The Resting Places, page 5
I pulled down on a long red lever to void this section of the fuel feed assembly, but found the lever was frozen in place. Despite straining and heaving on it with all my strength, it held fast.
I searched for a means of leverage, seeking something appropriately long and solid. I seized the thighbone from one of my withered antecedents, tearing it free with a rustle and a quiet pop, and wedged it between the stuck lever and the bulkhead behind it. Tugging downward on the bone, I forced it into the closed position. I uncoupled the fuel lines by the light of the torch.
Removing the burnt-out pressuriser and tossing it onto a heap of others like it, I fitted its replacement into the assembly and tightened it down. Striking the red lever upward with a blow from the bone, I reopened the feed line. The pressuriser drew fuel from the tanks, hissing as it injected the volatile substance into the plasma reactor’s ignition chambers.
I laughed, giddy at my success. With a muttered but sincere word of thanks, I replaced the femur where I had found it, patting it gently.
Dashing across the ancient decking, following the stablight’s bounding beam and my own intuition, I hastened to the Pharisene’s secondary ignition system. Satisfied with the gauge readings, I grasped the ignition toggle.
One of the corpses at my feet caught my attention, shadows and the lamp’s light giving his hollow eye sockets and fleshless lips a disquietingly expectant expression.
‘This will all be worth it,’ I reassured him with a kind smile.
He had been me. They had all been me, each one boarding the Pharisene as she dropped out of the warp, each one slightly younger than the last. Like me, they had been keeping a weather eye on the nebula, just as Yarvais told us to. I wasn’t sure how many jumps I had made; I couldn’t keep count of how many I’d killed. I didn’t want to know.
My great hope, my only hope, lay with Astero. If I could reach him, warn him, he would know what to do. If he understood what would befall him if he accompanied the ordo on that fateful journey, he could choose not to go. And if I could not persuade him to stay, I would convince him to take me – my past self – with him. Better that than be left, alone and forgotten, on that watch station. He would change his course, and change both our destinies.
I knew well the doom that remained for me if I prevailed here. My younger self was entirely correct – the ordo existed because of things like me. I was anathema, my existence proscribed. I would be condemned to death by the very institution I served. Yarvais would have no choice but to end me, however fascinating he might find my return. In truth, I welcomed the oblivion my success promised, if it but gave me the chance to live a life different from my nightmarish synchronism with the Pharisene. In the end, I was certain, it would all be worth it.
I said the incantation to the Machine-God that I had been taught in my youth and flipped the toggle.
A deep vibration rumbled from the depths of the ship as a small sun kindled in the core of the Pharisene’s engines. Lights flickered on across the vessel, followed by the quiet hiss of atmospheric circulators, barely audible above the quaking din of the plasma drives, as she took the first breath of her new life. I felt, watched and listened, swelling with pride as I noted the various signals of the Pharisene’s rebirth, her long-failing engines restored, at least temporarily, by a flood of pressurised fuel.
Elated, I sprinted to the warp mechanism. I had no idea how long the Pharisene’s restored vitality would last, or if my fuel pressuriser might yet overtax the engines, dooming us to a fatal, explosive demise as the reaction ran out of control.
I scanned a number of status reports that flowed from the slaved cogitator arrays at a workstation next to the warp mechanism. The warp drive, with its familiar fault reading, was fully operational. The Gellar field generator was likewise functional and responsive. Gasping for breath and sweating, I struck rune after rune on the cogitator array, priming the warp core to breach realspace as I spooled up the Gellar field.
I closed my eyes, drumming my fingers on the terminal as I calculated the length of burn it would take to travel back three months, once we were in the empyrean.
The Pharisene’s shaking became increasingly violent, juddering the ship’s entire superstructure. Flakes of old paint and rust crumbled from bulkheads and ceilings as the vibration shifted even the ever-present dead from their customary resting places. A section of the deck above collapsed, pitching rusted metal, flotsam and corpses about the compartment with a titanic, wrenching screech and crash. A length of steel bar punched through my left leg, tearing through flesh and shattering bone, and I collapsed onto the workstation with a scream.
Keying in the final coordinates with shaking hands, I reached for the initialisation rune, but a sudden, fierce shock from the Pharisene knocked me to the floor.
I lay on the heaving deck next to one of the corpses. Older than many of the others, it stared at me with empty sockets, its mouth stretched open in a laughing rictus. I struggled to rise on my good leg, but the Pharisene’s tremors sent me sprawling onto the carcass. Its head lolled back and its mouth cracked open wider still, giving the impression of a hideous, silent paroxysm of laughter.
‘Do shut up,’ I grumbled, pushing it away and dragging myself up by the edge of the terminal.
The Pharisene’s quaking diminished, though I didn’t know if this indicated that the plasma reaction had stabilised or was simply the next step in our journey to annihilation. Bracing myself, I reached for the warp drive’s initiation rune.
Power levels were satisfactory, the Gellar fields were functional and the warp core stable. Amidst the pervasive ruin, I looked to the dead with whom I had for so long shared the ship.
‘It will be worth it,’ I promised them, and struck the rune.
A final leap into the dark.
One last jump.
THE STACKS
Chris Winterton
Archivist-Praefectus Livia Tiro ground the heel of her hand into her eye socket, as though to drive wakefulness through her optic nerve and into her brain. Flashes of shifting, coloured shapes writhed through the darkness behind her eyelid. She had snatched only a handful of hours of sleep since the Library had received the Inquisition’s demand. Livia stretched, hard enough to crack her spine, though the ache in her shoulders remained unyielding, and continued her search of the overstuffed shelves that lined the room, a servo-skull tracking along them with her. They bulged with old books and fragile scrolls, sagging under the weight of the texts written by Livia’s predecessors in their attempts to document the Library’s contents. Livia had ransacked it all in search of any indication of the location of the tome the Holy Ordos demanded. Acidic ink had long since burnt the meaning out of the earliest, turning the pages to brittle fretwork. The later accounts were filled with errors and omissions, keyed to reference systems long since abandoned. Countless hours of work had narrowed the tome’s whereabouts down to the restricted section, but even that was a vast expanse. She’d dispatched the news to the searching archivists and continued her work in an attempt to truly pinpoint the tome’s location, activity serving as a bulwark against fevered panic.
She pulled a map from the shelves, unrolling the frail parchment on her desk atop the discarded books and charts already splayed across it. The malformed topography spread fresh cracks through the brittle paper. Her own doomed attempts at cartography made up the lowest strata of the accretion of falsehoods on her desk. Every document in the praefectus’ office was misleading to some greater or lesser degree, the Library’s contents growing too fast, within a structure too vast to be memorised, the already considerable area enclosed within the footprint of the Library walls multiplied many times over by the labyrinth of shelves that folded upon themselves in a geometric maze.
The latest map showed the Library’s main expanse in eye-watering detail. Once she’d orientated herself, Livia skimmed over the intricate network of lines, the ragged nail of a trailing finger covering in seconds what it would take hours to accomplish on foot. The servo-skull hovering at her shoulder felt more critic than companion, the eyes of the librarian-majoris watching her progress. She looked to the restricted section. Here the shelves didn’t continue on in their angular runs but were confined to small squares, representing the cages the books there were held within, the contents proscribed.
Her finger began to flick between the reference numbers within each inked box. At last she found the code she sought, fingertip grinding into the parchment. She checked her notes once again, unnecessarily – the Inquisition’s diktat was seared into her mind, the tome they requested identified by a string of characters. The reference on the map matched it exactly.
Livia’s relief was but momentary; finding the location on the map was a minor and uncertain victory, hope lying only in its presumed accuracy. She wasted no time in savouring her fragile triumph, making a hastily sketched copy of the map section in her notebook and running from the cell, the servo-skull matching her pace.
Livia had lost any accurate track of time as she’d worked, but knew that many days had elapsed since she’d left the entrance hall. Still reeling from the arrival of the Inquisition’s request, the archivist-majoris had summoned all the archivists that could be spared and dispatched a team into the depths to locate the tome. They’d not returned. Nor had the two that followed them. Livia had stopped watching their departures then, leaving others to stand in vigil.
The glow from the hall seeped into the corridor, but even forewarned, Livia had to shield her eyes from the profusion of candles crowded upon the Shrine of the Lost. One for every soul consumed by the depths. The Library was burning lives to find what the Inquisition sought. Despite the heat rolling off the shrine, Livia couldn’t help but shudder. She made a swift obeyance before it, the wing-tips of the aquila she made turned tattered by her chewed nails.
A warden made his way towards her across the deserted chamber, dark robes clenched tight about him. Behind him Livia could see the Inquisition’s request displayed upon the gates that barred the entrance to the Library proper. Within the thrice-barred ‘I’ of the heavy seal at the bottom of the scroll, a skull regarded her with a baleful gaze.
‘Archivist-praefectus.’ Barely more than a whisper, in the now-hollow space the warden’s voice reached Livia’s ears clearly. ‘The majoris has gone to prepare. The Inquisition are sending an emissary for the tome. Their acolyte will leave with it, even if it means venturing into the Library to rip it from the shelves.’
Outrage trembled the notebook in Livia’s hand. An outsider in the Library was tantamount to desecration, no matter the authority commanding it. Their rift with the Mechanicus had saved them from the worst abuse from beyond their walls, but the Library had been forever scarred by the last time an inquisitor had stepped amongst the shelves. Clenched upon her notebook, her fingers had drained of colour. She seized upon a thin hope.
‘The others?’
‘There has been no word from within. They are lost. You are the last upon this side of the gate.’
Livia looked again to the shrine, eyes watering from the number of candles. From where she stood, choice seemed a far-distant thing, the many threads of duty twisting into a lash that compelled her onwards. She looked upwards to the saints and martyrs painted upon the ceiling. Hanging from long-dead chandeliers, stalactites of wax formed reproving fingers. She marched towards the gate.
‘I can retrieve the tome. I know where it is.’ Somewhere within, she tried to find confidence to match her tone.
‘May the God-Emperor guide your steps. He sends His Inquisition, and we have all but failed them.’
At the gate, the warden hefted a satchel bulging with large candles and held them out to Livia. Taking them, she put her notebook inside, unhooked the holder from her belt and lit a candle from the warden’s proffered flame. Thus armed, she stepped into the Library.
The first candelabra stood just beyond the gate, a pale ghost towering out of the darkness. Its ironwork had drowned centuries ago beneath the vast cascades of wax that enveloped it, testament to the countless archivists who had set out from here into the sepulchral depths that lay beyond. Livia pulled a candle from her bag, reversed her stylus and marked her initials at its base. She lit it and scaled the handholds in the wax monolith to secure it atop the mound of its expired kin. It was a flicker in the darkness to guide her way back, the first of many that would mark her trail.
The light revealed only the smallest hint of the stygian space ahead. The maps she had pored over in her office did little to capture the grandeur of the Library. Shelves loomed in front of her in serried, innumerable ranks, here rising only two storeys, ladders scaling them. In the distance on either side the shelves rose higher, spiral staircases accessing balconies which ran their length.
The Library contained books, journals, correspondence, maps, star charts, manifests, reports and manuscripts across all fields. The section on the system’s military history alone was vast, filling shelf after groaning shelf. The great wing to Livia’s right contained duplicates of the Arbites’ annals of law, trial documents and rulings, which were supplemented weekly. To her left, the wing containing the Administratum archives grew by the hour. In places the shelves were utterly lost beneath piles of paperwork that had been stacked up in the aisle, makeshift tunnels burrowing through the teetering accumulations lit by rare and precious lumens.
Livia raised her candle high, expanding the circle of light surrounding her fractionally. Darkness crowded tight at every side, her own shadow thrown wild and shifting against the floor, anchoring the false night of the Library to her heels. She plunged into the stacks, perturbed by the still unfamiliar presence of the servo-skull at her shoulder, past shelves of dark wood with edges rubbed pale by the brushing passage of countless trailing hands. Her course became a weaving zigzag as she made her way deeper into the Library, skirting dead ends and impassable stretches of shelves.
Livia came to a sudden halt. A tumble of unused candles spilled across her path, one crushed flat by the weight of a descending foot. She struggled to imagine why an archivist would not pause to pick up the scattered candles. Even as she knelt to add them to her own supply, she cast about, looking for any clues as to what had happened, but found none.
The servo-skull circled, descending in front of her. Livia looked up with a jerk. Its presence, which she had ceased to notice as she traversed the shelves, was suddenly ominous once more. Empty sockets level with her eyes, it stopped, nibs skittering out from below its severed jaw with a chatter to scratch out a message upon the parchment trailing beneath it. It began to write, the darting of its many nibs manifesting the words from the majoris in ink upon the hanging parchment before they withdrew behind its teeth.
He is here. He is coming. He has breached the gate. Find the tome and our salvation, lest we burn.
The candle she’d picked up fell from Livia’s numb fingers. It tumbled into the darkness as she scrambled to her feet and started to run. She had expected to have days, maybe a week, in which to achieve her task, not a mere handful of hours. Her mouth turned as dry as the parchment that surrounded her, the panic redolent in the majoris’ words welling up inside her. Her fingers trembled as she rushed to light each candle she left as a way marker. The flames danced, and she feared more than once she would snuff them out in her haste. She knew she was leaving a trail for her pursuer to follow, but without them to light it, there would be no way back. The servo-skull and its trailing invective dogged her steps, as inescapable as whatever emissary of the Inquisition now pursued her to the tome.
Livia’s desperate pace stuttered as she saw light up ahead. Her own candle shivered as she contemplated the thought that she had somehow been overtaken and headed off by the Inquisition’s acolyte. She forced herself to keep moving, one cold foot at a time, trusting to the God-Emperor to protect her and the works under her charge from whatever fate lay ahead.
She spied a dark figure collapsed beside a dwindling candle.
A far cry from the upright and wrathful instrument of the Inquisition she had expected, she instead found a black-robed warden slumped against the shelves, their candle a guttering stub.
Livia made a cautious approach, bolder than she might have been had she not at first imagined that something more frightful lay in wait. The marks of the scourge on her back were a reminder of the punishment for breaking the silence of the Library, so she said nothing as she crept closer. She was nearly beside them when she realised that she’d made two mistakes: firstly, that the warden was dead, only the flickering candlelight giving the body the illusion of lifelike motion; secondly, that they were not a warden at all.
Livia studied the fallen figure. As a novice, she’d been sent on heaving slogs to drag back the chanced-upon corpses of lost archivists from amid the stacks, but never a fresh body. What she’d mistaken for a dark warden’s robe was in fact the white of an archivist’s, but filled so tightly with script that it was stained almost black with ink, letters and symbols drawn onto the fabric, bearing little resemblance to the High and Low Gothic or native dialects with which Livia was familiar. The servo-skull hovered in close, its nibs skittering once but writing nothing.
Its open pages so heavily suffused with ink that Livia had at first failed to pick it out, a notebook nestled in the archivist’s lap. Their words had exceeded the boundaries of the paper, spilling onto their robes and yet further on. Where the cloth proved insufficient, they had begun to inscribe words into their own skin, their stylus gouging letters into flesh. Curlicues of excised tissue hung from the self-inflicted wounds. It was not just ink that stained their robes but also dried blood, the corpse bled as white as the robes should have been. The stylus was locked in a death grip in their hand, the nib blunted and buckled. They had taken so long at their task that the first words cut into their skin had begun to scab over. Where their flesh stretched thin over bone and tendon, the body’s working could be seen revealed within the deeply carved letters.
