EIGHTEEN

A Thorn in the Mind

The timbre of the shuttle's thrusters deepened as they made a near-ballistic descent towards Aldurukh, swelling from an angry whine to a thunderous roar as they plummeted from the stratosphere into the denser air at sea level. The shuttle's airframe trembled as the pilot pushed the craft to its limits; Zahariel had told him to fly to the fortress as though his life depended on it, and he was taking the Astartes at his word. The Librarian felt the shuddering of the craft in his bones and had to raise his powerful voice to be heard over the noise.

'General Morten, this is a direct order,' he yelled into his vox-bead. 'Unseal the hab levels at the Northwilds arcology and redistribute the populace through the upper levels.'

The Terran general's reply was faint and washed with static, but there was no mistaking the exasperation in his voice. 'Sir, I believe I explained this before. The security situation—'

'I'm well aware of the security situation,' Zahariel snapped. He glanced across the passenger compartment at Master Remiel and Sar Daviel, who were both pretending not to listen to the tense exchange. 'The cordon is only making things worse. You've got to get those people out of there before you have a catastrophe on your hands.'

'But sir, the logistics of relocating five million people—'

'Will require a great deal of effort and coordination on our part,' Zahariel cut in. 'So I expect you and your staff to give the matter your complete and immediate attention. Make it happen, general. I don't care what it takes.' Zahariel broke the connection without giving Morten a chance to reply. He wasn't interested in arguing the matter, and he had no intention of explaining his reasons over vox.

Daviel turned away from the viewport at his left and stared questioningly at Zahariel. 'Do you think he'll do it?' the maimed knight asked.

The Librarian sighed. 'Not all Terrans are corrupt devils, Sar Daviel. Morten is a good soldier. He'll follow orders.'

Daviel's scarred face twisted into a scowl, but he offered no reply. Zahariel studied the scarred knight for a moment.

'How long have you known?' he asked.

Sar Daviel narrowed his one good eye. 'Known what?'

'About Caliban. About the taint.'

Daviel's fierce expression grew haunted. 'Ah. That.' He rubbed his chin with one scarred hand. 'A long time. Too long perhaps.' The knight shook his head. 'At first, I thought I must be going mad. After all, you'd seen the same things I had, and never seemed to think anything of it.'

Zahariel straightened in his chair. 'What things?' he asked, feeling the skin prickle on the back of his neck. 'What are you talking about?'

Daviel frowned in consternation. 'Why, the library, of course.' He replied. 'At the fortress of the Knights of Lupus. Surely you remember.' His one eye grew unfocused, as though he were recalling the details of a nightmare. 'All those books. Those terrible, terrible books…'

The Librarian felt his skin grow cold. 'How could you have seen the library, Daviel?' he asked him. 'I saw you wounded in the castle courtyard.'

Daviel's gaze fell. 'So I was,' he said quietly. 'I was raving with fever for days afterward. The chirurgeons feared to move me in the state I was in, so I and a few other wounded men were left behind when the army returned to Aldurukh.'

The old knight fell silent for a moment as the memories welled up inside him. He stared at his hands, curled like claws in his lap. 'Later, when we could get up and hobble about for a few hours at a time, they tried to find jobs for us to do, to keep our spirits up. So they put some of us to work in that library, crating everything up to be carried back home.'

Daviel sighed. 'They rotated us in shifts, so we were only up there a few hours at a time, and we had stria orders not to open any of the books.' He smiled ruefully. 'The chirurgeons said they didn't want us to exert our minds unduly in our weakened state.'

'But you didn't listen.'

'No, I didn't,' Daviel said heavily. 'I and another knight succumbed to our curiosity. We pored through some of the oldest books as we readied them for packing. Towards the end, we spent more time reading than working to tell the truth.'

'What was in the books?' Zahariel pressed.

'History. Literature. Art and philosophy. There were books on science, and medicine, and… forbidden things. Ancient, occult tomes, many of them written by hand.' He shook his head. 'I couldn't understand most of it, but it was clear that the Knights of Lupus had been studying the great beasts - and the Northwilds itself - for centuries. They knew about the taint, though they didn't fully understand it. They seemed to believe it was a force that could be summoned and controlled. I saw grimoires that purported to contain rituals for that very purpose.'

His voice trailed away, and his face paled at the recollections. Zahariel watched him raise a hand to his ruined cheek, as though the old wound pained him once more. After a moment, the knight gave a shudder and shook his head roughly, as though waking from a vivid dream. He blinked his eyes a few times and focused on the Astartes once more.

'Afterward, once the books were crated away and we were allowed to make the journey home, we tried to forget the things we'd seen.' He smiled faintly. 'Strange, of all the horrors we witnessed at that place, it was the memories of those books that haunted us most of all. We would talk about them sometimes, late into the night, trying to understand what it all meant. I believed that they heralded the next stage of our crusade; that once the great beasts had been destroyed, Jonson would dedicate our Order to driving the taint from Caliban once and for all.'

Daviel's face turned solemn. 'Then the Emperor came, and everything changed. We traded one crusade for another, and I couldn't understand why. If what was in those books was true, then Caliban was still in terrible danger. That, more than anything else, was why I left.'

'Why?' Zahariel asked.

Daviel paused, struggling to find a way to put his thoughts into words. His hand reached up to absently rub his scarred temple.

'I had to know the truth,' he said at last. 'The books had vanished, but the memories of what I saw stuck with me, like… like a thorn in the mind. I tried to tell myself that they were just fables - peasant myths, like the Watchers in the Woods - but guilt ate at me day and night. Because if the taint was real, the great beasts would just rise again, and everything we'd suffered would be in vain.' The old knight sighed. 'So I left the Order and embarked on one last quest - to find the surviving members of the Knights of Lupus.'

Zahariel blinked in surprise. 'But there were no survivors,' he said. 'Lord Sartana had summoned the entire order back to their fortress in the Northwilds. They died to a man in the final assault.'

'So we were led to believe,' Daviel replied. 'Lord Sartana sent out the call, to be sure, but the Knights of Lupus were famous for sending their knights out to the farthest-flung parts of the world on strange and secretive quests. Not all of them could have made it back in time for the siege, or so I believed.'

The Librarian frowned, trying to think back to the days immediately after the siege. Hadn't Jonson made a statement of some kind about hunting for outlaw members of the Knights of Lupus? He couldn't recall. A faint sense of unease stirred in his gut.

'For the first few years I waited near the ruins of their fortress, waiting for the errant wolves to come home,' Daviel continued. 'I expected the survivors would try to return and see what they could salvage of their order. When none appeared, I began to search the frontiers for signs of their passage.'