Ravenor Returned

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Well then, no,’ said Boneheart. ‘If we’re looking for a gamma or a beta, an alpha even, there are only a few hits that match.’ He tapped his finger on the graph at a particularly large wobble in the signal. ‘Like that. Except that’s the Astropath Guild. And that, that’s the guild’s sub-station at Tenthe Arch. In fact, most of the big returns here can be identified as legit psy uses. Except these four.’

  He pointed. ‘This one, up in Stairtown. Could be our man, but intelligence suggests it’s a known unsanctioned psyker called Efful Trevis. Same story here in Central F. Another black-market mind-pirate known to us. And here. In J. Same again. I’ve sent teams out to secret all three, but I’m pretty sure all we’ll be doing is closing down unsanctioned activities that the ordos should have picked up long since.’

  ‘Which behind leaves one,’ Monicker whispered.

  Boneheart nodded. ‘That’s right. This one. It fits damn well. High grade activity, delta at the very least. The site is meant to be unoccupied, so that matches too. A hideaway, someone acting in seclusion.’

  ‘Show me the map,’ Revoke said. Another of the secretists passed him a hand slate. ‘The chief provost was quite particular. We are to move in immediately and end this.’

  Revoke looked up at the secretists around him. The low-lit room was quiet except for the chatter of codifiers and data-engines. ‘Ravenor is an Imperial inquisitor. We must not underestimate his abilities, nor the abilities of the men and women who accompany him. This will be a full force operation, maximum prejudice. I’ll be leading it. I want you, Boneheart and Monicker, Tolemi, Rove and Molay as team leaders. Combat ordnance. Where’s Drax?’

  Secretist Molay looked awkwardly at Boneheart.

  ‘I thought you’d been told, Toros,’ Boneheart said. ‘Drax is dead.’

  ‘Since when?’ Revoke asked, his voice as heavy and cold as permafrost.

  ‘This morning,’ Molay replied. ‘He was part of the operation to secret the members of Special Crimes. Someone shot him at a residence in Formal E.’

  ‘Who was he secreting?’

  Molay referred to his data-slate. ‘Uh, a junior marshal called Maud Plyton. She worked with Rickens. Lived with her uncle at the address. Two other bodies were recovered from the scene, one male, one female, so that probably accounts for the girl and her uncle. Both were reported as shredded by the sheen birds. Maybe this junior marshal popped Drax before the birds got her.’

  Revoke pursed his lips. ‘What is the status of the Unkindness now?’

  ‘They’re loose, naturally,’ Boneheart said. ‘But we’ve got Drax’s pupil Foelon working to bring them under control. He’s a good boy. I estimate we’ll have the Unkindness back in play before the morning.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Revoke. ‘I’ll review this matter again later. For now, we have our priority. And we’ll just have to do it without bird cover. Harness up. I want us airborne in twenty minutes.’

  Thunder peeled across the murky city. In Formal E, rain lashed down out of the premature night, rippling the windows of Miserimus House.

  Frauka was cooking. Zeph was still prowling the place, a gun in his hand. Carl had gone upstairs to shower. I sat, watching over Carl’s machines as they mumbled and whirred, watching data-fields pulse and flicker on the screens. Whatever had been stirred up was now dying down, but that didn’t mean we could relax. Only the insane or the recklessly powerful would unleash five psykers to scour an Imperial hive. No, let me correct myself. Only the insane, the recklessly powerful or the Holy Inquisition would unleash five psykers so.

  We had not been found, and Wystan’s limiter was still off, blotting me out from prying minds. But it was just a matter of time. My confidence was faltering. I had come back to this world, dragging my loyal friends along, to uncover some great conspiracy. I had even boasted that I thought it might go right to the top.

  Now, the more I pushed, the higher it got. Arrogantly, I had come back to this world under the badge of Special Condition, cutting myself off so heroically from support or back-up, safe in the knowledge that I was an Imperial inquisitor and, armed with that authority, I could explode this heresy.

  Hubris. That’s meant to be noble, isn’t it? As a human quality, it rates next to stupidity in my opinion. We were going against foes of demonstrably formidable power, the planetary authorities themselves. Just us, the eight of us if you included Zael. We would all pay for my arrogance. Every single one of my friends would–

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  Zael was with me, curled up in a drum chair.

  ‘Guess.’

  He sat up. ‘You were thinking that we’re really fricked up,’ he said.

  ‘Where did you learn language like that, Zael Efferneti?’ I asked. ‘Have you been hanging out with Nayl too much?’

  He smiled. ‘Streets of Petropolis, born and bred,’ he said. ‘I know all kinds of swears.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  ‘Was I right?’ he asked.

  I hesitated for a moment. ‘We could be in a difficult situation, Zael. I may have put you in a difficult situation. If I have, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Can’t you find the bad guys then?’

  I turned my chair to face him. ‘Some of them. What really matters is what they’re trying to do. We don’t know that yet. Once we do, maybe we’ll–’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  Die horribly, I thought. ‘Do something about it,’ I transponded.

  ‘Sacristy,’ he said suddenly, getting to his feet and reaching for a glass of water from Carl’s desk.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Sacristy. I don’t know what the word means, but I had a dream where it was very important. Dreams are important, right? You told me that.’

  ‘For someone like you,’ I said and spurred my chair towards him. ‘Say it again. “Sacristy”?’

  He nodded. ‘Sacristy. I had this dream, and when I woke up I thought I’d better remember that, so I did. But only just then.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  He blushed.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘All right. I… I was dreaming I was in this lovely golden place. Like a landscape. Green hills, woods, a glade, all these beautiful people walking around with haloes of light around them. There were some buildings too. I think they were golden. That’s probably where the golden thing comes from.’

  ‘Uh huh… move on.’

  ‘So one of the people is Kara. And she looks really good.’ He paused and blushed a darker shade. ‘She had this white gown on, it was really tight. Halter neck. And she said, she made me promise…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If… if I remembered to tell you the word “sacristy”, she’d take her dress off and–’

  I swung away. ‘That’s great, Zael. Keep up the good work.’

  ‘But I haven’t told you the end of the dream yet!’ he protested.

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘But–’

  Carl wandered in. He’d showered and changed. He was wearing black velvet trousers with high boots and a tight black singlet. It showed the taut flesh of his torso and arms, but it also displayed the grim, puckered suture scars around his right upper arm where the limb had been reattached. I was surprised. Carl had been so fastidious about hiding his awful wound so far. He had been ashamed of it, and thought it spoiled his perfect looks.

  No longer, apparently.

  He smiled at me. ‘What are you two talking about?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I do!’ he grinned, sitting down at his workstation.

  ‘Kara undressing,’ I said, trusting that would put him off.

  ‘I had a dream!’ Zael protested.

  ‘I’m sure you did, little man,’ Carl beamed. ‘You two boys and your smut when you get alone together.’

  Now I felt embarrassed.

  Carl’s fingers danced across the keyboard, pulling up the latest data-skeins. Carl had always worn
jewellery – it was part of his measured elegance – but now I saw that every finger on his right hand was laced with rings. Four or five to each digit. The left hand was bare.

  ‘Nice rings,’ I suggested.

  ‘Thanks,’ he replied, flexing his right hand towards me to show off nearly thirty rings, including those around his thumb. ‘If you’ve got them, flaunt them, I say.’

  ‘Status?’ I asked him.

  Carl looked at his screen. ‘Lots of agitation still. Plenty of Ministry comm traffic, plenty of Magistratum flare. Gimme a sec to punch up some data for you.’

  The vox chimed. It was Zeph. ‘Contact coming in. Hnh. Stand down, it’s Nayl.’

  Harlon had ridden the commute rail back into E from the Ministry towers. He was tired and hacked off and bedraggled from the storm.

  ‘Don’t think I can handle another day like that, Gideon,’ he told me as he settled down next to me, swigging a big amasec Carl had poured for him. ‘I mean, I thought our lives were supposed to be hard. In the Ministry towers, like a drone, it’s a mind killer. Just relentless crap. You know, I actually saw a scribe die at his station. And you know what they rushed to the medics? His cogitator.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  Nayl shrugged, sipping his drink. Rain clattered against the windows like pebbles. He looked more exhausted than I’d ever seen him and that was saying something.

  ‘It’s all about the data, I think. The data,’ he shrugged again. ‘I don’t know what they’re processing in there, but it’s not straight information. It’s like code, a jumble, a cipher. It seems all wrong to me. Then again, I don’t know what it’s like in any Administratum centre.’

  ‘You sampled the sort of stuff you’re talking about?’ I asked.

  Nayl nodded. ‘Yeah, I used my picter when I could. You make sense of it.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Carl. ‘I still haven’t made anything intelligible out of the stuff from Kys’s feed.’

  ‘Speaking of, where is Patience?’ Carl asked. Nayl frowned. Kara had told me she intended to visit Belknap before she came back so he could check her dressings, so I wasn’t expecting her for another couple of hours at least. But Patience, like Nayl, was supposed to come straight back to Miserimus after her shift.

  She should have arrived by now.

  ‘Her analyser’s no longer transmitting,’ Carl reported. ‘Hasn’t been for quite a while now. I’d just assumed she’d turned it off.’

  ‘Wystan?’ I said.

  Frauka paused. ‘You sure? It could still be a risk.’

  ‘Do it, please.’

  He activated his limiter.

  Immediately my mind rose free. I reached out carefully, masking myself, but the psykers had gone, leaving an aggravated weather pattern behind them.

  +Patience?+

  I couldn’t see her, couldn’t even sense her unique bio-signature.

  +Patience?+

  There was no reply.

  The armoured fliers dipped down towards the target location, mobbing through the evening light and the thunderstorm.

  Clad in black body-armour, his hellgun cinched across his belly, Toros Revoke climbed to his feet in the red-lit hold of the lead flier. He looked back at the secretists harnessed to the bare metal walls.

  ‘Make ready to deploy,’ he called above the purr of the jet wash.

  As if thickened and darkened by the storm, night had closed in across the bay side of the hive. Squalling inshore winds crashed the high tide against the breakwaters, pounding the stone piers of the outer flood defences.

  The occulting lighthouse, a black tower against a black sky, pulsed out its regular flashes, as if defiantly refusing to match the haphazard rhythms of the lightning.

  Inside, the cold, gloomy chambers and galleries had been lit by thousands of tapers and old, stained glow-globes. The storm winds hissed in under ill-fitting doors and rotting shutters, gusting like unquiet spirits along the dark halls, guttering the taper flames. Five of the fraters, armed with tindersticks, were occupied in a patrol of the lighthouse, relighting all the tapers and candles the intruding wind extinguished.

  Most of the other Fratery members were at devotion in the stockbrick basement, or working in huddled groups in various parts of the structure to record the latest refinements to the prospect and its focus and determiners as revealed by the menischus. The psyker who Orfeo Culzean had ordered them to procure, an evil-tempered renegade astrotelepath called Eumone Vilner, had arrived that afternoon, and he was hard at work relaying the whispered messages of the fraters on Nova Durma.

  In his private chamber, bathed in the light of the five oil lamps, the magus-clancular was taking his supper. Gawdel, a junior frater with a face mercilessly disfigured by disease, was feeding Lezzard liquidised nutrition supplements with a long-handled spoon. Lezzard’s exo-shell lacked the subtle motor control to feed himself, and his crumbling, back-peg teeth were long past dealing with solids. After every couple of spoonfuls, Gawdel sponged the magus-clancular’s chin with a cloth.

  ‘A little more wine,’ Lezzard wheezed and Gawdel obediently held the cup up to his mouth.

  There was an urgent knock on the chamber door.

  ‘Come,’ Lezzard called.

  Arthous entered, along with Frater Bonidar. They both appeared anxious. Each of them carried armfuls of paper scraps, seer papers, so many that some slipped from their grasp and fluttered to the floor.

  ‘Magus…’ Arthous began.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Lezzard asked, elevating his exo-skeleton so he was standing.

  ‘A sudden… I don’t know what to call it…’ Arthous stammered. ‘A sudden flurry in activity from the meniscus. We’re being inundated with new determiners.’

  ‘They’re coming so fast they’re contradicting themselves,’ said Bonidar.

  Lezzard remained composed. ‘My brothers, my dear brothers, calm yourselves. When you have served the silver mirrors as long as I have, you will know that from time to time such urgency breaks out. A sea-change has occurred somewhere, perhaps a quiet, subtle thing. Someone has experienced a change of heart or inadvertently reckoned upon a new course of action. Some subtle thing. Its effects however, may be far-reaching for our prospect. So the future is reshuffling its deck, rearranging itself to compensate, a knock-on effect. That is what causes these occasional flurries of contradiction. By the morning, it will have calmed, just as this storm will pass and calm, and a new, true picture will be readable. Why, I remember a time on Gloricent, years ago when–’

  ‘I think,’ Arthous butted in. ‘I think it’s more than that. See for yourself…’

  He held out a clutch of the papers in trembling fingers. Lezzard squinted to read them because the thin scraps were backlit by one of the lamps.

  ‘Ravenor. Ravenor. Ravenor,’ said Arthous. ‘And again here. And here. And see? Trice, again and again. Twenty, thirty times.’

  The magus-clancular raised a metal-caged hand. ‘They are known determiners, both of them major focal points. This is to be expected.’

  ‘But new names are appearing too,’ Bonidar said. ‘Here, this name: Revoke. We’ve not seen it before now, but it has turned up eight times. And this one, Boneheart. And this one, Molay. And others besides.’

  Lezzard frowned. ‘Show me,’ he said.

  The two fraters dropped their paper scraps onto the floor, knelt down and began scrabbling through them, holding up certain readings to show to the magus-clancular.

  ‘Here,’ said Arthous. ‘Another new name. Zael Efferneti. It occurs, by my count… six times. And this. Kara Swole. Two instances.’

  ‘Three,’ corrected Bonidar. ‘Also this name: Siskind. And this one. Lilean Chase: And this, Zygmunt Molotch. His name is clouded, but it features on thirteen occasions.’

  ‘All will become clear once the future settles–’ Lezzard began, but the tone of his voice betrayed his concern.

  Arthous rose from the floor and held out a scrap of paper in each hand. ‘Read these, t
hen, magus, and understand our fear.’

  Lezzard bent forward to look at the scribbled writing on the two scraps. One read, Orfeo Culzean. The other said simply, Stefoy.

  There was a long silence in which only the wind and the rain and thunder spoke.

  ‘Bring Frater Stefoy to me,’ Lezzard said quietly.

  The two fraters nodded and turned towards the door.

  The front entrance of the lighthouse detonated.

  Throughout the building, the brothers of the Divine Fratery barely had time to react before a second blast shook the place, then a third. The tang of smoke filled the lower chambers, and the brothers could hear cries and the blurt of gunfire. They ran to grab weapons of their own.

  The killers broke into the lighthouse from all sides, kicking in doors, smashing through window shutters. The storm blew in along with them, and to the bewildered fraters it seemed as if the wind and rain had taken human form to invade their stronghold.

  The first group of fraters to have found firearms clattered down the main staircase into the entrance hall and met the wrath of the invaders head on. Unarmoured, and firing only poor quality las-pieces and autoguns, the fraters were cut down without quarter. The intruding killers, grim figures in their black combat plating, stalked forward out of the smoke billowing from the ruptured threshold, placing shot-bursts with their hellguns. Fraters were blown off their feet as they tried to return fire, or were hit in the back as they broke and fled. The hallway and stairs were quickly littered with tangled bodies.

  ‘Up,’ Revoke signalled to Boneheart. His mind already had a firm lock on the psy-trace somewhere in the basement area.

  Boneheart led his squad up the staircase, firing from their shoulders at the landing above as they went. Clipped by the whining energy bolts, sections of the old wooden banister exploded and shattered. The body of a frater tumbled down, hit the stairs and slithered to a halt.

  As Boneheart’s secretists reached the landing, a group of fraters led by Bonidar pinned them briefly, establishing a ragged crossfire from the doorways of the first floor rooms. One of the secretists staggered back, wounded.

  Boneheart got in behind the stairway wall and threw a grenade. The bang of light and pressure threw debris out across the landing, and forced Bonidar and his men back, dazed and shaken. The secretists rushed them. They swung into each doorway, firing their hellguns on rapid. Fraters jerked and fell, blown backwards, some dismembered by the searing shots. Boneheart himself stormed the largest chamber. Firing from the shoulder, he killed the three fraters in the doorway, then swung round to slaughter two more who were trying to hide behind a table.