It snapped Mesring from his catatonia. The glow of inspiration suffused his face. He stood up. He began to speak.
Encouraged by the Ecclesiarch, Ekharth’s cry was taken up. It emerged from the silence, a reed-thin complaint from the depths of an echoing well. What is it? What is it? What is it? The news of the approaching ship rippled out from the Great Chamber to spread across Terra. The ship could be seen only by Terra’s sensor arrays, but the haunted souls who stared at the moon imagined they could trace the path of the Militant Fire.
What is it? What is it? What is it?
Mesring’s sermon fed the question. It offered no answers. It took theories apart. The orks were not attacking. The ship could not be a doomsday weapon, because it was too small, and what would be the point?
‘Perhaps,’ Mesring said, ‘we are witness to a miracle. Perhaps, by the grace of the Father of Mankind, this blessed vessel has been delivered from our foe.’
An escape. The flight of a single ship could not offer true hope. But it was a dream.
What is it?
It is a sign.
The cry of frightened children was answered by a call to prayer. Summoned, the people came. Faith was the last refuge. They turned to it with a vengeance. The Militant Fire lay at the heart of the prayers. The people did not look to it for hope, but they prayed to the God-Emperor that it would become the source of hope.
In the Great Chamber, Mesring led the Senatorum in worship. Vangorich watched him with a mixture of contempt and admiration. Tull’s moment had passed. The power dynamic of the High Lords had been in flux again with the failure of the Proletarian Crusade, and within minutes Mesring had the whip hand. Impressive. And pointless. How long did Mesring think the orks would allow him to enjoy his supremacy?
Mesring’s sermon was not long. He gave the yearning of the populace a shape, then cast them back into a silence from which his voice would only be the more welcome when it returned. He sat down and bowed his head, his hands clasped.
Vangorich rose. He walked over to stand before the Ecclesiarch. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What if there is no miracle aboard that ship?’
Mesring looked up. He was calm as only a man who was as devout as he was devious could be. ‘Then we will need our spiritual strength all the more.’
Vangorich swallowed his disgust and turned to Verreault. ‘Is the Astra Militarum putting all of its trust into the divine?’
‘A company of the Lucifer Blacks will meet the ship.’
‘But not you.’
‘My place is here.’
Of course it was. There might be more power plays in the time it would take for the Fire to arrive. The High Lords would be keeping each other under observation.
Vangorich left. All he would see here would be the rearranging of furniture in a burning house.
He made his way to the Daylight Wall. The Lucifer Blacks were attempting to take the place of the Imperial Fists. The sight of simple mortals in guard posts that had been manned by giants drove the loss home again. Vangorich spoke to the officer of the watch. The ship, he learned, was transmitting a request for permission to land at the Inner Palace’s pocket space port. Vangorich considered the risk that the ship might be a bomb, come to wipe out the Terran leadership. The idea was so far removed from every aspect of the ork way of war that he snorted.
He passed through the gates of the Wall. He would meet the ship, and whatever news it brought.
The space port was not far beyond the Daylight Wall, and was visible from the High Gardens. It was reserved for high dignitaries from other systems and could accommodate a handful of lighters at a time. The Militant Fire, though a small merchant ship, was large for the space. When it arrived, Vangorich watched with approval as its pilot dropped the vessel between the spires of the Imperial Palace with an assured precision. Retro-rockets extinguished, exhaust from the descent dissipating into the grimy air of the palace, the ship sat in gathering silence for several minutes before a door rose on the port side of nose. A staircase descended. Then nothing more for a few minutes. The Lucifer Blacks’ rifles were trained on the dark entranceway.
The figure that at last appeared was human enough. The man’s clothes were expensive, though his coat was torn now. His face was grey with exhaustion and fear. He raised his arms over his head. ‘My name is Leander Narkissos,’ he said. ‘Captain of the Militant Fire. Please don’t shoot. No one on the ship is armed.’ He waited, looking like a man who didn’t particularly care if he was gunned down.
Vangorich walked forward on the landing pad and joined the commanding officer of the Lucifer Blacks. ‘What is your name, captain?’
‘Mercado, Grand Master.’
‘The situation is tense, I know, and so are your troops. Unthinking fire is the last thing we need at this juncture, don’t you agree?’ He kept his voice calm, his tone light.
Mercado nodded. ‘Hold fire,’ he shouted. ‘Weapons down, but keep them ready.’
‘Come down,’ Vangorich called to Narkissos, and he advanced until he was a few metres away from the base of the steps, visible to all the nervous soldiers.
Narkissos lowered his arms and took the stairs slowly. He wobbled when he reached the landing pad.
Vangorich stepped forward and steadied him. ‘Did you escape?’ he asked.
‘No.’ Narkissos looked back up at the doorway. ‘They want to be escorted to the Senatorum.’
Vangorich followed his gaze. He almost asked, Who? but he knew the answer. Beneath the denial that even he maintained for the sake of his sanity, he had known since the ship’s approach was first detected.
Three orks appeared. They descended the steps, and then they were there, on the landing pad, on Terra, near the heart of the Imperial Palace. Vangorich was not religious, yet his stomach turned at the obscenity of the greenskins’ presence.
He fought down his atavistic response. He shouted ‘Hold your fire!’ because the Lucifer Blacks would need to hear that command again. He forced himself to examine the orks so he, at least, might have some rational understanding of the Imperium’s foe. He already knew he would be one of the few, apart from Kubik, to be capable of clear thought, and he didn’t trust the Fabricator General to be candid with his insights.
Vangorich had studied all the reports the Mechanicus had made available about the resurgent orks. He had also read more than a few documents that the cult of the Omnissiah had preferred to keep to itself. One of the recurring themes of the studies, which the Mechanicus emphasised with undisguised enthusiasm, was novelty. These orks kept producing new weapons, acting in new ways. The pattern continued now. Vangorich looked at the orks before him, and felt another unwelcome shock of the new. All three were big. Two of them were a full head taller than he was. The third was half again as large. A leader and two subordinates, then. They wore thick leather, decorated with the brutal signs of the ork clans. The clothing seemed more like robes of office than armour.
What alarmed Vangorich most was not the unusual garb, though, but what the orks did not have.
They were unarmed.
Vangorich stared at this impossibility. The leader held a staff. It was three metres long, made of iron. Its girth was decorated with clusters of skulls. Some were human, others eldar, and many from species Vangorich didn’t recognise. The skulls were iron also, their jaws agape in an agony of death. Real teeth hung from a coil of wire that spiralled the length of the staff. The crown was a representation of an ork face, snarling in victory and hunger. The staff was formidable, but it was not a weapon. By the standards of what Vangorich knew about the greenskins, it was an artistic masterpiece.