Perdu’s congregation never seemed to grow or diminish. There was room for half a dozen, and half a dozen always showed up for his services. The faces varied, depending on who was sent to do what jobs, and on who lived and who died. War changed things, and when the war was over and the occupation established, that changed things too. The resisters were the most devout and the biggest risk-takers; they needed priests, and they needed safe places where they could exchange information or pool resources. The two coincided here.
He was surrounded by men, taller and thinner than dusk shadows. They stank too. They had come off the agri-galleries, tired and hungry, but at least they didn’t have to worry about their feet. He did not envy the aching in their bones from arching their backs and stooping their shoulders to fit into the rooms that he could stand erect in, but he did envy their prosthetics, their elongated, telescopic shins and tapered spade-like feet that meant they were never ankle-deep in anything.
‘The Emperor protects,’ he said. He wondered if he believed it.
‘The Emperor protects.’
The words were barely out of his mouth the second time when Perdu heard the wet thud of someone going down. The man had been standing behind Perdu. He didn’t know his name. There were no names any more, nor conversations, nor even rumours. Three years was a long time to learn that lesson, but now, no one talked, no one shared, no one speculated. The work that was done was done quietly. His work was done only in these places, these rooms that were assigned to him, with these people, who came to him for strength and solace, who came to him because they believed, against all reason, that the Emperor would protect.
He was an agent of the God-Emperor and of the beloved Beati, and he was an enabler of the resistance movement on Reredos.
He dropped the prayer book and turned, in time to see the foetid air swirl around the collapsed figure. He bent over the body, his prayer book banging against his chest as it hung from the chain around his neck. It swung out, almost catching the dying man on his brow. He rasped a breath and reached up a hand. Perdu placed the book in the agri-worker’s hands, and reached out his own clean palm to crack the man’s chest filter.
Perdu had to bang hard on the filter, twice, before he could twist it and draw it out of the man’s chest. It was caked with a gritty purple mass of spores mixed with the mucus that the agri-workers now produced in such vast quantities that ceramite tar-buckets were used as spittoons in the drinking holes that surrounded the galleries where the men lived and worked. Perdu had seen what this crap could do to rockcrete floors, pitting and scarring, and eating away at all but the most impenetrable materials.
The congregation dispersed as Perdu tried to save one man in a world that was being eaten away and gobbed out in mucus chunks by relentless occupation forces.
The ayatani priest pushed two fingers into the hole in the man’s chest, like a kid with a jar of ploin-kernel butter, turning them around the circumference of the filter and digging out the unholy shit that had taken the victim’s breath away.
How many times had he done it before? Dozens, certainly, scores, maybe even hundreds. And how many men had he saved?
There was too much of it. Why hadn’t this damned pute cleaned his filter? He must have left it for days. Did he have some sort of death wish?
Perdu eased the man flat onto his back. He hated laying him on the cold wet filth, but had no choice. He straddled the body, placing one knee on either side of the filter, and pushed his fingers back into the cavity. The pressure of his knees pushed more of the filth out onto his fingers, and he scooped it up and flicked it out onto the floor before going back for more. The body seemed to be breathing, but it was the action of Perdu pumping his legs against the chest that was causing the rasping gulps that he could hear only too clearly in the corpse’s throat. He was a corpse. His face was grey and his lips blue. His eyes stared blankly out of his head, bulging slightly as though he’d been strangled. This creeping asphyxia was worse than being throttled; it was worse than anything.
‘The Lady’s...’ Perdu began as he pushed his knees once more into the corpse’s chest. He felt a rib give way, and took off the tension, dropping his knees onto the cold dank floor to either side of the body, horrified by his attempts to resurrect the man.
He drew the back of his hand across his forehead, and dropped his head down onto his chest.
He could feel the gritty mucus spreading beneath the knees of his trousers, and started to rise to his feet. There was nothing more for him to do. His congregation had left him; he was alone. Time stood still as he hovered over the body for several more minutes. His eyes shifted to the floor, to the oil-slick of purple sputum that was spreading and leaching into the ground around the corpse, around where his knees had been, bubbling, and corroding the trampled surface. The fabric of his trousers was smouldering slightly, and he tore away the ragged scraps, knowing that there was no mending the cloth.
He noticed edges in the purple mess, hard lines that shouldn’t have been there. Tentatively, he ran his fingers through the spreading mucus and began to retrieve tiny tablets of ceramite, chips that had been shaved away from Emperor-only-knew what. They were small and irregular in shape; they had been improvised.
Perdu had not seen their like before, but he knew what they were. This was not the usual useless waste of life. This death had a purpose. This man had sacrificed himself, given his life in the service of the God-Emperor to deliver the information on the ceramite chips to one of the many anonymous resistance cells in the hive.
Perdu took a flat, narrow flask from his webbing, and gently poured some of the contents into the pool of mucus, but the water had no effect. He tipped the flask between his lips, and proceeded to wash his mouth out with the remaining liquid, moving the quantity of water around and over his tongue and teeth before gargling with it, and then sending it around again. When he was satisfied, he spat the mixture of water and saliva onto the mucus, and worked the frothing mess with his fingers, fingers that no longer bore surface skin, let alone prints. He had only one pair of gloves, and he would rather risk his skin than their destruction.
After several minutes, Perdu gave up the search, and looked down at the half a dozen mismatched shards lined up on his finger.
His time was up. Suddenly, he knew that the room was no longer safe. He’d stayed too long, and he wouldn’t be able to use the site again. He scraped the chips off his finger into the still-open water flask, and pulled his gloves on. The right one would be useless by the time he took it off again, but there was no time to clean himself up. He could feel the burning in his fingers as the mucus set to work to destroy his flesh.
Perdu pushed the dead man’s filter cap back into his chest, and rolled the corpse onto its side to cover evidence of the mucus; the idiot enemy wouldn’t look under the body. He did not wait for the enemy excubitors to appear with their narrow frames, distended bellies and grotesque masks. They were grey-skinned monsters with plugs and hoses embedded in their pallid flesh, harsh voices translated through grilles that produced guttural combinations of grunts and too much purple spittle.
Out on the street, the quality of the light told Perdu everything. He did not need to look up to know that a glyf was hovering nearby, six or eight metres above his position, its bright runes swirling and pulsing through the air, ready to penetrate the minds of any pute fool enough to look at it. They wafted over populated areas of the planet, checking for those who were not consented, who didn’t carry imagoes in their arms, or whose imagoes limited their free passage. They altered the quality of the air with their ethereal light, and with the buzzing insect noise they made, rising to a pitch when they homed in on some poor transgressor. Perdu smelt the hot acrid bloom of battery acid that the glyfs emitted, judged that the incessant purring noise was stable, and walked in the opposite direction.