by Dan Abnett
I did not think this was a usual thing. It was not the look, say, of a lascivious older man who might spy a young girl who takes his fancy and gazes upon her. This was the look a man might have upon being reunited, unexpectedly, with a long-lost sibling, or a father might have upon seeing a child he believed dead. It was the look of a person who remembers a loved one long lost.
He stared at me. He could not help it. I went to look away, because it was uncomfortable, and at the same moment he managed to wrench his gaze aside, realising that he was staring. He did not get up and approach me, nor did he go away. I was aware that I kept looking at him.
I imagined scenarios. If he was a veteran general of the Emperor’s Guard, perhaps I reminded him of the girl he’d left behind, or a long-dead wife, or a favourite trooper lost on the line.
+Alizebeth.+
I heard my name spoken, but I did not hear it with my ears. The soft whisper of a psyker had spoken to me. I looked around, alarmed.
The man was staring at me again. Was it him? I wondered if I should switch my cuff, but I had been told not to. He was looking at me so keenly. He had one hand placed on the back of the pew in front of him, as if he was about to pull himself to his feet and come over to me.
But he hesitated. He had seen something.
‘You took some looking for.’
I snapped around at the voice, and found Lightburn taking a seat on the pew beside me. The Curst kept his eyes straight ahead, as though he were just another pilgrim who happened to be sitting down next to me.
‘How did you find me?’ I asked
‘It weren’t easy at all,’ he replied.
‘But how?’
‘You won’t believe me. That goat Shadrake.’
‘Shadrake?’
Lightburn risked casting a glance at me, and mimicked the wretched artist’s way of holding up his sighting glass to see through it.
‘I don’t know how, but he spied you. Looked through that glass of his and told me we’d find you at the basilica.’
‘I feared you’d suppose I’d just given you the slip,’ I said.
‘I did at first,’ he admitted. ‘But then we saw the mess in the painting room upstairs, and I found this pinning some scrap of cloth to a table.’
He opened his hand on the seat beside me to show me the bent silver telekine pin. I reached out my left hand under the line of the pew back and he passed it to me.
‘I saw that, and I knew you’d been taken or something,’ he said, still looking straight ahead as though he was talking to himself. ‘Then Shadrake says he can help us find you again.’
‘Renner, you said “us”, and before that you said “we”. Who do you mean?’
‘Your friend, he showed up,’ said Lightburn.
‘Judika?’
‘Uh huh,’ he said, nodding. ‘About an hour, maybe two, after we found you’d gone, he turns up.’
‘Is he here?’
‘Yeah, but not down here. I came in here, he circled around the upper walks to see if he could spot you. We’ve come to have you out of here.’
‘It won’t be that easy,’ I said. ‘There is a psyker close by.’
‘A devil like that? In a church?’ Lightburn asked, horrified.
‘And besides, there are other enemies all around,’ I said, ‘unseen in the crowd. I fear that they might reveal themselves and slay you if you try to take me from here.’
‘They can try,’ he replied.
‘Renner, we are outnumbered and exposed,’ I said. ‘Do not try.’
‘Then what? Just sit here? Who’s brought you here? What do they want with you?’
‘I don’t know the half of who brought me here, and I don’t know at all what they want of me,’ I said. ‘But I am caught here by powerful persons. Men of the Church, Renner. Their reach, power and influence are mighty, and we are right in the heart of their world. Go and find Judika. Tell him I am to be taken to the Pontifex. I do not think they will kill me. Perhaps he can use the authority of his rosette to approach the office of the Pontifex through an official channel.’
‘The what of his what?’
‘Just go and tell him,’ I said, whispering urgently. ‘Mr Lightburn, I believe there are more effective and thorough ways to get me out of this predicament than either fleeing from this seat or starting a fight.’
‘I don’t,’ he replied.
‘Then look to your left!’ I hissed, not looking at all.
He did so, and I heard him mutter a quiet oath. Balthus Blackwards, along with Lupan, the other confessor, and the four bodyguards, had just wandered into view. They came to a halt in the open floor, just a few metres away from the end of the ranks of pews.
‘Go,’ I hissed. ‘Go! Blackwards will recognise you, and he will kill you.’
‘He will not.’
‘He will have his sell-swords do it. You aggrieved him greatly.’
Lightburn plucked up the hood of his black coat to fashion a temporary disguise. He looked sidelong at me.
‘All right,’ he said. He had at least enough sense to know that tangling with four professional bodyguards in a very public space was a terrible idea, even for a man who is so cursed he has nothing much of anything left to lose. ‘All right, I’ll go and tell this to Sowl. But do not do anything foolish. We will come for you.’
‘Your devotion is quite touching, Renner,’ I said.
He frowned. He did not see it that way.
‘If you die horrible before I get you to the mamzel, that’s one burden I won’t never be able to scratch off my skin,’ he said.
He got up, bowed in the direction of the high altar, and slid past me to exit the pew at the end opposite the Blackwards party. Just then, Lupan spotted me and pointed me out to Balthus Blackwards. Neither of them seemed to notice the hooded figure leaving my row.
I turned quickly to see Lightburn away, but the Curst was already lost in the pilgrim crowd. I noticed too that the mysterious man, the veteran general who had been so struck by me, had also disappeared.
I faced front again and saw that Hodi was finally coming back across the open space of the basilica floor towards me. As he approached the ranks of pews, he held out his hand and beckoned to me.
I stood up. I slipped the bent silver pin into my pocket.
CHAPTER 24
Which concerns his Holiness and the brass reading room
I walked across to join Hodi where he waited. I did not feel brave. Once I had reached him, he fell in step with me and we walked across the huge expanse of the open floor towards the high altar. Prayer drones buzzed past us. A man with a wooden tray called out the prices of the parchment blessings he was selling. A brief flurry of raindrops fell on us, milked from the microclimate high in the dome’s apex. The spatter of raindrops made me look down at the floor. It was mosaic, a huge mosaic, made up of trillions of tiled fragments. I had heard that only if you climbed up the dome to the very top, and peered in through the skylights at the summit, could you perceive the mosaic image in full and understand what it depicted. This felt, to me, like an adequate metaphor for my life.
An amplified voice was booming out from the direction of the high altar and the oratory platform. The voice had been booming for the whole time, but only now was I getting close enough for it to become the dominant sound.
I realised it was the voice of the Pontifex. It was his daily address and blessing, delivered from the high throne, through vast, augmetic vox systems, the speaker horns of which bloomed like ivory flowers from the mouths of giant, screaming angel statues around the oratory steps. As you approached the high altar, the volume became painful. Dense crowds of pilgrims, hundreds deep, had gathered to stand or kneel at the steps and listen. Many held aloft votive candles, or blessed scrolls, or medals of the God-Emperor, as if they might soak up some benediction that the Pontifex’s voice bestowed upon the air.
Precinct wardens, their painted masks beatific, parted the crowd to let Hodi through, and I followed in his slip
stream. We went up the steps onto the lower oratory platform, right under the first outcrop of vox speakers. The noise was immense. The voice was so distorted by volume and echo, I could no longer make any distinct sense of it. It was just a noise. Pilgrims covered the steps, many in floods of tears, though whether this was a sign of religious rapture or hearing damage, I could not tell.
Further banks of speakers stood behind the first, huge chrome horns, cones and bells, growing out of the mouths and eyes of the vast statues and carvings that encased the walls on either side. They were all gilded. Prayer drones in great numbers hovered and buzzed in this area, stirring as the sound waves pulsed the air, surrounding the speaker horns like bees or hummingbirds around tropical blooms.
We were now advancing across the lower platform and down the throat of the monolithic ravine that led to the altar. Vertical columns of black and bronze organ pipes lined the cliffs on either side of us, rising some two or three hundred metres into the roof. At various levels, like shelves, hung wooden balconies where choristers sat, waiting to sing. The wooden boxes were brightly decorated with coloured paint and gold leaf. Some were supported on the heads or shoulders of caryatid statues.
I felt sure that, for all I was assailed by the noise of the amplified address, I would like even less to be advancing down that canyon when the organ began to play.
We reached the second ascent to the next platform. More pilgrims clustered here, but they were of a higher class: richer families, nobles, merchants, people who could afford to pay a higher stipend and thus be rewarded by a position closer to the Pontifex. These people, dressed in extraordinary finery, were escorted by immaculate servitors and haughty slaves. Some were sitting in golden walking carriages or ornate mobility carts. Some family groups carried huge oil paintings of the deceased family member they were here to have blessed.
Ahead of us rose the high thrones on their platforms, with the great altar before them. Some magnificent trick of architecture meant that hard columns of sunlight poured down through the canyon gloom from the celestory to spotlight the golden altar.
The ‘high thrones’ was a misnomer, a throwback to older days. It had originally been where the elders and senior ecclesiarchs sat in audience before the congregation. Now it was another vast machined cliff of riveted metal, another huge and howling face in bas-relief. This one, the largest of all in the basilica, was made of gold and, from the radiant crown it wore, was supposed to be the God-Emperor. The Pontifex, in his throne, sat in the open mouth of the one-hundred-metre-high face, speaking into the bank of wired vox-casters in front of him.
The skin of the giant face, as I got close enough to see, was like the hull of an oceanic ship: metal beaten together in panels and secured by rivets that could not be seen from a distance. It was, never the less, impressive.
We halted for a moment and stood, looking up at the Pontifex as he made his address. This close to the high thrones, only members of the Ecclesiarchy were permitted, or visitors conducted by them. Even the good and the great of society, from the affluent areas of Queen Mab, from Sancour, and the Imperium beyond both, did not approach so close without permission.
The Pontifex Urba sat in a balcony made of a giant lower lip and chin. The vox phones, a jumble of them on many rods and supports, extended up from behind the massive metal teeth at his feet. He was in a great throne, reclining, with his hands on the broad arms of the seat, and his head back against the rest. His head was sunk into his shoulders as though he was weary. He was a big man, softened by a life of lifter frames and augmetic supports, unused to the exertion of his own musculature. He was draped in purple silk, including a huge gold-trimmed chasuble over his vestment robes. He wore a high golden mitre. The words, too loud to be anything except thunder to me any more, poured out of him. This was what it would be like to hear the God-Emperor speak, I felt. It was not an approximation or a surrogate. If the Lord of the Imperium uttered a word, it would be more than sound, more than noise. It would hurt us and unmake us.
Hodi touched my sleeve to indicate we should continue. It was too loud for me to have heard any words from him. He led me across the golden pavement beneath the vast face of the high thrones towards a row of recessional doors to the right. As we began to walk, the Pontifex’s address finally came to a close. Trumpets sounded in harsh, blaring relays. I looked up and saw that the Pontifex’s throne was withdrawing into the gullet of the huge head, retracted by vast mechanical pistons. As he disappeared, the jaw slowly swung up and the mouth closed.
We went inside, out of the open. As we stepped through the doorway, the great organ pipes began to play, filling the canyon of the high altar with a terrible dirge.
We entered an anteroom lined with gold. It was like being inside a jewellery box. The floor was crimson velvet. Two dozen ecclesiarchs awaited us: deacons, preachers and other exalted elders. They wore white albs with red or black, or even gold caputiums. At the sight of me, as one, they all put on capirotes, the tall, conical hats of penitence. The capirotes were so tall they made the assembled priests seem inhuman in form. Their eyes gazed at me through the slits in the cloth of the hats.
Hodi put on one of his own. He led me on, and the priests in their conical hats formed a procession behind us, two abreast.
I honestly believed, at that moment, that I would not be returning from the bowels of the basilica.
From the anteroom, we walked out onto a staircase that wound down into darkness. The staircase was old, perhaps part of an older church upon which the modern basilica had been raised, and it looked to me as though it had been made of bone. It was carved from some hard substance that was white, yellowing with age and worn with use. The staircase was lit by a hundred thousand candles, which were glued by their own dripping wax down the banisters on each side. Fresh candles were evidently lit and squashed into the hot wax every time one went out. Two shrunken men, more like sickly monkeys than humans, cowered at the top of the steps, guarding baskets of fresh candles, wick trimmers and tapers. It was their duty to keep the old staircase lit.
It was a long staircase. The darkness around the golden radiance of the candles grew blacker, and the air colder, a subterranean chill that could only mean we were properly underground. The apocalyptic sounds of the basilica’s great organ became increasingly muffled overhead.
A mendicant in pitifully ragged brown robes was waiting for us at the foot of the stairs. I was glad to see him. I was glad to see anyone whose face was not hooded in a devilish cone of white cloth. The descent had been as though we were climbing down through the very void itself on a lighted staircase in the blackness of the interstellar gulfs.
The mendicant bowed, took a large brass key from around his neck, and inserted it into a slot that I realised was not a chink in ground rock, but was in fact a keyhole in a rusted iron plate. The key turned, and a hatch whirred open in the blackness. It opened like the mechanism of a mechanical toy, dividing in four parts, each quarter withdrawing into a corner of the hole.
A warm orange light shone from within.
What we entered could only have been the brass room that Hodi had mentioned. It was a long chapel crypt with a vaulted roof, entirely lined with brass. Every surface was ornately decorated with etching and bas-relief. Glow-globes hung from wall sconces. The room was a reading room, a library of sorts. It was lined with shelves on which ancient books and data-slates were locked behind brass cage doors. In the open centre of the room there were many study desks and reading lecterns, all made out of brass or beaten copper. Behind us, to the left of the entrance, was a huge copper fireplace, entirely empty, which seemed incongruous. At the far end of the chapel was an oddly battered, disfigured altar, perhaps a distinguished ancient relic that had been carried on crusades and finally placed here for veneration. To the right, beside a doorway that seemed to let through into an annex or side chapel, there was a row of screened wooden doors like confessional boxes built into the wall.
I looked around.
‘
Copper and brass,’ I said aloud.
Hodi glanced at me.
‘This is the private reading room. The brass room. Copper and brass are far more inert than silver, gold or iron…’
His voice trailed off. Again, he seemed to think better of telling me things, though it was harder to be sure with his face masked.
There was a sudden noise: a grinding of gears, a hissing of pistons and a clank of metal upon metal. What I had taken to be the great fireplace was opening from behind. It was a mechanism, a machined socket. The massive throne containing the Pontifex was descending from above on its elaborate engineering, and the socket was opening to receive it. It slotted in place with a clang of locating metal tongues and hisses of pneumatic release, and the end of the reading room became a grand throne room, with the Pontifex Urba seated on a chair that had been delivered from the basilica far above by an intricate mechanism.
The priests all genuflected. Hodi took my wrist and led me towards the throne. Steam still trickled from the seams where the throne had plugged into the brass socket.
Close to, I saw that the Pontifex was a sick man. He was old and ludicrously obese. I doubted he could even walk unaided. His cope and chasuble, both of purple silk, were wrapped around his bloated body like a sack. His head lolled, and his mouth was slack. His eyes did not appear to be able to focus. I saw that his golden mitre had been wired to his scalp to prevent it from falling off with the nods and jerks of his head.
‘Your Holiness,’ Hodi began.
The Pontifex’s lips trembled. He stank of anointing oils. ‘Abraded circumstance,’ he said in a querulous voice that seemed to bubble out of him unevenly, ‘that is a dark place and it contains two stars, one of which is a star and the other is two birds.’
‘We have brought the asset to you, so that you might regard her,’ said Hodi.
