"Lord of the Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Спуриэр Саймон)

Mita Ashyn

It was less an awakening than a rebirth.

Always it was like this, after the trance. Always she allowed the subtle skeins of perception and concept to break free from her focus, shifting her mind state from some inner vantage to the mundane outer realities, the province of conventional sense and thought.

She returned to her corporeal self like an eagle resuming its eyrie, breathing honeyed incense and enjoying the slow trickle of physical sensation. It felt like blood flowing through starved arteries.

In the Scholastia Psykana she'd learnt to call this the pater donum: the brief flush of warmth and contentment that followed a scrying trance, like a reward from the Emperor's own hand. She allowed it to work its way along each limb, curling her toes and arching her back.

Relish it, the adept-tutors had taught. Enjoy it whilst it lasts. It was, after all, the single facet of telepathy that justified the term ''gift'' where all others equated more accurately to the symptoms of a curse.

The pater donum would not last. It would be gone in an instant, and at that unhappy moment all the fierce memories of the trance would crash inwards to drown her.

She opened her eyes, focused on the single guttering candle at the centre of the scrying-ring, and allowed the sludge of recollection to break through.

Her first thought was this:

Something has fallen from heaven.

The meditation cell was a simple affair.

Four rockcrete walls arched overhead, sloping together to form a crude dome with a needle of bronze at its core: a conduction point for the astral body. Gone were the scriptures picked out in gold and opal across each wall, gone were the stylised star charts and mantras patterning the seer-dome, gone were the great twisting shelves of chittering incense drones. Such comforts she'd left behind on the fortress-world Safaur-Inquis, and this spartan cube was as far removed from the decadence she'd come to expect as it could be. She supposed she should be grateful for anything at all, given the indifference her new master had showed her, but still... there were limits.

A withered servitor — once human, long since lobotomised, dissected, infested with logic engines and clattering components — poked a stunted limb against her shoulder, its one rheumy eye fluttering spastically. It tried to talk, but the rune-etched staples through its lips and jaw allowed little more than a moist clucking, a long strand of drool wobbling from its chin.

On Safaur, her trance-awakenings had been tended by gende servants: smooth-skinned subordinates with tongues neady removed and ownership studs across each eye, hurrying to mop her sweat and massage her shoulders, lovingly recording on scented parchment whatever insights the meditation bestowed. On Safaur her trance-suite flocked with locust-like automata: emeralds for eyes and rubies for jaws, coloured streamers of psychoactive pheromones falling like musk from their tails. On Safaur a dozen cogitators existed solely to interpret her visions. On Safaur the majesty of her quarters was matched only by the view from her central garret, and between assignments she spent hours gazing across the acid shores of the sulphur seas. On the Inquisitorial fortress-world of Safaur-Inquis, her masters wielded their influence with artistry and opulence.

Her present circumstance was therefore somewhat galling.

Here, a one-armed man/machine with a techstylus and a snot-clogged nose was the best the governor's chamberlain could provide. It poked her again, marking her naked skin with a moronic stripe of ink before leaning away, eye rolling. Above it a faulty servodrone corkscrewed erratically across the ceiling, oozing incense. It bashed against the wall with depressing regularity, and she found herself unconsciously counting along — tap-tap-tap — like the beating of a plastic heart.

Anything to distract her from the memories.

But no, the warm pleasure of the pater donum had passed, the details of this dull little chamber had ceased to offer any but the most rudimentary of diversions, and the growing pressure behind her eyes couldn't be contained indefinitely. Sighing, she pulled a simple robe across her shoulders, clenched her jaw, snuffed out the candle and focused on the details of the trance, still burning bright in her mind.

'Record,' she commanded, waving a hand. The servitor straightened, stylus poised on the fluttering surface of an augur-slate, clucking its readiness.

'There follows the account,' she began formally, ignoring the whispering of the servitor's joints, 'of the furor arcanum undertaken in the Emperor's name on this day — date it — by I, interrogator primus of the retinue of Inquisitor Kaustus, on Imperial hive-world Equixus. In service of the most blessed Inquisition and in fealty to his Holiness the Emperor of Man, I attest upon my immortal soul to the provenance of this account, and swear upon its veracity — may my lord else strike me down.' She drew a breath, shivering at the cold. 'Blessings be upon His Throne and dominion. Ave imperator!'

She watched as the servitor scrawled the dedication with a mechanical twitch, scrolling the data-slate onto a clean line. She took a moment to compose herself, pursed her lips, then continued.

'For the third time — refer to prior reports — the trance began with the sensation of... altitude.' She closed her eyes and remembered the cold, the dizzying sensation of an abyssal nothingness gaping on every side, ice forming on her skin. She immersed herself in the memory and continued to speak, applying the recall techniques she'd been taught since an early age. 'I... I felt as though I was standing at a great height,' she said, 'and all around me the ground rushed away like the sides of a mountain. Except... a mountain made of metal. I couldn't see anything — there was too much snow — but I knew that if I stepped too far in any direction I'd fall. I'd fall and never stop falling, all the way down to a... a deep darkness, where no light ever shines. I couldn't see it, but... I knew it was there. I could feel it.

'There was a moment of nausea — though...' She half smiled, childishly proud, '... though today, for the first time, I did not vomit. It seemed to me, then, that something was drawing near, pushing through the snow, and though I was scared I stood my ground...' She chewed a lip, brows dipping. 'Perhaps I feared the drop more than I feared the approaching presence, I... I don't know. During previous trances I've awoken at this point and my efforts to divine further details have been frustrated. Today I... persisted. I'm certain I caught a glimpse of the... the presence in the snow, which has eluded me until now.

'It seemed to be myself.'

She glanced up, aware of how ridiculous the sentiment sounded. If the servitor was even capable of such judgement it gave no indication of it, awaiting her next words with the same dumb focus as before. She tried to relax, reminding herself that the interpretations of the furor arcanum were never straightforward, and that the libraries of the Scholastia Psykana were filled with validated predictions that had arisen from the most preposterous of trance-visions.

Still she hesitated, disturbed by the vividness of the dream.

'It was me, but... but I looked different. My hair was cut short and I wore rags, and... there was blood on my face. One of... oh, Throne... one of my arms was gone. Bleeding like a fountain... I was trying to say something but the wind was too strong and I... I couldn't hear, and that's when I saw... I...

'I was being carried. In the air, like... flying. I tried to see what was holding me but it was covered by the snow and there was... there was a shadow over its face.'

She was vaguely aware of a tear slipping down her cheek, and distantly — surreally — wondered why it was there. What did it mean?

The words came in a jumble now, refusing to stop, and she felt herself caught up in the same fearful horror as during the trance itself, tumbling and screaming and freezing, all at once.

'I looked into it... the shadow, I mean... and it was like I was falling, straight through the snow towards the ground, and... and something was chasing me, burning me from behind my eyes... Emperor preserve me, it was a pregnant hag — the size of a city — rushing down from the stars... a-and... and she hit the snow and... ohhh... her bones broke and her belly split and...

'...and darkness crawled out from her womb.'

She forced open her eyes long enough to check that the servitor had recorded every word. It watched her without comment or movement, fully prepared to wait forever for her next command.

Sighing, Interrogator Mita Ashyn of the Ordo Xenos allowed herself the indulgence of slipping into a deep, exhausted faint.

'Ah, interrogator.'

'My lord.' Mita bowed formally, keeping her eyes lowered. She hadn't yet grown accustomed to her new master's idiosyncrasies, but had learned quickly that his legendary temper was deployed far more readily amongst those who failed to show the proper obeisance. Given that he insisted upon wearing a mirror-helm with only the narrowest of eyeslits, it was perhaps unfortunate that any interested glance towards his surreal headgear was mistaken for disrespect, which of course invited the full force of his wrath.

Inquisitor Kaustus was not a man to cross lightly.

Mita considered herself relatively safe, just as long as she occupied her view with the tails of his chequered robes and the heavy soles of his armoured feet, rather than his feather-mantled shoulders and reflective mask.

'Stop that,' he snapped, proving her wrong, his voice curiously soft for such an imposing figure. 'I won't have my acolytes bowing and scraping like common peasants. I'm your master, girl, not your Emperor.'

'Apologies, my lord.' She straightened and adjusted her gaze vertically, oozing penitence. Perhaps chest height would be more appropriate.

Behind her, a couple of the innumerable cowled figures that comprised Kaustus's retinue sniggered lightly, amused at her mistake. She forced down the overwhelming desire to break their heads and forced herself to calm. As the newest member of the entourage she'd quickly learned that rank counted for exactly nothing: technically her command was second only to the inquisitor's, but it seemed respect was earned — not demanded — amongst this colourful crowd. As long as Kaustus continued to humiliate her in front of them their respect would continue to be in short supply.

'I've read the account of your vision,' the inquisitor said, voice dripping scorn, waving a spindly datapad across her view. 'You fainted.'

'It was... unusually vivid, my lord.'

'I don't care how vivid it was, girl. I'll not tolerate my servants passing out at the drop of hat.'

'It won't happen again, my lord.'

'No. It will not.' The datapad dipped upwards — the inquisitor's gaze roving across its spidery text. 'Your account makes for... interesting reading,' he said. 'What does it all mean?'

'I don't know, my lord. There are no cogitators here to deciph—'

'I didn't ask what some Emperor-damned machine would make of it, girl! I asked what you think.'

She swallowed, resisting the urge to meet his gaze. Here, in the splendour of his guest suite at the heart of the governor's palace, he was as terrible and magnificent a figure as the legends made claim.

'Well?'

'I... I think something is coming, my lord. Coming here, I mean.'

'"Something". Is that the best you can do?'

She bristled, fists clenching at her sides, struggling to keep the bitterness from her voice. 'Something from the stars, then. Something massive. S-something dark.'

For a moment there was silence. Dust motes circulated through the hard beam of a hovering illuminator, and at the periphery of her vision Mita could see the retinue shuffling its collective feet. Had her words struck a chord?

Kaustus shattered both the silence and her hopes with one deft exclamation.

'Emperor's blood!' he boomed, voice heavy with sarcasm, 'such detail! How did I ever cope without a witch at my side?'

Predictably the room exploded, acolytes and cowled disciples venting their sycophantic amusement in gales of laughter. Willing herself not to blush — unsuccessfully — Mita supposed she couldn't blame them. In shared cruelty lay acceptance, a bitter lesson she'd been slow to grasp.

For an instant she found herself hating them. Hating him, even, reviling her own master like some undisciplined child... But such thoughts were the gatestones at the head of a dangerous path, and her entire life had been spent studying to ward off such heretical temptations. She willed herself to relax, bore the humiliation with good grace—

—and dug her fingernails so far into the flesh of her palms that blood oozed between her knuckles.

'Enough.'

Kaustus silenced the laughter, tossing aside the data-pad like some broken toy, its ability to entertain spent. An abrupt silence gripped the room and he watched the crowd with narrowed eyes, colossal shoulders squared.

'A mission.'

To Mita, bathed unwillingly in a tumult of psychic emissions, the phrase was like an icy wind. She tasted the hungry anticipation of the retinue, all forced amusements forgotten, minds focused and sharp. She gave them their dues: fools they might be, but they were obedient with it.

'Investigation and salvage.' Kaustus cocked his head towards his staff, barking commands. 'Three teams, three transports. Division pattern delta. Now.'

The entourage divided like a machine, three groups forming in short order. Without the benefit of individual familiarity, Mita could nonetheless detect the more obvious distributions of resource: in each group there hulked the cowled form of a combat servitor, in each a medic fussed with triage apparatus and checked chemical proboscis, in each a hooded priest stepped from figure to figure, administering blessings and prayers.

Kaustus had been collecting disciples his entire life, amassing a crew to shame even the most luminary of fellow inquisitors. With a single command the capabilities and specialisms of the whole had been spliced evenly and instantly, without comment or question or flaw. Even to Mita, still smarting from their scorn, it was a display of impressive efficiency.

She struck what she hoped was an authoritative pose — uncomfortably aware that she alone had failed to fall in. If Kaustus had expected her involvement he gave no sign of it, nodding briskly at each group.

'We rendezvous at gate Epsilon-Six in three hours,' he barked. 'Cold-weather gear, night-sight, fully armed. Dismissed!'

The retinue filed from the suite without a word, and Mita reflected that for all their variety, for all the many characters and histories contained within the group, they operated with parade-ground efficiency to match even the most elite of the Imperial guard's storm troopers.

She realised with a start that she was the last to leave, and that Kaustus was staring at her, gloved fingers toying elegantly with the cruciform ''I'' medallion around his neck. 'Interrogator,' he said, features unreadable. 'You appear to still be here...'

'My lord,' she swallowed, hunting for a diplomatic method of delivering her enquiries, settling eventually for a lame: 'What are we to investigate?'

The anticipated rebuke for her insolence never came. She imagined the man's lips curling behind the mask: the grin of a cat entertained by its struggling prey.

'That's just it, interrogator,' he cooed. 'You already know.'

She frowned. 'My lord?'

'How did you put it? "Something from the heavens... Something massive... Something dark"?'

'I... I'm sorry, my lord, I don't u—'

'You were right. Albeit somewhat late.'

'Late?'

'A vessel — a large vessel — crash-landed in the ice wastes two hours ago. Given that we were already here, it would seem remiss to not aid in the investigation.'

'But... but...'

'It's not coming, interrogator. It's already arrived. Dismissed.'

She marched out in an unthinking haze, and as she stamped towards her dingy cell to prepare, an ugly foreboding twisted in her guts. Her waking revelation returned to her and she winced against the pain.

Something has fallen from heaven.

Through night-vision binox — baroque coils of cabling and lenses enveloping her eyes like a hungry kiss — the hive was a flaming steeple.

Peering over her shoulder, shivering despite thick furs, Mita regarded the city-world as the convoy left it behind, swallowed by the horizon like a melting stalagmite. That there were larger hives on worlds less remote couldn't detract from its magnificence: the city's vastness snagged at her eyes, sucking on her attention. Two hundred million souls, crushed together like termites, eking out their blind lives in the belly of a spine-tipped beast.

Most would never see the sky.

It punctured the air like a gnarled knuckle. Cloud-clad and encased in frost, it was an inverted icicle, its uneven surfaces eroded by time and weather, pitted by industry and accented by turrets and spires. Where once the tempests of Equixus had raged undisturbed, now they found themselves incised, gashed apart by this upstart architecture. It drew a thick blood of lightning, auroras boiling into the night, and the splendour of its crackling crown strobe-lit the bleak wastes for kilometres around.

On this, the planet's unlit face — tumbling in perfect synchronicity with the orbital year — it was always dark, and always cold. Against the gloom, factories belched fiery waste and loading bays vented nebulae of ionic pollution. From the upper tiers, above the drudgery of plebeian life, windows bled galaxies of spilled light. In Mita's eyes, with her binox devouring every luminous pinprick, the hive stood against the darkness like a monolith-god, an effigy thick with fire.

More pronounced still was the brightness in the chambers of her mind: in those unseen tendrils of psychic thought that swarmed about her like the arms of an anemone, she could taste the life of the city. Two hundred million souls, each one a guttering candle of psychic light. Each one as fragile as it was bright.

She turned away, briefly dazzled, and focused instead upon the small convoy. There were four transports — converted Salamanders with widened tracks and pintle flashlights — racing across the ice at an alarming speed. Three contained the Inquisitorial retinue — assorted cloaks fluttering as their mass allowed — whilst in the lead vehicle a squad of the local lawmen, the Preafec-tus Vindictaire, set their helmeted heads against the wind and glared back towards the others, no doubt deriding the interference of outsiders. Officially the Preafectus was an independent body, administrated by the galaxy-spanning Adeptus Arbites, but a certain amount of diplomatic compromise to Imperial officials was customary. Mita suspected that the inquisitor's involvement had been far from sanctioned by the lawmen, though it would be a brave man indeed who denied an offer of assistance from Kaustus.

The man himself shared her portion of the rear vehicle, gazing out from a raised gantry with face and mind equally as shrouded. The Inquisition trained its operatives to shield their minds from psykers with enviable aplomb, and where the other members of the retinue blazed in her sixth sense like lanterns, his radiance was shuttered and barred. He stood with arms crossed, as unperturbed by the cold as if still within his suite, and only his fingers — kneading together — belied the impression that he was a statue: some decorous idol draped in fine cloth. She realised without surprise that she still knew all but nothing about him. In the short time she'd spent in his service the one obvious conclusion she'd drawn was this: The legends were wrong.

Inquisitor Kaustus came complete with a reputation as glowing as the nocturnal hive at his back, and exploited it shrewdly. That he had undertaken great deeds, that he had crushed alien heresies throughout the Ultima Segmentum, she did not doubt. But that he had done so with nobility and honour — with heroism, no less, as the myths claimed — was harder to digest. Ruthlessness and heroism did not, in her experience, sit well together.

Mita had begun her tenure as an Inquisitorial explicator direct from the Scholastia Psykana on Escastel Sanctus. Selected by her masters, deemed strong enough to resist corruption without recourse to the crippling Soul Binding ceremony required of lesser psykers, she remembered the shadowy recruitment rituals with uncomfortable clarity. Naked and hairless, the young chosen had shivered in subterranean caverns, servitors gliding amongst them, testing, prodding, twitching. She remembered the shame, mingled with secret relief, as one by one the other youths were borne away by the vapid machines, selected from afar by their new masters. They would be scattered amongst the Munitorum offices, she knew, or perhaps deployed by the Administratum, or even — so the whispers went — inducted into the Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes.

No one had warned her there was a fourth possibility.

She was claimed by the Ordo Xenos of the Emperor's divine Inquisition: that most clandestine of societies. She found herself gobbled whole by an organisation with unlimited authority, tasked to stalk the shadows of the Imperium and keep it strong, pure, and holy. Drugged and hooded, she was initiated into a world of secrecy and paranoia at the age of twelve.

At the age of twenty-five she left the fortress-world of Safaur-Inquis to join the retinue of the Inquisitor Petrai Levoix — blessed be her name — and for six years she was... content.

In that time she witnessed the scouring of the necron'tyr megaliths on Parson's Moon. She took a hand in the shattering of the Waaagh-Shalkaz when she overcame the warlord's puppet-wyrds. She bested the primacii magi of a genestealer insurrection in the Marquand Straits, and broke the mind of the Hruddite Demagogue of the Pleanar campaign. She earned the rank of interrogator at the age of thirty and, in the crucible of the Ylir uprisings, earned a citation from the Congresium Xenos for capturing the song-sword of a slain eldar warlock.

She was making a difference. She was the inquisitor's right hand. She sought — and earned — glory, and the accounts of her deeds ran in fluttering text-ribbons that she twined through her hair. She was somebody.

And then a week before her thirty-first birthday her mistress died — stupidly, pointlessly — in a messy crossfire on Erasula IX. And everything changed.

Abruptly she was no one. Abruptly she was less than nothing, and when all the enquiries and refutations were done she found herself reassigned, re-deployed—

—and re-subordinated.

Staring ahead into the driving snow, daring to study her new master's statuesque form in stolen glances, she wondered how long — if ever — it would take her to regain those heady heights of respect. Tasting the ebb and eddy of the retinue's thoughts around her, each one swarming with the desire to impress, to rise to the top, to be noticed, she realised with gloomy certainty that it was not going to be easy.

The crash site was as chaotic and as desolate as Mita could have imagined. To see a thing so mighty as a spacecraft so utterly ruined was a humbling sight. Already the snow settled across its fractured flukes, only the jutting paraphernalia of its lance arrays and command turrets breaking through the white sheet like the half-submerged bones of a drowned corpse.

For all that it was a mighty thing, its ancient plates and spars were nonetheless imbued with a great sadness — and a great bitterness. If the other members of the retinue shared the empathic shudder she felt as she ran a questing finger across a frosted bulkhead they gave no sign of it, but their search was conducted nonetheless with unusual restraint, like looters invading a mausoleum.

The vindictors barely exchanged a word with their uninvited assistants, clumsily picking their way towards a wound on the vessel's side, powerful torches spilling light as they entered. By contrast the retinue deployed quickly and efficiently, entering jagged orifices on three flanks. As they quested deep inside, like maggots squirming through rotten flesh, they directed terse reports via the shortwave voxcasters each wore. Kaustus received these bursts without comment, wandering across the vessel's surface, content to allow his minions to explore on his behalf.

She fidgeted in his wake, wondering whether she should have taken it upon herself to join the search. Her mind fluttered through awkward quandaries: should she await his command or assert her own authority? Should she seek to impress him with loyalty and obedience, or would a firebrand self-initiative gain his approval? Without any inkling of his temperament or tastes, such actions could easily dictate her success or failure as his highest ranking servant.

Unable to skim his thoughts, denied the view of his facial expressions, she nonetheless had a fair idea that she'd singularly failed in her attempts to impress him thus far.

'Are there survivors?' he asked, fingers kneading together.

'My lord?'

He sighed, hot vapour curling from the dimpled breathing slats of his mask. 'Interrogator, I dislike being answered with questions.'

'But, my lord, I—'

'I was assured by the ordo that your skills would prove invaluable. Are you now suggesting they were incorrect?' He spoke slowly and loudly, voice thick with condescension, and Mita struggled to control her rising hackles.

'N-no my lord, but—'

'Excellent. Then the time has come for you to show me you're here for a reason, don't you think?'

She tried to form an intelligent response, but as ever the options each seemed as lame as each other. She sighed, nodding in defeat. 'Yes.'

'So? Are there any survivors?'

Forcing herself to calm, she closed her eyes to the glowing traceries of the binox view and unfolded her mind, allowing it to seep into the metal of the craft like acid through stone. Immersed in the Empyrean, she tasted the ship's secrets, she learned its ancient name, she swarmed in its chambers, and she drank its flavours.

She finally stopped screaming when the inquisitor slapped her, hard, across the cheek.