He reviewed his files on the artefact known as The Hammer and Anvil. Data was scarce. The Sisters of Battle guarded their secrets with great care and vehemence, and this was one of their most precious. It was unquestioned that the relic dated back to the thirty-sixth millennium, to the Age of Apostasy when the mad High Lord Goge Vandire had plunged the Imperium into his so-called Reign of Blood. Some said it pre-dated the creation of the Adepta Sororitas, having been gifted to the progenitors of the Battle Sisters when they were still known as the Daughters of the Emperor. Others said it was a tool, a powerful weapon granted to the Sororitas by the High Lords of Terra during the great Reformation, when the remnants of Vandire’s cults were mercilessly purged from the galaxy. Many records of that era were sketchy, but the Adeptus Mechanicus had reports of entire worlds being ‘burned at the touch of the Hammer’ and ‘broken upon the Anvil’ of the Sisterhood’s fury. If those words were more than just figurative… The thought hung in Tegas’s mind.
And yet the identity of the relic was unknown to the galaxy at large, and had remained so to all but the most highly ranked Sororitas for thousands of years.
Tegas looked at the capsule and felt hungry. He had no need to eat, his internal systems fed by a microfusion generator and monthly ingestions of a polymer nutrient gel dense in metals and proteins, but he remembered the sensation from when he had been fully human. Even as he set the pod down on the stone floor, he knew what he was doing was folly. Logic screamed at the questor to take the capsule and flee with it, to find some safe location far from prying eyes before he even contemplated what he was doing now.
And yet, he did not stop himself. The need to know was just too great. It swamped his reason. I will just take a look, he told himself, just enough to lay my eyes upon it and know. He could not conscience the thought that he might perish in his escape from here – and the chances of that were substantial – without ever having uncovered the secret the Sororitas had kept. Information was meant to be known, known by those with the intellect to use it. That was Tegas, that was the Adeptus Mechanicus. It was his right. More than that, it was his duty to know.
With a cutting laser in the tip of his servo-arm, he delicately excised the security lock-out on the capsule and worked to open it. The task would have tested anyone else, but not the questor. The Sisterhood had failed to remember that their security devices and their strongboxes were made by the Mechanicus. Every lock could be defeated, if one understood it.
Time passed. The lid came off and clanked to the floor, a whiff of old air curling in the cold of the necron laboratorium. Tegas detected the flicker of a stasis field disengaging. Whatever had been inside had been kept in a timeless condition of suspension by the field effect.
His manipulators trembled slightly as he reached inside and grasped the object within. A thick, heavy rectangle. He detected metals and plastics, combinations of chemical surfactants and cured organic matter. Leather. The relic is covered with a sheath of cured leather.
Tegas had expected a pistol, a skull, an orb of gold, a crown made of crystal. He had expected something xenos and inhuman, or daemon-made and unholy. A hundred possibilities. But nothing like this.
In his hands he held a book. Thick, secured by dense bindings and a latch that held it shut. There, on the hide cover, etched in gold, the title: The Hammer and Anvil.
His driving curiosity, the one human emotion he had never been able to fully purge from his persona, faded away and was replaced by something else, something rare. Confusion.
The questor carefully opened the book at its first page and coiled his mechadendrites around it, scanning the tome across every possible perceptive range. The form could be illusory, he told himself. There were files on Mars that described things that resembled books, such as the Malus Codicium, the Ravonicum Rex or the Epistles of Lorgar, things that were so much more. Pages encoded with telepathic matrices, subspace memes, even possessed by daemonic energy from the warp. There could be nanoforms within the ink itself, the paper could be psychoactive, even the spine might hide data needles that led to other riches.
He detected nothing, only the great age of the pages. The book was old, on the scale of hundreds of centuries. Tegas blink-transcribed the text into his personal data pool, dragging it through counter-encryption programs, layering it one image atop another, sifting for patterns. He created a disarray of meaningless information, the rational words on the paper rendered into recurring gibberish by his attempts to read something into them.
In his hands he held a book, pages of verses and observations on faith and duty, penned in pious manner but with no sense of focus or aim. It was not a disguise for something else, it was not imbued with preternatural power on any scale that Tegas could detect.
As he scanned it, and scanned it again, the questor’s confusion deepened. There was no secret message lurking in these words, no code embedded in the patterns of the text. No blueprints for a weapon so powerful that it could burn a world of heretics. No ethereal powers lying dormant, no binding made of daemon’s skin or ink drained from the blood of aliens.
All he held in his hands was a book. Ink and paper and binding.
‘This is… nothing else!’ Tegas bit out the words, trembling. He shook the container, but only particles of dust fell from it. The questor brandished the tome in his claw grip. ‘What is this? What is this?’
‘Read the name.’ Tegas spun in place and found the woman Miriya standing in the entrance to the chamber. He had been so invested in the relic he had not heard her approaching. She was panting, her face bloody, but her manner was reverent. ‘The author’s name,’ she demanded. In her hand she held a smoke-blackened bolter.
Tegas looked down at the title page and read aloud what was written there, scratched in a careful and deliberate hand. ‘These words and thoughts are mine. Know me. I am Sister Katherine Elysius, Daughter of the God-Emperor.’
‘Blessed be her name, mother of my Order and first among the companions of Alicia Dominica.’ Miriya completed the ritual phrase and bobbed her head. She hoped that Saint Katherine could forgive her for failing to make the sign of the aquila, but under the circumstances she did not trust Tegas enough to take her eyes off him. ‘You opened it. You have no right to touch it, cog! You dirty the words of my mistress with your presence!’
‘Words…’ The questor shook his hooded head. ‘In the name of Terra, tell me that there is more to this than just words on a page!’
He waved the ancient tome at her and Miriya felt a jolt of fright. She was furious at him for his desecration of the relic, but at the same moment terrified he might damage it. ‘Give it to me, or I will kill you where you stand.’
Tegas didn’t seem to hear her. ‘There is nothing in this, is there? No secret but the one you have invented to surround it!’ he shouted. ‘How can this worthless text be so highly valued? There is no new knowledge here, no insight that unlocks the universe! It is just a book! I risked everything for the doggerel of a dead nun!’
‘You blaspheme my Saint.’ Miriya took aim at his head. ‘It is her book, you maggot! Written in her own hand, her own words laid down for her Sisters to come. For me! It is faith, in its purest form!’
‘I know faith!’ Tegas shot back at her. ‘I have conviction enough for the Imperial Cult and the Omnissiah!’
‘Your only faith is in your own arrogance,’ Miriya said coldly. ‘You have no understanding of what it is to believe in something bigger than yourself.’ The words seemed to come from somewhere far away, as if they were being spoken by a part of the Battle Sister that had been silent for many months. ‘The Hammer and Anvil is Katherine’s soul poured out onto paper. You hold the only copy still in existence. The physical matter of it, the pages, the binding… Those things have no value at all. But the inscriptions within, questor… The Martyred Lady herself wrote them. In this, that book is beyond any material worth to the Adepta Sororitas. It is our secret prize, carried from convent to convent to bless each outpost of our Ord
er with Katherine’s memory. I wondered why Sepherina fought so hard to return to Sanctuary 101… I did not fully understand until she told me of the book.’ Miriya glared at him. ‘Do you understand now, Tegas? The coin with which you measure the value of the world does not carry to all of us! What you think worthless I see as priceless.’
He was silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, the questor’s voice was loaded with venom. ‘I should destroy it out of spite. You and your Sisterhood have been nothing but impediments to my designs from the very beginning!’ Then with a jerk of motion, he threw it down. ‘Take your precious book, then, and read aloud all your dead Saint’s homilies and sermons on the nature of faith. We will see how far that gets you.’
Miriya reached for the book, and a cold breath of air passed over her face. It brought with it the heavy aroma of old dust and heated metals.
She knew that odour. The Battle Sister spun, bringing up her bolter to aim down the length of the chamber. Her blood chilled as she glimpsed a curl of inky mist creeping along the walls of the laboratorium, sliding over the glassy spheres and the lines of steel supports.
‘Faith,’ said a sepulchral voice. ‘Once, I had so much of that. But now it is forgotten to me. I struggle to remember how it was to process that concept.’
‘There!’ Tegas stabbed a finger into the gloom. ‘I cannot read the nature of that mass… It is radiation-opaque–’
‘Be silent!’ Miriya snarled at him.
The veil of black melted into the walls like a tide retreating across a shoreline, revealing the arched, decorated form of the cryptek. Ossuar tilted his head to study the Battle Sister. ‘You came back,’ he offered. ‘Good. Things were left unfinished at our last meeting.’
‘It speaks…’ Tegas managed, bringing up his mechadendrites to wave in the air around him. ‘Analysing.’
‘You may make the attempt, human,’ said the necron. ‘You will understand nothing.’
‘I understand enough,’ the questor retorted. ‘You are not superior to us.’
‘No?’ The machine eyed him. ‘Do you actually believe that you gained access to our information network on your own? You are here only because I allowed it.’ It approached, studying the questor with open curiosity. ‘Fascinating. You have attempted biotransference through an organic replacement progression. Flawed. Your theory is based on a faulty base concept.’ The cryptek eyed the Sororitas. ‘Is this part of your “faith”? These false beliefs, the insistence you show on defying us?’ He gestured with the black staff in his claw, pointing it towards them both. ‘I wonder how it will be of use to you when I dismantle your living forms.’
Miriya’s expression darkened. ‘I am Adepta Sororitas,’ she told the xenos, ‘and we do not suffer the alien to live.’
She pulled the trigger on the boltgun, and unloaded the rest of the mass-reactive rounds in the clip into the cryptek’s torso.
On the other side of the towering stained glass windows, a hell-storm was raging. The tiles of the Great Chapel’s ornate floor trembled beneath Verity’s feet with the deep impacts of heavy weapons fire, dislodging stones and rains of dust from the high dome over her head.
She helped Zara move the last of the wounded into the lee of the granite altar, wrapping the injured woman in a combat cloak. The Battle Sister’s breathing was shallow and she was in delirium. The woman lay unaware of where she was or what was taking place around her.
‘Perhaps it is for the best,’ said Zara in a low voice, her thoughts paralleling those of the other hospitaller. ‘When the end comes, she will not be troubled by it.’
Verity rounded on the other woman. ‘We are not dead yet!’
Zara looked away, to the tall steel doors where Battle Sisters were arriving in twos and threes, their guns smoking hot from firing. ‘I beg to differ,’ she replied.
Verity shook her head and walked away, her hands finding one another as another lengthy barrage of enemy shots shook the pillars around her. Zara’s morose manner was infectious, and she could feel the same creeping sense of desolation welling up inside her. She spoke a litany under her breath to stave off the sensation, but it was hard to focus. The roar and shriek of alien weapons were so close, they sounded as if they were on the far side of the chapel’s curved walls.
As if in response to her thoughts, a metal stay broke from the constant vibrations and the tall tapestry it supported crackled as it fell to the ground, pooling in a heap. The others ignored it, the Battle Sisters busy as they secured great wooden pews across the only other means of egress from the chapel, the door to the transept. And there, strangely calm among it all, she came across the canoness.
Sepherina was lighting votive candles, one after another, arranging them in rows along the front of the curved altar. She seemed oblivious to the dissonance of the encroaching battle.
It had been on her orders that they had drawn back to the chapel. When the force walls faded and died, the command had come over all the vox-channels. Sepherina did not tell them to retreat. She did not use words like ‘withdraw’ or ‘surrender’. Instead, the canoness told them that the hour was upon them.
‘Come to the chapel,’ she had said, ‘it is time for matins.’
Verity looked up as green light flashed in the windows. It did not seem like any morning prayers she had ever experienced. They were in the eye of a hurricane, the pitiless advance of the necrons and their constant guns drawing closer with every passing second.
The chapel was the closest thing to an impregnable space in the convent, but then those who had made those claims had also promised that the walls would never fall, that the wards would never be breached. Verity considered this as she watched the trickle of survivors slow to almost nothing.
Now Sepherina was speaking into an auspex activated in recording mode, moving her hands in a benediction. Verity came closer as the gun-thunder sounded again, and caught some of her words.
‘It is my hope,’ she was saying, ‘that those who come to find this will also find forgiveness for us. We did not fulfil this mission, and for that I will pay penance in eternity. Look to us at the God-Emperor’s side, Sisters, and know that we did our best.’
‘Last rites?’ Verity challenged, as Sepherina placed the device on the altar. ‘Is that all we have left now?’
‘That and our devotion.’ The canoness made the sign of the aquila before the statues towering over her. ‘I only wish it had been enough. But I was foolish to think so.’ Her hand fell to the sheathed sword at her waist. ‘I believed our tenacity and fortitude would be enough to cut through all the lies and lost truths in this place.’ She glanced around. ‘But arrogance has doomed us all. Hoth’s, Tegas’s… and mine.’
‘I don’t want to die here.’ Verity said the words without thinking.
Sepherina gestured at the statues. ‘Under the eyes of Saint and God-Emperor? What better place is there?’ She paused. ‘Do you have a weapon? You should have a weapon.’
‘You already consider us dead,’ she shot back. ‘What is the point, what would I be defending?’
The canoness looked at her with surprise. ‘Your Sisters,’ she said, with mild reproach. Sepherina drew one of her own bolt pistols and pressed the master-crafted gun into the hospitaller’s hand. ‘There. I give this as a gift to you. Its name is Ithaca. I was awarded it on Gamma Solar for victory in the pogroms there.’
She cradled the pistol in her hands. ‘I am not a Sister Militant.’
‘You are today.’ Sepherina walked on, down the aisle towards the doors. ‘Close the way, my Sisters,’ she called, her voice carrying over the din. ‘Come to the altar and draw near.’ She pulled the coif from her head and discarded it, running a gloved hand over her bald, tattooed scalp.
‘Wait!’ Zara cried out. ‘Someone comes!’
Wisps of grey smoke curled around the open door as the Battle Sisters standing guard there hesitated on the threshold. Guns growled in the corridor beyond, and then a figure stumbled through the gap, bloody bu
t still walking tall, the muzzle of the storm bolter in her hands glowing dull red.
‘Sister Isabel…’ Sepherina accepted a weary salute from the other woman.
‘Not the last,’ coughed the Sororitas, jerking a thumb over her shoulder.
Verity holstered the pistol and gathered up her narthecia pack, following Sepherina as another shape came through the smoke. The last arrival resolved itself into a ragged figure supporting another.
Decima, her torn hood pulled back from her scarred face, gently set Sister Helena down. The veteran had cruel burns all down one side of her body, and she was barely conscious.
‘Tesla carbine,’ explained Decima. ‘The blast was attenuated but she caught enough for it to wound her deeply.’
Verity nodded, drawing counter-infectives and pain-killers for the injectors in her medicae gauntlet. She worked on bandaging Helena’s wounds, and the other woman stirred. The hospitaller stole a glance at Decima’s troubled expression. The last she had seen of the revenant had been when the attack began in full force. In the disorder following the first breaches of the wall, Decima had vanished. Verity thought she might have gone searching for a death in battle, but now here she was, a life saved in her hands.
A life saved, for all that it mattered. With a heavy crunch of gears, the chapel doors were sealed. Outside, the rattle and howl of the attack began to lessen, but still there was a steady drum resonating through the floor beneath them.
‘They’re marching out there,’ said Isabel, with a wheeze. She halted, bitterly wiping smoke-dirt from the lens of her artificial eye. ‘Nothing to stop them now.’
‘Thank you… child...’ Helena’s eyes fluttered open as the medicines began to take effect, and she righted herself. She gave Decima a terse, respectful nod, and limped away, looking for a place to make ready for the last attack.
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