Severita watched the frozen face and tightened her grip on the sword in her hands. The cryo-machines thumped their heartbeat rhythm, and out beyond the metal skin of the ship, the void slid past.
‘God-Emperor,’ she began again. ‘In Your wisdom hear the words of Your daughter.’
+Did you get bored?+
Severita spun around. Lightning arced down her sword as the power field activated. A figure hung in the gloom by the door. Withered limbs and dark blue robes hung from a bald head set in a bulbous collar of chrome. Its bare feet hovered just above the deck. A heat haze shimmered around it. Bubbles of ghost light popped and cracked.
‘You must leave,’ said Severita, fighting her jaw muscles trying to clamp her teeth together. She could taste burned sugar on her tongue. Mylasa – Covenant’s thief of thoughts – drifted forwards, until she was an inch from Severita’s sword tip.
+No,+ said Mylasa’s voice in Severita’s head. +Your part is over for a while. I am sure that fact will come as a relief.+
‘I have no orders to leave from Lord Covenant.’
+Then stay. It is all the same to me, so long as you understand that you will do nothing.+ The psyker drifted forward so that she was facing Severita. +You are good at doing nothing, though from that little break in concentration I saw, you could do with more practice.+
Severita felt the rage and loathing rise in her like a tide. Mylasa’s black eyes were glittering in the pale mask of her face. She held that gaze, feeling her skin prickle with static, then she let out a breath and lowered her sword. Its power field deactivated with a dry crack.
+Well done. That is a lot of control you just showed. Now please get out of the way and let me do my work.+
Severita did not move.
‘What are you going to do to her?’
+She is the acolyte of an inquisitor who, until recently, we thought both an ally and dead. Now we know that Inquisitor Idris is alive and decidedly not friendly, and that this creature is an assassin whose identity has been reshaped by a resurrection cult that was responsible for massacring a conclave of inquisitors. She bore the name Enna Gyrid, but we have no idea who she really is. She showed every sign of being more than a little lethal, and there is a good chance that she is harbouring what you would charmingly call witch powers. What do you think I am going to do to her, Severita?+
Severita did not move for a second, and then stepped back.
+My thanks.+
Mylasa slid into the space in front of the casket.
+In case you are concerned, I have orders not to kill her.+
‘Why would I be concerned about that?’
+I don’t know. I don’t like to pry.+
The slow thud-thump of the cryo-machines filled the silence.
TRUE AND PURE
‘Water, miracle water from the weeping saint, shrine water, true and pure…’
Acia kept close to her grandfather as he began to shake the beaten tin cup while they walked down the main walk of the Palace of Pillars. She could feel the sullen hostility in the air. The pebble on its string rattled against the metal. Curtains hung across the doors of lean-tos twitched as they passed. Her grandfather smiled as he looked at the downcast eyes of the few people they saw.
The Palace of Pillars was not a palace of course, but someone had given it that name and it had stuck. Technically it was not even part of the halls of the monastery. The brick pillars which stretched up to the vaulted arches high above were there to support the floor of structures higher up. The pilgrims had found the space, just like they had the tunnels and forgotten spaces threading through the monastery. They were not supposed to be there, and the shrine guards came down sometimes to clear them out, but they always came back. Where else was there for them to go? All of them had come so far: for hope of healing, or revelation, or peace. Some even found it, but most found that the bones of saints and holy men could not feed them or keep off the cold that blew from the high plateau. These ones were lucky in a sense. Places in the shelter of the monastery itself cost.
Lean-tos of fabric and plastek, stretched over scrap metal frames, filled the space around the pillars. Cooking fires wound smoke into air that reeked of sweat. The bright tatters of prayer flags and saint kites hung from wires strung between the pillars. An icy draught, which had found its way down from the upper levels, stirred the strips and effigies.
‘True and pure…’ They trudged on. Liquid sloshed in the can Acia carried. Her fingers were cold. The hunger pain in her gut was a rising ache. There had been no food for the last two days, and no one had bought the water.
‘Grandfather, they are not going to buy the water.’
‘They will.’
Acia looked up at him with the hard stare of a child whose view does not allow for the comfort of little lies.
‘Why? They haven’t so far?’
‘Because it’s good, and holy, and because the God-Emperor Himself will make it happen.’
‘Why didn’t He do that in the other places we went?’
‘Now, Acia, to question is heresy, remember.’
Acia frowned and stared around her.
‘Besides, we haven’t been here before,’ he said, smiling around as a man stirring a cooking pot looked away from them. ‘These people are closer to the blessed places. They have holiness in their hearts.’
Her grandfather rattled the cup in the direction of a man peering out of an opening between tattered sheets. Acia met the man’s eyes for a second before they vanished.
‘True and pure!’ her grandfather called.
The water hanging from Acia’s back by a rag rope was holy, he believed that, she knew. Everything in this place was holy, from the stones to the people that crowded at its edges and in its roots. It didn’t matter that the water had come from a broken pipe he had found out in the pilgrim sprawl. It didn’t matter that the real water from the weeping saint had lasted only a few minutes and soaked into the ground. It didn’t matter that the can she carried it in had been pulled from a refuse heap. It didn’t matter, because it couldn’t matter.
Acia could almost hear his plea in his smile – ‘Oh please, God-Emperor, let it not matter. Let someone give a coin for a cup. Please…’
‘The Emperor will provide,’ he said, and Acia felt him squeeze her hand.
They turned a corner.
‘Grandfather!’ Acia’s voice was sharp. Two men and a woman barred their path. They had the narrow, sharp expressions of the unforgiving, and iron bars in their hands.
Her grandfather blinked as though only just seeing them.
Acia folded close beside her grandfather. All of them wore tattered scraps of clothes, she noticed, but all had crude blue tattoos covering their right hands.
‘Do you want water?’ her grandfather asked, and she heard the tremble in his voice.
The woman stepped forward. Her rags shifted.
‘That water is not pure,’ she said. She raised a heavy iron bar and lowered it so its tip rested on her grandfather’s chest. ‘The stone saint wept and brought blessings amongst His faithful, but you are peddling lies.’
‘Your pardon,’ he said, taking a step back. A fourth figure, who had slipped behind him without him noticing, nudged him back. ‘Please,’ said her grandfather. ‘We will go… I… just wanted to…’
‘We have touched the true water,’ hissed the woman, her face so close that Acia could see the rotted pits where her teeth had been. Her hands were twisting on the iron bar. ‘We have! We are blessed and you are a blasphemer.’
A hand grabbed the water canister and ripped it from Acia’s grip. The rag-rope strap broke. She fell. For an instant it was slow, like she was watching what was happening but it was not her. She felt her grandfather’s hand slip out of hers, heard his cry crash into her ears.
‘Acia!’ he shouted. ‘Acia, run! Run–’
And the woman swung the iron bar, and her grandfather’s last words ended in blood and shattered teeth.
Bloo
d. Blood falling in a ragged scatter. Wide eyes and teeth clenched with effort.
‘Grandfather!’
And the woman was swinging the bar again, and the others struck too, and her grandfather was falling…
Falling…
Like a bloody doll.
A shattered red ruin for a head.
Strings cut.
Life left as a half-gasped plea for her to run.
And she felt a scream begin to unwind from inside her.
And–
Blackness.
She was standing, because she could feel the ground beneath her feet, but she felt like she was hovering on the edge of waking and sleeping. She could smell smoke… smoke and something else… something rich and bitter… It was quiet too. The quiet of a dream. No, not completely quiet… There was a light pattering, like heavy rain drops.
She opened her eyes.
The men and woman had gone.
Everything within twenty paces had gone.
Dark tatters of fabric and wet, torn shreds of meat hung from the wires strung between the pillars, like storm debris snagged on trees. Red rain was pattering through the silent cavern from the red daubed roof. On the ground near Acia, a flayed and scorched hand sat, fingers still curled around an iron bar.
Acia looked, and the scream that came from her this time was just sound.
SEVEN
‘Wait,’ Memnon called. Ninkurra paused and turned back to where the gunship was cycling its engines. She had just loosed one hawk into the icy air and was raising her left arm to loose the other. It was midday, but she had known lighter nights. The scrap of light that existed was hidden behind a layer of leaden cloud that promised snow, if she was any judge.
They had set down ten kilometres from the monastery, intending to arrive on foot and unseen. All of them were swathed in thermal cloaks with fur-lined hoods pulled up over their heads against the ice wind. Besides Ninkurra and her master there were two others: Geddon and the looming silence of Cinis, his head hidden beneath his hood. Geddon had taken the additional clothing despite the fact that her scanning and signal implantations made her glow like a walking stove in Ninkurra’s heat sight. A tracked auto-skid carried the main load of their equipment. If anyone had been there to see them, they might have thought they were going into the wilderness rather than to a monastery the size of a city.
‘What is it?’ called Ninkurra, raising her voice above the wind whistling across the surrounding rocks.
‘A ship has just entered outer orbit,’ said Geddon, her patchwork machine-voice scraping against the wind. ‘Our own ship was just moving to the edge of sensor range when it picked it up. The ship is known – it is the Dionysia, last vessel of the von Castellan dynasty, and bound in service to Inquisitor Covenant of the Ordo Malleus.’
The hawk twitched on Ninkurra’s gauntlet but she did not release it.
‘How is he here?’ she asked.
Memnon’s gaze had fixed on the middle distance.
‘He was a Thorian and trained in prognostication. If he is here it is because he has read the auguries. He knows that a prospect will emerge here.’
‘And that we are here?’ asked Ninkurra.
‘Perhaps,’ said Memnon, and then shook his head. ‘This should have been dealt with before now.’ Ninkurra frowned.
‘You say that he took captive an agent involved in the endeavour. Could she have given him information?’
Memnon nodded but did not move. His gaze was still far away. The wind gusted. Above them, Ninkurra’s hawk let out a low cry of hunger.
‘It is possible.’
‘How do we proceed?’
Memnon looked at Ninkurra.
‘The prospect will manifest here, and it will happen soon. When it does it must be removed. This development does not change that.’ He nodded to himself. ‘But the danger to the endeavour must be removed. The agent he has captured must be killed, along with any who have learnt what she may know.’
Ninkurra nodded, understanding what she needed to do without him needing to speak an order.
‘If he is coming to the surface he is unlikely to bring a captive,’ she said. ‘So, the ship…’
Memnon nodded, and then looked up as a large snowflake fell from the dark sky. He held out a gloved hand and caught it on his palm. Another flake spun down, and then another and another.
‘Atmospheric disturbance is increasing,’ buzzed Geddon. ‘I am reading paradoxical charge patterns and etheric disturbance across a significant area.’ The wind gusted and brought with it a wall of white shards to kiss Ninkurra’s face. The snow was settling on the ground already.
‘It is rising,’ said Memnon, as though to himself. ‘It is rising…’
Ninkurra turned back towards the gunship, flicking a hand gesture to the pilot to drop the closing rear hatch. The hawk she had loosed into the sky swooped low and landed on her shoulder.
She turned back just as she reached the ramp. Memnon, with Cinis, Geddon and the auto-skid in front of him, was almost at the edge of the rock bowl.
‘What about Covenant? The word is he is hard to kill.’
‘That is my concern,’ called the inquisitor, and walked on. Ninkurra watched him for a second, and then went up the ramp into the gunship. Seven seconds later it lifted off, thrusters kicking the newly settling snow up into night.
‘How did it take so long to find?’ asked Iacto through the fold of cloth he had pressed to his mouth. The taste of vomit was still thick in every breath, even through the cloth, and brought another wash of the stench. He blinked, trying to hold what remained in his stomach down. The gusting wind brought another lungful of stench, and he had to focus so as not to let it overwhelm him. His head was pounding.
Senior Shrine Guard Loa held out the breath mask she had first offered Iacto before they had entered the drift alley. He had refused then, thinking of the indignity. Now he was sure that vomiting uncontrollably had been a more grievous blow to his holy dignity. Neither Loa nor the squad of shrine guard with them had shown any sign of amusement or contempt – perhaps they thought that in the face of what waited in the pilgrim hole, a little vomit was the least that could be expected.
‘Your holiness,’ said Loa, nodding at the breath mask. Iacto took it, and fumbled the straps over his head. The rubber-scented air that filled his mouth was a blessed relief. For an instant, he thought that he must look strange indeed – robed in grey with a purple stole, hung with his chain of office, and his head hidden by a mask shaped like an exaggerated face of sorrow with a heavy filter plug for a mouth. Set beneath the bronzed lobster helms of the shrine guard they looked intimidating, even fierce. On Iacto it must look bizarre.
The Shrine Guards of the Congregation of the Bearers of the Lamp were neither priests nor members of a holy order. Long ago, the blessed Saint Sebastian Thor had banned the Ecclesiarchy from keeping armed forces. And so, in many places and in many ways, the priesthood had found methods of keeping Thor’s decree and surviving in a universe defined and maintained by war. In the Monastery of the Last Candle, this practically came in the groups of men and women who took oaths to protect the sacred places and those who tended them. Several hundred strong, clad in quilted leather armour sewn with prayer medallions and all bearing iron maces besides their other arms, they were intimidating and effective in keeping the pilgrim-drowned monastery peaceful.
Armed by alms given by pilgrims and bearing no formal connection to the Ecclesiarchy, the shrine guards were technically a militia, raised and maintained by its members out of devotion to the God-Emperor. In reality, they were the enforcers of law and order in the monastery, and the High Sentinel of All Sacred Places wielded as much power as the head of an order. For that reason, Iacto had been careful to find allies within the shrine guard ever since he had begun his ascent, and had seen such cultivation pay off time and again. Loa was one of his most valuable assets: clever, but not too clever, and with enough flaws to exploit that he now owned her utterly.
‘It took this long to find because there is no reason to come out here,’ said Loa. ‘Pilgrims that live here might be luckier than those further out in the drifts, but they still have nothing worth the trouble.’
They were standing on the top of a flight of steps that led down to the floor of a covered cistern, set in the close-crammed alleys and shacks of the Western Pilgrim Drift. This part of the shanty expanse was so close to the true monastery that he could have thrown a stone and hit its outer wall.
He looked down into the pit again and wished he hadn’t. Under the light of the shrine guard torches the floor of the cistern was dark red, almost black.
Almost.
Hand prints were smeared across its walls. Insects crawled over everything, the buzzing of their wings a low rasp against the wind in the silence.
‘How could this…’ he began to ask, and trailed off, finding that speaking made the taste of bile stronger in his mouth. He coughed and dropped his eyes. ‘It would have taken…’
‘A lot of people,’ said Loa.
‘And no one heard anything?’
She shrugged.
‘There are no pilgrims in the buildings nearby. Either they cleared out, or…’
‘Who else knows?’ he asked. Loa shifted.
‘The High Sentinel has sent messengers to the holy bishop, and to the Voice of the Concordance. I got word to you first, but they will know by now.’
‘This is going to cause a riot,’ said Iacto. ‘There is already trouble in the drifts. Sickness too, spreading fast, really fast. But this is… Heresy.’ His eyes had caught something amongst the buzz of flies, half hidden by shadows.
‘Give me your torch,’ he said, and when she had handed it to him, descended a few steps and held the light up to the cistern wall. Loa hissed a curse from behind him.
Incarnation - John French Page 11