by Dan Abnett
‘…always a heliolithic city, a tribute to the sun above, and we may see this afternoon, indeed, I’m sure you will have noticed, the glory of the light here. A city of light. Light out of darkness is a noble theme, by which, of course, I mean the light of truth shining upon the darkness of ignorance. I am much taken with the local phototropic technologies I have found here, and intend to incorporate them into the design…’
Karkasy sighed. He never thought he would find himself wishing for an iterator, but at least those bastards knew how to speak in public. Peeter Egon Momus should have left the talking to one of the iterators while he aimed the wretched picter wand for them.
His mind wandered. He looked up at the high walls around them, geometric slabs against the blue sky, baked pink in the sunlight, or smoke black where shadows slanted. He saw the scorch marks and dotted bolt craters that pitted the basalt like acne. Beyond the walls, the towers of the palace were in worse repair, their plasterwork hanging off like shed snakeskin, their missing windows like blinded eyes.
In a yard to the south of the gathering, a Titan of the Mechanicum stood on station, its grim humanoid form rising up over the walls. It stood perfectly still, like a piece of monumental martial statuary, instantly installed. Now that, thought Karkasy, was a far more appropriate celebration of glory and compliance.
Karkasy stared at the Titan for a little while. He’d never seen anything like it before in his life, except in picts. The awesome sight of it almost made the tedious outing worthwhile.
The more he stared at it, the more uncomfortable it made him feel. It was so huge, so threatening, and so very still. He knew it could move. He began to wish it would. He found himself yearning for it to suddenly turn its head or take a step, or otherwise rumble into animation. Its immobility was agonising.
Then he began to fear that if it did suddenly move, he would be quite unmanned, and might be forced to cry out in involuntary terror, and fall to his knees.
A burst of clapping made him jump. Momus had apparently said something apposite, and the iterators were stirring up the crowd in response. Karkasy slapped his sweaty hands together a few times obediently.
Karkasy was sick of it. He knew he couldn’t bear to stand there much longer with the Titan staring at him.
He took one last look at the stage. Momus was rambling on, well into his fiftieth minute. The only other point of interest to the whole affair, as far as Karkasy was concerned, stood at the back of the podium behind Momus. Two giants in yellow plate. Two noble Astartes from the VII Legion, the Imperial Fists, the Emperor’s Praetorians. They were presumably in attendance to lend Momus an appropriate air of authority. Karkasy guessed the VII had been chosen over the Luna Wolves because of their noted genius in the arts of fortification and defence. The Imperial Fists were fortress builders, warrior masons who raised such impenetrable redoubts that they could be held for eternity against any enemy. Karkasy smelled the artful handiwork of iterator propaganda: the architects of war watching over the architect of peace.
Karkasy had waited to see if either would speak, or come forward to remark upon Momus’s plans, but they did not. They stood there, bolters across their broad chests, as static and unwavering as the Titan.
Karkasy turned away, and began to push his way out through the inflexible crowd. He headed towards the rear of the square.
Troopers of the Imperial army had been stationed around the hem of the crowd as a precaution. They had been required to wear full dress uniform, and they were so overheated that their sweaty cheeks were blanched a sickly green-white.
One of them noticed Karkasy moving out through the thinnest part of the audience, and came over to him.
‘Where are you going, sir?’ he asked.
‘I’m dying of thirst,’ Karkasy replied.
‘There will be refreshments, I’m told, after the presentation,’ the soldier said. His voice caught on the word ‘refreshments’ and Karkasy knew there would be none for the common soldiery.
‘Well, I’ve had enough,’ Karkasy said.
‘It’s not over.’
‘I’ve had enough.’
The soldier frowned. Perspiration beaded at the bridge of his nose, just beneath the rim of his heavy fur shako. His throat and jowls were flushed pink and sheened with sweat.
‘I can’t allow you to wander away. Movement is supposed to be restricted to approved areas.’
Karkasy grinned wickedly. ‘And I thought you were here to keep trouble out, not keep us in.’
The soldier didn’t find that funny, or even ironic. ‘We’re here to keep you safe, sir,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see your permit.’
Karkasy took out his papers. They were an untidy, crumpled bundle, warm and damp from his trouser pocket. Karkasy waited, faintly embarrassed, while the soldier studied them. He had never liked barking up against authority, especially not in front of people, though the back of the crowd didn’t seem to be at all interested in the exchange.
‘You’re a remembrancer?’ the soldier asked.
‘Yes. Poet,’ Karkasy added before the inevitable second question got asked.
The soldier looked up from the papers into Karkasy’s face, as if searching for some essential characteristic of poethood that might be discerned there, comparable to a Navigator’s third eye or a slave-drone’s serial tattoo. He’d likely never seen a poet before, which was all right, because Karkasy had never seen a Titan before.
‘You should stay here, sir,’ the soldier said, handing the papers back to Karkasy.
‘But this is pointless,’ Karkasy said. ‘I have been sent to make a memorial of these events. I can’t get close to anything. I can’t even hear properly what that fool’s got to say. Can you imagine the wrong-headedness of this? Momus isn’t even history. He’s just another kind of memorialist. I’ve been allowed here to remember his remembrance, and I can’t even do that properly. I’m so far removed from the things I should be engaging with, I might as well have stayed on Terra and made do with a telescope.’
The soldier shrugged. He’d lost the thread of Karkasy’s speech early on. ‘You should stay here, sir. For your own safety.’
‘I was told the city had been made safe,’ Karkasy said. ‘We’re only a day or two from compliance, aren’t we?’
The soldier leaned forward discreetly, so close that Karkasy could smell the stale odour of garbage the heat was infusing into his breath. ‘Just between us, that’s the official line, but there has been trouble. Insurgents. Loyalists. You always get it in a conquered city, no matter how clean the victory. The back streets are not secure.’
‘Really?’
‘They’re saying loyalists, but it’s just discontent, if you ask me. These bastards have lost it all, and they’re not happy about it.’
Karkasy nodded. ‘Thanks for the tip,’ he said, and turned back to rejoin the crowd.
Five minutes later, with Momus still droning on and Karkasy close to despair, an elderly noblewoman in the crowd fainted, and there was a small commotion. The soldiers hurried in to take charge of the situation and carry her into the shade.
When the soldier’s back was turned, Karkasy took himself off out of the square and into the streets beyond.
HE WALKED FOR a while through empty courts and high-walled streets where shadows pooled like water. The day’s heat was still pitiless, but moving around made it more bearable. Periodic breezes gusted down alleyways, but they were not at all relieving. Most were so full of sand and grit that Karkasy had to turn his back to them and close his eyes until they abated.
The streets were vacant, except for an occasional figure hunched in the shadows of a doorway, or half-visible behind broken shutters. He wondered if anybody would respond if he approached them, but felt reluctant to try. The silence was penetrating, and to break it would have felt as improper as disturbing a mourning vigil.
He was alone, properly alone for the first time in over a year, and master of his own actions. It felt tremendously liberating.
He could go where he pleased, and quickly began to exercise that privilege, taking street turns at random, walking where his feet took him. For a while, he kept the still-unmoving Titan in sight, as a point of reference, but it was soon eclipsed by towers and high roofs, so he resigned himself to getting lost. Getting lost would be liberating too. There were always the great towers of the palace. He could follow those back to their roots if necessary.
War had ravaged many parts of the city he passed through. Buildings had toppled into white and dusty heaps of slag, or been reduced to their very basements. Others were roofless, or burned out, or wounded in their structures, or simply rendered into facades, their innards blown out, standing like the wooden flats of stage scenery.
Craters and shell holes pock-marked certain pavements, or the surfaces of metalled roads, sometimes forming strange rows and patterns, as if their arrangement was deliberate, or concealed, by some secret code, great truths of life and death. There was a smell in the dry, hot air, like burning or blood or ordure, yet none of those things. A mingled scent, an afterscent. It wasn’t burning he could smell, it was things burnt. It wasn’t blood, it was dry residue. It wasn’t ordure, it was the seeping consequence of sewer systems broken and cracked by the bombardment.
Many streets had stacks of belongings piled up along the pavements. Furniture, bundles of clothing, kitchen-ware. A great deal of it was in disrepair, and had evidently been recovered from ruined dwellings. Other piles seemed more intact, the items carefully packed in trunks and coffers. People were intending to quit the city, he realised. They had piled up their possessions in readiness while they tried to procure transportation, or perhaps the relevant permission from the occupying authorities.
Almost every street and yard bore some slogan or other notice upon its walls. All were hand written, in a great variety of styles and degrees of calligraphic skill. Some were daubed in pitch, others paint or dye, others chalk or charcoal – the latter, Karkasy reasoned, marks made by the employment of burnt sticks and splinters taken from the ruins. Many were indecipherable, or unfathomable. Many were bold, angry graffiti, specifically cursing the invaders or defiantly announcing a surviving spark of resistance. They called for death, for uprising, for revenge.
Others were lists, carefully recording the names of the citizens who had died in that place, or plaintive requests for news about the missing loved ones listed below. Others were agonised statements of lament, or minutely and delicately transcribed texts of some sacred significance.
Karkasy found himself increasingly captivated by them, by the variation and contrast of them, and the emotions they conveyed. For the first time, the first true and proper time since he’d left Terra, he felt the poet in him respond. This feeling excited him. He had begun to fear that he might have accidentally left his poetry behind on Terra in his hurry to embark, or at least that it malingered, folded and unpacked, in his quarters on the ship, like his least favourite shirt.
He felt the muse return, and it made him smile, despite the heat and the mummification of his throat. It seemed apt, after all, that it should be words that brought words back into his mind.
He took out his chapbook and his pen. He was a man of traditional inclinations, believing that no great lyric could ever be composed on the screen of a data-slate, a point of variance that had almost got him into a fist fight with Palisad Hadray, the other ‘poet of note’ amongst the remembrancer group. That had been near the start of their conveyance to join the expedition, during one of the informal dinners held to allow the remembrancers to get to know one another. He would have won the fight, if it had come to it. He was fairly sure of that. Even though Hadray was an especially large and fierce woman.
Karkasy favoured notebooks of thick, cream cartridge paper, and at the start of his long, feted career, had sourced a supplier in one of Terra’s arctic hives, who specialised in antique methods of paper manufacture. The firm was called Bondsman, and it offered a particularly pleasing quarto chapbook of fifty leaves, bound in a case of soft, black kit, with an elasticated strap to keep it closed. The Bondsman Number 7. Karkasy, a sallow, rawheaded youth back then, had paid a significant proportion of his first royalty income for an order of two hundred. The volumes had come, packed head to toe, in a waxed box lined with tissue paper, which had smelled, to him at least, of genius and potential. He had used the books sparingly, leaving not one precious page unfilled before starting a new one. As his fame grew, and his earnings soared, he had often thought about ordering another box, but always stopped when he realised he had over half the original shipment still to use up. All his great works had been composed upon the pages of Bondsman Number 7’s. His Fanfare to Unity, all eleven of his Imperial Cantos, his Ocean Poems, even the meritorious and much republished Reflections and Odes, written in his thirtieth year, which had secured his reputation and won him the Ethiopic Laureate.
The year before his selection to the role of remembrancer, after what had been, in all fairness, a decade of unproductive doldrums that had seen him living off past glories, he had decided to rejuvenate his muse by placing an order for another box. He had been dismayed to discover that Bondsman had ceased operation.
Ignace Karkasy had nine unused volumes left in his possession. He had brought them all with him on the voyage. But for an idiot scribble or two, their pages were unmarked.
On a blazing, dusty street corner in the broken city, he took the chapbook out of his coat pocket, and slid off the strap. He found his pen – an antique plunger-action fountain, for his traditionalist tastes applied as much to the means of marking as what should be marked – and began to write.
The heat had almost congealed the ink in his nib, but he wrote anyway, copying out such pieces of wall writing as affected him, sometimes attempting to duplicate the manner and form of their delineation.
He recorded one or two at first, as he moved from street to street, and then became more inclusive, and began to mark down almost every slogan he saw. It gave him satisfaction and delight to do this. He could feel, quite definitely, a lyric beginning to form, taking shape from the words he read and recorded. It would be superlative. After years of absence, the muse had flown back into his soul as if it had never been away.
He realised he had lost track of time. Though it was still stifling hot and bright, the hour was late, and the blazing sun had worked its way over, lower in the sky. He had filled almost twenty pages, almost half his chap-book.
He felt a sudden pang. What if he had only nine volumes of genius left in him? What if that box of Bondsman Number 7’s, delivered so long ago, represented the creative limits of his career?
He shuddered, chilled despite the clinging heat, and put his chap-book and pen away He was standing on a lonely, war-scabbed street-corner, persecuted by the sun, unable to fathom which direction to turn.
For the first time since escaping Peeter Egon Momus’s presentation, Karkasy felt afraid. He felt that eyes were watching him from the blind ruins.
He began to retrace his steps, slouching through gritty shadow and dusty light. Only once or twice did a new graffito persuade him to stop and take out his chap-book again.
He’d been walking for some time, in circles probably, for all the streets had begun to look the same, when he found the eating house. It occupied the ground floor and basement of a large basalt tenement, and bore no sign, but the smell of cooking announced its purpose. Door-shutters had been opened onto the street, and there was a handful of tables set out. For the first time, he saw people in numbers. Locals, in dark sun cloaks and shawls, as unresponsive and indolent as the few souls he had glimpsed in doorways. They were sitting at the tables under a tattered awning, alone or in small, silent groups, drinking thimble glasses of liquor or eating food from finger bowls.
Karkasy remembered the state of his throat, and his belly remembered itself with a groan.
He walked inside, into the shade, nodding politely to the patrons. None responded.
In the cold gloom, he found
a wooden bar with a dresser behind it, laden with glassware and spouted bottles. The hostel keeper, an old woman in a khaki wrap, eyed him suspiciously from behind the serving counter.
‘Hello,’ he said.
She frowned back.
‘Do you understand me?’ he asked.
She nodded slowly.
‘That’s good, very good. I had been told our languages were largely the same, but that there were some accent and dialect differences.’ He trailed off.
The old woman said something that might have been ‘What?’ or might have been any number of curses or interrogatives.
‘You have food?’ he asked. Then he mimed eating.
She continued to stare at him.
‘Food?’ he asked.
She replied with a flurry of guttural words, none of which he could make out. Either she didn’t have food, or was unwilling to serve him, or she didn’t have any food for the likes of him.
‘Something to drink then?’ he asked.
No response.
He mimed drinking, and when that brought nothing, pointed at the bottles behind her.
She turned and took down one of the glass containers, selecting one as if he had indicated it directly instead of generally. It was three-quarters full of a clear, oily fluid that roiled in the gloom. She thumped it onto the counter, and then put a thimble glass beside it.
‘Very good,’ he smiled. ‘Very, very good. Well done. Is this local? Ah ha! Of course it is, of course it is. A local speciality? You’re not going to tell me, are you? Because you have no idea what I’m actually saying, have you?’
She stared blankly at him.
He picked up the bottle and poured a measure into the glass. The liquor flowed as slowly and heavily through the spout as his ink had done from his pen in the street. He put the bottle down and lifted the glass, toasting her.