Chapter 48: Then Go Meet Him First
The main thoroughfare running north to south through the city was packed with people. A dense mass of pilgrims moved in the direction of the rear, filling the road from wall to wall. The air above them was thick with incense and underneath it the smell of sweat and stone dust.
Duvette stood at the road's edge and looked at what was in front of him. His expression went past anger and arrived at something closer to grim amusement.
The pilgrims were moving at a pace that could not honestly be called movement. They advanced a few steps and then knelt, pressing their foreheads to the paving stones with an audible impact. Then they rose, walked a few more steps, and knelt again. The process repeated itself with the regularity of a liturgical cycle, which was precisely what it was, and the entire column's rate of forward progress was approximately that of a man crawling with a broken leg.
Duvette turned to look at Finn. The sniper rolled his shoulders in a minimal shrug. The mechanical eyes pulsed briefly. "Don't look at me," he said. "I know better than to be involved in this."
Finn raised a hand in a tactical glove and pointed behind them.
Duvette turned.
A saint statue stood in the middle of the column. Ten meters of white marble, the surface worked with gold foil and precious stones set into the carved fabric of the figure's robes. At present, it had been encircled with thick rope, and under its base someone had laid eight or nine heavy wooden rollers. More than a hundred people were heaving at the ropes with organized labor calls, attempting to roll the statue forward along the logs.
Each meter took several minutes. The people pulling were soaked through with the effort. The pilgrims on all sides continued their cycle of advance and prostration around the statue and the people moving it, and the column had effectively stopped existing as a column and become a stationary devotional gathering that was very slowly migrating south.
Duvette had reached his limit.
"Irredeemable idiots!" His voice cut through the scripture recitation around him without effort. He turned to Evan. "Where is the Bishop?"
Evan had already determined this. "At the head of the column, Commissar."
Duvette took one long breath. "With me."
He moved forward through the column with his fifty-odd soldiers behind him. They pushed past kneeling pilgrims, working through the press of bodies by presence and momentum. Displeased looks came their way, until the people doing the looking registered the weapons and found other places to direct their attention, and then they bent their heads back to the paving stones and continued.
The front line could collapse. The Orks could be an hour behind this column, or thirty minutes. At the speed this procession was moving, none of the thousands of people in it were going to survive long enough for the distinction to matter. Duvette moved through them and did not look charitable about it.
He found his target at the column's head.
An elderly man in elaborate ceremonial robes, the fabric embroidered in heavy golden thread, surrounded by dozens of clergy. He held a staff whose upper end burned with a sustained open flame, the mark of senior Ecclesiarchy rank. Three Battle Sisters stood at his flanks — power armour, bolt rifles, faces sealed behind helmets. Duvette recognized the specific damage patterns on their armour. Eternal Lament survivors.
The Battle Sisters registered his approach and raised their weapons. They registered him a fraction of a second later and brought them back down. The clergy stopped moving. Every face in the cluster turned toward the new arrivals.
The elderly man turned slowly to face Duvette. His face was a landscape of deep wrinkles, but his voice, when he spoke, had the carrying power of a man who had spent decades projecting it through cathedrals.
"May the Emperor's light shine upon you, and in His grace may you..."
"Bishop Raphael Sharp?" Duvette cut across him, his brow set.
The old man blinked. "That is correct. And you are?"
"Commissar Duvette. Ash Watchers 101st Regiment." No salute. He took one step forward and dispensed with preamble entirely. "I need you to stop every activity your people are currently engaged in that is not walking, and to evacuate this city at the maximum possible speed. The front line has fallen. The enemy is in transit."
Bishop Sharp regarded him. His expression did not change.
"I'm not certain I understand you, Commissar."
"The enemy is coming," Duvette said. "Within a short time."
"No," the Bishop said, gently shaking his head, his tone the patient one of a teacher managing a misapprehension. "What I mean is that I don't understand, Commissar — this man blessed by the Emperor's grace — what you are referring to when you say 'every activity that is not walking.'"
"All of it." Duvette's volume increased. "Everything except walking and running. Stop doing everything else."
The thoroughfare went quiet. The scripture recitation around them died. The clergy stared.
Bishop Sharp fixed his gaze on Duvette's eyes. He pronounced each word at deliberate intervals. "Commissar. Are you telling me that the Emperor's likeness and the statues of the saints have no meaning?"
He took one step forward. The flame at the top of his staff jumped higher.
"Are you telling me," the Bishop said, and his voice had begun rising toward the register he reserved for addresses to full cathedral congregations, "that prayer and devotion to the Emperor hold no meaning?"
The words rolled out across the silent thoroughfare and echoed between the buildings.
Duvette turned his head to one side and pressed his lips together for a brief moment.
"Fine," he said. "They have meaning. There is no time. If this continues, everyone here dies."
"Then let us return in glory to the Golden Throne!" The Bishop's arms spread wide. His voice completed its ascent from pastoral patience to something close to a roar. "Let the Emperor witness our devotion! For the Emperor's eternal glory!"
From the column behind them, a wall of human sound detonated.
"Praise the Emperor! Praise the Emperor!"
The combined voices of thousands struck Duvette like a pressure wave.
Then, in the same moment:
A shot.
The sound of the bolt pistol discharged across the thoroughfare and swallowed every other sound in the vicinity instantly. What followed was a silence so complete it had a texture.
The Bishop's body fell backward. His elaborate robes spread outward in the air for a moment, opening like a banner with the weight cut from its center, before the body completed its fall and hit the paving stones. The bolt round had done what bolt rounds did at close range to unarmored human heads. The residue of it reached the clergy closest to him — faces, robes, hands — and they received it without moving, because they were not yet capable of moving.
The staff hit the ground and rolled. The flame at its tip dragged across the stone, guttered, and went out.
Every pilgrim in visible range had frozen where they stood. The fanatical expressions that had been there a moment before had no path from that emotional state to what they were now processing, and had locked into something between shock and vacancy. The clergy looked at the body on the ground and continued looking, because looking away would mean having to do something with what they had just witnessed. The three Battle Sisters raised their bolt rifles in a single movement, the barrels all finding the same target.
Duvette wiped his left hand across the side of his face. The blood was warm and smelled of iron. He looked at the headless body on the paving stones.
"Then I'll send you to meet Him first," he said. The temperature in his voice reached the bone.
"This is mutiny!" One of the Battle Sisters came forward a step, the bolt rifle barrel coming within centimeters of Duvette's chest. Her finger sat on the trigger. The power armour's joints made the small sound they always made under pressure.
Behind Duvette, the fifty-plus soldiers brought their weapons up simultaneously, the charge sound of lasrifles rising in a low collective note.
Duvette stepped forward. He let the barrel make full contact with his chest and stared up into the Battle Sister's visor. He looked at the damage on her armour's surface and recognized it precisely. She had come through the Eternal Lament and come out the other side. He met her eyes through the visor.
"Every life is the Emperor's currency," he said. He bit each word off separately and clearly. "And he — his orders, his actions, his decisions in this place today — were wasting the Emperor's currency. That is intolerable. It is unforgivable."
He held her eyes for one more second.
Then he turned away from the Battle Sisters entirely.
They kept their weapons raised. Their fingers remained on the triggers. They were shaking. They did not fire.
They watched his back and in each of their minds an image formed: a woman with white hair and one red eye, in a black coat, speaking quietly and making promises. They looked at the body on the ground. Their faces, behind their visors, showed the working of a conflict that had no clean resolution.
Duvette walked to the very front of the pilgrim column. He took the peaked commissar's cap from his head and tucked it under his left arm. The black hair beneath was wet with sweat. Blood was still on his face, and under the sickly amber sky it gave his expression something that was not comfortable to look at directly.
He turned to face the thousands of people standing in the road.
"Listen to me!" His voice had the volume he saved for open battlefields, and it reached everything in range without apparent effort. "Put down everything in your hands! Stop kneeling! The Emperor does not need your worship right now — He needs you to be alive when you reach the other end of this road!"
He let that hang for one second.
"Your life is not yours to waste! From this moment, my weapon represents the Emperor's wrath! My orders are what bring you through this alive!"
He raised the bolt pistol. The muzzle pointed at the sky.
"Anyone who disobeys —"
The shot went straight up.
"— dies!"