Penitent

by Dan Abnett

  We came to a long gallery where many more macabre sculpture displays had been raised from the bone litter. Skulls mounted on serpentine trunks of braided spines leered at us like lamia out of the fossorial gloom. Skulls hung inside baskets of ribs, like birds in cages. A skeletal beast, with far too many legs, each of which was far too long, lurked like a titanic spider. It wore an intricate clavicle crown.

  ‘It’s different today,’ he said, then glanced at me. ‘Today? Tonight? I have no clue of the hour. Is it night yet?’

  ‘It’s always night here,’ I answered. ‘Why do you say it’s different?’

  ‘Something has stirred them up,’ he said. ‘The anatomists. Lightburn said they keep to themselves, and avoid the players when they come through. But not tonight. They’ve moved up to these levels. I’ve glimpsed them and heard them. I think they’re picking us off.’

  ‘Why would they do so?’ I asked.

  ‘I think something has risen up from the very deepmost places,’ he said, ‘and scared them towards the light. It has driven them before it.’

  I put no store by this. His mind had been playing pranks with him.

  ‘Why do you say that, Eyling?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve heard the rushing,’ he said. ‘Have you not? Now and then, a great rushing sound, like… Like the wind through trees. Or the crash of waves on a sea.’

  ‘There’s no sea here,’ I assured him. ‘Or any trees.’

  ‘But I’ve heard it,’ he insisted. ‘The rushing of a sea. I think the city is sinking into a great and hidden sea, and the flood tides have drowned the deep, and driven the anatomists up to these levels.’

  He stopped then. We both did. Another rat-skitter of bone in the darkness.

  ‘Do you know the way out?’ he asked, his voice very small and tight.

  ‘I cannot say yes to that,’ I replied, ‘but I have a hope.’

  I had been following the markers. Those odd and deliberate bones still seemed to me to point the way, though now I was beginning to suspect that, like Eyling, my mind was simply imposing order where there was none. That tibia – had it been placed there on purpose to point the way, or was it simply lying where it had fallen?

  Was I tracing a pattern that my mind had invented? I did not tell him so.

  Eyling grabbed my sleeve suddenly.

  ‘Is that a light?’ he asked.

  The chthonic blackness ahead was indeed invested with a pallor, and it was no trick of the eye. It was a lambent glow, like limelight, and as we hurried towards it across a shingle of metacarpals, it grew brighter. A light at last.

  It glared at us, a soft white radiance tinged with green. We passed under a high archway of vertebrae, and through a longbone colonnade where every upright femur was capped with a jawbone finial.

  The chamber beyond was vast, but it was not the outside we had hoped for. Some algae afflicted the dripping walls, and issued a photoluminescent haze that filled the place with snow-soft light. Wooden pews, taken from some temple, and rotting with age and mildew, had been placed in rows along the cavern floor. They were occupied. A congregation of skeletons, wired and screwed into their seats, all faced forwards, with decayed hymnals in their fleshless laps or hooked upon their finger bones. There were hundreds, filling all the pews in silent worship.

  I saw what they faced, what they had all been wired to gaze at.

  My heart broke a little. After all this time, I had found an angel, that which I had yearned for to bring me clarity, and balance out the daemons that polluted my life.

  But it was long dead.

  CHAPTER 9

  Of angels and anatomists

  The angel hung upon a cross at the front of the anatomists’ parody of a temple. It had been crucified, with iron pins driven through its arms, ankles and outspread wings. Algae had invested its bones so that they glowed with frosty light, like the cavern walls.

  ‘Their minds are twisted,’ Eyling muttered. ‘This is their greatest desecration.’

  I nodded. The anatomists had constructed abominations throughout the chambers of the ossuary, things that were perverse and bizarre, and a disgrace to the ways of nature. But this seemed a greater disgrace, because it was, in a way, more beautiful: a magnificent winged figure, nailed to timber beams.

  So yes, I nodded in agreement with the vagabond, but I had noticed details that he had not.

  Every sculpture we had seen thus far had been built of human bone in defiance of anatomical sense. But I could not tell how this angel had been made. The bones were assembled in what seemed like natural order. This was no mix of parts thrown together. And even given the disfigured and abnormal nature of many bones the anatomists chose and favoured, I could not discern where these had come from.

  I approached the crucifixion and gazed up at it. The figure was a giant, well over two metres tall. Where did bones of such magnitude originate? They seemed to match, as if this was no sculpture but a whole body preserved. There was something odd and shell-like about the massive thorax and heavy sternum. And the wings were not crafted from pilfered human longbones. They seemed like the bones of real wings. What avian creature possessed wings with a four-metre spread, and where could its remains have been found? How had they been attached in such a seemingly authentic way?

  Close up, I saw that the giant’s bones were clad in a flaking husk, like old parchment, the sorry vestiges of skin and tissue. It was not an artful construct of depraved anatomists. It had been real and whole, a winged giant that had once been alive.

  ‘They make sick mockery of the Brightest One,’ said Eyling, who knew the myths too. He did not dare speak the name aloud, but I knew it. The Great Angel was a saint of ancient legend, who had fought at the side of the God-Emperor in the Last Conflict of Terra, and had fallen in sacrifice to a vengeful spirit in the final hours.

  This was sacrilege indeed, certainly as Eyling saw it. But he, in his outrage, had no eye for the forensic detail. To me, it was worse than blasphemy, for I was sure it was real. An angel, murdered and crucified, proof of the divine that infuses the One Faith, displayed as a grim trophy.

  I felt I might weep.

  ‘It is Astartes,’ I said.

  ‘It is not,’ he refused, with a sharp shake of his head.

  ‘It is, Eyling. Look at the bones of it. The scale of them is more than human.’

  ‘Astartes are a myth!’ he snapped.

  ‘We are in a realm of myths here,’ I replied, then added, ‘Besides, they are not.’

  ‘They are,’ he returned, ‘and any fool-child can tell you they do not have wings.’

  ‘The primarch did–’

  ‘Speak not to me his name!’ Eyling said, raising his hands to stopper his ears. ‘And even if he did, blessed be his might, Astartes do not.’

  I stepped forward again, and knelt, sifting through the litter and refuse at the base of the cross. Old books had been piled up, gone to dust and mulch, along with other pitiful tributes.

  ‘I thought it was daylight,’ Eyling murmured from behind me.

  ‘I did too,’ I answered.

  ‘The glow, I thought it was a way out, but no. Just shining slime in a hellpit. Why does it make light?’

  ‘It is a chemical process, Eyling,’ I replied, still sifting. I had found something, a large object under the heap of dead books, hard and metal.

  ‘Tricked by slime, that is my life,’ Eyling cursed.

  It was a warhelm of some size, too large for human use. It was caked in grave-mould and dirt, and its lustre was gone, but it had once been red.

  ‘We must move on, girl,’ Eyling said behind me, paying no attention. ‘I saw light, and it gave me hope, but it was a deceit. We must move on.’

  ‘We will,’ I replied. I scraped dirt off the helm’s dome, and picked crusts of mould from the eyepieces. I knew this pattern, for I had seen it
in variation. Astartes armour, without doubt. Upon the brow was marked, in black, the numeral ‘IX’.

  ‘Nine,’ I murmured.

  ‘Yes, I am nine,’ Eyling said. ‘Nine is my number. What of it?’

  ‘And you led me here,’ I mused. ‘To the light.’

  ‘What?’ He grew exasperated.

  The myths of Queen Mab and its underworld were toying with me. I had sought the light, and it had been false. I had traversed the underworld, and found no exit, but instead the angel I had prayed for, except that it was dead. Myths only linger if they have meaning. They are knowledge encoded in story so that they can be passed down through generations. I was surrounded by the symbols of myth, and yet could not extract a meaning.

  I decided there was none, and there never had been. I was seeing patterns that were not patterns, and appreciating symbols that were not symbols, just as I had done with the bone markers. All my life, I had wanted to make sense of the world, and that desire had become so desperate, I was manufacturing sense. There were no myths. I was a woman lost in a bonehouse, bewildered by the darkness. The world had no sense to offer me, for it had none, and all the signs and signifiers were not symbols for anything.

  I heard a smack, like the impact of a bullet.

  I looked to Eyling. He turned to me with an expression of puzzlement on his face. There was a hole in his neck from which blood was flowing in great quantities. He was already dead.

  There came a second crack. Eyling lurched as something struck his temple, and the impact dropped him on his back. His legs twitched as the life went out of him. On his head, where he had been struck the second time, a huge weal had raised.

  More impacts struck around me, one scattering bone chips near my feet. I could hear no report of gunfire, but I was being shot at. An impact took out my lamp, shattering the glow-globe. I dropped the pole and ducked for cover. Further impacts splintered the edge of the pew I had chosen for shelter. One missile hit hard, and bounced off the wood, its force spent. I saw that it was a human knucklebone. Slingshots, catapults… bones were being used as ammunition to fire at me.

  I saw the first anatomist when he rushed me down the length of the pew. He was hunched low in a scurrying gait, a spavined thing, emaciated and clad in dirt-black rags. His skin was caked with white bone-dust, like an aristocrat’s face powder, and his sunken eyes were filmy and glazed. He hissed through a mouth of broken yellow teeth and decayed gums, and swung an axe to cleave my head. The blade of the axe was a sharpened human scapula, the haft a femur.

  I sprawled on my back to evade the blow, and the axe missed my face by a whisker and bit into the pew. There was no time to regain my footing. I arched onto my shoulders, and caught his arm between my legs, then scissored, snapping the limb. As he staggered backwards, squealing, I made a back-spring onto my feet, and felled him with the heel of my hand.

  A second anatomist hurled himself across the pews to get at me, knocking free the heads of several of the skeletal congregation. I ducked aside, avoiding his grasp, and he tumbled to the ground. By the time he got up, I had drawn the burdener’s old hook-knife, which I rammed into his chest. He fell, but the blade had wedged fast, and his body took the knife with it.

  Lethal shots were whipping at me. Under the bone arch through which Eyling and I had entered, I spied half a dozen anatomists spinning slings and loosing knucklebone pellets. The missiles struck the pews, puffing splinters, and rattling the seated skeletons. One shot hit a skull, blowing it apart like old crockery. I dropped back low, hearing the pew thump and shake with impacts. If there was another way out of this place of crucifixion, I did not know it, and I dared not raise my head to look.

  I drew my quad-snub. It was a compact piece with a rubberised grip and a short, square snout of blued steel, with four barrels set like the pips on a die. A squeeze of the trigger fired each shot, clockwise from top right, but if the trigger was held, all four rounds would fire in such rapid succession as to be almost simultaneous. I reached to my belt for spare bullets, so that I might reload quickly when the first salvo was fired.

  Something struck the back of my head with great force. I blacked out, briefly, and came to on the ground with my cheek in the powder dust. I could smell blood in my sinuses, and the rear part of my skull throbbed with a stinging, radiating pain. My vision swam back into focus and I saw, on the ground, right in front of my nose, a human knucklebone that was wet on one side with blood.

  A slingshot had found its mark.

  I tried to rise. My body was sluggish. The impact had quite denied me sense. I could hear the anatomists calling out and approaching, and knew I would be dead if I did not stir quickly.

  But I was still too dazed.

  Then came a great, echoing detonation that seemed to lift the dust from the ground in front of my eyes with its shiver.

  A hand seized my shoulder.

  ‘Can you get up? Are you killed dead?’ a man asked, before firing another blast. ‘Can you move, woman?’ he demanded, shaking at me.

  I knew the voice. It was Renner Lightburn. I had come all this way to save him, but he had, once again, saved me.

  CHAPTER 10

  Which is of ways out

  Lightburn no longer had the great Thousander pistol that had been his pride. He fired a long-barrelled autopistol, a Gulet-P, that had seen better days.

  ‘Can you get up?’ he cried again, forcing the anatomists to dive and shelter with his steady shots.

  I could, though I was far from steady.

  ‘That’s twice now,’ I said.

  ‘Twice what?’

  ‘You’ve saved me.’

  ‘What?’

  Of course, he didn’t know. In the moment, I had forgotten that he had forgotten. One of Ravenor’s agents, Patience Kys, had put a telekine spear through his short-term memory so that he remembered nothing.

  His gun was out. He ducked to reload.

  ‘There’s a passage back there,’ he said, indicating with a jerk of his head. ‘When I make ’em cower again, run for it.’

  I took out the quad.

  ‘Let’s run now,’ I suggested.

  I swung up, my head woozy, and discharged all four loads. The quad-snub’s recoil jolted my hand. The shots blew the end off a pew, and smashed part of the vertebrae arch.

  We ran, as fast as we were able. He hooked his hand under my upper arm to steady me. A few bone missiles chased us. The passage was where he said it would be. We sped along its darkness, loose bones kicking out under our feet.

  ‘We have no light!’ I cried, stumbling.

  ‘Stay with me,’ he insisted.

  We ran into another vault space. More mould grew here, emitting light, though far less than in the eerie chamber we had exited.

  ‘In here,’ he said, and yanked me into the shelter of a dank culvert. We waited for sounds of pursuit. He quietly reloaded his pistol. His beard had grown in, and his hair was longer than before. He was also thinner, but he was the man I remembered. The tattooed litany of his Curst burden showed on his skin.

  I opened the break action of the quad, and a spring clip automatically ejected the warm shell casings. I slotted four more rounds in place, and snapped the quad shut.

  ‘That’s a decent piece,’ he said.

  ‘It is,’ I agreed, and slid around to watch for movement.

  ‘I’d ask how it come to belong to you,’ he said, ‘but a bigger conun­drum is what you’re doing here. Did you enter the bonehouse by mistake?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You ain’t no vagabond,’ he said, ‘and your clothes are good. I can’t think of no reason that a woman like you would be down here.’

  ‘You do not know what kind of woman I am like,’ I said.

  ‘True,’ he said. ‘But I look like a worthless Curst, for I’m exactly that, while you–’

 
‘I was looking for you,’ I told him.

  He squinted at me, baffled. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you?’ I returned.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I think you’ve gone an’ mistaken me for someone, mamzel. I’m but a Curst.’

  ‘You are number three,’ I said, ‘and your name is Renner Lightburn.’

  He was alarmed by this, and I couldn’t blame him.

  ‘You have forgotten all about me,’ I said. ‘Your memory was taken. But you knew me once, months ago. And you helped me, according to your burden.’

  He looked most doubtful and troubled, but I sensed I had struck something.

  ‘A few months back,’ he said quietly, but with some stern anger, ‘I woke in the street near the Coalgate. I couldn’t remember how I’d got there, or anything of the hours or days precedin’ that awakening. I wondered if I had drunk meself stupid on ’still juice, but I’ve never been no drinker. Well, I believe I’ve never been no drinker. I supposed then that I had been mugged, or had suffered some malady-fit. But a man such as me isn’t able to seek the expertise of a fancy medicae.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I continued with what I presumed had been me life,’ he said. He paused. ‘We knew each other?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You carried a Thousander when last we met.’

  ‘That I remember,’ he said. ‘It was with me a while. I ain’t got no idea where I lost it.’

  ‘The same night as your memory,’ I said.

  He stared at me in the blue gloom for so long, I began to feel uncomfortable.

  ‘I don’t know your face,’ he said at length. ‘Is this a trick? Are you tricking me?’

  ‘I am not,’ I said.

  ‘The gun. Your mention of the gun. That feels convincing. Few if any would know of that. I’m not a man much noticed. I ain’t a man of acquaintances.’