by Rob Sanders
Czevak went to say something, his voice a battered croak. The lines, weights and pulleys on Malchankov’s derrick hummed as the Ordo Hereticus inquisitor leant in closer.
‘Going deaf,’ Czevak told him with a slack-jawed smile. ‘Can you repeat that? Everything from “I would just kill you”? Didn’t catch the rest.’
Malchankov’s cadaverous features contorted before the Monodominant blasted him again, coursing agonising energy from his power claw down through the chain. Czevak spasmed and then trembled as the power burned through his veins.
‘My lord,’ Sister Archangela Voightdecker finally and fearfully ventured. If Malchankov killed the aged inquisitor then they would never discover the secrets he harboured.
After a few moments more of affliction Malchankov released the chain and allowed Czevak agonising control of his body and mind once more. Malchankov manoeuvred himself closer so that the two inquisitors’ faces were almost touching.
‘It hurts, yes?’ Malchankov beamed. ‘You’re going to talk to me, heretic. I promise that you are going to talk to me.’
Czevak mumbled something, forcing Malchankov to turn the scarred and ragged hole in the side of his head where his ear had been to the High Inquisitor.
‘The Inquisition won’t…’ Czevak managed feebly.
‘Won’t tolerate your kidnap and torture?’ Malchankov grinned maniacally. ‘Well that is where you are wrong, my learned friend. And you have been wrong about a great many things. As I said before, your celebrity poses some problems, but that isn’t one of them. Your celebrity is in fact the solution. Everybody wants Bronislaw Czevak – famed High Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos and visitor to the Black Library of Chaos. The Inquisition wants you. The High Lords of Terra want you. Every apocalyptic crazy in the galaxy wants you. Most of all, the followers of the Dark Gods want you. Renegades, Chaotics, daemons, sorcerers; all would pay in blood for the Black Library’s secrets. Your vessel, lost over Cadia in the opening days of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. Let’s just blame it on one of them, shall we?’
An Ordo Hereticus serf entered the catechorium and passed a note to Sister Archangela Voightdecker.
‘What?’ Czevak croaked at the inquisitor, angling an ear and feigning deafness once more.
Malchankov reached for the chain.
‘My lord,’ Archangela interrupted again. ‘Mordant Hex reports from the surface that he has located the gate.’
Malchankov threw the Sister an irritated glance before peering back into Czevak’s rebellious eyes.
‘You’re right, of course. This has run its course. Time to step it up. Tell Mordant to begin the ritual.’
‘But without the…’
‘Let me worry about that.’ Malchankov leant back in on Czevak. ‘Inquisitor Czevak is about to give me that information now.’
‘What information?’ Czevak said.
‘Why, the rune designations for the eldar warp gate on Etiamnum III,’ Malchankov told him with maniacal certainty.
‘And why would I do that, Witch Hunter?’ Czevak asked weakly.
Czevak’s vision faded for a moment, which didn’t unduly worry the inquisitor. Under the barrage of Confessor Graefe’s mighty fists he was often knocked unconscious. This felt different, however. It was almost like having his head held under water and then being allowed to resurface. Blinking the light back to his eyes, Czevak found that impossibly his surroundings were changing. Both the walls of his prison and the faces of his gaolers were melting. His stomach had long been empty but if there had been anything in it then Czevak was sure that he would have brought it up on the deck. His centre of gravity seemed to flip and his surroundings assumed a fresh terror.
He was no longer in the dank catechorium of an Ordo Hereticus Black Ship. The unsmiling Inquisitorial serfs were gone and in their place were droves of misshapen cultists, dressed in gaudy robes and afflicted with warped limbs and horrific mutations. They manned consoles and stations on a colossal, labyrinthine bridge, waiting in attendance on larger figures on the huge command deck who were all finished in cobalt and gold. The vessel interior had a flowing architecture with features and equipment rolling fluidly into one another, as though dissolved by some unnatural force that seemed to hang in the crackling air. Even the gigantic view ports appeared melted into irregularity and revealed the dusty, red surface of Etiamnum III gently spinning below them.
The Hexenguard were no longer hulking figures in blessed plate but Traitor Space Marines in ancient power armour, helmeted Thousand Sons in blistering azure, clutching bolters and waiting obediently for orders. The only armoured figures without helmets were the cloaked sorcerers who acted like lieutenants on the bridge, their unhealthy features glowing with dark power and minds in constant congress with the warp. Chief among these was an androgynous tyrant standing where Sister Archangela Voightdecker had been. With the traitor Space Marines and sorcerers standing about him, Czevak could only reason that he had never been an Ordo Hereticus prisoner aboard the Divine Thunder at all. His present predicament was far worse than that. His prison was in fact a Chaos Marine battle-barge belonging to the Thousand Sons traitor legion, masked through the duration of his confinement using Tzeentchian illusory magic.
‘Welcome to the Impossible Fortress,’ the sorcerer leered. Gone was the androgynous monster. His face had changed and seemed in constant motion: a Cadian grimace, a courtesan’s smile, a nightworld barbarian, the alien eyes of an eldar, the rictus grin of a servitor, Voightdecker, Czevak himself. The transformations continued, less a morphing of the flesh than an elusive trick of the eye.
Turning, Czevak found himself face to face not with Valentin Malchankov but with the extravagantly horned Crusader-pattern helm of the sorcerer’s hulking master. The ornate power armour gleamed blue brilliance and was draped in robes covered in arcane runes and symbols. Polished skulls and ancient artefacts dripped from the psyker and his entire being shimmered with otherworldly power. Where Malchankov’s power claws had been there were now the spindly gauntlets of the Chaos sorcerer. Using them, he unclipped his helmet to the twin, equalising sighs of the armour’s pressure seals and removed the horned helm. Czevak flinched as the raw power of the Space Marine sorcerer was revealed to him.
Czevak felt as though he were in the presence of a god – or at least one that aspired to such exaltation. The air was bleached of all else but the being’s will. A cold desire – devoid of the fever of human passion – saturated Czevak. A purity of purpose so powerful as to scorch lesser evils and the taint of corruption from its unswerving path. The inquisitor looked on Ahriman. It was as though his flesh was on fire with a sapphire radiance. His eyes were hungry orbs of intensity but his face a visage of godly calm. Ahriman seemed everywhere at once – a being out of time – like a busy deity, simultaneously answering the prayers of his worshippers and speaking through the mouths of distant prophets.
‘Inquisitor,’ Ahriman said. His voice hurt to be heard, everywhere as it was, but the words were composed and tranquil. ‘Let us talk as men who have seen some of the galaxy’s wonder. Little should surprise us. If the frailty of the flesh were not the key to the soul then believe me, inquisitor, I would not waste time searching for the secrets of others, in yours.’
With that Czevak’s heart stopped and crippling cramps began to reach out through his chest. The inquisitor’s eyes widened in panic and once again he began to convulse against the restriction of his bonds. Ahriman’s blazing eyes narrowed before the sorcerer laid his gauntlet upon the aged inquisitor’s chest. The spasms subsided and the cramps faded to terrifying memories.
‘Like all others – of the flesh, of the other, of the ether – I am driven by need. I would no less allow your heart to stop beating than I would allow my own, inquisitor – for both now beat beyond their natural inclination. They beat that I might learn the rune designations for the eldar warp gate on Etiamnum III. They beat that I might breach the eldar webway without invitation. That I might enter, as you have, the hallowe
d halls of the Black Library of Chaos and further learn my fate, the fate of this galaxy and the relationship between.’
Czevak threw forward his face and spat a stringy gruel of blood and saliva into Ahriman’s blazing eyes. Blinking, the Thousand Sons sorcerer unclipped one of his gauntlets and brought a glowing hand to his god-like face. With delicate fingertips he wiped the blood and spit from his eyes before rubbing the spittle between fingers and thumb with interest.
‘For all this talk of hearts beating,’ Ahriman told him with a cool, celestial certainty, ‘blood is not my medium. But I have seen what you may do and what you will do. Please forgive me the horror we both know you will make me put you through.’
Flourish
ACT III, CANTO I
Executive quarters, Rogue trader Malescaythe, The Eye of Terror
Enter TORRES
‘I’m glad to see you are feeling better, High Inquisitor,’ Reinette Torres lied.
‘Groxcrap,’ Klute heard Czevak reply between mouthfuls of restorative thistlebean soup and black bread. ‘But thanks anyway.’
The High Inquisitor was sitting amongst the blankets of his cot, with one wrapped around his bare shoulders, while he balanced the bowl and tray across his breaches and crossed knees. Klute passed him a steaming cup of quince tea. Czevak continued to feast with Klute and his gathered retinue looking on, his hair a mess but the feverish madness gone from his face. Klute had forbidden contact with the High Inquisitor for the past two weeks, allowing Czevak time – away from the excitation of the Eye and the retinue’s findings – to beat this latest flare up of the meme-virus and recover his former composure. The final week Klute had left the recovering inquisitor pretty much to himself, leaving day to day basics of care to infirmatory servitors. Meanwhile, Klute had had his hands full with Torres and Epiphani. The pair had taken to screaming at each other once again across the rogue trader’s bridge. With them, Klute had been attempting to navigate the Malescaythe through the nightmares and perversities of the Eye, bound for the relative safety of Nemesis Tessera. Epiphani’s reckless gambling with the captain’s vessel had been a constant source of conflict on the journey, however, leaving Klute with a migraine and an unenviable reliance on both of them.
Klute had brought the High Inquisitor the tray of food and the rest of the retinue – at Czevak’s insistence. Torqhuil stood hulking sentry on the cabin door, while Hessian and Epiphani luxuriated playfully on the fine furniture of the executive cabin. The warp-seer was disconcertingly dressed for battle, despite the fact that she had not left the vessel for weeks. Her hair was up in a plaited band that was wrapped around her head and her chest was bound in tubular plates of mirrored flak. Cargo pants and strider boots completed the relatively simple outfit with urban camouflage silks coiling limbs, plaits and plates to lend the outfit a martial unity. Father hummed above them and Klute sat on the edge of the cot, fussing with his satchel of medicae apparatus, taking Czevak’s vital signs while the High Inquisitor ate and drank.
Klute watched Torres close the bulkhead and make her way inside the High Inquisitor’s quarters. It looked nothing like the cabin into which Klute and the captain had deposited the ailing Czevak weeks before. The walls and even the ceiling and floor were covered with chalked diagrams, notations and numbers. Parchment and pages were tacked to every available surface and lengths of twine stretched across the room in a miasmic pattern, each carrying its own clothesline of pegged scraps of vellum, scribbled charts and graphs, torn from the sacred texts of the captain’s own stellagraphium. Stacks of diabolical tomes, freshly requested from Torqhuil’s stasis chambers, decorated the room and from the ceiling of one dark corner, Torres found the cage of her insane Navigator, Rasputus Guidetti. The mutant had been released from his skull-bridle but was still incarcerated in his gibbet cage. Webbed feet dangled through the bars and brushed the floor while his webbed digits thumbed through a portfolio of ancient star charts. The Navigator was surrounded by acres of crumpled vellum that was still spewing out of the Hellebore’s bridge mnemonic cogitator – the data bank having found a new home in Czevak’s cabin.
‘What the…’ Torres began, but almost immediately came to a pause of her own. The fury that had danced across her face faded to exhaustion and the rogue trader captain rubbed one tired cheek with a weary hand.
‘You done?’ Czevak put to Torres.
She pursed her lips then nodded, allowing herself to fall back into a chaise longue. Czevak handed Klute the bowl and tray, as well as the wired pads the inquisitor had affixed to his chest. He took a quaff of the quince tea.
‘Then I’ll begin. Firstly, I’d like to apologise to you all. It seems that my ailments were responsible for some panic aboard the ship. Inquisitor Klute assures me that my delirious insistence that the Malescaythe had been compromised by an alien force was unfounded and that the ship has been searched from prow to keel. Even I get it wrong sometimes.’
‘You think that the eldar are hunting you?’ Torqhuil asked from the bulkhead.
‘I know they’re hunting me,’ Czevak said.
‘Because of what you saw and learned in the Black Library of Chaos?’
‘Because of what others might do with that information,’ Czevak corrected the Relictors Space Marine, ‘should my knowledge lead them to its hallowed doors. But I was wrong. It was the virus, it was the fever. The Harlequins are not here.’ Czevak got to his feet, drawing the blanket around him like a cloak. ‘Bed rest has afforded me many hours to think on our present predicament: Mammoshad, Xarchos, Ahriman and the Thousand Sons.’
At mention of the daemon Mammoshad, Klute and Torres exchanged guilty glances that were lost on the High Inquisitor, who was taking position in the centre of the vandalised cabin. He uncoiled a cable from the Hellebore’s mnemonic cogitator and screwed it into the mind-impulse link situated in the back of his head. As he walked, the cable trailed after him about the cabin.
‘As my fever broke and I began to dwell once more on Mammoshad’s words – this time with my faculties intact – I came to realise that the warp-spawn thing had in fact given us the location of Ahzek Ahriman, as I had demanded.’
‘I was there,’ Torqhuil said. ‘The daemon did nothing but twist us with its lies and insanity.’
‘And I started to think on exactly that,’ Czevak told him with growing excitement. ‘The twists and turns of its lies and the warped logic of its utterances. Mammoshad is a daemonic entity, a Tzeentchian essence. There was truth in its lies on Ablutraphur. And there has been truth in its tortured lies since.’
‘Did not dwelling on such things drive you to fevered madness?’ Klute warned. He was eager that his former master not tempt a relapse of his ailments. More than that, he hoped that Czevak wasn’t suggesting further conference with the daemon. A conference he could no longer demand.
‘When following the dread logic of the damned and daemonic, a little insanity can take you a long way,’ Czevak admitted. ‘I demanded the location of Ahriman and when the monster denied me that I demanded the location of his apprentice. “You seek the student to find the master?” it said – which at the time I took to be a question. It was not.’
‘What was it?’ Torres asked.
‘An instruction. Look for Xarchos and we will find Ahriman.’
‘But we knew that,’ Torqhuil said. ‘And Mammoshad never told you where you could find Korban Xarchos.’
‘But it did,’ Czevak told them. ‘In its own sick, perverted way. It could not resist giving us the first clue.’
‘Which was?’ Klute asked.
‘Follow the screams.’
Klute nodded slowly. ‘I heard that myself, but what does it mean?’
‘I spent many hours in that cot considering possible answers to exactly that question.’
‘And?’ Klute had never enjoyed Czevak’s penchant for suspense.
‘Daemon tracts like the Corpus Vivexorsectio hold part of the answer. They detail the ways in which daemonic entities can be summone
d – usually as part of arcane rituals that open rifts in the fabric of reality, interdimensional tears through which daemons can pass from the warp into the real world. These rituals are as bizarre and varied as the cultists that conduct them but many share a common practice. Would anyone like to guess what?’
‘Human sacrifice,’ Torqhuil rumbled from the bulkhead.
‘Precisely,’ Czevak said in mock congratulation. ‘A general rule in these perverse proceedings seems to be that the more powerful the entity crossing over…’
‘The larger the sacrifice?’ Klute said.
‘The larger the sacrifice,’ Czevak repeated.
‘You think that Korban Xarchos is involved with human sacrifice and daemonic summoning? That should hardly surprise us,’ Torqhuil said.
‘Right.’
‘And “Follow the screams”,’ Klute added. ‘The screams of the sacrificed? Follow them where? I would imagine the depraved sorcerers of the Thousand Sons – Xarchos among them – are sacrificing and summoning all over the galaxy.’
‘Right again,’ Czevak beamed, raising his mug of tea to the inquisitor. ‘It’s that brand of logic that led me to consider where.’
Moving towards the opposite wall Czevak directed the gathering’s attention to what seemed to be a convoluted scrawl of a chalk diagram. The dramatic dimension of the schematic madness ran the length of the executive chamber and was annotated with scribblings and sweeping lines indicating some kind of pattern or relationship.