Karkasy could see that the Astartes's wide-featured face was earnest and serious, his skull shaved and covered with intricate scriptwork. One shoulder guard of his armour was draped in heavy parchment, rich with illuminated letters, while the other bore the distinctive icon of a book with a flame burning in its centre. Though he knew it symbolised enlightenment springing forth from the word, Karkasy instinctively disliked it.
It spoke to his poet's soul of the Death of Knowledge, a terrible time in the history of ancient Terra when madmen and demagogues burned books, libraries and wordsmiths for fear of the ideas they might spread with their artistry. By Karkasy's way of thinking, such symbols belonged to heathens and philistines, not Astartes charged with expanding the frontiers of knowledge, progress and enlightenment.
He smiled to himself at this delicious heresy, wondering if he could work it into a poem without Captain Loken realising, but even as the rebellious thought surfaced, he quashed it. Karkasy knew that his patron was showing his work to the increasingly reclusive Kyril Sindermann. For all his dreariness, Sindermann was no fool when it came to the medium, and he would surely spot any risque references.
In that case, Karkasy would quickly find himself on the next bulk hauler on its way back to Terra, regardless of his Astartes sponsorship.
'So who's that?' he asked Keeler, returning his attention to the new arrival as Tsi Rekh stopped his chanting and bowed towards the newcomer. The warrior in turn raised his long staff in greeting.
Keeler gave him a sidelong glance, looking at him as though he had suddenly sprouted another head.
'Are you serious?' she hissed.
'Never more so, my dear, who is he?'
'That,' she said proudly, snapping off another pict of the Astartes warrior, 'is Erebus, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers.'
And suddenly, with complete clarity, Ignace Karkasy knew why Captain Loken had wanted him here.
Stepping onto the dusty hardpan of Davin, Karkasy had been reminded of the oppressive heat of Sixty-Three Nineteen. Moving clear of the propwash of the shuttle's atmospheric rotors, he'd half run, half stumbled from beneath its deafening roar with his exquisitely tailored robes flapping around him.
Captain Loken had been waiting for him, resplendent in his armour of pale green and apparently untroubled by the heat or the swirling vortices of dust.
'Thank you for coming at such short notice, Ignace.'
'Not at all, sir,' said Karkasy, shouting over the noise of the shuttle's engines as it lifted off the ground. 'I'm honoured, and not a little surprised, if I'm honest.'
'Don't be. I told you I wanted someone familiar with the truth, didn't I?'
'Yes, sir, indeed you did, sir,' beamed Karkasy. 'Is that why I'm here now?'
'In a manner of speaking,' agreed Loken. 'You're an inveterate talker, Ignace, but today I need you to listen. Do you understand me?'
'I think so. What do you want to me to listen to?'
'Not what, but who.'
'Very well. Who do you want me to listen to?'
'Someone I don't trust,' said Loken.
THREE
A sheet of glass
A man of fine character
Hidden words
On the day before making planetfall to the surface of Davin, Loken sought out Kyril Sindermann in Archive Chamber Three to return the book he had borrowed from him. He made his way through the dusty stacks and piles of yellowed papers, lethargic globes of weak light bobbing just above head height, his heavy footsteps echoing loudly in the solemn hush. Here and there, a lone scholar clicked through the gloom in a tall stilt chair, but none was his old mentor.
Loken travelled through yet another dizzyingly tall lane of manuscripts and leather bound tomes with names like Canticles of the Omniastran Dogma, Meditations on the Elegiac Hero and Thoughts and Memories of Old Night. None of them was familiar, and he began to despair of ever finding Sindermann amidst this labyrinm of the arcane, when he saw the iterator's familiar, stooped form hunched over a long table and surrounded by collections of loose parchment bound with leather cords, and piles of books.
Sindermann had his back to him and was so absorbed in his reading that, unbelievably, he didn't appear to have heard Loken's approach.
'More bad poetry?' asked Loken from a respectful distance.
Sindermann jumped and looked over his shoulder with an expression of surprise and the same furtiveness he had displayed when Loken had first met him here.
'Garviel,' said Sindermann, and Loken detected a note of relief in his tone.
'Were you expecting someone else?'
'No. No, not at all. I seldom encounter others in this part of the archive. The subject matter is a little lurid for most of the serious scholars.'
Loken moved around the table and scanned the papers spread before Sindermann - tightly curled, unintelligible script, sepia woodcuts depicting snarling monsters and men swathed in flames. His eyes flicked to Sindermann, who chewed his bottom lip nervously at Loken's scrutiny.
'I must confess to have taken a liking to the old texts,' explained Sindermann. 'Like The Chronicles of Ursh I loaned you, it's bold, bloody stuff. Naive and overly hyperbolic, but stirring nonetheless.'
'I have finished reading it, Kyril,' said Loken, placing the book before Sindermann.
'And?'
'As you say, it's bloody, garish and sometimes given to flights of fantasy…'
'But?'
'But I can't help thinking that you had an ulterior motive in giving me this book.'
'Ulterior motive? No, Garviel, I assure you there was no such subterfuge,' said Sindermann, though Loken could not be sure that he believed him.
'Are you sure? There are passages in there that I think have more than a hint of truth to them.'
'Come now, Garviel, surely you can't believe that,' scoffed Sindermann.
'The murengon,' stated Loken. 'Anult Keyser's final battle against the Nordafrik conclaves.'
Sindermann hesitated. 'What about it?'
'I can see from your eyes that you already know what I'm going to say.'
'No, Garviel, I don't. I know the passage you speak of and, while it's certainly an exciting read, I hardly think you can take its prose too literally.'
'I agree,' nodded Loken. 'All the talk of the sky splitting like silk and the mountains toppling is clearly nonsense, but it talks of men becoming daemons and turning on their fellows.'
'Ah… now I see. You think that this is another clue as to what happened to Xavyer Jubal?'
'Don't you?' asked Loken, turning one of the yellowed parchments around to point at a fanged daemon figure clothed in fur with curling ram's horns and a bloody, skull-stamped axe.
'Jubal turned into a daemon and tried to kill me! Just as happened to Anult Keyser himself. One of his generals, a man called Wilhym Mardol, became a daemon and killed him. Doesn't that sound familiar?'
Sindermann leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Loken saw how tired he looked, his skin the colour of the parchments he perused and his clothes hanging from his body as though draped across his bare bones.
Loken realised that the venerable iterator was exhausted.
'I'm sorry, Kyril,' he said, also sitting back. 'I didn't come here to pick a fight with you.'