Swear to the Throne, my hearing fuzzed out a little bit when she really opened up. She was a little grey-haired stick of a thing – where did that voice come from?
‘Wheel-lift’s missing, mam!’ one of the deckhands called back. Three of them, all top-heavy with muscle-grafts and wearing the green-and-gold headscarves of senior deckhands, were trying to heft a freestanding pulpit along the grand colonnade. There was an iron aquila worked into the front rail, and an arch overhead, made of heavy ship’s chain with the links welded into place, was decked with sculpted islumbine, the leaves worked in etched brass and the blooms in silver. I hated to think how much the thing weighed.
All along the colonnade frantic crews were engaged in last-minute preparations, sweeping, scrubbing, hefting altars and statues into position. From what I’d been able to glean from various cranky and flustered officers, a crowd of pilgrims and clerics had been unable to contain their enthusiasm and started an impromptu parade up and down the colonnade while I was in the library. Mobs of revellers from Far Halt and Nonimax, who do their worship through enormous pageants and carnivals, had poured onto the upper decks in their brightest colours, forming great dancing and shouting columns carrying eagle banners and effigies of the Saint down the centre of the colonnade. By the time they had turned at the portals to the bridge complex and started back they were also carrying over two dozen of their own number, whose devotional ecstasies had peaked early and sent them tottering off their feet, convulsing and shouting. They were borne away on the shoulders of their fellows, whooping and singing in celebration of the divine touch on the shuddering body they were carrying. More than one had apparently pissed themselves, too. I could smell the sharp tang of counterseptic from several knots of crew frantically scrubbing away puddles on the deck. It mixed with the lingering stink of flash-powder from fireworks let off as the parade hit its peak, and the sickly smell of the fire-suppressant gel that had automatically followed. The whole thing sounded utterly delirious. I was delighted to have missed it all.
But it didn’t seem to be the sort of thing to draw a Hagian, whose ayatani priests and imhava pilgrims embraced a more sedate and cerebral kind of piety. Certainly not an esholi, who by all accounts were more reserved still. Sanian, who seemed to still think like an esholi for all her protestations that she wasn’t one any more, had tucked herself away in the library. And Brillin, according to the manifest I’d called up when the disappearance was called in, had appointed himself to Anchorites’ Row. Choosing to spend a multi-week voyage saying prayers outside locked doors and pushing the occasional bowl of gruel through a feeder slot didn’t suggest the sort of man who’d then daub himself in wild colours and dance beneath a paper aquila. It made sense, but it was damned inconvenient. The parade had been my shot at finding somewhere a vanished esholi might fetch up, and now I was back at…
‘Well, WHAT is it doing down THERE?’ Quan was going off at her intendants like a salvo of concussion bombs. ‘The formal procession to the viewing windows begins in an HOUR. Do you have a PLAN for getting all this DONE with only TWO wheel-lifts? Or is someone going to go down to Anchorites’ Row and FETCH it?’
That got my attention. It was tenuous as anything, but it was a connection. Maybe, Throne willing, I wasn’t right back at square one after all.
’I doubt I can shift a pulpit,’ I put in when the little overseer drew in a breath for her next assault, ‘but I’m not too old to push a wheel-lift. May I offer to fetch it for you?’
The Barrekat Faltornae, like a lot of ships that did heavy service for the Ministorum, had cribbed a few features from planet-bound temple buildings over her long life. One of them was an anchorhold, a long street of cells retro-built into a midships compartment one deck up from my usual rounds. The light was poor, the air stale, the feel gloomy and oppressive. When the echoes of the hatch clanging shut behind me had died away, the silence was eerie. I don’t think I’d ever experienced that kind of quiet in my whole time aboard. The anchorhold corridor stretched away from me into the gloom. The cell doors were in the left wall; the right was covered in frescoes, portraits and Ecclesiarchal maxims rendered in ornate calligraphy, sometimes in gold leaf, more often in patches of dark grey utility primer where someone had peeled the gold leaf away. Most of them were difficult to make out in the murk in any event.
As I walked past the endless procession of sealed doors, I wondered what it would be like in those cells, your whole universe bounded by six metal bulkheads barely larger than your outstretched arms, just you and your thoughts and the Emperor watching over you. Did they ever regret it? Want out again? Each door had a quatrefoil window set high up in it, but in every one I passed the inner shutter was pulled down. It could only have been a few minutes but it felt like hours before I finally saw a feeble yellow light up ahead. Just before it ended, the passage’s right wall curved out into a semicircular space lit by a dirty yellow overhead lamp. It was empty of people, but clearly not permanently. Squinting around, I made out two writing lecterns, a food-cart pushed against the far wall and a pair of sleeping pallets. No sign of anyone. This was definitely where Brillin had taken up station before he fetched up in that conduit. Would it be sacrilegious to knock on one of the doors and ask where the other caretaker had gone? Not that they would have any way of knowing. Was I going to have to rummage around in the pallets to look for clues?
‘You!’
I almost jumped clear off the deck, and the only reason I didn’t yell was because my throat closed up with the shock and I started coughing instead. I used that as cover to try and get my nerves under control before I turned around. If whoever owned that gravelly, overused voice had been going to brain me, I told myself, they would have done it without yelling to attract my attention first.
And frankly, if this man had been intent on braining me he probably could have. He was lean, but a hard, wiry, weather-beaten lean, not like the spidery, gangly builds voidborn tend towards. His hands were the first thing I really took in: battered, scarred and callused, the kind I saw on the menials who fought in the swelter-deck barefist circuit in their off shifts. The second thing was his face, the features tightly and angrily bunched, the eyes a startling bright blue-green.
‘Me,’ I said, for want of a better way to stall. He wasn’t in a ship uniform, nor in anything I recognised from any of the Ecclesiarchal contingents we had on board. Dusty dark-red tunic and dusty grey pants and a long jacket. He could have been anyone, from anywhere.
‘Noverin,’ I said, and tapped the rank-badge under my left lapel. ‘Purser’s staff.’ It wasn’t much of a rank to intimidate with but if this ruffian had violence on his mind as well as in his face then hopefully he’d realise there would be consequences to assaulting one of the Barrekat’s own. ‘Who else is working down here?’
‘Me.’ The man folded his arms and I relaxed a little. That wasn’t the posture of a man still intending to kill me with his fists. ‘I’m looking after the cells. The others are… away. Doing their work.’
‘That would be Esholi Brillin and Junior Steward Sahr?’ I’d stopped on the way down to call up the formal crew assignment for the anchorhold. Sahr was the only name on it for this voyage, but it wasn’t a surprise to find she had company here. The Barrekat was flooded with priests and pilgrims, groaning at the seams with them, and plenty of them had simply appointed themselves to jobs on the ship and started doing them. Sanian in the library, Brillin down here along with… this guy. ‘Your name?’
‘Holtch. Gofnar Holtch. With respect.’ Those last two words came out of his mouth like they’d been pulled with pliers.
‘You’re not crew, then, Holtch?’
‘I transferred from the Keres Everhearted in the last intake before we broke warp at Boniface Cardinal,’ he said quickly, as though I were timing him. ‘I boarded that ship at Phantine after service with the Missionaria Galaxia there and at Unida and Anselmo.’
‘Some great victories there,’ I said. ‘Stirring stuff to have been a par
t of, I imagine, even a small one after the fact. Throne be praised.’ He mumbled something without meeting my eyes.
‘Now, I do still have my work to do, humble as it is next to triumphs like those. Do you perchance have a wheel-lift registered to the colonnade deck here? Perhaps one that you used to, oh, bring meals for the anchorites and maybe haven’t had the chance to return yet?’
I watched Holtch shifting from foot to foot, waiting for him to grab one of the easy outs I was giving him. It was his eyes that gave me the answer: he kept glancing at a point behind my shoulder. I turned and peered into the shadows at the end of the passageway.
‘Splendid! You’re done with it? I assured the colonnade crew I’d be back with it directly. They’re expecting me.’
The wheel-lift was sitting right against the very last cell door, pushed in at an untidy angle and its brakes not properly engaged. The charge light was still green, though, and the motor hummed beautifully when I bowed to the little cog icon between the handgrips and thumbed the activation rune. There was a faint but unpleasant smell to the air back here, and I wondered if Holtch or one of his comrades had been caught short and nipped back into the shadows rather than slog down the passageway and back.
I was out of practice with steering a wheel-lift, and the sudden anxiety about what I might be treading in didn’t help, but eventually I manoeuvred the bloody thing out of the doorway and pointed it down the passageway.
‘They’ll be so happy to have this back!’ I called to Holtch, now a dim shape lurking by the sleeping pallets. ‘Thank goodness for the beacons, eh? Or we might never have found it!’ Still babbling my relieved thanks and farewells over my shoulder, I sped the lifter up until I was trotting along behind it and made for the hatch. My wish right at that moment was to never have to lock eyes with Gofnar Holtch again for as long as either of us lived.
Funny how things turn out.
‘Do you call this ACCEPTABLE CONDITION?’
Maybe I was still euphoric from that feeling of a narrow escape from the anchorhold but I didn’t let Quan’s voice bowl me over backwards this time.
‘Madam overseer, I may be a little rusty steering one of these things but I am certainly capable enough not to be responsible for that.’
We were in a cul-de-sac towards the aft of the spinal deck, sheltering from the pomp and ceremony that had consumed the main colonnade. Quan and four of her senior crew were all collected in a knot around the wheel-lift, clucking and muttering about the dings in the bright green paint and the scratches in the yellow-and-black bordering tape. Nobody had thanked me for slogging down to that rank little dungeon and fetching it back for them, either.
‘Just so you’re prepared to say this is the shape you brought it back to us in,’ one of the deckhands said over her shoulder. ‘Look, even the wheel rim’s scraped, an’ all! We’re not wearing the blame for this when it goes back.’
‘Back? This isn’t assigned to your crew?’ I hadn’t even bothered to check the assignment code in the thing’s beacon. Down on my deck a wheel-lift with a working beacon was a mythic event on a par with saintly manifestations; I’d forgotten it was even a thing you could do.
’Requisitioned it, aye,’ she said, straightening up with a wince and a hand in the small of her back. ‘And they can’t have it back yet, either, we’re still using it.’
’I wouldn’t have dreamed of suggesting otherwise,’ I said, gesturing behind me. The boisterous din of that first impromptu revel was gone, replaced by the slow, sonorous pageantry of the formal Ecclesiarchal processions. Every priestly delegation was one moving part in a scrupulously choreographed, agonisingly slow and courtly dance. They crept along the colonnade in formations laid out to preserve the tiniest nuances of seniority and deference, and arranged themselves in front of viewing windows allocated through fierce diplomatic haggling more than a year before the voyage even began. They had first begun while I was down in the anchorhold but they would be going for hours yet. The Barrekat was the first ship to make this voyage since His brave soldiers had pushed the Archenemy far enough back for the trip to be safe; this was the first time in living memory a pilgrim ship had been able to reach the right point in space to see the Visage in all its perfection. Nobody wanted to go home and tell their bishop or eparch or abbess that they hadn’t rated a place in the first viewing.
‘Mister Noverin.’
The tired, tinny voice had us all looking around in mild surprise. It was Quan’s intendant, an indentured rating with the distinctive red-and-black metal harness clamped over his mouth and ears through which he spoke with the Barrekat’s Dispatch and Logistics command, buried beneath the bridge tower. He was the one who’d asked for the beacon-call that had found the vanished wheel-lift.
’Mister Noverin, you are the subject of a Dispatch and Logistics summons. Please check in.’
‘Originator?’ All I could think of was that Yebrett had finally got fed up of my chasing a vanished passenger around the upper decks and wanted me back down in my place.
‘Deck-clerk Mowle. Header: About the conduit. Remainder of message for direct transmission, eyes/ears. Shall I acknowledge?’
’Thank you. Uh…’ I looked around, ignoring the curious stares of the crew. Direct D&L missives were hard to wrangle – whoever heard of a deck clerk being granted one to page a junior purser? Now I just needed to find somewhere I could take the damn thing. And then I thought of a place.
‘Acknowledge and note that I’m en route to the crew station in the library. I’ll take receipt of the full message there.’
The intendant’s head and eyelids drooped and muttering and crackling sounds trickled out of the harness grille. I sighed. Suddenly the slog back to the library felt like a lot further than it was. I’d been on my feet too long today.
‘As you’re heading that way,’ Quan barked from behind me, ‘perhaps you’ll consider returning their JUNK?’
‘Their what?’
She was pointing to something stuffed in the little carrier basket under the wheel-lift’s steering grips, something I hadn’t registered was there. A book. A smallish one, but beautifully made, the hard covers bound in creamy-white cloth, the fittings of brass and leather. It was locked with a bulbous clasp I recognised straight away. I’ve never seen a Hagian chelon, but there’s not a soul in the Sabbat Worlds who doesn’t recognise the design of its shell. One of the tokens of the Saint.
Not just a book. One of the sacred books.
And hanging from its spine…
I grabbed the book with both hands and strode off, leaving Quan and her crew behind.
‘You didn’t tell me that books, sanctified books, had been stolen from the library.’
‘I didn’t know!’ Sanian was staring wide-eyed at the book I was holding up. We could both see the stub of brass chain hanging off the spine that had held the text to its shelf. It had been crudely hacked through with some kind of double-bladed cutter. Cable-shears, if I were any judge, and I was because every crew member on the lower decks had at least a couple of sets of them in their locker. I knew the marks.
‘How? How did you not know, Madam Sanian? This isn’t just… whatever these things are!’ I swung my arm around at the scroll racks that lined the bay we were standing in. ‘This is the Doctrines and Revelations! Part of the Sabbatine creed! What were you doing putting on all those pious airs about coming from Hagia if you come on board my ship and let something like this happen?!’
I might have been getting a bit big for myself with the ‘my ship’ bit, and I would have been for it if Yebrett or someone had been around to hear me. But I was tired, and confused, and getting angrier by the minute. Too many little oddities, little things out of place, that seemed to point to a pattern in front of my nose that danced away from me just when I thought I saw it. And now this. Holding a stolen sacred book in my hands and, I was sure, being lied to about it.
I’m far from the most pious man you’ll ever meet, but come on. It was the gospel of the Sai
nt!
‘Enough shouting!’ came a new voice from just outside the bay.
‘You’re shouting,’ I shot back as the owner of the voice came into view, and then immediately clamped down on my bad temper and started to frame a grovelling apology.
I knew who Curator Tolleon Wymes was, although there was no reason to suppose the reverse applied. The Barrekat had appointed a curator about five years back, when we started taking so many contracts from the Ministorum that we apparently needed a dedicated ward-officer just to manage the relics and icons that the high-paying faithful expected to be surrounded by when they travelled in style. I didn’t recall the name of the original curator, some old mumbler who never came down to our deck, but since he’d taken over the post a year ago Wymes had made several visits to the midships. Each time he’d summon a random couple of dozen low-ranking officers into an assembly room and question and hector them for an hour or more about their devotional habits and whether they were holding on to any consecrated items that were ‘above their station’. This was not a man I wanted knowing my name.
Looking at his face, though, I wondered if he’d remember my name now even if I chanted it at him for the next twenty minutes. Wymes looked stricken. The flesh of his round face was loose and pasty with shock, and his eyes were red-rimmed and staring. His lips were pursed and he was breathing hard. He affected shoulder-length braids on each side of his head but they were pulled askew and fraying now, as if he’d been dragging at them. His forehead gleamed with sweat.
‘May I ask, curator, in the spirit of respect and duty, if you were aware of this?’ I held the book up again as I spoke. Wymes recognised it straight away and I saw his face crease in actual pain at the sight of the severed chain.
‘Theft,’ he said eventually, his voice an exhausted sigh. ‘Blasphemous theft. I heard you before. You were right. That’s no ordinary book. And it’s not the only sacred thing to have been taken.’ He stared at me. ‘Noverin, is it? Good, good. Well done, Noverin, you… Well done.’ He put his hand to his eyes for a moment and actually swayed in place. I wondered uneasily if I’d be in less or worse trouble if he keeled over in front of me.
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