The Outcast Dead

Like most buildings in the Petitioner’s City, the temple had been constructed from random materials appropriated from the endless cycles of construction, repair and rebuilding that now engulfed the palace. Its walls were raised with marble offcuts stacked and mortared by itinerant migouexpelled from the Masonic Guilds for habitual usage of narcotics.

That stonework had been shaped and carved into a menagerie of forms: distraught angels with upraised arms, weeping cherubs with silver trumpets and great birds with golden wings dipped in sorrow. Mosaics of mourners fashioned in Gyptian pebble looked down from brick corbels and death masks of stillborn children stared out from painted frescoes assembled from crushed glass.

A mish-mash of pew-like benches filled the temple, many occupied by wailing families gathered round the body of a loved one. Sometimes these bodies were old, mostly they were not. Roxa

At the far end of the temple was its crowning glory, a tall statue of dark-hue that had come to be known as the Vacant Angel. Thanks to some imperfection in the Syryan nephrite, the warmasons had rejected the base material and cast it on the spoil heaps. Like most things discarded by the palace, it had found its way to the Petitioner’s City.

Carved in the form of a kneeling man, its muscular body was classically proportioned and in need of finishing. The face was blank, no doubt intended to be completed in the likeness of some Imperial hero by a Masonic sculptor. It had stood in the temple for over a year, but Palladis had – for reasons he kept to himself – chosen not to give it a face, though Roxa

Compared to the chambers in which Roxa

Palladis Novandio stood beside Maya, who knelt weeping at the feet of the Vacant Angel. She cradled an unmoving infant close to her breast, as though expecting to suckle it once again. Maya’s tears fell on the child’s eyes and rolled down its cold cheeks. Palladis looked up and gave Roxa

A stoop-shouldered man touched her arm, and Roxa

‘Who have you lost?’ he asked.

‘No one,’ she replied. ‘At least no one recently. You?’

‘My youngest sons,’ said the man. ‘That’s my wife at the statue.’

‘You are Estaben?’

The man nodded.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she said.

The man shrugged, as though the matter were of no consequence. ‘Maybe better this way.’

Before Roxa

Estaben led her away from the statue, and Roxa

‘Did you get the medicine?’ he asked without preamble.

She nodded. ‘Yes, though it took a while to rouse Antioch from a qash stupor.’

‘The man likes to sample his own wares,’ said Palladis shaking his head. ‘Foolish.’

‘Here,’ said Roxa

Palladis took the medicine and nodded. His hands were rough and callused, the nails permanently edged in black from long years working stone with rasp and chisel. He was a man of middling years, with greying hair and a face weathered like the side of a cliff from a lifetime spent in the open air, carving statues, columns and detailed adornments for pediments and vaulted arches.

‘Maya will be grateful to you,’ said Palladis. ‘Once she has finished her mourning.’

‘You paid for it, I just went to get it.’

‘At no small risk to your person,’ pointed out Palladis. ‘You encountered no problems?’

She lowered her head, knowing she had to tell him what had happened, but fearing his disappointment more than any censure.

‘Roxa

‘I ran into some of Babu Dhakal’s men,’ she said at last.

‘I see,’ said Palladis. ‘What happened?’

‘They attacked me. I killed them.’

He sighed. ‘How?’

‘How do you think?’

Palladis raised a placatory hand. ‘Did anyone see you?’

‘I don’t know, probably,’ said Roxa

‘I know, but you must be more careful,’ said Palladis. ‘The Babu is a man of great rages, and he will find out what happened to his men. He will come here, that much is certain.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to bring you trouble. That’s all I ever seem to do.’

Palladis laced his big, callused hands in her fingers and gave a slow smile.

‘One problem at a time, Roxa

He spoke with the passion of a zealot, yet there was kindness in his eyes. Roxa

Roxa

‘What did Estaben give you?’ asked Palladis.

She looked at the papers as though seeing them for the first time. The paper was thin and looked like whatever was printed on it now wasn’t the first ink it had known.

‘The usual,’ she said, flicking through the palimpsest and picking out phrases at random. She read them aloud.

‘The Emperor of Mankind is the Light and the Way, and all his actions are for the benefit of mankind, which is his people. The Emperor is God and God is the Emperor, so it is taught in the Lectitio Divinitatus, and above all things, the Emperor will protect…’

‘Let me see that,’ said Palladis, with a sharpness she had not heard in his voice before.

She held out the pamphlet, and he snatched it from her hand.

‘Not this Lectitio Divinitatus nonsense again,’ he said with a sneer of contempt before ripping the pamphlet in two. ‘A bunch of desperate people beguiled by a glittering light and who have yet to discover that all that glitters is not gold.’

‘They’re harmless enough,’ said Roxa