The lights on the panel fizzed and flashed green. Bal nodded and stepped back out of the hoist doors. Viola looked at him, puzzlement briefly replacing panic.
‘What are you–’
‘Go for your brother,’ he said. ‘I will make sure that your prisoner is safe.’
‘Wait, what…’ she began.
‘You were going to her,’ he said. The doors began to close. ‘Because that is your duty, but serving you is mine.’
Viola opened her mouth to speak. The doors closed, and the hoists lurched upwards. The last sight she had of the lifeward was of him breaking into a run, pistols in his hands.
‘This way,’ said Iaso, turning through a hatch. Ninkurra pushed her mind into the medic’s but felt no deception. The hawk glided through the opening. In her mind Ninkurra saw the dark passage through the bird’s eyes. It was deserted. ‘The deck around where they are keeping her has been cleared of security. Once we are inside that cordon there will be no guards.’
‘She is not guarded?’
Iaso hesitated, and Ninkurra felt a spike of emotion on the surface of the medicae’s mind.
‘How is she guarded? Answer, or your duke will be dead by the time you get halfway through a lie.’
‘There is a woman, a former Sister of the Adepta Sororitas – she was set guard over the prisoner, and…’ Iaso trailed off.
‘And what else?’
‘The witch might have been sent to interrogate her.’
‘That is all?’
‘That is enough,’ said Iaso.
Ninkurra smiled and shoved the medicae through the hatch.
‘Then it is good that I have your help,’ she said.
The hawk shifted and ruffled its feathers. Cleander froze. The machine-beat of his heart was still strong, but in his chest he had felt the first tremor of his own heartbeat. It had made him feel sick, a discordant rhythm pushing against the blood syphon’s pulse. The machine had chimed a low warning, and that had made the bird move. He didn’t know how long he would live if the blood machine went to war with his own heart, and he didn’t know what would happen if he tried to move.
He closed his eyes and tried to focus on keeping his breath in time with the machines. He thought of the thing coiled around his spine.
Even if I live now, for how long after? he thought. Then felt a bitter smile pull at his cheeks. Too long. Too long, you fool.
Carefully he began to tense the muscles of his legs and arms.
‘Now,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Now, and then forever.’
He took a deeper breath. The machines chimed.
+Someone is coming.+ Mylasa’s voice snapped through Severita’s thoughts.
‘Who?’ asked Severita.
+I… I don’t know… I don’t have the energy to look. Not now…+
Severita moved towards the chamber door, sword in hand.
Thick frost had covered the walls and ceiling. Black icicles hung from pipes. The cryo-machines were coughing as frost choked their exhausts. Only Enna’s casket remained clear of ice. The metal of its frame glowed dark red with heat. The only other light was the prayer candle Severita had lit and placed in front of her as she knelt and prayed.
No one should have been coming to this chamber unless Covenant had returned.
She reached the door, drew her bolt pistol, levelled it at the closed portal, and began a fresh prayer in the silent storm of her skull.
He who watches, be my sight…
He who sees, open my eyes…
He who judges, guide my hand…
‘With me!’ shouted Viola, running, as bulkheads slammed open ahead of her. Two household troopers ran with her. Armoured, helmed and visored. The two guards in the companionway in front of her hesitated for a second. ‘Move!’ roared Viola. The two guards fell in with the two she had found one deck down. The vox was still a mess of growling static.
The doors to the primary medicae wing loomed in front of her as she rounded a corner. Her gun was in her hand. She should have a cadre of troops with her. She should have gone to the bridge, taken stock, calculated, evaluated.
‘Anything unknown is hostile,’ she said, as she reached the doors. ‘Shoot to kill.’ The four troopers’ weapons armed with a clatter as she hammered her rings into the override panel.
Ninkurra could feel the psychic pressure building. The hawk on her shoulder flinched, beak open in a silent cry. The passage was wide and dark, but she could see through the bird’s eyes. Iaso stumbled and Ninkurra caught her and pulled her on. Frost marked the door they were making for. The air smelled of burning plastek and roses. She could taste the blood and storm charge.
‘Open the door,’ she hissed at Iaso, and shoved her forward. The soft fabric of her cameleoline cloak folded her into the dark as she stepped back. The hawk glided from her shoulder into the dark above. Her pistol was in her left hand, her shard-blade in her right.
‘It’s sealed from the inside,’ said Iaso.
‘Then get them to open it.’
The medicae did not move for a moment, and then reached for the speaker control next to the frosted door.
‘What’s next?’ said Enna. Mylasa looked at her, surprise creasing the perfect lines of her face. Enna shook her head. ‘Come on, let’s be done with it. What revelation do you have to show me next? Something before this? A child crying alone in a cradle? Abandonment? A mother screaming, alone as I was born and she died? Whatever it is, let’s start now. Why pause? The truth must be close. Let’s hack it out right now.’ She bit the last words off. She was almost vibrating with anger.
Mylasa looked at her for a long moment. Enna stared back at her. The image of the psyker wore a simple green robe, its hood hanging around her shoulders. Her hair curved around her neck in a long plait. After a few seconds she found that she wanted nothing more than to punch the psyker’s face until it was bloody. She let out a breath, and looked away. The space around her was grey and depthless. Again she had the feeling that there was someone standing directly behind her.
‘Do you want answers?’ Mylasa asked.
‘Do I want answers?’ She laughed. The image of the psyker actually flinched. ‘After all this time…’ She laughed again, and the grey air seemed to flex. ‘After all you have done to me, after all the choices that have been taken from me, you ask me that?’
‘This is not a universe that allows choice, Enna, and if it does, that choice is an unkindness.’
Mylasa turned away and looked into the grey mist around them. Enna noticed that there were shadows in the distance, as though a diffuse light was seeping out of the distance and washing past things standing just out of sight.
‘We can’t…’ began the psyker and then paused. ‘I can take us no further alone. Everything up to this point was buried deep by Idris and the Renewed. But there is more, and it is buried deeper still. Too deep for my skill and strength.’ She turned back to Enna. ‘I could try, but I think it might kill you, and I have a feeling it might do the same to me.’
Enna looked at Mylasa and then the grey land around.
‘If Idris did not hide those deep memories from me, then who did?’
‘I am not certain.’
‘But you have an idea – you always have an idea, don’t you?’
Mylasa smiled sadly.
‘You. I think you did this, Enna. I think when the Renewed and Idris began their work on your mind, you hid things from them, walled them off and shut them out so strongly that even with all of their craft they did not find them.’
Enna opened her mouth to reply, then closed it, and shook her head.
‘You showed me all of this so that you could ask me to help you go further, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Mylasa.
Enna gave a snort of laughter.
‘But how could I have done that? An assassin taken by Idris as a child and made into a weapon. How does a child or a weapon do what you describe?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mylasa.
Enna held herself still and quiet, and then looked at the shadows in the mist.
‘What do I do?’ she asked eventually, turning towards Mylasa. ‘Surely I don’t just–’
Mylasa was not there. Light flooded her eyes, blinding. The mist and shadows were gone. The scene that replaced it was both smudged and sharp. Patches of colour clumped together like areas of a half-finished artist’s canvass. A man stood above her, the sharp features of his face clear above the blurred impression of brushed steel armour. A red cloak hung from his shoulders, and a grey-flecked beard ran down the edge of his jaw. His hair was drawn back in a ponytail behind his head. The tri-barred ‘I’ sigil of the Inquisition was pinned to a fold of the cloak.
‘You may leave us,’ said the inquisitor, his voice deep and resonant. His dark eyes glittered as he looked down at Enna. She was seeing this memory as she had lived it, she realised, through a child’s eyes.
‘Of course, lord inquisitor,’ said the voice of someone she could not see.
There was a pause and then the man smiled at her.
‘Hello, again,’ he said. ‘You look less hungry than when we last met, at least.’
A moment of silence.
The man’s hands appeared. His fingers held a disc of brass and bone the width of a small eating plate. Symbols, lenses and crystals covered its surface. A series of rings divided the disc, and he moved them each in turn, aligning elements of the design, eyes hard with focus. After a moment his hands stilled. He looked at the disc for a second and then lowered it.
‘What is that?’ said a voice. Enna flinched at the sound. It was her voice, younger and higher, but still her voice.
‘My knowledge of the Monastery of the Last Candle is not detailed,’ said the inquisitor, ‘but I thought that curiosity is not encouraged amongst its children.’
‘But I am not part of the monastery.’
The man looked at her for a long moment.
‘I am an inquisitor,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘Do you know what that means?’ he asked.
‘It means that everyone should be frightened of you.’
The lines around the man’s eyes crinkled, but his face remained still.
‘But you are not afraid, it seems.’
‘Should I be?’
The smile was brief, like a flash of light in the dark.
‘Very much so. Do you know what this is?’ He held up the disc of bone and brass.
‘No.’
‘I must admit the question was largely rhetorical. There are very few people who would be able to begin to give you an answer, and almost all of them would be wrong. It’s an etheric auspectrum, or at least that is what some call it. It was created by a madman, and is used to measure the influences of imperceptible forces on the flow of cause and effect.’
‘It tells the future?’
‘It tells me what the present means. The future is a different matter.’
‘That’s witchcraft, isn’t it?’
‘Just so,’ he said.
He paused and the disc disappeared. A second later his hands re-appeared holding a small package wrapped in soft, pale leather. He knelt down so that his face was now level with her. He set the packet down, and carefully unfolded it. Beneath the leather was a layer of purple velvet, and within that a stack of rectangular, crystal wafers, each the length of an open palm along their longest side. He fanned them out with a gesture. A pattern of eagles and serpents wheeled and squirmed in gold and silver on the back of each wafer.
‘Please,’ he said, ‘choose one.’
‘What is it?’
‘A conduit for the will of the Emperor. Some call it His tarot.’
‘What does it do?’
‘It shows us things we cannot see.’
Silence filled the pause, and then a small hand – that must have been her own – reached out towards the tarot wafers. The eagles and serpents flickered as the fingers hovered above them. Then the hand darted down and touched a wafer. The design on the back froze, feathers and scales suddenly red with blood, broken wings tumbled across the crystal. Her hand snapped back as though burned.
The bearded man’s features had become a mask.
‘Turn it over, please,’ he said softly. The hand appeared again, hesitated, and then flicked the wafer over. An enthroned figure sat on the crystal surface. Its robes were black, and it held a silver lightning bolt in its left hand, a jade chalice in its right. A rayed halo of silver flickered around its head. A blue heaven, spotted with stars, turned behind it. Each detail was sharp and real, seeming a thing with dimension and life and, at the same time, a painting. Only the figure’s face remained hidden, the features a shadow inside a deep hood. ‘The Emperor,’ said the man, softly.
‘You sound scared,’ said Enna’s voice. ‘Why?’
He breathed out and smiled, but his eyes were still on the image on the crystal sliver.
‘What is your name?’ he asked at last.
‘Acia,’ she said.
‘Suitable for a pilgrim, but not for you. You shall have a new name from now on.’ He shook his head, and gathered up the spread of crystal wafers. ‘You shall be called Revelation.’
‘Revelation… Does that mean something?’
‘Everything means something.’
The last word seemed to linger in Enna’s ears as the image of the man faded, and then it was just a dimming echo running off into the distance, and Enna felt the dream of tears on her cheeks, but didn’t know why she wept.
SIXTEEN
Koleg followed Covenant as the inquisitor strode towards the doors of the House of Concordance. Shouts and cries from connected passages and stairwells echoed up the long corridor. The panic was rolling through the monastery like thick smoke now. Parts of it were alight and burning. They had heard cries and screams from inside the inner cloisters as they had come from the bridge. Koleg knew panic and fear. It was his speciality, a weapon that he had been trained to create and use, and though his alerted mind did not let him experience its results, he understood like a falcon understood the winds it rode. And he could tell that terror was rising faster than it could be contained or outrun.
‘Lord Covenant!’ came a call from by the door into the House of Concordance. Epicles hobbled out of the sally door beside the main entrance, leaning on a cane. Covenant had the spinning brass device out again, his eyes fixed on it as he strode towards Epicles. The arbitrators on duty came to attention.
‘Lord Covenant, there is something you should know,’ said Epicles. Covenant reached the doors. The scanning beams of the servo-skulls behind the arbitrators flicked over him and Koleg.
‘Speak,’ he said to Epicles.
‘I said something to the abbot who was searching the records, I think I said too much. He left, and–’
‘It does not matter now. It is coming, Epicles. And when the prospect rises, that is where the Triumvirate will be.’ They entered the chamber. Orsino was standing by a block of machinery projecting a blurred hologram of tunnels and passages. Soot and blood marked her armour, and the armour of the arbitrators at her side. Glavius-4-Rho stood beside her. His hooded head twitched up as Covenant approached.
‘This place cannot be held,’ said Orsino, turning without preamble. Her face was pale. ‘It is coming apart. The red pilgrims have breached the inner cloisters in several places. If you intend a last stand and martyrdom, then that’s the only wish I think you will have granted here.’
‘The prospect is emerging. They will be here,’ said Covenant, halting with them and holding up the brass and crystal device. ‘Epicles, begin the divinations.’
The old astropath trembled and nodded. The smell of smoke was already threading the air. Everything in the chamber seemed to have become still, a moment balanced on the edge of the future.
Glavius-4-Rho unplugged the cable connecting him to the monastery’s communications system.
‘Communications are fail
ing across the monastery structure,’ he said, his machine voice low. ‘My last summation from available data is that the death/life termination rates in the drifts and outer cloisters are… near total. Fire is spreading, and the geothermal governors are failing.’
‘Everything will freeze or burn,’ said Orsino, looking from the magos to Covenant. ‘The dominion of man left to the pyre.’
Covenant met her gaze.
‘The Triumvirate is here. This is a moment that cannot be allowed to pass to them.’
‘And everything else is irrelevant? The rule of law, the survival of anything or anyone else?’
‘Yes,’ said Covenant.
Orsino looked at him for a long moment. Koleg noticed the lines around her eyes pinch tighter.
‘You are more like Argento than you think.’
For a second, Koleg thought he saw something move under the still mask of Covenant’s face. Then he nodded.
‘Get every remaining portion of our force together. The future is coming and we shall be ready.’
Shouts from by the door made them all turn. The arbitrators had a woman in a robe held in a double arm lock. She was breathing hard with pain, but her eyes were defiant. Koleg recognised her as the assistant to the abbot who had been reviewing the monastery’s records. She was called Claudia, he remembered.
‘My lords, she says–’ began one of the arbitrators.
‘Inquisitor!’ she called. ‘I have knowledge that you desire.’
The arbitrators shifted their grip and Claudia screamed. Covenant raised a hand.
‘Let her speak,’ he said as they lowered her.
‘I want a promise first,’ she sneered. Orsino flinched forwards, but Covenant stilled her with a look.
‘Speak your price,’ he said.
‘Covenant–’ began Orsino.
‘Commerce is faster than principle when you have no time, and we have none.’ He looked back at Claudia. ‘Speak.’
‘Abbot Iacto, the master of my order…’ she paused. ‘For the first time in his life he has done something stupid…’ The woman shook her head, her eyes for a moment looking at something that she alone saw. ‘Save him,’ she said at last. ‘Give your word that you will save him and I will tell you what we found.’
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