Descent of Angels (36 page)

‘Did anyone ask the Saroshi for an explanation?’

‘According to the Saroshi, crime is rare on their world. When a crime is committed, they punish the criminal by making him work more hours in their bureaucratic service.’

‘Even the murderers?’ frowned Zahariel. ‘That sounds unlikely.’

‘There’s something else. As part of the process of compliance, the calculus logi with the fleet asked to see the census data from Sarosh for the last decade. I have no head for figures, brother, but something I heard when the logi reported back to the fleet strategium has stayed with me. Based on the planet’s birth-rate and the number of deaths recorded in the census, it is estimated the population on Sarosh should be much bigger than the figure the Saroshi have reported back to us. When asked about this, the Saroshi government claimed the census data must be in error.’

‘What kind of figure are we talking about?’ Zahariel asked him.

‘Eight per cent,’ Kurgis told him. ‘Put that way it doesn’t sound much, I know, but if the calculations are right, it means more than seventy million people have disappeared on Sarosh in the course of the last ten years.’

I
T WAS A
wonderful night. As Rhianna walked the streets and passages of the city of Shaloul she marvelled at the extraordinary sights she saw all around her. The festival Dusan had spoken of earlier was in full swing. The streets were crowded with masked revellers, the roadways made vibrant with colour as legions of lithe dancers swayed rhythmically along in outlandish costumes, trailing swooping kites and long paper streamers behind them.

She saw jugglers and painted clowns, contortionists and sleight-of-handers, mummers and mimics, tumblers and acrobats. She saw giants on stilts, sword-devourers and men breathing fire, and, above it all, she heard the music.

Strange sounds drifted to her from across the carnival throng. The songs of Sarosh were beautiful, yet perplexing. They switched mood constantly, alternating between complex patterns of harmony and discord, expressing conflicting emotions of sorrow and joy without warning.

She heard musical notes and key changes she never even knew existed, as though some special quality of the music had broadened the range of her hearing.

Underlying it all, almost hidden, were the most startling rhythmic variations she had heard in her life.

Listening to the sounds of Sarosh, Rhianna understood for the first time just how perfect and splendid music could be. She had trained her entire life as a composer, but nothing she had written could compare to the astonishing sounds she heard echoing through these streets. It was an experience as heady in its own way as the perfume of the flowers had been on the balcony.

Dusan was beside her, his hand at her elbow, leading her through the crowds. Earlier in the day, when Rhianna had made landfall, they were told that the Saroshi authorities had assigned them each a guide to ensure they would not get lost. She supposed Dusan was intended to serve as her minder as much as anything else, following forever close at hand to keep her out of trouble.

Initially, when they met, she had asked him what he did for a living. He had told her he was an exegetist. As she understood it, he was a professional explainer. Due to the scale of bureaucracy on Sarosh, it was not uncommon for even relatively trivial matters of governance to become fiendishly complicated as dozens of bureaucrats had their say on the issue, each with a different interpretation of the planet’s statutes.

These situations sometimes escalated to long-running disputes lasting up to twenty years or more, long after all those involved in it had forgotten the question that had initially triggered the impasse.

In such occurrences, an exegetist was hired to research the causes of the dispute and explain it to the contesting parties to ensure they fully understood it.

It was a curious system, but whatever the byzantine complexity of local custom, Rhianna had suffered far less convivial escorts in the past. In the initial months of the Imperial presence, on the few occasions she had been granted permission to explore Sarosh, she had been accompanied by a half-squad of Imperial Army troopers stalking her steps like bored and ill-tempered shadows.

It had been embarrassing, not to mention difficult to establish a rapport with the local people when a fireteam of heavily armed men lurked just over your shoulder.

Thankfully, in recent months, at the urging of Lord Governor-Elect Furst, the fleet had adopted a more enlightened approach. The planet of Sarosh might not be officially one hundred per cent compliant, but it had been decided it was safe enough to permit Imperial personnel to walk about on their own without requiring a full military escort.

At the same time, in the hope of building bridges between the locals and the Imperials, Army and fleet commanders had begun to allow more of their men to visit Sarosh on shore leave.

‘This way,’ said Dusan.

At some point in the night, he had begun to steer her through the streets as though he had a specific destination in mind. His grip on her elbow had grown tighter, but she found she hardly noticed. Drunk on the music and the scent of purple flowers, she let him lead.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked him, dimly perceiving that her words sounded slurred.

‘There is a place where they make better music,’ he said from behind his mask. ‘It is just a little further.’

He began to walk faster, his hold on her arm forcing her to hurry her pace to keep up with him. Looking around, Rhianna became suddenly aware that they had left the main boulevards behind for a series of twisting, narrow alleyways.

It was dark. The glow-globes that had once floated above their heads had abandoned them, staying behind at some distant corner. They were alone in the night, the only light coming from the silver sickle of the moon high overhead.

Despite the darkness, Dusan did not miss a step. He seemed to know exactly where they were heading.

‘Dusan? I don’t like this.’ She found it harder to speak. Her tongue felt numb. ‘I want you to take me back.’

He did not answer. No longer in the humour to explain anything, he dragged her through the alleyways as a creeping paralysis spread through her limbs. She realised he had poisoned her somehow. The air was heavy with the scent of flowers.

Flowers. Perhaps that was how he did it. She was staggering, barely able to keep her feet, even less able to fight him.

‘Dusan…’ Her words sounded distant and hollow. ‘Why?’

‘I am sorry. It is the only way. The Melachim have decreed you are an unclean people. Your liar angels must not be allowed to pollute us. You will be our weapon against them and there will be pain, I am afraid. It seems cruel, I know, but be assured you serve a higher purpose.’

They turned a corner into a courtyard. Ahead, Rhianna could see a handcart of the kind used to sell bottled drinks to the carnival revellers. Two figures stood by the side of it, wearing baggy multi-coloured costumes covered in dangling knots and ribbons.

Seeing them, Dusan released his hold, allowing Rhianna’s body to fall unceremoniously onto the cobbled surface of the courtyard. She heard him snap out orders in his native tongue, and then she saw the two figures advance towards her.

There was something wrong in the way they moved. Whoever had made their costumes had tried to cover it, but Rhianna could see it clearly. They walked with an odd sideways gait, their knees and ankles flexing at peculiar angles.

Their mannerisms put her in mind of the movements of reptiles.

There was something unnatural about them. The closer they came, the more she became convinced they were inhuman. Paralysed, she could only watch as they drew nearer and looked down upon her. As the two strange, clownish figures bent forward to lift her between them, Rhianna saw the mask on one of them slip for a moment.

She saw his true face.

Despite her paralysis, she screamed.

TWENTY

‘N
OT TO SEEM
dismissive of what is potentially a terrible human tragedy,’ said Nemiel, ‘but do you remember you told me there was a chance that seventy million people had gone missing on Sarosh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I think I know what happened to them. From the look of it, I’d say their leader ate them.’

He made the comment by private encrypted channel, vox to vox, so no one else could listen in on the conversation. For his own part, Zahariel was glad he was wearing his helmet. If not, the notables and functionaries crowding the deck might have seen his sudden smile.

Their exchange took place on the embarkation deck. A visiting delegation of government officials from Sarosh had come aboard the
Invincible Reason
via shuttle, and the Lion had insisted they be greeted with all due ceremony. Zahariel had been chosen to lead the honour guard for the Saroshi delegation, alongside Nemiel and a selection of men from the first squads of their respective companies.

It was a serious business, at least as far as the commander of the Legion was concerned.

Zahariel had never felt entirely at home at such high state occasions, but his devotion to duty meant he had accepted the task without argument. Still, it would have been easier to treat it with solemnity if it was not for his cousin’s voice in his ear, secretly denigrating the guests and deflating their pretensions.

‘I mean, look at him,’ said Nemiel, unheard by anyone but Zahariel. ‘He’s nearly as big as an Astartes, and that’s just his gut! If you ask me, these people should start calling him the lord wide exalter.’

It was true, the lord high exalter – to give him his proper title – was fat, almost stupendously so. Zahariel estimated him at a little under two metres in height, but the enormous girth of his belly was so pronounced that it made him look more like a ball with arms and legs than a man.

His stature seemed doubly unusual because every other Saroshi that Zahariel had seen to date tended to be slim and lithe in build. Whatever his misgivings about their habit of going masked, Zahariel had to admit that they were a graceful people.

Barring the extravagance of their golden masks, the Saroshi leaned towards simplicity in their garments, men and women wearing little more than sandals and a robe wrapped loosely around their bodies, held in place with metal clasps at the shoulder and a belt at the waist. From what he had learned, they cultivated the same simplicity in their daily lives, leading a quiet, peaceful existence that eschewed both war and violence.

According to Imperial surveyors, the only time the Saroshi showed any excess of emotion was during regular festivals of the kind currently being held on the planet’s surface to celebrate the Dark Angels joining the Imperial fleet.

During these carnivals, many of the normal rules of social behaviour on Sarosh were suspended, allowing for a temporary licentiousness, which had been a source of unexpected pleasure to those Army and fleet personnel granted shore leave to attend the festivities.

As an Astartes, he was above such concerns, but Zahariel understood there was widespread disappointment among some of the fleet’s officers that duty had forced them to be present during the ceremony to welcome the lord high exalter and his delegation when they would rather have been on Sarosh for the carnival.

Zahariel had ordered the men of the honour guard to form up in two lines facing each other, leaving a broad avenue between them for the lord high exalter and his entourage to pass down. The Lion had offered to send one of the Dark Angels’ Stormbirds to pick up the Saroshi party, but the high exalter had insisted on using his own shuttle, an ancient conveyance with over-sized engines that struggled to lift its mass from planetary gravity and had only now passed through the rippling integrity field that prevented the internal atmosphere from bleeding out into space.

Zahariel did not know quite what he had expected the most senior political leader on Sarosh to look like, but the waddling corpulent creature that emerged from the shuttle had never featured in his thoughts. Given that he had grown up in the harsh environment of Caliban, Zahariel had never even seen anyone who could be called fat until he had left his homeworld and visited other human cultures elsewhere in the Imperium.

Shockingly, unlike the rest of his people, the lord high exalter did not wear a mask. His face was exposed, revealing a sweating, florid featured, middle-aged man with a bullfrog neck, who seemed unable to move at anything faster than a slow processional stride.

There was a symbol drawn on his forehead in an indigo-coloured dye: a circle with two unevenly sized upturned wings at its base. In the style of some barbarian potentate, he was flanked on either side by young women bearing baskets of purple flowers, which were strewn in his path to be crushed to scented pulp by his ample tread.

‘Visitors aboard!’ called out Zahariel, switching his helmet vox to external address as the lord high exalter stepped between the twin ranks of Dark Angels. ‘Honour guard, salute!’

As one, the Dark Angels complied in a smooth motion, crossing their arms in front of their chests in the sign of the aquila.

‘Angels of the Imperium, we salute you,’ said the lord high exalter, waving a bloated hand as he passed. ‘Praise the Emperor and all his works. We welcome you to Sarosh.’

‘And may I welcome you to the flagship
Invincible Reason
, my lord,’ said the Lion, stepping forward to greet him. Behind him stood Luther, looking about as pleased to be at this ceremony as Zahariel felt.

The primarch of the Dark Angels wore his ceremonial armour, his surplice freshly pressed and starched with the symbol of the Dark Angels picked out in crimson thread. ‘I am Lion El’Jonson, legion commander of the First Legion, the Dark Angels.’

‘Legion commander?’ said the lord high exalter, raising a painted eyebrow. ‘You are the autarch here, then? These angels serve you?’

‘They serve the Emperor,’ corrected the Lion, ‘but if you meant to ask if I am their leader, then the answer is yes.’

‘I am pleased to meet you, master of angels. We have much to discuss. My people are very eager to become… compliant, I believe you call it. Too much time has been wasted already, lost to cultural misapprehension and foolish misunderstandings. Today, we can begin a new page in the relationship between us. Are the other leaders of your fleet present? I had hoped to address them all and make clear how ready we are on Sarosh to take the final steps to becoming full Imperial citizens.’