Auric Gods

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

Hezme had led what she regarded as an ordinary life. She had worked hard, toiling in the data-stacks of the western district’s scriptorium primus, compiling census records, mercantile quotas and military tithing rates. It was dusty work and although she had never done a shift bending metal fuselage plates in a factorum or counting furnace-hot casings in a bullet farm, she did still bear some scars. Her fingers were regularly shredded by the ancient leaves of vellum spewed from the mouths of calculation-servitors. It had got so bad, in fact, that she had resorted to bandaging her hands in the manner of a leper. And her bones ached so regularly from hauling massive quantities of hard-data records around the stacks that she sometimes felt true manual labour might be easier on her body.

She had never married, nor did she have children. She lived alone and had a modest income that came with modest expectations. Hezme had believed she would die in the stacks or the clean but tired confines of her tenement hab. She was pious. Her fear of all things aberrant, the alien, the witch and the heretic, had her cleave to the Imperial Creed as an infant would its mother’s teat. An aquila shrine to the Emperor Ascendant was one of the few adornments she allowed herself to possess, and she knelt before its glory at the start and end of every day.

But deep down, she wanted more. Piety should be rewarded. Xenophobia and intolerance required recognition. It took effort to hate, to fear what was other. Wasn’t Hezme deserving of something for her efforts?

She had heard about the preacher through clandestine channels, through whispers and rumours. A missionary some said, he who had come to speak of the Emperor’s will and usher the faithless back to His light. He had been hard to find. In the end, he had found her. Trudging through the Vorganth down-trans heading for the western maglev transit station, she had been confronted by a figure in dark red robes with a learned disposition.

His charisma, his absolute faith and belief in the Emperor of Mankind beguiled her. After that first meeting she had not returned to the scriptorium primus. The wanderer, as he was known, had changed all that. She felt warmer in his presence, and a sense of fulfilment she had not realised she was lacking until the moment she met him.

He had other followers, of course, and it was impressed upon her the need for complete and utter secrecy. At first, she had questioned why such steps needed to be taken. After all, worship of the Emperor was no crime and in the dark times that had fallen upon the city, an outpouring of faith could shore up the ailing populace.

It was only when Hezme became privy to the purpose – to the Awakening as the preacher had described it – that she understood. It thrilled her to think of it, to know that she would be a part of this great undertaking. So devout was Hezme, so utterly committed to the cause, that after many weeks there came the day she had long been waiting for.

‘You are to be illuminated, Hezme,’ the preacher had told her.

And in that moment, she realised all her piety and faith had been rewarded.

Illumination.

So she did not question when they took her to a forgotten place at the edge of the western district, to a derelict factorum whose machines had long since turned cold, where the silky webs of orb-spiders hung in gossamer strands between the bullet-cutters and metal-shapers.

She felt the accumulated dirt and grime between the toes of bare feet and the warm air catch around her thin shift as she was led into a large ablutions chamber.

The old, grimy tiles chilled her skin as she followed the steps into a deep basin rimmed with scum around its edges. The lights were no longer working, so oil drums had been stacked with combustibles and set aflame. The flickering light cast across a circle drawn inside the basin. In the dingy confines of the room, it looked dark red.

She entered the circle along with seven others, each ushered to their place where a rune had been marked in the floor. These runes were strange to Hezme and it hurt her eyes to look upon them. She shivered, not out of fear but anticipation.

Only when they clamped the heavy chains around her wrists, neck and ankles did she begin to quail. The chains were marked too, just like the circle. There were stains on the metal and a smell like warm copper.

Then he entered the room and Hezme’s concerns lessened. She tried to catch his gaze but he seemed to look through her, focused on his purpose.

‘Through His will are we judged,’ he said, ‘and through suffering will He judge you worthy of salvation. Gaze upon the abyss. See into the mind of that which lurks beyond the veil for only then shall you be illuminated, only then shall you be inured to the terror and take your place in the Awakening.’

A sudden chanting began from figures hidden in the darkness at the edges, and a strange sensation overcame Hezme. The chains began to burn her skin. She wanted to scream but an invisible force held her tongue and so she writhed instead as a foreign and intrusive presence wormed its way inside her body. Like a dirty splinter, it festered, growing more virulent with every passing second. She heard voices, but they spoke in a language Hezme did not understand and in a way that turned her blood to ice.

She wanted to escape. This was wrong. She had changed her mind, but she knew with gut-churning clarity that it was too late to back out.

Her sense of time fell away, and the tatters of herself fell with it, carried off on a foul-smelling breeze.

It could have been days she spent in this place, the voices growing ever louder in her head, her will dissolving like ice before a cruel sun. Distantly, she felt changes to her body, to her bones, even her mind. There were strange growths that hadn’t been there before, and unclean marks had spread across her skin like mould over a canvas.

And for the briefest moment before her will surrendered to the thing that had taken root within her and made of her flesh its host, Hezme saw the other supplicants and the cult spreading across the city, as rampant as a holy wildfire.

The wanderer was with her at the end, but his words provided no comfort.

‘Do not despair,’ he said. ‘Your suffering serves a great purpose.’

Hezme laughed, though the voice was not her own, and as she threw back her head, laughing, crying and shouting, she let the darkness swallow her.