Brecht found himself in a crumpled heap on the cold, mosaic floor. From this new more humble perspective, Patroclus looked even taller. He towered over him, a dark mass that filled his vision.
The Space Marine had pulled the punch. That Brecht's head was still on his shoulders was proof enough of that.
He had one hell of a headache, though.
Patroclus bent over him and grabbed him roughly by his greatcoat lapels. Brecht didn't resist. There was really no point. He did wince with pain, however, when the armoured marine lifted him up and slammed him against the rock wall.
"You haven't answered my question."
"What," Brecht mumbled through quickly-swelling lips, "would you like me to say?"
Patroclus' eyes - those cold inhuman Astartes eyes - flashed dangerously.
"You have sworn oaths."
Brecht tried to keep his voice level. "One thing I've learned - the most valuable lesson I've ever learned - is that Chaos is within as well as without." Patroclus' eyes narrowed, but he remained silent. "You're Astartes, Brother. You of all people should know this." He licked his bottom lip tentatively. Split. Swelling. Wonderful. "Horus. Fulgrim..."
"Do not."
"Alright. But you understand what I'm saying." He flexed his feet experimentally in the air. The rock against his back was very hard. He looked Patroclus squarely in the eye. "Yes. Of course I enjoyed it. Satisfied? Or are you disappointed that the Astartes don't have a monopoly on giving into temptation?"
With a flick of his wrist, the Space Marine flung Brecht back to the ground, where he lay panting for a moment. Patroclus indicated the door at the end of the corridor.
"You're on your own now, Inquisitor."
Brecht picked himself up and smiled. "Well, don't think I haven't appreciated the company, but..."
"Your flippancy may one day be the death of you."
Brecht nodded. "I've heard that before." He glanced towards the door. "So what's behind the door, Brother?"
Patroclus looked at him and Brecht fancied he detected the barest hint of amusement in those too-large, too-strange eyes.
"Something you desperately need."
Brecht raised an eyebrow. "A bath? Cup of recaf?"
Patroclus shook his head slowly. "Perspective."
Brecht watched him walk away for a long moment and then turned his attention to the end of the corridor. Slowly, tentatively, he made his way towards the door.
Closer to it, he could now make out that, just like Patroclus' armour, it was scarred and pitted. The embossed aquila in its centre was worn, but freshly painted a lustrous gold. Some instinct made him reach out his hand to touch it. It was the same hand that had been cut on the daemon's sharp hooks. As his fingers brushed against it, the door swung open, revealing a small room, simply furnished. A table sat in the centre of the room and behind it a hooded figure sat, his face lost in the shadows cast from a single bright candle stuck to the table's top.
"Come in, Inquisitor." The voice was the rustling of aged parchment, accompanied by the soft wheeze of ancient lungs. "Have a seat. I am Brother Asclepius. And I have some important things to show you."
The journey to the Brachius City spaceport was smooth and fairly uneventful, largely because Bex and Ekkert undertook it in a commandeered Regulator ground car, complete with blaring siren, flashing emergency lights and a grim-faced driver and co-driver who were not averse to brandishing combat shotguns at other road users. On arriving at the spaceport gatehouse, an almost wilfully unattractive building, whose squat blocky shape and drab grey walls seemed to cast a pall on the surrounding esplanade, Bex and Ekkert disembarked from their impromptu transportation, the former with a grateful smile that was intended to mollify their unwilling escorts and the latter with the kind of graceful disdain that only a noble savage can truly possess.
Bex surveyed the large gateway in front of them critically. She wagered that it had been a long while since it had been this… shut. A heavy duty blast door had descended from the gate's high arch, meeting its twin which had risen from the ground, the two slabs of brass-coated adamantium interlocking to form a barrier impenetrable to pretty much anything shy of a plasma cannon.
"I know Dranguille said she was going to lock the place down, but…" Her voice trailed off and she stepped forward.
"You doubt the word of the Interrogator?" Ekkert was looking at her quizzically.
"No. Not at all. But I do doubt the efficiency of Administratum officials on lazy backwater worlds like this one. This is pretty impressive."
Bex turned as a small door in the side of the gatehouse opened with a pneumatic wheeze. A few short moments later, a pale and sweating adept was standing before them, flanked by two impassive Arbitrators, one on each side.
"My lady… my lady…" blurted the adept. "I'm so sorry to keep you waiting…"
"That's quite alright," said Bex, feeling slightly bemused by the fawning man quivering in the dying daylight before her.
"And I beg… no, I crave your forgiveness for the unconscionable error of protocol earlier on. My junior adept was distracting me at the time with some pointless drivel that he deemed important even though a blind baboon could see that…"
"Erm…" said Bex, holding a hand up to stem the flow of obsequiousness, "I think you're mistaking me for someone else. It's probably Interrogator Dranguille you need to be grovelling to." She smiled sweetly, leaning forward as if to take the adept into her confidence. "And, if I were you, I'd really work on that apology, because, you know, as it stands, it's pretty poor." Straightening up, Bex fixed one of the Arbitrators with a cool, appraising stare. "You. Arbitrator…?"
"Darvill," came the curt reply.
"Darvill." Bex nodded just as curtly. "What's the security situation?" She began to march towards the gatehouse, Ekkert falling into step just behind her, Darvill doing the same to her right. The other arbitrator held back to keep an eye on Controller Nirel who was struggling to keep up – both physically and intellectually.
Darvill's voice was surprisingly quiet. "Non-essential personnel have been told to report to their assembly points. Passengers and merchants who have yet to be processed have been restricted to the central concourse." He paused to let her through the gatehouse doorway. "There are a number of passengers still in the terminal buildings."
"How many?"
A shrug. "Couple of hundred, maybe. It's been a quiet day."
"And where are they?"
"Confined to the departure lounges or the arrival halls. For the most part."
Bex scowled. "For the most part?"
Another shrug. "It's possible that a few didn't get to their designated areas in time. In fact, I'd say it's quite likely."
The gatehouse interior consisted of a large control chamber with several smaller rooms accessed by curtained archways to the left. The party strode through it purposefully, ignoring the handful of arbitrators who had straightened to attention when they entered.
Bex stopped before a large steel security door, set in the far wall. The gothic script stencilled across its grey surface indicated that it led to the space port proper. "Well, I suppose it could be worse."
Declining to comment, Darvill punched in the access code, muttering a prayer to the door's machine spirit as he did so. He turned to Bex as the door slid slowly open.
"Whatever you and your friend are going to do, you'd better do it quickly."
A violent swelling roaring sound rushed through the widening gap. At her shoulder, Ekkert said something, but Bex couldn't catch what it was. She stepped through the doorway into a narrow corridor of empty space created by heavy duty steel barriers on each side. Grim-faced space port security personnel patrolled the corridor, electric stun guns clutched in gauntleted fists. Here and there, arbites officers stalked behind them, the barrels of their combat shotguns gleaming in the artificial light.
On the other side of the barriers, a disconsolate, frightened, abandoned mass of humanity crouched, stood, jostled, pushed and shoved. For an instant, it seemed to Bex that she was looking at a single organism, a sweating shuddering aggregation of creatures whose individuality had been subsumed by an overpowering collective will. Each face – fat, gaunt, young or lined with age - was drawn tight with an anxiety that, Bex knew, was quickly gnawing away at their self-restraint.
There must have been at least a thousand faces, a thousand bodies confined in the space port concourse, pressed against the shuttered food stalls and ancient brick, surging forwards with all the unthinking motion of a restless, clamouring sea.
And she was the moon to their tide. Her appearance had energised them, given their discontent focus.
A man in his thirties, his face arranged into a pleading desperate mask, plunged through the crowd towards her, reaching the barrier through the indiscriminate use of elbows and fists. She turned instinctively towards the movement.
"How long?" he screamed at her. "How long are you going to…"
His voice was stilled by the brutal intervention of a shotgun butt. A livid spray of red seared itself on her memory but the face it had come from vanished, swallowed up by the heaving sea of bodies around him.
Bex swallowed. Darvill had been right. They needed to do this quickly or…
"Hurry!" Darvill again, his hand firmly on her shoulder. "The control spire's this way."
Following the arbitrator's lead, Bex and Ekkert broke into a jog, the clamouring of the crowd lapping at their heels.
"Who are you?"
Brecht stood just inside the threshold of the small chamber, scrutinising the ancient Astartes behind the simple wooden table. The not-quite-man's face was lined with age and the inevitable scarring that almost every Astartes who had survived his first few decades of combat possessed. His eyes were a bright violet. Briefly, he wondered if the venerable Space Marine had been born on Cadia, but quickly suppressed the thought. It was irrelevant. What the Space Marine was now was much more important.
"I asked you a question."
Brecht kept his tone level, but there was an undercurrent of steel in his voice. He knew all the senior members of the Scarlet Storm's command structure. He'd met most of them and knew the names and achievements of the others. Patroclus' captain in the Third Company, Graylan, had led the charge at Sierra Minor, besting an eldar exarch in a bloody prolonged combat, the accounts of which had reached the ears of the High Lords of Terra thousands of light years away. Chaplain Drastis of the Fourth Company had led the shattered remnants of the company's second and third squads into a heretic encampment on the agri-world of Gott and emerged with the head of an Alpha Legion sorcerer in his blood-soaked fist. Jakroth on Generis. Krassos on Zokkoth Prime. Velper on an abandoned millennia-old Imperial cruiser in the Tarsis Reach. Brecht knew the heroes of the Scarlet Storm and their legends. He knew the chapter inside out.
And yet, he didn't know this man sitting in front of him – this aged Astartes with violet eyes, a ghost of a smile haunting his wide, thin mouth.
"True to form." The Space Marine's voice slithered from his throat, a dry rustling in the still air. "Always asking questions. I am not here to answer them. Sit down."
"I'd prefer to stand." Brecht glanced around the room although there really wasn't much to see. He moved forward casually, hands thrust into the greatcoat pockets. The thin smile on the Space Marine's face had vanished. Something crackled drily in a shadowy corner. Automatically, Brecht turned his head towards it, but there was nothing there. Nothing he could see.
When he turned back, the Astartes was standing up, a faint luminescence gathering in the depths of his violet eyes. The crackling sounded again, but this time it was louder and it seemed to come from all around them.
"I am sorry," said the Astartes flatly. "We're running out of time." He stretched forth his hand – whether in command or in supplication, it was impossible for Brecht to tell. "Now, sit." Brecht felt the hairs on the back of his hands and neck grow stiff. A terrible power was building in the little room and it was centred on the Space Marine.
"Down!"
Something invisible and immensely powerful smashed Brecht to the floor. For a split second as he was plummeting towards the rough stone, Brecht saw the Space Marine's form shimmer like oil on water, become not one but two images, one overlaid on the other.
His mouth was dry as dust and he blinked to clear his vision. The Astartes loomed over him, his burning violet eyes fastening on his.
"Who…" Brecht croaked, "are… you?"
The Astartes bent down and Brecht smelled the tang of ozone. Light spilled from the Space Marine's eyes, brimming over his eyelids. His voice was a whisper and yet his words somehow seemed to reverberate in Brecht's mind.
"I am the Crooked Path. I am the Guardian at the Threshold. I am the Angel who soars on wings of Shadow. I am your one, last hope to leave this place."
Heart pounding frantically in his chest, Brecht attempted to raise himself on his elbows, tried to back away from the ancient Space Marine and his burning eyes.
"That I have revealed myself to you now, in this manner, should indicate to you how serious your predicament is."
Violet lightning flared in the Space Marine's eyes. Brecht half turned over, trying to find the strength to drag himself upright, but an immense weight pressed down upon him.
The Astartes roared at him.
"I said down!"
Brecht screamed involuntarily, as the floor disappeared from underneath him and he plunged into darkness.