WINTER BRINGS A CHANCE
THE DAMNED HAS A NAME
THE PYLON AT KASR GESH
Wintertide on Cadia.
There had been glinting ice-floes in the gun-metal waters of the Caducades that morning, and light snow had fallen on the moors. At that time of year, the foul corona of the Eye of Terror was visible even during the fleeting hours of daylight. The unholy mauve radiance of the nights became a violet fuzz in the cold daylight, like a badly-blotted ink stain on white paper.
It made us feel like we were under surveillance all the time. The Eye, bloodshot, angry, peering down at us.
Worst of all were the moor winds, cold and sharp as a Cadian’s bayonet, blowing down from arctic latitudes. The high lakes were all frozen now, and lethal pogonip fogs haunted the bitter heaths and uplands. In the Kasr itself, it seemed like the locals had a morbid fear of heaters or window insulation.
Chilly gales breathed down the hallways of the minster and the Administratum building. Water froze in the pipes.
Despite it all, the war-bells sounded every few days, and the moors rolled with the sounds of winter manoeuvres. I began to imagine that the Cadians were simply shooting at each other to keep warm.
Ten and a half long, increasingly cold weeks after we had begun our systematic search of the Kasr’s records, I was making my now habitual morning walk from the minster of the Inquisition to the headquarters of the Interior Guard. I wore a thick fur coat against the cold, and spike-soled boots to combat the sheet ice on the roads. I was miserable. The search had left us all pale and edgy, too many fruitless hours spent in dark rooms.
There had been so many promising leads. Links and traces of the Sons of Bael, unauthorised starship traffic, suspicious excise logs.
They had all dwindled away into nothing. As far as we could make out, no living member of the Sons of Bael, or any living associate or family member, remained. There had been no pylon-related cult activity, not even registered xeno-archaeological work. I had interviewed specialist professors at the universitary, and certain tech-priests from the Mechanicus who were shown in the records as having expert knowledge of the pylons.
Nothing.
With Inshabel, Nayl or Fischig, I had travelled the region, as far afield as Kasr Tyrok and Kasr Bellan. A worker in the gunshops of Kasr Bellan, who had been identified as a Bael cult member, turned out to simply have the same name, misfiled. A wasted ten hour round trip by speeder.
Aemos had constructed a codifier model by which we checked record anomalies against the timetable of past cult activity.
There seemed to be no correlation at all.
I walked up the steps of the Ministry of Interior Defence, and submitted myself to the clearance check in the postern guardhouse. It should have been a formality. I had been arriving at the same time almost every day for the last seventy-five. I even recognised some of the Guardsmen by sight.
But still, it was like the first time I had ever been there. Papers were not only stamped, but read thoroughly and run through an anti-counterfeit auspex. My rosette was scrutinised and tagged. The duty officer voxed my details through to the main building to get authorisation.
‘Doesn’t this ever bore you?’ I asked one of the desk officers as I waited, folding my papers back into my leather wallet.
‘Doesn’t what bore me, sir?’ he asked.
I hadn’t seen Ibbet since the first week. I’d been rotated between a number of supervisors. One told me it was because of shift changes, but I knew it was because none of them liked to deal with an inquisitor. Especially a persistent one.
That morning, it was Major Revll who escorted me in. Revll, a surly young man, was new to me.
‘How can I assist you, sir?’ he asked curtly.
I sighed.
Open log books and data-slates were piled around the workstation where I had abandoned them the night before. Revll was already calling for a clerk to tidy them away and make space for me before I could explain that I’d made the mess in the first place.
He looked at me warily. ‘You’ve been here before?’
I sighed again.
I had two hours. At eleven, I was due to meet Inshabel and Bequin and fly out to a village on one of the islands in the Caducades to investigate a rumour that a man there knew something about smuggling. Another waste of time, I was sure.
I started in on the air-traffic day-book, reading through the lists of orbital transfers for a summer day two years earlier. Halfway down the slate was an entry showing a shuttle transfer from an orbiting ship to a landing field near Kasr Gesh. Gesh was near to one of the pylons frequented by the Sons of Bael. Moreover, on checking, I realised the date put it three days before the last incident of cult activity at the pylon.
I stoked up the data-engine, and requested further information on the entry. I was immediately denied. I used a higher decrypt key, and was shown a report that withheld both the name of the ship and the source of its authority. I began to get excited, and scrolled down. Even the purpose of the visit was restricted.
Now I typed in the teeth of my highest decrypt key. The terminal throbbed and chattered, sorting through files and authorisations.
The name came up. My elation peaked, and plunged away.
Neve. The mysterious entry had been a record of a classified mission by the inquisitor general. Back to square one.
The island was cold and bare. A small fishing community clung to the rim of the western bay. Inshabel swung the speeder down onto the cobbled tideway where spread nets had gone stiff with ice.
‘How much longer, Gregor?’ Bequin asked me, winding her scarf around her throat.
‘How much longer what?’
‘Until we give up and leave? I’m so sick of this fate-forsaken world.’
I shrugged. ‘Another week. Until Candlemas. If we haven’t found anything by then, I promise we’ll say goodbye to Cadia.’
The three of us trudged up the icy walk to a grim tavern overlooking the sea wall. Anchor fish, as tall as men, were hung outside, salted and drying in the winter air.
The barman didn’t want to know us, but his steward brought us drinks and led us through to a back parlour. He admitted that he had sent the message about the smuggler. The smuggler was here to meet us, he said.
We entered the back parlour. A man sat by the roaring grate, warming his jewelled fingers at its flames. I smelled cologne.
‘Good morning, Gregor,’ said Tobias Maxilla.
Despite the shouting coming from the back parlour, the steward brought us herb omelettes and bowls of steaming zar-fin broth, along with a bottle of fortified wine.
‘Are you going to explain?’ asked Inshabel tersely.
‘Of course, dear Nathun, of course,’ Maxilla replied, pouring a careful measure of wine into each glass.
‘Be patient.’
‘Now, Tobias!’ I snapped.
‘Oh,’ he said, seeing my look. He sat back. ‘I confess I have become despondent these last few weeks. You’ve been so busy and I’ve just been waiting up there on the Essene… well, anyway, you’ve said a number of times that the answer you’re searching for depended on one key thing. It depended on you establishing a way of getting past this dire planet’s obsessively tight security. Anonymously. And I said to myself… “Tobias, that’s what you do, even though Gregor doesn’t like to think about it. Smuggling, Tobias, is your forte.” So I decided to see if I could smuggle myself down here. And guess what?’
He sat back, sipping his glass, looking disgustingly pleased with himself.
‘You smuggled yourself onto the planet to prove it could be done?’ asked Bequin slowly.
He nodded. ‘My shuttle’s hidden in the spinneys behind the village. It’s amazing how many zipped mouths and blind eyes you can buy with a purse of hard cash round here.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.
He made an open-handed gesture. ‘You told me weeks ago that the Interior Guard recognised no illegal or suspect immigration. Well, I’m here today – literally – to prove that claim wrong. Cadia’s a tough nut to crack, I’ll admit. One of the toughest I’ve faced in a long and naughty career. But not impossible, as you see.’
I sank my wine in a single gulp. ‘I should sever my links with you for this, Tobias. You know that.’
‘Oh, pooh, Gregor! Because I’ve shown up the Cadian Interior Guard as a bunch of fools?’
‘Because you’ve broken the law!’
‘Ah ah ah! No, I haven’t. Bent it, possibly, but not broken it. My presence here is entirely legal, under both Cadian local and Imperial general law.’
‘What?’
‘Come on, my old friend! Why do you think my shuttle wasn’t blasted out of the heavens this morning by eager Cadian lightning jockeys? That was a rhetorical question by the way. Answer… because when the interceptors came scrambling up to meet me, I broadcast the right security clearance, and that contented them.’
‘But the day codes are privileged! The counter-checks are triple! They are issued only to those with appropriately high credentials. What authority could you possibly have used to get them?’
‘Well, Gregor… yours, of course.’
It had been staring me in the face, and it took the grandstanding flamboyance of Maxilla, in his very worst showing-off mode, to reveal it. The reason the Interior Guard had no file on illegal or suspect immigration was because there was nothing of that nature to file. Those that tried to run the strict gauntlet of Cadian security and failed, died. The ones that got through were never noticed.
Because they were using high-level security clearances, masquerading as the sort of official visitor who would not be stopped.
People like me. People like Neve.
‘I never made this trip,’ Neve said, staring steadily at the data-slate I was showing her. ‘Or this.’
‘Of course not. But someone borrowed your authority code. Used it to gain trans-orbital access. That’s how they were getting in. Look here, your code again, and again. And before that, the code headers of your predecessor, Gonfal. It goes back forty years. Each and every flurry of activity from the Sons of Bael… and other cults… can be matched by space-to-surface transfers cleared as genuine Inquisition flights.’
‘Emperor protect me!’ Neve looked up. She put down the data-slate and called hoarsely for a servitor to bring more lights into her octastyle sanctum.
‘But my authority code is protected. How was it stolen? Eisenhorn, yours was used to prove this. How was that stolen?’
I paused. ‘It wasn’t, not exactly. One of my associates borrowed it to prove the point.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me? Oh, no matter! Eisenhorn, there’s a great deal of difference between you and me. You may have rogue elements in your band who act behind your back in unorthodox, unilateral ways. I do not. My code could not have been abused so.’
‘I accept your point, but it could. Who has access to your code?’
‘No one! No one below me!’
‘But above you?’
‘What?’
‘I said this could be one of ours. A senior inquisitor, a grandmaster even. Certainly a wily veteran with enough clout to pull the right strings.’
‘That would require a direct override at the highest levels.
‘Exactly. Let’s look.’
In the end, that was my adversary’s downfall. All the blood and fury and combat we had gone through was as nothing to this prosaic clue that revealed his identity. To steal Neve’s authority code, and the authority codes of her predecessors, my adversary had been forced to use the clout of his own identity get into the files.
The record of that operation was encrypted, of course. Sitting side by side at the codifier in her sanctum’s annex, Neve and I quickly found it. It wasn’t even hidden. He never thought anyone would look.
But still, it was encrypted.
The cryptology was beyond both me and Neve. But together, combining our ranks, we could request, via the Astropathicus, permission to use the Inquisition’s most powerful decryption keys.
It took five hours to approve our joint rating.
Just after midnight, a scribe from the Officio Astropathicus brought us the message slate. Midwinter winds shook the sanctum’s casements.
I was alone with Neve. We had felt it inappropriate to have company. This was a matter of the gravest import. We had talked, of this and that, to pass the time, though both of us were restless and edgy. She poured generous glasses of Cadian glayva, which took the edge off the cold.
Her aide announced the scribe, and he entered, bowing low, his augmetic chassis grinding beneath his robes. He held out a slate to her clutched in the mechadendrites that served as his hand. Neve took it and dismissed him.
I rose, and put down my barely touched glass of spirits.
Neve limped over to me, leant on her silver crutch, and held up the slate.
‘Shall we?’ she asked.
We went into the annex and loaded the slate into the ancient codifier. The limpid green display shifted feverishly with runes. She opened the file we were after and set the key to work.
It took a moment or two.
Then the identity of the veteran who had used his power to manipulate Neve’s code was revealed on the small, green-washed screen. At last, the damned had a name.
It shocked even me.
‘Glory from above,’ breathed Inquisitor General Neve. ‘Quixos.’
Aemos was arguing with Neve’s chief savant, Cutch.
‘Quixos is dead, long dead!’ Cutch maintained. ‘This is clearly a case of someone using his authority…’
‘Quixos is still registered as living by the annals of the Inquisition.’
‘As an oversight! No body has ever been retrieved. No proof of death–’
‘Precisely…’
‘But still! There has been no sign or word from Quixos for over a hundred years.’
‘None that we’ve seen,’ I said.
‘Eisenhorn’s right,’ Neve said. ‘Inquisitor Utlen was presumed dead for over seventy years. Then he reappeared overnight to bring down the tyrants of Esquestor II.’
‘It’s most perturbatory,’ Aemos muttered.
Quixos. Quixos the Great. Quixos the Bright. One of the most revered inquisitors ever to roam the Imperium. His early texts had been required reading for all of us. He was a legend. At the age of just twenty-one he had burned the daemons out of Artum. Then he had purged the Endorian sub-sector of its false goat-gods. He had transcribed the Book of Eibon. He had broken the wretched sub-cult of Nurgle that had tainted one of the palaces of Terra itself. He had tracked down and killed the Chaos Marine Baneglos. He had silenced the Whisperers of Domactoni. He had crucified the Witch-king of Sarpeth on the battlements above his incinerated hive.
But there had always been an odour about Quixos. A hint that he was too close to the evil he prosecuted. He was a radical, certainly. Some amongst the Ordos said he was a rogue. Others said, in low, private voices, much worse.
To me, he was a great man who had perhaps gone too far. I simply honoured his memory and his achievements.
Because, as far as I had been concerned, he was long dead.
‘Could he still be alive?’ Neve asked.
‘Madam, not at all…’ Cutch began.
‘I don’t know why you employ him,’ I said, pointing dismissively at the Cadian savant. ‘His advice isn’t sound.’
‘Well really!’ Cutch huffed.
‘Shut up and go away,’ Neve told him.
She stalked across to me and took my empty glass from me. ‘Go on, then. Your opinion.’
‘You want it? From an adventurer like me? Are you sure, inquisitor general?’
She thrust a topped-up glass of glayva into my hand so hard it sloshed. ‘Just give me your damned opinion!’
I sipped. Aemos was staring over at me nervously from the settle by the door.
‘Quixos could be very much alive. He’d be… what, now, Aemos?’
‘Three hundred and forty-two, sir.’
‘Right. Well, that’s no age, is it? Not given augmetics, or rejuvanat drugs… or sorcery.’
‘Dammit!’ Neve said.
‘He’s an incredibly gifted individual, as his career testifies. He has a reputation, however unwarranted, for straying too far to the radical side. He has… dabbled with the warp. We can say that much. Just because we’ve heard nothing of him these last hundred or more years, doesn’t mean he isn’t still active.’
‘And that activity?’ Neve smacked the tip of her crutch down twice on the tiled floor. ‘What? What? Utilising daemonhosts? Perverting inquisitors? Hunting for abominated texts like your Necroteuch? Triggering the dreadful atrocity of Thracian?’
‘Perhaps? Why not?’
‘Because that would make him a monster! The exact antithesis of everything our order is about!’
‘Well, yes it would. It’s happened before. A powerful man who gets so close to the evil he is sworn to combat he gets dragged into it. Inquisitor Ruberu, for example.’
‘Yes, yes! Ruberu, I know…’
‘Grandmaster Derkon?’
‘Granted. I remember…’
‘Cardinal Palfro of Mimiga? Saint Boniface, also called the Deathshead of a Thousand Tears?’ intoned Aemos.
‘For the Emperor’s sake!’
‘High Lord Vandire?’ I suggested.
‘All right, all right–’
‘Horus?’ Aemos dared to whisper.
There was a long silence.
‘Great Quixos,’ Neve murmured, slowly turning to face me. ‘Will he be added to that unholy list? Is one of our greatest to be condemned so?’
‘If he must be,’ I replied.
‘What do we do?’ she asked.
‘We find him. We find out if the passing centuries have truly changed him into the being we fear he is. And if they have, Emperor pardon me, we declare him Heretic and Extremis Diabolus, and we destroy him for his crimes.’
Neve sat down hard, staring into her glass. There was a knock at the sanctum’s door, which Aemos answered.
It was Fischig.
‘Sir… madam…’ he said, acknowledging Neve.
‘Well, Fischig?’
‘Further to your discoveries today, we have been monitoring inter-orbit traffic. Two hours ago, a craft made planetfall at Kasr Gesh. It cleared Cadian airspace using the inquisitor general’s authority code.’
Gesh was the site of the last known cult activity.
I gathered up my coat. ‘With your permission, inquisitor general?’
Neve rose with me, her face set hard. ‘With your permission, Inquisitor Eisenhorn. I’d like to come with you.’
Kasr Gesh was three hours flight from Kasr Derth. Cruel winter had blown in from the upland heaths, and the gun-cutter was vibrating its way against powerful ice storms.
My band was all aboard, preparing weapons. So was Inquisitor General Neve and a six-man squad of Cadian Elite Shock, impassive troopers in winter camo armour, prepping matt-white lasrifles and stubbers in the crew-bay.
‘God-throne, they’re tough-ass bastards,’ Nayl muttered to me as I passed him coming out of the bay.
‘Impressed?’
‘Scared is more like it. Regular Cadian is soldier enough for me. These are elite. The elite of the elite. The Kasrkin.’
‘The what?’ It wasn’t like an experienced fighter to show deference to other fighting men.
‘The Kasrkin. The Cadian best, and you can imagine what that means. Holy Terra, they’re stone-killers!’
‘How do you know?’
‘Oh, please… look at their necks. The Caducades sea-eagle brand. Come to that, just look at their necks. I’ve seen slimmer trees!’
‘Good thing they’re on our side,’ I said.
‘I bloody hope so,’ Nayl returned, and moved forward.
The deck lurched again. I walked back down the bay, steadying myself on the overhead handloops, and approached Neve.
She was dressed in Cadian mesh armour, and was adjusting her winter hood. I saw she had exchanged her silver crutch for a lift-assisted cane fitted with a compact cylindrical grenade launcher.
In my fur coat and bodyglove armour, I felt underdressed.
‘Your usual attire?’ I asked.
‘Necessary clothing. You should come out with me sometime, cult-hunting in the islands after dark.’
‘My staff are… worried. These men are Kasrkin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Their reputation precedes them.’
‘So did yours.’
‘Good point. But, anyway…’
Neve looked round at the row of Cadian elite. ‘Captain Echbar!’ she shouted, raising her voice above the roar of the buffet and the thrusters.
‘Inquisitor general ma’am!’ said the warrior on the end.
‘Inquisitor Eisenhorn wants reassurance that you are the best of the best and will be careful to watch the backsides of him and his band.’
Six snow-visored faces turned to look at me.
‘We’ve logged the bio-spoors of you and your company into our sighting auspexes, sir,’ Echbar announced to me. ‘We couldn’t shoot them now even if we wanted to.’
‘Make sure you don’t. My staff and I will be leading the way in. The situation may not call for firepower. If it does, the vox or psyker command is “Rosethorn”. Vox-channel is gamma-nine-eight. Are you prepared for a psychic summons?’
‘We’re prepared for anything.’ Echbar told me.
The gun-cutter stopped shaking.
‘We’ve come out of the storm,’ Medea voxed me.
A moment later, she crackled, ‘I see approach lights. Kasr Geth landing field in two.’
The pylon stood three kilometres outside the earthworks of Kasr Geth. The night was clear and glassy, with a heaven full of stars. The Eye of Terror throbbed dimly at the top of the sky. It seemed to me more lurid and brighter than ever before.
Somewhere up there, I knew, orbital detachments of the Cadian Interior Guard were hunting the hidden starship from which the visitors to Kasr Gesh had come. Neve had scrambled them before we left, with strict orders not to move until we had engaged on the ground.
We didn’t want our visitors tipped off.
My team moved in up through the frost-caked scrub of the moorland slope. The pylon was simply a black, oblong, absence of stars. I could hear it moaning.
I slid out my main weapon: a storm-bolter which I had sprayed green in memory of the prize sidearm I had lost somewhere on Eechan, may Librarian Brytnoth forgive me. This storm-gun was slightly larger and more powerful, but nothing like so well engineered as the boltpistol I had treasured.
On my hip I wore a Cadian hanger, a short, curved twin-edged sabre that replaced my beloved power sword. It was just a simple piece of sharp steel, but I’d had the hierarchs at the Ministorum of Kasr Derth make some modifications.
Still, in truth, I felt vulnerable going up that slope.
Nayl was to my left, fielding a combat-cannon. Husmaan to my right with his trustworthy long-las. Inshabel was to his right, armed with a brace of antique laspistols that had belonged to Inquisitor Roban. Fischig, hefting an old and trusted Arbites-issue riot-gun, had gone wide to the far left.
Bequin, a long-barrelled autopistol in her gloved hand, was right beside me.
Behind us, Neve and her Kasrkin lurked, waiting for my signal.
Aemos was aboard the gun-cutter with Medea, hovering above the drop point, lights killed. They, rather than Neve and her elite, were my reassurance.
‘What do you see?’ I voxed.
‘Nothing,’ replied Husmaan and Nayl.
‘I’ve got an angle into the seat of the pylon,’ said Inshabel. ‘I see lights.’
‘Confirm that,’ crackled Fischig, wide to the left. ‘There are men down there. I count eight, no ten. Twelve. Portable lights. They’ve got machines.’
‘Machines?’
‘Handheld. Auspexes.’
‘Measuring again,’ Neve whispered over the link.
‘I’m sure,’ I said. Then I said, in Glossia: ‘Thorn eyes flesh, rapturous beasts at hand. Aegis to arms, crucible. All points cowled. Razor torus pathway, pattern ebony.’
My storm-gun made a loud click as I racked it.
The robed men working in the floodlights around the foot of the pylon froze and slowly turned from their work to look at me.
I walked down from the moor, through the ice-stiffened bracken, bracing my gun in a pose that could kill any one of them.
Bequin followed me a few steps behind, her pistol held loosely, ready to swing up.
I knew we were covered by Husmaan, Inshabel, Nayl and Fischig.
‘Who is the leader here?’ I asked, panning my weapon around.
‘I am,’ said one of the robed figures.
‘Step forward and identify yourself,’ I said.
‘To whom?’
I raised the rosette plainly in my left hand. ‘Imperial Inquisition.’ Some of the robed men moaned with dismay.
The leader did not. He stepped forward. I could suddenly smell a cold, metallic scent, one that was not new to me.
A warning that came too late.
The leader slowly drew back his cowl. His angular, cruel head was hairless and a cold blue light shone out through his skin. Sharpened, steel-tipped horns sprouted from his brow. His eyes were white slits.
A daemonhost!
‘Cherubael?’ I said, foolishly, stupidly.
‘Your witless ally is not here, Eisenhorn,’ said the being, baring his teeth and gleaming with light.
‘My name is Prophaniti.’