Unholy: Tales of Horror and Woe From the Imperium
Author: J C Stearns; David Annandale; Nick Kyme; Justin D. Hill
Date: 2023-02-09 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Anthologies
Description: A Warhammer Horror Anthology The 41st Millennium is scary enough, but it becomes truly terrifying in these four Warhammer Horror tales. Not even the God-Emperor can protect you as you explore the darkest corners of the grim, dark future. Are your nerves up to it? READ IT BECAUSE It's a chilling collection of Warhammer Horror fiction, where the victims of this vast and lonely galaxy are pushed to their limit. DESCRIPTION Amidst the bloody wars, fanatical cults, and mad tyrants of the Imperium, there lurks a far quieter horror. Valgaast is an entity that compels and corrupts. Darker than the pit
Publisher: Black Library

• TALES OF MHURGHAST •

Book 1: GOTHGHUL HOLLOW

Anna Stephens

Book 2: BRIARDARK

C L Werner

THE VAMPIRE GENEVIEVE

An omnibus by Kim Newman

THE WICKED AND THE DAMNED

A portmanteau novel by Josh Reynolds, Phil Kelly and David Annandale

MALEDICTIONS

An anthology by various authors

INVOCATIONS

An anthology by various authors

ANATHEMAS

An anthology by various authors

THE HARROWED PATHS

An anthology by various authors

THE ACCURSED

An anthology by various authors

THE HOUSE OF NIGHT AND CHAIN

A novel by David Annandale

CASTLE OF BLOOD

A novel by C L Werner

DARK HARVEST

A novel by Josh Reynolds

THE OUBLIETTE

A novel by J C Stearns

SEPULTURUM

A novel by Nick Kyme

THE REVERIE

A novel by Peter Fehervari

THE DEACON OF WOUNDS

A novel by David Annandale

THE BOOKKEEPER’S SKULL

A novel by Justin D Hill

PERDITION’S FLAME

An audio drama by Alec Worley

THE WAY OUT

An audio drama by Rachel Harrison

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Warhammer Horror

Unholy: Tales of Horror and Woe from the Imperium

THE OUBLIETTE by J C Stearns

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

SEPULTURUM by Nick Kyme

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

THE DEACON OF WOUNDS by David Annandale

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

THE BOOKKEEPER’S SKULL by Justin D Hill

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Gothghul Hollow’

A Black Library Imprint
eBook license

A dark bell tolls in the abyss.

It echoes across cold and unforgiving worlds, mourning the fate of humanity. Terror has been unleashed, and every foul creature of the night haunts the shadows. There is naught but evil here. Alien monstrosities drift in tomblike vessels. Watching. Waiting. Ravenous. Baleful magicks whisper in gloom-shrouded forests, spectres scuttle across disquiet minds. From the depths of the void to the blood-soaked earth, diabolic horrors stalk the endless night to feast upon unworthy souls.

Abandon hope. Do not trust to faith. Sacrifices burn on pyres of madness, rotting corpses stir in unquiet graves. Daemonic abominations leer with rictus grins and stare into the eyes of the accursed. And the Ruinous Gods, with indifference, look on.

This is a time of reckoning, where every mortal soul is at the mercy of the things that lurk in the dark. This is the night eternal, the province of monsters and daemons. This is Warhammer Horror. None shall escape damnation.

And so, the bell tolls on.

TO: Adept Stavrophore Weschler

FROM: Adept Dyorak

SUBJECT: Ceocan

Honoured Adept,

Please find appended the report you requested.

Ceocan is a world on the galactic south-east fringes of Segmentum Tempestus. It is an inter-sector system within Sector Ephialtis, a sector primarily of interest for its use to the Adeptus Mechanicus. The system holds three separate asteroid belts, a gas giant, and a halo cloud rich in radioactive material. The resources of this system are of incalculable benefit to the wider Imperium.

The planet of Ceocan, however, isn’t one of those resources.

Officially classified as an ‘agri world,’ Ceocan exhibits a combination of traits which gives the false impression that it might be of some interest to an explorer, historian or investigator. The planet features a wide variety of biomes, each sparsely settled, with population centres invariably tightly arrayed around the production of foodstuffs.

Huge grain fields dominate the temperate areas. Thick, lush orchards yield fresh fruit by the ton. Seaweed and fish are harvested in bulk trawlers. Massive underground caverns produce fungus blooms which can crush an unwary harvester. All of this bounty is harvested by machines which are in turn powered by biofuel harvested from the massive grain fields.

Although the Imperial Tithe is high, the planet’s production is far in excess of their consumption. Even the poorest peasant has more than enough food to live on, and in fact tends to eat healthier, more lavish food than very wealthy hive worlders can boast. The luxury quality of the yields from Ceocan could satisfy the needs of the greediest of paradise worlds.

They don’t, though.

Instead, the food from Ceocan is used to feed the Adeptus Mechanicus crews that mine the asteroid belts, harvest the halo zone, and siphon the gas from Ceocan’s neighbour. The fine salt-encrusted fish, fresh ripe fruit and crisp earthy vegetables are all loaded up into processing hoppers in the Callistonian Haven, an orbital processing facility above the planet, and rendered down into a tasteless beige paste, which is then dried and cut into hand-sized bricks that are sent out to feed the tech-priests, lay servants and skitarii of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

This arrangement is slightly preferable to the alternative (bringing the ration bars for the Adeptus Mechanicus in-system with the empty cargo haulers returning after ferrying the system’s resources back to the galaxy proper), but only just: Magos Logisticos Smythen notes that the Adeptus Mechanicus ran projections and determined it was 2.7% more efficient to gain their food from Ceocan as opposed to having it brought in from off-world.

All further data has been appended. I’m sure you will find the report much like Ceocan itself: small, uninteresting and easily forgotten.

Yours in Service,

Adept Dyorak

CHAPTER 1

The tolling of the church bells was truly breathtaking. Even through her haze of grief, Ashielle could appreciate the labour that had to have gone into the Toll of Mourning for her father.

All across Kostoveim, from cobbled streets to arched, embellished spires, the bells rang out for Governor Ruprekt Matkosen. Every bell in every cathedral, shrine and watchtower across Ceocan pealed at once, each rolling cry sounding perfectly in unison. After each ring, a brief pause followed to let the reverberations fade, to let each citizen of the planet appreciate the profound silence. Then the bells were struck again. Ashielle was grateful to the priests and clergy who had spent so much time coordinating the Toll of Mourning, ensuring that the timing of each ring was perfect as far as her ear could detect. She had never before heard the bells so coordinated. Even at the most sombre of state funerals, as long ago as she could recall, she could always remember hearing one cathedral out of sync. Of course, she’d never attended the funeral of a governor before. Very few of the people living on Ceocan had.

Certainly, none of those massed beyond the gates of the Augusta Korgana, the grand graveyard of the planet’s most venerated dead, had ever seen such a thing. Thousands of citizens had come out to pay their respects. It lifted her spirit to see so many people moved by their loyalty to Ruprekt, that they would face the cold, drizzling rain to stand in solidarity with her family. The noble families, the Adeptus masters, the other dignitaries whose stations and accolades demanded they be admitted inside the gates of the Korgana: they attended to be seen attending. They marched solemnly through the gravestones, cenotaphs and raised sarcophagi, shielded from the chill shower by wide, robust hoods, or beneath engraved and embroidered umbrellas held by numb and shivering servants. They bowed their heads to Ashielle, of course, mouthing platitudes or quoting bits of scripture which were meant to give her comfort. Always, of course, they maintained their dignity and composure, never allowing themselves to act as though this were anything more than a formality.

Beyond the wrought iron fencing, thinly threaded with rose canes, the populace of Kostoveim pressed in, clad in mourning black, their faces daubed with grey ashes. Their emotional displays were raw in their honesty, with many older serfs weeping openly and grasping at the Korgana fences, uncaring hands bloody against the thorns of the roses. When Ruprekt Matkosen’s body was drawn from the hearse, draped in its white shroud and adorned with the golden aquila, Ashielle could hear several voices from the gathered throng of commoners wailing in anguish. Truthfully, she drew more solace from their intense grieving than she did the perfunctory performances of the elite gathered near to her.

She remembered standing in the Korgana Ecclesiastia as a child, when the venerable Deacon Yasoven had passed. The pious had journeyed from all across Ceocan to pay their respects. The crowd hadn’t been half the size of that gathered for Governor Matkosen, but it was the largest state funeral she could recall. Then, as now, the gathered throngs wept and tore at their hair, the intensity of their mourning inversely proportional to their social rank. Ashielle had marvelled at the lives that the aged deacon had touched in his time on Ceocan.

‘He visited no great evil on their homes,’ her father had told her, ‘and placed no burdens upon their shoulders too great for them to bear.’ The planetary governor had seemed so tall and strong to her, as a child. His broad shoulders seemed stout enough to bear the grief of the entire household. Only she and Geordan were permitted to stand close enough to him to see the dampness beneath his eyes.

‘For most of humanity, that is all that is required for the foundation of a great leader. Given enough time, that simple basis can become the foundation of their whole lives.’ Ruprekt had given the slightest of nods then, to the crowd of wailing mourners. ‘After such a tenure as the deacon had, losing him is like waking to discover that a mountain has vanished, or a moon has fallen from the sky. They weep not because they have lost a friend or a loved one – instead they weep because a cornerstone of their world is missing, and now for them everything is uncertain.’ The governor turned his unyielding gaze to his two children, his marble grey eyes boring into them over his thick, bushy moustache. ‘The onus of stability falls to us. In this time of uncertainty, the governor must be the rock upon which the entire planet may anchor themselves. Do you understand?’

The enormity of the responsibility that might one day be hers had borne down on her, then. Geordan had reached out and taken her hand in his when Ruprekt turned away. She remembered smiling up at him, grateful for his support. She wished Geordan could be with her now, for she could use that manner of comfort again. Thinking of her elder brother brought a spike of grief of a different kind, one mixed with shame. His own funeral had been several days prior, and had been far smaller in scale, of course.

Ruprekt’s words had been prescient. If the deacon’s death was akin to the loss of one of Ceocan’s four moons, then Ruprekt’s had been as though the citizens had gazed up at noon and seen the sun explode. When the deacon had gone to the Throne, it had been a shock, but not an unexpected one. Deacon Yasoven had been nearing his fourth century when his body had finally failed. Ruprekt Matkosen had been much greater in importance than the deacon, and there had been no emotional preparation for his passing. The accident had seen to that.

As the bells continued their droning memorial, ringing out one toll for each of the one hundred and twelve years of Ruprekt Matkosen’s life, Ashielle felt a moment of true grief creeping into her throat. Hot tears threatened her eyes. She knew how the assembled crowd felt: Ruprekt should have governed them for decades to come. She was only thirty-three, far younger than anyone had ever thought Ruprekt’s heir would be when they ascended.

The mourners inside the iron barricades did not wail: they whispered. Out of the corners of their mouths and behind delicate fans, Ashielle knew they were murmuring. It wasn’t a sound she could hear; it was a sensation she could feel.

She spied the narrow shoulders of Langreve Oldemeier. He was leaning close – literally rubbing shoulders with Margreve Tianesh Bruisell. They huddled together, he in his jet-black suit with his raven hair, she in a charcoal mourning coat, the lace collar webbed across her throat, looking the very picture of young lovers sharing an umbrella on a rainy day. Ashielle knew better. Before he was the Langreve of his house, Uri Oldemeier had counselled Ashielle’s father to send her away to the schola rather than her brother, Hanrik. Despite her cherubic features and youthful complexion, Lady Bruisell was over one hundred and thirty, and Ashielle had heard her make remarks before, indicating her feelings that no one younger than a century should serve in any real leadership position. From a distance, their closeness could be mistaken for support and comfort in a time of sorrow, but Ashielle knew veteran politicians such as they would be whispering about some political manoeuvring which would benefit them both.

The bells ended, and a dreadful silence washed over the Korgana, drawing Ashielle back to the present. Deacon Phoebian placed a hand on the shroud covering Governor Matkosen. Former Governor Matkosen, Ashielle corrected herself. No one who spoke of Governor Matkosen was referring to her father any longer. Now that honour belonged to her, whether she wished it or not. The aged deacon held one hand out towards her.

Ashielle grabbed Hanrik’s hand and squeezed it for support as she stepped forward. Her brother allowed her to take his hand, but did not return her gesture. He seemed to have no need for her support, and no solace to give to her in return. If the gathered nobles and adepts were reserved, he was positively mechanical. The hooded saints carved in stone looming from the cenotaphs offered more succour than she saw in his unyielding face.

The other nobles she passed on her path to the deacon were no warmer. They had come to the Korgana dutifully, but like her brother, they had no comfort for her. Each of them offered kind words, of course, but not to lift her up or ease her burden. The heads of the planetary organisations, like Magos Crofeld, Adept Sheng and Master Trulanthion, attended because they had an obligation to do so. Like General Zhevan and the deacon herself, they came because they understood that the projection of stability they were obligated to show required them to be seen supporting her in this time of transition. The lesser nobles of the Grevenate offered her their verbal tokens as well, not that they had any desire to support her, either. Each hoped that somehow their paltry attempt at succour would be remembered when they came calling, as if they could buy political favour with a sad expression and a mumbled platitude.

Her servants followed behind her, but she gestured them away, taking a single umbrella from an elderly attendant, who released the handle from her icy fingers with relief. Ashielle held the canopy overhead and walked the final lengths to her father’s open sarcophagus alone. She collapsed the umbrella before kneeling on the prayer bench before the deacon. Let the mourners see her walking in the rain, enduring the cold and the damp for a few moments with no more protection than they had. From the street, she would be easy to pick out. Among the mourners, even those of means and noble bearing, she alone wore white, her pale gown and veil marking her as the head of House Matkosen and sole entrusted governor of Ceocan.

Deacon Phoebian placed her withered hand on Ashielle’s head, muttering whispered scriptures under her breath. In years long past, the spiritual head of the community would preside at state funerals, ritualistically serving as a conduit to pass the divine right of rulership from one liege to another. Now, of course, the action was entirely symbolic. The senior adepts had borne witness to her official ascension weeks ago, within hours of her father’s untimely passing.

Ashielle stood as Deacon Phoebian finished her liturgy, and drew the veil from her face. She let the cold rain wash over her features for a moment, taking a pause to appreciate the gravity of her last moments, symbolic or not, with her father’s presence. Then she placed her veil in Ruprekt’s sarcophagus, draped over his shrouded remains.

She stepped away, and the Ministorum servitors approached. They had the appearance of men, albeit hulking ones, naked save for a black tabard emblazoned with the image of the cathedral. Each wore a bronze mask, wrought in the shape of a bull’s head, to keep the public from seeing their slack-jawed, hollow-eyed visages. To the public they might be mighty, miraculous warriors of the church, but Ashielle knew their sorry nature. She knew, too, that little of human flesh remained to them, mostly pale skin stretched over their corded hydraulic musculature, and a lobotomised brain and spinal cord to coordinate the industrial machinery contained in their frames.

The two servitors lifted the lid of Ruprekt Matkosen’s sarcophagus, adorned with an image of the late lord governor kneeling in piety towards the Grand Cathedral, leaning against a sword, his forehead resting against the pommel. The servitors lowered the lid with a delicacy their forms would not seem to possess.

The sombre thump of the stone lid sliding home echoed in Ashielle’s mind. She would remember it more clearly than the tolling of the bells or the wailing of the mourners. That booming, earthen sound was the end of everything that had come before: there could be no denying now that she was the governor of Ceocan.

They came in ones and twos: the nobles and functionaries wishing her well or expressing a tearful reminder of how close they had felt to the late Governor Matkosen. Most of the words were hollow and meaningless, of course, but she smiled and thanked them nonetheless. More gratifying were the few nobles who seemed genuine in their grief. Paola Gavozny, who had been a fellow scholar at Trenkovi University with her when she had studied Artistic Legacy of Imperial Societies. Liana Chole, the daughter of Greve Chole, who Ruprekt had saved from bankruptcy with a generous loan which had become a gift, had honest tears in her eyes, which nearly moved Ashielle to the same. When the line of mourners finally came to Langreve Evanova, who had attended the capital’s elite schola with Ruprekt and with whom he had shared a fondness for aged amasec and fine Ystrodian cigars, the old man had become choked and unable to form a single word. He had just nodded, gripping Ashielle’s hand tightly, before his wife had put a hand on his shoulder and led him away.

There were a great many people who wished at last to express their condolences to her, now that they had an opportunity to be seen in public doing so. Lesser noble scions, heads of august and aged families, wealthy merchant captains: she knew all of them from years of careful briefings, which had been the subject of her renewed interest over the past few weeks. She knew which ones owed her family favours, which ones lusted for greater power, which ones were bound together by their own bonds of loyalty. So when a small man she did not recognise stepped forward, it was something of a mild surprise.

There were a great many aspects of the management of an entire planet to which Ashielle remained ignorant, and which she anticipated she would have to learn very swiftly in the coming days. Analysis of character was not one of those skills. Ashielle had met men like this before.

He had soft, gentle features and a round, chubby face. His hair was short, his nails clean. His clothes were tidy and neat, tasteful but not sumptuous. His jacket was short, offering no depths in which to conceal a weapon. He was heavier than was fashionable, although not so fat as to elicit comment. In short, every aspect of his being contributed to the general sense that the man presented no threat of any kind. Therefore, she concluded, he was an exceptionally dangerous man. Her father had taught her that only the most malevolent people cultivated such a well-manicured image of innocuousness. The stranger’s tinted, round-framed spectacles hid his eyes entirely behind mirrored lenses, which was perhaps the most damning trait of all. The eyes allowed a glimpse into the soul, and in Ashielle’s opinion, people who concealed them had something inside themselves they wanted to hide from those around them.

‘I don’t believe we’ve met before,’ she said.

‘We have not,’ the man replied. ‘I am Lostrovsky.’

Psycholinguistics had always been a passion of Ashielle’s. The idea that one could, through careful attention to one’s vocabulary and syntax, subconsciously influence actions or attitudes in a listener was an attractive one. There were days when she had her doubts as to the efficacy of its application, but she continued doing so anyway. At the very least, she reasoned, there was no harm in taking an extra moment to choose one’s words carefully.

‘What do you wish of me, Lostrovsky?’

The dangerous little man smiled. He had generous dimples that added to his harmless appearance, and he carefully presented his sad half-smile to show no teeth.

‘Nothing for myself, excellency. Rather, it is my mistress who would speak with you.’

Ashielle was intrigued, but it wouldn’t do to let Lostrovsky know that.

‘Who might your mistress be? One could consider it a grave insult that she doesn’t deign to make her requests of me in person.’

Lostrovsky shook his cropped little head. ‘My mistress is acutely aware of your excellency’s social station,’ he said. ‘She knows it would be improper for a supplicant of noble bearing to approach you on such an occasion. Hence her decision to employ a man of no particular house allegiance for this task.’ He made a humble gesture at his attire, as if to demonstrate his own inoffensiveness, in case she had missed it. ‘However, she did not want to pass up the opportunity to speak with you in this rather informal setting. Were you to seek her out here, in the Korgana, it would merely be a chance meeting at an event you were both attending already. Should she be required to seek you out, her attendance to the palace at Darcarden would certainly attract more notice than the two of you would wish.’

Ashielle had a sinking feeling she knew who Lostrovsky was referring to. Minor nobles made appointments to visit the governor at Darcarden nearly every day. There was only one ruling family whose presence at the governor’s palace would be worthy of comment.

‘Esilia Vaneisen calls a meeting? Now?’ Ashielle fixed Lostrovsky with an icy glare. Lord Ruprekt had mastered the bloodless stare, a skill Ashielle had tried to emulate. She had utilised the technique before, but this was her first time doing so with the authority of the title of governor behind her. She had never been sure if it was the threat that the title carried, or rather the confidence that it imparted, but Ruprekt had been able to chill a supplicant in their tracks with his gaze.

Lostrovsky was no street thug, but he seemed unnerved.

‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘My mistress would never think of compelling your excellency’s appearance in her presence,’ he said, his tone making it clear that he was implying quite the opposite. Even without his practised delivery, she would have known the truth: Vicereine Esilia Vaneisen, coadjutor to the planetary governor, meant for Ashielle to attend her then and there. Better to clear up any misunderstandings about their relationship immediately, before the city could go back to the mundane routines of daily life.

‘So the impropriety might be mine alone?’ Ashielle said. She crossed her arms, fixing the unctuous Lostrovsky with a wicked sneer. ‘I think not. If Esilia wishes to speak with me, then she’ll simply have to take the hit to her pride.’ She made a flicking gesture with one hand. ‘You, on the other hand, should go before I have time to contemplate the audacity it would take not only to attempt to coerce a planetary governor, but to do so on holy ground.’

Lostrovsky bowed, a sheen of sweat visible on his forehead. Good. She hated the notion of ruling like a tyrant, but she was no one’s puppet.

The other dignitaries were less audacious. Most of them repeated the same sort of platitudes they had already given her. A few kept their words perfunctory and light, as though burying her father was just an unpleasant formality, and now they could all move on as if he had never existed. She reasoned that to many of them, he was merely a distant figure, with no more a personal relationship to them than the sun above. So long as the dawn came, she couldn’t blame them for not being as broken as they might have been. Their honesty was refreshing, if anything.

More than a few had gathered around Hanrik. She supposed she couldn’t blame them for that, either. The youngest of the Matkosen children was something of a curiosity, having been sent away at a very early age. For many of those in attendance, it was the first time they’d seen the returned son.

By the time she had made her rounds of the minor nobles vying for her attention, he had been surrounded by a small knot of mourners. Ashielle noted with no small amount of amusement that several of those eager to hear more about the estranged Matkosen child were eligible young women of the minor noble houses. Hanrik’s disinterest was clear to her from a mile away, but several of the sons and daughters of the minor noble houses preened and posed and tittered at his small talk anyway.

‘Governor Ashielle,’ he said when she approached. Ashielle smiled at his stiffness and formality.

‘Arbitrator,’ she replied. ‘Will you be so good as to accompany me back to Darcarden?’

Hanrik paused for a moment, clearly weighing the discomfort of his various options. The two of them had never been close. She had few memories of him. He had always been a private child. With two heirs ahead of him and no valuable allies to be secured with his marriage, the truth was that Hanrik had been a potential danger rather than an asset to Ruprekt Matkosen. She had been too young to remember clearly, but Geordan had told her that their father had spent weeks arguing the issue with the Grevenate. The custom was an archaic one, he’d said, and no longer required or wanted in the governing family. An industrial crisis in the southern provinces had arisen, however, and protecting the lives of his citizens had necessitated every ounce of political capital he could spare. As always, when forced to choose between family and duty, their father had chosen his obligations to his people. Ruprekt had needed to pull many strings to get his youngest son accepted to the schola progenium on Sorinoux, but he had done what was required of him.

‘I would be happy to escort you to the palace,’ he said carefully. His words were chosen cautiously so as to neither exclude nor include the possibility of staying in the palace itself. Ashielle smiled. Perhaps they had more in common than she had previously thought.

‘My lady?’

Ashielle was surprised when she turned to find Esilia Vaneisen behind her.

Many of the wealthy elite of the Imperium used their influence and fortunes to stave off the effects of ageing, often reversing their physical appearance to a visage of youth. Not so with the matriarch of the Vaneisen family. Vicereine Esilia Vaneisen, coadjutor of Ceocan, chose instead to wear her age proudly, as both challenge and threat.

Look here, her steel-grey hair boasted, I have borne the weight of years; I have seen decades of sorrow and treachery. Every furrow on her perpetually scowling face was a campaign ribbon declaring her participation in some deep-seated feud with another dignitary, now humbled and long forgotten. Like many institutions of the Imperium, she might be weathered and weakened by the passage of time, but her resilience had not failed yet, and was not likely to do so in the near future.

‘Will you excuse us?’ Ashielle asked the gathered courtiers. She gave her brother the dignity of a personal dismissal. ‘Hanrik, would you be good enough to wait in the carriage? I’ll be there shortly.’ Her brother frowned, but strode off towards her carriage dutifully, picking his way through the tombstones and mausoleums. The other courtiers, egos stinging, retreated to their various families, leaving the governor and coadjutor alone in the garden.

The Augusta Korgana, like most cemeteries on Ceocan, was laid out not in the neat ranks and rows that predominated on worlds of the Imperium. Instead, the raised headstones and monuments were arrayed along twisting paths that intersected and branched in a maze of loops and spirals. The mourning gardens situated amid the curving paths were oases of respite, where nobles could rest and reflect amid small patches of grave blossoms.

Ashielle seated herself on one of the stone benches, decorated with a bas relief of Saint Symion smiting the unbelievers at Loresk. She folded her hands in her lap and cocked her head. In private audiences between nobles, etiquette demanded that social inferiors spoke first. Among peers, however, the honour of speaking second was passed to the eldest participant. Esilia regarded her, silently. Ashielle recognised the trick for what it was. If she gave into the instincts of a young noblewoman to defer to the matriarch, Esilia would begin both the conversation and their entire professional relationship in a position of authority.

After a moment, the elder woman realised Ashielle had no intention of speaking first.

‘Poor thing,’ Esilia said, feigning a matronly concern. ‘Here I am, waiting for you to speak first. How silly of me to stand on formalities in your time of grief.’

‘Not at all,’ Ashielle said, placing a forgiving hand on Esilia’s arm. ‘I’m grateful for your slip. Why, if I had similarly forgotten myself it might have looked inappropriate. We are, after all, no longer peers.’

Esilia Vaneisen frowned. The elderly matriarch had clearly expected this conversation to go differently. In each of their previous encounters, Ashielle had given way to Esilia, accepting her barbs and her slanders with downcast eyes and accepting nods. In every previous meeting, however, she had been the second heir, not the lord governor.

‘My apologies, my lady.’ Esilia switched tone. ‘The working relationship I developed with your father was so close that there were times when we regarded one another as peers. I forget that we have not yet developed so close a bond. Perhaps when you have been governor for more than a short time, we can build such a rapport.’ Her words were kind but Ashielle knew what she meant: a reminder that she had been a veteran at planetary politics before Ashielle had even been born.

‘I hope that we can build a relationship that close between ourselves,’ Ashielle said, answering Esilia’s lie with one of her own. ‘In time.’ She was cognisant of the eyes upon them. The gravestones, decorated with the winding knotwork and images of Imperial saints, were rarely tall enough to obscure sight, and the lesser nobles that ambled their way through the winding paths of the Augusta Korgana were taking their time, casting surreptitious looks back to the mourning garden. The words between her and Esilia might be private, but everyone was making sure to take note of their conversation, all witnesses eagerly doing their best to discern some clue as to the context of the meeting.

‘Forgive me, my lady.’ Esilia bowed her head as if committing some egregious crime. More egregious than the ones Ashielle knew about, at any rate. ‘I had hoped to broach a sensitive topic. I know it is a rather unfortunate time, but we find ourselves in a rather unfortunate situation.’

Ashielle cocked her head again. ‘Oh?’

‘As my lady may or may not be aware,’ she said, ‘when your own father ascended to the throne, he was already wed, with your brother Geordan already on the way.’ She was on more comfortable ground now, educating a younger noble on events that she had personally witnessed, as if Ashielle couldn’t possibly have heard about the circumstances of her father’s coronation. ‘In fact, the governor’s throne hasn’t been without an heir for over three millennia.’

‘Two,’ corrected Ashielle. ‘You’re referring to the Reformation, when a plague epidemic killed half the nobility. You’re forgetting about the second Great Collapse. Lord Governor Windover died without producing an heir, despite his four successive wives.’ Esilia cleared her throat, but Ashielle continued without pause. ‘Of course, the Matkosens were the coadjutor family at the time, and Sadion Matkosen had a number of heirs. Governorship was transferred to the new ruling family without incident, and the Grevenate elected a new coadjutor from among their number.’ Ashielle’s face brightened. ‘The Netsullens, if I recall correctly, although I believe they married into a wealthier, if genetically stunted, family and changed their name. To Vaneisen, I believe.’

Esilia sat, her face as impassive as the stone angels carved into the mausoleums around them. ‘I believe that’s correct,’ she said. ‘Broadly, at any rate.’

‘The Netsullens had a bit of wealth, and were owed quite a few favours,’ Ashielle said, ‘but they lacked somewhat in prestige, didn’t they? Something about the business they were in?’

Esilia cleared her throat. ‘Quite possibly,’ she said. ‘Waste management has long been considered a disreputable profession, despite the immense value it has, especially on an agri world. For their part, the Vaneisen family had reached an… unfortunate state of being unable to continue their practice of marrying within their own line,’ Esilia said. ‘Too few cousins to keep going, I suppose. Fortunately, in this instance, as is often the case, uniting two noble houses provided the remedy to both their ills.’ She folded her hands in her own lap, and gave Ashielle a serene smile.

Ashielle smiled sweetly. This was the battlefield her father had trained her for. She’d never faced an opponent with as much clout as the Lady Vaneisen before, but she had learned from the best. She paused for a moment, staring at the pale white weeping lilies arrayed around a stone aquila in the centre of the reflecting garden.

‘Why, Esilia, do you imagine the example from your family’s history has some sort of bearing on current events?’ No matter how reasonable the request, she couldn’t afford to let Esilia Vaneisen deal with her on a level playing field. She had to keep the old woman off-balance, treated like a pauper begging for alms.

Lady Vaneisen looked around as if considering whether or not to continue. She had to realise what Lady Matkosen was doing, of course. By refusing to acknowledge what Esilia was implying, she forced the elder noble to spell her request out in ever more explicit, and ever more demeaning, terms.

‘Your father was ever a proponent of stability,’ Lady Vaneisen said finally, ‘and the current situation is anything but stable. As coadjutor, it would be my recommendation that you find a spouse and produce an heir as swiftly as possible.’ Ashielle had to hand it to her rival: framing her power play as part of her duties as coadjutor was a wise manoeuvre, which gave her requests the veneer of respectability.

Ashielle gave a small nod. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘when matters of state permit, that would be one of my first priorities.’ Esilia looked pained, but Ashielle went on. ‘You understand, given the suspicious nature of the accident that claimed both my father and elder brother, the need to reevaluate our security measures before we allow an outside influence into Darcarden.’

The Korgana was beginning to empty. There was no reason to remain in the icy drizzle any longer, and most of the Grevenate families had begun to retreat to their own homes, to pursue their own petty interests.

‘We could, of course, offer our assistance in that regard,’ said Esilia.

‘Oh?’

‘Of course,’ the matriarch said. ‘We have a number of young men who would be suitable matches, I should think.’ She waved a hand and smiled as if they were old friends. ‘Such closeness between the regent and coadjutor families would be good for the political landscape, I believe. Unity is our best course in the wake of such tragedy, don’t you think?’

‘Oh, Esilia,’ said Ashielle, ‘not at all.’

The old woman looked as if she’d been slapped. ‘No?’

Ashielle shook her head and stood. The gesture wasn’t dramatic, but it was enough for anyone looking at their conversation to gather that she had rejected whatever offer had been put before her.

‘I admit to a certain degree of inexperience,’ Ashielle said, ‘although not as much ignorance as you apparently credit me with. It would take a great deal of ignorance, after all, for a house such as mine, with as solidified a reputation for honouring their obligations to the planetary populace, to marry into one such as yours.’

Esilia kept smiling, although her eyes were wide and furious.

‘Providing protection to the flesh peddlers, narcotics traffickers and extortionists of Kostoveim would be bad enough. But the rumours? The strife societies? The famed Black Mask balls your family hosts? And what happens to the… entertainment afterwards? My dear Esilia, even if only a fraction of the stories are true, the perversion would simply be too much to bear.’

She unfolded her umbrella and strode away, leaving Esilia Vaneisen fuming quietly on the stone bench in the graveyard.

CHAPTER 2

‘I expected to see them buried together.’

Ashielle looked up at Hanrik, but her brother was staring out the tinted carriage window at the streets beyond. He’d barely said a word to her since arriving on-planet. He hadn’t even glanced at her since they left the Korgana.

‘Geordan couldn’t be buried in the Augusta Korgana,’ she said. ‘He never reigned as governor. I asked Deacon Phoebian if he could still be interred with our father, as he was the rightful heir, but she was adamant that it was against tradition.’ Hanrik might have been born to the ruling family, but she forgot that he had left so young there would be so many aspects of governance that would be alien to him.

Hanrik didn’t even look at her. At least he’d removed his helmet. Freed from the shaded visor and thick ceramite shielding, his face looked nothing like an arbitrator’s. Hanrik had inherited the same angelic features from their mother that she had, along with her ash blonde hair. His years among the Arbites had hardened his face, however. He had developed Ruprekt’s lantern jaw, and the questing stare of a veteran investigator. Only a small scar to the left of his chin marred his otherwise statuesque features.

‘I’m surprised you didn’t pull strings to get your way,’ he said.

She felt as though she’d been slapped, and the coldness between them intensified. Abusing her position for personal concerns would have been a betrayal of everything Ruprekt had taught them. He had to remember at least that much. Ashielle took a moment to let tempers cool. His words were meant to hurt her, to remind her that he had been sent away on just such an exertion of influence.

‘My relationship with the deacon isn’t strong enough to use for matters of pride,’ she said.

Hanrik looked away from the window finally. ‘Is honouring the dead a matter of pride?’

‘It is,’ she said. ‘The honour we give to the dead is not for their benefit, but that of the living. It marks finality to their lives and gives everyone a clear delineation of new beginnings.’ She shook her head, and deliberately softened her tone. Hanrik was her brother, not a wheedling member of the nobility looking for any sign of weakness to exploit. He’d always been closer to Geordan than he had been to her, or than he had been to Ruprekt. Even if he had no comfort for her, she would still offer what she could to him. ‘Geordan is interred in the family crypt, right beside mother. No dishonour has been done him.’

Hanrik said nothing, but returned his gaze to the window. The grey stone construction of the city rolled by outside. She supposed she couldn’t blame his inattention. Kostoveim’s monolithic buildings offered much to the visiting eye. Judgmental saints and warmasters looked down from their perches in pointed tympana. Facade fittings were narrow and high, drawing the eye ever upwards to vaulted roofs crowned by ridged spires. Grim-faced warriors and double-headed eagles carved in gleaming brass ringed the roof edges, small enough to seem distant, yet large enough that their imposing visages could still be seen from below.

‘There are more people than I remember,’ he said.

She was certain he had no great interest in discussing municipal statistics. It was an awkward comment, intended to fill an even more awkward silence. Ashielle nodded, staring out of her own window and reminding herself that Hanrik had not seen Kostoveim, or any other part of Ceocan, in over twenty years. Most of the satellite cities would be entirely new to him.

‘The population of Kostoveim gets larger every year,’ she said.

‘What do they all do? Their livelihood, I mean?’

It wasn’t like Hanrik to have a great deal of curiosity. She wondered if that was a trait the Arbites had instilled in him, or if he had some ulterior motive. In either event, if it bridged the gap between them, she would be happy to satisfy his interest.

‘The agri-camps are at capacity,’ she said, ‘but we employ all of them that we can. As the population booms, a growing service sector has started springing up. Of course, House Vaneisen is able to employ more of them than we are.’

Hanrik said nothing, but half-turned towards her.

‘The commercial districts they require are built by the Vaneisen holdings. Their leases are paid to Vaneisen landlords, their hab-rises owned by Vaneisen lieutenants. Every few decades, the population strains the city’s resources, requiring a new satellite city to be built. Vaneisen construction, naturally.’

To Ashielle, the imposing grey stone of Kostoveim inspired a mixture of emotions. The towering arches and columns were made of stone from Vaneisen quarries. The serfs of their house had mined the copper and tin to create the bronze reliefs that scrolled across the friezes and up the archivolts. The undeniable solidity of her capital city was a source of great pride, a constant reminder of the unshakeable foundations her dynasty had been built upon. At the same time, each graven saint was an unblinking harbinger of doom, a reminder that the coadjutor watched her at all times for the slightest sign of weakness or disloyalty. All the opulence and strength around her was coin in her enemies’ coffers.

‘It sounds like House Vaneisen’s fortunes continue to increase,’ said Hanrik. Which was the crux of the problem, of course. The more stretched her own house’s resources became, the more value was placed on the commodities the Vaneisens controlled.

‘So it would appear,’ Ashielle said. ‘And now, an unprecedented elimination in the line of succession. Why, if I had been taking that journey with them, then the only member of the family left would be you.’

Her brother sighed and turned back to her. For the first time, he seemed truly engaged.

‘My own oaths to the Adeptus Arbites would preclude me accepting the throne,’ he said. ‘But you knew that, just as, presumably, the Vaneisens do.’ He nodded, running the facts through in his mind. ‘You believe the carriage accident was intentional?’

Ashielle nodded. ‘The investigation is ongoing, but yes, yes I do. It’s not as though ascension through assassination is unheard of.’

Assassination had been a concern. The thought suddenly struck her that the people passing by outside the window had not grown up with hired murderers as an ever-present threat in their lives. None of them had been forced to wait on a bench, hands folded in lap, while melta bomb sweepers cleared the garden before they were allowed to play outside. None of them had ever had a meal suddenly swept away because a taster-servitor had tripped a secondary warning, nor had they sat trying desperately to maintain their composure while the household waited to find out if the servitor’s chem-analysers had returned a false positive or not. Unlike her, it was unlikely a single one of them had spent their sixteenth birthday lying in a medicae, having all of their blood flushed to remove a xeno-toxin introduced by a disgraced enemy of their parents.

‘Distressingly common,’ Hanrik said. ‘More common than I’d ever thought possible.’ His face might have been the legacy of their mother, but all of Ruprekt’s children had inherited his pale grey eyes and unyielding stare. He turned from her to stare back out of the window.

It had to have been terrible for him, she realised. As an arbitrator, he would have borne witness to the worst atrocities the galaxy had to offer. He would have had to shield himself with a level of callousness she could scarcely imagine. The life of an arbitrator would have taught him, either through instruction or hard experience, to trust no one. She wouldn’t be surprised if he had even pondered whether she herself had arranged their father’s death.

‘I can’t investigate father’s death, you know.’ Hanrik turned back to her.

She nodded. ‘I had rather assumed that would be the case. If they won’t allow you to be assigned to your own homeworld to avoid conflicts of interest, they’d hardly let you return here to begin an inquiry, would they?’

Hanrik nodded as well. ‘Just so. Has Idonell told you anything yet?’ He relaxed, and she realised that he must have been tensely anticipating her to request his assistance. She would have to tread very carefully with him, she saw. No matter. She had no intention of asking for her brother’s help. If she had gauged him correctly, he would help all on his own.

‘Not yet, but I doubt he intends to.’ Ashielle hadn’t met the arbitrator, not in an official capacity. She hadn’t even seen Judge Idonell for over a decade. Like all of his predecessors who had manned the lonely precinct of Ceocan, he had made his home in the orbital processing facility, the Callistonian Haven. With the bulk of the Administratum and Munitorum traffic occurring there, the few demands on his time saw Ceocan’s arbitrator inevitably in orbit more often than on the ground. The enforcers submitted regular reports to him, of course, and each of the enforcer captains – as well as the luminaries of the various Adeptus organisations – had the capacity to contact Idonell if they needed to.

‘The judge would never ignore you entirely,’ said Hanrik. ‘You are a planetary governor. He could ill afford to.’ Hanrik sounded like he was speaking from some form of personal experience, and Ashielle realised she didn’t actually know many of the details of his service. She wondered if he had come into conflict with ruling families, and resolved to ask when it was more convenient.

‘Of course not,’ said Ashielle, ‘but neither does he want to tell me something he knows I don’t want to hear. The judge is a veteran of the Imperium’s politics, after all. If he hasn’t been able to find any evidence that the crash was anything other than an accident, he’s more likely to keep the investigation open until he can ascertain how I’m likely to react.’

‘Or how best to present his conclusion in a way you’ll accept,’ said Hanrik.

Ashielle nodded. ‘He has intimated to Commodore Zelucan that there is no evidence of wrongdoing.’

Hanrik raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Her brother knew as well as she did that accidents happened, even to very important people. Shuttle crashes were rare on Ceocan, but not unheard of. That her father and Geordan’s shuttle had crashed over the Pellucidian Sea did not help; it was lucky that any of the wreckage had been recovered at all.

‘You trust Zelucan?’ he asked.

Ashielle nodded. ‘I do,’ she said.

‘Whatever happened to General Renniver?’

It was Ashielle’s turn to stare out of the window. They’d reached the centre of the city, where the architecture began to grow ever taller. No more were the streets hemmed in by faceless grey stone walls. The core of Kostoveim was home to the oldest and most lavish buildings of the capital. Massive rose windows dominated the peaks of the buildings, and gold began to replace bronze for decorative elements. The side alleys and cut-throughs, rather than being choked with wooden construction and shanty towns, were walled off for use as gardens and private estates.

‘I had to let him go,’ she said. The idea of assassination had been a difficult one for her to swallow, but the aftertaste of paranoia it left behind was unavoidable. If her father and brother had been killed by deliberate sabotage of their shuttle, then it followed that someone on the governor’s staff had been the cause of the sabotage. Ashielle had almost been able to hear her father’s voice in her ear, reminding her that as unpalatable as her suspicions might be, her responsibility to the population demanded that she treat them with validity. Assembling a core staff that she could trust had to take precedence over the consideration of decades of service from those like Renniver.

‘I assume Zelucan has been doing his own investigations?’ Hanrik said.

Although officially a division of the Corps of Ceocan, in reality the High Service acted as the lord governor’s palace guard and personal militia. The commanding officer served under the title of ‘Officer of Reconnaissance,’ ostensibly a battlefield scouting position, actually a sort of minister of intelligence and espionage.

‘He has,’ she said.

Hanrik looked at her, and she could feel the judgement in his eyes. She knew how it looked. Removing an experienced officer like Renniver and replacing him with the former head of her own security detail smacked of favouritism. It was vital that the people charged with her safety were people she could trust, however, and thirty years with Commodore Zelucan had taught her that he was a man she could trust intimately.

‘After consulting with the tech-priests who were permitted to examine the wreckage, the commodore believes that a gravitic stabiliser failed mid-flight, resulting in an uncorrectable spin leading to a crash.’

Hanrik sighed. She smiled. As she’d expected, some habits were trained too deeply to be ignored.

‘For someone of the governor’s rank, pre-flight inspection is a requirement,’ said Hanrik. He shifted in his seat, opening his posture up. ‘The entire team would be suspect, but the enginseers would have specific assignments for who maintained and inspected which portions of the shuttle.’

Ashielle nodded. ‘They do. Although they were loath to reveal any of their order’s secrets, Zelucan was able to… persuade them to divulge that the affected component is one of the first things which is inspected. Although they were affronted by the very notion that it could be one of their number, they did also concede that were a heretic so inclined, the sabotage of the stabiliser would have been the work of moments, and easily concealed. They estimated a saboteur would have about twenty minutes between the component’s inspection and the governor’s arrival at the shuttle to commit their treason.’

Hanrik held up a hand to interject. ‘Stating the obvious,’ he said, ‘it would also follow that the saboteur would have to have plausible access to the shuttle. In other words–’

‘They would have to be someone that wouldn’t be out of place there,’ said Ashielle. ‘Like Lieutenant Norovika.’ Hanrik gave her that interrogative eyebrow raise again, and she continued. ‘Lieutenant Orvan Norovika – six years in the High Service. Known frequenter of gaming establishments throughout the shipping district. Parents both served as assistants to tech-priests in the arco-maintenance shrines.’

‘So, he has experience with the grain harvesters, which include anti-grav skimmers. He’s a known frequenter of gambling halls, and gambling debts are one of the prime methods of recruiting saboteurs. And no one would have batted an eye seeing a member of the High Service hanging around the governor’s shuttle.’ Hanrik nodded, his face softening for the first time since she’d seen him. ‘Sounds like a good suspect, sister. I assume you have him in custody?’

Ashielle frowned and crossed her arms. ‘I wish. Orvan Norovika was found dead in the gutter in the shipping district two weeks ago. He’d been stripped and robbed.’

Hanrik leaned back, staring out of the window again. His face was different, though. Before, he had stared at the passing facades and people with a slack expression, looking anywhere rather than engaging with her. Now, his eyes were still distant, but she could see the wheels turning behind them. He was deep in thought.

‘So, you think you’ve found your assassin?’ he said. ‘Degenerate gambler whose debts led him to be pressured by your enemies – presumably the Vaneisens – into committing treason is certainly a narrative that would satisfy most magistrates. Without a confirmation, it’s entirely circumstantial, although not unreasonable.’ He turned back, to look her in the eyes. ‘But you’re ignoring the other possibility.’

Ashielle stiffened. She’d been prepared for his experienced eye to see something darker than she’d considered, but a part of her dreaded who he might point the finger at.

‘Norovika was found in a part of the city known for its high crime rate,’ he said, ‘and I assume that crime has spiked there as the population has increased. A lone man being robbed and killed would hardly be out of the question.’ He sighed. ‘You should also consider the sad truth, which is that the technology on Ceocan has never been the best the Imperium has to offer. While the shuttles and security tech available to the governor might be cutting edge on this world, I’ve been to planets where even middle-class merchants command better resources.

‘The Adeptus Mechanicus has never had a great interest in placating the servants of the Imperium on Ceocan,’ he said. ‘Our world is a convenience to them, no more. Suffice it to say that the members of their brotherhood that they send to work planetside are somewhat short of their best and brightest.’

‘You cannot be serious,’ said Ashielle.

‘Of course I’m serious,’ said Hanrik, and Ashielle had little reason to doubt him. ‘I know that it’s painful to consider, but Governor Matkosen’s–’ he paused, ‘father’s death may very well have been precisely what Idonell thinks – an accident.’

‘It seems so awfully convenient, does it not?’ Ashielle said. She could feel the suspension on the carriage attempting to adjust to account for the inclination. The road was rising, which meant they had left the centre of Kostoveim and were nearing the highlands of the capital, the oldest districts where the wealthiest homes were located.

Hanrik hesitated, and nodded. ‘It does, I’ll concede.’ He stared out of the window, and Ashielle couldn’t tell if he was staring at the scenery or lost in thought again. ‘And you suspect the Vaneisens?’

‘They have the most to gain,’ she said. ‘Whether or not they were responsible, they now circle our house like carrion birds.’

‘Was that what your messenger was about?’

She nodded absently. ‘A go-between for Esilia Vaneisen.’

‘Any idea what she wanted?’ Hanrik asked.

Ashielle frowned. She had to remind herself that Hanrik hadn’t spent the last several decades knee-deep in the politics of Ceocan.

‘She had floated the notion of marriage between myself and Tanzeg Vaneisen to father on a number occasions,’ said Ashielle. ‘No doubt she believes that my position, being somewhat precarious, makes marriage to her son a more attractive prospect.’

‘Does it?’

‘Of course not,’ said Ashielle. She shuddered. ‘I can scarcely think of anyone I’d rather be married to less.’

Hanrik smiled for the first time since he’d been home. Ashielle laughed.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Your revulsion,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the most honest reaction I’ve seen from you since before I left. I don’t remember Tanzeg.’

Ashielle shook her head. ‘Esilia’s oldest child,’ she said. ‘Officially he governs the family’s ancestral holdings in waste management.’ On Ceocan, a planet where agriculture was the primary industry, waste management and reclamation was a necessary, and lucrative, profession. ‘In reality, he governs the majority of the family’s criminal enterprises. Illegal usury, smuggling, gambling, unlicensed prostitution – trace any of them back far enough and more often than not the trail ends with someone in Tanzeg Vaneisen’s employ.’

‘Underworld scum,’ said Hanrik. ‘A by-product of any world with a civic government.’

‘If he were just an organising force on the criminal element,’ she said, ‘I might be able to come to an arrangement. But he’s a wanton sadist. He considers himself a master at breaking household servants, training them to difficult tasks with savage punishments. Supposedly he covers his unruly lieutenants in skin irritants and locks them in footlockers with shards of broken glass. The criminal gangs call it “the boo-boo box”.’

‘And the enforcers are not sufficient to the task?’ Hanrik asked.

‘They might be, if they were committed to it,’ Ashielle said. ‘But the wardens are the province of the Grevenate.’

In theory, the mustering and control of the wardens, the enforcers of Ceocan, being given to the Grevenate established a check on the authority of the regent and the coadjutor. In truth, each officer among the wardens was wholly the creature of whichever noble had sponsored their rise through the ranks. And the reins of those nobles were in turn held by the ruling families.

‘So, there are as many among the wardens that owe their fealty to you as there are who answer to the Vaneisens?’

No matter what she might think of Hanrik, he was no fool. Then again, she supposed the politics of Ceocan were likely not too difficult to parse out – the broad strokes, at least.

‘Have you brought the issue before Judge Idonell?’ he asked.

Ashielle paused to consider her words carefully.

‘Not I,’ she said.

‘But father did?’ Hanrik asked. He really was quite quick on the uptake.

‘Yes,’ she said, after giving some consideration to her wording. ‘Judge Idonell’s professional judgement was that the Vaneisens’ enterprises were limited enough in scope to constitute a local matter, rather than a violation of the Lex Imperialis.’

Hanrik nodded, his gaze distant. ‘Not atypical,’ he said. ‘Especially among sole arbitrators in charge of entire worlds or installations. Do you see his position as laxity?’

Ashielle smiled at Hanrik’s dogged refusal to speak ill of the senior arbitrator directly. ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I like to see it not as laxity, but efficiency – thus far, father and I have kept the corruption of the Vaneisens from affecting Ceocan’s tithe output. Since that is the only aspect of the planetary management which might affect the broader Imperium, it stands to reason that Judge Idonell’s attention is indeed better spent on the Callistonian. Given the continuous interaction between the various factions on board the facility, there is doubtless much to hold his attention there.’ She hesitated to speak ill of one of her brother’s peers, but also didn’t want to begin the renewal of their relationship by lying to him. ‘I suspect Judge Idonell is a man who values order above all else. So long as I continue to provide that, he will accommodate me to an extent, but I don’t see him putting himself out on my account, nor do I think he would hesitate to remove the governor under a charge of incompetence before the Throne if the political situation ever deteriorated that far.’

The carriage ground to a halt.

‘Which leaves you in a difficult position, I assume.’ Hanrik paused at the carriage door. ‘You perform your duties so well that you cannot get the aid you need.’

Ashielle smiled at his hesitation – conventional etiquette demanded he exit and offer her his hand, but social etiquette also dictated he wait to allow the governor to exit first. She laughed and slipped through the door.

‘For what it’s worth,’ Hanrik said as he stepped to the ground, ‘it’s an excellent capital.’

The sun had sunk below the rainclouds, although not yet below the horizon, allowing a brief moment of unimpeded light before the start of the chill Ceocan night. Throughout the city, the brass cornices and columns of the highest buildings reflected the dwindling light like polished mirrors, casting their red-gold glow onto the streets below. In the final moments of sunset, Ceocan was nearly as bright as midday.

‘It is at that,’ Ashielle said.

CHAPTER 3

Ashielle was exhausted.

Not just tired. She’d gone to bed tired before. During the mandatory four years she had done with the Ceocan High Service at her father’s insistence, she’d come to know tiredness intimately. No, this was utter exhaustion. She sat in the huge wingback chair in her father’s bedchamber, too weary even to admonish herself that it was her bedchamber now, unable to summon the energy to even move to the bed.

She’d had her father’s bed, the ancient canopied monstrosity he’d shared with her mother, hauled into storage, and her own slightly-less-ostentatious furniture moved from the heir secundus suite lower in the palace. Some of it would have to be either returned or replaced eventually, but she had to draw a line somewhere. Her duties and daily tasks now revolved around stepping into her father’s skin in so many ways, but the assumption of his private trappings was something she couldn’t bring herself to do. The belongings in the bedchamber had been witness to his most intimate moments; the room had been one of the few places in which he was able to be himself, his mask set aside for a few seconds. The thought of stealing that for herself seemed too painful for her to face, not until the passage of time had been given the chance to dull her pain at least a little bit.

Dinner had been a welcome change from the sorrowful affairs of the day. The meal might have been a disaster had it not been for Drenata. Ashielle had dismissed almost all of the household servants until they could be thoroughly vetted by Zelucan. Zelucan’s people were working as swiftly as they were able, and had managed to clear several of the essential staff. Ashielle had made sure to move a few names up his list, including her personal carriage driver, Cheyster, and Drenata.

Ashielle had no clue how long Drenata had served the family. She remembered the old woman occupying a position of authority in the kitchens as far back as she could recall, and strongly suspected that her father had quietly footed the bill for at least one juvenat treatment for Drenata rather than lose such a skilled artisan. There were other chefs available who could produce larger and more sumptuous foodstuffs with greater presentation, but there was no one in the entire segmentum more capable when it came to making comfort food. Drenata’s skill at the hearth was surpassed only by her uncanny ability to properly remember people’s culinary tastes years or even decades after having met them, sometimes only a single time. Ashielle had been delighted to find jugged gren, a menu choice so stigmatised as peasant food that she could never allow it onto a menu for a formal function, as well as a curious fish stew she couldn’t ever recall having. To her surprise, Hanrik had told her it had always been his favourite as a child.

Hanrik had insisted on asking Drenata to dine with them, in defiance of tradition, but if it made her brother more comfortable, Ashielle approved. The commodore was wise enough not to bring up any suspicions regarding the governor’s death, so there were no major conflicts, but Hanrik had precious little to add to the conversation, save for expressing concern that dismissing so much of her staff might be dangerous for Ashielle. Zelucan assisted Ashielle in alleviating his concerns, laying out their plan for a swift and thorough vetting process. Hitting on an area of shared interest, Commodore Zelucan was finally able to engage him by discussing the investigations of the various staff members. By feigning interest in Hanrik’s expertise, Zelucan was able to draw the arbitrator out, and they managed to pass about an hour or so in pleasantly diverting conversation.

Still, as warm as the meal had been, and as welcome as Drenata had managed to make them all, especially Hanrik, Ashielle had reached the end of her reserves. This was the truly insidious part of death, she mused: for whom it affected most, an event which should have been a time of deep introspection and emotional self-indulgence was reduced to a litany of tedium. As if the endless decisions to be made, the never-ending tirade of false niceties, and the actual minutiae of running an entire planet weren’t enough, she’d found herself dealing with Esilia Vaneisen on top of all of it.

Ashielle groaned as she remembered the conversation with Esilia. As much as she wished she could just surrender to her bed, and let the leaden sleep of total exhaustion claim her, she knew that she needed to appraise Zelucan of the latest development. She lurched to her feet, found a pair of slippers and padded into the night.

There was a profound emptiness to the palace. All her life, Darcarden had been a veritable hive of activity. The halls of the palace had swarmed with servants, cooks, gardeners, menials, scribes, and enforcers there to protect the governor’s life. It had been easy for her to adjust to her father’s demand that she live as if she were always under observation, because for the most part, she was. When Zelucan finished his investigations, the palace would once again be a stellar system of activity, but it would be she that would be the sun at the centre of everyone’s world. Cooks, artists and consorts to provide her comfort; enforcers and the High Service to protect her person; scribes, priests and guildmasters to serve her. They would all rise and fall at her whim, their very lives dependent on her moods and favours.

It was a sobering thought, and against the frightening immensity of that impending reality, she found the emptiness of the palace to be soothing, in its way. The rooms seemed larger, devoid of people. Even the halls seemed like vast, vaulted tombs, silent save for her echoing footsteps. She thought of meandering her path to the outer courses of the palace, cutting through the servants’ quarters to greet them as she passed, but she discarded the notion. For one, the servants’ halls were a place of refuge for them. She had learned during her adolescence that no matter how much she cared for them, the labourers and maids didn’t appreciate her presence: the social divide between them always made them uncomfortable. Secondly, she found the idea of being alone in the palace to be delightfully exhilarating. She had rarely, if ever, been completely alone in her life, and the concept of total isolation filled her with a sense of thrilling dread.

The kitchens were dark, the last of the menials having gone to their rest some time ago. Ashielle had offered to move Zelucan to the formal quarters for the Officer of Reconnaissance, but he had politely asked to maintain his old office, connected by a short servant’s corridor to the kitchens. Drenata had long suspected the commodore of sneaking into her domain for surreptitious snacking during late working sessions, often muttering threats of graphic violence should she ever catch him. The kitchens, like everything under Drenata’s purview, were spotlessly organised, with not a thing lying out of place.

The servant’s door, standing ajar, was out of place. It was a little thing, but neither Drenata nor Commodore Zelucan were the type to leave a door hanging open. In the darkness, Ashielle fumbled along the sink for the first tool she could find with any real heft, and tucked it to her chest. Borrowing a knife or meat tenderiser might seem a little overly paranoid to anyone who saw her, but her father had always taught her not to ignore instincts, especially ones that warned her of danger.

The servant’s corridor was better lit, and Ashielle paused to see what improvised weapon she had selected for her defence. Her blinded hands had picked up one of Drenata’s kitchen knives. Decades old and wickedly sharp. Even in her panic, she had the absurd thought that if she didn’t return it before the morning, the old woman would have words for her that would be equally sharp.

She was surprised to see a servant coming from Zelucan’s quarters. He had his back to her, a small serving cart taking up much of the hall. Embarrassed, Ashielle tucked the purloined knife to her side before the late-night snack-bearer saw it. She cleared her throat softly to draw his attention.

The servant half-turned, then jerked his head back to his task.

‘Sorry, ma’am. I mean, sorry exc’llency.’ He hastily shuffled his cart a little further down the hall to allow her access to the commodore’s office.

She realised as soon as she stepped into the office that Zelucan was dead. There was no blood, and no signs of struggle, but still she knew. Commodore Zelucan lay with his head on his desk, one arm folded beneath his face as though he were merely resting. There was a subtle wrongness, however, a stillness to the scene that raised all immediate senses of alarm. She threw herself backwards, lest she be caught by the same assassin.

Ashielle slammed into the servant in the hall behind her. She heard his surprised grunt, even as the laspistol in his hand went off, missing the intended target of her head and going wide into the room. The heat was positively blistering: no wonder there was no pooled blood. There was no time to waste being surprised: the servant was the assassin. She smashed backwards with one elbow, and was rewarded with a grunt of pain and the sound of a pistol clattering to the stones. He shoved her into the door frame, and it was her turn to grunt in surprise.

‘Good reflexes,’ the killer said. As his voice whispered in her ear, Ashielle realised she’d heard it before. She’d smelled that same clean, soapy scent before as well, a distinct lack-of-scent that finally clicked with the soft, effeminate voice. ‘But you should have just held still. It would have been over quick that way.’ She heard the sliding metallic sound of a weapon being drawn behind her.

‘Lostrovsky,’ she snapped. In the split second the assassin paused at hearing himself identified, she struck. She spun, lashing out with the knife in her hand, slicing a deep line across the assassin’s face. He yelped in pain and surprise, clearly not expecting her to be armed. She pushed past him and tore down the hall.

The Vaneisens’ hitman had pushed his cart back down the corridor, blocking off the way to the kitchens. She spun on her heel and raced down the other hall, not caring what direction she fled in, so long as she fled away from the armed killer behind her.

‘There’s nowhere to go, excellency,’ Lostrovsky said from behind her.

Ashielle ignored the voice and kept running. She could hear him continue, no longer yelling but instead speaking too softly for her to hear. If he was having a conversation, it was over a vox-bead or other hand-portable comm system, despite such systems being illegal for the ordinary citizens on Ceocan. That meant additional assassins; at least one more.

The hallway opened into a small common area, where the cooks and menials could gather together. There were several such rooms throughout the servants’ run of the palace, nearly all adjacent to main rooms so that they could be used as staging areas for banquets and ceremonies. The hall continued away from the gathering place, but Ashielle ignored that in favour of the stone staircase leading up to the main floors. It had been years since she had run through these hallways as a child, but if she remembered correctly, she was in the Manciple’s Den, which abutted the Game Hall. Not the best refuge: the Game Hall had several antique fowling pieces on display between the mounted beasts, but hadn’t held any functional weapons since a Solstice Banquet two and a half centuries prior, when her great uncle Kylidian had shot and killed Denlo Oldemeier in a duel over a game of cards. Still, there was a private study off the Game Hall which would have a vox-unit she could use to call for help. No sooner had she started up the stairs, however, she heard the sound of another voice behind the door at the top.

The door rattled. Ashielle let out an involuntary gasp, and the rattling stopped.

‘Lostrovsky?’ The voice on the other side of the door was muffled, but the speaker had clearly heard her.

She fled back down the stairs, leaping from the edge to the ground. She could hear footsteps coming down the hall. The fireplace was her only refuge now. Counting herself lucky that no one had used the fire for days, Ashielle shoved herself into the chimney space. The passage was narrow, but there was just enough room for her between the hearth and the damper. Fortunately for her, the sweeps had been diligent in their duties before the death of her father, and the few remaining servants had apparently had little use for the Manciple’s Den, and there was only the thinnest build-up of soot above the hearth. She wedged herself in high enough to be hidden from view, and then froze.

She could hear Lostrovsky stalking through the common area. Her face, covered in ash, itched ferociously. Her arms were already throbbing from holding her own weight aloft in the chimney. The ridges where the brick pressed into her sides were beginning to bite, but she didn’t dare move. Even the slightest shift could betray her position, and the thought of being dragged from the wall by her ankles and shot dead, covered in filth and crawling across the floor, was intolerable.

Ashielle could hide, but she didn’t know how long it would take for forces she could trust to get back inside the palace. The Vaneisens couldn’t have turned everyone, or even most of her staff; if they had, they would simply have declared a coup and placed her under arrest. No, an assassination meant that they lacked widespread support. All she had to do was to escape the immediate attack and find help, and she could finally–

Hands grabbed at her legs, and Ashielle kicked out. The grip was like iron, though, and she found herself hauled bodily from the fireplace. She landed hard, stumbling into the side of the hearth, and her knife tumbled from her hand. Determined not to go down without every bit of fight she could muster, Ashielle pushed off the wall and rushed her attacker.

She brought herself up short as she realised it wasn’t Lostrovsky. She recognised Drenata’s hunched shoulders and gnarled hands and froze, her fist raised high.

‘It’s not safe, lady.’ Drenata had always had a knack for understatement. If she was at all concerned that the governor had nearly punched her in the head after being found hiding in a chimney, it didn’t show. The ancient servant turned and pulled her shawl about her. ‘This way. Come quickly.’

‘Out the Butcher’s Gate?’ asked Ashielle, recovering her kitchen knife.

Drenata shook her head. Her voice was like a whisper. ‘They’re out there, governor. Came in that way, killed Lavini’s little grandson on the way in.’

Drenata gestured towards a door with one angry hand. Ashielle realised the old woman was holding a large carving knife, even bigger than her own.

‘Stuffed him in a box hedge, even took his pistol.’

Ashielle shook her head, realising that Drenata was talking about one of the High Service, not an actual child.

The old woman produced her own key and unlocked the door. Behind them, Ashielle could hear someone pounding on the door of the Manciple’s Den. Faster footsteps sounded more distantly in the halls, and this time she was certain they belonged to her would-be assassin.

The hall beyond was pitch black, but Drenata drew a small luminator globe from her pocket.

‘Where are we going?’ Ashielle asked. She looked around for something she could improvise into a weapon, but as far as she could tell they were in a side hall that led to servants’ quarters. As far as she knew, Drenata’s own room was this way.

‘To hide you, governor. Until I can fetch Lord Hanrik, that is.’ Drenata held the luminator out, the knife hidden beneath the folds of her shawl. The way she held it, down and ready, the old maid could deliver a vicious jab to anyone closing in on her. Ashielle shuddered to think how close she had come to being gutted by her own servant without realising it. ‘There’s a coup afoot and I don’t know yet who among the military still keeps your faith.’

Ashielle shook her head. ‘It isn’t a military coup.’

Drenata, ever obedient, stopped and turned to regard the governor.

‘If it was, they would have tried to arrest us all, not have us murdered in our sleep.’

Drenata didn’t ask who was behind the attack, just waited patiently for the governor to explain as much as she wished. Ashielle could have simply issued commands to the elderly maid, but speaking aloud helped her to work through her thoughts. Her servant’s mention of Hanrik had been a good thought, but her brother had chosen to stay at the guest house: unattached from the palace and at the edge of the property. By the time someone fetched him and returned, the assassins would likely be gone, or else successful in their task.

‘The little fiend who killed Commodore Zelucan is one of Esilia’s creatures,’ she said. ‘He was in disguise, but he’s definitely working for the Vaneisens. I’m sure they’ve got some clever story waiting to explain my gruesome death, of course. He’s not alone, either. There’s at least two of them, so there’s no telling how many avenues of escape they’ve–’

She grimaced in the darkness, suddenly furious with herself. Escape! The escape tunnels. She knew why the thought hadn’t occurred to her – she had always been forbidden to go into them while her father was governor, and she had only had access to them for a short time. Still, it was something she should have thought of.

‘I confess I don’t remember the layout of these particular halls,’ Ashielle said, peering around a door jamb into a small bedchamber. ‘Can we get to the Draper’s Hall from here? The corridor near there has a side room that father always said led to an escape tunnel.’ She had never been in the tunnel, but if it was to be of any use, an escape tunnel had to remain of the utmost secrecy, so she understood Ruprekt’s insistence that no one but himself be allowed inside.

Drenata, ever faithful to her liege, led the way through the darkness. She paused at each intersection, peering around corners with furtive glances swift and subtle enough to avoid the notice of even the most keen-eyed observer, gesturing for her lady to follow when the route was clear or to backtrack if the old woman saw or heard another figure moving. Ashielle suspected they would have made better time if she’d had her own key; several times they were forced to divert around a quicker route because Drenata’s own key wouldn’t open a locked door. Nevertheless, the aged maid was true to her task, and Ashielle soon recognised the smell of sour hops from the Draper’s Hall.

Similar in size and purpose to the Manciple’s Den, the Draper’s Hall had seen more recent use: the coals in the fireplace were still glowing, and there was a small scattering of empty wine bottles and dirty plates on the stools around the room. Drenata tutted in horror at the mess, ignoring their peril for a moment to mumble something about lazy footmen, accompanied by a menacing waggle of her knife.

Once in the side corridor, Ashielle found what she was looking for easily. The door looked just like another servant’s door. The door handle, of course, went nowhere. Instead, it pulled open like a hinged cabinet to reveal a small genecode pad and screen. Ashielle silently hoped that the biolock’s machine-spirit wasn’t feeling obstinately loyal to her father, and pressed her thumb to the pad.

After a moment of spine-chilling suspense, the light flashed green. Ashielle breathed a sigh of relief. Then the magnetic locks surrounding the door disengaged with a deep, reverberating thump. She winced, and listened to hear if one of the searchers had heard the door. After a moment, she picked up the sounds of footfalls approaching rapidly.

‘Time to run, lady.’ Drenata squared her shoulders and stood between Ashielle and the direction of the approaching footsteps.

‘Come with me,’ Ashielle said.

‘No, lady.’ Her servant shook her head. ‘My old knees shan’t take any more running. So, go now before they catch up.’ She pointed emphatically with her knife, forcing Ashielle to step backwards. She realised her mistake, realised she’d stepped through the door, but too late to stop Drenata from slamming it closed. The magnetic locks slammed home with a resounding boom, even louder in the confines of the tunnel on the other side.

Ashielle cursed in language that would have appalled her father, although Drenata would have approved. If the old lady was smart, she would follow her original plan and find somewhere to hide. She could feel a panel on her side of the door, but it didn’t respond to her touch.

The tunnel was short, and opened not into an escape route, but a vault. The walls were lined with tables, each stacked with a profusion of junk in no particular order. Bits of art were scattered through the chamber along with stacked furniture, piled books and folded uniforms. Luminators in the wall came on automatically, the machine-spirits dutifully responding to her presence. She had no idea such a vault had even been here, but there was no time for satisfying curiosity. She immediately began searching for either a weapon or another way out.

The room seemed to be stocked with items of no particular importance, or even value. She recognised a portrait leaning against one wall as being of General Terresant, executed for heresy a few centuries prior. She saw a few pieces of jewellery she remembered from her childhood as being gifts from a rogue trader, gifts that her father had confiscated after a number of the trader’s other buyers had been sanctioned for possessing xenos artefacts.

A vault of heresy, then. Nothing too egregious, she’d wager, but the sort of things a planetary governor might need to hang on to in case the Inquisition ever came calling with probing questions about past events. At the same time, not the sorts of things one wanted to display openly. She found a lasgun with an Astra Militarum uniform from an unrecognised regiment, but the power pack was cold and dead.

‘Assassins! Invaders!’

The piercing shriek cut through the gloom, audible even through the thick stone between her and the hall. Ashielle recognised Drenata’s voice, but she had never in her life heard the woman so loud. She heard faint noises of a scuffle, followed by a loud bang against the door. She froze, wondering if they had already heard her, or if she had yet gone undetected. She could hear muffled voices in the hallway, but only make out part of their conversation.

‘We knew there was a possibility of tunnels.’

‘I can get through this, my lord. If I may suggest, a departure? The entire endeavour would be for nothing if the wardens or the High Service were to find you here when they arrive.’

She recognised Lostrovsky’s voice. His unseen companion said something she couldn’t make out.

‘I can escape covertly, my lord, although not if I’m accompanied by another.’

The other voice grumbled something, and she could hear them depart. After a moment, she heard the faint sound of beeping beyond the door, and her blood ran cold. Lostrovsky was assaulting the genecode pad itself to circumvent the lock! His wickedness had already been evident, but that he was skilled not only as an assassin, but in the ways of perverting the works of the Adeptus Mechanicus? Tantamount to sorcery.

Ashielle turned back to ransacking the room. There had to be something. She knocked books and scrolls to the ground in her haste, certain there had to be some method of salvation hidden in the room. Finally, she knocked aside a stack of handbills (over a century old, advertising a play titled The Last Revel of X’amot by Reimgold of Valgaast) and saw her rescue: a small door set in the corner. The door was tiny, and easily overlooked. It barely came up to her chest, and was no more than half a yard wide. In no place to be picky, Ashielle threw her weight into the table blocking the door. She shifted it just enough to access the portal. The tiny door had no lock, only a corroded metal knob that she feared would snap under the lightest pressure. To her great relief, the mechanism stood true, and slid free easily. The door still refused to open. She checked the hinges, confirming it should swing inwards rather than out towards her, and began putting gentle pressure on the door.

Behind her, the magnetic locks disengaged with a scream of protest. Desperate, Ashielle threw her shoulder into the door. It squealed, and shifted just a little. The door from the hallway boomed open behind her, and she threw herself onto the escape hatch again. This time, it fell open with a groan and a small shower of rust. She heard the sound of a laspistol firing behind her, and slammed the door shut, trusting its heavy weight to protect her against gunfire. A bang and a bloom of heat on the metal proved her trust to be well-founded.

She pressed her shoulders into the door, noticing as she did so a rusty bolt mechanism. She slid the bolt home just in time to see the door rattle in its frame.

‘The longer you make me chase you, the more painful this is going to be,’ he said. Here, finally, the façade dropped, and she could hear the real Lostrovsky. His voice rasped, the softness and sophistication gone. Here was a killer who had clawed his way from the gutter to the halls of power. His true voice revealed him for what he was: a predatory animal draped in the guise of a man. Ashielle refused to engage.

The hallway beyond the door was little more than a landing, with a narrow stone staircase beyond that, curling down into darkness. The air was heavy with the smell of moisture and rotten stone. She held her luminator out, but the light it cast was swallowed up by the immense darkness. The door behind her rattled again, and she took a first trepidatious step on the staircase. The stone neither crumbled nor slipped, and she continued on.

The staircase was narrow, the walls close enough to brush her shoulders, and barely taller than she was. This was not the sweeping, vaulted architecture of the Imperium with its soaring, complex construction that drew the eye upward to reflect on the divine. This was something far older. The dry fitted stones and narrow spaces spoke to Old Ceoc construction, from the time when the Empire of Mankind had forgotten about their planet. There were alcoves cut into the walls at shoulder height, filled with moss and cobwebs. In times long past, they would have held flickering candles to illuminate the passage, and the skulls of trespassers, their brows engraved with scrimshawed warnings to any who would repeat their folly.

The air turned cool quicker than she would have expected, the warmth of the palace soon left behind. Beads of moisture ran down the walls this far down. Beneath her feet, the path had become less sure than it had originally been. She could feel the damp squish of moss, and the occasional shift where the surface of the stone had been eaten into sand. Her own footfalls were swallowed up by the darkness.

Sites of Old Ceoc civilisation were rare. The Ceoc culture that had existed before Reunification had shunned the Imperial Creed, and was considered heretical. Even possession of Old Ceoc artefacts was a crime. At irregular intervals of a century or century and a half, some small ruin of Ceoc culture would be found: spiralling pre-gothic carvings in a weathered sandstone cave, vine-shrouded foundations of a long-vanished stone building, or a piled stone cairn atop a remote seaside cliff. These had inevitably set off a flurry of activity, with the Administratum removing the artefacts of the forgotten past and the governor relocating anyone whose property had contained the redacted history.

She padded down the staircase, listening to the echoes of distant, squeaking rodents, and wondered how this site had gone unnoticed for so long. She couldn’t have been the first governor to open the little door. The mechanism might have stuck, but it had moved too smoothly to have gone unused since before the Matkosen ascension. If her father hadn’t used the door, her grandfather certainly had. What was the original purpose of this hidden place? And why had Ruprekt felt the need to lie to her about it?

The staircase ended, and Ashielle groaned. The hallway in front of her branched and, holding her illuminator aloft, she could see the passage in either direction curving away, further branches barely visible in the gloom, moisture beading along their mossy walls.

A damned maze. Of course. The Old Ceocs had loved their mazes. They had built their cities and their dwellings like labyrinths, and constructed elaborate puzzle paths outside their largest homes. The capital ran much more sensibly, in a defined, grid-like pattern based around large avenues running east to west. The tradition had survived in part, however, and most of the nobles kept at least a small maze on their property to show (or to pretend to show) a connection to the planet’s past. Many of the oldest cities on the planet were still laid out in the branching, spiralling patterns her forebears had preferred before the Imperium came.

Far away, Ashielle heard a metallic shriek. Her heart leaped. Lostrovsky had figured out a way to force the little door, or soon would. Swallowing her fear, and forcing herself to maintain a calm footing rather than race into the darkness, she turned to her right.

Fortunately for her, after a harrowing Reunification Day ball that had left her crying in the grounds’ maze as a child, Geordan had showed her the trick of defeating virtually any maze with an external entry and exit.

She put her hand on the right wall and began walking. She passed the first branch, keeping her unbroken contact with the wall. The stone was damp, rough. She trailed her fingers along the wall as lightly as possibly, knowing that Lostrovsky would be able to track her if she left trails in the moss and mould that grew there. The path was slick now, the stone uneven and worn by the ministrations of the centuries. She was too far to turn back now, and she kept her course, headlong into the darkness.

The wall curved inward, and she followed it. Ashielle imagined she could hear Lostrovsky in the maze with her, and realising how it might give her away, she stashed her luminator in her pocket. She took each step carefully, reaching out with a tentative toe tap before committing her weight to the irregular floor. The wall shifted and turned, but she kept to her course. Geordan’s trick might take some time, depending on the layout of the maze, but it was infallible, and she had to trust it.

That assumed, of course, the maze was wholly natural. Like the population at large, the Imperium intended her to be entirely ignorant of the practices of heretics. Like most with her wealth and station, of course, she knew more than she was supposed to. Whispered legends among the wealthy and the learned hinted that the ancient Ceoc peoples might have dabbled with warp sorcery before the coming of the aquila. Could her father, her entire family, have conspired to keep a haven of such sorcery secret from the world they governed?

Just as she was beginning to despair, convinced she had found a dark and twisted labyrinth, the solution of which would open a portal to some nether hellscape, she came out of the maze tunnel and into an open room.

The ground beneath her feet looked uneven, like natural stone. Ashielle paused, scanning the floor, and realised she couldn’t see any seams in the masonry. For all she knew, at some point the ground had transitioned to smooth stone. Of far more interest were the trophy racks.

She had seen illustrations of Old Ceoc trophy displays, had even seen a recreation in the museum in Pennenvost, but had never thought she would see an authentic one, much less several. Standing waist high, the wooden rails served as a set of primitive shelves, which could be used to display bones or weapons from fallen enemies. They were believed to have been placed on borders to warn away attackers. She’d never heard of them being buried like this, as though they were some form of grave goods. The ones in front of her had a few scraps of what might have once been banners or pennants, or could just as easily have been enemy scalps – the degradation was too great to tell. Several weapons that looked like they were fashioned from bones also decorated the trophy racks.

Her circumstances precluded any kind of detailed examination of the artefacts. The bone weapons looked worn and dulled by the centuries, and she doubted any of them would have survived even a cursory swing. She tapped an experimental finger to a curving sickle (she shuddered to think what sort of beast was large enough to produce a bone so big it could be carved into such a weapon) and was unsurprised to find it brittle to her fingertip.

The trophy racks were arranged in the room to impede progress through it, but she threaded her way through easily enough. Stacked against one wall was a rotting skeleton, although the flesh and whatever clothing it had been wearing were so far gone there was no way to tell if it had been laid to rest here or entombed by some past governor. She hoped the former.

The tunnel opened into another worked room. The room may very well have been a natural formation when the ancient architects had begun their work on it, but it had clearly been modified by the touch of human hands. Limestone stalagnates dotted the room irregularly, each carved by master artisans into whirling columns of fire. The columns were hollow, the bases blackened. The stone ‘flames’ wrapped over and under one another, turning each stalagnate into a massive lantern that could be lit from within. Bas reliefs climbed the walls, framing a huge stone archway.

To her surprise, the large arch led nowhere. It was merely a ring of stone set into the wall, with the floor sloping up to the bottom portion of its curve, as though a pedestrian could walk right through it. In the centre, however, was a recess of perhaps three feet, then nothing but solid stone. She tapped her fingers along it, trying to see if there was a catch or seam. The interior seemed to be nothing but natural stone, pitted by water damage. The outer ring was a different story. There was trailing moss which had grown into the cracks, but the structure of it appeared completely undamaged. It was made of some material altogether different to the limestone around it. The ring looked pale beneath her luminator, and when she touched her fingers to it, it was painfully cold. She snatched her hand back, and swore that the spots of the stone where she had touched were brighter, as if they had retained some of the warmth they had stolen from her.

All along the length of the stone ring were strange carvings she couldn’t quite place. They were a strange combination of simple geometric shapes and jagged lines, and put her in mind of primitive pictograms, although they conformed to no human alphabet she knew of.

The phrase ‘no human alphabet’ leapt out, highlighting itself in her mind, and she turned away from the wall carving. She felt an itch between her shoulder blades, as if some unseen eyes were following her. Far away in the darkness, she heard the scream of the tormented latch finally giving way. The arch was no longer relevant; she needed to find a way out immediately.

The large room was covered in stonework showing the primitive deities and myths of the Old Ceoc, but there were no exits. There were no alcoves, no hiding places. After all her running, she was trapped. She tightened her grip on the kitchen blade, and steeled herself against the rising despair. Maybe she could still conceal herself, lie in wait, ambush Lostrovsky.

Ashielle lifted the luminator in front of the archway, checking to see if there was a place she could hide within the alcove. As she peered at the corners of the alcove, she spied something she hadn’t seen the first time, wedged into a corner. She lifted her luminator, and stifled a scream.

Wedged in the edge of the space behind the stone ring was a corpse. The body in the arch was far better preserved than the bundle of rags and bones in the trophy room. The cadaver’s sex was indeterminate, but it had evidently mustered the composure to die with dignity, for its emaciated form was hunched into a crouch, its back to the wall. Dried, blackened skin stretched taught over knobby bone. She had never seen a creature so gaunt and withered.

Then it opened its eyes.

She would have screamed, if her mouth had been capable of sound. The eyes glowed red, like dying embers in a neglected campfire. Their destructive power was long past, banked almost to the point of obscurity, but promised danger to the unwary.

Impossibly, the thing stood. Its bones should have creaked with the weight of ages, its skin should have cracked and flaked away, but somehow it moved as part of her knew it always had: all sinuous undulation and oily grace.

‘Abomination,’ she whispered. She stood frozen, unable to accept what she was seeing. She knew she should run, strike out, do something, but all her training and discipline failed in that moment. She was like a game animal, frozen in terror as the baying of hounds closed in around her. How had such a thing come to be beneath the palace? Surely her father couldn’t have known about this… horror.

‘No.’ The voice didn’t seem to be speech, not quite. It echoed in her ears, seeming to come from everywhere at once, as though the creature was speaking through the darkness itself. It reached out for her, and she flinched, but its hand stopped short at the threshold of the alcove. The crystals set into the wall glowed dimly.

‘What… what are you?’ she demanded. The question came as a matter of instinct, her mind compelling her to talk her way out of a situation she surely could not fight. Her hands were shaking with terror, and she could hear a quake in her voice that repulsed her.

‘Your kind had many names for mine, once.’ The thing stood tall in front of her. She knew, in the animal part of her mind, that she should run. There was nowhere to go, though, and she knew that just as surely.

With no other option, she met the creature’s stare with one of her own. There was a tension to the monster, a primal tightness that reminded her of beasts she had seen caged. No, not caged. Leashed. The thing appeared to be standing straight, but it was straining, leaning forward, unable to move past the edge of the stone ring.

‘You’re trapped,’ she said. The realisation brought the tiniest bit of reassurance. The thing was dangerous, alien even, anathema to mankind, but the knowledge that it was restrained allowed her higher reason to come creeping back, abating the paralysing fear enough for her to function.

‘Yes.’

From the darkness, she could hear Lostrovsky’s footfalls splashing into the puddles at the base of the staircase, and a profane string of curses as he, too, saw the maze he must navigate.

‘Is there another way out of here?’ she whispered. She hardly expected a reasoned reply, but the situation was desperate.

‘Not any more,’ the creature said. The imprisoned thing did not mimic her hushed tone. She prayed that Lostrovsky couldn’t hear the sibilant hissing of the shadows. It stared at the knife in her hand, then back through the darkness over her shoulder, as if it could see through the shadow and through the stone itself. It looked back at her. ‘The other comes.’ There was no threat in its words, merely a statement of bare fact.

Ashielle could hear Lostrovsky cursing and shuffling in the maze. As cunning a beast as he was, apparently the labyrinth was more of a challenge for him than it had been for her. She searched the room again, ignoring the creature behind her. There was no place to hide. No alcoves, no corners. She couldn’t duck behind one of the stalagnates, even. They were too thin, and carved through with so many openings that the assassin would see her in an instant.

‘Do you need me to stop him?’

She turned back towards the imprisoned thing. It stood there, staring at her. Limp strands of white hair clung to it like trailing ferns.

‘What did you say?’ she asked. She recoiled as the creature reached a hand out again, and this time she could see the runes on the pale stone ring throb with pale energy.

‘I still give honour to the ancient pacts,’ the creature said.

‘The ancient pacts?’ She looked at the room again, seeing it with fresh eyes. This was no shrine to the worship of foulness. It was a cage, built by the Old Ceoc rulers. An oubliette. ‘What pact is that?’ she asked. ‘What do you get for your service?’ In business, politics, or foulest sorcery, nothing came for free.

‘Flesh and blood,’ it said. ‘The key to all great endeavours.’ It ran one hand along the wall of its prison, as close as it could get to the stone ring. ‘In times long past, each new ruler to inherit the mantle of the ancient pact would anoint their gate with a sacrifice.’

Ashielle scowled in contempt. The very notion was appalling. There could be no further discourse. Living sacrifice was the mark of the most blatant heresy. Only the Master of Mankind was revered enough to take the souls of humanity.

‘I have no one to sacrifice to you,’ she said, ‘nor would I be inclined to do so even if I had.’

In the darkness, its face split wide, revealing a grin of tiny sharpened teeth that shone impossibly white.

‘You misunderstand,’ said the thing. ‘The pact is sealed with a token offering of your own blood and flesh.’

Through the darkness, she heard the electric flash of a lasgun firing, and the clatter of falling bones. Lostrovsky had navigated the maze. She looked down at the knife in her hand.

She was aghast. Was she really contemplating such a thing? To unleash a warp-tainted monster on her enemies, in defiance of all that was holy? It was heresy to even think of such a thing, let alone to actually do it. To compound that, there was no surety the creature would be held to its word.

She saw Lostrovsky’s luminator stabbing through the darkness, and knew she had no choice. Trying to fight Lostrovsky would be suicide. Dying alone, forgotten in this oubliette, would accomplish nothing but the delivery of her own planet into the depraved hands of the Vaneisens.

She put one hand on the wall, her fingers splayed out, and steeled herself. She’d never suffered any truly grievous injury before, and her hands shook at the thought of mutilating herself. There could be no room for doubt, though. Her father, her grandfather, the line of governors stretching back millennia wouldn’t have so carefully concealed and maintained a tool that didn’t serve a purpose. That couldn’t be controlled.

Ashielle shut out the drawn hissing sounds from within the ring, the wooden clattering as Lostrovsky picked his way through the trophy racks, and the hammering of her own terrified heartbeat. She placed the knife carefully at the lowest joint of her index finger, took a deep breath, and threw her weight onto it.

The pain was unbelievable. Agony like nothing she had ever encountered in her life lanced through her hand like a cold sheet. She reeled, feeling her vision fading, and forced herself not to succumb to shock. She looked down, and nearly fainted when she saw her finger, severed less than halfway through. Blood was gushing down her hand. She could see little yellow fat deposits glistening in the wound. With a desperate surge of adrenaline, she slammed the butcher knife down and finished the job.

‘The ring,’ the creature hissed. Its voice was thin and high. She slapped her hand onto the pale stone ring. The cold shock snapped her back, numbing her arm from her mutilated finger to the elbow.

Ashielle saw the blood soak into the ring. She heard the hiss as the runes around its length flared to life. She saw the circle of light cross over her and the stone ring, as Lostrovsky came into the room. She heard his cry, and tried to turn, waiting for the shot that never came.

There was the sensation of motion, but no sound, no rushing of wind. Just an icy chill that she could feel in her bones, and the feeling of the creature from the cell surging past her. Lostrovsky’s pistol flashed, but hit nothing save shadows. The assassin lurched to the side as if struck, and his luminator fell away, shattering on the stone floor. The only light was the muzzle flare of Lostrovsky’s laspistol, as the assassin fought desperately for his life, capturing the scene in a series of snapshots.

Flash: she saw Lostrovsky backed against an alcove wall, the creature stalking him, crouched and feral.

Flash: the creature in mid-leap, Lostrovsky trying to retreat, his back already against the stone wall.

Flash: the monster on top of Lostrovsky, holding the assassin’s arm out by the wrist, preventing the pistol from being brought to bear, its mouth opened wide to reveal rows of identical, tiny, triangular teeth.

Ashielle lowered her shoulder and rushed out of the dungeon. There was no way to see, no light at all. She could hear Lostrovsky’s screams, undercut by wet gurgles and the thick, wet sound of tearing meat. One shoulder against the wall, she stumbled through the darkness, blind and helpless. She screamed again. She screamed in pain, she screamed for help, but mostly, she screamed to try to drown out the noises behind her.

But no matter how loud she screamed, she could still hear them.

CHAPTER 4

The Basilica Grevenator always made Ostap feel small and insignificant. Then again, it was meant to do so. The architect had intended for visitors called before the Grevenate to be reminded of their insignificance, and to be struck immediately with a respect for the scope of the body they stood before.

Guests, those called to give testimony, or other officials of the planetary government were seated within the Occurriam, the open section of the grand meeting room which sat below even the ground level. Wealthy merchants, generals, foreign traders, all were expected to descend the two steps into the Occurriam to acknowledge their obeisance to the governing body of Ceocan. Unless they were being called for criminal testimony, those in the Occurriam were still furnished with elegantly padded chairs and functional mantiswood desks, to show that the resources and generosity of the Grevenate extended even to the lowest citizens allowed in their presence.

The rectangular perimeter of the ground level was seated with alcoves for the greves. Each greve occupied their own large area, furnished with desks topped by white-veined marble that rested on legs shaped like curled raptors’ talons. Each alcove was decorated in rich fabrics that showed the family colours of the greve who was stationed there. Between each alcove, huge columns, carved from polished black basalt supported by steel cores, rose from the pure white marble floors to support the level above. Each column was crowned by a gold aquila, its wings stretched to either side, as though bearing the weight of the next level on their mighty pinions.

The second level was open, ringing the same perimeter as the first, so that the langreves who presided there could look down upon those below them. The langreves were fewer in number than the greves, and so their alcoves were much larger. Their desks bore signets of their house arms, each carved from a single large piece of precious material such as silver, jade or crystal. Amplifiers in their alcoves allowed their words to be broadcast in booming volume to those below them. The aquilas which perched atop the columns of the second floor were larger and more fierce than those of the greves, with barbed talons and fearsome screeching faces.

The third floor, the domain of the margreves, was more impressive yet. Below each alcove hung a banner depicting the arms of their house. The arms on the titanic desks of the margreves were intricate embellishments of their usual family crests. The aquilas atop the third tier columns were the biggest yet, clutching clusters of ripe fruit and bundles of broken swords in their fierce claws. Their alcoves were more sizeable still than those of the langreves, as large as small amphitheatres. Even with the massive size of their alcoves, the smaller number of margreves left space between their seats of power, which contained enormous marble tablets to bridge the gap. Covered in sculptures in high relief, they showed the glorious servants of the God-Emperor of Mankind triumphing over His many enemies.

The dome of the Basilica Grevenator yawned above the tier of the margreves. Pendentives rose from the rectangular walls to support the circular walls of the dome. Low relief images sculpted into the pendentives showed a line of forms, each depicting one of the militant forces in service to Him upon the Throne. A sister of the Adepta Sororitas, a soldier of the Astra Militarum, a pilot of the Aeronautica Imperialis – each had their place in the line with the Adeptus Arbites, the Adeptus Astartes, and others Ostap couldn’t name, all staring down in judgement and readiness at the assembly below. Above them, the great dome stretched, covered in a vast fresco of Holy Terra as seen in transit across its home star. The great sphere, painted so as to appear to be curving out towards the viewers beneath, had been painstakingly rendered in vibrant shades of blue and green, a reminder of the life that had once thrived there before growing and scattering across the galaxy. Golden beams, decorated with hammered leaf and meant to represent the glittering light of Sol, arched down from the ceiling to meet the pendentives.

It was a building that meant to send a message: to remind those who did not belong that they were insignificant, and to remind those who trod its halls that they were mortal, merely tiny threads in a tapestry larger than any of them. It was an august structure meant to enforce, by its very atmosphere, mindfulness and gravitas for the important proceedings which took place within.

At the moment, though, it was in the grip of madness.

‘A complete annihilation!’ bellowed Langreve Oldemeier. ‘We stand upon the cusp of an utter destruction of the ruling line!’

The assembled ruling nobles were in turmoil, yelling to be heard over one another, breaking into side squabbles and ignoring Trentshat’s Tenets of Decorum entirely. The terrifying sight of the Grevenate occupying their alcoves was a useful one for cowing witnesses and guests into submission, but when the members met without outsiders present, they used the closer quarters of the Occurriam, where they could speak, or scream, face-to-face.

‘The line of succession remains clear.’ Greve Prytsak pounded his desk to be heard over the din. ‘And Lord Governor Ashielle remains alive and healthy! This very meeting borders on treason!’

A robust man, his was one of the youngest houses, whose business was seated firmly in the service industry, namely orvox herding. Although his house was regarded as essentially an adjunct of the Matkosens, since their industry was entirely subservient to that of the governing family’s, Grigor Prytsak was more than willing to use his beefy frame and booming voice to command the respect that his elitist peers might be reluctant to grant him based on his title alone.

‘I would remind Greve Prytsak that ensuring the safe succession of the lord governor’s office is within the demesne of the Grevenate.’ Ireina Vaneisen smiled sweetly. ‘A fact the more experienced members of this body are well aware of.’

A titter of laughter swept through the crowd of lords and ministers. The Vaneisen daughter’s mockery brought a moment of peace to the proceedings, which she was quick to capitalise upon.

‘There is no thought of treason here,’ she said. ‘The collected company here thinks only to safeguard the security of the planetary government.’

Although, technically speaking, Ireina was not the head of her house, neither was Ostap. Conducting the work involved in running an entire noble family, and the commercial concerns that had seen the family elevated in the first place, as well as participating in the planetary governance was an unreasonable expectation for many of the family heads. The members of the Grevenate were therefore empowered to name a minister to sit in their place and speak with their voice. As Vicereine, Esilia Vaneisen was entitled to a margreve’s seat, and usually delegated that seat to her daughter Ireina.

Bearing the honour of that delegated responsibility was something Ostrap and Ireina had in common. The only thing, he hoped. Ostap’s own family, dominant in the cart and carriage trade, were located on Ceocan’s smallest continent, far from Kostoveim. His father, Greve Ollan Fomynko, had little interest in the politics of the capital. Like more than a few of the lesser greves, he considered the position of so little importance that he hadn’t even bothered to send his eldest child. Ostap was the third Fomynko child, and the distant capital had been a banishment.

Greve Fomynko wasn’t alone in his feelings. In the Grevenate, the vote of each noble was weighted by the tier they occupied. For the base greves of the lowest tier, there was often a feeling of having little real voice in the chamber.

‘Is Lord Governor Matkosen truly well?’ asked Tianesh Bruisell. The elderly matriarch rarely participated when the Grevenate descended into screaming matches, preferring to wait until things had quieted before making her opinions known. ‘We have been given word that she has survived, but has she deigned to make a public appearance since the attempt on her life?’

Ostap bristled. Margreve Bruisell was a frequent critic of the palace, and could always be counted on to support the coadjutor. In the week since someone had attacked Ashielle Matkosen, Tianesh had lent her support to any argument that implied the governor was too unwell to lead.

Which was by no means a new development. Before the assassination attempt, the lords loyal to the Vaneisens had tried to undermine Ashielle’s autonomy by suggesting that without an heir she was unfit to govern. Propositions had included passing resolutions to require her to choose a partner, or naming the coadjutor heir to the throne temporarily until such time as Ashielle had produced a child. None had got past the point of opening arguments, but the fact that the lords who counted themselves as Vaneisen allies had been emboldened enough to even discuss such matters spoke to how much fear was running through the Basilica Grevenator following the death of Ruprekt and Geordan Matkosen.

Ostap Fomynko had never counted himself among the Vaneisen allies, nor among the more numerous greves whose loyalties shifted with the winds, in accordance with whatever benefited them most at the time. Very early in his career, he had made the mistake of using his position as his father’s minister to edge in some legislation which benefited his family, and authorised the sale of carriages to a stone shipping concern to replace their horse-drawn wagon teams, the animals and carts of which had been in a state of serious decrepitude. Unknown to him, those wagon teams had been supplied by Tanzeg Vaneisen. The drivers who had attempted to deliver the Fomynko carriage fleet had met with disaster, waylaid on their journey and killed to the man, the carriages looted and burned. It was a wrong that Ostap had not forgotten, and he had spent every day in the Grevenate since then dedicated to spoiling the works of the Vaneisens and anyone beholden to them. It had earned him few friends, but those families loyal to the Matkosens had noticed his zeal, and his family’s fortunes had increased as a result. The Matkosens in particular had, after the first few years of his service, replaced their entire carriage fleet with Fomynko models, a service that had only increased his loyalty to them.

‘She isn’t required to,’ Ostap said. Now that the chamber had returned to something approaching normalcy, he could be heard. His arguments were often overshadowed by the louder, more boisterous lords and ministers around him, just as he was usually overshadowed in life. Ostap was a man of small stature and small presence. He had a keen mind for details, and was quite skilled as an administrator, but he lacked the charisma of the leaders he was surrounded by. He had long ago given up trying to cultivate a bold or magnetic appearance, and now merely went about his business in the conservative robes of a professional clerk. He’d cropped his hair short and no longer neglected the crystal spectacles he required to see anything up close. But if he had got their attention for a moment, he was going to use it.

‘Group Captain Barrin, acting head of the High Service, has testified that she is alive and on the mend. Her official statement of the attack, sealed with her own signet and delivered in her handwriting, has been seen by every member of this body.’ Ostap stood, feeling his anger rise. How dare they? ‘She fought off her attacker by hand, and was grievously wounded in the process, yet still manages to answer our missives, still manages to authorise the shipments to the Callistonian Haven. In one night, she shed more blood for the government of this world than most of the members of this assembly.’

There was a roar of outrage, but he raised his voice, fury giving him an edge that he usually lacked.

‘The lord governor has endured more personal tragedy in a single month than anyone here. She has lost her lord governor and father, her beloved sibling, and several of her most trusted personal servants.’ Ostap pointed emphatically skyward. ‘And yet,’ he yelled, ‘she continues to serve! How shameful would this body be if we look upon such strength and question her fitness?’

The yelling began again as he sat, with some lords cursing him and others echoing his words. Ostap could barely even make out individual arguments. He could see the faces of lords like Tianesh Bruisell, Uri Oldemeier and Lagaret Gavozny, though. The faces of the staunch Vaneisen supporters were pinched and angry, mouths clenched in silence. Their votes weighed more heavily in the chambers of the Grevenate, but not so heavily that they could overcome the mass of lower-tier greves, and those greves were energised, having seen their lord governor rise triumphant from disaster. They would not turn on her.

At least, Ostap reflected, not for now.

Tanzeg held one hand out. A bustling servant wiped the smear of vitiberry paste from the cuff of his dining robe. Returning his hand to his data-slate, he flipped through the news idly.

‘The Grevenate is rallying behind her,’ said Esilia. She folded her newsprint and dropped it to the table. With the matriarch as coadjutor, the Vaneisens were more than capable of receiving sector news, at least that which was available to the astropaths aboard the Callistonian. What constituted news to the general plebian public of Ceocan, however, was still distributed by primitive folded newssheets.

Tanzeg never bothered to read them. There was rarely anything of importance there. If there was, he certainly already knew about it some time before the sheet printers had got hold of the rumours. Not that he needed briefing by his contacts in order to know all about how the lesser greves had rallied, eager to show their support for their liege in the two weeks since the failed attempt on Ashielle Matkosen’s life.

‘Nothing boosts the public’s confidence in a ruler like seeing them survive an assassination attempt,’ said Ireina. Esilia gave her younger child a wan smile, and Ireina wriggled like a puppy that had been told that indeed, it was the good girl.

Tanzeg studied the freshly cleaned cuff. The vitiberry paste had better not stain the rich fabric. He glanced up to make a note of which serving girl had wiped the glob away. If the robe didn’t clean properly, he intended to have her whipped each time it came back from the cleaner. Acutely aware of his mother’s cold fury, he finally looked away from his wrist. The two women stared at him over the breakfast table.

Esilia didn’t even have a plate in front of her. He didn’t know why she bothered taking breakfast with them any more; she scarcely ate a thing. Like the truly elderly, she seemed to subsist on nothing but boiled oats and spite. He’d long since outgrown any expectations of her dying of natural causes before his second century, and resigned himself to inheriting his family’s fortunes in a few decades, if at all. There were still plenty of diversions to be had in the meantime.

Until she expired, of course, Esilia still insisted on her children dining with her regularly, preferably over an early morning meal in the Solaria Atrium so she could fill them in on their roles in whatever her latest conspiracy happened to be.

He had long thought that their dining atrium matched his mother’s temperament perfectly. The ceiling, open to the sky, and the delicate paintings on the walls and supporting columns, surrounded them with constant reminders of their own wealth and good taste. The atrium was at the centre of their manor, however, surrounded by the upper floors on all sides, impervious to espionage or casual observation. The perfect place for the planning of subterfuge. Tanzeg loathed the Solaria Atrium. It had been built by their grandfather, a paltry imitation of a larger and more elegant atrium in the Matkosens’ summer home in Trenkovi Bay. Faizal Vaneisen had intended to prove that anything the Matkosens could accomplish, he could as well, but to Tanzeg’s eyes it was merely a cheap copy.

‘So?’ Tanzeg, rolling his eyes at Ireina. ‘What of it?’

Most nobles preferred to have children who were as insidious as they were, to serve as willing partners in their machinations. Others chose instead to raise the most vapid, loyal pawns that could still manage to string two words together without drooling, in order to ensure their rule for as long as possible without fear of being usurped.

Whenever Tanzeg looked at Ireina, he couldn’t escape the feeling that their mother had tried to hedge her bets with the best of both worlds. While he was capable of his own plots, or serving as an able second in his mother’s schemes if he was forced to, his younger sister had no such capabilities. Esilia had raised him to lead, but kept his clay-headed sister in the wings in case Tanzeg’s reach exceeded his grasp, and Esilia was forced to have a suspicious ‘accident’ befall her heir.

Such thoughts might be abhorrent to many parents, but his mother had always valued pragmatism. Unlike the hand-wringing Matkosens, sending their excess heirs off-world to become Arbites, the Vaneisens had always been the more practical family. He and Ireina had had an additional three siblings, all of whom had perished tragically young.

‘So?’ Esilia said. His mother’s face, normally so impassive, contorted into a brief moment of rage before she regained her composure. He sneered at her lapse. ‘So, strengthening her position doesn’t exactly work in our favour.’

He snorted. ‘A brief surge in public opinion is “strengthening her position”, now? How terrible for us.’ Tanzeg put a hand to his head as if feeling faint. ‘Oh no! Whatever shall I do! Suddenly my rival is armed with the favour of peasants! What a nightmare!’ He rolled his eyes, and took a sip of his recaff. ‘The loyalty of our specialists is a greater asset than any warm feelings the masses may have for our dear leader,’ he said.

Esilia glowered at him.

‘Speaking of our specialists,’ chirped Ireina, ‘I haven’t seen Lostrovsky for some time.’ She beamed, glancing around as if Tanzeg’s toady would materialise in accordance with her wishes. Not that Tanzeg or his mother would ever have dreamed of allowing a lowborn gutter cretin like Lostrovsky into the Solaria Atrium.

Tanzeg loathed Ireina. Despite being in her early eighties, she had pushed the vanity of juvenat treatments and cosmetic surgery to extremes bordering on the ridiculous. She had frozen her age in her late teens, with her frizzy hair and loose splatter of freckles (most assuredly dyed in – no Vaneisen had ever had such blemishes naturally), puppy fat curves and beaming, wide-eyed stares.

His mother caught his eye, and Tanzeg cleared his throat. He picked up the newssheet and examined the headlines disinterestedly.

‘Lostrovsky will be away for a while,’ he said. Which was true. After all, if the little shit had been captured alive, he would already have spilled his guts, and all of the Vaneisens would be in custody at that very moment, or at the least fleeing for their lives through black market channels. More likely, he had been killed trying to finish the job on that miserable Matkosen girl, or otherwise had failed and escaped Darcarden and gone to ground. Tanzeg wasn’t sure which of those options left the least possibility of Lostrovsky’s involvement being traced back to him.

‘It might behove you to keep tabs on him,’ said Esilia, carrying on the pretence of innocence. ‘It would be a shame if a valued creature like that were acquired by another party.’

Tanzeg stared intently at the newssheet, sipping his recaff slowly.

‘Indeed,’ he said.

CHAPTER 5

‘Have we made any progress on finding the assassins?’ Ashielle’s expression remained commanding even whilst propped up against the headboard of her four-poster. She folded her hands in her lap and glared. Her medicae may have insisted on bed rest, but she would be damned if that would stop her from ministering to her affairs.

To encourage her to rest, her servants had kept the thick maroon drapes of her bedchamber closed, casting the room back into darkness. The rolling rainy season was continuing apace, of course, so even throwing the curtains wide did little to illuminate the room. Even at midday the sky was an oppressive grey, the threat of another thunderstorm always hanging in the air.

Her servants had done their best to encourage her convalescence, no doubt at the medicae’s direction. The spiral-carved posts of her bed had been hung with allium flowers to soothe. All her accoutrements of business had been neatly tucked away in the drawers of the thick-legged work desk. The directions she’d laid out for the modifications had been fulfilled in record time. The baroque paintings her father had preferred had been removed and replaced by pieces from her own collection, as if the dolorous landscapes she’d collected would somehow heal her own scrapes and bruises faster.

None of it helped, of course. That very morning she had woken from sleep convinced she could see burning red eyes watching her from the shadows, hidden in the gloom of the canopy above her bed. She’d lain there, frozen in terror, watching the eyes stare back at her, until full wakefulness had come and she realised she had only dreamt them.

‘No, ma’am.’ Group Captain Barrin lacked his predecessor’s ease in her presence. He stood stiffly, his hands folded behind his back, as if on parade rest in front of a superior officer. Technically, of course, she was, but it was a stiffness she wasn’t used to from the High Service. Fidal Barrin wouldn’t have been her first choice for Zelucan’s replacement; he had been recruited into the Ceocan Air Corps from the wardens and had very little military experience. Worse, she didn’t know him personally at all. Group Captain Barrin had done his service entirely on the southern continents before transferring to the High Service. Barring the presentation of his service honours (which the governor and his children always attended), neither of them had seen the other before her father’s death. Commodore Zelucan had trusted Group Captain Barrin implicitly, however. He was the first staff member the commodore had investigated and cleared, before naming Barrin as his second-in-command.

‘You’re investigating the Vaneisens?’ Ashielle had no doubt as to who had been behind the attack on her, but it wasn’t as though she could acknowledge such publicly. Lostrovsky’s body was the only evidence tying the coadjutor family directly to the assassination attempt, and the assassin’s corpse was still lying somewhere in the cavern below Darcarden. Without presentable evidence, she might have been able to have a common citizen arrested and disposed of, but an entire noble family couldn’t be vanished overnight without some kind of inquiry. The Vaneisens had too many in the Grevenate that owed the coadjutors their loyalty, and they would make her life difficult if their patrons were to be persecuted en masse.

Barrin nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am. The Lady Vaneisen was in the company of several representatives of the Grevenate at the time of the attack. And Ireina Vaneisen was seen in the company of half a dozen young men until the early hours of the morning. Only Tanzeg’s whereabouts remain unaccounted for. As he was the only member of the inner family we considered a suspect, this doesn’t give us any new revelations.’

‘How so?’ said Ashielle.

‘Lady Esilia’s physical infirmity makes her unsuited to midnight assassinations, ma’am. And the detailed elimination of four of the High Service along with the meticulous nature of this operation led us to discount Ireina Vaneisen as well.’

‘But you’re sure Ireina’s alibis check out?’

‘I am, ma’am. We confirmed her presence at the… house of ill repute with several independent witnesses, including those not… intimately connected with her.’ He coughed and glanced away from her. ‘From what I can see in Commodore Zelucan’s files, she isn’t one to have the wherewithal to orchestrate such an action.’

Ashielle smiled a little at his awkward formality. ‘Don’t discount her so readily,’ she said. ‘Ireina Vaneisen may be the most dangerous of the lot.’

To his credit, Group Captain Barrin didn’t contradict her or show any signs of doubt openly. ‘My apologies, ma’am. Our records show a consistent pattern of behaviour going back years.’

Ashielle sighed. ‘No doubt, group captain. Her cow-eyed debutante routine has been carefully polished over the course of decades. It is, however, a façade. She’s as sadistic and cunning as anyone else in her family.’

Barrin nodded. ‘Once again, my apologies, ma’am. There was nothing about this in Commodore Zelucan’s files.’

She straightened in the bed. ‘I think you’ll find that there’s a great deal which is not in the files that you’ll be expected to learn, group captain. Above a certain social stratum, there are some things which cannot be entrusted to paper, at least not to those papers which one’s subordinates will have access.’

Barrin nodded again. Ashielle sighed.

‘In that regard, ma’am, I’d like to look at bringing in a specialist team to try to seek out the assassin below the palace.’ He shifted slightly. Ashielle wished he didn’t insist on maintaining a military posture in her presence. She and Zelucan had been close enough that he could be relaxed around her, and she found the group captain’s stiffness to be mildly contagious.

‘Absolutely not,’ she said. ‘As it was in the time of my father, the chambers beneath the palace are to be kept locked, and entry into them forbidden.’

This was a sore spot with them. The group captain had been pressing to investigate the tunnels ever since she had been found in the buttery, her dressing gown soaked with blood and cavern filth.

‘I understand your trepidation, ma’am, but the investigation would greatly benefit from–’

‘There’s nothing else to say on the topic, Group Captain Barrin,’ she said. The friendly tone was gone now. She needed to make certain there was no ambiguity. ‘I commend you for your diligence in this regard, but those tunnels are condemned not for secrecy, but for safety. The substructures they lead to are unstable and dangerous in the extreme.’

The story she had given them had been as close to the truth as possible: beneath the palace she had discovered the ruins of far older structures. That in itself was not terribly shocking. It stood to reason that the governor’s palace had been built on a site of ancient rulership or significance. While it was true that the ruins gave way to natural cavern formations, she had given them a rather more fanciful account of their breadth and decrepitude. Barrin knew too that her would-be assassin was dead (or presumed dead and subsequently entombed behind locked doors). In the version she had imparted to her subordinates, however, the killer who had been pursuing her had fallen into a chasm.

She’d been quite incoherent when they found her, barely able to maintain consciousness. The medicae had concluded her weak state was due to the blood loss from her attack coupled with the cold environs below the palace. They’d asked about her injuries, of course. Her arms were covered in raw scrapes where she had been drawn from the chimney. There was a fading bruise high on her head where Lostrovsky had struck her. She’d declined to discuss the attack in detail, and had simply told the medicae, Barrin and her brother that she had suffered her injuries while fending off her attacker. She knew that explaining the specifics of any of the wounds would mean explaining them all, and she hadn’t been able to concoct a specific lie about her missing finger.

‘Are preparations for the ball in place?’ she asked, to forestall any further questions about the caverns.

He nodded stiffly. ‘Indeed. Is her excellency quite certain I can’t convince her to postpone? Or at least to limit the size of the guest list?’

Ashielle’s eyes narrowed, and she fought down the urge to throw something heavy at the group captain. She reminded herself that providing for her security was his job, after all.

‘Quite certain,’ she said. ‘Our staff is reduced, group captain. Our family reduced in size and influence. If I am to maintain my office, and, quite frankly, my life, I must present a strong and stable image to the Grevenate, lest any of them begin to court some foolish notion about placing the coadjutor on the throne. That means the Devotional Banquet must proceed.’

Normally the highlight of the Ceocan social calendar, the Devotional Banquet was a holdover from the days of planetary warfare, when rulers would invite their officers and subordinate chieftains to swear renewed oaths of fealty, and to renew their own vows of stewardship. It had evolved into a ceremony to celebrate and form alliances, where inter-house marriages were proposed and new business ventures cemented. To Ashielle’s mind, the proximity to Ruprekt’s death made this year’s banquet a ghoulish procession of those anxious to see how she was settling in to her role. She would be expected to mediate disputes and settle grievances, and all eyes would be on her for the slightest slip.

‘And my brother?’ she asked, keen to move on.

‘Reporting events here to Judge Idonell aboard the Callistonian Haven, ma’am.’ The group captain hedged for a moment, as if uncertain to offer his personal observation. ‘I believe he may also be attempting to feel out the judge’s feelings regarding the Vaneisen family and their involvement with the assassination.’

‘He and I have already discussed that matter,’ Ashielle said, ‘and I suspect he’ll find little has changed, with no tangible evidence to present. Still, there’s no harm in him trying.’ Despite her insistence that she didn’t need as much rest as those around her believed, she was growing weary. ‘If there’s nothing else in the immediate, I would take my rest.’

Group Captain Barrin nodded, saluted crisply, and left her bedchamber with a sharp twist of his heel.

She stared into the corners of the bedchamber for some time. The sconces in the wall glowed, turned up to their maximum setting, but still there were shadows that couldn’t be banished. She gazed at the darkness beneath the feet of her cloak wardrobe, wondering if some thing lurked beneath, peering back at her.

Ashielle sank into the pillows, no longer concerned with appearances now she was alone. She pulled the soft duvet up to her chin and stared unblinking at the walls. The governor’s bedchamber was surprisingly devoid of ornamentation, with plain walls and worn wooden floors. Her own sleeping quarters had been much more lavish as a child, with cabbage roses engraved in silver set into the wooden columns, and an expansive starscape painted across her ceiling, depicting whirling comets, brilliant nebulae and burning stars. The bedchamber she had taken over from her father was no peasant’s hovel, but it had also clearly not been designed or decorated with the thought or desire that the governor spend a great deal of time there. The art pieces the servants had hung during her recovery were the only personal touches to the décor. Ashielle knew if her circumstances had been different, if she had been relegated to bedrest only a month ago, she would have gone mad just sitting in that room.

It seemed like every day brought the same thing, now. When her aides and her underlings came to her, she could rouse herself, could scrape her mind together into some semblance of functionality, but as soon as they left, she fell apart like a marionette with the strings cut. She found herself staring into space for hours. Some days she realised she had skipped several meals in a row. Although she always allowed her maids to turn down her lights when they believed she was going to sleep, she always turned them up again as soon as the room was empty. When she did sleep, she did it with the room fully lit.

That was when she could sleep, which was rare. The image of Lostrovsky’s terrified face, frozen in the laspistol flash, kept haunting her. The sound of his screams echoing off the stone walls followed her into her dreams. At her best, in the middle of the night she insisted to herself over and over that there had been no other choice, no other way to survive. In the terrible light of each dawn, with the cathedral bells tolling out across the city, she knew better: she was damned.

She sighed. There was too much at stake for her to continue this way. Millions of people across her planet were dependent on her, heretic or not. She knew that she needed to pull herself together, that she couldn’t lie in her bed, trapped between fear and regret forever. She had to rise, to prove to her enemies that they could not defeat her.

Ashielle pulled the duvet over her mouth and nose, leaving only her eyes exposed. She stared at the wall to her side, her eyes unblinking.

Tomorrow. She would rise tomorrow.

Across Kostoveim, unseen eyes watched from the shadows. The flowing, rushing form was too swift and too ephemeral to be spotted by mortal eyes, but its effects could be felt by the exceptionally sensitive. But it watched them nevertheless, a thousand scenes of mundane torment spread before it like a feast before a prisoner starved.

In the corner of a glazier’s storefront it found the craftsman’s apprentice huddled in a corner, tears staining the boy’s face, his ribs still aching with the dull soreness of the drunken beating his master had given him. The thing in the shadows loomed over the boy, close enough to smell the salt on the child’s cheeks, before moving on in search of more varied prey.

Screams of agony drew it to a flakboard home in the oldest part of the city. A rich aura of pain emanated from a candlelit room, where the shadow found a cluster of humans attending a woman in the throes of childbirth. From the shadowy corner it stared, its thin, black lip curled up in revulsion. There was pain here, true, and fear aplenty, but it was spoilt by a flood of joy and hope as well. It drew a deep breath, savouring what sustenance it could take from the corrupted offering, and then was gone.

In the shrouded alleys, it paused to watch a man being gutted over a gambling debt. Even after the knife-wielding perpetrators fled into the night, it lingered over the fallen victim, drinking the man’s agony as he tried to crawl across the cobbles to some imagined safety. The victim was sotted, his senses dulled by drink, so his fear and pain were only a fraction of what they might have been.

After centuries of starvation, the pricks and stings of the city were a joy and a hideous curse to the shadow. Each new sufferance was burning, crimson relief: a draught of wine to a man dying of thirst. Yet each sip was torment. Almost better to have nothing at all than to have too little. Centuries had passed with only floating wisps of sustenance, and now it was forced to accept a trickle when a flood was demanded – was there for the taking before its very claws.

Down the alleys it flickered and flowed, back to the palace. Back to the place of its imprisonment. Back to the site of its freedom.

The scuttling guards took no notice of it. Why would they? To them it was a shadow on a moonless night. It was as much a part of the background as the stones of the wall, as the paintings of governors past that had hung there for centuries. It paused as it passed the strutting figure of the major-domo. Shadowy fingers extended, stroking the air just behind the marching man’s exposed neck. The soldier paused, feeling the chill run up his spine, and turned. The shadow flowed as effortlessly as sin, flattening against the wall as the soldier’s gaze fixed on the empty hallway. It thrilled at the spooky chill which emanated from the major-domo, who turned back to his path and marched on, his stride slightly quickened by the unexplained sense of dread.

So little, it knew, but soon there would be so much. The teeming, filthy herds of humanity had grown fat during its long incarceration. The air was choked with the stench of their sweat, their heaving breath, their bleating, braying voices. It was a world of prey who had forgotten that predators even existed.

The shadow flowed once more into the master bedroom where its patron slept fitfully. It knelt by her bedside, its burning eyes staring at her slumbering features. Only a mild unease floated from her now. In the first nights of its freedom, she had been plagued by the horrors she had witnessed, the churning nocturnal terrors occasionally driving her to wake screaming. Time had salved her wound, as it did, but the shadow knew that was inevitable.

The air held the thinnest scent of a far richer taste, however. The taste of remorse was one of the rarest in the world. More than a pain of the body, it was a pain of the soul. Only a spark, now, but the human gently slumbering in the bed, her mind only occasionally stirring with the faintest notions of what she’d unleashed, held the potential for a far grander feast to come.

If there was one building on Ceocan that dwarfed even the governor’s palace for both size and ostentation, it was the central cathedral in Kostoveim. The massive church had been built in the low-lying central portion of the city, as the focus of the Great Reconstruction. Building materials had been brought in from far away to construct the house of worship. So high were its vaulted ceilings that the carmine roof tiles were visible at any point in the city proper. The central tower rose high enough that travellers could use its illumination as a navigation point during stormy nights.

The governor’s carriage threaded through the wrought iron gates. Several of the penitent brigade moved to close the gates behind her. Despite its size and grandeur, the cathedral of Kostoveim was too small to warrant protection from the Ecclesiarchy’s trained militants. Instead, its defence was seen to by the volunteer penitents, those citizens of Ceocan who pledged their lives and service to the Ministorum in exchange for sustenance and shelter. Ashielle noted with some discomfort that she had never seen so many penitents before. Even as a child, the notion of accepting a penitent’s habit had been seen as an act of desperation, something only accepted by former criminals or outcasts. Now, the cathedral had them employed not only as guards and sentries, but menials and servants.

The façade of the cathedral had been commissioned and completed after the Great Reconstruction, and had been intended to send an ironclad message: a reminder that the attentions of the Imperium might wax or wane in their intensity, but the presence of Him upon the Throne was eternal. The grand doors had been made from a lustrous grey metal that had never shown signs of abrasion, corrosion or degradation in the millennia since their installation. The rose window above them was large enough to fly a landing craft through, and studded with basal crystal panels in a dizzying kaleidoscope of colours. Images of great men in ancient power armour flanked the rose window, their war-plate decorated with the ultima. At the apex of the façade, the Emperor of Mankind stood in profile, His noble gaze cast to the east. In the middle of the night on Reunification Day, His gaze into the night sky lined up with the direction of Holy Terra, His graven visage seeing the distant star that mortal eyes could never discern in the blackness. Behind Him, the great aquila spread its bronze wings.

The thoroughfare was blocked to carriages beyond the great entry, forcing visitors beyond that to proceed on foot. The blockade was topped by a statue of Saint Sebastian, his unforgiving visage graven in black marble shot through with veins of gold. The pilasters of the façade were embellished with images of the lesser saints, elongated to fit the proportions of the fake columns. Ashielle was surprised to find the deacon waiting for her near Sebastian Thor’s stone feet. Petty displays of power were common among high-ranking luminaries, and she had come with every expectation of being made to wait, or at least being escorted inside and treated to a display of Phoebian’s power and resources.

Instead, the deacon met her at the narthex of the great cathedral. A small flock of attendants crowded around her. Most of her entourage consisted of lower-ranking clergy, but near the back Ashielle could see two or three scarred, dead-eyed faces she imagined were still being diligently sought by enforcers in some part of the world or another.

‘Your eminence,’ Ashielle said. One of the attendants slid a stool in front of the deacon, and Ashielle lowered her knees to the cushioned surface.

‘Your excellency.’ Deacon Phoebian held her hand out to the young governor, who dutifully bent her knee and brushed her lips across the adamantium aquila on the deacon’s finger. At an official state function such as her father’s funeral, the governor would not normally be required to genuflect. Since she was the one calling on the deacon unbidden, it was customary to offer a show of deference to the Ministorum.

‘Did I call at an inopportune time?’ Ashielle asked, regarding the deacon’s entourage. She dismissed her own guards with a flick of her fingers. Sullenly, both men stepped back to stand guard over the carriage. A small spike of pain lanced through her hand as she stood, and she rubbed the silver cap on the end of her missing finger.

‘Hardly,’ said Deacon Phoebian. ‘I was just out taking my exercise. I thought a little walk along the Saint’s Arcade would afford us the time to talk to your satisfaction.’

Of course, such a venue would also offer the elderly deacon a plausible excuse to end the conversation at any time by claiming fatigue. Clever, Ashielle realised.

‘What can I do for you, excellency?’

Ashielle fell in with the deacon, uncertain of how candid she would be able to be if the deacon’s followers accompanied them the entire way. To her relief, the hangers-on fell away immediately. The deacon set off down the arcade with a measured stride that belied her frail frame. The stone arches of the arcade shielded them from the sun.

‘I wanted to talk to you about history, your eminence.’ Ashielle didn’t want to dance around the topic, but at the same time she wasn’t going to put all her cards on the table at once, lest the deacon suddenly reveal a fanaticism deep enough to impugn even a governor.

‘In what regard?’

‘What do you know of Ceocan’s history, prior to the Great Restoration?’

The deacon nodded. ‘I thought that might be what you wanted to discuss,’ she said. ‘Was there anything specific you were curious about?’

Ashielle smiled. Getting herself out of bed had taken an extreme act of will. In her mind, it had been easier to take her own finger off. But now that she was in the moment, matching her own wits against another woman of high station, she found her drive and confidence returning.

‘I’ve been reading through my father’s notes,’ she lied, ‘and I came across a mention of a town in Garenvos. Specifically, a construction project that unearthed an Old Ceoc burial mound.’

The deacon nodded again, a contemplative expression on her face. Ashielle had to admire the old woman for her ability to keep up the ‘wizened sage’ act. She would be willing to bet her last coin that Phoebian had never heard of any construction project in Garenvos. There was money on whether the deacon even knew which of her ministers was in charge in Garenvos. Phoebian was playing it the way she would have, though, had Ashielle been in the deacon’s position.

‘What I mean to ask is, do you know why the Old Ceoc are so feared?’ Ashielle did her best to project a little trepidation into her voice. If the old woman wanted to play the role of a learned scholar, she was happy to act the part of a wide-eyed student.

‘The Old Ceoc are not feared, child.’ The deacon beamed, clearly thrilled to be back in a familiar authoritative role, now that she believed she had a clear idea of what the governor wanted. ‘The forces of the Emperor laid low the heretics in their midst, and freed the population that had laboured beneath profane rule for so long. The dangers of the Old Ceoc are gone, never to return. True children of mankind never fear such base heretics, of course. We pity them as we cleanse their corruption.’

Ashielle smiled, hesitated, then nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said, meeting the deacon’s gaze and then looking away. ‘I just meant, why are we so vigilant for the relics of their culture? Surely any remains of their society should be preserved as monuments to our success? My father taught me that war trophies of the Emperor’s faithful are sacred, and that it was heresy to destroy them.’

The deacon stopped walking and laid a patronising hand on Ashielle’s shoulder.

‘Fear not, my child. It is well that Ceocan has one so pious as you to steward her.’ Phoebian resumed her pained shuffling. ‘You speak true, but for those of such elevated positions as we, there is a higher duty. We must protect the hearts and souls of the lives entrusted to our care. So foul were the perversions of the Old Ceoc, that even to know of their existence could corrupt the living.’

‘You speak of… dark powers? Of sorcery?’ Ashielle made the sign of the aquila.

Deacon Phoebian turned and regarded her, glanced around as if fearful of being overheard, and then nodded gravely.

Ashielle dropped her gaze, feigning terror. A month earlier, unearthing a secret history of sorcery on her world might have been genuinely horrifying, but the discovery of the vile creature such sorcery had been meant to contain had adjusted her standards for horror somewhat.

‘The very thought fills me with dread,’ she said. ‘The thought that someone might unearth some heretical ritual, that I might have apostates working foul magics within the population I am sworn to protect…’

‘I’m not surprised,’ the deacon sighed. Ashielle clamped down on her shock. How much did Phoebian know?

‘How do you mean?’ Ashielle said, carefully.

‘Preacher Larrichan told me your father made similar inquiries after his ascendancy,’ Phoebian replied. ‘It stands to reason that there are a number of sensitive matters that only a planetary governor is trusted enough to deal with.’

The deacon paused, leaning her hand against one wall of the cathedral, looking for all the world like nothing more dangerous than a winded old lady.

‘Do you recognise this image?’ she asked.

Ashielle had ceased paying attention to the decorations, and refocused on them. Between the pilasters of the wall, adorned with their grotesquely stretched saints, the walls of the arcade had been decorated with marble reliefs.

It depicted the soldiers with the ultima, the same ones that stood guard over the cathedral doors. Ashielle had seen similar figures on the gates of the Korgana Militant. They hefted mighty bolters and huge swords, and were locked in fierce battle with twisted, abstract forms.

‘I assume the larger figures are Adeptus Astartes,’ she said, although she had never seen such a being in life or image. ‘Fighting monsters of lore.’

‘Indeed,’ said the deacon. ‘The forces of the Reunification.’ Phoebian pointed to another figure, rising above the others. It looked smaller in frame than the angels of death that it led, and had a spindly frame with a long, forked beard. ‘Led by Aleandru the Confessor.’ Deacon Phoebian made the sign of the aquila. ‘Great men, who sacrificed much, including many of their own lives, to leave their legacy to us. To you in particular.’

Ashielle nodded, as if seeing the wisdom of the deacon. How disappointing. She had been hoping the deacon would have some more concrete notions on opposing the forces in league with the Old Ceoc.

‘I shall not fail to honour it,’ she said.

‘If you are plagued by fear,’ the deacon said, ‘keep tight to your legacy.’ She reached out with one aged hand to tap the bas relief of Saint Aleandru. ‘Particularly the rod that Saint Aleandru gave to the first governor of the Reunified Ceocan. The same rod he used to smite the unholy.’

Ashielle smiled, honestly this time. ‘Is it the same rod of office that was passed down to me?’

Deacon Bettonara beamed as the student got it. ‘The very same, Preacher Larrichan tells me.’

Ashielle bowed again.

‘Your eminence,’ she said. ‘You’ve given me much to strengthen my spirits.’

CHAPTER 6

Ostap was, quite simply, outmatched.

‘Our duty as an assembly is to the people of Ceocan,’ he said, ‘not just to the wealthy of Kostoveim.’

Those who had been called before the Grevenate, the witnesses and experts arrayed in the Occurriam, could scarcely hear him. That was fine; his words weren’t meant for them. The audiovanes in his alcove picked up his words and transferred them to the alcoves of all the other members. He could have activated his amplifier if he’d so wished, but this particular issue did not involve any members of the public, and Minister Fomynko didn’t feel the need for grandstanding.

Margreve Bruisell had no such discretion. ‘Just so, as Minister Fomynko says.’ The margreve’s voice boomed from the amplifiers, echoing in the open space of the Basilica like a roll of argumentative thunder. ‘We must think of the citizens of Ceocan, but that includes those of our own city! If we allow the Tupykamin evacuees to settle in Kostoveim, it will create a drain on local resources. We have our own unfortunates to care for, after all.’

Tianesh’s alcove in the third tier was on the wall above his own, preventing Ostap from looking at her directly. The holoscreen built into the top of his desk displayed the face of each current speaker, however, reminding all of the lords who held the floor and allowing them to see one another, albeit in a scratchy blue-and-white colourshift.

‘I remind Lady Bruisell that this assembly speaks on behalf of all of Ceocan. The evacuees are “our own unfortunates”.’ Langreve Evanova was one of the few voices from the upper tiers who could reliably be counted on to support the ground level, especially when the issue concerned the Matkosens and their agenda or legacy. ‘We have already received an affirmative response to the missive we drafted to the palace. Lord Governor Matkosen stands prepared to authorise emergency food allotments to the displaced through her own holdings. Their care and feeding will pose no burden to the citizens of Kostoveim.’

Despite Lord Evanova’s support, Ostap could see the currents of discussion, and knew it would be a difficult battle to get the evacuees cared for. Burrowing vermin had destabilised large portions of the cliffs the city of Tupykamin had been built on. When the worst of the rainy season storms had begun to crash into the coast, the city had suffered a series of disastrous rockslides, displacing over half of the city’s population. Nearly two thousand of the evacuees had journeyed on foot to Dnisiv, but Controller Norshynka, the executive administrator of Dnisiv and a man thoroughly bribed by the Vaneisens, had turned them away.

There just wasn’t any profit to be had in taking the Tupykamini in. They were a population of fur-trappers and deep-sea fisherfolk; this far inland they were nothing but unskilled labour, at least as far as the lords were concerned. The fact that they were on foot, with nothing but the clothes on their back, trekking through the most violent weather of the Ceocani year seemed to be irrelevant to them.

‘We can all appreciate the lord governor’s magnanimity.’ Minister Zborov’s voice was all oily charm. ‘Indeed, in the area of personal generosity, her example is a paragon of selflessness many would do well to take heed to.’ He never bothered with the amplifiers, as though his words were for the Grevenate alone. If he had a question to ask a witness, he merely mused it aloud to his colleagues, who never failed to relay it to the citizen being questioned.

Ostap wagered that Zborov was perhaps the most influential member of the Grevenate who was not themselves a lord, and was one of the only ministers not connected to their lord by blood. Margreve Jorgen Yulanski had appointed Zborov to his vital clerical position nearly sixty years ago after a vicious argument with Lord Ruprekt, after which Jorgen had not voluntarily set foot in Kostoveim again. The bitter old patriarch had even refused to come to Ruprekt’s funeral, sending his youngest daughter in his stead.

‘However,’ Zborov continued, ‘has Lady Ashielle offered to open her palace to these displaced villagers? Has she ordered soldiers to clear houses so that she might have room to house them?’ Minister Zborov was one official Ostap hated hearing from. No matter what the issue, the man could be counted on to say the right thing while doing the wrong thing. ‘Living quarters for these evacuees are also needed, and not within the lord governor’s province to provide, on this scale and at this time, as much as it might pain us to face this truth.’

‘Three thousand of the townspeople fled Tupykamin when the cliffs gave way.’ Greve Inzigo Hodyuk looked appalled by the tone of the conversation thus far. ‘Norshynka’s people only reported little more than two thousand when they were denied refuge in Dnisiv and sent into the maw of a stormfront. Our latest report estimates only sixteen hundred remain. Are we to sit by and do nothing while the storms scour these people from the face of our planet?’ Greve Hodyuk was young, but a fierce populist. Ostap wasn’t particularly surprised. Her family were lumber merchants from Trenkovi Bay, where the hard work of logging required the nobles who ran the business to work right alongside the men and women who laboured for them. It bred a lessening of the class divide that crossed the rest of Ceocani society.

‘And why would you think that these people have perished?’ Ireina Vaneisen’s voice crackled from the amplifiers, and hidden within his alcove Ostap grimaced, grateful his colleagues across the chamber were too far away to make out his facial expression. ‘I’ve seen no pict-steals of drifts of dead bodies. The tech-priests of the Pellucidian Troposec monitoring station have not contacted us with reports of corpses raining from the heavens. There are many isolated and unincorporated communities of agrarian workers across the continent. Is it not more likely these refugees have taken shelter with friends or family among those, than the wild and baseless claim that they are dropping dead in droves from exposure to a little rain?’

She was skilful, Ostap had to give her that. Greve Hodyuk tried to respond to Ireina’s barbs, but was drowned out by the laughter of her colleagues. This wasn’t the first time he had seen this dance, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. Ireina knew that the best way to lead the greves by their nose was to appeal to their treasury, while belittling and patronising any opposition.

‘We do, of course, have adequate accommodation for the evacuees,’ Ostap said, when the jeering had died down. ‘The Roveik district currently has several hab-blocks which are sitting vacant, more than enough to house the remaining sixteen hundred refugees. Or we could let them take their chances on trying to find a pair of farmers with grain silos large enough to house a thousand people.’ There was a murmur of laughter from those on his side, but Ostap could measure the laughter and see the eventual outcome.

‘The Roveik district has been slated for demolition,’ Margreve Bruisell boomed. ‘It has already been redistricted for a new warehousing facility, which you yourself voted for, if I recall.’

‘What I recall,’ Ostap said, ‘was that the demolition was scheduled not to begin until two years hence. Ergo, there’s nothing preventing us from housing the evacuees there.’ He smiled. He wasn’t going to win, but neither did he intend to let the Vaneisens and their supporters perform their villainy without being called to task for it. ‘Nothing, that is, save for the statutes of usury, which would prevent the Vaneisen family from collecting rent from temporary tenants of those properties. Nothing except for the fact that none of my esteemed colleagues from the upper tiers can see an easy way to exploit these displaced citizens for their own profit.’

The chamber roared with a dozen officials speaking at once. The amplifiers were programmed to accept and respond to primacy and seniority, but so much input at a single time overwhelmed them, reducing the Basilica Grevenator to a cacophony of thunderous voices all melding into a single chaotic storm. The remaining citizens in the Occurriam doubled over, their ears covered. Only the sonoblative generators in the alcoves prevented the members of the Grevenate from being deafened. After a few moments, the primacy filters finally managed to kick in.

‘…and is precisely the sort of grandstanding nonsense that perpetually bogs this chamber down in battles of folly!’ Langreve Oldemeier fumed, his face visibly flushed in rage even through the static-laden holodisplay. ‘A displaced workforce numbering in the thousands? With no means of supporting themselves, quartered in a pauper’s tenement and fed on the welfare of the public? All of us, or at least all of us with the wisdom of more than a scant few years, know this to be an ingredient list for a disaster of cataclysmic and generational proportions!’

‘Order is the assigned task and the appointed command,’ intoned Margreve Ulika Wynovok, a woman whose insufferably false piety grated even on her allies, ‘and by idle hands are the labours of heresy performed. I cannot in good conscience vote on measures that would see a district of destitution added to my city, with the residents therein condemned to a life devoid of opportunity and doomed to criminality.’

Ostap tried to speak, to argue, but Lady Gavozny cut him off.

‘Too right,’ she said. ‘We must all surely recognise that, despite the unfortunate circumstances of their plight, those citizens from Tupykamin are served better, in the long run, by relocating to somewhere other than the capital. With that said, by the authority of the Basilica Grevenator, I call this issue to vote.’

Ostap sighed as the lights across his desk began illuminating, indicating the votes of his colleagues. He tapped the icon to indicate his assent, and realised it was never a good sign when he could identify which of the tiny lights was his: one of the few green icons overwhelmed by a sea of red ‘decline’ votes.

He cast his eyes upward, to the relief images of the Imperium’s militant defenders. The soldier of the Astra Militarum caught his eye, as it had done so many times before. He had never stood shoulder-to-shoulder with such august warriors, of course. He had not knelt in a sandbag fortification as mankind’s enemies came slavering forward, determined to fight once again a battle that was almost certainly a foregone conclusion. More and more, however, he felt that his service in the Grevenate gave him, if not an equivalent frame of reference, then a modicum of empathy for those doomed to perish in a losing battle their honour would not let them walk away from.

‘Great Throne on Terra,’ Ashielle whispered. She’d had no idea a human could hold so much blood.

Her would-be assassin had made it out of the labyrinth and to the base of the tight spiral stair. Or perhaps he had been dragged there. Ashielle stood on the staircase and marvelled at the scene. She didn’t even reel in horror; it was as if the carnage was simply beyond her mind’s ability to process. Blood, dried and tacky, covered every surface, as if it had been applied not by arterial spray but with a painter’s brush. The corpse, or the bulk of it, lay with limbs askew. The headless remains were so discombobulated that she couldn’t begin to guess which stumps had been arms and which had been legs. Lesser portions of meat lay scattered about the torso, foundations for splinters of gleaming bone and tattered strips of dangling skin. Of Lostrovsky’s head there was no sign.

She held her torch aloft. In the thin electric light of the mounted luminator globe, she could just make out the edge of the maze. She sighed and picked her way across Lostrovsky’s remains.

The thought had occurred to her to seal the basement away. If the creature possessed the capacity or intent to go on a killing rampage it surely would have done so by now, after all. Either it was gone, returned to whence it came, or else it was unable to leave. That second thought was sobering, and had given her pause.

In the end, she couldn’t stomach the thought of sleeping in her father’s room, walking by his portrait’s unforgiving gaze and wearing the leaden weight of his ring on her hand without living up to his example to her. She had a responsibility, not only to everyone living in Darcarden, but to all those who would live there in the future. She could no more leave such a dangerous creature running loose than she could leave a live grenade lying in a hallway.

Her plasma pistol did a great deal to alleviate her anxiety, of course. She wasn’t certain what manner of thing had torn Lostrovsky to pieces, but it was a rare beast that could withstand a full burst from such a weapon. If the deacon had spoken true, then the rod of office tucked in her belt was proof against such blasphemies.

The circular maze was as frightening as it had been the first time, with its walls as narrow as the sides of a sarcophagus and the vague sense of dripping water somewhere in the darkness. She only needed her navigation trick in part, however. A few of the passages she recognised as dead-ends. The thought of the creature wandering lost through the labyrinth occurred to her, but if that was the case she would have to come up with an alternative plan. Wandering away from the route through the maze, alone in the darkness, wasn’t a plan she fancied going through with.

Emerging from the maze solved one of the mysteries: the location of Lostrovsky’s head. The assassin’s visage stared at the mouth of the labyrinth from the remnants of one of the trophy racks. The killer’s face was contorted in an agonised scream, the little round chin extended and warped in a way Ashielle would have thought impossible. Her family had been avid hunters at one point, and the mounted specimens of dozens of animals lined the upper levels of Darcarden. She had always noted in her youth the difficulty of capturing life and emotion in the dead eyes of a trophy creature. Lostrovsky’s murderer had no such difficulty, and in fact was a true master of the craft: the assassin’s eyes were still bright and clear, wide with terror and wet with torment. Even when he had been prepared to snuff her life, those eyes hadn’t betrayed a flicker of emotion to her, but here before her she read a world of pain.

Ashielle was shaken from her reverie by the bone-chilling realisation that the assassin’s face was still moving. A chill touch crept down her spine, rooting her to the foetid stone floor as she watched the eye rolling in its skull. Just before she began to scream, she realised the dead eyes had not been animated by some unholy means; a large drop of blood had merely welled up in the socket, and finally spilled from the eye. She shook herself, breathing deep and willing her hammering heartbeat to slow. She didn’t know how long she had stared into Lostrovsky’s dead face, but by the time she had calmed down, her joints were stiff and her fingertips cold. She clutched her pistol tighter and stomped past the spiked head to the main chamber.

Something was different. Ashielle held her luminator out, trying to determine what was amiss. There were bloody streaks on the ground, evidence of Lostrovsky’s terrified and ultimately doomed struggle for life, but it was more than that. There was a brick lying loose on the ground that hadn’t been there before.

There was a passage, or at least the beginnings of one, leading away from the trophy room in the opposite direction from the oubliette chamber. Scratch marks covered the dirt there. Several other stones and bricks had been dislodged to form a loose pile at the bottom. The creature had been busy. Beyond the damage the creature had inflicted, she spied a vertical shaft, too narrow for anything larger than a rodent to squeeze through. The flow of air told her that it went all the way to the surface. Could the creature squeeze itself through such a passage? If it could travel through the shadows, as she’d seen, she wouldn’t be surprised.

The oubliette room held an even more disturbing labour. The geometric runes ringing the stone circle had been cleaned, the cobwebs and dust brushed away from the smooth white material. Each rune had been carefully daubed with a thin coat of blood.

‘You like my little display?’

Ashielle spun, trying to pinpoint the voice. She snapped her pistol up, ready to threaten the creature, only to find the passage behind her occupied by nothing but damp moss and the echo of her fearful breathing. She realised that even the chittering of rodents was absent, and had been since she had ventured through the secret door. The quiet was so total, she began to fear she had imagined the voice.

When she turned back to the stone ring, her gaze was met by the hellish pits of the creature gazing back at her. The coal-eyes she had seen locked away before were more intense now, the spark brighter and deeper. The brilliant orbs were so hateful she could have sworn they would burn her if she got close enough. She had no idea how it had moved past her without making a sound. The inhuman face was no more than an arm’s length from her own, close enough to pounce before she even raised her weapon. She shuddered to think how long it had stood behind her, studying her, while she had been menacing an empty passage. The thing stood watching her, but its easy stance didn’t fool her. She knew it could move with the speed of a marshlion if it wished.

‘The grunting, painted barbarians that used to call these caves home were fond of planting those ridiculous little trophy displays to ward us off.’ The voice was smoother, richer than it had been before. Ashielle swallowed, her mind suddenly unable to focus. She couldn’t have shot the thing if she wanted to. This wasn’t what she’d been expecting.

‘The trophies, the labyrinth,’ she said, aware that she needed to regain the social footing, ‘they weren’t for intruders from the surface, were they? They were supposed to intimidate and obstruct your people.’ She successfully resisted the urge to turn her head to the stone ring, but her eyes flicked towards it anyway.

The thing let out a horrifying sound: a hollow, echoing click that reminded her of a primitive trying to start a fire in a cave by slamming rocks together. The monster’s shoulders juddered slightly, and she realised with a start that it was laughing at her.

‘Yes,’ it hissed. ‘Your kind has always clutched desperately at talismans they think will protect them from us.’ It shifted its gaze to her pistol. As if to demonstrate its point, the thing broke away from the shadows and stalked back towards the stone ring, turning its back fully to her. It was as if the darkness swallowed it up. Its form became faded and indistinct. She tried to focus on the ashen grey hair, but after a moment that too was gone in the gloom.

‘Why are you still here?’ Ashielle asked.

‘I cannot leave,’ came the hissing reply. It seemed to echo throughout the room. Ashielle felt a creeping dread up her spine. She knew the thing was trying to unnerve her. She had no intention of playing its childish games.

‘I find that hard to countenance,’ she snapped. ‘I think you could be out of the palace and gone from Kostoveim before anyone even realised you had been here, if that was your wish. So why remain?’

The eyes snapped open again, no more than a handful of paces from where the creature had vanished. It stood in front of the stone ring upon the wall, one hand lifted to trace the runes. It gazed at her over its shoulder, the red eyes now taking on a hateful hue they had not seemed to possess before.

‘Palace, city, river or caves – they’re all still here.’ It turned back to the stone ring. ‘And I cannot leave here until I am bidden to do so.’ The creature turned back and cocked its head. ‘As it has ever been, the emissary serves the pleasure of the chieftain.’

Ashielle scowled. ‘Explain.’

The creature clack-laughed at her again.

‘You bear the signet on your hand,’ it said. ‘You wielded the knife that made the offering of flesh and blood. You gave life to reconsecrate the pact.’

Ashielle’s eyes narrowed. ‘So, are you bound to my bidding, then?’

The red eyes flared briefly.

In the space of a blink, the thing crossed the distance between them. It stood close enough for her to smell the dry, rotten odour of its skin, like a den of hibernating reptiles. Its arm moved like a striking serpent, snatching her rod of office from her belt. The fiend held it up between them.

‘No,’ it said. For the first time its tone was not jovial or restrained. She could feel a galaxy of contempt in that word.

‘In what way do you serve my pleasure, then?’ Ashielle knew she had the upper hand, at least for the moment. As fearsome as the creature was, it was prevented from harming her, either by sorcery or necessity.

The thing growled with a voice like a drowning gurgle. The eyes burned steady now, and along its black skin she could see a series of heliotrope runes glowing faintly. Here was the truth of it, the cultured and easy demeanour a thin mask. Beneath lay a predator, alien in thought and body.

‘Call my name,’ it hissed. The cadence and lilt were still alien, but the anger and arrogance were unmistakable no matter the language. ‘Make your offering of flesh and blood. Of life. And the darkness shall descend where you command, leaving only whom you wish.’

‘And what is your name?’ she asked.

‘Jaezubiel.’

There was no discordant hiss, no pop of displaced air, no dramatic device to signal the fiend’s departure. It was just gone.

Tanzeg slammed the door to the carriage. The previous night had been positively vexing.

The wardens had arrested his primary apothecourier in Kostoveim earlier in the week in a raid that was so well coordinated it had to have been instigated by inside information. Try as he might, Tanzeg had been unable to determine who the rat had been. His suspicions had already led to him questioning several of his bagmen, two of them to the point that they would no longer be able to serve his enterprises.

He’d tried to work out his frustrations by visiting his favourite gentry’s club, home to one of Kostoveim’s infamous ‘strife societies.’ Amid the tang of aged amasec and a pall of rich smoke, the wealthiest degenerates of Kostoveim would gather together to dine and drink in luxury, surrounded by fine art and finer consumables. Under cover of darkness, the most desperate of the city’s poor were brought in and enticed to fight for the pleasure of the viewing elite. Sportsmanship and righteous challenge were nowhere to be found; the strife societies operated to turn a profit and provide the audience with entertainment. The rules were irrelevant, the lives of the competitors valued less than beasts, and the terms of each match subject to change at a moment’s notice with the offer of enough coin.

Even this had failed to assuage Tanzeg’s mood, however. Normally the bloodshed at his behest perked him right up, but nothing seemed to relieve his stress. He had even opened his own purse to up the violence, first paying to have two bare knuckle brawlers armed with meat cleavers. When their brutal dismemberment of one another failed to satisfy, he’d intervened in another match, paying to have a recurring fighter’s legs broken before his bout. Even the boos and wails of his fellow nobles as they watched the crowd favourite beaten to death by a pair of half-starved street performers could not alleviate his ire.

This night didn’t appear to be shaping up any better. His date for the evening shivered on the carriage bench next to him. The women’s bench occupied by his mother and sister had a heavy down quilt to warm the legs on chill nights, but none of the Vaneisens would ever have let a common companion sit with nobility. It was only in the interests of time that they allowed Tanzeg’s companion into the carriage at all. If they’d been attending a soiree closer to the Vaneisen villa, his mother would have insisted he make Marysia walk.

He’d tried to self-medicate to take the edge off, of course. The new supplier he had found for rekanine capsules had proven to be slightly too good at his job. The high had been intense, but had lasted far longer than Tanzeg was used to. The sun had been creeping over the horizon before his heart had slowed enough for him to be able to get any sort of sleep at all, and what little he had managed had been light and easily disturbed.

And now he had the unenviable task of the governor’s ball. Few things were less attractive than spending an evening listening to tired string music and feigning deference to the pretentious child who ruled Darcarden. Of course, there was no experience so loathsome that it couldn’t be made more miserable by the presence of his mother and sister.

Ireina and his mother stared at him as he adjusted his coattails on his carriage bench.

‘Are you finished with your little temper fit?’ Esilia said. For the governor’s ball, she had chosen an outfit of Anzellian batsilk. The fabric of the gown itself was woven so tightly it looked as though it could be liquid. Her decorative shawl was a far looser weave, like a finely woven fisher’s net laid over her bared shoulders. Her hair had been bound with a series of batsilk threads, their gleaming silvery finish contrasting against the steel grey of the matriarch’s head.

Tanzeg said nothing, only slouched in his seat. He had chosen a rib-belly coat over a padded duellist’s vest and riding breeches. His creamy white outfit, trimmed with gold and odobenid bone, was the height of expense and ostentation.

‘Whatever has got into you?’ asked Ireina. She gazed out of the window idly.

Tanzeg slammed a fist against the back of the carriage. If the driver didn’t get moving shortly, he was apt to throw the man to the street and drive them himself. He’d done it before.

To many of the ruling families in Kostoveim, an autocarriage was the pinnacle of wealth and status. Few could afford them, and only the governor could afford to run one for mundane tasks. The Vaneisens had always preferred horses. Like his father and his grandfather, Tanzeg could wax poetic about the pride of Ceocan’s animal husbandry, about the dangers of automation, or the superiority of the horse to the autocarriage. It was all too common to meet a petty noble full of pride over their family’s new acquisition, and Tanzeg enjoyed injecting a bit of humility in their lives. In truth, his preference came down to the fact that he couldn’t whip an autocarriage.

‘He’s embarrassed because his security was breached,’ said Esilia.

Tanzeg’s eyes narrowed. How had she known? Ireina pursed her lips quizzically.

Their mother went on. ‘One of his little narcotic houses was raided, and not by the enforcers. He’s spent the better part of the last few days trying to figure out who did it.’

Tanzeg realised that his mother never spoke with such confidence about matters she was ignorant of. If she was putting his business on display, it was because she already knew who had betrayed him. It didn’t take him long to come to the obvious conclusion.

‘You?’ he asked, turning a wicked eye to his mother.

Ireina giggled. Esilia ignored her son’s outburst and her daughter’s taunts.

‘Clearly it was warranted,’ she said. ‘You’ve poisoned your mind to powder – how else could your utter failure be explained?’

Tanzeg forced his face into a bitter, crazed grin.

‘You underestimate me, mother. I’m wounded that you think your own son wouldn’t turn a setback to his family’s advantage. We haven’t been arrested, which means Lostrovsky wasn’t taken alive by the governor’s forces.’

Ireina waggled her decorative fan dismissively. ‘And yet your minion has yet to make himself known, either. Which suggests he didn’t make it out alive.’

‘Too right.’ Tanzeg nodded, reached under his jacket, and produced a slim control unit. ‘It would be a shame, then, if his corpse were to be discovered in the governor’s palace.’

Ireina leaned over to her mother. ‘He fitted the assassin with an iso-tag,’ she said.

Esilia continued to look unimpressed. ‘Which is all well and good if the Matkosen child was foolish enough to keep a rotting cadaver lying about her drawing room for a month after shooting him dead. What are we to do if the body has been removed?’

‘The device tracks the radionuclidic signature of the tag,’ Tanzeg said. ‘All I need to do is begin at the last place I left him, and I should be able to track Lostrovsky all the way to his final resting place. At the very least, to the site of his death, which should be able to produce evidence of his demise.’

Esilia scowled. ‘There will be a great deal of security.’

Ireina laid an obsequious hand on Esilia’s arm.

‘Please, mother,’ she said. ‘I can think of no task that Tanzeg has more practice or talent for than skulking about a lady’s home unwanted and unnoticed.’

She made not a sound, but Tanzeg caught the hitch in Marysia’s breath as she bit back a snort of laughter. He wasn’t sure if his escort’s laughter was at his expense, or because she knew things his sister did not. His pride compelled him to believe the former.

‘That’s why I brought a professional,’ he said. ‘After all, what was it you always said about craftspeople?’

‘Artists,’ corrected his mother, absently staring at the curtained window. The windows of their carriages were always heavily draped. All the better to remind themselves and the world around them that there was a wall around the family, an eternal separation between them and the common person. ‘An artist is only as good as their tools.’ She turned and cast a critical eye on Marysia. ‘And you are a useful tool, are you?’

Marysia’s face betrayed nothing, but Tanzeg could feel the brief tension in her. He knew she wanted to say something sharp, but wisely refrained.

‘I should think so, ma’am. Good enough to do my job and remain silent about it afterwards,’ she said. Tanzeg was glad Marysia hadn’t tried to make some snide comment or witty boast. Real professionals never did, in his experience.

‘And you can do your part?’ he asked his sister.

Ireina nodded. ‘The Grevenate knows that having a ruling family as weak as the Matkosens invites nothing but disaster. Ashielle succeeds now only by walking the most perilous of balancing acts. The nobles need only the flimsiest of tangible excuses to back our installation as the governing family.’ She smiled sweetly, in a way that made Tanzeg distinctly uneasy. He’d seen that smile before. In their youth it had usually heralded him being punished for a crime he hadn’t actually committed. In adulthood he had learned it came before far more nefarious turns of fortune.

‘You have an agent within the Matkosen household, don’t you?’ He had tried for months to plant a solid traitor within the governor’s household, or else to flip a loyal supporter. How had his sister got her hooks into the governor’s people? And how highly were they placed?

‘She has a prospect,’ Esilia snapped, stealing the momentum from her daughter’s gloating. ‘So far that seems to be all either of you have. And we cannot build a legacy on ifs and maybes.’ Esilia smiled for the first time since Tanzeg had got into the carriage. ‘How do we build our future?’

Tanzeg grimaced and slumped in his seat. As much as he hated Esilia, she was right. In many ways he supposed he and Ashielle had a great deal in common. Both of them had been shaped by their parents, moulded to fill a certain role since before their birth.

‘We build our future in the shadows,’ he said. ‘We do not build with them.’

CHAPTER 7

Jaezubiel watched the human breathe.

There was no one else in the room to see it, but it clung to the shadows, drawing them about itself like a cloak, out of habit. The chamber was small, but warm, and smelled faintly of herbs. The old woman, her frame bent and gnarled, slumbered fitfully beneath layers of woven blankets. Someone had laid out a thoughtful, if useless, bouquet of wildflowers across the crone’s stomach.

It had never seen her face before, but Jaezubiel knew this woman. It knew her intimately, in fact. Just as a man stranded on a darkened plain would fixate upon a light source so faint he would never otherwise notice, or have his ear drawn to the sound of a pin drop when locked in a mausoleum, so Jaezubiel’s incarceration had sharpened its senses. Locked away in its oubliette, it had been able, after a time, to sense the hurts of those far overhead.

It had never been a replacement for devouring the pain of someone close at hand – or, Muses forbid, those pains caused by its hand – but it had sufficed. The pain of those who dwelled in the palace had been its crust of bread, the trickle of water down the wall of its cell that had sustained it. Like that life-sustaining trickle, it had lapped at such pains, savouring every minute drop. Sharp, sudden pains, even very intense ones, were often gone so quickly that there was nothing of them to consume by the time Jaezubiel had felt them.

It was the familiar pains that had been the best. How many times had this woman scrubbed stones with fingers swollen with arthritis? How many times had she bent on her scabbed and creaking knees to clean a forgotten pantry, a shelf that no one would see, in a labour which would never be appreciated? How many times had she sat sipping lukewarm tea because her teeth were too thin and worn to bear the brunt of a hot drink?

The thing of shadow loomed over the bed, inhaling the rich scent of the woman’s discomfort. Even in slumber her ancient limbs pained her. Her head ached, the bones soft and yielding where the butt of a pistol had cracked them. What few thoughts remained to her were fearful, resentful and agonised. Jaezubiel clicked a soft laugh to itself. It was funny, it thought. It had spent so many years lamenting that it had only her to feed on, and when it was finally released, with an entire city of torments to delight in, it was to her it returned. Her pain was a flavour it had only tasted from afar, and now that it was so close, it was a welcome delight beyond anything it could have imagined. A thin and simple meal, but one that had teased its senses for nearly a hundred years.

Empathy was unknown among its people. Among the freezing, lightless void of its home, where every shadow hungered and the griefwyrms cawed their mockery of the dead, feelings that warmed the soul called out like a beacon to the predators of the realm. And in that realm, everything was a predator. Jaezubiel couldn’t construct any true sympathy for the bed-ridden old woman. Still, it felt a closeness to her. She had been a familiar, if distant, presence for many years. Empathy might be beyond its remit, but selfish possessiveness was not. It pained it that she could no longer serve its needs. The thought that she might perish, and not at its hands, sparked a cold anger within it.

With one blackened talon, Jaezubiel stroked the withered, sunken cheek. The thin flesh twitched at its touch, and the old servant moaned in her sleep. Jaezubiel’s lips parted over its seed-pearl teeth, and it faded back against a wall. There might yet be a way she could serve it, it realised.

It was the minutiae that dragged a leader down. Ashielle’s father hadn’t told her that. He hadn’t needed to; his example showed it to her every day. For every major decision, every crisis, there were a hundred thousand matters of trivia. She hadn’t been governor for a month before she lost track of the number of routine approvals, denials and authorisations she had signed or notarised.

Hanrik sighed as he scanned the bookshelf in her office. Behind her desk, Ashielle smiled. How many times had Ruprekt heard a similar sigh from one of his family as he sat behind that desk, buried beneath a mountain of bureaucratic incidentals? More than she could count, Ashielle would wager. That’s what had made him an excellent governor. He had never shirked, never faltered, never knocked off early with a scheduled task undone to go fowling or play with his children. Rain or shine, ill or healthy, he had done his duty.

‘The crowd is already amassing for your banquet,’ said Hanrik. ‘Drenata must have been very busy.’

Ashielle glanced up from her paperwork. Her brother had eschewed the arbitrator armour for the evening, instead going with a quilted slashed doublet and matching hose in a soft blue-grey colour. The style was unconventional, probably Sorinouxian, but his outfit was civilised enough. By luck or design he’d chosen a colour that matched their house’s. She noted he had even found a decorative holster for his autopistol, with the Matkosen arms embossed in silver.

Ashielle winced. She realised she’d forgotten to tell Hanrik what had happened to Drenata.

‘Unfortunately not,’ she said. ‘Drenata is still recovering.’

Her brother turned, not quite comprehending. ‘Still recovering?’

She nodded. ‘The injuries she suffered during the assassination attempt were more severe than was at first believed,’ she said. ‘I’ve had her made comfortable, but my medicae tells me she’s suffered severe brain damage, and that it’s unlikely she’ll ever wake.’ The notion of providing Drenata with the best care available had never been in question. Unlike so many other issues she’d dealt with, she didn’t have to ask what her father would have advised her to do. Drenata had given the bulk of her life in service to the governor’s household, and making sure she was cared for was the least Ashielle could do to honour her service.

Hanrik grimaced and turned back to the bookcase. Few on Ceocan had welcomed him back, Ashielle knew. Having one of the few who had opened their hearth to him taken away had to sting. She supposed that her brother had been so treated throughout his life that he probably considered the feeling typical by now. Drenata had always had an extra moment to spare for the wellbeing of the children in the palace, but Ashielle was beginning to suspect she had doted on Hanrik.

‘It’s a shame,’ he said. ‘It would have been nice to see a friendly face. Or at least feel their presence.’

‘Should I take that to mean that Judge Idonell will not be attending?’ Ashielle smiled as Hanrik turned back to her, to show her brother she was teasing him. ‘Or does that mean your meeting with him went less than spectacularly?’

Hanrik straightened his belt, frowning. She wondered if he realised how much he looked like their father in that moment. She knew that look: the stern, patrician glare as he tried to fight back a decidedly unprofessional comment.

‘Judge Idonell will not be attending,’ he said. Ashielle could tell he was fighting himself on whether or not he should say more to her. A quandary of duty to his position against duty to his family. If voicing a negative opinion of his superior gave him this much difficulty, how much worse might it be if he was forced to intervene professionally?

Ashielle signed one of the documents in front of her. A routine authorisation for grain shipments to the Callistonian Haven. The key to getting men like Hanrik and her father to open up was to give them an out.

‘I’ve yet to meet him, of course,’ she said. ‘In my preparations for the possibility of his attendance this evening, I’ve had to rely on father’s notes.’ She shuffled the request to the other side of her desk, studiously avoiding Hanrik’s sudden gaze. ‘He seemed to be of the opinion that Idonell had no interest in the goings-on of Ceocan.’

Hanrik cleared his throat and shuffled uncomfortably. There it was: confirmation of all she needed to know.

‘With regards to what matters, or rather, that is, in the broader sense of the Imperium at large,’ Hanrik said, caught between honesty and offending a planetary governor, and his own sister to boot, ‘the Callistonian takes up a greater portion of attention than, or rather, the affairs of–’

‘A relatively minor world?’ Ashielle offered. ‘Relative to the Imperium as a whole?’

Hanrik visibly relaxed. ‘Quite.’

Ashielle signed the last of the documents and pushed back from her desk. ‘Hanrik,’ she sighed, ‘I’m not as self-deluded as the council of nobles. I may not have been educated on Sorinoux, but I have enough awareness to know that Ceocan is only a very small part of the Imperium as a whole. I’m sure the judge has more than enough to occupy his time on the Callistonian.’

Hanrik shook his head. ‘It isn’t so much that, but the Callistonian is where the bulk of traffic comes through. I know it looks like a slight, but if anything, it’s a credit to father’s administration that the arbitrators need pay so little attention to the planet.’

Ashielle gave herself a last check in the mirror before leaving. She allowed Hanrik to open the door for her, but made sure it was she who locked the door. After the intrusion, she couldn’t trust anyone.

‘So, in your opinion, what is the likelihood of the arbitrator being drawn in to a power struggle?’ she asked as they walked.

Hanrik kept his eyes forward. ‘Very small,’ he said. ‘Idonell has managed to stay out of the politics of the noble houses for decades, and has every intention of keeping it that way. So long as the tithes keep coming and whoever occupies Darcarden continues to give him a plausible veneer of stability, he isn’t going to get involved.’

‘You seem like you disapprove,’ said Ashielle. Hanrik grimaced again.

‘It’s not my place to approve or to disapprove of the judge’s methods of operation,’ he said.

‘But if it was?’

Her question brought her brother up short. He stopped walking for a moment, weighing whether to be honest with her or not.

‘If I were in Judge Idonell’s position,’ he said cautiously, ‘I might be more inclined to pay greater attention to the goings-on of Ceocan.’ He started walking again, refusing to look Ashielle in the eye. ‘Of course, my superiors would rightly question whether my interest was motivated by personal spite. Which is why I would never be allowed to serve on Ceocan.’

That was as it ever had been. The truth was that the political warfare of Ceocan was relatively small time. She knew that on worlds like Sorinoux, the monolithic bulwarks of the ancient Adeptus organisations ground against one another in titanic clashes, struggles that might leave thousands or even millions dead as a result of a petty dispute between rival functionaries. Ceocan had none of that. Their sole arbitrator cared little for the world. The Adeptus Mechanicus and the Administratum both considered the Callistonian Haven to be their primary concern, and kept the bulk of their forces there. The Adeptus Astra Telepathica did not even have an office on Ceocan, apparently considering the world too insignificant to bother with a standing contingent of sanctioned psykers trained to send and receive interstellar communication. Her household staff had the only assigned astropath on the entire planet, although she knew a few of the wealthier noble houses were able to afford private astropaths of their own.

She was glad that Hanrik was walking with her. The halls of Darcarden had begun to change their tone for her. Where she had once drawn strength from their immensity, the upswept arches reminding her to lift her head, the ancient stone foundations that had borne her people for millennia lending strength to her feet, she now walked them with trepidation at best. The vaulted ceilings were never completely lit; how could they be? Each darkened hallway she passed was a potential hiding spot. Each shadowy recess was the home for an imagined set of lurking eyes.

Her unseen stalker watched her from the shadows, she knew, and in Darcarden, there was nothing but shadows to hide in.

‘I’m afraid I simply must slip away, ladies.’ Tanzeg smiled at the simpering noblewomen vying for his attention. ‘My companion needs a little air, and what sort of escort would I be if I didn’t accompany her?’ He prodded Marysia to move, smiling all the while.

His companion smiled and curtseyed. A skilled actress, Marysia did not give away the slightest clue that she didn’t belong to this world. Her skilful cold reading of the guests allowed her to navigate conversations about art, politics and finance with practised ease. She gave no reason for any of them to believe she was anything other than a new-money merchant’s daughter or distant cousin of one of the Grevenate, in Kostoveim for the ball, and infatuated perhaps with the eldest Vaneisen scion.

Tanzeg led Marysia through the side halls, tugging at her arm insistently. This was why he had brought her: no one would question a spoiled son of privilege stealing away to a side room with his lady friend. Governor Matkosen was busy receiving official supplicants, and the rest of the guests were too busy plotting to stab one another in the back to care. Tanzeg found the narrow staircase down into the footman’s hall where he had pursued Ashielle with Lostrovsky. He would have been capable of blustering his way through any mundane servant challenging him, but none did.

‘Wait here,’ he said to his companion. Marysia had served her purpose, and while she was useful, he certainly didn’t trust her.

He reached into his duelling vest and produced his iso-tracker. The piece of tech was ancient, but faithful yet. The screen flickered to life and began cycling through tracking arcs. He heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hall, but didn’t break his cool. Holding the iso-tracker low against his leg, he used his free hand to pull a lho-stick from his breast pocket, and lit it while leaning against the wall. After a moment, a pair of servants came around the corner, carrying a tray of finger sandwiches between them. Tanzeg ignored them.

After they were gone, he checked back with his iso-tracker to discover that it had returned a hit. Not only that, it was close. Tanzeg smiled to himself and set off down the hallway. The iso-tracker was as eager for its task as Tanzeg himself was. Other nobles might eschew performing their own labour, and for menial tasks Tanzeg was no different. When it came time to enact the malevolent schemes of his family, however, Tanzeg preferred to act himself. The last time he had visited, Lostrovsky had tried to convince his employer not to accompany him into the palace. Then, as ever, Tanzeg had insisted on being part of the action. When it came to the inflicting of pain and the snuffing of life, men like Lostrovsky were mere functionaries. Tanzeg was an artist.

The cold, whistling servants’ corridors were the things of dreams. The Vaneisens’ palace had servants’ corridors as well, but they were small, tight and functional, with plaster walls and no embellishments. Darcarden had been built in a much older time, and its support structure showed it. The buttresses arcing overhead put to mind the ribs of a great beast, its long-deceased corpse turned to the purpose of a new generation now living in its shadow.

The heat of the great halls could never penetrate these side corridors, not completely, and they held a palpable chill. The small fireplaces of the footman’s parlours, where servants could rest and take their meals, would alleviate the cold somewhat, but even then, the air was crisper here than in the rest of Darcarden. He grinned wolfishly. Without someone tending to them regularly, the walls and floor would become slick with condensation. A film of moss would grow over the whole length. Great arachnid webs would dominate the arches overhead. If Tanzeg had ever needed any proof that he and the holier-than-thou woman upon the throne were cut from different cloth, then these corridors proved the question beyond a doubt. When these halls were his, he marvelled, what a spectacle they would be!

The iso-tracker led him to the door where he’d bludgeoned the old maid, which wasn’t a surprise. At one point the door had been bound shut by a lock of staggering complexity, a technological marvel the likes of which he’d never before seen. The digital screen of the device was blank, its machine-spirit dead and gone, no doubt at Lostrovsky’s hand. Tanzeg ran a finger along the exposed guts of the device.

‘What delightful apostasy were you up to?’ he whispered. To defile a relic of the Mechanicus? He’d known Lostrovsky was a bloodthirsty little pervert, but hadn’t realised him capable of such blasphemy.

Tanzeg scanned the hallway in either direction. He heard the sound of distant echoes, but that was to be expected. There was nothing immediate. He pulled his set of lockpicks from his jacket and went to work on the lock. It was a monster. Ashielle’s archaic and irreplaceable biolock may have been destroyed, but she had at least been wise enough to replace it with a formidable, if wholly mechanical, replacement. The lock-and-chain were too thick to even consider cutting through, even if he’d had tools to do so, but Tanzeg was one of the wealthiest people on Ceocan, and one of the many toys his fortunes had supplied him with was a set of crystalline lockpicks of surpassing craftsmanship. He didn’t know where they came from, only that the smuggler who had sold them to him had later been arrested aboard the Callistonian Haven for possession of xenos artefacts. What he did know was that they had never failed him, and seemed to amplify his own perception and dexterity when he was using them.

The lock gave way eventually, as every obstacle eventually did for Tanzeg. He was only mildly surprised to a find a hidden storeroom behind the door. The portrait of General Terresant gave him pause, and he idly examined the room’s contents. A low table held a small brick of obscura, a trio of gladstones in a woven basket, and a tiny shard of red glass wrapped in tissue paper.

Now there was a surprise. As straight-sown as the Matkosens were, it seemed that even they had a taste for the illegal. He moved through the room, examining the contents in greater detail. A uniform from the traitorous Haradni Militarum officers that had tried to infiltrate the Callistonian Haven during the reign of the first Matkosen. A watercolour from one of the Encidious Enclave, an infamous group of artists executed for heresy in centuries past. A collection of tokens bearing the sigils of the T’au Empire.

He sighed. Nothing really interesting. His own hideaway cellar had far more… eccentric artefacts. Still, the presence of such a vault could cause a great deal of concern for the new governor if he were to find a way to reveal its existence. He thought about pocketing one or two items to blackmail her, but dismissed the thought out of hand. Nothing here was so offensive that it would warrant a real investigation, nothing so egregious that it couldn’t be explained away as a heretical item that had been confiscated and then forgotten about. Tanzeg turned his attention back to his tracker unit, which showed the isotope trail from the slave tag passing through the wall of the vault.

Shifting the table aside revealed the hidden door, and Tanzeg almost laughed.

He produced the luminator globe from his pocket and made his way cautiously down the staircase. A vault of heresy wasn’t so shocking. He’d have been more surprised not to find one in the home of a ruling family, although the lower-class greves could hardly boast any heresies worth speaking about. A hidden dungeon, though? That was something far more interesting.

His experienced nose detected the scent of offal long before he reached the bottom of the staircase. He recognised the distinct squelch as his boots left the stairs and sank into something gelatinous at the bottom. He lowered his luminator-globe to his knees, curious as to what could be scattered about down here.

‘Well, that’s interesting,’ he said. He recognised Lostrovsky’s silly little spectacles, the lenses smeared with a thin, greasy film. The rounded end of a tibia protruded from a slab of rotting meat a hand’s breadth away. He scanned the ground slowly, mentally accounting for most of his servant’s remains.

How delicious. He’d suspected the Matkosens had some sort of dark secret from the outside world, but this was beyond his wildest expectations. To the warp with what his mother wanted: if Ashielle was capable of this, he would be willing to play the long game. He’d shift tactics, present a more charming front, but he would find a way to win her heart. He held his luminator aloft and set off through Lostrovsky’s remains. He was curious what Ashielle had done with his assassin’s head. He couldn’t begin to guess what she could have used it for, but he found the very idea that she had absconded with it more interesting than anything else she’d ever done.

The labyrinth was intriguing. Fortunately, Lostrovsky had left a trail for him to follow. Most likely unintentionally, as the trail consisted largely of the assassin’s own blood, but the Vaneisen heir could overlook that. It looked as though Lostrovsky might have been worth his hiring fee after all.

If there was anything that Ashielle truly appreciated about the Adeptus Mechanicus, it was their devotion to efficiency. Where all her other dutiful citizens had come with fawning assurances of loyalty or unctuous attempts to hitch their fortunes to her own, the representative of the Priesthood of Mars had been blunt, curt and dryly technical.

‘Would you think less of me if I confessed I didn’t understand a word of that?’ Hanrik asked. He kept his voice low, but Ashielle couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘I caught something about oceans and mining, but that was about it.’

The ball guests might look as though they were paying attention to their food, or to the music, or to one of her many artistic displays, but all such distractions were merely blinds that hid the true object of the guests’ attention: the governor herself. Ashielle knew that all eyes were on her, judging her, trying to determine what direction her administration might take.

The sensation of being a stranger in her own home wasn’t new to her. The ballroom was packed with members of the Grevenate and their families, as well as various adepts, luminaries, and other citizens wealthy or influential enough to merit an invitation. Coronations and state funerals were sombre affairs, laden with gravitas and ceremony, but the Devotional Banquet following the installation of a new lord governor was a true celebration, and for many a once-in-a-lifetime event. The crowd was arrayed in their finest, with most nobles dressed in garments that cost more than any of their servants would make in their entire careers. Fine silks, neotex collars and triphidian feathers were on display, along with materials more exotic yet, all crafted by the most elite tailors and haberdashers on the planet.

If the reception was to be her introduction to the nobles of Ceocan, her chance to make an opening statement, she had decided early it would be a declaration of conservative plenty. The Colonnadium Mecenate, the enclosed columned hall that surrounded the Darhaver Ballroom, had been refitted with the finest art pieces the Matkosens owned. Paintings, weavings, furnishings and sculptures from the breadth of the planet, many older than the noble houses represented in attendance, were on display for all to admire. Her chefs had not crafted any new or bizarre dishes, had imported nothing from off-world, and had designed no titanic displays of culinary theatre. Instead, the food she had served showcased the entire palette of Ceocan cuisine, from hearty Kostoci steak to salted Pellucidian fish pastries. Two separate instrumental ensembles, staged at opposite ends of the ballroom, alternated music in a variety of styles popular throughout Ceocani history.

Despite being surrounded by those anxious to get her measure, she drew some small comfort having Hanrik by her side. He was a supportive presence: distant for twenty years he might have been, but he was nonetheless a family member she had known from childhood, who shared her blood and at least the core of her values. At the same time, his presence had a transient quality that added to his safety – he wasn’t going to be staying for more than a few days, so he had no worth to any long-term plans of potential rivals. It was a strange combination that ultimately made him more comforting and trustworthy than anyone else around her.

‘I got most of it,’ she said, watching the magos amble away. ‘He asked for us to divert fishing in the northern ice bays while his teams conduct a mineral survey. At least the Priesthood of Mars is direct in their approach. This will probably be the only time Magos Crofeld sees me all year unless I summon him, which the governor generally only does if there’s an emergency. So, logic dictates he make any request he has now. To tell the truth, I prefer the directness.’

The next supplicant was already approaching them. Ashielle sat apart from the dancers and diners, upon a raised dais of ebbulite marble, the stone’s natural luminescence dulled to a faint yellow glow by the centuries that had passed since its mining. Those who wished to speak with her had to ascend the wide, shallow steps and ascend to her level, to address her as she sat in the great padded seat which served as her throne. Blood-red velvet atop ferenwood dredged from the Trenkovi bogs. Age had darkened the wood to a glossy black. The tree that had provided the wood had been extinct before humans had set foot on the planet, preserved and petrified in the moss-choked mud for thousands of years. The specific trunk that would one day become the throne of Ceocan would have sprouted, grown and died when the skies and oceans of Holy Terra still ran blue.

Margreve Lagaret Gavozny was a woman Ashielle had never personally met, but had heard much about. Paola and Ashielle had, during many long conversations at university, confided their personal opinions of their own family members to one another. Paola’s father had been, like Ashielle, the second child of the ruling member of his house. Unlike Ashielle, his elder sister had survived, and had become margreve shortly after Hanrik’s birth. The Gavoznys had made their fortune in chemical processing, most specifically dyeworks, although they had expanded as the years had rolled on. From what Paola had told her, her aunt Lagaret was a single-minded woman, who had never let loyalty, mercy or empathy get in the way of lining her family’s coffers.

‘Lord Governor Matkosen,’ said Lagaret as she reached the last stair. ‘We thank you for your generous hospitality. May I present my own daughter, Quelevea Gavozny.’

The Margreve Gavozny was a stout woman, short and thickly muscled. She did no manual labour that Ashielle was aware of, and instead had perfected her strong physique only for herself. From what Paola had told her, the margreve had been a successful bare-knuckle brawler in her youth, and was not above using her physicality to intimidate some of the idle, perfumed nobles with whom she had business dealings.

In many ways, Quelevea was the opposite of her mother. Her hands were folded in front of her, her gaze lowered timidly. She was small and withdrawn, and when she mumbled an echo of her mother’s thanks, her voice shook with fear.

‘So lovely to have you both,’ said Ashielle. ‘May I offer you a sweet?’ She gestured to the servitor standing next to her, holding a tray of ice-cold cubes of shivering Marcorellian gelatin. The servitor, like all the others navigating the crowd with trays of food and drink, was a pinnacle of cybernetic craft. The flesh was clean and dressed in Matkosen servants’ livery, the artificial components oiled, maintained and silent. The slack faces had been covered by porcelain masks made to honour the faces of long-serving former employees of the palace. They were particular points of interest for the guests. The works aboard the Callistonian Haven absorbed most of the servitors produced on Ceocan, and the agri-works took the majority that remained. Most noble houses could afford only a single servitor, and many had none at all.

‘You’re most gracious, my lord, but no.’ Margreve Gavozny had a grim half-smile. Ashielle wondered what manner of game the woman was playing. ‘It is my daughter who has a request of you.’ She turned to Quelevea. ‘Don’t just stand there, child. The lord governor has a busy evening.’

‘So sorry, your excellency.’ Quelevea seemed unsure what to do with herself, and made do with a curtsy. ‘However, I’m old enough now to enter into holdings of my own.’

‘I see,’ said Ashielle. She smiled and leaned forward, trying to relax her posture to be as unintimidating as possible.

‘There is, ah, significant demand for our family’s goods,’ the young woman said, eyeing her mother uncomfortably. ‘However, my elder family members have the demand sufficiently covered.’

Ashielle understood the girl’s plight: she didn’t want to earn her mother’s disapproval by spelling out the naked truth. Fortunately, she was up to date on the economics of Ceocan, and already knew that the Gavozny fortunes were stable, but had no room for expansion at the moment. The expanding population required housing, not fabric dyes.

‘Did you have something in mind?’ Ashielle asked. The traditional holdings of a noble family were the most common occupation for its members, but by no means the only one available to them.

Quelevea nodded. ‘Yes, excellency. I have a partner, my betrothed, Theole Arclaven, who is a vintner by trade.’ The name wasn’t familiar to Ashielle, which meant the partner wasn’t a member of any of the ruling families. Quelevea was a third child, however, which meant her family would have no concerns allowing her to marry outside of her class.

Ashielle saw the trouble, however, and the trap Margreve Gavozny believed she was laying for Ashielle. The family trades associated with each noble house might not be a requirement for them, but they were protected industries, by law. Food production was the undisputed territory of the Matkosens. Vineyards occupied a legal grey area. Some court rulings had found them to be classified as food or beverage enterprises, and thus the province of the Matkosens. Others, particularly the smallest and most elite, had been ruled as artistic endeavours, and thus belonging to no house as a default matter of law.

To make matters even more tricky, all the best land for the growing of vitiberries was prime arable land, and thus owned by the Matkosens unless otherwise granted. If Ashielle wanted to help Quelevea Gavozny, she would need to give away a portion of her own land, and cede a business enterprise that could arguably be considered hers, to a noble house that did not operate in her favour. If she refused, she could be seen as petty, holding on to a small scrap of land she wasn’t using, and undermining the empathetic and reasonable image she had cultivated for herself.

‘What a lovely idea,’ Ashielle said. She looked Margreve Gavozny in the eye. ‘I believe I could, conditionally, spare a few square miles outside of Trenkovi Bay. Say, fifteen?’

The eyes of the Gavozny women widened in shock. No vineyard of that size had ever been classified as an artistic endeavour before.

‘What conditions?’ Lagaret asked, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.

Ashielle smiled. ‘Taxes paid at trade rate, until such time as the value of the property has been repaid. In addition to standard tithes and taxes, one per cent of your daughter’s production by vintage, to be diverted to the palace.’ She nodded at Quelevea. ‘We must keep our own stocks plentiful, after all.’ Turning back to Lagaret, she added another clause, as if as an afterthought. ‘And the labourers, both seasonal and permanent, to be recruited from a city of the governor’s choosing, in perpetuity. You can begin with, we’ll say, three hundred workers from Selpergam.’

Margreve Lagaret nearly laughed out loud. The terms were quite generous, but more to the point, they did nothing to harm the fortunes of the Gavozny family. They would, however, bode poorly for the Vaneisens, who had already accepted contracts to build additional housing in Selpergam, some of which would sit vacant now that a few hundred workers would be moved to another continent.

‘Thank you, your excellency,’ Quelevea gushed. Ashielle gave her a gracious smile and a wave as the young woman’s mother guided her down the dais and away into the crowd. Another petty trap of her enemies averted. At least that one had been relatively easy.

Hanrik grimaced as they watched the crowd, waiting for the next guest to approach. ‘They all want something. It’s all so… avaricious. I thought the evening was supposed to be a show of loyalty to you.’

She smiled again, this time openly and genuinely. The parade of supplicants had begun the moment she walked into the ballroom, and would likely continue through the night.

‘And most of them demonstrate that loyalty with pretty words and trivial gifts,’ she said. ‘Then, of course, they reason that they should immediately capitalise on that loyalty before I have the opportunity to divine whether or not they’ve truly earned it.’

The gifts meant little to her, save for those rare few that were personal and meaningful, like the embossed book of neo-legalist poetry that Paola had delivered earlier. That was the image she had attempted to convey. From the food to the music to the artwork, to the grand architecture of Darcarden that she had laid open to the Grevenate, it all spoke to the same message. The massive, arched ribs of the ballroom, the ancient throne, the goods both fine and mundane from every reach of her planet, told everyone present that nothing was beyond her grasp. It was no accident that she had chosen the Darhaver Ballroom for her Devotional Banquet. As the highest point of the palace’s northern side, the glass windows of the Colonnadium Mecenate offered a stunning vista of the palace to the south and east, and the rolling countryside to the north. To the west, the entire city of Kostoveim lay before the viewers, the lights stretching to the horizon to blend nearly seamlessly with the stars of the night sky.

The message, she hoped, was clear: this is a person who has everything. Not through ostentation, but through completeness, venerability and reliability, she showed that her means were as close to infinite as mattered on Ceocan. Her wealth so vast as to make her unbribable. If she had to make a single statement to begin her reign, she would make it a declaration that she could not be bought, for there was nothing she did not have, and little she could not afford to give in service to her world.

‘That’s appalling,’ said Hanrik, drawing her thoughts back to the conversation at hand.

‘Does it really work differently on Sorinoux?’ asked Ashielle.

‘Sorinoux is a shrine world,’ he said, ‘so the influential elite tend to be members of the Ecclesiarchy, and a little more focused on maintaining an appearance of pious loyalty.’

She might have hoped to continue the conversation for a while longer, as much to postpone the inevitable torrent of personal requests as to hear more about her brother’s new home, but Barrin’s arrival ended that. The group captain’s stern expression told her it was not mere social formality that brought him out.

‘Ma’am,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘One of the visitors was observed discretely sneaking into the servants’ corridors off the main room,’ he whispered.

Aware of how many eyes were upon her, Ashielle smiled as though he had told her something charming and innocuous.

‘Whom?’ she asked.

‘Tanzeg Vaneisen, and his guest.’

The thought of Tanzeg Vaneisen sneaking through the halls of her palace was disturbing enough, but the notion that he might have a greater agenda concerned her even more.

‘Where was he spotted, Fidal?’ She smiled and leaned in as if laughing at a private joke.

‘By the Draper’s Hall, ma’am.’

Inside, she fumed. Tanzeg creeping off into the shadows for a covert liaison with whatever woman he’d bribed into accompanying him she could see as being mere coincidence, but the same footman’s hall she’d nearly been cornered in? Her father had had a saying: When conspiracy goes abroad, coincidence is the mask it wears, and she was beginning to see the wisdom in it.

‘Then we should go and see if there’s anything he needs,’ she said as she stood.

Hanrik stood as well, confused. ‘A runaway guest? Does that warrant your personal intervention?’ he asked.

How much she could reveal to Hanrik still weighed upon her. To tell him everything, Jaezubiel and all, might be more than he could handle. He was an arbitrator, after all, and she couldn’t trust the bonds of blood to take precedence over the oaths he had taken. Still, she might need his assistance if things were to go too far awry.

‘The Draper’s Hall is the closest point to the corridor where I was attacked,’ she said. ‘If my assassin, or those who hired him, were to return to the scene of their attack to destroy evidence, or to ensure none remained, that’s the route they would take.’

Hanrik nodded, and she was grateful that his assistance required no more explanation than that. Her brother gestured for Fidal to lead, and the three of them made their way through the crowd, Ashielle responding to all inquiries about her departure with a smile and an off-hand comment about a minor domestic issue that required her attention.

She thought about summoning her guards, but she couldn’t simply have Tanzeg arrested. Not without cause, at any rate, and slipping away from a ball to stink up a side hallway was hardly grounds for a charge of high treason. Arresting Tanzeg, or even his whole family, wouldn’t give rise to much ire in the general population, but the Grevenate members who owed loyalty (coerced or otherwise) to the coadjutor family could cause her no end of grief.

To her dismay, they didn’t catch Tanzeg doing anything untoward at all. She half-expected to find him attempting to force his way through the cellar door when they arrived, but to her displeasure he was coming her way, with a woman by his side whom Ashielle didn’t recognise.

‘Ah, excellency,’ he said, his voice slightly slurred. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

The hallway, already uncomfortably narrow, felt crowded with the sudden tension that filled the air. Tanzeg’s guest stiffened, her gaze shifting from the arbitrator, the group captain and the governor. Ashielle felt a twinge of empathy towards the poor woman. It was clear she wasn’t one of the aristocracy, despite her gestures to the contrary. Whatever Tanzeg needed her for, Ashielle doubted the woman had expected to become trapped between the lord governor, a member of the Adeptus Arbites, and one of the planet’s most powerful crime lords. She admired the woman’s composure; she had seen people crumble under much less pressure.

‘My evening’s been full of surprises,’ Ashielle said.

‘Mine as well,’ Tanzeg replied. ‘These old buildings are just full of them.’

‘Not usually, one would imagine, in the wine cellar,’ said Hanrik.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Tanzeg. ‘As her excellency has the wine cellar locked behind a rather impressive anchor chain. I suppose such precautions are required when one’s own servants can’t be trusted.’

‘Yes, unfortunately Darcarden seems to play host to a significant number of treacherous types these days,’ she said.

‘Quite.’ Hanrik’s voice had taken on a tone that Ashielle had never heard before, yet seemed somehow familiar. ‘Where were you headed in such a hurry, Mr. Vaneisen?’ The voice was cold and immutable. If ceramite spoke, it would sound like that.

Tanzeg held up his hands. Ashielle wondered how many times that boyish grin and innocent demeanour had got the Vaneisen out of trouble. If he was angry at having his title dropped, he didn’t let it show.

‘My apologies, Lord Matkosen,’ he said. ‘Finding a hidden room locked in such a fashion is something I’ve learned to treat with alarm. Having grown up on Sorinoux, you might be unaware, but it’s not uncommon for ruling houses on Ceocan to have secret rooms with all manner of decadent perversions hidden away from prying eyes.’ He winked at Ashielle. ‘Not that I imagine her excellency is involved in any such wickedness, of course, but such heavy defences on such an innocuous area understandably set off alarm bells for me, you understand. I thought it might be better to withdraw with all haste.’

Ashielle narrowed her eyes. His attempts to throw suspicion on her were ludicrous. He suspected his man Lostrovsky had been lost somewhere in this area, but if he hadn’t gotten through the door, then there was no way he’d ever be able to prove it.

‘Withdrawal seems the best course of action,’ said Hanrik. ‘If you and the young lady have business pressing enough that you need to leave, I’d hate to keep you here.’

Ashielle struggled to keep her face grim while the smile faded from Tanzeg’s face, as the older noble tried to work out if he had been politely dismissed or subtly threatened. The woman beside him seemed relieved to have an out.

Tanzeg’s mask finally reasserted itself. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You know how it is when a relationship is exciting and new.’ He paused. ‘Or I’m sure you will.’

Hanrik stepped aside, inclining his head towards the way back. Tanzeg flourished his arm elaborately for his companion, and swept past them. As he brushed past her in the narrow hall, Tanzeg locked his eyes with Ashielle and grinned. It wasn’t a smile of a knavish troublemaker weaselling his way out of a punishment. It was a look of a man genuinely trying to be charming. Ashielle was revolted.

At the top of the stairs, once they’d left the servants’ corridors, Tanzeg’s escort seemed to overcome her timidity.

‘Oh, your excellency,’ she gushed, gesturing to one of the tapestries hanging on a nearby wall. ‘I’ve never seen such a magnificent piece. Could I trouble you for an explanation of its origin? I confess that my knowledge has failed me on this example, and I’m told you’re quite the authority on post-Resurgence artefacts.’

Ashielle favoured the woman with a gracious smile.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘This piece depicts the triumph over Warlord Ngosh at the Bethterrian Divide. It’s one of the few physical portrayals of an inquisitor not sanctioned by the Inquisition. Of course, Inquisitor Hechevarra is deliberately shown with an appearance wildly different than his true image…’ She continued to draw on, the young woman nodding and interjecting questions in a perfect display of feigned fascination.

She had to commend the woman’s skill. Ashielle hadn’t even seen the signal that must have come from Tanzeg to command her to create a distraction. As a con artist, her talents were impeccable. The specific information she was able to cite (gleaned from Ashielle’s own contributions to the conversation) made her seem like an avid art history enthusiast. If the woman hadn’t mistaken a pre-Solarian piece for post-Resurgence at the top of the discussion, Ashielle might not have had any reason to doubt her counterfeit knowledge.

‘If I can beg your forgiveness, your excellency, I was hoping to show my companion the lovely western view.’ Tanzeg interjected, politely taking the woman’s arm, the picture of courtly decorum. She nodded and thanked Ashielle as she was led away. Ashielle sincerely hoped Tanzeg wasn’t placing the woman in danger. She knew Jaezubiel wasn’t the only monster she’d allowed to walk into the halls of Darcarden.

CHAPTER 8

Jaezubiel drifted from shadow to shadow. Perched atop a bronze image of a weeping saint, it stared down into the crowd of humans in the Colonnadium Mecenate. A few swayed unartfully to the pained string music. To the human senses it was no doubt sublime, but compositions of harmony and rhythm were anathema to creatures like it.

A blink, a heartbeat, and it was behind a corpulent man draped in pale furs. From his proximity to others, Jaezubiel guessed the other humans smelled nothing but the stocky man’s mild perfume. Crouched in the shadow, Jaezubiel could drink in more, much more. Beneath the rancid floral perfume, it could smell the musty shroud of ages, the reminder that this fur cloak had lain unused for many years. Beneath that, however, Jaezubiel could smell blood. It could taste the fat from the ursine creature’s blubber. It could smell the oily tang of the skinning knife that had harvested the pelt. Most importantly, it could feel the creature’s shock and pain as the spear had been plunged into its body, the prideful outrage that any puny prey animal had dared to sharpen a stick and come after him. Jaezubiel felt a shiver run down its spine as it felt the vengeful fury that had possessed the beast in the moment of its death, and there, just there, at the very edge of its senses, it could detect the tiniest hint of the hunter’s own heart, cold and prideful with the knowledge of what it had done.

Jaezubiel came back to its senses, crouching in the shadow of a credenza, and seethed to itself. The perfumed flesh offered no great arousal – the fur cloak smelled of great pain and pride, but the wearer was soft and simpering.

In the space of a glance, it was gone. Skulking behind a tapestry. Creeping beneath a table. Perched atop a ceiling support. On the field of battle it would stick to the deepest shadows, creeping slowly with its brethren, but here, far from the bright-eyed gaze of the terrified or the dull, alert stare of the jaded veteran, it could move with impunity. It might as well have been moving openly among them, as free as it was.

It didn’t have the psychic puissance of its more refined cousins, but the shadows revealed to Jaezubiel what its mind itself could not take. It could smell their fears, could feel their little discomforts, and could taste their unspoken malevolent urges.

It paused behind the old woman in silver. Here was a familiar scent. The nightfiend leaned in close, savouring the odour of hate, and shivered as the old woman stiffened. Not quite astute enough to sense its presence, but almost.

This was the smell from the ancient manor. The one with the decaying wards. Her children and lesser relations bore the ripe scent of blood and bruise; they were hands that were no strangers to blade and bludgeon. The matriarch was something altogether different: in her it sensed a mind full of barbed points and venomous edges. A wicked mind.

It could always reveal himself to her. There was nothing stopping it from showing itself to anyone it chose, from saying what it liked. It might not be able to effect its will on the cattle of this world with claw, blade or flame, but it could wield a canny word better than anyone else. If it wished, it could betray the young signet bearer who had freed it to this wizened doer of evil. Its brethren would regard it a fool for not doing so.

Although it was a master of arts profound and profane, and witness to secrets so perverse that humans had no vocabulary to describe them, its long incarceration had shown it that there were still skills it had left to learn. In particular, the eternity of insensate imprisonment had taught it patience and foresight.

The cruel and vicious little family of murderers in the lesser position would be more satisfying in the short term, certainly. They would shed enough blood that it and its kind could indulge in a feast of agony. A little patience, a little planning, however, offered a far greater reward. With a gentle touch and the right enticement, this world could offer a bounty of torment that would replenish itself for eons.

Jaezubiel stared at the cold, cruel face of the old woman. It might be satisfying to see her work, but it would be vastly more rewarding to work its arts upon her. As jaded as she was, she too had much still to learn about the infliction of pain.

‘I’ll have someone sweep for listening devices or infiltration tools, ma’am.’ Group Captain Barrin looked to Hanrik, who concurred with a nod.

‘No,’ Ashielle said, patting Barrin’s arm absently, ‘I don’t think that will be necessary.’ She forced a laugh. ‘If we launch an investigation every time a Vaneisen slinks away from their responsibilities for some tawdry dalliance, we’ll never get any work done.’

Group Captain Barrin laughed along with her, although she noticed Hanrik’s stern visage, which gave her pause. She had never before seen him operating as he would in a professional capacity, and the experience had been chilling. Her brother was naturally taciturn and composed, but the Hanrik who had questioned Tanzeg Vaneisen with the voice of ceramite was like a different person. His gaze, his voice, his posture; she realised she had been seeing Hanrik as her little brother, and had not adequately understood the man he had become. She had a better perspective now, and knew that allaying Hanrik’s suspicions needed to remain a priority. If he were to turn the full power of his training and intensity to questioning her, it could be calamitous.

‘I appreciate your excellency’s position,’ Barrin said. ‘I would be remiss in my duties, however, if I did not at least attempt to investigate what Lord Tanzeg was doing down here.’

Ashielle bit back a sharp response. Barrin was proving to be an effective choice as Zelucan’s replacement, but his professionalism was currently an impediment.

‘Your diligence in this regard is noted, group captain, but I think it is unwarranted. The cyber-hounds would have detected if anyone had brought explosives inside, so we know he did not leave a bomb. If Tanzeg were foolish enough to have planted a listening device, then he did so in the most inept place possible, for there are no conversations of importance taking place in the Draper’s Hall.’ She paused, as if considering the evidence. ‘If his behaviour is indeed suspicious, I would think it more likely to be a distraction than anything else. If you want to go and make sure he gets back without incident, I’ll let my brother escort me back to the ball. If you believe his conduct is worthy of further action, then let us check in with the High Service on patrol, and perhaps call in those who are currently off-duty.’

Properly mollified, Barrin nodded and faded into the crowd to execute her commands.

Ashielle looped her arm through Hanrik’s to guide him back to the ballroom. She didn’t have the years of experience with Hanrik that she’d had with Ruprekt or Geordan, but she didn’t need a close relationship to read his mistrust. Her mind was racing. She needed to allay his suspicions as quickly as possible.

‘I’d like to take a look at the door he was trying to get through anyway,’ Hanrik said. She followed him back to the servants’ corridor, nodding as if she shared his concerns.

The icy chill of the servants’ corridors deepened the further they ventured. The age of the palace, even its side passages, had been something Ashielle could be proud of. They were a reminder that her home, and her entire reign, was built on old bones that had endured the ages without failing. Now, however, she saw them in a different way. She knew the darkness that her power had been founded in, and could not shake the feeling that the cold and silence of the side corridors spoke to a dark, malevolent aspect of the palace’s history that could never be permanently erased.

Hanrik glanced over the unassuming door, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He held the lock in his hand, looking at the thick chains with the hawkish gaze of an investigator.

‘It looks like there’s been some damage here,’ he said, gesturing to the door panel.

Ashielle disliked lying outright, but like any other social skill, it was one her father had drilled into her from a young age.

‘It’s a biolock, isn’t it? A few of those in the palace are damaged, from the time of father’s ascension,’ she said. ‘Some of the biometric locks refused to accept father’s bioreadings. Commander Svergei was in charge of the security transition, and you remember how he was. A loyal and effective man, but a bit of an ambull in a ceramic shop.’

Hanrik regarded her for a moment, as if wondering how efficient an ambull ceramicist would really be, then turned his gaze back to the lock in his hand. After a moment he let the lock and chain fall. Ashielle smiled as he stepped away, and offered her arm to him.

‘Do you know what’s in there?’ he asked. As aggravating as his persistence was, she admired his tenacity. She reflected that if he brought such dedication to his duties, his superiors probably valued him greatly. She had no doubt his career within the Adeptus Arbites would make her and her descendants proud, but only if she managed to draw him away from his current focus first.

‘Old decorations,’ she said. ‘I believe.’

He gave her a quizzical look.

‘I’m pretty sure it’s where they keep furnishings and ornaments that are of moderate value, but no longer in fashion or are in need of repair. Those Truvian feather-quilts that were in vogue for a year or so? They’re in there, although I think mother may have given one of them to Lady Lozarev after her daughter passed…’

She kept chattering away, gently guiding Hanrik back towards the ballroom. Keeping up an endless stream of small talk was second nature to her, but inside her mind was racing. If Tanzeg didn’t have anything concrete on her, then she needed to figure out how to get something concrete on him.

‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ she said, ‘what did you and Tanzeg discuss while I was educating his companion on the finer points of historical tapestries?’

Hanrik shook his head. ‘Nothing at all,’ he said. ‘He just took one of the serving napkins to wipe his shoes with.’ He gave her a quizzical stare. ‘I didn’t consider it suspicious at the time. It’s not an uncommon behaviour.’

He was right. The most fastidious (or elitist) of aristocrats and their servants sometimes chose to wipe their shoes off after trekking through servants’ side halls. Even Group Captain Barrin did. That was why she had trays of serving napkins stationed throughout the Colonnadium.

‘Why? Do you think it was abnormal in some way?’

‘Oh, no,’ Ashielle said, waving her hand dismissively. ‘I just wanted to make sure he didn’t take the opportunity to purloin one of the Marcorellian furnishings.’ She laughed. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him.’

Hanrik nodded, a half-smile finally returning to his face. As a small child, she knew, he had been convinced that someone was going to steal his mother’s collection of Marcorellian silver, and had spent many social engagements keeping a wary eye on any guest who ventured too close to the glass cabinet they were kept in. The reminder of their earlier years seemed to do what her airy pleasantries had not, and put him back in the mindset of her little brother.

‘If you see Group Captain Barrin,’ she said, ‘would you have him come and find me?’ She seethed, trying to wrap her head around what she should do.

‘More security issues?’ asked Hanrik.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I just want to introduce him to some of the other nobles, see how he comports himself. If he’s to become lord-consort, it would be to everyone’s benefit if he can navigate social scenes without embarrassment.’ When possible, it was always best to hide a lie firmly inside the truth. She had intended to vet Barrin’s social skills, and he was on her short list for a potential lord-consort.

Hanrik stared at her in puzzlement.

‘I hadn’t realised you had any sort of feelings for him,’ he said, as they re-entered the ballroom.

The second musical arrangement had begun a slow, Pellucidian bolero, a song of love lost and found. The slow, mournful notes of the stringed ensemble were perfectly chosen for the high arched ceiling of the ballroom. The acoustics of the room favoured the sad, romantic music. Many of the guests shuffled slowly together across the dance floor. Many more strolled along the windows in the lower light of the Colonnadium Mecenate, enjoying private conversations in the picturesque atmosphere.

‘I don’t.’ She shrugged. ‘Not any strong ones, at any rate. But he’s healthy, loyal and competent. His service record is exemplary, and his family is well-positioned enough to avoid embarrassment, but not so well that they would pose a political threat.’

‘You would think that his position as Officer of Reconnaissance would preclude his service in that regard,’ said Hanrik, ‘although I admit I’m not the most well-versed in protocols of this nature.’

‘It’s not unheard of.’

The Matkosens turned to see Esilia Vaneisen and her daughter swooping out of the crowd of those near the side of the ballroom. Ashielle wasn’t particularly surprised; she had never before seen Esilia Vaneisen dance.

‘Lady Vaneisen,’ Ashielle said, inclining her head politely. Hanrik bowed respectfully to the matriarch.

‘A number of governors have been wed to military officers, including the heads of their own High Service,’ the old lady said. ‘Typically, the consort will officially resign their post, although in practice they tend to take responsibility for the administration of the High Service after marriage, thus continuing their office in fact, if not in title.’

‘Should we be expecting a wedding invitation in the near future?’ Ireina asked. She sipped coquettishly at her flute of wine.

‘I don’t think so,’ Ashielle said. If Esilia’s daughter thought she could embarrass her, she had another thing coming. ‘Or did you mean I should be expecting one? Your brother and the young lady he brought seemed quite taken with one another. I scarcely even recognised her. Is that one of Lord Bruisell’s daughters?’ She held up one hand, as if struck by sudden inspiration. ‘If they’re serious, we should all have a drink together. Wouldn’t that be delightful. Where is she?’

She needed to find out how much Tanzeg knew about what had happened to Lostrovsky. She knew he was involved in the assassination attempt, but she still couldn’t have him arrested without some form of definitive proof. If she could corner him, she might be able to draw out how much he had gleaned. With any luck, she could also find some charge to have him arrested on, something the Grevenate couldn’t hold against her. Ireina glared at her, while Esilia smiled graciously. Ashielle was grateful that Hanrik had enough sense to keep quiet.

‘Unfortunately, she and Tanzeg decided to leave early. They made their goodbyes some time ago.’ Esilia smiled grimly. ‘He said something about a moonlit stroll back to our manor.’

Why would he have left early? Were the Vaneisens still planning an attack? They couldn’t be, or Esilia wouldn’t have endangered herself by staying here. No, Tanzeg had left his mother and sister behind deliberately. Whatever purpose he’d had in the side hall was already completed. If he was on foot, there was little chance she would find him. Ashielle swallowed back panic. She needed to get out of there, but she had locked herself into a conversation.

‘Did you mention you were looking for Group Captain Barrin, ma’am?’ Hanrik leaned into her field of view, pointing through the crowd to where Fidal was directing one of his subordinates.

The flood of relief could have carried her away. She squeezed Hanrik’s arm affectionately. Was it possible he was more politically astute than she’d given him credit for? No matter if he’d been giving her an intentional out or just aligning with her goals through a happy accident: she was grateful for the assistance.

‘Why thank you, Hanrik.’ She favoured the Vaneisens with a gracious smile. ‘If you’ll excuse me, ladies.

‘Group captain,’ she said, approaching from Barrin’s other side. She put one arm through his, and leaned in conspiratorially. She guided the group captain out of the ballroom, conscious of the eyes upon her. To his credit, Barrin accepted her arm graciously, but didn’t lean in or become overly familiar.

Once in the hall, beyond the sight of prying eyes, he pulled away from her and straightened, ever the picture of duty and professionalism.

‘Ma’am?’

‘Exercise discretion, but I need you to find Tanzeg Vaneisen. Immediately.’ She had no time to explain to the group captain, but he didn’t seem to require any. He nodded, executed a crisp spin, and strode down the hall.

The moment he was gone, Ashielle was off. Smiling, nodding, she weaved her way through the crowd of nobles, edging around to the same door they had come in. Something was eating at her, a nagging instinct that Tanzeg had not had his con artist distract her for no reason. If she could figure out why, it might give her an idea of what the Vaneisen had been up to.

The tray of serving napkins, set out for any guest who might feel the need to use them, remained where it should have been. Ashielle looked around the base of the high table it had been placed on, but found no evidence of a used specimen. After a moment, she pulled one of the napkins down and, pinching it between thumb and middle finger, (even she had been surprised at how quickly she had adapted to the missing forefinger) dropped it onto the floor. Nothing happened immediately, so she drifted around the Colonnadium, keeping an eye on the discarded cloth, exchanging pleasant small talk with any noble who came close enough to require a response.

Ostap was ready to be done with the banquet.

The lord governor had left her dais, either on business or to mingle with her guests, so there was little chance of an audience, and if he were honest with himself, even less reason for one. The receiving of guests at the Devotional Banquet was traditional, but by no means required, and no one ever expected a lord governor to sit and listen to every single guest. The event would last days if that were the case.

Ostap could afford to be a little more efficient. He had an advantage over Ashielle Matkosen, in that no one actually wanted to talk to him. So his conversations with many of the langreves and margreves had been delightfully short. Their family members, on the other hand, were frequently keen to converse with a member of the Grevenate that would deign to speak to someone who was not a member of that august assembly. So he had passed the hours listening to the eclectic musical arrangements, perusing the governor’s vast collection of art pieces, occasionally dancing with an elderly matron, and engaging in an endless stream of conversations that were by turns odd, wheedling or frightfully tedious.

If he served long enough in the Grevenate (and given his family’s opinion of the governing body, there was every chance he would serve there until his death), then some of these secondary family members might eventually be named ministers or even lords of their houses, and might be more favourably inclined to an outspoken greve they remembered fondly from social engagements in the past.

This was only a secondary interest to him, however. His primary goal at such events was always to find other family members like himself. The hangers-on, the superfluous children, or the administrative assistants who were sidelined by their houses for having the wrong pedigree or for being politically inconvenient, but whose views and goals aligned with his own. Ostap wielded only a little power in the grand scheme of things, but he sometimes found it within his purview to grant assistance to such potential allies, and he knew that if only a few of them were ever in a situation to repay him, their intervention might one day prove to be the critical support he needed in a future endeavour.

Still, the whole evening had begun to wear him out. Forcing himself to pretend to be civil with the likes of the Bruisells and Wynovoks left him feeling hollowed out and depleted, as though he’d just run from one end of the city to the other. He’d even smiled and played nice with the two Vaneisen siblings, both of whom had reacted to his presence as though he had retched on their shoes. He would have loved nothing more than to depart early and retire to the small villa his family had on the edge of Kostoveim, to pass away the remainder of the evening with a small glass of amasec, a long Ystrodian cigar and a thick book. There were, however, still many forgotten siblings and hideaway cousins to meet, attempt to charm and try to ingratiate himself with. He just needed a moment to himself, to pull his mind back together. When one of the musical ensembles began playing the lively horns of ‘The Call of the Grainier,’ and most of the assembled wealthy elite began shuffling to the open floor like grinning fools to participate in the popular Kostoci dance, Ostap took the moment to slip from the ballroom into the Colonnadium Mecenate, eager to steal a few seconds of respite.

In a corner of the columned hallway, he found a small display of paintings with only a lone guest, staring quietly at the art on the wall. Her back was to him, and Ostap scarcely even glanced at her. He turned instead to gaze out the window, across the dark forested hills east of the palace. Swooping vorhawks glided over the trees, their serene flight paths a calming sight.

‘Tedious, is it not?’ Ostap didn’t want to engage the woman in conversation, but thought it might be rude to stand behind her and say nothing at all.

‘The paintings?’ she asked, her voice coming from over his shoulder.

‘The people.’ He allowed himself a wry chuckle.

She laughed briefly as well. ‘I might agree, but if I did I suspect that some of the guests might take offence, hearing such truths from their host.’

Ostap’s head wheeled around. Lady Ashielle stood in the same place she had when he had entered, her head turned to look at him. He felt his face flush immediately, and cursed himself for his wagging tongue.

‘I, ah, meant no disrespect for her excellency or the company she chooses to invite to her palace,’ he stammered. ‘I merely sought to diffuse any possible tension with–’

‘You’re quite all right,’ Lady Ashielle said, kindly interrupting his rambling before he spun himself into an anxiety-riddled wreck. ‘You’re neither the first introspective aristocrat to be bored by the pretension of these social events, nor shall you be the last. It’s Minister Fomynko, is it not?’

‘Ostap, excellency.’ He bowed.

‘I confess, I needed a break myself, Ostap.’ Lady Ashielle gestured towards the array of paintings on the wall next to her. ‘Many pieces in my collection were added precisely for the calming effect I find they bring. Are you a collector?’

Her calm and friendly demeanour did much to assuage his earlier panic. Ostap studied the paintings she had been viewing. They were irregularly sized, each portraying a different landscape, in a variety of seasons and with a variety of foreground subject matter.

‘I am not,’ he said, ‘although the stroke and composition leads me to believe these are by the same artist.’

The lord governor nodded. ‘Indeed. By Endekamp. Very ably spotted, Minister Fomynko.’

Ostap continued to look at the paintings. There was something about them that nagged at him. He leaned forward, hoping somewhere in the back of his mind that he didn’t look too pretentious in front of Lady Matkosen.

‘Are these meant to be the same property?’ he asked.

Lady Ashielle beamed a radiant smile at him, as though she were a tutor and he a prized pupil. ‘Quite correct, Ostap. Most viewers fail to make that connection. May I ask what led you to this conclusion?’

Ostap pointed to one of the paintings. ‘This tree, here,’ he said, ‘is the same as this one, in this larger piece over here. It’s a decade or more apart in time, and you’re seeing them from different angles, but you can clearly see that the primary fork is the same, and in the latter painting you can make out a large knotting in the lower trunk, where the spike that held the “No Trespass” sign from the first painting was eventually grown over.’

Lady Ashielle laughed, a genuine laugh this time, not the politely reciprocal mirth she’d used before.

‘I’ve never noticed that particular detail,’ she said. ‘But yes, the paintings were all made on the Vorskiv Estate, over the course of about twenty years.’ She placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘The collection is called Reaping Season. You really do have a wonderful eye for detail, Ostap. Any idea what the thrust of the work is?’

He shrugged. ‘There, excellency, I am at the mercy of my scholastic ignorance. If I were to guess I would say that it pertains to the inevitable degeneration of individual elements, despite the persistence of the collective. The Vorskiv Estate still stands, as it has for hundreds of years, despite the buildings, plants and people dying and fading away. Even the landscape changes, but the estate itself remains. Possibly meant as a metaphor for the Imperium as a whole.’

‘A more complete and concise explanation of Endekamp’s Reaping Season I have never heard,’ Lady Ashielle praised. ‘If you weren’t so valuable in the Grevenate, I would insist a place be made for you at Trenkovi University.’

‘Your excellency is too kind,’ Ostap said. He crossed his hands behind his back, uncomfortable with Lady Ashielle’s praise. ‘I’ve accomplished quite little in my time, unfortunately. Truthfully, I’m just a bottom-tier minister with a chronic inability to keep my mouth shut. Any gains we make on your behalf are largely the result of Langreve Evanova or Margreve Aleitovich.’

‘I daresay you sell yourself short, minister.’ The lord governor turned her head to look at a napkin that had been discarded on the floor. Ostap realised she’d glanced at the same piece of detritus several times. As if realising she was fretting, she turned back to give him her full attention. ‘I understand you were the one who thought to use the orvox futures financing to block the Vaneisens’ reappropriations last year. Ryvan Aleitovich might have sponsored the resolution, but it was your insight that made it possible.’

Ostap merely nodded. That was supposed to have been a secret. He had provided the legal chicanery that Margreve Aleitovich needed to prevent the Vaneisens from allocating government funds to their own corrupt contracts, but he hadn’t thought anyone but himself and the Aleitovich family were aware of it.

‘Such diligence has paved the way,’ she said, ‘for more than one dutiful minister to find themselves named with their own title and holdings, eventually.’

Ostap laughed nervously. ‘Your excellency is most kind, as always, but it seems unlikely we shall see another lord named to the Grevenate for some time.’ Naming a new greven of any rank required unincorporated population centres to have grown large enough to require representation in the Grevenate, and there were few current prospects for that. Most unincorporated populations were on the decline. ‘Unless one of the current families were to be destroyed entirely – a tragic prospect that no one wishes to see pass. Not to mention, of course, that I am ineligible to be named a lord, being currently unwed.’

Lady Ashielle sat on one of the benches that lined the edge of the hall. Ostap wasn’t sure if these, too, were unique pieces of art meant to be observed rather than used, but the lord governor waved him to sit as well.

‘I had not realised,’ she said. ‘I had assumed you had a wife already. I’m certain that if you were so inclined, many of the women from the Kostoci families would be delighted to be wed to a new greve.’

Ostap couldn’t quite tell if she was teasing him or not, but opted for casual self-deprecation anyway. ‘Her excellency flatters, of course, but the truth is that I am a bitter man, possessed of a compulsion towards quarrelsomeness, who commands no vast wealth or impressive skill, and spends his free time being frightfully dull. These qualities might make a loyal lower-echelon politician, but they are not enticing commodities in the market of romance.’

Lady Ashielle nodded. ‘Truthfully, you describe a great many of the grevens, while leaving out their avarice and boorishness, which places you at the head of the procession to many. Does your family not consider it worthwhile to arrange a pairing for you?’ Such arranged marriages were quite common, Ostap knew. Ruprekt and his bride had never even met one another before their wedding day, he’d been told.

‘Alas, they view such an endeavour as a wasted effort. With multiple siblings before me, there would be little point, I suspect.’ A higher tier noble could offer an arrangement for him, of course, but there were even fewer nobles who would wish to have him as a relation. ‘Though truth be told, I find myself rarely interested in those I meet. At least, in a romantic fashion. Potential matches who share my loyalties and similar interests to mine are… well, relatively rare, and usually interested in those who are far more interesting.’

Lady Ashielle raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ve seen you in the company of several eligible young women this evening,’ she said. ‘You mean to tell me you haven’t an interest in any of them?’

Ostap looked away. ‘Ah, no.’ He rarely found himself in situations where he was conversing with someone as a friend, and found the discussion of personal topics to be somewhat embarrassing. ‘Not really, I should say.’

‘Not really?’

‘I was captivated by the young lady accompanying Lord Vaneisen,’ he confessed, ‘but she is, of course, accompanied, so there isn’t much future there.’

Lady Ashielle nodded. ‘I met her briefly. She seemed to have quite the mind for details. Not unlike yourself.’

Ostap shrugged, and realised he had become flushed. ‘I, erm, I suppose so. Lord Tanzeg had no particular desire to speak to me, but she engaged me for a few minutes about classical Trenkovi literature. I was fairly surprised to find another so versed in the topic.’

Lady Ashielle smiled again, as if he had confirmed something she suspected. As the up-tempo music in the ballroom began to die out, replaced by the slow swelling of a Navoschi dirge-ballad, Ostap spotted a quietly trundling servitor headed in their direction.

‘In any event,’ he said, suddenly mortified that he had been so open with someone who had neither the need nor desire to listen to his life’s story, ‘I have business remaining yet, and I’ve occupied far too much of your time already.’ The lord governor was standing as well. Ostap hurried towards the ballroom before he humiliated himself further.

‘Thank you for discussing the displays with me,’ she said as Ostap edged away, uncertain of how to disengage graciously.

‘Of course,’ he said, bowing. ‘And I thank you for giving us the option to experience the complete set of such a magnificent collection.’

‘Oh, it’s not a complete set,’ the governor said as Ostap turned to depart. He turned back, not quite knowing how to take his leave without causing offence. ‘What makes Endekamp’s Reaping Season so special is that it cannot ever be complete, by definition. Before his death, he took the most popular piece from the set, Glass Shards on a Lakeside, and burned it. A permanent reminder that while the collective entity may endure despite the loss of its constituent elements, those elements were nonetheless unique and precious, and incapable of being brought back once they had been destroyed.’

Ostap pursed his lips and nodded. The cleaning servitor bent and retrieved the napkin, then turned and began retracing its steps. As if the removal of the cloth had reminded her of something, the governor’s face shifted to an expression of businesslike objectivity, quite apart from the engaged empathy she had shown him.

‘We do share one thing in common, Minister Fomynko.’ Ashielle nodded and began walking away. ‘We both have urgent business to tend to before we will be able to rest this evening.’

CHAPTER 9

Ashielle paused to wish Ostap a pleasant remainder to his evening and hurried to follow the porcelain-faced servitor. The automaton walked slowly through the Colonnadium, eventually turning off into one of the servants’ corridors. It would have been easier to simply open the door next to the tray of napkins and toss the cloth down to the footman’s parlour, of course, but servitors had limited cognitive ability, and could not override their base directives. In this case, a pre-determined location for refuse or soiled cloth.

The servants’ corridors on this side of the palace were no warmer or more inviting than the ones off the Draper’s Hall. This particular corridor was more shrouded in dust, leading Ashielle to believe her servants rarely had occasion to use it. The servitor finally reached its destination, and cast the napkin onto a small but growing pile of rags. She stepped to the side as the servitor turned and returned to the banquet.

The pile appeared to indeed be dirty pieces of cloth for laundering. Fortunately, there were only two other serving napkins present, one of which was stained with Kostoci gravy. She prodded the other, which was crusted with some form of glutinous mud. She picked it up by one of the unsoiled corners, and sniffed it gingerly.

No, not mud. The coppery tang of blood was unmistakeable, as was the wretched odour of rotten stone and human offal. Ashielle dropped the cloth, her face growing cold. She forced herself to breathe, to control the racing of her heart. She needed to find Hanrik. Or Barrin. She swiftly retraced her steps through the cobweb-strewn side hall to the Colonnadium Mecenate. She was just about to call a servant to fetch the group captain and her brother when the folly of that plan hit her.

If Tanzeg revealed what he had seen, there would be an investigation. One that she could never talk her way out of. The discovery of Lostrovsky’s corpse, murdered by xenos hands at her direction, would seal her fate. She paced back and forth between the art pieces, grateful for the lively Kostoci rigadon being played in the ballroom, which seemed to have drawn nearly all the guests back.

Ashielle paused and forced a deep breath through her body, and re-centred her mind. She stared at the muted colours of Endekamp’s Reaping Season, and considered her options. The stub of her missing finger pained her as her anxiety grew, and she rubbed it with her thumb as she thought.

Tanzeg Vaneisen had seen too much. Lostrovsky’s remains on his shoes proved he’d been through the doorway, into the secret rooms of heresy hidden beneath Darcarden. No matter what he had or hadn’t seen, he couldn’t have failed to notice enough to ensure her execution if he were to make it public. The act of killing Lostrovsky itself was a matter of self-defence, and the minor artefacts in the uppermost room would be unlikely to condemn her. The ritual room of the Old Ceoc, however, and Jaezubiel’s oubliette, would be a different story. Should her involvement with the monster be discovered (which it almost certainly would be, if Lostrovsky’s remains were brought to the attention of the authorities) then there would be absolutely no chance of her maintaining her title, and precious little chance of escaping her predicament alive.

There was no way to capture him. Not before he made it back to his home, where his danger increased exponentially, as he would be among his own, and there was no telling who he would let know about what had happened. In fact, every second that passed increased the danger of him telling someone else what he knew.

There was only one course that remained open to her.

No. What was she thinking? It was heresy even to consider consorting with the xenos again. She berated herself for her weakness. Ashielle knew what she had to do. It might be a greater risk, but she would just have to command the High Service to raid the Vaneisen manor and arrest Tanzeg. It would be risky, and would create political backlash, but if she acted with haste she could keep a veneer of respectability. She made to go and find Barrin, and wondered if she should arrange a distraction for Esilia and Ireina before issuing the order.

The thought of a distraction reminded her of Tanzeg’s partner, and brought Ashielle up short. The poor woman obviously hadn’t realised the extent of what Tanzeg had been getting her into. Her knowledge of art might have been feigned, but her initial apprehension in Ashielle’s presence had seemed genuine. What would become of her if Ashielle did not intervene?

Nothing pleasant, she knew. Tanzeg might keep the woman alive, for a little while at least, to bolster his own story. If the Vaneisens intended to move against the Matkosens in the ultimate, however, the woman would be a witness: a liability that had to be extinguished. She doubted the girl would last that long, though. If she was putting herself in the nefarious mindset of a Vaneisen, then their plans were better served by the companion’s death. Once the Vaneisens went public with their accusations against the governor, the nobles would begin dividing their loyalties. If the only other witness to the Vaneisens’ discovery of evidence of a xenos killer in the palace were to then be found dead, it would convince a critical mass of the Grevenate beyond a shadow of a doubt as to her guilt. Idonell wouldn’t need to act, an inquisitor wouldn’t need to be reached: the lesser noble houses would unanimously support her removal. The military would support her, of course, but the wardens owed their loyalty to the Grevenate, and combined with the standing forces of the noble families, she wouldn’t stand a chance. Which would leave countless people vulnerable.

For a moment, she couldn’t help but wonder what her father might have done. He had known about Jaezubiel, hadn’t he? It seemed almost inconceivable to her that he had not. She could not foresee any situation dire enough that her father would have committed heresy. By the same token, she could not imagine a situation in which Ruprekt would not have done everything in his power to protect people like Marysia and Quelevea from the depredations of the Vaneisens.

Her father had also never been in a situation as dire as her own, that she knew of.

She licked her lips, glancing around to make sure there was no one else in the hall with her.

‘Jaezubiel?’ she whispered. From behind her, she felt a growing chill as the shadows deepened.

‘Yes, your excellency?’ Whatever language the thing spoke, she could discern its mocking tone in her mind.

She steeled her gaze. She was no trembling supplicant; she was the commander-in-chief, and whether she understood the mechanism or not, this thing was under her command. Its own thoughts about the arrangement were irrelevant. Ashielle turned, giving the monster an imperious glare.

Jaezubiel was examining a painted black-figure vase, feigning deep interest in the artefact. In the flickering light of the attending hall, she could see it more clearly than she ever had before. Its skin was black. Not dark or dusky. No, the thing was a velvety black, whose body looked soft and satiny because it didn’t reflect enough light to look hard or slimy.

‘Did someone other than me enter the labyrinth this evening?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ the creature hissed. It jerked its head to the side, examining from a different angle the vase’s parallel lines of suffering saints being tormented by the mythical skitterlings. Its white hair drifted languidly, lighter or finer than human hair to float so ethereally.

‘And you just allowed him to leave again?’

Jaezubiel lifted its head from the urn to fix her with a gaze of mock innocence. Its lipless, sinister face spoiled the effect. Nothing with eyes so malevolent could ever have held true innocence. Whatever it was, it had been born in sin.

‘I cannot act unbidden,’ it hissed. ‘By the ancient pacts between our people, I am bound by the crystal chains. Only with a sacrifice of flesh and blood can I be free to act on your behalf.’

‘Another finger?’ she asked, dryly.

‘No, excellency. Your blood and flesh have already been sacrificed.’ Light rippled through the pinkish-purple runes on its flesh, as if an unholy heartbeat had quickened. ‘It must be another, this time.’

‘I’ll not create a cult for you,’ she said. She would sooner perish than allow that. How long would it be before some enterprising cultist decided they didn’t need her? What if someone else lacked the wisdom to deal with a creature as nefarious as Jaezubiel? No, that wouldn’t do at all. ‘If you want a legion of followers making sacrifices to you, you’ll have to look elsewhere.’

‘Oh, no,’ Jaezubiel said. It crouched low, the hellfire red eyes glaring at her behind the curtain of gauzy white hair. ‘Not a willing sacrifice.’ It crooked a finger at her in a beckoning motion. ‘You are the holder of the covenant. You are the only one who can offer blood and flesh to the darkness.’ Jaezubiel’s head wound to the side like a serpent sniffing the air. ‘And your own flesh, of course, has already been offered.’

Ashielle frowned.

‘I see,’ she said. So, this was the creature’s game. If she wanted to stop Tanzeg, she would have to take a life. Ashielle turned from the Colonnadium, moving through her receiving hall. She could feel Jaezubiel’s malevolent gaze watching her as the creature flitted from shadow to shadow, following her as she went.

The portraits of the past governors were like a judgmental tribunal. They stared down at her from the wall of the receiving hall, their imperious stares condemning the actions she was contemplating. How could she even countenance such a thing? Would Lendallia or Stendoz Matkosen have condoned her actions? Kuzmov Windover had burned a trader for offering him xenos goods; how could she walk through the palace he had reigned in and consider such corruption?

Ashielle’s mouth tightened. She could consider it because there was no other option available. The governors upon the walls were dead, their stern gazes nothing but paint, and their judgement existed only in her mind. She could do what had to be done because she was the only person with the power to do so. The governors of the past had built the oubliette that imprisoned Jaezubiel, and while she did not know how many of them had laid eyes upon the wretched creature, it was a certainty that many of them had to have known. Jaezubiel was not just her secret: it was a secret that had belonged to all of them, stretching back to the time of the Reunification. It was a tool that had been kept in waiting, until such a time as the palace might need it.

Past the receiving hall, deeper into the palace she walked, not to any specific destination, but rather to stay in motion as she thought. She walked past the well-lit parts of the palace, and into the places where the halls were dim and the shadows fell long across the marble floors. She need not bow to the cruel whims of the creature. There was no requirement to take a life needlessly. There were soldiers in her employ, criminals in the cells of the wardens. Neither option sat well with her. Both would take too long to arrange, and both would involve making someone suffer and die for the fiend’s enjoyment.

Ashielle stopped as a thought occurred to her. She discounted it almost at once, being too wicked even to consider. But as she walked, it occurred to her again, and seemed less wicked the more she mulled it over. It wasn’t as if Jaezubiel were going to eat the soul of whomever she killed, after all. Surely, He upon the Throne was more powerful than a loathsome alien, no matter how frightening, and would take the spirits of the pious unto Him.

Yes, she realised. She began walking more swiftly, now with a firm destination in mind. She did know of a life she could take that would involve inflicting no suffering whatsoever. One that would, in fact, end someone’s suffering.

Marysia’s lie was gnawing at her. When she had accepted Lord Vaneisen’s assignment, of course she had known it would involve deception. That was her speciality. But she had assumed the task would be to stir jealousy in an ex-lover, or to act as Tanzeg’s collaborator to defraud some other aristocrat. At worst, she thought she’d be distracting one of the High Service while her client replaced some artwork with a cunning forgery. Colluding against the lord governor herself had not been in the contract, and though she was far from a loyal citizen, she couldn’t shake the notion that lying to the Holy Emperor of Mankind’s chosen speaker for her planet was a serious transgression.

Marysia – who would positively die if any of her peers or clients were to learn that her real name was Thora Rede, named for Saint Sebastian Thor, whose piety and diligence she had spectacularly failed to live up to (according to her mother) – was a veteran of the streets. She’d fought off crooks with nothing but a springblade and her bare hands. She’d defrauded priests and greves with her deceptive talents. Once she’d even convinced a particularly dull-witted boat of fishermen that she was a senior adept of the Administratum. She’d been bold enough to steal from nobles and criminals alike, and smart enough to evade the wrath of all of them so far, even if that sometimes meant racing blind through dark alleys and leaping over flakboard fencing to escape the wardens.

So she was no stranger to an underhanded enterprise. She was not, however, comfortable with the scheme she’d become embroiled in at the governor’s ball – nor the current traipse through the gloomy streets of Kostoveim. Lord Vaneisen hadn’t told her they’d be walking all the way back to his manor – assuming he was telling her the truth about where they were going – and she was beginning to feel like someone was driving knives into her feet with every step. She’d dressed for a banquet, not a hike, and was starting to lose feeling in her toes.

Of course, there was no telling how long the journey was going to take. Tanzeg was used to riding in carriages, and had no experience walking the streets of the city, especially its back alleys. They were already wandering far afield of the quickest route back to the Vaneisen manor.

‘I think we might have missed a turn,’ she said. Closer to the palace, she hadn’t had much to worry about, but the further they moved into Kostoveim, the more likely they were to run afoul of lowlifes who wouldn’t be swayed by the power of the Vaneisen name.

She knew he was riled the moment she said it. He stopped, and she could almost feel the temperature in the alley plummet. Tanzeg turned to glare at her, his jaw clenched in rage.

‘What did you say?’ he said. His words were calm. She knew better, though. She was treading on the thinnest of ice. Her friend Karine had warned her long ago not to take an appointment with a Vaneisen, and for the millionth time she wished she’d listened. She’d seen this kind of maniacal calm before.

‘I think one of the street lights might have been out,’ she said, hastily trying to put the blame on someone else, ‘you know how inefficient the street-workers are.’

The lordling stepped closer, his hands balled into angry fists. His nostrils flared, his jaw clenched and unclenched. Marysia knew the Vaneisens had a reputation for cruelty and violence, but the families of the Grevenate were usually too weak-willed to do their own dirty work. It occurred to her that whatever dark business he had been about in the palace, she was a witness to it – a witness that might need to be silenced, in Tanzeg’s eyes. This was real, and she had a sudden realisation that there was a serious possibility she wasn’t going to leave this alley alive.

‘You think I don’t know where I’m going?’ he hissed.

Marysia started edging her hands lower, creeping towards the hidden springknife in the cuff of her jacket. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, desperate to stay alive. She might be able to outfight Tanzeg, but a murder of the coadjutor’s son was the last thing she needed the wardens seeking her for.

‘Sorry, what?’ he said, enraged.

She’d thought at first he was trying to intimidate her, or that he might be hysterical on rekanine, but the truth dawned on her that Lord Tanzeg was just unhinged.

‘Sorry, what?!’ he screamed. The veins in his neck bulged, and saliva flew from his mouth. She was afraid to make a move for her knife lest it provoke him to actually attack her. ‘Sorry, what? Sorry, what?!’ With every repetition, he took another threatening step towards her.

‘I don’t understand,’ she pleaded. Marysia was a veteran of the streets, but she had never seen anything as frightening as Tanzeg Vaneisen.

‘He wants you to use his title.’

The alley was as silent as the grave, but she could hear the voice nonetheless. Marysia looked around in panic. There was no saviour for her, not in this part of town. The only unknown left was how badly things were about to go for both her and Tanzeg.

Tanzeg had abandoned any semblance of sanity. His eyes were wide, his lips drawn back in a feral snarl. Marysia realised she hadn’t imagined it: the temperature in the alley had dropped. The air was freezing. Tiny spicules of ice had spread across the cobbles, creeping from the edges of the alley where the shadows were deepest.

‘He wants you to call him lord or baron or whatever grand laurel he’s draped about himself,’ the shadows whispered. ‘He demands you debase yourself with the labours of your own tongue.’

Both she and Tanzeg spun, trying to locate the source of the terrifying emanations. She saw it first: a pair of burning red slits that opened directly behind Tanzeg’s back.

‘How pathetic,’ the voice hissed, now horrifyingly real. Tanzeg’s eyes widened as he heard the physical voice. Marysia could see a ripple of electric violet squiggles across the thing’s skin. She was only seeing it because it wanted her to see the end coming.

Tanzeg reacted with lightning speed: Marysia had turned away to look at the creature, and felt an iron grip on her shoulder from behind. She flipped her springknife and jammed it at his leg even as he pushed her forward, thrusting her in the monster’s direction.

‘Take her!’ Tanzeg yelled.

She tried to right herself, but she was falling, almost horizontal from the force of Tanzeg’s shove. She writhed anyway; she would rather snap her own ankle, her own back, before she touched that thing.

The impact with the creature never came. She passed through where it had been standing, felt the shadows rushing past her, even felt a hand – dry and so, so, cold – pressed against the small of her back redirecting her trajectory, and then the shadows around her were empty.

When she looked up, Tanzeg was trying to escape. He favoured his right side, however, and Marysia saw a stain of red down the leg of his elegant trousers. She had wounded him with the springblade, now lying discarded on the cobbles, after all. Realising the futility of flight, Lord Vaneisen drew his blade and engaged the creature, which she now saw clearly for the first time.

The angular jaw, the mouthless face, the gauzy hair: it was a creature born of nightmares. It was the dark skitterling come to life. It flickered in and out of view, vanishing one moment to reappear behind its quarry the next. In its hands, it wielded two weapons: a small sickle no broader than her hip, and a straight, wickedly serrated sabre, both the creamy off-white of flensed bone. Its broad, flared breeches flapped and pooled like a performer’s skirts. A horrendous croaking, clicking sound accompanied its attacks.

Tanzeg was no stranger to the blade. He might even have been able to defend himself against a street ganger or two. Still, his attacks came nowhere near the monster. The thing evaded the lord’s blade with ease, stepped around Tanzeg’s defences to shred the duelling cloak as effortlessly as snipping a flower, and moved away with the footwork of a trained dancer. Marysia realised that the clicking sound wasn’t a product of the creature’s attack: it was a mocking laugh. The sudden realisation, that additional cruelty of knowing the thing was only toying with Tanzeg, solidified the horrendous scene, making reality from the nightmare.

She screamed.

The creature spared a glance her way, and Lord Vaneisen saw his opening. Tanzeg retreated back, pulled a pistol from the depths of his jacket, and opened fire. He only got a single shot off with the holdout stubber, which slammed into the creature with no apparent effect.

The nightmare eyes flared with outraged fury, and its head snapped back towards Tanzeg. Marysia felt her face and head flare with pain; it was as though every injury she’d sustained since she left the ball had been inflicted anew.

Blue fire flickered at the creature’s claws, and the shadows closed over its body, as Tanzeg fired another wild shot. He had no time for a third. The monster appeared again, snapping the flame from its fingers to engulf Tanzeg’s hands.

The Vaneisen heir’s agonised wail was beyond anything Marysia had ever heard in her life. Limned with crystal blue flames, the skin of the noble’s hands paled, then dimmed to blue, then blackened and died, all within the space of time it took her to draw breath for another scream. She tried to stand, but panic stole her balance, and she found herself scrambling like a deer on an icy lake.

‘You consider yourself a master of torment?’ the nightmare hissed, looming over Tanzeg. The noble knelt on the cobbles, his face contorted in pain, unable to tear his gaze away from the dead, blackened claws at the end of his arms. Marysia had seen frostbitten corpses dug out of alleys during the depths of winter, but never had she seen such a condition happen so fast.

‘Would you trust a vintner who refused to imbibe?’ the creature asked, its hellish gaze snapping up to Marysia. Fixed by its stare, she opened and closed her mouth, not comprehending any answer she could give that would spare her. Fortunately, it required none. The monster lashed Tanzeg’s back with the serrated sabre. Marysia was certain it could have severed the lord’s spine and ended his pain in a moment if it had wished, but the slash merely sent a fan of blood spraying across the alley.

‘Would you trust a chef who would not sample his wares?’ the creature crooned. Tanzeg spun on his knees, his face crazed. Marysia had seen that face before, on cornered rats refusing to die without a final bite. The thing flickered a step, and the little sickle hooked under Tanzeg’s arm. Another spray of blood, and the arm dangled uselessly.

‘Have you felt the sting of the scourge, the salt-cured leather rending your flesh to the bone?’ the shadow-thing laughed. ‘Have you crawled on needles, knelt on grains of rice? Have your limbs been stretched until your bones broke?’ Marysia could do nothing but stare, wide-eyed, as the thing capered above Tanzeg’s form, claws slicing down to send up spurts of blood, blades flashing in to gouge and nick the man’s flesh. ‘Tell me, mighty noble, how can you be a master at giving that which you refuse to receive?’

Distantly, Marysia heard the sound of the cathedral bells tolling the hour. Their rich chime was like a cleansing charm, a purifying call from the Throne itself that shook her from her horrified reverie. Suddenly aware of where she was, Marysia reached a hand behind herself to crawl away.

The creature moved without moving. One moment it was carving up Tanzeg’s back with delicate flicks of its hooked fingers, the next it was standing over her. The features were gaunt and sharp, without any softness or blemish. Up close, the eyes blazed with a fire that was as deep as it was evil. They weren’t eyes; they were pits. Every mote of light this thing had stolen was contained in those depths. She could see, as her soul started to fall into that gaze, the truth: inside this creature hatred had been compressed, transformed into emotive cold fusion. Its soul was a battery of wickedness, which would fuel the rune-marked shell it wore for a million years if necessary.

‘You might want to leave,’ the thing whispered. When it spoke aloud, its smooth chin split to reveal a hidden, lipless mouth filled with tiny, sharp seed-pearl teeth. Its breath smelled like stepping on dung in the depths of winter, full of the certain knowledge that beneath the cold there was the richest of foulness. ‘I have so many wondrous lessons to share with him.’

Marysia scrambled to her feet and ran into the darkness.

Ashielle ran a hand over her stomach, smoothing her gown and calming her nerves. She made the sign of the aquila, and turned away from Drenata’s bed. Necessity and equivocation had not made her task easier.

The other servants had loved Drenata. Her bedchamber had been tended to with the greatest of care. There were a dozen small trinkets, herbal charms affixed with wax seals meant to invoke the Emperor’s blessing, laid on the old woman’s dresser. It had been cleaned from top to bottom, removing any speck of dust that might have remained. Ashielle had seldom seen a fire in the palace that had been better tended, allowed to neither burn too hot nor dwindle too far.

A sharp rapping at the door failed to arouse any apprehension in her, which she found strange. She had felt such trepidation as she had come to the servant’s quarters that Drenata had occupied for so long. If anyone had rapped on the door a few moments earlier, while she was doing what she had known needed to be done, she would have been filled with panic. Now, however, as the bells rang out from the cathedral, she felt only a sense of relief.

She opened the door, not terribly surprised to find Hanrik behind it. A sentiment his own expression didn’t echo.

‘I hadn’t realised you were here,’ he said.

Ashielle straightened herself. ‘One of the servitors delivered a summons,’ she said. ‘I came as soon as I heard.’

Hanrik pushed past her into the room, denial etched across his face. However, the truth before him could not be refuted: Drenata lay peacefully on the bed, eyes closed, her hands folded in the sign of the aquila across her chest.

‘No,’ he breathed, kneeling at her side. ‘How could this happen?’ He looked back at Ashielle angrily. ‘She was resting comfortably only earlier today!’

Ashielle shook her head. She wished it could have been anyone else behind that door. She’d known Hanrik had a special connection with Drenata, and had planned to break the news to her brother gently. To find out this way, to come expecting to see his friend only to find her gone, was more painful than he deserved.

‘Her body was weak,’ she said gently. ‘The chances of her waking again were never good.’ She placed a hand on Hanrik’s shoulder. ‘But we made her comfortable, in the end, and allowed her to pass peacefully in her sleep.’

Hanrik’s eyes were cold and distant, staring only at the recumbent form of the old maid, and the soft, silken pillow her hands rested on.

‘Yes,’ he said, his words steeped with numbness. ‘Taken in her sleep.’

CHAPTER 10

A tincture of aoifemint and eucalypt sat on the steps to hide the stench.

Ashielle panned her luminator around the floor, looking for body parts that had escaped her notice. She spotted an organ near the bottom of the steps, and added it to the barrel. She should have disposed of Lostrovsky’s body as soon as she realised it was still beneath Darcarden. It had been a foolish mistake to leave it; there was no problem that went away on its own.

The newest remnant joined the others with a flop and a squish. The black, rotted flesh was studded with a bone of some kind, but Ashielle couldn’t immediately recognise what part of Lostrovsky’s body it had come from. Most likely part of his forearm. When she’d started the distasteful task, she’d tried to focus on the mechanical work, to disassociate the pieces from what they had been. Her mind, it seemed, was incapable of that, and kept reminding her of what she was looking at. After so long, the stench had become unbearable. Ashielle had broken the tincture, scattering the fragrance over the remains and smearing it thickly across her upper lip. The body’s rank presence could never be ignored, but it overloaded her senses enough to let her work.

She swept the luminator around again, wiping her forehead on the sleeve of her apron. The boots, gloves and apron had all been stolen from Drenata’s trunk, as Ashielle didn’t think she had anything that would be appropriate for the task in her own wardrobe. She had originally resolved to clean every possible trace of Lostrovsky’s presence from the labyrinth, but within an hour her back and knees were screaming in pain, and she quickly revised her plan. There was no way she could make the heretical tomb safe to bring anyone down into, anyway. She focused on gathering the body parts: if nothing else she wouldn’t have to tromp through Lostrovsky’s stinking carcass every time she came down here.

‘It’s not all here,’ she said, staring into the barrel. There simply weren’t enough of the larger bones, even accounting for the profusion of smallest pieces that she couldn’t place.

‘Of course not.’ Jaezubiel’s voice came from behind her, as always, but this time she refused to give it the satisfaction of spinning in disorientation. ‘Where do you think these came from?’

She spared a glance at the fiend. It was holding its pair of blades aloft. The curved, smooth form of the small sickle she’d seen before, but the long serrated sabre was new. Neither weapon had a handguard, merely leather wrappings around their lowest ends. Ashielle stared at the weapons for a moment before realising they had been formed from Lostrovsky’s bones. No wonder the sabre lacked a handguard: the assassin’s femur would have been too small to carve one out.

‘How grotesque,’ she said. The shredded skirt the creature had been wearing had grown: newer, darker strips of material had been added, crudely stitched together to form a pair of large, billowy pantaloons. It was decorating itself with the flesh of its victims.

Correction: her victims.

Whether soldier or specialist, her father had always made it clear to his children that the assets they employed were still their responsibility. Instruments of command, he’d called them, and his lesson had been clear: a commander bore the responsibility for the actions of their instruments. Just as a soldier couldn’t blame a murder on his firearm, a commander could not shirk the blame for the actions of their instruments of command.

Not that her hands would have been clean even if she had ignored her culpability in the murder of her attempted assassins. Drenata had been beyond help, she knew that. Still, she hadn’t realised how long it would take, how long the old woman would fight for breath that the pillow would never let her draw. Limbs that had lain dead and withered in sleep had suddenly come alive again, thrashing weakly against Ashielle’s weight. In her dreams, she could hear Drenata crying out beneath the pillow, but she was certain that the old woman had been silent at the end.

‘The limits of the fine and the melodic have been defined long ago,’ Jaezubiel said. ‘The only true artistry that remains is in the realm of the grotesque and the profane.’

She couldn’t deny the impact its display had created. One of her tutors had once defined art as ‘a purposeful display that created emotional or intellectual resonance.’ Tanzeg’s murder had indeed resonated across the city. At every winehouse, alehouse and bordello across Kostoveim, taletellers claimed to have been the first upon the scene, the first to find Tanzeg Vaneisen’s remains. No two of them seemed to be able to agree on the method of his execution or display, but these stories never let truth stand in their way, and tales of Tanzeg’s flensing, quartering or dissection continued to be repeated throughout Kostoveim.

‘A public display attracts too much attention,’ she said. ‘Your exhibitionism does nothing to serve my ends. Since you cannot, or will not, rein it back, I might as well seal this chamber off entirely.’ She stood and stripped her gloves off, casting them into the barrel.

Jaezubiel’s glittering red eyes stared at her for a moment.

‘You have what you want, do you not?’ the creature asked. It seemed genuinely puzzled. ‘Your enemies plotted and schemed against you. I could have swept the matriarch’s son away, true. I could have wrapped him in my embrace, taken him to the darkness, and let the shadows swallow his screams. If I had, would you be the stronger for it?’

The creature drew itself forward, its voice a buzzing hiss.

‘Now she and her house quake in fear of you. You, who leave your slain enemies strewn about the streets, daring any who would challenge you to step forward and wager their life to the deed.’ Jaezubiel clicked in its throat, and Ashielle realised with a cold shiver that it was being absolutely sincere: it believed with all its dead heart that Tanzeg’s brutal murder and dismemberment had been for the best. ‘Fewer of your subjects will die this way. Even your own blood will look upon your works and despair once he has the measure of the truth.’

‘My own blood?’ Ashielle’s attention snapped back to Jaezubiel.

‘Yes,’ the creature whispered. ‘Your brother, of course. Even now, he stares at renderings of your enemy’s ravaged figure, marvelling at my creation.’

She clamped the lid on top of the bio-barrel. The vacuumiser hissed as it extracted the air inside. Ashielle studied the valve as if monitoring it carefully. She needed to think.

She found Hanrik in Geordan’s old room. He was bent over their older brother’s desk. It was an antique rolltop, its sides covered in intricate carvings of ripe fruits, twining vines and leaping fish. In addition to the sheaf of drawers it housed, there was a veritable army of concealed compartments, hideaway shelves and small swinging doors.

‘I hadn’t realised the servants had put you in here,’ she said. She hadn’t set foot into Geordan’s room since his death. There was no art or elaborate decorations in her older brother’s quarters. Instead, his bedroom had been fitted with floor-to-ceiling shelves throughout. Most were neatly packed with books on law, religion, military history and governance, but many had been given as space for tools such as sextants, magnoculars and astrolabes. It painted the picture of a man who had devoted his life to preparing to rule an entire planet, determined not to be caught unawares by any aspect of his destined career. She wondered if there were any personal interests that Geordan had eschewed in his doomed study for a role he would be cheated out of.

Hanrik didn’t bother to look up. She wondered if his habit of not making eye contact when he was conversing was born from an erosion of social niceties after living with the rough men and women of the Arbites for so long, or if it was a deliberate affectation to aggravate and wrong-foot those he spoke with. Either way, she knew the best course of action was to ignore it.

‘The staff put me in the guest house initially,’ said Hanrik, ‘but I asked them to move me after the attempt on your life.’ He spared her a glance. ‘And it seemed that my childhood room had been converted for someone else’s use. There were paintings of sailing ships all about.’

‘Metrianne,’ she said. ‘One of our tutors. She had a fondness for them. I hadn’t realised father gave her your old rooms.’

She prided herself on taking more of an interest in the minutiae of the household than other nobles did. How had she not known that their father had renovated Hanrik’s old quarters? Was it possible she’d gone decades after he’d left without even once going to his old living space to remember him? Or had she seen the changes at some point, and then forgotten about them? Both possibilities were disturbing, but neither so disturbing as the uncertainty that she didn’t know which was true.

There were a handful of data-slates on the desktop. A number of books lay beneath them, open to various places. There were even a few loose reports, although Ashielle couldn’t make out what they pertained to.

‘What are you working on?’ she asked.

Hanrik looked up from the desk, finally.

‘Judge Idonell asked me to assist with the investigation into Tanzeg’s murder,’ he said.

‘I didn’t think that was allowed,’ she said.

‘Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t be,’ said Hanrik, ‘but Idonell has the authority to authorise my involvement anyway.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The judge felt that my name and background would give me insight into this crime that the wardens might lack.’

It took Ashielle a time to parse that together.

‘The judge doesn’t actually want a real investigation, does he?’ she asked. ‘He just wants a pat answer so he can file the incident away as “resolved”, and he thinks you’re the perfect catspaw to cover up the murder of your family’s rival.’ She snorted. ‘He might even think he could use this to hold over you at a later point in your career.’

Hanrik’s eyes dropped back to the data-slate in his hands. He could lie with his face, but his fingers tapping on the edge of the slate betrayed his perturbance.

‘I have no intention of falsifying or throwing an investigation,’ he said. ‘I cannot lawfully refuse his order to conduct this inquiry, but should I be challenged on the ethics of my conduct, then no one is going to be able to look at the record and say I did anything less than my duty.’

Ashielle smiled in spite of herself. She knew that her brother’s determination was an incredible danger to her. At the same time, it was only his devotion to the ethics of his office which poised his blade over her neck. The schola could separate him and attempt to re-educate him, but at the end of the day he was still a Matkosen.

‘You seem quite busy,’ she said. ‘Did you want the use of a full office?’

‘I enjoy working at Geordan’s old desk,’ he said.

They all had. The desk had been their grandfather’s. Ruprekt had tried to use the monstrosity when he became governor, but the entire thing had been overwhelmed with trivial correspondence, notes, personal books, and the paper effluvia of a century’s worth of use. After their mother had given him a new bloodteak desk, imported from Espandor at great expense, for an Ascencion Day gift, he had ordered the old governor’s desk incinerated.

Geordan had intervened, begging their father to allow him to use the desk as his own. The three of them had spent days cleaning it out. She remembered going through each drawer and slide, discovering doodles, economic or legal reports annotated with scrawled profanity, and hidden scraps of notations that offered an insight into the grandfather they’d never known in life. Each note, every confusing piece of correspondence was like a treasure to them. Ashielle couldn’t recall many other times all three of them had been so unified on the same task.

‘If you like, when you get settled in a permanent position, I can have it sent to you,’ she said. She regretted it immediately. She’d only meant to do something nice for her brother, but his look of disgust was profound.

‘No,’ he said, regaining his composure. ‘I’d rather it stayed in the family.’

Of course. He’d helped to clean that desk, helped Geordan and her to restore it. The ancient wooden behemoth might last centuries yet. It was perhaps his only tangible contribution to the Matkosen legacy. How had she thought he would want it removed from Ceocan? What a foolish thought.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Would you be kind enough to bring me up to speed?’

Hanrik heaved a great sigh.

‘Currently, I’m still going over the, ah, forensic evidence,’ he said, handing over a data-slate.

It showed a series of images of the alley where Tanzeg had been found. Hanrik had dramatically undersold the gravity of the situation.

Tanzeg was on his knees, leaning forward, his arms stretched behind him. Cords or bindings of some type stretched away from his wrists to secure him to the nearby walls. His back was bared, not just of clothes, but to the bone. Ashielle realised the cords that bound Tanzeg were made from his own twisted flesh. Pieces of meat and various organs had been piled in a pyramid before the Vaneisen heir, as if he were bowing before a sacrificial altar made from his own body. His head was stretched back, mouth agape as if screaming to the open sky. A springknife had been embedded into the crown of his head, the somehow unbloodied steel gleaming in the flash of the picter. It was as though he had been anointed, not with holy oil or water, but with the blade pressed into his bone.

‘What kind of monster would desecrate a corpse in this fashion?’ said Ashielle, to fill the silence. She was suddenly acutely aware of Hanrik’s gaze on her as she studied the data-slate.

‘Who said he was a corpse?’

Ashielle felt her gorge rising. ‘What do you mean?’ she whispered.

‘When we found him, Tanzeg Vaneisen was alive.’ Hanrik shook his head when she met his gaze, misinterpreting her sudden panic. ‘Don’t fret, he’s gone. He perished before a medicae could arrive.’

Ashielle studied the pictures again. Her skin felt cold. There was a growing pit in her stomach. She had thought she was prepared for the consequences of her actions, but this was beyond anything she had anticipated.

‘Do you know what Tanzeg was doing in the servant’s corridors?’ Hanrik asked.

Ashielle turned away from the data-slate to look at her brother again. His eyes were stone. For the briefest of moments, she thought to throw the data-slate at him and run. How could she have been such a fool? If Hanrik had even the barest glimmer of competence, he had to consider her a suspect in Tanzeg’s murder.

‘You think I had something to do with this?’ she snapped. Her anger was entirely hypocritical, but it would suffice. She slammed the data-slate onto the desk. ‘That’s ridiculous, Hanrik!’

‘Is it?’

She crossed her arms. ‘Yes. I don’t have anyone in my household, have never had anyone in my household, capable of, of,’ she gestured to the data-slate, ‘of that! And you know damn well I couldn’t have done it myself.’

‘That’s right,’ said Hanrik. ‘You were with Drenata, while Tanzeg was being murdered.’ He left the accusation hanging in the air.

Ashielle felt a cold fury creep over her. Even as she reeled at the accusation, a coil of guilt tightened in her belly. She was his own blood, and his trust in her should’ve been absolute.

‘Drenata was my dearest servant, too,’ she said. ‘Don’t think for a second I wouldn’t trade anything to have her back.’

Hanrik’s face had gone cold. She recognised that look from when he had confronted Tanzeg the previous evening. ‘Do you know anything, anything at all, about the murder of Tanzeg? The death of Drenata?’

‘No,’ she lied. ‘Nothing beyond what I’ve told you.’

‘Are you certain?’ he asked. ‘As a planetary governor, there is a wide latitude given to you. Given the immense pressure you must be under, with the danger from your enemies and the loss of Ruprekt and Geordan, it might be that something got out of hand.’ His face softened. ‘I only want to help, if you’ll let me.’

The hard voice, the voice of ceramite, had seemed to her to be like a different person the first time she’d heard him use it. Now, looking into his eyes, she realised it was still the voice of Hanrik. The voice of her blood.

She wanted to ask him if he was asking as her brother, or as an arbitrator, but in full truth she was afraid of what the answer might be. If she were to allay his suspicions, she would need to do it quickly. Ashielle knew the correct course. If she wanted to manipulate Hanrik, she would need to offer him what he had been denied: the acceptance of his family.

‘Hanrik,’ she said. ‘Throne of Terra, how you must be hurting to say such things. I had no idea you and Drenata were so close.’ She softened her expression and relaxed her stance. Her empathy was a better shield against his distrust than outrage. His own posture relaxed, if only a little.

‘We weren’t, I suppose,’ he said. ‘But she was kinder to me than anyone else. She treated me like a human being, instead of a resource to be expended or an inconvenience to be dealt with.’

‘I can’t imagine how much her loss must pain you,’ said Ashielle. ‘But I swear to you I had nothing to do with her passing.’

Hanrik stared at her for a long moment, as if weighing the truth in her words. No, not quite. Measuring her sincerity. Finally, he looked away.

‘Very well,’ he said.

Ashielle wished she could tell him everything. He would be shocked, certainly. Maybe even offended. But the words choked in her throat. He was a servant of the Emperor. His devotion to the Throne would come before his devotion to his family. Ruprekt had seen to that when he’d sent the boy into exile.

Of all the many legacies Ruprekt Matkosen had left her, Hanrik’s enmity was the one that Ashielle found herself cursing him for.

Ashielle strode through the halls of Darcarden as fast as she was able without breaking into a sprint. She dared not even swear aloud lest Hanrik hear and have his suspicions heightened. She stowed her fear and anger, and kept her face as still and resolute as one of the busts of governors past studding the hallways.

Only when she had reached her own rooms and slumped into the spindle chair in front of her vanity did she allow herself a hiss of fury.

‘Does something perturb?’

When Ashielle looked up, she could see the two pinpricks of hellfire near the gauzy shadows of her curtains.

The curling purple runes suddenly filled her with a dread they had not before. When she had first seen Jaezubiel, imprisoned in its oubliette, it had been terrifying, yes, but that had been the terror of the profane. No matter its origin, it was an affront to humanity, fit only to be purged by the Inquisition.

The killing of Lostrovsky, too, had been horrifying, but again the shock was mundane and classifiable. It had been the brutal attack of a wild animal, a shocking and feral act to be sure, but no worse than what might have happened if a marshlion had got hold of the assassin.

The murder of Tanzeg had been something else entirely. There had been a level of astonishing savagery there that was beyond comprehension. At the same time, she had recognised the intricacy of the braided flesh, the deliberateness of the posing. Not just the staging, but the murder itself, had been carried out with a malign sophistication that boggled the mind.

‘What a foul and wretched thing you are,’ she said into the mirror.

‘Thank you,’ said Jaezubiel. ‘Your own capacity for cruelty surprises me, too.’

Ashielle turned in her chair.

‘Don’t lump me in with you, creature.’ She cut herself short. Drawing the attention of the household was the last thing she wanted. She had no doubt the shadow-thing would vanish the moment the door opened, leaving her staff to suspect her sanity was floundering. ‘I’m nothing like you.’

‘Aren’t you?’ The curtains ruffled, and Jaezubiel was across the room, staring at her small bookshelf. ‘The night you commanded me to slay the princeling, you had a palace full of enemies. Every house that wished you ill had sent representatives to pledge their false loyalty to you. You could have seized any of them.’ Jaezubiel turned from the bookcase, a slim volume of art history in its clawed hands. It gave her a savage grin, tiny teeth shining in the darkness. ‘You could have taken one of the servants or soldiers of your foes. But when you had to make a sacrifice to our pact, it wasn’t the blood and flesh of your enemies you reached for, nor even for a soldier pledged to your service. Your hands reached first and instinctively to a trusted retainer, a woman who had given you a mother’s care and devotion.’

‘Don’t distort my actions,’ Ashielle said, stabbing an accusing finger at the monster, ‘and don’t try to interpret them through your own base and twisted lens. I didn’t revel in her suffering, I ended it.’

Jaezubiel chuffed its clicking laugh. ‘You can lie to your reflection, oh lady, but you can’t lie to me.’

Ashielle sneered. ‘I wouldn’t expect a basal creature like you to understand.’

‘Oh?’

‘I have the responsibility for the preservation and welfare of every life on this planet,’ said Ashielle, ‘and the moral authority to decide how and where those lives will be spent in the execution of that duty.’

‘What a vain and haughty thing you are,’ said Jaezubiel.

‘I don’t need your taunts,’ said Ashielle.

‘Of course not,’ the thing said. In the blink of an eye it had crossed the room again to lean against a chest of drawers, staring intently at the book it had taken from the case. ‘You must be far too busy to exchange barbed comments with a creature like me. What pressure your brother’s investigation must be putting on you.’ The malevolent eyes came up again to regard her with a vicious wink. ‘What raw and aching wound in his life compels him to throw himself into his work so, I wonder?’

‘Get out,’ Ashielle hissed. No sooner had the words left her mouth than the bedroom was empty again. The book Jaezubiel had been holding tumbled to the ground.

Jaezubiel was right, however. She hadn’t realised how close Hanrik had been to Drenata, although who could tell if the old servant had returned his affection? No matter the truth of the situation, his attention to his duty had suddenly become quite inconvenient for her.

It had been wrong to use the creature to kill Tanzeg, she saw that now, but what options did she have? The ethical choice was to turn herself in, to reveal her crimes so that the public could maintain faith in the system.

How viable an option was that, though? Where would that leave Ceocan? If she turned herself in, no matter which authority she placed herself in, she had no future. Any sane or just system would have her executed for heresy, dereliction of duty and failure before the Throne. Even in the most unlikely of scenarios where she was able to plead her case and secure some sort of leniency from the most merciful arbiter of fate imaginable, she would still be forced to abdicate her throne. Which would, of course, leave Darcarden in the hands of the Vaneisens.

What then? Would the pleasure gibbets and the boo-boo boxes of whispered urban legend suddenly become state sanctioned? From the merchant captains who came through to take on or deliver supplies to the Callistonian Haven, she had heard horror stories of the wider Imperium, barbarities she’d sought to keep from her people. If the Vaneisens were to rise to power, such iniquities would be visited on the populace not out of some notion of necessity, but simply because the governing family enjoyed them.

She reminded herself of those who had already fallen victim to the Vaneisens’ treachery. Ashielle went through her mind, listing the sons and daughters of the lesser noble houses, forcing herself to recall their faces. Each and every one of them might face their own personal Lostrovsky, an assassin sent to threaten or remove them if their parents or family proved an inconvenience to the Vaneisens.

No, the path was clear: she could not yield, not now. She had already committed too much, come too far, to surrender to the evil of the Vaneisen family. The only option remaining to her now was to forge on.

Not with Jaezubiel, though. Never again. One of Ruprekt’s earliest lessons had been to acknowledge one’s limitations. Prideful ignorance of a weakness would lead only to failure. She had fooled herself into believing the evil that Jaezubiel represented wasn’t hers – she had neither summoned it nor bound it beneath Darcarden. It was not she who had made the ancient pacts with the creature. She had only used the resource which had been presented to her, after all, to save her own life. She had deluded herself into thinking she could control it.

Jaezubiel wasn’t a tool, though. It wasn’t an attack falcon, or some form of animal that could be set upon an enemy and relied upon to do its job. It was a serpent, it was a grenade – it would strike the hand which wielded it as surely as it did her enemies. The moral course demanded it be removed – banished to the hell that had spawned it, or slain. After it had been destroyed or locked away, then she could focus on the Vaneisens again. Her brother would be dissuaded simply enough, his investigation easy to run aground when there was no longer a monster for him to find.

Ashielle moved through the room, setting thought to deed immediately. She tucked her brush back into her armoire, straightened the curtain where the fiend had been standing. Methodically, she moved through the suite of rooms, removing every trace of its passing.

The book it had left upon her bed drew her attention as she lifted it to return it to the case. It was open to a reproduction of a mid-Resurgence diptych, Canthor’s Between Glory and Ignominy. Ashielle sat on the bed, studying the pages more closely. Like most Resurgence-era work, it showed servants of the Imperium going about their appointed duties, flanked on either side with vast scenes of metaphorical recompense. To the right were pious and dutiful figures being elevated and beatified for their service, bathing in the indirect but paternal light of Him on the Throne. To the left, the figures of the impious and the false were punished for their failure, sawed in half by grim-faced inquisitors or splayed out on a number of appalling torture devices.

What drew her attention was not the diptych itself, which was a rather unremarkable piece, but the background of the left panel. Among the vicious torturers and the wailing damned, black, vaporous creatures with red eyes and clawed hands cavorted.

Skitterlings. Again she found Jaezubiel studying, or perhaps admiring, the ancient art which depicted the Ceocan boogeyman.

Ashielle shelved the book and summoned her secretary. She had an appointment which needed to be made.

CHAPTER 11

The Basilica Grevenator was a building designed to break people. No matter who you were, Ostap knew, appearing before the Grevenate was a humbling experience. The towering verticality of the columned walls, the array of fearsome aquilas and sigils of august families, the massive dome that crowned it all: it took a monumental ego to stand within such a structure and not feel the least bit reduced by comparison.

Down in the Occurriam, the lowered height gave a person the perspective of being on their knees, the thunderous voices the impression of being held immobile before an oncoming storm. Even the most welcome and friendly witness was intended to be brought low, constantly reminded of the power and the dignity of the assembly.

Ostap had seen lesser men and women broken by the Basilica Grevenator. He had seen generals and void captains made to feel fear, to shake in their place and apologise for their own ineptitude. Those unused to power and prestige crumbled utterly, bowing and weeping, confessing their crimes and complicities as if they had been threatened by the Throne itself.

He was somewhat surprised, then, to see Group Captain Barrin comporting himself so well.

‘As I have already told the Grevenate,’ Barrin said, ‘the investigation is yet ongoing. The High Service is not prepared, at this time, to reveal the details of said investigation.’ What impressed Ostap most was that the group captain made none of the mistakes common to those who appeared before the Grevenate. He didn’t raise his head or turn to try to identify the specific speaker addressing him. He also didn’t try to raise his voice and yell to be heard by those in the highest tiers. The group captain seemed aware that the lords and ministers in their alcoves were perfectly capable of seeing his face via their desk slates, and that his words were likewise transmitted to them. No doubt Lady Ashielle or Commodore Zelucan had prepared him for the duty.

It was more than that, however. The group captain had a dignity that many in his place did not. He stood with confidence, hands behind his back, giving his testimony in clear, sincere language.

‘That is insufficient, group captain.’ Tianesh Bruisell was infamous for her dogged insistence. Ostap had rarely seen someone stonewall her so excellently. ‘When the wardens agreed to coordinate their investigation with the High Service’s, it was under the explicit understanding that there would be a sharing of information.’

‘And when our investigation turns up information which merits being shared, rest assured that it will be.’ Fidal Barrin would no doubt make the Lady Matkosen a capable lord consort. Ostap had seen the filings for service records come through on the group captain’s name the day previous, while the lesser greves had been going through the tedious paperwork and bureaucratic filings that preceded the Grevenate sessions. Service record requests on an officer were a reliable indicator of that person being transferred to another service branch, or retiring. Since the group captain was too young to retire, and was already heading the most prestigious position his rank and experience could qualify him for, the only conclusion Ostap could come to was that the group captain was going to be given special dispensation, which most likely meant a marriage. Ostap would hardly have bet his title on it, but the pieces all fit.

‘Group captain, do you not see how this action could seem suspicious to those of the Grevenate?’ Uri Oldemeier asked. ‘The wardens did not ask for the assistance of the High Service.’

‘Nor do they have to,’ said Greve Darmodi Chole.

His voice boomed as thunderously as the margreves in their marbled alcoves far above him. A century and a half of Ystrodian cigars had necessitated the replacement of much of Darmodi’s lungs and throat with artificial replacements, and the greve had paid a handsome amount of currency to ensure that his surgery would never see him silenced, adding vocal amplifiers that let him shout loud enough to rattle structures if he so chose. Many of the old man’s other organs had begun to fail him and he had difficulty walking, and so rarely bothered to attend Grevenate assemblies.

‘But the High Service has always worked hand-in-hand with the wardens in the case of an assassination of a member of the Grevenate,’ Chole continued. ‘The extensive records and countermeasures that the High Service keeps on assassination-related crimes makes them a highly focused and valuable ally in such situations.’

Ostap smiled. It had been over eight years since he had seen Darmodi Chole in the Basilica, and it gladdened him greatly. The oldest serving member of the Grevenate, Darmodi was one of the few lords Ostap had met who seemed to come from the same school of thought as the Matkosens with regards to civil obligation. On a more personal note, Darmodi seemed to come from the same school of thought as Ostap himself when it came to not shying away from fights he knew he wouldn’t win. Ostap had heard stories that, even well into his third century of life, Greve Chole had closed out many Basilica assembly sessions by speaking continuously, refusing to cede the floor in order to prevent an unscrupulous lord from bringing some particularly noxious issue to vote, his augmetic respiration letting him drone on until every other greve had given up and gone home.

‘Quite right,’ said Group Captain Barrin. ‘Major Kotrynn has expressed great gratitude for our assistance thus far.’ He nodded to the alcove where Greve Chole sat.

Ostap knew that if Darmodi Chole had returned to the assembly, it was an important sign. These were tumultuous times, and the elderly rogue of House Chole had no intent on sitting out and missing the excitement.

‘Lies!’ shrieked Margreve Wynovok. ‘This was no assassination, it was a threat, an execution!’ To Ostap, it seemed Ulika had forgotten that her words were being amplivoxed. The audio compensators in his alcove accounted for it, but several of the witnesses in the Occurriam hunched down. Even Barrin winced. ‘Why would the lord governor attach her agents to this investigation unless it stood to uncover something she had to hide?’

‘Honoured margreve,’ said Barrin, ‘she has allowed the High Service to assist this investigation precisely because she has nothing to hide.’

‘The honourable lords of this assembly seem to be a bit confused,’ said Greve Chole. ‘First Tish implies the Lady Matkosen’s people are incompetent. Then Old Uri would have us believe they are attempting to suppress evidence. And now Missionary Ulika tells us that it was a deliberate killing to scare us into line, and implies the lord governor is to blame! It would seem that the lords circling the palace like so many carrion birds might want to take a moment and make sure their feathers are all lined up in the same direction.’

Darmodi’s use of the diminutive epithets employed by the aristocracy behind closed doors was all the spark that the room needed. The assembly descended rapidly into chaos. Threats were issued. Old enemies confronted. New enemies made. Darmodi Chole’s bully tactics had worked: all attention fell away from Group Captain Barrin, who eventually packed up his notes and left as the elevated lords, in their hall of dignity and purpose, continued to scream and insult one another.

When it became clear no work was going to be done for the rest of the day, Ostap eventually gave up as well. He tapped a command into the data-slate on his desk, and his alcove darkened. A small panel of the wall slid away, allowing access to the private hall that allowed the greves to take their seats without being seen by the general public.

Although called the Lower Hall, the backroom that ringed the greves’ tier was more properly a series of interconnected chambers, where adjacent greves could sit in threes and fours and converse privately or prepare for the issues of the day. Wood panelled walls and deeply carpeted floors gave an enclosed, cosy feeling. In many ways, going from the Lower Hall to the Basilica Hall felt like stepping between two different worlds.

To Ostap’s good fortune, neither Minister Wernek nor Lord Sipivisky – two of the peers with whom he shared his portion of the Lower Hall – had stayed to talk. It wasn’t that he detested speaking to either of them, but neither was a political ally and he was in no mood for debate. Inzigo Hodyuk was there, reclining in one of the great padded chairs for the use of the lords, her feet resting on a tasselled stool.

‘Bad business,’ she said. Ostap nodded, taking the chair next to hers. The two sat in silence, staring at the elegant wood on the far wall, knowing that just beyond, the upper tiers were still shrieking at one another, or at the few lower greves who had not the sense to leave yet.

‘It’s blood in the streets,’ Ostap said. ‘It’ll get worse before it gets better.’

Greve Hodyuk sat forward with surprise on her features.

‘You think she did it, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You don’t know how, but you think she was involved in… in the murder.’ Inzigo, like many of the Grevenate, had actually seen pictographs of what had been done to Tanzeg Vaneisen. Few of them were sleeping well any more.

Ostap kicked his feet up onto his own foot stool, and closed his eyes. He rarely stayed long in the Lower Hall. Some of the lords treated it as a gentry’s club, and he knew there was food or fine spirits just waiting for a servant to fetch them for him, but Ostap had always preferred his own company. Still, the day had been exhausting enough that he was willing to lounge for a minute or two more.

‘I cannot say, for I wasn’t in that alley on that night,’ he said, finally, ‘nor would I wish to have been. I can’t imagine how strong a person would have to be to witness such a thing and emerge on the other side still whole, but I can say for certain that however strong that might be, I am found wanting.’

‘An evasion,’ said Inzigo. A servitor wheeled into the room bearing a glass on a tray. Inzigo took the drink and eased herself back into her seat. ‘We’ve all had nightmares of the alley, Ostap. Now quit hedging and tell me what you think.’

Ostap went quiet, and considered his response carefully. Greve Hodyuk was hot-headed, but also a valued friend.

‘I think that most of us know, or believe that we know, that Geordan and Ruprekt Matkosen were killed in an accident that was anything but,’ Ostap said. He sat forward, swinging his feet back to the carpet. ‘Even if that weren’t true, it’s perceived to be true. The law of the street demands retaliation.’

‘And this, by you, is a positive outcome?’ Inzigo asked. ‘Our nobles warring against one another using criminal hitmen?’

Ostap shrugged and stood. ‘Politicians sending assassins to kill one another is vastly preferable to them settling the issue with armies.’

‘Did you hear about the evacuees?’ Inzigo said, as if he had reminded her.

‘I didn’t,’ he said. None of the local newssheets had been covering them.

‘They were struck by an intensely terrible storm while crossing the Arendian Divide. Fewer than seven hundred were still alive by the time they reached Pennenvost.’ Greve Hodyuk caught Ostap’s eye, and he saw for the first time how drawn her face had become. He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover she was skipping meals and losing sleep to spend more time in the Basilica dealing with Grevenate issues.

‘I’m so sorry, Inzigo.’ Ostap knew it had been a landmark for her. She had spent days lobbying for better treatment for the Tupykamini.

She shook her head. ‘You did everything in your power. As did I. But the Vaneisens and their cronies preferred the deaths of twenty-three hundred men, women and children over a sting to their pride. Rather than allow desperate people to take shelter in buildings they were going to take down eventually anyway, they chose to turn them away, knowing it would kill them.’ She took a sip of her spirits, nodding and staring, her eyes glazing over. Ostap suspected that no matter where she looked, she was seeing barefoot outcasts, dead of exposure and drowned in swollen, flooded rivers.

‘I hope it was the lord governor,’ she said.

So this is what they’d come to. A population so beholden to a corrupt line of nobles that they would accept execution-style murders if it meant their lives might improve. A government so jaded that they took reciprocal murder in their stride, so long as it stood a chance of bringing the madness to an end.

As terrible as he knew it was, Ostap had to agree.

The athenaeum appeared, at first glance, to be a sad reflection of the Grand Cathedral. It was shorter, without the soaring height and elaborately buttressed façade of the grand Kostoveim architecture. The pilasters at the front were old and worn, and mounted on the north of the building, where they never gleamed in the sunlight. Inside it was nearly devoid of life. No candelabras adorned the halls, and there was no army of chandlers to light them.

Ashielle, however, recognised the dedication of the athenaeum for what it was. There were no dribbling decorative candle mounts because there could be no open flame in such an ancient building. The worn pilasters were some of the oldest on the planet, shielded from the degradation of the elements until they could be preserved or restored.

Group Captain Barrin had been quite insistent on trying to send a group of soldiers with her as an escort, but she would have none of it. Instead she had brought only Cheyster, her mother’s faithful driver, whose loyalty she knew to be beyond reproach. In the salt-miner’s strike, a group of disaffected labourers had attempted to waylay Cheyster in the course of his duties, to kidnap and ransom the Lady Matkosen, who had been expecting her first child at the time. The faithful driver had been prepared to give his life to protect Ashielle’s mother, and had taken two bullets in the exchange – then still managed to drive the Lady Matkosen to safety. Ashielle felt that a large entourage would have sent the wrong message to the party she intended to speak with, and if she could only take a single person, there was no one in her employ better qualified than Cheyster.

Inside, the library was shrouded in dimness, with only a fraction of the luminators lit. Part library, part restoration laboratory and part scriptorium, she could see the care that had gone into preserving the works within. Ashielle couldn’t even make out the titles of the books that she passed. In some places, the shelves were replaced by glass-walled enclosures, each housing a work of art too delicate to be exposed to the elements. These, too, were too poorly lit to be seen. The building was one large room; the bookshelves, workbenches and display mounts were the only walls or dividers to be found inside.

The athenaeum was a dream for one such as her, though. If time had permitted, Ashielle might have wandered the library alone for days. She could see a complete collection of the Erchenvolt chapbooks on one shelf, works the broader literary community had considered lost for decades. Beneath the glass of a restoration bracket she recognised pages from Tenshigo’s Treason of Nine Lovers, a work she had heard of but never thought to actually see. To the warp with the bank vaults and treasury rooms: this athenaeum was her true treasure.

Like a hunter in the southern fern savannas being shadowed by a lion, Ashielle could hear her stalker long before she saw her, and she realised she had been heard the moment she stepped through the doors. A slow stomp traced its way through the stacks of books, heralding the arrival of Preacher Larrichan.

Ashielle had expected someone old, and indeed the preacher was ancient. She had expected, however, such a venerable and sequestered elder to be frail and enfeebled. She’d never seen anyone outside of the cult of the Machine-God with so much heavy augmentation. The upper left third of the preacher’s face was covered by a jade mask, carved with angelic features, including a crown of cherubic curls. Beneath her ear, a cluster of gold threads wound up from beneath her collar to socket into the mask. The jade covering left the right eye and the preacher’s mouth exposed. The eye set into the jade was pure white, although as the preacher approached, Ashielle could hear the tell-tale clicking of lenses telescoping inside.

‘Preacher Larrichan,’ she said.

The preacher inclined her head graciously. She moved smoothly and rhythmically, but there was a measured mechanical clumping sound that accompanied her steps. Ashielle was willing to bet the augmetics beneath Larrichan’s cassock were even more extensive than what was visible.

‘Lady Matkosen,’ Larrichan replied. She gestured to the tea table, already set for them. Ashielle smiled to herself, imagining her father’s apoplexy if he could see a preacher bucking the system of address so. ‘What brings you to our library today?’

Ashielle handed the book she had brought from her chambers, open to Canthor’s diptych, and slid it across the table to the preacher. She pointed to the cavorting skitterlings.

‘Ah,’ said Preacher Larrichan. ‘Common proto-cthonic mythofauna. A frequent sub-theme or background element in Ceocan artworks. I believe the local name for them is skitterlings.’

‘Can you tell me anything more about them?’

‘This seems like an odd topic of fascination,’ said Preacher Larrichan, ‘for the lord governor.’ She poured a small cup of tea for herself and her guest.

Ashielle had the feeling that something was being left unsaid.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t ask as the lord governor. Art history was my chosen career field before… well, before my life changed so dramatically. There has been so much turmoil, recently.’ She paused. ‘I should think pursuing my intellectual passions might provide an outlet for me, one that might very well save me in the years to come. But rest assured, I seek your advice only as a personal favour.’ She paused again, to allow the preacher to hear what remained unsaid. ‘I would never dream of involving you in politics, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Preacher Larrichan. ‘I have so little time for political intrigue these days. What do you know about ancient Ceocan history?’

‘Only what everyone knows,’ she said. ‘The Old Ceoc turned their eyes from Him upon the Throne, and Ceocan endured millennia of darkness until He led an exploratory fleet to rediscover our planet and bring us back into His light.’ She stirred her tea, acutely conscious of how loud the sound of spoon against ceramic sounded in the tomb-quiet of the athenaeum. Even the air was still, devoid of any stray breeze that might dislodge an errant page. The preacher stirred her own tea in complete silence.

‘Not everyone,’ said Larrichan. ‘Only those with any sort of formal education know even that much. The farmers and fishers are told only what we allow them to know, which is a far more sanitised version of the same story. Surely a child of such wealth as yourself has a bit… broader knowledge of the galaxy?’

Ashielle sipped her tea, trying to gauge how much to tell the preacher. Larrichan already seemed completely unlike every other member of the Ministorum she had ever met. She had the impression Preacher Larrichan was testing her in some fashion.

‘I know our world was settled during the Dark Age of Technology,’ she said, ‘lost for unknown years before the Astartes Legions found us during the Great Crusade.’

‘Is that it?’ Preacher Larrichan seemed unimpressed. The stone half of her face seemed kinder than the flesh. ‘Were you educated in anything other than rote platitudes?’

‘Was my father?’ Ashielle said. ‘When you spoke with him?’

Preacher Larrichan smiled, although she didn’t seem surprised. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Your father was much more willing to speak freely with me than you are.’ She bobbed her head from side to side as if gauging some unknown factor. ‘Although, it took him nearly a year longer to approach me. I suspect he had exhausted other avenues of research, or perhaps done more extensive probing into my own background. Either way, he was more trusting.’

Ashielle kept her face neutral. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked. She was not a veteran of this particular form of verbal dance, but she was familiar with the steps. Both she and the preacher knew more than they were saying, but each had to tread with caution, given the authority of the other.

‘Do you really believe the Old Ceoc turned, en masse, from their devotion to the Throne?’ Preacher Larrichan broached the topic carefully, but Ashielle had been prepared for this.

‘Unlikely,’ she said, choosing her words with care. A verbal misstep could be construed as heresy. Throne, the most conservative of Ecclesiarchy officials would consider the entire conversation heretical already, anyway. ‘I think it’s more likely a warp storm, bureaucratic error, or simply shifting trade routes cut Ceocan off from the Imperium for a time, and while our closest neighbours probably meant to re-establish contact eventually, time went on. Wars were waged. Governors fell. The Imperium restructured. Eventually, the planet was forgotten.’

Preacher Larrichan arched one eyebrow. She lifted her own cup of tea, and Ashielle realised for the first time that the preacher’s right hand was entirely augmetic.

‘Do you believe that the Emperor directed the exploratory fleet to return the planet to the Imperium?’ The preacher’s voice was light, innocuous, though her question was anything but. Ashielle paused, breathing in the scent of the tea, trying to think of the best way to answer.

‘I think,’ she said, slowly, ‘that those who commanded the exploratory fleet which found Ceocan again believed that they did so of their own free will, guided by nothing more than their own expertise. The Adeptus Ministorum tells us that the Emperor is omniscient and omnipresent, however, so I will believe that the actions of those men and women were guided by the invisible hand of Him upon the Throne, if the Ecclesiarchy tells me it is so. Such facts are, after all, their area of expertise.’

Preacher Larrichan tsked in her throat. She set the cup down on her saucer, the augmetic hand guiding the vessel so smoothly the china didn’t even clink.

‘Deacon Phoebian likes to govern with a kind hand, as such things are judged,’ she said, ‘but if a common labourer were to say such things on our hallowed grounds, even she would have them in stocks in a moment.’

‘I am no common labourer,’ said Ashielle, beginning to realise what sort of game Larrichan was playing. ‘Does the Book of Solangia not say, “the weight of duty is borne by the strength of privilege”?’

Preacher Larrichan smiled, her flesh mouth a mirror of the half-smile of the jade. ‘True, but she goes on to say “privilege shall fail the faithless and the false, the weight of their duty shall grind them to meal”.’

‘Do you believe that I am faithless or false?’ Ashielle asked.

‘Faithless, no,’ said the preacher. ‘Although I’ve yet to meet the politician who wasn’t a little bit false.’

Both women smiled in lieu of laughing at the joke, which didn’t deserve it.

‘True enough in your duty for Solangia’s purposes, anyway. Understand,’ said the preacher, ‘that the Old Ceoc had a history with inhuman influences. Before the Great Crusade, the people of Ceocan had fallen far from the ancestors of theirs who had colonised the planet. They believed that great xenos deities had spirited them away from the world on which they had been born, taken them to live on Ceocan. If there is any evidence of humanity arriving here under their own power, it has long since been destroyed.’

The preacher stood, and clumped her way through the bookshelves. After a moment, she returned, bearing a slim volume of ancient paper.

‘This is the personal journal of Schain Renislaus, a remembrancer with the Thirteenth Legion of the Emperor’s elite.’ The preacher smiled at Ashielle’s wide-eyed expression. ‘Not the actual journal, of course. This was a fairly common text in the more populated parts of the Ultima Segmentum, although it’s fallen out of favour as the Historitors gained power and scope.’

‘I see,’ said Ashielle. ‘And did Schain Renislaus have something to say about Ceocan?’

‘I believe he did,’ said the preacher. ‘He speaks of a world filled with “painted barbarians, who know nothing of Terra and call themselves the Shoke.” He goes on to say that the world is beset intermittently by xenos who hunt the nomadic Shoke for sport. The legionaries set up an Imperial garrison on the planet, and the planet of Shokan became a vital supply of foodstuffs for the crusade fleets.’

‘Speculative,’ says Ashielle. ‘But assuming Mr Renislaus was misspelling Ceocan’s name, that does fit.’

‘Indeed,’ said the preacher. She stood, and gestured for the governor to follow her.

The stacks of books between the door and the preacher’s receiving area were curated, Ashielle realised, and arranged to convey a sense of gravitas. Here, back in what must be Preacher Larrichan’s private area, there was no order she could perceive. Some shelves were devoid of books entirely, and were filled with picks, brushes and other tools that Ashielle could only guess at the function of. Other shelves were filled to the point of sagging beneath the weight of the ancient tomes piled upon them, and stuffed full of yellowed scrolls so brittle with age that she couldn’t begin to guess how the preacher could handle them without the paper turning to dust. The plaster walls, once adorned with frescoes of pastoral scenes and soaring aquilas, had been sacrificed on the altar of necessity. There was scarcely a square inch of bare wall visible, as it was buried beneath a forest of paper. Handwritten notes about ink or paint recipes, book-binding techniques and restoration instructions were mixed in with spare pages that had been salvaged from destroyed books, reference picts for damaged paintings, and cross-reference lists for research projects.

Finally, they came to a stout case set against a back wall. The case itself was decorative, made from iron trimmed with gold, but there were no baroque paintings or decorative reliefs. Instead, the entirety of the black metal surface was covered in gold inscription, which Ashielle recognised as Imperial scripture. This was no display cage like the glass-fronted cases in front. Ashielle had seen similar scripture cases. There was, in fact, one of them in the secret room off the Draper’s Hall in Darcarden.

Unlike the other scripture cases Ashielle had seen, Larrichan’s had no lock. Instead, the preacher placed the index finger of her augmetic hand in the depression where the lock should be. Ashielle could hear smooth metallic clinking echoing from within the lid of the scripture case. Clearly the lock on the scripture case was far more elaborate than the ones that Ashielle had seen before.

The lid popped open with a hiss. Inside were a number of texts and tomes, protected from the corrosive effects of even the air itself.

‘We tell the people that the world was brought joyfully back to the Imperium upon Reunification.’ The preacher straightened, and held one finger aloft as if correcting herself. ‘Rather, we tell that to the children of families wealthy enough to afford a private education.’ She resumed shuffling through the papers with painful slowness, carefully moving each stray note or piece of correspondence from one pile to another.

‘Is that not the case?’ Ashielle asked.

‘Is it ever?’ The preacher turned, hefting a large folio from the case. ‘Here we are,’ she said, before Ashielle could answer her rhetorical question. She gestured to a workbench, where she spread the folio out across the work surface.

The glossy pages were unlike anything Ashielle had ever seen – a treasure trove of artworks from before the Reunification. Picts of displays, shrines and art exhibitions. She drew her hands back sharply before her fingers touched the paper. Ashielle looked to the preacher, who nodded, and she began leafing through the pages.

‘This is an installation,’ she said.

The pict showed a triptych of paintings, lit from beneath. The paintings were beautiful, in the hinged Marcorellian style. Of greater interest to her was the background. The walls behind the painting were fitted wood, and on the left edge of the frame she could make out a dividing screen. Ashielle had seen such architecture in paintings and sculpture, but never in real life.

‘Where was this pict taken?’

The preacher smiled. ‘A city on Ceocan, about a day’s ride south of Ystrode.’

‘There is no city south of Ystrode,’ said Ashielle, closing her eyes and recalling her geography. Ystrode and Kostoveim were on separate continents, but it was all part of her planet, and she prided herself on knowing it well. ‘Just scrubland until you reach the ocean.’

‘That may be true, now,’ said Preacher Larrichan, ‘but at the time of Reunification, there was a thriving community there.’

Ashielle had been to Ystrode, once, and had seen the desert to the south of it. There were no resources there, no buildings. Nothing but scrubland for miles. If there had ever been a city there, it had to have been razed to the ground.

Of course, that’s exactly what would have happened, wasn’t it? The Imperium did not do things by half measures. Its attention might be slow to adjust, but when it had fixed its gaze on a target, there was little and less that could be done to stop its inexorable advance. The very idea that a planet could exist self-sufficiently outside their domain was heresy. The notion of leaving any evidence that it had done so? Intolerable.

‘The Old Ceoc resisted Reunification,’ Ashielle said. Each pict she paged through showed her more of the art and culture that had been lost. How many of these sculptures had been destroyed? How many spirited away? She saw examples of architecture that could no longer be found anywhere on Ceocan. Paintings that had been burned for venerating a hero not sanctified by the Ecclesiarchy. Thousands of years’ worth of history, crushed beneath the conqueror’s boot.

‘Of course they did,’ said the preacher. ‘They had new masters, by then.’ She extracted one of the picts, and laid it out for Ashielle’s viewing.

The pict showed a wall fresco, a grand mural picked out in small coloured shells, the largest no bigger than a fingernail. The mural showed a grand house, a temple or mansion of some kind, in cutaway view. Inside, a man in a grand headdress presided over a legion of bowing human figures: a priest or king of some type. More troubling was the figure next to him, at his right hand. The second figure was humanoid, picked out in glossy black shells. Small green lines, an abstraction of glowing runes, covered its body.

The preacher showed her more pictures of the same mural. Outside the temple there was a city of tiered towers, distinct in their stacked, multiple-eaved design. Images of Ceoc people running through the streets, clustering together in the light of massive bonfires. Between the buildings, skitterlings cavorted. These beings did not merely take to the background, as all images Ashielle had seen did. They wielded blue flame against foolish sword-wielding soldiers. They carried wailing children into the night. They stared out of the wall, directly at the viewer, their eyes picked out in red lacquered shells.

‘The Ceoc people dwelled on this world for thousands of years, alone in the darkness,’ said the preacher. ‘But then the skitterlings came.’

‘What are they?’ Ashielle asked. ‘Nightmares made flesh?’ She stared at a pict of a woven blanket, divided into panels, which told a pictorial story of a family offending a king and being condemned to be dragged away by skitterlings.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Larrichan. ‘I believe they’re scouts or espionage specialists for the sport-hunters that plagued the planet before the Crusade.’

‘You think they came back?’

‘It’s possible, although the few surviving elements of pre-Reunification history don’t show anything like the sport hunts from Renislaus’ third-hand accounts.’ The preacher flipped through a few more picts which showed other art pieces, each of which depicted similar scenes to the first.

It took everything Ashielle had not to laugh in triumph.

‘The Imperium banished them, though,’ she said. ‘During the Reunification, they must have.’

Preacher Larrichan nodded. ‘You see this orange blade this ruler is depicted with?’ she asked. ‘And here, this shows a house with orange stones set in the roof being passed over by the skitterlings. If I’m correct, these are slaenite crystals. Known to be mildly psycho-reactive, and prized in Geller field technology.’ The preacher must have seen the inquisitive look coming across Ashielle’s face. ‘The slaenite crystals on Ceocan are occluded and of poor purity. The ones in our solar system’s asteroid field are abundant and of far greater quality.’ She turned over another page. ‘However, I do believe even locally-sourced crystals would be sufficient for someone familiar with warpcraft to use them to create a shield or protective device to prevent extra-dimensional incursion.’

‘A shield against the invaders?’ said Ashielle. ‘If they aren’t from here, then it stands to reason they must arrive somewhere.’

‘There you are,’ said the preacher. ‘And their means of entry were sealed with slaenite crystals. I doubt the crystals would be sufficient themselves – it would likely also have taken rituals infused with mighty warp powers.’

‘How could such a monumental task be undertaken?’ said Ashielle. ‘How would the Imperium have known?’ She rubbed her thumb across the cap of her missing finger idly.

‘If you notice, the motif of a leader commanding or working alongside the skitterlings is common,’ said Larrichan. ‘And always while brandishing a token of office made of slaenite. I suspect that the skitterlings had some form of compact with the tribal leaders of the Old Ceoc. When the Imperium of Man came calling again after so long, the most powerful of them would have been disinclined to cooperate. The new system had seen them accrue much power and influence.’

Understanding dawned on Ashielle. ‘But when the Imperium of Man came calling again after so long, the least of these leaders, or perhaps their avaricious subordinates, saw an opportunity for advancement for themselves. Betray the ancient covenants of their people,’ she nearly retched as she realised she was almost using Jaezubiel’s exact phrasing, ‘and rise to positions of power in the aftermath.’

‘A reasonable assumption,’ said Larrichan. She fixed Ashielle with a hard look. ‘I suspect, however, that it’s possible that some of those loyal supporters of the Imperium chose not to build a wall, but rather a prison, trapping one or two of the skitterlings in our world.’

Ashielle returned her stare, giving away nothing. ‘That would be the gravest folly,’ she said. ‘No ward can hold forever, after all. Such disastrous short-sightedness would eventually spell danger for someone down the line from them.’

‘Too right,’ said the preacher. ‘Your father had a similar concern, oddly enough.’

‘Do you think these slaenite talismans still have the power to command such creatures?’

‘If their material form was part of the covenant, then most likely,’ said Larrichan. She smiled, a little wistfully. ‘However, it should be noted that the talismans of rulership were considered grand heresy. The last known example was the Spear of Fortunes, but that was destroyed in late M37. So far as I know, only one such relic has survived the years.’

Ashielle looked at her, expectantly, but the preacher only dropped her gaze. The governor felt her heart sink. She had come all this way, only to find that the scholar didn’t know. Then she realised that Larrichan had not dropped her gaze in shame, but rather to stare at Ashielle’s hand.

Or more importantly, her signet ring.

Ashielle lifted the hand, gazing at the dull silver of the band, the flat amber stone set atop it. It was much clearer and purer in colour than any slaenite crystal she’d seen before. She had always taken it to be amber or a rich topaz. It had never occurred to her that it might just be merely a stunningly clear example of a common mineral.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Preacher Larrichan, you’ve been most helpful.’

The preacher inclined her head. Ashielle was beginning to suspect that the cleric was incapable of bowing at the waist.

‘It is no trouble,’ she said. ‘The material was ready to hand.’

Ashielle stopped on her way to the door.

‘Why would that be?’ she asked.

The preacher paused, as if considering whether or not to prevaricate.

‘Someone else was asking about the same subject,’ Ashielle said. ‘Weren’t they?’

‘No,’ said the preacher. ‘Not quite. Although a related one.’

‘Who came to ask you about the skitterlings?’ she asked.

‘Your brother. The arbitrator.’

CHAPTER 12

Esilia enjoyed her rose garden more than any other part of the Vaneisen manor. When she had discovered the garden, it had been a forgotten part of the estate. The fountain was dry and overgrown, the hedges long since atrophied to nothing.

As a young woman, she had made it part of her mission to reinvigorate the rose garden, and under her care, it had flourished. The lawns were lush and green, watered by hand from heavy brass canisters hauled daily from the cistern. The brightly polished bronze furnishings allowed the Vaneisen nobles a place to read quietly or receive visitors. The benches and tables scattered throughout the garden were separated by a waist-high series of rose hedges. The thin, sparse vegetation made for a deceptive maze, often appearing from a distance to have a gap where none existed, or concealing an actual passage from view. The fact that all of the features of the garden were visible at all times made navigating the labyrinth all the more frustrating. The slightest misstep on the path would lead to a painful correction, as the Vaneisen rose had been bred for the wickedness of its thorns.

The blood-red blooms of the garden were at their most beautiful when dripping with fresh rainwater, but Esilia preferred to sit in her greatest work when the sun was high in the sky and the garden was positively baking. Reading or calmly taking a meal while all around her servants toiled to sacrifice their sweat and blood before the altar of her vision: that was the most potent joy she could imagine.

She smiled as she saw Ireina picking her way through the maze to her. Her daughter eyed the thorny hedges distastefully. Her children didn’t share her love for the rose garden, but she didn’t require them to. They each had their own interests and areas of excellence.

‘Have the funeral arrangements been made?’ Ireina asked as she sat down. She had wisely chosen a thick riding outfit.

‘They have,’ said Esilia. ‘There will be no viewing, however.’

Ireina was not surprised. She and Esilia had both seen the mess that had been made of Tanzeg’s body. It would have taken a miracle for his corpse to have been made presentable.

Esilia studied her daughter’s face as Ireina gazed about the garden. She watched Ireina, who was in turn watching the head gardener, Rorgen, correct a new servant, striking the young boy with a thin switch whenever he trimmed a bloom incorrectly. Ireina had been the one who had hired Rorgen, recognising in him a commitment to detail combined with a ruthless streak. She had always been skilled at spotting and cultivating good talent. It was a talent that would serve Ireina well, now that she was poised to inherit her mother’s title someday.

‘Have you given any thought to your prospects?’ Esilia asked.

Ireina tore her eyes away from the gardener, who had begun kicking the boy. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, waving one hand. ‘I’ve been focusing on tying up loose ends.’

Esilia grimaced and sipped at her tea. ‘Tanzeg was a dear boy, but he was ever prone to leaving his messes for other people to clean up.’

Ireina nodded. Esilia knew that if her daughter was going to take the position of Vaneisen matriarch someday, to continue her family’s legacy, there couldn’t be any random claimants to her position coming out of the woodwork. Tanzeg might not have married, but his numerous companions over the years had borne several illegitimate children. While Tanzeg had been the Vaneisen heir Esilia had been content to allow the children to live, as she was loath to discard useful tools. With Tanzeg deceased, however, those children had become threats to Ireina’s ascension. She felt no great sorrow at Ireina disposing of her own bastard nieces and nephews. In fact, Esilia would have thought less of her daughter if she hadn’t dealt with the brats.

‘All tidied up?’ Esilia asked.

‘All done,’ said Ireina. ‘There were two that gave my agent a bit of trouble, but it’s all taken care of now.’

‘Oh?’ asked Esilia. ‘Anything I need to be concerned about coming back on us?’

‘Nothing extreme,’ said Ireina. ‘Two of the women claimed Tanzeg wasn’t the father of their children, and I couldn’t establish conclusively if they were telling the truth or not.’

‘What did you do about it?’ Esilia asked.

Ireina shrugged. ‘Better safe than sorry.’ She leaned back a little, closing her eyes and enjoying the sunshine.

Esilia nodded. ‘Indeed.’

Ireina tapped her finger against the table and opened her eyes again. ‘I’m a little concerned about this much activity,’ she said, ‘especially so close to what happened to Tanzeg.’

‘As am I,’ said Esilia. ‘But there’s little we can do about it, is there? If Ruprekt’s daughter goes looking too closely at our affairs, there’s all sorts of nasty secrets she might find poking around in Tanzeg’s business. So, we have to clean them all up, as quickly as possible.’ She paused, suddenly afraid. ‘I do hope you took precautions?’

Ireina scowled. ‘Of course,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not a child. The families died in a combination of house fires and street muggings. Nothing suspicious at all.’

‘And your cleaner?’

Ireina shrugged. ‘Gone,’ she said, ‘which is a pity. He was extremely efficient.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Esilia.

‘Nevertheless,’ said Ireina, ‘the only way to question him would be to question his corpse. Which would require the wardens to dig it out of the rockcrete foundation of the hab block that Jennifia Bruisell started pouring this morning.’

Esilia nodded. ‘Good girl,’ she said. There had been many times when she’d wished that Ireina had been born first. She certainly was far from pleased that her son had been killed, if for no other reason than the time and expense that she had invested in him. Several arms of influence had been under his control and would require time and resources to wrangle, especially the illicit ventures.

‘Switching topics,’ said Esilia, ‘how is your new friendship coming along?’ If Ireina was able to secure a solid relationship with an agent inside Darcarden, it would make many of their endeavours easier.

‘Progressing well,’ her daughter replied. ‘There’s no love lost between them and the governor. At this point their relationship is… professional at best.’

Esilia nodded and returned her attention to her newssheet.

‘What about you?’ asked Ireina.

Esilia arched one manicured eyebrow. She was unaccustomed to her daughter speaking to her in that way, but if Ireina was going to step into the number one position she supposed she was deserving of some leeway.

‘What about me?’ she said.

‘Have you figured out who killed Tanzeg?’

Esilia knew she meant who had done the deed. They both knew who had ordered it done. There was hardly any surprise there. Tanzeg had taken a shot at the lord governor and missed. Esilia was hardly surprised that he had ended up dead. She had made her peace with that possibility the night Lostrovsky had failed to return.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. Which was true. She’d put two of her people on investigating the murder, but both of her agents had quit after discovering enough of the details of her son’s demise. Esilia had to hand it to Lady Matkosen: if she had been trying to send a message, she’d done so loud and clear. Several lesser houses that had been content to sit quietly and let the regent and coadjutor slug it out were now grousing their support for the Matkosens as loudly as possible. She could still count on her most loyal (or indebted) supporters, like the Bruisell and Gavozny families, but the notion of pushing Lady Matkosen out through influence or coercion was now a dead idea.

‘Oh?’ asked her daughter.

‘We both know who had Tanzeg killed,’ she said. ‘We were doing what we could to keep the warfare off the streets. To keep our assassinations quiet. The Governor Matkosen doesn’t seem to want to play that way, however.’ She nibbled delicately on a biscuit. ‘She has chosen to show us her teeth. When we have shown ours, and removed her entirely, the rest of the Grevenate will fall in line.’

‘Are you sure?’ Ireina asked.

‘It’s already done,’ said Esilia. ‘She’s visiting the cathedral today, for some goodwill mission or other. Unfortunately for her, that position leaves her uncharacteristically vulnerable.’ She returned to her tea. She might have known her son’s death was inevitable, even made peace with it in some fashion, but there was a far cry between that and allowing his murder to go unpunished.

The carriage door closed. Ashielle arranged her skirts around her lap and pursed her lips in silent thought. Suspicious glances were one thing, but if Hanrik was inquiring with the Ecclesiarchy about the heresies of Ceocan’s past, it meant he was pursuing something more concrete, whether he knew it or not. The carriage lurched into motion.

‘I know you’re here,’ Ashielle said.

The burning red eyes appeared before she saw the rest of it.

‘Did you follow me here,’ she asked, ‘or do you just hear my call wherever you are?’ She stared idly out the tinted window. The sunset glare did little to penetrate the smoked glass.

‘Why can’t it be both?’ Jaezubiel said.

‘I think you followed me,’ she said, ignoring the creature’s evasiveness. ‘After all, you’ve invested quite a bit of risk into me, haven’t you?’ Ashielle didn’t turn to see if Jaezubiel reacted, and didn’t wait for it to respond. ‘If I perish, you pass into the hands of the coadjutors. You’ve already weighed that and decided against it.’

The silence was so profound it was nearly audible, a distinct and threatening lack of sound.

‘Perhaps,’ said Jaezubiel. ‘Perhaps you’re correct.’

Before she could ask it why, the carriage shook violently.

Ashielle folded her skirts into her lap and exited the carriage. The early evening crowd pressed in around the route, with several other carriages filling the street before and behind her. The bronze facades reflected the light of sunset down the thoroughfare, filling the street with golden orange radiance.

‘Cheyster, what is it?’ she asked her driver. The man looked down, surprised to see the governor out of the carriage.

‘Appears to be a downed cart up ahead, ma’am.’ The driver put one hand up to shield his eyes. ‘Some sort of accident.’

‘How long to clear?’ she asked.

Cheyster’s face contorted with the look of a man trying to feign uncertainty to conceal an unpleasant truth.

‘Hard to say, ma’am.’ He pointed down the way, although Ashielle couldn’t see anything through the packed mass of people and milling horses. ‘The alleys here are too narrow to take a cart, so it could be quite a while before they get the street clear.’

Ashielle nodded and leaned against the side of the carriage. She folded her arms across her chest, and stood posed as if deep in impatient thought.

‘We have to leave on foot,’ she whispered out of the corner of her mouth.

She could hear a peevish hiss from inside the carriage.

‘You do so alone,’ Jaezubiel whispered back. ‘I cannot follow through this damnable light.’

Ashielle nodded and stepped away. The wide street was indeed bathed in light so bright it banished nearly all shadows. The polished bronze cornices, statuary and reliefs all reflected the day’s final radiance, aligned nearly perfectly with the angle of the setting sun. Any of Jaezubiel’s kind trying to cut through the city would be isolated and exposed.

She looked back down the street as far as she could see. For the first time, she wondered if the layout of Kostoveim’s streets was deliberate. The largest, oldest streets had all been laid out in neat rows, like a farmer’s field. All arrayed east-to-west along the line of the sun, every building adorned with gleaming metal decorations that would turn the hour of dusk and dawn into a blazing inferno of light. The cross-streets that carved through the old blocks, the markets which cut the main roads into segments, the satellite cities that followed no set pattern but the sprawling madness of the convenience of the moment: they had all sprung up centuries after the Reunification. After people had forgotten that there was once a time when they feared the encroaching shadows more than anything else.

‘The sun will be down shortly,’ Ashielle said, as though this were a reasonable impetus for her impatience. She reached back into the carriage and plucked out her hat: a wide-brimmed Kostoci lady’s hat meant to be worn low, perfect for concealing the face. She nodded to her driver. ‘Come, Cheyster. We’ll walk from here.’

She did not wait, but began pushing her way through the crowd with all the haste she could manage. It was slow going. Once off the main thoroughfare and onto the pedestrian’s sideways, she was no one, recognisable only as an impatient noblewoman too hot-headed to wait for traffic to clear. The newssheets rarely had both the reason and the means to run picts of her, and currency bearing her face wouldn’t go into production until the beginning of the winter season.

Cheyster, ever faithful, had leaped from his board to follow her. Despite the crowd impeding her progress, she had evidently made good pace, because by the time her driver had caught up with her, he was flush-faced.

‘Begging your excellency’s pardon,’ he huffed, ‘but why are we leaving the carriage?’

Ashielle managed to push through a break in the crowd and down a side-alley. At some point a market vendor had used the alley to store a wheeled stall, but by the looks of the mouldered wood he had long been out of the street meat business. Beyond that, the alley angled sharply away. A few pedestrians from the pack of dusk traffic populated the end of the alley, having ducked in to have a quiet smoke or a low conversation and avoid the busiest part of the day.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘I generally find that the best method of avoiding an assassination is to not be where it is occurring.’ As though to illustrate her point, an explosion roared behind them. Ashielle forged on down the alley, even as the screams began from the street.

‘Is there a place we can hide you, excellency?’ Cheyster shifted without command to a pace behind her, his footsteps matching her own, his large frame spoiling any shot at her from behind.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We need to get back to the palace.’ She reached the turn in the alley and peered around the corner. It only ran another fifteen feet or so, then turned again to run parallel to its original course. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a vox-bead.’

Or a pistol, she realised. Her plasma pistol was holstered in a smuggler’s rig hidden beneath the short jacket she wore over her dress. An exquisite piece of covert tech, the holster allowed her to carry the weapon entirely unnoticed, even by some auspex arrays designed to detect concealed weapons. The trade-off was that it took a few moments to extract the weapon, and she didn’t have them to spare at the moment.

‘Beg pardon, ma’am?’

‘Vox-bead,’ she said. ‘It’s like a military vox, only it fits in the ear. Quite common in the galaxy at large, but after the Night of Bloody Streets the Grevenate asked Vittorya Matkosen to outlaw man-portable communication devices smaller than the backpack units.’

Not that it had prevented Vittorya from keeping them in use in her own house, of course. It hadn’t been until Ruprekt ascended that the governor’s staff had quit using them as well, her father insisting on setting an example for his subordinates. He had always been adamant that ethical conduct kept a governor from death at the hands of a populist uprising, so she found it quite ironic that his ethics were about to be the reason she was probably going to be assassinated.

As she passed the second corner in the alley, she corrected herself to ‘definitely going to be assassinated.’ Instead of connecting back to the next large street, the alley ended in an impromptu wall. Flakboard sheets had been erected to close the alley off, with wooden struts supporting them. Ashielle turned on her heel and tried to go back the way she had come, but she rounded the first corner and saw a trio of men pushing their way through the crowd, laspistols in hand.

Ashielle dropped to the ground behind the alley’s corner before the first shots blazed past them. Cheyster saw the first volley of shots go sizzling by before he was able to leap for cover behind the abandoned vendor stall. He fumed, as though the audacity of the assassins was beyond comprehension. Cheyster reached into his overcoat as the laspistol shots blasted smouldering holes in the wooden cart and blew divots in the grey stone of the alley’s buildings. He drew a laspistol of his own, old but serviceable. Ashielle hadn’t even realised he carried it, but could well imagine that having survived one kidnapping attempt on an aristocrat in his care, he had made preparations to never be caught so unawares again. She crouched, back against the stone building corner, and dug beneath the jacket she wore over her dress for her plasma pistol.

‘Come out, lady, and we’ll let your man go free,’ called a voice from the end of the alley. Ashielle could barely hear him over the screaming of the crowd. ‘You like pretending that you give a damn about your people’s lives, right? ’S your chance to die a martyr!’

‘Heretics!’ Cheyster’s face had turned livid with rage, his odobenid moustache trembling with fury. He leaped up from behind his makeshift barricade. ‘Wretched traitors! Rebels! Scum!’ He punctuated every word with a shot from his antique laspistol.

The first several shots of the return fire went wide, but eventually one of them clipped Cheyster’s leg. He fell to his knees, his face screwed up in pain, and kept firing. She heard his efforts rewarded by a pained scream from one of the assassins, but he was no longer a moving target, and they had found their range. The next three shots impacted him squarely in the chest, and Ashielle’s long-time servant slumped to the dirty pavement. His sacrifice had not been in vain, however, as it had afforded her the time to retrieve her own pistol.

She poked her head around the alley, as low as she could. Cheyster had evidently kept his marksmanship in practice: one of the three assassins was lying face-down, another leaned against a wall, one leg stretched out and marred by a charred hole. She snapped her pistol up and pulled the trigger.

Ashielle had worried that her aim would be ruined by firing with her middle finger, but once again she found that her middle finger could do just as well as the missing one had. The first shot took the wounded man by surprise, the plasma round tearing down the alley and blazing into his lower leg. He screamed in agony as half his leg vaporised, and fell to the ground, wailing. The uninjured assassin fired blindly and tried to shrink down. Ashielle fired again, but the plasma pistol had been made for shorter ranges, and her shot went wide. Superheated brick exploded, sending shards across the alleyway and showering the assassin with debris. Venomous cursing and wild lasgun fire flew back in her direction.

She pulled the trigger again, but her pistol merely beeped in warning, the safety threshold reached. If she tried to fire it again before the coils cooled, she would risk catastrophic heat damage.

‘Jaezubiel,’ she said. Ashielle ducked back behind the corner. She looked down at the blinking red light on the side of her pistol, willing it to return to green. No luck. ‘Jaezubiel?’

The fiend didn’t respond. She gazed up at the sky with exasperation. She was still twenty minutes out from it being able to rescue her, assuming the carriage hadn’t been detonated with it inside in the first place. She looked back towards the dead end. Maybe she could climb it?

The tromping of boots put an end to that notion. She sighed as she heard them. Reinforcements. Still not willing to admit defeat, she tried to recall the words to the Litany of Thermal Maintenance. Then she heard the voice, booming through the alley with the thunder of a plains storm.

‘By order of the Arbites, citizen, you are under arrest!’

Ashielle dared to poke her head around the corner again. The wardens, clad in their flak armour and green tunics of office, had spread across the entrance to the alley. Her would-be assassin, his face pocked with tiny bits of brick, scrambled down the alley, coming towards her as he backed away from the wardens, and flipped his lasgun to full-auto.

Before he could fire, Hanrik stepped through the line of wardens. The gold aquila on his shoulder gleamed in the dying sunlight, enhanced by the pure black of his carapace armour. His expression was as unyielding and merciless as the eagle on his pauldron. His autopistol was extended, and three shells had fallen to the pavement before Ashielle even realised her brother had fired. She scarcely noticed the assassin’s body falling to the floor, or the wardens rushing to see if she was injured.

All she had been able to see was Hanrik dressed in the armour of a trained killer, striding towards her with a face devoid of mercy and an outstretched gun. It was a memory she feared would be with her for quite a while.

CHAPTER 13

Ashielle took the moist cloth and thanked her maid, closed the door of her bedchamber, and sat down at the vanity. She lifted one hand to her lips, her eyes unfocused and staring into space.

‘You seem less than pleased.’

‘I’m not.’ She didn’t bother to turn, or even look into a mirror. Jaezubiel’s appearances and vanishings had become rote to her.

‘Did the kill-sculptors who attacked us know too much? Agents of the preacher, sent to detain you for your heresy?’

She shook her head. ‘Unlikely. If Deacon Phoebian wanted me dead, she would have moved days ago. We don’t know who sent them. Yet.’

She sighed and looked up to see the creature in her mirror. It crouched on her bed, head turned on one side, its white hair pouring over one shoulder and down the asphalt-black skin of its chest. She was beginning to realise that the more pain the creature bore witness to, the healthier it became, as though it were literally feeding on suffering. With the pain and panic of a bombing on a crowded street, the thing was darkly radiant.

‘How unfortunate.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘If they are agents of someone who knows about you, I’d rather keep them silent. Fortunately, we recovered none of the assassins alive. The one I shot is in our custody, but there’s some doubt over whether or not he’ll regain consciousness.’ Ashielle took the moistened cloth and began wiping the cosmetics from her face.

‘And your driver?’ Jaezubiel sat upright a bit more. ‘The one with the inflamed knees?’

‘Alive, but sedated. He’s likely to recover. Also in the hands of my personal medicae.’ Ashielle furrowed her brow. ‘I didn’t know anything was wrong with his knees.’

Jaezubiel grinned with its mouthful of tiny teeth. ‘Yes,’ it said. ‘Horrible pain. When it rained, his knees and ankles would swell so bad he would occasionally sit on his board in the driving rain rather than go inside and bear the pain of walking.’

Ashielle shuddered. How horrible. She suspected that a month prior she would have been far more alarmed that she hadn’t realised such an important detail of Cheyster’s life, but so much had changed for her in so short a time.

‘How did you survive?’ she asked.

‘While the ancient wards stand, I am protected,’ said Jaezubiel. ‘Do you think your father didn’t try to kill me himself? I suspect, if we continue on long enough, you will try too, of course. With blade or bolt, you will come for me. But still I persist.’

‘Oh, cease your idle boasting,’ Ashielle snapped. In the mirror, she saw the monster sit upright, swinging its feet to the floor. ‘Your wards obviously have their limits. With all the gore you’ve soaked yourself in of late, you may have forgotten, but my people drove your kind from this world. With blade and with bolt. Whatever great and mighty kingdom of terror they might have commanded, their legacy now is dust and ashes, remembered not at all save for background graffiti and children’s stories.’

The shadows deepened, and Jaezubiel snapped from the bed to loom over her shoulder in an instant. Its eyes blazed, and the heliotrope runes across its skin raged. She did not flinch, but met its gaze in the mirror. The blackened streaks from her eyedark gave her a haunted, cadaverous glare.

‘I am no mere soldier of the darkness,’ Jaezubiel hissed. ‘I am a nightfiend, anointed by Nag-Tzaddyk the Unrighteous in the Weeping Ziggurat. Moreover, I was bound by ancient pacts forged between your people and the elders of Aelindrach when the Overlord still suckled at his mother’s teat. I am not so easily slain in this realm. Kill me, crush me, do what you will, and the darkness will claim me. The shadows will take me in their arms and nurse me back to health. I will be lurking, waiting in the darkness of the oubliette beneath your feet, feeding on the woes and worries of your children’s children’s children.’

Gone were the oily promises of help, the sly references to the halcyon days of cooperation between their peoples. She looked down at her hand, at the amber ring there. She should never have released Jaezubiel from its prison, but that field had been sown.

‘Not if Hanrik finds out about you,’ she said. The fiend clicked in laughter, but she cut it off. ‘I’m quite serious. You might think you’re immortal, and in the context of any resource I can bring to bear, you just might be. Should the Inquisition be called, however, that story changes dramatically.’

‘I don’t fear mon-keigh scholars,’ Jaezubiel sneered.

‘You should,’ said Ashielle. ‘And while I’d wager that their resources are enough to kill even the likes of you, I’m not particularly enthusiastic to find out, as that would involve my certain execution before that point.’ She held up one hand to forestall the creature’s inevitable argument. ‘If Hanrik makes his report, then eventually we’ll be staring down the barrel of an inquisitor. No, this needs to be put to bed, and now. Before he has concrete proof.’

‘Do you plan to go to your litter-mate?’ Jaezubiel asked. ‘Confess everything?’

It was Ashielle’s turn to sneer. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said. ‘But don’t make the mistake of thinking he won’t discover enough to destroy us both on his own merits. He might not have a living witness, and Preacher Larrichan might not have told him everything she knew, but he’s worldly enough to have put together that something inhuman is loose in Kostoveim, and that it’s something connected to the heretical deals of the Old Ceoc.’

The nightfiend glared at her in the mirror. She met its gaze. For all of its anger and cruelty, for all the sorcerous powers it wielded, it was bound to her will, and could only stretch its leash as far as it could cow her into allowing.

‘What do you suggest?’ Jaezubiel said. Its tone had changed from grand boasting to that oily hiss it only used when it was suggesting something particularly malevolent. ‘I gather you’ve already come up with an idea on your own?’

‘I have,’ said Ashielle. ‘The plan is to frame Lady Esilia. She and her family are a blight on Ceocan. They have been for generations.’

This could work, she realised, even more than just a way to escape the wrath of the Inquisition. Acquiring the business interests of the Vaneisens would be out of the question, of course: the Grevenate would never stand for her accruing that much power. She could always silence her detractors, if she were so inclined, but no. No, she clamped down on that thought immediately. Using Jaezubiel because she was forced to was one thing. She could even countenance using it for a larger social good, such as removing the wanton cruelty of the Vaneisens once and for all. But doing so merely to silence dissidents seemed beyond the pale. Still, the Vaneisen family’s business concerns could be parcelled out to those who were loyal to her, or rather to those who could be trusted to work hand-in-hand with her to keep the population crisis from coming to a head.

‘What a wickedly simple notion,’ Jaezubiel said.

‘It is,’ said Ashielle. ‘You murder the Lady Esilia, and we can plant a few heretical artefacts near her – items related to the lore of skitterlings. My forces can arrest Ireina Vaneisen, and after a suitably brief interrogation, determine that her family was attempting to summon and control a xenos assassin as part of a false flag operation, intended to get Hanrik Matkosen to destroy his own family. Their own assassin turned on them.’

Jaezubiel clicked its talons together in applause. It revolted her to think that this was where they had landed, but there was little else she could think of doing.

‘There’s just one obstacle,’ the fiend whispered. ‘Whose blood and flesh will you offer up in exchange for Lady Vaneisen’s?’

Ashielle finished wiping the cosmetics from her face and stared at herself in the mirror.

‘As provenance would have it, I’ve just had two possible choices brought home with me.’

The door to the medicae ward slid open cleanly. It had taken her an hour or so of searching, but she had found a copy of the key among her own security detailings.

All four of the beds were taken up. Two of the beds contained the dead assassins, sheets pulled up over their faces. Ashielle saw that the third assassin had also perished, and was likewise covered with a sheet. That left only one possibility.

Cheyster lay on his side, facing away from her. The damage to his torso was too severe to allow him to rest on his back. Ashielle felt a slight twinge of pity; the pain he had to be in would have been severe. Her distress might have been greater if Cheyster were facing a lifetime of agony, but she knew that his suffering would soon be at an end. Her own callousness might have bothered her, once, but her struggles in the past weeks had taught her that the mantle of leadership required a certain coldness. Stone, steel, iron: the strongest building materials were rarely warm to the touch.

She hadn’t come with a concrete plan on how to end the servant’s life. She had her plasma pistol tucked in her sash, but she would prefer to eliminate him in a way that would lead a medicae to conclude he’d died of natural causes. If she’d been able to use the assassin, she had considered the idea of just shooting him and claiming he’d lunged for her, but with Cheyster that clearly wouldn’t be an option. If she could find his old laspistol, perhaps she could shoot him with that? A medicae would surely see his gout on an autopsy. A suicide might seem like a reasonable course for such a man.

A fluttering, like a shifting sheet, drew her attention to the corpses. Her breath caught in her throat. She held her stance, staring at them for what seemed like an interminable period of time. They couldn’t be alive, she realised: the lights on the medicae bed were lit up solid red across the board. She took a deep breath, reminding herself that paper sheets were easily disturbed in the air. Unless the dead were rising, there was nothing to fear.

Cheyster breathed in with a sudden heaving rasp, and Ashielle saw the respirator next to him flicker and accordion with the rise and fall of the man’s chest. There, then. She walked around him, satisfied that he was in fact hooked up to a respiration machine. It would be a simple effort to sabotage the mechanical breathing apparatus, or simply remove it. It could be reactivated or returned once she’d left.

She paused. Was she really willing to do this? She shook her head. There was no other choice.

‘Stop.’

Ashielle turned. The medicae beds with the first two assassins were empty, the paper blankets discarded on the floor. Instead of an ambulatory corpse, her brother Hanrik stood before her. The black plates of his enforcer armour were resplendent. The gold trim at the shoulder gleamed. The autopistol was pointed directly at her, and was somehow far more intimidating than the laspistols she had been threatened with as of late. Laspistol barrels were delicate, tapered, almost toy like, and belied the danger of the weapon. The autopistol, on the other hand, had to serve a functional purpose. The blunt, squared muzzle of the weapon was much more solid. It didn’t just house the deadly apparatus of the pistol, it was a weapon in its own right, capable of cracking skulls with one brutal swing.

Even more disturbing was the partner who stepped out from behind him. She was unsurprised to see Hanrik working with a conspirator. Judge Idonell, one of the wardens, even Group Captain Barrin would have surprised her less than seeing Ireina Vaneisen, dressed in a black bodysuit and aiming a laspistol at her.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Ashielle said, adopting her best expression of terrified surprise. The fear was feigned, the shock was genuine. ‘You’ve thrown in with the Vaneisens?’

‘Do not feign innocence with me,’ Hanrik snapped. ‘It won’t work.’

It was telling, Ashielle thought, that for the first time he had donned his arbitrator helm. The black armorcrys of his visor reflected only her own expression of shock and dismay.

‘What… what are you talking about?’ she asked. She started to edge away from the table. If she could reach an intercom, she could try to call for Group Captain Barrin.

‘Stop moving,’ Hanrik snapped. ‘I will shoot you, excellency.’ He turned to Ireina. ‘Take the evidence we’ve gathered to the wardens,’ he said. ‘Make sure the Grevenate knows as well.’

‘Of course, arbitrator,’ Ireina said. ‘It’s my pleasure to perform my duty to the Throne.’

Ireina smirked at Ashielle and strolled from the medicae bay, as casually as if she were taking a moonlit walk about her own manor. Ashielle considered reaching for her pistol. She had wisely moved it to the sash around her waist, after seeing how impractical the concealed holster had been in the field. She might be able to kill Ireina and command Jaezubiel to subdue her brother.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Ashielle.

‘Stop your lying!’ Hanrik roared. ‘If you’re going to shame and disdain our family’s legacy, the obligations that father put on you, then at least have the stomach to bear the weight of your crimes!’

Ashielle drew herself up to her full height. Defiant of his authority, she dropped her arms to her sides.

‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Now put your weapon down, arbitrator.’

‘Not bloody likely,’ he spat.

‘You know nothing of what’s happening,’ Ashielle replied. She kept her voice level, refusing to return his anger with her own. She’d learned from her earliest years that nothing, bar nothing, infuriated her brothers more than refusing to match their anger.

‘Look at yourself!’ Hanrik yelled. ‘Look at what you’ve become! You were going to sacrifice a man’s life – a human life – to a xenos assassin! Not an enemy, not a traitor – a man who risked his own life to save yours!’

Ashielle continued to return his rage with cold distance.

‘Mine is the warrant of jurisdiction,’ she intoned. ‘I alone have the moral authority to decide that the ends are righteous and true, and to choose where and how the lives of my people are spent.’

‘As a human sacrifice?!’

Ashielle lifted her chin and gave him a cold and imperious look. ‘Don’t play the martyr, Hanrik. We’ve come too far for that. Perhaps on Sorinoux you can afford the luxury of such high and mighty ideals, but here, on the rim, we are alone in the darkness.’

Hanrik shook his head. Despite his words, he had not shot her yet. Against all of his training, he was in shock. She could see that he had so desperately wanted to believe that she had been fooled, that there was some part of her that was not what he feared she had become. He had come here thinking he knew the extent of her transformation, but it became ever more apparent with each passing second that he had not.

‘Do you see what you’ve done?’ he asked. ‘This is… this is heresy.’

‘Failure is heresy,’ she snapped. ‘A crime against the Emperor and dereliction before the Throne. And to allow the Vaneisens to take charge of this planet, that would be the truest failure imaginable.’

‘You cannot mean that,’ said Hanrik.

Now it was Ashielle who was in disbelief. ‘I thought father sent you to Sorinoux to grow up,’ she said. ‘Don’t ignore what they’ve done. Who they are. Allow Esilia Vaneisen or her poisonous brood to take up residence in Darcarden, and hundreds will bleed for their personal amusement. Thousands more will suffer and weep at the hands of the other nobles, who follow the example of their leaders. By the time their rule is finally concluded, it will have touched for the worse the lives of every man, woman and child on Ceocan.’

‘You cannot believe you are in the right,’ Hanrik breathed.

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ she snapped. ‘I rule in the Emperor’s name.’

‘Father always said that his privilege was a responsibility to the Throne, not a blessing from it.’

Something cold passed down her spine, and Ashielle realised for the first time that she did not care what her father had said or thought. He may have moulded her, but the laurel had passed to her now.

‘I am not my father,’ she said. ‘And my privilege is absolute.’

Hanrik’s grip tightened on his pistol.

‘Lord Governor Ashielle Matkosen, on the evidence of my own eyes and your own words, by the authority of the Adeptus Arbites and in the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind, I am hereby placing you under arrest for the crimes of murder, dereliction of duty, failure to report a xenos presence, heretical consortation, and hubris before the Throne. Give me your weapon.’

Ashielle stared at him.

‘The plasma pistol in your sash,’ he said. ‘On the ground. Now.’

Slowly, she reached her hand back for the weapon. She brought it out from behind her back, eyeing him carefully.

‘Confidence is always named hubris by the weak and the jealous,’ she said.

‘You’re a servant of foul powers,’ Hanrik snapped. ‘No one is jealous of you.’

Ashielle felt the growing chill. Somehow, as if she had learned through repeated exposure, she could sense the shadows deepening.

‘I dare say you are, law-giver.’

Hanrik wasn’t accustomed to Jaezubiel’s sudden arrivals. He heard the voice, felt the temperature plummet, and his head snapped around. The moment of action was there, and Ashielle seized it. Hanrik’s gaze was fixed on the creature, and she brought her weapon to bear, smoothly.

The carapace armour of the Adeptus Arbites was designed to deflect most small arms fire. A normal laspistol was rarely effective against their plasteel plates. Even an autopistol would usually be deflected harmlessly unless it found the bodyglove beneath. Ashielle’s plasma pistol had no such issue, however. Superheated plasma tore through Hanrik’s armour and the chest beneath as easily as if she had been shooting at a glassine sheet.

Hanrik tried to turn, but his legs were refusing to obey his commands. He smashed into the medicae cot on his way to the ground and rebounded off the corner of the bed, which did his work for him. He landed on his back, facing up at her.

Jaezubiel laughed.

Ashielle held a hand over her brother’s mouth. She could still feel the exhalation. He was mortally wounded, certainly, but there were still a few precious seconds left within his frame. She pulled Hanrik’s carapace helm free of his head. He stared at her, his jaw clenched. He was still fighting for life, fighting to do his duty. He was a true Matkosen to the end, and she could respect that.

‘Stand relieved, arbitrator,’ she said. ‘You have faithfully executed your duty to Him upon the Throne, and He would have but one task more from you before calling you home.’

She stood and shot her brother in the face.

‘Now go kill Ireina Vaneisen,’ she told Jaezubiel.

CHAPTER 14

The ancient rolltop desk was a fortress. Thanks to their loving ministrations as children, every lock, every secret compartment and concealed niche was in perfect working order. Searching the entire thing for Hanrik’s research might have taken Ashielle hours. Fortunately, it had been short work for the pry-bar she had brought.

‘Jaezubiel,’ she said.

The fiend appeared immediately. It leaned against one wall, its eyes watching her as she shuffled through the papers, brushing aside bits of splintered wood and thin, twisted metal springs. There was a different cast to its look. When she had first released it, when she had scraped the remains of its murder off the stones of Darcarden’s foundations, it had watched her with the predatory gaze of a marshlion.

Now, she was the lion.

‘It’s a letter from Judge Idonell’s office,’ she said. ‘He’s on the Callistonian and won’t be able to meet with Hanrik for a further three days.’

The fiend grinned. ‘Your secret is safe, then.’

‘Not quite,’ she said, scanning her brother’s notepad. She tsked to herself. ‘It appears he found the woman who was with Tanzeg in the alley: one Thora Rede. He hadn’t wanted to direct the wardens to pick her up until after they made an arrest. That’s a minor matter, easily resolved. It also looks like he met with Ireina Vaneisen last night and arranged to trade information with her. That’s where they hatched their plan to lie in wait to apprehend me.’ She glanced up at Jaezubiel over her reading spectacles. ‘That means the Vaneisens have evidence of my deeds. Circumstantial though that evidence might be, coupled with Hanrik’s sudden disappearance, it might be enough to convince a critical majority of the Grevenate to move against me. They’ve grown quite fearful in the last few weeks, for some reason.’

Jaezubiel clicked softly.

‘What do you propose to do about it, your excellency?’

There was a light in the darkness. Only a candle, a flickering tip of illumination, but it was enough. Ashielle had left the natural light far above her, along with the last wall luminator lighting her path before she had started descending the long spiral staircase. The depths beneath Darcarden no longer held any fear for her, however. They were hers, after all. Her ancestors had shaped them with their bare hands, in preparation for the day their people would need them again.

She hadn’t needed light for the labyrinth, either. Her fingers had traced the wall, guiding her along a path that had by now become familiar. The maze was hers as well. The ignorant might have once believed it could bind and twist the skittering denizens of Aelindrach, but she knew the truth, now: the maze was a moment of meditation, an interlude to allow her to attune her mind to the darkness around her.

‘What is it?’ she asked, as she ran a hand down the edge of the portal.

‘Wraithbone,’ Jaezubiel said. ‘Sung into being by young craftspeople who perished of old age before your kind had even learned to strike flame.’

Ashielle knelt on the cold stone floor. The yawning pale expanse of the portal stretched out above her. She spread her tools before her: a knife, her rod of office, a candle. She needed the candle only to read from the paper before her. It was short, less than a page, but Jaezubiel had insisted the wording be precise. Across from her, just barely visible in the wan candlelight, she could make out Jaezubiel’s indistinct form. Only its eyes were clear and bright.

‘There will be no holding them back,’ Jaezubiel said. ‘My kind have not my patience, and have long been denied this prized sporting ground. They will not be as restrained as I.’

‘Let them have their fun,’ she replied. She spread a parchment, covered in an intricate map of Kostoveim, before the portal. ‘Let those who live in earshot of House Vaneisen hear what befalls traitors and oathbreakers.’ Her men could move in after dawn and secure the manor. The High Service would believe what she told them: that the Vaneisens had released xenos assassins that had turned on them.

She pricked her finger, and traced a thin circle of blood around the borders of the Vaneisens’ manor. ‘Now bring him. And do it carefully – he barely clings to life.’

Jaezubiel vanished, and reappeared mere moments later, a heavy burden across its shoulders. With all the gentleness of which she believed it was capable, the mandrake dropped Cheyster’s body to the cold stone floor.

Ashielle smoothed the voluminous moustache he had always prided so much. Like the tail of a vulpid that had been stuffed and mounted, it just didn’t have the same volume and presence that it had in life.

‘Rest now,’ she whispered. Already Cheyster was gasping for air.

‘Azz-na tu’o Aelindrach,’ she intoned. She read aloud from the incantation that Jaezubiel had given her, the mandrake repeating her words a half-beat later, like her own reedy, whispering echo. She could not speak the language it had been composed in, and she doubted that she ever would, but the words themselves were more than mere phonetic accumulations. It was as though they were quasi-psychic concepts. When Jaezubiel spoke in its buzzing tongue, she heard the words echoing in her own mind. ‘Tazna taz-qu.’

‘We call to Aelindrach, the Shadow Realm, with the blood of our pact.’

She withdrew the silver cap from her severed finger, and drew the knife across it. Jaezubiel traced a rune on the stone in front of her, which she drew with her own blood. She continued to read.

‘Shaa-zad Jlun, Breaker of Legends, hear our demand. Behold the symbol of the conqueror. Let it pass to dust, as all things of light and memory shall.’ The rune in blood began to glow, a soft violet light emanating from the stone. Ashielle placed the rod of Saint Aleandru, the symbol of the Imperium’s victory over the mandrakes, atop the rune. As she repeated the incantation, the rod began corroding before her eyes, the adamantine steel turning to dust.

The stalagnates began to glow. With the sacrifice of the token, they flared to life, eldritch green fires glowing in their bases and spreading slowly up the length of them. Runnels of spectral flame spread across the floor, filling the runes that Ashielle had mistaken for imperfections in the stone. The wards were old, and worn by the passage of time, but the arcane flames knew their path all the same, and as she intoned the xenos spell, she found herself surrounded by a circle of writhing runic protections. The spiky script sketched out asymmetrical, alien geometry, nothing like the ecclesiastical seals or hexagrammatic wards of the Imperium.

Far, far above her in the skies of Ceocan, a massive clap of thunder heralded the arrival of a terrible storm upon Kostoveim. The force of the elemental wrath was loud enough to shatter the occasional window, and shook buildings in their foundations. Even in the depths of her hidden chamber, Ashielle could hear the planet protesting her actions.

‘Alei-a, alei-a, uzzulo,’ she finished. ‘What was, will be. We renew the covenant.’ She drew the knife down and across Cheyster’s throat. The blood pumped from the old man’s neck, and she held his head, whispering soothingly. When he had passed, she stood, her hands soaked red.

‘So say the Children of Aelindrach,’ Jaezubiel said, and pressed its hand to the stone.

‘So says the crown of the Ceoc.’ Ashielle pressed her own bloodied hand forward, but never felt stone. It was as if the wall fell away, pulled into a yawning void. The air froze, and she felt the heat being pulled out of her arm. She knew, instinctively, that she could step forward, through the portal if she wished to. She knew, too, that to do so would be to put herself in Aelindrach, at the mercy of the things that dwelled there.

The chamber was filled with the croaking, clicking, hissing laughter of the skitterlings. The single light from the candle flickered, and blew out.

Ashielle had expected the woman to be terrified in the face of ultimate authority, perhaps attempting to feign innocence, or possibly even catatonic from trauma. When Group Captain Barrin’s men escorted the young woman to her study, Ashielle was surprised to see her enter with her head up, her demeanour calm. There was no evasiveness and none of the duplicity from the Devotional Banquet, just a reasonable, collected woman waiting to be told why she’d been detained.

‘Thora Rede, I presume?’

The woman took one of the vacant chairs across from the lord governor. The huge desk that dominated the office sat between them. The poor woman was soaked, despite having only gone from the carriage to the door after she had been picked up. The storm outside was driving down on Kostoveim with a fury.

She nodded. ‘Yes, excellency.’

‘You seem much less fearful than most in your position would be,’ said Ashielle. She nodded to the High Service guards still in the office, gesturing for them to leave her alone. They exited, leaving the two women alone in the office.

Thora nodded. ‘I’ve seen more than most in my position,’ she said. ‘That tends to give one perspective.’

Ashielle nodded and smiled. ‘So I’m given to understand,’ she said. ‘The local arbitrator had an interesting file on what you’d seen as part of his investigation.’

Thora’s eyes perked up and she glanced around. ‘The arbitrator?’ she asked.

‘He’s suffered an unfortunate accident,’ Ashielle said. ‘While attempting to serve justice on the Vaneisen family, he was the victim of one of their security personnel. But before he did he deduced that you were almost certainly in the alley where Tanzeg Vaneisen was killed by… forces unknown.’

The young woman’s eyes narrowed, and Ashielle could see her tense up. She smiled again, and wondered if this was how Jaezubiel felt when it was stalking its prey. She could practically feel the fear radiating from the woman, no matter how calm she kept her face. Thunder rumbled overhead, and the woman shivered.

‘I didn’t say anything to anyone,’ Thora said, slowly. ‘I certainly didn’t talk to any arbitrator.’

‘No,’ Ashielle said, ‘you didn’t. You didn’t even come forward to the wardens. Not after it happened, and not after they started offering rewards for information. No, you kept what you knew to yourself.’

Thora’s eyes widened as she began to understand what she was hearing, what she was being told through innuendo. She began glancing around the room, and Ashielle could see in her face that she was only just now realising that despite the warm fire crackling in the fireplace, the room was actually quite dark beyond the desk, with deep shadows clinging to the corners.

‘Is it… is he…’ she stammered.

Ashielle nodded. As if on cue, the heat began to drain from the room, chilling Thora’s skin and crystallising her breath. The rain bearing down on the windows in sheets began pecking against the glass as it froze at the last moment.

‘Quite,’ Ashielle said. ‘Although I wouldn’t concern myself with it currently. It has little interest in you, and in fact would strongly prefer to be elsewhere at the moment.’

Thora’s eyes fell, and she bowed her head. Ashielle smiled, to no one but herself. This was what she had been waiting for. Sincerity. Subservience.

‘What will become of me, your excellency?’ There was fear in Thora’s question, but Ashielle could tell that she had found her centre, and would not be broken by terror. That was what she had been counting on.

‘Have you considered matrimony?’ she asked.

Thora’s face lifted, a confused expression drifting across it. Ashielle stood, and walked to the cabinet on the far side of her study. A few sentimental trinkets adorned the shelves, along with a small decanter of amasec. She poured a small glass for herself and for Thora.

‘When the Grevenate reconvenes, they’ll need to appoint a new coadjutor from among their ranks. As the Vaneisens were also the holders of a margrevenate, I shall have to name a new holder to their title as well. This new margreve would be just as eligible as any to be appointed Vicereine of Ceocan.’

Thora shook her head. ‘Excellency, I think you’ve misjudged me. I am an actor, nothing more. I could not pull off such a deception.’

Ashielle handed the young woman the glass and sat down again, this time in the chair next to Thora, rather than across the desk from her.

‘No,’ she said, ‘not you, dear. I have, however, a persistent and loyal minister among the Grevenate, whom I think would be the perfect man for the role. He is lacking, however, in one key area – a spouse. And for that role I can think of no one better.’

Thora sipped at her liquor. Ashielle could see the confusion in Thora’s eyes. She clearly felt like the opportunity was one she wanted, but long experience had taught her that good things freely offered were seldom what they seemed.

‘How can you force the Grevenate to choose him as Vicereine?’ she asked. Ashielle found it amusing that Thora had not yet asked who the minister in question was.

‘Oh, I can’t,’ she said. ‘But just as I diligently rooted out the treason festering in House Vaneisen, I suspect it would take me little time to dig up further nests of traitors and heretics. My friend, whom I believe you’ve met, has a large number of kin who visit from time to time, and as good hosts we must make sure their needs are provided for.’

Thora gave a half-smile into her glass. ‘And if providing for their needs should happen to coincide with our goals, so much the better.’ She shook her head and looked at Ashielle again. ‘Why me?’

Ashielle leaned back in her chair. A bolt of lightning ripped across the sky, followed immediately by a clap of thunder from the storm which was immediately over the city. In the bright flash of the storm, Ashielle could see Jaezubiel’s form, slipping out of the door to join its own kind in their barbarous revelry.

‘A number of reasons,’ she said. ‘The first is that you kept your silence when you could have gone to any number of authorities. The second is that I admire your skills. You have the capacity to project false sincerity, which is one of the rarest talents in the galaxy.’ Ashielle finished the rest of her glass. ‘But the most important is that Minister Fomynko found you fascinating.’

The storm rattled the windows, but Thora seemed beyond caring now.

‘Ostap Fomynko? The bald minister with the love for naturalist literature?’ Thora shrugged. ‘He seems sweet and relatively harmless.’ She paused, considering. ‘I see why you picked me. But why him?’

Ashielle nodded, respecting her even more for coming to that question on her own.

‘Minister Fomynko has just the right combination of cynicism and idealism,’ she said. ‘He has turned popular opinion in the Grevenate before, lacking only in power and prestige to be able to affect real influence. And he is doggedly loyal to my family.’

‘So he influences and monitors the grevens on your behalf. And I do the same for him?’

Ashielle nodded. ‘That’s correct. I’ll want to speak with you more, of course, and we’ll move you to the palace immediately, to prepare a suitable background for you. But do I have your interest?’

Thora set the glass down on the governor’s desk and nodded her assent. She took the governor’s hand in her own, and beyond the windows of the office, the storm roared, sweeping away from the capital and out across Ceocan.

CHAPTER 15

Ashielle paused in the receiving hall. She’d been to Vaneisen manor, of course, but had never had the opportunity to peruse the work on their walls without interruption. The paintings in the receiving hall were monuments to their own pride. A collection of portraits of their house rulers, going back the few generations they could do so. She would have them burned, of course, after denouncing the Vaneisens as traitors.

A piercing shriek drew her attention, and she turned from the portrait of Esilia’s grandmother that had drawn her eye. She resumed her walk through the halls. She could hear the skittering in the walls, and occasionally feel the cold passing of a mandrake, but felt no grip of fear any longer. She had given her blood to sanctify the ancient pacts between their people and hers.

The door to the great hall creaked open. Luminators fixed to lasgun barrels skewed crazed beams of light through the hall. Handheld luminator globes lay where they had fallen. Blood flowed over the stone tiles, seeping into every crack. Here and there, a broken weapon or a scrap of uniform showed where some militia member or house servant had tried to make a last, desperate stand against the invaders.

The art displayed on the walls of the Vaneisen great hall was gaudy and expensive, made to show wealth, not taste. The arterial fans and pitting of lasgun fire had done precious little damage. It had certainly not ruined anything that would diminish Ceoc history by its loss. Further up the walls, the moulding and the architecture showed less damage. Here were the bones of the home, laid down by those who had come before the Vaneisens, and who had shown a much greater degree of taste when they had done so. The scourging of the manor had not touched these sculpted elements. The rolling brass waves and the crying bronze sailors saw only the light of the hall below, reflecting in their burnished forms the carnage that they had borne witness to.

Above them, marble statues of great saints and heroes looked out from the arches of the hall’s triforium. Only the barest rumour of their forms penetrated the darkness, as if they had turned their face from the wickedness below.

Beyond them, the windows of the clerestory showed the few dim stars beyond. Their light was cold and distant, close enough to see but too far to be of any benefit to the people viewing it. Just like the worlds that orbited them.

Above the starry windows was only the vaulted ceiling of the hall. It would be covered with gilt and reliefs, of course. Too intricate to see from the floor even in the brightest light, and completely invisible now. The architecture of the hall was built to draw the eye skyward, to reflect on the almightiness of humanity and Him on the Throne. But none of that was visible, only darkness.

The few lights in the hall instead drew the eye downward, where everything of any importance was. Blood and ruin. The actions of the living compelled the eye to the carnage on the floor, the brutal evidence of the evil that had transpired there.

Ashielle slipped through the door and into the night.

TO: Prefect Secundus Corovidium

FROM: Adept Stavrophore Weschler

SUBJECT: Ceocan

Honoured Prefect Secundus,

Per your request I have completed the Tertiary Audit of Assessoria Exacta of M37 (Inter-sector systems, Sector Ephialtis). With the exception of Outpost Rorkenna [Destroyed by forces unknown, see appended Munitorum report J37.987.6-B], I find no planets recommended for a tithe reduction.

Due to the extreme isolation and difficulty transporting goods and personnel, I recommend no increases in tithe grades. Only Ceocan [see appended report collated by Adept Dyorak] shows an increase in output over the last millennium, but the deviation is likely a statistical anomaly. The data in fact shows that output on Ceocan is once again falling back towards statistical norms, and should remain at current tithe grade pending the next audit.

Yours in Service,

Adept Stavrophore Weschler

Sepulchre

– n. A hole made in the earth to burya corpse. A place where something is buried. A grave.

– v. The act of placing in a sepulchre or tomb; burial.

Sepulturum

– n. Lesser order of the Holy Inquisition, classified ‘Ordo Minoris’. Experts in the risen dead. Organisation formed specifically to investigate and neutralise the so-called ‘plagues of unbelief’, more commonly referred to as the zombie plagues.

CHAPTER 1

Two bullets

The bloody streak down the wall told Morgravia the man did not have long to live. His mouth trembled, like a priest murmuring a sermon, but nothing intelligible came out. Just the passing of his last breaths. He had said his name was Oshanti and that he knew Morgravia, but his face was like a foreign country to her.

She glanced over to the opening in the tunnel, where Oshanti had told her they had blasted through to reach her, and found a gaping dark iris staring back. Screeches echoed in that darkness, something sharp scraping against stone, and there was the scent of the abattoir heady on the thick, underground air.

‘We can’t stay here,’ she said. Even with her fragmented memory, she knew that much.

She had been saved, she supposed. It certainly felt that way. She had awoken, her arms and legs bound and Oshanti frantically sawing at the bonds with his combat knife. Her strength had returned slowly, her senses slower still. They were halfway back down the tunnel before Morgravia realised she was out, but she couldn’t remember from where.

She had tried to get answers but only got Oshanti’s name before the thing came out of the darkness at him. He fired his pistol, four heavy booms that echoed loudly off the smooth tunnel walls. The thing recoiled, injured fatally it seemed, though it all happened too fast, and it was too dark to tell anything about its nature.

Morgravia found out a little later that it had cut him, opened him like a burst tyre. And that was that.

‘We can’t stay,’ she repeated, more urgently, when Oshanti did not respond.

He nodded then, slow and ponderous like an oil derrick tipping towards the ground. She’d begun to wonder if his head would rise again, when it did and he gripped her hand, the one already holding onto his. The lips moved, gummed up with the same gory matter that stained the wall, but he emitted no more than an agonised gurgle. A bundle of red loops sat in his lap, glistening in the stuttering lumen light overhead. He stared blankly, forlorn and disconsolate, at his partially eviscerated intestines.

The screeching from the tunnel came louder now, undercut by a breathy wheezing like a punctured bellows.

By the time she looked down again, Oshanti had pressed his hand and hers to Morgravia’s chest. His eyes widened, conveying everything his voice could not. Another nod, one of resignation this time. He unclipped the clasp on his belt holster, tugging loose the heavy-gauge stub pistol that had sat snug, surrounded by dark leather. It took some effort, and as he pushed the weapon into Morgravia’s outstretched hand, his face had paled to the colour of alabaster.

He held up two fingers on his right hand, the number of bullets left in the pistol.

One for him, then one for me.

It was only then, when faced with the inevitability of her own imminent mortality, that Morgravia realised how fast her heart was beating. It thundered with a god’s voice.

She took the pistol in a firm grip.

The scraping and wheezing neared the tunnel mouth and silhouettes began to form in the foggy black beyond.

Aiming at Oshanti’s bloody face, she saw relief as the eyelids began to close and the breath he had been holding eked out of him, like a slowly deflating balloon.

Reacting, not thinking, Morgravia lifted her aim and fired off into the tunnel mouth. The pistol boomed, loud enough to subdue her thundering heart for a few seconds, and she hit something in the darkness. A lumbering thing, a heavy, hot, exhaling thing that brought with it the reek of copper and cold, dead meat. It fell back, or she thought it did; it was hard to tell, the light was so bad. Another screech tore into the shadows. Of pain. Of death? She hoped it was death.

Oshanti had opened his eyes, expecting the pistol’s retort to signal his end and obviously wondering why when it did not. Morgravia only had one answer, and it was a poor one that she hated herself for giving.

‘I’m sorry…’ she said, absorbing every scrap of fear and anger in Oshanti’s jaundice-yellow eyes, and ran.

The scraping followed, more numerous, more frantic than it had been before, pausing only long enough to make Oshanti scream.

Morgravia tried not to imagine the wet-meat tearing that would come after as she half ran, half stumbled down the sump pipe. The tunnel connected to it, the subterranean sewer works that served the factoria and hab-blocks of the greater hive. A foul-smelling swill of shit and industrial waste splashed underfoot as she ran. It made her sick to her stomach, but she couldn’t stop. They were coming, whatever they were. Heaving, hulking shadows surging up in her wake, that scraping refrain like a never-ending scream.

Morgravia clung to the pistol. One shot left. She knew she wouldn’t use it on herself. Either self-preservation or just rank cowardice wouldn’t allow her to do that. She grasped it, a near-useless lump of metal, holding onto the grip like a thirsty man holds a cup of water in an endless desert. And then she felt something give beneath her, a low cracking of rusted sump pipes and shearing metal. It was like stepping onto a stairwell in the dark that she didn’t realise was there, as a brief but stomach-lurching sense of vertigo seized her and she fell, fell screaming into darkness until she hit grimy water. She panicked as the cold struck her, punching the breath from her lungs, sending needles through her nerve endings.

Not like this not like this not like this.

But fate doesn’t care much for desire, and Morgravia sank beneath the water, her body carried along by its violent current. It filled her mouth, her nose, made her blind and deaf as the searing heat of drowning crushed her with vice-like finality… and then… peace.

Morgravia awoke with the taste of sump filth in her mouth. She knew it was an illusion, a weird sense memory and her mind’s oh-so-humorous way of remembering her past trauma.

‘Lumis…’

Candles flared, their sodium generators buzzing noisily as they activated. The light revealed a small hab-unit. It was bare ferrum, a chair in one corner where Morgravia had draped her clothes and other meagre belongings, a deep metal wash sink in the other. A rough mattress served as her bed. Scowling at the fever sweat dampening her thin sheets and blankets, and shivering at the chill prickling her flesh like a haunting spirit, Morgravia hauled her weary body into a sitting position. Pain struck her with a legion of daggers. It was all she could do to stop herself from crying out.

A single hexagonal skylight let in the flame-lit predawn of the low-hive. She stepped through its grainy shaft and over to the chair, where she rummaged around in her longcoat. Finding a handful of stimms, she bit down, wincing at the chalky non-taste, and went to stand before the room’s full-length mirror. She looked upon her naked form, enacting a daily ritual.

She was lean-limbed, muscled but not grotesquely so. Pale, milky skin reflected the light. She was tall, around six foot. One ice-blue eye looked back at her, alive with more vitality than she felt; the other one, yellowed and bloodshot, was a truer reflection of her physical and mental state. Silver-grey hair, shaved at the temples, a short mohawk forming a raised channel running between them, framed a stern but not unkind face. Yet it was strange to her, a rogue identity staring back from the dirty glass. Only the scars made sense, and these she found mostly unchanged. They threaded her body like zippers, a cross-hatching of permanently discoloured flesh that forced a mildly disgusted frown onto her face. One pull and she would unravel. All the warm wet red inside would come tumbling out, her flesh left a flaccid and empty vessel in its wake.

Undone, she thought, tracing the frenzied lines of scarification with her fingers.

It had been thirty-one days since the tunnel.

‘Emperor’s mercy…’ she whispered, and looked away, reaching for her tunic.

Morgravia froze, her hand poised in midair, her body half-turned.

A sinister figure stood before her, limned by the skylight, and for a moment she wondered if it were an actual spectre and not just the fever sweat washing her skin that had caused the chill in her bones. It smelled of blood and oil, and detached itself from the shadows with silky, yet syncopated movements. A blade flashed, its edge silvering in the light. A face with a rictus grin, two hollow sockets gaping around faintly glowing red eyes, regarded her.

Morgravia set down the pistol she had snatched from her gun belt, letting out a shuddering breath.

The rictus face crumpled into a frown.

‘You should put on some clothes, Mother. You will catch your death.’

Morgravia scowled and grabbed her tunic. ‘What do you want, Hel?’

Cristo had worked in the labour-pits of Meagre all his life. He was a bullet-maker, and a good one. His shells and munitions had a ninety-three per cent approval rate. Not many factorum labourers hit ninety-three per cent. He took pride in his work, though it was back-breaking and largely thankless. His proficiency at his job did yield some benefits. Slightly better food, his pick of the munition lines. Not much, but it left his belly fuller and his skin cooler, positioned as he was as far away as possible from the smelting furnaces under the labour floor.

It also attracted jealousy from some of his fellow workers. Toil in the pits was hard, relentless; it bred strong bodies but resentful minds. That resentment was usually reserved for the overseers, who tempered the slightest suggestion of unrest with the lash or the pain-maul, all the while sermonising on the purity of hard labour, the cleansing baptism of honest sweat given in the Emperor’s name. When offered the opportunity to direct his impotent fury somewhere other than the untouchable enforcers of the Emperor’s will and war machine, a man would take it. He would exercise that crushing sense of futility where it could be vented, where his suffering could be displaced onto another.

Cristo had heard the muttered threats, and caught the bitter glances directed his way; he had never believed they would be acted upon. Not at first. The labour-pit was a congested battery farm of human bodies, lurching in metronomic tandem. So numerous were the workers that maintaining vigilance over the entire labour cadre at all times was impossible, and yet no one man would raise hands against another for fear of reprisal. Not in the labour-pits, at least.

There were antechambers that bled off from the main pit, however, and these were less frequented. Several refectoria allowed for the taking of meals and an ablutions block served doubly as a decontamination chamber.

They had come for him here, jagged metal shivs glinting in the grimy washroom light. Three men, none of whom Cristo knew by name, though he recognised their faces well enough. The encounter had been short, brutal. He had killed them all, naked and caked in the rough, powdery scrub that served as a cleansing agent. Cristo was not a small man. He had bulk and muscle that his attackers’ strength in numbers failed to balance. It had happened quickly and almost silently. Cristo had been left with half a dozen lacerations, bleeding red into the grainy grey run-off gurgling down the drainage vent. Of his three attackers, one suffered a broken neck, another took a shiv through his jaw and up into his skull, and the third had his eyes gouged out so deeply it was possible to glimpse the inside of the back of his head through the grossly distended sockets.

Cristo had dressed quickly, sluiced the ablution cubicle down and dragged the dead men one by one to the furnace. Dull-eyed and indifferent servitors were the only witnesses to the deed.

He had never spoken of what had happened, for to do so would invite the strictest censure. The men would not be missed. Their loss, if it was noticed at all, attributed to the high attrition rate within the labour-pit. Punishment for murder would result in lobotomisation, and Cristo had no desire to join the pallid ranks of the half-alive automata that saw him immolate three corpses. To kill in the Emperor’s name was one thing, to kill those indentured to His holy service was very much another.

Cristo considered this as he waited beneath the overhang, a knife strapped to his belt and a handful of spent bullet casings clenched in his fist, and knew he would have to kill again. He stood in the shadow of Wrecker’s Curve. The old bridge between the ferro hives and the commercial district called Fallowhope had seen better days. It arched like a broken man’s spine, dilapidated and only fit for demolition. Two-thirds of the way across, it ran to a sheared cliff edge that plunged into a deep gully where the detritus of its collapse still lay in heavy ferrocrete chunks and twists of metal rebar.

Moving out from under the lee of the bridge, Cristo descended into the gully towards a ring of distant torchlight. As he drew closer, he made out a dozen drum fires arranged in a loose circle, a crowd of jeering, catcalling figures in rough leather and scavenged factorum overalls leaning in around the cordon of flame light.

The crowd were animated to the point of fervour, amped up on narco and cheap still-alcohol. Most were armed. Cristo saw cudgels, freight-rail spikes, blades. No guns though. Gaps appeared as the crowd shifted to bay or shove or hustle. Each offered a fleeting glimpse of what lay beyond them, of what was in the circle. Two urban gladiators, hands wrapped in bandages for grip, armoured in warpaint and leather. One carried a length of broken chain, her hair a fiery red and sticking up in spikes. The other hunched behind a drum lid, using it as an improvised shield, one side of her head shaved, the other left to grow long so a violet swash of hair covered half her face. Both were cut, the one with the chain hungrier for the kill. As she raised her arm to lash out at her opponent, Cristo got a decent look at her.

That’s when he started to run.

CHAPTER 2

Chainblades

‘And stop calling me that,’ said Morgravia, pulling on her breeches before buttoning up her tunic. ‘I’m not your mother.’

Hel sketched a jerky bow, the effect more than a little disconcerting, and Morgravia gave a slight shake of the head.

‘You’re as messed up as I am,’ she muttered.

‘You look tired, Moth– my lord.’

Tough to argue with that, thought Morgravia. Crimson tunic, dark brown breeches; at least they concealed some of the outer scars.

‘I feel like someone set off a chainblade inside my body. I’m beyond tired. I’m livid with pain.’

‘I have been abroad in the hive city,’ Hel announced, cheerfully changing the subject. Her short and slight appearance and oddly naive demeanour belied her lethality. That’s what made her so dangerous, Morgravia reminded herself. Hel whipped one of her swords over her shoulder, sheathing it in a thin scabbard strapped to her back. She did it swiftly, fluidly and with a trained killer’s grace.

This is what she was, of course. A killer. A rough blade honed to a lethal edge by one of the Emperor’s death cults. The Sanguinous or some-such, Morgravia could not remember; but these days that was nothing new.

‘Just tell me you didn’t murder anyone,’ she said, tugging on knee-length boots that went over her breeches and then picking up a dark green flak-weave bodice. A bullet-stopper at anything but point-blank, pretty good against ranged weapons too. Fuck all use against a knife, though. ‘Here…’ she said, and gestured to her disturbing companion, ‘don’t just stand there looking grim and forbidding, make yourself useful.’ The bodice pushed in her ribs as Hel tied it off and affixed the mag-clasps around the back.

‘Throne,’ Morgravia gasped. ‘I do not enjoy wearing this thing.’ She gave Hel, who was bound in a black-red bodyglove, a side glance. A raft of exterior metal studs caught the light, and the rags of death oaths were tightly cinched around Hel’s arms and legs. A synthetic skull mask was near imprinted on her face. ‘How do you even stand wearing that all the time?’

Hel canted her head, like a predator assessing a sudden peculiarity in its prey.

‘Pain and forbearance brings us closer to His glory,’ she said.

‘I thought you’d say that,’ Morgravia replied, strapping on her weapons belt before engaging the fingerprint access of a small lock-casket secreted in the inner pocket of her longcoat. The lid clicked loose with a hiss of depressurisation. ‘Did you see any sign of them?’ she asked.

‘I did not.’

‘But you found trouble?’

‘There is always trouble in Blackgheist.’

Morgravia smirked and gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘Too true, though we agreed you’d do it quietly.’

‘Confrontation was inevitable.’

‘So you did murder someone.’

‘Several someones.’

Morgravia swore under her breath.

‘It was necessary to retrieve the information you desired.’

Hope coloured Morgravia’s voice. ‘You found him?’

Hel nodded, Morgravia reciprocating with a nod of her own.

‘Good,’ she said.

‘Hallow’s End.’

‘I’ve heard of it.’ She still held the lock-casket, not yet ready to lift the lid on what was inside. Morgravia let her eyes close for a few seconds. ‘Throne, this needs to be ended.’

She eased open the lid, looked down.

‘Perhaps they have given up the hunt?’ suggested Hel after a few moments.

‘No, that’s not it. They’re waiting.’

‘For what?’

‘For me to remember,’ said Morgravia and took an item from the lock-casket. It was a sigil, an adamantium metal strip fashioned into the shape of a capital letter ‘I’ with three bars intersecting its horizontal axis. A synthetic wax seal in the shape of a jawless skull affixed to the midsection.

Morgravia regarded the sigil in her hand.

‘We were here for a reason, Hel. I just wish I could remember what that reason was,’ she said, and put the Inquisitorial rosette away. Throwing on her longcoat, she made for the door. ‘Are you coming?’ she said, but Hel had already gone. ‘Quietly…’ she said reflectively. ‘Good girl.’

The city stank of rot and venality. Tall gothic structures pressed in either side of a main street, leaning over the shuffling crowds like bent-backed old men. Huge statues sprouted liberally amongst the urban decay, pushing aside buildings and soaring so high into the false atmosphere their heads were wreathed in mist like the summits of mountains. Rivulets of moisture clung to their sculpted stone bodies, enhancing their godly aura, hands raised to the heavens as if holding up the very roof of the world. A thin river of effluence wended through the heart of it, peeling off into little tributaries, a manufactured delta of filth and industrial waste.

Morgravia drank it all in as she moved through the habitation district of Low Sink. She stuck to the bigger crowds, hood up and head down, her gaze flicking up every now and then to the overhangs, the gantries and the walkways. Hel would be up there somewhere, staying out of sight, flitting from perch to perch with an acrobat’s easy grace.

She trusted the death cultist, acknowledging she had little choice in the matter. Hel had dragged her from the sump outflow on the night Oshanti had died with his guts hanging out. She’d found the hab-unit, tended her wounds and wiped away every trace Morgravia had left behind. Without Hel, she would probably be dead. But Hel didn’t know anything, save she had a duty to the Inquisition and therefore Morgravia with it. She possessed no knowledge of the mission or what the threat might be. She was a weapon, nothing more, and a slightly broken one at that.

A light rain pattered on Morgravia’s longcoat, drizzling through the mouths of gargoyles crouched on the edges of slab-stoned tenements and spired factorum-cathedra. Daisy-chains of sodium lamps hung along the main civilian route, flickering and spluttering, casting long, knife-sharp shadows. Morgravia shuddered as the memory of the tunnel intruded on the present. She increased her pace, bulling her way past grimy dockhands, factorum serfs and grey-faced servitor units. Several streets converged into a public concourse where a preacher babbled from a makeshift pulpit, spitting zeal and fury as he brandished a tatty book in the direction of his onlookers. He’d attracted a decent crowd, though the roads out of Low Sink were so rammed he could hardly have not. Even the proctors, shock mauls swinging lazily from their belts, clad in black carapace and glaring through rain-spattered helmet visors, struggled to make way. One bellowed through a loudhailer, reminding every citizen of their Throne-expected duty to report any mutant, heretic or witch to the Imperial authorities. Vigilance, he said, protects.

Morgravia sincerely doubted that, and besides, she would have to flout that directive if she had any aspirations of convincing the Broker. And she needed to convince the Broker.

Pushing through the throng, edging around a burly ogryn hauling a stack of crates wrapped in a tarpaulin on its back, Morgravia made for a side street. She had taken a few steps beyond the alley threshold when the pain hit like a mag-trans locomotive, poleaxing her to the ground…

flesh stretched taut tearing ripping every seam pulled apart to reveal red hot and red hearts beating organs steaming blades pushing through skin twisting bones splintering skull cracking spine bent double and bleeding red red red pain and pain and agony a cut a slash peeling back every layer no crevice left untouched bruised and battered knives two red suns looming shearing pinned back and exposed a crimson flower in bloom its petals spread to every cardinal destination flensing grinding excise and exsanguinate until only red remains and red is all there is

She came to, a cry half-stifled in her throat, hot tears stinging her cheeks, to see a shadow looming over her. For a second, Morgravia panicked, taken back to a past trauma she couldn’t remember, a memory of knives and blood. Then she realised where she was. His hands were inside her longcoat, rummaging. Morgravia jabbed the stub pistol into the thief’s side, snarled.

‘I squeeze and the bullet perforates your liver. It will hurt. You will bleed to death in this alleyway and no one will mourn you.’

The thief backed away empty-handed, mumbling fearfully. Little older than a boy, he had a faint wash of downy stubble and bright, scared eyes. Dressed in rough clothes, he looked like a dock runner, and capered off as soon as he hit the crowds, leaving the whiff of ammonia in his wake.

Morgravia got up and dusted herself off. Someone had shoved a burning poker in her skull. That’s how it felt, how it always felt. The red dream. She vomited in her mouth, tasting the acerbity of stomach acid as it seared her throat. She spat it up, wishing she had something to drink. She could imbibe later when she reached Hallow’s End.

Sweeping her gaze across the ledges and gantries above, she scowled.

‘I see you pick and choose when you watch my damn back.’

Hel, if she was watching, didn’t make her presence known.

Morgravia was about to walk on when she heard a commotion from the street outside the alley. She heard shouting. Some of the proctors were bellowing orders for people to stand aside. Someone screamed. Even the preacher’s sermon had been interrupted. Wanting no part of it, Morgravia headed for Hallow’s End, where the Broker would be waiting.

The juve fell like a sack of dead meat.

The gangers had enough sense to post lookouts at the perimeter of their territory but Cristo moved swiftly for a big man and had a keen eye for trouble. He was also supremely motivated. He didn’t kill them. He loathed killing and felt the weight of those who had died at his hands like an ever-thickening noose around his neck. He hurt them though. Broke bones. Rendered them unconscious. Male, female, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the chain-wielding banshee in the fighting pit.

The cordon of flickering drum fires drew closer with every step. As Cristo moved deeper into the gully he realised he knew this place, more by reputation than familiarity. It was Red Hand territory, at the least the very edge of it. The juves he had put down wore patches depicting a crowned skull. Mark of the Death Kings. Such ridiculous names they gave themselves, but the Death Kings were a rival faction to the Red Hand, which only meant more trouble and the possibility of a ticking chrono. Cristo upped the pace to the rattling tune of a chain raking at a drum shield as the fight in the pit intensified. The mob bayed with every lash, urging violence, thirsty for more. Then a horn sounded like a distant war cry, discordant, blaring. Cristo turned, they all did, towards a ridge of refuse and debris that rose up like a grubby cliff. Lights flared, eye-achingly bright spots of magnesium white, and the rumble of engines suddenly eclipsed the catcalls like thunder rolling across a dirt sea.

‘Shit…’

The ticking chrono was ringing.

The interlopers had bloody handprints daubed on their faces and rode down the ridge on grit-bikes, jinking left and right, kicking up dirt, dust pluming from their tyres. Blades and axes whirled menacingly as they arrowed in on the other gang. An ash-runner, a much larger bike, grunted behind them. Petrochem spewed from its twin chrome exhausts. The rider was leant back in the saddle. His plate armour and the chainblade strapped to the bike’s hefty frame marked him out as the gang leader.

Gun shots rang out. The riders had sidearms as well as blades. The Death Kings gathered around the fighting pit scattered. A few pistols barked back. Someone in the crowd got hit and went down. The girl in the pit with the improvised shield took her chance, and Cristo cried out despite himself when she smashed her chain-wielding opponent in the neck. Heads turned, shocked at the burly bullet-maker in their midst, but they were too busy with the riders to really worry about him.

Cristo barrelled on, hoisting a ganger that got in his way up and over his shoulder. He barged another from his path, swatting the ganger aside, not missing a step as he rushed into the fighting pit to the side of the fallen.

‘Karina…’

She lay curled in foetal agony, choking for breath and clutching at her throat.

A rider sped past a few feet away, whooping and crowing. He hit something, a hatchet blade slapping into skin. Blood arced. It spattered Cristo’s cheek, hot and sudden, and he looked up to see one of the Death Kings juves fall with her head caved in.

The girl on the ground next to him could barely breathe. Her eyes rolled as a bruise blossomed menacingly across her larynx. She’d taken some licks in the pit too, deep cuts that bled beneath a leather jerkin. Cristo’s palms came away wet and red and he stared at them, horrified, for just a second. Then he swept his massive arms under and around the girl, scooping her up.

She gripped his arm, pinching the skin with what little strength she had, her eyes bright with fury.

‘You can shout at me later,’ he said, and that was that. They were moving, Cristo ploughing back up the ridge towards the overhang while Karina clutched his bullet-maker’s garb. She need not have worried about him dropping her. Cristo kept a tight grip and nothing but death itself would see him relinquish it.

He only slowed down when a rider came circling around, whooping and hollering, his grit-bike carving an arc in the dirt. A long spiked chain shrieked around his head, the brutal torturer with his lash. It whipped out towards Cristo, who ducked its bite and kept moving. Swiftly losing interest, the rider peeled off and went in search of better prey in the gully.

Skirmishes had broken out across the entire expanse below the overhang, as fighters poured in from either faction. Cristo had to run through them, though chose to largely skirt their ranks. In the snatched glances he got, he reckoned the Red Hands had the better of it. Their riders cut back and forth, scything through the Death Kings like horse-mounted savages, but reinforcements for the beleaguered gangers were still coming. Crackling gunfire rippled across the gully in staccato starbursts of muzzle flare as gangers ran between snatches of cover, or else fell clutching wounds or simply fell and did not rise again.

Cristo felt a sharp pain in his arm and looked down. Karina had dug in her nails, drawing blood.

‘Down…’ she rasped.

‘We need to keep moving.’

They were out of the worst of the fighting now, just a few fleeing juves flanking them at a distance, but they wouldn’t be safe until they reached the overhang so Cristo ignored the pain and carried on.

She stabbed harder and he had to clench his jaw to keep from crying out.

‘Down…’

He put Karina down.

She immediately snatched a knife dropped by a dead juve, whose eyes were fixed upwards to a sky he would never see, a bullet hole gaping in his forehead. Karina barely noticed him. She immediately headed eastward across the gully, cutting back in a diagonal line from the fighting, but Cristo put a hand on her shoulder to stop her. She whirled on him, her expression furious.

More gunfire snapped from below, pushing them into the shelter of a broken piece of the old bridge. Shots pranged off the granite chunks before being directed elsewhere.

Cristo shook his head. ‘Not that way.’

‘East is Death Kings territory. Red Hand won’t risk approaching the border.’

‘Like you didn’t with their territory.’

She frowned at that. ‘Where then?’

Cristo pointed to the arc of the sundered bridge and the shadows beneath it. ‘The overhang.’

‘And then what? Back to Meagre? I don’t think so.’ Karina continued in her original direction but Cristo stopped her again. She snarled, lashing out with the knife, but Cristo caught her wrist.

‘I can make you, Karina,’ he said, his voice harder than he meant it to be before it softened again, ‘but I don’t want to.’

He saw in her eyes that she knew he could do it.

‘You won’t take me back,’ she swore. ‘I belong here.’

She looked to her gang, but the fierceness in her expression slowly turned to despair as she saw the Red Hands literally taking the Death Kings apart.

‘Here is about to become nowhere,’ said Cristo.

She turned on him, savage and snarling. ‘Then I’ll be nowhere.’

Cristo held her gaze, knowing she had to climb down from her anger on her own, and anything he said now would inevitably be taken in exactly the opposite way it was intended.

Seething, still fighting for breaths, Karina relented. ‘I was winning,’ she said, stifling a sob.

‘You were fearsome,’ said Cristo, and meant it, though it went against every instinct to say so.

There was a short moment of silence between them, filled by the sounds of gangers fighting and dying, before Karina relented and they made for the overhang.

‘Why did you come for me?’ she said after a few paces.

‘I don’t know how you can ask that.’

Cristo risked a look back, making sure they weren’t being followed. He had been about to elaborate further when he thought he saw something in the skirmish below that made him slow down. And then stop.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind,’ said Karina, stopping too. She was a little way ahead – even injured she was faster on her feet than him – and looked back down the ridge.

Cristo didn’t answer. The overhang was close, but he was drawn to the battle as if his mind couldn’t reconcile what he was seeing and therefore refused to let him look away.

‘Something happening…’ he began, but couldn’t finish.

Karina snapped irritatedly. ‘What is it?’

The skirmishes had coalesced, devolving into a massive brawl. Either the gangers had run out of ammunition or they simply wanted to hack at each other hand-to-hand. But this wasn’t just bloodlust or territorial anger. Several gangers, badly wounded by the look of them, were fighting frenziedly. They had abandoned their knives, cudgels and other weapons, and went at their foes with bare hands, nails… and… teeth?

There was screaming. Not the kind of screaming to fire up the blood, or even the mortal scream of death or severe pain. It was terror, pure and abject.

Some of the gangers were trying to break loose but got snarled up. Cristo couldn’t quite make out why. He did see the leader of the Red Hand. His ash-runner had got snagged too. Something had tangled around the wheels. They looked like… limbs. Stood up in the saddle, he hacked around himself with the chainblade. Gore and matter flew wildly. Then he was dragged down by dozens of grasping hands, and his last stand ended.

Cristo’s eyes narrowed. ‘Bloody Throne…’

He quickly turned, suddenly aware of Karina behind him. He didn’t want her to see this.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said.

‘Damn it, Father,’ she shouted.

Cristo got in her way, making sure she wouldn’t see. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said again. ‘Please…’ he added, and in the use of this simple plea he saw understanding, if not full comprehension in her eyes.

She relented but asked in a quiet, almost fearful voice, ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing we need be a part of,’ he said, and gently turned her away.

No father would want his daughter to see this, assuming he could even say for certain what he had actually seen.

They pushed on, Karina flashing nervous glances in her father’s direction, Cristo doing his best not to look shaken. His head hurt all of a sudden, like he’d been squinting under the labour-pit’s lumens for too long, a dull ache that pressed in at his temples like insistent, probing fingers. It couldn’t erase the image from his mind, though, as he and Karina reached the shadow of the overhang.

Of what he had seen in the gully.

They were eating each other.

CHAPTER 3

Fog

Morgravia took a maglev to the other side of Low Sink.

The mag-trans was about the only thing in low-hive that still functioned with moderate dependability. It served as a public shuttle for the labourers, scriveners and other menials required for the hive to function, and Blackgheist’s ‘overmen’, the nobles, oligarchs and plutocrats that ran the city, had a financial interest in its continued reliability. The world’s industrial output, the raw materials extracted and mined from her bedrock, had made the overmen rich and powerful. Ostensibly, they served the Imperium, meeting their tithes and observing their duties in the furtherance of the great war machine; actually, they served themselves, their ivory towers built on the blood and bones of less privileged men, shielding them from the worst of the lower city’s depravities. The mag-trans kept those towers lofty, shipping goods as well as labour and ferrying it to the high-docks where it was packaged, sealed and assigned for usage off-world.

The train ran the edge of the natural basin into which the settlement of Low Sink had agglomerated over time, the name having sprung from its concave geography. Magnetic repulsion kept the heavy metal carriages a few inches above the rail, though the commute was far from smooth. A rattling coffin box with slits for windows and standing room only was a less than inviting environment in which to take a long journey. Morgravia shared air, space and body odour with a sweaty press of dirty factorum workers, dockhands and other sundry folk. Few spoke, their minds on whatever toil lay ahead, though the quiet shaking of the carriage was broken up by religious sermons piped through vox-emitters.

Maintain your vigilance.

Fear the witch.

Mutation is heresy.

Corruption lies in apathy.

She knew the words by rote; she had spoken them enough times, though recalling any specific instance was currently beyond her reach. That’s why she needed the Broker. Instincts remained – how to fight, how to move covertly, how to interrogate – but actual, solid memories did not. She knew the extent of her influence, the power it granted her, but she dared not risk employing it, not when the face of the enemy was still hidden. They had tried to kill her, whoever her quarry was. This she knew with instinctive certainty too. For now, they either thought she was dead or had stopped looking for her. That anonymity had to remain intact. It meant receiving no help beyond what she already had, and no transport that would attract attention. Ships, even junkers, were out. And so she favoured the maglev. Public, nondescript; no self-respecting inquisitor would deign to traverse in that cattle barge. It served her well as a perfect disguise and a place to marshal her thoughts.

Morgravia supposed that Hallow’s End had been chosen as a venue for the meeting with the Broker on account of its relative obscurity. Situated at the very western fringe of the basin just inside the border of a settlement called Meagre, it had one foot in the badlands, the territory of the gangs. This did not concern her. The red dream on the other hand… It had manifested after her liberation from her captors, and the natural assumption was one had caused the other. The dream must be tied to her fragmented memories, but the kaleidoscope of images and the sensations that accompanied them defied rationalisation. To piece herself back together, she needed a witch.

A sudden jerk arrested those thoughts as the maglev slowed to a stop. The carriage lowered itself down onto the guide rail beneath it as its repulsion engines cycled down. With a hiss of released hydraulic pressure, the doors lumbered open on screeching casters to let in the reek of Meagre. In the distance, a bell tolled. The last of the passengers pulled on rebreather masks or tied scarves as they left the carriage. Morgravia shuffled along with them, attaching her own mask as she ventured out.

Hazy fog lingered low to the ground, clinging in a creeping veil. Jaundiced with toxins, where it met structures it lapped at their sides like an ethereal sea. Its tendrils gently tugged around Morgravia’s ankles and reduced the departing passengers to muddied silhouettes. It obscured much of the cityscape but even with this generous softening of detail, the impoverished nature of the place was all too apparent. The faces of beggars loomed out of the morass like unquiet spirits desperate for exorcism. Sickly children huddled together for warmth, taking shelter in the shells of dilapidated buildings. Feral dogs scurried through ruins, barking mournfully, only kept at bay by grim-faced proctors who travelled in packs.

Morgravia took side streets, following signs of flickering neon until she came upon a pugnacious blockhouse, barely visible through the fog. It squatted between larger industrial structures, its stout frontage flanked by ferrocrete buttresses and jutting like a pugilist’s chin. A shed stood appended to one side, slabbed by plate and bolted tight. Armoured shutters sheathed the windows, yielding to a single dingy aperture that served as the entrance of the establishment.

A light flickered in the mouth of the doorway, not exactly an invitation but neither was it unwelcoming. The faint strains of music echoed from within. Morgravia followed them.

Hallow’s End beckoned.

It was as warm and dark as a womb inside. Old sodium lanterns threw off a weak, bluish glow that described a large room flanked around three sides with private booths. A communal area lay in the middle, a roughly carpeted expanse that led to a raised bar protected by a cage of wire mesh, with drinks served through narrow gaps like arrow slits. To one side of the bar a small stage played host to a female singer in a long dark dress that went beyond incongruous all the way to appropriate in the eclectic setting. She sang of sorrow, of dead men heading off to war and the loved ones they left behind. A wizened theremin player provided accompaniment, plying the invisible strings of his instrument in a beautiful lament. His green velveteen suit matched the gemstones on his ringed fingers. The musicians appeared indifferent to the seedy surroundings, lost in the reverie of their song, and Morgravia found she envied them.

She delved deeper, and plunged into a cloud of obscura smoke. It floated in purple ribbons, giving off the scent of spice and lavender, and coiled around the patrons like an eager lover. The colourful pall emanated from a fat man supping on a hookah pipe, chortling at his own indolence as he pawed at a bevy of languid, dull-eyed courtesans attending him. His considerable bulk nearly filled a private booth, and he sweated in the heat under saffron-hued silks and gilded finery. A merchant, trade-rich and morality-poor. His shadow was in considerably better physical shape, and exotically armed. He wore a flechette pistol tucked in a visible shoulder holster that wrapped around the hired gun’s bodyglove like it was a part of his genhanced musculature.

The Broker was exactly as his or her name suggested. A trafficker, a very exclusive purveyor of goods, introductions and favours. Finding them had been difficult, getting a meeting even more so. Hel’s red sword would testify to that. The initial business had been conducted through factotums and underworld intermediaries and now it came to it at last, Morgravia realised she had no idea how to identify the Broker.

Wealth, she assumed, was as good a barometer as any, and so she made for the fat man’s orbit, but stopped when she felt a light touch on the arm. She turned sharply, slipping a hand beneath her longcoat, sliding fingers around the hilt of the combat knife tucked behind her back.

Even in the dingy light, she saw the hard living in the scars of the man in front of her. He had swarthy skin with a soldier’s cut, hair shorn short around the temples and a little longer on the crown, and wore hardy travelling fatigues. A duster coat was swept over the back of the seat he had vacated, along with a gun belt that holstered a pair of ivory-handled autopistols. A ruddy, ragged scarf looped round his neck and there were small plates of armour stitched into his jerkin.

Catching Morgravia’s gaze, he lifted his hand to show her both palms in a placatory gesture.

‘No trouble here,’ he said in a low drawl. He had the look of a badlands drover, a cattleman. Either that or he was ex-Militarum.

‘Not for me, anyway,’ she warned him, relaxing her grip but not letting go of the knife.

‘So long as you stay away from Fharkoum, then sure.’

Something in Morgravia’s expression must have suggested confusion because the drover, or whatever he was, decided to elaborate.

‘The fat man draped in gold with his own harem. You don’t want anything from him.’

She stepped in closer, so barely half an arm length stood between them. ‘And how do you know what I want?’

The drover rubbed the bristles on his chin, as if appraising something. ‘I know he ain’t it.’

‘I suspect you know very little. What do you want?’

Morgravia wondered if Hel might put in an appearance, but it wouldn’t have been the first time she had let her fend for herself.

The drover smiled but she cut his charm to the quick when the knife pricked at his throat.

‘This is a monomolecular cleaving blade,’ she told him. They were close enough to kiss, but Morgravia had something much deadlier in mind. ‘It can cut through carapace like parchment. Push hard enough…’ she said, leaning in so the tip nicked the drover’s skin to let a crimson bead roll gently down the blade, ‘and it can even penetrate adamantium and ceramite. Do you know what kind of warriors wear armour like that?’

‘I most certainly do,’ replied the drover, maintaining his easy charm despite the knife held to his neck. ‘I can see you are a serious woman and I have no wish to incur your ire further, but I believe we may be at cross purposes.’

‘Is that so?’

‘It is.’

‘Are you going to tell me why I shouldn’t push ten inches of monomolecular plasteel through your larynx or shall I just begin?’

‘A very serious woman,’ said the drover and took a slow, backwards step and then another to the side. A booth had opened up behind him, one that hadn’t been there before. He smiled again, gesturing to the booth like a major-domo shepherding a guest of his master’s household.

‘The Broker will see you now.’

They entered the fog bank east of town, having gained the ridge and hurried past the shadow of Wrecker’s Curve. The old bridge was still visible behind them, its broken edge sagging into the gully like a flaccid tongue.

‘Saints’ blood, this came in fast,’ Karina remarked as the yellow morass closed in around them, and she began to think they weren’t moving fast enough. Something had happened in the gully; her father had seen it and wasn’t talking.

She had no desire to return to Meagre. That place hadn’t been home for a long time, but her choices were limited. Even still, she recognised the shacks made from scavenged metal and the grain silos raised up on stalks that marked the border. She had crossed it enough times. Broken agri-servitors paced the fields of hard earth, digging irrigation channels with their shovel-like hands. She hated them, with their idiot expressions and pallid skin. A red-scaled raptor alighted onto the head of one of the creatures and began pecking out the soft jelly of its eyes. Karina’s lip curled in disgust. Such toil to gain so little. A few of the servitors had collapsed, left to disrepair, their joints rusted through. Rot tainted the air. Blind to the strangers in their midst, they paid them no heed.

‘You hear that?’ Cristo had stopped part way through one of the fields and turned his head, frowning as he tried to listen.

Karina couldn’t hear anything beyond the misery and industrial churn of Meagre.

‘If you mean the soulless, beating heart of this shit heap, then yeah, I hear it.’

Cristo appeared not to acknowledge her but kept turning his head, first west then east. The fog thickened by the moment, and soon it would be difficult to tell one direction from another.

‘What is it?’ He was scaring her, though she wasn’t about to admit that. Something haunted him, like an old ghost hungry for his blood.

Then she heard it, muffled by the fog. Footsteps, coming fast. Lots of them. Then heavy, rabid breathing. Karina felt a bead of sweat trickle down the small of her back. Her heartbeat felt like a storm battering her chest. She understood what was wrong with a sickening and despairing clarity.

He was afraid. Desperately afraid.

Though they were at odds, she had always respected his fearlessness. He had fought to keep them alive in Meagre. No daughter should ever see her father scared. It went against nature, but with a profound feeling of unease, she realised that whatever was out there in the fog went against nature too.

She gripped his hand, hers still bound in the bandages from the fight.

‘Father…’

He turned to face her, his expression confused, as if he couldn’t remember who she was. Then he squeezed her hand back and, together, they ran.

The agri-servitors toiled in their wake, solemn as mourners and oblivious to what came after.

CHAPTER 4

Riot

Sirens wailed throughout Meagre. Proctors marched the streets, a veritable army of the bastards, bellowing through loudhailers and herding the scared populace like cattle. Curfew had been ordered. Citizens ran for their domiciles with the fervour of rats fleeing fire. Mothers clutched babes to their chests. Weak and fearful men looked to their own safety. Families huddled close, desperate to stay together. The churn of humanity ploughed ahead in a nervous mob, obeying the blaring of the horns, willingly ignorant of the false protection the proctors offered. As they made for their own hab, Cristo and Karina had little choice but to be swept up in the mayhem.

‘Have you ever seen so many?’ she asked, reckoning on about two hundred of the law keepers. Rank after rank of black carapace, helms and tower shields.

They’re more afraid than we are…

‘Not since the grain riots,’ Cristo replied, and looked hounded by his thoughts.

They were moving slowly through one of the main thoroughfares, hemmed in by bodies, the air tinged with fear but still short of outright panic. Karina dreaded to imagine the slaughter if the herd decided to stampede.

‘What did you see?’ she said as they were pressed close, whispering into his ear so they weren’t overheard. ‘In the gully… What was it?’

Cristo shook his head, staring as if whatever he had witnessed replayed before his mind’s eye.

‘Not sure.’

‘Yes, you are. You know exactly what you saw, you just don’t want to say it.’

Because that would make it real.

Cristo had been about to answer when a shout came from behind them. One of the proctors was reacting to something. He gave a few curt orders and a section of their ranks peeled off to deal with an unseen threat. They headed east.

‘The fields…’ said Karina, meeting her father’s wild gaze.

He grabbed her wrist. ‘I’m getting us out.’

She let him pull her along as he pushed through the crowd. The shouting grew worse, and quickly turned into screaming. A proctor yelled through his loudhailer.

‘Disperse! Disperse!’

Shotgun discharge thundered, the dull percussive booms overlaying each other in a desperate chorus. Now the crowd was running, scrambling… falling. Karina, half dragged by her father, saw a docker disappear into the mass of bodies. He didn’t rise again. She felt a sharp pain in her ribs, hands grasping at her hair and clothes, pulling her back like a human riptide. Lashing out, her elbow struck bone and the pulling eased. Cristo drove on like a battering ram, one hand clamped to his daughter, the other tearing at the undulating wall of bodies standing in their way. Blood flecked his face and hands. He roared, savage, driven.

A grey canister spiralled into the air, and Karina just caught sight of as it descended, corkscrewing smoke, before detonating right in the midst of the throng. Tear gas spewed out in a dense cloud. More screaming followed, both pain and terror. Half a dozen more canisters arced towards the crowd, fired from grenade launchers.

Karina watched their slow parabolas with increasing horror as one landed a few feet away.

‘Oh, Throne…’

A surge of light and heat struck her, and she lost her father’s grip as the blast took her sideways. Dazed, prone, her ears ringing, it took Karina a few seconds to realise that it wasn’t tear gas. The proctors were hurling frag grenades. They were trying to decimate the crowd and remove it as an impediment.

A factorum worker, face burnt black, overalls shredded and bleeding from a dozen shrapnel wounds, staggered and fell right in front of her. A mother in the robes of a low-level scrivener cast about for a missing child. Those caught in the explosion milled around, clutching the stumps of ruined limbs, searching for the pieces of them that were missing. Others wailed, blinded, bloodied and afraid. Stillness briefly reigned, the passing seconds abruptly stalled by the shock of the recent present. Then everything came crashing back, the fear and the agony, a river of it tearing through its banks and letting loose a flood.

Karina sat up. And screamed.

‘Murdering bastards! You’re killing us! You’re killing us!’

She tried to rise, and got struck by a flailing leg. The city spun, blurring. East became west as she stumbled and fell hard. Pain seared through her knee, burning needles piercing the bone, and she yelped. She rose again, unsteady, until a blow to her midriff put her on her back. Groaning, panic and desperation filling her gut with ice, Karina rolled over. Then she crawled, elbows dragging, blood fogging one eye and turning everything she looked at an ugly shade of crimson. She perceived legs, desperately scurrying, and the cold faces of the dead staring from the heaps of bloody bodies. A foot thudded into her back and she gasped as the breath was punched violently from her body. She kept crawling but got kicked in the chin. Starbursts erupted across her vision as a copper taste filled her mouth. Karina reached for her knife – at least she could die fighting – but grasped an empty scabbard.

Proctors scrambled as all pretence of order devolved into a desperate fight to survive. They were killing now – Karina watched them through the gaps in the panic – scything through the citizens of Meagre like butchers culling cattle. Mauls rose and fell, slick and bloody. Riot shields crushed and bludgeoned. Loudhailers fell, discarded. Shotguns replaced them.

Amidst the scrum of bodies, Karina caught a glimpse of what had terrified the proctors. And suddenly her father’s fear made perfect, horrific sense.

Another mob, but this one ran towards the carnage, their eyes glaring with feral hunger. A tide hit the proctors, pulling, tearing, biting…

Death swept through Meagre.

Karina fought. She kicked and thrashed and punched until she lurched to her feet. She found her knife, providence skittering it back within her reach, and held the blade before her like a torch to ward off the dark.

Except the dark could not be kept at bay. It would engulf the town and everyone in it.

The dimmed lamps in the booth framed a slight-looking figure in dark blue robes. The figure wore a deep hood to hide its face, but the dull flicker of augmetics caught the light. The figure’s hands, concealed in the folds of voluminous sleeves at first, shone with a metallic glint as it steepled mechanical fingers.

Morgravia glanced at the drover – in lieu of a name, she had come to think of him as such – who dabbed at the wound on his neck with a cloth, then she looked back at the robed figure apparently waiting for her.

‘You’re the Broker,’ she said, a statement of fact, not an interrogative, and took the seat opposite.

The robed figure gave a shallow nod.

Close up it was possible to discern that the Broker was female – or at least the parts of her that were still flesh and blood.

‘You’re a data-smith,’ Morgravia realised, ‘or at least you used to be.’

Another nod confirmed it.

‘So, what now?’ asked Morgravia.

At a curt gesture from the Broker, a servitor in a sweeping velvet robe brought over two long-stemmed crystal chalices. Far from the gruesome automata that toiled in the labour-pits or the holds of voidships, the creature looked almost civilised, though its visible skin was utterly devoid of hair and its gender impossible to determine. Apart from an odd dewy complexion, the only concessions to its ‘otherness’ were a small aural circuit chip behind its left ear and a hexagonal, ruby-like vox-emitter that had been fitted into a brass torc around its neck.

‘Incarnadine wine,’ the servitor explained, in an incongruous, urbane voice. Only one of the chalices had any liquid in it, a dark substance that put Morgravia in mind of blood.

‘I’ll pass, if it’s all the same to you.’

The servitor paused, its courtesy protocols momentarily wrong-footed, before retreating back into the shadows with its offering. ‘As you wish.’

‘I had thought a drink before we begin,’ offered the Broker once the servitor had become one with the bar’s dubious ambience. Her voice was resonant, almost mechanistic.

Morgravia raised an eyebrow. ‘You do speak, then?’

‘I speak.’

‘Fortunate, given your line of work, though I suppose your sommelier could act as intermediary.’

‘I am the intermediary,’ she replied. ‘That is my function.’

‘Is buying your clients a drink part of the transaction too?’

‘It can be.’

‘Though you won’t drink with me.’

‘Neither of us are drinking.’

‘Ah, but I’m thinking you never drink?’

‘I have no need to. Though I do appreciate the ritual, if not the actual imbibing,’ she conceded, interlacing her fingers. ‘But I do not believe you are interested in my habits.’

‘On the contrary, I always like to know with whom I am dealing.’

‘That’s a formal and antiquated way to put it.’

‘I am from a very formal and antiquated profession. One of the oldest, in fact.’

‘I see. Perhaps that bodes well for our transaction then?’

‘Too early to tell, though I have taken some pains to arrange this meeting.’ Morgravia glanced around. ‘I admit, I’m surprised you chose this place.’

‘What’s surprising about it?’ The Broker’s keen, artificial eyes remained intent on Morgravia’s. She had yet to blink. ‘It is a public establishment, but one of questionable moral repute. I can imagine there are many in here who would take issue with a profession as, how did you put it, “formal and antiquated” as yours.’

Morgravia smiled thinly. ‘Does your drover not provide you with adequate protection?’

The drover had finished tending to his wound and gave Morgravia a wink as she glanced at him.

‘Does your death cultist? I assume she is lurking here somewhere?’

Morgravia hid her surprise behind a curt laugh, and chose to bluff.

‘She’s as near as I need her to be,’ she said.

‘I see. He is not a drover, by the way.’

‘Of course he isn’t. He dresses like one, though.’

The Broker appraised her gun-hand as if doing so for the first time, then looked back to Morgravia. ‘I concur, he does.’

‘Does he have a name?’

‘That is highly likely.’

‘Do you?’

‘I am the Broker.’

‘I see,’ said Morgravia, her expression neutral.

‘Do you? See, I mean?’

Morgravia decided upon a different tack and wagged a remonstrating finger. ‘You’ve been watching me.’

‘As you say, I am a data-smith. My currency is information, and information keeps me alive.’

‘And rich. I assume the gun-hand and the silky major-domo aren’t your only servants.’

‘And rich,’ the Broker reiterated, though Morgravia caught a flash of something – anger? – in her eyes. Her next sentence confirmed it. ‘I have enjoyed our parlay but I believe one of us is perhaps wasting the other’s time.’

‘That’s an astute observation.’

‘Indeed. The only thing I do not comprehend is why?’

‘Information keeps me alive too.’

‘That is… reasonable, but perhaps we should move to business. Shall we begin with you confirming what it is that you want?’ The Broker paused, laying her hands down upon the table. ‘Assuming, of course, you can get what I want?’

‘Passage off-world on a rogue trader vessel. Undocumented, uninhibited. Yes, it is within my means to grant you this favour.’

‘And I am to take this on faith?’

‘How is this for faith?’ said Morgravia and showed her Inquisitorial rosette.

A tremor of unease rippled through the Broker at the sigil that had condemned heretics and witches to death and torture the galaxy over. Morgravia took no small amount of satisfaction from watching the Broker squirm.

‘That will more than suffice,’ she said, gently clasping her hands over the rosette to hide it, a silent urging for her companion to put it away. ‘We can proceed.’

‘I’m glad we could establish a measure of trust,’ Morgravia said, returning the ordo sigil to the folds of her longcoat.

‘I would not say that.’

Morgravia gave a mock frown. ‘You hurt my feelings.’

‘I sincerely doubt that,’ said the Broker. ‘Your terms, then?’

‘First I want to know why you want passage off-world.’

‘You definitely live up to your profession’s namesake,’ the Broker replied, trying to hide her annoyance. ‘Why does it matter?’

‘Why does anything matter? I don’t know, yet, but if I am to do this for you then I would like to know for what reason you need a ship.’

‘Let us just say that in my trade I make certain people nervous. Knowledge is power, and there is nothing the powerful fear more than knowledge. I have an abundance of it.’

Morgravia’s eyes brightened with a sudden revelation. ‘So that’s why you wanted us to meet here. You’re in hiding, aren’t you?’

The Broker’s silence answered for her.

‘You took a sizeable risk by treating with someone like me,’ said Morgravia.

‘I have. I am. Now you know my reasons, so all that remains are your terms. If you please.’

Morgravia stared at the Broker, still weighing and measuring. She had little choice, though. In thirty-one days she had not found a better lead, and the fact that the Broker was scared enough to make this deal with her when she knew she was being hunted went some way to assure her of its authenticity.

‘I have been…’ she tried to find the right word, ‘compromised. My memories are incomplete. This is a state I cannot allow to continue.’

‘Because you too are hunted.’

Morgravia saw no point in dissembling further. ‘I believe so, yes. My business here is my own, and you want no part of it, but I cannot conclude it without–’

‘Your memories. You say I would want no part in your business here, but you cannot say truly what that business is. The heretic or mutant or witch you were hunting is unknown to you, your purpose here likewise. It puts you at great risk and I think, perhaps, you have already fallen foul of these men or women before.’

Morgravia felt herself tense self-reflexively at the reference to her obvious physical injuries, the scarring on her hands and face all too apparent even in the dingy light of the bar.

‘How do you know they are men and women?’

‘That is true. Then let me correct myself and say, the parties whom you were hunting and now hunt you inflicted this hurt. And it was they who shattered the mirror of your memories also.’

‘Are you asking me or telling me?’

‘I believe you know the difference, inquisitor.’

Morgravia held the Broker’s gaze, putting a little steel in it.

The data-smith’s augmetic fingers tapped the table nervously. ‘I am in touch with an unsanctioned–’

‘The ordo I serve is not interested in rogue psykers. Tell me about the witch.’

‘She is called the Empath.’

Morgravia scoffed. ‘Really? Do any of you in this business have actual names?’

‘For someone used to the precautions of a clandestine agency, I am surprised you have to ask.’

Morgravia shrugged, then said, ‘The Empath, you were saying…’

‘She is what is sometimes regarded as a psychic chirurgeon. I know her whereabouts and can ensure an audience.’

‘I don’t need an audience,’ snapped Morgravia, harder than she intended, ‘I need my mind. Restored. Can she do that?’

‘She can do that. If she’s assured your intent is not hostile.’

‘How do you know my intent won’t be hostile?’

‘That measure of trust you mentioned, and I can detect your desperation.’

Morgravia wondered what else the Broker’s augmetics could discern, acutely aware of the risk she was taking and still wondering what had become of Hel. She was about to ask how she would make contact when a sudden scream made her turn.

A drunk had staggered in from the outside or some other part of the bar and was wrestling with one of Fharkoum’s courtesans. The girl screamed, struggling in her assailant’s grip. Addled by obscura smoke, the fat merchant was slow to realise the transgression against what he regarded as his property but now he cursed and spat, incensed at the interruption to his revels. He snarled something in a foreign tongue, prompting his hired gun to step into the fray and draw his weapon.

The hired gun barged in, jacked on stimms, sweeping out his flechette pistol like it was a badge of authority.

‘Release the chattel…’ he growled, exuding violence.

The girl staggered, having wriggled free. She was gasping for breath, pale with trauma. As she turned, the kohl and rouge bleeding down her tear-streaked face, Morgravia realised why.

Then everything changed.

The courtesan clung to her own severed forearm, like a marionette showing its broken parts to its master and not understanding why it was broken. The joint had been bitten through. Arterial blood painted the vicinity. And the chaos began.

CHAPTER 5

Shotgun

Cristo knew his daughter was about to die. She knelt in the middle of the main street, a lonely light surrounded by darkness and about to snuffed out. Proctors surged past her, oblivious. They fled with utter abandon now, throwing off helms, breastplates, discarding anything that could slow them down. A few even dropped their weapons, a crime punishable by death according to the book of the law, the Lex Imperialis. Something worse than death followed them, a hungering tide that slowed only to feast on flesh.

Back in the gully, Cristo had tried to deny it. He knew of men who had eaten the dead, explorators who had ventured into the ash wastes in search of fortune. Cannibalism was not an uncharted map. It had history. Certain dubious cults, those amongst the outlander tribes as well as others, venerated the flesh, believing it passed on the strength and memories of the owner. This, whatever it was, defied definition.

They lingered just beyond the far edge of the crowd, an undulating host, killing, feeding.

Cristo had made it to the edge of the road but as the crowd thinned, either dead, dying or scattered, he saw a way back. He ran, upending a proctor who had the misfortune of getting in his way. The proctor’s helm came loose as he hit the ground, revealing little more than a youth, his face chalk white with fear. He didn’t fight and limped away, leaving his combat shotgun where it fell. Cristo took it, holding the weapon in both hands as he barrelled into the mob. He barged into a rake-thin scrivener, heaving the man aside, then smashed a dockhand with the butt of the shotgun. Someone grasped for the weapon, so he struck out with an elbow and they fell back. In his urgency to get to his daughter, Cristo barely registered any of it.

Karina had a knife held out in front of her, and a burly proctor was about to trample her when Cristo wrapped an arm around her midriff and hauled her clear. He let off a burst from the shotgun, keeping his aim high. It served its purpose as the crowd screamed and scattered out of his way.

They reached the side of the street and Cristo pulled her into a side alley, guarding the entrance after he put her down. No one followed.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, and glanced over his shoulder. Fleeing bodies rushed past the side alley in a frantic blur. One stumbled and died beneath the feet of those that followed.

Karina rose unsteadily, her fingertips touching her ear and coming back wet and crimson.

‘Think I hit my head…’

Then she fell.

Cristo cried out, slinging the shotgun over his shoulder on its strap as he ran to his daughter. Then for the second time that day, for the second time in only the last five years, he swept her up into his arms.

‘I’ll get help. Hang on, Karina,’ he said, and ran.

Fharkoum gagged as the girl collapsed, her vitae jetting over his face and general corpulence. The hired gun cried out as the blood lanced across his eyes, and he desperately scrabbled to clear his vision. What he saw, what everyone saw, defied belief.

The attacker had been human once, female, but was now undeniably inhuman. Like the myths of changelings taking on the appearance of their victims, something else inhabited the flesh now. Her red eyes gleamed hungrily from a gaunt and shrunken face. Pallid skin clung to her emaciated skeleton like shrivelled parchment as she crouched over the girl, stripping the bone clean with a hurried, eager gnawing. Blood spittle flecked her chin and smeared her mouth. Whatever crude sentience remained in that cadaver-like shell became aware of being watched. Her head jerked up, agitated, rabid, and she glared between greasy strands of lank hair.

Morgravia reached for her weapon, having seen enough, and made for the creature.

Fharkoum threw aside the courtesan that had been fawning on his lap. She yelped, hitting the floor hard, but the merchant could have been discarding a glass for all the regard he paid her. The last courtesan he barged aside, trying to put as much distance between himself and the cannibal thing gorging on the least fortunate of his harem.

‘Kill it,’ he spat in heavily accented Gothic.

The hired gun experienced a moment’s pause before his master reiterated in the most strenuous of terms.

‘Fucking kill it!’

The hired gun pulled the trigger, lacing the air with dozens of scything discs. They ripped through the stricken girl, turning her to chunks of meat, and cut down a slew of patrons unlucky enough to be in the way. The cannibal took the brunt of it, her torso shredded and one arm torn off. She reeled with the impact of the flechettes but did not fall. Either she could withstand the immense pain or simply didn’t feel it. Drooling blood, her mouth matted with gore, she dropped the bone and sprang towards the nearest warm body. Her teeth clamped around the soft flesh of a dockhand’s neck, and the man shrieked. She clung to him, arms and legs wrapped around his body as she bit down savagely. He thrashed briefly but then was still.

Pain and panic took hold. There were perhaps thirty patrons in the bar and Morgravia battered through most of them, shoving people aside as they scurried or hid. Her pistol led the way but she couldn’t get a good shot through the terrified throng.

The drover was ahead of her, taking aim, twin autopistols quickly in his grasp. He shot the cannibal thing through the forehead before Fharkoum’s hired gun could unleash further collateral damage. She fell this time and did not rise again.

He slickly holstered his pistols, twirling them with the panache of a carnivale gunslinger, then exchanged a look with the hired gun who said gruffly, ‘I had it handled.’

‘Sure you did,’ answered the drover, a glance taking in the carnage the flechette burst had left in its wake. ‘I reckon you’d have killed another six people before you got your mark, but you’d have done it all right. Good for you.’

The hired gun stepped right up to the drover, eyes bulging with fear, trembling with adrenaline from the stimms. He had a roughly shaved face, the stubble an affectation rather than laziness. A slabbed forehead protruded slightly, an indication of a primordial mindset. Carefully cut cheekbones had been crafted cosmetically and his black hair was sculpted, a coiled serpent shaved into the left temple, the symbol of the consortium whom he served. His custom bodyglove had fibre tracing like sinews that enhanced strength. It reeked of sweat.

‘Want to make something of it?’

The drover smiled, feigning charm. ‘Now you look like the kind of man with an enlarged amygdala. Is that the case? Are you suffering from an overabundance of aggression, my friend?’

The hired gun’s finger twitched on his sidearm and he looked like he might use it, until he felt the pinch of a heavy-gauge stub pistol in his side.

‘I would not advise that…’ Morgravia said with quiet menace. She jabbed the pistol harder. ‘At this range, that fancy bodyglove might as well be parchment. Let it go.’

‘Kharata…’

The hired gun turned at the mention of his name, Fharkoum summoning his lackey. The other courtesans cowered near his bulk, too afraid to move, staring glassy-eyed at the bloody remains of their former associate.

Grunting an expletive at the drover, the hired gun obeyed his paymaster and returned to his side. Morgravia watched him depart.

‘A man could get ideas, seeing a woman come to his rescue like that.’

Inwardly, Morgravia groaned. ‘Get some different ideas.’

The drover smiled, not remotely dissuaded.

‘You don’t look like a hired gun,’ she said, scornful.

‘Not everyone is always what they seem.’

Sighing, Morgravia took in the situation. As of yet, none of the patrons had fled, which she took to be a good sign. They looked nervous, but curiosity overrode their fear as a few shuffled closer to the corpse killed by the drover.

Morgravia crouched by her side. In death, she appeared relatively ordinary. There were no obvious mutations, and she didn’t bear a witch’s mark or evidence of possession. This was no alien horror or plaything of the daemonic. It was a woman, a bullet-maker judging by soot stains on her fingers and burn marks on her upper arms.

‘Ever seen something like that?’

The drover had sunk down next to her, the fragrance of some balm or oil wafting off his skin. It was not unpleasant, Morgravia decided, finding his presence less irritating given his sudden sincerity.

‘Tell me what you see,’ she said.

‘Nothing, and that’s the strange thing. She’s just a low-hiver. I thought maybe a stimmer or obscura addict with a bad batch, but…’ He shrugged. ‘She’s ordinary.’

‘She is far from ordinary.’ Morgravia felt his regard as he turned.

‘I’m thinking you have some idea, then.’

‘And you’re hoping I share that with you?’

‘Oh, I know you can’t say anything here, not with these folks gathering like sump flies around shit,’ he smiled, and Morgravia’s ire rose anew, ‘but perhaps later?’

‘There is no later.’

‘I am afraid that is not entirely accurate.’ The Broker had emerged from the shadows, the exceptional circumstances pushing her into the open. ‘A cipher will verify your credibility to the Empath. Without it, she will not treat with you.’

Morgravia scowled, her wrathful gaze moving from the Broker to the drover. ‘I assume he has it.’

‘Yes.’

The drover gave her a playful wink. ‘Like I said, “later”.’ Then he frowned, his expression clouding. ‘You hear that?’ he said, drawing his guns as he looked towards the entrance.

Faint at first, it grew louder with each passing second.

‘Got caught by a badlands herd once,’ said the drover, rising to his feet. ‘Damn bovids went crazy. Sumpkroc had got into the paddock. Started killing. Bovids ran like hell, broke open the gate. Came thundering down on me like the wrath of the God-Emperor.’

‘A stampede,’ said Morgravia, now on her feet too.

Fharkoum had shuffled to the other end of the bar to remonstrate with the owner, his harem and the violently predisposed Kharata following in train. Plenty of other patrons still loitered near the entrance and they turned in eerie synchronicity at the steadily loudening clamour. The bar floor shook.

It began like heavy hail. A dense thud hit the outer walls of the bar, then another and another, until a rattling thunder of mortar reverberations rippled through the brickwork. Cataracts of dust spilled from rafters. Shutters dented, pale fingers reaching through the razor-edged gaps in the metal. It kept on going. Impact after impact, like a flock of suicidal raptors striking a viewport. Bones broke. Slicks of blood oozed through the cracks in the battered shutters.

Morgravia bellowed at the barkeep, ‘Shut the damn entrance!’

But it was much too late for that.

The patrons nearest the entrance started to run, but then something spilled in.

Hurtling through the gaping doorway, careening off the sides of booths and each other, creatures with pale skin and fever-red eyes sprang upon the hapless serfs, scriveners and hawkers. A slaughter began. Teeth bit skin, nails clawed hair, fingers dug into flesh. Bloody, raw gobbets clutched in skeletal hands were held up like offerings and devoured. A foaming red frenzy descended, undercut by screaming.

Muzzle flare from the drover’s autopistols lit up the horror in stuttering, monochrome bursts. The heavy boom of Morgravia’s stubber joined it. Her heart was drumming, all her old instinctual training kicking in to keep her sharp and alert. To blunt the horror welling in her gut.

‘Close the damn door!’ she cried at the barkeep, her attention on the pallid things piling through the gaping entrance. The ammo counter on her pistol clicked into the red.

Barak heard the woman, and was trying to extricate himself from the argument with Fharkoum, edging his way to a panel at the back of the bar. No sole proprietor worth his salt, or still breathing, would set up a place at the edge of the badlands without adequate precautions. And Barak was nothing if not cautious.

He struggled to focus. Jana was out on stage somewhere, and Veran with that damn theremin. How he hated that instrument and would have gladly smashed it to kindling but for the creds it yielded. Jana was his priority. Even a glance of her face would have done, just to know she was all right. He’d had trouble before. No badlands bar endured as long as Hallow’s End without a few battles and a few scars. But this wasn’t gang strife or even overzealous proctors pressing their protection rackets. Barak had no earthly thought what this was that had come to his door, but it scared the shit out of him.

Hands shaking, he fumbled the lid clasp over the panel and it got stuck.

‘Shit!’

That fat bastard, Fharkoum, raged at his manservant. Barak didn’t speak the dialect but knew a stream of expletives when he heard them. Then he felt that same ire directed at him, acutely aware of the patrons battering at the mesh cage behind him. How he wished Jana was in here with him.

He glanced at the archway leading to the storeroom out back. He had servitors in there. Hefters. Not fighters, but they were strong. Maybe one of them could…?

No time for that.

Barak wrapped his meaty fist around the clasp and pulled, hissing a curse as he slipped and cut his hand. Blood leaked from the jagged wound.

The rattling against the mesh grew worse. His patrons shouted, pleaded. Behind him, people were dying. He reached and grabbed a case off the wall, yanking it open. An old service-model combat shotgun, a ‘man-stopper’, sat inside it. The polished black stock shone, replete with sad memories. He wrenched the gun loose from its housings and turned it on the clasp.

‘Fucker!’

The blast tore off the clasp, taking part of the lid with it. Trying to drown out the screams, praying he wouldn’t recognise Jana’s voice amongst them, Barak threw the lever inside and whispered thanks to the Emperor as the mechanism kicked in.

CHAPTER 6

Burning the dead

Meagre was gone, swallowed up like a town lost to flood and sunk beneath the sea. Forgotten. No one would come. The old structures meant to preserve order had broken down. Mankind had begun to eat itself. Literally.

A sick feeling twisted Cristo’s gut. He tried to deny it, like a deserter tries to deny the firing squad’s bullet, but they’d both probably die if he didn’t find help. He took side streets to avoid the crowds. The rioting was everywhere. Habitats lay deserted, manufactoria empty. Even the great bell tower that stood at the heart of Meagre and could be seen from anywhere in the township, calling the hours for labour, for worship, for sanity, had fallen silent. Fires had broken out, either started deliberately or through misadventure, and coloured the air with the scent of burning. Ash drifted from the smouldering pyres of vellum-makers. The scent of crackling pig fat made him hungry and wretched at the same time. Although Cristo passed a few other citizens, hiding in their dwellings or staggering around lost and dumbfounded, no one challenged him. Despite taking byways and half-forgotten tunnels, they could still hear the desperate clamour of the riots. Eventually, it became background noise that gnawed at Cristo’s nerves. Even during rare moments of quietude, spared from the aural horrors, the memory of it lingered so viscerally that he could no longer tell the difference.

It haunted him, a heavier burden than the daughter in his arms.

He went north, reasoning that both east and west had likely been overrun or else occupied by the gangs, and southward would take them deeper into the township and trouble as yet unseen. He didn’t trust the protection of the proctors. It was possible there were no proctors left, at least not in any meaningful sense. Whatever had befallen Meagre had infected the populace. Therefore, the greater chance of survival was away from people. Cristo avoided the mag-trans too, reckoning that large swathes of the surrounding populations of Low Sink would be headed that way.

Even on foot, it didn’t take long to reach the outskirts of town. The industrial and habitation districts gave way to wilder and unkempt terrain. Old agri-mills stood like ruined monuments, colonised by massive fungal growths, bulging at their ferrocrete seams like overstuffed fruit. Roads were choked and cracked by massive roots, and floating spores thickened the air. Attempts had been made to cut back or otherwise burn off the roots and fungus but nature had repulsed every sortie and so continued its besiegement.

A thick brume drenched the land here, the colour of dirt and reeking of loam. Cristo had torn strips of cloth, first wrapping one around Karina’s mouth and nose, then his own, to fend off the worst of the smell. It was heady and strong like bad grain alcohol. Mercifully, the passage was uneventful and they soon broke clear, emerging into a rugged landscape of shallow metal escarpments and old rubble mounds.

Here the land swept up in a gentle ridge that overlooked the edge of an under-lake known locally as Iryn Mere, so named for its hue and the ferrous deposits that poisoned its grey waters. A jagged fissure in the ridgeline offered a narrow slice of the water. A few junkers and old tugs still plied the dead expanse, though nothing had lived in it for decades or more. They were salvagers, searching for sunken wrecks. The ships Cristo could see looked quiet, abandoned. That was strange, the sight of the barges and their patchwork hulls creaking as they lolled on the water. A couple had collided, prow to prow, and nudged against one another. He dismissed them and Iryn Mere. The under-lake was self-contained and led only to the hive edge. They wouldn’t find salvation there. He needed to find the tower.

An order of Hospitallers had built their priory here on the high ground. Called Saviour’s Rock, it had harboured the sick and injured since before Cristo was a boy. None were refused alms and as such the priory had garnered a sort of respect, even amongst the less salubrious types of low-hivers, that saw it ride out the vicissitudes of the years intact. Only when he smelled the smoke, and tasted its bitterness on the breeze did Cristo consider this indomitable history might have reached its terminus.

As he crested the western face of the ridge and the scudding smoke parted, Cristo saw them. Fleeing. Fire ate through the priory and shadows of the Sisters danced in its flames, except they weren’t dancing, they were burning.

Writhing.

Dying.

An abbess leapt from a high balcony. She plunged like a candle flame, her robes alight. Smoke swallowed her before she hit the ground. Several of the Sisters fought in the courtyard with table legs and candelabras. One wielded a ceremonial sword, its blade slick and black. A mob of rabid figures surrounded them. Cristo thought he recognised the markings of the Red Hand and Death Kings, though the actual gangers were wasted and more cadaverous than before, as if whatever contagion had swept through the districts was feeding on the life of its hosts and burning them out. He saw grimly transformed salvagers too, and suddenly understood why Iryn Mere had fallen silent. They dragged the Sisters down, their heroism as meaningful as a footnote, and tore them apart.

Old fears resurfaced like a bloated corpse in a river, the horrors he had half-witnessed in the gully still fresh. Cristo wanted to flee, to take Karina and run like hell and not look back, but then he saw the novice, scrambling and falling and desperately trying to live, and he knew he could not. Her robes were simpler than those of the rest of her sorority, and she went unhooded. She wore a plain auburn surplice over rough white robes, her sandalled feet slipping as she strove to put distance between herself and the cannibal flock. A simple leather knapsack was slung over one shoulder, brimming with scrolls and other irreplaceable religious arcana.

Strange what we find to cling to.

He couldn’t save the others, but the novice had broken free of the horde. Her Sisters had given her a chance but she wouldn’t make it. Not alone. She was young, as young as his daughter was before they had become estranged…

But then he thought of Karina as she was now and the fact she needed medical attention. He wouldn’t find it here. He should just leave, turn his back and look for help elsewhere. He knew a place, though he and the owner hadn’t spoken in several years. He thought of those men he had killed, the ones who would surely have killed him. The shame of it burned like the remembered heat of the furnace where he had disposed of their bodies. It had been justified. Running now was justified. No one would blame him. He had his daughter to think of.

The noose felt heavy enough, more sins than he cared to count. He didn’t want another.

Gently, he put Karina down and hefted the shotgun.

Galloping up the ridge, he called out.

‘Here!’ he cried, trying to get the novice’s attention.

She saw him, eyes streaming with tears, hair plastered to her face with blood and sweat and soot.

So much like Karina was before…

Whatever decision she made, it happened quickly. Hiking up her robes, she ran, one arm clutched around the knapsack, the other swinging furiously.

A boom reverberated, and a cannibal spun, its body shredded by buckshot.

She ducked, almost fell, but recovered and kept moving.

‘Come on, come on!’

Cristo roared and the shotgun roared too. Another cannibal fell, its legs ripped out from under it, practically sawn in half.

He was moving, hurrying to the novice, then bracing himself in a wide stance before firing off another blast. He aimed down the barrel, like a hunter picking off the herd. After the sixth cannibal-thing had gone down, the shotgun gave a heavy chack, its ammo expended. He might have panicked then but the fury was on him, the old anger he had sworn to leave behind him. Cristo kept on going, using the barrel like a bludgeon. He clubbed the first. It had overtaken the novice, ignoring her for the big angry man laying down fire. Its head snapped back as the nose drove into the skull. It didn’t rise. Cristo caught a second on the swing, using the full weight of the weapon. He broke its neck and near tore its head right off. He was in the slaughter now, grinding through the horde, putting his strength and bulk to killing. Sin after sin, thickening the noose, adding to his rope and his burden.

They stank; they stank like the dead, for that’s what they were.

The last of the Sisters fell just as the novice ran past Cristo, his bellowed urges telling her to keep moving. To run and run and run. Perhaps he was being selfish. Perhaps he hoped the novice Sister would find and tend his daughter. And then his burden would be done with. He had failed her as a father but perhaps he could do this one thing. Perhaps he had earned this death at the hands of the dead. Was it penance? he wondered. Did any of it really matter? Only now, as he waded into the thick of the dead, did Cristo realise what he had done. The dead were many and he was just one. It was sacrifice, so they could get away.

No, it was suicide and cowardice. But if the ends were the same, did it really matter?

Cristo roared, the bloody club of a broken shotgun clutched in his hands and swinging. It was his death song.

And then it was over.

He lived, a virtual hecatomb surrounding him.

‘I should be dead,’ he murmured, and plunged to his knees in a mire of blood.

‘But you’re not,’ said a quiet voice behind him. He felt a light touch upon his arm, as of a muleskinner daring to approach a fierce animal. ‘You’re alive,’ said the novice, little more than a girl, ‘and so are we. Thanks to you.’

Her tonsured hair shone despite the blood, her youth obvious by her face. Plain, pretty. How Karina used to be before the world hurt her, before it wore at the bond between father and daughter, fraying it until finally it snapped.

He encased her hands in his. It almost felt wrong to tarnish her with the blood of slaughter, but he was tired and had stopped caring so much.

‘Is she all right…?’ He gestured at Karina.

‘She’s unconscious. Hurt, I think.’

‘There was a riot. She got caught up.’

‘I see.’ The girl looked pensive, wary.

‘I won’t hurt you,’ said Cristo.

‘It wouldn’t matter if you did,’ she said, gazing over to where the priory still burned and her Sisters burned with it. The fire had spread out into the courtyard, creeping closer, consuming, cleansing. Perhaps it was for the best.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cristo, rising, the girl helping him. Now the adrenaline had fled, an ache came over him. He wanted to sleep, but dared not close his eyes for fear he wouldn’t open them again.

The girl walked up to the blaze and for a moment Cristo thought she might leap into it in an act of self-immolation. He almost cried out, but stopped when she wrapped a cloth around her hand and reached down to draw the ceremonial sword.

It was still bloody, but she unstoppered a canteen taken from her pack and cleaned it until it shone anew.

‘This was Sister Verida’s blade. She named it Vanquish.’ The girl turned and slid Vanquish through her belt. ‘I am the relic keeper now, the lore mistress. I am all that is left.’

Cristo thought she was the bravest damn kid he had ever seen. She didn’t weep, she didn’t falter. No weakness. Only strength.

She stepped away from the flames, and looked down at Karina. ‘Is she your daughter?’

‘Yes. Her name’s Karina.’ He put a hand against his chest. ‘I’m Cristo.’

The girl bowed her head. ‘Celestia.’

‘Can you help her? Are you a medicus?’

‘I am a novice, low skilled in the physik arts, but I have had some tutelage.’

‘If I can get us to a safe place, somewhere to lie low until whatever this is blows over, will you help her?’

Celestia nodded.

‘Then I know somewhere, but getting there will take us back into town. I just hope it’s still standing,’ said Cristo, and went to pick up his daughter. They headed west, towards Hallow’s End.

CHAPTER 7

Barricades

Morgravia’s autoloader clacked empty, which meant no more ammo beyond whatever was left in the oversized mag. She put a high-calibre bullet through a pallid’s face, painting the wall behind it with greasy brain matter. The nomenclature felt appropriate given the waxy, bled-dry skin. It was necessary. Give a monster a name, you limited its power, you made it tangible. Killable.

Her knife found the head of another. She jabbed hard through the ear, dropping the pallid as she yanked free the gore-slicked blade. The creatures were deep into the bar, taking down prey, feeding their hunger.

A few of the other patrons had put up a makeshift barricade of chairs and tables and were defending it with their lives. Morgravia stood on its shaky rampart. She caught the drover out the corner of her eye, wisely taking the high ground as she had, alternating between pistols, firing off short bursts to conserve ammo. They cleared the last of the pallid on the bar side of the barricade but these were just outliers. The horde pushed in from outside, too many to easily count.

She kicked one in the chin and sent it flailing into the ravening mass below. Several clamoured to get through the door, partly impeded by their own rabid urgency as they attempted to push their way inside at once. Those patrons with the wit and will to survive had pulled pistols and small-arms. Some improvised, wielding broken chair legs and bottles. Between them, they reaped a slaughter. But so did the pallid. A carpet of bodies lay between the barricade and the entrance, the dead of both sides entwined in perverse union.

The front of the bar was overrun, the communal area smothered by the horde.

Morgravia heard the sudden clunk of a hidden mechanism, gears turning, then saw a blast door inching from a concealed housing in the ceiling.

She willed it to move faster.

Barak’s hands trembled around the shotgun. He hadn’t fired it in years and even the act of using it to break open the security panel brought back the old anxieties. He had kept it pristine. He might have lost his nerve in the darkness of the underhive but he had retained his self-respect and sense of duty.

He tried to see Jana through the mesh but the churn of milling bodies made it impossible. He shouted for her, ignoring Fharkoum’s invective as his manservant hammered at the cage surrounding the bar. They wanted to get inside.

‘Jana!’ Barak needed to see her, to know she was all right.

Then he did.

Fharkoum had her, his fat hand wrapped around her neck.

A fist of panic clenched Barak’s heart, and the shotgun felt heavy as a corpse as he brought it up to the mesh and pointed it at the merchant.

‘Take your hands off her,’ he breathed, unsure if Fharkoum understood his words but certain the obese merchant had caught the meaning.

The manservant, Kharata, rapped on the mesh with the muzzle of his pistol. ‘Open up.’

Tears streaked Jana’s face, though she bravely tried to hide her fear. She looked pale, and struggled to breathe in the fat man’s oily grasp. Blood trickled down her leg, leaving a shallow puddle where she was standing. She mouthed, Don’t.

Barak lowered the shotgun and let them in.

The moment Barak released the lock, Kharata wrenched open the gate to let his paymaster through. He kept any intrepid patrons at bay with his flechette pistol as he retreated after Fharkoum, sealing the gate behind him.

‘Please… let her go,’ said Barak, looking at his wife.

Kharata jabbed him in the throat.

Barak fell to his knees, choking. He tried to rise, and remember his old training, but a kick in the chest hurled him back. Blood in his mouth, dimly aware of Jana’s angry screaming, Barak reached out to steady himself but ended up dragging a rack of amasec down onto his head. Glass shattered and the air suddenly reeked of strong alcohol.

The beating ended. He felt a cool, gentle touch on his skin. Jana coalesced before him, her hands cradling his face. Her expression flitted between pain and concern. She wept and Barak knew her tears were for him.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked once he’d caught his breath.

She nodded, but he caught the lie in her eyes. She was hurt. Her leg. He could smell the blood, acerbic and metallic above the spilled amasec, and guessed it was bad. He was about to scratch around for the medi-kit he knew he had back here somewhere when Jana gripped his shoulder and he stopped and looked at her.

‘Veran’s dead,’ she said softly. ‘They took him, Bar. He stood in their way for me and they took him, and they… they…’

Throne… Veran… Barak had known him for years. They had been friends. He buried the grief, it wouldn’t serve him now, and concentrated on what he had left. He touched Jana’s cheek, then softly stroked her raven hair. She’s so beautiful.

‘Don’t,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Don’t. You’re here, that’s all that matters right now.’

He noticed Kharata, who wore a smirk that made him look uglier than he already was, and then Fharkoum. The fat merchant had helped himself to a bottle of Jovian brandy, the finest and most expensive spirit Barak had, and swilled it down like cheap grain whiskey. He spilled most of the priceless vintage down his chins and sweat-stained robes. When he had emptied the bottle, he sagged, casting it aside. Barak winced as it shattered, just another senseless indignity piled atop all the rest. Ruddy cheeked, breathing hard, Fharkoum looked haggard, unused to physical exertion. He cast a nervous glance through the mesh, no doubt wondering if his fortune could keep him alive long enough to continue enjoying it.

Kharata’s continued loyalty would determine that. He had picked up Barak’s shotgun, and checked the ammunition before adding it to his arsenal.

You’ll bloody well need it, reckoned Barak.

Then Jana collapsed into his arms and Barak forgot about all of that. He held her, softly patting her face and rubbing her arm. Blood soaked the hem of her dress and her leg glistened wetly with it. He cast about, trying to find the medi-kit, caught between not wanting to let go of Jana and the need to help her. A small metal tin slid towards him and Barak looked up into the face of one of Fharkoum’s courtesans. She was young and pretty, much too young for the life she had been forced into, but she looked kind. Smudged alabaster whitened her face, contrasting with the dark rouge painting her lips and the pale amaranth dusting her cheeks and around her eyes.

‘Maela,’ she said, her manicured fingers tapping her heart, and pushed the tin closer.

Barak replied with his own name and then, nodding, took the tin. A small caduceus had faded on the lid but the supplies within were still good. He grabbed up a handful of bandages and gauze, but hesitated to expose the wound.

A touch on his hand alerted Barak to Maela’s presence. She nodded to reassure him, giving a furtive glance at her master, who was busy draining the bar of its strongest liquor and had no time for, or interest in, his slaves, then took the bandages and gauze. She gently pulled the dress away from the wound, moving slowly because the blood had stuck it to Jana’s skin. She writhed a little with the pain but Maela soothed her with low, calming words.

Past the mesh, the fight continued, and Barak tried to put it out of his mind and focus on his wife. He felt an involuntary pang of grief at the laceration to Jana’s leg. It went deep, souring at the edges where the vague impression of teeth marks could be discerned. Terror gripped him then on what that might mean, but Maela gave it no heed, cleansing it with a cloth and vial of counterseptic before patching on the gauze and then wrapping the bandage.

‘Very good, little bird,’ said an ugly, silky voice, thickly accented. It was Kharata, still his master’s shadow, with one eye on the front of the bar and one behind it. ‘You haven’t lost your touch.’

Maela lowered her eyes, afraid of attracting Kharata’s regard further but the manservant had already moved on, laughing as he did so.

Petty hurts, from petty men, thought Barak, remembering a day when he had punished men like Kharata, before muscle had turned mainly to fat and will had been supplanted by fear.

‘Merciful Throne,’ he breathed, ‘you’re damn good at that. Were you a medic in a previous life or something?’

Maela lifted her gaze, overcoming her timidity to tap the caduceus on the tin lid and then her chest.

‘Is that what he meant? Then… how?’

‘Refugee,’ she said. She struggled with the word.

‘And your friend?’ asked Barak, gesturing to the other courtesan who huddled beneath the bar, clinging to one of its supports and staring into the shadows.

Maela shrugged. Evidently, they weren’t that well acquainted.

Barak clasped her tiny, miraculous hands in his and nodded.

Maela gave a shallow dip of her head, before the sound of tormented metal reverberated through the bar.

The blast door jammed with a groan of protesting plasteel. It lurched, fighting the ground-up bone and viscera fouling its mechanisms, then shuddered to a halt. Smoke exuded from the hidden compartment from which the door had descended before a metallic death cry presaged complete loss of function. Lights flickered in Hallow’s End, suggesting the strain placed upon the local generator, but stayed on.

The pallid kept coming, and Morgravia felt the ground shift beneath her in more ways than one as the integrity of the barricade began to fail.

‘Back!’ she cried, grabbing one of the defenders, hauling on his coat collar. ‘Back!’

She took him with her – an old gate watchman wielding an unpowered maul – clambering down the rough flank of the barricade. The drover retreated too, though he went alone. A plucky cryer, still carrying a satchel of missives that would never be delivered, lingered too long. His shot-pistol got off one more thundering retort before his foot slipped and the horde overwhelmed him. The barricade couldn’t hold, the door had been the defenders’ last chance, and now, as the brave few retreated, Morgravia wished she had saved a bullet. Oshanti’s face returned uncomfortably in her mind and she cursed it for being one of the few things she actually did remember.

She met the drover on the other side, along with a handful of others.

‘I’ve never seen anything like these things…’ said the watchman, breathless. ‘Gunter,’ he added, holding out a hand for Morgravia to shake. ‘Thank you.’

She nodded back but didn’t take his hand. ‘We’ll need every man and woman capable of wielding a weapon.’

Slowly, Gunter let his hand fall, perturbed at what he saw as rudeness. Morgravia could not give a single shit.

‘Will it hold?’ asked a road warden in a long, tan coat and wielding a dirty knife. He looked less than salubrious, the kind of low-cred gun-hand you wouldn’t trust to guard a gutter, let alone an actual road.

A dockhand jammed an errant chair onto the pile, a hunk of broken brick in his other hand which he then threw on top. ‘It has to.’ A length of chain was wrapped around his work belt, and had recently served as a weapon judging by the matted gore. He looked young. They all did, except for Gunter and the trapper, the latter cradling a spent crossbow over one arm as she cast about for an improvised weapon. She found a hefty glass shard and, wrapping a piece of tape around its thicker end, fashioned a decent shank.

‘It’ll fail,’ she drawled, chewing noisily on a piece of tabac, her teeth stained brown from its juices. ‘We’ll have to fight our way out.’

‘Merciful Throne…’ A weaponless scribe, his face spattered with someone else’s blood, fell to his knees.

Morgravia hauled him up. ‘On your feet,’ she rasped harshly. ‘Find something to fight with.’ She glanced at the trapper. ‘She’s right. They’re coming through. Nothing can stop that except us.’

She sounded bolder than she felt, her ire at Hel’s conspicuous absence the only thing maintaining her edge. Morgravia reckoned they had minutes before the pallid clawed through the barricade. None climbed, seemingly compelled to take the shortest route to their prey regardless of what was in their path.

She caught the eye of the drover, who was checking his pistols. ‘If you smile now,’ she warned him, ‘I swear to the Emperor…’

He looked ruefully at the pair of empty mags. ‘No, I’d say this ain’t a time for smiling,’ he said, holstering his sidearms with a flourish before drawing a punch dagger from his belt. ‘I’d say we’re pretty screwed at this point.’

It proved too much for the scribe, who collapsed into a gibbering heap. Morgravia let him. The strong would live, the weak would not. Or maybe no one would, but she would die on her feet, not weeping like some wretch.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked the drover.

He frowned. ‘Come again?’

‘Your name. If we’re dying here then I’d at least know who you are.’

‘Drover.’

‘Shut up.’

‘No, really. It’s Drover. Arum Drover.’ He put his hand solemnly on his heart. ‘Since I was a babe in arms. I would say ask my mother if you don’t believe me, but she died of the lung rot when I was a boy. Even if she hadn’t, I don’t reckon we’ll make it out of this place for you to have met her anyway.’

Morgravia turned to the Broker, who was waiting near the bar with the sommelier. She noticed a fleck of blood on the servitor’s face, all but confirming her earlier suspicions that he didn’t just serve wine.

‘You are obviously not without resource. Any ideas?’

‘Only that I should have chosen a different place for our meeting, but that hardly matters now.’

‘I thought you might say something like that.’ Morgravia looked past her to the merchant. ‘That mesh won’t hold them,’ she said. ‘I know you can’t wholly understand me, but your hired gun speaks decent Gothic.’ She glanced at him. ‘They’ll kill us, then they’ll tear it down and kill you.’

To Morgravia’s surprise, Fharkoum answered.

‘You are lying.’

‘Been holding out on us, have you?’ She turned for a second at an ominous creaking coming from behind her, but the barricade still held.

‘Yes, I speak your tongue well enough, but I choose not to. It is an ugly language, the dialect of pigs and apes.’

‘It’s not a lie,’ said Morgravia, wanting to ram her fist down the fat bastard’s throat and pull out his lungs.

‘Let them in,’ demanded the barkeep, and looked like he was about to do it himself until Kharata intervened. The barkeep put up his hands, not wishing to add to his bruises.

‘This is no ordinary contagion,’ said Morgravia. ‘They’re stronger than they look. They’ll tear it down.’

Fharkoum offered a derisive chuckle. ‘What do you know, woman?’

She scowled, tired of subterfuge. She brandished her rosette. It shone, its authenticity undeniable. Her manner was even less so. ‘I am Inquisitor Morgravia Sanctus of the Ordo Sepulturum, and by the authority of the Immortal Emperor of Mankind I order you to open up that damn gate.’

It wouldn’t last, the barrier. She hadn’t been lying about that. Fighting in a bottleneck… maybe they could wear the pallid down, find a way out. It was all about attrition now. At the least, it might give the survivors a few more minutes and that was worth something. The look on Fharkoum’s face was worth immeasurably more.

The merchant paled, his mouth lolling open like a dullard. He hesitated, calculating, deciding, until he whispered, ‘Do it.’

Kharata pulled up short. ‘Master?’

‘I said fucking do it. She is Inquisition, you idiot!’

Kharata had opened the gate and the first of the survivors were coming through when the barricade collapsed in on itself and the horde rushed in.

Then the lights cut off as the power failed, and everything fell into darkness.

CHAPTER 8

Maggots

Something moved in the agri-fog.

They had reached as far as the old mills when Celestia stopped. She appeared nervous, but Cristo could hardly blame her. Mercifully, the wind had turned and the smoke and the stench of burning drifted across the Iryn Mere half a mile or more behind them. It couldn’t carry away the images though, the screaming; that was ingrained now, and as bad as it was for Cristo to remember, he could only assume it was magnitudes worse for the Sister-novice.

‘Are you sure…?’ he hissed, squinting into the murky brown fog. Karina slumped fitfully in his arms. About halfway from the priory, once the ruins had been out of sight but not out of mind, they had stopped in the lee of a metal overhang where the hive layers had accumulated to create a sort of crag. Condensation had made it slick, and tiny cataracts of coppery watery ran off its rough edges. He had set Karina down, agitated at having to stop but knowing she needed urgent medical treatment. Celestia had applied a balm and given her a tincture from a small silver phial. Cristo hadn’t known what the phial contained, but it had brought Karina round briefly before she descended back into a deep slumber.

‘She’ll sleep. Heal,’ the Sister-novice had said. Then they had moved on and had been making decent progress until the mills.

Now the light was fading, surrendering to night, and cast deep shadows that had the aspect of claws.

Celestia put a finger to her lips, urging silence. She listened hard, poised at the threshold of the fog that snagged at the hem of her robes as if trying to pull her in. Cristo listened too. He heard the groan of old metal, the creak of grotesquely oversized roots and the rustle of leaf litter.

Then a crack, and Celestia turned her head at the sudden crepitation.

A shape shifted in the fog, a lightly swaying silhouette.

Cristo felt a bead of cold sweat run down the nape of his neck. Suddenly his breath seemed inordinately loud and he fought the temptation to hold it. He strained his eyes, attempting to discern the silhouette more clearly. Definitely humanoid, upright. He didn’t remember any signs of habitation when he passed this way earlier but the old mills covered a large area, and they had come farther west than before. He considered the dead, for he could think of them as nothing other, that had assailed the priory.

Had to have come from somewhere…

Vanquish rattled in Celestia’s grasp and Cristo reached out a hand to gently tap her shoulder. She had barely moved since they had stopped but almost leapt back as he touched her. Daggers glared Cristo’s way and he apologised with his eyes, before putting Karina down and then taking the sword, only having to overcome a little resistance.

It felt light, well balanced, though small in his hand. An artificer’s weapon. Blade held in front of him, Cristo edged into the fog. Beyond the threshold, the reek of the old mills and their spilled guts became sickly and noisome. His eyes watered, impeding his ability to properly make out the silhouetted figure. It swayed still, its head lolling, feathery hair ruffling gently in the breeze. It smelled bad, worse than the saccharine root sap and botanical mulch underfoot. There was meat rot and putrefaction.

Dead.

Cristo felt a lump in his throat like a lead ingot, and swallowed hard to clear it.

Then he ran, full tilt, muscular strides eating up the yards, and swung hard. The blow caught the figure around the neck, shearing through papery skin and sloughed muscle, releasing a truly appalling odour and a vicious swarm of carrion flies interrupted mid-feasting.

Cristo felt the insects biting his neck, his arms, his fingers as he tried to make sense of what he had just beheaded. The flies dispersed, driven off by further swings of the blade, and Cristo was left looking at the headless body of a servitor. Its machine parts had rusted through, fixing it in place like some kind of slowly decomposing scarecrow. The flesh components were rank, barely clinging to bone. Much of it had turned to soup, and was oozing through its biological and artificial orifices.

‘It’s all right, it’s just a…’ Cristo was turning around, about to wade back out of the fog when he saw the lie in his words.

Skulking in the miasma, hunched over, it hadn’t seen him yet. Snorting and shovelling noises emanated from its busy mouth. Something twitched in the fog. A hand, one of the fingers spotted with blood. A wayward traveller. Then the dead thing turned, eyes gummed and red. It raised its head to sniff the foul air, revealing a little of its face. Gaunt, pale. A crimson smear across its features made it look like a lazy clown, but Cristo saw no humour there. A ribcage lay exposed behind it, steam curdling in the air above. Cracked open, the contents either churned in the creature’s distended belly or dangled in gory ropes from between its teeth.

It had been a woman, this hunched thing, wasted and emaciated now, but formerly human. A scrivener, judging by the ragged, dirty robes.

Cristo stared, transfixed like prey confronted by its predator, then took to his heels.

‘Run!’ he bellowed, hoofing through the fog. He collided with a disused agri-plough, pranging off its rusty shear and tearing a hole in his trousers. A fresh line of blood edged the blade. It drew the creature on, its olfactory senses doing what its eyes could not. It came after him, scurrying low like vermin, sniffing and snorting. A ragged bark articulated its displeasure and raw hunger.

‘RUN!’

Celestia had Karina over one shoulder, her arm draped over the Sister-novice’s back, half dragging her along the edge of the incorporeal fog. She made little headway, lacking the strength to hoist the other girl up and run with the burden in her arms like Cristo could.

Cristo heard more creatures, their grunting and shuffling made obvious by sudden manic animation. He thought they might be farther off. At least he couldn’t smell them, not like the one champing at his back. The reek of putrefaction made him gag. He had almost reached Celestia and Karina again when he turned, swiping low with Vanquish. The sword met flesh, and kept going until the dead thing’s skullcap and the upper portion of its brain lay on the ground separate to the rest of the head. A lucky blow, but Cristo felt he was due.

‘Give her to me,’ he demanded, breathless, pausing only long enough to see the dead thing collapse. He took Karina, his arms aching but having to find the strength regardless, and glanced at the fog and the shapes scurrying through it.

They ran, skirting the edge of the agri-mills, first heading north and then west. He kept one eye on Celestia. She had the sword again, having traded it for Karina, and it slapped against her leg as she ran. She was falling behind, her long surplice robbing her of movement. Cristo glanced back and saw the determination in her eyes, but she was waning and stumbled, almost spilling over, before she righted herself again.

One more slip was all it would take.

Please… she mouthed, the creatures closing on her like bloodhounds. Please…

‘Save me’ or ‘don’t let them take me alive’, Cristo didn’t know which.

Several feet separated them now.

Cristo turned back around, mindful he needed to watch the way ahead, that any serious stumble could be the end. His heart hammered so hard it hurt. All he could think about was Karina, and getting her safe. But letting Celestia die… He felt the imaginary noose around his neck tightening. Another twist of the rope to add to its weight.

I am a good man… I want to be.

He stopped, lungs fit to burst, legs shaking, and prepared to fight.

Celestia had collapsed. The sword was still in her grasp, held there by her sacred oaths and nothing more.

Of the dead, there was no sign.

Cristo waited. He looked. He listened.

Nothing happened. Until it did.

The sky had darkened to the point of dusk when he heard the engine drone, low and throaty, trembling the earth. The hive lamps flared, little halos of weak fire bullied by the shadows. Urging Celestia to her feet, the three found shelter in the split carcass of an old silo. Rotted grain spewed out of it like innards. Maggots writhed in the mass, but Cristo hunkered down, content to let them crawl across his skin, watching the skies as the drone grew louder.

A shape moved in the darkness, too black to really see, but it was big and hovered above the old mills like a night raptor searching for food. Something fell from the shape, spindly and agile, landing quietly in a crouch. A faint red eye burned like a hot ember, strafing the agri-fields.

Cristo shrank back into the ruptured silo, it the cave and he the primordial man recoiling from fire. It stalked, the shape, its syncopated movements like that of an avian. Its head canted and turned in the same manner. A lamp flicker caught the edge of a blade: a pair, one held in either hand. Something insectile persisted about its appearance, though the shadows obscured any detail.

It turned its head, its multifaceted eye-lenses flaring as if suddenly kindled.

Then it took a step towards them, twitching in that avian way, clicking, whirring.

Cristo found an old piece of brick and held it tightly, maggots squirming over his fingers.

Another step, and the blades lifted a fraction. Sharp enough to flense skin from flesh from bone. He thought of the precise butchery they could reap, the monomolecular steel hot as it cut into his body. A frenzied surgeon at the scalpel.

The brick felt useless in his grasp, faced by this thing. A killing thing, a cold thing unconcerned by mercy or pity. A machine.

Clicking, whirring, then the chirrup of detection as the lenses expanded.

Cristo braced himself. He dared not move, but felt Celestia’s trembling presence behind him. The maggots quested, infiltrating his clothes, his hair… squirming across his face. He tried not to think of them feasting on his dead flesh, coring out his body, and the stripped-bare bones he would leave behind. He fought the urge to scrape them off, to flee the wretched silo with its rot and its stench. He should not have come this way. He should have headed straight for Hallow’s End. He had no business here, but wishing it all otherwise would not make it so.

He remained still as the machine seemed to regard him, only ten or fifteen feet between them, the fog creeping slowly outwards to obscure the distance.

A dull chime sounded and it turned, loping away on reverse-jointed legs. In seconds it had gone, off to some grim purpose, and the hovering shape went with it.

Cristo waited six more minutes before he scraped off the maggots, urgently, disgustedly. Then he emptied his stomach, coughing up a puddle of hot bile and little else. It didn’t help the fear or the bone-aching fatigue. His muscles burned. He wanted to stop, to sleep. On his hands and knees, spitting out the acerbic taste in his mouth, he considered it. Karina stirred, a little moan escaping her lips. He rose, slow but back on his feet.

‘West…’ he said to Celestia. She looked as pale as marble, but gave a weary nod.

They returned to the fog, resigned to its monsters.

CHAPTER 9

No way out

The watchman, Gunter, died first. The pallid took him quickly, screaming into the black, a trail of finger marks clawed into the floorboards in his wake. Blood dashed Morgravia’s cheek, hot, arterial. A cry suggested it belonged to the road warden. Other sounds followed, chewing and rending. She shut them out, already moving, eyes adjusting to the darkness as she fumbled for the gate, wishing her gun wasn’t empty.

The trapper snapped on a lamp attachment for her crossbow, and swung it madly to try to get her bearings. The grainy beam alighted on corpse faces, hungry and malicious, stained red and fouled by strings of meat. She recoiled, tripping, and went down. They fell upon her like a pack of carrion-eaters. She screamed, and fought, until the screams rose higher and more desperate as she became aware of what was being done to her, of how she was being unmade and consumed. And then there was no more, just snorting and ripping, and the frenzy of the feast.

Part of the barricade collapsed on the dockhand, almost burying him. He fought his way free, the fallen lamp’s beam lighting up his struggle in staccato flickers. He was almost out when a clawed hand grasped his face. Nails tore into his cheek, pulling a part of it away as he shrieked, his youth laid bare by his fear. He kept moving, despite the red pouring from him, until another hand snatched at his ear and ripped it off. Another clamped across his forehead, digging furrows in his scalp and flensing part of it free. Another dug around his other cheek, pulling. Flesh tore like wet paper. Then his neck. Teeth biting into his shoulder, the meat of his forearm. In the end, he was so disfigured as to be barely describable as human.

Morgravia clamped her mouth shut as she witnessed his cannibalisation, turning away as he became no more than meat. The lamp fizzed and shut out, crushed underfoot as the pallid swallowed it beneath their masses.

She made it through the gate, with the lacerations to testify as to how close it had been. Arum Drover slammed it shut in her wake, throwing the heavy bolt before quickly stepping back as a host of gnarled and grasping talons reached for him. The pallid pushed hard against the cage, the mesh biting into the skin of those at the front of the horde and drawing blood.

The swiftest of looks between her and Drover yielded a slight nod in return. He was an insufferable arsehole, she had decided, but perhaps not an entirely useless or uncourageous one.

‘Is there a back way out of this place? A cellar? Anything?’

The barkeep, whom she had been addressing, shook his head. ‘Sealed it up years ago. Fewer ways in made it easier to keep the place safe from the gangs.’

‘Fewer places in, fewer places out…’ bemoaned Drover. He had taken up position near the Broker, evidently honouring his contract to her as a protector. The sommelier stood close by too, and Morgravia wondered again how far the servitor’s skills extended beyond pouring wine for his wealthy mistress. Even in all of this shitting mess, the Broker appeared composed, her arms folded neatly across her body, her hands concealed within the sleeves of her robes.

The room out the back of the bar enclosed spartan living quarters and also storage. A pair of blank-eyed servitors stood dormant in alcoves, unpowered, their forked lifter arms slack by their sides. They were different to the sommelier. Cruder. Grubbier. Their cyborganics were obvious. Patchwork.

‘Can you get them working?’ she asked the barkeep.

‘It’ll take time.’

‘We don’t have any.’

‘Then no.’

Morgravia scowled inwardly. She looked again. A little light spilled in from outside through ventilation slits, but they were much too narrow to traverse. A lighter shade of brick indicated where the rear door had once been. Racking lined the walls. Barrels and crates, the odd loose bottle or keg, piled up in the corners. No weapons. Nothing useful beyond the space itself. The feckless scribe had survived. He had retreated here, huddled in the dark, trying not to listen, to think. She was tempted to throw him back out and make him earn his place, but given how the mesh was already bending inwards it probably wouldn’t matter soon anyway. Fharkoum had taken up residence too, though sat alone, content to let his hired gun face the dead as he worked his way through a crate of expensive spirits.

‘Do something…’ he said, wiping the spillage from his mouth. ‘Or are you not as powerful as you claim?’

Morgravia yearned for the time not so long ago when he hadn’t spoken her language. Bad enough to listen, now she could actually understand the fat bastard.

He sneered. ‘You are Inquisition. Your warriors… bring them.’

‘There are no warriors,’ replied Morgravia grimly, ‘just me.’

The sneer deepened, spiced by a little threat. ‘Then you have no power.’

‘I have the Emperor’s authority. I have His will and purpose. I have power,’ she declared, strident, giving Kharata the eye by way of warning not to do anything that would shorten his already very likely brief life expectancy. He had wandered up to the doorway when he heard the exchange. ‘I just don’t have the power to save you.’

The mesh bulged again. The sheer mass of bodies pressed against it caused it to deform like a tumour in the metal, and a corner broke away from its fastenings. The scribe wailed and kept wailing, until Fharkoum leaned over and slapped him so he shut up.

‘Not one more sound out of you, wretch.’ He glared at Kharata then, the fear showing in his eyes if not his demeanour. ‘You. Do something.’

The hired gun nodded, firing a burst of flechettes against the pallid pulling at the breach but only succeeding in shredding parts of the mesh. Hands thrust in through the ragged gaps, flesh tearing and exposing ruddy bone.

Morgravia gave him a scathing look, which was met in kind by one of unimpeachable arrogance.

‘Don’t do that again,’ she warned.

Kharata had the good sense not to retaliate.

The available space grew tighter as the pallid started pushing and those behind the bar edged back. They were rabid, the creatures, driven, almost desperate. Something had made them this way, a plague, unnatural or manufactured, one Morgravia felt sure she had been charged to prevent. Its architects must be close; in Blackgheist, maybe even Low Sink. Like tendrils of fog slowly receding before the light, the pieces of her obscured memory started to edge back into focus.

Too slowly. None of it would matter if she couldn’t escape. Trapped in the hive, hunted by enemies she didn’t know and couldn’t effectively counter… Fharkoum was right. She had no power. None that she could bring to bear.

The cage lurched as more holding bolts sprung from their fastenings.

‘It’s coming down…’ warned Drover, and betrayed the first real sign of concern at their likely fate.

The Broker retired to the storeroom at his quiet urging, the sommelier in tow. Kharata followed, summoned by his master’s scared bellowing.

Morgravia held onto his arm as he went to move past her. ‘Are you leaving the fight?’

Kharata tried to hide his fear behind a scornful mask. ‘There’ll be no fight,’ he said quietly and made to move on but she wouldn’t let him.

‘Then you won’t be needing two guns.’

He looked down at the shotgun, the barrel poking out of his side from where it hung over his shoulder. He yielded without much resistance.

‘Take it.’

She did, and then let him go. Kharata backed away, off to hide in the darkness with his master.

‘I feel safer already,’ said Drover, and Morgravia scowled.

Only the barkeep and the singer in black were left, as well as the two courtesans and Drover.

‘Can she be moved?’ Morgravia indicated the singer.

‘Jana, my wife…’ said the barkeep.

‘Can she be moved?’

He shook his head. ‘Her leg. She’s injured.’

‘I’ll stay,’ said one of the courtesans. Morgravia noticed the other one staring into the darkness, and recognised shock when she saw it.

‘Then stay down and hope they come to us.’

The cage buckled again. It shook, wrenched back and forth, twisting and creaking, the thin metal barrier between life and something worse than death.

‘I don’t know about you,’ she said to Drover, ‘but I’d rather die on my feet.’

‘I’d sooner not die at all,’ he replied, ‘but since that’s not on the table…’

The barkeep was up too. He’d found a heavy-looking mace from some concealed alcove or other. It looked regulation-issue.

‘Shock maul,’ said Morgravia as the three of them took position, almost shoulder to shoulder, on the lookout for where the cage would surrender first. ‘You were a lawman?’

‘Barak,’ said the barkeep, ‘I’m an ex-proctor.’ He nodded to the shotgun. ‘That’s from back in the day, too.’

Morgravia gave him a rueful smile. ‘All hail the Lex.’

Barak thumped his fist against his chest in an old salute. The flare of the shock maul cast a dull crackling glow as it activated.

Drover looked down at his punch dagger. ‘I won’t deny, I’m experiencing some serious notions of inadequacy at this moment.’

‘Have no fear…’ Morgravia replied, her eyes on the pallid, their hordes pushing and reaching, ‘the Emperor protects.’

Drover’s colourful expletive was drowned out by the sound of the cage bending and snapping as a welter of bodies tumbled in.

The shotgun boomed, loud as artillery fire. It bucked in Morgravia’s grip, kicking like a punch to the shoulder. Muzzle flame flared, magnesium bright. Faces and bodies disintegrated, reduced to mist and offal. Something burned, a pallid with its hair alight, cooking in its own wretched skin. The smell of ozone and heat arose as Barak lit up another. He had the maul on maximum discharge. It was practically a flaming brand.

In the snatches between the thunderous retorts of the shotgun, Morgravia saw Drover. He fought behind a rampart of bodies, killing with a pit fighter’s ferocity, his face a mask of blood.

Not enough, thought Morgravia as the pallid kept coming, their numbers endless. Not enough, as the shotgun fed its last round into the breech. Hand to hand, they would quickly be overrun. Her senses slowed, the last seconds stretching like time smeared across the pane of her existence. Sound distorted, robbed of its clarity. She tasted blood, and smelled the actinic bite of another place. The red dream came again, uncaring of its inconvenience, and as she fell and the pain needles took their due, Morgravia looked up into the rafters at an arachnoid shape descending, silver fangs glinting, poised for the kill–

Then the dream took her.

hot blades severing paring dissecting organs heaped upon a slab clicking whirring the tools descending bone yielding cracking snapping the stink of burning fusion melding made and unmade metal and rods and sinew and muscle skin burning cold dark warm bright the throb of the machine droning chirping a long chime stretching on into forever dying dying endlessly dying the loop unbroken as two red suns loom over red red red

A flash of captured silver brought her back. The bar had partly collapsed as the mesh had been wrenched away and she stared through a canyon of splintered wood at the darkness. It was a sword she had seen. Held by a shadow, dark against light. A second joined the first. Two long, arching blades, snapping with serpentine quickness, wielded in tandem, scything and reaping. They severed hands and scalps, and legs and torsos. They impaled and cleaved and sheared.

Hel had arrived for the pallid in more ways than one, and it wore the face of death.

She sprang like a clockwork thing but with a dancer’s grace, fluid and syncopated at the same time. A heel turn, a pirouette. No pallid could touch her, but she went through their foetid ranks like a threshing machine, night black and deadly. She moved across the floor, the walls, the ceiling, as if the laws of physics and gravity did not apply to her, slashing and weaving, her swords like silver lightning.

Morgravia groaned, ‘Late as usual,’ and felt a soft hand stroke her calloused grip. She turned to see one of the courtesans, her face pale white but with a reddish rose colour around the eyes. Morgravia released her, tried to stand, stumbled, snarled a refusal of help and then stood upright on the second attempt.

The cage had come down, torn right off its hinges, and hung slack like a broken jaw. Bodies were trapped beneath it, within it, snagged where they’d tried to reach through the mesh. All were unmoving, dismembered or beheaded.

Barak sagged against the bar, exhausted.

Drover was wiping his punch dagger on a grimy trouser leg. He had a wild, faraway look in his eyes and didn’t meet Morgravia’s gaze at first. When he did, he just stared, the blood spattering his face like warpaint.

The others lived, the singer in black and the other courtesan, though she remained hunched up below the bar and had not broken eye contact with the shadows there. Morgravia wondered if there was much of her left beyond the shell she still possessed.

Every pallid was slain. Disassembled. An abattoir stench pervaded, the charnel devastation all too apparent. In the midst of it stood a slight figure: a girl, really, though she had ceased to be that for some time, if she ever really was one.

Morgravia felt a pang of something lost as she regarded her, this leather-clad assassin, as bloody as any corpse, staring from behind the hollows of a grinning skull.

Hel slid her blades back into their scabbards.

‘Hello, Mother,’ she uttered pleasantly, ‘did you miss me?’

CHAPTER 10

Relentless

Wearily, they trudged through Meagre. At first, Cristo had insisted they keep to the side alleys and narrower streets, the ones less travelled. He need not have concerned himself. The town was deserted, its districts ominously silent, its commercia and habitats empty as if they had all been abandoned at the same time. It was as if some unknown signal had gone out and now everyone was simply gone.

Scraps of parchment, fluttering strips of torn fabric and propaganda leaflets scampered across the main street, pushed and pulled by the breeze. Somewhere a recyc-fan turned, its lazy revolutions an eerie drone that put Cristo on edge. He glanced at Celestia. She clung to the sword, gazing up at the high buildings, at the squalor and the dilapidation. She hadn’t spoken since they had fled the agri-fields. Nor had he, the memory of the machine ever at the edge of his mind.

He had seen servitors before, the cyborganic creatures that fulfilled the labours at the bullet farm that no mortal could endure. But that stalk-legged thing, the red eyes strafing… It had been made to hunt and would have killed them both had it not been called away.

‘It is a grimy place,’ Celestia observed, pulling him from his thoughts.

‘Can’t argue there,’ Cristo replied, glad of the distraction. ‘It’s not usually this quiet. You’ve never seen Meagre before?’

She shook her head. ‘I have never left the priory.’

‘Ever? How did you come to serve the Church?’

‘My Sisters…’ she faltered, biting her lip to contain her grief. ‘They took me in as a baby. And raised me in their ways and beliefs. My aptitudes lay in healing, and so they tutored me also.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I have no regrets. I yearned for nothing more than the opportunity to serve Him. And to heal others.’

‘No,’ said Cristo, realising she had misunderstood. ‘I meant, I’m sorry you lost them. Your Sisters.’

Celestia’s face darkened and she replied in a small voice. ‘As am I.’ She looked up at him, tears brimming in her eyes but her emotions held in check. ‘Thank you. For saying that. You are a good man.’

Cristo gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I have sin enough for two lifetimes. If you knew what I had done, you would not think of me so favourably.’ He paused, considering the right words. ‘I want to atone. I want to be better.’

Celestia gestured to Karina. ‘For your daughter.’

Cristo nodded, and cast a fearful glance in her direction. ‘She’s all that matters now.’

Celestia smiled and for a moment she seemed older than her years, the teachings of her order ageing her artificially. ‘I do not know what you’ve done, Cristo, these sins you speak of. I only see what is before me, and that is not an impious man.’

Cristo bowed his head, feeling unworthy of her absolution.

He belonged here, amongst the filth and the rot. He knew that. Though the people had disappeared, the stench would always remain, the eye-watering reek of effluence that stuck to clothes and refused to depart. Blood scent coloured the air now too, so thickly that a great quantity of it had to have been spilled, but Cristo saw no bodies. He saw a few weapons here and there, a discarded riot shield. No one alive though. No one dead either.

He was wondering why that was when he felt a sort of low throb that hurt his ears. Then came a stirring of the air, a faint susurration of a distant disturbance. Celestia heard it too and turned to him, her eyes wide as silver coins.

Grasping her wrist, he pulled her into a parchment maker’s, the wares scattered around a dingy chamber and trailing unkemptly out of the open door. Bloody footprints marked a few of the pages, mixing with the smeared ink and dirt, and he wondered where the person who they belonged to had gone.

They crouched down, Cristo still holding onto Karina and listening, trying to discern where the sound was coming from.

‘What is it?’ hissed the Sister-novice before Cristo pressed a finger to his lips indicating that they should stay quiet.

He remembered those killing edges again and that cold regard. If the machine they had met earlier stalked the town… Cristo suddenly wished he’d stopped to pick up one of the weapons he’d seen lying around. Then he quickly dismissed the idea. There would be no fighting something like that. The only chance they had would be to stay hidden.

But it wasn’t the machine. It was something else. Maybe something worse. He knew it with all the gut-wrenching certainty of a man who can’t escape his fate, who is destined to face the penance he is due. He almost sank then, down to his knees, ready to accept, to relent at last.

Then he closed his eyes, clenching them tight and thought of Karina in those days gone, of the daughter he still owed and the girl crouched nearby he had sworn to himself to protect.

I want to atone. His own words returned to judge him.

They would not stop coming. They had no pity. No remorse. Cristo opened his eyes, ready to bear his burdens again.

Find the strength. Be like them. Never yield, not until she’s safe. Until they’re both safe. Then you can stop. Then you’ll be done.

He met Celestia’s scared gaze and reached out to grip her small hand in his.

‘We have to run.’

The dead had returned.

And they were coming.

CHAPTER 11

Plague

Barak disliked most people. He found them shallow and likely to disappoint, but he would miss Veran. He had been an ostentatious character in life, fond of jewelled rings and fine attire. At least as fine as he could afford, and the jewels were really just cut glass. Fake emeralds had been his favourite. Still, it gave him an air. Barak smiled sadly at the memory his thoughts provoked.

‘Damn theremin,’ he murmured, surprised at the thickness of his voice.

The instrument had emerged unscathed and intact, which was more than could be said for poor Veran himself. During the initial surge he had saved Jana, and Barak would be ever grateful for that sacrifice. He had wanted to bury him, but not enough remained to give to the earth, and as he hunted around the shed attached to his bar he realised he didn’t own a shovel anyway. The blanket he had wrapped Veran in would have to suffice instead, as it had for the others. Until they were all burned.

‘Is it still here?’ asked a quiet, hardened voice.

He nodded, not needing to turn around to identify the speaker. He’d known she’d want to see the Mule as soon as he’d mentioned he still had it. Barak worried she might sanction him, but he suspected they were beyond all of that.

‘Are you really one of them?’ he asked.

‘A woman?’

Barak chuckled, appreciating the effort at levity. ‘Well that answers one question,’ he said, his old hands finding the edge of a dusty tarp. It felt coarse against his fingers. ‘They don’t bleed you of humour at least.’

‘Oh no, they let us keep that. It helps when faced with the abyss.’

‘I should think it does,’ said Barak, hauling on the tarp, pulling it back and away. A small dust cloud kicked up and he coughed, waving his arm back and forth to help clear it. ‘Been a long while since I took her out.’

‘We’ll need it. No way we’ll get out of here on foot.’

The chains and clamps were still in place. Barak needed keys and they were back in the bar. He didn’t relish the thought of returning there. It was why he left in the first place when everyone else was still afraid to. Apart from her, of course. And the other one. He tried not to think about the one in black, grinning like death.

‘Will it run?’ asked Morgravia.

He faced the inquisitor. He caught an inkling they weren’t alone and found he had a sudden desire to leave.

‘She’ll have to.’

Barak departed, leaving Morgravia alone to her thoughts. At least for a short while.

‘I can feel you watching me, you know,’ she said, and stepped away from the shed.

Hel emerged from the shadows, poised like a dancer. Her head canted one way then the other, jerky and avian.

‘Are you angry with me, Mother?’

‘I asked you not to call me that,’ said Morgravia sternly. ‘And no, I’m not angry. You saved my life. You saved several lives.’

If that registered on any sort of emotional level, Hel didn’t show it. She had been well indoctrinated, a blunt blade honed into a killing weapon by the Sanguinous. Morgravia wondered if she’d had a part in that, handing a child into the hands of a death cult to be hollowed out and shaped into something lethal. She supposed she must have.

‘Is this a part of it, the reason why we are here?’ asked Hel.

Morgravia thought on that a moment, and decided that it probably was. ‘What did you find?’

‘It is bad, Moth– my lord. The plague has taken the town. Many are infected.’

‘Infected how?’

‘Unknown. The contagion affected masses at once. Entire districts.’

‘Spores? A chemical attack?’ Morgravia considered. ‘No… it can’t be the air. We would have felt its effects, and been turned ourselves. Blood or saliva? A biological toxin? That wouldn’t explain the mass infections.’

She ran through the probabilities aloud, collating what she could remember. The Ordo Sepulturum had a particular interest and efficacy in dealing with what had been termed ‘plagues of unbelief’, the miraculous and horrific rising of the dead. Chaos taint, the belief in old infernal gods and the rejection of the Imperial creed, was a supposed catalyst. A corruption of the faith as well as the body. In this case, the symptoms did not match the disease. The pallid were alive. At least at first. This was different. Without the expertise of a magos biologis or even a sanctioned chirurgeon, she could only postulate.

‘And the other matter?’ she asked. ‘Have you found any sign?’

‘They remain clandestine.’

‘It must be connected.’

‘I agree.’

A mild spike of pain had Morgravia pinching the bridge of her nose and shutting her eyes to ward it off.

‘The malady?’ asked Hel.

Morgravia nodded. ‘Still here. Ignore it. This is nothing.’

‘Has it worsened?’

Morgravia paused but saw no need to dissemble. ‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps it is connected too.’

‘Thought had crossed my mind.’ The pain ebbed and Morgravia opened her eyes again. She regarded Hel. ‘Why did you return?’

Although the rictus of her skull mask remained fixed, the slight angle of Hel’s head gave it the impression of confusion. Her voice sounded hurt. ‘You needed me.’

‘But how, Hel? How did you know I was in trouble?’

The head twitched again, jerky like before, an expression of incredulity.

‘I think I felt it.’

Morgravia frowned, walking past her to appraise the darkened town, wondering if Hel was in fact a latent psyker, but the idea didn’t resonate despite the ambiguity of her fractured memory.

It was quiet out in the beyond. Deathly so. Meagre had become a tomb, fit only for the dead. Morgravia stared down the darkness. They had waited here long enough.

‘Have I disappointed you?’ asked the assassin, interrupting her thoughts.

Morgravia shook her head. She caught a whiff of Hel’s odour near to her, the scent of charnel houses, the sweat of exertion. For a moment she had the distinct impression that the assassin might be reaching out to touch her or leaning in to smell her. ‘It’s just another unanswered question.’

She turned but Hel remained as she had been, having adopted a coy, almost childlike mien.

‘This is escalating. I need answers.’

‘Did you meet with the Broker? Can we trust her?’

The data-smith had yet to tell her where she would find the Empath. Given the current state of things, Morgravia supposed she could be forgiven for abandoning the idea in favour of self-preservation, but she needed her mind back. It mattered, she knew this much. Some small ember of urgency flared at the thought, a memory still without form, though the importance of its recovery impressed itself upon her.

‘Almost certainly not, but she’s desperate enough to deal. That’s longer term. I need an edge now. Something that gets us closer.’

‘Am I to hunt?’

Morgravia considered it. Having Hel by her side yielded obvious advantages, but the assassin made her uneasy, and finding the ones hunting her had become a priority.

A slow nod saw Hel disappear back into the dark.

CHAPTER 12

No choice left

The dead lay heaped in front of the bar, right where Barak had left them. Foolish to think they would do anything other than simply be, but he had seen things very recently that had put his mortal preconceptions to the question. In any event, they were still there. Bodies entangled with bodies, human and inhuman alike. The sight of it appalled Barak, but served as a stark reminder of watching as his two hefter-servitors hauled out the corpses.

He and Drover had found Veran and the others who had become part of the horde. It didn’t feel right to let the servitors take them. They were lumbering, indelicate things, prone to shovelling the bodies, mass piles of them and their constituent parts, pushing them out into the street to fester. Barak picked up what was left of Veran, weeping as he did so, not just for the man but for everything he had lost, for what might become of Jana. It was bitter to think that Veran’s sacrifice might have merely forestalled the inevitable.

It was grim work, and the smell would linger on long after. It had to be done though, to leaven the smell inside if nothing else. The bodies would have to be burned. He wanted to burn his clothes too but he had no spares. Fear had kept the pyre unlit, fear of what the smoke or fire might bring.

The night harboured a threat Barak could not see but knew was there. A disconcerting quiet had descended over the town, and he stood upon his stoop listening to it. He lit a stick of tabac, and was taking a deep draw to steady his nerves when he saw the light.

Bright and crimson, it coloured the sky as far as he could see before fading back into darkness. Barak moved down off the stoop, squinting for the light. It returned, as vibrant as before, red ink distilled in water. A blood drop expanding, reddening the clouds. Barak winced as a shriek split the night, so loud, so appallingly loud after the silence. It ended as abruptly as it had begun, and then faintly – barely audible despite the returning stillness, and therefore distant – there came a rumble. Barak imagined churned earth, the cracking of stone.

Digging…?

He doubted the mining consortiums of Low Sink would be operating. Their owners would have fled uphive by now to escape the terror.

Raised voices emanated from within the bar, briefly arresting Barak’s attention, as the others argued around their petty agendas. Tension lingered in the air like an uninvited guest. Death roamed Meagre. For now its shadow had moved on, but it was still out there somewhere, amidst the ghost town of empty buildings and silent streets.

The light did not return a third time. A glint of metal caught his eye instead. It came from a ringed finger, the hand it belonged to curled by death into a claw. It had flopped out from beneath its rough shawl, the gem upon the band a vivid green.

Deciding he had been out on the stoop long enough, Barak returned to the bar.

The stench of blood and decay remained.

It was over, Barak knew that. Assuming he survived whatever followed, Hallow’s End would not. Had not. It bore a taint, something foul and as indelible as memory that could never be removed. It had endured fire and flood, gang war and taxation, but not this. Whatever this was had ended it.

Jana was where he had left her, resting in a leather-backed chair in one of the booths. She slept fitfully, Maela by her side, gently holding her hand. Barak nodded to her as he crossed the threshold and she smiled back, mustering a grace he had, to his shame, thought a courtesan slaved to Fharkoum incapable of.

He gave a furtive glance to the shadows at the periphery of the room, relieved to find the morbid effigy still absent. She had exuded menace, that assassin, intentionally or not. He had seen what she had done to the pallid and wasn’t ashamed to admit it scared the shit out of him. He had met killers. He had put some of them away, and others in the dirt. In low-hive, mankind’s many depredations found expression. But he had never encountered anyone like that, so uniquely disposed to the art of killing. So, although the assassin had departed, Barak stayed alert like a man who has lost track of a wild beast but knows it could return at any moment.

A few of the others had gathered around a table, one still left more or less in one piece.

Earlier, Barak had found some old sodium lamps in the storeroom and their flickering glow illuminated an old, waxy map Drover had weighed down with coins and tankards. They had all become acquainted in the short time after, exchanging names and sometimes greetings, as if any of that really mattered any more. Mankind will find comforts where it may, he supposed, and approached the table.

‘Getting to the precinct house won’t be easy,’ Drover was saying. ‘This road,’ he pointed to the map, tracing a gloved finger down the map, ‘is the most direct route but that makes it the busiest. The place is a fortress, no way it’s been breached.’ He looked up as Barak stepped up. ‘Let’s hope your old comrades are in a charitable mood and open up for us.’

‘I can get them to open the gate,’ said Barak, with more confidence that he felt. He would have to trade on his old alliances, and even then he couldn’t seriously vouch for everyone in the room. As long as he and Jana were safe…

Another agenda, he thought. I’m no better than the rest of them.

The precinct district had a walled border dividing it from the rest of low-hive, handy in the event of a block riot or a gang war. A single high-sided gate was the only way in. Two guard towers manned by snipers and auto-turrets maintained overwatch. A kill box extended outwards from the wall for over a hundred and fifty feet.

Drover regarded Barak keenly, as if measuring the truth in his words. ‘Then I feel better already,’ he said, the smile he gave not reaching his eyes.

Fharkoum barked something in his native tongue. Apparently, he had tired of speaking Gothic.

He sat at a remove from the others, resting against the wall, sweating and drinking. The manservant, Kharata, stood close and translated for his master.

‘Our business is not with the proctors.’

Drover leaned back to put his booted feet up onto the table, one after the other, and crossed them. ‘Anyone would think you’re avoiding the upholders of the Lex.’

‘Do you trust them?’ asked Kharata.

‘That’s hardly the point, is it? I don’t trust you,’ then he gestured to Fharkoum who was muttering something to himself, or at least that’s how it appeared, ‘and I really don’t trust him. But there’s no staying here for any of us.’

Fharkoum scoffed, deigning to speak. ‘I have no business with proctors,’ he said.

‘Nor do I,’ said the Broker, who sat opposite Drover, the epitome of poise and studied neutrality. She and Fharkoum shared a glance and Barak sensed a deal had been made between them. ‘This crisis could be over in hours, days, it might already be.’

‘If you truly believed that you would have already left,’ Drover replied.

‘Remember who is paying you,’ the Broker said, the threat more than implied.

Drover appeared unconcerned. ‘Your coin buys my gun arm, not my free will.’ He flicked a glance at the sommelier standing behind her. It looked nondescript enough, but he evidently knew better.

The Broker didn’t press the issue. ‘Regardless, I need the inquisitor before I can leave,’ she countered. ‘I am still owed.’

‘A debt I swore would be paid in full,’ said Morgravia, having overhead everything. She stopped in the doorway. They had raised the blast door manually, using a crank located in the storeroom, and the wan light from outside framed her imposing silhouette. ‘It will be,’ she promised, moving inside.

She looked pale, almost haunted, and Barak wondered if the ‘abyss’ she had spoken of earlier had begun to show its toll. He hadn’t forgotten her collapsing during the fight, but had chosen not to mention it.

‘But we can’t stay here any longer,’ said Morgravia. ‘Meagre is without power, maybe all of Low Sink. It is also seemingly without order. Whether this crisis has abated or not, a different one will have arisen to replace it or complicate it further. The precinct house is close. It has troops and weapons. We have discussed this.’

‘In actual fact, you declared it,’ said the Broker.

Morgravia pressed on, ignoring the discontent. ‘We head there, find out what the proctors know. If you want to leave after that… No one will stop you.’

The Broker bowed her acquiescence but Barak didn’t think she looked placated.

‘You, inquisitor…’ uttered the fat merchant, sweaty and dishevelled. He inflected the word so it sounded like an expletive rather than a form of address. Contempt tightened the inquisitor’s face. ‘What is all of this…’ he gestured to the blood and the strings of viscera still gumming up the partly sealed blast door, ‘…shit.’

He sneered at Morgravia, and she returned the sentiment, her eyes narrowing to knife-slits.

‘Beyond your understanding,’ she said.

Barak could see Fharkoum rooting through the shadows with his eyes, trying to determine if the assassin was still nearby. He wondered what the merchant was thinking – if, via his hired gun, he would be bold enough to try anything. He looked scared, and scared men were prone to making poor decisions.

‘I’ve seen something like this before,’ Drover cut in, forestalling the need for violence. ‘Out in the herds. Called it the ravening. Beasts eating beasts, foaming, raging. Messy. Never heard of it being passed on to humans though.’

Ravening, thought Barak, always such colourful names.

‘You might be thinking about getting out of low-hive,’ said Morgravia, apparently uninterested in whatever bestial ague Drover had encountered in his past. ‘A sane idea. But the border gate is several districts away, and I can vouch for what’s between here and there. Even assuming the mag-trans still functions, and that’s a large ask, it’s a distance.’ She met Barak’s gaze, and he imagined she must have seen it falter when he realised Morgravia alluded to the possibility of Jana never surviving such a journey. ‘Precinct house is reachable, and it’s about the only safe haven left.’

Fharkoum muttered something to Kharata, the hired gun smiling coldly. Barak didn’t trust them and wondered how long the fragile alliance between the survivors would last. A barked invective then saw the courtesans scurrying to the fat merchant’s side. Maela sent a furtive glance to Barak, who nodded by way of silent gratitude.

Drover swung his feet off the table and stood.

‘It’s decided then,’ he said, flashing an adder’s smile at Barak. ‘We impose upon the lawmen, and hope they have kind hearts and a lot of fucking guns.’

The throaty growl of an engine had presaged the arrival of the Mule.

Drover had made some comment about its reliability, suggesting the vehicle was less than fit for purpose and should perhaps be sold off for parts, but it ran. And it looked tough.

It was a rig, an armoured truck, ostensibly used for riot suppression. Its flanks were shielded by metal plates, its hood fitted with a triangular dozer blade. Heavy, chained tyres tore up the ground, ripping furrows in the dirt as it came to a halt, and a pair of cowled lamps at the front cut through the dark like lances. A ladder unfolded down from the cabin to the ground. The cabin itself had enough room for six, two sitting up front and four behind. A flatbed trailer mounted onto the vehicle chassis could take more.

Barak drove, familiar with the vehicle’s operation. The Broker sat next to him. Fharkoum took up two seats in the back, the others going to Jana and Maela. The merchant didn’t much like being estranged from his hired gun, nor did Kharata for that matter, but there was little choice.

Morgravia stood up in the trailer, hands braced against the lipped edge. An acrid scent thronged the air, and as they got underway she followed the trailing smoke.

A fire burned. It had spread to the stoop, then crept further until the frontage of the bar crackled with flames. It was voracious, devouring bone and flesh. It ran rampant through old timber, catching on scraps of parchment and cloth. It rose up like a dark beacon, pluming with oily black clouds. Vortices of ash spiralled upwards, churning, growing. The breeze turned thick with the reek of pig fat, though it wasn’t pig but crackled and spat just the same. A thunderous boom resounded as the fire reached the alcohol and it cooked off.

‘Damn…’ Drover murmured, holding up a hand to ward off the heat and the glare of the fire.

Rain was falling. It hissed against the flames, a reaction of the mild toxins in the water.

As the distance grew and the sight of Hallow’s End became less and less distinct, Morgravia watched in silence as the two servitors they had left behind lit up. They stood like sentinels, unmoved by pain, unconcerned by the fire consuming them. As their sinews and wires blackened away, one of the servitors collapsed to its knees and then plunged forwards. Its skin was burning. The other followed swiftly afterwards, just two more bodies for the pyre.

The smoke billowed, drifting until it cloaked the bar from sight.

CHAPTER 13

Hollow

The rain felt good against Cristo’s skin. It vented from the upper strata of the hive and possessed low-level alkalinity, a product of atmospheric compressors and colossal air filtration. The rich would breathe clean, pure air with all its harmful elements extracted, while the working poor would make do with less. At least it was cooling and kept him awake.

Fatigue gnawed at his body. His muscles ached. His limbs dragged as he walked and he didn’t dare put Karina down for fear he wouldn’t be able to pick her up again, such was the stiffness in his arms. They had fled through Meagre, dead-legged, pushing on through raw adrenaline and terror. The town was abandoned, offering nothing but silence and the slow creak of vendor signs or the scuttle of refuse stirring on the breeze. It was quiet enough to hear the approach of the horde, slower than before, though they had yet to see it, its feral groaning more laboured.

That and that alone had given them the slightest of chances to reach Hallow’s End.

Cristo stumbled then righted himself, belatedly noticing Celestia standing by his side. She had sheathed the sword, and wrapped both her arms around Cristo’s thick bicep to help keep him on his feet. He nodded, too tired to speak, and held up his face to the alkali rain, unconcerned by the gentle stinging against his skin.

‘How far?’ Her voice came out a weakened rasp.

Close, thought Cristo, I hope it’s close. Then he smelled the ash and soot on the air.

‘God Emperor… no,’ he croaked, and tried to run. He staggered, stride leaden, hot agony searing through his limbs.

Celestia staggered with him, half pushing, half dragged, her own reserves of strength way past the redline. She gasped, a starved breath. A grunt of pain.

Then came the end of hope.

Emerging from an alleyway, Cristo stopped dead. Unprepared for the abrupt halt, Celestia bundled into him.

The rain had doused much of the fire. It crackled in embers now but must once have raged like an inferno. Hallow’s End was gone; it had simply ceased to be, and in its place remained a shadow, a hollow and burnt-out shell. Blackened timbers reached up, splintered like broken bones. Soot smeared and funereal, the stone and metal had endured, though both were cracked and warped by heat.

Cristo staggered on. He felt Celestia’s arms untether from his own and heard the dull thud of her body as she crumpled to the ground. He took another step, two more, the fire-gouged ruin almost goading him. He came upon two bodies at the periphery, the corroded machine parts amongst their bones revealing them as servitors.

Cristo passed them. He still had Karina in his arms, unable, unwilling to put her down.

She stirred then, coughing from the smoke that lingered throughout the devastation. It curled, grey and black, phantasmal in the falling rain.

‘Father…’

He didn’t hear her at first, and took another step. A piece of roof bent underfoot, raising a metallic din. A fallen beam cracked, nothing left to it but charcoal. And there were bodies. Not just those out front, or in the conglomerated heap, still gently simmering. These were inside.

‘Father…’

Bits of skulls. Teeth. A skeletal hand. Pieces disparate from their concomitant bodies.

‘Father!’

Cristo looked down…

‘Karina…’

…and felt the strength leave his limbs entirely. He sank knee-deep in the ash, his daughter detaching herself from his grasp to leaven the burden. She stood unsteadily, touching the dried blood on her head. Any disorientation she might have felt fled in the face of her father’s near expiration.

Cristo fell down on one hand, and Karina fell too, moving with him to hold him steady.

‘It’s Hallow’s End…’ he rasped. ‘It’s Barak’s old place.’

Karina looked around, disbelieving. She knew this place. Her father had drunk at Hallow’s End, she just a girl in his shadow, listening to Jana and Veran playing on the stage. It had been the only peace they had ever known. But things had changed. She had changed. No longer content to sit in her father’s shadow, unwilling to submit to the endless toil of the bullet farms. That life had taken her mother and ruined her father, she vowed it would not take her. But what kind of choice was there between the grind and the gangs? She was as disorientated then as she was now.

‘I can’t…’ she said, trying to piece together her present and reconcile it with the most recent past she remembered. ‘What’s happening?’

Her gaze alighted on Celestia, lying prone in the street.

‘Who is that?’

‘Holy Sister.’

Karina’s gaze snapped back to him, incredulous. ‘A what?’

Cristo shook his head, too tired to give an explanation.

‘Is she…?’ asked Karina.

‘I don’t… know.’

‘Did you…?’

‘No.’ He was broken, beaten. A strong man, laid low, and he needed her.

‘Throne,’ Karina wept, whispering, ‘Dad.’

A decade rolled back like the recoiling of the tide, all those years washed away, and all it took was for him to die.

‘I’m sorry…’ Cristo rasped. ‘For all of it. I never wanted any of this… for you.’

He slumped forwards like so much dead weight and Karina hadn’t the strength to keep him upright. Cristo felt the kiss of wet ash, and let its scent fill his nostrils, let its blackness smear his skin. He wanted to rise, to fight. He could feel the dead approaching, detect their voices and half-heard susurrations scratching on the wind.

You have to run, he tried to say but could only gasp, his mouth opening and closing in impotent frustration.

Darkness crowded his sight, beginning at the edges and creeping inwards. He kept his gaze on Karina. Her face, his daughter’s face, fraught with worry for a father who had failed her in life, the bond between them perhaps restored, but which he would never know again. Cruel that it should happen now, at the end. He should have been better. He wished he had been better.

Then Cristo shut his eyes, and the darkness became absolute.

CHAPTER 14

Hate red

The roads through Meagre were empty, the town and the district apparently deserted. No crowds bustled, no vendors hawked their wares; even the preachers of the Imperial faith had been silenced. Debris from collapsed buildings littered the streets, fires faintly guttering in their burnt-out remains. A makeshift stockade had fallen as if sacked by an attacker, its barricades rent and torn down. The detritus of the riots lay everywhere, and was widespread. A stampede had come through here, and it had left the remnants of humble lives in its wake: a scribe’s broken quill, a few scattered coins, a shoe without its owner. The Mule crushed everything under its heavy tread, relentless and inexorable. Rubble parted before its dozer blade, old standing barricades were flattened.

The ride was dulcet enough, the trailer rattling and vibrating to the pitch of the terrain. Barak had found sufficient blankets to make sitting comfortable and the Broker had taken advantage, curled up like a feline against the cross-legged figure of the sommelier. Waiter, warrior and concubine? Morgravia preferred not to assume either way as she regarded her fellow passengers. One of Fharkoum’s courtesans had found a corner to become lost in. She hunched up her knees to her chest and stared at the grubby blankets, perhaps hoping a door would open up inside their folds and let her escape the nightmare.

Morgravia sat against one of the flanking trailer walls and looked out into the night, feeling its wintry regard. She tried not to imagine what might lurk beyond her sight but knew the pallid were but a symptom of something worse, something she had been hunting. She again considered the cause of the plague, the unlikelihood of a pathogen and the even less probable notion of the taint of Ruin. Meagre, all of Blackgheist, was a faithless place. Any contagion brought about by unbelief and the embrace of the Dark Gods would have manifested long before now. And the sheer masses infected… It was as if someone had thrown a lever.

‘Please…’ a wheedling voice enquired.

She looked across the flatbed, irritated to be turned from her thoughts, and glared into the fearful eyes of the scribe. Finely attired, though worn by recent events, he exuded softness.

‘I can’t do this,’ he said.

Morgravia wanted to hit him but Drover, who had been leaning nearby and smoking a black cheroot, put a reassuring hand upon the scribe’s shoulder.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Sir?’

‘What does your mother call you?’

‘Oh… Arkyle.’

‘Listen to me, Arkyle,’ Drover said, squeezing a little tighter, ‘no one wants this, but you’re alive. You are doing this. We’re all doing this, like it or not.’ He paused, conceding, ‘Mostly not.’ He smiled then, pulling his punch dagger so quickly that even Morgravia was taken aback. ‘I can shorten the experience, if you want,’ he said, his voice soft, the scribe’s eyes widening at the blade suddenly held to his throat. ‘It’ll be clean, and I promise it won’t hurt much. I’m good. Real good. I’ve done it for cattle more times than I care to count. Not a one of them ever made a peep. Would you like me to snuff you out, quiet and gentle like? I’d do it quick, a little pain, a little heat, a little cold and then…’ He made a flourish of his other hand then put a finger to his lips. ‘Is that what you want?’

Arkyle stared, he stared for so long unmoving that Morgravia began to think his heart might have stopped, but then he shook his head – a slight movement, a near-imperceptible gesture.

‘So, you’re doing this,’ Drover confirmed.

Arkyle nodded.

‘Don’t make us have this conversation again,’ Drover warned, ‘and if you refuse to fight when you need to fight, I will slit you open from neck to nethers and leave you to bleed out with your guts round your ankles, understand?’

Another nod, shallower than the preceding one. The eyes widened further.

Drover leaned back, sheathing the knife and gesturing to the ruins of the town with the glowing ash of his cheroot. ‘This here is shit. It’s as shit as it gets. We are nostril-deep in it so we ain’t got no choice but to suck it up, and there ain’t no way out we don’t make for ourselves, and that is a f–’

He stopped, wrong-footed by the courtesan springing to her feet and leaping onto the cabin.

‘The hell…’

She crawled, half slid, and threw herself under the wheels.

Barak slammed the brakes hard, and Drover nearly pitched out himself as the others were smashed forwards, but it was too late.

The Mule ground to a halt, muddy red tracks left in its wake, and from the cabin Barak shouted a raft of expletives. After he’d recovered, the two-way vox-receiver in the flatbed hissed and his voice crackled through.

‘Who was that? What the hell was that?’

Picking herself up, Morgravia answered. ‘One of Fharkoum’s harem.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing, damn your soul. She did it herself.’

Drover had leapt down to the ground, landing in a crouch.

‘As we’re stopping, someone should keep a watch,’ he said.

Morgravia agreed and tossed him the shotgun, which he caught deftly as he moved to the front of the rig. She heard him whistle as he inspected the carnage.

She heard the low thrum of shrouded engines, like a lander or a gun-cutter on mute, but looking into the night sky she couldn’t discern anything unusual. Just smoke and darkness.

‘You hear that?’ she asked of no one in particular.

Then something moved nearer the ground. Morgravia saw it flicker in her peripheral vision and turned her head to try to track it. Nothing.

‘Get us moving, Barak,’ she said into the vox-receiver. The sky still looked clear.

‘She’s entangled in the drive axle,’ he called back, having stepped out of the cabin to take a look himself. ‘Merciful Throne…’

Morgravia went to the trailer edge and leaned over, acutely aware of the Broker watching silently. She had sat up, the sommelier still close. Drover wandered into her eyeline, coming from the front of the rig.

‘It’s a mess. Strings of meat, cracked bone. Hair.’

Morgravia scowled. ‘Barak, get us moving now. Loitering in the open is a very bad idea.’ She hadn’t seen or heard anything of Fharkoum or Kharata, and she assumed the fat merchant had no opinion of the ugly death of his slave.

‘I see something…’ It was Drover who spoke, slowly walking the perimeter of the Mule, shotgun at the ready.

Morgravia followed his gaze, briefly wishing she hadn’t surrendered the weapon.

A soft chime emanated from the darkness, like metal ringing against metal. A scrape followed, metallic like the first sound, a butcher sharpening his knives.

Another chime pealed from the north, the same pattern repeating, then from the south, east and west.

Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape.

Drover had roamed farther out, muzzle switching between cardinal points, all the while the metallic refrain growing louder.

Morgravia recalled him, kicking out the trailer’s rear ramp so that it slammed down to the ground.

‘Back here, now.’

Drover turned, about to say something pithy, but thought better of it when he saw Morgravia’s face. He slung the shotgun on its strap and hurried back to the trailer, scurrying aboard with a hand up from the inquisitor before helping pull up the ramp.

The engine surged, a high-pitched shriek that set their teeth on edge. The front wheel turned on the right-hand side and the rig slewed in a half-circle, kicked out of true by the sticking left wheel.

Watery red lamps flared in the shadows, distant, but becoming more distinct.

Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape.

A veritable chorus sang out the butcher’s song. The red lamps multiplied into a crimson constellation.

‘Let’s get underway,’ Morgravia urged down the vox.

The engine replied, shrieking, the rig turning as the rear wheels propelled it around the sticking drive axle. They were almost facing back the way they had come.

‘Barak…’

‘I’m damn well trying…’

The circle of red lamps closed, hot embers now, unfettered by distance or the thready smoke still clouding the township. A noose enclosed, one with sharp paring blades.

Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape.

Drover still had the shotgun and panned it full circle, following the sounds.

Morgravia had pulled her knife and turned to the others in the trailer. Her gaze fell on the Broker and the sommelier in particular. ‘Are you prepared to fight?’

The sommelier, already standing, conceded the slightest nod and Morgravia swore she saw his arms tense inside the folds of his robes. She imagined a weapon concealed beneath, one the sommelier was well practised with. Even the scribe, Arkyle, since Drover had given him the talk, had found a crowbar and clung to it with both quivering hands.

‘Kharata,’ Morgravia snarled down the vox, ‘get your sorry carcass up here with the rest of us, or is the scribe who near pissed himself the braver man?’

There was a moment’s pause in which those inside the trailer watched the periphery and the red lamps burning. Morgravia squinted as a figure started to resolve. Metallic, spindle-limbed, blades for arms. The sight of it stirred something in her besides fear, a vague memory which coalesced only to scatter like a wisp of smoke against the wind. She felt her scars itch, the slow and agonising unstitching of flesh, the physical abuses of her body.

She knew this thing, or its ilk. The cyborganic butchers of the heretic Mechanicus. What past transgression, what blight against reason had Blackgheist committed to bring these flesh carvers and technological perversions to its door?

Morgravia dearly wanted a gun. Instead she called to Drover. ‘There!’

The spindle-thing ran, breaking from the circling pack, its reverse-canted legs pistoning hard.

Drover’s blast hit it left of middle, forcing its shoulder to dip and turn. It stumbled, fragments falling from its skeletal frame. The eye burned, hate red.

‘Kill it!’ Morgravia shouted.

A second burst riddled its torso, tearing out wires in a flash of sparks. Oil and vital fluids sprayed its countenance where a mouth-pipe bulged with laboured intensity. It got ten feet from the trailer when Drover took off its head, neck and part of its clavicle. It collapsed into a mire of its own fluids, limbs twitching like a dead arachnid.

Drover clacked a fresh round into the shotgun’s breech. ‘What the Throne is that?’

‘Only the first,’ Morgravia replied.

Two more were coming, barrelling on all four limbs, back legs kicking as the blade arms dug into the ground and propelled them.

The first spun on its heel, back leg shot out, opposite front limb torn off as Kharata demonstrated the stopping power of his flechette pistol.

Good of you to join us, Morgravia wanted to say, but settled for withering contempt in her gaze instead.

It kept going, the spindle-thing, crawling and scraping on one leg, one arm, before a flechette round to the head ended it.

Drover took out the other one, cleaner this time having now assessed his enemy, a focused blast to the skull leaving it decapitated and floundering as it skidded onto its front and slid to stillness.

‘Barak!’ Morgravia roared.

The engine roared too, harder this time as Barak hammered the fuel pedal. The Mule whirled so sharply the Broker tipped out, shrieking a little as she did so. Without a moment’s hesitation, the sommelier leapt after her, his robes parting to reveal a battle-harness beneath. A long chained whip unfurled, its segmented parts snapping like a tongue as the sommelier energised each link. It lashed out, carving two more spindle-things to wreckage, cleaving through metal with horrific ease. They discombobulated where they stood, torso, limbs and face pulled apart by simple gravity as they were separated.

The Broker crawled, reaching her formidable protector as he looped the whip around, scything at the spindle-things as they rushed in. She kept going, getting back to the rig where Morgravia leaned down to haul her up, grunting with the weight of the Broker’s augmetics.

Drover and Kharata fended off the rest as they piled in, a machine herd bent on slaughter. This wasn’t the plague, the ravening as the Drover had referred to it. It had the hallmarks of a purge, a determined and thorough execution and eradication. Meagre had been cleared out and now just the dregs remained, Morgravia amongst them. Illegal psykers, mutants, heretic cults – each were worthy of such focused pogroms, but the motivation here was beyond her ability to currently fathom.

At last Barak freed the drive axle, grinding away whatever bone and matter had gummed its workings. The Mule lurched but then turned, its forward momentum restored. The Broker was shouting from the back of the trailer, her usual composure fracturing under the very real and present threat to her sommelier, who fought ferociously as the spindle-things came for him. Drover sent forth another blast and even Kharata added to the fusillade, but the Mechanicus killers were numerous, and they were fast. They swarmed the sommelier, cutting him off from the rig.

His eyes met with the Broker’s, a momentary connection that suggested he had a good degree more sentience than Morgravia had first given him credit for. He didn’t cry out or plead for rescue or even urge the others on, he simply fought, that one look he gave to his mistress the only indication of his will. But he couldn’t engage them all, and the overspill made for the rig, blade limbs scything, legs poised to spring.

‘Move damn it, Barak. Get us out of here. Now.’

Wheel-spinning in the sludge, the rig sped off, kicking up filth in its wake.

Clinging to the back wall of the trailer, the Broker stared as the sommelier fought. The machines flocked him, only kept at bay by the fatal revolutions of his whip. She stared until the fight had become a smudge and then nothing but a memory as the darkness claimed it. Even then she stared, her eyes on the night, listening to the distant chimes of battle, until even they fell still and all was shadow and silence again.

Only then did she release her grip, only then did she retreat from the wall and turn her gaze upon Morgravia.

The rig rumbled on, as the precinct house grew ever closer. And in the night sky, faint and distant, crimson lights.

CHAPTER 15

Ruination

The blade felt sharp against the skin, tucked just under the jugular. A quick slash and the carotid would open, spilling a river of red. This was the first thing Cristo thought of as he regained consciousness. The second was simply, I’m alive…

Relief quickly turned to fear, the revelation coming as he opened his eyes and saw men gathered around them.

A circle of masks, ragged strips of robes masking old military fatigues or factorum uniforms. One of those masks regarded him, the eyes that were visible through the slits bright and azure like chips of sapphire. It wore a simulacrum of a blank face, the strange figure, and his dirty red vestments smelled of cloying incense and blood, as if one had been deployed to obscure the other. Instead, both mingled into something noisome.

Cristo glanced about, only moving his eyes. He counted seven more figures, thuggish kinds, with masks of saints or laurel-crowned paragons. Two wore the faces of eagles. The aquila daubed their attire, roughly drawn, a dark stain that reminded Cristo of blood. Cudgels and rusty knives hung from studded leather belts. A few had a flagellant’s binding rope lashed around their ankles, the dried matter trailing from its inward-facing spikes like little tears of penance. Some carried trophies. Cristo saw bones, a rotting skull. They stank, despite the effort of cloves and garlic to suppress their foul odour.

The one with the knife – it was silver, double-edged and had the ornate look of an athame – leaned in to speak into Cristo’s ear. His breath reeked of soiled meat.

‘Weary traveller,’ his voice slid with the honey of a practised demagogue, ‘I am called Convocation, and these are my flock, the Divine.’

Zealots, Low Sink had them in abundance. Most deprived settlements did, their easy charms and false promises playing well with the disenfranchised and the desperate. Ordinarily, the proctors would suppress their bolder ambitions, but the Lex had departed Meagre altogether and left something primal in its place. Gang rule was now the only law, and the largest gang of all was that of the Imperial cult.

Power abhors a vacuum, or so Cristo had heard it said. An old phrase from old lips, but it held true. And in the absence of the proctors, a new law had arisen.

Belatedly, Cristo realised the skulls hanging off their belts were of the infected. Distended and emaciated, they could be no other. Then he saw Karina and Celestia, pushed to their knees, hands bound behind their heads, and Cristo tried to rise. The knife bit, deep enough to sting and draw a thick crimson rivulet that beaded down the blade.

‘No,’ the priest called Convocation said, ‘you stay.’

‘Don’t–’ Cristo snarled.

But Convocation smiled, certain of his absolute dominion.

‘Tell me, brother of man,’ he said, like a mendicant in search of alms, ‘do you believe in the Emperor’s light and righteous judgement?’

Two burly zealots hauled Cristo up, one wearing a hessian hood emblazoned with the eagle, the other an angelic mask. The latter’s false-face only came halfway down his features; a stubbled chin was left jutting and exposed, and in direct opposition to the serenity evoked by his porcelain visage. They had short-hafted maces looped to a length of rope that tied their makeshift robes together. Heavy boots and coarse fabrics were just visible beneath. Cristo thought he caught the fringe of a partly hidden proctor’s uniform on one of them.

Make an already weak man feel powerless and watch him join the first cult that offers him succour. Convocation kept the knife close throughout Cristo’s rough handling, an eagerness for violence lighting his eyes. Cristo gave the priest no cause to act upon it, even when they dragged Karina and Celestia to their feet too.

Eight further masked figures emerged through the murk and the rain, like pale spectres. A few wielded spiked clubs, improvised lengths of timber with nails punched through the ends. Two carried large hammers. Several had pistols tucked in their rude belts. One had an autogun slung over her shoulder on a strap. Begrimed, raggedly attired but so armed, they had the look of psychotic beggars.

Convocation withdrew but didn’t speak. Instead, he gestured with the ritual knife. Two flicks of the wrist, a feudal lord ordering his vassals, and Cristo was ushered forwards.

Then began a slow march through the ruins of Meagre.

Abandoned buildings gave hollow greeting as they passed. Fires still burned in some places. In the distance, an old watchtower spewed out smoke. A sense of profound absence had taken the town. Death had swept through it, death and fear, leaving it raw and exposed like a wound. It was quiet now, barring the rain, but so is a cemetery.

Cristo tried not to imagine the lives lost or those who had succumbed to the contagion sweeping the districts. He had his head down for most of the march, trying to think, to plan a way out. Karina and Celestia were kept behind him, their fate concealed also, and Cristo thought it was probably a means to keep him in line. Not that he was in much fit state to do anything other than comply. He had slept earlier, at least. He didn’t know for how long, and it been a fitful rest brought on by exhaustion. The priest had fed him a pungent draught that Cristo had tried to refuse at first, but then rough hands had gripped his arms, his neck, before levering open his jaw, and he had drunk. It tasted vile, like strong hooch, and he thought it drugged but it had invigorated him, even quenching a little of his thirst.

‘Where are you taking us?’ he asked, but Convocation didn’t answer.

They marched in silence, a column of pilgrims being led to paradise, except Cristo thought his idea of what that meant might differ from what it meant for the priest and his flock. They were lean folk, their eyes hard and hungry, sustained by will – or more accurately the fear of what Convocation might do to them if they defied him. Cristo knew Meagre had fallen far, but for its people to accept such demagogues unflinchingly and absolutely in such a short span of time told him exactly how far.

That they encountered none of the dead was the only saving grace. Cristo feared for his daughter, and for Celestia. Not because of what the zealots might do to them but because he felt powerless to prevent it. By the time they reached the gaping maw of the maglev tunnel that fear hadn’t lessened. Apart from the uninviting dark and the cold and existential dread that comes from staring into an abyssal void, the first thing that struck Cristo was the smell. Something had died in that tunnel. It had become a burial place, a tomb of the unquiet. He had no wish to go that way, and even less for his daughter to accompany him.

‘What is this?’ he asked, slowing his footfalls and feeling the resistance of the two men charged with his compliance. Convocation had lifted the knife from his throat and now paced alongside Cristo. Surprisingly, he answered.

‘Salvation…’ The priest smiled, but it was humourless, a product of cruelty and mania. ‘Perhaps.’

‘You sound doubtful about that.’

Convocation tutted, a lecturer telling off a foolish student. ‘Not doubt. Though,’ he conceded, ‘not everyone can be saved. To be judged one must first enter the dark and see into their immortal soul.’

And so they did.

At Convocation’s gentle urging, Cristo was led into the maglev tunnel and the rest of the pilgrims followed. A chill touched the air, redolent of a butcher’s meat locker. Old blood, spoiling flesh and the actinic tang of active magnetism ran riot across his tongue. His nose wrinkled at the stench of it. Darkness swept down on him, tenebrous and abject. It smothered him. He was immediately blind and forced to rely on his other senses for navigation. More than once he slipped, near twisting his ankle. The live maglev rail hummed in his right ear, promising a swift death. Break from his captors, leap onto the rail. It would be easy enough. As his minders backed off, Cristo suspected Convocation was testing his resolve.

‘You’ll have to kill me first…’ he whispered, to which he heard to his dismay, ‘Good, good…’ and knew he had been right.

The dead found them here, in dribs and drabs, in a part of the tunnel where the lights yet flickered. Nothing like the horde that had swept Meagre and gutted it. Spiked clubs, maces and staves did for these pitiable creatures, their gaunt faces rendered up in spastic flashes of cold grey light. They were slower than the ones Cristo had previously encountered and he wondered if this enervation was somehow symptomatic of whatever contagion had infected the populace. Certainly, it made them easier to kill, which the zealots did with unfettered abandon. It was savage, gratuitously violent, and it took Cristo a few moments to realise what it actually was. Anointment. A baptism in blood. The masks came back rubricated.

‘And so are we judged…’ he heard Convocation murmur.

Eventually, the tunnel opened out, still illuminated in spasms but here the light described a subterranean station. More or less intact, Cristo could scarcely believe his eyes when he saw the functioning mag-trans carriage aloft a few inches off the humming rail.

More of the infected lingered here, though they were skeletal, emaciated and beyond the point of perambulation. Wallowing, grasping impotently, teeth bared in a permanent grimace. Wasted, like flames deprived of air and close to extinction.

He stared as he passed them, then kept staring as they mounted the mag-trans and it ferried them deeper into hell.

CHAPTER 16

The fortress

It stood empty and silent like a ransacked tomb. A fortress, sacked but unsullied.

The rig drove through into the yard, through an open gateway, unseen and unremarked. Sentinel watchtowers loomed but did no more than cast long shadows. Beyond them, beyond the perimeter wall, lay the keep itself. Stout, buttressed flanks. A ferrocrete stockade crowned by razor wire. Auto-sentry guns jerked with spasmodic motion recognition, their ammo hoppers bled dry. The most heavily guarded and well-fortified structure in all of Meagre. Precinct IX, the proctors’ last redoubt. In the end, it had not availed them.

A carpet of shell casings crunched under the rig’s tread, pushed into the dirt like brass seedlings as it trundled past. A ramp led to a canopied depot, its parking zones also empty. Barak still brought the vehicle to a halt within the chevroned lines, habit harder to break than the ex-lawman’s spirit. He wore a stony expression as they brought Jana out from the back of the cabin, Maela assisting her as she climbed down the short ladder.

She stepped gingerly on her wounded leg, the pain obvious from her pinched features. Barak took her then, clasping his wife’s hand as if to try to squeeze the hurt out of her or perhaps absorb it into himself. He wrapped his arm around her back, gently holding her up as they walked the approach road to the keep’s entrance.

The others followed, weary from the ride, a few casting nervous glances at the darkness they had left behind them. Nothing had followed, at least nothing that could be seen or heard. The Broker had fallen into silence and melancholy, the loss of the sommelier more akin to that of a loved one than the indentured slave he had appeared to be.

Fharkoum and his man muttered to one another, the fat merchant dragging Maela close like one might cling to his property in the presence of a thief. Her scorn kept the worst of his pawing at bay, a resilience having flourished in her since Hallow’s End and everything that had come after. Barak looked about to intervene but a careful glance from Maela warned him off.

See to her, it said. And he did.

Before Barak reached the entrance, Morgravia cut him off, Drover in tow.

‘Why would they leave the keep?’ she asked.

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ Barak frowned. ‘Could be the entire precinct got deployed.’

‘And they happened to leave open the gate behind them?’

‘Fair point.’

Morgravia gestured to Drover, who looked back at her mildly aghast, poking a finger against his own chest.

‘You’ve got the gun, hireling,’ she explained.

He had smoked his cigar down to the nub and clenched it between his teeth, puffing a slow purplish smoke trail as he said, ‘Best see if anyone’s home then, eh?’

Shotgun held at waist height, Drover ducked inside.

The lumens ignited with a flash of sodium brightness, a heavy clunk echoing through the barren complex as Drover threw the lever.

Having made it as far as the generator room and now returned to a wide, dirty lobby, the nerves of the party began to ease. Barak had secured the entrance, the door sealed behind manual slide bolts, and had procured lock codes from behind the raised pulpit where the proctors processed their intake. Procedurally, it appeared little had changed since his tenure as a law keeper.

Each lock code was a sheaf of parchment like a wafer, but hardened to the stiffness of plastek, and Barak showed them to the group as they gathered around him.

‘Armoury, ammunition store, mess hall, med-bay and vox-station,’ he said, leafing through the cards like a street gambler explaining a lure to his marks.

‘Pair up, divide the tasks between us,’ said Morgravia, and no one contradicted her. Lessened in agency or not, she was still Inquisition and that commanded a certain measure of obedience.

‘Well, I for one will feel better when I’ve fed my children,’ said Drover, patting his autopistols. He then unhooked the shotgun and threw it back to Morgravia, who caught it deftly. He took the lock code for the ammunition store, and wrapped an arm around Arkyle’s back as he moved off. ‘You’re with me, partner.’

‘You know what you’re looking for?’ Morgravia called.

Drover eyed the hefty sidearm holstered to the inquisitor’s belt. ‘I’m guessing cannon shells.’

Morgravia smiled thinly, her eyes betraying her amusement. ‘You’ll do just fine.’ She turned to Barak. ‘You and I are going to the armoury,’ she told him.

He cast a glance at his wife, who he had left in Maela’s care. The courtesan held her close, Jana barely lucid in that moment.

‘I will take her,’ she said. ‘The med-bay.’

Fharkoum grunted something to Kharata, prompting the hired gun to step forwards. ‘I’ll go with them,’ he uttered, eyes cold, ‘for protection.’

Barak began to mouth a protest but Morgravia stepped in.

‘Now, why do I think you’re more concerned about your master’s property than getting this injured woman to the med-bay.’

Kharata shrugged. ‘Like I give a shit what you think.’

Morgravia let her gaze linger on him just long enough that he knew she’d kill him if anything happened to either of the two in his charge, then turned back to Barak. ‘You know the armoury. You know the guns, and you’re another pair of hands that I trust.’

He nodded by way of agreement, though still didn’t look happy about the arrangement with Kharata.

‘Then I shall procure sustenance,’ said the Broker, having reasserted her air of calm. Whatever grief or blame she harboured for the sommelier’s fate, she kept it hidden for now. The mess hall was closest to the entrance. It was visible from the lobby. It therefore didn’t surprise Morgravia when Fharkoum went with the Broker.

The lobby was a hub with several avenues all trailing off from its main nexus. A map mounted on the wall made navigation easier. The precinct house was a fortified keep but it wasn’t huge. Three floors, one sub-basement where the cells and archives were located. This area would remain sealed. According to Barak it also ran on a separate generator, so the lights would still be out.

Nothing down there for us, thought Morgravia and followed Barak towards the armoury.

Stripped almost bare, the main armoury was a sorry sight.

‘Is this it?’ asked Morgravia, scowling.

‘Precinct’s only got this one cache.’

A pair of shotguns, three stub pistols, one autogun, a few sodium lanterns and a belt of tear gas grenades. It wasn’t much. They took everything.

‘Here,’ said Barak, throwing Morgravia a handheld vox. She caught it and checked the power. A rasp of static issued out.

Barak snagged its twin to his belt. ‘Channel two,’ he said, having already clicked it into place on his own vox.

Morgravia nodded and did the same.

‘What about the sub-basement?’ she asked, reassessing her earlier assumption as she armed up. She took one of the shotguns, a lantern and a stub pistol. Like a packhorse, Barak carried the rest.

The ex-proctor rubbed at his stubbled chin. ‘Could be something useful. There’s a few old stores down there. Mainly machine parts back in the day, but that might’ve changed.’

‘It’s worth a try.’ She hefted the shotgun. It was weighty, reassuring. ‘We won’t get far on these.’

Barak raised an eyebrow. ‘How far do we need to go?’

‘Hive edge, to the gate. We need to move uphive and quickly.’

She didn’t mention that she had other concerns, ones that might mean spending more time in Low Sink. That would all depend on the Broker giving up the location of the Empath. Up until now, Morgravia had been focused on survival, but with the immediate danger passed a different imperative took hold.

‘Won’t the gate be sealed?’

‘Not for me.’

That too was misleading. She doubted she would be headed to the gate, and so she needed to find another way to ensure it remained unbarred for Barak and the others. A problem for later, although not much later.

‘Okay then,’ Barak replied, and something in his tone suggested scepticism. Lying, for an inquisitor, was like breathing. Perhaps she was losing her touch.

As she slung the shotgun over her shoulder, Morgravia noticed a barrack room leading off from the corridor to the armoury.

‘Is there a washroom back there?’ she asked, feeling the patina of grit and dirt crusting her body. She needed a bath, a shower, something. Right now, she’d settle for semi-clean water and a hose.

‘Should be a basin or two,’ said Barak. ‘You feeling all right?’

‘Tired.’

‘You want me to wait?’

‘Find your wife.’

‘What about the stores in the sub-basement?’

‘I’ll deal with those.’

Barak nodded, grateful. Before he left, he said, ‘I saw you collapse. Back in the bar.’ He held up his hands. ‘I’m not prying. I’m not. Just want to make sure I’m doing the right thing by leaving you.’

Morgravia smiled. A loyal and dutiful man. That was rare, in her experience.

‘I’ve faced the devils of the abyss, Barak. I’ve stared them down and vanquished them with this very hand.’ She showed him. ‘The chivalry is appreciated but I’ll be fine.’

Barak nodded again, but lingered.

‘Those machines…’

‘You want to know what they were?’

‘Not really. I’d rather not know anything about your world. Mine was bleak enough, serving the Lex. I can’t imagine the burdens of knowledge an inquisitor has to deal with. Are they…?’

‘Anything to do with me? Yes. I think that they probably are.’

‘Will you stop them? Can you?’

‘I am the Emperor’s servant,’ was all Morgravia said.

Barak’s face suggested he doubted that would be enough, then he said, ‘Outside the bar, before we left, before it burned to the ground, I saw lights in the sky. Red lights. And then a high-pitched shrieking. I’ve heard that sound before, or at least something similar. A mining tool, sonics. It’s used for digging. No Blackgheist mining consortium is burrowing for ore when all this shit is going on, least not one in Low Sink. I doubt any are left. Could it be related to the other machines?’

‘I’m assuming you didn’t just crack skulls as a proctor.’

‘I was an investigator too.’

‘Pretty good one, I’d say.’

‘Had my moments. So, what do you think?’

Morgravia paused, considering how much she should say. ‘I saw them too. The lights. Didn’t hear the shriek but I did hear something else. Engine drone. Low, masked. Something small like a gun-cutter. Do the proctors have anything like that?’

Barak shook his head. ‘Not in my day. Besides, proctors are noisy. Bright lamps, loud engines. Dominate, subdue and control. Not big on stealth.’

‘Another unanswered question then.’

‘I think they’re looking for something and they don’t want anyone else to know they’re doing it.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘I hoped you might have an idea.’

‘I might.’

‘Care to share?’

‘Not just yet. Let’s focus on gearing up and getting out. Something’s off about this place. I don’t think we should overstay.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘See how your wife is doing. Then meet back at the lobby.’

That seemed to satisfy Barak, who nodded then went on his way.

Once he was gone, Morgravia entered the barrack room and found the two basins he had spoken of. A cracked mirror reflected a haggard face back at her. Dark rings around the eyes had the appearance of kohl, and the skin was pale. Still, the features were strong, the expression resolute. Morgravia turned the faucet, releasing a slow but steady stream. After a few seconds, the briny appearance of the water cleared and she cupped her hands to make a reservoir, splashing her face. It felt warm but wet and some of the grime washed away, leaving dark trails in the sink. She found a cloth, wiped the back of her neck and ran a hand through her silver mohawk, finding it wretched with gritty particulate.

She stared, one ice-blue eye, the other jaundiced and bloodshot staring back. And then she saw it, a reflection of light on the mirror, momentary but not imagined. Her ice-blue eye flashed, a ripple of brilliance through the sclera. Like a bionic.

Morgravia had no bionics.

She gripped the basin with one hand, tentatively touching the edge of her eye with the other. She was breathing hard, fast. Her heart galloped. She felt around her eye socket, gently probing. It was cold, colder than the rest of the skin around it. Another flare of light. This time unmistakable. Azure, clean. She discerned focusing rings, turning slowly on concentric arcs. She probed deeper, wiggling a finger into the tear duct, searching for a gap. She found resistance. Metal. Both hands suddenly clenched the edge of the basin as Morgravia almost fell and the red dream lingered, eager for release.

‘A mind without purpose will walk in dark places,’ she murmured, looking down as she repeated the words like a mantra. She’d read them in an old book several years ago, surprised at the clarity of recall.

Taking a breath, she looked up. Nothing had changed, no horrific transformation had taken place, and the eye seemed like an eye again. But she knew. She knew. In that moment, her scars took on fresh meaning. Hurriedly, a rising fear in her gut threatening to overwhelm her if she didn’t do it quickly, she undid the flak-weave and removed the tunic underneath.

She stood naked from the waist up, examining the roadmap of pain traced across her body. Old wounds presented themselves, bullet holes, abrasions, stabbings, but the longer scars reminded her of a clothier’s markings and the segmenting of material. She had been re-sewn like a garment. She had no idea why, but felt the presence of something parasitical within, she its host.

Pressing her fingers against the edge of a thready cicatrice running down her sternum she began to dig with her nails. It hurt but only a little, as if some of the nerve endings had been scraped away, and blood started to bead…

A vox crackled, stopping Morgravia, releasing her. She blinked, and heard Drover’s voice. For a second she thought it was the handheld unit but then realised it was coming through a fluted vox-horn set in one corner of the barrack room, next to the ceiling.

‘He’s gone…’ He sounded pained. Angry. ‘The little shit’s gone.’

Dragging on her tunic, Morgravia found the voxponder and spoke into the boxy unit’s receiver cup.

‘What’s happening?’ she demanded. Her head felt heavy, hungover. She breathed deeply to clear the fogginess from her mind.

‘Bastard hit me. Hard. And he ran.’

‘Ran where? Who? What the hell are you talking about, Drover? Are you at the ammunition store?’

‘Didn’t get that far. Said he felt dizzy, so I went to find a canteen. Some water. Next I know, I’m on my knees nursing a cracked skull.’

Morgravia swore under her breath then said, ‘I think I know where he’s going.’

She turned, about to explain further, when she saw the Broker standing in her way.

The shotgun stood upright against the basin. She’d unslung it when she’d washed her face. The stub pistol lay on the basin’s edge, well within the Broker’s grasp. Morgravia’s monomolecular knife was still tucked in the back of her belt.

Morgravia didn’t move. ‘I wondered when we’d have to do this.’

CHAPTER 17

Evidence

As Barak made his way to the med-bay, he found bullet casings, las-burns on the walls, the parts of now tumbledown barricades. He had no doubt the proctors had been deployed in force, but whoever had been left had fought hard to try to hold the keep. Against whom, he didn’t know, but the gangs had been growing bolder for years and Meagre was hardly a pillar of law and order to begin with. The few signs of incursion revealed little evidence to go on. Fifteen years since he had last trod these halls. In all that time, Precinct IX had never looked so beleaguered. He also knew its ways, and had taken a shortcut in order to get to Jana quicker. Upon happening on the shell casings that goal had been subverted.

Stooping to examine one of the spent casings, Barak found the shards of something resembling a human cheekbone, only made from porcelain. At first he thought it might have come from a doll or child’s toy but upon closer inspection realised it was part of a mask, broken from a heavy blow and missed in the clean-up. He didn’t know of any gangs that wore porcelain masks as their signature, but then it had been a while.

He had passed several wanted edicts on his way through the precinct, the kind usually given to bounty hunters, for their kind was rife in Low Sink, the pickings of vagrants, gang leaders and other recidivists abundant enough to serve a great many private contractors. The proctors were known to occasionally enlist outside help, wherever a criminal element might be beyond their reach or means to apprehend or kill. Barak couldn’t remember seeing any porcelain masks, or masks of any description, amongst them and figured he might have better fortune with the archive.

The med-bay resided on the third floor but the archive would be here on this one. Reuniting with Jana had been his utmost priority since leaving the armoury, and he didn’t like the thought of her or Maela with that bastard Kharata, but he’d found a piece of evidence and knew he should follow his old instincts. All the talk with the inquisitor had rekindled a desire he thought long extinguished. He was an investigator, and he yearned for answers. For the truth.

And then there was the smell, faint at first but unmistakable now. It was rot and death. He followed it to the archive.

A locked door barred entry. With a brief moment’s hesitation, Barak shoulder-barged it. The lock broke but something else had wedged the door, and it only opened a few inches. The reek intensified, foul enough to make Barak wretch. He considered again the wisdom of breaching the door. In all his years as a proctor, he had never gone against his instincts. He had to know. Stepping back, he fired off two shots, their retorts deafeningly loud in the quiet corridor, and destroyed both hinges. The door fell back with the creak of old metal. It thudded heavily and left a rectangular void in its wake.

Barak stepped up to it.

A records cabinet lay across the threshold, the barricade keeping him out. He climbed over it. The second-floor archive was more of an office – the proper historical records were kept in the sub-basement – but he reckoned the mask and the perp who wore it were likely to be referenced here. All thoughts of digging into it evaporated, though, when Barak discovered the cause of the smell.

The watch captain was seated at his desk, the contents of his cranial cavity littering the opposite wall.

Instinctively the shotgun came up, a shell snapped into the breech.

No movement came from inside, and the air smelled ripe. The watch captain had been dead a while and must’ve barricaded himself in while death reigned outside. Wrapping an old bar cloth around his nose and mouth, Barak moved in to investigate.

A small, leather-bound journal lay open on the desk next to the watch captain. Barak picked it up, careful to avoid the sticky blood pool that had thickened to a syrup around the dead man’s chair. A pistol lay half consumed in it, but Barak wasn’t desperate enough for more ammo to attempt to retrieve it. A dead man’s gun, especially when used for a self-inflicted wound, was a bad omen.

He flicked through the journal, finding notes on criminal activities, names of informants, suspected gang territories and illegal enterprises – the usual material. A section had been devoted to a gang referred to as ‘the Divine’, a religious cult that had become more than a nuisance in the districts. The record mentioned burnings, abductions. The Divine were doomsayers and while they had been tolerated, their influence had been growing, and their behaviour more and more aberrant. Arrests had been made. Confessions extracted. Proctors had identified what they thought was the Divine’s main hideout, an old church on the outskirts of Meagre at the maglev north terminus. Plans had been devised to storm the location and purge it, stamp out the fire before it grew into a conflagration.

The riots put paid to that. As did the horror that followed. It made for harrowing reading. Lists of criminals gave way to lists of the dead, those proctors taken casualty by the growing civilian unrest. It referenced deployments, not just in Meagre but in other townships of Low Sink like Fallow and Drudge, as well as other parts of Blackgheist. The spread had been endemic to low-hive. Most of this, Barak already knew or had deduced. The last paragraph was effectively a suicide note; the one immediately preceding it chilled him like cryo-ice.

So absorbed was he in his reading, he had failed to appreciate the significance of the gentle fizz of activation emanating from the pict screen in one corner of the room. Divided into four separate feeds, each focused on a part of the precinct house. Three of the images were crazed with static, representing signal loss; the fourth was grainy but depicted the sub-basement and the cells. Not unusual for a watch captain to want to keep a close eye on his prisoners. Except in this case, most of the lights had been doused. The words in the journal returned to him.

They appear to be agitated by light.

Sodium lamps in the corridor leading to the cells still burned. The greyscale rendering of the pict feed made the light watery, but Barak saw the shadow flit past all the same. Fresh fear overlaid that already cultivating in his gut, like a bacterial infection rapidly worsening. He tapped a few iron keys on a slate next to the screen, cycling to a different feed that offered a wider view of the corridor.

The scribe, Arkyle, had found his way to the sub-basement. Even with the poor resolution of the feed, he appeared manic.

Inmates present an irritated state, their mood fractious and urgent.

He scurried, his movements frenetic, stopping occasionally to scratch at his scalp or hunker down in the nook of the wall to gently rock on his heels.

Complaints of headaches are common.

He avoided the light, or turned from it whenever he got too close.

Violent outbursts.

Several deaths.

He shuffled around in the darkness, searching for something.

We lost four proctors trying to keep them contained.

Couldn’t reach them.

Heard their screaming.

We left them, Throne forgive us.

Arkyle found the secondary generator.

Had to lock down the cells. Too many.

Emperor help us.

Arkyle threw the lever and the lights flickered, once, twice, revealing what was inside the cells, and then held steady.

Drover’s voice burst through the precinct vox-emitters, and Barak nearly dropped his shotgun. He was trembling. He hadn’t shaken this bad for fifteen years. No, that was a lie, he had much more recently, back at Hallow’s End.

The last line in the journal imprinted itself in his mind.

They were eating each other.

Stuffing the journal into his pocket, Barak ran.

He barrelled through the halls of the precinct house, breath heaving, until he reached the med-bay.

‘We have to get out,’ he said as he barged in, breathless.

Then he frowned as he fully took in the scene.

‘Where’s Kharata?’

CHAPTER 18

A reckoning

The Broker glanced at the gun and then back at Morgravia.

‘I don’t need that to kill you,’ she said.

Morgravia had guessed the Broker would have protection that extended beyond the servants she had surrounded herself with. Something in the augmetics, she assumed. Haptic weapons. Finger implants.

‘And is that why you’re here?’

‘I have every right to.’

‘Oh? How did you come to that conclusion?’

‘He died.’

‘We all die. Well,’ the inquisitor conceded, ‘most of us do. You need to be more specific.’

The weapons lit, an array of warm light glowing at the fingertips of the Broker’s right hand. Morgravia had goaded her, wanting to know what she was up against.

‘Do not be facetious, inquisitor,’ the Broker warned, emotion clouding her voice. ‘It does not suit you.’

‘That’s fair,’ Morgravia conceded. ‘Though you don’t know he’s dead.’

‘I know.’

Morgravia let that go too. ‘You are not as cold as you make out, are you?’ she said. It was a deduction not a question. ‘Though you hide it well. Voice modulation to clean out tonality, inflection.’

‘Are you investigating me now?’

‘Not currently. I warn you, though–’

‘You warn me?’ A flash of anger saw sparks crackling across the Broker’s haptic implants, like she had lightning captured in her fingers.

‘I warn you,’ Morgravia repeated, with all the confidence and strength that her rigorous training and indoctrination afforded. Her memory might be broken, but instincts were ingrained. She had lost events, moments, but not herself. ‘This will not unfold the way you want it to. The likely demise of your servitor was regrettable but could not be helped.’

‘He was no mere servitor.’

‘I assumed as much. A body-slave?’

‘A friend. A concept as alien to you as the monsters you hunt, I am sure.’

Morgravia felt that barb a little more keenly than she expected to. She was, for all intents and purposes, alone. Her enemies had isolated her, made her vulnerable and robbed her of her greatest asset – her mind. It was also very possible they had left something behind, but she couldn’t worry about that now.

‘I’m not looking for a friend,’ she said. ‘I do need your help though. And, if the weapons and the servants are any gauge, you need mine. What are you running from?’

The activation glow around the haptic weapons faded and the Broker let her arms fall to her sides.

‘What are any of us running from but our fate.’

‘Profound.’

‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you either.’

‘It helps in my sworn vocation.’

The Broker eyed Morgravia silently, the tension having lessened but still not entirely dissipated from the encounter.

‘If you’re not here to kill me, what are you here for?’

After a few seconds, the Broker answered. ‘The machines. The ones he lost his life to…’

Morgravia gave her a rueful look. ‘You’re the second person coming to me with theories.’

‘Oh?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Go on.’

The Broker gave her a shrewd look but then continued. ‘I have made many deals, inquisitor. Acquired many different items for an array of clients. That list extends to the Mechanicus.’

‘Those creatures were not of the red world.’

‘I didn’t say they were Martian.’

‘And what are you saying then?’

‘What were you investigating?’

‘I told you, my memory–’

‘Partial retrograde amnesia does not impede your intellect or deductive capacity, inquisitor.’

Despite herself, Morgravia was actually starting to like the Broker, which had to mean they were really in trouble.

‘A cult. It has to be.’

‘Hereteks,’ the Broker confirmed. ‘Renegade magi who rebel against the strictures of the Mechanicus in the pursuit of dark science and proscribed fields of study.’

Morgravia nodded.

‘Such creatures do not simply appear at a whim,’ the Broker went on. ‘There is a design in this.’

A shrug, as Morgravia made a surprised expression. ‘Have you ever considered the ordos?’

The Broker’s contemptuous narrowing of the eyes answered for her. ‘What is the cause of all this?’ she asked.

‘Of the plague?’

The Broker scowled. ‘Yes, the plague. Have you considered that? I have. I observe behaviour. I judge. Theorise. Connect. It is how I have survived this long, though not without injury.’ She held up her augmetic arms to emphasise the point and intimate a dark episode in her history. ‘It is not biological in origin. The singer, the one in black from the bar, has been bitten. This is not the causal element of the plague. Her symptoms are consistent with mild blood poisoning.’

Morgravia’s eyes narrowed, intrigued. ‘And why do you say that?’

‘Consider the rapidity of contagion. Propagation and saturation.’

‘As if someone had flipped a lever, infecting large masses at once.’

‘Precisely.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘Exactly what I have said.’

‘A switch, is that it? You think a psyker is pulling strings?’

The Broker stiffened at the term but gave no other outward reaction. Perhaps a witch had taken her arms. ‘Have you encountered many psykers who could subjugate a population?’

‘If I could remember, I’d tell you,’ replied Morgravia, somewhat bitterly.

‘What about a psyker powerful enough to alter the mental architecture of the populace of an entire city and send it rabid? Or do you think it is faith that Low Sink is lacking? Is it a grand manifestation of Ruin, of the will of the Dark Gods and we its mere playthings?’ the Broker sneered. ‘You don’t believe any of that.’

‘Say I don’t. Where does that leave us?’

‘Us?’

‘Survival now depends on our ability to work together, so, yes, us.’

‘I felt it, didn’t you? The pain, like a headache only more invasive.’

‘We’re back to mental manipulation again.’

‘Yes, we are, but not through psychic means. I think this is something else. A frequency, one specifically attuned to the human populace of the hive, and designed to elicit aberrant behaviour.’

‘Like a canine will howl if it hears the appropriate pitch?’

‘Reductive, but yes.’

‘Doesn’t turn the canine rabidly cannibalistic though.’

‘As I said, your example is reductive, crude. This frequency is of a much more sophisticated nature.’

‘How? Why?’

‘Isn’t that where your profession comes in?’

‘Helpful as ever. See, sarcasm does suit me. Are we done here?’

The Broker seemed to consider it, as if deciding whether killing Morgravia would advantage her more or less in the long run.

‘He made his choice,’ said the inquisitor softly. ‘He chose to save you.’

‘Yes. Yes, he did.’

At this admission, the tension bled away and Morgravia retrieved her weapons. ‘Help me with this,’ she said, indicating the flak-weave. Arkyle was still on the loose somewhere, doing Throne knows what. He had to be herded, questioned, possibly sanctioned. He might have answers, given willingly or otherwise. Light might be shed on the theory of the frequency, the signal that had turned human beings into the pallid.

But then the vox crackled, and upon hearing Barak’s voice she knew it was too late for any of that.

CHAPTER 19

Red ribbons

He waited at the gate, drenched in darkness as most of the lights had cut out. Those that lit the cells had been doused. Even in the shadows, the scribe looked a pitiable figure. His robes were torn and edged with dirt, his wasted body depleted by hunger and fear. He was weak. Barak had seen plenty of men like him in Hallow’s End. Meek but cruel. He would have sacrificed everything and everyone to save his own skin. And now? That desperation looked about ready to break him.

‘Arkyle,’ Barak called. He’d overhead Drover use the name, and hoped he hadn’t misheard.

The scribe turned a fraction, confirming it. He looked pale, like an exsanguinated corpse. Cadaver white with red-ringed eyes.

‘Arkyle…’ he repeated, and began to walk the corridor, ‘it’s all right. Easy to get lost in this old place.’ Barak’s guns were holstered, his hands up and palms showing, though he kept the pistol loose in its holster. He prayed the sweat didn’t give away his anxiety. His entire back was wet with it, his shirt dragging at his slick body. He was wire-taut, close to snapping. As soon as he’d seen that Jana was all right, he’d left her and Maela in the med-bay and told them to stay there and seal the door. To not let anyone in, unless it was him or Morgravia. Hurrying down to the sub-basement had left him a little breathless. In his haste, he’d forgotten he had the vox. Taking care not to make any sudden moves, edging one step after another, he flicked the audio switch to transmit and clenched the button.

The scribe didn’t react or show much awareness of anything at all, which was either good or really, really bad.

‘Arkyle, what are you doing here in the sub-basement,’ he said. ‘Nothing down here but old records and machine parts.’ Still walking, Barak paused to lick his lips. ‘Come away from the gate, son.’

Twenty feet of grimy, whitewashed corridor stood between them. The dried blood was patchy and black as pitch. A killing place.

‘I can’t…’ rasped Arkyle, then in a sobbing voice, ‘I’m sorry… it’s already too late.’

The low lumes flickered overhead, the scribe shrinking from their sodium glow as they flared and revealed that the gate was already open. Barak felt his mouth dry up like an ash desert.

‘Oh shit…’

Rank upon rank of the pallid stood on crooked limbs, dishevelled and emaciated. Gangers, low-life scum, enforcers; all and sundry stood behind the opening of the gate. Waiting. They stared dully out into the corridor.

Barak froze, torn between the urge to cross the last twenty feet and shut the gate or to run like hell.

In the end, the pallid chose for him.

They came awake as one, as if a spark had been lit, provoking sudden and violent ignition.

Turning on his heel, Barak fled. His last sight of the cells was of Arkyle, swept up by the onset of the horde. He simply vanished, absorbed into the mass. His screams only lasted a few seconds before being swallowed up too. As he released the transmit button on the vox, Morgravia’s voice came through.

‘…Barak, answer me! What the hell is happening?’

‘They’re coming.’

He slammed into the corner, jolting his elbow and nearly dropping his gun as he hit the stairs.

‘Who’s coming? We’re headed down to the sub-basement.’

‘Stay away. It’s the pallid… A shitload, right behind me.’

He fired off a shot over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of the onrushing horde, skittering around the corner after him, bodies slamming into bodies in their haste. A few were crushed, red smears lapping up the wall. Limbs tangled with each other in a disorganised scrum. Others clambered, bestial and urgent. A host of dead faces glared, withered and cadaverous. And the hunger. That awful, insatiable hunger. They had shambled at first, tight limbs finding their rhythm. Momentum threw them on like a tidal surge. Flesh, and tooth, and nail. Clawing and snarling.

Another shot. Barak couldn’t miss.

‘Med-bay…’ he gasped, heart hammering, face burning with effort. Another flight of stairs behind him, the pallid unrelenting. ‘Jana.’

‘We’ll get her,’ said Morgravia.

A third flight. Barak neared the landing to the first floor. There was door with a slide bolt. It was sturdy.

‘Kharata…’ he said, hoofing three steps at a time. Needles in his chest. Something grasped at his trouser leg but scraped cloth, then air. Fabric tore. He redoubled his efforts. More pain. He could hardly breathe. Black spots began to crowd his vision. ‘He’s gone,’ he rasped.

He reached the landing, arm outstretched for the door. Grasping it, he felt a sharp tug on his back and then he was falling. He didn’t fall far, just a couple of steps. Instinct pumped the trigger of his pistol. Three pallid lurched back, their skulls blasted outwards. Gory matter sprayed. Then came agony. Hot and bright and spiced by primordial terror. Barak kicked, felt his boot hit, a jaw yield then break. His arm came back shredded, ugly teeth marks in his flesh and blood spewing. He crawled backwards, the three pallid he had killed impeding the rest, a corpse barricade plugging up the tight corridor. The fourth had recovered, its rancid jaw hanging like a snapped hinge as it leapt and raked Barak with its claws. Skin came away in ribbons, Barak’s chest a crimson mess. He threw a punch, wrenched off the jaw completely. His gun was pressed against his body but he fired it anyway. The burst took out a chunk of the pallid’s torso: shattered rib bone dripped with gore, the cavity limned in red. He got a knee up, fighting to stay awake, to stop from passing out from the pain. He managed to extend his leg, pushing the pallid back, holding it at bay as it frantically clawed the air. Then it started scratching at Barak’s leg, and he roared.

Cold static fizzing through the vox. Black and red in his eyes.

He had led a violent life, at least at first. He had expected a violent end. A ganger’s knife. An angry patron’s bullet. Dead in an alley. Killed in his own bar.

Not this, not this way. Oh Throne, please not like this.

A bullet took the pallid in the eye, punched it back. A spray of lead followed, whipping through the horde, pinpoint and deadly. Over in seconds, it felt like minutes. The bodies jammed up the rest. Barak felt a hand grip his collar, and for a moment feared one of the bastards had got behind him.

‘You’ve been in tighter binds than this, I’d wager,’ said Drover, the labour in his voice betraying the aura of easy charm. ‘Get up, lawman. On your feet.’

They reached the door, Barak in an agonised fugue, vaguely aware of the gunslinger hauling his sorry carcass back up the stairs and through to the first floor. As soon as they were clear, Drover slammed the way behind them shut, wrenching across the deadbolt.

Drover whipped off his belt to employ as a tourniquet on Barak’s arm. Then he smiled, breathless and blood-flecked.

‘I suggest we get gone.’

Barak nodded. ‘I can stand,’ he said. The wounds to his leg and chest were painful but not so bad he couldn’t move. His arm hung by his side though, and he’d need to get it patched up sooner rather than later. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass.

Fevered scratching sounded at the door, the hinges immediately bulging against a sudden pressure from the other side.

Drover slammed a fresh clip in both autopistols. Evidently, he had reached the ammunition store after all. ‘I’ll save your hide but I ain’t carrying you, lawman.’

Barak bit back his pain. A feverish sweat lathered his body. He felt heavy, unsteady.

‘You won’t need to,’ he growled, wavering.

And then collapsed.

CHAPTER 20

Bind the wound

The lights flickered overhead, casting strange shadows through the dingy precinct. Morgravia held her pistol in front and trained it on every doorway, every alcove. Cold sweat dappled the back of her neck. Her mind wandered, and she fought to remain focused.

A frequency, the Broker had said. A signal that overrode human behaviour and turned it abnormal. Morgravia’s thoughts returned to what she had seen in the mirror. Every spasm of the sodium lamps provoked an image in her mind. Replayed over and over. The eye. The focusing lenses. A traitor in her own skin. A foreign object embedded in her flesh. And no memory of it. Not merely a piece to excise, but an actual replacement. It was both invasion and absence in one. She smelled blood, felt bullet casings crushed underfoot. A frantic buzzing filled her ears, a swarm of cognitive dissonance threatening to engulf her.

The red dream began to encroach…

cutting scything peeling back the layers red bone cracking cold metal blood stench pain two red suns looming closing…

She shut it off, closing her eyes and murmuring a benediction to anchor herself to the present as she felt herself slipping.

The Emperor is my shield, and I His will made manifest…

Here, now. That’s what mattered. The rest would have to come later. Like gauze wrapped around a split in her psyche, she’d keep it tight, hold back the blood, so she could keep moving. Bind the wound. Keep going. She had to.

The precinct swam back, like the reality of the world rushing in after breaching the surface of the ocean. So did the situation at hand. Barak had seen them. They were here. The pallid. And they were coming. He might very well already be dead. Drover too.

‘You look unwell.’

Morgravia opened her eyes as she heard the voice beside her. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’m lying.’

‘Then what is it?’ She sounded irritated.

Morgravia stopped and turned to face the Broker. ‘Have you ever felt pain in your dreams? Pain so vivid it felt real? I have. I wake from them with remembered agony and I don’t know why. I am cut and bleeding, my flesh is sundered and split. There is heat then cold. I look upon my skin and I don’t recognise it. I see a face whose features I don’t trust. I am a foreign presence inhabiting my own body. I need my mind restored. I think I might turn insane without it.’

‘And I need a ship that will take me off-world.’

‘And I ask again, why?’

The Broker would not answer.

‘And so you see,’ said Morgravia, ‘everyone has their secrets. The difference is mine are even secret from me.’

‘I heard the vox,’ said the Broker. ‘We need to leave. They might both be dead.’

‘Thought had occurred. In any case, we are leaving.’

She carried on walking. The med-bay was close, just a few more turns.

‘I mean you and I,’ said the Broker. ‘Right now.’

‘I swore an oath.’

‘I have no wish to die a heroic death for strangers.’

‘You think of Drover as a stranger?’

‘I believe the word you used was hireling. That’s accurate. I needed a gun, he provided one. Our relationship is purely transactional.’

‘And yet you trusted him with the Empath.’

‘Did I?’

Morgravia scowled. ‘More lies? It appears you trade in them too.’

‘I do,’ the Broker said brazenly. ‘You would know. I saw it in your eyes, as you looked in the mirror.’

A spike of sudden anxiety had Morgravia’s heart thundering. Ever since that moment in the barrack room, an itch had begun to irritate her, something deep within the flesh. A sense of unease nested inside her, spreading like a contagion, consuming her thoughts. She stopped to regard the Broker.

‘What did you see exactly?’

‘Only that you are hiding something. And this is a secret you do know.’ The Broker paused, considering her for a moment, the two of them standing in the flicking half-light in the industrial grime of the abandoned precinct. ‘I’ll give you the Empath,’ said the Broker in a quiet voice. ‘Get me out of the low-hive and I’ll honour the bargain we struck. You have my oath.’

‘How do I even know she is alive?’

‘She is alive. I would know if she was not.’

‘And what if I need to know what’s in my head to get us out?’

‘Then,’ said the Broker, her expression one of grim resignation, ‘we are both destined for disappointment.’

Morgravia sighed and trudged on. Soon enough, they reached the med-bay.

Jana had been patched up, and a tight if slightly yellowed bandage bound her lower leg. She perched on the edge of a low bunk, still frail, but her skin had lost its waxy sheen and ashen pallor. An empty vial of pain suppressors sat within her reach. Maela stood nearby rinsing medicae tools in a basin.

‘Where is Barak?’ Jana demanded.

‘He’s coming,’ said Morgravia. ‘Can you move?’

‘I think so.’

‘Good, because we can’t stay.’

‘Not leaving without Barak,’ said Jana, and shrugged herself off the bunk. She landed gingerly but straightened as she looked Morgravia in the eye. ‘I’ll find him alone if I have to.’

Morgravia swore under her breath.

‘You know what I am?’ asked the inquisitor.

‘I don’t care. I’m not asking you to come with me, I’m telling you I am going to get my husband.’

Morgravia applauded her fearlessness. Not many ordinary Imperial citizens would dare to speak to an inquisitor in that way. Fharkoum’s indolence and arrogance were inbred and fuelled by a sense of entitlement; Jana’s bravery came from an entirely more decent place.

‘And you?’ she asked Maela.

‘I stay too,’ she said without hesitation. Her accent was thick but her intonation of Low Gothic perfect. ‘With her.’

Morgravia swore again, a little louder this time. She gestured to Maela’s handiwork. ‘You made those bindings?’

‘I did.’

‘You were a medic?’

‘I still am.’

An educated woman in thrall to a wretched, solipsistic man. Morgravia smiled ruefully.

‘Fharkoum, he does not like you,’ Maela offered.

‘Feeling’s mutual.’

‘I overhear them talking. They think I do not listen. That I am beneath their notice.’

Morgravia wanted to hurt Fharkoum very, very much.

‘What did they say?’

‘He has a ship and a pilot. He wants to bring it here.’

‘A flyer?’ the Broker interjected, hope rising in her voice.

‘And leave us for dead, I assume,’ said Morgravia grimly.

Maela nodded.

‘Bastard…’ Morgravia’s gaze went to Jana. She slipped the shotgun over her shoulder on its strap and offered it to her. ‘If we’re going after Barak, you’ll need protection.’

Jana took it, and expertly shucked a round into the breech. Years of being the landlady of a downhive dive bar had evidently yielded some useful experience.

‘You cannot mean to go down there,’ said the Broker.

‘That’s precisely what I mean to do,’ said Jana.

Maela raised a hand, urging the others to be quiet. ‘Listen… Can you hear that?’

And in the distance, echoing through the dimly lit confines, they heard shouting and knew they wouldn’t need to go anywhere. The monsters had come to them.

CHAPTER 21

Survive or die

Kharata had been less than subtle.

Sparks riddled every scrap of equipment, every device he could lay hands on once he had got what he needed from it. Tiny serpents of electricity ran rampant over wireless units, auditory scrubbers, transmitters and receivers. Static whispered through the air like the half-heard voices of the dead.

Ejecting the empty casing of his flechette pistol, Kharata took a replacement from his belt and left the vox-room behind. He moved quickly, headed to the lifter. He’d need to disable that too. A deft knife-slash through the cable would suffice. Clean. Simple. No sense in complicating matters more than they already were. It was his method. How he had survived so long doing what he did. Keep it simple. Survive or die. No moral ambiguity. No hesitation. He served Fharkoum because the fat merchant paid well, and because it suited his needs. Loyalty could be bought if you had enough coin.

The ship was coming, a way out of this merciless shit they were in.

Kharata’s only regret was not killing that bastard cattle-hand and the inquisitor. He took solace from the fact they would die anyway. The pallid would have them. More grist for mankind’s ever-churning mill.

He reached the lifter, the doors parting to reveal the odious bulk of the merchant. Sweat poured off his ample frame and Kharata had to make a concerted effort not to wrinkle his nose at the stench. He presented a mask of implacability instead.

‘When will it arrive?’ snarled Fharkoum, wiping his mouth with the cuff of a dirty sleeve. Waddling out of the lifter, he clutched Kharata’s shoulder. His laboured breath smelled faintly of lavender and soured milk.

‘Imminently.’

Fharkoum’s lip curled in an ugly, sadistic grin.

‘Then let’s make sure that inquisitor bitch and the other dregs die in this shithole.’

He patted Kharata’s cheek, a master praising his dog but with a savagery in his eyes that promised a beating if it ever failed him.

Resisting the urge to retch at the merchant’s gelid touch, Kharata dealt with the lifter cable and then led them on. The route up to the roof was close, and he fancied he could already hear the sound of faraway engines drawing nearer.

Barak was on his feet, but limping. He looked groggy, half delirious from all the blood he was losing. His shirt was drenched in crimson and he left a dark smear in his wake, his right leg dragging behind him like a dead weight. Drover kept them moving, an arm around his back, Barak’s over the gunslinger’s shoulders. A pistol hung languidly in his grasp, close to falling.

Jana ran, her injuries forgotten in her desire to reach him. Barak smiled, teeth bloody, his features haggard. She embraced him, the pair slipping slowly to the ground, arms enfolding, clenched tightly. She kissed his face, his cuts, his lips. Held him by the chin so she could see him alive, and wept for his hurts.

He breathed, ‘I’m sorry…’

And Jana shook her head, tears cutting tracts in the dried blood.

Drover sagged beside them, leaning on the wall, exhausted with the effort of heaving the hefty ex-proctor halfway through the precinct. He held his autopistol in a loose grip, and wore a bulky musette bag slung over one shoulder. He looked nearly as ragged as Barak.

‘How many?’ asked Morgravia. The itch had returned, insistent and uncomfortable. She tried to quash it through a barricade of clenched teeth.

‘Enough. We barely made it out. Managed to get a door between us but it won’t hold long.’

She gestured to the bag and Drover pulled out a clip of heavy shells, the exact fit for her stub pistol.

‘Everything on your list.’

‘And more besides?’ she asked, partially recovering her composure.

Drover nodded, a searching look in his eyes that Morgravia ignored. ‘In case we ran into trouble,’ he said, looking behind him and then tossing the bag to Maela who caught it by the strap. She had a medi-kit in the other hand with everything she could scavenge from the med-bay. ‘They’re coming, Morgravia,’ said Drover. ‘They’re coming right now.’

A long corridor swept into darkness behind him, but sound travelled easily through the gloom, a chattering, snarling refrain of bestial voices.

They waited in the darkness, a light rain slicking the landing pad and turning it black like tar.

Through the clouds of smog and pollutant, a heavy lamp beam strafed, cutting through the morass. Grainy, dispersed light fell upon the precinct roof, and Kharata winced. He stepped forwards at Fharkoum’s barked request, flagging down the gun-cutter as it hove in to land. Rivulets of rainwater ran in tiny cataracts off its wings. The nose dipped, a giant, gunmetal bird of prey nodding its acquiescence. The backwash of stabiliser jets kicked up squalls of water, little typhoons swirling away from the lander’s descent. It touched down on clawed metal pinions, a rear ramp lowering to admit its passengers.

Fharkoum hurried over to it, grimacing at the wet and the noise. He hoisted the damp skirts of his robes, the hem sodden and stained, revealing fat, pale ankles and blotchy, yellowed-nailed toes.

‘No one follows,’ he snapped back at Kharata, shouting above the drone of cycling engines.

Kharata nodded, but experienced a moment’s hesitation as he watched the fat man struggle up the ramp and into the waiting gloom of the hold.

‘Hurry up,’ snapped Fharkoum, a hand braced against the inner side of the hold, ‘or you share their fate.’

The door to the roof was sturdy. Thick metal, heavy. A tiny slit in its face allowed Kharata to peer through to the corridor inside. He saw them, barrelling and careening in their desperation. And they saw him, his dark eyes through the slit, glittering with unashamed malice. Losing the slave girl was regrettable but he could easily procure another. The rest were nothing to him.

The cattle-hand shouted something, some bawled invective, then he raised a pistol. Kharata ducked back, hissing in pain as the bullet tore along his cheek. It missed by a hair’s breadth, but the hot brass seared his skin and left a mark.

He swore, then slammed a brace against the door so it stayed shut.

‘Survive or die,’ he muttered, grimacing as he touched the burn on his cheek and ran for the gun-cutter.

Drover aimed a kick and the door shuddered but held. He threw his body against it, rebounding off, teeth gritted at his bruised shoulder.

‘Won’t yield…’ he said, rolling back against the wall, a half-glance at what was coming for them.

Morgravia pressed her face against the slit, peering into slanting rain and darkness at a ship soaring away, its engine roar diminishing as its lights faded, consumed by cloud. She turned, and saw hope die in the others’ faces. Her skin felt hot, taut, as if stretched. The itch. It gnawed at her, slowly unpicking the stitches of her sanity.

She focused on the present, on the death that was coming for them. Farther back, lit by jerking bursts of sodium brightness, she saw the pallid.

‘You want to live…’ she said, striding forwards with her pistol arm outstretched, ‘then fight. It’s us or it’s them. Survive or die. This is it.’

She fired and in the rapidly closing distance a body fell. The pallid trampled it, barely hindered, the corpse consumed by a mudslide of bodies. A shotgun blast took another, ripping away a leg and thudding it into the wall to be dashed then crushed by the onset of the horde. Jana racked a shell into the breech and fired again. Morgravia’s pistol boomed. Drover stepped up, autopistols blazing. Then came Barak, one-handed with his pistol; Maela on the second shotgun, not as capable as Jana but so close she could hardly miss. A firing line erupted, a deadly fusillade lighting up the corridor in pellucid white. It tore into the pallid, bursting torsos, shredding limbs. Heads were sundered and blown apart in the storm of shells. Another foe would have balked, fled against the onslaught of violence. The rabid herd knew no such fear, only instinct, only hunger, their minds eroded by the signal.

They reached the defenders, decimated but relentless, and fell upon them without mercy or restraint.

Morgravia lost sight of Barak in the scrum. He fell back, Jana reaching for him with a cry on her lips. She caught snatches of Drover, shouting and stabbing. Maela disappeared, having stepped in front of Barak as the old man collapsed. Stray gunfire rattled then fell silent, subsumed by animalistic voices.

She heard a shriek, like a power coil charging, and felt a flash of heat; saw a beam of perfect blue light, severing and burning. It strafed the corridor, not one beam but several, slowly turning and overlapping, scorching the walls black with their irresistible trajectory. Bright, blinding. The reek of seared flesh filled the narrow space, cloying and choking. Morgravia retched, sinking to her knees. She clutched her Inquisitorial rosette, willing herself to rise.

The light faded, the deafening shriek retreating into obscurity, leaving behind a whining tinnitus.

Smoke threaded the air, thin and dissipating. It hung over bodies dissected, butchered and almost bloodless. Every cut had cauterised, a raft of flash-seared pieces, the stumps of limbs and half-torsos, of necks, precisely severed.

Nothing remained. Pieces of plaster detached from the walls and crumbled inwards. A sodium lamp swayed like a hanged corpse until its tether snapped and it fell too, the crash obscenely loud in the sudden silence.

Only the Broker was left standing, her right arm outstretched. The fingers of her hand had fused, the hot metal of her ruined augmetics steaming and shimmering with heat haze. A fallen hood revealed her for what she was. Pale, with scratches of hair, her skin patchy with the scars of old burns. A faded brand in her flesh. Self-consciously she reached for her cowl and pulled it back over her ravaged scalp.

‘I tried…’ she uttered, her voice hoarse. ‘No one can say I didn’t try.’

Amongst the dead was Maela. She had been spared the severing beam. A dark wound blossomed on the left side of her chest, her sightless eyes staring back at the others from where she lay amongst a tangle of bodies.

Barak sank to his knees by her side. Softly, he closed her eyelids and pushed a stray hair from her face. Jana stood behind him, a hand upon her husband’s shoulder, her face contorted with sorrow. She had saved her, this courtesan; a stranger, and yet one who had risked and given everything. It seemed a poor end for such altruism.

‘Just a girl…’ muttered Barak. ‘Should’ve been me,’ he said, and started to gently weep. ‘Stupid, old, broken-down man. It should’ve been me.’

Jana’s grip tightened and Barak clasped her hand in his, shaking with grief. She wept too, tears for a daughter they never had or ever could.

Morgravia looked on, dulled to their pain. She should say something, remind them that they could not stay here. That they had to leave low-hive. Pity stopped her at the last. Let them have this, at least. They had already lost so much.

In the end, Barak spoke, intruding on her thoughts. ‘Before the precinct fell,’ he said, stiffly getting to his feet, ‘the proctors had been watching a religious cult.’

Morgravia eyed him shrewdly.

‘I found references to it in a watchman’s journal,’ Barak went on. ‘He called them “the Divine”. Mentioned their hideout too, old church at the north edge. I’m thinking they attacked the precinct, maybe even took some prisoners.’

‘What makes you say that?’ asked the inquisitor.

‘On account of the lack of bodies, and that I found this.’ He produced the piece of shattered mask he had recovered.

Drover lit up another cheroot. ‘Once a lawman, always a lawman, I suppose.’

‘The Divine wear masks like this,’ said Barak, ignoring him. ‘These are bad men, inquisitor. Really bad. Burnings, abductions.’

‘And what are you saying, exactly?’ asked Morgravia.

‘I’m saying it’s a lead. Even without your memories, even if this one,’ he jerked his chin at the Broker, ‘doesn’t make good. It’s worth following.’

Morgravia considered it. She had no guarantee even if she reached the Empath, if any of it was real, that it would cure her and that the answers she sought would be buried in her subconscious. At absolute best, it was a hunch.

‘And will you make good?’ she asked of the Broker, who had recovered a little of her poise.

‘You know my terms.’

‘We might all be dead before I can meet them.’

‘Then for all our sakes I hope it does not come to that.’

Morgravia bit back a reply. She didn’t think she could compel the Broker to reveal the Empath’s location or she would have already done so. With little other choice, it had to be this way. Quid pro quo, just as the Broker had said.

‘The gate lies to the north,’ she decided eventually, ‘so does the church if it’s at the north edge.’

Drover took a drag on his tabac and exhaled a long plume of smoke. ‘That’s settled then.’ His eyes fell on the Broker. ‘I assume the Empath lies that way too?’

The Broker didn’t answer, though her face betrayed her ambivalence as she picked her way through the bodies.

The others followed, and left only the dead behind.

CHAPTER 22

Swallow the bullet

Kharata saw the gate to uphive ahead, an immense ferrocrete barrier than had more in kind with an ancient fastness than a border wall. Distant figures moved along its battlements too far away to discern any details. They faced a mass of desperate humanity, the crowds before the gate swelling like a living sea. A riot of bodies, made anonymous by its sheer number, hammered at the unyielding metal to be let through, but the monolithic gate stayed firm.

As the gun-cutter came in low under the smog layer, specifics resolved at an accelerated rate.

A thicket of razor wire crowned the walls, which were marginally lower than the gate itself and bridged the relatively narrow causeway between low-hive and uphive. Watchmen in up-armoured proctor garb manned the ramparts, a garrison stationed for the express purpose of keeping people out. Flamer teams stood at the ready, poised before murder slits, prepared to douse the region directly in front of the gate should there be an unauthorised breach. Heavy stubbers angled low on their pintle mounts, piled on threat, but didn’t fire.

Not yet.

Kharata counted eight gun nests from where he crouched by the gun-cutter’s side hatch. He watched as a dozen canisters jetted out into the crowds trailing vapour. Tear gas erupted in bulbous mushroom clouds, quickly blanketing the rioters, who recoiled like a single organism. He heard distant screaming and imagined the stampede below.

‘Hail them,’ snarled Fharkoum, peeking at the carnage through a vision slit as he dabbed the sweat from his lips.

Kharata used the hold’s vox to contact the pilot, who did as bidden. The reply from the wall was terse. It mentioned the phrases ‘restricted area’ and ‘turn back immediately’. Two of the gun nests had two-man rocket tubes. One lined up on the gun-cutter’s trajectory.

Fharkoum swore, his fear and arrogance bleeding from his pores in a sickly-smelling sweat.

‘Offer to pay,’ he said, ‘any amount.’

‘These are gate watch, master,’ Kharata offered, still hanging out of the side hatch. His eyes narrowed. Behind the milling crowds, he saw movement, an army on the march. ‘They do not accept bribes.’

‘I don’t fucking care. Do it!’ Fharkoum roared, spittle flying, a hacking cough erupting from his corpulent body.

No, not an army, Kharata realised. A horde. The pallid.

Urgent requests for clarification hissed through bouts of vox static, as the pilot started to get nervous. They were still on course for the gate, and now a second rocket tube had angled towards the gun-cutter.

Kharata barely registered. He watched in morbid fascination as the pallid scurried below like a greasy flood, the tendrils of the horde reaching like talons. Panic rippled through the crowds at the gate as they slowly realised what was upon them. The rear edges, those too afraid to get close or sent reeling by tear gas, disappeared first. Absorbed. Consumed. The hungry tide spilled on and now the crowds fled or fought. Not that it mattered. Two opposing poles met in the middle and were crushed. Confusion took hold, abruptly dissipating as the realisation of what the rear ranks were running from became apparent.

A fresh tide swell gained momentum in the direction of the gate, braving the thready remnants of the gas and the threat of the guns, impelled by the fear of something worse. One of the watchman had his eye to a scope and called out. His outstretched finger pronounced death as if it had been granted godlike power in the very act of pointing. Men, women, children were ripped apart and torn down, or else burst into flames as every weapon on the wall opened up.

Though he dearly wished to, Kharata could not look away. A savage yank of his shoulder brought him around and he found himself staring into the verminous, bloodshot eyes of his employer. A cloying stench assailed his nostrils, a mix of poorly masked body odour and pungent halitosis.

‘Offer to pay…’ Fharkoum hissed through clenched, overly white teeth. One molar glinted with a precious gemstone.

A blow from the flat of Kharata’s palm sent Fharkoum sprawling back into his seat. The fat merchant’s expression went from confused, to angry, to fearful as he fell under the hired gun’s regard.

‘Do not touch me like that again,’ Kharata warned, but then answered the pilot’s frantic calls with the instruction to bribe the watchmen.

Their answer was emphatic. A rocket blasted towards the gun-cutter, riding a contrail of ignition. The gun-cutter banked hard, and Kharata flew out of the side-hatch as Fharkoum was flung from his seat and hit the side of the hold. The hired gun clung to the guide rail, managing to get a toehold on the edge of the hatch and pull himself in.

He hammered the vox, screaming at the pilot to turn around. He spared a glance for Fharkoum, who was bleeding from a head wound and crawling across the deck reaching for something to cling to.

The pilot didn’t reply as he banked again to avoid a second rocket. A shudder trembled through the fuselage as the rocket exploded against the hull. The shriek of tearing metal followed. Then they were spinning, the view through the open side hatch flitting past in frenzied revolutions. Smoke obscured everything, spilling into the hold, choking the buffeting air. Through the vox, the pilot urged them to brace. Seconds later, hard impact and the screech of deformed metal as the hull bunched and split. A wing tore off; Kharata saw it spiral away into the murky distance like a leaf tossed on a hurricane. Earth churned, the gun-cutter’s prow turning plough as it dug its burial furrow. Armourglass shattered as the cockpit crumpled inwards, unable to resist the forces being exerted against it. Kharata hung on, battered against the inside of the hold. He tasted blood, felt a bone snap. Bit back the hurt behind a barricade of clenched teeth. On and on it went, the rumbling, rattling cacophony of the crash, pieces ripping away, split off like satellites in a decaying orbit, metal yielding and buckling.

The gun-cutter shuddered to a halt, spewing steam and smoke. At the edge of hearing, fire crackled dulcetly.

Kharata opened his eyes, relieved to be alive. He lay on the deck, his eye drawn to a thick shaft of light spilling through the open side hatch. He had no idea where they had crashed; his only view was bright but indistinct. A sodium lamp, flickering. Inside. They had speared through a building. Rock dust, dangling as motes in the hot air, confirmed it.

The pilot was dead. Nothing remained of the cockpit. A hand extruded from a crush of deformed metal. A single blood trail did little justice to the ruin inflicted on the body.

Fharkoum floundered like a swollen rat, trapped against the deck by a heavy spur of metal. He groaned, writhing in unfamiliar agony, unable to fathom why he couldn’t move properly.

Kharata tried to get to his feet but a sharp spike of pain put him down again, and he realised his leg was broken. He found a piece of shredded pipe, something from the inside of the hull, and fashioned a splint with wiring wrenched from a broken wall panel. He tied it tight, grimacing, and found a thin but long piece of panelling to use as a crutch.

He heard Fharkoum groggily slur his name from across the hold. Kharata looked up from his labours but didn’t go to his master. The fat merchant started shouting, his rage and pain congealing into something base and primordial.

Rising gingerly, Kharata tested the crutch and his leg. It hurt like hell, but he was up at least.

Another groan from Fharkoum, and now his bleary gaze found the hired gun. He swore, a veritable barrage of expletives, first promising riches, and then retribution if Kharata did not act to rescue him.

‘Get me out, get me out…’ Fharkoum blathered, pushing pathetically at the spur firmly pinning him to the deck. He flailed and lurched, his obese frame contorting ineffectually.

‘Kharata…’ he snarled, and then as he realised his plight he uttered much more softly and incredulously, ‘Kharata?’

The hired gun turned away, his only gift to his master a contemptuous look as he shuffled through the side hatch of the grounded gun-cutter and into the ruined building beyond.

‘Kharata! Kharata, you bastard! I’ll skin you, whoreson! Guttersnipe! Kharata… help me… Any price. Name any price… Kharata!’

Fharkoum’s screamed threats and accusations followed him, as did pleading. And weeping.

As he limped away from the gently burning wreck, Kharata saw the pallid converging. They were still a little way off, enough time for him to be on his way. A maglev tunnel offered a way out and he made for it with a little urgency. As fat as Fharkoum was, the pallid were voracious and would not feast for long.

He had put a decent distance between himself and the wreck as the pallid reached it. Fharkoum’s screams rose to fever pitch, a shrieking girlish terror that abruptly cut off into silence.

After a last look back, darkness swallowed Kharata as he entered the maglev tunnel. It went deeper into Low Sink, running south, but that hardly mattered. The gate was impenetrable. No one would be getting through, although a last image surfaced in his mind as he ventured into the black, of the pallid at the gate, climbing…

A low hum betrayed the lethal energy coursing through the rail and Kharata made certain to stay clear, hugging the opposite side of the tunnel. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. A gaunt, pale visage loomed for him. A pallid, slow and ailing. He shot it through the head, flechette pistol in one hand, crutch in the other. He kept moving. Debris caught underfoot and he stumbled more than once. A second pallid staggered from the murky darkness. It wasn’t alone. Kharata killed it, and the rest.

The flechette pistol clicked empty. He patted his bodyglove but had no further reloads, so he tossed the priceless weapon and focused on moving.

Limping hard, sweat beading his face, sticky beneath the bodyglove, Kharata felt the fear return. He heard them nearby, shuffling, sniffing, snarling. He felt the tunnel rumble as a crackle of energy surged through the rail. The maglevs ran on an automated schedule and the next carriage flashed by, raucous and bright. The harsh light revealed more pallid. Lots more. They clamoured down the tunnel, emerging from alcoves and nooks, starved and desperate.

Kharata hurried on, but the broken leg slowed him like an anchor. A glow flickered ahead, the promise of a station. He pushed on harder, striving to reach the light, to reach salvation. Heart thudding, breath scything. Then he fell, the crutch having snapped beneath him. White pain flared, every nerve ending aflame. A scent of rot and dank wafted over and he knew they were close. Too close.

He felt the electrical jolt of the rail. It was near enough to touch.

Kharata knew men like him died in one of two ways. Either they were killed in the prosecution of their profession, or their fallen morality would eventually catch up to them and they would swallow a bullet to escape their self-hatred. He did not believe in the latter, thinking it the way of cowards. A sociopath like him had no morality. He only had his mantra.

Survive or die.

Rancid breath washed across his ear, pricking his nostrils.

Kharata made his choice. He reached out and seized the rail.

CHAPTER 23

Buried in the flesh

The Mule headed north, its passengers riding in funerary silence, the rig’s jangling metal refrain a lament to their mourning. The precinct house was a lightless and towering shadow in the background, its haunted shell gratefully left behind. A few miles off yet lay the border, and from there a few more miles to the gate to uphive. Morgravia watched as Meagre submitted to slumber again, as if the horrors had retreated to lick their wounds; or perhaps they simply lay in wait. Hunched figures still shuffled along the periphery, too far away and too slow to be of concern. Meagre had never been an affluent place, but now it belonged to the pallid.

Drover had the wheel. He had been quiet since they left the precinct, uncharacteristically so. Barak slept fitfully in the back, his injuries having earned him a respite, his head on Jana’s shoulder. The Broker sat alongside, a dignified distance between them, staring into the shadows outside the window as the skeleton of the settlement slipped by in jagged silhouette. She clung to the wrist of her ruined hand as if the very act of grasping it would ease the pain of her fused fingers.

‘This horror…’ the Broker said, her voice barely louder than a murmur in the back.

Jana stirred, but Barak slept on.

‘It will consume this place. I can taste it, on the air… the fear. It will drive us all mad. Perhaps it already is.’

Jana leaned over to put a consoling hand on the Broker’s shoulder.

‘Have hope. We are alive. If we can reach the border then–’

‘It will not matter,’ said the Broker, and turned towards the front of the cab. ‘She knows.’

Morgravia looked up but didn’t speak. Her skin prickled as if reacting to an intense heat, but it was cold in the cab. Sweat beaded her face and she wiped it away with a gloved hand.

‘She knows what follows,’ the Broker continued, ‘if this does not stop. They will burn it. Her kind. To preserve the body, sever the limb. Is that not the way? A purging fire? No one is getting through that gate alive. They simply will not allow it.’

The bitterness radiated as palpably as the heat prickling Morgravia’s feverish skin. A sense of violation had begun to overwhelm her, like mites burrowing into her flesh. Only through an effort of will did she keep it in check. Her chest thumped with palpitations as a bout of dyspnoea took hold. Her throat constricted, her every nerve raw and burning. Pain flared in her eye like a hot needle rammed into the iris. Her will collapsed, like a dam capitulating against the wrath of a raging torrent. It gave, and so did she.

‘Let me out…’ she croaked, so hoarse it barely registered.

Drover turned an ear but hadn’t really heard her.

Morgravia gasped, wrenching out a breath, barely able to draw in more. She clenched the rig’s front panel, finally getting Drover’s attention.

‘You all right?’ he asked, looking askance at her, his eyes mainly on the road.

An old mining district loomed in the distance, abandoned and drenched in foreboding. The rig had taken the main road that led through it, the ramshackle silos and warehouses drifting closer.

‘Let me out,’ Morgravia said, louder, a fire surging through her flesh as whatever had been buried within fought for release.

Drover frowned. ‘In this wasteland? There’s nothing here.’

‘Right now, damn it!’ Morgravia shouted, the urge to be violently sick forcing her stomach to contract.

The rig slewed to a halt on a patch of scrubland.

She tumbled out, half leaping, half falling and vomited all over the ground. Spitting out the last of it, Morgravia expected to see something in her ejection, some grim evidence of the contagion she harboured. A foetid pool of regurgitant swilled before her, but it was largely an accretion of bile. It stung her throat, hot and acerbic.

The sensation did not end with the evacuation of her stomach. It stirred, the feeling within, like surgical tools probing.

‘I need a moment…’ she said, gasping at the pain inside her, and staggered towards the dilapidated shell of a manufactory, limned by the glow of the rig’s lamps. She needed to get away, out of sight, a few minutes to think, to understand. Only the lower floor of the building remained, but Morgravia had caught sight of an ablutions block, old, disused but still standing. She made for it.

‘Inquisitor?’ asked the Broker, before opening the door and stepping outside.

‘What the hell is happening?’ said Drover.

‘Stay with the rig,’ Morgravia called to him, and said nothing more.

The Broker started to follow her.

Drover leaned out of the window. ‘And where are you going? This ain’t no time to be wandering off.’

‘I forget the part where the money I paid you affords you the right to question me,’ the Broker replied, and walked away.

Drover swore again, lighting up another cheroot as he watched her go.

A narrow gantry bridged a labour trench that led to the entrance of the manufactory. Whatever ores dug from the earth it had once refined had dried up long ago. It was lightless and cold, like a snuffed candle in winter. An industrial odour pervaded. The manufactory had been stripped of anything of worth. Dust had settled like a shroud. Gang insignia daubed slate-grey walls. Evidence of recent fires littered the ground. Chains hanging from the high ceiling reminded her of nooses as they gently swayed this way and that, clinking whenever they touched.

The ablutions block was appended to the main manufactory and comprised several small cells. Each had a basin, mirror and wash faucet. Grimy off-white ceramic tiled the immediate surrounds. As she stepped into one of the cubicles, Morgravia felt her heart thundering like heavy ordnance. The pain flared, a sensation of violent rebirth running through her body. She clung to her sides, hoping to hold in whatever felt like it was trying to push itself out. Her eye burned, and she clenched the lid shut as she engaged the old sodium lamp above the basin and clung on like she had in the barracks.

She breathed, slow and steady, reciting the mantra.

‘A mind without purpose will walk in dark places…’

She reminded herself who she was, what she was, despite the ever-present sense of disassociation. Her will was everything. She had seen the abyss and had not flinched. And slowly but certainly, Morgravia found calm. Her breathing eased and her heart resumed a more natural rhythm.

‘Is this why…?’ a voice asked behind her.

It was the Broker, having followed her from the rig.

‘An injury taken at the precinct house, that’s all,’ said Morgravia, though she didn’t turn around at first, nor did she look at her reflection.

‘Not a good lie,’ the Broker said. ‘I have heard better.’

Morgravia clenched her fists, the echo of the itch in her flesh stirring. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know your secret. Why are you out here?’

‘I learn secrets, I don’t divulge them.’

‘I have to say, it intrigued me,’ the Broker continued, as if Morgravia hadn’t spoken. ‘An inquisitor in need of an unsanctioned psyker. I thought it might be a trap at first. That’s why I brought a friend.’

Morgravia licked her lips, surprised at how dry they’d become. She tasted bile and winced at the caustic flavour. ‘You don’t mean Arum Drover, though.’

The Broker’s expression soured. Morgravia saw it in the mirror, relieved to see her own face reflected back at her and not something else.

‘He is a hireling, exactly as you said,’ the Broker went on. ‘Hallow’s End had a reputation. I thought I might need the extra protection.’

‘And the cipher you gave him?’

‘Useless. I just needed you to believe I had a proxy who could deliver what you wanted.’

‘So you were planning on betraying me.’

‘Of course.’

‘And him too.’

‘He had already been paid. He loses nothing.’

‘So, why are you really here? It’s not to know my secret. It’s to divulge yours, isn’t it?’ She turned then, her face impassive. ‘You’re the Empath.’

A moment of silence stretched between them, a gulf of indecision which would change their relationship forever.

In the end, the Broker decided to relent. ‘How long have you known?’

‘I wasn’t certain until I saw the brand. That’s a witch mark. An old one. I assume you escaped your persecutors. What was it, local militia, bounty hunter?’

‘Neither. They were just men. Blinded by fear and hatred. Petty minds who wanted to hurt what they didn’t understand because it made them feel safer. I killed them. After they branded me. I eviscerated their minds, turned them into empty vessels. Then I fled and found solace of a kind in Meagre. I plied my trade, became known as the Broker. Did well. I am good at knowing what someone wants.’

‘And now you’re being hunted again.’

The Broker gave a bitter smile. ‘I was… incautious. An ear to the ground, I heard a hook had been cast. I was not lying when I said I had made enemies.’

‘What if it’s me?’ said Morgravia flatly. ‘What if the reason I am here is you?’

She smiled again, wryly. ‘You are not here for me, and we both know it. More likely it is a–’

A shot rang out, startling in the quiet of the ablutions block.

Morgravia drew her pistol on instinct, then saw the red bloom unfolding across the Broker’s robes. Or the Empath’s. It made no difference when she fell, slowly, to one knee, and then lay on her side, gasping for breath.

‘It’s like I told you,’ Arum Drover’s voice issued from the shadows, ‘not everyone is always what they seem.’

He emerged slowly, a spectre from the gloom. The charm remained, but tempered by something cruel and greedy.

‘You’ll drop that hand cannon if you please,’ he said, wagging his gun at her. ‘I like you, inquisitor, but not that much. And unlike that witch dying on the ground over there, I ain’t the trusting kind.’

Morgravia did as he asked, her heavy stub pistol landing with a thud.

‘You were hunting her,’ she said, putting herself between Drover and his mark.

‘Not me specifically, but I took a contract. I like to get close to my kills before I pull the trigger.’

‘And she was under your nose all this time.’

Just like he was right under mine and I missed it.

‘I’ll admit that’s a little galling, but I didn’t know the Empath, what she looked like, her hideouts. No one did. That’s what interested me. I did know of her Broker, though. She puts herself around. Has to in her profession, I suppose. I kept my ear out, found out someone was looking,’ he nodded to Morgravia, ‘and offered my services as a mercenary.’

‘Who’s even left to pay you?’

‘I’ll find a precinct house that’ll honour the fee. If not, I’ll find her stash. Shouldn’t be too hard. I reckon there’ll be enough there to compensate. Broker was a rich woman.’

‘Still is.’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘I can’t let you kill her.’

Drover’s face rumpled in mock perplexity. ‘Don’t see as how you have much choice, given I’m the one holding the gun and I don’t see your skull-faced assassin anywhere hereabouts. She’s a helluva thing, by the way. Never seen anyone kill like that. Where’d you find her? Oh, that’s right,’ he said, wagging a finger in self-remonstration, ‘you don’t remember, do you? Can’t imagine what that must be like. You have my sympathies, and I mean that sincerely, but I have a contract to fulfil and I’d like to do so before there’s no leaving this place. So… if you don’t mind.’

‘Can’t do it.’

Drover gave a curt sigh and bit his lip, agitated. ‘How’s about this. I let you get what you need from her and then you head on your way. I get my fee, you get your memories. No downside.’

‘Can’t. Do. It.’

He swore. ‘She’s about half dead already. Nothing to gain here by being obstinate. Now, stand aside so I can finish her off. No reason for you to die.’

Morgravia held her ground. She felt the itch, strong and insistent, the slow uncoiling of something within her, a waking presence reacting to the threat.

‘I am a servant of the Holy Ordos,’ she said with difficulty, trying to hold the itch at bay, but it grew, expanding, conjoining as the red dream became suddenly more tangible.

cutting parting bones reshaped replaced with metal and piston blades and gears red as blood cables and wires like veins

‘And I have no desire to kill one,’ said Drover, ‘but I will.’

‘You’ll bring the wrath of the Inquisition down on you…’ she gasped, the ends of her fingers burning as she felt something sharp pushing through the tips.

‘I doubt that. If they gave a shit about you, they’d already be here,’ said Drover, seemingly oblivious to Morgravia’s discomfort.

She reeled.

Is this a symptom of my fractured mind?

He was still talking. ‘This city is going to hell. It’ll be assumed you died along with it.’

She blinked, and a grainy red haze overlaid her vision. A data stream scrolled across her iris, the focusing rings expanding and contracting. Gauging, measuring.

‘I can bring you Hel…’ she said, trying to hold on, trying not to collapse as she teetered on the brink.

‘Is that what you call her?’

‘Only to her face,’ said Morgravia, glancing at the shadows behind him. Drover half turned, fearing the effigy of death in his midst, and pulled his aim. Just enough.

Morgravia rushed him, her monomolecular blade carving a silver blur through the air. She heard the pistol retort, and felt the pinch in her side. Her armour absorbed the worst of it, but the bullet found flesh. A second shot followed the first, this one pushed aside before the muzzle flared, Morgravia’s hand on the barrel. A tile splintered with the impact. Her other hand slashed up with the knife, carving a ragged red line through the Drover’s duster.

He swore. ‘Can’t believe I fell for that,’ he growled, still wrestling to draw a bead on the inquisitor. ‘I must really like you.’ Firing off a burst, he raked the wall instead. More splinters, shattering ceramic.

Morgravia brought her knee up into his stomach. Drover let out a grunt, tossed one pistol and drew the other. Bleeding profusely, he got off a shot and Morgravia cried out as the bullet clipped her shoulder. She was empty-handed, and as the autopistol fell from Drover’s nerveless fingers he realised why. A monomolecular blade was embedded in his chest up to the hilt.

No, it wasn’t the knife. That lay on the ground, flecked with blood. She had dropped it. A blade extruded from Morgravia’s flesh, her fingers having split and conjoined into a lengthened spear of metal.

Drover staggered back as the blade slid out of him, the tongue of metal retracting as if sentient, and spat up a little blood. Barging into a basin, he slid to his rump, legs akimbo, arms by his sides. Breath sawed from his mouth, blood pooled in his lap. He gaped, eyes widening as a look of sheer, unreasoning terror contorted his features. He reached for a gun that wasn’t there, then he slumped over and did not move again.

Morgravia groaned, clutching at her arm, aghast at the bloody spar of metal inexplicably conjoined with her body. A lurching sensation overcame her, like a moment of disconcerting weightlessness before a fall. Head spinning, she crumpled onto her elbows and knees as something uncurled inside her gut. Letting out a thin, wordless cry, she tried to crawl as kaleidoscope images surfaced in her mind, crashing together like disjointed tides. The red dream… every aberration, every abuse and incursion of her flesh, collapsing and reforming…

Coalescing.

The scent of chemical sanitisation and iron, of meat and cold tangs the air. A laboratory takes form. Robed figures huddle around the slab upon which she is lying. They are festooned with blades, with scalpels and saws, and drills and hot, red beams. Their regard is alien and automated. She is a living autopsy splayed out for experimentation. Her skin is pinned back, her organs exposed. A heart pulses, rapid and arrhythmic. It glistens in the cool light like a fleshy apple mutated with arteries. It takes a few moments for her to realise it is hers. A pair of lungs inflate and deflate in stuttering dyspnoea, also hers. Ribs, cracked open and wide, admit invaders. They come with the intent to cleave, to cut, to sever and partition. They click and whirr, her faceless surgeons, creatures of metal and the sparest flesh. They remove bone and parts of her intestines. Steam rises from several nearby basins, reeking with an abattoir stench. Her surgeons emit a series of curt shrieks and whines, undercut by hissing static as they converse. Parsing their language is impossible and leaves only the impression of screaming, a cacophony of hoarse, emotionless screaming. And she realises she is screaming too, in horror, as agony descends in a red veil and the reality of their violation of her embeds itself like cold ice. As she is remade. And the surgeons cut and converse, deaf to her dismay, as cold and uncaring as the void, and in the shadows, two red suns loom over her before blackness sweeps in and the rest is lost.

She tasted dirt, and realised her face was touching the ground. Morgravia rose, slowly and experimentally. Fearing what she would see, she looked at her arm but it was flesh again, albeit with a thin seam of dried blood around the forearm and the gaps between her fingers. Like a zip, or the petals of a flower closing at dusk. The irrefutable reality of that struck her like a blow, and she fought to quash the profound sense of unravelling.

Morgravia clutched her shoulder, biting back the pain from the bullet hole. It gave her focus, an anchor to ground her. It staved off the nebulous sense of dread rising like bile up her throat. Trauma had provoked a reaction. The tenebrosity veiling her memories had parted a fraction allowing in a sliver of revelation, but still the answers would not come.

She saw the Empath, lying in a pool of blood, and crawled to her. One glance at the wound in the Empath’s chest and Morgravia knew she was near death. The psyker reached out to the inquisitor, fingers trembling. Her mouth gaped, opening and closing in a futile attempt at speech. Morgravia took her hand, but the Empath wrenched it away and strained to touch the inquisitor’s forehead.

Trembling herself now, Morgravia leaned in and closed her eyes. She felt the chill caress of hoarfrost and the convulsion of an electrical charge as the gated vaults of her memory opened and were let out.

CHAPTER 24

Burning for our sins

After what felt like several hours, the terminus of the maglev rail led Cristo and the others to a dilapidated church. An old, tarnished effigy of the eagle crested a broken spire and bore down on anyone walking beneath it like a fell omen. Fire had devoured the roof, leaving black spurs like ribs in its wake. The reek of cooking meat choked the air, directing Cristo’s gaze from the monolithic church to a nest of hanging cages. Within each cage he saw partly burned bodies, their limbs like sticks of charcoaled kindling. A glance at Convocation, at the dewy state of his wide eyes, betrayed the fact he had put these men and women to death. He had judged them, possibly first with the blade, but then with the flame. He had done so under the auspice of the Emperor’s will, framing it as righteous. Necessary, even. Men such as the priest always sought excuses for their depravity. Cristo knew then that he would have to kill this man, or he would surely kill all of them. The alternative was indoctrination, subsumption into the cult.

‘His glory upon us…’ Convocation whispered, nodding for his flock to drag the prisoners onward.

It had been fortified, this church of perverted faith. Thorny tank traps stood outside, an impediment to the restless dead. Scaffolds holding up makeshift watch stations were occupied by snipers carrying crude rifles. A gate fashioned from two pieces of tank armour plate, doubtless stolen from an abandoned manufactory and welded to a pillar and hinge, barred the way. At Convocation’s shouted proclamation, the gate opened, admitting them into the heart of his twisted fiefdom.

Beyond its fortifications, the church was less rigorously intact. Its narthex had all but collapsed into disrepair, amounting to little more than a fractured arch of stone. Only when they entered the crumbling nave did Cristo finally understand what had happened to the people of Meagre, at least those yet living.

Crude pens had been erected and here the survivors were amassed, dirty, hollow-eyed and awaiting judgement. And before them lay their fate. A massive pit had been dug into the heart of the nave, extending down into darkness so deep it could have been fathomless, the stone flags split and sundered around it. The sheer size of it defied belief as a man-made excavation and yet the sounds of toil from below could be heard faintly echoing, putting the lie to its bottomless appearance. A crude wooden gantry zigzagged down one interior flank, disappearing into darkness. Another jutted out over the pit like a gangplank.

The pens looked down into this great yawning chasm, a sacrificial pit in all but name, the burn cages suspended above it. Their inhabitants were both fuel for sacrifices and recruits for Convocation’s army. Queues of pale-faced, haunted individuals snaked from the pens to a pair of lecterns, where a robed acolyte interrogated them. Cristo couldn’t hear what was being said but he saw the outcome of these terrifying interviews. A false answer, a sentiment that did not support the faith of the Divine, and you were dragged to the cages and hoisted over the pit to await immolation. Demonstrate enough fervour, a taste for the aberrant creed of madmen, and you were awarded a mask and a cudgel or knife.

There was weeping, screaming. Several prisoners wore the torn uniform of proctors. Most of these ended up with a mask. Cristo saw one poor soul beaten to death for trying to resist and another slit her own throat with a jagged piece of glassaic rather than face the flames. The cages were filling, and he had the sense that the lesser acolytes had been waiting for their high priest to return. Eighteen cages in all, suspended at various heights. The charred corpses of their former occupants were released by long pikes unlatching the bases of the cages and then letting the blackened remains fall as ashen offerings. It wasn’t always clean, though. Skeletal hands came apart from their former wrists and were left clinging to the bars like fetishes, a grim foretaste of what awaited whoever next entered the cage.

Cristo could scarcely believe his eyes. ‘Holy Throne…’

He watched as a factorum worker was led onto the gangplank, the two lecterns either side looming down upon him. Rather than submit to the ruling of the court, the man ran, bolting for the gangplank’s edge, preferring a quick death to being burned alive.

A pistol shot rang out, clear as a clarion, and the man slumped a few feet from making his fatal leap. Crimson blossomed on his back as two masked thugs fetched him and dragged him away.

‘None shall besmirch His glory,’ uttered Convocation, the pistol in his hand still trailing smoke from its recently used barrel. He had appeared silently alongside Cristo, his tread soft but his aroma unmistakable. ‘You asked me before where you were being taken,’ he said. ‘Look now and see… Ruination! The end of mankind as we know it, and the Emperor’s judgement over all sin.’

‘You think that pit is the Emperor?’

‘It is the maw that must forever be fed. For the Imperium to thrive, sacrifices must be made.’

‘This is insane…’ It slipped out, as natural as breathing, but the priest did not react adversely, though his eyes widened as he sermonised.

‘It is the only sanity that remains to us. A return to the old ways, to fire and purity. His will!’

He gestured, and they were ushered into the pens. As they stumbled through the gate, joining with a mass of others who were awaiting their fate, Cristo took Karina in his arms. She hugged him back fiercely, her eyes afraid.

‘What is happening? What are they doing?’

Cristo shook his head. He had no answer. ‘Stay together,’ he said. ‘I’ll get us out.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, his gaze wandering the crowd for inspiration.

The earlier hysteria that had led to the deaths had faded, replaced by a weary acceptance. The prisoners remained huddled but shuffled towards their end like dull-eyed cattle.

Celestia stared about herself, bewildered.

‘It’s an aberration,’ she said. ‘They are depraved. The mad have begun to eat each other.’

Cristo reached out and took her hand. The zealots had taken her ceremonial sword, Celestia wise enough not to try to stop them, but she watched as Vanquish was presented to the priest and Convocation slid it into his belt, a trophy of conquest. She had already earned several dark looks from the priest’s flock, her religious vestments a challenge to their own twisted beliefs. They had yet to act upon it, but Cristo thought it was only a matter of time.

‘I shall see it returned to you,’ he said.

Another promise he likely couldn’t keep.

‘They will perish for this,’ she answered, her voice vehement. ‘Not for the sword but for what they have done in His name.’

Truly the Emperor had forsaken this place and in His stead had arisen something darker, a simulacrum of the Imperial faith, but one held up to a dirty mirror and reflected back.

Staring into the darkness of the pit, Cristo could not help but wonder what was down there and why these twisted men and women had raised the church of their religion around it.

A shout rose up from the ranks of the Divine as if in answer. Part signal, part affirmation.

‘Look away,’ he told his daughter, but she did not. None of them did.

The cages were lit. The screaming began anew.

CHAPTER 25

Fractured memories

Fragments resolved, pieces of a greater whole. She didn’t remember everything, not immediately. Oshanti flying the ship as they came in to land over the haunted spires of Blackgheist. His laughter as Roper made a dumb joke, stroking his coiffured moustaches for effect. Roper’s cold, dead eyes as she crawled over his gunshot body. Hel eager to leave the ship’s hold, and her graceful cartwheeling as the rear hatch opened. Carnergie following in her wake, making some sardonic comment about the ebullience of youth. And then Carnergie atomised by a flash of light, too late raising her forcefield, too drunk to notice the trap their enemies had set.

The memories returned in a violent cascade that threatened the banks of Morgravia’s mind. They were ill-ordered, confused, a melange of thoughts and emotions.

A word rose prominently, however, and the inquisitor knew instinctively that this was the reason she had been hunting.

Valgaast.

A cult of the machine, of arcane technologies and proscribed science. They were a cancer requiring excision and Morgravia had been the scalpel.

That had been then. Before she was sprawled on the ground, jackknifed in agony. Before her mind had been flensed and raked. Before her agents were slaughtered with only the sparest flickers of memory as proof of their existence.

Morgravia had lived. She had been taken, bloody and beaten, and dragged before the heads of the cult. They wore dark robes, sigils woven into the fabric resembling both the machine cog and the eight-pointed star, the mark of Ruin. Of evil.

She had underestimated them, both their reach and the depths of their depravity. Arrogance had blinded her. Impatience had sealed her fate. They reduced her to a subject, an experiment. They remade her, cut her flesh, emptied her and refilled the void with horrors, before restitching her again.

I am a vessel for their evil…

The heavy stub pistol glinted in the coarse light of the ablutions cell. Morgravia reached for it, contrition framing her expression as she gathered the sidearm into her grasp and looked down upon the Empath. She was dead, frostbitten and cold to the touch. Tiny icicles glittered on her eyelashes like diamonds.

‘I am the signal…’ she uttered, unsurprised at the bitterness in her voice.

Not only had the Valgaast violated her flesh, they had engineered it so she would betray herself and all she stood for. It was a hard pill to swallow, so she put the gun into her mouth instead. Bit down on the barrel, angling it just right so it would blow out the back of her head. One pull. Her life for thousands. It wasn’t suicide. It was necessary. A sacrifice. Stop the signal, end the threat. She would not become an abomination, not for them.

Morgravia closed her eyes, felt her finger tightening on the trigger. Just a little pressure needed…

Then hesitated.

It wasn’t enough. The cult had to burn. Root and branch. It was the only way to be sure they were done.

Easing her finger off the trigger, she gagged, tears in her eyes as she removed the gun barrel from her mouth. The taste of it lingered. Warm metal and cordite. She took a long, shuddering breath and hauled herself to her feet.

Barak and Jana were waiting for her as she trudged back to the rig.

The ex-proctor looked sallow, leaning heavily against the rig, Jana by his side.

‘Where are the others?’ she asked, silently noting the inquisitor’s haggard appearance. ‘I heard gunshots.’

‘Dead. Drover killed the Broker and I killed Drover,’ Morgravia replied flatly, and kept on walking. ‘Take the rig. Get to the gate.’ She dug around in her longcoat, pulling out her Inquisitorial rosette. She tossed it to Jana, who scrambled to catch it.

‘What’s this? And what do you mean they’re dead? What’s happening?’

‘An ending, at last.’ She gestured to the rosette. ‘You’ll need that. They won’t let you through without it. Say you’re my acolytes. That you’re on Inquisition business. They’ll be too afraid to challenge you. Easier just to let you through.’

At least, I hope they will.

Barak stepped into Morgravia’s path as she was passing the rig. He gently clasped her wrist and asked very softly. ‘Why are they dead?’

‘Because neither were what they seemed,’ Morgravia told him, ‘and nor am I, it would appear.’

If Barak thought anything about that last remark he didn’t mention it.

‘We can’t just leave you here,’ he said. ‘I won’t do it.’

‘I walk alone, Barak,’ Morgravia replied. ‘I have to. It’s not safe for either of you. You have to let me.’

He held her gaze for a moment as if gauging her veracity then nodded, letting his hand fall to his side. ‘You’re headed to the church, aren’t you.’

‘In a manner of speaking, I am.’

He nodded at that too, though the tension in his jawline told her he wanted to come with her and avenge the dead from Precinct IX.

‘Be careful,’ said Barak.

‘Just reach the gate. If I fail, it’ll be all that stands between the plague and the rest of the hive. I’d prefer you on the other side of it.’

Barak looked like he wanted to say more but thought better of it. Morgravia preferred it that way. She had never been one for sentiment, and felt nothing of it now. She carried on walking.

‘We won’t meet again,’ she called back. ‘And do not try to find me.’

Because I’ll be dead.

Barak gave no answer. A few minutes later, the rig sputtered and chugged away into the distance.

A lonely figure waited for her in the shadows. It was short and lithe, and held itself with a dancer’s poise, but Morgravia knew better.

A stir of old memories swilled to the forefront of her mind as she looked at Hel. A young girl, nervous and afraid, barefoot as she held onto her mother’s hand. At the temple of the Sanguinous, its huge bronze doors opening. A forbidding darkness and the scent of death. A tiny hand slipping loose from hers, as soft footsteps led up to the threshold. Innocence sacrificed. Silent tears. Darkness all consuming. The doors shut on one life, then open on another. Loss compounded by loss, and magnified.

‘I have found you, Mother,’ uttered Hel, and gave a shallow curtsey.

‘Not just me,’ Morgravia replied. ‘You’ve something else, haven’t you.’

Hel bowed. ‘Have you remembered?’

‘Some.’

‘Follow me then, I know the way.’

Morgravia fought back grief, fought the urge to touch Hel’s face, to feel the innocence she knew had long departed. It was a longing in her, a deep yearning. She betrayed none of this. For she did not understand it, the lacuna in her memories conspiring to elude her.

CHAPTER 26

Faith

The unbelievers burned. They burned all the way to the bone, writhing in their cages, skin blackening, until nothing remained but ash. Those in the pens still awaiting their fate were made to watch. Some wept, others looked on with dull fascination. Most of the prisoners huddled together in groups, some because they were kindred, others out of simple tribalism. Mankind is not meant to live alone. Its evolutionary cycle is driven by the innate desire to propagate. Every man requires a clan. It is primordial, an imperative survival instinct. For alone, a man is weak but together, he is strong.

He is also stupid, thought Cristo, reflecting on these words he had read once. A mob mentality had overtaken the cult; their demagogue, Convocation, the firebrand and stoker of its aberrant beliefs. He promulgated as he murdered and immolated, professing the Emperor’s will and offering those in the flames to the darkness below. What horrors lay in that abyssal deep Cristo could not begin to fathom but the thought of drifting down into it as nothing more than charred bone and ash terrified him. It terrified him more than death or pain, for he was forced to acknowledge that some sliver of him might believe there was something in that darkness. A misappropriation for certain, but he felt it, a confession he had only recently admitted to himself as he looked upon the pit.

A presence. He wondered if those suspended above it, in the moments before their deaths, felt it too.

He kept Karina close. She had said little since regaining consciousness. A part of him wished she had not. At least then she would be spared this hell. Literal fiery fucking hell.

A few factorum workers, bullet-makers and armour-shapers clustered with them.

Clans.

He only realised Celestia had slipped away when it was too late. She stood alone, apart from any tribe, for hers was dead, immolated by fire just like those in the cages, or else devoured by some devolved version of mankind.

They too had a tribe, the cannibalistic creatures. A horde. Though they did not seem to trouble the church. Perhaps that was how Convocation had yoked so many to his cult. He had offered protection, a haven from the dead, and though ignorant of how he had prevailed, he had called it – like so many small-minded men who crave power do – faith. That which cannot be proven, it must only be adhered to, blindly and absolutely, to the destruction of anything raised in opposition to it, however rational.

Cristo reached out, shrugging his way through the crowded pen as he tried to get to Celestia.

‘Blasphemy…’ She said it quietly at first, an appraisal and confirmation all at once. ‘Blasphemy,’ she uttered louder, getting the attention of a masked acolyte who approached the pens, a cudgel gripped easily in her fist.

‘Shut up,’ snarled the acolyte, threatening with the cudgel.

Shoulders straight, chin raised, Celestia faced her down.

‘Blasphemy.’

The acolyte lashed out but Cristo weathered the blow, interceding on Celestia’s behalf.

‘Don’t touch her,’ he snarled, his paternal instincts extending beyond just his daughter. He saw Karina moving up, but warned her off with a look. He was in this now, she didn’t have to be.

The acolyte summoned several of her cohorts, some freshly anointed and eager to vent their fear by inflicting suffering on the helpless. Cristo was far from that, but he was outnumbered. As if sensing the change in mood, the frightened cattle in the pens shuffled back and a gap formed between Cristo and Celestia, and the rest.

‘Defiance will not be tolerated,’ the acolyte told them in a low voice that promised the violence to come. ‘You must be judged.’

The gate to the pen opened, the guards either side ready with shabby-looking autoguns to scythe down anyone who attempted to flee. The memory of the other attempted escapees still lingered fresh, pinning the prisoners in place.

Cristo was about to step up as the slighted acolyte and her thugs entered the pen but felt a light touch upon his shoulder that kept him back. He turned.

Celestia regarded him, her eyes limpid, her pretty face serene. She gave him just the faintest shake of her head and moved ahead of him to embrace her fate. She almost glided, diaphanous and pure, her defiance a rod of adamantium running through her.

‘I am Sister Celestia of the Order of the Silver Lantern,’ she declared. ‘I am the Emperor’s daughter and in Him–’

A heavy blow sent her to her knees and Cristo cried out, ready to surge forward until Celestia’s shaking hand stopped him. She rose groggily to her feet, a jagged cut across her forehead bleeding into her eye, and confronted the acolyte, who trembled with rage.

And fear. There was always fear in the violent.

‘And in Him do I place my faith. I am His instrument, His sainted sword.’

‘You’re a dead girl, is what you are,’ promised the acolyte, backed up by her fellow cultists.

Celestia remained undaunted. ‘I denounce you,’ she said. ‘I denounce these foul works. I denounce you!’ she cried, and at this the acolyte appeared to pale; whether the Sister-novice’s vehemence had made an impression or something else stayed the thug’s hand, the next blow did not fall.

For a fleeting moment, Cristo dared to believe that Celestia had somehow got through to the mob, that her true faith had returned a measure of their sanity. It was not to be.

Convocation appeared at the head of the aggressors. He gutted the acolyte with Vanquish, prompting a cry of anguish and anger from Celestia, then as the woman lay bleeding on the ground he struck the Sister-novice across the head with the hilt, a blow savage enough to render her half unconscious.

The priest was breathing hard behind his mask like a dog left too long in the sun, trying to marshal his anger in the wake of violence. His gaze went first to Celestia, her crumpled body lying at his feet like a discarded doll, before alighting on Cristo. A glimmer of something hungry and sadistic flashed across his eyes.

‘Take them both,’ he ordered. ‘Judgement awaits.’

They had to drag Cristo. It took four men, the screams of his daughter ringing in his ears with every resisted step.

He was ushered before one of the lecterns, a cosh to the back of his head to make him compliant. Convocation presided, his gaze imperious as he looked down upon them both.

‘Righteous are the just,’ he began, ‘who do not shirk from the Emperor’s light. False prophets have no purchase here, nor do heretics or the followers of aberrant faith.’

Celestia was pushed forward. Her hands were bound and she stumbled.

‘Unbelievers shall be cleansed, purged from the Emperor’s sight.’

She squirmed, her anger muffled by a gag tied around her mouth. It bit deep, the edges of her lip sore and bleeding as it chafed her.

‘Please…’ Cristo slurred, skull throbbing from the blow to the back of his head. A cultist either side held his arms, their attention on their priest. ‘Please,’ he said again, ‘put me in the cage. I am a fallen man,’ he declaimed. ‘I have killed. I am not righteous. I deserve punishment. Take me instead.’

Convocation’s ire had its focus now and would not be swayed. At a subtle gesture, a thug smacked Cristo across the stomach, winding him. He stooped, gasping for breath. He saw Celestia looking back, saw all her youth betrayed in the tears running down her face, in the soft weeping stifled by the gag, in the trembling of her limbs.

‘You are condemned,’ decried the priest, seizing upon the edges of the lectern as he leaned forwards. ‘You are condemned! Do you seek redemption?’ he asked.

Celestia blinked, suddenly confused. She tried to look at Cristo but a rough hand on the back of her neck thrust her face forward at Convocation.

‘Remove it,’ snapped the priest, ‘let the condemned speak. Let her confess to sin so that we might all hear it.’

The gag was removed, a painful wince on Celestia’s face making Cristo’s fists clench in impotent fury. He felt the grip of his captors lessen as religious fervour stole upon them, an incoherent baying erupting from the entire flock.

‘I… I…’ Celestia struggled to form words, every effort to speak rewarded with pain.

Convocation grew impatient, demanding, ‘Do you seek redemption?’

‘I… I…’ A bead of ruby blood trickled down her chin and dripped on her bare feet. ‘I do.’

Convocation leaned back, satisfied with his work. He was about to sermonise when Celestia interrupted.

‘As do all of His true servants,’ she said, ‘those who lead imperfect lives. I seek it. In my every deed, just as I seek it now as I denounce your heresy.’ She scowled. ‘False priest… zealot.’

Silence fell, the baying voices faded to a shocked murmur. Convocation did not react at first, his mask impassive. He took a shuddering breath, made the holy sign of the aquila over his chest, and then calmly pronounced judgement.

‘Take her to the cage, where she shall burn for her sins.’

The chain creaked ominously as the cage came down, the old links corroded and black.

At first she did not struggle, but as they took her to the edge of the gantry and lowered the cage to her in which she would be interred, Celestia fought. She cried, and punched and kicked. Cristo fought too but the gun pressed to the back of his neck soon quieted his outward quarrel.

‘Take me,’ he whispered, shedding tears of his own as he watched Celestia thrust into the cage and the door slammed and sealed behind her. ‘Take me.’

She stared dumbly as if resigned to her fate. A dousing of skin and cloth commenced, the reek of petrochem astringent in the church’s cold air. A torch was lit, the crackle of wood and flame like savage laughter.

‘Take me…’ Cristo wept, the zealots deaf to his pleas.

And despite all of her courage, Celestia screamed as they burned her body.

The baying returned, louder and more guttural than before. Men had become beasts and they each turned their faces to the fire, basking in its dark glow. Cristo bowed his head, feeling the presence of the noose, the burden of all his sins pulling him down. He thought of Karina, standing in the crowd, of her watching as he did nothing. He raised his gaze and found his daughter’s eyes in turn. She bellowed, her face twisted in anger and fear.

‘Father!’

The fire blazed, mere moments old, the silhouette of a girl writhing inside it. Her hair and clothes aflame. An endless scream as the cage slowly rose up on its protesting chain…

‘Father…’ Karina roared, louder than the mob, louder than the wailing crowds, ‘give her mercy!’

Stay alive, Karina… Stay alive.

One last look at his daughter, imprinting her image on his mind like a photograph, and Cristo surged to his feet. He threw off the guards, near delirious in their sadistic revels, and lunged for Convocation.

The priest had turned to exult his flock, arms outstretched as if in benediction. An inkling of disquiet had him look over his shoulder at the burly bullet-maker bearing down upon him. He raised his pistol and Cristo felt the shot sting as it entered his body, but by then he was leaping and tackling Convocation off his feet, the pair of them crashing into the fiery cage as it was still rising. A shriek of metal and the chain snapped.

The cage, Cristo and the priest fell burning into the abyss.

CHAPTER 27

Arteries

They entered the tunnels through an old outflow, wading through brackish water riddled with the corpses of vermin. A vast network, like arteries in a body, threaded through Low Sink’s grimy underhive and beyond. The air stank here, cloying with sewer heat and the backwash of huge, subterranean generators. The mechanisms were ancient, as large as landed starships, and droned like the voice of some primordial spirit of the deep earth.

Morgravia didn’t believe in such fancies. She didn’t need wild stories to convince her of the uncanny. She knew it existed, only her experiences were not some romanticised folktale; they were blood and horror and the death of worlds. This she knew. Ingrained. The price of her profession. Know the secrets, harbour the secrets, learn to live with them. Insanity, death or damnation rewarded those who could not.

She wondered which she would succumb to first. Perhaps she already had.

The itch in her flesh had abated at least, but not gone away entirely, like a creature slumbering, dormant until roused again. She had followed Hel into the maw of the outflow, old memories churning of poor Oshanti, dying with his back to the wall and two bullets in his gun. Morgravia grimaced at the thought, and the fate she had condemned him to.

As her sodium lamp parted the darkness, she knew these were not the same tunnels but almost certainly a part of the greater network, a tributary. Did the cult operate here? She could not remember, only that they felt familiar.

‘Why are we here, Hel?’ Morgravia asked.

Hel roved ahead, ankle-deep in silty runoff, though she made little sound as she slid through the murk. Pale cadavers bobbed in the turgid water like driftwood. Bloated by putrefaction, with teeth rotted to black stumps and cavernous sockets for eyes, many were too large and too humanoid to be vermin.

‘As the plague worsened they grew complacent,’ she said, neither turning nor slowing. ‘I waited, a rook upon my perch. The pallid did not bother me there. I can be still when I wish to be, as still as the dead. I watched and eventually they revealed themselves, seeking openly, in the dank and the dark. In the forgotten places.’

Morgravia did not dwell on the unsettling nature of that.

‘In this… underworld?’

‘Yes. Cold, red eyes,’ Hel went on. ‘Blades for limbs and metal bodied. Stalkers. Machine-killers. Like me. They sent them to find it. I found it first.’

The encounter before they had reached the precinct house returned to Morgravia in lurid technicolour. Chime, scrape. Chime, scrape. The butcher’s song. Hate red.

Morgravia shut her eyes hard, banishing the image.

‘You are not a machine, Hel.’

The assassin stopped, head cocked slightly to the side.

‘Am I not a tool though, Mother? Fashioned for a specific purpose. A machine by any other name?’

Morgravia remembered saying those words as Hel was uttering them. A pang of regret weighed heavy.

‘You are a servant of the Emperor,’ she said, uplifted.

‘And am I good?’

‘In His eyes and mine, you are righteous.’

‘And have I always been this way?’

‘You are as the Emperor made you.’

Hel seemed to consider that.

‘I am sorry I took so long to find you, Mother,’ she said, carrying on. ‘The world below is larger than I realised and has sharp teeth.’

Morgravia glanced at the shadows, wondering what they harboured and what all of this portended. The return to equilibrium was slow, arduous. Without all of her memories, she felt naked, unarmoured.

‘None of that matters now,’ she murmured, thoughts returning to the parasite churning within and to whether or not Hel would have to kill her before it tore loose. ‘Take me to what you have found.’

She looked up at a curved ceiling, its low arches glistening with condensation like a ribcage of wet bone. It led on into the darkness, a whispering cavern of half-heard voices and penumbral stirrings. Something brushed against her boot and Morgravia glanced down. It was a jawbone, drifting on a scum of black ash. Other bones swam with it, a finger, a piece of skull, a fragment of pelvis. A littering of the macabre, a floating declaration of mass murder.

Hel saw it too, and drew her sword with a rasp of steel against leather.

‘Nearly there now…’ she said.

A memory intruded, of a little girl standing before a temple, her name surrendered to duty, of the scent of rain, of a door closing in her wake and the silent tears that followed.

CHAPTER 28

The abyss

A savage hiss echoed through the cavern as the cage hit the water, smoke and steam pluming. Cristo plunged into darkness, cold and suffocating. He tasted ash, the brackish water filling his nose and mouth. A deep lagoon beneath the pit, a sump of sewage and chemical waste. Skin stinging, heart burning in his chest. A heavy throb in his skull as he began to drown. Fierce panic, then slow calm. Cristo kicked, and flailed, and broke the surface.

A huge, painful wrench of air filled his lungs. The stench worsened. He gasped, half drowned upon the bank, aching with the effort of survival. And turned, and dived back in.

Blackness, a crushing closeness and the terror of never again seeing the light edged in. He denied it, denied the fear and the paralysis. He swam, down and down, reaching with outstretched fingers, pawing at the fathomless dark as pieces of old bone brushed against him. He felt metal, coarse and pitted. The cage. Blind, he quickly traversed the edge, bars used as handholds until he found the gate. It opened stiffly, dragging on filth and against the grimy water. A hand reached for his and he took it firmly, pulling her into his embrace, this half-dead thing, and kicked like hell for the light.

Coughing up black water and ash, Cristo grasped at the bank. He hardly dared look at Celestia, who breathed raggedly, her skin a mess of red-raw burns. She shivered on her back, trembling at the pain. Gently, Cristo took her into his arms and out of the sump. A cavernous tunnel presented itself, a vaulted chamber with rib-boned arches stretching off into the distance.

He put Celestia down on a raised stone lip. She looked small and shrivelled, a candle worn almost to its wick.

He cast around for a way out, and found the priest.

Convocation lay slumped against the bank, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle and evidently broken. He still had the ceremonial sword lashed to his belt. Cristo took it, drawing it reverently.

Celestia’s eyes followed him, alighting on the sword as he placed it softly into her trembling grasp.

‘You are…’ rasped Celestia, her lips burned away to blackened gums and teeth, her once beautiful golden hair reduced to ash-white threads plastered to her skull, ‘a good man.’

She pulled Vanquish to her chest, her arms brittle as charcoal and dark as overcooked meat. The skin flaked, red beneath the black, sore and agonised. She shut her eyes, and abruptly the trembling ceased.

Cristo buckled, dropping to his knees as he wept. Another senseless death, when he had survived to suffer on. He sank down into a different abyss entirely, and would not have come up but for the tingling in his skull. It began as a pinprick then turned into knives stabbing. He lurched, vomited, red pain thundering, black oblivion threatening at the edge of sight.

The presence he had felt. It called to him. And powerless to resist, he followed its keening.

Karina clamped her jaw shut for fear of what pain and anguish she would allow in if she didn’t. Her father had gone, leapt into the darkness, trailing fire. And the priest had gone with him.

A dumbfounded silence stole across the Divine, a flock without its shepherd. Afraid and disorientated. They looked at each other and then the pit. One man pulled off his mask, slow and lingering, like tearing away false flesh. Another sagged to her haunches, an axe lying at her feet where she had dropped it. Convocation had indoctrinated them so thoroughly that in his absence, without his will to puppet them, they were empty, their animus draining like poison from a wound.

‘Let us out,’ Karina uttered to one of the guards.

He turned dumbly.

‘Let us out,’ Karina repeated, gesturing to the keys on his belt. ‘Just hand me the keys. It’ll be easy. And then you can leave. We can all leave.’

‘L-leave?’ he asked. ‘Leave where?’

‘Anywhere.’

She felt the anticipation of the others in the pens, watching and waiting, their fate depending on the outcome of this moment.

‘Hand me the keys.’

The guard took them off his belt and held them up.

Carefully, Karina stretched through the gate of the pen and took the keys. She watched the guard as she turned the lock, felt the satisfying clack. The gate opened and she stepped through it.

‘Thank you,’ she said, then ripped the guard’s knife from his belt and slashed his throat. Blood spray anointed her and anyone nearby. The guard crumpled, gurgling, dying.

His death turned a mental lever. The prisoners broke from the pen, and savagely fell upon their captors, stabbing, punching, kicking.

The violence worsened and Karina knew instinctively that this wasn’t just the outpouring of pent-up fear. It felt like a low throb in her skull, a migraine waiting to bloom and spread its cold grey agony. Karina clutched her head, as if holding it might prevent her skull from cracking open. She had felt this before, at the gully, when the Death Kings and the Red Hands had slaughtered each other. Weaker then, not as intense.

She looked around, the knife still in her bloody fist, and saw madness. Tearing, pummelling and killing.

A few retained their sagacity. They screamed. A man was borne down, his arms and legs pinned as a rabid pack opened up his stomach with knives and teeth and pieces of glass. A clawed hand delved and she saw the man’s expression change to choked, excruciating pain and then disbelief as the glistening rope of intestine was pulled forth and stuffed in hungry mouths. It didn’t end there. Soft red meat remained within, and the pack yearned for it.

Karina, teeth clenched, needles of fire splitting her skull, fled for the gate.

And overhead, through the fog of agony, she heard engine drone. Low and throaty, it trembled the ground. A shadow grew above her, descending as an actinic charge crackled the air.

Cristo staggered, sloshing through the murky brine, letting bits of corpses slap against his legs. He moved in a daze, wearing a perpetual grimace. He travelled downwards, through a crack in a cistern wall. Older here, the architecture was archaic, the cistern expansive and long since polluted and drained. The keening drew him on like an invisible thread tethered to his neck, gently pulling. Darker here, colder, a place light had not touched in centuries or more. Musty air made him choke and cough, but he persisted. He felt with his hands, took careful steps. Chill stone, gelid to the touch, echoed every sound back like a conversation.

And then he stopped, a tiny shaft of light directing his eye to the middle of a great room. He wondered how far down it was from the church and reasoned it could not be that deep. Columns, some broken, others miraculously standing, delineated a frescoed square. Rubble had fallen; it might have been aeons old, and cracks gaped in the stone like jagged grins.

A casket – no, a sarcophagus – lay at the heart of the room. Old pipes, the rubber perished and begrimed, coiled from its sides. A filthy patina turned the brass green and foetid. Wires trailed like intestines, some frayed, others lost to the dark. The grainy shaft limned the edges of the sarcophagus, dust motes spiralling at his disturbance. Cristo approached and saw a hand reaching from the broken lid, its fingers outstretched as if trying to touch the light. Mimicking the gesture, he went to touch it. The keening made resistance impossible.

And like a sprung trap, the hand snapped over his.

He recoiled on instinct but the hand felt cool and shone with gunmetal lustre. A cybernetic. A machine. It clenched harder and now he felt true fear, then pain as the bones in his fingers snapped like twigs. A muted cry struggled from his open mouth before a metal, tentacular thing inserted itself within. Cristo gagged but couldn’t spit it out, his free hand wrenching at the prehensile appendage squirming down his throat. He shook, nerves misfiring. The hand clenched tighter, and his bones were reduced to powder, eliciting a strangled whimper. And the keening went on and the presence imposed itself, filling him.

It consumed and usurped, a consciousness in need of a shell. His mind, its mind. Draining marrow and blood, the agony of every fresh violation like liquid fire through his nerve endings.

He felt its will, its desire, its need as it spread and overwrote.

It wasn’t enough. The invasion stalled. The slow absorption reversed, the tentacle retracted, and like an organ incompatible for its host, it rejected him.

A discarded shell remained, half cracked and bloody on the inside. A soft and boneless thing that had once been a man.

Cristo lived long enough to see the face of death coming for him out of the darkness, and then there was the black and–

Hel held her sword to the pile of offal and sloughed skin that had presumably once been a man. It quivered in its death throes and fell still, steaming and broken like a butcher’s leavings.

‘Stay back,’ warned Morgravia, one eye on the sarcophagus as she shone a light upon it.

‘This is it,’ said Hel, poised, her blade high and ready to strike. ‘This is what they are seeking, Mother.’

A tentacle slid back into the hollows, slithering away like a worm afraid of the light.

‘I’m not your…’ Morgravia stopped mid-sentence. A voice echoed in her mind, a mewling, whining need.

I am afraid, it said.

I am dying, it said, though in no language that could be spoken. It had to be parsed, processed. Meaning was formula, equation. It was the same language as in the red dream, of the machine surgeons as they had her on their slab, dissecting and experimenting. The magi of the Valgaast.

I need you, it said. An impulse. A piece of clever cognition bound up in machine code.

I love you, it said.

The wrongness of it made Morgravia recoil and shrink back from the old remembrance it provoked.

The girl… as she had turned to face the door. Her eyes, burgeoning with tears. Her fear. Her love. Not knowing she would be remade. That they would take away her fear and replace it with something cold and unfeeling.

Morgravia had been grateful for the rain when it came. It made hiding her sorrow easier.

Memory gave way to reality.

‘Hel… stay back,’ she said, retreating. A parental instinct, an old feeling of disquiet before the veil fell and horror was revealed. The dust motes froze, glinting like dying fireflies in the light. A charge lit the air, crackling like static. The scent of ozone and heat.

Morgravia blinked, suddenly surrounded.

The Cult of Valgaast were here.

CHAPTER 29

The monster inside

Clad in dark robes, the sigil of the cog and star conjoined stitched into the fabric, they encircled Hel and Morgravia like a flock of patient ravens.

‘Shall I kill them, Mother?’

A chuckle, mechanistic but dripping with derision.

Seven voices spoke as one, their hoods hiding their faces and only the faint glow of blood red beneath betraying their cybernetic natures.

‘You are undone,’ they said.

Hel raised her sword a fraction, but Morgravia lifted a hand in warning. At the periphery she saw them, hate-red eyes, blades for limbs. The magi had not come alone. As they closed, details were revealed. Mutations, the curl and twist of the unnatural. Arcane devices carved into metal. Aberrant biology and flesh. Bestial limbs, a serpentine tail. Rot and rust upon one. A cloying, soporific musk on another. Furnace heat, the coppery reek of slaughter. Mirrored facets instead of a face, colours iridescent and ever-changing.

‘You are the Valgaast?’ said Morgravia, her pistol drawn but held low.

One of their number nodded. An eighth spoke to the cult’s wheel. Tall and thin, its robes draping something skeletal. She saw metal, a plate riveted across its mouth to mute it. Runes had been fashioned into the plate, sickening to look at. It closed on her, raising its head with the whirring of servos and gears. Light flared, two red suns looming, and inwardly Morgravia quailed. She knew this monster, the magos who had presided over her unmaking. Her skin itched, the monster stirring within.

Hel tensed, eager for violence. Exactly as she had been made, her childhood sacrificed to turn her into a weapon.

‘Mother…’

Morgravia was shaking her head. ‘Don’t…’ She had been here before. Captured, eviscerated, unmade. Hel had rescued her, not knowing what she had done. The signal unleashed. It was inside her. It had to end. There was no other way.

She took her pistol and rammed it under her chin.

‘I’ll do it,’ she swore. ‘Too many have died, but if it takes one more to make it stop then so be it.’

‘It will accomplish nothing,’ uttered the seven voices, and somehow Morgravia realised it wasn’t seven but one, it was him, their muted lord, the hub of the wheel, who spoke through them.

‘I disagree,’ Morgravia replied, though she felt Hel’s uncertainty mirrored by her own. ‘I will sever the signal from its source.’

‘You mistake your purpose. Let us teach you…’

A vice of agony exerted itself upon her and she struggled to hold onto the pistol. She glanced at Hel, wanting to reach out, but she stood perfectly still, her sword now lowered, arms by her sides.

Hel had rescued her…

Afraid, disorientated, Morgravia had fled. Oshanti had led them through the tunnels, having cut her free. They had made a breach. Carnergie was dead. Roper too. He looked shaken. He asked about Hel but Morgravia didn’t know. She barely knew her own name back then.

Hel had rescued her. She had stayed behind, luring them away, fighting.

How long had it taken her to find her? It felt like hours but it could have been days.

She recalled the words she had spoken to Hel back in her hab.

‘They’re waiting,’ she had said. ‘For me to remember.’

And now she did.

‘And so you are enlightened,’ said the seven voices.

The pain eased. Morgravia lowered the pistol from her chin, tears in her eyes as she regarded Hel.

‘You never escaped.’

‘You let us go…’

‘As I said, you mistake your purpose.’

‘It’s not within me. It’s her. She is the signal.’

Hel, as if she had been paused and now resumed, turned.

‘Mother, shall I kill them now?’

Morgravia raised her pistol. And fired.

‘Yes, daughter…’ she gasped, tears steaming as the weapon slipped from her grasp. Hel collapsed, a gaping hole in her chest. Her eyes met her mother’s, and Morgravia held them like she wanted to hold her. They clung to each other like that, staring, holding on, trying to grasp a sliver of a life not lived, a life that had ended as soon as the doors to the temple had closed. ‘And then you can sleep.’

‘It changes nothing,’ said the seven voices. ‘You mistake your purpose.’

‘You mistake your reach,’ snapped Morgravia, heart clenched by grief but still defiant, straining as the monster within uncoiled, slowly waking. ‘It won’t end with me. The Inquisition will find you. They will burn your grubby cult to ash. Valgaast is but another heretic footnote in the great war.’

‘You are as wilfully ill-informed as you are insignificant. Valgaast is not a cult. It is beyond your mortal comprehension. It is the unpinning of the universe. It is the grand unmaking. We are but humble servants, gratefully beholden to its will and majesty. You speak of burning cults as if this will end it. You have no say in this. You do not know what this is.’

Morgravia’s eyes flicked to the sarcophagus, to the childlike hand reaching from its shattered lid and the tendrils slowly eking from its dark confines.

‘It is the Simulacrum. It is older than ages, a relic from before. It is sentience in the machine, the apogee of aspiration. You have been remade for it, the perfect incubator. That is your purpose and now you shall fulfil it.’

And it was dying, Morgravia realised. Whatever dark technologies had preserved the Simulacrum had begun to fail. She was to be its vessel, a host fashioned so it might endure, nourished by her machine body. Hel had brought her here willingly but unwittingly, another pawn in the game.

Hel… scraped clean of her humanity, a killer without a face. A daughter laid upon the sacrificial slab of the Imperium. Death by any other name. And now she had suffered another. Her final death.

Morgravia felt it scratching at the core of her, aching to be unleashed. The monster inside.

Let it…

The rage and grief spilled out of her, skin unstitching, limbs distending. She became blades and churning teeth and whips of razored metal, lashing. Unmade. Remade.

Shouts in the machine language of the cult suggested panic. She had already eviscerated two without thinking, her flesh face dappled with oil and blood. Their parts lay scattered, perfectly, brutally dissected. Offal and scrap.

The stalkers lunged for her, cantering out of the shadows to the defence of their black-robed masters, hacking and cutting.

Morgravia flung herself in a whirr of teeth and blades. She bifurcated, eviscerated, decapitated. Cleaved and severed. Tore and wrenched. An orgy of violence, sickening and satisfying in its application. The monster well fed, but far from sated.

The last of the stalkers slid off her bladed limb, impaled. The machine light died in its single eye. She did not slow nor consider. Humanity faded, an overexposed image turned to white. Whatever she had become, whatever they had made her, it was no longer human. Arachnoid, insectile, she sprang onto the cult, stabbing with the mandibles unfurled from an overstretched jaw. She tasted them as they died. Their oily plasma, the gelatinous fluids pumping like ichor through their bodies. She drank of it, revelled in it. Slashing and hunting and gorging herself until only two remained.

‘It is inexorable,’ said the seven voices that now were one. ‘Nothing you do here will stop it.’

She speared the voice, slitting it down the middle and leaving the two halves sparking and spewing in a shivering heap. Then she met the gaze of the last, the leader. He seemed untroubled when she took his head. A single snip, paired blades scissoring his machine neck. Black sludge gushed from the wound, corroding and dissolving.

Morgravia sank down and felt her flesh reknitting, her limbs retracting. Pain, abject and magnesium bright suffused her like acid. She shuddered, howling her anguish. Screaming it over and over until, at last, the resonance of her agony faded and she was left silent and alone.

Naked but for the scraps that remained, she hobbled over to the sarcophagus. The tendrils reached for her as she closed, a neonate grasping for its mother’s sustenance. It lay within the Simulacrum. A face, beatific, infantile, gave expression to a tentacled abomination, a slithering accumulation of malign and proscribed science. It felt. And as Morgravia looked upon it, as its tendrils gently but purposefully wrapped themselves around her, she realised it did not want to die. That it would do anything to live, kill anyone to perpetuate.

I love you, it said, that cold alien presence intruding, persuading. I love you, Mother.

Morgravia stiffened, her lip curling.

‘I’m not your fucking mother,’ she uttered, her pistol against the Simulacrum’s tiny forehead as its tendrils squeezed desperately.

A loud boom resounded, emphasised by the confines of the sarcophagus.

The tendrils slackened, letting Morgravia slide away. She slumped down, her back against the sarcophagus. A pistol lay in her hands, heavy with purpose. One bullet remained. She crawled across the pieces of bodies and the machine wreckage, through spilled blood and oil. To reach her.

Hel.

Trembling, she took off her mask and found a girl behind it. Pale skin, eyes like fiery amber. Her hair shaved, but still a girl. Her girl.

‘Now we end it…’

Morgravia touched a hand to Hel’s cheek, pressed the gun against her own left temple and spent the last bullet.

CHAPTER 30

Survivors

They got almost half a mile away from the gate when Barak decided to turn back. Jana didn’t argue or even object. Still weak, still pale, he reversed the rig and headed south. To the church. To Morgravia.

He drove in silence, Jana loading up the shotguns as he hammered the accelerator.

Two hundred feet away and he saw the girl. Thought it an apparition at first, a symptom of his injuries. It was only when Jana yelled at him to stop that he pumped the brake and slewed the Mule to an ungainly halt. She stood there, half lit by the forward lamps, a young female ganger. Scared, alone. Needing help.

Jana stepped out, a shotgun slung across her back.

‘I don’t…’ the girl grimaced, running a hand through her hair, looking this way and that, ‘I don’t know where I am.’ She wrung her hands, wet her lips. ‘They were killing each other. Eating each…’ She trailed off, her face turning blank. ‘Oh, Throne…’

‘It’s all right,’ said Jana, holding out her hand. ‘It’s all right. You’re not alone. Come with us. We’ll help you.’ She edged closer. ‘But you need to put that down.’

The girl frowned, eyes glazing as she regarded the bloody knife in her hand. Her arm was slick. It glistened tackily in the light.

‘I must’ve…’ she said, touching the base of her neck.

‘Come with me now,’ said Jana. ‘You don’t need that any more. Come with me and you’ll be safe.’ She smiled. ‘What’s your name?’

‘My name?’ The girl looked around, as if searching for the answer. ‘Karina,’ she said at last. ‘I’m Karina.’

‘I’m Jana,’ said Jana, ‘and this is my husband, Barak.’

‘Barak? My father knew a man by that name.’

Barak had stepped out of the rig and his eyes narrowed as he recognised the girl in the young woman before him.

‘Karina,’ he said, disbelieving. ‘You’re Cristo’s daughter.’

Karina wept, nodding. She let go of the knife and Jana embraced her, held her long enough that she could stop crying.

They didn’t head any further south. Nothing left there, Karina told them. Nothing but the dead.

The gate remained sealed as they approached it, the rig giving its last dying breaths. Its engine failed at the edge of the long processional leading to hive edge. Bodies burned on either side of it, some contorted by the plague, others simply corpses. Barak found it hard to count, to even fathom. He led his wife and the girl through the fields of the dead, past cleansing crews in proctor garb.

As they reached the gate, looking up upon the vast and indomitable edifice, he saw evidence of a vicious battle for the ramparts. A watchman speaking through a loudhailer addressed him, demanded they turn back. Uphive was sealed until further notice. Containment, he said. Plague, he said. Weapons edged from murder slits, anonymous and deadly.

Barak held up the rosette Morgravia had given him, a spark of grief lighting within at the thought of her as he raised it, for surely she must be dead.

A scope peered down. Seconds passed, freighted with the possibility of imminent execution. He heard shouted orders. Hurrying feet.

The weapons retracted.

The gate to uphive opened.

Two years later…

The ship was coming, and throughout Low Sink bells rang in celebration. A landing field had been prepared, near hive edge overlooking the Iryn Mere and the old ruin where a priory had once stood. A blackened spur of rock stood there now, a sapling having taken root in the rich soil left in its wake.

Karina stood, shoulders back, her face tilted to the sky as she watched for the lander. She had a knapsack slung across her back, a knife in her belt that she hoped they’d let her keep. Rugged clothes and a heavy coat that Barak had given her.

He and Jana stood nearby, proud as parents, already missing the daughter they never had.

Karina had never told them what happened at the church. In truth, she remembered little after she had fled. There was a shadow, a ship suspended above her. And then she was in the street, wandering, alone and afraid.

They had found her and they had taken her in. She had found purpose, inspired by her father’s example. She would give her life for something greater than herself. She had answered the tithe and would find her place amongst the stars as a soldier. She knew it would be hard, that the galaxy held terrors the recruitment parchments omitted. Death held no fear. Insignificance did.

Rumbling the earth, engines growling as it made its descent, the lander came into view. Smog parted, pushed aside like waves before its mass and power. Fire lit the sky, muted and diffuse across the heavy cloud layer.

A klaxon sounded, signalling for the recruits to advance onto the landing field.

Karina turned before she headed out, a smile and a wave for the man and woman she had come to trust and think of as her family. Both held back tears, clinging to one another, already wondering how they would fill their lives without her.

A Munitorum officer approached her at the threshold of the landing field, one of an advance party here to ensure the tithe went smoothly and in an orderly fashion.

‘Name,’ he said curtly, eyes on a data-slate cinched in the crook of his elbow, a stylus in the other hand primed to write.

‘Karina Cristo.’

The officer ran through the names, and made a face. ‘Not many from Blackgheist.’

Karina stiffened as old, unpleasant memories intruded.

The officer frowned then, rubbing at his temples. He looked suddenly ill, a vein throbbing in his neck like a cord of rope. Flushed, sweating, he appeared starved of breath.

‘Are you all right?’ Karina asked.

It passed, whatever it was, a shadow withered by the sun.

‘It’s nothing. Just a headache.’ He gave a watery smile, and thrust a piece of parchment in her hands, stamped and approved for tithe. ‘Must be the hive air,’ he said. ‘Never much cared for it.’

Karina smiled back. It was a tight, contained thing, almost cold.

‘Neither have I,’ she said, and advanced onto the landing field.

PROLOGUE

Night.

Night and dreams.

Night and wind.

He could not face the dreams, so he chose the wind.

The wind screamed over the battlements of the Ecclesiarchal Palace. It shrieked around the towers. It clawed at the shutters and howled in frustration at those it could not wrench open. Over others, it triumphed. These slammed back and forth, prisoners of the wind’s rage. Bang, bang, ba-bang, they struck the walls with a stuttering rhythm. The crashes hammered down the halls, and Cardinal Lorenz frowned, irritation breaking through his anxiety. Where were the serfs? Why weren’t they dealing with the shutters? If he had been trying to sleep, the clatter would have woken him.

If he had been trying to sleep.

He shuddered at the thought of slumber, and of the terrors that squirmed in its embrace.

Lorenz moved down the empty hall, tracked by the distant cacophony, called by the insistent, unforgiving storm. Traceries hung like spiderwebs above him. The light from the lumen sconces was dim. The shadows were so deep they seemed to be part of the night itself, its essence leaking into the palace, oozing down from the ribbed vaults and out of the peaks of the Gothic arches, waiting for him to stumble into the pools of darkness so they could seize him and drag him down.

Where was everyone? Lorenz was alone. There was no one in the hall. The limestone walls, darkened to black by millennia of grime, bounced the hollow sounds of his footsteps back at him. He could hear no activity anywhere. It was as if the palace were deserted.

Is this a dream?

Lorenz stamped. The impact on marble sent a jolt up his leg. And he was uncomfortably warm. Everything felt real. He was awake.

Not a dream.

Thank the Emperor.

He had been in his quarters, staring at his bed with dread, when the wind had begun to howl. He had decided to head to Saint Halfad’s Cloister, to spend a little longer praying before facing the implacable foe unconsciousness had become.

The nightmares were never the same, and they were all the same. When he woke, he could remember nothing except vague shades of horror. But he always came to in a panic, gasping for air, drenched in sweat, his skin crawling with the lingering sensation of whatever had touched it, or whatever it had been becoming.

He hadn’t slept for more than a few broken hours in over a month. And it was growing worse. Last night, and the night before, he had woken himself with his screams. A new residue was now left behind. The sense of imminence coated his soul.

Lorenz prayed for guidance. There was no one in whom he could confide. To open up would be to reveal weaknesses. Vulnerability was lethal. He had no patience for what was weak. Especially in himself.

He despised himself for being afraid.

So, he had been praying. And had received no answer.

Lorenz pushed open the bronze double doors that led to the cloister. It sat at the centre of the Ecclesiarchal Palace, its ivy-covered walls surrounding the lush inner garden. It was here that Lorenz was used to finding peace, a green oasis that shut out the realities of Theotokos.

Even here, sheltered by the four walls of the palace, the wind was ferocious. It roared at him as he stepped outside. He would not find peace here tonight.

Why did you come here?

He wasn’t certain. The choice had been between the wind and dreams. There had been no other possibility.

The tempest was so strong it pushed him back against the doors.

This is pointless. Go back.

Go back to what?

The cardinal shook his head. He was being ridiculous. He had come to contemplate the fury of a storm in the night. He would let the wind inspire him, lead him to meditate on the glory and power of the Emperor.

Yes. That sounded right. That was why he was here.

Squinting into the force of the gusts, pulling his robes tightly around himself, he advanced into the garden. A scattering of ornate, wrought-iron lumen posts cast halos of light over the cloister. The hedges and flowers were dimly limned silhouettes, the trees brooding guardians. Lorenz made his way to the centre of the cloister, where his preferred bench sat under the branches of a massive yew. The tree was older than the palace. Its roots, Lorenz felt, reached to the molten core of Theotokos. This was his retreat. This was where it was forbidden to disturb him. It was the last refuge of true rest for him, the place where he was most shielded from the ugliness of the world, and from the proof of his failure.

The wind batted at him. Twice, he came close to losing his balance. The gusts came from one direction, then another, as if the storm were trapped inside the cloister and raging to escape.

Lorenz was breathing hard from effort by the time he reached the yew. He held up a hand, shielding his eyes from the blasts, and looked up at the tree. A lumen post illuminated the sprawling, gnarled canopy of branches.

The tree was still.

Though the wind roared, though it tore at Lorenz’s robes and tried to knock him off his feet, it left the tree untouched. Not a single branch moved. Not a single twig.

Lorenz stared. He staggered backwards in confusion. He had to be mistaken. Somehow, he was looking at the tree in the wrong way.

He glanced around, turning to the rest of the garden for support, for sanity. Nothing moved. The hedges, shrubs and flowers might as well have been cast in bronze.

This is wrong. I’m wrong. I must be.

A dread worse than the fears of sleep clutched his heart.

Then the sound of buzzing thrummed in the night, and an immense cloud of flies boiled out of the centre of the yew’s branches. In moments, it filled the cloister. Gusts hurled the flies by the hundreds against Lorenz. They rattled against his robes. They struck his face, dry as sand. They flew into his mouth, vibrating and crawling. He gagged and coughed them out, spitting in horror and disgust. Winged bodies flew into his nose and he fell, clawing at his face, choking.

He snorted and wept, vomited up squirming bodies. Then he clapped his hands over his mouth and ran, weaving back and forth through the wind and the flies. His eyes were all but shut and he could barely see where he was going. He knew the garden intimately, knew every path and rise and fall by heart, but now he felt lost, flailing through a buzzing, whining, howling storm. These were not flies. They were pieces of the night. They were fragments of his forgotten nightmares that had come for him.

There was movement to his right. He was not alone in the garden. A hooded figure glided past the edge of the light, untroubled by the flies.

Lorenz collided with a hedge. It slashed at his face, and when he finally pulled himself free, the figure was gone.

Lorenz kept running. He tripped over a minor dip in the path and fell again, and then again. Only the horror of the bodies hurtling against him kept him from crying out. His breath wheezed from his lips in a thin, despairing moan.

He slammed into one of the pillars of the walkways. The impact stunned him. His body rang with blunt pain and he doubled over, agonised by the effort to keep from gasping.

Almost there. He was almost there.

He moved forward again, pursued, surrounded and assailed by flies. If he tried to pray he would choke, and he would fall, and he did not think he would rise again.

At last, he crashed against the doors. He held his breath and struggled with the handles. A huge gust pushed against him, and for a terrible moment he thought it would hold the doors closed. But he pulled and he pulled, and the heavy doors moved and parted, opening just enough for him to pass.

He couldn’t help it, then. He sobbed in relief. And he took a breath. And though he covered his mouth again as he slipped between the doors, it was too late. A struggling bundle of flies squirmed past his lips and he swallowed.

Gagging again, his eyes streaming, he managed to stay on his feet and pull the doors to. They only moved a couple of feet, yet they shut with a cavernous, thunderous clang.

The cardinal sank to his knees. He coughed. It felt as though the flies were caught in his throat, buzzing and crawling. By the grace of some miracle, none of the insects were in the hall.

And the wind seemed to be dying.

Hidden by the doors, the horrors in the cloister already seemed less real. He had seen impossible things. So, he must not really have seen them.

The tree must have been moving in the gusts. There had been only a storm, and insects caught up in it.

He was exhausted from lack of rest. He was overreacting.

But the echoing clang of the doors did not fade right away. At first, they grew louder – louder than the sound that had made them. Then closer, with a heavy, relentless rhythm, like the footsteps of approaching doom.

CHAPTER 1

A modified Taurox bearing the seal of the Adeptus Ministorum was waiting for Arch-Deacon Ambrose when he stepped out of the city of Magerit’s trans-hub. He winced at the sight of the vehicle and its pointed ostentation. Where the turret had once been mounted, there was now a shrine of iron and gold. Banners of scripture hung from poles on the rear of the roof. They moved sluggishly in the breeze. The driver, a sturdy woman named Maevek, gave Ambrose a sympathetic smile as she bowed, letting him know she understood his embarrassment.

He had been travelling for over a month, and his return to Magerit was the first time Ambrose had been presented with armoured transport. This felt like Lorenz sending a message to the populace of the city. Ambrose suspected it was aimed at him too. Either way, it was clumsy and counterproductive.

With a sigh, Ambrose made his way over to the Taurox. People streamed past him, entering and leaving the terminal. The building of the trans-hub towered over the crowded outdoor concourse. Webs of plasteel walkways linked the rockcrete structures. Fine ash drifted slowly down from the grey-brown sky, coating everything in layers of grit. For the first time in weeks, Ambrose tasted the familiar, thick, chewy air of Magerit. The air had been easier to breathe in a number of the other cities he had visited, but not for pleasant reasons.

In the time it took Ambrose to cross the five yards to the vehicle, half a dozen people recognised him. They called to him and reached out, and he greeted them, smiling. He was getting used to his rising public image, even though he still felt conflicted about it. He was an arch-deacon. He was not meant to be the visible face of the Ecclesiarchy on Theotokos.

Maevek opened the door of the passenger compartment as Ambrose approached, then took his travel bag from him. He climbed into the Taurox, settling his robes as he sat on a bench. The compartment was meant to hold ten fully equipped soldiers. It was ridiculously vast for just him. He opened the viewing slits, trying to get a little bit of air. There was no relief to be had from the heat – it was as stifling outside as it was in the Taurox. A bit of a breeze, though. A little bit of movement in the air. That would keep him from going mad.

With a lurch, the vehicle started moving, its four sets of tracks rumbling over the pitted surface of the road. Ambrose leaned his head against the viewing slit, watching the industrial tangle of Magerit slide by. He was home. He was seeing crowds again. He wasn’t seeing starvation and worse wherever he looked. He should have been glad. Instead, he felt only a resigned dread.

The vox-speaker in the compartment crackled to life. ‘Welcome back, arch-deacon,’ Maevek said. ‘You were missed.’

‘That’s kind of you to say.’ He meant it.

‘Was your journey a good one?’

‘It was a sobering one,’ Ambrose said. ‘A solemn one.’ He had known Maevek for years. It wasn’t because he trusted her discretion that he spoke freely. It was because he did not think there was any point, or even possibility, of concealing what he had seen.

Maevek was silent for quite a while, as if unsure how to respond. Finally, she said, ‘Do you think it will rain soon?’

‘The Emperor protects, and the Emperor provides,’ Ambrose said.

That it was the truth did not prevent his answer from sounding rote in his ears. But there was no other answer to that question, the question that had become a refrain on Theotokos, sung by a choir composed of every living soul on the planet.

Every soul except those behind the walls of the Ecclesiarchal Palace.

Ambrose closed his eyes. He was tired. It had taken thirty hours on a series of short-haul lifters and a maze of maglev connections, a number of them through stations and lines that were barely operational, to get him back to Magerit. He dozed uneasily, his head jerking up and down with the jolts of the ride. He woke up feeling stunned when the Taurox came to a halt at the gates of the palace’s grounds.

Ambrose thumbed the vox-speaker’s button. ‘Maevek,’ he said. ‘I will walk from here.’

‘The cardinal wants to see you when you arrive,’ Maevek said uneasily.

‘And he will. I simply prefer to arrive on foot. Please open the passenger compartment door.’

Maevek obeyed, and a few moments later Ambrose walked through the open gate, nodding to the guards who stood to attention for him. Maevek drove past him, taking the Taurox up the rest of the palace’s hill towards the building itself. Ambrose walked off the road and onto one of the paths that wound its way gradually up the slope.

Magerit sat in a wide bowl. A mile beyond its western lip, the palace mount rose. It was not much more than five thousand feet high, but that was still enough to lift the palace above the worst of the haze that shrouded the three-hundred thousand souls that made up the city’s population. An outer wall of rockcrete fortifications ringed the hill halfway up, sealing off the palace grounds. Below it, the terrain was barren rock and scattered, desiccated scrub. Within the palace’s outer wall, lush parkland flourished.

Ambrose walked slowly through the last jewel of Theotokos, feeling a pang of guilt for the joy he experienced in seeing greenery again. There was shade here from trees that grew in an artificial, forced variety. The temperate stood next to the tropical. Oaks were surrounded by palms, and cacti were draped in vines. Every night, an army of mono-tasked servitors descended the hill, controlling irrigation, adjusting individual patches of soil, pruning trees and hedges.

The slope of the hill had been landscaped into broad terraces, with moss-grown stone steps linking the levels. Ornamental brooks had been dug, while an underground complex of piles provided the actual irrigation. Deeper inside the hills was the Ecclesiarchal Palace’s gigantic reservoir, fed by redirected subterranean springs. If it never again rained on Theotokos, All Martyrs would still have water to survive for a century or more.

Ambrose thought about the ocean beneath his feet as he slowly made his way up the terraces. In his chest, guilt, anger and frustration fought for supremacy. The emotional pain became even more intense when he stopped just below the palace walls and looked back downslope. From here, high above the grounds’ outer walls, he beheld the full prospect of Magerit in its bowl. The city had long endured suffocating air. The years of endless heat, each more intense than the last, it had also learned to shoulder. But the heat had finally brought drought, and it was the thirst that was slowly killing the city.

And Magerit was among the last cities of Theotokos.

I am going to live to see the death of my world.

He had never spoken the words aloud. But after what he had seen in the last month, he could no longer suppress the thought.

Emperor, look upon the suffering of Your faithful servants. End this drought. Send us rain, that we might fight on in Your name and help carry Your banners forth across the galaxy.

Ambrose could not make it rain. He could not end the planet-wide drought. The only thing that might be within the scope of his power was to keep his fellow citizens alive until the drought ended.

The task ahead filled him with despair.

I’ll never convince him. Not Lorenz.

But I have to try.

He turned away from Magerit’s suffering and headed for the entrance to the palace.

Cardinal Lorenz received Ambrose in the throne room. He was not a big man, but the cardinal looked tiny in the huge seat of iron trimmed with gold, dwarfed by the immensity of the throne and its hall. Massive columns of polished black marble supported a vault seventy feet high. Like everywhere else in the palace, lumen sconces on the pillars cast insufficient light to lift the hall out of a solemn gloom. Statues of saints stood on the bases of the columns, looking down on all who passed and judging them harshly. A great, circular stained-glass window in the western wall caught the sun’s rays and turned them to deep, crystalline choirs of emerald, sapphire and ruby. Beneath it was the throne, mounted in the centre of a three-tiered platform.

Lorenz hunched into the seat, a crooked, exhausted vulture. He had shrivelled since Ambrose had last seen him. He seemed to have aged ten years. The lines of his face were deeper, his eyes heavy lidded and sunken. His thin lips pressed tightly together, as though he were reluctant to open his mouth.

Standing at the cardinal’s right, leaning against the throne with an unpleasantly proprietary air, was Rosarius, the relic-keeper. He was Ambrose’s age, much younger than Lorenz, a man in his prime, except he could not bring himself to associate the word prime with anything that had to do with Rosarius. The relic-keeper’s face was pinched and hungry, squeezed by ambition that could never be sated. His shoulders were rounded, and his neck bowed from his eternal, performative subservience.

‘Welcome back, Arch-Deacon Ambrose,’ Rosarius said, as if he were the one holding court. ‘The cardinal is eager for your news.’

Lorenz grunted.

Ambrose kneeled before the cardinal. He lowered his forehead to touch the first step of the platform. ‘The blessings of the Emperor be upon you, eminence,’ he said. He rose, waited for Lorenz’s nod, then climbed to the upper tier of the platform. He barely glanced at Rosarius. He answered to the cardinal, not the sycophant.

Rosarius sniffed, clearly displeased to have Ambrose standing on the same level. He leaned away from the throne, standing straight, for all the good it did him. Ambrose was almost six inches taller, and Rosarius had now lost the advantage of being able to look down on him.

‘You took your time on your journey,’ Lorenz said.

‘We hope you were not indulging yourself,’ Rosarius added.

‘I was being thorough, cardinal,’ Ambrose said. He spoke calmly, hoping there was no defensiveness in his tone. ‘You commanded me to gather a complete picture of the situation on Theotokos.’ Because you and your lickspittle wanted me out of the way for as long as possible, and then still complain that I took too long. Even so, Ambrose had been glad to go. Lorenz might only be pretending to care about the conditions across the planet, but Ambrose was not.

‘One can be too thorough,’ said Lorenz.

He sounded genuinely aggrieved, and Ambrose wondered what had happened for the cardinal to have actually missed him. Was order in Magerit deteriorating in a way he had not seen upon arrival? ‘If I have erred, I am sorry,’ he said.

Lorenz waved the apology off. ‘Tell me what you have learned.’

‘Indeed,’ Rosarius chimed in. ‘Do the cities delinquent in their tithes have a reason for no longer being in communication with us?’

Tithes. That is your concern. Ambrose fixed the relic-keeper with a long stare. He did not hide his disgust. He was not surprised that Rosarius knew such details about the tithing. He and Lorenz had been steadily eroding Ambrose’s financial authority, and it was becoming harder and harder for him to exercise his actual duties as arch-deacon. He was the one who was supposed to be governing the administrative side of the diocese. It was he whose responsibility it was to direct the flow of Ecclesiarchal wealth to the channels where the ministry needed it most. He still had the ability to see what was happening to the treasury, but his role had been relegated to that of a passive witness. Given the scale of the crisis on Theotokos, it was painfully clear to him how that wealth should be spent. Against all morality, Lorenz and Rosarius disagreed. To date, they had been unable to see beyond their personal horizons. There was no hope that Rosarius could be made to change his mind. He was venality made flesh. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what was happening outside the walls of All Martyrs. It was that he didn’t care. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Ambrose wanted to believe that Lorenz could yet be reasoned with. He needed to feel some hope. He had known the cardinal for over a decade. There had been a time, in the early days of Ambrose’s appointment, when Lorenz had shown signs of the cardinal he could become. But that side of his character had withered along with the fortunes of Theotokos. The decline had started even before Rosarius had established himself as Lorenz’s shadow.

Rosarius did not make Lorenz into what he has become. It was Lorenz who opened the door to Rosarius. You know this.

Yes. But I have to act as if I do not, or else I will have nothing left except despair.

‘The silence of those cities has a very good explanation,’ Ambrose said quietly. ‘The dead do not speak.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lorenz asked after a beat.

‘Your eminence, the years of drought have pushed almost all of Theotokos past the point of no return. Our focus has been on the immediate parish of Magerit, and the pressures of local circumstances have unavoidably narrowed our perspective. The same drawing inwards has happened everywhere else as the drought has persisted. The worst has happened. Theotokos is dying. The scythe of famine has swept over the globe. I have seen cities emptied of life. I have seen entire regions where the few people who remain are, without exception, starving, when they are not dying of thirst.’

‘You exaggerate,’ said Rosarius.

‘I swear by the Throne that I do not. The simple truth is this. Magerit is all that remains. It is the last functioning city on Theotokos.’

Lorenz grimaced. He stirred on the throne, shifting as if in pain.

You understand that, don’t you? You understand what that means.

Ambrose held his breath, hoping that Lorenz was learning the right lesson. In the comfort and safety of the Ecclesiarchal Palace, Lorenz was not in immediate personal danger from drought or famine. And Magerit’s spaceport was still in operation. When the end came for Theotokos, Lorenz could always leave. What Ambrose was telling him did, though, present the prospect of total humiliation. Lorenz’s diocese had shrunk in prestige as Theotokos’ economy, and thus its importance, had collapsed. With every year of the world’s decline, the cardinal had become more bitter, and more obsessed with holding on to what he clearly thought of as his. His diocese, his world, his wealth.

Now Ambrose had just told Lorenz that his domain had become just one city.

And you’re on the verge of losing that too.

‘You come here to sound the clarion of doom, then,’ Lorenz said.

‘There is still hope, eminence.’

‘I have yet to hear it. Have you discovered how to make it rain?’

‘Before I left, I presented you with a series of proposals. I feel their implementation is more urgent than ever. Have you had a chance to look them over?’

Rosarius smirked.

‘Your proposals,’ said Lorenz. He muttered something incomprehensible to himself. It sounded like a curse. ‘Your proposals. Yes. Yes, we have examined them.’

Rosarius grinned at Ambrose when Lorenz said we.

‘They are not realistic,’ Lorenz concluded.

‘With respect,’ Ambrose said, ‘I fear that if we do not implement them, we are not being realistic. The reservoir of All Martyrs is large enough, and is replenished enough, for us to provide considerable relief to Magerit for a considerable time.’

‘And what do you mean by considerable?’ Lorenz asked. ‘Until it does rain? Do you think rain will ever return to Theotokos?’

‘I must have faith that it will.’ And when Lorenz snorted, Ambrose added, ‘The Emperor protects.’

Lorenz stared at him, unblinking, unmoved.

‘Until the drought ends,’ Ambrose went on, ‘it is our sacred duty to preserve this world, sacred in its fealty to the Emperor, for as long as we can. If we do not act, we will lose everything.’

‘If we do not act with caution, we will lose everything,’ Rosarius said, his voice unctuous with pious reason.

Lorenz raised a crooked finger. ‘Yes. That. Precisely. The Emperor protects. He does. You repeat the truth we all know, arch-deacon. The Emperor will provide. These times are sent to test us, to test our faith, and to test our discipline. When the trials come, we must remain steadfast. That is what we shall do.’

In other words, you will do nothing. Except hoard water and wealth until it no longer serves a purpose.

What did Lorenz hope to accomplish? What was he planning? What sort of a reception did he expect off-world if he waited until there was nothing to do except abandon a dead planet? Ambrose had no illusions about the corruption that ran like a cancer through the Adeptus Ministorum. He had too much direct experience of it to pretend otherwise. If anything, he thought it was Lorenz who was being naive. The stench of failure would cling to him like a curse. And the way his diocese had been carved up by other cardinals clearly showed the esteem in which he was held. He was powerful on Theotokos. He would be nowhere else.

Maybe he knows. Maybe he has no plans to leave at all. Maybe he’s calculating that he can remain comfortable in the palace until he dies, and what happens next is no concern of his.

That had the awful ring of truth. Lorenz did have the look of a man who saw death drawing nearer with a mixture of relief and dread. Something was troubling him, but whatever it was, it was not the fate of anyone other than himself.

What about Rosarius? What is he planning? He had to be looking beyond the lifespan of his patron, his future after Theotokos. Rosarius could leave without taint. He was not responsible for the collapse of the world. That was the fault of the lord-governor, who had died a year ago and not been replaced, leaving Lorenz as the unchallenged ruler of the planet. It was the fault of the cardinal. It was, Ambrose thought bitterly, no doubt the fault of the arch-deacon too. Rosarius was a humble relic-keeper, after all. He had no influence over his betters, or any right to attempt to exert one.

How perfect for you, Rosarius. Amass your wealth, then leave the ruins when the moment is right.

Ambrose had no difficulty guessing when that moment would be. The day after Lorenz’s funeral, the relic-keeper would be gone.

There is no hope. They have decided. One way or another, they are abandoning Theotokos to its fate.

Lorenz and Rosarius were looking at Ambrose as if expecting his capitulation.

He could not walk away. He had to keep trying.

‘I have seen the status of Magerit’s reservoirs,’ he said. ‘They will not last much longer. The entire city is on severe water rationing. The situation is critical. We are perilously close to seeing a disintegration of order.’

‘If the people forget their duty to the Emperor and to the Imperial Creed, then they must be disciplined,’ Lorenz said. He sounded as if he was losing interest in the discussion. There was something else on his mind, something preying on it, and it bothered him far more than the prospect of societal collapse.

‘Disciplined by whom?’ Ambrose asked. ‘What will happen when the enforcers of the Magerit Watch are dying of thirst too? Remember that the greenery of the palace’s hill is perfectly visible from the city.’

‘It is also well defended,’ said Rosarius. ‘There will be no rabble within these walls.’

Lorenz stood, signalling the end of the audience. He moved more easily than his hunched figure suggested. ‘This disaster will not come,’ he announced, as if his will were enough to forbid it. ‘The faith of the people is strong.’ The words were an order, not a statement. ‘And if they need to be reminded of its strength, then they will be.’ He looked at Ambrose. ‘I thank you for your report, arch-deacon. You are no doubt eager to ensure that the charities you support have continued their good work in your absence. I have detained you long enough.’

And that was it. Ambrose was dismissed. The month and more of travel, the report he had painstakingly assembled from evidence so terrible it had destroyed the last vestiges of his peace of mind, all these things meant nothing.

The death of an entire world meant nothing. Whatever it was that troubled Lorenz, it was not the fate of the citizens of Theotokos.

‘Your eminence,’ Ambrose said. He bowed his head to the cardinal and left. As he walked back down the dark length of the throne room, he could feel Rosarius’ smug grin burning into the back of his neck.

There was work waiting for him in his quarters. And Lorenz was right. The charities needed him. They were the one financial outlet over which the cardinal had let him retain a modicum of control. They would be needed more than ever now. And the only reason they were still his to direct, he reflected sourly, was that they were useful to Lorenz. Through them, he expected Ambrose to tamp down the possibilities of unrest.

Instead of heading for his quarters, Ambrose left the palace. He needed to be outside, beyond the walls that allowed the inhabitants of All Martyrs to pretend there was not a desperate city just a few miles away.

Back on the green slopes, Ambrose looked down at the smudged misery of Magerit. The skyline wavered. The air quivered in heat. From here, it was easy to believe that life went on as it always had in the city.

That was a lie.

Everything Ambrose loved was down there.

And everything he loved was going to die.

CHAPTER 2

The relief centre’s new premises was the warehouse complex of an abandoned manufactory. Bethia Antoniax was pleased with her choice of location, though the reasons for the change filled her with sorrow and dread. The charity needed more space. There were too many people desperate for its help, too many for the hab assembly hall that had been the former base. The pride that Bethia had first felt when Arch-Deacon Ambrose had granted her the authority to make decisions on the ground for the charity had given way to a grim, determined sense of duty. That duty was what gave her the strength to keep going, and to stave off hopelessness. Between working as a shift supervisor at the promethium refinery a mile to the north, and the hours she spent here doing what she could for the thirsty, the hungry, the ill and the dying, she had no energy to spend on anything but the needs of the immediate present. Despair was a luxury. It drained the will to work and struggle. Therefore, it was a sin against the Emperor.

Despair hovered close, though. A shadow, it clung to her, dogging her steps, always waiting for her to let down her guard. Every day, it loomed larger. She felt its cold touch now as she moved through the cavernous expanses of the warehouse halls, confronting the dark twins of enormity and futility.

There were thousands of people here, thousands who had nowhere else to go, no other recourse. They were manufactory serfs and Administratum clerks, maglev adepts and the cathedral’s cleaners. They came from all the walks of life of Magerit, except the nobility. They were all those who could no longer function. They were too thirsty, too hungry, too weak. They were, Bethia feared, what everyone in the city would become soon enough.

They were curled up against walls and the iron columns that supported the warehouse ceiling. They were prone, lying in attitudes of defeat and misery. Some shuffled aimlessly, gazing up at the high ceiling, as if somewhere there was cooler air and running water. As big as the space was, its atmosphere was as suffocating and stagnant as just about everywhere else in Magerit. On the ceiling, a faded, grime-encrusted fresco of the Imperial aquila looked down with blank impassivity on the suffering.

In the centre of the first warehouse were the latest supplies to be distributed. Bethia stopped before the piles of food crates and water jugs. There were fewer of each kind than the day before.

As she joined the line of volunteers who were carrying parcelled-out rations to the desperate, a stirring rippled across the warehouse. People sat up straighter. They called out, weak but grateful.

Bethia turned around. She smiled. Arch-Deacon Ambrose had entered the warehouse. People gathered around him, and he greeted them warmly, but with a distinct melancholy as he blessed them. They wanted reassurance from him, and he clearly wished he could grant it, but he was unwilling to lie. So, he said little. His mere presence was helping, though. It was a message – the people of Magerit had not been forgotten, by someone at least.

Ambrose must have risen quickly through the Ecclesiarchal ranks to this position, Bethia thought, because there was still a youthful energy to his strong features. As he drew closer, she could see that fatigue and care were wearing him down, but he strode with purpose all the same. His burdens had not bowed his shoulders, and he stood tall among the faithful, a beacon of hope in a world that desperately needed one.

Ambrose nodded to her. He stopped a few yards away from the supplies, speaking quietly to the people crowding around him. They were too weak to stand very long, and they drifted back to the resting places, grateful that he was there and that he had seen them. Then he walked the rest of the way to the volunteers, and he could not hide his dismay when he looked at what little they had to distribute.

‘Is that all?’ he asked Bethia. He gazed across the warehouse, and at the door at the far end leading to another hall and still more of the needy.

‘It is,’ Bethia said. ‘The donations are dwindling. We get a bit less every day.’

‘So either the nobility of Magerit is itself dwindling, or it is becoming fearful for its own reserves.’

She did not think she would ever get used to his frankness. Or tire of it. He had given voice to her own suspicions, though for one of her class to speak them aloud would be to invite violent repercussion. Even so, encouraged by the righteous anger she heard just beneath the surface of his words, she took a risk. ‘Or both those things are true,’ she said.

There was no rebuke from the arch-deacon. ‘I fear they may be,’ he said sadly.

Most of the supplies were not even donations, only what the volunteers had been able to scavenge. There was discarded food that was turning mouldy but still this side of rotting. There were manufactory rations. These could not rot, though they were stale and tasteless to start with and were so old they were turning into tooth-shattering bricks.

‘Where has the water come from?’ Ambrose asked. He picked up a canister, unscrewed the top and sniffed. He frowned. ‘Is this safe?’

‘We hope so. A lot of it is condensation gathered from pipelines in the manufactories that are still running. It’s been boiled.’

‘Throne,’ Ambrose muttered. ‘It has come to this.’ He recapped the canister. ‘Any donations from the largess of the wealthy?’

‘Very little.’

‘I will make some visits.’ His tone was cold, angry, determined. And without hope.

‘Our prayers will go with you.’

‘Given the circumstances, I am all the more impressed with what you have done in my absence,’ Ambrose said. ‘I approve of the relocation.’

‘Thank you, arch-deacon.’

‘Are you using the entire complex?’

‘Unfortunately, yes. And there is something I must show you. In the furthest hall.’

Ambrose closed his eyes for a moment, as if briefly unable to hold off the burden of exhaustion. ‘That is where the most unfortunate are, I take it?’

‘It is.’

He nodded. ‘Very well. Lead on.’

It was almost a year since Ambrose had first seen Bethia Antoniax. It was easy for him to pinpoint the date. It had been the first time he had led prayer services at Magerit’s Cathedral of Iron Obeisance, the moment when he had begun to perform the public duties that would normally have been Lorenz’s domain. This was when the cardinal had started to avoid being seen, rapidly turning into a recluse behind the walls of All Martyrs.

Ambrose gave Lorenz credit for being able to read the mood of the citizenry. A year ago was when the impact of the drought had reached critical levels in the city, and when the Ecclesiarchy’s hoarding of its water supplies became painfully apparent. Lorenz had known how bad things could get. The soldiers of the militia and the enforcers of the Magerit Watch would be thirsty too. A time would come when the sight of an ecclesiarch might ignite an uprising. If that happened, the cardinal would prefer that spark to be the arch-deacon, and that he would be caught outside the palace.

But there had been no uprising. If anything, the more Ambrose had been visible in the city, the calmer the populace had seemed. He didn’t want violence. He did everything he could to help to maintain order.

And he cursed Lorenz for his expert, manipulative strategy. The cardinal used the arch-deacon’s best impulses for his own ends.

The first mass that he presided over set the pattern for all that were to come after. The sermon was not his own, Lorenz saw to that. The cardinal ensured he still controlled the conduct of the rites, even when he was not present.

The sermon was nakedly self-serving. Its hypocritical call to thrift and patience caught in Ambrose’s throat. The only way he got through it was by reading it as mechanically as possible, without a single trace of inflection. He performed the rest of the service with all the might of his faith. The people heard and understood the difference. They knew when he was having to speak with someone else’s voice. And after he spoke, at the end of the rite, he came down from the pulpit to talk with the congregation, and most of all to listen.

What he did mattered to him, and it mattered to the faithful. He took some pride in that, despite himself. He was glad he made a difference.

His pride was tempered, though, by his honesty with himself. At that first service, after he had managed to choke out Lorenz’s shallow words, it was not principle that pushed him to descend from the pulpit, but the presence of a single person. It was the sight of Bethia that called him down.

She was sitting in a pew a few rows back, in the centre of his line of sight. He had noticed her a few minutes into the service. She had the face of someone who had spent her life in the manufactory and yet was not eroded or broken down by the demands of that existence. Instead, miraculously, she was being tempered – forged into a stronger, more resilient alloy. She took part in the prayers and hymns with a focus and commitment that would have been a credit to any preacher of the Adeptus Ministorum. Her eyes were as steely as her faith.

There sits a true citizen of the Imperium. That was what Ambrose told himself he had thought when he saw her, and why he was drawn to come down and speak with her. It was an easy lie to tell himself in those first few days, because it was also a truth. Bethia was a true citizen of the Imperium. The lie was that this was the reason he chose to speak to her. The lie was that it was something rational that pulled him towards her.

The truth that he would deny was that it was the happenstance of those particular lines of her face, and the shape of those eyes, that drew him in. The truth was that he found her beautiful, and so he wanted to speak to her, as simple and as inadmissible and as damning as that. And when he heard her voice, and when he saw the bedrock of her faith and her unwavering commitment to the people around her, he was lost.

In the days that followed, he was just honest enough with himself to admit that he was lost. He also told himself he was strong enough to enjoy her company without risking impropriety. He knew that this too was a lie, but guilt went a long way in giving him the strength he needed.

He spoke to Bethia, and with the other congregants who milled around, and in the aftermath of that first service in the cathedral the people had embraced him with a fervour even stronger than the resentment that had been building towards the cardinal. In the weeks and months that followed, he continued the practice of delivering Lorenz’s sermons with mechanical disinterest, and then moving within the congregation as if he were just another worshipper.

He could not resist talking with Bethia and her family each time. She attended with her parents, manufactory serfs who were nearing the end of their productive lives. They were hunched, worn thin, and moved slowly. Her father, Havak, had lost an arm decades earlier, and its bionic replacement was crude, little more than a claw on the end of a jointed cylinder, and suited only to the most rudimentary tasks of the refinery. Elyra, her mother, bore the scars of having been scalded by live steam a few years earlier. She moved her mouth with difficulty and spoke little. If the parents had once had their daughter’s strength, only traces of it remained.

Bethia’s sister, Levan, and her brother, Urus, were also present. They were much younger, having only just begun their first shifts at the refinery. They looked at their elder sibling with worshipful awe. They were both thin and showing the early signs of malnutrition when Ambrose first met them. They had grown weaker, not stronger, in the year since.

Within a week, Ambrose had stopped lying to himself about why he treasured his time with Bethia. He now fully acknowledged the truth of what he felt about her, and he faced the consequences of that truth. On Theotokos, the Ecclesiarchy was celibate. What he felt, he could never admit, to Bethia or to anyone else. Yet he could not bring himself to shun her company. He channelled his emotions into helping the unfortunate people of Magerit with even greater energy, keeping Bethia and her family close to the centre of his activities as much as he could. He invited her to serve as a volunteer in his charities, and then gradually gave her more and more authority. She rewarded his trust in her, and though he agonised over the fact that he was doing the right things for the wrong reasons, that even surrendering his peace of mind was simply part of a performative sacrifice, it didn’t matter. He accepted all the pain as the price to be paid for indulging himself this far.

And the need for the charities kept climbing, even as Magerit’s population was shrinking. Its people were starving and dying of thirst, starting with the most destitute. Ambrose was trying to halt the tide of death, but with his hands tied by Lorenz, his success was limited. He was able to do more for the morale of the people than for their lives.

Now he was with Bethia for the first time since he had left to begin his travels across the dying world. He was as close to happy in this moment as he had been since his return, and he was ashamed of his indulgence. But his soul warmed when he walked by her side. He let himself enjoy the confused stir of emotions, barely noticing the misery surrounding him that he could do little to alleviate, his frustration fading into the background as they crossed one warehouse after another. The presence of Bethia was his shield against the pain of the world, but it was also an agony – a reward and a punishment.

Ambrose pulled himself out of his reverie when Bethia slowed her pace. They were approaching the last of the warehouses. Its bay doors were closed and locked.

‘That bad?’ Ambrose asked.

‘I’m afraid so.’

He followed her up the iron staircase that switchbacked up the wall. At the top was a doorway that linked the upper walkways between the warehouses. Bethia took the key ring that hung from her belt and opened the door. From the pockets of her work tunic she produced two face masks. She gave one to Ambrose and donned the other. Then they passed through the doorway into the room beyond.

They said nothing at first. The view commanded the solemnity of silence. Ambrose found he was walking more slowly and softly as he looked down onto the floor below. He tried to find some solace in the fact that this hall was not as crowded as the others.

With the drought had come disease. The people drank any water they could find, whether it was safe or not. The fevers took hold, and they spread.

There were hundreds of sufferers below. They twitched and moaned and retched. They cried out to the Emperor. Some slept without rest, their breathing rattling like stones. Volunteers went from one patient to the other, placing damp rags on foreheads, and kneeling in prayer.

‘So many more than a month ago,’ Ambrose muttered.

‘There are more quarantine zones too,’ Bethia said.

‘Yes. I spoke with Chief Enforcer Bonarmo. She says the spread of the fevers has been more or less contained.’

‘It has helped that she has had the Magerit Watch move as many of the afflicted as possible to holding stations like this.’

‘I have long been impressed by Chief Bonarmo’s judgement and precision.’ Ambrose also admired her commitment to Theotokos. She was as frustrated with Lorenz as he was, particularly after the death of the lord-governor had brought an end to even the weakest check against the cardinal’s power.

‘She does not use force without just cause,’ Bethia said, and the implication that others might was as close as Ambrose had ever heard her come to criticising the cardinal.

‘Who are the volunteers?’ Ambrose asked, admiring their dedication. They were risking a lot.

‘Those who have recovered.’

‘I see. The fatality levels could be worse, then?’

‘They could be. They are high among the weak, the infirm, the old and the very young. If you are strong, you should recover, but…’

‘But without enough food and water, everyone is getting weaker.’

‘And the cemeteries are becoming overburdened,’ Bethia said quietly.

‘Then the bodies must be burned.’

‘They are, by command of the chief enforcer.’

Order still held in Magerit, then. If we are to die, it will be slowly and with as much dignity as we can muster. The thought was a sour one. He was glad the Magerit Watch was taking an active role in preventing chaos before it happened. He was dismayed, though, by how much the other branches of the planetary government must have decayed to render that necessary.

After watching the ministrations a bit longer, Ambrose pointed. ‘Those rags…’ he began.

‘Cooled with water unfit for drinking.’ She shrugged unhappily at the compromises the situation had forced upon those who tried to help. ‘Since they are already sick, and since doing this provides a bit of relief, it seemed better than doing nothing.’

‘Doing nothing is no longer a lesser of evils,’ Ambrose said. He thought about the paltry donations from the citizens of Magerit who still had food to eat, water to drink, and wealth to spare. He thought of Lorenz, barricaded in luxury behind the walls of All Martyrs. He had already run up against one wall of callous indifference. It was time to bash his head against another.

Ambrose returned to the Ecclesiarchal Palace at nightfall. He was exhausted, and he was furious. He found a bench a short distance below the palace and sat down beneath the spreading, gnarled arms of an ancient oak. He gazed at the dirty amber glow of Magerit. Was the light dimmer than a month ago? Perhaps. Were those patches of darkness he saw in the glow? Perhaps. Or perhaps he was imagining them, his fears racing ahead to the city’s demise.

Some of it deserved to die.

But not all of it.

How long before she is sick too?

She’s being careful. She’s strong. She’ll avoid the fever.

So she can die of thirst, then.

Ambrose hissed, muttering a long stream of curses under his breath. He called damnation down on Lorenz, and on all those who sheltered under his protection.

Wind rustled the leaves of the oak. It hissed with him.

A shadow moved nearby, and Ambrose jumped.

‘I am so sorry, arch-deacon,’ said a voice. ‘I did not mean to startle you.’

Ambrose had chosen a bench some distance from any of the grounds’ lumen posts. He wanted the comfort of the dark, a cocoon in which he could retreat, untroubled by others and by the need to maintain a public face. It was late, and he had thought he was alone. He could not see the face of the figure who approached him, but could just make out the shape of the robes and knew the stranger was a shrouded cenobite.

He did not recognise the voice. It was a man’s, deep and liquid, as if the adept should be preaching rather than devoted to meditation. It was low, too, and instead of disturbing Ambrose’s solitude in the night, it felt like a welcome part of his retreat.

‘No apologies necessary,’ Ambrose said. He suddenly wanted company. It would be good to speak to someone who would place no demands on him. ‘Do join me.’

‘Thank you, arch-deacon,’ the cenobite said. He sat on the other end of the bench. He leaned forward slightly, the point of his hood cutting a silhouette against the glow of the city.

‘Have we met before?’ Ambrose asked.

‘We have not,’ said the cenobite. ‘I am newly arrived on Theotokos. I hail from Valgaast. My name is Nossos.’

‘Then I am pleased to know you, Adept Nossos.’

‘And I am honoured to meet you, Arch-Deacon Ambrose. I admire the work you are doing on behalf of the people of Theotokos.’

‘You flatter me.’ And you are the sole member of the Adeptus Ministorum to feel this way. In fairness, he did not know how the lower Ecclesiarchal ranks in the palace regarded him. They were careful not to do anything that would displease Lorenz. It was not clear to anyone, Ambrose included, whether Lorenz had decided he was an enemy, a useful shield, a scapegoat, or something else. It seemed that Nossos had not been in All Martyrs long enough to learn caution.

‘I speak only what I know to be true,’ said Nossos. ‘I confess that I am surprised to have encountered you here. I would have thought Saint Halfad’s Cloister to be a more serene retreat.’

‘That is the cardinal’s preserve,’ said Ambrose.

‘No one else is permitted there?’

‘Not exactly. But the cardinal values his privacy.’ If Nossos did not know this, it was something important for him to learn.

‘I see. From you as well?’

‘No.’ When Lorenz wasn’t getting him out of the way for extended periods of time, he liked having Ambrose close by. He enjoys having me on a leash, one he can yank at his pleasure. ‘I simply prefer the grounds.’

The shrouded cenobite was quiet for a few moments. Then he said, ‘Forgive me, and please tell me if I speak out of turn, but do you seek to avoid Cardinal Lorenz?’

That was out of turn. Nossos had no right to ask something so impertinent. Ambrose should have silenced him. He would have been right to order Nossos beaten. Instead, all he said was, ‘What?’ He needed time to organise his thoughts. He did not know how he wanted to respond.

‘Will you grant me permission to speak frankly, arch-deacon?’

He should say no. He should end this conversation now. But he was too interested to see where it might lead. In the night, in the dark, in the quiet, in the liminal space between the walls of the palace and the walls of its grounds, the exchange took on a rarefied aura. Ambrose wanted Nossos to speak freely. Ambrose wanted to give voice to his own thoughts as well. ‘You have my permission,’ he heard himself saying. ‘You need fear no condemnation from me.’

‘Then I must tell you, arch-deacon, that though I have not been here long, I believe the cardinal is not a man of faith. He is a political animal, and nothing more.’

Hearing his own thoughts spoken aloud took Ambrose’s breath away. So did the shock of Nossos’ daring. Ambrose would never have uttered so dangerous a condemnation.

And why not? Because there was never anyone you could speak to like this. Especially not Bethia. It would have been unfair to her. And very probably fatal.

Nossos dared because he sensed that he could say this to Ambrose.

Unless this is a trap? He wondered whether Nossos might be working for Lorenz or Rosarius. It was not impossible, but the ploy seemed a bit pointless. There wasn’t much more for either of them to do to hamper Ambrose’s efforts or diminish his authority. And as far as he could tell, he was still a useful tool for the cardinal, one it would be counterproductive to destroy.

Then he decided that he didn’t care. If Lorenz didn’t already know what Ambrose truly thought of him, then he was as much a dullard as he was corrupt, and the one thing Ambrose had never doubted was the cardinal’s intelligence.

What can he do to me? He has already doomed us all.

Nossos hadn’t finished. ‘I would call Cardinal Lorenz an apostate, but that would imply he has beliefs that extend beyond his own well-being. I have seen enough to know he does not. The Emperor curse him, arch-deacon. The Emperor curse him.’ Nossos spoke softly, but with tense anger.

‘In the end, he will be cursed,’ Ambrose said. He felt giddy with relief to open up like this. ‘As Magerit dies, every soul who looks on this green mount will know the cardinal could have helped them, and that he chose not to.’

Nossos was silent for so long that Ambrose wondered if he had, in turn, shocked the shrouded cenobite. ‘Are we this close to disaster?’ he finally asked.

‘The disaster has already taken most of the planet. There is no certainty that survival is possible at all. Without rain, the end will come. But this palace has the means to keep Magerit alive for some time. That is what we must do.’

‘Is there no other recourse?’

Ambrose laughed bitterly. ‘Today, I travelled to the tall spires of the city. The wealthy have become miserly in the help they are willing to give to the citizens beneath them. I went to their mansions in the sky to wrestle with their consciences.’

‘And?’ Nossos asked when he paused.

‘One cannot wrestle with what does not exist. I found some of the dwellings deserted, their owners dead. The others were shut tight. They would not open to me. They would not open to anyone, I was told very clearly, except the cardinal.’

‘They have an understanding with him.’

‘They do indeed,’ said Ambrose. ‘He has told them to hoard their supplies. I think he has implied they will find refuge here when those reserves run out.’

‘Will they?’

Ambrose shrugged. ‘Perhaps a few. The most useful. The ones he might think have connections that will find him a comfortable landing on another world.’ Again, he wondered how far forward Lorenz was planning. Again, he pictured the cardinal’s worn, haunted face. Perhaps he will be satisfied simply to be the last man standing.

But there was Rosarius still to consider, and his plans. The connections that Lorenz was indifferent to would be very important to the relic-keeper.

‘There is no hope, then,’ said Nossos.

‘The Emperor protects. There is always hope. There may yet be rain.’ After how many years? ‘But as long as Lorenz holds our ability to help in check, then our hope is slim.’

‘I understand.’ Nossos’ words sounded in the darkness like the toll of a passing bell. Then he rose. His hood turned towards Ambrose, though his face was still invisible in its deep shadow. ‘I have intruded on your prayers long enough,’ he said. ‘Our Father will provide, arch-deacon. There will be life. There will be rain. You will have your proper destiny.’

‘My destiny?’ Ambrose snorted. ‘Do not make me into something I am not.’

There was no answer.

‘Adept Nossos?’

Silence.

Ambrose leaned forward, towards the darkness he thought was the silhouette of the shrouded cenobite.

There was no one there.

CHAPTER 3

Lorenz was not asleep. He was lying in his bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. The lumen globes in his chamber were on, holding back as much of the darkness as they could. He was staring blankly, numbly, pointlessly, at the ceiling. On every side and in the corners of the fresco, the cardinals of the Ecclesiarchy raised their arms in worship, creating a frame of praise. They faced the centre, their faces alight with pride and awe. In that centre, the Golden Throne radiated light so bright it concealed the figure of the God-Emperor. But the brilliance was merely paint and gold leaf. It was not real light. It offered Lorenz no comfort. It could not lift his soul in prayer. The fresco was just dim shapes, lines on which his eyes travelled back and forth, from cardinal to Throne and back on a radiant beam, always a different one, bouncing off another shadowy cardinal and back to the centre again.

No hope, no inspiration, no succour.

No respite from the memories of that night in the cloister.

He had not been back since, except to walk its circuit a few times during the day with Rosarius. Lorenz could not show weakness, and so he could not deviate from his routine. He must not let slip any hint that he was afraid.

Only, he was afraid. He was terrified. He managed the walks with Rosarius and kept up a pretence of interest in what the relic-keeper had to say, but only because he was not alone, and only because he was in daylight. Even so, he had to work hard not to gaze anxiously at the great yew tree. Every stray insect buzz made him tense.

He could not make the memory of that night recede. It lingered in his throat. He could not convince his body that there was no insect there, crawling and whirring its wings. He could not stop thinking of the figure he might or might not have seen.

He held on to his power through force of habit, and because there was nothing else to be done. Ambrose’s compulsion to help the meek and the needy repulsed him more than ever. Lorenz did not care about what was happening to Theotokos. The world was nothing to him except the symbol of his thwarted ambition. But he would be cursed if he would give Ambrose the chance to save its mewling populace. The arch-deacon’s dreams would die with Lorenz’s. The world would die with Lorenz. That was the only thing it was good for.

That was how he had felt before the night in the cloister, before his nightmares had bled into reality. That was when he could still swallow without shuddering. He still felt that way, but the anger and the bitterness were in the background, swamped by the fear.

Sooner or later, he would sleep for a few, tortured hours. He did not want to, but his body gave him no choice. The sleep would come, and with it the terror, the panic, and the awful half-memory of a touch.

The touch.

He felt it.

Right now, awake. There, on his cheek, a finger cold as despair, sharp as hunger. The scrape of a nail, dry, yet tracing the cool, thick trail of a slug, a tear trickling slowly down from the corner of his eye.

Lorenz jerked up. He flailed, grasping for the figure that touched him, his shout struggling to be born, catching in his throat with the weakness that came with nightmares. His hands swept air. He was alone. But he could still feel the crawl of the touch. And the tear was there, intimate and strange.

Lorenz wiped at it, but he just smeared it over his cheek and covered his palm with slime. He clawed at the tear. His skin was defiled. He wanted it off, and he drew blood.

He began to weep. Fear bloomed in his chest. He was not weeping in terror; he was terrified because he was weeping. He could not stop the tears. They flowed, thick and wide, in spite of him. His chest hitched violently, again and again, the wracking spasm of his body’s betrayal. He sobbed with such fury he feared his ribs would crack.

The tears came faster, and they were thicker yet. They covered his face. They poured into his mouth. He sobbed and jerked, and he inhaled the tears. They were slick and lumpy as phlegm. He gagged. He tried to spit them out, but they clogged his throat. He gasped, and more flooded his mouth. He fell back, struggling for air, twisting the bedclothes around his legs. The tears filled his nose too. He choked and clawed at the air. He was drowning. The tears flowed and flowed and flowed, serpents leaking from his eyes, coiling in his throat and lungs. And the buzzing was there, the insect wriggling he had tried to dismiss from his imagination. It was real, and it was spreading, an infestation building in his lungs and air passages.

He tried to cry for help.

He was drowning.

He was suffocating.

The tears, serpent and insect, forced their way into him. His mouth was wide open, his chest hammering with effort, and he could not breathe. He could not breathe.

The cardinals on the ceiling, with their eyes fixed on the throne, could not see his torment. The Golden Throne faded deeper into grey, withdrawing from him. Shadows flowed up the walls. They swallowed the light of the lumen globes. The room dropped into darkness, drowning in the shadows.

Lorenz bucked once more with desperate violence and fell from the bed. He struck the marble floor, landing hard on his shoulder. Something cracked. There was pain, but it belonged to someone else. The smothering was his. It was huge. It was dragging him down.

Pain in his chest, greater than the pain in his shoulder.

The tears, flowing, flowing, flowing.

An ocean, submerging him.

Forcing him down, covering him with the shadows of the end.

He thrashed in terror and agony until the very end. The last thing he heard began as laughter. It was inhuman, liquid, delighted.

Then the laughter turned to the sound of drumming rain.

Ambrose ran before he was fully awake. A shrouded cenobite had shaken him from sleep. This wasn’t Nossos. It was Tazker, one of the adepts Ambrose knew well. His hood had fallen back in his distress and haste, revealing his scarred, shaven skull. Ambrose opened his eyes, saw the alarm on Tazker’s face, and heard the word cardinal. Then he was up, and he was running.

He weaved drunkenly at first, his legs weak with slumber, his eyes bleary. A voice in his head, loud as the most primal instinct, commanded that he run.

Hurry.

Get there first.

His thoughts bounced against each other, confused, scrambling for purchase.

I can’t be there first. Tazker was there.

He doesn’t matter. Go. HURRY!

Why? What has happened?

He sprinted down the length of the hall from his chambers. The shadowed vaults seemed to stretch in a dream’s infinity before him, as if he could never reach his goal. He rounded a corner too quickly and slammed his shoulder against the wall. He stumbled, then found his footing again and the shock of pain cleared his head.

I know what has happened.

Lorenz is dead.

Get there before Rosarius.

Tazker was Ambrose’s friend. He would have come straight to the arch-deacon. Ambrose was on friendly terms with most of the adepts. He gave them respect where Lorenz gave them indifference, and Rosarius haughty contempt. But the relic-keeper had his allies, bound to him by ambition and fear. The news would reach him soon, if it had not already, and he would be running too, just as desperate as Ambrose to win the race.

You are running for your own ends, Rosarius. I run for Magerit. The Emperor sees us. He sees you. He knows your heart. You will not win, Rosarius. Not this time. Not in the end.

Ambrose arrived, panting, at the cardinal’s chambers, Tazker a few steps behind him. The doors were wide open. The high windows let in weak dawn light, tentative and grey. It fell over the cardinal’s four-poster bed, its twisted covers, and the figure on the floor.

Three more cenobites were here. ‘Arch-deacon,’ they said. None of them had the low, flowing tones of Nossos. They stood against the wall furthest from the bed, shifting uncertainly, waiting for orders, waiting for someone to take charge. That was clearly not going to be the small man who knelt a few feet from the corpse. Chapel-Master Burun looked up from his murmured prayers, and when he saw Ambrose, his face flooded with relief. Ambrose suspected that Burun had been praying primarily to fill time and to avoid having to do anything concrete. There was enough distance between him and the body that it was clear this was as close as he had dared venture.

Burun was a good man, a devoted chapel-master, but Lorenz had broken him of any trace of initiative. For many years, his role had been reduced to the barest, most literal interpretation of its name. His purpose had been to go in advance of Lorenz’s appearance at the cathedral – or, more rarely, another temple of worship – and ensure it was conforming to the cardinal’s specifications. It had been so long since he had had a function other than anticipating Lorenz’s desires and doing everything he could to avoid provoking Lorenz’s wrath, that with the cardinal dead, he was now a stringless marionette. Ambrose was almost surprised that Burun could move of his own volition.

‘Thank you for attending, chapel-master,’ Ambrose said.

‘It is my duty, arch-deacon.’

Ambrose moved past him and knelt beside Lorenz. The cardinal was lying on his side, facing the bed. His legs were swaddled in sheets wrapped so tightly he looked like he was being swallowed by a chrysalis.

‘Has anyone touched him?’ Ambrose asked.

‘No, arch-deacon. I found him only a few minutes ago. I sent for you at once.’

And not Rosarius. Thank you, Burun. ‘And Chirurgeon Morano?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. You did well. I think, though, that we should grant him some dignity now, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Ambrose reached for the body, and Tazker rushed forward to help him. Burun recalled himself to active duty after a moment and joined them. They rolled Lorenz onto his back.

When they saw his face, Burun gasped and reared back. Tazker jerked his hands away but stayed where he was. Ambrose froze, struggling to keep from making his shock too visible.

Lorenz’s face was a violent blue and slick with sweat or tears. His eyes bulged from their sockets. His mouth hung open, his tongue distended. His hands were hooked into claws, and ragged gashes scored his cheeks.

‘God-Emperor protect us,’ Burun whispered. ‘What horror did he see?’

‘The horror of his own demise,’ Ambrose said. Irritation with Burun’s tremulousness broke him from his own shocked reaction. ‘He seems to have been choking.’

‘On what?’ the chapel-master quavered.

On greed. On contempt. On petty, jealous anger. ‘You have not seen many deaths, have you?’

‘Not many, no.’

‘I have. Too many in the past month alone. He might not have been choking on anything at all.’ But the truth was, he had not seen anything exactly like this on his travels. The wet, dripping sheen on Lorenz’s face bothered him. It seemed to glint with secrets. At the same time, there was a dullness to it, as if it were infected by the grey dawn. He did not want to touch it. ‘But I will not pronounce in the chirurgeon’s stead.’

Ambrose stood, pulled the bottom sheet off the bed, and draped it over the cardinal’s body. With the contorted features and clenched fingers hidden, he felt better. Everyone else in the room did too. Ambrose felt his shoulders loosen, and he heard Burun start breathing more easily. Now they were not gathered around the corpse of the cardinal; Lorenz was just a shape. He was being dealt with.

Tazker joined his fellow cenobites as they drew a bit nearer. They all looked at Ambrose for direction.

‘There are preparations to make,’ he began.

Then Rosarius appeared at the doorway. ‘Cardinal,’ he said. He stopped. He gaped. He had nothing to say. ‘What,’ he managed. No one spelled out the obvious. Rosarius tried again, and got as far as, ‘I don’t…’

No, I don’t think you do, Ambrose thought. You have lost your patron. You have arrived too late to claim this stage for your personal theatre. No one is here to ask your opinion. No one is interested in hearing it. More than the cardinal has died in this room – your hopes have too.

Chirurgeon Livra Morano arrived shortly after Rosarius, and she pushed past the relic-keeper, advancing with a sharp brusqueness that belied her great age. Morano had been the personal chirurgeon to Lorenz’s predecessor. Her narrow face hung like frail, wrinkled parchment from her skull, but her eyes were still hard as iron. Ambrose nodded to her and pulled the sheet back again. While Morano knelt to begin her examination, Ambrose turned back to Burun. ‘You will make things ready in the cathedral,’ he said.

Burun nodded. Ambrose thought he seemed more than relieved. He was actually happy that he knew what to do. ‘Yes, arch-deacon. The Rite of Cardinal Ascension is known to me.’

‘Wait,’ Rosarius said. He spoke too loudly and sounded petulant instead of authoritative. The word dropped awkwardly into the sudden silence he created. The relic-keeper cleared his throat. ‘Is this how we should be proceeding?’

In spite of himself, Ambrose was impressed by how quickly Rosarius had recovered. Enough, anyway, to try to fight back against the catastrophe. It was much easier for Ambrose, after all. He saw nothing to grieve about in this chamber. There was only justice.

‘What do you mean?’ Burun asked. His bafflement was no help to Rosarius.

‘We have no cardinal,’ Rosarius said. He was trying to sound condescending, as if Burun had said something stupid and it was up to the relic-keeper to explain how things should be done. If Lorenz had been at his side, it might have worked. ‘By whose authority do you act now?’

‘By Arch-Deacon Ambrose’s, of course,’ said Burun, in genuine disbelief that Rosarius could be so ignorant. ‘The procedures for such an event are clear. Until such time as a new cardinal can be appointed, the arch-deacon is acting cardinal.’

Rosarius visibly wilted. He said nothing in answer.

Chapel-master, you have come into your own in this moment. Ambrose had known this too, but Rosarius might have tried to present his claim as usurpation. But Burun knew this aspect of the administrative side of the Ecclesiarchy too. He had to, because it was linked to one of the rites he might someday have to arrange in the cathedral. By being the first to explicitly state Ambrose’s authority, Burun cemented it.

Morano had been muttering to herself under her breath as she looked over the corpse. With a grunt of effort, she straightened now. She was frowning, her bloodless lips pursed.

‘Have you formed an opinion?’ Ambrose asked.

Morano parted her lips with a wet click. ‘Asphyxiation, certainly. As to the cause, I will need to look more deeply.’

‘Understood,’ said Ambrose.

Morano made an irritable gesture at the cenobites. ‘Pick him up. Take him to the medicae hall.’

They obeyed after only the smallest hesitation. The four of them picked up the cardinal and shuffled towards the door. Morano followed them.

‘Will you accompany them?’ Ambrose said to Burun. ‘When Chirurgeon Morano has completed her work, it will be necessary to prepare the body.’

‘I shall,’ Burun assured him. Now that he had direction, the corpse was no longer fearsome to him, it seemed.

‘Good. In the meantime, I will speak to the people, and bid them be ready for the funeral.’

Burun left. Only Rosarius remained. Ambrose looked at him solemnly. ‘Is there something you wish to discuss, relic-keeper?’ he asked. He made his tone open. Rosarius would see no gloating from him. Neither would he see weakness. The cardinal’s suffocating grip on Theotokos was broken, and with it all of Rosarius’ schemes.

Rosarius stared back at Ambrose, his face a portrait of impotent hate.

‘If not,’ Ambrose went on, ‘you will excuse me, I hope. We all have duties we must attend to.’

Rosarius’ lips twitched in a violent rictus before he whirled and walked away.

Ambrose left the cardinal’s bedchamber and headed for the deepest subterranean levels of the palace. He had to order the most important command of his first day with a free hand.

Ambrose announced Lorenz’s death in the Cathedral of Iron Obeisance during the rites of Evensong. He did so at the start of his sermon. In the pulpit, nestled midway up the pillar overlooking the altar, he stood in silence for a long moment before he began to speak, letting the people’s curiosity build, and granting himself the licence to savour his own anticipation. For the first time, he was going to speak his own words. He was no longer the enslaved mouthpiece of the cardinal. He was going to address the faithful of Magerit as they deserved. Directly, openly.

A bank of incense fog filled the gloom of the nave. Ten thousand people sat in anticipatory silence, looking up at him, a figure poised midway between them and the painting of the Emperor’s judgement that covered the great vault of the ceiling a hundred and fifty feet up. Ambrose felt the force of that art behind him. The burning rays from the Golden Throne reached to every corner of the cathedral, and they embraced him. They gave him certainty.

He sensed the moment the silence was at its peak as surely as he knew the rhythms of his own breath. He was a spiritual conductor, governing unheard music, and at the instant that called for the beat to begin, he spoke.

‘I am the bearer of grave tidings,’ he said. ‘Cardinal Lorenz is no longer among us. Last night, his soul departed to seek its reward before the Golden Throne of the God-Emperor.’ He paused for only half a moment, creating the illusion that he was giving the congregation a chance to respond with shock or grief, but in reality speaking again before the people could show that they felt neither. ‘I will not dwell upon the loss we feel,’ Ambrose said. Because we feel none. ‘It is another among many. My duty to the Emperor and to you is to bring hope – for hope, the reward of faith, is what you need, what we need, what Magerit and Theotokos need.’

He paused now and smiled at the congregation. From somewhere in the back, one of the worshippers, emboldened by the aura of patience and approachability Ambrose had always cultivated, called out, ‘Will there be rain?’

‘I wish I could say there will be, and that I knew when,’ Ambrose said, pleased with the question. Thanks to it, he could turn the rest of his sermon from an announcement to an answer. ‘I believe it will rain, because I believe that the Emperor protects. But though I can do nothing to hasten its arrival, I can ease the pain of our waiting. Servants of the Emperor, you faithful of His Imperial Creed, hear me and rejoice. I have given orders, and work has commenced. The underwater streams of the Palace of All Martyrs are being redirected. By tomorrow morning, they will be flowing into the reservoirs of Magerit.’

Now he had no choice but to pause. Joy roared across the nave of the cathedral, building to a wave so massive he thought it would sweep him from the pulpit. He had a moment of doubt, worrying that he had strayed too far from his duties of religious instruction, veering headlong into politics.

And what were those sermons that Lorenz had you read? There was nothing sacred about them. They were tools of pacification and nothing more.

Now I’m speaking from the heart. Now I can do what the Emperor has called upon me to do.

The clamour of celebration went on and on. The people wept with gratitude. They shouted their praise of the Emperor. Their faces were grimy with the dust and soot of the city’s air, yet they shone like suns.

‘The Emperor,’ Ambrose began, then stopped. No one could hear him yet. He waited, smiling.

And there, below him, was Bethia. She was with her family, and they were as joyful as all the others. She looked up at him, and he saw her mouth the words thank you.

The nature of the celebration changed. Ambrose began to hear his name shouted again and again. He held up his hands for silence, and was greeted by the redoubled thunder of Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose.

‘Please!’ he shouted, and finally the roar subsided.

‘Please,’ Ambrose said again. ‘I am not worthy of your praise, nor deserving of it. All glory to the Emperor, to whom all is known, and to whose will we are gratefully bound. Praise Him, now and forever. Praise Him, as I know you truly can.’

And the people did. Their rapture filled the cathedral with such force it seemed to Ambrose it should have lifted the roof and hurled the walls to the winds. Their faith should have given the cathedral wings.

You could have made this happen, Lorenz. Instead, you ensured that only your death would be the source of hope.

Ambrose abandoned any attempt to continue his sermon. He would speak more at the cardinal’s funeral, and many more times in the days to come. He would embrace the full responsibility of being acting cardinal. For now, he would join in the rapture. For the first time in years, he felt hope too. The emotion had been a stranger to him for so long that he almost did not recognise it.

Will the rains come?

He did not know. He believed in their possibility now. Nothing truly had changed. The drought was as merciless as ever. All he had done was buy the people some time. Yet in doing so, he had revived hope in Magerit and in his breast. Rain seemed possible again. The thought of water from the skies was no longer an agony.

Ambrose swept his eyes over the congregation. He welcomed their joy. He spread his arms to receive it.

Movement above caught his eye. He looked up. Rosarius was in the gallery. He lurked in the shadows beside an arch’s column. Ambrose could barely see the relic-keeper, though he knew it was him. Rosarius’ hatred blazed from the heights. It struck Ambrose, and then expanded to take in the entire congregation. It was so strong it reached far beyond the walls. It encompassed every soul on Theotokos.

Ambrose’s smile vanished. He returned the hate with determination.

He will destroy everything I have accomplished today if he can.

Don’t let him. Don’t let him win.

Ambrose looked back at the people for a minute, drawing strength again from their joy. When he turned to Rosarius once more, the relic-keeper was gone.

Ambrose vowed this would be the last time he lost Rosarius from his sight.

CHAPTER 4

The difference the first day of the new water regime made to the relief centre was enormous. Bethia took Ambrose through, showing him what he had wrought with a delight that was at once solemn and giddy. At first, all he saw was the continued suffering.

‘There are so many in need,’ he said. ‘So much to be done.’

‘But look at what has been done, arch-deacon,’ Bethia told him as they moved down the centre of the first warehouse. ‘We have water enough to provide some relief for everyone here.’

‘Still not enough.’

‘No, but sufficient to ease the worst pangs of thirst. Look at them, arch-deacon. Look at their faces.’

He did, and there it was: hope, reborn here too, like a seed germinating beneath the broken soil of agony. Food was still in short supply, but he had begun the day by taking back full control over the Ecclesiarchal finances, and commanding that funds be used to send more food to the relief centres. The problem now would not be the poverty of the charities, but the lack of food to buy. Those who had supplies were hoarding them. Some of the noble families, though, were open to being convinced that surrendering some of their supplies in order to afford even more guards was a worthwhile exchange.

She’s right, Ambrose thought. See what a day has changed. See what you have done with that day.

The people who had come here for help knew the difference. They reached for him when he passed, as they had before, but now they did so with a gratitude that was far more powerful than it had been before. They clasped their hands, and they wept. They touched the hem of his robes, and their eyes burned with a fervour that discomfited him even as it pleased him.

There will be more changes, Ambrose promised himself. With Lorenz gone, the governance of Theotokos was effectively his. He would have to be cautious. Rosarius was far from the only one of the cardinal’s loyalists. If Ambrose overstepped, if he moved too quickly before he was certain he really had the political strength to back his decisions, everything could be reversed. He was not naive. Assassination was a possibility that would only become greater as time went on.

The redirecting of the underground streams was a big risk, but it had also been the action whose need and scale demanded it be taken immediately. He had gambled that the promise of civil calm that came with the gift of water would stay the hands of his enemies, at least for the moment.

‘What of the sick?’ Ambrose asked.

‘We are easing their suffering too,’ Bethia said.

‘Can any be saved?’

She looked sorrowful. ‘Very few, if any.’

‘The water comes too late for them.’ His heart clenched in grief.

‘But it will help slow the spread of infection,’ Bethia pointed out. ‘Not as many people will be driven to drink polluted water.’

‘That is something.’ Not enough, though. Nothing will be enough until the drought ends.

Ambrose struggled to keep his mood steady. He was swinging from elation to frustration and back again. It was exhausting.

Listen to Bethia. Accept that we have work to do and accept that this first day is itself miraculous. And keep fighting.

The fight was only going to become harder. Rosarius would bring everything down in flames if he could not have his way. Ambrose took that as an article of faith.

‘Arch-deacon,’ Bethia said. She sounded hesitant, and that made Ambrose’s pulse beat with an unseemly force.

‘Yes?’ His throat was suddenly dry, and the word emerged with a rasp he did not like.

‘What you have done has helped many more citizens than just those in the relief centres.’

‘I am glad, but the credit is not…’

She placed a hand on his arm, cutting him off. She then took it away quickly, shocked by her own impropriety. Her touch burned through his robes. Its heat lingered on the flesh of his arm.

‘Forgive me, arch-deacon,’ she said. ‘I meant no insult.’

He was having trouble hearing. His entire being was suddenly concentrated into that one spot on his arm. ‘There has been no insult,’ he managed. His lips were numb. His tongue was too thick.

‘I only wished to say that you must not discount the importance of your actions. All of Magerit owes you a debt of thanks.’

It owes its thanks to the Emperor. That was what he should have said. It should thank the Emperor for striking down an unworthy cardinal. That was what he wanted to say.

He said nothing.

‘Will you…’ Bethia began. She paused, took a breath, and plunged on. ‘Will you grant an unworthy few the honour of thanking you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘My family. If you knew…’

He nodded, breathing carefully, a titanic effort holding his face in a mask of careful dignity. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘After everything you have done here, all the help you have given me, this is a small thing for me to do.’

They finished the inspection of the warehouses and Ambrose was troubled by how little attention he paid to what he saw. Afterwards, Bethia led him to a grimy hab complex a mile to the west of the relief centre. They climbed the grey rockcrete shell of a stairwell. It was musty and stank of old smoke and urine. The halls were dark, their walls crumbling, their few lumen strips giving off a weak, dirty amber glow. On the tenth floor, they entered the home of the Antoniax clan. It was almost as dark as the hall, its windows opaque with grime. The sleeping chamber and the kitchen that made up its two rooms were clean, though. Bethia’s siblings and parents must have been expecting Ambrose to accept their invitation. Or perhaps they had simply prepared themselves in the hopes that he would. They dropped to their knees when he entered, abasing themselves as he had before Lorenz.

‘Please, rise,’ he said, uncomfortable. He was not actually a cardinal, and he did not like the trappings that went with the Ecclesiarchal rank that were beginning to follow him.

The family rose. Havak Antoniax reached for Ambrose’s hand, but when he saw there was no ring to kiss, he withdrew his grasp, embarrassed, and said, ‘We are blessed to be able to thank you in person, Arch-Deacon Ambrose, for what you have done for Magerit, and for us.’

Ambrose shook his head. ‘I have done nothing but the barest of necessary actions.’ Nothing that anyone would not have done, he almost said, but stopped himself from uttering so damning a falsely modest lie. No one else had done it. Least of all the cardinal.

‘You are a miracle from the Emperor,’ said Elyra. ‘He sent you in the hour of our need.’

‘You flatter me too much,’ Ambrose said. ‘All I am is His servant, striving to do His will.’

The humility came naturally to him, in the same way the words did at the cathedral. He thanked the Antoniax family in turn, and then headed back to the palace. He walked there, refusing to travel in the Taurox, at least today. The people wanted to see him, and he wanted to be among them.

But when he returned to All Martyrs, he made for Saint Halfad’s Cloister. It was free of the cardinal’s tainted ego now, and he sought out its embrace of solitude and calm. He sat beneath the central yew and tried to sort out his reactions to the day.

He was worried by the ease of his expressions of humility. He had expressed more, variations of the words he had spoken in Bethia’s home, when he had toured the relief centre, and on his long walk through Magerit. Were the words too automatic? Did he mean what he said? Or were they mere gestures, lip service whose hypocrisy Lorenz would have understood? Ambrose worried they were just a formula, granting him absolution to enjoy the praise that surrounded him like an ocean as he moved among the people of the city.

But I am obeying the will of the Emperor. I know I am. Lorenz was not, and that is why he was struck down. Someone else had to act to save what is left of Theotokos.

And he was the one who was taking the action. If what was done was worthy of praise, why receive it with guilt? He was doing what he had to for the city, and he would continue to do so.

Rosarius will try to stop me. Wherever he is, he is moving against me now. I should concentrate on being wary of him, not of my own trivial responses.

Satisfied, for the moment, he rose and walked away from the yew, breathing deeply the scents of the garden. The door to the cloister was open when he reached it. Livra Morano was standing on the threshold, watching him approach.

‘You wish to speak to me?’ he asked as he entered the palace.

‘I do.’

‘If it’s important, you should have come to fetch me.’

‘The cardinal gave orders never to be disturbed when he was in the cloister.’

‘I am not the cardinal.’

‘No,’ Morano said tartly. ‘You are not.’

The chirurgeon had been loyal to Lorenz too, and her brand of loyalty made her possibly even more dangerous to Ambrose’s hopes for Theotokos than Rosarius. The relic-keeper’s motivations were venal, selfish. They made him, Ambrose thought, easier to anticipate, predictable in his corruption. But Morano was not corrupt. She was honest. She had been loyal to the cardinal because he was the cardinal, as she had been loyal to his predecessor. She owed her fidelity of service to a rank. It did not matter who held it. It did not matter how badly Lorenz had acted. He had been cardinal.

He ignored Morano’s dig and asked, ‘What is it that you wish to discuss?’

‘What do you think?’ she asked, as if he had said something monumentally stupid.

‘The death of Cardinal Lorenz,’ Ambrose said calmly. Was she trying to bait him? No, he didn’t think so. Morano was too straightforward to play such a game. She was angry, and he was the target of her anger.

‘His death,’ Morano said. ‘Precisely. I do not like the deaths of cardinals, arch-deacon. They have been rare things, in my experience, but that does not make me dislike them any less. There are always questions when a cardinal dies. I don’t like questions, either. I especially don’t like questions when I am the one who is forced to ask them because the answers are not present.’

‘And the cardinal’s death raises questions,’ said Ambrose.

‘It does.’

‘Of what sort?’

‘Why, for instance, is there so much liquid in his lungs?’

Ambrose frowned. ‘Did he drown?’ In bed?

‘Yes, he did. Though I do not think that was the sole cause of death.’ Genuine puzzlement lay at the foundation of her anger.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Ambrose.

‘Neither do I.’

‘He can’t have drowned in his quarters.’

‘No,’ said Morano. ‘He could not have.’

‘Was the body moved? Are you implying assassination?’

‘I’m saying he was drowned,’ she said, as though that were an answer to his question.

‘Where? How? His sleeping raiment wasn’t wet…’

‘Sweat-damp,’ Morano corrected. ‘But not wet, no. Not like it would be if his head had been held down under water. There is also the problem of viscosity.’

‘And what problem is that?’

‘The liquid in his lungs. It was, at least initially, like a particularly thick phlegm, only in impossible quantities. It broke down as I tried to examine it. Before I could arrive at any conclusions, it was merely water.’

‘That is very strange,’ said Ambrose.

‘Yes, arch-deacon, it is strange,’ Morano said, with all the irritation of a Schola Progenium instructor confronted with a pupil proud of their grasp of the obvious. ‘That is very strange indeed. Can we also agree that the word strange in connection to the death of a cardinal is far from desirable?’

‘We can,’ Ambrose said, refusing all temptation to lose his temper. I accept every test You send me, God-Emperor. I accept them with humility and obedience.

‘In sum, I do not know why Cardinal Lorenz died, arch-deacon. And I do not like the fact that I do not know.’

‘I share your worry,’ Ambrose told her. That was true. If Lorenz had been assassinated then there were political currents in the Palace of All Martyrs that Ambrose had never suspected. He had no idea how he might defend himself, and what he hoped to accomplish, against agendas that had cloaked themselves so utterly from his sight and were now lashing out, to ends he could not imagine. But Morano did not know the cardinal had been murdered. That was the point. She did not know. There was still the chance his death had been natural.

Even if it had been, he reflected, there was cause for concern. There was illness enough present in Magerit. If Lorenz had died of something contagious, there were precautions Ambrose would have to take.

‘Are there further tests you can make?’ he asked Morano.

The chirurgeon shook her head with emphatic displeasure. ‘No. I have done all I can.’

‘You are releasing the body for burial?’

‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But I will not let the questions rest. Be assured of that, arch-deacon. I will find answers.’

‘I hope you do,’ Ambrose said. ‘They are as important to me as they are to you. Be assured of that.’

Morano gave him a look that implied she was assured of nothing of the sort. Then, with a curt nod, she walked off, her steps short but sharp, her hunched figure the very shape of accusation.

A few hours later, Ambrose stood in the centre of the cardinal’s study, telling himself he had the authority to claim it as his, and that he must claim it as his. He wanted to retreat to his quarters, to the much smaller study. That space belonged to him. It suited him. This chamber, with the ceiling twice as high and the shelves rising all the way to the dome, was a place of ostentation, not reflection. It was a chamber that performed the status of its owner. The scrolls and tomes were possessions more than they were works of sacred exegesis and instruction.

In the dome, a relief sculpture of the symbol of the Adeptus Ministorum, the winged skull in the Imperial ‘I’, gazed down at him with stern, empty eyes, warning against the improper search for knowledge. Ambrose bowed his head, obedient to the commands of the Imperial Creed. He had no doubt Lorenz had been faithful in this regard too. He was also certain Lorenz had used what scholarship he had engaged in for his own ends.

And look what your selfishness brought you, cardinal. Your parish was reduced to a lone, dying world. Well done. Well done indeed.

It fell to Ambrose not to make the same mistakes. He also had to avoid making as many as possible, and not setting himself up in the cardinal’s quarters would be one of them. It would be easy to leave them empty and make a show of humility by staying in his old chambers, but there was such a thing as being too humble, of appearing weak and leaving the field to the enemy. Vacant cardinal’s chambers would send the signal that the acting cardinal was not to be taken seriously. The symbols of power had to be filled.

Ambrose did not know how long it would take the Adeptus Ministorum to appoint and send a new cardinal. Given the state of Theotokos, it would not be a desirable posting. The Ecclesiarchy might well see no point in sending anyone at all. They could leave him in charge until the world died.

It was his duty to do what he could to keep Theotokos alive and keep it viable.

And if you are appointed cardinal?

Then that happens when it happens.

He would prove himself worthy of the position.

If you are to be a cardinal, even just an acting one, then do that. Act like one.

He crossed the floor to Lorenz’s huge desk. A massive lumen candelabra of bronze stood on one corner, a golden globe of Theotokos on the other. Ambrose sat down in the leather-and-oak throne. Its wide arms invited his to rest upon them. He accepted and was astonished at the way this point of the room seemed to gather power to itself. The effect was a bit too pleasurable to be a good thing. He thought he should rise.

In a minute. In just a little while.

He was still sitting a quarter of an hour later when Chapel-Master Burun appeared at the study’s door. He stopped on the threshold as suddenly as if he had hit a wall and looked anxiously towards Ambrose.

‘What is it, Master Burun?’ Ambrose asked. He rose and came around the desk. There was no need to intimidate Burun. Tremulousness was the man’s natural state.

‘It’s about tomorrow’s burial ceremony for Cardinal Lorenz,’ Burun said. ‘There… There is a problem with the body.’

‘Chirurgeon Morano told me she was going to release the cardinal to you. Has she changed her mind?’

‘Oh no, it isn’t that. It’s…’ Burun grimaced, hesitating as if the burden of his news would be lifted from him if he waited. When that did not happen, he gulped and went on. ‘It’s the state of the body that’s the problem.’

‘Take me to it,’ Ambrose said, and Burun scuttled gratefully ahead.

The Sanctum Silentium was the most rarely used chamber in the Palace of All Martyrs. It served only upon the death of a cardinal. On its marble plinth, lit dimly by guttering lanterns and thick with the smell of incense, the body of the deceased was to be dressed and anointed in oil. A coterie of monks prayed continuously for the twenty-four hours leading up to the funeral in the Cathedral of Iron Obeisance. This was the cardinal’s last port before his final journey. It was also where every art was deployed to make the body presentable for the worshippers, that the devoted might see their beloved spiritual leader one last time and feel awed by the solemn dignity of his frozen sainthood.

Ambrose approached the plinth and looked down at the body in shock. Lorenz’s attendants had failed him badly. Tazker and two other cenobites stood on the other side of the plinth from Ambrose. They had put their hoods back to do their important work more easily, and now they clearly wished to don them again, and hide their shame-filled features.

‘What have you done?’ Ambrose gasped, covering his mouth and nose with his hand and taking a step back from the cardinal, keeping his breathing as shallow as he could. Incense sticks smouldered away at the corners of the plinth. Their smoke was dense, curling slowly in the still air, but it was not enough to conceal the sweet, throat-squeezing stench that wafted from the corpse. ‘You’re meant to preserve him!’

The cardinal was rotting. His skin was porous as a sponge, a mottled purple and grey. Strips of flesh hung from his neck. His eyes had disappeared into their sockets. His face was coated in a shiny slick.

‘It is not what we have done,’ Burun said plaintively. ‘We are doing everything we can. Everything the rite demands. I have never seen anything like this before. He started to rot as soon as Chirurgeon Morano turned him over to us.’

‘The body resists all our efforts at preservation,’ said Tazker. ‘It is almost as if…’ He stopped himself, turning pale at the blasphemous thought he had almost uttered.

Almost as if the cardinal’s body were cursed, Ambrose thought. Almost as if this is no saint. Almost as if he were an abomination in the sight of the God-Emperor.

‘What are we to do?’ Burun asked.

They were not looking for a practical solution. Any one of the cenobites knew better than Ambrose how to treat a body for burial. They were looking for absolution for their failure.

Can I grant absolution when there is no failure?

He wished Burun or one of his underlings had committed an egregious mistake. That would be reassuring. Ambrose worried that it was as Burun maintained, that they had done nothing wrong at all.

He forced himself to lean over the body again.

What are you hoping to find?

I don’t know. I just have to make a show of trying something too.

There was movement in the corners of the eye sockets. Thick, grey tears formed, swollen like maggots.

Ambrose grunted in revulsion. He recoiled, inhaled violently, and coughed on the incense.

‘Arch-deacon?’ Burun asked.

‘What are those?’ Ambrose asked, pointing with one hand while he wiped his eyes with the other.

‘What are what?’ Burun asked.

Ambrose steadied himself and looked at Lorenz’s face again. The tears had vanished.

Perhaps he’d been wrong. Perhaps he hadn’t seen them.

‘Nothing,’ Ambrose muttered. ‘I thought… Nothing.’ He straightened. ‘There is nothing for it. The cardinal must be cremated.’

‘That is a deviation from the rite,’ said Burun.

‘So is this,’ Ambrose said, with a brusque gesture at the festering corpse. ‘If the cardinal’s state is this bad already, what will it be by tomorrow afternoon? Will you have me present a grotesque spectacle to the faithful? Or do you still think you can halt the decomposition?’

‘We cannot,’ Burun admitted.

‘More to the point,’ said Ambrose, ‘I am concerned about what this might mean. We do not know if an illness took the cardinal from us.’

Burun backed away from the body. ‘Do you think…?’

‘I don’t know. Better to be cautious.’

‘Yes. I quite agree.’ If there had been a flamer at hand, Burun would have used it.

Another thought struck Ambrose. ‘Has the cardinal’s body been left unattended at any time since he was found?’

Burun thought for a moment. ‘I cannot say if Chirurgeon Morano was present the entire time the cardinal was in her medicae chamber. Otherwise, no.’

‘Thank you.’ Ambrose would speak to Morano about this when the moment felt right. ‘Perform the rite of the Valediction to the Flesh, then. Cremate the cardinal and prepare his urn for tomorrow.’ As he turned to go, he said to Tazker, ‘Brother, will you accompany me?’

The cenobite was a sound man. His actions the day before marked him as worthy of trust.

‘How can I help, arch-deacon?’ Tazker asked once they were in the hall and the bronze doors of the Sanctum Silentium were closed behind them.

‘What I am going to ask is delicate, and it pains me to do so. But after what has happened with the cardinal, I have no choice.’

‘If I can help you in any way, arch-deacon,’ Tazker said, ‘please, let me.’

‘Very well.’ Ambrose walked slowly down the hall. His footsteps echoed, and he lowered his voice. ‘Do you know where I might find Relic-Keeper Rosarius?’

‘I do not, arch-deacon.’

‘Have you seen him at all recently?’

‘No, and I was in the reliquary earlier today. He was not there.’

Ambrose repressed a sigh of irritation with himself. What was I vowing in the cathedral yesterday? That I would not lose track of Rosarius again?

‘It has become clear to me that it is important I know where he is. And what he is doing.’

Tazker was silent for a beat. ‘Do you… Did he interfere with the cardinal’s body?’ The shrouded cenobite barely whispered the words, as if the mere mention of such a blasphemy would strike him down.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ambrose. He didn’t. But he could envisage Rosarius doing so. As blasphemous as such a crime would be, he could imagine the justifications Rosarius would tell himself. Anything he did to undermine Ambrose would be in keeping with the cardinal’s wishes. He would be carrying on as his mentor commanded. How far would he be willing to go? To judge by the last time I saw him, as far as necessary to destroy the enemy and all his works. Me. And the recovery of Magerit. ‘It is because I do not know,’ Ambrose said, ‘that I must find out what he is doing, if only to rule out this horrible possibility.’

‘I understand, arch-deacon,’ said Tazker. ‘I will find him. And thank you for doing me this honour.’

‘The honour is mine to know you,’ Ambrose said.

The shrouded cenobite moved ahead quickly. Ambrose paused until Tazker was lost in the shadows of the hall.

I am not proud of what I have just done.

He was taking his first real step into the quagmire of political intrigue that he had sidestepped for so long.

Maybe what you should not be proud of is your aloofness. Maybe you should not be proud of having kept your hands clean for so long.

Maybe.

But he could not shake the feeling that the rot had followed him from the Sanctum Silentium, and was settling into his soul.

CHAPTER 5

Clouds gathered in the hour before the funeral. They were true clouds, visible above the brown haze of the city, heavy and grey with promise. Ambrose looked up at them as he emerged from the cathedral, following the cardinal’s urn. He tried to remember when he had last seen cloud cover. He couldn’t. It was too much to hope that rain would come with them, but he hoped for it anyway.

Rain or not, this is a sign.

And the breeze was another; an omen of better things to come. It brushed against his cheek, a gentle, warm kiss. It was barely strong enough to stir the ends of his robe’s sleeves and did not cool the air – Magerit was as suffocating as ever – and yet, the air moved. It did not sit on Ambrose’s shoulders like a lead weight. Its vice grip on his chest and lungs eased by an infinitesimal degree. That was very close to being a miracle.

The Emperor protects. Behold His wonders.

Behind Ambrose, the cathedral was empty. So it was decreed, on the day a cardinal was laid to rest. With his passing, the Ecclesiarchal throne of Theotokos was empty, and in a demonstration of mourning and respect, the cathedral was host only to the small, lost sounds of the arch-deacon’s solemn footsteps and the shuffle of the cenobites who carried the bier on which rested the urn of black and gold and crimson. The faithful gathered in the great square of the cathedral instead. In their thousands, they piled into its confines, spilling out into the surrounding streets. The cathedral stood on the peak of a low hill in the centre of the city, and when Ambrose approached the dais that had been erected on the parvis, he could see down the slopes of the main avenues. The population of Magerit had turned out in force to bid Lorenz farewell.

I think you would be pleased, cardinal, to see so vast a number of mourners.

And that was why the people were here, wasn’t it? Not to hear him preach. They had come for the cardinal, not for him.

A single bell tolled in the spires of the Cathedral of Iron Obeisance. The bourdon sounded the slow procession, and Ambrose followed the rhythm of its heavy, sonorous clang as he mounted the stairs of the dais. The tolling rolled over the crowd, leaving silence in its wake. For the hour of the funeral, all the manufactories had stilled. The city had stopped to pay tribute to its cardinal.

At the final peal, Ambrose lifted his arms. He held them high for a full minute, his face uplifted. Then, with vox-speakers transmitting his voice across the square, down the streets and over all the rooftops of Magerit, he began to speak.

‘Behold the servant of the Emperor!’

‘Behold him, and honour him,’ said the crowd.

‘Emperor, behold Your servant!’

Only there was nothing to behold. Only the urn. Every cardinal before Lorenz had lain in an open coffin, which had been raised to a vertical position so that all might see him in his beatitude. Ambrose had decided to make no announcement about the change in the rite. He would not draw attention to it. Lorenz’s reign had been so long the memory of the last cardinal’s funeral would be a vague one for the few citizens of Magerit that had been alive at the time to witness it. If anyone did wonder why this cardinal was not afforded the same dignity, the same glory, as the others, then let them. The conclusions they could draw would be close enough to the truth, at least in the spiritual sense.

He was rotting long before he died, and all of you suffered because of that, and you know it.

‘Father of Mankind,’ Ambrose intoned, ‘before You, the mountains are brought forth to bow. You are the Emperor everlasting, and without end. By Your will, Your servant returns to dust. By Your command, he returns to sit in worship at Your Throne. He has served You, Emperor, and he has made Your enemies to suffer.’

‘Grant that we shall make Your enemies to suffer.’

Ambrose slowly lowered his arms until they were level but still outstretched, embracing the multitude before him.

‘For we are consumed by Your displeasure,’ Ambrose recited, ‘and are fearful of Your wrath.’

‘We are fearful of Your wrath.’

‘Yet we are joyful of Your wrath, for before it the xenos and the heretic are cut down and withered.’

‘And carried away as with a flood.’

‘Behold Your servant,’ Ambrose said again.

‘Behold Your servant!’ the crowd echoed.

The cenobites still held the bier. They were standing one level below Ambrose on the dais, putting the top of the bier and the urn level with his waist. On the left and right side of the bier were bowls of holy oil. Ambrose dipped his fingers in each, then brought his hands close to the urn.

‘Lorenz, Cardinal of Theotokos, with this oil will I bless you, and speed your passage to the Golden Throne.’ He reached for the urn.

Before he could touch it, the breeze became a violent wind. The transformation in the air was instant. It stirred Ambrose’s hair that extended from beneath his mitre, and then it roared. It slammed into him with a predator’s brutality. His robes billowed like sails. He stumbled, and almost fell against the bier. The shrouded cenobites wavered, barely managing to keep the bier level. At the front of the dais, Burun fell forward and rolled down the steps to the flagstones of the parvis.

The urn was of iron and gold, inlaid with rubies and with a base of black marble. It was heavy. It was stable. It was sealed. Yet the wind took it, and jerked it way from Ambrose’s hands, and knocked it over.

With a clatter, the lid broke off.

The wind roared in triumph, and it took the ashes of Cardinal Lorenz and hurled them high and far. They spread over the faithful like a swarm of flies. They flew in spirals and twists, down the streets and over the rooftops – black snow, motes dancing in the violent air, their reach growing wider and wider, further and further.

Ambrose clapped his hands over his mouth on instinct, but the ash did not come near him. It flew away, all that remained of a corrupted life extending the dead man’s touch over the entire city.

CHAPTER 6

They were only ashes. Just ashes. They can’t do any harm.

Ambrose kept up the refrain in his head all the way back to the Palace of All Martyrs. Ashes. Just ashes. Harmless. If he told himself this simple truth often enough, perhaps he would finally believe it.

Except it wasn’t the truth. The ashes had already done their harm. They had cast a shadow over the funeral rite, and the shadow had already covered all of Magerit.

Ambrose tried to disperse it. He righted the urn, and he completed the ceremony, but he barely heard what he was saying, and he doubted anyone else did. The people cowered away from the ashes. Those on whom the flakes landed brushed at them furiously and cried out in fear. The others looked to Ambrose for help, but he was constrained by the rite. He could not extemporise; that would be blasphemous. So he finished the ceremony, mouthing words that were no more than ashes themselves, and when he was done, he tried to help. While the cenobites carried the empty urn into the cathedral to inter it in the crypt, Ambrose began the journey back to All Martyrs on foot, speaking to the people, reassuring them that all was well. They gathered around him and reached for him, and he took their hands, and he spoke words and words and words, and they were as empty to him as the urn. They must have been empty for the people too, because none of those he spoke to looked reassured.

Ashes. Just ashes. Harmless.

If he could make himself believe, then he could convince others too. But all he could think about was the way they had spread, and the wind that would not die down. It gusted, it raged, it knocked him from side to side as it roared out of narrow streets. As long as the wind blew, the ashes were flying, and spreading their harm. Where Ambrose had seen joy and hope wherever he had gone in the last two days, now there was a new kind of distress, one that had nothing to do with hunger and thirst. It afflicted the soul.

Curse you, Lorenz. The Emperor blast your twisted spirit. Is this your last attack? One final attempt to blight Theotokos from beyond your grave? I will not have it. I will defeat you.

He looked for Bethia. He had not been able to spot her in the vast gathering in the square. He needed the sight of her now more than ever. If he saw her, and her strength, and her belief in him, then he too would be stronger. He would believe what he was telling himself. But he could not see past the immediate crush of the faithful. He could not find her. He was on his own.

No, I am not alone. The Emperor walks with me. I am the agent of His will. Too much has happened for it to be otherwise. I have His light by my side. With the sword of faith, I will save Theotokos.

The vow was an exhausted one. It had no force behind it. And in the end, Ambrose could no longer keep up even the pretence of comfort.

He turned and saw Burun walking behind him, his face as stricken and pale as those around them. Ambrose nodded to him, and Burun ducked back through the crowd, making for the cathedral. A few minutes later he returned, riding in the Taurox. Ambrose touched a few more shoulders, a few more faces, reminded the people that the Emperor protects a few more times, and then climbed inside.

‘I will be among you again soon,’ he promised the crowd. They looked back at him with anxious hope, and with unease roiling through their numbers like an oil slick.

Then Burun slid the armoured door closed, shutting out the supplicants. Ambrose collapsed on the seat with a groan. ‘I should be walking,’ he said as the vehicle rumbled forward.

‘It is miles from here to the palace,’ Burun said. ‘With such a crowd, how could you?’

‘With a bit more energy than I have, and that is my failing.’

‘Forgive me for saying this, arch-deacon, but Cardinal Lorenz did have reasons for ordering the use of this vehicle.’

‘I’m sure he did. But I am not Cardinal Lorenz.’

‘You are not,’ Burun agreed. He paused. ‘I am glad you are not,’ he said. He spoke quickly and quietly, then sat tense and silent for a moment, as if frightened by his temerity. Then he smiled, briefly but radiantly, proud that he had spoken his mind, before becoming serious once more. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘some of the same reasons might apply.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ambrose asked. In spite of what had happened, he took some pleasure in seeing the change the last few days had wrought in the chapel-master. There was much less of the timorous obsequiousness that had defined him under Lorenz’s rule. He was beginning to think more, instead of waiting to be told what to think. He was acting a bit more like an ecclesiarch.

‘I mean that with so many people present, there could be risks to your person.’

Assassination? ‘I am not Cardinal Lorenz,’ Ambrose repeated.

‘Precisely,’ said Burun. ‘And we know there are some who are not pleased about that.’

Burun was right. Ambrose was being naive. While Lorenz was alive, and Ambrose had most of his power clipped, he had not been worth killing. But he was powerful now. He ruled the planet, as Lorenz had. And he had enemies. His mind returned to Rosarius, and he dreaded how the relic-keeper might turn the day’s events to his advantage.

‘Your words have wisdom, Chapel-Master Burun,’ Ambrose said. ‘I would be wise in turn to heed them.’

The little man beamed again.

Ambrose avoided looking through the viewing slits during the rest of the trip back to the palace. For a short time he could seal himself off from the world, and wrestle with his thoughts. He was no stronger for the effort when he and Burun disembarked before the palace’s main doors.

‘Is there anything I can do…?’ Burun began hesitantly.

‘Thank you, no. I must speak with Chirurgeon Morano.’ Maybe she knows more than she did yesterday. She might, at least, set his mind at ease about the ashes.

As he made his way through the halls of the palace, he became conscious of the spread of whispers. Small groups of monks spoke in hushed tones and fell silent when he drew near. So did the palace’s serfs, pausing in their duties to confer with each other. Ambrose did not have to hear them to know what they were talking about. Their faces told the tale. Monks and cenobites and serfs, they all looked at Ambrose as he passed. Some of the eyes on him held the hope that he would dispel the new fears. Others were merely uncertain. Others were hostile.

Lorenz’s final act had widened and deepened the divisions in the palace.

You will not destroy what I am creating, Ambrose promised the cardinal. I will banish your shadow. Your ash, and scattered ash at that. Nothing more. Ash. Just ash.

The plasteel doors to the medicae chamber were locked when Ambrose reached them. He knocked but there was no answer. One of Morano’s serfs came around the corner cautiously.

‘Why is this chamber locked?’ Ambrose asked her.

‘The chirurgeon’s orders, arch-deacon. She said she must be alone.’

‘When was this?’

‘A couple of hours ago, arch-deacon. While you were away at the funeral.’

What do you mean by pointing that out? Ambrose wondered. Burun’s caution came back to him. What is Morano planning?

‘I need to speak with the chirurgeon,’ said Ambrose, ‘and as she does not answer, I must have the door opened.’ She will not prevent me from saving Theotokos. No one will. ‘Do you have a key?’

‘I do,’ the woman said, unhappy to be caught between conflicting orders.

Ambrose stepped aside. ‘Please use it.’

‘Yes, arch-deacon.’ She produced a ring of keys from her tunic and inserted one into the lock next to the doorway. She turned it. There was a rattle of tumblers from inside the wall, a hiss of escaping air, and the doors slid aside.

‘Stay here,’ Ambrose told the serf. She nodded, more than happy to comply. With mounting concern, he entered the medicae chamber and closed the door behind him.

The lighting here was brighter than in the rest of the palace, though not by much. Lumen globes cast illumination directly over each examination bed, and the translucent plasteel instrument trays beside them were lit from within. Between the empty beds, and around the periphery of the chamber, the shadows were deep. The ribs of the ceiling’s low, shallow dome reached down to the floor like the limbs of a spider.

In the centre of the chamber was a command pulpit and a cogitator workstation on a rotatable platform. Ambrose could see no one. ‘Chirurgeon Morano?’ he called.

There was no answer. He was alone in the chamber, though he could not be. ‘Chirurgeon?’ he called again, his eyes drawn to the gloom at the edge of the room.

There was a scratching sound, like the gnawing of rats. It was coming from the platform. Ambrose made his way through the tables warily. ‘Morano?’ Now he was hoping there would be no answer.

He heard a weak groan, gurgling with phlegm, and at the same time the smell assaulted him. He coughed, eyes watering from the stench of violets and dead fish. He reached the platform, peered around the pulpit.

Morano lay curled at its base. She quivered, her small frame so withered that she seemed little more than a jumble of bones covered in robes. Her breathing was ragged and choking. Her fingers, curled into claws, twitched and scratched the floor with every desperate effort of her lungs.

She was on her side, turned away from Ambrose. He touched her shoulder and she whirled on him with a spasm like a dying snake. He jerked away, his own breath stopped. Her agony was a mirror of what he had seen on Lorenz. Her mouth opened and closed as if she were biting the air. Her eyes were wide, dry and hard like marble. And yet there were tears trickling down from the corners, the thick, grey substance Ambrose had seen for a moment in Lorenz’s dead sockets. The stinking sludge dribbled through the lines in Morano’s cheeks and pooled beneath her face.

‘Chirurgeon,’ Ambrose said. He knelt before her but was reluctant to get too close. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to say. How can I help? The woman was dying.

Morano’s terrible eyes focused on him. She tried to form words, but only managed a liquid moan. She tried again, and this time Ambrose understood her. ‘Are… you… satisfied…?’

‘What do you mean?’ He rose, horrified. ‘What is happening, chirurgeon? What must we do?’

The questions were futile. He was wasting time Morano did not have to spare. He hesitated for another moment. Do not be a coward. You are already infected, or you are not. You cannot leave this room until you know.

Ambrose crouched again and picked up Morano. She weighed nothing. He brought her to the nearest examination table, then went back to the command pulpit and punched the vox-speaker. ‘Medicae personnel to the chamber,’ he called. ‘Don plague armour.’

Morano groaned again, syllables caught in her throat. She was trying to speak. Ambrose rushed back to her. ‘Others…’ she gasped. ‘Are there others?’

Ambrose nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘We will search. We will contain this.’

He was trying to reassure a woman consumed by agony. He wanted to cry out, to beat back the wave of futility that crashed upon him.

He stayed by Morano’s side. She said nothing more. All her strength was spent from struggling to breathe, and she was losing. The grey tears continued to gather. They crawled down her face, thick and slow. Their movements had the sluggish heft of something alive. Ambrose fought hard to stay where he was. He did not know if his presence was a comfort. He would not abandon her, though. He would not give her cause to think her suspicions were correct.

The doors to the medicae chamber opened again. Brother Ivallus, Morano’s chief assistant, entered with a trio of medicae serfs. They had heeded Ambrose’s warning, and were clad in hermetically sealed plague armour. Hexagrammic runes of protection covered the dark, reflective, flexible material. Blessed ribbons of purity hung from their shoulders. The oxygen tanks on their backs fed the rebreathers in their beaked helmets. They resembled carrion birds. There was little comfort, and less mercy, in their appearance.

Ambrose stood aside while Ivallus examined Morano. Her hand clutched at her assistant’s sleeve, pleading, then fell away. Ivallus’ gloved hands hovered over the thick tears and their grey pool. He pulled away without touching the liquid.

‘Is this what killed the cardinal?’ Ambrose asked.

‘It looks very similar,’ Ivallus said, his voice emerging from the mask as a thin, electronic rasp.

‘Can you help her?’

‘I don’t know how,’ the monk said, frustrated.

‘Do what you can.’ To the others, Ambrose said, ‘Search the palace. Find anyone else who is showing symptoms of illness and bring them here.’

Ivallus tried to place an oxygen mask over Morano’s mouth, but she writhed with unexpected force and pushed him away. He stepped back, defeated.

‘There must be something,’ said Ambrose.

‘We learned nothing from the body of Cardinal Lorenz.’ Ivallus moved to the command platform and examined data-slates at the workstation. ‘Look, arch-deacon.’ He held up the slates. ‘Chirurgeon Morano has tracked her own symptoms. She sealed herself in here at the first sign of them. She has already tried everything I could attempt.’

‘Then all we can do is bear witness,’ Ambrose said grimly.

Morano’s breathing sounded like one death rattle after another.

‘And what about you, arch-deacon?’ Ivallus asked.

‘I am staying here.’ He was resigned to what he had to do, but he dreaded the horror that was in store for him. ‘We must quarantine anyone who might be infected. That includes me.’

‘I can bring you a suit of plague armour.’

‘Thank you, but no. Would there be any point now?’

‘No,’ Ivallus admitted.

‘Then let us do what we can, and accept what we cannot alter.’

The search took more than an hour, during which Morano’s breathing became more and more agonised. Once or twice she tried to speak. She failed, and only choked with greater violence.

One by one, other victims were brought in. There were thirteen of them. All but two of the examination tables were now occupied.

The symptoms of the afflicted varied in severity. Three were almost as bad as Morano. None were worse. Ambrose guessed that Morano was the first after Lorenz to be struck by the disease.

‘So quickly,’ Ambrose muttered. If Morano was the first, then this was the effect of a single afternoon.

Since the ash flew, Ambrose thought.

‘This doesn’t make sense,’ said Ivallus.

‘What doesn’t?’

‘None of the other infected are medicae personnel. I don’t think anyone else here has had any contact with Chirurgeon Morano. At least not recently.’

Ambrose moved from table to table, taking in the faces, murmuring prayers to give them strength in their ordeal. ‘You are not alone,’ he told them. ‘You are not alone. The Emperor protects.’

One of the faces stopped him cold. It was Brother Cavatus, Rosarius’ personal aide. Cavatus glared at Ambrose, his face white and sheened with sweat. His breath hitched hard enough to make his head jerk up and down against the table. The grey tears streamed from his eyes. His lips worked as if he might curse Ambrose or spit at him. ‘The Emperor protects,’ Ambrose said gently, and moved away.

He turned around slowly, looking at the sufferers again. There was a pattern in who they were. Along with Cavatus there was Estein, Lorenz’s dresser. Brothers Briant, Merrex and Trovus, utterly Lorenz’s creatures. And all the others, in one way or another, close to Lorenz, Rosarius or both. All of them beneficiaries of the cardinal’s regime. All of them would have been hostile to what Ambrose had planned. He was surrounded by enemies. They were all dying. And he might be joining them very soon.

Is this irony or something darker?

Ivallus came up to him. ‘There are no other cases in the palace, arch-deacon.’

‘Very well. If there is nothing more to be done here, leave us. But I want to know if there are any cases appearing in Magerit. Keep me informed.’

‘Yes, arch-deacon.’

‘Any new cases in the palace must be brought here.’

‘Of course.’

‘The cardinal died two days ago. Do you think that will be sufficient time to quarantine me?’

Ivallus thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Yes, arch-deacon. If you are not showing symptoms by then, I think you will be safe. But are you sure you do not wish for a separate space?’

‘No. I have been too close to Chirurgeon Morano. We will wait and see. If I become ill, this is where I belong.’

‘As you wish.’

Ivallus and his aides left, sealing the doors behind them. Ambrose was alone with the dying. The choking, gargling, drowning breaths of the afflicted filled the chamber. It was a choir of the damned. It seemed to circle Ambrose, scraping at his chest. Within moments, he was convulsively clearing his throat. Every tickle in his chest was a sign that this new plague was taking him.

Where has it come from? Lorenz, what did you do?

He spent the first several minutes regretting that he had not asked to be quarantined in his chambers. Either the old or the new ones, it wouldn’t have mattered. Then he recalled himself to his duty. He was surrounded by the dying, and there was no one else who could minister to them.

There was another reason to stay, too, though he hated the pragmatic calculation behind it. If he survived, he would be facing even greater obstacles to his work for Theotokos than he had before the funeral. The identities of the afflicted concerned him. How could the plague be so selective? Was it merely chance that the first to succumb were all of the cardinal’s party? Whatever the reason, if the pattern looked suspicious to him, it would to others too. The rest of Lorenz’s faction would use this against him. His enemies would accuse him of killing off whoever would oppose him. So, he had to stay. He had to be just one among the afflicted. If he survived, the accusations would have less hold than if he sequestered himself apart.

Knowing what he had to do didn’t make it easier. Or keep him from speculating and seeing a deliberate hand at work.

‘Rosarius,’ he muttered.

But how?

It doesn’t matter.

Oh, I think it does. If he can do this, think what other horrors he might be able to unleash.

All right, yes, how he did this does matter. We will have to learn that. But the point is, this must be his doing. He would have had access to everyone here.

Ambrose asked himself if he really believed that Rosarius would go this far, if he would kill his own allies, and risk spreading a plague across Theotokos, in order to strike at him. The answer came easily. He did believe it. He had seen how, even more than Lorenz, Rosarius saw the world as something to plunder, as a raw resource for his own advancement and prestige. He had no intention of remaining here in the long run. If he saw to the destruction of all of Ambrose’s hopes, and then departed, he would be well and truly satisfied. Ambrose was sure of that.

So how do we stop him?

We have to find him first.

And even before that, he had to survive.

Ambrose made the rounds of the beds, offering prayer, offering companionship, offering the pretence of comfort. It was his duty. It was also a waste of time. The sufferers were beyond the reach of prayer. Their lives had contracted to the agony of the present moment, the horror that each breath presented. Nothing existed for them except their slow drowning. If they recognised Ambrose at all, they slashed at him with clawed hands, as if he were responsible for what was happening to them. He hovered near, in spite of them, and murmured the Final Litanies of Faith, and the Psalms of the Unbending. It was his duty.

It was his duty.

He had been weary when he had returned to the palace. Now he was exhausted. In his exhaustion, he became angry. It was all he could do not to shout at the sick when they coughed and choked their hate at him. Didn’t they see what he was trying to do? Didn’t they realise they should be turning to the Emperor in their last extremity?

Of course they didn’t realise. Just like they hadn’t realised, or hadn’t cared, what Lorenz and Rosarius had been doing to Theotokos. Or because they had revelled in it too. They had put themselves beyond the reach of the sacred long ago.

The day turned into evening, and the evening into night, though there were no windows in the medicae chamber. There was a chronometer on the command platform, and Ambrose learned quickly not to look at it. Time had slowed in this hall. It was as sluggish as the tears that seeped from the eyes of the dying. All of them had been struggling for breath when they had been brought in, though some had still been able to walk with help. The grey tears did not manifest themselves right away, but eventually, and without exception, they appeared. Ambrose regarded them with a special horror. The other symptoms, fearful as they were, at least resembled other conditions. He had never seen anything like the tears before. Their colour and their viscosity were deeply wrong. No human body should ever produce such a substance.

No body that was not corrupted.

Ambrose resisted the thought at first. It was easy to believe that of one’s opponent. He had seen Lorenz use that accusation against those who displeased him or had something he wanted. It would be wrong, though, to withhold the condemnation when it was warranted. That would be the greater sin.

The sounds of lungs filled with liquid were so loud. He could not concentrate. He could not escape from the wet, rattling march of death. There was no retreat anywhere in the chamber. The plague was everywhere. Ambrose felt that he was drowning too. He became uncomfortably aware of his own breathing. Every clear inhalation was a gift. Every exhalation was a prologue to possible doom.

The worst of the night began with a confirmation of his worst surmises. He was surrounded not just by the dying, but by the corrupt.

It started with Morano. Her struggles turned into a rising moan of utter despair. He rushed to her side, sure that this was the end, wanting to be there for her even though she would have rejected his aid.

He recoiled, his breath freezing in his chest.

Her tears, thick and grey, stretching from the corners of her eyes, were now more than a foot long. They coiled and writhed. Their ends opened, revealing circular maws lined with teeth. Morano screamed. She had no air in her lungs, but she screamed, her soul devoured by an agony Ambrose could not imagine. Her head hammered up and down against the examination table. Her neck cracked. Her skull cracked. The worms danced and pulled further and further out of her eyes. Their bodies grew thicker, until they squeezed her eyes out of their sockets. The orbs rolled down her cheeks.

Her throat swelled, and her scream stopped, though her head hammered and hammered and hammered against the table, hard and fast as a terrible rain. A worm even larger than the rest emerged from her mouth. Its maw opened wide, and it uttered a thin, reedy wail. It was a cry of two notes, DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee, a song of monstrous birth and celebration.

Morano lay still at last. And the worm sang.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

Morano’s mouth hung open with the empty slackness of the dead. The worm slid from it with a squelch and fell to the floor. Ambrose shifted away from the worm’s path and leaned closer to Morano to look for any sign of breath. As he did, her throat bulged like a frog’s before a fountain of flies erupted from her mouth. The insects slammed into Ambrose’s face, a dry and squirming hail. He fell back, swatting and clawing. He bit down on his scream and scrambled to his feet. In his horror, the black bodies seemed to be Lorenz’s ash returned to claim him.

Stumbling, Ambrose bumped into an instrument tray beside another examination table. With one hand waving at the cloud of flies, and without taking his eyes from the worms twisting around Morano’s skull, he fumbled over the tray until his hand closed around the handle of a surgical blade. He clutched the knife and took half a step towards the corpse.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

The worm sang, and now it was a chorus. The cry was taken up on the other side of the chamber. Ambrose whirled. Another of the diseased was in his final moments, his entire body convulsing with the same murderous rhythm, and the worms were dancing on his skull. Then the flies rose from his mouth too.

The knife turned slick in Ambrose’s sweaty hand. He withdrew to the command platform. All around him, tears were turning into worms. An entire choir wailed the mindless, repetitive song.

It seemed the arrival of the first worms had accelerated the transformation of the other sufferers’ tears. Soon they squirmed over the faces of every soul on the examination tables. Many of the afflicted were not nearly as far gone as Morano had been. They still fought to breathe, but already their throats and eyes were swelling with the things crawling out. They screamed with the strength granted them by the outer reaches of suffering. They screamed with a horror beyond naming.

Ambrose dropped the blade. It clattered on the platform. He was too frightened of what might happen if he attacked a worm. He saw it leaping for his eyes. He saw it spewing unholy ichor into his face. He saw a hundred different nightmares unfolding.

He covered his ears, but he could not blot out the screams and the song and the buzzing of the flies. He tried to close his eyes, but the fear of what might come for him in that self-created darkness was too great. He turned around and around, and everywhere there was agony, everywhere there was monstrosity. The shrieks and the choking and the singing of the worms battered his courage and his soul. He shrank beneath the force of the blows. He curled onto the platform, his head wrapped in his arms. He cried out, begging for it all to stop, but his voice was muffled by his arm as he hid his mouth from the flies, and the horror went on and on, and the chorus of abomination grew louder and louder and louder, and soon it would kill him, it had to kill him, for nothing could survive in this cauldron of writhing plague.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

Mocking, mindless, endless, triumphant.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

Coming for him. Destroying his mind. Consuming his soul.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

And the flies, the flies like ashes, ashes, everything just ashes.

CHAPTER 7

‘The Emperor protects.’

Ambrose could not hear his own words. The whisper was too dry, too quiet. And the worms sang on, and the swarms of flies hummed. They did not seem to be as loud as they had been. But they were loud enough.

‘The Emperor protects.’

It was all he could manage of a prayer. His mind felt hollowed out and eroded, beaten and gnawed. There was nothing in there, no strength, no thought, no will. Just that one phrase, that one truth, his last possession.

‘The Emperor protects.’

It was true. It had to be true. If it was not, then all was lost and there had never been any point in fighting.

How many hours since the tears had become worms? How many hours of the two-note, up-down, maddening wail?

How many days had this night lasted? How many years?

Curled up and shivering, when he had stopped shrieking he had made himself pray. At firs he managed to gasp out complete verses. But his voice was hoarse, his throat was sore, and of course they were because he had been screaming. But the soreness terrified him, because maybe it was the first symptom of the plague, and soon the worms would be pressing out from his eyes too.

The visions of torment were too powerful. They blew the verses of prayers away like ashes in wind. All he had left was the Emperor protects, and the need for that last and most basic truth not to abandon him too.

There was no time here. Just the vortex of choking and death and awful birth. An infinite dance from which he could not break free.

Twice, he uncurled, twice, he forced himself to rise, and twice, he reached for the vox. And both times, he managed to stop himself. That was his victory in this night. At least if he died, he would go to the Emperor and be able to account for himself that much. He had not given in completely to cowardice. He had not called for help and thus exposed someone else to the death in this chamber.

This was his ordeal. He must not inflict it on others.

The centuries passed, and he knew he still breathed, because he could still form the words of the phrase that remained to him. Millennia passed, and the fever dream of his existence in the medicae chamber finally changed. The mists of horror began to part.

The wailing of the worms was diminishing. So was the corpse-hum of the flies.

For the third time, Ambrose straightened his limbs, wincing at the cramps, and staggered upright. He looked around the room.

Almost all the patients were dead. Only two were still caught in the slow drowning. On many of the corpses, there was no more movement. The ones where the worms still visibly twisted had, Ambrose thought, died recently. There were far fewer flies fouling the air.

He forced himself out from the doubtful shelter of the command platform and made his way over to Morano. The worms that had disported themselves on her skull were gone. Where they had once been there was now a motionless grey sludge, drying out and starting to flake. Flies stirred on its surface. He could not tell if they were eating it or trapped in it.

There had been so many insects in the room that the floor should have been carpeted with them. It was not. Unlike the worms, the flies left no trace as they died. Or if they did, what they left behind was too slight for Ambrose to see.

Whether dawn was close or not, the night was ending.

Ambrose returned once again to the platform, sinking down against the pulpit. ‘The Emperor protects,’ he said again, with greater strength. Then he wept.

One of the last two survivors began the tell-tale rattle-thumping of spine and limbs against the table. Ambrose braced himself for a new burst of flies. It would be over, though. All of this was ending.

‘Die, you wretches!’ he called out. ‘By the Throne, die and be done with it!’

At last, they did. The worms no longer wailed. The flies disappeared.

Ambrose finally let himself look at the chronometer. It was a few minutes until dawn.

He stood. He took a deep breath. His throat was still sore, but his lungs were clear. And as he took in the importance of the befouled dead, his eyes became clear too.

‘Thank you, God-Emperor,’ he said, and wept again. ‘I thank you for the ordeal I have suffered, for it is, in truth, a revelation.’

Before this night, he had thought of Lorenz’s sycophants and the others resistant to the changes Ambrose brought as selfish, venal, even malignant. He had been too kind. He had not seen them for what they truly were.

Corrupt.

Corrupt, in the most profound sense of the word. They were heretics. They were rotten in their hearts, in their souls, and in their bodies. He had seen the truth. He had seen their corruption made manifest.

But what about the flight of ashes from the urn? What did that mean?

He would learn in due course. For the moment, what he knew without doubt was that his enemies were the enemies of Theotokos, and the enemies of the Emperor. Rosarius had tried to destroy Ambrose by unleashing this plague. He had strengthened the arch-deacon instead, because Ambrose had survived to see the truth.

The hour of Matins came, and the vox-speaker buzzed to life. ‘Are you well, arch-deacon?’ Ivallus asked.

‘I am,’ Ambrose said. ‘I am also the only one. Come and remove the corpses. They must be cremated, and their urns sealed in lead.’

‘Yes, arch-deacon.’

‘I am not done. Their urns are not to be buried in the palace’s crypt.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Ambrose was about to tell Ivallus about the revelation he had experienced, and that the dead were abominated by the Emperor. He stopped himself. Careful. You can’t afford to give in to transports of joy. Not yet. Ivallus had worked closely with Morano. He might not be trustworthy. ‘We cannot take any chances with the possibility of contagion,’ he said. ‘Have the urns thrown into the ocean.’ The coast was only ten miles from Magerit.

‘Yes, arch-deacon.’

‘Good. Come and take the bodies then, but summon Brother Tazker to the vox first.’

Ivallus did as Ambrose asked, and Tazker was on the vox before Ivallus and his team had arrived at the medicae chamber.

‘Are you alone?’ Ambrose asked Tazker.

‘I am, arch-deacon.’

‘Tell me, have you been able to locate Relic-Keeper Rosarius?’

‘I’m sorry, but I haven’t. No one has seen him in days, as far as I can determine. I will keep looking.’

‘Please do, brother. It is important that he be found.’ You coward, Rosarius, Ambrose thought. Hide all you want. You will not prevail. ‘Keep looking,’ he said. ‘But ask Chief Enforcer Bonarmo to come to the palace. Tell her I need to speak with her.’

To his credit, Tazker did not ask why. ‘At once,’ he said, and that was all.

It was a while before the head of the Magerit Watch arrived at the palace, time enough for Ivallus and his aides to remove the corpses from the medicae chamber. Ambrose examined them closely while he was still alone. The flies had all vanished before Ivallus unsealed the chamber door. There was no trace of anything unnatural having occurred, only the grim evidence of the plague’s mortality rate.

‘How long did they survive?’ Ivallus asked. The beak of his plague mask turned back and forth as he took in the sight of the dead. All the faces were twisted in final agony.

‘It varied,’ said Ambrose. ‘I don’t know if there was any firm pattern.’ He had been too terrified to notice. Now, it was all he could do to remain standing and not collapse with exhaustion. ‘The last of them died before dawn.’

‘No recovery at all. That is worrying.’

‘It is. Especially if cases turn up in Magerit.’ Emperor grant that Rosarius confined his crimes to the palace. He feared they would not be so lucky.

‘And you, arch-deacon, how are you feeling?’ said Ivallus.

‘Tired, but otherwise well. I am not experiencing any symptoms.’

‘I am glad to hear it. Perhaps the contagion is not as strong as it might be.’

‘Let us hope not, Brother Ivallus. Let us hope not. We shall see what my state is tomorrow.’

‘Our prayers are with you, arch-deacon. Shall I have some food brought to you?’

‘Please.’ With the night behind him, he was ravenous.

Ambrose kept his other thoughts to himself while Ivallus oversaw the removal of the bodies. The horrors of the night had left him feeling optimistic about his chances of fighting off the plague. This was not just a simple disease. It was a spiritual death. It manifested the corruption of those it afflicted. That was how he was beginning to see it. He was having trouble reconciling that aspect with the conclusion that Rosarius had spread it deliberately, but nevertheless, he grew more and more convinced that both things were true. He was not yet ready to presume that he was immune. He would not dare embrace that kind of pride. But with the bodies gone, and with them the reminder of the nightmare, he felt more confident about surviving the next twenty-four hours.

Ivallus and his aides finished their work. A meal of bread and cheese was brought, along with a flagon of water drawn from the underground cisterns. Ambrose ate and drank, feeling better yet. It was frustrating to remain another day in the medicae chamber, constrained in what he could do and learn, but he told himself that at least he would get some rest.

What surprised him was how long it took for Chief Enforcer Velansa Bonarmo to make contact. She finally arrived in the late afternoon. She knocked on the chamber doors and spoke through the vox-grille set in the wall next to them.

‘I apologise, arch-deacon, for making you wait so long. I have been detained by events in the city.’

Apprehension tightened Ambrose’s throat. ‘Why? What has been happening?’

‘I’m afraid your attempts to calm spirits after the funeral of Cardinal Lorenz did not work. The rumours have been flying. My troopers are succeeding in keeping order, but there are large sectors of the city that are closer to mass panic than I would like.’

‘I see.’

‘There has also been an outbreak of the plague that has visited All Martyrs.’

Ambrose winced. ‘How bad?’

‘I think we have it contained. At least, all the cases we know of are now isolated. But…’

‘Yes. There could well be others.’ People dying alone. People with friends who did not know what to do. People who might try to hide the sick. If the symptoms always turned into the horrors he had seen during the night, then people would be terrified to report such things. ‘Any fatalities?’ he asked, giving Bonarmo the opening to tell him if anything blasphemous had been witnessed.

‘A few,’ she said. ‘The rest are being watched closely.’

Were there worms? Were there flies? She would have told him if there had been. She sounded tired and worried, but nothing more. She had not seen the impossible births of monstrosities. What did that mean? Was that a good sign? There were too many things he did not know and could not know while he was trapped in this chamber.

The memory of the ashes swirling in the wind rose up. With his mind’s eye, he watched them dance over the rooftops, and fall upon the citizens he was trying to save.

No. Please no. They were ashes. Just ashes.

There was no need to imagine causes when the guilty party was so evident. We will find you, Rosarius. You cannot hide. The time for subtlety was past. Rosarius had forced his hand.

‘Chief Enforcer Bonarmo,’ Ambrose said, ‘there is something you must know. I have reason to believe that this plague has been deliberately spread.’

‘Throne,’ said Bonarmo. ‘How?’

‘By what means, I do not know. But I am certain this is the work of Relic-Keeper Rosarius. He vanished shortly after the cardinal died. No one knows where he is.’

‘Rosarius,’ Bonarmo repeated. ‘He was frequently in the company of Cardinal Lorenz, wasn’t he?’

You have it right, chief enforcer. He was never a friend of Theotokos. ‘That’s correct.’

‘Then I see why he might do this.’ She sounded disgusted. ‘A plague for political ends. There are no words for such a crime.’

‘There is one,’ Ambrose told her. ‘It is an abomination.’ I have seen the full extent of his crime. The word is a true one. ‘He will try to get off-world.’

‘Then he will be disappointed. There has been no traffic from outside the system for months. We have been left to fend for ourselves, arch-deacon.’

‘And we will. The Emperor sees us. He knows Theotokos renews its faith.’

‘You give me hope, arch-deacon. And it will be a simple matter to forbid all out-system travel. He will have nowhere to go.’

‘There is certainly nowhere else on Theotokos for him. We will continue to search the palace. If he is not here, he must be in the city.’

‘We will find him.’

‘It must be soon.’ They had to stop him before he spread the plague any further.

‘I know. At least I know what we are looking for.’

‘Then you give me hope too, Chief Enforcer Bonarmo.’

He did feel encouraged for a short while after she left. But the hours stretched ahead, interminable, and he was alone with his thoughts and his doubts and his fears. The more Ambrose thought about what Rosarius had done, the more he feared it.

What did you do? How did you do it?

He had been given a glimpse of unspeakable corruption last night. But the author of the corruption was still out there. And Ambrose was stuck in here, losing another day.

He began to wonder if his earlier optimism had been a cruel illusion. He began to wonder if Rosarius might not have won after all.

CHAPTER 8

Ambrose spent his second night in the medicae chamber in prayer and meditation. The silence and solitude of the hall were blessings. The contrast with the choking and the monstrous songs of the night before made the silence even more pronounced. Ambrose performed a ritual of blessing, sanctifying the space once more, reclaiming it from the corrupted horrors that Rosarius had brought to the palace. He felt calm. He felt strong. He had come through the trial and was better for it. He was armoured for the struggles ahead.

He knelt for hours at a time. The pain in his limbs became the spur to more committed prayer, and to deeper meditation. By the middle of the night, Ambrose sensed his purpose with greater clarity than ever before. He could almost hear the Emperor’s words in his soul, directing his steps. What he was engaged in on Theotokos was, he now understood, more than a simple struggle. It was a crusade. Last night, his iron had been tempered on the anvil of terror. This night was the time for revelation.

The Emperor had blessed him with a mission to save the people of Theotokos. He had instinctively pursued that goal for a long time, but he had not seen its full scope until now. He was called upon to do more than save them from thirst and famine. There were limits to what he could do there. He could only stave off those spectres for so long, for if the rains did not come, then doom would.

But his mission was also to save the people from corruption. It had always existed on Theotokos, and it had found champions in Lorenz and Rosarius. Before last night, Ambrose had not been able to see beyond their simple venality. That had changed. The cardinal had been corrupted in the most profound way, and Rosarius was even worse.

I cannot control the rains. I will defeat corruption. I will save the souls of my people. When they are cleansed, when they are worthy, then the rains will come.

The spiritual and moral logic was unassailable.

In the last hours before dawn, Ambrose finally rose. He revelled in the explosion of purifying pain the simple act of standing caused. He staggered for a few steps but did not reach out to an examination table for support. He walked until his movements were easy again. He smiled. He took a deep breath. His lungs were clear. The plague had not touched him. He was certain that it could not touch him.

He was strong. He was clean. He was clear.

He was ready. Whatever wounds Rosarius and his allies might inflict on him, he would withstand them and triumph.

Morning came, and Ivallus unsealed the doors to the medicae chamber. Ambrose strode out, smiling to the monks and cenobites who had come to greet him on his release. ‘It is a joyful morning, my brothers,’ he said. ‘I am so pleased to see you.’

Though there was strain on their faces, they smiled back at him. He thought, too, that they clung to his words as if their succour were tangible.

‘There is much to be done,’ Ambrose said. ‘Not least by me, and I might as well have been hundreds of miles from Magerit these past two days. I will need your help on all fronts. Theotokos cries out for help, and we are the ones who must provide it.’ He paused and smiled again. ‘As a first step, Brother Tazker, will you accompany me to my study and bring me up to date?’ The words my study came naturally. He no longer felt like an imposter. It was Lorenz who should never have claimed ownership of those chambers.

Tazker fell into step beside Ambrose. They walked in silence until they reached the study. There, Tazker closed the door while Ambrose settled himself behind the desk. ‘So,’ said Ambrose, ‘from your grave expression, I can guess that things have not progressed well during the night.’

‘They have not, arch-deacon,’ Tazker said, approaching the desk. ‘The efforts to contain the plague have not been successful. There are more and more cases being seen. It already has a name. The Grey Tears.’

Ambrose made a show of thinking carefully while he calmed himself. As far as he knew, only he had seen the tears in the cardinal’s sockets. Morano had certainly not mentioned them to him, and she had been forthright enough about the other mysterious aspects of Lorenz’s demise. If people had witnessed the tears transforming into worms, surely that would have been the first thing Tazker said. He also would look more than just worried. Perhaps the worst forms of the plague only manifested in the truly corrupt. ‘The Grey Tears,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Once a plague has a name, it has become an object of great fear.’

‘Indeed it has, arch-deacon,’ said Tazker. ‘Many of my brothers and I, following your example, have gone forth from these walls to walk among the citizenry. We have seen and heard the fear.’

‘Your actions do you credit, and you have my thanks,’ Ambrose told him. ‘This is how we will continue our works of salvation. And what of Rosarius? Is there any news?’

‘He has not been found. But the Magerit Watch have broadcast his name. Across the city, he is known as the author of the plague. He is greatly hated.’

Good. That would hamper him, and make the actions of his allies, whoever they still were, more difficult. ‘Then the people of Magerit are vigilant. I am sure it will not be long until he is found. Is there any other news?’

‘Only one thing more. The people feel your absence, arch-deacon. They need to see you. They need to hear your words in this time of fear.’ Tazker lowered his head. ‘I hope I do not speak out of turn.’

‘You do not, brother. You recall me to my immediate duty. The people will see and hear me at Evensong.’ I will bring them more than hope, Ambrose promised himself. I will bring them salvation.

Ambrose headed out into the grounds of the palace. The retreat of the cloister was unsuited to his task. The sermon he would deliver that evening was an important one, and he needed to think carefully about what he would say. He would reassure the people, yes. But he could not banish the plague. He had to remind the citizens of their solemn duty to fight for the Imperium. Their resistance to the machinations of Rosarius was as fully a part of the war against the enemies of the Emperor than any front-line battle. To find the words that would put iron in the people’s faith, and in their spines, he needed the inspiration that came with watching over the city while he thought. He had to see what he was striving to save.

The wind that had come up at Lorenz’s funeral still blew with steady force, punctuated by violent gusts. It had knocked down many trees on the grounds, and monotasked servitors laboured with mindless precision to restore the hillside to its pristine state. One of the tracked servitors was attached to a woodchipper, and a group of the humans turned into machines of flesh was sawing through the fallen trunks and loading them into the contraption, turning them into the dust that would nurture other growths. The whine of blades and pulverised wood echoed across the hillside. It did not bother Ambrose. It was background noise, the sound of another kind of revival.

He wandered along the paths, his robes buffeted by the hot wind, the sermon slowly taking shape in his mind. He stopped beside one of the artificial brooks. It was the steepest and widest, cutting down the centre of the slope that faced the city. Clusters of carefully placed boulders created frothing rapids, and the water plunged past with a ceaseless roar. It blended with the whine of the woodchipper.

There was both renewal and constancy here, Ambrose thought. The dead wood was being taken away, and the stream flowed with uninterrupted force. The images pleased him. He could use them.

He was just framing the climax of the sermon, and walking slowly downhill beside the stream, when another noise, much less pleasing, intruded on his thoughts. He tensed at the buzzing of flies. A few dozen yards further down, there was a cloud of them darting and swirling over a group of boulders at the brook’s edge. Ambrose approached cautiously, wary for the first hint of the song of the worms. He relaxed a little, but only a little, as he drew near and nothing unnatural manifested itself. The flies seemed to be just that – flies.

But something had drawn them here.

The flies were thickest at a narrow gap between two boulders that created the effect of a crevasse a good ten feet deep. Water flowed violently in and out of it. Ambrose held his breath, covered his mouth and nose with one hand while trying to wave away the cloud of insects with the other, and looked down into the crevasse.

A corpse lay upside down, caught in the rocks, its limbs twisted and broken, the head suspended just above the water. Ambrose recognised the robes of the relic-keeper at once. Determining whether the face was that of Rosarius was more difficult. The nose and one cheek had been smashed in the fall, and the flesh had already rotted to a greenish-black and was sloughing off, crumbling wetly into the water. Forgetting the flies, Ambrose stared at the body, wondering at first if this might be another of Rosarius’ crimes. Perhaps he had murdered another brother and put his robes on the body.

No. Don’t lie to yourself. This is Rosarius.

Ruined though the face was, Ambrose could still make out its narrow cast. The squeezing hunger of a lifetime’s greed had marked it deeply.

How long has he been here? The putrefaction was far advanced, too much for the few days he had been missing. But Lorenz had also rotted quickly, the plague fusing with his corruption to devour his corpse.

Rosarius must have contracted the Grey Tears shortly after Ambrose had seen him in the cathedral. He might even have been sick then. Perhaps that was when he had spread the contagion.

Did he know he was sick? Did he know what he was doing?

What difference does it make? His crime is the same.

Ambrose backed away from the boulders, out of the cloud of flies. There was a bench nearby, and he sat down, feeling cold despite the heat.

He looked around. There was no one about except the servitors. He would have to head back to the palace to find some help and get word to Bonarmo that Rosarius had been found. He should go now.

He stayed where he was. He turned his gaze on the boulders and the storm of insects feasting on the body. ‘You would like me to summon help, wouldn’t you?’ he whispered to Rosarius. ‘You filth. That would suit you very well. It would be a good way to commit a few more crimes against Theotokos and the Emperor. Eh? Eh? Don’t answer. I understand perfectly. The people will be relieved you are dead, but your allies will argue that you had nothing to do with the plague. They’ll present you as just another victim. Some people will believe that. You’ll wind up fighting against the salvation of Theotokos from beyond the grave.’

Ambrose clenched his fists. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I will not let you have that victory. Not even the smallest part of it.’

Dead, Rosarius became a threat again. Alive, he was an enemy that united the citizenry of Magerit behind Ambrose.

What he had to do was as clear as revelation.

He rose and walked uphill. He made his way over to where the servitors were disposing of the trees. He stopped beside the woodchipper and checked again that he was alone.

Is that a hood between those two oaks?

No. Just thick ivy, moving in the wind.

And what if there had been someone there? What he was going to do was necessary. He would have no difficulty explaining that. His position was beyond argument.

He halted the servitor in its task. The whine of the blades slowed to a rattle, then went quiet.

‘Priority debris,’ Ambrose said. Which was absolutely true. The corpse could not be permitted to pollute water that might end up in the reservoirs of the city. Though he had no idea why it should even occur to him to worry about lying to a servitor. He pointed towards the swarm of flies. The upper body of the servitor, the portion of it that was still flesh, turned obediently to mark the position. ‘Fallen matter between those rocks,’ said the arch-deacon. ‘Dispose of it.’

There was a belch of blue fumes, and the tracks of the servitor jerked to life. The machinic slave rumbled down towards the rocks. The other servitors followed it automatically, the tasks of the whole group synchronised, turning them into a single unit of labour.

Ambrose followed slowly, keeping a short distance away. He watched as two servitors removed the corpse from the rocks. The mechanised servitor positioned itself nearby and aimed its discharge chute at the roots of the nearest trees. The chipper blades roared to life, their high whine rising as they reached their destructive speed. The servitors threw the body into the chipper’s maw.

There was a sharp rasp, and then a mist of blood and atomised bone coated the roots of the trees, staining the grass crimson.

The servitors reacted to the discolouration immediately. They began to rake the earth, and to turn over the soil. The pristine beauty of the palace’s grounds had to be preserved.

Ambrose watched until every trace of Rosarius had vanished. The flies dispersed, their meal gone. When the servitors moved on, returning to the fallen trees, Ambrose walked over to the freshly groomed earth that was Rosarius’ unmarked grave.

‘Now you are defeated, you corrupted wretch,’ he said. ‘There is nothing more you can do against me and the world the Emperor has tasked me to save. You are under my control now. There will be no memory of you except that which I choose to give you, and what I shall give, you will not like.’ He pictured what must have been Rosarius’ final moments, stumbling desperately down the hill, drowning in his lungs, the Grey Tears turning into worms, blinding him. Then falling and dying wedged between the rocks. A foul death. Deservedly so. ‘Your end was atrocious,’ Ambrose said. ‘Your legacy, despite your best efforts, will be the salvation of Theotokos.’

A single fly buzzed at Ambrose’s ear. He batted it away and started back to the palace. He had his sermon in mind now. He knew every word of it.

The throng of the faithful in the Cathedral of Iron Obeisance was enormous. The people overflowed from the pews, stood crowded in the nave and the aisles. They gathered on the parvis and in the square, as numerous as they had been for the funeral of Lorenz. They had come to see Ambrose if they could, and at the very least to hear him. As before, the vox-casters carried his voice through the streets. The entire city had turned to him. He would not fail it.

And in her accustomed pew, where Ambrose had prayed she would be, Bethia stood with her family, her face uplifted. He looked at her, and the clarity and determination that had been his since he had survived the night amongst the corrupted became a hundred times stronger. Every decision he had made since that moment was the correct one. Every decision had been commanded.

‘Our trials are not at an end,’ he said, beginning his sermon with this hard truth. He would not lie to the people. At least not about that. ‘The drought afflicts us still. And now a plague has come among us. It has come because an enemy walks in the shadows, corrupt and heretical. He has turned his back on the Emperor, and on Theotokos. He was blessed with the holy rank of relic-keeper, and he has defiled His trust. I will not pronounce his name while I stand on sacred ground, yet it is known to you. It is known to all of you.’

The congregation murmured in assent to his words, and in anger against Rosarius. Ambrose spoke about the relic-keeper’s perfidy, conducting the rage until it rose like the tide. Then he turned to hope. ‘The enemy has already done us great harm. He has allies, and they plan to do more. But they are weak because they are corrupt and heretical. We are strong because we have faith. We are strong because we serve the Emperor, together. Faith that is true cannot be broken. With faith, there is courage. With faith, there is unity. With faith, courage and unity, there is strength no enemy can withstand.’

He paused just long enough for the roar of the people to begin, then started to speak again as if he had not been expecting this response. He smiled, let the roar build, and at its crest, he raised his voice to channel the collective fury.

‘Do not suffer the heretic to live!’ he shouted. ‘These are the words we have all been taught! These are the words that must govern our acts. We will allow no corruption to sully our city! Let us rededicate ourselves with purpose! We shall withstand the plague, and Magerit will shine so brightly the entire galaxy will wonder at what our faith has accomplished.’

He fused rage with hope, and in so doing he fused the people into a perfect whole. He had lied to them by telling them that Rosarius still lived. The deeper truth, though, was that he had lied for them. He had told them what they needed to hear so they would be steadfast in the trial of the plague. Their vigilance would protect them against Rosarius’ allies. He was sure they were around. The relic-keeper would not have acted alone. They could be anywhere. They could be anyone. He would have to watch for opposition that came disguised as agreement.

When he told the lie, he had felt a spiritual stab. He had wounded his soul. He had wounded his soul for a great cause. If he had to suffer other wounds in order to save his world, then so be it. That was the will of the Emperor.

Ambrose gazed down on the people, on his people. They shouted his praise. They screamed their hatred of Rosarius. They broke into a thunderous hymn to the Emperor. The wave of their faith, of their faith in him, rolled over him, and it transported his soul.

And Bethia, the way Bethia was looking at him, with admiration and absolute trust, oh, he would suffer any wound to see her this way.

Ambrose took a deep breath, taking the very air of faith into his lungs.

The outcome of the struggle against the enemies of salvation and the Grey Tears had already been decided.

The people were his. The victory was his.

CHAPTER 9

The chamber of Chief Enforcer Velansa Bonarmo was spare. A battered iron desk, two chairs, an equipment chest and a small shrine were its only contents. Its window was wide and high, and it was so covered in grime that the view of the street that ran in front of the Magerit Watch barracks was a dirty blur, the light that came through filtered into a sullen grey. Bonarmo stood behind her desk, walking slowly back and forth while she and Ambrose talked. Dark-skinned, she was compactly built, a battering ram of an officer. Though the energy for action was always there, she looked tired. There was nothing new in that. Her duties had expanded and grown more onerous as the situation on Theotokos had deteriorated. Desperate people took desperate actions, and the Watch had been kept busy just at the level of ensuring Magerit did not erupt into full-scale food and water riots. The battle had been lost everywhere else, something which Ambrose knew weighed on Bonarmo, even though the collapse of the other cities had been beyond anyone’s ability to prevent. Keeping order in Magerit was no small achievement. He had hoped that the relief provided by greater water and food rations would relieve some of the pressure, but the Grey Tears had undone almost all the good he had been able to accomplish.

Bonarmo looked more than tired. She looked worried. That was new, and it worried Ambrose too.

‘You are generous with your time, arch-deacon,’ the chief enforcer said.

Ambrose shook his head. ‘My place is in the city, where I can be useful, not cloistered in the palace. I am doing my rounds of the relief centres, and it seemed a better use of your time for me to come and see you, rather than the other way around. I take it, though, that the news is not good?’

‘It is not. The Grey Tears is spreading more quickly than we can contain the cases. I have expanded quarantine zones in the north and south-centre sectors, where we have seen the greatest concentration of infected. That has not stopped the spread. I’m hoping that it has slowed it. But that is a hope, arch-deacon. It is not a conviction.’

‘Few people are willing to volunteer themselves for quarantine,’ Ambrose guessed.

‘Exactly. They know it is a death sentence if they contract the plague.’

The distance between the main concentrations of the plague bothered him. Eruptions so widely spaced. Ashes in wind swirled before his mind’s eye. No. Ashes. They were just ashes. Rosarius had simply launched his attack with great cunning before he died. ‘No one has recovered, then,’ said Ambrose.

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘I see.’ That was what he had suspected. He had hoped to hear otherwise, since he still had not heard even a whisper about the tears becoming worms. He had prayed that the innocent might have a chance of recovery, that only the corrupt were doomed. ‘And what about the rate of infection?’

‘To date, arch-deacon, it would appear that the only person to survive unprotected contact with a diseased individual is yourself.’

If Ambrose had needed any further proof that his mission was divinely ordained, he now had it. This fact, though, only made the struggle against the plague harder. ‘So, the fear of the plague is almost as much of a threat as the plague itself.’

‘That is what we are facing, yes,’ said Bonarmo.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ Ambrose asked her.

‘I was hoping you could tell me.’ She clearly meant it. ‘You give the people hope, arch-deacon. Your presence gives them strength. And it calms them.’

Ambrose mused for a few moments. He would preach every evening for the duration of the crisis. That wasn’t enough, though. Then he thought of the relief centres where he was headed. He sighed. There was nothing joyful in the idea that had occurred to him. But it might make a difference.

‘This is a small enough thing,’ he said, ‘but it is worth doing, I think. You know that one section of each relief centre, one that can be sealed off, has been reserved for the sick.’

‘You want the plague-infected brought to those centres?’

‘I do.’

‘You will need to repurpose each complex entirely,’ Bonarmo warned.

‘That many infected?’

‘At least.’

There were so many in need who were not struck by the plague. They would be harmed by this change. A choice of two evils faced him. Except there really was no choice. The Grey Tears had to be stopped before all else. ‘So be it,’ he said.

‘Forgive me, arch-deacon, but I’m not sure what this is meant to accomplish.’

‘We must let the people know that I will visit the afflicted.’

Bonarmo fixed him with a long stare. ‘Are you sure?’

‘If I were going to contract the Grey Tears, I would have already, don’t you think?’

‘Yes,’ she conceded. ‘You will take precautions, all the same?’

‘You would have me visit the dying in plague armour? No. I was surrounded by the infected, and the plague did not touch me. I am proof that an immunity exists.’ He did wonder if that immunity extended to him alone. That was not an idea he wanted to propagate at this point. He also told himself that he hoped it wasn’t true, and that there were others who could fight the infection.

If corruption is death, maybe purity is life.

That was a thought he was uneasy about pursuing. He filed it away, aware that sooner or later he would have to examine it again. For the moment, he turned to a safer, heartfelt plea.

God-Emperor, grant that Bethia is immune.

‘The people must see that I am unafraid,’ Ambrose said to Bonarmo. ‘They must see that I will minister to the dying. Then they will know that there is comfort to be had, even in this extremity. Maybe they will not seek to hide, then.’

‘Maybe,’ Bonarmo said, clearly reluctant to agree to the plan. ‘Just so we are clear, I wish to state my concerns, arch-deacon. Though I can see the potential benefits, and yes, maybe this could help the efforts to establish a workable quarantine, your loss is something that Magerit can ill afford.’

Ambrose smiled reassuringly. ‘That is flattering. Do not be concerned, chief enforcer. The plague cannot touch me.’

Ambrose spent the rest of the day visiting the relief centres, and letting the volunteers know what was about to happen. He saved the primary one for last. He was glad that Bethia understood why this had to be done, though he saw the sorrow in her face, and her worry for those she would no longer be able to help. That sorrow was still there when he returned the next day. By then, he had made his announcement in the cathedral. The relief warehouses were filling up with the dying. Some had been brought there by the enforcers, but many more had been carried there by their families. Those people too had to be quarantined, but they accepted this fact with patience. The knowledge that Ambrose would be among them was enough to make them compliant.

Bethia was waiting for him at the main entrance to the warehouse complex. She was there with her fellow volunteers. It was the first time he had been sorry to see her. He didn’t want her here. The warehouse’s rockcrete wall felt like far too thin a barrier between Bethia and the Grey Tears.

‘We are here to help you in your rounds, arch-deacon,’ she said.

Ambrose shook his head sadly. None of them had plague armour. ‘Your commitment honours me, and your faith does you honour. But you cannot come in with me. Not without protection. I have already passed through the trial of exposure.’

‘It’s hard to feel useless,’ said Bethia.

‘You aren’t. Other relief centres will need to be set up. We will have to start again from the beginning, I’m afraid. As to what I must do here, I must do it alone.’

‘We will stay until you come out,’ Bethia insisted, and there was a murmur of agreement from the other volunteers.

‘Very well,’ Ambrose said. ‘But will you do me the favour of moving a bit further away? Across the street, at least?’

They accepted, and when they had done as he asked, Ambrose raised the lever that controlled the warehouse door. The massive iron slab ground upwards with a metallic shriek of gears. He walked in as soon as it had risen high enough for him to enter without ducking. He closed it again as soon as he was inside. The door came back down with a clang. Its echo was swallowed up by the huge chorus of gasps and choking.

Ambrose looked at the rows and rows of the sick. They had no beds. There were too many of them. They lay on whatever bedding had been brought with them. Some had rough blankets. Many just had rags. Some had nothing at all. Their agony filled the cavernous space of the warehouse. Ambrose shuddered with sympathy. They were all going to die, hundreds and hundreds of the wretches. This was the horror of the medicae chamber magnified beyond nightmare. Though he knew, he knew, that he was immune, his throat began to tickle again. It tightened, feeling sore, his body reacting to so much suffering.

A sea of suffering.

The gargling, the gasping, the drowning and drowning and drowning, the sound so terrible and vast, the waves of the sea rising to the roof of the warehouse.

These are the innocent. These are the victims of Rosarius. They need you now. Fulfil your promise and be present for them.

Ambrose realised he had been motionless in front of the door. With a jerk, he forced himself into action. He entered the sea of pain.

‘I have come to be with you, faithful of the Emperor,’ he called out.

There was no answer. There could be no answer in this hall of suffocation.

He moved slowly through the rows, stopping to pray every few yards, kneeling to bless the afflicted. Were they not thrashing so violently, he could have touched them. A few, a very few, seemed to realise who he was. They reached out for him, eyes wide, mouths gasping, their contorted faces pleading for help, for relief, for mercy. All he could offer was his presence, and the whispered hope that their tortures would end soon.

The grey tears streamed thickly from their eyes. The sight turned his stomach. He must not let them see his revulsion. It was doubtful any of them were in a state to notice or care what he thought of them, but even so, he owed them all the dignity and solemnity he could summon. None of them deserved what was happening to them.

Rosarius, you should die a thousand times over for what you have done. Your memory will live in the curses of Theotokos forever, and that is already too great a reward.

Ambrose worked his way through the first hall of the warehouse complex, then on into the next. All this space had been the comfort of the weak and the thirsty. Now it was as if the furthest hall, once the place of the sick, had flooded the rest of the complex with its charges. Even the most pitiful victims of the drought and foul water had not been suffering like this, though. Even they had still been capable of hope.

Midway through the second hall, Ambrose paused. He shut his eyes, blocking out the images of suffering, though the ragged, horrible cries surrounded him and held him with a constrictor grip.

Keep going.

I can’t. This is too much.

You saw a thousand kinds of death when you travelled across this world. This is just another one.

Yes. Yes. That was all. And the innocent needed him.

He opened his eyes again.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

The piercing, sing-song, mindless, mocking wail.

The worms rose first from the afflicted closest to the main door, then their emergence became a rapidly spreading ripple through the warehouse. In moments, they pushed their way into the air, crushing eyes and distending throats.

The flies followed, their numbers so great they darkened the air of the warehouse, their buzzing a steady drone that threatened to smother the choking of the dying. The wave of embodied corruption rushed past Ambrose and beyond, through the halls. He staggered under the assault of hearing more than a thousand people reach their final agonies at once, of thousands of worms singing their piercing tune.

The storm of flies assaulted him. His gasp of horror pulled fistfuls of the insects into his mouth and he doubled over, gagging and choking. Small bodies broke apart on his tongue. He spat out wings and legs. His body betrayed him and tried to take a deep breath, but he fought it, terrified of swallowing the horrors. He coughed and spat some more, breathing through his nose, covering his mouth. His teeth were rough with insect debris.

Ambrose fled back to the entrance, fighting his way through the flies. Worms pulled themselves out of the skulls of the dying and crawled towards him. He stepped on them as he ran. Their rounded bodies rolled and then flattened beneath his feet. Their heads popped off, trailing spurts of viscera. Ambrose slipped on the streaks of yellow and green. He fell, more worms squirming and bursting beneath his hands as they slammed down on the floor. Moaning in hate and revulsion, he pushed himself back up and ran. The door was a hundred miles away, and he could barely hold back his scream.

The dying convulsed, their skulls and limbs shattering as they hammered on the hard floor of the warehouse. The end of all breath came for the afflicted. The Grey Tears reigned triumphant. The warehouse was a cauldron of monstrosity; the sea of suffering had become a sea of putrescence, physical and moral putrescence, a thick, humming, whistling, squelching morass that clutched at Ambrose. It would not let him go. It was hungry. It would drag him down and force itself into his throat and lungs.

He tried to run, but it was too dangerous. If he fell again, he was afraid the worms would take him. They were everywhere, some as long as his arm, rearing up as he went past and trying to wrap around his legs. The flies poured out of the bodies of the dying. They flew in his ears, they crawled over his face and in his hair. He waved his arms helplessly. He had to squint to keep the insects out of his eyes.

He was never going to reach the door.

But then he did. He found the lever in the wall and shoved it up. He did not hesitate. There was no question of enduring this trial again, in an infinitely worse manifestation. He was immune to the plague. He was not immune to being devoured. And he had to survive. He had to stop this horror. His sacrifice now would be sheer selfishness.

The door rose, and it was slow – cruelly slow.

Hands grabbed his robe and pulled him down. Two of the dying clutched at him, their contorted faces pleading for the help he could not give. More crawled towards him, sliding in the filth of the tears. They crushed worms beneath them, sending out bursts of thick, green viscera.

Ambrose moaned behind his clenched jaw. He kicked out with reflexive violence, breaking the nose of one of the men. It collapsed inwards, and more worms spewed out of the hole. Ambrose kicked and punched with desperate hate. He felt no pity or remorse or duty to the dying. They were monsters, seeking to drag him down with them. Their own desperation gave them strength, but it was brittle, and they were fragile. Ambrose battered them until they fell away, dropping back into grey ooze and blood.

More and more were coming, choking on pleas and worms.

The door was just high enough. Ambrose crawled out under it, his robes soiled by the slime of worms and the slick of phlegm and blood. The cloud of flies billowed out into the open. The worms crawled after him, their DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee songs triumphant.

Bethia started to run to him from across the street. The other volunteers ran with her, but then stopped, crying out when they saw and heard what was emerging from the warehouse.

Ambrose lunged up and to the side, yanking the outside lever down. The door jerked to a halt. Gears shrieked in protest, and then the heavy barrier began its slow descent. Ambrose backed away, wiping his face, still spitting out pieces of fly. The constant wind dispersed the swarm, and the worms wriggled forward onto the pavement. The door finally closed again, and Ambrose frantically stomped on the worms, crushing them to ooze, silencing their cries one by one. Bethia joined him, and then so did everyone gathered in the street. In a few moments, the terrible song no longer sounded outside the warehouse. But from inside came the muffled cacophony of rising and falling wails, and the deep hum of the greater swarm.

‘What…’ said Bethia. She could not finish. Her face was pale and taut.

‘Corrupt,’ Ambrose managed. ‘All of them. Filth and corruption.’ He could still feel the touch of the dying. He straightened, gathering his breath and his anger as the certainty took form for him. ‘We have been deceived,’ he said.

There were at least a hundred people around him now. All of them had witnessed the unnatural manifestations of the worms and the flies. All of them were looking at him with the greatest desperation he had seen yet. Nothing they knew or had been taught to believe could explain what had happened. They needed him to force the world to make sense again.

And he could. ‘The sick are the enemies of the Imperium,’ he said. ‘They are sick because they are heretics, allied with the great heretic Rosarius.’ He had never imagined that the relic-keeper’s influence could be so far-reaching. The proof horrified him. ‘Crushed beneath your feet is the evidence of their corruption.’

‘How can such things be?’ Bethia asked.

Ambrose only had a partial answer for that. ‘Rosarius has used forbidden knowledge. How he came by it, I do not know, nor should I, for curiosity is the handmaiden of perdition. We know his crime by its results. To fall ill is to give birth to your corruption.’

‘What must we do?’ someone in the crowd called, and the cry was taken up.

Ambrose turned to face the warehouse. ‘We must purge ourselves,’ he said. The answers came to him as he spoke. He felt the truth of every syllable he uttered. More and more clearly, he saw that he had been chosen by the Emperor for this task of salvation. The labour before him was much greater than he had ever dreamed. So, too, was the blessing of being given this task. The revelations were not yet complete, but he understood more and more. The plague was the sign of the heretic, and the heretic must be destroyed. He had never been called to lead a purge before. He had never even witnessed one. Necessity called to him now. Faith called to him. And he would answer. ‘Everything in that warehouse is unholy,’ he said. ‘It must be burned.’

‘How?’ someone asked.

‘I know a way,’ Bethia said, saving Ambrose from having to admit that he did not know. She pointed to the disused manufactory next to the warehouses. ‘I’ll need a team of welders,’ she said, ‘but there are conduits that connect the manufactory to the storage complex. The liquid waste from when the forge was in use is still in the holding tanks.’

‘You think you can route the waste into the warehouses?’ Ambrose asked.

‘I know I can.’

‘Then you must do it.’ Everything that is happening has been preordained. I have faced a second trial so that Bethia might perform her destined task. His initial distress that the impossible manifestations had been witnessed by so many vanished. This was all meant to be.

‘Helden!’ Bethia called to one of the men in the crowd. He trotted over, hunched, slight of frame, and wiry. ‘He was a maintenance serf in the manufactory before it closed down,’ she said to Ambrose.

‘You know the interior of this building well, Helden?’ Ambrose asked.

‘Knew it better than my home, arch-deacon.’ When Bethia explained what had to be done, Helden pointed to the nearest hab block. ‘More of us from back in the day live there. Just a few heartbeats, arch-deacon, and we’ll have the interior flooded.’

‘The Emperor has sent you at the hour of Magerit’s need,’ Ambrose told him.

Preordained. All of it.

Ambrose stayed where he was, a few steps away from the loading bay door, while Bethia and her team disappeared into the manufactory and got to work. He led the growing crowd in prayers of purity and anathema. He spoke words of reassurance for the faithful, and of condemnation for the heretic. His discourse was far more wrathful than it had ever been before. He was conscious of the change in his tone. It was driven by the need of the times. He almost did not recognise himself.

Yet this is what I must be. Forge me into Your weapon of faith, God-Emperor.

And he needed to be strong. Though there were no windows in the warehouse walls, no way to see what was happening inside, the hum of the flies was audible. Ambrose did not like to think how thick the swarm must be in the complex for it to be heard through the walls. He did not like to think it, but he could not stop doing so. And if the flies were so numerous, what of the worms? He pictured a rising, writhing tide, swallowing up the bodies of the dying.

How can it take so long to die? How can they linger so when they cannot breathe? Is it their punishment? Or is it their corruption, keeping them alive to spread the plague even further?

There was a contradiction there. If the plague was a symptom of corruption, then the innocent should have no fear of it. The problem nagged at him, but distantly. It was overshadowed by the certainty of his decisions.

Bethia was gone for close to an hour, and the crowd in the street grew and grew. Ambrose kept steadfast. He held the fear at bay. And at last, he heard the sounds that meant purification was about to begin. With groans of old metal, heavy clanks and the release of steam, some inner portion of the manufactory lurched into life. Conduits rattled, and a few moments later there came the thick, shushing roar of liquid flooding into the warehouse. The buzz of the flies became angrier, and then the song of the worms became so piercing it worked its way through the walls.

The people in the street fell silent, prayers dying on their lips.

‘Do not be afraid,’ Ambrose told them. ‘Be wrathful! Feel hate for the enemies of the Emperor and be glad of the purgation whose moment has come.’

And the moment came. He was not in communication with Bethia; he had no way to know when and how the process of ignition would take place. But because all of this was destined, and because he had been chosen by the Emperor, as soon as he finished speaking a muffled detonation went off inside the warehouse. The walls shook. A new sound, of wind and crackling, consumed all the others. Black smoke poured out of the vents, shrouding the roofs of the complex, rising to the sky in a furious column. Ambrose coughed from the chemical stench. His eyes watered. Noxious fumes filled the street, and it was hard to breathe, but this was the choking stench of human industry. The waste and sludge that had lain fallow for a year had become a blessed poison.

Ambrose waited a full minute, then he commanded the crowd to stand back. They obeyed and pulled even further back when they saw him approach the lever next to the door. He wanted to give oxygen to the blaze. More importantly, he wanted the people to witness the purification. It was not enough just to hear it and see the smoke.

Standing to the side of the door, Ambrose hauled the lever up.

The door rose.

The sudden rush of oxygen into the fire created a backdraft. The flames bellowed from the entrance, roaring with a volcano’s rage. The blast reached across the street, and some of the people who had not retreated far enough screamed as the storm of fire grasped at them.

The concussion knocked Ambrose back and down. Flames washed over him. The heat was pain, but it was also purity. It was the sacrifice to be made to defeat corruption.

But he did not burn. His robes were singed, his face blistered, but he wasn’t injured. The fire blast receded, and Ambrose got to his feet. Preordained, he thought again, even as the crowd gasped, and then roared with adulation as he moved to stand in front of the centre of the doorway. The interior of the warehouse was a conflagration of searing orange. He faced the crowd, the fire raging at his back. He raised his arms in triumph. ‘Behold, the judgement of the Emperor!’ he shouted.

Even the injured answered with shouts of praise.

The pyre that had once been a place of refuge burned and burned and burned.

CHAPTER 10

Ambrose changed the order of service for that day’s Matins. The break from tradition was rare, but not without precedent. Cardinal Irkaysus had deviated from the norm and delivered his sermon at the end of the service a bit more than four hundred years earlier. He had done so at the launch of a crusade.

I must do so now.

Ambrose was barely aware of the rest of the service. He stayed in the shadows of the alcove nestled inside the huge column that held the pulpit. His limbs were numb and buzzing. Blood pounded in his ears. He saw nothing except the pulpit, that elevated space of iron surrounded by air from which he would soon speak again. He had never imagined that space becoming so important to him, so quickly and so frequently. It had always been a site of reverence because of what it was, even when all he had been was a reluctant puppet mouthing Cardinal Lorenz’s words. After the cardinal’s death, when he had understood his new role, he had also understood the pulpit’s place in his mission. It was through it that he spoke to the people. His people.

Except he hadn’t fully understood, had he? He hadn’t seen the full scope of what he was doing, and what he had yet to do. With each passing day he had needed to speak with more gravity, authority, and urgency. Each time he stepped into the pulpit there was a greater weight on his shoulders. The task of saving Theotokos grew larger and larger.

I embrace the trials, God-Emperor. I will not fail You.

The last of the hymns ended. Silence fell over the cathedral. The people were waiting for him, waiting for his words, waiting for his wisdom.

They were waiting for him to shape their world.

Because that was what he had not understood before. That was what he was here to do. That was his task. It had fallen to him to interpret the evil that had struck the world, to tell the people what it was, and to guide them through the tribulation. His modest hopes of just a few days ago, of easing thirst and hunger, seemed almost blasphemous in their triviality.

Ambrose stepped out of the alcove. He looked down at the people, but he did not see them. Not even Bethia, though he was certain she was there. All he saw was the double-headed eagle that formed the pulpit’s lectern. He placed his hands on the wings of the aquila, calling on them for strength. The numbness would not leave him.

His robes stank of smoke, and beneath its sharp tang was the stench of fouler stains. He had come here directly from the pyre of the relief centre. He needed to stand before the faithful with the marks of struggle upon him, so they would know what they must do as well.

And he needed to think.

To try to think.

To try to understand the truth of the Grey Tears.

The horrors he had witnessed clung to his spirit. It was horror that numbed his body. Horror and fear, fear that he might still not understand enough.

He depended upon his determination and his faith to break through the numbness.

Grant me fire in my veins, in my heart, in my voice, and in my deeds.

He opened his mouth, and the words came. The truth came. The fire came.

‘We were moved to pity when we saw our kin weeping the Grey Tears,’ he said. ‘I was moved to pity. Like you, I sought to comfort the afflicted. I sought to bolster, in their hour of need, their devotion to the God-Emperor. Yet the sick did not hear me. I thought it was their agony that turned them from my words, and I did not blame them. I pitied them. I was wrong. I was deceived.’ He paused. ‘You have all been deceived!’ he shouted.

Anxious murmurs rippled through the nave.

‘The infected are corrupt!’ Ambrose shouted. ‘The Grey Tears are the mark of their corruption. Twice over, I have seen the full manifestation of the plague. Twice over, I have come through the trial to stand before you, to bear witness, that we may destroy the unclean and remain pure and true to the Emperor’s will.’

This time, the nave rumbled with the prayers of thanks. The people packed shoulder to shoulder. They did not fear contagion here. They feared only the Emperor.

‘And so, I tell you, faithful of the Emperor, beware the corrupted. Beware the ill. Root them out. Do not let the illusions of friendship or love or kinship stay your hand. Be resolute and be merciless. We must purge the infected lest the Emperor turn His gaze from us.’

The congregation roared. Fear and reverence and determination were one.

‘Will you let me guide you?’ Ambrose asked. It felt strange to speak again with the humility that used to be his.

‘Guide us!’ the people cried. ‘Guide us! GUIDE US!’

In all humility, Ambrose obeyed.

He left the pulpit and descended the spiral staircase inside the column. He emerged in the nave and solemnly walked down the aisle to the main doors. The people followed in silence. The reverence of the moment was too great for the imperfection of words. This was the beginning of a crusade. This was, Ambrose thought, the true start of the salvation of Theotokos.

He stepped out onto the parvis and saw Bonarmo approaching him. And that was as it should be, as it must be, as it had been preordained. She looked exhausted, ready to collapse. Ambrose smiled at her, offering her renewal.

‘Is what I hear about the relief centre true?’ she asked.

‘It is. Our task is more urgent and more straightforward than we thought, Chief Enforcer Bonarmo. The infected must be exterminated.’

She nodded, looking even more drained of hope.

‘Where is the nearest concentration of the plague?’ Ambrose asked. If she saw, she would understand, and grow stronger for it.

‘We have quarantined a hab complex a mile to the north of here.’

‘Then we must go there. Please have your forces prepared for what must be done. Flame is our salvation now.’

The chief enforcer led the way, but it was Ambrose that the people followed. It was he that they looked at, he from whom they awaited guidance.

He would give it to them. That was what he had been called upon to do. To guide, to teach, and to save.

Bethia pushed her way to the front of the procession of ten thousand. He smiled at her, and slowed his pace for a moment, letting her know that she was welcome to walk beside him. Her face was drawn in anxiety.

‘Arch-deacon,’ she said, ‘when you say flame, do you mean…’

‘I mean exactly what you think. The inhabitants of that block must burn.’

‘All of them?’

‘All of them.’

‘Could there not be some innocents among them?’

‘If there are, they will die as martyrs.’ The answer came so easily he winced. It was the sort of smoothly immediate response that he had always despised in Lorenz. The difference was truth. It must be. ‘But I do not think there will be innocents there. You did not see everything I did at the relief centre, but you saw enough. There is no recovery from the Grey Tears, because there is no redemption from corruption.’

Bethia was silent for some time. She seemed to be trying to find the right way to frame her question. ‘Forgive me if I speak badly,’ she began, ‘because I mean no heresy.’

‘Speak freely, Bethia. I know your faith is beyond question.’ The words were a painfully bland cover for what he really wanted to express.

‘What if there is another explanation? Is it possible that the affliction causes the transformation? Parasites in the water, perhaps, that they manifest in this way…’

‘If that were so, then everyone at the Ecclesiarchal Palace would have succumbed. Instead, it was only the corrupt.’

‘Then Rosarius…’

‘How he brought this about, I do not know. But he did, and his allies in corruption have died for his sins. As he will be punished, when he is found.’ Ambrose felt uneasy again. He was not bothered by the thought of what he had done with Rosarius’ body, and the secret that he was keeping. What bothered him was that the logic of what he was saying seemed thin, brittle, ready to snap under scrutiny. But it was the only explanation that connected all the things that he knew to be true. Therefore, it too must be true.

Bethia tried once more. ‘But if the Grey Tears are contagious…?’

‘So is corruption. To avoid its taint we must be pure, and burn whatever is corrupt.’

‘I see.’

She did not sound convinced. Ambrose saw doubt written across her features, and it hurt him. He was doing the right thing. She would understand. The people around them did. She would see. He would show her.

Ambrose touched her shoulder. It was more than he had ever dared do before. The feel of her body through her work uniform against his palm was a jolt that almost broke the coherence of his thoughts. She looked at him in surprise. Are you feeling this too, Bethia? She must be. She had to be. Instead of what he wanted to ask, he said, ‘Have I ever called for people to be harmed?’

‘Never,’ she said, her eyes confused.

Her shoulder tensed. She must be worried about impropriety. He took his hand away. The sense of intimate contact lingered on his fingers. ‘Nothing has changed,’ he said. ‘I would never see the innocent hurt. The heretic isn’t a person. Not any more. Perhaps not ever. That is a hard lesson for all of us.’

She said nothing, but kept looking at him.

Ambrose walked on, and the people walked with him. He mingled with them, while staying close to Bethia. A mother brought her children forward to him. ‘Bless us, arch-deacon,’ she begged. ‘Keep us free of taint.’

He put his hands on the heads of the children. ‘The Emperor guide you,’ he said. ‘Steel your heart against the heretic.’

An old man crouched to kiss his hand. ‘You will save us, arch-deacon,’ he said.

‘The Emperor will save you,’ Ambrose told him. ‘If He has chosen to use me as His instrument, then I can only obey.’

They reached the quarantined hab complex. Ambrose’s jaw tightened with dismay when he saw how large it was. Almost half a mile long, the drab, soot-darkened rockcrete building was thirty storeys high. Magerit Watch troopers had cordoned it off, barricaded the surrounding roads and evacuated neighbouring complexes. Bonarmo had sent orders ahead of the procession, and most of the troopers were armed with flamers. Repressor armoured personnel carriers were stationed near the main entrances of the building, their pintle-mounted heavy flamers at the ready.

From the open windows came cries for help and pleas to the Emperor.

‘Do not let their voices deceive you,’ Ambrose called out. ‘Their fidelity to the Father of Mankind is a pretence. You can hear the foul truth behind their lies. We all hear it.’

The song of the worms sullied the air. There was a deep hum from the swarms of flies inside the apartments. The wracking coughs and gasps of the dying were louder than the pleas for mercy.

‘God-Emperor!’ Ambrose shouted. ‘See how we purge the unclean!’ He nodded to Bonarmo. ‘Let it be done,’ he said.

Bonarmo issued the order, but it was at Ambrose’s will that the destruction began. As the flamers opened up and the storm bolters on the Repressors began pounding the walls, he felt something collapse inside his chest. He had never before commanded that executions be carried out. No one had died because he had wished it. Until now, everything he had done in all the years of Theotokos’ slow agony had been to preserve the lives of his fellow citizens. And though he knew that, ultimately, he was still acting to save the lives and the souls of the uncorrupted, in this moment, his was the hand of death, and he had stretched its shadow over the hab.

His chest split, and then his heart slid, and it took him with it in its fall. He was plummeting down a chute into darkness. He was doing something he had never imagined doing, and he was caught in the vertiginous descent into violence. He was disgusted, and he was exhilarated. His soul raged in triumph at the extermination of the unholy, and perhaps it was a righteous triumph and perhaps it was just a hideous enjoyment, and though he could tell the difference, he could not make himself care. The need for more and faster was a fever as powerful as the Grey Tears.

The lower floors of the hab caught fire. Walls caved in under the bolter fire, and guns began to hammer deeper and deeper into the building, shattering support columns, undermining the building’s structural integrity. The flames spread upwards rapidly, finding easy fuel in poor furnishings and the flammable paint in the densely packed slum. As inhabitants rushed for the exits, Repressors lurched forwards, their dozer blades hurling them back into the fire or turning them into pulped smears on the road.

There were cries of horror in the crowd as people saw their friends and relations scraped flat by blades. They were seeing slaughter instead of purgation, Ambrose realised.

‘Do not waste your pity!’ he warned. ‘There can be no regrets for us! Every death we witness is an act of righteousness!’

The screams of the dying melded with the singing of the worms. Ambrose wanted to cover his ears, to howl in an ecstasy of rage. Instead, he forced himself to speak again.

‘Give thanks!’ He tried to shout over the hammering of weapons, the gathering roar of the fire and the sounds of death. ‘Thus are the corrupted purged! Thus do we perform the will of the Emperor! Thus will we find salvation!’

He put all the force of his lungs into his voice. He used all of his skill to give his words the fire they needed. Now was the moment for the guidance he must provide.

Then he saw Bethia, staring at the conflagration in horror. She was not hearing what he was saying, or she was not understanding him, or she did not believe him. She turned away from the fire. She faced him. The anguish in her eyes sliced through the burning fog in his mind and let in a riot of confusion.

He knew he was right. He was doing what he must. But her pain stabbed him in the heart. He trailed off, his voice dropping beneath the thunder of the purge. Smoke billowed over the street, making him cough.

‘Bethia,’ he said. Even he could not hear his croak.

Then the centre of the hab’s roof collapsed. The core of the building crumbled, and the walls cracked and leaned in towards the inner weakness. Dust blasted out of the doors and windows. For long minutes, Ambrose could see nothing except the vague silhouette of Bethia in front of him. The glow of flames punctuated the choking gloom, and the hammering of the Repressors’ guns went on and on.

Ambrose wiped the dust from his eyes. He spat the dust from this throat. He shook his head, trying to clear the buzzing that filled it. As the dust began to settle, he realised that the buzzing came from elsewhere. It was tremendous, greater than the fire, greater than the weapons. The broken shape of the hab complex became visible again, and he saw the monstrous column of flies erupting from the centre. It formed a dark, roiling cloud, darker than the smoke, a furious, snarling storm of a million fragments of night.

The screams came from the street now as the people backed away in panic. They fled, pushing and trampling each other in the rush to escape the huge swarm. It grew and grew, gathering a terrible weight, spreading wider and wider. The awful birth formed into a massive ball over the hab, the vibration of infinite wings shaking the ground, and Ambrose’s bones, and his soul.

Then, with a final great cry of the worms, the swarm burst wide, and spread over the city.

The chronicle of the Grey Tears.

Fragments of the mosaic of plague.

The wounds that were the fruit of the deeds and words of Arch-Deacon Ambrose of Theotokos.

His words spread faster than the flies. They arrived first, issued by the wave of his preaching, carried by the strength of his authority, transmitted by vox, and most of all by the repetitions of the faithful.

The people witnessed the propagation of the Grey Tears, and they were fearful. They were helpless to stop it, and so panic took hold. They were desperate to grasp hold of any action they could take, anything better than waiting passively for the invisible foe to take them. Even a charade of control would have been a boon.

The words of Ambrose arrived, and they were welcome. Now there was something to do. Now there was someone to blame.

The people who fell ill were not victims. They were heretics. The Grey Tears revealed the truth. The truly faithful were immune, and the truest way of showing sanctity was in destroying the heretic.

And now the heretic was visible to all. Many of their sins had been held in such deep secret, so utterly unsuspected, that the revelation of their iniquity triggered rages far beyond murderous in their loved ones.

Not far north of the gutted relief centre, Valla Straaven, who had once been one of the centre’s most devoted volunteers, returned to her hab complex and heard, as she paused by her door, a coughing fit coming from the apartment of her immediate neighbour, Gregor Batis. They worked at the same promethium refinery and had often been shift-mates, though Gregor, forty years older than Valla, had been absent for many days now. He was one whom the drought had left without strength, and though he was ill, he was not quite ill enough to have been taken to the centre.

Valla saw the truth of his illness now. She was sickened by the lie of their years of friendship. She was strong, too. She kicked down his door. She found the hypocrite kneeling in front of one of the small, crude altars of lead that were present in every one of the impoverished habitation cubicles. She seized it, lifted it high and battered open Gregor’s skull.

She had not stopped to see if the Grey Tears were oozing from his eyes. That he was ill was proof enough.

The flies came as she stepped back into the corridor. They swarmed through the broken window at the end of the hall. They choked on blackened bodies. She swatted at the insects and stumbled, unthinking and panicked, back down the stairs and into the street. By the time she reached open air, the Tears had come for her, and she was beaten to death by the crowd that was rushing into the hab.

The Grey Tears spread quickly. With them spread the desperate violence of purity. Three thousand people lived in the complex. None would be alive by morning.

On the other side of Magerit, in one of the spires that held what remained of the city’s ruling class, Ambrose’s words had reached here too. While the flies were yet to come, young Javeth, heir to the riches of the Hoven clan, heard his father cough in his study. Javeth had no need to run and tell his mother what he had discovered. The arch-deacon of Theotokos had spoken in terms that even the children of Magerit understood. Javeth did as the Emperor willed. He had to venture into the kitchen to find what he needed, a place of serfs that the family rarely had reason to enter. But Javeth knew his duty, and it was not long before he had set the apartment on fire, beginning with his father’s study, and ended the line of the Hovens.

Ambrose’s words spread along with the flies. The fear of the Grey Tears encountered the desperate hopes of purity, and the conflagrations of violence increased throughout Magerit.

Before nightfall, the riots exceeded the abilities of the Watch to contain them.

The Taurox rumbled back towards the Palace of All Martyrs. With Bonarmo and a squad of troopers as escort riding in the troop compartment with him, Ambrose looked out through the viewing slit. He watched Magerit teeter on the edge of an abyss from which, if it fell, it could never emerge. With every block and intersection the vehicle passed, he saw signs of the struggle. The air over the city was growing as thick with smoke as it had been with flies at the hab complex.

It would be so easy to doubt himself.

This is part of the test. You must hold firm.

There was too much he did not understand. That terrible storm of flies… What could explain it? There was nothing he knew of in the Imperial Creed that allowed for the possibility of such an abomination. Perhaps in the archives of the palace there might be, among the oldest of exegetical scrolls, illumination.

No time for that now. Learn why this has happened after the plague has passed.

But have I done the right thing?

I preached the words of the Creed. I told the people what had to be done.

This was the necessary pain that led to purity. When the fires ended, the city would be saved.

Do you really believe that?

He had to.

It would be easier if Bethia were here, at his side, her faith in him beyond question. But she had left with the coming of the flies. I must go, she had said. My family, she had said.

He had almost called her back. It was not impropriety that had stopped him. It was the certainty that she would not listen.

She will understand. She always has before.

He tried not to think about what might happen if her understanding came too late.

Sitting opposite him, Bonarmo straightened suddenly. She clapped a hand to her ear, pressing in on her vox-bead to hear more clearly. ‘Arch-deacon,’ she said when she had finished listening, ‘I must ask for your help.’

‘Of course,’ Ambrose said. What now?

Over the vox, Bonarmo ordered the Taurox driver to change direction. The armoured transport picked up speed. Instead of west, towards All Martyrs, it headed north, though still making for the outskirts of the city. Ambrose guessed the new destination immediately.

‘What has happened?’ he asked Bonarmo.

‘I’m not sure. The reports are still fragmentary. It may just be desecration.’

‘Just?’

‘I would prefer that to any alternative.’

The great cemetery of Magerit covered most of the northern slopes of the city’s bowl. From a distance, it looked like another, older city, with low houses instead of hab blocks, and fewer manufactory chimneys. Closer, the houses became vaults and sepulchres, and the manufactories were crematoria. Massive, blocky ossuaries shouldered up between obelisks commemorating the great, the headstones of the humble, and the mass graves of the poor. In these years of the drought, the cemetery’s cobbled lanes had become almost as busy as the city’s, clogged with the grieving and an unending stream of funerary services. There was an aura of false calm about the graveyard as the Taurox approached. There was no fighting going on here.

There was, though, a contingent of Magerit Watch troopers. The Taurox stopped next to them. When Ambrose alighted, he saw that Preacher Schedoni was with the troopers. His remit was the cemetery and the mourning faithful who gathered there. His calling was strong as iron, and his appearances in the Ecclesiarchal Palace were rare. Ambrose liked him. He had kept his distance, physically and politically, from Lorenz, and the cardinal had, for the most part, left him alone. He was short and thin, his grey hair tonsured, his face weathered from decades of open-air ceremonies. He had dealt with death in every form and was beyond surprise.

Or so Ambrose had thought. Now, Schedoni looked grey with fear and he rushed forwards to grasp Ambrose’s hands.

‘Arch-deacon,’ he said, ‘the Emperor shield us from this darkness.’

‘What is it?’ Ambrose asked.

‘Look,’ said Schedoni. He pointed to the grave behind him.

It was empty.

‘Look,’ Schedoni pleaded, on the verge of tears of horror. He swept his arm to take in the hillside.

Ambrose looked up at the vista of fallen monuments, overturned headstones and gaping vaults. Everywhere, obscene emptiness confronted him.

He said nothing. There was nothing here he could explain, nothing he could understand.

His frozen silence lingered. The clamour of riot in the city receded.

Then, the city began to scream.

CHAPTER 11

For as long as he could stand it, Ambrose kept the roof hatch of the Taurox open. He sat in the observation seat and stared at the stricken city as the vehicle took the route back to the Palace of All Martyrs. It was his duty to see, because the Emperor had called upon him to save Theotokos. If he was to fulfil his mission, he had to know what was happening. He had to understand it, too, so he could instruct the people, and show them the difference between the just and holy fear of the Emperor, and the cowardice of trembling before the heretical and the damned.

The more he saw, the more he doubted his abilities. Only the knowledge that he had been chosen sustained him.

The dead had risen from their tombs. Their gait was a weaving, drunken shuffle as they shambled after the living, reaching out for them, their jaws hanging open with choking hunger. The grey worms coiled in thick bunches in their mouths. They slithered in and out of empty eye sockets. They hung from arms, twisting in the air. Clouds of flies boiled in the air above the dead, as if urging them forward. Some of the corpses still bore their flesh. It crumbled and sloughed off skulls and limbs as they struggled after their prey. Others were little more than skeletons, the nests of squirming grey worms visible through their ribs.

Bonarmo rode on the roof of the Taurox. She crouched next to Ambrose, holding fast to the hatch with one hand, wielding a shotgun with the other. She was husbanding her ammunition, saving her shots in case any of the corpses tried to climb up and seize the arch-deacon. Thus far, though some had gone down under the wheels of the armoured car, the dead had shown no interest in it. They were focused only on whatever citizen was nearest to them in the street.

‘The plague makes the dead walk,’ Ambrose said. ‘The worms will not let them rest.’

Bonarmo gave him a stricken look. His explanation offered her no comfort. ‘How can this be?’ she demanded, as if he were controlling the unfolding of reality. ‘How can the dead catch the plague?’

‘Because we have failed the Emperor,’ Ambrose said. He answered without hesitation, as he knew he must. And in truth, there could be no other explanation, as weak as it sounded even to him. ‘Our faith is not yet strong enough, and our sins seek our destruction.’ He tried to sound certain. He must not let Bonarmo know he was as shaken as she was. Everything was crumbling around him, from the city to the truths that had always been there for him. Everything he had always believed in was falling apart. What he was seeing could not be happening, yet it was, and so there had to be something fundamental he had never properly understood, something that still meant these horrors did not violate the unchallengeable truths of the Imperial Creed.

‘We are being punished for our failure,’ Ambrose said, speaking the words as if they were an incantation that would impose order on nightmare. ‘Even the dead are guilty.’ The implications were so vast, he had to grasp the edges of the hatch-opening to hold himself up. Theotokos must be sinful in ways he had never imagined.

The funereal host staggered up the streets leading from the cemetery. They dragged their victims to the ground, and the worms slithered onto the living, spreading the plague still further. Troopers of the Magerit Watch and the militia fired on the dead. The corpses were fragile and flew apart when struck by shells, releasing clouds of worms and flies. The troopers kept their distance, fighting hard to contain the new source of the spread, but what Ambrose saw was more and more of the city burning, more and more death coming for the people he was meant to save.

‘What must we do?’

It took a few moments for Ambrose to register Bonarmo’s question. He turned around slowly, his soul filling with the sights of corpses and worms and flame. ‘Fire,’ he said. That was the sign of purging, of sin expunged. It was the destruction that led to salvation. ‘Burn it all,’ he said. ‘Burn everything unholy. Burn the dead. Burn the sick. Burn the disease and the sin out of Magerit.’ He pointed to another hab building that was engulfed in flame. ‘That is our task begun, chief enforcer.’

‘But the clouds of flies…’

‘The task will be long and hard, and the punishment will be long and hard. Our sins will come for us, and they will take us until we have proven the iron of our faith.’ As long as he spoke, he could hold on to a facsimile of certainty. It flew away from him, ashes in the wind, when he fell silent.

I can’t look at this any more.

Ambrose dropped down inside the Taurox. Bonarmo followed him and sealed the hatch. Ambrose leaned back against the hull. Vibrations jarred him as the vehicle ran over soft debris in the road.

‘Take me back,’ Ambrose said. ‘Take me back to the palace.’

‘That is where we are going,’ Bonarmo reminded him.

‘Of course, of course.’ He was finding it difficult. He needed some calm. He needed to shut out the horror.

What about Bethia?

He didn’t know where she was. He didn’t know if she was alive or not. His ignorance tormented him. But he couldn’t ask Bonarmo to launch a search. What he felt for her was wrong. It was a temptation to stray from his vows. He had not, though. He had not sinned.

But if I ask, I will sow doubts in the chief enforcer’s mind.

No one must doubt him. For the sake of the world, his authority must not be questioned.

The Taurox passed through the gates of All Martyrs, followed by the Repressor that would take Bonarmo back to the city, and came to a stop near the main doors. Ambrose climbed out. The chief enforcer followed him, then stopped, her head cocked as she listened to her vox-bead. Her expression darkened.

‘Now what?’ Ambrose asked. He prayed she would not ask him to accompany her again.

‘It’s the reservoir,’ Bonarmo said. ‘The water is covered in a slick of flies. It is contaminated beyond hope.’

No more drinking water in the city, then. Ambrose looked up at the sky. The clouds were growing ever thicker and darker. But still, there was no rain.

Mass burnings. There must be mass burnings, and they must not stop until the rains come.

Ambrose’s last commands to Bonarmo before she left the palace. The impact of having to say such things almost made him reel. Only a few days ago, he would have considered the words the cry of murder, the call of a madman. He would have been horrified, if not fully surprised, to hear Lorenz utter them. Now he was commanding more violence than the cardinal ever had.

And he was not done.

‘Seal the palace,’ he told the attendants when he entered. ‘Prepare for siege.’

‘Yes, arch-deacon,’ the two monks said with a bow.

‘Send word to all,’ Ambrose continued. ‘No one is to enter or depart All Martyrs without my express consent. We are in a state of war against the plague of the Grey Tears and against heretical sin. They are one and the same. Anyone within these walls who shows symptoms of the Grey Tears is to be burned at once, their ashes collected in lead urns, and the urns disposed of outside the walls of the palace.’

When he was satisfied that his orders had been understood and would be carried out, he hurried to Saint Halfad’s Cloister. More than ever, he understood why Lorenz had jealously kept the cloister to himself. Ambrose could not yet bring himself to command that no one else enter. He expected, though, that force of habit would have the effect he wanted.

He breathed a little more freely as he walked the paths in the deepening twilight. Here, he could not see the city. Here, the walls embraced him and promised an interlude of peace.

They promised, but they lied. Though Ambrose was spared the sight of Magerit’s agony, he could still hear the distant uproar of death, terror and flame. The horror of the plague followed him everywhere. He felt its touch. He was immune to the worms, and so the plague infected him with doubts instead.

I am doing what must be done.

How can you be so sure? We were never so certain before.

We were never so desperate before. The fate of Theotokos was not this urgent.

Famine was not urgent?

Not like this. And we did what we had to then, too. We did what we could.

Are you really doing all you can now?

For that, he did not have an answer.

He reached the yew, and the bench beneath it. He ground his teeth in irritation when he saw there was someone already there. The shrouded cenobite rose quickly at his approach, as if sensing his anger.

‘Your pardon, arch-deacon. I will not intrude upon you.’

Ambrose recognised Nossos’ voice, and his anger vanished. ‘No, no, please stay. I am glad to see you again.’ The memory of their conversation in the palace grounds, and how much clarity it had given him, made him welcome Nossos’ presence now. ‘Please, sit with me.’

The hood bowed in acquiescence, the cenobite’s face as hidden as ever. Nossos waited for Ambrose to take his seat on the bench, then sat down beside him.

‘I have not seen you since our first meeting,’ Ambrose said. ‘I would have welcomed speaking with you during this, our time of trial.’

‘I am sorry to have failed you, arch-deacon.’ The liquid, sonorous tones rolled through the air, clear as chimes, soft as honey. ‘I was assigned to the archives, and my duties have kept me on the lower levels without cease since we spoke. It is with shame that I confess I was not aware of much of what has been transpiring until today.’

‘I envy you that ignorance,’ said Ambrose. ‘I envy you the retreat of the archives.’ As before, he surprised himself with his confession. As before, he felt no regret in unburdening himself to Nossos, in showing his weakness. Doing so before had given him the strength he had needed to carry on, and Nossos had proven himself discreet.

‘Theotokos has demanded much of you,’ said Nossos. ‘Theotokos, and the Emperor.’

‘Yes,’ Ambrose admitted. ‘The way before me is a long one, I fear.’

‘That is because you are strong enough to walk it.’

Ambrose sighed. ‘I will have to be. But I have my doubts, Brother Nossos. The situation is desperate, and I feel helpless before it.’ He almost wept with the relief of speaking those words. He thought he would stop there. Then he heard himself say, ‘I know of nothing in the Creed that can truly explain what is happening.’

That was as close to heresy as he had ever come. He should have been horrified even to have the thought cross his mind, though he had already moved on past that position. He was giving voice to a cry for help and of despair. He should not. He should be silent, even when alone. His very soul should be silent. Yet he spoke his pain and was glad that Nossos heard him. Somehow, he knew that if there was anyone that could help him, when he no longer had the strength to help everyone else, Nossos was that person.

And like a figure of prophecy, Nossos gave Ambrose what he so desperately needed. ‘I wonder…’ he said, and those two words were a beacon of salvation.

‘Go on,’ said Ambrose.

‘I do not understand everything I have been cataloguing these past days,’ Nossos said diffidently.

‘I suspect you are not giving yourself enough credit.’

‘You are too kind, arch-deacon. I do not want to be wrong, and guilty of heresy.’

‘There is something you wish to tell me, and I think it may be of the most crucial importance. Do not fear being wrong. Fear nothing.’

‘You give me courage, arch-deacon,’ the voice flowed, warm as shadows. ‘Very well. There is a parchment in the lowest level that you must see. I think it could be what you seek. It may be that I was looking at an answer to questions I did not know were being asked.’

‘Show it to me,’ Ambrose commanded.

When he rose to follow Nossos, he felt the fire of determination flow back into his limbs.

They left the cloister and took the long spiral staircase down into the archives. The holdings of the All Martyrs were vast. They contained the records, the exegetical writings and the holy texts of thousands of years. The archive was a silo under the centre of the palace, and it went even deeper into the hill than the machinery that governed the underground river. No one living knew all of its passages and aisles and vaults. It was given to every initiate assigned to the archives to be responsible for one small region. Nossos, it seemed, had been assigned the lowest level.

Ambrose had never been this far down. The air was cool and musty with age. Even the light from the dim amber lumen globes felt ancient. Nossos led the way through a maze of towering shelves and monolithic document vaults. The passages were narrow enough that the two men often had to turn sideways.

Nossos took them through the labyrinth until they reached a wall. They were, as far as Ambrose could guess, on the far side of the level from the staircase. Nossos approached the wall, then disappeared.

Ambrose froze. ‘Cenobite Nossos!’ he called. He squinted. The light was so dim the darkness seemed to be flowing out of the wall.

Nossos’ head and shoulders reappeared, and Ambrose saw that he was leaning out of an opening in the wall so thin and dark that it was invisible. He did not know how Nossos had managed to locate it, even knowing where it was.

‘This way, arch-deacon,’ Nossos said. ‘Be careful. The footing is treacherous.’

Ambrose followed slowly. He felt his way forward, running his hands against the wall. He reached the gap, and found its sides were ragged. It seemed more like a crack in the foundations than a real passage. The walls were damp. The floor was rough and uneven, and Ambrose felt water trickling past his boots. The only light was a faint, grey glow some distance ahead.

The cramped walls of the passage squeezed at Ambrose’s shoulders. He was an insect, asking to be crushed. He was sure that he was leaving the archive behind and forcing his way into bedrock.

The air was cooler, but thicker. The mustiness began to shade into the stench of rot. Ambrose had difficulty swallowing. Taking a breath felt like ingesting a mouthful of unseen insects.

The wan, flickering light grew stronger. Ambrose made out the shape of a narrow archway in the left-hand wall. He followed Nossos inside and found a candle-lit chamber, roughly hewn out of the rock. It was a space of putrefaction. Damp, crumbling scrolls spilled out of disintegrating chests piled into heaps. Clusters of silverfish skittered over them. Water trickled down the walls and flowed in thick, jagged channels across the floor. A rusted iron lectern stood in the centre of the room. It held a few mouldering scrolls.

‘What is this place?’ Ambrose asked. He wrinkled his nose in disgust as his foot slid in a patch of grey slime.

‘I don’t really know,’ said Nossos. ‘I found it only yesterday, by chance, or so I thought. I believe now that something stronger than chance directed my footsteps. I have only just begun to attempt to catalogue what is here, or at least what is salvageable.’

‘It doesn’t look like much will be.’

‘If you will pardon the presumption, arch-deacon, I will observe that I am not alone in finding lost causes compelling.’

‘Very true, Cenobite Nossos. Very well said.’ Perhaps this connection was why Ambrose found it so easy to speak to Nossos.

Nossos moved to the lectern. With slow, delicate movements, he unrolled a vellum scroll. Large chunks of it were missing around the edges. ‘I read this scroll barely two hours ago. I feel certain, now, that it was fated that I should discover it so soon before meeting with you again, arch-deacon.’

‘What is it?’ Ambrose peered over Nossos’ shoulder. The words on the scroll had smeared with moisture, and he found it impossible to read in the dim light.

‘A prayer,’ Nossos said. ‘It is called the Cry to the Father.’ Nossos paused. He took a step away from the lectern and his hood faced the arch-deacon. Ambrose felt the gaze of hidden eyes. ‘It is a cry that the Father must answer.’

‘Must?’ Ambrose started. The idea that the God-Emperor should be compelled in any way should never have been articulated.

Nossos gestured at the other parchments on the lectern. ‘From what I have read in these documents, I believe the Father is self-compelled. It is a promise that has been made, to answer this particular ritual.’

‘A promise,’ Ambrose repeated.

‘A promise of gifts,’ said Nossos. ‘I have found references to an end to famine and drought.’

‘I would like to believe that,’ Ambrose said warily.

‘I know,’ said Nossos. ‘This seems to fit our present needs too precisely, doesn’t it?’

‘That was my thought.’

‘But is it too much to believe that this ultimate crisis on Theotokos was foreseen?’

Ambrose considered that possibility. No other moment in the history of Theotokos was as critical as this one. The world would end, or it would be saved.

The Emperor had called upon Ambrose to save it.

Could he believe that, thousands of years ago, the Emperor had provided the means Ambrose would need to fulfil his mission?

Yes. Yes, he could.

‘The Emperor sees all,’ Ambrose said to Nossos. ‘You are right. Of course this was foreseen. Tell me what the ritual involves.’

‘There is a cost,’ said Nossos.

‘As there must be. Holy ritual is propitiation. It is a sacrifice, and sacrifices must be real to be meaningful.’

‘As you say, arch-deacon.’ Nossos brought a candle closer to the scroll, and guided Ambrose through its barely decipherable words.

When they were done, Ambrose was silent. ‘This is the true test,’ he said finally. He was speaking for his own benefit. He had no need to convince Nossos. What he had to do was convince himself, so that when the time for action came, he would not hesitate. ‘This is the test, and it is also the way to salvation.’

‘The Father will answer,’ Nossos promised. ‘The rains will come.’

CHAPTER 12

It was hours before Bonarmo was able to return in answer to his summons. Ambrose paced the corridors of All Martyrs while he waited. Nossos remained in the depths of the archives, instructed to find anything at all that might be relevant to the ritual, anything further that Ambrose must do to ensure the blessing of rain.

The purity of rain, sent by the Father of Mankind, would wash away the plague and the unclean. This was how things must unfold. This was what had been ordained from the start.

He was impatient for the end.

With Your help, God-Emperor, I will end this night, and Theotokos will greet the sweetness of dawn.

Until then, the hand of the night pressed down hard on Magerit. Ambrose felt its weight on his shoulders. There was nothing he could do until Bonarmo returned with the force Ambrose needed.

He could not bear to sit idle in the cloister or in his chambers, so he travelled the halls with a determined stride. He showed his confidence to the adepts he passed. He gave them courage. He told them that this was the eve of salvation.

He also ensured his orders had been carried out. The palace had become a fortress. Its gates were closed and its water was held, safe from the sin and contagion of the city. There had been no cases of the Grey Tears. The first outbreak had been the last.

We are purged. We are clean. The plague began in these walls, unleashed by Rosarius. This night, it is within these walls that it will end, too.

So many signs that he was right. So many patterns coming together. But the events that must come had not been accomplished. He wished and wished and wished they had been.

If only the night were already over, the ritual performed, the dawn come and the doom banished.

If only the price were already paid, and his guts no longer twisted with eager dread.

If only Bonarmo were here so he could leave and put an end to waiting.

By the time she finally came, he was standing by the gates. When they parted to admit the squadron of three Repressors that would escort the palace’s Taurox, he felt a lurch in his heart.

Now we begin.

There would be no arresting the momentum of what must be set in motion. Though he was about to save his world, Ambrose felt the vertigo of standing at the edge of a precipice.

Bonarmo climbed out of the lead Repressor. Her face was smudged with dust, blood from a cut on her forehead coagulating in filth. She looked beyond exhausted, and she met Ambrose’s eye with a mixture of scepticism and last-gasp hope. Ambrose saw in her someone who had moved past desperation some time ago. She was still moving only because she had no choice.

Ambrose forced himself not to flinch at the vista that presented itself beyond the gates. Far below, the bowl of the city throbbed with a dark red glow. Smoke was as thick as muscle as it roiled low over the towers. ‘You have been fighting hard…’ he began.

Bonarmo did not let him finish. ‘Fighting and losing,’ she said. ‘The city burns.’

‘As it must.’

‘To what end, arch-deacon? The contagion spreads. The people are dying. My troops are dying. There is no water. Either thirst or disease will take us all before long.’

‘You speak as if you were not sustained by faith, Chief Enforcer Bonarmo,’ Ambrose said.

‘It is all that sustains me,’ she answered. ‘We have lost. We do not have the forces to save the city.’

‘On the contrary, the forces you have brought with you will be enough to save Magerit, and with it all of Theotokos.’

‘How?’ A whispered croak.

‘The action you will help me take will be a spear thrust into the heart of the plague. The damned will seek to stop us, but by dawn all will be resolved. I swear it, chief enforcer. This is almost over.’

‘Very well,’ said Bonarmo. She walked with him to the Taurox. At a jerk of her head, five troopers followed. ‘Where are we going?’

Ambrose gave her the coordinates for the hab complex where Bethia and her family lived. Bonarmo relayed the directions to the drivers. She said nothing else until after the convoy had moved off with the Taurox following one of the Repressors. With the palace disappearing into the night behind them, and the throbbing glow of the city drawing closer and beginning to resolve itself into individual conflagrations, she leaned close to Ambrose and asked, ‘Why are we going there?’

‘There are people there we must bring back to the palace.’

‘Why? What is their importance?’

Ambrose wrestled with various partial truths. ‘I need them with me,’ he said, which was very close to the whole truth.

Bonarmo looked doubtful. ‘What assurance do you have they will be in their home?’

‘None,’ Ambrose said simply.

‘Or that they are not infected? Or even that they are alive?’

‘There is more at work than I can easily explain,’ Ambrose told her. ‘Let it be enough that I know we will find them. Because it is written. The hand of the Emperor draws near. This night, all Theotokos will know that He sees us, and that He does indeed protect. The rains come, chief enforcer. The rains come, and soon.’

Ambrose opened the roof hatch. Bonarmo took up her shotgun, climbed out ahead of him and settled into her crouched position on the roof. ‘This is risky,’ she said, disapproving, as he emerged from the hot, dark interior.

‘I know,’ Ambrose said. If he could have, he would have remained below, closed his eyes in the darkness, and shut his ears to the cries of the burning city. If he could have, he would have receded from all awareness until Bethia was in the Taurox with him.

He could do none of these things. The grasping fist in his chest would not let him. If he saw where the convoy was heading, perhaps he could will it to go even faster. Even if he could not, the immensity of what was coming forced him to look upon the city, to see the damnation that he would end in a few hours.

The vision that confronted him was even worse than the one he had turned his eyes from on the return journey from the cemetery. All trace of order had collapsed. Gunfire rattled, the bursts echoing near and far from every direction. Entire blocks were aflame, the fires sweeping over the faces of buildings with awful, hungry grace. The road vibrated from the periodic whump of explosions tearing out the hearts of manufactories, and the heavy, seismic collapse of walls.

Miles away from the convoy, in the centre of the city, were the narrow spires that were the homes of Magerit’s aristocracy. They had, until today, been spared the worst of the drought and the famine. They had been the last refuge of the privileged. Now they were high, glittering torches. Fires embraced their forms. At this distance, Ambrose thought they looked like tapers in a cathedral, guttering in the darkness. As he watched, one of them fell. It toppled forward, killed by no visible thing except the chaos that was taking the city. It seemed to die in silence, the cracking and thunder of disintegrating rockcrete reaching Ambrose’s ears only after the spire had vanished, and a cloud of dust was rising to smother the distant infernos in obscurity.

And in the streets, the people ran and fought and suffered and died. The plague-animated dead were everywhere, their numbers less concentrated, their horror as powerful as ever. More common were the infected. The ones in the early stages stumbled and weaved. Many more crawled, or lay writhing where they had fallen in the street and on the pavement. Those without sickness ran in mobs, fleeing the dead and infected, pursuing and killing those who had, for whatever reason or whim of chance, been denounced as unclean.

Worms, long and grey, squirmed along the ground. Swarms of flies filled the air. As if born of fire and smoke, the insects descended from the black, suffocating sky and whirled in dances around flames.

Death and fire and terror surrounded Ambrose. Magerit was dying, and its death was a nightmare more virulent than his worst fears during all the years of the drought.

This is the final paroxysm of evil. This is what I am going to end.

Seeing the horror gave him the strength he needed to face the cost of the ritual.

People recognised him as the convoy roared down the wide boulevards. They screamed his name. They reached out for him, crying out for the comfort he had given them so often in the cathedral and in the relief centres. They ran for the Taurox, ignoring the warnings to keep back that blared from the convoy’s vox-casters.

‘We cannot stop,’ Ambrose said to Bonarmo.

‘Enough of them can slow and stop us.’

Ambrose took a breath. ‘That must be prevented.’

‘As long as we are clear on what that means, arch-deacon.’

‘We are.’

As the first civilians closed with the flanks of the Taurox, Bonarmo fired her shotgun. She blasted a hole through a man’s chest. His body flew back against the people coming up behind him. The boom of the gun was the signal to the troops in the other vehicles. The Repressor weapons opened up in time with her second shot. The gunners of the cupola-mounted storm bolters unleashed destruction in wide, sweeping arcs. Heavy flamers poured out waves of burning promethium, turning the street into a river of fire. The transports accelerated, the dozer blades slammed into the people and the wheels ground over the corpses.

Ambrose stared straight ahead. He focused on the smoke-clogged end of the boulevard and avoided looking directly at the carnage. He ground his teeth with the effort it took. For his entire ministry, he had made it a point of pride to look at the crowds as groups of individuals, to see the faces, to know the people to whom he preached. For him, they were never, as they had been for Lorenz, units of wealth extracted from the world.

Only now, in the crucible of salvation, he was forced to ignore the screams and the pleas. He had to command a massacre.

‘Forgive me,’ he murmured, his voice inaudible in the roar of flamers and bounding of storm bolters. ‘I cannot save you. I will remember your martyrdom in the new dawn of Theotokos.’

That’s a lie. You can’t remember them if you don’t look at them.

I will remember. Because I will dream of this horror forever. I will remember the sound of bodies crushed and scraped. I will remember the cries. I will remember the stench of burning flesh. I will remember the deaths, if not the faces. Let that be the memorial to the dead tonight. It is the only one the world can afford.

The slaughter continued all the way to Bethia’s hab. Ambrose urged Bonarmo to greater speed, and she complied. He wanted the atrocities over with, and she wanted the momentum.

‘This is what a spear thrust looks like,’ she said.

He nodded grimly, accepting the pain of the lesson, and reminding himself that, along with the innocent, they destroyed many who were infected and so deserving only of execution.

Ambrose held on to this thought with a death grip.

The convoy pulled up to a stop in front of the main door of the complex. There were fires burning here too, and smoke billowing out of numerous windows, but not the majority, and Ambrose was able to tell himself that the conflagration had not yet taken hold of the entire hab.

Bonarmo jumped to the ground and her troopers marched out of the Taurox and the Repressors. Ambrose climbed out from the hatch and dropped down beside the chief enforcer. She shook her head at him. ‘You should stay here, arch-deacon. We can bring them out.’

‘My place is with you. They need to see that I am with you.’

‘They could already be dead. We may not even be able to reach them through the fire.’ Before Ambrose could object again, Bonarmo assigned a squad to remain behind as his protection. Then she strode forward, leading the charge, leaving him with no chance to change her mind.

He could not follow. Three of the troopers returned to the Repressors and the storm bolters. The other two stayed with Ambrose, wielding shotguns against any of the desperate souls who tried to approach him. A few bursts from the storm bolters cleared the immediate vicinity and sent the survivors running. The tormented mob began to flee at the sight of Ambrose.

He was turning into a figure of terror.

This is part of the cost, too.

He did not tell himself it would pass. He had to accept his sacrifice in all its fullness. He could not afford the hesitations that were the curse of regret.

Sharp, staccato blasts of gunfire erupted inside the hab block. Ambrose winced. The massacre in the streets showed him what must be happening in the halls and stairwells of the complex. He could picture with brutal clarity what he could not see. Again, he pushed regret away. It was a useless indulgence. It could not change what was happening, nor what must yet happen.

Every person who dies because of me this night is a martyr for Theotokos. Every corpse is a paving stone on the road to salvation.

The sounds of battle went on. The smoke grew thicker and thicker. The fire was spreading. Ambrose could almost see its hungry progress through the corridors and apartments.

Save them. Save them. Save her.

The Watch must have reached Bethia’s home by now. It had been so long. Too long. Why weren’t they out yet? What was happening in there?

Fire was happening. Flame and smoke. Burning and suffocation. And the wall-shattering hail of shells.

Save her. Save her. Save her.

The thought became the centre of Ambrose’s existence. The future had shrunk down to this point. He conceived of nothing past the moment that Bonarmo re-emerged from the hab, with Bethia or without.

Save her. Save her. Save her.

More shots. More flame. The sharp snapping and crumble of collapses beginning. And then Bonarmo and her troopers marched out of the exit, coughing, armour scorched, their discipline unbroken. At their centre was Bethia and her family, looking confused and frightened.

‘Here they are,’ Bonarmo said to Ambrose. ‘I hope they are as valuable as you say.’

He noticed now that the Watch had lost two of their number.

‘Our losses are almost at an end,’ Ambrose said. Then he pushed past Bonarmo. He held his hands out to the rescued civilians. ‘I’m sorry if you were frightened,’ he said.

Havak and Elyra fell to their knees and kissed his hands. Their two younger children kneeled too. Bethia remained standing. ‘What is happening?’ she asked.

Ambrose placed his hands on her parents’ shoulders and bid them rise. He wanted to take her by the hands. If Bonarmo had not been there, perhaps he might have done so, and that would have been dangerously wrong.

‘Great things,’ Ambrose said. ‘I promise. You must come with me, to the Palace of All Martyrs.’

‘You are offering us sanctuary?’ Elyra asked, stunned.

‘There can be none for you here.’

‘Why…’ Bethia began, then stopped. A wave of screams rolled down the street, drowning her voice, silencing questions.

‘Our thanks are beyond words, arch-deacon,’ said Havak.

‘Then there is no need to say them,’ Ambrose said, and he ushered them into the Taurox.

Ambrose stayed inside the compartment for the journey back, the hatch closed, shutting out the dying city as much as he could. The time of witnessing was over. The reason for venturing into the city had been accomplished.

Bethia was quiet most of the way to the palace. She slumped against the hull of the Taurox, eyes closed, face sagging with exhaustion. She had put her questions aside for the moment. She and her family were in relative safety for the first time since the chaos had begun, and her body succumbed to the need for rest.

Ambrose was relieved. He was bursting with things he wanted to say to her. Later, though. After he had been given time to think how he should say them.

Bonarmo was quiet too. She watched Ambrose through lidded eyes, her dark gaze going back and forth between him and Bethia. Ambrose looked back at her steadily. He had nothing to be ashamed of. He had never broken his vows. He expected a very different attitude from her tomorrow, when dawn came for Theotokos.

Bonarmo’s mood was still dark when the convoy reached the palace, and having deposited Ambrose and his civilians, she prepared to leave again with her troops. The mission seemed to have drained away the reverence in which she had held Ambrose until now. Even respect seemed all but gone.

She thinks this has been nothing but an indulgence of my selfish whim. If I were Lorenz, she would be right.

‘What will you do now?’ Ambrose asked her.

Bonarmo sniffed and glanced through the open gates at the burning glow of Magerit. ‘Whatever I can. As useless as that might be.’

‘I swear to you, this ends tonight.’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘Tomorrow, you will know that I have spoken truly, and kept faith with Theotokos.’

Bonarmo’s nod was non-committal, as curt a farewell as was possible without being offensive, and she left.

‘Arch-deacon,’ Bethia said when the gates had closed behind the departing Repressors, ‘why are we here? We are grateful for the sanctuary, but how are we worthy of it?’

Ambrose smiled at her. ‘You are here because I need your help. And because something wonderful is going to happen, to which you will bear witness.’

‘I don’t understand.’ She looked doubtful.

Have you lost faith in me too? The thought was a dagger blow to his heart.

‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I must speak with you.’ He turned to her family. ‘You are tired,’ he said to them. He gestured to the waiting attendants. ‘You will be taken to a place of rest.’ To Bethia, he said, ‘Will you come with me?’

The hesitation before she agreed stabbed him in the heart again.

CHAPTER 13

Ambrose led Bethia into the Palace of All Martyrs. He took his time before speaking. He needed the right words. He needed her to understand. There were some things that night that he must do, but there were things that he needed, too. The denial of those needs was very likely part of the cost he would have to pay, but he nurtured the hope that he might steal one moment, one memory, that he might cling to for strength in the trial to come.

But the ease of the sermons did not come. The confidence he felt when proclaiming to the masses escaped his grasp. He was addressing just one individual, one whose good opinion of him, whose faith in him, mattered more to him than was proper.

‘Arch-deacon…’ Bethia said as they reached a narrow staircase that led to the galleries over the palace’s main chapel.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ambrose said. He cursed himself for being silent too long. ‘I did not mean to be mysterious.’ He started up the stairs, and she followed. ‘I know you are feeling confused and uncertain. How could any of us feel otherwise in this crisis? Even sustained by faith, we would not be human if what we have witnessed did not terrify us.’

‘But why am I here?’

‘I will try to explain. Bear with me.’

They reached the gallery. Ambrose walked next to the outer wall, away from the arches overlooking the chapel. Their footsteps echoed on the marble. The scent of incense tickled Ambrose’s throat. Bethia was waiting, and he still couldn’t find the words. The wrong ones would make him sound megalomaniacal, and it was important that Bethia understand that he had chosen none of this, and that he had instead been chosen.

At the end of the hall the arches ended, and nave-side walls bulged outwards. Ambrose pulled open the heavy bronze door in the centre of the curve and held it for Bethia. On the other side was an observation chamber situated above the apse, a room Lorenz had used when he had ordered Ambrose to conduct the services in the chapel. From here, behind tinted armaglass windows, the cardinal could surveil, unseen, the celebrant and the congregation of adepts. A resplendent throne, framed in gold and draped in velvet, sat before the window. Ornate cabinets held decanters of amasec and silver, jewel-encrusted goblets. The first time Ambrose had been in the room, after Lorenz’s death, he had sworn he would strip it of the decadence that made a mockery of the murals depicting the martyrdom and vengeance of Saint Halfad. As soon as the nightmare was over, he would make good on that vow, but for now he had a more urgent need for the chamber.

‘Do you still believe the sufferers of the Grey Tears are heretics?’ Bethia asked.

‘I do,’ he said sadly. He invited her to sit on the throne. After a pronounced hesitation, she accepted. ‘It is the only explanation that makes sense.’

‘But why?’

With that question, he found the words. Standing beside the throne, looking down at Bethia, Ambrose said, ‘All that has happened in these terrible days has happened for a reason.’ He glanced down into the chapel. It was empty except for Nossos. Motionless next to the altar, the hooded cenobite could have been a dark statue. All was ready, then.

‘We have sinned against the Emperor,’ Bethia said. ‘That is what you told us.’

‘And that is what I maintain. We have a chance to turn back, though. As hard as our lesson has been, it is a trial, not a sentence of execution.’

‘I see that you do not wish me to lose hope, but–’

‘Please listen!’ Ambrose cut her off. ‘Cardinal Lorenz died a heretic. Rosarius unleashed the sin of the Grey Tears, and he will be punished for that yet, even as his plague reveals the sinful among us.’ The implication that Rosarius was still alive mixed with truth so easily, he wondered if it was not a lie at all, but simply a deeper truth. ‘Do you see? Even Rosarius’ crime was meant to be, because it forced the sins of Theotokos into the light.’

‘I see,’ Bethia said slowly, clearly unconvinced.

Ambrose forged on. He was committed now, and he would make her see what had been revealed to him. ‘The sins of Lorenz and Rosarius were preordained, and so was my presence here. It is the will of the Emperor that I save Theotokos.’

Bethia stirred uneasily in her seat.

‘I know what that sounds like,’ Ambrose said. He realised he had come close to shouting, and he lowered his voice. ‘You know me,’ he said. ‘Have I ever been one to covet glory?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘It feels strange to say that I have been chosen. I was reluctant to admit that I had been, until I understood that denying the truth was itself a form of pride. And I have felt as helpless as you. Even as I knew it was my duty to save our world, I did not know how. Today, I finally learned. The Emperor’s will was finally shown to me in all its stern clarity. Tonight, with your help, I will do what must be done. We will rescue our world.’

Bethia said nothing, her face expressionless.

Ambrose crouched beside the chair. He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Will you help me?’

‘How?’ Bethia whispered.

‘In a short while, I am going to call upon the Emperor, and He will answer.’

She stared at him, eyes wide and frightened. She started to rise.

‘No, no,’ Ambrose said. He kept his hand on her shoulder, holding her down. ‘I sound mad, I know. But you have not seen what I have seen. If you spoke to Cenobite Nossos down there, he would confirm everything I am telling you.’

‘Cenobite Nossos?’

Ambrose pointed. Bethia peered into the chapel, then looked at Ambrose, confused. ‘I don’t–’ she began.

‘I am not blaspheming,’ Ambrose insisted, cutting her off. ‘I have never been as conscious of the sacred as I am now.’

Bethia sat back, trembling. ‘What are you asking of me?’

Not to be frightened. To trust me. To look at me as you once did. All the things he could not say. ‘I need you as witness.’

‘Why me?’

‘None is more worthy, and none is more necessary.’ She looked at him with even greater alarm. He cursed himself for using the wrong words. And though he understood the reasons for them, he cursed her incomprehension and new wariness. ‘I cannot explain as clearly as I would, because the mysteries of the divine cannot be encompassed by thought. I need you to draw upon your faith, Bethia. The work ahead of us will be hard, but the redemption of Theotokos lies on the other side of it.’

‘I will do as you ask,’ Bethia said quietly.

‘Thank you.’ Before he could stop himself, he clasped her hands in his. The shock of contact jolted through his soul. ‘Thank you. I want you to know how much this means to me. How much…’ And then he did stop, right at the edge of breaking his vows. With an effort, he released her cold hands and stood up. ‘Thank you,’ he said again. ‘I must go now. Look for me below and know that we are saving everything.’

Her nod was barely perceptible.

He left the chamber. He closed the door behind him and, as quietly as he could, locked it.

Burun had arrived in the chapel and taken his place to the right of the altar by the time Ambrose entered. The chapel-master nodded and smiled at him, doing his best to seem confident, though his uncertainty was obvious. It was an hour before dawn, one of those blank times when no rite was scheduled. Ambrose had not told Burun what the ceremony would be and had only sent word that he should be in attendance. Burun kept glancing curiously at Nossos, whose position on the other side of the altar was more exalted than normal for a shrouded cenobite.

Ambrose stopped in front of the altar. He kneeled before its ornate, golden sculpture of the winged skull of the Emperor, then turned to face the main doors.

‘Arch-deacon,’ Burun said, ‘what is our purpose here?’

‘Salvation, chapel-master. Tonight, we call upon the Emperor, and He will answer.’

‘Please, arch-deacon… I beg you to not blaspheme,’ Burun said, horrified.

‘I do not. Do not concern yourself with how such a thing can come to pass. Do as I direct, and you will be part of the miracle.’

‘As you wish, arch-deacon.’ Eager to please as always, his greatest concern the worry that he should ever overstep his mark.

The chapel doors swung open slowly, admitting Havak, Elyra, Levan and Urus Antoniax. Tazker and four other shrouded cenobites followed. They closed the heavy doors again. One of them stayed by the exit.

Ambrose spread his arms in welcome to Bethia’s family. ‘I am so glad you are here,’ he said as they drew near. ‘All of Theotokos will soon be in your debt.’

Elyra opened her mouth, but Ambrose raised a hand to stop her. ‘You have questions, I know,’ he said. ‘They will be answered very soon. Please, come and pray to the God-Emperor with me.’

He stepped forward, away from the altar so they could kneel in turn before it. As they began to murmur their devotions, Ambrose heard Bethia. She was calling to her family, her voice muffled to a faint murmur by the armaglass. Ambrose looked up at the window. Its surface, tinted red and blue, reflected the torchlight and gold leaf of the chapel. He could not see Bethia, though he knew she could see him, and so he smiled reassuringly in her direction.

It will be all right. No matter what you are thinking right now, everything will be all right. I promise.

‘Let us begin,’ Ambrose said.

Nossos came to him and presented the scroll. He unrolled it slowly, holding it up for Ambrose to read.

‘Repeat after me,’ said Ambrose, and his tiny congregation obeyed. ‘Father of rain,’ he intoned slowly, pausing after each phrase for the echoed responses, ‘Theotokos cries out to thee. A drought is upon her waters, and they are dried up, for this is the land of false belief. But praise waiteth for thee, Lifefont, and unto thee shall the vow be performed. O thou that hearest our prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come.’ The words seemed strange to him; the tone different from what he was used to. The passing of ages had made alterations to the worship of the God-Emperor, but there were still elements that were familiar. The plea to the Father, and the promise of obedience were there as they should be. ‘Thou visitest the earth,’ Ambrose read on, ‘and waterest it. Thou greatly enrichest it with thy river, which is full of water. Thou waterest the ridges abundantly. Thou crownest our hopes with abundance, and thy paths drop fatness. They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness, and the hills rejoice on every side. The valleys also are covered over with thy rain. They shout for joy. They also sing.’

Nossos rolled the scroll and placed it on top of the altar. It was no longer needed. Ambrose knew the last few words. He had rehearsed the next few moments in his mind, picturing them as clearly and as fully as he could, teaching himself to understand the salvation they would bring.

‘Hear our prayer, Rainfather.’

From the folds of his robe, Nossos produced the relic he had found with the scroll. Its hilt bulged in three linked circles of iron. Its blade was a dark green metal that seemed to glisten in the flickering light of the chapel.

Barely audible, Bethia pounded on the armaglass and screamed. Her sister looked up from her prayers for a moment, curious, but the sounds were too small, too far away, and she lowered her head again in reverence. ‘Hear our prayer, Rainfather,’ she repeated with her brother and her parents.

Ambrose smiled in Bethia’s direction again. This will be all right. The promise she could not hear.

‘This is our gift,’ he said.

This is the hardest part. This is the cost.

She would not understand what he now had to do. She would think he was a monster, not just because of his actions, but for making her witness them. If only you knew, my love. If only you knew that forcing you to see this is really my cost. This is the price I must pay. And because of this cost to me, you will live.

‘This is our gift,’ the family repeated.

Still smiling gently, he grabbed Havak’s hair, pulled back his head and slit his throat.

Blood spurted over the altar. Burun staggered back in shock. The rest of the family screamed. Before they could rise, Tazker and his fellow cenobites held them in place.

‘Arch-deacon…’ Burun, confused, shuffled back and forth.

‘Repeat the prayers, chapel-master. All is well.’

‘This is our gift,’ Burun said, fussing at the blood that had spattered his robes.

Elyra struggled hard in Tazker’s grip. Ambrose went to her next. ‘All is well,’ he said again. ‘Hush,’ he reassured her as she screamed. His slash opened her neck, adding the spray of her veins to the slick that covered the altar. Then, he killed her children too.

The cenobites stood back from the corpses. Ambrose glanced at Nossos, whose hood bent in an approving nod.

‘Rainfather!’ Ambrose shouted, his arms raised, the knife dripping blood down his arm. ‘Hear me!’

I HEAR

Ambrose staggered and dropped the knife. The voice was in his head and in the air at the same time. It was deeper than night, and it rolled, thick and liquid. It gave birth to thunder, shattering peals that seemed to come from the ground as much as from the sky. The floor of the chapel shook, and the columns cracked, sending down clouds of marble dust. The doors boomed open, knocking the guardian cenobite off his feet.

‘Emperor preserve us!’ Burun cried, on his knees, his hands over his ears, his eyes wide in horror.

‘Do not blaspheme!’ Ambrose told him. ‘Rejoice! He has answered!’

‘That cannot be His voice!’

‘It is,’ Ambrose insisted. ‘Come with me! Come and behold!’ His heart pounding with exhilaration and religious terror, he ran down the length of the chapel, his balance sure despite the tremors. Nossos was ahead of him, unhurried yet gliding forward with surprising speed.

Adepts filled the corridors, shouting in alarm. Ambrose called upon them to rejoice, but the thunder drowned him out. They followed his lead, though, and he and Nossos led the rushing crowd out of the palace and into its grounds.

‘Look!’ Ambrose pointed at the sky. ‘Look!’

Lightning flashed in the clouds in sheets, lighting up the night with brilliant strokes. The thunder hammered like an artillery barrage. Ambrose’s eyes widened as the clouds bulged like membranous sacs. And then they burst, unleashing the rain.

The first few drops hit his face, and they were a miracle. They were the end of years of drought. They rolled down his cheeks, tears of gratitude. The adepts and the palace serfs shouted in celebration.

I have done it. The Emperor heard me, and He has answered. Theotokos is saved. Ambrose thought about the possibility of rest. He thought he might sleep forever. His mind leapt towards Bethia, locked in the observation chamber. No. Don’t do that to yourself. There will be time enough later. He looked down the hill at the burning city and prepared to witness the extent of the miracle.

Within moments of the first droplets, the rain came down in a deluge. It pounded with the force of hail. Ambrose winced under the blows. Then the shouts of joy became cries of horror, because the rain was thick, viscous and grey. The storm blotted out the dawn, but the lightning flashed with such unceasing intensity now that it illuminated the world with a harsh, pulsing, bleaching light. The water squirmed with vermin. Ambrose wiped it from his face, and his hands came away sticky. Long, translucent insects crawled over his fingers. The stench of rot filled his nostrils.

The ground turned slick. Rivulets of slime ran down the slope. They grew larger, spreading and joining, turning the grounds into a swamp. The flies rose in clouds, and then they fell, the bodies of the insects too bloated and heavy. They drowned in the water and burst open, releasing new generations that rose and fell in their turn. The grey worms writhed in the sickness, and there were so many that their song became louder than the thunder.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

The trees and flowers in the garden swayed but it was not the beating of the rain or the gusts of foul wind that caused the movement. It was disease. It was life at its most vile. Tumours swelled on stalks and branches. Trunks turned pale, then became an enflamed pink veined with green. Lesions split open along their lengths, revealing needle teeth. Maggots spewed out from between them and were swept away as the mire turned into a torrent.

The rain came harder yet. It was as if an ocean had been upended over Magerit. Ambrose could barely stand. The filthy water, calf-deep, rushed against his legs. Monks and cenobites and serfs fell into the torrent, howling as they were carried down the slope, the slime enveloping them and slowing their struggles. Their cries became gurgles as the grey water and the grey insects swarmed into their mouths, and the grey worms emerged.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

A deeper beat joined the wormsong. It had the same rhythm but sounded like drums. Slow, massive drums that shook the earth. They grew louder.

They were footsteps, immense and terrible, and drawing closer, approaching from the other side of the palace’s hill.

Ambrose saw Burun on his knees, shrieking, trying to get up. The chapel-master froze as the booming drew nearer, his gaze fixed on the air above the palace. His screams stopped. His breath was held in terrified anticipation of what he would see.

Nossos, motionless as stone, stood a few yards upslope from Ambrose. The hood, and the darkness within, faced him.

‘What have you done?’ Ambrose shouted.

‘I have done nothing,’ said Nossos. ‘These are the fruits of your labour. You chose, and you acted. Are you not pleased? The drought is ended. Famine is banished. Already the fires dim in Magerit. The water comes with gifts for all. No longer will there be a distinction between the diseased and the untouched. None shall escape the blessings of the Bringer of Plenty.’

The hill trembled from the impact of the footsteps. The voice that had boomed in the chapel returned. It hummed in pleasure to the tune of the worms, profound as an organ’s deepest chord, yet thick and blurry, gurgling with phlegm.

‘The Rainfather has answered your call!’ Nossos proclaimed. ‘Give your thanks to Rotigus!’

A hill of flesh loomed over the palace.

I HAVE COME

The horror was the colour of a drowned corpse. A ragged hood hung over the Rainfather’s horned head, flapping in the wind, dripping filth down its heaving bulk. Rotigus opened his jaws wide. At the same time, a huge wound in his belly parted in an eager, hungry grin. An avalanche of maggots tumbled from both sets of jaws. The colossus raised high a cross-shaped rod of gnarled, dripping wood. The lightning gathered around it, and the storm twisted its centre above the Rainfather. The deluge was his. It was his art, his gift, and his command.

Burun screamed and screamed and screamed, and then the waters, rising to Ambrose’s knees, swept the chapel-master away.

‘Where is your thanks?’ Nossos taunted.

Ambrose roared his hatred and fear as he charged up the hill towards the shrouded cenobite. The lightning made the shadows deep and jagged, and in his stillness, Nossos was hard to distinguish from them. Ambrose reached for his darkness and found nothing. The shrouded cenobite was not there.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee, the worms sang in mindless triumph.

The walking mountain leaned against the battlements of the palace. The gut-mouth gnawed on them, and they crumbled and softened, falling apart as mould overtook them.

Bethia was still in there.

Ambrose ran through nightmare, slowed by nightmare, towards the greater nightmare. He ran without hope. He ran because he had to, because he saw what he had done, what his pride had led him to. He saw the wounds that had flowed from his hand to destroy everything he loved. He ran not because he thought he could save Bethia. He knew there was nothing to be saved. He knew that the very idea of salvation was a lie. There was only corruption, and the only victorious life was plague.

He ran because he wanted to give Bethia the last gift he could. All that was left was the comfort of love before the end.

Inside, the palace was transforming. Marble and rockcrete and gold and bronze were diseased. They found their truth in flesh and bone. They became weak, pustulent, yet exultant in their sudden explosion of life as they collapsed. Slime coated the walls. Blisters popped beneath Ambrose’s feet. Murals took on the livid hues of fever and pulsed with the spread of insect nests. When he climbed the stairs to the chapel gallery, the steps gave beneath him, soft muscle squelching.

In the gallery, the flies were so thick he could barely see his way forward. They clustered around his nostrils and prised at his tightly closed lips. The ceiling of the chapel had split wide, and a stinking cataract thundered down into the nave.

Everything was changing, yet the door to the observation chamber was still a door, and still metal. He was able to unlock it. He rushed inside. The air was foetid but there were few flies, and he slammed the door shut against the swarms.

Bethia was still on the throne. From this end of the chamber, he could just see some of her slumped form. She wasn’t moving.

‘Bethia,’ he called.

No answer. No movement.

‘Oh no, oh no, oh no.’ He rushed to the throne and fell to his knees at the sight of her grey, slack face and empty stare. He took her body in his arms, embracing her at last when it was too late. ‘Forgive me,’ he sobbed. ‘Forgive me.’

He held her tightly, and she was too soft. He couldn’t feel her bones.

‘Forgive you?’ she whispered. Her voice was slurred. It thrummed with tiny wings. Something pattered wetly on the floor. Her body squirmed as if her skin were filled with snakes.

‘Forgive you?’ Bethia repeated. ‘But you gave me life.’

And then, she stirred.

CHAPTER 1

The solemn bells of the Cathedral Ignatzio tolled over the Evercity that morning, as I stood in the baroque stone doorway of my attic room and took a last look at my childhood. This lofty chamber had been a refuge from the madness of my home world, but I could not stay here. Not now that I’d been summoned by the responsibility of my birth. I took in a deep breath, telling myself I was ready.

On my shelves were ranks of metal Guardsmen, boxes overflowing with long-discarded playthings, and the few books that had helped shape me: Wain’s Illustrated Lex Imperialis, Thorn’s Book of Martyrs and 101 Devotions for the Young. But there were older companions, too.

I saw the stiff poses of my most treasured toys, lying in the shadows. They had wooden arms, legs and heads, uniforms of embroidered cloth, bodies of fur and flesh. Time and play had ruined most of them. Staring back at me were empty eye sockets and black, glassy optics. Tufts of stuffing peeked through worn torsos. Only one of them moved: Gambol, my clown. He stood out with his red hair, whitened skin, blue diamonds stitched over his eyes, and a broad, red smile tattooed upon his face. He rocked back and forth on his sutured haunches, the bells on his harlequin’s uniform ringing gently as he scratched at the brass flesh-plug behind his ear. His voice was boyish, despite his adult size. ‘Ruddie go?’

‘Ruddie go,’ I said in our childlike pidgin.

He sniffed ostentatiously as a tear rolled down his pockmarked cheek.

‘Who Gambol play with?’ He pulled an exaggerated sad face and started to sob theatrically. ‘Gambol sad.’

I could see that. When I was young, I had thought of him as my closest friend. Now, I was unmoved by these cheap displays of fake emotion. In truth, he was once some criminal or heretic that had been turned into a wealthy kid’s plaything – his legs amputated, his brain hacked into and his neural pathways slaved to a simple spectrum of emotions. Growing up, I had occasionally wondered what crime he had committed to deserve such punishment, and whether something lurked still beneath his neural circuitry. Was there a malevolence in his bloodshot eyes?

Gambol scratched behind his ear again. His fingers came away bloody.

‘Itches,’ he said, but his flesh-plugs had always festered.

‘Gambol must not scratch,’ I told him.

‘Itches,’ he said again, and fresh blood covered his nails in a red glaze. He held them up for me to see.

I didn’t know what he wanted me to do about it.

‘Pain is a sign of life,’ I told him.

I dragged that parting out, but I’ve since learnt that it is kinder to leave people behind without fuss. There’s no point in prolonging torment, or apologising, or asking for forgiveness. It’s better just to rip off the plaster, as they say. Pull the trigger. Put the shot right between the eyeballs – or even better, in the back of the head. A brutal kiss, where skull and spine meet.

But I didn’t know any of that back then, as I stood in the doorway of my refuge, trying to be kind to an old friend.

‘I’ll be back,’ I lied.

Gambol wiped his hand on his quartered livery. Suddenly he was bright and cheery. ‘Back? Gambol wait! When you back?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Today?’

‘No.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘No.’

He flinched at my tone and opened his mouth in an exaggerated wail, his blue-diamond eyes squeezing another torrent of tears down his face. I should have shot him there and then to put him out of his fake misery. But I was in a hurry, and through the ancient walls of my ancestral home, I could hear the cathedral bells tolling solemnly, reminding me of my duty that morning. It was the hallowday of Saint Helena Richstar, and I had been summoned.

‘Gambol sad!’ he called as I turned my back on him. They were his last ever words to me. I didn’t bother answering, but shut the door, the click of the lock sealing my childhood firmly in the past.

Some say that partings are hard, but the truth was I felt lighter after I left Gambol behind and made my way down the grand staircase, one hand on the ironwood banister to guide my steps in the darkness.

This stairway descended through the heart of the ancient palace that my mother had bought lock, stock, and with all the paraphernalia of a noble household when she had arrived on the planet. The walls were lined with antique portraits of complete strangers: men and women in gilded Militarum uniforms with high shakos and gold braids, like shrines to ancient battles. The unknown faces were severe, their eyes haunted by illustrious careers, fighting and dying for the God-Emperor across the wide Imperium of Mankind. And there were their mementos as well: crossed lances with musty tassels, venerable powerblades, and hunting trophies from across the Gallows Cluster – a mix of heads and fangs and horns and antlers, mouldering pelts exposing white skulls, glassy eyes dulled by veils of ancient cobwebs, and the stink of naphthalene preservatives.

Halfway down I smelt the musky reek of the greenskin head. The monstrous creature had always terrified me with its broken tusks and beaded, blankly staring eyes. The mount bore the name of the Battle of Cinnabar’s Folly and that of the man who had killed the beast: a General Everard Richstar. I had learnt about him in my histories. He’d been a reputable Guardsman until he had fallen in the bloody rout at Oukk.

At the bottom of the stairs was a wide landing with thick carpets and ten-foot doors opening off into various rooms of further pomp and grandeur, home to more historical figures I would never live up to. One set of doors, leading to my mother’s apartment, was ajar. I heard her voice calling my name. ‘Ruddie?’

She sounded as if she had just noticed my approach, but I knew she had been watching me ever since I left my chamber. The whole palace was covered by her surveillance picters. Their crystal eyes had been silently following my progress.

I used to joke that nothing was ever hidden from my mother, but I’ve since learnt that there are two ways of keeping confidences: not telling anyone anything or, if you must, killing them once you do.

Death is a true friend. It keeps all secrets.

My mother’s boudoir had the musty air of a museum, dedicated to my childhood. On the wall hung my old tasselled caps, stiff jackets and embroidered shoes, while a chosen assortment of my toys cluttered the black-lacquered shelves.

Mother had never been a happy woman, but she cherished the past in the misapprehension that she had been happier then. Her discontent was like a weight upon all who knew her, and I looked forward to leaving it all behind as I entered her room.

She was sitting in her high-backed leather throne, facing away from me. The throne swung soundlessly round, revealing its occupant.

‘Mother,’ I said, and bowed.

She wore a black lace dress with a ruff of furs about her neck, and an ornate black headdress lit with fairy lights, dark against her silver hair.

My mother was a curious sight, even for the Evercity. Subdermal implants had turned her eyes to gold, and her skin silver. In the half-light of candle flames, she shimmered, but it was hard to read emotion in her metallic visage. She let out a long breath of smoke and took me in, from boots to head.

From her long ivory pipe came the sweet scent of narcotics. They left me feeling nauseous, but they were one of her only joys. ‘Ruddie,’ she said, exhaling smoke along with my name.

An augmetic monocle covered one eye. In its light I could see the flicker of a pict-image against her skin. The miniature screen went dark as she moved the monocle aside and I looked into her gilded eyes. They gave nothing away as she regarded me.

‘I wanted to look good for father,’ I told her. Over my black bodyglove, I wore a suit of combat armour made by the finest artisans in the Evercity. She beckoned me forward, her silver skin catching the flickering light, and nodded silently.

‘You look like him.’ When she said that, it was not a compliment. Father was an ugly man and I had inherited his craggy looks. ‘Be careful, Ruddie,’ she said. ‘Or you will end up like him in other ways.’

Her words stung me.

Now, of course, I know better. I have known handsome men and beautiful women who were not much served by their good looks, and I have got used to being an ugly man. I’ve learnt to not let other people hurt me. Feelings are like tripwires. A blank conscience is the difference between wakeful and dreamless sleep.

Something in my mother’s lap moved. It was one of her pet simians, squatting amongst the drapes of her skirt, dressed in a hat of velvet and a jacket of silk brocade. About its neck was clasped an electro control-leash, the neuro circuits buried in the scruff of its neck. I think it was called Imp, though I made a point of not keeping track of any of her pets’ names. I had never liked any of them: they had always been rivals to my mother’s affection. When she lifted it up and pressed it to her chest I refused to be baited, but then it reached down and dragged my clockwork Titan, Rhadameor, from the folds in her gown.

The winding mechanism had long since broken, the blue-and-flame paintwork was chipped and worn, the inferno cannon re-welded onto the arm more times than I could remember, but it was dear to me. ‘That’s mine,’ I said.

‘You don’t play with it any more. You’re all grown up.’ The words held an edge of spite.

‘No,’ I said, ‘but it’s still mine.’

A montage flashed through my head of sitting with Gambol and the other playmates my mother had bought – human and augmented. We had filled my bedroom floor with metal Militarum. My bed was the gates of the Imperial Palace on Holy Terra, and Rhadameor had smashed its way through the legions of traitors.

She was trying to hurt me, and I refused to show any emotion.

She saw that her ploy had failed, or maybe, in her narcotic stupor, she felt a pang of guilt. ‘It seems that only yesterday you were just a boy. And now look at you…’

My mother’s eyes blinked and I saw a golden tear make its way down her silver cheek. Beneath all the frippery and glittering façade, she loved me. It was a stifling, choking love, but it was well meant. And she knew that she was losing me.

‘He’s a hard man,’ she warned. ‘He will brook no weakness.’

She spoke from experience, of course. She was the last of my father’s three concubines and had spent most of my childhood lamenting her luck at being brought to this planet, but as she spoke, my eyes must have taken on that glazed, hard exterior because she stopped herself and took a deep breath.

‘I bought this for you,’ she said at last, and took something out of the voluminous folds of her midnight lace skirts. Her silver arm shimmered as she held it out to me.

For once I was lost for words.

The autopistol was priceless, with a carved ivory handle and an exquisitely patterned barrel, acid-etched with entwined vines and the Imperial aquila etched on either side. But it was the Tronsvasse symbol stamped into the barrel that struck me dumb.

It was the mark par excellence, of beauty and craftsmanship, and expense. And, even for my mother, it must have cost a fortune.

‘Mother!’ I breathed. I felt a genuine wave of humility. It was so unfamiliar that it stuck in my throat. I had to cough to clear away the emotion. ‘Thank you,’ I said at last.

‘I asked the Cardinal Archbishop to bless it. And he blessed these as well.’ She handed me a heavy package of hard rounds. ‘They fragment upon impact,’ she told me. I held them up. Each one of the snub-nosed bullets had been hand-ground by artisans into the shape of a flower. ‘Manstoppers,’ she said.

I knew, of course. Xenos-hunters used them to stop the foes of humanity in their tracks. There was an image in one of my books that showed how the shards ripped through the flesh of the target.

I thanked her many times and she nodded stiffly.

‘You had better go. Arcad is waiting for you downstairs.’

‘I don’t need him,’ I said. She started to argue but I was adamant. ‘What will father think if you send one of your lifewards with me?’ My logic was clear. If I was to prove myself his successor, I had to set myself high standards.

She fell silent. The simian nudged her finger to encourage her to scratch again.

‘I will be fine, I promise.’ I patted the Tronsvasse at my side.

Her fingers curled protectively about the creature in her lap. Its blank eyes blinked slowly at me as it clutched my Titan in both hands.

‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you were mine first.’

‘You’re right. I was,’ I said.

The past tense stung her and there was ice in her voice as she answered, ‘Well, go to him then.’

I nodded curtly and stepped forward to embrace her. She did not stand. The smell of narcotics had worked its way into her clothes. She was stiff in my arms. We were silent for a moment, mother and son, till at last I started to pull away. Her fingers clutched my arm, and her hoarse whisper spat into my ear. ‘They will try to kill you,’ she said. ‘You must be ready. And when they come for you, do not hesitate.’

She slapped my cheek to make me remember. The blow smarted and her nails left scratches across my face. I blinked and nodded. I had known this for years. It was burned into my soul. I did not need to be struck again.

‘Go, if you must,’ she said.

I walked to her doorway, took a deep breath, and closed the double doors.

Those were her final words to me. A month later she was dead. But I did not know that then, and if I had, I do not know that I would have done anything differently. Each life runs its own course, and it was the Emperor’s will that hers should end.

CHAPTER 2

For a week, the people of the Evercity had been preparing for Saint Helena’s hallowday with fasts, prayer strips and displays of self-mortification.

I was a little hazy on what exactly Saint Helena, Celibate Matriarch and Healer of the Sick, had done to earn her beatification. The Gallows Cluster had so many holy folk, it was sometimes hard to keep track of them all. Either she had conquered worlds or purged apostates, or perhaps she was the martyr who had been lashed to an asteroid and fired into the local star.

But these details were the last of my concerns as I slipped out of the rear gate of my home and found myself in a dark, narrow alley. A rain of foul liquids dripped down from leaking pipes high above. The mouldering rockcrete was stained with long, damp streaks of moss and fungi.

The alley led south, dropping sharply down the tiered steps of the Evercity. It quickly left the Palace Quarter behind, and snaked back and forth through the narrow slum dwellings.

A foetid stink hung in the air. In these cramped habitations faith was even stronger, and woven charms and icons hung from every rockcrete eave. Prayer strips were plastered onto every wall, Imperial aquilas had been given a fresh lick of silver paint, and from the murmurs issuing from behind closed doors, the fervent were already up and working their way through their chaplets.

I took a flight of worn marble stairs down another narrow alley that plunged between two fallen marmoreal palazzos, now crumbling and subdivided into blighted tenements. This was the kind of place my mother had warned me of – a narrow and forsaken spot where a man might be gutted, his body dropped in an acid bath, and never seen again. But I was young, and it was a little act of rebellion and fearlessness that morning that I took that road. But even as I checked behind me, just in case, I felt someone following me. I touched the Tronsvasse at my side. Just the feel of it was reassuring, as I spun about and saw a dark shape with a cloth pulled close about their face. I felt a prickle of fear run down my spine, like a droplet of ice water.

My mother’s words rang in my head. I stopped, drew my sidearm and raised it.

‘Halt!’ I ordered. There was a shout of surprise and I saw that it was just an old woman, going out for her morning prayers. She threw up her hands in dismay and retreated back the way she had come, old legs going slowly up the steep stairs.

I felt foolish as I slid my gun back into its holster.

My father was Chief Enforcer of the planet of Potence and I knew that I could shoot with impunity, but an innocent old hag wasn’t worth the ammunition.

A manstopper would rip her apart, I thought, and she was probably harmless. And besides, I was in a hurry to meet my father.

My father was Aebram Howe. He had held the position of Chief Enforcer of Potence for nearly a century, and I was his third son. We were direct descendants of Knoxe Howe, officer of the Adeptus Arbites, who had been brought to the Gallows Cluster six hundred years earlier, by the then dowager Patridzo – a tough woman who knew the limitations of her son and his consorts.

Knoxe Howe was, by all accounts, a bastard. One of his first acts after imposing his authority was to move himself and his captains out of the Patridzo’s sprawling palace complex. ‘Courtly politicking is a canker that has made this world weak,’ he was rumoured to have told his son. ‘Do not let it weaken you.’

The family lore was full of stories about Knoxe Howe. There was so much internecine plotting that he had ended up purging two whole branches of the Richstar family, including that of Everard Richstar, whose palace I had grown up in. But one of his major contributions to the Evercity was the Enforcer Block, a rockcrete cube within a ferrocrete palisade, ringed with curled loops of flaywire and set at the base of the capital.

It was a blunt and brutal riposte to the baroque splendour of the tiered palaces and palazzos. It was there my father lived, and it was the place to which I had been summoned.

As soon as I set foot on the broad approaches to the Enforcer Block, I saw the Tarantula sentry guns swivel towards me. To the slaved minds within I was a potential threat. Their twinned blunt muzzles tracked my progress across the featureless thoroughfare.

As I drew closer, I could make out the servitors that manned each weapon. The skulls were set into the metallic gun housings, their eyes replaced with augmetic targeters. They reminded me unpleasantly of Gambol. He had been prone to spells of anger, and there had been times when I had had to hide under my bed until they had passed. The experience had taught me not to trust my safety to the repurposed brain of a heretic or criminal, and now I felt uncomfortable as the malevolent red targeters fixed upon my forehead.

The heavy gates slid open as I stepped onto the access ramp.

An enforcer stood guard within. He wore everyday battleplate consisting of flak armour and a helmet with mirrored visor, and carried a pump-action riot-gun. I didn’t bother showing him my personal idents and he didn’t ask. Everyone knew who I was. I could be his boss in a year’s time. His boss, or dead, as my mother had reminded me – depending on how dirty my half-brothers fought for our inheritance.

In the courtyard, a row of halftracks with riot-screens and black enforcer heraldry stood ready for deployment. At the far end were the three Repressors Knoxe Howe had brought with him to Potence, six hundred years earlier. They were like living shrines to the Lex Imperialis, with thrice-blessed armour and lovingly oiled storm bolters.

They dwarfed the other transports in size, and with their brutal lines and weight. My father loved them more than anything else in the world – including his own flesh and blood. I told myself that I had learnt not to hold it against them, but to be honest, it wasn’t true. The only consolation was that they would be mine, eventually.

A riot squad were heading out on patrol. Each of them was strapping on their body armour and helmets. I hurried past them down some rockcrete steps, polished smooth by the passage of many black jackboots. Enforcer Captain Bachis, my father’s right hand, met me coming up and said, ‘Your father–’

I nodded as I swept past him. I knew what he was going to say: I was late.

My father’s office was sunk into the bowels of the rockcrete block. I took the steps down to the basement, to where the air underground was cool, and smelt like a mix of damp and disinfectant.

Stretching away from the bottom of the stairwell was a long, brightly lit corridor of holding and interrogation cells. I could hear someone screaming, though the noise was muffled behind heavy doors. The pitiful note of a lost soul pleading for their life. A deviant being cured of their crimes.

The plaintive calls echoed about me as I made my way along the corridor. My father’s office was located halfway down. It had no obvious markings, the presence of another enforcer, assault shotgun held across his chest, the only clue as to its significance. The man nodded me through. I took a moment to catch my breath and then knocked.

‘Come!’ a voice boomed.

The office was a windowless rockcrete chamber. A bare strip-lumen lit the room with a sterile white light. My father sat behind a large pressed-metal desk, absent-mindedly rubbing the fifty-year-old scar that marked where an assassin had almost succeeded in cutting his throat.

It was hard to take your eyes off him. He looked as ugly as the building he occupied, and exuded all the menace of a frag grenade. But that morning, as he flipped through a pile of papers, I saw that his skin was sallow, his breathing was laboured.

The rumours are true, I told myself. His last rejuvenat treatment had not taken well. My father was mortal after all.

At last, he looked up from his desk and sighed. ‘Ah, there you are.’

I had expected so much more, despite all my mother’s warnings, and my palms started to sweat as apprehension rose within me.

‘I am ready for work, sir,’ I said, and made the sign of the aquila.

His eyes flickered over me, from my boots up to my neck, just as my mother’s had done. His look was of ill-disguised contempt. He simply took me all in: gun, uniform, armour – then, without warmth, he said, ‘I see you brought your gun.’

‘Yes, sir. A Tronsvasse.’ I held it out.

‘A parabellum,’ he snorted. ‘And you think you deserve it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I am a Howe,’ I said.

‘It’s a name,’ he snapped. ‘That’s all. If you want to live up to it, then prove yourself.’

‘I will, sir!’

He grunted and went back to the papers before him, and my cheeks reddened. When he spoke again, it was not to me, but to one of the officers standing waiting against the wall. ‘When is the Patridzo returning?’

‘This afternoon.’

My father rolled his eyes. The Patridzo was the hereditary ruler of Potence, a ‘weak and corrupt product of ten thousand years of dynastic struggles’, as my father liked to say. Now, he said, ‘Everyone is in place?’

‘Yes, sir.’

My father didn’t trust the man’s word, as for the next half an hour he checked the details each in turn. I waited through it all and started to think I had been entirely forgotten as he went on to demand reports on the Banda synth-drug cartels and crime syndicates.

He seemed to suddenly remember me and explained, ‘We have pinpointed one of the Banda safe houses. Time to wipe the vermin out.’

My father and his officers went back and forth, discussing which gang leader they would be up against, and how much force to commit. I listened with growing interest, thinking that this would be my first mission. I would soon be getting my first man, I thought.

I let them talk, even though my legs and back ached. ‘May I help, sir?’ I asked at last.

I saw a spark of amusement in my father’s eye. It was as if he was measuring how long I would wait without attention. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sending you on a judgement tour.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A chance to get to know the world beyond…’ – my father waved his hand in a dismissive manner – ‘all this.’

I risked a joke. ‘Is there life beyond the Evercity?’

My father did not even smile. He nodded across the room to the row of officers who waited upon him. ‘Meet Enforcer Terrini,’ he said.

I spun round. Terrini was a square man, with broad shoulders, a broad belt and military boots laced up over his ankles. He was grizzled and grey and looked solid, reliable. And he was clearly hand-picked. ‘You’re both leaving in an hour’s time,’ my father said.

I thought of the raid on the Banda hideout. ‘Today?’ I said.

‘Yes. Today,’ my father said. ‘What – were you expecting to be allowed to take part in the hallowday revelries?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just that… the raid… on the safe house?’

He fixed me with a steely glare. ‘Boy. You start at the bottom, like the rest of us.’ He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Terrini will let you know what you’ll need.’

At that moment there was a knock on the door. Another enforcer put his head around it. ‘Sir. He is ready to confess.’

A man was dragged in. Banda tattoos swirled about his bare arms. The enforcer who’d spoken kicked him. ‘Tell the Chief Enforcer what you told me!’

The man had started to speak when the enforcer punched him full in the face. There was a crunch as his nose broke, and then a torrent of blood started to splatter down onto the floor.

Terrini took my arm and led me towards the doorway. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s time to go.’

The sound of heavy blows followed us outside as Terrini shut the door behind us. We stood alone in the corridor. ‘Enforcer First Class Algar Terrini,’ he said and put his hand out. His grip was like a vice. He nodded towards my sidearm. ‘Nice piece. Know how to use it?’

‘Point and pray,’ I told him.

Terrini laughed and slapped my arm. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I like your style!’

A few minutes later we were striding across an underground hangar. The low rockcrete roof was crossed with steel I-beams and looped pipes and ducting slung under the crossbars. At the far end was a parked halftrack, emblazoned with the Imperial aquila and the Richstar emblem.

Two kitbags were leaning against one of the front wheels. Terrini lifted one in each hand. ‘Everything you’ll need,’ he said as he hefted them up onto a rack on top of the driver’s cabin. He lashed them down, then dropped to the rockcrete.

The cabin was bare and rudimentary, the seats bowed, the leather covers patched and torn. The green paint on the dashboard was chipped and scratched from decades of use. Underneath was dull iron and patches of rust. It smelt of cheap lubricants and stale lho-tar. It was a long way from my father’s Repressors.

Well, this is the bottom, I thought, as Terrini started the engine on the third attempt. A cloud of thick, brown promethium smoke rose behind us as he pumped the pedals to gently wake the machine-spirit.

Once it was fully awake Terrini played with a few buttons and levers, pulled a pair of mirrored glare-shields from his breast pocket, and at last, with a crunch of gears, we lurched forward.

CHAPTER 3

‘So, what is a judgement tour?’ I asked as Terrini ground the halftrack’s gears and we swung up out of the subterranean hangar into the main courtyard. He did not turn to me, but kept his gaze fixed ahead, his thick knuckles fastened upon each handle of the butterfly steering wheel.

‘The outer settlements… they’re too distant and too small to maintain their own Court of Misdemeanours.’ He tapped an ornate scroll case chained to his waist. ‘Writ of Magisterial Authority,’ he said, and lifted his two forefingers like a pistol and made the sound of firing. ‘Full judicial powers. Settle scores, impose fines and execute.’

He nodded towards a tin chest that lay between us. ‘Open that.’

I did so. I had expected food, water, spare galvanic powercells, but instead there were a pair of leather-bound tomes of law and a selection of chains, cuffs, nail screws, power prods and other bladed implements.

‘Instruments of interrogation,’ Terrini stated.

I remembered the man who had been brought into my father’s office that morning. Terrini appeared to read my mind. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Those who rebel against the Imperium of Man, and the Emperor’s representative – they’ve forfeited their humanity. They’re not much better than beasts.’

I nodded, taking this in as we pulled out of the enforcer compound.

‘You’ve got to understand,’ Terrini went on, ‘this whole planet is just a small tooth on a cog, buried in the guts of the Imperium. We’re just an agri world. As far as the High Lords of Terra are concerned, we’re almost entirely insignificant. Our only function is to deliver our agri tithes on time.’ He raised his fingers into the air to punctuate his words as he drove. ‘If we fail, then millions – billions – will die. But the serfs don’t care. They only care about filling their bellies and screwing their sisters. Forget all the “Emperor loves you” bullshit. It doesn’t work with them. The only way of getting them to focus is to shoot them. Ten. Twenty. Half of them. So, before each tithe fleet arrives we have to make a show of violence. Put the fear of the Emperor in them.’

‘And does it work?’

‘Of course,’ Terrini said. He turned to me and smiled. ‘Power comes through violence, and violence must be seen to be done.’

As the Evercity shrank into the distance, I breathed deep and felt some of life’s pressures fade, like barking hounds that fall behind.

‘First stop is Cardinal Water,’ Terrini said. ‘The bookkeeper there’s a solid man.’

‘Who are the bookkeepers?’

‘They run the farmsteads. They’re called bookkeepers because they keep the tithe books,’ he said, as if it were obvious.

‘And what are they?’

Terrini sighed. ‘They’re the record of what each facility has to deliver for the Imperial tithes.’

‘And if they don’t deliver?’

‘They do.’

‘Always?’

Terrini smirked. ‘If they want to live, they do.’

We were waved through a series of roadblocks and then we were rolling south through serf-camps, warehouses and brutal factorums with barred windows and chimneys pouring out heavy black promethium fumes. Ahead lay Starport – a sprawling ferrocrete plain, with rust-stained circular silos, augur towers and acre upon acre of rusting bonded hangars. Parked on the landing zones were the orbital landers, awaiting agri tithes to ferry into space.

At last, Terrini broke the silence. ‘Know how to roll a lho-stick?’

He pulled a leather pouch from under his body armour and tossed it across the cabin. I sprinkled the shredded leaf, rolled and sealed the paper, and handed the object back.

‘Light it,’ he said.

I took his lighter from the panel before me, lit it in my cupped hand and passed it stub first.

He took a long drag and let a thread of smoke trail out of the corner of his mouth. Then he pursed his lips and blew out a funnel of blue smoke and started to sing tunelessly to himself as the hours stretched on with the miles, which grew increasingly quiet.

As fields took over from factorums, there wasn’t much to see but rank upon rank of twenty-foot-high corn stalks, dry and rustling and approaching harvest.

Life away from the Evercity was all a revelation to me. This was a world of serf-camps, dirt and poverty. There were night soil trucks with human filth slopping from their open lids; labour gangs, strung out in fields or resting in the shade of the corn, each one wearing the locked casket about their neck that bore details of their confinement. The overseers stood apart, ancient laslocks thrown over their shoulders. They looked almost as downtrodden as their serfs, each one a study in poverty and haunting desperation. None of the thralls looked up. There was safety in the crowd. It was dangerous to be singled out. Only a fool brought trouble upon themself.

It struck me how charmed my life had been up to now. I understood that, despite the silks and marble and palace life, only a quirk of fate separated me from the chained agri serfs huddling by the side of the road. And who knew what the future held? When my father died, there would be a scramble for the inheritance. I did not know how I would be tested in the months ahead, but I knew that failure meant death.

And thinking of Gambol, there was worse than death.

‘What are their crimes?’ I asked Terrini as we passed another serf-gang.

‘All sorts. The worst heretics are culled. Suitable ones are turned over to the flesh-wrights. But, for those whose crimes are less serious, they suffer serfdom. Their children inherit their crimes, as do their children’s children, over many generations, until their ancestors’ sins have been expunged.’

I thought of Gambol and wondered what dark crimes had lurked behind his tattooed smile.

After a long silence Terrini said, ‘How long do you think your father’s got left?’

‘What do you mean?’

Terrini laughed, a deep, phlegmy rumble that brought up a gobbet which he spat out of his open window. ‘Don’t play stupid. Everyone can see he’s dying.’ There was a pause. I had no idea what to say. He looked almost bashful for a moment. ‘You do know, don’t you?’

‘Of course,’ I said. I looked out of the window, considering how much I could or should say. I answered his first question. ‘A few years.’

Terrini tossed his lho-stub out through the window. ‘And what’ll happen when he’s gone?’

I didn’t answer. I looked at Terrini, and it struck me that this was what happened in all the stories I had read as a child. The youngster was sent out of town with a guardian instructed to kill them…

Silence returned. Terrini tossed the pouch back to me for another lho-stick. ‘Want one?’ he asked.

‘Sure.’

The lho was rougher than I was used to. It caught in my throat and made me cough, and Terrini laughed. ‘Puts gravel in your throat,’ he said, and rattled out a cough to prove his point.

CHAPTER 4

Cardinal Water was a sprawling farmstead six hours south of the Evercity, manned by a hundred agri serfs. The facility consisted of serf barracks, a command block, barns and subterranean plant houses with plex-glass domes.

We arrived as the afternoon was starting to cool, the halftrack coming to a rest in the middle of the rockcrete courtyard. Terrini slammed his door shut and looked about. There was a harvester clearing a broad furrow through a distant field. The rumble of its engine was like a constant, faraway thunder. A haze of dust rose in its wake.

The whole place had an apathetic air – even the ex-Militarum overseers, who had seen our approach, and now appeared, strapping their belts tight about their pot bellies. The bookkeeper was the fattest of the lot. He started sweating as he approached, and talked quickly as he led us around.

Terrini’s standard response was to disapprove of everything he was shown, tutting and shaking his head. It keeps the bookkeepers on their toes, he told me later, but at the end of the inspection he gave the bookkeeper a warning glance. ‘You’d better fulfil your quotas.’

The bookkeeper mopped his brow. ‘Yes, sir. Of course. I promise. We will!’

Terrini said nothing as the bookkeeper showed us into his office. An ornate wooden bureau took up half of one wall. ‘It’s all in there,’ he said.

I saw then that the title ‘bookkeeper’ was no mere honorific. The leather-bound tithe book was as tall as a man, and as thick as a cargo-8 pneumatic tyre. It took three men to carry it out and set it upon its stand. Two of them pulled the front cover open. The vellum pages had a visible weight to them. Each leaf was covered with ruled lines and columns of neat Gothic miniscule. The bookkeeper used a stick to smooth them down until he had found the right one.

‘Here,’ he said, and started to read aloud.

We sat for nearly half a day as Terrini and the bookkeeper ran through each of the entries. The only thing that got us through were little glasses of recaff.

I took my first sip and winced. It was sour and earthy. I looked around to read the others’ expressions but they all seemed to be tolerating it. At last, Terrini took out his seal and wax, dripped enough to affix the seal, and then affirmed the requisite amounts of grain and slab.

‘Done,’ he said.

Afterwards, we shared a meal – a mediocre spread of home-processed slab and some of the fruits of the farmstead, washed down with a passable jug of grog that just about banished the taste of the recaff. At the end of the meal Terrini belched. ‘Any malefactors?’

The bookkeeper nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Good!’ Terrini slapped me on the back. ‘Now, Rudgard, is your pistol loaded?’

‘Yes.’

‘Time for the fun bit.’

A narrow stage had been erected and the sun was setting as we stood on the narrow boards and looked out over a crowd of serfs, sitting in huddles on the sun-baked earth. There had to be a hundred of them. Men, women, children – all wearing their chains of servitude. Their faces were dirty, pinched and hollow. The stink of unwashed human bodies rose from them.

Scrolls of writ hung from banner poles to either side of the stage, and behind us the Richstar flag rippled limply in the hot air. A vox-horn played the sound of chanting choirs as a servo-skull hummed over the crowd, trailing a banner praising the God-Emperor. In the palace, the servo-skulls I had seen were all finely crafted objects, but this one was a crude job with patches of poorly cured flesh clinging to the bone. It looked like something dragged from a coffin and hastily embalmed. It trailed the scent of disinfectant.

A dread expectation hung over the crowd as one of their own was dragged forward by two of the overseers. He was a skinny man, dressed in rags, bare feet scrabbling to keep up. A hood covered his head. He was blind as they hauled him towards the back of the truck.

Terrini patted my shoulder. ‘He’s yours.’

I had always imagined my first man would be a Banda ganger, shot down in the heat of an armed raid, not a petty criminal, bound and gagged. He read the look on my face.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, and slapped my arm. ‘Just point and pray.’

I found myself apprehensive and took a deep breath. The man was a serf and deserving of his punishment, but I wanted to blood my sidearm with a more worthy death. ‘May I use your gun?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Use yours.’

I started to argue, but he was firm. ‘A serf is a life. Your gun doesn’t care.’

As he was led towards me, I felt anger at the serf for making me have to shoot him with my Tronsvasse. I’m wiser now, of course. Life seldom gives us the lessons we want, and the truth is killing a man in an armed raid is as easy as blinking. The world is a blur. Events are happening too fast all about you and it’s all instinctive. You are living at the edge of your wits, and the threat of death keeps you sharp. You do not think, until afterwards.

Executing criminals takes more steel. It is a good place to start. You are calm, and ready, and there is an audience watching who demand the death. And I remembered Terrini’s words.

Violence must be seen to be done.

There were many other crimes to get through before the shooting. Two serfs were flogged for stealing slab, five others for meeting together in secret. Another man had his tongue cut out for cursing the bookkeeper.

We stood witness to it all. Heard the cracks of the whip, watched the long welts rise and weep blood, heard the lamenting cries of the chastised as his tongue was pulled out for the knife to do its work. And through it all a beaten air hung over the serfs. At last it was time for the execution.

Two overseers lifted the condemned man onto the stage, hands under each armpit, then half carried him to the centre. He struggled against them and they kicked the backs of his knees and forced him to kneel.

I wiped my hands on my trousers, set my feet wide, and took a deep breath.

At Terrini’s instruction they removed the hood. A ball gag forced his mouth open. He blinked in the sudden glare, and singled me out. His eyes were green and lit, like a cat’s, with a spark of malevolence. I returned his gaze with equal venom.

Terrini took a vox-horn. ‘Serf Bann. You are accused of engaging in secret rituals. The God-Emperor is tired of your miserable existence. Your pitiful labour is not worth the food that the Imperium of Mankind wastes upon you. Your sentence will be passed on to your scions for three generations so that they might scour your crimes from the record. But for you, your existence has come to an end. The God-Emperor demands your death, and the beneficent Patridzo has asked us to ensure that this is done.’

The man kneeling before me was a similar age to me – but we were divided by fate to be killer and killed. I felt contempt for him as I waited for the sentencing to be done.

Terrini stepped up behind me and whispered, ‘Arm’s length. Don’t close your eyes like your eldest brother. He winged the bastard and I had to step in and finish them off.’

I nodded, still holding the condemned man’s gaze, stepped into position and wiped the sweat from my palms.

‘Straight into the face,’ Terrini told me, but by then I barely heard his words. This was between me and this stranger kneeling before me. He was a criminal and I was his death.

I stepped forward and raised my straight arm, like a duellist, and spoke in a loud voice. ‘In the name of the Patridzo, Saint Ignatzio Richstar and the God-Emperor of Mankind, I condemn you.’

There was a moment’s pause for the words to fall on the watching crowd, and then I fired.

The pistol kicked in my hand, but I was strong and the shot went true.

It was as if a bomb had gone off. The man’s head exploded. I felt a gritty wet shower and there was a stunned silence as the headless torso bubbled with blood before toppling sideways off the stage into the crowd of serfs.

I wiped my face. The silence persisted a moment longer, and then the serfs started moaning. Even Terrini looked pale. He came over to me, wiping a bloody scrap of scalp from his face. A shard of bone had cut him just under the eye.

‘Throne!’ he said. ‘What did you shoot him with?’

I showed him the round I had used.

‘Manstoppers?’ he said, and laughed. Later he handed me a magazine of standard-issue hard rounds. ‘Next time, use these.’

The next week saw a succession of ledgers, executions and the assessment. Everyone asked about the coming tithe ships. When would they arrive? How much would the God-Emperor demand? How hungry were His armies?

Terrini answered them all with solemn authority as if he had a link through to the God-Emperor Himself. It was a misunderstanding he did nothing to allay. He talked of the enemies that the Imperium faced. How xenos threats hemmed the God-Emperor in on all sides, while darker forces of corruption and heresy undermined us from within. All of them wanted to enslave humanity. They wanted the galaxy for themselves.

The staff of each farmstead listened with weighty respect. Terrini let his warnings sink in. ‘The Patridzo has promised the Emperor that we will deliver our tribute. There cannot be any backsliding. The tithes must be delivered on time and in full. It is only the God-Emperor’s armies that keep our enemies at bay.’

I nodded solemnly by his side, and the overseers looked up at me with trepidation.

Of course, at each farmstead there were condemned serfs.

I shot them all.

‘It should be like wiping your shoes,’ Terrini said one night as he sat back, sipping a glass of amasec and smoking his lho-stick.

My eyes had been following the distant lumens of a lighter, spiralling slowly up as it ferried tithes to the orbital hangars. Terrini went on, and I nodded. That first time had been shocking, but each subsequent instance was a little easier than the last.

I loaded plain old enforcer-issue hard rounds into my magazine. They were as long as the end of my little finger, blunt-nosed, brass cartridges packed with fyceline, weighing heavy in the cupped palm.

The dull steel slugs did the job. Some of the condemned looked me in the eye. Some of them prayed. Some of them begged. I put an end to each of them.

Calm. Collected. Like wiping your shoe when you come off the street.

By the thirtieth I was almost casual. Even Terrini seemed impressed. At the end he slapped my arm in congratulations. ‘You’re a natural,’ he said. ‘Just like your father!’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

The last place on our judgement tour was an agri plant named Reklanbore. It was a well-run little establishment, with strict discipline and browbeaten serfs. We were drinking our morning recaff when a messenger came to the guest-hab where we were staying.

‘Sir,’ he said to Terrini, ‘they’re calling for you at the command block.’

Terrini went off while I finished my recaff and shoved my clothes in the kitbag.

When Terrini came back his face was dark, though his mirrored shades reflected the clear cobalt sky. I handed him a lho-stick and lit it for him. Terrini blew a long, blue plume of smoke into the air. ‘Vox message from the Evercity. One more place to visit.’

I had been looking forward to a return to the Evercity and met this news with irritation.

‘Place called Thorsarbour,’ Terrini said. ‘Bookkeeper’s named Taru. A good man. Ex-Militarum.’

One of the men standing nearby looked uncomfortable. He hesitated before speaking. I caught his eye and he felt compelled to talk. ‘You haven’t heard…?’

‘What?’ Terrini snapped.

‘Bookkeeper Taru’s dead…’

Terrini looked up. ‘Really? He seemed healthy last time I saw him.’ The man pulled a face. Life on Potence was tough. There were all manner of dangers out there. Terrini said, ‘So who’s there now?’

The man wasn’t sure. ‘There’s a new gang.’

Terrini shook his head. We were both looking forward to returning to the Evercity. This was the last thing either of us wanted.

‘What’s this place called again?’ I asked, as we loaded our kitbags up onto the halftrack and made ready to depart.

‘Thorsarbour,’ Terrini said.

‘Never even heard of it. Is it far?’

He nodded. ‘Butt end of nowhere.’

CHAPTER 5

Thorsarbour was two days’ drive further south, set in the dusty wastes of the Long Dry. The landscape became more bleak and dusty as we rumbled on. After the first day we stopped in a wayside lodge – just a two-room shack with a pit latrine and water pump, and a pile of dry firewood.

Terrini was an enforcer veteran of many tours such as this, but even he was unimpressed with the crudeness of the housing, and made his discomfort plain. But we set to without unnecessary words, brewed recaff, boiled up our slab, then sat and smoked our lho-sticks as the day darkened. When the sun disappeared we lay back and watched the orbital hangars twinkle in the gathering dark.

I did not sleep well.

Gambol was waiting for me in my dreams. I flinched at his appearance as he swung his sutured torso forward till he was sitting over me, peering down and fretting at the plugs behind his ears.

‘Itches!’ he hissed, and started to get upset. His blue-diamond eyes stretched as he pulled a face. He pinched something out and held it up for me between his bloody nails. It was a hard, white lump of pus. I tried to tell him to stop, but I could not speak and Gambol could not stop scratching. He could not understand that his scratching only made his flesh-plugs worse.

He started to bleed freely and the blood splattered down on my face and I woke with a start – the dream-scent of blood and festering flesh in my nostrils.

It was a short-lived reprieve. Each time I turned over he was there, waiting for me – suffering one of his angry fits and reaching under the bed for me, or reading me to sleep, Thorn’s Book of Martyrs open in his lap.

‘Let me see the picture,’ I told him. It showed a penitent, strapped into a chair, as surgeons bent over them with wires and implants and cavity drills.

‘What’s happening to him?’ my childish dream-self asked. I tugged Gambol’s sleeve as he stared in silence.

‘They are punished!’ he said at last. He pulled a sad clown face. His teeth were yellow against his white skin. I could see the veins in his eyes, and then his left eye began to twitch.

I knew what was coming, and immediately kicked away.

‘Punished,’ he hissed. ‘Deviants must be punished. It itches!’ He pulled at the implants and they came free. Blood trickled down his neck as the dulled light in his eyes changed. Now they were lit with a malevolent intelligence.

In terror I scrambled towards my bed and Gambol dragged himself after me, using his hands to pull himself along. I kicked at him. ‘Get off me!’ I shouted, but he seized my wrists and dragged me towards him. I kicked and thrashed but he pinned me down.

‘Mother!’ I screamed, but he clamped a hand over my mouth. It was hot and sweaty. I wanted to bite him but I was afraid.

‘They are broken,’ he whispered. ‘Tortured. Beaten. Bled. They are made to repent of their sins.’

This dream-Gambol was terrifying. ‘Stop!’ I tried to tell him, but Gambol’s broad, red mouth was curled in a snarl. His breath was foetid, his green eyes spiteful.

‘They are forced to repent!’ he spat again. And then he started to sob. It was a chilling thing to see him cry. ‘They are broken…’

Somehow I had managed to twist a wrist free and had lurched to my feet, scrambling up the shelves of my bookshelf. Toys rained down as I climbed ever higher. The only safe place was where he could not reach me.

In my dream I was awake all night, pressed against the wall, eyes wide to the darkness, ready and fearful. I could hear Gambol swinging his stumped torso along, patrolling under my bed like a hungry wolf.

He tried to lure me down. Made promises. Threats.

‘No!’ my dream-self told him, and I listened to the cathedral bells striking the hours, waiting desperately for the morning, when the servants would come for me.

As dawn silhouetted the spires and buttresses of the Evercity, Gambol knew his time was up. I heard his grunts as he dragged himself up the shelving. I prayed to the Emperor as I saw the red tufts of hair appear over the lip of the top shelf. Gambol’s white face lifted slowly, like a sickly moonrise, his blue-diamond eyes dark in the night.

‘Gambol is sorry,’ he said, pulling himself up level with me. He held himself up with one arm, and reached for me with the other. ‘Come to Gambol!’

I shook my head. In my dream I was just a child, but I would not go to him. Not when he was like this. He reached for me, but I was pressed right against the wall, my legs drawn up to my chin. He caught Rhadameor and swung it at me, but the effort dislodged him and he almost fell.

‘Come here!’ he hissed, grasping at me again. ‘You little bastard!’

Next morning, Terrini and I were up before dawn. I said nothing of the nightmares, and did not ask him about his night’s sleep, but he looked tired as well. We packed up and set off, rumbling south.

A few hours after lunch, the road gave way to a dirt track that plunged straight out into the wastes. ‘I didn’t know there was anything this far out,’ I said.

Terrini had one arm resting on the sill, the other holding his lho-stick. ‘No,’ he replied simply.

After an hour we saw a wall had been built across the wastes before us. It stretched from horizon to horizon, a behemoth of rockcrete, like a dam when the water had been drained away.

Where it met the road, iron gates had half fallen from their hinges, and lay open. There were words on the gates, though I could not read them for the dust and rust. But as we plunged into the dark of the arch, I had a brief impression of a guard chamber, long abandoned.

Terrini drove through at speed. I had expected to see something different on the other side of the wall, but the landscape was the same. Just mile after mile of salty scrubland, flat as a dead man’s heartbeat. And the hours wore on…

I twisted and turned, trying to relieve the boredom and the ache in my backside as Terrini hummed a tune for a while, smoked, hummed some more.

At long, long last, the salt flats gave way to scrubby fields, and then slowly, out of the silvered landscape, rose the dark brown of mile upon mile of irrigated farmland. Pipes ran through broad, square fields of giant corn stalks, near-on thirty feet high; so tall that they rose up like walls on either side, their heads bowing under their own weight.

Here and there, irrigation pipes had failed, and there were long stretches where the plants were stunted and desiccated by the heat. The rustling stalks were thick with webs. There was a ghostly rustle as we drove by, like we were moving through ranks of the dead. Every so often, in the margins of the fields, we saw piles of rusting machinery: a cargo-6 without tyres; an old ploughing rig, grass growing through its iron struts. And sheltering in the shadows were birdlike creatures with leathery wings. Occasionally we would startle one out, and it would flap away in search of a new roost, hanging upside down in the shadows.

The whole landscape had a dismal and depressing air that only deepened as we passed a long line of vast, rusting agri machinery. The machines reminded me of blunt-nosed instruments of war, fitted out with scythes and threshers instead of guns. Rank weeds grew in all the paver cracks, and along the side of each were stretched banners emblazoned with religious texts, and then a row of iron gallows.

There were bodies within the cages of looped iron. The first one was just a tumble of bones, but as we rolled along the line, the later corpses were fresher, the stink stronger. Each bore scraps of prayers and quotes and scripture. Pennant strips claimed that the dead had chosen self-immolation.

The stink of ostentatious and destructive piety hung in the air.

I recalled lies that I had told, times that I had missed my prayers, hallowdays when I had lain in bed and played with Gambol, or lined up my metal soldiers on the floor, and imagined them armies at my command. And I remembered other times as well, when my mother and I had lit a taper against the darkness so that she could read the holy words as we knelt by my bedside.

The last cadaver could not be more than a week or so dead. The corpse’s head had fallen forwards against the bars. The eyes had been pecked out. The nose had been eaten away, and there were maggots falling out of the nostrils. The skin was black and swollen, and a hand reached out through the bars of the cage, its forefinger pointing back the way that we had come. Spilling from the open mouth was a long tongue of parchment with black script that was fire-and-las-bolt kind of stuff.

Death is preferable to madness, the script said.

At last, Thorsarbour’s command block loomed into view. As we swung into the main compound a flock of bantams erupted in a flutter of wings and feathers. There was a thud as we slammed a couple aside, and we left them broken and flightless in our wake.

Terrini brought our truck to a halt. The machine-spirit rattled as it fell back to sleep, and the dust settled. Before us was a shrine to the God-Emperor. It was an open building, with red pillars and a red tile roof. Through the thicket of prayer strips nailed to the eaves, I could see candles burning under a golden skull, which was disfigured by ancient stalactites of melted wax. In front of it was a giant brass censer, heaped with a cone of pale ashes, into which a tall red candle had been thrust. A thread of blue smoke trailed upwards.

I looked about. The walls of dry corn, pressing in on all sides, gave the place a crushing air of desolation.

Terrini kicked his door open. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get this over with.’

The sound of our slamming doors brought startled figures from the shadows of one of the barns. They were nondescript in many ways – some shoeless, others wearing mismatching military surplus boots or home-made sandals, their ill-fitting garments sun-bleached and patched at the elbows and knees. But their stubbled scalps showed some of the most extreme forms of self-mortification that I had ever seen. The shaven skin was blotched and scabbed with long scars – some faded, some so fresh that the wounds were puckered, crusted with gore or dripping blood.

They stared at us in silence.

I’ve since banned such sanguinary forms of Imperial cults, but they were a common enough feature on Potence then. Even as I stood watching, one of the men slashed himself and started to bleed.

‘Who’s the bookkeeper here?’ Terrini demanded.

‘Capo,’ one of the men said.

‘Where is he?’

Another, who had cut his lips right down to the gum lines, pointed along the yard to a rockcrete bunker with sheer walls and dark loopholes. We walked the rest of the way to the command block in silence, save the crunching of the gravel under our feet.

The main gate was ajar. An aquila had been stencilled across it, but the double-headed eagle was scratched and streaked with corrosion. The gateway was plastered on either side with prayer strips. The words had faded in the bright sunlight.

The guilt of the unholy hangs heavy upon their souls, one read.

Madness is purity, said another.

The holy wash their hands with blood.

Through the command block’s gate was a wide rockcrete atrium, around which were set a number of doorways. The air was cool. It smelt dusty. All the doors were closed.

‘Bookkeeper?’ Terrini called, his voice echoing off the grey walls.

There was a long pause before a voice called, ‘Hello?’

Coming out of a doorway to our left was a bull of a man, dressed in mountain infantry boots and a stained white apron tied loosely about his waist. His face was as puffy as a pit fighter’s. His nose was a sideways smear across his cheek and one eye was missing, the socket depressed and hollow.

‘Bookkeeper Capo, at your service,’ he said.

‘Enforcer Terrini,’ my fellow said, ‘and Enforcer Howe.’

He stopped before us. ‘There aren’t more of you?’

‘Just us.’

‘No confessor?’

‘I said it’s just us. What’s the problem here?’ Terrini said.

‘Oh,’ the bookkeeper said, and paused and took a deep breath. ‘Right.’ He gestured to his office. ‘Come inside. We need to talk.’

The bookkeeper’s office was lit by the screen of a deskbound cogitator. Capo pulled a knotted cord and a strip-lumen rattled to life. The room was cluttered. The shelves were stuffed with papers, scrolls and box files, and on the bare wall behind the desk hung a large graph, a few mouldering Munitorum awards, faded with age, and a paper icon of Saint Ignatzio pinned at the corners with four brass tacks. The saint was depicted in his guise of Ignatzio Victorious, with golden armour, a power spear crackling in his hand, and a tumble of extinct xenos species lying in heaps at his feet. But it was the large metal desk that drew my attention.

Next to the cogitator was an overflowing ashtray, and a skull. It reminded me of the pet simians that my mother kept, with an elongated snout set with fangs, like a canine’s, and eye sockets overshadowed by heavy brows. There were strange icons carved into the surface that caught my eye.

I reached out for a closer look.

‘Don’t touch!’ the bookkeeper said. He hurried across and took the simian skull. ‘Please. It was my father’s,’ he said, as he put it on top of one of the shelves. He rowed back from the harshness of his tone. ‘Brought it back from campaign.’

‘He was a military man?’ Terrini said.

‘Supply corps.’

As he spoke, the door swung open and a servo-skull hummed into the room, vestigial spine trailing in the air. We’d seen many poorly made skulls on our tour, but this one looked like the scavenged remains of a murder. Scraps of skin were held in with crude metal sutures and a cog device had been hammered into the forehead, almost like an afterthought.

‘Throne!’ Terrini said, as its anti-grav generators hummed past his shoulder. Its underslung buzz saw, drill and claw hung beneath it like palsied limbs, a sheath of paper clamped in the three-pronged pincers. ‘That’s one ugly creation.’

Capo nodded as he took the file from the servo-skull, and stuffed it into a wooden crate. ‘Yes,’ he said, his single eye crossing to each of us in turn. ‘Listen. I didn’t like to speak too loudly. The truth is we’re packing up.’

Terrini’s voice instantly hardened. ‘What do you mean, “packing up”?’

Capo was sweating, despite the interior cool. ‘Enforcer, I’m not a foolish or ignorant man but there’s something unnatural here…’ He took a deep breath and looked as if he were trying to organise his thoughts. ‘You don’t feel it?’

When we didn’t reply, he puffed out his cheeks. ‘It’s been building for months. Nightmares. Shapes at night. Shadows where no men are.’ He put his hand to his head and wiped away the film of perspiration. ‘The serfs have become unruly. Some of them have gone missing. They all feel it. Their fervour has become… extreme. Then there’s the girl…’ He paused and took another breath, as if he knew that what he was about to say was a little incoherent. ‘I think she’s a witch.’

Terrini laughed and rested his hand to his pistol – nothing too obvious, just a subtle threat. ‘I cannot believe the nonsense that I’m hearing.’

The bookkeeper rubbed at his temple. ‘You should listen to her.’

Terrini cut him off. ‘I don’t want to listen to her. We can take her back to the Evercity. The Ecclesiarchy can judge. But meanwhile, I’m here to make sure you bring in the harvest.’

Capo sat down, and put his head in his hands. ‘Sorry, sir. I’m a little out of my depth, sir, to be honest. I was only ever made a temporary replacement to Taru. I’ve asked for guidance… but the Evercity – they never answer.’

Before Terrini could reply, the bookkeeper set to listing all of his problems. ‘First serfs came down with the sweating sickness, then suppurating boils that left them in agony… We prayed for deliverance, but some of the overseers’ girls started to wake every night in fits. I saw one with my own eyes. She thrashed about, twisted her body into animal shapes. Inhuman sounds came out of her. It was the most chilling thing I’ve seen. And then there were voices, where no man stood. Draughts of wind in empty rooms. The serfs refused to go out to work. We had to go out and guard them even in broad daylight. My team are not experienced. They started to become fearful too. There were rumours. A curse. A heretic. A hungry soul that was looking for a body to take for its own. Suddenly, even with guards I could not get anyone to go out and bring in the harvest. And then he came. He called himself “Unworthy”. He said he was a holy man.

‘At first I was glad. His prayers stopped the sickness and the next time one of the girls went into a trance, he was summoned. He spoke to her in commanding tones, and laid hands on her. “She is possessed by a spirit!” he told us, and he bled himself as he sat in vigil, and when the spirit came again, he was there and he drove the malevolence out.

‘I thought he was a blessing, but he said that whatever was inside her had not gone away. That it was chained to this place – that the only way of keeping it at bay was to mortify yourself. Some of the serfs started believing they’d been possessed. They locked themselves in cages and starved themselves to death. Now, what’s left are all his followers and they all worship together… But it seems this curse – this thing – has started to attack our outposts. We’ve lost three of them.’

‘What in Holy Terra’s name are you talking about, man?’ Terrini said, his temper rising. ‘And what do you mean you’ve lost three outposts? You misplaced them? You put them in a drawer and forgot about them?’

The bookkeeper blushed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean the crew are dead.’ He paused and took in a deep breath as his woes weighed upon him anew. ‘All this time the Patridzo demands my tithes. And yet he does not send me the help I need.’ He sat down, rubbing his head again. ‘We are desperate, enforcer, for a holy man. Someone with the power to drive out the malevolence that haunts us.’

Terrini put up his hand. ‘Stop! You sound like a superstitious thrall. Think. You’re an overseer. You wear the badge of the aquila. We are not superstitious folk. We are the instruments of the God-Emperor. He sits on the Golden Throne on Terra holding the Imperium together, and He relies on the likes of us to serve Him, and to do His will. We cannot let ourselves sink to the level of the superstitious and the ignorant, can we?’

Capo held Terrini’s gaze. At last, the bookkeeper shook his head. ‘No. I’m sorry. You’re right.’ He sighed and Terrini patted his shoulder. His voice was kinder now.

‘I know it can be hard, the Emperor demands much of all of us, but we cannot waver. We must remain strong. You understand that, don’t you?’

Capo nodded.

Terrini paused. ‘He relies on us to provide Him with food. His armies defend us all from xenos and insanity. So we have to get that harvest in.’

Capo’s head snapped up, and he started to try and explain again.

‘Hush!’ Terrini said. ‘Breathe. Tell me again – what’s happened to your outposts?’

‘Farrar’s crew disappeared,’ he said. ‘Raine died of the flux. Talia went out hunting one day and never came back. I couldn’t find anyone who would go out and look for her. And then, just yesterday, I had word from Mamma Jett that there was something hanging about her farmstead… I promised her help – but now the vox has gone quiet.’

I had been sitting, watching this all. I was as mystified as Terrini. ‘Who is Mamma Jett?’ I asked.

‘She’s a freed serf, been working her plot for thirty years. She’s tough as old leather.’

‘And how far is her steading?’

‘An hour.’

‘That’s it?’ I said.

Capo nodded.

I looked to Terrini. ‘Surely we can get there before dark?’

Terrini checked his chronometer. ‘Yes. Capo, come and show us the way.’

Capo paled. ‘Now?’

I slapped his back encouragingly. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now.’

CHAPTER 6

As there were three of us, we took one of the compound’s Goliaths. It was a rusting old hulk, with Munitorum insignia barely visible under the caked dust. Capo started the engine on the second attempt. A thick, brown cloud of promethium fumes rose about the truck as he pumped the pedal to warm the engine.

‘Just takes a little encouragement,’ he said, as we started forward.

The road led through the back of the farmstead, along a row of barns, then turned off into a canyon of corn stalks. The Goliath’s iron suspension did nothing to soften the journey. A tracked machine had come along here in the wet season and the road was torn up and rutted, the ruts since baked into hard ridges. The Goliath rattled every bone in our bodies. We felt every bump.

‘So, this Mamma Jett,’ I started, raising my voice over the background din. ‘You say she’s a freed serf?’

‘Yes. Fourth generation. Ancestor convicted of heresy a hundred and thirty years ago. Turned free when that sentence had been served.’

‘And how old is she now?’

Capo puffed out his cheeks. ‘Fifty. Sixty. I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know if she knows herself.’

‘Do many serfs stay on after they’re freed?’

Capo shook his head. ‘Not many of them live long enough to get freed. And those that do, most of them are institutionalised. They wouldn’t know how to live in the real world. So they’re either inducted into the factorum workforce, or the Militarum. Or, like Mamma Jett, they keep on doing what they know.’

We passed through mile after mile of corn stalks before Mamma Jett’s settlement swept into view.

It had been carved out from the fields, a square space with a low hab, open barn, pump station, and a row of subterranean plant house domes, sparkling in the sunlight.

Behind the pump station was a row of tall water storage towers and galvanised irrigation pipes that trekked out into the fields. The nodding head of the pump jack was slowly moving up to a seventy-degree angle, and then descending again, and repeating this action. Otherwise, the place had an ominous stillness.

A straw man stood outside the hab, its wooden pole thrust into the ground. It was clothed in a thin, ragged dress, its arm pointed towards the hab.

The Goliath’s engine wound down and Capo threw his door open and slid out. Terrini did the same from his side. As I landed on the grit, Capo shouted, ‘Mamma Jett?’

I called her name as well. But, apart from the creak of the pump head, there was no answer.

The single-storey hab had a narrow veranda made from scavenged flakboard. The door was just a couple of pieces of rusting sheet metal, screwed onto a simple wooden frame and hung with crude icons.

Capo knocked. ‘Hello?’ he called out.

No one answered. It creaked as he shoved it open. ‘Mamma Jett?’

I followed him inside. The room looked as though a vortex had swept through it. Every piece of furniture was overturned and smashed, and over the whole mess, shreds of clothing had fallen like snow.

‘Holy fucking Throne,’ I muttered as my boots crunched on smashed pots and jars, and shards of glass. The floor was sopping with pickling fluids and slab powder.

‘Mamma Jett?’ we called as we pushed through the rooms. ‘Mamma Jett?’

I pushed through to the back and stopped.

‘What?’ Terrini asked.

‘Looks like the grox have broken free,’ I said.

Grox were a staple livestock across the Imperium. They were vicious reptilians, apex hunters on their home world, with a ferocious temper and a set of jaws that could cut a man in two – but they had the distinction of being able to turn almost anything into meat protein.

The only way we had of keeping them safely was lobotomising them en masse, and housing them in sunken pits.

But it was clear that something had gone wrong here. The galvanic fence had been trampled down, and a half-grown grox was standing in the backyard. I held my breath. It was hunched like a cat, ready to spring, its black reptilian eyes staring straight at us, the end of its sinuous tail flicking menacingly.

For the first time in my life I had the chilling sensation that I was not a human, but simply a prey animal. And then it sprang.

I fired and missed, and as I aimed again Terrini pushed me aside.

He fired one shot after another. The reports echoed back from the fields of corn. It took five rounds. The grox hit the earth ten feet before us, and died with a great heave of breath that inflated the dewlaps along its throat and whistled out through its nostrils.

Terrini slammed his sidearm back into its holster. ‘One down,’ he said, turning to Capo. ‘How many more?’

We found two more grox almost immediately. They were dead, and looked like they’d been eaten by the rest of the herd. I found the fourth. It was as big as a halftrack and was only ten feet away from me, back half turned towards me as I came around the hab.

Its dewlaps flared in warning. It was protecting a human body.

The extremities had gone, but before me was the torso of a woman. The grox stuck its head into the stomach cavity and dragged the body sideways, lifted it from the floor, and shook it.

My mouth went dry as I aimed and fired.

This was very different to shooting criminals in the face. As I fired it seemed that time stopped.

The clap of the report was followed by a moment of silence. Paradoxically, a moment of stillness.

I’ve experienced it many times. It’s as if the whole world turns to look in sudden shock, as if everyone knows that something terrible is about to happen. A shot has been fired and so a life is about to end. Events unfold with the paralysing slowness of a nightmare.

And then the round strikes home and it’s suddenly a shitstorm.

After the first shot, the grox turned its head towards me. It seemed to wait for the slug to strike. The round slammed into flesh, just below the front shoulder. I saw it go in but did not see it come out. Now the beast was angry and alarmed. It moved with sudden speed, charging at me with a thin hiss of fury.

The next shot hit above the shoulder. It kept coming.

I fired twice more. These were manstoppers, I thought, as I pumped three more rounds into it. At last it fell, sideways, vicious claws kicking ineffectually, fanged maw open in a screech of rage as it reached for me with its sinuous neck.

If I close my eyes I can still hear that sound.

When you shoot a man or woman, they fall to the floor and more often than not, they are so traumatised by the shot that they can barely speak. Sometimes they call on another for aid in this moment of mortal torment. The Emperor. Their father, or more often, their mother.

Occasionally they question you. I’ve stood there many a time, reloading to put the last bolt into a skull, and the condemned has stared up at me, and whispered, ‘Why?’ or ‘Who are you?’ or even, ‘How do you sleep at night?’

‘I sleep at night because scum like you are dead,’ I tell them, and put them into the hands of the Emperor.

But more often they are in such pain and shock as they waver on the edge of life that all they can manage is a mewling, wounded sound as they drag themselves into a corner. There is no escape, of course. Even if it is a dark room, all you do is follow the broad smear of blood and find them lying against the wall, curled up about the entry wound, pale and trembling as they bleed out their last.

If you’re feeling merciful you can put them out of their misery. But I don’t see why I have to be forgiving. If you’ve broken the Lex Imperialis, then there is no mercy. Mercy is for the weak.

No, you let them bleed out their last… or put another round into their guts. Let all the filth of their digestive tract out into the wound. It’s the slowest way to die, and the most painful. For some, even that is too good – but I didn’t know any of these things then.

This grox lacked any of the intelligence and understanding of a criminal. All it knew was pain, and in its pain it barely seemed to draw breath as it let out a hiss of fury and anger, still struggling to get to me.

I stood over it and let it scream as I looked into its black, lidded eye. Its teeth were yellow and irregular. Blood was frothing from its snout. Unthinking as the thing might have been, my sense of right and order demanded its punishment.

Not far off lay the torso of Mamma Jett. The head had gone, and the stomach had been ripped open, and the choice organs had been devoured, the legs gnawed up to the knee.

With the half-eaten torso of that woman in mind, I let the creature squeal.

Terrini stumped up next to me and took out his own gun. ‘Shut it up!’ Terrini said, and at last I ended its final scream with a round to the skull.

Capo went into the house to find a winding sheet while Terrini and I hunted the remaining grox down.

We found four more in the back fields, but one was still missing. We went around the hab, and then stalked towards the pump station, watchful.

The iron machinery was well maintained. It had been painted so many times the rivets and joins were all blurred into each other. Its nodding head pumped water from below. There were piles of grox-shit, but no beast I could see.

I found the remains of another of Jett’s workers. There was just a booted foot, and a few scraps of clothing. When we came out, blinking into the faded sunlight, we couldn’t see Capo. I felt a moment’s panic, but the bookkeeper appeared from the hab.

I beckoned him over. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

CHAPTER 7

We’d gathered up all the human remains we could find, and now they bounced around in the back of the Goliath, each wrapped in the stained sheets.

It was quiet as we drove back. I looked out of the window and relived the face-off with the grox, piecing together what might have happened at the farmstead.

I tried to picture it: the galvanic fence failing, someone going out to investigate, stumping down to the grox pit, and then suddenly being confronted with a stray grox, looming in the darkness.

Those inside, hearing the screams, rushing to help and the grox pushing inside, driven wild by the scent of blood. The women and the children must have hidden under beds, or in wardrobes. But once they were inside, there was no stopping the beasts.

The destruction inside the house made sense to me now. Those that had fled had been caught in the open. Those that had cowered inside had been sniffed out by the grox.

The sight of death had made me think about my father. About his failed rejuvenat. Whether he would have been proud of me this day. How long he would live for. What I would miss when he was gone.

The sombre air even seemed to affect Terrini. He smoked his lho-stick in studied silence.

We watched the setting sun stretch the shadows long upon the ground. It was a red ball sitting on the horizon by the time we pulled into the main courtyard. There was a crowd of serfs waiting for us there. One of them had dark stubble and a prominent lower jaw. ‘They are here!’ he shouted and drew a blade along his forehead. There was a second before the blood welled up and started to stream down his face. He slapped the wound to keep it open. Each splat showered himself and those about him with blood.

‘What the Throne are they doing?’ Terrini snapped.

‘They think human blood has sacred properties,’ Capo said.

As we dismounted, one of them started to flick his blood towards us, shouting, ‘Outsiders – you must be purified!’

‘Stop it!’ Terrini snapped.

There was a sudden silence, as one of the penitents – the serfs’ leader, I presumed – pushed his way forward. He was not more than twenty years old, and wore what had once been a white gown, now dirt-stained about the hem and discoloured with old bloodstains. He had more piercings than Saint Fentula of the Bloody Shroud. One eye had been freshly stitched open. Blood leaked from the stretched punctures. The exposed eyeball was laced with angry red capillaries.

‘The Emperor blesses you,’ he said to us. His voice was deep for one so thin, and his prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he spoke. He did not share the serfs’ thick accent, but had the clipped tones of the Evercity’s nobility. I guessed this was the man that Capo had spoken of. The holy man who had led a sanguinary cult among the serfs.

His confidence was striking, even though he was dressed in rags. He said simply, ‘My name is Unworthy. I was cursed with wealth and name and luxury. All these I have disowned. I embrace servitude. I embrace the example of the Emperor, who serves us all. If the faithful toil then I too will toil. I share their burden. And I will not answer to any name that my mother gave me. I have no rank. I have no family, and the only name I answer to is the one that I have given myself.’

Something about Unworthy held Terrini back. It was not just the accent, and the obvious links to the planetary nobility, but I think it was also the steely self-assurance that flowed from him. He was different from most of the holy men I had met, who cared more about their earthly progression than souls like these. In fact, I don’t think I had seen a member of the Ecclesiarchy ever take up the life of a serf. It was more natural for them to adopt the role of overseers.

Unworthy felt me watching him and I held his gaze. It was all I could do to stare him down. He could not blink, and when he tried, a bead of blood appeared at one of the stitches, and started to drip down his cheek.

He addressed Terrini. ‘The Emperor is unhappy with us,’ he said, pointing at the bookkeeper. ‘That is why we must make amends for our sins. Until we have satisfied Him with our purity, the Emperor will surely punish us all.’

The crowd of serfs murmured their assent. It was as loud and confident as any religious congregation voicing their creed. Terrini paused. Mobs are dangerous. Once unleashed they have a wild and berserk fury. Maybe if it had not been me standing at his shoulder he would have been bolder, but I was the Chief Enforcer’s son, and he decided that it was better to defuse the tension.

‘Listen to me, all of you. You belong to the Emperor, and the one thing the Emperor demands from this world is food. Grain. Meat. Provisions for His armies across the Imperium who fight in His name, and defend us all from the unclean and the inhuman…’

He was in full flow when Unworthy interrupted him. ‘You speak false.’

There was silence.

I tightened my grip on my sidearm.

‘There is one thing greater that we provide to the God-Emperor, who sits over all on His Golden Throne!’ Unworthy shouted. ‘It is prayer! It is only through faith and prayer that we nourish the soul of the Emperor. And it is with our blood that we keep Him vital and alive!’ Unworthy swelled before us, as the crowd answered with shouts of affirmation. At Unworthy’s command, one of the serfs stepped forward and put his fist to his head, grimacing as he slowly dragged his clenched hand downwards. It was like striking a well head: gouts of blood poured over his face.

He opened his hand and I saw a pair of razors held within his grip. He grinned as he repeated the gesture. The blood ran in hot rivulets, dripping from his chin, and he flicked it at us both.

He missed me, but a splatter freckled Terrini’s face. ‘You little bastard!’ the enforcer cursed, and he lashed out, throwing the man sideways.

The serf propped himself up on one elbow, spitting blood. Terrini’s boot connected with his ribs and the man lifted a foot off the ground. I heard the crack of breaking bone, but Terrini was not done. Another kick connected fully with the man’s face.

I don’t know what broke – whether it was his cranium or his neck – but there was a sickening crunch and the man lay still as a puddle of blood pillowed his head.

‘We are enforcers in the service of the God-Emperor and the Patridzo of Potence. I carry the Writ of Magisterial Authority.’ Terrini touched the ornate scroll case at his waist. It had a golden skull engraved at one end.

The serfs stared at it with obvious awe. ‘We are the embodiment of the Emperor’s will,’ Terrini shouted. ‘This scroll allows us to execute immediately whosoever refuses to comply with my demands. You speak of faith, but faith has many manifestations. Tithes, however, do not. You should be ashamed of yourselves, scarring the bodies the God-Emperor gave you when you should cherish the strength and heart He has bestowed. You were all blessed with servitude. Your role in this life is to serve, not to judge others. I have killed many times in my life, and I will happily shoot any of you who refuse my commands. Now, go back to your barracks. Tomorrow morning, at dawn, the harvest will begin.’

The death of one of their comrades had stunned the crowd. They had been suitably cowed and there was a rattle of chains as they made their way back to their barracks.

Unworthy, though, refused to leave, even as his congregation left him stranded. He was shaking with fury as he held our gaze.

‘Don’t waste my time,’ Terrini said, ‘or I’ll make you a serf and you can live out the rest of your life in the mines on Blackrock.’

‘Who are you to speak for the Emperor?’ Unworthy demanded.

‘I am Enforcer Terrini, and I will feed you to the grox if you cross me again.’

Two of Capo’s men were sitting just inside the command block, playing dice on a small table in a guardroom.

They started when they saw Terrini but he was already on them. His boot connected with the table and there was an explosion of dice as he grabbed one by the scruff of the neck, and threw him into the other man.

‘Get up!’ he shouted and they scrambled back to their feet, and hastily straightened their clothes as they saluted. Terrini’s anger was frightening. ‘Who the hell runs this place?’ he demanded of them. ‘I’ll tell you who,’ he said. ‘It’s not Unworthy! It’s the fucking Emperor, and until He arrives, it’s me.’ Their eyes fell to the writ of authority he wore at his belt, but it wasn’t that which convinced them. It was his anger, his violence and his steely conviction.

‘Now. Find the rest of the crew and bring them here to me!’

The sky was darkening by the time the overseers were gathered together. Terrini took them in. They looked as if they were serfs themselves. ‘I don’t know what’s happened here before, but I am here now. I bear with me the writ of authority of the Patridzo of Potence and through him, the God-Emperor of Mankind.’

I’ve always found silence the most threatening, but Terrini was the vox-horn kind. He went on and on till the veins stuck out from his neck and spittle was flying from his mouth. He cowed them, intimidated them, and then he made it as if they could redeem themselves through following his commands.

‘I’ve just come from Mamma Jett’s farmstead. Someone turned the galvanic generator off and the grox got out. Killed the lot of them. And one of those beasts is still out there. Which means it’ll be on its way here. It’s had the taste of human meat. The serfs are watched at all times, and you will work in pairs until the harvest is brought in. So no one goes about unarmed. Is that understood?’

They nodded.

Terrini knocked one of them over to make his point. ‘Sloppiness costs lives!’ he told them and they nodded again in stunned silence. At the end he pointed. ‘In the morning I want every corner of this farmstead cleared out and working.’ Then he picked five men out at random. ‘In the back of our Goliath are all that remains of Mamma Jett and her crew. Dig graves and bury them. And unless you’re careful, you’ll be next.’

They each went their way, but one of them stood a little uncertain, not sure if he should approach. Terrini felt the man’s presence too and turned in irritation. ‘Yes?’ he snapped.

The man bobbed in discomfort, and stammered. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I used to know…’ he started.

Terrini looked at him. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘It’s me, sir. Hamber.’

There was a pause as Terrini looked at him, but the next moment his expression changed. ‘Hamber!’ Terrini said. ‘Throne! What are you doing here?’

‘Well. I came with Taru…’ the other man said. ‘And here I stayed.’

I left Terrini and Hamber talking as I went to supervise the burial. Night had fallen and the overseers had parked a Sentinel powerlifter and used its search-lumen to illuminate a cone of white light.

I sat on a rock, rolled a lho-stick and looked on. We were a hundred yards from the command block, next to a small flakboard chapel. Serfs were not buried here, apparently. Their corpses were fed to the grox, but overseers were, and along one side of the chapel was a ragged line of metal posts, each one marked with a rusting aquila.

Mamma Jett and the others were all being lumped in one grave. The overseers were already working with picks and shovels. The top of the ground was hard, but once they were a couple of feet down, it was soft and sandy. The shovels scraped as the overseers heaped the soil up at the side.

After nearly an hour, they were done and they carried the remains of Mamma Jett and her crew from the back of the Goliath. The winding cloths were stained with old blood. They set each down at the side of the pit and then one went to find somebody who could say some words. Not Unworthy, but an older man, dressed in black robes, who limped around the corner, leaning on a silver stick topped with the symbol of a cog.

The air was warm and the scent of death was already rising from the pit.

He was a sickly-looking man, his complexion made even paler by his garments. He looked as if he had just been woken up as he adjusted the rope belt about his waist. He put out a hand when he met me and spoke in a phlegmy and apologetic voice. ‘I am Enginseer Gad,’ he said.

I told him my name, but he gave no sign of recognition.

‘Well!’ he said, taking a breath. ‘I’d better get them away to the Omnissiah!’

I sucked on my lho-stick. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said.

I sat back as Gad started his work. I paid this ceremony little attention. I was thinking of what would happen when I returned to the Evercity. When my father died. It was going to be messy.

One of the overseers came over and nodded a greeting. He stood, staring at me till I offered him a lho-stick.

‘Sure?’ he said, and I nodded. ‘Thanks!’

Another came over. They shared the lho-stick I had given the first and told me their names. ‘I’m Perin,’ said one with straight dark hair, cut unevenly over his ears.

‘And I’m Tombs… Been here five years,’ the shorter man said, squinting as he inhaled. ‘This is sweet stuff you have.’

Perin nodded as he waited his turn. ‘So you’ve met Unworthy?’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Where did he come from?’

Perin shrugged. ‘Just appeared three months ago. Moved in with the serfs… Cult of the Holy Blood. But he won the serfs over within a few weeks. They scare the shit out of me.’

Once the enginseer was done he came over to scrounge a lho-stick as well. He took it with trembling fingers. As he bent towards me to light it I could see his eyes were bloodshot. ‘This place is killing me,’ he said. ‘Do you feel it?’

I paused and looked about. It did feel a little weird.

He closed his eyes as he took in a long drag. ‘Did you hear about Rlor?’

‘No. Who is he?’

‘He was Taru’s second-in-command. Another Militarum guy. Not bright, but reliable, know what I mean?’

I did. ‘And?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘he was in the plant house and he slipped. Into the slop tank.’

I didn’t understand the implication of this.

‘The slops give off poisonous gases. If you fall in then you only have a few seconds to get out.’

‘And if you don’t, you pass out?’ He nodded, and I pulled a face. ‘And then you drown…’

‘Next day,’ he said, ‘this figure of a man was found outside, stuffed with straw, just like the ones we put out in the fields. Except no one remembered moving this one. The serfs were terrified. There were lights there at night. Capo closed it down. He said we should leave whatever was in there inside. Otherwise, it might get out. Now, whenever there’s a death, there’s one of these bloody straw men. Just waiting.’

CHAPTER 8

Once Mamma Jett and her team were buried, we shared a simple dinner of boiled roots with a few shreds of cured grox. Everyone turned in early, Capo wishing each a good night as they sloped off into the dark. I took the opportunity to ask about Rlor’s death in the plant houses. Capo’s mouth fell open as he started stammering something in reply.

‘It’s just malfunctioning,’ he said. ‘It’s a jungle in there.’

Terrini’s eyes narrowed. ‘So, we need to get it working,’ he said. ‘What’s it growing?’

‘Algae.’

‘Right. So we need to harvest the algae. Understood?’

Capo nodded. ‘I’ll send someone in in the morning.’

There was a tense air as we finished our meal. Finally, Capo said, ‘Overseer Perin will take you to your hab.’

We grabbed our kitbags from the rack on top of the halftrack’s cabin, and followed Perin as he took us past the chapel and along a line of barns. The track was unpaved, and here and there were stones and potholes from the wet season. The serf block was on our right. It was a low, solid rockcrete building with bars on the glassless windows and a pair of overseers standing duty at the door. They were dressed much like Perin, with lasrifles thrown over their shoulders.

The made the sign of the aquila as we passed, and we did the same.

‘The guest hab is this way,’ Perin stated, turning left along another unpaved track. We passed through a tall wire fence to a little line of prefab terraces set along one side of a gravel path.

The overseer hab compound had clearly been meant to give these colonists of the desert a sense of home and order. There was a broad pavement and cast iron lumens along either side of the road, and about each single-storey hab was a wire-fenced yard. But the desolation made the place feel empty and deserted regardless.

Half the lumens were dark and broken, their glass smashed. The few that remained cast tight circles of light, illuminating little except stones and rank weeds.

Perin pointed to the third in line. ‘That’s mine,’ he said proudly. It was hard to find anything to say. The hovel looked as dingy and dilapidated as the rest, and Perin felt our lack of enthusiasm. ‘The guest hab is further up. We don’t have much use for it. No one comes out here.’

I tried to make conversation. From the way he carried himself, Perin was clearly ex-Militarum, although that spanned a wide range of roles, from local militia to reserves. ‘Did you get to see the Evercity?’ I asked.

‘Once,’ he said, his face reddening. ‘Spent most of my time up on the Gallows Cluster. Astropathic facility there. Never went inside. Scared the shits out of me.’

Conversation dried up. A single hab had been added to the end of the row, but unlike the others, this looked like it had been built with a pair of old Munitorum containers stuck together and fitted out with a flakboard roof.

‘This is it,’ Perin said with forced enthusiasm, as he pushed the wire gate open.

A dirt path led up to the guest hab. A lumen was on outside. Someone had planted a row of greens in the front yard. A pair of sticks held up a tepee of gauze netting.

Leathery avians were fluttering outside the windows. One slapped me in the face as I climbed up the steps. I smacked it down.

‘What are these things?’

‘Imhis,’ Terrini said as he crunched it underfoot. ‘They’re a bloody pest.’

A heavy brass bolt lock was on the door. Perin fumbled for a moment with the key. It took a lot of jiggling before there was an audible ping and the two pieces of the lock came free and tumbled into his hand, the door opening with a creak of weary hinges.

Perin reached in and punched an ignition stud. A light came on. It was a bare lumen, screwed into a black plastek socket in the middle of the hallway’s pressboard ceiling. Hot, stale air greeted us as we followed him inside. The interior of the container had been panelled with cheap flakboard, papered over with a standard aquila design, faded almost to obscurity.

‘I’d have cleaned the rooms out if I’d known you were coming today, but with everything that’s happened…’ Perin said.

Three doorways opened up from the front hall. There was nothing much to see in the rooms to either side, just single cots, blankets and pillows folded at the foot of the bed, and a small, flakboard side table. Perin pushed the door in front of us open. ‘And this is the galley.’

The scent of stagnant water greeted us as we crowded inside the small room.

There was a wooden counter with a cheap pump-prime promethium stove, an aluminium lidded pot, open timber shelves and, at the end, a cupboard. Perin opened it, as if to have something to introduce to us. It too was bare.

‘I’ll make sure we send over some implements,’ he said.

I gave Terrini a look. Neither of us were impressed.

In the corner, a plastek barrel of water was half full. Perin lifted the lid and a cloud of bugs rose into the air. He felt our displeasure. ‘The latrine is outside…’ he started, and pushed open the back door and tried the rear lumen. It didn’t light. ‘I’ll get that fixed as well.’

Disapproval oozed out of Terrini.

‘S-s-sorry, sir.’ Perin’s cheeks flushed. He apologised once more as Terrini followed him to the front door and shut it on him, cutting yet another of his apologies off mid-sentence. ‘I’ll sort it in the morning,’ he called.

‘No,’ Terrini told him. ‘Go out and get us a replace-ment – now.’

‘Alone, sir?’

‘Yes,’ Terrini said. ‘Alone.’

I knew Perin’s mind was travelling to the lone grox, but he clearly thought better of objecting further. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

‘And be quick about it!’ Terrini snapped as he turned from the door. ‘Damn idiots,’ he said. He took in a deep breath. Both bedchambers were open. ‘Which do you want?’ he demanded.

I didn’t care.

‘Right. I’ll take this side,’ Terrini said, and grabbed his kitbag.

I took the opposite side. It looked like no guests had slept here for years. Besides the cot there was a cheap metal chair with missing slats. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust and the room had a hot, stale smell. I pulled the thin cotton mattress aside. The cot was standard issue with a metal frame and bowed cross-hatch leather supports.

Perin came back a few minutes later, panting and red in the face.

‘I’ve brought these.’ He stood on the doorstep and passed me a broad metal pan with some pressed-metal enamelled mugs, and a jerrycan half filled with promethium for the pump stove. He was about to go when he said, ‘You should leave the porch lumen on at night. And close the shutters.’

‘Why?’

‘Stops the imhis getting in.’

I shut the door and joined Terrini in the galley. He was searching through the empty cupboard, and cursing under his breath. He banged the doors closed, but brightened when he saw that I had promethium.

‘I’m dying for a recaff,’ he said. ‘Did that idiot bring any?’

‘No,’ I said. He cursed again. ‘There’s some in the halftrack,’ I offered.

‘There’s that missing grox…’ he said.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I told him.

‘Sure?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Okay. You’ve got more grit than that Perin,’ he said. ‘Just don’t get eaten. What will I tell your father?’

‘I won’t,’ I said, and laughed. ‘What are the chances of me running into the missing grox?’

‘In this place,’ he said, ‘who knows?’

I have purged many dens in my time as an enforcer. I have come face to fang with the mad and the corrupt in the benighted pits and hollows beneath the Evercity. But I don’t think I have ever known a darkness as intense as the nights of Thorsarbour. It wasn’t natural. It pressed in all around, and even though the stars gleamed cold and white above, they cast no light, and only served to intensify the shadows. It was unholy.

As I stood on the doorstep and closed the door behind me I immediately regretted my decision to set out alone without a stablight, but I was young and proud and stupid, as many young men are. The only illumination beyond the guest hab was the single unbroken lumen at the end of the gravel track. It stood out from the gloom, but its glow was hemmed in, and it cast only a thin puddle of yellow light at its feet. Still, it was a beacon for me, and I pushed off, my heartbeat quickening as my feet felt their way along the track.

As the darkness pressed in, my other senses compensated. I heard a distant door slammed, a hound bark, and then the unearthly screech of a far-off grox – the missing one, I thought, and was immediately reassured by the distance, until I remembered that Thorsarbour had its own herd.

I was almost at the lumen when I sensed a shadow at the side of the road, and my heart was in my mouth for a moment.

‘That you, Perin?’ I called, Tronsvasse already in hand.

There was no answer, and as I stared I wasn’t sure I hadn’t imagined it all. ‘Who is that?’

Nothing. No one, I told myself. Just my imagination.

I was still edgy as I reached the main yard. A light was on above the command block’s gateway. It was unnaturally quiet as I made my way to our halftrack.

I had to reholster my gun to climb up the cabin to reach the luggage rack. The ration bag clattered down as I descended the ladder, jumping the last few rungs to the floor.

No grox, I told myself, as I threw the bag over my shoulder and started back to the hab.

I hummed a tune to comfort myself. It was what I had done when a child, alone in the attic apartment, when the shadows seemed to have a life of their own. Gambol had sung it to me when I woke in the middle of the night. In that forsaken place I could see his eyes, the red veins standing out against his white-painted face.

I passed the pale bulk of the serf block, and turned left along the track to our hab, the working lumens guiding me home.

I was ensconced in my memories of Gambol when I saw a woman standing at the edge of the lumen’s pale reach. Her face was ashen and pinched – but what stood out were her eyes. They were black. So black they seemed to suck in the meagre light.

She was ten feet off. I stopped. ‘Who are you?’ I called.

Her fingers clutched the shawl that hooded her face. She did not speak, but took a step closer.

My hand went to my gun.

‘You are one of the enforcers?’ she said.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Agafa,’ she said. There was a pause. ‘You shouldn’t be here. The straw man does not like it.’

‘What straw man?’

The girl looked at me. Her eyes were like pits that felt as though they would suck me in. She was about to say something when a voice called, ‘Agafa!’

A moment later I saw the thin light of a hand-held lumen, hurrying towards me. It was carried by a woman. She approached the circle of light and I saw she was middle-aged, with a frizz of greying hair pulled into a rough knot behind her head. ‘Agafa!’ she shouted. ‘Come here!’

‘Wait – you were saying,’ I prompted the girl. ‘What is this straw man?’

Agafa looked to her mother, who took her arm and pulled her away. ‘Sorry, lord enforcer!’ the older woman said, fumbling with her words. ‘It’s just silly talk. We believe in the Emperor, and do our duties. We’re good people.’ She didn’t wait for me to respond but said, ‘Come, Agafa! It’s late to be out.’

When I got back to the hab the door was unlocked. It was ominously quiet. ‘Terrini?’ I called out as I pushed open the other man’s bedchamber door. The room was empty.

‘Terrini?’ I said, walking through into the galley. I searched each room, but Terrini was nowhere. I hurried out to the back porch and shouted his name.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Terrini cursed as the latrine door banged suddenly open. He pulled his belt buckle tight and strode back towards the hab. ‘Sheesh. Can’t a man even take a shit in peace?’

I felt stupid.

‘Got the recaff?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Thank the Throne!’

As we waited for the water to boil, I took my turn outside in the latrine while Terrini rolled a pair of lho-sticks.

The latrine was enclosed inside a wooden hut. It was all shadow. The door creaked open. I could sense the drop, and didn’t want to go inside. It had a scent that mixed counterseptic and the usual stale stink. I stopped in the doorway and relieved myself in the direction of the drop.

Afterwards, there was a plastek tub of water, with a ladle hanging off the side. I used it to splash water inside, then let the latrine door bang shut and hurried back to the hab, and locked and bolted the back door.

By the time I got inside, the pot had boiled and Terrini had spooned a thick dollop of recaff paste in the pan. He waited for it to melt and used the lid to strain the solids out.

‘Here,’ he said, passing me the mug, as I lit my lho-stick and then lit his. We sat and sipped it and I told Terrini about the girl, and this mention of the straw man.

Terrini exhaled a long plume of blue smoke. ‘“Straw man?” Who is the straw man?’

‘I don’t know. Her mother called her away before she elaborated,’ I said. ‘But one of the guys at the burial mentioned it, too. And there was that one at Mamma Jett’s. I dunno – just something about it feels off. She felt off.’

Terrini shook his head at me. ‘This is a farmstead. There are straw men everywhere. Don’t let them get to you,’ he said, as he found a pressed-steel plate to use as an ashtray. ‘It’s all the fault of that idiot bookkeeper. He’s too weak, impressionable. Men go native and start mixing with the serfs, and look what happens!’ He read my face. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll shoot some of them tomorrow, that’ll sort them out. Then we can head back home.’

Home, I thought, as I finished my lho-stick and ground the stub into the metal plate. It seemed suddenly so very far away.

That night, I closed the shutters on my chamber, checked the locks, flicked off my lumen and lay awake for a long time, listening to the mutterings of the wasteland.

In my dreams Agafa was standing over my bed. Black eyes, cold skin, that intense stare sucking all the life from the room. I tried to sit up, but she knelt down by the side of the bed and took my hands. ‘Beware the straw man!’ she hissed, and I woke with a start.

The room was empty, the door closed. I could hear Terrini’s snores from across the hallway.

The air felt cold. I pulled the blankets up to my shoulders, took in a deep breath and tried to calm my heartbeat as I tossed and turned for what felt like hours, waking and dozing, then waking once more.

In another dream I was in a cell in the basement of the Evercity Enforcer Block, tied to a chair. There was that distinctive smell of old blood, urine and pervasive damp, and I could hear the screams of deviants echoing outside. The sounds were coming towards me as the interrogator made their way along the line of cells.

I listened to the man in the chamber next to me. His cries started slowly then rose to a pitch of wild pain, before they fell silent. I could hear each scrunch of grit under the interrogator’s heavy boots, the jangle of keys, the heavy latch rising.

When the door opened, in the light of the corridor lumen I saw that the interrogator was my father. I should have felt a wave of relief, but as he padded into the room, I could see that he was not there to set me free. His hands were stained red. There was a knife in his fist, and when he spoke it was through fanged teeth. ‘Son,’ he rasped, ‘do you love me?’

It was not a question my father had ever asked before. It was not something I had ever had to think about. I feared my father, certainly, but love?

But I was no fool. ‘Yes, father!’ I said. ‘Of course.’

He came closer. One side of his face hung down, as if palsied. I saw to my horror that his throat had been cut from ear to ear, and that his front was soaked with blood. It glistened in the light. His breathing was laboured. ‘You want me to live?’

‘Of course, father.’

‘My rejuvenat is failing,’ he said, and gestured towards his neck. ‘They’re trying to kill me. You’re all trying to kill me.’

‘Not me, father.’

He swallowed and nodded as if he accepted my words. ‘You can help me,’ he said, bending towards me and pressing his knife to my cheek. He pressed so hard I felt my skin part, and warm blood started to ooze down my face. He was a master of pain. He always knew how hard to press to get what he wanted.

‘You want to help me?’ he asked.

‘Of course, father.’

He bent down towards me and whispered, ‘I need your liver.’

I paused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m going to cut it out.’

‘No,’ I said quickly, playing for time.

His eyes were heavy with reproach. ‘You do not love me.’

‘I do, father, but if I give you my liver then I’ll die.’

‘Why do you think you were born?’

Those words jolted me awake. Or was it a sound?

I turned over and thought I heard a gentle tapping on my window. I was out of bed in a moment, edging towards the shutters, and used the barrel of my pistol to open them a crack. I could see nothing, but the tapping continued. I unbolted my chamber and crept to the front door and slowly slid the bolt back. The tapping was clearer now.

‘Hello?’ I called.

I edged outside. The outside lumen cast a weak circle of light on the porch but little further. I went down the steps to investigate and was standing under my window when I saw it.

It was nothing but a cord, flapping in the breeze, nailed to the eaves and slapping against the window pane.

It came away with the first tug. I walked back inside and saw that the end of the cord had been twisted into a noose – and hanging from the end was a straw torso, small enough to fit inside my palm, a scrap of wire thrust through it to make arms and legs. It wore a tattered jacket of faded homespun and had a face of crudely fashioned wood, the mouth just a slit, the eyeholes drilled out.

CHAPTER 9

It took me a long time to go back to sleep after that, but when I eventually woke it was morning and I could hear Terrini shuffling around in the galley. He was making no effort to be quiet. He went through his routine as normal, sniffing loudly, clattering metallic pots. Soon, the water boiled and I smelt the rich scent of freshly brewed recaff and the smoke of Terrini’s lho-stick.

I pushed myself up. It was still early. Slanting light fell through the shutters. There was the rumble of far-off engines, the sound so low that the air seemed to vibrate. So, the harvest had started, I told myself, as I swung my legs over the edge of my bed and rested my head in my hands. The noose was lying on the floor nearby.

I pulled on my bodyglove, buckled on my armour and helmet, holstered my Tronsvasse.

‘Afternoon,’ Terrini said. ‘Recaff?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but handed one to me. ‘Here.’

The first sip jolted me awake. I took another sip before holding out the miniature straw man. ‘I found this last night,’ I said. ‘Hung outside my window.’

Terrini picked it up. The eyes were like black holes, sucking in the thin morning light.

‘Was it there before we went to bed?’

‘No idea.’

He looked at the thing in silence for a long time. ‘You think Unworthy is trying to frighten us?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘This doesn’t seem his style.’

We sat in silence, sipping and smoking as we readied ourselves for the day ahead. Terrini’s mood was darkening as he thought about the attempted threat. ‘Ask any healer. They’ll tell you. There’s no point administering medicine unless you’ve diagnosed the illness. Most places, shooting the serfs works, but sometimes the sickness lies within the crew. Sometimes it’s even the bookkeeper. Sometimes the whole place is rotten to the core.

‘I did a tour a few years ago, where the whole place was run by the Banda. They had bought every single man, woman and child, and they were adulterating their loaders with shredded straw, and selling the good stuff off to merchant adventurers through one of the orbital stations in return for obscura. The whole place appeared well run. It was as slick as oil. They acted all friendly at first, and then, when we started sniffing round, they got scared. We brought in support and wiped them out.’

‘Do you think something like that is happening here?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

I thought about that. We were a long way from any support. ‘Should we make contact with the Evercity?’

Terrini paused. ‘I don’t think this lot are competent enough to be running a scam, do you?’

I shook my head.

‘What did that girl say to you again?’

‘“Beware of the straw man”,’ I said.

He laughed as he tapped the ash from the end of his lho-stick. ‘Damn rustics. They’re too remote, that’s all. I think we’ll have to shoot a few of them today, just to get them focused.’

As we finished our recaff there was a knock at the door.

It was Hamber. ‘I just wanted to let you know, sir. The harvesters have been assembled and are ready. The bookkeeper wanted to know if you would like to attend the blessing.’

Terrini looked to me, and I was keen to learn about these farmsteads. Wasn’t this what my trip was all about? I thought. I should take every opportunity to learn.

‘Of course,’ I said, and finished my recaff in a single gulp. ‘Let’s go.’

The harvesters were heavy, tracked engines with turret pilot cabins set before their high chimney stacks and mowing arms folded upon themselves, until they reached the fields. We arrived as Enginseer Gad limped his way along the files of parked vehicles, stopping before each to bless their engines and anoint them with unguents and holy oils. A couple of serfs trailed along behind him, holding his equipment, and chanting simple prayers.

Only once this process was complete were the machine-spirits roused from sleep. Their engines started up with dark puffs of promethium smoke. The rattle of each built to a steady roar, until every vehicle was adding to the thick clouds of fumes.

The crews mounted up and the ancillary serfs clambered back aboard their transports – a motley collection of farm trucks, dirty bikes converted into unsteady three-wheelers, and Goliaths retired from service elsewhere, repaired and modified, presumably by Gad.

Once all of the engines were roaring their faith in the Emperor, Gad blessed the serfs as well. I’d not heard his prayer before, but it covered familiar ground: the sacrifices of the God-Emperor and Omnissiah, the serfs’ own privileged lives – blessed with all manner of machinery and free from heresy and xenos threat – and how, by bringing in the corn, they would provide His armies with victuals and oil the cogs of the Imperium of Man.

When he had finished, one of the crews was still waiting for their overseer to appear.

‘What’s wrong?’ Capo called. ‘Who is taking this lot out?’

‘Dunne,’ Hamber shouted.

‘Where is he?’

All the overseers looked at each other. No one had seen him.

Capo stepped forward. ‘Hamber, you go!’

Hamber grabbed a spare ammo belt from one of the others, and clambered aboard.

‘Right!’ Capo shouted, and waved them off with both hands. ‘For the Emperor!’

His shout was answered and Gad limped quickly out of the way as, one by one, the harvesters rolled out of their barn, the drivers making the sign of the aquila.

‘That’s a fine sight, isn’t it?’ Capo said, as the tracked vehicles headed out towards the fields. A trail of dust settled behind them.

‘It is.’ I nodded. ‘The Emperor is beneficent.’

The enginseer approached. ‘We should thank you both for your help.’

Terrini waved a hand dismissively. He was all bonhomie now that the harvest was underway. ‘We each serve in our own way,’ he said. ‘Each according to his means and talent. Now, what is the problem with Dunne?’

Capo’s one eye looked at Terrini and then at me. ‘I sent him to the plant houses.’

We did not think anything more of it, but by midday Dunne had still not returned, so Capo, Terrini and I went to investigate. It was half an hour’s drive towards a water head and a line of domes marking each plant house.

Dunne’s Goliath was parked outside. We pulled up alongside it. The Goliath was empty and there was no sign of Dunne – only a vox-set, lying on the seat.

I took it out and flipped it on. ‘Dunne?’ I called.

There was a crackle of static.

‘He’s not answering,’ I told the others.

Terrini nodded. ‘Come on. Let’s go inside.’

Algae was one of the staple foodstuffs that Potence supplied to the Munitorum. It was cooked then dried into thin, nutrient-rich sheets that could be added to slab stew. It was brewed up in great vats, and harvested every week. It was clear that this had not been happening here. The venting towers were silent and the plex-glass domes of the plant houses were misted up and smeared with strands of green algae.

We made our way down the steps together. Capo had a bunch of keys at his belt. The lock had been opened. The metal shutters clattered up, seeming too loud in the sudden stillness.

The sight that greeted us was like a jungle. Even in a week, the long tiers of micro-greens had overwhelmed their trays. Hot, foetid air rolled out, bringing with it the damp stink of putrid vegetation. It smelt like a bog.

‘Can we get the lumens on?’ Terrini said.

There was a row of lever switches by the door. I pulled one, but nothing happened. ‘Dunne!’ I shouted, but the wet vegetation seemed to muffle noise.

‘Try the vox again,’ Terrini said.

It crackled with static.

‘Dunne?’ I called again.

The static crackled on. I slapped the handset into my palm. ‘Dunne?’

Nothing.

‘Come on,’ Terrini said as we set off into the swirling, humid air. ‘Let’s have a look.’

‘I’ll stay here,’ Capo said.

‘No,’ Terrini told him. ‘You come with us.’

We split up, each taking a row of the long plant house.

Narrow walkways stretched the whole length of the structure and stacked up on either side were tiers of long micro vats. The algae had grown out of control, far taller than their fibrous stems were designed to support. They had flopped out from their vats, blocking our lines of vision. They had not been harvested for months, and now the only illumination came from the thin spears of light stabbing down through the green gloom.

The thick, rotting vegetation seemed to go on and on. At last we reached the end, and turned down another row. ‘Dunne?’ I called out.

I passed an intersection and something wet slapped against my arm. I presumed it was a piece of vegetation but it stuck to my skin, and as I brushed it off with my hand, it clung to me.

I let out a shout when I saw what it was: a human hand, severed at the wrist.

‘I’ve found a hand!’ I called out, and pushed on and found a web of intestines, looped across the walkway. ‘Dunne?’ I called out, but the jungle seemed to soak up my voice. ‘Dunne?’

Dunne’s body lay face down just beyond the next intersection. A trail of dried blood ran along the floor. Scabs caked the side of his head. The face was already black and bloated. ‘He’s here!’ I shouted, recognising him as one of the men from the meal the night before.

Whatever had cut through the belly had made a hell of a mess. The edges of the wounds were torn and shredded. It was as if a chainsaw had been taken to him, or a savage beast. One wound ran from his navel to halfway up his chest. His sternum had been sawn through to get at his lungs and heart. And his insides had been pulled out. They hung from racks on either side, the surfaces of the kidneys and heart and liver starting to harden in the humid warmth.

Terrini pulled a face.

‘Come on, let’s get him out of here,’ I said.

It was hard pulling the dead weight through the tangle of clinging algae fronds. Terrini and I took a leg each. We got him to the door and let his legs drop, and left him there as we got a breath of the clean, fresh air.

We were both sweating. We looked to Capo to understand what had gone on. He shook his head. ‘I have no answers…’ he said.

Terrini went to look at Dunne’s body. ‘Was he a gambler?’

Capo shook his head. Terrini went through the list of common causes of murder. Affairs of the heart, drunkenness, grievances that others would want to settle.

Capo frowned and ran a hand across his head. ‘No. Nothing more than any other man.’

I turned Dunne over. ‘Here,’ I said to Terrini.

His black hair was matted with blood. Terrini knelt down next to me and pulled the hair aside. There was a neat round hole in the back of his head. Terrini stuck his finger into the wound.

‘Was he shot?’ I asked.

Terrini paused, feeling inside. ‘I don’t feel a round…’ There was a long pause as he gauged the depth. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and stood and went to the nearest vat to wash his hands. He dried them on the front of his jacket. ‘It might be a pick. Or a bolt gun.’

‘So not the missing grox,’ I said.

‘No,’ Terrini replied.

I thought of the bodies at Mamma Jett’s. They had all been eaten, but Dunne had been mutilated.

‘There was a killer. And the killer is still abroad.’ Terrini turned to Capo. ‘Who else was missing this morning?’

Capo put the heel of his hand to his temple. ‘I can’t think of anyone.’

‘There had to be someone.’

He tapped his head as he thought aloud. ‘The overseers were all there… and Gad.’

‘Was Unworthy there?’

‘No.’

‘And the serfs?’

Capo didn’t know. ‘I couldn’t tell, to be honest.’

‘Well, find out,’ Terrini said.

CHAPTER 10

When we got back to the command block, Hamber was waiting for us on the steps. He read our faces as we parked the Goliath and slid down from its cabin.

‘Found him?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Dead.’

The servo-skull hummed through the doorway on its morning tour of the facilities, palsied limbs hanging hunched underneath it and spine trailing behind.

‘Vox message from the crews on the northern stretch,’ Hamber said. ‘Possible grox sighting.’

We went inside to look at a map. Hamber pointed out the spot where the grox had been seen. It was a long way from Mamma Jett’s.

‘Well,’ Terrini said, ‘shall we go for a hunt?’

He looked at Hamber, not me, and I felt disappointed.

‘I can come,’ I said, but Terrini gave me a look. ‘Stay here and have a look around.’

I started to argue but he put up a finger, and afterwards, when we were standing alone, he said, ‘I’d like to get Hamber by himself. See if he will open up.’

‘Sure,’ I said, but I’d rather have gone hunting.

I watched Hamber and Terrini set off in our halftrack, a pair of long-las rifles leaning out of the passenger side window.

I set off down the path that led towards our hab, but carried on along the long line of barns. The scents of the countryside rose about me: dry earth, old dung piles, mouldering meal-sacks, sprouting grass. I could smell the stink of the grox pits long before I reached them. Grass was growing through piles of rusting machinery, a cargo-6 without tyres, and an old ploughing rig. Somewhere, a distant engine started with a low splutter. I could hear the scrape of metal pots being cleaned, a man clearing his throat and spitting, the scrape of a brush along a rockcrete surface.

A raised flakboard roof covered the grox pits at the end of the barns. I got there as the servo-skull was hovering at the maintenance cabin of the power fencing. Blue voltaic pulses sporadically flared. It hovered there for a moment, data-input plugged into the continuity engines.

The air crackled with energy. I went as close as I dared and peered down. All I saw were needle-sharp teeth, reptilian skin, pulsing dewlaps, and beetle-black eyes staring at me. The stench of ammonia, rotting feed and dung rose up.

‘Greetings,’ a voice said.

I spun about.

A thin, dark-haired man, with the damp stub of a lho-stick in his mouth, was watching me.

‘Better be careful, enforcer.’ He nodded towards the fencing. ‘Galvanic. Only stuns them, but it would fry you.’

‘I guessed.’

He came to stand next to me and looked down as well. ‘I’m Kossu,’ he said. ‘Grox-herd.’

I shook his hand. Grox-herds were Munitorum staff. A separate class of worker from the serfs and overseers. ‘They’re hatchlings. Only a month old. Ugly bastards, aren’t they?’

‘When do they go for slaughter?’

‘Another month, if they’re well fed,’ Kossu said. There was a pause as I took them in.

A squabble broke out amongst the reptiles below. We could hear the hissing as they fought amongst themselves. It was like a ripple through the herd. They picked on a wounded grox, and in a moment it was surrounded by snapping jaws, and desperately trying to fend them off.

It had no chance. The other grox set upon it with merciless hunger. Its dewlaps flared, it bared its fangs, and its long tail lashed about, but its fellow hatchlings were unperturbed. They started to tear chunks off its haunches, and then the largest of them caught its neck in its jaws, and crushed the breath from it.

There was a moment of savage violence as we watched it die with a paralysed gasp of breath. Then came a furious melee as the herd clawed over each other for the fresh meat.

In a minute it was over. There was not even a bone left. Nothing.

‘You don’t worry about them killing each other?’

Kossu laughed. ‘No. I deliver meat by weight, not by the head of grox. If they eat one, the others get bigger.’ He paused. ‘Are you the ones who found Mamma Jett?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded and sniffed again. ‘And I hear you let one go…?’

‘My colleague is hunting it down now.’

‘No need,’ the man said.

‘No?’

‘It’ll come here soon enough. They follow their noses, and everything edible is here. Want to see the daddy?’

I didn’t bother arguing as he led me along to another sunken feed pit a hundred yards further out. It was twice as deep as the other pit and covered with a cage-grid of welded I-beams. The bars were bent and misshapen. There was a strong, musky scent: the stink of an apex predator.

I almost feared to look over the edge.

When I did I took in an involuntary breath. The grox within was curled up, but even gathered in, it was enormous. It was as long as a cargo-6, and had the compressed energy of a coiled spring. Only its head moved. It was a wedge of malevolence, swinging on the end of a long neck. The eyes were small black points in the heavy skull. At the front of its snout were long nostrils that opened independently as it detected the presence of the newcomers. Its forked tongue tasted the air and it slithered towards us.

‘The hatchlings are lobotomised,’ Kossu said. ‘Takes a few seconds. Drill out the left lobe, around the ear. Stops them eating each other. You couldn’t keep them in a herd otherwise. They’d be a pile of bones and one fucking big monster. This one though… We always keep one unblemished, otherwise he won’t fertilise the eggs. Drill out the brain and it takes away the urge, know what I mean?’

I did, but at that moment its sinuous head curled up, vivid red dewlaps flared out to either side as it hissed at us. I didn’t hear what else he told me. I could not take my eyes off it. That grox was the most frightening thing I had ever seen. Even now I cannot think of a living thing that has inspired such terror. It was pure beast.

He tapped my arm. ‘You’re lucky. It’s feeding time!’

He moved to the side of the pen and slowly cranked a metal cogwheel. It was stiff with dried crud. At last the duct opened and a trickle of slop began to accelerate, then to pour steadily. A slurry of human waste and grit filled the waiting trough.

Kossu rejoined me as we watched the thing gulp the filth down with hungry grunts. The beast was totally focused on feeding, and when it was done it started to lick at the slops, then belched, spewed up a little, and ate its own vomit, before slithering to the corner.

‘There was a straw man at Mamma Jett’s,’ I said.

Kossu looked at me and licked his lips. ‘This is a farm,’ he said. ‘The barns are full of straw men…’

‘I’ve heard they turn up when people die.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Who should I talk to?’

Kossu let out a long sigh. ‘Listen, enforcer. I don’t think anyone is going to talk to you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If you stay here long enough, you get the feel of Thorsarbour. It’s not normal. Things go wrong. I’ve seen it time and again.’

‘Like what?’

‘Taru. Raine. Talia. Mamma Jett. And it went on before I arrived.’

‘What about Unworthy?’

Kossu took the wet stub of lho-stick from his mouth. ‘He’s like carrion. He’s drawn here by the deaths. I keep myself to myself, and say my prayers every night to the God-Emperor. He protects me.’ He pointed north. ‘Know why they built that wall? It was to keep people out. The ancients understood. We shouldn’t be here.’

I left to make my way back on the outer side of the barns. The fields began a few yards to my left; the corn stalks were twenty feet high, the heads heavy with grain.

On a hunch I walked into one of the barns. There was a pile of round bales, rising up to the roof. The other half of the barn was filled with clutter. There was a beaten sign leant against one of the posts. No trespassing, it read. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.

I bent under an old shed awning. The entrance had been screened off with a piece of corrugated roofing. The steel had rusted through into sharp edges. I lifted it carefully away and pushed inside. The interior was dark. Through the weatherboard, stripes of light did little to illuminate the space.

I paused, letting my eyes get used to the darkness.

One of the roof rafters had fallen in. A rusting truck took up most of the space. The engine panels had once been painted in Richstar colours, but were now chipped and scratched and rusted through. The tracks had been removed; the track wheels still had thick black grease smeared over their moving parts.

Webs caught my face. I brushed them off and pushed past rolls of wire, old farming implements with broken shafts.

Hanging on a nail in the wall was a woven figure. I picked it off. It was similar to the one I had found nailed above my window. A country charm with a crudely formed jacket that had once been blue. I turned it over in my hand. The eyes had been bored out. I stuffed it into my pocket and moved deeper into the shadows.

A sudden movement made me start.

It was just a colony of imhis hanging from the intersection of the rafters. They squeaked in alarm. I swatted them away as they flapped into my face. There was a stack of boards propped against the wall. Droppings had smeared them all. The first was an old, warped noticeboard. Faded papers were pinned to it with rusted tacks. The notices were filled with the slogans common to this kind of establishment. Nearby was an old sign, words printed on it in block capitals. I pulled it closer; it read: CLEAR THE XENOS, PLOUGH THE LAND, FEED THE GALAXY.

I let it fall back, then looked again.

The title was not Thorsarbour, but ‘Valgaast’.

The name disturbed me. As I stood there, a voice said suddenly, ‘Morning, enforcer.’

I dropped the sign as I spun about.

In the shadows stood Unworthy. He smiled. ‘This is a strange place to find you,’ he said.

Next to him was a straw man in a sun-bleached top, a battered hat thrust down onto its head, propped up against the wall.

‘What are you doing with that?’ I demanded.

He looked at the straw man next to him. ‘This is a farmstead…’ he said. ‘There are hundreds of straw men.’

‘You’re the second person to tell me that.’

He looked at me with a smirk. ‘They are here to scare off vermin.’

‘There was one outside Mamma Jett’s. There was one outside the plant house this morning.’

‘Oh,’ he said, a smile playing about his mouth. ‘What happened at the plant house?’

‘I wonder if you know?’

He shook his head.

‘Where were you this morning?’

‘Why should I tell you?’

‘Where were you?’ I said again.

He paused, sensing the threat in my voice. ‘I was at prayer,’ he said.

‘Anyone with you?’

‘No.’ He looked at the straw man standing next to him and said, ‘Why is everyone so concerned about petty things? It’s a straw man. Nothing more.’

To prove his point he knocked the scarecrow over. It slid sideways, and caught on the fallen rafter.

‘You should not believe every tattletale you hear,’ Unworthy said as he stepped towards me.

He had sliced the end of his tongue right through and, as he licked his lips, I saw that it was forked, like a reptile’s. He came so close I could see the pores of his skin, the surface tension in the droplet of blood under his eye as it filled, then slid a red path down his cheek – but I refused to stand back.

‘Have you seen this sign for a place called Valgaast?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Where’s it from?’

‘Valgaast. Obviously.’ He repeated the name in a lisping hiss.

‘But where is that?’

‘No idea. What’s the matter, enforcer? Does that name disturb you?’

‘No,’ I lied.

His eyes were wide. ‘I love the taste of it. The first time I read that sign aloud, I felt physical pain. Now when I say it, I taste blood. I come here just to read that name. Each night I repeat it as part of my mortifications, and I know that I am doing His will. Though it makes my skin crawl,’ he whispered. Then he said, ‘Do you dream, enforcer?’

I shook my head.

I saw a glint of steel as he lifted his hand to his cheek. The skin indented as he pressed it in. It was clear, even in the half-light. The silver edge pressed against living flesh, and the flesh parted and blood welled up. ‘I dream,’ he said. ‘And I bleed. I always see blood. The God-Emperor is so hungry. We cannot keep Him satisfied. He is consuming us all.’

The whole time he was speaking his blood ran freely. I had seen worse in the confession chambers of the Evercity, but even so there was something unnerving about the look in the man’s eye. He seemed to be enjoying my discomfort. ‘You know why Mamma Jett died?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

Unworthy stepped forward. ‘Because she was a sinner. The God-Emperor sees everything. He is unhappy with us. He disapproves.’

The blood was running so fast it trickled down the side of his palm, all the way to his wrist. He lifted his arm and licked up its length. I could see the broken veins in his cheeks. ‘If you have faith then you need to bleed,’ he said, and reached for me.

I shoved him and he stumbled back over the machinery, and fell heavily, razor still in hand.

‘Touch me again and I will shoot you,’ I told him.

He glared up at me. ‘The Emperor sees all our sins,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘My sins are between the Emperor and me. I’ll talk to Him when that time comes.’

‘You cannot hide from the Golden Throne!’ he called after me, and I left him to his sanguinary ablutions.

I was glad to get back into the daylight. As the serfs were out in the fields I thought I would look inside their barracks. It was a filthy place, the walls smeared with religious texts and hand marks of blood. Each room was littered with old food wrappers and a few pitiful possessions: clothes, footwear, the plastek head of a child’s toy. In the corners were scraps of bedding and filth. There were roaches everywhere – their shiny carapaces darting for cover as I stepped forward.

Behind the serf block was a run of work sheds. In the stillness of the heat, sound travelled, and I could hear voices from inside.

I found the source. There was a small doorway in the side of a large flakboard construction. Through a narrow atrium was a room with a cast iron shredder – a great beast, with a broad funnel for taking corn stalks, the scraps fired out the back. The engine casing was lifted high and propped open, and Perin stood at the side, someone beside him.

‘Enforcer,’ he said by way of greeting.

The other man looked up. It was Hamber. ‘How did the hunt go?’ I asked.

Hamber pulled himself out. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Good.’

‘Did you find it?’

‘We did,’ he said. ‘Terrini bagged it. He was very proud of himself. Cut off the head for a trophy.’

He wiped the sweat from his forehead on the back of his arm.

‘So,’ I started. ‘I met a girl last night.’ I gestured with my hand. ‘This tall. Black hair. Dark eyes. Kind of odd. I’d like to speak with her.’

I could see from his face that he knew who I was talking about straight away.

‘Agafa. She’s the ale-wife’s daughter.’ He looked to Perin. ‘Why don’t you show Enforcer Howe the way.’

Perin led me around the back of the serf block to a low, rockcrete structure. ‘This is the brewhouse,’ he said. He knocked on the flakboard door, before shoving it open.

Inside the air was warm and humid. There were wide cauldrons, brimful of bubbling brown mash. They gave off a sour, malty scent.

A stout woman in a white apron was stirring the far pot with a long wooden paddle. She hadn’t heard us. ‘Murgia!’ Perin shouted. ‘This is Enforcer Howe. He’s looking for your daughter.’

Murgia put the paddle down and came towards us, shoving up her sleeves like a man striding into a fight. It was the middle-aged woman I had seen last night. ‘Greetings, enforcer,’ she said.

‘Where’s your daughter?’ I asked. ‘I want to talk to her.’

She wiped her hands on her apron. ‘She’s a good girl, sir, but she’s never been right up there. Ever since she could talk. She feels things powerfully.’

‘Where is she?’ I said in a tone that told her to shut up.

She nodded and bobbed. ‘Sorry, sir.’ She took in a deep breath. ‘Follow me.’

She led me to a lean-to at the back of the brewhouse. The space inside was dark and smelt foetid – of too much humanity in too small a space. I had thought that darkness had played tricks on me the night before, and made an apparition out of a human face, but I saw that in daylight, Agafa was even more disturbing.

She was pale as a sheet, with black eyes in deep, sunken sockets. It was the eyes that threw me. There was no white at all, just pits of darkness. She had the look of a plague-child. A face malformed by evil. ‘Enforcer Howe,’ the girl said. ‘I know what you are going to ask. You want to know about the straw man…’

I felt sweat on my back, and suddenly my mouth was full of spittle. For a moment I thought I was going to be sick. Quickly, I tried to pull myself together. ‘Agafa. This thing – this straw man… Why do you believe it to be responsible for the stuff that’s going on here?’

‘Do you know the real name of this place?’ she asked.

I paused, tense, fearing what she would say, and her black eyes looked at me slowly and deliberately as she said the same word that had been written upon the sign in the barn. The one that Unworthy had uttered with such relish.

‘I– Stop. Was the straw man responsible for the death of Mamma Jett?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, without hesitation. ‘It will kill all of us.’

‘But why?’ Agafa stared at me for a moment, then shook her head, and said nothing. I tried again. ‘Have you seen it?’

‘Of course!’ she said.

‘What does it want?’

‘It wants us to leave. It does not like us here. This is not a place for humanity.’ She started speaking again, and then her eyes rolled up into her head and she sat there, shaking. ‘Oh!’ she said, hugging herself as she started to rock back and forth. ‘It is coming…’

‘Where?’

She started to shake violently.

‘Where!’ I demanded. She shook her head. ‘I can’t,’ she said. She suddenly jerked upright, then shook her head and put her palms to her temples, as if she wanted to crush her skull. ‘Stop!’ she hissed, her eyes clamped shut. Blood gathered in the seams of her eyelids and started to drip down her face. ‘It’s coming!’ she said again as she squeezed her blood-gummed eyes tighter, pressed her hands against her head anew, and screamed.

Moments later, I heard shouts of alarm from outside and hurried out through the brewhouse.

The first person I saw was Terrini. He had come at a jog. Perin was with him, the overseer looking as pale as a sheet of paper.

‘It’s Hamber,’ Perin said breathlessly. ‘There was an accident. The shredder started up while he was working on it.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know, sir. It shouldn’t happen. It can’t happen. Not unless someone started it.’

I caught the look in Terrini’s eye. It was sceptical.

Perin led us to the shed door. The scent of promethium fumes hung in the air. He paused before we went in. ‘Sir, I’m a military man, but I’m warning you… It’s a mess.’

‘I’ve seen many things,’ Terrini said. He put his hand out. ‘Perin. Your lumen.’

The overseer unclipped it from his belt and handed it over.

Terrini looked at me. ‘Shall we?’

CHAPTER 11

It took me a moment before my eyes became accustomed to the sudden gloom, and then Terrini clicked the lumen on. The light it gave off was a fierce blue-white. We stepped towards the chamber containing the shredder. At the doorway I caught the familiar, metallic scent of blood and my skin began to goose-pimple.

The scent of promethium fumes hung in the air. Terrini strode forward and stopped in the middle of the room, panning the lumen about the chamber. It was a storage shed. The walls were hung with all manner of agricultural implements: hoes, scythes, forks, threshers, scourers and a spindle-driven seed drill, and in front of them a recently serviced chisel plough, a topper.

Before us was the shredder. It was just as I had left it, except Hamber was no longer there, just the scent of blood.

Perin had followed us in. He stood in the doorway and said, ‘We found it just like this. Just as you see it.’

Terrini looked about. Liquid was dripping down the far wall. He puffed out his cheeks as he took in the mess. ‘It’s a damned shambles,’ he said.

I thought that was the understatement of the year. This wasn’t a murder, it was an evisceration. Terrini took it all in. At last he touched my arm and pointed upwards. A word had been scratched onto the ceiling. I saw the first letter and knew what it said.

‘Valgaast,’ Terrini sounded, with obvious distaste.

‘It’s an old name for this place,’ I said.

He stepped closer to the far wall. A fine mist of blood hung in the air. The wall was covered in gobbets of gore. Bone, flesh, muscle, all reduced to shreds that had been splattered over every surface.

The overwhelming stench made me gag.

‘So he started it up and accidentally fell in…’ Terrini said.

Perin did not come inside, but stayed in the doorway. ‘That’s impossible. There is a safety catch.’

Terrini turned. ‘Suicide?’

I laughed despite myself. ‘There are easier ways to kill yourself.’ Terrini nodded. Throwing yourself into a shredder seemed a masochistic way to end your life. ‘And I saw him just an hour ago,’ I added. ‘He did not look like a man who was about to meet the Emperor.’

‘Was he unpopular?’ Terrini said to Perin.

‘No more than anyone else.’

‘Wife?’

‘She died.’

‘When?’

‘Six years ago. In childbirth.’

‘And the child?’

‘Died as well.’

Terrini frowned. ‘Did anyone hold a grudge?’

Perin shook his head. ‘You knew him. He was a good man, he kept himself to himself.’

I turned it over in my mind. ‘A shredder. That’s a brutal way to kill a man. Someone was unhappy.’

Perin scratched his head, but he did not come up with a name.

Terrini let his breath whistle out between his teeth as he took in the sight one last time. Here and there I could make out an ear, a finger, what looked like part of an arm.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to him. ‘I know you two served together.’

‘Someone was frightened of what he might tell me… Who else has seen this?’

‘Only us three,’ Perin said.

Terrini puffed out his cheeks and let out a long, deep breath. ‘Lock it,’ he said at last. He took the key and put it into his pocket. ‘I will speak to Capo. In the meantime, I think it’s best if we keep this to ourselves.’ He paused. ‘Capo is in the fields. When is he due back?’

‘This afternoon.’

Terrini nodded. ‘We need to speak to the Evercity. Is there a vox?’

‘Yes,’ Perin said. He inhaled deeply. ‘I’ll show you.’

The farmstead’s vox-unit was kept in an alcove of its own in the command block.

‘We don’t use it often,’ Perin said apologetically as he unbolted the two doors top and bottom and swung them open.

The vox-alcove was not much bigger than a closet. It was spotless – no dust, no mess, nothing to show common usage. It was as if the unit were kept like an altar. The machine was an ancient beast: there were levers and buttons to engage the motivators, and its brass pipes and ducting took up half the confined space. The front panels were of polished wood, and there was an iron skull and a vox-horn handset set into the fascia.

Just the sight of it quelled the noise in the room. It was as if that skull were the God-Emperor Himself, looking out at us. Perin made the sign of the aquila and stepped forward.

‘I’ve seen it done enough times…’

He moved methodically through the routines rousing the machine-spirit. As he engaged the power stud, the lumens within the skull’s eye sockets lit up. At that moment, one of the overseers who had come back from the fields stumbled in on us.

‘Get him out of here!’ Terrini said.

I shoved the man out of the room as Terrini entered the small alcove.

Perin had more sense than to stay. ‘I’ll go and keep an eye out,’ he said.

I closed the door as Terrini sat down. The skull face was three times larger than a human head. It stared down on Terrini and made it look as though the enforcer were communing with Death itself.

Terrini took a brass headset off a rack to the side and set it upon his head, winding a wood-and-brass handle at the side. I could hear a low whine of galvanic motors. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time before the note of the humming changed. I felt the atmosphere in the room start to change as the lights of the skull glowed brighter.

The air began to vibrate and the hairs of my arms stood on end. Gears and cogs turned within the device. Terrini suddenly sat up straight and stated his name and rank into the handset. A panel opened, he pressed his hand onto it and a needle pricked his finger. After a long pause the lights of the vox changed hue, and the glowing eyes pulsed and flickered as if there were a sentience within them. I felt the air turn cold.

‘Yes,’ Terrini said, repeating his credentials. ‘Enforcer, first class. At Thorsarbour.’ He clearly knew the man on the other end. I could picture him on the cogitator as he ran investigations. Terrini had a list of names before him. He went through them all, starting with Unworthy. He drummed his fingers absent-mindedly onto the tabletop. He checked on the records of Taru’s death, Taru’s service record.

All of a sudden he said, ‘Are you sure?’

I listened now, but could hear nothing of what was being said to him.

‘Very interesting,’ Terrini said. ‘A manumission, granted by Taru? What was the date of that?’ He frowned as he listened, repeating the information so that I might hear. ‘Right. So Taru granted her manumission, and two months later he dies… That smells, doesn’t it?’

Who? I mouthed silently, but he clearly wanted to keep his little secret, and kept me guessing until the end.

‘Thank you,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, no doubt, we’ll see you back at the Evercity.’ He closed the link down and took a deep breath. ‘Well, the tithe fleet has arrived.’

‘Already?’ I said, though I knew that the warp was an unreliable road.

‘They’ll be docking in a week’s time.’

A week, I thought. That would be enough time to get the harvest in. ‘And what about Hamber?’

Terrini pushed himself up as he wiped the blood from his fingertip. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It seems that there are unpleasant links between my old friend Taru and Murgia. Come, let’s see what the ale-wife has to say for herself.’

We left the alcove, closing the door behind us.

‘Perin, is there somewhere we can talk to Murgia?’ Terrini asked.

‘There are rooms in the basement.’

‘Show me.’

Perin led us to a food storeroom filled with sacks of grain, and a pair of lock-ups.

‘We use these for drunks,’ the overseer said. There was a narrow-barred skylight and three chairs stacked atop one another, and while there was no cot there was a mattress and a blanket in the corner of the room.

‘Good,’ Terrini said. ‘Go get her.’

Outside, the sun was at its zenith. All the shadows had shrunk back from the intense light, and the glaring heat was oppressive. Murgia was sitting in her brewhouse, fanning herself with the end of her apron as we pushed inside.

She had heard the alarm, and said, ‘Is he dead?’

I didn’t see any point in hiding it. ‘He is. And we’d like to talk to you about that.’

She dropped the corner of her apron. ‘Why?’

‘Terrini will talk to you about that.’

‘I’d better turn this down,’ she said, and went to one of her cauldrons and adjusted it. ‘Can I speak to my daughter?’

‘No,’ I said.

We escorted her out of the brewhouse. She tried to make conversation, but neither of us were forthcoming. We mounted the steps of the command block. Murgia stopped at the door. ‘Inside?’ she said.

I nodded.

She was hesitant, I pushed her through. Once inside the atrium she stopped again.

‘Down the stairs,’ I told her.

She went ahead of us, and halfway down she seemed to panic. She turned around and tried to push past us. She was a strong woman. Perin and I caught her and dragged her down. She fought every inch of the way to the basement. We were sweating by the time we pulled her inside.

Terrini was waiting. He shut the door behind us as we hauled her across the room and thrust her down into the chair.

She knew she was beaten, and sat still.

‘Ale-wife,’ Terrini said. ‘Tell me, why were you sentenced to serfdom?’

She was a confident woman. ‘I did wrong,’ she said. ‘But I have worked hard since. I’m a loyal servant of the Emperor.’

Terrini sniffed as he turned towards her. He pulled a chair over, and put his foot up on it.

‘Are you?’

She nodded.

‘Tell me, why did Taru grant you manumission?’

She shrugged. ‘I worked hard,’ she said. ‘I kept myself clean.’

‘Clean from what?’

She stammered for a moment, looking for an answer, but stopped as Terrini came closer. He bent down, till his head was next to hers, and said, ‘Think of yourself as a patient. Inside you is a cancer that will devour you. Only I can save you. I am the surgeon. I can remove the tumour. But unless you tell me the truth, it will be hard for me. I will have to dig around. You wouldn’t want that. It can get messy. The patient usually dies.’

She flushed at these words, and looked at him and nodded, but she didn’t speak.

He smiled. ‘Listen. This will be easier if you assume that I know the truth. Because I will get it out of you. So first, let’s start again. Why were you sent here? And more importantly, why weren’t you shot?’

‘I was with child,’ she said.

‘Before or after you were taken?’

‘Before,’ she said.

‘And your child is…’

‘Agafa.’

‘She is a strange child.’

‘She’s a good girl.’

‘And whose was she?’

Murgia blushed.

‘Was she Taru’s?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘You’re lying.’

She set her jaw hard.

‘Is that how you won your freedom?’

‘No!’

Terrini paused. ‘I knew Taru. We served together. He saved you from execution, didn’t he?’ Terrini went on. ‘And he died just two months after he freed you. Were you involved?’

‘No, sir! I mourned him. We all did. He was a good man.’

‘Was he?’

There was a long pause. Murgia was clearly holding something back, but Terrini was determined. He set his jaw hard as he stood over her. ‘And now you’re the ale-wife.’

She put her chin out. ‘I serve the Emperor in my own little way.’

‘I have just spoken to the Evercity… You were a bad woman, weren’t you? Seems a stupid thing to do, to put a woman guilty of dealing in narcotics in charge of supplying ale.’

Murgia clammed up.

‘Do you know why Taru was sent here?’

She shook her head but there was a slight colour in her cheeks, an uncertain flicker in her eyes, quickly subdued as she shifted her weight.

Terrini paused, took out the leather pouch from his pocket, slid a paper, carefully filled it with dried leaves, then rolled, licked and tapped down either end.

It was slow, deliberate, supremely confident. He retrieved his lighter, sparked the flint with his thumb, sucked the flame into the lho-stick. He breathed the smoke deep, and leant forward and let it out in a long plume.

‘You don’t know why he was sent here?’

She shook her head.

‘Really?’

She stared at him defiantly. ‘I do not know.’

Terrini took another long drag and then dropped the lho-stick onto the floor and ground the flame out with his boot. ‘You’re lying,’ he said again.

Murgia tried to look impassive, but I saw her pause and lick her lips.

Of course, I had seen this process before – and I have seen it many times since. But this was the first time I watched it all unfold before me: the guilty working out how much to tell the interrogator, wondering whether she could fob him off with a lie.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Terrini’s hand lashed out. The smack was audible and Murgia fell backwards. She landed heavily on her side. Terrini nodded towards me. I lifted her chair back up and set her facing the enforcer. Her lip was split. A long thread of blood was running down her chin. She licked her lip and her teeth turned red as it mixed with her saliva.

‘Now. Shall we try one more time?’ Terrini said.

Murgia glared at him, but Terrini was into his stride now. This was only going to end one way.

‘The simplest way out of this is to admit everything,’ he told her.

Murgia knew her life was on the line, and with every interaction any hope of salvation was slipping away, and she did not know how to stop it. I willed her to tell Terrini everything. I had seen what happened to criminals who did not speak.

She appealed to me but I gave her nothing.

Terrini had a blade out, and was sharpening it on the stone at his feet. The long, rasping strokes filled the chamber with an ominous sound.

‘We do not want you to feel any unnecessary pain,’ he said. ‘The Emperor does not want that. He just wants your absolute compliance. You understand that, don’t you?’

She glared at him.

‘The Emperor loves you,’ Terrini said. ‘But you have let Him down. I know that you don’t want to fail Him. All that He has suffered on our behalf, and all He wants is for humanity to obey His laws.’

He sounded like Gambol when I was a child and he would look after me. I knew what was coming. I hardened myself against it.

Terrini wiped his hands on his thighs. He examined the blade. ‘I’m going to skin you,’ he told her.

I thought of Saint Casophili in Thorn’s Book of Martyrs. He had been skinned alive. The image in my head was not pleasant, and I did not think skinning Murgia would bring us closer to the truth.

I stepped forward. ‘Enforcer,’ I said. ‘May I?’

He did not appear to be happy, but he did turn her over to me.

I pulled a chair across the room, spun it round, and straddled it. Ever since I was a child, my father had insisted I sit in on the interrogations. He had perfected the manner of unlocking a guilty conscience and would work with bare hands on the criminal. Only a thug used violence. The secret weapon of the interrogator lies within the mind of the criminal. It is their own imagination.

‘Murgia, if you do not tell the truth then Enforcer Terrini will do his worst. It will be slow and it will be painful. And at the end, when you have told him everything, only then will he grant you the Emperor’s Peace. Then your daughter will be orphaned – and let’s face it, your daughter is not normal. Some might even say that she’s a freak – maybe even a heretic. I can help her, if you assist us. If not, after your death, she will be alone.’

‘She’s a good and decent girl.’

‘That may be so, but we live in an uncaring world. Unloved children live short lives.’

‘I love her,’ she protested.

‘But if you do not speak, you will be dead. It’s even possible that the Inquisition would be interested in examining her…’

The word ‘Inquisition’ fell as heavy as a stone.

‘If you speak, then the Emperor will protect her.’

Murgia looked at me, as if assessing whether I was telling the truth.

I was, and my face made that plain. I pressed on. ‘But if not, they will peel her open, like a piece of fruit. And once they have assured themselves that she is not a threat to the God-Emperor, then, to be frank, there will not be much of her left. If she’s lucky, her sanity will go before her life ends. But it is not assured.’

Murgia swallowed. ‘She isn’t a heretic, sir. She just sees things sometimes. Things others cannot, or will not. That is all. It’s this place. It tests us all.’

I nodded. ‘They would destroy her. It’s not a fate I would wish upon my worst enemy.’

‘I’ll speak,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you.’ She took in a deep breath and hung her head and fumbled with her fingers. ‘You’re right, sir. I lived in the Evercity, but I fell into hard times. I made bad friends. They offered me easy credits. I did not know who they were, until it was too late. If I did not do what they wanted they said that they would turn me over to the Enforcers.’

‘Speak plainly,’ I told her.

Murgia took a deep breath. ‘Sir. I did. I dealt in obscura.’

‘And?’

‘I was sent here. Taru helped me.’

‘And why would he do that?’

There was a long pause. ‘Think of what is best for your daughter,’ I told her.

Murgia looked up at me. There were dirty streaks down her cheeks. She sniffed and wiped her nose with the heel of her palm. She looked beaten as she nodded, and said, almost to herself, ‘I swore an oath that… But he’s dead now, so I can say.’ She took another breath. Her head hung down. ‘Taru was an obscura addict. He needed it. The Banda helped both of us. I gave it to him, a little at a time. He couldn’t live without it, so I looked after him. I never gave him too much.’ She was breathless as she came to an end, and gasped as she wiped her cheeks.

‘There!’ she said. ‘I’ve told you. I worked with the Banda. I’m sorry but I did it.’

‘So, you supplied Taru with…?’

‘Obscura,’ she said, and nodded. ‘You heard me. I’m truly sorry, sir. The Emperor knows I am sorry and I have repented many times.’

‘So how did Taru die?’

‘You’ve read the reports,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I have not.’

‘He had a heart attack,’ Terrini said.

She nodded.

‘Brought on by the filth you were pushing on him?’

‘No, sir. Not me. He always wanted more, but I would not let him.’

‘And Hamber?’

‘I did not kill him.’

‘Murgia,’ I said, ‘think of your daughter.’

‘I am, sir. I am!’

‘See?’ Terrini said. ‘She hasn’t told us the truth. She killed Hamber.’

‘I did not!’

Terrini and I conferred outside. We spoke in low voices that echoed in the stairwell. ‘She’s hiding something,’ Terrini said. ‘I’ll get it out of her.’

‘How?’

‘By any means possible.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But I want her to stay alive. I want to take her back to my father.’

He nodded. ‘Of course.’ I thought for a moment that he was about to call me ‘sir’.

When we went back inside, Murgia glared up at Terrini.

‘The simplest way out of this is to admit everything,’ I repeated.

‘I have!’

‘That,’ said Terrini, ‘is simply not true.’ She thrashed her head back and forth as he reached for her. Her breath came in wheezing gasps. I thought he was going to throttle her, but all he wanted was for her to lie still enough.

‘Murgia,’ Terrini said as he struggled. ‘You leave me with no choice. Those who are blind should live in blindness,’ he said gently. He spread his fingers across the sides of her face. He found the right place, his thumbs on either side of her cheeks. ‘Hold still. I do not want this to hurt more than is necessary.’ She started to snarl with pain as he pressed his thumb into her eye socket.

When it was done, Terrini held out the eyeball in his hand. He peered into it, as if taunting her, before ripping it out and flinging it across the room. It skidded across the ground, trailing a tail of pale nerves.

‘One gone,’ he said, and sat back as he looked into the remaining eye. ‘One to go.’

He stretched his hands above his head and rolled his shoulders. I had seen eyeballs squeezed out before. I was not squeamish, but something told me that she had not killed Hamber, and I did not think that Terrini’s blunt violence was going to work. But she had traded in obscura, and this was how we kept the people down. The Emperor was loving but He was not forgiving. She had betrayed Him, and worse, she had annoyed Terrini. There was a strange intimacy between torturer and the tortured. His face, I thought, would be the last thing that she would see as he forced his thumbs into the corners of her remaining eye.

We left her kneeling on the floor, her hands scrabbling around.

‘I know she killed him,’ Terrini said. But he had wanted to make her say it.

We locked the door, and started back up the stairs. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about Hamber. He seemed like a good guy and there was history between you. But I don’t think she did this. There is more she knows, definitely, but – maybe it’s to do with this talk of the strawman.’

‘Rudgard, that’s just bumpkin talk.’

‘It’s scaring the shit out of these people. And some of those people are now dead.’

‘That woman is who’s responsible for this. Trust me. There’s something bigger going on here and she knows about it.’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’

‘Something related to obscura. Not bloody straw men.’

I pursed my lips and stared at the older man for a moment. Finally, I said, ‘I want her back at the Evercity. I want her able to speak to my father.’

Terrini shrugged. ‘I left her tongue.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ he said, then, seeing my seriousness, he sighed. ‘All right. It seems that all is in order… which means that tomorrow we can return to the Evercity.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Excellent.’

As Terrini went to wash his hands, I summoned Perin. ‘Go and fetch Agafa,’ I told him.

He saluted and left, and I went into the bookkeeper’s office. The room was quiet. The simian skull stared down from the top shelf where Capo had put it, and the servo-skull was sitting on its perch. Its eye sockets shone with a dull light as its generators charged, its limbs bunched under its gap-toothed jaw.

The tithe book stood on its stand, the heavy cover closed.

I lifted it open, and went through the records: diligent scribes recording so many tons of grain delivered in time for the tithe fleet… so many tons of grox-meat… so much algae cake.

I inhaled deeply. Something important had happened down there, I thought. Not only had I uncovered a Banda operative who was willing to talk, but on top of that I had given Terrini an instruction and he had obeyed. I felt as though I had passed some unknown test.

Perin returned, and knocked on the door. ‘Yes?’ I called.

‘I couldn’t find Agafa. I looked everywhere.’

‘Let the other overseers know I’m looking for her,’ I told him. ‘I want her bringing in as soon as possible.’

The shadows gradually lengthened as the afternoon wore on. The overseers not out searching for Agafa kept themselves to themselves. I think they napped the afternoon heat off. The air was still and unbearably hot. Sweat trickled down my sides. There were growing stains on my uniform under my armpits and in the small of my back.

Every once in a while, a breath of wind would lift the sound of the harvesters, and carry it to us across the fields. It brought a momentary relief from the heat.

Terrini pulled out his lho and rolled us both a stick. He seemed oddly insouciant as he sat back, pouring what must’ve been his fifth mug of recaff. I wondered if he’d taken umbrage at our slight disagreement. ‘Did I ever tell you about Eviscerator?’ he asked, as he lit the lho-sticks.

‘No,’ I said, taking the one he held out for me.

‘He was one of my first interrogations. Nasty piece of work.’

‘Aren’t they all?’

‘This one was different. Proud. Excited. He confessed immediately. Wanted to tell me all about his little crime. How he had cut up a poor bunch of buggers. How he’d eaten them raw. He wanted to put all that into my head. It seemed to thrill him…’

I didn’t know where this story had come from, or why Terrini felt the need to regale me with it. I squinted out of the window, greased up with lho-tar, the glass splintered in one corner, but there was no sign of Perin or any of the other overseers. Restlessly, I drew on the lho-stick and started to pace.

‘Spent his time in prison carving runes into himself,’ Terrini went on. ‘The wounds wouldn’t heal. They were deep, raw sigils. He was quite mad by the time his execution came. When the medicae arrived ready to harvest his organs, we had to chain him to the bed.’ He took a slow sip of recaff. ‘They didn’t use anything to dull his pain. Why waste medicine on a monster such as him? They cut out his vocal cords, though, so he couldn’t scream. But despite that, he let out a terrible rasping noise. I couldn’t watch. But I could see his hands, and through them, I read his pain. They clenched and struggled as his voiceless mouth made that dreadful sound.’

It was hard listening to his story. I paced up and down the hard, creaking floorboards. I drew hard on my lho-stick as he went on.

‘His liver came first. Then his kidneys. I could hear his strangled moans. They knew how to make him squirm. One kidney, two. Spleen. Stomach. Pancreas. When his lungs came out they were still moving – pink balloons, wheezing as they were cut free and dropped into the medicae’s stasis cask. Each time they cut a blood vessel, it was clamped shut. Some were lost in the bloody mess of flesh, and they had to use tweezers to dig them out. His heart was still beating when they started to remove long sections of skin. And then… they skinned him alive.’

‘Throne!’

‘Harvested him right down to his bones.’

I was no longer interested in my recaff, but Terrini took a long sip of his. ‘When everyone had gone, I stood over the bed. It was like an animal had devoured him. His arms and legs had been cut back to stumps. They had skinned him, removed his eyes…’

I had lost my appetite as well. Terrini seemed oblivious.

‘The Emperor has no mercy. Now, no doubt those organs are being put to good use by some Astra Militarum officer.’

‘No doubt,’ I said. No doubt.

CHAPTER 12

We could hear the dull rumble of the harvesters as they ran long, straight lines across the open fields. They grew gradually louder as they approached the farmstead, and then more distant again. Hours passed in that manner. Perin appeared to tell us there was still no sign of Agafa anywhere. I had no choice but to give up the search for the time being, though I was determined to discover something about this place.

I went to the bookkeeper’s office. There was a pleasant coolness to the air, and I returned to the tithe book and ran through the details, looking for a clue as to when the farmstead had changed its name. The distant noise of the harvesters made the motes of dust vibrate in the air about me. The servo-skull sat, grotesque, upon its stand – red eyes slowly pulsing as it charged. I disliked the thing staring at me.

‘Skull!’ I said to it and its eyes brightened. ‘Find the bookkeeper.’

There was a pause before it disengaged and rose, humming into the air. Its trailing spine slapped my cheek as it passed overhead.

Half an hour later it returned, and hovered in the doorway.

‘Rest,’ I told it.

It hesitated for a moment, anti-grav humming loudly. I had to repeat my instruction before it returned dutifully to its stand. I went back to the accounts but soon heard footsteps outside and Capo appeared, sun hat askew, his red face filmed with dust.

‘Come in,’ I told him. ‘Have you heard about Hamber?’

He shook his head. ‘No, is all well?’

‘No. He had an accident. With the shredder…’

Capo looked pale as I related the details. I studied his response and he seemed genuinely surprised.

‘We believe it was Murgia,’ I said.

‘Murgia? Oh dear. Why would she do that?’

I did not want him discovering what we had heard, just in case the web of crime included him. ‘Who knows what drives souls to kill?’ I said. ‘Thwarted love. A slight. A sudden angry impulse?’

He nodded. My gut told me he was not involved.

‘And how’s the harvest going?’

‘All good!’ he said. ‘All good. We’ve five trucks to send off to Starport.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow, Enforcer Terrini and I are returning to the Evercity.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Fine.’

‘You have everything under control?’

‘Of course,’ he said.

As evening fell we could see the lights of the cargo-8s as they set off towards Starport. They went slowly, each one loaded with corn.

‘That’s a great sight,’ Capo said. ‘I didn’t think we would bring in the harvest – thank you for your help.’

‘Thank the Emperor,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Where’s Terrini?’

‘He went down towards the brewhouse. He wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything.’

When Terrini returned a short time later, the bookkeeper said, ‘I think we should share a toast.’

He had the air of a man who craves a drink so much that he always feels the need to celebrate something.

‘What are we celebrating?’ Terrini said.

‘The harvest.’

Capo went to the vox-alcove, where he apparently kept a dusty bottle of amasec. He brought it out and wiped away the dust with his forearm, took three cut-crystal glasses from the clutter on the shelves, blew the dust out of them, rinsed them out, and then set them upon the table.

‘Here,’ he said, and filled each glass and handed them out, first to Terrini, then me. ‘To the harvest!’ We drank.

And then, ‘To Hamber’s soul!’ and then, ‘To one less malefactor to trouble the Emperor!’

Each time, we clinked glasses and drained them.

After three shots I felt Terrini’s tension ease. His instincts were to cut Murgia to shreds, though I had stopped that for the moment. But as the work-teams returned in the back of the Goliaths, dusty and thirsty and exhausted, the amasec kicked in, and we all started to relax.

Terrini sniffed as he nursed his glass. ‘I’ve seen some things,’ he said as it was refilled once more. ‘I’ve met some evil bastards, I can tell you.’ He went on like this for a while. Maybe it was because he wanted to restore his sense of pride. He listed gunfights, malefactors. ‘Ever heard of Dread Baeblio?’

Capo nodded. Of course he had. Baeblio had terrorised the lower wards of the Evercity for months.

‘I was the one who executed him,’ Terrini said.

Capo shook his head. ‘No!’

‘It’s true,’ Terrini said. ‘I was Rudgard’s age. I spent the night in the guardroom next to the cell. The bastard didn’t sleep his last night, and he muttered incessantly as he stayed awake.

‘There was a little vision slit with a metal grille. He was an ugly, ugly man – had heavy brows that made him look like an ogryn. He rocked back and forth, kept on muttering. His lips were moving but there were no words I could hear. My super had a look. They turned to me – I was a cocky cadet. “Off you go, Terrini. You’re a big talker. Go and find out what he’s saying.”’

Terrini held his glass out and Capo refilled it, and then went on. ‘They pushed me in and locked the door behind me. I stood with my back against the door. I was terrified. “Hello?” I said. He didn’t react. His hair hung down over his face, like a hood, in thick, black clumps. In places it had been torn out. His scalp was raw flesh. There were heavy iron rings hanging from his lips and cheeks. He just sat there, hunched. And do you know what he did? He turned to me and said, “Terrini. Is that you?”’

It took a moment for Capo to understand the implication. ‘You had never met him before?’

‘Never,’ Terrini said.

Capo frowned. ‘How did he know it was you?’

When Terrini spoke it was in a low whisper. ‘He looked up. His eyeballs had been tattooed red, his lips slashed through, right down to the base of his gums. They made his speech indistinct. I suddenly understood what he’d been saying all this time. He’d been saying my name all along. “Terrini,” he said. He looked me in the eye and said, “I will come back and kill you.”’

My attention wandered. Outside, the sun was setting and the crews were coming back to the farmstead.

From the barrack kitchens came the clatter of cauldrons. Terrini grew increasingly garrulous. Darkness fell as he went on, recounting lurid stories. In the corner of my eyes I thought I saw a shadow cross the window. It was just a flitting image, but then it came again.

I didn’t interrupt Terrini but went to the door. I saw the servo-skull’s stand was empty.

Neither Capo nor Terrini knew where it had gone.

For some reason it disturbed me. I went outside. The horizon was a thin, paling blue and I saw the skull’s lights, as it hummed away across the farmstead. I looked about. Everything seemed well, but something left me feeling uneasy. I puffed out my cheeks and returned inside. The room was a cluttered mess. I felt there was something here that I was missing.

Then Perin brought us a pot of slab and a set of bowls. It was plain, farmstead stuff, and we sat at the table a long time after the meal had finished, kicking back, rolling lho-sticks and pouring more drinks. Terrini had as many tales as there were stars in the sky. Perin tried to match Terrini with his own tales of life in the mountain infantry. There was a competitive air that only got worse as the grog flowed.

I heard a shout and looked around; Terrini was much too relaxed to pay much attention. It came again, louder this time.

Terrini caught the look on my face. ‘I thought I heard something,’ I said.

‘It’s nothing,’ Terrini said.

‘I’ll just go check.’

‘Whatever,’ he said.

It was cool and dark outside, and as I left the command block I paused for a moment to let my eyes become accustomed to the gloom. The shadows were so thick that I could not penetrate them. I closed my eyes to enjoy the breeze. After the heat of the day it was like fresh water. And I was full of amasec. And I felt myself a man.

As I stood there a voice said, ‘Enforcer?’

I spun about. It was Murgia’s daughter. She was standing right behind me, arms wrapped about her ribs.

‘Agafa. Where have you been?’

‘What are you doing with my mother?’

‘We’re taking her to the Evercity.’

‘Enforcer Terrini… He blinded her.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘That was cruel.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I saw it. I saw it before you came. I saw it all. I warned her, but she didn’t believe me.’

The farmstead was quiet. Far off a canid started barking. And then I went cold as I realised that I could see the lumens through the girl. I shook my head. Too much grog, I thought, but I had the strange sensation that I was not speaking to a creature of flesh, but an apparition. She leant towards me. ‘It’s going to kill everyone. You have to stop it.’

She was chewing her lip and twitched nervously as she rubbed her hands together.

‘Listen,’ I said, fed up of the evasion and finally coming to a conclusion, ‘I don’t believe in any of this straw man shit. Someone is behind all this. Who is it?’

She disappeared, and then her voice came from the other side of me. ‘No one,’ she said. ‘I’m not lying to you, I swear on my mother’s life!’

I whirled, but there was nothing there. I turned again. I’d never seen anything like it. The hairs on my arm stood on end. The sudden movements were too much, and I fell drunkenly and it took me a moment to push myself up.

I should have eaten more, I told myself. Amasec on a half-empty stomach was never a good idea.

I swayed as I clambered back up the steps and went indoors.

‘Where have you been?’ Terrini said as I rejoined him.

‘Just checking on the ale-wife.’

‘How is she? Regretting her crimes?’

I nodded, unnerved by the memory of Agafa’s strange presence. I took another sip of my grog, and said nothing.

CHAPTER 13

As we stumbled back to our hab, Terrini and I shared a lho-stick, and in our drunkenness we talked openly about my father’s succession. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘there are three of you, and you’re not strong enough to beat the others alone. If I were you I’d make an alliance with one of your brothers, kill the third, then turn on the one who helped you. That will only leave yourself.’

I knew that it was inappropriate to discuss this, but I was drunk and I was curious what the enforcers thought about it all. Besides, I had heard my mother’s opinions so many times I wanted a fresh perspective.

‘Who’s the strongest?’ I asked Terrini.

‘Well, no one likes Hingull,’ he said, ‘but Gaktum has a following. He’s been working at the “I’m not Hingull” thing for a while. He’s weak, but some men like that – it means they can use him.’

‘And me? What do the men say of me?’

He paused. ‘No one knows you so well.’

‘Is that a good thing?’

‘It’s not good or bad, but you can use it to your advantage.’ I prompted him to keep speaking. ‘Well, it means you’re an unknown quantity. That’s a good place to be. You can put out what you want them to think.’

‘What does the Patridzo want?’ I asked.

Terrini laughed. ‘He’s unimportant. The dowager, however – she wants a good, honest, strong Chief Enforcer. But she’s about the only one. The nobles want someone who will take their side against their enemies. The people don’t much care as long as they’re left alone. And that’s about it.’

‘What about the enforcers?’

He laughed. ‘They want your father to live.’

I laughed at that as well. ‘So do I.’

We walked on in silence for a while. ‘You make it sound simple,’ I said finally, thinking of having to kill my brothers.

‘It is,’ Terrini said. ‘You know what the Banda say.’

‘No.’

Terrini took a long drag on his lho-stick as we turned up the path to our hab. The end flared with hot embers, and then the smoke came out in one long exhalation. ‘Trust makes way for treachery,’ he said, and winked. ‘Come on, let’s get to bed.’

I did not sleep well that night.

Spirits came to haunt me. My mother. My father, my brothers, and even Gambol, his sutured body hitting the wooden floor with a dull thud. When he caught me, his arms were so strong I could not pull myself away. He hauled himself up, and pinned me down.

‘Come in!’ he called, and in my dream my brothers entered. It was clear that they knew the drunken plan we had hatched up that evening.

Their faces were as white as Gambol’s, with the same blue diamonds surrounding their eyes.

‘Thank you, Gambol,’ Hingull, my eldest brother, said. He had all my father’s menace, heightened by a sadistic streak.

Gambol held me down.

‘Get a stone,’ Hingull said to Gaktum, my middle sibling.

I should have been able to escape him easily, but some ghostly force held me back, and I could see his red tufts drawing closer. Gaktum struggled to lift the stone he had found. He grunted as he straightened, and then hobbled over. ‘Lift it higher!’ Hingull said. ‘Now. Drop it on his head.’

I woke with a start and sat up.

It was morning. I rubbed the sleep from my face. Just dreams, I told myself, and cursed out loud for being concerned.

Terrini was banging away in the galley. I shoved myself up, pulled on my bodyglove and gun belt, and stuffed my clothes into my kitbag, then dumped it by the door. This place was starting to grate on me. I was looking forward to getting back on the road to the Evercity.

We sat and sipped our recaff, our thoughts already turning to the journey. Terrini drained his mug, slapped his hands onto his knees and sniffed. We were talking about the trip. Chief concern was Murgia. ‘We’ll bung her in the back, cuff her to the railing,’ he said, then paused and leant towards the door to spit his morning phlegm out the back. ‘We’ll get some slab from the bookkeeper. Enough for three of us, for five days. She won’t need any more than that.’

He said the last sentence without any drama. It was a fact. Murgia would need her strength for when she was handed over to my father.

The serfs had already been driven out into the fields. As we made our way up the steps of the command block, we could hear the harvesters out in the fields, the growl of their vast engines a vibration in the air.

Capo was in his office, whistling tunelessly to himself. The servo-skull hummed back and forth about his head. It hung in the air, cogitators whirring inside the hollow cavity of its skull, its drill bit spinning.

‘Rest!’ Capo told it, and the servo-skull flew straight towards me, veering off at the last second.

‘Disgusting thing,’ Terrini said as the skull settled for a moment, palsied metal limbs relaxing as the red light went from its eyes. He dragged a chair out, turned it round backwards, then sat down with his arms folded across the back.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’re heading back to the Evercity today, and we’re taking Murgia. The tithe ships have arrived early. You will continue to fulfil your duties as interim bookkeeper. You will bring the harvest in, in its entirety. Understand?’

Capo nodded through it all. He puffed out his cheeks. Yes, he could manage for a few more days. Yes, he really needed someone to take over. He was never the kind to lead, he’d always been a follower.

‘I’ll convey your fears to the Chief Enforcer,’ Terrini said. ‘And the Ecclesiarchy. Did that girl ever show up?’

Capo shook his head.

‘Never mind. When she does, send her to the Evercity. Now,’ he said, ‘let’s get that woman.’

He tossed the key across the room. I caught it and went down the stone spiral staircase to the second floor.

The lock came apart in my hands, the chain rattling as it ran through the handles. I pulled the door open. It grated on the gravel underfoot. Murgia was crouched in the far corner, her legs pulled up to her chest.

‘Murgia?’ I called. There was no answer. ‘Up you get.’

I crossed the room. ‘Up!’

She refused to move.

‘Come on.’

I gave her a nudge with my foot, and her body slid down the wall, her head flopping sideways.

It looked like a chainsaw had ripped her throat open. A savage wound had almost cut her head from her body, and as she fell I saw that something had cut her insides open.

‘Terrini!’ I yelled.

He came at a run, his feet pounding on the steps as he stormed in and looked down at Murgia’s corpse. The cut was savage. It went right down to the bone. ‘How the Throne…?’ he started.

We looked about. There was no sign of a break-in. No sign of a fight, either. Nothing.

Terrini knelt down next to her to feel her body. ‘Cold,’ he said. ‘Which means this happened hours ago.’

As he propped her back up, her hair left a smear of blood on his arm. He crouched down again, and checked the back of her head. There was a round hole at the nape of her neck.

We walked about, looking for a hidden door, or trapdoor. There was nothing. The walls were solid, bloodstained, cold.

I felt slow with the effects of last night’s amasec and wanted to work it all through. ‘And we have the only key?’

‘Yes.’

I looked round. All there was, was a narrow, high window. As I looked, something caught my attention. There was a long piece of twine hanging from the sill, and dangling from the end was a figure of twisted wire. I tore it down and held it in my hand.

A straw man.

‘Murdered? Holy Throne…’ Capo said, sitting at his desk, face in his hands. He was beyond words.

At that moment Perin came in with something to report. I put up my hand for him to stop and demanded, ‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ Perin stammered.

‘Then wait outside,’ I told him.

‘But… we found Agafa,’ he said.

‘Finally. Put her in the storeroom,’ I said, then slammed the office door shut.

‘Holy Throne,’ Capo said again. ‘Didn’t I tell you we needed a confessor!’

I slammed my hand down onto the table. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘This is not a haunting. Someone killed Murgia. Not a ghost. Not a spirit. A man or woman. And we will find them, whoever it is.’

I looked to Terrini. He could see what I was thinking. ‘Let’s get them all in here,’ he said.

We called Perin and the others back inside.

I was calm and cool and hard as marble. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Murgia was murdered overnight. I want all of you armed at all times, and I want you in pairs. Understand? No one tells the serfs. The harvest goes on and we deliver what is due to the Emperor. Any questions?’

There were none.

We all headed to the armoury. The heavy reinforced doors were dusty with years. There was a rack of auto-rifles inside, a chain threaded through the trigger guards. Terrini pulled the chain clear. I took the rifles out two at a time, and handed them to the men. They were ancient pieces, retired long ago from the Astra Militarum, and then passed down to part-time home-based military units, eventually filtering down to places like this.

Terrini and I spent the morning questioning anyone – serf and overseer – who was not in the fields. They were a motley mixture, like the bookkeeper, largely inept. None of them had seen anything, no one knew anything. I didn’t believe them. They were holding things back.

Unworthy demanded to be questioned by me. His cuts were swollen. The swelling had stretched the skin of his cheek such that it was almost transparent. Under the pink skin I could see pale mounds of infection, with crowns of hard yellow pus. One of them had burst, and blood and pus leaked down his cheek. He seemed delighted by the turn of events. ‘You are men of little faith,’ he said. ‘The Emperor is unhappy with us. He will judge us all.’

When we were done, Terrini went into the alcove and sat at the vox-unit and summoned the spirit back to life. The eyes glowed. The words of the vox-unit were a dull crackle, too far away for me to make out.

‘Yes. Unexplained deaths,’ Terrini said. There was a long pause. ‘Two, while we have been here.’ Another long pause. ‘We thought we had the culprit. A Murgia Crovo, linked to the Banda. Dealing in obscura.’

Another pause. I turned my back on him and drummed my fingers. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’ He cupped the vox handset and said to me, ‘They’re checking.’

At last the conversation came to an end. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He sat for a moment and took in a deep breath before looking at me. His face looked concerned.

‘What?’

‘They warned me that there’s a storm coming in from the Long Dry.’

I didn’t know much about this part of the world, so he had to explain. ‘A desert cyclone. They’re pretty formidable.’

I still didn’t understand, so he spelt it out for me. ‘We can’t leave until it’s passed.’

‘So we’re trapped?’

He nodded.

‘How long have we got?’

‘Two days, probably.’

‘Right,’ I said, aware that we had no choice but to make the best of this. I was thinking about my reputation in the forthcoming battle for the succession. ‘Well. The tithe ships are in-system, so we can make sure we get as much of the harvest in…’

Terrini nodded. ‘Yes. The harvest.’

CHAPTER 14

That first day, the storm was just a dark stain on the horizon. It helped focus all the workers at Thorsarbour. Now, it seemed, every hour was precious. We drove the serfs out, and the harvesters ploughed up and down, stripping the fields down to the ground.

I went out to the fields to supervise and watched the gloomy forests of stalks being chewed up by the swirling blades of the threshers. All manner of creatures lived in the corn, and they scuttled for safety as the whirling blades cleared their cover.

The harvesters left bare stubble in their wake, and long trails of corn stalks. Nothing was wasted and once the grain was processed, then the stalks would be taken to the farmstead and shredded as fodder for the grox.

Back at the farmstead we had left Kossu in charge of getting the place storm-worthy. Shutters were screwed in, strips of tape plastered across any exposed glass. Anything loose was lashed down or brought inside.

Unworthy saw the storm as a sign of the Emperor’s displeasure. He was there, at the end of the day, waiting for us when the Goliaths brought the serfs back from the fields. ‘Brothers and sisters!’ he called out as the Goliaths unloaded. ‘Look! That cloud is the Emperor’s anger. He is angry at you all. You must mortify yourselves!’

A few serfs shouted back to him and called out prayers as they came to sprinkle blood onto the steps of the Emperor’s shrine. They were a jostling crowd as they attempted to mortify themselves. They were tired and disorganised, and shoving past each other.

As the crowd seethed, one of the serfs was knocked forward. He tripped on the steps and fell head first into the statue of the Emperor. There was a stunned silence as the wooden edifice slowly toppled sideways.

It wobbled for a moment, and then fell backwards.

The serf pushed himself up, and fumbled to pull the Emperor erect. But it was too late.

Unworthy pointed at him. ‘We are cursed and here is the reason. Thank the Emperor! In His fury the disbeliever reveals himself. Here, brothers and sisters, is the despoiler. Heretic. Traitor!’

I wanted to help the man in danger. I peered over the crowd and saw his face. He worked in the canteen. He was a big, bony man, with ears that stuck out from the sides of his shaven scalp, like handles. His name was Chalice.

His face was a mask of horror. Unworthy pointed him out. ‘Look! He has unmasked himself. See how brazen he is to knock down the Emperor before our eyes! He has such contempt for us.’

The serfs began to shout and hiss. I saw Chalice try to remonstrate. He pushed one man off, and then another before Unworthy pushed himself to the fore.

‘Kneel!’ he demanded. ‘Admit your guilt!’

Chalice disappeared from view, but giving in did not mollify the mob. In a moment the crowd had turned from prayers to accusations. A punch was thrown, then another.

I pulled my pistol and fired in the air. I know that they were serfs, but it was almost as if they were no longer human, as if they had turned into a many-headed beast. For a brief moment, Chalice appeared, shielding himself as best he could. He was a big man, but the blows came in from all directions and he could not fend them all off.

Perin looked to me as if questioning whether we should intervene. There were only four of us, and more than thirty of them. There was no way of stopping this without shooting half of them. But this was about authority. Who was in charge of this farmstead, Unworthy or me?

I strode towards them, shouting to them to stand aside. I fired twice, the rounds whistling over the heads of the crowd. They kept beating Chalice. I knocked one skinny man over, and shoved through the mess of bodies.

Perin was right behind me, covering my back. ‘Back!’ I shouted, pushing forwards.

Chalice half lay on the ground. I stood over him as the serfs surrounded me like barking canids. Their faces were contorted with anger and hatred. ‘This place is cursed!’ one shouted. ‘How can we stay here?’

The serfs were no longer human. They were like the tentacles of a beast of nightmare. ‘It’s not safe!’ one screamed.

‘Cursed!’ another put in.

‘He shamed the Emperor!’ a pockmarked woman lisped, her front teeth missing.

I remained standing over Chalice and fired into the air again. ‘Back!’ I commanded. ‘I will curse you all if you do not get back to your barracks!’

At this moment Terrini arrived with more overseers. He strode forward, knocking the mob back.

‘Back to the barracks!’ he ordered them. ‘Back!’ he shouted again when they hesitated.

The serfs were driven off. Only Unworthy remained. He refused to leave, and glared at me and pointed to Chalice. ‘He is marked for death.’

‘We’re all marked for death.’

Unworthy smiled at my retort. ‘Yes, but he dies today.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You do. Seize this man,’ I told the overseers.

They hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. Unworthy seemed stunned to be manhandled in such a manner. He started to resist, and spat bloody phlegm at me.

‘Bind and muzzle him,’ I told Perin, and the overseer lashed Unworthy’s hands behind his back. I ordered that Chalice was housed in the command block. We tied Unworthy to the back of the Goliath and dragged him through the farmstead.

Terrini stayed to vox the Evercity. I took Kossu with me.

He was quiet. I made small talk so I didn’t have to listen to Unworthy’s ravings.

We dragged him to the unblemished grox pit, untied him, and pulled him to the edge.

‘You cannot do this,’ he told me in his distinct Evercity tones.

‘You’re wrong,’ I said, and I stepped behind him, put my boot to his back and shoved him forward.

He toppled over the edge, hit the I-bars, and tumbled through. The grox within moved with the speed of a snake. Unworthy didn’t even hit the floor – the creature caught him in the air, and shook him violently back and forth as if he were a rag doll, then put a claw onto his back and tore him in half.

The power of the creature stunned me. I stood to watch Unworthy be devoured, and then swallowed back my fear.

Kossu and I walked back to the Goliath. We climbed up into the cabin. I had never felt so alive, I thought, as I turned to Kossu and said, ‘The Emperor is wise.’

Kossu nodded. ‘And for some of us, He protects.’

Next morning the winds were too strong for the cargo-12s so we piled the corn up in the barns. As the day wore on the barns were filled, one by one, before the heavy doors were shut and sealed and barred against the coming gale. By lunchtime, the horizon was as dark as evening.

The sense of foreboding increased as the wind began to whip up twisting spirals of dust. The serfs became edgy. They kept looking towards the storm, and calling out to the Emperor for His mercy.

When one of the harvesters’ engines became clogged with dust we had to summon Gad, and wait for him to clean the filters. He limped over to me, leaning on his stick.

‘The Omnissiah thinks we should stop,’ he said.

‘The Omnissiah runs on promethium, but the Militarum need food in their bellies, or they will starve. What will you say to the Emperor when all this is flattened?’

I ordered the teams back after lunch, and only the harvesters kept working.

By the time that Terrini and I headed back to Thorsarbour the storm was whipping through the fields of corn and flattening the twenty-foot stalks to the ground.

We were parched and dirty, too tired to speak. We rocked with the movement of the truck as behind us the dust rose, and the air cooled quickly as the sun faded to a dull red coin hanging over the horizon.

We took shelter in the command block. The door was hard to close – I had to put my shoulder to it before drawing the bolt. In the office the servo-skull sat on its charging mount, its eyes glowing a dull red, and I had the odd feeling that I was being watched.

‘Skull. Out,’ I ordered.

Its eyes lit up, spiral lenses adjusting to the light levels. There was a moment’s pause as it processed my command, then lifted with a hum of anti-grav generators. There was a creak of old sinews. I looked up and saw the thing as it drifted towards the door.

I went to the vox-alcove to see if there was any communication from the Evercity, but the parchment mouth was empty. As I stood there, there was a long, low moan of voices on the wind as the storm howled around the building. Terrini was brewing recaff in the guardroom.

I went down to check on Agafa. I had left a guard there. He hadn’t heard me coming, so was leaning against the wall and jumped to attention as I approached. ‘If I catch you slacking on duty again I’ll have you demoted to serf and you can live out the rest of your miserable life eating slab-grit,’ I told him.

‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,’ he said, looking pale.

I opened the door. Agafa was sitting across the room, her legs drawn up to her chin. Her hair was pulled down over her face. She was still alive. I closed the door, relieved.

My lips were gummed with dried spittle and dirt as I joined the others to eat cold slab stew. Capo gave us all a glass of amasec, but we were exhausted and soon ran out of conversation, so Terrini and I said our goodnights, and made our way through the darkness to the guest hab.

Sheets of dust obscured it, but as we approached I saw that the storm had ripped the roofing off. Terrini had his head down. ‘The roof has come off!’ I shouted to him.

‘What?’

I repeated myself and pointed. He looked. The rafters were now bare, there was no way we could sleep there. He raised his voice over the storm. ‘Let’s grab our bags and get back to the command block.’

The front door of the hab was swinging wildly. We pushed inside and each went into our rooms.

My clothes had been scattered across the cramped space. I stuffed them into my kitbag and threw in the recaff and pots from the kitchen. Terrini had his own kitbag under his arm.

We used our arms to shield the dust from our eyes as we retraced our steps to the command block. Grit whipped up in sheets. The God-Emperor had fallen over again, His statue covered in a film of dust. His stern face stared out, unblinking, as a tangle of corn stalks tumbled past.

We stumbled up the command block steps as a section of barn roofing flew past us, turning end over end. It took both of us to push inside. We slammed the heavy doors behind us. I held it closed as Terrini threw the bolts home.

There were a couple of old mattresses in the guardroom that the overseers used for their afternoon naps.

We dragged them out and made beds. Terrini blew the dust from the pots, then rinsed them out with fresh water. I pumped the promethium stove. It took me a couple of times to get it lit. The flame burnt yellow and smokily at first, flickering with every gust of air, and I twisted the knobs until it settled with a hiss to a steady blue.

‘Can’t sleep without recaff,’ Terrini said and started to brew up a fresh pot.

I heard something behind me and saw the servo-skull hovering in the atrium. It started to butt against the front door. ‘Rest!’ I shouted to it, but it took no notice.

‘It wants to get out,’ Terrini said.

‘But there’s a storm.’

The skull didn’t seem to care. ‘There’s a storm!’ I told it, but it kept banging against the outside door.

In the end I unbolted the door and let the servo-skull fly out into the night. Terrini gave me a look. ‘I can’t stand that thing,’ I said, and slammed the door closed behind it. ‘Good riddance.’

The wind moaned through the building and each gust made the blue promethium flames lie flat.

I yawned as Terrini measured out the black recaff paste into the pot and then we sat down to watch in an exhausted torpor. Terrini peered in as the water boiled slowly. I could barely keep my eyes open. ‘Nearly there!’ he said and then the pot began to rock.

He flicked off the heat as the door rattled. It sounded like a knock.

‘Think it’s back?’ he said.

I pushed myself up and opened the front door. I stepped out onto the top step, but I could see nothing. I gave it a moment, just in case the servo-skull had returned, then closed the door and fixed the lock.

‘Who was it?’ Terrini said when I came back to the guardroom.

‘No one,’ I said. The knock came again.

I went a second time, and again there was nothing.

When the banging came again, he said, ‘Leave it.’

I slept as Terrini sat up. At about midnight he shook my arm. ‘The storm’s passing,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a look round. I’ll knock when I’m back.’

I let him out and had a brief impression of the courtyard littered with corn stalks and scraps of flakboard. I locked the door behind me and turned back into the atrium. The servo-skull was hanging in the air behind me, its clawed limb reaching out to me. ‘Throne!’ I cursed. ‘Don’t do that.’

It hung, anti-grav generators letting out a low hum as the underslung drill whirred.

‘Where the hell did you come from?’

It remained at eye level, red lens flaring.

‘I have no need for you,’ I told it. ‘Rest.’

It tried to follow me into the guardroom. ‘No,’ I said again. ‘Rest!’

It hung back as I closed the guardroom door. I finished the dregs of the recaff and yawned. The skull had unnerved me. I slid the chair and jammed it under the door knob, then lay down, exhausted, sliding my sidearm under the kitbag I was using as a pillow.

The guardroom door rattled as if someone was trying to get in. I thought I could hear Agafa shouting my name, and pulled Terrini’s kitbag over my head to block out the sound.

CHAPTER 15

For the first time at Thorsarbour, I slept without interruption. My sleep that night was as deep as a well and it was morning already when a shout woke me.

I started and sat up. Dawn light was streaming from under the door. The storm had passed and the stillness was palpable.

I yawned as I unbolted the guardroom door. The atrium was quiet and empty. A thick layer of dust had blown in during the night, and the yard outside was littered with vegetation and parts of barns and roofing. Dunes of grit had been sculpted along each of the command block steps. The God-Emperor lay half buried in dirt. His shrine had lost half of its prayer strips – a line of them hung from the barn opposite. The candles had been blown against the halftrack.

‘Terrini!’ I shouted.

There was no answer.

‘Terrini?’ I called again.

The silence was absolute.

I returned to the command block and went into the bookkeeper’s office, in case he had come back in the night, but there was no sign of him. The stove was cold. The remains of last night’s recaff was still in his mug. I started down the stairs. I felt a prickle of fear as I unlocked the door, and pulled it open.

Agafa lay in the corner of the room, where her mother had lain. I called her name, and her head slowly lifted.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’

‘Has Enforcer Terrini been here?’ I asked.

‘No, I–’ I didn’t wait for her to finish, but went and pulled on my body armour before I headed back outside.

Our halftrack stood where we had parked it, its wheels part submerged in blown dirt. One of the lumen-posts had come down opposite the serf block, as had a section of wire fencing. There were pieces of flakboard roofing lying in the middle of the track. My footsteps led me back to our hab. The front door stood open, the rooms open to the morning sky. They were filled with dirt.

I pushed through to the galley. Outside, the storm had stripped the top off our latrine. The door was closed. ‘Terrini?’ I called tentatively.

Nothing.

I poked my head inside. Nothing.

I pushed on, into the yard, and saw a figure standing at the end of the garden.

‘There you are!’ I started, even as I realised my mistake. It was not a man, but a straw edifice set on a piece of metal rebar that had been thrust into the ground. I pushed through the back gate. This straw man wore enforcer-black. Its body was crudely stuffed with blankets, which gave it a lumpy and misshapen look.

I made to knock the thing down, thinking someone was mocking us, but as I stared at it I stopped dead. It was an enforcer jacket, with badges and a name tag sewn into the cloth. My breath caught in my throat.

Terrini, the label read, the letters stitched in white on black.

In that moment the Evercity felt a long, long way away. I spun about, but there was no one there. No clues. No hints. Nothing.

My palms dripped sweat, my throat tightened. My mouth was full of saliva but I couldn’t swallow it. For a brief instant I imagined this was all a joke – that Terrini was watching me, laughing at the terror he had instilled in the Chief Enforcer’s son.

It would be a story that he’d recount many times over, I told myself as I searched for him.

I knew as soon as I saw the body that Terrini was dead. I found him lying in the back garden of one of the deserted habs. I nodded, and walked across, pushed through the wire gate.

He lay face down, his body stripped naked. A dark puddle of blood stained the earth beneath him. It was unmistakably Terrini: short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, a tattoo of the aquila across his shoulders. It was blurred and distorted with age.

There was a puncture wound at the back of his head. I turned him over and saw that he had been eviscerated. I found his organs in the nearest tree. They hung suspended like fruit from one of the branches. They were starting to dry in the heat, their thin membranes a papery red, marbled with subcutaneous fat.

I stared out over the fields of corn and felt as though the world were unsteady beneath my feet. There were many emotions trapped within me. I didn’t really know what they were, to be honest, but the strongest among them was a deep sense of betrayal.

Something had gone terribly wrong. It was not supposed to happen like this, I thought. This was supposed to be a training trip. I felt anger rise within me. It was hot, raw, volcanic.

I was as angry with Terrini as anyone else. He had underestimated our foe, and he had ended up dead.

‘He’s dead?’ a voice said.

I spun around. It was Perin. His face was pale, his hands trembling. He saw Terrini’s body and looked as shocked as me.

I nodded and tried to show no emotion, but the truth was I didn’t trust myself to speak.

‘What do we do?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

There was a long pause. For a moment, I felt like crying.

‘I’d better tell Capo,’ Perin said, and fool that I was, I let him go.

CHAPTER 16

I say it with hindsight, of course, but I see now that this was one of life’s great tests. I had spent my youth learning stories of Imperial heroes, and while Gambol read, it was the illustrations that taught me most. I would sit on the stumps of his legs as he rocked back and forth, and breathe in the smell of the cheap counterseptics he sprayed on his flesh-plugs.

In all those stories, a single figure stood out amidst the crowds of slavering xenos or heretics, the hero of the tale standing tall amidst the masses of the words. I had always associated myself with those individuals, even as Gambol’s stuttering voice recounted the events that made them famous.

But this was a book of martyrs… The stories always ended in their deaths. It was designed to teach young men and women how to die well.

Some were ripped apart; others were broken on the wheel, or sliced apart with an unholy number of cuts. The graphic pictures had been sobering for a child, even though I did not appreciate the pain that each of these manners of martyrdom could inflict.

But I was clear about one thing. I was much too selfish to be a martyr. I wanted to live long, inherit my father’s position, and look back on all this and recount it.

I felt trepidation until I thought of either of my brothers becoming Chief Enforcer, and I knew that I would fight harder than ever to return to the Evercity.

Perin ran off, and I stood there cursing Terrini for getting himself killed.

It was the sound of shouting that roused me. I had been so confident the day before, giving orders, feeling in control, putting my boot to Unworthy’s backside and shoving him to his death.

Now I saw all this for the joke it was. Life was playing with me, like a cat with a rodent.

I left Terrini’s body lying in the dirt.

I left a lot more there as well. Looking back, I shed the last of my childhood fantasies. Innocence, pity, naivety. This moment of extremis stripped them all from me and I left them behind me like a pile of abandoned garments.

I felt better without them. A quiet, calm sense of release rose through me as I strode towards the command block. It was as if Terrini had been a weight upon my chest.

Perin, it seemed, had come upon the assembling serfs and overseers as they readied themselves for the harvest, and he had given them his news. Panic had done the rest. I tried to assert control. ‘Out to the fields!’ I shouted. ‘The Emperor expects you all to do your duty. The tithe fleet demands the fruits of your labour.’

But it was too late. There was an unhappy silence and then Capo stepped forward. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘I understand your position, but I do not think that the workers will stay.’

‘What do you mean?’

He ran a hand over his head. ‘This is more serious than any of us can deal with, sir. I’ve ordered an evacuation.’

His words had a physical effect upon me. I tensed up and stared at him with deadly calm. ‘What do you mean, you’ve ordered an evacuation?’

Capo’s mouth opened but I did not let him finish. ‘No one is leaving this place until the harvest is brought in, is that understood?’

The bookkeeper stared at me in shock. He was between two masters now – fear of me and fear of this place – and he wavered, not sure which to give obeisance to.

He started to speak again, but I cut him off. ‘The Emperor expects and we must deliver. That harvest will be brought in before anyone leaves this place. Is that understood?’

Capo’s face darkened, but he nodded and cleared his throat. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

I went into the office, and stood for a moment, blood thundering in my head.

I just needed to be alone to think. I should vox the Evercity, I thought. And then I tried to imagine how it would sound – claiming that there was an unholy presence here. They would think that I was either mad, or running scared.

No, I thought and calmed myself. No. I would have to stay and fight. This thing – whatever it was – would have to come for me. And I would be waiting.

But as I stood there I heard a note of adulation in the shouts outside, and it raised my suspicions. I returned to the command block steps and saw the overseers and serfs all throwing sacks of their belongings onto a pile.

I lifted my hands for silence but the crowd were unsettled and frightened, and the news of Terrini’s death had made them edgy.

‘Quiet!’ I called, but the hubbub only rose.

A single gunshot shut them up. I didn’t know what I was going to say, and turned to my name as if it were a talisman that had real power.

‘I am Rudgard Howe,’ I said, ‘son of the Chief Enforcer. My father sent me here to protect you. We are all servants of the Emperor. I will do my job and you must do yours. You must not be dismayed by the death of Enforcer Terrini. You must not be fearful of night shadows or straw men.’ I held up the Tronsvasse. ‘This weapon has been blessed by the Cardinal Archbishop of the Gallows Cluster. The hard rounds are blessed as well. No supernatural force can withstand the power of the God-Emperor.’

As I spoke, a cargo-8 rolled into the yard. A second followed it, and a third. The roar of their engines drowned out my voice.

One of the drivers, a foreman, leapt down, waving his arms in the air, calling the people over.

‘Stop!’ I shouted, but the spell had been broken. The crowd were no longer listening. I lifted my pistol again, and fired, but it was too late. They were all running.

‘Stop!’ I yelled as the gathering turned into a mob. The weak and infirm were knocked aside, those that fell trampled down. The strong clambered aboard the cargo-8s first. Fights broke out, punches flew. People shouted and screamed. I saw Chalice throwing his bag up onto one of the trucks, and felt like I had been betrayed.

They took it in turns to haul each other up. Even Gad clambered aboard. I saw Perin running towards the lead truck and thought that I could appeal to a shared sense of brotherhood, but he was caught up in the panic.

I tried once more to use my authority. ‘Stop!’ I shouted as I advanced. ‘I command you to remain!’

He slowed for a moment, and paused as he put his hand to the cabin door, but shook his head. ‘We cannot stay,’ he said. ‘This place is cursed.’

I fired. The shot hit Perin in the ribs and threw him against the cabin. The second struck his shoulder and there was a puff of blood and cloth. He spun about, took a few steps backwards, reaching forward as if to clutch on to something to remain standing.

He was falling back against the door when I fired the third time. The round hit Perin in the jaw and whipped his head back and to the right. It shattered bone and sprayed blood and teeth and gore and spittle out over my shoulder. He stumbled and fell heavily, like a sack of meat being flung to the ground.

‘Why?’ he managed to mouth as blood bubbled up about his words.

My jaw was set. I gave no answer, but fired again. Three more shots made Perin’s body dance off the floor, but it was just a form of necromancy. There was no real life left within the cadaver. Perin had gone.

The first cargo-8 was already moving off. The driver veered towards me and I fired at him through the windscreen. The glass fractured but the vehicle did not slow. I threw myself sideways, but the truck grazed my side and flung me to the ground. The acrid stink from the engine housing was hot in my nose as I rolled for cover.

I had barely got to my feet again before another truck roared towards me. I dived under the eaves of a barn, old timbers shattering beneath my impact. A moment later I was lost in a haze of dirt and debris as the second cargo-8 accelerated away.

I rose, coughing in the cloud of dust. ‘Stop!’ I shouted at the third truck that swept past me, Chalice among the desperate serfs clinging to the open back.

I knelt and aimed at it. I saw shreds come off the rear wheel, but there was no way of stopping the truck. They were solid polymers, built by a distant forge world to last for generations.

A few seconds later, all three of them were rumbling towards the northward road.

My immediate impulse was to chase after them and to force them back to work.

I leapt into the halftrack, which was still standing before the shrine of the Emperor. I settled into the driver’s seat and pressed the power stud. Nothing happened.

I pressed harder.

Still nothing.

I jumped out and pulled the engine covers up and saw a mess of torn wires. It would take hours to fix the damage, at best. I jumped down and glanced about. Only Perin’s corpse remained. The overseer was lying on his back, his head flung to the side, mouth open, a look of reproach in the dead eyes.

I tipped him over onto his front and looked along the road to the Evercity, and saw the cadavers hanging in their iron cages that lined the road north.

At that moment I heard footsteps, and spun about.

It was Kossu. He saw the dead body and froze, as if he wasn’t sure whether he should stand or run.

‘They fled,’ I said. I felt that I needed to give an explanation. ‘They disobeyed me.’

I could see the calculation in Kossu’s eyes. He was reappraising me, or wondering if he could flee as well. ‘So there’s only two of us left?’

I paused. ‘Three,’ I said. ‘There’s Agafa as well.’

If she’s still alive, I thought.

CHAPTER 17

The first thing I had to do was raise the alarm.

I went straight to the vox-alcove, sat down and cranked it to life. The eyes of the skull glowed in response. I had seen how Terrini did it.

I put the ornate headset on and slid my hands into place. There was a sudden prick of pain on the end of my middle finger, then the reader slid back into the ornate housing.

The vox-link was poor, but at last I relayed my name, location, and the fact that Terrini had been killed.

‘Yes, this is Enforcer Howe,’ I said, with emphasis on my last name.

There was a long pause. ‘Report,’ the man at the other end said. I took a breath, considering.

‘Bookkeeper Capo has abandoned the facility with the overseers and the serfs. Only two staff remain. Kossu, the grox-herd, and a girl named Agafa, suspected of witchcraft.

‘Fugitives are heading north in three cargo-8s. I have secured Thorsarbour. Situation is under control,’ I reported. ‘But I wish to make an urgent request for replacement labour gangs.’

There was another pause. ‘Confirmed,’ and then the vox-link ended with an audible click.

I closed the machine down as the lights in the eye sockets faded to narrow slits, still glowing. I had done my job, I thought. I would remain here until the support arrived.

When the call was done I went down to check on Agafa. She was sitting in the middle of the room, knees drawn up to her chest. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she said.

‘Who?’

I had expected her to say Terrini, but she answered, ‘Perin.’

I nodded. ‘He tried to flee.’

‘They’ve all gone, haven’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s still here.’

‘The straw man?’

She nodded and started to rock back and forth.

‘Tell me what you see…’ I said, but she shook her head and pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes and started to moan.

It was a long day waiting. Part of me wanted to flee, but I knew this was a test that I either passed or failed. There was no running away from it. The Howe family did not breed craven hearts, I told myself to jolly my courage up.

I watched the sun reach its zenith and then begin to slide down towards the horizon, and I knew that when night fell my trials would come. I could not sit still, and so, when Kossu said he had to feed the grox, I went with him.

The only sound in the whole farmstead was the hum of the generators.

Again, I felt we were being watched; felt as though there was a predator just biding its time. Flashing through my mind were images of the mutilated bodies. I saw myself lying like Terrini: dead, discarded and impotent. I relived Unworthy’s end. I thought about Perin.

Life was cheap on Potence. Even mine would not be so sorely missed by many. Only my mother would really care. And Gambol, perhaps. My father had two other sons and one of them would inherit from him – and I would be a no one, I’d vanish from the record. No history would bear my name. I stood near the galvanic fencing thinking on this, as Kossu opened up the sluice gates to feed the hatchlings.

The sun was setting by the time we started back through the farmstead. The serf block was deserted, the barred windows staring out. The sense of desolation was crushing.

As evening fell I could not sit still, and paced up and down. I walked through every inch of the command block. In the bookkeeper’s office, the simian skull stared down from the top shelf where Capo had put it that first night. The servo-skull sat on its perch, eye sockets slowly pulsing as its generators charged. I pulled out drawers, opened cabinets. There were musty files, covered with dust, alongside vellum rolls, ledgers, lists of rotas and punishments for the long dead.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but it was better than just waiting.

What I found did not seem to be anything particularly noteworthy. The usual reports of successes and arguments, of slack behaviour and misdemeanours. Drunkenness. Failures to report for corvée labour. Over the years teams were replaced, bookkeepers added at a strangely fast rate. But I couldn’t find any records more than a hundred years old.

‘Kossu?’ I called.

He barely noticed me.

I shook him. ‘How old is this place?’

He shook his head as if to say he had no idea. ‘Hundreds of years,’ he said. ‘Maybe more.’

‘But there’s nothing here in the records.’

I remembered the sign that I had found in the barn that first morning, and sat at the bookkeeper’s desk.

‘Do you know the name “Valgaast”?’

He shivered and shook his head. I went to the main cogitator. The ancient box was as large as a cabinet. A sheath of thick cables ran to the screen on the desk.

I found the power stud. The machine took five minutes to warm up. The green screen flickered slowly as its cathode ray came to life, and I typed in my security access codes. The connection was slow this far out. I thought I could probably drive to the Evercity faster than this thing took.

For a long time the screen remained unchanged. Only the flashing icon showed me that it had not frozen up altogether. I typed in ‘Valgaast’. The screen went blank. For a moment I thought I had lost the whole thing, but slowly the light began to return.

There was one report from the reign of Dowager Ciricao, six hundred years before, which asked for permission to breach the wall and establish a farmstead in the Valgaast region. I could feel my heartbeat quickening. This was the same lady who had summoned my ancestor to the planet. I felt a personal connection to this story, as if it were running full circle, and kept scrolling through reams of data.

There were only a few scraps. The first settlements had died out, blaming lack of water, disease, pestilence, murrain, but each time it seemed a new crew was sent, with fresh serfs. I found a long list of official correspondence. Tithe quotas received. Command crews. A sheath of files recording the movement of stud grox. One falling sick, handlers eaten.

But the records ran out and I got tired.

I stopped and tried a different tack. When I attempted to access Terrini’s service record, a confidential data file opened up. It listed the various stages of his career, the investigations he had worked on, the criminals he had brought to justice.

I was almost surprised to see the names of Dread Baeblio and the Eviscerator.

The Eviscerator: pseudonym for Asterin Lucius, the record ran. Bookkeeper of Thorsarbour, known formerly as Valgaast…

I felt a chill run through me.

There were all kinds of picts of victims and crime scenes, and then there were three interrogators’ picts of Asterin himself: in profile, a frontal image, and then another with his head twisted to the side.

I looked at that face and saw a glowering man, with heavy brows.

Something about him seemed familiar, though I could not trace it. I tapped in the access codes, looking to see what was done with him, and where his body parts had gone after harvesting, but at that moment the lumens flickered, and went out.

The machine clicked, and the glowing screen shrank back to a point of light in the middle that paused for a moment, before going black.

I froze, listening. There was no sound.

The power had failed. The blackness was almost complete. I stumbled round the desk. Agafa started to scream, her voice echoing up from below.

‘Kossu?’ I called. ‘Kossu?’

‘Hello?’ he called. ‘I’m here!’

I found him in the corner of the guardroom. I knelt next to him, blind in the darkness, my hand on his shoulder. His scrawny body was trembling; he was stiff with fear. Agafa’s screams were getting louder.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘I think the generator has gone out.’

‘How?’

He shook his head.

‘Kossu!’ I said. ‘I need to find the generator.’ He didn’t answer me. ‘You must show me where it is.’

He shook his head. ‘No. I can’t.’

‘Kossu!’ I shook him. ‘We need to get the power back up, just think of the grox.’

‘Oh Throne!’ he said. ‘The grox.’ He took a deep breath. ‘The main generator is down at the grox pit. The reserve is in the shed.’

‘Which one?’

‘The same one as the shredder.’

I fixed the location of the shed in my head. ‘Where is the generator, exactly?’

He explained it all to me.

‘Right,’ I said, standing. I thought about bringing him with me, but he seemed so petrified, I didn’t want him getting in the way. ‘Stay here.’

Kossu clung to me. I had to pull his hands away. ‘Lock the doors behind me,’ I told him. ‘When I return I’ll knock three times.’

As the doors closed and I heard Kossu carry out my instructions to lock them I stood alone on the steps and looked out. The vastness of the night faced me. Far off to the north, lander lights flashed as they slowly spiralled upwards, and above me I could see the twinkle of orbital hangars moving across the sky.

The sight of these only reinforced my sense of isolation. I was truly alone.

I felt my way down the steps. An imhi flapped over my head. It startled me for a moment, but I told myself not to be frightened.

Seeking reassurance, I put my hand to my Tronsvasse. It felt warm to the touch.

I drew the sidearm and slipped my finger onto the trigger.

I’ll be straight. I am not a devout man – but I felt that warmth spread up my arm. In my mind’s eye it was like a yellow sun streaming through my veins, into my shoulder, then across my chest and through my body. I remembered how my mother had said that it had been blessed by the Archbishop Cardinal.

‘The Emperor Protects,’ I told myself. I was descended from a line of men who spent their lives enforcing the Lex Imperialis. Not timid or cruel, but hard, rigorous and fair men.

I felt some comfort as I reached the bottom of the steps, felt my way around the back of the shrine, and then turned right along the line of barns and right again, towards the sheds.

They were patches of deeper shade in the darkness. I counted my way along them, to the one with the shredder. I thought of Hamber and wiped the sweat from my brow.

The generator was located on the opposite side to the shredder. My fingers found the door handles in the gloom. I pushed my way inside and tripped; got up, but stumbled again, knocking a metal bucket over. The noise seemed louder in the stillness.

I cursed, and for the first time I dared to switch on my lumen.

The sudden blue light blinded me for a moment as I panned about the room. The space was cluttered with sacks, pallets and discarded pieces of harvester – some smeared in oil, or rusted. A few had been freshly sharpened, and the whetted blades gleamed out like thin smiles. I kept well away from them as I ducked under the bars.

I had to go slowly. I could smell promethium ahead of me and as I straightened up from under another crossbar, I saw the solid bulk of the generator – there was a large fire-chamber, with pipes running off it, and a galvanised steel chimney thrusting straight up, through the flakboard roof.

I paused, taking it all in. Pipes in and out, the bleeding chamber, a few knobs and levers, and a well-worn ignition stud. It reminded me of the generator in my mother’s cellar. They were all of a fairly standard design. The ignition chamber was cold. I checked the levers and then pressed the stud.

Nothing happened.

After a few more attempts I stood back and looked at it all, then went back to checking the other details. The promethium pipes sounded full. The valves were on. Then I heard the scrape of metal and spun round.

The lumen’s beam was bright where it fell, but the circle of blue-white light plunged the rest of the room into greater darkness.

‘Hello?’ I said.

My voice sounded timid, even to me.

There was no answer. Just an imhi, I told myself.

I felt all the pipes, and found a safety valve located within their tangle.

To reach it I had to slide up and use both hands. I rested the lumen on the casing and slid my sidearm into its holster, feeling vulnerable as I reached right inside the housing.

My hands were sweating as I worked. I could feel my heartbeat accelerate. I was both blind and exposed. My ears strained for any sound that might alert me to danger. The valve was stiff with age. Cold sweat prickled on my neck as I pushed myself deeper into the guts of the machine, and reached up with both hands.

At last the valve grated open and I heard a welcome gurgle of promethium falling through the pipe.

I slid back down, almost expecting to come face to face with some horror, but I was alone. Nothing appeared to have changed.

I pressed the ignition stud and as it clicked there was a welcome rattle as the flame lit, and the generator began to burn. I put my back against the machine, and took a deep breath.

Done, I thought, then I waited almost a minute before the motivators started to turn and the farmstead lumens flickered to life.

When I got back to the command block doors, I knocked three times with the butt of my pistol. The doors opened with the force of my blows.

‘Kossu?’ I called.

There was no sound. I slid inside. In the bookkeeper’s office a light was on, but the room was empty. ‘Kossu?’ I shouted, then again, louder this time, ‘Kossu!’

There was still no answer. Perhaps he had gone to see Agafa, I thought, and started down the rockcrete steps. I was three steps from the top before I felt something wet beneath my feet. It clung to the sole of my shoe. The next footfall, something turned beneath me. The scent of death rose. The steps were slick with blood.

As I turned the corner it seemed as if a giant spider had strung a web out across the stairwell – but the strands of web were pink and bloody, and halfway down the stairs lay Kossu’s body.

He was face down. There was a ragged wound across his back and his guts had been pulled out through the gash. His innards were strung across the embrasures. On the back of his head was a puncture hole, raw and bloody.

At that moment there was a deflating sound as the lights flickered, then failed again. I froze. For a moment the only sound I could hear was my own frightened breath, echoing in the stairwell.

I had left the lumen up in the office. I did not want to go back up there.

‘Agafa!’ I called, as my fingers reached blindly for the end of the corridor. I had to pass the curtain of wet pink intestines; they clung to my face as I pushed through. I was near the bottom. There was no answer.

At last I felt my way to the bottom of the stairwell. I was fumbling for the handle when I heard a voice from within. It was Agafa. ‘Quick!’ she hissed. ‘It’s coming!’

Panic rose within me. I found the handle and put my hand into my pocket, but there was no key there.

I remembered, in a moment of sudden terror, that Kossu had the keys. I started back towards the stairs, fell, and found myself crawling blindly up the steps, through the puddles of blood and entrails. My heart was pounding. My mouth was full of spit. My fingers landed in something wet. I felt around, and realised that I had my hand in Kossu’s open mouth.

‘It’s coming!’ Agafa called again through the door.

My fingers scrabbled along his body. They searched blindly through his pockets. I feared for a moment that I would never find them. I cannot tell you what I put my hands into but it was all wet and warm and sticky. At last I felt my way along his arms, and in one of his hands I detected the round metal ring upon which the keys were slung.

I prised the dead fingers open, pulled the keys from his grasp and stumbled back down the stairs.

A low whine sounded above me. It was so faint as to be like a swooping bird passing across the top of the stairwell. The enclosed space amplified it, and then I heard it coming closer.

In the darkness, I heard the whirr of a drill and in terror I leapt down the stairs. It was a mad, frantic tumble, my feet skidding and slipping on the wet steps. My shoulder slammed into the door. The impact jarred my right wrist and I dropped the key, falling to my knees as I frantically searched for it again, cursing my stupidity.

Blood had pooled on the bottom step. A baleful red glow was descending towards me.

My fingers scrambled for the keyhole. It seemed to take an age before I managed to get the key inside but it could only have been a few seconds.

‘It’s coming!’ Agafa screamed.

The lock turned with a low click. I pushed the door open and fell inside, then slammed the door behind me. Something threw itself at me.

It was Agafa.

She was all nails and arms and wild hair. I battered her off, but I realised that she was not trying to fight me – she was clinging to me, like someone drowning will cling to a rock. ‘Get off!’ I snapped and shoved her, but she was incoherent as she leapt back at me, nails raking at my skin in her terror.

And then, just as suddenly as she had started, she stopped. It was as if she were a dancing puppet and her strings had been cut through with a single swipe of a blade. She collapsed into a heap and clung at my legs. I could feel the terror in her slight frame. She was shaking like a timid canid. And so, I realised, was I.

CHAPTER 18

It is hard for me to relate what happened that night. Even now, years later, I can feel the laws of sanity start to peel away as I recall it. There is sweat in my palms, saliva in my mouth, bile in the back of my throat. And to be honest, I doubted my sanity, even as it happened to me.

I stood with my back to the cell door and heard the scrape of an unseen hand testing the handle. There was a creak of metal as it began to twist, and I turned and grabbed it to stop it moving.

I felt a wave of relief, but, with horror, I realised that in my haste I had left the key on the other side, and a moment after the handle stopped moving I heard the metal rattle of the key being withdrawn from the latch.

‘It’s here!’ Agafa hissed.

I took in a deep breath. Even a plain Munitorum-issue laspistol can turn an indentured Guardsman into a hero and I had a Tronsvasse parabellum, blessed by the Archbishop Cardinal of the Gallows Cluster.

I was Rudgard Howe. I was not going to hide here like a serf. No, I told myself, with my blessed weapon, I would face down this terror.

Steeling myself, I put my hand to the handle and opened the door a crack.

The stairwell was lit with a menacing red light. I opened it a little further. Two red eyes stared back at me from under looming brows.

It suddenly struck me where I had seen the face of Asterin Lucius before, as I heard the whirr of an underslung drill as it started to spin and then suddenly swung at my face.

Agafa tried to shove the door closed. ‘Stop him!’ she cried. She scrambled at me as I tried to throw her off, and in her madness she made to grab the gun from my hand. I fell backwards as the servo-skull hummed through the opening. The drone of its buzz saw gave me a moment’s warning. I twisted as I fell, just in time. It caught me and it felt as if a razor had been run across my scalp.

My blood was hot as it started to pour down my forehead. I kicked at Agafa as I scrambled to the corner, and put my back against the wall. I could see the skull swing round for another pass. Agafa came at me again. I caught her this time, knocking her sideways as I held my gun up and fired.

Blood was running freely down my neck. The servo-skull’s two red eyes narrowed to fierce dots. I felt as if I were in the sights of a long-las as they focused upon me.

My fingers found one of the blessed manstopper rounds at my belt. I slammed it into the magazine and raised the Tronsvasse again as the red eyes glowed with a fierce and intelligent malevolence.

‘Come on, you bastard!’ I hissed. It flew at me as I aimed the Tronsvasse, and fired.

EPILOGUE

The relief force arrived two days later in a convoy of Tauros all-terrain vehicles. They dismounted and took in the scene before them.

There were scraps of flakboard roofing strewn across the ground, and the farmstead had a deserted air, like something from a warzone. My father’s expression was grim as he strode towards me.

‘Where the hell is Terrini?’ he demanded.

‘Murdered,’ I said.

‘I didn’t believe it. Killing an enforcer is a capital crime. Have you caught the culprit?’

I tensed up as a servo-skull swept out of one of the trucks. It flew towards me, and I reached for my sidearm, before stopping myself.

This was no crude farmstead version: it was a well-artificed device, such as was used within the Evercity.

‘I have destroyed it,’ I said.

He frowned at my words. ‘Destroyed? What do you mean destroyed? Did you kill the killer?’

I took a deep breath. The truth was that Terrini’s killer had been executed years before. Where even to start? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did.’

I had faced horror like I’d never known existed at Thorsarbour, and I was a harsher, more serrated version of myself in the aftermath. In the months that followed, my father grew increasingly sick, but he clung to his miserable life for nearly two more years. My brothers were not so fortunate, if that is what to survive really means. One of them was responsible for the murder of my mother. I did not care which. I killed them both and let the Emperor judge between the two. But that is another story.

I had no compunctions about either death. They were better done by my hand. It was private, family business, and if an outsider had killed them, then I would have been duty-bound to take vengeance upon them, as no one interfered with the Howe family – no one except us. Not on Potence, nor indeed anywhere in the Gallows Cluster. A lesson my father had taught me.

Afterwards, I went to see my father. I had just washed Hingull’s blood from my hands. My father took me in and said, knowingly, ‘So, there’s just you left?’

I nodded.

‘Sit down. I’ve got a lot to teach you, and time is short.’

That was it. I took a chair in my father’s office, and he never mentioned it again.

One of the first things he tasked me with was sending a new squad of enforcers to Thorsarbour – but they did not outlast my father. Within weeks, one of the guards went rogue and murdered the rest of the squad. The Ecclesiarchy sent a confessor to purge the place before their replacements were sent, yet still two further squads suffered similar ends: the first to a serf revolt and the next to a freak sickness.

Around that time, my father finally died. One of the first challenges I had as Chief Enforcer was to deal with Thorsarbour – for good. Honestly, I had thought that with the destruction of Asterin Lucius’ skull I had purged the place of its malevolence, but I was wrong. The sickness went deeper than that. It seemed to soak down into the very soil there, or rise up from it. So, I took the only reasonable action and ordered the whole place closed down and sealed off. I set the boundary at the wall and deemed it a capital offence for any soul to step foot inside.

‘Terra Excommunicado,’ I said, as I locked the gates myself, my seal affixed to the parchment hanging from its rails.

Today, Thorsarbour remains deserted. The cardinals of Potence installed anchorites at the gateway, holed up in prayer cells built against the wall to keep subdued whatever evil tries to grow there. They do not last long, but there are always devout youths willing to take up such a posting.

I am not a cowardly man – not now – but I refuse to ever set my eyes on that place again, for I cannot forget its festering silence, its skulking sentience. I fear a seeping of insanity pervades the cracks of this world. Like a tune of madness, playing just on the edge of hearing.

There is a file I have locked away for any who might follow me that explains why I have taken these actions. There is wisdom in the ancients, though it is in the manner of things that over time old wisdoms are forgotten. New generations will start afresh, and are forced to make the same errors.

Burns teach children about fire better than any warning, and some lessons are never forgotten.

But it is best that whatever lies there remains hidden.

As for Agafa, I turned her over to the Ecclesiarchy; took her personally up to the cathedral. It was the hallowday of Saint Arabella and the bells were ringing as we approached the pinnacle of the Evercity and passed through the gatehouse.

Psalms were coming from the house of the Sisters of the Ebon Chalice, and above the cardinal’s palace praise birds were circling, singing of the virtues of Arabella.

We stopped before the cardinal’s palace. It was a sombre building, with gothic windows rising up in tiers above us. The whole place had a dour and serious feel. This was not just a place of worship but of raw power, for the Cardinal Archbishop held sway over the whole of the Gallows Cluster.

There was a moment’s pause as I stood looking up at the building. At last a heavy door opened and three black-robed men came out to meet me, hoods drawn over their shaven heads, their hands thrust into their sleeves, and folded before them.

They stopped ten feet from us and bowed.

The foremost seemed an overly officious cleric. He announced his name and rank, and I forgot both straight away as I looked into his face with its hooked nose and intense blue eyes. ‘Blessings, Chief Enforcer Howe,’ he said.

I made the sign of the aquila and bowed in return. I was never a religious man and felt uneasy standing at the heart of the Ecclesiarchy.

I had driven up in an enforcer halftrack. Agafa was sitting in the back compartment, her face hidden behind a knotted curtain of scraggly black hair.

‘This is her,’ I said.

The ordinand stood next to me. He spoke with authority. ‘Come!’

Agafa did not move. He tugged the leash about her neck and she looked up, and the sight of her sickly, pale face and black eyes even stopped him for a moment. ‘Blessed Throne!’ he said, and made the sign of the aquila.

‘She has strange powers,’ I said, and gave a brief account of what had transpired. Her ability to sense the attacks of that skull.

The ordinand put his hand to my arm. ‘You did right, Chief Enforcer Howe. We will care for her, and if there is a cure for her malady, then we will find it.’

I never heard about her again. I could not tell you what happened to her. As far as I know she disappeared into the pits of the Ecclesiarchy, her life puffed out like the fragile flame of a candle.

I still dream of Thorsarbour.

On dark nights I find myself sitting in the corner of my room with sweat pouring down my face, as an unseen foe hums through the air about my head.

It is the same each time. In my mind, Gambol’s head is a servo-skull. The neural plugs hang severed and my old plaything’s palsied limbs claw their way up my body. ‘Ruddie play?’ he hisses as he reaches my neck, and I feel the draught of air, and hear the whine of an underslung drill as it starts to spin.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David Annandale is the author of the Warhammer Horror novels The House of Night and Chain and The Deacon of Wounds, as well as the novella The Faith and the Flesh, which features in the portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned. His work for the Horus Heresy series includes the novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint, Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, and several stories involving the Grey Knights, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written A Dynasty of Monsters and the Neferata titles Mortarch of Blood and The Dominion of Bones. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

Justin D Hill is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Cadia Stands, Cadian Honour and Traitor Rock. He has also written the Necromunda novel Terminal Overkill and the Space Marine Battles novel Storm of Damocles, as well as the short stories ‘Last Step Backwards’, ‘Lost Hope’ and ‘The Battle of Tyrok Fields’. His novels have won a number of prizes, as well as being Washington Post and Sunday Times Books of the Year. He lives ten miles uphill from York, where he is indoctrinating his four children in the 40K lore.

Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Old Earth, Deathfire, Vulkan Lives and Sons of the Forge, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio dramas Red-Marked, Censure and Nightfane. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection The Primarchs. For Warhammer 40,000, Nick has written Volpone Glory and the Dawn of Fire novel The Iron Kingdom. He is also well known for his popular Salamanders series and the Cato Sicarius novels Damnos and Knights of Macragge. His work for Age of Sigmar includes the short story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm, and the audio drama The Imprecations of Daemons. He has also written the Warhammer Horror novel Sepulturum. He lives and works in Nottingham.

J C Stearns is a writer who lives in a swamp in Illinois with his wife and son, as well as more animals than is reasonable. He started writing for Black Library in 2016 and is the author of the Warhammer Horror novel The Oubliette. He has also written the short stories ‘Turn of the Adder’ and ‘Blackout’ which have featured in various volumes of the anthology Inferno!, and ‘The Marauder Lives’ in the Horror anthology Maledictions. He plays Salamanders, Dark Eldar, Sylvaneth, and as soon as he figures out how to paint lightning bolts, Night Lords.

An extract from Gothghul Hollow.

‘Glowing red eyes, they say, and huge. It’s as big as a man, with teeth as long as your palm. It’s the Curse of Null Island returned.’ Oskar shivered, though his face was lit with fascinated horror as well as the weak realmlight filtering through the darkening clouds. It would rain again soon, and Gothghul Hollow’s market would empty of patrons.

Pietr scoffed at his fellow trader’s words and rearranged his display of protective charms into a more pleasing configuration. ‘It’s a mere spirit-hound, nothing more. Hunters and priests will do for it – you mark my words. And that curse is idle gossip. Now let’s talk about something else before we frighten off any more customers.’ He smiled for the two women approaching his stall and stepped aside so they could see the black velvet cloth and the talismans arrayed upon it. ‘New protection amulets for your homes, gentlewomen, guaranteed against the loathsome undead. Hang them from the eaves and you’ll be safe.’

The women seemed sceptical at the promise, but they paused long enough to take a good look. Behind them and over the heads of the rest of the patrons, Gothghul Hollow’s houses rose crooked and cramped, slate roofs shining with moisture. Talismans hung from every eave and wards were carved upon every door.

There was a dart of movement from one of the crooked alleyways and Pietr flinched. Despite himself, the latest tales of the beast had made him jumpy. Only it wasn’t the hound of the moors, but a boy who darted between their stalls like a gheist.

‘Hey, you, get back here! Why, you thieving little…’ Oskar’s shout trailed into a grumble, but he made no effort to chase the boy, who stopped and looked back, grinning as he dangled a small amulet from his fingers. He hung it around his neck and dared a wink. Oskar shook his fist in the boy’s direction, but Pietr could see the glint of amusement in his eyes.

‘Do you ever make a profit, Oskar?’ he asked, somewhat offended by the other trader’s easy-going approach to theft. He didn’t wait for an answer, knowing he wouldn’t get one. Oskar usually lost a few of the smaller and weaker talismans every market day; the children knew he’d never chase them.

Pietr turned back to his customers, and a broad grin crossed his face as one of the women exclaimed over his ornamental blood-roses. ‘My own design,’ he murmured with a self-effacing little shrug. ‘If you catch it in the light at the right angle, you will see the amber itself has been engraved with a prayer to Nagash for health and wealth.’

He gestured for one of the women to pick up the item. She tilted it into the light from the glow-lamp standing on a tall pole behind the stall. Not only was the item exquisite, the black-petalled roses suspended in clear honeyed amber, but it was also well made.

‘You have a refined taste, madam,’ the trader began, but then a long, ululating howl drifted towards them on the strengthening wind. It came from north of the small town. From the moors beyond the broken graveyard, out past the old gibbet where the younger children played.

Eldenor, an aged, wandering aelf who had settled in the Hollow years before and sold exotic goods, let the melancholy tune he had been playing on his bone flute screech to a halt, the last note skirling high and wild. The dozens of shoppers froze, as pale and lifeless as the gargoyles on the temple roof or the statues of the God of Death that stood sentinel at each corner of the town. There was a long, pregnant pause, and then the cramped marketplace erupted into noise and motion.

‘Home, right this instant!’ Oskar bellowed at the boy who’d stolen the amulet, shooing him away. The thief bolted into the crowd, his fear tracing a path like jagged lightning, arcing from one person to the next until they were all vibrating with it.

There were a few panicked screams as people fought each other to be the first into the narrow alleys and twisting streets leading away from the market. The howl came again, louder this time, closer to town.

‘Pietr, come on,’ Oskar shouted as he hesitated at the back of his stall.

It had taken Pietr an hour to unpack everything and lay it out just so. ‘But the amber, the protection spells,’ he muttered. ‘My life’s work. My livelihood.’

‘The beast doesn’t want your damn roses, Pietr. It wants you.’ Oskar had dragged the cords of half a dozen amulets over his head and didn’t wait any longer, abandoning his stall and his friend without a backward glance. Pietr tore his gaze away from his wares. He was alone, the only person left in the once crowded marketplace. The aelf had vanished as only aelves could, and even the duardin blacksmith was gone. Doors and shutters slammed in the nearest houses, and the panicked cries were abruptly cut off as the townsfolk hid their children and themselves.

‘A spirit-hound at most and more likely a feral dog,’ he muttered. Yes, it had killed people, but it was just an animal. Not even one of the undead or something that had slithered across the moors from the blasted land of horrors to the east. At most a spirit-hound, and he wouldn’t abandon his livelihood to it. A third howl cut through the air, seeming to shiver up from the belly of the earth itself, as long and mournful as a night-time death vigil. It came from the direction of the town gates, only a few hundred strides from the marketplace.

Pietr’s nerve broke, and he snatched up the long wooden club he kept to deter thieves and backed away from his stall. His house lay in the direction of the approaching beast – Dog, it’s just a dog – near the edge of town closest to the moors. He ran south instead, to the nearest house, and pounded on the skeleton-carved door. It didn’t open, and the sick panic inside him bloomed suddenly, like blood in water, into outright fear.

He sprinted to the next house, its upper storey leaning so far out that the sky was a purple sliver between its eaves and those of the building opposite. He knocked again, crying out for aid, but there was not even a murmur from within. Pietr stumbled further down the narrow road, his shouts for help trailing off into low whimpers and then silence. Rising within that silence from not very far behind came a low, rumbling growl.

Thunder, it’s just thunder.

This road led through the town and up towards Gothghul Castle on its low hill. The black stone building squatted to the west of town, towers and spires like reaching talons and crowned with a ring of gargoyles that loomed at its edges and spat rainwater onto the unwary. The moors curved around the town and then swept up to the castle like a vast ocean of gorse and heather in every shade of purple, from the most delicate lilac to the almost-black of indigo, framing it against the expanse of wild sky and lonely wind. It was the tallest thing on the horizon but for the Blood-Rock Peaks a few miles distant. It was a long way and all uphill, but it was away from the source of the howling and the Gothghuls would let him in. No one else would.

Gripping the club so tight his fingers ached, Pietr began to run, slipping on the cobbles and twisting his ankle in an unexpected wheel rut. He yelled at the flare of pain, the sound lost in a rumble that was definitely thunder and that rolled and muttered for long seconds. Using the club as a walking stick, he limped on as fast as he could. Fat, icy drops of rain fell, as if the thunder had been the clouds tearing themselves open.

The pain in his ankle faded to a steady throb and he pushed on faster, the rain increasing and the sky angry. Around him, the town was silent. The beast was silent. The road steepened and Pietr’s breath grew short as he laboured upwards, the pounding rain turning the road to slick mud. The building storm roared in his ears and the wind screeched – Pietr halted and spun in a circle, bringing the club up in front of him. That wasn’t the wind.

At first, he couldn’t see anything as the rain drove down in thick grey curtains. Hysh’s light was a distant memory, though it wasn’t just its absence that made the trader shudder. He’d passed the last couple of houses and now there was nothing but glowering sky and threatening moor and the distant – too distant – promise of safety that was Gothghul Castle.

A shadow moved on the road, emerging from between the last pair of houses. Pietr stumbled backwards, blinking rain out of his eyes. ‘Just a dog, just a dog, just a dog,’ he panted, still stumbling up the hill. His empty hand rose to his throat, clutching at the tangle of amulets lying beneath his soaking jacket. The just-a-dog lifted its head and stared at him, and even from here he could see the red glow of its eyes. As if a low, sullen fire burnt inside it. He could see every detail of its broad head and long, pointed muzzle despite the distance and the pounding rain. He shuddered again when he realised it was as big as Oskar had said. As big as a man. Bigger, even. Black and hulking, coarse fur slicked to its body by the rain, teeth grinning silver in a flash of sheet lightning. There was a low rumble that wasn’t thunder, and rainwater splashed up as it padded closer.

Pietr wanted to turn and run, but he was paralysed. He wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to go. He wanted, most of all and with an intensity he’d never experienced in the fifty-odd years of his life, to live.

The beast moved faster until it was almost flying, pounding up the road towards him, those awful glowing eyes fixed on him as if it didn’t need to watch its footing. As graceful and inevitable as death, the beast closed the distance between them.

‘Please,’ Pietr whispered, the word lost in the rain and the thud of its paws. ‘Please.’ His legs took over control of his body, ignoring the terror freezing his brain, and he finally, finally, put his back to the creature and ran. The soreness of his ankle meant nothing. The slippery steepness of the road meant even less. Pietr ran faster than he’d known was possible, the club whining as it cut through the air with each pump of his arm. A thin, high sound came out of his throat with each exhalation, a cry somewhere between hysteria and terror. His legs and lungs began to burn, and then, without warning, he tripped, falling headlong into a puddle.

At first, he thought he’d stumbled into a hole or that the club itself, somehow, had tangled his foot as he ran. Soaked as he was, the puddle wasn’t able to add to his misery. He registered the impact on his open palm and the knuckles of the hand holding the club, and then pain threaded like red-hot wire up the back of his leg, and he screamed.

Pietr thrashed, turning over in the road. The beast stood at his feet, its jaws bloody. More blood in the puddle, on the road, soaking out of his trousers. His blood. ‘What do you want?’ he screamed at the creature. It hulked over him, a thick mane of black bristles standing proud down the back of its neck. The low, rolling rumble of its growl increased in pitch as he spoke. Its breath was hot, coming in short, easy pants like steam from a kettle.

The trader scuttled backwards on hands and heels like a crab until he hit the bank at the edge of the road. A carrion crow hopped down off a nearby broken headstone – a solitary, empty tomb dug into the edge of the moor – and flapped lazily closer. The beast stalked him, the growl rising again until Pietr’s muscles turned to water. ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Please…’

The beast paused for the barest second, head cocked to one side as if it could understand him. The rumbling growl faded away and the glow of the eyes seemed to brighten, as if someone had blown on hot coals. And then it whined, an almost questioning sound. Pietr’s breath stuttered in his chest.

A loud crack rode the back of the wind from behind him. From the castle. A gunshot. The great black animal flinched and looked away, breaking eye contact, and Pietr felt the strange paralysis lift immediately, a paralysis he hadn’t noticed while he’d been lost in the beast’s eyes. He gasped in cold air and the rank stink of wet fur, and jerked up onto his feet. Agony lanced through his left leg and he bit down on a scream. He looked up towards Gothghul Castle and saw distant figures running towards him. Help was coming.

He looked back, eye to eye with the beast again. The scream he’d trapped in his chest broke free and soared into the storm like a wind-tossed bird, helpless to fight the tempest. He brought up the club and swung. The beast leapt to the side, dodging the strike. Its fangs flashed and it was out of range again. Pietr stared at the ragged stump of his arm, then down at his wrist and hand still holding the club that lay in the mud at his feet. Then back to his arm and its jet of arterial blood, bright against the darkness of the moors.

Back to the beast. Pietr had time for one final breath, the deepest and last of his life. He used it all to scream as it advanced again, head lowered and ears pinned back, lips writhing from teeth as long as his palm. Another bright splash of blood arced and Pietr fell to his knees in the mud as his legs refused to hold him. A weight at the front of him, as if a heavy coin purse hung from his belt. Pink and purple ropes spilt out of a rent in his coat. Blood-warm, they steamed in the frigid air.

The last of his last breath slipped from his mouth. There was another gunshot, but it didn’t matter now. Pietr looked into the beast’s red eyes and calmly raised his chin, exposing his throat.

Lightning flashed, or maybe teeth. Darkness fell.

Edrea Gothghul stood aside as the body was carried in through the front door.

‘Father’s study, immediately,’ she snapped, and the drenched figures hurried along the corridor and squeezed into the room. Her father had already cleared his desk, and Edrea’s satchel of ointments and herbs was open on the windowsill next to it. She’d managed a glimpse of the man’s face as he flopped, sodden and unmoving, between the carriers, and knew there was nothing that she could do for him. It didn’t matter.

She pushed her way through the little crowd to the desk next to the window. ‘Too many people,’ she said. ‘Out.’

‘Grab your coats and meet me in the stables,’ said Runar Skoldofr, her father’s hired gunman, to the three men and one woman who’d brought in the body. They were all soaked. ‘We’re going straight back out. It can’t have gone far.’

Edrea didn’t waste time watching them go. ‘More light,’ she ordered. The storm, if possible, had darkened even further, and despite the wide expanse of glass in the room’s tall, arched window, it was difficult to make out the victim’s features or wounds. Her father, Lord Aaric Gothghul, brought another lamp without a word, standing by her side and holding it up over the body.

‘By Nagash,’ Edrea swore as lantern light fell across it. Aaric grabbed her shoulder, as if wanting to spin her away from the table and spare her the sight. She shrugged him off. ‘Closer,’ she insisted, and bent forward.

‘Daughter–’ Aaric began.

‘He’s dead, Father. He can’t hurt me. Closer, I said.’ Edrea could feel his frozen outrage, and the embarrassment of the room’s only other occupant at her tone – Tiberius Grim, a Sigmarite priest and her father’s oldest friend. Like Aaric, her Uncle Tiberius was in his sixties, but where her father was gaunt and walked with a slight stoop and occasionally an ornate, bone-headed cane, Tiberius had retained the loose gait of a much younger man. He’d strapped on his rapier when they heard the first howl, and Edrea knew he had a talent for the blade.

Grudgingly, Aaric lowered the lantern, its warmth caressing Edrea’s brow as she bent almost in half and brought her face to within a hand’s width of the corpse’s.

‘The same as all the others.’

Tiberius shifted by the fireplace. ‘No blood?’

Edrea poked at the leathery skin of the face, and then pinched the flap of flesh drooping from the jagged rent in the throat and peeled it back. Her father made a tiny noise of disgust. Not at the action, she knew, but at the fact that it was her performing it. His precious child. She ignored him.

‘No – no blood,’ she said to Tiberius. ‘A few smears on the throat, of course, but the way this has been torn open, the man should be coated in it, rain or not. And his skin is… wrinkled, dried. Desiccated, even. But… I think I know him. He trades down in the market, doesn’t he? Look, this green coat with the blue lining. He crafts the larger talismans for warding buildings, I think. Yes, it’s him – and he can’t be more than fifty.’

‘Then the beast has drawn the blood from the body, as it did with the others,’ Tiberius said in a low voice. ‘I have never heard of a creature of this nature doing such, not in all my years. It doesn’t take the flesh. As if sustenance is not its goal. Aaric, this is not familiar to you?’

Edrea’s father was a scholar and former Freeguild captain who had served alongside Tiberius in Lethis’ Blackshore Guard. Edrea only knew him as the austere, dusty old figure in the study or the library, nose forever in a book if it wasn’t raised in disapproval of her. It was easy to believe that if Aaric had seen something like this before, it would have been in a bestiary or ancient scroll, not in real life. And yet years before, he really had done all those things for which his name was still whispered among the Freeguilds and the townsfolk. He was not boastful about his exploits, nor had he invented any of them – she knew this for fact. Aaric, too, still wore a sword whenever he left the castle, and she’d spent enough childhood hours watching him practise to know it was no mere affectation. And he had been the one to teach her to shoot, clean and strip a rifle – no one else.

Aaric Gothghul, hero of the Bonesplinter War and the Siege of a Thousand Nights. Defender of the innocent, devoted husband to Hephzibah. Father to a lonely child. A scholar. A wise and temperate leader of the Hollow. Scion, judge, hunter, teacher.

Edrea was struck, once again, by the juxtaposition of the man Aaric Gothghul had been and the man she knew. The man he’d become upon her mother’s death.

She poked at the ragged flesh again, because it made him wince. Yes, he was all those things. But he was other things, too. A liar. A secret-keeper. A man so desperate to keep his daughter safe that he would no longer speak her mother’s name for fear of invoking the same madness that had claimed her life.

‘Despite all the creatures that plague us in Shyish, I have never seen nor heard its like,’ Aaric said, bringing Edrea’s attention back to the corpse and the room.

She straightened and flicked through the pages of the journal she was compiling that recorded what she’d learnt so far of the beast’s eight victims. This was the first one she’d seen, and she could tell immediately that the information her father had allowed her to know about the others was vague and worse than useless.

She put the journal next to the trader’s head and began tugging at the savaged jacket. Whatever sorcery had been performed on him had shrunk his form, and it wasn’t too difficult to drag the coat down over his shoulders.

‘What are you doing?’ Aaric asked. The hand holding the lantern shook slightly.

Edrea gave him a cool glance. ‘We need to examine the body. Someone in our midst could be engaging in the necromantic arts. I can recognise even the subtlest marks of a curse.’

‘It’s a sensible suggestion, and Edrea is a sensible girl,’ Tiberius said mildly before her father could respond. Edrea frowned at his use of girl, but she wouldn’t protest if he was on her side for once.

‘Go to your chamber – we will conduct the inspection.’

Edrea straightened up and put her back to the table. She folded her arms and raised one eyebrow. ‘No. You might be a scholar, Father, but death magic is my area of expertise. Even if he reanimates now, he is in no condition to molest me. Rest assured my honour is quite safe.’ Tiberius snorted, stifling something that might have been a laugh. Aaric reddened.

‘Besides, he’s not the first naked man I’ve seen,’ Edrea added, and turned back to the table. The silence was thunderous. She ignored it. The master of Gothghul Castle slammed his lantern down on top of her journal and jostled her out of the way, then wrestled the body into his arms and began removing its coat, exposing the ravaged stump of its missing right hand. The corner of Edrea’s mouth twitched as she stepped back, but she let him proceed.

Tiberius caught her gaze and shook his head just a little in disapproval, but she could see the glint in his eye. She grinned, and he bit his lip and then winked before sobering again.

‘Help me, man,’ Aaric muttered, and Tiberius crossed to the desk and bent to the task, pulling off the corpse’s boots and then trousers, while her father peeled the wet shirt off the body. He made a sound of disgust, and she pushed back alongside him and then blinked, fighting back a surge of nausea. It wasn’t just his throat and arm that were ravaged – the victim had had his belly torn open as well. Only the desiccated state of him had prevented his savaged guts from stinking out the entire castle. As it was, the thin, flattened ropes of intestines were as dry as the rest of him, looping and knotting on the outside of his body.

Aaric was watching her, waiting for the first sign of weakness in order to justify sending her out of the room, but while he and Tiberius were familiar with common native curses, this particular one – if indeed it was a curse at all – was beyond their scope. But not Edrea’s.

‘He looks… mummified, almost,’ she said. ‘My notes, please, Father. And a quill.’

Still he said nothing, passing one to her and moving the lantern off her journal. Edrea took a deep breath and bent closer to the corpse, humming under her breath. ‘Interesting.’ She stuck her finger into his abdomen and then swiftly put it in her mouth.

‘Just as I thought,’ she said. ‘Pure rainwater. There isn’t any of his own liquid left inside his body. Nothing. If it hadn’t been for the storm, he’d be as dry as a stick of firewood. The others were the same, were they?’

‘They were,’ Tiberius said. ‘And they’ve already been buried by their families.’

She turned a sour glance on him. ‘I know. Which is why this is the only specimen I have to work with.’

‘Person, by Sigmar’s grace,’ Tiberius said mildly. ‘Not specimen.’

Edrea waved her hand in acknowledgement and dismissal both. Carefully, she examined the dead man’s flesh as best she could amid the ruin of his injuries. There was no curse mark she could see. Unless it had been conveniently located somewhere the aberration had attacked, her guess was there was no curse at all.

‘All right, step back. Let me try something.’

‘What?’ Aaric asked suspiciously.

Were you like this with my mother? The words sat heavy on her tongue, a stone in her mouth begging to be spat out. She swallowed them and found others, less combative, to say instead. ‘I want to see the last images of his life. It might not work, given how drained he is. Then again, it might. Either way, it won’t take long, and we have nothing to lose but a few drops of blood and a couple of herbs.’

That wasn’t quite true, but Aaric didn’t need to know that. Edrea took her satchel and dragged out a soft leather roll that clinked as she untied it and spread it open on the deep windowsill. The lanterns and candles were behind her, and the storm was a black hand pressing against the stained glass, but the thin, tightly stoppered phials were hers, and she wouldn’t have needed to read the labels even if there were any. Each one sat in its individual pocket, prepared by her own hands.

Her fingers stole over the glass phials, some containing liquids, some powders and others herbs. She selected the one that would lend her a few moments of deadsight and then took a small golden bowl and a larger stone mortar and pestle from her satchel. Half turning out of her own shadow so she could see, she unsheathed the dagger that hung at her waist and worked open a long, thin scab on the back of her right wrist. The familiar pain blistered at her, but she barely winced. The wound was clean, and she reopened it every few days for such sorcery – she was used to it.

Facing the window again, she turned her arm over and squeezed nine thick, slow beads of blood into the mortar. She caught the tenth on her fingertip before it could fall and licked it clean, then ran her tongue over the cut to help it seal. Five other lines, these ones healed, decorated her right arm so far. One for each year of her ritual craft. She wondered how many there would be before her time among Shyish’s living came to its end, and then she cleared her mind, concentrated on the bright copper taste in her mouth and chanted the incantation as she tipped herbs into the blood and ground them with the pestle nine times.

Three by three. Sacred.

There was a rustle behind her. ‘Deadsight? Isn’t that–’

Tiberius hissed a sharp, whispered command, stilling Aaric. She ignored them both. Already Edrea felt the realm’s magic rising from the mortar, and she tipped the thick mixture into the golden bowl. It smoked as it slid across the incantations engraved within it and the concoction jolted and thickened, heady now in her nostrils. Edrea turned to face the corpse, and Aaric took a long, slow breath in through flared nostrils. He also took a soft step backwards, giving her space. She rolled her head on her neck and put the bowl on the trader’s chest, dipping her left forefinger into the mixture and dabbing it very gently in each corner of her eyes. Her vision pinked with blood and burnt with the herb juices; bloody tears began to leak down her cheeks.

Edrea dipped her finger again and drew the shape of an eye in the centre of her brow, and then, with one violent motion, she plunged her whole hand into the bowl, scooped up the mess of herbs and blood, and slapped it across the corpse’s face. Her body convulsed, a flinch from her toes to the crown of her head. Her teeth clicked together and a low, inhuman grunt shook from her chest. Long, rasping pants clawed out of her throat as the deadsight took hold. It was weak. Too weak.

Growling, Edrea plunged her hand into the bowl again, and this time slapped the mixture across her own face, hard enough to hurt – and to solidify the connection between herself and the corpse.

‘Pietr. Crafts talismans for the priests to bless, though he sells many that have never seen the inside of a temple. Approaching fifty and unmarried. Lived in the Hollow all his life.’ The words came through her, not from her. It wasn’t her voice either, but one that was lower and tinged with a rage she’d never been able to identify or suppress. Her fingers dug into the desk, their short nails bending under the force. Pain blossomed at the fingertips, but Edrea ignored it.

‘He heard it first, north of the town. Everyone ran and… he waited, his bravado a shiny, useless shield that broke too late into fear. He ran. He fell. The rain fell. And the creature found him.’

Edrea shook as Pietr’s last moments enveloped her. She shuddered at the cold of the rain on his skin and cried out as he fell, rose, fell again. Screamed as the teeth tore out the back of her leg – they hadn’t seen that injury yet – and again when she thrashed over in the rain and the creature locked its gaze with hers. Screamed, and then went silent as she tried to assess a strange new feeling.

Those ruby eyes. Those coal-bright, all-seeing, intelligent eyes. It was more than Pietr’s terror or the growing toll of death magic. There was some kind of connection. I know those eyes. I know this beast.

You. I know you.

A faint gunshot and the burning link was severed as the creature looked away. She felt Pietr fill with desperate hope and desperate courage. He had stood again and tried to fight. The beast gutted him, and when he collapsed back into the road, Edrea clearly felt its compulsion. In time with the dying talisman-maker, on her knees in the study of Gothghul Castle, only faintly aware of Aaric’s shouts, she lifted her chin and presented her throat to the beast.

The deadsight faded.

Blood and herbs had dried on her face and in her eyes, scratchy and stiff, flaking as she rubbed her cheeks and temples. Her eyes stung and a vicious headache spiked through the very centre of her brain. Aaric grabbed her shoulders, and she flinched and cried out in shock, overwhelmed by the sensation. ‘Get off,’ she gasped, shuddering and shrinking away. ‘Too much… too much.’

He let her go as if she’d burnt him and took a pace sideways, leaving her crumpled between the window and the desk. Groaning, Edrea dragged herself up the wall until she stood, swaying slightly. Tiberius handed her a damp cloth, and she wiped her face clean, gently sponging her eyes until she could see again. ‘Thank you.’

‘What did you see?’ Aaric asked eventually, and the impatience and worry were tightly leashed, barely audible.

‘The creature did not respond to a curse placed on Pietr – nor then, I imagine, on any of the victims. It was searching for something. A person, perhaps. A way to convey…’ She trailed off and coughed. Aaric handed her a glass of wine, and she took a large swallow, then nodded her thanks. ‘It wants something,’ she added, her voice growing less like the one that spoke through her and more like her own. ‘It won’t stop until it gets it. Until it gets the right person.’

‘Then a curse could still be at work somehow,’ Tiberius mused, pulling at his bottom lip as he stared into the fireplace without seeing. ‘One imperfectly performed and thus weak. The creature knows the object of its master’s ire is here, but it cannot identify who it is.’

‘Then it will wreak havoc until it finds the accursed townsperson. I cannot allow that to happen.’ Aaric looked back at Edrea and his hand lifted, hovered in the air as if unsure of its action, and then dropped back to his side. ‘You did well, daughter. Very well. Is there anything else you can tell us?’

I know this beast. I know it.

She met her father’s eyes. ‘No, Father. There is nothing else.’

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