‘Perhaps,’ he conceded.
‘You will be inspired,’ Ske Vris promised.
Kanshell returned to the yurt. The rest of the day passed. The saurian attacks continued. All but one were repulsed without further casualties. As evening fell, one of the guards overbalanced and fell over the wall. His screams were mercifully short. They caused barely a ripple in the delight of the others as they brought down the beast. Kanshell wondered where the line lay between optimism and callousness. Repulsed, he decided he would not attend the service. He would, he told himself, work until the transport back to the base arrived.
He held fast to the resolution until the ritual began. The sound of chanting made him look up from the hides he was helping stitch together. Hundreds of colonists had gathered at the first lodge. They filled the space, and spilled down the mound. The song was as celebratory as any Kanshell had heard from these people. But there was power there, too. The song was triumphant.
He skirted the pit and moved towards the lodge. He listened to the chanting in a way he had not before. It spoke to him. It claimed a bond between them. Until a few days ago, he had looked down on the colonists’ songs. They were the products of superstition. They were a sign of delusional thinking, a denial of the hard, insistent realities of the universe. So he had told himself. Now he thought that the denial had been his. He had refused to hear the truth in this music. He had refused to hear the praise, because he had not wanted to believe there was any being who would hear and receive the praise.
He drew closer. He repented his foolishness. The sound of hundreds of voices lifted in song swirled around him. He was swept up by the need to worship. The melody opened up vistas of infinite possibility. It demanded he accept them. It imposed greatness. His skin tingled with the brush of undiluted sensation. His chest swelled with pride and humility. He took a deep breath, and was startled when it hitched. He raised a hand to his cheek. His fingers came away wet. Though his tears flowed, his vision was clear.
The crowd parted for him as he reached the base of the mound. He walked up the centre as if flowing down a rushing stream. The song had a fragrance: the sharp, sweet tang of apples. It became his world, shutting him off from the mundane. He could no longer feel his legs. He was floating, not walking. He was a consciousness only now, a soul freed from the corporeal vale of tears. Somewhere far below, his body was raising its arms, expecting to float upward, lifted by the strength of the song. He laughed at the body’s presumption, he laughed at the exhilaration of the senses, and he laughed at being free of fear for the first time since Callinedes.
Ske Vris was standing before him. The novitiate took hold of his shoulders. ‘I rejoice to see you here, brother,’ she said.
The words cut through Kanshell’s joyous haze, bringing the world back into focus. He was in and of his body again, though the ecstasy was just as strong. He found that he could remember how to form words. ‘Thank you.’
‘Come forward.’
The lodge was filled to bursting, but somehow the people made room. A path appeared before Kanshell, leading to the centre of the floor. Ske Vris gestured, inviting him to approach the priest who stood there. Kanshell guessed this was Ske Vris’s master, though he had never seen the man’s face. Even now, the priest was hooded. He was dancing. His steps were both sinuous and martial. He was worshipper, and he was warrior. His staff was the sign of his office, and it was the terror of his foes. His robes swirled as he danced, and the tunic beneath them was that of a soldier. Though much smaller than a Space Marine, he was a giant among these people. Other priests surrounded him, echoing his dance. They, too, were robed and hooded. They were almost as tall as the head priest, though they were much thinner. Their dance was the swirl of the melody; his was the force. And it was he who was the focus of the lightweb.
The light.
The extraordinary patterns Kanshell had seen when the lodge was empty were even more pronounced now. He stared in wonder. It was impossible. Outside was deep twilight. Though torches surrounded the lodge, they could not account for the intensity of the illumination. Light shone through the slits in the walls as if the lodge were inside Pandorax itself. As before, the closer Kanshell came to the centre, the more the web assumed definition, the more it came to be a language. It would speak to him, if he let it. It had a message, one that the priest had heard, and he danced, rejoicing. The lightweb interwove with the runes on his robe. Kanshell saw call and response, and he saw a constant exchange of roles. The priest was calling to the numinous at one moment, and answering a divine summons the next.
Now, finally, Kanshell felt he understood the colonists. He understood how they retained unwavering hope no matter how many of them fell to the jaws of Pythos. It was inconceivable that they should do otherwise.
The priest stopped dancing. The light did not move, but such was the complexity of the pattern, Kanshell’s gaze did not stop the dance. It stepped nimbly from point to shaft to nexus, round and round, mesmerising, intoxicating. The priest held out his arms, palms facing Kanshell.
‘You are welcome,’ he said. ‘Stand with me.’ His voice was deep, rough, yet liquid. A glacier whisper.
Kanshell advanced. He had been reluctant before. Now he was eager. He almost stumbled in his joy. He ran towards the priest.
Three steps from the centre, the message crystallising before him, an immense truth on the cusp of revelation, he paused. He blinked, uncertain. His feet were rooted.
‘What troubles you?’ the priest asked.
Kanshell swallowed. His lips were dry. His throat was parched. The apple fragrance was heady, and he so wished he could slake his thirst. But he could not. He mustn’t. He had to wait. ‘Something…’ he croaked. He tried again. ‘Something is missing.’
The priest cocked his head. ‘Yes?’
Kanshell tried to look away. Perhaps if he could close his eyes, he could concentrate and discover what was wrong. ‘I feel…’ He trailed off, helpless.
‘You are not yet at home,’ the priest said.
Kanshell almost sobbed with gratitude. ‘Yes.’ Yes, that was it. He still did not belong here, though that was what he wished, as powerfully as he dreaded the nights on the base.
‘Our song and this space are still unfamiliar. You need reassurance. You need a sign that you are not betraying your own faith by sharing with us.’
‘Yes,’ Kanshell said. The tears were flowing again.
‘And if I said that our faiths were the same?’
‘I want to believe that.’
Though the priest’s face was hidden, Kanshell was sure he smiled. ‘Sometimes, proof is the proper support for faith. You shall have proof. Come to us again, and bring a symbol of your faith. Then you shall know the truth, and we will rejoice together.’
‘Thank you,’ Kanshell whispered.
He tried to back away. His knees had gone weak. If he tried to walk, he would collapse. But then Ske Vris was at his side, taking his arm over a shoulder. Kanshell leaned against her and staggered out of the lodge. As they left it behind, Kanshell noticed a few other serfs at the periphery of the crowd, watching and listening, their faces hungry with envy. The chanting still filling his ears, his heart hammering from its brush with the power of faith unleashed, Kanshell was struck by a vision of what might be. He thought about the strength he gained from the morning prayer circle. He imagined how much greater that strength would be if there were as many worshippers as there were at the lodge. To praise the Emperor as He should be praised, to do so openly, to do so by the hundreds – that would, Kanshell was sure, strike a death-blow to the fear.
And why stop there? The vision soared. He pictured thousands, millions, billions raising their voices to the glories of Emperor. His breath stopped. He was not a violent man. He had never fought. He had cleaned weapons, serviced them, knew their names and uses, but had never fired a single shot. He was Jerune Kanshell, menial
serf, an insignificant, eminently replaceable cog in the machine of the X Legion, and nothing more. But in the service of this dream, he felt ready to kill.
The need and the glow of the vision did not leave him as he boarded the transport back to the base. When he disembarked on the landing pad, and heard the noises on the other side of the walls, he lost the glow. The need remained, and he clung to it, and to the promise of strength, even as the fear returned, boasting new claws, new teeth, new ways to murder hope.
The young night echoed with a very different chant. It was the song of the carnivore. Kanshell’s ears rang with another call and response: the roar of alpha predators, and the answers of their packs. There had been a sudden gathering of saurians here. There had been nothing like this cacophony in the morning. Now he could hear countless reptilian voices growling challenges to the walls. The beasts were taunting their prey.
Kanshell walked away from the landing pad. He was in no hurry to reach the dormitorium. He paused in the open between buildings, legs still shaky, the howls in the dark hurting him as if jaws were already closing around his head.
He was still there when Tanaura found him. She looked as haggard as he felt, though the iron was still there in the set of her jaw.
‘How long has this been going on?’ he asked.
Bolter fire from the wall. Roars turning to shrieks and then silence. Echoes of the siege at the settlement. Monsters testing the defences.
‘It started this morning,’ Tanaura said. ‘They’ve been growing more bold all day.’
‘Why?’ he demanded to no one. The saurians’ actions here bothered him more than the assaults on the wooden palisade. Its vulnerability was clear. But the promontory was a strong position. The base’s walls were solid. Its defenders were strong as gods. Why would animals stalk such a target? Why such stubbornness? ‘They can’t hope to break through.’
‘They’re animals,’ Tanaura said. ‘They don’t hope.’
‘Really? Then what is keeping them here?’ These animals can hope, he thought. They hope for our blood.
The crack of snapped branches. The crash of heavy bodies against each other. Snarls of rage and pain. Some of the monsters were tired of waiting, and were fighting each other.
‘I don’t know.’ Tanaura shrugged, trying to be dismissive. ‘Perhaps they hope, but they don’t reason. They won’t get in. The legionaries massacre them as soon as they approach the wall.’
‘And when there are no more munitions?’
‘It won’t come to that.’
‘You sound very sure.’
‘The mission of the Legion will not drag on like that.’ She spoke as if the decision were hers to make. Kanshell almost remarked on her presumption, but then he saw how her eyes burned. Determination, hope, desire, prophecy… They were all combusting in her gaze. So was desperation. ‘This is not where the war should be fought,’ she told Kanshell.
‘But it is being fought here,’ he answered.
Beyond the wall, the roars grew louder. The sound was a rising tide, coming to drown them all. It would never ebb. And inside the wall, the thoughts of the deep night waited, eager to test Kanshell’s faith.
Fourteen
The tightening noose
Shadows against shadows
Mission of the blind
Galba said, ‘The planet is turning against us.’
‘That is an irrational statement,’ Atticus snapped.
‘I did not mean to imply sentience.’
‘You did not? You were not speaking from a hidden spring of knowledge?’
Galba sighed. Unlike the captain, he still had the ability to do so. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Merely from observation.’ He gestured to the jungle beyond the wall, covering the eastward slope of the promontory. The lights of the base illuminated a narrow band of foliage and trunks, bleaching the green to silver. Behind was only hulking black, shaken by the endless, growing rage of the monstrous life within.
‘You do not see those animals as a realistic threat,’ Atticus informed him. The statement had the finality of a direct order.
Galba turned to Darras for help. The other sergeant said nothing. He kept his gaze steady on the jungle. He had spoken little to Galba since the battle in the ruins. Atticus’s suspicion shrouded Galba like a disease. The rumour was running through the ranks of the company – one of its number might be using forbidden arts, powers doubly forbidden for contravening the commands of the Emperor and for violating the spirit of the machine. Intuition was almost as suspect as sorcery. Sorcery itself was beyond the pale.
‘What I see, brother-captain, is a change in a pattern of behaviour. As unthinking as this enemy is, the effect of its actions are the same as if there were a concerted campaign.’
‘I am not unaware of that, sergeant. I am cognisant of everything that plagues our mission. But that,’ he pointed at the jungle, ‘is not our principle threat.’
‘No,’ Galba agreed. ‘It is not.’
They fell silent. Behind them, the sounds of nocturnal terror filtered out of the serf barracks. None of the Iron Hands reacted. The howls of damnation were expected. There was nothing to be done except deal with the casualties come dawn. Even so, Galba could not bring himself to ignore the screams. He knew something of what the mortals were experiencing. He sympathised, though he recognised their suffering as a weakness of the flesh. Atticus, he suspected, heard only a reminder of futility.
Galba tried again. ‘All the same, I do think the saurians are a threat that we should not ignore.’
‘What would you have us do? Burn the jungle down?’
‘No.’ They could no more do that than drain the ocean. The green and its monsters were infinite. But the word burn stuck with him. It rattled around his mind. It suggested something. It was the seed of an idea. Its contours were unclear to him, but if he was patient, they would resolve themselves in time.
Burn, said the thought, the echoing refrain, the nascent obsession. Burn.
Atticus returned to the command block. Darras, maintaining his position on watch, waited for Galba to head off on a patrol. Galba stayed where he was. At length, he said, ‘I am not a psyker.’
Darras turned to face him. ‘I don’t think you’re lying to me, brother, and that is the problem. You’re lying to yourself.’ Galba opened his mouth to answer, but Darras held up a hand, cutting him off. ‘You are not following reason. You are listening to what you want to believe. That is a failing of the flesh.’
‘You don’t trust me.’
‘No, I don’t. You’re denying logic. You’re straying from the path Ferrus Manus showed us, and breaking from the Imperial Truth as surely as if you were deliberately exercising sorcery. So no, I can’t trust you. You shouldn’t trust yourself, or any decision you make.’ He faced the jungle once again. Rejecting his brother was painful, but necessary. The battlefield was unforgiving in its rejection of error.
‘And if I’m not wrong,’ said Galba, ‘what then?’
‘Then the universe is filled with terrible irrationality, and there is no such thing as reason. The madness is yours, brother. Keep it away from me.’
The attacks were more concerted. The disruptions were worse. Erephren fought back. She was on her guard now. She would not be taken by surprise. She still felt the anger from her confrontation with the serf, Tanaura. It was not aimed at the woman herself. It was directed at the surrender her position represented. The X Legion had suffered enough humiliations. She had played a role in restoring its pride. The destruction of the Callidora and its escort was a real victory. She would not let the enemy they had encountered here rob them of further vengeance.
Tanaura had her faith. May it grant her a measure of comfort as the screams of the night began. A delusion could do little more. Erephren had her fury. It drew upon the empirical, insistent, bloody reality of war itself. She needed the anchor to cast he
r mind into the immaterium and not go mad. She used it now to defend herself against the enemy. The cutting edges of darkness sliced into her consciousness. Laughter and jaws surrounded her. Something that had the very shape of terror tried to form before her. She repulsed it. It retaliated by tearing her perception of the warp apart.
She hissed. Her hands were clumsy and numb, light years away from her mind, but she worked them just well enough to disconnect herself from her throne. She staggered away on legs that were as rigid as death one moment, weak as air the next. Her head was filled with lightning and broken glass. Voices of hell shrieked at her. She defied them. This time, she would not black out. She shut herself off from the warp, choosing blindness instead of being thrust into it. The intensity of the voices diminished, but they were not silenced. Slivers of the unreal followed her. They were gossamer-thin, fragile as a dream at the moment of waking. But they were toxic, serrated, and they clung. They left incandescent scars on her mind. Far in the distance, her lips pulled back in a rictus. Her teeth clacked together. She tried to bite off the pain. She would have torn out the throat of the enemy with her teeth if it had stood before her.
Coward, she thought, embracing rage. I cannot see. I can barely walk. Still you hide. You are nothing. You are not worth my time.
The whispers showed their power by ignoring her taunts. They slithered around her. They teased her perceptions with the threat of sudden reality. When she reached out her hands to find her staff, she twitched away from the brush of the imminent. But her left hand closed around the haft, and her right found her cane. ‘You are not real,’ she told the shadows.
Not yet, they murmured. Coming, they promised.
She sent a dispatch to her arm, and it banged the tip of her cane against the floor. The sound belonged to another world, but it was present. She banged again, again, tapping the beat of her march. She felt her way forward, engulfed in the coils of the dark. They could not hold her back. When her hand touched the door, her heart swelled with triumph. She pushed it open. In the corridor, she sensed a hulking presence. It was massively real, yet cousin to shadows. As much as she had closed herself off, she still sensed warp currents affected by the being ahead of her. She took a step back and raised her cane, braced for a fight. What confronted her was huge, and the fractured, painful chaos of the warp had crippled her. She had no illusions about her ability to win, but at least she would leave the enemy with none about her willingness to fight.
The Damnation of Pythos Page 21