Divination by John French

Author:John French
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2019-09-09T13:33:33+00:00

THE THIEF OF CHALICES

‘There is no virtue to knowledge, no comfort in knowing. There is no greater curse that can be bestowed than insight and no higher blessing than to be oblivious. If you look for comfort in this age, seek ignorance; shun thought, close your mind and break its key.’

– Personal reflection of Inquisitor Silas Marr,

during his time in the Ordo Redactus

VI

Viola had crossed the threshold into the archive and begun to die. The poison was still a sweet taste on her tongue.

‘You need to keep moving,’ said their guide, glancing up at the racks of rotting tomes, scrolls and broken data-slates stacked above them. The light of the lantern carried by the servo-cherubs reached into the gaps between shelves and spiral stairs. Viola had the impression of wide silver eyes catching the light as it passed. ‘Even this close to the door, there are things watching.’

Viola glanced up again. The dark beyond their bobbing lights flowed down narrow gaps between towering shelf stacks.

‘I am Tristana. Just in case in you were wondering,’ said the guide, without looking back at them. The woman had been waiting for them just inside the door into this underworld of abandoned books – oak- skinned and wrapped in armour that looked like it was made of dry scales the colour of ash. She held a gun with a flared, pepper-pot barrel, and carried short, barbed spears in a quiver on her back. Blue-black traceries of inked burn-scars mottled her face and arms.

‘You want safeties off. You don’t look like the types to shoot each other from nerves but be careful, all right?’

Covenant did not reply but strode on. He wore a dark grey storm coat, and a black cuirass without mark or insignia. He had an Arbites pattern shotgun in his hands, and a flechette blaster twitched on a mount on his left shoulder. The mind-interfaced gun whirred as its targeting lenses focused on the spaces branching off from the path they walked. Severita kept three steps ahead of Covenant, her bolt pistols in her hands, the upper portion of her face hidden by a set of six-lensed infra goggles.

Viola kept close to the guide, Tristana, and tried to ignore the sweet taste in her mouth.

‘Drink,’ the hag at the door to the Dead Archive had said.

Viola had looked at the chalice set on the plinth before the portal. The cup was iron and silver. Death-masks and dead hands ringed its bowl and stem. Rubies and cracked sapphires glinted in the eye sockets of the carved skulls. The liquid inside the bowl was clouded white.

The door that waited behind the plinth was circular. An iris of corroded bronze sealed its mouth and Viola could see the glint of servitor eyes in the nests of cables that hung from the tunnel roof above them. She did not need to see them to sense the threat and promise of the weapons aimed at them from the dark. This was not a place of welcome.

The hag had stood before the door.

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