Pushing awkwardly past Fenter, his footsteps halting and uncertain, Vollex entered the room.
And stared.
It was, he realised later, the contrast that was so arresting. One half of the room was bathed in gentle light, a golden glow suffusing the room's pastel pink walls; the other was… infected with something altogether darker. Distractedly, his mind acknowledged the large double bed resting against the far wall just to his right, and it registered the elegant, tasteful furniture arranged nearby.
But he wasn't looking at them.
He was looking at the other side of the room.
He was staring at the darkness.
Growing up in the under-hive of Graltor's largest conurbation, Vollex was used to darkness, where death waited patiently for the unwary and where a multitude of sins were covered by an inky veil, preserving secrets and best forgotten truths. The darkness that swelled and pulsed in the far corner of the room was all too different.
Vollex stared and licked lips that had suddenly gone dry.
It was easier to look at the edges, rough black tendrils that throbbed with an unwholesome glistening pulsation. Vollex saw how they'd spread across the soft pink walls. Like the gnarled roots of some ancient and irredeemably corrupted tree, they seemed to plunge into the fabric of the building, disrupting its structure, warping straight lines and smooth surfaces into a twisted aggregation of broken plaster and bulging wall.
But his gaze was drawn inexorably towards the centre, where the darkness breathed and something flickered on the edge of sight, always threatening to break through into… what? Vollex couldn't say, but a secret knowledge lurked within him, a horrible suspicion that knelt at the door of his mind, picking the lock of his sanity.
He saw the squat, round plinth, its surface crusted with old blood. He saw the small human skull perched upon it. He watched, stomach churning, the slimy things crawl in and out of the pleading eye sockets. Children went missing in the outer habs all the time, so they said. A small, quiet part of him wondered which one the skull had belonged to. The rest of him was staring at the darkness.
Vollex let out a breath and wondered at how his chest ached. The air was heavy and close. It smelled of fear and blood and yearning. And death. He felt as if it were congealing around him, solidifying, holding him fast in a relentless embrace. There was a numbness on his skin and a suffocating coldness in his mind. His nose was sharp and pinched; his eyes were watering. It was hard to concentrate. He was staring at the darkness.
There was something he should be doing, surely? Something important. But that thought was distant, too vague to find definition within his freezing brain.
He was staring at the darkness and he felt it call to him – to the darkness that glittered in his eyes; to the hunger that uncoiled in his gut; to the emptiness that yawned wide in the very core of his being. Faintly, as if through a faulty auspex, he was aware of the tendrils on the walls flickering, moving, stretching languidly towards him.
Something heavy shoved against him and he whirled round instinctively, a particularly vile curse on his lips. Fenter stood mutely over him, his eyes staring and afraid. The taller man tentatively reached out his hand to Vollex's shoulder, but the under-hiver swatted it away.
"Alright," he said, sharply. "I'm alright. Just a little…" He snapped his head away sharply, convinced that he had seen something move on the periphery of his vision, but there was just the skull on its plinth, its small pits of shadow aching for a salvation that had never come. He blinked and shook his head. "Spooked…"
Vollex swallowed. "I think we've found what we want. Let's get what we came for, eh?"
He licked his lips slowly, eyes fixed on the corner of the room. But it was still now. The darkness was shadow and gloom; the streaks of black on the wall were paint or dried blood. He moved forward, approaching the plinth cautiously. There were symbols burnt into the carpet, he noticed. Strange, spiralling shapes.
He ignored them and examined the stone plinth with a practised eye. "Check the drawers by the bed," he called over his shoulder.
Knowing it was pointless to wait for a reply, he bent over the plinth, his sharp professional gaze spotting the tell-tale hairline crack of a hidden compartment and identifying the release mechanism for it a few seconds later. He reached for it quickly, sighing with a thrill of pleasure as a panel at the back of the stone artifact fell away. Grinning, he reached round behind it, resting his free hand on the plinth itself, although he was careful not to touch that part of the blood-encrusted surface on which the skull rested or the gruesome relic itself. After a moment's tentative fumbling, he drew his hand out again, clutching a stained and battered leather-bound book.
"Lovely," he breathed. And then paused. Something had changed, something in the quality of the silence that had fallen on the room. The air was sharp with the tang of ozone. Slowly, he turned round.
Fenter was sprawled on the bed, his long limbs splayed out like those of a discarded doll. Vollex couldn't tell whether he was alive or not. He didn't have the time to worry about that right now.
There was a woman standing in the doorway. No. Not standing. Floating. Hovering a few inches above the thick cream carpet. Her face was achingly beautiful and her skin was smooth and pale like alabaster. Her hair was lustrous and dark and stirred in the wake of a wind that he could not feel. Gold dripped like honey from her wrists and precious jewels sparkled on her fingers. Her dress was made of silk and was the colour of the dying sun.
But her eyes… her eyes were as blue as the summer sky and flecks of golden fire danced and played in their azure depths.
Vollex clutched the book tightly to his chest as the beautiful, terrible woman slowly turned her head to regard him. When she spoke, her voice crackled with power and thick blue cords of lightning crawled across the exposed skin of her neck and hands.
"What," she asked, "are you doing in my daughter's rooms?"
She was running. Always running.
Scurrying away from her father's fists. Running in the darkened alleyways that spread like inky tendrils from the ugly blot of her home. Sprinting through the dusty marketplace, dodging the grasping hands of angry traders as she took one, two, three gaijil fruit, their rinds cool and hard in her small palms.
She heard the traders' curses sting the air behind her, but she didn't care.
She was doing what she had to.
She was doing what she had to.
In the elegantly decorated hallway, Sister Elinore almost stumbled, as she realised the sharp taste of aniseed was flooding her mouth. So intent had she been on catching her quarry that she couldn't have said precisely when the root-thing had begun to change flavour. Hurriedly, she spat it out, glancing at it briefly as she ran past. It had turned pale and seemed to quiver on the polished floorboards, glistening wetly in the soft light. She swallowed and the taste began to subside.
She couldn't slow down. Querin was somewhere ahead of her and she had her orders. She ran, her body feeling strange to her, somehow distant. Her heart beat furiously in her chest and her skin underneath the ceramite armour was feverous with a dry heat. The sacred bolter was heavy in her left hand; the las pistol seemed as light and unreal as smoke in her right.
As she rounded a corner and saw the broad central staircase of the house stretch upwards before her, she wondered how much time she had left. She realised it didn't really matter.
She was doing what she had to.
She was running.
Through the twisting maze of lanes and alleyways, crouching low under the indolent gaze of the militia patrols, squeezing through the gaps between the grimy huts of the hintertown, she ran. The bright green fruit had become slippery in her hands, but she did not drop them. They had become the most precious, most real, things in her dusty, dirty world. She could not, would not, let them go.
The stairway was a bent 'y' shape, sweeping grandly up to a central landing and then branching into two narrower stairways that ran parallel to each other leading to the grandeur of the first floor. A large detailed painting covered most of the wall behind the landing. Elinore couldn't tell what its subject was and she didn't care.
She took the stairs two at a time, her blood pounding unnaturally loud in her ears. She felt as if there were a tight metal band across her chest, immovable and heavy. Drawing breath was difficult, uncomfortable.
She reached the small landing and scanned the two stairways for a moment. There was movement at the top of the left hand one and she darted forwards and then stopped. Sweat beaded her forehead, but she couldn't wipe it away. Both her hands held guns and both of them were trained on the figure at the top of the stairs.
"Stendahl Querin," she called out, her voice shaking slightly despite her best efforts to keep it even. "You are guilty of heresy and treachery."
The figure of the under-governor was a dark silhouette in the light streaming from the hallway behind him. She saw him bring his hands together once. Twice. The sound of his clapping seemed small in the space of that vast house.
"Oh, bravo," he said, irony dripping from his voice. "Bravo. Well done."
Elinore kept the weapons trained on him. Her left shoulder shivered involuntarily, but she kept her gun hand steady through an intense effort of will.
"My orders are to capture you alive, but I will not hesitate to use extreme force if you do not surrender now!"
The under-governor took a single step downwards, his eyes glittering with a cold amusement. "Is that a threat, Sister?" He chuckled. "I've never been threatened by a dead woman before."
Elinore licked her lips. Her pulse throbbed dully in her neck. Sweat dribbled thinly down her burning cheeks.
"You are now a prisoner of the Holy Inquisition," she said. "Your status as a citizen of the Imperium and the rights and privileges dependent upon it are hereby revoked."
Querin ignored her, as he took another step towards her. She could see his face now, see the cold cruel curve of his smile.
"And you are dead, Sister. You do know that, don't you?"
She knew something was wrong the moment she stepped inside.
The air in the dark little hovel was perfectly still as if it was holding its breath, as if it was afraid of what was waiting in the silence. She wanted to call out. She wanted to hold out the three fruit proudly to her mother. She wanted to hear her mother speak her name. She wanted to feel the love and approval in her voice.
The hovel was silent.
But not empty.
Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness now. She could see the small roughly made table overturned in the centre of the earthen floor. She could see her father's chair, moth-eaten and blotched with sweat stains. She could see the hunched, squatting shape next to it. She could see…
"Your mother's had… an accident."
She knew it had been her father who had said these words, but his voice had been strange, taut and quivering like the skin of a drum after it has been struck. She stared at her mother. Her mother was lying on her back, her face hidden from her by the angle of her outstretched arm – an arm that, in the poor light of the tiny hovel, was streaked with darkness. Her father was stroking his mother absently with his large, rough hand. His hand was streaked with darkness, too.
She took a step forward and another, all the while gazing at her mother lying on the floor. She took a third step and saw, in the weak light spilling in from the doorway behind her, her mother's face for the last sound of the hard-skinned fruit striking the compacted earth floor brought her father's head up with a sharp snapping motion. His face was indistinct in the shadows of that tiny one-room hut, but she knew the expression he was wearing. She had seen it before in those times when he stopped being her father and became something else. Distantly, she was aware of the bright green fruit rolling away into the shadows.
The thing that wore her father's face was getting to his feet, his movements awkward and stumbling.
"Your fault," said her father's voice. "All your fault."
She turned from her home and started running.
The under-governor's eyes were diamond hard as he called out, "Gamma-Kappa-Epsilon!"
As Elinore squeezed the firing stud of the pistol, a deep rumbling roar erupted from her left. Her shot went wide, as the landing trembled beneath the tread of something huge, something monstrous. She glimpsed the flash of metal through the billowing, choking dust that engulfed her.
The floor shook again. And again. She dived to her right, as a towering combat servitor, its polished chrome flecked with fragments of plaster, bore down upon her, its weapons blazing. The burst of gunfire tore up the carpet next to her as the servitor's shoulder-mounted autogun roared its cold fury. She flung herself down the stairs, rolling and tumbling, landing awkwardly as the servitor stalked after her. Suppressing a gasp of pain, she brought her bolter up and loosed off a short burst of fire that thudded into the servitor's armour-plated chest and legs. She heard the soft fizzing sound of relays and circuits shorting out, but whatever damage she had done to the machine creature seemed only to be superficial.
She pulled herself to her feet and darted to her right once more as the servitor's weaponry tracked her, its servos whirring. As well as the autogun, the servitor bristled with weaponry: its right forearm was an integrated heavy duty las carbine and its left had been replaced with a gently curving longsword. Its head seemed disproportionately tiny, perched on a torso swollen with armour and adorned with vicious spikes and hooks. Its skull seemed to be composed of burnished bronze and a golden bejewelled mask bisected its face. The skin stretched tight across the remainder of its face was a pallid grey, a grisly contrast to the conspicuous opulence of the metallic augmentation. A ruby red sensor eye, set in the half-mask face plate like the centrepiece of some jeweller's display, glowed with an inner light; its one remaining unaugmented eye was bloodshot and wept clear fluid, as it focused dispassionately upon her.
Above the sound of its internal motors, Elinore thought she heard Querin's laughter. She loosed another burst of bolter rounds, grunting with satisfaction as she saw them hit home, smashing into the thing's chest and abdomen once more. It faltered, but continued firing and, even as she threw herself down to the floor, she screamed as a lasbolt punched through the armour encasing her thigh and seared the flesh within.
She lay on her back, training the bolter on the servitor, gritting her teeth through a haze of pain.
She was running.
The world did not pass her in a blur, but in a series of discreet moments of crystallised time, separate and distinct from one another, dissociated: the startled, open mouth of a merchant's clerk, his robes billowing outwards as she pushed against him; the spiderweb cracks in the crumbling façade of a once-elegant hab block; the small puffs of dust kicked up by a pakko rat as it darted across her path.
The thing that wore her father's face was chasing her, fury and an incomprehensible desire driving him on. She heard his cursing behind her like the baying of wild dogs, snatches of it becoming clear as he got closer.
"… your fault…"
She vaulted over a pile of trash, the sweet scent of decay strong in her nostrils for a moment,and she stumbled as she landed.
The father-thing's shadow lapped like a black tide at her thin legs. His snarling voice was close and cruel.
"Someone must pay."
She rolled away from his lunging arms and got to her feet. An alley mouth gaped open and she dived for it desperately. Somewhere above her, even though she couldn't dare look for it, was the white stone tower. She knew where she was going and she knew she was close.
She just had to keep running.
She inched away from the advancing servitor, trying to ignore the pain that throbbed in her thigh. She had fallen underneath the first floor hallway, she realised. She could hear Querin moving across it, his footsteps distant above her.
The servitor seemed to be having difficulty aiming its las carbine. Presumably she had damaged its internal mechanisms in some way. But its longsword flashed, cold and vicious, as it brought it up for the killing blow.
She burst through into the plaza and kept running.
The doors were always open, she told herself. The doors were always open.
The father-thing was following her into the wide spaces of the assembly square, where the faithful gathered at the appointed times to hear the words of the preachers and bring their offerings and tithes. The plaza was empty today. But the doors would be open. She knew that. The doors were always open.
The white stone tower of the Church of St Beatrice of the Veladan Wastes loomed over her and she ran, head down, heading for the darkness framed by the granite archway of the entrance portal. Her heart felt like it would burst in her chest and her arms and legs were tired. She smoothed the hair away from her face with a grimy hand and kept running. She was almost there.
She was…
"Hey!"
She sensed the two of them standing by the doorway, but she couldn't slow down. She ran straight into one of them and felt a wild panic growing within her as strong arms took hold of hers and arrested her flight.
"Please!" she screamed. "Let me go!"
"Be quiet, child!" said a voice, stern and unyielding.
"Shush, Jernigan," said another, gentler voice. "Can't you see she's frightened?" She struggled against the strong, cool hands that held her and then their owner was bending down to look into her eyes.
The woman was thin-faced and older than her mother had been, but her eyes were the same colour of blue. No. Not quite the same. There was the hint of grey in them – like rain clouds on a summer's day. The unmistakeable shape of the double eagle aquila was tattooed on her right cheek.
The woman's lips were thin, but they were smiling at her.
"What's your name, little one?"
She opened her mouth to reply, but –
"She's mine." Her father's voice, authoritative and hard, cut the air. "We've been playing a game. Now it's time to go home."
She couldn't turn to look at him. She imagined his hand stretched out to claim her, to take her back. She imagined his other hand, the one streaked with darkness, held behind his back.
The woman who held her straightened. She clung to her skirts, thin fingers digging into the heavy cloth.
"It looks like she doesn't want to go home," the woman said, mildly.
"She's mine," said her father again. This time, a hint of uncertainty crept into his voice. "We were playing a game."
Huddled in the skirts of the thin-faced woman, she shuddered involuntarily. She remembered the 'games' in the darkened hovel. Remembered the voices raised in anger. Remembered the sounds of the fists striking. Remembered her mother's face.
"Is this true?"
The woman was looking down at her again, brow furrowed. She didn't know. She didn't know who to believe.
She decided, then. She would not beg or plead or cry.
"Come back home," her father said. "Come back with papa."
She looked up into the woman's eyes, watching the grey clouds gather in their depths.
"No," she said, clearly and calmly. "No. It isn't true."
Her father was angry now. "You stupid little girl! Do as you're told! Come back home! Come back with -"
But, she was looking at the woman's eyes and she saw the change in them, saw something settle there. The woman's voice cut across her father's words. "She has made a choice," she said and in her voice was strength and something else – a conviction that was total, a belief that was absolute. "She belongs to the Church now. Go your way. Do not come here again."
The other voice – the one belonging to the man she would come to know as Brother Jernigan – growled a protest. "What do you think you're doing?"
The woman's words were calm yet through them ran a thread of steel that would not be broken.
"What I have to."
Brother Jernigan fell silent. She heard her father say things, but she could not remember what they were. She felt the woman's arm across her shoulder as she led her across the threshold of the cool, darkened church.
She knew that one day she too would believe like that.
She did believe.
A part of her had always understood that her life was going to end in violence and pain. That didn't matter. It had never mattered. What mattered was that she died as she was meant to - that her death, as much as her life, was imbued with faith.
The servitor's sword hung above her, its flawless edge keen and hard. Above her, making his way across his comfortably carpeted floor, the heretic Querin was walking freely, a traitor's smile clinging to his lips.
She raised the bolter quickly. There wasn't time to aim or even say a prayer. The sword flashed down as she pulled the trigger, but it didn't matter.
She was doing what she had to.
