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237.738.M41

Velgrad, Convent of the Riven Veil

The convent is just outside of Velgrad, on the western side of the city. It commands the top of a low hill, and all the ground except eastward is cleared for a kilometer in every direction. Once a year we seed the ground with fruiting roses and stunted blackberries—too low to conceal a man or monster crawling, even if he could escape the thorns. They are beautiful in spring, all white and red and pink and green. In late-summer, we let families into the places not made hazardous by shrapnel from our gunnery practice; and children leave with sticky mouths and baskets piled high with fruit. There are two families of beekeepers who live just outside the razor-wire, but still protected by the sight-lines of our guns.

The field is cut through by a winding stream from north to south. And from east to west, eight hundred meters from the inner wall, it ends in the broad, straight tracks of one of Velgrad's freight rails and the blackened ground of its exclusion zone.

The inner wall is natural granite. Most of the year, ivy hides the stone, but in winter you can see the places where it has been rebuilt after long-ago artillery and bombs. The chapel is much the same outside. Inside, the sanctuary-altar and the open space of the nave are lit by hundreds of candles and seven tall, narrow stained-glass windows. Three windows combine to show the Emperor, as if they were plain glass windows and He was standing just outside, partially occluded by the stone. The others show Saint Mina, Saint Dominica, the Ascension, and the Visitation of Tarisius. The chapel air holds the aroma of beeswax and incense even early in the morning before the first candles are lit. When you prostrate yourself in prayer, the scent is in the stones of the floor.

We have forty-eight rooms in the dormitories, which coexist with our armory and storage sectors in the artillery-hardened section of the convent. About one hundred and forty people sleep in them, including novices and a former Sister Hospitaller who lives with us as our on-base physician now that her husband is dead and her children are grown. Only a few of us sleep in individual cells. But it is not so hard as you might think to find places to be alone. There are the bell-tower, the mortar positions, the anti-aircraft dugouts in the corners of the walls, the garden, the wall itself, prayer alcoves, and the Chamber of Skulls. Even your room, much of the time. The rooms are for sleeping, and are usually empty during the day.

The men (Fr. Phaedo, Surs, and two apprentice priests) lived in the city nearby.

The convent had been my home for little more than two years, broken in the middle by the Eldar war and my deployment to the voidship Fist of Tabbat. But it felt like my true home.

Palatine Elin didn't have time to arrange our schedule for the first hours after we came back. The sun was shining, so we lay in the garden, just Hana, Verity, Tara and me, listening to nearby laughter, distant bolterfire at the practice range, and a group of sweet-voiced Sisters practicing a complicated hymn. I caught an ant and presented it to Tara. She thanked me for the noble gift and pretended to eat it, which made us laugh.

Our schedule, when we worked it out, became as follows.

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​

05:00. Lauds, morning prayer.

05:30. Conditioning and rehabilitation from injury.

06:30. Personal time.

07:00. Breakfast.

07:30. Arms and armor maintenance.

08:00. Terce, wargear prayer.

08:15. Leave convent. I, Tara, Verity, and Hana travel to the day's designated training site to meet Castor, Adem, and Mak'ti. We participate in training as assigned by Palatine Elin, Inquisitor Grendel, or me in their stead.

11:30. Sext, the sixth hour prayer, is shared with Castor, Adem, and Mak'ti as we care for our wargear and vehicle. Midday meal is taken in the field. Rest and personal time follows. Explorations of personal areas of focus are encouraged.

14:30. None, the ninth hour prayer, is shared with Castor, Adem, and Mak'ti. A topic related to knowledge of the Eldar enemy is studied.

15:30. Rehabilitation exercises and additional training as assigned by me. Cross-training on Castor and Adem's weapons, Arvus vehicle rites, and the rites of operation for Mak'ti's servo-drones.

17:30. Arvus maintenance and logistical needs. Return to convent before 18:25.

18:30. Vespers, evening prayer, liturgy.

19:00. Evening meal.

20:00. Reflection, confession, and guidance.

20:45. Compline, night prayer.

21:00. Sleep.

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​

238.738.M41

Forest west of Velgrad

About 16:30

Thirty meters away, where a large flat rock was open to the sun, I had Hana instructing Castor and Adem on the disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly of the Godwyn-De'az bolter.

Mak'ti and Tara were nearby in the shade, taking turns doing fire-reload-fire drills on Adem's grenade launcher using a pair of dummy rounds. Mak'ti's face was unreadable as always, but the drill had clearly turned into a competition for the best time.

I had assigned Verity and myself to become familiar with Mak'ti's weapon, which took about two minutes each. I'm sure Mak'ti could have talked for hours about the mechanical and spiritual differences between the Merovech Model 481 lascarbine and the M36 Kantrael lasgun we had drilled on in Schola—if I could have gotten her to start talking at all. But for the infantryman, the differences were that the Merovech's automatic setting ran at 1100 shots per minute instead of 720, the accuracy was poor beyond 150 meters, and the takedown pin liked to fly out and get lost in the leaves instead of being sensibly retained by the metal of the housing when you stripped the cover off. The controls were all the same except that the Mrovech's charge-pack release and fire selector were only on the left-hand side, while the Kantrael is ambidextrous.

The Merovech was now put aside. Verity's foot had been seizing all day, even though our training had been light to the point of being almost effortless. I took it in my lap and massaged it. It was still green, faded a little but still vivid.

"Verity," I said, "Can I say something really stupid—and then we'll pretend I'm not stupid, anyway?"

"Hmm? Oh, yes! Say all the stupid things you like."

"Okay, then…" I glanced around, as if we weren't out in the forest with no one else for kilometers. I don't know what I expected.

"Go on, go on! Be stupid, I love you anyway!"

"I wish—I half wish—that we could have sex," I said. Her eyebrows shot up. "I mean. Not with you, I mean. I mean, not, not with anyone, just—"

"That is stupid," she said. "You need another person for that. The texts are very clear."

"That's not what I mean."

"I get it. Are you sure it isn't with somebody, though? Not even shirtless rooftop Sergeant Gustav? And all his bulging bulges?"

"No, not even… I don't know. Maybe. No. Let me be serious."

"You have my green foot in your lap. For seriousness, I am at your mercy."

"I don't know, I don't know. I know all the reasons, but I just… I feel like it would… like I could…"

"Marisa?" She looked at me. Really looked. Her smile went away. I massaged her foot and tried to find words.

"I keep thinking that it would take a week ago, the Eldar, the hab. Take it and make it go away."

"Oh," she said. "Oh, Marisa. Give me back my foot, you stupid little girl."

"I'm older than you."

"Stupid, come here."

Something flooded up inside me. I couldn't hold it down. I started sobbing. She was petting my hair.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Is it the boy in the window?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said.

My mind was full of halves of thoughts. I couldn't finish any of them and they all piled up into a heap. "If" and "I couldn't" and "I wish that," in a heap. It was like completing any of them would cut me open. It was him, and the children in the alien ship, and the thing the Eldar did to the old woman, and the way Hana looked when her helmet came off, and forgetting to reload my weapon when I had the spare seconds, and choosing the rooftop for a fighting position, and none of those things, and all of them together. Somehow it was also leaving Surs in the burning Rhino a month ago, on day 213, but it wasn't that, either.

She said, "You know he was going to die anyway, right? The tox-darts would have killed him. If the Eldar took him, they would have killed him. There was no way—you couldn't have… every possible action would have led to him dying."

"I know, I know."

"It was not sin. They murdered him. Not you."

"I wish… I don't know. I don't know anything."

"Stupid Marisa. You know how to close with and destroy the enemies of God. That's enough."

"It's not."

"It is. Shh. Shh. Sex wouldn't help. Have you prayed and confessed?"

"Yes."

"Smart. Good. Good. Let's stop being stupid now, hmm?"

"Yes," I said.

"Ugh. My foot really, really hurts."

"Oh. Yes. Give it back, then, stupid."

"Hmf."

She gave me back her foot. The others pretended not to have noticed. After a while Verity's foot was better and I could tell Tara and Mak'ti were as good at the reloading drill as they were going to get, so I made new assignments. Verity and I played with the launcher for a while and tried to beat Tara's best time.

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​

Please keep that part, especially, a secret. It is the kind of thing you instructed me to include, but I don't want other people to see.

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​

Grendel's investigation dragged on and on. We saw little of him, but in the brief times when our paths crossed each day, it was like each day sapped a little of the haste and dynamism that were so much of what he seemed to be. The ten locations where he thought the Eldar might be stayed ten locations. Their individual sizes shrank by blocks and streets and acres, not districts and kilometers. His parallel pursuit of the sect made small gains. Caches of weapons were found and recaptured. Individual suspects and witnesses were arrested and interviewed, results were added to the mountain of half-contradictory data from which he hoped to sift out useful parts.

Our role faded into background readiness, even as Verity became increasingly capable of returning to combat. By day 244, two weeks since her injury, our training looked like real training again. We needed frequent breaks, and massaging Verity's leg and foot was an unwritten part of our daily hours, but we were maintaining and developing fluidity and skill, not just trying to restore lost function or productively fill time while waiting for her to heal. It was hard to remember that the green color wasn't caused by the poison, but by the cure—because it went away as Verity got better. The greenness seemed to exist in opposite proportion to her agility and freedom from pain.

I noticed on day 245 that I had stopped noticing the subtle strain of being in the company of men. I thought about shaving one side of my head. Hana had kept her hair on one side shaved to stubble as her wound turned from a cut under mediskin to a long pink scar. It made her look rakish and feminine at once. Castor and Adem told her that they thought it was appealing, at least as good as the way she had her hair before. They could have been lying to make her not regret the loss, but I saw them glance at each other and silently agree on something in a secretive manly way, and I think they were telling the truth.

Midmorning on 246.738, Grendel summoned us. Mak'ti and I had been crawling through the mud of last night's rain, trying to sneak up on Tara and Adem. We tried to rinse off but we still left mud everywhere in the Arvus.

Grendel had kept his offices in the burned section of Velgrad, but it wasn't the burned section anymore. The city had retaken the less-damaged blocks, and life had resumed. The tak-tak-tak of jackhammers and the whine of grinding or cutting tools was a constant background as badly damaged buildings were rebuilt. Grendel himself seemed remade into his old self, striding towards us with quick powerful strides that made him seem bigger than his already bulky self. I thought he had finally found something about the Eldar, or key information about the sect, but I was wrong.

"I am leaving you for a few days," he said. "An urgent matter requires different skills than yours on one of the outer moons."

"Not Eldar?" I said.

"No. The Ruinous Powers. In better days I would take you, and let you experience the gravest enemy of Man, but I must preserve you for your chosen task. Do not fear. It is urgent, but within the skill of those who will follow me."

He wanted instead to show us the current state of his research. Others would be carrying it forward in his place until he returned, not us. But he wanted us to know, to keep our minds running on the problem. I think he hoped there was a chance we might make some guess that had eluded him and his scholars. He would not have cared about our approval, that we, his subordinates, should stand in absurd judgment over his work.

All that had been learned about the toxins was a collection of small discoveries proving where they were probably not coming from. Production byproducts were likely not polluting certain rivers. Precursors were likely not stolen from certain factories. Waste was likely not dumped in certain city purificator drains. The search had spread and grown more grueling and meticulous. Initial hopes of gleaning the information from existing records had come to nothing, or pointed to possibilities that had turned out to be a waste of time and risk.

I had not realized the extent of risk attached to investigation. It was the same as reconnaissance. The greater force used, and the more bold the searchers were, the greater chance the enemy would know it was being hunted. Grendel feared the Eldar might discover their peril, detonate their toxins in some unsuspecting city, and vanish to force the investigation to begin all over again.

At least on the level that Grendel had managed to penetrate, the sect seemed truly ignorant that our Eldar enemy was their secret ally or manipulator. There were propaganda placards everywhere, if you weren't cloistered in a convent. Some had paintings, others had picts of Eldar corpses from the fight. One had a blurred pict of a Wrack and the text IT WANTS YOU TO DOUBT. Another was a stylized painting that showed a helmetless, bloody-faced Battle Sister impaling an Eldar Warrior on a fixed bayonet. WORK. OBEY. HELP HER FIGHT. That night, I made Castor get one for us to put up in Grendel's headquarters, and we inked in her hair so she would look like Hana. Though that is not the point. The point is that Grendel said the few sect sympathizers that had been captured all believed that the Eldar were lies made up by their oppressors—that the sect had no Eldar connection at all.

There was one great mercy, though it did not please Grendel as it did all of us around him. The search for the Eldar had found no Eldar, but it had found human monsters. In Haldenmarch, Enforcers followed Inquisitorial data and rescued nineteen girls from a manmonger ring. In Vasker, a man was found who had the skeletons of three missing children under his garden, and he revealed the location of two more little graves before he died under torture. Thirty-five murderers were arrested, and six had already been hanged.

To count as success, Grendel wanted the Eldar Haemonculus killed, the sect leadership broken, and the Fear units found or destroyed. He would accept one of the three—especially the first—as adequate to give the investigation to the Enforcers and withdraw the attention of the Inquisition. He had little hope that any of the three would be accomplished before the turning of the Solar year.