‘What is that?’ said Provallak.

  Mazarine stared, disbelieving. ‘It looks like pages,’ he said.

  It was.

  They floated down, bringing with them the smell of smoke. They fell everywhere, hundreds coming to rest in the garden and on the palace roofs.

  Mazarine snatched a sheet out of the air and examined it. The page was singed and discoloured, but most of the words were legible.

  ‘I know this,’ he said. ‘It’s from the Enchiridion of the Flagellants.’ He scanned the words. Yes, he recognised the passage. It called upon the faithful to accept all suffering, and to actively seek more hardship in order to demonstrate their fidelity to the Emperor.

  Mazarine blinked. He rubbed his eyes. He must be more tired than he thought. The words had squirmed on the page, running together and changing.

  Mazarine looked at the passage again. ‘“Such abasement, so urged by the orthodoxy of the Imperial Creed, and exhorted by the ecclesiarchs from their palaces of luxury, is as perfect an invitation to the citizen to demonstrate their mindless acceptance of lies as can be imagined.”’

  Mazarine gasped. He tore the page to bits.

  He picked up a handful of others, scanned them quickly, and found similar obscenities.

  The others were looking at sheets too, their faces aghast. Provallak looked as if he were holding a piece of rotten, fly-ridden flesh that he could somehow not release.

  ‘The words moved,’ the marshal said in a horrified whisper. ‘I saw them move.’

  ‘They must be burned.’ Mazarine reached for a ring of authority he did not feel. ‘All of them. Without exception.’ He turned to Lenda. ‘Here is the retaliation. Cerastes is not dead.’

  ‘All of them,’ Provallak echoed. ‘How far have they spread?’

  Mazarine’s throat dried. From the Garden of Discipline, they could not see beyond the palace walls.

  Mazarine broke into a run. So did the others, and they were both faster than he was. They whipped past him before he reached the garden doors, and he struggled to keep pace, sprinting by the astonished guards. Mazarine was breathing hard already, and by the time he arrived at the great balcony on the tower facing the Cathedrum of Iron Revelation, exhaustion had him stooped over and drawing air in painful gasps.

  The sight before him stopped his breath in his throat.

  The pages erupted from a point just south of the cathedrum. The initial blast had shattered one of the great connecting bridges between two spires that were the private domains of some of Legitur’s most noble families. Rockcrete stubs projected from the towers, and between them the geyser of pages vomited up into the sky for a thousand feet. Then it spread out into a cloud stretching as far as the eye could see. The sheets drifted down everywhere, a falling snow of heresy.

  ‘We must destroy them,’ Mazarine insisted. ‘Every single one.’

  But when he looked at the immensity of the plague, all he could think of was, How?

  The distant beat of a second eruption drowned him out. A few moments later came a third, even further away.

  Mazarine clutched the edge of the balcony, staggered by the thought of the malign words covering every square inch of his world.

  Above the distant din of the bombing, cutting through the beginnings of the clamour of confusion as people in the streets and plazas saw the falling pages, Mazarine heard a sound that sparked hope, a sound that had become such background noise to him that he had not paid it any attention in years. It was the sound of his own voice, preaching the lessons of the Imperial Creed, endlessly recalling the people to their duties of obedience and sacrifice.

  All those recordings. When had he last addressed the populace directly? He would do so now. They must receive his guidance at this crucial juncture.

  ‘The vox-casters–’ Mazarine began.

  A screech of feedback and static cut off his recorded self. Then another voice replaced it. The voice he had sent down to bring the Lower Glyphs to heel.

  ‘People of Legitur, hear me and hear the truth so long denied you. I am Borthas. I was bishop of the Ecclesiarchy, master at the Collegium Sanctificatus. No longer! I have shaken off the chains of servitude and hypocrisy. I have seen the glory of ruin! I have seen the miracles of the true gods! I know the ecstasy of unfettered thought and unleashed desire! See the truth that falls upon you! Embrace it and feel the chains fall from your souls!’

  ‘Stop him,’ Mazarine whispered. He looked around at the others, and they stared back at him with the same stunned shock upon their faces. ‘Stop him!’ he shrieked.

  Provallak rushed off.

  ‘Infantry,’ Lenda muttered to herself. ‘Everywhere.’ She left too, marching quickly but with more purpose and assuredness than the marshal. But then she stopped and looked back. ‘Will you call her?’ she asked.

  Mazarine shook his head, kept shaking it. ‘No. No. We don’t have to. We will stop this without her.’

  ‘Can we?’

  ‘We must!’

  CHAPTER 14

  Cerastes counselled patience to himself, and waited. He let days pass, let the actions he had taken percolate through Legitur and do their work. He waited, and he listened. In the vault of the armour, in the centre of his web, he felt the vibrations of prey in his threads. Through messengers, through witnesses, through words passed down from cultist to cultist, he heard the tales of what transpired, and the mosaic of the Upper Glyphs came together for him.

  Across Legitur, the people heard Borthas. And in every square, on every roof, on every thoroughfare, into every open window, came the snowfall of pages. Mazarine, Provallak and Lenda sent out every element of the forces under their command that could be spared, in every sector of the world-city, to round up and destroy them. Fifteen minutes passed before the heretical vox-cast could be silenced. A short time, but long enough for the sermon to be spoken, for its seeds to be cast, and for them to fall into the fresh soil of the Upper Glyphs. The Imperial forces countered the message, seeking to dig out the seeds before they took root. Vehicle-mounted vox-casters echoed and re-echoed the decree that the pages were to be burned on sight, and that to read even a single word was to be guilty of heresy. Attempts to send Mazarine’s voice out to the masses failed for most of that day. Borthas had been silenced, but the vox-cast network refused to obey the enginseers until late into the night.

  The authorities of Legitur acted quickly, with force, and with merciless, ferocious vigour. Public bonfires appeared on crossways beyond number. So did public executions of those caught in the act of reading. Even within the first few hours of the eruptions, the citizens of Legitur learned to fear the falling texts, and to flee them.

  And yet.

  And yet.

  These things also happened.

  In the first minutes of the plague, Gregor Famulus, a student of the Collegium Sanctificatus, found some pages on the desk in his dormitorium cell that he did not remember putting there. He read them, at first recognising the exegesis. Then the argument changed, but he did not notice when the change occurred until it was too late, and he had read the entire page, and new thoughts, snarling with implications, blossomed in his mind. He looked out of his window, saw the falling white pages, and grabbed as many of them as he could.

  He was not the only one, not the only student to feel the foundations of their faith crack and crumble that day.

  In the upper reaches of Legitur’s fog, where the air was too murky for the region to be considered part of the Upper Glyphs, but where fine artisans and many successful merchants made their homes, there lived Hova Noverian, an artist of stained armaglass, one much in demand in the Upper Glyphs. They read a single page. They crumpled it up in disgust. They rejected its teachings. But Noverian wondered how such a thing had come to be written on Legitur. They wondered, even as they heard the decree against heresy, what all of this meant. At night, dreams came for them. The dreams made them scream. When they awoke, the world looked subtly different. They could not put their finger on what had changed, but they felt that awareness seep into their art. Inspiration came to them more easily than it had in years, and the images they worked on in one of the aristocracy’s spires took on darker, slyer hues.

  They were not the only one, not the only artist to respond to the genius of change.

  A serf, who toiled in the kitchens of the Ecclesiarchal palace, found a fragment of a page lodged in a cobblestone just outside the service entrance to the kitchen. Her name was simply Vexa, and she knew nothing of her upbringing outside of eternal servitude. She, like the others of her class, had never been taught to read. Yet she saw the scrawls on the page move and shift before her eyes. To witness that was enough to sow the first seeds of doubt about what she had always been told about the world, and her place in it.

  She was not the only one, very far from being the only serf to receive the first brush of revelation.

  Troopers burned the pages. But a few, too curious, concealed fragments on their person to examine.

  Citizens from every walk of life, from every level of the Upper and Lower Glyphs, kept the sheets they found. The letters always changed. The pages never read the same way twice. Each was a miracle that could be held and looked at, again and again, and hidden so very, very easily.

  Miracles to be treasured. Change to be pondered.

  For many days, the vox-casters warned against heresy.

  But heresy had been spoken. And the voice of heresy had been a bishop of the Ecclesiarchy. The words landed with greatest force in the Collegium Sanctificatus, in the hearts of the many who knew Borthas, and knew of his scholarship and the rigour of his faith. They wondered what it meant that he, of all people, had fallen. His new words formed arguments as carefully constructed and as persuasive as any lecture he had given in the collegium. What he said could not be forgotten.

  It could, though, be interpreted in different ways.

  Below the fog line, through all the hundreds and hundreds of levels of the Lower Glyphs, the bishop’s words resounded as a call to liberation. Obedience and misery, intimately braided, had been the lesson and the legacy of the Imperial Creed. The alchemy of Borthas’ sermon and the fall of altered texts mixed with the pain, the anger and the suffering created by the punishment meted out by the enforcers and the Zealot Spears fuelled the spread of heresy. The gods of Chaos promised power and strength and vengeance.

  What do you offer, False Emperor? You offer nothing. You only demand.

  The residents of the Upper Glyphs heard the messages differently. They heard the promise of licence and the end of restraint. They who had everything had the right to take more. They were the strong, the righteous. Their situation in life proved this. Their privilege was just the beginning, an incomplete step. To take and do whatever they desired, that must be the whole of the law.

  Cerastes did not need to plant the seeds of corruption in the Upper Glyphs. It had long since rooted and flowered in those heights. He had seen that well enough in his previous life. The corruption of the Upper Glyphs had many different blooms. Some, like Mazarine’s, were resistant to the call of Chaos. Minds like his were too wedded to the system that had produced them. Others, though, had greed, ambition and a belief in their own superiority running like blood in their veins.

  They listened to Borthas. They read the texts. They embraced the promise of more and the annihilation of enough.

  And so the embrace occurred in the estate of Count Iovus Belain. It occupied the top two hundred feet of a tower that stood a mile west of the Collegium Sanctificatus. Like the homes of the other nobility of the world, its wealth was measured in verticality. Ballrooms, reception halls, sleeping chambers and corridors were all spacious, their ceilings a vast height above their floors. Frescoes called the eye of the visitor to look up and up, and marvel at the airy, indulgent splendour. As for Belain, the balconies of his domain gave him the pleasure of looking down, in every sense, on his social inferiors, and the knowledge that no one, in this tower at least, could look down on him.

  The evening following Borthas’ address and the storm of texts, he paced restlessly on his hundred-foot-long balcony. He had glanced at a page that had drifted his way earlier, but had not looked at it long. It said nothing he had not always believed in his heart, and he tossed it away. He had never been one for reading, though he owned a priceless collection of the most exquisite editions. They looked well on his shelves, and by their presence spoke well of his means.

  He did hear the bishop. He listened, and now brooded on the constraints he saw had been placed unjustly on him and his actions. He had had enough of them. Constraints were for those whose limitations pleased him. He realised that now.

  He must do something about that. He must take action and prove to himself that nothing could resist his will, that there were no boundaries that he acknowledged.

  He paced until inspiration struck. He laughed when it did, because the answer, so simple, had been before him all this time. He had been following the right path all his life. He had simply not taken it all the way.

  He left the balcony, walked through the great hall, where his older sister, the widowed Lady Livara Rivelas, sat similarly brooding on a divan. He signalled to the pair of guards standing sentinel against the wall. Clad in the vermilion and violet of the Belain livery, they blended in against the same colours that covered enormous, stained mirror tiles behind them. They followed the count as he traversed the dining hall, then walked through the gold-and-silver doors at its far end, into the kitchen.

  The kitchen, vast and luxurious in the quality of its utensils, the size of its oven, and the skill of the serfs who laboured there, was not a room Belain had visited in living memory. This was the place of underlings, where commands were meant to be followed out of sight of the living spaces of the estate. But Belain owned this space too. It belonged to him. So did the people within it.

  He pointed at random. ‘Him,’ he said to the guards, indicating a young man cleaning the interior of the oven. ‘Bring him here.’

  The guards obeyed. The young man came without protest. Belain did not know his name. He knew those of very few of the people he owned. Their names did not concern him. What they could do for him did.

  ‘Hold him,’ Belain said.

  The guards took the man’s arms. Belain picked up a knife. He walked up to the serf, who now looked frightened. A thrill of gratification sent a shiver down Belain’s spine. What he would do now was not in the name of punishment. He had no need to rationalise it as the Emperor’s will. Whatever he chose to do would be the act of his will. He needed no other permission.

  When he cut the man’s nose off, the blood that splashed against his face and clothes felt like the baptism of freedom.

  In the great hall, Livara Rivelas looked up at the sound of the scream. She stood, and then made her way towards the kitchen, cautiously at first, then eagerly, possessed with the sudden, monstrous hope that at last had come the end to all boredom.

  For days, heresy spread in the privacy of awakened minds, in shadows and behind closed doors. It grew and festered, ratcheting up the tension in the fault lines of Legitur.

  Cerastes let the impact of his dual attack sink into the fabric of the world-city and do its work. He let the days go by with apparent silence from the Eightfold Bane. He waited for the work of the storm of pages to ripen, and he prepared for the harvest.

  The bombings continued with renewed intensity in the immediate wake of the eruptions. Ten days later, they ended. There was nothing left to destroy at ground level, unless Mazarine and his lackeys wanted to bring down their cities entirely.

  Patrols of the Zealot Spears now roved over the territory. Cerastes gave them nothing to find. A great many of his followers were in the towers now, remaining silent and hidden, but their numbers growing, the infection spreading in all directions from the Lower and Upper Glyphs. Those underground dug deeper and deeper, their access points to the surface rare and concealed. When more time went by, and the patrols found nothing to fight, they became fewer in number, their raids sporadic, more and more of them redeployed to purge Legitur of Cerastes’ written words.

  A futile task, he thought with satisfaction. His sermons had spread around the globe, materialising on the sheets that had once praised the False Emperor. No matter how many pages were destroyed, enough of the millions would have been read, and seen to change, burrowing their way like worms into the minds of the populace.

  Beneath the surface, Cerastes’ followers laboured eagerly, other worms, burrowing through different clay. They expanded the networks of tunnels. They used primitive tools, when they had tools at all. They did have purpose, drive, and growing numbers. The bombing had collapsed many caves, but the others remained. Cerastes contemplated Legitur’s bedrock, riven with fissures, and thought of it as a symbol for the cracking foundations of the world’s faith.

  He had suffered reversals, but his forces had grown again. Orthaon saw the change in fortune. He asked fewer questions. He worked at selecting the most promising specimens among the cultists, the ones who would become the new battle-brothers of the Eightfold Bane. He seemed to be convinced that he and Cerastes were meant to be here, that this war had been appointed to them by the gods. At least, if he had doubts, he did not voice them.

  The faithful laboured day and night, and though it galled Cerastes and tested his patience, he kept himself and his movement hidden. If the cardinal believed himself victorious, then Cerastes would have to swallow that added humiliation for the time being. The greater work, which would lead to the greater victory, proceeded.

  The Abandoned dug and dug and dug. They expanded a moderately sized cavern into a crude amphitheatre. It would serve as a gathering place.