The Oubliette, page 8
Ashielle sighed. ‘No doubt, group captain. Her cow-eyed debutante routine has been carefully polished over the course of decades. It is, however, a façade. She’s as sadistic and cunning as anyone else in her family.’
Barrin nodded. ‘Once again, my apologies, ma’am. There was nothing about this in Commodore Zelucan’s files.’
She straightened in the bed. ‘I think you’ll find that there’s a great deal which is not in the files that you’ll be expected to learn, group captain. Above a certain social stratum, there are some things which cannot be entrusted to paper, at least not to those papers which one’s subordinates will have access.’
Barrin nodded again. Ashielle sighed.
‘In that regard, ma’am, I’d like to look at bringing in a specialist team to try to seek out the assassin below the palace.’ He shifted slightly. Ashielle wished he didn’t insist on maintaining a military posture in her presence. She and Zelucan had been close enough that he could be relaxed around her, and she found the group captain’s stiffness to be mildly contagious.
‘Absolutely not,’ she said. ‘As it was in the time of my father, the chambers beneath the palace are to be kept locked, and entry into them forbidden.’
This was a sore spot with them. The group captain had been pressing to investigate the tunnels ever since she had been found in the buttery, her dressing gown soaked with blood and cavern filth.
‘I understand your trepidation, ma’am, but the investigation would greatly benefit from–’
‘There’s nothing else to say on the topic, Group Captain Barrin,’ she said. The friendly tone was gone now. She needed to make certain there was no ambiguity. ‘I commend you for your diligence in this regard, but those tunnels are condemned not for secrecy, but for safety. The substructures they lead to are unstable and dangerous in the extreme.’
The story she had given them had been as close to the truth as possible: beneath the palace she had discovered the ruins of far older structures. That in itself was not terribly shocking. It stood to reason that the governor’s palace had been built on a site of ancient rulership or significance. While it was true that the ruins gave way to natural cavern formations, she had given them a rather more fanciful account of their breadth and decrepitude. Barrin knew too that her would-be assassin was dead (or presumed dead and subsequently entombed behind locked doors). In the version she had imparted to her subordinates, however, the killer who had been pursuing her had fallen into a chasm.
She’d been quite incoherent when they found her, barely able to maintain consciousness. The medicae had concluded her weak state was due to the blood loss from her attack coupled with the cold environs below the palace. They’d asked about her injuries, of course. Her arms were covered in raw scrapes where she had been drawn from the chimney. There was a fading bruise high on her head where Lostrovsky had struck her. She’d declined to discuss the attack in detail, and had simply told the medicae, Barrin and her brother that she had suffered her injuries while fending off her attacker. She knew that explaining the specifics of any of the wounds would mean explaining them all, and she hadn’t been able to concoct a specific lie about her missing finger.
‘Are preparations for the ball in place?’ she asked, to forestall any further questions about the caverns.
He nodded stiffly. ‘Indeed. Is her excellency quite certain I can’t convince her to postpone? Or at least to limit the size of the guest list?’
Ashielle’s eyes narrowed, and she fought down the urge to throw something heavy at the group captain. She reminded herself that providing for her security was his job, after all.
‘Quite certain,’ she said. ‘Our staff is reduced, group captain. Our family reduced in size and influence. If I am to maintain my office, and, quite frankly, my life, I must present a strong and stable image to the Grevenate, lest any of them begin to court some foolish notion about placing the coadjutor on the throne. That means the Devotional Banquet must proceed.’
Normally the highlight of the Ceocan social calendar, the Devotional Banquet was a holdover from the days of planetary warfare, when rulers would invite their officers and subordinate chieftains to swear renewed oaths of fealty, and to renew their own vows of stewardship. It had evolved into a ceremony to celebrate and form alliances, where inter-house marriages were proposed and new business ventures cemented. To Ashielle’s mind, the proximity to Ruprekt’s death made this year’s banquet a ghoulish procession of those anxious to see how she was settling in to her role. She would be expected to mediate disputes and settle grievances, and all eyes would be on her for the slightest slip.
‘And my brother?’ she asked, keen to move on.
‘Reporting events here to Judge Idonell aboard the Callistonian Haven, ma’am.’ The group captain hedged for a moment, as if uncertain to offer his personal observation. ‘I believe he may also be attempting to feel out the judge’s feelings regarding the Vaneisen family and their involvement with the assassination.’
‘He and I have already discussed that matter,’ Ashielle said, ‘and I suspect he’ll find little has changed, with no tangible evidence to present. Still, there’s no harm in him trying.’ Despite her insistence that she didn’t need as much rest as those around her believed, she was growing weary. ‘If there’s nothing else in the immediate, I would take my rest.’
Group Captain Barrin nodded, saluted crisply, and left her bedchamber with a sharp twist of his heel.
She stared into the corners of the bedchamber for some time. The sconces in the wall glowed, turned up to their maximum setting, but still there were shadows that couldn’t be banished. She gazed at the darkness beneath the feet of her cloak wardrobe, wondering if some thing lurked beneath, peering back at her.
Ashielle sank into the pillows, no longer concerned with appearances now she was alone. She pulled the soft duvet up to her chin and stared unblinking at the walls. The governor’s bedchamber was surprisingly devoid of ornamentation, with plain walls and worn wooden floors. Her own sleeping quarters had been much more lavish as a child, with cabbage roses engraved in silver set into the wooden columns, and an expansive starscape painted across her ceiling, depicting whirling comets, brilliant nebulae and burning stars. The bedchamber she had taken over from her father was no peasant’s hovel, but it had also clearly not been designed or decorated with the thought or desire that the governor spend a great deal of time there. The art pieces the servants had hung during her recovery were the only personal touches to the décor. Ashielle knew if her circumstances had been different, if she had been relegated to bedrest only a month ago, she would have gone mad just sitting in that room.
It seemed like every day brought the same thing, now. When her aides and her underlings came to her, she could rouse herself, could scrape her mind together into some semblance of functionality, but as soon as they left, she fell apart like a marionette with the strings cut. She found herself staring into space for hours. Some days she realised she had skipped several meals in a row. Although she always allowed her maids to turn down her lights when they believed she was going to sleep, she always turned them up again as soon as the room was empty. When she did sleep, she did it with the room fully lit.
That was when she could sleep, which was rare. The image of Lostrovsky’s terrified face, frozen in the laspistol flash, kept haunting her. The sound of his screams echoing off the stone walls followed her into her dreams. At her best, in the middle of the night she insisted to herself over and over that there had been no other choice, no other way to survive. In the terrible light of each dawn, with the cathedral bells tolling out across the city, she knew better: she was damned.
She sighed. There was too much at stake for her to continue this way. Millions of people across her planet were dependent on her, heretic or not. She knew that she needed to pull herself together, that she couldn’t lie in her bed, trapped between fear and regret forever. She had to rise, to prove to her enemies that they could not defeat her.
Ashielle pulled the duvet over her mouth and nose, leaving only her eyes exposed. She stared at the wall to her side, her eyes unblinking.
Tomorrow. She would rise tomorrow.
Across Kostoveim, unseen eyes watched from the shadows. The flowing, rushing form was too swift and too ephemeral to be spotted by mortal eyes, but its effects could be felt by the exceptionally sensitive. But it watched them nevertheless, a thousand scenes of mundane torment spread before it like a feast before a prisoner starved.
In the corner of a glazier’s storefront it found the craftsman’s apprentice huddled in a corner, tears staining the boy’s face, his ribs still aching with the dull soreness of the drunken beating his master had given him. The thing in the shadows loomed over the boy, close enough to smell the salt on the child’s cheeks, before moving on in search of more varied prey.
Screams of agony drew it to a flakboard home in the oldest part of the city. A rich aura of pain emanated from a candlelit room, where the shadow found a cluster of humans attending a woman in the throes of childbirth. From the shadowy corner it stared, its thin, black lip curled up in revulsion. There was pain here, true, and fear aplenty, but it was spoilt by a flood of joy and hope as well. It drew a deep breath, savouring what sustenance it could take from the corrupted offering, and then was gone.
In the shrouded alleys, it paused to watch a man being gutted over a gambling debt. Even after the knife-wielding perpetrators fled into the night, it lingered over the fallen victim, drinking the man’s agony as he tried to crawl across the cobbles to some imagined safety. The victim was sotted, his senses dulled by drink, so his fear and pain were only a fraction of what they might have been.
After centuries of starvation, the pricks and stings of the city were a joy and a hideous curse to the shadow. Each new sufferance was burning, crimson relief: a draught of wine to a man dying of thirst. Yet each sip was torment. Almost better to have nothing at all than to have too little. Centuries had passed with only floating wisps of sustenance, and now it was forced to accept a trickle when a flood was demanded – was there for the taking before its very claws.
Down the alleys it flickered and flowed, back to the palace. Back to the place of its imprisonment. Back to the site of its freedom.
The scuttling guards took no notice of it. Why would they? To them it was a shadow on a moonless night. It was as much a part of the background as the stones of the wall, as the paintings of governors past that had hung there for centuries. It paused as it passed the strutting figure of the major-domo. Shadowy fingers extended, stroking the air just behind the marching man’s exposed neck. The soldier paused, feeling the chill run up his spine, and turned. The shadow flowed as effortlessly as sin, flattening against the wall as the soldier’s gaze fixed on the empty hallway. It thrilled at the spooky chill which emanated from the major-domo, who turned back to his path and marched on, his stride slightly quickened by the unexplained sense of dread.
So little, it knew, but soon there would be so much. The teeming, filthy herds of humanity had grown fat during its long incarceration. The air was choked with the stench of their sweat, their heaving breath, their bleating, braying voices. It was a world of prey who had forgotten that predators even existed.
The shadow flowed once more into the master bedroom where its patron slept fitfully. It knelt by her bedside, its burning eyes staring at her slumbering features. Only a mild unease floated from her now. In the first nights of its freedom, she had been plagued by the horrors she had witnessed, the churning nocturnal terrors occasionally driving her to wake screaming. Time had salved her wound, as it did, but the shadow knew that was inevitable.
The air held the thinnest scent of a far richer taste, however. The taste of remorse was one of the rarest in the world. More than a pain of the body, it was a pain of the soul. Only a spark, now, but the human gently slumbering in the bed, her mind only occasionally stirring with the faintest notions of what she’d unleashed, held the potential for a far grander feast to come.
If there was one building on Ceocan that dwarfed even the governor’s palace for both size and ostentation, it was the central cathedral in Kostoveim. The massive church had been built in the low-lying central portion of the city, as the focus of the Great Reconstruction. Building materials had been brought in from far away to construct the house of worship. So high were its vaulted ceilings that the carmine roof tiles were visible at any point in the city proper. The central tower rose high enough that travellers could use its illumination as a navigation point during stormy nights.
The governor’s carriage threaded through the wrought iron gates. Several of the penitent brigade moved to close the gates behind her. Despite its size and grandeur, the cathedral of Kostoveim was too small to warrant protection from the Ecclesiarchy’s trained militants. Instead, its defence was seen to by the volunteer penitents, those citizens of Ceocan who pledged their lives and service to the Ministorum in exchange for sustenance and shelter. Ashielle noted with some discomfort that she had never seen so many penitents before. Even as a child, the notion of accepting a penitent’s habit had been seen as an act of desperation, something only accepted by former criminals or outcasts. Now, the cathedral had them employed not only as guards and sentries, but menials and servants.
The façade of the cathedral had been commissioned and completed after the Great Reconstruction, and had been intended to send an ironclad message: a reminder that the attentions of the Imperium might wax or wane in their intensity, but the presence of Him upon the Throne was eternal. The grand doors had been made from a lustrous grey metal that had never shown signs of abrasion, corrosion or degradation in the millennia since their installation. The rose window above them was large enough to fly a landing craft through, and studded with basal crystal panels in a dizzying kaleidoscope of colours. Images of great men in ancient power armour flanked the rose window, their war-plate decorated with the ultima. At the apex of the façade, the Emperor of Mankind stood in profile, His noble gaze cast to the east. In the middle of the night on Reunification Day, His gaze into the night sky lined up with the direction of Holy Terra, His graven visage seeing the distant star that mortal eyes could never discern in the blackness. Behind Him, the great aquila spread its bronze wings.
The thoroughfare was blocked to carriages beyond the great entry, forcing visitors beyond that to proceed on foot. The blockade was topped by a statue of Saint Sebastian, his unforgiving visage graven in black marble shot through with veins of gold. The pilasters of the façade were embellished with images of the lesser saints, elongated to fit the proportions of the fake columns. Ashielle was surprised to find the deacon waiting for her near Sebastian Thor’s stone feet. Petty displays of power were common among high-ranking luminaries, and she had come with every expectation of being made to wait, or at least being escorted inside and treated to a display of Phoebian’s power and resources.
Instead, the deacon met her at the narthex of the great cathedral. A small flock of attendants crowded around her. Most of her entourage consisted of lower-ranking clergy, but near the back Ashielle could see two or three scarred, dead-eyed faces she imagined were still being diligently sought by enforcers in some part of the world or another.
‘Your eminence,’ Ashielle said. One of the attendants slid a stool in front of the deacon, and Ashielle lowered her knees to the cushioned surface.
‘Your excellency.’ Deacon Phoebian held her hand out to the young governor, who dutifully bent her knee and brushed her lips across the adamantium aquila on the deacon’s finger. At an official state function such as her father’s funeral, the governor would not normally be required to genuflect. Since she was the one calling on the deacon unbidden, it was customary to offer a show of deference to the Ministorum.
‘Did I call at an inopportune time?’ Ashielle asked, regarding the deacon’s entourage. She dismissed her own guards with a flick of her fingers. Sullenly, both men stepped back to stand guard over the carriage. A small spike of pain lanced through her hand as she stood, and she rubbed the silver cap on the end of her missing finger.
‘Hardly,’ said Deacon Phoebian. ‘I was just out taking my exercise. I thought a little walk along the Saint’s Arcade would afford us the time to talk to your satisfaction.’
Of course, such a venue would also offer the elderly deacon a plausible excuse to end the conversation at any time by claiming fatigue. Clever, Ashielle realised.
‘What can I do for you, excellency?’
Ashielle fell in with the deacon, uncertain of how candid she would be able to be if the deacon’s followers accompanied them the entire way. To her relief, the hangers-on fell away immediately. The deacon set off down the arcade with a measured stride that belied her frail frame. The stone arches of the arcade shielded them from the sun.
‘I wanted to talk to you about history, your eminence.’ Ashielle didn’t want to dance around the topic, but at the same time she wasn’t going to put all her cards on the table at once, lest the deacon suddenly reveal a fanaticism deep enough to impugn even a governor.
‘In what regard?’
‘What do you know of Ceocan’s history, prior to the Great Restoration?’
The deacon nodded. ‘I thought that might be what you wanted to discuss,’ she said. ‘Was there anything specific you were curious about?’
Ashielle smiled. Getting herself out of bed had taken an extreme act of will. In her mind, it had been easier to take her own finger off. But now that she was in the moment, matching her own wits against another woman of high station, she found her drive and confidence returning.
‘I’ve been reading through my father’s notes,’ she lied, ‘and I came across a mention of a town in Garenvos. Specifically, a construction project that unearthed an Old Ceoc burial mound.’
