Stand, Adelynn’s voice says, in my head. Until you cannot.
So I do, because I must. Because I want to see my Sister.
‘Where is she?’ I ask.
Lourette’s frown is still in place. ‘The training halls,’ she says.
I blink, surprised. ‘Then, she is healed?’
‘Ashava lives,’ Lourette says, though that is not what I asked, and then she beckons me to follow her.
We leave the quiet and the sanctity of the Vow’s hospitaller ward behind and go out into the ship proper. The Unbroken Vow is ancient. Ironwork shows through the gilding and plaster all along the vaulted corridors. Candles burn in sconces leaving long, overlapping trails of wax to run down and pool and thicken on the deck floor. Cherubim thrum their artificial wings amongst the rafters and iron supports, playing repeated loops of hymnals through their tinny vox-casters. The arterial corridors are long, and made longer by the slowness of my still-waking limbs, and the constant flow of ship’s crew and priests and others of the Orders. Everywhere I go, there are whispers and sideways glances. I catch sight of one of the ship’s crew making the sign of the aquila as I pass, and it takes all of my self-control not to lash out and put him against the wall.
Eventually, we reach the Vow’s training halls. They are vast and vaulted, made to accommodate dozens of Sisters at any one time, but inside Hall Tertius we find only two, standing alone in the middle of the massive space. The first is another Sister Hospitaller, clad this time in the crimson vestments of the Bloody Rose. The other is Ashava. Looking upon her, I understand Lourette’s answer, because my Sister might indeed live, but she is not healed.
Ashava is clad in loose training clothes that are cut short to mid-thigh and shoulder. Both of her legs are encased in brutal wire and steel support frames that catch the candlelight. Long, ridged scars run down the lengths of her arms and her legs, and her skin is marked with fading bruises. Ashava leans heavily on a pair of gnarlwood crutches, limping slowly towards the Sister Hospitaller. The crutches toll against the exposed decking like funerary bells. As we approach across the training hall floor, the Sister Hospitaller turns. Her augmetic eye glows in the dim light.
‘Sister Lourette,’ she says, and then looks at me. Her human eye widens, just a little. That makes me want to lash out, too. ‘Evangeline,’ she says.
Ashava stops limping, but she still does not turn.
‘Melanya,’ Lourette says, in reply. ‘A word, if I may.’
The Sister Hospitaller nods. As she passes Ashava, she puts her hand on my Sister’s shoulder.
‘Keep strong,’ she says to Ashava. ‘All pain must pass.’
I do not know if Melanya is referring to Ashava’s injuries, or to me. The two Sisters Hospitaller leave the training hall, their boots echoing on the deck. The door slides closed behind them with a thud, and only then does Ashava turn to look at me. It is an awkward, unsteady movement. Her crutches toll against the deck again. She locks her eyes with mine. Her scarified face is still and unreadable. For a moment neither of us says a word. I have known Ashava for the better part of a decade. I have fought and trained and prayed with her, but in that moment, I am unsure of what to do.
I am unsure of her.
Ashava limps over to me slowly and stops, less than an arm’s reach away. This close, I can see the way the frames around her legs are secured by pins that go straight into the bones. All that I can think about is how swift she was before, and it makes me want to weep.
‘Sister–’ I begin, but Ashava cuts me short with a sudden and fierce embrace. Her crutches fall against the deck with a clatter. She falls against me a little, too, without them. I hold her up, and hold onto her, and for the first time since waking in the hospitaller’s ward I don’t feel quite so alone, or quite so empty.
‘It is good to see you, Eva,’ she says in her soft, edgeworlds burr.
‘And you, Sister,’ I say, and I mean it.
Then Ashava lets me go, and I stoop down and give her back her crutches. She leans on them anew, and I can see the relief written plainly on her face. Merely standing is agony for her, now.
‘Do you want to rest?’ I ask her.
She shakes her head. ‘As I recall it, Adelynn bade me to stand.’
A small, sad smile finds its way onto my face. ‘Yes, she did.’
‘And Melanya bids me to walk,’ Ashava says. ‘So, let us walk.’
I nod, and together we walk the training hall deck. I slow my pace to match hers. Neither of us acknowledge it.
‘They were set to take my legs,’ Ashava says. ‘To carve me like a kill and replace the broken parts.’ She shakes her head, her face set in a scowl. ‘They said it would be less pain.’
‘And what did you say?’ I ask her, though knowing Ashava I can guess.
‘That it would be kinder to kill me,’ she growls. ‘That I would stand again on flesh and bone or not at all.’
The answer does not surprise me. The world where Ashava was born is far from the galaxy’s heart. Triumph is dominated by a singularly martial understanding of the Faith that sees them raise warriors without peer. Ashava’s people see the body as an extension of the God-Emperor’s will, scars, wounds and weaknesses all. That is their creed, and even after being taken from there and raised in the convents, she has not forgotten it.
‘They could have gone against my wishes,’ she says. ‘But they didn’t.’
‘Do you think that the Canoness intervened?’
Ashava shrugs. ‘Or perhaps they did not wish to take anything more from me.’
‘Perhaps,’ I allow.
We are quiet for a moment then, accompanied only by the rapping of Ashava’s crutches on the deck.
‘The mark,’ she says, after the moment passes. ‘You truly can see the God-Emperor’s sign in it.’
I cannot find words with which to answer her, so I don’t.
‘It troubles you, doesn’t it?’ Ashava asks.
‘The mark does not trouble me. It is everyone else. They watch and whisper and look to me as though I am blessed. As if I am worthy of praise.’
‘Aren’t you?’ Ashava asks. ‘You bear His mark, Eva. You stand where others have fallen, without the aid of cages or crutches or butchery.’
I stop walking, and so does she. I look at the mess that’s left of her.
‘I am sorry, Sister,’ I say. ‘I meant nothing by it.’
‘Neither did I,’ she says. ‘I do not begrudge my injuries. Things are what He shapes them to be, through blade or clay.’
It is another of the Triumphal creeds. One that Ashava has written into her skin in scars.
‘And what of me?’ I ask her, before I can stop myself. ‘What is He shaping me to be?’
Ashava smiles in a patient sort of way, as she often would when we trained. You must be swifter, Eva. Always swifter.
‘Only two can know that,’ she says. ‘You, and Him.’
The door at the far side of the training hall slides open again. I look, expecting to see Lourette and Melanya returning, but the woman who enters the room is clad for war, in ornate black battleplate. A crimson half-cloak stirs at her back like a bloodied shadow, and a gilded longsword is sheathed at her hip. Her face is dominated by a deep, knotted scar that starts at her throat and ends when it reaches her cropped white hair. That alone is enough to tell me who she is, though we have never met. I duck into a shallow bow and Ashava does the same beside me, though it clearly pains her.
Canoness Commander Elivia shakes her head. ‘Please, Sisters,’ she says as she crosses the room to stand before us. Elivia’s voice is warm, and war-torn. ‘We bow for no one save the God-Emperor.’
I know that Ashava smiles at her words without having to look.
‘How may we serve, your grace?’ I ask.
‘That is why I have come,’ she says. ‘I must spe
ak with you, Evangeline.’
I nod my head. ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Though if I may, what is it that you wish to speak of?’
Elivia smiles at me, fractionally. It reminds me of a blade’s edge.
‘The matter concerns a sword,’ she says.
I go with Elivia to her quarters, high on the Unbroken Vow’s spine. The room is large and vaulted, like the rest of the Vow, and kept as cold as the stone towers of the convents. It is lit scarcely by tall, slender candles, leaving deep shadows at the edges of the room. The only adornments are the prayer scrolls and the many weapons that hang in rows on the walls. I see fine swords and flails and a massive, star-headed mace.
The far wall of Elivia’s quarters is made up of a dimmed armaglass viewport that looks out over the prow of the ship and the void beyond, allowing starlight in to augment the flicker of the candles. Dozens of warships hang in the blackness, all void-blackened and bull-snouted and bristling with weapons. Some are painted with the white ultima of the Ultramarines. It occurs to me that the Lord Commander could be aboard any one of them at this moment. Arisen. Moving amongst the living. The thought of it is so overwhelming that the ships become difficult to focus on, so I drag my eyes from the viewport and concentrate on the tangible. On what is in front of me.
Canoness Elivia’s quarters are dominated by a large gnarlwood table, laid with maps and star charts and tools for tide-taking. Other than that, there is no furniture at all. Not even a chair. It does not surprise me. From everything that I have heard, the Canoness is not the type to be found in repose.
I stand and I wait for her to speak as she makes her way to the weapons hanging on the walls. Elivia puts her armoured fingertips to each blade in turn as if she is checking their quality.
‘You and Ashava are to be taken into my commandery, as are the other survivors of Palatine Helia’s Mission,’ she says bluntly.
My heart skips at the word survivors.
‘If I may, Canoness, how many others survived the incursion?’
Elivia nods. She still isn’t looking at me, but at the swords. ‘At the time of the incursion, there were over five thousand serving Sisters at the Convent Sanctorum. More than twenty times that in adjutants, auxiliaries and serfs.’ She pauses. ‘We cannot be sure, but early estimates suggest that almost half of those defending the convent were lost.’
My heart more than skips, then. It feels as though it stops as I think on all of those losses. On all of those martyr’s deaths.
‘Only six of Helia’s fifty-strong Mission were recovered from the ruins of the eighty-fifth preceptory,’ Elivia continues. ‘That is counting yourself and Ashava.’
‘And the Palatine herself?’
‘Taken unto Him, sword in hand,’ Elivia says, her voice much softer than I would have guessed it could ever be.
I blink. Breathe out.
‘May her blade never dull,’ I say, finishing the old adage.
Elivia nods, before reaching out to take a power sword from the wall. It is beautiful. A slender, double-edged blade with spread wings wrought into the hilt in gold. Elivia weighs it in her hand, nods, and then turns away from the wall of weapons and looks at me.
‘Precious little remains of Helia’s Mission,’ she says. ‘And no Sisters of rank.’
I can see what she is about to say looming large.
No, I think. Not me.
‘Effective immediately, I confer upon you the rank of Sister Superior,’ Elivia says, approaching me with that sword. ‘The survivors will be yours to lead, as well as five Sisters from my own commandery.’
Elivia holds out the sword towards me by the neck of the blade, offering me the hilt.
‘Take up the blade,’ she says. ‘And take up the mantle, under the sight of Saint Katherine, and of the God-Emperor, whose realm is everlasting.’
I want to say no. The word rises up from within me so quickly and urgently that it takes everything I have to stop it from spilling out. I was the youngest of my Sisters, before. The least experienced. The one who was trained and taught. I was the dawning bird. I do not seek progression, nor do I want it. I am not ready. But Elivia is not asking me what I want, and this is not an offer to be refused. It is a duty, so I push down my doubts and the word no and I answer how I am expected to.
‘Under their sight,’ I say, and I reach out and take the sword from her. The blade catches in the starlight from the viewport, illuminating the words engraved along the blade’s length.
Inventi sumus in fide.
In faith, we are found.
With the sword granted, Elivia turns away from me and crosses to the opposite side of the gnarlwood table. Under other circumstances, the rite would have been much grander. There would have been readings and hymnals and praises sung, but this quieter method fits what I know about Elivia as much as the lack of places to sit does. I was always told that she is abrupt and direct, and that ceremony irks her. It is a strange thing, for someone raised amongst the Orders. We are surrounded for our entire lives by ceremony of one kind or another.
‘Ophelia VII is as good as recaptured,’ Elivia says, reaching out and tracing her armoured fingers over the maps before her. ‘The Lord Commander’s crusade will soon move on.’
I take a few steps forwards and join her at the table, the sword heavy in my hand. My sword. The maps chart a multitude of systems and pathways from across the God-Emperor’s domain. I see the Armageddon system. Badab, and Tallarn. At the heart of the largest of the charts, Holy Terra is wrought in gold leaf. But it is not just our worlds and fiefdoms that I see. Every one of Elivia’s maps has been amended and revised. I see Cadia, blotted out in red. Great warp storms, wrought in ink, and across all of Elivia’s charts and maps a vast, red scar that touches everything in one way or another.
The Cicatrix Maledictum. The Great Rift.
‘Where will the crusade go?’ I ask, because I would not know where to begin.
‘To the galaxy’s edge,’ Elivia says. ‘To liberate more worlds as it did our home.’
Her words run fingers down my spine, because this might look to be our darkest hour on maps and charts, but even so, it is a time of miracles. True miracles, like the Lord Commander, returned. The need to fight sets a fire inside me.
‘And we will accompany it,’ I say.
Elivia lifts her fingertips from the map. Her battleplate hums discontentedly.
‘No,’ she says. ‘We will not.’
Elivia’s response is like being struck. I cannot help but ask, ‘Why?’
Elivia picks up a slim roll of parchment marked with the seal of the open eye. ‘Because we have received an astropathic communication from the Convent Prioris on Terra,’ she says. ‘The message was sent months ago. It was delayed by the opening of the Great Rift. Distorted by distance, and by the storms. It killed half of our choir just to hear it, but they divined the meaning nonetheless.’
Dread grows large in my chest.
‘What did it say, your grace?’ I ask.
‘That the Shield of Saint Katherine has been lost beyond the Great Rift,’ Elivia says.
All in an instant, I am consumed by my dream. By the fire and the question, and the gold and steel face of the shield.
‘I dreamt of it,’ I say, before I can stop myself. ‘In the hospitaller’s ward, as I healed.’
I expect Elivia to challenge me, or at least to frown, but instead she surprises me by smiling her blade’s-edge smile.
‘And so we come to the second part of the message,’ she says, unrolling the parchment and passing it to me. It is spattered with ink, written in violent, instinctive scrawl by several different hands.
‘The Shield rests where the light began,’ I say, reading from the parchment. ‘In the space between spaces. It will bestow itself upon a worthy soul. One who was burned, but not butchered. Spared by Him.’
I pause, because I cannot bring myself to say the words. Cannot bear to see them, bound there in ink. It is worse than the whispers. Worse even than the crewman and his holy sign.
‘It will bestow itself upon she who bears the mark of His favour,’ Elivia says, finishing the message for me as the parchment starts to tremble in time with my hands.
‘This cannot be,’ I say.
‘This message comes from Terra, Evangeline,’ Elivia says. ‘From those who see the furthest and the most clearly. They cannot be wrong.’
‘But the Rift could have distorted the message, as well as delayed it.’
‘I thought the same, at first,’ Elivia says. ‘But the message has been ratified by every choir within the flotilla. Even the astropaths in service to the Lord Commander heard it.’
My scars burn all over again. I have to fight the urge to put my hands to my face. If accepting the sword felt heavy, then this feels crushing.
Suffocating.
‘It cannot be me,’ I say.
‘It can be no one else,’ Elivia replies. ‘Burned, but not butchered. Spared by Him. The mark. The dream you had. It can only be you.’
I blink, still struggling to breathe. ‘But I do not know where the Shield lies.’
Elivia smiles. ‘The answer will come to you in time,’ she says. ‘The God-Emperor chose you, Evangeline.’
I cannot dispute that. I will not, no matter how hollow I might feel. So instead I roll the parchment slowly, put it back on the table and ask the only question that is appropriate to ask.
‘What happens now?’
‘We break with the fleet and set sail for the Throneworld as fast as the tides can take us,’ Elivia says. ‘Once there, we will meet with the cardinals senior for our duty to be blessed. We will pray for guidance. Resupply and prepare the Vow for the test to come. Then you will lead us to the Shield.’
On any other day, my heart would sing joy at the notion of standing on the Throneworld, under His skies. But not today. Today, all that I can think about is the sword at my hip. The great red scar that has taken so much from me, and those echoing words from the dream.
Heart & Soul - James Swallow Page 6