Legends of the wolf the.., p.92
Legends of the Wolf: The Omnibus, page 92
He had to get off the Immaculate Destiny as soon as he could. His story had been constructed under duress, and wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny. He would speak to Orquemond, when he could, and explain that he needed to return to his previous duties. A shuttle to take him to the closest Ecclesiarchy facility would be quite sufficient, and after that he could make his own arrangements. Once back within the bosom of the Church, he would be able to draw on his private accounts again, make contact with his old network of associates. Some of Delvaux’s remaining allies would no doubt be willing to help, if he made it worth their while.
It would be best, he thought, to forget about the Fulcrum altogether. It was finished now, its last station wiped out and its mastermind dead. The Wolves had nothing more to hunt, and the Church had nothing more to fear. He would have to move on, to find new patrons and new causes. As soon as he was away from Orquemond, free of association with the whole damned business, things would get easier again.
They had already started to improve. The crew had found him new robes, had arranged for a cadre of menials to see to his needs, and had appointed comfortable chambers for him on the command levels. Since the ship had entered the warp, he had been left largely to his own devices. The time had been filled well – he had feasted on the exquisite meals prepared in the senior refectories, perused the fine collection of devotional books in the cardinal’s private library, started to plot out the course back towards greatness.
It was seven days before Orquemond paid him a visit again. Klaive had just finished another extensive supper, taken in his private rooms, and was pondering retiring for a period of rest. Orquemond arrived without warning, entering the chamber with four armsmen and a women in a black tunic and bodyglove.
‘By His immortal will,’ said the cardinal, inclining his head a little in greeting. ‘I see you are enjoying our hospitality, confessor.’
Klaive stood up, dabbing at his chin. Orquemond was a powerful presence even out of his battle-armour. The armsmen all had their lasguns drawn. The woman hung back, said nothing, but he didn’t like the look of her at all.
‘You have been most generous, lord,’ Klaive replied. ‘I trust that all is well?’
‘Perfectly. Though the damage in the lower levels was remarkable. It seems, contrary to all sense, that a single warrior must have got on board. Extraordinary. I am still uncertain how it was done, or even why. Do you have a theory?’
Klaive began to get uncomfortable. The tone of the man’s voice was unmistakable – he’d used it himself, many times, but only when interrogating a suspect. ‘None at all. Though the servants of the Archenemy can be powerful, their objectives hard to fathom.’
‘Quite so. It was for that reason that I ordered a forensic examination of the damaged areas. I had to be sure that I was not being somehow made a fool of.’ Orquemond held out his hand, and an armsman gave him a small piece of metal. Klaive only had to glance at it to see what it was – a dataslug, capable of holding hours of testimony. ‘This was the only thing we managed to retrieve. It was left in plain sight, just where we were likely to stumble across it. Curious, isn’t it? Left just where we lost that shuttle, amid all the wreckage of the outer blast-doors.’
Klaive couldn’t take his eyes off it. A sick taste was beginning to ferment in his mouth. He tried to think of something to say, but no words would come.
‘There is a lot stored here,’ Orquemond said. ‘Would you like to listen to a portion of it? Very well.’
He clicked a switch, and a crackling audex-feed began to play.
‘I don’t even know that the Fulcrum is a single person. I told you that.’
Orquemond clicked it closed. ‘There’s much more. It seems they recorded every conversation they ever had with you. And one of them, no doubt displeased that you tried to escape their care, felt obliged to leave a copy here.’
Klaive’s vision began to waver. He felt nauseous. He looked at the woman again.
‘This whole business has left me angry,’ Orquemond said. ‘It has soured my mood. And yet, just when all seems darkest, He has ways of rewarding the faithful. I wished to learn the truth of the Fulcrum, and thought I had been denied it. Now, though, I find that illumination was always waiting, handed to me, so to speak, on a plate.’
The nausea grew. ‘I know almost nothing, lord,’ he tried feebly. ‘You will see this, if you listen to what is on that thing. I could tell them very little.’
Orquemond nodded to an armsman, who shut the doors and locked them. The woman took a step towards him, withdrawing something metallic and barbed from her tunic.
‘Perhaps they didn’t press you hard enough,’ Orquemond said. ‘My servants are very diligent – they have a way of getting to the truth, no matter the… messiness encountered on the way.’
The woman began to unfold more instruments, never making eye contact with him. Two of the armsmen moved to stand beside him. They had shackles in their hands.
Klaive felt like weeping. He had been so close.
‘You don’t need to do this, my lord,’ he tried. ‘I could just… talk.’
Orquemond smiled at him – as cold and humourless a gesture as it was possible to imagine. ‘But you have already lied so completely to me, confessor. I do not like that. And, as I said, this thing has placed me in a foul mood.’
Klaive barely noticed as he was forced back onto the chair, the shackles closed over his wrists. The woman finished her preparations, and started to move the tip of the steel barb towards him.
‘I wanted Chirastes, but you will do,’ said Orquemond, fixing him with a final, acid stare before turning to the woman. ‘Interrogator, you may begin when ready.’
IV
THE DEAD OF FENRIS
CHAPTER TWENTY
Gunnlaugur had been right – the woman was tough. As Ingvar looked down at her, he found himself increasingly impressed.
She was old, by mortal standards – maybe more than a century old. The skin around her face was tight, as if she’d undergone rejuvenat on more than one occasion, though those effects were fraying now. She was thin, with signs of malnourishment, and had clearly not been in good health even before the suicide pact with her master. The poison she’d taken on Ojada was working its way through her body rapidly, shutting down her organs, turning her blood to gel, blocking up her lungs.
The two of them were alone in a private compartment of the Amethyst Suzeraine’s medical bay. The walls, deck and ceiling had been scrubbed clean prior to their arrival, and now gleamed whitely under twin strip lumens. The woman lay on a hard cot, her head propped up with a rough bolster. The ship’s medicae staff had done what they could when he’d brought her in, and Ingvar had briefly held out some hope that she might be revived. Eventually, though, the chief officer, a competent man from Collaqua’s old crew, had shaken his head.
‘Acherosa,’ he’d said grimly. ‘Horrible stuff.’
After that, they’d made her as comfortable as they could, and left the two of them alone. She had a morphex line inserted into her arm, as well as numbing agents prepped and ready in vials.
She should have died on the passage up from Ojada, by rights. Something was keeping her alive – force of will, maybe. Bajola had been the same, Ingvar remembered. There was something about the coming of the moment, the final moment, that did it to all of them. They always wanted to talk.
‘He didn’t tell us the truth, did he?’ Ingvar said.
There was so much he wanted to ask her. Everything about the discovery of Chirastes had been frustrating – that they’d been too late to properly enact revenge, that there was still so much they didn’t know. If time had not been so pressing, he’d have wished to extract every last morsel of information from her – the Fulcrum’s history, its modes of operation, its bases of operations.
The woman smiled weakly. ‘He didn’t lie,’ she croaked. ‘He never really lied. Not even to me.’
‘Then he left something out.’
She closed her eyes. ‘Why do you think there’s anything more to say? You are a devil. My life has been devoted to hurting you.’
‘His life was. Maybe yours was too, in the beginning.’ Ingvar watched her carefully throughout. ‘But I saw the way you were with him. I think you’ve been doing this for a very long time. Long enough to ask why your whole existence was wasted on one man’s obsessions. He kept the faith, right up to the end, because he had to. I’m not sure you did.’
The woman smiled, then opened her bloodshot eyes again. ‘Quite the philosopher. I hoped you were going to rage at me, barbarian.’
‘I can, if you want. Or you can use this time to salvage something.’
‘And give you what you need.’
‘Just the truth. Imagine it – you could go the Allfather with your soul eased.’
‘The Allfather.’ She shook her head, a dismissive movement, heavy with pain and contempt. ‘Blasphemy. All of it, blasphemy. That was what started this.’
‘Did you never think, just for a moment, that by harming us, you were harming the Emperor’s work?’
‘A work may be corrupted. Perhaps you were purer, long ago, when He first made you.’
‘We have never changed. That’s one thing even our enemies agree on – we were fighting His wars even before there was a Church.’
‘There was always a Church.’
Ingvar sighed. ‘You wish to debate history with me? Now?’ He stretched out, reaching to grip the edge of her cot, leaning on the frame. ‘What is your name?’
‘Buta Avelina.’
‘You were his deputy, yes? His most senior commander?’
‘By the end, yes.’
‘So how did you do it?’
Avelina’s expression flickered. Her knuckles whitened as she clutched the blanket. ‘Like he said. We tried going to war, and failed. So we did what we had to, in secret.’
‘But you needed whole regiments. You couldn’t have hidden those.’
‘The regiments weren’t hidden. They were Astra Militarum, Navy, defence forces. They operated in plain sight, under normal chains of command. Most of their troops were untampered with. A few – sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds – were ours. The ones we’d built and trained. They were inserted carefully, over decades. Even they didn’t know much, not until the imprint-commands were given.’ She swallowed painfully. ‘Then they only had one objective. One they’d die to reach. That was the pattern. In the heat of battle – always major engagements, the bigger the better – we’d work to place auxiliaries in the right position. Move alongside you. They’d only deploy when we told them, and only when the target was exposed. That was the hardest part of our work – monitoring, making the judgement on when to activate. Chirastes blew his entire fortune to build that predictive capacity. He could have been master of a whole diocese. Maybe master of much more. In the end, though, seeing you suffer was more important.’
Was there an edge of bitterness in her voice, then? Or just the pain having its effect?
‘A waste,’ he murmured.
‘Was it?’ She shrugged a little. ‘How long have you hunted us, in your turn?’
‘Wrong us, and we will surely come after you.’
‘And, as far as Leon saw it, you committed the original crime.’
Her voice was getting weaker. Debates over who had started the vendetta, and for what cause, seemed more futile than ever. ‘So the work was complete, was it? Your funds were all expended, your troops all gone?’
‘The coin was spent, yes. We made ourselves paupers, hunted eventually by our own people. I began to wonder who would reach us first – them, you, or neither. As fate would have it, you both did.’
‘But you haven’t answered me. Were all your armies extinguished?’
She hesitated. Her gaze shifted, almost like a schola girl caught in some minor wrongdoing. Ingvar wondered how much damage to her mind had been done over the long years of secrecy. Maybe she might have been genuinely impressive, once. Now she was ruined, burned out, and she must have known it.
‘Ojada was the last base,’ she said reluctantly. ‘The last place we had regiments under our influence. All the Hunters we still controlled, they were in those units, training there, waiting for the command to activate.’
‘Why? Chirastes said he’d reached the end of the list.’
‘He had. Or, at least, by the time you reached us. The programme had become harder to operate. We used to control an entire fleet. A huge fleet! It was all gone, used up. Everything was difficult – we were reliant on agents in the Ojada Administratum. Those regiments had been earmarked for the defence of that planet. They should have been present, when the enemy arrived. It took a lot of effort to get them posted off-world. You can imagine why.’
‘You moved them? To where?’
‘To where the last name on the list would be. The last one. Leon was adamant he had to get them all. So we got the regiments sent away, added to the sector musters. Once they did their work, everything would be accomplished. They’ve gone now. Maybe you even passed their troop carriers on your way in-system. Ha! Imagine that. You would have gone straight past them, thinking they were evacuating.’
She was fading quickly now. Her gaze was unfocused, her skin had turned grey.
‘Where were they going?’ he asked. ‘What was the name he gave them?’
‘You are devils,’ she slurred, smiling. ‘And you have been duly punished.’
Ingvar wanted to grab her then, to shake her by the shoulders, but that would have snapped her spine. He moved closer, not to threaten her, just to hear what she said. As her life slipped away, so did the last chance for information.
‘You can see me here in front of you,’ he said. ‘You can see truly that I am no devil. You know, in your soul, that you have made a terrible mistake, and that it has consumed your whole life. You have a chance – a last chance – to make partial amends, as your final breaths come, if you choose it.’
‘I never broke a vow.’
‘All I need is a name. The last one Chirastes wanted.’
She shot him a strange look then. ‘You and he are the same, I think. I might have served you the same way, had I been born on your witch-world. Think on that.’ The last colour bled from her cheeks. ‘Then I might have destroyed myself for another useless cause, and wasted my promise for another tyrant.’
Ingvar’s eyes never left hers. She was slipping away, and nothing he could say made much difference now.
‘Ah, I see him now,’ she murmured. ‘I see him amid the choirs of angels. I see the golden veil lifting.’ Then, strangest of all, she winked at him – a sly gesture, one that indicated there was still some spark there, some hint of the woman she had been a long time ago. ‘Not really. I don’t want to see him ever again. I just want to rest, now. I want it all to be over. It’s been a long time, consumed by this. And it wasn’t even my revenge. We all just followed orders.’
She looked at him directly, her expressions suddenly clarifying – the clarity of the moment before death, when the transition between worlds was imminent and visible, like a cliff-edge into oblivion.
‘Blackmane,’ she said, with some satisfaction. ‘Blackmane Thunderfist. That’s the last one. That’s the one he had to get.’
‘So, tell me how it was.’
Gunnlaugur sat in the throne in his quarters. It was a heavy stone piece, ripped out of the Hlaupnir’s innards and bolted to the deck of the Amethyst Suzeraine. The granite was carved with runes, some so old that the figures had almost worn away, though the Fenrisian knotwork would still be made out, snaking its way under the armrests and up to the crown. On either side, braziers burned low, making the walls shift and flicker.
The only other occupant was Olgeir. He’d removed his helm and scraped the lacquer out of his beard. His armour still bore the signs of combat – a blackened dent in his shoulder-guard – and would be removed soon for attention at the forge.
‘A dreg of the old Legions,’ Olgeir said. ‘It had some tricks. They didn’t prove sufficient.’
‘And Fjolnir?’
‘He was very helpful.’
‘He didn’t… waver?’
Olgeir looked at him carefully. ‘He has been master of himself since we pulled him out from under Njal’s nose. You know that.’
‘But still.’ Gunnlaugur shifted against the cold stone. He had to resist the urge to drum his fingers, to move again. He was restless. Impatience already tore at him, to be moving again, to shift to the next sniff of quarry. Now that they were back in the warp, every emotion was heightened. ‘The creature was corrupted. Proximity to that, well…’
‘Is that why you sent him with me? To see if he could handle it?’
Gunnlaugur raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised. ‘You think I’d do that? No. It had to be removed, that was all.’
And that was true. At least, it was what he told himself was true. In battle, with the rush of events and the need for decision, it might have been a little different – you couldn’t always reconstruct, after the action.
‘So why was it there?’
‘Not much time to ask it questions,’ Olgeir said, amused. ‘Baldr might know more.’
‘I’ll speak to him, then.’
‘They’re everywhere, vaerangi. The old Legions. Like acid-spiders spilled from a nest. You know what I think? I think they’re going where they want to now, taking advantage of the collapse. It didn’t need a reason – it was just there, picking at the meat on the bones.’
‘Aye.’ Gunnlaugur drew in a long breath. ‘Aye, that seems to be the way. A time of trial. Maybe it’ll burn itself out, like all the others. Or maybe not, this time.’
Olgeir looked uncomfortable.
‘Anything else you want to tell me, Heavy-Hand?’ Gunnlaugur asked.
