By now, the whole crowd was chanting. When the old woman reached for her leg again, Cyrene shook herself free of the hag’s wrinkled talon.
‘Please don’t touch me,’ Cyrene said. It was tradition never to touch those who wore red shuhl robes without first gaining the maiden’s permission. In her fervency, the old woman ignored the ancient custom. Her fingernails raked the younger woman’s skin through the street dress’s thin silk.
‘On your knees. They have returned!’
Cyrene went for the qattari knife strapped to her naked thigh. Slender, ornamented steel gleamed amber in the firelight reflected from the sky-craft.
‘Don’t. Touch. Me.’
With a hissed curse, the old woman returned to her prayers.
Cyrene took a deep breath, seeking to slow her frenetic pulse. The air heated her throat, prickling at her tongue with the charcoal spice of thruster smoke. So they had returned. The angels of the God-Emperor had returned to the perfect city.
She didn’t feel the rush of reverence. Nor did she fall to her knees and thank the God-Emperor for his angels’ second coming. Cyrene Valantion stared at the vulture hull of the iron craft, while one question burned behind her eyes.
‘They have returned,’ the old woman murmured again. ‘They have returned to us.’
‘Yes,’ said Cyrene. ‘But why?’
Movement from the craft came without warning. Thick doors clanged wide and a ramp juddered down on squealing pneumatics. Between gasps and nervous weeping, the worshipful chanting grew louder. The people intoned prayers from the Word, and the last of those standing finally dropped to their knees. Cyrene was the only person left on her feet.
The first of the angels stepped from the thinning smoke cloud. Cyrene stared at the figure, her eyes narrowing despite the exalted rightness of the moment. A sliver of ice wormed through her blood.
As if one girl’s whispered protest could possibly change what was happening, she breathed a single word.
‘Wait.’
The angel’s heavy armour was at immediate odds with the images from scripture. It stood unadorned by the holy parchments that should detail its holiness in flowing script, nor was it clad in the winter-grey of the God-Emperor’s true angels. This one’s armour, like the craft it emerged from, was a deep and beautiful cobalt, trimmed with bronze so polished it gleamed close to gold. Its eyes were slanted red slits in a stoic facemask.
‘Wait...’ Cyrene said again, louder this time. ‘These are not the Bearers of the Word.’
The old woman hissed at her blasphemy, and spat on her bare feet. Cyrene ignored her. Her gaze never left the warrior armoured in cobalt, so subtly and distinctly different from the scriptures she’d been forced to study as a child.
The angel’s brethren emerged from the dark interior of their landing craft and descended to the plaza. All wore armour of the same blue. All of them carried great weapons too heavy for a mortal man to lift unaided.
‘They are not the Bearers of the Word,’ she raised her voice above the chanting. Several people kneeling around her replied with harsh whispers and potent curses. Cyrene was drawing breath to call out the accusation a third time when the angels, moving in inhuman unison, raised their weapons and aimed into the crowd of worshippers. The sight stole the breath from her throat.
The first angel spoke, its voice deep and raw, filtered through hidden speakers in its facemask.
‘People of Monarchia, capital city of Forty-Seven Ten, hear these words. We, the warriors of the XIII Legion, are oathed to this moment, honour-sworn to this duty. We come bearing the Emperor’s decree to the tenth world brought to compliance by the Forty-Seventh Expedition of humanity’s Great Crusade.’
All the while, the dozen angels kept their weapons aimed at the kneeling civilians. Cyrene could see the muzzles were as charred as the vulture craft’s hull, darkened from firing shells of monstrous size.
‘Your compliance with the Imperium of the Man has held for sixty-one years. With the greatest regret, the Emperor of Mankind demands that all living souls abandon the city of Monarchia immediately. Moments ago, your planetary leaders were given the same warning. This city is to be evacuated within six days. On the final day, your planetary leaders will be allowed to send a single distress call.’
The crowd kept silent, but their stares were now of confusion and disbelief, not reverence. As if sensing a drift in their attention, the angel aimed its weapon into the air and fired a single shot. The gunshot banged like a thunder peal rolling around a valley, storm-loud in the silence.
‘No one is to remain in Monarchia by dawn of the seventh day. Go now to your homes. Gather your belongings. Evacuate the city. Resistance will be met with bloodshed.’
‘Where will we go?’ a female voice called from the transfixed crowd. ‘This is our home!’
The first angel turned his weapon, aiming directly at Cyrene. It took several seconds for the young woman to realise she’d been the one to speak. It took much less time for those near her to break and flee, leaving her in an ever-expanding patch of sudden isolation.
The angel repeated its words, its emotionless inflection no different from before. ‘No one is to remain in Monarchia by dawn of the seventh day. Go now to your homes. Gather your belongings. Evacuate the city. Resistance will be met with bloodshed.’
Cyrene swallowed, saying nothing more. Cries and jeers rang out from the crowd. A bottle crashed against one of the angels’ helms, shattering into glass rain, and as several others shouted out demands to know what was happening, Cyrene turned and ran. Where the crowd wasn’t already fleeing with her, she forced her way through the press of people.
The throaty chatter of the angels’ weapons started up a handful of seconds later, as the God-Emperor’s messengers opened fire on the rioting crowd.
Three days later, Cyrene was still in the city.
Like many of the people calling Monarchia home, Cyrene’s dusky skin was a legacy of her ancestors’ lives in the equatorial deserts, and she had handsome eyes of a light brown that were rather like burnt auburn. Sun-lightened hazel hair fell in tumbling locks over her shoulders.
At least, her more infatuated lovers described her in such terms.
This was the picture her mind painted, though she no longer saw it when she looked in the mirror. Now her eyes were ringed from two nights without sleep, and her mouth was soured by dehydration.
Exactly how things had come to this point remained a mystery. Across the city, resistance to the invaders had been ferocious for the hour or so it had lasted. The greatest massacre had taken place at the Tophet Gate, when the protests became a riot, and the riot became a battlefield. Cyrene watched from the haven of a nearby church, though there hadn’t been much to see. Citizens cut down and culled, all for the crime of daring to defend their homes.
A battle tank of cobalt and bronze fired at the Tophet Gate itself, and though the slaughter was a tragedy, this was raw desecration. Grinding the dead beneath its treads, the tank fired a salvo at the towering structure. Its cannons left pain-scars across Cyrene’s sight, but she couldn’t look away.
The Tophet Gate fell, its marble bulk breaking into segments after it pounded into the plaza. A fortune in white stone and gold leaf, a monument to the God-Emperor’s true angels, shattered by invaders claiming to be loyal to the Imperium.
Cyrene could make out the unmoving bodies of fallen statues, toppled from the fallen gate. She knew them well, having attended many midnight markets in Tophet Plaza. Each time, marble angels had stared down at her from their places carved into the gate’s surface. Slanted, featureless eyes watched without blinking. Wingless suits of armour were rendered with exquisite skill in the smooth stone. These were not the false, feathered angels of ancient Terran myth, but holiness incarnate – the angels of death – formed in the fearful aspect of the God-Emperor. His shadows, his sons, the Bearers of the Word.
Through the dust, heretic silhouettes drifted closer to the tank. ‘The Warrior-Kings of Ultramar’, Cyrene had murmured in that moment. ‘The XIII Legion.’
Blasphemers, all. Their resemblance to the Bearers of the Word only compounded their impurity.
Planetary vox was down. She’d heard from a street vendor that the invaders destroyed all of Khur’s satellites before they came through the clouds. True or not, contact with other cities – even within Monarchia itself – was limited to word of mouth.
‘They rose up in Quami District,’ the vendor insisted. ‘Not just Tophet. Gulshia, too. Hundreds dead. Perhaps thousands.’ He shrugged as if such things were mere curiosities. ‘I’m leaving tonight. There’s no hope fighting devils, shuhl-asha.’
Cyrene said nothing, though she smiled at his gentlemanly use of her profession’s archaic title. But what was there to say? The invaders had the city in lockdown. The seeds of rebellion would never take root in such unfertile ground.
District by district, the exodus from Monarchia began after those first purges. Once the gates were opened, a ceaseless flood of humanity spilled from the city.
By nightfall, the mass evacuation was fully underway. Monarchia’s wealthiest citizens – most of them merchants or high-ranking clergymen serving as Speakers of the Word – secured their own transportation, leaving the city for secondary estates in other towns. The morning air above Monarchia was dense with shuttlecraft boosting away to other havens, ferrying the rich, the important, the economically vital and the spiritually enlightened to sanctuary elsewhere.
Cyrene hadn’t left yet. In truth, she wasn’t certain she would leave. She stood on the balcony of her second-floor habitation pod – somewhere between a room and a cell in the Jiro Apartment Block, in one of the cheapest parts of town.
The nearby speaker towers blared their message, over and over. ‘Strict weight allowances are in effect for personal belongings on the evacuation craft. All residents of Inaga District are to report to Yael-Shah Skyport or the Twelfth Trade Gate immediately. Strict weight allowances are...’
Cyrene tuned out the warnings, watching the people flocking through the streets below, strangling traffic with their slow, marching queues. There, at the end of the street, one of the XIII Legion directed the herds of people like livestock. In its hands, the false angel carried the same weapon as its brothers, the massive rifle with its supply of explosive ammunition.
Cyrene leaned on the balcony’s railing, bearing witness to the eternal theatre of oppressor and oppressed, of conquerors and the conquered. Her district was due to be evacuated by tomorrow morning. The process was stilted, with a great deal of curses cried and lamentations heaped upon the silent false angels.