Day Of Ascension, page 7
After that, he went to further interrogate Doctor Tesling. The man’s useful lifespan was shortening like a fuse, and Triskellian wanted results. Because he was increasingly convinced there were results to be had.
The little medicae cringed satisfactorily when he re-entered. Claven and Herma had him scribbling away, defacing a pristine scroll with his scrawl of a hand. Triskellian strode over and tore the most recent writing from under the man’s pen. ‘What even is this?’
‘We have him reporting on the methodology used in his laboratory.’ Claven limped up, Herma rattling along behind him.
‘It was not,’ Tesling said quietly, ‘a laboratory. It was my clinic. I helped people. I made them well.’
‘And this monster is well, is he?’ Triskellian placed a hand on the armaglass and met the baleful three-eyed stare of the thing within. He was aware of the little clerk watching him from the smaller jar they’d hauled in for her. She was practically human, though, and didn’t interest him as much.
‘He would have died,’ Tesling insisted. ‘I have saved him.’
‘You have damned him,’ Herma declared sanctimoniously, and then, ‘but there may be something to be derived from your method. The flesh thus treated shows a remarkable resilience.’ She prodded Claven with a crackle and he unravelled another scroll, his own results from samples torn and carved from the monster’s flesh, subjected to every manner of stress and damage. And that was what interested Triskellian.
What was it that limited the legions of the Adeptus Mechanicus, that prevented them from triumphing against any odds? Burzulem would say it was the flesh, and in this Triskellian would actually agree. The flesh that could not be excised. The living parts that remained, even in the skitarii, when everything else had been cored out and scoured away. Better mechanics would not make a better soldier or a wiser priest, because the chain was at the mercy of its weakest link. The flesh that could not be replaced must be rendered less vulnerable. And if there was ever a world to serve as a laboratory for that experiment it was Morod. There were a thousand poisons in the soil and rock of this planet that the miners constantly inhaled and ingested. And still they mined, because the same elements that killed were the most valuable for the adepts and the Imperium. Morod was a forge world in more ways than one. It was the hammer and the anvil that human flesh was beaten on.
‘What was your recovery rate? Not for aberrations like this, but for your regular subjects?’ Triskellian asked idly.
‘Patients,’ Tesling muttered. ‘They were patients,’ and then Triskellian’s steel hand cuffed him and he cringed. ‘At least four out of ten lived, after being brought to me.’
For tech-priest surgery the survival rate was dismal, but it was likely ten times what the average labourer on Morod might expect. ‘And these were your… kin.’
‘My siblings, adept. My people.’ The invasive surgeries Tesling’s records attested to should have left his victims bleeding out on the table or needing the sort of prosthetics the tech-priests reserved for their own. And yet many of them lived, and Triskellian knew why. His patients weren’t human – something he was unwilling to say out loud even here, hedging it about with words like atypical and anomalous. Yet the conclusion was inescapable: an alien taint had infiltrated Morod and spread, undetected, until its most recent scions were human enough to get work as clerks at the Palatium. And Triskellian should have gone running to Burzulem with that news and then organised an incendiary strike to obliterate seven districts of the South Chasm down to the deep bedrock. Except that he knew Burzulem would mock him for the news, and give him no credit for his vigilance. Except that he had pored over Tesling’s results. The strength of the flesh.
And it was alien flesh, but it was human flesh too. These were no brute orks made of deviant vegetal matter, utterly inimical to human biology. This was a strain of the xenos that could inveigle its way into human cells and form an uneasy truce between the familiar and the strange. A compatibility against all logic, that produced an end result with the virtues of both. And Triskellian had recoiled from the thought – impurity of impurities! – but he had not consigned Tesling to the fire.
And now he looked over Tesling’s scrawlings, the man’s understanding of his own craft, and almost despaired. ‘How do you know what treatments to give? You must have a better grasp of how the atypical elements respond to these chemicals. Your own results speak to that. And yet this… this is gibberish.’ Reading over the man’s desperate scratchings of dosage and ministration, he felt all the frustration of his earlier interview wash over him and pincered Tesling’s shoulder hard with his metal fingers. ‘Tell me how you know what to do.’
The medicae let out a choked sound of pain. ‘It speaks to me,’ he got out. ‘Then I know what to give them, to save them.’
‘What speaks to you?’ Triskellian demanded, looking at Claven and Herma for support.
‘The us in them,’ Tesling gasped, ‘speaks to the us in me, and we know each other, and I know how strong they are and how much to give them.’
‘Not good enough,’ Triskellian snapped. Because that was no use to him. He didn’t want this alien flesh giving commands. He needed it obedient, predictable, pinned down in numbers and calculations and replicable results. We will tame it, like a beast. Like some sweating alien draft animal, co-opted to draw the ordnance of the Astra Militarum, save that it would be enslaved within human cells. Claven’s initial tests already showed the hybrid flesh was resistant to the toxins and radiation of Morod. Triskellian’s own experiments suggested that it might be far more able to keep up with skitarii cybernetics, a stronger link in that chain. And Triskellian believed in the strength of human purity. He sang along to the Imperial creed, that humanity was superior and the xenos was weak and deviant and fit to be purged. But if humanity was superior and the xenos was weak, then there should only be one outcome when they met and grappled within a human cell.
‘It will speak when it is spoken to,’ he told Tesling. ‘It will render up its information to our instruments, not to this thing within you. Or you are no use to us, you understand? You will make this resilience in your flesh obedient.’
‘You do not understand what we are.’ There was a flash of spirit in Tesling’s eyes, as though the alien thing within him rose momentarily to the surface.
‘I have read sufficient texts to know you,’ Triskellian told him derisively. In truth those old scrolls he had been able to find were incomplete and had precious little to say. Certainly his order had encountered infections such as this in the past, written of in veiled terms and maddening allusions. They had always sought to exterminate it, by those records, even down to salting the earth of whole continents on some worlds. Blind, Triskellian decided bitterly. As devoid of vision as Burzulem. ‘You are merely human stock adulterated by some alien bacillus or parasite. The taint within you will work for the human cells it inhabits just as your bodies are set to work for our greater purpose. Or they will be purged. As without, so within.’
He suppressed a shudder of revulsion, telling himself, This could be the greatest advance of the age. And in his mind, always, Burzulem chuckling and bobbing and denying him a chance to be the visionary he knew he should be. A bleak hand settled on his heart, a pain so physical and immediate he wished he’d had the organ cut out and replaced long before.
It wouldn’t matter. All the advantage he could wring from this discovery, everything he was risking his very soul to uncover, it would be wasted. It would be ground beneath Burzulem’s many iron feet. Triskellian was on the brink of a discovery that might give the soldiers of the tech-priests the keys to conquer and perfect the universe, and to Burzulem it would just be ‘soft sciences’ and he would bury it.
Burzulem wastes my potential, he thought. He denies me a chance to worship the Omnissiah the only proper way. Through knowledge that the Fabricator General would scorn.
He is the misaligned component in Morod’s machine. Without him, everything would run so smoothly.
And with that, he understood the use he could put that prying little clerk to.
6
Davien had been in a jar for three days. By her reckoning, another two and she’d either miss Ascension Day or find herself as one of the central components of the tech-priests’ revelries. The one benefit was she had a good view of Doctor Tesling as he worked on her brother under the supervision of the two conjoined lackeys. Niem seemed in less pain, and he had bulked out even more under the doctor’s ministrations. Doctor Tesling had not only saved him, but exalted him. Niem was swollen so vast with muscle and plates of dermal armour that he would only just fit through the door of these rooms. Not that he would have the opportunity given they were all captives of the tech-priest.
And here he was, returned, sweeping into his rooms with a handful of skitarii at his back. A terse command to his subordinates and the winch was descending into the mouth of her jar. She’d tried to get Doctor Tesling to operate it while the priest was away, but the man seemed utterly whipped, terrified of offending their brutal captor. Now she considered refusing to step into the hoist, but something of Tesling’s timorousness had touched her. And besides, once out of the glass prison, who knew what she might accomplish?
Or who knew what fate the man intended for her? Perhaps this was a prelude to her execution.
Except, apparently, it was lunch.
She’d eaten nothing, in her three days. The jar had a pipe for tepid, metallic-tasting water and another for biological necessities – she was surprised the priests had even thought of that – but nothing else. Now the priest had perched himself on a high stool, and one of his skitarii threw a handful of sealed packages at her feet. Rations, like the miners got. She tore into one hungrily, took a bite and then watched the priest warily as she chewed.
‘My name is Gammat Triskellian, magos biologis of the Genetor order. You may address me as adept. I assume they gave you a name, or some designation.’
‘Davien. Adept.’ She’d started at the titles. Back home she had knelt before the Congregation’s own magus, Claress, and she’d heard Tesling referred to as a biophagus. They steal our names and twist them, she thought, but right now, hungry and a prisoner and locked away down here, she couldn’t avoid the unhappy thought that perhaps the theft had gone the other way.
‘Davien.’ Triskellian loomed over her as she ate. ‘You are a remarkable little monster. Perhaps not so remarkable as that thing, your brother.’ A nod to the bell jar cell, where Niem’s broadened face was pressed against the glass to watch. ‘You belong to a… subset of Morod’s population. You’re the relic of an invasion from generations ago. Probably your monstrous progenitors wanted you to take over this world for their own appetites, hmm?’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘But that hasn’t happened, has it? The attempt by your assassin on our Fabricator General was sheer desperation. And it failed.’ He lifted one hand, the metal one. ‘Which seems ironic, given where we are now. If only I’d been a step further back from Burzulem, how different things might have been.’
Davien blinked at him, not following but awaiting any opportunity his words flung her way.
‘You know, obviously, that everything done by our priesthood is to advance the perfection of the universe, towards a more efficient cosmos and the perfection of humankind.’ He rattled the words off almost blandly and smiled at her reflexive scowl. ‘Oh, you don’t believe? Well, being what you are, I can understand that. I could go to the Fabricator General right now and tell him what I’ve uncovered in the South Chasm, and he’d tell me to root you all out, bring you in to be purified at our feast, or just incinerate you in your holes. That’s the fate your little strain of abomination has earned, under Burzulem. He would see you as… needlessly organic.’ Davien could only stare blankly and wait.
‘But I,’ he went on, ‘am a more benign director, or would be, had I the chance to direct. I am sure that, in your own mind, you wish to serve the Emperor and humanity. And all things can be made to serve. In serving, they become a part of the greater machine, and as the machine progresses forwards, so they move with it, rather than being ground between its gears. There is a way for your little rat’s nest to become more than a charred spot in the histories, little Davien. There is a way for you to serve.’
‘And what if we don’t want to serve?’ she demanded. There was a moment of shocked silence. She wasn’t sure where it had come from. She was a prisoner of the Hollow Men, those who used people up and then cast them aside. Her place, in his world, was to obey. Yet she felt a surge of defiance pulsing in time to her heartbeat, waiting for the skitarii to step in and strike her.
Triskellian laughed like the rattle of broken things. ‘Everything serves,’ he told her. ‘Either as a component, or as fuel. Your fellows, taken in the streets of South Chasm, they will be fuel. Their purification will feed the belief and understanding of the faithful. They will be a salutary lesson. Or that is what Burzulem would make of them. If I were able to make the decision, I might rule differently. I might instead find a way to incorporate their virtues into the machine. Your family is an atavism, Davien. Once, it might have been a threat to the purity of this world. But how many generations have you malingered here, unseen and useless, like a vestigial organ? If there was ever a moment for you to accomplish the will of your monstrous progenitors, it is long past. Now you are an equation with only two possible solutions: service or extinction. And you are in a position to help choose which.’
Davien was aware of Tesling hovering between them and Niem, pallid hands clasped before him. She glanced his way, then snapped her eyes guiltily back to Triskellian.
‘Go on,’ the tech-priest invited. ‘Speak to your physician. He knows.’
‘Doctor…?’ Davien whispered. For Tesling was one of the elders, a man high in the ranks of the Congregation. Surely he would resist any inducement to cooperate with the hated Taskmasters.
But the doctor just hunched his shoulders, his lined face drawn tight with worry. ‘He will burn us,’ Tesling whispered. ‘We hid for so long. We struggled on in the shadows. But now he has seen us and knows us. My child, you must…’ Here, in Triskellian’s chambers, he looked small and weak and old.
‘Must what?’ Davien demanded, of him, of the tech-priest. She saw Niem staring at her mutely, a jolt of sibling empathy she took strength from. ‘What is it you want, Taskmaster?’
The insult glanced off him without leaving a mark. ‘I? Why, Davien, I want to meet your family. I want you to take me to your misbegotten people so that I might have an audience with your elders.’
He didn’t bind her hands. That omission was the greatest blow. Other than acting as a native guide to the claves of the South Chasm, Davien didn’t matter. Nothing she could do would be a threat to Gammat Triskellian. And of course he had a squad of skitarii at his back, keeping their machine visages turned towards the looming tenements on either side, but Triskellian just strode on as though he owned everything he surveyed.
And soon enough they were in her familiar haunts. At first it was just one or two homes in buildings where the Congregation had established themselves, made converts and set up hidden chapels. Then she was stumbling over the rubble of the conscription pool’s passing, knowing that whole floors and wings of the faithful had been hollowed out by Triskellian and his troops a few days before. And, just one street further on…
She stopped. The feeling of betrayal was too great. Any further and she’d be in sight of where Tesling’s clinic had been. She’d be looking up at the broken walls of the building she’d been born in, where the Congregation had its heart. Magus Claress lived there, and there were covens of the elder generation, her Aunts and Uncles and Great-Aunts and even older than that. Those closer to the stars than she was, kin to the angels who would – yes, she still believed! – come some day soon to save them all. To embrace their poor faithful in the divine Union she had always been promised.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Triskellian asked. And then one of the skitarii leant in and made a buzzing report she couldn’t follow, and the tech-priest said, ‘We’re being watched. By your kin, no doubt. Call to them. Let them know what they must do.’
And she couldn’t. She just hung her head, weighed down with the shame of being here in this company. No matter, though. There were already people emerging – her own people, or they had been before now. She saw faces at windows, bodies crowding doorways or creeping out over the rubble where their homes had been. Human faces, and faces that were more than human. The Aunts and Uncles were out in the open for the first time, hunched in robes and rags that barely hid the divinity of their shapes. A crowd was gathering, and the skitarii shifted nervously. She saw hammers and lascutters, wrenches and knives, and there were the simple pistols and shotguns they made in the factories while the overseers’ backs were turned. Enough to kill one tech-priest and his escort, and to obliterate the stain on their family that Davien had become. Had it been just her, then so be it, but Tesling and Niem would die if anything happened to Triskellian. She had to play her part for them.
And Triskellian was just facing them all down, nothing in him but that superior confidence the tech-priests all had. As if their mechanical augmentations placed them above mere humanity. The Congregation all knew that it was the flesh, not the steel, that served as a bridge to the divine.
He gave her a shove and she stumbled forwards, towards the hungry crowd. She could see them working themselves up to punish this intrusion, and she had to reach them before their mood broke. Holding her hands up, Davien picked her way over the broken plascrete and fallen stones.
‘I need to speak to the elders!’ Her thin, high voice rose over all the rumbles of their discontent.
A figure lurched forwards from the ranks: Uncle Eddarc, though his expression admitted no kinship with her right then. His yellow eyes bored into her, set into the purplish white of his stretched face. He was stooped, supporting himself on two twisted bare feet and the claw-hand of his extra arm. More than half angel, was Uncle Eddarc.
