• THE VAMPIRE GENEVIEVE •
by Kim Newman
BOOK 1: DRACHENFELS
BOOK 2 : GENEVIEVE UNDEAD
BOOK 3 : BEASTS IN VELVET
BOOK 4 : SILVER NAILS

THE WICKED AND THE DAMNED
A portmanteau novel by Josh Reynolds, Phil Kelly and David Annandale

MALEDICTIONS
An anthology by various authors

INVOCATIONS
An anthology by various authors

ANATHEMAS
An anthology by various authors

THE HOUSE OF NIGHT AND CHAIN
A novel by David Annandale

CASTLE OF BLOOD
A novel by C L Werner

DARK HARVEST
A novel by Josh Reynolds

THE OUBLIETTE
A novel by J C Stearns

SEPULTURUM
A novel by Nick Kyme

THE REVERIE
A novel by Peter Fehervari

THE COLONEL’S MONOGRAPH
A novella by Graham McNeill

PERDITION’S FLAME
An audio drama by Alec Worley

THE WAY OUT
An audio drama by Rachel Harrison

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer Horror

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Reverie’

A Black Library Imprint

eBook license

A dark bell tolls in the abyss.

It echoes across cold and unforgiving worlds, mourning the fate of humanity. Terror has been unleashed, and every foul creature of the night haunts the shadows. There is naught but evil here. Alien monstrosities drift in tomblike vessels. Watching. Waiting. Ravenous. Baleful magicks whisper in gloom-shrouded forests, spectres scuttle across disquiet minds. From the depths of the void to the blood-soaked earth, diabolic horrors stalk the endless night to feast upon unworthy souls.

Abandon hope. Do not trust to faith. Sacrifices burn on pyres of madness, rotting corpses stir in unquiet graves. Daemonic abominations leer with rictus grins and stare into the eyes of the accursed. And the Ruinous Gods, with indifference, look on.

This is a time of reckoning, where every mortal soul is at the mercy of the things that lurk in the dark. This is the night eternal, the province of monsters and daemons. This is Warhammer Horror. None shall escape damnation.

And so, the bell tolls on.

PROLOGUE

Night.

Night and dreams.

Night and wind.

He could not face the dreams, so he chose the wind.

The wind screamed over the battlements of the Ecclesiarchal Palace. It shrieked around the towers. It clawed at the shutters and howled in frustration at those it could not wrench open. Over others, it triumphed. These slammed back and forth, prisoners of the wind’s rage. Bang, bang, ba-bang, they struck the walls with a stuttering rhythm. The crashes hammered down the halls, and Cardinal Lorenz frowned, irritation breaking through his anxiety. Where were the serfs? Why weren’t they dealing with the shutters? If he had been trying to sleep, the clatter would have woken him.

If he had been trying to sleep.

He shuddered at the thought of slumber, and of the terrors that squirmed in its embrace.

Lorenz moved down the empty hall, tracked by the distant cacophony, called by the insistent, unforgiving storm. Traceries hung like spiderwebs above him. The light from the lumen sconces was dim. The shadows were so deep they seemed to be part of the night itself, its essence leaking into the palace, oozing down from the ribbed vaults and out of the peaks of the Gothic arches, waiting for him to stumble into the pools of darkness so they could seize him and drag him down.

Where was everyone? Lorenz was alone. There was no one in the hall. The limestone walls, darkened to black by millennia of grime, bounced the hollow sounds of his footsteps back at him. He could hear no activity anywhere. It was as if the palace were deserted.

Is this a dream?

Lorenz stamped. The impact on marble sent a jolt up his leg. And he was uncomfortably warm. Everything felt real. He was awake.

Not a dream.

Thank the Emperor.

He had been in his quarters, staring at his bed with dread, when the wind had begun to howl. He had decided to head to Saint Halfad’s Cloister, to spend a little longer praying before facing the implacable foe unconsciousness had become.

The nightmares were never the same, and they were all the same. When he woke, he could remember nothing except vague shades of horror. But he always came to in a panic, gasping for air, drenched in sweat, his skin crawling with the lingering sensation of whatever had touched it, or whatever it had been becoming.

He hadn’t slept for more than a few broken hours in over a month. And it was growing worse. Last night, and the night before, he had woken himself with his screams. A new residue was now left behind. The sense of imminence coated his soul.

Lorenz prayed for guidance. There was no one in whom he could confide. To open up would be to reveal weaknesses. Vulnerability was lethal. He had no patience for what was weak. Especially in himself.

He despised himself for being afraid.

So, he had been praying. And had received no answer.

Lorenz pushed open the bronze double doors that led to the cloister. It sat at the centre of the Ecclesiarchal Palace, its ivy-covered walls surrounding the lush inner garden. It was here that Lorenz was used to finding peace, a green oasis that shut out the realities of Theotokos.

Even here, sheltered by the four walls of the palace, the wind was ferocious. It roared at him as he stepped outside. He would not find peace here tonight.

Why did you come here?

He wasn’t certain. The choice had been between the wind and dreams. There had been no other possibility.

The tempest was so strong it pushed him back against the doors.

This is pointless. Go back.

Go back to what?

The cardinal shook his head. He was being ridiculous. He had come to contemplate the fury of a storm in the night. He would let the wind inspire him, lead him to meditate on the glory and power of the Emperor.

Yes. That sounded right. That was why he was here.

Squinting into the force of the gusts, pulling his robes tightly around himself, he advanced into the garden. A scattering of ornate, wrought-iron lumen posts cast halos of light over the cloister. The hedges and flowers were dimly limned silhouettes, the trees brooding guardians. Lorenz made his way to the centre of the cloister, where his preferred bench sat under the branches of a massive yew. The tree was older than the palace. Its roots, Lorenz felt, reached to the molten core of Theotokos. This was his retreat. This was where it was forbidden to disturb him. It was the last refuge of true rest for him, the place where he was most shielded from the ugliness of the world, and from the proof of his failure.

The wind batted at him. Twice, he came close to losing his balance. The gusts came from one direction, then another, as if the storm were trapped inside the cloister and raging to escape.

Lorenz was breathing hard from effort by the time he reached the yew. He held up a hand, shielding his eyes from the blasts, and looked up at the tree. A lumen post illuminated the sprawling, gnarled canopy of branches.

The tree was still.

Though the wind roared, though it tore at Lorenz’s robes and tried to knock him off his feet, it left the tree untouched. Not a single branch moved. Not a single twig.

Lorenz stared. He staggered backwards in confusion. He had to be mistaken. Somehow, he was looking at the tree in the wrong way.

He glanced around, turning to the rest of the garden for support, for sanity. Nothing moved. The hedges, shrubs and flowers might as well have been cast in bronze.

This is wrong. I’m wrong. I must be.

A dread worse than the fears of sleep clutched his heart.

Then the sound of buzzing thrummed in the night, and an immense cloud of flies boiled out of the centre of the yew’s branches. In moments, it filled the cloister. Gusts hurled the flies by the hundreds against Lorenz. They rattled against his robes. They struck his face, dry as sand. They flew into his mouth, vibrating and crawling. He gagged and coughed them out, spitting in horror and disgust. Winged bodies flew into his nose and he fell, clawing at his face, choking.

He snorted and wept, vomited up squirming bodies. Then he clapped his hands over his mouth and ran, weaving back and forth through the wind and the flies. His eyes were all but shut and he could barely see where he was going. He knew the garden intimately, knew every path and rise and fall by heart, but now he felt lost, flailing through a buzzing, whining, howling storm. These were not flies. They were pieces of the night. They were fragments of his forgotten nightmares that had come for him.

There was movement to his right. He was not alone in the garden. A hooded figure glided past the edge of the light, untroubled by the flies.

Lorenz collided with a hedge. It slashed at his face, and when he finally pulled himself free, the figure was gone.

Lorenz kept running. He tripped over a minor dip in the path and fell again, and then again. Only the horror of the bodies hurtling against him kept him from crying out. His breath wheezed from his lips in a thin, despairing moan.

He slammed into one of the pillars of the walkways. The impact stunned him. His body rang with blunt pain and he doubled over, agonised by the effort to keep from gasping.

Almost there. He was almost there.

He moved forward again, pursued, surrounded and assailed by flies. If he tried to pray he would choke, and he would fall, and he did not think he would rise again.

At last, he crashed against the doors. He held his breath and struggled with the handles. A huge gust pushed against him, and for a terrible moment he thought it would hold the doors closed. But he pulled and he pulled, and the heavy doors moved and parted, opening just enough for him to pass.

He couldn’t help it, then. He sobbed in relief. And he took a breath. And though he covered his mouth again as he slipped between the doors, it was too late. A struggling bundle of flies squirmed past his lips and he swallowed.

Gagging again, his eyes streaming, he managed to stay on his feet and pull the doors to. They only moved a couple of feet, yet they shut with a cavernous, thunderous clang.

The cardinal sank to his knees. He coughed. It felt as though the flies were caught in his throat, buzzing and crawling. By the grace of some miracle, none of the insects were in the hall.

And the wind seemed to be dying.

Hidden by the doors, the horrors in the cloister already seemed less real. He had seen impossible things. So, he must not really have seen them.

The tree must have been moving in the gusts. There had been only a storm, and insects caught up in it.

He was exhausted from lack of rest. He was overreacting.

But the echoing clang of the doors did not fade right away. At first, they grew louder – louder than the sound that had made them. Then closer, with a heavy, relentless rhythm, like the footsteps of approaching doom.

CHAPTER 1

A modified Taurox bearing the seal of the Adeptus Ministorum was waiting for Arch-Deacon Ambrose when he stepped out of the city of Magerit’s trans-hub. He winced at the sight of the vehicle and its pointed ostentation. Where the turret had once been mounted, there was now a shrine of iron and gold. Banners of scripture hung from poles on the rear of the roof. They moved sluggishly in the breeze. The driver, a sturdy woman named Maevek, gave Ambrose a sympathetic smile as she bowed, letting him know she understood his embarrassment.

He had been travelling for over a month, and his return to Magerit was the first time Ambrose had been presented with armoured transport. This felt like Lorenz sending a message to the populace of the city. Ambrose suspected it was aimed at him too. Either way, it was clumsy and counterproductive.

With a sigh, Ambrose made his way over to the Taurox. People streamed past him, entering and leaving the terminal. The building of the trans-hub towered over the crowded outdoor concourse. Webs of plasteel walkways linked the rockcrete structures. Fine ash drifted slowly down from the grey-brown sky, coating everything in layers of grit. For the first time in weeks, Ambrose tasted the familiar, thick, chewy air of Magerit. The air had been easier to breathe in a number of the other cities he had visited, but not for pleasant reasons.

In the time it took Ambrose to cross the five yards to the vehicle, half a dozen people recognised him. They called to him and reached out, and he greeted them, smiling. He was getting used to his rising public image, even though he still felt conflicted about it. He was an arch-deacon. He was not meant to be the visible face of the Ecclesiarchy on Theotokos.

Maevek opened the door of the passenger compartment as Ambrose approached, then took his travel bag from him. He climbed into the Taurox, settling his robes as he sat on a bench. The compartment was meant to hold ten fully equipped soldiers. It was ridiculously vast for just him. He opened the viewing slits, trying to get a little bit of air. There was no relief to be had from the heat – it was as stifling outside as it was in the Taurox. A bit of a breeze, though. A little bit of movement in the air. That would keep him from going mad.

With a lurch, the vehicle started moving, its four sets of tracks rumbling over the pitted surface of the road. Ambrose leaned his head against the viewing slit, watching the industrial tangle of Magerit slide by. He was home. He was seeing crowds again. He wasn’t seeing starvation and worse wherever he looked. He should have been glad. Instead, he felt only a resigned dread.

The vox-speaker in the compartment crackled to life. ‘Welcome back, arch-deacon,’ Maevek said. ‘You were missed.’

‘That’s kind of you to say.’ He meant it.

‘Was your journey a good one?’

‘It was a sobering one,’ Ambrose said. ‘A solemn one.’ He had known Maevek for years. It wasn’t because he trusted her discretion that he spoke freely. It was because he did not think there was any point, or even possibility, of concealing what he had seen.

Maevek was silent for quite a while, as if unsure how to respond. Finally, she said, ‘Do you think it will rain soon?’

‘The Emperor protects, and the Emperor provides,’ Ambrose said.

That it was the truth did not prevent his answer from sounding rote in his ears. But there was no other answer to that question, the question that had become a refrain on Theotokos, sung by a choir composed of every living soul on the planet.

Every soul except those behind the walls of the Ecclesiarchal Palace.

Ambrose closed his eyes. He was tired. It had taken thirty hours on a series of short-haul lifters and a maze of maglev connections, a number of them through stations and lines that were barely operational, to get him back to Magerit. He dozed uneasily, his head jerking up and down with the jolts of the ride. He woke up feeling stunned when the Taurox came to a halt at the gates of the palace’s grounds.

Ambrose thumbed the vox-speaker’s button. ‘Maevek,’ he said. ‘I will walk from here.’

‘The cardinal wants to see you when you arrive,’ Maevek said uneasily.

‘And he will. I simply prefer to arrive on foot. Please open the passenger compartment door.’

Maevek obeyed, and a few moments later Ambrose walked through the open gate, nodding to the guards who stood to attention for him. Maevek drove past him, taking the Taurox up the rest of the palace’s hill towards the building itself. Ambrose walked off the road and onto one of the paths that wound its way gradually up the slope.

Magerit sat in a wide bowl. A mile beyond its western lip, the palace mount rose. It was not much more than five thousand feet high, but that was still enough to lift the palace above the worst of the haze that shrouded the three-hundred thousand souls that made up the city’s population. An outer wall of rockcrete fortifications ringed the hill halfway up, sealing off the palace grounds. Below it, the terrain was barren rock and scattered, desiccated scrub. Within the palace’s outer wall, lush parkland flourished.

Ambrose walked slowly through the last jewel of Theotokos, feeling a pang of guilt for the joy he experienced in seeing greenery again. There was shade here from trees that grew in an artificial, forced variety. The temperate stood next to the tropical. Oaks were surrounded by palms, and cacti were draped in vines. Every night, an army of mono-tasked servitors descended the hill, controlling irrigation, adjusting individual patches of soil, pruning trees and hedges.

The slope of the hill had been landscaped into broad terraces, with moss-grown stone steps linking the levels. Ornamental brooks had been dug, while an underground complex of piles provided the actual irrigation. Deeper inside the hills was the Ecclesiarchal Palace’s gigantic reservoir, fed by redirected subterranean springs. If it never again rained on Theotokos, All Martyrs would still have water to survive for a century or more.

Ambrose thought about the ocean beneath his feet as he slowly made his way up the terraces. In his chest, guilt, anger and frustration fought for supremacy. The emotional pain became even more intense when he stopped just below the palace walls and looked back downslope. From here, high above the grounds’ outer walls, he beheld the full prospect of Magerit in its bowl. The city had long endured suffocating air. The years of endless heat, each more intense than the last, it had also learned to shoulder. But the heat had finally brought drought, and it was the thirst that was slowly killing the city.

And Magerit was among the last cities of Theotokos.

I am going to live to see the death of my world.

He had never spoken the words aloud. But after what he had seen in the last month, he could no longer suppress the thought.

Emperor, look upon the suffering of Your faithful servants. End this drought. Send us rain, that we might fight on in Your name and help carry Your banners forth across the galaxy.

Ambrose could not make it rain. He could not end the planet-wide drought. The only thing that might be within the scope of his power was to keep his fellow citizens alive until the drought ended.

The task ahead filled him with despair.

I’ll never convince him. Not Lorenz.

But I have to try.

He turned away from Magerit’s suffering and headed for the entrance to the palace.

Cardinal Lorenz received Ambrose in the throne room. He was not a big man, but the cardinal looked tiny in the huge seat of iron trimmed with gold, dwarfed by the immensity of the throne and its hall. Massive columns of polished black marble supported a vault seventy feet high. Like everywhere else in the palace, lumen sconces on the pillars cast insufficient light to lift the hall out of a solemn gloom. Statues of saints stood on the bases of the columns, looking down on all who passed and judging them harshly. A great, circular stained-glass window in the western wall caught the sun’s rays and turned them to deep, crystalline choirs of emerald, sapphire and ruby. Beneath it was the throne, mounted in the centre of a three-tiered platform.

Lorenz hunched into the seat, a crooked, exhausted vulture. He had shrivelled since Ambrose had last seen him. He seemed to have aged ten years. The lines of his face were deeper, his eyes heavy lidded and sunken. His thin lips pressed tightly together, as though he were reluctant to open his mouth.

Standing at the cardinal’s right, leaning against the throne with an unpleasantly proprietary air, was Rosarius, the relic-keeper. He was Ambrose’s age, much younger than Lorenz, a man in his prime, except he could not bring himself to associate the word prime with anything that had to do with Rosarius. The relic-keeper’s face was pinched and hungry, squeezed by ambition that could never be sated. His shoulders were rounded, and his neck bowed from his eternal, performative subservience.

‘Welcome back, Arch-Deacon Ambrose,’ Rosarius said, as if he were the one holding court. ‘The cardinal is eager for your news.’

Lorenz grunted.

Ambrose kneeled before the cardinal. He lowered his forehead to touch the first step of the platform. ‘The blessings of the Emperor be upon you, eminence,’ he said. He rose, waited for Lorenz’s nod, then climbed to the upper tier of the platform. He barely glanced at Rosarius. He answered to the cardinal, not the sycophant.

Rosarius sniffed, clearly displeased to have Ambrose standing on the same level. He leaned away from the throne, standing straight, for all the good it did him. Ambrose was almost six inches taller, and Rosarius had now lost the advantage of being able to look down on him.

‘You took your time on your journey,’ Lorenz said.

‘We hope you were not indulging yourself,’ Rosarius added.

‘I was being thorough, cardinal,’ Ambrose said. He spoke calmly, hoping there was no defensiveness in his tone. ‘You commanded me to gather a complete picture of the situation on Theotokos.’ Because you and your lickspittle wanted me out of the way for as long as possible, and then still complain that I took too long. Even so, Ambrose had been glad to go. Lorenz might only be pretending to care about the conditions across the planet, but Ambrose was not.

‘One can be too thorough,’ said Lorenz.

He sounded genuinely aggrieved, and Ambrose wondered what had happened for the cardinal to have actually missed him. Was order in Magerit deteriorating in a way he had not seen upon arrival? ‘If I have erred, I am sorry,’ he said.

Lorenz waved the apology off. ‘Tell me what you have learned.’

‘Indeed,’ Rosarius chimed in. ‘Do the cities delinquent in their tithes have a reason for no longer being in communication with us?’

Tithes. That is your concern. Ambrose fixed the relic-keeper with a long stare. He did not hide his disgust. He was not surprised that Rosarius knew such details about the tithing. He and Lorenz had been steadily eroding Ambrose’s financial authority, and it was becoming harder and harder for him to exercise his actual duties as arch-deacon. He was the one who was supposed to be governing the administrative side of the diocese. It was he whose responsibility it was to direct the flow of Ecclesiarchal wealth to the channels where the ministry needed it most. He still had the ability to see what was happening to the treasury, but his role had been relegated to that of a passive witness. Given the scale of the crisis on Theotokos, it was painfully clear to him how that wealth should be spent. Against all morality, Lorenz and Rosarius disagreed. To date, they had been unable to see beyond their personal horizons. There was no hope that Rosarius could be made to change his mind. He was venality made flesh. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what was happening outside the walls of All Martyrs. It was that he didn’t care. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Ambrose wanted to believe that Lorenz could yet be reasoned with. He needed to feel some hope. He had known the cardinal for over a decade. There had been a time, in the early days of Ambrose’s appointment, when Lorenz had shown signs of the cardinal he could become. But that side of his character had withered along with the fortunes of Theotokos. The decline had started even before Rosarius had established himself as Lorenz’s shadow.

Rosarius did not make Lorenz into what he has become. It was Lorenz who opened the door to Rosarius. You know this.

Yes. But I have to act as if I do not, or else I will have nothing left except despair.

‘The silence of those cities has a very good explanation,’ Ambrose said quietly. ‘The dead do not speak.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lorenz asked after a beat.

‘Your eminence, the years of drought have pushed almost all of Theotokos past the point of no return. Our focus has been on the immediate parish of Magerit, and the pressures of local circumstances have unavoidably narrowed our perspective. The same drawing inwards has happened everywhere else as the drought has persisted. The worst has happened. Theotokos is dying. The scythe of famine has swept over the globe. I have seen cities emptied of life. I have seen entire regions where the few people who remain are, without exception, starving, when they are not dying of thirst.’

‘You exaggerate,’ said Rosarius.

‘I swear by the Throne that I do not. The simple truth is this. Magerit is all that remains. It is the last functioning city on Theotokos.’

Lorenz grimaced. He stirred on the throne, shifting as if in pain.

You understand that, don’t you? You understand what that means.

Ambrose held his breath, hoping that Lorenz was learning the right lesson. In the comfort and safety of the Ecclesiarchal Palace, Lorenz was not in immediate personal danger from drought or famine. And Magerit’s spaceport was still in operation. When the end came for Theotokos, Lorenz could always leave. What Ambrose was telling him did, though, present the prospect of total humiliation. Lorenz’s diocese had shrunk in prestige as Theotokos’ economy, and thus its importance, had collapsed. With every year of the world’s decline, the cardinal had become more bitter, and more obsessed with holding on to what he clearly thought of as his. His diocese, his world, his wealth.

Now Ambrose had just told Lorenz that his domain had become just one city.

And you’re on the verge of losing that too.

‘You come here to sound the clarion of doom, then,’ Lorenz said.

‘There is still hope, eminence.’

‘I have yet to hear it. Have you discovered how to make it rain?’

‘Before I left, I presented you with a series of proposals. I feel their implementation is more urgent than ever. Have you had a chance to look them over?’

Rosarius smirked.

‘Your proposals,’ said Lorenz. He muttered something incomprehensible to himself. It sounded like a curse. ‘Your proposals. Yes. Yes, we have examined them.’

Rosarius grinned at Ambrose when Lorenz said we.

‘They are not realistic,’ Lorenz concluded.

‘With respect,’ Ambrose said, ‘I fear that if we do not implement them, we are not being realistic. The reservoir of All Martyrs is large enough, and is replenished enough, for us to provide considerable relief to Magerit for a considerable time.’

‘And what do you mean by considerable?’ Lorenz asked. ‘Until it does rain? Do you think rain will ever return to Theotokos?’

‘I must have faith that it will.’ And when Lorenz snorted, Ambrose added, ‘The Emperor protects.’

Lorenz stared at him, unblinking, unmoved.

‘Until the drought ends,’ Ambrose went on, ‘it is our sacred duty to preserve this world, sacred in its fealty to the Emperor, for as long as we can. If we do not act, we will lose everything.’

‘If we do not act with caution, we will lose everything,’ Rosarius said, his voice unctuous with pious reason.

Lorenz raised a crooked finger. ‘Yes. That. Precisely. The Emperor protects. He does. You repeat the truth we all know, arch-deacon. The Emperor will provide. These times are sent to test us, to test our faith, and to test our discipline. When the trials come, we must remain steadfast. That is what we shall do.’

In other words, you will do nothing. Except hoard water and wealth until it no longer serves a purpose.

What did Lorenz hope to accomplish? What was he planning? What sort of a reception did he expect off-world if he waited until there was nothing to do except abandon a dead planet? Ambrose had no illusions about the corruption that ran like a cancer through the Adeptus Ministorum. He had too much direct experience of it to pretend otherwise. If anything, he thought it was Lorenz who was being naive. The stench of failure would cling to him like a curse. And the way his diocese had been carved up by other cardinals clearly showed the esteem in which he was held. He was powerful on Theotokos. He would be nowhere else.

Maybe he knows. Maybe he has no plans to leave at all. Maybe he’s calculating that he can remain comfortable in the palace until he dies, and what happens next is no concern of his.

That had the awful ring of truth. Lorenz did have the look of a man who saw death drawing nearer with a mixture of relief and dread. Something was troubling him, but whatever it was, it was not the fate of anyone other than himself.

What about Rosarius? What is he planning? He had to be looking beyond the lifespan of his patron, his future after Theotokos. Rosarius could leave without taint. He was not responsible for the collapse of the world. That was the fault of the lord-governor, who had died a year ago and not been replaced, leaving Lorenz as the unchallenged ruler of the planet. It was the fault of the cardinal. It was, Ambrose thought bitterly, no doubt the fault of the arch-deacon too. Rosarius was a humble relic-keeper, after all. He had no influence over his betters, or any right to attempt to exert one.

How perfect for you, Rosarius. Amass your wealth, then leave the ruins when the moment is right.

Ambrose had no difficulty guessing when that moment would be. The day after Lorenz’s funeral, the relic-keeper would be gone.

There is no hope. They have decided. One way or another, they are abandoning Theotokos to its fate.

Lorenz and Rosarius were looking at Ambrose as if expecting his capitulation.

He could not walk away. He had to keep trying.

‘I have seen the status of Magerit’s reservoirs,’ he said. ‘They will not last much longer. The entire city is on severe water rationing. The situation is critical. We are perilously close to seeing a disintegration of order.’

‘If the people forget their duty to the Emperor and to the Imperial Creed, then they must be disciplined,’ Lorenz said. He sounded as if he was losing interest in the discussion. There was something else on his mind, something preying on it, and it bothered him far more than the prospect of societal collapse.

‘Disciplined by whom?’ Ambrose asked. ‘What will happen when the enforcers of the Magerit Watch are dying of thirst too? Remember that the greenery of the palace’s hill is perfectly visible from the city.’

‘It is also well defended,’ said Rosarius. ‘There will be no rabble within these walls.’

Lorenz stood, signalling the end of the audience. He moved more easily than his hunched figure suggested. ‘This disaster will not come,’ he announced, as if his will were enough to forbid it. ‘The faith of the people is strong.’ The words were an order, not a statement. ‘And if they need to be reminded of its strength, then they will be.’ He looked at Ambrose. ‘I thank you for your report, arch-deacon. You are no doubt eager to ensure that the charities you support have continued their good work in your absence. I have detained you long enough.’

And that was it. Ambrose was dismissed. The month and more of travel, the report he had painstakingly assembled from evidence so terrible it had destroyed the last vestiges of his peace of mind, all these things meant nothing.

The death of an entire world meant nothing. Whatever it was that troubled Lorenz, it was not the fate of the citizens of Theotokos.

‘Your eminence,’ Ambrose said. He bowed his head to the cardinal and left. As he walked back down the dark length of the throne room, he could feel Rosarius’ smug grin burning into the back of his neck.

There was work waiting for him in his quarters. And Lorenz was right. The charities needed him. They were the one financial outlet over which the cardinal had let him retain a modicum of control. They would be needed more than ever now. And the only reason they were still his to direct, he reflected sourly, was that they were useful to Lorenz. Through them, he expected Ambrose to tamp down the possibilities of unrest.

Instead of heading for his quarters, Ambrose left the palace. He needed to be outside, beyond the walls that allowed the inhabitants of All Martyrs to pretend there was not a desperate city just a few miles away.

Back on the green slopes, Ambrose looked down at the smudged misery of Magerit. The skyline wavered. The air quivered in heat. From here, it was easy to believe that life went on as it always had in the city.

That was a lie.

Everything Ambrose loved was down there.

And everything he loved was going to die.

CHAPTER 2

The relief centre’s new premises was the warehouse complex of an abandoned manufactory. Bethia Antoniax was pleased with her choice of location, though the reasons for the change filled her with sorrow and dread. The charity needed more space. There were too many people desperate for its help, too many for the hab assembly hall that had been the former base. The pride that Bethia had first felt when Arch-Deacon Ambrose had granted her the authority to make decisions on the ground for the charity had given way to a grim, determined sense of duty. That duty was what gave her the strength to keep going, and to stave off hopelessness. Between working as a shift supervisor at the promethium refinery a mile to the north, and the hours she spent here doing what she could for the thirsty, the hungry, the ill and the dying, she had no energy to spend on anything but the needs of the immediate present. Despair was a luxury. It drained the will to work and struggle. Therefore, it was a sin against the Emperor.

Despair hovered close, though. A shadow, it clung to her, dogging her steps, always waiting for her to let down her guard. Every day, it loomed larger. She felt its cold touch now as she moved through the cavernous expanses of the warehouse halls, confronting the dark twins of enormity and futility.

There were thousands of people here, thousands who had nowhere else to go, no other recourse. They were manufactory serfs and Administratum clerks, maglev adepts and the cathedral’s cleaners. They came from all the walks of life of Magerit, except the nobility. They were all those who could no longer function. They were too thirsty, too hungry, too weak. They were, Bethia feared, what everyone in the city would become soon enough.

They were curled up against walls and the iron columns that supported the warehouse ceiling. They were prone, lying in attitudes of defeat and misery. Some shuffled aimlessly, gazing up at the high ceiling, as if somewhere there was cooler air and running water. As big as the space was, its atmosphere was as suffocating and stagnant as just about everywhere else in Magerit. On the ceiling, a faded, grime-encrusted fresco of the Imperial aquila looked down with blank impassivity on the suffering.

In the centre of the first warehouse were the latest supplies to be distributed. Bethia stopped before the piles of food crates and water jugs. There were fewer of each kind than the day before.

As she joined the line of volunteers who were carrying parcelled-out rations to the desperate, a stirring rippled across the warehouse. People sat up straighter. They called out, weak but grateful.

Bethia turned around. She smiled. Arch-Deacon Ambrose had entered the warehouse. People gathered around him, and he greeted them warmly, but with a distinct melancholy as he blessed them. They wanted reassurance from him, and he clearly wished he could grant it, but he was unwilling to lie. So, he said little. His mere presence was helping, though. It was a message – the people of Magerit had not been forgotten, by someone at least.

Ambrose must have risen quickly through the Ecclesiarchal ranks to this position, Bethia thought, because there was still a youthful energy to his strong features. As he drew closer, she could see that fatigue and care were wearing him down, but he strode with purpose all the same. His burdens had not bowed his shoulders, and he stood tall among the faithful, a beacon of hope in a world that desperately needed one.

Ambrose nodded to her. He stopped a few yards away from the supplies, speaking quietly to the people crowding around him. They were too weak to stand very long, and they drifted back to the resting places, grateful that he was there and that he had seen them. Then he walked the rest of the way to the volunteers, and he could not hide his dismay when he looked at what little they had to distribute.

‘Is that all?’ he asked Bethia. He gazed across the warehouse, and at the door at the far end leading to another hall and still more of the needy.

‘It is,’ Bethia said. ‘The donations are dwindling. We get a bit less every day.’

‘So either the nobility of Magerit is itself dwindling, or it is becoming fearful for its own reserves.’

She did not think she would ever get used to his frankness. Or tire of it. He had given voice to her own suspicions, though for one of her class to speak them aloud would be to invite violent repercussion. Even so, encouraged by the righteous anger she heard just beneath the surface of his words, she took a risk. ‘Or both those things are true,’ she said.

There was no rebuke from the arch-deacon. ‘I fear they may be,’ he said sadly.

Most of the supplies were not even donations, only what the volunteers had been able to scavenge. There was discarded food that was turning mouldy but still this side of rotting. There were manufactory rations. These could not rot, though they were stale and tasteless to start with and were so old they were turning into tooth-shattering bricks.

‘Where has the water come from?’ Ambrose asked. He picked up a canister, unscrewed the top and sniffed. He frowned. ‘Is this safe?’

‘We hope so. A lot of it is condensation gathered from pipelines in the manufactories that are still running. It’s been boiled.’

‘Throne,’ Ambrose muttered. ‘It has come to this.’ He recapped the canister. ‘Any donations from the largess of the wealthy?’

‘Very little.’

‘I will make some visits.’ His tone was cold, angry, determined. And without hope.

‘Our prayers will go with you.’

‘Given the circumstances, I am all the more impressed with what you have done in my absence,’ Ambrose said. ‘I approve of the relocation.’

‘Thank you, arch-deacon.’

‘Are you using the entire complex?’

‘Unfortunately, yes. And there is something I must show you. In the furthest hall.’

Ambrose closed his eyes for a moment, as if briefly unable to hold off the burden of exhaustion. ‘That is where the most unfortunate are, I take it?’

‘It is.’

He nodded. ‘Very well. Lead on.’

It was almost a year since Ambrose had first seen Bethia Antoniax. It was easy for him to pinpoint the date. It had been the first time he had led prayer services at Magerit’s Cathedral of Iron Obeisance, the moment when he had begun to perform the public duties that would normally have been Lorenz’s domain. This was when the cardinal had started to avoid being seen, rapidly turning into a recluse behind the walls of All Martyrs.

Ambrose gave Lorenz credit for being able to read the mood of the citizenry. A year ago was when the impact of the drought had reached critical levels in the city, and when the Ecclesiarchy’s hoarding of its water supplies became painfully apparent. Lorenz had known how bad things could get. The soldiers of the militia and the enforcers of the Magerit Watch would be thirsty too. A time would come when the sight of an ecclesiarch might ignite an uprising. If that happened, the cardinal would prefer that spark to be the arch-deacon, and that he would be caught outside the palace.

But there had been no uprising. If anything, the more Ambrose had been visible in the city, the calmer the populace had seemed. He didn’t want violence. He did everything he could to help to maintain order.

And he cursed Lorenz for his expert, manipulative strategy. The cardinal used the arch-deacon’s best impulses for his own ends.

The first mass that he presided over set the pattern for all that were to come after. The sermon was not his own, Lorenz saw to that. The cardinal ensured he still controlled the conduct of the rites, even when he was not present.

The sermon was nakedly self-serving. Its hypocritical call to thrift and patience caught in Ambrose’s throat. The only way he got through it was by reading it as mechanically as possible, without a single trace of inflection. He performed the rest of the service with all the might of his faith. The people heard and understood the difference. They knew when he was having to speak with someone else’s voice. And after he spoke, at the end of the rite, he came down from the pulpit to talk with the congregation, and most of all to listen.

What he did mattered to him, and it mattered to the faithful. He took some pride in that, despite himself. He was glad he made a difference.

His pride was tempered, though, by his honesty with himself. At that first service, after he had managed to choke out Lorenz’s shallow words, it was not principle that pushed him to descend from the pulpit, but the presence of a single person. It was the sight of Bethia that called him down.

She was sitting in a pew a few rows back, in the centre of his line of sight. He had noticed her a few minutes into the service. She had the face of someone who had spent her life in the manufactory and yet was not eroded or broken down by the demands of that existence. Instead, miraculously, she was being tempered – forged into a stronger, more resilient alloy. She took part in the prayers and hymns with a focus and commitment that would have been a credit to any preacher of the Adeptus Ministorum. Her eyes were as steely as her faith.

There sits a true citizen of the Imperium. That was what Ambrose told himself he had thought when he saw her, and why he was drawn to come down and speak with her. It was an easy lie to tell himself in those first few days, because it was also a truth. Bethia was a true citizen of the Imperium. The lie was that this was the reason he chose to speak to her. The lie was that it was something rational that pulled him towards her.

The truth that he would deny was that it was the happenstance of those particular lines of her face, and the shape of those eyes, that drew him in. The truth was that he found her beautiful, and so he wanted to speak to her, as simple and as inadmissible and as damning as that. And when he heard her voice, and when he saw the bedrock of her faith and her unwavering commitment to the people around her, he was lost.

In the days that followed, he was just honest enough with himself to admit that he was lost. He also told himself he was strong enough to enjoy her company without risking impropriety. He knew that this too was a lie, but guilt went a long way in giving him the strength he needed.

He spoke to Bethia, and with the other congregants who milled around, and in the aftermath of that first service in the cathedral the people had embraced him with a fervour even stronger than the resentment that had been building towards the cardinal. In the weeks and months that followed, he continued the practice of delivering Lorenz’s sermons with mechanical disinterest, and then moving within the congregation as if he were just another worshipper.

He could not resist talking with Bethia and her family each time. She attended with her parents, manufactory serfs who were nearing the end of their productive lives. They were hunched, worn thin, and moved slowly. Her father, Havak, had lost an arm decades earlier, and its bionic replacement was crude, little more than a claw on the end of a jointed cylinder, and suited only to the most rudimentary tasks of the refinery. Elyra, her mother, bore the scars of having been scalded by live steam a few years earlier. She moved her mouth with difficulty and spoke little. If the parents had once had their daughter’s strength, only traces of it remained.

Bethia’s sister, Levan, and her brother, Urus, were also present. They were much younger, having only just begun their first shifts at the refinery. They looked at their elder sibling with worshipful awe. They were both thin and showing the early signs of malnutrition when Ambrose first met them. They had grown weaker, not stronger, in the year since.

Within a week, Ambrose had stopped lying to himself about why he treasured his time with Bethia. He now fully acknowledged the truth of what he felt about her, and he faced the consequences of that truth. On Theotokos, the Ecclesiarchy was celibate. What he felt, he could never admit, to Bethia or to anyone else. Yet he could not bring himself to shun her company. He channelled his emotions into helping the unfortunate people of Magerit with even greater energy, keeping Bethia and her family close to the centre of his activities as much as he could. He invited her to serve as a volunteer in his charities, and then gradually gave her more and more authority. She rewarded his trust in her, and though he agonised over the fact that he was doing the right things for the wrong reasons, that even surrendering his peace of mind was simply part of a performative sacrifice, it didn’t matter. He accepted all the pain as the price to be paid for indulging himself this far.

And the need for the charities kept climbing, even as Magerit’s population was shrinking. Its people were starving and dying of thirst, starting with the most destitute. Ambrose was trying to halt the tide of death, but with his hands tied by Lorenz, his success was limited. He was able to do more for the morale of the people than for their lives.

Now he was with Bethia for the first time since he had left to begin his travels across the dying world. He was as close to happy in this moment as he had been since his return, and he was ashamed of his indulgence. But his soul warmed when he walked by her side. He let himself enjoy the confused stir of emotions, barely noticing the misery surrounding him that he could do little to alleviate, his frustration fading into the background as they crossed one warehouse after another. The presence of Bethia was his shield against the pain of the world, but it was also an agony – a reward and a punishment.

Ambrose pulled himself out of his reverie when Bethia slowed her pace. They were approaching the last of the warehouses. Its bay doors were closed and locked.

‘That bad?’ Ambrose asked.

‘I’m afraid so.’

He followed her up the iron staircase that switchbacked up the wall. At the top was a doorway that linked the upper walkways between the warehouses. Bethia took the key ring that hung from her belt and opened the door. From the pockets of her work tunic she produced two face masks. She gave one to Ambrose and donned the other. Then they passed through the doorway into the room beyond.

They said nothing at first. The view commanded the solemnity of silence. Ambrose found he was walking more slowly and softly as he looked down onto the floor below. He tried to find some solace in the fact that this hall was not as crowded as the others.

With the drought had come disease. The people drank any water they could find, whether it was safe or not. The fevers took hold, and they spread.

There were hundreds of sufferers below. They twitched and moaned and retched. They cried out to the Emperor. Some slept without rest, their breathing rattling like stones. Volunteers went from one patient to the other, placing damp rags on foreheads, and kneeling in prayer.

‘So many more than a month ago,’ Ambrose muttered.

‘There are more quarantine zones too,’ Bethia said.

‘Yes. I spoke with Chief Enforcer Bonarmo. She says the spread of the fevers has been more or less contained.’

‘It has helped that she has had the Magerit Watch move as many of the afflicted as possible to holding stations like this.’

‘I have long been impressed by Chief Bonarmo’s judgement and precision.’ Ambrose also admired her commitment to Theotokos. She was as frustrated with Lorenz as he was, particularly after the death of the lord-governor had brought an end to even the weakest check against the cardinal’s power.

‘She does not use force without just cause,’ Bethia said, and the implication that others might was as close as Ambrose had ever heard her come to criticising the cardinal.

‘Who are the volunteers?’ Ambrose asked, admiring their dedication. They were risking a lot.

‘Those who have recovered.’

‘I see. The fatality levels could be worse, then?’

‘They could be. They are high among the weak, the infirm, the old and the very young. If you are strong, you should recover, but…’

‘But without enough food and water, everyone is getting weaker.’

‘And the cemeteries are becoming overburdened,’ Bethia said quietly.

‘Then the bodies must be burned.’

‘They are, by command of the chief enforcer.’

Order still held in Magerit, then. If we are to die, it will be slowly and with as much dignity as we can muster. The thought was a sour one. He was glad the Magerit Watch was taking an active role in preventing chaos before it happened. He was dismayed, though, by how much the other branches of the planetary government must have decayed to render that necessary.

After watching the ministrations a bit longer, Ambrose pointed. ‘Those rags…’ he began.

‘Cooled with water unfit for drinking.’ She shrugged unhappily at the compromises the situation had forced upon those who tried to help. ‘Since they are already sick, and since doing this provides a bit of relief, it seemed better than doing nothing.’

‘Doing nothing is no longer a lesser of evils,’ Ambrose said. He thought about the paltry donations from the citizens of Magerit who still had food to eat, water to drink, and wealth to spare. He thought of Lorenz, barricaded in luxury behind the walls of All Martyrs. He had already run up against one wall of callous indifference. It was time to bash his head against another.

Ambrose returned to the Ecclesiarchal Palace at nightfall. He was exhausted, and he was furious. He found a bench a short distance below the palace and sat down beneath the spreading, gnarled arms of an ancient oak. He gazed at the dirty amber glow of Magerit. Was the light dimmer than a month ago? Perhaps. Were those patches of darkness he saw in the glow? Perhaps. Or perhaps he was imagining them, his fears racing ahead to the city’s demise.

Some of it deserved to die.

But not all of it.

How long before she is sick too?

She’s being careful. She’s strong. She’ll avoid the fever.

So she can die of thirst, then.

Ambrose hissed, muttering a long stream of curses under his breath. He called damnation down on Lorenz, and on all those who sheltered under his protection.

Wind rustled the leaves of the oak. It hissed with him.

A shadow moved nearby, and Ambrose jumped.

‘I am so sorry, arch-deacon,’ said a voice. ‘I did not mean to startle you.’

Ambrose had chosen a bench some distance from any of the grounds’ lumen posts. He wanted the comfort of the dark, a cocoon in which he could retreat, untroubled by others and by the need to maintain a public face. It was late, and he had thought he was alone. He could not see the face of the figure who approached him, but could just make out the shape of the robes and knew the stranger was a shrouded cenobite.

He did not recognise the voice. It was a man’s, deep and liquid, as if the adept should be preaching rather than devoted to meditation. It was low, too, and instead of disturbing Ambrose’s solitude in the night, it felt like a welcome part of his retreat.

‘No apologies necessary,’ Ambrose said. He suddenly wanted company. It would be good to speak to someone who would place no demands on him. ‘Do join me.’

‘Thank you, arch-deacon,’ the cenobite said. He sat on the other end of the bench. He leaned forward slightly, the point of his hood cutting a silhouette against the glow of the city.

‘Have we met before?’ Ambrose asked.

‘We have not,’ said the cenobite. ‘I am newly arrived on Theotokos. I hail from Valgaast. My name is Nossos.’

‘Then I am pleased to know you, Adept Nossos.’

‘And I am honoured to meet you, Arch-Deacon Ambrose. I admire the work you are doing on behalf of the people of Theotokos.’

‘You flatter me.’ And you are the sole member of the Adeptus Ministorum to feel this way. In fairness, he did not know how the lower Ecclesiarchal ranks in the palace regarded him. They were careful not to do anything that would displease Lorenz. It was not clear to anyone, Ambrose included, whether Lorenz had decided he was an enemy, a useful shield, a scapegoat, or something else. It seemed that Nossos had not been in All Martyrs long enough to learn caution.

‘I speak only what I know to be true,’ said Nossos. ‘I confess that I am surprised to have encountered you here. I would have thought Saint Halfad’s Cloister to be a more serene retreat.’

‘That is the cardinal’s preserve,’ said Ambrose.

‘No one else is permitted there?’

‘Not exactly. But the cardinal values his privacy.’ If Nossos did not know this, it was something important for him to learn.

‘I see. From you as well?’

‘No.’ When Lorenz wasn’t getting him out of the way for extended periods of time, he liked having Ambrose close by. He enjoys having me on a leash, one he can yank at his pleasure. ‘I simply prefer the grounds.’

The shrouded cenobite was quiet for a few moments. Then he said, ‘Forgive me, and please tell me if I speak out of turn, but do you seek to avoid Cardinal Lorenz?’

That was out of turn. Nossos had no right to ask something so impertinent. Ambrose should have silenced him. He would have been right to order Nossos beaten. Instead, all he said was, ‘What?’ He needed time to organise his thoughts. He did not know how he wanted to respond.

‘Will you grant me permission to speak frankly, arch-deacon?’

He should say no. He should end this conversation now. But he was too interested to see where it might lead. In the night, in the dark, in the quiet, in the liminal space between the walls of the palace and the walls of its grounds, the exchange took on a rarefied aura. Ambrose wanted Nossos to speak freely. Ambrose wanted to give voice to his own thoughts as well. ‘You have my permission,’ he heard himself saying. ‘You need fear no condemnation from me.’

‘Then I must tell you, arch-deacon, that though I have not been here long, I believe the cardinal is not a man of faith. He is a political animal, and nothing more.’

Hearing his own thoughts spoken aloud took Ambrose’s breath away. So did the shock of Nossos’ daring. Ambrose would never have uttered so dangerous a condemnation.

And why not? Because there was never anyone you could speak to like this. Especially not Bethia. It would have been unfair to her. And very probably fatal.

Nossos dared because he sensed that he could say this to Ambrose.

Unless this is a trap? He wondered whether Nossos might be working for Lorenz or Rosarius. It was not impossible, but the ploy seemed a bit pointless. There wasn’t much more for either of them to do to hamper Ambrose’s efforts or diminish his authority. And as far as he could tell, he was still a useful tool for the cardinal, one it would be counterproductive to destroy.

Then he decided that he didn’t care. If Lorenz didn’t already know what Ambrose truly thought of him, then he was as much a dullard as he was corrupt, and the one thing Ambrose had never doubted was the cardinal’s intelligence.

What can he do to me? He has already doomed us all.

Nossos hadn’t finished. ‘I would call Cardinal Lorenz an apostate, but that would imply he has beliefs that extend beyond his own well-being. I have seen enough to know he does not. The Emperor curse him, arch-deacon. The Emperor curse him.’ Nossos spoke softly, but with tense anger.

‘In the end, he will be cursed,’ Ambrose said. He felt giddy with relief to open up like this. ‘As Magerit dies, every soul who looks on this green mount will know the cardinal could have helped them, and that he chose not to.’

Nossos was silent for so long that Ambrose wondered if he had, in turn, shocked the shrouded cenobite. ‘Are we this close to disaster?’ he finally asked.

‘The disaster has already taken most of the planet. There is no certainty that survival is possible at all. Without rain, the end will come. But this palace has the means to keep Magerit alive for some time. That is what we must do.’

‘Is there no other recourse?’

Ambrose laughed bitterly. ‘Today, I travelled to the tall spires of the city. The wealthy have become miserly in the help they are willing to give to the citizens beneath them. I went to their mansions in the sky to wrestle with their consciences.’

‘And?’ Nossos asked when he paused.

‘One cannot wrestle with what does not exist. I found some of the dwellings deserted, their owners dead. The others were shut tight. They would not open to me. They would not open to anyone, I was told very clearly, except the cardinal.’

‘They have an understanding with him.’

‘They do indeed,’ said Ambrose. ‘He has told them to hoard their supplies. I think he has implied they will find refuge here when those reserves run out.’

‘Will they?’

Ambrose shrugged. ‘Perhaps a few. The most useful. The ones he might think have connections that will find him a comfortable landing on another world.’ Again, he wondered how far forward Lorenz was planning. Again, he pictured the cardinal’s worn, haunted face. Perhaps he will be satisfied simply to be the last man standing.

But there was Rosarius still to consider, and his plans. The connections that Lorenz was indifferent to would be very important to the relic-keeper.

‘There is no hope, then,’ said Nossos.

‘The Emperor protects. There is always hope. There may yet be rain.’ After how many years? ‘But as long as Lorenz holds our ability to help in check, then our hope is slim.’

‘I understand.’ Nossos’ words sounded in the darkness like the toll of a passing bell. Then he rose. His hood turned towards Ambrose, though his face was still invisible in its deep shadow. ‘I have intruded on your prayers long enough,’ he said. ‘Our Father will provide, arch-deacon. There will be life. There will be rain. You will have your proper destiny.’

‘My destiny?’ Ambrose snorted. ‘Do not make me into something I am not.’

There was no answer.

‘Adept Nossos?’

Silence.

Ambrose leaned forward, towards the darkness he thought was the silhouette of the shrouded cenobite.

There was no one there.

CHAPTER 3

Lorenz was not asleep. He was lying in his bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. The lumen globes in his chamber were on, holding back as much of the darkness as they could. He was staring blankly, numbly, pointlessly, at the ceiling. On every side and in the corners of the fresco, the cardinals of the Ecclesiarchy raised their arms in worship, creating a frame of praise. They faced the centre, their faces alight with pride and awe. In that centre, the Golden Throne radiated light so bright it concealed the figure of the God-Emperor. But the brilliance was merely paint and gold leaf. It was not real light. It offered Lorenz no comfort. It could not lift his soul in prayer. The fresco was just dim shapes, lines on which his eyes travelled back and forth, from cardinal to Throne and back on a radiant beam, always a different one, bouncing off another shadowy cardinal and back to the centre again.

No hope, no inspiration, no succour.

No respite from the memories of that night in the cloister.

He had not been back since, except to walk its circuit a few times during the day with Rosarius. Lorenz could not show weakness, and so he could not deviate from his routine. He must not let slip any hint that he was afraid.

Only, he was afraid. He was terrified. He managed the walks with Rosarius and kept up a pretence of interest in what the relic-keeper had to say, but only because he was not alone, and only because he was in daylight. Even so, he had to work hard not to gaze anxiously at the great yew tree. Every stray insect buzz made him tense.

He could not make the memory of that night recede. It lingered in his throat. He could not convince his body that there was no insect there, crawling and whirring its wings. He could not stop thinking of the figure he might or might not have seen.

He held on to his power through force of habit, and because there was nothing else to be done. Ambrose’s compulsion to help the meek and the needy repulsed him more than ever. Lorenz did not care about what was happening to Theotokos. The world was nothing to him except the symbol of his thwarted ambition. But he would be cursed if he would give Ambrose the chance to save its mewling populace. The arch-deacon’s dreams would die with Lorenz’s. The world would die with Lorenz. That was the only thing it was good for.

That was how he had felt before the night in the cloister, before his nightmares had bled into reality. That was when he could still swallow without shuddering. He still felt that way, but the anger and the bitterness were in the background, swamped by the fear.

Sooner or later, he would sleep for a few, tortured hours. He did not want to, but his body gave him no choice. The sleep would come, and with it the terror, the panic, and the awful half-memory of a touch.

The touch.

He felt it.

Right now, awake. There, on his cheek, a finger cold as despair, sharp as hunger. The scrape of a nail, dry, yet tracing the cool, thick trail of a slug, a tear trickling slowly down from the corner of his eye.

Lorenz jerked up. He flailed, grasping for the figure that touched him, his shout struggling to be born, catching in his throat with the weakness that came with nightmares. His hands swept air. He was alone. But he could still feel the crawl of the touch. And the tear was there, intimate and strange.

Lorenz wiped at it, but he just smeared it over his cheek and covered his palm with slime. He clawed at the tear. His skin was defiled. He wanted it off, and he drew blood.

He began to weep. Fear bloomed in his chest. He was not weeping in terror; he was terrified because he was weeping. He could not stop the tears. They flowed, thick and wide, in spite of him. His chest hitched violently, again and again, the wracking spasm of his body’s betrayal. He sobbed with such fury he feared his ribs would crack.

The tears came faster, and they were thicker yet. They covered his face. They poured into his mouth. He sobbed and jerked, and he inhaled the tears. They were slick and lumpy as phlegm. He gagged. He tried to spit them out, but they clogged his throat. He gasped, and more flooded his mouth. He fell back, struggling for air, twisting the bedclothes around his legs. The tears filled his nose too. He choked and clawed at the air. He was drowning. The tears flowed and flowed and flowed, serpents leaking from his eyes, coiling in his throat and lungs. And the buzzing was there, the insect wriggling he had tried to dismiss from his imagination. It was real, and it was spreading, an infestation building in his lungs and air passages.

He tried to cry for help.

He was drowning.

He was suffocating.

The tears, serpent and insect, forced their way into him. His mouth was wide open, his chest hammering with effort, and he could not breathe. He could not breathe.

The cardinals on the ceiling, with their eyes fixed on the throne, could not see his torment. The Golden Throne faded deeper into grey, withdrawing from him. Shadows flowed up the walls. They swallowed the light of the lumen globes. The room dropped into darkness, drowning in the shadows.

Lorenz bucked once more with desperate violence and fell from the bed. He struck the marble floor, landing hard on his shoulder. Something cracked. There was pain, but it belonged to someone else. The smothering was his. It was huge. It was dragging him down.

Pain in his chest, greater than the pain in his shoulder.

The tears, flowing, flowing, flowing.

An ocean, submerging him.

Forcing him down, covering him with the shadows of the end.

He thrashed in terror and agony until the very end. The last thing he heard began as laughter. It was inhuman, liquid, delighted.

Then the laughter turned to the sound of drumming rain.

Ambrose ran before he was fully awake. A shrouded cenobite had shaken him from sleep. This wasn’t Nossos. It was Tazker, one of the adepts Ambrose knew well. His hood had fallen back in his distress and haste, revealing his scarred, shaven skull. Ambrose opened his eyes, saw the alarm on Tazker’s face, and heard the word cardinal. Then he was up, and he was running.

He weaved drunkenly at first, his legs weak with slumber, his eyes bleary. A voice in his head, loud as the most primal instinct, commanded that he run.

Hurry.

Get there first.

His thoughts bounced against each other, confused, scrambling for purchase.

I can’t be there first. Tazker was there.

He doesn’t matter. Go. HURRY!

Why? What has happened?

He sprinted down the length of the hall from his chambers. The shadowed vaults seemed to stretch in a dream’s infinity before him, as if he could never reach his goal. He rounded a corner too quickly and slammed his shoulder against the wall. He stumbled, then found his footing again and the shock of pain cleared his head.

I know what has happened.

Lorenz is dead.

Get there before Rosarius.

Tazker was Ambrose’s friend. He would have come straight to the arch-deacon. Ambrose was on friendly terms with most of the adepts. He gave them respect where Lorenz gave them indifference, and Rosarius haughty contempt. But the relic-keeper had his allies, bound to him by ambition and fear. The news would reach him soon, if it had not already, and he would be running too, just as desperate as Ambrose to win the race.

You are running for your own ends, Rosarius. I run for Magerit. The Emperor sees us. He sees you. He knows your heart. You will not win, Rosarius. Not this time. Not in the end.

Ambrose arrived, panting, at the cardinal’s chambers, Tazker a few steps behind him. The doors were wide open. The high windows let in weak dawn light, tentative and grey. It fell over the cardinal’s four-poster bed, its twisted covers, and the figure on the floor.

Three more cenobites were here. ‘Arch-deacon,’ they said. None of them had the low, flowing tones of Nossos. They stood against the wall furthest from the bed, shifting uncertainly, waiting for orders, waiting for someone to take charge. That was clearly not going to be the small man who knelt a few feet from the corpse. Chapel-Master Burun looked up from his murmured prayers, and when he saw Ambrose, his face flooded with relief. Ambrose suspected that Burun had been praying primarily to fill time and to avoid having to do anything concrete. There was enough distance between him and the body that it was clear this was as close as he had dared venture.

Burun was a good man, a devoted chapel-master, but Lorenz had broken him of any trace of initiative. For many years, his role had been reduced to the barest, most literal interpretation of its name. His purpose had been to go in advance of Lorenz’s appearance at the cathedral – or, more rarely, another temple of worship – and ensure it was conforming to the cardinal’s specifications. It had been so long since he had had a function other than anticipating Lorenz’s desires and doing everything he could to avoid provoking Lorenz’s wrath, that with the cardinal dead, he was now a stringless marionette. Ambrose was almost surprised that Burun could move of his own volition.

‘Thank you for attending, chapel-master,’ Ambrose said.

‘It is my duty, arch-deacon.’

Ambrose moved past him and knelt beside Lorenz. The cardinal was lying on his side, facing the bed. His legs were swaddled in sheets wrapped so tightly he looked like he was being swallowed by a chrysalis.

‘Has anyone touched him?’ Ambrose asked.

‘No, arch-deacon. I found him only a few minutes ago. I sent for you at once.’

And not Rosarius. Thank you, Burun. ‘And Chirurgeon Morano?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. You did well. I think, though, that we should grant him some dignity now, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Ambrose reached for the body, and Tazker rushed forward to help him. Burun recalled himself to active duty after a moment and joined them. They rolled Lorenz onto his back.

When they saw his face, Burun gasped and reared back. Tazker jerked his hands away but stayed where he was. Ambrose froze, struggling to keep from making his shock too visible.

Lorenz’s face was a violent blue and slick with sweat or tears. His eyes bulged from their sockets. His mouth hung open, his tongue distended. His hands were hooked into claws, and ragged gashes scored his cheeks.

‘God-Emperor protect us,’ Burun whispered. ‘What horror did he see?’

‘The horror of his own demise,’ Ambrose said. Irritation with Burun’s tremulousness broke him from his own shocked reaction. ‘He seems to have been choking.’

‘On what?’ the chapel-master quavered.

On greed. On contempt. On petty, jealous anger. ‘You have not seen many deaths, have you?’

‘Not many, no.’

‘I have. Too many in the past month alone. He might not have been choking on anything at all.’ But the truth was, he had not seen anything exactly like this on his travels. The wet, dripping sheen on Lorenz’s face bothered him. It seemed to glint with secrets. At the same time, there was a dullness to it, as if it were infected by the grey dawn. He did not want to touch it. ‘But I will not pronounce in the chirurgeon’s stead.’

Ambrose stood, pulled the bottom sheet off the bed, and draped it over the cardinal’s body. With the contorted features and clenched fingers hidden, he felt better. Everyone else in the room did too. Ambrose felt his shoulders loosen, and he heard Burun start breathing more easily. Now they were not gathered around the corpse of the cardinal; Lorenz was just a shape. He was being dealt with.

Tazker joined his fellow cenobites as they drew a bit nearer. They all looked at Ambrose for direction.

‘There are preparations to make,’ he began.

Then Rosarius appeared at the doorway. ‘Cardinal,’ he said. He stopped. He gaped. He had nothing to say. ‘What,’ he managed. No one spelled out the obvious. Rosarius tried again, and got as far as, ‘I don’t…’

No, I don’t think you do, Ambrose thought. You have lost your patron. You have arrived too late to claim this stage for your personal theatre. No one is here to ask your opinion. No one is interested in hearing it. More than the cardinal has died in this room – your hopes have too.

Chirurgeon Livra Morano arrived shortly after Rosarius, and she pushed past the relic-keeper, advancing with a sharp brusqueness that belied her great age. Morano had been the personal chirurgeon to Lorenz’s predecessor. Her narrow face hung like frail, wrinkled parchment from her skull, but her eyes were still hard as iron. Ambrose nodded to her and pulled the sheet back again. While Morano knelt to begin her examination, Ambrose turned back to Burun. ‘You will make things ready in the cathedral,’ he said.

Burun nodded. Ambrose thought he seemed more than relieved. He was actually happy that he knew what to do. ‘Yes, arch-deacon. The Rite of Cardinal Ascension is known to me.’

‘Wait,’ Rosarius said. He spoke too loudly and sounded petulant instead of authoritative. The word dropped awkwardly into the sudden silence he created. The relic-keeper cleared his throat. ‘Is this how we should be proceeding?’

In spite of himself, Ambrose was impressed by how quickly Rosarius had recovered. Enough, anyway, to try to fight back against the catastrophe. It was much easier for Ambrose, after all. He saw nothing to grieve about in this chamber. There was only justice.

‘What do you mean?’ Burun asked. His bafflement was no help to Rosarius.

‘We have no cardinal,’ Rosarius said. He was trying to sound condescending, as if Burun had said something stupid and it was up to the relic-keeper to explain how things should be done. If Lorenz had been at his side, it might have worked. ‘By whose authority do you act now?’

‘By Arch-Deacon Ambrose’s, of course,’ said Burun, in genuine disbelief that Rosarius could be so ignorant. ‘The procedures for such an event are clear. Until such time as a new cardinal can be appointed, the arch-deacon is acting cardinal.’

Rosarius visibly wilted. He said nothing in answer.

Chapel-master, you have come into your own in this moment. Ambrose had known this too, but Rosarius might have tried to present his claim as usurpation. But Burun knew this aspect of the administrative side of the Ecclesiarchy too. He had to, because it was linked to one of the rites he might someday have to arrange in the cathedral. By being the first to explicitly state Ambrose’s authority, Burun cemented it.

Morano had been muttering to herself under her breath as she looked over the corpse. With a grunt of effort, she straightened now. She was frowning, her bloodless lips pursed.

‘Have you formed an opinion?’ Ambrose asked.

Morano parted her lips with a wet click. ‘Asphyxiation, certainly. As to the cause, I will need to look more deeply.’

‘Understood,’ said Ambrose.

Morano made an irritable gesture at the cenobites. ‘Pick him up. Take him to the medicae hall.’

They obeyed after only the smallest hesitation. The four of them picked up the cardinal and shuffled towards the door. Morano followed them.

‘Will you accompany them?’ Ambrose said to Burun. ‘When Chirurgeon Morano has completed her work, it will be necessary to prepare the body.’

‘I shall,’ Burun assured him. Now that he had direction, the corpse was no longer fearsome to him, it seemed.

‘Good. In the meantime, I will speak to the people, and bid them be ready for the funeral.’

Burun left. Only Rosarius remained. Ambrose looked at him solemnly. ‘Is there something you wish to discuss, relic-keeper?’ he asked. He made his tone open. Rosarius would see no gloating from him. Neither would he see weakness. The cardinal’s suffocating grip on Theotokos was broken, and with it all of Rosarius’ schemes.

Rosarius stared back at Ambrose, his face a portrait of impotent hate.

‘If not,’ Ambrose went on, ‘you will excuse me, I hope. We all have duties we must attend to.’

Rosarius’ lips twitched in a violent rictus before he whirled and walked away.

Ambrose left the cardinal’s bedchamber and headed for the deepest subterranean levels of the palace. He had to order the most important command of his first day with a free hand.

Ambrose announced Lorenz’s death in the Cathedral of Iron Obeisance during the rites of Evensong. He did so at the start of his sermon. In the pulpit, nestled midway up the pillar overlooking the altar, he stood in silence for a long moment before he began to speak, letting the people’s curiosity build, and granting himself the licence to savour his own anticipation. For the first time, he was going to speak his own words. He was no longer the enslaved mouthpiece of the cardinal. He was going to address the faithful of Magerit as they deserved. Directly, openly.

A bank of incense fog filled the gloom of the nave. Ten thousand people sat in anticipatory silence, looking up at him, a figure poised midway between them and the painting of the Emperor’s judgement that covered the great vault of the ceiling a hundred and fifty feet up. Ambrose felt the force of that art behind him. The burning rays from the Golden Throne reached to every corner of the cathedral, and they embraced him. They gave him certainty.

He sensed the moment the silence was at its peak as surely as he knew the rhythms of his own breath. He was a spiritual conductor, governing unheard music, and at the instant that called for the beat to begin, he spoke.

‘I am the bearer of grave tidings,’ he said. ‘Cardinal Lorenz is no longer among us. Last night, his soul departed to seek its reward before the Golden Throne of the God-Emperor.’ He paused for only half a moment, creating the illusion that he was giving the congregation a chance to respond with shock or grief, but in reality speaking again before the people could show that they felt neither. ‘I will not dwell upon the loss we feel,’ Ambrose said. Because we feel none. ‘It is another among many. My duty to the Emperor and to you is to bring hope – for hope, the reward of faith, is what you need, what we need, what Magerit and Theotokos need.’

He paused now and smiled at the congregation. From somewhere in the back, one of the worshippers, emboldened by the aura of patience and approachability Ambrose had always cultivated, called out, ‘Will there be rain?’

‘I wish I could say there will be, and that I knew when,’ Ambrose said, pleased with the question. Thanks to it, he could turn the rest of his sermon from an announcement to an answer. ‘I believe it will rain, because I believe that the Emperor protects. But though I can do nothing to hasten its arrival, I can ease the pain of our waiting. Servants of the Emperor, you faithful of His Imperial Creed, hear me and rejoice. I have given orders, and work has commenced. The underwater streams of the Palace of All Martyrs are being redirected. By tomorrow morning, they will be flowing into the reservoirs of Magerit.’

Now he had no choice but to pause. Joy roared across the nave of the cathedral, building to a wave so massive he thought it would sweep him from the pulpit. He had a moment of doubt, worrying that he had strayed too far from his duties of religious instruction, veering headlong into politics.

And what were those sermons that Lorenz had you read? There was nothing sacred about them. They were tools of pacification and nothing more.

Now I’m speaking from the heart. Now I can do what the Emperor has called upon me to do.

The clamour of celebration went on and on. The people wept with gratitude. They shouted their praise of the Emperor. Their faces were grimy with the dust and soot of the city’s air, yet they shone like suns.

‘The Emperor,’ Ambrose began, then stopped. No one could hear him yet. He waited, smiling.

And there, below him, was Bethia. She was with her family, and they were as joyful as all the others. She looked up at him, and he saw her mouth the words thank you.

The nature of the celebration changed. Ambrose began to hear his name shouted again and again. He held up his hands for silence, and was greeted by the redoubled thunder of Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose.

‘Please!’ he shouted, and finally the roar subsided.

‘Please,’ Ambrose said again. ‘I am not worthy of your praise, nor deserving of it. All glory to the Emperor, to whom all is known, and to whose will we are gratefully bound. Praise Him, now and forever. Praise Him, as I know you truly can.’

And the people did. Their rapture filled the cathedral with such force it seemed to Ambrose it should have lifted the roof and hurled the walls to the winds. Their faith should have given the cathedral wings.

You could have made this happen, Lorenz. Instead, you ensured that only your death would be the source of hope.

Ambrose abandoned any attempt to continue his sermon. He would speak more at the cardinal’s funeral, and many more times in the days to come. He would embrace the full responsibility of being acting cardinal. For now, he would join in the rapture. For the first time in years, he felt hope too. The emotion had been a stranger to him for so long that he almost did not recognise it.

Will the rains come?

He did not know. He believed in their possibility now. Nothing truly had changed. The drought was as merciless as ever. All he had done was buy the people some time. Yet in doing so, he had revived hope in Magerit and in his breast. Rain seemed possible again. The thought of water from the skies was no longer an agony.

Ambrose swept his eyes over the congregation. He welcomed their joy. He spread his arms to receive it.

Movement above caught his eye. He looked up. Rosarius was in the gallery. He lurked in the shadows beside an arch’s column. Ambrose could barely see the relic-keeper, though he knew it was him. Rosarius’ hatred blazed from the heights. It struck Ambrose, and then expanded to take in the entire congregation. It was so strong it reached far beyond the walls. It encompassed every soul on Theotokos.

Ambrose’s smile vanished. He returned the hate with determination.

He will destroy everything I have accomplished today if he can.

Don’t let him. Don’t let him win.

Ambrose looked back at the people for a minute, drawing strength again from their joy. When he turned to Rosarius once more, the relic-keeper was gone.

Ambrose vowed this would be the last time he lost Rosarius from his sight.

CHAPTER 4

The difference the first day of the new water regime made to the relief centre was enormous. Bethia took Ambrose through, showing him what he had wrought with a delight that was at once solemn and giddy. At first, all he saw was the continued suffering.

‘There are so many in need,’ he said. ‘So much to be done.’

‘But look at what has been done, arch-deacon,’ Bethia told him as they moved down the centre of the first warehouse. ‘We have water enough to provide some relief for everyone here.’

‘Still not enough.’

‘No, but sufficient to ease the worst pangs of thirst. Look at them, arch-deacon. Look at their faces.’

He did, and there it was: hope, reborn here too, like a seed germinating beneath the broken soil of agony. Food was still in short supply, but he had begun the day by taking back full control over the Ecclesiarchal finances, and commanding that funds be used to send more food to the relief centres. The problem now would not be the poverty of the charities, but the lack of food to buy. Those who had supplies were hoarding them. Some of the noble families, though, were open to being convinced that surrendering some of their supplies in order to afford even more guards was a worthwhile exchange.

She’s right, Ambrose thought. See what a day has changed. See what you have done with that day.

The people who had come here for help knew the difference. They reached for him when he passed, as they had before, but now they did so with a gratitude that was far more powerful than it had been before. They clasped their hands, and they wept. They touched the hem of his robes, and their eyes burned with a fervour that discomfited him even as it pleased him.

There will be more changes, Ambrose promised himself. With Lorenz gone, the governance of Theotokos was effectively his. He would have to be cautious. Rosarius was far from the only one of the cardinal’s loyalists. If Ambrose overstepped, if he moved too quickly before he was certain he really had the political strength to back his decisions, everything could be reversed. He was not naive. Assassination was a possibility that would only become greater as time went on.

The redirecting of the underground streams was a big risk, but it had also been the action whose need and scale demanded it be taken immediately. He had gambled that the promise of civil calm that came with the gift of water would stay the hands of his enemies, at least for the moment.

‘What of the sick?’ Ambrose asked.

‘We are easing their suffering too,’ Bethia said.

‘Can any be saved?’

She looked sorrowful. ‘Very few, if any.’

‘The water comes too late for them.’ His heart clenched in grief.

‘But it will help slow the spread of infection,’ Bethia pointed out. ‘Not as many people will be driven to drink polluted water.’

‘That is something.’ Not enough, though. Nothing will be enough until the drought ends.

Ambrose struggled to keep his mood steady. He was swinging from elation to frustration and back again. It was exhausting.

Listen to Bethia. Accept that we have work to do and accept that this first day is itself miraculous. And keep fighting.

The fight was only going to become harder. Rosarius would bring everything down in flames if he could not have his way. Ambrose took that as an article of faith.

‘Arch-deacon,’ Bethia said. She sounded hesitant, and that made Ambrose’s pulse beat with an unseemly force.

‘Yes?’ His throat was suddenly dry, and the word emerged with a rasp he did not like.

‘What you have done has helped many more citizens than just those in the relief centres.’

‘I am glad, but the credit is not…’

She placed a hand on his arm, cutting him off. She then took it away quickly, shocked by her own impropriety. Her touch burned through his robes. Its heat lingered on the flesh of his arm.

‘Forgive me, arch-deacon,’ she said. ‘I meant no insult.’

He was having trouble hearing. His entire being was suddenly concentrated into that one spot on his arm. ‘There has been no insult,’ he managed. His lips were numb. His tongue was too thick.

‘I only wished to say that you must not discount the importance of your actions. All of Magerit owes you a debt of thanks.’

It owes its thanks to the Emperor. That was what he should have said. It should thank the Emperor for striking down an unworthy cardinal. That was what he wanted to say.

He said nothing.

‘Will you…’ Bethia began. She paused, took a breath, and plunged on. ‘Will you grant an unworthy few the honour of thanking you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘My family. If you knew…’

He nodded, breathing carefully, a titanic effort holding his face in a mask of careful dignity. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘After everything you have done here, all the help you have given me, this is a small thing for me to do.’

They finished the inspection of the warehouses and Ambrose was troubled by how little attention he paid to what he saw. Afterwards, Bethia led him to a grimy hab complex a mile to the west of the relief centre. They climbed the grey rockcrete shell of a stairwell. It was musty and stank of old smoke and urine. The halls were dark, their walls crumbling, their few lumen strips giving off a weak, dirty amber glow. On the tenth floor, they entered the home of the Antoniax clan. It was almost as dark as the hall, its windows opaque with grime. The sleeping chamber and the kitchen that made up its two rooms were clean, though. Bethia’s siblings and parents must have been expecting Ambrose to accept their invitation. Or perhaps they had simply prepared themselves in the hopes that he would. They dropped to their knees when he entered, abasing themselves as he had before Lorenz.

‘Please, rise,’ he said, uncomfortable. He was not actually a cardinal, and he did not like the trappings that went with the Ecclesiarchal rank that were beginning to follow him.

The family rose. Havak Antoniax reached for Ambrose’s hand, but when he saw there was no ring to kiss, he withdrew his grasp, embarrassed, and said, ‘We are blessed to be able to thank you in person, Arch-Deacon Ambrose, for what you have done for Magerit, and for us.’

Ambrose shook his head. ‘I have done nothing but the barest of necessary actions.’ Nothing that anyone would not have done, he almost said, but stopped himself from uttering so damning a falsely modest lie. No one else had done it. Least of all the cardinal.

‘You are a miracle from the Emperor,’ said Elyra. ‘He sent you in the hour of our need.’

‘You flatter me too much,’ Ambrose said. ‘All I am is His servant, striving to do His will.’

The humility came naturally to him, in the same way the words did at the cathedral. He thanked the Antoniax family in turn, and then headed back to the palace. He walked there, refusing to travel in the Taurox, at least today. The people wanted to see him, and he wanted to be among them.

But when he returned to All Martyrs, he made for Saint Halfad’s Cloister. It was free of the cardinal’s tainted ego now, and he sought out its embrace of solitude and calm. He sat beneath the central yew and tried to sort out his reactions to the day.

He was worried by the ease of his expressions of humility. He had expressed more, variations of the words he had spoken in Bethia’s home, when he had toured the relief centre, and on his long walk through Magerit. Were the words too automatic? Did he mean what he said? Or were they mere gestures, lip service whose hypocrisy Lorenz would have understood? Ambrose worried they were just a formula, granting him absolution to enjoy the praise that surrounded him like an ocean as he moved among the people of the city.

But I am obeying the will of the Emperor. I know I am. Lorenz was not, and that is why he was struck down. Someone else had to act to save what is left of Theotokos.

And he was the one who was taking the action. If what was done was worthy of praise, why receive it with guilt? He was doing what he had to for the city, and he would continue to do so.

Rosarius will try to stop me. Wherever he is, he is moving against me now. I should concentrate on being wary of him, not of my own trivial responses.

Satisfied, for the moment, he rose and walked away from the yew, breathing deeply the scents of the garden. The door to the cloister was open when he reached it. Livra Morano was standing on the threshold, watching him approach.

‘You wish to speak to me?’ he asked as he entered the palace.

‘I do.’

‘If it’s important, you should have come to fetch me.’

‘The cardinal gave orders never to be disturbed when he was in the cloister.’

‘I am not the cardinal.’

‘No,’ Morano said tartly. ‘You are not.’

The chirurgeon had been loyal to Lorenz too, and her brand of loyalty made her possibly even more dangerous to Ambrose’s hopes for Theotokos than Rosarius. The relic-keeper’s motivations were venal, selfish. They made him, Ambrose thought, easier to anticipate, predictable in his corruption. But Morano was not corrupt. She was honest. She had been loyal to the cardinal because he was the cardinal, as she had been loyal to his predecessor. She owed her fidelity of service to a rank. It did not matter who held it. It did not matter how badly Lorenz had acted. He had been cardinal.

He ignored Morano’s dig and asked, ‘What is it that you wish to discuss?’

‘What do you think?’ she asked, as if he had said something monumentally stupid.

‘The death of Cardinal Lorenz,’ Ambrose said calmly. Was she trying to bait him? No, he didn’t think so. Morano was too straightforward to play such a game. She was angry, and he was the target of her anger.

‘His death,’ Morano said. ‘Precisely. I do not like the deaths of cardinals, arch-deacon. They have been rare things, in my experience, but that does not make me dislike them any less. There are always questions when a cardinal dies. I don’t like questions, either. I especially don’t like questions when I am the one who is forced to ask them because the answers are not present.’

‘And the cardinal’s death raises questions,’ said Ambrose.

‘It does.’

‘Of what sort?’

‘Why, for instance, is there so much liquid in his lungs?’

Ambrose frowned. ‘Did he drown?’ In bed?

‘Yes, he did. Though I do not think that was the sole cause of death.’ Genuine puzzlement lay at the foundation of her anger.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Ambrose.

‘Neither do I.’

‘He can’t have drowned in his quarters.’

‘No,’ said Morano. ‘He could not have.’

‘Was the body moved? Are you implying assassination?’

‘I’m saying he was drowned,’ she said, as though that were an answer to his question.

‘Where? How? His sleeping raiment wasn’t wet…’

‘Sweat-damp,’ Morano corrected. ‘But not wet, no. Not like it would be if his head had been held down under water. There is also the problem of viscosity.’

‘And what problem is that?’

‘The liquid in his lungs. It was, at least initially, like a particularly thick phlegm, only in impossible quantities. It broke down as I tried to examine it. Before I could arrive at any conclusions, it was merely water.’

‘That is very strange,’ said Ambrose.

‘Yes, arch-deacon, it is strange,’ Morano said, with all the irritation of a Schola Progenium instructor confronted with a pupil proud of their grasp of the obvious. ‘That is very strange indeed. Can we also agree that the word strange in connection to the death of a cardinal is far from desirable?’

‘We can,’ Ambrose said, refusing all temptation to lose his temper. I accept every test You send me, God-Emperor. I accept them with humility and obedience.

‘In sum, I do not know why Cardinal Lorenz died, arch-deacon. And I do not like the fact that I do not know.’

‘I share your worry,’ Ambrose told her. That was true. If Lorenz had been assassinated then there were political currents in the Palace of All Martyrs that Ambrose had never suspected. He had no idea how he might defend himself, and what he hoped to accomplish, against agendas that had cloaked themselves so utterly from his sight and were now lashing out, to ends he could not imagine. But Morano did not know the cardinal had been murdered. That was the point. She did not know. There was still the chance his death had been natural.

Even if it had been, he reflected, there was cause for concern. There was illness enough present in Magerit. If Lorenz had died of something contagious, there were precautions Ambrose would have to take.

‘Are there further tests you can make?’ he asked Morano.

The chirurgeon shook her head with emphatic displeasure. ‘No. I have done all I can.’

‘You are releasing the body for burial?’

‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But I will not let the questions rest. Be assured of that, arch-deacon. I will find answers.’

‘I hope you do,’ Ambrose said. ‘They are as important to me as they are to you. Be assured of that.’

Morano gave him a look that implied she was assured of nothing of the sort. Then, with a curt nod, she walked off, her steps short but sharp, her hunched figure the very shape of accusation.

A few hours later, Ambrose stood in the centre of the cardinal’s study, telling himself he had the authority to claim it as his, and that he must claim it as his. He wanted to retreat to his quarters, to the much smaller study. That space belonged to him. It suited him. This chamber, with the ceiling twice as high and the shelves rising all the way to the dome, was a place of ostentation, not reflection. It was a chamber that performed the status of its owner. The scrolls and tomes were possessions more than they were works of sacred exegesis and instruction.

In the dome, a relief sculpture of the symbol of the Adeptus Ministorum, the winged skull in the Imperial ‘I’, gazed down at him with stern, empty eyes, warning against the improper search for knowledge. Ambrose bowed his head, obedient to the commands of the Imperial Creed. He had no doubt Lorenz had been faithful in this regard too. He was also certain Lorenz had used what scholarship he had engaged in for his own ends.

And look what your selfishness brought you, cardinal. Your parish was reduced to a lone, dying world. Well done. Well done indeed.

It fell to Ambrose not to make the same mistakes. He also had to avoid making as many as possible, and not setting himself up in the cardinal’s quarters would be one of them. It would be easy to leave them empty and make a show of humility by staying in his old chambers, but there was such a thing as being too humble, of appearing weak and leaving the field to the enemy. Vacant cardinal’s chambers would send the signal that the acting cardinal was not to be taken seriously. The symbols of power had to be filled.

Ambrose did not know how long it would take the Adeptus Ministorum to appoint and send a new cardinal. Given the state of Theotokos, it would not be a desirable posting. The Ecclesiarchy might well see no point in sending anyone at all. They could leave him in charge until the world died.

It was his duty to do what he could to keep Theotokos alive and keep it viable.

And if you are appointed cardinal?

Then that happens when it happens.

He would prove himself worthy of the position.

If you are to be a cardinal, even just an acting one, then do that. Act like one.

He crossed the floor to Lorenz’s huge desk. A massive lumen candelabra of bronze stood on one corner, a golden globe of Theotokos on the other. Ambrose sat down in the leather-and-oak throne. Its wide arms invited his to rest upon them. He accepted and was astonished at the way this point of the room seemed to gather power to itself. The effect was a bit too pleasurable to be a good thing. He thought he should rise.

In a minute. In just a little while.

He was still sitting a quarter of an hour later when Chapel-Master Burun appeared at the study’s door. He stopped on the threshold as suddenly as if he had hit a wall and looked anxiously towards Ambrose.

‘What is it, Master Burun?’ Ambrose asked. He rose and came around the desk. There was no need to intimidate Burun. Tremulousness was the man’s natural state.

‘It’s about tomorrow’s burial ceremony for Cardinal Lorenz,’ Burun said. ‘There… There is a problem with the body.’

‘Chirurgeon Morano told me she was going to release the cardinal to you. Has she changed her mind?’

‘Oh no, it isn’t that. It’s…’ Burun grimaced, hesitating as if the burden of his news would be lifted from him if he waited. When that did not happen, he gulped and went on. ‘It’s the state of the body that’s the problem.’

‘Take me to it,’ Ambrose said, and Burun scuttled gratefully ahead.

The Sanctum Silentium was the most rarely used chamber in the Palace of All Martyrs. It served only upon the death of a cardinal. On its marble plinth, lit dimly by guttering lanterns and thick with the smell of incense, the body of the deceased was to be dressed and anointed in oil. A coterie of monks prayed continuously for the twenty-four hours leading up to the funeral in the Cathedral of Iron Obeisance. This was the cardinal’s last port before his final journey. It was also where every art was deployed to make the body presentable for the worshippers, that the devoted might see their beloved spiritual leader one last time and feel awed by the solemn dignity of his frozen sainthood.

Ambrose approached the plinth and looked down at the body in shock. Lorenz’s attendants had failed him badly. Tazker and two other cenobites stood on the other side of the plinth from Ambrose. They had put their hoods back to do their important work more easily, and now they clearly wished to don them again, and hide their shame-filled features.

‘What have you done?’ Ambrose gasped, covering his mouth and nose with his hand and taking a step back from the cardinal, keeping his breathing as shallow as he could. Incense sticks smouldered away at the corners of the plinth. Their smoke was dense, curling slowly in the still air, but it was not enough to conceal the sweet, throat-squeezing stench that wafted from the corpse. ‘You’re meant to preserve him!’

The cardinal was rotting. His skin was porous as a sponge, a mottled purple and grey. Strips of flesh hung from his neck. His eyes had disappeared into their sockets. His face was coated in a shiny slick.

‘It is not what we have done,’ Burun said plaintively. ‘We are doing everything we can. Everything the rite demands. I have never seen anything like this before. He started to rot as soon as Chirurgeon Morano turned him over to us.’

‘The body resists all our efforts at preservation,’ said Tazker. ‘It is almost as if…’ He stopped himself, turning pale at the blasphemous thought he had almost uttered.

Almost as if the cardinal’s body were cursed, Ambrose thought. Almost as if this is no saint. Almost as if he were an abomination in the sight of the God-Emperor.

‘What are we to do?’ Burun asked.

They were not looking for a practical solution. Any one of the cenobites knew better than Ambrose how to treat a body for burial. They were looking for absolution for their failure.

Can I grant absolution when there is no failure?

He wished Burun or one of his underlings had committed an egregious mistake. That would be reassuring. Ambrose worried that it was as Burun maintained, that they had done nothing wrong at all.

He forced himself to lean over the body again.

What are you hoping to find?

I don’t know. I just have to make a show of trying something too.

There was movement in the corners of the eye sockets. Thick, grey tears formed, swollen like maggots.

Ambrose grunted in revulsion. He recoiled, inhaled violently, and coughed on the incense.

‘Arch-deacon?’ Burun asked.

‘What are those?’ Ambrose asked, pointing with one hand while he wiped his eyes with the other.

‘What are what?’ Burun asked.

Ambrose steadied himself and looked at Lorenz’s face again. The tears had vanished.

Perhaps he’d been wrong. Perhaps he hadn’t seen them.

‘Nothing,’ Ambrose muttered. ‘I thought… Nothing.’ He straightened. ‘There is nothing for it. The cardinal must be cremated.’

‘That is a deviation from the rite,’ said Burun.

‘So is this,’ Ambrose said, with a brusque gesture at the festering corpse. ‘If the cardinal’s state is this bad already, what will it be by tomorrow afternoon? Will you have me present a grotesque spectacle to the faithful? Or do you still think you can halt the decomposition?’

‘We cannot,’ Burun admitted.

‘More to the point,’ said Ambrose, ‘I am concerned about what this might mean. We do not know if an illness took the cardinal from us.’

Burun backed away from the body. ‘Do you think…?’

‘I don’t know. Better to be cautious.’

‘Yes. I quite agree.’ If there had been a flamer at hand, Burun would have used it.

Another thought struck Ambrose. ‘Has the cardinal’s body been left unattended at any time since he was found?’

Burun thought for a moment. ‘I cannot say if Chirurgeon Morano was present the entire time the cardinal was in her medicae chamber. Otherwise, no.’

‘Thank you.’ Ambrose would speak to Morano about this when the moment felt right. ‘Perform the rite of the Valediction to the Flesh, then. Cremate the cardinal and prepare his urn for tomorrow.’ As he turned to go, he said to Tazker, ‘Brother, will you accompany me?’

The cenobite was a sound man. His actions the day before marked him as worthy of trust.

‘How can I help, arch-deacon?’ Tazker asked once they were in the hall and the bronze doors of the Sanctum Silentium were closed behind them.

‘What I am going to ask is delicate, and it pains me to do so. But after what has happened with the cardinal, I have no choice.’

‘If I can help you in any way, arch-deacon,’ Tazker said, ‘please, let me.’

‘Very well.’ Ambrose walked slowly down the hall. His footsteps echoed, and he lowered his voice. ‘Do you know where I might find Relic-Keeper Rosarius?’

‘I do not, arch-deacon.’

‘Have you seen him at all recently?’

‘No, and I was in the reliquary earlier today. He was not there.’

Ambrose repressed a sigh of irritation with himself. What was I vowing in the cathedral yesterday? That I would not lose track of Rosarius again?

‘It has become clear to me that it is important I know where he is. And what he is doing.’

Tazker was silent for a beat. ‘Do you… Did he interfere with the cardinal’s body?’ The shrouded cenobite barely whispered the words, as if the mere mention of such a blasphemy would strike him down.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ambrose. He didn’t. But he could envisage Rosarius doing so. As blasphemous as such a crime would be, he could imagine the justifications Rosarius would tell himself. Anything he did to undermine Ambrose would be in keeping with the cardinal’s wishes. He would be carrying on as his mentor commanded. How far would he be willing to go? To judge by the last time I saw him, as far as necessary to destroy the enemy and all his works. Me. And the recovery of Magerit. ‘It is because I do not know,’ Ambrose said, ‘that I must find out what he is doing, if only to rule out this horrible possibility.’

‘I understand, arch-deacon,’ said Tazker. ‘I will find him. And thank you for doing me this honour.’

‘The honour is mine to know you,’ Ambrose said.

The shrouded cenobite moved ahead quickly. Ambrose paused until Tazker was lost in the shadows of the hall.

I am not proud of what I have just done.

He was taking his first real step into the quagmire of political intrigue that he had sidestepped for so long.

Maybe what you should not be proud of is your aloofness. Maybe you should not be proud of having kept your hands clean for so long.

Maybe.

But he could not shake the feeling that the rot had followed him from the Sanctum Silentium, and was settling into his soul.

CHAPTER 5

Clouds gathered in the hour before the funeral. They were true clouds, visible above the brown haze of the city, heavy and grey with promise. Ambrose looked up at them as he emerged from the cathedral, following the cardinal’s urn. He tried to remember when he had last seen cloud cover. He couldn’t. It was too much to hope that rain would come with them, but he hoped for it anyway.

Rain or not, this is a sign.

And the breeze was another; an omen of better things to come. It brushed against his cheek, a gentle, warm kiss. It was barely strong enough to stir the ends of his robe’s sleeves and did not cool the air – Magerit was as suffocating as ever – and yet, the air moved. It did not sit on Ambrose’s shoulders like a lead weight. Its vice grip on his chest and lungs eased by an infinitesimal degree. That was very close to being a miracle.

The Emperor protects. Behold His wonders.

Behind Ambrose, the cathedral was empty. So it was decreed, on the day a cardinal was laid to rest. With his passing, the Ecclesiarchal throne of Theotokos was empty, and in a demonstration of mourning and respect, the cathedral was host only to the small, lost sounds of the arch-deacon’s solemn footsteps and the shuffle of the cenobites who carried the bier on which rested the urn of black and gold and crimson. The faithful gathered in the great square of the cathedral instead. In their thousands, they piled into its confines, spilling out into the surrounding streets. The cathedral stood on the peak of a low hill in the centre of the city, and when Ambrose approached the dais that had been erected on the parvis, he could see down the slopes of the main avenues. The population of Magerit had turned out in force to bid Lorenz farewell.

I think you would be pleased, cardinal, to see so vast a number of mourners.

And that was why the people were here, wasn’t it? Not to hear him preach. They had come for the cardinal, not for him.

A single bell tolled in the spires of the Cathedral of Iron Obeisance. The bourdon sounded the slow procession, and Ambrose followed the rhythm of its heavy, sonorous clang as he mounted the stairs of the dais. The tolling rolled over the crowd, leaving silence in its wake. For the hour of the funeral, all the manufactories had stilled. The city had stopped to pay tribute to its cardinal.

At the final peal, Ambrose lifted his arms. He held them high for a full minute, his face uplifted. Then, with vox-speakers transmitting his voice across the square, down the streets and over all the rooftops of Magerit, he began to speak.

‘Behold the servant of the Emperor!’

‘Behold him, and honour him,’ said the crowd.

‘Emperor, behold Your servant!’

Only there was nothing to behold. Only the urn. Every cardinal before Lorenz had lain in an open coffin, which had been raised to a vertical position so that all might see him in his beatitude. Ambrose had decided to make no announcement about the change in the rite. He would not draw attention to it. Lorenz’s reign had been so long the memory of the last cardinal’s funeral would be a vague one for the few citizens of Magerit that had been alive at the time to witness it. If anyone did wonder why this cardinal was not afforded the same dignity, the same glory, as the others, then let them. The conclusions they could draw would be close enough to the truth, at least in the spiritual sense.

He was rotting long before he died, and all of you suffered because of that, and you know it.

‘Father of Mankind,’ Ambrose intoned, ‘before You, the mountains are brought forth to bow. You are the Emperor everlasting, and without end. By Your will, Your servant returns to dust. By Your command, he returns to sit in worship at Your Throne. He has served You, Emperor, and he has made Your enemies to suffer.’

‘Grant that we shall make Your enemies to suffer.’

Ambrose slowly lowered his arms until they were level but still outstretched, embracing the multitude before him.

‘For we are consumed by Your displeasure,’ Ambrose recited, ‘and are fearful of Your wrath.’

‘We are fearful of Your wrath.’

‘Yet we are joyful of Your wrath, for before it the xenos and the heretic are cut down and withered.’

‘And carried away as with a flood.’

‘Behold Your servant,’ Ambrose said again.

‘Behold Your servant!’ the crowd echoed.

The cenobites still held the bier. They were standing one level below Ambrose on the dais, putting the top of the bier and the urn level with his waist. On the left and right side of the bier were bowls of holy oil. Ambrose dipped his fingers in each, then brought his hands close to the urn.

‘Lorenz, Cardinal of Theotokos, with this oil will I bless you, and speed your passage to the Golden Throne.’ He reached for the urn.

Before he could touch it, the breeze became a violent wind. The transformation in the air was instant. It stirred Ambrose’s hair that extended from beneath his mitre, and then it roared. It slammed into him with a predator’s brutality. His robes billowed like sails. He stumbled, and almost fell against the bier. The shrouded cenobites wavered, barely managing to keep the bier level. At the front of the dais, Burun fell forward and rolled down the steps to the flagstones of the parvis.

The urn was of iron and gold, inlaid with rubies and with a base of black marble. It was heavy. It was stable. It was sealed. Yet the wind took it, and jerked it way from Ambrose’s hands, and knocked it over.

With a clatter, the lid broke off.

The wind roared in triumph, and it took the ashes of Cardinal Lorenz and hurled them high and far. They spread over the faithful like a swarm of flies. They flew in spirals and twists, down the streets and over the rooftops – black snow, motes dancing in the violent air, their reach growing wider and wider, further and further.

Ambrose clapped his hands over his mouth on instinct, but the ash did not come near him. It flew away, all that remained of a corrupted life extending the dead man’s touch over the entire city.

CHAPTER 6

They were only ashes. Just ashes. They can’t do any harm.

Ambrose kept up the refrain in his head all the way back to the Palace of All Martyrs. Ashes. Just ashes. Harmless. If he told himself this simple truth often enough, perhaps he would finally believe it.

Except it wasn’t the truth. The ashes had already done their harm. They had cast a shadow over the funeral rite, and the shadow had already covered all of Magerit.

Ambrose tried to disperse it. He righted the urn, and he completed the ceremony, but he barely heard what he was saying, and he doubted anyone else did. The people cowered away from the ashes. Those on whom the flakes landed brushed at them furiously and cried out in fear. The others looked to Ambrose for help, but he was constrained by the rite. He could not extemporise; that would be blasphemous. So he finished the ceremony, mouthing words that were no more than ashes themselves, and when he was done, he tried to help. While the cenobites carried the empty urn into the cathedral to inter it in the crypt, Ambrose began the journey back to All Martyrs on foot, speaking to the people, reassuring them that all was well. They gathered around him and reached for him, and he took their hands, and he spoke words and words and words, and they were as empty to him as the urn. They must have been empty for the people too, because none of those he spoke to looked reassured.

Ashes. Just ashes. Harmless.

If he could make himself believe, then he could convince others too. But all he could think about was the way they had spread, and the wind that would not die down. It gusted, it raged, it knocked him from side to side as it roared out of narrow streets. As long as the wind blew, the ashes were flying, and spreading their harm. Where Ambrose had seen joy and hope wherever he had gone in the last two days, now there was a new kind of distress, one that had nothing to do with hunger and thirst. It afflicted the soul.

Curse you, Lorenz. The Emperor blast your twisted spirit. Is this your last attack? One final attempt to blight Theotokos from beyond your grave? I will not have it. I will defeat you.

He looked for Bethia. He had not been able to spot her in the vast gathering in the square. He needed the sight of her now more than ever. If he saw her, and her strength, and her belief in him, then he too would be stronger. He would believe what he was telling himself. But he could not see past the immediate crush of the faithful. He could not find her. He was on his own.

No, I am not alone. The Emperor walks with me. I am the agent of His will. Too much has happened for it to be otherwise. I have His light by my side. With the sword of faith, I will save Theotokos.

The vow was an exhausted one. It had no force behind it. And in the end, Ambrose could no longer keep up even the pretence of comfort.

He turned and saw Burun walking behind him, his face as stricken and pale as those around them. Ambrose nodded to him, and Burun ducked back through the crowd, making for the cathedral. A few minutes later he returned, riding in the Taurox. Ambrose touched a few more shoulders, a few more faces, reminded the people that the Emperor protects a few more times, and then climbed inside.

‘I will be among you again soon,’ he promised the crowd. They looked back at him with anxious hope, and with unease roiling through their numbers like an oil slick.

Then Burun slid the armoured door closed, shutting out the supplicants. Ambrose collapsed on the seat with a groan. ‘I should be walking,’ he said as the vehicle rumbled forward.

‘It is miles from here to the palace,’ Burun said. ‘With such a crowd, how could you?’

‘With a bit more energy than I have, and that is my failing.’

‘Forgive me for saying this, arch-deacon, but Cardinal Lorenz did have reasons for ordering the use of this vehicle.’

‘I’m sure he did. But I am not Cardinal Lorenz.’

‘You are not,’ Burun agreed. He paused. ‘I am glad you are not,’ he said. He spoke quickly and quietly, then sat tense and silent for a moment, as if frightened by his temerity. Then he smiled, briefly but radiantly, proud that he had spoken his mind, before becoming serious once more. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘some of the same reasons might apply.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ambrose asked. In spite of what had happened, he took some pleasure in seeing the change the last few days had wrought in the chapel-master. There was much less of the timorous obsequiousness that had defined him under Lorenz’s rule. He was beginning to think more, instead of waiting to be told what to think. He was acting a bit more like an ecclesiarch.

‘I mean that with so many people present, there could be risks to your person.’

Assassination? ‘I am not Cardinal Lorenz,’ Ambrose repeated.

‘Precisely,’ said Burun. ‘And we know there are some who are not pleased about that.’

Burun was right. Ambrose was being naive. While Lorenz was alive, and Ambrose had most of his power clipped, he had not been worth killing. But he was powerful now. He ruled the planet, as Lorenz had. And he had enemies. His mind returned to Rosarius, and he dreaded how the relic-keeper might turn the day’s events to his advantage.

‘Your words have wisdom, Chapel-Master Burun,’ Ambrose said. ‘I would be wise in turn to heed them.’

The little man beamed again.

Ambrose avoided looking through the viewing slits during the rest of the trip back to the palace. For a short time he could seal himself off from the world, and wrestle with his thoughts. He was no stronger for the effort when he and Burun disembarked before the palace’s main doors.

‘Is there anything I can do…?’ Burun began hesitantly.

‘Thank you, no. I must speak with Chirurgeon Morano.’ Maybe she knows more than she did yesterday. She might, at least, set his mind at ease about the ashes.

As he made his way through the halls of the palace, he became conscious of the spread of whispers. Small groups of monks spoke in hushed tones and fell silent when he drew near. So did the palace’s serfs, pausing in their duties to confer with each other. Ambrose did not have to hear them to know what they were talking about. Their faces told the tale. Monks and cenobites and serfs, they all looked at Ambrose as he passed. Some of the eyes on him held the hope that he would dispel the new fears. Others were merely uncertain. Others were hostile.

Lorenz’s final act had widened and deepened the divisions in the palace.

You will not destroy what I am creating, Ambrose promised the cardinal. I will banish your shadow. Your ash, and scattered ash at that. Nothing more. Ash. Just ash.

The plasteel doors to the medicae chamber were locked when Ambrose reached them. He knocked but there was no answer. One of Morano’s serfs came around the corner cautiously.

‘Why is this chamber locked?’ Ambrose asked her.

‘The chirurgeon’s orders, arch-deacon. She said she must be alone.’

‘When was this?’

‘A couple of hours ago, arch-deacon. While you were away at the funeral.’

What do you mean by pointing that out? Ambrose wondered. Burun’s caution came back to him. What is Morano planning?

‘I need to speak with the chirurgeon,’ said Ambrose, ‘and as she does not answer, I must have the door opened.’ She will not prevent me from saving Theotokos. No one will. ‘Do you have a key?’

‘I do,’ the woman said, unhappy to be caught between conflicting orders.

Ambrose stepped aside. ‘Please use it.’

‘Yes, arch-deacon.’ She produced a ring of keys from her tunic and inserted one into the lock next to the doorway. She turned it. There was a rattle of tumblers from inside the wall, a hiss of escaping air, and the doors slid aside.

‘Stay here,’ Ambrose told the serf. She nodded, more than happy to comply. With mounting concern, he entered the medicae chamber and closed the door behind him.

The lighting here was brighter than in the rest of the palace, though not by much. Lumen globes cast illumination directly over each examination bed, and the translucent plasteel instrument trays beside them were lit from within. Between the empty beds, and around the periphery of the chamber, the shadows were deep. The ribs of the ceiling’s low, shallow dome reached down to the floor like the limbs of a spider.

In the centre of the chamber was a command pulpit and a cogitator workstation on a rotatable platform. Ambrose could see no one. ‘Chirurgeon Morano?’ he called.

There was no answer. He was alone in the chamber, though he could not be. ‘Chirurgeon?’ he called again, his eyes drawn to the gloom at the edge of the room.

There was a scratching sound, like the gnawing of rats. It was coming from the platform. Ambrose made his way through the tables warily. ‘Morano?’ Now he was hoping there would be no answer.

He heard a weak groan, gurgling with phlegm, and at the same time the smell assaulted him. He coughed, eyes watering from the stench of violets and dead fish. He reached the platform, peered around the pulpit.

Morano lay curled at its base. She quivered, her small frame so withered that she seemed little more than a jumble of bones covered in robes. Her breathing was ragged and choking. Her fingers, curled into claws, twitched and scratched the floor with every desperate effort of her lungs.

She was on her side, turned away from Ambrose. He touched her shoulder and she whirled on him with a spasm like a dying snake. He jerked away, his own breath stopped. Her agony was a mirror of what he had seen on Lorenz. Her mouth opened and closed as if she were biting the air. Her eyes were wide, dry and hard like marble. And yet there were tears trickling down from the corners, the thick, grey substance Ambrose had seen for a moment in Lorenz’s dead sockets. The stinking sludge dribbled through the lines in Morano’s cheeks and pooled beneath her face.

‘Chirurgeon,’ Ambrose said. He knelt before her but was reluctant to get too close. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to say. How can I help? The woman was dying.

Morano’s terrible eyes focused on him. She tried to form words, but only managed a liquid moan. She tried again, and this time Ambrose understood her. ‘Are… you… satisfied…?’

‘What do you mean?’ He rose, horrified. ‘What is happening, chirurgeon? What must we do?’

The questions were futile. He was wasting time Morano did not have to spare. He hesitated for another moment. Do not be a coward. You are already infected, or you are not. You cannot leave this room until you know.

Ambrose crouched again and picked up Morano. She weighed nothing. He brought her to the nearest examination table, then went back to the command pulpit and punched the vox-speaker. ‘Medicae personnel to the chamber,’ he called. ‘Don plague armour.’

Morano groaned again, syllables caught in her throat. She was trying to speak. Ambrose rushed back to her. ‘Others…’ she gasped. ‘Are there others?’

Ambrose nodded. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘We will search. We will contain this.’

He was trying to reassure a woman consumed by agony. He wanted to cry out, to beat back the wave of futility that crashed upon him.

He stayed by Morano’s side. She said nothing more. All her strength was spent from struggling to breathe, and she was losing. The grey tears continued to gather. They crawled down her face, thick and slow. Their movements had the sluggish heft of something alive. Ambrose fought hard to stay where he was. He did not know if his presence was a comfort. He would not abandon her, though. He would not give her cause to think her suspicions were correct.

The doors to the medicae chamber opened again. Brother Ivallus, Morano’s chief assistant, entered with a trio of medicae serfs. They had heeded Ambrose’s warning, and were clad in hermetically sealed plague armour. Hexagrammic runes of protection covered the dark, reflective, flexible material. Blessed ribbons of purity hung from their shoulders. The oxygen tanks on their backs fed the rebreathers in their beaked helmets. They resembled carrion birds. There was little comfort, and less mercy, in their appearance.

Ambrose stood aside while Ivallus examined Morano. Her hand clutched at her assistant’s sleeve, pleading, then fell away. Ivallus’ gloved hands hovered over the thick tears and their grey pool. He pulled away without touching the liquid.

‘Is this what killed the cardinal?’ Ambrose asked.

‘It looks very similar,’ Ivallus said, his voice emerging from the mask as a thin, electronic rasp.

‘Can you help her?’

‘I don’t know how,’ the monk said, frustrated.

‘Do what you can.’ To the others, Ambrose said, ‘Search the palace. Find anyone else who is showing symptoms of illness and bring them here.’

Ivallus tried to place an oxygen mask over Morano’s mouth, but she writhed with unexpected force and pushed him away. He stepped back, defeated.

‘There must be something,’ said Ambrose.

‘We learned nothing from the body of Cardinal Lorenz.’ Ivallus moved to the command platform and examined data-slates at the workstation. ‘Look, arch-deacon.’ He held up the slates. ‘Chirurgeon Morano has tracked her own symptoms. She sealed herself in here at the first sign of them. She has already tried everything I could attempt.’

‘Then all we can do is bear witness,’ Ambrose said grimly.

Morano’s breathing sounded like one death rattle after another.

‘And what about you, arch-deacon?’ Ivallus asked.

‘I am staying here.’ He was resigned to what he had to do, but he dreaded the horror that was in store for him. ‘We must quarantine anyone who might be infected. That includes me.’

‘I can bring you a suit of plague armour.’

‘Thank you, but no. Would there be any point now?’

‘No,’ Ivallus admitted.

‘Then let us do what we can, and accept what we cannot alter.’

The search took more than an hour, during which Morano’s breathing became more and more agonised. Once or twice she tried to speak. She failed, and only choked with greater violence.

One by one, other victims were brought in. There were thirteen of them. All but two of the examination tables were now occupied.

The symptoms of the afflicted varied in severity. Three were almost as bad as Morano. None were worse. Ambrose guessed that Morano was the first after Lorenz to be struck by the disease.

‘So quickly,’ Ambrose muttered. If Morano was the first, then this was the effect of a single afternoon.

Since the ash flew, Ambrose thought.

‘This doesn’t make sense,’ said Ivallus.

‘What doesn’t?’

‘None of the other infected are medicae personnel. I don’t think anyone else here has had any contact with Chirurgeon Morano. At least not recently.’

Ambrose moved from table to table, taking in the faces, murmuring prayers to give them strength in their ordeal. ‘You are not alone,’ he told them. ‘You are not alone. The Emperor protects.’

One of the faces stopped him cold. It was Brother Cavatus, Rosarius’ personal aide. Cavatus glared at Ambrose, his face white and sheened with sweat. His breath hitched hard enough to make his head jerk up and down against the table. The grey tears streamed from his eyes. His lips worked as if he might curse Ambrose or spit at him. ‘The Emperor protects,’ Ambrose said gently, and moved away.

He turned around slowly, looking at the sufferers again. There was a pattern in who they were. Along with Cavatus there was Estein, Lorenz’s dresser. Brothers Briant, Merrex and Trovus, utterly Lorenz’s creatures. And all the others, in one way or another, close to Lorenz, Rosarius or both. All of them beneficiaries of the cardinal’s regime. All of them would have been hostile to what Ambrose had planned. He was surrounded by enemies. They were all dying. And he might be joining them very soon.

Is this irony or something darker?

Ivallus came up to him. ‘There are no other cases in the palace, arch-deacon.’

‘Very well. If there is nothing more to be done here, leave us. But I want to know if there are any cases appearing in Magerit. Keep me informed.’

‘Yes, arch-deacon.’

‘Any new cases in the palace must be brought here.’

‘Of course.’

‘The cardinal died two days ago. Do you think that will be sufficient time to quarantine me?’

Ivallus thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Yes, arch-deacon. If you are not showing symptoms by then, I think you will be safe. But are you sure you do not wish for a separate space?’

‘No. I have been too close to Chirurgeon Morano. We will wait and see. If I become ill, this is where I belong.’

‘As you wish.’

Ivallus and his aides left, sealing the doors behind them. Ambrose was alone with the dying. The choking, gargling, drowning breaths of the afflicted filled the chamber. It was a choir of the damned. It seemed to circle Ambrose, scraping at his chest. Within moments, he was convulsively clearing his throat. Every tickle in his chest was a sign that this new plague was taking him.

Where has it come from? Lorenz, what did you do?

He spent the first several minutes regretting that he had not asked to be quarantined in his chambers. Either the old or the new ones, it wouldn’t have mattered. Then he recalled himself to his duty. He was surrounded by the dying, and there was no one else who could minister to them.

There was another reason to stay, too, though he hated the pragmatic calculation behind it. If he survived, he would be facing even greater obstacles to his work for Theotokos than he had before the funeral. The identities of the afflicted concerned him. How could the plague be so selective? Was it merely chance that the first to succumb were all of the cardinal’s party? Whatever the reason, if the pattern looked suspicious to him, it would to others too. The rest of Lorenz’s faction would use this against him. His enemies would accuse him of killing off whoever would oppose him. So, he had to stay. He had to be just one among the afflicted. If he survived, the accusations would have less hold than if he sequestered himself apart.

Knowing what he had to do didn’t make it easier. Or keep him from speculating and seeing a deliberate hand at work.

‘Rosarius,’ he muttered.

But how?

It doesn’t matter.

Oh, I think it does. If he can do this, think what other horrors he might be able to unleash.

All right, yes, how he did this does matter. We will have to learn that. But the point is, this must be his doing. He would have had access to everyone here.

Ambrose asked himself if he really believed that Rosarius would go this far, if he would kill his own allies, and risk spreading a plague across Theotokos, in order to strike at him. The answer came easily. He did believe it. He had seen how, even more than Lorenz, Rosarius saw the world as something to plunder, as a raw resource for his own advancement and prestige. He had no intention of remaining here in the long run. If he saw to the destruction of all of Ambrose’s hopes, and then departed, he would be well and truly satisfied. Ambrose was sure of that.

So how do we stop him?

We have to find him first.

And even before that, he had to survive.

Ambrose made the rounds of the beds, offering prayer, offering companionship, offering the pretence of comfort. It was his duty. It was also a waste of time. The sufferers were beyond the reach of prayer. Their lives had contracted to the agony of the present moment, the horror that each breath presented. Nothing existed for them except their slow drowning. If they recognised Ambrose at all, they slashed at him with clawed hands, as if he were responsible for what was happening to them. He hovered near, in spite of them, and murmured the Final Litanies of Faith, and the Psalms of the Unbending. It was his duty.

It was his duty.

He had been weary when he had returned to the palace. Now he was exhausted. In his exhaustion, he became angry. It was all he could do not to shout at the sick when they coughed and choked their hate at him. Didn’t they see what he was trying to do? Didn’t they realise they should be turning to the Emperor in their last extremity?

Of course they didn’t realise. Just like they hadn’t realised, or hadn’t cared, what Lorenz and Rosarius had been doing to Theotokos. Or because they had revelled in it too. They had put themselves beyond the reach of the sacred long ago.

The day turned into evening, and the evening into night, though there were no windows in the medicae chamber. There was a chronometer on the command platform, and Ambrose learned quickly not to look at it. Time had slowed in this hall. It was as sluggish as the tears that seeped from the eyes of the dying. All of them had been struggling for breath when they had been brought in, though some had still been able to walk with help. The grey tears did not manifest themselves right away, but eventually, and without exception, they appeared. Ambrose regarded them with a special horror. The other symptoms, fearful as they were, at least resembled other conditions. He had never seen anything like the tears before. Their colour and their viscosity were deeply wrong. No human body should ever produce such a substance.

No body that was not corrupted.

Ambrose resisted the thought at first. It was easy to believe that of one’s opponent. He had seen Lorenz use that accusation against those who displeased him or had something he wanted. It would be wrong, though, to withhold the condemnation when it was warranted. That would be the greater sin.

The sounds of lungs filled with liquid were so loud. He could not concentrate. He could not escape from the wet, rattling march of death. There was no retreat anywhere in the chamber. The plague was everywhere. Ambrose felt that he was drowning too. He became uncomfortably aware of his own breathing. Every clear inhalation was a gift. Every exhalation was a prologue to possible doom.

The worst of the night began with a confirmation of his worst surmises. He was surrounded not just by the dying, but by the corrupt.

It started with Morano. Her struggles turned into a rising moan of utter despair. He rushed to her side, sure that this was the end, wanting to be there for her even though she would have rejected his aid.

He recoiled, his breath freezing in his chest.

Her tears, thick and grey, stretching from the corners of her eyes, were now more than a foot long. They coiled and writhed. Their ends opened, revealing circular maws lined with teeth. Morano screamed. She had no air in her lungs, but she screamed, her soul devoured by an agony Ambrose could not imagine. Her head hammered up and down against the examination table. Her neck cracked. Her skull cracked. The worms danced and pulled further and further out of her eyes. Their bodies grew thicker, until they squeezed her eyes out of their sockets. The orbs rolled down her cheeks.

Her throat swelled, and her scream stopped, though her head hammered and hammered and hammered against the table, hard and fast as a terrible rain. A worm even larger than the rest emerged from her mouth. Its maw opened wide, and it uttered a thin, reedy wail. It was a cry of two notes, DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee, a song of monstrous birth and celebration.

Morano lay still at last. And the worm sang.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

Morano’s mouth hung open with the empty slackness of the dead. The worm slid from it with a squelch and fell to the floor. Ambrose shifted away from the worm’s path and leaned closer to Morano to look for any sign of breath. As he did, her throat bulged like a frog’s before a fountain of flies erupted from her mouth. The insects slammed into Ambrose’s face, a dry and squirming hail. He fell back, swatting and clawing. He bit down on his scream and scrambled to his feet. In his horror, the black bodies seemed to be Lorenz’s ash returned to claim him.

Stumbling, Ambrose bumped into an instrument tray beside another examination table. With one hand waving at the cloud of flies, and without taking his eyes from the worms twisting around Morano’s skull, he fumbled over the tray until his hand closed around the handle of a surgical blade. He clutched the knife and took half a step towards the corpse.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

The worm sang, and now it was a chorus. The cry was taken up on the other side of the chamber. Ambrose whirled. Another of the diseased was in his final moments, his entire body convulsing with the same murderous rhythm, and the worms were dancing on his skull. Then the flies rose from his mouth too.

The knife turned slick in Ambrose’s sweaty hand. He withdrew to the command platform. All around him, tears were turning into worms. An entire choir wailed the mindless, repetitive song.

It seemed the arrival of the first worms had accelerated the transformation of the other sufferers’ tears. Soon they squirmed over the faces of every soul on the examination tables. Many of the afflicted were not nearly as far gone as Morano had been. They still fought to breathe, but already their throats and eyes were swelling with the things crawling out. They screamed with the strength granted them by the outer reaches of suffering. They screamed with a horror beyond naming.

Ambrose dropped the blade. It clattered on the platform. He was too frightened of what might happen if he attacked a worm. He saw it leaping for his eyes. He saw it spewing unholy ichor into his face. He saw a hundred different nightmares unfolding.

He covered his ears, but he could not blot out the screams and the song and the buzzing of the flies. He tried to close his eyes, but the fear of what might come for him in that self-created darkness was too great. He turned around and around, and everywhere there was agony, everywhere there was monstrosity. The shrieks and the choking and the singing of the worms battered his courage and his soul. He shrank beneath the force of the blows. He curled onto the platform, his head wrapped in his arms. He cried out, begging for it all to stop, but his voice was muffled by his arm as he hid his mouth from the flies, and the horror went on and on, and the chorus of abomination grew louder and louder and louder, and soon it would kill him, it had to kill him, for nothing could survive in this cauldron of writhing plague.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

Mocking, mindless, endless, triumphant.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

Coming for him. Destroying his mind. Consuming his soul.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

And the flies, the flies like ashes, ashes, everything just ashes.

CHAPTER 7

‘The Emperor protects.’

Ambrose could not hear his own words. The whisper was too dry, too quiet. And the worms sang on, and the swarms of flies hummed. They did not seem to be as loud as they had been. But they were loud enough.

‘The Emperor protects.’

It was all he could manage of a prayer. His mind felt hollowed out and eroded, beaten and gnawed. There was nothing in there, no strength, no thought, no will. Just that one phrase, that one truth, his last possession.

‘The Emperor protects.’

It was true. It had to be true. If it was not, then all was lost and there had never been any point in fighting.

How many hours since the tears had become worms? How many hours of the two-note, up-down, maddening wail?

How many days had this night lasted? How many years?

Curled up and shivering, when he had stopped shrieking he had made himself pray. At firs he managed to gasp out complete verses. But his voice was hoarse, his throat was sore, and of course they were because he had been screaming. But the soreness terrified him, because maybe it was the first symptom of the plague, and soon the worms would be pressing out from his eyes too.

The visions of torment were too powerful. They blew the verses of prayers away like ashes in wind. All he had left was the Emperor protects, and the need for that last and most basic truth not to abandon him too.

There was no time here. Just the vortex of choking and death and awful birth. An infinite dance from which he could not break free.

Twice, he uncurled, twice, he forced himself to rise, and twice, he reached for the vox. And both times, he managed to stop himself. That was his victory in this night. At least if he died, he would go to the Emperor and be able to account for himself that much. He had not given in completely to cowardice. He had not called for help and thus exposed someone else to the death in this chamber.

This was his ordeal. He must not inflict it on others.

The centuries passed, and he knew he still breathed, because he could still form the words of the phrase that remained to him. Millennia passed, and the fever dream of his existence in the medicae chamber finally changed. The mists of horror began to part.

The wailing of the worms was diminishing. So was the corpse-hum of the flies.

For the third time, Ambrose straightened his limbs, wincing at the cramps, and staggered upright. He looked around the room.

Almost all the patients were dead. Only two were still caught in the slow drowning. On many of the corpses, there was no more movement. The ones where the worms still visibly twisted had, Ambrose thought, died recently. There were far fewer flies fouling the air.

He forced himself out from the doubtful shelter of the command platform and made his way over to Morano. The worms that had disported themselves on her skull were gone. Where they had once been there was now a motionless grey sludge, drying out and starting to flake. Flies stirred on its surface. He could not tell if they were eating it or trapped in it.

There had been so many insects in the room that the floor should have been carpeted with them. It was not. Unlike the worms, the flies left no trace as they died. Or if they did, what they left behind was too slight for Ambrose to see.

Whether dawn was close or not, the night was ending.

Ambrose returned once again to the platform, sinking down against the pulpit. ‘The Emperor protects,’ he said again, with greater strength. Then he wept.

One of the last two survivors began the tell-tale rattle-thumping of spine and limbs against the table. Ambrose braced himself for a new burst of flies. It would be over, though. All of this was ending.

‘Die, you wretches!’ he called out. ‘By the Throne, die and be done with it!’

At last, they did. The worms no longer wailed. The flies disappeared.

Ambrose finally let himself look at the chronometer. It was a few minutes until dawn.

He stood. He took a deep breath. His throat was still sore, but his lungs were clear. And as he took in the importance of the befouled dead, his eyes became clear too.

‘Thank you, God-Emperor,’ he said, and wept again. ‘I thank you for the ordeal I have suffered, for it is, in truth, a revelation.’

Before this night, he had thought of Lorenz’s sycophants and the others resistant to the changes Ambrose brought as selfish, venal, even malignant. He had been too kind. He had not seen them for what they truly were.

Corrupt.

Corrupt, in the most profound sense of the word. They were heretics. They were rotten in their hearts, in their souls, and in their bodies. He had seen the truth. He had seen their corruption made manifest.

But what about the flight of ashes from the urn? What did that mean?

He would learn in due course. For the moment, what he knew without doubt was that his enemies were the enemies of Theotokos, and the enemies of the Emperor. Rosarius had tried to destroy Ambrose by unleashing this plague. He had strengthened the arch-deacon instead, because Ambrose had survived to see the truth.

The hour of Matins came, and the vox-speaker buzzed to life. ‘Are you well, arch-deacon?’ Ivallus asked.

‘I am,’ Ambrose said. ‘I am also the only one. Come and remove the corpses. They must be cremated, and their urns sealed in lead.’

‘Yes, arch-deacon.’

‘I am not done. Their urns are not to be buried in the palace’s crypt.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Ambrose was about to tell Ivallus about the revelation he had experienced, and that the dead were abominated by the Emperor. He stopped himself. Careful. You can’t afford to give in to transports of joy. Not yet. Ivallus had worked closely with Morano. He might not be trustworthy. ‘We cannot take any chances with the possibility of contagion,’ he said. ‘Have the urns thrown into the ocean.’ The coast was only ten miles from Magerit.

‘Yes, arch-deacon.’

‘Good. Come and take the bodies then, but summon Brother Tazker to the vox first.’

Ivallus did as Ambrose asked, and Tazker was on the vox before Ivallus and his team had arrived at the medicae chamber.

‘Are you alone?’ Ambrose asked Tazker.

‘I am, arch-deacon.’

‘Tell me, have you been able to locate Relic-Keeper Rosarius?’

‘I’m sorry, but I haven’t. No one has seen him in days, as far as I can determine. I will keep looking.’

‘Please do, brother. It is important that he be found.’ You coward, Rosarius, Ambrose thought. Hide all you want. You will not prevail. ‘Keep looking,’ he said. ‘But ask Chief Enforcer Bonarmo to come to the palace. Tell her I need to speak with her.’

To his credit, Tazker did not ask why. ‘At once,’ he said, and that was all.

It was a while before the head of the Magerit Watch arrived at the palace, time enough for Ivallus and his aides to remove the corpses from the medicae chamber. Ambrose examined them closely while he was still alone. The flies had all vanished before Ivallus unsealed the chamber door. There was no trace of anything unnatural having occurred, only the grim evidence of the plague’s mortality rate.

‘How long did they survive?’ Ivallus asked. The beak of his plague mask turned back and forth as he took in the sight of the dead. All the faces were twisted in final agony.

‘It varied,’ said Ambrose. ‘I don’t know if there was any firm pattern.’ He had been too terrified to notice. Now, it was all he could do to remain standing and not collapse with exhaustion. ‘The last of them died before dawn.’

‘No recovery at all. That is worrying.’

‘It is. Especially if cases turn up in Magerit.’ Emperor grant that Rosarius confined his crimes to the palace. He feared they would not be so lucky.

‘And you, arch-deacon, how are you feeling?’ said Ivallus.

‘Tired, but otherwise well. I am not experiencing any symptoms.’

‘I am glad to hear it. Perhaps the contagion is not as strong as it might be.’

‘Let us hope not, Brother Ivallus. Let us hope not. We shall see what my state is tomorrow.’

‘Our prayers are with you, arch-deacon. Shall I have some food brought to you?’

‘Please.’ With the night behind him, he was ravenous.

Ambrose kept his other thoughts to himself while Ivallus oversaw the removal of the bodies. The horrors of the night had left him feeling optimistic about his chances of fighting off the plague. This was not just a simple disease. It was a spiritual death. It manifested the corruption of those it afflicted. That was how he was beginning to see it. He was having trouble reconciling that aspect with the conclusion that Rosarius had spread it deliberately, but nevertheless, he grew more and more convinced that both things were true. He was not yet ready to presume that he was immune. He would not dare embrace that kind of pride. But with the bodies gone, and with them the reminder of the nightmare, he felt more confident about surviving the next twenty-four hours.

Ivallus and his aides finished their work. A meal of bread and cheese was brought, along with a flagon of water drawn from the underground cisterns. Ambrose ate and drank, feeling better yet. It was frustrating to remain another day in the medicae chamber, constrained in what he could do and learn, but he told himself that at least he would get some rest.

What surprised him was how long it took for Chief Enforcer Velansa Bonarmo to make contact. She finally arrived in the late afternoon. She knocked on the chamber doors and spoke through the vox-grille set in the wall next to them.

‘I apologise, arch-deacon, for making you wait so long. I have been detained by events in the city.’

Apprehension tightened Ambrose’s throat. ‘Why? What has been happening?’

‘I’m afraid your attempts to calm spirits after the funeral of Cardinal Lorenz did not work. The rumours have been flying. My troopers are succeeding in keeping order, but there are large sectors of the city that are closer to mass panic than I would like.’

‘I see.’

‘There has also been an outbreak of the plague that has visited All Martyrs.’

Ambrose winced. ‘How bad?’

‘I think we have it contained. At least, all the cases we know of are now isolated. But…’

‘Yes. There could well be others.’ People dying alone. People with friends who did not know what to do. People who might try to hide the sick. If the symptoms always turned into the horrors he had seen during the night, then people would be terrified to report such things. ‘Any fatalities?’ he asked, giving Bonarmo the opening to tell him if anything blasphemous had been witnessed.

‘A few,’ she said. ‘The rest are being watched closely.’

Were there worms? Were there flies? She would have told him if there had been. She sounded tired and worried, but nothing more. She had not seen the impossible births of monstrosities. What did that mean? Was that a good sign? There were too many things he did not know and could not know while he was trapped in this chamber.

The memory of the ashes swirling in the wind rose up. With his mind’s eye, he watched them dance over the rooftops, and fall upon the citizens he was trying to save.

No. Please no. They were ashes. Just ashes.

There was no need to imagine causes when the guilty party was so evident. We will find you, Rosarius. You cannot hide. The time for subtlety was past. Rosarius had forced his hand.

‘Chief Enforcer Bonarmo,’ Ambrose said, ‘there is something you must know. I have reason to believe that this plague has been deliberately spread.’

‘Throne,’ said Bonarmo. ‘How?’

‘By what means, I do not know. But I am certain this is the work of Relic-Keeper Rosarius. He vanished shortly after the cardinal died. No one knows where he is.’

‘Rosarius,’ Bonarmo repeated. ‘He was frequently in the company of Cardinal Lorenz, wasn’t he?’

You have it right, chief enforcer. He was never a friend of Theotokos. ‘That’s correct.’

‘Then I see why he might do this.’ She sounded disgusted. ‘A plague for political ends. There are no words for such a crime.’

‘There is one,’ Ambrose told her. ‘It is an abomination.’ I have seen the full extent of his crime. The word is a true one. ‘He will try to get off-world.’

‘Then he will be disappointed. There has been no traffic from outside the system for months. We have been left to fend for ourselves, arch-deacon.’

‘And we will. The Emperor sees us. He knows Theotokos renews its faith.’

‘You give me hope, arch-deacon. And it will be a simple matter to forbid all out-system travel. He will have nowhere to go.’

‘There is certainly nowhere else on Theotokos for him. We will continue to search the palace. If he is not here, he must be in the city.’

‘We will find him.’

‘It must be soon.’ They had to stop him before he spread the plague any further.

‘I know. At least I know what we are looking for.’

‘Then you give me hope too, Chief Enforcer Bonarmo.’

He did feel encouraged for a short while after she left. But the hours stretched ahead, interminable, and he was alone with his thoughts and his doubts and his fears. The more Ambrose thought about what Rosarius had done, the more he feared it.

What did you do? How did you do it?

He had been given a glimpse of unspeakable corruption last night. But the author of the corruption was still out there. And Ambrose was stuck in here, losing another day.

He began to wonder if his earlier optimism had been a cruel illusion. He began to wonder if Rosarius might not have won after all.

CHAPTER 8

Ambrose spent his second night in the medicae chamber in prayer and meditation. The silence and solitude of the hall were blessings. The contrast with the choking and the monstrous songs of the night before made the silence even more pronounced. Ambrose performed a ritual of blessing, sanctifying the space once more, reclaiming it from the corrupted horrors that Rosarius had brought to the palace. He felt calm. He felt strong. He had come through the trial and was better for it. He was armoured for the struggles ahead.

He knelt for hours at a time. The pain in his limbs became the spur to more committed prayer, and to deeper meditation. By the middle of the night, Ambrose sensed his purpose with greater clarity than ever before. He could almost hear the Emperor’s words in his soul, directing his steps. What he was engaged in on Theotokos was, he now understood, more than a simple struggle. It was a crusade. Last night, his iron had been tempered on the anvil of terror. This night was the time for revelation.

The Emperor had blessed him with a mission to save the people of Theotokos. He had instinctively pursued that goal for a long time, but he had not seen its full scope until now. He was called upon to do more than save them from thirst and famine. There were limits to what he could do there. He could only stave off those spectres for so long, for if the rains did not come, then doom would.

But his mission was also to save the people from corruption. It had always existed on Theotokos, and it had found champions in Lorenz and Rosarius. Before last night, Ambrose had not been able to see beyond their simple venality. That had changed. The cardinal had been corrupted in the most profound way, and Rosarius was even worse.

I cannot control the rains. I will defeat corruption. I will save the souls of my people. When they are cleansed, when they are worthy, then the rains will come.

The spiritual and moral logic was unassailable.

In the last hours before dawn, Ambrose finally rose. He revelled in the explosion of purifying pain the simple act of standing caused. He staggered for a few steps but did not reach out to an examination table for support. He walked until his movements were easy again. He smiled. He took a deep breath. His lungs were clear. The plague had not touched him. He was certain that it could not touch him.

He was strong. He was clean. He was clear.

He was ready. Whatever wounds Rosarius and his allies might inflict on him, he would withstand them and triumph.

Morning came, and Ivallus unsealed the doors to the medicae chamber. Ambrose strode out, smiling to the monks and cenobites who had come to greet him on his release. ‘It is a joyful morning, my brothers,’ he said. ‘I am so pleased to see you.’

Though there was strain on their faces, they smiled back at him. He thought, too, that they clung to his words as if their succour were tangible.

‘There is much to be done,’ Ambrose said. ‘Not least by me, and I might as well have been hundreds of miles from Magerit these past two days. I will need your help on all fronts. Theotokos cries out for help, and we are the ones who must provide it.’ He paused and smiled again. ‘As a first step, Brother Tazker, will you accompany me to my study and bring me up to date?’ The words my study came naturally. He no longer felt like an imposter. It was Lorenz who should never have claimed ownership of those chambers.

Tazker fell into step beside Ambrose. They walked in silence until they reached the study. There, Tazker closed the door while Ambrose settled himself behind the desk. ‘So,’ said Ambrose, ‘from your grave expression, I can guess that things have not progressed well during the night.’

‘They have not, arch-deacon,’ Tazker said, approaching the desk. ‘The efforts to contain the plague have not been successful. There are more and more cases being seen. It already has a name. The Grey Tears.’

Ambrose made a show of thinking carefully while he calmed himself. As far as he knew, only he had seen the tears in the cardinal’s sockets. Morano had certainly not mentioned them to him, and she had been forthright enough about the other mysterious aspects of Lorenz’s demise. If people had witnessed the tears transforming into worms, surely that would have been the first thing Tazker said. He also would look more than just worried. Perhaps the worst forms of the plague only manifested in the truly corrupt. ‘The Grey Tears,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Once a plague has a name, it has become an object of great fear.’

‘Indeed it has, arch-deacon,’ said Tazker. ‘Many of my brothers and I, following your example, have gone forth from these walls to walk among the citizenry. We have seen and heard the fear.’

‘Your actions do you credit, and you have my thanks,’ Ambrose told him. ‘This is how we will continue our works of salvation. And what of Rosarius? Is there any news?’

‘He has not been found. But the Magerit Watch have broadcast his name. Across the city, he is known as the author of the plague. He is greatly hated.’

Good. That would hamper him, and make the actions of his allies, whoever they still were, more difficult. ‘Then the people of Magerit are vigilant. I am sure it will not be long until he is found. Is there any other news?’

‘Only one thing more. The people feel your absence, arch-deacon. They need to see you. They need to hear your words in this time of fear.’ Tazker lowered his head. ‘I hope I do not speak out of turn.’

‘You do not, brother. You recall me to my immediate duty. The people will see and hear me at Evensong.’ I will bring them more than hope, Ambrose promised himself. I will bring them salvation.

Ambrose headed out into the grounds of the palace. The retreat of the cloister was unsuited to his task. The sermon he would deliver that evening was an important one, and he needed to think carefully about what he would say. He would reassure the people, yes. But he could not banish the plague. He had to remind the citizens of their solemn duty to fight for the Imperium. Their resistance to the machinations of Rosarius was as fully a part of the war against the enemies of the Emperor than any front-line battle. To find the words that would put iron in the people’s faith, and in their spines, he needed the inspiration that came with watching over the city while he thought. He had to see what he was striving to save.

The wind that had come up at Lorenz’s funeral still blew with steady force, punctuated by violent gusts. It had knocked down many trees on the grounds, and monotasked servitors laboured with mindless precision to restore the hillside to its pristine state. One of the tracked servitors was attached to a woodchipper, and a group of the humans turned into machines of flesh was sawing through the fallen trunks and loading them into the contraption, turning them into the dust that would nurture other growths. The whine of blades and pulverised wood echoed across the hillside. It did not bother Ambrose. It was background noise, the sound of another kind of revival.

He wandered along the paths, his robes buffeted by the hot wind, the sermon slowly taking shape in his mind. He stopped beside one of the artificial brooks. It was the steepest and widest, cutting down the centre of the slope that faced the city. Clusters of carefully placed boulders created frothing rapids, and the water plunged past with a ceaseless roar. It blended with the whine of the woodchipper.

There was both renewal and constancy here, Ambrose thought. The dead wood was being taken away, and the stream flowed with uninterrupted force. The images pleased him. He could use them.

He was just framing the climax of the sermon, and walking slowly downhill beside the stream, when another noise, much less pleasing, intruded on his thoughts. He tensed at the buzzing of flies. A few dozen yards further down, there was a cloud of them darting and swirling over a group of boulders at the brook’s edge. Ambrose approached cautiously, wary for the first hint of the song of the worms. He relaxed a little, but only a little, as he drew near and nothing unnatural manifested itself. The flies seemed to be just that – flies.

But something had drawn them here.

The flies were thickest at a narrow gap between two boulders that created the effect of a crevasse a good ten feet deep. Water flowed violently in and out of it. Ambrose held his breath, covered his mouth and nose with one hand while trying to wave away the cloud of insects with the other, and looked down into the crevasse.

A corpse lay upside down, caught in the rocks, its limbs twisted and broken, the head suspended just above the water. Ambrose recognised the robes of the relic-keeper at once. Determining whether the face was that of Rosarius was more difficult. The nose and one cheek had been smashed in the fall, and the flesh had already rotted to a greenish-black and was sloughing off, crumbling wetly into the water. Forgetting the flies, Ambrose stared at the body, wondering at first if this might be another of Rosarius’ crimes. Perhaps he had murdered another brother and put his robes on the body.

No. Don’t lie to yourself. This is Rosarius.

Ruined though the face was, Ambrose could still make out its narrow cast. The squeezing hunger of a lifetime’s greed had marked it deeply.

How long has he been here? The putrefaction was far advanced, too much for the few days he had been missing. But Lorenz had also rotted quickly, the plague fusing with his corruption to devour his corpse.

Rosarius must have contracted the Grey Tears shortly after Ambrose had seen him in the cathedral. He might even have been sick then. Perhaps that was when he had spread the contagion.

Did he know he was sick? Did he know what he was doing?

What difference does it make? His crime is the same.

Ambrose backed away from the boulders, out of the cloud of flies. There was a bench nearby, and he sat down, feeling cold despite the heat.

He looked around. There was no one about except the servitors. He would have to head back to the palace to find some help and get word to Bonarmo that Rosarius had been found. He should go now.

He stayed where he was. He turned his gaze on the boulders and the storm of insects feasting on the body. ‘You would like me to summon help, wouldn’t you?’ he whispered to Rosarius. ‘You filth. That would suit you very well. It would be a good way to commit a few more crimes against Theotokos and the Emperor. Eh? Eh? Don’t answer. I understand perfectly. The people will be relieved you are dead, but your allies will argue that you had nothing to do with the plague. They’ll present you as just another victim. Some people will believe that. You’ll wind up fighting against the salvation of Theotokos from beyond the grave.’

Ambrose clenched his fists. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I will not let you have that victory. Not even the smallest part of it.’

Dead, Rosarius became a threat again. Alive, he was an enemy that united the citizenry of Magerit behind Ambrose.

What he had to do was as clear as revelation.

He rose and walked uphill. He made his way over to where the servitors were disposing of the trees. He stopped beside the woodchipper and checked again that he was alone.

Is that a hood between those two oaks?

No. Just thick ivy, moving in the wind.

And what if there had been someone there? What he was going to do was necessary. He would have no difficulty explaining that. His position was beyond argument.

He halted the servitor in its task. The whine of the blades slowed to a rattle, then went quiet.

‘Priority debris,’ Ambrose said. Which was absolutely true. The corpse could not be permitted to pollute water that might end up in the reservoirs of the city. Though he had no idea why it should even occur to him to worry about lying to a servitor. He pointed towards the swarm of flies. The upper body of the servitor, the portion of it that was still flesh, turned obediently to mark the position. ‘Fallen matter between those rocks,’ said the arch-deacon. ‘Dispose of it.’

There was a belch of blue fumes, and the tracks of the servitor jerked to life. The machinic slave rumbled down towards the rocks. The other servitors followed it automatically, the tasks of the whole group synchronised, turning them into a single unit of labour.

Ambrose followed slowly, keeping a short distance away. He watched as two servitors removed the corpse from the rocks. The mechanised servitor positioned itself nearby and aimed its discharge chute at the roots of the nearest trees. The chipper blades roared to life, their high whine rising as they reached their destructive speed. The servitors threw the body into the chipper’s maw.

There was a sharp rasp, and then a mist of blood and atomised bone coated the roots of the trees, staining the grass crimson.

The servitors reacted to the discolouration immediately. They began to rake the earth, and to turn over the soil. The pristine beauty of the palace’s grounds had to be preserved.

Ambrose watched until every trace of Rosarius had vanished. The flies dispersed, their meal gone. When the servitors moved on, returning to the fallen trees, Ambrose walked over to the freshly groomed earth that was Rosarius’ unmarked grave.

‘Now you are defeated, you corrupted wretch,’ he said. ‘There is nothing more you can do against me and the world the Emperor has tasked me to save. You are under my control now. There will be no memory of you except that which I choose to give you, and what I shall give, you will not like.’ He pictured what must have been Rosarius’ final moments, stumbling desperately down the hill, drowning in his lungs, the Grey Tears turning into worms, blinding him. Then falling and dying wedged between the rocks. A foul death. Deservedly so. ‘Your end was atrocious,’ Ambrose said. ‘Your legacy, despite your best efforts, will be the salvation of Theotokos.’

A single fly buzzed at Ambrose’s ear. He batted it away and started back to the palace. He had his sermon in mind now. He knew every word of it.

The throng of the faithful in the Cathedral of Iron Obeisance was enormous. The people overflowed from the pews, stood crowded in the nave and the aisles. They gathered on the parvis and in the square, as numerous as they had been for the funeral of Lorenz. They had come to see Ambrose if they could, and at the very least to hear him. As before, the vox-casters carried his voice through the streets. The entire city had turned to him. He would not fail it.

And in her accustomed pew, where Ambrose had prayed she would be, Bethia stood with her family, her face uplifted. He looked at her, and the clarity and determination that had been his since he had survived the night amongst the corrupted became a hundred times stronger. Every decision he had made since that moment was the correct one. Every decision had been commanded.

‘Our trials are not at an end,’ he said, beginning his sermon with this hard truth. He would not lie to the people. At least not about that. ‘The drought afflicts us still. And now a plague has come among us. It has come because an enemy walks in the shadows, corrupt and heretical. He has turned his back on the Emperor, and on Theotokos. He was blessed with the holy rank of relic-keeper, and he has defiled His trust. I will not pronounce his name while I stand on sacred ground, yet it is known to you. It is known to all of you.’

The congregation murmured in assent to his words, and in anger against Rosarius. Ambrose spoke about the relic-keeper’s perfidy, conducting the rage until it rose like the tide. Then he turned to hope. ‘The enemy has already done us great harm. He has allies, and they plan to do more. But they are weak because they are corrupt and heretical. We are strong because we have faith. We are strong because we serve the Emperor, together. Faith that is true cannot be broken. With faith, there is courage. With faith, there is unity. With faith, courage and unity, there is strength no enemy can withstand.’

He paused just long enough for the roar of the people to begin, then started to speak again as if he had not been expecting this response. He smiled, let the roar build, and at its crest, he raised his voice to channel the collective fury.

‘Do not suffer the heretic to live!’ he shouted. ‘These are the words we have all been taught! These are the words that must govern our acts. We will allow no corruption to sully our city! Let us rededicate ourselves with purpose! We shall withstand the plague, and Magerit will shine so brightly the entire galaxy will wonder at what our faith has accomplished.’

He fused rage with hope, and in so doing he fused the people into a perfect whole. He had lied to them by telling them that Rosarius still lived. The deeper truth, though, was that he had lied for them. He had told them what they needed to hear so they would be steadfast in the trial of the plague. Their vigilance would protect them against Rosarius’ allies. He was sure they were around. The relic-keeper would not have acted alone. They could be anywhere. They could be anyone. He would have to watch for opposition that came disguised as agreement.

When he told the lie, he had felt a spiritual stab. He had wounded his soul. He had wounded his soul for a great cause. If he had to suffer other wounds in order to save his world, then so be it. That was the will of the Emperor.

Ambrose gazed down on the people, on his people. They shouted his praise. They screamed their hatred of Rosarius. They broke into a thunderous hymn to the Emperor. The wave of their faith, of their faith in him, rolled over him, and it transported his soul.

And Bethia, the way Bethia was looking at him, with admiration and absolute trust, oh, he would suffer any wound to see her this way.

Ambrose took a deep breath, taking the very air of faith into his lungs.

The outcome of the struggle against the enemies of salvation and the Grey Tears had already been decided.

The people were his. The victory was his.

CHAPTER 9

The chamber of Chief Enforcer Velansa Bonarmo was spare. A battered iron desk, two chairs, an equipment chest and a small shrine were its only contents. Its window was wide and high, and it was so covered in grime that the view of the street that ran in front of the Magerit Watch barracks was a dirty blur, the light that came through filtered into a sullen grey. Bonarmo stood behind her desk, walking slowly back and forth while she and Ambrose talked. Dark-skinned, she was compactly built, a battering ram of an officer. Though the energy for action was always there, she looked tired. There was nothing new in that. Her duties had expanded and grown more onerous as the situation on Theotokos had deteriorated. Desperate people took desperate actions, and the Watch had been kept busy just at the level of ensuring Magerit did not erupt into full-scale food and water riots. The battle had been lost everywhere else, something which Ambrose knew weighed on Bonarmo, even though the collapse of the other cities had been beyond anyone’s ability to prevent. Keeping order in Magerit was no small achievement. He had hoped that the relief provided by greater water and food rations would relieve some of the pressure, but the Grey Tears had undone almost all the good he had been able to accomplish.

Bonarmo looked more than tired. She looked worried. That was new, and it worried Ambrose too.

‘You are generous with your time, arch-deacon,’ the chief enforcer said.

Ambrose shook his head. ‘My place is in the city, where I can be useful, not cloistered in the palace. I am doing my rounds of the relief centres, and it seemed a better use of your time for me to come and see you, rather than the other way around. I take it, though, that the news is not good?’

‘It is not. The Grey Tears is spreading more quickly than we can contain the cases. I have expanded quarantine zones in the north and south-centre sectors, where we have seen the greatest concentration of infected. That has not stopped the spread. I’m hoping that it has slowed it. But that is a hope, arch-deacon. It is not a conviction.’

‘Few people are willing to volunteer themselves for quarantine,’ Ambrose guessed.

‘Exactly. They know it is a death sentence if they contract the plague.’

The distance between the main concentrations of the plague bothered him. Eruptions so widely spaced. Ashes in wind swirled before his mind’s eye. No. Ashes. They were just ashes. Rosarius had simply launched his attack with great cunning before he died. ‘No one has recovered, then,’ said Ambrose.

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘I see.’ That was what he had suspected. He had hoped to hear otherwise, since he still had not heard even a whisper about the tears becoming worms. He had prayed that the innocent might have a chance of recovery, that only the corrupt were doomed. ‘And what about the rate of infection?’

‘To date, arch-deacon, it would appear that the only person to survive unprotected contact with a diseased individual is yourself.’

If Ambrose had needed any further proof that his mission was divinely ordained, he now had it. This fact, though, only made the struggle against the plague harder. ‘So, the fear of the plague is almost as much of a threat as the plague itself.’

‘That is what we are facing, yes,’ said Bonarmo.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ Ambrose asked her.

‘I was hoping you could tell me.’ She clearly meant it. ‘You give the people hope, arch-deacon. Your presence gives them strength. And it calms them.’

Ambrose mused for a few moments. He would preach every evening for the duration of the crisis. That wasn’t enough, though. Then he thought of the relief centres where he was headed. He sighed. There was nothing joyful in the idea that had occurred to him. But it might make a difference.

‘This is a small enough thing,’ he said, ‘but it is worth doing, I think. You know that one section of each relief centre, one that can be sealed off, has been reserved for the sick.’

‘You want the plague-infected brought to those centres?’

‘I do.’

‘You will need to repurpose each complex entirely,’ Bonarmo warned.

‘That many infected?’

‘At least.’

There were so many in need who were not struck by the plague. They would be harmed by this change. A choice of two evils faced him. Except there really was no choice. The Grey Tears had to be stopped before all else. ‘So be it,’ he said.

‘Forgive me, arch-deacon, but I’m not sure what this is meant to accomplish.’

‘We must let the people know that I will visit the afflicted.’

Bonarmo fixed him with a long stare. ‘Are you sure?’

‘If I were going to contract the Grey Tears, I would have already, don’t you think?’

‘Yes,’ she conceded. ‘You will take precautions, all the same?’

‘You would have me visit the dying in plague armour? No. I was surrounded by the infected, and the plague did not touch me. I am proof that an immunity exists.’ He did wonder if that immunity extended to him alone. That was not an idea he wanted to propagate at this point. He also told himself that he hoped it wasn’t true, and that there were others who could fight the infection.

If corruption is death, maybe purity is life.

That was a thought he was uneasy about pursuing. He filed it away, aware that sooner or later he would have to examine it again. For the moment, he turned to a safer, heartfelt plea.

God-Emperor, grant that Bethia is immune.

‘The people must see that I am unafraid,’ Ambrose said to Bonarmo. ‘They must see that I will minister to the dying. Then they will know that there is comfort to be had, even in this extremity. Maybe they will not seek to hide, then.’

‘Maybe,’ Bonarmo said, clearly reluctant to agree to the plan. ‘Just so we are clear, I wish to state my concerns, arch-deacon. Though I can see the potential benefits, and yes, maybe this could help the efforts to establish a workable quarantine, your loss is something that Magerit can ill afford.’

Ambrose smiled reassuringly. ‘That is flattering. Do not be concerned, chief enforcer. The plague cannot touch me.’

Ambrose spent the rest of the day visiting the relief centres, and letting the volunteers know what was about to happen. He saved the primary one for last. He was glad that Bethia understood why this had to be done, though he saw the sorrow in her face, and her worry for those she would no longer be able to help. That sorrow was still there when he returned the next day. By then, he had made his announcement in the cathedral. The relief warehouses were filling up with the dying. Some had been brought there by the enforcers, but many more had been carried there by their families. Those people too had to be quarantined, but they accepted this fact with patience. The knowledge that Ambrose would be among them was enough to make them compliant.

Bethia was waiting for him at the main entrance to the warehouse complex. She was there with her fellow volunteers. It was the first time he had been sorry to see her. He didn’t want her here. The warehouse’s rockcrete wall felt like far too thin a barrier between Bethia and the Grey Tears.

‘We are here to help you in your rounds, arch-deacon,’ she said.

Ambrose shook his head sadly. None of them had plague armour. ‘Your commitment honours me, and your faith does you honour. But you cannot come in with me. Not without protection. I have already passed through the trial of exposure.’

‘It’s hard to feel useless,’ said Bethia.

‘You aren’t. Other relief centres will need to be set up. We will have to start again from the beginning, I’m afraid. As to what I must do here, I must do it alone.’

‘We will stay until you come out,’ Bethia insisted, and there was a murmur of agreement from the other volunteers.

‘Very well,’ Ambrose said. ‘But will you do me the favour of moving a bit further away? Across the street, at least?’

They accepted, and when they had done as he asked, Ambrose raised the lever that controlled the warehouse door. The massive iron slab ground upwards with a metallic shriek of gears. He walked in as soon as it had risen high enough for him to enter without ducking. He closed it again as soon as he was inside. The door came back down with a clang. Its echo was swallowed up by the huge chorus of gasps and choking.

Ambrose looked at the rows and rows of the sick. They had no beds. There were too many of them. They lay on whatever bedding had been brought with them. Some had rough blankets. Many just had rags. Some had nothing at all. Their agony filled the cavernous space of the warehouse. Ambrose shuddered with sympathy. They were all going to die, hundreds and hundreds of the wretches. This was the horror of the medicae chamber magnified beyond nightmare. Though he knew, he knew, that he was immune, his throat began to tickle again. It tightened, feeling sore, his body reacting to so much suffering.

A sea of suffering.

The gargling, the gasping, the drowning and drowning and drowning, the sound so terrible and vast, the waves of the sea rising to the roof of the warehouse.

These are the innocent. These are the victims of Rosarius. They need you now. Fulfil your promise and be present for them.

Ambrose realised he had been motionless in front of the door. With a jerk, he forced himself into action. He entered the sea of pain.

‘I have come to be with you, faithful of the Emperor,’ he called out.

There was no answer. There could be no answer in this hall of suffocation.

He moved slowly through the rows, stopping to pray every few yards, kneeling to bless the afflicted. Were they not thrashing so violently, he could have touched them. A few, a very few, seemed to realise who he was. They reached out for him, eyes wide, mouths gasping, their contorted faces pleading for help, for relief, for mercy. All he could offer was his presence, and the whispered hope that their tortures would end soon.

The grey tears streamed thickly from their eyes. The sight turned his stomach. He must not let them see his revulsion. It was doubtful any of them were in a state to notice or care what he thought of them, but even so, he owed them all the dignity and solemnity he could summon. None of them deserved what was happening to them.

Rosarius, you should die a thousand times over for what you have done. Your memory will live in the curses of Theotokos forever, and that is already too great a reward.

Ambrose worked his way through the first hall of the warehouse complex, then on into the next. All this space had been the comfort of the weak and the thirsty. Now it was as if the furthest hall, once the place of the sick, had flooded the rest of the complex with its charges. Even the most pitiful victims of the drought and foul water had not been suffering like this, though. Even they had still been capable of hope.

Midway through the second hall, Ambrose paused. He shut his eyes, blocking out the images of suffering, though the ragged, horrible cries surrounded him and held him with a constrictor grip.

Keep going.

I can’t. This is too much.

You saw a thousand kinds of death when you travelled across this world. This is just another one.

Yes. Yes. That was all. And the innocent needed him.

He opened his eyes again.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

The piercing, sing-song, mindless, mocking wail.

The worms rose first from the afflicted closest to the main door, then their emergence became a rapidly spreading ripple through the warehouse. In moments, they pushed their way into the air, crushing eyes and distending throats.

The flies followed, their numbers so great they darkened the air of the warehouse, their buzzing a steady drone that threatened to smother the choking of the dying. The wave of embodied corruption rushed past Ambrose and beyond, through the halls. He staggered under the assault of hearing more than a thousand people reach their final agonies at once, of thousands of worms singing their piercing tune.

The storm of flies assaulted him. His gasp of horror pulled fistfuls of the insects into his mouth and he doubled over, gagging and choking. Small bodies broke apart on his tongue. He spat out wings and legs. His body betrayed him and tried to take a deep breath, but he fought it, terrified of swallowing the horrors. He coughed and spat some more, breathing through his nose, covering his mouth. His teeth were rough with insect debris.

Ambrose fled back to the entrance, fighting his way through the flies. Worms pulled themselves out of the skulls of the dying and crawled towards him. He stepped on them as he ran. Their rounded bodies rolled and then flattened beneath his feet. Their heads popped off, trailing spurts of viscera. Ambrose slipped on the streaks of yellow and green. He fell, more worms squirming and bursting beneath his hands as they slammed down on the floor. Moaning in hate and revulsion, he pushed himself back up and ran. The door was a hundred miles away, and he could barely hold back his scream.

The dying convulsed, their skulls and limbs shattering as they hammered on the hard floor of the warehouse. The end of all breath came for the afflicted. The Grey Tears reigned triumphant. The warehouse was a cauldron of monstrosity; the sea of suffering had become a sea of putrescence, physical and moral putrescence, a thick, humming, whistling, squelching morass that clutched at Ambrose. It would not let him go. It was hungry. It would drag him down and force itself into his throat and lungs.

He tried to run, but it was too dangerous. If he fell again, he was afraid the worms would take him. They were everywhere, some as long as his arm, rearing up as he went past and trying to wrap around his legs. The flies poured out of the bodies of the dying. They flew in his ears, they crawled over his face and in his hair. He waved his arms helplessly. He had to squint to keep the insects out of his eyes.

He was never going to reach the door.

But then he did. He found the lever in the wall and shoved it up. He did not hesitate. There was no question of enduring this trial again, in an infinitely worse manifestation. He was immune to the plague. He was not immune to being devoured. And he had to survive. He had to stop this horror. His sacrifice now would be sheer selfishness.

The door rose, and it was slow – cruelly slow.

Hands grabbed his robe and pulled him down. Two of the dying clutched at him, their contorted faces pleading for the help he could not give. More crawled towards him, sliding in the filth of the tears. They crushed worms beneath them, sending out bursts of thick, green viscera.

Ambrose moaned behind his clenched jaw. He kicked out with reflexive violence, breaking the nose of one of the men. It collapsed inwards, and more worms spewed out of the hole. Ambrose kicked and punched with desperate hate. He felt no pity or remorse or duty to the dying. They were monsters, seeking to drag him down with them. Their own desperation gave them strength, but it was brittle, and they were fragile. Ambrose battered them until they fell away, dropping back into grey ooze and blood.

More and more were coming, choking on pleas and worms.

The door was just high enough. Ambrose crawled out under it, his robes soiled by the slime of worms and the slick of phlegm and blood. The cloud of flies billowed out into the open. The worms crawled after him, their DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee songs triumphant.

Bethia started to run to him from across the street. The other volunteers ran with her, but then stopped, crying out when they saw and heard what was emerging from the warehouse.

Ambrose lunged up and to the side, yanking the outside lever down. The door jerked to a halt. Gears shrieked in protest, and then the heavy barrier began its slow descent. Ambrose backed away, wiping his face, still spitting out pieces of fly. The constant wind dispersed the swarm, and the worms wriggled forward onto the pavement. The door finally closed again, and Ambrose frantically stomped on the worms, crushing them to ooze, silencing their cries one by one. Bethia joined him, and then so did everyone gathered in the street. In a few moments, the terrible song no longer sounded outside the warehouse. But from inside came the muffled cacophony of rising and falling wails, and the deep hum of the greater swarm.

‘What…’ said Bethia. She could not finish. Her face was pale and taut.

‘Corrupt,’ Ambrose managed. ‘All of them. Filth and corruption.’ He could still feel the touch of the dying. He straightened, gathering his breath and his anger as the certainty took form for him. ‘We have been deceived,’ he said.

There were at least a hundred people around him now. All of them had witnessed the unnatural manifestations of the worms and the flies. All of them were looking at him with the greatest desperation he had seen yet. Nothing they knew or had been taught to believe could explain what had happened. They needed him to force the world to make sense again.

And he could. ‘The sick are the enemies of the Imperium,’ he said. ‘They are sick because they are heretics, allied with the great heretic Rosarius.’ He had never imagined that the relic-keeper’s influence could be so far-reaching. The proof horrified him. ‘Crushed beneath your feet is the evidence of their corruption.’

‘How can such things be?’ Bethia asked.

Ambrose only had a partial answer for that. ‘Rosarius has used forbidden knowledge. How he came by it, I do not know, nor should I, for curiosity is the handmaiden of perdition. We know his crime by its results. To fall ill is to give birth to your corruption.’

‘What must we do?’ someone in the crowd called, and the cry was taken up.

Ambrose turned to face the warehouse. ‘We must purge ourselves,’ he said. The answers came to him as he spoke. He felt the truth of every syllable he uttered. More and more clearly, he saw that he had been chosen by the Emperor for this task of salvation. The labour before him was much greater than he had ever dreamed. So, too, was the blessing of being given this task. The revelations were not yet complete, but he understood more and more. The plague was the sign of the heretic, and the heretic must be destroyed. He had never been called to lead a purge before. He had never even witnessed one. Necessity called to him now. Faith called to him. And he would answer. ‘Everything in that warehouse is unholy,’ he said. ‘It must be burned.’

‘How?’ someone asked.

‘I know a way,’ Bethia said, saving Ambrose from having to admit that he did not know. She pointed to the disused manufactory next to the warehouses. ‘I’ll need a team of welders,’ she said, ‘but there are conduits that connect the manufactory to the storage complex. The liquid waste from when the forge was in use is still in the holding tanks.’

‘You think you can route the waste into the warehouses?’ Ambrose asked.

‘I know I can.’

‘Then you must do it.’ Everything that is happening has been preordained. I have faced a second trial so that Bethia might perform her destined task. His initial distress that the impossible manifestations had been witnessed by so many vanished. This was all meant to be.

‘Helden!’ Bethia called to one of the men in the crowd. He trotted over, hunched, slight of frame, and wiry. ‘He was a maintenance serf in the manufactory before it closed down,’ she said to Ambrose.

‘You know the interior of this building well, Helden?’ Ambrose asked.

‘Knew it better than my home, arch-deacon.’ When Bethia explained what had to be done, Helden pointed to the nearest hab block. ‘More of us from back in the day live there. Just a few heartbeats, arch-deacon, and we’ll have the interior flooded.’

‘The Emperor has sent you at the hour of Magerit’s need,’ Ambrose told him.

Preordained. All of it.

Ambrose stayed where he was, a few steps away from the loading bay door, while Bethia and her team disappeared into the manufactory and got to work. He led the growing crowd in prayers of purity and anathema. He spoke words of reassurance for the faithful, and of condemnation for the heretic. His discourse was far more wrathful than it had ever been before. He was conscious of the change in his tone. It was driven by the need of the times. He almost did not recognise himself.

Yet this is what I must be. Forge me into Your weapon of faith, God-Emperor.

And he needed to be strong. Though there were no windows in the warehouse walls, no way to see what was happening inside, the hum of the flies was audible. Ambrose did not like to think how thick the swarm must be in the complex for it to be heard through the walls. He did not like to think it, but he could not stop doing so. And if the flies were so numerous, what of the worms? He pictured a rising, writhing tide, swallowing up the bodies of the dying.

How can it take so long to die? How can they linger so when they cannot breathe? Is it their punishment? Or is it their corruption, keeping them alive to spread the plague even further?

There was a contradiction there. If the plague was a symptom of corruption, then the innocent should have no fear of it. The problem nagged at him, but distantly. It was overshadowed by the certainty of his decisions.

Bethia was gone for close to an hour, and the crowd in the street grew and grew. Ambrose kept steadfast. He held the fear at bay. And at last, he heard the sounds that meant purification was about to begin. With groans of old metal, heavy clanks and the release of steam, some inner portion of the manufactory lurched into life. Conduits rattled, and a few moments later there came the thick, shushing roar of liquid flooding into the warehouse. The buzz of the flies became angrier, and then the song of the worms became so piercing it worked its way through the walls.

The people in the street fell silent, prayers dying on their lips.

‘Do not be afraid,’ Ambrose told them. ‘Be wrathful! Feel hate for the enemies of the Emperor and be glad of the purgation whose moment has come.’

And the moment came. He was not in communication with Bethia; he had no way to know when and how the process of ignition would take place. But because all of this was destined, and because he had been chosen by the Emperor, as soon as he finished speaking a muffled detonation went off inside the warehouse. The walls shook. A new sound, of wind and crackling, consumed all the others. Black smoke poured out of the vents, shrouding the roofs of the complex, rising to the sky in a furious column. Ambrose coughed from the chemical stench. His eyes watered. Noxious fumes filled the street, and it was hard to breathe, but this was the choking stench of human industry. The waste and sludge that had lain fallow for a year had become a blessed poison.

Ambrose waited a full minute, then he commanded the crowd to stand back. They obeyed and pulled even further back when they saw him approach the lever next to the door. He wanted to give oxygen to the blaze. More importantly, he wanted the people to witness the purification. It was not enough just to hear it and see the smoke.

Standing to the side of the door, Ambrose hauled the lever up.

The door rose.

The sudden rush of oxygen into the fire created a backdraft. The flames bellowed from the entrance, roaring with a volcano’s rage. The blast reached across the street, and some of the people who had not retreated far enough screamed as the storm of fire grasped at them.

The concussion knocked Ambrose back and down. Flames washed over him. The heat was pain, but it was also purity. It was the sacrifice to be made to defeat corruption.

But he did not burn. His robes were singed, his face blistered, but he wasn’t injured. The fire blast receded, and Ambrose got to his feet. Preordained, he thought again, even as the crowd gasped, and then roared with adulation as he moved to stand in front of the centre of the doorway. The interior of the warehouse was a conflagration of searing orange. He faced the crowd, the fire raging at his back. He raised his arms in triumph. ‘Behold, the judgement of the Emperor!’ he shouted.

Even the injured answered with shouts of praise.

The pyre that had once been a place of refuge burned and burned and burned.

CHAPTER 10

Ambrose changed the order of service for that day’s Matins. The break from tradition was rare, but not without precedent. Cardinal Irkaysus had deviated from the norm and delivered his sermon at the end of the service a bit more than four hundred years earlier. He had done so at the launch of a crusade.

I must do so now.

Ambrose was barely aware of the rest of the service. He stayed in the shadows of the alcove nestled inside the huge column that held the pulpit. His limbs were numb and buzzing. Blood pounded in his ears. He saw nothing except the pulpit, that elevated space of iron surrounded by air from which he would soon speak again. He had never imagined that space becoming so important to him, so quickly and so frequently. It had always been a site of reverence because of what it was, even when all he had been was a reluctant puppet mouthing Cardinal Lorenz’s words. After the cardinal’s death, when he had understood his new role, he had also understood the pulpit’s place in his mission. It was through it that he spoke to the people. His people.

Except he hadn’t fully understood, had he? He hadn’t seen the full scope of what he was doing, and what he had yet to do. With each passing day he had needed to speak with more gravity, authority, and urgency. Each time he stepped into the pulpit there was a greater weight on his shoulders. The task of saving Theotokos grew larger and larger.

I embrace the trials, God-Emperor. I will not fail You.

The last of the hymns ended. Silence fell over the cathedral. The people were waiting for him, waiting for his words, waiting for his wisdom.

They were waiting for him to shape their world.

Because that was what he had not understood before. That was what he was here to do. That was his task. It had fallen to him to interpret the evil that had struck the world, to tell the people what it was, and to guide them through the tribulation. His modest hopes of just a few days ago, of easing thirst and hunger, seemed almost blasphemous in their triviality.

Ambrose stepped out of the alcove. He looked down at the people, but he did not see them. Not even Bethia, though he was certain she was there. All he saw was the double-headed eagle that formed the pulpit’s lectern. He placed his hands on the wings of the aquila, calling on them for strength. The numbness would not leave him.

His robes stank of smoke, and beneath its sharp tang was the stench of fouler stains. He had come here directly from the pyre of the relief centre. He needed to stand before the faithful with the marks of struggle upon him, so they would know what they must do as well.

And he needed to think.

To try to think.

To try to understand the truth of the Grey Tears.

The horrors he had witnessed clung to his spirit. It was horror that numbed his body. Horror and fear, fear that he might still not understand enough.

He depended upon his determination and his faith to break through the numbness.

Grant me fire in my veins, in my heart, in my voice, and in my deeds.

He opened his mouth, and the words came. The truth came. The fire came.

‘We were moved to pity when we saw our kin weeping the Grey Tears,’ he said. ‘I was moved to pity. Like you, I sought to comfort the afflicted. I sought to bolster, in their hour of need, their devotion to the God-Emperor. Yet the sick did not hear me. I thought it was their agony that turned them from my words, and I did not blame them. I pitied them. I was wrong. I was deceived.’ He paused. ‘You have all been deceived!’ he shouted.

Anxious murmurs rippled through the nave.

‘The infected are corrupt!’ Ambrose shouted. ‘The Grey Tears are the mark of their corruption. Twice over, I have seen the full manifestation of the plague. Twice over, I have come through the trial to stand before you, to bear witness, that we may destroy the unclean and remain pure and true to the Emperor’s will.’

This time, the nave rumbled with the prayers of thanks. The people packed shoulder to shoulder. They did not fear contagion here. They feared only the Emperor.

‘And so, I tell you, faithful of the Emperor, beware the corrupted. Beware the ill. Root them out. Do not let the illusions of friendship or love or kinship stay your hand. Be resolute and be merciless. We must purge the infected lest the Emperor turn His gaze from us.’

The congregation roared. Fear and reverence and determination were one.

‘Will you let me guide you?’ Ambrose asked. It felt strange to speak again with the humility that used to be his.

‘Guide us!’ the people cried. ‘Guide us! GUIDE US!’

In all humility, Ambrose obeyed.

He left the pulpit and descended the spiral staircase inside the column. He emerged in the nave and solemnly walked down the aisle to the main doors. The people followed in silence. The reverence of the moment was too great for the imperfection of words. This was the beginning of a crusade. This was, Ambrose thought, the true start of the salvation of Theotokos.

He stepped out onto the parvis and saw Bonarmo approaching him. And that was as it should be, as it must be, as it had been preordained. She looked exhausted, ready to collapse. Ambrose smiled at her, offering her renewal.

‘Is what I hear about the relief centre true?’ she asked.

‘It is. Our task is more urgent and more straightforward than we thought, Chief Enforcer Bonarmo. The infected must be exterminated.’

She nodded, looking even more drained of hope.

‘Where is the nearest concentration of the plague?’ Ambrose asked. If she saw, she would understand, and grow stronger for it.

‘We have quarantined a hab complex a mile to the north of here.’

‘Then we must go there. Please have your forces prepared for what must be done. Flame is our salvation now.’

The chief enforcer led the way, but it was Ambrose that the people followed. It was he that they looked at, he from whom they awaited guidance.

He would give it to them. That was what he had been called upon to do. To guide, to teach, and to save.

Bethia pushed her way to the front of the procession of ten thousand. He smiled at her, and slowed his pace for a moment, letting her know that she was welcome to walk beside him. Her face was drawn in anxiety.

‘Arch-deacon,’ she said, ‘when you say flame, do you mean…’

‘I mean exactly what you think. The inhabitants of that block must burn.’

‘All of them?’

‘All of them.’

‘Could there not be some innocents among them?’

‘If there are, they will die as martyrs.’ The answer came so easily he winced. It was the sort of smoothly immediate response that he had always despised in Lorenz. The difference was truth. It must be. ‘But I do not think there will be innocents there. You did not see everything I did at the relief centre, but you saw enough. There is no recovery from the Grey Tears, because there is no redemption from corruption.’

Bethia was silent for some time. She seemed to be trying to find the right way to frame her question. ‘Forgive me if I speak badly,’ she began, ‘because I mean no heresy.’

‘Speak freely, Bethia. I know your faith is beyond question.’ The words were a painfully bland cover for what he really wanted to express.

‘What if there is another explanation? Is it possible that the affliction causes the transformation? Parasites in the water, perhaps, that they manifest in this way…’

‘If that were so, then everyone at the Ecclesiarchal Palace would have succumbed. Instead, it was only the corrupt.’

‘Then Rosarius…’

‘How he brought this about, I do not know. But he did, and his allies in corruption have died for his sins. As he will be punished, when he is found.’ Ambrose felt uneasy again. He was not bothered by the thought of what he had done with Rosarius’ body, and the secret that he was keeping. What bothered him was that the logic of what he was saying seemed thin, brittle, ready to snap under scrutiny. But it was the only explanation that connected all the things that he knew to be true. Therefore, it too must be true.

Bethia tried once more. ‘But if the Grey Tears are contagious…?’

‘So is corruption. To avoid its taint we must be pure, and burn whatever is corrupt.’

‘I see.’

She did not sound convinced. Ambrose saw doubt written across her features, and it hurt him. He was doing the right thing. She would understand. The people around them did. She would see. He would show her.

Ambrose touched her shoulder. It was more than he had ever dared do before. The feel of her body through her work uniform against his palm was a jolt that almost broke the coherence of his thoughts. She looked at him in surprise. Are you feeling this too, Bethia? She must be. She had to be. Instead of what he wanted to ask, he said, ‘Have I ever called for people to be harmed?’

‘Never,’ she said, her eyes confused.

Her shoulder tensed. She must be worried about impropriety. He took his hand away. The sense of intimate contact lingered on his fingers. ‘Nothing has changed,’ he said. ‘I would never see the innocent hurt. The heretic isn’t a person. Not any more. Perhaps not ever. That is a hard lesson for all of us.’

She said nothing, but kept looking at him.

Ambrose walked on, and the people walked with him. He mingled with them, while staying close to Bethia. A mother brought her children forward to him. ‘Bless us, arch-deacon,’ she begged. ‘Keep us free of taint.’

He put his hands on the heads of the children. ‘The Emperor guide you,’ he said. ‘Steel your heart against the heretic.’

An old man crouched to kiss his hand. ‘You will save us, arch-deacon,’ he said.

‘The Emperor will save you,’ Ambrose told him. ‘If He has chosen to use me as His instrument, then I can only obey.’

They reached the quarantined hab complex. Ambrose’s jaw tightened with dismay when he saw how large it was. Almost half a mile long, the drab, soot-darkened rockcrete building was thirty storeys high. Magerit Watch troopers had cordoned it off, barricaded the surrounding roads and evacuated neighbouring complexes. Bonarmo had sent orders ahead of the procession, and most of the troopers were armed with flamers. Repressor armoured personnel carriers were stationed near the main entrances of the building, their pintle-mounted heavy flamers at the ready.

From the open windows came cries for help and pleas to the Emperor.

‘Do not let their voices deceive you,’ Ambrose called out. ‘Their fidelity to the Father of Mankind is a pretence. You can hear the foul truth behind their lies. We all hear it.’

The song of the worms sullied the air. There was a deep hum from the swarms of flies inside the apartments. The wracking coughs and gasps of the dying were louder than the pleas for mercy.

‘God-Emperor!’ Ambrose shouted. ‘See how we purge the unclean!’ He nodded to Bonarmo. ‘Let it be done,’ he said.

Bonarmo issued the order, but it was at Ambrose’s will that the destruction began. As the flamers opened up and the storm bolters on the Repressors began pounding the walls, he felt something collapse inside his chest. He had never before commanded that executions be carried out. No one had died because he had wished it. Until now, everything he had done in all the years of Theotokos’ slow agony had been to preserve the lives of his fellow citizens. And though he knew that, ultimately, he was still acting to save the lives and the souls of the uncorrupted, in this moment, his was the hand of death, and he had stretched its shadow over the hab.

His chest split, and then his heart slid, and it took him with it in its fall. He was plummeting down a chute into darkness. He was doing something he had never imagined doing, and he was caught in the vertiginous descent into violence. He was disgusted, and he was exhilarated. His soul raged in triumph at the extermination of the unholy, and perhaps it was a righteous triumph and perhaps it was just a hideous enjoyment, and though he could tell the difference, he could not make himself care. The need for more and faster was a fever as powerful as the Grey Tears.

The lower floors of the hab caught fire. Walls caved in under the bolter fire, and guns began to hammer deeper and deeper into the building, shattering support columns, undermining the building’s structural integrity. The flames spread upwards rapidly, finding easy fuel in poor furnishings and the flammable paint in the densely packed slum. As inhabitants rushed for the exits, Repressors lurched forwards, their dozer blades hurling them back into the fire or turning them into pulped smears on the road.

There were cries of horror in the crowd as people saw their friends and relations scraped flat by blades. They were seeing slaughter instead of purgation, Ambrose realised.

‘Do not waste your pity!’ he warned. ‘There can be no regrets for us! Every death we witness is an act of righteousness!’

The screams of the dying melded with the singing of the worms. Ambrose wanted to cover his ears, to howl in an ecstasy of rage. Instead, he forced himself to speak again.

‘Give thanks!’ He tried to shout over the hammering of weapons, the gathering roar of the fire and the sounds of death. ‘Thus are the corrupted purged! Thus do we perform the will of the Emperor! Thus will we find salvation!’

He put all the force of his lungs into his voice. He used all of his skill to give his words the fire they needed. Now was the moment for the guidance he must provide.

Then he saw Bethia, staring at the conflagration in horror. She was not hearing what he was saying, or she was not understanding him, or she did not believe him. She turned away from the fire. She faced him. The anguish in her eyes sliced through the burning fog in his mind and let in a riot of confusion.

He knew he was right. He was doing what he must. But her pain stabbed him in the heart. He trailed off, his voice dropping beneath the thunder of the purge. Smoke billowed over the street, making him cough.

‘Bethia,’ he said. Even he could not hear his croak.

Then the centre of the hab’s roof collapsed. The core of the building crumbled, and the walls cracked and leaned in towards the inner weakness. Dust blasted out of the doors and windows. For long minutes, Ambrose could see nothing except the vague silhouette of Bethia in front of him. The glow of flames punctuated the choking gloom, and the hammering of the Repressors’ guns went on and on.

Ambrose wiped the dust from his eyes. He spat the dust from this throat. He shook his head, trying to clear the buzzing that filled it. As the dust began to settle, he realised that the buzzing came from elsewhere. It was tremendous, greater than the fire, greater than the weapons. The broken shape of the hab complex became visible again, and he saw the monstrous column of flies erupting from the centre. It formed a dark, roiling cloud, darker than the smoke, a furious, snarling storm of a million fragments of night.

The screams came from the street now as the people backed away in panic. They fled, pushing and trampling each other in the rush to escape the huge swarm. It grew and grew, gathering a terrible weight, spreading wider and wider. The awful birth formed into a massive ball over the hab, the vibration of infinite wings shaking the ground, and Ambrose’s bones, and his soul.

Then, with a final great cry of the worms, the swarm burst wide, and spread over the city.

The chronicle of the Grey Tears.

Fragments of the mosaic of plague.

The wounds that were the fruit of the deeds and words of Arch-Deacon Ambrose of Theotokos.

His words spread faster than the flies. They arrived first, issued by the wave of his preaching, carried by the strength of his authority, transmitted by vox, and most of all by the repetitions of the faithful.

The people witnessed the propagation of the Grey Tears, and they were fearful. They were helpless to stop it, and so panic took hold. They were desperate to grasp hold of any action they could take, anything better than waiting passively for the invisible foe to take them. Even a charade of control would have been a boon.

The words of Ambrose arrived, and they were welcome. Now there was something to do. Now there was someone to blame.

The people who fell ill were not victims. They were heretics. The Grey Tears revealed the truth. The truly faithful were immune, and the truest way of showing sanctity was in destroying the heretic.

And now the heretic was visible to all. Many of their sins had been held in such deep secret, so utterly unsuspected, that the revelation of their iniquity triggered rages far beyond murderous in their loved ones.

Not far north of the gutted relief centre, Valla Straaven, who had once been one of the centre’s most devoted volunteers, returned to her hab complex and heard, as she paused by her door, a coughing fit coming from the apartment of her immediate neighbour, Gregor Batis. They worked at the same promethium refinery and had often been shift-mates, though Gregor, forty years older than Valla, had been absent for many days now. He was one whom the drought had left without strength, and though he was ill, he was not quite ill enough to have been taken to the centre.

Valla saw the truth of his illness now. She was sickened by the lie of their years of friendship. She was strong, too. She kicked down his door. She found the hypocrite kneeling in front of one of the small, crude altars of lead that were present in every one of the impoverished habitation cubicles. She seized it, lifted it high and battered open Gregor’s skull.

She had not stopped to see if the Grey Tears were oozing from his eyes. That he was ill was proof enough.

The flies came as she stepped back into the corridor. They swarmed through the broken window at the end of the hall. They choked on blackened bodies. She swatted at the insects and stumbled, unthinking and panicked, back down the stairs and into the street. By the time she reached open air, the Tears had come for her, and she was beaten to death by the crowd that was rushing into the hab.

The Grey Tears spread quickly. With them spread the desperate violence of purity. Three thousand people lived in the complex. None would be alive by morning.

On the other side of Magerit, in one of the spires that held what remained of the city’s ruling class, Ambrose’s words had reached here too. While the flies were yet to come, young Javeth, heir to the riches of the Hoven clan, heard his father cough in his study. Javeth had no need to run and tell his mother what he had discovered. The arch-deacon of Theotokos had spoken in terms that even the children of Magerit understood. Javeth did as the Emperor willed. He had to venture into the kitchen to find what he needed, a place of serfs that the family rarely had reason to enter. But Javeth knew his duty, and it was not long before he had set the apartment on fire, beginning with his father’s study, and ended the line of the Hovens.

Ambrose’s words spread along with the flies. The fear of the Grey Tears encountered the desperate hopes of purity, and the conflagrations of violence increased throughout Magerit.

Before nightfall, the riots exceeded the abilities of the Watch to contain them.

The Taurox rumbled back towards the Palace of All Martyrs. With Bonarmo and a squad of troopers as escort riding in the troop compartment with him, Ambrose looked out through the viewing slit. He watched Magerit teeter on the edge of an abyss from which, if it fell, it could never emerge. With every block and intersection the vehicle passed, he saw signs of the struggle. The air over the city was growing as thick with smoke as it had been with flies at the hab complex.

It would be so easy to doubt himself.

This is part of the test. You must hold firm.

There was too much he did not understand. That terrible storm of flies… What could explain it? There was nothing he knew of in the Imperial Creed that allowed for the possibility of such an abomination. Perhaps in the archives of the palace there might be, among the oldest of exegetical scrolls, illumination.

No time for that now. Learn why this has happened after the plague has passed.

But have I done the right thing?

I preached the words of the Creed. I told the people what had to be done.

This was the necessary pain that led to purity. When the fires ended, the city would be saved.

Do you really believe that?

He had to.

It would be easier if Bethia were here, at his side, her faith in him beyond question. But she had left with the coming of the flies. I must go, she had said. My family, she had said.

He had almost called her back. It was not impropriety that had stopped him. It was the certainty that she would not listen.

She will understand. She always has before.

He tried not to think about what might happen if her understanding came too late.

Sitting opposite him, Bonarmo straightened suddenly. She clapped a hand to her ear, pressing in on her vox-bead to hear more clearly. ‘Arch-deacon,’ she said when she had finished listening, ‘I must ask for your help.’

‘Of course,’ Ambrose said. What now?

Over the vox, Bonarmo ordered the Taurox driver to change direction. The armoured transport picked up speed. Instead of west, towards All Martyrs, it headed north, though still making for the outskirts of the city. Ambrose guessed the new destination immediately.

‘What has happened?’ he asked Bonarmo.

‘I’m not sure. The reports are still fragmentary. It may just be desecration.’

‘Just?’

‘I would prefer that to any alternative.’

The great cemetery of Magerit covered most of the northern slopes of the city’s bowl. From a distance, it looked like another, older city, with low houses instead of hab blocks, and fewer manufactory chimneys. Closer, the houses became vaults and sepulchres, and the manufactories were crematoria. Massive, blocky ossuaries shouldered up between obelisks commemorating the great, the headstones of the humble, and the mass graves of the poor. In these years of the drought, the cemetery’s cobbled lanes had become almost as busy as the city’s, clogged with the grieving and an unending stream of funerary services. There was an aura of false calm about the graveyard as the Taurox approached. There was no fighting going on here.

There was, though, a contingent of Magerit Watch troopers. The Taurox stopped next to them. When Ambrose alighted, he saw that Preacher Schedoni was with the troopers. His remit was the cemetery and the mourning faithful who gathered there. His calling was strong as iron, and his appearances in the Ecclesiarchal Palace were rare. Ambrose liked him. He had kept his distance, physically and politically, from Lorenz, and the cardinal had, for the most part, left him alone. He was short and thin, his grey hair tonsured, his face weathered from decades of open-air ceremonies. He had dealt with death in every form and was beyond surprise.

Or so Ambrose had thought. Now, Schedoni looked grey with fear and he rushed forwards to grasp Ambrose’s hands.

‘Arch-deacon,’ he said, ‘the Emperor shield us from this darkness.’

‘What is it?’ Ambrose asked.

‘Look,’ said Schedoni. He pointed to the grave behind him.

It was empty.

‘Look,’ Schedoni pleaded, on the verge of tears of horror. He swept his arm to take in the hillside.

Ambrose looked up at the vista of fallen monuments, overturned headstones and gaping vaults. Everywhere, obscene emptiness confronted him.

He said nothing. There was nothing here he could explain, nothing he could understand.

His frozen silence lingered. The clamour of riot in the city receded.

Then, the city began to scream.

CHAPTER 11

For as long as he could stand it, Ambrose kept the roof hatch of the Taurox open. He sat in the observation seat and stared at the stricken city as the vehicle took the route back to the Palace of All Martyrs. It was his duty to see, because the Emperor had called upon him to save Theotokos. If he was to fulfil his mission, he had to know what was happening. He had to understand it, too, so he could instruct the people, and show them the difference between the just and holy fear of the Emperor, and the cowardice of trembling before the heretical and the damned.

The more he saw, the more he doubted his abilities. Only the knowledge that he had been chosen sustained him.

The dead had risen from their tombs. Their gait was a weaving, drunken shuffle as they shambled after the living, reaching out for them, their jaws hanging open with choking hunger. The grey worms coiled in thick bunches in their mouths. They slithered in and out of empty eye sockets. They hung from arms, twisting in the air. Clouds of flies boiled in the air above the dead, as if urging them forward. Some of the corpses still bore their flesh. It crumbled and sloughed off skulls and limbs as they struggled after their prey. Others were little more than skeletons, the nests of squirming grey worms visible through their ribs.

Bonarmo rode on the roof of the Taurox. She crouched next to Ambrose, holding fast to the hatch with one hand, wielding a shotgun with the other. She was husbanding her ammunition, saving her shots in case any of the corpses tried to climb up and seize the arch-deacon. Thus far, though some had gone down under the wheels of the armoured car, the dead had shown no interest in it. They were focused only on whatever citizen was nearest to them in the street.

‘The plague makes the dead walk,’ Ambrose said. ‘The worms will not let them rest.’

Bonarmo gave him a stricken look. His explanation offered her no comfort. ‘How can this be?’ she demanded, as if he were controlling the unfolding of reality. ‘How can the dead catch the plague?’

‘Because we have failed the Emperor,’ Ambrose said. He answered without hesitation, as he knew he must. And in truth, there could be no other explanation, as weak as it sounded even to him. ‘Our faith is not yet strong enough, and our sins seek our destruction.’ He tried to sound certain. He must not let Bonarmo know he was as shaken as she was. Everything was crumbling around him, from the city to the truths that had always been there for him. Everything he had always believed in was falling apart. What he was seeing could not be happening, yet it was, and so there had to be something fundamental he had never properly understood, something that still meant these horrors did not violate the unchallengeable truths of the Imperial Creed.

‘We are being punished for our failure,’ Ambrose said, speaking the words as if they were an incantation that would impose order on nightmare. ‘Even the dead are guilty.’ The implications were so vast, he had to grasp the edges of the hatch-opening to hold himself up. Theotokos must be sinful in ways he had never imagined.

The funereal host staggered up the streets leading from the cemetery. They dragged their victims to the ground, and the worms slithered onto the living, spreading the plague still further. Troopers of the Magerit Watch and the militia fired on the dead. The corpses were fragile and flew apart when struck by shells, releasing clouds of worms and flies. The troopers kept their distance, fighting hard to contain the new source of the spread, but what Ambrose saw was more and more of the city burning, more and more death coming for the people he was meant to save.

‘What must we do?’

It took a few moments for Ambrose to register Bonarmo’s question. He turned around slowly, his soul filling with the sights of corpses and worms and flame. ‘Fire,’ he said. That was the sign of purging, of sin expunged. It was the destruction that led to salvation. ‘Burn it all,’ he said. ‘Burn everything unholy. Burn the dead. Burn the sick. Burn the disease and the sin out of Magerit.’ He pointed to another hab building that was engulfed in flame. ‘That is our task begun, chief enforcer.’

‘But the clouds of flies…’

‘The task will be long and hard, and the punishment will be long and hard. Our sins will come for us, and they will take us until we have proven the iron of our faith.’ As long as he spoke, he could hold on to a facsimile of certainty. It flew away from him, ashes in the wind, when he fell silent.

I can’t look at this any more.

Ambrose dropped down inside the Taurox. Bonarmo followed him and sealed the hatch. Ambrose leaned back against the hull. Vibrations jarred him as the vehicle ran over soft debris in the road.

‘Take me back,’ Ambrose said. ‘Take me back to the palace.’

‘That is where we are going,’ Bonarmo reminded him.

‘Of course, of course.’ He was finding it difficult. He needed some calm. He needed to shut out the horror.

What about Bethia?

He didn’t know where she was. He didn’t know if she was alive or not. His ignorance tormented him. But he couldn’t ask Bonarmo to launch a search. What he felt for her was wrong. It was a temptation to stray from his vows. He had not, though. He had not sinned.

But if I ask, I will sow doubts in the chief enforcer’s mind.

No one must doubt him. For the sake of the world, his authority must not be questioned.

The Taurox passed through the gates of All Martyrs, followed by the Repressor that would take Bonarmo back to the city, and came to a stop near the main doors. Ambrose climbed out. The chief enforcer followed him, then stopped, her head cocked as she listened to her vox-bead. Her expression darkened.

‘Now what?’ Ambrose asked. He prayed she would not ask him to accompany her again.

‘It’s the reservoir,’ Bonarmo said. ‘The water is covered in a slick of flies. It is contaminated beyond hope.’

No more drinking water in the city, then. Ambrose looked up at the sky. The clouds were growing ever thicker and darker. But still, there was no rain.

Mass burnings. There must be mass burnings, and they must not stop until the rains come.

Ambrose’s last commands to Bonarmo before she left the palace. The impact of having to say such things almost made him reel. Only a few days ago, he would have considered the words the cry of murder, the call of a madman. He would have been horrified, if not fully surprised, to hear Lorenz utter them. Now he was commanding more violence than the cardinal ever had.

And he was not done.

‘Seal the palace,’ he told the attendants when he entered. ‘Prepare for siege.’

‘Yes, arch-deacon,’ the two monks said with a bow.

‘Send word to all,’ Ambrose continued. ‘No one is to enter or depart All Martyrs without my express consent. We are in a state of war against the plague of the Grey Tears and against heretical sin. They are one and the same. Anyone within these walls who shows symptoms of the Grey Tears is to be burned at once, their ashes collected in lead urns, and the urns disposed of outside the walls of the palace.’

When he was satisfied that his orders had been understood and would be carried out, he hurried to Saint Halfad’s Cloister. More than ever, he understood why Lorenz had jealously kept the cloister to himself. Ambrose could not yet bring himself to command that no one else enter. He expected, though, that force of habit would have the effect he wanted.

He breathed a little more freely as he walked the paths in the deepening twilight. Here, he could not see the city. Here, the walls embraced him and promised an interlude of peace.

They promised, but they lied. Though Ambrose was spared the sight of Magerit’s agony, he could still hear the distant uproar of death, terror and flame. The horror of the plague followed him everywhere. He felt its touch. He was immune to the worms, and so the plague infected him with doubts instead.

I am doing what must be done.

How can you be so sure? We were never so certain before.

We were never so desperate before. The fate of Theotokos was not this urgent.

Famine was not urgent?

Not like this. And we did what we had to then, too. We did what we could.

Are you really doing all you can now?

For that, he did not have an answer.

He reached the yew, and the bench beneath it. He ground his teeth in irritation when he saw there was someone already there. The shrouded cenobite rose quickly at his approach, as if sensing his anger.

‘Your pardon, arch-deacon. I will not intrude upon you.’

Ambrose recognised Nossos’ voice, and his anger vanished. ‘No, no, please stay. I am glad to see you again.’ The memory of their conversation in the palace grounds, and how much clarity it had given him, made him welcome Nossos’ presence now. ‘Please, sit with me.’

The hood bowed in acquiescence, the cenobite’s face as hidden as ever. Nossos waited for Ambrose to take his seat on the bench, then sat down beside him.

‘I have not seen you since our first meeting,’ Ambrose said. ‘I would have welcomed speaking with you during this, our time of trial.’

‘I am sorry to have failed you, arch-deacon.’ The liquid, sonorous tones rolled through the air, clear as chimes, soft as honey. ‘I was assigned to the archives, and my duties have kept me on the lower levels without cease since we spoke. It is with shame that I confess I was not aware of much of what has been transpiring until today.’

‘I envy you that ignorance,’ said Ambrose. ‘I envy you the retreat of the archives.’ As before, he surprised himself with his confession. As before, he felt no regret in unburdening himself to Nossos, in showing his weakness. Doing so before had given him the strength he had needed to carry on, and Nossos had proven himself discreet.

‘Theotokos has demanded much of you,’ said Nossos. ‘Theotokos, and the Emperor.’

‘Yes,’ Ambrose admitted. ‘The way before me is a long one, I fear.’

‘That is because you are strong enough to walk it.’

Ambrose sighed. ‘I will have to be. But I have my doubts, Brother Nossos. The situation is desperate, and I feel helpless before it.’ He almost wept with the relief of speaking those words. He thought he would stop there. Then he heard himself say, ‘I know of nothing in the Creed that can truly explain what is happening.’

That was as close to heresy as he had ever come. He should have been horrified even to have the thought cross his mind, though he had already moved on past that position. He was giving voice to a cry for help and of despair. He should not. He should be silent, even when alone. His very soul should be silent. Yet he spoke his pain and was glad that Nossos heard him. Somehow, he knew that if there was anyone that could help him, when he no longer had the strength to help everyone else, Nossos was that person.

And like a figure of prophecy, Nossos gave Ambrose what he so desperately needed. ‘I wonder…’ he said, and those two words were a beacon of salvation.

‘Go on,’ said Ambrose.

‘I do not understand everything I have been cataloguing these past days,’ Nossos said diffidently.

‘I suspect you are not giving yourself enough credit.’

‘You are too kind, arch-deacon. I do not want to be wrong, and guilty of heresy.’

‘There is something you wish to tell me, and I think it may be of the most crucial importance. Do not fear being wrong. Fear nothing.’

‘You give me courage, arch-deacon,’ the voice flowed, warm as shadows. ‘Very well. There is a parchment in the lowest level that you must see. I think it could be what you seek. It may be that I was looking at an answer to questions I did not know were being asked.’

‘Show it to me,’ Ambrose commanded.

When he rose to follow Nossos, he felt the fire of determination flow back into his limbs.

They left the cloister and took the long spiral staircase down into the archives. The holdings of the All Martyrs were vast. They contained the records, the exegetical writings and the holy texts of thousands of years. The archive was a silo under the centre of the palace, and it went even deeper into the hill than the machinery that governed the underground river. No one living knew all of its passages and aisles and vaults. It was given to every initiate assigned to the archives to be responsible for one small region. Nossos, it seemed, had been assigned the lowest level.

Ambrose had never been this far down. The air was cool and musty with age. Even the light from the dim amber lumen globes felt ancient. Nossos led the way through a maze of towering shelves and monolithic document vaults. The passages were narrow enough that the two men often had to turn sideways.

Nossos took them through the labyrinth until they reached a wall. They were, as far as Ambrose could guess, on the far side of the level from the staircase. Nossos approached the wall, then disappeared.

Ambrose froze. ‘Cenobite Nossos!’ he called. He squinted. The light was so dim the darkness seemed to be flowing out of the wall.

Nossos’ head and shoulders reappeared, and Ambrose saw that he was leaning out of an opening in the wall so thin and dark that it was invisible. He did not know how Nossos had managed to locate it, even knowing where it was.

‘This way, arch-deacon,’ Nossos said. ‘Be careful. The footing is treacherous.’

Ambrose followed slowly. He felt his way forward, running his hands against the wall. He reached the gap, and found its sides were ragged. It seemed more like a crack in the foundations than a real passage. The walls were damp. The floor was rough and uneven, and Ambrose felt water trickling past his boots. The only light was a faint, grey glow some distance ahead.

The cramped walls of the passage squeezed at Ambrose’s shoulders. He was an insect, asking to be crushed. He was sure that he was leaving the archive behind and forcing his way into bedrock.

The air was cooler, but thicker. The mustiness began to shade into the stench of rot. Ambrose had difficulty swallowing. Taking a breath felt like ingesting a mouthful of unseen insects.

The wan, flickering light grew stronger. Ambrose made out the shape of a narrow archway in the left-hand wall. He followed Nossos inside and found a candle-lit chamber, roughly hewn out of the rock. It was a space of putrefaction. Damp, crumbling scrolls spilled out of disintegrating chests piled into heaps. Clusters of silverfish skittered over them. Water trickled down the walls and flowed in thick, jagged channels across the floor. A rusted iron lectern stood in the centre of the room. It held a few mouldering scrolls.

‘What is this place?’ Ambrose asked. He wrinkled his nose in disgust as his foot slid in a patch of grey slime.

‘I don’t really know,’ said Nossos. ‘I found it only yesterday, by chance, or so I thought. I believe now that something stronger than chance directed my footsteps. I have only just begun to attempt to catalogue what is here, or at least what is salvageable.’

‘It doesn’t look like much will be.’

‘If you will pardon the presumption, arch-deacon, I will observe that I am not alone in finding lost causes compelling.’

‘Very true, Cenobite Nossos. Very well said.’ Perhaps this connection was why Ambrose found it so easy to speak to Nossos.

Nossos moved to the lectern. With slow, delicate movements, he unrolled a vellum scroll. Large chunks of it were missing around the edges. ‘I read this scroll barely two hours ago. I feel certain, now, that it was fated that I should discover it so soon before meeting with you again, arch-deacon.’

‘What is it?’ Ambrose peered over Nossos’ shoulder. The words on the scroll had smeared with moisture, and he found it impossible to read in the dim light.

‘A prayer,’ Nossos said. ‘It is called the Cry to the Father.’ Nossos paused. He took a step away from the lectern and his hood faced the arch-deacon. Ambrose felt the gaze of hidden eyes. ‘It is a cry that the Father must answer.’

‘Must?’ Ambrose started. The idea that the God-Emperor should be compelled in any way should never have been articulated.

Nossos gestured at the other parchments on the lectern. ‘From what I have read in these documents, I believe the Father is self-compelled. It is a promise that has been made, to answer this particular ritual.’

‘A promise,’ Ambrose repeated.

‘A promise of gifts,’ said Nossos. ‘I have found references to an end to famine and drought.’

‘I would like to believe that,’ Ambrose said warily.

‘I know,’ said Nossos. ‘This seems to fit our present needs too precisely, doesn’t it?’

‘That was my thought.’

‘But is it too much to believe that this ultimate crisis on Theotokos was foreseen?’

Ambrose considered that possibility. No other moment in the history of Theotokos was as critical as this one. The world would end, or it would be saved.

The Emperor had called upon Ambrose to save it.

Could he believe that, thousands of years ago, the Emperor had provided the means Ambrose would need to fulfil his mission?

Yes. Yes, he could.

‘The Emperor sees all,’ Ambrose said to Nossos. ‘You are right. Of course this was foreseen. Tell me what the ritual involves.’

‘There is a cost,’ said Nossos.

‘As there must be. Holy ritual is propitiation. It is a sacrifice, and sacrifices must be real to be meaningful.’

‘As you say, arch-deacon.’ Nossos brought a candle closer to the scroll, and guided Ambrose through its barely decipherable words.

When they were done, Ambrose was silent. ‘This is the true test,’ he said finally. He was speaking for his own benefit. He had no need to convince Nossos. What he had to do was convince himself, so that when the time for action came, he would not hesitate. ‘This is the test, and it is also the way to salvation.’

‘The Father will answer,’ Nossos promised. ‘The rains will come.’

CHAPTER 12

It was hours before Bonarmo was able to return in answer to his summons. Ambrose paced the corridors of All Martyrs while he waited. Nossos remained in the depths of the archives, instructed to find anything at all that might be relevant to the ritual, anything further that Ambrose must do to ensure the blessing of rain.

The purity of rain, sent by the Father of Mankind, would wash away the plague and the unclean. This was how things must unfold. This was what had been ordained from the start.

He was impatient for the end.

With Your help, God-Emperor, I will end this night, and Theotokos will greet the sweetness of dawn.

Until then, the hand of the night pressed down hard on Magerit. Ambrose felt its weight on his shoulders. There was nothing he could do until Bonarmo returned with the force Ambrose needed.

He could not bear to sit idle in the cloister or in his chambers, so he travelled the halls with a determined stride. He showed his confidence to the adepts he passed. He gave them courage. He told them that this was the eve of salvation.

He also ensured his orders had been carried out. The palace had become a fortress. Its gates were closed and its water was held, safe from the sin and contagion of the city. There had been no cases of the Grey Tears. The first outbreak had been the last.

We are purged. We are clean. The plague began in these walls, unleashed by Rosarius. This night, it is within these walls that it will end, too.

So many signs that he was right. So many patterns coming together. But the events that must come had not been accomplished. He wished and wished and wished they had been.

If only the night were already over, the ritual performed, the dawn come and the doom banished.

If only the price were already paid, and his guts no longer twisted with eager dread.

If only Bonarmo were here so he could leave and put an end to waiting.

By the time she finally came, he was standing by the gates. When they parted to admit the squadron of three Repressors that would escort the palace’s Taurox, he felt a lurch in his heart.

Now we begin.

There would be no arresting the momentum of what must be set in motion. Though he was about to save his world, Ambrose felt the vertigo of standing at the edge of a precipice.

Bonarmo climbed out of the lead Repressor. Her face was smudged with dust, blood from a cut on her forehead coagulating in filth. She looked beyond exhausted, and she met Ambrose’s eye with a mixture of scepticism and last-gasp hope. Ambrose saw in her someone who had moved past desperation some time ago. She was still moving only because she had no choice.

Ambrose forced himself not to flinch at the vista that presented itself beyond the gates. Far below, the bowl of the city throbbed with a dark red glow. Smoke was as thick as muscle as it roiled low over the towers. ‘You have been fighting hard…’ he began.

Bonarmo did not let him finish. ‘Fighting and losing,’ she said. ‘The city burns.’

‘As it must.’

‘To what end, arch-deacon? The contagion spreads. The people are dying. My troops are dying. There is no water. Either thirst or disease will take us all before long.’

‘You speak as if you were not sustained by faith, Chief Enforcer Bonarmo,’ Ambrose said.

‘It is all that sustains me,’ she answered. ‘We have lost. We do not have the forces to save the city.’

‘On the contrary, the forces you have brought with you will be enough to save Magerit, and with it all of Theotokos.’

‘How?’ A whispered croak.

‘The action you will help me take will be a spear thrust into the heart of the plague. The damned will seek to stop us, but by dawn all will be resolved. I swear it, chief enforcer. This is almost over.’

‘Very well,’ said Bonarmo. She walked with him to the Taurox. At a jerk of her head, five troopers followed. ‘Where are we going?’

Ambrose gave her the coordinates for the hab complex where Bethia and her family lived. Bonarmo relayed the directions to the drivers. She said nothing else until after the convoy had moved off with the Taurox following one of the Repressors. With the palace disappearing into the night behind them, and the throbbing glow of the city drawing closer and beginning to resolve itself into individual conflagrations, she leaned close to Ambrose and asked, ‘Why are we going there?’

‘There are people there we must bring back to the palace.’

‘Why? What is their importance?’

Ambrose wrestled with various partial truths. ‘I need them with me,’ he said, which was very close to the whole truth.

Bonarmo looked doubtful. ‘What assurance do you have they will be in their home?’

‘None,’ Ambrose said simply.

‘Or that they are not infected? Or even that they are alive?’

‘There is more at work than I can easily explain,’ Ambrose told her. ‘Let it be enough that I know we will find them. Because it is written. The hand of the Emperor draws near. This night, all Theotokos will know that He sees us, and that He does indeed protect. The rains come, chief enforcer. The rains come, and soon.’

Ambrose opened the roof hatch. Bonarmo took up her shotgun, climbed out ahead of him and settled into her crouched position on the roof. ‘This is risky,’ she said, disapproving, as he emerged from the hot, dark interior.

‘I know,’ Ambrose said. If he could have, he would have remained below, closed his eyes in the darkness, and shut his ears to the cries of the burning city. If he could have, he would have receded from all awareness until Bethia was in the Taurox with him.

He could do none of these things. The grasping fist in his chest would not let him. If he saw where the convoy was heading, perhaps he could will it to go even faster. Even if he could not, the immensity of what was coming forced him to look upon the city, to see the damnation that he would end in a few hours.

The vision that confronted him was even worse than the one he had turned his eyes from on the return journey from the cemetery. All trace of order had collapsed. Gunfire rattled, the bursts echoing near and far from every direction. Entire blocks were aflame, the fires sweeping over the faces of buildings with awful, hungry grace. The road vibrated from the periodic whump of explosions tearing out the hearts of manufactories, and the heavy, seismic collapse of walls.

Miles away from the convoy, in the centre of the city, were the narrow spires that were the homes of Magerit’s aristocracy. They had, until today, been spared the worst of the drought and the famine. They had been the last refuge of the privileged. Now they were high, glittering torches. Fires embraced their forms. At this distance, Ambrose thought they looked like tapers in a cathedral, guttering in the darkness. As he watched, one of them fell. It toppled forward, killed by no visible thing except the chaos that was taking the city. It seemed to die in silence, the cracking and thunder of disintegrating rockcrete reaching Ambrose’s ears only after the spire had vanished, and a cloud of dust was rising to smother the distant infernos in obscurity.

And in the streets, the people ran and fought and suffered and died. The plague-animated dead were everywhere, their numbers less concentrated, their horror as powerful as ever. More common were the infected. The ones in the early stages stumbled and weaved. Many more crawled, or lay writhing where they had fallen in the street and on the pavement. Those without sickness ran in mobs, fleeing the dead and infected, pursuing and killing those who had, for whatever reason or whim of chance, been denounced as unclean.

Worms, long and grey, squirmed along the ground. Swarms of flies filled the air. As if born of fire and smoke, the insects descended from the black, suffocating sky and whirled in dances around flames.

Death and fire and terror surrounded Ambrose. Magerit was dying, and its death was a nightmare more virulent than his worst fears during all the years of the drought.

This is the final paroxysm of evil. This is what I am going to end.

Seeing the horror gave him the strength he needed to face the cost of the ritual.

People recognised him as the convoy roared down the wide boulevards. They screamed his name. They reached out for him, crying out for the comfort he had given them so often in the cathedral and in the relief centres. They ran for the Taurox, ignoring the warnings to keep back that blared from the convoy’s vox-casters.

‘We cannot stop,’ Ambrose said to Bonarmo.

‘Enough of them can slow and stop us.’

Ambrose took a breath. ‘That must be prevented.’

‘As long as we are clear on what that means, arch-deacon.’

‘We are.’

As the first civilians closed with the flanks of the Taurox, Bonarmo fired her shotgun. She blasted a hole through a man’s chest. His body flew back against the people coming up behind him. The boom of the gun was the signal to the troops in the other vehicles. The Repressor weapons opened up in time with her second shot. The gunners of the cupola-mounted storm bolters unleashed destruction in wide, sweeping arcs. Heavy flamers poured out waves of burning promethium, turning the street into a river of fire. The transports accelerated, the dozer blades slammed into the people and the wheels ground over the corpses.

Ambrose stared straight ahead. He focused on the smoke-clogged end of the boulevard and avoided looking directly at the carnage. He ground his teeth with the effort it took. For his entire ministry, he had made it a point of pride to look at the crowds as groups of individuals, to see the faces, to know the people to whom he preached. For him, they were never, as they had been for Lorenz, units of wealth extracted from the world.

Only now, in the crucible of salvation, he was forced to ignore the screams and the pleas. He had to command a massacre.

‘Forgive me,’ he murmured, his voice inaudible in the roar of flamers and bounding of storm bolters. ‘I cannot save you. I will remember your martyrdom in the new dawn of Theotokos.’

That’s a lie. You can’t remember them if you don’t look at them.

I will remember. Because I will dream of this horror forever. I will remember the sound of bodies crushed and scraped. I will remember the cries. I will remember the stench of burning flesh. I will remember the deaths, if not the faces. Let that be the memorial to the dead tonight. It is the only one the world can afford.

The slaughter continued all the way to Bethia’s hab. Ambrose urged Bonarmo to greater speed, and she complied. He wanted the atrocities over with, and she wanted the momentum.

‘This is what a spear thrust looks like,’ she said.

He nodded grimly, accepting the pain of the lesson, and reminding himself that, along with the innocent, they destroyed many who were infected and so deserving only of execution.

Ambrose held on to this thought with a death grip.

The convoy pulled up to a stop in front of the main door of the complex. There were fires burning here too, and smoke billowing out of numerous windows, but not the majority, and Ambrose was able to tell himself that the conflagration had not yet taken hold of the entire hab.

Bonarmo jumped to the ground and her troopers marched out of the Taurox and the Repressors. Ambrose climbed out from the hatch and dropped down beside the chief enforcer. She shook her head at him. ‘You should stay here, arch-deacon. We can bring them out.’

‘My place is with you. They need to see that I am with you.’

‘They could already be dead. We may not even be able to reach them through the fire.’ Before Ambrose could object again, Bonarmo assigned a squad to remain behind as his protection. Then she strode forward, leading the charge, leaving him with no chance to change her mind.

He could not follow. Three of the troopers returned to the Repressors and the storm bolters. The other two stayed with Ambrose, wielding shotguns against any of the desperate souls who tried to approach him. A few bursts from the storm bolters cleared the immediate vicinity and sent the survivors running. The tormented mob began to flee at the sight of Ambrose.

He was turning into a figure of terror.

This is part of the cost, too.

He did not tell himself it would pass. He had to accept his sacrifice in all its fullness. He could not afford the hesitations that were the curse of regret.

Sharp, staccato blasts of gunfire erupted inside the hab block. Ambrose winced. The massacre in the streets showed him what must be happening in the halls and stairwells of the complex. He could picture with brutal clarity what he could not see. Again, he pushed regret away. It was a useless indulgence. It could not change what was happening, nor what must yet happen.

Every person who dies because of me this night is a martyr for Theotokos. Every corpse is a paving stone on the road to salvation.

The sounds of battle went on. The smoke grew thicker and thicker. The fire was spreading. Ambrose could almost see its hungry progress through the corridors and apartments.

Save them. Save them. Save her.

The Watch must have reached Bethia’s home by now. It had been so long. Too long. Why weren’t they out yet? What was happening in there?

Fire was happening. Flame and smoke. Burning and suffocation. And the wall-shattering hail of shells.

Save her. Save her. Save her.

The thought became the centre of Ambrose’s existence. The future had shrunk down to this point. He conceived of nothing past the moment that Bonarmo re-emerged from the hab, with Bethia or without.

Save her. Save her. Save her.

More shots. More flame. The sharp snapping and crumble of collapses beginning. And then Bonarmo and her troopers marched out of the exit, coughing, armour scorched, their discipline unbroken. At their centre was Bethia and her family, looking confused and frightened.

‘Here they are,’ Bonarmo said to Ambrose. ‘I hope they are as valuable as you say.’

He noticed now that the Watch had lost two of their number.

‘Our losses are almost at an end,’ Ambrose said. Then he pushed past Bonarmo. He held his hands out to the rescued civilians. ‘I’m sorry if you were frightened,’ he said.

Havak and Elyra fell to their knees and kissed his hands. Their two younger children kneeled too. Bethia remained standing. ‘What is happening?’ she asked.

Ambrose placed his hands on her parents’ shoulders and bid them rise. He wanted to take her by the hands. If Bonarmo had not been there, perhaps he might have done so, and that would have been dangerously wrong.

‘Great things,’ Ambrose said. ‘I promise. You must come with me, to the Palace of All Martyrs.’

‘You are offering us sanctuary?’ Elyra asked, stunned.

‘There can be none for you here.’

‘Why…’ Bethia began, then stopped. A wave of screams rolled down the street, drowning her voice, silencing questions.

‘Our thanks are beyond words, arch-deacon,’ said Havak.

‘Then there is no need to say them,’ Ambrose said, and he ushered them into the Taurox.

Ambrose stayed inside the compartment for the journey back, the hatch closed, shutting out the dying city as much as he could. The time of witnessing was over. The reason for venturing into the city had been accomplished.

Bethia was quiet most of the way to the palace. She slumped against the hull of the Taurox, eyes closed, face sagging with exhaustion. She had put her questions aside for the moment. She and her family were in relative safety for the first time since the chaos had begun, and her body succumbed to the need for rest.

Ambrose was relieved. He was bursting with things he wanted to say to her. Later, though. After he had been given time to think how he should say them.

Bonarmo was quiet too. She watched Ambrose through lidded eyes, her dark gaze going back and forth between him and Bethia. Ambrose looked back at her steadily. He had nothing to be ashamed of. He had never broken his vows. He expected a very different attitude from her tomorrow, when dawn came for Theotokos.

Bonarmo’s mood was still dark when the convoy reached the palace, and having deposited Ambrose and his civilians, she prepared to leave again with her troops. The mission seemed to have drained away the reverence in which she had held Ambrose until now. Even respect seemed all but gone.

She thinks this has been nothing but an indulgence of my selfish whim. If I were Lorenz, she would be right.

‘What will you do now?’ Ambrose asked her.

Bonarmo sniffed and glanced through the open gates at the burning glow of Magerit. ‘Whatever I can. As useless as that might be.’

‘I swear to you, this ends tonight.’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘Tomorrow, you will know that I have spoken truly, and kept faith with Theotokos.’

Bonarmo’s nod was non-committal, as curt a farewell as was possible without being offensive, and she left.

‘Arch-deacon,’ Bethia said when the gates had closed behind the departing Repressors, ‘why are we here? We are grateful for the sanctuary, but how are we worthy of it?’

Ambrose smiled at her. ‘You are here because I need your help. And because something wonderful is going to happen, to which you will bear witness.’

‘I don’t understand.’ She looked doubtful.

Have you lost faith in me too? The thought was a dagger blow to his heart.

‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I must speak with you.’ He turned to her family. ‘You are tired,’ he said to them. He gestured to the waiting attendants. ‘You will be taken to a place of rest.’ To Bethia, he said, ‘Will you come with me?’

The hesitation before she agreed stabbed him in the heart again.

CHAPTER 13

Ambrose led Bethia into the Palace of All Martyrs. He took his time before speaking. He needed the right words. He needed her to understand. There were some things that night that he must do, but there were things that he needed, too. The denial of those needs was very likely part of the cost he would have to pay, but he nurtured the hope that he might steal one moment, one memory, that he might cling to for strength in the trial to come.

But the ease of the sermons did not come. The confidence he felt when proclaiming to the masses escaped his grasp. He was addressing just one individual, one whose good opinion of him, whose faith in him, mattered more to him than was proper.

‘Arch-deacon…’ Bethia said as they reached a narrow staircase that led to the galleries over the palace’s main chapel.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ambrose said. He cursed himself for being silent too long. ‘I did not mean to be mysterious.’ He started up the stairs, and she followed. ‘I know you are feeling confused and uncertain. How could any of us feel otherwise in this crisis? Even sustained by faith, we would not be human if what we have witnessed did not terrify us.’

‘But why am I here?’

‘I will try to explain. Bear with me.’

They reached the gallery. Ambrose walked next to the outer wall, away from the arches overlooking the chapel. Their footsteps echoed on the marble. The scent of incense tickled Ambrose’s throat. Bethia was waiting, and he still couldn’t find the words. The wrong ones would make him sound megalomaniacal, and it was important that Bethia understand that he had chosen none of this, and that he had instead been chosen.

At the end of the hall the arches ended, and nave-side walls bulged outwards. Ambrose pulled open the heavy bronze door in the centre of the curve and held it for Bethia. On the other side was an observation chamber situated above the apse, a room Lorenz had used when he had ordered Ambrose to conduct the services in the chapel. From here, behind tinted armaglass windows, the cardinal could surveil, unseen, the celebrant and the congregation of adepts. A resplendent throne, framed in gold and draped in velvet, sat before the window. Ornate cabinets held decanters of amasec and silver, jewel-encrusted goblets. The first time Ambrose had been in the room, after Lorenz’s death, he had sworn he would strip it of the decadence that made a mockery of the murals depicting the martyrdom and vengeance of Saint Halfad. As soon as the nightmare was over, he would make good on that vow, but for now he had a more urgent need for the chamber.

‘Do you still believe the sufferers of the Grey Tears are heretics?’ Bethia asked.

‘I do,’ he said sadly. He invited her to sit on the throne. After a pronounced hesitation, she accepted. ‘It is the only explanation that makes sense.’

‘But why?’

With that question, he found the words. Standing beside the throne, looking down at Bethia, Ambrose said, ‘All that has happened in these terrible days has happened for a reason.’ He glanced down into the chapel. It was empty except for Nossos. Motionless next to the altar, the hooded cenobite could have been a dark statue. All was ready, then.

‘We have sinned against the Emperor,’ Bethia said. ‘That is what you told us.’

‘And that is what I maintain. We have a chance to turn back, though. As hard as our lesson has been, it is a trial, not a sentence of execution.’

‘I see that you do not wish me to lose hope, but–’

‘Please listen!’ Ambrose cut her off. ‘Cardinal Lorenz died a heretic. Rosarius unleashed the sin of the Grey Tears, and he will be punished for that yet, even as his plague reveals the sinful among us.’ The implication that Rosarius was still alive mixed with truth so easily, he wondered if it was not a lie at all, but simply a deeper truth. ‘Do you see? Even Rosarius’ crime was meant to be, because it forced the sins of Theotokos into the light.’

‘I see,’ Bethia said slowly, clearly unconvinced.

Ambrose forged on. He was committed now, and he would make her see what had been revealed to him. ‘The sins of Lorenz and Rosarius were preordained, and so was my presence here. It is the will of the Emperor that I save Theotokos.’

Bethia stirred uneasily in her seat.

‘I know what that sounds like,’ Ambrose said. He realised he had come close to shouting, and he lowered his voice. ‘You know me,’ he said. ‘Have I ever been one to covet glory?’

‘No,’ she admitted.

‘It feels strange to say that I have been chosen. I was reluctant to admit that I had been, until I understood that denying the truth was itself a form of pride. And I have felt as helpless as you. Even as I knew it was my duty to save our world, I did not know how. Today, I finally learned. The Emperor’s will was finally shown to me in all its stern clarity. Tonight, with your help, I will do what must be done. We will rescue our world.’

Bethia said nothing, her face expressionless.

Ambrose crouched beside the chair. He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Will you help me?’

‘How?’ Bethia whispered.

‘In a short while, I am going to call upon the Emperor, and He will answer.’

She stared at him, eyes wide and frightened. She started to rise.

‘No, no,’ Ambrose said. He kept his hand on her shoulder, holding her down. ‘I sound mad, I know. But you have not seen what I have seen. If you spoke to Cenobite Nossos down there, he would confirm everything I am telling you.’

‘Cenobite Nossos?’

Ambrose pointed. Bethia peered into the chapel, then looked at Ambrose, confused. ‘I don’t–’ she began.

‘I am not blaspheming,’ Ambrose insisted, cutting her off. ‘I have never been as conscious of the sacred as I am now.’

Bethia sat back, trembling. ‘What are you asking of me?’

Not to be frightened. To trust me. To look at me as you once did. All the things he could not say. ‘I need you as witness.’

‘Why me?’

‘None is more worthy, and none is more necessary.’ She looked at him with even greater alarm. He cursed himself for using the wrong words. And though he understood the reasons for them, he cursed her incomprehension and new wariness. ‘I cannot explain as clearly as I would, because the mysteries of the divine cannot be encompassed by thought. I need you to draw upon your faith, Bethia. The work ahead of us will be hard, but the redemption of Theotokos lies on the other side of it.’

‘I will do as you ask,’ Bethia said quietly.

‘Thank you.’ Before he could stop himself, he clasped her hands in his. The shock of contact jolted through his soul. ‘Thank you. I want you to know how much this means to me. How much…’ And then he did stop, right at the edge of breaking his vows. With an effort, he released her cold hands and stood up. ‘Thank you,’ he said again. ‘I must go now. Look for me below and know that we are saving everything.’

Her nod was barely perceptible.

He left the chamber. He closed the door behind him and, as quietly as he could, locked it.

Burun had arrived in the chapel and taken his place to the right of the altar by the time Ambrose entered. The chapel-master nodded and smiled at him, doing his best to seem confident, though his uncertainty was obvious. It was an hour before dawn, one of those blank times when no rite was scheduled. Ambrose had not told Burun what the ceremony would be and had only sent word that he should be in attendance. Burun kept glancing curiously at Nossos, whose position on the other side of the altar was more exalted than normal for a shrouded cenobite.

Ambrose stopped in front of the altar. He kneeled before its ornate, golden sculpture of the winged skull of the Emperor, then turned to face the main doors.

‘Arch-deacon,’ Burun said, ‘what is our purpose here?’

‘Salvation, chapel-master. Tonight, we call upon the Emperor, and He will answer.’

‘Please, arch-deacon… I beg you to not blaspheme,’ Burun said, horrified.

‘I do not. Do not concern yourself with how such a thing can come to pass. Do as I direct, and you will be part of the miracle.’

‘As you wish, arch-deacon.’ Eager to please as always, his greatest concern the worry that he should ever overstep his mark.

The chapel doors swung open slowly, admitting Havak, Elyra, Levan and Urus Antoniax. Tazker and four other shrouded cenobites followed. They closed the heavy doors again. One of them stayed by the exit.

Ambrose spread his arms in welcome to Bethia’s family. ‘I am so glad you are here,’ he said as they drew near. ‘All of Theotokos will soon be in your debt.’

Elyra opened her mouth, but Ambrose raised a hand to stop her. ‘You have questions, I know,’ he said. ‘They will be answered very soon. Please, come and pray to the God-Emperor with me.’

He stepped forward, away from the altar so they could kneel in turn before it. As they began to murmur their devotions, Ambrose heard Bethia. She was calling to her family, her voice muffled to a faint murmur by the armaglass. Ambrose looked up at the window. Its surface, tinted red and blue, reflected the torchlight and gold leaf of the chapel. He could not see Bethia, though he knew she could see him, and so he smiled reassuringly in her direction.

It will be all right. No matter what you are thinking right now, everything will be all right. I promise.

‘Let us begin,’ Ambrose said.

Nossos came to him and presented the scroll. He unrolled it slowly, holding it up for Ambrose to read.

‘Repeat after me,’ said Ambrose, and his tiny congregation obeyed. ‘Father of rain,’ he intoned slowly, pausing after each phrase for the echoed responses, ‘Theotokos cries out to thee. A drought is upon her waters, and they are dried up, for this is the land of false belief. But praise waiteth for thee, Lifefont, and unto thee shall the vow be performed. O thou that hearest our prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come.’ The words seemed strange to him; the tone different from what he was used to. The passing of ages had made alterations to the worship of the God-Emperor, but there were still elements that were familiar. The plea to the Father, and the promise of obedience were there as they should be. ‘Thou visitest the earth,’ Ambrose read on, ‘and waterest it. Thou greatly enrichest it with thy river, which is full of water. Thou waterest the ridges abundantly. Thou crownest our hopes with abundance, and thy paths drop fatness. They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness, and the hills rejoice on every side. The valleys also are covered over with thy rain. They shout for joy. They also sing.’

Nossos rolled the scroll and placed it on top of the altar. It was no longer needed. Ambrose knew the last few words. He had rehearsed the next few moments in his mind, picturing them as clearly and as fully as he could, teaching himself to understand the salvation they would bring.

‘Hear our prayer, Rainfather.’

From the folds of his robe, Nossos produced the relic he had found with the scroll. Its hilt bulged in three linked circles of iron. Its blade was a dark green metal that seemed to glisten in the flickering light of the chapel.

Barely audible, Bethia pounded on the armaglass and screamed. Her sister looked up from her prayers for a moment, curious, but the sounds were too small, too far away, and she lowered her head again in reverence. ‘Hear our prayer, Rainfather,’ she repeated with her brother and her parents.

Ambrose smiled in Bethia’s direction again. This will be all right. The promise she could not hear.

‘This is our gift,’ he said.

This is the hardest part. This is the cost.

She would not understand what he now had to do. She would think he was a monster, not just because of his actions, but for making her witness them. If only you knew, my love. If only you knew that forcing you to see this is really my cost. This is the price I must pay. And because of this cost to me, you will live.

‘This is our gift,’ the family repeated.

Still smiling gently, he grabbed Havak’s hair, pulled back his head and slit his throat.

Blood spurted over the altar. Burun staggered back in shock. The rest of the family screamed. Before they could rise, Tazker and his fellow cenobites held them in place.

‘Arch-deacon…’ Burun, confused, shuffled back and forth.

‘Repeat the prayers, chapel-master. All is well.’

‘This is our gift,’ Burun said, fussing at the blood that had spattered his robes.

Elyra struggled hard in Tazker’s grip. Ambrose went to her next. ‘All is well,’ he said again. ‘Hush,’ he reassured her as she screamed. His slash opened her neck, adding the spray of her veins to the slick that covered the altar. Then, he killed her children too.

The cenobites stood back from the corpses. Ambrose glanced at Nossos, whose hood bent in an approving nod.

‘Rainfather!’ Ambrose shouted, his arms raised, the knife dripping blood down his arm. ‘Hear me!’

I HEAR

Ambrose staggered and dropped the knife. The voice was in his head and in the air at the same time. It was deeper than night, and it rolled, thick and liquid. It gave birth to thunder, shattering peals that seemed to come from the ground as much as from the sky. The floor of the chapel shook, and the columns cracked, sending down clouds of marble dust. The doors boomed open, knocking the guardian cenobite off his feet.

‘Emperor preserve us!’ Burun cried, on his knees, his hands over his ears, his eyes wide in horror.

‘Do not blaspheme!’ Ambrose told him. ‘Rejoice! He has answered!’

‘That cannot be His voice!’

‘It is,’ Ambrose insisted. ‘Come with me! Come and behold!’ His heart pounding with exhilaration and religious terror, he ran down the length of the chapel, his balance sure despite the tremors. Nossos was ahead of him, unhurried yet gliding forward with surprising speed.

Adepts filled the corridors, shouting in alarm. Ambrose called upon them to rejoice, but the thunder drowned him out. They followed his lead, though, and he and Nossos led the rushing crowd out of the palace and into its grounds.

‘Look!’ Ambrose pointed at the sky. ‘Look!’

Lightning flashed in the clouds in sheets, lighting up the night with brilliant strokes. The thunder hammered like an artillery barrage. Ambrose’s eyes widened as the clouds bulged like membranous sacs. And then they burst, unleashing the rain.

The first few drops hit his face, and they were a miracle. They were the end of years of drought. They rolled down his cheeks, tears of gratitude. The adepts and the palace serfs shouted in celebration.

I have done it. The Emperor heard me, and He has answered. Theotokos is saved. Ambrose thought about the possibility of rest. He thought he might sleep forever. His mind leapt towards Bethia, locked in the observation chamber. No. Don’t do that to yourself. There will be time enough later. He looked down the hill at the burning city and prepared to witness the extent of the miracle.

Within moments of the first droplets, the rain came down in a deluge. It pounded with the force of hail. Ambrose winced under the blows. Then the shouts of joy became cries of horror, because the rain was thick, viscous and grey. The storm blotted out the dawn, but the lightning flashed with such unceasing intensity now that it illuminated the world with a harsh, pulsing, bleaching light. The water squirmed with vermin. Ambrose wiped it from his face, and his hands came away sticky. Long, translucent insects crawled over his fingers. The stench of rot filled his nostrils.

The ground turned slick. Rivulets of slime ran down the slope. They grew larger, spreading and joining, turning the grounds into a swamp. The flies rose in clouds, and then they fell, the bodies of the insects too bloated and heavy. They drowned in the water and burst open, releasing new generations that rose and fell in their turn. The grey worms writhed in the sickness, and there were so many that their song became louder than the thunder.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

The trees and flowers in the garden swayed but it was not the beating of the rain or the gusts of foul wind that caused the movement. It was disease. It was life at its most vile. Tumours swelled on stalks and branches. Trunks turned pale, then became an enflamed pink veined with green. Lesions split open along their lengths, revealing needle teeth. Maggots spewed out from between them and were swept away as the mire turned into a torrent.

The rain came harder yet. It was as if an ocean had been upended over Magerit. Ambrose could barely stand. The filthy water, calf-deep, rushed against his legs. Monks and cenobites and serfs fell into the torrent, howling as they were carried down the slope, the slime enveloping them and slowing their struggles. Their cries became gurgles as the grey water and the grey insects swarmed into their mouths, and the grey worms emerged.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee.

A deeper beat joined the wormsong. It had the same rhythm but sounded like drums. Slow, massive drums that shook the earth. They grew louder.

They were footsteps, immense and terrible, and drawing closer, approaching from the other side of the palace’s hill.

Ambrose saw Burun on his knees, shrieking, trying to get up. The chapel-master froze as the booming drew nearer, his gaze fixed on the air above the palace. His screams stopped. His breath was held in terrified anticipation of what he would see.

Nossos, motionless as stone, stood a few yards upslope from Ambrose. The hood, and the darkness within, faced him.

‘What have you done?’ Ambrose shouted.

‘I have done nothing,’ said Nossos. ‘These are the fruits of your labour. You chose, and you acted. Are you not pleased? The drought is ended. Famine is banished. Already the fires dim in Magerit. The water comes with gifts for all. No longer will there be a distinction between the diseased and the untouched. None shall escape the blessings of the Bringer of Plenty.’

The hill trembled from the impact of the footsteps. The voice that had boomed in the chapel returned. It hummed in pleasure to the tune of the worms, profound as an organ’s deepest chord, yet thick and blurry, gurgling with phlegm.

‘The Rainfather has answered your call!’ Nossos proclaimed. ‘Give your thanks to Rotigus!’

A hill of flesh loomed over the palace.

I HAVE COME

The horror was the colour of a drowned corpse. A ragged hood hung over the Rainfather’s horned head, flapping in the wind, dripping filth down its heaving bulk. Rotigus opened his jaws wide. At the same time, a huge wound in his belly parted in an eager, hungry grin. An avalanche of maggots tumbled from both sets of jaws. The colossus raised high a cross-shaped rod of gnarled, dripping wood. The lightning gathered around it, and the storm twisted its centre above the Rainfather. The deluge was his. It was his art, his gift, and his command.

Burun screamed and screamed and screamed, and then the waters, rising to Ambrose’s knees, swept the chapel-master away.

‘Where is your thanks?’ Nossos taunted.

Ambrose roared his hatred and fear as he charged up the hill towards the shrouded cenobite. The lightning made the shadows deep and jagged, and in his stillness, Nossos was hard to distinguish from them. Ambrose reached for his darkness and found nothing. The shrouded cenobite was not there.

DEE-deee, DEE-deee, DEE-deee, the worms sang in mindless triumph.

The walking mountain leaned against the battlements of the palace. The gut-mouth gnawed on them, and they crumbled and softened, falling apart as mould overtook them.

Bethia was still in there.

Ambrose ran through nightmare, slowed by nightmare, towards the greater nightmare. He ran without hope. He ran because he had to, because he saw what he had done, what his pride had led him to. He saw the wounds that had flowed from his hand to destroy everything he loved. He ran not because he thought he could save Bethia. He knew there was nothing to be saved. He knew that the very idea of salvation was a lie. There was only corruption, and the only victorious life was plague.

He ran because he wanted to give Bethia the last gift he could. All that was left was the comfort of love before the end.

Inside, the palace was transforming. Marble and rockcrete and gold and bronze were diseased. They found their truth in flesh and bone. They became weak, pustulent, yet exultant in their sudden explosion of life as they collapsed. Slime coated the walls. Blisters popped beneath Ambrose’s feet. Murals took on the livid hues of fever and pulsed with the spread of insect nests. When he climbed the stairs to the chapel gallery, the steps gave beneath him, soft muscle squelching.

In the gallery, the flies were so thick he could barely see his way forward. They clustered around his nostrils and prised at his tightly closed lips. The ceiling of the chapel had split wide, and a stinking cataract thundered down into the nave.

Everything was changing, yet the door to the observation chamber was still a door, and still metal. He was able to unlock it. He rushed inside. The air was foetid but there were few flies, and he slammed the door shut against the swarms.

Bethia was still on the throne. From this end of the chamber, he could just see some of her slumped form. She wasn’t moving.

‘Bethia,’ he called.

No answer. No movement.

‘Oh no, oh no, oh no.’ He rushed to the throne and fell to his knees at the sight of her grey, slack face and empty stare. He took her body in his arms, embracing her at last when it was too late. ‘Forgive me,’ he sobbed. ‘Forgive me.’

He held her tightly, and she was too soft. He couldn’t feel her bones.

‘Forgive you?’ she whispered. Her voice was slurred. It thrummed with tiny wings. Something pattered wetly on the floor. Her body squirmed as if her skin were filled with snakes.

‘Forgive you?’ Bethia repeated. ‘But you gave me life.’

And then, she stirred.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Annandale is the author of the Warhammer Horror novel The House of Night and Chain and the novella The Faith and the Flesh, which features in the portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned. His work for the Horus Heresy series includes the novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar and Vulkan: Lord of Drakes. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint, Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, and several stories involving the Grey Knights, as well as titles for The Beast Arises and the Space Marine Battles series. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written Neferata: Mortarch of Blood and Neferata: The Dominion of Bones. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

An extract from The Reverie.

The snow was falling heavily when the traveller found the dead village. He stumbled upon it with the sudden, dislocating strangeness of one dream slipping into another. One moment he was battering a path through a tangle of thorny bushes, the next he was out in the open, blinking in the sunlight. After the forest’s perennial murk it was dazzling, though the day was already waning towards dusk.

With a sigh of relief the traveller raised his face to the light. He was slight of build and his shoulders sagged under the weight of his backpack, lending him the stooped look of a much older man. His hooded greatcoat was woven from white synth-leather, the fabric augmented with rubbery black thermo-pads that stored the wearer’s body heat. It was an expensive garment, but filthy and frayed, speaking of great misfortune or too long in the wilderness.

Leaning on his staff, the traveller squinted at the sallow smear of the sun.

It’s ailing. The notion saddened him. It wasn’t his sun, for this was not his world, but what did that matter? The yearning for light was a primal truth that transcended the confusion wrought by interstellar travel. Some things were constant, even in this most inconstant of places. The sun – any sun – was life.

‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ he told himself, recalling the bright disc that had greeted him when he’d disembarked at the planet’s majestic space port. Like Malpertuis’ marble-clad capital city, the sun had been glorious and vital, afire with potential. The sickness wasn’t in the sun or the sky, but in this land – a malaise so complete it tainted the light itself.

‘Perhaps you were right, my lady,’ he murmured, picturing the woman who had revealed this path. So much had become hazy since his descent into the woodland valley, but not her. Never her…

‘The Reverie is no place for old souls,’ the woman in blue warns.

‘I am not old, my lady,’ her visitor protests, taken aback.

‘Too old to outrun yourself,’ she judges. ‘Far too old to rise above yourself.’ Her azure irises are surely too vivid to be entirely natural. Lenses perhaps, or bio-tinting? Such contrivances are common in this city of dreamers.

It has taken the traveller much longer to locate his contact in the capital city than he anticipated. The directions he’d been given proved to be a riddle couched in seemingly plain language, for none of the places he sought existed. Their names were shrewd metaphors for the reality, relying on intuition rather than intellect to unravel. It was a test, of course, and neither the first nor the last on his long journey. Which was as it should be.

‘I am only twenty-three standard years old,’ he presses.

‘In this flesh, perhaps,’ the woman answers, ‘but your soul says otherwise, Seigneur Olba.’

‘That isn’t my name.’ Nor has he offered her one, for anonymity is the custom of those bound for the Reverie. They are simply ‘travellers’ until they reach their destination. After all, they are seeking themselves. Old names are meaningless on the Mirrored Path, though they might prove burdensome.

‘Another lie then,’ she observes obliquely. ‘No matter.’

He senses recognition in her regard, though that isn’t possible. He is certain they have never met before. This woman is not someone he would have forgotten. She is extraordinarily tall and slender, her body wrapped in overlapping fronds of shimmering blue silk. Silver bangles encircle her velvet-sheathed arms in serpentine coils. Her scalp is smoothly shaven save for a braided topknot that blooms out to cover her ears and shoulders in an indigo cascade. A web of fine black lines covers her face, weaving a ‘third eye’ upon her forehead, its spiral iris framed by widespread wings. The traveller cannot tell whether the pattern is tattooed or incised into her alabaster skin, nor decide upon her age, for she seems suspended between youth and maturity, but her allure is unquestionable. Timeless. The name he knows her by is Euryale, though he suspects that is only one of many and not the truest.

She is, among other things, a painter. Her studio is secreted in the helical labyrinth of the Spyndryft, far below the city’s sunlit streets. This is where the most introspective of Charlemagne’s myriad dreamers reside, along with the lost souls from which they draw inspiration – and, occasionally, it is rumoured, sustenance. They are an exclusive clique in a city abundant with artists, their work a dark mirror of the idealised splendour on display elsewhere.

Euryale’s paintings are particularly unsettling because they find beauty where it has no place being, spinning glamour from squalor or mystery from the banal – a cadaverous beggar with gentle eyes who proffers a bowl that spills radiant gems… The desiccated carcass of a rat that sprouts luxuriant orchids filled with teeth… A winged child perched atop a heap of rusting machinery as she plays with the severed head of a cybernetic beast…

Among these grim-bright flights of fantasy are a handful dedicated to the planet’s reclusive custodians. None are depicted as the traveller imagines them. None are heroic, at least not in the conventional sense. And yet they are still magnificent and otherworldly. His attention keeps straying to them as he converses with the painter.

‘You’ve seen them?’ he asks on impulse.

‘I have. Once I sought to frame them in verse, but words proved too narrow for the endeavour. Too absolute.’ She shuts her eyes and lays her gloved hands on the table between them. It feels like the beginning of a ritual. ‘Why are so many visitors to this world bound for the Reverie?’

‘So many?’ The traveller cannot conceal his surprise, or a flash of covetousness.

‘So many of the few who find me,’ she elaborates. Though her eyes are closed he can still feel her gaze, as though her painted eye sees more than its fleshly counterparts. ‘Why are you all so eager to embrace your unravelling?’

‘We rise on burning wings,’ he quotes boldly. Above all else, it is those valiant words that have drawn him here. ‘And I do not plan on dying, my lady.’

‘So say they all.’ The tattoos around her lips writhe as she smiles, twisting the expression into sorrow. ‘I cannot persuade you to renounce your intent, traveller.’ This is spoken as a statement rather than a question, but he answers regardless. Her smile saddens further at his inevitable reply.

‘So it goes,’ she says gravely. ‘You have the toll?’

He pays the agreed fee, both the material and the symbolic offerings, wincing when she draws a measure of his blood then tattoos the Winged Eye onto his left palm. He has always feared needles, though he has rarely felt their sting, and never intensely. Truthfully, he has felt little real pain in his life, either in body or spirit, though he would never admit this, even to himself. Indeed, if pressed, he would proclaim himself a tortured soul.

The final part of the ritual is altogether more pleasurable, yet its mark cuts deeper.

Afterwards Euryale makes the arrangements, emphasising the importance of discretion throughout his quest. While his course is not forbidden, it would be unwise to speak of it outside their select circle. Like many esoteric societies, theirs is best kept secret.

‘Perhaps we shall meet again, my lady,’ he says, offering a graceful bow.

‘On some paths perhaps, but I will not remember you.’

Unable to decide if this is a slight, he turns away then hesitates.

‘Will I find them?’ His eyes lock on the painting behind her. It portrays an armoured figure shattering into many-coloured fragments from its abdomen, as though its body is formed from crystal. The warrior’s helmeted head is thrown back and his arms are outstretched, seemingly exulting in his own disintegration as rainbow light spills from his visor. ‘Will I find the Resplendent?’

‘If they seek you.’

‘They’re close,’ the traveller assured the enfeebled sun, though he was really speaking to her, as he so often did. ‘I’ve felt them watching me, Euryale.’

His journey to the planet’s northern reaches, where the not-quite-forbidden territory lay, had been long. Air transport was restricted so he had travelled overland, first aboard the sleek maglev trains connecting the cardinal cities, then with a variety of wheeled vehicles and finally – astonishingly – a cart drawn by indigenous animals. With each phase of the journey he’d felt himself slipping further into the past, disentangling himself from mankind’s excesses and the guilt of his own – reaching for something finer.

Like Malpertuis itself…

The planet was a verdant jewel, free of the monolithic manufactoria or continent-spanning nutri-farms that despoiled so much of the Imperium. So many worlds existed only to serve mankind’s perpetual wars, like cogs in a voracious machine that devoured itself to feed its own expansion, blind to the absurdity of the endeavour.

By decree of its elusive custodians, Malpertuis was governed with a benign but firm hand by a council of mortal delegates who’d lived and learned amongst the Resplendent from childhood. Vast tracts of land were left wild and population levels strictly regulated, seemingly without incurring the displeasure of the people, who were as varied as they were vibrant. Off-world visitors were required to prove their aesthetic sensibilities before being granted passage, which ruled out most with the means to undertake the journey, for the Chiaroscuro System was remote and difficult to find, hidden deep in the Veil Radiant on the easternmost fringes of the Imperium, where interstellar navigation became an art rather than a craft. No doubt this had played a part in its custodians’ attraction to the world. Fortunately payment had been no obstacle for the traveller and he had delighted in the tests set before him, as he’d delighted in the world they warded.

Shining Malpertuis… The Painted World… Reve le Sangre… The Planet of Dreamers…

Creativity was celebrated across its thirty-one realms, from the glittering capital to the humblest rural townships. Those with talent or simply raw passion were supported in their endeavours, for the Resplendent regarded aspiration as the equal of excellence. Artistry lies in the soul, not the hand, he was told wherever he went. And dreams are the highest currency.

By the time he reached the frigid northern wilderness of the Hinterwylds he’d come to love this world, and somewhere along the way his fascination with its guardians had crystallised into reverence. It was remarkable that such a utopia could exist within the Imperium. Oh, there were countless safe, even beautiful worlds far from the front lines of mankind’s perpetual war – sanctuaries and pleasure retreats for the wealthy and the powerful – but he doubted there was another haven like this, where genuine idealism flourished. It was the exception that proved the grim rule of the wider reality.

Nevertheless, when he’d first looked upon the Reverie the traveller had wavered…

The final leg of his journey is a climb into the glacial mountains bordering his destination. His guide, a local woman with a face as stern and weatherworn as her land, takes him as far as the summit. There she points at the valley below then departs without a word. She has said nothing during their entire six-day trek. He wonders how many other seekers she has led here before him. Doubtless she thinks them all fools. And perhaps she is right.

Gazing down into the valley, the traveller feels the first stirrings of doubt. A forest fills the lowlands, vast and dense, its canopy wreathed in a fine mist that stains the vegetation a sickly yellow. The trees extend in an unbroken swathe to the distant plateau of the Severed Ridge, beyond which lie the Otranto Fjordlands, where the planet’s custodians reputedly reside. The northerners call them the Shining Ones, a name dating back over three thousand years to the warrior-artisans’ arrival on this world. Nothing is recorded of the planet’s history prior to that. Like its name, Malpertuis’ story begins with its custodians.

The Resplendent have been magnanimous in their stewardship, but they remain apart from their subjects, their souls turned towards a higher purpose, for they are descended from a demigod, who was in turn the brightest of the God-Emperor’s nine true sons. It is rare for mortals to draw their attention, let alone their approbation, so only a fool would approach their citadel uninvited. But invitations cannot be requested. They must be earned. That is the purpose of the Reverie.

And yet, though he believes all this fervently, the traveller still hesitates.

The forest below is unquestionably where his path lies, as it does for all mortals who seek an audience with the Resplendent – and those who aspire to join their ranks – but crossing it appears hopeless. His sophisticated nav-auspex began playing up during the ascent, its readings jumbled into nonsense. The more primitive instruments he carries have fared little better, the needle of his gyrocompass spinning wildly and his tri-gauge indicating a void. Once he enters the forest and loses sight of the sun and the stars he will be lost. He could wander that tangle for a lifetime and never find a way out.

‘The Mirrored Path is navigated by ideals, not traversed by steps,’ the traveller quotes from the sublime treatise that set him on this course. The words steady him. This is his test and the Resplendent will be watching.

Trusting in destiny he descends, and the Reverie swallows him.

‘Reality is only superficially reasonable,’ the traveller confided in the bilious sun. ‘Nothing is what it seems, yet also nothing more, for semblance is all there is.’

The favoured verse brought a smile to his cracked lips. Hunger had hollowed out his once handsome face and his complexion had faded from burnished copper to beige. A scrappy beard clung to his chin, flecked with snow. He suspected he looked twice his age now, almost the old man Euryale had seen in him. Once that thought would have been mortifying, but he was long past such vanity. The flesh was only an illusion. The Arc Resplendent was as emphatic about this point as it was ambiguous about so much else, though its obscurities were doubtless a failing in him rather than the treatise, or due to the incomplete transcript in the society’s possession. Someday soon he hoped to read the complete work. Then everything would become clear.

His smile became a frown as his gaze settled on the village ahead. It was huddled in a shallow dip in the land and bordered by a patchwork of fields, their crops long overrun by hardier vegetation, though even that looked lifeless. A conical building rose from the nearest field, its tall frame draped in withered vines. Four fans jutted from its apex, forming a cross against the sky, like a massive grave marker. A mill. He had seen similar structures across the northern territories, though never in such a dilapidated state.

Beyond its outskirts the village was a muddle of ramshackle wooden dwellings, many only standing because they leant against their neighbours. A stone steeple loomed over the sullen, snow-piled rooftops, hinting at a more substantial structure at the community’s centre, probably a temple, though they were rare on Malpertuis. The Resplendent discouraged conventional worship, even if they didn’t overtly suppress it.

Looking past the buildings, the traveller saw the forest completely encircled the place, yet kept its distance, like a besieging army wary of a trap. He narrowed his eyes, unsure what he was looking for. The village was obviously long dead, yet its decrepitude felt evasive. Sly. It was the first sign of civilisation he’d seen since entering the Reverie – the first sign of anything really – but it was nowhere he wanted to go.

Are you certain? he asked himself. Night was fast approaching and it was already bitterly cold. Why not take shelter here? Surely it was better than–

Something glinted fleetingly in one of the broken windows, as though a bright form had flitted across the room behind.

No, the traveller decided. Better the cold and the darkness than the ghosts those blighted dwellings might harbour. Something very bad had happened here and the stain lingered. Briefly he considered making camp in the fields then shook his head. It was still too close. He wanted to be as far from this place as possible when night fell.

‘It’s poisoned, Euryale,’ he said, nodding to himself, quite certain she would sense the taint too and approve of his decision.

Casting a last glance at the sun, he turned away. As he entered the trees he imagined the town shedding its sham stillness and reaching after him with claws of splintered wood, its windowed eyes glowering beneath shrunken-browed rafters, furious at being cheated of its prey.

The traveller didn’t look back. Some things were better left unseen.

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WARHAMMER HORROR

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Rachel Williams.

The Deacon of Wounds © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. The Deacon of Wounds, Warhammer Horror, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-512-7

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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For my father, Eric Thomas Annandale (1937-2020).
In loving memory.

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o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.