The Unquiet Grave Read online

  In the aftermath of the Bloodshed - as historians had come to call the great war between human and mutant - the Iconoclasts had become the most potent military force in the Pan-Species Accord. Their evolution had begun during the Bloodshed itself, but had accelerated massively during its final stages. Their duties had now grown far beyond the simple protection of the human species: they were charged with suppression of mutant activity on a thousand fronts, collection of planetary tithes, patrol of Accord territorial borders and most important of all, the complete annihilation of the underground mutant cadre known as the Tenebrae.

  For their part, the Tenebrae represented the dripping knife-edge of anti-humanism. The days when they had been a simple sect of blood-worshippers were long gone. United behind the image of Saint Scarlet of Durham, they had become a potent military organisation; secret yet overt, hidden yet able and willing to strike with genocidal force. Only the vastness of the inhabited galaxy allowed them to remain little more than myth in most quarters, and yet command battlefleets.

  Iconoclast and Tenebrae: never before or since had two more bitterly opposed forces come to be.

  The Tenebrae drew strength from their worship of the arch-vampire, Durham Red. The Iconoclasts believed with unshakeable conviction that the vampire was the most deadly threat to the human race that existed. Thus, they became vampire-killers.

  Iconoclast soldiers were not simply indoctrinated to hate and fear the vampire or trained to kill it; they were physically altered for the task. Counter-vampire charms were burned into their skins, a network of sacred tattoos protecting their arteries and surface blood vessels. Their bones were reinforced, their nervous systems rewired. Eyes were altered to receive input from vision amplifiers, their senses of smell, taste and hearing jacked-up to insane levels. An Iconoclast at the height of their powers could hear a man's heartbeat at ten metres, a breath at a hundred. He could see thermal differences of a tenth of a degree.

  He could detect a mutant by smell alone.

  All this, Matteus Godolkin could do. And when he finally met a vampire, a real one, none of it was the slightest use.

  In response to a wild tale of the mythical Saint Scarlet's revival, Godolkin and his team had been sent to purge the university world of Wodan. Unfortunately for him, the tale had been true. Durham Red herself had attacked him.

  That had been something of a surprise. But up to the last moment, just before her great leap had brought her teeth to his throat, he had still believed he would prevail. His charms, his training, his belief would save him.

  He'd been wrong, of course.

  She had knocked him flat, torn the anti-vampire weapons from his grasp, ripped away his vision amplifier, and sunk her fangs into his neck. Which would have been the end of Matteus Godolkin and all his works, had the Blasphemy's mutant companion, Judas Harrow, not hauled her away.

  Every day, without fail, Matteus Godolkin climbed to the top of the tower at the Church of the Arch and stood staring out over the Eye of God, willing the Almighty to somehow transport him back to that day and let Durham Red take those last, fatal drops.

  He was trapped by her now. Her poison was in his blood, her fangs at his throat no matter how far apart the two of them were. From that moment on, Godolkin had ceased to be a warrior of the Accord and had become a slave to the fiend herself. The Blasphemy's word had become his law.

  It was intolerable and horrible. He was sworn to destroy her, and yet, with a single utterance from her, he was bound to protect her. For weeks after that day he had been her unwilling companion, until finally, blessedly, she had grown tired of him and Harrow. Told them they were cramping her style, whatever that might have meant. She had ordered Godolkin to leave her side; a command he followed willingly.

  His wanderings after that had taken him to world after world, before he had at last found the Church of the Arch, and a kind of peace.

  If only he could stop dreaming about Durham Red.

  She came to him again that night, after the Earl Grey, striding through mists and darkness, a sly smile playing about her lips. She was as he had last seen her, on the pleasure-moon; dressed in black synthetic leather, the cut of the garment showing every curve, every plane and angle of her perfect, hellish body. Her hair was long, scarlet and black, and her eyes glowed a deep crimson. "Hey, Godolkin," she purred. "I've missed you."

  "Blasphemy," he hissed. "Come no closer, or I swear you will fall."

  "Aw, honey, don't be like that." She whirled girlishly, spinning on one impossibly high heel. "I know you want me."

  He shook his head, violently. "No. Your body is a poison, a house of death. You sicken me."

  "Really? Not the impression I got." She leaned close. "Still, if you don't want my body, I know you want my mind..."

  She reached up with both hands, crooking her long fingers down to meet in the centre of her scalp. Godolkin saw her wrists tense, heard the cracking of bone as she forced her fingertips downwards through hair and skin and skull. Blood spilled from the wound, ran down over her smiling face.

  Slowly, horribly, she wrenched her hands apart.

  Her head split, scalp to jaw, her face coming apart in two equal sections as she levered her skull open to expose the steaming mass within. "Come on, Godolkin," she grinned, fangs awash with blood and fluid. "I know you're hungry. Dig in!"

  And he rose to her, mouth watering, opening his jaw impossibly wide to take that first succulent bite...

  There was no real night and day on Lavannos. The monastery ran on an artificial diurnal cycle, based on the Galactic Standard Hour. It was a well-known system, the same used on starships, and easy enough to adapt to. Matteus Godolkin had no problems adjusting to the most wildly different day-night lengths, due to a mixture of training and biochemical implants. None of the other attendants, however, had this advantage. As far as records showed, no other Iconoclast had ever been to the Church of the Arch.

  Lavannos and its gigantic partner, Mandus, orbited very far indeed from their sun. The star, Godolkin knew, was called Shantima, and occasionally he was able to spot it during his meditations on the tower. From this distance, though, it was nothing more than a bright point in the sky, barely able to cast a shadow. No heat reached Lavannos from Shantima either - thermal emissions from Mandus provided the only warmth on offer.

  Almost as if Lavannos acknowledged the debt it owed Mandus, it kept one face turned continually towards it; tidally-locked to its giant companion by the vast gravitational well.

  Thus the foamed landscape of Lavannos remained unchanging, save the occasional drift of frost off the Great Scour. Perhaps, Godolkin thought, gripping the tower wall hard, that was why people came here. In a frantic, baleful universe, maybe even this deathly peace was enough to ease the soul.

  He wished it would do something for his own.

  Godolkin had not seen the abbot for some days - the old man was spending most of his time elsewhere. Hardly surprising, given that the old man had seventy monks, thirty attendants, the church, the monastery and everything within its walls to keep track of. There were times, it was said, when he would disappear for weeks.

  As an Iconoclast warrior, Godolkin would be the first to tell anyone that he needed no company but his own. Self-reliance was of paramount importance in the field of battle. While it was important to know how to fight as part of a team - and recognise one's place in the vaster armies of the Accord - it was also essential to be able to operate completely alone, without succour or supply, for indefinite periods of time. Matteus Godolkin, Iconoclast First-Class, knew this better than most.

  But he still wished the abbot were around. He had, against all his training, grown rather fond of the old man. Plus, of course, the abbot was the only person who he would confess to and reveal the torment that was ripping his mind apart.

  The dreams had been getting worse.

  Contrary to popular belief, Iconoclasts dreamed just like anyone else. They just didn't talk about it. But Godolkin's dreams were becoming
so intense, so disturbing, that they were threatening his sanity. Night after night, for weeks, he had been visited by the Blasphemy, and drawn with her into the foulest acts imaginable. He had seen terrible things in his time and done terrible things, but the images that haunted his nights on Lavannos were far, far worse. And he didn't know what to do.

  He could leave Lavannos, ship out on the next supply tender, only a few days away. But would the dreams stop if he did? They might get worse, once he was returned to the harshness of the galaxy. Not forgetting, of course, that he was still a wanted man.

  The vampire's taint was in him, now. Any Iconoclasts he met would immolate him on sight.

  Abruptly, his reverie was broken by the sound of someone climbing the tower steps. The atmosphere of Lavannos was unbreathably thin - if it hadn't been for Mandus, it wouldn't have had one at all - and the lack of air impaired his hearing. He still heard the footsteps well before anyone emerged onto the roof.

  He could also tell that it wasn't the abbot. "Prior Rinaud."

  "Het Godolkin." Rinaud was the abbot's second-in-command, a severe woman with the lean, angular frame of someone who had spent a long time on Lavannos. The light gravity did that to people. "I was told I could find you here."

  Godolkin blinked. He hadn't been aware it was a secret. "By whom?"

  "The abbot. He sent me to find you, to give you a message." Rinaud hadn't crossed the roof. She was keeping near the steps, with the trapdoor open. Godolkin could hear her shivering, even with a thermocowl covering her from head to foot and heat washing up the steps from the levels below. "Sneck, it's cold up here. Lord, pardon my foul tongue."

  "Was that the message?"

  Rinaud snorted through her breath-mask. "No, Het, the message is this: 'Look to the Rule of Lavann, chapter seven, verse four.'"

  Godolkin raised an eyebrow. "'Idleness is the enemy of the soul'," he quoted. "I am intrigued."

  "He said you would be." Rinaud turned away, and began to bob back down the steps. "He's in the reliquary."

  Unusually, the reliquary was on the other side of the monastery from the chapel. Godolkin could have reached it through the pressurised, heated areas of the building, but the quickest way was across the courtyard. Once down the tower steps and back at ground level he took a small side-corridor past the chapel and the west cloister, and out onto the plain black tiles of the open court.

  A small attendant, masked and hooded against the chill, peered at him as he strode past. Godolkin caught a glimpse of a woman's face under the hood, and felt a strange jolt of recognition. "Good day, Het," he muttered, using the universal honorific. Past the breath-mask he couldn't be sure if she smelled of human or mutant.

  The woman said nothing, and turned away. Godolkin was puzzled for a moment, but then put her out of his mind. She had probably arrived on the same supply tender he had.

  The reliquary was a small building, as blocky and unadorned as the rest of the monastery and coated in the same radiation-reflecting white stone. Godolkin found the heat-lock and keyed the chime set into the frame. A few moments later the lock hissed out a small cloud of condensation and swung aside.

  Godolkin stepped in and heard the outer door seal behind him a fraction of a second before the inner one opened. The monastery's heat-locks were efficiently built and scrupulously maintained. To go through one was little more effort than walking through an ordinary door.

  They were, however, built a little low for someone of Godolkin's height.

  The reliquary felt warm after the icy cold of outside, but not as stifling as other areas of the monastery. Godolkin tugged his breath-mask free and sniffed the air, picking up the dead tang of atmosphere control instantly. Whatever relics the building contained must have been of some delicacy to require such precise monitoring of their air and climate.

  The interior of the reliquary was not what Godolkin was expecting. Most churches kept their sacred relics in grim, forbidding places, bedecked with symbols and the gilded skulls of the honoured dead. This, however, was more like an operating theatre.

  Flat, silvery panels of insulation lined the walls, reflecting soft white light from the low-level ceiling. The floor beneath Godolkin's boots was black antistatic carpet, silent as he paced inside, and shelves, stacked neatly with artefacts, rose in symmetrical banks on either side of him. At the far end of the reliquary was what looked like a small but well-equipped laboratory with multiple data-engines and holo displays centred around a coffin-sized scanning deck. Godolkin drew closer, noting several items that had no normal place within a place of prayer: an electron microscope, a phase-breacher, a quantum probe.

  This was not worship. This was intense study.

  He was alone in the reliquary, the only sound a faint chattering from the lab's engines. "Het Abbot?" he called.

  There was a soft noise of concealed panels sliding away.

  Godolkin turned. A doorway had appeared between two sets of shelves and the abbot's face was peering out of the shadows behind; it was oddly close to the floor. "Ah, Matteus!" he smiled, beckoning. "Come down. I've got a job for you."

  Godolkin padded back to the doorway. The abbot was already descending a steep set of stairs, leading down into the gloom. "I'm glad Rinaud found you," he was saying, his voice echoing harshly. "She was rather loath to venture onto the tower, I'm afraid."

  "The view is not to everyone's taste." Godolkin lowered himself down onto the first step, and then began to descend.

  "Nor the climb." The abbot looked back, making sure that Godolkin was following. He carried a bright hand-lume, casting bluish light up the tunnel. "Take care, by the way. These steps are carved out of the crust of Lavannos, and they can be slippery, to say the least..."

  Godolkin's old black boots were Iconoclast standard issue, with grips that would keep him upright on wet ice in a gale. Still, he took his care. The steps, and the tunnel that surrounded them, were indeed that same black, glassy stuff as the rest of Lavannos, like a kind of bubble-flecked obsidian. It was not only slippery, but razor-sharp.

  "Het Abbot? I am puzzled."

  "About what?"

  "The reliquary. Are the items there holy things?"

  The abbot chuckled. "Only in as much as Lavannos itself is holy to us. Its appearance to Saint Lavann is still an accepted miracle among his followers."

  And a heresy to the orthodox faith of the Accord, thought Godolkin, although he kept his silence. Lavannos was, thankfully, well outside Accord space, almost on the fringes of the Vermin Stars. "I had expected to come face to face with the bones of Lavann himself."

  "Oh no, our blessed father left nothing so crass." The abbot turned back up the steps to Godolkin. "A few more metres, Het, and then all will be revealed."

  The abbot's words, Godolkin discovered moments later, were perfectly true. If something of an understatement.

  It was perfectly logical, when he thought about it. The titan bubbles of gas that gave Lavannos its foamed structure couldn't all have reached the surface before the crust refroze. Millions of them must still have been buried.

  Like the one he stood in now.

  It was vast, a flattened ovoid space as big as a freighter hold. The inside surface of it, where the light from the abbot's lume reached it, was as glossy as black silk. Barring a few imperfections - smaller bubbles, minor pits and cracks - it was almost completely featureless.

  "Large, isn't it?" grinned the abbot, his voice reverberating insanely around the cavern. "Lavann be praised, it's the biggest void under the monastery by far. I've had nightmares about something the size of Eye of God opening up under my feet."

  Godolkin, who had enough nightmares of his own to worry about, just nodded.

  The abbot was walking away, towards the furthest wall of the bubble. "And over here, my friend, is why I called you down here. I need your strength. And your silence."

  Godolkin followed him, boots crunching on glassy dust. "I will take no vow, Het Abbot. I've told you that."

  "I kn
ow, Het. This is trust on my part, believe me." He raised the hand-lume. "But it would give rise to more questions than answers if we made this too well-known."

  Matteus Godolkin, for all his iron will, only barely stopped himself from uttering one of Durham Red's infamous curses.

  The wall of the cavern was studded with objects, frozen into the rock.

  This was where the reliquary's artefacts had come from - he could see the places where they had been chipped and wrenched out of the glass. There were strange objects he could hardly recognise, some burned and melted by the intense heat that had ruined Lavannos, some almost intact. Pieces of metal, plastic, other materials he could not name. Items of technology, pieces of reinforced structure, furniture. Human bones.

  "Look at this," The abbot directed the lume's light onto a gleaming artefact, what looked like part of a metal hand. The finger joints were intricate, subtle workings of metal and ceramic that was nothing like the brute technologies of the Accord. "Have you, in all you travels, seen anything like this?"

  Godolkin shook his head. "I have not."

  "But you do see why this mustn't, for the moment, be revealed. To the other attendants or anyone else."

  "I believe so." Godolkin straightened. "I am no archeotech. But I see these technologies have no current analogue. Abbot, do your relics date back to before the Bloodshed?"

  The old man rubbed his chin. "We think so. This cavern was only discovered ten years ago - ten years standard, of course. We've been studying the finds ever since, with the help of any attendant we felt we could trust, and whose knowledge might have been useful." He too stood straight, putting a hand to his lower back. "It may turn out to be nothing, curios from some vessel that crashed hard enough into Lavannos to melt part of the crust. A jumpspace accident, maybe. But if we call in a university or Accord archeotechs the administratum will be all over Lavannos like a nasty rash, if you'll pardon the analogy."