by Rob Sanders
Torqhuil and Hessian joined them moments later. Czevak got to his feet and looked down the unforgiving path of their climb. The balcony was swarming with frenzied degenerates who were taking it upon themselves to duplicate their ascent. Slipping his bolt pistol from its holster, the Techmarine sprayed the climbing cannibals, knocking bolt-blasted skeletals from their purchase. Looking up, the High Inquisitor found only the sculptured belfry and the sickly clouds that its tower pinnacle almost reached. This time they really had run out of palace.
‘Where’s Epiphani?’ Klute said – up on his feet and wandering the shuttle pad. The four of them span around, searching for signs of the warp-seer. Father appeared behind Czevak, rising up the Spire wall and above the platform. Epiphani’s head appeared also and Klute’s shoulders sagged in relief. Moments later they tightened again as the Unbound officer’s putrescent features came up behind the warp-seer. It had in fact been the Nurgle officer who had been pulling her up through the final stages of the exhausting climb. Clambering over the edge of the platform the Guard officer had the daemonhost, the Space Marine and the two inquisitors storming towards him. The Unbound officer stood on the lip of the pad, its Cadian greatcoat flapping in the wind with Epiphani clasped in one rotting hand and the rusty bolt pistol in the other. Bringing the weapon to her temple, the Guardsman brought its enemies to a halt.
Moving forward with confidence it rasped, ‘Lose it.’
Holding his bolt pistol out, Torqhuil ejected his all but spent magazine.
‘I am asking for the final time,’ the thing promised. ‘Where is your ship?’
Without replying, Czevak began walking towards the Unbound officer. The aberration held the bolt pistol at arm’s length, the muzzle buried in the tresses of the warp-seer’s hair. The High Inquisitor said nothing but kept walking at the putrid soldier.
‘Czevak!’ Klute called in alarm, but the inquisitor continued marching. The pale, bloated arm of the creature brought the bolt pistol around to meet the oncoming antagonist. With the weapon off Epiphani, Czevak flashed his eyes at the sky.
‘Up there,’ he indicated.
The corrupted Guardsman looked up just in time to see the thick shaft of the harpoon fall towards him like a thunderbolt. The weapon impaled the gelatinous carcass of the putrefying soldier, falling through its ruined face and down through the soft tissue of its ruptured torso. With the Unbound officer brought to its knees and skewered to the platform, the bolt pistol fell to the deck. Above, the swale gypsy balloon silently hovered, drifting out of the clouds. A wire ladder followed the harpoon down and Czevak directed his grateful retinue up its metal rungs. With cannibal hivers clawing their way over the edge of the landing platform, Czevak stepped onto the ladder, the others quickly following. Cutting the harpoon and line away, the be-goggled gypsy captain fired his methane burner and took the balloon, the ladder and the High Inquisitor to safety.
Once up in the plasteel frame, with knees and elbows locked around the cage bars and rigging, Klute bemoaned their wasted efforts.
‘All for nothing,’ he cursed, after a stream of less charitable mumblings. ‘Is this always the way with you?’ the inquisitor said with sudden accusation.
‘Had you forgotten?’ Czevak replied simply, drawing a slow nod from his former acolyte.
Below them the toxic lethality of the carcinogen swamp passed. The gypsy captain climbed down between them, showing Czevak five fingers, each representing a minute remaining of their journey. From his vantage point the High Inquisitor could see the vine-choked mound of the satellite hive from which they had emerged. He could even make out the opening he had created in the rockface with the assistance of one of Torqhuil’s pneumatic lines.
‘Lucky that the gypsies waited,’ Klute put to the High Inquisitor.
Czevak smiled. ‘Luck had very little to do with it.’ He took the finger ingots he owed the gypsies and offered them to the be-goggled captain. ‘The same again when the job was done,’ Czevak said to the gypsy, echoing their earlier agreement.
The captain grinned like an idiot and unbuttoned a satchel pouch he carried slung across his chest and shoulder, inviting the High Inquisitor to deposit them inside.
‘And there you are,’ Czevak said, dropping the ingots in the money pouch and extracted a single coin from the inside, a large sovereign.
‘May I?’ Czevak asked the gypsy captain, who simply laughed and slapped the inquisitor’s shoulder before making his way back up to the burner to execute the balloon’s landing.
Klute sat astride the plasteel bar amazed. Both Epiphani and the Relictors Space Marine stared from the other side of the frame. Hessian remained asleep in the rigging.
‘Is that it?’ Torqhuil called across the open space.
‘The Black Sovereign of Sierra Sangraal,’ Czevak confirmed, admiring the grotesque imagery on the raised surface of the obverse side of the coin. He rolled the round, corrugated edges of the fat coin between his finger and thumb. ‘I have you now you artful, insidious bastard,’ the High Inquisitor told it.
‘How did it… How did you… How?’ Klute stammered at him.
‘Epiphani told us,’ Czevak explained. ‘Bye, laugh, seen, inflecting, true.’
‘But you said she was confused – you said the reading was, “I have been expecting you”.’
‘When we give this thing a voice,’ Czevak said, ‘I have a feeling that those will be among the first words we will hear out of its mouth. This devious, daemonic scum couldn’t resist leaving us clues of its true intention.’
Klute waited and then prompted. ‘Like?’
‘“I have been expecting you”. The key words are “have been”, as in – no longer. It was gone by the time Epiphani received her reading. It knew the hive was lost and Lady Krulda’s time was up. Time to move on; it could hardly continue to do damage in the possession of a starving cannibal hiver. So, it had itself used as payment for the gypsies’ delivery.’
‘It left as we entered?’ Klute asked, not quite believing the daemon coin’s cunning and guile.
‘There was a clue in the mistranslation also,’ Czevak revealed.
Klute shrugged his shoulders.
‘“Bye, laugh, seen, inflecting, true.” The daemon Mammoshad leaves and is amused at our inability to see his reverse truths.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Klute admitted, astounded, as the balloon came in to land.
‘Believe it,’ Czevak said. ‘I told you before, expect anything.’
Klute nodded, watching Czevak roll the accursed Black Sovereign across the knuckles of one hand.
‘I think it’s fair to say that that advice still applies.’
Exeunt
ACT II, CANTO III
Archeodeck, Rogue trader Malescaythe, The Eye of Terror
Enter KLUTE
It had been three days.
Three days for Klute to cleanse himself of Ablutraphur’s stink and for the recurring images of the hive city’s horrific demise to fade from his mind. The inquisitor had spent a good deal of this time either at prayer or submerged in plunge basins of scorching water, anointed oils and Saint Vesta’s salt in the rogue trader’s baptisterium. Unlike Czevak, who purged himself of the Eye’s corruptive influence every time he opened his precious Atlas Infernal and bathed in the spiritual sterility of the tome’s nullflesh, Klute had to go to great efforts to resist the contamination of dreadspace.
While Klute had been purifying both body and spirit, Czevak had immersed himself in matters less holy. As the inquisitor crossed the deck he saw Czevak and Torqhuil camped out amongst a nest of tables and the Relictors Techmarine’s extensive collection of tomes, artefacts and recovered archeotech. The Space Marine safely stored the bulk of his Chaos relics and arcana in the large Geller and stasis chambers that adjoined the archeodeck, but the Relictor and High Inquisitor’s joint project of communing with the daemon Mammoshad had demanded extensive experimentation and research. Czevak had the pages of Kronochet’s Anatomae and the Co
rpus Vivexorsectio spread out amongst various other dark grimoires, banned xenos translations and daemonologist tracts while the Relictor moved back and forth between the deck and the stasis chambers with tools, ancient remnants and bastardised equipment, heretically configured without consideration for STC tech-designations.
Czevak didn’t acknowledge Klute’s approach, but the Relictors Space Marine looked up from his sacrilegious tinkering and nodded gravely. Czevak looked like hell. Despite his youthful complexion, his eyes were dark and his expression distant and empty. His mouth was tensed in a line of vexation and his fingers stiff and irritable as he flicked through the pages of his damned tomes.
The Black Sovereign of Sierra Sangraal was sitting in amongst a jury-rigged apparatus, constructed from a hotchpotch myriad of different instruments. The machine was all turntables, wires and finger glyphs. The contraption was crowned with a pair of speaking trumpets that twisted around one another, lending it the appearance of a twin phonograph. In the centre spun the Black Sovereign on an anti-gravity field with a psychoactive crystal stylus running along the grooved edge of the large coin.
Klute had been present as Torqhuil had completed the sacrilegious project and the daemon’s first words escaped the blooming funnel of the left hand trumpet. The inquisitor didn’t understand the words, although it was clear that the daemonic entity was in full flow. Its voice excited the air around them and was an unholy mixture of raptorial screech and reptilian sibilance.
Torqhuil had to rescue his dia-log interface and runecable from the Hellebore’s mnemonic bank, adjusting the shaft of tubular keys and attempting likely combinations before settling on a configuration that turned the hissing cacophony of squawks erupting from the trumpet into words that the Techmarine and the two inquisitors had instantly recognised.
‘I have been expecting you…’
Along one nearby table were an intimidating line of objects, arranged like instruments of torture – all selected from Torqhuil’s collection of relics and artefacts. Many Klute did not know but among them he did recognise the sinister shapes of a grimoire-diabolicus of True Names, a hexagrammic stamphammer, a stasis-casked astramoebic warp infestation, blessed unguents of different grades and consecrations and the hymnals of the Confederation of Light – vox-captured on Dimmamar millennia ago. Torqhuil’s prize was the Geller wave-tuned vibro-scalpel that he had improvised himself from the recovered pages of the Corpus Vivexorsectio.
Czevak drew his stool up to the second speaking trumpet.
‘Tell me again,’ he said with words of cold steel. ‘Where can I find Ahzek Ahriman of the Thousand Sons?’
‘Where can’t you find him?’
Czevak dipped his fingers into a bowl of blessed unguent and flicked oil at the spinning Black Sovereign. The liquid sizzled and soaked into the unearthly metal of the coin, drawing an avian shriek from the trumpet.
‘I told you,’ Czevak said darkly. ‘Stop answering questions with questions.’
Mammoshad’s wounded screeching devolved into an insane laughter.
‘Ahriman is everywhere. He is part of everything and everyone. His cult is legion. He is where you’ve been and where you’re going. His influence is felt in the halls and palaces of the Terran corpseworld, in damnation’s cradle and aboard this ship. No one knows where.’
‘No one?’ the inquisitor repeated. ‘Except Ahriman, himself. Are you Ahzek Ahriman?’ Czevak put to the beast.
‘I am many things,’ the daemon told him, provoking Czevak to reach for another of Torqhuil’s instruments of infernal torture. ‘…but Ahriman I am not.’
The High Inquisitor rested an elbow on the nearby table.
‘Where can I find Korban Xarchos, bastard sorcerer of the Thousand Sons?’
‘You seek the student to find the master?’
‘Test me void-spawn…’
‘I pass through the hands of many. Those hands belong to bodies to which ears also belong. Those ears heard that Korban Xarchos was dead.’
‘Impossible.’
‘Seemingly, since he didn’t die.’
‘I tire of your games, daemon. Speak plainly.’
‘Of course, High Inquisitor, but of which one? There are so many planes of existence – as you well know. Follow the screams. ’
Czevak screwed up his face at the disappearing darkness of the speaking trumpet.
‘Brother Torqhuil, some music please,’ the High Inquisitor instructed, at which the Techmarine mounted a vox-disc of hymnals on the nearest turntable and allowed the ghostly choral music of the Confederation of Light to afflict the cavernous hangar. The Confederation’s devotions had been driving the darkness from Imperial ears hundreds of years before the Ecclesiarchy established its stranglehold of faith on humanity.
Mammoshad began to moan and whimper in the background of the castrato choir. ‘It hurts, yes?’ Czevak seethed. ‘You’re going to talk to me, daemon. I promise that you are going to talk to me. Tell me what you have heard through your many ears. Tell me what you have heard of the whereabouts of that warpspawn sorcerer. Brother Torqhuil, the volume; I want our guest to experience the full power and piousness of the Confederation’s heretical devotion.’
Klute felt the vibration of the booming hymnals on the air and in the metal decking below his feet. Mammoshad’s agonies fragmented into different squawkish voices, each addressing Czevak’s demand with a different answer.
‘Delta Myrias.’
‘Pyrrus.’
‘The Triggonaut Sphere.’
‘The Minerva Reach.’
‘UV6-26.’
‘Alpha Myrias.’
‘Shenghis, Mizar Blue or Brannigan’s Hope in the Archive Worlds.’
‘Hive Havoque.’
‘Eaten by Wombwort giant.’
‘Vegatra.’
‘Beta Myrias.’
‘Beaten by the Counter-Clock Heart on Tituba Prime.’
The insanity went on.
‘Enough!’ Czevak commanded.
‘But there’s more,’ the entity cackled, ‘there’s so much more…’
‘What does Korban Xarchos want with the Daecropsicum’s dark technologies?’ Czevak put to the monster.
Mammoshad did not answer.
‘Sensitive subject, eh?’ Czevak said with self-satisfied scorn. ‘Well, you’d better speak up daemon or the tortures you suffered at the hands of the Dark Mechanicus will seem like a pleasant memory.’
‘I think that you just enjoy hearing stories of pain and torment, mortal weakling, to ease the memory of your own suffering. I have and continue to live the miserable agony of a living autopsy; it amuses me that you consider your feeble imagination capable of scaring me with worse than that.’
As Czevak continued barking at the polluted thing, gesticulating wildly and contorting his face in anger and desperation, Klute pulled the Relictors Techmarine to one side.
‘He’s been like this for days,’ Torqhuil told him. ‘Mammoshad just plays with him, twisting his words, feeding him hope, denying him satisfaction.’
A scream-tangled screech filled the hangar, cutting through the Confederation hymns. Klute turned around to find his master had dashed a pot of holy unguent at Torqhuil’s contraption – which was now dripping with oil and purity – and was spitting blessings from the open grimoire down the speaking trumpet.
‘It’s the meme-virus,’ Klute said, offering the Techmarine his medical opinion.
Czevak writhed with hatred. His face glistening red. He was clearly running a fever and the virus was running rampant through his system and out of balance with his body’s usual ability to keep it in moderate check. The High Inquisitor had a corporal need for the information – like a hunger or whimpering desire for a pain or affliction to end.
‘He asks the thing the same questions, over and over. I know your kind are trained in the arts of interrogation,’ Torqhuil confided solemnly, ‘but it is as if he expects the creature to lie to him.’
‘Of course it is
going to lie to him,’ Klute said harshly. He didn’t welcome the Space Marine’s criticism. ‘It’s a creation of darkness.’
‘Then why continue to ask it the same questions?’ the Adeptus Astartes put to Klute with troubling logic. ‘It has no corporal form. It won’t tire. Like the Daecropsicum before him, he visits eternal agonies on the beast. He knows the daemon will deny him and this gives him justification to torture it further.’
‘I told you,’ Klute said, looking up and narrowing his eyes at Torqhuil. ‘It’s the virus. It flares up from time to time – especially during moments of great stress.’ Behind the words, however, was a fear that the Space Marine was correct and that Czevak was simply acting out the agonies of his own past tortures and interrogations.
‘But what you have to ask yourself, inquisitor,’ the Relictor said, ‘is why should this be a moment of great stress for him?’
Klute watched Czevak sweep up the stasis-casked astramoebic warp infestation and smash it on the anti-gravity turntable. More howling screams burst from the speaking trumpet as the infestation ate away at the entity’s immaterial presence.
‘Are you lying?’ Czevak bawled at the contraption.
As the monstrous creature fought through the pain of this fresh torture, its squealing levelled out to a daemonic hiss, ‘Even to myself…’
‘This is getting out of hand,’ Klute concluded. ‘What would you do?’
‘I wouldn’t pointlessly torture the thing or engage with it unless I had to.’
‘Your Chapter is not known for such squeamishness,’ Klute said.
‘We believe in using the tools of Chaos against Chaos, daemon against daemon. We don’t enter into needless congress with the damned or inflict fruitless tortures upon the polluted. And it has become obvious that this enterprise is now both needless and fruitless.’