‘Aye,’ said Garro, after a few moments. ‘You only voice the words I heed inside myself, but it braces me to hear another say them.’
‘The Half-heard is heard at last, eh? A pity it has taken such a turn of events to bring that to pass.’
‘I accept my lot in this,’ the Death Guard noted, fingering the oath paper sealed to the breastplate of his power armour, ‘and yet I do not understand it.’
‘Understanding is not required,’ Qruze quoted the old axiom, ‘only obedience.’
‘Not true,’ reasoned Garro. ‘Obedience, blind obedience, would have made us follow Horus to his banner and go against the Emperor. What I wish to understand is why, Iacton. Why would he do this, to his father of all men?’
‘The question that comes again and again.’ A shadow passed over the Luna Wolfs face. ‘Damn me, Nathaniel. Damn me if I didn’t see this coming but had too much pride to accept it.’
‘The lodges,’
‘And more,’ said Qruze. ‘In hindsight I see trivial things that meant so little at the time, turns of phrase and looks in the eyes of my kinsmen. Now, under the light of what has transpired, suddenly they show a different aspect.’ He mused for a moment. ‘The death of Xavyer Jubal on Sixty-Three Nineteen, the burning of the Interex… Davin, it was on Davin that things began to turn, where the momentum came to a head. Horus fell and then he rose, healed by the arcane. I knew then, even if I dared not take the scope of it. Men took the good and open nature of our brotherhood and turned it slowly to meet their own ends. Dark shadows grew over the hearts of warriors who had once been devoted and loyal, Astartes I had seen grow from whelps to fine, upstanding brothers. When I finally spoke of these things, they thought me an old fool with nothing to provide but war stories and a target for their mockery.’ The Luna Wolf looked away. ‘My crime, brother, my crime was that I let them. I took the easy road.’
Garro shook his head. ‘If that were true, then you would not be here. If events of recent days have taught me anything, it is that there comes a moment for each of us when we are tested.’ As he said it, once again Euphrati Keeler came to the surface of his thoughts. ‘What happens in that moment is the true measure of us, Iacton. We cannot break, old man. If we do, then we will be damned.’
Qruze chuckled softly. ‘Strange, is it not, that we choose that word? A term so loaded with overtones of religion and holy creed, at polar opposites to the secular truth we are oath-bound to serve.’
‘Belief is not always a matter of religion,’ said Garro. ‘Faith can be a thing of men as well as gods.’
‘You think so? Perhaps then you ought to venture below decks and visit the empty water store on the forty-ninth tier, and share your viewpoint with those gathered there.’
Garro’s brow furrowed. ‘I do not follow you.’
‘I have learned there is a church aboard your ship, captain,’ said Iacton, ‘and the congregation swells with each passing day.’
SINDERMANN LOOKED UP as Mersadie tapped him on the shoulder. He put down the electroquill and slate.
He saw she had a couple of men with her, two junior officers in the uniforms of the engineering division.
The remembrancer hesitated, and one of the men spoke. ‘We’ve come to see the Saint.’
Kyril threw a sideways glance along the length of the makeshift chapel. He saw Euphrati down there, talking and smiling. ‘Of course,’ he began. ‘You may have to wait.’
‘That’s all right,’ said the other. ‘We’re off-shift. Couldn’t make the… the sermon before.’
The iterator smiled slightly. ‘It was hardly that, just a few people of like mind, talking.’ He nodded to the dark-skinned woman. ‘Mersadie, why don’t you take these young gentlemen up?’ He patted his pockets. ‘I think I have a tract I could give you both.’
‘Got one already,’ said the man who’d spoken first. He showed Sindermann a frayed booklet with the kind of rough printing that came from old and rusted machinery. It wasn’t a pamphlet he had seen before, not one of those that had circulated on the Vengeful Spirit. It appeared that the Lectitio Divinitatus had already made inroads aboard the Eisenstein long before his arrival.
Oliton led the men away, and Kyril watched her go. Like all of them, only now was Mersadie coming to understand the path that was laid out before her. Sindermann knew she was holding true to her calling as a remembrancer, but the recollections that she stored in the memory spools of her augmented skull were not tales of the Great Crusade and of Horus’s glory. Mersadie had gently moved into the role of documentarist for their nascent credo. It was Euphrati Keeler’s stories that she wrote now, storing them and weaving them into a coherent whole. Kyril looked down at the data-slate where he had been attempting to marshal his own thoughts, and reflected. How could he ever have expected to become part of something like this? All around him, a church, a system of belief was accreting, gaining mass and potency beneath the shadow of the Warmaster’s rebellion. How could any fate have judged that he, Kyril Sindermann, primary iterator of the Imperial truth, was suited for this new role? And yet here he found himself, shepherding the words of Keeler, moulding them for the ears of the people even as Mersadie stood at his side, blink-clicking still images and recording Euphrati’s every deed.
Not for the first time, Sindermann traced the line of events that had brought him here and pondered how things might have played had he spoken differently, thought differently. He had no doubt that he would be dead by now, gunned down in the mass termination of the remembrancers aboard Horus’s battle-barge. It was only the intervention of Loken’s comrade Qruze that had saved their lives. The echo of the fear he felt at the sight of the bombing of Isstvan III whispered through him again. Death had been only a moment away, and yet Euphrati had shown no apprehension. She had known that they would live, just as she had been able to guide them to this ship and their escape. Once he would have rejected ideas of divine powers and of the so-called saints who communed with them. Euphrati Keeler took that scepticism away from him with her quiet authority, and made him question the secular light of unswerving reason he had lived his life in service to.
They had all been changed after that day at the Whisperhead Mountains, when Jubal had transformed into something that still defied categorisation in Sindermann’s thoughts. A daemon? In the end, Kyril was unable to find any other means to explain it away. His light of logic fled from him, his precious Imperial truth was found lacking. Then the horror had come again, this time to destroy them all.
But he lived. They lived, thanks to Euphrati. With his own eyes, Sindermann saw her turn the might of a warp-spawned monstrosity with nothing more than a silver aquila and her faith in the Emperor of Mankind. His need for denial perished with the hateful creature that day, and the iterator saw truth, real truth. Keeler was an instrument of the Emperor’s will. There was no other explanation for it. In His greatness – no, in His divinity – the Emperor had granted the imagist some splinter of His might. They had all been changed, yes, but Euphrati Keeler the most of all.
Gone was the defiant but directionless young woman whose picts had caught the history around them. In her stead there was a new creation, a woman both finding and forging the path for all of them. Kyril should have been afraid. He should have been terrified that they would perish fleeing from Horus’s perfidy. A single look at Keeler made that all disappear. He watched her talk to the two engineers, smiling and nodding, and a warmth spread through him. This is faith, he realised, and it is such a heady sensation! It was no wonder that the believers he had encountered during the Crusade resisted so hard, if this was what they felt.
Now, in the Lectitio Divinitatus, Kyril Sindermann found the same strength. His loyalty and love for the Imperium had never swayed. Now, if it were possible, he felt an even deeper devotion to the Lord of Man. He was ready to give himself to the Emperor, not just in heart and mind, but in body and soul.
He was not alone in this. The Cult of Terra, as it was sometimes known, was strengtheni
ng. The pamphlet in the engineer’s hands, the ease with which Mersadie was able to find this disused water reservoir in which to assemble their makeshift chapel, all these things showed that the Lectitio Divinitatus existed on this vessel. And if it was here on this small, unremarkable frigate, then perhaps it was elsewhere too, not just concealed in the midst of Horus’s fleet but maybe further afield, on worlds and ships spread across the Imperium. This faith was on the cusp of becoming a self-actualised creation, and all it needed was an icon to rally behind, a living saint.
Euphrati made the sign of the aquila and the two engineers followed suit. The hollow, nervous mood he had seen in their eyes upon their arrival was gone, and they walked away with purposeful strides, a new assurance in their spirits.
‘The Emperor protects,’ said the younger of the two as he passed the iterator, nodding in thanks. Kyril returned the gesture. The girl gave them faith and calmed their fears as she had with dozens of others. The train of men and women finding their way to this rough-hewn chapel had been slow at first, but now they were coming more often, to listen to him speak or merely to be in the presence of the young woman. Sindermann marvelled how word of Keeler had spread.
‘Kyril!’ He turned to see Mersadie coming towards him in a rush, her perfect face turned in abject fear. ‘Someone is coming!’ The hushed dread in her words brought back memories of the secret ministry on the Vengeful Spirit, and of the men who had come at the Warmaster’s behest with bolters and clubs to destroy it. A lookout reported in, ‘Just one of them: a single Astartes.’
Sindermann stood up. He could hear heavy boot steps ringing off the gantry deck outside the service hatch to the reservoir chamber, coming closer. ‘Did the lookout see a weapon? Was he armed?’
‘When are they not?’ Oliton piped. ‘Even without sword or gun, when are they not?’
His answer was lost as the hatch slammed open and the reverberation put every other sound to silence. A towering form in marble-white armour bent to enter the compartment and the iterator saw the glitter of polished brass on an eagle’s-head cuirass. Sindermann stepped forward and gave a shallow bow to the Death Guard, fighting down his trepidation. ‘Captain Garro, welcome. You are the first Astartes to come here.’
GARRO LOOKED DOWN at the slight man. He was thin and nervous, a cluster of sticks in an iterator’s robes, but his gaze was steady and his voice did not waver. ‘Sindermann,’ noted Garro. He looked around at the inside of the reservoir. It was a large, cylindrical space some two decks tall, with grid-decked gantries on different levels and a network of pipes and vent shafts protruding into the chamber. Tall sheets of metal extended out from the walls to act as baffles when the drum was full of water, but when the chamber stood empty as it did now, they gave the place the look of a chapel knave rendered in old, bare steel. Cargo pallets from the service decks had been arranged as makeshift seating and there was an altar of sorts made from a fuel cell container. ‘Are you the architect of all this?’
‘I’m only an iterator,’ replied the man.
‘What are you doing in here?’ Garro demanded, a conflict of anger and frustration rising inside him. ‘What do you hope to achieve?’
‘That would be my question for you, Nathaniel.’ The imagist, the woman they were calling the Saint, walked forward into the light of a string of biolumes. ‘Keeler,’ he said carefully, ‘you and I will speak.’ She nodded and beckoned him. ‘Of course.’
‘You won’t hurt her!’ The other remembrancer, the one Qruze identified as Mersadie Oliton, snapped at him. Her words were half in threat, half in desperation, and Garro raised an eyebrow at her temerity.
Keeler spoke again, her voice carrying to all the silent congregation in attendance. ‘Nathaniel is here because he is no different from any one of us. We all seek a path, and perhaps I can help him to find his.’
And so, saint and soldier found a place in a shaded corner, and sat across from one another at the fringes of the lamplight.
‘THERE ARE QUESTIONS,’ she began, pouring cups of water for Garro and for herself. ‘I’ll answer them if I can.’
The captain grimaced and took the tiny tin goblet in his hands. ‘This cult goes against the will of the Imperium. You should not have brought your beliefs here.’
‘I could no more leave this than you could leave behind your loyalty to your brothers, Nathaniel.’
Garro grunted and drained the cup with a grim sneer. ‘And yet I have done exactly that, some would say. I have fled the field of battle, and for what? Horus and my own primarch will name me deserter for doing so. Men I have sworn to honour I have left to an uncertain fate, and even in my fleeing I have executed that poorly.’
‘I asked you to save us, and you have.’ Keeler watched him kindly. ‘And you will. You are the embodiment of your Legion’s name. You guard us against death. There is no failure in that.’
He wanted to dismiss her words as insincere and accuse her of speaking empty platitudes, but despite himself, Garro found he was grateful for her praise. He forced the thoughts away and pulled Kaleb’s papers from his belt pouch, the brass icon and its chain wrapped around them. ‘What meaning do these things have, woman? The Emperor is a force against false deities, and yet your doctrine talks of him as a god. How can this be right?’
‘You answer your own question, Nathaniel,’ she replied. ‘You said “false deities”, did you not? The truth, the real Imperial truth, is that the Master of Mankind is no sham divinity. He’s the real thing. If we acknowledge that, He will protect us.’ Garro snorted, but Keeler kept speaking. ‘In the past, a priest would ask you for faith based on nothing but words in a book, a tract.’ She gestured to the bundle of papers. ‘Does the Emperor do that? Answer my question, Astartes. Have you not felt His spirit upon you?’
It took an effort of will for Garro to speak. ‘I have, or so I think… I am not certain.’
Keeler leaned back in her chair, and her beatific, metered manner dropped away. She became challenging and focused, eschewing the saintly serenity he expected from her. ‘I don’t believe you. I think you are certain, but that you are so set in your ways that to voice it frightens you.’
‘I am Astartes,’ Garro growled. ‘I fear nothing.’
‘Until today.’ She eyed him. ‘You are afraid of this truth, because it is of such magnitude that you will forever be remade by it.’ Keeler placed her hand on his gauntlet. ‘What you do not realise is that you have already been changed. It’s only your mind that lags behind your spirit.’ She studied him carefully. ‘What do you believe in?’
He answered without hesitation, ‘My brothers, my Legion, my Emperor, my Imperium, but some of those are being taken from me.’
Euphrati tapped him on the chest. ‘Not from here.’ She hesitated. ‘I know you Astartes have two hearts, but you understand my meaning.’
‘What I have seen…’ His voice grew soft. ‘It pulls at the roots of my reason. I am questioning all that I thought absolute. The xenos psyker child that saw into me, that mocked me with jibes about what was to come… Grulgor, dead and yet returned to life by some gruesome infection… and you, glimpsed in my death-sleep.’ He shook his head. ‘I am as adrift as this ship. You say I have certainty but I do not sense it. All I see are paths to ruin, a maze of doubt.’
The woman sighed. ‘I know how you feel, Nathaniel. Do you think that I wanted this?’ She pulled at the robes she wore. ‘I was an imagist, and a damned good one. I depicted history as it was made. My art was known on thousands of worlds. Do you think that I wanted to feel the hand of a god upon me, that I dreamed one day of becoming a prophet? What we are is as much where destiny takes us as it is what we do with the journey.’ Keeler gave a slight smile. ‘I envy you, Captain Garro. You have something I do not.’
‘What is that?’
‘A duty. You know what it is that you must do. You can find that clarity of vision, a mission that you can grasp and strive to fulfil. But me? Each day of my calling is new, a different challenge, con
stantly striving to find the right path. All I can be sure of is that I have an aspiration, but I can’t yet see its shape.’
‘You are of purpose,’ murmured the Astartes.
‘We both are,’ agreed Keeler. ‘We all are.’ Then she reached out and touched his cheek, and the sensation of her fingers against his rough, scarred face sent a tingle through Garro’s nerves. ‘Since you delivered this ship from the predations of the warp, some of the crew have been praying here for a miracle to save us. They asked me why I did not join them in their calls to the Emperor and I told them there was no need. I told them: “He has already saved us. We only have to wait for His warrior to find the means”.’
‘Is that what I am? The Emperor’s divine will, made flesh?’
She smiled again, and with it she brought forth again the flutter of powerful emotion that Garro had felt alone in the barracks. ‘Dear Nathaniel, when have you ever been anything else?’
‘STATUS,’ ORDERED QRUZE, catching Sendek’s eye at the control console.
The Death Guard nodded at the Luna Wolf with more than a little weariness in his manner. ‘Unchanged,’ he replied, casting about the bridge to see if any of the officers had anything else to add. Carya met his gaze and silently shook his head. Many of the shipmaster’s crew, including the woman Vought, had been granted temporary suspension of their duties in light of the empty void where they found themselves, leaving the ever-wakeful Astartes to man the bridge while the men and women took some small respite. ‘Machine-call signals continue to cycle on the short-range vox, although at a generous estimate they will not reach any human ears for at least a millennium.’
The Flight of the Eisenstein Page 24
