In the sacristy, by the light of many candles, an aumbry cupboard was foggily visible. The cupboard was so gorgeously decorated in silver and gold as to dazzle any spectator who did not view it thus through a veil. Armed sacristans stood guard alongside the aumbry, softly chanting a canticle.
‘That holy aumbry itself being triple-locked. Within is reposing a rich reliquary. Inside that reliquary is resting the True Face of Him-on-Earth—’
That precious treasure was only ever exposed to injurious sunlight in Holy Years. In the interval between such rare public exhibitions, the Face was occasionally shown briefly by candle light in the sacristy to munificent donors, for half a minute or so. ‘No such private viewing being permitted during Holy Year—’ But high above the veiled entrance to the sacristy there hung in shadows a gold-framed picture executed in ink upon camelopard vellum. A picture of a lean and rueful though glorious face. ‘Travellers, that being a copy of a copy of the True Face of Him!’
Inside the sacristy, two indentured artists were labouring painstakingly to produce similar copies.
‘Being expensive to buy?’ asked Grimm nonchalantly.
Why, two priests known as the Fraternity of the Face were always selling such copies in one of the chapels of the basilica. The sexton would guide the trio by way of that chapel on their return.
More than ten thousand years in the past, enthused the sexton, when the sacred Emperor had roamed the galaxy in the flesh, one day He had wiped His face upon a cloth. His psychic energy had imprinted that cloth with His visage. After so many millennia the original cloth was frail. That was why the artists copied from a copy.
‘A copy being shown to the crowds?’ enquired Grimm.
The sexton’s expression darkened. His hand brushed the butt of his laspistol. ‘The True Cloth being shown!’
J
AQ STARED UP
at the dim face on the vellum.
When he had seen – or believed he had seen – Him-on-Earth in the huge throne room athrob with power and acrackle with ozone, amidst hallowed battle-banners and cherished icons, the face which had been framed in the soaring prosthetic throne was that of a wizened mummy. Such potent soul-stripping thoughts had issued from the mind within that mummy that Jaq had almost been annihilated. How could a mite comprehend a mammoth?
Would Jaq ever return to that throne room, illuminated within himself?
How dared he contemplate allowing any daemonic power access to his soul, in the hope of exorcising and illuminating himself? The trio declined the offer to purchase a copy of the Face.
‘Already giving our only real valuable for a squint at the sacristy,’ lied Grimm.
W
HEN THEY WERE
heading away from the barricade through the host of pilgrims and tents, a scrawny liver-spotted hand clutched at Jaq’s hem.
‘Charity for a registered cripple,’ croaked an elderly voice.
Smouldering thuribles of incense dangled on chains from a gibbet-like frame. Backed up against the base of this frame was a rickety cart with small iron wheels. Upon the cart crouched a ragged crone. Her face was wizened with age. Her stringy long hair was white. Yet her rheumy blue eyes were keen with a light of tense intelligence. In those eyes was a quality of anticipation for which expectancy of coins alone could hardly account.
Grimm scrutinized her circumstances. The thurible-gibbet protected this cripple from being trampled accidentally. A handle jutted from the rear of her cart. It might be pulled or pushed. Here she crouched under the cool red sun, begging.
‘No respect for the elderly on most worlds!’ grumped the little man. He fished in one of his pouches for a half-shekel. ‘Oh, your legs being all withered away, mother.’ This was plain to see: two brown sticks were folded unnaturally. Was Grimm about to shed a sympathetic tear? The crone’s cart smelled of urine.
Grimm withheld the coin temporarily. ‘Who’s wheeling you away at nightfall, mother?’
Aha. Had her legs perhaps been broken by her own greedy family so that she could serve as a source of income? ‘Temple servant pushing me into a shed,’ she replied. ‘Servant assisting me, kind sir.’
‘Was the temple breaking your legs, mother?’ Surely the Occidens Temple did not need to create and exploit cripples, pitifully to swell its coffers.
The crone rocked forward, as if in sudden anguish from a cramp of the bowels.
‘Oh yes, it was breaking my legs!’ was her reply. ‘Yet not in the way you’re meaning.’
Grimm hunkered down by the cart. Soon so did Lex, and Jaq.
T
HE CRONE’S NAME
was Herzady. One thing she had never been was a mother. Defiantly she declared her age to be eleven years old.
Who else upon Sabulorb would dream of counting their age in local years? She had lived long enough to arrive at double figures. She had endured more than a hundred and ten Imperial years – the vast majority of them spent in this cart. Grimm was impressed by Herzady’s longevity, even though to a long-living squat a century was rather small beer.
‘Pretty impressive for an ordinary, unenhanced human being, particularly in such reduced circumstances!’
A century earlier, as a young girl, Herzady had attended that Holy Year’s unveiling in company with her pious parents. During the bedlam which ensued, her mother and father both lost their lives. Herzady’s legs were permanently crippled. A compassionate priest had taken pity and provided this cart. For decades Herzady had awaited the next Holy Year. When the unveiling came again she was watching from a safer place than on the previous occasion.
Bedlam?
Oh yes. At the unveiling fifty years later there had been homicidal bedlam again, due to the hysteria of pilgrims intent on seeing... what could not be seen.
Could not be seen? What did she mean by this?
Why, Herzady had been all ears and eyes for decades. She knew that the Visage had faded, aeons since, into invisibility. On the climactic day of Holy Year when the high priest of Occidens in splendid procession carried the reliquary out along the walkway, briefly to open the sacred container, what he would expose to the gaze of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims was a cloth which was blank, apart from a couple of stains vaguely located where eyes might have been.
‘Pilgrims are glimpsing almost nothing, sires! How they are straining and struggling to see!’
Consequently a vehement riot would cut short the ceremony. What about those copies?
Ah, the earliest copy had been made by laying sensitive material upon the precious faded cloth until a psychic imprint was transferred. This imprint was then piously embellished.
‘Huh,’ said Grimm. ‘In other words, invented!’ This account of the invisible True Face filled Jaq with an eerie sense of awe at the sheer devotion of so many of the Emperor’s subjects. What did it matter if pilgrims were besotted? What did it matter if they would die or be injured just to catch a fleeting glimpse of the cloth which had once wiped His Face? Their agonies were as nothing compared to the eternal agony of Him-on-Earth. The veneration of pilgrims would pass into the psychic sea of the warp, flavouring it with benediction.
Kneeling beside Herzady’s cart, Jaq found that he was able to pray. For a while.
Gently he said to Herzady, ‘Being crippled, crippled because of adoring him, you are partaking in His vaster malady.’
‘I am waiting,’ she replied bleakly, ‘for many more persons being crippled and killed the day after tomorrow, as surely must be happening. Then I am dying contentedly.’
It was to witness this calamity that Herzady had endured indomitably throughout the five decades since the previous holy year! The crone’s persistence was pathological. Her lucidity was madness.
Futility flayed Jaq’s briefly-boosted faith, as surely as the gulf of time had erased the True Face. He rocked from side to side. ‘That courthouse, hmm?’ Grimm said to Herzady. ‘You been overhearing talk ‘bout the courthouse? Involving itself much in the life of this holy city?’
Did Grimm suppose that they might wheel the crone away in her cart to their mansion in the suburbs, to become their informant about matters Sabulorbish?
The little man prompted her: ‘Hundreds of people dying outside that courthouse earlier on today. All imagining the True Face being unveiled early – and panicking.’
Galvanized by shock, the crone sat bolt upright upon her twisted shrivelled legs. She gasped tragically. ‘Herzady missing so many deaths...’
Her wizened face spasmed in pain. A thin spotted hand fluttered to her chest. She slumped over.
Lex checked her pulse. In his hefty hand her wrist looked no wider than a pencil. Herzady was dead. Of a heart attack, of a broken heart. It was Grimm who reached to close the crone’s gaping empty eyes. ‘Huh,’ he said, ‘saved meself half a shekel, anyway.’
T
WO DAYS LATER
, of an afternoon, they struggled to a position at the very rear of the great square.
Although Grimm had been reluctant to come to the unveiling, Jaq was intent on studying the pious madness of a multitude possessed by rapture to the point of derangement where injuries and deaths would be as nothing. There were lessons to be learned about passion, obsession, possession. About derangement of the senses and the soul.
How untypically warm and foetid it was in the square this afternoon due to the exhalation of so much breath and the closeness of bodies rubbing together.
How many people in this press had already fainted or asphyxiated during the hours of waiting? What a roar arose as – presumably – the True Face was borne forth at long last. How the spectators convulsed. It was as though that sea of people was a vast pan of water which had reached boiling point. Or perhaps a pan of hot oil.
‘Oh, my blessed ancestors!’ yelped Grimm. The little man was crushed between Jaq and Lex. Exerting his enhanced musculature, Lex forced wailing pilgrims aside, perhaps cracking ribs in so doing. The long, high sandstone wall of a nearby house was indented with shallow niches – as if a line of statues had once kept vigil along there, or as though that ancient wall had been squeezed and rubbed into that crinkled shape by the sheer pressure of people during so many similar unveilings in the past.
Lex tore pilgrims loose from a niche. He was a massive bulwark against the heaving tide of frenzied humanity. He offered partial shelter to Jaq and Grimm in his lee.
Grimm huffed and puffed to replenish his lungs. How many chests were being crushed in the crowd? The little man squawked disgustedly. Grimm could, of course, see nothing whatever other than the nearest bodies.
Jaq was inhaling odours of hysteria. Lex alone could see clearly over heads and hoods and hats bearing True Face badges – although the focus of his vision was a full kilometre away.
‘Priest’s opening the reliquary,’ he bellowed. A greater roar came, briefly drowning his voice.
‘Crowd’s surging against the baffler...’
I
NEVITABLY THAT BAFFLER
would have given way soon, and the walkway would have come crashing down, were it not for the guardian deacons in their white surplices.
At first, the deacons used humane stun-guns to subdue the excesses of enthusiasm. Pilgrims who had camped to the fore had merely guaranteed themselves a stunning into unconsciousness upon their flattened tents. A rampart of stunned bodies arose all along the barricade.
The rampart rose higher as frustrated pilgrims climbed up over bodies, and were stunned in turn. Soon that rampart of bodies was imperilling the security of the barrier. By now the resplendent high priest had shut the reliquary and retreated. Pilgrims still pressed forward.
Deacons discarded their stun-guns. Probably those guns had run out of charge. The deacons must resort to autoguns and shotguns. Now they fired high-velocity caseless shot and low-velocity fragmentation shot. The giant red sun which filled a quarter of the sky grew even ruddier as though soaking up the blood which was being shed. Dust stirred up by thousands of milling, stamping feet might be to blame for the deepening of the sun’s hue.
I
T WAS ONLY WITH
difficulty, and with bruises, that the trio eventually extricated themselves from the edge of that square.
In spite of all the deaths in the vicinity of the temple, many pilgrims’ eyes sparkled brightly. Their eyes might have been doped with belladonna. Many were weeping with joy. Some warbled to themselves, ‘Oh the True Face!’ – even though they had seen next to nothing.
T
HAT NIGHT
J
AQ
dreamt his dream of Askandargrad again.
One by one, all the collars of the beastmen had exploded – and their heads had been shorn from their shoulders.
Some of the squealing maidens were tethered to one another. Some, to shrubs jutting from shattered urns. Some tethers hung loose upon the ground. If only some of the maidens might escape their fate while they were temporarily unsupervised. If only one of them might escape – and not fall foul of other marauders, and hide herself somewhere in the ruins.
Help was on the way. Just days prior to the invasion by the renegades of Chaos, Space Marines of the Raven Guard had refuelled on Askandar and their ship had departed for the jump-zone. Messaged by astropath before the governor’s palace was destroyed, the Ravens had now turned back. They would reach Askandar in another two days. Potently armed, black-armoured Raven Guards would hurl themselves against the raiders. Pray that the daemonic sights they saw did not require battle brothers to be mindwiped subsequently, to save their sanity.
It was almost as if the powers of Chaos had deliberately planned to taunt the Ravens.
If only some captives might escape! But the din of exploding collars had swung attention toward the maidens.
‘In the Emperor’s name, fire that weapon!’ Jaq ordered the eunuch beside him. Suiting deed to word, Jaq peered over the barricade and discharged his own boltgun at one of those terrible parodies of a righteous knight.
RAAARK—
The male and female rune of Slaanesh was emblazoned provocatively on that Chaos warrior’s knee protectors. Unlike his accomplices, his obscenely moulded armour was enamelled in purple and gold – a sardonic flaunting of the ancient colours of his Chapter before evil perverted it.