Table of Contents

THE SUMMONS OF SHADOWS

REVELATIONS

REUNION

THE SUMMONS OF SHADOWS

In the dark depths of an Imperial archive, Scribe Maltenus dreams of

seeing his family once more. Yet some dreams should not come true,

as you will soon find out…

REVELATIONS

In the day that would have marked thirty years of their union, and did mark twenty years since the Tithe-Giving, when his family had departed to bear arms for the Emperor, Hakob Maltenus saw the shadow of his wife.

He was in a transcription chamber of the Administratum palace complex, seated on a pew with a dozen other scribes around a long iron table stacked high with piles of manuscripts. Servo-skulls hovered over the scribes as they dictated summaries of reports, correspondence, regulation amendments, and every other form of bureaucratic minutiae generated by a dying forge world in an Imperium under siege. The servo-skulls preserved the information, and then the parchments were either destroyed or archived, depending on their importance. The documents Maltenus was working on were decades old. Many of them detailed forgotten transactions between deceased individuals. But no record could be ignored.

All must be catalogued.

A precious lumoglobe stood in the centre of the table on an iron stalk, casting little more than a dim, brown glow. Tallow candles mounted on tall candelabra illuminated the rest of the room with a flickering light, barely enough to read by, and their cloud of dark, acrid smoke hung below the ceiling.

Maltenus finished with a report fifty years out of date about the decline of vermin populations since underhivers had begun eating them. He barely paid any attention to what he was dictating. He was thinking of Velya, the melancholy ache of her absence undiminished by time.

‘Hakob.’ The whisper came from right beside his ear.

Startled, he looked up and saw her shadow. Velya wasn’t there. He knew that. She hadn’t been on Fumus for twenty years, not since she and their twins, Ballan and Ulys, had departed. The boys had been only ten. They should have been too young to fight, but the dwindling population of Fumus meant that the tithe had swept up children too, so long as they were healthy. They had left, and Maltenus had mourned this partingevery day of every year. He was proud of them, as he was of Velya.

He could not fight for the Imperium. His heart was fragile. His lungs were weak. Arthritis curled and swelled the joints of his fingers. His duty was to serve in the bowels of the Administratum, and to be patient in his sacrifice.

But the shadow.

The woman’s silhouette was eerily motionless in the wavering candlelight. It was too angular. There was nothing about it that should have made him think that Velya was here.

Yet he was sure the shadow was hers. It was her voice that had whispered in his ear, though the sound had been cold as wind over snow. Maltenus twisted in his seat, turning so violently he knocked a handful of parchment off the table. Other scribes glanced up in disapproval. There was no one behind him. When he looked back, the shadow was gone.

‘What troubles you, Hakob?’ Artur Tissein asked.

‘Nothing,’ Maltenus said. ‘An archival reference I forgot to check.’ He stood and walked slowly away from the table, heading in the direction the shadow seemed to have come from.

It wasn’t her. She can’t have been here.

He moved between the towering storage archives. They were monoliths, over fifteen feet high, with railmounted ladders giving access to their drawers. Servitors climbed over them, retrieving and replacing documents. The grind of moving ladders and the slam of drawers were swallowed by the space of the chamber, the sounds reduced to the distant fall of pebbles into a dark, fathomless pool.

A short distance in, Maltenus crossed paths with Availa Reveken. She nodded in greeting.

‘Marking your day with thanks and contemplation, Maltenus?’ she asked.

Her Tithe-Giving had come at the same time. She, too, had seen her family go. Her friendship with Maltenus had been forged through shared pride and loss.

‘Lam,’ Maltenus said, distracted, looking past her. ‘I trust you are, too.’

‘My thoughts are with Velya and your sons. The Emperor protects, brother.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ he answered, smiled weakly, and moved on.

The Emperor protects. Maltenus kept his spirit alive on the hope embedded in that promise. The Emperor would protect his family. Maltenus would see them again. He had not heard from them once since their departure from Fumus. But he had to believe in this dream. It gave his existence meaning. Without it, he might as well be a servitor. Maltenus stopped at an intersection of paths through the archives.

‘What do you think you're doing? You were imagining things.’

He turned around to head back. As he did so, he saw, in the corner of his right eye, one of the twins standing at the far end of an aisle.

Maltenus whirled. There was no one there. But there had been — he was sure he had seen...

‘Seen whom? Which twin?’

To his horror, he did not know. He realised, with piercing shame, that Ballan and Ulys had blurred in his memory into a single being. If he saw them today, he would not be able to tell them apart.

If you saw two men of thirty ... But that was a child.

A child. He had seen the twin as he had been twenty years ago. Thought he had seen. He was mistaken. Clearly. He should go back. He had been gone too long from his post.

Even so, after a furtive glance around, he walked down the aisle to where he had seen the child. One of the drawers near the bottom of the archive unit was open. He looked inside.

It held a large stack of unsorted documents —labour waiting for another day or another year. His mouth going dry, Maltenus picked up the top sheet of vellum.

It was an accident report concerning the troop transport Exaltation of Faith. Sealants on the ship’s plasma reactor had been found to be fractured. The supervising tech-priest had ordered them ‘to be replaced’. At some point, a transcription error had occurred and the sealants had been registered simply as ‘replaced’. The ship had left with the flaw unattended to. The Exaltation had survived as long as its first warp jump, but when it translated back to the materium and fired up its plasma engines again, there had been a rupture. Fire had raced through the ship's decks, killing all hands.

The report was from twenty years ago.

Maltenus stared at the page and the long columns of casualties. Then, he gaped. His throat closed in grief and the scream that shook his body emerged as a strangled hiss. There, listed among the dead were the names of his wife and sons: Velya Maltenus, Ballan Maltenus, Ulys Maltenus. They had died twenty years ago — and their deaths had meant nothing. They had not perished as heroes fighting for the Imperium. They were victims of a stupid mistake. Their tragedy had no importance. It was a loss among many, an incident barely worth noting. The names clouded before him. He slumped against the archive unit, the parchment crumpling in his clawed hands.

‘Scribe Maltenus, you are damaging an Imperial document.’

Maltenus jerked upright, his breath ‘hitching. Overseer Tarasyn stood at the other end of the aisle. Her skin was grey, her hair was grey, and her robes were grey. She was as forbidding and pitiless as lead.

‘I... I was ...’ Maltenus stammered, barely able to think.

‘Return to your post at once.’

‘Yes, overseer.’

Maltenus had no consciousness of going back to his tasks. Yet he must have. Somehow, he worked again. He was not aware of doing so. There was no room in his mind for anything except burning anguish and an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness.

And rage. He felt rage at a galaxy that would reduce every dream to ash. Rage at the lie he had lived for twenty years, a lie supported by an even greater one.

‘The Emperor protects. The Emperor protects.’

‘No. He does not.’

REUNION

The refrain tormented Maltenus throughout the drudgery of the day. It pursued him still after nightfall as he made the long walk through the dark and the bitter cold towards his quarters. The streets here were narrow, squeezed between high, decaying hab towers. The pavement and the facades were grimy from the soot and smoke that choked the air. Filthy, grey smog rolled through the alleys, and Maltenus could often not see more than a few yards ahead. Snow fell in thick, sodden flakes. They left black smears where they landed on his cheeks and slid down like thick tears. He had none of his own left. The grief was too big. So was the hate.

The population of Fumus was diminishing as its resources were depleted, and much of Maltenus’ sector was close to deserted. Entire hab blocks now stood abandoned. Their windows, broken and dark, were the blind sockets of skulls. Snow drifted in over the sills.

Even in Maltenus’ building, fewer than a tenth of the residencies were occupied, and there were no other inhabitants on his floor. It was not unusual, then, for him to be utterly alone in the streets on this last part of his journey home. He did not expect anyone else to be around — just the rats, scavenging through piles of old refuse against the base of the tower facades.

At a cross-street, Maltenus looked up at the sound of human footsteps. To his left and right, half-hidden by the fog, he saw the twins. They stopped walking when he did and stood motionless, each a block away. Then, as he stared at them directly, they disappeared, shadows carried off by soot and snow. When he started walking again, the shadows returned. The twins kept pace with him, lurking at the edge of his vision.

They are not really there. They are merely what he wanted to see.

Even that conviction brought no comfort; it merely exposed his weak memory of his children. The two shadows, one on either side of him at the intersections, were indistinguishable because he had lost the identity of his sons.

Velya was here too, always behind him, always gone when he turned to look, though the length of her shadow kept falling over him like a judgement.

‘I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But it's been so long, Velya. I remember you, though! Won't you let me see you?’

Oh, to see her again. To see all of them. Now that he knew he never would, there was nothing to keep him going, to support his loneliness. An endless void of mourning opened up before him, and he could not go on. He fell to his knees.

‘One more time!’ he cried to the empty night. ‘I would give anything to see you, all of you, one last time!’

He did not pray to the Emperor. He felt too great a betrayal to turn his thoughts that way ever again.

But the perversity of his loved ones’ deaths and. the strange, chance discovery of that report was too strong for him to believe there was no controlling hand at work. There was no coincidence here. There was a will, a shaper of fate.

‘Grant me this boon,’ he prayed to that shaper, and his cracked whisper seemed huge, as if it would claw furrows in the rockcrete of the abandoned hab blocks.

‘Let me see them one more time.’

The instant that he formulated the prayer, the shadows vanished. A heavy silence fell with the snow. He was completely alone, with not even the imaginings of his grieving mind for company.

A heavy, dragging tread from some distance behind him broke the silence. Maltenus looked back, staring into the swirling dark of the night. The noise drew closer. It was something large, clumsy. Sometimes it sounded as if it were limping on two feet, and sometimes there was a clumsy, rapid patter between the steps.

There was a scream of pain and anger from a voice that was like a woman's, or might once have been a woman's, but was no longer.

Maltenus ran. He must not see what was approaching through smoke and snow. He ran faster than he had since his youth. Before long, his heart was hammering a painful, irregular beat, and his lungs were rasping wetly with the effort to draw breath. He would have collapsed, but the heavy steps and the scream were drawing closer. And terror kept him running.

He reached the rusted, flaking entry to his hab block and staggered up the six flights of stairs. Long before he reached his floor, he heard the thing behind him begin to climb. A thump, a slipping patter, and then another thump of steps echoed up the stairwell. The scream came again, but it was changing. More than a wail now. A choking, gargling growl. There was a throat, trying to form words.

Maltenus covered his ears as he stumbled down the dark hall to his apartment. The lumen strips of the corridor barely functioned. They flickered a pulsing grey, struggling and failing to push back the night. Maltenus knew the hall well, though, and he tripped only once.

Sobbing, he fumbled with his keys, unlocked the plasteel door, and slammed it shut behind him, locking it again.

Gasping for breath, he backed away from the door. The shambling thing was drawing closer. How pathetic he had been to act as if he could find refuge in his home! A hand scraped at the other side of the door, and he froze, a prey at bay.

The door flew open, knocked off its hinges. The horror entered.

It was his wish granted. It was his one last look at Velya, and Ballan, and Ulys. His wife and his sons had come back to him, fused into a single being. Velya staggered forward, her steps heavy with the weight of her sons melded with her torso. Their legs scrabbled for purchase on the floor, sometimes finding it, sometimes not. Three pairs of arms stretched out, hands clawing to reach Maltenus. The heads of the boys melted into Velya’s lower jaw, and their mouths had become one terrible, distorted maw. The flesh of the monster was burned black. Crisp pieces of it broke off at Maltenus’ feet.

The maw opened wide, and at last the scream became words.

‘You did this!’

Maltenus’ family screamed. Six eyes fixed on him, hating him and his wish that had brought them back in this agony.

And then they were upon him, dragging him into the mass.

His screams were muffled quickly in the nightmare of reunion.