by Ian Watson
Jaq reeled and clutched at Lex.
‘Somewhere in this mob there’s a telepath. I can sense him! A psyker. He’s terrified. He’s sending out chaotic images—’
Aye, muddled images of the massacre, which had assaulted that psyker’s senses with so much pain and so many death agonies. Pilgrims who possessed any trace of psychic sense were picking these images up. Everyone was already so highly strung. In this road there was none of the desperate mass prostration, as there was on the main boulevard. Voices cried dementedly:
‘Murder!’
‘Mirror-heads!’
Those who shouted could have no clear idea whether “mirror-heads” were engaged in murder, or whether it was essential for themselves to kill anyone who fitted such a description. Hysteria was becoming ever more rampant by the moment, infecting almost everyone, whether remotely psychic or not.
LEX CRANED HIS neck. He glimpsed the masked Arbites emerge from the warehouse. Jaq and Grimm only heard the howl of the mob. For several seconds the trio were borne backwards by a homicidal tidal surge towards the Arbitrators. Then they were free. They escaped along a less crowded lane which forked and forked again.
They ran and then jog-trotted until they came to Shandabar’s fish market, where all seemed normal.
A host of stalls occupied several dusty hectares, arcaded on three sides. Under the vast red sun trade was brisk. Fishmongers were bawling the virtues of the harvest from the broad Bihishti and from the nearest freshwater sea – fresh or dried, salted or pickled. A glutinous tangy reek pervaded the chilly air. Of the panic and deaths near the courthouse there was no realization here, no more than there was awareness in any of the glazed bulging fishy eyes peering blindly from slabs and boards.
Grimm panted.
‘Oh my legs! Reckon... that mob... minced the mirror-heads?’
‘Probably,’ said Lex. He scratched at his fist in frustration. ‘It wouldn’t have been right for us to kill representatives of Imperial justice. They were just carrying out their duties. I ought not to have fired that bolt. I apologize.’
‘Why?’ asked Grimm.
‘Those Arbites could have reported the use of a bolter. Could have started an investigation.’
‘With Arbitrators visiting every rental agency on the off-chance of tracing us?’
‘I don’t suppose we really drew much attention to ourselves, considering the mayhem. I’ve noticed big guys on the streets as well as little squirts.’
‘Squats,’ Grimm corrected him tetchily. ‘I’ve spotted a few of us as well. Engineers off starships, probably. Us squats like to travel and see the sights. If I do run into one of my kin I shan’t be doing any hobnobbing, let me assure you. Us three don’t really stand out – not with all these pious lunatics around.’
‘Devout souls,’ Jaq corrected him.
For a brief while the little man hyperventilated. ‘In my book,’ he resumed, ‘there’s generally summat weird ‘bout most pilgrims. Grossly fat, or got a squint, or a goitre size of an apple on the neck. Or a skin disease, or webbed toes kept well hidden. Bunch of freaks, if you ask me.
‘Our book,’ said Jaq, ‘is the Book of Rhana Dandra.’
‘Which we can’t read, ‘cos it’s written in Eldar, and the script’s impossible.’
Jaq shrugged. ‘I wonder how much local animosity there is towards the courthouse, aside from sheer dread of the judges? What happened back there was a mere reflex action of goaded animals. I’d guess that the marshals of the court will feel the need to show more presence now. As Grimm says, there’s a whole haystack of people, even at normal times – and only a few needles to probe it with. I rejoice bleakly in the religious rivalries here. Those will sow confusion.’
He pondered. ‘We may need to make contact with criminals – to integrate ourselves, and protect ourselves from the attentions of the courthouse. Crime, after all, is everywhere. We ourselves are similar to criminals.’
Grimm grinned. ‘Cosmic jewel-thieves, eh?’ Jaq was eyeing Lex, who nodded soberly.
‘Transgressors against the Imperium, my lord inquisitor. Seemingly so. Temporarily. Until we understand. Until we can report back to trustworthy authority.’
‘If the Inquisition is at war with itself, Lex, what authority can we trust?’
‘I realize that! My own Chapter is beyond reproach. Yet our Librarians could merely report to the Administratum.’
‘Which would notify the Adeptus Terra. The Inquisition would intervene. But which faction of the Inquisition?’ Lex bowed his head briefly, as if praying privately to his sacred primarch.
SO AT LAST they reached the vast sandy area outside the complex of domes which was the Occidens Temple. A few thousand expectant pilgrims were already camping. Thousands more milled. There was a heady aroma of incense and of grilling fish kebabs – no sooner cooked over braziers than sold – and of spiced wine, and of bodies. Acrobats performed atop tall poles for all to see. Fortune tellers fanned versions of the Imperial Tarot. Cripples begged for alms.
It was possible to wend one’s way to the fore, in a slow journey of well over a kilometre. This the trio did.
AROUND THE TEMPLE stretched a strong plasteel crush-barrier manned by armed deacons. An elevated walkway draped with rich brocades ran from the top of the temple steps out to a splendid platform overlooking the barricade.
At a gate in the crush-barrier, a deacon was soliciting sumptuous offerings for the opportunity to enter the temple – which was otherwise closed to worshippers now that the unveiling was imminent. An armed sexton would guide those who paid lavishly. These privileged persons would behold the actual sacred aumbry cupboard where the True Face was kept.
Tomorrow – on the eve of the unveiling – offerings must be twice as sumptuous as today.
Here was the origin of the rumour which had caused hundreds of deaths and injuries. Someone had misunderstood; and the misunderstanding had been compounded.
A fat bald man, accompanying his squint-eyed daughter, had handed over a fat purse of shekels, which were being counted. For most pilgrims the cost of admission was too steep, whatever special virtue might accrue.
Jaq was consumed with curiosity – with an inquisitor’s desire to know, and know. From a pocket he produced a small emerald of the finest water.
Rather than spiriting Jaq’s offering away out of sight, the deacon held it up to the light. Did he suppose such a jewel was false? Even in the dull light of the red sun, the sparkle said otherwise.
Grimm dragged on Jaq’s sleeve. Amongst the crowd a tall woman, grey-gowned and hooded, was peering intently. ‘Meh’lindi...’ gasped Jaq. It was her. Her ghost. Within that shading hood the face was—
No, that was not Meh’lindi’s face. He mustn’t delude himself. The features merely bore a resemblance. And the height, the lithe stance. Already the woman had turned away so smoothly that she might never have been watching at all. She was distancing herself amongst the throng, losing herself. Already she was gone from view.
‘That lady was eyeing our sparkler,’ said Grimm.
‘Forget her,’ Jaq said distractedly. The woman hadn’t been Meh’lindi at all. Of course she hadn’t been. Meh’lindi was dead, gutted by the power-lance of a female Phoenix Warrior. As to the resemblance, why, there were only so many possible permutations of physical appearance amongst human beings. Billions of variations certainly existed on the human theme – yet in a galaxy of a million populated worlds trillions and trillions of people seethed. Somewhere in the galaxy there must be several people who appeared to be identical twins of Meh’lindi. Dozens more people must bear a striking resemblance to her.
No one could truly match Meh’lindi. No one!
THE SEXTON WHO guided the trio was a wiry weasel-faced elderly man. A laspistol was tucked in the girdle of his camelopard-hair cassock. ‘On entering our temple, first of all you are encountering—’ A portico crowded with the carved and crumbling tombs of previous high priests, hundreds of them.
I
n a huge colonnaded atrium beyond, a forest of incense sticks burned soporifically. Sweet smoke ascended through vents in the domed roof. This chamber resembled a colossal thurible. Further beyond was the basilica, patrolled by armed deacons. ‘Fifty side chapels being dedicated to fifty attributes of Him-on-Earth—’ Innumerable candles were burning. Millennia of smoke had deposited a coating of soot and wax on most surfaces. The great hall was a place of light, yet because of the soot the dominant impression was of darkness crowding in upon effulgent lumination to quench it.
‘Paying attention, travellers, to the great wall-mosaic depicting our blessed Emperor’s defeat of accursed Horus the rebel—’
This mosaic was actually kept clean of wax and smoke. It had been cleaned so many times that its details had almost been erased. That fat man and his squinty daughter were gaping at the mosaic, while their escort waited impatiently.
Next was an oratory for private prayers. Jaq and Lex only bowed their knees briefly. At the rear of the oratory hung an ancient curtain interwoven with titanium threads. That curtain was so frayed, save for the tough titanium, that one could see through it mistily into the sacristy beyond.
Through the curtain, and through a resplendent grille-gate, ‘—being of arabesque tungsten, the grille.’
In the sacristy, by the light of many candles, an aumbry cupboard was foggily visible. The cupboard was so gorgeously decorated in silver and gold as to dazzle any spectator who did not view it thus through a veil. Armed sacristans stood guard alongside the aumbry, softly chanting a canticle.
‘That holy aumbry itself being triple-locked. Within is reposing a rich reliquary. Inside that reliquary is resting the True Face of Him-on-Earth—’
That precious treasure was only ever exposed to injurious sunlight in Holy Years. In the interval between such rare public exhibitions, the Face was occasionally shown briefly by candle light in the sacristy to munificent donors, for half a minute or so. ‘No such private viewing being permitted during Holy Year—’ But high above the veiled entrance to the sacristy there hung in shadows a gold-framed picture executed in ink upon camelopard vellum. A picture of a lean and rueful though glorious face. ‘Travellers, that being a copy of a copy of the True Face of Him!’
Inside the sacristy, two indentured artists were labouring painstakingly to produce similar copies.
‘Being expensive to buy?’ asked Grimm nonchalantly.
Why, two priests known as the Fraternity of the Face were always selling such copies in one of the chapels of the basilica. The sexton would guide the trio by way of that chapel on their return.
More than ten thousand years in the past, enthused the sexton, when the sacred Emperor had roamed the galaxy in the flesh, one day He had wiped His face upon a cloth. His psychic energy had imprinted that cloth with His visage. After so many millennia the original cloth was frail. That was why the artists copied from a copy.
‘A copy being shown to the crowds?’ enquired Grimm.
The sexton’s expression darkened. His hand brushed the butt of his laspistol. ‘The True Cloth being shown!’
JAQ STARED UP at the dim face on the vellum.
When he had seen – or believed he had seen – Him-on-Earth in the huge throne room athrob with power and acrackle with ozone, amidst hallowed battle-banners and cherished icons, the face which had been framed in the soaring prosthetic throne was that of a wizened mummy. Such potent soul-stripping thoughts had issued from the mind within that mummy that Jaq had almost been annihilated. How could a mite comprehend a mammoth?
Would Jaq ever return to that throne room, illuminated within himself?
How dared he contemplate allowing any daemonic power access to his soul, in the hope of exorcising and illuminating himself? The trio declined the offer to purchase a copy of the Face.
‘Already giving our only real valuable for a squint at the sacristy,’ lied Grimm.
WHEN THEY WERE heading away from the barricade through the host of pilgrims and tents, a scrawny liver-spotted hand clutched at Jaq’s hem.
‘Charity for a registered cripple,’ croaked an elderly voice.
Smouldering thuribles of incense dangled on chains from a gibbet-like frame. Backed up against the base of this frame was a rickety cart with small iron wheels. Upon the cart crouched a ragged crone. Her face was wizened with age. Her stringy long hair was white. Yet her rheumy blue eyes were keen with a light of tense intelligence. In those eyes was a quality of anticipation for which expectancy of coins alone could hardly account.
Grimm scrutinized her circumstances. The thurible-gibbet protected this cripple from being trampled accidentally. A handle jutted from the rear of her cart. It might be pulled or pushed. Here she crouched under the cool red sun, begging.
‘No respect for the elderly on most worlds!’ grumped the little man. He fished in one of his pouches for a half-shekel. ‘Oh, your legs being all withered away, mother.’ This was plain to see: two brown sticks were folded unnaturally. Was Grimm about to shed a sympathetic tear? The crone’s cart smelled of urine.
Grimm withheld the coin temporarily. ‘Who’s wheeling you away at nightfall, mother?’
Aha. Had her legs perhaps been broken by her own greedy family so that she could serve as a source of income? ‘Temple servant pushing me into a shed,’ she replied. ‘Servant assisting me, kind sir.’
‘Was the temple breaking your legs, mother?’ Surely the Occidens Temple did not need to create and exploit cripples, pitifully to swell its coffers.
The crone rocked forward, as if in sudden anguish from a cramp of the bowels.
‘Oh yes, it was breaking my legs!’ was her reply. ‘Yet not in the way you’re meaning.’
Grimm hunkered down by the cart. Soon so did Lex, and Jaq.
THE CRONE’S NAME was Herzady. One thing she had never been was a mother. Defiantly she declared her age to be eleven years old.
Who else upon Sabulorb would dream of counting their age in local years? She had lived long enough to arrive at double figures. She had endured more than a hundred and ten Imperial years – the vast majority of them spent in this cart. Grimm was impressed by Herzady’s longevity, even though to a long-living squat a century was rather small beer.
‘Pretty impressive for an ordinary, unenhanced human being, particularly in such reduced circumstances!’
A century earlier, as a young girl, Herzady had attended that Holy Year’s unveiling in company with her pious parents. During the bedlam which ensued, her mother and father both lost their lives. Herzady’s legs were permanently crippled. A compassionate priest had taken pity and provided this cart. For decades Herzady had awaited the next Holy Year. When the unveiling came again she was watching from a safer place than on the previous occasion.
Bedlam?
Oh yes. At the unveiling fifty years later there had been homicidal bedlam again, due to the hysteria of pilgrims intent on seeing... what could not be seen.
Could not be seen? What did she mean by this?
Why, Herzady had been all ears and eyes for decades. She knew that the Visage had faded, aeons since, into invisibility. On the climactic day of Holy Year when the high priest of Occidens in splendid procession carried the reliquary out along the walkway, briefly to open the sacred container, what he would expose to the gaze of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims was a cloth which was blank, apart from a couple of stains vaguely located where eyes might have been.
‘Pilgrims are glimpsing almost nothing, sires! How they are straining and struggling to see!’
Consequently a vehement riot would cut short the ceremony. What about those copies?
Ah, the earliest copy had been made by laying sensitive material upon the precious faded cloth until a psychic imprint was transferred. This imprint was then piously embellished.
‘Huh,’ said Grimm. ‘In other words, invented!’ This account of the invisible True Face filled Jaq with an eerie sense of awe at the sheer devotion of so many of the Emperor’s subjects. What di
d it matter if pilgrims were besotted? What did it matter if they would die or be injured just to catch a fleeting glimpse of the cloth which had once wiped His Face? Their agonies were as nothing compared to the eternal agony of Him-on-Earth. The veneration of pilgrims would pass into the psychic sea of the warp, flavouring it with benediction.
Kneeling beside Herzady’s cart, Jaq found that he was able to pray. For a while.
Gently he said to Herzady, ‘Being crippled, crippled because of adoring him, you are partaking in His vaster malady.’
‘I am waiting,’ she replied bleakly, ‘for many more persons being crippled and killed the day after tomorrow, as surely must be happening. Then I am dying contentedly.’
It was to witness this calamity that Herzady had endured indomitably throughout the five decades since the previous holy year! The crone’s persistence was pathological. Her lucidity was madness.
Futility flayed Jaq’s briefly-boosted faith, as surely as the gulf of time had erased the True Face. He rocked from side to side. ‘That courthouse, hmm?’ Grimm said to Herzady. ‘You been overhearing talk ‘bout the courthouse? Involving itself much in the life of this holy city?’
Did Grimm suppose that they might wheel the crone away in her cart to their mansion in the suburbs, to become their informant about matters Sabulorbish?
The little man prompted her: ‘Hundreds of people dying outside that courthouse earlier on today. All imagining the True Face being unveiled early – and panicking.’
Galvanized by shock, the crone sat bolt upright upon her twisted shrivelled legs. She gasped tragically. ‘Herzady missing so many deaths...’
Her wizened face spasmed in pain. A thin spotted hand fluttered to her chest. She slumped over.
Lex checked her pulse. In his hefty hand her wrist looked no wider than a pencil. Herzady was dead. Of a heart attack, of a broken heart. It was Grimm who reached to close the crone’s gaping empty eyes. ‘Huh,’ he said, ‘saved meself half a shekel, anyway.’
TWO DAYS LATER, of an afternoon, they struggled to a position at the very rear of the great square.
