I have been intimately connected with the written word for as long as I can remember, and it has always elicited in me the deepest of emotions. My father taught me to read with his mother’s torn and stained copy of the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer (only much later in life did I realise those stains were her blood). Growing up, I learned never to ask for playthings or confectionaries, but my mother would never say no to a new book.
Tears pricked the corners of my eyes, and I exhaled slowly to calm the sudden and unexpected recall of youth.
‘It’s quite something the first time you see it, isn’t it?’ said Garrett Grayloc, emerging from the space between two shelves with an armful of books. He set them down perilously close to the edge of the table with a carelessness that set my conservator’s soul on edge. I hadn’t known he was there, and quickly reasserted a measure of control upon my emotions.
Only now did I notice the collapsible packing crates lying stacked in one corner of the library. A handful had already been assembled, and a quick mental calculation told me there were not nearly enough to contain even a fraction of the library’s books.
‘It is impressive,’ I agreed. ‘Is everything here physical?’
‘Yes, my mother didn’t hold with data-slates, even in the Guard. Claimed if it wasn’t set down on paper then it wasn’t real. Always hand-wrote everything.’
I moved through the space, resisting the urge to run my fingers down the spines of the books just to feel the texture of cracked leather and gilt binding.
‘That will make my job easier,’ I said.
‘Good, the sooner this is gone the better,’ he replied, hefting another armful of books from a nearby shelf. I resisted the urge to tell him to be careful. These were his books, after all.
‘Gone?’ I said, a flutter of panic welling in my breast. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’
Garrett nodded. ‘Yes, was my letter not clear on the nature of your engagement?’
‘It spoke of a desire to have your mother’s collection catalogued,’ I said. ‘Nothing of the purpose behind that effort was mentioned.’
‘Ah, that was remiss of me,’ said Garrett, pointing to the stacked crates. ‘Just so we are clear from the outset, it is my intention to sell the entire collection.’
‘Sell it?’ I said, aghast. ‘Why?’
Garrett sighed and said, ‘My mother possessed many qualities, but sound financial judgement was not one of them. Our family’s trade dealings have enjoyed Imperial Charter for over two thousand years, ever since Fydor Grayloc first broke Uglork Splitfang’s blockade. Our fortunes have risen and fallen with the tides of war, but we have always maintained a solid fiscal foundation from which to do business. Unfortunately, many of our most lucrative trading partners are in systems now lost to us beyond the Great Rift, and the maintenance of an inter-system fleet of ships is ruinously expensive.’
‘This collection is likely priceless…’ I said.
‘Which is why I wish you to catalogue its contents and place a fair market value upon each volume it contains,’ said Garrett. ‘It has recently become clear my mother lived far more extravagantly than any of us suspected, and her debts are what might be charitably called calamitous. I had to release what staff remained and begin selling off the furniture to keep the bailiffs from our doors so you might complete your work.’
That surprised me. My admittedly limited knowledge of Colonel Grayloc was that she had lived simply in Vansen Falls until her recent death (I had, as yet, not read anything that revealed how that end had come). I wondered how she had incurred such catastrophic debt, but refrained from asking so indelicate a question.
‘My father has made it clear that he will see everything in this house down to the last nail sold before he liquidates any of our business assets to pay my mother’s arrears,’ continued Garrett. ‘And neither he nor I wish to hold on to reminders of the past.’
I could understand the reality of the situation, but part of me rebelled at the notion of selling so important a collection. The shelves of the house Teodoro and I shared had been replete with books, and the thought of ridding ourselves of any of them, even volumes we knew we would never again read, filled us with horror.
But these were not my books, and all of us have things that connect us to pasts we would be better off letting go. I could not know what bad memories lurked in Garrett’s family histories, nor what painful associations his mother’s books might have for him. If ridding themselves of these books was what they needed of me, then who was I to judge them for that?
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I will begin immediately.’
‘One last thing. You may be aware that my mother was also something of a writer.’
I nodded, and Garrett continued.
‘She mainly wrote military books, but she also contracted with a local printer to publish a few collections of poetry and, if you can believe it, romantic verse. I’m told she even wrote a passably reviewed novel.’
I hadn’t known that, and Garrett read my expression.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘it surprised me too.’
‘Assuming they are here, do you wish those books set aside?’
‘Throne, no!’ said Garrett. ‘I’ve no interest in them, but there was one book the staff mentioned that she never published.’
‘What was the book?’
‘I’m told it was a memoir of sorts,’ said Garrett. ‘A monograph.’
‘A monograph? Do you know the subject?’
‘I am given to understand it describes the events that led up to the Dawn of Dark Suns.’
With my task laid out before me, I threw myself into cataloguing the colonel’s collection that very night. Garrett Grayloc gave me carte blanche to conduct the work in whatever way I saw fit, so my first week was taken up by systematising a methodology; breaking the effort into genre, author, subject and style, which would allow me to classify each text according to its veracity, age and condition.
Immediately, I saw it would require many weeks if not months to complete this task, but I cared little for the time it would take. Immersing myself in the art of my profession would be intensely satisfying, as it had been too long since I had rolled my sleeves up, snapped on frictionless proxy-gloves and donned an appraiser’s loupe.
Each shelf was identified by a numbered ceramic disc set within the shelf edge, but they appeared to be placed at random – or at least I could find no pattern to their placement. For example, shelf sixty was next to shelf three, which was adjacent to eleven and twenty-nine. Each night I sought to work out the system of numbering, to no avail.
If there was a sequence, I could not find it.
The collection itself encompassed a wildly varied span of time periods and styles. The bulk of her books were, as was only to be expected, of a military nature. Over the coming weeks, I catalogued no fewer than two hundred copies of Tactica Imperium, and ninety-four copies of The Uplifting Primer, each with a subtly different bias to their contents, depending on the fighting style of the regiment that printed it.
Equally common were planetary histories of the worlds on which the 83rd had fought, and I grouped these together, reasoning that the more complete each collection, the greater value it would possess. I cross-linked those to other books describing the various regiments and commanders the 83rd had fought alongside. Presumably these had been exchanged between officers in the field, and while some were blatantly hagiographic in nature, they offered fascinating windows into human cultures across the Imperium.
Naturally, most of the military books were concerned with the fighting histories of the Astra Militarum, though a few touched upon the legendary heroes of the Adeptus Astartes. The Book of Five Spheres described the dogmatic warfare of the Imperial Fists, while a series of twine-bound pages purported to be one of the sole surviving excerpts of the Prandium Consul’s Codex Astartes. My fav
ourite of such books was a tome clothed in animal hide and penned by an unnamed warrior of the White Scars: Hidden Chronicles of the Chogorian Epics. I kept returning to this book, and such was the skill of the writer that I felt I could taste the wild salt flats of the Chapter’s homeworld.
Religious texts were also common, and I collated numerous editions of the sermons of Sebastian Thor and Dolan Chirosius. I even found a mildly heretical volume in the form of a book of catechisms said to have belonged to Cardinal Bucharis before his fall to apostasy. I recorded numerous textbooks as well; legal doctrines mainly. Corpus Presidium Calixis, various planetary versions of the Book of Judgement as well as books of natural philosophy such as Drusher’s A Complete Taxonomy of Gershom, Linnaeus’ Nemesis Divina, and the medico-anatomical texts of Crezia Berschilde.
I also recorded a great many biographies of Imperial heroes. Some, like the individual chronicled in To Serve the Emperor, described acts of bravery that were almost beyond belief, while others, like a first edition of Ravenor’s The Mirror of Smoke, broke my heart anew.
Most of the texts were valuable and of considerable age, dealing primarily with human institutions, which was to be expected in the library of an Imperial hero, but a great enough proportion delved into subjects that were less expected and would no doubt create a stir when listed at auction.
These risqué volumes were mostly concerned with the cultures of xenoforms: Dogma Omniastra, Greenskins and How to Kill Them, Aeldari Perfidy, Obscurus Analects of Xenoartefacts, and Locard’s seminal Biophage Infestations. The possession of any one of these works might not raise too many eyebrows, but to see so many gathered together was certainly surprising, though I put the colonel’s possession of so many texts of this nature down to the maxim of know thine enemy.
Frustratingly, the one book I saw no sign of within the library was the colonel’s monograph. Any record of the Dawn of Dark Suns would be of incalculable worth, and the completist heart of my archivist’s soul longed to study its contents.
What knowledge might it contain? What secrets?
I was working on the assumption that the book depicted in the portrait hung at the entrance to the library was the volume I was seeking, reasoning that the colonel would keep such a book close to her person at all times. Its binding bore a specific pattern, a golden circle with a rippling line bisecting it horizontally and a cruciform arrow running through it, parallel to the book’s spine. The symbol was unknown to me, yet I felt it held the key to locating the book. I confess, in my eagerness to find the colonel’s monograph, I did not stop to consider why it might have been hidden.
The system of categorisation (such as it was) that existed within the library did not obviously suggest a section in which I might have found the monograph, but then, I had not expected it to reveal itself so easily.
It would be hidden in a way that would be obvious only to Colonel Grayloc herself.
In lieu of a dead woman’s instructions, it was going to require time and patience.
My nights at Grayloc Manor were restful, and the insomnia that so often plagued me abated almost entirely after a few nights. At first, I put this down to the ocean air or simply exhaustion from spending so long in the hermetic vault of the library.
How naive that now sounds.
For the most part, I did not dream, and modesty forbids me to record in detail those few I did have. Suffice to say, they were entirely pleasant memories of intimacy with Teodoro that saw me awaken with my skin sheened in sweat and the breath hot in my throat.
I miss my husband more than I care to describe here, but I pushed thoughts of him to the back of my mind. I was not yet ready to face the full weight of grief, and work was my way of keeping that loss at bay for a time. Perhaps that was cowardly, but each of us face loss in different ways, and this was mine.
Between cataloguing the colonel’s books, I began exploring my surroundings.
The grounds of Grayloc Manor were extensive, though much of its grand finery had been overtaken by nature now there were no groundsmen to maintain it. Its best years had passed, but I saw enough to wish that I had known the gardens in full bloom or that it might one day be restored. But, as with all things, every moment of neglect makes any former perfection harder to reclaim.
I discovered a hedge maze with winding pathways overrun by creeping weeds and bracken. The hedges had grown so high and crooked that no cheating was possible, but the decrepitude of age has not withered my recall, and I easily divined the path to its centre.
There I discovered a tall statue wrought from a curious, pinkish material that somewhat resembled coral, yet was smooth and pleasing to the touch. It featured an abstract figure dressed in flowing robes with proportions and features that were curiously ambiguous. From certain angles it resembled a beautiful man, while from others I found it to be a woman of superlative comeliness. Its outline was protean, as though the statue had once been pliant and had settled naturally into this shape, as opposed to being sculpted by chisels and smoothed by rasps. A marble bench that mirrored the curve of the cratered bay partially encircled the statue, and I lost many an afternoon in contemplation of this figure’s elusive truth.
No plaque existed to offer clues as to the statue’s identity or creator, and when I asked Garrett Grayloc, he told me it was something his mother had brought back from an ocean world of floating cities. Beyond that, he could offer no further clues as to its nature.
Beyond the maze, there was a hexagonal landing platform with the regimental emblem of the 83rd all but obscured by the jetwash of aircraft. It sat next to a small hangar I felt was built perilously close to the edge of the cliff. Peering inside, I saw the hangar was now home to the Kiehlen 580 groundcar that had brought me here. Whatever aircraft the colonel might once have possessed had clearly been sold already.
I took most of my meals upon the sun-dappled patio to the rear of the house or within one of the many vineyard follies. During one mid-afternoon perambulation, I discovered steps running from the lowest of the follies that zigzagged down a precipitously steep cliff to a small jetty artfully concealed in the rocks at its base, though I saw no evidence of a boathouse.
Kyrano served my food, and I gradually became somewhat used to the limping servitor, often throwing out rhetorical questions to it whenever a particularly knotty taxonomic issue presented itself. With no voice or mouth it of course gave me no answers, but the very act of questioning often led me to the answer I sought. I still found myself uneasy whenever it spent any amount of time in my presence, but its strength was a boon when I required heavy crates of books moved.
Of Garrett Grayloc, I saw little, save for on those few occasions he entered the library to enquire as to my progress. He was frequently distracted, which I attributed to dealing with creditors and the settling of his mother’s affairs. He would, each time, enquire as to whether or not I had found the monograph, and left disappointed when I answered in the negative.
His tone was always casual, but the tension behind his words was hard to miss. With every question I became more and more convinced Garrett Grayloc already had dark suspicions as to what might be contained within his mother’s memoir.
I tried not to speculate what that might be, but I am only human.
Could it be the unabridged story behind her citation for the Honorifica Imperialis?
Perhaps the truth behind the stars going out?
Or something more sinister?
After three weeks of constant work, even I conceded that a break beyond the bounds of Grayloc Manor was required. As the sun rose on the twenty-second day after my arrival in Vansen Falls, I dressed in a loose-fitting tunic of pale green and pulled on a pair of sturdy walking boots, intending to hike around the rim of the crater to the Imperial shrine.
The wind blew in cold from the ocean.
Rain clouds gathered on the horizon.
I set out early, following
the road the Kiehlen had taken through the town. The sun was bright, but low cloud cover rendered the sky washed out like grey dishwater. The air bore the crispness of oncoming winter, but I had a long padded coat that kept me warm as I descended the curve of the crater.
The stiffness in my back had eased a great deal, and there was a vigour to my step I had not felt in a long time. I saw only a few of the town’s inhabitants as I entered its outskirts, and though they nodded in greeting, they kept on about their business. I did not find this unusual or rude, for only those with pressing desires were about at this hour.
The buildings of Vansen Falls were old indeed, older even than many in Servadac Magna, and the texture of their walls was gnarled and eroded by salt winds from the ocean. They were, nevertheless, characterful, with no two alike, and a variety of heights and widths that made each one unique.
I had brought my sketchbook, and though my works will never be hung in a gallery, I take great solace in the act of sketching a fine landscape or a handsome building. I saw many buildings I would happily draw, and resolved to take another day to do just that.
The smell of baked bread and fresh-brewed caffeine drew my attention to a quaint, timber-framed eatery built of greenish stone, with rippled-glass windows. A projecting sign named the establishment as Gant’s Confectionary and Recaff Emporium. I entered and was delighted to find the interior was just as rustic as the exterior.
‘Greetings of the day, ma’am,’ said the owner, an aproned man with a ruddy complexion and a welcoming demeanour. ‘Zeirath Gant, at your service.’
‘Greetings be upon you, sir,’ I replied. ‘I was on my way to visit the temple on the headland, but the rich aromas from your establishment diverted me.’
The majority of our conversation had no bearing on what was to follow, but when I introduced myself and spoke of my task at Grayloc Manor, Gant’s demeanour abruptly changed.
The Colonel's Monograph Page 3