by Dan Abnett
We headed for the light.
We emerged high on the curving upper face of the saruthi edifice. It was cold, and the wind that came across the segmented ridges of the polished white roof was brisk and full of the odours of smoke, fyceline and prome-thium.
We were at a dizzying height. The pearly flanks of the vast structure arced away to a ground far below and the surface was hard and polished like ice. Bequin slipped, and I managed to grab her before she slid away down the curve.
From up here, high in the alien sky, we could see across the lakes of fire and the vast smoke banks that roiled away for hundreds of kilometres. We could see flocks of troopships soaring up and away through the smoke cover towards the parent ships in orbit. On the flats of white mud far beneath us, Imperial troops ran to waiting dropships, discarding packs and helmets and even weapons in their haste to leave. Tanks and armoured carriers wallowed and puffed through the wet mud and up onto the tongue-like ramps of heavy lifters. Shells and las-fire flickered across the lakes and mud as the remaining heretic forces fought on heedless.
Lances and forks of dazzling energy bit down from the clouds, murdering the landscape. Obeying Molitor's instructions to the letter, Admiral Spatian was levelling the area. All five of us inquisitors, along with Cynewolf and key Deathwatchers and selected officers of the invasion force, had been given the code words to unleash this doom. Molitor had sealed our fate. Once given, Sanction Extremis could not be revoked, even if my vox had been working instead of crippled by the electromagnetic bursts that accompanied every orbital strike. As per the battle plans, Spatian was systematically wasting the invasion site as fast as possible, even at the cost of his own retreating ground forces.
Another saruthi edifice, twenty kilometres away, died. Shaped in a form that suggested a nautilus shell, its opalescent curves were cracked and split by blue-hot heavy lasers. The die-straight beams came down through the clouds from ships so far up they were invisible, and tore through the edifice like testamental judgment. Waves of fighter-bombers swept in, sowing payloads of munitions that bloomed in rippling seas of explosions. Guided warheads, sleek like airborne sharks, whined overhead on the last stage of their first and final journey from starship to target.
The edifice ruptured and blew out. Light-shock lit the hemisphere. A towering column of white ash-smoke rose, folding into a fifteen-kilometre torus-shaped cloud.
The sight was stunning, shocking. Bequin and I gazed at it. A few heartbeats later it was repeated behind us, forty kilometres distant, as another saruthi edifice was annihilated.
The edifice on whose smoothly curving upper surfaces we now stood was undoubtedly going to go the same way soon. Even now, I knew, the co-ordinates were being loaded into the fleet's gunnery servitors.
We ran along the lip of another curved segment. Afterburners red against the black smoke, more dropships came in, heading towards cheering, gesticulating huddles of Mirepoix infantry out on the flats. I was astounded at the selfless courage of the dropship crews. Spatian's bombardment wasn't waiting for them to move in and pull out. They were risking everything to make the surface run and retrieve as many troopers as they could.
'Gregor!' Bequin shouted in my ear.
I turned. Down the shell-form span of the roof behind us, Molitor and his henchman had appeared out of the blast hole. Unsteady, they scrambled up after us.
A las-shot whined past me, kissing the pearly surface and leaving a burn-scar.
'The primer, you whoreson bastard! Give me the primer!' Molitor yelled.
I gave him a full clip of bolt rounds instead.
The first of the thundering tracer shots splintered chunks out of the edifice roof. Then I hit and exploded his left thigh, his belly and his throat.
Konrad Molitor bucked and twitched as the rounds tore through him, and then fell. His mauled body slid down the curve of the roof and disappeared, leaving a smear of blood behind it.
His henchman advanced, heedless of the shots, throwing off his hooded robe.
He was naked beneath it. Tall, well muscled, with a golden cast to his skin. His face was handsome and tiny residual horns sprouted from his skull.
His eyes were blank.
My prophetic dreams were made flesh.
Terror seized me, turned my heart inside out.
TWEJMTY-SIX
Cherubael.
The brink.
Exterminatus.
The blank-eyed man – though in truth he was not a man, but a daemon in human form – strode up the shining curve towards me. The glowing octahedron of the saruthi's unholy text was clasped in one nimble hand.
'I would like the primer now please, Gregor.'
What are you?'
'This is no place for introductions/ He gestured about himself. Lances of annihilation blasted down into the mud-flats nearby.
'Humour me…' I managed.
Very well. My name is Cherubael. Now, that primer. Time is ticking away.'
Time will always tick away/ I said. 'Who made you?'
'Made me?' The blank-eyed man smiled at me duplicitously.
'You're… a daemonhost. A conjured thing. Tell me who made you and who commanded you and Molitor to come after this prize… and I might give you the primer/
He laughed and licked his thin lips with a glossy forked tongue.
'Let us both be abundantly clear about this, Gregor. You will give me the primer. Either you will hand me the primer now, or I will come over to you and take it. And break every bone in your body. And rape that girl at your side. And break every bone in her body too. And then drag your jiggling carcasses down into the chamber below and string you both up on the
hooks, and burn out your agony centres as I wait for the bombardment to flatten this place/
He paused.
'Your choice/
You've been in my dreams for a long while now. Why is that?' I pressed.
'You are gifted, Gregor. And time is not the arrow that humans like to think it is. A second in the warp would show you that. Why, a second in the four-dimensional habitats of the saruthi should have proved it too. Your dreams were just nightmares of something yet to happen/
'Who made you?' My voice was insistent. His answer was the one I least expected, and it left me all but stunned.
The Holy Inquisition made me, Gregor. A brother of yours made me. Now, for the last time, give me that-'
The daemonhost swung around suddenly as voices called out from lower down the roof. Brother-Captain Cynewolf was clambering up out of the blast hole, flanked by Midas and another Deathwatcher carrying the limp form of Titus Endor.
Cynewolf raised his storm bolter and fired at the blank-eyed man.
Cherubael reached out and caught the glowing shells, plucking them out of the air.
'Go home, Astartes bastard!' he yelled down the sloping roof at Cynewolf. 'This has nothing to do with you!'
The fiend came up the ridge until he was facing me. I could see the tiny arcs of power darting across his glowing skin. I could smell the stink of corruption.
Eye to eye now.
He held out his hand, palm up, fingernails long and polished like claws.
'Clever of you to find an untouchable to cancel me out/ He looked over at Bequin. 'How did you manage that?'
'Fate, like time, is not linear, Cherubael. Surely you know that. I found Bequin in the same way that the dreams of you found me/
He nodded. 'I like you, Gregor Eisenhorn. So very challenging and stimulating – for a human. I wish we had leisure to discourse and break bread… But we haven't!' he snapped suddenly. 'Give me the primer!'
I took out the polyhedron. His smile broadened.
I dropped the artefact onto the silky roof and, before it could slide away, crushed it under the heel of my boot.
The daemonhost took a step backwards, gazing down at the crunched dust.
He looked up at me again with his blank eyes. You are a man of singular dedication, Gregor. I would have enjoyed killing you, when
the day and hour came. But you're dead already. This edifice is two hundred and forty seconds away from destruction. Cherish this-'
He tossed me the xenos Necroteuch and I caught it in one gloved hand.
'You've won. Take that consolation to the afterlife/
He started to run, towards the lip of the roof, and then threw himself out in a perfect dive, arms raised. For a moment, he hung in space, then
he forked his body in, executed a precise roll and disappeared into the lake of fire below.
I pulled Bequin to me as Cynewolf, Midas and the other Deathwatch Marine approached. Endor, crumpled in the Astartes's arms, looked dead. I prayed he was, for in a moment this place would dissolve in fire.
'Rosethorn from Aegis, above and… well, above, for Emperor's sake! Damn this Glossia crap! Move!'
My gun-cutter swung in over the edifice roof, ramp-jaws open. I could see Fischig at the helm through the cockpit screens, yelling at me. Aemos was at his side.
I watched 56-Izar die from the bridge of the Saint Scythus as we left orbit. Petals of flame, the size of continents, spread out under its milky skin. Sanction Extremis. Exterminatus.
After the deluge of fire, the virus bombs. The seething storms of tailored plagues. The nuclear atrocity.
It was a cinder by the time we left. No contact with the saruthi race was ever made again.
And the tainted, glowing light of the Necroteuch was extinguished forever.
EPILOGUE
At Pamophrey.
At Pamophrey, we rested.
Forty weeks of voyage through the immaterium had dulled our sense of victory. The fleet dispersed at Thracian Primaris and the last 1 saw of Sergeant Jeruss was a waving hand across a smoky, beery bar.
I rented a villa out by the Sound at Pamophrey. Midas slept most of the day, and whiled away the night in games of regicide with Aemos and Fischig. Bequin bathed in the sun, and swam in the breakers.
I sat out on the salt-whipped stoop and watched over the beach like a god who has forgotten his creations.
Great labours still awaited us. Reports to be made, interviews and debrief-ings to be attended. Lord Rorken had called for a tribunal of enquiry, and the High Lords of Terra were awaiting a full account of the matter. Months of paperwork, hearings and evidential audits lay ahead. The identity of the force behind Molitor and his daemonhost remained a mystery, and though Lord Rorken was as anxious as myself to find an answer, I doubted any would readily emerge. The question might fester and stagnate, unanswered, in the slow, unwieldy bureaucracy of the Inquisition for years.
I would not allow that. As soon as I was free to engage upon another case, I would dedicate myself to finding Cherubael's master. The beloved rule of man had come close to great calamity thanks to his scheming.
I would not forget the saruthi. They were an object lesson – if any were truly needed – of how an entire, advanced culture might be consumed by Chaos.
* * *
Seabirds looped in the gusting tide wind. The breakers crashed. The blank-eyed man still haunted my dreams. After-echoes or ripples of the future? I would have to wait and see.
MISSING IN ACTION
I lost my left hand on Sameter. This is how it occurred. On the thirteenth day of Sagittar (local calendar), three days before the solstice, in the mid-rise district of the city of Urbitane, an itinerant evangelist called Lazlo Mombril was found shuffling aimlessly around the flat roof of a disused tannery lacking his eyes, his tongue, his nose and both of his hands.
Urbitane is the second city of Sameter, a declining agro-chemical planet in the Helican subsector, and it is no stranger to crimes of cruelty and spite brought on by the vicissitudes of neglect and social deprivation afflicting its tightly packed population. But this act of barbarity stood out for two reasons. First, it was no hot-blooded assault or alcohol-fuelled manslaughter but a deliberate and systematic act of brutal, almost ritual mutilation.
Second, it was the fourth such crime discovered that month.
I had been on Sameter for just three weeks, investigating the links between a bonded trade federation and a secessionist movement on Hesperus at the request of Lord Inquisitor Rorken. The links proved to be nothing – Urbitane's economic slough had forced the federation to chase unwise business with unscrupulous ship masters, and the real meat of the case lay on Hesperus – but I believe this was the Lord Inquisitor's way of gently easing me back into active duties following the long and arduous affair of the Necroteuch.
By the Imperial calendar it was 241 .M41, late in that year. I had just finished several self-imposed months of recuperation, meditation and study on Thracian Primaris. The eyes of the daemonhost Cherabael still woke me some nights, and I wore permanent scars from torture at the hands of the sadist Gorgone Locke. His strousine neural scourge had damaged my
nervous system and paralysed my face. I would not smile again for the rest of my life. But the battle wounds sustained on KCX-1288 and 56-Izar had healed, and I was now itching to renew my work.
This idle task on Sameter had suited me, so I had taken it and closed the dossier after a swift and efficient investigation. But latterly, as I prepared to leave, officials of the Munitorium unexpectedly requested an audience.
I was staying with my associates in a suite of rooms in the Urbitane Excelsior, a shabby but well-appointed establishment in the high-rise district of the city. Through soot-stained, armoured roundels of glass twenty metres across, the suite looked out across the filthy grey towers of the city to the brackish waters of the polluted bay twenty kilometres away. Ornithopters and biplanes buzzed between the massive city structures, and the running lights of freighters and orbitals glowed in the smog as they swung down towards the landing port. Out on the isthmus, through a haze of yellow, stagnant air, promethium refineries belched brown smoke into the perpetual twilight.
They're here/ said Bequin, entering the suite's lounge from the outer lobby. She had dressed in a demure gown of blue damask and a silk pash-meena, perfectly in keeping with my instruction that we should present a muted but powerful image.
I myself was clad in a suit of soft black linen with a waistcoat of grey velvet and a hip length black leather storm-coat.
'Do you need me for this?' asked Midas Betancore, my pilot and confidant.
I shook my head. 'I don't intend to be delayed here. I just have to be polite. Go on to the landing port and make sure the gun-cutter's readied for departure.'
He nodded and left. Bequin showed the visitors in.
I had felt it necessary to be polite because Eskeen Hansaard, Urbitane's Minister of Security, had come to see me himself. He was a massive man in a double-breasted brown tunic, his big frame offset oddly by his finely featured, boyish face. He was escorted by two bodyguards in grey, armour-ribbed uniforms and a short but handsome, black-haired woman in a dark blue bodyglove.
I had made sure I was sitting in an armchair when Bequin showed them in so I could rise in a measured, respectful way. I wanted them to be in no doubt who was really in charge here.
'Minister Hansaard/ I said, shaking his hand. 'I am Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn of the Ordo Xenos. These are my associates Alizebeth Bequin, Arbites Chastener Godwyn Fischig and savant Uber Aemos. How may I help you?'
'I have no wish to waste your time, inquisitor/ he said, apparently nervous in my presence. That was good, just as I had intended it. 'A case has been brought to my attention that I believe is beyond the immediate purview of the city arbites. Frankly, it smacks of warp-corruption, and cries out for the attention of the Inquisition/
He was direct. That impressed me. A ranking official of the Imperium, anxious to be seen to be doing the right thing. Nevertheless, I still expected his business might be a mere nothing, like the affair of the trade federation, a local crime requiring only my nod of approval that it was fine for him to continue and close. Men like Hansaard are often over-careful, in my experience.
There have been four deaths in the city during the last month that w
e believe to be linked. I would appreciate your advice on them. They are connected by merit of the ritual mutilation involved.'
'Show me/ I said.
'Captain?' he responded.
Arbites Captain Hurlie Wrex was the handsome woman with the short black hair. She stepped forward, nodded respectfully, and gave me a data-slate with the gold crest of the Adeptus Arbites on it.
'I have prepared a digested summary of the facts/ she said.
I began to speed-read the slate, already preparing the gentle knock-back I was expecting to give to his case. Then I stopped, slowed, read back.
I felt a curious mix of elation and frustration. Even from this cursorial glance, there was no doubt this case required the immediate attention of the Imperial Inquisition. I could feel my instincts stiffen and my appetites whetten, for the first time in months. In bothering me with this, Minister Hansaard was not being over careful at all. At the same time, my heart sank with the realisation that my departure from this miserable city would be delayed.
All four victims had been blinded and had their noses, tongues and hands removed. At the very least.
The evangelist, Mombril, had been the only one found alive. He had died from his injuries eight minutes after arriving at Urbitane Mid-rise Sector Infirmary. It seemed to me likely that he had escaped his ritual tormentors somehow before they could finish their work.
The other three were a different story.
Poul Grevan, a machinesmith; Luthar Hewall, a rug-maker; Idilane Fas-pie, a mid-wife.
Hewall had been found a week before by city sanitation servitors during routine maintenance to a soil stack in the mid-rise district. Someone had attempted to burn his remains and then flush them into the city's ancient waste system, but the human body is remarkably durable. The post could not prove his missing body parts had not simply succumbed to decay and been flushed away, but the damage to the ends of the forearm bones seemed to speak convincingly of a saw or chain-blade.
When Idilane Fasple's body was recovered from a crawlspace under the roof of a mid-rise tenement hab, it threw more light on the extent of Hewall's injuries. Not only had Fasple been mutilated in the manner of the evangelist Mombril, but her brain, brainstem and heart had been excised. The injuries were hideous. One of the roof workers who discovered her had subsequently