by Dan Abnett
I went to him that night. Voke and his interrogators were still at work, now with a sense of urgency.
They held him in what could only be described as a dungeon, ninety metres below the massive grey stone fortress. All the other prisoners taken during the raid on House Glaw were sequestered here too. In order to contain and interrogate them all, Voke had co-opted local Arbites, soldiers of the Gudran standing army, and officials of the Ministorium. They worked in concert with his own extensive staff.
Arriving by air launch, I was met by a tall, grey-haired man in a long maroon coat attended by two armed servitors. I knew him at once. Inquisitor Titus Endor and I were of similar ages and had both studied under Hapshant.
You are recovered, Gregor?' he asked, shaking my hand.
Well enough to continue my work. I didn't expect to see you here, Titus/
Yoke's reports on the Glaw case have concerned our order's sub-sector officio. Lord Inquisitor Rorken has declared the need for a full disclosure. Voke's inability to get anything out of Urisel Glaw has annoyed him. I've been diverted to assist. And not just me. Schongard is here too, and Moli-tor is on his way/
I sighed. Endor, a fellow Amalathian, I could work with, though there is a proverb about too many inquisitors. Schongard was a rabid monodom-inant, and a liability in my view, and Konrad Molitor was the sort of radical I felt had no place in the order at all.
This is unusual/1 said.
'It's all down to connections/ Endor remarked. 'What has come to light through your work here, and Voke's, is a massive puzzle that itself
connects dozens of separate cases and investigations. I burned a heretic on Mariam two weeks ago, and in his effects found documents linking him to the Glaws. Schongard is pursuing blasphemous texts that he is certain first came into the sub-sector in the cargoes of Guild Sinesias traders. Molitor... well, who knows what he's doing, but it no doubt connects.'
'Sometimes/ I told him, 'I think we work against each other. This comes out and, look! We all hold pieces to the same mystery. How might we have taken this enemy and his structure apart a month ago, two months, if we had exchanged information?'
Endor laughed. 'Are you questioning the working practices of the most lauded Inquisition, Gregor? Working practices laid down centuries ago? Are you questioning the motives of fellow members of our convocation?'
I knew he was joking, but my manner remained serious. 'I'm decrying a system where we don't even trust each other.'
We descended, under escort, into the depths of the prison block.
"What of Glaw?'
'Gives up nothing,' said Endor. 'What he's endured so far would have broken and cracked most men, or at least had them begging for death or trying to kill themselves. He persists, almost in good humour, almost arrogant, as if he expects to live.'
'He's right. We'll never sign his death notice while he has secrets.'
Voke's men were at work on Glaw in a foul-smelling, red-painted cell. Glaw was a ruin, kept alive by expertise that matched the skill used to torture him.
To unlock an answer from the mind of the heretic is the greatest duty of an inquisitor, and I will not shrink from any means, but this way was futile. Left to me, the physical torture would have stopped days before. One look showed that Urisel Glaw was resolved not to talk.
I would have left him alone, for weeks perhaps. Despite his agonies, our constant attention betrayed our desperation, and that gave him all the strength he needed to endure. Silence and isolation would have broken him.
Inquisitor Schongard stepped back from the table where Glaw was strapped and pulled off soiled surgical gloves. He was a broad man with thin brown hair and a chilling mask of black metal surgically fixed to his face. No one knew if this mask covered some grievous injury or was simply an affectation. Dark, unhealthy, bloodshot eyes regarded Endor and myself through the oblong slits in the metal.
'Brothers/ he whispered. His phlegmy voice never wavered from that low, hushed level. 'His resistance is quite the doughtiest I have seen. Voke and I agree that some monumental work has been done to his mind, allowing him to block out the manipulations. Psychic probes have been tried, but found wanting/
'Perhaps we should have the Astropathicus provide us with one of their primary class adepts/ said Voke from behind me.
'I don't think there's a mind block there at all/ I said. 'You would see traces of the conditioning. He'd most likely be screaming for us to stop now because he knows he cannot tell us the answer/
'Nonsense/ whispered Schongard. 'No raw mind could withstand this/
'I sometimes doubt whether my fellows know anything about human nature at all/ I said, mildly. This man is a fiend. This man is nobility. He has seen into the darkness we so fear, and he knows what power feels like. The promise of what lies at stake for him and his collaborators is enough to steel him/
I crossed to the table and looked down into Glaw's lidless eyes. Blood bubbled at his flayed lips as he smiled at me.
'He promised the overthrow of worlds, the annihilation of billions. He boasted of it. What the Glaws are after is so great, that none of this matters. Isn't that right, Urisel?'
He gurgled.
This is just a hardship/ I said, turning away from the heretic in disdain. 'He keeps going because he knows that what awaits him will make this all worthwhile/
Voke snorted. What could be so?'
'Eisenhorn sounds convincing to me/ said Endor. 'Glaw will protect his secrets no matter what we do, for those secrets will repay him a thousand fold/
Schongard's masked face shook dubiously. 'I am with brother Voke. What reward could be worth the prolonged ministrations of the Inquisition's finest fleshsmiths?'
I didn't answer. I didn't know the answer, in truth, but I had some notion of the scale.
And the thought of it froze my soul.
If I had harboured any doubts that the Glaws' authority had survived, they were dispelled in the course of the next week. Campaigns of explosive, toxic and psychic sabotage plagued the worlds of the sub-sector, as if all the secret, dark cells of evil hidden away within Imperial society were revealing themselves, risking discovery as they turned on their local populations, as if orchestrated by some ruling power. The likes of Lord Glaw and his accomplices had either escaped destruction or they were but part of an invisible ruling elite that now mobilised all the hidden offspring cabals on a double-dozen worlds into revolt.
There is another explanation/ Titus Endor said to me as we attended mass in the Imperial Cathedral of Dorsay. 'For all their power and influence, the Glaws were not the summit of their conspiratorial pyramid. There were yet others above them/
It was possible, but I had seen the Glaws' arrogance first hand. They were not ones to bow to another master. Not a human master, anyway.
The unrest had broken out on Gudrun too by then. A bombing campaign had stricken one town in the south, and an agricultural settlement
in the west had been exterminated by a neural toxin released into its water supply. Battlefleet Scarus was still struggling to recover from the self-inflicted blow against it, and Admiral Spatian had returned from his mission to reassemble the panicked fleet units empty handed. Captain Estrum's mobile group had simply vanished. I had exchanged messages with Madorthene, who told me that no one in battlefleet command now doubted mat the destruction of the Ultima Victrix and the subsequent mayhem had been anyming other than sabotage. Our enemy's reach extended into the battlefleet itself.
Then two massive hives of Thracian Primaris rose in open revolt. Thousands of workers, tainted by the corrupt touch of Chaos, took to the streets, burning, looting and executing. They displayed the obscene badges of Chaos openly.
The Lord Militant's plans for a crusade into the Ophidian sub-sector were now indefinitely postponed. Battlefleet Scarus left anchor and made best speed to suppress the Thracian uprising.
But that was only the first. Open revolt exploded through the suburbs of Sameter's capital city and, a day later, a c
ivil war erupted on Hesperus. In both cases, the stain of Chaos was there.
This miserable, shocking period is referred to in Imperial histories as the Helican Schism. It lasted eight months, and millions died in open warfare across those three worlds, not to mention hundreds of lesser incidents on other planets, including Gudrun. The Lord Militant got his holy crusade, though I am sure he hardly expected to be waging it against the population of his own sub-sector.
The authorities, and even my worthy fellow inquisitors, seemed stunned to the point of inactivity by this unprecedented outbreak. The archenemy of mankind often acted openly and brutally, but this seemed to defy logic. Why, after what may have been centuries of careful, secret establishment, had the hidden cults risen as one, exposing themselves to the wrath of the Imperial military?
I believed the answer was the 'true matter'. Urisel Glaw's almost gleeful resistance to our methods convinced me. The archenemy was embarked upon something so momentous that it was prepared to sacrifice all of its secret forces throughout the sub-sector to keep the Imperium occupied.
I believed, with all conviction, that it would be better for planets to burn than for that 'true matter' to be accomplished.
Which is why I went to Damask.
THIRTEEN!
Damask.
North Qualm.
Sanctum.
Under a leaden, rusty sky, the ball-tree forests followed the wind.
They looked like thick herds of bulbous livestock, surging across the rolling sweeps of scree, and the jostling, clattering noise they made sounded like hooves.
But they were trees: pustular, fronded globes of cellulose swelled by lighter-than-air gases generated from decomposition processes deep inside them. They drifted in the wind and dragged heavy, trailing root systems behind them. Occasionally, the pressure of one ball-tree against another caused a gas-globe to vent with a moaning squeal forced out through fibrous sphincters. Plumes of gas wafted above the tree herd.
I climbed to the top of a low plateau, where the bluish flint and gravel were caked in yellowish lichens. A couple of solitary ball-trees, small juveniles, scudded across the hill's flat summit. In the centre of the plateau's top stood a rockcrete pylon marker, commemorating the original landing place of the first settlers who had come to Damask. The elements had all but worn away the inscription. Standing by the marker, I slowly turned and took in the landscape. Black flint hills to the west, thick ball-tree forests in the wide river valley to the north, leagues of thorn-woods to the east, near to where we had set down, and grumbling, fire-topped volcanoes to the south, far away, sooting the sky with threads of sulphurous brown smoke. Clouds of small air-grazers circled over the
forests, preparing to roost for the night. A surly, scarred moon was rising, distorted by the thick amber atmosphere.
'Eisenhorn/ Midas called over the vox.
I walked back down the plateau slope, buttoning my leather coat against the evening breeze. Midas and Fischig waited by the landspeeder that they had spent the past two hours unstowing and reassembling from the gun-cutter's hold. It was an old, unarmed model and it hadn't been used for three years. Midas was closing an engine cowling.
'You've got it working, then,' I said.
Midas shrugged. 'It's a piece of crap. I had to get Uclid to strip in new relays. All manner of cabling had perished/
Fischig looked particularly unimpressed with the vehicle.
I seldom had a use for it. On most worlds, local transport was available. I hadn't expected Damask to be so... unpopulated.
Records said there were at least five colony settlements, but there had been no sign of any from orbit, and no response to vox or astropathical messages. Had the human population of Damask withered and died in the past five years since records were filed?
We'd left Aemos, Bequin and Lowink with the cutter, which had put down on the shores of a wide river basin. We'd carefully disguised it with camouflage netting. Midas had chosen a landing site within speeder range of some of the colony locations, yet far enough out to avoid being seen by anybody at those locations as we made descent. Tobius Maxilla awaited our pleasure aboard the Essene in high orbit above.
Midas fired up the speeder's misfiring engines and we moved off overland from the hidden cutter towards the last recorded position of the closest human settlement.
Tumble-brush scudded around the speeder, and we rode through scarp-land where root-anchored trees spread aloft branches blistering with gas-sacks so that the whole plant seemed to strain against the soil and gravity in the wind. Grazers, little bat-like mammals with membranous wings, fluttered around. Larger gliders, immense headless creatures that were all flat wingspan and fluked tail, turned silently on the thermals high above us. The landscape was jagged, broken and had the bluish cast of flint. The air was dark and noxious, and we used rebreather masks from time to time.
We followed the frothy, brackish river waters for twenty kilometres and then left the wide flood banks and juddered up through rocky scarps, sculptural deserts formed by elementally shattered flint outcrops, brakes of dusty yellow fern, and seas of lichen trembling in the gusting wind. The ugly moon rose higher, though there was still daylight left.
Midas had to slew the speeder to a halt at one place where a group of much larger grazers broke across the trail, panicked by the sound of the engines. They were dove-grey giants with steep, humped backs, trunk-like snouts and long attenuated legs ending in massive pads. Their legs seemed too slender and long to support such bulks, but like the local plant life, I
suspected the swollen torsos of these animals contained supporting bladders of gas.
They snorted and clattered away into the fern thickets. The speeder had stalled. Midas got out and cussed at the rotors of the turbo-fan for a few minutes until the mechanism chuckled back into life. As we waited, Fischig and I stretched our legs. He climbed up onto an igneous boulder and fiddled with the straps of his rebreather as he watched the hot blue streaks of a meteor storm slice the gloomy sky on the western horizon.
I gazed across the fern thickets. Air-grazers chirruped and darted in the hushing leaves. The wind had changed, and a forest-herd of ball-trees scudded in through the edges of the ferns, squeaking and rasping as the wind drove their globes and root-systems through the grounded plants.
We pushed on another ten kilometres, coming down into a rift valley where the ground became thick, sedimentary soil, black and wet. The vegetation here was richer and more rubbery; bulb snakelocks and bright, spiky marsh lilies, clubmoss, horsetail, tousled maidenhair, lofty cycads festooned with epiphytic bromeliads and skeins of ground-draping gneto-phytes. Clouds of tiny insects billowed in the damper glades and along seeping watercourses, and large, hornet-like hunters with scintillating wings buzzed through the damp air like jewelled daggers.
There/ said Fischig, his eyes sharp. We stopped and dismounted. A muddy expanse near the track had once been a cultivated field, and the rusty carcasses of two tilling machines lay half-buried in the sucking soil.
A little further on, we passed a marker stone struck from flint. 'Gillan's Acre' it read in Low Gothic.
We'd passed the township itself before we realised, and turned back. It was nothing but the stumps of a few walls covered with wispy weed-growth and rampant gnetophytes. Until at least five years before, this had been a community of eight hundred. A scan showed metal fragments and portions of broken machinery buried under the soil.
Fischig found the marker screened by sticky cycads at the north end of the town plot. It had been fashioned from local fibre-wood, a carved symbol that was unmistakably one of the filthy and unnerving glyphs of Chaos.
A statement? A warning?' Fischig wondered aloud.
'Burn it immediately/ I told him.
The vox-link warbled. It was Maxilla, from orbit.
'I've been sectioning the landscape as you requested, inquisitor/ he reported. 'The atmosphere is hindering my scans, but I'm getting there. I just ran a sweep of the volcanic re
gion south of you. It's hard to tell because it's active, but I think there are signs of structures and operating machines/
He pin-pointed the site to the speeder's navigation system. Another seventy kilometres, roughly the location of another possible settlement listed on our maps.
'That's quite a distance, and the light is failing/ Midas said. 'Let's get back to the cutter. We'll head south at dawn/
In the night, as we slept, something approached the shrouded cutter and set off the motion alarms. We went out, armed, to look for intruders, but there was no sign. And no sign of drifting ball-trees either.
At dawn, we headed south. The volcanic region, its smouldering peaks rising before us, was thickly forested with fern and thorn-scrub. It was hot too, as stinking, heated gas leaked into the glades from the volcanic vents that laced the rocky earth. A half-hour into the sulphurous forests we were sweating heavily and using our rebreathers almost constantly.
Below the peak of one of the largest cones, the landspeeder's rudimentary scanners detected signs of activity as we rode up a long slope of tumbled, desiccated rock. Fischig, Midas and I dismounted from the speeder and clambered up a flinty outcrop to get a better view with our scopes.
In the shadow of the cone was a large settlement... old stone and wood-built structures, mostly ruined, as well as newer, modular habitats made of ceramite. There was machinery down there, generators and other heavy systems at work under tarpaulin canopies. Tall, angled screens of reinforced flak-board had been erected on scaffolding rigs to shield the place from ash-fall. Three speeders and two heavy eight-wheelers were drawn up outside the main habitat units. A few figures moved around the place, too distant to resolve clearly.
'The last survey showed no signs of active vulcanism in this region/ Midas reminded me, echoing an observation Aemos had made on our arrival.
'See there/ I said, indicating a portion of the settlement that ran into the slope of the largest cone. Those old buildings are partially buried in solidified ash. The original settlement predates the activity/