An extract from Sabbat Martyr.

  ‘Bad day coming!’ the man cried aloud. ‘Bad day coming! Bad day in the morning!’

  He had clambered up onto an almsman’s wagon, ignoring attempts to pull him down, and was now shouting, arms outstretched and fingers clawing, at both the sky and the gathering crowd.

  ‘Bad day is coming down upon us all! On you! And you, sir! And you, madam! Nine more wounds! Nine times nine!’

  Some in the crowd were booing him. Others made the sign of the aquila or the beati mark to ward off any evil luck he was bringing on with his words. Others, Anton Alphant noticed wryly, were listening quite intently.

  There was nothing new in the man’s rantings. He, and others like him throughout the camps, had been causing scenes like this regularly in recent days. It wasn’t good for morale, and it certainly wasn’t endearing the pilgrim mass to the city authorities.

  Almsmen, their rank denoted by the blue ribbons that fluttered from their long dust-cloaks, were trying to coax the man down off the wagon. His feet had already knocked over several sacks of the corn-wafers and hardtack they had brought to distribute through the camp. An ayatani from one of the farworld congregations had elbowed his way through the crowd and was holding up a prayer-paddle as he shouted benedictions at the man. Two junior Ecclesiarchy adepts were clutching pewter cups and using their silver aspergillums to shake water at the improvising preacher. Holy water, Alphant was sure, that they had purchased at great expense from the stoups of the Holy Balneary.

  Alphant closed his fingers around the ampulla of holy water in his own coat pocket. He’d come an awfully long way to get it, and it had cost him the last of his coins. He wasn’t about to waste it so generously.

  ‘Maybe we should stop him,’ Karel said.

  ‘We?’ smiled Alphant. ‘You mean me.’

  ‘Everyone listens to you.’

  ‘He’s entitled to his opinion. Every last soul here came because it mattered to them more than anything else. You can’t deny his passion.’

  ‘He’s scaring people,’ said Karel, and a fair few of the other infardi grouped around the clock shrine with them agreed. ‘Things could get ugly.’

  They were right. Several penitents in the crowd had become so agitated by the man’s preaching they had begun to scourge themselves. The row had even captured the attention of some of the nearest stylites. They turned round on their pillar tops to watch, and some shouted out over the heads of the crowd. Other pilgrim troupes had wheeled or carried their clock shrines up close to the wagon, pointing them at him as if the symbolism might deter him.

  It seemed to make him worse.

  ‘The brink of midnight, and then the bad day dawns! Fire from the heavens and the precious blood spilled!’

  ‘Can’t you make him stop, Alphant?’ Valmont asked.

  ‘I’m no priest,’ said Alphant. How many times had he said that? Just an agri-worker from Khan II who had made the pilgrimage here when he’d heard the news because it seemed like the right thing to do. Along the way – and it had been a hard journey – he’d somehow become the nominal leader of those he’d travelled with. They looked to him for opinion and direction, more than ever since they’d reached the cold, austere reality of the camps. He’d never asked for the responsibility.

  Then, of course, she’d never asked for hers.

  Alphant had no idea where that sudden, sobering notion had sprung from. But it was enough to make him change his mind, hand his bowl and breviary to Karel, and walk towards the ruckus around the wagon.

  He’d gone no more than three steps when someone in the angry crowd hurled a lump of quartz at the gibbering man. It missed, but others followed. One cracked against his forehead and he toppled back off the wagon top.

  ‘Damn!’ said Alphant.

  The crowd went mad. Fighting broke out, and more missiles flew – rocks, ampullas, bless-bottles. The alms wagon overturned with a crash and people started shrieking.

  Alphant put his head down and shouldered into the surging mob. The hapless preacher would be torn apart in this, and the last thing the camp needed was a death. Alphant was still a strong man, and he found he remembered some of the old moves, enough to tackle and dissuade the most boisterous rioters in his path anyway. Nothing too vicious, just a little deflection and the occasional squeeze of a nerve point.

  He got round the upturned wagon, and paused to prevent three screaming infardi from throttling one of the almsmen. Then he looked for the preacher who had started it all.

  And saw an amazing thing.

  The preacher was sitting on the rough ground, both hands clamped to his forehead. Blood was pouring out through his fingers, staining his robes and making dark patches in the dust. He was in no state to protect himself.

  But no one was touching him. A girl, a young girl no more than eighteen, was standing over him. Her face, thin and pale, was confident, the look in her green eyes soft. She had one hand extended, palm out, to ward off the riot. Every time a part of it spilled towards her, she moved her hand in that direction and the people drew back. That simply, that quietly, she was maintaining a tiny circle of calm around the preacher, keeping at bay a crowd lusting for his blood.

  He moved towards her. She looked at him, but did not turn her palm towards him, as if recognising his peaceful intentions.

  ‘Do you need help?’ Alphant asked.

  ‘This man does,’ she said. Her voice was tiny, but he heard her clearly over the uproar. He bent down at her side, and examined the preacher’s injury. It was deep and dirty. He tore a strip off his shirt, and wetted it with water from his ampulla without even thinking of the cost. Wasn’t it said to cure all wounds?

  ‘Bad day coming,’ the man murmured as Alphant wiped the blood away.

  ‘Enough of that,’ Alphant said. ‘It’s already here as far as you’re concerned.’ He wondered how long the frail girl could hold the commotion at bay. He wondered how she was doing it.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, looking up at her.

  ‘Sabbatine,’ she said. He laughed at that. Saint names and their diminutives were common enough in this part of the Imperium, and there was, as might be expected, a disproportionately high number of Sabbats, Sabbatas, Sabbatines, Sabbeens, Battendos and the like in the camps. But for her, it seemed terribly appropriate.

  ‘I think he’s right,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think something bad is about to happen.’

  There was a quality to the way she said this that was more alarming than the entirety of the preacher’s manic declamation.

  ‘You mean like another attack? The raiders again?’

  ‘Yes. Get to safety.’

  Alphant didn’t question her any further. He got his hands under the preacher’s arms and hoisted him up. When he’d got the lolling man upright he realised that the girl had disappeared.

  And the nature of the uproar around him had changed. It wasn’t a riot any more. It was a panic. People were fleeing, screaming, falling over one another in their anxiety to leave. Something was burning. Smoke filled the low sky above the Ironhall camp.

  ‘Bad day…’ the blood-streaked man gurgled.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Alphant. He’d just heard a sound that he hadn’t heard in twenty years, not since he’d handed back his standard issue mark IV, put his cap pins and badge away in a dresser drawer, and used his Guard-muster pay-out as deposit on a nice little parcel of cropland in the agri-collective west of the primary hive of Khan II.

  The snap-crack of a lasrifle.

  The tac logis situation reports were urgently identifying a heretic raid in progress in the pilgrim encampment just west of the Ironhall Pylon, and true enough there was a furious plume of smoke rising from that quarter, a plume ominously undercut by the blink of weapons fire.

  But as Udol rode a lurching carrier down the Guild Slope, through the deafening uproar of the panicked suburb, he caught sight of fat brown vapour clouds wallowing up heavily from the obsidae east of the Simeon Aqueduct.

  ‘Is that the aqueduct?’ he shouted.

  ‘Fixing it now, major!’ answered his signals officer, dropping back inside the carrier’s rusty top hatch to man the tactical station.

  ‘It is the aqueduct, sir!’ the signalman called back a moment later.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The aqueduct, and the obsidae on the other side of it!’

  Their helmet mics were turned up full, but it was still nigh on impossible to hear one another over the din. The engines of the APCs were revving, and the vast crowds packing the street were wailing and shouting. Gorgonaught, the great prayer horn at the northern end of Principal I, was booming at the white sky from its ancient tower. Udol was sure he could also hear the slap of distant detonations and the sizzling kiss of impacts against the outer fan of shield cover. It was coming down again, fourth day in a row.

  Udol slithered down inside the hull and cranked his bare-metal rocker seat around so he could look over the signalman’s shoulder at the screen.

  ‘What does tac logis have?’

  ‘Nothing on that, major. They’re directing us forward to the Ironhall zone. Captain Lamm has engaged. Heretic raid coming in from the wastes. He–’

  ‘They’re in at the east door too,’ Udol muttered. He adjusted his vox set’s channel. ‘Pento? Udol here. Take the front six with you and go look after Lamm’s interests. Seven and eight? Move off with me.’

  Objections and several requests for clarification crackled back, but Udol ignored them. He tapped his driver on the arm and pointed.

  The carrier obediently veered east, parting the rushing crowds with blares from its warning sirens. Two other units from the convoy turned with it. They got off the Guild Slope and rumbled down a gravel linkway deeply shadowed by the tall buildings on either side. At the end of the linkway, the buildings framed an oblong of sky stained with clots of smoke.

  They emerged onto Principal VI, flanked by low-rise habs, and crossed the wide boulevard until they were facing the towering lime-brick arches of the Simeon Aqueduct. Beyond that massive arched structure lay the open reaches of a glass field. Like so many vacant spaces at the city edges, the area had become a pilgrim shanty over the last two months, a sea of rough canvas tents, survival blisters and hastily raised clock shrines. Another makeshift expansion of the city’s limits to accommodate the massive influx of believers.

  Filthy brown smoke billowed across the whole campsite and washed out between the arches of the aqueduct. Dirty pilgrims were pouring out with it, struggling with children and belongings.

  ‘Some damn infardi’s knocked over a campstove in his jubilation,’ said the signalman. ‘It happened the other week over at Camp Kiodrus. Whole row of tents went up and–’

  ‘I don’t think that’s what it is, Inkerz,’ Udol snapped. ‘Driver! Get us in through there!’

  The driver dropped the gears down to the lowest ratio and began to roll the carrier through the nearest arch span onto the obsidae. Almost at once they were crushing tent structures and lean-tos under their heavy, solid wheels. Frantic pilgrims, flowing around the vehicle as they fled the area, hammered their fists on the armoured sides and implored them to stop.

  ‘No go, major,’ said the driver, hauling on the brake. ‘Not unless you want to, you know, crush them.’

  ‘Everybody out!’ Udol ordered. ‘Rove-team spread! Get on with it!’

  The side hatches on all three troop carriers rattled open and the troops dismounted, fifteen from each. They lunged their way forward against the tide of the crowd, carrying their weapons upright. Udol paused long enough for Inkerz to strap the compact accelerant tank to his back and connect the hose, then he took off, pushing to the head of his men. He raised his armour-sleeved left arm, squeezed the stirrup built into the palm of the glove, and scorched off a little rippling halo of flame into the air so they could pick him out in the crush. Once he had their attention, he dispersed them left and right through the forest of tents and personal detritus.

  Fifty paces into the shanty, the place was almost deserted. The smoke was thicker. Udol was appalled but unsurprised at the wretched conditions the pilgrims had been living in. Junk, rubbish and human waste covered the narrow tracks that wound between the pathetic tents. It was hard to see more than a few metres in any direction. Quite apart from the smoke and the shelters, there were clock shrines everywhere. No two were identical, but they all followed the same essential pattern: a timepiece of some sort – domestic clock, electric timer, digital chronometer, handsprung horolog – set in a home-made wooden box, the taller and more gaudily painted the better, it seemed. He looked at one nearby. As tall as a man, with reclaimed tin shutters open at the top to reveal the clock face, it was set on a wooden handcart and anchored in place with industrial rivets. The thing had been painted gold and silver and, in places, green, and skirts of plastic sheeting had been wrapped around the towering body. Inside that upright box, a stationary pendulum hung down, festooned with dried flowers, crystals, keepsakes, coins and a hundred other votive offerings. At the top, inside the shutters, the old clock face and the hands had been sprayed green and then the dial and the tips of the hands picked out again in gold. The hands were set at a heartbeat before midnight.

  Major Udol knew precisely the significance of that.

  He went around the shrine, waving the troopers behind him close. The pilgrim shelters ahead of them were burning freely. Dirty yellow flames licked away shelter cloth and canvas and leapt up into the morning air, swirling into dense, dark smoke. Udol saw a clock shrine in the heart of the fire succumb and topple.

  The trooper beside him suddenly jumped back, as if in surprise. Then he did it again and fell on his back.

  Shot through the torso, twice. Udol didn’t even have to look.

  He barked a hasty warning into his vox. The men around him scattered into cover. Two-thirds of them made it. The bastards had been waiting.

  Udol crouched down behind the relative shelter of an overturned flatbed as energy bolts spat and whistled overhead. One of his men nearby got in behind the frame of a plastic tent and then rolled over onto his side as a las-round came through the fabric skin and into the back of his head. Another man, caught in the open, was knocked over by a laser bolt that broke both his legs. He fell hard, and started crawling until another shot hit him in the face.

  Udol felt his heart race. He glimpsed movement on the pathway next to the fire, drew his laspistol, and fired a few bright bars of energy down the narrow track. The troopers around him began to open up with their carbines.

  ‘Inkerz!’ Udol voxed. ‘Get tac logis. Tell them there’s another hot raid coming in right down here under the aqueduct!’

  ‘Acknowledged, sir.’

  It was hot, all right, and getting hotter. Udol counted forty-plus hostiles out there, in amongst the abandoned tents. He glimpsed drab red body armour and dust-cloaks. They matched the description of the hostiles that had been hitting and running all around the city skirts for the last four days. Heretic zealots, drawn to the city as surely as the pilgrims, as anxious to deny the truth occurring here as the pilgrims were to celebrate it. Marshal Biagi had told Udol personally that the hostiles were most probably militant cultists from a world in the local group. They’d made their way to the planet under cover of the mass pilgrim influx to stage terror attacks on the city.

  The bastards could fight. Fight disciplined, and that was what made them really scary. Udol had tangled with warp scum many times before – had the scars to prove it – and Imperial military rigour had triumphed over zealot fanaticism every time.

  Maybe it was the Imperium’s turn to play the fanatic, Udol considered. According to every clock in sight, the hour was on them. They certainly had something to be fanatical about at last.

  A sudden wind picked up, and began to drive the smoke cover hard north. A great part of the hostiles’ position in amongst the tents was abruptly unveiled. Udol coordinated his shooters and began systematic counter-fire. His troop pounded rapid fire into the shamble of tents and bivouacs, and then pushed forward through the shanty, keeping their heads low.

  A weapon cracked close to Udol, and the man to his left tumbled over onto the remains of a survival blister. Udol swung round and fired his sidearm, hitting the hostile square in the snarling iron visor he was wearing. Before the bastard’s body had even folded up under him, another two came charging out of cover, firing wildly. Udol dropped to one knee, raised his left arm straight and clenched the stirrup grip. A long spear of incandescent flame leapt from the torch-vent behind the knuckles of his glove and broke around their torsos. Both staggered, ablaze, screaming. The flames cooked off the powercells in the nearest one’s webbing and blew him apart, shredding his arms and torso right off his collapsing legs in a searing flash. The explosion felled his companion, who lay writhing and burning on the ground. Udol walked over to him and executed him with a single shot from his laspistol.

  ‘Farenx. Beresi. Get forward on the double,’ Udol told the men behind him. They were close to the edge of the shanty spread, and the hostiles were falling back fast. Just heretics, Udol thought. Maniac cultists testing the faith and resolve of the city with their cowardly terror-tactics. Exactly what the Regiment Civitas Beati had been formed to fight.

  But when he reached the hem of the shanty, he realised he was wrong. It was more than that, far more. The open vista of the obsidae lay before him: a flat, cold waste of grey pumice and dust flecked by litters of black volcanic glass. It stretched away north for three kilometres towards Grace Gorge and the murky crags of the Stove Hills.