Saints and martyrs, p.24
Saints And Martyrs, page 24
Xenos Bane left them on a patch of level ground. It had not always been so. The low, shattered walls surrounding the area showed that a towering mausoleum had once stood here. The surface under Dagover’s boots was smooth, blackened glass. The ground vibrated with the distant rumble of volcanoes in the east. Their wrath turned the horizon into a pulsating sunset. There was no combat here, though. Nor was there any detectable within miles of the landing site.
‘Peace reigns here,’ said Irvo Werhig, looking around. He was the sergeant of the squad. His face was a mass of burn tissue, and his single eye stared with a fanatic’s commitment.
‘I’m not sure peace is precisely the right word,’ Dagover said. He had heard wails coming from nearby when they had landed. They were growing louder. ‘It is true, though, that the fighting here has stopped.’
‘This is her work,’ said Werhig, and there was a murmur of agreement from his troopers. ‘She has been here. This is her work.’
‘We’ll know soon enough.’ Dagover began the march towards the tower.
The structure loomed over the landscape, much higher than any of the monuments surrounding it. Many of them had been destroyed in the battles that must have raged over the area. Their rubble had been hammered flat. Some had been sheared away, as if they had been stalks of wheat before the passing of a monstrous scythe. Not everything had been destroyed, though. Some smaller tombs and statuary were still standing. And as he made his way through the ruins, he saw that there was new construction happening.
The wailing filled the air with a thick miasma of repentance and despair. The people of Parastas came into sight. Some crawled in the direction of the tower, raising pleading arms as they cut their flesh to bloody rags over the shards of rockcrete. Others cowered, facing the same way, abasing themselves and gabbling incomprehensible prayers. Their fear and their shame were clear, though. Many, many more were at work on the new statues, whose details came into focus as Dagover approached.
‘Who are these people?’ one of the troopers asked.
‘Heretics,’ said another, raising her plasma rifle.
‘Hold your fire,’ said Dagover. There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of the desperate, howling people. They were ignoring the squad, though. ‘Do not let them distract us from our purpose.’ He also needed to study them more closely. There were things to be learned here.
The trooper was right. The people were heretics. They were covered in blasphemous tattoos and scarification. Unholy runes defaced their flesh. Their bodies bore the marks of fealty to the Ruinous Powers. Yet there was no rage here, no dark celebration, no worship, as he would have expected it. The reverse was true, he saw, as they passed the first of the statues. It had been carved from a broken column. The work was as crude as it was unmistakeable. It was a depiction of a daemon at the moment of its destruction. The horned abomination’s maw was wide in fear, its arms outstretched in agony. Its lower limbs looked as if they were melting into stone. The heretics had created the graven image of defeat. The same was true of the next statue, and the next. The figures multiplied the closer the squad came to the tower. It was as if an army of daemons had been petrified, and all their doomed faces were turned towards the tower.
‘This is not worship,’ Dagover said. ‘This is repentance.’
The crowd grew thicker as the squad advanced. The wailing was deafening. The people tore at their flesh with their nails and with jagged stones. They whipped themselves. They laboured on statues, they wept, they begged and they howled. The night shook with their desperation. They sought forgiveness.
They had not received it.
The tower was a colossal fortress-sepulchre. A high, forbidding wall of rockcrete and iron surrounded a structure that rose as a step pyramid, from whose peak a tall, rounded spire emerged. The top of the spire was encircled by a parapet, which seemed to look down at the land with brooding judgement. The structure was black, its sculptures a brutal, remorseless symphony of mourning, remembrance and calls to penitence and duty. Martyrs and heroes, rendered in immense proportions and wrapped in death shrouds, had their gazes turned to the horizons. There was no mercy to be found in them.
The penitent cultists held back from the wall. Fearful, they left a wide space between themselves and the sepulchre’s gate. Those at the forward edge of the line stretched their arms out, begging for that which would never be given, but they did not take another step forward. None of them even glanced at the inquisitor and his troops.
Dagover paused at the edge of the open ground and smiled grimly. ‘Look,’ he said to the squad. ‘See this boundary that the heretics cannot cross? That is the demarcation line where need finally encounters a level of fear that it cannot surmount.’
‘Perhaps some tried, and their fates have taught the others that fear,’ said Werhig.
‘Perhaps,’ Dagover said. The ground between the penitent and the wall was wide open. The shrines that had been here had been utterly destroyed in the battles that had surrounded the tower. The ruins were powder and loose stone. Dust eddied in the mournful wind. ‘But I think the repentance we see is a result of the destruction that occurred here and elsewhere. I do not see any bodies before us. It is not the fear of retribution that holds these people back. It is awe. At its most fearful.’
‘Then we who have been saved by her have nothing to fear,’ Werhig said. He took a step forward.
Dagover reached out, the articulations of his long arm grinding softly. He touched Werhig’s shoulder and the sergeant froze. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘We do not wish to risk our approach being misinterpreted.’
Werhig blanched and stepped back. ‘No, my lord.’
‘I will go alone,’ said Dagover.
He started across the shattered plain. The cries grew even louder. The penitent saw him now. They saw him doing what they dared not. Did they envy him? he wondered. Or did they fear the retribution that would now come?
He walked slowly, boots crunching slivered rubble. The gate loomed before him, its relief work depicting a single kneeling, shrouded figure. Its hands were clasped and raised, offering the Emperor the force of its grief, compelling the onlooker to take up the torch of duty.
The gate was closed but did not appear to be barred. Dagover took hold of one half and pulled. His armour’s servo-motors strained, and with a slow grind, the gate opened. He entered the gloom of the passage running through the wall. The other side opened into a narrow courtyard. The sepulchre loomed over Dagover, its walls marked by the maws of hundreds of vaults. Carved into the massive entrance doors was the same figure that had been emblazoned on the gate. Its features concealed by the hood, it faced outward now, as if demanding to know if the viewer had followed its example.
Dagover tried the doors. They, too, were unlocked, and he passed into the sepulchre. There was illumination here, albeit dim. Lumen torches, mounted every twenty feet along the walls, cast a funereal glow over the interior. The shadows at the edges of the light were deep and still as grief. Vaulted corridors branched off the main one, each holding rows of crypts ten storeys high. Dagover advanced towards the centre of the monument, the sound of his footsteps echoing back at him.
At length, the corridor ended at an immense chamber, its shadowed roof hundreds of feet up. Narrow stone staircases cut down to each landing of the stepped walls. The crypts were beyond counting, a vast hive of the dead. Dagover looked up, and saw the shaft of a column extending skyward from the centre of the chamber’s ceiling. The effect was dizzying, the spiral of lumen torches in the spire a distant thread of cold stars.
On the floor of the chamber were the tombs of cardinals, vying to outdo each other with the complexity of their bronze and gold ornamentation. In between the tombs were piles of books and reliquaries. These were objects that had been rescued, over time, from the rubble of destroyed monuments, he realised. The struggle for Parastas had not been a short one, and it was not over yet.
This was why they had been able to catch up with her.
A shadow moved. It was silent. It was just enough of a disturbance in the stillness of the sepulchre to draw Dagover’s attention. That was, he was sure, precisely the intent. He turned to his right. An aeldari warrior crouched on a tomb a short distance away, power sword in one hand, pistol aimed steadily at Dagover.
The inquisitor recognised the type of armour worn by the alien. It was sleek, engineered for maximum agility. The coat the aeldari wore was flowing, its collar high. The effect was theatrical, a performance. This was a Harlequin. Dagover had killed more than one over the years. But he had not come to do that here. And the colouring of the Harlequin’s gear was unusual. It was dark, devoid of the markings that would have identified the aeldari’s troupe. It was battle-scarred too, its elegance eroded by long years of combat.
Dagover stretched his arms and opened his hands. The gesture was symbolic of his purpose, not his ability. Though he was not holding a weapon, he could easily punch through stone. ‘I must speak with her,’ he said.
‘Do you, human? You declare this role for yourself upon this stage?’ the aeldari said. ‘But what of our leading lady? Are you so certain that you perform together? Must she speak with you?’
‘I hope she will.’
‘Many have regretted that hope.’
‘I do not think I will.’
The aeldari’s blank expression was as eloquent as a shrug.
Light descended from above, silver-white light that cut as sharp as a blade. Dagover winced and looked up, squinting. There was a figure in the centre of the light. Psychic energy crackled around the silhouette, lightning emerging from the dark centre of the storm. The figure dropped slowly from the shaft of the spire, and pulled the shimmering, pulsing, dangerous light inside itself, gradually containing an energy whose purity was lethal.
Boots touched the marble floor a few feet from Dagover. A woman in dark, battered power armour stood before him. Her hair was white as death, and for a few moments her eyes were even more so. An awful white, the blank white that was the overflowing of power. Tendrils of lightning flickered in their corners.
Her very gaze can destroy, Dagover thought.
The Sister of Battle looked at him. She had less of an expression than the Harlequin. She might have been a statue. She might have been the cold of the void.
‘You should not have come here,’ said Ephrael Stern.
III
THE DESTROYER AND THE PREDATOR
The man was a reptile.
She must be wary.
Stern eyed the inquisitor. It had been a long time since one had found her. She supposed she should not be surprised one was still looking for her. She had grown used to their obsessive pursuits, and with all other meaning in their lives gone, their obsessions might be all they had. Still, she was bored with these witch-hunters. The Inquisition was not a threat to her any longer, not after her second death. Not after she had embraced the full flowering of her power.
She had given the inquisitor his warning. Now, with tedious inevitability, he would ignore it. He would attack, and she would have to deal with him. Once, she and Kyganil would simply have stepped into the webway, leaving another officious, blinkered fool behind. But she felt held on Parastas, as if her task here was not finished. She did not know where to go. She did not know how to fight the nothing that had come for the Emperor, and soon would come for everything else.
So she would not run from this man. Nor would she kill him. She would not kill a loyal servant of the Emperor. She would have to remove him from her path, though.
If he was corrupt, then the task became easier – and it would be easy to believe the worst of this man, with that death’s head of a face emerging from the power armour, and those inhuman optics instead of eyes, concealing whatever remained of his soul. Stern knew the flaws in quick judgements, though. She had been on the receiving end of many.
‘You are wrong,’ the inquisitor said. What remained of his natural voice was a serpentine rasp. The vox-amp in his gorget magnified it into a phantom, echoing growl. ‘I am exactly where I should be. I am where I have been destined to stand. Hail, Chosen of the Emperor. Hail, Thrice-Born.’
That was unexpected. Stern had never imagined those words being spoken by a servant of the Inquisition. Still wary, she said nothing.
‘I have been seeking you for a hundred years and more,’ the inquisitor continued. ‘It must be with the Emperor’s grace that I see you at last.’
‘The Emperor’s grace,’ she repeated softly. Hearing those words from another’s lips wounded her anew with fresh grief. At the same time, she resented the inquisitor’s manipulations. He was choosing his words well, telling her what he thought she wanted to hear.
She sensed Kyganil tensing, as alert to a trap as she was. The inquisitor’s words of welcome made her far more suspicious than the usual anathema. ‘Why have you been looking for me?’ she asked.
‘Because the Imperium needs you.’
‘The Imperium.’
‘Of course.’
She grunted. ‘I see. You come with offers of absolution, do you? Promises of reconciliation with the Adepta Sororitas?’ A promise she would not believe. She was a psyker, tainted by the warp, and a heretic in the eyes of all Sisters of Battle. They would not welcome back an unclean, twice-resurrected being.
The man’s smile was an awful thing. Hooks pulled his lips back, revealing teeth filed to points. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I make no such promises. Who would even believe I had the power to make them a reality? You would not. Anybody who did believe that would be of no use to me. No. I am here because I know what is needed. You are needed.’
She shook her head. ‘Do not lie to me. I know that the Imperium is gone.’
The smile vanished. ‘It is wounded. It is not gone.’
The man’s sincerity gave her pause. His faith was unbroken. A needle of shame pierced the wall of her grief.
‘How do you know?’
‘The alternative is unthinkable.’
She sighed. ‘You do not know what I know.’
‘I have seen worlds where you have passed, and the faith in the Imperial creed is renewed. Worlds that stand against the darkness that has swept across the galaxy with the coming of that rift. They have new hope, and new light. Some of their citizens have travelled with me in my search for you.’
‘And who are you?’
‘I am Lord Inquisitor Otto Dagover of the Ordo Xenos.’
‘Xenos,’ Stern repeated. She turned to Kyganil. ‘Stand with me, old friend,’ she said. If Dagover believed the ordos still existed, then he was an enemy.
The aeldari moved to her side. Though he did not sheathe his weapons, he lowered them, showing how little the threat of the inquisitor mattered.
‘Ordo Xenos,’ Stern said again. ‘Then, Inquisitor Dagover, the friendship you see before you is blasphemous in your eyes, and we must be destroyed.’ She took in the nature of Dagover’s cloak. Her lip curled in disgust and azure sparks snapped from the ends of her fingers. ‘Have Kyganil’s kin become part of your war attire? Are you seeking to provoke his attack?’
The reptile smiled again. ‘I come before you as I am so that there can be no secrets between us.’
Kyganil’s expression did not change, but Stern sensed his sour amusement. She shared it. If an inquisitor promised to be open, the secrets he was hiding must be immense. ‘Go on,’ she said, her voice neutral.
Still that awful smile. ‘I see that you do not believe me. I am not offended. I would not believe me either, were our positions reversed. Nevertheless, I maintain that I have no quarrel with your companion.’
‘You appear to be a poor servant of your ordo then, inquisitor.’
‘To the contrary. I am a clear-eyed one. I understand the difference between means and ends. It is the ends that matter.’
‘That is a dangerously radical position. It is an invitation to corruption.’
‘That is true. When I said I was clear-eyed, it is because I must be.’
He had no eyes at all, Stern thought. Dagover looked at reality through Mechanicus constructs. He must despise his flesh and seek to conceal his soul. She wondered what, exactly, his conception of clarity was.
‘You said you have been searching for me for over a century. That surprises me.’
‘You are used to being pursued by the agents of the Ordo Malleus.’
‘I am.’
‘I have friends of that calling. It is through them that I first heard of you. Their records were useful, if misguided. That is the problem with so many of the Ordo Malleus. When you are consumed with being a hammer, everyone begins to look like a witch.’
‘You saw something else.’
‘I did. I saw a great weapon.’
She wondered how strategic his candour was. ‘I am not a tool for you to use.’
‘Of course you aren’t.’ And again, Dagover smiled. ‘I was looking for you before the darkness came. I have seen what you have done since. You have pushed the darkness back. I know you can do even more. The Imperium needs you more than it ever has before.’
Dagover’s confidence in the existence of the Imperium continued to give her pause. She knew what she knew. She had seen the nothing. Yet Dagover’s belief gave him a surety of purpose she envied, even with her commitment to avenge the Emperor. No doubt, that was what he wanted. ‘In other words,’ she said, ‘you plan to wield this great weapon you say I am.’
