‘It will not be here, will it? He will not walk amongst us here, will He?’
The man shook his head, and reached out a hand to her shoulder.
‘We need you to do one last service for us. It is not a small thing, and it will mark your soul with blood and suffering.’
She laughed then, and lifted one of her chains of penance. The weight swung slowly on its end.
‘Have I ever refused such tasks?’
In the shadowed recess at the back of the chapel, Iacto watched, mind racing, trying to still the thunder-beat of his heart. He was aware of the thinness of the gloom around him, of the fact that there was just shadow and air between him and what he was seeing and hearing.
Iacto began to let his breath out. How was he going to get out of this? If he did, what was he going to do? His head was aching again. Nausea-bright lines coiled across his eyes.
‘It is supposed to be here,’ said the bald man, softly. ‘In this place and at this time. The dust speaks of it, and the other portents scream it… but it is not clear. The prospect can’t be picked out. So another path must be taken. If we cannot find the flower to cut then all must know the scythe’s edge.’
Xilita began to shake her head.
‘You…’
‘Not just I,’ said the man. ‘You, bishop. The geothermal vaults, you have the authorising control.’
‘You cannot…’
Iacto blinked. The pain in his head was blindingly bright, and he had the sudden instinct to run, to get as far away from what he was seeing and hearing as he could.
‘The monastery will fall,’ said the bald man. ‘Darkness has come for it in this Season of Night. The fire will be a mercy, as much as a necessity, and mercy is a blessing in this age.’
Iacto flinched before he could stop himself. His arm twitched and brushed an embroidered hanging on the wall. A ripple passed through the fabric.
The man’s head jerked up. His eyes swept the dark as he rose, and Iacto was running for the chapel door, before he could even consider if it was a wise idea. Unseen, the man’s hand flicked out. Iacto felt something hit him in the back. He ran another two steps and then his legs folded as though they had been cut from underneath him. He fell, feeling coldness and lightness spread through him in the stretched time before he hit the floor. He was trying to breathe, hearing himself gasp, and feeling bubbles burst in his throat.
A hand gripped his shoulder and rolled him over. Iacto gasped and felt something splatter out of his mouth. The bald man looked down at him.
‘Who is he?’ he said, half glancing at Xilita. Iacto gasped again.
‘The abbot of one of the orders.’
The bald man nodded, and then reached down next to Iacto’s back and tugged. A wet noise squelched through the air. Pain exploded inside Iacto’s chest. The man held up a short throwing dagger of dark metal with a blade that broadened near the tip. It had no tines, and the man held it loosely, as though it was a feather.
Iacto tried to move, but pain and numbness were spreading through him.
‘No, don’t bring yourself more pain,’ said the man. ‘What you have heard means that you must die, but you have not earnt suffering.’ The man leant close enough that his voice became a whisper for Iacto alone. ‘Forgive me this,’ he said. ‘But salvation is always birthed in blood.’ And he stabbed the dagger up into Iacto’s chest.
FOURTEEN
The hawks glided ahead of Ninkurra, wings beating silently in the ship’s corridors, folding in shadow and stillness when they saw anything. It had taken time to find an officer with the correct uniform and access rings to pass through the doors she needed. She had not wanted one of the von Castellan household elite. Such select groups tended to be tight, and infiltration into them took a great deal of time and delicacy, and she did not have the luxury of either.
In the end she had settled on a first-line gunnery officer of middle rank, but with the starburst crest on her chest that marked her as senior cadre amongst the middle deck officers. That should mean she should have limited access to the command bastion. The officer had died slowly but without pain as the venom dart had shut down her nerve pathways one by one. Ninkurra had stripped the uniform and dumped the corpse in a crawl space. Then she had pulled the uniform over her bodyglove. Her shard-blade had slid into her belt at the base of her back under the uniform jacket. Her other weapons and equipment had gone into a roll made from her cloak. Hung over her shoulder on a length of cord, it looked like a kit bundle that any crewman might carry. The uniform did not fit properly, but it would pass so long as no one looked closely. So far no one had, but that might be about to change.
The door to the hoist she was making for was not guarded. She shifted her mental sight between the two hawks perched in the struts above it, and then approached. The control panel chimed as she presented the officer’s ring to it. Cogwork buzzed within. A light pulsed amber.
Despite herself, Ninkurra held her breath. This hoist would take her up into the Dionysia’s command levels, just two decks down from the medicae section. If she had selected her last victim poorly then there was a good chance that something would notice an attempt to access the hoist.
There was a low hiss of pistons and the double blast doors pulled wide. The hoist space beyond was a bare metal box, but free of the creep of rust and grime that marked the lower decks. Ninkurra stepped in and twitched the hawks off their perches in the piping above. They flitted within and settled amongst the latticework covering the ceiling.
She keyed the code for the exit point that the ensign had given her, and pressed the dead officer’s ring against the controls. Amber lights flickered for an instant and then flashed red.
Ninkurra raised the ring to try again. Blinking, she wondered if someone had found the corpse; if the officer’s clearance codes had been rescinded; if there was already a security servitor staring at a warning light on its console and reading an intrusion response.
‘Hold it!’ The voice echoed down the corridor. Feet rang on the metal decking. Ninkurra spiked her will into the hawks above her, as her hand slid around the pommel of her shard-blade. ‘Hold!’ She tensed, ready to snap the blade out and cut in a single movement.
A figure ran into sight and across the threshold.
‘My thanks,’ panted an officer in the black and red uniform of a household officer. The woman was breathing hard. Ninkurra relaxed the muscles poised to draw the blade, but kept her hand on the pommel behind her back.
The officer blinked, looked at the flashing red light on the hoist control panel, and then up at Ninkurra.
‘You put in the wrong code or did the ghost in the spirit decide to say no again?’
‘I…’ began Ninkurra.
‘No matter,’ said the household officer, and pressed her ring into the control panel. It went green. ‘Nothing has been the same in the last few days. I hear it’s something to do with the storm, like it followed us out into this backwater. Ghosts and system failures all over the place. Exit code?’
Ninkurra spoke it, and the officer punched it in, then her own. A second later the doors closed and the hoist began to lurch upwards.
‘What station are you reporting to?’ asked the officer, after a few minutes of clanking quiet.
‘Primary medicae,’ said Ninkurra.
The officer frowned.
‘Reporting for duty there, or reporting with malady?’
Ninkurra shaped her will and sent a barb out into the other woman’s mind. The officer flinched and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.
‘Are you all right, ma’am?’ asked Ninkurra.
‘Yes, just a pain.’
‘A lot of that recently,’ said Ninkurra, saying out loud something she had seen in the woman’s thoughts. ‘Since the last passage through the storm.’
‘Yes…’ said the officer, still blinking.
The hoist lurched to a halt. The control panel flashed amber, waiting for authorisation to open the doors.
‘Would you min
d?’ asked Ninkurra, gesturing at the door. ‘I doubt the spirit has forgiven me yet.’
‘Yes…’ said the officer, wincing. ‘Yes, of course.’ She pressed the ring into the controls again. Lights snapped green and the doors opened. Ninkurra sent another pulse into the woman’s thoughts, so that she squeezed her eyes shut for long enough that the hawks could glide out of the doors. She stepped after them, paused, and looked back.
‘My thanks,’ she said. The officer nodded, still blinking with pain. Then the doors shut, and Ninkurra looked around at the heart of the von Castellan domain.
‘Do I need to be conscious?’ asked Cleander. Iaso paused and tilted her head, as though giving his question careful consideration.
‘No, you don’t, but part of what I am attempting is very delicate, and one of the few ways I will have of knowing if I have gone too far is if you tell me.’
‘If I really scream, you mean?’
‘If you like.’
‘Just one more time – is there any alternative to all this?’
‘The alternative of letting whatever your aeldari friends put in you continue to activate and do unknown things to your biology – yes, there is that alternative.’
He did not reply. He was face-down on a steel slab. Runnels ran across the polished metal. Presumably for blood. His face was stuck through a rubber-lined hole so that all he could see was the white tiled floor, and the coiled pipes of various chirurgical machines. Iaso had let him keep mobility in his face and vocal cords, but for the duration of the operation he would not be able to move another muscle. Even his breathing and heart would be stopped, those functions being taken up by the devices that ringed the theatre.
‘Ready?’ asked Iaso, looking down at him with her carbuncle eyes. She had set a mirror on a stand under the slab so that he could see her. He had a feeling it was supposed to be reassuring.
‘Why not?’ he said, and forced a grin.
‘Very well, last nerve infusion proceeding now.’ He saw a needle-tipped servo-arm extend over Iaso’s shoulder and then glide down. He felt it slide into his neck and then a sensation like ice water running down his spine. ‘Attaching sanguinary piping to vascular plugs now.’ He heard cables snap and lock into the socket plugs she had fitted into his side. ‘Injecting cardio paralysis venom… now.’
His heart stopped. For a second he had the sensation of feeling silence in his chest. The breath stopped in his throat. The low buzz of the machinery filled his senses. He had the strangest feeling that he was drowning, but without being underwater. A spike of panic filled him. Then the cables beneath him jerked, and he felt a new pulse fill his veins, stronger and clockwork regular.
‘So, now we begin,’ she said. And he felt the first razor cut down his back.
‘Mistress Viola…’ She heard the voice, and felt the clouds of her dream shift and billow. She was walking down the galley of ancestors, back home. They were looking down at her with stone and painted eyes. ‘Mistress Viola…’ said a portrait of Sisyphina von Castellan. The old woman’s eyes were stern, her face hard. ‘Viola!’
She came awake, head rising from the desk she had not left. Her rooms were a dim blur, the candle set above the desk a pool of wax around the nub of a wick.
Bal stood next to her, a glow-globe in his hand. The outer door to the chamber was ajar.
‘What is happening?’ she asked, blinking and trying to rise as the fog of her exhausted sleep pulled back from her thoughts.
‘A message,’ said Bal, ‘or at least, I think it is a message.’
‘From the surface, from Covenant?’
‘No,’ he said, and held out a loop of polished wire. A yellow finger bone and copper cogs were threaded on it. ‘A rating tried to get up to the household levels to give it to you two cycles ago. The guards sent him away, but took this off him. His squad sergeant found it a few hours ago and was showing it to Kynortas when I was in the household billets.’
Viola took it, staring as she forced her thoughts to quicken.
‘I recognised it,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the bangles worn by the void-speakers you went to talk to, isn’t it? But if someone tried to get it to you, it must mean something.’
‘It does,’ she said.
Then she stood, shrugging on her crimson coat. She was two strides to the door when she stopped, went back to her desk and pulled out a laspistol in a holster, which she buckled around her waist.
‘Are you armed?’ she asked.
‘Always,’ he replied, ‘but what–’
‘What was that idiot of a guard thinking!’ she snapped, striding towards the door. ‘Two cycles, a lot can happen in two cycles.’
‘What–’
‘We are going down to the lower decks. No logs, no one else is informed, no one. You are my army if I need it.’
‘Always,’ he said, catching her up as she stopped short of the main door to the chamber.
‘Good,’ she said, and tapped one of her rings against the wood-panelled wall. There was a soft thump of piston bolts withdrawing, and a section of the wall hinged outwards. A small, red glow-globe lit in the space beyond. Narrow spiral stairs plunged down into the dark. ‘I probably should have mentioned this,’ she said, and stepped through onto the stairs.
‘What does it mean?’ asked Bal, before she could take the second step. ‘It was a message, but what did the void-speakers mean by sending it to you?’
She looked at him for a second, and then held the thread of bones and cogs up.
‘It’s a lie-catcher. They are worn to prevent the bearer speaking falsely of what they have heard the iron-mother say.’ Bal opened his mouth, but she answered his question before he could ask it. ‘But given like this, to a friend, it is a warning. It means that there are ghosts and revenants walking the decks. It means that we have a hidden enemy here on the ship.’
The cry shuddered from Cleander’s mouth before he could bite it off. The smell of burning meat filled his nose again. He wanted to gag, but the instinct found only the dead end of blanked nerves and paralysed muscles.
‘Is the pain different from before?’ asked Iaso, her voice flat.
‘Yes…’ he hissed through clenched teeth. It was difficult to speak with the air flowing up his throat from one of the respiration machines.
‘How so? Please be exact.’
In the mirror positioned beneath his face he could see the medicae staring at something on one of the machines, the reflection of green numerals flowing over her eye lenses.
‘It… hurt… more.’
‘Hmmm… Localised or more general?’
‘Down… my… spine…’ he said. ‘Sharp… and… burning…’
‘Hmmm…’
‘What… does… that… mean?’
‘The alien device, for want of a better description, has fused with both your nerve sheath and areas of bone. It appears to be biological, or at least to mimic such a nature. In places it has… grown, branching along other pathways. I was reasonably sure, before, that it would be impossible to remove by excision – now I am certain of it.’ He heard the buzz of the chrome servo-skulls, and the hiss of the contraseptic mist they breathed over the open wound of his back. ‘I have been trying to selectively cut and burn sections of it. This has been… unsuccessful.’
Cleander could hear the puzzlement floating to the surface under the layer of control.
‘But… you… can… do… some… thing?’
‘I am less confident of that. You see, the… device has responded to what I have been doing. It is repairing, healing itself and you. It has taken a great deal to keep the incisions open. It is… it is not going to let go of you, and it is trying to heal you to protect itself. I have never seen–’
A door release chimed.
‘I ordered no interruptions,’ snapped Iaso. In Cleander’s mirror view of her, Iaso turned her head. He heard steps on the tiled floor from the far side of the theatre. ‘This is a–’ There was a sound like wings beating. Iaso yel
led. One of the servo-skulls flew past her, towards the door, its chrome a blur. A shriek of tearing metal, and the sound of beating wings. Something dropped to the floor. Swift running steps, and he could hear Iaso scrabbling for something on one of the machines.
A sound like the wind turning pages of a book. A cry, high and shrill, and terrifying, and a wet thump of something hitting the tiled floor.
‘Quiet,’ said a female voice. ‘It will rip your throat out if you try to move or speak without being told to – understood?’ A pause. ‘Good. Tend to your arm, before you go into shock.’
He heard more steps coming closer. He tried to move, but he could not. The steady, mechanical rhythm of his breath and blood beat on. His eyes were wide, fixed on the mirror beneath him that was his only window to the rest of the world. There was a spray of bright, red blood across it, he noticed.
‘This is the Duke von Castellan?’ said the same cool, female voice. ‘Answer, or I will take a hand off him to keep yours company on the floor.’ Iaso must have nodded. ‘Is he conscious?’
‘Yes,’ said Iaso, her voice dry and rattling with shock. Cleander’s mind was racing. There were household guards nearby, but Iaso had ordered them to stay clear of the medicae bay while she operated. Iaso must have reached for a vox alarm, and…
The steps paused next to him. And then a face appeared in the mirror, looking down at him. Slim, hard, with eyes that held a touch of amusement.
‘Duke von Castellan, I hope you are well enough to talk.’
Viola lit the candle and placed it on the deck.
‘How long?’ asked Bal from behind her. He had kept at least one hand on a pistol ever since they had begun their descent to the lower decks.
Viola stood next to the wall and banged her fist on a pipe in a precise rhythm.
‘Not long,’ she said, turning back to the lifeward. He had donned a silvered infravisor. In the candlelight it reflected her own face.
‘You believe them?’ he asked, not looking at her but burning his gaze slowly across the dark distance of the tunnel. Pipes formed the curve of its walls, and its floor was a rusted grate. The smoke from the candle rose in a stuttering plume. Viola could smell the synth-scents laced into its tallow. ‘I mean that a hidden enemy could be on the ship?’
Incarnation - John French Page 23