‘No!’ I shouted, and tried to rise, reaching for her as the frame of the Titan lurched and Zavius’ back arched on his throne. Its metal was glowing with heat under an impossible covering of frost. ‘No!’
But Ishta-1-Gamma plunged the cable into the socket on her forehead. For a second she was still, frozen.
Light exploded through her. Metal became liquid. Ceramic became dust. And her form became a shadow suspended in the flash of her disintegrations.
Then Artefact-ZA01, the Titan that had slept silent in darkness for millennia, screamed.
War horns boomed. A rolling cry broke from every speaker grille. Steam poured from coolant vents in a rush. I felt the chamber pitch as the god began to rise. Then, with a sound like an avalanche of gears, it collapsed back. The lights on the consoles dimmed. Then the impact shockwave of the Titan falling back to the ground slammed me back into a girder. My consciousness failed and blackness filled me.
‘It was a failure,’ I said. ‘It cannot wake. It should never wake.’
Atropos tilted its head beneath its graphite-weave cowl. Lenses flicked from green to cold blue. No reply was given.
I had woken in a chamber bare of machines and blessed only with the light of caged lumen spheres. The damage to my physical components had been repaired. My chronometric measures indicted that I had been unconscious for one hundred and five hours. Atropos had been there when I regained consciousness.
‘You know what they are,’ I stated. ‘Ishta-1-Gamma found the remnants of the records you had imperfectly expunged from the cogitator-sifts.’ I held up the crushed data capsule that I had carried in my robes. ‘She wanted to believe that there was a purpose to what you… in what we were doing here. A higher illumination that was guiding our actions… She linked to the machine to prevent it waking fully. It was the only way. If we had had known, if she had known…’
‘Your contributions to the endeavour are no longer required,’ said Atropos. ‘Your efforts and diligence up until this point mean that no censure will follow you. You will submit to a total data purge before you depart.’
Atropos turned and glided away.
‘I will remember, though,’ I called and even now I am struck by the emotion in my words, the humanity, you might say.
Atropos half turned. ‘Ghosts caught in flesh are not truth. Data is truth. And only truth will be heard. You may keep your memories, Glavius-4-Rho.’
I left the facility four hours and forty-five seconds later. The rites that purged my data reservoirs and sensor captures were thrice performed. I left with nothing. The shuttle did not take me back to one of the forge fanes but up to a ship in orbit and a summons to attend the forges of Kelio 4 as Magos-Maxmima. I never spoke again of what I had seen.
‘Did you ever find out what happened to them, to the Titans, to the facility?’ asked Severita.
Glavius-4-Rho adjusted a dial on a control panel. An armature of chrome unfolded from the top of the workbench. He lowered a tiny cog of grey polished metal into it.
‘What prompts you to enquire?’ he said.
Severita looked at him, unblinking. ‘I believe that I know when a story has not been fully told,’ she said.
He did not answer, but keyed a control and watched the fingers of the armature close on the cog. A hair-fine laser beam extended to the cog from a projector. A tiny wisp of smoke rose as the beam began to cut.
‘Truth is data,’ he said without turning from his work. ‘Do not stories need to be truth, also?’
‘There is more to truth than data,’ said Severita, ‘and more to stories than truth.’
He released the armature, removed the cog and turned to the sword that lay on the metal slab of the workbench. Its disassembled parts lay in gleaming rows beside the repaired blade.
‘I do not know what happened to the facility,’ he said at last. ‘But…’ he hesitated, and then pressed on. ‘There is the dream… I have not dreamed since I ascended to the priesthood. I do not believe my cognitive augmentation allows for it. But before I left, and sometimes since, I have had a dream… In that dream I am standing on the platform in the cavern beneath the mountain on Zhao-Arkkad. I am alone. The cavern is dark except for the lumen spheres on the platform. Beyond its edge the dark goes on beyond sight. I step to the platform edge, and look down…
‘And something moves. Something vast rises up, unfolding through the dark. I cannot move. I hear nothing. Silence swallows any cry. A vast head of metal lifts to become level with the platform. Dust falls from it. Its eyes are cold fire. I look into them, and I hear a voice. Her voice, Ishta-1-Gamma, echoing through me.
‘
‘And you hear her voice?’ asked Severita. ‘The other magos, it is always her?’
‘Always,’ said Galvius-4-Rho.
He turned to Severita, holding out her sword. It was fully assembled. The blade shone blue and silver in the light of the plasma torch burning on the workbench. All notches and blemishes had gone. The power field generator at the base of the blade gleamed with sacred oils.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘It is perfect again.’
She took it and muttered a prayer before sheathing it.
‘My thanks.’ She began to turn, hesitated. ‘For this and for your tale.’
Glavius-4-Rho was still for a moment, and then bowed his head and turned back to his machines.
THE THIEF OF CHALICES
‘There is no virtue to knowledge, no comfort in knowing. There is no greater curse that can be bestowed than insight and no higher blessing than to be oblivious. If you look for comfort in this age, seek ignorance; shun thought, close your mind and break its key.’
– Personal reflection of Inquisitor Silas Marr,
during his time in the Ordo Redactus
VI
Viola had crossed the threshold into the archive and begun to die. The poison was still a sweet taste on her tongue.
‘You need to keep moving,’ said their guide, glancing up at the racks of rotting tomes, scrolls and broken data-slates stacked above them. The light of the lantern carried by the servo-cherubs reached into the gaps between shelves and spiral stairs. Viola had the impression of wide silver eyes catching the light as it passed. ‘Even this close to the door, there are things watching.’
Viola glanced up again. The dark beyond their bobbing lights flowed down narrow gaps between towering shelf stacks.
‘I am Tristana. Just in case in you were wondering,’ said the guide, without looking back at them. The woman had been waiting for them just inside the door into this underworld of abandoned books – oak- skinned and wrapped in armour that looked like it was made of dry scales the colour of ash. She held a gun with a flared, pepper-pot barrel, and carried short, barbed spears in a quiver on her back. Blue-black traceries of inked burn-scars mottled her face and arms.
‘You want safeties off. You don’t look like the types to shoot each other from nerves but be careful, all right?’
Covenant did not reply but strode on. He wore a dark grey storm coat, and a black cuirass without mark or insignia. He had an Arbites pattern shotgun in his hands, and a flechette blaster twitched on a mount on his left shoulder. The mind-interfaced gun whirred as its targeting lenses focused on the spaces branching off from the path they walked. Severita kept three steps ahead of Covenant, her bolt pistols in her hands, the upper portion of her face hidden by a set of six-lensed infra goggles.
&n
bsp; Viola kept close to the guide, Tristana, and tried to ignore the sweet taste in her mouth.
‘Drink,’ the hag at the door to the Dead Archive had said.
Viola had looked at the chalice set on the plinth before the portal. The cup was iron and silver. Death-masks and dead hands ringed its bowl and stem. Rubies and cracked sapphires glinted in the eye sockets of the carved skulls. The liquid inside the bowl was clouded white.
The door that waited behind the plinth was circular. An iris of corroded bronze sealed its mouth and Viola could see the glint of servitor eyes in the nests of cables that hung from the tunnel roof above them. She did not need to see them to sense the threat and promise of the weapons aimed at them from the dark. This was not a place of welcome.
The hag had stood before the door. She was twice Viola’s height, withered flesh bonded to a clicking exoskeleton of stilt-like piston-legs and armatures shaped like the bones and ribs of a cadaver. White hair hung lank and ragged from the brow above eyes like black pearls. Two attendants stood just behind the hag. They wore robes the colours of cobwebs. Both held lumen globes on poles and both had their eyelids sewn shut.
‘There is no other way?’ asked Viola, looking up at the hag.
‘No other way if you wish to pass beyond this door,’ replied the hag, and Viola thought she saw a smile twitch the woman’s dry lips. ‘This is an archive that now belongs only to the dead. If you wish to seek a ghost of knowledge within, then you too must die.’
Viola glanced at Covenant, but the inquisitor’s gaze was steady on the hag.
‘She will not let us pass,’ he said to Viola. ‘We would have to kill her and all of the other guardians of the door that we cannot see, and then we would have to breach the door, and proceed without a guide. Is that not right?’
The hag had given a rasping wheeze that might have been a chuckle.
‘Just so,’ she said. ‘Those who pass into this archive must die before they cross the threshold and live only if they return within the time allotted to them.’ She extended an arm and stroked her hand across the bulbs of hourglasses hanging from the ceiling above her. ‘You have the power or the coin to reach this threshold, but to pass further you must forfeit your life. There is no other way.’
Covenant had held Viola’s gaze for a long moment and given a small nod. She had felt her mouth compress into a thin line but had returned the gesture. They were here without the mark of Covenant’s Inquisitorial authority. To the hag they were but a party of script seekers, wealthy, powerful, but not the anointed servants of the Emperor himself. Watching the hag grin down at them, Viola had wondered if the ancient creature suspected what they were but did not care.
Covenant had moved forwards, lifted the chalice and drained the poison within. Viola and Severita had followed suit. The hag had chuckled and unhooked the hourglasses from the ceiling above and set the sand within running. Each of them had drunk and each time the hag had filled it for the next. Viola had drunk last, and as she had she had looked up and seen that the hag was watching her, smiling.
‘A price must always be paid,’ the woman had said. ‘Life for the dead. Death for the living.’ Viola had drained the cup and placed it back on the plinth without replying. Her timer now hung from her waist, its weight tapping against her thigh as she followed the guide, Tristana.
‘How far to the location?’ asked Viola.
‘Not the right question,’ replied Tristana without looking around. ‘What you should ask is how long will it take and do you have enough life to get there and get back.’
‘How long, then?’ asked Viola.
‘Difficult to say. You can’t even tell me exactly what it is you are after, in a location that was probably in a secured stack even before this place was sealed and given to the dead. That means that it might take hours, it might take days, or we might not find it at all.’
‘It is here,’ said Covenant, his voice clear and certain.
‘Well, confidence is good,’ said Tristana with a snort of laughter. ‘But this place has a habit of taking it as a challenge, if you understand me.’
‘Do we have enough time?’ asked Viola.
‘Maybe,’ said Tristana, glancing back at Viola, and grinning. ‘The Doorkeeper was generous.’
‘Generous?’ replied Viola, glancing down into a void created where a thirty-metre-high shelf had collapsed through the corroded floor. Her eye caught the bulb of her hourglass hanging at her waist; there was already an inch-deep layer of sand in the bottom.
‘You get back before the sand vanishes and you can drink the antidote and live,’ said Tristana. ‘And that’s more time than I have seen carried down here in a long while.’
‘I did not know that many came to the sealed archives,’ said Viola.
‘They come,’ said Tristana with a grim laugh. ‘Script seekers and record hunters, just like you, all hoping to find something intact that the archivists will pay for.’
‘Do any leave with what they seek?’ asked Viola.
‘Some leave…’ Tristana replied, the mockery gone from her voice. ‘Some even leave with something they need, but none of us leave with what we were looking for.’
ONE
The lighter shed its escort craft as it curved in above the island. From inside the cockpit, Cleander von Castellan looked down at the sea glittering under the sun. From up here he could see the edge of the island balloon out into the depths beneath the water. Sprays of neon-bright weed clung to the rust-thick metal, billowing in the pulse of the tide. Above the water line, the island rose in spiked towers like fingers of coral, hung with ropes of script banners.
‘Lighter aircraft designate Phoenician,’ crackled a servitor’s voice from the vox in his flight helm, ‘this is Archive Node 001. You are clear to land on North Platform 72. Follow guidance signals.’
‘Received and understood, Archive Node 001,’ Cleander replied. ‘Proceeding as instructed.’ A touch of the controls and the curve of their path began to tighten. The lighter started to judder as its airspeed dropped. Thrusters began to fire, jolting the craft up into the air as it seemed about to fall. The bannered towers were so close now that Cleander felt that he could breathe on them. Just one small movement and the craft would be an orange smear of fire on a rusted pinnacle. Just one small movement… Would that be such a bad thing?
‘You all right?’ Josef growled from behind Cleander.
‘Never better,’ he said, and flashed a smile back at the old preacher. Josef’s face was pale and clammy above the collar of his bronzed battleplate. ‘You don’t look so good, though.’
‘I am as good as your flying lets me be,’ said Josef, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth and shifting his shoulders under the layers of ceramite plating. Kynortas and a quartet of troopers in bronze and green sat next to Josef in the lighter’s crew compartment.
‘I thought you like this kind of ride,’ called Cleander over the rising whine of altitude thrusters. They were coming in tight around a tower pinnacle now. Salt- and rust-clogged grotesques leered at them from lintels and ledges. The lighter shuddered and whined as its engines fought to keep it in the sky. ‘All those boarding actions and combat drops – shouldn’t this be like home for you?’
‘If you can lay on some incoming flak and a better than evens chance of not making it through the next minute, it might improve the experience,’ snarled Josef.
‘I can fly, you old bastard,’ said Cleander. ‘I am even more than slightly brilliant at it.’
‘Whatever you need to tell yourself to get us down on this cursed island is fine by me.’
The pinnacle vanished behind them, and a chasm between two towers opened beneath them. A landing pad clung to the flank of a tower. Cleander cut the engines and slammed the retro-thrusters to full. The lighter lurched to a halt, its frame screaming as it hung in the air. He held it in place for a secon
d and then let it sink down onto the plateau of metal.
He keyed the door release and was up and out of his flight harness before any of the others. Kynortas and the guards fell in behind him as he waited for the rear hatch to open fully. The household troopers wore bronze carapace over quilted ballistic weave fabric in dark blue and red. Draconic symbols coiled on shoulder guards and lasgun stocks, and glittered in the rings set on Cleander’s fingers. He smoothed the long coat of black and green, reset the smile on his face and looked around as Josef came to stand next to him.
For this excursion, the preacher had replaced his robes with powered half-armour that coated his torso and arms with massive plates of bronzed ceramite. The power pack set into the back was already chugging and whirring as it pumped power into the struts and fibre bundles that carried the weight. Below the waist, Josef wore a skirt of chainmail and layers of blue fabric and boiled leather. A bolt carbine was mag-clamped to his waist, and he held a long staff in his right hand.
‘Heralds generally smile,’ said Cleander.
‘Is that right?’ said Josef, scowling at the widening view beyond the hatch.
Cleander stepped down the ramp as it touched the landing pad. The air was hot, and he overrode the need to squint as the sun struck his face. Salt-laden wind spilled his hair as he crossed to the people waiting at the edge of the landing platform. The two in the front were hunched, their wizened flesh crawling with inked tattoos. Exo-braces coiled up their spines and necks, providing the support that their failed muscles could not. Behind them stood a block of figures in matt-black armour. Each had a plough-fronted helm and all of them carried wide-mouthed guns with the poise of those who knew how to use them.
He stopped and widened his smile as he looked at the wizened pair and their guards. Josef lumbered to a halt a step in front of him and slammed his staff into the floor. A banner of emerald fabric unfolded from the staff, caught the wind and spilled out. The device of a winged lion in golden thread clawed its crimson field.
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