Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

The pilgrim throng was swaying like the crops that had stood where they now walked. Whooping prayers lifted into the air. Inside the tent of glass, the priests were gathering around the altar box. She could see them sway as they sang their secret songs and swung incense smoke around the reliquary. From their point of view, her seeing this would be a blasphemy; she was not of the priesthood, and not initiated into the mysteries of the Emperor’s Eternal Light. The pilgrims who circled the tabernacle would have torn her apart if they had known that she could see a priest open the first leaf of the reliquary. They would have been even more incensed that she could see an acolyte at the back of the group pick his nose. A kilometre away from them, she snorted with laughter.

‘Something diverting?’ asked Memnon.

‘No,’ she said, still watching the priests, ‘not really, just… Don’t you sometimes think humanity is too petty for divinity? If we found the Emperor’s frozen tears someone would give them to a child as a toy.’

‘That is what defines the divine – that it is beyond us.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’

Seen from above, the tabernacle itself was a mountain made of ­triangular sheets of glass, each one tethered to another, the smallest on the outside just a couple of metres tall, the largest over fifty metres in height. Its apex was a blade point thrust at the sun. Even though each sheet of glass was transparent, those stood on the outside could see only a handful of layers inside. Rainbows of blinding light scattered from its faces and edges, hiding the sanctuary at its core. Once the ceremony began, only a few of the pilgrims would be allowed inside. There was no straight way to the centre of the structure, just an ever-weaving path between sheets of reflection. If a pilgrim reached the sanctuary itself, they would be able to turn, and – thanks to the precise setting of each glass pane – see perfectly in every direction.

She opened her true eyes and for a moment felt vertigo as the sight from her hawks clashed with the world in front of her. Then the two split and the hawk’s eye view receded to the back of her mind.

‘I see no indications of the prospect,’ she said.

Memnon reached beneath his robes and withdrew a small box of bone. Ash tattoos marched down his cheeks in rows of tiny dots, each one faded to grey. His patchwork robes fluttered in the warm breeze. He alone was not dressed in pilgrim blue, but in the faded and torn cloth that he always wore. Ninkurra had often thought that he looked more like a beggar or an ascetic monk than an inquisitor. He looked young, at least young in the way that people judged such things, maybe no more than three decades to the eye. Ninkurra saw his lips move in silent prayer before he opened the lid of the box. He took a pinch of dust from within, and cast it into the air. The grey powder caught the breeze. Memnon watched it, face impassive, until it had dissolved into the wind. Ninkurra had no idea what he looked for, but she knew that he saw more than dust vanishing on the wind.

‘It is coming,’ he said at last. ‘Order the gunships to come in.’

Ninkurra obeyed, transmitting the command with a thought.

‘I am reading low-grade atmospheric interference across multiple spectra.’ Geddon’s voice was a scratched patchwork of static and voice samples. The auspextra was sweating profusely under the sun’s glare. Sweat stuck her blue pilgrim’s robe to her hunched body. Bulbous curves of metal gleamed in the gaps between the lank cloth. The heat sinks of her signal and scanning arrays must have been cooking her, reflected Ninkurra. ‘Static and moisture levels are rising. Pressure inversion unfolding at one hundred metres above ground level.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Ninkurra, glancing back.

‘There is a storm coming,’ said Geddon.

Ninkurra snorted. ‘It’s clear blue to beyond the horizon,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Memnon softly, and raised a hand to point up. ‘Look.’

Ninkurra followed the line of his long finger. She squinted against the light, raising a hand to shield her eyes. Then she saw it – a smudge of white in the clear air. A gust of air tugged at her robe, and she was aware of the same wind pulling at her hawks as they turned above the tabernacle.

‘You may wish to bring your birds back,’ said Geddon. ‘All readings are spiking.’

Above the tabernacle the patch of cloud was growing, expanding up and out, darkening. She could hear the voices of pilgrims rising in ­puzzlement. Through the eyes of her hawks, she saw the black dots of the gunships rise from above the horizon. Even the voices of the priests in the tabernacle were faltering. The outer layers of glass shook in the rising wind.