[Ciaphas Cain 05] - Duty Calls

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  “Rather more than you might think,” I replied, taking it with confidence, as my augmetic fingers would be more than adequate to counter any subtle attempts to disconcert me by applying excess pressure. His handshake was firm and decisive, but no more than that. Evidently our peculiar host felt he had no need to resort to childish games to establish his status. To my surprise he chuckled as he let go, as though I’d just said something inordinately witty.

  “Which is precisely what I would have expected a man like you to say.” He smoothed the front of his neat black tabard, which had become slightly crumpled, and nodded to the Sister Superior. “Sister Caritas, could you see to it that the commissar’s friends are taken care of? There must be something acceptable to the soldierly palate in the refectory, I would have thought.”

  “Most considerate,” I said, determined not to seem in the slightest bit disconcerted by anything that happened here, even though I was understandably reluctant to be parted from Amberley at this juncture.

  After all, she knew a great deal more about what was going on than I did. “But don’t take them too far. We have business at the PDF garrison, and I’ll need them when I get there.”

  “They’ll be waiting when you’re ready to leave,” the strange inquisitor assured me. I nodded.

  “Dismissed,” I told Amberley, and she saluted again.

  “Commissar.” She turned to the others, adopting the tone of a junior NCO admonishing her subordinates as accurately as if she’d been one since the First Founding. “Right, we’re all guests in a house of the Emperor, so I expect you to act like it. Show respect to the Sisters, mind your manners, and watch your frakking language.”

  “Yes, corporal,” Pelton said seriously, and the others nodded, still playing their parts to the hilt. As they formed up to file out, I gestured to Jurgen to remain.

  “This way,” Sister Caritas said, her lips compressed into a thin line of disapproval, and led the little group of pseudo-Valhallans away, the rest of her squad, to my unspoken relief, going with them. The inquisitor glanced at Jurgen, and raised an eyebrow.

  “Jurgen’s my personal aide,” I explained blandly. “His security clearance is as high as my own.”

  After a moment the black-clad man nodded, a hint of amusement in his eyes. “Of course, keep him to hand by all means. I’d probably want a little backup myself in your position.” He inclined his head towards an archway leading deeper inside the complex. “Perhaps you’d appreciate some lunch while we talk.”

  “I’d certainly appreciate an explanation or two,” I said, keeping my cards as close to my chest as possible. I had no doubt that, despite his affable demeanour, this fellow was extremely dangerous. Without Amberley to provide me with a lead, my best course of action would be to encourage him to talk, and hope to the Golden Throne that I’d be able to make some sense of the situation without giving away just how little I really knew about what was going on. “Who you are and why you’ve diverted me here would be a reasonable place to start.”

  “My dear fellow, how very remiss of me. Inquisitor Killian, of the Ordo Hereticus.” We continued to walk as we spoke, navigating a labyrinth of corridors wide enough to have driven a Salamander down with little difficulty. Now my peculiar host ushered me through a doorway into what was evidently a suite of guest rooms, surprisingly well appointed for so austere an institution. Large sliding doors at one end of the lounge gave on to a lawn fringed with more rose bushes, and he gestured towards it a trifle hastily as Jurgen followed us into the room, preceded as always by his personal aroma. “Perhaps you’d care to dine al fresco?”

  “As you wish,” I said blandly, following him into the garden. As I did so something hurtled past my head, a servo skull with a silver soup tureen slung incongruously beneath it, and I turned to follow it suspiciously as it settled over a wrought iron table in the middle of a sweet-scented arbour to deposit its burden. Someone was already sitting there, a blank-visaged techpriest, who stood slowly as we approached. Killian noted my reaction with a wry smile.

  “These ones are completely harmless,” he assured me. He gestured towards the techpriest. “Since you insist on being accompanied by your associate, I’m sure you won’t mind extending me the same courtesy.”

  “Of course not,” I told him. I extended my hand, which to my quiet relief the techpriest shook with his own, rather than one of the mechadendrites wavering gently over his shoulders. “The elusive magister Metheius, I presume.” The guess was evidently a good one, as the techpriest flinched back as I spoke, and shot a startled look at Killian from under the cowl of his robe. There wasn’t enough flesh left on his face to form a surprised expression, but then he hardly needed to after a reaction like that.

  “You’ve been talking to Lazurus, I take it,” Killian said, settling into one of the vacant chairs around the table, and motioning for me to sit. Still playing out the charade of good manners I did so, taking the opportunity of making sure my chainsword was loose in its scabbard as I moved it out of the way. Killian noticed the tiny movement, but chose to ignore it, gesturing instead to the selection of viands laid out between us. “Can I offer you a slice of cottleston pie?”

  “We’ve exchanged a few words,” I admitted blandly, declining the platter he held out towards me. “At the briefing your assassin disrupted. I take it he was one of yours?” It was a reasonable guess, the Ordo Hereticus dealing with witches and rogue psykers as a matter of course, and far more likely than most other Imperial institutions to have access to their sanctioned counterparts.

  “He was,” Killian admitted, without a moment’s embarrassment. He took the lid off the tureen, and ladled out a bowlful of groxtail soup, which he proceeded to sip at appreciatively. “Are you sure you won’t try some of this? It’s rather good. They add some local herb to it, grows wild on a few of the lower plateaux. Might as well enjoy it while we can, I don’t suppose there’s much left of it now the tyranids have been through there.”

  “At the risk of seeming a little discourteous,” I said carefully, “I’m not entirely sanguine about eating anything offered to me by a man who’s already made several attempts on my life.”

  “No offence taken,” Killian assured me. “But if I still wanted you dead, I would just have ordered the Sisters to take care of it as soon as you stepped off the shuttle. I doubt that even a man of your formidable fighting prowess could have subdued the entire convent.”

  Well, that sounded reasonable enough, and I was getting pretty hungry by that point, so I put my doubts aside and began to dig in, finding the meal just as pleasant as my strange host had promised. To my surprise Jurgen refused almost everything other than some cold meat in bread, standing close enough behind my back to decorate it with a steady drizzle of crumbs, his lasgun hanging loose across his shoulder where he could seize the grip and swing it around to fire from the hip in an instant, a party trick that had taken more than one foe by fatal surprise before now. Metheius, of course, didn’t eat a thing.

  “I’m glad to hear you’ve changed your mind,” I said, slipping a slice of the pie onto my plate. By this point he’d eaten some himself, which wasn’t an infallible indication that it was harmless of course, but it definitely seemed safer than anything I hadn’t seen him touch yet. “Although I’m still rather vague about why you wanted to kill me in the first place.” Killian waved expansively and swallowed a mouthful of soup.

  “My dear Cain, we’re both men of the galaxy. There’s no need to pretend ignorance, although I’m sure Lazurus would be delighted to hear how diligently you’re sticking to your cover story. He sought your aid as soon as he realised you were on Periremunda, didn’t he?”

  “He spoke to me at the earliest possible opportunity,” I said carefully, sticking as close to the truth as I could. I was as sure as I could be that the affable lunatic across the table wasn’t a psyker himself, or he would undoubtedly have reacted as violently to Jurgen’s presence as Rakel usually did, so I had no fear that he’d be able to pul
l the information he wanted directly from my own mind. But he was undoubtedly as skilled as Amberley at reading body language, and there was no telling what biometric monitoring systems Metheius might have been enhanced with, so there was no point in pushing my luck by telling outright lies unless I really had to. Killian nodded pensively. “He seemed rather anxious to establish the whereabouts of your friend here.”

  “I thought so,” he said, clearly believing, as I’d intended, that I’d been in contact with Lazurus for some time before our first meeting in the Arbites building which in itself was significant. Equally clearly he had no idea of Amberley s presence on Periremunda. “He knew you’d been on Perlia, so he must have thought he could trust you with the secret.”

  “I know a little more than I used to about what I found in the Valley of Daemons,” I admitted. I gave Metheius a hard look. “And who was evidently responsible.” I redirected my gaze to Killian. “Although I must admit I’m surprised to find you giving sanctuary to a traitor. I thought the Inquisition and the Adeptus Mechanicus were supposed to be partners in the project.”

  “Part of the Inquisition,” Killian explained, spreading ackenberry preserve on a freshly toasted florn cake. He took a bite, and regarded me sombrely as he chewed and swallowed, evidently marshalling his thoughts. “It’s rather hard to explain to an outsider, but, despite what you might have been led to believe, the Inquisition is far from united in its battle against the malign forces threatening the Imperium.” This much I already knew from Amberley of course, but I contrived to look vaguely surprised, which, as I’d intended, encouraged him to go on. “The artefact recovered on Perlia was given into the custody of the Ordo Xenos, which was the right and proper course of action at the time, but after Metheius discovered its most striking property, clearly it became a matter for the Ordo Hereticus.”

  “I imagine there was some debate over the matter,” I said, prompting him to continue, and wondering what in the name of the Emperor he was talking about.

  Metheius nodded. “There was. Several of the tech-priests agreed with me, that the Ordo Hereticus should be informed at once, although the majority favoured retaining the backing of the Ordo Xenos, unwilling to risk a confrontation over the issue.” His voice took on a timbre of agitation quite at odds with the measured tones I normally associated with one of his calling. “I could scarcely believe their stupidity! The key to eradicating the scourge of Chaos from the galaxy was in our hands at last, and still they procrastinated! I took it upon myself to inform Inquisitor Killian of what we’d discovered, certain from what I knew of him that he’d make use of this devastating weapon against the Great Enemy at the earliest opportunity.”

  “You’d met before, then, I take it,” I said, wondering what in the warp he was babbling about. If he really had discovered what this shadowlight thing did, and it was as dangerous as it sounded, using it seemed like a very bad idea indeed to me.

  “We had,” Killian confirmed. “Metheius had helped me eradicate a heretical cult among the techpriests of a minor astropathic waystation some years before, and was aware of my commitment to using every weapon to hand in our struggle for survival.”

  “I see,” I said, the pieces beginning to fall into place at last. “So you tried to poke your oar in, and the Ordo Xenos told you to go frot yourself.” That might have seemed an incautious thing to say, but I’ve found time and again that pricking someone’s pride with an unexpectedly blunt remark can often get them to reveal more than they intended to.

  “Something like that,” Killian admitted. He shrugged. “Unfortunately all my intervention achieved was tipping them off to the fact that something was going on in the Valley of Daemons that the techpriests there were too scared to pass on. No doubt they would have dispatched an inspection team to resolve the matter, if the orks hadn’t already invaded the place.”

  “I remember,” I said grimly. Even after all these years, and all the other horrors I’d seen since, the desperate struggle to survive what I’d experienced on that unhappy world still surfaced in my dreams from time to time.

  “It was like a sign from the Emperor,” Killian said, the light of something not entirely sane flickering at the back of his eyes. “I couldn’t let the artefact fall into orkish hands, and with it in my possession I knew I could cleanse the galaxy in a way the purblind fainthearts of the Ordo Xenos would never dare to even imagine.”

  “So you went in and took it,” I said. Killian nodded, spraying florn cake crumbs in his earnestness with almost as much abandon as my aide.

  “It was the Emperor’s will,” he said simply. “I had the means, and the determination. We stormed the place before the cowards and traitors even knew we were coming, and struck them down in His holy name.”

  “You used the Sisters,” I said, remembering the bolter wounds I’d seen in the bodies of the slain, and the surgical precision of the strike. Despite the calmness of my outer demeanour, my blood ran colder than a Valhallan shower at the sudden realisation. There must have been hundreds of warriors in the convent, all of them unquestioningly loyal to this maniac. If we didn’t tread very carefully indeed, our chances of getting out alive were about as great as teaching an ork to tap-dance.

  Killian nodded. “The Order of the White Rose has been a loyal ally in our purges and wars of faith for millennia,” he said. “They did all that was asked of them in His glorious name.”

  “Nothing very glorious about gunning down unarmed cogboys if you ask me,” I said, and Metheius sighed.

  “It was necessary. All traces of my work had to be expunged, if we were to continue it successfully in secret.”

  “In Hell’s Edge,” I said, and Killian nodded, looking as absurdly pleased as if I’d just performed some minor conjuring trick.

  “So you found our old bolthole. That was remarkably resourceful of you.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “by the time I got there the ’nids had found it first.”

  “They had,” Killian admitted. “The Sisters were barely able to extract us in time.”

  “And the miners?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  Killian shook his head regretfully.

  “We only had room for Metheius and his team. Most unfortunate. We had to shoot a few of the civilians who tried to get their children aboard, and the rest got quite abusive.”

  “How very distressing for you,” I said dryly. Emperor knows, far better men than me have fallen on the field of battle while I looked after my own miserable skin, on more occasions than I care to count, but the sheer callousness of the man raised my hackles, I don’t mind admitting it. Fortunately he took my remark at face value, seeming as impervious to irony as my aide.

  “ ‘The path of duty is often a stony one’,” he quoted blithely, as though that excused everything, apparently forgetting the rest of the sentence.[1] I nodded, pouring some fresh recaf into a delicate porcelain cup that held barely a mouthful, grateful for the distraction. Tempting as it was just to draw my chainsword and swipe his misbegotten head from his shoulders, giving into the impulse would be unwise in the extreme. He was an inquisitor, after all, and I would hardly have been the first man to try it. And even if I did succeed it would certainly annoy the sisters, who were bound to react with some petulance, probably involving copious amounts of incoming fire. [1. The full quotation, from The Precepts of Saint Emelia, a work Cain displays a surprising fondness for in several passages of his memoirs, runs “The path of duty is often a stony one, made smoother by thought for others.”]

  “How did you persuade them to let you set up there in the first place?” I asked instead. It was becoming more and more clear to me that Killian was one of those megalomaniacs who are absolutely desperate for an audience, so consumed by the delusion of their own cleverness that they need someone else to appreciate it, and I might as well indulge him for as long as possible. The more I let him ramble, the more I’d be able to tell Amberley when I caught up with her again, and at least while we were chattin
g he was unlikely to make another attempt at killing me.

  “I didn’t have to,” he said simply. “Hell’s Edge was a Gavarronian colony, and the settlers were delighted to have friends of the convent working there.”

  “I see.” I nodded thoughtfully, sipping recaf, and wishing it was in a proper sized mug. That explained the surprising amount of devotional literature left lying around the place. I wondered how many of the unfortunate colonists had regretted their choice of friends when the holy Sisters had left them to the ’nids. I felt my jaw begin to tighten again at the thought, and threw out another conversational fishing line. “I take it you’ve found somewhere to continue your researches?”

  “Most certainly.” Metheius’ voice was taking on the familiar timbre of someone fanatical about his work, and eager to discuss it. I was beginning to see why he got on so well with Killian. “The Sisters have been most accommodating.”

  “I’m sure they have,” I said, trying to project an air of outward calm. If his words really meant what I thought they did, the key to the whole affair was right here, somewhere in the Convent of the White Rose. The question was, could I find my way to it? The place was vast, and the shadowlight could have been anywhere. Metheius nodded eagerly.

  “Would you care to see for yourself?” he asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “By all means,” I replied, as calmly as I could, unable to believe this sudden stroke of good fortune. Mindful of the civilised facade we were trying to maintain, I glanced at Killian, who was still stuffing his face. “If you have no objection, of course.”

  He shook his head, smiling, which as you’ll no doubt appreciate did little to reassure me. “None at all,” he declared, pushing his chair back from the table at last. “Quite the reverse, in fart.” An aura of smug pomposity hung around him like Jurgen’s body odour.

  I rose to my feet. As I did so, the faint rumble of the orbital bombardment rolled over us again, like the first presentiment of summer rain, and I glanced at Jurgen, exchanging a brief moment of uneasy understanding. We’d begun our long and inglorious careers together in an artillery unit, and if those years of experience were anything to go by, that barrage was a little closer than the last one had been. That, in turn, implied that a tyranid swarm large enough to attract the attention of the orbiting starships, even in spite of the sandstorms blocking their sensors, was moving in our general direction. There was no reason to believe that we were their target, though. Gavarrone was a lot higher than any of the plateaux the roving scout swarms had scaled before the main bulk of the hive fleet had arrived, so I forced my disquiet to the back of my mind and returned my attention to the immediate problem.