by Dan Abnett
Beldame Sadia was a heretic witch and consorted with xenos breeds. She had a particular fascination with the beliefs and necromancies of the dark eldar, and had made it her life-cause to tap that foul alien heritage for power and lore. She was one of the only humans I knew of who had struck collaborative pacts with their wretched kabals. Rumour had it she had been recently initiated into the cult of Kaela Mensha Khaine, in his aspect as the Murder-God beloved of the eldar renegades.
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 raptured 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.
TWO
Something so typically Betancore. My fallen.
The summons.
From the moment I slipped into unconsciousness at the feet of the vicious Witchfinder Tantalid, I knew nothing more until I woke, twenty-nine hours later, aboard my gun-cutter. I remembered nothing about the seven attempts to shock my system back to life, the cardiac massages, the anti-venom shots injected directly into my heart muscle, the fight to make me live again. I learned all about it later, as I slowly recovered. For days, I was as weak as a feline whelp.
Most particularly, I knew nothing about the way Tantalid had been denied. Bequin told me, a day or two after my first awakening. It had been something so typically Betancore.
Alizebeth had been hard on my heels up the stairs from the sacrarium, in time to see Tantalid's arrival. She had known him at once. The Witchfinder is notorious throughout the sub-sector.
He'd been about to kill me, and I was unconscious at his feet, going into anaphylactic shock with the venom bonding and seething in my veins.
She'd cried out, fumbling for her weapon.
Then light - hard, powerful light - had streamed in through the stained glass windows. There was a roaring sound. My gun-cutter, its lamps on full beam, rose to a hover over the rained chapel, lighting up the night. Guessing what was about to follow, Bequin had thrown herself down.
Betancore's voice had boomed out from the hull tannoy of the hovering gunship.
'Imperial Inquisition! Step away from the inquisitor now!'
Tantalid had squinted up into the glare, his stringy tortoise head turning in the rim of his massive carapace armour.
'Ministorum officer!' he had yelled back, his voice amplified by his suit's vox-unit. 'Back off! Back off now! This heretic is mine!'
Bequin grinned as she told me Betancore's response. 'Never argue with a gun-cutter, you asshole.'
The slaved servitors in the cutter's blunt wingtips opened fire, hosing the chapel with autocannon shells. The stained glass windows had all shattered, statues had been decapitated, flagstones had disintegrated. Hit at least once, Tantalid had fallen backwards into the dust and debris. His body had not been found, so I presumed the bastard had survived. But he had been smart enough to flee.
My prone body had not been touched, even though the chapel around me had been peppered with fire.
Typical Betancore bravado. Typical Betancore finesse.
She was just like her damned father.
'Send her to me/ I told Bequin as I lay back in my cot, half-dead and feeling terrible.
Medea Betancore looked in a few minutes later. Like her father, Midas, she was clad in the red-piped black suit of a Glavian pilot, and she proudly wore his old cerise, embroidered jacket.
Her skin, like Midas's, like all that of all Glavians, was dark. She grinned at me.
'I owe you,' I said.
Medea shook her head. 'Nothing my father wouldn't have done.' She sat on the foot of my cot.
'He'd have killed Tantalid, though,' she decided.
'He was a better shot/
That grin again, pearl white teeth framed by ebony skin.
'Yeah, he was that/
'But you'll do/ I smiled.
She saluted and left.
Midas Betancore had been dead for twenty-six years. I missed him still. He was the closest thing to a friend I had ever had. Bequin and Aemos, they were allies, and I trusted them with my life. But Midas...
May the God-Emperor rot Fayde Thuring for taking him. May the God-Emperor lead me to Fayde Thuring one day so that I and Medea may avenge Midas.
Medea had never known her father. She'd been born a month after his death, raised by her mother on Glavia, and had come into my service by chance. I was her godfather, a promise to Midas. Duty bound, I had visited Glavia for her ascension to adulthood, and watched her drive a Glavia long-prow through the vortex rapids of the Stilt Hills
during the Rites of Majority. One glimpse of her skills had convinced me.
Arianrhod Esw Sweydyr was dead. So were Gonvax and Qus. The battle in the sacrarium had been fierce. Ravenor had killed the raging haemoncu-lus, but only after it had ripped open his belly and taken off Zu Zeng's left ear.
Gideon Ravenor was in intensive care in the main city infirmary of Lethe. We would collect him once he was out of danger.
I wondered how long that would be. I wondered how he would be. He had loved Arianrhod, loved her dearly. I prayed this loss would not set him back too far.
I mourned Qus and the swordswoman. Qus had been with, me for nineteen years. That Darknight in the chapel had robbed me of so much.
Qus was buried with full honours in the Imperial Guard Memorial Cenotaph at Lethe Majeure.
Arianrhod was burned on a bare hill west of the salt-licks. I was too weak to attend either service.
Aemos brought the sabre Barbarisater to me after the pyre. I wrapped it in a vizzy-dofh and a silk sheet. I knew I was duty bound to return it to the tribal elders of the Esw Sweydyr on Carthae before long. That would mean a round trip of at least a year. I had no time for it. I put the wrapped sword in my safebox. It barely fitted.
As I worked my way back to health, I considered Tantalid. Arnaut Tantalid had risen from the rank of confessor militant in the Missionaria Galaxia seventy years before to become one of the Ministorum's most feared and ruthless witch-hunters. Like many of his breed, he followed the doctrines of Sebastian Thor with such unswerving precision it bordered on clinical obsession.
To most of the common folk of the Imperium, there would be blessed litde to choose between an Ordo Xenos inquisitor such as myself and an ecclesiarchy witchkiller like Tantalid. We both hunt out the damning darkness that stalks mankind, we are both figures of fear and dread, we are both, so it seems, laws unto ourselves.
Twinned though we may be in so many ways, we could not be more distinct. It is my personal belief that the Adeptus Ministorum, the Imperium's vast organ of faith and worship, should focus its entire attention on the promulgation of the true church of the God-Emperor and leave the persecution of heretics to the Inquisition. Our jurisdictions often clash. There have, to my certain knowledge, been two wars of faith in the last century provoked and sustained by just such rivalry.
Tantalid and I had locked horns twice before. On Bradell's World, five decades earlier, we had faced each other across the marble floor of a synod court, arguing for the right to extradite the psyker Elbone Parsuval. On that
occasion, he had triumphed, thanks mainly to the strict Thorian mindset of the Ministorum elders of Bradell's World.
Then, just eight years ago, our paths had crossed again on Kuuma.
Tantalid's fanatical hatred - indeed, I would venture, fear - of the psyker was by then insurmountable. I made no secret of the fact that I employed psychic methods in the pursuit of my work. There were psychic adepts in my staff, and I myself had worked to develop my own psychic abilities over the years. Such is my right, as an authorised bearer of the Inquisition's seal.