The Absolution of Swords - John French Read online

  Shock shuddered through Gul. His head was spinning. Anger flared up, hot and bright.

  ‘You don’t know what you are talking about,’ he snarled. ‘You really have no idea what you are–’

  ‘The Inquisition,’ said Covenant. ‘The man who came to you said that he was of the Inquisition.’ He raised his hand, and opened his fingers. Luminous lines spread across the palm as an electoo lit.

  Gul stared at the glowing image of a stylised ‘I’ broken by three bars across its middle. It was a sigil he had only seen once before, and then, as now, its implication stole every thought from his skull.

  ‘And the Inquisition is something that I know very well,’ said Covenant.

  ‘But he was of the Inquisition,’ Gul heard himself say.

  Covenant gave a single slow nod.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did he... need me?’

  ‘Because he needed someone to protect the seed he planted here until he could harvest its flower.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Gul. ‘He was an inquisitor, and he said that I served humanity. Yet if you are an inquisitor how can you condemn me for doing his work?’

  ‘Because everything you have believed is a lie. The Tenth Path are not lost souls that share your misguided heresy. They are a coven devoted to darkness and ruin. What you have sheltered and protected is a cradle of monsters.’

  ‘I don’t believe you...’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Covenant.

  Gul felt the shaking start at his feet, and roll up through muscle and skin. Something in him wanted to shout that he was innocent, that it was just another layer of lies. But something in Covenant’s voice cut through that tissue of comfort. He felt his knees begin to fold.

  A strong hand caught his shoulder and steadied him. Gul glanced behind him and saw a scarred face in the shadow of a hood, and realised that the fat man with the hammer had stepped behind him without a noise.

  ‘Steady,’ growled the man softly. ‘Remember what you were, prior. Face this with courage.’

  Gul blinked, confused, but felt his back straighten and some strength return to his limbs. Covenant remained still, gaze fixed, face expressionless. Gul felt moisture on his cheek, and raised his hand to touch his face.

  I am crying, he realised. ‘What...’ he stammered. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Before dawn comes the Tenth Path will be no more. There is nothing more you can do to aid or condemn them. But the one who began this, the one who deceived you, he lives, and above all else he fears what you can give me.’

  ‘I will tell you everything,’ said Gul.

  A breath of cold air stirred his robes, and prickled his skin. ‘I...’ he began to say, but Covenant’s head had jerked up, eyes moving across the shadows beyond the altar.

  ‘How many ways in are there?’ growled the fat man behind Gul.

  ‘What?’ stammered Gul. ‘The main arch, the priest’s door, and–’ the words caught in his throat as he realised what the draught of air meant. ‘And... and the way through the undercroft.’

  ‘Severita,’ called Covenant.

  ‘I feel it, lord,’ came a woman’s voice from close by the arch into the main chapel. ‘Something is here.’

  ‘What is happening?’ hissed Gul.

  ‘A watcher,’ said Covenant. ‘The man who you served would have sent a servant to watch over you, to make sure you did not stray.’ The breath of cold air was stronger now. The candle flames rippled.

  ‘Where is the entrance to the undercroft?’ said Covenant.

  ‘Here,’ said Gul, taking a step forwards without thinking. A warm glow had filled him suddenly. ‘It’s just behind this part of the altar. There is a trick to it,’ he said, and felt a smile form on his face as he spoke. ‘A trick lock that releases a panel. I have often wondered why anyone would conceal such a thing. As an amusement, perhaps.’ He laughed. His mind was clear. There was nothing to fear. Everything was simple. He just needed to show them where the hidden door was. He heard the one called Covenant shout something, but the words were distant, soft, meaningless. All that mattered was the next step he needed to take.

  A thin figure stood before him in the shadows. Pale robes hung from it, a hood hiding its bowed head. Recognition sparked in the fog of Gul’s thoughts.

  ‘Lumn?’ he said, and felt the warm dullness of his thoughts shift as he frowned at his Silent Acolyte. ‘What are you doing here, boy? I said to wait in the south transept.’

  Lumn did not answer, but raised his head. The face beneath the hood was Lumn’s but its eyes were holes, and for an instant Gul could not see the chapel, just the dark and stars swirling against the blood- and violet-stained sheet of night.

  Then something lifted him from his feet and spun him over, as gunfire tore through the air.

  VI

  Cleander brought the needler up and squeezed the trigger twice. Toxin splinters hissed into the nearest pilgrim’s throat. The man crumpled, the chain in his fist whipping out with the last of his momentum. Cleander ducked. The chain whistled over his head. Another pilgrim was on him before he could stand. A knife sliced across his forearm. He flinched back, and shot the pilgrim in the face.

  ‘Koleg!’ he shouted.

  More figures were coming from the arches on either side of the chamber. Two ran at Cleander. Neither had hands. Hooked blades projected from the stumps of their wrists. The first swung at him. He ducked under the blow, came up and levelled his closed fist. The digi-weapons in his rings fired. A stream of plasma hit the hook-armed figure, and blasted him into a cloud of ash and screaming heat. Another man came at him, hook arm arcing down towards his head. Cleander stamped his foot out, felt bone break under his heel, and the pilgrim was falling backwards. He rammed the muzzle of his needler into the man’s face and squeezed the trigger three times.

  Cleander raised his head, breathing hard. A mass of figures was pouring from the arches, eyes closed, weapons reaching.

  ‘Koleg!’

  ‘Down!’ shouted Koleg.

  Cleander dropped.

  Koleg’s macrostubber purred thunder. The first rank of pilgrims fell, torsos almost cut in two by the deluge of rounds. Koleg panned the pistol left, scything into the crowd of bodies. Blood puffed into the air, scattering across the black surface of the mirror pool. The macrostubber clicked dry.

  More pilgrims were scrabbling over the bodies of the dead, teeth bared, eyes twitching beneath closed eyelids. Cleander stood as Koleg levelled his pistol launcher and fired. Fire burst across the far side of the chamber. The visor in Cleander’s mask blinked to near black. Gasping cries rolled with the roar of the inferno. Limbs thrashed in the blaze. As his visor switched to mundane sight, he could see mouths moving in snarling faces as the flesh cooked from skulls.

  Cleander moved forwards, needle pistol in both hands. Koleg was snapping a drum into his macrostubber. The surface of the pool was a mirror of flames. The fire coiled in the air, tongues spiralling together, roaring with the screams of the dying. The grey shroud covering the statue at the end of the chamber caught light, and dissolved in a curtain of ashes. The thing – that was not a statue – stood tall and shook itself free of cinders.

  It had started as a human, or perhaps many humans. It looked like a man, but a man so tall that its shoulders touched the ceiling. Its skin was the white of marble. Rows of red eyes ran down its cheeks. Muscles bunched as it moved, and blood seeped from the iron bolts hammered into flesh. Chains circled its limbs and the links rang as it stepped forwards. Cleander knew what it was, though he wished with all his heart that he did not. It was a host to the powers of the warp, a conduit to the hungering beyond. It was a creature of Chaos.

  The air in the chamber reeked of sulphur. The creature took a juddering step forwards. Koleg fired. The creature raised a hand. Cleander had an impression of long fingers and sharpness.
Time stuttered, and the bullets melted in the air. Sparks and metal droplets scattered onto the surface of the pool. Koleg dropped the macrostubber, his hands a blur as he reached for the grenade launcher. The creature roared. A spear of fire ripped from between its teeth. Koleg dived aside as fire washed where he had stood. The creature dropped to all fours, and leapt through the blaze.

  Help me...+

  Cleander heard the voice in the back of his head. He took the last step towards the ice-crusted pool, and looked down. The figure was still there, just beneath the surface. Ghost light blazed in its eyes. Its hands were moving, paddling weakly, tugging against the silver tubes linked to its fingers. He could see its lips moving, could see teeth glinting like pearls beside the wound where its tongue had been.

  On the other side of the chamber, Koleg was rolling over, the right side of his body on fire. The creature from beneath the shroud stretched back to its full height. The air shimmered around it. Cleander could feel heat radiating from it. The figure in the pool was writhing under the ice, and he could see an echo of the warp creature’s movements in the desperate thrashing. They were connected, the host creature and the body tethered in the pool. He should do something now that he understood that fact, he should...

  Help...+

  Sensations were spinning through Cleander’s skull. He felt his gun drop from his fingers. Everything was a rolling cloud of competing voices from his memory: his father shouting at him, the leaden disappointment in his sister’s eyes, the stillness of Covenant.

  Help–+

  He punched his hands through the water’s surface. Ice cracked. Wet warmth surrounded his arms, soft and thick, like blood. He touched flesh, gripped, and twisted, and he felt something snap. Time blinked.

  And then he was falling forwards into the dark embrace of the water.

  VII

  Gul hit the floor. Air thumped from his lungs. He rolled over and gasped. There was a slow quality to everything, as though his mind were a jammed chronometer catching up with time. He was on the floor next to the tier of pews that ran down the right of the chapel. The atmosphere was bright with explosions. The place where he had been standing in front of the altar was ten paces away. Something had picked him up and flipped him through the air like a hand batting away a toy. Lumn stood in the dark beyond the altar. Except it was not Lumn.

  The young man’s face was a mask broken by black holes where his mouth and eyes had been. Colour and shape distorted around him, light casting shadow, shadow burning with light. Bolt rounds burst in mid-air around him. Shrapnel tore the wood of the seating. Splinters spun out. Lumn turned his head towards Gul, and stepped forwards. Covenant stepped across his path. Light haloed the inquisitor, and the air in front of him shimmered. A wall of invisible force blasted from Covenant. Broken pews tore from the floor. Lumn met the wall of force with a raised hand. Light shattered just beyond his palm. A shockwave rolled outwards. Gul felt his ears pop.

  To his left he could see the woman with the marked face vault onto the pews, fire blazing from her bolt pistols. One of the bolts stuck Lumn in the shoulder and punched him off his feet in a spray of shrapnel and blood. Covenant was moving, the great sword sliding from his shoulder in a single blur of sharpness and activating a power field. Lumn hit the floor, and the sword descended above him. He vanished. Covenant’s sword struck the floor. Stone sheared into shards.

  A shadow rose above Gul. He looked up. Lumn stood on the tier above him. Black smoke coiled from where the bolt round had ripped away his shoulder and half of his face. Worms of pale light burrowed through the bloody flesh, and Gul realised that muscle and bone were bubbling up to fill the wound. The edges of Lumn’s form were like a ragged cloak blowing in the wind. The pews crumbled to glowing ash around him. He pointed at Gul and his hands seemed to grow, spreading through the air like the shadows reaching from flame. Pain exploded in Gul’s chest. Ice formed on his lips as he screamed.

  The fat man with the hammer charged from behind Gul, muscle surging under fat as he spun his warhammer. Lumn raised his hands, and to Gul they seemed to be claws of hooked bone. The man swung the hammer, roaring, face locked in rage. Claws and hammerhead met, and suddenly Lumn was going backwards, shadows coiling around him, and there was blood mixing with the embers.

  Bolt rounds exploded against the shadows around Lumn. Gul could see the woman with the bolt pistols leaping across the chapel. He heard words lift into the air between the roar of her guns. ‘Blessed father of mankind...’ the voice rose high and clear, echoing from the high roof. ‘May my hands be your talons...’ Fire blistered the gloom.

  The man with the hammer glanced over his shoulder.

  ‘Get up! Move!’ he shouted at Gul, as Lumn stepped from the fire of the explosions, and punched his clawed hand into the man’s side. The man gasped, eyes wide, blood on his lips. Lumn lifted him from the floor.

  ‘For I am your Seraph...’ The woman leapt across the last yards between her and Lumn, pistols still firing.

  Lumn’s head turned towards her. His face was a mass of red flesh, his eyes holes in a bloody skull. Lightning and blue fire lit the dark, and the woman was crumpling to the floor, the words of her prayer lost on her lips. Lumn threw the man with the hammer across the chapel, and stepped forwards, his form flickering like the frames of a faulty pict feed. He no longer looked like the young man who had walked at Gul’s side for three years. He no longer looked even human. His body pulsed with wet sinew and cold fire as he reached out for Gul. The clawed fingers closed over Gul’s mouth. Sharp claw tips bit into his cheeks as Lumn pulled him off the floor like a child lifting a broken toy.

  Silence,+ hissed a voice in Gul’s thoughts as he saw blackness fold around him.

  The sword blow severed Lumn’s arm at the elbow. White light flooded Gul’s eyes as the power field flared. A cry filled the air, rising higher and higher. Half blind, Gul had time to see Lumn reel back, blood pouring from the stump of his arm. Covenant followed him, turning with the weight of his sword as he cut. Lightning flashed, and Lumn, or whatever had called itself Lumn, was falling, its blood burning as it scattered through the air.

  VIII

  The memory came to Cleander as he drowned.

  ‘How many choices do I have?’ he had asked.

  Covenant had held Cleander’s gaze for a second, dark eyes unblinking.

  ‘There is always a choice.’

  ‘Information or execution?’

  Covenant shook his head.

  ‘Execution is kindness in this universe, Duke Von Castellan, and you know nothing that I want to know.’

  ‘So?’ Cleander had said, raising his eyebrow. ‘That is supposed to be your threat? You should work on your technique.’

  ‘You are not a coward, and you are not unintelligent, so please do not insult my intelligence by saying that you don’t understand what I am saying.’

  ‘Obliteration...’ Cleander had said at last.

  ‘For you,’ said Covenant, ‘and for your family, and everyone you ever knew and cared for. Those that are not found will be hunted for all time without hope of forgiveness.’

  ‘You can’t do that. No one can do that.’

  ‘I can, and you know that I can,’ said Covenant.

  ‘If I am the man you say I am, then you should know that I don’t care about anyone else.’

  ‘But you do.’

  Cleander had not replied for a long moment, and then nodded once at the inquisitor.

  ‘What is the other choice?’

  Hands gripped his back and hauled him out of the dark. He broke the surface of the water, gasped for air, and vomited. Water and bile poured from his mouth as he coughed and heaved air into his lungs.

  ‘You are alive,’ said Koleg from above him.

  ‘Your...’ Cleander vomited again. ‘Your observations are as insightful as ever.’

  ‘It
was intended to reassure you.’

  ‘Good...’ gasped Cleander. The world in front of his eyes was smeared with grey and pain. ‘Good...’

  He rolled over and tried to sit up. The chamber was quiet. Flames still crawled over the heaped corpses, and a layer of smoke was gathering beneath the roof and flowing through the archways into the spaces beyond. The pool of water stirred with the waves from Cleander’s exit, but it was just water, its surface reflecting the devastation in rippled fragments. A corpse floated close to the edge of the pool, its head waving on its broken neck.

  ‘Where is the... monster?’ he asked.

  ‘The host creature fell when you broke the neck of the thing in the pool,’ said Koleg. He pointed at the far side of the pool where a heap of skin lay on the wet stone like a discarded coat.

  Koleg shifted his weight, and Cleander noticed that the soldier was holding his right arm against his body. His scorched mask and visor hung around his neck, and glossy burns marked the side of his face. Not for the first time, Cleander wondered if the alterations made to Koleg’s brain removed pain or just the man’s ability to feel the emotion of being in pain. He felt his own hands begin to tremble.

  ‘It was as Covenant expected,’ said Koleg, nodding at the floating corpse in the pool. ‘Another warp conduit and symbiotic possession, just like on Agresis.’

  ‘Yes, yes... just like it,’ said Cleander, not really listening. His limbs felt numb and his head was swimming. ‘Help me up.’ Koleg reached down with his good arm. Cleander gripped the arm and pulled himself up with a stream of swearing. He swayed on his feet, looked around the floor, frowning. ‘Where is my gun?’ Koleg held it up. Cleander nodded, took it, and began to limp towards the arch that led to the stairs.

  ‘Where are you going?’ called Koleg. ‘This area will need to be cleansed.’

  ‘Someone else’s problem, someone else’s job. I am going to somewhere where the transmitter will be able to reach our lord and master, and then...’ he trailed off, pausing, blinking. He thought of the reflection he had glimpsed in the surface of the pool before he had touched its surface: a man with dark hair and beard, his skin marked by time and scarred by blades, one eye a pit, the other a flicker of black under his own gaze. ‘Then I am going to drink more than is necessary, and then, I guess, I am going to wait to hear where I will next serve my penance.’