‘They smashed all the statues,’ said Zara, one of the hospitallers. ‘Who would do that? Why would they do that?’
‘Hate takes many shapes.’ The answer came from the frost-white lips of an imposing woman who resembled the marble more than she did true flesh and blood. Verity and Zara bowed slightly as Canoness Sepherina walked past them, the woman’s heavy Aspiriate cloak leaving a trail through the drift-sand behind her.
Sepherina had no hair upon her head, but her scalp was heavy with lines of detail and electoos that spelt out lines from the Litany of Saint Katherine, just visible beneath the ballistic-cloth coif she habitually wore. The gold-rimmed gorget of her battle armour framed a face that was lined with age and war-scars. The canoness radiated a stony kind of authority that was effortlessly intimidating, even towards veterans with decades of experience in the Order. She was poles apart from the acid, often waspish nature of her second-in-command, Sister Imogen.
A party of armed Sororitas were moving with the canoness, wary and prepared for anything. Among their number, Verity spotted Sister Miriya and the two of them shared a brief nod of acknowledgement.
Almost three years had passed since the day they had crossed paths, at the funeral of her blood sibling Lethe on the planet Neva – and in that time much had happened. Verity considered the Battle Sister to be a trusted friend, having long since absolved her – as Lethe’s former commander – of any responsibility for her sister’s death. Their shared trials on Neva had forged a bond of comradeship, but Miriya had made it difficult to maintain over the last few months of the Tybalt’s voyage. It was as if the closer they came to Sanctuary 101, the more withdrawn the Battle Sister had become. Even her compatriots Cassandra and Isabel had seen it, but there seemed little they could do to draw her out. Perhaps now the mission had truly begun, Miriya would find her purpose refreshed… And yet, as Verity considered this desolate place, she felt her own spirits diminish. There was something ephemeral in these ruins, like a radiation of despair. The dead convent seemed to reek of human anguish.
Sepherina appeared to sense the same thing, and the canoness turned. ‘This place…’ she began. ‘This place was once full of life and faith and the Emperor’s Light, and it will be again.’ The woman’s voice carried across the courtyard. ‘We will see to it. I shall not delay in that responsibility.’
Her hand disappeared into the folds of her cloak and returned with an iron torch-rod, at the widest end bearing a brass basket shaped like a crown. Sepherina touched a control on the side of the rod and a puff of bright fire ignited among the brass splines. Verity had seen such firebrands before, carried by preachers as symbols of human faith.
‘His Light has returned to Sanctuary 101,’ she told them, emotions warring across her expression. ‘Come see it with me.’
‘Milady.’ Sister Imogen was approaching. ‘We should wait, the scouts have yet to be certain that this place is safe–’
Sepherina cut her off with a gesture. ‘No. We will not tarry, Imogen. The Sororitas have been made to wait long enough, do you not agree?’
Imogen was chastened, but she continued on. ‘The questor and his party will be aboard the next flight of shuttles. He will expect to be met.’
Sepherina gave a sharp nod. ‘He will be, then. By you.’ The canoness turned. ‘Sister Miriya. You and your squad will accompany me.’
Miriya nodded. ‘Aye, mistress.’ She glanced at the women standing with her and they stood to attention.
Verity looked back to find the canoness studying her. ‘And the hospitaller shall come along as well.’ Without waiting a moment longer, Sepherina led the way across the quad, towards the oval doors that passed through the inner walls to the keep proper.
Verity fell in behind the lines of Miriya’s unit, keeping pace with Sister Ananke at the rear. She chanced a look back over her shoulder and saw Imogen watching them, an unreadable expression on her alabaster face.
Inside, the oppressive sense of gloom was stronger, but the canoness braved it with the torch in her hand, casting it this way and that as they moved deeper into the building. The jumping flames cast their glow across walls coated with a layer of powdery mineral dust that glittered like sunlight off snow. Emergency illuminators powered by chemical reactions were still active, but after a decade they were little more than waypoint markers that gave some measure of the distance the Sisters travelled.
Miriya kept her focus clear and steady, holding her Godwyn-De’az pattern bolter across her chest in a combat-ready carry, her finger resting on the trigger-guard. Despite her personal feelings towards the Sister Superior, Miriya found herself agreeing with Imogen. Sepherina was the highest ranking woman of the mission, and it was flirting with danger to allow her into a zone where the nature of any threats was still to be confirmed. It bordered on recklessness, and it seemed uncharacteristic of the canoness.
Or was it? Miriya had to admit that in the older woman’s place, she would have done the same thing. In a way, this gesture on her part, this defiance of the fates and ready danger, was the impulse lying at the core of this entire mission. Others might have allowed Sanctuary 101 to return to dust after it was attacked, perhaps written it off as a sad loss and moved on to other, easier places to find purchase.
That was not the way of the Sisterhood, however. Some might mock them for it. Miriya knew that many common soldiers considered the Adepta Sororitas to be the living model for the trait of dogged bloody-mindedness, and there was truth in that. But this was what they did.
If a Sister is knocked to the ground, yea, will she not gain her footing again, stand and fall and stand again? Die upon her feet for her Emperor? The words were from Alicia Dominica herself, the first Sororitas. Thousands of years after they had been uttered, they still rang true.
Sepherina’s defiance went beyond simple reason. She was leading by example, daring an uncaring universe to come again and strike at their faith.
Miriya remained silent as they went on, passing from the entry cloister and through into one of the wide radial corridors that led into the central keep. The building was modelled after the great Convent Sanctorum but on a far smaller scale. The sand was here too, years of it blown in through open doors, making the air dry and cloying. In the light from the torch she saw the way ahead. The sand lay in uniform ripples where it had been deposited by waves of wind, and there were no visible footprints like those the Sisters left behind them. If anything did live in this place – be it an enemy or just some example of local wildlife – then it had not passed this way for some time.
The convent was a shambles. It was not the broken and destroyed remnants of a battle fought and lost, but rather the aftermath of some great act of nature. It did not look like vandalism, more as if a hurricane had been let loose in the corridors and allowed to tear down the tapestries and devotional works hung upon the walls. Through open doors into rooms they passed, Miriya glimpsed collapsed bookcases, their texts spilled out across the floor. More than once, Canoness Sepherina hesitated at these sights before moving on.
She heard Ananke speak in a low, guarded voice as they passed a choke-point where the corridor narrowed. ‘This is the fifth defensive post we have passed since entering the building. None of them show signs of having been manned.’
Cassandra answered. ‘I have yet to see a single corpse.’
‘Look sharp,’ Miriya muttered, and from then on no one spoke again. But she knew that all the Sisters were thinking the same thing. Where are the dead? Miriya had not been privy to the documents given to the Sororitas by the Ordo Xenos and she wondered what they said about the bodies of her comrades. Had the enemy taken those who were killed, or was it the work of some other agency?
They skirted the chambers of the central keep and followed the mistress towards the core of the massive donjon. Even as they approached the tall steel doors to the central chapel, Miriya felt a curious tingle of anticipation run through her. It was not quite fear.
Sepherina slammed the doors
with the heel of her hand, and on groaning hydraulic pistons, they slowly inched open. Air, cold like a tomb’s breath, issued out and made the torch flame crackle and writhe.
The Great Chapel of Sanctuary 101 was a hexagonal space, each of the six walls rising several stories high to support a dome of dark stone. Light fell into the massive chamber from glassaic discs set in the roof. There was one for each of the Orders Militant Majoris, each inlaid with stained panels that formed the shape of their sigils: a heart upon a crux maltese, roses in white and blood red, a death’s-head, a chalice. These five lay around the largest in the centre of the dome, and it should have exhibited a crimson inverted cross topped by a white skull – but the glassaic had been brutally shattered and only a shaft of weak, dusty light was visible. The fragments of the Order’s symbol lay in pieces across the broad, ornate altar in the middle of the space.
The group moved in, past lines of tipped-over pews cut from red woods shipped in from some far distant forest world. Six marble pillars supported the roof and the Battle Sister saw impact points in the dimness where stray gunfire had kissed their surfaces. Low dunes of sand deposited through the broken windows slowed their progress. Relicals full of prayer-books and minor devotional shrines were half-buried in the drifts, emerging from the mounds of dust like the wheelhouses of sunken ships at low tide.
Here, more than any other sight that had greeted them at the outpost, was desolation and emptiness. The chapel of an Adepta Sororitas convent was meant to be a place of safety and contemplative piety, warmed by the constant glow of electrocandles, tended by servitors. There, a Sister of any Order could come and kneel at prayer, and know with absolute certainty that she was a part of something far greater than herself, far greater than individual human life. It was meant to be a place of transcendent unity.
This was a shadow of that ideal. It was as if the very heart had been ripped out of the convent. The faces of the Saints and Honoured Palatines on the friezes around the pillars and the walls seemed infinitely sorrowful, and for a moment Miriya shuddered at the thought of what horrors they might have witnessed in this place.
If only there was some sign, she thought, some idea of it. Even that would be better than the not knowing.
In the very centre of the Great Chapel a circular dais made of white marble glowed in the faint light, and atop the altar there were the statues. The smaller of the two, at a scale twice human size, was a rendering of Saint Katherine. She was depicted as she had been in the days when their sect was known as the Order of the Fiery Heart, as the hand of the church’s vengeance. It was her murder at the blades of the long-destroyed Witch-Cult of Mnestteus that had led Miriya’s sisterhood to rename itself the Order of Our Martyred Lady, and even now as she looked upon the stone face of the statue, the Sororitas veteran felt a familiar sensation of ingrained sorrow.
Towering over Saint Katherine was a giant bent down upon one knee, one hand reaching out to her like that of a parent protecting a child. Made of the same white marble as the altar, the statue of the God-Emperor of Mankind was shot through with platinum and gold detail that even a thick patina of dust could not completely dull. Like the friezes, in this dark place the image of the statues appeared to convey a very different message than the one they were meant to instil. It almost seemed as if the statue of the Emperor had been frozen in mid-motion, as He tried to protect Katherine from some unseen force come to destroy her.
The squad were, for a moment, distracted from their duty as they shared the same thoughts, and only Canoness Sepherina moved, approaching the foot of the dais. Miriya saw her run her hands over a missing stone in the altar.
Then Sepherina bowed her head and began, very gently, to weep.
Miriya frowned and turned to Cassandra and the others, gesturing with quick flicks of her hand, sending the women off to make a circuit of the chamber. They did as the veteran commanded, using the pin-lamps beneath the barrels of their bolters to peer into the shadowed corners of the chapel nave. Verity remained, hesitating, then stepped forwards. Miriya came in step with the slight, auburn-haired hospitaller as she approached the canoness.
‘Milady,’ Verity began. ‘I fear there are none in this place who need me.’
‘I was once a novice here.’ Sepherina turned to face them and the older woman’s aspect had changed. ‘Sanctuary 101 was where the God-Emperor first spoke to my spirit.’ The distant, steady aspect Miriya had come to know during the journey from Terra had slipped away. In its place, the canoness seemed suddenly more human as the tears lined her cheeks. Miriya was surprised by the surge of empathy she felt for her superior officer. ‘I feel as if this is my failure.’ She gestured around, her voice quiet and fluid. ‘I was meant to return to this outpost. Circumstances prevented it. Otherwise I, not Sister Agnes, would have been canoness here on that day twelve years ago.’
‘What could you have done differently, mistress?’ Miriya asked. ‘You would have suffered the same fate as our lost Sisters.’
Sepherina looked away, back at the strange gap in the altar’s surface. Closer to it now, Miriya could see it was a compartment of some kind, concealed in the structure of the carved stone. It was quite empty. ‘I do not know. I only wish I could have stood here at that moment and had the opportunity.’ She sighed, and to Miriya it seemed as if the woman was bearing a great weight upon her.
Verity saw it too; the hospitaller was as perceptive to the nature of wounds on the soul as she was to those on the flesh. ‘But there is more that troubles you.’
The canoness nodded. ‘Aye, Sister.’ She nodded towards the drifts of sand. ‘I know many things that have yet to be said. I know why there are no bodies here.’
‘The enemy…’ Miriya began, but fell silent as Sepherina shook her head.
‘They were not taken by the aliens that defiled this place,’ she retorted, some measure of her former manner returning. ‘The Ordo Xenos… Inquisitor Hoth himself… He removed the corpses of our kinswomen.’
Verity could not mask her shock. ‘Why?’ she demanded, aghast. ‘Why would the Inquisition do such a thing? Why would you let them?’
Sepherina’s expression returned to its stony neutrality at the accusation in the hospitaller’s voice. ‘Consider your tone, Sister,’ she warned. ‘I know you think of the dead here and remember the loss of your own sibling, but that does not give you the right to speak out of turn.’
The other woman nodded woodenly, her cheeks burning. Miriya, however, was not so easily silenced. ‘Verity’s point is valid, mistress.’
‘Aye,’ repeated the canoness, wearily. ‘And it is one that has tormented me throughout this journey. But it was the price the Order had to pay. Hoth played his games and made certain that we would not be granted permission to return here by the High Lords of Terra.’ Her lips thinned. ‘I was on the verge of launching a mission to this planet, sanctioned or not, when he relented. The bodies of our dead were the fee, curse Hoth for his avarice.’ She sighed. ‘The inquisitor has promised that those we have lost will be returned to us in due course… After he has completed his study.’
‘Our war dead are not playthings for the Ordo Xenos,’ Miriya grated. ‘What can a man like Hoth hope to learn from them?’
‘A greater insight into the alien threat that swept across this world,’ said Sepherina, clearly repeating the poor explanation she had been given. ‘For the good of the Imperium of Man. And by the word of the Ecclesiarchy, we are bound to honour his agreement.’
‘We have come all this way,’ said Verity, finding her voice once more. ‘And still no one has voiced the name of whatever malice overcame this outpost–’
‘I know its name,’ Sepherina told them.
She would have spoken again, but Sister Ananke’s shout echoed across the chapel. ‘Milady! Your attendance, please! There is something here!’
Miriya heard the danger in the other woman’s tone and brought up her bolter to the ready.
They found Ananke standing near a cluster of fall
en support struts brought down by a blast shock. Helena and Isabel were already there, weapons at their shoulders, aiming into a pile of rubble.
‘What is it?’ demanded Sepherina, any trace of her moment of emotion now vanished.
‘Keep back,’ warned Ananke. ‘It may be a trap designed to draw in responders.’
Miriya looked in the direction that the dark-skinned woman was pointing her gun and saw the cloudy glint of something metallic among the broken stones. She looked at the fallen struts again, casting a soldier’s eye over them. ‘This looks like damage from a krak grenade detonation.’ She shook her head and indicated one of the big marble pillars nearby. ‘Poor weapons discipline. They could have brought one of the columns down with it.’
‘They were desperate,’ offered Verity, her gaze momentarily losing focus as she imagined the moment of terrible concussion inside the chapel’s confines. ‘Fighting with all they had…’
The Sororitas hoisted her boltgun over her shoulder and snapped it to the mag-plates on her backpack. Miriya was about to advance across the rubble pile when she paused; taking the initiative was something a Sister Celestian was allowed to do, but she wasn’t that any more. You are only a Sister Militant now, she chided herself, remember that. You are a line soldier in the church’s wars. Taking a breath, she turned to the canoness. ‘Milady, with your permission?’
‘Proceed, Miriya.’ Sepherina gave her a nod in return.
She was aware of the other women drawing back a few metres as she slowly and carefully picked her way over the debris towards the object Ananke had sighted. The other Battle Sister remained were she was, her weapon trained and rock-steady.
At first Miriya though it was some variety of prayer box, for such things were commonplace in the chapels of the Sororitas. Perhaps it had been caught in the grenade explosion, landing amid the rubble. Then she saw how very mistaken she was.
Hammer and Anvil Page 4