INTERVIEW WITH THE DAMNED
BURE, WARSMITH
ORBUL INFANTA
‘Let me make sure I understand you, Eisenhorn,’ said the disembodied voice of Pontius Glaw, slowly and contemptuously. ‘You think I’m going to help you?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Yes.’
Pontius laughed. Synapse leads connected to the gold circuits of his engram sphere flashed in series. ‘I didn’t think a man of such studied dullness and sobriety as you would have the ability to surprise me, Eisenhorn. My mistake.’
‘You will help me,’ I said, quietly but emphatically.
I brushed frost from the grilled steps and sat down facing his casket. It was claw-footed, rectangular, compact and filled with complex technology designed for one purpose: the support and operation of the engram sphere, a rough-cut nugget the size of a clenched fist in which resided the intellect – and perhaps the soul – of one of the most notorious heretics in the Imperium.
Pontius Glaw, dead in body for nigh on three hundred years, had been in his physical life one of the more unwholesome products of the powerful Glaw dynasty. That family line, part of the high nobility of Gudrun, had whelped many heretics in its time, the last of whom had been instrumental in the affair of the Necroteuch. Supported by the considerable efforts of Imperial Navy Security, I had all but crushed their poisonous lineage, and in the process had captured the engram sphere of Pontius Glaw. His family and their minions had attempted to sacrifice thousands of innocents in order to restore him to physicality. That, too, I had denied.
Once the affair had ended, I had been left with this casket full of heretical spite. In terms of technology alone, it was a wonder, and there was no telling what secrets the Pontius might have in it. So instead of destroying it, I had passed it into the safekeeping of Magos Geard Bure. Bure, I knew, would have the time and skill enough to unlock its technical marvels at least. And he was trustworthy.
But from time to time in that past hundred years, I had questioned the validity of that decision. In all honesty, I should have surrendered the Pontius to the Ordo Hereticus for examination and disposal. The fact that I hadn’t sometimes played on my conscience, for it suggested deceit and unwholesome subterfuge on my part. In the light of events in the past year, I found myself fighting back the notion that perhaps my accusers were right. Had it been the act of an unsound man to secret away such a radical entity?
Aemos had consoled my spirits, reminding me that the casket utilised mind-impulse technology undoubtedly stolen from the Cult Mechanicus. There was, he said, no question that such a device should be in the custody of the Adeptus priesthood.
‘Go on then,’ Pontius said. ‘Make your case. Why would I help you?’
‘I require specialist information that I’m certain you have. Certain lore.’
‘You are an inquisitor, Eisenhorn. All the resources of the Imperium are at your disposal. Am I to understand that, well, that your scope has become somewhat limited?’
I was damned if I was going to tell this monster of the straits I was in. And even though he was right in a way, there was no Imperial archive I knew of that could answer my questions.
‘What I need might be regarded as… proscribed knowledge.’
‘Ahhhhh…’
‘What? “Ah” what?’
Even without features or body language to read, Pontius seemed insufferably pleased with himself. ‘So you’ve finally reached that place. How wonderful.’
‘What place?’ I felt uncomfortable. I had been planning this interview for months, and now control was slipping entirely to Glaw.
‘The place where you cross the line.’
‘I hav–’
‘All inquisitors cross the line eventually.’
‘I tell y–’
‘All of them. It’s an occupational hazard.’
‘Listen to me, you worthless–’
‘Methinks Inquisitor Eisenhorn protests too much. The line, Gregor. The line! The line between order and chaos, between right and wrong, between mankind and man-unkind. I know it, because I’ve crossed it. Willingly, of course. Gladly. Skipping and dancing and delighting. For the likes of you, it is a more painful process.’
I rose. ‘I don’t think this conversation is going anywhere, Glaw. I’m leaving.’
‘So soon?’
‘Perhaps I’ll be back in another century or two.’
‘It was on Quenthus Eight, in the spring of 019.M41.’
I paused at the cell hatchway. ‘What was?’
‘The moment I crossed the line. Would you like to hear about it?’
I was rattled, but I returned to my seat on the steps. I knew what he was doing. Imprisoned in his casket without touch or smell or taste, without any sensory stimulation, Pontius Glaw craved company and conversation. I had learned that much during my long interrogations of him aboard the Essene ten decades before during the voyage to the remote system KCX-1288. Now he was simply feeding me morsels to make me stay and talk to him.
However, in a hundred years of captivity, he had never come close to revealing such intimate details of his personal history.
‘019.M41. A busy year. The buttress worlds of the far eastern rim were resisting a holy waaagh! by the greenskins, and two of the High Lords of Terra had been assassinated in as many months by disaffected Imperial families. There was talk of civil war. The sub-sector’s trader markets had crashed. Trade was bad. What a year. Saint Drache was martyred on Korynth. Billions starved in the Beznos famine.’
‘I have access to history texts, Pontius,’ I said dryly.
‘I was on Quenthus VIII, buying fighters for my pit-games. They’re a good breed, the Quenthi, long in the hams and quite belligerent. I was, perhaps, twenty-five. I forget exactly. I was in my prime, beautiful.’
There was a long silence while he considered this reflection. Light-sparks pulsed along his wires.
‘One of the pit-marshals at the amphitheatre I was visiting advised me to see a fighter who had been bought in from the very edges of the Ultima Segmentum. A great, tanned fellow from a feral world called Borea. His name was Aaa, which meant, in his tongue, “sword-cuts-meat-for-women-prizes”. Isn’t that lovely? If I had ever sired a son, a human one, I mean, I would have called him Aaa. Aaa Glaw. Quite a ring to it, eh?’
‘I’m still on the verge of leaving, Glaw.’
The voice from the casket chuckled. ‘This Aaa was a piece of work. His teeth were filed into points and his fingertips had been bound and treated with traditional unguents since his birth so that they had grown into claws. Claws, Eisenhorn! Fused, calcified hooks of keratin and callouses. I once saw him rip through chainmail with them. Anyway, he was a true find. They kept him shackled permanently. The pit-marshal told me that he’d torn a fellow prisoner’s arm off during transit, and scalped a careless stadium guard. With his teeth.’
‘Charming.’
‘I bought him, of course. I think he liked me. He had no real language, naturally, and his table manners! He slept in his own soil and rutted like a canine.’
‘No wonder he liked you.’
The frost crackled around the casket. ‘Cruel boy. I am a cultured man. Ha. I was a cultured man. Now I am an erudite and dangerous box. But don’t forget my learning and upbringing, Eisenhorn. You’d be amazed how easy it is for a well-raised and schooled son of the Imperium to slide across that line I mentioned.’
‘Go on. I’m sure you had a point to make.’
‘Aaa served me well. I won several fortunes on his pit-fights. I won’t pretend we ever became friends… one doesn’t become friends with a favourite carnodon now, does one? And one certainly never makes friends with a commodity. But we built an understanding over the years. I would visit him in his cell, unguarded, and he never touched me. He would halt out old myths of his home world, Borea. Vicious tales of barbary and murder. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The moment, the moment was there on Quenthus, in the amphitheatre, under the spring sun. The pit-marshal showed me Aaa, and tempted me to purchase him. Aaa looked at me, and I think he saw a kindred soul… which is probably why we bonded once he was mine. In his simple, broken speech, he implored me to buy him, telling me graphically what sport I would have of him. And to seal the deal, he offered me his torc.’
‘His torc?’
‘That’s right. The slaves were allowed to keep certain familiar items provided they weren’t potential weapons. Aaa wore a golden torc around his neck, the mark of his tribe. It was the most valuable thing he possessed. Actually, it was the only thing he possessed. But no matter… he offered it to me in return for me becoming his master. I took it, and, as I said, I bought him.’
‘And that was the line?’ I sat back, unimpressed.
‘Wait, wait… later, later that same day, I examined the torc. It was inlaid with astonishing technology. Borea might have been a beast-world by then, but millennia back, it had clearly been an advanced outpost of mankind. It had fallen into a feral dark age because Chaos had touched it, and that torc was a relic of the decline. Its forbidden, forgotten technology focussed the stuff of the Darkness into the wearer’s mind. No wonder Borea, where every adult male wore one, was a savage waste. I was intrigued. I put the torc on.’
‘You put it on?’
‘I was young and reckless, what can I say? I put it on. Within a few hours, the tendrils of the warp had suffused my receptive mind. And do you know what?’
‘What?’
‘It was wonderful! Liberating! I was alive to the real universe at last! I had crossed the line, and it was bliss. Suddenly I saw everything as it actually was, not as the Ministorum and the rot-hearted Emperor wanted to see it. Engulfing eternity! The fragility of the human race! The glories of the warp! The fleeting treasure of flesh! The incomparable sweetness of death! All of it!’
‘And you ceased to be Pontius Glaw, the seventh son of a respectable Imperial House, and became Pontius Glaw, the sadistic idolator and abomination?’
‘A boy’s got to have a hobby.’
‘Thank you for sharing this with me, Pontius. It has been revealing.’
‘I’m just getting started…’
‘Goodbye.’
‘Eisenhorn! Eisenhorn, wait! Please! I–’
The cell hatches clanged shut after me.
I waited two days before I returned to see him. He was sullen and moody this time.
I entered the cell and set down the tray I was carrying.
‘Don’t expect me to talk to you,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘I opened my soul to you the other day and you… walked out.’
‘I’m back now.’
‘Yes, you are. Closer to that line yet?’
‘You tell me.’ I leaned over and poured myself a large glass of amasec from the decanter on the tray. I rocked the glass a few times and then took a deep sip.
‘Amasec.’
‘Yes.’
‘Vintage?’
‘Fifty year old Gathalamor vintage, aged in burwood barrels.’
‘Is it… good?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘It is perfect.’
The casket sighed.
‘You were saying. About that line?’ I asked.
‘I… I was saying I was most annoyed with you,’ Pontius returned, stubbornly.
‘Oh.’ I casually slid a lho-stick from the paste-board tub I had backhanded from Tasaera Ungish’s stateroom. I lit it and took a deep drag, exhaling the smoke towards the infernal casket. Nayl had injected me with powerful anti-intoxicants and counter-opiate drugs just half an hour earlier, but I sat back and openly seemed to relish the smoke.
‘Is that a lho-stick?’
‘Yes, Pontius.’
‘Hmmm…’
‘You were saying?’
‘Is it good?’
‘You were saying?’
‘I… I’ve told you of my slip. My crossing of the line. What else do you want of me?’
‘The rest. You think I’ve crossed the line too, don’t you?’
‘Yes. It’s in your bearing. You seem like a man who has understood the wider significance of the warp.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I told you it happens to all inquisitors sooner or later. I can imagine you as a young man, stiff and puritanical, in the scholam. It must have seemed so simple to you back then. The light and the dark.’
‘Not so obvious these days.’
‘Of course not. Because the warp is in everything. It is there even in the most ordered things you do. Life would be brittle and flavourless without it.’
‘Like your life is now?’ I suggested, and took another sip.
‘Damn you!’
‘According to you, I’m already damned.’
‘Everyone is damned. Mankind is damned. The whole human species. Chaos and death are the only real truths of reality. To believe otherwise is ignorance. And the Inquisition… so proud and dutiful and full of its own importance, so certain that it is fighting against Chaos… is the most ignorant thing of all. Your daily work brings you closer and closer to the warp, increases your understanding of orderless powers. Gradually, without noticing it, even the most puritanical and rod-stiff inquisitor becomes seduced.’
‘I don’t agree.’
Pontius’s mood seemed to have brightened now we were engaged in debate again. ‘The first step is the knowledge. An inquisitor must understand the basic traits of Chaos in order to fight it. In a few years, he knows more about the warp than most untutored cultists. Then the second step: the moment he breaks the rules and allows some aspect of Chaos to survive or remain so that he can study it and learn from it. I wouldn’t even bother trying to deny that one, Eisenhorn. I’m right here, aren’t I?’
‘You are. But understanding is essential. Even a puritan will tell you that! Without it, the Inquisition’s struggle is hopeless.’
‘Don’t get me started on that,’ he chuckled. Then paused. ‘Describe the taste of that amasec in your mouth. The quality, the scent.’
‘Why?’
‘It is three hundred years since I have tasted anything. Smelt anything. Touched anything.’
I had feared my gambit with the amasec and the opiate too obvious, but it had drawn him in. ‘It feels like oil on my tongue, soft, body-heat. The aroma precedes the taste, like peat and pepper, spiced. The taste is a burn in the throat that lights a fire behind my heart.’
The casket made a long, mournful sound of tantalised regret.
‘The third step?’ I prompted.
‘The third step… the third step is the line itself. When the inquisitor becomes a radical. When he chooses to use Chaos against Chaos. When he employs the agencies of the warp. When he asks the heretical for help.’
‘I see.’
‘I’m sure you do. So… are you going to ask me to help you?’
‘Yes. Will you give me that help?’
‘It depends,’ the casket murmured. ‘What’s in it for me?’
I stubbed out the lho-stick. ‘Given what you’ve just said, I assume your reward would be the satisfaction of seeing me cross that line and damn myself.’
‘Ha ha! Very clever! I’m enjoying that part already. What else?’
I turned the glass in my hand, swilling the amber spirit around. ‘Magos Bure is a talented man. A master of machinery. Though I would never release you from imprisonment, I could perhaps ask him for a favour.’
‘A favour?’ Pontius echoed with trembling anticipation.
‘A body for you. A servitor chassis. The ability to walk, reach, hold, see. Perhaps even the finessing extras of sense actuators: rudimentary touch, smell, taste. That would be child’s play for him.’
‘Gods of the warp!’ he whispered.
‘Well?’
‘Ask. Ask me. Ask me, Eisenhorn.’
‘Let us talk for a while… on the subject of daemonhosts.’
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Fischig said to me.
‘Of course,’ I said. We had taken over the security office in Cinchare minehead as our base. Bequin and Aemos had set the place straight and got it running properly, and Medea, Inshabel, Nayl and Fischig patrolled the area regularly. Bure had provided servitor-stalkers as additional guards, and a vox-uplink had been established with the orbiting Essene to forewarn us of any arriving space traffic.
It was late one afternoon in the third week of our visit to the mining rock. I had just returned from my daily visit to Glaw’s cell in the Mechanicus annex and I stood with Fischig by the windows of the office, looking down into the plaza.
‘Really sure?’ he pressed.
‘I seem to remember him asking us the same thing when we sprang him from the Carnificina,’ said Bequin, coming over to join us. ‘Thanks to Osma and his ridiculous witch-hunt, we’ve been forced into a corner. If we can come through this successfully, we will redeem ourselves.’
Fischig snorted. ‘I just don’t like it. Not dealing with that butcher. Not promising him anything. I feel like we’ve crossed the line–’
‘What?’ I asked sharply. I had told them only the very sparest details of my conversations.
‘I said I felt like we’d crossed the line. What’s the matter?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing. How are the rest of the preparations going?’
I sensed Fischig wanted to have it out, but it was really too late for that. I deflected him with the subject change.
‘Your magos friend is working. Nayl took him the blade yesterday and showed him your notes and diagrams,’ he said.
‘The communiqués are all written, encrypted and sealed, ready to be sent,’ said Bequin. ‘Just give the word, and Ungish will transmit them. And I have the declaration here.’ She handed me a data-slate.
It was a carta extremis formally declaring Quixos Heretic and Extremis Diabolus, naming his crimes and given in my authority. It was dated the twentieth day of the tenth month, 340.M41. There was no location of issue, but Aemos had made certain all the other particulars were phrased precisely according to High Imperial Law and the statutes of the Inquisition.
‘Good. We’ll send that in a few days.’ I knew that the moment the carta was published, my agenda would be known. The scheme I was embarking on might take years to complete, and all that time I would be hunted. I really didn’t want to stir things up so soon.
‘How much longer will we be here?’ Bequin asked.
‘I don’t know. Another week? A month? Longer? It depends on how forthcoming Glaw decides to be.’
‘But you’ve got things from him already?’ asked Fischig.
‘Yes.’ Not too much, I hoped.
I walked through the empty streets of the minehead for an hour or two that evening to clear my mind. I knew damn well that I was choosing a dangerous path. I had to remain focussed or I risked losing control.
Once I’d got the upper hand with Glaw, I’d been playing with him during those early conversations. His talk of the line, his three-step description of the corruption that awaited an imprudent inquisitor… that was nothing new to me. I had indulged him so that he might feel superior and smug. Any inquisitor worth the rosette knew the perils and temptations that surrounded him.
But it didn’t stop his words from cutting me. Every puritanical Commodus Voke was a potential Quixos. When Glaw said that the line was often crossed without it being recognised, he was right. I’d met enough radicals to know that.
I had always, always prided myself on my puritanical stance, moderate and Amalathian though it might be. I deplored the radical heresies. That’s why I wanted Quixos.
But I worried still. I considered what I was doing to be risky, of course, but also pragmatic given my difficult situation. To destroy Quixos, I had to get past his daemonhosts, and that required power, knowledge and expertise. And I could no longer turn to the Holy Inquisition for support. But had I crossed the line? Was I becoming guilty of sins that could so easily escalate into radical abomination? Was I so obsessed with bringing Quixos to justice that I was abandoning my own principles?
I was sure I was not. I knew what I was doing, and I was taking every precaution I could to manage the more dangerous elements I was employing. I was pure and true, even now.
And if I wasn’t, how could I tell?
I climbed an observation mast that rose above the mine settlement and lingered for a while in the caged glass blister at the top, looking out across the town’s skyline to the ragged blue landscape of Cinchare, and the gliding stars beyond it. Shoals of meteors burned bright lines down the sky.
There was a noise on the stairs behind me. It was Nayl.
He put away his sidearm. ‘It’s you,’ he said, joining me in the blister. ‘I was patrolling and I saw the tower door open. Everything all right?’
I nodded. ‘You fight dirty sometimes, don’t you, Harlon?’
He looked at me quizzically and scratched his shaved scalp. ‘Not sure I know what you mean, boss,’ he said.
‘All those years, bounty hunting… and I’ve seen you fight, remember? Sometimes you have to break the rules to win.’
‘I suppose so. When all’s said and done, you use whatever works. I’m not proud of some of my more… ruthless moments. But they’re necessary. I’ve always been of the opinion that fairplay is overrated. The bastard trying to skin you won’t be playing fair, that’s for sure. You do what you have to do.’
‘The end justifies the means?’
He raised his eyebrows and laughed. ‘Now that’s different. That kind of thinking gets a man into trouble. There are some means that no end will ever justify. But fighting dirty, occasionally, is no bad thing. Neither’s breaking the rules. Provided you remember one thing.’
‘Which is?’
‘You have to understand the rules in the first place if you’re going to break them.’
Apart from my daily visits to Glaw in the annex, I also spent time with Bure. He was labouring in his workshops, assisted by servitors and his tech-adepts. He had thrown himself totally into the tasks I had set him. Though he never said, I think he saw it as returning with interest my efforts in the battle with the Lith.
He had also listened without alarm when Aemos and I had related the history of the recent past. It felt like a confession. I explained the carta out against me, my rogue status. He had accepted my innocence without question. As he put it, ‘Hapshant wouldn’t have raised a radical. It’s the rest of the galaxy that’s wrong.’
That was good enough for him. I was quietly moved.
One day in the sixth week of our increasingly prolonged stay, he called me to his workshop.
It lay beneath the main chapel of the annex and was two storeys deep, a veritable smithy alive with engineering machines and apparatus the purposes of which baffled me. Steam-presses hammered and banged, and screw-guns wailed. Quite apart from my own projects, there was much work to do repairing the annex and the translithopede. I walked down through the swathes of steam and found Bure supervising two servitors who were machining symbols into a two-metre long pole of composite steel.
‘Eisenhorn,’ he said, raising his bright green eye-lights to look at me.
‘How goes the work?’
‘I feel like a warsmith, back in the foundries of the forge worlds, when I was flesh. The specifications you have asked for are difficult, but not impossible. I enjoy a challenge.’
I took several sheets of paper from my coat pocket and handed them to him. ‘More notes, taken during my last interview with Glaw. I’ve underlined the key remarks. Here, he suggests electrum for the cap piece.’
‘I was going to use iron, or an iron alloy. Electrum. That makes sense.’ He took my notes over to a raised planning table that was littered with scrolls, holoquills, measuring tools and data-slates. Pages of notes that I had already provided him with were piled up, along with the psychometrically captured images Ungish had drawn from my mind of the Cadian pylons, Cherubael, Prophaniti, and the ornaments he had worn.
‘I’m also pondering the lodestone for the cap. I considered pyraline or one of the other tele-empathic crystallines like epidotrichite, but I doubt any of them would have the durability for your purposes. Certainly not for more than one or two uses. I also thought of tabular zanthroclase.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A silicate we use in mind-impulse devices. But I’m not convinced. I have a few other possibilities in mind.’ It was a measure of the trust Bure showed me that he felt he could mention such Cult Mechanicus secrets so freely. I felt honoured.
‘Here’s the haft,’ he said, showing me to the etching bench where the two servitors were machining the decoration of the long pole.
‘Steel?’
‘Superficially. There’s a titanium core surrounded by an adamantium sleeve under the steel jacket. The titanium is drilled with channels that carry the conductive lapidorontium wires.’
‘It looks perfect,’ I said.
‘It is perfect. Virtually perfect. It’s machined to within a nanometre of your measurements. Let me show you the sword.’
I followed him to a workbench at the far end of the smithy where the sword lay on a rest under a dust sheet.
‘What do you think?’ he asked, drawing the cloth back.
Barbarisater was as beautiful as I remembered it. I admired the fresh pentagrammatic wards that had been etched in the blade since I had last seen it, ten on each side.
‘It is a remarkable artifact. I was almost unwilling to make the alterations you requested. As it was, I wore out eight adamantium drill bits on this side alone. The hardened steel skin of the blade around the solid core has been folded and beaten nine hundred times. It is beyond anything we can manufacture today.’
I would owe Clan Esw Sweydyr for this weapon, as I already owed them for Arianrhod’s life. I should have returned it to their care, for it was part of their clan legacy and usuril, or ‘living story’. It was mine to safeguard, not to take, and certainly not to deface this way. But face to face with Prophaniti at Kasr Gesh I had learned two things. Indeed, that monstrous thing had told them to me. Pentagrammatic wards worked against daemonhosts, but they were no stronger than the weapon that bore them.
To my certain knowledge, there were few finer, stronger blades in human space. I would make my peace and apologies to the clans of Carthae in time, fates permitting.
I went to touch it, but Bure stopped me. ‘It is still resting. We must respect its anima. In a few days, you can take it. Train with it well. You must know it intimately before you use it in combat.’
He accompanied me to the door of the forge. ‘Both weapons must be blessed and consecrated before use. I cannot do that, though I can ceremonially dedicate their manufacture to the Machine God.’
‘I have already planned for their consecration,’ I said. ‘But I would welcome your ceremony. When I go against Quixos, I can think of no more potent a patron god to be looking down over me than your Machine Lord.’
‘We will be leaving in a few days,’ I told him.
The casket was silent for a while. ‘I will miss our conversations, Eisenhorn.’
‘Nevertheless, I have to go.’
‘You think you’re ready?’
‘I think this part of my readiness is complete. Is there anything else you can tell me?’
‘I have been wondering that. I cannot think of anything. Except…’
‘Except what?’
The lights around the engram sphere twinkled. ‘Except this. Apart from everything you’ve learned from me, the secrets, the lore, the mysteries, you must know that going after this foe is… dangerous.’
I laughed involuntarily. ‘I think I’ve worked that much out already, Pontius!’
‘No, you don’t know what I mean. You have the determination, I know, the ambition, I know that too – you have the knowledge, we assume, and the weapons too, we hope – but unless your mind is prepared, you will perish. Instantly, and no ward or staff or blade or rune will save you.’
‘You sound like… you care if I lose.’
‘Do I? Then consider this, Gregor Eisenhorn. You may deem me a monster beneath contempt, but if I do care, what does that say about me? Or you?’
‘Goodbye, Pontius Glaw,’ I said, and closed the cell hatches behind me for the last time.
I will record this thought now, because I feel I must. For all that Pontius Glaw was… and for all that came later, I cannot shake my bond to him, though I try. There, in the cell on Cinchare, and a century before in the dim hold of the Essene, we had spoken together for hundreds of hours. I had no doubt that he was an unforgivably evil thing, and that he would have killed me in a second during those times had he been allowed the chance. But he was a being of extraordinary intellect, wit and learning. Admirable in so many, strange ways. But for that torc, Aaa’s torc, back on that spring day on Quenthus, his life may have been different.
And if it had been different, and we had met, we would have been the greatest of friends.
We had stayed on Cinchare for three months. Too long, in my opinion, but there had been no way to speed the preparatory work.
We celebrated Candlemas in the little chapel of the Ministorum off the plaza, lighting candles to welcome the new Imperial year, and lighting others to commemorate the town’s dead. Aemos and Bequin read the lessons, for all of the Ecclesiarchs were amongst the remembered dead. Bure and his tech-adepts worshipped with us, and he hovered to the choir rail under the great statue of the God-Emperor to lead us in the devotional prayers.
I was fretful and edgy. Partly because I was anxious to get underway now, but also because of the lore in my head, the mysteries to which Glaw had introduced me. So much, so much of it dark. I knew I was a changed man, and that change was permanent.
But I considered that a year before – just a year, though it felt much, much longer – I had been a helpless prisoner in the bleak Carnificina, and Candlemas had passed me by before I had realised it.
I was not that man any more either, and that change had been nothing to do with Pontius Glaw’s whispered secrets. For all the darkness swilling in my head, it was better to be here, strong and ready, fortified, in the company of friends and allies.
There was no choirmaster to play the organ, so Medea had brought her father’s Glavian lyre, and played the Holy Triumph of the Golden Throne so that we could all sing.
That night, we feasted in the refectory of the Cult Mechanicus to honour the start of 341.M41. Maxilla, who remained on duty aboard the Essene, sent a banquet to us on a shuttle, along with servitors to wait upon us. One of them reported that a vast storm of meteors had swarmed across the sky at the stroke of midnight, lighting the night side of Cinchare with their fires. Nayl growled that this was a bad omen, but Inshabel insisted it was a good one.
I suppose it rather depended which part of the vast spread of the Imperium you came from.
The others spent the next two days packing up and making ready to leave, but Aemos and I attended the dedication ceremony in the cimeliarch of the Adeptus Mechanicus annex.
Machine Cult servitors chanted in a modulated binary code and beat upon kettledrums. Magos Bure was clad in his orange robes with a white stole over his shoulders.
He blessed the weapons he had made in turn, taking one then the other from the two tech-adepts who stood in attendance.
Barbarisater, the pentagrammatic power sword, lifted to the light that speared down from the eyes of the Machine God’s altar. Then the runestaff, Bure’s masterpiece.
He had fashioned a cap-piece for the rune-etched steel pole out of electrum in the form of a sun-flare corona. In the centre of it was a human skull, marked with the thirteenth sign of castigation. The skull was the lodestone, carved by Bure himself into a perfect facsimile of my own skull, as measured by radiative scans. He had tried and rejected over twenty different tele-empathic crystals before finding one he trusted would be up to the task.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, taking it from him. ‘What crystal did you use in the end?’
‘What else?’ he said. ‘I carved that copy of your skull from the Lith itself.’
He came to see us off, to the docking barn where the gun-cutter had sat for so long. Nayl and Fischig were carrying the last things aboard. We had broken astropathic silence at last the night before, and informed Imperial Allied, Ortog Promethium, the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Imperial authorities of the fate that had befallen Cinchare minehead. We would be long gone before any of them arrived to begin recovery work.
Bure said farewell to Aemos, who shuffled away to the cutter.
‘There’s nothing adequate I can say,’ I told the magos.
‘Nor I to you, Eisenhorn. What of… the inmate?’
‘I’d like you to do what I asked you. Give him mobility at least. But nothing more. He must remain a prisoner, now and always.’
‘Very well. I expect to hear all about your victory, Eisenhorn. I will be waiting.’
‘May the Holy Machine God and the Emperor himself protect your systems, Geard.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. Then he added something that quite took me aback, given his total belief and reliance on technology.
‘Good luck.’
I walked to the cutter. He watched me for a moment, then disappeared, closing the inner hatch after him.
That was the last time I ever saw him.
From Cinchare, the Essene ran back, fast and impatient, into the great territories of the Segmentum Obscurus, a three-month voyage that we broke twice.
At Ymshalus, we stopped to transmit the prepared communiqués, all twenty of them. Inshabel and Fischig left us too at that point; Inshabel to secure passage to Elvara Cardinal to begin his work there, and Fischig for the long haul back to Cadia. It would be months, if not years, before we saw them again. That was a sorrowful farewell.
At Palobara, that crossroads on the border, busy with trading vessels and obscura caravans guarded by mercenary gunships, we stopped and transmitted the carta declaration. There was no going back now. Here, I parted company with Bequin, Nayl and Aemos, all of whom were heading back to the Helican sub-sector by a variety of means. Bequin’s goal was Messina, and Aemos, with Nayl to watch over him, was bound for Gudrun. Another hard parting.
The Essene continued on for Orbul Infanta. This was now a lonely, waiting time. Each night, the remains of my company gathered in Maxilla’s dining room and ate together: myself, Medea, Maxilla and Ungish. Ungish was no company, and even Medea and Maxilla had lost their sparkle. They missed the others, and I think they knew how dark and tough the time ahead would be.
I spent my days reading in the cabin library of the cutter, or playing regicide with Medea. I practised with Barbarisater in the hold spaces, slowly mastering the tricks of its weight and balance. I would never match a Carthae-born master, but I had always been good enough with a sword. Barbarisater was an extraordinary piece. I came to know it and it came to know me. Within a week, it was responding to my will, channelling it so hard that the rune marks glowed with manifesting psychic power. It had a will of its own, and once it was in my hands, ready, swinging, it was difficult to stop it pulling and slicing where it pleased. It hungered for blood… or if not blood, then at least the joy of battle. On two separate occasions, Medea came into the hold to see if I was bored enough for another round of regicide, and I had to restrain the steel from lunging at her.
Its sheer length was a problem: I had never used a blade so long. I worried that I would do my own extremities harm. But practice gave me the gift of it: long-armed, flowing moves, sweeping strokes, a tight field of severing. Within a fortnight, I had mastered the knack of spinning it over in my hand, my open palm and the pommel circling around each other like the discs of a gyroscope. I was proud of that move. I think Barbarisater taught it to me.
I worked with the rune staff too, to get used to its feel and balance. Though my aim was appalling, especially over distances further than three or four metres, I became able to channel my will, through my hands, into its haft and then project it from the crystal skull in the form of electrical bolts that dented deck plating.
There was, of course, no way I could test it for its primary use.
We reached the shrine world of Orbul Infanta at the end of the twelfth week. I had three tasks to perform here, and the first was the consecration of the sword and the staff.
With Ungish and Medea, I travelled down to the surface in one of the Essene’s unremarkable little launches rather than the gun-cutter. We went to Ezropolis, one of Orbul Infanta’s ten thousand shrine cities, in the baking heartland of the western continent.
Orbul Infanta is an Ecclesiarchy governed world, famously blessed with a myriad shrines, each one dedicated to a different Imperial saint, and each one the heart of a city state. The Ecclesiarch chose it as a shrine world because it lay on a direct line between Terra and Avignor. The most popular and thriving shrine cities lay on the coast of the eastern continent, and billions of the faithful flocked to them each year. Ezropolis was far away from such bustle.
Saint Ezra, who had been martyred in 670.M40, was the patron saint of undertaking and setting forth, which I took to be appropriate. His city was a shimmering growth of steel, glass and stone rising from the sun-cooked plains of the mid-west. According to the guide slates, all water was pumped in from the western coast along vast pipelines two thousand kilometres long.
We made planetfall at Ezra Plain, the principal landing facility, and joined the queues of pilgrims climbing the looping stairs into the citadel. Most were clad in yellow, the saint’s colour, or had tags or swathes of yellow cloth adorning them. All carried lit candles or oil lamps, despite the unforgiving light. Ezra had promised to light a flame in the darkness to mark all those setting forth, and consequently his hagial colour was flame yellow.
We had done the necessary research. I wore a suit of black linen with a sash of yellow silk and carried a burning votive candle. Ungish was draped in a pale yellow robe the colour of the sun at dawn, and clutched a plaster figurine of the saint. Medea wore a dark red bodyglove under a tabard on which was sewn a yellow aquila symbol. She pushed the small grav-cart on which Barbarisater and the staff lay, wrapped in yellow velvet. It was common for pilgrims to cart their worldly goods to the shrine of Ezra, in order that they might be blessed before any kind of undertaking or setting forth could properly get underway. We blended easily with the teaming lines of sweating, anxious devotees.
At the top of the stairs, we entered the blessed cool of the streets, where the shadows of the buildings fell across us. It was nearly midday, and Ecclesiarchy choirs were singing from the platforms that topped the high, slender towers. Bells were chiming, and yellow sapfinches were being released by the thousand from basket cages in the three city squares. The thrumming ochre clouds of birds swirled up above us, around us, singing in bewilderment. They were brought in each day, a million at a time, from gene-farm aviaries on the coast, where they were bred in industrial quantities. They were not native to this part of Orbul Infanta, and would perish within hours of release into the parched desert. It was reported that the plains around Ezropolis were ankle-deep with the residue of their white bones and bright feathers.
But still, they were the symbol of undertaking and setting forth, and so they were set loose by the million to certain death every midday. There is a terrible irony to this which I have often thought of bringing to the attention of the Ecclesiarchy.
We went to the Cathedral of Saint Ezra Outlooking, a significant temple on the western side of the city. On every eave and wall top we passed, sapfinches perched and twittered with what seemed to me to be indignation.
The cathedral itself was admittedly splendid, a Low Gothic minster raised in the last thirty years and paid for by subscriptions generated by the city fathers and priesthood. Every visitor who entered the city walls was obliged to deposit two high denomination coins into the take boxes at either side of the head of the approach stairs. A yellow robed adept of the priesthood was there to see it was done. The box on the left was the collection for the maintenance and construction of the city temples. The one on the right was the sapfinch fund.
We went inside Saint Ezra Outlooking, into the cool of the marble nave where the faithful were bent in prayer and the hard sunlight made coloured patterns on everything as it slanted through the huge, stained glass windows. The cool air was sweetened by the smoke of sweetwood burners, and livened by the jaunty singing from the cantoria.
I left Medea and Ungish in the arched doorway beside a tomb on which lay the graven image of a Space Marine of the Raven Guard Chapter, his hands arranged so as to indicate which holy crusade he had perished in.
I found the provost of the cathedral, and explained to him what I wanted. He looked at me blankly, fidgeting with his yellow robes, but I soon made him understand by depositing six large coins into his alms chest, and another two into his hand.
He ushered me into a baptism chancel, and I beckoned my colleagues to follow. Once all of us were inside, he drew shut the curtains and opened his breviary. As he began the rite, Medea unwrapped the devices and laid them on the edge of the benitier. The provost mumbled on and, keeping his eyes fixed on the open book so he wouldn’t lose his place, raised and unscrewed a flask of chrism with which he anointed both the staff and the sword.
‘In blessing and consecrating these items, I worship the Emperor who is my god, and charge those who bring these items forth that they do so without taint of concupiscence. Do you make that pledge?’
I realised he was looking at me. I raised my head from the kneeling bow I had adopted. Concupiscence. A desire for the forbidden. Did I dare make that vow, knowing what I knew?
‘Well?’
‘I am without taint, puritus,’ I replied.
He nodded and continued with the consecration.
The first part of my business was done. We went out into the courtyard in front of the cathedral.
‘Take these back to the launch and stow them safely,’ I told Medea, indicating the swaddled weapons on the cart.
‘What’s concupiscence?’ she asked.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said.
‘Did you just lie, Gregor?’
‘Shut up and go on with you.’
Medea wheeled the cart away through the pilgrim crowds.
‘She’s a sharp girl, heretic,’ Ungish whispered.
‘Actually, you can shut up too,’ I said.
‘I damn well won’t,’ she snapped. ‘This is it.’
‘What? “It”?’
‘In my dreams, I saw you foreswear in front of an Imperial altar. I saw it happen, and my death followed.’
I watched the sapfinches spiralling in the air above the yard.
‘Deja vu.’
‘I know deja vu from a dream,’ said Ungish sourly. ‘I know deja vu from my backside.’
‘The God-Emperor watches over us,’ I reassured her.
‘Yes, I know he does,’ she said. ‘I just think he doesn’t like what he sees.’
We waited until evening in the yard, buying hot loaves, wraps of diced salad and treacly black caffeine from street vendors. Ungish didn’t eat much. Long shadows fell across the yard in the late afternoon light. I voxed Medea. She was safely back aboard the launch, waiting for us.
I was waiting to complete the second of my tasks. This was the appointed day, and the appointed hour was fast approaching. This would be the first test of the twenty communiqués I had sent out. One had been to Inquisitor Gladus, a man I admired, and had worked with effectively thirty years before during the P’glao Conspiracy. Orbul Infanta was within his canon. I had written to him, laying out my case and asking for his support. Asking him to meet me here, at this place, at this hour.
It was, like all the messages, a matter of trust. I had only written to men or women I felt were beyond reproach, and who, no matter what they thought of me, might do me the grace of meeting with me to discuss the matter of Quixos. If they rejected me or my intent, that was fine. I didn’t expect any of them to turn me in or attempt to capture me.
We waited. I was impatient, edgy… edgy still with the dark mysteries Pontius Glaw had planted in my head. I hadn’t slept well in four months. My temper was short.
I expected Gladus to come, or at least send some kind of message. He might be detained or delayed, or caught up in his own noble business. But I didn’t think he’d ignore me. I searched the evening crowds for some trace of his long-haired, bearded form, his grey robes, his barb-capped staff.
‘He’s not coming,’ said Ungish.
‘Oh, give it a rest.’
‘Please, inquisitor, I want to go. My dream…’
‘Why don’t you trust me, Ungish? I will protect you,’ I said. I opened my black linen coat so she could see the laspistol holstered under my left arm.
‘Why?’ she fretted. ‘Because you’re playing with fire. You’ve crossed the line.’
I balked. ‘Why did you say that?’ I asked, hearing Pontius’s words loud in my head.
‘Because you have, damn you! Heretic! Bloody heretic!’
‘Stop it!’
She got to her feet from the courtyard bench unsteadily. Pilgrims were turning to look at the sound of her outburst.
‘Heretic!’
‘Stop it, Tasaera! Sit down! No one’s going to hurt you!’
‘Says you, heretic! You’ve damned us all with your ways! And I’m the one who’s going to pay! I saw it in my dream… this place, this hour… your lie at the altar, the circling birds…’
‘I didn’t lie,’ I said, tugging her back down onto the bench.
‘He’s coming,’ she whispered.
‘Who? Gladus?’
She shook her head. ‘Not Gladus. He’s never coming. None of them are coming. They’ve all read your pretty, begging letters and erased them. You’re a heretic and they won’t begin to deal with you.’
‘I know the people I’ve written to, Ungish. None of them would dismiss me so.’
She looked round into my face, her head-cage hissing as it adjusted. Her eyes were full of tears.
‘I’m so afraid, Eisenhorn. He’s coming.’
‘Who is?’
‘The hunter. That’s all my dream showed. A hunter, blank and invisible.’
‘You worry too much. Come with me.’
We went back into the Cathedral of Saint Ezra Outlooking, and took seats in the front of the ranks of carrels. Evening sunlight raked sidelong through the windows. The statue of the saint, raised behind the rood screen, looked majestic.
‘Better now?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she snivelled.
I kept glancing around, hoping that Gladus would appear. Straggles of pilgrims were arriving for the evening devotion.
Maybe he wasn’t coming. Maybe Ungish was right. Maybe I was more of a pariah than I imagined, even to old friends and colleagues.
Maybe Gladus had read my humble communiqué and discarded it with a curse. Maybe he had sent it to the Arbites… or the Ecclesiarchy… or the Inquisition’s Officio of Internal Prosecution.
‘Two more minutes,’ I assured her. ‘Then we’ll go.’ It was long past the hour I had asked Gladus to meet me.
I looked about again. Pilgrims were by now flooding into the cathedral through the main doors.
There was a gap in the flow, a space where a man should have been. It was quite noticeable, with the pilgrims jostling around it but never entering it.
My eyes widened. In the gap was a glint of energy, like a side-flash from a mirror shield.
‘Ungish,’ I hissed, reaching for my weapon.
Bolt rounds came screaming down the nave towards me from the gap. Pilgrims shrieked in panic and fled in all directions.
‘The hunter!’ Ungish wailed. ‘Blank and invisible!’
He was that. With his mirror shield activated, he was just a heat-haze blur, marked only by the bright flare of his weapon.
Mass panic had seized the cathedral. Pilgrims were trampling other pilgrims in their race to flee.
The backs of the carrels exploded with wicked punctures as the bolt rounds blew through them.
I fired back, down the aisle, with tidy bursts of las-fire.
‘Thorn wishes Aegis, craven hounds at the hindmost!’
That was all I was able to send before a bolt round glanced sidelong into my neck and threw me backwards, destroying my vox headset in the process.
I rolled on the marble floor, bleeding all over the place.
‘Eisenhorn! Eisenhorn!’ Ungish bawled and then screamed in agony.
I saw her thrown back through the panelled wood of the box pews, demolishing them. A bolt round had hit her square in the stomach. Bleeding out, she writhed on the floor amid the wood splinters, wailing and crying.
I tried to crawl across to her as further, heedless bolt-fire fractured the rest of the front pews.
I looked up. Witchfinder Arnaut Tantalid disengaged his mirror shield and gazed down at me.
‘You are an accursed heretic, Eisenhorn, and that fact is now proven beyond doubt by the carta issued for you. In the name of the Ministorum of Mankind, I claim your life.’