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Sacred Hate – Extract

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SACRED HATE

David Annandale

The hymn tormented Cerastes.

He stood with his fellow novice missionaries in the great chapel of the Sacred Hate. He sang with them because he must. The words lashed his soul. The verses that should have renewed his faith instead cracked its brittle shell.

‘Look down on me, Father of Mankind.

Grant me your wrath,

Make me your spear.

Transform me,

Transform my voice.

Let all who hear my words kneel in awe and fear,

And make me the force that changes worlds.’

The chapel dominated the bow of the ship. Thousands of missionaries filled the pews, and with them tens of thousands of troops of Legitur’s regiment, the Zealot Blades. The Sacred Hate had a score of planets in its sights, worlds that needed to be bound more tightly in the holy chains of the Imperial creed. The missionaries would descend on the errant worlds with the torch of faith. The soldiers of the Astra Militarum came to escort them, and to burn what needed to be burned.

The journey from Legitur had already been long enough for routine and tedium to take hold. Cerastes found some relief in that. The frenzy of services that had marked the beginning of the pilgrimage were over, and he had more time to himself. He split most of his time between his cell and the librarium. Through prayer, meditation and research, he tried to recapture meaning and purpose in his life, and the strength of belief that had once been his. His last year on Legitur, the last year of his studies at the Collegium Sanctificatus, had stolen all of these from him. The year that should have completed his education and made him ready to take up his first position in the Ecclesiarchy had rendered him unfit to serve.

He could not speak to anyone about his agony. He attended the thrice-daily services in the chapel with machinic regularity. It would be unthinkable not to. But the ceremonies rang as hollow as he felt. The hollowness terrified him. He could speak of it to no one. Even admitting it to himself made his blood run cold, as if eyes of judgement could look into his heart and see the heresy that lurked there.

Whose eyes?

Did the terror mean there was more to his faith than he thought? Did it mean he did believe after all?

That logic felt like a desperate rationale. It was clutching after a theological straw. The more he thought it through, the less convincing it became, and the terror slowly receded, giving way to the tide of despair.

The service ended, the last echoes of the congregation’s song evaporating in the vaults of the nave. The chapel was as nothing compared to the majesty of the Cathedral of Iron Revelation on Legitur. Its great spires rose next to the collegium, and Cerastes had come to know its vast spaces well over the years. The colossal statues of the saints, armoured and unforgiving, that stood on the pedestals before the pillars had looked down on him and borne witness to the growth of his doubts. If the cathedral could not shore up his faith, the chapel of the Sacred Hate had little chance.

Cerastes left his pew and joined the throng shuffling out of the chapel. He had almost reached the door when Deverast, the Keeper of Texts, caught up to him.

‘Will I be seeing you in the librarium later?’ Deverast asked.

‘You will,’ Cerastes confirmed.

‘Ah, very good.’ Deverast’s soft voice contrasted with his appearance. Tall and heavyset, Deverast had hands that looked like they could punch out an auroch. At first sight he came across as someone who would have been more at home brawling in a tavern than devoting his life to the cataloguing and preservation of sacred texts. The appearance was deceptive. Cerastes had never known a gentler soul. No one in his acquaintance had ever heard Deverast raise his voice. The Keeper of Texts had taken to him because he visited the librarium so regularly, and behaved more paternally than his own father ever had. Cerastes’ parents were minor nobles on Legitur. For them, a son entering the Adeptus Ministorum was above all else a key to greater social standing.

‘Too many of our fellow citizens take the printed word for granted,’ Deverast continued. ‘An unfortunate result of being children of Legitur. I am glad you do not, my son.’

‘I never will.’ Cerastes surprised himself with the fervour of his promise. He meant what he said, and yet he was not sure that he knew what he meant. The words came out of him as if yanked from his soul by the hand of fate.

Does this portend something?

How could he tell?

A momentary spike of spiritual excitement dissipated in the swirls of uncertainty.

‘An inspiring service, wasn’t it?’ said Deverast, and though his enthusiasm was obviously genuine, the platitude pushed Cerastes back down into the grey of despair.

‘Singularly inspiring,’ he said, managing to strip the sarcasm from his tone at the last moment.

They were walking down the main hall that ran the length of the ship from chapel to stern. Cerastes took the first branching corridor he saw and bid Deverast farewell. He needed to be alone.

He returned to his cell. An iron aquila, its wings spreading across the curve of the ceiling, was the chamber’s lone adornment. The black metal stood out against the utilitarian grey of the walls and floor. Like the other missionaries, Cerastes had his needs served by a simple metal chair, table and cot.

Cerastes sat at the table. He stared at the stacks of books that teetered to unstable heights. He grimaced at them and the futility they represented. No, he would never take the word for granted. But for words to have value, they had to have meaning. The words in these tomes were empty, arranged to form pointless bromides.

The stacks reminded him of Legitur, and of the mountains of futility on his home world.

Deverast was right. It would be easy to take the printed word for granted on Legitur when one lived surrounded by texts – its great industry and export was the holy book and the exegesis. In the upper levels of the planetwide city, in the privileged atmosphere of the Collegium Sanctificatus, that fact was a point of pride. But Cerastes had made the mistake of venturing into the city’s lower levels. He had seen the endless, unthinking production of volumes, the illiterate scribes copying pages they could not understand, and the mountains, hundreds of feet tall, of discarded output that exceeded the uses and export capacity of the planet. He had seen these things, and understood what they meant. He had been unable to hold the implications of futility at bay through any effort of denial. And he had seen something else…

He had felt the meaning of existence torn away from him, as if his flesh had been flayed from his body.

His response had been to chase after meaning. He discovered that the foundations of his faith had been meaning and reason, and without them, all that he was and had believed began to crumble. The hunt had been futile, and in the end, pursued by doubts and the memories of what he had seen, he had fled Legitur as soon as he completed his studies at the collegium. Taking on the role of a missionary made him feel like a fraud. He demonstrated all the knowledge and all the ability to speak sermons of fire that his superiors in the Ecclesiarchy expected. They smiled on his desire to spread the cleansing flame of the Imperial creed. He had been a model scholar. He had shown much promise, and they believed they saw his promise fulfilled.

Fraud. Liar. Imposter. Coward.

His flight was his last hope. Maybe, just maybe, away from the dead words of Legitur, he would find his faith again. In bringing the word to straying cultures, in guiding the extermination of heretics by the hands of the Zealot Blades, maybe he would become himself once more. He would track reason and meaning down at last, and heal the wounds of his soul.

The voyage held out the prospect of hope for as long as it remained an idea instead of a reality. The Sacred Hate had not yet reached the first of its target worlds, but Cerastes already knew his hope had been a delusion. His doubts had not slowed. They had multiplied and deepened. He did everything he could to hold them off. He spent hours in his cell in meditation and prayer.

Give me a sign, God-Emperor. I do not even ask for the faith of saints. Give me the faith of the lowliest serf.

No answer came. No strength returned. The meaninglessness of the galaxy became more and more manifest, a monstrous truth of crystalline clarity.

When he was not kneeling in his cell, he was in the librarium. Midships, on the same level as the chapel, much smaller but still a great, high space, lined with shelves instead of glassaic, the librarium tortured him with the promise of wisdom, and the possibility of meaning. If only he could find the right book, the right argument, the revelatory turn of phrase that would restore to him what he had lost.

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