by Dan Abnett
‘Uhm, changes?’
‘The Conservatory has become a victim of its own success!’ Emantine laughed.
‘It has?’
‘Whether we like it or not, it’s time to consider legitimacy. I can’t nursemaid the Conservatory forever. My future is beckoning in different ways. A seneschalship to Luna or Mars, maybe.’
‘A seat on the Council, I was told.’
Emantine pulled a modest face. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘It’s what I heard.’
‘The point is, I can’t protect you forever,’ said Emantine.
‘I wasn’t aware the Conservatory was being protected at all.’
‘Its resource and personnel budget has become quite considerable.’
‘And is scrupulously policed.’
‘Of course. But it’s the mandate that bothers some. It’s having what is essentially a vital organ of government, a key and growing human resource, functioning separately from the Hegemonic Administration.’
‘That’s just the way it is,’ replied Hawser. ‘That’s just the way it’s evolved. We’re transparent and open to all. We’re a public office.’
‘It might be time to consider bringing the Conservatory in under the umbrella of the Administration,’ said Emantine. ‘It might be better that way. Centralised, which would help with the bureaucratic management, and with archiving and access, not to mention funding.’
‘We’d become part of the Administratum?’
‘Really just for book-keeping purposes,’ replied the prefect-secretary.
‘I… well, I think I’d be a little hesitant. Resistant, in fact. I think we all would.’
The prefect-secretary put his digestif down and reached out his hand to clasp it around Hawser’s. His young man’s fingers enclosed Hawser’s grandfather hand.
‘We must all move with a fluid, common purpose towards Unification, that’s what the Sigillite says,’ said Emantine.
‘The Unification of Terra and the Imperium,’ replied Hawser. ‘Not the literal union of the intellectual branches of mankind that—’
‘Doctor Hawser, they may refuse to renew the charter if you resist. You’ve spent thirty years showing them that the systematic conservation of knowledge is important. Now the feeling is – and it’s shared by many on the Council – conservation of knowledge is so important, it’s time it was conducted by the Administration of the Hegemony. It needs to be official and sanctioned and central.’
‘I see.’
‘Over the next few months, I’m going to be handing off a lot of responsibilities to my undersecretary, Henrik Slussen. Did you meet him earlier?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll see to it you meet him tomorrow at the manufactory visit. Get to know him. He’s extremely able, and he’ll steward this situation in directions that will reassure you.’
‘I see.’
‘Good. And once again, congratulations. A deserving winner. Fifty years, eh? My my.’
Hawser realised his audience had concluded. His glass was empty too.
‘How can it be so long?’ he asked, as the Astartes took him from the firepit chamber and out along the dark, breathing halls of the Aett. The wind gusted around them. Away from the firelight, his left eye lost its sight again.
‘You’ve been asleep,’ the rune priest replied.
‘You say nineteen years, but you mean Fenrisian years, don’t you? You mean great years?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s three, four, times as long in Terran years!’
‘You’ve been asleep,’ the rune priest said.
The Upplander felt light-headed. The sense of personal dislocation was intense and nauseating. He was afraid he might be sick, or pass out, and he was afraid of doing anything so frail in front of the Astartes. He was afraid of the Astartes. The fear added to his sense of personal dislocation, and made him feel sicker.
There were three of them with him, walking behind him: the rune priest, Varangr, and another whose name the Upplander did not know. Skarsi had shown no particular interest in coming with them. He had turned back to his playing boards, as though the Upplander was a mild diversion that was now finished with, and more important things, like bone counter discs on an inlaid board, had become more significant.
As they walked, the Astartes directed him with the occasional tap on the shoulder to turn him left and right. They walked him through great rock crypts and chambers of basalt, sulking voids of granite, and mournful hollowed halls panelled in bone. He saw all of these places through the green glare of his right eye, with only impenetrable darkness in his left. All of them were empty, except for the plaintive lament of the respiring wind. They were like tombs, tombs waiting to be filled, great sepulchres carved out in the expectation of an immense death toll, in anticipation of the corpses of a million warriors, carried in on their shields and laid to rest. A million. A million million. Legions of the fallen.
The wind was just rehearsing for its role as chief mourner.
‘Where are we going?’ the Upplander asked.
‘To see the priests,’ said Varangr.
‘But you’re a priest,’ the Upplander said to Ohthere, half-turning. Varangr gave him a little push to encourage him forwards.
‘Different priests,’ said Varangr. ‘The other kind.’
‘What other kind?’
‘You know, the other kind,’ said the nameless Astartes.
‘I don’t know. I don’t understand,’ said the Upplander. ‘I don’t understand and I’m cold.’
‘Cold?’ echoed Varangr. ‘He shouldn’t feel the cold, not where he’s been.’
‘It’s a good sign,’ said the other.
‘Give him a pelt,’ said the rune priest.
‘Do what?’ retorted Varangr.
‘Give him a pelt,’ the rune priest repeated.
‘Give him my pelt?’ Varangr asked, looking down at the red-brown skin around his shoulders. The S-curve of his lacquered hair rose like a spear-casting arm as his chin dipped. ‘But it’s my pelt.’
The other Astartes snorted and pulled off his own fur, a grey wolfskin. He held it out to the Upplander.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it. A gift from Bitur Bercaw to Ahmad Ibn Rustah.’
‘Is this some kind of compact?’ the Upplander asked warily. He didn’t want to accidentally become beholden to a wolf Astartes on top of everything else.
Bercaw shook his head. ‘No, not anything with blood mixed in it. Maybe when you tell my account, you’ll remember this kindness, and make it part of the story.’
‘When I tell your account?’
Bercaw nodded. ‘Yes, because you will. When you tell it, you make me look good, sharing the pelt with you. And you make Var look like a selfish hog.’
The Upplander looked at Varangr. His eyes shone like lamps in the frosty dark. He looked as if he was going to strike Bercaw. Then he saw the rune priest watching him. He sagged a little.
‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he mumbled.
The Upplander pulled Bercaw’s gift around his shoulders. He looked up at Ohthere Wyrdmake.
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘I know,’ said the priest.
‘No, no,’ the Upplander replied in frustration. ‘This is where you reassure me. This is where you tell me that everything will be explained.’
‘But I can’t,’ replied the priest, ‘because it won’t. Some things will be explained. Enough things, probably. But not everything, because explaining everything is never a good idea.’
They arrived at the drop.
The long, draughty hall came to an end and they were standing on the lip of a great cliff. A chasm plunged away beneath them, dropping sheer into total blackness. On the far side of the great drop, the Upplander could see the ghost-green ragged wall of the shaft. The sepulchral hall had brought them to an enormous flue, rising vertically through the rock in the heart of the mountain. The shaft vanished into darkne
ss high above them. The winter gale gusted up from far below.
‘Which way now?’ asked the Upplander.
Varangr gripped him firmly by the upper arm.
‘Down,’ he said, and he stepped off the cliff and took the Upplander with him.
He was too shocked to scream out the terror that exploded his chest and burst his brain. They fell. They fell. They fell.
But not hard, and not to their deaths. They fell softly, like flecks of down from a torn sleeping roll, caught by the breeze, like papery flecks of ash, like a pair of humming bird servitors defying gravity with wings so fast they seemed still.
The wind of Fenris was everywhere inside the Aett, gusting in halls, breathing through crypts and vaults and chambers, but in the great vertical flue it blew with enough upward force to catch falling objects and cushion their descent. The rising gale lowered them slowly, dragging against their flapping pelts, and flapping the beads and straps of the Astartes.
Varangr stuck out an arm, the one that wasn’t gripping the Upplander’s limp frame. He stuck it out like an eagle’s wing into the updraught, and steered them. He turned them slowly, at an angle in the fierce blast. The Upplander’s tear-shot eyes, blinking furiously in the wind and out of gutting fear, saw another cliff-lip below, another shelf opening into the flue. They came into it at a perfect angle. Varangr landed on his feet, and turned the landing into a couple of quick steps that bled off his speed. The Upplander’s feet scrambled and kicked, and he fell on his face. The pelt flopped forwards over his head like a hood.
‘You’ll learn the knack,’ said Varangr.
‘How?’ asked the Upplander.
‘By doing it more,’ replied the Astartes.
On his hands and knees, the Upplander convulsed violently and retched. Nothing but spittle and mucus came up out of a gut that had been empty for nineteen years, but his body wrenched and wrung itself in a brutal effort to find something.
Bercaw and the rune priest landed on the lip behind them.
‘Pick him up,’ said the priest.
They carried him forwards, away from the cliff edge. His head lolled, but his left eye woke up. He saw a chamber up ahead, well lit with biolumin lamps and electric filaments in glass tubes. The sudden illumination was painful. He had a hot, orange version of the scene in his left eye, full of fire shadows and the warm yellow glow of tube lights and ivory flooring. In the other eye, the scene was an incandescent green, violently bright. The lamps and other light sources were so intense to his right eye, they had almost scorched out of vision entirely and become white-hot spots and after-image blooms. There were very few shadows in his right eye, and the focus was shot.
The Astartes put him down.
The Upplander could smell blood, salt water and the bleachy reek of counterseptic. The chamber was either a medical facility or an abattoir. Or perhaps it was both, or had been one and was now the other. There was also a hint of laboratory, and a smack of kitchen. There were metal benches and adjustable cots. There were clusters of overhead focus lights, and branches of automated servitor arms and manipulators sprouting from the ceiling like willow trees. There were stone slabs, like butcher blocks or altars. Hidden machinery hummed and whirred, and electronic notes sounded a constant background chorus like a digital rainforest. Archways led through to other kitchen-morgues. The complex was vast. He glimpsed the frosty doors of cryogenic units and the glass-lidded tanks of organic repair vats. Library shelves stretched off into the distance, lined with heavy glass bottles and canisters, like giant jars of pickled and preserved fruit in a winter root cellar. But the flasks did not contain vegetables or radapples in their dark, syrupy suspensions, and they were slotted into the shelves to connect with the facility’s vital support system.
Horned skulls appeared, robed men with animal skull heads like the ones who had surrounded him when he first woke up. The rune priest sensed his alarm.
‘They are just thralls. Servants and grooms. They will not hurt you.’
Other figures appeared from invisible corners of the rambling laboratory. These were Astartes, from the build of them. Horned skulls of significantly greater scale and threat than the ones worn by the thralls covered their faces. Their robes were floor length and had a quilted look, stitched together from sections of soft, napped leather. When they reached out their hands to greet or grasp the Upplander, he saw that their hands were covered in gloves patched together from the same material, and that the gloves were sewn into the enveloping cloaks, as if they were inside patchwork bags of skin with integral glove extensions that allowed them to work. The stitching on the patchwork seams, though expertly neat, reminded the Upplander far too much of surgical sutures.
They were sinister figures, and their presence was not helped by the fact that even Ohthere Wyrdmake showed deference to them.
‘Who are you?’ the Upplander asked.
‘They are the wolf priests,’ said Ohthere softly at his shoulder, ‘the geneweavers, the fleshmakers. They will examine you.’
‘Why?’
‘To make sure you’re healthy. To check their workmanship.’
The Upplander shot a quick glance at the rune priest.
‘Their what?’
‘You came to the Aett broken and old, Ahmad Ibn Rustah,’ said one of the wolf priests in a voice that creaked like floe-ice, ‘too broken to live, and too old to heal. The only way to save you was to remake you.’
One of the horned giants took his right hand, another his left. He let them lead him into the slaughterhouse chapel like parents leading a child. He took off the pelt and settled on the black glass bed of a body scanner. There were a lot of wolf priests around him now, shamanic shadows with feral horns and guttural voices. Some were intent on adjusting the backlit wall plates of the control panels. Others were occupied with the elaborate tapping and shaking of rattlebags and bone wands. Both tasks seemed to carry equal significance.
The scanner bed elevated him and tilted him backwards. Manipulator arms, some of them fitted with sensors, others with the finest micrometre tool-heads, clicked down around him in a cage, like a crouching spider. They started working, twitching and brushing and scurrying. He felt the tickle of scan-beams, the nip of pinpricks, the sting of diagnostic light beams penetrating his held-open eyes.
He looked up, past the surgical lights, and saw himself, full length, reflected in the tinted canopy of the body scanner.
He had the fit, athletic body of a thirty year-old. Fitter and more athletic, in fact, than the thirty year-old body he had once possessed. The muscle definition was impressive. There was not an ounce of fat on him. Nor was there any sign of the old augmetic. He had the makings of a moustache and beard, a fuzz of growth a few weeks thick. His hair was shorter than he chose to wear it, as if it was growing back in after being shaved. It was darker than it had been since his fiftieth birthday.
Behind the beard growth, his face was still his own: younger, but still his own. This fact filled him with greater relief and confidence than anything else that had happened since he had woken.
It was the face of Kasper Ansbach Hawser, twenty-five years old, back when he was headstrong and arrogant and knew nothing about anything. This latter detail seemed more than a little appropriate.
In the reflection, dozens of hands in gloves of patchwork skin worked on him.
‘You refashioned me,’ he said.
‘There was significant damage to your limbs and to your internal organs,’ said the ice-creak voice. ‘You would not have survived. Over a period of nine months, we used mineral bonding and bone grafts to reconstitute your skeletal mass, and then resleeved it in musculature gene-copied from your own coding, though reinforced with plastek weaves and polymers. Your organs are primarily gene-copied transplants. Your skin is your own.’
‘My own?’
‘Removed, replenished, rejuvenated, retailored.’
‘You skinned me.’
They did not reply.
‘You worked on my m
ind too,’ he said. ‘I know things. I know a language I didn’t know before.’
‘We did not teach you anything. We did not touch your mind.’
‘And yet here we are conversing, without a translator.’
Again, they did not reply.
‘What about the eye? Why did you take my eye? Why do I keep going blind in my left eye?’
‘You do not keep going blind in your left eye. The sight in your left eye is human-normal. It is your eye.’
‘Why did the warrior take my right eye?’
‘You know why. It was an implant. It was not your eye. It was an optical recording device. It was not permitted. Therefore, it was detected and removed.’
‘But I can see,’ the Upplander said.
‘We would not blind you and leave you blind,’ said the ice-creak voice.
He looked up at his reflection. His left eye was the eye that he remembered.
His right eye, gold and black-pinned, was the eye of an adult wolf.
Rector Uwe called them in, just as the moon rose. All the children had spent the day outside, because the weather was clement and the grids had forecast no rad clouds or pollution fogs on the desert highland.
The children had worked outdoors, especially the older ones. That, the rector taught, was the purpose of community. The parents, all the adults, they were raising the city, the great city of Ur. They were gone for months at a time, away in the sprawling work camps that surrounded the vast street plan that the Architect had marked out on the chosen earth. Rector Uwe showed the children scenes from Faeronik Aegypt in old picture books. Gangs of industrious labourers with uniform asymmetric haircuts pulled ropes to raise the travertine blocks that made the monuments of Aegypt. This, he explained, was very much the way their parents were working, pulling together with a single purpose to build a city. The difference, he added, was that in old Aegypt, the builders were slaves, and in Ur, the workers were freemen, come willingly to the task, and all according to Catheric teachings.
Though they could not work on the city itself, the children still worked. They harvested fruit and vegetables from the tented fields, and washed them and packed them to be shipped to the work camps. They patched and mended worn clothes sent back from the labour site in yellow sacks, and wrote messages of encouragement and salvation on slips of paper that they tucked into pockets to be discovered at random.