Incense-laden wind brushed against her face, scouring the bruised flesh. A billion lanterns wafted into the dark sky, blown by Terra’s sluggish air currents. For a moment, just a moment, the populace had forgotten its fears. There would be many prayers accompanying those fragile baskets of flame and paper, whispered quietly from fervent lips.
She remembered Rassilo’s words to her.
That’s why they light the fires, to push the shadows back.
It was primeval, a celebration whose form had existed since the earliest days of the species, one that would continue as long as humanity existed in a hostile galaxy.
‘Impressive, is it not?’ Crowl said, coming alongside her.
She had heard him coming from a long way off. Even out of armour, his trace limp was now recognisable to her, but she did not wish him to know that.
Of course, he probably did.
‘My soul exalts,’ Spinoza said, and that was true enough.
Crowl nodded. His grey gaze traced the path of the lumen-shaft.
Spinoza stole a brief glance. Her master’s face, always gaunt, looked haggard now. A scatter of cuts across his skin was healing messily and his lips were blistered.
‘You should take time to recover, lord,’ she said.
‘As should you.’
Ahead of them, out in the lamplit skies, an Ecclesiarchy sky-crawler traced a long arc across the forest of spires. Hymns blared from its vox-augmitters, enthusiastically taken up by the teeming hosts below. For once, the manufactoria were still, the forges cool, the Munitorum production lines quiet. All were out in the terraces and the streets, embracing one another and crying out fervent praise to the God-Emperor.
‘I could not help but notice, lord,’ Spinoza ventured then, cautiously. ‘You referred to the Lord Rassilo by her given name. I reflected on that. It struck me as unusual.’
‘Did it.’
‘And was your association… close?’
‘Mind your own damned business.’
She smiled. Out in the fevered night, ghostly shapes were being projected into the shafts of red light — the primarchs, the saints, the great heroes of the Adeptus Astartes. Each one brought a fresh cheer, a wave of displaced sound that briefly overshadowed the perennial growl of Terra’s urban processors.
‘I have learned some things,’ Spinoza said at length.
‘Oh?’
‘Some things you told me. About fear. I think I understand what you meant.’
‘Good.’
‘Though I shall speak frankly. I do not much like your methods. I find your impiety troubling.’
‘You sound like someone else I know.’ Crowl leaned heavily on the balustrade. ‘So was there anything else, Spinoza, or is that the sum of your complaints for this night?’
‘Only that it is unsafe for servants of the Emperor to labour alone, for many eyes may be required to identify dereliction of character.’
Crowl raised an eyebrow. ‘I see.’
‘And that we may suit one another,’ she said. ‘That is all.’
‘I told you to speak your mind, once,’ Crowl said, sourly. ‘I recant that now.’
‘As you will it, lord.’
‘Though you could, for the love of Him on the Throne, please stop calling me that.’
‘I promise I shall make the attempt.’
Crowl became breathless, and his scarred hands clutched at the stone more tightly. Questions clustered in Spinoza’s mind, ones that had been formulating during the rare snatches of time she had had to herself since arriving on the Throneworld. It did not feel right to raise them now, when the entire world was gripped with rare thankfulness, but then she did not know if she would ever get another opportunity.
‘I asked about you,’ she said. ‘When I could. They always told me the same thing.’ She turned to face him. ‘They said you were not always alone.’
Crowl looked straight ahead, his thin face turned to the lights in the sky.
‘No, not always,’ he said. ‘It was a long time ago.’ Perhaps it was his wounds, but he looked worse than ever. ‘It takes that long, to get over some losses. We’re human, Spinoza. Some of us, anyway.’
Spinoza did not know what to say. That admission might have struck her as indulgent before, but somehow did not now.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Your master happened. The butcher of Forfoda happened.’ Crawl’s face was static, a mask of old sorrow. ‘He didn’t stop to question why, just as ever. It was pointless, and it was a mistake, but that mattered nothing to him. She was innocent. How could she not have been, since she and I were…’ He trailed off, then shook his head. ‘When her body was gone he barely paused before lighting the next pyre. And then the next, and then the next, tracing his bloody path across the galaxy. Another man would have sought vengeance then, but I was too slow, and there were always duties, and so it festered.’
Spinoza looked away. ‘Tur died on Karalsis.’
‘So they tell me,’ Crowl said. He drew in a long, wheezing breath. ‘And I’ll join him soon enough — you know by now I’ll not live out this millennium.’ He looked down at his gauntlets. ‘So once he was gone, I looked at my life, and its solitude, and saw an empty throne in Courvain and relived the loss of the one soul who might have given me a reason for enduring. I resolved to spite him in the only way he would never understand. I would take the best of his retinue, the proudest and the most pious, and I would change it. He raised butchers and I would raise a soul in my own likeness. He had deprived me of my legacy, I would subvert his.’
Spinoza raised her eyes to the hololith. The spectral image of the last primarch, Sanguinius, was beginning to fade, to dissolve back into the myriad light of the world-city.
‘I was a tool in your disputes, then,’ she said, softly.
‘That was how it began.’
‘And what do you think now?’
She did not look to see if Crowl’s expression had changed.
‘That not all cruelties are of the body,’ he said. ‘That there are feuds that must be let go lest they never end. That you have exposed the foolishness of an old man, and that you do not need to stay here any longer, should you wish to leave now and make your own way. You will be a formidable inquisitor whichever creed you choose to cleave to.’
The cheering never relented. As the primarch-ghosts faded into nothingness, fireworks began to shoot up into the sky — military rockets converted to shower starbursts over the cathedral heights. The celebrations would go on until the grey dawn came, and the manufactoria klaxons sounded once more; a weary world would return to its drudgery after a brief, cathartic interlude of euphoria.
It was impossible not to be angry. Tur had taught her that beyond all else — to use anger, the last and most powerful emotion. She could hear his strident voice now, reminding her of her dignity and her destiny. She could hear what Erastus would say too, confronted by decay in the place of vitality.
And yet… From only days ago, though it already felt like a lifetime away, she remembered some of the first words Crowl had spoken to her.
‘Pay no attention to the voices you can hear,’ she said, repeating them. ‘Pay attention to the ones you can’t.’
Crowl looked up at her, then smiled wryly. ‘Who told you that?’
‘I forget.’
He nodded. ‘An enlightened attitude to take, though,’ he said.
‘This is Terra,’ she replied, watching the golden stars as they fell to earth. ‘One gift given, another returned.’
He had been sitting in the cell for a long time. How long was impossible to tell. They had treated him for his wounds, just enough to keep him alive, taken him in a transport with no windows, deposited him in a lightless room with a pitcher of oily water and no food. There had been no brutality — one of the guards had even apologised for tightening the wrist-shackles too much and drawing blood — but then there had been no need for it, for his fear had become crippling.