Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  He cursed himself for a fool, for having taken so long to see what was going on. Every time he heard the whispers, Krudge was somewhere nearby. He never saw the labourer speak the twisted, sibilant sounds. The screams had died away but the whispers were now his constant companions, always close, but never there, always just around the corner, behind a door, in the next cavern. The same with Krudge, at those moments: not far, but ever present.

  The craven way the man went about his campaign was contemptible. Blanchot didn’t know if he was speaking with anyone else, or engaged in malevolent prayer – it was hard to tell if it was one voice or several. The echoes and syllables / prey, everywhere prey / twined around each other, overlapping, repeating, building into a choir and then falling back to a lone, barely audible maggot of sound. But he was hearing more all the time, and he was hearing more clearly. The whispering wasn’t just a rasp reaching into his ear and his soul like a gnarled finger of ice. The syllables were becoming more distinct. They were coalescing / meat for the teeth, blood for the claws, bones for the truth / into words, phrases. The terror he had first felt at the sounds was now joined by the horror of their meaning.

  And there were other words. At least, he thought they were words. He didn’t understand them. They couldn’t have come from his mind. They were beyond alien. The mere sound of them drove a spike through the centre of his forehead. He didn’t know what they meant, and for that he was grateful. To understand those words, he was sure, would be to fall into madness.

  There was one consolation. He knew, now, that he wasn’t hallucinating the whispers. He was incapable, at any level, of imagining / taste the worship of their little god-king, it grows and spreads and feeds us, yes yes let him be a god, smash the rational, plunge them into the dark / such blasphemies.

  The situation was clear. Krudge was in league with forces inimical to the divine God-Emperor. He was working to bring death and ruin to the arcology, just as those forces had done to Calth.

  He had to be stopped.

  Major Devayne did not have a headquarters as such. But, as the senior officer in the arcology, with responsibility for all the lives within it falling to him, he needed a location where people could have a reasonable expectation of finding him. He had chosen the chamber adjacent to where the debris from the exit tunnel was being dumped, where the dig teams mustered. This put him close to the most vital operation in the arcology. If it failed, everything else became futile.

  He had dozens of kilometres of tunnels and caverns to oversee, but Blanchot knew that if he waited long enough, Devayne would show up here. So he waited.

  About two hours later, the major arrived. He was Verlun’s age, but carried his years and his fatigue with greater vigour. His posture and the lines of his movement were so precise that it was as if he had been assembled by a carpenter. He gave the impression that his uniform, as torn and stained as everyone else’s clothing, was still pressed and parade-worthy. While most of the other men in the refuge wore several days of stubble, he was clean-shaven.

  Exhaustion had hardened his eyes into flints, and his expression was cold when Blanchot walked up to him. The adept understood: Devayne saw only a man who had been standing here, doing nothing. Idleness wasn’t a luxury in the arcology. It was treason.

  Blanchot’s nerve wavered. He almost said nothing. But then Narya Mellisen entered the chamber from the side leading towards the cave-in, and the presence of another believer gave him the strength he needed.

  He told Devayne everything. He tried to do so calmly, but he was so conscious of the man’s impatience that the words came in a torrent.

  He sounded ridiculous.

  Devayne did him the courtesy of looking to Mellisen for any sort of confirmation. ‘Have you heard these whispers, too?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And you’ve worked many of the same shifts as both men.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He turned back to Blanchot. ‘I don’t suppose a single other person heard any–’

  ‘They couldn’t have,’ Blanchot tried to explain, and heard himself making things even worse. ‘Except for once in the medicae centre, there has never been anyone else close by when they’ve been going on.’

  ‘I see.’ Devayne’s lip curled. He was about to dismiss a nuisance. ‘I hesitate to ask, but why do you suppose that is?’

  ‘I–’ Blanchot stammered. ‘I think Lassar Krudge knows I suspect him, and he’s taunting me.’

  Devayne rolled his eyes. ‘Adept Blanchot,’ he said, turning each carefully enunciated syllable into the snap of a whip, ‘I would not be surprised to learn that there were traitors among us. Given the events that drove us to this location, there is very little that can still surprise me. But you are describing a conspiracy so ineffective, so trivial, I dearly wish you were right. We would be facing an enemy so incompetent that the war would already be over. But it isn’t, and if you take up another minute of my time, I’ll have you arrested.’

  He was about to say something else, but then he cocked his head, listening to the vox-bead in his ear. The garbled, scratchy sounds made Blanchot’s skin crawl. They were too much like whispers.

  Devayne touched the bead. ‘I’ll be right there,’ he said. He pointed at Blanchot. ‘Enough from you,’ he said, and turned to Mellisen. ‘Lieutenant, we’re needed at the medicae chamber.’

  ‘Sir.’

  She gave Blanchot a sympathetic look as she began to follow the major.

  Blanchot’s shoulders slumped under the weight of despair and anxiety. Then / a big kill, a worthy sacrifice, now, now, now, he does it now / the whisper shot across the room, strong / hhhhhiiihhhhhh / as pitiless laughter.

  ‘Stop!’ Blanchot pleaded, both to the voice and to the officers, but Devayne disappeared down the tunnel toward the main cavern. Mellisen hesitated, and Blanchot ran to her. ‘Something terrible is about to happen!’

  ‘Where?’

  He didn’t know. ‘I heard it again,’ he said. ‘Just now. I don’t know how. I was wrong before. I see that. I can’t have been hearing people speaking. But the voices are real, lieutenant. I swear it on the book we both hold dear. You said my survival must have a purpose. This must be it. I have been blessed to hear these things so we can act against them.’ The words tumbled from him without forethought, but he knew them to be true. He spoke with the conviction of faith, and the urgency of prophecy.

  There was uncertainty in Mellisen’s eyes, but he could tell that she wanted to believe. ‘Act how?’ she said. ‘You don’t know where the attack will occur.’

  She was right. He wanted to weep. His vision blurred / a flash, limbs everywhere, a fanged smile the size of anguish / and in that blur, the truth became clear. ‘An explosion,’ he said.

  Blood drained from Mellisen’s face. ‘The dig,’ she said.

  Of course. A bomb planted there – triggering a second collapse – would be a death sentence for every soul in the arcology. Mellisen ran back to the cave-in and he took off after Devayne. That has to be it, he thought. We’ll stop it.

  Yet doubt ate at the base of his fervour. There was something wrong with the answer. It had come from Mellisen, not him. It had the ring of logic, not revelation.

  Devayne’s strides had carried him far. He had just reached the main cavern when Blanchot caught up with him. ‘Major,’ he began.

  The officer gave him a murderous look and did not break his stride. Ahead of them, Verlun waited at the entrance to the medicae centre. Devayne moved through the chamber as though the floor were clear of the sleeping, the weeping, the groaning, the wounded and the dying. Blanchot stumbled as he tried to keep up.

  ‘Out of my sight,’ Devayne ordered.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Blanchot tried again, but then stopped dead in the middle of the cave. He gasped as / intake of breath, hissing with eagerness, a world-eating serpent about to strike / he
felt something rejoice in the moment. He saw that Verlun had suddenly crouched, curled tight in his doorway. The medic was laughing, and it was the ugliest sound Blanchot had ever heard a human being make.

  There were a dozen explosions. They were almost simultaneous, two demolition charges and a cluster of frag grenades, concealed under wrecked shelving and discarded crates along the perimeter of the cavern, projecting their force and shrapnel inward. Another frag went off at Devayne’s feet. The major vanished in a mist of blood.

  Blanchot was slammed to the ground. The huge cave was suddenly a confined space, filled with thunder, fire, slashing metal and wind like a fist. Light flared behind his eyes, and then there was darkness filled with the thunder of tonnes of falling rock, a shrieking rumble that buried the screams of the victims.

  There was what seemed like an eye-blink of oblivion. It must have been longer, because when Blanchot opened his eyes, there were no sounds of ongoing collapse. He heard muffled voices, some yelling, some screaming. He could see nothing. He was lying on his back, pressed down onto the rock by a soft weight. It was warm, too, and wet. The liquid dribbled into his open mouth.

  It was blood. He was buried under the bodies of the murdered.

  He panicked. He clawed at slabs of butchered meat. He couldn’t push them away. They were held in place by a greater, immovable weight. There had been a collapse, he realised. He was trapped in a grave of stone and flesh. He tried to scream, but choked on a mouthful of bloody grit. He struggled harder, mewling, reason evaporating in the blast of claustrophobic horror. His fingers hooked into claws as they dug for purchase in the yielding, cooling flesh. They tangled in ripped clothing, tore into muscle. Blanchot felt like he was trying to swim in a quagmire of meat and blood. His mewling turned into a rasping whine.

  But then the dead weight of flesh shifted. In tiny increments, he pulled it away from his face. He heard rock shifting. The rubble above him moved, but did not crush him. At last he could breathe properly, and at last he could scream.

  His hands encountered dirt and stone. He dug and pushed, and the rubble moved just enough to let him change position. Perhaps that was an illusion of progress, but he grasped it, the sliver of hope restoring a sliver of sanity. He fought against the fallen rock, and it shifted again, and he could move again, and now he was beginning to crawl. He didn’t know if he was going in the right direction. In the absolute dark, the only sounds were his shrieks and the muttered grinding of settling rubble.

  He fought with his tomb, feeling his hands tear and bleed. Wherever he felt something give, that was where he went. He told himself he was getting out. ‘Just a bit more,’ he whispered. ‘Just a bit more. Just a bit more.’ He needed the litany. It was the only thing that kept the image of the never-ending dig in the exit tunnel from his mind. It kept him from descending into howling despair when he struggled through more crushed bodies.

  The despair came for him anyway. It was stronger than he, and it reached out for him.

  Then, as he began to fall into its embrace, the miracle happened. He heard voices other than his own. He heard shouts, muffled but real. He heard the sounds of other hands pulling rocks away. He called out. He shouted with real hope.

  And he was answered.

  It was still hours before the rescue party hauled him out. He emerged into a dimness as welcome as daylight. Mellisen helped him to his feet. Reborn, slicked in the blood of many, he looked around at the shattered chamber. Dangling lumen strips and a few guttering fires provided a ghostly illumination through the still-hovering dust. The cavern had not collapsed, though large chunks of the ceiling had come away, dropping slabs of rockcrete and natural limestone down from the structural supports above. In the centre of the space there was a hill of jagged rock, rising halfway to the new vault. He was standing shakily at its base.

  ‘How many survivors?’ he asked Mellisen.

  ‘Only you,’ she answered.

  There was something strange in the lieutenant’s voice. It was in her eyes, too, which he could see shining even in the wavering light of the cavern. At first, Blanchot didn’t know what this thing was. Then he realised it burned in the eyes of all the rescue party members as they gazed at him.

  It was reverence.

  The truth of yet another miracle jolted him. He had been standing only a couple of paces from the grenade that had disintegrated Devayne. He had been buried under tonnes of rock. He was bruised and cut, but in every important way, he was unharmed.

  He shivered, feeling the touch of revelation. How many times had he cheated certain death since the war had begun? Could he really pretend that there was no purpose in his survival? No, he could not. He had been singled out for some special task by the will of the God-Emperor. Mellisen and the others understood this. Now, so did he.

  But what was his purpose?

  The answer came a few minutes later. He was washing away the blood with a rag Mellisen had handed him. The crowd was growing larger as word spread through the arcology of the man with the charmed life. The blessed life. Mellisen told him, ‘You knew this was going to happen.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘The attack. You knew there was a betrayer in our midst. You heard the whispers of treachery.’ She spoke softly, but her voice carried far over the awed silence of the crowd.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Yes, I did.’ His role in the destiny of the Imperium took shape before him. What he saw made him shake with excitement and coursing adrenaline. He understood the truth of his terrifying visions. He understood why he had to suffer the whispering corrosion. It was given to him to know the enemy.

  Mellisen was still looking at him. So were the others. They were all waiting for him, he realised. They were waiting for guidance.

  ‘Is it over, then?’ Mellisen asked.

  No. It was not. Behind Mellisen, in the doorway leading back towards the dig, Krudge stood. He was not much more than a silhouette in the dim light, but Blanchot knew that distorted figure. ‘Him!’ he shouted, stretching out his arm as if he could grab Krudge himself. ‘He’s part of it!’ Then a word rose to his lips, unbidden, foreign to his life until now, yet so perfect, so completely true.

  ‘Heretic!’ he screamed.

  He didn’t have to do more than that. The people scrambled after Krudge, pouring into the tunnel like a river bursting a dam and plunging into a channel long denied. Krudge fled, and Blanchot and Mellisen were swept up in the current.

  Blanchot kept losing sight of the fleeing man. He ran faster. The tunnel took a sharp turn to the right. Blanchot came around it, and straight into a milling, confused crowd.

  Krudge had vanished.

  ‘He went in there,’ someone said, pointing up. A ventilation grille hung from an opening in the wall just below the ceiling. The hole was wide enough for a man to fit through, if the man was desperate enough. No one here seemed as desperate to follow Krudge as he had been to escape. The arcology’s ventilation system was an even more haphazard construction than the main network of caves itself. Shafts had been drilled, but there was also a tracery of fissures running from cavern to cavern. It had proven impossible to isolate one from the other. The result was a hugely inefficient network, one that was also a lethal rat’s warren.

  ‘Who’s going in after him?’ someone else asked.

  ‘No one,’ Mellisen answered. ‘If he’s crawling around in there, it’s only a matter of time before he picks the wrong path and gets stuck. If he wants to starve to death caught in a tight squeeze, let him.’

  Blanchot nodded, thinking that Mellisen was right. Krudge hadn’t escaped. He had opted for a slower execution.

  ‘Is that it, then?’ Mellisen asked. ‘Is it over?’

  There was no whispering coming from Krudge now. The cost had been high, but the treasonous conspiracy had been crushed. ‘Yes,’ Blanchot said. Trapped underground, covered in blood, unsure if he would ever see
the light of day again, he had never been more proud.

  And yet...

  There was the aftermath of the bombing, and the discovery that Verlun had planted explosives in more than one cavern. They had all gone off at the same moment. One of the major living quarters had utterly collapsed, killing everyone inside. The medic had also rigged incendiary devices that had destroyed the arcology’s cache of emergency rations. The food was gone. If the exit tunnel was not opened up in the next few days, it would never be opened at all.

  As those days fell into darkness, Blanchot felt his moment of triumph slipping away, its meaning turning to dust. The doubts crept back. Mellisen’s belief in his divine mission was unwavering, and through her it spread like a grass fire amongst people desperate for hope. She insisted that Blanchot keep to Devayne’s former haunt when he wasn’t working on the dig. He was important, and, as with Devayne before and herself now, he should be where he could be found. He was living his moment of glory.

  It frightened him. He would accept his duty, if only he knew what it truly was. Perhaps it was over. He had issued the warning. But he had understood it too late.

  This was what he believed when he finally curled up in a corner of the chamber, next to some broken digging equipment. The sound of the work at the cave-in was no more than a distant clamour, and he fell asleep within seconds. His dreams were disturbing, but they were the expected nightmares of shredded bodies and waves of blood.

  He woke with a gasp, and / the strength of darkness reaching in from the walls, stone no barrier to the slayer of reality, and the tides of black sweeping through, devouring, jaws opening to reveal stars within, the maw of the universe coming for all / his illusions died, hammered to bloody shards by the force of the visions, images that now blinded him to the real world while they unveiled their parade of horrors. He moaned in terror, but he couldn’t hear his own voice because / the faithful servant of the path, he did well, yes yes yesssssss, we accept that sacrifice, but we have more to do, the work is just beginning / the whispers were back. Louder. More mocking. The words were perfectly clear now, if not their meaning.