SABBAT WAR

by Edited by Dan Abnett

  And I was grateful they thought to bring lamps. Even with an armed and visored warden on each side of me I didn’t like the walk back into that deep gloom at the far end of the anchorhold. Emperor willing, I never wanted to set foot in it again after today.

  The lamps shed a cold green-white light that made everything look dead and bilious. Our shadows jumped and lurched against the walls around us. The little living area looked just as it had when I had first come down here. There was no sign of Holtch, let alone Brillin or Sahr. I could still smell that faint stink in the air as I crouched down at the very last cell door. The doorframe was scraped, scuffed and battered, as I’d been sure it would be. I could see traces of green paint and black-and-yellow tape. Wheel-lifts are a bastard to steer if you don’t have practice with them, every menial decker knew that. Like, say, if someone who’s never used one before steals one from a work crew to move their stolen goods in.

  ‘This one,’ I said over my shoulder into the glare of the lamps. Nobody volunteered to come and be the one to open the door, so I squared my shoulders, yanked the locking lever back and swung it wide.

  Everyone else was standing well back, the cowards, so I was the one who got the full blast of the stink. I back-pedalled until I hit the far wall of the passage, sleeve over my mouth and nose. It wasn’t just the excrement I thought I’d smelled before. It was the sweet, meaty stink of a rotting body.

  The good news was that there was no chance of anyone lying in wait in there to jump me, not in that filthy fug. The bad news was that meant I had to go back in.

  The good news was that I’d been right.

  I had no idea how anchorite cells were traditionally furnished, but I was pretty sure that piles of pack-boxes weren’t usual. Holy books and icons made more sense, but I didn’t think they’d be scattered and trampled all over the floor. And, of course, there were the corpses.

  ‘I suppose that’s your missing esholi,’ Yebrett said at my side. I nodded, impressed he could draw in enough of that reeking air to speak normally. Brillin’s body was slumped against the cell’s right-hand wall, a crater where his left eye should have been. The body had been in here a while, and it was visibly decaying. That was where most of the stink was coming from.

  The second one was a bit more of a surprise.

  Gofnar Holtch lay full length on the floor, just his head propped against a small carton of fake pipe islumbine garlands, still wearing a startled expression. He’d been shot like the anchorite, neatly above and between the eyes, and as with Brillin there was no exit wound. Frangible ceramics again. They unpack into a cloud of fibres after they punch into flesh, liquefy whatever they pass through and never burst out the other side. As I’d pointed out to Yebrett when all this started, only the wardens carried weapons that could fire them.

  The warden’s weapon that had fired these was lying on the floor by Holtch’s hand. I didn’t doubt that we’d find three rounds gone from it. Maybe four, if Attendant Sahr had died the same way.

  I became aware of the rumble of machines as someone got the ventilators for the passageway into a higher gear. The new air circulating in was stuffy but not chokingly foul, and Yebrett, Mowle and I moved forward to the cell again with a warden right behind us. So we all got to see the worst part of it all at the same time. I had begun to have suspicions about what the sacred materials stolen from the library had been destined for, but being sort-of-kind-of prepared didn’t make it any easier. I could only really take it in in glances. The scrolls soaked in urine. The icons propped against the crates, the eyes of the Emperor and His saints gouged out with a knife-point and leering grotesques painted across their faces in what looked like blood. The parchment streamers bearing scriptures and psalms now scrawled over with some barbarous calligraphy and strange semi-geometrical patterns that made me avert my eyes.

  ‘Holtch wasn’t a real pilgrim,’ I told Yebrett. ‘You know, in case you were still wondering. I asked him if he was crew and he rattled off a potted travel history for me. Too much information and too quick and pat a delivery. So he was hiding something. I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly where he did come from.’

  ‘Filth,’ Yebrett said.

  ‘I know. Trust me, I breathed in more of it than you did. Once we’re done I’ll send a clean–’

  ‘No. Filth. Filth! Traitorous, blasphemous filth.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Utter blasphemy. Traitorous? Only if he were once loyal, surely? Technically? And, you know, I don’t reckon he was. I don’t think this is a loyal son of the Throne who fell into madness. Look.’ I leaned forward to inspect the corpse. ‘Those scars across his palms, you can see them from here. They don’t look accidental. The stories say the Archenemy’s slaves feel compelled to mark themselves in some way, even the spies. I suppose someone more senior than us will know what to make of it.’

  ‘Looks like madness to me,’ Yebrett grunted, and Mowle nodded her agreement. ‘What thinking mind does this?’

  ‘One that knows the exact value of what it’s doing,’ I said. ‘You’ve read the same tracts I have, sir. We’ve listened to the same sermons. The Archenemy, the darkness that nourishes it, it’s not just some blind force of nature, is it? It’s not gravity. It has intent. It’s gravity, but capable of malice. Gravity that wants to toy with you before it pulls you down and smashes you into a planet. Gravity that knows exactly what it’s doing when it pulls your child down off a ladder and breaks them in front of you, and rejoices in it because it means so much more than just clashing giant rocks together in deep space.’

  ‘That’s a good one, sir,’ Mowle said. ‘You ought to be a preacher.’

  ‘In context, Mowle, I shall take that as a compliment. Thank you. Where was I?’ I glanced back into the cell, but it wasn’t long before I had to look away again. ‘Holtch wasn’t some broken-headed madman just lashing out. He was stealing the holiest items he could find, the things that carry our weight of faith. The holier the item, the more powerful the blasphemy when it’s defiled. Can you think of holier objects than the ones we brought here to be carried out and blessed in the light of the Visage? Can you think of a more potent act of defilement than to take them out of the light of the Throne and bury them in witch-filth?’

  ‘Until it caught up with him,’ Yebrett said with satisfaction. ‘Pity you couldn’t have caught him before he did quite so much damage, Noverin, but it’s over now. The blaspheming turd dead by his own hand. There must have been a little spark of decency left in him after all.’

  ‘With respect, sir, I’m not sure the evidence at hand points to quite that conclusion.’

  ‘Noverin! You’re veering perilously close to spoiling my appetite again!’

  ‘For which I apologise, Mister Yebrett, but it perishes in a good cause. We have to see through the delusions the Archenemy places in our way.’ I tilted my head towards the cell door. ‘Even ones as hasty and clumsy as this one. I’m sorry, sir, but there’s no way Holtch shot himself. The gun’s lying at his feet, not in his hand. There’s no scorching on his head around the bullet hole, which there would have to be at the range the shot would have gone off at. As with his crimes, so with his death. He couldn’t have managed alone. He had help.’

  I looked past Yebrett, past the doctor and the wardens, to the gowned figure that was standing stock-still in the middle of the passageway behind them.

  ‘Didn’t he, Wymes?’

  The curator didn’t answer. He didn’t twitch a muscle. I was too far away to see for sure but I don’t believe he was even able to blink.

  What was weird was his face. The cadaverous green-white lamplight didn’t do his already pale complexion any favours, but that gutted, grieving expression that had so disturbed me in the library was gone. His mouth was hanging slightly open, and he closed it. If he had made a single move that had looked to me like going for a weapon I would have shouted to the wardens to gun him down, lines of command be damned, but he just hung his hands by his sides and stared at me.

  Fina
lly, weirdest of all, he smiled. Tears began to glint on his cheeks. He sank to his knees and closed his eyes.

  And didn’t speak a word, so I kept speaking for him.

  ‘I could buy Holtch getting onto the ship. The nobles and the high priests might all have been vouched for, but the pilgrims came mobbing on board by the brigade. A halfway clever and all-the-way determined enemy would have been able to ride the waves in and hide himself away in any number of places. The Barrekat’s a big ship. Bustle in somewhere and make yourself useful and people aren’t going to ask too many questions, even when there’s a war on and they know they really should. It’s kind of frightening when you think about it. Sorry, Mister Yebrett, I probably shouldn’t be admitting this in front of you, but it’s true.’

  ‘You think it’s bad down at the deck crew level?’ Yebrett snorted. ‘I can tell you stories from the wardroom that’d curl your hair.’

  I would have time to think back and be retroactively stunned by that little bit of candour plenty of times after that day, but for now I kept going. I could feel the whole thing, the whole crime, balanced perfectly in my mind, everything making sense. I needed to get it out of my head and into these others before I lost my grip on it and the whole thing collapsed back into nonsense.

  ‘But he couldn’t have done it all. A self-appointed emptier of anchorite chamberpots isn’t going to be able to push a wheel-lift into the library and start trucking boxes of texts and icons down to his little hidey-hole. He won’t have passage through the upper decks. He’ll get stopped. A man who has the passage – the ship’s curator, for example – can’t do it. He’ll get noticed. The two of you together, though… I suppose we’ll find out how you arranged it, Wymes. I checked the records. I know you were the one who sponsored Holtch’s passage on board. You’d been on board for some time before that. A deep agent, yes? Part of a fifth column that sent Holtch your way? The same people you were going to deliver your defiled holy works to, for whatever unspeakable purpose they had in mind for them? I suppose we’ll find out. Or someone will.’

  Wymes nodded. He was still smiling. He seemed so at peace. I envied him that. My mind was still full of that mad whirling as I tried to keep everything in place long enough to articulate it.

  ‘The anchorhold was such a perfect spot to hide your handiwork until you could smuggle it off the ship. Nobody had any reason to think there was anything in these locked cells apart from the people who were supposed to be in them, praying. Of course, you had to get one of the occupants out and get rid of the body before you began your thefts – and there was another clue that there was more to this than Holtch doing his own wet-work. That conduit was up in the passageway ceiling. Two men could hoist a man’s dead weight up through that hatch, one wouldn’t have had a chance.

  Everything shaped up pretty well after that, didn’t it, Wymes? Holtch doing the muscle work, you using your rank to ease his movements. It must have been annoying when another passenger had the same idea Holtch did, except genuinely rather than as a cover. Poor Esholi Brillin. Came down and started volunteering to help you care for the anchorites. And got shot and dumped into a pit of defilement for his pains.’

  I snapped my fingers and pointed at the cell again.

  ‘That’s another thing to itemise, by the way, sir, while I think of it. I told you those rounds were from a warden’s gun. But they’re available to officers, too, as a matter of tradition, even in posts where they do no fighting. I think you’ll find that the gun in there tracks back to the weapon locker in the curator’s ready room on the high deck. Three rounds missing.

  ‘But even then,’ and I rounded on Wymes again. ‘Even then, you could probably have managed it. Give it a little bit of luck, a bit of calculated nastiness by Holtch, a bit of string-pulling from you. Even if you’ve no other conspirators on board – and we will find out if you have – you might well have got away with it. Except for a great, big, bright, out-of-context problem.’

  ‘Your murderer over there might know what you mean, Noverin, but drop the pantomime.’ Yebrett was trying to appear stern but I could see the light in his eyes. Emperor forgive my vanity, but I loved that I had him hooked.

  ‘He saw her,’ I said simply. The doctor got it immediately, nodded and made the sign of the aquila. Yebrett just scowled at me.

  ‘He went onto the colonnade when the shutters first opened and he saw the Holy Visage.’ Wymes was weeping and nodding so rapidly his brains must have been rattling. ‘After spending who knows how many years as an enemy of the Golden Throne, not just living in enmity but conspiring against it, desecrating its holies right under the noses of its priests… And then he goes out for a walk to the windows, just to keep up appearances, Wymes, am I right? And that was it. A transcendent moment. An honest-to-Throne religious awakening.

  ‘It’s almost a little miracle on its own, isn’t it?’ I asked, turning back to Yebrett. ‘That the Saint should reach out past so many other souls on this ship and choose that one to touch. I think I even know when it happened. I thought that gutted expression you were wearing was just your basic-issue religious fervour. Or maybe a crisis because you hadn’t felt anything when you looked the Saint in the face.’ I felt a twang of bitterness at that, remembering my own little vigil staring out at the inanimate stars, but I turned away from it before it could get a hook into me. ‘But I was seeing a man transformed. She showed you what you were and you finally understood it.’ Wymes had slumped forward until his face was almost on his knees, his shoulders shaking. I sighed. My exhaustion was finally catching up with me. ‘I’d love to know, Wymes. Did you try and talk Holtch around? Did you tell him what you’d experienced? Did you try and get him up to the windows so he could see what you’d seen? Did you kill him when he wouldn’t accept what had happened to you? Or did you just kill him?’

  Wymes sobbed something that I couldn’t understand. I shrugged and turned back to Yebrett.

  ‘If you track the access tickets he requested you should find ones for the decks under that conduit. And there’s bound to be witnesses who put him and Holtch on the colonnade when that lifter was stolen. Oh, and the wheel-lift they were both so hopeless at steering. Look at the marks they left on the cell doorway. You’ll probably find matching ones at the utility lift into the rear of the library. There’s another esholi working there who can probably help you look for them.’

  It didn’t strike me as odd until much later that I still trusted Sanian implicitly, no matter that she’d been working so closely with Wymes. These days, of course, I understand why. Right then, all I could do was sway slightly in place and wonder if I was about to just drop to the deck and fall asleep.

  An arm fell about my shoulders, so heavily that my knees almost folded on me then and there. I looked around into Yebrett’s beaming face.

  ‘Noverin. My dear fellow,’ he said, and leaned in for emphasis. ‘I never doubted you for a second!’

  I finally found her at the windows.

  She had left it right to the last to come out and see. There was less than half an hour left until the shutters were due to close. As I’d left my home decks they’d already started corralling the menials and sealing the compartments. The beautiful concourses and chambers of the upper decks were emptying out and going dark as the toffs and the dignitaries sealed themselves away in their velvet-and-gold staterooms. At least half the other people hurrying back and forth on the high colonnade now were other crew, stewards and shipwardens in the grey hoods and surplices they wore for warp travel, carrying their lanterns and bells.

  She was in one of the forward viewing galleries, the one closest to her library. Most of the lights had been shut off and the last of the devotees were shuffling towards the door, shooed respectfully on by the wardens, twisting and stretching to try to draw out their last ever look at the Visage for as long as they could. Then they were gone and it was just Sanian and me.

  She was sitting in the centre of the curve of windows, cross-legged on the floor. My foo
tsteps sounded very loud to me as I walked up behind her but she did not turn, or give any sign she had heard me. I stood by her for a little while, looking alternately at her and out at the Visage. The stars were still glorious, but they felt no holier to me than when I had last seen them. It was her face that kept drawing my eyes back.

  She was smiling, but I didn’t think she had been smiling for long. Her eyes were red raw and her cheeks wet, and there was a harshness to her breathing that spoke of deep, brutal sobbing not long done. I wondered what the stewards had made of it, but somehow they seemed to not even have realised she was here.

  Finally, awkwardly conscious of the time, I sat down on the floor next to her.

  ‘You found him,’ she said, once I was comfortable.

  ‘That was what I was coming to tell you, yes. The whole thing passes out of my hands now. I don’t expect I’ll be coming up here again. I wanted to let you know what had happened. That and to thank you. You helped me a great deal.’ I was almost whispering, as though we were sitting in the front pew at some great temple, even though I could hear the voices and the rattle of trolleys and compartment doors from outside. Surely any moment now the wardens would see us and march us out.

  ‘We helped each other,’ she said. She still hadn’t turned to look at me. Her eyes were anchored to the Visage. I could see its light reflected in the tears that still stood in them. ‘I was too frightened. I would never have come here by myself. Not without talking to you. You were the one who made it possible. Thank you.’

  It felt strange, hearing her talk like that. I kept wanting… You know, it took me a long while to understand what I wanted. Not the sort of thing old greyhairs like me are supposed to want from beautiful girls half their age. That never crossed my mind. I wanted her to stand up, so that I could fall in behind her. I wanted to follow her and fight for her. Can you imagine that? Skinny old Noverin with his twingey back and delicate digestion, fumbling with a lasgun as he trots off to war? It seems as ridiculous to me now as it did then, even as I was thinking it. But at the same time, something had changed. I could feel it, sitting there with her. Something felt different, and everything felt possible.