False Gods (34 page)

Karkasy smiled and wondered what that old man would have said if he could see the truth of the Imperium taking its secular light to the far corners of the galaxy. On the other hand, perhaps this
Lectitio Divinitatus
cult was vindication of his words: proof that, in the face of that emptiness, man had chosen to invent new gods to replace the ones that had passed out of memory.

Karkasy wasn’t aware of the Emperor having transubstantiated from man to god, but the cult’s literature, which was appearing with the same regularity as his own publications, claimed that he had already risen beyond mortal concerns.

He shook his head at such foolishness, already working out how to incorporate this weighty pontificating into his new poems. His billet was just ahead, and as he reached towards the recessed handle, he immediately knew that something was wrong.

The door was slightly ajar and the reek of ammonia filled the corridor, but even over that powerful smell, Karkasy detected a familiar, pervasive aroma that could mean only one thing. The impertinent ditty he had composed for Euphrati Keeler concerning the stink of the Astartes leapt to mind, and he knew who would be behind the door, even before he opened it.

He briefly considered simply walking away, but realised that there would be no point.

He took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

Inside, his cabin was a mess, though it was a mess of his own making rather than that of any intruder. Standing with his back to him and seeming to fill the small space with his bulk was, as he’d expected, Captain Loken.

‘Hello, Ignace,’ said Loken, putting down one of the Bondsman number 7’s. Karkasy had filled two of them with random jottings and thoughts, and he knew that Loken wouldn’t be best pleased with what he must have read. You didn’t need to be a student of literature to understand the vitriol written there.

‘Captain Loken,’ replied Karkasy. ‘I’d ask to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, but we both know why you’re here, don’t we?’

Loken nodded, and Karkasy, feeling his heart pounding in his chest, saw that the Astartes was holding his anger in check by the finest of threads. This was not the raging fury of Abaddon, but a cold steel rage that could destroy him without a moment’s pause or regret. Suddenly Karkasy realised how dangerous his newly rediscovered muse was and how foolish he’d been in thinking he would remain undiscovered for long. Strangely, now that he was unmasked, he felt his defiance smother the fire of his fear, and knew that he had done the right thing.

‘Why?’ hissed Loken. ‘I vouched for you, remembrancer. I put my good name on the line for you and this is how I am repaid?’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Karkasy. ‘You did vouch for me. You made me swear to tell the truth and that is what I have been doing.’

‘The truth?’ roared Loken, and Karkasy quailed before his anger, remembering how easily the captain’s fists had bludgeoned people to death. ‘This is not the truth, this is libellous trash! Your lies are already spreading to the rest of the fleet. I should kill you for this, Ignace.’

‘Kill me? Just like you killed all those innocent people on the embarkation deck?’ shouted Karkasy. ‘Is that what Astartes justice means now? Someone gets in your way or says something you don’t agree with and you kill them? If that’s what our glorious Imperium has come to then I want nothing to do with it.’

He saw the anger drain from Loken and felt a momentary pang of sorrow for him, but quashed it as he remembered the blood and screams of the dying. He lifted a collection of poems and held them out to Loken. ‘Anyway, this is want you wanted.’

‘You think I wanted this?’ said Loken, hurting the pamphlets across the billet and looming over him. ‘Are you insane?’

‘Not at all, my dear captain,’ said Karkasy, affecting a calm he didn’t feel. ‘I have you to thank for this.’

‘Me? What are you talking about?’ asked Loken, obviously confused. Karkasy could see the chink of doubt in Loken’s bluster. He offered the bottle of wine to Loken, but the giant warrior shook his head.

‘You told me to keep telling the truth, ugly and unpalatable as it might be,’ said Karkasy, pouring some wine into a cracked and dirty tin mug. ‘The truth is all we have, remember?’

‘I remember,’ sighed Loken, sitting down on Karkasy’s creaking cot bed.

Karkasy let out a breath as he realised the immediate danger had passed, and took a long, gulping drink of the wine. It was poor a vintage and had been open for too long, but it helped to calm his jangling nerves. He pulled a high backed chair from his writing desk and sat before Loken, who held his hand out for the bottle.

‘You’re right, Ignace, I did tell you to do this, but I never imagined it would lead us to this place,’ said Loken, taking a swig from the bottle.

‘Nor I, but it has,’ replied Karkasy. ‘The question now becomes what are you going to do about it?’

‘I don’t really know, Ignace,’ admitted Loken. ‘I think you are being unfair to the Mournival, given the circumstances we found ourselves in. All we—’

‘No,’ interrupted Karkasy, ‘I’m not. You Astartes stand above us mortals in all regards and you demand our respect, but that respect has to be earned. It requires your ethics to be without question. You not only have to stay above the line between right and wrong, you also have to stay well clear of the grey areas in-between.’

Loken laughed humourlessly. ‘I thought it was Sindermann’s job to be a teacher of ethics.’

‘Well, our dear Kyril has not been around much lately, has he?’ said Karkasy. ‘I admit I’m somewhat of a latecomer to the ranks of the righteous, but I know that what I am doing is right. More than that, I know it’s
necessary
!’

‘You feel that strongly about this?’

‘I do, captain. More strongly than I have felt about anything in my life.’

‘And you’ll keep publishing this?’ asked Loken, lifting a pile of scribbled notes.

‘Is there a right answer to that question, captain?’ asked Karkasy.

‘Yes, so answer honestly.’

‘If I can,’ said Karkasy, ‘then I will.’

‘You will bring trouble down on us both, Ignace Karkasy,’ said Loken, ‘but if we have no truth, then we are nothing, and if I stop you speaking out then I am no better than a tyrant.’

‘So you’re not going to stop me writing, or send me back to Terra?’

‘I should, but I won’t. You should be aware that your poems have made you powerful enemies, Ignace, enemies who will demand your dismissal, or worse. As of this moment however, you are under my protection,’ said Loken.

‘You think I’ll need protection?’ asked Karkasy. ‘Definitely,’ said Loken.

‘I’
M
TOLD
YOU
wanted to see me,’ said Euphrati Keeler. ‘Care to tell me why?’

‘Ah, my dear, Euphrati,’ said Kyril Sindermann, looking up from his food. ‘Do come in.’

She’d found him in the sub-deck dining area after scouring the dusty passages of Archive Chamber Three for him for over an hour. According to the iterators left on the ship, the old man had been spending almost all of his time there, missing his lectures – not that there were any students to lecture just now – and ignoring the requests of his peers to join them for meals or drinks.

Torgaddon had left her to find Sindermann on her own, his duty discharged simply by bringing her back to the
Vengeful Spirit
. Then he had gone in search of Captain Loken, to travel back down to Davin with him. Keeler didn’t doubt that he’d pass on what he’d seen on the planet to Loken, but she no longer cared who knew of her beliefs. Sindermann looked terrible, his eyes haggard and grey, his features sallow and gaunt. ‘You don’t look good, Sindermann,’ she said. ‘I could say the same for you, Euphrati,’ said Sindermann. ‘You’ve lost weight. It doesn’t suit you.’

‘Most women would be grateful for that, but you didn’t have one of the Astartes fetch me back here to comment on my eating habits, did you?’

Sindermann laughed, pushing aside the book he’d been poring over, and said, ‘No, you’re right, I didn’t.’

‘Then why did you?’ she asked, sitting opposite him. ‘If it’s because of something Ignace has told you, then save your breath.’

‘Ignace? No, I haven’t spoken to him for some time,’ replied Sindermann. ‘It was Mersadie Oliton who came to see me. She tells me that you’ve become quite the agitator for this
Lectitio Divinitatus
cult.’

‘It’s not a cult.’

‘No? Then what would you call it?’ She thought about it for a moment and then answered, ‘A new faith.’

‘A shrewd answer,’ said Sindermann. ‘If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to know more about it.’

‘You would? I thought you’d brought me back to try and teach me the error of my ways, to use your iterator’s wiles to try and talk me out of my beliefs.’

‘Not at all, my dear,’ said Sindermann. ‘You may think your tribute is paid in secret in the recesses of your heart, but it will out. We are a curious species when it comes to worship. The things that dominate our imagination determine our lives and our character. Therefore it behoves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.’

‘And what do you think we worship?’

Sindermann looked furtively around the sub-deck and produced a sheet of paper that she recognised immediately as one of the
Lectitio Divinitatus
pamphlets. ‘That’s what I want you to help me with. I have read this several times and I must admit that I am intrigued by the things it posits. You see, ever since the… events beneath the Whisperheads, I… I haven’t been sleeping too well and I thought to bury myself in my books. I thought that if I could understand what happened to us, then I could rationalise it.’

‘And did you?’

He smiled, but she could see the weariness and despair behind the gesture. ‘Honestly? No, not really, the more I read, the more I saw how far we’d come since the days of religious hectoring from an autocratic priesthood. By the same token, the more I read the more I realised there was a pattern emerging.’

‘A pattern? What kind of pattern?’

‘Look,’ said Sindermann, coming round the table to sit next to her, and flattening out the pamphlet before her. ‘Your
Lectitio Divinitatus
talks about how the Emperor has moved amongst us for thousands of year, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well in the old texts, rubbish mostly – ancient histories and lurid tales of barbarism and bloodshed – I found some recurring themes. A being of golden light appears in several of the texts and, much as I hate to admit it, it sounds a lot like what this paper describes. I don’t know what truth may lie in this avenue of investigation, but I would know more of it, Euphrati.’ She didn’t know what to say.

‘Look,’ he said, pulling the book around and turning it towards her. ‘This book is written in a derivation of an ancient human language, but one I haven’t seen before. I can make out certain passages, I think, but it’s a very complex structure and without some of the root words to make the right grammatical connections, it’s proving very difficult to translate.’

‘What book is it?’

‘I believe it to be the
Book of Lorgar
, although I haven’t been able to speak with First Chaplain Erebus to verify that fact. If it is, it may be a copy given to the Warmaster by Lorgar himself.’

‘So why does that make it so important?’

‘Don’t you remember the rumours about Lorgar?’ asked Sindermann urgently. ‘That he too worshipped the Emperor as a god? It’s said that his Legion devastated world after world for not showing the proper devotion to the Emperor, and then raised up great monuments to him.’

‘I remember the tales, yes, but that’s all they are, surely?’

‘Probably, but what if they aren’t?’ said Sindermann, his eyes alight with the possibility of uncovering such knowledge. ‘What if a primarch, one of the Emperor’s sons no less, was privy to something we as mere mortals are not yet ready for? If my work so far is correct, then this book talks about bringing forth the essence of god. I must know what that means!’

Despite herself, Euphrati felt her pulse race with this potential knowledge. Undeniable proof of the Emperor’s divinity coming from Kyril Sindermann would raise the
Lectitio Divinitatus
far above its humble status and into the realm of a phenomenon that could spread from one side of the galaxy to the other.

Sindermann saw that realisation in her face and said, ‘Miss Keeler, I have spent my entire adult life promulgating the truth of the Imperium and I am proud of the work I have done, but what if we are teaching the wrong message? If you are right and the Emperor is a god, then what we saw beneath the mountains of Sixty-Three Nineteen represents a danger more horrifying than we can possibly imagine. If it truly was a spirit of evil then we need a divine being such as the Emperor, more than ever. I know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude – we’ve proven that time and time again. People are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and force action. They kill and revive, corrupt and cure. If being an iterator has taught me anything, it’s that men of words – priests, prophets and intellectuals – have played a more decisive role in history than any military leaders or statesmen. If we can prove the existence of god, then I promise you the iterators will shout that truth from the highest towers of the land.’

Euphrati stared, open mouthed, as Kyril Sindermann turned her world upside down: this arch prophet of secular truth speaking of gods and faith? Looking into his eyes, she saw the wracking self-doubt and crisis of identity that he had undergone since she had last seen him, understanding how much of him had been lost these last few days, and how much had been gained.

‘Let me see,’ she said, and Sindermann pushed the book in front of her.

The writing was an angular cuneiform, running up and down the page rather than along it, and right away she could see that she would be no help in its translation, although elements of the script looked somehow familiar.

‘I can’t read it,’ she said. ‘What does it say?’

‘Well, that’s the problem, I can’t tell exactly,’ said Sindermann. ‘I can make out the odd word, but it’s difficult without the grammatical key.’