Xenos, p.32
Xenos, page 32
He laughed and licked his thin lips with a glossy forked tongue.
‘Let us both be abundantly clear about this, Gregor. You will give me the primer. Either you will hand me the primer now, or I will come over to you and take it. And break every bone in your body. And defile that girl at your side. And break every bone in her body too. And then drag your jiggling carcasses down into the chamber below and string you both up on the hooks, and burn out your agony centres as I wait for the bombardment to flatten this place.’
He paused.
‘Your choice.’
‘You’ve been in my dreams for a long while now. Why is that?’ I pressed.
‘You are gifted, Gregor. And time is not the arrow that humans like to think it is. A second in the warp would show you that. Why, a second in the four-dimensional habitats of the saruthi should have proved it too. Your dreams were just nightmares of something yet to happen.’
‘Who made you?’ My voice was insistent. His answer was the one I least expected, and it left me all but stunned.
‘The Holy Inquisition made me, Gregor. A brother of yours made me. Now, for the last time, give me that–’
The daemonhost swung around suddenly as voices called out from lower down the roof. Brother-Captain Cynewolf was clambering up out of the blast hole, flanked by Midas and another Deathwatcher carrying the limp form of Titus Endor.
Cynewolf raised his storm bolter and fired at the blank-eyed man.
Cherubael reached out and caught the glowing shells, plucking them out of the air.
‘Go home, Astartes bastard!’ he yelled down the sloping roof at Cynewolf. ‘This has nothing to do with you!’
The fiend came up the ridge until he was facing me. I could see the tiny arcs of power darting across his glowing skin. I could smell the stink of corruption.
Eye to eye now.
He held out his hand, palm up, fingernails long and polished like claws.
‘Clever of you to find an untouchable to cancel me out.’ He looked over at Bequin. ‘How did you manage that?’
‘Fate, like time, is not linear, Cherubael. Surely you know that. I found Bequin in the same way that the dreams of you found me.’
He nodded. ‘I like you, Gregor Eisenhorn. So very challenging and stimulating – for a human. I wish we had leisure to discourse and break bread… But we haven’t!’ he snapped suddenly. ‘Give me the primer!’
I took out the polyhedron. His smile broadened.
I dropped the artefact onto the silky roof and, before it could slide away, crushed it under the heel of my boot.
The daemonhost took a step backwards, gazing down at the crunched dust.
He looked up at me again with his blank eyes. ‘You are a man of singular dedication, Gregor. I would have enjoyed killing you, when the day and hour came. But you’re dead already. This edifice is two hundred and forty seconds away from destruction. Cherish this–’
He tossed me the xenos Necroteuch and I caught it in one gloved hand.
‘You’ve won. Take that consolation to the afterlife.’
He started to run, towards the lip of the roof, and then threw himself out in a perfect dive, arms raised. For a moment, he hung in space, then he forked his body in, executed a precise roll and disappeared into the lake of fire below.
I pulled Bequin to me as Cynewolf, Midas and the other Deathwatch Marine approached. Endor, crumpled in the Astartes’ arms, looked dead. I prayed he was, for in a moment this place would dissolve in fire.
‘Rosethorn from Aegis, above and… well, above, for Emperor’s sake! Damn this Glossia crap! Move!’
My gun-cutter swung in over the edifice roof, ramp-jaws open. I could see Fischig at the helm through the cockpit screens, yelling at me. Aemos was at his side.
I watched 56-Izar die from the bridge of the Saint Scythus as we left orbit. Petals of flame the size of continents spread out under its milky skin. Sanction Extremis. Exterminatus.
After the deluge of fire, the virus bombs. The seething storms of tailored plagues. The nuclear atrocity.
It was a cinder by the time we left. No contact with the saruthi race was ever made again.
And the tainted, glowing light of the Necroteuch was extinguished forever.
EPILOGUE
At Pamophrey
At Pamophrey, we rested.
Forty weeks of voyage through the immaterium had dulled our sense of victory. The fleet dispersed at Thracian Primaris and the last I saw of Sergeant Jeruss was a waving hand across a smoky, beery bar.
I rented a villa out by the Sound at Pamophrey. Midas slept most of the day, and whiled away the night in games of regicide with Aemos and Fischig. Bequin bathed in the sun, and swam in the breakers.
I sat out on the salt-whipped stoop and watched over the beach like a god who has forgotten his creations.
Great labours still awaited us. Reports to be made, interviews and debriefings to be attended. Lord Rorken had called for a tribunal of enquiry, and the High Lords of Terra were awaiting a full account of the matter. Months of paperwork, hearings and evidential audits lay ahead. The identity of the force behind Molitor and his daemonhost remained a mystery, and though Lord Rorken was as anxious as myself to find an answer, I doubted any would readily emerge. The question might fester and stagnate, unanswered, in the slow, unwieldy bureaucracy of the Inquisition for years.
I would not allow that. As soon as I was free to engage upon another case, I would dedicate myself to finding Cherubael’s master. The beloved rule of man had come close to great calamity thanks to his scheming.
I would not forget the saruthi. They were an object lesson – if any were truly needed – of how an entire, advanced culture might be consumed by Chaos.
Seabirds looped in the gusting tide wind. The breakers crashed.
The blank-eyed man still haunted my dreams.
After-echoes or ripples of the future?
I would have to wait and see.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Abnett is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers. He has written almost fifty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. He scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous audio dramas and short stories set in the Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer universes. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.
An extract from Malleus.
As I grow older, may the Emperor protect me, I find I measure my history in terms of milestones, those occurrences of such intense moment they will never pass from one’s memory: my induction into the blessed ordos of the Inquisition; my first day as a neophyte assigned to the great Hapshant; my first successful prosecution; the heretic Lemete Syre; my elevation to full Inquisitorial rank at the age of twenty-four standard years; the long-drawn out Nassar case; the affair of the Necroteuch; the P’glao Conspiracy.
Milestones, all of them. Marked indelibly onto the engrams of my memory. And, alongside them, I remember the Darknight that came at the end of the month of Umbris, Imperial year 338.M41, with particular clarity. For that bloody end was the start of it. The great milestone of my life.
I was on Lethe Eleven under instruction from the Ordo Xenos, deep in work, with the accursed xenophile Beldame Sadia almost in my grasp. Ten weeks to find her, ten hours to close the trap. I had been without sleep for three days; without food and water for two. Psychic phantoms triggered by the Darknight eclipse were roiling my mind. I was dying of binary poison. Then Tantalid turned up.
To appraise you, Lethe Eleven is a densely populated world at the leading edge of the Helican sub-sector, its chief industries being metalwork and shield technologies. At the end of every Umbris, Lethe’s largest moon matches, by some cosmological coincidence, the path, orbit and comparative size of the local star, and the world is plunged into eclipse for a two week period known as the Darknight.
The effect is quite striking. For the space of fourteen days, the sky goes a cold, dark red, the hue of dried blood, and the moon, Kux, dominates the heavens, a peerlessly black orb surrounded by a crackling corona of writhing amber flame. This event has become – students of Imperial ritual will be unsurprised to learn – the key seasonal holiday for all Letheans. Fires of all shape, size and manner are lit as Darknight begins, and the population stands vigil to ensure that none go out until the eclipse ends. Industry is suspended. Leave is granted. Riotous carnivals and firelit parades spill through the cities. Licentiousness and law-breaking are rife.
Above it all, the dark fire of the eclipsed sun haloes the black moon. There is even a tradition of fortune-casting grown up around the interpretation of the corona’s form.
I had hoped to catch the Beldame before Darknight began, but she was one step ahead of me. Her chief poisoner, Pye, who had learned his skills in early life as a prisoner of the renegade dark eldar, so the story went, managed to plant a toxin in my drinking water that would remain inert until I ingested the second component of its binary action.
I was a dead man. The Beldame had killed me.
My savant, Aemos, accidentally discovered the toxin in my body, and was able to prevent me from eating or drinking anything further. But graceless death beckoned me inexorably. My only chance of survival was to capture the Beldame and her vassal Pye and extract the solution to my doom from them.
Out in the dark streets of the city, my followers did their work. I had eighty loyal servants scouring the streets. In my rooms at the Hippodrome, I waited, parched, unsteady, distant.
Ravenor came up trumps. Ravenor, of course. With his promise, it wouldn’t be long before he left the rank of interrogator behind and became a full inquisitor in his own right.
He found Beldame Sadia’s lair in the catacombs beneath the derelict church of Saint Kiodrus. I hurried to respond to his call.
‘You should stay here,’ Bequin told me, but I shook her off.
‘I have to do this, Alizebeth.’
Alizebeth Bequin was by that time one hundred and twenty-five years old. She was still as beautiful and as active as she had been in her thirties, thanks to discreet augmetic surgery and a regime of juvenat-drugs. Framed by the veil of her starch-silk dress, her handsome face and dark eyes glared at me.
‘It will kill you, Gregor,’ she said.
‘If it does, then it is time for Gregor Eisenhorn to die.’
Bequin looked across the gloomy, candlelit room at Aemos, but he simply shook his ancient, augmented skull sadly. There were times, he knew, when there was simply no reasoning with me.
I went down into the street, where canister fires blazed and masked revellers capered and caroused. I was dressed all in black, with a floor length coat of heavy black leather.
Despite that, despite the flames around me, I was cold. Fatigue, and the lack of nourishment, were eating into my bones.
I looked at the moon. Threads of heat around a cold, black heart. Like me, I thought, like me.
A carriage had been called for. Six painted hippines, snorting and bridled, teamed to a stately landau. Several members of my staff waited nearby, and hurried forward when they saw me emerge onto the street.
I assessed them quickly. Good people all, or they wouldn’t have made the cut to be here. With a few wordless gestures I pulled out four to accompany me and then sent the rest back to other duties.
The four chosen mounted the carriage with me. Mescher Qus, an ex-Imperial Guardsman from Vladislav; Arianrhod Esw Sweydyr, the swordswoman from Carthae; and Beronice and Zu Zeng, two females from Bequin’s Distaff.
At the last moment, Beronice was ordered out of the carriage and Alizebeth Bequin took her place. Bequin had quit active service with me sixty-eight standard years before in order to develop and run her Distaff, but there were still times she didn’t trust her people and insisted on accompanying me herself.
I realised this was just such a time because Bequin didn’t expect me to survive and wanted to be with me to the end. In truth, I didn’t expect to survive either.
The carriage started off with a whipcrack, and we rumbled through the streets, skirting around ceremonial fires and torchlit processions.
None of us spoke. Qus checked and loaded his autocannon and adjusted his body armour. Arianrhod drew her sabre and tested the cutting edge with one of her own head hairs. Zu Zeng, a native of Vitria, sat with her head down, her long glass robes clinking with the carriage’s motion.
Bequin stared at me.
‘What?’ I asked eventually.
She shook her head and looked away.
The church of Saint Kiodrus lay in the waterfowlers’ district, close to the edge of the city and the vast, lizard-haunted salt-licks. The darkness throbbed with insect rhythms.
The carriage stopped in a street of blackly rotting stone pilings, two hundred metres short of the church’s wrecked silhouette. The sky was amber darkness. Behind us, the city was alive with bright points of fire. The neighbourhood around us was a dead ruin, slowly submitting to the salty hunger of the marshes.
‘Talon wishes Thorn, rapturous beasts within,’ Ravenor said over the vox-link.
‘Thorn impinging multifarious, the blades of disguise,’ I responded. My throat was dry and hoarse.
‘Talon observes moment. Torus pathway requested, pattern ebony.’
‘Pattern denied. Pattern crucible. Rose thorn wishes hiatus.’
‘Confirm.’
We spoke using Glossia, an informal verbal code known only to my staff. Even on an open vox-channel, our communications would be impenetrable to the foe.
I adjusted my vox-unit’s channel.
‘Thorn wishes aegis, to me, pattern crucible.’
‘Aegis arising,’ Betancore, my pilot, responded from far away. ‘Pattern confirmed.’
My gun-cutter, with its fabulous firepower, was now inbound. I looked to the others in the shadows as I drew my weapon.
‘Now is the time,’ I told them.
We edged into the gloomy, slime-swathed ruins of the church. There was a heady stink of wet corruption in the air and sheens of salt clung to every surface. Clusters of maggot-like worms ate into the stones, and flinched back as the fierce beams of our flashlights found them.
Qus ran point, his autocannon swinging from side to side, hunting targets with the red laser rangefinder that projected from the corner of his bionically enhanced left eye. He was a stocky man, rippling with muscle under his harness of ceramite armour. He had painted his blunt face in the colours of his old regiment, the 90th Vladislavan.
Arianrhod and I tailed him. She’d dulled her sabre’s blade with brick dust but still it hooked the light as she turned it in her hands. Arianrhod Esw Sweydyr was well over two metres tall, quite the tallest human woman I have ever met, though such stature is common amongst the people of far away Carthae. Her long-boned frame was clad in a leather bodysuit embossed with bronze studs, over which she wore a long, tasselled cloak of patchwork hide. Her silver hair was plaited with beads. The sabre was called Barbarisater and had been carried by women of the Esw Sweydyr tribe for nineteen generations. From the braided grip to the tip of the curved, engraved blade, it measured almost a metre and a half. Long, lean, slender, like the woman who wielded it. Already I could sense the vibration of the psychic energies she was feeding into it. Woman and blade had become one living thing.
Arianrhod had served with my staff for five years, and I was still learning the intricacies of her martial prowess. Ordinarily I’d be noting every detail of her combat trance methods, but I was too fatigued, too drawn out with hunger and thirst.
Bequin and Zu Zeng brought up the rear, side by side, Bequin in a long black gown with a ruff of black feathers around the shoulders, and Zu Zeng in her unreflective robes of Vitrian glass. They stayed back far enough so the aura of their psychic blankness would not conflict with the abilities of Arianrhod or myself, yet close enough to move forward in defence if the time came.
The Inquisition – and many other institutions, august or otherwise – has long been aware of the usefulness of untouchables, those rare human souls who simply have no psionic signature whatsoever and thus disrupt or negate even the most strenuous psychic attack. When I met her on Hubris, a century before, Alizebeth Bequin had been the first untouchable I had ever encountered. Despite her unnerving presence – even non-psykers find untouchables difficult to be around – I had added her to my staff and she had proved to be invaluable. After many years of service, she had retired to form the Distaff, a cadre of untouchables recruited from all across the Imperium. The Distaff was my own private resource, although I often loaned their services to others of my order. They numbered around forty members now, trained and managed by Bequin. It is my belief that the Distaff was collectively one of the most potent anti-psyker weapons in the Emperor’s domain.
The ruins were festering with shadows and dank salt. Rot-beetles scurried over the flaking mosaic portraits of long-dead worthies that stared out of alcoves. Worms crawled everywhere. The steady chirrup of insects from the salt-licks was like someone shaking a rattle. As we probed deeper, we came upon inner yards and grave-squares where neglect had shaken free placestones and revealed the smeared bones of the long interred in the loamy earth below. In places, rot-browned skulls had been dug out and piled in loose pyramids.
It saddened me to see this holy place so befouled and dreary. Kiodrus had been a great man, had stood and fought at the right hand of the sacred Beati Sabbat during her mighty crusade. But that had been a long time ago and far away, and his cult of worship had faded. It would take another crusade into the distant Sabbat Worlds to rekindle interest in him and his forgotten deeds.
