Incarnation - John French
Page 21
SMALL LIGHT THAT IS THIS SOUL
Acia ducked back into the shadows, holding her breath. It was hot down here in the deep root of the monastery. Very hot. The stones of the walls were crowded with crumbling saints, and the dust-covered floors were warm under her feet. She had run, and crawled down and down until she did not know where she was, until the dark was all there was. Then she had stopped, and breathed, and whatever had driven her down here faded. Hunger had filled her belly, and the silence of the dark had suddenly seemed strangling rather than comforting. She had closed her eyes, and the child’s prayers of her mother and father, spoken over her as she tried to sleep in the decks of pilgrim ships, breathed into her mind.
Oh, small light that is this soul, shine in the dark undimmed…
Oh, great light that is all, shine for this soul so small…
She listened and the memories must have tugged her from exhaustion to sleep, because she was walking down a corridor now, feet padding on red and white tiles, eyes looking up at tapestries showing a man of gold – who must be the Emperor – wounded and bleeding, the blood from His wounds falling into the hands of haloed saints who crowded close to Him. There were skulls stacked in niches along the walls and candles burning on iron stands. It was all somehow soft and strangely liquid, like a reflection glimpsed on a pool of oil and water.
There was someone there: a woman in white robes hung with chains. There was another person there, too: a man in brushed steel armour with a neat, iron-grey beard. Acia did not feel afraid any more, just puzzled. She did not recognise either of the people, and though the surroundings felt familiar, it was not anywhere she had been. It looked like a part of the monastery, but not one she recognised. Maybe it was one of the higher cloisters, up amongst the spires where only the holy orders most blessed went. But then why was it here in her dreams?
‘Lord inquisitor,’ said the woman in chains, bowing low. ‘We will find the witch.’
‘That would be something that I would not advise,’ said the man.
‘Oh, small light that is hope, shine for all that will see…’
The words of prayer whispered in her ear. She spun around.
And light poured into her eyes. Red but bright, like the glow of a vast coal before it cooled. Acia tried to move away, but the dream of floors and walls had gone, and the glow was getting closer, and there were voices, shouting and whispering and calling, and she could see now that the light was not one fire. It was thousands, millions, a countless mass of flames forming a single inferno. Heat broke over her. She felt herself begin to burn. She wanted to scream. She could not scream.
She opened her eyes just as the scream was forming on her lips. It drained back into her throat. She was sitting in a dark corridor, feet curled under her. And there was light, red and orange, flickering in the middle distance. She could hear the sound of footsteps, coming closer, like the sound of a river flowing over rocks.
A wave of figures in robes of every colour were coming down the passage towards her. Some held burning torches, some whips and ropes.
‘There she is!’
She tried to run, but found her limbs would not move.
‘Witch! Witch!
Oh, small light that is this soul, shine in the dark undimmed…
But she could not move, and the words of the prayer were fading and something was rising within her, blotting out thoughts with pain and anger, and she could see nothing but dust and the ruins of a dead city, and the howl of wolves was the laughter of the wind.
Her eyes were still open as the shadows around her flickered and crashed forwards towards the oncoming torchlight. Then the screams filled her ears.
Oh… small… light…
And then she was falling and falling, and could not hear the words of her lost prayer.
THIRTEEN
Agata went through the alley mouth just behind Josef. The gap was only just wide enough for them to pass through.
‘To the souls of the unworthy the gates of purity are like the eye of a needle…’ whispered a memory in her head.
The space beyond was green in the light of her helm display. Static popped and fizzed at the edge of her sight. She could see Josef just in front of her, hammer in his hands, moving forward a step at a time. There was an opening between the roofs above. A few scattered snowflakes fell from the slit of night sky.
‘There is blood here,’ said Josef, quietly.
‘How can you tell?’
‘I can smell it.’
Agata signalled the arbitrator to cover the entrance gap.
Josef edged further forwards. Agata looked around at the close-pressed walls. There were shapes attached to them, lumpen and still. Agata paused, stepped closer, and then away.
‘There are severed hands pinned to the walls,’ she said.
Josef stopped suddenly. Agata looked around, bolter up and swinging with her gaze. Then she saw.
A carved head lay against the end wall of the opening. In the thin green light of her dark vision its features were defined by shadows. Dark fluid streaked the stone of its cheeks. Metal bars had been hammered into its stone eyes, and a pair of human arms hung from them. A body sprawled beneath them, half lying on the ground, half hanging.
‘What…’ began Agata.
‘It’s a shrine,’ said Josef. ‘A profaned shrine.’
Josef was bending down, slowly, eyes fixed on the marks daubed on the stone face. They hurt to look at.
‘A shrine to what? What can such creatures worship?’
‘The truth,’ said a voice like the rattle of dried skin. Josef jerked back to his feet, hammer rising. Agata’s gun was aimed at the figure pinned to the stone face. It was moving, shifting under its wrapping of red rags. ‘That is what we bring – the truth.’
Agata’s finger tensed to fire. Josef raised a hand.
‘No!’ he said.
A dry rustle of a chuckle came from the figure.
‘You see, you want the truth too,’ said the figure.
A man, thought Agata, but there was something about the way his words slid into her ears that made her think of serpents gliding over dry sand.
‘What is this?’ growled Agata. ‘He is one of them… they did this to one of their–’
‘No,’ said Josef. ‘They were guarding this, guarding him. He is not just one of them.’ Agata watched as Josef tilted his head. ‘Are you?’
‘I was called Krade, and I am the Pilgrim of Hate.’
There was a smile in the words. Agata looked back to where the arbitrator stood watch at the opening onto the alley. Josef squatted down so that he was at eye level with the man.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Agata.
‘Getting answers,’ said Josef, and Agata could hear the control in it. He looked back to Krade. ‘You started this, didn’t you?’
‘I was the false prophet, yes,’ said Krade. ‘But a prophet only. I have done my work, and my children have set me down to sleep on a bed of pain.’
‘What are you doing here, who sent you here?’
‘Providence sent me,’ said Krade, and shuddered, his whole body jerking. Fresh blood glittered on the metal spikes pinning him to the saint’s head. ‘It is our time, and I am the prophet of that future.’
‘And what do you see in that future?’
‘Josef…’ began Agata.
He held up a hand to her.
‘What does it mean, you mean?’ asked Krade, his smile broad and bloody. ‘Why am I here? Why did this happen? What is my significance?’ A low dry wracking cough. ‘My significance is that this false paradise of ours must burn and so someone must set the first fire. It was seen, you see. On Nex, I killed my redeemer, just as my children have nailed me to this shrine to die. In his pain he saw that the one who will bring final truth and tip the world into fire was made here, right here – a child of the dark. This is unholy ground, and all that was needed for the prophesied destroyer to rise was for this place, its cradle, to burn and drown in blo
od. So I came and made it so.’
Josef was silent, his face hard. Agata could feel her own anger at the blasphemy.
‘You are a priest, aren’t you?’ said Krade. ‘I can smell the blindness on you. How does your god comfort you now, priest? Does he whisper promises in your ears? Does he fill your heart with the light of certainty and meaning?’ The man grinned. The skin of his face creased like paper. ‘Or is he silent? I know. I was once like you. Just like you. Once, worlds and stars away, I had faith. I believed. I knew that there was a plan, a great and divine plan that everything fitted into. I knew that He protects. I knew that He was light and all else darkness.’
Krade shuddered, and then coughed a great gobbet of bloody phlegm onto his chin.
‘Then I was shown the truth… You can see it, you know. You can see it in a boy dying on a plague bed, or in the drip of blood from the lips of someone that has just spent their last breath asking for grace, for compassion. You can see it then, bright and clear as a candle lit for prayer. And you know what it is?’ He breathed in, and the air rattled wetly in his throat. ‘Nothing. There is no hope, no light, no divine will guiding and protecting us. There is just the embrace of night and the long, slow, screaming slide down to the grave.’
Agata felt coldness run through her. The words the man was speaking slid and shivered in her skull. Every instinct trained into her was screaming for her to pull the trigger and punch a shell through this thing’s body. Then she noticed that his eyes had moved from Josef to her, as though he could see her clearly through the dark.
‘You, old daughter of a corpse, you want to know more. Do you want to know the truth?’
‘Heretic,’ she said, the word somehow cold and flat in her mouth.
‘I can show you,’ he said. ‘I was shown it. I was shown that there are other powers in this universe. Great and vast powers, that hunger and claw at us and the excrement we call life. Some call them gods, but they too are false. Life’s last mark of cruelty on our skin – all gods are lies, and all hope is dead.’
‘What did you come here to do?’ asked Josef.
‘And once you see that, you see that the only reaction is hate. What else can there be? Hate is purity. Oblivion is salvation. And once I knew that, I had purpose again. It filled me. It is the truth. It spoke with my lips, and by my hand, others saw.’
‘You will answer me.’
‘It began here, on this spot it was born – the false light, the beast of truths, the pilgrim of hate, red without and night within. The tools of false gods are my claws and hate my gift. I was not the beginning, and I am not the end. The truth lives, you fools. It began here, with false saint’s tears, and it lives and walks, and you cannot stop it. It wants to be free. It is coming – the last, true pilgrim of hate, the false prophet of oblivion. And I have laid the wood for its birthing pyre. The fire of this last candle shall become an inferno. When all burns, and there is only fire and night, it will come and it will bring truth to all.’ Krade smiled.
Agata heard three loud gunshots in the middle distance.
‘Josef,’ she said.
The preacher had not moved, but was still looking at the smiling bloody mask of Krade’s face.
‘The world ends by many hands, priest – the deluded, the blind, and the cruel. You are as dead as your god,’ hissed Krade. ‘I can see it inside you. I can taste it. Can you feel the cold hand on your shoulder?’ Krade leaned forwards suddenly, so that his lips were inches from Josef’s ear. ‘Listen, listen to me, I have a gift for you.’
The arbitrator at the end of the alley jerked his gun up.
‘Josef!’
‘Your god is dead. And soon you will join him.’
The arbitrator’s shotgun roared. Agata pivoted towards the opening to the alley. Krade was laughing, cold and shrill, blood bubbling up with the sound.
Josef brought the hammer up and then down, with a snarl. Krade’s skull shattered into bloody pulp and scraps of bone. The arbitrator fired again.
A shape loomed across the snow and night, towering stilt-limbed, ragged wrappings billowing around it. Agata had an instant to catch an impression of skin stretched over bone, and then an iron-tipped arm punched down and lifted the arbitrator off the ground in a spray of blood.
The cloister of the Sage Order of the Faithful echoed with voices. Ladders rattled along metal rails, built into the high shelves running down every corridor. Brothers and sisters of the order hurried between rooms with armfuls of scrolls and carts of books. In every contemplation cell, men and women bent over texts, running bone reading wands over faded words. In the great scriptorium at the centre of the cloister, the scribes had stopped work on new manuscripts for the first time in living memory. Scribe, archivist or novice; all were plunging back through the stacks of monastery records.
Iacto moved through it all, waving away signs and words of respect. He found Claudia in the great stack, standing on a wooden walkway above the cylindrical shaft lined with the order’s oldest tomes. Here, and throughout the rest of the order’s cloister, were the records of days for the entire monastery complex, written as an act of devotion by members of the order. There were other records and libraries, of course. Several of the other orders kept and produced all manner of scriptures, but it was the anointed duty of the Sage Order of the Faithful to mark the passing of days, and to keep the knowledge of the monastery alive.
‘Brother abbot,’ said Claudia, as he approached. She was working in a ledger, marking something off. Books lay open on brass stands around her. Her face was pinched and there were black shadows of fatigue under her eyes. ‘My message reached you quickly, then.’
‘Message?’ he asked. She looked up at him, a frown deepening. He shook his head. ‘No message reached me.’
‘Then why–’
‘The inquisitor is not here because of the uprising. He is here for something else. He is not here to help save the monastery. Whatever he is looking for we must find first – it is the only thing that is keeping him here. Without it we are alone.’
Claudia was very still for a moment, then picked up the ledger she was working in and turned it around so that he could see it.
‘My message was that we have found something.’
Iacto’s eyes flickered over the pages. Dates in the monastery’s calendar form ran down one of the pages, with cyphered notes on the facing page.
‘What are these?’
‘The Inquisition has been here before,’ she said. ‘Many times before.’
‘These are just dates, and codes for the keeping of the books of days–’
‘These are dates from the past one hundred years where there is no record. None. Not a note of a death, or the giving of a pilgrim gift.’
‘Curious, but–’
‘Except there are records, or there were. Members of the order were performing their devotion in these times. Their presence is recorded, as are the number of lines scribed. But there is no trace of what they wrote.’
Iacto nodded, reading the details from the ledger.
‘The Inquisition, though. How can you be sure?’
‘Marginalia. I looked at the prayer books of the scribes that are noted as devoting themselves to work on the days where there are no records.’
‘And?’
‘There was nothing in most of them, but in one…’ She held up a small book, bound in plain, worn leather. It was a prayer-pillow. Each member of the order made and kept such a book, reading from it and inscribing prayers into it. ‘This belonged to a Brother Tehlo of our order.’
Iacto took the book and opened it. Pages had been marked with black ribbons. He looked at the neat text running down the page. At the bottom, blurred where the writer had clearly tried to scrape the ink away, was a line of cursive running up the side of the verses of cant for that day.
‘And the anointed of the left hand of the Most Holy Emperor did come with the morning light, and I was summoned to attend to him and to give him record of all the str
angeness that has passed within the monastery.’ Iacto stopped reading and looked up at Claudia. ‘How could this not be known? If the Inquisition came here before they must have seen someone, and someone must have seen them.’
Claudia reached out and turned the pages of the prayer book to another black ribbon, then another and another.
‘It goes on, telling of how an inquisitor came in secret to the monastery, and how Tehlo was summoned each time, to talk about events in the records – miracles, the unexplained, rumours of saints and witches. It seems that he became a tutor or teacher, or keeper of some sort.’
‘A tutor?’
‘That is the implication.’
‘What would the Inquisition need a scribe to tutor?’
Claudia did not answer, but took the book back and began to turn the pages, showing him brief entries, all partially scraped away.
‘He begins willingly, even exultant. He talks about revelation. He says how he is blessed to have been singled out for this task. He writes the word revelation against pages and prayers for months, and the prayers are about forgiveness, and moulding the soul. I am not certain, but I think that they were keeping–’
‘Someone,’ said Iacto, looking up, eyes fixed on the cliff of shelves and the bustle of his brothers and sisters. ‘The Inquisition was keeping someone here in this monastery. Someone who needed tutoring.’
Claudia nodded.
‘Someone that frightened Brother Tehlo. You see, he writes like this for some time, but then the prayers he copies into the pages become about fear, entreaties to the Emperor for purification, forgiveness or protection.’
‘The obvious questions are who and where – and then the even more obvious, why?’
‘There are no answers, but there is this,’ she said, and turned to a page and pointed at a single passage.
Iacto looked at the page. He looked up at Claudia, feeling the shock spread across his face. She met his look and nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said, seeing the obvious logic spreading through his thoughts, ‘it had to be. How else could the records be purged and this all happen and it not be spoken of?’