Elucidium by Simon Spurrier

Author:Simon Spurrier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2004-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

The first order are my brethren, the primacii: scions of the fourth generation.

In our biology the lineage reaches its zenith, withdrawing its eccentricities and crudities to the inside, working its labile craft upon the mind, the soul, the anima. We, of all the Mother’s flock, are best able to create, to innovate, to imagine. We, who have tasted sentience and promised its heady gifts to the service of Her godhead: we are truly the most blessed of her children.

The primacii are bred with a disposition towards gauntness and intellectualism; our minds are honed to an incisive edge, our tastes and pleasures unbridled by the Mother’s credence. We may exercise our intellects in whatever way we see fit, shepherding the entirety of the Mother’s flock towards that most divine, most perfect, most profound conclusion:

Her ascendancy.

She comes; blessed be!

The return to the cool tunnels of the Underchurch filled G’hait with more relief than he could have imagined. Still reeling from the unexpected events of the evening, his head pounded with the thoughts and sensations that were his particular disability. As he followed Arkannis and Trikara through the wending catacombs, the muffled scurrying from resin-coated shadows around him broadcast the attention of other maelignaci; lumbering and moronic or sleek and vicious, they regarded his passage with disinterest that – he fooled himself into thinking – bordered on disdain. In truth they were no more interested in him than in anything: servile only to the direct orders of the Council.

He would never be like them; spared the complexity and grief that came with sentience. Theirs was an animalistic simplicity, an utter devotion and supplication to the Mother’s will (channelled, the council regularly crowed, through the primacii) that G’hait found himself envying.

The memory of Governor Ansev’s execution (mewling like vermin through G’hait’s thoughts, the thick sinews of his elbows and knees sliced and raw) filled G’hait with guilty satisfaction. A gift, Arkannis had called it. A gift to help him vent the anger and rage that had accreted in his mind like a tumour, dizzying his thoughts and tripping his senses. He was astonished at the speed with which events had darkened, trapping him at the heart of some impossible and complex ruse. A magus posing as an inquisitor posing as a Cardinal; G’hait had relished the opportunity to divorce himself from the confusion, lost in a haze of a bloodlust.

Briefly he’d tasted the feral simplicity of his brethren. Briefly he’d allowed the monster out of its emotive cage, stampeding through the frail shell of abstraction and intelligence that was his particular weakness. Briefly he’d tasted what it meant to be maelignaci, true and sincere and unsullied, rather than a mere Mother-damned freak with the mind of a human.

Briefly he’d tasted slaughter, and when he’d looked down at his work, at his claws slick and sticky with human blood, at the shredded jelly-flesh that was all that remained of Governor Ansev, he’d exalted in the sheer animal obviousness of it.

It didn’t last, of course. How

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