“Not so far,” Vex said, his voice abstracted, continuing to work the keypad in front of him. “I’ve been attempting to find some reference to archeotech finds matching the artefact we recovered from the Fathomsound, but there are no records in any of the archives I’ve been able to obtain access to.”
“We need more recaf,” Drake said, setting a pot on the stove.
“We need more of everything,” Horst replied. Vorn appeared to have frugal tastes, and hadn’t been expecting so many visitors; after two days here, the meagre supplies they’d found in the kitchen were all but gone.
“I’ll pick something up while I’m out,” Keira said, looking up from checking that the fall of her skirt didn’t reveal the outline of the throwing knife strapped to her left thigh. She’d have another up each sleeve, Horst knew, the loose-fitting blouse concealing the scabbards on her forearms, and would probably be regretting that the local costume didn’t offer her anywhere to hide her sword. She hitched up her skirt to clip the crossbow to the quiver full of quarrels already in place on her right thigh, any lingering Redemptionist scruples about modesty swept away by the dispassionate precision of the professional assassin. Horst averted his eyes politely nonetheless; as he did so, she glanced in his direction, with an expression which in anyone else he would have taken for flirtatious. “Seen anything you’d like? In the market, I mean.”
“Just use your own judgement,” Horst said, then fearing he was sounding too priggish, he added “but don’t forget the recaf. If we run out of that, Danuld might decide to move in with Barda instead.”
“Damn right,” Drake said, infusing the last scrapings of gritty brown powder from the bottom of the can with the water he’d just boiled. Horst suspected that a fair amount of rust had gone into the beverage too, but if Drake could live with that, he certainly could. “I’d move in with Horus himself if he could guarantee me a mug in the morning.”
Keira’s jaw tightened, clearly unhappy with the casual mention of the arch-heretic who’d struck down the Emperor, but controlled the impulse to chide Drake for his irreverence with an effort only Horst, with an arbitrator’s affinity for the subtle cues of body language, had been able to spot.
“Then I’d better do my best to find some,” she said. “Even Horus wouldn’t deserve Danuld as a house guest.” Apparently satisfied that her weapons were invisible, she waved a farewell, and left the flat.
The street outside was bustling, as always, and Keira took a moment to orientate herself, standing in the narrow entranceway to the apartment building. Out of habit she scanned the crowds passing by in both directions, the two flows of humanity interpenetrating with an ease only hivers could match, having grown up dodging their way through uncounted numbers of their fellow citizens. No one seemed to be loitering, observing the doorway, or keeping a covert eye on the building from further down the street. The sidewalk on the far side of the traffic-choked carriageway was harder to check, being obscured every few seconds by thundering lorries or an omnibus packed with manufactoria hands shuttling between hearth and shift, but her training and experience enabled her to discount the possibility of hidden watchers behind the cover they afforded rapidly enough.
It took a while longer to calm her own mind, however. Danuld hadn’t meant anything by his tasteless little joke, she knew, but it rankled nonetheless; then a sudden doubt assailed her. Instead of reacting with righteous anger, as she certainly would have done until recently, she’d let the matter go; she had even responded with an impious witticism of her own.
She was changing, she could feel it, and a sudden, unfamiliar sensation uncomfortably like panic suffused her, rooting her feet to the pavement. All the comforting certainties she lived by were shifting; although that had been happening to some extent ever since Inquisitor Finurbi had taken her away from the crusade in Ambulon, and set her feet on a different path. Bringing the unrighteous to the Emperor’s judgement had always been relatively uncomplicated in the past, though, the holy work enough in itself to justify the moral compromises she’d been forced to make to carry His retribution to those who deserved it, but now the words of the psyker she’d confronted aboard the Misericord rushed back to haunt her: was her faith really flawed, and if it was, were her barely acknowledged feelings for Mordechai to blame?
Taking refuge in the demands of duty, even one as mundane as replacing the dwindling supply of recaf, she slipped easily into the turbulent throng of humanity. Sure-footed as only a graduate of the Collegium Assassinorum could be, she passed through the dance of intersecting bodies as though they were no more substantial than mist; only one passer-by, a local habwife whose red hair stood out in stark contrast to her drab surroundings, actually touched her, brushing past with a reflexive and insincere apology, which she couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge.
There was a small cluster of market stalls in a square a few hundred metres from here, she recalled, in what had apparently once been the ballroom of the palace of some aristocratic family when this district had been at the crest of a spire, towering over the bulk of the main hive. The porticoes surrounding her were encrusted with coats of arms, identifying the long-forgotten owners of mansions long since built above and forgotten, into which the middle-hive workers had seeped as insidiously as the water which now saturated every vertical surface, trickling down to erode the faces of the statues, and shroud everything in a clinging miasma of damp. Now the magnificent rooms were split into smaller apartments, like the one Vorn occupied, or their walls crudely broken through to make way for new thoroughfares.
Halfway to her destination, Keira hesitated. A heavy handcart was rolling along the pavement, a tottering pile of furniture balanced precariously on top, and a family orbiting around it, bickering among themselves in shrill voices while they attempted to keep the load from falling into the gutter by hopeful random shoves at anything which seemed particularly loose. It was a common enough sight in the mid-levels; lodgings were often lost due to structural failure, increases in rent, or the appearance of the owner or their agents in some previously overlooked corner of their holdings with visible weapons and scant sympathy for squatters. A bow wave of displaced pedestrians were moving ahead of the miniature juggernaut, and Keira stepped aside reflexively, unwilling to be caught in the crush or forced into the carriageway.
A pair of double doors stood open to her left, and she took another step inside the building, away from the commotion. It occurred to her that she’d never noticed this particular entrance before, taking it for the front of another apartment house on the few occasions she’d passed it, but the reality of its interior was very different.
Warm candle flames lit the space beyond the narrow hallway she found herself in, casting yellow light across a cloth-shrouded altar, and an icon of Him on Earth mounted above its centre. Keira felt the breath catch in her throat, and made the sign of the aquila as she continued walking into the modest little chapel with no more volition than thistledown on the wind.
“Can I help you, young lady?” The speaker seemed hardly any older than she was, but she let that pass, and nodded anyway. He could only have been in his twenties, straight out of the seminary probably, and his robes seemed as new to the priesthood as their owner; despite his youth his hair was already beginning to thin, and a wispy blond fringe hung over his forehead like a theatre curtain waiting to descend. He was trying to grow a beard, probably in an attempt to give himself an air of gravitas, but it hadn’t taken very well, and clung to his face in patches, like the fragments of mosaic in Vorn’s kitchen.
“I think so, yes,” Keira said, looking back at the icon of the Emperor again, so lost in the wonder of the moment that she barely noticed the crash of falling furniture and the raised voices in the street outside. He had guided her here, she was suddenly certain of it. “I’ve been having doubts. About the right thing to do.”
“Perhaps you should simply trust the Emperor to guide you,” the priest said. “He cares for us all, as a father does for his child
ren.”
“That means he punishes us when we do the wrong thing, though, doesn’t it?” Keira said.
The priest looked troubled for a moment. “I prefer to think he gives us the choice, trusting us to do the right thing, and lets us take the consequences if we don’t,” he said carefully, after pausing just long enough to formulate a sufficiently simple answer to a complex theological question. “If your intentions are pure, He gives you His blessing.”
“That’s just it,” Keira said, feeling a tremendous surge of relief, as she was finally able to put her doubts into words. “I’m not really sure if my intentions are pure anymore.”
“I see,” the priest said, glancing towards a curtained-off recess in the corner. “If you’d feel more comfortable in the confessional, we could always…”
“Here’s perfectly fine,” Keira said, reluctant to leave the benevolent gaze of the man above the altar.
“Good.” A faint air of relief washed over the priest. “Then what seems to be the problem?”
“I work with someone,” Keira said, allowing her clothing to lie for her, and let the priest think she was one of the local labourers. “And, recently, I’ve started to have these feelings about him. Ones I think might be wrong.”
“I see.” The young man looked at her, with what he probably hoped was a grave and understanding expression, but which merely made him look well-meaning and a little simple-minded. Under the circumstances, Keira was happy to settle for that. “Is he married?”
“Throne on Earth, no!” Keira said, so outraged that she forgot for a moment where she was, and who she was speaking to. “What do you take me for?” Her left hand was already dropping to receive the knife up her sleeve, and she checked the motion just in time; killing a priest, particularly on holy ground, would have damned her for eternity without a doubt.
“Nothing at all,” the priest said hastily, then realising how that must have sounded, he shook his head. “I mean, not blameworthy in any way. You’re clearly unmarried yourself.” Round here, it seemed, if you were married, you advertised the fact with a nose stud, although whether that was true of the whole hive, or just this particular district, Keira had no idea. “So if he’s free too, I must confess I don’t really see what the problem is.”
“The problem is, I used to be sure of what the Emperor wanted of me,” Keira said. “Now I’ve started to doubt my own judgement. People rely on me to do the right thing, and I’m not sure I know what that is anymore.”
“I see.” The priest clearly didn’t, but wanted to help, which was something at least. “Have you prayed for guidance?”
“All the time,” Keira said.
“Then Him on Earth will undoubtedly show you the right way to proceed,” the priest replied, manifestly happy to pass the problem on to a far higher, and unassailable, moral authority. He must have sensed Keira’s disappointment, because he added, “After all, He brought you here.”
“Yes,” Keira agreed. “I really think He did.”
“So listen to what He tells you,” the priest advised. Then he smiled, a little wistfully. “But it’s my opinion that love is His gift to us all, if we’re willing to receive it. Or have the courage to take it when it’s offered.”
Keira considered this. If courage was the absence of fear, then she’d proven her possession of it countless times in her short and violent life. But the hesitancy she felt now was completely different from the way she’d felt before going into combat against the Emperor’s enemies. Well, perhaps this was a battle too, against some aspect of herself. The only question was, what kind of a test was she being faced with? The courage to act on the feelings she’d started to experience, or the courage to turn her back on them forever, dedicating herself entirely to the path of destruction?
Fourteen
Hive Tarsus, Scintilla
256.993.M41
“It’s all right, I know him. Let him in.” Greel looked up from behind a plain wooden desk, which had probably been chosen to fit the image he liked to project of a moderately prosperous businessman, with an air of polite curiosity. The only thing spoiling the impression was the hand he kept hidden behind an open drawer, undoubtedly containing a gun. It seemed there were plenty of men like the one he pretended to be in Hive Tarsus, the economic, and, thanks to the presence of the Cathedral of Illumination, spiritual centre of the Scintilla System. On his way here, Kyrlock had passed innumerable offices just like this, every one dealing with the storage, forwarding, or dissemination of the trade goods which flowed through the mercantile hive like blood through a beating heart. Where better for an agent of the Shadow Franchise to base himself, he thought, where his clandestine business would be hidden among uncountable legitimate movements of goods and people?
The thugs who’d been attempting to bar his way fell back at once, except for the groaning one he stepped over as he crossed the threshold, and Kyrlock smiled as he nodded a greeting. “I’ve come about that job you offered me,” he said.
“I assumed as much.” Although it was the first time Kyrlock had been able to see him clearly, in the daylight flooding through the heavily tinted windows, Greel seemed just as much a creature of the shadows as he always had. His hair was indeed grey, although his face was darker than the Secundan had expected, browned by the sun which managed to penetrate even this deeply into the middle hive, and his eyes were a startling blue, like distant lightning. His clothes were blue as well, a pale, pastel shade, which would be better at reflecting the light and heat, cut loosely to facilitate the flow of air around his limbs.
Kyrlock had already known a little about the conditions here before he arrived, as Elyra had spent a fair amount of time on Scintilla in the past, and had taken care to fill him in as best she could on the most important aspects of all the main hives: at least the ones she’d had occasion to visit. Fortunately, one of them had been Tarsus, so he’d landed with some idea of what to expect.
Perhaps because of this, despite the brightness of the sky, which had struck him at once as being so different from the perpetual cloud cover of his home world, and the suffocating heat which had enveloped him the moment he’d set foot on the baking surface of the shuttle pad, Kyrlock felt quite at home here already. He’d discarded the heavy furs he’d been wearing throughout the journey at once, leaving them in the hostel he’d found lodgings at shortly after disembarking, secure in the knowledge that no one here was likely to steal them. What had happened to his fellow passengers, he had no idea, and cared even less; he’d spent a few moments conversing with one of the franchisemen he recognised as having accompanied Greel on his visit to the hold, getting directions to his office, and by the time he’d left the cargo pad where the shuttle had grounded, they’d all disappeared.
Despite its size, and the very different temperature, Hive Tarsus reminded him quite strongly of Icenholm. He hadn’t spent long in the suspended city, but he’d been there long enough for the similarities to be obvious as soon as he’d begun to orientate himself.
Tarsus was a huge tangle of buildings, streets and infrastructure, slung between vertical support columns so vast that, on most worlds, they would have been considered hive spires in their own right. Set in the middle of a baking, inhospitable desert, the further down and deeper inside the complex web of interwoven structures a location was, the more comfortable it felt; so, in contrast to most such communities, the rich and powerful reserved the lowest levels for themselves. Here, in the middle hive, conditions were tolerable enough; but out towards the skin, Kyrlock knew, they grew hellish.
“Here on your own?” Greel asked, his eyes staying on the doorway as his unexpected guest advanced into the room. A faint air of disappointment seemed to hang about him for a moment, as his battered minion finally staggered to his feet and pulled the door closed, with a last, venomous look at the former Guardsman.
“For the moment.” Kyrlock sat in the visitor’s chair in front of the desk without waiting to be invited. He knew Greel’s type well, the
Tumble back home was full of them, although none were quite so successful as the franchiseman appeared to be. The key to dealing with them was not to seem too deferential; any sign of weakness would be pounced on like a tree weasel scenting blood. “Elyra decided to carry on babysitting for a while.”
“I see.” Greel nodded, and poured himself a glass of water from a decanter on his desk. He didn’t offer Kyrlock one, but then the Guardsman hadn’t expected him to. He’d taken the initiative, and now Greel was subtly underlining who was really in charge around here. “And you didn’t.”
“I didn’t get the chance,” Kyrlock said. “Voyle only wanted Elyra.” He wasn’t sure whether the man across the desk knew that he’d been smuggling wyrds, but suspected not; if he was wrong, Greel would probably be able to deduce the reason for the Sanctuary’s interest in his travelling companion. Either way, it wouldn’t make a lot of difference to his story. He shrugged. “The juves have got used to her, I guess.”
“I suppose so,” Greel said, his obvious indifference adding weight to Kyrlock’s assumption that he really had no idea who or what he’d been dealing with.
[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing Page 26