Divination - John French Read online

  He fell, the wire rope coiling behind him. The guns were heavy weights in his hands.

  ‘Why does it fly so high?’ asked a voice that came from the still depths of his mind. ‘Why doesn’t it keep lower?’

  ‘So it can see the world.’

  ‘All of it?’

  A small face looking up, wide eyes under a frown.

  ‘As good as all of it, yes.’

  ‘I want to be a hawk.’

  He had laughed.

  ‘Maybe you will be…’

  And above them the hawk had turned in a cloudless sky.

  SIGNIFIER 2

  ‘Faith is a powerful thing,’ said the voice from the chapel door.

  ‘Is it?’ asked Koleg, without looking around.

  The candle burned in front of his eyes. He had not looked up from it since he had entered the chapel. That had been six hours ago, and the candle had burned to almost a nub. The commissars and warders of the prefectus would find him soon enough. He had not made it hard for them to find him. Once they did there would be pain and then… nothing.

  ‘In another context that question would be heresy,’ said the voice. ‘But I am sure that the punishments don’t hold much fear for you, now.’

  Koleg looked around then.

  The man standing behind him wore grey robes, without mark or ornamentation. His face was dagger-sharp beneath his hood. He looked something like a priest and a lot like a killer.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am your confessor.’

  ‘Did they send you?’

  ‘If you mean the commissars and your superior officers, then no, they did not.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘A higher power, shall we say.’

  Koleg grunted and looked back at the candle. He did not have the energy to think about why the man who dressed like a priest, and talked like something else, was there. It just meant that the end was coming, at last.

  ‘So what happens now?’ asked Koleg, looking back at the candle.

  ‘You beat your captain to the point that he has only just come out of a coma. There must be a consequence to that action.’

  Koleg’s face twitched as the fire rose in him.

  ‘He should have got the grid coordinates for the fire drop right.’ He turned his gaze on the grey-clad man. He could feel the rage burning behind his eyes. ‘What are the consequences of that?’

  The hand was black. The fire had shrunk the skin around the bones, and hooked the fingers into claws, but somehow they still opened to reach for his hand.

  ‘You…’

  The fingers were cold. He looked at them, only at them, and tried not to hear the bubbling gurgle of air sucking into fluid-filled lungs. The inferno bomb had hit just the other side of the wall. The blast had ripped that down and then the liquid fire had drowned the remains. Pools of reeking, jellied promethium sat in depressions still burning with black-edged flames. He had seen corpses as he ran through the ruins – lasgun thumping into his back on its sling – pink mouths open on charred faces, silent amongst the guttering flames.

  ‘You… are…’ said the face that he could not look at.

  ‘I am here, Kesh,’ he said. Somehow the words were not a scream. He still did not look up at his brother’s face.

  Kesh jerked, a huge swallow of air sucking into his lungs and crackling back out.

  ‘You…’ he began, but the words never followed.

  The man in grey held Koleg’s gaze.

  ‘Regiments are raised to fight, soldiers to die. They are not meant to live, they are not meant to be family.’

  Koleg’s muscles bunched, the rush of fresh anger feeling cold in his guts, like water, like cold rain. The man gave the smallest shake of his head, and somehow that movement was enough to freeze Koleg to the pew. The man stood up and moved around to the shrine that Koleg’s votive candle burned on. A statue of the Emperor as judge gleamed in the flame light, its features lost under layers of gold leaf.

  ‘What do you pray for?’ asked the man, his voice soft.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Koleg. ‘I ask Him why He did this.’

  The man in grey took an unlit candle from the box beside the shrine, and lit it from Koleg’s flame.

  ‘Because we are made by suffering,’ said the man.

  Koleg was silent for a second, and then felt his mouth open.

  ‘I just… I just want not to feel that any more.’

  The man in grey turned to look at him, candlelight dancing in hard eyes.

  ‘That prayer, my son, is one that can be granted.’

  MISSION TIME STAMP 01:43:05

  The floor of the cavern shot up towards Koleg as he fell. Above him, the neuro-disruptor reached full charge. A ball of actinic lightning formed around it, held in place for an instant and then burst outwards. The pulse shivered through the temple. Exotic energies poured into toxin-laden synapses. It was a simple method, really. The gas mix created fear and altered perception. The neuro-disruptor took those nerve signals and shaped them into violent panic and paranoia. The aim was not just to kill; it was to make the targets tear each other apart. Pulses of grey, blue and white noise filled Koleg’s ears as the disruptor energies washed through him. Motes of pain flared behind his eyes, but he felt only the steady beat of his heart as he fell. They had cut out the strings on which emotion played its song, leaving only echoes.

  He could see figures hacking and tearing at each other on the cavern floor beneath him. One of them looked up, eyes bloodshot above a bloody snarl. The wire rope snapped taut. Koleg jerked to a stop, brought the hand cannon up and fired, three times. Three figures fell. He released the wire rope and dropped the last metre, spraying a long burst from the macrostubber in a circle around him. The gun clicked empty.

  Koleg rose to his feet. A figure came out of the fog to his right, screaming, a bloody length of pipe raised above its head. Koleg put a hand cannon shell into its chest.

  He looked down.

  Three circular hatches stuck with prayer papers formed a triangle on the floor. Motes of lurid green light were ­bubbling and bursting through the metal. Koleg felt a greasy pressure slide over his scalp. This was the one facet of the mission that he could not leave to chance. The psykers held by the cult would not have been able to inhale the gas, but they would have felt the neuro-pulse. Fear like that was a dangerous thing to inflict on a tortured soul whose thoughts could break reality.

  He unfastened the krak charges from his waist and clamped the first one to a hatch. It armed with a dull chime. The floor began to shake. Ozone filled his nose inside his mask. Another charge clamped in place. The arming runes glowed amber at the edge of his sight.

  Pain sliced across his right side. He pitched forwards, twisting, hearing the buzz and crack of the round that had gouged across his shoulder. A figure in bloody robes staggered closer, blood leaking from a torn face, a slug pistol clutched in its hands. The barrel swung towards Koleg.

  The floor hatch just behind the figure exploded upwards. Arcs of ghost light crawled through the air. The figure with the pistol twisted, as a shape rose from the broken hatch. Blood-streaked amnion fell from it. Wasted limbs ­scrabbled at the floor. A corona of pale light pulsed around its head. The hatch ring glowed and blackened under its touch.

  Pain filled Koleg’s eyes as he looked at the psyker. The floor was buckling. Heat ringed the other two hatches. The psyker opened its toothless mouth and howled.

  And the world vanished into the past.

  SIGNIFIER 3

  The sun was high and he was laughing, Kesh running a pace behind him. High above, the hawk turned in the cold dawn air. They should not have been out, but had sneaked from the house while the sun was just a golden blush beyond the mountains, the heat of the day still to soak into the stones of the streets. Their mother and father had be
en asleep, and had not stirred as Koleg pulled open the door on the hawk house. Kesh had fitted the red hood over the hawk’s head as he took it from the cage. It had settled onto Koleg’s leather-wrapped arm, and kept still as they walked through the night-stilled streets to the edge of the settlement and up onto the hills. They had sung as they ran, the old nonsense rhyme remembered since the crib:

  ‘Oh-ho, ho-nooo…

  Which one did we know…

  Knowww… ho…’

  On and on in the sleep-rocked rhythm of the childhood they thought they had outgrown. They ran all the way until the town was laid out beneath them, its off-white buildings clustered around the aquila-capped spire.

  When he took the hood from the hawk’s head, it had given a sharp cry, stretched its wings and taken to the air. He had watched it, and laughed with joy as it had returned to his call, and then cast it back into the air, and they had run to track its shadow.

  Kesh had stopped suddenly.

  ‘You hear that?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Koleg, ‘hear what?’

  Then he had heard it too. Kesh had pointed, and Koleg had seen the black dot on the lightening horizon. He had stared at that dot for a long minute, watching as one became two, became half a dozen. The drone of engines threaded the air. Lights lit in the town, and then he heard the blare of sirens. He stood for a second, frozen, the hawk crying as it wheeled above him. He began to run. Kesh followed an instant later. They were still running, feet stumbling on the rocky hillside as the first bombs began to fall.

  MISSION TIME STAMP 01:47:26

  The flare of explosions died in his eyes. He was lying on the metal floor. The psyker’s howl faded as it pulled the last of itself out of its prison. Koleg looked into its cataract-clogged eyes. It was shivering. Desperate. Terrified. The halo of ghost light above its head grew. Koleg raised his gun. It opened its mouth. He fired.

  He pulled himself up. Blood flowed down his coat from his shoulder. The pain was bright, but he kept moving. Frost rimed the floor around the two remaining hatches. Above and around him rose the sound of the Seekers of Incandescent Truth slaughtering themselves. He blanked the pain in his shoulder, reattached the steel rope. He keyed his wrist controls. The air above the floor shimmered, greasy, fizzing with bubbles of light. The charge runes in his helmet display blinked green.

  He triggered the explosives at the same moment as the cable recoil. The wire rope yanked him into the air as the krak charges on the hatches blew. Fire flashed through the smog of gas as Koleg rose.

  In a closing box in the back of his mind, the memory of explosions rising into the blue sky shrank beneath the eye of a circling hawk.

  SIGNIFIER 0

  The lid of the casket closed and locked. Koleg unfolded a green tarpaulin and spread it across the floor of the cell. He began to strip the macrostubber. His eyes noted the dust and soot on each component as he laid it beside the others. The grenade launcher and hand cannon would come next, and then he would check over the neuro-disruptor. Everything would be mission-ready within the hour. Viola was watching him from by the door, turning the data-stub from his mask over in her fingers. He did not return her look.

  ‘Any problems?’ she asked.

  He split the firing block and laid the parts out, cold metal under his fingers. The light feathered from the oiled edges, and for a second became the sun behind a spreading wing.

  ‘Koleg…?’

  ‘Yes, Mistress von Castellan.’

  ‘There were no problems?’

  ‘The mission was completed. The full details are in your hand. If you need further clarification I am happy to provide it, but anything I can add might be more relevant after you have reviewed the mission capture.’

  A frown pinched her forehead for a second, but then she nodded and opened the door.

  ‘Mistress Viola,’ he said as she was stepping through the cell door. She paused and half turned. He looked up at her, fingers still moving to break apart the macrostubber.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There were no problems.’

  ‘Thank you, Koleg,’ she said.

  She made her face smile and then closed the door.

  On the cell floor Koleg began to clean the pieces of the pistol. Behind his eyes he remembered hawk feathers beneath a high sun, and candle flame, and felt nothing at all.

  THE FATHER OF FAITH

  ‘There is nothing worse than realising that one’s father is mortal, and flawed, and always was.’

  – from the Life of Sebastian Thor,

  proscribed as a Heretical text circa M37

  You know what I can’t stand?

  Quiet. Too much silence and I find myself wishing for the rattle of a chain or the hum of a machine, or the sound of footsteps. Just goes to show, doesn’t it, enough of anything and you can get used to it.

  I find myself coming down here more and more recently. Here, down in the dark stirred by the old machine heart of the Dionysia, time seems to mean less. The past seems closer and the future a little further away. I am called Josef Khoriv, preacher of the Imperial Creed, sometime drill abbot to the schola progenium, Inquisitorial servant, and mostly just Josef to those that know me.

  I am old. I can still move, and there is still enough strength in my arms to wield a hammer, and my wits are only as dull as they ever were. But being old is not just about muscle and brains. It’s about how much you have seen pass, about how much you remember and regret is in the past. Everything comes back around eventually. Live long enough and you see the truth of the past wearing the face of lies in the present.

  In truth I don’t know exactly how old I am. The years weren’t counted in the sump of the hive where I was born, and the birth of another screaming human was no more marked than the sound of a bullet passing. You aged in scars down there, and I have enough that I think I must have been barely an adult when the Navy press-gangs came. I fought them; we all did. They were all in heavy ballistic coats with scales of bronze. And they were vicious bastards. I remember that one of my gang brothers got a knife in under the visor of one of them. Didn’t manage to cut the throat but it spoilt the press-ganger’s face. They didn’t like that. They had shock-mauls to break bones and knock us senseless, but the one who had been cut flicked the power on his maul all the way up, and the next blow crumpled my brother’s chest like cheap tin. They kept hitting until there was just pulped meat.

  We didn’t know why they wanted us or where they would take us. So we fought. I lost. Strange to think now, but those press-gangers in their coats of scale bronze were a form of salvation. The Emperor moves in ways that we cannot always see or understand, and the tools He uses are mysterious. That was the start, the first step on the road to where I am now. It has not been a good life, but it has mattered. I hope it has mattered.

  Why am I talking about this? Why now, alone down here in the dark and quiet of a ship’s hold, am I talking to the dark about something so long ago that it might as well have happened to a different person?

  Because sometimes you don’t know what things mean until later.

  The message came for me as I laboured in the Dionysia’s training hall. Two of the von Castellan household guards were doing their best to try and beat me down with small shock shields and heavy Naval cutlasses. I, old man that I am, had chosen an old man’s weapon, and had been holding them at bay with a five-foot staff of metal-capped wood. Time was when I would have just gone at them with armour gauntlets and aggression. Not now, though. Part of the thing about time is that it teaches you to change. I am slower, fatter and wiser than when I was young, so I now use a stick in these bouts and let the young try and kill me. All of them had bloody lips and faces. I was sweating.

  It was Covenant, my master, who brought the message. I did not see him enter. One of the household guards had just strung together a clever series of feints with shield and blade.
I ducked the last cut and stepped in as the shield edge slammed towards my face. My staff took the trooper’s legs out from under him and sent him tumbling to the floor. I hit the butt of the stick into his helm and brought it up just in time to strike another of them in the gut as they came at me. Both guards staggered, and the other end of the staff cracked across each of their heads. The klaxon sounded to signal the end of the bout. I reached down to help the two troopers up off the floor. I was breathing hard, but I was grinning. The Emperor, high and beneficent that He is, may forgive me for taking pleasure in what is duty, but I do love to fight. You might think that the life I have led would have made combat a grim necessity, but it has never been like that for me. Fighting is a joy, and one that has been mine since I can remember.

  The household troopers pulled their helmets free. Both returned my grins, but then their eyes caught sight of something behind me and both snapped to attention, heads bowed. I looked around. Covenant walked from the edge of the training room. He wore dark grey robes like those of an adept or an official of the Adeptus Terra, but without symbol or rank.

  ‘Lord,’ I said and bowed my own head briefly. ‘How may I serve?’ He did not look at me but gestured at the troopers to leave. I waited until they had gone before talking again. ‘Has something happ–’

  ‘Abernath has been sanctioned for heresy. He is being held on the Ecclesiarchy sanctuary at Bakka.’

  I must confess that for a moment I could not answer. It was as though I had been struck over the head with an iron-tipped staff instead of the troopers.

  ‘What are the charges?’

  ‘Heresy and blasphemy,’ said Covenant. ‘One of my agents in the Bakka power complex sent the information as part of a wider operation.’

  I nodded slowly, part of my mind parsing Covenant’s words. The rest… the rest was trying to find footing in a world that had tilted over on its axis.