[Dark Heresy 01] - Scourge the Heretic

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  Elyra had regretted stowing her laspistol in the bottom of her backpack, but she hadn’t expected to need it so soon. At least her innate abilities would protect her if necessary, so she simply put her trust in the Emperor and followed her guide. To her mingled surprise and relief, none of the shuffling serfs seemed to register their presence at all, or, if they did, could not rouse themselves enough to care about the strangers in their midst.

  “Down this way,” Kyrlock said, turning off the roadway at last, and slipping between two spoil heaps, which looked to Elyra no different from any of the others surrounding them. Kyrlock was looking more wary, scanning every patch of shadow, and she followed his lead, wishing the gentle light from the city suspended above them was a little brighter. Several times she caught glimpses of movement, heard hushed voices in the darkness around them, and once the distinctive aroma of lho smoke drifted across their path, the faint glow of the smouldering sticks pinpointing at least two people conversing quietly among the sheltering stacks.

  “Where are we going?” Elyra asked, completely disorientated. Every mound of rubble looked the same to her, although Kyrlock continued to stride out with confidence, enviably sure-footed on the treacherous surface. Elyra stumbled several times, but remained standing by the Emperor’s grace. She almost turned her ankle more than once, but the stout hiking boots she’d selected supported and cushioned the joint, preventing any serious injury. Every now and again she felt an irrational urge to glance back and see if Keira was still following them, but she fought it down. Even if she was there, which the sensible part of Elyra’s mind didn’t doubt for a moment, the young assassin wouldn’t be visible.

  “A drinkhole I know,” Kyrlock said, and then shrugged. “Used to know, anyway. Should still be there, if Mung’s made the right pay-offs.”

  “And this Mung can get us off-planet?” Elyra asked, aware that other ears in the shadows might be listening, and sticking to her cover story as a precaution.

  Kyrlock looked back at her as if she was simple. “Course not,” he said, as though explaining it to a child. “He can sell us a drink, that’s all, but it’s a place to start asking.” He shook his head, playing the same game as she was, laying the groundwork against later suspicion. The group they were hoping to contact would be cautious, and would ask around. A pantomime argument now would consolidate their cover, if the right people overheard it. A faint edge of derision entered his voice. “You’ve got no idea at all how things work down here, have you? I should have left you where you fell.”

  “And waited for the commissars to catch up with you?” Elyra scoffed. “You need to get off this dirtball as much as I do.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I do, but I don’t see you managing it on your own.”

  “Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you.” They stared at each other for a moment, and Elyra fought down the impulse to giggle at the theatricality of it all.

  After a moment, Kyrlock shrugged, and turned away. “Well, come on then, if you’re coming,” he said.

  Mung’s place was exactly where Kyrlock remembered, and didn’t seem to have changed at all in the last year or so: a crude shaft, driven into the side of a millennium-old spoil heap by someone desperate or crazy enough to attempt to recover the scraps of low-grade ore discarded along with the waste by an earlier, more profligate generation. Shored up by flakboard and pit props too worn or flawed to be of any use in the mine itself, it was typical of thousands just like it scattered throughout the Tumble. Now, truncated by cave-ins, it only went back a dozen metres or so, extending about half that to the sides, creating a rectangular space with just enough room to stand upright. Large and small packing crates did their best to look like tables and chairs, and a roughly rectangular section of metal, which looked as though it had been scavenged from the chute of an ore hopper, formed a crude bar at one end.

  Kyrlock reslung his shotgun and pushed aside the flap of canvas that covered the entrance, meeting the eyes of the large man with a pickaxe handle standing next to it for a moment as he did so. The fellow nodded automatically, before registering his face, and smiling a slightly strained greeting.

  “It seems they haven’t forgotten you,” Elyra said, stepping through the gap after him, and ignoring the frankly curious stare that followed her.

  “No, they haven’t,” Kyrlock agreed, scanning the faces that glanced up to assess the new arrivals. A few were familiar, glancing away again as soon as they registered his presence, the rest strangers. Well, that was to be expected, the turnover of clientele in a place like this tended to be rapid. No one seemed overly pleased to see him, but then no one seemed overtly hostile either. He tried to remember any unsettled grudges someone might still be holding from before his arrest, but none came to mind. The cuckolds who’d turned him in wouldn’t dare enter the Tumble at night, and he didn’t owe anyone money. Several of the customers were eyeing Elyra with barely concealed interest or suspicion, which was all according to plan. They’d intended to make an impression, and they were certainly doing that. “Come on.” He gestured for her to follow him, and walked up to the bar.

  “Vos,” Mung said, from the relative safety of the other side, a faint edge of surprise in his voice. “I heard they hung you for tithe evasion.” He looked just the way Kyrlock remembered, thin and wiry, with lank brown hair and an insincere grin, which revealed a misshapen row of yellowing teeth. A shaggy beard covered his face, obscuring the tattoo, identical to Kyrlock’s, which was still just barely visible behind a hedgerow of hair and grease.

  “You heard wrong,” Kyrlock said, with a humourless smile. “Two drinks.” He dropped a couple of coins on the counter, with a metallic rattle. “I got tithed off myself, to the Imperial Guard. Say what you like about the nobility, they’ve a fine sense of humour.”

  “Some of ’em you can die laughing,” Mung agreed, slopping something from a bottle into a cracked glass and a mug with a broken handle. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Not really sure,” Kyrlock admitted. “She’s from up there.” He pointed skywards, and Mung nodded, taking in the quality of Elyra’s clothing. “Name’s Elyra. Seems to have been the butt of another little joke.”

  “Vos.” Elyra tugged at his sleeve, pretending to be nervous. “He doesn’t have to know all this, does he?”

  “Course he does,” Kyrlock said. “The right people come in here, he can tell them I’m looking to deal.” He pushed the mug towards her dismissively. “Enjoy your drink.” He turned back to Mung. “Kantris still show his face in these heaps?”

  “Now and again,” Mung said, noncommittally. “What do you want to talk to him about?”

  “That’s between him and me,” Kyrlock said, and Mung nodded cordially, not having expected any other answer.

  Elyra sniffed suspiciously at the pale liquid in her filthy cup, and winced. “What is this stuff?”

  “Best not to ask,” Kyrlock said, knocking his own drink back in one, with a sigh of satisfaction. “He’ll only lie about it anyway.”

  “Got that right,” Mung agreed cheerfully. “Another?”

  “Why not?” Kyrlock dropped another coin on the counter. “We’ve got time.”

  “So,” Mung said, looking him up and down as he refilled the glass. “You’re a Guardsman now.”

  “Not as such,” Kyrlock said, grinning. “I sort of resigned.”

  “I see.” Mung took in the stencilled serial number on the haft of his chain axe, next to the aquila symbol of the Guard, and the shotgun hanging casually from his shoulder. “Do they know you’re gone yet?”

  “Oh yes.” Kyrlock nodded. “I settled a couple of scores before I left.” Mung glanced at the weapons, drawing the conclusions he was meant to, and Kyrlock continued with a well-concealed sense of satisfaction. “Since then I’ve been hiding out in the Breaks. Most of ’em couldn’t find their arses with both hands and a map up there.” He snorted derisively. “City boys. But then Elyra fell on me, and it turns out she’s got a better id
ea.”

  “Which is?” Mung asked, his eyes going to the woman again.

  “Our business.” She took a cautious sip of the drink in her hand, and grimaced. ’emperor’s blood!”

  “Knew you’d like it,” Mung said cheerfully. He turned back to Kyrlock. “Fell on you, you said?”

  “I jumped,” Elyra said, “with a set of glidewings. I’d never used one before, so the landing was a little rough. Vos saw me come down, and dug me out.”

  “I thought my luck was in,” Kyrlock said, knocking back his second drink. “Dead aristo just dropping out of the sky like that, bound to have some good jewellery or something on ’em, you know? But she was still breathing.”

  “Can’t win ’em all,” Mung said, sympathetically.

  “Right.” Kyrlock nodded. “And it turns out she’s in trouble too.”

  “Must be, to take a risk like that.” The rodent-like barman looked at Elyra with a mixture of curiosity and respect. “Mind if I ask what kind?” Then he smiled insincerely, in a belated attempt at tact. “Folk’ll be asking, see, when I say Vos and his friend were mentioning some business.”

  “Well, if you must know,” Elyra said, managing to look both embarrassed and angry at the same time, “my master and I fell in love with each other.” Kyrlock nodded, impressed with her acting ability. If he hadn’t known she was lying, he’d never have been able to tell. She swallowed the drink in one gulp, apparently overcome with emotion for a moment, and taking advantage of the tears that the raw alcohol brought to her eyes to add extra verisimilitude. “Which was fine, until the mistress found out. The vindictive old hag was going to have me killed, so I made a run for it.”

  “Quite right too,” Mung said, sympathetically, and out of the corner of his eye Kyrlock could see that the rest of the customers were listening as avidly as they could without appearing to. Within the next few hours, the story of his desertion from the Guard and Elyra’s flight from a vengeful noble would be all over the underworld that thrived in the ruins of the Tumble and the back alleys of the Commons. The barman poured more of the anonymous liquid into Elyra’s cup, which, to Kyrlock’s surprise, she downed too. “Here, have another. On the house.”

  “We’ll need somewhere to stay,” Kyrlock said, “until the word gets out.”

  Mung nodded, pulling aside a curtain behind the bar, to reveal a shabby storeroom with a stained and grubby bedroll on the floor, and a reeking bucket in one corner. “You can have my place,” he offered, “for five credits, each.”

  “Ten credits for that?” Elyra said. “That’s outrageous!”

  Mung shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, “but you won’t do better.” He glanced speculatively in her direction. “This mistress of yours, is she hacked off enough to hire a bounty hunter by any chance?” The question was choked off as Kyrlock’s fist closed around the front of his greasy and malodorous shirt, and he transferred his attention to the Guardsman, smiling in what he imagined was an ingratiating fashion. “I’m only saying, they’ll want to be sure she’s dead, won’t they? They’ll go straight to the Commons, start asking around. If you want to stay hidden, you’ll need to be with someone you trust.” He wriggled free of Kyrlock’s grasp.

  “Fair enough,” Kyrlock said, wiping his hand on his furs, “but it’s five for the room, flat. “And any trouble walks in here looking for us, you’ll be the first to die. Got it?”

  “Pleasure doing business,” Mung agreed, standing aside to allow them behind the counter. Kyrlock and Elyra ducked through the curtain, letting it fall closed behind them, and the psyker lowered herself gingerly onto the bedroll, shuddering a little as her bare hands made contact with the blankets.

  “Can you trust him?” Elyra asked, pillowing her head on her backpack, and relaxing with a sigh.

  Kyrlock nodded slowly, seating himself on a crate of tinned food, facing the curtain, and laying the shotgun across his lap. “I suppose so,” he said, considering it. “He’s a greedy little bastard, so he definitely won’t rat us out before we pay him.” He sighed. “And he is my brother. That still counts for something, even down here.”

  ELEVEN

  The Tumble, Gorgonid Mine, Sepheris Secundus

  097.993.M41

  Dawn came slowly to the Gorgonid, even out on its fringes, and Keira knew from her earlier stealthy explorations that there were many parts of the vast chasm where it never arrived at all. Now the city above the mine was beginning to glow more brightly, as the rising sun reached the array of reflectors on the highest peaks surrounding it, and the shadows around her were beginning to lighten. In another hour or so the pale disc would climb above the encircling mountains, casting as much illumination as it ever did into these foetid depths, and it would become too much of a risk to move around openly. As if in anticipation of the new day’s arrival, the furtive nocturnal activity that had scurried and whispered all around her during the hours of darkness had tapered off in the last hour or so, leaving the shattered landscape curiously quiet.

  Aware of the need for concealment, Keira had settled into a small declivity near the crest of a spoil heap with a good view of the entrance to the drinkhole where Elyra and Kyrlock had found refuge. She lay prone, beneath a scrap of canvas as ingrained with the ever-present dust as everything else around here seemed to be, watching the entrance through an amplivisor that Vex had blessed in some fashion so that it was able to function even in pitch darkness, limning the world in muted shades of softly refulgent green.

  The smell and the taste of powdered stone was everywhere, scratching her eyes, clogging her nostrils, and coating the back of her throat, but she ignored the discomfort, considering it a fitting penance for the sin of theft; even one as petty as the robbery she’d committed to protect her makeshift refuge from prying eyes.

  When she’d first joined the service of the Inquisition Keira had been profoundly dismayed at the moral compromises that doing the holy work of Him on Earth so often seemed to demand, the creed of Redemptionism having little room among its tenets for anything other than absolutes. But the more she saw of the galaxy the more she’d come to understand that sometimes the commission of a smaller sin was the unavoidable price of extirpating a much greater one. She had even come to take a quiet pride in her ability to bear the burden of such minor transgressions without giving way to the weakness and corruption they promulgated in less pious souls. Her service to the Emperor conferred something akin to divine sanction on whatever she did, but she still embraced any privations He sent her way as a consequence of these petty misdemeanours.

  It was as though He was looking over her shoulder on such occasions, reminding her of His forbearance, and Keira relished the idea that she might have attracted a small fragment of His attention, even for a moment.

  Sometimes, however, like this morning, she found herself fretting over her actions, wondering if she’d failed Him in some way, and whether the grittiness in her throat and the hard edges of the rocks beneath her ribs were signs of His displeasure. Maybe she should have killed the truck driver after all.

  She’d scavenged the scrap of canvas from an ore lorry she’d found a couple of hours earlier, pulled over next to the highway, in a patch of deep shadow where one of the flaring torches had been extinguished. Certain that Kyrlock and Elyra wouldn’t be moving again so close to dawn, she’d slipped away in search of something to secure her hiding place, spotting the truck almost at once through the Omnissiah-blessed lenses. As she’d approached it, keeping to the deepest patches of darkness, slipping silently across the treacherous scree, she’d heard voices, and glanced around the tailgate to make sure the crew’s attention was otherwise engaged while she rummaged through the vehicle’s external tool locker in search of the material she needed.

  As she’d caught sight of the speakers, only her Assassinomm training had prevented an involuntary gasp of horror from escaping her, and possibly betraying her presence. The driver had been arguing with a cloaked and hooded figure, whose body was clearly tw
isted in a manner far from the true perfection of humanity. Any residual doubts about its identity that Keira might have retained were dispelled almost at once, as she grasped the subject of their conversation. They were haggling over the price of some black market scrabblings from the Shatters, the lowest levels of the mine, where only mutants and renegades dared to go.

  Righteous anger welled up in her at the realisation of what she was witnessing, nothing less than a traitor consorting with a mutant for mere squalid profit. Without thinking her hand went to the crossbow at her belt. Within seconds she had a quarrel nocked, the weight of the silent killer heavy in her right hand, and a throwing blade balanced in her left.

  Quick and quiet, she told herself. Take the abomination with the bolt, and the man with the knife. The cavalcade of traffic continued to rumble past only a few metres away, and would drown any cries they might make.

  Then she hesitated. Disposing of the bodies would be difficult in this wilderness of stone, and leaving them to be discovered was out of the question. Violent death was common enough in the Tumble, and would excite little comment, but it tended to be crude and brutal. The people Elyra and Kyrlock were hoping to infiltrate were far more sophisticated than the average mining serf, and might recognise the fact that these two had been taken out swiftly and cleanly. They might even suspect that such unusual deaths were somehow connected to the new arrivals, which would put the whole operation in jeopardy.

  The mission comes first, Keira thought, one of the fundamental tenets her collegium tutors had schooled her in. Everything else is secondary. But letting such cancers in the body of the Imperium live on left a sour taste in her mouth. Resheathing the knife, and loosening the tension in the crossbow string, she prised the lid off the lorry’s equipment locker and extricated what she needed.

  “All right, five protein packs per tonne,” the driver said, his deal apparently concluded. “Provided it’s as pure as you say, and not mostly shale like the last lot.”