‘Take care, nursemaid,’ said Sepherina, ice forming on the words.
‘But she’s right, isn’t she?’ Miriya let her bolter drop from her shoulder-ready stance. ‘Ever since we landed on this dust ball, you and Sister Imogen have been looking for something. This is not about the necrons, or the dead, or Hoth and Tegas and whatever secret pacts they may have made. You have hidden something from us, milady. And since the very start of the pilgrimage, I would warrant.’
Verity nodded at her Sister’s statement. ‘What could be so important?’ she asked. She did not demand, or insist that Sepherina answer her – and yet, the compulsion to reply crackled in the air.
Slowly, the canoness got to her feet and studied their faces in turn. Her hand twitched close to the butt of her holstered pistol, and her stony, unreadable expression returned.
But only for a moment. By degrees, the hard, unchanging aspect she showed them disintegrated, and Sepherina showed them truth. She looked stricken, like the lost orphan girl she once had been, like they all had once been.
Verity felt a jag of sorrow as, for the first time, she gained some sense of the great burden that the canoness had been silently shouldering.
‘A lie has been told,’ Sepherina began. ‘A great gift was stolen from us in this place, twelve years ago. An artefact of exalted significance, something priceless and irreplaceable. Lost by pure chance in the xenos attack.’ She looked down at Decima, who hung her head low, mouthing a prayer.
‘A relic?’ asked Cassandra.
‘Aye,’ The canoness nodded. ‘This secret is known only to a few of the highest-ranked abbesses and certain members of the Sisterhood. I have borne this burden ever since Hoth first told us of the loss of Sanctuary 101. It has been my singular onus since then, and now you will all be sworn into the same oath, on pain of death.’ Sepherina waited for them to nod their wary agreement before she went on. ‘It was deemed that it would travel the galaxy, making a pilgrimage to every convent, holdfast and citadel of the Order of Our Martyred Lady. No matter how remote or how far from the axis of the Core Worlds. It was ordered so, to bring a moment of light to all places we called ours.’
Verity had heard of such things; while most pilgrimages of Imperial artefacts and saintly relics required that devotees cross space to come to them, there were some shrines that were constantly in motion, aboard ships or with cadres of preachers and missionaria soldiers to protect them.
But what had happened on Sanctuary 101? What had been within these walls when the necrons had struck?
‘The Hammer and Anvil,’ said Sepherina, and she spoke the name as if it were agony to do so.
Miriya, Cassandra, and the other Battle Sisters went white with shock, and Decima let out a faint sob. Their shock was palpable.
Zara frowned. ‘I… do not know that name,’ she admitted.
‘It is an object sacred to the daughters of Saint Katherine, the founder of their sect,’ Verity told her, nodding at Sepherina and the others. ‘The nature of it will never be revealed to us, or to anyone else outside their Order. But I have heard the name, and I know that it is of great value to them.’ Verity recalled the stories about The Hammer and Anvil. Some said it was a weapon of great power created by the Emperor himself during the time of the Horus Heresy, capable of blinding suns; perhaps a great storehouse of cosmic knowledge without rival among any species, human or xenos; or a device capable of shifting the flow of time itself, built by a rogue caste of technologians employed by the apostate lord Goge Vandire.
Cassandra turned on the canoness, her eyes flashing. ‘How can this be?’ she spat. ‘The relic is on Ophelia VII, in our shrinehold!’
‘No,’ Sepherina told her. ‘That is the fiction told to the galaxy at large. In reality, it has been in motion for the last four hundred years, secretly crossing and re-crossing the space lanes as it visited every place we hold sacred…’ She trailed off. ‘Until it came here.’
‘And this was done without the knowledge of the wider Sisterhood?’ Miriya asked.
Sepherina nodded. ‘Private ceremonies were held in each place, as blessings were made. It was done in secret so that the relic would not be threatened.’ She frowned. ‘There are many who would wish to possess it.’ The canoness reached into a pocket concealed in her robe and returned with a small, oval pict-slate. ‘This image is all that remains.’
The display showed a container made of heavy, starship-grade metals, inscribed with runes and wards, carved symbols of the Sororitas spread across the surface. Decima’s hand went to her mouth when she saw it, harsh recognition etched across her features.
‘It is lost,’ she moaned. ‘I failed…’
‘It is not,’ said Verity, snatching the pict-slate from Sepherina’s hand. ‘It is not lost. I saw this object.’ The closer she looked, the more she became certain.
Miriya saw it too and gave a silent nod of agreement.
‘Where?’ Sepherina demanded. ‘Speak, for Throne’s sake!’
A grey, dust-caked metal drum etched with a fleur-de-lys. The memory of it snapped into hard focus in Verity’s thoughts. ‘Ossuar… The necron tormentor. I saw that container in his laboratorium. What you seek is up there inside the Obsidian Moon.’
Sister Imogen placed them in the cell-crypts, one member of the questor’s team in a compartment, each of them separated by one empty cell, with a local-range countermeasures transmitter set up in the corridor to make it difficult for them to engage in wireless communication. Similarly, the acerbic woman had left Battle Sisters patrolling the corridor outside, watching for any of the Mechanicus adepts who might have dared to use a mechadendrite or laser beam to connect to one of their fellows.
Tegas had weighed the options, judging if an attack against their captors would work, and the probabilities returned to him were less than favourable. He elected to offer no resistance for the moment, and Lumik and the others followed his example.
Instead, he decided to play a longer game. For all the things that had been done to offend the Sisterhood, it was only acts of heresy that they would kill for without hesitation, and Tegas would never betray the Throne. Sepherina and Imogen, for all their stern snarls and righteous anger, would not murder him out of hand. He was alive because they wanted him to face what they considered his misdeeds before the High Lords of Terra. It would never occur to them that perhaps some of those self-same High Lords were complicit in what was going on in the Kavir System.
He decided he would wait and look for an opportunity; but Tegas didn’t expect to see it so very soon.
‘A great gift was stolen from us in this place, twelve years ago. An artefact of great significance, something priceless and irreplaceable. Lost by pure chance in the xenos attack.’ Sepherina’s voice came to him on a narrow bandwidth that the crude Sororitas jammer had no hopes of blocking. It was being transmitted from a microscopic surveillance probe no bigger than a sand-fly. In the moments before Imogen had turned her guns on him, Tegas had released the miniscule robot from a pod in his arm. Currently, it was hiding in a crevice on Sister Cassandra’s power armour, the crackle of static over the transmission indicating to the questor that it was close to the Battle Sister’s backpack microfusion generator. He ordered the probe to crawl into a position where its sensors could better relay the ongoing conversation.
Now Sepherina was talking about secrets and clandestine pilgrimages, and Tegas’s interest was piqued.
Then she said the name of the relic, and unbidden, the questor’s emotive emulator gave him a kick of adrenal reaction. The Hammer and Anvil. He knew of it; like a million other relics and legendary items from the deep past, the Adeptus Mechanicus had a file on the object. It was inconclusive, little more than a list of possibilities, but it was undeniably tempting.
The revelation made immediate sense to him. All this time, and he had been labouring under the impression that the Sororitas wanted nothing more than to bury their dead and make melancholy speeches about the victims of necron aggression
… But they were here for the same reason he was, in search of a glittering prize.
If the Sororitas relic was in the Kavir System, then Tegas’s quest had just gained a new and exciting objective. There was still time to salvage this mission, still time to turn it to his advantage and return home not only with Inquisitor Hoth’s gratitude but also an artefact that would lead him straight to exalted rank and high office on Mars.
Necron weapons and a fabled, sacred item of lost-tech. It was a bounty worth risking everything for… And if the Sisters perished in the winning of it, then that would be a tragedy he would have to endure.
Tegas granted himself leave to do something human, and smiled as he listened on.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Uriahi Zeyn ran a thick-fingered hand through his unruly hair and pulled it back into a tight, high ponytail, binding it up with a brass wire as he climbed the spiral staircase inside the watchtower.
Each stone of the steps was engraved with words from one of the verses from The Book of Atticus, and he whispered them to himself from memory as he rose into the dimness. There was scant light inside the tower other than the faint pre-dawn glow that ventured in through the gun slits in the stone walls. The deacon emerged on the battlement tier and took a moment to pause, drinking in the sound of the workgangers going about their duties below him, at the foot of the shield wall.
They did not sing, because the canoness had ordered them to maintain a sense of order and quietude. Zeyn disagreed with that – the work was a sacred task, and being unable to raise voice in the duty of it seemed somehow negligent. He loved the hymnals and a day without them was like being denied water or air. The only sounds were the occasional mutter of the men and the steady clink of metal on stone as they cut and placed the blocks that would rebuild the collapsed segment of the wall. Floating lume-globes drifting over the heads of the workers offered weak illumination, but enough that Zeyn could see them all and measure the pace of their efforts.
He wanted to sing with them, but Sepherina forbade it. The thought brought a grimace to his lips. The God-Emperor had so much to watch over, he mused. How was He supposed to turn His gaze this way, if not by hearing the songs of His most devoted?
The workgangers saw Zeyn and they all put on a spurt of fresh exertion, and made sure not to meet his gaze. The deacon’s electro-whip hummed in its holster, and there was not a single man or woman among them who had not felt the lash of it. Zeyn folded his thick arms and scanned the group, searching for any infraction he could punish.
He counted the shift a man short.
The whip came out and uncoiled, a neon-bright streamer twitching in his grip. ‘You.’ The preacher pointed at the nearest man to him. ‘The work party is shy a soul. Tell me where he is–’
He had no need to say the words or face the whip. The man pointed up at the higher tiers of the guard tower.
‘Went there, he did,’ came the nervous reply. ‘Went for water, padre.’
Zeyn nodded down to the flagstones below, to where one of the Sister Hospitallers was moving among the labourers with a jug. ‘There’s enough here.’ The deacon gave the worried workganger a threatening look that promised censure if this proved to be a falsehood, then he turned on his heel and returned to the spiral stairs. Careful to walk as silently as his bulk would carry him, Zeyn climbed to the very top of the minaret.
The slender tower was designed with a gun post at the apex, where a heavy weapon could be emplaced and give a full sweep of the outlands beyond the convent’s walls, but the damage suffered in the xenos attack had collapsed part of the structure, opening the tower to the air and ripping away its easterly battlements.
The deacon had been a soldier in the Imperial Guard before he had gone to his holy calling, and he had lost none of the military training the instructors had beaten into him a good thirty years earlier. It was these skills that spotted the makeshift tripwire arranged by the roof hatch. An oil can dangled from a cord, a handful of pebbles inside it. The crude device would have been enough to warn anyone on the roof they were about to be discovered.
With care, Zeyn made safe the alarm line and slowly went the rest of the way. He emerged on the roof to find a workganger in a leather vest bent down over what appeared to be a pict-slate. A stylus in one hand moved in swift little jerks of motion, as lines of ideograms were entered into the device’s memory.
The deacon let the lash out once again, and cleared his throat.
The man started and jerked to his feet, grimly holding on to the slate, his other hand fumbling at the catches on his vest. ‘Beg… Beg pardon,’ he began. The glow of the whip made his face pale and ghostly.
‘Sloth,’ Zeyn began, measuring out the word. ‘Sloth is one of the aspects of a man of low character. He lets his fellows do their share and shirks his. Thinks he’s better than the rest…’ The deacon had given this lecture and the accompanying discipline a hundred times, and was about to again – but something in the worker’s manner stopped him.
The pict-slate. The slight man gripped it like it was his lifeline.
Zeyn was adroit with the use of the electro-whip, enough that he could strip a single leaf from a tree branch. He flicked his wrist and the tip snapped up, cutting a line of blue fire over the workganger’s hand. The man screamed and the slate went flying, spinning away cross the flagstones.
The deacon bent to recover it. The device’s display was covered with symbols that he couldn’t read, coded numeric runes in long, meaningless strings. ‘What is this?’ he demanded, searching his memory for the worker’s face, his story.
It came to him: Jonah Sijue, an indentured citizen working a six-solar contract with the Imperial Church, as payment for a feast day infraction. He was a stonecutter, and he should have been hard at work, lasing rock into perfect cubes for the new wall.
What Jonah Sijue certainly was not was a man who had the wealth to own a device of such fine manufacture as this slate, nor was he a man of such learning who would be able to parse a complex text-code like this one.
Sijue’s face lost its dull, cow-like blankness and grew an expression of cold, steady focus. ‘Turn it over,’ he told the deacon, without fear.
Zeyn did so, and there on the back of the device was a symbol stamped into the metal. A capital letter ringed by wards in High Gothic; an ‘I’ bracketed by crossed spears.
‘You know what that means,’ said Sijue, rubbing at the wound on the back of his hand. ‘Now return it to me.’ Gone was the obedient, servile nature the man had shown on their previous encounters.
‘The Inquisition,’ Zeyn had to say it aloud just to be certain of it. ‘You… You are not of the ordos! You are a helot, a drudge doing the Church’s work!’
Sijue drew a disc of dark metal from inside the lining of his vest, and it unfolded into the shape of a holdout pistol. A silencer baffle shrouded the muzzle. ‘Clever toy, isn’t it?’ remarked the man. ‘Like a logica game. Something too clever for you to meddle with, priest.’ He gestured at the slate. ‘Give it back, now. Give it back and we’ll forget all of this. I’ll go back to work. And so will you.’
Zeyn wasn’t a fool. Oh, the Sisterhood had kept their motivations close and spoken little of what happened on Sanctuary 101 before this reconsecration – but he had heard the stories, the rumours. The workgangers spoke freely when they thought he was not listening. They talked of many things, some ideals fanciful and unlikely, others less so. Some said the Ordo Xenos were enamoured of this planet and wanted it for themselves. Some said they were being watched by the Inquisition at every turn here.
He hadn’t done anything to disabuse the workgangers of these beliefs. Paranoid men tended to work harder than those at ease with their lot. But Zeyn had found it hard to imagine that the exalted guardians of Imperial integrity would be drawn to somewhere so remote and so desolate as this world.
He thought differently now, however.
‘Put away the whip and give me the slate,’ said Sijue. ‘I won’t ask you a t
hird time.’
Sudden heat boiled at the back of Zeyn’s thoughts. ‘You will kill me to keep this secret? Whatever master you serve, you do so in darkness!’ He took a warning step forwards, and the tiny gun muzzle rose with it. ‘In the name of the God-Emperor, I refuse!’
‘I serve Him as much as you do,’ Sijue replied coldly. ‘As much as any of these fools or those sanctimonious nuns. But there are some things more important than prayers or–’
He never finished the sentence. From below, down on the broken wall, a man cried out and the voice broke the pre-dawn hush with such abruptness that they were both distracted for a split-second. Sijue reflexively glanced away, and Zeyn reacted without thought, snapping the whip once again.
He caught Sijue across the chest and face, and the smaller man spun back in a cluster of sparks, howling. The deacon ran to him and batted him down, one heavy punch from his ham-sized fist enough to disarm and put him on the floor. The gun clattered away, as the wind began to pick up. Particles of loose sand hissed across the stones.
Warily, Zeyn peered over the lip of the tower and looked down, careful to keep the injured man at the edge of his vision. He saw the workers breaking rank and scrambling to climb back over the half-repaired wall, some of them in such haste they were shoving one another aside in panic.
What was putting them to flight? His grip stiffened on the whip’s handle as he glared out past them, to the open, rock-strewn sands beyond the convent walls.
Out there, in the half-dark and the low clouds of dust, he saw what looked like fireflies, lines of them bobbing and dancing as their phosphors glowed; but then they began to resolve into other shapes, the green glimmering moving in steady, careful motions, radiating out from eye-sockets in metal skulls.
The swarm of lights broke apart and changed, the trick of it as clever and dangerous as Sijue’s secret gun.
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