Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  She glanced down, her fingertips finding the beads of her chaplet, caressing the places where the chain had been broken and then repaired. Each tiny orb represented an act of devotion in the name of the Imperial Church. Once there had been many more adamantine beads on the chain, sufficient to signify officer rank as a Celestian Eloheim, but now there were barely enough to compare with that of a Novice Constantia newly raised to the status of a Sister Militant.

  Miriya had committed a crime against her Order. She had disobeyed the direct orders of her Sister Superiors and risked life and limb in order to follow her own agenda to the bitter end. At the time, it had seemed like it was the only choice, but the passage of weeks into months made that certainty appear less solid – and on the voyage aboard the Tybalt, Miriya had found herself with much time to reflect on the way things might have played out differently. She was fortunate to be alive, she reflected, but frequently that mercy felt like just another kind of punishment. The sentiment was not lessened by the manner in which women like Sister Imogen treated her.

  In the aftermath of her demotion back to the line rank of Battle Sister, Miriya felt lost and without purpose, and it had been the hospitaller Verity who offered her a path. The young woman impressed the warrior with her keen intellect and an inner reserve of strength that belied her gentle aspect, and so Miriya accepted her Sister’s suggestion – and her forgiveness. Lethe had been Verity’s blood kindred, and with her friendship, Miriya could at least believe that one of her mistakes had been absolved.

  But it was not enough. She looked around, taking a deep breath of the dry air. Miriya signed on to Canoness Sepherina’s mission because she believed that she would find some kind of renewed purpose in it. She believed this pilgrimage to the rim of the Imperium would let her make peace with herself. It had not done so. Rather, it had shone a light upon harsh truths that Miriya had never wished to dwell upon.

  She tried to lose herself in the endless rounds of prayer and practice, drilling and singing and fighting. But she had never been one for introspection or the layered games of interaction between rank and file, church and state. Miriya was a warrior first and foremost, and she craved the pure focus of combat.

  Battle was her true chapel. Here, on this distant outpost that lay nigh-forgotten by the rest of the galaxy, she was far away from the Order’s great Wars of Faith, far from the places where her sword arm and her boltgun could serve the God-Emperor in dispatching the infidel. It troubled her to admit that without the clash of gunfire and the screams of the unworthy in her ears, all Miriya could hear were the sounds of her own shortcomings. The thought seemed seditious. Could it be true that she was so enraptured by the spilling of blood that without it she would crumble?

  Her soul was turning inwards, and she did not like what she saw there. Sister Miriya’s absolute faith to Holy Terra was not in question – that had never, it would never leave her – but now she felt as if she were a blunted blade. She was broken and rusting, and might never again be called to the heights of martial glory she had once reached for.

  She would do her duty to the letter, because she was an Adepta Sororitas and even the death of every star in the sky would not change that. But Miriya was deeply troubled by the yawning hollow in her spirit, as it seemed to grow ever wider with each passing day.

  The Battle Sister looked down at the memorial markers and wondered if that would be her fate – to live and die here, and be recalled only by those who had not known her.

  I followed Verity out to the middle of nowhere because I thought that distance would bring me clarity… And for my sins, I have found it. Miriya’s aspect became grim.

  Turning from the lines of memorial markers, her line of sight crossed the courtyard, where the workgangers had erected their temporary bivouacs and wind shelters for the reconstruction gear.

  Miriya glimpsed a motion between a stand of rockcrete panels and a tethered habitat module. She froze, old battle senses stiffening her muscles. This late, only Miriya and the guards were at large. She wondered if one of the workers might have been foolish enough to venture outside of their cabins after the last shift. Or perhaps it was a trick of the eye, the motion of the wind casting a moving shadow from the edge of an untethered tent-flap.

  Then she saw it again, certain this time, and Miriya knew her instincts had been on the mark. Staying low so as not to stray into the pools of light cast by the windows of the hab modules, a cloaked figure moved in jerky starts towards the central keep. The umbra was human in scale, but the Battle Sister could not pick out anything visible beneath the hood or in the depths of the wide sleeves. Her first thought was that it was one of Questor Tegas’s errant tech-priests sneaking back into the convent, but then the figure moved slowly past the struts supporting the Mechanicus laboratorium module and kept on going.

  Intruder. It could be nothing else. Taking steady, careful steps, Miriya advanced, never taking her eyes off the cloaked form. She cursed her circumstances; she had no vox on her, nor any weapon better than the combat knife in her boot. She was afraid to call out in hopes that Sister Pandora might still be within earshot. This one could be a scout for all she knew, there could be others of them in the deeper shadows where Miriya could not see. If she sounded an alarm without being certain, the workgangers would panic at it and doubtless break into disorder.

  Her feet crunched on a broken stone and the figure spun in the direction of the sound. Miriya dropped to her knees behind the cover of a cargo drum, and took the opportunity to draw her blade.

  Her mind raced. Whoever – or whatever – this interloper was, Miriya had only spotted them by pure chance, and the thought of that set her blood running cold. It had to mean that the cloaked intruder had not only made it past the perimeter line of sensing rods deployed by Imogen’s scouts, but then across open sand to the walls of the convent, through them and into the courtyard without ever drawing the attention of Pandora or the other Sisters on guard duty.

  She chanced a look over the top of the drum and saw nothing. Even that brief moment of losing direct visual contact had been enough. Miriya snarled a sanctioned curse under her breath and sprinted back towards the wall. Gathering up a loose pebble, she pitched it at the battlements and it cracked off the stonework. After a moment Pandora’s helmet emerged over the ledge, leading with the muzzle of her bolter.

  ‘Spread the word,’ Miriya hissed, low and quick. ‘But quietly! Something is inside the perimeter! One intruder, humanoid.’ She pointed. ‘I saw it heading towards the central donjon!’

  Pandora hesitated. Technically, she outranked the other Battle Sister even though they both had veteran’s laurels, but Miriya’s manner was still that of a unit commander; she had to remind herself to show fealty. ‘Please, Sister Militant,’ she added, appending the title to pay due deference.

  Sister Pandora nodded and cocked her head. Miriya knew the motion. The guard was sending a subvocalised message via her vox-bead. Without waiting for a reply, Miriya broke into a jog, skirting the piles of rubble arranged by the worker helots, and made for the great keep as quickly as she could.

  She reached the steel doors to the primus atrium and found they were already hanging open.

  For a little while, Verity allowed herself to think she was back on Ophelia VII, in one of the Yabarantine Naves that dotted the landscape of the great Cardinal World. She imagined turning her face to the west in order to catch a glimpse of the moonlight off the towers of the Synod Ministra, the city-sized complex where some of the Imperium’s most notable religious texts had been authored. The thought warmed her.

  But then she opened her eyes and she was half a galaxy away from that sainted place, still here in the Kavir system, kneeling before a damaged altar and tending to a cluster of votives that seemed small, lost in the murk and the debris of the place. Deacon Zeyn’s workers had done a passable job of clearing away the worst of the wreckage in the Great Chapel, but the sting of rock dust was still in the air and thick in the hospitaller’s nostr
ils. The dust… The damnable dust coated everything, seeming to materialise out of nowhere to re-cover any surface a millisecond after it was wiped clean.

  She listened to the soft crackle of the candle flames, and caught the scent of rose-oil wafting up from them. Each candle had a prayer machine-printed about the body of it, open and bland missives to the God-Emperor full of generalities and receptive hopes. They were a common sight in cathedrals across the Imperium of Man, cheap enough that a single Throne coin would buy you a box of them to place in your own domicile shrine, should one so wish. Here, this night, Verity had gathered up a few of them to light in the name of Sister Thalassa, and bound them with entreaty to Holy Terra. Perhaps a miracle might be visited on the injured woman and the shard of autocannon round that had lodged in her spinal column would yet be expunged; certainly, Verity and Zara and the other hospitallers had exhausted every earthly manner of doing so.

  Verity’s head was leaden with fatigue and she craved sleep, but still she had come to the chapel at this late hour to light the candles and say the words. She saw it as much a part of her duty as she did the healing of the flesh of her Sisters.

  A dolorous moan echoed out behind her, and the noise made the woman go tense with surprise. She turned and saw a vertical crack of lamplight across the chapel, wavering in the gloom. The steel doors had opened, the groan of the mechanism sounding like a solemn lament. Verity came up from her knees and took two steps away from the altar, her brow furrowed. She had expected no other company in this place at this hour. Belatedly, a breath of wind came across the chamber and made the candle flames mutter.

  Unbidden, fear prickled Verity’s flesh, and she was suddenly very aware that she stood in a haunted, desolate place.

  Then there was the whispering. It seemed to come from very far away, and it was difficult for her to place its location. A woman’s voice, that was all she could be certain of. And coming closer.

  Emotion, something base and animal in Sister Verity, uncoiled inside her chest, something abruptly afraid and very human. She backed away, shrinking into the lee of a towering marble column, her heart thudding in her chest. Her need for sleep was banished by a powerful kick of adrenaline. Verity let the shadows swallow her and pressed herself to the far side of the stone pillar, not daring to breathe. The whispering voice made its approach, carried by loping footfalls, and by turns it defined itself until she could hear the words that were being spoken.

  ‘You know nothing,’ said the voice. It came through cracked lips and a parched throat. ‘Get out. You have no right to speak.’

  Verity heard the shuffle and drag of boots, the murmur of a heavy cloak being pulled across the flagstones. Part of her cursed this moment of weakness. She was a Sister of the Adepta, not some child who ran and cowered at every shadow. She had faced great horrors in her service to the Golden Throne, seen terrible things as she tended to the wounded upon the battlegrounds of piety, sights that would have sent lesser souls running for the hills.

  And yet at the same moment she felt an icy fear gripping her chest like claws made of frost. There was something out there in the gloom that she did not want to lay her eyes upon, and she could not answer as to why.

  ‘I hate you,’ said the voice, dripping with venom and old revulsion. ‘You cannot…’ There was a moment of silence, as if the speaker was listening to an interjection that could not be perceived by Verity’s ears. ‘Silence!’ The voice returned with an angry snarl, and boots scraped on the stones.

  The hospitaller set her teeth and at last dared to peer around the column, listening to the thump of her blood in her ears.

  She saw a human figure in a shabby cloak the colour of rust, turn and lash out at the cluster of candles atop the altar. With a single sweep of a clawed hand, an arm clothed in ragged strips of cloth emerging from the folds of the cloak, the husk-voiced woman dashed the votives to the floor, breaking the glass cups, snuffing out the flames and spilling fluid wax where they fell. She spat and ground them to powder beneath her heel. In the flashes of motion, Verity glimpsed slivers of the body hidden under the cloak as she moved: an emaciated form swaddled in tatters, flesh covered in scars, matted locks of dark hair. It seemed to be a human. Seemed to be. She could not be certain of anything.

  ‘You can’t stop me,’ came the hissing words. ‘No. No no.’

  Verity realised then it was the voice that lit the fear inside her. There was a gallows manner in it, a tone that resonated as harshly as the slamming of a sepulchre’s gate. Hearing the hooded one speak was like hearing the voice of death itself.

  With a strange gentleness, the figure gathered up one of the untouched candles left to one side by the hospitaller, and put it in pride of place on the altar. Head bowed, she struck a tinder-rod and lit the wick. The whispers returned as the cloaked head bobbed, muttering a litany that Verity could not define.

  The hospitaller retreated into the gloom, not daring to take her eyes off the intruder, feeling her way back towards the main doors. Her hand flailed in the air and was suddenly arrested in the grip of another. Verity swallowed a yelp of surprise and spun to find Sister Miriya close by. The Battle Sister carried a wicked combat knife in one hand, and in the other a thick rod of steel rebar recovered from one of the rubble piles.

  ‘I followed it,’ Miriya said quietly, nodding towards the altar. ‘It came in over the walls.’

  ‘She,’ gasped Verity. ‘It is a human being. I think.’

  Miriya accepted this without comment. ‘The other exits from this chapel – they are secured?’

  ‘Aye,’ said the hospitaller.

  ‘Then we have it– We have her trapped.’

  Verity glanced back at the altar. There was only the candle there now, burning steadily. ‘Miriya–’

  The warning had barely left her lips when a clattering noise and the snap of a cloak sounded out across the chapel. The hooded woman was moving, disappearing into thick stands of shadow, reappearing, moving in and out of cover.

  The Battle Sister strode forwards, throwing Verity a last nod towards the chapel doors. The hospitaller understood, and raced across the stone floor towards the entrance.

  ‘Show your face!’ Miriya demanded, hefting the steel rod like a sword. ‘Surrender now and there will be no bloodshed. Resist and you will be killed!’

  Verity skidded to a halt at the doors, hearing the rattle of loose stones out in the shadows. The chapel’s internal lighting system had not been repaired, and only a string of free-standing work lamps cast a corridor of illumination across the nave to the altar. Beyond its reach, the occasional shaft of moonlight cut through the dark ranges of the wide chamber.

  ‘Show yourself, intruder!’ shouted the Battle Sister, her temper flaring. Verity sensed movement out in the corridor as Cassandra emerged into the chapel, clad in full wargear and carrying her bolter. Isabel was a few steps behind her, and armed in a similar fashion.

  ‘There!’ Verity pointed in the direction of the sound.

  Cassandra gave a nod. ‘The alert is being passed to all sentries. Stand back. Let us deal with this.’

  Rubble shifted out in the shadows and the armed Sisters advanced at a run, closing in to join Miriya.

  ‘We need preysight to find this thing,’ she heard Isabel say.

  ‘No need,’ responded Cassandra, and plucked a small orb from her belt and tossed it into the air. The silver sphere described an arc that took it up into the rafters of the Great Chapel’s dome, and at the apex it burst into a glaring white clump of fire. The flare-pod began a slow drift back to the ground, but the stark illumination it threw out cast sharply defined shadows that shifted and wheeled.

  Verity saw motion over on the west wall and called out; the ink-blot shape of a ragged cloak flickering as it dragged itself up the length of a dust-caked tapestry.

  Isabel fired warning shots that chewed great divots of masonry from the walls, but Miriya was already cautioning her not to seek a kill. ‘We take her alive!’ she shouted.
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br />   The Battle Sister’s hopes seemed unlikely, though. Verity marvelled as the intruder scaled the sheer stone facia where there seemed little purchase, before leaping across yawning gaps to swing around support beams and stanchions. Isabel ignored her former commander’s call to stand down and tried to bracket the fleeing figure with shots. Each round was far past true, however, and the cloaked figure launched itself into space. She made a powerful, hurtling push and darted through the broken fingers of glassaic ringing the shattered portal in the roof dome. Dislodged fragments fell in a chiming rain against the altar as the intruder vanished into the darkness.

  Other Battle Sisters pushed through the doors behind Verity, and she saw Helena there, bearing a drawn power sword, with Pandora at her side.

  ‘Did you see it?’ Pandora snapped.

  Verity nodded. ‘I saw it.’

  Miriya sprinted back towards them. ‘She’s outside, on the top of the dome! We can still catch her!’

  Helena nodded. ‘Tactical squad, with me!’ She stormed back out into the corridor, with Isabel and Cassandra on her heels.

  ‘You won’t catch her.’ It was a moment before Verity realised that she had said the words.

  Miriya halted and shot her a look. ‘We will try.’

  Sister Pandora placed a heavy, gauntleted hand on the hospitaller’s shoulder. ‘Girl, what did you see? Tell us.’

  Verity looked towards the altar, where a lone candle still burned, and she gave an involuntary shiver. ‘I saw the walking dead,’ she replied, speaking from the heart. ‘Not a resurrected, not something animated by the Ruinous Powers. Worse than that. A woman like a living ghost. Flesh and rags. Scars and tears… And that voice…’