Miracles - Nicholas Wolf Read online

  My mother gives me a scolding look. ‘Do you suggest that the Emperor Enthroned makes mistakes?’

  ‘No!’ I yelp. ‘I would never! I just… What use would the Emperor have for someone like me? I’m not holy, or brave. I’m… broken.’

  ‘Because of your mother,’ the Angel says.

  ‘Yes,’ I mutter weakly. ‘Because of you.’

  ‘Your prayers to the Emperor have not gone unheard,’ the Angel replies with a reassuring nod. ‘Not a one. He is aware of your suffering, for He sees all from the Golden Throne.’

  The same creeping nausea worms through my gut, leaving me shivering. ‘What… purpose am I to fulfil?’

  Mother smiles sweetly, too wide. ‘This world is doomed.’

  I can’t help but tremble at its voice. ‘What do you mean “doomed”?’

  ‘I will show you.’

  The Angel reaches out a hand, somehow both gently and faster than I can prepare myself for. It touches my forehead. Agony, like a metal spike being hammered through my skull, floods me.

  And then I see.

  I see Praxis burning in living fire that gives no light. I see shadows with the faces of monsters slinking through the darkness, feeding on a hive world as it dies. I see men and women running, screaming, tearing at their bodies as crawling things gnaw through their skin. I see the blood of innocents forming rivers in the streets as the skies turn the colour of clotted vitae. I see the insane carving their bodies apart while thorny monsters praise their mutilation. I see the corpses of children piled in rotting mountains that blot out the sun.

  I see Myra, crying out in agony before a blood-drenched nightmare that devours her hope. I see Markus and Arden pulling their eyes from their skulls so that they don’t have to see.

  I see.

  I see.

  Sophya.

  The vision ends. I suck in putrid air like a drowning man.

  ‘By the Emperor!’ I choke out. My throat is on fire, like I’ve swallowed poison. I double over, vomiting across the floor. ‘What… was that?’ I finally gasp.

  ‘But a taste of the fate that awaits this world, and every soul in it,’ the Angel says in my mother’s ‘you’d-better-take-this-seriously’ tone. ‘Unless you stop it.’

  I can’t close my eyes. Every time I blink I see echoes of that horrible reality etched on the backs of my eyelids. ‘But how can I stop it?’ I gasp. ‘I’m nobody.’

  ‘So were many of the Emperor’s saints. The divine may do its work through anyone, no matter how small. But first…’ The Angel pauses. ‘You must prove your devotion. To the Emperor.’

  ‘My devotion?’

  The Angel’s form seems to blur in the lumen light. ‘The Emperor has heard your prayers, Jacen Hertz. He has also heard your skulking disbelief, your unrepented sins. The power to save this world, and your family, cannot inhabit a broken vessel.’

  I cling tightly to my mother’s leg. ‘I’ll do anything!’ I cry out, unable to think of anything but the vision. ‘Anything!’

  ‘Bring me the heart of the child you love most.’

  I stop.

  The world stops, not just me. The Angel’s words are like being doused in ice water. Its form blurs once more as my childhood home spins back into focus.

  ‘No.’

  My mother’s face twists in a frown, the kind she made when she’d started hearing voices. A resonant growl thrums from everywhere at once, pressing against my ears. ‘You refuse?’ she says, still smiling brightly.

  I push away from her. My eyes sting with tears. ‘I can’t! You’re… you’re asking me to… to…’

  ‘The Emperor knows what He asks,’ the Angel says. ‘Do you think you’re the first person to have to make this choice? Do you not think He felt the same as you do when He sacrificed His sons to prevent this same darkness from swallowing the galaxy?’

  My eyes brim with tears. ‘Why the heart?’ I finally spit out.

  Why not the eyes, or the lips, or the tongue?

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter!’ I scream at it, so loud my throat clenches. ‘I’m not killing my daughter!’

  ‘The choice is yours alone to make,’ my mother says grimly. ‘I am only a messenger. Either you accede to the Emperor’s test and cleanse your spirit in your daughter’s blood, or you watch as your world and your family dies. You have until morning.’

  The weak lumen light splutters and dies, drowning the kitchen in shadow. The Angel sinks back into the darkness, leaving only two glowing eyes to regard me as the world fades away.

  I open my eyes.

  I’m awake.

  Burned flesh and voided bowels.

  I’m alive.

  Antiseptic and lubricant.

  I shouldn’t be alive.

  Wailing screams and animal howls.

  Where am I?

  My eyes trace the astringent sterility of a medicae wing, roiling in complete chaos. Blackened wrecks of steaming flesh are stacked two to a bed, mewling prayers to the Emperor and begging for death. Corpses choke the floor and there are far too few blankets to cover them all. Sisters Hospitaller and medicae servitors scramble between the dead and the dying, overwhelmed, out of control. Priests, confessors and acolytes provide what succour they can. The laspistol crack of the Emperor’s Peace being administered on the doomed barely penetrates the cacophony.

  It’s like the vision from my insane dream, in microcosm.

  Through the chaos, like sinister islands in a roiling sea, I see enforcers.

  Clad in glossy black carapace armour and clothed in ebon robes, these are no ordinary troopers. They shoulder through the insanity of the medicae wing, faces hidden behind glowering rebreather masks. They exude menace as they sweep through the room, grabbing survivors and hauling them away to places unknown.

  I see an enforcer sergeant stop to interrogate a flustered Sister. She turns and points in the direction of my bed.

  Oh no.

  Before I can think or react the enforcers swarm over to me. Within moments I’m completely surrounded by hulking bodies and glaring helmets. Gloved hands grab me.

  ‘You’re coming with me,’ the lead enforcer growls, turning my blood cold as ice.

  ‘I-I can’t,’ I stammer. ‘I was in an accident. I’m hurt.’

  I can’t see the enforcer’s face, but I can somehow tell he’s giving me a strange look. Only then do I actually look down at myself.

  Just like in the dream, there isn’t a scratch on me.

  The enforcers hustle me into a makeshift interrogation room that might’ve been a supply closet. It reeks of antiseptic and machine lubricant. Two of them guard the door, shock mauls shouldered but not activated. In the confined space I can hear them breathing heavily. Then it hits me.

  They’re afraid.

  The enforcer sergeant points to a chair in the centre of the room.

  ‘Sit,’ he commands. I obey.

  With a tired sigh the lawman removes his helmet. Beneath is a face every bit as stern and intimidating as his mask: grey and scarred, with piercing eyes beneath a furrowed brow. He sits across from me, glaring, until I can feel sweat breaking out on my forehead.

  Finally he blinks, settling into his seat and consulting a data-slate. ‘Jacen Hertz,’ he says, scrolling through something on his slate. ‘You’re a lucky man.’

  I don’t feel lucky. The room feels stifling. Fecund. Like in my ridiculous dream. ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘Sub-level plasma generator suffered a critical failure,’ he replies in a clipped tone. ‘Manufactorum was completely destroyed.’

  ‘By the Emperor…’ I whisper. My father worked in that factory. I’ve spent more of my life in that building than I’ve spent everywhere else in the world. And now it’s gone. ‘How many…?’

  The sergeant raises an eyebrow. ‘Dead? Hard to
tell. The servitors will be combing the wreckage for weeks, but with the degree of incineration it’ll be up to our best estimation. Tens of thousands.’

  I try to think of something to say, some words to encapsulate the shock and horror. Nothing comes to my lips.

  ‘And then there’s you,’ he growls, his voice dropping to an icy pitch. In that moment I understand that this is a man who has killed people.

  ‘Wh-what do you mean?’

  The enforcer shrugs his armoured shoulders, but there’s nothing innocent about the gesture. It looks mechanical. Rehearsed.

  ‘Factory power plant melts down, pretty much everyone and everything in a mile radius gets turned to dust, and then we find you without a scratch on you.’ He leans forward, resting his elbow on his knee. He looks like a servitor trying to appear human. ‘You understand why I’m a little curious.’

  I fight the urge to shift uneasily in my seat. I’m suddenly acutely aware of the lawmen behind me. I hear the sound of leather-clad fists tightening on weapons. A fly buzzes past me. I smell the stink of sweat.

  And the odour of sulphur.

  ‘What are you implying?’

  ‘You’ve had a hard life, Jacen Hertz,’ the sergeant says, switching to a voice I believe he thinks sounds amicable. He glances again at his data-slate. ‘Mother, Lynne Hertz, suspected psyker, kills father, Corbin Hertz, then vanishes. Son, Jacen Hertz, sent to take his father’s place in the manufactorum the day he turns thirteen years Terran standard…’

  ‘My father wasn’t murdered,’ I interrupt.

  The sergeant raises an eyebrow. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘My mother didn’t kill my father,’ I repeat slowly, angrily. ‘He killed himself. The night she left.’

  The enforcer looks back at the data-slate. I see an eyebrow twitch as his eyes scan the file. ‘If that’s how you remember it.’

  ‘And my mother wasn’t a psyker,’ I add hotly.

  The sergeant gives me a long, blank look. I can tell he’s mulling a difficult thought but I can’t determine what it is.

  ‘Indeed,’ he says finally.

  Something in his tone sets my teeth on edge, even though I know he’s wrong. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I’m a sanctioned investigator, my mandate comes from the planetary governor himself,’ he says flatly. ‘Do you think there’s anything that goes on in my district that I don’t know about?’

  The implication leaves me feeling nauseous. ‘My mother went crazy and my dad killed himself over it,’ I say quietly. ‘That doesn’t make me a criminal.’

  The sergeant’s icy blue eyes grow wider. Too wide. ‘That kind of thing, especially at a young age… it does things to a man,’ he says. ‘Might make you snap one day. Maybe blow up that old manufactorum, for example.’

  ‘You think I–?’

  The enforcer surges to his feet, sending his own chair clattering to the floor. ‘This may or may not surprise you, Jacen Hertz, but in accordance with the Lex Imperialis I have the Emperor-mandated authority to kill you, in this very room, whenever I damn well deem it. It also may or may not surprise you that today I am very low on patience. So you are going to tell me everything you know, right this very moment, or I will judge you in contempt of my investigation and you shoot you in the head. You have until the count of three.’

  My mind races. I can’t breathe. ‘I didn’t do anything!’

  His bolt pistol is in his hand. ‘One.’

  He’s going to kill me.

  My stomach churns. I taste bile. ‘I didn’t do anything!’ I scream.

  The cold metal barrel presses against my forehead. ‘Two.’

  I’m going to die. I’m going to die, right here, right now. ‘I didn’t do anything!’ I sob. ‘I j-just want to go home!’

  The sergeant kicks his chair hard enough to twist the metal. I hear the sound of the hammer cocking back. ‘Then how do you explain the fact that you’re sitting here, talking to me, instead of being scraped off the wreckage like everyone else in that factory?’ he bellows. ‘How?’

  Tell him the truth, Jacen.

  The enforcers approach behind me. I hear the sound of the sergeant’s gloved finger squeezing the trigger. ‘It was a miracle.’

  After an eternity the sergeant holsters his weapon. Frantic breath gasps out of me. I ignore the warm wetness running down my leg.

  ‘A miracle?’ the sergeant sighs.

  Suddenly I’m back in weekly service, Myra and Markus and Arden and Sophya at my side, listening to some priest whose name I can’t remember, preaching to me about the Emperor’s miracles all around me. He might have been the same priest who spoke at my father’s funeral.

  ‘I was saved by an angel,’ I say, swallowing my own sense of disbelief.

  The sergeant raises a grizzled eyebrow. ‘Really? And what makes you so damned special?’

  You were chosen, Jacen.

  I don’t have an answer. I don’t have an answer to any of this. I’d been trying to figure out where the Emperor was in my life from the moment my mother, jabbering like a lunatic, ran out of the house into the darkness of the hive and never returned.

  I don’t have an answer, or at least not one that makes sense.

  You’re the only one who can prevent the darkness from consuming this world, Jacen.

  The hairs on my neck stand up. ‘Hello?’

  ‘What?’ the sergeant snaps.

  Skinless nightmares flaying men alive.

  I whirl around. There is only myself, the investigator and his two enforcers. ‘Who said that? Do you hear that?’

  The sergeant moves so fast I don’t even realise it until I try to draw in a breath of surprise and can’t. His hand tightens around my throat. I hear armour servos whirr over the buzzing of flies. My feet leave the ground.

  Shrieking children drowning in boiling oceans of blood.

  ‘I’ve persecuted the Emperor’s foes longer than you’ve been alive, boy,’ he growls. His voice is a cold fury. I see it in those grey, steely eyes. ‘His justice is like a scouring flame. There’ll be no shadows for the wicked to hide in.’

  The sergeant slams me into the wall hard enough to dent the metal. I collapse to the floor, coughing, wheezing. The enforcers tower over me as I struggle for breath. The light of the interrogation room flickers. The smell. I can’t breathe.

  Like haunted carrion on a battlefield that never ends.

  The sergeant stares at me for a long moment as I lay on the ground retching and gasping, studying me. ‘Get him out of my sight,’ he growls suddenly, mechanically.

  Gloved hands grab me by the shoulders. The door clicks open and I’m shoved out into the hallway. I see the sergeant muttering into his vox-bead, his dead eyes lingering on me as the door slams shut.

  He’s not letting me go.

  He’s following me.

  Chapter Four

  I flee the medicae facility as quickly as is humanly possible.

  Clattering orderly servitors attempt to record my information on reams of parchment as I pass through each wing of the hospital, but I run past each one without saying a word. The lobotomised menials do nothing to stop me. The Sisters are too concerned with saving lives to realise mine was just threatened. I feel the eyes of enforcers tracking me as I all but sprint into the streets. I can’t see anyone following me, but I know they’re there, watching me.

  Only when I’m out in the streets, turning left and right at random, losing myself in the shadows of the hive, do I allow myself to actually breathe. The air is hot, hotter than it should be at this time of day. It smells of sulphur and ash. The explosion?

  How far away was it?

  How long was I in the medicae?

  I wander, eyes on my boots, seeing nothing but ferrocrete passing beneath my feet. It doesn’t feel real. None of it does. This morning I was kissi
ng my wife and children goodbye and walking to the manufactorum, fully prepared to spend the majority of my day building power packs. Now the manufactorum is gone, most of the people I know are dead and a damned enforcer thinks I’m somehow responsible?

  You need to focus, Jacen.

  ‘Shut up,’ I say aloud. ‘You’re a dream. You’re not real.’

  I trudge through the darkening streets of the hive, turning this way, then that way, drifting into a grey rumination and letting my feet guide me on the familiar path home. I pass into a tunnel, and the glow of the street-lumens fades to black, black as skies bleeding madness across the world. In the shadows I see glowing eyes watching me, following my every movement.

  Why do you doubt what you’ve seen?

  ‘Because it’s insane!’ I snap, walking faster. ‘I mean, angels, miracles… I just… it’s all just…’

  It’s not that you don’t believe, Jacen. It’s that you fear what the Emperor has asked of you.

  ‘I’m not going to kill my daughter!’ I yell, loud enough for my voice to echo. Onlookers give me a strangely knowing look and scuttle away, murmuring to each other.

  I pull my coat tighter around my shoulders and all but run for home. A darkness is setting in, painting the hive in a gloom that not even the street-lumens can touch.

  You saw what awaits them, should you fail.

  The vision. I can’t escape it; even when I blink I see it. The urge to gouge out my eyes is kept at bay only by my desire to look upon my wife and children again. But still it’s there, embedded in my heart. Even trying to not think about it twists my stomach into nauseated knots.

  ‘Why does it have to be her?’ I ask, feeling tears brimming in my eyes. ‘Why?’

  Power requires sacrifice, Jacen. The Emperor is promising you the power to save a world, and the rest of your family. Such power does not come without a price.

  ‘Then the Emperor is evil!’ I shout, fighting back tears.

  His ways are mysterious. His plans are beyond fathoming to mortals.

  I pass by the cathedral. Enforcers patrol nearby the spot where Old Guryn used to beg. There’s an area cordoned off, next to an impounded groundcar. I see enforcers glance up at me as I walk by, eyes tracking me.