by Dan Abnett
He fell heavily, and rolled down the slope.
‘He’ was a mature ork warrior. Released by his spasming paws, a huge cleaver and a large metal cudgel lay on the roadway beside him. We approached slowly. Greenskins are notoriously hard to kill, and though we had blown this one wide open, I fired three more rounds into its skull to be on the safe side. Ichor, almost black in the dawn light, ran down the slope. The mangled corpse showed signs of body paint, tribal markings and lots of crude piercings and bangles. Fresh human ears were strung around its throat on a wire.
‘A greenskin?’ Zelwyn murmured. ‘But this isn’t green space. There haven’t been any orks in this sub for generations.’
‘It didn’t come from this sub,’ I said. I was finding it hard to speak or concentrate. The pain behind my eyes was even worse than before. It felt like a hot wire. ‘It came from whatever random site this regia occulta connects to. This beast went hunting one day, and ended up here. We’ll never know, I fancy, where… where…’
‘Inquisitor? Inquisitor Eisenhorn?’ I heard Zelwyn say. I felt his hand catch my arm. The pain behind my eyes had turned into full-blown psyk agony. I could barely stand, let alone speak.
And I really wanted to speak. I needed to. I needed to yell out, ‘It’s not over!’
The regia occulta was still open. While we had been standing there, gawping at the ork’s cadaver, a second one had walked in through the hidden way.
For such a massive thing, it moved very fast. I moved like lead, transfixed by the pain the seething warp gate was lancing into my receptive mind.
I heard a feral roar, and smelled a foul animal scent. I fell, shoved aside, I think. An autorifle fired.
The ork slew the first militiaman as he landed among us, splitting the fellow straight through the crown with his jagged cleaver. The man collapsed under the force of the blow, his sectioned skull spilling open as the blade jerked back out, his heels drumming the ground. The ork caught another man by the throat, yanked him off his feet, and bit away his face.
It is awful to reflect that this unfortunate lived for at least another ten minutes.
The ork broke the back of a third militiaman with a stinging cudgel blow, before making off in great bounding leaps towards the unlit buildings of the Commercia. Zelwyn and the sole remaining militiaman fired after it. The man with the broken back lay on the ground, screaming.
‘Eisenhorn?’ Zelwyn yelled.
+Lower. The. Bridge.+
I didn’t want to use my will on the poor fellow, but I had no choice. My mouth wouldn’t work. Zelwyn wet himself as my mind intruded upon his. To his credit, he rallied and signalled the machine room.
The New Bridge slowly rattled and clanked back into place. The corposant charge between the spans shorted out and vanished as the opposite ends touched.
My mind cleared at once, the pain draining back. The regia occulta was shut.
Blood had streamed out of my nose and soaked the front of my jacket. I got up and ran towards the warehouses. The ork had vanished from sight. I had to find it, before it found anyone else. A greenskin is dangerous enough. This one was enraged, possibly wounded, and knew it was cut off and pursued by its mortal foe, man.
Zelwyn ran after me. The remaining militiaman stayed put, too shocked to move, his rifle limp in his white-knuckled hands.
‘Get back, Zelwyn!’ I shouted. ‘Gather your militia in full force.’
‘Like hell!’ he yelled back. He shouted over at the units waiting behind the barricades, and they moved forwards after us. We entered the most likely venue, a warehouse stacked with mineral hoppers. Glow globes hung from the rafters, but not all of them worked. Frail daybreak glimmered through the rooflights.
‘In here?’ Zelwyn whispered, panting.
I held up my hand for hush. The place was quiet, except for the mocking chuckle of the Cackle. I tried to reach out with my mind, but I was drained, and no human psyker can read the greenskin mind. They are blunt to us. I took a deep breath instead, and smelled the air: mineral stink, wet rocks, and a hint, just a hint, of animal odour.
We edged forwards. I saw dark, wet spots on the rockcrete floor, leading between the piled hoppers. Unless someone had recently carried a leaky promethium drum through the place, Zelwyn had managed to wound the creature right enough. I touched one of the spots. It oozed warmth.
‘It’s here,’ I whispered.
Zelwyn already knew that. It had come out of the shadows, nightmarishly silent for something so big, and seized him by the throat. I turned slowly.
The ork had pulled the Jared commissioner in against its massive chest like a mother hugging a baby to its breast. Its left paw entirely encircled the man’s neck. Zelwyn’s eyes were wide, and his face was pale. The ork raised its right hand and gently rested the massive cleaver on Zelwyn’s scalp. Tiny trickles of blood ran down Zelwyn’s face.
The bull-ork’s yellow eyes, deep in the brow-ridged sockets, glared at me. Its heavy, flaccid lips wrinkled and twitched. Its tongue, huge and greasy, worked behind its rotting peg teeth. Each one of those teeth was the size of my palm.
The ork was not a bright beast, but it was smart enough, instinctive enough, to recognise its predicament. It was bargaining with me, a life for a life. This much I knew. Otherwise, Zelwyn would have been dead already.
I thought about taking a shot, but dared not risk hitting the commissioner. I was too spent, and it was no time to try my aim. Besides, greenskins are notoriously hard to kill. Even if I hit it, one round from a Tronsvasse would not do the trick.
All I had was my will. I couldn’t impel the ork in any way, but Zelwyn was a different matter.
Without hesitation, I reached into the commissioner’s panicking mind. He was still clutching his laspistol, dangling at his side. I squeezed his finger for him. The shot blew clean through the arch of the ork’s slabby right foot.
The greenskin convulsed in pain, but I already had a grip on Zelwyn’s motor function, and I threw him forwards. I felt his astonishment as his body acted without his permission. He flew out of the ork’s briefly weakened grip so fast and hard, he careered forwards and bounced face-first off the hopper to my right.
I was already firing, my weapon braced in a two-handed grip. I emptied the assault pistol’s clip into the greenskin’s chest, filling the air with drenching black mist and driving the monster into the stack of mineral hoppers behind it. It smashed heavily into the metal siding, but remained on its feet.
I ejected the dead clip, and let it drop and clatter to the floor as I snapped home a reload from my coat pocket. I tore off the second clip in one go, firing into the ork’s face and neck. The back of its vast skull banged repeatedly against the hopper behind it. Spray-patterns of ichor splashed out across the hopper’s side.
It swayed, then took another step towards me.
‘Oh, for Throne’s sake,’ I hissed, ‘just die.’
It died. The stack of hoppers, unsettled by the repeated impacts, creaked and toppled, crushing the ork in an avalanche of rock ore, clinker and iron crates. The noise was deafening. I shielded my face. Dust billowed up, and slowly settled.
I helped the Jared commissioner to his feet. He was quaking badly. Both of us were coated with a film of rock dust. He looked at the mangled heap of wreckage, where dark, clotted ichor seeped out from under the heaps of spoil.
‘Holy shit,’ he murmured.
There was no way, or no way in the understanding of the ordos, anyway, to close a regia occulta. I made it quite clear to Zelwyn that the New Bridge should never, ever be raised again, for it was that very raising, during the Cackle, that produced the unique combination of effects necessary for the regia occulta to function. He needed no persuasion. The day before I left Jared County Town, he had the machine room dismantled and the heavy gauge hydraulics uncoupled. I understand, though I cannot confirm the fact, that the New Bridge was swept away in a freak flood tide some years later. It was never replaced. The regia occulta never reoccurred
in Jared County Town.
Commissioner Zelwyn, who went on to serve his community for six and a half decades, kept one of the ork cleavers on his office wall, and enjoyed telling visitors that the dried blood on its points was his.
The morning I left, he came to see me off.
‘I hope I never see you again, inquisitor,’ he said, shaking my hand.
‘I hope so too, commissioner.’
He paused. ‘I meant that in a good way,’ he added.
‘So did I,’ I said.
I crossed over into Foothold County via the pass at Kulbrech. The reluctant motorised unit of the local militia was there to meet me, the engine of the Centaur idling. They weren’t glad to see me, but I was glad to see them. The Cackle was dying away, and I would soon be gone from Ignix.
The Cackle was dying away, but it insisted on having the last laugh. Many years later, at the end of my life, the mocking elements of Ignix would return to haunt me. But this was – oh – 223.M41, and I was only just out on my own.
MISSING IN ACTION
I lost my left hand on Sameter. This is how it occurred. On the thirteenth day of Sagittar (local calendar), three days before the solstice, in the mid-rise district of the city of Urbitane, an itinerant evangelist called Lazlo Mombril was found shuffling aimlessly around the flat roof of a disused tannery, lacking his eyes, his tongue, his nose and both of his hands.
Urbitane is the second city of Sameter, a declining agro-chemical planet in the Helican subsector, and it is no stranger to crimes of cruelty and spite brought on by the vicissitudes of neglect and social deprivation afflicting its tightly packed population. This act of barbarity stood out for two reasons. First, it was no hot-blooded assault or alcohol-fuelled manslaughter, but a deliberate and systematic act of brutal, almost ritual mutilation.
Second, it was the fourth such crime discovered that month.
I had been on Sameter for just three weeks, investigating the links between a bonded trade federation and a secessionist movement on Hesperus at the request of Lord Inquisitor Rorken. The links proved to be nothing – Urbitane’s economic slump had forced the federation to chase unwise business with unscrupulous shipmasters, and the real meat of the case lay on Hesperus – but I believe this was the lord inquisitor’s way of gently easing me back into active duties following the long and arduous affair of the Necroteuch.
By the Imperial calendar it was 241.M41, late in that year. I had just finished several self-imposed months of recuperation, meditation and study on Thracian Primaris. The eyes of the daemonhost Cherubael still woke me some nights, and I wore permanent scars from torture at the hands of the sadist Gorgone Locke. His strousine neural scourge had damaged my nervous system and paralysed my face. I would not smile again for the rest of my life. But the battle wounds sustained on KCX-1288 and 56-Izar had healed, and I was itching to renew my work.
This idle task on Sameter had suited me, so I had taken it and closed the dossier after a swift and efficient investigation. But latterly, as I prepared to leave, officials of the Munitorum unexpectedly requested an audience.
I was staying with my associates in a suite of rooms in the Urbitane Excelsior, a shabby but well-appointed establishment in the high-rise district of the city. Through soot-stained, armoured roundels of glass twenty metres across, the suite looked out over the filthy grey towers of the city to the brackish waters of the polluted bay twenty kilometres away. Ornithopters and biplanes buzzed between the massive city structures, and the running lights of freighters and orbitals glowed in the smog as they swung down towards the landing port. Out on the isthmus, through a haze of yellow, stagnant air, promethium refineries belched brown smoke into the perpetual twilight.
‘They’re here,’ said Bequin, entering the suite’s lounge from the outer lobby. She had dressed in a demure gown of blue damask and a silk pashmeena, perfectly in keeping with my instruction that we should present a muted but powerful image.
I myself was clad in a suit of soft black linen with a waistcoat of grey velvet and a hip-length black leather storm coat.
‘Do you need me for this?’ asked Midas Betancore, my pilot and confidant.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t intend to be delayed here. I just have to be polite. Go on to the landing port and make sure the gun-cutter’s readied for departure.’
He nodded and left. Bequin showed the visitors in.
I had felt it necessary to be polite, because Eskeen Hansaard, Urbitane’s Minister of Security, had come to see me himself. He was a massive man in a double-breasted brown tunic, his big frame offset oddly by his finely featured, boyish face. He was escorted by two bodyguards in grey, armour-ribbed uniforms, and a short but handsome, black-haired woman in a dark blue bodyglove.
I had made sure I was sitting in an armchair when Bequin showed them in so I could rise in a measured, respectful way. I wanted them to be in no doubt who was really in charge here.
‘Minister Hansaard,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘I am Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn of the Ordo Xenos. These are my associates Alizebeth Bequin, Arbites Chastener Godwyn Fischig and savant Uber Aemos. How may I help you?’
‘I have no wish to waste your time, inquisitor,’ he said, apparently nervous in my presence. That was good, just as I had intended it. ‘A case has been brought to my attention that I believe is beyond the immediate purview of the city Arbites. Frankly, it smacks of warp corruption, and cries out for the attention of the Inquisition.’
He was direct. That impressed me. A ranking official of the Imperium, anxious to be seen to be doing the right thing. Nevertheless, I expected his business might be a mere nothing, like the affair of the trade federation, a local crime requiring only my nod of approval that it was fine for him to continue and close. Men like Hansaard are often over-careful, in my experience.
‘There have been four deaths in the city during the last month that we believe to be linked. I would appreciate your advice on them. They are connected by merit of the ritual mutilation involved.’
‘Show me,’ I said.
‘Captain?’ he responded.
Arbites Captain Hurlie Wrex was the handsome woman with the short black hair. She stepped forwards, nodded respectfully, and gave me a data-slate with the gold crest of the Adeptus Arbites on it.
‘I have prepared a digested summary of the facts,’ she said.
I began to speed-read the slate, already preparing the gentle knock-back I was expecting to give to his case. Then I stopped, slowed, read back.
I felt a curious mix of elation and frustration. Even from this cursorial glance, there was no doubt this case required the immediate attention of the Imperial Inquisition. I could feel my instincts stiffen and my appetites whetten, for the first time in months. In bothering me with this, Minister Hansaard was not being over-careful at all. At the same time, my heart sank with the realisation that my departure from this miserable city would be delayed.
All four victims had been blinded and had their noses, tongues and hands removed, at the very least.
The evangelist, Mombril, had been the only one found alive. He had died from his injuries eight minutes after arriving at Urbitane Mid-rise Sector Infirmary. It seemed to me likely that he had escaped his ritual tormentors somehow before they could finish their work.
The other three were a different story.
Poul Grevan, a machinesmith; Luthar Hewall, a rug-maker; Idilane Fasple, a midwife.
Hewall had been found a week before by city sanitation servitors during routine maintenance to a soil stack in the mid-rise district. Someone had attempted to burn his remains and then flush them into the city’s ancient waste system, but the human body is remarkably durable. The post-mortem could not prove his missing body parts had not simply succumbed to decay and been flushed away, but the damage to the ends of the forearm bones seemed to speak convincingly of a saw or chainblade.
When Idilane Fasple’s body was recovered from a crawlspace under the roof of a mid-rise tenement hab, it thre
w more light on the extent of Hewall’s injuries. Not only had Fasple been mutilated in the manner of the evangelist Mombril, but her brain, brainstem and heart had been excised. The injuries were hideous. One of the roof workers who discovered her had committed suicide. Her bloodless, almost desiccated body, dried out – smoked, if you will – by the tenement’s heating vents, had been wrapped in a dark green cloth similar to the material of an Imperial Guard-issue bedroll, and stapled to the underside of the rafters with an industrial nail gun.
Cross-reference between her and Hewall convinced the Arbites that the rug-maker had very probably suffered the removal of his brain stem and heart too. Until that point, they had ascribed the identifiable lack of those soft organs to the almost toxic levels of organic decay in the liquescent filth of the soil stack.
Greven, actually the first victim found, had been dredged from the waters of the bay by a salvage ship. He had been presumed to be a suicide dismembered by the screws of a passing boat until Wrex’s careful cross-checking had flagged up too many points of similarity.
Because of the peculiar circumstances of their various post-mortem locations, it was pathologically impossible to determine any exact date or time of death. But Wrex could be certain of a window. Greven had last been seen on the nineteenth of Aquiarae, three days before his body had been dredged up. Hewall had delivered a finished rug to a high-rise customer on the twenty-fourth, and had dined that same evening with friends at a charcute in mid-rise. Fasple had failed to report for work on the fifth of Sagittar, although the night before she had seemed happy and looking forward to her next shift, according to friends.
‘I thought at first, a serial predator might be loose in mid-rise,’ said Wrex. ‘But the pattern of mutilation seems to me more extreme than that. This is not feral murder, or even psychopathic, post-slaying depravity. This is specific, purposeful ritual.’
‘How do you arrive at that?’ asked my colleague, Fischig. Fischig was a senior Arbites from Hubris, with plenty of experience in murder cases. Indeed, it was his fluency with procedure and familiarity with modus operandi that had convinced me to make him a part of my band. That, and his ferocious strength in a fight.