Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave Read online

  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. Wh
atever 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 know, 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 artifacts 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."

  "And your holy retreat would end up as nothing more than a farworld dig, laid open and swarming with historians." Godolkin put a finger to his black lips. "A sad end to the church."

  "I'm glad you agree, my friend." The abbot winced. "God! Curse these old bones of mine. The indignities of seniority. Which is the other reason I brought you down here, Matteus. You translated my message?"

  "I did." Godolkin had read the rule of Lavann upon entering the retreat, just like every attendant. Once he had read something, he didn't forget it. "And far be it from me to let my soul fall prey to an enemy again. Where would you like my strength applied?"

  "Here." The abbot moved a few metres further along the wall, where a large, flattened cylinder jutted from the rock. Around its ridged surface the cavern had been chipped and scored into a deep crater, exposing more of the artefact. Godolkin could see that most of it had been freed, almost three metres of gleaming metal.

  Something about it jolted inside him. He shook the feeling away. "Do you wish me to simply pull it free?"

  "More or less." The abbot gestured at the rough surroundings of the cylinder. "I don't want to use the light-drill any more—it's at too awkward an angle, and I don't want to score the metal. I think that with the right leverage…"

  Godolkin put his arms around the cylinder, feeling a slight warmth from it, a subtle vibration. The aftermath of the light-drill, no doubt. He pulled.

  There was a sharp cracking sound. Bits of glass splintered away and scattered across the bubble floor.

  Boots firmly planted, Godolkin bettered his grip on the cylinder and heaved. For a second there was no movement, but then the glassy wall of the cavern groaned. There was a squeaking, snapping report.

  The cylinder came free.

  Par
t of the wall shivered to fragments behind it, collapsing in a dusty heap around Godolkin's feet. Still holding the cylinder, he moved back, careful to avoid the larger shards of glass, and set the artefact down before the abbot. "You were correct," he said. "It was almost free."

  And then, in the light of the abbot's lume, he got a good look at the thing.

  And realised where he had seen it before.

  * * * *

  For the first time, the tower roof seemed cold to Godolkin.

  He'd been able to hide his recognition of the cylinder from the abbot, and the horrified shock of seeing what he had freed from the cavern wall. At that moment, more than at any other time, he'd wished he had never set foot on Lavannos.

  And yet, that awful thing in the cavern, and whatever nightmare it may contain, could lead him to salvation. It could bring him to a final confrontation with Durham Red.

  To do so was madness, he knew. What he had found might have lethal consequences: for himself, for Lavannos, for the Accord. It could raise Durham Red to true supremacy or destroy her utterly. Or it might do neither. But one thing it would do, of that he was certain.

  It would bring her to Lavannos.

  He couldn't contact her. Even if he knew where the arch-bitch was, she had ordered him not to. But he had no other choice. The dreams were shredding him. From whatever hellish lair she had secreted herself in, she was driving him insane with these nightmares.

  He would stand before Durham Red again, and one of them would fall. Either way, the torment would end. Godolkin felt as though he were teetering on the Bridge of Splinters. Razor-edged shards of black glass in every direction and a sheer drop of five kilometres on either side.

  Communications from the monastery were normally forbidden, and the Shantima system was so out of the way and so far from a relay station that messages from Lavannos back to the Accord might take days. Godolkin, however, had access to technology very few others had even seen. One of these, kept concealed in his room ever since he had arrived, was a military comm-linker, with full encryption.