Ornsworld was the main home of the ratling sub-race and the recovery from this attack on the world would be long and painful, if indeed the planet and its population ever fully recovered at all from the decimation which had been visited upon them. For the next few generations at least, Horst coldly calculated, the Imperial Guard would have to make alternative arrangements for the recruitment of its quartermasters and sniper specialists.
He was standing in what had once been the central square of the ratling settlement known as Samstown, but the anonymous, burnt-out ruins around him showed little discernible evidence of what had once been the settlement’s main focal point. Horst had never been on Ornsworld before, but he was familiar with its numberless similar counterparts scattered across the length and breadth of the Imperium, and, without too much effort, he could well imagine the look and feel of the place.
Over there would have been the local Administratum building, the centre of the Imperial bureaucracy on Ornsworld, and facing it almost in rivalry from the other side of the square would have been an Ecclesiarchy temple dedicated to whatever form of the Divine Emperor the ratlings had been given to worship. No doubt around the fringes of the square would also have been clustered the headquarter buildings of many local provincial trade guilds and merchant houses, since ratlings were nothing if not enterprising and industrious in the acquisition of wealth and material comforts.
All of it was gone now, swept away in mere hours as the gaze of the Despoiler fell upon this tranquil and unremarkably ordinary backwater Imperial world, located well away from the front-line planetary systems and main attack routes leading out from the Eye of Terror.
When his vox crackled into life, Horst easily recognised the brief series of staccato identity code blips hidden within the seemingly random-sounding burst of radio static.
“Horst here. Where are you, and what have you found, old friend?” he answered.
The voice which answered him was typically gruff and irreverent. Half a century of dispensing the Emperor’s harsh and often brutal justice to the subjects of the Imperium had done little to improve the Senior Arbitrator Haller Stavka’s notoriously blunt manner.
“In the hills, inquisitor, about sixty kilometres north-west of your position. It took a bit of doing, but we finally got one of these little bastard runts to act as guide and lead us to the site. No wonder the Hereticus could never find the place. The woodlands are so dense up here, and there’s so many deep ravines and dead-end canyons that you could spend a lifetime crawling through these bloody hills and never find anything. It wasn’t so hard to find the way as we got closer, though. After a while, we just followed all the damn buzzards in the sky above us, and they led us straight to it.”
“And?” Horst fought to quash the tight, underlying tone of apprehension in his question.
“I’ll say that for these little half-pint bastards, they must have put up a hell of a fight defending the place, not that it did them any good in the end, of course. We found them all over the place, but the ones who were still alive at the end made their last stand in the inner temple part of the cave system.”
“The xeno-artefact?” Again, Horst struggled to control the anxiety in his voice. There was a pause before Stavka replied, although Horst already knew what the answer would be.
“Gone, inquisitor. Just like on Purgatory.”
The door at the far end of the corridor opened, and Horst saw the stolid figure of Stavka emerge from the interrogation cell beyond. Even though he was out of uniform and wore only leather breeches with a simple, rough-spun tunic and a belt with holstered bolt pistol sidearm, there was little mistaking him for anything other than the capable and veteran servant of the Emperor’s law which he had been for all but the last two decades of his life.
From the Imperial eagle emblem branded into his shoulder to the grim, impassive fix of his jaw to the rippling muscles beneath the surface of his scar-crossed arms, this was clearly a man well used to the often violent imposition of the Emperor’s justice, a loyal and capable servant of the Imperium who would not flinch in the face of whatever task was required of him.
Even so, Horst could see the anxiety written across the arbitrator’s uncharacteristically pale features. Stavka had been supervising the interrogation of the warp-spawn thing for over thirty-six hours now, and the strain on the man’s face was clearly evident. Once again, Horst silently asked himself for perhaps the thousandth time if he was truly justified in taking such an extreme course of action. The creature’s very presence here was an abomination, he knew. It was an unnatural, tainted thing, and the corruption it carried could potentially spread further—much further indeed—than this time and place.
Stavka nodded in salute to Horst as he met the inquisitor at the entrance to the interrogation chamber.
“It’s been asking for you, inquisitor,” he said simply. “By name.”
“Horsssssst,” hissed the daemon-thing in undisguised pleasure, one of the torture-inflicted wounds in its throat splitting open wider and warping to form a crude mouth. “Why haven’t you come down to see me earlier? I’ve been bored waiting for you. You should be more careful with your choice of minions. These ones here make for such dull company.”
A queer, bubbling laugh emerged from the ruin of its face, and it writhed in pleasure, straining against the bindings which held it down onto the pitted, filth-stained surface of the interrogation slab. Its skin was criss-crossed with scars and open wounds, some of the wounds horribly opening and closing in synch with the creature’s mouth as it talked. Something that wasn’t blood bubbled hotly out of the torture-openings in its body. Its skin was blackened and charred in those portions where the mystic binding wards and glyphs had been carved or tattooed into its flesh. Beneath the tight, stretched drum of its skin, the musculature of its unnatural body seethed and broiled in urgent agitation.
Other than the sick laughter of the warp spawn, the only other sound in the chamber was the droning chanting of the chorus of three Inquisition-approved Ecclesiarchy confessors as they endlessly recited prayers of protection and the sacred words of the litanies of binding. One of them swung an incense burner filled with potent and blessed unguents in a vain attempt to dispel the vile, hot reek of the thing which filled the air in the close confines of the underground chamber, and Horst silently gave quick thanks for the rebreather implants inside his throat and nostrils as he leant forward to confront the daemon-creature.
“You know me, warp-spawn?”
It laughed again, a hideous, high-pitched, almost childlike giggle. “Perhaps, perhaps not, noble Inquisitor Horst. Perhaps we met during your famous scouring of Cato, or perhaps it was earlier than that? During that incident in the tunnels beneath Pazzazu?”
Horst visibly flinched at the mention of the so-called “hive of damnation”. Not even his brethren in the innermost circles of the Inquisition knew the full facts of what he had seen and endured in that hellish network of underhive passages and crypts, and he doubted that anyone born in the last century or so even knew the name of that once most infamous of hive cities, so rigorous had been his ruthless subjugation of the full facts of his investigation there, and the forces it had stirred up. The daemon-thing cackled in delight, and Horst angrily cursed at himself, realising that, in falling for a trick that even a novice interrogator apprentice might have avoided, he had allowed the creature to open up a possible weakness in his mental defences.
“Warp spawn, is that all you have to offer me?” he said, deliberately putting a heavy sneering tone into his voice. “Half-truths and lies? Vague hints of ancient events of no interest to anyone in these last hundred years? You disappoint me. I thought even a minor warp-born such as you could have done better than that.”
Again, the creature cackled, clearly relishing the encounter. “Ah, but Gideon, isn’t that why you had me summoned? To hear the whispers carried on the currents of the warp? To know the shape of the future? To learn what plans the Despoiler has been weaving all thi
s time?”
Horst’s expression was stony and impenetrable, betraying no hint of the thoughts which lay behind it, but, whatever the daemon was searching for as it carefully studied his reaction, somehow it found it. It laughed in satisfaction, forming new mouths to further express its hellish delight.
“Ah yes, the Despoiler, who stood with Horus as the walls of your precious corpse-emperor’s palace came tumbling down before them. Abaddon of old, who still desires above all else the prize which was denied to him and his master those ten thousand years ago. He’s come again, Gideon, out of the Eye of Terror, out of a place which you cannot and should not dare try to imagine, and all I see for you and the other servants of the corpse-emperor is a darkness of fear and futile sacrifice. Enjoy what time you have left, Gideon,” it laughed, “for the Despoiler’s plots are nearly done, and soon these worlds you cling to so tenaciously will all be gone!”
Horst was turning angrily away even before the last echoes of the creature’s mocking, multi-voiced laughter had died away. “Have the chamber sealed and leave this thing here to rot,” he instructed Stavka. “Let us see if it’s still laughing in a thousand years’ time, cut off from the warp, bound inside this body and encased within a hundred tonnes of reinforced rockcrete.”
He took four steps—perhaps two more than he had expected—when the daemon-creature’s voice shrilly rang out from behind him.
“The sleepers will be awakened! The Talismans of Vaul, that is what the Despoiler truly seeks here. And, oh yes, Gideon, just wait and see the light that will shine forth from those pretty baubles! Your day will come! The six will become one, and then all shall fall together!”
It screamed to itself in mad laughter and then started to babble in a confused chorus of voices. The printer mechanism of the cogitator device set up in a corner of the room clattered noisily as its auto-transcription abilities strove to keep up with the wild stream of gibberish and prophecies fed to it from the audio receptors of the servo-skull monitors hovering above the interrogation slab.
Later on, Horst and Monomachus would spend long hours going over these transcripts and the accompanying vidpict records of the creature’s interrogation, but Horst knew that such second-hand evidence was no substitute for actually being here and facing the thing, listening to the fear and hate in its chorus of voices.
He leant closer, wary of some warp-born trick from the thing imprisoned on the slab, but keen to pick up more of the pattern he was beginning to discern amongst the torrent of nonsense words the daemon was now screaming in various different-toned voices. A second’s concentration, a clearing away of all the extraneous gibberish using a mental trick which Monomachus had taught him, and, suddenly he heard the strain of prophecy amongst the stream of daemonic gibberish.
“Fularis, Anvil and Fier,” trilled the daemon in a grotesque and child-like song-song voice, repeating the couplets over and over to itself. “Rebo, Schindelgeist and Brigia. The day will come. Six become one! All shall come together!”
Stavka too had heard the daemon’s words and instantly grasped something of their meaning. “Fularis, Anvil and the others,” he started, “they’re all Imperium worlds where—”
A sharp look from Horst cut him off. At the inquisitor’s silent, urgent gesture, he quickly joined Horst in the passageway outside.
“Let it babble on until it’s finished, but I think we’ve already heard the best of what it had to tell us.”
The one-time Arbites officer nodded grimly in agreement. “And after that?” he asked, looking questioningly at Horst.
“As we agreed beforehand,” said Horst, looking his subordinate straight in the eye. “Maximum containment. Nothing said or done in that room leaves this place.”
Stavka nodded in understanding, his hand unconsciously shifting towards his bolstered bolt pistol. He saluted briefly and turned and re-entered the room.
Horst’s thoughts were deep and troubled as he made the journey back to the elevator platform which would take him back up to the main levels of the citadel and forever away from this tainted place. The summoning of the daemon would surely damn him in the eyes of many of his fellow inquisitors, the so-called “puritan” faction who zealously followed the ancient maxims of Imperial dogma to the very letter. It was, he admitted, a dangerous and desperate thing to do, an act which was, at best, an admission of his failure to divine the plans and purposes of the enemy by any other means. What he was about to do next would, he judged, leave him equally damned in the eyes of others within the Inquisition.
“Talismans of Vaul,” he murmured to himself, repeating one of the things the daemon had said. He did not fully understand the true import of everything the daemon had spoken of, but already his worst suspicions were deepening, and he recognised at least part of that phrase.
Vaul.
When the High Lords of Terra had despatched him here to the Gothic sector to investigate what had only then been a series of bewildering if seemingly random attacks by Chaos raiders across the fringes of the sector, he had little imagined the strange and terrible places the course of that investigation would lead him to. Now, as the forces of the Despoiler broke out of the Eye of Terror and plunged all of the Gothic sector into ferocious, full-scale war of a level not seen since the time of the Great Heresy, his investigation into the enemy’s true purpose was nearing an end, and this last stage of that journey would take him in a new direction and possibly towards the strangest and most dangerous encounter of all.
Vaul. An eldar word. One of their damned alien heathen deities, he knew. Well, when this is all over then, if the fanatics of the Ordo Malleus don’t get me, he thought to himself, their brethren in the Ordo Xenos most assuredly will.
The moment of humour was short-lived. As he entered the elevator and activated the command rune for the surface levels, he could already hear the first bolt pistol shots ringing out from the place he had just left.
Days later, Horst and his entourage pushed their way through the bronze doors, entering the Lord Admiral’s strategium chamber beyond in a dash of heavily booted feet and weapons on armour. Navy armsmen guards raised the blunt-nosed barrels of their deadly shotcannon weapons in sudden alarm, but were quickly quelled into submission by the sight of the Inquisition emblem upon Horst’s carapace-armoured chest-plate, as well as by a warning growl from Stavka and the rest of Horst’s bodyguard retinue: veteran warriors gathered from half a dozen different branches of the Imperium armed services.
Horst took the scene in with a glance. A group of Imperial Navy officers, the proof of their various exalted ranks indicated by the colourful plumage of gold braiding and glittering medals decorating their dark blue uniforms, stood around the spinning strategium globe at the centre of the room. Around them were waiting phalanxes of adjutant officers, scribe adepts, Munitorium officials, tech-priests and even, standing to one side in the wide chamber, the distinctive crimson and gold robes of a cardinal-prince of the Ecclesiarchy, attended by his own smaller courtly entourage of followers.
All eyes were upon Horst and his group, many navy officers openly gawping in surprise at this unforgivable breach of protocol. Only one figure amongst the cluster of senior navy personnel gathered around the hologram display failed to react or show any sign of alarm at this unwarranted invasion of the very centre of Battlefleet Gothic Command. The man, a tall and elegantly thin naval officer wearing the resplendent uniform of an admiral of the Segmentum Obscuras fleet continued to lean forward in inspection of the strategium display, staring in close concentration at the complex ballet of planet and battle-squadron runes projected across the three-dimensional map of the Gothic sector. He seemed to be caught up in deep contemplation of some remote and complex long-range strategy equation, the workings of which only he could truly fathom. The flickering light from the display played across his face, reflecting off the trademark cyber-device implanted in place of his missing right eye and throwing his distinctive hawk-like features into stark relief. It was a face now fami
liar to the inhabitants of every civilised Imperial world within the Gothic sector from the endless propaganda vidpict-casts which had become a feature of daily life since the start of the war.
Not even the lowliest rating or indentured slave-worker aboard any of the hundreds of Imperial Navy warships under his command would be in any doubt about the figure’s identity, even without the magnificent diamond-inlaid and gold-woven rank sash he wore across his tunic breast.
“My dear Horst,” said Lord Admiral Cornelius Ravensburg, in the tell-tale clipped accent of the hereditary navy aristocrat class of Cypra Mundi, “always a pleasure to welcome a member of the Imperial Inquisition aboard my flagship, even if the visit is both unannounced and unexpected. I take it then that you are not here to check anything as mundane as mere naval strategy?”
The voice of the commander of Battlefleet Gothic concealed a dry, slightly mocking tone. It had been five centuries since the Inquisition had conducted a merciless purge of suspected and widespread seditious elements amongst the senior officer cadre of Segmentum Obscuras, but such events lingered long in the memories of the institutions of the Imperium of Mankind, and there had traditionally been a great deal of hostile resentment to the agents of the Inquisition amongst the upper echelons of Battlefleet Obscuras.
Horst sensed Stavka bristling in anger at the Lord Admiral’s tone, but Horst himself knew that this was not the time to dwell on any of the petty resentments and rivalries that existed between so many branches of Imperium authority. He bowed slightly in a modest deference to Ravensburg’s rank, and, when he spoke, his tone was polite and conciliatory.
“Forgive the intrusion, Lord Ravensburg, but I must speak to you most urgently. What I have to tell you is too precious to be trusted to any courier vessel or astropath communication, and involves vital information concerning the enemy’s underlying motives in launching their assault upon the Gothic sector.”
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 2