‘This conjunction is expected to continue for another day or two,’ she remarks. ‘When would you like me to take over from you? Before or after you stroke out and tumble to the floor?’
Tawren realises he isn’t listening. He has become preoccupied with the inload.
‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘Scrapcode.’
Any complex information system will produce scrapcode as a result of internal degradation. She knows that. She wonders what he means, and peers into the manifold.
She sees the scrapcode, dull amber threads of diseased information buried in the mass of healthy data. There is two per cent more of it than any Analyticae projection has calculated for the Calth noosphere, even under the irregular circumstances of the day. That is an unacceptable margin.
”Filtration isn’t clearing it. I don’t know where it’s coming from. ”
He has reverted to binaric blurt. There is no time for words.
Criol Fowst has been given a blade, but it proves impractical to use it. He uses his sidearm instead. The oblators need to be killed cleanly and quickly. There isn’t time to fool about with a knife.
Outside the shelter, his appointed officers are rousing the men in song. Chanting fills the air. They have been encouraged to bring viols and qatars, tambours, pipes, horns and bells. It is supposed to sound like a celebration. The eve of battle, honoured allies, the anticipation of glory, all of that nonsense. It is supposed to sound joyous.
And it does, but Fowst can hear the ritual theme inside the noisy singing. He can hear it because he knows it’s buried there. Old words. Words that were old before humans learned to speak. Potent words. You can set them to any tune, to the verse-and-chorus of an Army battle reel. They work just the same.
The singing is loud. It’s quite a commotion, six thousand men in this corner of the muster fields alone. Loud enough to drown out his shots.
He pulls the trigger.
The matt-grey autopistol barks, bucks in his hand, and slams a single round through the temple it’s pressed against. Blood and tissue spray, splashing his jacket. The kneeling man flops sideways, as if the weight of his punctured head is pulling him down. There’s a whiff of fycelene in the air, a smell of powdered blood, burned flesh and blood vapour.
Fowst looks down at the man he has just shot and murmurs a blessing, the sort one might offer to a traveller embarking on a long and difficult voyage. His mercy almost came too late that time. The man’s eyes had begun to melt.
Fowst nods, and two of his appointed officers step forward to drag the body aside. Now the corpses of seven oblators lie on the groundsheet spread out to one side.
The next man steps up, stone-faced, unfazed at the prospect of imminent death. Fowst embraces him and kisses his cheeks and lips.
Then he steps back.
The man, like the seven who have come before him, knows what to do. He has prepared. He has stripped down to his undershirt and breeches. He’s given everything else away, even his boots. The Brotherhood of the Knife uses whatever equipment it can gather or forage: hauberks, body armour, ballistic cloth, sometimes a little chainmesh. There’s usually a coat or cloak or robe over the top to keep out the weather, always dark grey or black. With no more need for any field gear, the man has given away his good coat, his gloves and his armour to those who can use them later. His weapons too.
He’s holding his bottle.
In his case, it’s a blue glass drinking bottle with a stoppered cap. His oblation floats inside it. The man before him used a canteen. The man before that, a hydration pack from a medicae’s kit.
He opens it and pours the water out through his fingers so the slip of paper inside is carried out into his palm. The moment it’s out of suspension in the hydrolytic fluid, the moment it comes into contact with the air, it starts to warm up. The edges begin to smoulder.
The man drops the bottle, steps forward and kneels in front of the vox-caster. The key pad is ready.
He looks at the slip of paper, shivering as he reads the characters inscribed upon it. A thin wisp of white smoke is beginning to curl off the edge of the slip.
His hand trembling, the man begins to enter the word into the caster’s pad, one letter at a time. It is a name. Like the seven that have been typed in before, it can be written in human letters. It can be written in any language system, just as it can be sung to any tune.
Criol Fowst is a very intelligent man. He is one of a very few members of the Brotherhood who have actively come looking for this moment. He was born and raised on Terra to an affluent family of merchants, and pursued their interests into the stars. He’d always been hungry for something: he thought it was wealth and success. Then he thought it was learning. Then he realised that learning was just another mechanism for the acquisition of power.
He’d been living on Mars when he was approached and recruited by the Cognitae. At least, that’s what they thought they’d done.
Fowst knew about the Cognitae. He’d made a particular study of occult orders, secret societies, hermetic cabals of mysteries and guarded thought. Most of them were old, Strife-age or earlier. Most were myths, and most of the remainder charlatans. He’d come to Mars looking for the Illuminated, but they turned out to be a complete fabrication. The Cognitae, however, actually existed. He asked too many questions and toured datavendors looking for too many restricted works. He made them notice him.
If the Cognitae had ever been a real order, these men were not it. At best, they were some distant bastard cousin of the true bloodline. But they knew things he did not, and he was content to learn from them and tolerate their theatrical rituals and pompous rites of secrecy.
Ten months later, in possession of several priceless volumes of transgressive thought that had previously been the property of the Cognitae, Fowst took passage rimwards. The Cognitae did not pursue him to recover their property, because he had made sure that they would not be capable of doing so. The bodies, dumped into the heat vent of the hive reactor at Korata Mons, were never recovered.
Fowst went out into the interdicted sectors where the ‘Great Crusade’ was still being waged, away from the safety of compliant systems. He headed for the Holy Worlds where the majestic XVII Legion, the Word Bearers, were actively recruiting volunteer armies from the conquered systems.
Fowst was especially intrigued by the Word Bearers. He was intrigued by their singular vision. Though they were one of the eighteen, one of the Legiones Astartes, and thus a core part of the Imperium’s infrastructure, they alone seemed to exhibit a spiritual zeal.
The Imperial truth was, in Fowst’s opinion, a lie. The Palace of Terra doggedly enforced a vision of the galaxy that was rational and pragmatic, yet any fool could see that the Emperor relied upon aspects of reality that were decidedly unrational. The mind-gifted, for example. The empyrean. Only the Word Bearers seemed to acknowledge that these things were more than just useful anomalies. They were proof of a greater and denied mystery. They were evidence of some transcendent reality beyond reality, of some divinity, perhaps. All of the Legiones Astartes were founded on unshakeable faith, but only the Word Bearers placed their belief in the divine. They worshipped the Emperor as an aspect of some greater power.
Fowst agreed with them in every detail except one. The universe contained beings worthy of adoration and worship. The Emperor, for all his ability, simply wasn’t one of them.
On Zwanan, in the Veil of Aquare, a Holy World still dark with the smoke of Word Bearers compliance, Criol Fowst joined the Brotherhood of the Knife, and began his service to the XVII primarch.