n. pl. in·cu·nab·u·la (-l)1. A book printed before 1501; an incunable.
2. An artifact of an early period.
| |
|
|||
|
It is the strangest of things,
to be chased by a word. To be literally pursued; driven to mutilation
and torture by nothing more than a word. Hunted until I found myself
here, locked in this cell, the warders gone, and the last light my world
will see dawning through the high, barred window. We are instructed clearly that we must not read the works we transcribe, but such instruction is unnecessary. Even if we did not transcribe them last word to first to preserve our sacred ignorance I would have no interest in learning their contents. What do they have to say to me, that the Emperor has not already said? Knowledge is a burden; questions an impertinence; answers an insult to the Divine font of all truth. Even so, one becomes – attuned – to noting certain works, certain passages, certain irregularities. If a scribe sees this, and with my lensing eye I saw better than most, he is to bring it to his Erudite who will remove it for – well, I did not know. For many, many years I did not know, but I found out. That morning I began work on an unremarkable ledger. There was nothing specific about it that concerned me; as I said, a good scribe grows a third eye that sees when a text has some special quality about it. This one was an almanac compiled by some long-dead fisherman of the brine-tides where he lived and worked; tables of times and heights, weather information and so on. Nothing obviously out of the ordinary, and yet. And yet. My third eye itched, if you will excuse a scribe’s saying. My lensed eye lingered an iota too long on certain tabular entries before refocusing on the next. My array slowed, the tiered scratching of the stylus-fingers almost pausing. Can you imagine? Pausing? The shame, but in this, I knew that something was amiss. Every blessed gift from the Emperor was talking to me, telling me to be cautious. I immediately sealed the almanac in its original cloth pouch and took it to the Erudite. I was fortunate to be one of the elder scribes who had earned through long service a place on ground level in that vast and hallowed atrium. More than fortunate, I was proud. Rightfully proud. Had I not been so honoured I would have had to wait for the chains and pulleys to lower me to the floor through the many tiers of suspended scribes that hung above my head. There was no need for words to be spoken, of course, as there was only one reason why I should rise from my stool and unplug myself from the lectern before the appointed time. Speech would, after all, have only disrupted the reading from the Book of Hours and distracted the other scribes within earshot. I handed the Erudite the pouch and turned to go. A hand on my arm stopped me. Surprise thrilled through me for a moment, closely followed by a wave of deep discomfort. I do not like departure from routine. Not at all. The Book of Hours is there to tell us the minutes of every day and how they must be filled, and it is enough for me. I had, I am ashamed to admit, secret ambitions of being one day installed to read the Book of Hours to the scribes myself, daydreams of a lowly peon perhaps, but I was diligent and faithful and it might have happened. Not any more, of course. The Erudite looked carefully at the pouch, at some markings I took to be dirt on the outside, gestured to me and walked away through the rows and columns of scribes, feet shuffling on a floor stained with the ink of centuries past. I hastened after him. Down the steps, past the text pipes, more steps, a hall filled with servitors and finally his office. He placed the pouch on a table and busied himself with some rolls of wafer-steel in a pigeonboard. His office was, it is fair to say, clearly the sanctuary of a busy, important man, and I was appropriately humbled at the honour and mindful of the time he was giving me to gather myself. It is rightly said that forbearance is the courtesy of the strong. I glanced around with downturned eyes. Codices, parchment, incunabula, diacris slates and nodes and a myriad others besides all bespoke a man willing to shoulder the burden of knowledge for the sake of the Imperium. What could he want with me? He turned, one hand grasping a golden-hued roll of wafer-steel. As it was proffered, so I took it, with as much reverence as I could muster. What was this? Thin as a child’s excuse but heavier than many an illuminated manuscript I have hefted to my lectern over the decades. I shall not forget his words to me. “I have need of a runner, to deliver certain items. You will do this for me, now. Take that to the vellum wells and wait. I will contact you there.” You can see why. The Erudite wanted me – me! – to carry the valuable and priceless items from his collection. In some small way I was to share his Holy burden. I could not speak, I could not find any words (oh, what a bitter phrase!) and I left for the wells where the shredded vellum was sent for pulping. He was already opening the pouch as I went, and seemed to be holding his breath. It was a fair distance to the well, but I knew the way of old. I went slowly, cradling my charge. I confess in my over-eagerness to perform my duty I may have entertained fears of the air itself scratching the titanium lustre of the scroll. The foolishness of an simple scribe, maybe, but it saved my worthless life. I kept it wrapped in a fold of my robe and hunted as I went for something more suitable to contain it. In the hall of the wells, where the vellum dust hung in the air like mist in the morning, I found a sheet of pure, unsullied mink vellum. No scribe could resist, and I allowed my calloused, ink-stained fingers to run over the milky softness of its surface, smooth as skin and delicate as a rose. To write on this would be an honour indeed. Troubling to me then, to see it awaiting pulping where it would eventually be compressed and used as packaging material or cheap bricks for hab construction. No matter, it was a suitable container for my – for the Erudite’s – scroll. I wrapped it carefully, swept a section of wallbench clear of other, coarser scraps of vellum and set it down to await the Erudite’s call. When it came, it was not quite what I was expecting. With no warning other than a tiny click the package I had so diligently protected burst into flames. Blue tongues of fire two, maybe three, feet long shot out either end. One blackened the wall, the other singed my eyebrows. A moment later the whole package was burning merrily, the now yellow flames (for so vellum burns as anyone who has attended an Ecclessiarchy immolation can tell you) leaping and dancing. My mind was blank, aghast. This was appalling. A scribe’s fear of fire, in this building of all places, resides ever in that sightless razor-realm beyond terror, but there and then all I could think was that I had failed the Erudite. Somehow the vellum had combusted of its own accord, spontaneous conflagration, even though part of me insisted this was not possible. But how could I deny the evidence of my own eyes? I snapped out of my self-flagellation, pulled my robe over my head and began to beat at the flames. All I succeeded in doing was knocking the blazing brand onto the adjoining heap of vellum scraps. Very dry vellum scraps. The flames began to spread with a hunger and a speed that finally ignited that very primal fear in me; I cried out, the wordless sounds escaping my lips as reason escaped my mind. I beat again and again, my robe now aflame itself and dark smoke rolling in thick coils to the ceiling and descending in serpentine tendrils to choke my lungs. Were it not for the servitor, I shudder to think what holocaust may have engulfed the hall of wells. Could it have been contained? I have to think that the Erudite believed so. He had intended for me to be holding that scroll when it kindled. Had it not been for the vellum I wrapped around it, and had I been holding it, I do not doubt that a fireball would have consumed me utterly. Me, and the clicking device that summoned the flames in the first place, neatly removing all evidence of his crime. I picture even now my blackened body thrashing blindly at the centre of a pillar of fire, running in a futile, maddened effort to escape the melting of my own skin and causing the very inferno the servitor only just managed to avert. I ran from that place, leaving the empty-faced machine-man to damp the flames. It did not occur to me then what had just happened, how close I had come to death, to being murdered. Not even as I scrambled up the long stairwell, gasping for breath with my soot-lined lungs, my smouldering robe tailing behind me like some hellish bridal train. To his office, then. The Erudite. I must report the disaster, and suffer the consequences. Remember, I had not then had time to stop and realise what had just happened. Condemn me as a fool if you wish, but phantom fires flaring in my mind drove all other thoughts out. There he was, lying on the floor, limbs splayed. How came this to be? I knelt, only just taking in the destructive rage that seemed to have torn apart his office in my absence. He breathed still, heavy and laboured, his face hidden under a mask of blood, his every rasping breath crinkling the skin that was already starting to form, his grey beard matted and stained wine-dark. His eyes saw me. I knew, looking into them, that I was not all they saw; dangerous vistas and shadowy figures also troubled his vision, and perhaps he thought I was some denizen of that nether world that only he could see. He was fading fast and something told me that the light of the Emperor could not find him where he was going. I recoiled, then, in alarm and fear but for the second time that day he gripped me. For the second time that day he spoke to me, and now I cannot forget his words no matter how hard I try. “I am with you now. Receive me. Iyma Sheg’ab. Iyma. Your servant. Receive me.” He was babbling, I thought. I tried to tear myself away, to summon the fleshchanic servitors to save him, but then I think he saw me properly for the first time. Saw I was not some phantom. His eyes focused hard on mine. “The words. Must not be lost. Others can complete. Our task. Listen to me…” I will not write here the words he spoke, although I can see from the view out of the oillet in my cell that there would be no harm in doing so one more time. No, if this account of mine survives, I do not want what I see coming to be repeated elsewhere. Author of disaster and abomination I may be, but I am still loyal to the Emperor, although I confess that may be hard for you to believe as you read on. The Erudite’s words should have died with him. Now they will die with me. He spoke the words; strange words that meant nothing to me, and yet as he spoke them I felt them sinking into my mind like corpses slipping below the surface of a moonlit lake, one by one. I knew then that once I heard them, I could not un-hear them, but as they sank so I forgot them. I cannot explain it. They came to rest somewhere deep, where I could not consciously go, somewhere only they could return from. Word after word he spoke, slowly and haltingly as he died, and as he spoke them I forgot them. And then he stopped, and said to me, “The last. I do not know. You must find it. Complete our task. Speak His name.” I think he thought I was some treacherous compatriot of his, his clouding eyes betraying him at the very end. He died soon after, and did not speak another word. Others arrived, Heastators and Incipits and servitors. Word of the fire had spread, naturally, and so did word of the Erudite’s strange death. I was seized, manacled, de-monocled, thrust in some dank hole and then questioned over and over again by a succession of interrogators. Most were simple bureaucrats who asked their questions and served their torments upon me with the efficiency of supreme disinterest. Others took more pleasure in their work, had more - ingenuity. No matter. My faith was a bedrock, my conscience was clean, and the events bore out my tale. Fires are not unknown. I was a long-serving scribe and had been seen fighting the fire at risk to my own life. The Erudite’s blood was on my hands, yes, but the servitor who tamed the fire had, naturally, logged the exact moment of my departure. All accepted that I just did not have the time to reach his office and kill him in the manner in which he had died. I would have needed much more time and several implements the nature of which were never fully explained to me. Furthermore, I only had his blood on my hands. His killer, although I doubt it was a corporeal one, would have been drenched head to toe (although I suspect my anatomical assumptions are not even remotely accurate in this case) in gore. They did not ask about the words – why would they? I could not have told them even if they had. I knew he had spoken, but I could not then remember what he had said. Suffice to say, I was released and returned to my role, no stain upon my character. A simple scribe once again, happy – delirious even – to bow my head toward my lectern and continue my work, the sonorous words of the Book of Hours settling over me once again like warm dust. But it was not to last. As if bloated by internal decay, the corpse-words began to rise out of the silt. Slowly, they began to break the surface, one by one. I was scribing a collection of testimonials by visitors to Ultophor’s Peak, the Cult-Shrine that lies over by Meleander. At first I thought it some malfunction of my scribing array, for the words I read were not the words my array was prepping. I had to consciously over-ride the errors, and the occasions of error grew in frequency. Mis-spellings, just subtle differences at first, but getting worse. I submitted myself for repair to the adepts, thinking that smoke or fire damage, or some damage to my flesh from my recent questioning was to blame. No faults were found. The machine-spirit in my arm was already pacified and compliant. I was given new litanies to speak, and sent back. It is not for me to question the adepts, but if no fault was found, what use were new litanies? No matter. I recited them anyway, but the errors continued. Then I tried something. I am not, as you know, a person keen to explore the new and the different. Routine keeps us all safe, ensures the Emperor knows where to find us, so why I did what I did I cannot say. But I did it. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t, if I had stifled those corpse-words that rose in my mind unbidden. If I had somehow sunk them again into the sightless depths and carried on with my life. I will never know. In my chamber, late at night, I laid out the sheet of oil-paper that my meal had been delivered in. What to write? I wanted to summon the errors, force them out of me, return me to the way I had been but without something to copy from I was lost. My array ticked softly, idling in unfamiliar quiescence. My name. I started with that. My age. My parents’ names, Emperor rest their souls. My brother, fallen on some distant world as he carved the Emperor’s will in the flesh of His enemies. My routine came next, what I did when I awoke. A simple list, but the words came quickly now, and my array could scribe as quickly as I could think. Perhaps that was the key that unlocked the words the Erudite had spoken. As the events that set the order of my day came to me my array wrote them down, faster and faster until I seemed I was simply spectating, an Erudite myself perhaps, watching my scribe at work. My daily rote spilled out onto the page and then it happened. The errors coalesced, the dark surface of the lake was broken, the words that were spoken remembered themselves. And I wrote them down, one by one, on the oil-paper. I was afraid then, late at night in my chamber. Before no eyes but my own I guiltily tore the oil-paper to pieces, to shreds, feeling all the time as if I were being watched. I had remembered the words, yes, but I was not fool enough to speak them. Perhaps now I had dredged them up from where they lay they would lose their hold on me, lose their power to manipulate my hand and my array. Perhaps they would just fade and let me get on with my life. Was that too much to ask? Of course, you know the answer, as did I, although I was not brave enough to admit it. Six words I had remembered, six words I had written and six words I had destroyed, but it was not enough. There was a seventh word. The Erudite had mentioned it as he lay dying. He did not know the word, he said. Had he lived longer, I believe he would have. Had he not found it, as I think he was trying to do and perhaps had been trying to do for decades through the efforts of me and my fellow scribes, it would have found him before long. And before long, I realised it was trying to find me. The Erudite had said I must “speak his name.” That was the meaning behind the seventh word, and you do not need me to tell you the power that lies in a name. It started simply enough. The word was not in me, so it could not act through me. It had to come to me some other way. Ink drips. It happens all the time, and in an atrium as large as the one I worked in, with so many scribes filling the space from wall to wall, from floor to groin-vaulted ceiling, sometimes it sounded like gentle rain, the individual teardrops pattering blackly to the floor. There were more than usual that morning, irregular but frequent. I slowly realised they were mostly falling near me, descending from the dozens of scribes directly above me. I looked up, then down. The drops lay, almost invisible against the pitch-stain of their centuries-old predecessors, but their newness, their glistening wetness made them stand out. That was when I caught my first glimpse of the word in the process of forming. Each new drop added a serif here, a ligature there, the characters of the word slowly growing point by point as I watched, my array silent and still, my shame at this unfelt as the realisation of what was happening at my feet grew. The seventh word. How I knew this I cannot say, but here it was, almost whole, creating itself out of random nothingness, demanding that I read it and complete the name. I cried out. There, in the atrium of scribes, I cried out. The reader of the Book of Hours faltered, his mouth-grille hissing in the silence that followed my cry, soon filled by the dry rustle of a million leaves as every scribe in the hall turned my way. My foot darted out, smudging the still-forming word, smearing its form beyond legibility. Then I ran from that place, terror clutching at my mind. I lied, spun some fiction about my array causing me pain at the shoulder. More tests and inspections by the adepts followed, and this gave me time to recover my wits, to calm myself and think on what had happened. I am sorry to say I dismissed the incident as foolishness, and I was eager to return to my duty, but by the time the examinations and prayers had finished my shift was over. I returned instead to my chamber, the huge levelcar that normally teemed with others of my shift almost empty at this odd hour. It stopped to admit a maintenance crew from the steam rooms. Warm, moist air surged into the levelcar like an inrushing tide and my lensed eye fogged at once. Droplets of water beaded, joined, ran. Began to form letters on the surface of my eye. I wiped at it, but the moisture was inside the lens, between layers of crystal gel. I tugged at it, but the gripping coils inside that socketed into the orbital bone did not budge. Frantic now, the word near fully-formed, I darted around for some way to stop the inevitable. Then I saw the cart the maintenance crew had pushed onto the levelcar. Solid, stocky and with clean, clear metal corners. Sharp corners. Without further thought, although my bowels knotted in anticipation, my hands gripped the edges of the cart. I drew back my head and snapped it forward. The pointed corner loomed frighteningly in my vision, a loud crack resounded and then I was on the floor, machine-pain surging through the bones of my skull as if I had dripped acid in my eye. My broken eye. With my now monocular vision I could see razor-shards of crystal on the grubby floor. Heavy boots crunched them. Hands tugged at my robes, voices raised in concern. My own flesh hand sought the site of the agony pulsing through me. The fingers came back wet; the calloused tips bleeding from deep cuts caused by shattered edges so fine I could not feel them and coated in the weeping gliding-oil the lenses had used. The blood and oil mixed and ran down into my palm. Even though, by now, I knew what was coming I still watched, rapt in awful attention, as the mingling fluids ran in rivulets that started to commingle, started to form the word out of my own life-blood. I wiped my hand on my robe as strong arms pulled me to my feet. I assured the others I was not badly injured, and if any of them believed that they had really seen a simple scribe deliberately mutilate himself in such a shocking way they did not voice it until after I left the levelcar. My bleeding fingers wrapped in a torn corner of my under-robe I hurried back to my chamber. The narrow corridors were empty before matins were called, and I avoided all contact with my fellow scribes. Back in my chamber I dressed my wounds as best I could, and then I hunted through my home for any possible sources of composition. Anything random or mobile that could take shape through natural or unnatural forces and make me read the seventh word. I turned on a light to help me see. The patterns of dust on the shade threw darkened shadows against the wall behind me. I did not even turn to check, I simply turned the light off and tore the shade apart. A data-node reader lay glowing softly on the table. I approached it warily. I had indeed left it turned on, but these devices could malfunction. Could read their nodes incorrectly and display corrupted data. Could display gibberish. Averting my eyes I fumbled for the reader and turned it face-down, before finally turning it off. Wires that snaked across the worn floor I picked up and janked clear of the devices they connected, lest their coils betray me. I closed the door to my tiny cleansing-room, fearful of the mirror in there. Why, I could not properly say, but I was now a shaking bundle of nerves, jumping at the slightest sound or at the most mundane of domestic items glimpsed out the corner of my remaining eye. The pain in my ruined eye had subsided as the machine-spirit decided further damage was unlikely. Then I sat on my stool, my bandaged hand in my lap, my scribing array hissing quietly to itself by my side, my chamber finally rendered impotent, a sanctuary from the word. I must have fallen asleep, sitting there, it would certainly not have been the first time I fell asleep there having failed to make it as far as my cot after a gruelling shift. And that is how they found me, I suspect, slumped and dead to the world. Someone in the levelcar must have spoken out, after all. Either that, or my masters at the Collatarium did not believe my excuses. Perhaps they had been watching me ever since the fire and the Erudite’s death, waiting for signs of sickness or heresy. No matter. I fear the state of myself and my chamber left no room for rational explanations nor, when I awoke to the confining chains and the harsh voices of the Arbites, did my screams for a hood to be placed over my head as I was taken away. In the interrogation chamber I did myself no favours either. Alone, strapped naked and face down to a plain steel frame that hung from the ceiling in the centre of a echoing vault, I ranted and raved that my captors pluck out my eye, that they turn out the lights, that they blindfold me. Of course, I kept my eye closed as much as possible during the agonies that ensued, but even so sometimes I was powerless to stop the lid flicking open in response to some current or needle or brand. Every time I did so, I saw the word starting to form quicker and quicker, be it out of the sparks from an anbaric tormentor, the smoke coiling from a recruciator or the splattered patterns of my own blood, sweat or feces on the mirrored floor over which I hung. It was too much. Death was not coming; my tormentors were too skilled for that, although I would have accepted death with open arms. Before long the word would form too quickly for me to react, and I would read it and complete the name in seven parts. Death holds only the Emperor’s light and eternal service before the true Golden Throne. The word would surely have ended my wordly torment, but doubtless also heralds the very flensing of the soul as the entity whose name it completes erupts into this realm. He who allows such a being to manifest must surely face a different manner of eternal service. And then it came to me. The word was pursuing me because I and I alone knew the other six. I was too weak to resist, but another - another might be strong enough. Strong enough to resist, or strong enough to seek death rather than betray humanity. And who could be stronger than an Arbitrator, the very upholders of the Emperor’s will? How could the word resist such blessed quarry? I called out. I relented. I repented. I wished to confess. It shames me now how much relief flooded through me as I spoke those words. Did I do what I did just to stop the pain? Could I have held out and avoided the word for however it long it took them to give up and execute the unrepentant heretic they saw in me? I might have been able to weather the pain, but I had no safe-harbour from the word. It would have found me before death could, of that I am sure. It took some time, and some further hours of pain, to persuade them that although I wished to repent, I wished to do so face to face with my interrogator. Finally my wish was granted. I was placed in this cell on whose walls you read these words and I met him. Tall and broad, I do not know if he wore the carapace armour because he had to, because he wanted to, or because he thought it would intimidate me. Perhaps all three. I never saw his face under that menacing helmet, never heard his real voice through that grating grille. His tones, so deep they must have been heard by distance mountain roots, turned my bowels to ice. What fool would willingly face one of these giants, and oppose him? I told him my story, as best I could and then - Emperor forgive me - as the dust and dirt on his armour began to shift and move before my eye, I whispered to him the six words the Erudite had told me. They affected him, I know. He froze, for an instant, as he heard them. Did his training protect him in some way, or did it betray him? Did he forget the words as I had? I think not, although I cannot say why. This mighty soldier of the Emperor’s word was, perhaps, too well versed in words of meaning – the Law, the Emperor’s Will, the Books of Judgement – to so easily forget what he heard. He struck me, knocking me to the ground and left. As he went, I think I saw him clutching at his helmet. I cannot be certain. What is certain is that he never returned, and that the damp and stains and dirt in my cell remained resolutely still and unmoving from that moment on. The blood that seeped from a hundred wounds and lacerations on my broken body was simply blood, nothing more. It did not form letters as it trickled or smeared or dried. The word had let me be. I had escaped it. It had a new quarry now, one stronger than I. I fell to my knees and gave thanks, praying to the Emperor and every saint I could name that the brave Arbitrator would do what I could not. Would resist the word and banish it forever. I must have slept for over a day, laid out on the floor of this stone cell, but when I awoke I knew my prayers had not been answered. Had he not been strong enough? Or had others overheard my words to him, listeners who might have lacked the strength of that armoured colossus? The daylight coming in the oillet was sickly, and somehow thick. Greasy, almost. I pulled myself up, ignoring my body’s squeals of pain, and looked out. The sky had gone. Above the world lay only emptiness. The sun was a blazing, furious eye that mocked my own, a cyclopean eye in a face of utter darkness. Screams came to me on the wind, the massed screams of a dying city and above and over and through them all, the sound of spiderweb cracks running through a sheet of glass, hundreds of overlapping, fragile tinkling sounds. It was a maddening sound, and it was growing louder by the second, coming not just from the world outside the narrow oillet in the stone but all around me. I had the impression then of something dark and vast and seething with malevolent glee pressing against the bottom of a sheet of ice covering some deep lake the size of the planet, pressing harder and harder as it started to break through everywhere at once. Whatever it was, I knew its name, or most of it at least. It seemed someone had learned it all. As this world dies I leave behind this record in case this lonely cell somehow survives the coming maelstrom of Chaos. As ever, all I have to give the Emperor are my words, and I scribe them here upon the stone in the only ink I have left to me. Red it is now. By the time you read this, it will have turned black, and that dried husk at your feet? That is me. A fool and a coward, yes, but never a traitor, although you will just have to take my word for that. THE END
|
| Search | Contact | Disclaimer |
