The ground shook. He felt it through the pillar. His pulse leapt for a moment. He forced himself to breathe deeply through his mouth, slow, deep inhalations of the sort he used to steady himself before taking a shot.
You were telling me how you came to be here.'
Larkin looked round at the Angel. Though her head was still angled down, now she was gazing at him, smiling grimly. Larkin licked his lips and gestured idly around with one dirt-caked hand.
'War. Fighting. Fate.'
'I meant specifically,' said the Angel.
'Orders. The will of the Emperor.'
The Angel seemed to shrug her robed shoulders slightly. 'You are very defensive. You hide yourself and the truth behind words.'
Larkin blinked. For a moment, sickle-shaped moons of bright white light and fuzzy oblongs of red blackness lurched across his vision. A tiny moment of nausea. He knew the signs. He'd known them since childhood. The visual disturbances, the nausea, the taste of tin in his mouth. Then, the anxiety, the tunnel vision. After that, if he was lucky, a white hot migraine pain that would burst inside his skull and leave him dazed and helpless for hours. If he was unlucky: fits, spasms, blackouts and an awakening hours later, bruised and bloodied from the thrashing seizures; empty, miserable, destroyed inside.
'What's the matter?' asked the Angel.
Larkin tapped his forehead gently with his index finger. 'I'm… not right. Never have been, not in all my life. The fits used to scare my mother, but not half as much as they did me. They come on me from time to time.'
'Times like now? Under pressure? In the presence of danger?'
'That doesn't help. But it's just another trigger. You know what a ploin is?'
'No.'
'Round fruit. Soft, green-skinned, juicy. Lots of black pips in pink flesh. They used to grow in my uncle's orchard on Tanith. Divine things, but even the smell of them would trigger an attack.'
'Is there no medicine you can take?'
'I had tablets. But I forget to take them.' He took a little wooden pill-box from his jacket, opened the lid and showed her it was empty. 'Or I forget when I run out.'
'What do they call you?' asked the Angel.
They call me Mad Larkin.'
That is cruel.'
'But true. I'm not right in my mind. Mad.'
'Why do you think you are mad?'
'I'm talking to a statue of the Imperium, aren't I?'
She laughed and smoothed the folds of the white robes over her kneeling legs. There was a low and perfect radiance to her. Larkin blinked and saw glowing moons and oblongs in afterimage again.
Outside, a hail of gunfire lit the evening and a ripple of explosions crackled the air. Larkin got to his feet and crossed to the nearest window. He looked out through interlocking pieces of coloured glass at the city below. Steepled, tall, rising within a curtain of walls eighty metres high, the capital city-state of Bucephalon clung to the ridge of the mountains. Smoke obscured the sky, las-fire filled the air like bright sleet. Two or more kilometres away, he saw the pair of enormous storming ramps that the sappers of the Imperial Guard had raised against the walls. Huge embankments of piled earth and concrete rubble almost a kilometre long, rising high and broad enough to deliver armoured vehicles to the top of the wall. Heavy fighting within blooms of flame lit the ramps.
Below, nearer, the men on the ground looked like insect dots. Thousands, churning in trenches, spilling out across the chewed and cratered mess of the battlefront to assault the forbidding walls.
Larkin's vantage point was high and good. This shelled, ruined fortress was part of a stone complex which straddled and guarded the main aqueduct into the city, a huge structure that had defied the most earnest attempts of the enemy to fell with mines. Though heavily defended, it had seemed to Commissar Gaunt a good way in for a stealth team. Not the first time the commissar had been wrong.
Gaunt had told them that, before the clutch of Chaos fell upon it, the city-state had been ruled by thirty-two noble families, the descendants of merchant dynasties that had established the settlement. Their brilliant banners, the heraldic displays of thirty-two royal houses, were displayed on the walls, tatters of rich cloth draped from massive timber awnings. Those mighty awnings were now additionally decorated with the crucified bodies of the leaders of those noble families.
It had been Nokad's first act. Nokad the Blighted, Nokad the Smiling, the charismatic cult leader whose malign forces had risen to conquer Bucephalon from within, and win one of the most honourable of the Sabbat Worlds. In his great liberation address at the start of the crusade, Warmaster Slaydo himself had listed proud Bucephalon as one of the worlds he was most eager to save.
Shells burst outside the windows and Larkin ducked back into cover. Glass pattered and tinkled onto the stone floor. The flashes behind his eyes were getting worse and he could taste the tang of metal in his saliva. There was a moaning, too, a dull aching groan in his inner ear. That was a particularly bad sign. He had only got that a time or two before, just prior to the very worst madnesses. His vision was not entirely stable. Everything in the chapel around him seemed elongated and stretched, like in the mirror tent at the Attica carnival. In places his vision belled and warped, objects shimmering in and out of focus, drifting near and then away again.
He shuddered, deep in his bones.
The Angel was lighting tapers at the wrought iron offertory. Her movements were slow and lovely, pure grace.
She asked, 'Why don't you believe in angels?'
