Heart & Soul - James Swallow Page 5

  Oleande – the other Oleande – was on her feet now, ignoring the blood streaming down her belly and leg. Her power sword was in her hand once more, sizzling as its energy halo burned off the caked dust and fluids that coated its surface. Each step she took was torture to her, but she did not falter.­ ‘This ends now,’ she declared, aiming her blade at the fallen one.

  The traitor whose face she shared opened her mouth wide and shrieked, vomiting unhallowed words into the air that curdled the blood in Miriya’s veins. Tendrils grew out past her lips, from her nostrils, ears and through the orbs of her eyes. The shrieking came from hundreds of the tiny lamprey maws and the profane clamour made the air vibrate. Desecrated glassaic cracked and broke, dust and loose stones fell from the damaged ceiling above.

  Miriya and the Sister of the Valorous Heart shared a look and they attacked the heretic as one. Blows from their swords rained down on the traitorous Sororitas, chopping off divots­ of armour, slashing away pieces of quivering flesh. But even as Oleande fell to her knees, she was still screeching, still kept alive by whatever daemonic parasite her blasphemous god had implanted in her.

  ‘You are already His,’ she brayed, her mouth choked with convulsing cilia. ‘It is inevitable. The Sisters of Battle are drenched in blood! Your faith is a lie! You all walk the Skull Road!’

  Miriya raised her chainsword and glanced at the other warrior. ‘Together, then?’

  The Battle Sister gave a weary nod. ‘Together, aye.’

  In a single united motion, both of them plunged their blades deep into Oleande’s chest cavity and silenced her.

  The heretic’s body collapsed in on itself to become a mess of offal and warped bone. Whatever power from the warp that had kept the woman alive was suddenly gone, and all her deaths returned a thousand-fold.

  Miriya did not grace the traitor with a second glance. She strode away, sheathing her bloodied chainsword on her back as she crossed to where Verity stood over Isabel’s unconscious form. The hospitaller was still clutching the other woman’s bolter, but clearly she had been unwilling to use it again for fear of hitting her friend in the turn of the sword melee.

  But then the brief moment of relief on Verity’s face crumbled­ and she raised the weapon, aiming it unsteadily past Miriya. ‘Sister!’ she called, her shout a warning.

  Miriya halted and turned in place, knowing what she would see behind her. The surviving Sister of the Valorous Heart, the one who had subsumed herself in a traitor’s identity to protect her Order’s virtue, now aimed her power sword at Miriya’s throat. ‘You should never have come after us,’ she said quietly. ‘My duty is clear.’

  ‘She won’t let us live…’ said Verity, drawing the bolter close. ‘We saw Oleande… The true Sister Oleande… And what she had become.’

  Miriya nodded. ‘We are witness to her Sisterhood’s greatest­ disgrace.’ She cocked her head. ‘That was the command you were given, was it not? Do whatever must be done to ensure that this secret is never revealed?’

  The Battle Sister nodded. ‘Just so. Anyone who learns of the shame must not be allowed to speak of it.’ She shook her head sorrowfully. ‘I am sorry, Sister.’ The woman planted her sword in the dirt, and pulled a pair of krak grenades from her belt. ‘But this is how it must be.’

  ‘I disagree.’ Miriya walked slowly towards the other Sister,­ and placed her hands over those gripping the explosive devices. She knew that if they detonated, the krak charges would bring down the shrine’s ceiling and bury them all. ‘You have sacrificed so much to this mission,’ she told her. ‘Your very self. And I have given much too. My service and my blood, my Sisters. But if we perish here today, that duty ends. And the enemy still endures.’ Miriya nodded towards the remains of the heretic. ‘Not just the foe without, but the foe within.’ She closed her eyes for a moment and remembered the horrible sense of temptation ghosting at the edges of her thoughts. To live was to be in battle with it, day after day… But to live was also to defy it, and make each breath a victory against the darkness.

  The injured woman’s grip on the grenades slackened. ‘But this is my failure,’ she said quietly. ‘I must sacrifice…’

  ‘You must live,’ Miriya insisted. ‘Sister Oleande must live. Else, the archenemy will have their victory and all you have done… All we have done will be for naught.’

  ‘We will not speak of what was seen here,’ said Verity. ‘I vow this, on the honour of the Order of Serenity. I will carry it to my grave unspoken.’

  ‘I vow this,’ repeated Miriya. ‘On the honour of the Order of Our Martyred Lady and in the name of Saint Katherine. I will carry it to my grave unspoken.’ She paused, and then met the other woman’s gaze. ‘What say you, Sister?’

  At length, Oleande gave a nod.

  They regrouped with Cassandra’s team in the shrine’s nave, finding Rubria grim-faced and bleeding, with Ananke supporting her weight. There had been a firefight, Cassandra explained briskly. None of the Iconoclast’s army had survived it.

  ‘What of the heretic?’ she asked.

  ‘Sister Oleande brought down our enemy,’ said Miriya, before anyone else could speak. ‘The treachery of the Iconoclast’s existence is ended.’

  Cassandra helped Verity carry Isabel towards the gateway in the energy field, and they passed through it with a flash of radiation. Rubria and Ananke were next, and then it was only Miriya and the Sister of the Valorous Heart.

  ‘What do I tell my kinswomen when I return to our convent?’ said Oleande. ‘I was not expected to live beyond my mission.’

  ‘Adversity is a test, Sister. We must never fail it.’ Miriya strode towards the gateway, drawing herself up, her head held high as was fitting to a victor. She paused on the threshold­ and offered the other woman her hand. ‘And only the God-Emperor can decide when our duty is ended.’

  About the Author

  James Swallow is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Fear to Tread and Nemesis, which both reached the New York Times bestseller lists. Also for the Horus Heresy, he has written The Flight of the Eisenstein, The Buried Dagger and a series of audio dramas featuring the character Nathaniel Garro, the prose versions of which have now been collected into the anthology Garro. For Warhammer 40,000, he is best known for his four Blood Angels novels, the audio drama Heart of Rage, and his two Sisters of Battle novels. His short fiction has appeared in Legends of the Space Marines and Tales of Heresy.

  An extract from Mark of Faith.

  Darkness surrounds me, complete and heavy. Suffocating. I cannot see. Cannot hear. I cannot remember, either. Not how I came to be here, or where I came from. Not who or what I am. I am nothing, and no one. Little more than a heartbeat, inside a hollow shell. I try to speak. To make a noise of this nothingness, but I am mute as well as blind and deaf. No words will come. No voice, save for that locked tightly inside my mind.

  Please.

  And then, a sound. A voice, answering my silent plea.

  Evangeline.

  The name falls across me like a cloak, and I know instinctively that it is mine. I know the voice, too, despite how distant it sounds. How distorted.

  ‘Adelynn?’

  My Sister Superior’s name escapes my throat and disappears into the unbroken darkness. Adelynn answers me once again with my own name, but this time she sounds even more distant. More distorted. I start to run, though I cannot see. Though the darkness mires me and pulls at my limbs like deep, cold water. But then I see it. A tiny pinprick of golden light, growing larger and closer until it resolves into a shape. A stone pedestal, draped in crimson cloth. That is where the light is coming from, only it is not light at all. It is an object. A shield, cast in steel and gold and engraved with the image of an armoured warrior bearing blade and aegis with a ten-pointed halo around her head. My heartbeat grows loud at the sight of it, for it is not a shield at all. It is the Shield. The Praesidium Protectiva.
<
br />   The Shield of Saint Katherine.

  ‘Evangeline.’

  I look up from the Shield and I see her. Adelynn is standing on the opposite side of the hallowed relic to me. Uplit in gold, she could as well be a statue, were it not for her emerald eyes.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she asks me, and she gestures to the Shield.

  It is a question to which there is only ever one answer, but this time I find that I cannot give it. Because I am not ready. Not for this. I try to tell her so, but even that proves impossible. All that I can manage is an empty oh sound. The very definition of nothing. Adelynn’s face turns wrathful, then.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she asks, again. ‘Are you ready?’

  Adelynn repeats the question over and over and over until the sound of it surrounds me. It suffocates me, just like the darkness. I cannot bear it, nor the disappointment in her emerald eyes, so I scream for her to stop and I thrust out my hands to take up the Shield, but the very instant that my ­fingertips come into contact with the gold and steel, I catch fire. It blossoms on my fingers first, before blooming across my hands and up my arms, golden yellow and flickering. It tracks over my shoulders and engulfs my body and travels up my throat until I am consumed by it in the same way that the air around me is. The fire burns fiercely, melting my armour and searing my flesh. It blinds me with its brightness, and deafens me anew with a roar that is not the roar of the fire at all, but that same dreadful question rendered in an inferno’s voice.

  Are you ready?

  I wake with a gasp, lying flat on my back. Still blind, no matter how I blink. Still deaf to everything but the overloud beat of my thundering heart. My teeth are chattering and my body is trembling completely from my head to my toes. I am soaked with sweat. I try to cry out, but no words will come. No sound at all. I get up, but something mires me. I fall hard onto my hands and knees, completely unable to breathe. Someone takes hold of me, firm hands printing cold onto my feverish skin.

  And then, a voice.

  ‘Be still, Sister. You are safe.’

  It is a woman’s voice. One that I do not recognise. I try to speak. To fight her. But those hands hold firm and the voice speaks again.

  ‘Breathe,’ she says. ‘Just breathe.’

  Left with little choice, I do as the voice commands me. I breathe. I allow myself to be still. And little by little, my senses return.

  Touch, first. The cold floor under my hands and knees. Then sight. Bare steel treadplate, and my own hands, wrapped tightly in blood-speckled bandages. Scent. Incense and blood and the harsh tang of counterseptic. Other sounds filter in. I hear the click and hum of machinery, and the soft murmur of prayer. I am in a hospitaller’s ward. I exhale, slowly.

  ‘There we are,’ says the voice.

  I look up at the owner of the voice. She is of the convents. Non-militant, but a Sister nonetheless. The hospitaller is pale as new marble, clad in robes as white as her hair. I cannot tell the colour of her eyes, because she will not meet mine.

  ‘You were dreaming,’ she says. ‘That is all.’

  I try to tell her that I do not dream. That I haven’t since I was a child. Since before my Sisters and before Adelynn and before the convents. But all that I can make is the shape of the words. A rasp in my throat, like steel on stone.

  ‘My name is Lourette,’ the Sister Hospitaller says, her voice patient and calm. ‘Let me help you.’

  I do not resist as Lourette helps me to my feet and sits me down again on the edge of my cot. This place is not so much a ward as a private room. The walls are clad with whitewashed flakboard and hung with linen drapes. Lourette gives me a plastek cup to drink from. The water is so cold that it makes me cough myself double. Lourette holds out a silvered bowl for me as I spit clots of blood and blackness into it until I can breathe again. When I do, I taste stale air. Recycled. All at once I know that I must be aboard a starship. That I am no longer on Ophelia VII.

  At the thought of my home world everything returns to me. The Contemplation. The Last of Days. Losing my Sisters, one by one. I wait for grief to strike me, to sweep over me, but all I feel is emptiness.

  ‘Are you in pain, Sister?’ Lourette asks.

  I wish I were. Pain is honest. It gives you focus. I am not in pain. In its place, all I feel is emptiness. That deceitful nothing. I cannot explain that to Lourette, so I just shake my head and ask a question in return. It takes three attempts, because my throat is so unused to speaking.

  ‘What ship is this?’

  Lourette still does not look me in the eyes. She sets about changing my bloodied bandages with slow and deliberate care. Even that does not hurt.

  ‘The Unbroken Vow,’ she says. Her voice is soft and patient, with the clipped pronunciation of the convents. ‘It is a Dauntless-class cruiser sworn to the commandery of Canoness Elivia. We are holding at high anchor over Ophelia VII.’

  The information sinks in slowly. Canoness Elivia. Like so many of my Order, she was far from Ophelia VII when the Rift opened and the darkness descended.

  Very far.

  Dread settles over me like a shroud.

  ‘How long have I been here?’ I ask.

  ‘You have been under our care for six weeks,’ Lourette says. ‘We kept you dreaming so that you could heal.’

  I take a breath that hurts. Six weeks of slumber, as my world burned beneath me. Six. Weeks.

  ‘Then, the cardinal world?’

  I say the cardinal world but I think my home. I steel myself, expecting Lourette to tell me that it is gone. Burned and broken to nothing, like my Sisters. But she doesn’t. Instead, Lourette smiles a small smile.

  ‘It was spared at the final hour,’ she says.

  I remember the thunderclaps. The golden light that I mistook for the God-Emperor’s final mercy. ‘By who?’ I ask.

  Lourette stops in her work and makes the sign of the aquila. Her bloody hands begin to shake, and the moment before she speaks seems long and charged, like the quiet before a storm breaks.

  ‘By Roboute Guilliman,’ she says softly. ‘The God-Emperor’s son is arisen.’

  I feel blinded all over again at her words. Unable to catch my breath. My skin begins to burn as though I have a fever. I start to shake, too. From my core outwards.

  The God-Emperor’s son.

  ‘Arisen,’ I say, because it is all that I can say.

  Lourette nods. She does not try to prevent me when I pull away to make the sign of the aquila, too.

  ‘The primarch came from Terra, and brought with him a new crusade to wrest back what has been taken from us by flame and by sword. Countless warriors follow with him. The Adeptus Astartes. The Silent Sisterhood and the God-Emperor’s own Custodian Guard.’ Lourette takes a breath. Another awestruck smile pulls at her scarred face. ‘And our Sainted Sister.’

  Her words settle slowly on me. The God-Emperor’s son arisen. The Silent Sisters and the God-Emperor’s watchmen treading the stars. Saint Celestine, returned.

  ‘It is a miracle,’ I say.

  Lourette goes back to removing the bindings around my arms. She still has not looked at me directly. Another long moment passes before she speaks again.

  ‘I have heard the same word whispered about you, now and then,’ she says.

  I blink. My eyelids are still sticking. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of how they found you. Ablaze, but alive.’ Lourette finishes unwinding the bandage from my left arm and lets it drop onto a silvered tray in loops. ‘I have never known a soul to be burned the way you were and live, much less heal.’

  I look down and see where my skin has run and set again from the touch of the warpfire. In places, I am patchworked to stark white, all of the pigment gone. There is no blood, though.

  No pain.

  ‘And then there is the matter of the mark,’ Lourette says.

  ‘Whi
ch mark?’ I ask, because there are so many.

  Lourette finally looks at me, then, and the expression on her face makes me wish she hadn’t. Her limpid eyes are wide with fervour.

  ‘You do not know,’ she says. ‘Of course you do not know.’

  She stops her work and goes to fetch a mirror-glass from one of the equipment trays. She holds it up in front of my face, and I notice that her hands are trembling now too.

  ‘Do you see?’ Lourette asks.

  I take the mirror-glass from her and look at my reflection, and the patchwork that the warpfire has made of my face. All of the pigment is gone from around my eyes and across my cheeks, leaving bright white streaks against my skin that almost look like wings.

  ‘It is the God-Emperor’s mark,’ Lourette says. ‘A blessing.’

  I stare at my reflection. At the shape of the eagle, so clearly writ into my skin. It is the God-Emperor’s mark, just as Lourette says. A blessing.

  ‘Do you see it?’ she asks.

  I nod, because I cannot speak. Because I can see the mark, but I cannot feel it. I cannot feel anything. I am nothing, and no one.

  Just a heartbeat, in a hollow shell.

  I realise that Lourette is still speaking, her words hurried by zeal.

  ‘The God-Emperor saw you, Evangeline,’ she says. ‘He sent His son to spare you. Graced you with His mark and His favour.’

  I put the mirror-glass face down on the cot and ask Lourette the only question I can think to ask. The only one that matters.

  ‘And my Sisters?’

  Lourette frowns, taken aback by my words, and the implied dismissal in them. ‘They were lost,’ she says. ‘All save for one.’

  My thoughts slow to a crawl once more. It is all that I can do to ask her who survived, and Lourette’s frown only deepens when she says the name.

  ‘Ashava,’ she says.

  Lourette is reluctant to let me leave my cot, but I insist on it. Six weeks of sleep is enough for a lifetime, and I will wait no longer to see my Sister. Lourette uncouples the pain relief and fluids before bringing me a set of robes. I stand, for the first time in weeks. My legs buckle and try to give under my weight, but I refuse to fall. I refuse Lourette’s offer of help.