by John French
Vult strode across the chamber towards the open doors, Talicto and Quadin beside him.
Covenant turned his face away, and looked at Idris. His mouth was set, his eyes hard glitters in a stone face.
‘Talicto,’ he said. ‘I am here for Talicto.’
Idris blinked, and Enna thought she saw her mistress’ skin pale. Then she smiled.
‘You really know how to cause trouble.’
Koleg pulled himself out of the access hatch and onto the landing pad surface. Mag grips in his boots and knees locked him in place. He crouched low, the wind battering him, streams of dust blurring his sight. He waited, his visor pinging as it searched for auspex fields. Nothing had found him; in this murk nothing would. The last of the servitors moved away, and Koleg began to move across the deck like a spider, one limb at a time, as though he were climbing a sheer cliff.
Servitor crew moved amongst the machines, the wind yanking at them as they maglocked their landing gear to the pads. They did not see him. Whatever awareness had been left to them was concerned with nothing but the execution of their duties of maintenance. He moved towards the cluster of gunships and lighters on the far side of the landing pad.
The curtains of dust hid the view of the Reliquary Tower lost above him. Petals of thick armour began to hinge up at the edge of the pads to shield the craft. Koleg watched as the crews withdrew through hatches into the sheltered dark beneath the pad. The wind turned the scene into a streaked picture of shadows. In moments the storm front would hit and stop every shuttle and gunship from taking to the air. For a while, that is. Somewhere, off beyond the wind, the eye of the dry-cyclone would be coming closer, and when it arrived the sky and air above the tower would clear. A good pilot, or a desperate one, could launch at that moment and burn up through the column of spinning air towards the sky above.
The wind found the exposed skin of his neck, and he felt the dust sting like the touch of needles. He observed the sensation as he crawled, noting its texture with emotionless detachment. It, just like what he did, and how he did it, held nothing for him beside cold, inert fact: details of action and reaction, as though the universe he moved through was a mechanism, his actions just the clicking of cogs, its tides of callousness of equal value with the blessings of fortune.
The wind caught his right hand as he released the mag tether on its palm and slammed it down onto the metal plating. Pain snapped up his nerves. He focused and pushed his hand down again, and felt the mag grip attach with a thump. He paused, waiting for his thoughts to settle. For an instant, when the pain had lit his nerves, he had remembered something: a hand, heavy and weighted with rings, lashing across his jaw with casual brutality. The pain had been similar, and with it shock and anger. These last two sensations had made him pause, his mind frozen by the alien touch of emotion. It was not the first time fragments of emotion had surfaced from the flattened sea of his thoughts, but whenever they did it took time for him to process them. And at this moment time was not something he had. He waited for a second, aware that he was exposed, and then began to move again.
He reached the first lighter, slid under its fuselage and began to place the krak charges in a line down its belly. He repeated the process for the gunships which sat on its sides, and then began his crawl back to the partial shelter of a loading hatch at the edge of the pad. He locked himself in place, limbs bound to the metal, just his right hand free, and keyed the detonation control ringing his left wrist. Amber status markers lit in his visor. Time blinked at the corner of his display, seconds and minutes rolling down to zero.
Three
‘Forgive me.’ Severita said the words as her fingers struck the Battle Sister in the neck. The woman staggered, the shout caught in her crushed throat. Another human might have dropped at just that, but this was a Sister of the Adepta Sororitas, a weapon honed by battle and tempered by faith. In their universe weakness did not exist. The Sister raised her bolter, finger pulling the trigger.
Excellent response, thought a part of Severita’s mind. Her skill is a blessing.
She hit the Sister’s trigger hand. Her rigid knuckles stuck the weak point between the armour plates just behind the thumb. Bone shattered. Pain overwhelmed nerve clusters and the Sister’s finger froze on the trigger. Severita saw a flash of shock in the other woman’s eyes in the instant before she whipped an elbow into her temple. It was a cruel thing to have done, a sin against her kind, only possible for someone with years of training and experience. And for someone who knew by experience the vulnerabilities of Sororitas power armour. It was an act only possible by betrayal.
Severita stripped the bolter from the Sister’s hands as she fell. Then she bent and pulled the bolt pistol and spare clips from the pouches. Weapons and clips tucked under her shift, she paused, kneeling above the unconscious Sister for a second. Then she shook herself and rose. She began to jog through the dark.
The corridor was narrow, its walls rough stone, the curve such that the Sister she had attacked had not seen her coming until Severita was within a stride of her. Now that curve made the chance of her running into another guard a distinct possibility. She tried not to think of what she would need to do if that happened. She kept running; someone would find the unconscious Sister soon, and once that happened…
She slowed her pace as she reached a narrow flight of stairs and began to climb. She passed another two Sisters coming the other way, but their eyes marked her without word or challenge, and they passed her without hesitation or comment. They would have memorised the faces of everyone who had entered the shrine, and outcast though she was, they would not stop her; she was bound under the authority of the Inquisition, beyond their judgement or pity.
Beyond their reach for now, Severita reminded herself. Soon matters would be more complicated. At the top of the spiral stairs she found a small door, broke the lock, and squeezed herself through and out onto a narrow ledge. A gulf fell away beside her. Banner-hung walls plunged down to meet a long strip of black and white tiled floor. Statues of Sisters and saints gazed down from the dark stone walls. Benches of black wood ran in tiers to either side of the open floor, their panels snarling with eagles and thorn roses in raised relief. Above her a vaulted ceiling curved beyond a pall of incense smoke. At one end of the chamber were the high doors into the tomb of Saint Aspira; at the opposite end a pillar of red marble rose from the floor. Steps of brass led to its summit. Cages of red coals burned beside it, fuming smoke into the air. Cherub-servitors wheeled above it, scattering blessed water from silver aspergills.
Severita glanced down, pulled the door shut behind her, and began to edge along the ledge until she was the precise distance from the door that she needed to be. She lay flat, body pressed against the cold stone, her stolen weapons set on the ledge above her head. The banners and statuary jutting from the walls would hide her from anyone glancing up from the floor of the chamber, but she would risk no sound or movement until the moment came.
Slowly, silently, she began to listen and to pray.
Most high and Holy God-Emperor… the words filled her mind, just as they always did, and she thought she heard the voice of Palatine Justina, her voice still strong as she spoke the Pleas of Penance through bloody lips and broken teeth.
The sound of hundreds of whispers and footsteps filled her ears as the inquisitors and their servants took their places, half-heard secrets sliding up to her with the smoke of candles. The sound rolled on like the sound of the sea, and she waited, and the words of the unspoken prayer were her tether to the world.
Lead your servant to redemption…
She had never wanted this life, and had never chosen it. That was where the problems had begun, where her sin had begun. The Emperor demanded only that she serve. That was what was ordained. But she had wanted to choose.
Be it through pain…
She could not remember being told that her father had died, just their
hard eyes as they had pulled her away from her nurse.
Be it through fire…
She had learned. She had learned devotion in long years of cold and darkness. She had learned strength from agony. She had learned that her life was service to something greater than herself.
Be it in death, may redemption be your gift to the penitent…
But a secret part of her, a splinter of sin buried deep, had wanted to make a choice, for one moment in her existence, to direct one grain of sand’s time on a path that she chose.
Far beneath where she lay – hidden in the shadows of one of the holiest places she had ever been, her hands resting on weapons of war – the doors to the chamber shut with a rumble of struck iron. The murmur of whispers and movement died, and a voice, its edges rasping with age and damage, spoke.
‘We are gathered in conclave,’ said the voice, the words echoing from the stone walls. ‘May wisdom be heard, and our judgement be true. In the name, and by the will of the Master of Mankind.’
‘By His will,’ whispered Severita, as the words rolled from hundreds of throats.
Magos Glavius-4-Rho would never admit it, but he enjoyed being an apostate in a fortress of holiness. That he and his subordinates and vassals were crucial to the existence of the Reliquary Tower only added to the pleasure of the fact. He knew it was wrong, an indulgence of redundant biological imperatives, but that did not stop him. Every system needed an imperfection if it was real – his was that he liked to record the Adepta Sororitas’ discomfort every time he referred to the shrine’s reactors and field generators as its most holy relics. The fact that the lower half of his face had been a tarnished silver skull for 30.786 years helped him in such circumstances; it meant that they could not tell he was smiling.
Hissing a mist of blessed oil in his wake, he clattered across the gantry above the stacks of sacred machinery. His lower and upper sets of visual sensors rotated in opposite directions around his skull as he moved, taking in the chamber in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view.
Snakes of electro-charge ran up and down the sacred engines, and the air sang with static. Servitors moving amongst the generators bowed low as their implants registered Glavius-4-Rho’s proximity. Their simple signal-inputs blinked in his data sphere. He ignored them; his mind was moving between data feeds from the tower atmospheric sensors, and the ratio of reactor and field output. The values were all within their ordained balance, but he would not leave the machine chambers until the storm had passed and the muster was complete.
He blurted a short loop of redundant code. The Adepta Sororitas called this place a shrine, and bowed to the remains of their dead warrior in the halls above. The true holiness of the tower was not in that box of bones. It was here, singing in the dark under their feet. The tower was a miracle, a finger of stone standing taller than a mountain, unyielding against storm or attack. That miracle began in the machines: gravitic compensators held its root steady as the world shook beneath it; static baffles cloaked its stone skin against Ero’s storms; void shield nodes sheathed it against attack. Without these wonders of charge and field, the tower would be nothing but tumbled blocks and broken statuary. That was divine. That was worth awe.
A sound made him pivot his torso and focus his primary lenses behind him. He stopped. The brass callipers of his legs froze. Data from his auditory and visual sensors buzzed through his mind. A figure stood on the gantry 10.655 metres from him. It was perfectly still. Rags swathed its body and limbs. A mask of coarse fabric covered its face, holes torn for its eyes. Glavius-4-Rho could detect the smell of blood in the air, blood and dust. In the frozen second he noticed the three shards of crystal haloing its right fist, each mounted in a grip of bone and leather. A sub-implant in his head pinged an anomaly code. The figure was cold. Too cold for a living human.
An emotion began to manifest in his thoughts.
Glavius-4-Rho shunted the data to one side. This must be one of the creatures brought by the Inquisition, a rare example of life outside of his experience.
‘Identify/justify/name yourself,’ he growled, from his chest-mounted speaker.
The figure in rags tilted its head to one side, the eyes unblinking.
Glavius-4-Rho felt a tremor in his data sphere. An input had just vanished. He swung his awareness into his connection to the servitors in the generator chamber in time to see nine more inputs vanish. Task trackers read as invalid. Life signs became error tones.
Defence subroutines snapped the mechadendrites on his back into a halo above his shoulders while the organic part of his brain was still processing what was happening. Laser cutters lit with a buzz of blue heat. Nanoseconds flicked past. More and more data-links to servitors and thralls cut out. His leg joints tensed to spring him forward. An alarm signal formed in his mind and began to scream into the tower’s security system. The figure in rags was still watching him.
The alarm signal reached the security system. The first blink of red light flooded the generator chamber. Blast doors began to slam shut. The first note of a siren sounded.
Glavius-4-Rho felt the tower’s systems begin to shift from watching to waking as his limbs reached for the ragged intruder before him.
Something hit him in the back. The deadened nerves of his flesh barely registered the impact. He tried to turn towards the source of the unseen attack, but his body froze as he twisted. Then he was falling, his mechanical limbs tangling as his nerve signals scrambled. The laser cutter tips of his mechadendrites thrashed, scoring the mesh of the gantry. Error code flooded his awareness, scrolling over his sight. His body was not responding to any commands. Exotic venom was flooding his bio-components faster than his cleansing systems could counter. His flesh – the weak, pathetic residue of his humanity – had betrayed him. He was on the floor, trembling, cut off from the sacred metal of his augmetics.
The ragged figure was walking towards him, steps unhurried. Red light blinked through the air in time with the boom of the sirens.
Inside his mind he could see the alarm protocols spread through the tower’s security systems.
That is strange/inconsistent, he thought. The venom that had shut his nerve signals was selective and complex, a beautiful and spiteful blend that his bio-monitors saw unfolding through his flesh like a flower growing from a seed. But somehow the venom had allowed him to stay connected with data systems of both the generators and the tower.
The ragged figure was next to him now, bending down. Its eyes were grey, he noticed, the skin around them cobwebbed with fine wrinkles. A rag-wrapped hand reached out, the tips of the fingers bare. Glavius-4-Rho experienced a stab of panic as he tried to flinch back. The ragged figure touched the magos’ face. For a second there was nothing. Then there was pain. Needles of cold dug into his mind. He screamed into the data connections. Far above him, glow-globes blew out, and now the world was sliced between darkness and the red glare of the alert lights. The pain bored deeper. Glavius-4-Rho felt another mind threading through his consciousness, strangling his will to resist, stealing his thoughts. Ice crusted his silver face.
The cold was inside him, growing, and he could feel his mind shutting down, his thoughts becoming simpler and simpler.
The grey eyes in the ragged mask were still there gazing into him.
Soft static filled Glavius-4-Rho’s data-link. The ragged figure crouching over him tilted his head to the other side and the eyelids inside the mask fluttered for a second.
The signal cracked in the connection. The light of the alerts was a treacle-slow pulse of red, like blood in a sleeping heart. The ragged figur
e twitched, then went still again.
Glavius-4-Rho stood, his machine limbs skidding on the grating, his mechadendrites hanging limp down his back. The ragged figure moved to stand beside him, frost-rimed fingers still resting on the magos’ skull. Glavius-4-Rho began to walk, his steps dragging, his body hanging like a puppet from the ragged figure’s fingers. He could see, but as his eyes touched the crumpled bodies of servitors and thralls his mind did not register anything. Figures in rags stood amongst the dead, their heads turning to watch Glavius-4-Rho pass.
He stopped before the central control altar. Pure black oil burned in lamps hung from chains above it. Exposed cogs, levers and mind-impulse sockets crowded its surfaces. Glavius-4-Rho stared at it blankly. Beside him, the ragged figure closed its eyes.
Glavius-4-Rho lifted a brass and chrome arm as a pocket of memory thawed in his mind. He began to turn dials and push levers.
Somewhere in the generator chamber, cogs began to turn. Sparking power connections pulled apart. Warning lights flicked to amber with no living eyes to see them.
Glavius-4-Rho’s hand kept moving, adjusting, balancing, connecting, as the sacred rituals dictated.
A high-pitched noise rose from the centre of the chamber, cutting against the blare of the sirens.