by Marc
Today, something was different about this grand hallway, and the trauma of difference shivered its way into Lexio’s consciousness like a maggot into an overripe fruit. As his higher functions wrested control from his muscle-memory, he looked around and found himself in the middle of the Procession of History. It took a moment for him to calm his nerves, as he realised that he could actually see the great doors ahead of him – there would be no need to return to his hab-unit and make the journey all over again. Thus calmed, Lexio cast his eyes back down onto the shimmering white marble at his feet and he struggled to work out what was different. What had disturbed him so much that it had broken his automatic, daily routine? There were no menials with broken necks lying across his path this time.
After a few minutes of focussed concentration, the picture began to resolve itself in Lexio’s mind. He studied the pristine floor and watched the gradually shifting forms of the shadows creeping across the marble. One of those dark smudges on the ground was slightly different from the previous day… from all previous days. It was just a tiny difference, just the hint of a protrusion where there should have been smooth uniformity.
Lexio gingerly raised his eyes from the ground and looked up at the glorious image on the window, blazing in reds and golds in the sunlight. The picture showed a giant red Space Marine with the wings of an angel, flourishing a great sword but contorted in agony. This was the first time that Lexio had ever seen the visage of the Adeptus Astartes, and a pang of guilt plucked at his soul, as though the powerful images were supposed to be reserved for those greater and better than him. But he mustered his courage and narrowed his eyes, concentrating on the pillar that rose at the edge of the great window. The intricate stonework sported an array of icons and the swirling form of High Gothic script. Right up near the arch that folded back over the top of the glorious window, Lexio could see a small gargoyle with a sneering face and two long homs. He traced the line of light from the hideous sculpture to the ground, and realised that the erroneous shadow was being cast from that ugly face. Squinting against the light and straining his eyes, he saw a tiny fleck of black between the gargoyle’s horns. It was almost nothing – almost not there at all – but its tiny shadow betrayed it to the perfect memory of Lexio.
Now what am I supposed to do, thought Lexio, wringing his hands anxiously and looking around at the bustle of other officials in the Procession of History, hoping that one of them might notice the flaw in the morning routine.
THE FEET MADE him stop moving. They were directly in his path, blocking the route of his broom and apparently unwilling to move aside. Gingerly, Cregg prodded at them with the harsh bristles of his brush, half hoping that they were not connected to anything, so that he could simply sweep them up and continue with his rounds. He was running a little late already this morning, and he really wanted to make up some time in the gleaming Procession of History – it was always so sparkling clean that he was sure he could get away with a cursory sanitization just this once.
The feet didn’t budge. Instead, a whispering cough sounded down from above them, as though somebody was trying to attract Cregg’s attention. For a moment, he wondered whether this was some kind of test. He had been warned about such things by the veteran menials: prefects lying in wait for an unsuspecting menial and then tricking him into looking into their eyes. The results of an errant glance depended upon who was telling the story. In the depths under the western wing, huddled around a spluttering, oily fire during the short, cold off-hours, Cregg had heard about how the gaze of a prefectus could turn a menial to stone, or wipe his memory so that he forgot who he was. He had even heard of menials being dragged out of the tower altogether and thrown back amongst the non-adepts outside, for daring to look into the eyes of a superior, hereditary official. Whatever the truth of it, Cregg had never once looked up from the floor outside the dungeon-like confines of the menials’ sector, and he didn’t mean to break that practice now.
After a couple of experimental prods, Cregg manoeuvred the broom around the feet and attempted to continue on his route. But the feet moved, stepping carefully over the crack between the marble slabs and coming to rest again directly in front of Cregg’s sanitizer. It seemed that the feet were determined to prevent Cregg from successfully performing his Emperor-given duties. In a flash of anger, Cregg’s mind boiled with sudden resentment at the heresy being performed, and his knuckles whitened as his hands tensed around the handle of his broom. He pushed the brush forcefully against the feet, without looking up.
‘Excuse me, my lord,’ he whispered, barely audible. ‘I must press on… for the Emperor,’ he added, hoping that the hallowed name might budge the feet through sheer resonance.
There was another vague cough from above the feet, and then a thin, stuttering voice. ‘Urn, look, erm, t… there’s a b… bit of a p… problem h… here.’
Cregg stopped jamming his sanitizer against the feet, hardly able to hear the weak voice above the sounds of its bristles against the stone. That really didn’t sound like the voice of an adept who could turn him to stone or wipe his memory with a single word. He looked again at the feet. They were wrapped in simple, unadorned, dark grey cloth, soled in thick rubber. Coating the heels, Cregg could distinctly see the unpleasant, granulated sheen of grime. Then, looking back to where the feet had been only seconds before, Cregg winced as he saw the sticky suggestion of a pair of footprints polluting the marble.
Where in the world could a hereditary official have so sullied their feet, wondered Cregg? Unless, Brother Greek had completely failed with his cycle of cleaning before him, Cregg could see no way that these could be the feet of a prefectus.
Slowly, and with great trepidation, Cregg lifted his eyes slightly. The grey feet were connected to grey leggings, which were buried beneath the long folds of a plain, featureless grey smock. Squinting his eyes and feeling faintly nauseous with tension, Cregg lifted his glance the last few centimetres and saw the face of a hereditary official for the first time since he was selected for service in the tower, five years earlier.
The face was pale to the point of whiteness, with a thin sprinkling of grey stubble over its jaw and scalp. Etched into the sickly, sunless skin were a series of complicated lexiographs, written in neat, black vertical lines down the side of the face and neck, disappearing under the featureless material of the smock. But, after all of his fear about the petrifying gaze, Cregg could not see the man’s eyes, since they were averted – they seemed to be staring up towards something on the huge window at the side of the Procession of History. Indeed, the man was pointing in that direction with his hand and muttering something inaudible under his breath, as though talking to himself.
THE SENTRIES STOOD in silence, half hidden in the deep shadows of the ornate, arched doorway. There were no windows in the corridor that led into the Great Hall of Vindicare, and no lights shone out of the cavernous space beyond. The entire temple was cloaked in darkness, as though shimmering on the edge of existence. The endless, labyrinthine corridors twisted and snaked in tortuously indirect patterns, turning back on themselves and suddenly stopping in abrupt dead-ends. Some of the flagstones were wired with explosives, and others did not really exist at all, hiding pits of excruciating pain beneath their silent charade. In places, there simply was no floor, and the unwary risked falling into the unspeakable abyss below the ancient temple, where forgotten horrors lay waiting to feast on the careless and the stupid.
Even if an assailant were stupid enough to attempt unauthorised access into the Vindicare temple, it would be a rare individual indeed who could make it through the maze of tunnels, around the myriad traps, and live to confront the sentries who seemed to haze into translucence at the entrance to the Great Hall. And these were no ordinary sentries – they were amongst the most honoured and exalted of the Vindicare brethren, standing a tireless vigil before the most sacred site of their faith. They were enwrapped in the ritual synskin of their creed, which seemed to absorb the faint light and render them almost invis
ible, and were armed with an incredible array of exotic blades, many of which had never seen the light of the sun outside the temple’s confines.
On this particular morning, a svelte and graceful figure flicked through the darkness of the Vindicare temple, sweeping through the web of passageways with practiced ease, stepping around the false flagstones and vaulting the moments of yawning abyss without giving them a second thought. She seemed to know where they were before she reached them, springing up to swing from a well-placed handrail or to walk the thinnest of ledges set into the black stone walls. All the time, her simple black robes fluttered and billowed behind her; thanks to the unique way in which the fabric had been folded, the flowing material made no noise as it rushed in her wake.
Without hesitation, the mysterious figure vaulted into the air as she emerged into the darkness of the corridor that led to the Great Hall. Reaching up with her slim arms, she grasped hold of the tails of a hanging, black banner and hoisted herself up behind it, climbing it with arachnoid ease. She could feel the attention of the sentries focused along the long, narrow corridor below her, but she didn’t stop moving.
Reaching the top of the banner, she pulled herself up onto the thin horizontal pole from which it was suspended, and stood motionless for a moment, hidden in the vaults of the ceiling. With a sudden spring, she threw herself forward into space, catching the detail of a delicate carving in one hand just as her momentum failed and she started to fall. Pivoting around her arm, her fall was transformed into a flowing arc that flung her across the ceiling.
Landing softly above the arch of the doorway that led into the hall, she could see the tops of the heads of the two sentries only four metres below her. Bending down to touch her hands to her toes, she gripped hold of the ledge at the apex of the arch and let herself fall forward, swooping through the doorway like a pendulum and up into the Great Hall on the other side, coming to rest on the equivalent ledge on that side, facing the wall.
Scanning the dark expanse of the hall, she could see nothing at all. The walls had been constructed out of vividium – a stone amalgam that actually soaked up light, rendering any space that it enclosed into complete blackness.
Having expected no less, the figure was unsurprised. She climbed silently up the wall, digging her fingernails into the tiny cracks between the great blocks of stone and pulling herself towards the invisible ceiling. After a few moments, she reached a thick ledge which supported a row of black gargoyles. Melting into the space behind one of them, she settled in to wait, unseen and utterly alone.
‘Ah, Nyjia, I have been waiting for you. There is something that you must do.’ came an even voice from the darkness beside her.
THE SCRIPT IN the book had been etched in an obscure and ancient language, and it made Thucydia’s head spin when she looked at it. It was almost as though it had been designed to be difficult, even painful to read. In the dim light around her desk in vault 47589X3 of the Historicus Librarium, Thucydia rubbed her forehead and rocked back into her chair. She looked along the aisle on either side of her at the hundreds of other desks receding off into vanishing points in both directions, each at the head of a perpendicular aisle of book stacks, and she shook her head in awe at the scholarship going on around her. Each of the curators at those desks was descended from one of the finest scholar-families in the segmentum. Some of them could trace their lineages all the way back into the very pages that they were studying.
Pushing her palms into her eyes and rubbing them dryly, Thucydia leaned back over the manuscript in front of her and forced herself to focus once again. The language was an archaic form of Vindracum, itself a perverted form of an early version of the Imperium’s Gothic script, dating from the time of the Wars of Vindication. Thucydia was probably one of only a handful of people in the galaxy who could still read this text, with all of its spidery contortions and unvoiced ideographs. It was an unusual written language, since it had no sound at all, as though the agents of the ancient Vindicare temple who employed it had no use for noise.
Like her father before her, Thucydia was chasing a loophole in the history of the Imperium, struggling to find one of the thousands of missing pieces from the immense, sprawling jigsaw that was the story of man’s conquest of the stars. She had inherited her position in the Tower of Idols from her father, just as he had passed on his rare linguistic sense together with mountains of notes about the aftermath of the Wars of Vindication. Thucydia herself had managed to narrow the scope of her research to the machinations of the early Vindicare Masters. It seemed to her that their sinister and stealthy hands lurked behind many of the catalytic events of that time, but she could find no record of them at all. It was almost as though they had done nothing for millennia. Even the most cursory glance along the great windows in the Procession of History would reveal the profound absence of the entire Officio Assassinorum. It had an invisible history, which was both incredible and unbelievable – two of the most intriguing characteristics of a historical puzzle.
THREE MENIALS WERE fussing around the base of the ladder, one holding onto each side and the third standing on the bottom step, acting as a dead weight. The highly polished marble floor was not the best surface on which to erect such a crude climbing device, but it was the first thing available at hand, and the most sophisticated technology available to adepts at the level of menial. The feet of the ladder slipped and skidded on the cold stone as the three menials struggled to keep it in place, stumbling and tripping over each other as they did so. Part of the problem was their refusal to look up from the ground, so none of them really knew what was going on above them or around them.
Meanwhile, nearing the top of the ladder was the excited and trembling form of Cregg, his hands uncertain on each new rung and his feet shaking under his own weight. He was studiously looking down towards the ground, but realising with increasing excitement that looking down from such a height widened his horizons significantly. He could see, for example, the image of the winged warrior emblazoned on the window itself, and, standing anxiously on the ground next to the bottom of the ladder, he could see the cipher wringing his hands and muttering to himself, looking nervously up and down the Procession of History.
Taking a few more steps, Cregg reached up his hand to grasp the next rung only to find that there wasn’t one. With his gaze still trained diligently on the ground, he moved his hand from side to side experimentally, as though believing that fhe next step on the ladder might have moved slightly. Wifh the creeping dread of realisation, Cregg slowly raised his eyes from the ground – he had reached the top.
As his eye-line finally drew level with his head, Cregg found himself staring into the face of a muted grey, granite gargoyle. He flinched as he saw it – never having been so close to such a thing before. The three menials at the base of the ladder groaned with the effort of keeping the fidgeting Cregg upright, but he quickly regained his composure in the face of the inanimate stone horror.
For a few moments, Cregg stared at the ugly sculpture in front of him, wondering why anyone would want to decorate a glorious, clean procession with such polluted forms. Then he wondered how long it must have been since anyone had cleaned it. Automatically, he pulled the sleeve of his smock over his hand and spat onto the cloth, before proceeding to buff the hideous face into a faint gleam.
‘Ah, y… yesss.’ came the uneven voice of the cipher from the ground. ‘P… perhaps you m… might fet… bring down the t… tube?’
Cregg shook his head, jolted out of his sanitization reflexes by the stuttering anxiety of the grey cipher below him. Then he nodded with determination and reached out his hand to feel behind the head of the gargoyle. There did certainly seem to be something lodged in the thin gap at the back. His fingers quested around the metallic tube, scraping at its almost frictionless surface with little effect. He needed more purchase on it. Leaning forward still further, Cregg levered himself a little higher by wrapping his left arm over the top of the gargoyle and reaching round behind
it with his right. His fingers poked at the cold, slick tube on the other side, and he could feel it starting to work free of the stonework.
Lexio saw it all happen at once, as a yelp of desperation sounded from one of the menials holding the ladder. The ladder slipped out of the menials’ grasps and its base skidded out towards the centre of the hallway, knocking a number of officials over and sending others scurrying out of their regular routines. Meanwhile, Cregg was left hanging by one arm from the gargoyle’s neck, whimpering and crying in fear. Most importantly, however, the little tube slipped out of the masonry and fell end over end towards the ground, clinking and clattering as it struck the marble.
‘Um, you should h… help him, please.’ said Lexio to the other menials as he hopped from one marble slab to the next, heading towards the fallen tube – the aberration that had caused so much trouble already. When he reached it, he pulled his sleeves down over his hands so that he wouldn’t have to touch the offending article with his skin, and picked it up. Peering inside, he saw a small roll of paper, covered in strange spidery squiggles that he could not recognise.
BACK IN THE familiar darkness of her chambers in one of the outer towers of the temple precinct, Nyjia unfastened the clasp that held her cloak secured around her shoulders and let the layered material slip to the ground into a pile around her ankles. Those luxurious robes were only suitable for the deference required within the Temple of Vindicare itself, and she would have no need for such false humility once she arrived in the Tower of Idols to perform her duty. The Vindicare Master in the Great Hall had been very clear about the importance of secrecy, and she was not about to take any chances with a direct order from the grand master of her temple.
Her small, circular room was lit only by the tiny javelins of light that shot through the cracks in the windowless walls of the spire. In fact, there were no windows at all in the Vindicare temple, giving the interior the atmosphere of perpetual night. Every year, some of the new initiates – all of them orphans of Imperial officials fostered in the Schola Progenium – would go insane because of the lack of daylight. They were the lucky ones, since they would be removed from the temple before the serious conditioning began and the others started dying. A class of twenty pre-selected, would-be assassins might be reduced to two before the end of the third year of training. One of those would inevitably die in the final initiation ceremony nine years later, when the two would confront each other in their last trial – as much a test of their will to kill as of their technical ability to do so. Given that there were only one or two classes started in each year, this meant that the temple produced only one or two fully developed assassins each year – something that placed a huge responsibility onto the shoulders of each, and something which made them extraordinarily valuable to those rich or powerful enough to employ their services. In the long, shrouded history of the Vindicare temple, these patrons had not always been agents of the Emperor. This was not something that they cared to advertise.