First he went to Biff’s deserted cell.
A skeletal hand lay half-engraved upon the small worktable, beside the buffing wheel and a pitcher of paraffin. During the time-dilated absence of the Fists, dust had settled on these—dust which no servitor had dared to suck or lick up, though the floor and sleeping pallet were kept impeccably clean. An ikon of Dorn hung on the wall.
Lex picked up that ancient jackknife of Biffs from amongst some patches of lizard skin. He let his finger test the blade and the point. He drew a line of carnelian blood, then shrugged. Biff’s big fists might have been able to scrimshander with such a primitive tool, yet Lex doubted his own skill.
His attention shifted to a silicon carbide engraver lying long neglected on a shelf, coated in more dust than knife or wheel; and he took this elegant little stylus with him.
En route to the nearest scriptory, nodding to passing brothers, he encountered a cyborged cleaner and thought to have the graving tool cleaned and polished by that gastropodic semi-automaton.
Then he thought better. Growling at the mute servant, he himself licked the tool and buffed it on his pus-yellow tunic till the rune-etchings on the silver shaft shone.
Some candidate-acolytes were studying in the scriptory. New muscles for the Fists. Aye, muscles and muscular minds. On screens Lex noticed pages of the Codex Astartes displayed. One acolyte had opted for fully illuminated calligraphic presentation. Each sentence of the sacred manual of Marine organisation commenced with an uncial capital letter set in a gold and silver cartouche of decoration. Lex smiled briefly at this acolyte, who shivered, awed by such fleeting notice from a mature battle-brother with a long-service stud in his brow.
Seating himself at a vacant console ornamented with ormolu, Lex tapped in data till the screen found what he sought and displayed a tabula topographica of the Apothecarion sector of the fortress-monastery…
* * *
The little chamber was, as he had expected, empty of any surgeon interrogators or tech-priests. Scientific attention was elsewhere, focused upon the samples and data which Fists had brought back from the tyranid nautilus-ships. Perhaps this room had been out of use, in any case, for a decade.
Here was the selfsame laboratorium which Sergeant Huzzi Rork had shown to the three brothers in that holo long ago, on Necromunda.
Here was the identical steel framework and the mechanical hand-gibbet. Here was the clear vitrodur hand-bath; and above it the reservoir of fluid.
On one wall, wrought in brass, there hung the snake-wreathed sceptre of surgery gripped in a gauntlet with spiked knuckles. The top of the serpent-rod opened out into sharp forceps.
Turning a spigot, Lex let colourless liquid stream into the glassy basin, half filling it.
He spat, and momentarily the fluid sizzled, fumed. Yes, the same acid. Caustic aqua imperialis.
Lex laid the silicon carbide stylus on the plasteel bench supporting the glassy bath.
He stripped to his waist.
Flawless, his body; flawless.
Impeccable, except for the contour lines of bygone surgical implantations. Unscarred by wounds, at least. But how blemished, his soul…
Disdaining the gibbet, he slid his left hand into the vitriolic solvent.
The corrosive liquid sizzled as it began to ravage and gnaw his flesh—and a hiss escaped from Lexandro’s own lips too. Only a hiss.
There he stood, his feet locked firmly in place not by bondage but by his own dominating muscles, while he endured utter torment, relishing that torment, forcing his fingers to remain flat on the bottom of the basin as the bubbling acid grew milky with dissolving tissue…
Long enough.
Despite the conflicting message-traffic of agony along his shorn nerves, the muscles in Lex’s left arm still responded as he lifted his now-skeletal hand from the bowl and placed its bones—linked by some residue of withered ligature—on the bench alongside.
His arm, of flesh and muscle. His hand, of bare bones.
Oh, it would be possible for the chirurgeons to graft new nervewires and synthmusclefibre and pseudoflesh over that armature so as to rebuild his hand. He wasn’t crippling himself in the long term. He wasn’t denying his fist to his Chapter. That would have been blasphemous… and blasphemy was far from his intention.
With his right hand Lexandro picked up the engraver. He powered its tip alive, and began slowly to scrimshander upon his own metacarpal and phalange bones.
Scribing in cursive script as elegantly and minutely as he could contrive, Lexandro painstakingly wrote the names Yeremi Valence and Biff Tundrish again and again upon his bones, and also the name of their original homeplace: Trazior Hive, Necromunda.
He sought perfection in every letter.
After two hours, when all the back of his hand was full, he turned it over and continued scribing those words across the palm side of his bones.
Now and then, tears from his eyes dropped to cool the little graving tip of the stylus.
Eventually he stopped.
Holding up his carved hand to rotate and scrutinise, he murmured, “Forgive me.”
To whom did he pray? To Yeri and Biff? To Rogal Dorn? To the God-Emperor?
Though the muscles of Lexandro’s left hand were all eaten away, and though his nerves had been utterly consumed as high as his wrist, yet as he sat there his engraved finger bones began slowly to cramp inward.
The miraculous constriction shaped the bones of his hand into a… fist.
A skeleton—of an Imperial Fist.
Overwhelmed, he contemplated that fist of wrought bones.
And he saw, in a delirium of insight, what his own personal heraldry might one day be as an officer—though he no longer craved ambitiously for any such heraldic honour…
No.
The situation was too dire.
Just when it seemed that the ever-faltering cobweb of the Imperium was holding the thin red line of faith against rebels and heretics, against orks and slanns and genestealers, what viler menace could have appeared than the very begetters of those “stealers—the huge tyranid hive fleets?
What worse threat indeed? Unless, perhaps, the Powers of Chaos themselves…?
Those could never be Lex’s province. He must not even think of Tzeentch, lest the thought corrupt him…
Oh to be on Necromunda, in a hive, viciously innocent again, scared only of demotion, pollution, gang warfare, predatory nomads, occult covens, mutants, starvation, and other petty worries.
But Lex was no longer innocent. He was responsible. He offered up the cage of his clenched bones to the primarch…
And in his heart a different cage seemed to open up… to admit a shaft of Rogal Dorn’s radiant light.
That familiar light transfixed him blessedly like a lance tipped with burning balm.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in England in 1943, Ian Watson graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1963 with a first class Honours degree in English Literature, followed in 1965 by a research degree in English and French 19th Century literature. After lecturing in literature at universities in Tanzania and Tokyo, and in Futures Studies (including Science Fiction) in Birmingham, England, he became a full-time writer in 1976 following the success of his first novel, The Embedding (1973) which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and in France the Prix Apollo, and The Jonah Kit (1975) which won the British Science Fiction Association Award and the Orbit Award.
This was followed by numerous novels of SF, Fantasy, and Horror followed, and nine story collections. His stories have been finalists for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and widely anthologised. From 1990 to 1991 he worked full-time with Stanley Kubrick on story development for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed after Kubrick’s death by Steven Spielberg, for which Ian has screen credit for Screen Story. He lives with a black cat called Poppy in a small rural village 60 miles north of London.
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