I DISCOVER I AM DEAD
UNDER DARK FIRE, THE LAIR OF SADIA
TANTALID, UNWELCOME
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.
Qus called a halt and pointed towards the steps of an undercroft that led away below ground. I waved him back, indicating the tiny strip of red ribbon placed under a stone on the top step. A marker, left by Ravenor, indicating this was not a suitable entry point. Peering into the staircase gloom, I saw what he had seen: the half buried cables of a tremor-detector and what looked like bundles of tube charges.
We found three more entrances like it, all marked by Ravenor. The Beldame had secured her fastness well.
‘Through there, do you think, sir?’ Qus whispered, pointing towards the columns of a roofless cloister.
I was about to agree when Arianrhod hissed ‘Barbarisater thirsts…’
I looked at her. She was prowling to the left, towards an archway in the base of the main bell-tower. She moved silently, the sabre held upright in a two-handed grip, her tasselled cloak floating out behind her like angelic wings.
I gestured to Qus and the women and we formed in behind her. I drew my prized boltpistol, given to me by Librarian Brytnoth of the Adeptus Astartes Deathwatch Chapter on the eve of the Purge of Izar, almost a century before. It had never failed me.
The Beldame’s minions came out of the night. Eight of them, just shadows that disengaged themselves from the surrounding darkness. Qus began to fire, blasting back a shadow that pounced at him. I fired too, raking bolt rounds into the ghostly opposition.
As befitted such a loyalty, she recruited only convicted murderers for her minions. The men who attacked us in that blighted yard were base killers, shrouded in shadow fields she had bought, borrowed or stolen from her inhuman allies.
One swung at me with a long-bladed halberd and I blew off his head. Just. My body was tired and my reactions were damnably slow.
I saw Arianrhod. She was a balletic blur, her beaded hair streaming out above her flying cloak. Barbarisater purred in her hands.
She severed the neck of one shadow with a backward slash, then pirouetted around and chopped another in two from neck to pelvis. The sabre was moving so fast I could barely see it. She stamped hard and reversed her direction of movement, causing a third shadow to sprawl as he overshot her. His head flew off, and the sabre swept on to impale a fourth without breaking its fluid motion. Then Arianrhod swept around, the sword held horizontally over her right shoulder. The steel haft of the fifth shadow’s polearm was cut in two and he staggered back. Barbarisater described a figure of eight in the air and another shadow fell, cut into several sections.
The last minion turned and fled. A shot from Bequin’s laspistol brought him down.
A pulse was pounding in my temple and I realised I had to sit down before I passed out. Qus grabbed me by the arm and helped me down onto a block of fallen wall stone.
‘Gregor?’
‘I’m all right, Alizebeth… give me a moment…’
‘You shouldn’t have come, you old fool! You should have left this to your disciples!’
‘Shut up, Alizebeth.’
‘I will not, Gregor. It’s high time you understood your own limits.’
I looked up at her. ‘I have no limits,’ I said.
Qus laughed involuntarily.
‘I believe him, Mistress Bequin,’ said Ravenor, stepping from the shadows. Emperor damn his stealth, even Arianrhod had not seen him coming. She had to force her sabre down to stop it slicing at him.
Gideon Ravenor was a shade shorter than me, but strong and well-made. He was only thirty-four years old. His long black hair was tied back from his sculpted, high cheek-boned face. He wore a grey bodyglove and a long leather storm coat. The psycannon mounted on his left shoulder whirred and clicked around to aim at Arianrhod.
‘Careful, swordswoman,’ he said. ‘My weapon has you squarely.’
‘And it will still have me squarely when your head is lying in the dust,’ she replied.
They both laughed. I knew they had been lovers for over a year, but still in public they sparred and sported with each other.
Ravenor snapped his fingers and his companion, the festering mutant Gonvax, shambled out of hiding, drool stringing from his thick, malformed lips. He carried a flamer, the fuel-tanks strapped to the hump of his twisted back.
I rose. ‘What have you found?’ I asked Ravenor.
‘The Beldame – and a way in,’ he said.
Beldame Sadia’s lair was in the sacrarium beneath the main chapel of the ruin. Ravenor had scouted it carefully, and found an entry point in one of the ruptured crypts that perhaps even she didn’t know about.
My respect for Ravenor was growing daily. I had never had a disciple like him. He excelled at almost every skill an inquisitor is meant to have. I looked forward to the day when I supported his petition to Inquisitorial status. He deserved it. The Inquisition needed men like him.
Single-file, we entered the crypt behind Ravenor. He drew our attention carefully to every pitfall and loose flag. The stench of salt and old bones was intolerable, and I felt increasingly weak in the close, hot air.
We emerged into a stone gallery that overlooked a wide subterranean chamber. Pitch-lamps sputtered in the darkness and there was a strong smell of dried herbs and fouler unguents.
Beings were worshipping in the chamber. Worshipping is the only word I can use. Naked, daubed in blood, twenty depraved humans were conducting a dark eldar rite around a torture pit in which a battered man was chained and stretched.
The stink of blood and excrement wafted to me. I tried not to throw up, for I knew the effort would make me pass out.
‘There, you see him?’ Ravenor whispered into my ear as we crawled to the edge of the gallery.
I made out a pale-skinned ghoul in the distant shadows.
‘A haemonculus, sent by the Kabal of the Fell Witch to witness the Beldame’s practices.’
I tried to make out detail, but the figure was too deep in the shadows.
I registered grinning teeth and some form of blade device around the right hand.
‘Where’s Pye?’ asked Bequin, whispering too.
Ravenor shook his head. Then he seized my arm and squeezed. Even whispers were no longer possible.
The Beldame herself had entered the chamber.
She walked on eight, spider legs, a huge augmetic chassis of hooked arachnid limbs that skittered on the stones. Inquisitor Atelath, Emperor grant him rest, had destroyed her real legs one hundred and fifty years before my birth.
She was veiled in black gauze that looked like cobwebs. I could actually feel her evil like a fever-sweat.
She paused at the edge of the torture pit, raised her veil with withered hands and spat at the victim below. It was venom, squirted from the glands built into her mouth behind her augmetic fangs. The viscous fluid hit the sacrificial victim full in the face and he gurgled in agony as the front of his skull was eaten away.
Sadia began to speak, her voice low and sibilant. She spoke in the language of the dark eldar and her naked brethren writhed and moaned.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ I whispered. ‘She’s mine. Ravenor, can you manage the haemonculus?’
He nodded.
On my signal, we launched our attack, leaping down from the gallery, weapons blazing. Several of the worshippers were punched apart by Qus’s heavy fire.
Whooping the battlecry of Carthae, Arianrhod flew at the haemonculus, way ahead of Ravenor.
I realised I had pushed it too far. I was giddy as I landed, and stumbled.
Her metal spider legs striking sparks from the flagstones, Beldame Sadia reared up at me, ululating. She pulled back her veil to spit at me.
Abruptly, she reeled backwards, thunderstruck by the combined force of Bequin and Zu Zeng who flanked her.
I gathered myself and fired at her, blowing one of the augmetic limbs off her spider-frame.
She spat anyway, but missed. The venom sizzled into the cold stone slabs at my feet.
‘Imperial Inquisition!’ I bellowed. ‘In the name of the hallowed God-Emperor, you and your kind are charged with treason and manifest disbelief!’
I raised my weapon. She flew at me.
Her sheer bulk brought me down.
One spider limb stabbed entirely through the meat of my left thigh. Her steel fangs, like curved needles, snarled into my face. I saw her eyes, for an instant, black and without limit or sanity.
She spat.
I wrenched my head around to avoid the corrosive spew, and fired my bolt pistol up into her.
The impact threw her backwards, all four hundred kilos of wizened witch and bionic carriage.
I rolled over.
The haemonculus had met Arianrhod’s attack face on, the glaive around his right hand screaming as the xenos-made blades whirled. He was stick-thin and clad in shiny black leather, his grin a perpetual consequence of the way the colourless skin of his face was pinned back around his skull. He wore metal jewellery fashioned from the weapons of the warriors he had slain.
I could hear Ravenor crying out Arianrhod’s name.
Barbarisater sliced at the darting eldar monster, but he evaded, his physical speed unbelievable.
She swung again, placing two perfect kill strokes that somehow missed him altogether. He sent her lurching away in a mist of blood. For the first time since I had known her, I heard Arianrhod yelp in pain.
Flames belched across the chamber. Gonvax shambled forward, forever loyal to his master… and his master’s lover. He tried to squirt flames at the haemonculus, but it was suddenly somehow behind him. Gonvax shrieked as the glaive eviscerated him.
With a howl, Arianrhod threw herself at the dark eldar. I saw her, for a moment, frozen in mid-air, her sabre descending. Then the two bodies struck each other, and flew apart.
The sabre had taken off the eldar’s left arm at the shoulder. But his glaive…
I knew she was dead. No one could survive that, not even a noble swordswoman from far Carthae.
Bequin was pulling me up. ‘Gregor! Gregor!’
Beldame Sadia, her spider carriage limping, was fleeing towards the staircase.
Something exploded behind me. I could hear Ravenor bellowing in rage and pain.
I ran after the Beldame.
The upper chapel, above ground, was silent and cold. Darknight flares glimmered through the lines of stained glass windows.
‘You can’t escape, Sadia!’ I shouted, but my voice was thin and hoarse.
I glimpsed her as she skittered between the columns to my left. A shadow in the shadows.
‘Sadia! Sadia, old hag, you have killed me! But you will die by my hand!’
To my right now, another skuttling shadow, half-seen. I moved that way.
I was stabbed hard from behind, in between my shoulder blades. I turned as I fell, and saw the manic face of the Beldame’s arch-poisoner, Pye. He cackled and giggled, prancing, a spent injector tube clutched in each hand.
‘Dead! Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead!’ he warbled.
He had injected me with the secondary part of the poison.
I fell over, my muscles already cramping.
‘How does it feel, inquisitor?’ Pye chuckled, capering towards me.
‘Emperor damn you,’ I gasped and shot him through the face.
I blacked out.
When I came round, Beldame Sadia had me by the throat and was shaking me with her augmetic mandibles.
‘I want you awake!’ she hissed, her veil falling back and the toxin sacs in her wizened cheeks bulging. ‘I want you awake to feel this!’
Her head exploded in a spray of bone shards and tissue. The spider carriage went into convulsions and threw me across the chapel. It continued to scuttle and dance, her corpse jerking slackly from it, for a full minute before it collapsed.
I was face down on the floor, and I tried to turn, but the advancing effect of the poison was shutting me down.
Shutting me down hard.
Massive feet strode into my field of vision. Armoured feet, plated with ceramite.
I rolled as best I could and looked up.
Witchfinder Tantalid stood over me, holstering the boltgun he had used to kill Beldame Sadia. He was encased in gold-encrusted battle armour, the pennants of the Ministorum suspended over his back plate.
‘You are an accursed heretic, Eisenhorn. And I claim your life.’
Not Tantalid, I thought as my consciousness spun away again. Not Tantalid. Not now.