by Neil
Scrambling up, Serpilian signalled back towards Hachard, hoping that the Commander could see and would understand his gestures. Then he resumed his reckless run towards the boy who was holding the robot at bay, like a rat defying a bull. He no longer pointed his jokaero needler.
Casting his own aura of protection, Serpilian seized Jomi by the shoulder.
‘In the Emperor’s name, come with me to safety! Come swiftly, Jomi Jabal!’
HACHARD MUST HAVE understood. As soon as Serpilian had hauled the boy to some reasonable remove, and had ducked with him behind a boulder, the las-cannons of the Land Raiders opened fire. Shaft upon shaft of searing energy lanced at the robot. The Space Marine infantry added their contribution. Wounded ogryns scattered, abandoning the remaining groxen which had been preoccupying them.
Had the giants not engaged with the savage reptiles, by now one of those might have attacked Serpilian or the boy…
The robot launched jets of plasma and energy beams. A Land Raider exploded, raining hot shards of plasteel. Several Marines fell victim to beams and jets. The Imperial energies cascaded off the robot’s shields, pluming into the sky, rendering the landscape bright as day.
Yet now the robot seemed confused. It backed. It lumbered. Perhaps the mind within was anguished. Perhaps, infected by Jomi’s vision, it imagined that it had passed safely back through the portal, though the nightmare evidence was otherwise. Perhaps it was running low on energy.
At last an Imperial energy-beam tore loose a weapon arm. Another beam pierced the vulnerable hatch. Part of the robot’s mantle flared and melted. Still firing – but falteringly now, seemingly at random – the great, damaged machine stomped back towards the portal. Land Raider beams focused in unison upon its back, so that it seemed to be propelled in its retreat by a hurricane-torn, white-hot sail woven from the heart of a sun.
As it entered the portal, the robot incandesced blindingly. A detonation as of a dozen simultaneous sonic booms rocked the torn terrain. Glaring fragments of the robot’s carapace flew back like angry boomerangs, like scythes. The bulk of its disintegrating body pitched forward, out of existence, vanishing.
SERPILIAN DEACTIVATED HIS energy armour, and Jomi, smeared with dirt and stinking of sweat, wept in his arms.
‘I shall,’ vowed Serpilian, ‘recommend you for the finest training – as an inquisitor yourself.’
The boy cried, ‘What? What? I can’t hear! Only the awful terrible thunder.’
‘Your hearing will return!’ Serpilian shouted into the boy’s streaked face. ‘If not, that can be repaired with an acoustic amulet! One day you will serve the Emperor as I serve him. I came a long way to find you!’
AFTER A WHILE, Jomi listened to Serpilian’s thoughts instead and began to understand. This cloaked figure had come a long way to find him. Why, so had the voice; so had the mind, and the daemon, in the robot…
Jomi would be sent far away from the wretched moon, to Earth itself. He thought fleetingly of Gretchi; but as the voice itself had suggested, that kind of yearning seemed to have become extremely insignificant.
GROANING, AND RUBBING his head, Grimm ambled back to where the BONEhead lay sprawled; but it was undeniable that Thunderjug’s whole skull, including the riveted battle honours, was missing. The dwarf patted the toppled giant consolingly on the shoulder. ‘Huh!’ he said.
Bilious-hued power armour loomed. Commander Hachard himself stood over the ogryn.
‘I watched him charge,’ said Hachard’s external speaker. ‘The other subhumans remain alive – I think so, by and large – but not their sergeant. The Grief Bringers are… honoured, by his bravery.’ Ponderously, the Space Marine Commander saluted.
What about me? thought Grimm. I nearly got bloomin’ blown to pieces. But he said nothing. It was Thunderjug who was dead.
Bending, assisted by the squat, Hachard dragged the ogryn’s corpse into his powered arms.
As Grimm gazed up at the indigo sky, the stars stared back down at him blindly. The portal had disappeared a while since, yet a tremor seemed to twist the night air, warping the heavens. Or was the distortion due to moisture in his eyes?
MONASTERY OF DEATH
Charles Stross
TENZIG DIDN’T REALIZE what was going on until he viewed the book in the crypt beneath the library, but when he did it began to come clear. And it didn’t make a nice picture.
He was still hunched over the fading screen of the viewer hours later, when the master of the secret arts passed by his booth and touched him on one shoulder with the tip of a finger. Tenzig turned in his seat, then looked up enquiringly. The master beckoned, and Tenzig forced himself to his feet. The world seemed to be spinning around his tired head as he followed the master out of the silence of the scriptorium and into the echoing brightness of the pentagon. The condition of silence was lifted, but even so his lips were too dry for speech. ‘Why?’ he croaked.
The master spared him a brief, enigmatic glance before turning back to the path. ‘White noise,’ he said, gravel crunching beneath his sandals. The day was dry and mild, the clouds overhead masking the starglare into a lambent glow that washed all trace of shadows from the scene, so that they seemed to walk through liquid light.
‘You will join me in my retreat,’ the master said, rubbing his shaven scalp with the heel of one hand, as if the enlightenment of ages required the polishing of flesh. ‘Such things are not… fit for conversation in public. Perhaps some novice, overhearing these matters, might panic. Perhaps the sky might fall…’
Perhaps, perhaps, Tenzig thought. “Perhaps” was the holy word of the order, an admission of doubt in the face of overwhelming probability. The master might equally well say, perhaps not. The facts, as Tenzig saw them, were absolutely terrifying.
The Imperium was returning.
THE MASTER’S RETREAT was high in the north tower of the monastery, one of the oldest buildings in the complex and, indeed, one of the oldest on the planet. Cold-chiselled blocks of stone had been placed atop one another without mortar, their massive weight holding them in position. The clement weather and lack of quakes in this area had allowed them to last for a long time; hundreds of generations of monks had lived, toiled and died beneath the gaze of those high windows.
That was not to say that the retreat was austere. His master had many rooms, floored and walled in polished parm-wood that had achieved a dark, glossy finish through centuries of rubbing. The furniture was of greater antiquity than Tenzig’s ancestry. And it was into this environment that the master of the secret arts led his postulant and offered him hospitality.
‘Please be seated,’ said the master as Tenzig slid shut the screen door behind him and stood, uncertainly, in the portal. A thin smile flitted across the master’s face as he strode over to the window and looked out. With measured movements his eyes scanned the horizon; then, as if satisfied, his fingers rested for a moment on a concealed spot on the window frame. Tenzig stared with fascination as his silhouette shifted: where behind him there had been landscape and sky, now there was only a glowing plane of light.
‘A randomizer,’ his master said, still with that faintly knowing smile. ‘We are safe from eavesdroppers, for the time being.’ He moved to the wooden reading-throne beside the window and sat in it, hands resting on armrests polished black by generations of his predecessors in office. ‘Now, Tenzig. Perhaps you are ready to report to me what you have seen, so that I can convey the joyful tidings to brother abbot?’
Tenzig shifted in his seat. The cushion beneath him felt unnaturally soft after years of meditation on polished wooden floors.
‘I fear that there are scant glad tidings for the master of temporal administration,’ he said hesitantly. ‘As you suggested in your wisdom, I consulted the archives for reference to this ancient body of lore. The old paper archives, the chronicles of the ancients; not the true library. It would appear that at one time the Bodies Secular were visited on a regular basis by an overlord from beyond the sky; while he cl
aimed high office, he claimed that others ranked higher yet than his exalted person. Such taxes as he extracted he took in their name. Insurrectionists were dealt with cruelly, but the last such visit occurred many centuries ago: before the time of the foundation of our order, even before the near stars went out. The texts say little on the matter of the Imperium he claimed to represent, save only what we already know – and that none can stand against such force.’
He fell silent, and the only noise in the retreat was the faint soughing of the north wind outside the walls. The master of the secret arts, those arts upon which the monks had depended for their defence across the centuries, bowed his head in silent contemplation. Tenzig felt fear. If he had caused even the master of the secret arts to despair, a man who possessed such awesome powers that it was whispered that he could cause a leaf to wither by blowing on it, the implications were barely worth considering.
I am a channel, he recited to himself in silence: a stream through which the water of history can flow. I cannot obstruct, I cannot distort, and with the passage of my life I enlarge the channel a little, so that my successors can expand it further. This was the catechism of the Order of the Heavenly Virtues, who defended wisdom in a world so plainly lacking in it – and that branch of the order known as the secret arts, who defended the defenders of wisdom. Tenzig shivered, feeling the roots of his being bend in an unholy tempest of doubt. For if the master could not see a solution, what hope was there for such as he?
The power from beyond the sky would brook no rivals. And, through force of circumstances, the order might almost be one…
The master’s head snapped up, and Tenzig froze before his gaze like a small bird before a snake. Eyes of utter blackness seemed to drill right through his soul. His muscles tensed in reflex and he found himself unable to move.
‘Never think that we are endangered, Postulant Tenzig,’ said the master, mildly. ‘There are no absolutes, even for gods. I have much thinking to do, and little time left. Tell me,’ he added, his hands fiddling with the bulbous armrests, ‘what do we know of the theosophy of those who come from the stars?’
Tenzig blinked. ‘They believe in absolutes,’ he said. ‘Absolute power and absolute evil, and absolute ignorance. They are trapped in the cycle of their own eternal turmoil, and they will subject us to it if they can. They accept only mindless accession to their cant… with which our uncertain dogmas might be—’
‘Stop.’ The master held up his right hand. ‘Your bias is becoming intrusive. Have you learned nothing?’
‘No, master,’ Humbled, Tenzig bowed his head; rueful self-doubt tugged at him. Have I been colouring them with my own daemons, he wondered?
‘The Imperials are undoubtedly inimical to the order,’ pronounced the master, ‘but to act in haste is worse than not to act at all,’ He stood. ‘There will be a concillium of the masters, when brother abbot will make his determination. And then we shall see how to deal with the outsiders,’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps, even with the Imperium, there will be a way.’
JUDIT GLANCED FROM the swirl of stars to the planet through the observation deck window, indescribable thoughts circulating in her head. A billiard-ball of white mist, it was totally featureless from orbit; it reminded her of her home-world, except that Neuss-Four had been grey rather than creamy white, and everyone on it had died shortly after her departure. Her abduction. Recruitment, rather. She grimaced at the recollection and looked back to the globular cluster, shifting her grip on the free-fall grabrail.
The starswarm was magnificent, a diadem of stars that gleamed across half the sky and drowned the Milky Way with its brilliance; but it was the magnificence of a jewelled catacomb. During the Age of Strife, entire suns had disappeared into warp space: the frozen husks of a thousand civilizations drifted between the stars. How this world had escaped was beyond understanding, but now that it had been rediscovered, it would be the job of this mission to purge it of deviationists and mutants, and then install puppet rulers to support the Imperial demands.
‘Another dirtball, eh?’ said Joachim Ahriman, grinning humourlessly at her. He stood behind her, a slim figure clothed entirely in form-fitting blackness, the lightweight armour of a member of the Adeptus Arbites, the order of judges. ‘Just another flyblown wasteland full of nomads, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Possibly not,’ she murmured. ‘When’s the report from the preliminary probe due in?’
‘Shortly,’ Joachim fell silent, also contemplating the world – but from his own perspective of elevated disdain. Joachim considered any world not of the Imperium to be barbaric, its inhabitants barely more than animals. It was a failing, Judit thought. Even barbarians could display sophistication and indirection… which was why they were here. An assassin and a martial priest of the Adeptus Arbites, sent to support the Inquisitor in his reassertion of power over the lost worlds of this cluster, of which Hito was but the seventh in priority.
She pursed her lips as she glanced at him. Why did they have to saddle me with an intolerant fanatic like this? she thought. Surely no one could be this crude? Perhaps it’s an attempt to discredit me…
A tone rang out from the annunciator: Joachim answered it. ‘Yes?’ he said impatiently.
‘This is the Holy Office – we have cleared the preliminary probe. Reports are coming in of an indigenous civilization, some techlore, a native government. Would you care to examine them?’
Joachim snorted, but Judit spoke over his shoulder, ‘I’ll be up shortly.’
‘Tell me if they can talk,’ he called out after her as she went up the tube into the body of the ship. ‘Tell me if they look human!’
She shook her head as she climbed the decks towards the Holy Mission. A government to deal with delicately, and she was going to have to do it saddled with a blunt instrument like Joachim. What kind of bloody mess was he going to make of this one? Then a different thought occurred to her. Perhaps it could be turned to her advantage.
ON LEAVING THE presence of the master, Tenzig returned to his cell. He changed his loose, dark habit for the white woollen surplice of a postulant, then composed himself for meditation.
He was not surprised when, presently, a visitor knocked on his door; moving to open it, he was confronted by a young novice.
‘The abbot would see you,’ he stammered at Tenzig, eyes wide at the prospect of attracting such attention. ‘I am to take you…’
‘Then lead.’
Deep in thought, Tenzig followed the boy through the passages of the monastery, out into the open pentagon at the heart of it, and across to the white tower where brother abbot and his staff controlled the day-to-day destiny of the order.
The burden of foreknowledge was heavy on Tenzig as the novice brought him to a halt outside the wide, thick doors of the tower. The boy stopped and looked up at him. ‘I am not allowed to go any further,’ he said. ‘You are to proceed from here alone.’
Tenzig paused, nonplussed. Presently he grinned. Not waiting to see if the boy would go, he turned to the door and rapped hard on the rough surface with his right hand. Invisible eyes stared at him, and presently the door opened.
‘Postulant Tenzig,’ said the sallow-faced monk behind it, ‘you are bidden enter. May your stay bring honour to the order.’
‘And may its days be long,’ Tenzig replied with an inclination of his head. The door-keeper stepped back, admitting him, and shut the portal. Tenzig looked around, ignoring the strangely fashioned weapon that the monk held loosely. Bare, polished stone and solid black iron: an architecture of war. But of course. The knowledge of the Order of the Heavenly Virtues was its treasure, and during times of trouble the order’s reputation was not always an adequate defence.
‘You are to come this way,’ said the gatekeeper, beckoning Tenzig towards a staircase. They made their way up winding flights of steps and along landings floored in wood that creaked loudly, beneath narrow slots in the ceiling; Tenzig marvelled at how vulnerable the tower was. Presently they arrived in a
surprisingly small room, and the gate-keeper took his leave. In all this time, Tenzig had seen not one other person, but now the door slid open and brother abbot himself entered the room.
‘Tenzig,’ the abbot said, voice grave and totally assured. ‘The master of the secret arts has assured me that you aspire to membership of his branch of the order, and all that that entails – to membership, moreover, with mastery. You know that such rank can only be earned?’
‘I do,’ he replied, throat suddenly dry and tight. The room seemed to be closing in, constricting his chest so that the beat of his heart pressed against the walls themselves.
‘Then know this,’ said the abbot, ‘if you succeed, today, you will achieve just such mastery with glory. But if you fail, far more than this order will revile you. The world will curse your name; legions unborn will suffer for your failure.’ He looked away, a half-amused expression on his face. ‘I have confidence in you, Tenzig. Your master says that it is justified. Will you accept this burden, at risk of your life?’
Tenzig paused, and the room seemed to focus on him with a thunderous silence. ‘I will,’ he heard someone say in the near-distance, and realized that it was himself. The abbot smiled grimly.
‘Good. Then this is how we shall deal with the dragon…’
THE SCRIBE READ from a text that flopped across his lectern like an expired snake, limp but still fanged and deadly. ‘The planet is in a state of intermediate civilization, supported by the presence of records left over from an STC source. Only one continent supports a human population, and there are no nations as such, but a number of warring factions and duchies. A broadly feudal system pertains outside of the religious orders, with homage paid to a ceremonial king by the warlords, who compete for temporal leadership. The tech-records are maintained by a monastery: the Order of the Heavenly Virtues.’
The scribe paused, frowning as if the taste of the words which were to follow were bitter in his mourn. ‘The cult of the Emperor is extinct on this world, if indeed it ever existed here. Two religions coexist; one is a superstitious animism based on the sky and the forces of nature, while the other is a broadly philosophical cult which maintains the monasteries – our scouts, to their credit, were unable to understand the basic tenets of the heresy. The cults are both widely respected and the monastic orders in particular are large and almost as powerful as the warlords – perhaps because they control the supply of advanced goods on this world.’