Warden of the Blade Page 3

  Cragg smiled. ‘I’m glad to see you are pleased, cardinal.’

  ‘Pleased?’ Rannoch croaked. ‘That is a poor word. Captain, no description can do justice to your work here.’

  ‘Then I’m hopeful we can assist you.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Was there anything specific you had in mind?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Rannoch said. ‘My concern is not apostasy. There are no instances of heresy on Sandava II.’ He spoke with perfect confidence. He would know if such evil were abroad on his world. He was vigilant. The church’s grip on the citizenry was secure. That was not sufficient, however. ‘I feel the people take their faith for granted,’ he said. ‘They need a renewal of commitment. They need to be enflamed.’

  ‘I see,’ said Cragg. ‘I hope you will not be offended, cardinal, if I say your situation is not unusual. It is, in fact, what we specialise in addressing.’

  ‘I am not offended. I am delighted.’

  ‘Good. In these cases, my normal recommendation is, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, a display of relics in the capital city.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Then would you care to select the relics?’

  He would. But as he walked up and down the aisles, passing hundreds of cases, his initial wonder faded. His spirits lowered. Disappointment set in. There was nothing wrong with the relics, yet they were not exceptional. Maybe there were too many. Maybe he was hoping for something so sublime, yet so vaguely defined, that no actual object could meet that expectation. Rannoch wanted to be transported. He wanted to tremble in awe. He wanted to experience the all-consuming fire he would then see ignited in his congregation.

  Nothing he saw achieved those heights. He felt respect. He felt reverence. He was not overpowered. No relic was too much for his senses.

  Cragg sensed the shift in his mood. ‘I fear our offerings are disappointing you.’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ Rannoch said. ‘It’s hard for me to define what I am seeking. It must be transcendent. It must…’ He groped for the words. ‘It must exceed the limits of what we imagine. That is when we feel the divine touch of the Emperor’s will.’ He sighed, frustrated by the inability of mere words to express something beyond their boundaries. ‘Do you understand what I’m trying to say?’

  Cragg had begun to look uneasy as he was speaking. ‘I think so,’ she said. Her eyes flickered involuntarily to her left.

  Rannoch caught the movement. He turned his head. There was an empty case a few yards down the aisle. Rannoch approached it. ‘What was in here?’ he asked.

  ‘A funerary mask,’ Cragg said.

  ‘Where is it? Was it sold?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It is not an object that will ever be sold.’

  ‘Then where is it?’ Rannoch insisted.

  ‘We have removed it to a storage vault for the time being.’

  ‘What does “for the time being” mean?’

  ‘Until we can be more certain of its provenance, we will not display it. It is something of a mystery, and so has no place among confirmed relics. We thought it was from the tomb of Saint Estheria.’

  ‘Wasn’t that destroyed?’

  ‘It was. The planetoid on which she was buried was shattered by an ork incursion three centuries ago. We believed some fragments of the tomb had survived.’

  ‘You no longer think the relic is from her tomb?’

  ‘It may be. It may also be the funerary mask of Saint Praxtor. The general description in both cases matches.’

  ‘Saint Praxtor’s tomb has never been located,’ Rannoch said.

  ‘That is so. The mask corresponds to surviving records of his burial. That is all.’

  The ambiguity was frustrating. It was also fascinating. Two possible origins from two vanished tombs. There had to be meaning in that coincidence. ‘I would like to see this mask,’ said Rannoch.

  ‘I can vouch for nothing about it,’ Cragg said.

  The reservation sounded mechanical to Rannoch. Cragg blinked, as if she had meant to speak more firmly than she had. Rannoch puzzled over the response, then decided he was seeing a clever merchant pretend to object to something she had intended to show him all along.

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I want to see it, all the same.’ Whether Cragg was trying to manipulate him or not felt irrelevant. The conviction was stealing over him that fate was at work. It was important that he see this mask.

  ‘Very well.’

  Cragg turned right, towards the ship’s bow. Rannoch followed. They passed the choir, entered a narrow passageway that ran off the reliquary and took it for a few hundred yards. At an intersection, Cragg went down a staircase. She and Rannoch descended many levels until the stairs ended at a massive iron door. At a nod from Cragg, two guards pulled the door open for them. Inside the vault, crates and chests were stacked high on steel shelves. The space was purely functional. Rannoch frowned when he saw it.

  ‘You disapprove,’ said Cragg.

  ‘Where is the invocation of the sacred I saw before?’

  ‘I believe it must be earned.’ Cragg gestured at the containers. ‘Many of the items stored here are reproductions. They are treated with respect, but not the reverence due to an icon. I will have no false worship on my vessel.’

  Rannoch bowed his head, conceding the point.

  ‘As for objects like the mask,’ Cragg went on, ‘the same principle applies. Until we can definitively establish its identity, and therefore its sanctity, it remains here. This vault is unadorned, cardinal, but it has been consecrated.’

  ‘I am satisfied, captain. Please proceed.’

  She brought him to a chest at the end of the first aisle of shelves. It was sitting on a large work table, flanked by data-slates and stacks of scrolls and leather-bound volumes.

  ‘You have been hard at work, I see,’ said Rannoch.

  ‘Yes, the research is proving extensive, and very contradictory. We are no wiser than before we began.’ She started unlatching the chest. It was not locked, but a dozen bronze clamps held it closed.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ Rannoch asked. ‘Wouldn’t that provide some guidance?’

  Cragg shook her head. ‘We recovered it from the wreckage of the Steadfast Apostle. Our sister ship went missing thirty years ago. We found what was left of her on a planetoid in the Apsorus System.’

  ‘What could she have been doing there?’ Rannoch said. There were no colonies in Apsorus. There were no planets there at all, not since the hive world of Apsorus IV had been subjected to Exterminatus four centuries ago. That civilisation’s fall had provided material for warning sermons across the subsector ever since. Rannoch had made frequent use of it himself. That’s three, he thought. Three instances of absent worlds. The connections he was drawing were spurious, he knew. If the mask was from one tomb, it could not be from another. Even so, he saw still greater meaning in the growing coincidences.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cragg. ‘The Apostle seems to have come to grief in the debris field, though why she was there at all, I can’t guess.’ She raised the lid of the chest. ‘At any rate, this is what we found.’ She lifted a stand from the interior and placed it on the table. She stepped back to give Rannoch the space to examine the mounted relic.

  The mask stared at Rannoch with empty eyes. He met the cold gaze, and a buzzing began in his extremities, working its way towards his heart, leaving numbness in its wake. The mask was gold, though it must have had a framework of something more rigid, for the relic seemed strong as well as beautiful. Jewels were inlaid around the eyes and mouth, and in sharp lines along the contours of the cheekbones. They picked up the light from the vault’s lume-strips, refracting it into a dazzling spectrum. Rannoch beheld a play of gold and a shimmer of every colour at once. The face was both serene and demanding. Its forehead was engraved with almost microscopic runes,
line upon line of them running across the mask’s surface like wrinkles of age and experience, yet they enhanced rather than marred the beauty of the face. The mask held the cardinal rapt. His eyes flicked from detail to detail. Each element of it was perfect. Together, they forged something that went beyond perfection. Rannoch felt as if he should be wincing. The beauty before him was painful. But his eyes remained wide, his gaze caught in a perpetual dance from individual feature, to whole, and back to feature. He could spend his life trying to learn all the different configurations of the artefact before him, and there would always be more.

  ‘This…’ he whispered. He cleared his throat. He could not look away. ‘This is astonishing,’ he said.

  ‘It is a powerful work,’ said Cragg. ‘I will rest easy once we have determined its origin.’ If she really was uncomfortable, she conveyed her emotion too softly once again, almost as if it were being suppressed.

  Rannoch admired the merchant’s craft abstractly. He could think of little else than the mask.

  ‘To contemplate this wonder is to feel the gaze of divinity,’ Rannoch said. ‘It could only come from the tomb of a very great saint.’ As he spoke, a sliver of doubt stabbed at him. Not concerning the holiness of the relic, but the idea that this was a funerary mask. Rannoch experienced the solemnity that came from standing before a humbling force. But there was too much energy in the network of lines on that face. The play of light upon the jewels was too great, too alive to sequester in the darkness of a tomb. The power of this art would overwhelm any grave. It was meant to be seen. It was meant to have living eyes looking out from behind it, calling the faithful to an engulfing ecstasy of death.

  He felt the ability to look at the mask with anything like rationality slip away from him. He tensed for a moment, and then awe swamped his concern.

  ‘I agree,’ Cragg said. ‘The personage for whom the mask was fashioned must have been extraordinary. But until we know which saint, I must keep it here. It is the responsible thing to do.’

  ‘True,’ Rannoch said. Reluctantly. He was even more reluctant to let Cragg replace the mask in its chest. He stared at the relic until the lid closed. Its removal from his sight felt like a theft. No, worse than that. It was a bereavement and a wound.

  Rannoch’s limbs were heavy as he walked with Cragg out of the vault. His mind raced. He had found what he had been seeking. The mask had more power than all the other relics on the ship combined. It had to go down to Sandava II. He imagined the incendiary effect the mask would have on the faith of the citizenry, and the heaviness fled from his body. His excitement was very like an urge to dance.

  He did not ask Cragg to arrange for the mask to be displayed, or if she would sell it. He knew what her answer would be. Just as he knew with absolute certainty he must bring to Sandava II the gift that would create a faith of fire.

  There would be a way to make this happen. Surely that was the will of the Emperor. Why else would fate have shown Rannoch such a relic?

  The image of gold and jewelled light shone in his mind’s eye. Already the memory was a torment. The thing itself called to him. He vowed he would answer.

  Chapter Two

  THE SHADOWS COMMAND

  The Silver Pinnacle pierced the darkness in all its forms. It rose from the centre of the Citadel on Titan, a gleaming knife stabbing through the deep orange gloom of the nitrogen atmosphere. Its brilliance was aimed at the greater dark of the void, and the force within its walls penetrated the most profound darkness of all. The Silver Pinnacle was the light of wisdom. It was the sword of foreknowledge.

  It was the redoubt of the Prognosticars.

  Reflection. Refraction. Distortion. Amplification. Madness. These were the ways of the warp, the nature of the immaterium’s corruption of the real. To counter the warp meant understanding it. Reading it. Becoming intimate with its currents of insanity and the vortices of dreams while remaining untouched by the lures of its sins. And so the Grey Knights turned to the dreadful power of mirrors.

  The Auguirium was the Chamber of Reflection. Its walls and ceiling were mirrored. Their concavity concentrated all images in the huge, perfectly polished mirror of the floor, turning it into a pool of infinite depth. The Prognosticars sat around its circumference. Their focus was an even more powerful form of concentration. It was the one that gave the mirrors their power. It opened the way to the coils of the immaterium. They spiralled on the great mirror, twisting themselves into shapes without reason, but heavy with omens. The Prognosticars observed what their focus wrought, and they peeled away the madness to find the meaning.

  They did not seek to control the warp. That impulse was the betrayer of heroes and the doom of souls. It could not even be truly navigated. It could be traversed with caution, and at great risk. So too could portions of it be read. With great caution. At great risk. The mind that contemplated the warp did so as a nomad, always moving, adapting, aware of the eternal storm and the lethality of transcendence and contingency. The warp could not be seized. It could not be surveyed.

  But when the mind travelled the warp, with the respect due to an ocean in fury, warnings could be found in the particular clash of waves, in the runic turn of eddies, and in the howling reflections of the spirit. Time in the warp was as illusory and treacherous as space. The configurations of madness, interpreted at the right moment, could be the ripples of the future. The Prognosticars who saw that future could sound the alarm. With diligence, predatory powers could be stopped, or at least the present might not be destroyed.

  In the Auguirium, the Prognosticars watched and meditated, meditated and prayed, prayed and watched. The sea of nightmares convulsed before them. The screams of the real broke against each other, falling into nothingness. And then, a vortex became a knot, a contusion of corruption. It gathered coherence. It moved to strike.

  The Prognosticars did not move, but their minds raced with one accord to the knot.

  Something was coming. It did not yet exist, but it was coming, and the hour of its reality onrushing.

  The Prognosticars directed their focus to the growing nexus. And so the Grey Knights went to war against a thing that did not, as yet, exist.

  But it was coming, gathering nightmares in its wake.

  Rannoch couldn’t sleep. He didn’t think he would ever sleep again. As long as the mask was not before his eyes, the golden, acid-etched memory image would eat at his peace, remind him of his failure and twist him with the phantom agony of absence. If he beheld the mask, how could sleep return then? There would be the unending fire of worship. He would be transported forever by awe. Either way, there would be no rest for him. If this was to be his fate, it would be better to embrace his obsession than deny it – better to be bathed in the light of a saint than savaged by the thought of duty unfulfilled.

  He was lying in a stateroom situated midway up the superstructure of the Envoy of Discipline. A glassteel window looked out over the length of the ship. Its frame was flanked by two of the immense statues. Their heads, hooded and bowed in prayer to raised hands, were level with the window. Their monumental piety invited Rannoch to contemplate the infinite vistas of the Emperor’s galaxy, to give thanks and to find rest within their protection.

  He glared at the statues’ profiles, resenting their calm of stone. Did they not see his pain? Were they mocking him?

  The bed was huge. He was lost in it. He thrashed, strangling himself in the covers. He fought free, then lay back, gasping.

  Cragg had invited him to stay through a night cycle, then make his decision regarding the relics in the morning. He had accepted even though he already knew what he would say. None of the relics Cragg was willing to display were adequate. Only one would answer the needs of Sandava II. Rannoch stayed because the thought of quitting the ship and losing the mask forever was unbearable.

  He had eaten with Cragg and her officers. The feast in his honour had been lavish. He had
barely tasted it. He had washed down a couple of mouthfuls with gulps of amasec, conscious of doing a grave injustice to the vintage, but unable to care. Then he had stared at his plate, just managing to take part in the conversation. He couldn’t remember what had been discussed. He chose now to regard his abstinence as a fast. His mind and his soul were caught in a tempest. Perhaps the denial of the body would help see him safely to port.

  Rannoch prayed for guidance. He tried to find even a single moment of calm, but the turmoil refused to let him go. The golden face stared at him, accusing him of cowardice and neglect. Its perfection was marred by the flaws of memory, and he wept at his sacrilege.

  He stumbled from the bed and collapsed in front of the window. ‘Father of Mankind,’ he cried to the void, ‘what would you have me do?’

  There was no answer. He had never been so alone.

  Illumination burst upon him one heartbeat later. Despair became exultation. His solitude was his answer. He had come to the Envoy of Discipline without his retinue. He had never travelled without attendants before. He had surprised himself with his decision almost as much as his major domo. At the time, he could not explain his impulse. Now he understood. Now, he saw the workings of destiny, and he sobbed his praise of the God-Emperor.

  He was alone, and this was a blessing. If his retinue had been here, servants would have been knocking at his door at the first sound of distress. He would not have been able to take step beyond the threshold of the state room without being asked what he desired. Here and now, though, he could act. He could do what the Emperor demanded, and not be seen.

  A small inner voice, easily ignored, wondered why the Emperor’s work should require secrecy of him here, on this missionary vessel. He was not an inquisitor, after all.

  Rannoch silenced the voice with the simple thought of the mask. Besides, holy secrets were the mortar of faith.