Prospero Burns Page 3

  The scholars had come out of Dume’s Panpacific realm with a priceless cargo of data that they had painstakingly liberated from the Tyrant’s library prior to one of his data purges. Some of that material, rumour suggested, dated from before the Golden Age of Technology.

  When Hawser and his fellow conservators finally located the refuges, they found them long-since extinct. The cargo of data, the books and digital records, had degraded to powder.

  The more man masters, the more man finds there is to be mastered; the more man learns, the more he remembers he has forgotten.

  Navid Murza had said that. Hawser had never seen eye to eye with Navid Murza, and the various associations they’d been forced to make during their careers had fostered a sour and immotile disdain between them.

  But there was no faulting Murza’s passionate intent. The strength of his calling matched Hawser’s.

  ‘We have lost more than we know,’ he said, ‘and we are losing more all the time. How can we take any pride in our development as a species when we excel at annihilation and fail to maintain even the most rudimentary continuity of knowledge with our ancestors?’

  Murza had been with him that day, in Boeotia. Both of them had been awarded places on the conservator team by the Unification Council. Neither of them had yet seen their thirtieth birthday. They were both still young and idealistic in the most vacuous and misguided ways. It rankled with both of them that they had tied in the appointment rather than one winning and one losing.

  Nevertheless, they were professionals.

  The vast refinery eight kilometres away had been mined by the retreating Yeselti forces, and the resulting fires had blanketed that corner of Terra in lethal black smoke, a roiling, carcinogenic soup of soot-black petrocarbon filth as thick as oceanic fog and as noxious as a plague pit. The conservators wore sealed bodygloves and masks to go in, shambling through the murk with their heavy, wheezing aug-lung packs in their hands, like suitcases. The packs were linked to the snouts of their masks by wrinkled, pachydermic tubes.

  The grave gods loomed to meet them through the smoke. The gods wore masks too.

  They stood for a while, looking up at the grave gods, as immobile as the ancient statues. Divine masks of jade and gold, and staring moonstone eyes looked down on haz-guard masks of plastek and ceramite, and lidless photo-mech goggles.

  Murza said something, just a wet sputter behind his visor.

  Hawser had never seen anything like the gods in the Boeotian shrine. None of them had. He could hear the visor displays of several team members clicking and humming as they accessed the memories of their data-packs for comparative images.

  You won’t find anything, Hawser thought. He could barely breathe, and it wasn’t the tightness of the mask or the spit-stale taste of the aug-lung’s air flow. He’d scanned the grapheme inscriptions on the shrine wall, and even that quick glance had told him there was nothing there that they’d expected to find. No Altaic root form, no Turcic or Tungusic or Mongolic.

  The picters they carried were beginning to gum up in the sooty air, and battery packs were failing left and right. Hawser told two of the juniors to take rubbings of the inscriptions instead. They turned their goggles towards him, blank. He had to show them. He cut sheets of wrapping plastek into small squares and used the side of the wax marker-brick to scrub over the faint relief of the mural marks.

  ‘Like at school,’ one of the juniors said.

  ‘Get on with it,’ Hawser snapped.

  He began an examination of his own, adjusting the macular intensity of his goggles. Without laboratory testing, it was impossible to know how long the shrine had stood there. A thousand years? Ten thousand? Exposed to the air, it was degrading fast, and the pervasive petrochemical smog was destroying surface detail before his very eyes.

  He had a desire to be alone for a minute.

  He went outside, back up the throat of the entranceway. The Boeotian Conflict had uncovered this treasure. The site had been exposed by a parcel of wayward submunitions rather than the diligent hand of an archaeologist. But for the war, this treasure would never have been found, and because of the war, it was perishing.

  Hawser stood at the entrance and put his aug-lung on the ground beside him. He took a sip of nutrient drink from his mask feeder, and cleaned his fogging goggles with hand spray.

  To the north of his position, the conflict in the Boeotian citadel underlit the horrendous black roof of the sky, a bonfire shaped like a city. The blackness of the vast smoke canopy was all around, as dense as Old Night itself. Gusting pillars of bright flame came and went in the distance as the smoke shifted.

  This, he remarked to himself with leaden irony, was what the great era of Unification looked like.

  According to history tracts that were already published and in circulation, that were already being taught in scholams, for goodness sake, the glorious Unification Wars had brought the Age of Strife to an end over a century and a half earlier. Since then, there had been more than one hundred and fifty years of peace and renewal as the Emperor led the Great Crusade outwards from Terra, and courageously reconnected the lost and scattered diaspora of mankind.

  That’s what the history tracts said. Reality was far less tidy. History only recorded broad strokes and general phases of development, and assigned almost arbitrary dates to human accomplishments that had been made in far less definitive instalments. The aftershocks of the Unification War still rolled across the face of the planet. Unification had been triumphantly declared at a point when no power or potentate could hope to vanquish the awesome Imperial machine, but that hadn’t prevented various feudal states, religious adherents, remote nations or stubborn autocrats from holding out and trying to ring-fence and preserve their own little pockets of independence. Many, like the Boeotian Yeselti family, had held out for decades, negotiating and conniving their way around treaties and rapprochements and every other diplomatic effort designed to bring them under Imperial sway.

  Their story demonstrated that the Emperor, or his advisors at least, possessed extraordinary patience. In the wake of the Unification War, there had been a strenuous and high-profile effort to resolve conflicts through non-violent means, and the Yeselti were not tyrants or despots. They were simply an ancient royal house eager to maintain their autonomous existence. The Emperor allowed them a twilight grace of a century and a half to come to terms, longer than the lifespan of many Terran empires.

  The story also demonstrated that the Emperor’s patience was finite, and that when it was exhausted, so was his mercy and restraint.

  The Imperial Army had advanced into Boeotia to arrest the Yeselti and annex the territory. Hawser’s accredited conservator team was one of hundreds assigned to follow the army in, along with flocks of medicae, aid workers, renovators, engineers and iterators.

  To pick up the pieces.

  Hawser’s mask-mic clicked.

  ‘Yes?’

  It was one of the juniors. ‘Come inside, Hawser. Murza’s got a theory.’

  In the shrine, Murza was shining his lamp pack up angled stone flues cut in the walls. Motes of soot tumbled in the beam, revealing, by their motion, a flow of circulation.

  ‘Airways. This is in use,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This isn’t a relic. It’s old, yes, but it’s been in use until very recently.’

  Hawser watched Murza as he prowled around the shrine. ‘Evidence?’

  Murza gestured to the faience bowls of various sizes dotted along the lip of the altar step.

  ‘There are offerings of fish and grain here, also copal resins, myrrh I believe. Scanners show carbon counts that indicate they’re no more than a week old.’

  ‘Any carbon count is compromised in this atmosphere,’ Hawser replied. ‘The machine’s wrong. Besides, look at the state of them. Calcified.’

  ‘The samples have degraded because of the atmosphere,’ Murza insisted.

  ‘Oh, have it both ways, why not?’ said Hawser.

  ‘Just look at this place!’ Murza shot back, gesturing with his gloved hands in exasperation.

  ‘Exactly what are you proposing, then?’ asked Hawser. ‘An occulted religious observance conducted outside the fringe of Boeotian society, or a private order of tradition sanctioned by the Yeselti?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Murza replied, ‘but this whole site is guarding something, isn’t it? We need to get an excavator in here. We need to get into the recess behind the statues.’

  ‘We need to examine, record and remove the statues methodically,’ Hawser said. ‘It will take weeks just to begin the preservation treatments before we can lift them, piece by—’

  ‘I can’t wait that long.’

  ‘Well, sorry, Navid, but that’s the way it is,’ said Hawser. ‘The statues are priceless. They’re our first concern for conservation.’

  ‘Yes, they are priceless,’ Murza said. He stepped towards the solemn, silent grave gods. The juniors were watching him. A few took sharp breaths as he actually stepped up onto the base of the altar, gingerly placing his foot so as not to dislodge any of the offertory bowls.

  ‘Get down, Murza,’ said one of the seniors.

  Murza edged up onto the second step, so he was almost at eye level with some of the gazing gods.

  ‘They are priceless,’ he repeated. He raised his right hand and gently indicated the blazing moonstone eyes of the nearest effigy. ‘Look at the eyes. The eyes are so important, don’t you think? So telling?’

  He glanced over his shoulder at his anxious audience. Hawser could tell Murza was smiling, despite the haz-mask.

  ‘Get down, Navid,’ he said.

  ‘Look at the eyes,’ Murza said, ignoring the instruction. ‘Down through time, they’ve always meant the same thing to us, haven’t they? Come on, it’s basic! Someone!’

  ‘Protection,’ mumbled one of the juniors awkwardly.

  ‘I can’t hear you, Jena. Speak up!’

  ‘The eye is the oldest and most culturally diverse apotropaic symbol,’ said Hawser, hoping to cut to the chase and end Murza’s showboating.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Murza. ‘Kas knows. Thank you, Kas. The eye guards things. You put it up for protection. You put it up to ward off evil and harm, and to keep safe the things you hold most precious.’ His fingertip traced the outline of the unblinking eye again. ‘We‘ve seen this so many times, just variations of the same design. Look at the proportional values! The eye shape, the brow line, this could have been stylised from a nazar boncugu or a wedjat, and it’s not a million kilometres away from the Eye of Providence that is so proudly displayed in such places as the Great Seal of the Unification Council. These are gods of aversion, there’s no doubt about it.’

  He jumped down from the steps. Some of the party gasped in alarm, but Murza did not disturb or break any of the precariously placed bowls.

  ‘Gods of aversion,’ he said. ‘Keep out. Stay away.’

  ‘Have you finished?’ Hawser asked.

  ‘The pupils are pieces of obsidian, Kas,’ Murza said eagerly as he came towards Hawser. ‘You get as close as I did, get your photo-mech to decent resolution, you can see that they’re carved. A circle around the edge, a dot in the middle. And you know what that is.’

  ‘The circumpunct,’ Hawser replied quietly.

  ‘Which represents?’ Murza pressed.

  ‘Just about anything you want it to,’ said Hawser. ‘The solar disc. Gold. Circumference. Monad. A diacritical mark. The hydrogen atom.’

  ‘Oh, help him out, Jena, please,’ Murza cried. ‘He’s just being awkward!’

  ‘The eye of god,’ said the female junior nervously. ‘The all-seeing singularity.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Murza said. He looked directly at Hawser. His eyes, behind the tinted lenses of the goggles, were fierce. ‘It says keep out. Stay away. I can see you. I can see right into your soul. I can reflect your harm back at you, and I can know what you know. I can read your heart. I can keep you at bay, because I am power and I am knowledge, and I am protection. The statues are priceless, Hawser, but they are gods of aversion. They’re guarding something. How valuable is something, do you suppose, that someone would protect with priceless statues?’

  There was silence for a moment. Most of the team shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘They’re a family group,’ said Hawser quietly. ‘They are a representation of a dynastic line. A portrait in statue form. You can see the gender dimorphism, the height differentials, and the placements, thus determining familial relationships, hierarchies and obligations. The tallest figures on the highest step, a man and a woman, lofty and most exalted. Below them, children, perhaps two generations, with their own extended families and retainers. The first son and first daughter have prominence. It’s a record of lineage and descent. They’re a family group.’

  ‘But the eyes, Kas! So help me!’

  ‘They are apotropaic, I agree,’ said Hawser. ‘What could they be guarding? What could be more priceless than a gold and jade effigy of a god-king, and his queen, and his divine sons and daughters?’

  Hawser stepped past Murza and faced the altar.

  ‘I’ll tell you. The physical remains of a god-king, and his queen, and his divine sons and daughters. It’s a tomb. That’s what’s in the recess. A tomb.’

  Murza sighed, as if deflated.

  ‘Oh, Kas,’ he said. ‘You think so small.’

  Hawser sighed, knowing they were about to go around again, but they turned as they heard noises from the entrance.

  Five soldiers clattered into the shrine, spearing the gloom with the lamps strapped to their weapons. They were Imperial Army, hussars from the Tupelov Lancers, one of the very oldest regiments. They had left their cybernetic steeds outside the shrine and dismounted to enter.

  ‘Clear this site,’ one of them said. They were in full war-armour, combat visors down, frosty green photo-mech cursors bouncing to and fro along their optical slits.

  ‘We’ve got permission to be here,’ said one of the seniors.

  ‘Like crap you have,’ said the hussar. ‘Gather your stuff and get out.’

  ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ Murza exclaimed, pushing forwards. ‘Who’s your commander?’

  ‘The Emperor of Mankind,’ replied the hussar. ‘Who’s yours, arsewipe?’

  ‘There’s been a mistake,’ said Hawser. He reached for his belt pack. Five saddle carbines slapped up to target him. Five lamp beams pinned him like a specimen.

  ‘Whoa! Whoa!’ Hawser cried. ‘I’m just reaching for my accreditation!’

  He took out the pass-pad and flicked it on. The holographic credentials issued by the Unification Council Office of Conservation billowed up into the smoky air, slightly blurred and malformed by the edges of the smoke. Hawser couldn’t help but notice the Eye of Providence on the Council seal that flashed up before the data unfurled.

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said one of the hussars.

  ‘This is all current. It’s valid,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Things change,’ said the hussar.

  ‘This was personally ratified by Commander Selud,’ said one of the seniors. ‘He is primary commander and—’

  ‘At oh-six thirty-five today, Commander Selud was relieved of command by Imperial decree. All permits and authorities are therefore rescinded. Get your stuff, get moving, and live with your disappointment.’

  ‘Why was Selud removed?’ asked Murza.

  ‘Are you High Command? Do you need to know?’ sneered one of the hussars.

  ‘Just unofficially?’ Murza pleaded.

  ‘Unofficially, Selud’s made a total clusterfug of the whole show,’ said the hussar. ‘Six weeks, and he still manages to let the refinery fields catch fire? The Emperor’s sent someone in to tidy the whole mess up and draw a line under it.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘Why are these civilians still here?’ a voice asked. It was deep and penetrating, and it had the hard edges of vox amplification. A figure had entered the chamber behind the Tupelov Lancers. Hawser wasn’t sure how it could have possibly walked in without anyone noticing.

  It was an Astartes warrior.

  By the pillars of Earth, an Astartes! The Emperor has sent the Astartes to finish this!

  Hawser felt his chest tighten and his pulse sprint. He had never seen an Astartes in the flesh before. He hadn’t realised they were so big. The curvature of the armour plating was immense, oversized like the grave god statues behind him. The combination of the gloom and his goggles made it hard to resolve colour properly. The armour looked red: a bright, almost pale red, the colour of watered wine or oxygenated blood. A cloak of fine metal mesh shrouded the warrior’s left shoulder and torso. The helmet had a snout like a raven’s beak.

  Hawser wondered what Legion the warrior belonged to. He couldn’t see any insignia properly. What was it that people were calling them these days, now that the bulk of all Astartes forces had deployed off Terra to spearhead the Great Crusade?

  Space Marines. That was it. Space Marines. Like the square-jawed heroes of ha’penny picture books.

  This was no square-jawed hero. This wasn’t even human. It was just an implacable thing, a giant twice the size of anybody else in the chamber. Hawser felt he ought to have been able to smell it: the soot on its plating, the machine oil in its complex joints, the perspiration trickling between its skin and its suit-liner.

  But there was nothing. No trace, not even a hint of body heat. It was like the cold but immense blank of the void.

  Hawser could not imagine anything that could stop it, let alone kill it.

  ‘I asked a question,’ the Astartes said.

  ‘We’re clearing them now, ser,’ stammered one of the Lancers.

  ‘Hurry,’ the Astartes replied.

  The hussars started to herd the team towards the entrance. There were a few mumbles of protest, but nothing defiant. Everyone was too cowed by the appearance of the Astartes. The aug-lungs were wheezing and pumping more rapidly than before.

  ‘Please,’ said Hawser. He took a step towards the Astartes and held out the pass-pad. ‘Please, we’re licensed conservators. See?’