Incarnation - John French Read online

  ‘Tell us.’

  ‘Catullus Van’s belief was that the salvation of mankind lay in a fusion of the Emperor’s power and that of Chaos.’ Hesh’s teeth closed over his tongue briefly, and his tattooed cheeks had twitched. ‘He sought an avatar of the Emperor’s divinity, a saint, that could be infected with shadow. The light and dark would fuse and create…’

  ‘An abomination,’ Covenant had said.

  ‘Catullus sought prospects for his dark messiah using divination and prognostication.’ Hesh had shot Covenant a hard look. ‘Much as some who follow the Thorian dogma do.’

  Covenant scattered a ring of crystal cards across the table top. Epicles was swaying. A nimbus of light was growing around his head. The taste of bitter iron filled Josef’s mouth. The designs on the backs of the cards were changing. Golden eagles and snakes became leaves, then circles, then stars on a field of black.

  Epicles’ head flicked from side to side. His mouth was opening and closing.

  ‘Well of light, midnight sun, gold, gold and fire and thirst and red…’

  A haze of light was rising above the table. The light of the candles was brighter but the shadows pressed closer. Josef could no longer see the walls of the chamber. He looked up. The stars beyond the dome had moved.

  ‘They are searching for prospects, old friend,’ Covenant had said. ‘The Triumvirate are searching for those that might be vessels of the Emperor’s divinity. Just as we did once.’

  ‘Hesh did not say that. Viola said the information he gave was suggestive but nothing more.’

  ‘They are searching for saints.’

  ‘There is nothing that makes that more than a…’ Josef had trailed off, realising the fact that he had missed. ‘Idris. You believe that is what they are doing because of her.’

  Covenant had gone still, but then nodded.

  ‘What is the first law of war?’

  ‘Deny your enemy what they want, lord.’

  ‘They are searching and so we must outrun them.’

  ‘You know where this path ends, lord.’

  ‘I know what I must do, old friend.’ And Covenant had placed his hand on Josef’s shoulder and looked at him, his gaze steady. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Always, lord,’ Josef had said, bowing his head. ‘Always, and to the last.’

  ‘Light eternal,’ panted Epicles. There was blood on his lips. ‘Light that reaches through all dark…’

  The cards on the table rose into the air, rotating in place, the designs on their backs flowing and changing like the pattern of a turning kaleidoscope. Covenant watched them.

  ‘Beacon of truth… flame of protection…’

  The cards slid through the air, forming a pattern, an echo of a current of truth flowing under the skin of being, a shadow on the wall of existence.

  ‘By Your will and wisdom,’ said Covenant, ‘let all be revealed.’

  And the first card turned over without a hand touching it.

  The patterns faded as the ash sank beneath the pool’s surface. Memnon stood slowly.

  ‘Dominicus Prime…’ he said.

  ‘You are certain?’ asked the Sorceress.

  ‘Use your own methods if you trust mine so little,’ he said, voice and face mild, but his eyes hard in the candlelight. ‘But as far as such things can be so, I am certain.’ He closed his eyes briefly, head bowed as though in prayer.

  The Sorceress looked at the High Priest.

  ‘Dominicus Prime…’ she breathed, and her voice clicked with still-healing damage. ‘That cannot be right, not after all this time. We poured resources into it, and lost them all when the child was lost. Prophecy failed, and our attempt to rekindle it died.’

  ‘This is a new prospect and must be dealt with,’ said the High Priest. ‘Dominicus Prime remains a crucible, a pit from which saints and beasts may rise just as it was before.’

  ‘I will go,’ said Memnon, raising his head and opening his eyes. ‘For my sins I will see it done, just as I have with all the rest. I still have resources and agents on Dominicus Prime from the previous endeavours.’

  ‘You do the work of salvation,’ said the High Priest.

  ‘I do as I must,’ said Memnon and began to walk away from the pool, leaving the other two bereft of the light of the candle in his hand.

  ‘The Ragged Fool…’ said Josef, looking down at the cards scattered across the stone table top. A layer of psychic rime was melting to mist from its surface. Epicles sat slumped on the floor, breathing in wheezes and shivering. Josef himself was fighting the nausea rolling through his gut and head. The smell of ozone was thick.

  ‘The Executioner, the Candle inverted… I know little of such things,’ he began, and coughed. The taste of iron lingered in his mouth and he swallowed it, pausing to steady his breath.

  ‘Speak your feelings,’ said Covenant. He alone in the room seemed unmoved, though his skin was pale and sheened with sweat. The sensor pod on his shoulder was twitching in small arcs. Its lenses switched focus, and then switched again. Josef watched the pod for a second and then looked back to the table. He let emotions form as his eyes moved over the pattern and the images on the crystal cards. They were subtly different from how they had been when he last looked: the High Priest was no longer on his throne but walking away from it, swathed in a black cowl, his hammer abandoned on the steps beneath the throne. The Ragged Fool now bore a bundle of swords over his shoulder, and his shadow was black behind him.

  ‘It feels… like a threat. As if I am looking at something that is not just a picture of what is, but something that has been designed… no…’ he paused, frowning. ‘Not designed, mutilated.’

  ‘Aitiokratía…’ muttered Epicles from the floor. He was shivering still, but a little colour was returning to his skin.

  ‘What–’ began Josef.

  ‘Aitiokratía – an archaic way of saying that action is determined by something other than itself.’ The astropath gestured weakly with his hand and his servitor helped him to his feet. ‘In the context of this form of divination it means that, by looking, we change what happens, or in some cases–’

  ‘That what we are seeing has been deliberately altered,’ said Covenant. He looked at Josef. ‘The future is being mutilated. Your intuition is right. This reading was intended to divine the time and place that a prospect for divine incarnation might appear. It is very clear. Too clear. We are not seeing chance here. We are seeing the product of deliberate actions.’

  Josef shivered and turned away. ‘Does it tell us what we need?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you mean was it worth my breaking my vow to myself?’ replied Covenant.

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘They are cutting down prospects like a gardener pruning fruit from a tree in the hope of picking one that is sweeter than all the rest,’ said Covenant.

  ‘I see we have not only returned to divination, but to poetry,’ said Epicles with a snort. ‘But the analogy is not quite right, my lord. A better one might be lightning in a storm cloud. It builds and builds until it can find a root to the ground, and when it does…’ The old astropath clapped his hands once, loudly. ‘What this Triumvirate is doing is denying the lightning its path. So the charge in the cloud builds and builds, and when the final lightning bolt falls…’

  ‘Except it is not a storm cloud,’ said Josef, his voice cold. ‘It is the power of the warp, and the path of the lightning is power pouring into a living soul.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Epicles, and all sarcasm had gone from the old astropath’s voice.

  Josef looked at Covenant. ‘But is the lightning the power of the God-Emperor, or the fire of Chaos? Salvation or abomination?’

  Covenant met his gaze, held it, but did not answer.

  Josef looked back to the tarot cards.

  ‘Where does the next prospect rise?’ asked the preacher. ‘Can we tell?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Covenant, and nodded at a cluster of cards: the Candle surrounded by red eyes in the night; the Lightn
ing Tower, gargoyles falling from its parapets as the thunderbolt shattered its stones; the Supplicant kneeling in front of an altar in the robes of a penitent pilgrim. Other cards in different positions formed a curving arc around the three. ‘It will happen on Dominicus Prime, in one of the monastery complexes.’

  ‘The Monastery of the Last Candle, to be precise,’ said Epicles. They both looked at him. Epicles shrugged and waved a hand at the Candle card. ‘Sometimes meanings are hidden and subtle, and sometimes they are as obvious as a fart in a confession box.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Josef.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought we were indulging in poetical flourishes of phrase.’

  Josef let out a controlled breath and looked at the card-strewn table. The psy-holo images flickered and flowed.

  ‘It does not feel…’ said Josef, ‘it does not feel right. There is something missing.’

  Covenant reached out, took a card off the top of the un-dealt stack of cards, looked at it and tossed it down on top of the others. The Lord of Swords looked out from the card’s face. A halo of fire surrounded him, and the blade in his hand glowed with frozen lightning.

  ‘Me,’ said Covenant. ‘I am missing from this sight of the future.’

  FOUR

  Agata waited in one of the Great Cathedral’s side chapels, and prayed. After all these decades it was a reflex. Even alone, the training and ways of the Sororitas never left her. Her life was lived between tasks of defined purpose: prayer, training, ritual and war. Any time that did not have a purpose was time for prayer or practice. In the chapel, waiting for the bishop, she had nothing to do, and as swinging her blade through the sixteen sacred cuts would have been disrespectful to its peace, she prayed.

  Emperor hear the prayer of thy servant. Emperor lead thy servant on the path of purity. Emperor hear the prayer of thy servant…

  It was a silent prayer, simple and meditative in its repetition. She felt its words thread through the shadows clustering at the edge of her thoughts. Above her the stained-glass ceiling of the chapel reflected the candles burning on the small altar.

  She heard the main door open behind her, paused to complete the last loop of phrases and turned with her head bowed. The red-and- white-robed attendant who had opened the door moved to the side, his head also bowed. His mouth was sewn shut with silver thread, she saw, and he wore a belt of heavy chains hung with lead weights in the shapes of saints and angels. He bowed lower as Bishop Xilita walked through the door. Her robes were also red and white, but threaded with gold and silver at the edges and a stole of deep crimson draped her shoulders. Shackles ringed her ankles, wrists and neck, plated with gold and platinum, and studded with rubies. Silver and iron chains hung from each shackle, the links etched with words of confession and pardon. The weights attached to each chain were jewel-encrusted globes and exquisite sculptures of martyred saints cast in every metal, mundane and precious alike. Two attendants moved at her side, steadying her swaying steps but not coming close enough to ease her of her burden.

  The figure that moved under the load of chains and weights was slight and bent, like a tree curved over by decades of strong wind. As head of the Weighted Order of Penance, Xilita bore the burden of her sins and the sins of all her flock as literal weights. Her ascension to the Bishopric of the Last Candle had necessitated that she show her devotion by bearing even further weight as a sign of her authority and purity within her order, even though it was not officially required by the position. Agata admired the devotion, but was certain that, faith notwithstanding, the weights and chains would drag Xilita down into an early grave.

  ‘Forgive my interrupting your meditation, sister superior,’ said Xilita as she came to a halt. She raised her head, dragging a mane of weighted chains up her back. It was a young face, made old by responsibility and mortification. Olive skin was drawn taut over sharp bones. Dark brown eyes fixed Agata and focused.

  ‘I am grateful that your holiness could see me at such short notice.’

  ‘When the Protector of the Flame asks, the God-Emperor’s servant answers.’

  ‘You do the exaltedness of your office a disservice.’

  ‘Nonsense, what you represent is eternal, a fragment of His will and might placed here. I am just a servant, and I will be gone soon enough.’

  Agata bowed her head, thinking as she had before that as young as she was, Xilita had an old soul. ‘Your holiness is in good health.’

  Xilita laughed, and for a moment seemed the younger woman she was. Then she straightened, biting her lip but showing no other sign of the effort it must have taken, or the pain it cost. The bishop stood only an inch shorter than her.

  ‘Good enough to bear what I must,’ she said, and then let the weighted chains pull her back into a stoop. ‘For now.’ She patted Agata on the shoulder. ‘What did you wish to discuss?’

  ‘A spiritual matter.’

  Xilita raised an eyebrow, and then smiled.

  ‘I am a priest, and you a holy daughter of the Emperor, why is it that such a topic is surprising? But then if this age has brought miracles it is to a realm where priests are made money-counters, and the soul a poor coin beside gold.’

  ‘The blessed Saint Sebastian Thor,’ said Agata.

  ‘Quite so. Now what troubles you, sister?’

  ‘Your holiness, I fear either that I may be unclean, or that my mind is failing. But if I am neither, I fear that this place may be in danger of the kind that cannot be imagined.’

  ‘Brother abbot,’ said Claudia.

  Abbot Iacto flicked his eyes to the reflection of his acolyte in the mirror and noted the careful composure of Claudia’s face. She stood just inside the chamber door, seeming the picture of deference. He liked that impression; it made her much more useful. She shifted slightly, no doubt twirling her ring of office around her finger inside the wide sleeves of her robe. She was angry about something. She did a good job of hiding it but he could tell.

  He winced as the headache that had been building since he woke stabbed sharply into the space behind his eyes. He had not been sleeping well recently, and for as much opportunity as recent events brought they gave him little rest when awake.

  He looked again at Claudia waiting for him to reply. That was a bad sign. She was not normally so courteous. There was news, probably bad news. There rarely seemed to be any other kind these days. It could wait a moment. He looked back to his reflection. A clean-shaven face with bright eyes looked back at him from beneath a neat tonsure. He smoothed the stole over his chest. The purple robes of the Sage Order of the Faithful were thick, and thanks to his position, lined with fur. Rings of office gleamed on his fingers.

  ‘Chain,’ he said, and held out a hand. Claudia took his chain of office out of its velvet-lined box and put it in his hand. He lowered it over his head, and positioned it on his shoulders. Diamond, agate and emerald gleamed in the aquila’s claws.

  ‘Faith, surety and purity,’ he said, and smiled. ‘They were careful to leave out poverty.’

  ‘As you say, brother abbot,’ said Claudia. She kept her eyes on the floor. Her face was so thin that she looked almost starved. As his senior aide, she ate well, but somehow she always looked on the edge of starvation. The close-cropped hair did not help, except in creating an air of lean piety. It was an impression that was often useful.

  ‘Did she agree?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Claudia. ‘I was unable to secure Sister Agata’s agreement to your proposal.’

  Iacto felt his face harden for a second. He looked back at the reflection of the chain of office in the mirror. It, like the private chambers he stood in, was a sign of the heights he had climbed in the last two decades.

  ‘We will have to find another route to resolve the matter,’ he said.

  ‘There must be a way,’ snapped Claudia. ‘Everyone has a lever that can be pulled.’

  He gave a dry snort of laughter, and turned from the mirror.

  ‘You do not know much of the most h
oly Adepta Sororitas. Difficult and dangerous does not even come close. Try to pressure them and it often ends badly. They don’t have attachment to restrain them, you see. They are willing to do things that some might call insane, and others call true devotion.’

  ‘She said that you are a slave to your ambition.’

  ‘Well, I am glad that my soul does not rest in the hands of Sister Agata, then,’ he said, and smiled. ‘If the sister superior will not act because of her own conscience, then we will have to find another way to put pressure on the beloved bishop. Do matters continue to worsen?’

  Claudia nodded.

  ‘The reports of unrest are increasing. The beggar orders say that hunger is rife in the drift and the pilgrim holes. They are latching on to every scrap of fear and hope,’ she said. He marked the hard gleam in her eye as she spoke, and reminded himself that, as useful and effective as she was, he would one day have to deal with her before she became a threat. ‘They are cattle searching for hope and finding fear. All it will take is a cause or voice to rally around and there will be blood and fire. There are words of a new sect, penitents whose mark are their red rags.’ She snorted. ‘Even this morning there is word of a red-clad pilgrim who could be cut and not bleed. They are calling it a miracle and the girl a blessed messenger – if their heresy was not enough to earn them their suffering, their credulity should.’

  He laughed and shrugged.

  ‘Is there any use we can make of this girl?’

  Claudia shook her head.

  ‘No, your holiness, it is nothing…’ she paused, and a small smile twitched her lips. ‘But there is something else.’

  Ah, he thought, this is what she really came to tell me, and she is so proud that she saved it to the end.

  He moved towards the door. Claudia moved in front of him and pulled it open.

  ‘Tell me as we walk,’ he said.

  ‘Another ship has broken orbit and made for the system edge,’ she said, her voice low.

  Their steps echoed as they moved down the corridor beyond. A freezing wind was pouring down from the open roof of the structure above. Torch flames streamed and guttered in iron brackets.