The Colonel's Monograph

by Graham McNeill

‘That manor at the top of the promontory happened to him,’ she said, circling her stricken husband and stroking his head. ‘The books he read. The colonel’s very own words. The things she saw, things she did. The things she brought back…’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Colonel Grayloc, they say she was a hero, yes?’

  ‘She is,’ I said. ‘She was able to fight her way back to the Imperium after the Dawn of Dark Suns when all others fell.’

  ‘So many died,’ said Odette. ‘Did you never wonder how she made it back?’

  ‘By all accounts, Elena Grayloc was an exemplary leader, and her soldiers were some of the very best.’

  ‘The 83rd were good soldiers, some of the very best,’ agreed Odette. ‘But no one is that good. They all should have died. No one could have lived through that, but she did. She and those she trusted to come with her, no matter what. Imagine what that cost her, how much of her humanity she would’ve had to surrender along the way.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I asked.

  Odette knelt beside her husband.

  His head turned this way and that, as if straining to hear a far-distant song. I wondered how much he could understand of what we were saying.

  Odette gently placed a hand on his arm and said, ‘My Montague, he found her memoirs.’

  My heart leapt with excitement I did my best to conceal.

  ‘He found the colonel’s monograph?’

  ‘For all the good it did him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Odette rose from her knees and said, ‘I’ve heard about you, Mistress Sullo. You’re going through the colonel’s books, yes?’

  ‘Yes. Garrett Grayloc intends to sell them to cover his mother’s debts.’

  Odette moved around the back of her husband’s chair and rested her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘You should leave this place,’ she said to me. ‘Now, while you still can. I ought to have warned you earlier, but I couldn’t leave my Montague. The books… the things he read… they drove him mad, you see. The horror of learning what happened out there in the Ocyllaria subsector, it broke his mind. The day it was finally too much… he came home, the words just spilling out of him in a flood, like he couldn’t stop it. He was saying awful things, vile things…’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Things I won’t repeat,’ said Odette, and I saw a memory of the most hideous slurs imaginable pass over her face. ‘He knew he was saying them, he was weeping the whole time, but it was like he couldn’t stop saying them. He kept trying to stop, but the words inside kept boiling out of him.’

  I could see revisiting these memories was traumatic for Odette, but I needed to know what had happened, what Montague had found.

  ‘Did he ever mention Val–’

  Odette’s hand snapped out and clamped over my mouth. Her skin tasted of fish and the stale sweat of a locked room.

  She glanced down at Montague and shook her head slowly. ‘Don’t say it.’

  I nodded as she lifted her hand away and continued.

  ‘So he’s ranting and raving like a madman, and that word you were about to say comes out of his mouth. No sooner does it pass his lips than he gets up and smashes his fist into the mirror. Breaks it to pieces and picks up a long shard like a carving knife. Takes it to his tongue first, then his eyes. All the time I’m screaming and trying to stop him, but he’s stronger than he looks and he throws me off. No sooner are his eyes and tongue gone than he’s looking for parchment and quill, like what was in him was trying to find a way out, any way out. He starts scratching random numbers on a page he’d torn from his old journal. As soon as he’s done, he takes the same glass that cut out his eyes and tongue and hacks his fingers away back to the palm. When he realised he couldn’t do the same to the hand he had left, he just punched the wall until it was nothing but bloody flesh and bone fragments.’

  All through Odette’s tale, I sat incredulous, transfixed by the horror Montague Rhodes had wrought upon his own flesh.

  ‘What could have been so terrible that it would warrant such horrifying self-mutilation?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Odette. ‘I don’t want to know. And neither should you.’

  ‘Do you think something similar happened to the colonel?’

  Odette’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I heard she fell from the cliffs of the manor during the storm,’ I said. ‘Perhaps her death wasn’t an accident? Perhaps she too was afflicted by these… visions, and that drove her to hurl herself from the cliff?’

  Odette gave me a look of the kind I had not seen since my days in the scholam when the drill abbots were displeased with me.

  ‘You’re half right,’ allowed Odette.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means the colonel’s death wasn’t an accident, but it wasn’t a suicide either.’

  ‘So what was it?’

  ‘Boatman that found her said her head was mostly gone, split wide open, and empty like a cracked egg.’

  ‘Those cliffs are high. The impact of landing could easily explain such a wound.’

  ‘That they are, but the boatman is ex-Guard,’ said Odette. ‘He saw more than one commissar perform a summary execution.’

  Odette saw my look of confusion and said, ‘Point is, he knows what a gunshot to the back of the head looks like.’

  I did not linger much longer in that awful cottage, and the memory of Montague Rhodes still sends a surge of revulsion through me, though now I have a better understanding of what motivated him to take the mirror­glass to his face.

  As I stood in the doorway of the cottage, Odette pressed a folded sheet of paper into my palm and said, ‘Take it. I don’t want it in here a moment longer. Maybe it’ll help you, or maybe you should just burn it.’

  She retreated and closed the door before I could ask any more.

  I felt desperately sorry for Odette and her husband, but I stepped quickly away from their cottage, wanting to put as much distance between myself and the despair that lay within like a sickness. I could feel the dank texture of trapped air leaving my lungs with every step I took and each breath of sea air.

  I was not yet ready to return to Grayloc Manor, so made my way to Gant’s emporium. I intended to purchase a hot mug of caffeine, hoping to impart some warmth to my limbs and to drive away the ice that had settled in my bones. I needed time to process all I had learned from Odette’s tale. How much of it could be true, and what did it mean?

  I took a seat in a secluded booth at the rear and nursed my drink, now understanding how little I really knew, and how much more there was to Colonel ­Grayloc’s life.

  Could the colonel have been murdered?

  If so, by whom, and why?

  What terrors were concealed within the monograph that had driven Montague Rhodes to inflict such terrible injuries upon himself? What danger was I in just being here? And, most important of all, could I endure what he had not?

  Those were questions I could not answer with my limited knowledge. I sipped my drink and reached into the pocket of my robes to lift out the journal and see if any new insights might reveal themselves. I thumbed through its pages until I came to the ragged edges at the gutter where two of its pages had been ripped out.

  Unfolding the paper Odette had handed me, I laid it flat next to the torn edges.

  Its edges perfectly matched up, unequivocally establishing its provenance.

  The paper had been crumped since being torn out, and dried bloodstains were smeared across it. I could imagine Odette, having balled up the page in grief, standing before the hearth and debating whether or not to throw it in the fire. I wondered why she had not, as I wondered why she had thought to pass it on to me.

  The page was filled with a repeating series of six numbers.

&nbs
p; The handwriting was familiar to me, the frantic etchings of a damaged psyche. Like the later writings in the journal it was hard to read, but given the circumstance in which these numbers had been set down, it was a miracle any of this was legible at all. What could be so important about these numbers that the last remaining scraps of sanity the old man possessed had driven him to record them after stabbing a glass dagger into both his eyeballs?

  I stared at them for hours, willing them to reveal their significance. Running a finger over the paper, I felt the rough texture of its pressed fibres, the raised ridge-lines of dried ink.

  Was there a sequence or order to these numbers?

  Was there a sequ–

  And then I knew.

  After speaking with Odette and seeing the ruin of her husband, I had little desire to return to Grayloc Manor, but the promise of what I might discover were my suspicions correct was too great to resist. The sun was well past its zenith, and I felt no warmth from it as a stiff gale blew in from the ocean.

  The curve of the crater spun ocean spume into vortices of mist and seawater, such that I felt as though I was walking uphill through a veil of tears. Looking out to sea, it was clear the storm that had long threatened to break overhead now seemed on the verge of unleashing its fury. Though it was only mid-afternoon, the sky was the textured grey of napped flint, and the dark clouds over the ocean were racing to the coast at a rate of knots.

  I glanced back at the temple on the opposite headland, its lonely spire stark against the clouds. Now that I knew the truth of its condition, it was impossible not to feel the absence of the Emperor’s presence in Vansen Falls.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ I whispered as I approached the manor, but the memory of the destroyed temple made my words ring hollow. I saw no lights within the manor, all its windows as black as the void of space.

  Taking care to make as little noise as possible, I entered the manor like a thief, not wishing to attract any attention. I hoped to test my theory undisturbed, and the approaching storm abetted me in this as a peal of ­thunder rumbled overhead.

  The house felt deserted, which perfectly suited my purpose as I climbed the stairs towards the library. A sudden burst of rain beat a tattoo against the windows. Howling winds whistled around the eaves.

  Darkness held sway within the house. No lights were lit, but I knew my way around enough not to need more than the last of the day’s light spilling in through the rain-smeared windows. Swiftly, I made my way to the red doors of the colonel’s library. I paused to listen at the door, but could hear nothing more than the creak of settling timbers and rattling roof tiles. Satisfied the library was empty, I entered and closed the door behind me.

  Thunder rolled again, louder this time.

  A flash of lightning illuminated the colonel’s formal portrait and the weapons beneath it.

  Taking a moment to quell my rising anticipation, I let out a shuddering breath and unfolded the paper Odette had given me.

  1, 6, 15, 28, 45, 61.

  My time in the library had given me a deep familiarity with its layout, and I made my way to the shelf inset with the numbered ceramic disc labelled with a 1.

  I laid my fingertip against it and felt the tiniest sensation of potential movement. Taking a deep breath, I pressed the disc, and my heart leapt as I was rewarded with a soft click, like a tumbler rolling in the barrel of a lock. Moving from shelf to shelf, I located each number in turn and pressed. Each time, it clicked with the sound of a turning key.

  Despite everything I had learned and my growing sense of standing at the edge of something I could barely comprehend, I could scarce contain a giddy sense of excitement as I stood before the last shelf.

  I pressed the disc marked 61 and waited.

  For long seconds, nothing happened. All I could hear was the rising winds encircling Grayloc Manor, but then I heard the ratcheting clockwork sounds of an elaborate mechanism coming into some preordained configuration.

  I turned to see a portion of the floor sliding back to reveal a set of stone steps leading down into darkness. A flash of lightning illuminated a short stairwell. The musky bouquet of Fireblooms wafted up from below, and I had the impression of a much larger space beneath.

  I had found what I was looking for, yet still I hesitated.

  My mouth was dry. Suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what lay below.

  Was this where Colonel Grayloc kept her monograph?

  Surely so secret a room was too great a precaution for any book, even one so singular?

  What else might the colonel keep hidden below? What was it Odette had said?

  The things she brought back…

  But I had come too far to turn away now, so I descended into the darkness with hesitant steps, each one feeling like it might be my last.

  Dust lay thick on the stone floor of the room below, and the musty air of something spoiled was hard to miss, even over the potency of the Firebloom petals that lay scattered like confetti. My nose wrinkled at the smell – like soured fruit or an overpowering perfume.

  The room beneath the library was akin to a study, lit by an oil-fuelled storm lantern that threw dancing shadows upon walls lined with shelves. Most of these were empty, but those that were not held disturbing statuettes carved from a strange greenish soapstone whose grotesque and monstrous anatomies were thankfully obscured by the gloom. A few books stood in splendid isolation, as though some past librarian – Montague perhaps? – had come upon them and not dared remove these particular volumes of forgotten lore.

  The remains of packing crates and scraps of wax paper lay discarded in a corner, telling me that whatever books and artefacts had once lined these shelves had long gone.

  But where were they now?

  My skin crawled just to look upon the books that remained, for the texture of their bindings was, even in this low light, impossible to mistake for anything other than skin.

  Why would a colonel of the Astra Militarum possess such things…?

  I could not bring myself to touch any of these books and thus learn their titles. Just being near them made me feel unclean and violated in the most profound way.

  But worse than the hideous books, the fundamental wrongness of this space was impossible to ignore.

  I knew from my time at Grayloc Manor that the dining room lay directly beneath the library. This space should not be able to exist. So blatant a violation of the natural physical laws set my teeth on edge and the contents of my stomach churning.

  I could not bear to be here, but nor could I leave.

  My body was at war with competing sensations of revulsion and the desire to know more.

  My heart beat fast in my chest as I walked an ever-decreasing circle around the single table and chair in the centre of this impossible space. The lantern cast a fitful illumination over two books laid upon the table as though awaiting a reader to unlock their secrets. I felt unhealthily drawn to these books, as though an invisible cord linked me to them and was being wound tighter with every step I took.

  No, these books weren’t waiting for just any reader, they were waiting for me.

  Denying the inevitable seemed pointless at this stage, so I pulled the chair back and sat down, feeling like my entire life and career had led me to this time and place.

  The first book was thinner, and appeared to be a nondescript accounting ledger, while the second bore a cover stamped with the aquila and skull symbol of the Astra Militarum. While researching the campaigns of Lord Militant General Hexior Padira III during my time at the Cardophian Repository, my team and I had studied countless commanders’ records kept in just such books.

  Though it wasn’t the same book as painted in the colonel’s portrait, it bore the same circular symbol pierced by an arrow that book had possessed. I felt certain that this was the book that Garrett Grayloc and I had long sought.

&
nbsp; Reluctant to touch this item, I instead lifted the ledger and scanned its contents.

  The pages were arranged in columns and were filled with titles, dates, amounts of money and locations. It took the recognition of unwelcomely familiar titles I had seen in Montague Rhodes’ journal for me to realise what I held. I looked up at the empty shelves as a rancid knot of horror made a clenched fist in my belly.

  This was a record of the various locations to which the books in this study had been despatched. Some had been sent off-world to fellow connoisseurs of the perverse, others to hive nobility across Yervaunt. But a great many had been sent to the Cardophian Repository.

  The texts in the library above were occasionally risqué, sometimes ill-advised to own, or borderline illegal, but every title I could bear to read in the ledger was utterly proscribed, a heretical book that would see its owner immediately executed for even knowing about, let alone possessing.

  The things she brought back…

  Colonel Grayloc had spread a host of blasphemous books throughout the subsector like a virus, and altogether too many were housed in my repository. Who knew what damage they were doing or how many innocents had become tainted by the heresy they contained?

  I was hyperventilating at the scale of Colonel Grayloc’s treachery, and I put the ledger back on the table as my eyes drifted to the larger book. This had to be the monograph Garrett Grayloc had spoken of, and though I absolutely did not want to look at what lay within, I knew that I must.

  I had to have an explanation. I had to know why Colonel Grayloc had chosen to collect these hideous books and wilfully spread their blasphemous knowledge.

  She was a hero of the Imperium, and her betrayal was a knife in my heart.

  Tears streamed down my face as I opened the ­colonel’s monograph and began to read.

  I have studied the writings of many great men and women, the words of saints and traitors alike. Throughout my life, the written word has made me laugh, made me weep, brought me joy and pierced me with sorrow.

  In all its forms it has brought me knowledge, wonder and escape.

  The monograph of Elena Grayloc was the first book I wished I could unread.