Servants of the imperium, p.11
Servants of the Imperium, page 11
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
A cracked, mosaic concourse led to the entrance of the library. Tufts of wiry, grey vegetation clung to its fissures, steadily prising them apart. Statues of politicians, warriors and priests stood in dilapidated ranks, worn by age or vandalism and served to emphasise the faded grandeur of the place.
The door to the library was tall, almost twice the height of the Custodians, and lay partly open, letting in the dirt and the vermin and anything else that chose to make this ruin its lair. A stone portico, its columns rendered into the likeness of saints and theologians, framed a grand entrance but had also succumbed to disrepair.
Cartovandis paused at the threshold as the three Custodians took in the monolithic structure.
Standing behind the others, Meroved regarded it too. ‘Magnificent, or at least it was once. A forgotten world…’ he murmured.
‘Then let us bring it back into the Throne’s light,’ said Cartovandis, and gestured to Adio. The two of them then heaved against the door, pushing it open. A chasm of darkness yawned beyond and there was the suggestion of a wide and sweeping stairway that led below.
Without further hesitation, Cartovandis led them inside.
Even with only ambient light coming through the dirt encrusting its glass ceiling, the devastation was obvious. A fire had ravaged the library, turning its tomes and scrolls to ash, blackening its halls and stacks. Part of the stairway had given way to the blaze, a ragged edge leading to further darkness and the collapsed remains of the steps below. Rot and disuse had sundered the rest, the air thick with spores and coiling with dust motes disturbed by the Custodians. As deserted as it first appeared, a light flickered below, distant but apparent.
Once again, Cartovandis asked himself why Meroved had waited for their arrival to act.
Upon reaching the base of the stairs they passed through the broken and sorry stacks to the edge of a large lectorium pit.
A dais sat in the middle of the pit, sparking with obscure technologies. Hoar frost crept over it. Wires and cables fed to it and the device that lay atop. It was a spherical cage, forged of black metal. Inside it sat two further spherical cages, one slightly smaller than the other. Each of these inner compartments turned slowly, in opposing directions, on the axis of the largest sphere. Thick spikes jutted both outwards and inwards. Carved sigils adorned the metal, deep enough that the half-light caught in their recesses. And within this tri-part prison, a man was turning along with the spheres, chained so that his arms and legs were splayed in a cross. Lightning arcs obscured further details, crackling across the surface of the metal.
As the Custodians reached the edge of the lectorium pit, a different man, in dark red robes and flak armour reminiscent of that worn by the Astra Militarum, turned to greet them.
‘I thought you might have survived,’ he said to Meroved, his voice urbane and with wisdom that belied his apparent youth. ‘I hoped you had survived to live to see the purpose of what I am trying to achieve.’
He cast his eye across the Custodians.
‘Behold…’ he uttered with almost breathless awe. ‘Auric gods.’ Orn shook his head. ‘You would not seek to stop me if you knew what I intended.’
‘Enslavement and death,’ Cartovandis replied. ‘We have witnessed your intent and are here to end it. Though I would know your plan before we kill you.’
‘Awakening,’ said Ylax Orn, and his next words made Cartovandis pause. ‘His awakening. Resurrection.’
The shadows moved at the edge of the light.
‘Blasphemy! You’ll die by my hand!’ Varogalant leapt into the pit and made for the Vexen Cage just as Orn’s minions surged out of the darkness. The crack of lascarbines heralded their arrival, men and women in heavy grey carapace armour. Dozens and dozens of them. They advanced along the balcony that delineated the edge of the pit, sharp red flashes denoting their positions. In a few seconds, the air was filled with heat and las.
Adio took the brunt of the blasts against Bulwark, sweeping his cloak aside to reveal gilded auramite to the cultists, inspiring awe in some before he advanced down the left side.
‘To the other side!’ snapped Meroved, gesturing to Cartovandis as he went after Varogalant.
Mirroring Adio, Cartovandis went right. His sentinel blade, Arcana, roared in his grasp, its attached bolt casters breaking apart the frail mortal bodies sent against him. They held their ground despite the onslaught, finding cover behind upheaved benches and debris. As soon he got close enough to wield Arcana as a broadsword it would be over.
Adio barrelled a cultist over the edge of the balcony with his shield as the mortal’s ill-considered charge went awry. Then he let loose with Puritas and the fight was all but done.
Down in the pit, Orn had retreated onto the dais as more of his cohorts rushed to defend him from inside.
Varogalant cut them apart, barely slowing down.
A few with breacher shields and power mauls braved hand-to-hand, but lasted only a few seconds longer. At last, they brought up a heavier gun and from his vantage above the pit, Cartovandis saw the first ranks for what they really were – a distraction.
It came out on tracks, a Rapier mount designed to take on armour. A flare-nosed graviton cannon rumbled as it emitted a heavy particle burst that struck Varogalant in the chest and crushed him into the ground. Stone slabs split and the floor cracked beneath him. He did not rise.
Then the track-mount turned, angling its cannon and aiming for Meroved as it started to power back up. A low energy hum rippled the air, the invisible presaging of a second grav-burst. The sound built, rising to a fever pitch whine, nanoseconds from activation.
Cartovandis redirected his fire against the Rapier and destroyed it, releasing a dense grav-implosion that gave off a migraine-inducing bass note and pulped its crew to shattered bone and jelly.
Adio hurled his shield to kill the last of the cultists, bulwark embedding in the far wall and quivering like an arrow as he leapt the balcony.
As the grav-cannon exploded, Meroved saw a way through to Orn. He touched a hand to his chest and it came back bloody. No matter. He had to end this. Gritting his teeth against the pain, knowing he should probably be dead already, he ran.
He got off a few shots with Firebrand before he realised Orn was protected by a refractor field, the beams hitting an invisible wall and dissipating in a flash of light. He discarded the archeotech pistol and focused on his blade. The vibro-sword hummed in his grasp. It would cut through almost any defence with ease.
Orn was close. He backed up a few more steps, the Vexen Cage circling faster and faster.
You’re mine now…
Corposant crackled over the dais, drawing Meroved’s eye. Too late, he realised what was happening and urged his wounded body to move faster.
‘Not this time!’ he roared, just as Adio came into his peripheral vision.
‘Do not despair…’ Orn began.
Meroved threw the vibro-sword. It disappeared in a flash of blinding light and spatial displacement. Meroved felt a surge of pressure hammer into him.
The dais and everything on it disappeared. A storm blew about the pit, throwing around scraps of old parchment and other refuse. Lightning crawled across the ground, across the stacks, ephemeral and beautiful.
Meroved’s blade clattered down in two neatly shorn pieces.
The dais was a teleportation plate. Orn had prepared well.
He had also sent something the other way – not just matter translation but also a concomitant matter transfer.
The incendiary device blinked once then went off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
The explosion tore through the library, billowing up out of the pit and swallowing the ringed balcony in fire and clouds of shrapnel. The bodies of the cultists were blown back, paper marionettes tossed about by a hurricane.
Cartovandis stood firm and weathered the blast, letting the fire and the sheer force of it wash over him. He lost sight of the others down in the pit and had to wait for the chaos to clear.
Smoke and heat bled off Adio’s armour but he was moving, clambering to his knees and closest to the blast. He must have thrown Meroved clear when the bomb went off, an Aquilan Shield to the last, his instinct to protect his old mentor as ingrained as the names etched on the inside of his armour.
Varogalant staggered over to him, his own armour cracked in places from the effects of the grav-cannon but otherwise unharmed. Both had lost their helms or removed them and as Varogalant clasped the back of his brother’s neck, Adio did the same, their heads touching briefly in celebration of their survival.
Both had cuts to their faces, no more than flesh wounds.
No words passed between them, their bond of fraternity obvious. More than a century of long-held enmity dissipated in that moment, and Cartovandis found himself suddenly envious.
They broke apart, exchanging curt nods.
Though it had momentarily lifted, Varogalant’s expression darkened again when he saw the empty teleportation dais. Much of it had been destroyed in the blast and it was a mess of sparking wires and bent conductor plates.
Scraps of books, their torn and half-singed pages scattered about, gently floated to earth. The rest of the library had been utterly denuded by the fire or possibly some prior calamity; these were the only tomes left. But Varogalant’s attention was elsewhere. He had noticed one of the cultists had survived. The man’s uniform was torn up, the bones in his legs shattered, and as he crawled on his belly he left a dark blood trail like a slug. Varogalant seized upon him.
‘Unburden your soul and tell us where he took it,’ he said, his voice low and sinister. Unsheathing his misericordia, he pressed it to the man’s throat.
‘I fear… no… p-pain…’ said the man, choking out the words just before he went limp. ‘The… Emperor… protect–’
Snarling, Varogalant released the dead cultist.
‘They fight us and yet invoke His name,’ he muttered, arcing back his neck as he briefly closed his eyes.
‘We will find it, brother,’ Adio said, the burden on Varogalant never more apparent than in that moment.
His answer was simple. ‘We must.’
It was then that Meroved lurched to his feet and promptly collapsed.
Cartovandis saw him first and leapt into the pit, coming to the side of his stricken mentor, who lay prone and barely breathing.
‘A blast like that should not have injured him this grievously,’ said Adio.
‘Without the auramite–’ Varogalant began.
Adio cut in. ‘He is still Adeptus Custodes.’
Cartovandis pulled open Meroved’s ravaged armour to reveal a black wound that had festered around his heart. ‘He was dying before he even entered the library.’
‘It looks like a piece of bone,’ said Varogalant, standing over the other two as they crouched next to Meroved.
Adio inspected the bloody wrappings around the wound, which had rotted through. ‘An attempt has been made to clean and bind it…’
They had all seen wounds like that before, over a century ago at the Lion’s Gate.
Meroved coughed hard as Adio examined him, and Cartovandis held his head to prevent further injury.
‘You are dying, old friend,’ he uttered.
Meroved looked at him from the side of his eye and gave a blood-toothed grin.
‘I am sorry, Syr…’ His voice was weak, a scratch of a quill against parchment.
‘For what, shield-captain?’
Meroved’s grin turned into a rueful smile.
‘I have not been that for some time.’
‘You have ever been my shield-captain.’
Meroved reached up, hand trembling, to clasp Cartovandis’ shoulder.
‘I know you wanted to repay me. To balance the debt.’
Cartovandis said nothing. No one spoke. Adio held his head low in reverence, muttering an oath. Varogalant detached himself, uncomfortable with the intimacy.
‘You coming here…’ Meroved continued. ‘It is already repaid. Know that I never regretted my decision to leave. I have found purpose here at the end of my duty…’
He held out a device, showing it to Cartovandis, a small black box forged from metal in the likeness of an eagle’s head. It was the motif of their order.
‘Her name is Gedd,’ Meroved told him. ‘She is watching. She will know.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘She will know.’
Cartovandis frowned, exchanging a confused glance with Adio.
Meroved’s clenched teeth were pink with blood and tight with pain. He rasped, ‘No more. I have served. Let that be enough.’
His breathing grew sporadic, coming in sharp, punctuated bursts. His eyes widened.
‘Let it be en–’
He stopped and fell still.
‘And so tolls the Bell of Lost Souls…’ said Adio.
They each bowed their heads, observing a moment of quiet contemplation.
Cartovandis looked on grimly. ‘Our task remains unfinished.’ He glanced at the vox-device Meroved had given him and was about to activate it when Varogalant spoke up.
‘There is something here, Syr. Something you need to see.’
He was standing amidst the fallen scraps of books and scrolls, a clutch of burnt paper in his hand.
‘Here,’ he said, handing Cartovandis a few pieces as he joined him.
They were torn-up fragments of various genealogy charts, ancient judging by the brittle nature of the vellum, and some scraps of Terran censuses dating back millennia.
As a member of the Ecclesiarchy, Orn would have been privy to records that ordinary citizens of the Imperium would not, but these were colonial records cataloguing the diaspora of mankind following the War of Shame. They had been unearthed, removed from shrines and archives. The names of families and clans had been compiled in exacting, if incomplete, detail. Each account shed more light on the one that preceded it. Bloodlines that stretched back to Terran prehistory, to the violent days of Old Earth and pre-Unification. To collate it was the labour of several lifetimes.
Cartovandis cogitated all of this in a few seconds, one name resounding in his consciousness above all others, the end of the string that Ylax Orn had pulled.
‘The Sigillites.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
They were close. Orn knew this as he shrugged off the vague feeling of nausea and the lingering existential dread of matter translocation. Strands of warp residue clung to the edge of his robes, dissipating rapidly with the reassertion of the real over the incorporeal realm of dreams.
He had nowhere else to fall back, no more boltholes. This was the last one, a place in the depths of Vorganthian that would be hard to find. Orn was forced to admit he had reached the point of desperation. Meroved had seen to that, and they would be coming. His kind. Very soon. It saddened Orn to think of how blind they were. Revelation would come. Illumination would come. Then it would not matter. He would have fulfilled his purpose.
‘Make ready,’ he said to one of his men, a believer. The light of illumination burned in the soldier’s eyes. He nodded at his master’s commandment, and issued gruff orders to a handful of others.
They would perish. No mortal army could withstand the Ten Thousand. He doubted few foes that lived in the galaxy could. So he had been forced to look beyond the veil of the void.
‘It won’t be long now…’ Orn said to himself, only now aware of the Vexen Cage and its infernal revolutions. ‘Turn, turn, turn…’ he said as the hosts grew restless in their chains below.
And the Cage did turn, and the heir of the Sigillite screamed with it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
Zatu was waiting for them in the gun-cutter when they emerged from the library with Meroved’s body. Cartovandis carried him and he almost appeared smaller in the Custodian’s arms, as if the piece of his soul that had sustained him and fortified him had fled with his passing. Adio and Varogalant formed an honour guard, and they walked up the hold’s ramp in solemn silence. From there, they flew to the observatory, where a woman called Ursula Gedd waited for them.
‘So he’s dead then,’ she said, regarding Meroved’s inert form. ‘I actually didn’t think your kind could die.’
Gedd had met them in the observatory’s arming chamber. She had resisted the urge to kneel, though she had felt a profound desire to do so. Her heart hammered to be so close to such beings, but her sadness at Meroved’s death had tempered that too. Grieving, even for so short an alliance, would have to wait. The Aegis had been summoned and Vorganthian might yet be saved.
It struck her that an onlooker might find the scene in the arming chamber mildly preposterous. A woman in the battered uniform and armour of a peacekeeper, standing before the body of a dead giant with his three solemn companions who looked like statues wrenched from some mythic age, hanging on her words.
‘Saint’s piss…’ she muttered, and instantly regretted the choice.
The leader, or at least she assumed he was in charge, frowned.
‘My apologies…’
‘Syr Cartovandis,’ he supplied. ‘We can die, Ursula Gedd. We are flesh and blood just the same as you.’
Gedd took them in with a glance, frowning. ‘I can hardly tell the difference.’
Gedd knew she should have more respect, but she had spent the last few weeks trying to survive with a sanity-eroding throbbing forever at the edge of her conscious mind. Dark grey rings had formed around her eyes, which had sunken a little in her skull on account of lack of rest and ready nourishment. She scratched at the rash on her neck, her nails digging under the metal clasp that encircled it. Her teeth itched. Her bones ached, but she was alive and that counted for something. She had also been given a purpose, and this is what her newfound allies waited on.
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
A cracked, mosaic concourse led to the entrance of the library. Tufts of wiry, grey vegetation clung to its fissures, steadily prising them apart. Statues of politicians, warriors and priests stood in dilapidated ranks, worn by age or vandalism and served to emphasise the faded grandeur of the place.
The door to the library was tall, almost twice the height of the Custodians, and lay partly open, letting in the dirt and the vermin and anything else that chose to make this ruin its lair. A stone portico, its columns rendered into the likeness of saints and theologians, framed a grand entrance but had also succumbed to disrepair.
Cartovandis paused at the threshold as the three Custodians took in the monolithic structure.
Standing behind the others, Meroved regarded it too. ‘Magnificent, or at least it was once. A forgotten world…’ he murmured.
‘Then let us bring it back into the Throne’s light,’ said Cartovandis, and gestured to Adio. The two of them then heaved against the door, pushing it open. A chasm of darkness yawned beyond and there was the suggestion of a wide and sweeping stairway that led below.
Without further hesitation, Cartovandis led them inside.
Even with only ambient light coming through the dirt encrusting its glass ceiling, the devastation was obvious. A fire had ravaged the library, turning its tomes and scrolls to ash, blackening its halls and stacks. Part of the stairway had given way to the blaze, a ragged edge leading to further darkness and the collapsed remains of the steps below. Rot and disuse had sundered the rest, the air thick with spores and coiling with dust motes disturbed by the Custodians. As deserted as it first appeared, a light flickered below, distant but apparent.
Once again, Cartovandis asked himself why Meroved had waited for their arrival to act.
Upon reaching the base of the stairs they passed through the broken and sorry stacks to the edge of a large lectorium pit.
A dais sat in the middle of the pit, sparking with obscure technologies. Hoar frost crept over it. Wires and cables fed to it and the device that lay atop. It was a spherical cage, forged of black metal. Inside it sat two further spherical cages, one slightly smaller than the other. Each of these inner compartments turned slowly, in opposing directions, on the axis of the largest sphere. Thick spikes jutted both outwards and inwards. Carved sigils adorned the metal, deep enough that the half-light caught in their recesses. And within this tri-part prison, a man was turning along with the spheres, chained so that his arms and legs were splayed in a cross. Lightning arcs obscured further details, crackling across the surface of the metal.
As the Custodians reached the edge of the lectorium pit, a different man, in dark red robes and flak armour reminiscent of that worn by the Astra Militarum, turned to greet them.
‘I thought you might have survived,’ he said to Meroved, his voice urbane and with wisdom that belied his apparent youth. ‘I hoped you had survived to live to see the purpose of what I am trying to achieve.’
He cast his eye across the Custodians.
‘Behold…’ he uttered with almost breathless awe. ‘Auric gods.’ Orn shook his head. ‘You would not seek to stop me if you knew what I intended.’
‘Enslavement and death,’ Cartovandis replied. ‘We have witnessed your intent and are here to end it. Though I would know your plan before we kill you.’
‘Awakening,’ said Ylax Orn, and his next words made Cartovandis pause. ‘His awakening. Resurrection.’
The shadows moved at the edge of the light.
‘Blasphemy! You’ll die by my hand!’ Varogalant leapt into the pit and made for the Vexen Cage just as Orn’s minions surged out of the darkness. The crack of lascarbines heralded their arrival, men and women in heavy grey carapace armour. Dozens and dozens of them. They advanced along the balcony that delineated the edge of the pit, sharp red flashes denoting their positions. In a few seconds, the air was filled with heat and las.
Adio took the brunt of the blasts against Bulwark, sweeping his cloak aside to reveal gilded auramite to the cultists, inspiring awe in some before he advanced down the left side.
‘To the other side!’ snapped Meroved, gesturing to Cartovandis as he went after Varogalant.
Mirroring Adio, Cartovandis went right. His sentinel blade, Arcana, roared in his grasp, its attached bolt casters breaking apart the frail mortal bodies sent against him. They held their ground despite the onslaught, finding cover behind upheaved benches and debris. As soon he got close enough to wield Arcana as a broadsword it would be over.
Adio barrelled a cultist over the edge of the balcony with his shield as the mortal’s ill-considered charge went awry. Then he let loose with Puritas and the fight was all but done.
Down in the pit, Orn had retreated onto the dais as more of his cohorts rushed to defend him from inside.
Varogalant cut them apart, barely slowing down.
A few with breacher shields and power mauls braved hand-to-hand, but lasted only a few seconds longer. At last, they brought up a heavier gun and from his vantage above the pit, Cartovandis saw the first ranks for what they really were – a distraction.
It came out on tracks, a Rapier mount designed to take on armour. A flare-nosed graviton cannon rumbled as it emitted a heavy particle burst that struck Varogalant in the chest and crushed him into the ground. Stone slabs split and the floor cracked beneath him. He did not rise.
Then the track-mount turned, angling its cannon and aiming for Meroved as it started to power back up. A low energy hum rippled the air, the invisible presaging of a second grav-burst. The sound built, rising to a fever pitch whine, nanoseconds from activation.
Cartovandis redirected his fire against the Rapier and destroyed it, releasing a dense grav-implosion that gave off a migraine-inducing bass note and pulped its crew to shattered bone and jelly.
Adio hurled his shield to kill the last of the cultists, bulwark embedding in the far wall and quivering like an arrow as he leapt the balcony.
As the grav-cannon exploded, Meroved saw a way through to Orn. He touched a hand to his chest and it came back bloody. No matter. He had to end this. Gritting his teeth against the pain, knowing he should probably be dead already, he ran.
He got off a few shots with Firebrand before he realised Orn was protected by a refractor field, the beams hitting an invisible wall and dissipating in a flash of light. He discarded the archeotech pistol and focused on his blade. The vibro-sword hummed in his grasp. It would cut through almost any defence with ease.
Orn was close. He backed up a few more steps, the Vexen Cage circling faster and faster.
You’re mine now…
Corposant crackled over the dais, drawing Meroved’s eye. Too late, he realised what was happening and urged his wounded body to move faster.
‘Not this time!’ he roared, just as Adio came into his peripheral vision.
‘Do not despair…’ Orn began.
Meroved threw the vibro-sword. It disappeared in a flash of blinding light and spatial displacement. Meroved felt a surge of pressure hammer into him.
The dais and everything on it disappeared. A storm blew about the pit, throwing around scraps of old parchment and other refuse. Lightning crawled across the ground, across the stacks, ephemeral and beautiful.
Meroved’s blade clattered down in two neatly shorn pieces.
The dais was a teleportation plate. Orn had prepared well.
He had also sent something the other way – not just matter translation but also a concomitant matter transfer.
The incendiary device blinked once then went off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
The explosion tore through the library, billowing up out of the pit and swallowing the ringed balcony in fire and clouds of shrapnel. The bodies of the cultists were blown back, paper marionettes tossed about by a hurricane.
Cartovandis stood firm and weathered the blast, letting the fire and the sheer force of it wash over him. He lost sight of the others down in the pit and had to wait for the chaos to clear.
Smoke and heat bled off Adio’s armour but he was moving, clambering to his knees and closest to the blast. He must have thrown Meroved clear when the bomb went off, an Aquilan Shield to the last, his instinct to protect his old mentor as ingrained as the names etched on the inside of his armour.
Varogalant staggered over to him, his own armour cracked in places from the effects of the grav-cannon but otherwise unharmed. Both had lost their helms or removed them and as Varogalant clasped the back of his brother’s neck, Adio did the same, their heads touching briefly in celebration of their survival.
Both had cuts to their faces, no more than flesh wounds.
No words passed between them, their bond of fraternity obvious. More than a century of long-held enmity dissipated in that moment, and Cartovandis found himself suddenly envious.
They broke apart, exchanging curt nods.
Though it had momentarily lifted, Varogalant’s expression darkened again when he saw the empty teleportation dais. Much of it had been destroyed in the blast and it was a mess of sparking wires and bent conductor plates.
Scraps of books, their torn and half-singed pages scattered about, gently floated to earth. The rest of the library had been utterly denuded by the fire or possibly some prior calamity; these were the only tomes left. But Varogalant’s attention was elsewhere. He had noticed one of the cultists had survived. The man’s uniform was torn up, the bones in his legs shattered, and as he crawled on his belly he left a dark blood trail like a slug. Varogalant seized upon him.
‘Unburden your soul and tell us where he took it,’ he said, his voice low and sinister. Unsheathing his misericordia, he pressed it to the man’s throat.
‘I fear… no… p-pain…’ said the man, choking out the words just before he went limp. ‘The… Emperor… protect–’
Snarling, Varogalant released the dead cultist.
‘They fight us and yet invoke His name,’ he muttered, arcing back his neck as he briefly closed his eyes.
‘We will find it, brother,’ Adio said, the burden on Varogalant never more apparent than in that moment.
His answer was simple. ‘We must.’
It was then that Meroved lurched to his feet and promptly collapsed.
Cartovandis saw him first and leapt into the pit, coming to the side of his stricken mentor, who lay prone and barely breathing.
‘A blast like that should not have injured him this grievously,’ said Adio.
‘Without the auramite–’ Varogalant began.
Adio cut in. ‘He is still Adeptus Custodes.’
Cartovandis pulled open Meroved’s ravaged armour to reveal a black wound that had festered around his heart. ‘He was dying before he even entered the library.’
‘It looks like a piece of bone,’ said Varogalant, standing over the other two as they crouched next to Meroved.
Adio inspected the bloody wrappings around the wound, which had rotted through. ‘An attempt has been made to clean and bind it…’
They had all seen wounds like that before, over a century ago at the Lion’s Gate.
Meroved coughed hard as Adio examined him, and Cartovandis held his head to prevent further injury.
‘You are dying, old friend,’ he uttered.
Meroved looked at him from the side of his eye and gave a blood-toothed grin.
‘I am sorry, Syr…’ His voice was weak, a scratch of a quill against parchment.
‘For what, shield-captain?’
Meroved’s grin turned into a rueful smile.
‘I have not been that for some time.’
‘You have ever been my shield-captain.’
Meroved reached up, hand trembling, to clasp Cartovandis’ shoulder.
‘I know you wanted to repay me. To balance the debt.’
Cartovandis said nothing. No one spoke. Adio held his head low in reverence, muttering an oath. Varogalant detached himself, uncomfortable with the intimacy.
‘You coming here…’ Meroved continued. ‘It is already repaid. Know that I never regretted my decision to leave. I have found purpose here at the end of my duty…’
He held out a device, showing it to Cartovandis, a small black box forged from metal in the likeness of an eagle’s head. It was the motif of their order.
‘Her name is Gedd,’ Meroved told him. ‘She is watching. She will know.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘She will know.’
Cartovandis frowned, exchanging a confused glance with Adio.
Meroved’s clenched teeth were pink with blood and tight with pain. He rasped, ‘No more. I have served. Let that be enough.’
His breathing grew sporadic, coming in sharp, punctuated bursts. His eyes widened.
‘Let it be en–’
He stopped and fell still.
‘And so tolls the Bell of Lost Souls…’ said Adio.
They each bowed their heads, observing a moment of quiet contemplation.
Cartovandis looked on grimly. ‘Our task remains unfinished.’ He glanced at the vox-device Meroved had given him and was about to activate it when Varogalant spoke up.
‘There is something here, Syr. Something you need to see.’
He was standing amidst the fallen scraps of books and scrolls, a clutch of burnt paper in his hand.
‘Here,’ he said, handing Cartovandis a few pieces as he joined him.
They were torn-up fragments of various genealogy charts, ancient judging by the brittle nature of the vellum, and some scraps of Terran censuses dating back millennia.
As a member of the Ecclesiarchy, Orn would have been privy to records that ordinary citizens of the Imperium would not, but these were colonial records cataloguing the diaspora of mankind following the War of Shame. They had been unearthed, removed from shrines and archives. The names of families and clans had been compiled in exacting, if incomplete, detail. Each account shed more light on the one that preceded it. Bloodlines that stretched back to Terran prehistory, to the violent days of Old Earth and pre-Unification. To collate it was the labour of several lifetimes.
Cartovandis cogitated all of this in a few seconds, one name resounding in his consciousness above all others, the end of the string that Ylax Orn had pulled.
‘The Sigillites.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
They were close. Orn knew this as he shrugged off the vague feeling of nausea and the lingering existential dread of matter translocation. Strands of warp residue clung to the edge of his robes, dissipating rapidly with the reassertion of the real over the incorporeal realm of dreams.
He had nowhere else to fall back, no more boltholes. This was the last one, a place in the depths of Vorganthian that would be hard to find. Orn was forced to admit he had reached the point of desperation. Meroved had seen to that, and they would be coming. His kind. Very soon. It saddened Orn to think of how blind they were. Revelation would come. Illumination would come. Then it would not matter. He would have fulfilled his purpose.
‘Make ready,’ he said to one of his men, a believer. The light of illumination burned in the soldier’s eyes. He nodded at his master’s commandment, and issued gruff orders to a handful of others.
They would perish. No mortal army could withstand the Ten Thousand. He doubted few foes that lived in the galaxy could. So he had been forced to look beyond the veil of the void.
‘It won’t be long now…’ Orn said to himself, only now aware of the Vexen Cage and its infernal revolutions. ‘Turn, turn, turn…’ he said as the hosts grew restless in their chains below.
And the Cage did turn, and the heir of the Sigillite screamed with it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light
Zatu was waiting for them in the gun-cutter when they emerged from the library with Meroved’s body. Cartovandis carried him and he almost appeared smaller in the Custodian’s arms, as if the piece of his soul that had sustained him and fortified him had fled with his passing. Adio and Varogalant formed an honour guard, and they walked up the hold’s ramp in solemn silence. From there, they flew to the observatory, where a woman called Ursula Gedd waited for them.
‘So he’s dead then,’ she said, regarding Meroved’s inert form. ‘I actually didn’t think your kind could die.’
Gedd had met them in the observatory’s arming chamber. She had resisted the urge to kneel, though she had felt a profound desire to do so. Her heart hammered to be so close to such beings, but her sadness at Meroved’s death had tempered that too. Grieving, even for so short an alliance, would have to wait. The Aegis had been summoned and Vorganthian might yet be saved.
It struck her that an onlooker might find the scene in the arming chamber mildly preposterous. A woman in the battered uniform and armour of a peacekeeper, standing before the body of a dead giant with his three solemn companions who looked like statues wrenched from some mythic age, hanging on her words.
‘Saint’s piss…’ she muttered, and instantly regretted the choice.
The leader, or at least she assumed he was in charge, frowned.
‘My apologies…’
‘Syr Cartovandis,’ he supplied. ‘We can die, Ursula Gedd. We are flesh and blood just the same as you.’
Gedd took them in with a glance, frowning. ‘I can hardly tell the difference.’
Gedd knew she should have more respect, but she had spent the last few weeks trying to survive with a sanity-eroding throbbing forever at the edge of her conscious mind. Dark grey rings had formed around her eyes, which had sunken a little in her skull on account of lack of rest and ready nourishment. She scratched at the rash on her neck, her nails digging under the metal clasp that encircled it. Her teeth itched. Her bones ached, but she was alive and that counted for something. She had also been given a purpose, and this is what her newfound allies waited on.
