by Dan Abnett
‘This is ridiculous, Navid. Are you saying you… you can perform magic? You honestly expect me to believe you’re some kind of sorcerer?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Good.’
‘I haven’t studied for anything like long enough.’
‘What?’ said Hawser.
‘Sorcerer’s the wrong word. Better terms would be adept or magus. At my very junior level, acolyte or apprentice.’
‘No. No, no, no. You had a weapon of some kind. Something small, concealed. Under your cuff or in a ring. Digitally based.’
Murza looked up at him. He ran his left hand through his dripping hair, trying to comb it back. There was a glitter in his eyes, an appealing, predatory thing. Navid Murza had always benefited from excess charisma. It was what carried him so far.
‘You wanted to know, Kas. You asked to know. I’m telling you. Do you want to hear it?’
‘Yes.’
Murza got dressed. Hawser went down to the others and made up some excuse about stepping out with Murza to ‘have a serious talk about his shortcomings’.
Murza was waiting for him on the small, rusty landing platform at the rear of the pension. It was dark and surprisingly cold. The petrochemical whiff of traffic exhaust mixed with the vent-off of cooking smells from the eating houses along Sanantwun. Beyond the secure walls of Boborg, the lights of Lutetia glimmered like a draped constellation.
Murza was wearing a long coat, and he had a small rucksack over his shoulder. He’d called a skike for them, and it was sitting on the platform with its potent little lifter motors revving. They checked with the Boborg watchman, signed their gene-codes out of the gated perimeter, and took the little transponder that would admit them back into the pension’s airspace later.
‘Where are we going?’ Hawser asked as they ducked in under the rain hood and took their seats behind the skike’s centrally-mounted servitor pilot.
‘It’s a secret,’ Murza smiled back, locking his seat-belt in place. ‘It’s all about secrets, Kas.’
He pressed the ‘go’ switch, and the skike rose off the platform with a whine, carried by its three engines, the two under the passenger cage and the other one under the nose forks. At rooftop height, it rotated to face north, and then took off at a high rate of knots. From the high vantage, with the cold wind in his face, Hawser could see what seemed like the whole spread of night-shadowed Lutetia. They shared the darkness with the zipping running lights of other skikes and speeders.
‘You look nervous?’ Hawser said to Murza.
‘Do I?’
‘Are you nervous?’
Murza laughed.
‘A little,’ he admitted. ‘This is a big night, Kas. It’s been a while coming. I’ve wanted to tell you about this stuff for years, since we first met, really. I thought you’d understand. I knew you’d understand.’
‘But?’
‘You’re so serious! There was always a danger you’d go all disapproving and older brother on me, and spoil everything.’
‘Am I really like that?’
‘You know you are,’ chuckled Murza.
‘So this interest of yours has been going on for a long time?’
‘When I was still quite young, at the end of my schooling, I was inducted into a private society dedicated to the rediscovery and restoration of the powers man used to command.’
‘So, some foolish schoolboy club?’
‘No, the society is old. Hundreds of years old, at least.’
‘And does it have a name?’
‘Of course,’ smiled Murza. ‘But it’s too soon to tell you that.’
‘But its remit is essentially similar to the Conservatory’s?’
‘Yes, but more specific.’
‘It only concerns itself with what I might regard as occult material?’
‘Yes,’ said Murza.
‘Is this why you joined the Conservatory, Navid?’
‘Conservatory work gave me great access to the sorts of material the society was seeking, yes.’
Hawser glowered. He looked out of the skike to give himself time to check his annoyance. The superorbital plate Lemurya had long since slid out of the sky, but the immense moonshadow of Gondavana was passing silently over the world, east to west like a giant cyclonic pattern, and the slightly smaller ghost of Vaalbara was crossing beneath it, south-west to north-east.
‘So what do I conclude from that, Murza?’ Hawser asked at length. ‘That for years you’ve been passing stuff to this mysterious society? That the Conservatory work is just a cover for you? That you’ve been exploiting the Council’s investments and—’
‘You see? You see this? Just like an older brother! Listen to me, Kas. I have never betrayed the Conservatory. I have never withheld anything, not a single find, not a book, not a page, not a button or a bead. I have dedicated myself to my work. I have never given the society anything that I haven’t given to the Conservatory.’
‘But you’ve shared?’
‘Yes. At certain times, I’ve shared certain discoveries with the society. Isn’t sharing the point? Isn’t that the guiding principle of the Conservatory?’
‘Not in such a clandestine way, Navid. There’s a nuance here, and you know it. You’re observing letter, not spirit.’
‘Maybe this was a mistake,’ said Murza, sullenly. ‘We can get the skike to turn back.’
‘No, we’ve come too far,’ Hawser replied.
‘Yes, I think we have,’ said Murza.
Longfang lurched forwards violently as another spasm of pain shook him. Hawser recoiled. He wasn’t sure what to do. There was little help he could offer. He couldn’t do anything to make the rune priest more comfortable, and he felt in some physical danger from the convulsions. An armoured Astartes, even a dying one, was not something a human being could cradle in his arms.
‘I’m not dying,’ said Longfang.
‘I didn’t say you were,’ said Hawser.
‘I can see it in your eyes, skjald. I can see your thoughts.’
‘No.’
‘Don’t tell me “no”. You’re afraid of me dying. You’re afraid of what to do if that happens. You’re afraid of being left here on your own with a corpse.’
‘I’m not.’
‘And I’m not dying. This is just healing. Sometimes healing hurts.’
Hawser heard a sharp noise from somewhere close by. He glanced at Longfang. The priest had heard it too. Before the priest could do or signal anything, Hawser had put a finger to his lips and signed for quiet. He got up off the ground, and picked up the nearest weapon.
Slowly, with the weapon raised, he edged around the courtyard, checking each archway and cloister. There was no sign of anything. The noise had probably been debris falling from above, a false alarm.
Hawser went back to Longfang, sat down with him again, and handed the weapon over.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I needed something.’
Longfang looked down at the frostblade in his hands and then back up at Hawser.
‘You realise I’d have killed any other man for taking this without asking, don’t you?’ he said.
‘You’d have had to get up first, wouldn’t you?’ Hawser replied.
Longfang laughed. The laugh turned into a bloody cough.
‘I don’t remember Terra,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I don’t remember it. I’m oldest of all, and I don’t remember it. I was made there, one of the last few that was, and I remind all the brothers of our proud link to the birth-sphere. But the truth is, I remember very little. Dark barrack fortresses, exercise camps, fight-zones, off-world expeditions. That’s all. I don’t remember Terra.’
‘Maybe one day you’ll go back,’ suggested Hawser.
‘Maybe one day you’ll finish this account and tell me something about it,’ replied Longfang.
The skike dropped them in a puddle of floodlights outside a sulking monster of a building in the western quarter of the city-nod
e.
‘The Bibliotech,’ said Hawser.
‘Indeed.’ Murza was smiling, but his nerves were getting worse.
‘I called ahead. I’m hoping they’ll meet you.’
‘They?’
Murza led him up the steps into the vast portico. The ancient stone columns soared away into the darkness above them. The floor was tiled black and white. Hawser could smell the dry air of climate control. He’d been to the Bibliotech many times before, for study and research. Never in the middle of the night. The sodium lamps cast a frosty, yellow glare on everything.
‘The society has had its eye on you,’ Murza said. ‘For quite a while now, in fact. I told them about you, and they think you might be very useful to them. A useful ally, like me.’
‘Do they pay you for what you deliver to them, Navid?’
‘No,’ Murza said quickly. ‘No money. I’m not rewarded financially.’
‘But you are rewarded. How?’
‘With… secrets.’
‘Like how to kill a man with a word?’
‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘No, you shouldn’t.’
Murza shook his head.
‘No, I mean that was beyond my skill-set. Way beyond my skill-set. It was an abuse of my power. I don’t have anything like that level of control, which is why I damaged my mouth trying to do it. Besides, Enuncia shouldn’t be used for harm.’
‘What’s “Enuncia”, Navid?’
Murza didn’t answer. They had already taken stimm shots to lessen the effects of the alcohol in their systems, and used enzyme sprays to neutralise the stink of amasec in their mouths. The Bibliotech’s book priests were waiting for them, robed and silent in their ceremonial vestments. Murza and Hawser removed their boots and outer clothes, and the book priests dressed them in the visitor gowns: the soft, cream-felt, one-piece robes with integral gloves and slippers. The book priests fastened the robes around the men’s throats, then gathered their hair and added tight skull caps. Murza took two data-slates out of his rucksack and led the way into the Bibliotech. Book priests opened the towering screen doors.
The grand hall was empty. None of the long reading desks was occupied. Three hundred pendant lights hung from the high ceiling on long brass chains, and lit the great length of the room in pairs that marched away from them. It was like stepping into the stomach of a great whale. The light from the pendant lamps reflected in soft, brushed spots off the warm wood of the reading desks, and glittered wetly off the polished black ironwork of the shelf cages lining the walls.
‘Where are they then?’ Hawser asked.
‘They’re all over the world,’ Murza replied cockily. ‘But I’m hoping a few of the members who operate in Lutetia will be able to meet us here.’
‘This is about recruiting me, then?’
‘This could be the most exceptional night of your life, Kas.’
‘Answer the damn question!’
‘All right, all right,’ Murza hissed. ‘Keep your voice down, the book priests are looking at us.’
Hawser glanced and saw the disapproving faces of the priest officers peering in through decorative holes in the screen door. He lowered his voice.
‘This is about recruiting me?’
‘Yes. I don’t know what it is, Kas. I just can’t seem to keep them happy. They keep wanting more. I thought if I brought you in—’
‘I don’t like any of this, Navid. I don’t like where this is going.’
‘Just wait here, all right? Wait here and then hear them out.’
‘You probably can’t keep them happy because you’re such a liability, Navid! I don’t want to get drawn into your games!’
‘Please, Kas! Please! I need this! I need to show them I can deliver! And you’ll see! You’ll see what it can do for you!’
‘I’m not meeting anybody without knowing their names.’
Murza handed him one of the data-slates.
‘Sit down here. Read this. I’ve marked the file. I’ll be back in a minute.’
He hurried away.
Hawser sighed, and then pulled out a chair at one of the reading tables. He switched on the data-slate, lit it, saw the item Murza had called ‘For Kasper’, and selected it. It had a little marker image in the shape of a toy horse beside it. Preferring to read things on a large view, he plugged the slate into the reading table’s terminal jack, and opened the full screen. A seamless slot in the edge of the wooden desk top opened, and a hololithic screen a metre square projected up in front of Hawser, tilting to the optimum angle.
Images began to form and move.
It was random notes at first, digital facsimile pages copied from Murza’s tattered work journal. Hawser had seen the kind of thing before, because he had peer reviewed and worked up a lot of Murza’s material over the years. They counted on each other for that. Quite often, after a Conservatory expedition, one of them would supervise the physical archiving of any artefacts recovered, while the other collated and audited their working notes for the Imperial Catalogue and for scholastic publication. He was used to Murza’s short-hands, his annoying tics, his habit of skipping, and sometimes annotating laterally.
It was definitely Murza’s rough journal. Hawser found himself smiling at the old copperplate typeface that Murza always chose to work in, and the occasional doodles and sketches that he’d copied into the memory.
The pages seemed to have come from a number of different sources, though. They were extracts, bits that Murza had snipped and sampled from his journal from different times. Hawser recognised notes recorded during more than a dozen different expeditions they had made together over the previous few years. If this was all linked to Murza’s underlying obsession, then his madness did indeed run back a long way. Hawser saw reference to an expedition to Tartus that he knew Murza had made the year before their first meeting.
He looked up from the light screen. A sound.
One of the book priests, perhaps? There was no sign of anyone.
He went on reading, trying to make sense of what Murza had loaded into the file. There seemed to be no particular connection between the facts and locations Murza had put together. What was he missing? What had Murza found?
Just his own madness?
He looked up again.
He could have sworn that he’d heard footsteps, soft felt steps approaching across the stone tiles of the Bibliotech floor. Murza returning, perhaps.
There was no one there.
Hawser got to his feet. He walked down the table to the far end and back again. He stopped. He swung around sharply.
He thought he caught a glimpse of someone flitting past the backlit holes of the main screen doors. Just a glimpse. A robed figure.
‘Navid?’ he called out.
There was no reply.
He went and sat down again, and turned the display to the next sequence of pages. These were annotated pictures of excavation finds, artefacts removed from dig sites around the world. The annotations were all in Murza’s style. Two of the artefact specimens were from lunar excavations.
Had Murza been to the moon? He’d never said so. That was special permit work. You needed direct Council authority.
Hawser sat back for a moment. Maybe this was Murza simply studying artefacts retrieved by other field workers. He tried to find dig dates and source codes.
There weren’t any.
The artefacts were all figurines or amulets, worked in stone, in clay, in metal. They were, in no particular order, a sampler of the uncounted ethnic cultures that had formed the long and half-known patchwork of mankind’s history. Some were a thousand years old, some were tens of thousands. Some were so old or obscure in origin that it was impossible to cite their provenance. There was no commonality of age, or geographical location, no shared thread of ritual significance or religious practice, no unity of script or language. A five hundred year-old Panpacific Dumaic battle standard had been placed in the file between a four thousand year-old ceremonial
synapse shunt from the Nanothaerid Domination and a thirty thousand year-old votive bowl from Byzantine Konstantinopal. There was absolutely no—
There was one linking element.
Hawser began to see it. He was trained to notice these things, and he’d been doing his job well for a long time. He had a memory that leaned towards the eidetic, and as he switched between the holo-images, rotating some in three dimensions with quick gestures of his felt-gloved hands, he saw what Murza had seen.
Eyes. Stylised eyes. A whole varied symbology of eyes, of eye-like dots, of circumpuncts, of monads, of omphalos, of aversion marks.
‘The all-seeing singularity,’ Hawser whispered to himself. You idiot, Navid. This is so simplistic. Every culture in human history has noted and reflected the significance of the eye in its ritual and art. You are making connections where there are no connections. These tiny similarities are only due to the fact that all of these things were made by human beings. For fug’s sake, Navid. You’re seeing some kind of conspiracy in history, some kind of illuminating tradition, an occult continuity, and it’s all nonsense! Your mind is simply making sense of shadows on the cave wall! There is no sense! They’re only shadows, Navid, they’re only—
Hawser blinked. His skin was prickling. It was the dry heat of the Bibliotech and the over-warmth of the felt robes. He had stopped at the annotated image of an uraeus or wedjat. It was an amulet, partially damaged, formed in the traditional eye-and-teardrop shape. Navid’s careful note indicated it was between thirty and thirty-five millennia old, and was composed of carnelian, gold, lapis lazuli and faience.
‘The wedjat/uraeus perfectly typifies ABSOLUTELY ambiguity of eye as symbol/motif,’ Navid’s rambling note went on, ‘espc. in the Faeronik Era, it seems it was both a talisman of protection, of guarding, AND of wrath & malice. It is good & evil AT ONCE, it is good & light and dark, it is positive & negative. The wedjat, later known as the Eye of Horus, may perhaps be said to represent DUPLICITY: a thing or person that can present one face to the world & then turn to present a contrary aspect. But this ‘traitorous’or ‘treacherous’ interpretation may be offset/modified/qualified by notion that wedjat is COSMOLOGICALLY NEUTRAL. Eye is both aggressive AND passive, protective AND proactive. Alignment depends upon WHO or WHAT is employing device.’
