by Neil
A sister brought me supper on a tray. Just as I was finishing, and Kalibane was lighting the lamps, Niro and Jardone came to my chamber.
‘Brothers?’
Jardone got right to it, staring at me through his half-moon lenses. ‘The brotherhood of the hospice have met, and they decided that you must leave. Tomorrow. No further audiences will be granted. We have a vessel that will take you to the fishing port at Math island. You can obtain passage to Symbalopolis from there.’
‘I am disappointed, Jardone. I do not wish to leave. My recollection is not complete.’
‘It is as complete as it’s going to be!’ he snapped.
‘The hospice has never been so troubled.’ Niro said quietly. ‘There have been brawls. Two novitiates have been injured. Three inmates have attempted suicide. Years of work have been undone in a few moments.’
I nodded. ‘I regret the disturbance, but—’
‘No buts!’ barked Jardone.
‘I’m sorry, Higher Sark,’ said Niro. ‘That is how it is.’
I SLEPT BADLY in the cramped cot. My mind, my memory, played games, going over the details of the interview. There was shock and injury in Ebhoe, that was certain, for the event had been traumatic. But there was something else. A secret beyond anything he had told me, some profound memory. I could taste it.
I would not be deterred. Too many lives depended on it.
Kalibane was slumbering heavily when I crept from the chamber. In the darkness, I felt my way to the stairs, and up to the third floor. There was a restlessness in the close air. I moved past locked cells where men moaned in their sleep or muttered in their insomnia.
At intervals, I hugged the shadows as novitiate wardens with lamps made their patrols. It took perhaps three quarters of an hour to reach the cell block where Ebhoe resided. I stalked nervously past the bolted door of Ioq’s room.
The spy-slit opened at my touch. ‘Ebhoe? Colonel Ebhoe?’ I called softly into the darkness.
‘Who?’ his cold voice replied.
‘It is Sark. We weren’t finished.’
‘Go away.’
‘I will not, until you tell me the rest.’
‘Go away.’
I thought desperately, and eagerness made me cruel. ‘I have a torch, Ebhoe. A powerful lamp. Do you want me to shine it in through the spyhole?’
When he spoke again, there was terror in his voice. Emperor forgive me for my manipulation.
‘What more is there?’ he asked. ‘The Torment spread. We died by the thousand. I cannot help with your cause, though I pity those men on Genovingia.’
‘You never told me how it ended.’
‘Did you not read the reports?’
I glanced up and down the dark cell-block to make sure we were still alone. ‘I read them. They were… sparse. They said Warmaster Gatus incinerated the enemy from orbit, and ships were sent to relieve you at Pirody Polar. They expressed horror at the extent of the plague-loss. Fifty-nine thousand men dead. No count was made of the civilian losses. They said that by the time the relief ships arrived, the Torment had been expunged. Four hundred men were evacuated. Of them, only one hundred and ninety-one are still alive according to the records.’
‘There’s your answer then.’
‘No, colonel. That’s no answer! How was it expunged?’
‘We located the source of infection, cleansed it. That was how.’
‘How, Ebhoe? How, in the God-Emperor’s name?’
‘It was the height of the Torment. Thousands dead…’
VII
IT WAS THE height of the Torment. Thousands dead, corpses everywhere, pus and blood running in those damnably bright halls.
I went to Valis again, begging for news. He was in his infirmium, working still. Another batch of vaccines to try, he told me. The last six had failed, and had even seemed to aggravate the contagion.
The men were fighting themselves by then, killing each other in fear and loathing. I told Valis this, and he was silent, working at a flame burner on the steel workbench. He was huge being, of course… Astartes, a head and a half taller than me, wearing a cowled red robe over his Doom Eagles armour. He lifted specimen bottles from his narthecium, and held them up to the ever-present light.
I was tired, tired like you wouldn’t believe. I hadn’t slept in days. I put down the flamer I had been using for cleansing work, and sat on a stool.
‘Are we all going to perish?’ I asked the great apothecary.
‘Dear, valiant Ebhoe,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You poor little man. Of course not. I will not allow it.’
He turned to face me, filling a long syringe from a stoppered bottle. I was in awe of him, even after the time we had spent together.
‘You are one of the lucky ones, Ebhoe. Clean so far. I’d hate to see you contract this pestilence. You have been a faithful ally to me through this dark time, helping to distribute my vaccines. I will mention you to your commanders.’
‘Thank you, apothecary.’
‘Ebhoe,’ he said, ‘I think it is fair to say we cannot save any who have been infected now. We can only hope to vaccinate the healthy against infection. I have prepared a serum for that purpose, and I will inoculate all healthy men with it. You will help me. And you will be first. So I can be sure not to lose you.’
I hesitated. He came forward with the syringe, and I started to pull up my sleeve. ‘Open your jacket and tunic. It must go through the stomach wall.’ I reached for my tunic clasps. And saw it. The tiniest thing. Just a tiny, tiny thing. A greenish-yellow blister just below Valis’s right ear.
VIII
EBHOE FELL SILENT. The air seemed electrically charged. Inmates in neighbouring cells were thrashing restless, and some were crying out. At any moment, the novitiate wardens would come.
‘Ebhoe?’ I called through the slit.
His voice had fallen to a terrified whisper, the whisper of a man who simply cannot bear to put the things haunting his mind into words.
‘Ebhoe?’
Keys clattered nearby. Lamplight flickered under a hall door. Ioq was banging at his cell door and growling. Someone was crying, someone else was wailing in a made-up language. The air was ripe with the smell of faeces, sweat and agitated fear.
‘Ebhoe!’
There was no time left. ‘Ebhoe, please!’
‘Valis had the Torment! He’d had it all along, right from the start!’ Ebhoe’s voice was strident and anguished. The words came out of the slit as hard and lethal as las-fire. ‘He had spread it! He! Through his work, his vaccines, his treatments! He had spread the plague! His mind had been corrupted by it, he didn’t know what he was doing! His many, many vaccines had failed because they weren’t vaccines! They were new strains of the Torment bred in his infirmium! He was the carrier: a malevolent, hungry pestilence clothed in the form of a noble man, killing thousands upon thousands upon thousands!’
I went cold. Colder than I’d ever been before. The idea was monstrous. The Torment had been more than a waster of lives, it had been sentient, alive, deliberate… planning and moving through the instrument it had corrupted.
The door of Ioq’s cell was bulging and shattering. Screams welled all around, panic and fear in equal measure. The entire hospice was shaking with unleashed psychoses.
Lamps flashed at the end of the block. Novitiates yelled out and ran forward as they saw me. They would have reached me had not Ioq broken out again, rabid and slavering, throwing his hideous bulk into them, ripping at them in a frenzy.
‘Ebhoe!’ I yelled through the slit. ‘What did you do?’
He was crying, his voice ragged with gut-heaving sobs. ‘I grabbed my flamer! Emperor have mercy, I snatched it up and bathed Valis with flame! I killed him! I killed him! I slew the pride of the Doom Eagles! I burned him apart! I expunged the source of the Torment!’
A novitiate flew past me, his throat ripped out by animal tusks. His colleagues were locked in a desperate struggle with Ioq.
‘You burned
him.’
‘Yes. The flames touched off the chemicals in the infirmium, the sample bottles, the flasks of seething plague water. They exploded. A fireball… Oh gods… brighter than the daylight that had never gone away. Brighter than… fire everywhere… liquid fire… flames around me… all around… oh… oh…’
Bright flashes filled the hall, the loud discharge of a las-weapon.
I stepped back from Ebhoe’s cell door, shaking. Ioq lay dead amid the mangled corpses of three novitiates. Several others, wounded, whimpered on the floor.
Brother Jardone, a laspistol in his bony hand, pushed through the orderlies and ecclesiarchs gathering in the hall, and pointed the weapon at me.
‘I should kill you for this, Sark. How dare you!’
Baptrice stepped forward and took the gun from Jardone. Niro gazed at me in weary disappointment.
‘See to Ebhoe.’ Baptrice told the sisters nearby. They unlocked the cell door and went in.
‘You will leave tomorrow, Sark,’ Baptrice said. ‘I will file a complaint to your superiors.’
‘Do so,’ I said. ‘I never wanted this, but I had to reach the truth. It may be, from what Ebhoe has told me, that a way to fight Uhlren’s Pox is in our reach.’
‘I hope so,’ said Baptrice, gazing bitterly at the carnage in the hall. ‘It has cost enough.’
The novitiates were escorting me back to my room when the sisters brought Ebhoe out. The ordeal of recollection had killed him. I will never forgive myself for that, no matter how many lives on Genovingia we saved. And I will never forget the sight of him, revealed at last in the light.
IX
I LEFT THE next day by launch with Kalibane. No one from the hospice saw me off or even spoke to me. From Math Island, I transmitted my report to Symbalopolis, and from there, astropathically, it lanced through the warp to Lorches.
Was Uhlren’s Pox expunged? Yes, eventually. My work assisted in that. The blood-froth was like the Torment, engineered by the Archenemy, just as sentient. Fifty-two medical officers, sources just like Valis, were executed and incinerated.
I forget how many we lost altogether in the Genovingia group. I forget a lot, these days. My memory is not what it was, and I am thankful for that, at times.
I never forget Ebhoe. I never forget his corpse, wheeled out by the sisters. He had been caught in the infirmium flames on Pirody Polar. Limbless, wizened like a seed-case, he hung in a suspensor chair, kept alive by intravenous drains and sterile sprays. A ragged, revolting remnant of a man.
He had no eyes. I remember that most clearly of all. The flames had scorched them out.
He had no eyes, and yet he was terrified of the light.
I still believe that memory is the finest faculty we as a species own. But by the Golden Throne, there are things I wish I could never remember again.
LACRYMATA
Storm Constantine
HE BREATHED A steam of stars, each mote of light igniting in his lungs bringing a hot, sweet taste to his tongue. Space, time? What are these trifles?
Solonaetz Di Cavagni, navigator of the Imperial trader ship Dea Brava, coasted the warp tides of neural ecstasy, oblivious of all save his own blistering responses and the guiding scream-light of the astronomican, the Emperor’s own psychic beacon, searing through the heat of Chaos. He and the ship were one; a shining world speeding through the warp, his consciousness the benign god that nourished it.
Real space drop minus fifteen…
Solonaetz realigned consciousness. The warpscreen on the helm just in front of him was pulsing dully, displaying a convulsion of lesser eddies in the immaterium outside; nothing too worrying. He glanced upwards through the translucent plascryst of the navigation blister into an aching tumult of colour and optical noise. This was overlapped by his warp-sight, courtesy of his third eye, a mutation peculiar to navigators, which transmuted the chaotic fluidium of warp space into recognizable symbols. A phantom of his mother’s face gaped inches from the translucent blister, evoking the thought response: ‘Damn, I forgot the call!’ He had meant to send a message back to Terra before the jump into warp space. He knew Laetitia, his mother, fretted during his absence more than she did for any other members of the family. Out of consideration, he always sent brief communications whenever he remembered. Now, some deep shred of guilt within his mind had projected a thought-form into the warp, which was currently scratching disconsolately at the ship itself as if trying to reach him.
Real space drop minus ten…
He felt Dea Brava stir around him as the automatic real space navigational functions prepared to relieve him from duty. She was a witch-queen of the heavens, was Brava, a sleek little strumpet, one of many owned by the affluent Fiddeus merchant family, who for centuries had enjoyed a lucrative franchise from the Administratum. Solonaetz had been working for clan Fiddeus for some time now, following injuries incurred during military service.
He’d warp-piloted the battlecruiser Veil of Hecate (a crueller, less beautiful lady than Dea Brava) for three missions before a hideous accident during what should have been a routine purge of mercantile dissidents had decimated the crew and left Solonaetz little more than a disassembled jumble of bones within a leaking bag of flesh. Mercifully, because of his family’s prestige, he’d immediately received the best of medical attention, thorough reconsecration and a frozen trip home to recuperate.
The healing had been a long, wearing process, and his body still creaked with frissons of old pain occasionally. He comforted himself with the thought that one day the Administratum would accept his reapplication for duty, deciding, at last, his faculties were once more sharp and steady enough to entrust with the welfare of a battlecruiser. Solonaetz, though still mourning the thrill of such commissions, also suspected his yearnings to return to the Imperial fleet were slightly insane. He had a cosy niche within the Fiddeus fleet and the Dea Brava was a dream to work with. Over the three ship’s-time years he’d spent in her company, he had come to appreciate her personality. Her totem was one of recklessness and adventure; perhaps, like himself, she fretted impatiently at being confined to the routine function of cargo carrier.
The phantom of Laetitia lost its hold on the slick surface of the blister and was churned into the amorphous boiling that Dea Brava left in her wake. Solonaetz became aware of physical pain; his neck was playing up again. That was another thing he’d meant to do before entering warp space: consult the medic about this problem. It had not been an easy trip out this time all round. He would not be sorry to get home. One more drop and then… Real space drop minus five…
Solonaetz smiled. The warp portal into real space was a stunner this time. Dea Brava was dwarfed by an incredible apparition in the void ahead: brazen gates miles high, miles wide, encrusted with elaborate carvings. Giant beasts, their heads invisible in a smoke of stars, blew mammoth horns as if to bid the ship farewell with a star-shattering fanfare.
Solonaetz shook his head. Was it his own influence, he wondered, or the psychic, fluidium-bending whim of another navigator bored after a long stint alone? Perhaps the illusion had been spawned by the creative residue of some dazed eldar poet who’d once coasted the warp tides, coaxing dreams to reality. Whatever. Someone, somewhere liked to leave their own signature upon the warp. Three drops back, he’d cruised the ship through a yawning, fang-toothed mouth, whose gullet delivered him into real space near one of the Ministorum administrative worlds. Someone with a sense of humour, maybe?
The inevitable, and thankfully brief, spasm of nausea vibrated through his flesh as Dea Brava left the warp. He couldn’t resist glancing over his shoulder as he pulled his bandana back into place over his third eye. There were no mammoth gates closing behind the ship’s tail; of course not.
JOURNEY COMPLETED. SOLONAETZ touched a sequence of protective runes above his control helm and then lightly laid his fingers against his brow. ‘I thank thee, Lord Emperor, Divine Father of all that lives, for thy endless love that reacheth out to the corners of forever a
nd carries us all, thy children, in safety. Blessings and respect.’ He rubbed his eyes when the prayer of thanks was recited and began to unstrap himself from the navigator’s pod. His neck was singing in agony now. It would have to be seen to before the next warp shift.
Whatever protections Dea Brava might have, Solonaetz was always deeply relieved when they dropped back into real space, even if he never consciously admitted it. Sometimes, the things he saw out there were just too tempting. One sleeptime, he’d had a nightmare about the astronomican suddenly blipping away to nothingness, leaving him alone, without guidance, in a ship screaming blindly into entropy. He’d woken up sweating and pawing the air, his ultimate fear being that his dream self, despite being terrified, had also enjoyed a wild exultation. He had yearned for the final embrace of Chaos. If his subconscious toyed with such sentiments in sleep, Solonaetz was all too aware of how vulnerable he was in the warp.
But then, who wasn’t? He’d seen the burn-outs, shielded by their families, newly released from Ministorum retreats where the priesthood tried to launder the frazzled brains of those who succumbed. It was a risky business he was involved in: his lifeblood.
Solonaetz descended to the walkway leading to the camera recreata, rubbing his neck as he walked. It was always the same, this aftermath: vague depression, insecurity. He knew very well by the time the next warp shift was due he’d be aching to ride the stuff of Chaos once more.
CAPTAIN GRAIAN FIDDEUS was giving in to his usual ritual of inspecting the cargo now they’d dropped back into real space. He was aware that this was slightly neurotic behaviour – Dea Brava herself would know if anything was amiss – but could never talk himself out of doing it. Maybe, with time, his concerns would lessen.
He was a young man and the Brava, one of his family’s smaller vessels, had not long been entrusted into his care. Like Solonaetz, he was eager to return home. There’d been a series of mishaps this trip: an unexpected bout of illness amongst the crew, a near miss with a warp storm near the gate to Hovia Nesta. Problems with the consignment of goods on Phaeton South had caused an irritating delay, thus upsetting the receivers on the following drop. Problems, problems.