by Dan Abnett
“She isn’t real.”
There was a long silence. Corbec stared blankly at the wall opposite him. Daur groaned and put his head in his hands, ringers wrapped with a green silk faith ribbon. Dorden closed his eyes and folded one hand around the other. Zweil blinked.
“She… I’m sorry, what?” Zweil said.
“She is a fake. An invention. A subterfuge.”
“Oh, feth…” sighed Corbec.
“Seriously?” Daur asked. His eyes were welling up.
“More particularly,” Gaunt said, “she is known to us. To you, Colm, and you Dorden, and Daur too. As far as I can tell, she truly believes she is Sabbat incarnate. But when I met her, face to face, I realised it was the poor girl we’d met on Hagia: Sanian.”
“Sanian?” Corbec started.
“No, no… this… no, this isn’t right,” Zweil said, agitated. “The Saint has come back, the Beati. This is what we were told. She is here…”
“She isn’t. It’s… a scam,” said Gaunt.
“Absolutely not!” Zweil cried, and got up.
“Father… father, please. I understand this is hard for you to hear.”
“It is her! It has to be!” Zweil had become so upset that Dorden and Curth had both risen to their feet. “This is the Saint returned, not some esholi child with her head all messed up!”
“I believe,” said Hark, slowly pulling on his black leather gloves, “that Zweil ought to know. He is an ayatani of the Beati Cult, after all.”
Gaunt shot a dangerous look in Hark’s direction. “She isn’t real,” he repeated.
“She was on Hagia,” said Dorden, his arm around Zweil’s shoulders. He was staring at Gaunt. “She spoke to me.”
“I know she did, Tolin,” said Gaunt.
“She spoke to me too,” said Daur.
“And me, boss,” said Corbec.
“I know, Colm. I fully believe that on Hagia you and Ban and Tolin… and others too… had a communication from the Saint that drove you to do what you did. All I’m saying is… this isn’t the Saint. Not here. Not now.”
“But—” Daur began.
“Has she spoken to you since?” Gaunt asked.
The men were silent.
“Heretic! She spoke to you,” Zweil cried suddenly.
“What?”
“You… and Beltayn. On Aexe Cardinal. Through her servant.”
Gaunt closed his eyes, trying to master the anger that boiled inside him. “Ayatani Zweil… I told you that in strictest confidence It was meant to remain between just us. An act of confession, sacrosanct. I trusted you would keep it to yourself.”
“Well, this is too important!” snapped Zweil. The bone-thin old priest swayed, and for a moment Gaunt was afraid he was about to keel over. “Devil take my vows, you’re lying about this and I won’t have it!”
“What’s he talking about, Gaunt?” asked Dorden.
“He’s speaking out of turn, doctor,” said Gaunt.
“He knows!” Zweil cried.
“I think you should tell us, sir,” said Corbec.
“This is hardly the time or—”
“Tell them!” Zweil screamed. “Tell them what you told me! Tell them what made me believe!”
Gaunt looked from one face to the next slowly. He realised that, right then, he didn’t have a friend in the room.
“All right. On Aexe, I took a trip from the frontline to Meiseq to meet with Van Voytz. Beltayn was with me. Our train was delayed and we went on foot for a while, and we found this chapel in the woods. There was an old woman there She seemed to know us, and she warned me about Herodor, long before the orders came through. Later, Beltayn and I tried to find the chapel again. We… couldn’t and I can’t explain that.”
“Tell them the rest,” said Zweil.
“It’s not pertinent,” Gaunt said.
“It is! It speaks volumes! The woman they met identified herself, and later they discovered she had died here on Herodor six thousand years ago!”
“That’s enough,” snarled Gaunt.
“Yes, it is,” said Zweil. “It’s enough. Enough proof by anyone’s standards. The Saint told you to come here and serve her! How dare you deny her now!”
Gaunt took off his cap and sat down. Everyone was staring at him.
“I don’t know what happened in the woods on Aexe. It has been with me ever since. I’m sorry I never told any of you about it. But it doesn’t change the facts. The Saint here is not the Saint. She is a pretender.”
“And for the record,” Gaunt added, looking at Zweil, “I’m appalled by your lack of confidence, father.”
“Oh, get over it!” Zweil spat. He shook Dorden’s arm off him. “Tell me this, Ibram Gaunt… if this Saint is such an obvious fake, why did she request you here? You, the one man who could expose her?”
Gaunt shrugged. “I don’t know the answer to that.”
“And if Lugo is really calling the shots,” added Corbec, “why would he let that happen?”
“I don’t know,” said Gaunt.
“I know this,” said Hark, rising to his feet. “It doesn’t matter if she’s the Saint or not. As far as millions, maybe billions, of Imperial citizens are concerned, she is Sabbat reborn. Truth or lie, we have to uphold that, or Imperial morale will collapse overnight.”
“I was getting to that part, Hark,” said Gaunt. “We have a duty here, whether we like it or not…”
“To lie?” asked Dorden coldly.
“Even that,” said Gaunt.
Zweil let out a low moan and shuffled towards the door. He paused there and looked back at Gaunt. “Why here?” he asked. “If it’s a lie, why the hell here?”
Gaunt couldn’t answer him. Zweil paced out of the room, and Curth and Dorden followed him in concern.
“Dismissed,” said Gaunt. Corbec and Daur both left, uneasily.
Gaunt looked at Hark. “I see your old master has been working on you.”
Hark shook his head. “Lugo? He’s not my—”
“Shut up, Viktor. Lugo placed you with the Tanith on Hagia. You were meant to be my replacement. He—”
“No, Ibram. I was meant to be your judge and executioner. That was what Lugo wanted of me. I’d like to think that I have proved myself to you and the Ghosts since then. Yes, Lugo spoke to me when we arrived. I won’t lie. He asked me to work on you. He thought you could persuade Sabbat to relocate to Morlond. That would really do his cause no end of good.”
“I see. And?”
Hark smiled. “I told him you’d make your own mind up.”
Gaunt nodded.
“Zweil will calm down,” said Hark. “It’s in his nature to blow hot and cold. What interests me is how right he was.”
“What do you mean, Viktor?”
“If this Saint Sabbat is a fake… why us… and why here?”
THREE
UNHOLY NIGHT
“Everyone has a choice. Me, I choose to not make a choice. What? What? Why is that funny?”
—Hlaine Larkin, Ghost
If he’d learned anything about Herodor so far, it was that the nights were fething cold. The city shield was lit, and for that they might be somewhat thankful, but the wasteland wind, with a cutting edge like a chainsword, slid in under the canopy of energy and bit them to the bone.
If Larkin had understood his sergeant’s pre-brief right the area the carriers had dropped them off in was called the Glassworks, a ramshackle, two thousand hectare arrangement of dingy workshops, storebarns and manufactories in the northwest of the city. It seemed a long, long way from anywhere nice. The main bulk of the Civitas, well-lit and cosy-looking, was a good distance behind them. Here, the light of drumfires and phospha lamps combined with the gauzy glow of the shield overhead to produce a blue, submarine halflight.
Above, in the night sky, stars twinkled that were not stars. Those indistinct pinpricks of light were the hundreds — possibly thousands — of pilgrim ships that had swarmed to Herodor.
L
arkin’s platoon, number eleven, had been sent to the Glassworks with ten and twelve to secure that section of perimeter. Easy job, to say it. In practice, it was hard to even find the perimeter in the first place. The whole area had been overrun by pilgrims, and their tent towns had grown like forest fungus between the empty buildings — inside some of them, in fact — and out into the edges of the wasteland itself, beyond the limits of the crackling shield. There was no definable edge to the city at all.
Weapons slung, uneasy, the Ghosts moved through the twilight world of the camp. The pilgrim contingent was huddled around feeble fires, cooking late meals or forming prayer circles. Infardi worshippers in green silk were performing rituals around their clock shrines, or moving through the camp passing out pamphlets. Many were tonsured or had their napes shaved, others hugged placards or emblems of the Saint. The most extreme had pierced themselves with the stigmata of the nine wounds, or inscribed holy tracts on their skin. Some had whips or sticks to scourge themselves with. Every single one displayed his or her pilgrim badge proudly, and every one looked pinched and painfully cold.
“Keep it tight Larks,” Sergeant Obel called. Larkin hurried to catch up. Just for the hell of it, he shouldered his long-las and panned the scope around. Through the enhanced and magnifying viewfinder, he spot-picked locations in the fuzzy cold of the obsidae beyond the camp. For one brief second, he thought he glimpsed movement in the distance. Just wind blowing the dust up. That’s all, he told himself. Not the enemy.
As far as Hlaine Larkin — the regiment’s finest marksman — was concerned, the enemy wasn’t really out there anywhere. He was already inside the city, inside with them.
And his name was Lijah Cuu.
Just five hundred metres from where Larkin was standing, in another part of the straggled-out camp, Trooper Cuu raised his standard pattern lasrifle to fire.
“Not another step, gak-head,” he hissed. “Or I’ll ventilate your torso, sure as sure.”
“Put that up,” Sergeant Criid snapped, pushing past Cuu and jerking his gun-muzzle skywards with an off-hand gesture. “Sir? Mister? I need you to identify yourself.”
Anton Alphant turned and looked at her. He raised his arms so she could see his hands were empty.
“I don’t mean any trouble, trooper,” he said.
“Sergeant,” she corrected, and moved forward to face him as her platoon — the tenth — closed in behind her.
“My apologies, sergeant. It’s been a few years.”
“Since what?” she asked. Alphant liked her already. Sharp to the point of brittle, fast-eyed, confident. A looker too, if you liked hard, thin girls. A little beyond an old man like himself, of course.
“I was Guard. Years back. Sorry, that’s not important, is it?”
Criid shrugged. “We’ve been told to secure this area, sir. It’s okay if the pilgrims keep to their camp areas, but we can’t have them moving around after dark.”
“Because of the raiders?” he said.
She nodded. “You are a pilgrim, I suppose? You’ve got papers?”
Alphant affirmed with another quick nod, and then gently opened his robe so she could see what his hands were doing at all times. He pulled out his sheaf of certificates.
DaFelbe, Criid’s number two, a tall, thin, earnest young man, hurried forward and examined Alphant’s papers with a handheld verity-reader.
“Anton Alphant,” DaFelbe called back. “Registered infardi pilgrim. Place of origin, Khan II, place of birth—”
“Enough,” said Criid. She took the papers and walked over to face Alphant. “Says here you were assigned camp space in the Ironhall district. You’ve roamed a little too far.”
“I… I was looking for someone,” said Alphant.
“Who?”
“It’s not important now. I got sidetracked, I’m afraid. I was just going to see if the doors on that manufactory were open. There are a lot young children in this part of the camp and I was hoping to get them into shelter.”
“Why? Are you some kind of elected leader?”
“No, not at all. It’s just… the nights are cold.”
“Aren’t they just?” said Criid. “Hwlan?”
The tenth platoon scout hurried up.
Criid nodded to the empty building nearby. “Get that place open, please. Some kids here who could do with shelter tonight.”
“On it,” Hwlan said.
“Nessa… watch his back,” Criid added, signing to the platoon sniper Nessa Bourah scooped up her long-las and hurried after the scout.
“There was movement behind them, but it was just Sergeant Shogg,” Domor and twelfth platoon closing up.
“See much?” asked Domor.
Criid chuckled at the unintended irony of his question. “You tell me.” His bulbous, augmetic eyes were clicking and whirring as they scanned the horizon.
“Not enough to spit on, Tona,” he said.
“Be thankful for that,” she said.
Back down the file of Ghosts, Brin Milo chaffed his cold hands and looked into the distance.
“What the feth are those people doing?” he asked.
“Them there?” Nehn replied. “Keeping their fething balance, I’d say.”
Throughout the fire-lit sprawl of the pilgrim camp, as ubiquitous as the bizarre clock shrines, thin towers rose up into space. Wood, mostly, some steel, some stone on wheeled trolleys. On top of each one stood a pilgrim, poised vulnerably on the summit of his or her thin pillar.
“Stylites,” said Corporal Chiria, as if she knew. She was a heavy-made Verghastite, her plain face badly scarred by the last campaign they had gone through. “Stylites, you know? They stand on top of plinths and pillars, Milo.”
“Uh…why?”
“Well,” considered Chiria, “I don’t exactly know.”
“Brings them closer to the Saint,” said a voice from behind them. “Proves their faith.”
“Really, Gol?” asked Milo.
Gol Kolea set his lasrifle down and thought hard. It was painful to watch. Gol Kolea had once been leader of tenth platoon, with a fine war record behind him. Some said he was senior officer material. But on Phantine, two years before, the spraying fragments of a loxatl flechette round had ripped into his head and torn away his wits and his personality. It was a crying shame, a real tragedy. Kolea seldom said more than a few words. His last comment was a downright magnum opus.
“How do you know that, Gol?” asked Milo.
“Dunno,” said Kolea. He scratched at the side of his head. “Just is a thing.”
“Oh, you know the sergeant,” said Cuu, sauntering up. He was the only man who still referred to Kolea by his former rank. “Talks a lot of gak, don’t you, gak-head? Eh? Eh? Sure as sure.”
“One day, Lijah,” said China, venomously, “someone’s gonna plant a las-round straight between your eyes.”
“Uh huh. Who’d that be? You?” giggled Cuu. “You haven’t got the balls, Chiria. Sure as sure.”
Milo turned to face Cuu and stared into his deep set, scar-cut face. “You don’t stop mocking Kolea and I’ll do it myself, you understand?” Milo said.
Cuu grinned. “Whoo, careful, mascot. You’ll bust a seam!”
Milo dropped his lasrifle and balled his fists.
“Enough! That’s enough!” said Bonin, the twelfth platoon scout. He put himself in between Milo and Cuu. “Milo… signals is asking after you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Cuu. Go and be busy elsewhere.”
Cuu sniggered and wandered off.
“Not exactly homely,” Hwlan sniffed, looking around. The manufactory interior was dark and empty, and smelled of woodrot, motor oil and ozone. Nessa moved past him, scoping around with her long-las. DaFelbe advanced with her, shining his lamp pack into the darker corners. There were holes in the roof over their heads, and through them, they could see the shifting luminescence of the city shield.
“It’s out of the wind, that’s the important thing,” said
Alphant. “A few drum fires in here and it’ll be almost cosy.”
“I guess,” said Hwlan.
“All right if I bring some of the families in?” Alphant asked Criid.
She nodded. “As many as there’s room for.”
In less than fifteen minutes, the place was teeming. The pilgrims dragged belongings with them on barrows and litters, and some manhandled clock shrines in through the doorway. Fires were laid. The pilgrims were singing a slow, pastoral hymn as they settled themselves. Alphant moved amongst them, helping them get comfortable. Criid watched him for a while. The man might not claim to be a leader, but he had a natural, reassuring air of command that the pilgrims all responded to. He was, however, clearly preoccupied, and kept looking at the door as newcomers entered. Who was he hoping to find in the Ironhall camp?
Criid was helping an elderly man find a corner to sit in. The old man had a handcart loaded with crudely painted plaster busts of the Saint, undoubtedly copied cheaply and in bulk using a fabric replicator, which he sold to the faithful to keep himself in soup money. Once Criid got him bedded down on his ragged mattress roll in a corner of the manufactory, he pressed one into Criid’s hand.
“No, that’s all right.”
“Please.”
“Honestly, I have no money.”
“No, no,” the old man shook his head. “Not for money. It is my thanks for your kindness.”
“Oh,” Criid looked at the plaster effigy. It was hideous. The paint had been applied so badly and so clumsily that Saint Sabbat looked like a pre-teen clangirl wannabe from Vervunhive who had just that morning discovered cosmetics and applied them enthusiastically.
“Thank you,” Criid said, tucking the plaster bust into her jacket pocket. It was a non-uniform garment, a fur-trimmed Shadik army field jacket that she’d appropriated on Aexe Cardinal. She’d slit the insignia off. So far, no one had brought her up for wearing it, and she was glad of the warmth.
“May the Saint bless you,” the old man said.
“Thanks for that too,” she added, but her attention wasn’t really on him. She could hear raised voices coming from the factory entrance.