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The Deacon of Wounds – Extract

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CHAPTER 1

A modified Taurox bearing the seal of the Adeptus Ministorum was waiting for Arch-Deacon Ambrose when he stepped out of the city of Magerit’s trans-hub. He winced at the sight of the vehicle and its pointed ostentation. Where the turret had once been mounted, there was now a shrine of iron and gold. Banners of scripture hung from poles on the rear of the roof. They moved sluggishly in the breeze. The driver, a sturdy woman named Maevek, gave Ambrose a sympathetic smile as she bowed, letting him know she understood his embarrassment.

He had been travelling for over a month, and his return to Magerit was the first time Ambrose had been presented with armoured transport. This felt like Lorenz sending a message to the populace of the city. Ambrose suspected it was aimed at him too. Either way, it was clumsy and counterproductive.

With a sigh, Ambrose made his way over to the Taurox. People streamed past him, entering and leaving the terminal. The building of the trans-hub towered over the crowded outdoor concourse. Webs of plasteel walkways linked the rockcrete structures. Fine ash drifted slowly down from the grey-brown sky, coating everything in layers of grit. For the first time in weeks, Ambrose tasted the familiar, thick, chewy air of Magerit. The air had been easier to breathe in a number of the other cities he had visited, but not for pleasant reasons.

In the time it took Ambrose to cross the five yards to the vehicle, half a dozen people recognised him. They called to him and reached out, and he greeted them, smiling. He was getting used to his rising public image, even though he still felt conflicted about it. He was an arch-deacon. He was not meant to be the visible face of the Ecclesiarchy on Theotokos.

Maevek opened the door of the passenger compartment as Ambrose approached, then took his travel bag from him. He climbed into the Taurox, settling his robes as he sat on a bench. The compartment was meant to hold ten fully equipped soldiers. It was ridiculously vast for just him. He opened the viewing slits, trying to get a little bit of air. There was no relief to be had from the heat – it was as stifling outside as it was in the Taurox. A bit of a breeze, though. A little bit of movement in the air. That would keep him from going mad.

With a lurch, the vehicle started moving, its four sets of tracks rumbling over the pitted surface of the road. Ambrose leaned his head against the viewing slit, watching the industrial tangle of Magerit slide by. He was home. He was seeing crowds again. He wasn’t seeing starvation and worse wherever he looked. He should have been glad. Instead, he felt only a resigned dread.

The vox-speaker in the compartment crackled to life. ‘Welcome back, arch-deacon,’ Maevek said. ‘You were missed.’

‘That’s kind of you to say.’ He meant it.

‘Was your journey a good one?’

‘It was a sobering one,’ Ambrose said. ‘A solemn one.’ He had known Maevek for years. It wasn’t because he trusted her discretion that he spoke freely. It was because he did not think there was any point, or even possibility, of concealing what he had seen.

Maevek was silent for quite a while, as if unsure how to respond. Finally, she said, ‘Do you think it will rain soon?’

‘The Emperor protects, and the Emperor provides,’ Ambrose said.

That it was the truth did not prevent his answer from sounding rote in his ears. But there was no other answer to that question, the question that had become a refrain on Theotokos, sung by a choir composed of every living soul on the planet.

Every soul except those behind the walls of the Ecclesiarchal Palace.

Ambrose closed his eyes. He was tired. It had taken thirty hours on a series of short-haul lifters and a maze of maglev connections, a number of them through stations and lines that were barely operational, to get him back to Magerit. He dozed uneasily, his head jerking up and down with the jolts of the ride. He woke up feeling stunned when the Taurox came to a halt at the gates of the palace’s grounds.

Ambrose thumbed the vox-speaker’s button. ‘Maevek,’ he said. ‘I will walk from here.’

‘The cardinal wants to see you when you arrive,’ Maevek said uneasily.

‘And he will. I simply prefer to arrive on foot. Please open the passenger compartment door.’

Maevek obeyed, and a few moments later Ambrose walked through the open gate, nodding to the guards who stood to attention for him. Maevek drove past him, taking the Taurox up the rest of the palace’s hill towards the building itself. Ambrose walked off the road and onto one of the paths that wound its way gradually up the slope.

Magerit sat in a wide bowl. A mile beyond its western lip, the palace mount rose. It was not much more than five thousand feet high, but that was still enough to lift the palace above the worst of the haze that shrouded the three-hundred thousand souls that made up the city’s population. An outer wall of rockcrete fortifications ringed the hill halfway up, sealing off the palace grounds. Below it, the terrain was barren rock and scattered, desiccated scrub. Within the palace’s outer wall, lush parkland flourished.

Ambrose walked slowly through the last jewel of Theotokos, feeling a pang of guilt for the joy he experienced in seeing greenery again. There was shade here from trees that grew in an artificial, forced variety. The temperate stood next to the tropical. Oaks were surrounded by palms, and cacti were draped in vines. Every night, an army of mono-tasked servitors descended the hill, controlling irrigation, adjusting individual patches of soil, pruning trees and hedges.

The slope of the hill had been landscaped into broad terraces, with moss-grown stone steps linking the levels. Ornamental brooks had been dug, while an underground complex of piles provided the actual irrigation. Deeper inside the hills was the Ecclesiarchal Palace’s gigantic reservoir, fed by redirected subterranean springs. If it never again rained on Theotokos, All Martyrs would still have water to survive for a century or more.

Ambrose thought about the ocean beneath his feet as he slowly made his way up the terraces. In his chest, guilt, anger and frustration fought for supremacy. The emotional pain became even more intense when he stopped just below the palace walls and looked back downslope. From here, high above the grounds’ outer walls, he beheld the full prospect of Magerit in its bowl. The city had long endured suffocating air. The years of endless heat, each more intense than the last, it had also learned to shoulder. But the heat had finally brought drought, and it was the thirst that was slowly killing the city.

And Magerit was among the last cities of Theotokos.

I am going to live to see the death of my world.

He had never spoken the words aloud. But after what he had seen in the last month, he could no longer suppress the thought.

Emperor, look upon the suffering of Your faithful servants. End this drought. Send us rain, that we might fight on in Your name and help carry Your banners forth across the galaxy.

Ambrose could not make it rain. He could not end the planet-wide drought. The only thing that might be within the scope of his power was to keep his fellow citizens alive until the drought ended.

The task ahead filled him with despair.

I’ll never convince him. Not Lorenz.

But I have to try.

He turned away from Magerit’s suffering and headed for the entrance to the palace.

Cardinal Lorenz received Ambrose in the throne room. He was not a big man, but the cardinal looked tiny in the huge seat of iron trimmed with gold, dwarfed by the immensity of the throne and its hall. Massive columns of polished black marble supported a vault seventy feet high. Like everywhere else in the palace, lumen sconces on the pillars cast insufficient light to lift the hall out of a solemn gloom. Statues of saints stood on the bases of the columns, looking down on all who passed and judging them harshly. A great, circular stained-glass window in the western wall caught the sun’s rays and turned them to deep, crystalline choirs of emerald, sapphire and ruby. Beneath it was the throne, mounted in the centre of a three-tiered platform.

Lorenz hunched into the seat, a crooked, exhausted vulture. He had shrivelled since Ambrose had last seen him. He seemed to have aged ten years. The lines of his face were deeper, his eyes heavy lidded and sunken. His thin lips pressed tightly together, as though he were reluctant to open his mouth.

Standing at the cardinal’s right, leaning against the throne with an unpleasantly proprietary air, was Rosarius, the relic-keeper. He was Ambrose’s age, much younger than Lorenz, a man in his prime, except he could not bring himself to associate the word prime with anything that had to do with Rosarius. The relic-keeper’s face was pinched and hungry, squeezed by ambition that could never be sated. His shoulders were rounded, and his neck bowed from his eternal, performative subservience.

‘Welcome back, Arch-Deacon Ambrose,’ Rosarius said, as if he were the one holding court. ‘The cardinal is eager for your news.’

Lorenz grunted.

Ambrose kneeled before the cardinal. He lowered his forehead to touch the first step of the platform. ‘The blessings of the Emperor be upon you, eminence,’ he said. He rose, waited for Lorenz’s nod, then climbed to the upper tier of the platform. He barely glanced at Rosarius. He answered to the cardinal, not the sycophant.

Rosarius sniffed, clearly displeased to have Ambrose standing on the same level. He leaned away from the throne, standing straight, for all the good it did him. Ambrose was almost six inches taller, and Rosarius had now lost the advantage of being able to look down on him.

‘You took your time on your journey,’ Lorenz said.

‘We hope you were not indulging yourself,’ Rosarius added.

‘I was being thorough, cardinal,’ Ambrose said. He spoke calmly, hoping there was no defensiveness in his tone. ‘You commanded me to gather a complete picture of the situation on Theotokos.’ Because you and your lickspittle wanted me out of the way for as long as possible, and then still complain that I took too long. Even so, Ambrose had been glad to go. Lorenz might only be pretending to care about the conditions across the planet, but Ambrose was not.

‘One can be too thorough,’ said Lorenz.

He sounded genuinely aggrieved, and Ambrose wondered what had happened for the cardinal to have actually missed him. Was order in Magerit deteriorating in a way he had not seen upon arrival? ‘If I have erred, I am sorry,’ he said.

Lorenz waved the apology off. ‘Tell me what you have learned.’

‘Indeed,’ Rosarius chimed in. ‘Do the cities delinquent in their tithes have a reason for no longer being in communication with us?’

Tithes. That is your concern. Ambrose fixed the relic-keeper with a long stare. He did not hide his disgust. He was not surprised that Rosarius knew such details about the tithing. He and Lorenz had been steadily eroding Ambrose’s financial authority, and it was becoming harder and harder for him to exercise his actual duties as arch-deacon. He was the one who was supposed to be governing the administrative side of the diocese. It was he whose responsibility it was to direct the flow of Ecclesiarchal wealth to the channels where the ministry needed it most. He still had the ability to see what was happening to the treasury, but his role had been relegated to that of a passive witness. Given the scale of the crisis on Theotokos, it was painfully clear to him how that wealth should be spent. Against all morality, Lorenz and Rosarius disagreed. To date, they had been unable to see beyond their personal horizons. There was no hope that Rosarius could be made to change his mind. He was venality made flesh. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what was happening outside the walls of All Martyrs. It was that he didn’t care. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Ambrose wanted to believe that Lorenz could yet be reasoned with. He needed to feel some hope. He had known the cardinal for over a decade. There had been a time, in the early days of Ambrose’s appointment, when Lorenz had shown signs of the cardinal he could become. But that side of his character had withered along with the fortunes of Theotokos. The decline had started even before Rosarius had established himself as Lorenz’s shadow.

Rosarius did not make Lorenz into what he has become. It was Lorenz who opened the door to Rosarius. You know this.

Yes. But I have to act as if I do not, or else I will have nothing left except despair.

‘The silence of those cities has a very good explanation,’ Ambrose said quietly. ‘The dead do not speak.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lorenz asked after a beat.

‘Your eminence, the years of drought have pushed almost all of Theotokos past the point of no return. Our focus has been on the immediate parish of Magerit, and the pressures of local circumstances have unavoidably narrowed our perspective. The same drawing inwards has happened everywhere else as the drought has persisted. The worst has happened. Theotokos is dying. The scythe of famine has swept over the globe. I have seen cities emptied of life. I have seen entire regions where the few people who remain are, without exception, starving, when they are not dying of thirst.’

‘You exaggerate,’ said Rosarius.

‘I swear by the Throne that I do not. The simple truth is this. Magerit is all that remains. It is the last functioning city on Theotokos.’

Lorenz grimaced. He stirred on the throne, shifting as if in pain.

You understand that, don’t you? You understand what that means.

Ambrose held his breath, hoping that Lorenz was learning the right lesson. In the comfort and safety of the Ecclesiarchal Palace, Lorenz was not in immediate personal danger from drought or famine. And Magerit’s spaceport was still in operation. When the end came for Theotokos, Lorenz could always leave. What Ambrose was telling him did, though, present the prospect of total humiliation. Lorenz’s diocese had shrunk in prestige as Theotokos’ economy, and thus its importance, had collapsed. With every year of the world’s decline, the cardinal had become more bitter, and more obsessed with holding on to what he clearly thought of as his. His diocese, his world, his wealth.

Now Ambrose had just told Lorenz that his domain had become just one city.

And you’re on the verge of losing that too.

‘You come here to sound the clarion of doom, then,’ Lorenz said.

‘There is still hope, eminence.’

‘I have yet to hear it. Have you discovered how to make it rain?’

‘Before I left, I presented you with a series of proposals. I feel their implementation is more urgent than ever. Have you had a chance to look them over?’

Rosarius smirked.

‘Your proposals,’ said Lorenz. He muttered something incomprehensible to himself. It sounded like a curse. ‘Your proposals. Yes. Yes, we have examined them.’

Rosarius grinned at Ambrose when Lorenz said we.

‘They are not realistic,’ Lorenz concluded.

‘With respect,’ Ambrose said, ‘I fear that if we do not implement them, we are not being realistic. The reservoir of All Martyrs is large enough, and is replenished enough, for us to provide considerable relief to Magerit for a considerable time.’

‘And what do you mean by considerable?’ Lorenz asked. ‘Until it does rain? Do you think rain will ever return to Theotokos?’

‘I must have faith that it will.’ And when Lorenz snorted, Ambrose added, ‘The Emperor protects.’

Lorenz stared at him, unblinking, unmoved.

‘Until the drought ends,’ Ambrose went on, ‘it is our sacred duty to preserve this world, sacred in its fealty to the Emperor, for as long as we can. If we do not act, we will lose everything.’

‘If we do not act with caution, we will lose everything,’ Rosarius said, his voice unctuous with pious reason.

Lorenz raised a crooked finger. ‘Yes. That. Precisely. The Emperor protects. He does. You repeat the truth we all know, arch-deacon. The Emperor will provide. These times are sent to test us, to test our faith, and to test our discipline. When the trials come, we must remain steadfast. That is what we shall do.’

In other words, you will do nothing. Except hoard water and wealth until it no longer serves a purpose.

What did Lorenz hope to accomplish? What was he planning? What sort of a reception did he expect off-world if he waited until there was nothing to do except abandon a dead planet? Ambrose had no illusions about the corruption that ran like a cancer through the Adeptus Ministorum. He had too much direct experience of it to pretend otherwise. If anything, he thought it was Lorenz who was being naive. The stench of failure would cling to him like a curse. And the way his diocese had been carved up by other cardinals clearly showed the esteem in which he was held. He was powerful on Theotokos. He would be nowhere else.

Maybe he knows. Maybe he has no plans to leave at all. Maybe he’s calculating that he can remain comfortable in the palace until he dies, and what happens next is no concern of his.

That had the awful ring of truth. Lorenz did have the look of a man who saw death drawing nearer with a mixture of relief and dread. Something was troubling him, but whatever it was, it was not the fate of anyone other than himself.

What about Rosarius? What is he planning? He had to be looking beyond the lifespan of his patron, his future after Theotokos. Rosarius could leave without taint. He was not responsible for the collapse of the world. That was the fault of the lord-governor, who had died a year ago and not been replaced, leaving Lorenz as the unchallenged ruler of the planet. It was the fault of the cardinal. It was, Ambrose thought bitterly, no doubt the fault of the arch-deacon too. Rosarius was a humble relic-keeper, after all. He had no influence over his betters, or any right to attempt to exert one.

How perfect for you, Rosarius. Amass your wealth, then leave the ruins when the moment is right.

Ambrose had no difficulty guessing when that moment would be. The day after Lorenz’s funeral, the relic-keeper would be gone.

There is no hope. They have decided. One way or another, they are abandoning Theotokos to its fate.

Lorenz and Rosarius were looking at Ambrose as if expecting his capitulation.

He could not walk away. He had to keep trying.

‘I have seen the status of Magerit’s reservoirs,’ he said. ‘They will not last much longer. The entire city is on severe water rationing. The situation is critical. We are perilously close to seeing a disintegration of order.’

‘If the people forget their duty to the Emperor and to the Imperial Creed, then they must be disciplined,’ Lorenz said. He sounded as if he was losing interest in the discussion. There was something else on his mind, something preying on it, and it bothered him far more than the prospect of societal collapse.

‘Disciplined by whom?’ Ambrose asked. ‘What will happen when the enforcers of the Magerit Watch are dying of thirst too? Remember that the greenery of the palace’s hill is perfectly visible from the city.’

‘It is also well defended,’ said Rosarius. ‘There will be no rabble within these walls.’

Lorenz stood, signalling the end of the audience. He moved more easily than his hunched figure suggested. ‘This disaster will not come,’ he announced, as if his will were enough to forbid it. ‘The faith of the people is strong.’ The words were an order, not a statement. ‘And if they need to be reminded of its strength, then they will be.’ He looked at Ambrose. ‘I thank you for your report, arch-deacon. You are no doubt eager to ensure that the charities you support have continued their good work in your absence. I have detained you long enough.’

And that was it. Ambrose was dismissed. The month and more of travel, the report he had painstakingly assembled from evidence so terrible it had destroyed the last vestiges of his peace of mind, all these things meant nothing.

The death of an entire world meant nothing. Whatever it was that troubled Lorenz, it was not the fate of the citizens of Theotokos.

‘Your eminence,’ Ambrose said. He bowed his head to the cardinal and left. As he walked back down the dark length of the throne room, he could feel Rosarius’ smug grin burning into the back of his neck.

There was work waiting for him in his quarters. And Lorenz was right. The charities needed him. They were the one financial outlet over which the cardinal had let him retain a modicum of control. They would be needed more than ever now. And the only reason they were still his to direct, he reflected sourly, was that they were useful to Lorenz. Through them, he expected Ambrose to tamp down the possibilities of unrest.

Instead of heading for his quarters, Ambrose left the palace. He needed to be outside, beyond the walls that allowed the inhabitants of All Martyrs to pretend there was not a desperate city just a few miles away.

Back on the green slopes, Ambrose looked down at the smudged misery of Magerit. The skyline wavered. The air quivered in heat. From here, it was easy to believe that life went on as it always had in the city.

That was a lie.

Everything Ambrose loved was down there.

And everything he loved was going to die.

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WARHAMMER HORROR

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Rachel Williams.

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