Council Chambers of Kostazin Baszle,
Eparch of Hydraphur. Level 47, Ducatine Spire,
Cathedral of the Emperor Ascendant, Hydraphur
Reverend Simova glowered about him as they filed through the door and each priest touched the amulet at his neck to the feet of the marble statue of the Emperor set into the far wall. As was the habit in many Ministorum chambers it had been set deliberately off-centre so that it could watch over all the room, not stare out from behind the Eparchal chair. Moving from the statue, each kissed the aquila stitched into the end of the Eparch’s prayer shawl. It was done in green thread on blue at the moment, reflecting the sacerdotal colours for the celebration of the Hydraphur’s wet season and the turning of the year.
It was four minutes before they were all done and kneeling before their seats, repeating the Eparch’s brief High Gothic blessing. Then they rose, settled into their seats and waited to hear what was on their master’s mind.
“No, it isn’t about Reverend Simova’s continued clash with the law,” Eparch Baszle said, to dutiful murmurs of amusement from everyone except the man he had named. “Although perhaps, brother, you could hazard a guess as to exactly how long that affair will take?”
“There is little left for them to do,” Simova said with as much dignity as he could. “This arbitor they have set in charge is obviously anxious to prove himself to the Calpurnia woman, and he seems to feel that the way to do that is to subject the Adeptus Ministorum and her priesthood to all manner of pointless legal delays. Their real targets are the cell whose leaders we were punishing.”
“Or leader, at any rate. You only had one in the cages, didn’t you?”
“One, yes,” said Simova, bristling inside. It had been the Eparch’s insistence behind the reintroduction of the old Phaphanite cages, but anything going wrong of course was Simova’s fault alone. But he knew better than to start trying to defend himself in front of all the other clerics. He would wait and plead his case another time. Except that the Eparch did not seem minded to let it drop.
“The matter I want to discuss is an important one, important enough to require you all away from your afternoon duties. It will involve placing this Cathedral in the way of a certain amount of attention from the other Adeptus. In particular.” Baszle turned his handsome, angular head to stare at Simova again, “it will bring us the attention of Imperial law. And will involve questions of law both spiritual and temporal, so I must say, Simova, this is a particularly poor time for one of my senior exegetors to lock horns with the Arbites.”
“I am not on trial, your eminence.” Simova replied, flushing a little. “Praetor Imprimis Dastrom has made that clear. The investigation is into the infiltration of the construction and guarding work on the cages. Aspects of it that do not concern myself,” he added after a moment, conscious that he had been the one technically in charge of the whole affair. The supercilious Dastrom had made no secret of the fact that he considered Simova at least a little culpable. “But I am faithful according to my powers, and what they lay in my way I shall overcome since I know that the Emperor is with me.” He sat back in his seat, a little happier. “Your eminence, I must say that I am curious about this important matter that you say you wanted to discuss with us.”
The Eparch’s deep-set eyes stayed on Simova for a moment before he too decided to move on.
“Brother Palomas, will you please list for me the latest additions to the reliquary of our Cathedral?”
A short man in a simple brown habit at the far end of the semicircle read from a faxscroll.
“Two shell casings from the pistol of Saint Csokavi of Tamar, obtained as tithe from the Diocese of Chigand. They await their reliquary case; Demipater Ushiste will be blessing it at tomorrow’s sunset mass in the Bell Chapel.
“A vial of soil from the landing-field where the Four Bishops of Phael were martyred. It’s been authenticated by the Chamber Pronatus you authorised at the end of last year, your eminence, and the ship carrying it broke warp at the edge of Hydraphur yesterday. It should be here within the week. Lastly, the Reverend Baragry has sent word from Iskaza-Maru that he has recovered nearly all of the fragments of the skull of Sister Elidas the Demi-Sainted. I understand he will be returning here as soon as he is able.”
“Excellent, and thank you for the news of that last, brother. Our sisters in the Order of the Sacred Rose will be pleased that a relic of one of their own is on its way back to them. And I convey the Reverend Baragry’s apologies to this meeting, of course, but you all knew he was absent on my errands. Apparently there were certain parties on Iskaza-Maru who were reluctant to allow such a relic to be taken off their world. But all things unfold for a reason, my friends and brothers, and we can reflect on our brother’s exploits under a different sun to remind us that the ways of worship are often harsh and must at times be ruthless if our faith is to spread its wings and raise its spires. I know I’ve spoken to you all about my desire to make Hydraphur the brightest beacon of the Imperial faith in all the sectors around. Hundreds of worlds and billions of souls, all looking back to us as we reflect the Emperor’s light to them as Luna shines the sunlight down on holy Terra. I want the walls of the Cathedral to groan with the trophies of the Ecclesiarchy and the relics of her holiest saints. And I have said that there is much that the Emperor will smile upon in such a holy cause.”
Ah, Simova thought. That was why Baszle had gone off on the tangent about Baragry. It wasn’t a tangent—he was preparing them. There was something they were going to have to do.
“Let it never be said.” Baszle told them, “that I saw glory for my Cathedral and my Emperor and turned my back to it. We have the chance now to take a wondrous relic of the time when the Emperor Himself set His eyes to Hydraphur, to fetch it from hiding in a prison of iniquity and set it high in the Cathedral where it belongs. A token of the Emperor’s true life, that will have our faith strengthened as steel. Something that will place us at the head of an army of the faithful, pilgrims and priests and crusaders, as it ought always have been.”
The priests shifted in their seats and looked at each other, but Baszle himself had fixed his eyes on Simova again.
“We will not be tithing for this. It will not be brought here by a war of faith and force of arms. No matter what we demand of our Eparchy it could not furnish us with this. No, the way we are going to acquire this relic is through you, Simova, you and your chamber. There is a very precious relic being brought to our very doorstep here at Hydraphur, and the Emperor, all-providing, has seen fit to set its owners against one another. They will come before the Adeptus and they are going to try to argue that the Arbites should rule them the rightful owners of this relic, as if there could be any kind of rightful owner but the Emperor’s own Adeptus Ministorum. That is what we are here to plan. Curate Simova?”
Simova was about to cross his arms defensively and argue when he realised that Baszle was no longer accusing him but appointing him. He ran through the Eparch’s words again and blinked. A great relic, a relic that was to be fought over by law. The importance of his new task hit him so hard he almost gasped.
For a horrifying moment he thought he had run dry of words. And then, as it had so many times in the days-long debates in the chamber, his mind clicked smoothly into motion.
“I will begin,” he said, “by outlining the writings of Pontifex Militant Orgos Aruck concerning the right of the Adeptus Ministorum to take possession of any object, person or territory which meets the definition of a holy relic.
“We shall also consider the definition of a holy relic as originally addressed in the writings of Ecclesiarch Chiganne IV and formalised by the Four Thousand and Eighty-Second Ecclesiarchal Conclave. We must also consider the Eighth Edict-Spiritual of Terra and its implications for clashes between religious and temporal law; there are over a dozen recent and relevant precedents in the Segmentum Pacificus. And I believe, your eminence, that I should also touch on the epistles of Confessor Luzaro of Sirius w
hich, according to the deliberations of the Eparchs Solar in M38, is considered canon for Ecclesiarchal actions where holy items must be claimed from fellow Imperial subjects by brute force of arms.”
With the Eparch’s permission, he stood, then closed his eyes for the few breaths it took for him to find his orator’s voice and lay out the points of law in his head. This was what delighted Simova as few other things did: he could almost see it in his mind, an interlocking web of points and counterpoints, tracts of text and decrees of religious law, forming constellations and webs of duty and obedience.
He opened his eyes and began to speak. They listened, they questioned, they discussed, as outside the yellow Hydraphur sunlight ebbed away into a long, chilly, rainy night.
The Flotilla of Hoyyon Phrax,
in transit
What had been simply and luminously clear to Nils Petronas while he was killing Officer Gensh was not clear any more. It had come back to him with time, as treatment brought the spasms and pain under control and thinking was no longer like trying to pick up spilled oil in his fingers. He remembered the realisation clearly: the purging of the flotilla went far deeper than he had believed, that he and all his friends had been sentenced to death by some arcane tradition that the seniors and masters had kept from all the rest of them. It wasn’t as though there weren’t plenty of those.
That insight had had the force of a hammer. All he had been able to think of was striking back, taking as many with him as possible. If there was to be a hole in the flotilla where he and his friends had been, then he would make that hole a little bigger, leave a scar that the masters would have to remember.
But he no longer thought that was true. He no longer knew what was happening or why. He still knew something was going on—the scraps of memory of what he had heard in the kitchen and the Apothecarion saw to that. But he could look around him now at the luxurious chair that they had shifted him into from the survival-bed, the diagnostor hanging silently in the air over his right shoulder (it was built into a beautiful butterfly sculpted in silver and stained-glass, a holdover of an infatuation old Hoyyon had had with insects some decades ago), and the slender weave of tubes and lines that were nourishing his ravaged muscles and strengthening his flesh. He could not believe that they were nursing him so extravagantly just to put him to death again. If he were so valuable to the flotilla masters, that gave him power. At some point he was going to have the chance to hurt them.
Just that morning (as far as there were any mornings in the whiteness of his chamber) Petronas had found that he had enough strength to make fists of his hands again. They were weak, and he could not maintain them for more than a few moments, but when he made them he could see the last of the red roughness on his knuckles from the beating he had given the deck hand, and that made him feel better. He had even started to grin when he found that out, until he realised that someone was probably watching him. So he kept the grin but hid it inside his head, stoked like a little hot coal, and bided his time.
CHAPTER SIX
The Sanctioned Liner Gann-Luctis,
in transit
They had run into trouble right from the start.
Gunarvo lay at the edge of a band of perennial riptides and whirls in the immaterium that followed the line of worlds trailing out of the Broadhead Cluster. To accurately scry and catch those tides was work for a skilled Navigator, and most craft that left the system took on extra supplies and endured a ten-week haul through real space before they broke warp where the conditions were calmer. The Navigator that Domasa’s backers in House Yimora had assigned for Varro’s voyage was tough and skilled enough to make even Domasa feel deferential, but it had stilt taken three attempts to properly break through into the currents that grabbed them from Gunarvo into calmer warp flows where they could come about and lay in course for Hydraphur.
Ksana Phrax had travelled between the stars exactly three times in her life, and had counted herself lucky for it. Not just because her husband had told her so, either. Although she remembered him picking up a tiny pinch of gravel from the riverbed at the bottom of the Asterine Lock one night before their first voyage and holding it out to her. “If the riverbed is everyone on this whole world for the past hundred years,” he had said, “then this is the number of them who will ever manage to look down on Gunarvo and see it hanging in space, let alone how many of them will ever look down on another world the same way. “The people who never travel between worlds never think about it; tire people who do usually take it for granted. But it’s an incredible thing, my love, to look on a world so far from yours and taste its air. You’ll see.”
Ksana had believed him, and remembered her privilege. This should have been a greater privilege still: she still had to tell herself that, after so much anticipation, she was leaving Gunarvo as the wife of a rogue trader-in-waiting, to return, if she ever did, a merchant princess with a flotilla and a ten-thousand-year old legacy behind her. Varro had once told her about how the charters had been signed and sealed by the Emperor Himself, and although she had thought he was exaggerating she also believed she was coming into whatever destiny the Emperor had for her.
Alone in the beautiful stateroom, with its blue velvet drapes and cushions and its purple-trimmed furniture of ebony and gold, she told herself again that she should not be so disturbed, that there was no reason for her nerves to be so taut or for her hands to want to lace and unlace themselves—she had even put on gloves of thin blue silk when the skin between her fingers had become red and sore.
But there were things to disturb her. Plenty of them. Varro had told her with a smile that they were in good hands, that Dorel and Yimora and the rest were worthy allies who understood how important the charter was going to be to him. He had shown her letters from the first controller, the Imperium-appointed governor of Gunarvo itself, who would help them make the case for his proper succession. As they were leaving they had been joined by another delegation, Imperial Administratum representatives bearing seals from the subsectoral prefect on Baryatin II. The delegation leader, haughty in his formal gown and high, intricate collar, had told her that the Administratum would be pleased to place its resources “at the disposal of the Phrax succession and its orderly and correct resolution.” They had not said much else to her after that, and that had not surprised her. She knew how most of Varro’s new associates thought of her: the little heir’s trophy-wife, ignorant of the Imperium beyond the walls of the family compound, standing well back and smiling benignly at whatever her husband did.
But Ksana Phrax was the daughter of a Gunarvite merchant guilder and the sister of two doctors-at-law to the planetary Congress of Selectmen. She saw much and suspected more.
There was a plate of meats and spices on the table next to her, but she had little appetite. Her nerves had robbed her of it. She slipped off her shoes and padded carefully to the sleeping alcove to move the drapes carefully aside with a hand: Dreyder was still asleep, more quietly than he had been when they had been trying to break warp and he had twitched and cried out from the dreams. Ksana resisted the urge to pull the blankets up around him—the room was warm enough, and she didn’t want to wake him. She let the drape fall back into place.
What she had seen was the way that Domasa Dorel spoke to her husband, either artificially gruff as though she were a better friend than she had the right to consider herself, or a contrived singsong lilt as she pretended a respect for Varro she clearly did not feel. And that bright, steely, calculating look never left her eyes. Ksana had watched to see how Domasa dealt with the way she frightened their son—and there had been no reaction at all. The look in her eyes as she had watched Ksana consoling her son after he had cried at their first meeting had been cool and dismissive.
She knew about the whispered conferences between the first controller’s men and the delegation from the Administratum. She had gone walking the decks and visiting what few diversions the ship offered—the little library, the promenade stairs around the base of
the bridge-tower, the rows of idols to the Machine God that lined the halls leading to the enginarium—and time and again she had come on them, little knots of turned backs and low voices, that broke up to shower her with sunny greetings and then silently waited for her to move on. She knew that message-runners had been working the corridors between their suites night and day, special Administratum-trained couriers who were hypno-conditioned to remember nothing of what they heard and recited. She knew that she and Varro had dined with the Gann-Luctis’ officers at a table half-empty because the others were meeting privately in rooms that even the ship’s personnel had been barred from.
She knew that the first controller’s men wanted a copy of the charter’s wording, and resented Varro for not providing them with one. She suspected that they were looking for ways to distort those words: she knew enough about the controller’s dreams for Gunarvo that trying to tie the charter to their world instead of Hydraphur seemed natural when the prism of ambition was applied to one’s vision.
She knew that Maghal, the Adept Prolegis who was second-in-command of the Administratum delegation, was already trying to negotiate with Varro to attach a ship to the flotilla under an Administratum charter. The ship would have a captain appointed by Maghal or his superiors and its relationship with the rest of the flotilla would be governed by contract—it would collect tithes of populations, resources and data from the Imperial worlds the flotilla visited and the Administratum adepts on its crew would have a voice in determining the flotilla’s itinerary. And in return, subsidies and favoured-trader status on merchant routes all through the subsector. Ksana could well imagine what they were planning: get Varro fat and comfortable on a regular run across routes the Administratum already controlled, use his charter to flout the vigilance of the Arbites, use him to venture into the wild space south of Gunarvo where the prefect desperately wanted tithe-paying Imperial rule to spread again.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 9