A vox-crackle spoke into his ear. ‘Did you kill a fish, brother-sergeant?’
‘First blood to me, Phareous.’
‘It only counts if you kill it,’ said Zarrael.
‘Are you using a secure squad link to keep tally?’ grumbled Baldarich. Kjarvik did not think that the Black Templar liked him very much.
The huge metal wall of Hive Mundus’ exterior shell soaked up his light beam. It was a sheer cliff face of adamantium composite, encrusted with organisms that had spent the last five thousand years evolving to break it down. Kjarvik surveyed it quickly, beam nipping left, right, up, down. Its visual appearance aligned with the schematics that the tech-priests had released to Bohr. The deep ocean had shielded the hive’s foundations from the orbital strikes that had devastated the surface, and given a base for the orks to subsequently rebuild.
But it had been weakened. Kjarvik could see the hairline fractures in the plating.
‘Kjarvik. In position.’ He uncoupled the melta mine from its hip suspensor and clamped it to the wall, voxing it in as he backed up to put some distance between himself and it. Four more confirmations came swiftly back.
‘Detonation in three,’ voxed Bohr.
Kjarvik turned to the Sister. Her blank face was illuminated by the cold square of lumen strips that outlined the edges of her pressure mask.
‘Two.’
He clasped the woman’s wrist in his gauntlet. She turned to him questioningly, and he grinned. He was the Stormcrow. The unlucky.
‘One.’
Two
Tomorrow, he would be dead.
That view was Mesring’s own. His deterioration continued to baffle the mindless flow of hospitallers, physicae, and witch doctors that his personal staff summoned to his bedside. The cramps that woke him in the night to screaming agony at the passage of anything more fortifying than filtered water across his lips mystified them. As for the bouts of dizziness, the sweats, the lucid nightmares where he raved of plots and blasphemy — well, they were cause for great consternation. Every test was returned negative. Every palliative or medicament applied did nothing. It led even the most long-serving and decent amongst his staff to question whether it was simply his time. That he, Erekart Veneris Sanguinan Mesring, had served the divine Emperor for as long as He willed it.
Mesring would have sneered had he that much strength. The Emperor could not will Himself out of His own throne.
His opinion on his prospects, however, seemed to be one that his closest aides shared. He could think of no other reason, besides another ghastly hallucination, for the presence of Arch-Confessor Vitori Mendelyev beside him for his final hours.
‘This is a beautiful shrine,’ said Mendelyev. The old man took a deep breath of shriven air and candle smoke. ‘Peaceful.’ He had a soft, calming voice, an open face, both of which Mesring supposed were aids to his duties as confessor to the powerful.
‘I will not keel over on cue,’ Mesring snarled, fingernails digging into the wood back of the pew in front with his efforts at not crying out for the pain twisting in his gut. This was why he had sat in the second row when, as Ecclesiarch, the Emperor’s mortal representative on Terra, he could sit wherever he damn well pleased.
‘Of course,’ said Mendelyev, and fell silent. His eyes were closed, his lips moving soundlessly, his bald head dappled with the light of over a million candles. One for every world in the Emperor’s demesne. Mesring gave a rustling cackle, bringing the taste of old vomit back up into his mouth. Someone was failing to keep tally. There should be a few less of the things and their insufferable flickering by now.
The Cardinals’ Wake was a private sanctuary for the most senior clergy of the Adeptus Ministorum. The area was too sacred, and too sensitive, for their junior colleagues, and so even the most menial of functions from changing the oils in the scenting bowls to cleansing the colossal clerestory of stained glass were peformed by deacons and lectors, old men who could have been anointed primates of entire sectors and lived in commensurate luxury, but had instead opted to sweep the floors here. Mesring’s contempt for them was as limitless as the stars. The occasional Mechanicus adept, garbed respectfully in the palest off-white pink, worked out of sight beneath the basalt and gold statues of saints and Ecclesiarchs past, all the way back to Veneris I.
No effort was made to mask the great fibre-bundles and conduits that ran through the cathedra from the blessed machinery of the Golden Throne. It was sacred to both worlds, Terra and Mars, and the gentle susurrus of its continual operation was equally soothing to auditory systems of nerves and of wire. That was why the cardinals had held vigil here since the Emperor’s internment, and was what brought Mesring here now. Though he did not seek peace.
‘Doomed, all of you,’ he muttered, shivering, glaring at the handful of grey-haired clergy sat in silent prayer throughout the shrine. ‘Better to placate the Great Beast than trust in Him.’
‘The Emperor forgives and protects,’ said Mendelyev placidly, as though he had heard every deathbed blasphemy imagined by man.
‘It was the Emperor’s trespasses that brought the slow death to mankind. Ten millennia of decay and then final damnation. That is the loving bequest I foresee. One that only the Beast offers salvation from.’
The confessor, though bound for the same hell that awaited them all, of which Mesring now suffered but a fleeting foretaste, merely smiled. ‘In His deathless state, the Emperor reveals His divinity.’
‘Spare me. I can recite all the hypocrisy from memory.’
‘You want some new truth?’ said Mendelyev, soft still but with a firmer edge. ‘You have lived long and well, eminence. To all outward appearances you have been a paragon of the virtues of the Creed.’ Mesring caught the subtle reprimand. ‘The Emperor thinks little of self-pity. Believe me in this, eminence, that nothing eases a man’s passing like a little grace at the end.’
‘Grace,’ Mesring spat. ‘Vulkan is dead!’
The confessor shrugged. ‘As are many of his brothers.’
‘You seem remarkably sanguine.’
‘Worries are for the young.’
‘Old men dying with grace is what keeps the sheep in their pens and the wolves at the door.’
For all that they were used as metaphors in scripture wherever one looked, Mesring had never seen a wolf. They were the forest, the mountains, the night; the ancestral dread of upright apes that after a thousand generations of hive cities and nuclear winters still hadn’t lost a fear of the dark. They were what would emerge from the sump after the last lumen bulb sputtered out: not Chaos, but what Chaos made be.
Mesring blinked dizzily, realising that his voice was raised and echoing from the distant machinery, but also that a dying man couldn’t care less who he disturbed.
‘The Imperial Fists were destroyed, Vitori. It was Udo’s lie that put imposters bearing the black fist on their walls. My lie also. And Koorland upholds it. The people believe in a lie. They are all lies.’
To his surprise, tears were running down his cheeks.
Mendelyev clasped his shoulder kindly. ‘The Ecclesiarch weeps. This is good. Unburden yourself of your sins.’
‘I weep because I want to take off Vangorich’s head and stick it on a pole!’
‘Speak to me, eminence. I am here to listen, to whatever it is you need to say.’
Mesring looked up at the scrape of approaching footsteps, but it was merely a passing sexton come to relight the candles. With a cough that brought up some more blood, he reached into the sweat-soiled inner pocket of his surplice and withdrew a glass vial. It was empty. He placed it on the prayer table in front of Mendelyev.
‘What is this?’ the confessor asked.