Mark of Calth

by Edited by Laurie Goulding

  Some of those words could not be spoken by humans. They could not be spoken by anything from this plane of reality. They were chanted by something with more than one mouth. Their letters were bones and glass, their syllables corruption and doom. When he heard them, Blanchot tried to scream, but he choked instead, his mouth filling with blood.

  Mellisen found him there. He couldn’t stand without her help. Shifts at the dig changed while she walked him slowly back and forth until he found his footing and his breath again. He wiped the blood from his chin, aware of the looks he was getting. Mellisen waited until he had a measure of composure before questioning him.

  ‘There are more of them, aren’t there?’

  ‘Yes.’ He had to resist checking over his shoulder and peering into shadows. ‘There must be many more. I can hear them so clearly. I can see...’ He still didn’t know / python-black, dragon void / what he was seeing. The visions had to be symbolic. He shut down any thought that began to consider the alternative.

  Symbols, then. Metaphors of coming catastrophe. Prophecies and warnings of what would come if he did not use his gift. The God-Emperor had blessed him with this perception and this duty. He must not lay this burden down.

  ‘Do you know who they are?’ she asked, gently.

  ‘No.’ So many faces in the refuge, all of them blurring together in a uniformity of filth, exhaustion, misery and despair.

  Mellisen cursed. ‘What would you have me do, then? If Verlun was a traitor, anyone could be. How do we stop them?’

  ‘I’ll know,’ he said, speaking and realising the answer at the same moment. ‘They can’t hide their nature from me. Not now.’ The taste of blood in his mouth was a testament to his gift’s rising power. ‘I’ll see and hear who they really are.’

  ‘All right,’ Mellisen said after a minute. ‘All right. Then come with me. We’ll make a tour of inspection.’

  They began with the exit tunnel, the site of the last ember of hope, and so of their greatest vulnerability. Blanchot stumbled as they approached / black swallowing the rock, the tunnel a drop into the hungry void, the rushing void, the void that was no void but a terrible presence, a thing whose being was the destruction / the work teams.

  Once more, he couldn’t see the world in front of him. It was replaced by reality being ravaged by a thing he couldn’t name, couldn’t describe, and feared utterly. The visions did not last long, but they seemed to be growing in duration and intensity.

  Mellisen caught him by the elbow, held him up. ‘What is it?’ she said. She was suddenly holding her laspistol. ‘Who is it?’

  The whispers / he cannot see us, he looks and hears, but he cannot see us, he cannot see / arrived with the vision. They stayed. They were loud, mocking / small worship, hopeless worship, where is your god, boy, boy god, toy god / and came from all sides, but never in the direction he was looking. The words were nails and drums in his head. He held onto his concentration with slipping fingers. He was surrounded by hissing echoes that built upon one another, growing louder, prying deeper into his skull.

  If he didn’t silence them, he was certain that his skull would split.

  Blanchot stared at the people before him. All work had stopped. Everyone was staring back at him. Through the blood-pound behind his eyes, the faces lost definition, becoming a collection of abstracted expressions. Though he could no longer identify individuals, he could read their emotions as if they were signposts.

  He saw belief. He saw hope. He saw a great deal of fear that blossomed the longer he looked at a single face. He saw scepticism, too.

  No, he thought. That’s not what it is. Call it by its true name – unbelief.

  In these desperate times, to deny the Emperor’s divinity was to turn away from him. There was no difference, then, between unbelief and treason. When Blanchot realised this, everything came easily. He began pointing. When he did, he read a surge of determination in the faces on either side of the people he singled out. Their belief in what he was, and in what he stood for – what they should all be standing for – hardened into diamond, and they expelled the accused from their ranks. Mellisen didn’t give them a chance to strike. She shot each one in the head. In a few seconds, there were four bodies on the ground, and the whispers had faded.

  But they weren’t gone. They were scraping at the back of Blanchot’s mind, an abscess that would give him no rest until the purge was complete.

  ‘More?’ Mellisen asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  She turned back to the dig team. ‘You’re sure about the others here?’

  ‘I am.’

  There was a thrill in conferring grace. It felt like he was a direct conduit for the Emperor’s will. The pleasure he experienced in saving a life gave him the courage to admit that there had also been a rush when nothing more than a gesture on his part had ended lives. These were the realities of power. He must accept them. He must accept the power that was the necessary means to the ends of his duty.

  Mellisen picked three of the strongest-looking members of the detail. ‘You’re with us,’ she told them. To Blanchot, she explained, ‘Word will get around to the traitors. They will fight back.’

  ‘Of course,’ Blanchot agreed.

  They left the dig and headed back towards the main body of the arcology. Blanchot led the way, following the aural spoor of the whispers. The scratching mockery would grow loud in his ears and mind as he set foot in a cavern with more of the heretics. Then he passed judgement, and Mellisen’s laspistol did the rest. They purged chamber after chamber. Word of their march travelled before them. They encountered no resistance.

  Mellisen didn’t have to conscript any further enforcers of justice. There were plenty of volunteers. And increasingly, they would reach a cavern to find that the guilty had already been identified and, sometimes, already beaten to death.

  But even with so much of the arcology in ruins, there were still too many tunnels and caves, too many people, and not enough time. The whispering never stopped now. Blanchot felt a growing premonition of impending doom. Panic gnawed at the joy of duty fulfilled. The process was too slow. There were so many traitors. He didn’t understand how they could have infiltrated the shelter so quickly. But the devastation of Calth was proof of what the enemy could do.

  Blanchot judged, and judged and judged, and still the whispering would not stop.

  After twelve long hours, he had lost track of which caverns they had scoured, and which they had not. The whispers were becoming too insistent, the visions / closer and closer, the grasp of clawed night, smashing aside barriers and prayers, the terrible momentum of the unstoppable, the hunger of the night tearing bodies and souls and worlds / more frequent. Mellisen had to hold him up almost all the time now. His legs wouldn’t move properly. Each step was so beset / the slash, drawing blood, of a mind inhuman and vast, serpent coil, constrictor of light and hope / by the stabbing vistas / prey taken over an endless plain, the forever-land of bones and savage dying, madness given flesh and given force, devouring life, crunching its succulent skull / that his coordination fell apart, as if his body couldn’t remember what action it was taking from one moment to the next. What triumph he had felt earlier was leaking away. He was trying to hold back the tide, and he was beginning to drown.

  Accompanied by a mob almost a hundred-strong, he and Mellisen moved through the ruined cavern. Blanchot wondered, hadn’t they been here already? He didn’t know. But people moved around, and by now the conspirators would be desperate to stay ahead of the hunting party. Exhausted, he looked at the hill of debris. ‘I can’t go on,’ he said to Mellisen.

  ‘We should rest,’ she agreed.

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘There’s no time. We have to find them all. I’ll wait here.’ He pointed to the hill. ‘There are enough of us now.’ He winced as / hunger / a piercing virulence wracked his head. The blow was vision and shout, need and
words. It was a prophecy / humanity a corpse, dangling, shredded, ribs exposed and broken by the crushing teeth of laughter, the corpse never released to peace, forever dancing to the wail of the cosmos, dead but agonised, no pain ever enough, no butchery ever enough to quench the thirst of the grinning rage / and it was a command. It was an assault. No, he thought, fighting back as best he could, but he barely knew what he was denying. As the intensity rose, the whispers became indistinguishable from visions. When the words were spoken in the language of the dark, it was all he could do not to scream.

  He wiped blood / a drop a stream a torrent the deluge filling the galaxy the drowning that comes for all / from his nose. He found enough breath to speak to Mellisen again. ‘Split into teams,’ he said. ‘Cover more ground.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mellisen. ‘We’ll bring everyone to you.’ She was concerned. ‘Will you be all right?’

  He nodded. ‘Need to sit,’ he mumbled as he crawled up the rubble. Sharp edges of rockcrete cut the flesh of his hands and arms. He reached the top of the mound and collapsed, gasping. The whispers / listen listen listen listen lisssssssssssSSSSSS / sank their claws into his ears. They filled his head with / why hope, why reach for the sad and lifeless lie when there are greater lies, lies of majesty, the grandeur of absolute denial, the lie so magnificent that it tramples the real with its becoming-truth / poison. They were an endless round of hatred and chaos. Promises, rants, and seductions of blood / turn from the self-denying god, tear him down, break him into shards, taste the power of exultant betrayal / scrabbled over each other. Sentences broke apart / give me your mind your will your self your soul give me feast give me the waste of martyrs the capering never of dawn the roaring always of night-black blades / and devoured each other. Phrases lost all meaning / spider clutch of ripping flesh in bursting eye and sssssssliiiiiiiicccccccce the innocent with tooth of ending / except threat. But there were / dark-eye darkjaw darkclaw darkdown darkcall darkthought darksong darkgod darkgod darkgod DARKGOD / refrains, too. They were / soon soon soon oh the bloodtwist / the laughter of imminence. They were the smile / spineshatterkill / of a blade sawing through bone. Why, after all the good work of the day, were the whispers not dying down? Perhaps they were the voice of desperate evil lashing out as it died.

  That had to be it. That, and they were proof of his growing power.

  So was what happened next.

  Mellisen and her expanding army fanned out through the arcology. They rounded up the population. An endless parade began under Blanchot’s eyes. This was a different sort of power. This was authority. He was sitting with his back against a slab of rock that jutted from the peak of the rubble heap, and it was as if he sprawled upon a broken throne.

  He did not revel in the power. Through the mounting agony, he took a fragment of solace from the fact that he was no tyrant, that he was only doing what was right and necessary. Even that much came close to slipping from his grasp. The whispers gabbled with hysteria as the guilty were marched before him. He was horrified by how many people were involved in the conspiracy.

  But what he felt didn’t matter. There was only the duty to stamp out the traitors.

  He threw all that he had of strength and coherent thought into performing his task. The voices and the visions struck back, blinding him with / the walls of the real collapsing, an avalanche of reason and light smashed into crushing fragments, annihilating all that depended on them, and in their wake the darkness that moved and hissed, the dance of the murderous dreams / pain and monstrous sights. He saw little more than shapes going by, hearing only a vague din of protests and screams as he pointed and pointed and pointed, his hand palsied with pain and fury, and the executions filled the chamber with the clammy stench of blood and torn bodies.

  He was the centre of a maelstrom of hatred, and in a moment of morbid irony he realised that his work – though it seemed like an eternity ago – as a shipping controller had prepared him for this trial. It had taught him the management of overwhelming levels of information and the making of instant decisions. Instead of guiding vessels in the void, he now guided souls, turning the guilty over to the black mercies of the innocent.

  War-shattered and trapped, the people of the arcology loosed their passions and fears upon the traitors in their midst. They took revenge with fist and stone and blade, their fevered belief in Blanchot rising with every jab of his finger.

  If he hadn’t been the agent of divine will, he would have recoiled in horror from the atrocities that surrounded him, and perhaps it was a blessing that the unseen enemy’s clawing of his ears and eyes and mind kept him from witnessing the worst of what was done at his behest.

  But no matter how many criminals were found, no matter how many killed, the whispers / still whispers but whisper-howls, whisper-shrieks, whisper-roars, and the slithering approach of some great beast / grew in power.

  Finally, with blood running from his eyes, from his ears, from his mouth, he screamed.

  ‘Enough!’

  Mercy, or perhaps exhaustion, granted him a moment of oblivion. When he opened his eyes, the cavern was empty except for Mellisen. She sat at the base of the debris, watching him. The whispers were silent. He could see the real world again. His sigh of relief turned into a sob.

  Mellisen stood. ‘Are you all right?’

  He had to swallow a few times before his parched, lacerated throat let him speak. ‘I think so.’ He took in the litter of gore and body parts strewn throughout the rubble. Many of the dead were the victims of Verlun’s bombs, but it was easy to see that they had been joined by countless more.

  ‘How many?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Too many. I stopped counting. I didn’t want to know.’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘At the dig.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes. There aren’t many of us true souls left. A few dozen perhaps.’ Her voice shrank to a murmur, as if shying away from the scale of the calamity. She looked down at the blood on her hands, then back up at him. ‘So?’ she asked. ‘Now is it over? Did we get them all?’

  The blessed quiet. His heart swelled with hope. ‘I think–’ he began, and then the / slash the gibbering face of faith / silence ended. The whispers pounced upon him, raptors streaking to prey. They had been waiting for him to think them gone, so they might sink their talons in all the more deeply. Obscenity / life is a futile excrescence on the sublimity of Chaos, blind your tiny god, strike him down, he plays with your existence for his own purposes, you are nothing, he is nothing, everything is nothing / beat at him with huge wings, and his bludgeoned soul dragged his body down.

  How could this be? How could the serpent voices be so loud? There was no one here but Mellisen and himself. There was no–

  He froze. Realisation dawned, with a force to overpower the insinuations spreading like oil on water through his mind.

  ‘You,’ he gasped. He started down the slope towards her.

  ‘What?’ Mellisen said, the confusion and innocence of her words adding a knife-twist of mockery to the monstrousness of her betrayal.

  ‘It was always you,’ Blanchot said, horrified. Had he been doing her bidding all along? Had he been so short-sighted that he had delivered hundreds of unwitting sacrifices to her dark gods? No. Surely not. There had been no question as to the guilt of the people he had condemned. He had to believe that. Perhaps she had been getting rid of rival factions. Yes. There was a logic that would allow him to sleep, if that luxury ever came his way again. He stared at Mellisen with loathing. ‘Traitor,’ he hissed. ‘Heretic.’ Then, when he thought of how she must surely have savaged his mind, and of the powers she must have, he snarled, ‘Witch!’

  ‘Adept Blanchot!’ Mellisen warned him. ‘Stand down!’

  He threw himself the rest of the way. She had combat training. He did not. She should have been able to make short work of him in that moment
, but she seemed to be holding back. Instead of shooting him in mid-flight, she simply shrieked at him to stop.

  He collided with her. They rolled together in the mire of death. He reached for her throat, but she kicked him away, scrambled backwards and stood, her laspistol drawn. This time, as he lunged, she did fire. That should have been the end of it – the experienced trooper killing the shipping controller who had never fought a day in his life.

  But it wasn’t. Mellisen’s shot did not go wild. He saw the pistol flash, aimed squarely at his chest. Blanchot seemed to lose a fraction of a second / save this body / as though he had fallen into a momentary slumber. It was a tiny version of the vagueness that surrounded his survival of the death of the Veridius Maxim Star Fort. All he knew was that he was not hit. He was still flying at Mellisen, and she wore an expression of stunned shock.

  Then he knocked the pistol from her grip, and had her by the neck.

  She slammed her palms against his ears. Blood spurted from his mouth, and he understood that he should be down. He wasn’t. He was strong. He was the hand of justice, and he was not to be turned.

  Movement in the ruined ceiling distracted him. He looked up. A face stared at him from above the debris: it took him a moment to recognise it as Krudge. Blanchot’s jaw dropped in surprise, and his grip loosened just enough for Mellisen to bring her elbows down on his forearms and break his hold. She rolled away as Krudge dropped from the fissures in the cavern roof, and he scuttled down the debris, more animal than human.

  Blanchot turned to meet Krudge’s charge, but Mellisen kicked his legs out from under him. He fell backwards, and Mellisen held him down. Krudge raised a chunk of rock and brought it down at his head.

  No. Blanchot’s soul cried out in despair at a duty left undone. Instinctively, he surrendered completely to the source of the strength that had taken him this far. Krudge’s rock was taking an age to complete its arc, all the time in the world for something to shift inside Blanchot. It squirmed like an eel, but it fit into his body like a hand / claw talon iron / in a glove.