[Warhammer 40K] - Scourge the Heretic

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  The discussion went on for a few minutes longer, between Elyra and the voider at first, and then she switched her attention to the man at her shoulder. They conferred earnestly, with the air of two people both used to striking the bargain they wanted and unwilling to give any more ground than they had to. On a couple of occasions, she turned to Vos for support or to confirm something, which he did in a few terse words or with a brusque nod of the head. Then she handed over the jewellery with a smile that looked almost genuine, and the anonymous fellow in the grey cloak nodded in satisfaction. Their business concluded, Elyra and Kyrlock turned away, heading back to the airshaft, and the middle-aged man began to confer with the voider.

  “That’s it,” Drake reported, beginning to pack up his equipment with an odd sense of anticlimax. “The deal’s done. They’re on their way.”

  “Excellent,” Vex said. “I’ll inform Barda. He should be waiting for you at the extraction point by the time you reach it.”

  “Thanks.” On the verge of pulling out, Drake raised the amplivisor for one final time, following the distant figures of Vos and Elyra until they were both swallowed by the gloom of the airshaft, and tried not to wonder if he’d ever see either of them again.

  EIGHTEEN

  Icenholm, Sepheris Secundus

  105.993.M41

  The almost perpetual cloud cover had broken a little while Horst slept, allowing a haze of unfamiliar blue to appear in irregular patches above the suspended city, and shafts of sunlight to illuminate it sporadically in sudden effusions of dazzling polychromatic light where they struck the stained glass frontages of buildings and spires. As he entered the villa’s living room he found his colleagues making the most of the glittering spectacle, enjoying a midday breakfast facing the terrace, the wide glass doors thrown open to admit a chill but invigorating current of air.

  “Did you sleep all right?” Keira asked, glancing towards the door as he entered, and Horst nodded brusquely.

  “Fine,” he said, before his sleep-addled mind fully registered the fact that her tone was free of the sarcasm his expectation had loaded the question with. Noting the flicker of disappointment that crossed her features at his curt response, he smiled wearily, and added, “thank you for asking.” If she was still trying to rein in her habitual truculence, he might as well encourage her.

  “You’re welcome,” she replied, smiling. The effect was astonishing, and as unexpected as the sunlight slicing through the murky skies of Sepheris Secundus, softening her features in a manner he’d never seen before. For the first time he could remember, her brittle mask slipped, revealing a glimpse of the woman the girl might one day become if she allowed herself to, and he found himself wondering if playing the role of a lady was beginning to have a more profound effect on her than either of them could possibly have anticipated. “We’ve saved you some food, and I don’t think Danuld’s quite managed to drink all the recaf yet.”

  “I can always chime for some more,” Drake offered, glancing at the crystal mug in his hand with a faint air of guilt.

  Horst shook his head, finding enough remaining in the pot for his own needs, and ladled a thick layer of ackenberry syrup over a plateful of waffles from one of the chafing dishes cluttering the sideboard. “I’ve got enough,” he assured him, picking up some cutlery, and turning to skirt the sofa on which Keira was sitting, still swathed in her yellow dressing gown, while Lilith braided her damp hair into an elaborate coiffure. As he brushed past her, he caught a faint, lingering scent of warm water and bath oil. Comfortably seated at last, and settling his composure behind the shield of plying his fork, he risked a glance in the girl’s direction. “You seem to have had an interesting time with your tame philosophers last night.”

  “Most enlightening,” Keira agreed, taking the hint, and glancing up at Lilith. “Talking openly about their business with a servant in the room would be out of the question. Would this take much longer, do you think?”

  “Almost done, my lady,” the plump maid assured her, fussing a few final strands into place, and holding up a mirror to allow her to inspect the final result.

  “It looks very striking,” Keira said. “This is the latest Secundan fashion, you say?”

  “The queen herself wore her hair like that to the mass last St. Angevin’s Day,” Lilith assured her. “Since then it’s been all the rage. Of course, with your unusual colouring, the effect will be very different. Heads will turn, I can promise you that.”

  “Well, I am hoping to make a good impression,” Keira said, smiling at Horst in a fashion that, in anyone else, he would have thought of as flirtatious. Once again, the memory of his conversation with Elyra rose up to tease him with doubts and unwelcome distractions, not unmixed with some guiltily pleasurable fantasies, and he wished she was here to turn to for advice. Women had always been something of a mystery to him, Keira more than most, and he felt considerably out of his depth.

  “I’ve no doubt you’ll do that,” he agreed, bracing himself for whatever her response might be, but she’d already turned back to her servant.

  “Do you think you can find something for me to wear that would set it off properly?” she asked.

  “Of course, my lady.” Visibly swelling with pride at being entrusted with so momentous a decision, Lilith trotted from the room. As soon as she’d vanished, Keira picked up the looking-glass again, and grimaced at her reflection.

  “You look great,” Drake assured her, a little awkwardly, Horst thought. Clearly the job of tutoring her in Secundan etiquette had been a taxing one.

  “I look like a caba nut pastry,” Keira said, with a flash of her old belligerence. Then she smiled thoughtfully. “But at least I should be able to hide a couple of surprises in there.”

  “Good.” Horst nodded, not bothering to disguise his relief. “I want you as tooled up as possible. The rest of us will be ready to intervene if we have to, but if it all goes ploin-shaped it may take us a while to get in.”

  “Quite true,” Vex agreed, projecting a schematic of the Adrin estate on the hololith built into his data-slate. The mansion seemed relatively modest by the standards of most of the noble houses Horst had visited across the sector, but down in the Gorgonid the only space to build on would be the unproductive worked-out areas of the family holding. “Like most of the highborn dwellings in the pit, the majority of the house has been constructed underground.” He rotated the image, allowing everyone to appreciate the scale of the problem they faced. The outer wall encloses a roughly semi-circular depression in the main face, with a relatively small surface structure abutting on to the centre of the cliff. “Details of the interior layout are sparse, although I have been able to infer a speculative configuration from the old mining records, given that the main dwelling areas will have been enlarged from the worked-out shafts.”

  “Meaning there are bound to be back ways into the mine,” Drake put in.

  Horst nodded thoughtfully. “Can you pinpoint those?” he asked.

  Drake shook his head. “They’ll be secret. Only the family would know them all, and their most dependable retainers. Not even the household guards would be trusted with that kind of information.”

  “Does Adrin have guards?” Keira asked.

  “Not officially,” Vex said. “Household troops are a prerogative restricted to those of baronial rank, and the royal family. In practice, however, I’d be very surprised if he doesn’t have some kind of security in place.”

  “He does,” Drake confirmed. “They all do. It’s a status thing. They just don’t wear uniforms, or carry visible weapons.”

  “How many men are we likely to be facing?” Horst asked. This was the former Scourge’s area of expertise, and, not for the first time, he found himself grateful for Inquisitor Finurbi’s foresight in recruiting the man.

  “No more than a dozen, I would think,” Drake said. “A lot of the minor nobility have one or two personal bodyguards, who follow them around at a discreet distance, but Adrin doesn’t seem to
.” He glanced across at Keira, who shook her head.

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” she confirmed.

  “Then he doesn’t,” Horst said, a trifle indistinctly around a mouthful of waffle. “You’d have spotted a tagger within seconds of making contact.” Again, the smile flickered across her face as she registered the compliment, and he returned it awkwardly, feeling as though he was suddenly edging across a minefield. Infuriating as their old antagonistic relationship had been, it had at least felt settled. Now, new doubts and uncertainties were muddying the waters just when he needed to remain focused.

  “That probably means he fancies himself as a fighter,” Drake counselled. “A lot of the highborn go in for duelling or melee sports.” He looked at Keira with a little more concern than Horst would have expected, but then he hadn’t known her for long enough to realise just how deadly she could be. “Don’t underestimate him if things turn bad.”

  “I won’t,” Keira said, her usual breezy confidence reasserting itself, “but I don’t suppose he’ll have any tricks up his sleeve that I haven’t seen before.”

  “Leaving aside any resistance from the target,” Drake went on, warming to his theme, “his household security shouldn’t prove much of a problem. If it follows the usual pattern, he’ll only have two or three competent fighters among them, and maybe twice that in meat-head muscle. They’ll be carrying hand weapons mostly, blades or pistols for the leaders, and basic melee kit for the rest.”

  Vex coughed, and slapped his respirator panel reflexively. “That may not be an entirely safe assumption,” he said. “If Adrin really is involved with a heretical group, which seems extremely likely, then he almost certainly has access to far more resources than most men in his position. I think it only prudent to assume a greater number of guards than normal, and with significantly greater firepower.”

  “Based on what?” Horst asked, pushing his empty plate aside.

  “On Danuld’s observations last night,” Vex said, displaying the picts that Drake had taken of the fortified compound at the head of the airshaft. “Note the number of armed men, and the variety of firearms apparently at their disposal.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re guarding his house too,” Drake pointed out, “and you still haven’t tied the people smugglers directly to Adrin in any case.”

  “On the contrary,” Vex said, managing to inject a distinctly smug timbre into his usual monotone. “I followed your suggestion of tracing the ownership records of the mineshaft, and found them most illuminating.”

  “Illuminating how, exactly?” Horst asked, returning to the sideboard for more recaf.

  Vex shrugged. “To summarise the conclusions of a most interesting rummage through the archives, the holding formed part of the dowry settlement on the occasion of the marriage of Lord Harald Tonis and Lady Sibella Adrin, some forty-seven standard years ago. I can give you the exact date in a moment, if you like.”

  “Wait just a minute,” Keira said, in tones of outraged astonishment. “You’re telling us Adrin and Tonis were related?”

  The tech-priest nodded. “First cousins, to be precise.”

  “And you only just got around to telling us?” The familiar sarcastic tone was back in her voice, and Horst wasn’t quite sure if his predominant feeling was one of regret or relief. “Anything else you’re sitting on that we might need to know?”

  “I completed my cogitations this morning,” Vex replied levelly, unperturbed as always, “and am currently presenting my conclusions at the earliest opportunity. It’s hardly my fault that those unblessed by the Omnissiah require regular periods of sleep to remain functional.”

  “Then carry on, by all means,” Horst said, anxious to prevent the discussion from getting bogged down in pointless recrimination. He took a mouthful of recaf, considering the implications of this fresh revelation. “I suppose that would give Adrin a motive for aiding fugitive psykers, knowing his cousin had been one.”

  “It would,” Vex agreed. “In any event, his family’s ownership of their base of operations clearly implicates him in the Shadow Franchise smuggling racket.”

  “You seem very sure of the Franchise’s involvement,” Horst said. “Do you have any further evidence of that?”

  “It’s a matter of probabilities,” Vex said. “Keira overheard one of their operatives conferring with a mutant about a consignment of contraband ore, to be delivered last night, and just such a transaction took place while Danuld was watching the compound.” He gestured towards the data-slate’s pict screen, and the recording the Guardsman had made flickered across it. “It is, of course, entirely possible that another such exchange was taking place elsewhere in the Tumble at the same time, but given the amount of ore involved, I consider it far more likely that this was the arrangement Keira heard being discussed.”

  “So do I,” Horst agreed, considering the implications uneasily. A pattern of some sort was beginning to form, that was undeniable, but too much of it still didn’t make sense. Taking refuge in the methods of assessing evidence he’d learned as an arbitrator, he began trying to make connections between the facts. “So, we can assume that Adrin is involved in the smuggling ring, possibly at his cousin’s behest, and that the Shadow Franchise is moving fugitive psykers off-planet. That raises the question of whether or not they realise that.”

  “Would they care if they did?” Drake asked.

  “Probably not,” Horst conceded. “Not if they were making money. In either case, they’re only providing the means of transport. Someone has to be offering the wyrds refuge at the other end. Our primary goal is to find out who.”

  “We’ll know more about that when Elyra reports back,” Keira said. A faintly troubled expression crossed her face. “Assuming we’ll be able to track her through the warp.”

  “Fortunately, I’ve been able to identify the ship she’ll be on,” Vex put in, stilling another coughing fit with a resonant blow to the chest. Picking up a nearby screwdriver, he began poking about beneath his robe. After a moment, he put the tool down again, inhaled cautiously, and called up a fresh image on the pict screen. “Danuld was able to get this pict of a voider, who subsequently spent some time consulting with Elyra and Vos. I think it’s safe to assume that he’s part of the crew of the ship they’ll be travelling on.”

  “That doesn’t narrow it down all that much,” Horst pointed out. “There must be hundreds of ore barges in orbit at the moment.”

  “Quite so.” Vex coughed again, and slapped his chest plate, looking vaguely disappointed. “But I was able to enhance the pict. Under the right degree of magnification, the crew patch on his jacket became clearly visible.” He did something to the slate, and the display changed, zooming in on a small portion of the man’s upper sleeve, until the picture of a bear astride something small and cylindrical, surrounded by water, appeared centred in the screen. “He’s from the Ursus Innare, a Diurnus Line bulk transport, registered out of Scintilla. Traffic control has a flight plan logged back to the home system, departing tonight.”

  “Good,” Horst said, nodding in satisfaction. “Then find us a ship. If we can’t get there ahead of them, we can at least be hard on their heels.”

  “Should we inform the Tricorn?” Keira suggested, with uncharacteristic diffidence. “They could intercept the barge as soon as it drops out of the warp.”

  Horst shook his head. “Too great a risk. We need Elyra and Vos to move further up the chain and see where it goes. If the Ordos tip their hand before our people have a chance to make contact, we lose the lead.” He considered for a moment. “I’ll forward a report to the inquisitor before we leave. He’ll be in the Scintilla system before the Ursus Innare arrives, and I’m sure he’ll know what to do.”

  “Works for me,” Keira said.

  “Glad to hear it,” Horst said, his words sounding a little strange as he spoke them, the simple pleasantry shorn of the sarcasm he’d normally have loaded it with. He turned back to Vex. “Have you any idea what Tonis wa
s up to in the Fathomsound yet?”

  “None whatsoever,” Vex admitted. “The presence of psy dampers would imply that he was dealing with extremely powerful psykers, but the modifications he’d made to them would have rendered them completely inoperative. Quite honestly, I’m baffled.”

  “Fair enough.” Horst gave that line of enquiry up as a bad job for the moment. “We’ll just have to wait for some more evidence to turn up. Any luck yet identifying that other thing you found?”

  “No.” Vex picked up the strange piece of ivory, and shook his head. “I’ve no idea what this substance is. It’s certainly not listed among the Materia Codicie.”

  “'What about the carving on it?” Drake asked. “That must mean something, surely?”

  “It might if I could read it,” the tech-priest admitted, “but I’ve never seen anything like these marks before. In some ways they resemble circuit diagrams, but I haven’t found anything comparable in the annals of my order.”

  “Perhaps it’s archeotech,” Keira suggested. “We know Tonis was using the Conclave archives to look for stuff like that. Maybe he found some.”

  “It’s possible,” Vex conceded, doubt colouring his voice, “but if this were of human origin, some record of a similar system ought to have survived.”

  “The raiders who attacked the Citadel were using xenos tech,” Drake reminded him, “and Tonis was probably in league with them. Perhaps that thing was the price of his treachery.” He stared at the milky white object with undisguised loathing.

  “Perhaps it was,” Horst agreed. He held out his hand for the tiny object. It was heavier than he’d expected, and felt uncomfortably warm against his palm. After a moment, he returned it to the tech-priest, resisting the urge to wipe his hand against the leg of his trousers. “Perhaps it’s a talisman of some kind. If he was a psyker before this Magos Avia replaced that part of his brain with augments, he might still have needed some protection against the warp.” If Elyra was here, of course, she might be able to answer that question, but their only expert on such matters was kilometres away, as effectively cut off from them as if she was already transiting the realm of Chaos.