I walked back to it reluctantly. He brought the prayer drone in again, and set it hovering in front of me.
‘We will continue and use one of the words,’ he said.
‘Agreed,’ said the first shadow. ‘Despite her attitude, we are interested in the female’s performance.’
Hodi looked at me. In his eyes behind the cloth hood, I could see tension.
‘One word,’ he said. ‘Focus and say it clearly.’
He touched the hovering screen and a word appeared. The screen fizzled and blinked, as if it was having great difficulty maintaining resolution.
I looked at it.
I spoke the word.
CHAPTER 26
The word, and after
I do not know or understand what the word was. The moment I uttered it, it seemed to be released from me with some force, and was gone from my memory.
Then a thing that I cannot explain happened. The ancient altar at the far end of the brass room leapt into the air. It leapt into the air and buckled as it did so, and shredded apart in an explosive manner, as though it had been struck by some immense weight, which had broken it and strewn its twisted metal fragments in all directions, or as though a grenade had been placed inside it and detonated. Chips of brass shrapnel bounced off the walls, the ceiling and the caged shelves, and rained to the ground around us, jingling like dropped coins.
I found I had fallen over. I picked myself up off my hands and knees. There was a ringing in my ears. The lectern had overturned. I saw the prayer drone lying on the ground a few metres away, wrecked and mangled, sparks spitting from its ruptured casing, its screen cracked and dead.
I turned around. I put my hand to my mouth and found a drop of blood. I had very slightly split my lower lip.
The ecclesiarchs were in a state of confusion. Some had fallen down too, as had at least three of the shields. Many were swaying as if concussed. All of their handheld instruments had shorted out and failed.
‘Now you explain,’ I said to Hodi.
‘We will place you in a holding facility,’ he said, struggling to retain his composure.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘You will explain this. You will do it now.’
‘It is not your place to–’ he began to declare.
‘Do not make me say the word again,’ I said.
In truth, I did not remember the word to say it again, but he did not know that.
‘Control her!’ one of the shadows demanded.
‘The female has performed and survived the first assay of Enuncia better than any specimen before her,’ said the second. ‘She will be prioritised for development by the host.’
‘She is our property,’ Hodi snapped at them. ‘You do not own us, and neither do you give us orders! You are our partners in this enterprise, but you do not take what we have gone to great lengths to acquire!’
‘Control her, or we will control her,’ said the shadow. ‘And we will take whatever we want, if it is necessary to the cause.’
Hodi looked at me and pulled off his capirote. His face was flushed and his hair lank with sweat.
‘For Throne’s sake, cooperate with me,’ he said, ‘or they will take you and you do not want that!’
The Pontifex Urba suddenly let out a piercing wail. We looked over at him and saw he was sprawling back in his throne, afflicted by tremors. Some attack had overcome him. He was gazing up at the ceiling, and had rammed his head back so far against the throneback it had dislodged the golden mitre despite the wires holding it in place. The Pontifex appeared to be bleeding from the mouth.
‘What is it?’ Hodi demanded.
‘Perhaps an after-phrase?’ one of the ecclesiarchs suggested. ‘An echo of the enunciation?’
‘Send for the medicaes!’ Hodi barked. ‘Get a doctor of physik here at once! And secure the room.’
The poor Pontifex continued to wail and thrash and bleed. A detachment of church wardens hurried in from the anteroom. They wore the robes and painted saint masks of the ones who maintained the basilica precinct, but their robes were blue, and they were overtopped by shirts of segmented ceramite and brass armour. They carried force poles and had cutros strapped to their hips in copper scabbards.
I thought, since when do the male servants of the Ecclesiarchy come armed?
‘Guard her,’ Hodi told them, pointing at me. A trio of doctors, medicae in red albs, had also come running into the reading room to attend the Pontifex.
One of the shadows behind the screened doors insisted that Hodi account for the situation. The voice was like an anvil scraping across stone.
Hodi turned and glared at the shadows.
‘Withdraw!’ he declared. ‘Withdraw, and quickly now! Go to the undercells and prepare to leave the compound entirely if necessary.’
‘Displeasure is expressed,’ said the first shadow. ‘You seek to exclude us from the consistory and to keep the female for your own use–’
‘Warp take you, Scarpac!’ Hodi snarled. ‘Work with us as you promised! We don’t yet know what this is. Withdraw until we have made the area safe!’
The huge shadows loomed for a moment against the backlit screens, and then vanished back into whatever chamber lay behind the wooden partition.
The Pontifex was no better. Blood was now drooling out between his teeth in considerable quantities.
It was then I saw the key. It was a small brass key, one of the ones that secured the caged doors protecting the shelves of ancient tomes. An ecclesiarch had left it in the lock when fetching or replacing one of the breviaries I had read from.
I saw it wriggle in the lock. It wriggled, then it popped out of the lock all by itself and flew onto the floor. A moment later, the cage doors of the shelf swung open by themselves.
‘Confessor?’ I called. The armed wardens ringed me, and none of them had seen it. They were all too agitated by the shouting and commotion of the ecclesiarchs and doctors gathered around the ailing Pontifex.
I felt the floor tremble slightly.
‘Confessor?’ I called again. ‘Hodi!’
He turned to regard me, angry and preoccupied.
‘What?’ he snapped.
‘Look,’ I said.
The floor quivered again. The best way I can describe it is as though a giant footstep had stirred the room. I pointed at the shelves. With a sharp metal crack, several of the door locks failed, and the caged doors swung loose under their own weight.
‘Oh holy light…’ Hodi murmured, his eyes widening. One by one, the ecclesiarchs had stopped jabbering and turned to see what was happening. The room grew quieter and quieter until the only sound was the whimpering of the Pontifex.
The floor trembled for a third time. Another lock broke like a pistol shot. Two books fell off a high shelf and slapped onto the brass floor.
Our breaths were suddenly smoke at our lips and nostrils. The air temperature in the room plummeted. Frost began to form on the metal surfaces.
Hodi bent down and ran his finger through the rime.
‘Eudaemonic ice,’ he murmured. ‘We have to clear the room. We have to clear the room now.’
He rose.
‘Wardens, take her to the nearest anechoic bunker,’ he said. ‘Doctors, let’s make to carry his Holiness to–’
He did not get any further. A wind screamed out of nowhere, streaming through a chamber whose doors were closed. It was a hot gust, like the breath of a furnace, for it prickled our skins, but it did not melt the ice nor did it dispel the steam blooming as we exhaled.
More shelf doors ripped open and books began to fly out. They spewed out as though invisible hands were raking along each shelf in turn, cascading them into the air so that they spilled, covers opening, pages flying, spines breaking. Broken books and loose pages covered the floor, and torn paper billowed in the air like snow. Some of the airborne scraps began to glow and then burn.
A light came into the room. It came up through the floor, as if the beaten copper deck was a golden pool and the
light was a submarine beast breaking the flat surface and emerging into the air. It was a terrible, bloodshot light, a thing of malice. It made a vaguely humanoid shape out of the bloody sunset light that composed it, and that shape writhed and crackled internally, as though it was made of electric insects or radioactive beads.
It was the thought-form that had blasted through the Maze Undue.
It was the thing that had called itself Grael Magent.
CHAPTER 27
In which there is a degree of pandemonium
Two of the saint-faced wardens began to manhandle me towards the door. The other wardens turned to face the light and formed a protective ring around us. The fierce, hot wind was in our faces, flapping at hair and robes. Some of the ecclesiarchs stepped forwards to face the bloodshot light. One raised the brass icon he was holding, a censer set with images of the primarchs.
‘I abjure thee, unclean spirit!’ I heard him yell. ‘I renounce thee and cast thee back, into the immaterium whence thou emerged!’
The thought-form crackled. The defiant ecclesiarch began to leave the ground. His alb flapped around his floating ankles. He cried out. He left one slipper behind. His feet wiggled.
He rose slowly, as though the reading room was rapidly filling with water and he was being carried, buoyant, towards the ceiling by the rising surface. He dropped the icon, which hit the ground and broke, and started to claw at the air around him, as though trying to fight off or prise away the telekinetic grip that had him in its grasp.
It did no good. Vertical, he continued to ascend until he began to approach the ornate brass roof. He attempted to duck his head away, to bend, but his spine was rigid. Crying out again, he started to batter his fists at the approaching ceiling. Then he pressed his hands flat against the metal to stop his ascent.
It was still to no avail. He rose as slowly and inexorably as though he had been standing on an elevator platform. His head hit the ceiling, and he was forced to cock it aside against his shoulder as he continued to rise. His hands were splayed against the ceiling, his arms bent. He looked like a weight-lifter trying to clean and jerk the whole ceiling, except his feet were paddling like a swimmer’s. The ceiling started pressing onto his shoulders. His head was forced to bend forwards so that his chin was on his chest. His hands slipped and scrabbled. He looked, to my horrified eyes, like the primordial demigod Atlas carrying a world on his shoulders.
Then there was a crack, a ripple of cracks, sharp-pistol shots that we heard above the roar of the wind. The ecclesiarch’s hands went limp and his arms fell slackly to his sides. His feet danced for a second, like the feet of a man hanged from a black-iron platform on Ropeburn. He continued to ascend, slowly and relentlessly. The shoulders, pressed into the ceiling, were dislocating and bulging under the alb, and the man’s head hung too far down his chest, at an impossible angle. Blood began to drizzle out from under the skirts of his alb.
The devotion and courage of the ecclesiarchs was humbling. Despite this demonstration of horror, several more, including Hodi, stepped forwards to confront the vaguely humanoid light, all uttering oaths of banishment and deliverance at once, all brandishing icons and amulets.
The thought-form thing, Grael Magent, shivered back from their assault and lashed out. Two of the ecclesiarchs flew away to the right, limbs flailing, robes flapping. They smashed off the ceiling and crashed to the floor, where they were dragged along by some invisible force almost as far as the shattered hulk of the altar. They looked like men carried away by a flash flood.
Three others, one of them Hodi, were hurled to the left. One of these landed across a copper lectern with enough force to break his back. The bloodshot light began to advance, seething like the angry heart of a radioactive furnace.
The Church could not protect me. I had no intention of staying there and making myself another target. At least the tumultuous circumstances afforded me some confusion in which to attempt an escape.
I slipped the bent silver pin out of my pocket and jabbed it into the thumb ball of one of the wardens dragging me. His brethren, in their staunch defensive ring, were already head down into the wind as the thought-form came at them.
The warden cried out in pain, and released his grip. I grabbed his force pole as he stumbled, pulled it out of his grip, and side-smashed him with it, dropping him onto the floor. The other one was still pulling at me. I spun the pole one-handed to improve my grip on it, activated the power stud, and rammed the end of the charged weapon in his face.
His head snapped back, and the painted saint mask, broken in two, flew off him. As he fell, I turned and ran for the door.
I did not know where I was going, except out of the room, and perhaps back towards the candlelit stairs. Neither did I know quite how far I’d get, except that I trusted the entire precinct would soon be in such a state of pandemonium that I might succeed in getting very far indeed.
For a second, I was stopped in my tracks by a roar. Predators can do that, I believe, carnodons and other large ambush hunters. They can issue a roar of such force and tone that it literally stuns their prey with fear.
That was the quality of the sound I heard, but it was not especially meant for me. It was a declaration of intent, a warning that restraint would not be shown.
It was the full-throated bellow of a raging warrior entering combat.
I still do not believe what I saw occur next. In my memory, it has the quality of a vivid nightmare. What made it all the more extraordinary was that the extraordinary was already under way in that brass chamber. An entirely unnatural event was unfolding, the sort of exceptional thing a citizen of the Imperium might only witness once in his lifetime, if he was unlucky. Onto that, a second extraordinary thing was now being piled, more than the sane mind could even begin to accept.
Two of the three shadows, the mysterious mediators, had come back. They had come back with great haste to confront the thought-form. They came into the open through the screened wooden doors that had masked them, splintering the wood, shredding the screen mesh, completely demolishing the structure of the confessional boxes in their urgency to get out. They were huge, bigger than even their silhouettes had suggested. But, despite their size, they were moving with a speed that was quite abnormal. It was the sprint acceleration you see in some wild animals that reminds you that they are not constructed like us, that the engines of their skeletons and the attachments of their muscles are different, and therefore capable of things that a human body is not. As when you see a cat leap two metres from standing onto a bookcase, or a tinker’s simian pet race up the side of a building.
Or a cattle dog plough out of a holloway’s darkness and take a warblind warrior off his feet.
I did not know what the two things were. I could not make sense of them. Then I realised that I must know, for I had seen their forms in countless picture books and data entries, and I had seen their likenesses on statues and banners, in stained-glass windows, and graven on the very walls of the basilica above, between the staircase-mouthed faces with the sun-ray crowns.
They were of the Adeptus Astartes.
They were Space Marines.
One wore a helm, the other did not. The span of their shoulder guards was that of a massive arched doorway, and just as high. Their feet and boots were like the boles of mature trees. The one with the helm, a beaked thing like an anvil, carried a massive weapon in his huge hands. It was slabby and blunt in form, its metal shape scuffed and worn. It was preposterously large, so that any human who might wield it would appear to be a child. It was, I presumed, one of the sacred bolters of the Adeptus Astartes.
The one without the helm had a blade that appeared in form to be a heavy short sword, but which was as long as my leg and as broad as my thigh.
The one with the helm tore through the confessional screens with inhuman speed, ran two or three strides across the floor of the chamber towards the thought-form, halted hard, and swung his weapon up to fire from the hip.
The other foll
owed, smashing a screened section out of its frame. As he landed on the chamber floor, he braced like a great ape, with bent knees, his back bent to throw his head forwards. His arms were pressed to his sides, with the sword clamped in two hands between his knees. The stance made his huge armour-plated shoulders bulge aggressively. His chin jutted forward and his eyes were blazing. It was a threat stance, a challenge. He opened his mouth wide and roared at the thought-form, a noise dreadful in both its volume and its tone.
They were clad in crimson armour, with gunmetal edges, and black emblems upon the vast shoulder shields. The one without the helmet had flesh like cracked bread crust, and slate-grey teeth the shape of iron nails that filled his mouth and jutted forward past his peeled-back lips as he raged, flecked in spittle.
I did not know these things, but I knew for certain that they did not fight in the name of the Emperor any more, nor had they in a very long time. My initial supposition had been wrong. These were not Space Marines at all. They were Traitor Marines.
Now I wanted to be in that place even less. I remembered myself. I reminded my feet that they took orders from me, and I ran. I fled.
Behind me, the helmed Traitor Marine began to fire. His bolter boomed in the metal box of the reading room, the noise and the concussion pummelling me from behind as I ran for the door.
The searing shells went through the bloodshot light and destroyed the brass shelves and copper panelling along the wall behind it. The impact of each shot was like a small bomb going off.
The thought-form struck back, driving a dozer-blade of telekinetic force at the Traitor Marine. The Traitor Marine staggered back for two or three steps, as if fighting a gale-force blast, his immense feet raking and sparking the copper floor.
The other one, the one without the helm, rose out of his simian stance of feral defiance, and attacked. He went forwards with another abhuman burst of physical acceleration, an animal sprint, right into the bloodshot light, his sword coming back over his right shoulder in a two-handed swing.