Ravenor Returned

by Dan Abnett

  The beam from above snapped off, and the lifter pulled away. The shutter gradually began to lock back in place.

  The Diadochoi stepped towards the slowly revolving lexicon held in the beam of light. The thirteen cipherists closed around him.

  ‘The first Enunciation will now begin,’ the Diadochoi said. ‘Jader, take your seat.’

  Trice nodded humbly and backed away towards the seating.

  ‘Time?’ he asked.

  ‘Eight-oh-two,’ replied Revoke.

  ‘Send the signal to the axial temples. Tell the clerics to begin enunciating the anonymic wafers.’

  ‘Signal is sent,’ Revoke replied. Trice sat down in the front row of the dais seating. Beside him, Revoke took a seat and then immediately got to his feet again, his hand to his forehead.

  ‘Toros?’

  ‘An alert, sir. Trouble at the main entrance of the templum. And…’

  ‘What?’ Trice hissed.

  ‘Unleashed psychic power. Very strong, very urgent. I can taste him. It’s Ravenor.’

  Trice went pale. ‘Go,’ he breathed. ‘Go now. And kill him, for damnation’s sake!’

  Revoke hurried down off the dais, out of the sacristy and began to sprint down the cloister towards the grand templum.

  Behind the grand templum, Kys ceased fire. Faced by her brutal assault, the five marshals and three secretists she had encountered had tried to fall back into cover around the north porch so they might cut her down while she was still in the open. But she had nudged out with her telekinesis and frozen them all in their tracks: startled, immobile targets. The yard was now littered with their bodies.

  Kys looked back at Unwerth. The barrel of the machine pistol he had tied to his hands was smoking. He had not hesitated when the shooting began.

  ‘Nice work,’ she said.

  ‘I try my part, as it goes.’

  Ahead of them around the curve of the grand templum and the outcrop of the north porch, the back of the old sacristy was lit up by floodlights. Pulling away from the domed roof, a brightly lit lifter was beginning to climb up into the night sky.

  ‘I think we’re missing the main event,’ Kys said. ‘Follow me.’

  ‘I would, mamzel, excepting for that discomforting sound.’

  Patience Kys came to a halt and looked around. A figure stood just inside the doorway of the north porch, urgently spinning a psyber lure around himself.

  High above them, a furious clinking rang out of the night: the beating of steel wings. Called out of the air, from every building in the formal, the Unkindness formed into a seething ball overhead, glittering and flashing in the floodlights.

  ‘Not again,’ Unwerth stammered.

  ‘Sholto. Get behind me,’ said Patience Kys. ‘Get behind me now.’

  Forming themselves into a slender arrowhead, the sheen birds banked upwards, then dipped and streamed down to shred them both.

  Wounded in the thigh, limping, Harlon Nayl swung around and cut down two more secretists with his plasma rifle. He could see the main entrance of the grand templum, swathed in smoke, most of which he had created. But he no longer had sight of either Ravenor or Belknap.

  The Templum Square looked like a battlefield, like the streets of a city where civil war had raged. The fury of his one-man gun battle with the marshals and secretists had sent panic cascading through the already jumpy crowds at the edge of the square. A full-scale riot had broken out along the approach roads and boulevards. Nayl knew he had to get to the old sacristy. He limped forward, ignoring the distant echoes of gunfire and screaming issuing from the darkness and the smoke.

  Then something more solid came out of the smoke and kicked him in the face. Nayl went down on his hands and knees and lost his grip on the plasma rifle.

  Boneheart threw a killing punch down at Nayl’s spine, but Nayl rolled onto his back, his mouth bleeding, and captured the punch in the cup of his hands. Still on his back, he tightened his grip like a vice and fractured the hand bones and fingers in Boneheart’s fist.

  Boneheart screamed in pain and staggered away, clutching his hand. Kicking himself back onto his feet, Nayl drew his Hostec autos and pumped eight shots through Boneheart’s body.

  The secretist juddered and fell. A pistol in each hand, Nayl circled, checking for other surprises. There was no one in sight, no one alive, anyway. So why did he feel like–

  A blade struck out of nowhere, so hard and fast Nayl had barely time to react. He lurched backwards and the blade sliced off the muzzles of both his weapons.

  He tossed the ruined guns aside and hunched in low, turning, wary. Monicker, a scarcely-visible phantom in the smoky air, danced around him and stabbed with her serrated blade. Nayl felt the rip gouge his back, right through his armoured bodyglove.

  Desperately, he turned around, but the phantom had already vanished.

  Keeping behind the big man, always behind him, Monicker closed for the kill.

  With Belknap behind me, I hovered into the nave of the grand templum. It was an empty and silent space, in shocking contrast to the violent night outside.

  ‘This way,’ I said to Belknap.

  A man in a grey suit ran in through the west entrance ahead of us. He had stale yellow eyes, like dying suns. He slowed down and began to pace towards us.

  ‘Imperial Inquisition!,’ I announced. ‘Surrender now.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ he said.

  I knew who he was too. He wrenched out with his mind and slammed me backwards. Belknap tried to shoot him, but the yellow-eyed man merely nodded and tossed the good doctor twenty metres backwards through the air. Belknap cracked a pew as he landed. He rolled onto the floor, unconscious.

  +Let’s go!+ I sent, and went fleshless. Revoke met me head on, forming a barbed, red spectral form that tasted of sour wine and ripped right through my mental shields. I foundered back, as exposed as the inner flesh of a seafood delicacy broken from its shell at a supper table.

  Aware of the stench of my own mental wounds, I reinforced my armour and met Revoke again, lancing skewers of psy-force into his red mind form. They transfixed him like quills.

  He howled.

  The aftershock rattled the wooden pews of the grand templum and blew out several windows. I pushed the skewers deeper, becoming an urchin-form laden with metre-long spines. Revoke screamed again, and broke away, shattering the spines like glass. He circled into the upper limits of the grand templum taking the form of something vaguely bat-winged whose distressing shape was described by more than four dimensions. It extruded long, fibrous tentacles that lashed me, stripping away my perfunctory shielding, and savaged the edges of my mind. In desperate defence, I made my fleshless form blade-sharp and drove upwards through the flailing tentacles, severing some, until I punctured the wet core inside the bat-shape.

  Shuddering, Revoke’s body fell to its knees. Blood drizzled out of his eyes and nose. He tightened his mind, folding the alien bat form up into a tiny red dot, then unfolding the dot as a complex geometric form. The shape began to self-repeat and fill the air with copies of itself at an exponential rate. The multiplying geometric forms smelled of burnt blood and old bones.

  I tried to turn, seeking space to fight back. They were all around me.

  There was a violent snap which felt like the entire planet had been pulled out of gravity like a fruit being plucked off a bough. The foul geometric forms, hundreds of them now, rushed in together, fitting tightly against one another like the teeth of a fractal dragon, catching my mind between them. This was constriction like nothing I had ever known. Not biting, but crushing, being caught between complex shapes that fitted against each other so perfectly that there was no space between them for anything else to exist.

  I was being crushed into nothing, compressed so tightly that the only place I could go was outside reality to my doom.

  I tried to break free. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.

  Kara, Carl and Plyton rushed the north door of the old sacristy and crouched in
the shadows. From their point of concealment they could see the newly-built dais and the hooded cipherists gathered around the slowly turning sphere hanging in the column of light.

  ‘We should–’ Plyton began.

  ‘Wait!’ Carl cried. ‘Terra’s sake! That’s Governor Barazan!’

  The Diadochoi reached his hands into the light and opened the metal leaves of the lexicon. He began to read, announcing the unannouncable.

  Plaster fell from the ceiling. Lightning flared in the sky above. The Diadochoi enunciated the first few syllables of creation.

  Fed with power, the resonating obelisks began to shine. With a numbing rush, ethereal white light flared out of the sacristy and soared in solid bands down the axes of the city. Every single one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine churches was lit up by the beams. The clerics had been halfway through reading out the anonymic wafers. Now they continued, as burning light suffused their congregations with auras of flame.

  In the radiance of the old sacristy, the Diadochoi played his hands over the lexicon, declaiming the un-words of power, the anti-language that was Enuncia.

  He paused and reached up to take off his public guise. The mask of Oska Ludolf Barazan flopped down to the floor of the dais.

  The burned, scarred, true face of the Diadochoi was revealed, a vile mass of seared tissue, raw flesh and lipless teeth.

  He fanned his hands out, fluttering the spinning metal pages of the lexicon again and read out the words so revealed.

  A halo surrounded him. Piece by piece, his body was restored, flesh reknitting and recreating, gloving his hands in skin, sweeping across his raw skull to resculpt a face. Meat, skin, hair, all reformed, bright and new.

  ‘Oh Holy Throne!’ Kara cried.

  ‘What?’ asked Plyton. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Molotch,’ said Carl Thonius. ‘It’s Zygmunt bastard Molotch.’

  Eight

  Kara and Thonius ran forward into the sacristy, into the almost blinding radiance. Plyton was right behind them.

  Their first shots cut down the secretists who tried to prevent them from reaching the dais. Some of the seated guests reacted in alarm, but most were too entranced by the cosmic wonder unfolding at the centre of the stage.

  Carl was first on the platform, his Hecuter blazed into the light. Two of the officiating cipherists went down, bright red blood leaking from their bodies across the white platform. The radiant light flickered for a second and the lexicon vibrated, as if disturbed.

  Molotch turned, the sudden displeasure on his face changing to a smile as he recognised Carl, and Kara behind him.

  Hands still playing the pages of the lexicon, he formed new un-words that first froze and then evaporated the shots from Carl’s pistol and Kara’s bolter in mid-air before they could reach him.

  Then he spoke another un-word .

  The force of it hit them like a wrecking ball. Plyton was thrown right back off the dais. Kara, hurled into the air, crashed into the raised seating, breaking both it and herself. She felt ribs and collarbone go before pain blacked her out and left her sprawled amongst the broken wreckage of the seats.

  Carl had taken the full force of the un-word. His coat and most of his clothing was shredded off, his skin blistered. His back had hit the platform so hard that it had dented under him. It felt as if all his internal organs had been pulped and his mind set on fire.

  Carl Thonius screamed, partly in pain, but mostly in helpless fury.

  They had left it too late. Molotch was now far too powerful for any of them to stop.

  The Unkindness sliced in and Patience Kys met it with a laspistol in each hand and four kineblades orbiting her lean figure. Her telekinetic gifts had never been tested by such a huge and complex threat before, but she didn’t falter. The guns began firing, flicking from target to target between shots. Exploded, smoking sheen birds fell out of the rushing formation. The four kineblades swept into the oncoming flock like surface-to-air missiles. She drove each one independently, slicing them through individual birds and immediately on into the next.

  She also hit the birds themselves with her telekinesis. She caused collisions, impacts that sheered wings off, even hammered some sheen birds beak-first into their neighbours like iron nails.

  In seconds, before the Unkindness had even reached her, hundreds of their broken chrome forms littered the flagstones.

  But there were too many, too many even for her formidable talents. Suddenly they were all around her, and she was pushing the swirling mass away from her in every direction as she continued to shoot, and stab with her blades.

  Rips began to appear all over her arms and legs. She heard Unwerth, right behind her, cry out in pain as part of the whirling metal blur ripped into his arm. Then another sheen bird struck his forehead square on and dropped him to the ground, barely conscious.

  Concentrating hard, Kys howled out in frustration. She was killing a dozen birds every second, but it just wasn’t enough. She felt a metal flight feather rip across her temple, a beak tear one knuckle, a fluttering chrome edge slice through her left shoulder.

  Still she fought on, blasting point blank and sewing her kineblades through the dense storm of bodies.

  Then she staggered backwards as a bird got past her and hit her in the face. Blood poured down her left cheek. With a desperate grunt, she flared out her telekinesis and billowed the entire flock away from her for a second’s respite.

  But only for a second. It immediately rushed back. She no longer had the strength to drive it away.

  The phantom with the knife put another deep cut into Nayl’s body and he hollered in pain. He was fast for a man of his size, but this half-there daemon was a great deal more nimble.

  The only thing Nayl had going for him was experience.

  He couldn’t see his opponent, not well enough to fight back effectively.

  So he didn’t try. He closed his eyes. And there she was.

  He could smell a sweet, female scent that showed him her position as clearly as if he’d seen her.

  Monicker lunged in, her blade about to rip into Nayl’s liver. A fist hit her instead.

  She fell, shocked, hurt, suddenly frantic. He was on her, pinning her with his weight.

  Nayl looking down at the transparent shape he held, pressed to the ground beneath him.

  ‘What are you?’ he growled.

  For a moment, Monicker flashed like a mirror and was him, another Nayl looking back at himself. That usually worked. That usually disorientated an opponent quite long enough for her to finish her wetwork.

  Nayl looked at himself.

  ‘Fancy that,’ he said, and broke her neck.

  Secretist Foelon, spinning his psyber lure, stalked across the square towards the swirling ball of the Unkindness, grounded like a dust-devil over the flagstones. The shooting from inside the flock had stopped. The targets were undoubtedly dead by now.

  Foelon felt his spinning lure twitch oddly. It abruptly began to ignore the laws of centrifugal physics. Dragging hard against his struggling arm, it lashed backwards in a whip crack and wrapped five times around his throat.

  Foelon gagged out a terrified gasp. The lure pulled tight, so tight it lifted the secretist off the ground and lynched him in mid air.

  The Unkindness burst apart, the mass of it exploding away in all directions from the central focus, spilling out across the square, dissipating.

  It left in its wake thousands of dead or damaged sheen birds, carpeting the flagstones like autumn leaves. And Patience Kys, still standing, her clothes ragged, her flesh covered in scratches and cuts

  She holstered her spent laspistols, mind-called her now-buckled kineblades back to her, and looked up at the hanged man dangling in the air.

  Kys turned her back on Foelon and let him fall to the ground. She bent down beside Unwerth. He was groggy and covered in cuts himself.

  ‘We’ve got to move,’ she said. He nodded and got up.

  Side by side, they struggled round
to the old sacristy. It was lit up, not so much by the massive floodlight arrays, but by the huge beams of white-light radiance that poured out of it and blazed away along the axial strands of the city.

  They hobbled to the doorway. Plyton lay on the threshold, badly knocked about.

  ‘What happened?’ Kys yelled over the hurricane roar of the light.

  ‘Kara and Thonius are inside,’ Plyton gasped. ‘But the man hurt us all bad. I fell. I managed to crawl here.’

  ‘What’s going on in there?’

  ‘Some kind of ritual,’ Plyton yelled back. ‘So bright. So much power…’

  ‘We’ve got to get in!’ Kys said.

  ‘That isn’t permissive,’ Unwerth shouted to her. He’d already tried to walk into the light flaring out of the doorway, but it was like a solid barrier.

  Kys pushed her hands against it, felt the light crackle and pulse like a telekinetic field.

  There was no way in.

  Carl tried to move, tried to rise. It felt as if the howling light was pushing him down into the decking of the dais. He fought against it, drawing mental strength from his long hatred of Zygmunt Molotch and the shock of seeing the bastard alive.

  He sat up.

  His hands still flitting over the lexicon’s metal pages, Molotch looked round as he noticed Carl stir. He whispered an un-word, almost as if he were blowing Thonius an affectionate kiss.

  Carl fell backwards, screaming. It felt as if his entrails had been ripped out.

  Molotch returned to his enunciation.

  Up in the seating, Culzean suddenly jumped up.

  ‘Diadochoi! Diadochoi!’ he yelled, trying to make himself heard over the monumental clamour.

  ‘Take your seat!’ Trice yelled, getting up too. ‘How dare you disrupt the–’

  ‘Look! Look, you fool!’ Culzean bellowed back in his face. ‘Look!’

  Carl Thonius had risen to his feet. A filthy red light throbbed out of him, backlighting his skin and making silhouettes of his bones. In the ethereal brilliance of the sacristy, he was like a drop of blood in a pail of milk.

  He raised his right arm and the flesh crisped away like burning paper, exposing the blackened arm bones and the long fingers that sprouted into talons.