A walk through the streets of a shrine world.

Warning: Contains scenes that are potentially disturbing or upsetting for readers of a more sensitive disposition; therefore, this story by itself will be rated M.

The Emperor's People

0600 hours and the prayer hailers blared into life, welcoming the new day that dawned over Lorenzo III by blurting out exhortations to the Divine Emperor of Man. Each one gave some different prayer or catechism, every speaker fighting to drown out the noise of the others, and the result that rang across the shrine-city of St Lucia's Tears was a garbled, deafening mess of exultation. If one strained one's ears to try and pick out the words that rang off the many crenulations, gargoyles and holy symbols that adorned each building, you could make out the most common words; 'Emperor,' 'Terra' 'Lord'; but anything else was a fool's game.

Halben pulled himself out of his small sleeping pallet as one of the speakers on the side of his hab, placed obnoxiously close to his window, began to bellow one of the Catechisms of Fury. He slammed it shut, enough to muffle the din at least a bit, and pulled himself out of his sleeping pallet with a yawn.

Before anything else, he prostrated himself before the shrine to the Emperor that was in his small bedroom. It was a simple thing; a portrait of Him resplendent upon the Golden Throne in full battle armour, a claw covering one hand and a sword held in the other, patrician features glowering sternly from above the ornate gorget he wore. The only other things that occupied the table were a small selection of parchment prayer sheets and the statuette of Alicia Domenica. The small statue of the Matron Saint of the Adepta Sororitas was a somewhat unusual one; instead of being clad in full power armour and carrying a bolter or sword, as she was usually depicted, the small porcelain sculpture simply had her clad in a simple shift, both her hands held out as if to welcome or embrace an approaching member of the faithful. He remembered that Taylis had always liked that one.

He finished his prayers by asking the Emperor to look after her, rose and prepared breakfast. Ration-grade instant recaff was spooned into a china mug with an Aquila painted on it before water from the kettle was poured in, and he spread some thin, anaemic grox-fat butter over the slightly stale bread he took from the cupboard above his small kitchen's counter. Outside, the relentless dirge that praised the Emperor and His saints continued, now accompanied to the sound of St Lucia's Tears beginning to wake as priests and prophets took to the streets to add their own ranting to the din.

Halben locked the door to his small, cramped hab as he stepped into the dingy corridors of the block. He squeezed past the stooped, half-rotten cleaning servitor that had been methodically sweeping the floor with a broom that replaced its lower left arm in neat circuits of the floor, a role it had filled for the last five years. Day in and day out it had carried out that task, relentless and utterly mindless, completely unaware of the world around it. Halben remembered once that it had been knocked to the floor, and it had walked sideways in an almost comical manner, brush flailing at empty air; he had put it to its feet after he saw that, feeling sorry for the thing even though it lacked the capability for feeling sorry for itself.

He opened the door to the street, pausing only make some quick abasements to the shrine to St Lucia that occupied the hab-block's foyer, before being caught in the relentless flow of people that formed the shrine-city's traffic.

He navigated the crowds with the natural ease of one who had done it for every day of his life, one hand held loosely in the pocket where his credits and keys were to ward them from the attentions of any pickpockets or petty thieves. Around him, crowds of pilgrims and the faithful jostled, a living sea of humanity with its own unique swells and tides as people filtered into and out of the streets. Every sense here was under constant assault; sunlight gleamed off the gold leaf an filigree that adorned every building, and conversations had to be had by shouting at one another in order to be heard over the din of the many prayer hailers. Everywhere you were you were jostled by countless others, and the air was thick with the cloying smoke from a thousand censers, filling it with a constant, pungent scent and coating the tongue in an oily layer of sticky bitterness.

Halben broke into one of the great squares of the city, ringed on every side by cathedrals and churches, while stalls sold rosaries, prayer beads and relics to those willing to buy. And on crudely built wooden stages, surrounded by crowds, were the preachers.

"REPENT!" one wrinkled man bellowed through crooked, yellowing teeth, a ragged white beard flowing from his chin to trail at the floor along with the ornate robes he wore. One of his eyes was a milky white, but the other glowed with wild fervour, glaring out at the crowd as a gnarled hand held onto a microphone with a white-knuckled grip, the other wielding a burning brand. A thick rubber cable, patched in places, lead to the back of the skull of the amplivox servitor that followed him, the cyborg's jaw ripped away to be crudely replaced by a speaker while a much larger subwoofer distended its stomach into a disk of matt-black plastic. "Repent your sins and give yourself to the Emperor! Be cleansed by his holy flames!"

He pointed out at the crowd with his torch, one good eye staring madly at them before he cried; "Who here among you desires purification! A cleansing of all your sin?"

Half a dozen individuals pushed their way forwards out of the masses before him, each one of them calling and begging to be the first to have the honour of being cleansed. The priest's assistants, rag-clothed devotees with holy parchments stitched into their skin, helped them up, hoisting jerry cans filled with blessed promethium over their heads before pouring the liquid onto the overjoyed pilgrims.

"Do you see this, my brothers and sisters?" the preacher asked. "Such faith! Such devotion! Rejoice that we might be blessed with the company of those so keen to give their lives for their beloved Emperor!"

He touched his brand to each of them, the pilgrims igniting with a whumph and joyous screams of agonised rapture as they fell to their knees, six overjoyed torches sending smoke into the sky.

At another stage, a woman clad only in parchments and carrying a hammer with its heads shaped to look like the snarling beaks of an Aquila, topped with a smoking censer, was yelling at her own crowd.

"The witch!" she declared. "The witch is always among us! Every second of every day, the witch collaborates with the traitor and the heretic in order to enact the downfall of mankind! Every second of every day, the witch plots and schemes to destroy all that we love in the Emperor's great Imperium! And there is only one thing that can possibly stop their foul machinations; constant vigilance!"

This got a roar of angry approval from the crowd, many of them raising their fists in zealous support.

"Tell me now!" the preacher continued, hefting the weapon she carried in both hands and leaving a trail of incense in its wake. Her arms were thin from fasting, Halben noticed, and marked with scars carved in the shapes of various holy symbols. "Tell me now where we may find the witch, that we might strike them down and safeguard this world!"

"It's him!" someone in the crowd yelled, pointing at another member of the mass of people before the preacher, too caught up in religious fervour to care for such things as reason. "He's a witch! He's a sorcerer, he communes with evil!"

"No!" came a desperate protest. "I swear, I serve the Emperor and the Emperor alone!"

"Lies!" came the reply, before the preacher interrupted with; "Enough of your deception, herald of blasphemy! Bring him to me, that we might judge him guilty!"

The crowd fell upon their victim in a vicious, screaming tide of fists, kicks and mad fury. They beat at him, an overwhelming wave of hateful madness, bearing him under the surface before the current of people drew him up and deposited him before the preacher. He was already a mess of cuts, bruises and broken teeth, skin turning purple and bloodied, and he was unable to stand, instead whimpering wretchedly for mercy. The preacher showed none, her hammer slamming down on his skull with a wet, crunching squelch while the crowd bellowed their approval.

"He is not the only one!" she called to them, her assertion quieting the crowd. "He is not the only one among us who seeks to spread blasphemy and unbelief! There are others, always others who aim to undermine the Emperor! Together, we the faithful may find them and destroy them!"

Halben moved on before the crowd might notice him. He knew that in a matter of minutes the Arbites would be along to break the crowd up and silence the woman raving at them before she could kill too many, but in the meantime he knew that attracting their attention was a death sentence. He'd been in one of those crowds before, when a preacher not dissimilar to the one on the stage just a moment ago had been inciting them to be vigilant against the predations of the heretic, when some poor sod had been accused. Somehow, Halben had got too caught up in the collective madness of the mob to stop himself, had joined the crowd kicking and stamping on a screaming man who had begged for mercy even as his fellows bayed in animalistic hatred and killed him with their bare hands. Sometimes, he found himself thinking back on that moment when he had completely lost himself to the will of the mob, and it had been the cause of more than a few hours of lost sleep.

He pushed forwards through the crowds, past groups of chanting flagellants who beat and whipped themselves as they sang praises to the Emperor, a skeletal monk who proclaimed that he had subsisted on holy water and a stale breadcrust for every day for the last ten years and that it brought him close to Him On Terra. There were a pair of priests arguing theology on another stage, a debate that would surely erupt into violence, while there was great crowd singing hymns to the conducting of another preacher. Halben's sandaled feet slapped against the flagstones that paved the square as he hurried onwards, the slabs inlaid with brass prayers that had been worn into incomprehensibility by the tread of tens of thousands.

The wailing of trumpets suddenly cut through the din of chanted prayers, half a dozen of them carried by a flock of fluttering cherubim. The fusions of infant and machine darted and bobbed above an immense palanquin carried by dozens of bent-backed servitors, the vox-casters implanted in their mouths droning yet more catechisms to add to the noise around them. The cargo they bore was a hugely ornate thing, easily a good ten metres across and wrought with gold leaf, silks and finery. Braziers standing on the top and censers hanging off its side sent choking, incense-infused smoke drifting around it in a great cloud, while massive holy books occupied lecterns, from which priests and preachers read, each one trying to drown out the others around them with sheer noise. Towards the rear, in an ornately wrought golden throne, sat one of the shrine-world's many cardinals, his large stomach covered with sumptuous velvet robes of office. One hand held a staff tipped with the Aquila, the other simply resting on a pudgy knee, he surveyed the crowds that began to push towards him calmly, a mariner upon a sea of fervour.

Despite the press that was seething towards him, the palanquin was not overwhelmed, and as he craned his neck Halben could see figures in silver power armour holding it back; sisters of the Order of the Iron Heart, no doubt, assigned from the Covent-Fortress they used as their base on Lorenzo III to guard this man.

There were a series of rapid bangs as bolters were fired skywards to warn the crowd of worshippers of the consequences of getting too zealous in their adulation. Halben stayed only a moment, before pushing his way through the throng towards his destination, taking advantage of the diversion the cardinal and his escort would provide to make it through while it was somewhat thinner. He remembered once talking to a pilgrim from a hive world who had said that making their way through the tight, ganger-infested streets of their home city was nothing compared to navigating the living ocean of the faithful, and he had to agree.

He pushed his way against the flow of the jostling crowd as they surged forwards to see the cardinal, slipping past knots of people with practiced ease. His destination was close, the great, arched structure of St Lucia's Cathedral in sight. And he would have to be quick, too; Halben had seen the course that the palanquin and its escort had been sedately plotting, one that would send it straight to the great building. In a few minutes, the place would be packed by those wishing to hear the man speak, and Halben would have no way of getting in.

Instead, he hurried through the crowd, practically running up the steps and through the massive doorways of the cathedral, each one carved with scenes depicting the Emperor and the Primarchs victorious over xenos and heretics. There was already a crowd flowing in and out, and he received more than a few pointed looks for wearing working clothes instead of the usual robes that most of the pilgrims here wore, but he ignored them.

Instead, he worked his way through them, pushing open a wooden side door with a portrait of Saint Dovathin slaying the Drake of Aldun painted on it, and into one of the smaller side corridors of the cathedral. The tapers he used for his duties as a candlelighter would be waiting for him in the locker that he stored them in, and after that, his day would begin proper. As he had done every day without fail for the last twenty years of his life, he would light the candles of the Cathedral.

At least such a job was more restful than his walk to work.