And it didn’t help that the arrogant thug of an arbitor senioris seemed to be able to pluck his thoughts out of the air, because the first dung she said to him when he emerged from the courtroom through the four-metre-high courtroom doors was: “That was not your trial, reverend, but it so easily could have been.”
She was standing in a carefully careless way in amongst a knot of black-armoured Arbites in the centre of the corridor. Facing her, still alone as the door swung silently closed behind him, Simova touched the gold aquila on its chain around his expansive waist, for confidence.
“Do not presume, arbitor, to even speak to me, much less to hector me about trials and what you might or might not do to me. I do not back away from a single word I have said about what will come of this. There are some things I took care to make clear to your subordinate on the flight back from that wretched tor—”
“Indeed there were. I understand that your eloquence was matched only by your stamina. There were vox-pickups in the ornithopter that brought you and your Sororitas back to the hive, did you know that? I have every point you made to my long-suffering Arbites in a data-ark on the desk in my personal chambers. I haven’t listened to them yet. Perhaps I should ask one of the Bastion clerks to make a summary.”
“You are doing justice to the absolute worst of your reputation, Arbitor Calpurnia,” said Simova coldly. “You show all the worst tendencies of the arbitrator: the oafish reliance on force, the tendency to think with your fists and boots and the barrel of a shotgun, the belief that the Lex Imperia is nothing more than whatever you feel like doing to whatever devoted servant of the Emperor is unfortunate enough to—”
He had scored a result, although not the one he had intended. Suddenly the tip of Calpurnia’s slender power-maul was buried in Simova’s navel, the spines on its tip pricking him unpleasantly through the brocade of his robe. Her black-gauntleted thumb hovered over the power switch.
“Here you stand, in our courthouse, and you lecture me on the law of the Imperium and how I may or may not go about enforcing it,” said Calpurnia. “What an interesting thing to witness.” Her words were light but her eyes were locked on him like emerald lasers, and only now did Simova realise how furious he had succeeded in making her.
He took a step back, and she a step forward: the maul remained dug into the swell of his belly.
“You have presided over punishments for blasphemers against the Emperor, Simova. You know how literally damning words can be. Except that you forget it. You assault with words the authority of an Arbitor General of the Adeptus, something that will condemn you under a hundred different codes with every sentence you utter, and then you decide that you will lecture me on the law that I know and enforce? You forget yourself most grievously, reverend. I could execute you on the spot for what you have just said to me and my actions would be clad in iron by every letter of the law. There would even be cases, were you any other man, reverend, by which I myself could be placed on trial for failing to execute you. Do not test me again.” The pressure on his gut was suddenly gone; there was a click as Calpurnia returned the maul to its belt-clip.
“Is that why I was brought here, then, arbiter?” Simova made sure his tone was respectful and mildly curious. “I do not believe that at the time that two dozen Arbites… removed me.” He still could not quite say arrested, although that was obviously what it had been, “and my escorts from that tor, I had said anything at all about you or your authority, arbiter. We had not even broken the interdiction around your fortress, although our errand was no more and no less than to submit a claim in a matter of law that you are currently overseeing. An action with deference to the authority of your office built into it, you will notice. I have co-operated and ordered co-operation at every step. Do you think the Sororitas would have put up their weapons had I not expressly ordered them to? They were ready to fight for me on that tor.”
“Where you had no right to be, incidentally, reverend. You were required to remain here to be ready to appear before Dastrom’s tribunal.”
“To provide testimony, Arbiter Calpurnia, not as an accused party, despite your performance to the contrary. Read the testimony I gave in there. I am not the guilty party, and I do not see why you needed to pretend otherwise. Or do you seriously think that you’re going to find my fingermarks on the hijacked blimp and the crane-truck and Symandis’ power axe?”
“Let’s say for the sake of the argument that I don’t find you actively complicit,” said Calpurnia with a considering look. “The responsibility for setting up and overseeing the ordeal was still yours. If one of my Arbites dozes off on watch and an assassin gets past him to murder me, he’d be sadly mistaken to think he wouldn’t be found at fault even though he didn’t pull the trigger himself. Take note and take instruction. If it weren’t for your particular mission and the Eparch’s feelings about it you’d be in a cell already.”
“Must you drag the Eparch into this, arbiter? If you are alleging some kind of failure then kindly allege it of me alone rather than trying to besmirch the whole Cathedral.”
In reply, Calpurnia snapped her fingers and Culann placed a message scroll into her hand. Simova’s nerves, which had relaxed when Calpurnia had put her weapon away, tensed again when he saw the Eparchal seal on it, already broken.
“I’ve had a letter,” she said, “from the Eparch apologising for your actions in leaving Bosporian and trying to bully your way to Trylan Tor. He also says that you were merely trying your best to perform an errand that he had asked of you. I’m assuming that this is something to do with the matter of law you mentioned to me earlier, is it?”
Simova nodded, still staring at the Eparchal seal. Eparch Baszle himself had been forced to intercede on Simova’s behalf, to allow him to finish the mission Baszle himself had sent him on. One little part of his mind was bidding a mournful farewell to the gold statues and lush tapestry of the Chamber of Exegetors: after this, the rest of his career would be spent supervising the cleaning rosters in a roadside shrine on some dung-splat little agri-world in the ugliest corner of the segmentum that his rivals at the Cathedral could find.
For some reason Simova always became aware of the soreness of his feet when he was nervous, and they were aching badly now. He took a breath.
“You, Arbiter Calpurnia, have been appointed to rule on the succession of the rogue trader charter passed down through the merchant family of Phrax. This charter bears not the imprimatur but the personal inscription of the Immortal God-Emperor, investing it as a relic by the hand of Him on Terra. And so in the name and by the power of the Adeptus Ministorum, I claim it as a holy relic for the greater glory of the Eparchy and Cathedral of Hydraphur.”
Culann cocked an eyebrow and looked sideways at Calpurnia’s face; the other Arbites were motionless as before. There was silence in the hall while a pair of scribes hurried nervously past with armfuls of data-copy and rapped on the door behind them. The door opened to admit them, and then swung closed.
“Do you know, Reverend Simova,” Shira Calpurnia said in her most conversational tone, “I believe that your claim is, quite possibly, the very last thing that this whole affair needed.”
The Shrine of the Machine God,
Adeptus Quarter of the
Augustaeum, Hydraphur
The heralds had gone back and forth in the form of data codes, servitors and the occasional junior adepts. The formal invitation had been, issued, received and confirmed with all due protocol. The meeting between the two respected magi of the Machine God unfolded as flawlessly as two perfectly maintained logic engines working through a data transfer handshake.
Sanja knew that there were those in the Mechanicus who distrusted people like Dyobann, considering that tech-priests spending too long in the company of extraneous influences tended to develop miscalibrations of their sacred doctrines and corruption of their liturgical beliefs. But Sanja was a genetor, a studier of biological systems that were both incredibly complex and less predictable, and
such a field of study had left him a little more flexible of temperament than those of his colleagues who had embraced the inorganic for their studies.
And so when Magos Errant Dyobann came down from the Ring, alone but for two servitors and carrying an engraved flask of red-tinted steel, Sanja had met him amiably enough.
He had chosen to receive his guest in the Helispex Chapel itself. The much put-upon engine had already been dismounted for the move to Trylan Tor before it had turned out that the aforesaid move was out of the question; it had now been re-mounted in its ark in the centre of the chapel. Had there been no more pressing business at hand Sanja would have ordered the room filled with incense and a solid-state vox looping through psalms of placation, then locked with a seal placed on its door for seventy-three standard hours and fifteen seconds; this being an appropriate rite of appeasement for a machine that had been forced to endure some kind of insult to its operation. But duty and obligation awaited, and so the placation of the engine would have to wait too. Sanja had a binary translation of the Omnissiah’s Catechism of Subjection loaded into the ancillary data engines that attended upon the Helispex itself, and now they circulated it constantly through the data cables lining the walls to create an atmosphere of prayerful obedience. Sanja hoped it would remind the engine’s spirit of its responsibilities, at least for as long as the business of the charter took.
The chapel itself was narrow and long. Buttress-columns curving up from the floor and meeting overhead turned its sides into a procession of niches, the walls and pillars holding complex patterns of inlaid power- and code-lines ornamented and illuminated with rare metals and gems. The top and side of the ark were folded out to expose the face of the engine; the power cables running to the engraved bronze panels in the floor were adorned with ribbons, seals and strips of parchment bearing Mechanicus blessings. Behind it Genetor Sanja, in bright ceremonial robes, sat in a suspensor throne two metres above the floor. His luminant skulls hung in the air by his shoulders and his hands cradled a jewelled data-slate reader bequeathed to him by thirty-seven generations of forebears.
Dyobann left his servitors at the door and advanced with slow, deferential steps. His own garments were much plainer: red for the Mechanicus, with rows of patterns stitched into the fabric at sleeves, collar and hems to show the many disciplines of the magos errant: genetor, alchemys, metallurg, more. His head was bowed and his patchwork face was hidden by his hood.
The two luminants took the flask delicately from his hands in their webs of metal dendrites. As Dyobann knelt and prayed at the foot of the steps, Sanja’s throne lowered and circled the ark, always facing in so that his back was never to the engine itself. The luminants gave little twitches of their dendrites and flicks of red light from their optics as they inspected the metal and the seals: their report, beamed into Sanja’s brain through the receptors in his skull, showed all was well.
Sanja stepped from the throne and walked to them. Standing before the Helispex Engine, he felt the awe he always did: this was as great a relic of the Machine God as he would set eyes on in his lifetime. For a day and a half now he had been anointing it with oils, circulating precious incenses through the housing and meditating to clear his mind for the ritual—the preparations had left him in a state of religious concentration that bordered on trance. But now the faces were clear and cold, the air purified so that nothing might enter the engine except what he begged it to take into itself and show to him.
On the top step Sanja abased himself and set the flask down.
He closed his eyes and the world became a mosaic, a composite, like a series of images painted on layers of translucent curtains. He looked at the flask through all the senses of his luminants and through the eyes of the machine gargoyles that watched over the ark from the top of every column. He watched as the luminants’ dendrites, whose grace and delicacy no human could match, carefully broke the seal on the flask and lifted out the vial inside. Then, floating no more than a few centimetres off the floor and with their skull-faces turned downward, they approached the silvered face of the Helispex Engine.
The face of the engine was just that. Engraved on the silver slab of its side in breathtaking detail, detail so fine that without his augmetics there were elements to the picture Sanja would not have seen at all, was a stylised reproduction of the sacred emblem of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the half-skull, half-cog of the Machina Opus. But that had been superimposed over a larger design, another skull, this one drawn with augmetics to the eye and cranium that suggested a servitor or certain patterns of junior acolytes. The skull was distended and stylised, its mouth open, and it was into the maw of the skull that the luminants slipped the vial.
Sanja’s breath caught. He had heard the quiet click and hum of moving parts within the engine, the sign that its spirit remembered its duty. Moved by that spirit, the luminants moved back and outward and the doors to the chapel swung shut. The Helispex Engine was about to begin its operations, calling down the mind of the Machine God into its circuits and nanostacks, bringing the unknowable intellect of the Arch-Mechanicus to bear.
Sanja and Dyobann both set up a buzzing, chirruping prayer in machine-code that echoed through the chapel. The lights in the chapel flickered and the luminants bobbed in their places. And then, with a still and small sound like a sigh from the depths of the engine, it was done. The magi straightened up and looked at one another, and the doors to the chapel, and the outer doors beyond them, both opened again. Dyobann’s servitors stood there exactly as before.
It was time for the engine to rest before the revelation of data. The two magi stood at the base of the dais and waited.
“I acknowledge gratitude,” said Dyobann at length. “I have seen many things in my travels with Phrax, but none compare to this. To be present at such a ritual is an experience such as I had never expected to have.”
“Genetors come from three sectors on pilgrimages to this shrine,” said Sanja with a trace of smugness. “Seven months ago the arch-lexmechanic of the Twelfth Tech-Guard Fleet came here with gifts of servitors and scriptures and machine-parts blessed on Mars itself, for the right to pray at the foot of the dais for one hundred minutes and look upon the engine itself. The clarity of the engine’s communion with the Machine God is such that it can perform seventy-six billion calculations and observations in a second, and process them in five seconds more. This is the traditional honour that the Mechanicus pays to the line of Phrax, that no less a device than the Helispex shall confirm the bloodline at each succession.”
“You are to be praised for your custodianship, magos,” said Dyobann. “And you honour me in turn, permitting me to see the invocations for myself.” He had seemed to tense at the reference to the confirmation of the bloodline.
“Knowledge is holiness, the Omnissiah teaches us so.” Sanja replied. “To pass on knowledge to the select and the anointed is a great sacrament and elevates us all in the service of the Machine.”
“It is as you say.”
They both stood there for a moment longer, each one reluctant to break the gravitas of the moment. Then there was a tiny sound that made Dyobann look around: the slabs of carved stone that made up the ark of the Helispex were slowly closing around the engine itself. As both magi watched they locked into place and sealed themselves, the join lines now barely visible.
“It rests now,” said Sanja. “Tonight I will lead my acolytes in the ceremonies of cleansing as we refresh its spirit, and then we shall leave it for a time to restore itself. It has had a taxing time of these last days. Magos Dyobann, if your other duties permit you, do you wish to attend upon the engine when we do so?”
“It would be an honour, genetor-magos, thank you.” Dyobann’s voice bespoke a trace of nerves, Sanja thought, but that was only natural. Then he turned as two jointed metal arms wrapped about with transmission wires emerged from the dais: the engine had passed on its insights to its attendant machines, and these in turn were ready to pass them on to the two magi. Sanja and
Dyobann walked to the dais steps and knelt, each connecting to it in their own way. Dyobann extended the tiny tendril from the corner of his eye and stroked the tip of the arm until he found a receptor and slid the tendril home; Sanja had one of the luminants move forward to take the end of the other arm in one of its own and begin transmitting back to him. For a quiet moment the attendant engines performed last-minute collations on the data that the Helispex itself had vouchsafed to them, and then both magi closed their eyes and submitted to the flow of information.
In the space behind Sanja’s eyes, colours exploded and swirled, sonic codes cracked and buzzed in his ears, senses no unaugmented human possessed all began to sing. The Helispex had held Petronas Phrax’s blood up to the glare of the eternal Machine God’s gaze, and now he saw what it had seen.
Dancing through the image was archive-data, the parallel records back through every generation of the Phrax bloodline. The engine remembered every operation it had ever performed, every petition that had ever been made to it. It had known it was being asked to look once again at the bloodline of Phrax, and so now the knowledge of the tests it had done on the family’s every generation blossomed silently in the backs of the magi’s minds as the blood-print of this new heir danced through the fore of their consciousness. Gene-prints, chemical analyses down to the molecular, down to the sub-molecular, microchemical forensics that showed every influence and impact on the heir’s blood from the genes he had been born with to the food he had eaten, diseases he had had, the kinds of sunlight he had been exposed to, the kinds of vaccinations, the…
…the…
Wait.
With speed born of fear, Magos Errant Dyobann wrenched his consciousness out of the coded swirl, hissing at the flare of pain in his eye from the sudden disconnection of his tendril. At the door his servitors swivelled as he ran between them and then they fell in behind him, the sculpted metal hooves he had made for them clashing on the stone floor.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 15