The House of Night and Chain

by David Annandale

  Who are you? What have you done with my children? Does Montfor have them?

  If they had harmed Katrin and Zander, there would be no mercy.

  I blinked, suddenly unsure why I was there.

  This was Katrin. What was I doing? What was I thinking?

  I crept out of the room and shut the door. I returned to my chamber, jaw set and grim. I was still a bit disorientated. My grip on time and the passage of years was uncertain. At the same time, I knew I had not been dreaming. I was receiving messages. I was being shown things. There were truths that I needed to unearth.

  I felt better when I was back in the tower with the door bolted.

  Can we trust those people sleeping below?

  I was not sure that I could.

  Chapter 13

  My husband is an honourable man.

  His uncle was an honourable man.

  So much honour in the Strock family! Generations and generations and generations of honour, and duty, and faith, and unquestioning service to the Imperium. Such loyalty to the Emperor! An exemplary family! Centuries of labour to create a legacy of honour.

  I know what honour smells like. I know its stench. I know its foundation. What lies below. All these legacies are a mere film. All these centuries of duty, what are they worth? A film, so thin, always ready to tear.

  I understand the labour in this house now too, the relics of the past trying to bury the foundations.

  You are such an honourable man, Maeson. What do you think? Is it duty to the end? Duty to preserve? Duty to save? Is that what you think? Do you think the end isn’t already here? Do you think everything isn’t already rotting? Already rotten?

  So many chains. We are bound. I am shackled. Once we see and feel the chains, it is too late.

  That is a lie too. A comforting one. The truth is that it is always too late. The chains are always there.

  When was it too late for me? When I crossed the threshold for the first time? When I saw Malveil for the first time? The chains are long. The chains go deep. The chains were always there. There is no freedom. Only chains.

  Never day. Ever night.

  I left the house again. Isn’t that something? Are you proud of me, Maeson?

  ANSWER ME!

  Don’t be proud. I’m not. It felt like an accomplishment. It wasn’t. I didn’t pull myself free. I wasn’t even released. I was hauled along by the chains.

  I discovered nothing. I was made to see.

  Sometimes Malveil rattles the chains for its amusement. For its joke.

  I would like to tell you something, Maeson. I would like to tell you many things. But here is a small secret. It is a secret about humour and fate. You know what it is?

  I have to make my writing as small as possible, so I can whisper.

  Fate and humour are the same thing, and that is terrible. Consider the nature of jokes, Maeson. The construction of a joke is the movement towards a surprise that is also inevitable. When the ending arrives, we see, despite and because of the absurdity, that no other ending was ever possible. It was fated.

  The Strocks are fated, Maeson. I am too. The chains are strong. If you ever see them, you will try to break them. You will fail.

  The chains begin with Devris Strock. Leonel discovered this too late. So did all his predecessors. So did I. Devris made the pact. Leonel saw the proof. I have not yet. I know I will. The time is coming soon when I will have to look below.

  I have been to the Administratum for one last time. That was where Malveil sent me. That was where the chains dragged me. I knew where to look. The name of Devris was on enough fragments. The past is buried in Malveil, but it is restless. It surfaces. It sends up the lures, and then the iron traps snap shut.

  So. I have seen what I was meant to see, and I have been brought back. I do not think I will ever leave Malveil again.

  If I have seen this, Maeson, you should too. Why should I be the only one of us to bear this curse? You fight the wars, and you are shielded. You cannot know. You abandoned me, and you labour for duty and honour.

  You are honourable to your core.

  Honour is thin. It is brittle. It is your truth, but it is a lie.

  It is just the weakest film stretched over the pact.

  I will throw away the past too. There is nothing else I can do. It serves no purpose. Nothing does.

  Maybe I will gain time.

  Maybe that doesn’t matter.

  Honour. I wish the word were flesh. I would rip it with my teeth. I would drink its rotten blood.

  The storm had finally ended. The sky was still a heavy grey, gathering its strength for another burst. Rain fell intermittently, and the wind keened, cold as a scalpel cut against the flesh. I welcomed the bracing pain as I walked the grounds of Malveil in the desultory morning. I needed the air.

  Eliana’s journal was becoming harder and harder to read. I could no longer take any pleasure from it. I dreaded the effort. The hatred, the despair and the anger that soaked the pages were beyond disturbing. I had known that the closer I came to the final pages, the more upsetting I would find her words. Things could hardly be otherwise, with her suicide waiting after the last page. But I had not counted on the specific nature of her distress. The exhaustion she had complained about before seemed to have turned into a belief that Malveil held her prisoner.

  Is that true? Or was it something within her that formed a delusion?

  I did not understand everything that was happening at Malveil. There were aspects that were frightening. I did not think they were dangerous. I could come and go as I liked. I was not a prisoner. I did not want to leave, but that was not the same thing as being held. I wished that I could have done something for her while she was alive. I wished that I could have helped her find joy in Malveil.

  Maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I can give her peace now. She is reaching out to me. I will not abandon her again.

  So I kept telling myself. I clung to that hope tenaciously. I needed it to give me the strength to get through the rest of the journal.

  That was going to take some time. It was not just the content that was difficult. Page by page, Eliana’s handwriting slowly degraded. It became cramped, so jagged and angular that I could barely recognise it as hers. It had become infinitesimally small. It took several minutes to decipher each line, and the eye strain gave me a headache before I had managed to read more than half a page. Worse yet, actual words only made up a small portion of each line. It was as if Eliana were trying to hide her thoughts within a forest of incomprehensible marks. The stylus scratches looked like letters, and they were clustered into groups resembling words. There were even patterns in the shapes. Sometimes, my eyes watering, my head pounding, I found myself trying to decipher the shapes and feeling on the verge of comprehension. In such moments, I jerked myself away from the journal and had to leave it alone for a time. It became distasteful to me when that happened. It became a thing I did not want to touch.

  Eliana hinted at things I did not want to know but could not ignore. So far, she was vague about what she might have found at Malveil itself, but she had gone to the Administratum Palace, and there was a name. Devris Strock.

  I followed the path she had set for me. I had Belzhek take me to the palace. It dominated the eastern sector of Valgaast, a gigantic complex of black ferrocrete. Spires surmounted the great, dark hulk, the largest building on Solus. It was keeper of records, keeper of memories, keeper of secrets and monster of regulations. It sprawled for miles on each side, and was higher than any other structure in Valgaast except for the towers of the cathedral.

  The entrance hall was sombre, lit by candelabra. Its walls slanted inwards, meeting at a point more than seventy feet above. Though the floor was wide, the hall felt narrow. Its lines drew the gaze up. Suspended from the apex was the huge Administratum symbol, the great Imperial I with the e
mbedded, coiled rune of the Adeptus. The dimness and the solemnity of the space commanded silence.

  A few robed scribes passed as I entered. A servo-skull flew up to me.

  ‘Archives,’ I said. ‘Reference “Curator Strock, Eliana”.’

  The servo-skull chattered in binharic and then retreated, flying through an aperture in the far wall behind a high iron pulpit raised ten feet above the floor. Doors opened a moment later and a scribe in dark robes strode to the pulpit and looked down at me.

  ‘Lord-governor,’ she said. ‘You are welcome. You seek records related to your honoured wife.’

  ‘Yes. Specifically ones she would have requested herself the last time she was here.’

  The scribe typed a query into the cogitator mounted onto the pulpit. She consulted the screen, then flipped through the pages of a massive tome on the lectern before her. ‘These are ancient records indeed,’ she said. Approvingly, I thought. ‘It will take some time to reach them.’ She pulled a brass lever in the pulpit and another set of doors behind her opened. The servo-skull flew back out of its aperture, and through the doors came a wheeled servitor. ‘Historical,’ the scribe said to the skull. ‘Vault Secundus, sub-level twelve, archive one-two-seven.’

  The servo-skull spat out a thin scroll, which the scribe tore off and inserted into the back of the quiescent servitor’s neck. The servitor jerked into motion.

  ‘You will be taken to the records,’ said the scribe.

  I thanked her and followed the servitor through an archway on the east side of the hall. For more than twenty minutes we walked through the vaulted corridors, going deeper and deeper into the maze of the Administratum Palace. We passed honeycombs of cells where scribes laboured over transcriptions and exegetical texts, reconciling conflicting regulations. We crossed narrow bridges, barely three feet wide, that cut across the immense spaces of the enormous vaults. In Vault Secundus, the servitor led me down the webwork of bridges to a sub-level that must have been more than a hundred feet below the surface.

  The servitor approached one of the archives and moved onto a lift platform at its base. Mechanisms engaged, and the platform carried the servitor up a rail on the high iron archive. The lighting was dim here too, and the servitor became indistinct as it neared the top of the archive. I heard the grind of a cabinet door opening, and after a minute the servitor descended, laden with documents. I followed it another short distance to a reading cell. The servitor deposited the records on an iron table that took up most of the space in the cell, then departed.

  I sat on a dark oaken stool and looked through the documents. They were, as the scribe had said, very old. Vellum sheets cracked, brittle with age. Parchment crumbled at my touch. The printing was faded, and sometimes illegible. History was vanishing slowly into the void of the past.

  The files were a miscellany of everything that had passed through the Administratum during a period centuries back, a time that I recognised as coinciding with the rise of the Strocks to power. There were hundreds of records, and I spent hours combing through minor regulatory adjustments, notices of punishments meted out to families I had never heard of, agricultural production reports, and on and on, an endless collection of bureaucratic trivia. But at last I found one of the documents that Eliana must have been referring to. It was a duplicate of the exploitation licence granted to Devris Strock for the mineral resources discovered in the Malveil grounds. I found another report, dated several months later, that summarised the special session of the council following the death of Lord-Governor Agata Montfor. Instead of her son, Gregor, succeeding her, the council had named Devris to the position.

  The report was a dry summary, a record that existed merely to exist, with little expectation that it would ever be read. But it marked the moment of my family’s ascendance. Devris was the first Lord-Governor Strock.

  I had never known his name. The accomplishment was remembered. The man was utterly forgotten.

  The oblivion that surrounded my predecessors deepened. The paradox of power and obscurity that held the Strocks was more than strange. But there was nothing really new here. I had confirmation of what we had always known to be the reason for our power. Other than the name of our first lord-governor, this information did not seem particularly significant.

  I kept looking. Eliana had requested material that covered several years, coming from a period both before and after Devris’ ascension. I went back and forth through the documents, examining reams of tedium. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Even if Eliana hadn’t had a specific target, she would have been much better at this than I was. This was her domain, her battlefield.

  In the end, I found it. My eyes were glazing over by that point. I’d been there for hours. My head was beginning to throb. The record would have been easy to miss. But it was as if my hand were directed to hold the page and not let go until I read it and registered what it said. It was a query from the office of a surveyor. It requested a review of prior geological scans of the Malveil region to see where errors might have been made. Previous estimations of the composition of the hill showed no extractable value whatsoever.

  I stared at the parchment for several minutes, implications dawning on me. I looked some more, and found a memorandum making brief reference to the request, stating that the matter had been closed. I carried on for another half hour, but there was nothing else.

  It was growing cold in the reading cell. The candles flickered in a faint breeze that had begun to breathe about me. One went out. The breeze touched the back of my neck like ice.

  I looked back and forth at the parchments I had found, reluctant to acknowledge the chronology that appeared before me.

  The land on which Malveil stood was worthless, and then it was valuable almost beyond measure. I looked at the exploitation licence again, at the extraordinary range of riches that were found there. Gold, silver, iron, copper. All in one place. How truly fortunate. How gigantically improbable. No one had noticed this aberration except one person, and nothing had come of that. It was as if there were a balance. Everything impossible about the Strock riches was ignored as thoroughly as each governor was forgotten.

  This did not seem like a blessing from the Emperor.

  From somewhere, water dropped onto the document I held. It ran down the parchment like tears.

  ‘A pact,’ I whispered, repeating Eliana’s word.

  A sob of despair answered me. I jerked up from the stool and stumbled away from the table. Eliana was there, sitting where I had been, her eyes fixed on the documents, her mouth open. She tried to form words, her hands raised, her fingers clenched like claws. Tears flowed down her face, and then she screamed, the wail rising and writhing in terror and grief.

  Reach out! Give comfort!

  I could not. Her scream was too huge, too overwhelming. There could be no comfort here. There was only horror. It filled the room. It filled my soul.

  Ashamed, gasping, I turned and fled.

  Behind me, the spectre of my wife screamed and screamed and screamed.

  Chapter 14

  It was late when I returned to Malveil. I shut myself up in my chamber and sat in my bed, waiting for something, anything, to happen. I whispered Eliana’s name again and again, calling to her, begging her forgiveness for having abandoned her once more. This time I would do better, I vowed. I would help her.

  How would I atone? How would I comfort the dead? What did I know about peace? I had lived nothing but war for most of my adult life. Now that I no longer took to the field, I felt even less peace than before. But I must help. If only I knew what had made her scream. What I had read in the archives disturbed me. It made me uneasy. I did not understand enough yet. That might have been a mercy. It was also one I could not accept. If I were to help Eliana, I had to know the reason for her horror.

  The hours of the night dragged by. She did not come. Nothing appeared. I was alone with
my thoughts and my failures. I clutched my head. I wished I could tear the guilt from my mind. But all my thoughts were of guilt. I had failed my troops and the Imperium on Clostrum. I had failed Veiss. I had failed Eliana. I had failed my children. How could I stop the failures? How could I protect my children? How could I protect those who could not protect themselves?

  What do you mean? They’re adults. They’re down below, sleeping.

  Oh? Are they? And are they really…

  Really what?

  Are they really my children? I don’t know these people. I’m told she is Katrin. I’m told he is Zander, and I accept that. They could be anybody.

  They look like your children.

  There is a resemblance. I may be seeing it because I expect to see it.

  If they aren’t your children, who are they? Imposters?

  What, not who. That is the question. What are they? Isn’t it odd that they never react to the manifestations in this house?

  No one sees them but you.

  Perhaps, but it isn’t just that. When I pound on their doors, they don’t hear me. When I yell, they do not come. It is as if they aren’t present at all. As if the only time they exist and sleep in their beds is when I am there to observe. The young children, little Katrin and Zander, they react. They know the danger. They turn to me for help. They love me.

  I keep trying to save them. I keep failing, but they’re still safe. Somehow, they’re still safe.

  They burned in the fire.

  No, there wasn’t a fire. I chased the arsonist away. There were no bodies. I will find them again. I will save them. I swear it, Eliana.

  Please come back to me. Please give me another chance.

  Where are the children? Are they all right?