False Gods (The Horus Heresy Book 2) by Graham McNeill

Author:Graham McNeill [McNeill, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Agitprop

Brothers in suspicion

Serpent and moon

Slipping across the page like a snake, the nib of Ignace Karkasy’s pen moved as though it had a mind of its own. For all the conscious thought he was putting into the words, it might as well have. The muse was well and truly upon him, his stream of consciousness flowing into a river of blood as he retold the diabolical events on the embarkation deck. The meter played in his head like a symphony, every stanza of every canto slipping into place as if there could be no other possible arrangement of verse.

Even in his heyday of Ocean Poems or Reflections and Odes he had not felt this inspired. In fact, now that he looked back on them, he hated them for their frippery, their unconscionable navel gazing and irrelevance to the galaxy at large. These words, these thoughts that now poured from him, this was what mattered, and he cursed that it had taken him this long to discover it.

The truth was what mattered. Captain Loken had told him as much, but he hadn’t heard him, not really. The verses he’d written since Loken had begun his sponsorship of him were paltry things, unworthy of the man who had won the Ethiopic Laureate, but that was changing now.

After the bloodbath on the embarkation deck, he’d returned to his quarters, grabbed a bottle of Terran wine and made his way to the observation deck. Finding it thronged with wailing lunatics, he’d repaired to the Retreat, knowing that it would be empty.

The words had poured out of him in a flood of righteous indignation, his metaphors bold and his lyric unflinching from the awful brutality he’d witnessed. He’d already used up three pages of the Bondsman, his fingers blotted with ink and his poet’s soul on fire.

‘Everything I’ve done before this was prologue,’ he whispered as he wrote.

Karkasy paused in his work as he pondered the dilemma: the truth was useless if no one could hear it. The facilities set aside for the remembrancers included a presswork where they could submit their work for large-scale circulation. It was common knowledge that much of what that passed through it was vetted and censored, and so few made use of it. Karkasy certainly couldn’t, considering the content of his new poetry.

A slow smile spread across his jowly features and he reached into the pocket of his robes and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper – one of Euphrati Keeler’s Lectitio Divinitatus pamphlets – and spread it out flat on the table before him with the heel of his palm.

The ink was smeared and the paper reeked of ammonia, clearly the work of a cheap mechanical bulk-printer of some kind. If Euphrati could get the use of one, then so could he.

Loken permitted Tybalt Marr to torch the body of Eugan Temba before they left the bridge. His fellow captain, streaked with gore and filth, played the burning breath of a flame unit over the monstrous corpse until nothing but ashen bone remained.

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