A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
LEGACY
Shira Calpurnia - 02
Matthew Farrer
(v1.0)
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred
centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden
Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the
will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the
might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass
writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of
Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for
whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that
he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues
his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the
daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route
between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican,
the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast
armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds.
Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes,
the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors.
Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard
and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant
Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus
to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are
barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from
aliens, heretics, mutants—and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold
billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody
regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times.
Forget the power of technology and science, for so much
has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the
promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim
dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst
the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and
the laughter of thirsting gods.
PROLOGUE
Their lord and master had been carried into the trees at the opening of the day, and instead of the morning clarion, the halls of the flotilla’s spacecraft had rung with a single soft mourning-chime. Those appointed to it followed the catafalque into the arboretum deck, through the shin-high mint-grass with the insects around them chirruping in the morning air. The creatures had been chosen from a dozen worlds for the beauty of their sounds, both individual and in choir, and although the lord was too close to death to be able to hear them he would have been happy with the sounds in these his last hours.
Gait stood one rank back from the catafalque, head bowed, the white linen of the cover-cloth glimmering like summer cloud across the top of his vision. He wore the white gown and black shawl that they all did; his face, as all of theirs, was painted with the intricate downward-curving black and white patterns of mourning. The paint was mixed with an anaesthetic that deadened the face and numbed his skin to the fee) of the warm artificial breeze, but he could still feel the stir of the cloth and the brush of the grass against his legs and his bare feet. He stood looking at the grass below and in front of his laced hands, and now that the moment they had all been preparing for had come he found that his mind was empty and calm. He welcomed the sensation—he was too tired to carry any more emotion after the past year.
They stood and waited. The two black-hooded senior medicae standing on either side of the catafalque were the only ones to move, following the movements of their diagnostor, a silver replica of a human heart with spidery mechanical hands growing from its sides, as it glided slowly to and fro about the lord’s head.
Time passed. The singing of the insects was a soothing counterpoint to the lazy sounds of the carefully-choreographed breezes in the arboretum’s trees.
And finally, after who knew how long, Gait blinked as the medicae took a signal from the diagnostor and dismissed the machine, sending it coasting away. Those present stepped away in silent synchronisation, turning their backs to the catafalque and the body upon it. A sigh seemed to run through them all. There were no cries, no staggering or tearing of hair, just that slackening and release. They had all known too well for too long what was coming to respond any other way.
Gait’s thoughts were still quiet and empty with the same exhaustion that he sensed in the others. Something had ended, something had moved on, and now they themselves were free to return to their own lives. For now it was enough to stand in the warm still air of the arboretum and sink into reflection, but soon everything would begin to change.
Their lord and master, Rogue Trader Hoyyon Phrax, was dead. It was time to set course for Hydraphur.
CHAPTER ONE
The Avenue Solar, Outskirts of
Bosporian Hive, Hydraphur
They walked, the arbitor and the priest, in an amiable promenade beneath the great shoulder of the hive. Cool moist breezes set the cages overhead creaking on their chains, and the occasional shower of excrement pattered down around them.
At this end of the Avenue Solar, the footbridges connecting the towering urban stacks had grown together into a roof over the crowded truckways below. It was ungainly and humpbacked, following the arch that most of the footbridges had originally been designed with, a jigsaw of rockcrete, gritty asphalt, flagstones and tiles. Here and there were odd-shaped gaps where the space between intersecting bridges hadn’t quite been worth covering over and, even at this distance, Shira Calpurnia could hear the never-ending rumble of traffic beneath them.
A splat against the cloth over her head reminded her that it was not what was beneath their feet that concerned her today, and she looked up. The canopy was embroidered with devotional scenes and Ecclesiarchal livery, held above them on poles by six impassive Cathedral deacons. A thick blob of muck had landed on a panel showing an angel of the Emperor blessing the battlefleet. It was taking more and more effort for Calpurnia to keep the disgust from her face.
“We’ll be clear of them in a moment.” Reverend Simova told her, anticipating her thoughts. “It’s a little uncomfortable to see, but then a citizen who behaved as they should wouldn’t be up there in the first place. Soiling a sacred image is simply one more thing that they will pay for.” As they moved toward the edge of the bridge the deacons shuffled away with the canopy and they looked at the scene above them.
Calpurnia could see why the Eparch had chosen the Avenue Solar for his display. It was a place for awe. Here at the foot of the Bosporian, the capital city-hive of the world of Hydraphur, the towers of the sprawling lower city were the highest and most forbidding, rearing into the copper sky towards the pale band of the orbiting Ring. Classical Imperial architecture had a pattern and a purpose: it existed to symbolise implacable might and everlasting grandeur, and the sky-scraping towers to either side presented sheer cliffs of wall, intimidating overhangs and the stern gaze of statues to cow anyone who looked up at them. The design had been repeated all the way back down the avenue, making it a great deep canyon full of engine-noise that boomed off the high buildings.
And then in front of them, greater and taller still, the sloping side of the Bosporian itself, tier after tier of wall and buttress, glittering windows and polished statues, the steep zigzag of the Ascendant Way climbing up to the walls of the Augustaeum at the mountain’s crown. From here the paired spikes of the Monocrat’s palace and the Cathedral of the Emperor Ascendant were invisible, but the great mass of the hive was sight enough.
With that
sight to arrest the eye, the cages shrank to an afterthought, a cluster of flyspecks. They were strung like party-lanterns on great swoops of black chain, each link so large that Calpurnia could have put her fist through its centre without touching the edges, held up by girders that Ministorum work crews had driven into the skyscraper walls. The metal was still smooth and shiny, the rivets and padlocks on the cage doors bright and new. The Eparchal decree that had ordered the cages strung up was less than a fortnight old.
There seems to be something about this tradition that brings out the very worst in some of the penitents. “I was with the Eparch during his tenure in the Phaphan sub-diocese, and we had exactly the same problem. Hence…” he made a gesture with a red-and-grey-sleeved arm. Calpurnia looked off to her left.
A narrow set of bleachers had been set up at the foot of the arching bridge and when Calpurnia looked at them, she had to rein in a smile. Thirty Ecclesiarchal officers in dark red and bone-white cassocks, Wardens of the Cathedrals Ordeatic Chamber, were crammed in ten to a bench, packed almost shoulder to shoulder, their poses identical: hands laced demurely in laps, faces staring ahead in earnest concentration. By each man sat a little tripod bearing a brass casing no bigger than a pistol-clip, and from each casing a single unblinking metal eye stared. Each was fixed on a different cage, and every man on the bleachers had had their right eye replaced with a receptor for the cable feed; the flesh around the sockets was still raw from the newness of the graft. She suppressed a smile again—as soon as she had seen them she had thought of a row of birdwatchers, all sharing the same cramped hide and now fixated on a flock of some rare specimen preening itself in front of them.
“One for each cage.” Simova expanded his gesture to point at the chains and cages behind them. “The mechanical eye keeps a pict-record—that’s kept in the Cathedral permanently—but the controlling elements are members of our own clergy, not servitors. That’s important. Before anyone in the cages is deemed absolved and brought down, the Warden watching his cage has to confirm that they have not compounded their sins in any way. That’s how whoever was pelting us with filth is going to be made to pay. I wish I knew what it was about this punishment that makes people do that.”
Calpurnia didn’t respond immediately. She was looking at the cages, hands behind her back, face expressionless. In the near cages the penitents were visible, some grasping the bars to peer down at them, some rocking back and forth and setting their cages swinging, some slumped down, the occasional arm or leg hanging through gaps in the floor-bars. One, the nearest, whose cage was hanging above the most soiled stretch of paving, was crouched over the little slop-bucket bolted to the bars and busily scooping something up in its fingers. Higher up the figures were just grimy, ragged silhouettes against the distant hive wall; the furthest cages were no more than dots. She took off her helmet and squinted at the highest, hanging in the centre of the street, but it was impossible to see what, if anything, the person inside it was doing.
It seemed there was still some time left, and keeping Simova talking was as good a way of passing it as any. She pointed to where a knot of junior deacons stood donning rubberised cloaks.
“What exactly are they listening for? A particular chant or prayer? Or does it vary?” As if on cue, the priests began their procession under the cages and the penitents above them let off a chorus of shouts and howls. The one who’d been grubbing in its slops leapt to the cage bars and began scattering filth out and down onto the ground. The priests kept their hoods low over their faces and walked impassively beneath him.
“It varies with the offence, as you imagine. That determines what they have to make heard as well as where their cage is positioned. The ones down the bottom have committed trivial offences—careless misconduct during a religious service, minor disrespect to an officer of the clergy, you can guess the sort of thing. All we require from them is a short oath of contrition. Most of the time they’re able to call it out to the priests’ satisfaction on the first pass and they’re down from the cage within a couple of hours. A little longer for the ones who are tongue-tied or have trouble speaking up. There was a throat-fever in Phaphan one season, and I remember that even the most lightly-sentenced penitents spent days in the cages before the priests reported that they had heard contrition.”
“And that was considered acceptable?”
Simova gave the Arbitor Senioris a sharp look. The cries from the cages and the deeper rumble of engines under their feet floated through the silence between them for a moment.
“The answer to that is the whole premise of the cages, Arbitor Calpurnia. You people deal with the Lex Imperia and a traditional system of penalties, but the traditions of trial and sentence by ordeal are almost as old. They remain in the cages until their oath of contrition is heard in full. That’s the law of it, pure and simple.”
“You’re saying that there’s no such thing as being sentenced to six hours in a cage, or a day, or what have you.”
“Exactly. It is not for any lowly servant, no matter how pious, to judge whether a sinner’s contrition has outweighed his crimes. That is decided by the Emperor and by the infallible natural moral order that flows from Him. The ordeal simply reveals the truth to our own lesser eyes so that we can act on it.”
“So if someone in the cages has a throat disease and can’t make themselves heard, they might spend a month in the cage for stumbling on the altar steps during a temple ceremony.”
Simova gave a polite anything’s-possible nod.
“And, hypothetically, someone who’d stood on the High Mese for an hour screaming blasphemies against the Emperor and all the Saints and primarchs while giving the fig to the Cathedral spire with one hand and wiping his behind on the Litanies of Faith with the other—”
“—would be confined in the highest cages.” Simova finished, pointing at the speck that Calpurnia had been looking at herself earlier on.
“Where it wouldn’t actually be humanly possible to be heard at all, I’d think. I can barely even see them up there, and didn’t you tell me that the cages on Phaphan were hung even higher?”
“The ones we used for the most serious of crimes, certainly.”
“Was anyone ever heard from those highest cages?”
“Not during my own tenure there.”
“And that to you demonstrates…”
“…that the Emperor looked into their sinning hearts and saw fit not to give them the voice to make themselves heard so that their penance could end,” Simova finished smoothly. “The received tradition of the Ecclesiarchy teaches us that the blasphemer and the heretic may find absolution in death, and so we may observe that death was the absolution that the Emperor required of them.” Simova’s voice had taken on a ringing, pulpit-style quality, and the thought caused Calpurnia another inner smile. The man’s tonsured head and broad chest were unremarkable, but where his ribs began the reverend bloomed into a great swell of fat in all directions which held the hem of his cassock well clear of his legs and feet. A ringing voice was not inappropriate for a man who so resembled a bell.
She looked up at that furthermost cage again, squinting as she followed the lines of the chains back to the walls.
The chains were invisible by the time they reached their anchor points, but she could just see the metal catwalk that ran along the girders that held the chains up. She thought of taking the magnocular scope from her belt to look in more detail, but that could wait. Best to play it safe and dumb until things were under way.
“You have nothing to worry about the construction of the cages, Arbitor Senioris,” said Simova, who had followed her gaze and misinterpreted it. “The girder supports are driven an arm’s length into the rockcrete. I’m told that we could safely hang one of the holy Sisterhood’s Rhino tanks up next to each cage. You don’t have to fear anything falling on you. Well, except for…” He gestured to the filth splattering the walkway. The priests had left tracks through it as they walked about to listen for confessions.
“Of course. I will not say there isn’t much to admire about the Hydraphur Ministorum, but this is not a religious practice that ever took root here. The Eparch wanted to make sure when he instituted it here that it would be done properly.”
“Really?” Calpurnia strolled towards the bleachers where the wardens sat and stared upwards. The identical expressions on their faces had not changed.
“And done properly it was, arbitor,” said Simova, pacing alongside her and once again misunderstanding her interest. “The only significant blemish on the whole affair was one particular inhabitant of the upper stack levels, who insisted on an above-market rate of payment as well as the granting of Ecclesiarchal indulgences in exchange for the privilege of driving our bolts and rings into the walls of his building. You can see him in that cage there, the one third from the edge.”
Calpurnia made a small polite sound, but she wasn’t looking. Two Arbites were walking up to the rows of benches, one with an adjutant’s badge and carrying a compact vox-case, one in the brown sash of a chastener.
“I trust this isn’t the call of duty just yet, Arbiter Calpurnia?” asked Simova, misreading things again. “I had hoped you would have time to see the priests arrive back from walking beneath the cages. I’m sure that at least one of the prisoners will have had their full contrition heard, and it’s instructive to see the whole process of—”
He broke off. Arbites helmets could make it difficult to tell where their wearer was looking—it was part of the design—but it had become very obvious that the black-armoured figures were staring over his shoulder. Simova gave a disapproving frown and turned.
The blimp coming down the avenue was about fifty metres long, bulbous and dirty. The metalwork along its scooped nose was a clumsy attempt to duplicate the lines of an Imperial warship’s prow, and clusters of auspexes and magnoptic emplacements jutted from the long gondola. Its engines were a loud, insectile buzz that counterpointed the seismic rumble of the traffic below.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 1