Auric Gods

Chapter Eight City of Vorganthian, Kobor, within Terra’s light

He could sense her fear of him, though she hid it well. Micro-tremors in her cheek, neck and fingers, the slight dilation of the pupils, a scarcely detectable rise in heart rate and perspiration told Meroved all he needed to know.

‘I said, you’re late,’ he rumbled, still engaging with the data-feed as he addressed her. Six servo-arms, attached to a frame on his back and partially concealed by black robes, interfaced with the network of machinery delivering every scrap of information to Meroved for his analysis.

‘By whose definition?’ asked Gedd.

Meroved’s smile stayed hidden behind his vox-mask and the shadows of his hood.

‘I do believe you may have offended Xeus,’ he said.

‘That imp? The lamplighter? I can’t say I have a fond opinion of him, either.’ Gedd looked around, her keen grey eyes analysing everything. ‘What is this place? We’ve never met here before.’

‘Very old and well hidden,’ answered Meroved. ‘And we’ve never met anywhere before, Gedd.’

‘And yet I feel I know you.’

Meroved laughed, thunderous and resounding.

‘I’m glad you still find me amusing, but I have to know,’ said Gedd, ‘why did you bring me here? Two years, Meroved. Two years. And in all that time, never a face-to-face and never in your…’ She looked around, trying to find the word. ‘Lair. Either you’ve suddenly developed an inexplicable desire to trust or something is happening. It’s the suicides, isn’t it?’ She smiled ruefully. ‘I knew there was more to it.’

Meroved nodded.

‘Yes. You have found something, Gedd, and it relates to the deaths you describe.’

He took in the peacekeeper, her officer’s garb, her slightly drawn but not unattractive face, the black hair that had been cut short to be less of a hindrance in the field. She had a heavy build, broad-shouldered, muscular yet still athletic. Strong fingers, calloused from regularly loading and stripping her sidearm, betrayed her nervousness. Her work had aged her prematurely but only slightly, a litany of long, demanding shifts and a less than ideal diet. No evidence of rejuve, either. She favoured a heavy-gauge pistol, hip holstered; the blade strapped to her boot looked clean and sharp. All of this Meroved processed in less than a millisecond.

‘Though your colleague Arpa Klein is wrong about the cause.’

‘You’ve been watching me.’

‘Of course I have. That is my purpose. To watch,’ said Meroved. ‘What did you see?’

‘Ask your lamplighter. He was rudely poking around in my head.’

‘Xeus is a gatekeeper – he doesn’t gather information. We all have our roles, Gedd. We must merely play them the best way we can.’

Gedd did not appear mollified, but described what she and Klein had found in the tenement – the man shackled to the chair, his skull conspicuously distributed around the room; the volume of blood; the unspent pump-gun on the table; the fact there had been at least eleven other similar incidents in the last few weeks alone.

Meroved listened intently, absorbing every detail and filing it away alongside the constant data-stream spewing from his array of surveillance engines.

‘What else?’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘I want to know what you think. You have a theory.’

‘There are trends,’ Gedd went on. She made a face, attempting to summarise, and gesturing with her hands as if weighing the information and its value. ‘Disappearances, mysterious deaths, spontaneous combustion.’ She sniffed, trying to feign her insouciance, but Meroved could detect her unease. ‘Now we can add violent inter-cranial detonations to the list. I have a ream of reports and unsolved cases. Mostly low-hive. I think there’s one underlying cause and I think whoever is behind it is trying to stay out of sight by operating in places that will draw the least attention. And I think whatever they’re doing is increasing. Frequency, intensity, it’s going somewhere.’

Meroved listened intently, and when Gedd had finished he allowed the churn of the machines to fill the silence for a moment before deciding to speak.

‘Every city, every world has a pattern. Did you know that, Gedd?’

‘I’ve seen a pattern, and I’m fairly sure I know the origin point for this madness, but I don’t think you’re talking about just that, are you?’

‘We are not so far from Terra,’ said Meroved. ‘On this world, we live within His light, albeit at the very edge. But darkness encroaches, even here. Even now. Ever since the Rift… every­thing has changed.’

‘Including the pattern of this city.’

‘I am talking about the rhythms that define life in its usual state, its mundane comings and goings,’ said Meroved. ‘Anything is possible. The galaxy is vast, the Imperium’s worlds many, and there are old, old secrets that would threaten your grip on sanity were I to divulge them to you. Much therefore can be explained. Much therefore can be tolerated if a part of a small enough ratio. These quirks are simply that, inconsequential and innocuous. But, yes, in Vorganthian the pattern has changed. Even now, as you and I speak, it is moving.’ Meroved turned his hand for emphasis, his fingers half-clenched as if gripping an invisible object. ‘It is being reshaped.’ He nodded to Gedd. ‘I think you know this already, albeit on a crude, instinctive level.’

‘I’ll try not to take offence at that.’

‘Escalation, Gedd…’ Meroved narrowed his eyes, ‘and the slightest fraying of the edges.’ He illustrated the point by holding his thumb and forefinger a hair’s breadth apart. ‘Infinitesimal and almost unnoticed.’

‘Fraying?’ asked Gedd, her unease suddenly more apparent.

Meroved’s mouth curled into a humourless smile.

‘Reality, Gedd.’

Gedd paled but maintained her composure. ‘If I pretend to understand what you’re talking about, will you kill me? Is that why I’m here, because I know too much?’

Meroved gave a cold laugh. ‘That is precisely why you are here, Gedd. But I won’t kill you. I need your help.’

‘Why does this not feel like a promotion?’

Meroved engaged a hololithic projector built into his machine. It displayed a grainy image of a part of the city, rendered in three-dimensional green light. A red rune flickered over a small section of it. A warehouse.

‘Is this the same origin point you mentioned?’

Gedd took a closer look. ‘More precise than I had it, but…’ She nodded. She had brought up a similar schematic on her data-slate back in the bloody tenement room.

‘That’s the Hoard. It’s an abandoned commercia district in low-hive. Some habs, mainly warehouses. I need you to find out what’s there and report back. Observation only. You must go alone. The circle stays small. No one else must know, not until I am certain what it is we are dealing with.’

‘While you watch?’

Meroved suddenly rose from amongst the machines, the servo-frame detaching with a hiss of pneumatic pressure release. He had seen something on his myriad of screens and vox-feeds. He shrugged off his robes and padded over in bare feet and loose-fitting breeches towards an archway leading off from the chamber.

‘I have another matter to attend to.’

Ever since she had come into his service, Gedd had maintained theories about Meroved’s origins. At first she considered the Adeptus Arbites. His voice, his obvious authority, what he knew, his words and how he said them all pointed towards the Lex Imperialis. She had also considered the Inquisition, a theory that had fallen apart as soon as he had risen from the machine.

Meroved’s immensely muscled body shimmered in the light. His sheer size suggested transhuman, and his mental acuity went beyond exceptional into another spectrum entirely.

Gedd had thought some of his size could have been armour, but the sheer bulk and brawn hinted at beneath the now shed robes was all flesh and blood. He appeared almost sculpted, more a work of art than a man, though she also saw scars and the surgical evidence of augmentation. Part of the right leg, a section of shoulder, the right wrist – all shone metallically in the light.

Letters had been etched into his flesh using dark ink, long snaking syllables that coiled around his arms, his neck, across his back, his sides. Names, she realised, or parts of names. She noticed ‘Mero’ and ‘Ved’ amongst them.

Gedd could not help but stare.

‘The ink,’ she ventured. ‘It is military?’

‘Of a kind.’ He paused, seemingly unprepared for the question. ‘Though we were never supposed to be soldiers. That happened later.’

‘“We”?’

Meroved stopped to regard her, and Gedd saw his face properly.

‘A brotherhood of sorts.’

Without the vox-mask and hood, he had a noble face – old but with wisdom rather than age, though she saw signs of that too. A dark-haired beard, flecked with iron-grey, framed a sturdy chin. The head was closely shorn, barring a shaven strip of hair with blunt, brush-like ends that streaked back from just above the forehead and neatly divided the scalp into two equal hemispheres. A scar below the right eye suggested a serious wound, sustained a long time ago.

‘You are quite the sight,’ uttered Gedd. ‘I’m still staring, aren’t I?’

Meroved turned away again, indicating an end to the conversation. ‘Xeus will be waiting for you outside the gate. He will escort you back to Elserow.’

‘I think I can find my own way.’

‘No, you won’t,’ said Meroved, stepping through the archway and becoming lost to the shadows beyond.