Incarnation - John French Read online

  Hesh turned his pale eyes on her. Thin lips peeled back over yellow teeth.

  ‘To defend heresy is to become worse than those you defend.’

  ‘Enough,’ said Covenant, and Viola felt the cold authority in the word. He took a step closer to Hesh. The Black Priest did not move. ‘Your master lived his ideals, and died fighting for mankind’s survival. I am giving you the chance to serve mankind, because of him, because he trusted and valued you. But do not think that in this place you are anything but a servant of the Emperor, and your service is your knowledge, your reward is to obey, and if you presume to judge that which is beyond your means then I will judge you in turn.’

  Hesh held Covenant’s gaze for a second, and then bowed his head.

  ‘Your pardon, my lord.’

  ‘Continue,’ said Covenant.

  ‘Horusianism was an old belief, as old as the ordos themselves, some say. Its… followers sought a vessel to contain the ascended power of Chaos, and in so doing conquer Chaos. They sought to enslave Chaos to the service of mankind, to make the tormented the master, the enslaved the saviours of the future.’

  Hesh paused, his mouth moving as though he was chewing something bitter and sharp.

  ‘They believed that the warp holds no evil that we do not put into it, that with great will and strength the powers that seek to destroy mankind may save it. They sought a dark messiah to be the avatar of Chaos, a being of Chaos who will bring Chaos to its knees.’

  ‘You say they were,’ said Viola.

  ‘Horusianism is a dead ideal. The last who professed its creed was Catullus Ven and he is a millennium in the grave.’

  ‘Ardena-Venusia?’ asked Covenant.

  ‘A rumour, never confirmed. Likely a move by the Solar Cabals to discredit her.’

  ‘You sound very certain,’ said Josef.

  Hesh shot him a look.

  ‘I am. When Lord Vult took the seat of Inquisitorial Representative amongst the High Lords of Terra, he asked me to confirm the extinction of the Horusian ideal. I was thorough. I saw records that even the most exalted of my lord’s peers have not seen, past and ongoing. I burned through one hundred data-sift servitors in the task. Nothing was left to chance. I am certain.’

  ‘A lot of effort looking for signs of something that is supposed to be dead…’ said Viola.

  ‘My master was concerned with the stability and unity of the Imperium, and the Holy Ordos that protect mankind, and he did not believe in leaving risks to that stability uninvestigated.’

  ‘So he got you to check the grave to make sure the corpse of this dead ideology had not sprung back to life?’ asked Viola, arching an eyebrow.

  ‘Horusianism is not an ideal, it is a poison. You can see the shadow of its passing in the fragmentary records of wars within the ordos. Wars… not skirmishes between individuals of different convictions, but wars lasting centuries, battles fought in shadows and by means too terrible to think of. My master wanted to be certain that those days were gone.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Covenant.

  Hesh looked at him.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘Why did he want to be certain?’ asked Viola, her mind flowing forwards into the space left by Covenant’s question. ‘It was not whim, was it? What made Daemonhunter-Lord Vult think that the dead ideal of Horusianism might not be as dead as it seemed?’

  For the first time since entering the chamber, Hesh looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Nothing… A heretical superstition.’

  ‘You will tell me,’ said Covenant, his voice low.

  Hesh drew and let out a breath.

  ‘There was a… a prophecy… more an outpouring of insanity, in point of fact. A Black Ship entering the Solar System suffered a containment breach. A high-grade, unstable psyker began to manifest his nature. When he had been subdued he was conscious for several seconds. His words were recorded by the witch-keepers and passed to agents of the Inquisition on Terra.’

  ‘What did this psyker say?’ asked Viola.

  ‘I am not permitted to remember it in entirety,’ said Hesh, ‘just phrases from it.’

  ‘Those fragments?’

  ‘“Three born of judgement… bearer of cup, bearer of coin, bearer of crown… reborn, renewed, re-blessed…” That is all I am allowed to remember. The motifs in those phrases correspond to some of those found in the works of Catullus Ven, and in the writings of Inquisitor-Master Zaranchek Xanthus. Writings that related to the beliefs of Horusians and…’ Hesh trailed off, teeth closing over his tongue. Viola saw the muscles on his jaw tense.

  ‘Finish what you were going to say,’ said Covenant.

  ‘The writings concerned the appearance of a “prospect” for a vessel of Chaos – for the rise of their Dark Messiah.’

  The silence lengthened through the seconds.

  ‘Yet you found no evidence that Horusians were active in the Inquisition?’ asked Covenant.

  ‘None. It was coincidence, the noise of the warp throwing up the heresies of the past.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Covenant. ‘But if Horusianism was dead then it has found resurrection. Its followers walk amongst the Inquisition again. They killed your master.’

  ‘Talicto was no Horusian,’ growled Hesh. He was angry, Viola realised. Despite his utter control and stillness he was vibrating with rage.

  ‘No, Talicto was half a decade dead already when your master and I found him.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘There are three,’ said Covenant. ‘A triumvirate within our ranks. They wear the faces of friends, but they have been following their path for a long time.’

  ‘You have proof?’ asked Hesh.

  ‘You do not need proof,’ said Covenant. ‘You have my word.’

  ‘Who are these three?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Covenant.

  Hesh laughed. The cold sound was so sudden and unexpected that Viola flinched.

  ‘Corpses and phantoms, lord… If you hoped that I could help you chase ghosts then you will find my service a poor thing.’

  ‘I do not want your help to hunt them,’ said Covenant, his voice steady. ‘I want your help to discover what they are trying to do.’

  The man was dying when they reached his side. Ninkurra’s shot had ripped a scoop from the right-hand side of his neck and shoulder. Somehow he was still alive. Blood was pumping from him in time with his gasps. His eyes were open. They were blue, she noticed. He had a beard, black-streaked iron on a square jaw. He looked tough and strong, in the way that the land and open air, and worry of next season’s crop, breeds strength. He did not look like a saint, or a witch, but none of them ever did. The frost was still threading through his pooling blood. He opened his mouth and blood poured over his lower lip, bright red, crusting with ice as it fell. How he was still alive was a miracle, or the end of one at least.

  ‘Hush,’ said Memnon. He bent down beside the dying man, who extended a wet, red hand. Ninkurra flinched forwards, but Memnon raised a hand without looking up, and she froze. ‘This is peace. Whatever has befallen you before, whatever fears have grown inside you, they are gone now.’ Memnon put three fingers to his own forehead and then pressed them to the man’s forehead gently. The man stilled. ‘This was not your time, but know that this needed to happen. There is a purpose to everything, and you have served yours. Know that and know peace.’

  The man’s eyes fluttered. His mouth moved once more, forming words that would never be heard.

  Memnon stood, still looking down at the corpse. He pressed his hands to his eyelids and cheeks. Ninkurra heard the whisper of a prayer. His hands left bloody smears on his face when he lowered them.

  Around them, smoke was rising from burning stubble. Flames licked soot over the shattered tabernacle. A burst of rotor-cannon fire blasted down from one of the circling gunships.

  ‘Make sure it’s complete,’ said Memnon, watching as distant figures in blue fell. The troopers were moving inwards from their drop positions. Ninku
rra could hear the crack and fizz of lasguns. ‘No survivors.’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ she said.

  TWO

  The wind greeted Sister Agata with an ice-cold slap as she stepped into the tower top shrine. Beyond the unglazed windows the sun was bleeding to red as it slipped behind the horizon. Agata paused, feeling the ache of her climb despite the aid of her armour. She was breathing hard, and there was a tremble of fatigue in her muscles. Age was a burden sent to try faith.

  ‘Thank you for granting me this test that I may grow strong through bearing it,’ she said. The ice wind answered with a fresh gust. She moved to the window. The Monastery of the Last Candle dropped away from her sight, and she studied the plateau. Mountains ringed the land, their snow-covered caps shining pink as they caught the first of the dawn light. Ice greyed the ground beyond the ragged edge of the Pilgrim Drift. The iron torch poles had yet to be lit, but that time was only three days away, when the Festival of Illumination marked the last day of sunlight. Sixty-six days of darkness. Some pilgrims who had never passed through the Season of Night broke down just days into it. Even those deep in the guts of the monastery felt it, even if they rarely saw the sky. Night here was more than the sun not rising. The soul could feel it pass, and craved the return of light.

  ‘Oh, Lord and Master of Mankind, stand between the fearful and the darkness of their souls.’

  The words vanished in another gust of wind. A high, ululating cry pulled her gaze around to the top of a lower tower. A circle of figures in yellow robes were pulling a burning kite into the air on a long string. Each of the figures had a rayed halo of burnished copper, silver or gold attached to their shoulders behind their heads. Their hair was bright orange and pulled out into spikes. Solar cultists, worshippers of the Emperor as the source of all light and truth. The kite they held against the wind was shaped like a sun, circular with a ring of long spikes. As she watched, the fire leapt from the edge of the kite to its heart. The burning sun began to fall, trailing ash and smoke behind it. The solar cultists cried out, joy and sorrow threading on the air.

  Agata watched the last burning ashes fall. Her eyes caught the dome of the Great Cathedral, its apex just lower than her own viewpoint, and beyond that the tower shrines of the Order of the Golden Throne and the Bearers of the Lamp. Steam and smoke breathed from the tower tops. Each of them was built around a stack which vented excess heat and gas from the geothermal exchangers buried beneath the monastery. Amongst them, lesser towers and domes formed a tangled mountain range of stone and tarnished metal. Here and there she could just pick out the wheel-topped poles, and the pale figures of penitents and ascetics that sat atop each. Food was pulled up to them in a bucket each day. They would not move during the Season of Night. When the sun rose again after sixty-six days of ice and darkness, most would have gone to the Emperor’s embrace. Agata had been told that in all recorded time, only one person had survived two Seasons of Night, and she had been acknowledged as a saint.

  ‘Blessed Saint Goneril, watch over them,’ she muttered, ‘intercede that they might know the last of life without suffering.’ She stared at the nearest, a figure in ragged grey slumped on their wheel. She did not know why she prayed for the penitents. They had both chosen to sin and chosen their path to redemption. The sin meant that they deserved no pity, and their choice meant that if they were strong enough they would find what mercy was left to them. But she still spoke the prayer, just as she did whenever she saw them.

  She turned away, moved to the stone shrine at the tower’s centre, and drew her sword.

  ‘By the will of the God-Emperor of Mankind, I stand here, a token of his protection, guardian against the night.’

  She knelt, her sword held point down, the pommel resting against her forehead. She deactivated the power pack of her armour, and the dead weight of the battle-plate pulled at her. She had to steady herself and catch her breath before she began the rest of the prayer cycle. The altar she knelt before was a block of black granite. Inlaid silver wire traced the shapes of angels and saints across its sides. A flame rippled at its top, fluttering in the wind. It was a wisp of the volcanic flame that had burned on the ground when the monastery had been founded, now threaded up by pipes to the edge of the sky. Just as that flame had burned for three millennia, a Battle Sister of the Order of the Argent Shroud had climbed the tower’s steps every day for those thousands of years, and offered the same prayer before the flame. Agata was the one hundred and eighty-ninth bearer of that duty, and had made the climb and spoken the prayer five thousand, nine hundred and sixty-four times.

  ‘As your word is truth, so is my body thy weapon…’

  Her hair had been the colour of iron when she first made the climb. Now it was the grey of fire ash. She would die here. She knew that; had known it after she had descended from her first prayer vigil. There would be no battlefield end of fire and blood for her. The battle songs of her sisters would be only memories. The war scars that marked her steps with pain would be her last.

  ‘As you are merciful, so I am thy wrath…’

  She had accepted that end, and had guarded against the resentment that might have tried to take root in her soul. This was a duty as sacred as any. She knew that. She accepted that.

  ‘As you are light, so I shall bear your flame…’

  But a part of her wondered if it would not have been merciful to let her die all those years ago.

  ‘As your wisdom is eternal, so I shall live for you…’

  Perhaps that was why she prayed for the penitents, because deep down, under the duty, she wondered if she had not committed a sin by living when she should have died.

  ‘As you protect, so shall I bring the absolution of swords…’

  ‘Praise the daughter of the Emperor! Praise the defender of the holy flame! Praise–’

  Sister Agata walked through the prostrate crowd, keeping her eyes ahead. She had learnt in the last few months not to respond to the pleas, or the hands raised so that they might receive the blessing of her touch. When the sign-seekers had first appeared there had been a few waiting for her in the cloister ways after she descended from the tower of the flame. Now there were hundreds, and they responded to words with screams, and contact with weeping. Even so they reached for her as she passed through the granite chamber at the tower’s base. None actually touched her, though, but the hands rose like a wave at her approach and fell back as she passed. It made her uncomfortable.

  The sign-seekers were all members of holy orders; pilgrims were not permitted within the cloisters that made up the bulk of the monastery.

  There had been signs, they claimed, signs of catastrophe and revelation. Strange auroras had glimmered in the night sky. The numbers of pilgrims arriving had fallen and those that did come brought tales of worlds vanishing and of laughter in the dark as their ships had passed between the stars. There had been visions; dreams drowned in golden light. Portents had been witnessed: a dead eagle had been found in a collapsed wall and had no sooner been touched by light than it took to wing; a fire had sprung from the ground in the desolation beyond the monastery; a woman, who had been amongst the last to make the pilgrim walk from the south, had slipped into a coma and awoken speaking the verses of Sebastian Thor, though she had never heard them and could not read…

  Signs, portents, messages to the faithful, or so some believed. Waves of such convictions had swept the pilgrim population before, but now it had found purchase amongst some in the orders. Men and women, who were used to having their miracles mediated by tradition and proclamation, now sought to embrace the revelation that surely was at hand. And some of those had fixated on Agata as the representative of the God-Emperor’s divinity.

  She was no stranger to the miraculous or to fervour. She had seen the truth of the Emperor’s divinity in battle and in the deeds of her sisters time and time again, and knew that its power was more terrifying and sublime than could be comprehended. But to her, and the Battle Sisters of the Argent Shroud, t
he Emperor worked through the deeds of the faithful. Miracles were real, she knew, but more real was the hand of His servant working in His name.

  A woman in a grey robe waited for her at the edge of the chamber. Her hood was lowered, and the face beneath was pale and gaunt. Around her neck hung a bronze medallion showing a book and an open hand – the symbol of the Sage Order of the Faithful.

  ‘Reverend Sister Agata.’ The notary bowed her head and spread her hands in the sign of the aquila. Agata mirrored the sacred gesture.

  ‘Sister Claudia,’ she said, and met Claudia’s gaze when the woman raised her face.

  Cold eyes, she thought, and wondered if the head behind them held true faith, or if it was just a framework for a cold cleverness to grow on. She turned and made for a door into one of the minor walkways, which linked the towers and tall spires of the upper cloisters.

  ‘Walk,’ she said, not trying to keep the edge from the word.

  Claudia followed her through an arch and into a two-hundred-metre-long enclosed bridge whose sides were set with windows of grimy crystal. Agata was pleased to see that the young woman needed to hurry to keep up. She would pay for it later in aching muscles and joints but it was a small pleasure that was worth the price.

  ‘Abbot Iacto had wondered if your reverence had considered taking the matter he mentioned to Bishop Xil–’ began Claudia.

  ‘The answer is still no,’ growled Agata, increasing the length of her stride. The servos in her power armour buzzed in the cold air. ‘I will not by act, omission, or even accident help your abbot gain another step on the ascent he craves.’

  ‘Abbot Iacto wishes only for the unity of the God-Emperor’s servants and for His dominion to be governed by the will of the true,’ said Claudia. She was having to almost run to keep up now.

  ‘Governance by the will of Abbot Iacto, more truthfully.’

  ‘You do the holy abbot a grievous–’

  ‘I may be old, but I am not an idiot,’ snapped Agata.

  ‘The abbot only wishes that the case be heard for allowing pilgrims within the cloisters during the Season of Night.’