Horusian Wars: Resurrection

by John French

  ‘Raise your arms to the side, palms open and towards me,’ said Enna. The man spread his arms. ‘Turn around slowly.’

  ‘You are the child pilgrims from the land above,’ he said as he turned. He looked weak, and old, and half-starved, but he had moved amongst the wreckage with a careful grace. He had the look of a hermit she had once seen on the mountains of Keh: kept alive by a faith that was halfway to madness. ‘I watched you after you came from the sky. You are looking for revelation.’

  The man lowered his arms, and looked directly at Enna, gaze to gaze through the pitch black. His eyes were shining coins. Ice coiled through her. Something inside her shuddered. The eyes were… She had…

  ‘What is this revelation?’ said Covenant as he stepped up next to her. The sound of the cannon rotating on his shoulder was a whisper.

  ‘I cannot tell you,’ said the man. Enna heard one of the others start forward. Covenant raised a hand. The bearded man turned his head as though looking between them each in turn. As though he could see them clearly. ‘I cannot tell you, but I can show you how it begins.’

  The old man moved ahead of Enna as he led them deeper. She kept her carbine aimed at his back, the blind-light illuminating him clearly. Covenant was just behind her, the rest of the team strung out further back in the tunnel. It was narrow, barely wide enough for her to walk along with her shoulders square. The old man had to stoop, but he moved without hesitation, avoiding projections in the roof and walls without error or effort.

  ‘Why did you make the pilgrimage, child?’ he asked, turning his head back towards her as he moved. Something about the movement was not right, as though it were just a fraction too far for a human head to turn.

  ‘I…’ she began, not sure why she was answering. ‘I am following the will of my master.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ he said, continuing to move ahead of her. ‘Don’t we all? The Emperor ordained all that was, and we are his people, so we all follow what he willed.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she found the question coming from her lips before she was aware of it. Behind her she heard the sound of Covenant following close, but no objection or reprimand came from him.

  ‘I am a pilgrim who came here a long time ago. Now I am the last.’

  ‘That is not an answer.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘I had a name once, but it meant nothing.’

  ‘You act like you were waiting for us?’

  ‘I was,’ said the man, and the words made Enna’s finger poise on the trigger of her gun. ‘Someone would come. Someone always comes in search of revelation.’

  The man turned a corner. Enna followed and stopped. A tunnel mouth framed the man as he reached out and took a candle from a ledge. His hands moved deftly. Sparks flashed. Light blazed around him as a flame kindled. It might have been no more than candlelight, but in her dark-sight it burned like the rays of the sun.

  ‘This is the threshold,’ he said, and moved forward, ‘the beginning of revelation.’

  Enna stepped forward, blinking the intensity of her dark-sight down as she entered the space beyond the tunnel mouth. Covenant followed her, shotgun ready, shoulder cannon sweeping the flame-diluted gloom. He raised his hands and pushed his goggles up on to his forehead, pupils widening from pinpricks. Josef came after him, hammer in hand.

  The space was a cavern, vast and yawning far beyond the reach of the candle flame. The roof was a curve of water-hollowed rock, not the artificial blocks or detritus that formed the upper strata of the catacombs. This was the bedrock of Iago, raw and dark, glittering with veins of minerals. Jagged holes opened into narrow shafts up to the layers of debris and refuse above. Pale crystals ringed each opening. The ground beneath their feet was black, metallic sand. Just at the edge of sight, a wide, flat pool of black liquid shone like a mirror under the candle flame. The air had a still, chemical scent.

  ‘This is it,’ said the man. ‘This is the void of resurrection. You have arrived.’

  And he reached down with the candle to a channel cut at the bottom of the cavern wall. A tongue of blue and orange flame leaped up above the channel and ran into the dark, circling the cavern in flame. The crystals and veins of mineral shone with reflected and shattered light. Small openings lined the wall.

  Enna tore the goggles from her eyes as the light burned into her.

  ‘Blood of the saints,’ whispered Josef close to her. She looked up, sight still swimming with retinal burns.

  A huge statue of rusted metal and crumbling rock rose at the chamber’s centre. It did not stand, but lay on its back, like a corpse on a battlefield. Twisted girders were ribs rising from the ruin of a chest made of fused supporting struts and battered sheet metal. Its splayed limbs were chewed masses of pipes, bloated by clots of corrosion. A halo of broken bars surrounded its head, and gouged eye sockets looked up at the cavern roof from a face of hacked rockcrete. Steps led up its cheek, and to a door set in its open mouth. The pool surrounded a shelf of stone, which the figure lay on. Stepping stones led across the water from three sides.

  Enna let out a breath and watched it drift as pale mist on the chem-scented air. In the service of her mistress she had persecuted cults and demagogues whose beliefs had opened them to the influence of the warp. She had seen countless strands of the divergent belief that existed amongst humanity. She knew what she was looking at. It was just not what she had expected to find here.

  ‘What is this a representation of?’ asked Glavius-4-Rho.

  ‘It is the Emperor,’ said Covenant. ‘It is the Emperor in death.’

  The man, who had led them down, looked at Covenant and nodded.

  ‘You see and understand,’ he said. ‘The slain god who cannot die, but must die.’

  Enna heard a sharp intake of breath from behind her, and glanced around. Severita’s face was a mask of confusion and rage. Enna knew that look; it was the look of a fanatic in a universe that was filled with fanatics of a different breed.

  The orthodoxy of the Imperial Creed was not a single set of beliefs in the divinity of the Emperor, but a commonality amongst wildly different practices. At the core of that wide spread of expression, the differences were often small – minor differences in ritual or litany – but the further out from that core one passed, the greater the differences became. From the fire-cleansing Redemptionists of Necromunda who saw sin in every soul, to the Renewers of Sutio who represented the Emperor as a great tree from which all trees and life sprung, there were as many faces to His divinity as there were stars in the heavens. At the edges of this sprawling diversity was the blurred borderland of heresy, in which belief slipped away into an abyss.

  ‘A resurrection cult…’ said Josef, looking at Covenant with an expression that Enna could not read. ‘The Renewed… they are a resurrection cult.’

  ‘You know the name of the blessed?’ said the man. ‘I knew that you did not come here as pilgrims of ignorance.’

  ‘What is this expression of faith that you refer to?’ asked Glavius 4-Rho, his brass spider legs shifting him forward on the black sand shore.

  ‘That the Emperor is immortal,’ said Josef, carefully, ‘an eternal and divine presence trapped in the physical form. That he is shackled to the world, not able to ascend to his true power. That he is a god caught between death and new life.’

  ‘It is a creed that is seen across many worlds, with many variations,’ added Enna, and looked at Severita’s stony face and the tension holding her weapons very still at her side. ‘And many denouncers.’

  ‘Heresy…’ hissed Severita, closing her eyes as a tremor ran through her. ‘The Emperor is eternal.’

  ‘He is the soul of all things,’ said the man, turning to walk across the sand, bare feet leaving tracks in his wake. ‘He is the doorway to new beginnings within us all.’ He stepped onto the surface of the pool and began to walk towards the statue. Covenant moved to
follow. Severita paused for a moment, then breathed a prayer that stole the hard anger from her face, and followed.

  Ice whipped through Enna. She did not want to move. She did not want to cross the water. For a second she froze, unable to carry on. Then the feeling was gone, and she was following the others, feet splashing on the skim of liquid as they walked across water towards the image of a dead god and the door which yawned black in his mouth.

  ‘Come and see revelation,’ said the man. ‘Come and see…’

  ‘Revelation…’ muttered Josef, behind her. ‘That has a habit of meaning answers we didn’t want to find.’

  Eleven

  Cold light flickered through the chamber as glow strips lit along the roof. Enna’s eyes adjusted to the light immediately. The walls were mirror-flat rock of storm-cloud grey, flecked with crystal. They had climbed the statue of the dead Emperor and found the stairs in his mouth that led down to this chamber beneath the lake and statue above.

  The room they emerged into was roughly circular, at least six hundred metres across. While the previous cavern with the lake had a sense of a fane, this deeper chamber seemed closer to a laboratory. Row upon row of open stone sarcophagi ringed a central space, from which something that looked like a broken pillar rose to point at the vast dome above. Pipes snaked across the vaulted roof. Bunched chrome limbs hung above plasteel tables. Blades, saws and injectors tipped each of the articulated arms. Drainage grooves edged the brushed metal slabs.

  Covenant stopped beside Enna, eyes moving slowly over the chamber.

  ‘What is this?’ breathed Josef from beside the inquisitor.

  Glavius-4-Rho moved down the steps to one of the sarcophagi. Still water filled it to just beneath the brim. He extended his hand.

  ‘Do not touch His tears!’ hissed the old man, who had fallen to his knees on entering the chamber.

  Glavius-4-Rho did not seem to register the man’s words, and dipped a sensor tipped digit into the liquid. A circular wave rolled across the water’s surface as he withdrew the hand.

  ‘This liquid has the same constituents as that in the pool outside. The tincture is complex, lethally toxic across a broad spectrum, and exotically psycho-active.’

  ‘It makes you see visions, and then it kills you,’ growled Josef.

  ‘It realigns the nerve and brain structure and then suspends the biological processes, is a more accurate summary. From the arrangements in this chamber I would say that they bring subjects here and immerse them, though it would be an inefficient method of execution, and the toxicity of the substance would make it a short-lived form of torture.’ The tech-priest rotated his head to look in their direction. Static clattered from his chrome skull smile. ‘Literally so,’ he added.

  ‘Water is the door to the realm of death and dreams,’ said Covenant softly, stepping further into the chamber, eyes looking to his right, psycannon to his left.

  ‘Just like the Tenth Path on Dominicus Prime…’ said Josef, looking down into the mirror surface of one of the sarcophagi. ‘The water washes the pilgrim clean, so that the warp can plant its seed.’

  ‘No,’ said Covenant. ‘This is something different. Talicto did not create this. He found it.’

  ‘There is an object in this one,’ said Glavius-4-Rho.

  ‘Do not…’ began the hermit, coming to his feet, but Josef caught the man’s shoulder in a strong hand.

  The tech-priest’s mechadendrites arched over his shoulders and plunged down into the sarcophagus. The oiled metal fizzed as they twitched ripples across the water’s surface. Then they tensed, and yanked a body from the water. Liquid splashed on the floor. Waves ran from one end of the sarcophagus to the other. The hermit moaned.

  Glavius-4-Rho held the body for a second, the metal snakes of his mechadendrites coiling around it as he shifted his grip. It was human, or appeared so. Sodden rags hung from it, and a tattered fabric mask clung to its face.

  ‘Let them dream…’ said the hermit in a soft voice. ‘They found their path. Let them dream until he calls them.’

  ‘Life signs negative,’ pronounced Glavius-4-Rho, and began to peel the rags from the corpse. The smoke of the micro-laser cutter rose from the rotten fabric. His mechadendrites wound and rewound around the corpse, turning it over like an insect in a spider’s thread. Enna watched as fluted pipes extended from his throat and sucked the smoke and steam from the air.

  ‘Fabric is mundane,’ he said, ‘manufactured from reclaimed bio-matter. Immersion in the toxin has retarded the decomposition of both the corpse material and fibres. I noted a similar absence of micro fauna in the cavern above.’

  A set of razors split the rags, and they sloughed off the pale flesh beneath.

  ‘Male,’ he said. ‘Judging by general parameters and age markers, perhaps no more than seventeen years old. His muscles were not well developed, nor are there any signs of muscle grafting or augmentation. That is at odds with my experience of the combat effectiveness of this variety of…’ He clicked for several seconds, and Enna wondered if literal wheels were turning in his skull as he struggled to find a suitable word.

  ‘Assassin,’ said Josef in a cold rumble. ‘The word you are looking for is assassin.’

  Glavius-4-Rho did not respond, but turned the corpse until its bare head was just a hand span from the chrome of his own face.

  ‘There is something in its mouth…’ murmured the magos, eyes whirring as they focused. Pincer fingers reached between the corpse’s teeth, and then retracted. A bright circle of metal gleamed between Glavius-4-Rho’s digits. ‘A coin. Silver. Both faces stamped with the same design. That is a point of concordance with the description given by specialist/soldier Koleg of the Renewed cultist that he examined in the Reliquary Tower.’ The magos spun the coin, and then tucked it away beneath his robes. For a moment, Josef thought of Talicto running a coin over his knuckles as he listened to Covenant denounce him at the conclave.

  Glavius-4-Rho had shifted his grip on the corpse. His eyes were projecting a wide beam of blue light across its face.

  ‘Features are unremarkable,’ he said. ‘I would have to examine other specimens to be sure but it would indicate Renewed cultists are unexceptional in terms of appearance despite their prodigious combat ability.’

  ‘What do you mean by unexceptional?’ asked Enna. Josef, Severita and Glavius-4-Rho looked at her, but Covenant had moved off the steps and had walked to the side of another sarcophagus. He was looking down at the mirror surface of the liquid within. Enna glanced back at the tech-priest. ‘Koleg just said that the face of the Renewed beneath the mask he removed seemed ordinary. That’s not unexceptional, that’s just unexpected. So what do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that these specimens of what we call the Renewed demonstrate a wide variety of physical types, none of which include the physical fitness or augmetics necessary to endure a cyclonic dust storm, overcome armoured warriors of the Adeptus Sororitas, and kill several members and servants of the Inquisition. It should not be within the physical or psychological range of these specimens.’

  ‘The flesh is not weak,’ said Josef.

  ‘I am not sure what you mean,’ said Glavius-4-Rho. ‘The point is that it is weak. These individuals have overridden that weakness. The question is how.’

  ‘They drown them,’ said Covenant. He did not look up from the water in the sarcophagus in front of him. ‘That is how it begins. They immerse them awake and alive. They hold them under until the water fills their lungs, and their fears drown their thoughts. Then they take them out and begin work. They cut, and siphon, and pull something back to life. It is not the same person. They are something different to what they were before. Young or old, mundane or witch, they rise anew, stronger, unburdened by doubt or memory. The coin in the mouth is a ritual symbol of transition from one state to another.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Enna. Covenant glanced
at her, and raised an eyebrow for a second.

  ‘The idea is not new,’ he said, ‘just the expression.’

  ‘The Renewed…’ said Josef, and Enna saw the preacher shiver, his hand gripping the haft of his hammer. ‘The Adeptus Arbites reports said that they took all kinds from the surface and higher strata. Without their masks, they could be anyone.’

  ‘These devices are not within even the broadest scope of my knowledge,’ said Glavius-4-Rho. ‘Revival of the dead is a mystery of the lachrymae, but your assertion is consistent with what I can determine of these machines.’ He paused, extending a brass digit to tap a cluster of metal and crystal tubes. ‘Their spirits are unclean. I do not know what you would make by such artifice.’

  ‘Something closer to the divine,’ said Covenant, turning and moving to stand above the hermit. ‘That is what you believe happens here, isn’t it? The living are remade in the image of the dead Emperor.’

  ‘They are the children of the dead king…’

  ‘We have seen the results of how they believe they touch the divine. Talicto must have found them, subverted them to his control, and then declared them purged.’

  Enna looked down into one of the stone tanks. Her face looked back at her from the mirror of the water’s surface. She thought of Idris, of the rag-swathed figure coming from the smoke and flames, and the shard of crystal flying true from its hand.

  ‘If this has been here for a decade there could be hundreds, maybe thousands of remade subjects produced by this… method,’ said Glavius-4-Rho. ‘The failure rate is likely to be high, but…’

  ‘I am the person that you never saw,’ muttered Josef, ‘I am the hand that knocks on the door…’ Enna and the others all looked at the preacher, who shrugged. ‘Sorry, just an old ship-rhyme.’