After the Titans marched the men of the Snow Raiders, Leman Russ tanks to the fore, followed by Chimera armoured personnel carriers and then a thousand selected men marching. They wore their tall white bearskin hats even in the warm weather, and the officers had donned white bearskin cloaks. As they passed the front of the cathedral, they turned with disciplined precision and saluted as one. Every unit was to parade with just that sharpness today.
‘They picked their best drill squads, I see,’ murmured Anton from the place he had taken alongside me. He had his sniper rifle in his hand and held it ready. The Undertaker gave him a hard glance but Anton just continued to stand there. He looked nonchalant, as though he were considering lighting up a lho-stick. I would not have put it past him.
Next came the Calistan High Guard. They had mounted cavalrymen and hairless mammoths among their troops. The giant creatures had heavy weapons platforms strapped to their backs. They were notoriously temperamental beasts. One had run amok at the space port killing a hundred loaders only a few days back. I hoped the same thing was not repeated now. They passed without incident.
The Swordbearers of Stula followed. Tall men, garbed in kilts; their officers wore massive battle-blades strapped to their backs, bare-chested save for the leather straps of their scabbard harnesses. The men had bayonets affixed to their lasguns and twirled them in intricate patterns as they marched. Their officers all had shaved heads and long braided beards, and half of their faces were covered in tattoos of rank.
‘That’s just showing off,’ said Anton. Even I was staring at him now. It was only a matter of time before one of the high muckety-mucks noticed him and took him to one side, for one of those conversations that you did not come back from.
The Boilermakers were next. No marching for them. They were a mechanised regiment. All of them were in tanks or APCs, with the cog-wheel flag of their regiment flying above them. When you looked closely you could see that they were as kitted out with mechanical limbs and organs as Ivan, only in their case their best soldiers had volunteered to have their flesh replaced. They followed some obscure sect of the Machine-God back on their home world, or so I’d heard. ‘No marching for those bastards,’ said Ivan. He was a little quieter now, so perhaps the Undertaker’s glares were having some effect.
It was almost a relief when the 444th Infantry marched past. Their uniforms were Cadian-style tunics in light grey. Their boots gleamed with black polish. Their helmets were spiked.
Next came the Seventh Belial, our old regiment from what seemed like a lifetime ago. They had Baneblades and Leman Russ and Chimeras. Some of them marched just to show they could. I felt almost nostalgic when I saw their grey tunics and rebreather masks. I wondered if we would ever see Belial again. Much to my surprise, Anton said nothing. He just stood there watching misty eyed as the representatives of more and more regiments trooped by.
On and on they came; unit after unit, company after company, all of them looking as smart as if they had just got their first uniforms, and marching with a precision that would have done their drill instructors proud.
Cadian Shock Troopers, in rebreather masks and tri-dome helmets, marched in advance of Darkstorm Fusiliers all in shadowcloaks. Tallarn Desert Raiders, heads swathed in scarves, bodies straight as ramrods, strode along behind bare-armed, tattooed Catachan Jungle Fighters.
After the first few score, other things started to be mingled in with the marching troops. Massive converted vehicle crawlers carried dioramas and symbols of the crusade’s triumphs. In an enormous cage was a roaring bipedal gigantosaur from Paleon. It had been kept by the former governor and fed with his enemies in the arena. Macharius had ordered the governor and all his kin sent into the same arena armed with the sharpened sticks they had equipped their former captives with. It had been an edifying and horrific spectacle, but the watching nobles had got the point.
There was the Oracle-Machine, which had been worshipped as a god on Ibal. Men had thought it a remnant of the Dark Age of Technology and followed its pronouncements as if they had come from the Throne of the Emperor itself. Macharius had revealed it was nothing more than a hollowed out shell in which corrupt priests had hidden, making their announcements over a heavily modified vox system.
There were two gigantic xenos who looked like walking trees. They were the last remnants of the Viridar, a sentient jungle for which they had provided nodes of intelligence and communication. They had lost much of their greenish colouration, and I wondered how long they could survive so far from their home world. Their leaves looked brown and their bark-skins were starting to show a sickly white mould that did not look in the slightest bit natural. I had heard that their sap was hallucinogenic and that some of their captors had started tapping it and selling it on the black market.
There were prisoners in chains, of course, tens of thousands of them. They still wore the finery of nobles, but it had not been cleaned in weeks or perhaps months. They had not been allowed to bathe or shave. They looked gaunt and hollow-eyed and mad and desperate. They would be executed after the procession. These were nobles who had opposed Macharius and lost. I am sure the lesson there was not lost on the spectators.
On and on it rumbled, minute after minute, hour after hour. I half expected Macharius to be bored by it, but the smile never shifted from his face and he continued to look on with a mixture of pride and exultation. I suppose being worshipped as a god never grows tiring.
After long hours, the great procession finally ended. It was not because the crusade had run out of prisoners or victories to celebrate or soldiers to honour. There was simply too many of all three. It was because it was time for Macharius to move on to other things.
We stepped down from the balcony and entered the cathedral proper. The assembled planetary nobility greeted Macharius with applause. Some of them rose from the pews and reached out to try and touch the hem of his garments. Some of them he greeted affably, most of them we pushed none too gently back into place. Normally we would have been cuffed for it, common soldiers manhandling nobles, but not on this day and not in this place. We were Macharius’s bodyguard and all the normal rules of protocol were suspended in the great man’s presence.
Macharius took his place in the elevated area in front of the altar and accepted the blessing of the archprelate under the gaze of the statues of saints. Some claim to have seen a halo around him then. All I saw were the altar lights playing around him, but I suppose if you looked at them from certain angles you might have seen a holy glow.
Then it was time to leave. We swept out through the rear entrance of the cathedral. There were aircars waiting at all four doors to confuse any potential assassins. Macharius only decided at the last second which one to take. The landing ramp was clear. Valkyries hovered over head. We clambered into the aircar and rose into the sky, flights of gunships moving into position around us as an escort.
We returned to the palace. Looking out the porthole on the side of the aircar I saw a procession of glittering flyers following us. All of the great nobles and their retinues had been invited to the banquet that followed the triumph. I looked at Anton. He pretended to stifle a yawn. I knew what he meant. It was going to be a long night.
The orchestra played. Music filled the ballroom. The nobles danced. All of them were surrounded by their retinues, bodyguards, personal attendants of every sort, courtesans and companions and pet assassins.
Officers wore full dress uniforms, noblemen their court finery, noblewomen long gowns, narrow at the waist, their great hooped skirts supported by suspensor systems so that they seemed to float just above the ground. Every dress was a statement of power. They each cost as much as supplying a regiment. They glowed with precious materials and fitted their wearers with the same precision as a personal battle-suit. They would be worn only once and discarded, just to show that their owners could afford such things.