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Contents

Cover

Nightshift Nineteen – Peter Fehervari

PHASE I: Initiation

PHASE II: Elevation

PHASE III: Assignation

PHASE IV: Orientation

PHASE V: Revelation

PHASE VI: Affirmation

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Requiem Infernal’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

NIGHTSHIFT NINETEEN

Peter Fehervari

Ours is the hand that wipes away the stain betwixt the stars.
We cleanse so others may prosper!
Ours is the eye that spies the blight within the night.
We watch so others may sleep!
Ours is the spirit that fuels the stars.
We give so others may beget!
So it flows, from dirt to dome.
As above, so below!

First Canticle of Ablution,
The Canopic Testament

PHASE I: Initiation

The procession of neophytes marched towards the Cathedral of Ablution in single file, their backs bowed in symbolic toil, their ceremonial brass-headed mops clasped reverently. All wore orange tunics, flat caps and rubber gloves. Most were male, all were young. None were tall, for that would have been a hindrance to their forthcoming duties. Cherub-faced nozzles set into the circular gateway sprayed each supplicant with a fine, sterilising mist as they approached. It stung, but nobody closed their eyes. They had come too far to make such an error.

‘Cleanliness is righteousness,’ Izaq chanted, gazing directly into the spray when his turn came, then welcoming the tears that followed. ‘I weep away my sins.’

A symphony of creaks, rattles and groans answered from the cavernous chamber beyond. The pipes riddling the cathedral’s walls were ancient, but still very active, circulating holy liquids and gases that dated back to Hive Carceri’s foundation, untold millennia ago. That concoction was the spiritual lifeblood of the confederation of priests, adepts, administrators and labourers who maintained the city’s dome. Izaq and his fellow apprentices were about to ascend the first rung of that hallowed company.

‘Ours is the hand that wipes away the stain betwixt the stars,’ he intoned formally, raising his mop to the metal-spun sky, where the blessed Sunlights shone. Sarastus was not a welcoming world. Beyond the great dome lay only darkness and death, so its maintenance was the noblest of callings. ‘We cleanse so others may prosper.’

Izaq shivered with rapture as he stepped into the cathedral. This privilege was the culmination of five years of hard work and harder prayer, for labour was impotent without faith to fire it. He might never see the inner sanctum of the Canopic Congregation again, so he drank it in with relish. The interior was like a vast pentagonal cistern, its ceiling lost in a web of criss-crossing pipes and walkways. A brass altar loomed ahead, wreathed in steam billowing from vents set into its five faces. The order’s symbol – an open hand with a stylised star in its palm – hovered above the altar, rendered in three dimensions by a shimmering green holofield. At regular intervals the star would burst briefly into a staring eye and the hand’s fingertips would blossom with emerald flames.

‘Ours is the eye that spies the blight within the night,’ the initiates chanted. ‘We watch so others may sleep.’

Ten hulking, inhumanly angular figures stood before the altar. Sacred scouring unguents dripped from pipes coiled about their waists, pooling around their boots and filling the air with an astringent tang. Beneath their white robes the Canopic Deacons were reputedly more machine than man, their flesh and bones replaced by plastek and circuitry over centuries of service. Each oversaw one of the hive’s districts and was answerable only to the eternal Arch Deacon itself. Carceri was nominally ruled by a council of magnates representing its core industries, but few of them ever questioned the Congregation’s edicts. Everyone knew who kept the Sunlights burning.

‘Ours is the spirit that fuels the stars,’ the initiates sang. ‘We give so others may beget!’

‘As above, so below!’ the Deacons answered as one, concluding the canticle, then rapped their lumen staves against the tiles, bringing the apprentices to a halt. Izaq noticed he’d stopped with his left foot midway across two tiles. He pulled it back discreetly, mortified by his inattention. He’d been careful not to step on any cracks during the long march to the cathedral, but excitement had finally made him careless. He bit down on his inner cheek and drew blood, as he always did when he broke one of his self-imposed laws. His mouth was perpetually sore, but that was a small price to pay for absolution.

‘Scars are marks of grace,’ his mother used to say whenever he earned a beating. ‘A spotless hide hides an unclean heart.’

The Deacons’ porcelain masks began to glow, softly at first, then brighter. As the radiance peaked they burst into song. The abstract ululation gurgled from their chest speakers like electrified water, making Izaq’s hair stand on end.

I wish you could be here, mother, he mused, entranced. I wish you could see me here!

And perhaps she could. Given her connection to the Golden God-Emperor, was it really so unlikely? The glass charm she’d given him when he joined the order felt cool against his skin. He usually kept it hidden away, but today was special so he’d hung it around his neck by a cord, tucked under his uniform. Personal ornaments were forbidden during Canopic ceremonies, but nobody would notice his transgression. Besides, the charm was holy, so it wasn’t really a transgression.

You belong here, Izaq judged, addressing both the gift and its giver. More than I.

The Deacons fell silent and their masks dimmed. Izaq wondered what lay behind those smooth, featureless ovals. Perhaps there was only pure light. Yes, he decided, that would befit their transcendent nature.

A bell chimed somewhere in the cathedral’s heights and the holographic hand unravelled into a scroll. A ripple passed through it, leaving a list of glowing names in its wake.

‘Denomination sequence initialised!’ the Deacons boomed.

Izaq winced as he found his name midway down the scroll. The order was alphabetical – logical – yet he resented it. How many of his fellow initiates wholeheartedly believed in their cause? How many yearned to service the Sunlights as he did? During their shared apprenticeship he’d often been repelled by their vulgar banter and banal aspirations. True, a few were devoted to their duties, but none shared his vision. His passion.

‘Kneel to receive thy ordained designations, Lightkeepers!’ the Deacons commanded.

The best of us should be first, Izaq brooded as he obeyed. That midway position made his palms itch. It felt wrong. Suddenly the list looked like a tally of lost souls awaiting judgement.

Don’t be foolish, he told himself. Acceptance is penance.

A number flashed up beside one of the names near the top, consecrating that novice’s assignment. Another followed, much further down, then another… The youths waited silently as each was found and numbered in turn, seemingly at random, as if anything in life ever was. Izaq knew better. He’d been taught to know better, by a woman more attuned to the Golden God’s designs than the Congregation’s mentor priests.

‘So it flows,’ he murmured, trying to calm himself. ‘Inside to out, above and bel–’ He fell silent, staring at the digits that had just appeared beside his name. They stared right back, mute yet mocking, gloating in their toxic union – and the one they had forged with him.

SNEDDON, IZAQ – 19

Nineteen? Izaq blinked rapidly, his mind racing as he took it in. ‘1’ was a neutral numeral, neither benign nor malign in itself, yet infused with tremendous potential. A kingmaker, his mother had explained, but a blind one, like the Golden God’s own Prime Arches. It could go either way, as those demigods had done during the Hour’s Heresy that tore the old galactic order apart in an hour exactly.

But ‘9’… That was another tangle of snakes altogether. While ‘6’ was capricious and ‘7’ noxious, either could be harnessed for good work, but ‘9’ was volatile beyond control, poisoning every number it partnered with. And of those partnerships, ‘19’ was the most dangerous.

The Violator.

But there was something else about the number… Something closer, more personal, buried too deep to see clearly, but not deep enough to dismiss. Maybe he’d find it if he really tried looking, but he wasn’t about to do that. Not now. Not ever. All he wanted was for it to go away and take its stain with it.

Gritting his teeth, Izaq willed the number to change, the way his mother could move objects around without touching them, or sometimes even make sinners do the right thing, like the gang who’d set up shop in their hab-tower years ago. After a word from the ‘crazy lady downstairs’, those thugs had taken a running leap from the top floor, howling in ecstasy as they fell. Izaq had watched, captivated, as they hit the pavement far below, repenting in red. One had landed on a passer-by, killing them too, but his mother said that was okay because only another sinner would have put themselves in the path of the Golden God’s judgement.

‘Change,’ Izaq hissed, but the number wouldn’t obey. He didn’t have his mother’s gift. He’d tried to find it many times before joining the order, but even the blood sacrifices he’d made in secret hadn’t roused it. He’d started with the vermin infesting their block, then worked his way up to stray dogs and finally a vagrant he’d found sleeping in an alleyway. He still felt bad about that last one, though the creature was already half-dead when Izaq slit his throat, so it was more an act of mercy than murder. The old man’s eyes had opened, staring feverishly at his liberator, then glazed over as Izaq recited the ritual he’d written. That empty gaze had thrown him off his stride, spoiling the offering, along with his sleep for the best part of a year.

‘Don’t covet the gift, boy,’ his mother had warned afterwards, reading him like an open book, as she always did. ‘It’ll find you when you’re wanted.’

‘If you’re worth having,’ another voice added, coming from somewhere above. It sounded like nails rending metal, vicious yet seductive, as though its victim sighed as they were shredded. ‘And want to be had,’ the butcher added with another slash.

Izaq looked up, searching the dark tangle overhead.

Nothing.

No… Wait, there was something there, crouched directly above the holo-scroll – a deeper darkness among the shadows, splayed out and spiny, its abundant appendages too disconnected to form a coherent whole, like the shattered pieces of a man reassembled into a spider. Or a spider straining to be a man.

Or nineteen made manifest…

Izaq couldn’t see any eyes, yet felt the intruder returning his gaze. He squinted, struggling to make sense of its shape, but it slipped further away the harder he tried, until it was only a husk of pipes and shadows – never really there at all, like so many other phantoms he’d glimpsed over the years. There’d been something familiar about its watchful, impenetrable presence. When had he felt that before?

It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It wasn’t real. Focus!

Only a few names remained number-free on the holo-scroll. Time was running out. Growing desperate, Izaq turned to silent prayer. Surely fate had marked his name in haste, forgetting that this was his day. It wasn’t propitious to begin his service under such a baneful number.

Please, not that one. Any other…

He was sweating now, his hands gripping his mop like he meant to throttle it. His prayers were a formless cascade of pleas and promises, too needy to be heeded, but he couldn’t rein them in. The malignant number already had its hooks in him.

‘Please,’ he begged aloud, drawing stares from nearby apprentices. ‘Please!’

The bell tolled again as the final number flashed up, concluding the ceremony and sealing his fate.

‘So it flows,’ his mother judged, sounding so clear she might have been kneeling right beside him.

‘So it flows,’ another voice echoed through tortured metal.

‘So it flows,’ Izaq conceded, closing his eyes.

‘The Golden God-Emperor, He’s seen it all, decreed it all and done it all,’ Izaq’s mother tells him when he is old enough to listen. ‘Done it all ’fore it ever even happens. So it flows!’

‘How is that possible, mother?’ Izaq asks, frowning at the notion, then wondering what decreed means. He likes words and collects them avidly.

Mother Sneddon glares at him, looking like one of the saints on the devotional banners she collects. He has grown up with those hard faces staring at him from every wall of their apartment, but they still frighten him, just like she does. For a moment he thinks she’s going to wallop him for questioning the Golden God’s powers, but then she nods, confirming that he’s asked a Smart Question. The kind she likes.

‘Time don’t run in a straight line,’ she answers, slicing the air with a pudgy, silver-nailed finger. ‘That’s just how it looks to us ’cos we’re on the outside lookin’ in, but inside – where things are for real – there ain’t no forwards or backwards. Everything happens all at once, mashed up into one great big moment.’ She smacks her hands together, making him jump. ‘It’s all in there, forever and always.’ Her wide-set blue eyes turn glassy as she looks within, exploring the secret territory she has shared with him. ‘Ain’t nothing what it looks like, boy. Nothing what matters, anyways.’

Does that mean the whole world is lying to him? Izaq wonders. Everything and everyone – except his mother, of course. It’s a scary thought, but not a surprising one. He’s seen enough of the world to know it’s bad to the bones.

His mother’s gaze sharpens suddenly, fixing him like an insect spiked by a needle. ‘It’s up to the righteous to see the Inside clear and clean up the Outside in the Golden God’s holy name.’ She takes his hands in hers and squeezes hard enough to hurt. ‘That’s our calling, little pilgrim. That’s what binds us. You hear me?’

‘Yes, mother,’ Izaq answers, sensing the revelation, even if he doesn’t really grasp it yet. That will come later, he trusts. For now, the feeling is enough.

His journey to the stars begins that day.

PHASE II: Elevation

The Congregation’s watchtowers were the highest structures in the hive by many orders of magnitude. There were five in each district, rising from fortified temples like spindly steeples veined with lights. Each was essentially a tube housing a lift and crowned with a station where a second, far more powerful carriage awaited.

A sky sling, Izaq thought. I’m going to ride a sky sling. His fascination with the vehicles had begun as a childhood fantasy, inspired by tales of their ferocious speed, but later, as their place in the Divine Cleansing Plan became apparent, his excitement had matured into reverence. Fitted with propulsion jets, the sleek capsules were launched along vertical mono-tracks connected to the dome itself, ferrying personnel across a gulf of five thousand yards in mere minutes.

Like a bullet to the stars, Izaq imagined. That prospect made his current ascent almost intolerable. He’d been inside this wretched lift for what felt like hours. His gaze was fixed on its elevation counter, tracking its progress suspiciously. Lesser machine spirits were often sullen, resenting their place in the order’s hierarchy, but the one infusing this conveyance was either ailing or outright malicious, drawing them up the shaft in fitful bursts that made him want to scream with frustration.

‘Patience is a virtue, little pilgrim,’ his mother scolded with a cliché she’d never practised herself. ‘Your precious stars can wait a little longer.’

Izaq nodded, then began to hum a jaunty hymn of sterilisation, trying to calm himself. His present frustrations aside, this was a joyous occasion. Several days had passed since his initiation and he was finally on his way to the stars! He’d even come to terms with the vile number emblazoned on his coveralls. Intensive prayer and self-flagellation had brought an epiphany of sorts, as they usually did. The number wasn’t a curse, but a test – or a test within a curse, which was really a kind of blessing. He wasn’t sure of the specifics, but he felt the Golden God’s hand in the matter so he had embraced his fate willingly.

Apprentice Lightkeeper Sneddon, Nightshift 19.

Yes, he could – would! – make that work. He was approaching the hymn’s culmination when the lift juddered to a halt and the lights went out. A moment later the indicator followed. Only the red glow of the emergency button endured.

It’s the number’s doing, he thought, then thrust the notion aside. He’d already made peace with all that, hadn’t he? No, this was merely misfortune or a mischievous spirit at work.

He stared at the button, reluctant to summon help. Getting stuck in a lift wouldn’t look good on his first day, but neither would being late. He’d arrived at the tower well ahead of schedule, but hadn’t planned on delays. The rest of his crew would already be at the sling station, preparing for their launch. Soon they’d be waiting.

‘I won’t be late,’ he declared, but there was no confidence in his voice. Despite the cramped space it sounded reedy. Weak.

Meek.

‘Accursed are the meek!’ Mother Sneddon used to rail whenever one of her black moods took her. ‘The faint-hearted are fodder in the Golden God’s eyes!’ She would always grimace at that point, showing her slab-like teeth. They were stained grey by the gruel she’d become addicted to, with lumps of the goop stuck between the gaps. Vita Ephemera, it was called, a synthetic protein the manufactories churned out in cheerily labelled cans that proclaimed their benefits to body and soul. Izaq loathed the stuff, but his mother couldn’t get enough of it. Their apartment was always littered with empty cans, no matter how often he cleaned up. His mother had even erected a small shrine beside her bed to the brand’s mascot – a grinning, goggle-eyed abomination forged from cans. Towards the end, Izaq sometimes wondered whether she’d swapped her allegiance from the Golden God to that crass pretender deity.

‘Need more, boy!’ Mother Sneddon demanded from the past. ‘Get us more!’

‘No,’ Izaq said, as he’d never done back then, when refusal might have made a difference. He wanted to shout it, but only managed a gasp. The darkness was stifling him.

It’s bad, mother. Slow poison.

Something thudded softly against the lift’s roof. Izaq froze, straining to hear more. The silence lingered while he pictured the intruder above listening in return, waiting for him to dismiss it as something imagined. He was about to do just that when it moved, skittering slyly across the roof and down the lift’s far side, hugging the wall behind him. No… No, that was impossible. There was scarcely an inch between the lift and its shaft. Nothing could squeeze into that gap.

Nothing human anyway.

Izaq shivered, remembering the spiderlike apparition he’d glimpsed in the cathedral. A few extra contortions wouldn’t trouble something already so mangled. It would just twist its form a little further to fit the needs of the moment, becoming whatever its hunt called for.

Its hunt?

Izaq’s hand drifted to the charm his mother had given him. He was wearing it again, wanting her with him when he finally walked the sky. He wouldn’t have made it this far without her guidance, harsh as it was. Why hadn’t he visited her before leaving? The apprentices had been granted a day’s grace to visit family and friends, as they’d done during every recess in their training, but not Izaq. He’d never once returned to that mouldering basement apartment in Barka Tower, where she’d raised him to do the Golden God’s work. He hadn’t even tried contacting her.

I was afraid, he admitted. Afraid of what he’d find after five years. How many empty cans there’d be. How big she’d be.

‘I’m sorry,’ Izaq whispered, but the apology tasted stale, just shy of a lie, because nothing would make him go back there. ‘I wanted to.’ But that really was a lie.

A metallic rustling roused him from his reverie. The intruder was squirming over to the wall on his right, no longer bothering with stealth. It was heading for the doors, which the lift’s spiteful spirit would probably open in welcome.

Making a sacrifice of me, Izaq thought, staring at the red button beside the doors. It was a beacon in the darkness, perhaps even a way out. That made no sense, but neither did the thing coming for him. He felt it watching him through the wall, eager for more than sight. Once again, he was struck by the conviction that he’d felt that unholy gaze before. Long ago…

‘What are you?’ he murmured.

There was a scratching at the doors, then a familiar voice: ‘Will you, won’t you bleed to feed the night?’ This time there was a contralto twang to its tortured-metal rasp. It sounded almost feminine, alluring in its promise of annihilation. Long-buried feelings stirred within Izaq – feelings his mother had cautioned him against, even carving the warning onto his back when he turned thirteen, embodied in a single agonising, ecstatic word: PURITY. He had never disobeyed that edict, but he’d never wanted to as much as he did now. The promise in that voice was so tantalising…

‘Are you meek, boy?’ Mother Sneddon snarled, breaking the spell. ‘Are you meat?’

With a desperate moan Izaq lunged for the emergency button. It burst with a pop as he jabbed it, like a lanced boil, spilling wet red light. His finger passed through the wound, burying itself to the knuckle in what felt like a nest of barbed worms. He yelped as they coiled around the digit, biting as they tightened. It was the hunter, he realised through a haze of pain. He’d punched a hole right through to it.

Into it.

‘Are you a sinner?’

‘No,’ Izaq gasped, tugging at his trapped finger. He was drenched by the blood-light hanging in the air. It was swirling and dripping around him like a crimson flower, nebulous and leprous and ripe with profane possibilities. Its sour-sweet tang was nauseating, yet invigorating. Exhilarating.

‘Or are you a warrior?’

Izaq wailed as he wrenched his finger free, then again when he saw what was left of it. The worms had stripped it to the bone, but they were far from sated. A stream of dark filaments was squirming through the wound in the wall, thrashing about as they followed their prey. They would become a tide once the doors opened.

‘Feast or fury?’ Mother Sneddon challenged. ‘Fodder or fighter?’

Izaq backed up against the far wall, waiting for the inevitable, but the doors stayed closed. Perhaps the lift’s spirit wasn’t so disloyal after all, or perhaps it also feared this violation. Either way, it would only buy him a little time. The invading filaments were gathering substance as more wriggled through the hole and flopped to the floor. Izaq watched the ever-growing mass in horror. The hunter was weaving itself back together before his eyes.

‘Seeing don’t gotta mean believing, little pilgrim,’ his mother reminded him. ‘Outside ain’t always In.’ How many times had she hammered that lesson home when he’d screamed at something that wasn’t really there, but wanted to be? Or lost himself in a nightmare that came crawling out of sleep after him, eager to eat its maker? Those monsters had mostly gone away by the time he turned fifteen, but only because she’d taught him how to snuff them out.

And I left her to rot, Izaq thought, though rotting wasn’t what she’d be doing. Growing, more like. Spreading.

Mother Sneddon had been enormous when he left, her flesh rolling across the floor in flabby grey waves, looking a lot like the gruel that nourished it. She hadn’t walked in years, but she’d want for nothing, even with Izaq gone. She had acquired plenty of other followers by then, drawn from all over the block to serve and protect her. He’d lured the first ones to their home with tales of his mother’s holiness, then she’d bound them with her gift and sent them to gather more. How many served her now? And who was their true god?

That filth made you stronger, mother, Izaq thought, picturing a viscous tide of grey gloop. But it was still poison.

Denied for so long, his guilt was too bitter to swallow without anger. He breathed deeply of the blood-light and stared at the thing coagulating before him – then glared, enraged by its intrusion on this blessed day. By its very being. Its turbulent form defied comprehension, even up close and bathed in light, as though his eyes were repellent magnets to its nature, forever casting it out of true. As before, the best his senses could offer was a jagged, fractured spider spun from shadows.

‘You’re not here,’ he muttered to himself, then again to his tormentor: ‘You’re not here!’

‘Am I not,’ the hunter replied in a purr of blades. It didn’t sound like a question.

‘No,’ Izaq said, forcing himself to keep looking, because looking away invited oblivion. ‘You never were.’

‘Never play never,’ it parried, rearing up on a host of splintered, multi-disjointed legs.

‘You never will be!’ Izaq yelled as it leaned over him, coming so close he could reach out and touch it. And that was exactly what he had to do, he realised. It was the only way to prove his denial. ‘I cast you out in the Golden God’s holy name!’

‘Will you,’ it slashed back. ‘Won’t you.’

Izaq reeled, as though physically struck by the opposing commands, but didn’t look away. The charm pressed against his chest felt white hot. He felt sure it was shining through his coveralls, along with the blessed word scarred into his back. Both hurt worse than anything he’d ever known, yet it was a good pain. A pure pain.

‘You’re not here!’ Izaq shouted, raising his injured hand. ‘Not real!’ If he harboured any doubts about that truth his hand would be shredded, just like its index finger.

No, he told himself. The finger is fine. Despite appearances it was intact, at least on the Inside, where it mattered.

‘Get out!’ he yelled, thrusting his hand into the beast’s churning faces.

And remembered.

PHASE III: Assignation

Get out! Izaq thinks, staring at the monster hiding in the shadows ahead, too far to see clearly, but far too close to run from. It will catch him in a heartbeat if he tries and he’ll be done in the next, but if he stays put then maybe – just maybe – it’ll stay put too, content to drink up his fear until the lights come back on and banish it. The monster isn’t hiding because it’s scared, Izaq understands, but because hiding makes it scarier and it loves that, maybe even more than killing, though it surely loves that too. That’s what brought him up here in the first place, into its territory.

The killing.

Killing isn’t anything special, of course, at least not in the slum districts. Izaq is only eleven, but he’s already seen plenty of dead bodies, even jumped over one in the stairwell once. Lost souls are always stabbing, smashing or shooting each other into the Long Dark, or doing even worse to themselves with sin pills or potions. The girl he stepped over had died with a big smile on her face, though her lips were covered in red froth. She wouldn’t be smiling in the place she ended up, he guessed, and never would again. That thought made him sad until his mother reminded him that sinners deserved whatever they got or gave themselves. Damnation was the prize of a faithless world, and killing its price.

But the killing on floor 131 was different.

It usually takes the district’s clean-up crews hours to arrive after a body is reported, sometimes much longer. Izaq has watched the masked men in glossy white suits enter the tower empty-handed, then leave with big black sacks slung over their shoulders. Everyone knows they chop up the bodies for easier carrying. They put up screens while they work, but you can hear their rotor-saws roaring, and what the blades do to the meat and bone. It’s gross, but also tidy in a way that makes Izaq feel a bit better about things, like they’re in tune with him, because he’s always been tidy too.

Nobody else ever comes after a killing. Nobody asks questions or looks for answers or chases after a killer. Nobody cares, least of all the tower’s own folks. Or that’s what they pretend anyway.

‘They think they’re safe if they don’t look,’ his mother explained. ‘What you don’t see won’t see you, they tell themselves.’ She’d laughed at that, throaty and mean.

‘Are we safe?’ he’d asked, worried, but also a little angry, though he wasn’t sure why.

‘We’ve got the Golden God watching over us, little pilgrim,’ she’d replied, then grinned. A clean grin. That was before she’d found her own poison. ‘And we look evil right in the eye!’

Anyway, the killing on floor 131 was very different.

The men in white didn’t come for the body up there. This time it was men and women in blue uniforms so dark they were almost black, with silver badges on their heavy jackets and guns on their belts. ‘Law Keepers,’ his mother said, her snort making it clear what she thought of that.

The Law Keepers asked lots of questions and looked everywhere, even took some people away. Izaq could tell that the stone-faced, steel-eyed woman who’d come hammering at their door cared very much about getting answers. He’d never seen anyone talk to his mother the way this Warden Shreve did and get away with it. There was a thin white scar running across the woman’s throat that made her voice sound whispery, but not weak.

‘Will you catch the killer?’ he’d asked, stepping out from behind his mother’s skirts. Warden Shreve had looked at him long and hard, weighing him up like a suspect even though he was just a kid. He guessed she’d learnt the hard way that nobody was just anything in the slum districts.

‘We always catch the killer,’ she replied, then smiled. He didn’t know whether she’d lied to make him feel safe or scared, but he sensed how much she wanted the words to be true, because underneath all that stone and steel she was scared.

Something very bad had happened on floor 131. It was a weird number – kind of balanced, but also not, because ‘3’ was so unpredictable. His mother had been teaching him about numbers, but he didn’t really get it yet. He thought about asking her about this one, then decided against it. She’d guess why he was asking and stop him before he really got started with his own investigation, but afterwards, once he’d caught and banished the monster behind the murder, she’d be proud. And it was a monster for sure. He’d already learnt enough to tell.

Like always, people didn’t talk much about what happened, but this murder was so big and bad they couldn’t keep completely quiet about it, so Izaq snuck around, picking up bits and pieces until he had a better picture. A man had been butchered in his bed – shredded into strips of meat then woven back together with his own broken bones into something awful. The worst part was he was still alive when they found him – and talking too, but not in words anyone could understand, which was probably just as well. Izaq overheard old Cockerill, one of the tower’s caretakers, telling his drinking mates he’d seen a Law Keeper puking his guts out after entering the apartment where it happened.

The dead man had a wife, who’d gone missing, but nobody thought she was the killer. She’d been a shy, quiet sort who probably wouldn’t hurt a fly. Besides, nothing human could have done those things to her husband. The killer had taken her, Cockerill reckoned, probably to do even worse stuff. Izaq couldn’t imagine what that might be, but it made him more determined than ever to put a stop to the horror. The blasphemy, as his mother would say.

One night, long after the Law Keepers were gone, he sneaked up to floor 131 and found the apartment where it all happened. Its door was bolted shut with a metal plate and a warning to stay away. The plate was covered in graffiti, burying it at the centre of a creepy-looking flower sketched in spidery black lines. Its petals looked sharp, like they’d cut you if you touched them. Izaq had seen the mark around the tower before, painted on walls, doors and even windows, but he’d never seen the artist, if there was one. His head said there had to be, but his heart said the dark flowers grew all by themselves, like the yellow mould everyone moaned about. He wasn’t surprised one had grown here.

The apartment’s number was 19, which it had to be, though he didn’t know that at the time, only that it was a very bad number. Numbers didn’t scare him so much back then. Things might have turned out differently if they had. Then again, maybe they were only ever going to go one way.

The Law Keepers’ plate made the scene looked final – done and buried – along with any answers hidden here, which felt wrong to Izaq. Untidy. He’d been raised to clean up in the Golden God’s name, hadn’t he? And proved he had what it took. After all, he’d banished plenty of monsters since his mother taught him the trick. It was all about Conviction. He loved that word and everything it stood for. Now he planned on using it to do what the Law Keepers couldn’t, even Warden Shreve, who’d struck him as a woman of Conviction, whatever his mother said about her. But now, faced with the hard reality of a sealed door, he didn’t know what to do. Feeling stupid, he bit down on his cheek.

And the lights went out.

There was nothing unusual about the sudden darkness. The block’s power came and went on a whim these days. Its spirit was old and cranky, like most slum spirits.

‘It’s okay,’ Izaq told himself. ‘Nothing–’

There was a metallic pop and a clatter, then three more, followed by a clang as something heavy hit the ground by his toes. The bolts of the Law Keepers’ seal, then the seal itself, he realised. Broken.

The door opened slowly, spilling a wave of dancing, many-coloured lights into the corridor. Holo-ads, Izaq realised. They were shining through a big window at the apartment’s far side. It looked out onto the neighbouring tower, whose walls crawled with the crude projections, like most slum blocks at night. His mother called them Damnation Glams. The lightshow was evil, she warned, reeling souls into sinful dreams, but he was grateful for it now. Any light was better than none.

‘I’m not scared,’ he whispered, sizing up the bad place that was inviting him in. It was a regular one-room apartment, much like his own, but it had been stripped bare, which made it look much bigger. Even the sanitation cubicle and cooking station were gone. And yet, despite its emptiness, the room was full of shadows. They scattered then re-formed in time with the dancing lights, though their rhythm was off, always a split second too late or too early, but most of them at least tried to make sense, unlike the massive, spiky one in the middle of the room. That one ignored the lights completely, dancing to a tune all of its own. It looked a bit like a spider. Or a flower… Like the dark flower growing on the door, he realised, only much bigger and sharper.

That was when he felt it looking back at him.

And so here he is now, as he will be many times again in nightmares he can never quite remember, but never entirely forget either, frozen beneath the shadow of Nineteen Ascendant.

Get out! Izaq tries again, searching for the Conviction to say the words out loud so they’ll count. He’s found it plenty of times before and made other monsters go away, but now, when he needs it most, it’s not there.

Because this time the monster is really here, he finally understands. It’s been here all along, folded into cracks in the walls or hiding inside the smallest shadow, waiting for the Law Keepers to leave. Waiting for him, as it always has and always will, so long as a single shred of darkness or doubt remains to sustain it. Waiting for a way to make darkness and doubt last forever. Waiting within him for the day when he’ll grow up and carry it to the stars it loathes.

In those myriad, mingled moments of revelation, Izaq learns he must become a keeper of the lights, for better and for worse.

‘So it flows,’ the boy, the man and the monster say as one.

Their journey to the stars is consecrated that eternal night.

PHASE IV: Orientation

The watchtower’s rooftop was a flat expanse bordered by a safety rail that could easily be vaulted, even by a man as portly and disinclined to athletic activities as Bryn Bosch. He didn’t plan on jumping, but he’d known a few who had and they hadn’t seemed like jumpers either, so the rail always made him queasy. He reckoned the Congregation left it low to weed out headcases before they went up-top, where they’d put their workmates at risk. It stank, but it made sense. If Renny had jumped, it would have saved his crew a whole world of grief.

Bosch felt a twinge of shame at the thought. He’d liked Ren a lot more than most of the miserable pluggers he’d toured with over the years. As though summoned by his guilt, Renny was there again, standing right beside Bosch, his orange coveralls torn and filthy. His dark skin had withered to grey, sinking into the hollows of his cheeks and eye sockets. A rash of small, circular bites covered it, oozing pus.

‘There’s worse coming our way,’ the dead man said, choking out the words as though they hurt to say. ‘Kill your light and you’ll see it too, chief.’

‘Go away, Ren,’ Bosch answered wearily. He closed his eyes and counted to ten. The phantom was gone when he opened them. Sometimes ten wasn’t enough to do the trick. Sometimes a thousand wouldn’t cut it. Renny had cashed out his lights on their last tour, a few months back. It wasn’t the first death on Bosch’s watch, but it was the worst by a long way. That’s why Ren was still hanging around in his head, he guessed. That and what had happened to his head.

I’m too old for this, Bosch thought, rubbing the scar on his scalp. Where in the Nine Pits was the new spark? Rookies were usually dead keen, but this one was running late. Bosch glared at the lift housing he’d been leaning against. The indicator was busted so he couldn’t tell whether Ren’s replacement was even in the pipe yet.

‘Slack bastard,’ Bosch muttered, then stomped away, trying to warm up. There wasn’t any temperature regulation at this altitude so it was freezing at night, when the Sunlights were fully contracted. That beat burning to a crisp during the daylight cycle, but right now it felt like a close-run thing.

I should get meself inside, Bosch mused, peering at the sling station further along the roof. It would be toasty in there and Frye would have a brew going…

No, he decided. Fekk the cold. He’d be cooped up with his crew for eighty days straight, so these final minutes of privacy were golden. Besides, as shift chief, he ought to meet the new spark one-on-one and get a handle on any trouble upfront. The crew was still wired after what happened to Ren, especially Sztan, who’d made it personal, like he always did. Bosch usually embraced the miserable plugger’s bellyaching and ran with it. After all, yanking Sztan Vlodek’s chain kept Bosch’s spirits up, and probably did the same for his workmate too, even if he’d never admit it.

‘You’ll push him too far someday, chief,’ Frye had cautioned after Bosch’s last prank inspired Sztan to new heights of profanity.

‘Relax, gramps,’ Bosch had replied with a smirk. ‘Sztanley needs to vent. I just tear him the holes for it.’

Frye had accepted that with his customary soul-weary sigh. He worked hard, but worried harder, making him the shift’s dour, yet dependable backbone. It was all part of the rhythm of griping and gabbing that kept their heads straight for tour after tour.

Until the last one…

There’d been no pranks or banter after they lost Renny. The three of them had pushed through the remaining thirty-four days in near silence, like ghosts of themselves.

‘And there’s worse coming,’ Renny reminded Bosch, stepping alongside him.

‘Back already then, mate?’ Bosch sighed, reluctant to repeat his banishment ritual so soon, mostly because he sensed it wouldn’t work. At first Ren had only turned up in dreams, but lately he’d crept beyond sleep, seeping into Bosch’s waking life, always eager to deliver his warning. Of course, Bosch knew it wasn’t really Renny, but guilt was doing a fine job of faking his ghost.

‘Kill your light, chief,’ the shade pressed, his bloodshot eyes beseeching.

Bosch noticed his feet had carried him to the railing, as if they knew something he didn’t. Maybe a way out before it was too late?

This is the last time, he vowed, as he did at the start of every tour. He’d made the same promise to his wife a few hours earlier. As always, Beah had smiled, knowing it wasn’t true, but understanding that it wasn’t exactly a lie either. Someday soon, after they’d saved enough to bail on this dying world, he’d finally keep his promise.

‘Next year,’ Bosch said, addressing the slumbering, smog-shrouded city far below. The wash of holo-ads lent it a dreamlike quality, like one of the fairy-tale landscapes Beah liked to paint on her data-slate.

Everything’s better from far away, he reflected, gazing up at the dome. It looked like a vast swathe of darkness speckled with twinkling lights. At night, the artificial suns almost looked like real stars – the kind he’d seen in vid-reels – except for their regularity. While nature sprinkled her lights haphazardly, mankind arranged them along a curved grid, creating order, but while nature built to last, her rival’s work was looking shoddy. There were gaps in the grid. Lots of them. Most were solitary blips of darkness, but a few had spread into bigger clumps, swallowing up three or four lights.

Nothing swallowed ’em, Bosch reminded himself, lighting up a stimm-stik. They’re just old, and old things die. But his gut said otherwise. Anyone who’d crawled through the warren of service tunnels and valve chambers riddling the dome knew the darkness growing up there wasn’t natural. You could feel it crawling around, just beyond your beam, searching for a way past. You could even hear it sometimes, whispering, but not into your ears.

‘Kill your light,’ Renny suggested, like a looped recording. ‘And you’ll see it too.’

‘Already can, mate,’ Bosch murmured. He’d seen dozens of stars die during his service, and the blight was spreading faster by the year, even extending beyond the dome. Below it. Most districts had a couple of ‘Night Zones’ now. There were rumours about those regions of perpetual darkness he’d rather forget – of the people trapped there when the lights went out, and the ones who went in afterwards, looking for things nobody ought to want. Of the nightmares breeding there…

The Congregation walled the zones off, promising repairs that wouldn’t ever happen, because nobody knew how. That was its dirtiest secret. Beneath all its wealth and fancy traditions it was mostly a league of glorified janitors. The Lightkeepers swept the dome clean of filth and vermin, over and over again, but they worked around the Sunlights, not with them. Even the order’s few genuine cog-priests were clueless about the tech running the ancient machines, let alone how to fix it.

‘What’s gone is gone for good,’ Bosch’s old supervisor had confided shortly before he’d also gone for good. It wasn’t smart to gab about such things unless you fancied a one-way trip to a Night Zone. That’s why Bryn Bosch planned on keeping his nose clean and his lips sealed. Besides, folks would wake up to the truth by themselves someday, wouldn’t they? How many dead stars would it take to tip things over the edge? How long before everywhere was a Night Zone?

Time enough to get out, Bosch assured himself. He raised his stik for another drag and noticed his fingers were shaking.

‘Keep it together, Bryn,’ he muttered, then inhaled deeply, savouring the spicy vapours. It was strong stuff – much stronger than his old brand – but he needed it for his head. The order’s medicae said he’d healed up fine, but he didn’t feel fine. There wasn’t much pain any more, but it felt like something had shaken loose deep inside his skull, leaving a black hole right under his soul. A man could fall through a hole like that, and then where would he be?

‘Darkness calls to darkness,’ Renny wheezed, as if in answer. Bosch frowned. That was a new line, not just a variation on the usual loop. What did–

The lift chimed its arrival.

‘About bloody time,’ Bosch said, shutting the lid on his fears. ‘Let’s see what the Deacons ’ave sent us then.’ Give us a good ’un, he prayed as he turned to meet the newcomer. Quick to learn the ropes, but not cocky with it.

His heart sank when the lift doors opened. The boy inside was tall for a Lightkeeper, pushing the regulation limit, but so skinny he looked like he’d get lost inside his coveralls if he made one wrong move. Not that there was much chance of that right now, because he wasn’t moving at all. Nope, he was too busy gawping at his raised right hand, like it held the answers to all the hive’s woes.

Bloody wonderful! Bosch thought. We’ve got a right proper stargazer here.

If the newcomer had run straight for the railings Bosch wouldn’t have been surprised, or lifted a finger to stop him. He’d rather be down a man than nurse a bomb through the dome, and that’s what this boy looked like – a human bomb waiting for something to set it off. Better to walk away now and leave him to his hand-gazing.

No, Bosch decided reluctantly, picturing Beah’s disapproving frown. This kid was so damn young. They seemed to get younger by the year, like the order was churning ’em out faster and faster, ’cos they wouldn’t last long anyways. Fekk that, he’d give the lad a fighting chance at least.

‘Finally decided to join us then,’ Bosch drawled. ‘Keeping us keen, were you?’

The boy’s gaze slid up to meet his own. For a moment it looked like there was nothing behind his wide-set blue eyes, then, like a taut rubber band snapping back into itself, he was all there. His pale face reddened, almost matching the colour of his hair, which looked like it had been cropped around an inverted bowl.

‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, standing to attention so smartly Bosch wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d finished up with a salute. ‘The lift’s spirit was recalcitrant.’

Recalcitrant? A dreamer and a fancy-talker, then. Sztan was going to love this one!

‘Never trust a cog spook when you’re up against the clock, lad.’ Bosch shook his head. ‘I hope you whipped its slack arse back into line?’

The boy looked confused for a moment, then ventured a nod. ‘Yessir,’ he answered. ‘I applied five Upsilon-level cantrips as per standard operating protocols and–’

‘Works for me!’ Bosch snapped. ‘And it’s chief, not sir. Chief Bosch.’

‘Yes, chief. Sorry, chief.’

‘And you’d be…?’ Bosch prompted.

‘Sneddon, chief. Izaq Sneddon. Initiate Lightkeeper, First Class.’

‘First Class, is it?’ Bosch raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘Well then, I guess we’re lucky to have you on board, aren’t we, Mister Izaq Sneddon.’

‘Thank you, chief,’ the spark answered solemnly. ‘It’s a privilege to serve with you.’

The Golden God missed this one with the laughter-stick, Bosch judged. Still, the lad seemed a decent sort. Respectful, unlike some sparks he’d known. Bright too, if he’d really made First Class. Maybe he’d work out once he loosened up a little.

‘Right then,’ Bosch said, ‘it’s time you met the rest of your shift, Mister Sneddon.’

‘Yes, chief.’

‘Hop to it then, lad!’

‘Yes, chief!’ As the spark left the lift, Bosch noticed something scrawled across its back wall. No, scrawled wasn’t the right word for the picture there. It was too finely drawn for that, covering the dull metal with intricately woven black strokes. Or were they scratches?

‘There’s worse coming our way,’ Renny observed, as if in response to the mystery.

Where’d you come from? Bosch wondered, squinting at the picture. It hadn’t been there when he’d ridden the lift up here a few hours ago. Had Sneddon done it? It was the logical explanation, yet he couldn’t buy it. The idea of that gawky, uptight kid vandalising Canopic property just didn’t add up. Besides, it looked like hours of work.

Bosch squinted, trying to get a handle on the picture. Was it meant to be a spider? Or a flower maybe? Yes… a flower with its petals unfolding. Or were they folding? And was that an eye at its centre… or a mouth?

‘Kill your lights,’ Renny advised, ‘and it’ll see you.’

The spider-flower’s lines seemed to swirl as Bosch chased them, slithering between possibilities. It hurt to look at them, like they were spun from razor wire that sliced his senses with every shift, but looking away wasn’t an option – not when he was so close to catching their shape…

‘Watch yourself, chief,’ Renny warned. ‘It’s slippery down here.’

The flower’s eye suddenly snapped into a yawning, spiral-throated maw that went on forever. Bosch screamed as the world spun from under his feet and tipped him into the painted spiral abyss.

PHASE V: Revelation

Bosch cries out as he slips and topples forwards. His headlamp’s beam slashes the darkness ahead as he flails about frantically, trying to catch himself before it’s too late.

‘Watch yourself, chief!’ Renny yells, grabbing his arm and breaking the fall. ‘It’s slippery down here.’

‘Thanks, mate,’ Bosch gasps. He steadies himself against a pipe until his heartbeat slows. Slippery doesn’t begin to cover the state of the chamber he has just entered. There’s slime and shit everywhere, layered ankle-deep and piled high against the curved walls. It’s even on the ceiling, hanging in bulbous, sac-like stalactites that look ready to burst. He grimaces as a glob of filth drops onto his visor, then again when he tries to release the pipe and discovers his glove has stuck to it. Glistening strands follow as he yanks himself free. In thirty-three years of walking the sky, he’s never seen anywhere this far gone. Without their masks he and Ren would choke on the stench permeating the chamber, yet the darkness is even worse, clinging to everything so tenaciously that their headlamps scarcely make a dent in it. Still, despite everything, there’s no mistaking the place.

‘Good work, Ren,’ Bosch says wearily. ‘You’ve found the fekker at last.’

The circular chamber is around fifty yards across and half as high, dipping towards its centre like a caldera, where a massive glass cylinder towers over them, rising from a pool of black liquid. Several evenly spaced bridges connect the room’s outer ring to a narrow walkway hugging the cylinder. Yes, this is a socket shrine all right, but its plasma core is as dark as the coolant fluid around it. That means the star directly below them is dead.

‘Bloody wonderful,’ Bosch mutters. They’ve been trying to reach this place for days, working their way around burst tunnels and collapsed valve chambers, like rats in a crumbling maze. Now they’ll have to spend twice as long flushing it clean, and for what? If they’re lucky they might get current running through it again, but nothing will bring back the light.

‘We’ve got a nasty one here, mate,’ he gauges, searching the mounds of excrement with his beam. ‘A major infestation.’

‘Looks like lurks to me,’ Renny says eagerly. Sztan is the crew’s certified exterminator, but nobody enjoys burning vermin like Ren does, especially lurks. It’s odd because he’s an easy-going plugger for the most part, but the tentacled critters always twist something inside him. Bosch suspects he’s looking for payback for a bad run-in with them, but Ren’s never spilled the story. He’s only been with the crew a couple of years, transferred across after Brewer fell into a sluice vent, but he’s sharp and always up for taking point, so he’s earned their respect.

‘I reckon there’s a nest in here, chief,’ Renny adds.

‘More than one,’ Bosch replies, unhitching his hand flamer from his utility belt. ‘Arm up, son.’ It’ll likely be the usual mix of lurks and rats, but a whole lot more than he’s happy sharing a space with, even one as big as this. The critters usually run from bright lights, but larger packs can be aggressive, especially the mutie strains that’ve been cropping up recently.

But that’s not what’s really bothering him.

‘Where are they?’ Renny asks, picking up on the anomaly. The place ought to be crawling with disturbed vermin by now, but there’s no squealing or chittering from the shadows. Only the occasional drip-dropping of water or shit breaks the silence. That and their own filtered breathing, which sounds way too loud in this tomb. Dangerously loud.

‘Chief?’ Renny presses. ‘Where are–’

‘Fekk knows,’ Bosch answers uneasily. There’s something very wrong here. Something much worse than an infestation. This isn’t his first dead shrine, but it’s the first that also feels alive somehow, like there’s a presence here, watching them.

‘Gramps, move yer fat arse!’ Bosch yells, glancing at the chamber’s hatchway. ‘We need the blazer in ’ere!’ As always, Frye is bringing up the rear with the crew’s heavily loaded hover cart. There’s only so much gear a man can lug around in his backpack.

‘Cart’s stuck again!’ Sztan answers, appearing at the hatchway.

‘Well go help him then, Sztanley!’ Bosch snaps. ‘We need light in here!’

Sztan retreats with a blast of profanity, pushing past the yellow-robed Sanitary Priest behind him. The Nits are rotated between tours so you never know who you’ll get each time, but pull a bad one and you’re guaranteed a lousy tour. The crew have had some duds over the years, but this one’s the worst yet – a stickler for regulations and hopeless at anything that actually matters. Sure, Nits aren’t real cog-priests, but most can navigate the dome and do basic repairs, right? Well, not Brother Pleyl! This Nit doesn’t know a circuit breaker from a breaker valve, yet figures he’s the God-Emperor’s gift to the shift.

‘Abominable!’ Pleyl declares, raising his lumen staff dramatically. ‘It affronts the spirit to see the divine design desecrated by such foulness.’

Bosch scowls under his mask as the Nit approaches, stepping delicately through the muck. Pleyl’s robes are woven from the same padded, water-repellent fabric as a Lightkeeper’s orange coveralls, but its flowing skirts and peaked hood are a liability in the dome’s cramped tunnels. The Congregation hasn’t ever let a little thing like practicality get in the way of pageantry, which is probably why the whole city is so screwed.

‘We oughta bail on this one,’ Bosch advises. ‘Light’s dead anyhow.’

‘We shall do no such thing,’ Pleyl replies, his nasal voice ripe with contempt. ‘Once the shrine has been cleansed of ordure and any lingering ethereal taints, I shall beseech the star’s dormant spirit to arise and shine once more.’

And I’m blessed with the God-Emperor’s golden pecker, Bosch thinks sourly, then tries again: ‘I hear you, but we’ve got a serious infestation on our hands here.’

‘Which you shall purge with your customary zeal, Mister Bosch,’ the Nit proclaims with a snort. ‘We cleanse so…’ he prompts, twirling a long augmetic finger.

‘So others may prosper,’ Bosch completes the phrase dryly, accepting the inevitable. He might be the shift’s chief, but it doesn’t pay to cross a Nit, especially a petty bastard like Pleyl. It’s time to pull himself together and get on with the job.

‘Hey, Ren!’ he shouts, noticing his workmate has crept to the edge of the coolant pool. ‘Wait till the blazer’s up and running.’

‘I saw something moving, chief.’ Renny jabs his hand flamer towards the cylinder. ‘In the tank.’

‘Nothing in there but cold plasma, mate,’ Bosch answers. He isn’t sure whether cold plasma is even a thing, but it’s a comforting answer. Nothing has any business moving about inside that dead core.

‘Must’ve seen ’em through the glass then,’ his workmate calls back.

‘Them?’

‘The lurks, chief!’ Renny steps onto the nearest bridge. ‘Little shits are messing with us.’ Bosch imagines the grin on his friend’s face. Ren has picked up on the strangeness of this place, but he’s hearing the wrong bloody message.

‘Desist at once, Lightkeeper!’ Pleyl commands, striding past Bosch. ‘The Canopic Column must not be disturbed until the rites of propitiation have been conducted.’

‘Hold up!’ Bosch calls after him, but the Nit pays no heed. ‘Sztan!’ Bosch calls. ‘Frye!’ There is no reply from the entrance. He hesitates, then follows Pleyl. If the idiot gets hurt there’ll be no end of trouble when they get back, and no bonuses either. But another, wiser part of him knows that none of that matters any more. What matters is getting back at all, and that’s becoming less likely with every step he takes.

‘Easy there, Bryn,’ Bosch tells himself. ‘Nothing here but shit and shadows.’ But he doesn’t believe that for a moment. That’s why he keeps turning as he walks, trying to cover every angle with brief bursts of light from his headlamp, as if that will hold back the darkness.

‘Are you devoid of functioning auditory receptors as well as ignorant of the Canopic protocols, Lightkeeper?’ Pleyl shrills as he steps onto the bridge, moving with surprising speed. ‘Halt!’

‘We gotta burn ’em out!’ Renny shouts back. ‘Before they swarm us.’

We’re making too much noise, Bosch thinks. Far too–

Their lamps flicker as one, stuttering between light and darkness, lingering a little longer in death each time. For a few terrible seconds he feels certain the darkness will win, then their lights creep back on and hold. He hears someone giggling and wonders what the fekkin’ joke is here, then realises the sound is bubbling up from his own throat and the joke’s on him. He strangles it before it reaches its punchline, then reins in his feet too, though that’s harder because they want to keep on going.

‘Pull back!’ he yells at the others, but Ren and Pleyl have gone too far. It’s like they’re locked on to a one-way track, sliding inexorably towards the shrine’s heart. Did either of them even notice the outage, or were they already past caring? The Nit hasn’t quit ranting, so he’s probably still himself, just too stupid to realise how precious that is, but Ren has gone quiet.

‘Heretical imbecile!’ the Nit bawls, closing in on his quarry. ‘Get away from–’ His words break into a wail as he trips on his skirts and careens against the bridge’s guardrail. The corroded metal crumbles and he topples over into the pool. It swallows him without a splash or a ripple, as if he’s fallen into a void.

Moments later Renny reaches the end of the bridge and stops, staring at the plasma tank. Bosch wants to believe he’s looking through it, searching for his hated lurks, but he knows that’s not it. Ren’s forgotten about the lurks, along with everything else except the black glass right in front of him. The tank has become a pillar of deeper darkness against the gloom, so absolute it devours the light from their headlamps whole, offering no reflections in return.

Go! Bosch tells himself. Now or never.

He backs away slowly, grateful for every step he wins, but can’t bring himself to turn around and run. There’s no telling what that dark core will do if he takes his eyes off it. Quick glances over his shoulder to get his bearings are the most he can risk.

‘This is the last time,’ he mutters repeatedly, like a mantra of protection. He’s almost at the door when a pipe snags his ankle, and he slams to the ground, cracking his head against the step behind. His hardhelm absorbs the worst of it, but the impact stuns him, inverting his senses then blanking them out completely for a few moments.

‘Last time,’ he breathes into limbo. ‘Last… time.’

Renny is there when his sight returns, standing over him, framed in his headlamp’s beam, but there is no relief in that because the thing staring down at him isn’t his friend any more. Ragged-edged and bleeding shadows from a thousand invisible cuts, the apparition looks like it has torn its way out of the Nine Pits. Its headlamp is dead, yet somehow still shining, staining Bosch’s light black where their beams intersect. That makes no sense, but it is what it is and wants to be, which is all that matters down here in the dark.

‘There’s worse coming our way, chief,’ the shade declares. It sounds like it’s leaking the words rather than speaking them, and savouring every morsel of misery it spills out into the world. Its eyes are windows into the eternal night that spawned it, radiating hate and hunger and a terrible, undeniable understanding.

‘Get… away…’ Bosch mumbles. He tries to raise his hand flamer, but it’s gone. Maybe his hand is gone too, because it won’t answer his call. Nor his legs. Even his eyelids betray him, refusing to shut out the revenant as it leans over him, coming so close he can feel the void inside it, tugging at his soul.

‘Kill your light,’ it commands, ‘and you’ll see.’

PHASE VI: Affirmation

‘No,’ Bosch whispered, shaking his head. ‘That’s a lie. That’s not how it went down.’ He tore his gaze away from the thing growing inside the lift. No, not growing. It wasn’t alive. It was only bloody graffiti.

Graffiti that lied…

Why hadn’t the lift doors closed? Were they tempting him to take another look?

‘Chief?’ asked the lanky kid standing beside him. ‘Are you okay?’

‘All… good,’ Bosch rasped. His tongue felt like it had dried up and died while his mind went wandering. He coughed, trying to kick some life back into it. How long had he been standing here, gaping at ghosts? The newcomer must have him pegged as a headcase by now, and probably wasn’t far off the mark either, after the things he’d just seen. The lies…

There was a buzz from his wrist.

‘We’re running late,’ Bosch said, checking his chrono-strap. ‘Best get moving.’ He headed for the launch station, resisting the urge to glance back. That picture was venomous. Vicious. It had twisted a tragedy into something far darker. The infested shrine had been real enough, but its plasma core was dead, not filled with some kind of unholy energy that got into Renny. No, it was the lurks that snapped his friend’s mind, then ate him alive.

Wasn’t it?

Yes… Yes, the winged critters had been everywhere, chittering furiously as they swarmed the intruders, tearing at their suits with barbed suckers and tentacles. Ren’s old anger – or was it really terror? – had turned white hot and he’d started screaming and burning them blindly. Then their damn fool of a Nit had stumbled into the stream of fire and wound up burning and screaming too, his blazing robes lighting up the shrine like a huge candle. Scrambling away from the carnage, Bosch had tripped, cracking his head so hard his world almost went out. He’d held on by a thread and dragged himself towards the hatch, praying to a god he’d never much cared for, but who seemed like a fair bet in a crisis. Along the way he’d seen the Nit fall into the coolant pool, but it hadn’t gulped him down the way the graffiti told it. No, the poor bastard had flailed around in there until his own weight dragged him down. As for Renny, the last Bosch saw of him he was covered in lurks, staggering around like a man-shaped mass of writhing tentacles. The vermin had been drawn to him, as if his rage was a beacon to them.

‘I’m sorry, Ren,’ Bosch whispered, as he’d done countless times since crawling out of that hellish place and slamming the hatch shut. What else could he have done? It was a miracle he’d made it out at all, never mind trying to play the hero. He’d found Sztan and Frye further along the tunnel and told them the shrine had collapsed, killing the others, then repeated the story all the way up the chain of command, praying nobody would go looking. The dome was vast and that Sunlight was dead, so he reckoned he was in with a good chance the lie would last till he was long gone, one way or another.

‘Which lie is that, chief?’ Renny asked at his shoulder. ‘The one you told them or the one you’ve been telling yourself?’

I don’t know, Bosch realised. He couldn’t get the memories straight any more. That damned graffiti had twisted things up so both versions of the horror felt real, but the darker, more dangerous one was getting stronger the more he thought about it, strangling its twin into ever-diminishing credibility, like a fading dream. Would he even remember the lesser evil in a few minutes?

But the violation cut much deeper than that. He had a sickening feeling it wasn’t just his memories that were being overwritten. The more he believed the lie, the more real it became, changing the past itself. Darkening it…

What’s done is done, he told himself fervently. History couldn’t be unravelled and rewritten, for better or for worse.

‘Only ever for worse,’ the apparition walking beside him judged. ‘That’s the way of the worlds, chief.’ Like its origin, it had grown darker, its skin deepening to a flawless obsidian, free of the bites and scratches that previously afflicted it. Its pupils had dilated to drown out the rest of its eyes, like black stars rising. Bosch turned away before they blinded him, fixing his attention on the launch station ahead. The thing haunting him wasn’t remotely human any more, let alone a former friend. Looking at it was dangerous.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Sneddon said as they neared their destination. Turning, Bosch saw the boy had stopped to stare at the sky sling on the station’s roof, a dreamy smile on his long face. Renny’s shade was gone, as though banished by the spark’s joy.

‘Don’t fall fer her,’ Bosch warned, following Sneddon’s gaze to the sleek silver capsule. ‘She’s a rough old ride. Likely have you puking your guts out before we make skyfall.’ Despite his words, the sling looked pretty good to him too. Clean. Solid.

‘She won’t hurt me, chief,’ Sneddon replied. It was an odd thing to say, yet disarmingly earnest, much like the lad himself. Beah would call him sweet – a dreamer who didn’t belong in this world and always saw a better one behind it.

It takes one to know one, Bosch thought fondly, picturing his wife’s endless flights of fantasy. She’d like this lad and want him to come back safely. ‘Why’d you become a Lightkeeper, son?’ he asked on impulse.

‘Why?’ The boy met his gaze squarely for the first time. ‘Something inside me… It’s always wanted the stars.’ He smiled, but there was no warmth in it. ‘I don’t think I ever had a choice.’

Bosch nodded, weighing up the answer. ‘Well then, I guess you’ve found your calling.’ He offered his hand. ‘Welcome to Nightshift Nineteen, Lightkeeper.’

‘Thank you, chief.’ The boy’s grip was surprisingly strong as they shook, though off somehow, like he was missing a finger, though he clearly wasn’t. ‘It’s my number.’

Not my favourite number or my lucky number. Just my number. It was another odd thing to say, yet it sounded heartfelt.

‘This is my last shift,’ Bosch found himself saying in return. This time he realised he believed it. That should have felt good, but it didn’t. Not at all. Merely final.

‘So it flows,’ the boy acknowledged, raising his eyes to the dark, expectant dome. ‘As above, so below.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Fehervari is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Requiem Infernal, Cult of the Spiral Dawn and Fire Caste, as well as the novella Fire and Ice from the Shas’o anthology. He has also written the Warhammer Horror novel The Reverie, as well as many short stories for Black Library, including ‘A Sanctuary of Wyrms’, which appeared in the anthology Deathwatch: Xenos Hunters, and ‘Nightfall’, which appeared in Heroes of the Space Marines. His more recent works include the stories ‘Aria Arcana’ and ‘Blindsight’. He lives and works in London.

An extract from Requiem Infernal.

My revered canoness, it is with some reluctance that I begin this document, but several days have passed since my arrival on Vytarn and I can postpone my oath to you no longer. It is by your leave that I have made the voyage to this haunted, holy world, and by your decree that I must make an account of all that I find here. The first undertaking fills me with joy, for I have long yearned to return to the place of my birth, but I confess the second sits ill with me. To act as a spy, especially among those who opened my eyes to the God-Emperor’s glory and initiated me into our sacred sisterhood, feels like a betrayal. I owe more than my life to the Last Candle. Without its guiding light I would have been lost long before I learned to seek.

Under the circumstances I trust you will understand why I have shunned the convenience of an electro-stylus in favour of quill and parchment. To my mind these time-honoured tools cultivate a gravity of thought that less tactile instruments cannot match. Moreover they engender commitment – a sense that one is making a mark upon the world. If I am to write this account, then let it be both committed and lasting.

I shall begin with some observations about the Last Candle as I knew it in my youth, and as I believe I shall find it once again – a paragon of sanctity that has endured for over a thousand years. Though you and I have talked at length about my former sect, I feel honour-bound to set my views down as a matter of record.

As you well know, my lady, there have always been factions within the greater body of the Cult Imperialis whose traditions or interpretation of the Divine Truth have strained against orthodox scripture. Their deviations may be born of ignorance, arrogance or a sincere striving for enlightenment, but all are imperfect. Sometimes their flaws are harmless, yet we crush them without mercy. Sometimes they are born of malevolence and bred only for harm, yet we allow them to flourish. I have seen worlds where unspeakable cruelties are ennobled in the God-Emperor’s name – martyr festivals where the poor immolate themselves to atone for the sins of their rulers, or flagellation parades that revel in degradation, even ritualised children’s crusades that are little more than mass murder! Such barbarities debase His enduring sacrifice and our own honour, yet it is the Last Candle – a sect that sprang from our own blessed order – that has drawn the Convent Sanctorum’s suspicions!

Forgive me, I know it is not my place to interpret the line between tolerable heterodoxy and heresy, but wherever it lies I do not believe the Last Candle has crossed it, either in error or sin. During the decade that I served with its celebrants I found no cause to doubt their piety. If my old sect has a failing it is surely humility, but in the words of the blessed Saint Arabella, ‘A clever woman provokes envy, hence a wise one evades regard.’

I believe the Last Candle is both clever and wise, hence it has sought to serve the Imperium in solitude, devoting its talents to contemplation and healing rather than glorious crusades or proselytisation. It gazes inward upon the divine!

To understand the character of the Last Candle you must understand the world it has taken for its retreat, for the two are intertwined like faith and fire. Though I have been absent from Vytarn for over twenty years, its storm-wracked oceans and soaring granite isles have never left my heart. There is an empyreal vitality in the chill air – it is always cold here! – that sharpens the senses and exalts the spirit, spurring one to become the best that one can possibly be.

I do not doubt there is also darkness on this world. Indeed I occasionally felt its presence during my youth, like a phantom stain I could neither identify nor dismiss, but it is eclipsed by profound grace. None who have wandered among the seven temple-clad spires of the Koronatus Ring or gazed upon the cathedral-topped mountain that presides over them could doubt the integrity of their architects. Each spire extols one of the sevenfold Virtues Illuminant, while the colossus at their heart is a monument to mankind’s manifest destiny! It is my abiding hope that Vytarn will some day be recognised as a true shrine world of our beloved Imperium. Can such a resplendent realm be anything but holy?

Once again, I ask that you forgive me for speaking so boldly, my lady. I write these words to the sound of thunder – distant yet, but drawing closer with every line – and I confess the prospect of the coming storm incites me to be forthright. There is little in life as electrifying as being at sea amidst one of Vytarn’s great tempests! Our vessel will be sorely tested by the coming maelstrom, as will we who have entrusted our souls to its integrity, yet I welcome the trial!

You are my superior, but you have also been my truest friend and my second candle in the night. Without your faith I would not have survived my third death and awakened into my fourth and finest life. I will discharge my duty of vigilance to the Convent Sanctorum without prejudice or hesitation. If the Last Candle does indeed harbour heresy, as our revered prioress fears, then rest assured that I shall find it. But I believe my former mentors shall prove not merely innocent, but exemplary in their purity. I pray that my betrayal of their trust will also serve as their exoneration.

As if to punctuate the last word, thunder rumbled overhead and the lumen globes hanging from the ceiling flickered, swinging on their chains as the cabin heaved in sympathy with the ocean’s turbulence. The writer slammed a hand onto her journal as it began to slide from her desk. Fortunately the desk itself, along with the other elaborately carved furniture in the cabin, was bolted to the floor. The Exodus Gulf was rife with storms and the ships that ploughed its waters were designed to anticipate such fury. Nevertheless, no crossing was without hazard, and a handful of vessels were lost every year.

‘Exodus will take its toll,’ Asenath Hyades said aloud, though she was alone. ‘May the wrath of His regard sever us from iniquity.’

It had always been thus. Passage to the Koronatus Ring, Vytarn’s hallowed archipelago, could never – must never – be taken for granted, hence the planet’s only space port was situated on the remote Rosetta Isle, forcing visitors to complete their journey by sea. The eleven-day voyage was a sacrament in its own right, demanding a brave heart and a strong stomach, but above all else it was a test of faith, for though the sect’s Absolution barques were solidly built and solemnly blessed it was only by the Emperor’s grace that they prevailed.

The ship’s bell chimed through the squall, summoning the crew’s Exodii monks to the chapel, where they would chant the Litany of Exodus over and over until the storm had been appeased… or taken its toll. The vessel-indentured monks were forbidden to speak except when performing the ritual, though it was said the litany was never absent from their minds.

‘Unto the sea I cast myself, may He know my faith,’ Asenath intoned, finding the words as if she had spoken them only yesterday. ‘Unto the storm I castigate myself, may He feel my fire.’ She hesitated, though not because the final verse eluded her. ‘Unto the infinite I unveil myself, may He judge my sins.’

I pray mine do not condemn us, she reflected, though she didn’t think it likely. For all her failings, the God-Emperor wasn’t done with her yet. The dream that had compelled her to return to Vytarn was too vivid and recurring to be anything but a portent. She had a purpose here, even if she didn’t know what it was yet.

The room heaved again, and lightning flared at the portholes. For several heartbeats everything became a stuttering black and white negative of itself. Moments later a barrage of rain struck the vessel, battering the cabin’s outer wall.

Asenath realised she was smiling. It was good to be back home!

Ashamed of her excitement, she returned her attention to the journal. Her smile became a frown as she read her words over. Their tone was unseemly, the proliferation of exclamation marks particularly so. It was unlike her to be so unguarded – so volatile. The storm had certainly played a part in that, but the bigger part was Vytarn itself, especially the prospect of seeing the First Light again. The sacred flame had burned atop the archipelago’s great cathedral for over a thousand years, reputedly lit by the Torn Prophet.

‘Truth is our first and lasting light,’ Asenath recited. ‘Speak only as you see and seek to be, for all else is darkness.’

It was the opening verse of the sect’s gospel, and also the last, closing the great circle of its founder’s vision. Asenath had invoked it every night since her ordination into the Adepta Sororitas at the age of nine, even during the blood-soaked misery of her third life, but its meaning had never felt so clear.

My account is disquieting because it is honest, she decided.

Someone giggled, throaty and mocking.

Asenath swung round, her hand moving to the sculpted candle pinned above her heart as her eyes searched the cabin. The wavering light left shadows at its corners, but they were empty. She was alone save for the stylised Battle Sisters carved into the wood-panelled walls. The armoured warriors glared at her, their enamelled eyes filled with disapproval.

Suddenly Asenath was eager to be gone from here.

I have made a beginning, she decided, closing the book. Even if she were inclined to continue writing, it would be impossible while the cabin was rocking about like a zealot in the grip of a fervour dream.

She offered a prayer to her quill and returned it to its case, placing that in turn into her medicae bag. The quill was a minor relic from her order’s vaults and she carried it everywhere. Its nib had been carved from the incisor tooth of a long-dead prelate renowned for his eloquence, but more importantly to Asenath, it had been a parting gift from her superior, Canoness Sanghata. The mistress of the Eternal Candle had known her troubled Sister would have need of it, just as she had recognised her friend’s need to make this journey, even if she hadn’t understood why.

Would she have agreed if I’d told her the whole of it?

Asenath put the question aside. There were more pressing matters to attend to. Her report was only one of the duties she had accepted as the price of her pilgrimage. The rest awaited her in the Blood of Demeter’s infirmary.

All fifty-one of them…

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