by Rob Sanders
‘Enough of what you wouldn’t do, what would you do?’
‘Honestly?’ the Relictors Space Marine considered. ‘I’d casually lose the damned thing on Medrengard or Sicarus. Let this monster crush the daemon worlds of its enemies in the best way it knows how and make our job all the easier.’
Klute shook his head, looking between the assured eyes of the Space Marine and the rage-enflamed orbs of his old master.
‘I really have no idea what I am doing here,’ the inquisitor said. ‘You all seem as insane as each other.’
‘And what would you do?’ the Relictor asked.
‘I would destroy it, of course,’ Klute maintained with exasperation. ‘I wouldn’t communicate with it; I wouldn’t attempt to use or manipulate it. I would banish the thing back to the infernal womb of immaterial damnation from which it was born–’
Klute was forced to break off. Mammoshad had provoked the High Inquisitor to frenzied apoplexy with some lie, twisted truth or daemonic silence and Czevak had seized the hexagrammic stamphammer and was smashing indiscriminate purity runes into both the bouncing coin and Torqhuil’s heretical construct. Czevak was roaring at the coin and the daemon was bawling back through the speaking trumpet.
‘Bastard thing!’
‘Grow to enjoy it I think you did, Bronislaw!’ Mammoshad squawked. ‘Got a taste for victimhood and the lash. Enjoyed Ahriman inside you, I think, violating your mind and polluting your spirit.’
Klute grabbed his friend from behind, a hand digging into each thrashing shoulder. Torqhuil pulled his device of daemonic congress away from the swing of the hammer and the High Inquisitor’s flailing boots.
Czevak shrugged off his friend and stormed across the archeodeck. Klute and Torqhuil gave each other a dark look before the inquisitor set off after his master. He had seen Czevak exit the hangar via an access bulkhead but now out on the corridor he found himself alone. Klute had assumed that the High Inquisitor had desired the privacy of his quarters but the passageway leading up to them was long, dark and empty.
‘My lord?’ Klute called. He advanced – intent on finding Czevak, barging his way into his private rooms if need be and talking sense into his master. Klute’s march soon turned into a jog that half way up the corridor slowed to a suspicious halt. He looked both ways up the access way, eyes probing the shadows, the hairs on the back of his neck standing to a prickle. Something was wrong. The deck lamps were out. He didn’t know why but the inquisitor felt as though he was being watched and unconsciously slipped his Cadian street silencer from its thick holster. He span, jabbing the twin barrels of the pistol at the thick shadow opposite, only to have a pair of hands grab him from behind, one over his mouth, the other around his neck. Klute struggled but the figure pulled him back into a devotional maintenance alcove and held him in a feverish embrace. He heard a gentle hush in his ear. It was Czevak.
Klute calmed and lowered his pistol. He tried to turn his head and if he had would have seen his master’s eyes darting about the darkness of the corridor and little else. Held still in the deep shadow of the alcove, the Domino field on Czevak’s Harlequin coat had immersed itself in reflected gloom and made the High Inquisitor all but indistinguishable from his surroundings.
‘Up there,’ Czevak hissed, motioning his former acolyte to peer up the corridor at the benighted section beyond. ‘By the entrance to my quarters.’ Klute squinted up the passageway. ‘The masks. They wait for me.’
‘Who?’ Klute said. ‘Who are they? Who waits for you?’
‘The servants of the Laughing God – come for their prize. Keepers of the Black Library, come for its secrets and its secrets’ keeper.’
Klute shuddered, remembering visions from his youth.
‘The Harlequinade?’
‘Raimus – I’ll not exist a prisoner.’
Klute reached in his pocket and produced a vox-bead, inserting it into his ear.
‘Captain Torres, meet me in archeodeck access way east, the High Inquisitor’s quarters. Bring a security detail and my satchel. Klute out.’
The two men held there, Klute monitoring his master’s shallow breaths, feeling the heat radiating from his meme-virus ravaged body, until the corridor rang with the boots of Savlar Chem-Dogs. Torres was leading them with weapon drawn, Steward-Sergeant Rourke beside her, cradling an assault autorifle. His men stomped up behind, faces obscured by inhalers, in an assortment of scavenged armour. They hugged their own motley collection of weaponry.
‘Inquisitor?’ Torres called, prompting Klute to step out into the corridor where she tossed him his satchel.
‘Inquisitor Czevak believes that the Malescaythe has been compromised by an enemy force.’
Klute could see the rogue trader captain’s mind racing; no breach alarms or proximity warnings.
‘That damned gate!’ she spat.
‘The warp portal is a distinct possibility,’ Klute said.
‘Fan out!’ Rourke shouted at his men before bringing a helmet vox receiver down, ‘Dog-Two, secure warp gate and archeodeck. Dog-Three, take station on the bridge.’
‘High Inquisitor?’ Torres put to a fazed Czevak. When he didn’t answer, she crossed the corridor and reached for a robust handpull set in the wall opposite.
‘No klaxons,’ Klute warned.
‘The hell with that, we’ve been boarded – I’m sounding the general alarm.’
‘Eldar,’ Czevak murmured.
‘What?’ Torres said, swiftly losing patience.
‘Eldar Harlequins.’
Torres stumbled on her own words and then took a moment to digest the very bad news that the inquisitor had just given her.
‘F-for you?’ she finally managed, provoking in the young inquisitor a violent step forward and a frenzied dashing of palm to temple.
‘Of course for me, you inbred void-whore! Who doesn’t want the contents of this mind? Who wouldn’t slit the throats of everyone on board to claim them?’
Torres had clearly been taken off guard by the inquisitor’s uncharacteristic viciousness. She stared into Czevak’s doom-filled eyes, which were all the more disturbing, situated as they were, in the High Inquisitor’s flushed and feverish face. Czevak leant in further. ‘Or reclaim them?’
The furious tension in the High Inquisitor’s features suddenly slackened and fell as his knees gave out under him. Between them Klute and Torres caught him – at which the rogue trader captain realised that in Klute’s other hand was a syringe. A sedative, freshly selected from the medicae satchel he had asked her to bring.
Steward-Sergeant Rourke stared at the scene in confusion.
Torres shared the sentiment. ‘Raimus, what the hell is going on? A straight answer, for the God-Emperor’s sake, please.’
‘Paranoia,’ Klute told her, securing the syringe and hoisting Czevak’s arm across his shoulder, ‘is not caused by too little information, it’s caused by too much. The High Inquisitor suffers from a relapsing meme-virus. Now, help me get him to his quarters.’
‘We’re not under attack then?’ Torres was above all else concerned for the safety and security of her ship.
‘No.’
The two of them began to drag the deadweight of the High Inquisitor up the corridor between them. A Savlar Guardsman brought the blown deck lamps back on, bathing the crowded corridor in light.
‘You’re sure... just paranoia?’ Captain Torres asked.
Klute bit at his lower lip as they manipulated Czevak’s body through the bulkhead.
‘Ma’am?’ Rourke pressed.
‘Yes, yes,’ Klute said with irritation. ‘Meme-virus, stress, high temperature, hallucinations.’
‘Sergeant, false alarm,’ Torres shot with irritation of her own. ‘Stand your men down.’
‘Wait,’ Klute said as he held the High Inquisitor awkwardly. The inquisitor thought on the deck lamps. He’d assumed that Czevak had blown them to aid his concealment. But if he hadn’t? If someone else had?
‘Let’s be sur
e,’ Klute said to the Savlar sergeant. ‘Secure the Fornical. Then have your men carry out a sweep of the ship.’
‘Right you are, sir,’ the Guardsman affirmed, still confused – or at least unconvinced.
As Klute turned back to Torres he found the captain’s attractive features knotted with anger and suspicion.
‘Help me get him on the bed.’
As the two of them manhandled the High Inquisitor into his cabin cot, Klute’s vox-bead chirped.
‘Inquisitor.’
‘Brother Torqhuil?’
‘Inquisitor, the Black Sovereign of Sierra Sangraal has gone. Mammoshad is missing.’
‘You’re absolutely sure?’
‘The daemon is loose on the ship.’
Klute narrowed his eyes.
‘What?’ Torres demanded, not hearing Torqhuil’s warnings over the vox-bead.
Klute turned to Czevak’s lank body on the cot; the High Inquisitor’s face was still flushed but was free of the torment and tension that had cut into it during his interrogation of the daemon Mammoshad. Bending, Klute rifled through the many pockets of Czevak’s Harlequin coat, his fingers finally coming to rest on a circular object that was cool and hard to the touch. Withdrawing the Black Sovereign of Sierra Sangraal, Klute held it up to the light. The metal surface of the coin was gently morphing, almost as though it had melted in the High Inquisitor’s pocket, assuming a new shape and features. It was already a different metallic hue and upon its surface a raised representation was bubbling and forming, a blasphemous mockery of the Imperial aquila as a snaggle-toothed avian monstrosity. Czevak could have taken the polluted object but Klute thought it more likely that the thing had found its way into his pocket during the High Inquisitor’s attack on Torqhuil’s machine – just as it had found its way into the swale gypsy’s purse.
‘Inquisitor!’ Torres called, drawing Klute back to the moment and from the cursed spectacle of the Chaos artefact.
‘Where are we?’ he asked the rogue trader captain, suddenly himself again.
‘On the Kroulx Circumpolar Drift. In a few weeks we might be able to make Nemesis Tessera.’
‘Drop out of warp.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘It’s not wise but it is necessary.’
Klute looked down at his master sleeping peacefully. The meme-virus could explain Czevak’s hallucinations but so could the malign influence of Mammoshad playing with his expectations and infecting his mind.
‘Then what?’ Torres asked.
‘Pick a star, captain.’
‘And then?’
‘Then?’ Klute echoed, flicking the possessed coin with his thumb and snatching it savagely out of the air. ‘Then meet me down in the torpedo bay. This damned coin is going to find a new home in the heart of a raging star.’
‘You’re going to destroy it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think Brother Torqhuil or the High Inquisitor are going to like that.’
‘Then I guess we’d best not tell them.’
Exit
Interregna
Catechorium, Black Ship Divine Thunder, Above Etiamnum III
CHORUS
Agony. Like nothing Czevak had ever felt.
It was impossible to tell how long he had been aboard the Divine Thunder. Stretchered between a filthy cell in the bowels of the Inquisitorial Black Ship and Inquisitor Malchankov’s specially prepared catechorium, minutes became hours, hours days and for all Czevak knew, days possibly weeks. Pain seemed to make everything feel longer. During the inquisitor’s four hundred and eight years, even in the Emperor’s service, he had known many pleasures – almost all fleeting. In Czevak’s experience, however, pain always lingered and the torture inflicting that pain invariably reached out beyond the limits of the mind and body to withstand its attentions. Czevak’s calling had trained him in the art of such resistance, but it had also taught of its futility. He thanked the God-Emperor that he was not quite there yet.
‘Lower him.’
Czevak felt the chains around his broken wrists judder as his smashed body began to descend from where it hung above the bloodied catechorium floor. He was routinely suspended there between beatings and interrogations, his ancient body pulled apart and off the deck by a retracting chain on each arm. Bones had cracked, flesh had torn and organs had ruptured. Routinely, devotional physicians of the Order Hospitaller swept in to perform emergency procedures, bent on keeping the aged inquisitor alive before returning him to further torment. Czevak’s mind was a pain-addled fog in which the myriad agonies of his broken body competed for attention.
Czevak’s legs could not support him as he reached the deck and his feet slipped and slid in a mucky pool of his own blood. The slack on the chains increased and the inquisitor was allowed to collapse to his knees. As the chains locked off, his shattered arms were stretched taut in place. Czevak moaned incoherently to himself, an interior monologue shot through with internal agonies, mumbled from his swollen, cracked lips. A single spotlight illuminated the dismal scene, blazing at the inquisitor, forcing his bloodshot eyes to retreat further into their bruised sockets.
Sister Archangela Voightdecker stepped out of the gloom, arms folded inside the length of her carnodon fur cloak and her eyes peering imperiously down on the broken body of the inquisitor through her wire spectacle assembly. As a member of the Order of the Eternal Candle she carried no weapon, but she didn’t need to. Confessor Graefe was behind her. The confessor was built like a barrel and his shaved head and the brute girth of his forearms lent him more the appearance of a scud wrestler than a defender of the Creed. His hairy arms and fists were covered in hive-world tattoos and his robes wore the filth of a butcher’s apron.
‘Wake up!’ he bawled at Czevak.
Through the crusty slits of his eyes Czevak saw the confessor approach.
Within moments the thug ecclesiarch was upon him, smashing the inquisitor’s aged and emaciated body this way and that.
When the assault ended, Czevak was given a moment to think and experience the fresh tortures visited upon his body by the brute priest. The confessor waited to one side, his barrel chest expanding and contracting with exertion. What worried Czevak more was that Voightdecker was holding her ground. She was smirking nastily. Usually, after Graefe had sated his barbaric tendencies on the inquisitor, Voightdecker would advance with a barrage of her own, a barrage of questions and demands. All, Czevak had ensured, had gone unanswered. Why did you betray your race? How many others among your brother inquisitors are xenos lovers like yourself? What poisonous propaganda did you intend to spread at the Conclave at Hydra Cordatus? What impure alien technologies and Chaos artefacts have you exposed yourself to? What did you learn of alien intentions and threats mounted against the Imperium? What heresies did you commit with the xenos eldar? How do Imperial personnel gain entrance to the webway? Where is the Black Library of Chaos? Unending demands designed to incriminate himself and others. Unending threats and accusations of heresy. Until now.
Four armoured figures stepped forward, cardinal world crusaders garbed in simple plate upon which was inscribed runes and ancient Imperial glyphs of purity. Each bore a thunder hammer and shield carrying the sinister insignia of the Ordo Hereticus. They were Valentin Malchankov’s Hexenguard and were his personal escort. The inquisitor himself trundled forth between the honour guard of feudal henchmen. Valentin Malchankov was a Mondominant maniac and narrow interpreter of the Imperial Creed. He had fought every kind of heresy with a simple, unswerving devotion and murdered many whose loyalty to the Emperor had been seemingly less. He had little time for academics and politicians – even amongst his own ordo – and had committed himself to engaging the enemies of the Emperor face to face.
This strategy had unfortunately meant that the thing that presented itself to Czevak was much more machine than man. A set of counterweighted tracks supported a small derrick arrangement, upon which, what was left of Valentin Malchankov was suspended. He had l
ong since lost his legs in his many battles with the alien and unclean and his torso was a tube-infested basket of dead flesh and cybernetic improvements. Like his legs, the Monodominant’s arms had also been replaced with bionic attachments. These supported a set of heavy, wicked power claws, the digit quad of each snapped and crackled continually with the savage energy coursing through them. Malchankov’s head was that of a man long dead. His flesh was an unhealthy grey and his nose a ragged hole. His ears and hair had all been burnt off and had been replaced with rumpled scarring across the top of his scalp and his face was a patchwork of old stitching and thin, stapled skin. The only things that blazed with youth, vitality and crazed determination were the vat-grown eyeballs that now sat in his skull.
The tracks came to a rest before Czevak, allowing Malchankov’s wasted body to tower on its crane over the kneeling inquisitor. The Monodominant grasped one taut chain in his power clawed hand and leant his head down at the prisoner.
‘I told you I’d claim your blood,’ Malchankov slurped through reconstructed lungs and voice box. ‘And now it’s mine, every last drop.’
Czevak just gave the Ordo Hereticus monstrosity a bloody gaze. His lips remained sealed.
‘You have been enjoying the hospitality of my compatriots,’ Malchankov said. ‘They tell me they have whipped and beaten you, stretched your body to breaking, cut, burned and choked you. Such barbarism. And yet you say nothing. Answer a few simple questions and this can be all over, old man.’
The same defiant glare from the broken inquisitor.
‘I’m beginning to understand their frustration,’ Malchankov hissed. Czevak’s body suddenly came off its knees to spasmodic life as the Monodominant allowed energy to burn up the chain from his power claw and through his prisoner. Czevak screamed as power arced through his being.
At last the torture came to a close with Czevak slumping back to his knees, his neck slack and head rolling back, his pleading eyes staring at the ceiling.
‘I would just kill you, heretic, but there is the small matter of your celebrity. You are one of the most celebrated xenophiles in the Imperium. Your experiences must be catalogued and your transgressions analysed so that I, and those that follow me, may better combat your kind within the ranks of the Holy Inquisition. I will not let you die old man – not even of old age – until you give me the secret heresies to which you have been exposed. I want to know where you have been, with whom you have consorted and what deviant wonders you have seen. Only then will I allow you the peace of death. Do you hear me, Bronislaw Czevak?’