‘To your health,’ he said brightly, ‘and to the prosperity of your world. I know things are hard now, but trust me, this is all for the best. All for the very best.’
He swigged the drink. It tasted of liquorice and went down very well, heating his dry gullet and lighting a buzz in his gut.
‘Excellent,’ he said, and poured himself a second. ‘Very good indeed. You’re not going to answer me, are you? I could ask your name and your lineage and anything at all, and you would just stand there like a statue, wouldn’t you? Like a Titan?’
He sank the second glass and poured a third. He felt very good about himself now, better than he had done for hours, better even than when the muse had flown back to him in the streets. In truth, drink had always been a more welcome companion to Ignace Karkasy than any muse, though he would never have been willing to admit it, or to admit the fact that his affection for drink had long weighed down his career, like rocks in a sack. Drink and his muse, both beloved of him, each pulling in opposite directions.
He drank his third glass, and tipped out a fourth. Warmth infused him, a biological warmth much more welcome than the brutal heat of the day. It made him smile. It revealed to him how extraordinary this false Terra was, how complex and intoxicating. He felt love for it, and pity, and tremendous goodwill. This world, this place, this hostelry, would not be forgotten.
Suddenly remembering something else, he apologised to the old woman, who had remained facing him across the counter like a fugued servitor, and reached into his pocket. He had currency – Imperial coin and plastek wafers. He made a pile of them on the stained and glossy bartop.
‘Imperial,’ he said, ‘but you take that. I mean, you’re obliged to. I was told that by the iterators this morning. Imperial currency is legal tender now, to replace your local coin. Terra, you don’t know what I’m saying, do you? How much do I owe you?’
No answer.
He sipped his fourth drink and pushed the pile of cash towards her. ‘You decide, then. You tell me. Take for the whole bottle.’ He tapped his finger against the side of the flask. ‘The whole bottle? How much?’
He grinned and nodded at the money. The old woman looked at the heap, reached out a bony hand and picked up a five aquila piece. She studied it for a moment, then spat on it and threw it at Karkasy. The coin bounced off his belly and fell onto the floor.
Karkasy blinked and then laughed. The laughter boomed out of him, hard and joyous, and he was quite unable to keep it in. The old woman stared at him. Her eyes widened ever so slightly.
Karkasy lifted up the bottle and the glass. ‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘Keep it all. All of it.’
He walked away and found an empty table in the corner of the place. He sat down and poured another drink, looking about him. Some of the silent patrons were staring at him. He nodded back, cheerfully.
They looked so human, he thought, and realised it was a ridiculous thing to think, because they were without a doubt human. But at the same time, they weren’t. Their drab clothes, their drab manner, the set of their features, their way of sitting and looking and eating. They seemed a little like animals, man-shaped creatures trained to ape human behaviour, yet not quite accomplished in that art.
‘Is that what five thousand years of separation does to a species?’ he asked aloud. No one answered, and some of his watchers turned away.
Was that what five thousand years did to the divided branches of mankind? He took another sip. Biologically identical, but for a few strands of genetic inheritance, and yet culturally grown so far apart. These were men who lived and walked and drank and shat, just as he did. They lived in houses and raised cities, and wrote upon walls and even spoke the same language, old women not withstanding. Yet time and division had grown them along alternate paths. Karkasy saw that clearly now. They were a graft from the rootstock, grown under another sun, similar yet alien. Even the way they sat at tables and sipped at drinks.
Karkasy stood up suddenly. The muse had abruptly jostled the pleasure of drink out of the summit of his mind. He bowed to the old woman as he collected up his glass and two thirds empty bottle, and said, ‘My thanks, madam.’
Then he teetered back out into the sunlight.
HE FOUND A vacant lot a few streets away that had been levelled to rubble by bombing, and perched himself on a chunk of basalt. Setting down the bottle and the glass carefully, he took out his half-filled Bondsman Number 7 and began to write again, forming the first few stanzas of a lyric that owed much to the writings on the walls and the insight he had garnered in the hostelry. It flowed well for a while, and then dried up.
He took another drink, trying to restart his inner voice. Tiny black ant-like insects milled industriously in the rubble around him, as if trying to rebuild their own miniature lost city. He had to brush one off the open page of his chap-book. Others raced exploratively over the toe-caps of his boots in a frenetic expedition.
He stood up, imagining itches, and decided this wasn’t a place to sit. He gathered up his bottle and his glass, taking another sip once he’d fished out the ant floating in it with his finger.
A building of considerable size and magnificence faced him across the damaged lot. He wondered what it was. He stumbled over the rubble towards it, almost losing his footing on the loose rocks from time to time.
What was it – a municipal hall, a library, a school? He wandered around it, admiring the fine rise of the walls and the decorated headers of the stonework. Whatever it was, the building was important. Miraculously, it had been spared the destruction visited on its neighbouring lots.
Karkasy found the entrance, a towering arch of stone filled with copper doors. They weren’t locked. He pushed his way in.
The interior of the building was so profoundly and refreshingly cool it almost made him gasp. It was a single space, an arched roof raised on massive ouslite pillars, the floor dressed in cold onyx. Under the end windows, some kind of stone structure rose.
Karkasy paused. He put down his bottle beside the base of one of the pillars, and advanced down the centre of the building with his glass in his hand. He knew there was a word for a place like this. He searched for it.
Sunlight, filleted by coloured glass, slanted through the thin windows. The stone structure at the end of the chamber was a carved lectern supporting a very massive and very old book.
Karkasy touched the crinkled parchment of the book’s open pages with delight. It appealed to him the same way as the pages of a Bondsman Number 7 did. The sheets were old, and faded, covered with ornate black script and hand-coloured images.
This was an altar, he realised. This place, a temple, a fane!
‘Terra alive!’ he declared, and then winced as his words echoed back down the cool vault. History had taught him about fanes and religious belief, but he had never before set foot inside such a place. A place of sprits and divinity. He sensed that the spirits were looking down on his intrusion with disapproval, and then laughed at his own idiocy. There were no spirits. Not anywhere in the cosmos. Imperial Truth had taught him that. The only spirits in this building were the ones in his glass and his belly.
He looked at the pages again. Here was the truth of it, the crucial mark of difference between his breed of man and the local variety. They were heathens. They continued to embrace the superstitions that the fundamental strand of mankind had set aside. Here was the promise of an afterlife, and an ethereal world. Here was the nonsense of a faith in the intangible.
Karkasy knew that there were some, many perhaps, amongst the population of the compliant Imperium, who longed for a return to those ways. God, in every incarnation and pantheon, was long perished, but still men hankered after the ineffable. Despite prosecution, new credos and budding religions were sprouting up amongst the cultures of Unified Man. Most vigorous of all was the Imperial Creed that insisted humanity adopt the Emperor as a divine being. A God-Emperor of Mankind.
The idea was ludicrous and, officially, heretical. The Emperor h
ad always refused such adoration in the most stringent terms, denying his apotheosis. Some said it would only happen after his death, and as he was functionally immortal, that tended to cap the argument. Whatever his powers, whatever his capacity, whatever his magnificence as the finest and most gloriously total leader of the species, he was still just a man. The Emperor liked to remind mankind of this whenever he could. It was an edict that rattled around the bureaucracies of the expanding Imperium. The Emperor is the Emperor, and he is great and everlasting.
But he is not a god, and he refuses any worship offered to him.
Karkasy took a swig and put his empty thimble-glass down, at an angle on the edge of the lectern shelf. The Lectio Divinitatus, that’s what it was called. The missal of the underground wellspring that strove, in secret, to establish the Cult of the Emperor, against his will. It was said that even some of the upstanding members of the Council of Terra supported its aims.
The Emperor as god. Karkasy stifled a laugh. Five thousand years of blood, war and fire to expunge all gods from the culture, and now the man who achieved that goal supplants them as a new deity.
‘How foolish is mankind?’ Karkasy laughed, enjoying the way his words echoed around the empty fane. ‘How desperate and flailing? Is it that we simply need a concept of god to fulfil us? Is that part of our make up?’
He fell silent, considering the point he had raised to himself. A good point, well-reasoned. He wondered where his bottle had gone.
It was a good point. Maybe that was mankind’s ultimate weakness. Maybe it was one of humanity’s basic impulses, the need to believe in another, higher order. Perhaps faith was like a vacuum, sucking up credulity in a frantic effort to fill its own void. Perhaps it was a part of mankind’s genetic character to need, to hunger for, a spiritual solace.
‘Perhaps we are cursed,’ Karkasy told the empty fane, ‘to crave something which does not exist. There are no gods, no spirits, no daemons. So we make them up, to comfort ourselves.’
The fane seemed oblivious to his ramblings. He took hold of his empty glass and wandered back to where he had left the bottle. Another drink.
He left the fane and threaded his way out into the blinding sunlight. The heat was so intense that he had to take another swig.
Karkasy wobbled down a few streets, away from the temple, and heard a rushing, roasting noise. He discovered a team of Imperial soldiers, stripped to the waist, using a flamer to erase anti-Imperial slogans from a wall. They had evidently been working their way down the street, for all the walls displayed swathes of heat burns.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said.
The soldiers turned and looked at him, their flamer spitting. From his garments and demeanour, he was unmistakably not a local.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said again.
‘Orders, sir,’ said one of the troopers.
‘What are you doing out here?’ asked another.
Karkasy shook his head and left them alone. He trudged through narrow alleys and open courts, sipping from the spout of the bottle.
He found another vacant lot very similar to the one he had sat down in before, and placed his rump upon a scalene block of basalt. He took out his chapbook and ran through the stanzas he had written.
They were terrible.
He groaned as he read them, then became angry and tore the precious pages out. He balled the thick, cream paper up and tossed it away into the rubble.
Karkasy suddenly became aware that eyes were staring at him from the shadows of doorways and windows. He could barely make out their shapes, but knew full well that locals were watching him.
He got up, and quickly retrieved the balls of crumpled paper he had discarded, feeling that he had no right to add in any way to the mess. He began to hurry down the street, as thin boys emerged from hiding to lob stones and jeers after him.
He found himself, unexpectedly, in the street of the hostelry again. It was uninhabited, but he was pleased to have found it as his bottle had become unaccountably empty.
He went into the gloom. There was no one around. Even the old woman had disappeared. His pile of Imperial currency lay where he had left it on the counter.
Seeing it, he felt authorised to help himself to another bottle from behind the bar. Clutching the bottle in his hand, he very carefully sat down at one of the tables and poured another drink.
He had been sitting there for an indefinite amount of time when a voice asked him if he was all right.
Ignace Karkasy blinked and looked up. The gang of Imperial army troops who had been burning clean the walls of the city had entered the hostelry, and the old woman had reappeared to fetch them drinks and food.
The officer looked down at Karkasy as his men took their seats.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Yes, yes, yes,’ Karkasy slurred.
‘You don’t look all right, pardon me for saying. Should you be out in the city?’
Karkasy nodded furiously, tucking into his pocket for his permit. It wasn’t there. ‘I’m meant to be here,’ he said, instead. ‘Meant to. I was ordered to come. To hear Eater Piton Momus. Shit, no, that’s wrong. To hear Peeter Egon Momus present his plans for the new city. That’s why I’m here. I’m meant to be.’
The officer regarded him cautiously. ‘If you say so, sir. They say Momus has drawn up a wonderful scheme for the reconstruction.’
‘Oh yes, quite wonderful,’ Karkasy replied, reaching for his bottle and missing. ‘Quite bloody wonderful. An eternal memorial to our victory here…’
‘Sir?’
‘It won’t last,’ Karkasy said. ‘No, no. It won’t last. It can’t. Nothing lasts. You look like a wise man to me, friend, what do you think?’
‘I think you should be on your way, sir,’ the officer said gently.
‘No, no, no… about the city! The city! It won’t last, Terra take Peeter Egon Momus. To the dust, all things return. As far as I can see, this city was pretty wonderful before we came and hobbled it.’
‘Sir, I think—’
‘No, you don’t,’ Karkasy said, shaking his head. ‘You don’t, and no one does. This city was supposed to last forever, but we broke it and laid it in tatters. Let Momus rebuild it, it will happen again, and again. The work of man is destined to perish. Momus said he plans a city that will celebrate mankind forever. You know what? I bet that’s what the architects who built this place thought too.’
‘Sir—’
‘What man does comes apart, eventually. You mark my words. This city, Momus’s city. The Imperium—’
‘Sir, you—’
Karkasy rose to his feet, blinking and wagging a finger. ‘Don’t “sir” me! The Imperium will fall asunder as soon as we construct it! You mark my words! It’s as inevitable as—’
Pain abruptly splintered Karkasy’s face, and he fell down, bewildered. He registered a frenzy of shouting and movement, then felt boots and fists slamming into him, over and over again. Enraged by his words, the troopers had fallen upon him. Shouting, the officer tried to pull them off.
Bones snapped. Blood spurted from Karkasy’s nostrils.
‘Mark my words!’ he coughed. ‘Nothing we build will last forever! You ask these bloody locals!’
A bootcap cracked into his sternum. Bloody fluid washed into his mouth.
‘Get off him! Get off him!’ the officer was yelling, trying to rein in his provoked and angry men.
By the time he managed to do so, Ignace Karkasy was no longer pontificating.
Or breathing.
SIX
Counsel
A question well answered
Two gods in one room
TORGADDON WAS WAITING for him in the towering ante-hall behind the strategium.
‘There you are,’ he grinned.
‘Here I am,’ Loken agreed.
‘There will be a question,’ Torgaddon remarked, keeping his voice low. ‘It will seem a minor thing, and will not be obviously directed to you bu
t be ready to catch it.’
‘Me?’
‘No, I was talking to myself. Yes, you, Garviel! Consider it a baptismal test. Come on.’
Loken didn’t like the sound of Torgaddon’s words, but he appreciated the warning. He followed Torgaddon down the length of the ante-hall. It was a perilously tall, narrow place, with embossed columns of wood set into the walls that soared up and branched like carved trees to support a glass roof two hundred metres above them, through which the stars could be seen. Darkwood panels cased the walls between the columns, and they were covered with millions of lines of hand-painted names and numbers, all rendered in exquisite gilt lettering. They were the names of the dead: all those of the Legions, the army, the fleet and the Divisio Militaris who had fallen since the start of the Great Crusade in actions where this flagship vessel had been present. The names of immortal heroes were limned here on the walls, grouped in columns below header legends that proclaimed the world-sites of famous actions and hallowed conquests. From this display, the ante-hall earned its particular name: the Avenue of Glory and Lament.
The walls of fully two-thirds of the ante-hall were filled up with golden names. As the two striding captains in their glossy white plate drew closer to the strategium end, the wall boards became bare, unoccupied. They passed a group of hooded necrologists huddled by the last, half-filled panel, who were carefully stencilling new names onto the dark wood with gold-dipped brushes.
The latest dead. The roll call from the High City battle.
The necrologists stopped work and bowed their heads as the two captains went by. Torgaddon didn’t spare them a second glance, but Loken turned to read the half-writ names. Some of them were brothers from Locasta he would never see again.
He could smell the tangy oil suspension of the gold-leaf the necrologists were using.
‘Keep up,’ Torgaddon grunted.
High doors, lacquered gold and crimson, stood closed at the end of the Avenue Hall. Before them, Aximand and Abaddon were waiting. They were likewise fully armoured, their heads bare, their brush-crested helms held under their left arms. Abaddon’s great white shoulder plates were draped with a black wolf-pelt.