The walls of the hallway were lined with engravings, tall and narrow. The place, Mkoll guessed, had been a centre of clave administration. The engravings displayed the Urdeshi loyalty to Terra in the form of images of the God-Emperor, but they reflected the interests of Urdesh. Here was the Emperor in the aspect of a sea god, coiling with scaled tentacles, and here he rose from the Urdeshi deeps in a vast bloom of algae. On another panel, he was festooned with weapon-pods, triumphing the product of the forge’s war-foundries. On another, he was so augmeticised with cyber implants he resembled a Titan war engine with a single, human eye. Slogans had been daubed in yellow paint under each image, utterances of the Archenemy. But the images themselves had not been defaced.
‘Why have these not been torn down?’ Mkoll asked Olort.
Olort seemed surprised. ‘They show him as he is,’ he replied. ‘Why would we break those?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The Urdeshi know the deeper truths,’ said Olort. ‘They are kin to us. They understand the fluidity. You cannot stand upon a border line for generations and not see both sides.’
Olort glanced up at one of the images. ‘See him there, not as a false emperor surrounded by saints. He is shown as the machine, as the mutation, a force of war. He has always been a creature of the deep warp, warped like us. You know him only as you want to see him.’
Olort made a gesture of respect to the engravings.
‘You worship him?’ Mkoll asked.
‘Nen, we respect,’ replied Olort. ‘He is no god, nor is he an emperor. But a prophet? Kha. Yes. He has seen the enlightenments of the Eight Powers and witnessed the truth of the warp. Ghost, your kind… they follow blindly. They see what they want to see. The Holy Lord, blessed of all, defying the darkness. But he stands in the darkness, beyond the curtain of death, fed by the warp and changed by it. He is a brother to us, a brother we must sadly fight to subdue until he renounces his insurrection.’
Olort looked at him.
‘You know nothing of this?’ he asked.
‘It makes no sense.’
‘This is because of your breeding. The indoctrination of your heretical culture. Do you… not know why we fight?’
‘You fight to annihilate.’
Olort shook his head sadly.
‘You are a man of war, Ghost,’ he said. ‘You have spent your whole life, I’d wager, serving your Throne in the field of battle. And you have never stopped to wonder what those you fight believe in? What our cause is?’
Mkoll didn’t reply.
‘We fight to bring you back,’ said Olort. ‘We fight to break your mindset and your blind beliefs. To make you see the truth and embrace it. Your prophet-lord has seen it, but he can no longer speak it, so your kind, they fight on according to ancient decrees and fossilised laws, things you believe are what he would have wanted. He is of us, and will be welcomed back to our bosom on such day as his followers finally lay down their swords and accept the warp-truth. Your faith in a man that was never a god has blinded you for ten millennia.’
‘No,’ said Mkoll simply.
‘This is the way of it,’ replied Olort. ‘You think we are the darkness. But you are the darkness. Your ignorance is a shadow on your eyes and a fog in your mind. We fight to deliver you from that. We fight, Ghost, to save you.’
They moved on past administrative chambers where rubricators worked at cogitation systems, then out across a suspended walkway towards another stacked complex of cliff-side buildings.
‘You know this place?’ Mkoll asked.
Olort nodded.
‘You’ve been here before?’
‘Twice, not for long.’
‘I want to find… information,’ said Mkoll. ‘Data on layout. Personnel locations. Those chambers back there–’
Olort shook his head.
‘Just the old processing centres of the Urdesh dynasts,’ he replied.
‘There were people at work. Using the cogitators–’
‘They have finished stripping out the memory cores of the dynastic claves. A gathering of intelligence. Now those machines are simply being used to compose and circulate our litanies.’
‘Then, assuming your life depended on it–’ said Mkoll.
‘Which I know it does,’ Olort replied with some sarcasm.
‘Where would you go?’
Olort pointed to the structures that lay ahead of them. ‘The record rooms,’ he said. ‘There we collate deployment details and pack data by hand. Machines cannot be trusted on this world.’
‘Lead me.’
‘What do you seek, Ghost? Do you cherish some plan, some great scheme, whereby a lone man with a knife can bring down this host? How long will you persist in such fantasies?’
‘Lead me. I know what I’m looking for. And to answer your question, until my life is over. The Emperor protects.’
‘Not here he doesn’t,’ said Olort. He shrugged. ‘Come, then.’
They began to cross the walkway. Below, the water of a dock inlet gleamed like a rainbow where the floodlights caught the scum of spilled promethium lapping the surface.
Packsons were coming the other way, hefting metal barrows laden with dead vegetation. More fodder for the bonfires on the rockcrete strand. As they passed, Mkoll saw what the vegetation was.
Islumbine. It had been torn up in great quantities, leaf, flower, stem and root.
‘They’re taking it to burn it?’ Mkoll asked as the soldiers with the barrows moved past.
‘I told you this.’
‘Why?’
‘It is vergoht,’ Olort replied, using the unknown word again. ‘The flower of your Saint. It never grew here, not on Urdesh. It was not…’
He hesitated, trying to find the correct word.
‘Native?’ asked Mkoll.
Olort nodded. ‘Yet now it grows everywhere,’ he said. ‘Like weed. We cut it and it grows again. So we cut it and burn it.’
‘Why bother?’
‘Because it is her flower,’ Olort said. ‘It is a holy aspect of her heresy. We must purge it, for while it grows and flourishes, it means she is here.’
‘Sir?’ Oysten called. She held out the headphones of her vox-set.
Rawne sniffed and trudged back to her, tugging his collar up against the incessant rain. He was soaked to the balls and his mood was foul. From down the wet, rubble-strewn street came sounds of sporadic gunfire. He hoped there’d be some killing left to do when he got there. He needed to take his mood out on something.
He took the headset and pulled it on.
‘Rawne,’ he said. He looked at Oysten, who nodded. ‘Link is secure,’ he continued. ‘Speak.’
The signal chattered and whined. A burst of static. Then a voice broke through.
‘–do you copy? Repeat, Colonel Rawne–’
‘Daur? That you?’
‘Affirmative, sir. This link is bad.’
‘Agreed. The weather. Tell me you’ve raised me to give a withdraw notice.’
‘Negative, sir. Sorry. I have new orders for you.’
‘I’ve just had new orders, Daur, from some arsewipe in Grizmund’s brigade. I don’t know what the feth is going on, but we’re locked in grunt work, street cleaning, and–’
‘These orders are direct from the Lord Executor, and they supersede all others.’
Rawne wiped his mouth.
‘Why isn’t he talking to me himself?’ he asked.
‘Don’t be an arse. Because he’s the Lord Executor and he’s got shit on his plate. This is vital work, Rawne. I’m going to brief you, so get ready.’