‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Haven’t you read the rote of charges?’ he asked. ‘The Court of Purity of Bakka might resent Inquisitorial interference, but it won’t hinder it. Everything I have done, everything for which I will be punished, is in there, neat and true.’
‘What happened?’ I asked again. In truth, I had read the rote several times, dissected it with Viola, filtering the formulae of language for edges of inconsistency. We had found none. But written words are not the same as those spoken from a mouth.
‘I had a revelation, Josef,’ he said, and twitched, face twisting in pain as he held his side. I moved forward, but he held up his hand, shaking his head. ‘Age, my son, age and sitting in chains on a cold floor. It will pass.’
I waited. After a minute his face unknotted.
‘Revelation, Josef. The accounts in the Creed are wrong about it, you know – it is not like fire or like lightning or like anything so much as waking up.’
‘You were on Dominicus Prime, weren’t you?’
‘Ah, so you have read a little at least. Yes, I was on Dominicus, a grand visit as part of a circuit of the sector worlds…’
He trailed off.
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘I have come a long way, old friend.’
He shivered, nodded, and carried on.
‘It was half a decade in the planning and ten years to complete. There had been a growing tide of incidents in the worlds of the Caradryad Sector. Not a sudden surge of heresy but a gradual rise in the level of fear, and with it followed the two handmaids of that shadow – violence and rebellion. False prophets, stories of saints and resurrections, and omens of doom and ending, in dreams and in words shouted to the ears of crowds. But of course you know this better than I do.’
He paused and licked his lips. They were cracked and dry. I handed him a flask of water that I carried on my belt. He took a short swallow.
‘It had been thought that a grand tour of faith would pour water on the kindling before it caught aflame. So I and five hundred confessors, preachers, bishops and sundry others set out across the stars with an army of attendants and a treasury of relics. We arrived on worlds like an invasion. Processions bore the relics we had brought with us through the streets, crowds gathered, incense smoke clouded the sky and shouts of devotion broke over us. On over a dozen worlds it had been so. Then we came to Dominicus Prime, most holy, most blessed, where the world itself is given to nothing other than faith. The plains were covered with pilgrims as our landers took us to the surface. You could see them, a sea of people looking up to the sky…
‘They had prepared a dais – a huge block of tiered stone and metal. It alone was the size of a Battle Titan. Huge carved faces of the oldest saints covered its sides. Rose petals and leaves of gold wafer fell in a deluge from the holes that were their eyes. As I stepped onto the platform to speak the first blessing, the crowd fell to its knees and I heard the first word from my mouth roll across the land like thunder… Quite a feeling. You should feel humble in such moments. You are the voice of the Emperor’s divinity, a conduit for His truth. You are small, but at your back you should feel the weight of His presence.
‘It happened then. I was looking out and my eye caught one of the crowd, a woman. She was dying. She was on her knees and she was trying to raise her head, trying to look up at me, but there was blood on her chin and on her robes, and I don’t know how but I knew that this was the last inch of her life. She had spent everything in her body to bring herself to this point. To see me. And as I looked at her…’
Abernath paused then. His gaze had gone to the candle, and his eyes seemed both deep and far away.
‘I saw something… No, that’s not right – I didn’t see. For an instant I was somewhere.’
The sound of his voice raised the hairs on my arm. I have seen saints and daemons and heard prophecies and felt eternity’s breath close. But those words brought a chill to my flesh that I cannot explain. I did not speak. Part of me did not want him to carry on. But he did.
‘I was standing in a city. It was like nothing I had ever seen, vast in a way that I felt rather than saw. Statues and buildings rose as mountains. Streets were canyons. It was magnificent and humbling and ruined. Towers lay toppled. Rubble covered the roads and dry bones clustered under coverings of ash. Dust blew through it, billowing in rust-coloured clouds. And I could feel the wind and the dead coldness of the air. I have seen nothing more terrifying in my life, and… and I knew it was real.’
He stopped then, and I realised he was shaking, his arms wrapped around himself as though to keep warm from a frost that was not there. I did not say anything for a moment. I had heard words like his before and yet still what he said held the breath in my lungs. I had been standing until then, but now I sat on the floor in front of him, close, waiting.
‘Did you know where it was?’ I asked at last.
He did not move for a long minute, just stared into the candle flame. Then he nodded slowly.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think so.’
I nodded once. I knew too. I had heard a dying witch once gasp out words that could have been pulled from Abernath’s mouth. The Desolate City, that was what Argento, Covenant’s one-time master, had called it, an echo of what would be and a reflection of a terrible truth. A dream place, a place that existed only in moments of revelation.
‘Was there anything else?’ I asked carefully.
‘Yes,’ said Abernath quietly, and there was moisture on his cheeks once again. ‘There was a voice.’
‘What did it say?’
‘It said…’ He shook like a parchment taper caught in the wind. ‘It was calling out… It was in pain. I felt… pain. Terrible pain.’
‘And?’
‘I cannot go on,’ said Abernath, and he was very still now, eyes hollow. ‘That’s what it said. I cannot go on.’
‘And you saw who was speaking?’
The nod was so small it was almost imperceptible.
‘Tell me,’ I said, and saw him flinch and his head almost shake in refusal. Then he spoke.
‘There was a… figure… a figure sat on a stone chair in the middle of the city.’
‘No,’ I said gently. ‘It wasn’t a chair, was it?’
He shook his head then, eyes closed in pain as if the thought held in his head was burning him.
‘It was a throne,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, but it was a throne. The voice, it… He said He could not go on…’
I sat back, closed my own eyes, and listened to the man who had given me the greatest gifts of my life sob quietly.
‘You spoke about what you had seen,’ I said. It was not a question; I knew he had. I had read the full evidence, even the parts that would be withheld from the Court of Purity.
‘Not then. I blinked and the city vanished and I was on the dais on Dominicus Prime and there were hundreds of thousands of eyes all turned to me… I collapsed. When I recovered I–’
‘You spoke to Confessor Nissena, then to Gardula. You preached, Abernath. To small groups, you started to preach about what you had seen.’
‘The storms had come – ships lost, dreams and wild omens and darkness eating the stars, and I knew. I knew it was because of what I had seen.’
‘And what had you seen?’ I asked.
Abernath looked away, down at his hands.
‘The truth,’ he said.
‘What truth?’
‘The God-Emperor is dying.’
Saints preserve me, to hear it from his lips was like a blow.
‘A heresy black enough to stain the soul, and spoken from your lips enough to strip the faith of billions…’ I said.
‘Faith only matters if it is true, Josef, you remember that. You knew that.’
‘I know that still,’ I said.
‘I envy you.’
; The quiet came then, falling between us and folding over us as we sat on the floor next to the candle. I spoke at last, the words heavy as they came to my tongue.
‘There is something I have to ask you, old friend.’
‘They will punish him,’ I said. ‘He is guilty. He knows it. He just wishes it to be over.’
Covenant gave a single nod of acknowledgement.
I let out a breath and rubbed a hand over my eyes. It was an old hand. There were wrinkles under the patterns of scars and tattoos.
We were on the Dionysia. The ship had docked with the Ecclesiarchy enclave, and I had returned to it from the Dungeon of the Doubted to find Covenant waiting for me. We talked alone, the silver and gold death masks of enemies and allies watching us from where they hung on wood-panelled walls.
‘He is in pain,’ I said.
‘The weight of guilt?’ asked Covenant.
‘No, the weight of what he thinks he knows. It is a terrible thing when partial truth meets faith.’
‘You have endured,’ said Covenant.
I gave a snort of laughter.
‘I am a simple soul, lord. Bluntness has its benefits.’
Covenant raised an eyebrow. On the desk beside him the brass arms of a small fabricator array spun and wove around a bronze disc. The cable linking the machine to the mind-impulse plug in the back of Covenant’s skull hung down his back like a chromed plait of hair. Micro las-burners and grinders sent sparks and metallic dust into the air in a fine, glittering shower. The disc was the guard for a sword. Patterns were emerging on the bronze: roses, thorns and birds in flight. I watched the tools do their work for a moment, seeing the deft strokes and forms that came from my master’s hidden thoughts. We are all conflicted souls, all contradictions given flesh; priest and deck-scum, heretic and holy man, executioner and dreamer.
‘You were right,’ I said at last. ‘There was one thing he did not tell the Ecclesiarchy confessors.’ Covenant tilted his head but said nothing, just waited as the arms of the fabricator array danced beside him. He had known this would happen, that there was a shadow of a secret behind Abernath’s heresy. We had not gone to Bakka for the sake of friendship or old times. We were there because of what Abernath had seen in the vision that had broken his faith. We were there because it was one part of an emerging pattern, a great and terrible pattern that might bring humanity to an end.
There are some things that are more important than individuals, more important than one person or the meaning of one life. We have to be more than our own desires, or hopes, or faith. That is what Abernath had given me all those years ago, that is what I believe, and why I had gone to listen to him and asked if there was something he had yet to confess.
‘In his vision of the Desolate City,’ I said, ‘before it vanished from his sight, he told me he heard one more thing.’
Covenant waited. I closed my eyes and gave the slightest shake of the head.
‘You know what they are going to do to you?’ I had asked Abernath.
He had nodded.
‘I know. The punishment is ordained by my sin. And it is a sin, Josef. Though I know you could, I do not want to be saved from what awaits me. I have failed my god.’
‘Not in faith,’ I said gently.
‘No,’ he had replied. ‘But in strength, Josef. I am a weak soul who looked for something stronger than I to give me what I lacked. And then I see the face of all I have believed and I cannot help but despair.’
‘He said that the voice said, “Please… I must be free.”’
The arms of the fabricator array had stopped moving. Covenant sat still, his eyes on me.
‘Dominicus Prime,’ he said carefully. ‘The augurs and signs are circling that place.’
I did not reply. None was needed. There would be steps taken next, checks and information gathered. The signs had been there before and were there again – that the Emperor was seeking a way to walk amongst humanity again. We were chasing living gods again, though whether to find the salvation of all or prevent damnation I could not tell. Others would do that. The pursuit of truth was not what I was there for. I only knew that, the last time, it had ended in suffering and disaster.
‘Are you certain you wish to follow this path, lord?’ I asked.
‘It is demanded of me,’ he replied. ‘I do what I must.’
I nodded. I knew there would be no stopping him. I keep my faith, and always have, even in the face of all I have seen and done. It is my calling. I believe not in purity or righteousness, but that if we follow our purpose then the God-Emperor will work through us. I do not need visions or certainty to know that. I need only to know myself, and do what I can. I need no other proof than I am here, that I have lived this long and continue to serve. My faith is simple, perhaps too simple.
‘Lord,’ I said carefully. ‘Abernath is–’
‘He was a good man,’ said Covenant, before I could unfold the thought in my head. ‘But he is guilty and he goes to his punishment by his will. I will not stand in the way of that. You cannot save him, Khoriv. Nor should you try. Sometimes even the people who raise us up prove unworthy of us.’
I nodded. I knew that would be his answer, just as he knew that I would ask, and had spared me having to speak a plea that he could not grant.
‘I am sorry,’ he said at last. I looked up then and met his eyes. They say you know a soul by its deeds, but you don’t. More is hidden within than we can ever see.
‘Might I ask one thing, then, lord?’ I asked. Covenant nodded. ‘Once the Ecclesiarchy have completed the punishment there is a request you could make, one that they will grant without you having to order it.’
Covenant looked at me for a long moment. On the desk, the fabricator array flickered back into motion.
‘Speak it,’ he said.
The Ecclesiarchy agreed to our request. There was not much they could have done to stop it, but they did not try. The trial was completed and the sentence was passed and carried out.
We collected… it from the dock connected to the Court of Purity. It stood there, docile, fresh blood still weeping from the nails fastening the prayer tapers to its back. Stitches crisscrossed its flesh. Muscle had been grafted under the wrinkled skin, stretching it out like leather pulled taut across a drum head. Injector plugs and drug vials dotted its spine. Its arms hung limp at its sides, metal talons and power-flails dragging on the ground as it shuffled forwards and stopped in front of us. Arco-flagellation, a process and punishment, and a mark of the extent of the kindness of this age. Bits of flesh and humanity hacked out and the simplicity of fury and the peace of hypnosis put in their place.
‘What is he called now?’ I asked.
‘Credo 425,’ said the guard that had brought the creature to us. Its head rose at the sound of its name. A steel visor covered the top half of its face and encircled its skull. Through narrow eye-slits in the metal, I could see pale light flickering across placid, bloodshot eyes. The mouth was open, slack, spit dribbling down its chin. ‘He will respond only to voices that he is imprinted to obey. The helm will keep him docile until the word of waking is spoken to him. He is ready to follow your command, lord.’
‘Give us his words of control,’ said Covenant. The guard held out a sealed scroll. Covenant took it and passed it to me without looking at it. I held it in both hands for a second. Covenant turned and began to walk towards the docking bridge with the Dionysia. I half turned and then looked back at the hunched creature who had been one of the best men I ever knew.
‘Follow,’ I said, my tongue dry, the quiet ringing in my ears. And he followed me, like a child, like a silent, lost child.
THE BLESSING OF SAINTS
‘She was an angel, pure as righteous destruction. She laid low the twisted and lifted the hearts of the righteous. At her passing, a million voices cried out her name. Shall we ever see her like? No,
not now, not ever again…’
– Sister Patricia of the Order Famulous,
on the disappearance of Saint Celestine
The three saint-hunters came to the Hill of Brass as the call of hours blared from the vox-towers to greet the sun. They passed through the tangled alleys in a tight group, moving with the flow of foot traffic, the bright colours of their wound robes billowing slightly in the cool dawn breeze. No one they passed spared them a second glance. They were all tall, but that was not uncommon amongst those of the Temple of Plenty; service to the Emperor of Silver and Gold came with an excess of food and better health.
‘Mistress, mistress!’ The call made Idris turn her head. A boy in the off-white wrappings of the work-born was running up behind them, a plate of spice cakes held above his head. Idris felt Covenant tense. The shape of his surface thoughts shifted into hard lines of readiness. The boy slowed as he came level with her. ‘Sweetness for you, mistress,’ said the boy, looking up at her, clever eyes glittering in a wide face.
Idris stopped, and bent to look at the sweet cakes on the plate.
‘How much?’
‘Three coins for each,’ he said, then shot at look at where Covenant and Argento had stopped further up the alley they were climbing. ‘Or five for three.’
We do not have time for this,+ came Covenant’s thought voice, edged with impatience.
Idris smiled at the boy.
‘Just one,’ she said, and glanced at where Covenant stood, the hood of his red robes shadowing the sharpness of his face. ‘Those two don’t really appreciate sweet things.’
The boy handed her a cake wrapped in paper, took the three small coins and vanished with a grin.
A little on edge,+ she sent, as they started up the alley.
If they know we are coming, they will be waiting,+ replied Covenant.
Idris bit into the spice cake. It was warm, and tasted of honey.
Would you have preferred me to shoot him?+ she said.
Enough.+ Argento’s sending was light, but resonated with control. The inquisitor had not looked around at them, but continued to climb the slope of the alley, his sky-blue robe hiding the flow of his muscle. +We are close.+ Idris gave a slight shiver and took another bite of the spice cake.
Divination - John French Page 25