by Dan Abnett
From above, I realised belatedly. Whoever was on the stairs had a hard-slug sidearm, but the las-fire was coming down from the roof.
I heard steps running on the floor below. Fischig scrambled up to give chase, but another salvo of las-fire sent him ducking again.
I raised my aim, and fired up into the roof tiles, blowing out holes through which the pale light poked.
Something slithered and scrambled on the roof.
Fischig was on the stairs now, running after the second assailant.
I hurried across the third floor, following the sounds of the man on the roof.
I saw a silhouette against the sky through a hole in the tiles, and fired again. Las-fire replied in a bright burst, but then there was a thump and further slithering.
‘Cease fire! Give yourself up! Inquisition!’ I bellowed, using the will. There came a much more substantial crash sounding like a whole portion of the roof had come down. Tiles avalanched down, and smashed in a room nearby.
I slammed into the doorway, gun aimed, about to yell out a further will command. But there was no one in the room. Piles of shattered roof slates and bricks covered the floor beneath a gaping hole in the roof itself, and a battered lasrifle lay among the debris. On the far side of the room were some of the broken windows that Bequin had pointed out as overlooking the tannery roof.
I ran to one. Down below, a powerful figure in dark overalls was running for cover. The killer, escaping from me in just the same way his last victim had escaped him – through the windows onto the tannery roof.
The distance was too far to use the will again with any effect, but my aim and angle were good. I lined up on the back of the head a second before it disappeared, began to apply pressure–
–and the world exploded behind me.
I came round cradled in Bequin’s arms. ‘Don’t move, Eisenhorn. The medics are coming.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Booby trap. The gun that guy left behind? It exploded behind you. Powercell overload.’
‘Did Fischig get his man?’
‘Of course he did.’
He hadn’t, in fact. He’d chased the man hard down two flights of stairs and through the main floor of the warehall. At the outer door onto the street, the man had wheeled around and emptied his autopistol’s clip at the chastener, forcing him into cover.
Then Captain Wrex, approaching from outside, had gunned the man down in the doorway.
We assembled in Wrex’s crowded office in the busy Arbites Mid-Rise Sector-house. Aemos joined us, laden down with papers and data-slates, and brought Midas Betancore with him.
‘You all right?’ Midas asked me. In his jacket of embroidered cerise silk, he was a vivid splash of colour in the muted gloom of mid-rise.
‘Minor abrasions. I’m fine.’
‘I thought we were leaving, and here you are having all the fun without me.’
‘I thought we were leaving too until I saw this case. Review Bequin’s notes. I need you up to speed.’
Aemos shuffled his ancient, augmetically assisted bulk over to Wrex’s desk, and dropped his books and papers in an unceremonious pile.
‘I’ve been busy,’ he said.
‘Busy with results?’ Bequin asked.
He looked at her sourly. ‘No, actually. But I have gathered a commendable resource of information. As the discussion advances, I may be able to fill in blanks.’
‘No results, Aemos? Most perturbatory,’ grinned Midas, his white teeth gleaming against his dark skin. He was mocking the old savant by using Aemos’ favourite phrase.
I had before me the work roster of the warehouse where the three bodies had been found, and another for the agricultural store where our fight had occurred. Quick comparison brought up two coincident names.
‘Brell Sodakis. Vim Venik. Both worked as warehousemen before the place closed down. Now they’re employed by Hundlemas Agricultural Stowage.’
‘Backgrounds? Addresses?’ I asked Wrex.
‘I’ll run checks,’ she said.
‘So... we have a cult here, eh?’ Midas asked. ‘You’ve got a series of ritual killings, at least one murder site, and now the names of two possible cultists.’
‘Perhaps.’ I wasn’t convinced. There seemed both more and less to this than had first appeared. Inquisitorial hunch.
The remains of the lasrifle discarded by my assailant lay on an evidence tray. Even with the damage done by the overloading powercell, it was apparent that this was an old model.
‘Did the powercell overload because it was dropped? It fell through the roof, didn’t it?’ Bequin asked.
‘They’re pretty solid,’ Fischig answered.
‘Forced overload,’ I said. ‘An old Imperial Guard trick. I’ve heard they learn how to set one off. As a last ditch in tight spots. Cornered. About to die anyway.’
‘That’s not standard,’ said Fischig, poking at the trigger guard of the twisted weapon. His knowledge of guns was sometimes unseemly. ‘See this modification? It’s been machine-tooled to widen the guard around the trigger.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
Fischig shrugged. ‘Access? For an augmetic hand with rudimentary digits?’
We went through to a morgue room down the hall where the man Wrex had gunned down was lying on a slab. He was middle-aged, with a powerful frame, going to seed. His skin was weatherbeaten and lined.
‘Identity?’
‘We’re working on it.’
The body had been stripped by the morgue attendants. Fischig scrutinised it, rolling it with Wrex’s help to study the back. The man’s clothes and effects were in plasteen bags in a tray at his feet. I lifted the bag of effects, and held it up to the light.
‘Tattoo,’ reported Fischig. ‘Imperial eagle, left shoulder. Crude, old. Letters underneath it... capital S period, capital I period, capital I, capital X.’
I’d just found the signet ring in the bag. Gold, with a wheatear motif. ‘S.I. IX,’ said Aemos. ‘Sameter Infantry Nine.’
The Ninth Sameter Infantry had been founded in Urbitane twenty-three years before, and had served, as Aemos had already told me, in the brutal liberation war on Surealis Six. According to city records, five hundred and nineteen veterans of that war and that regiment had been repatriated to Sameter after mustering out thirteen years ago, coming back from the horrors of war to an increasingly depressed world beset by the blight of poverty and urban collapse. Their regimental emblem, as befitted a world once dominated by agriculture, was the wheatear.
‘They came back thirteen years ago. The oldest victim we have dates from that time,’ said Fischig.
‘Surealis Six was a hard campaign, wasn’t it?’ I asked.
Aemos nodded. ‘The enemy was dug in. It was ferocious, brutal. Brutalising. And the climate. Two white dwarf suns, no cloud cover. The most punishing heat and light, not to mention ultraviolet burning.’
‘Ruins the skin,’ I murmured. ‘Makes it weatherbeaten and prematurely aged.’
Everyone looked at the taut, lined face of the body on the slab.
‘I’ll get a list of the veterans,’ volunteered Wrex.
‘I already have one,’ said Aemos.
‘I’m betting you find the names Brell Sodakis and Vim Venik on it,’ I said.
Aemos paused as he scanned. ‘I do,’ he agreed.
‘What about Quater Traves?’
‘Yes, he’s here. Master Gunnery Sergeant Quater Traves.’
‘What about Omin Lund?’
‘Ummm... yes. Sniper first class. Invalided out of service.’
‘The Sameter Ninth was a mixed unit, then?’ asked Bequin.
‘All our Guard foundings are,’ Wrex said proudly.
‘So, these men... and women...’ Midas mused. ‘Soldiers, been through hell. Fighting the corruption... Your idea is they brought it back here with them? Some taint? You think they were infected by the touch of the warp on Surealis, and have been ritually killing as a way of worship back h
ere ever since?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think they’re still fighting the war.’
It remains a sad truth of the Imperium that virtually no veteran ever comes back from fighting its wars intact. Combat alone shreds nerves and shatters bodies. But the horrors of the warp, and of foul xenos forms, steal sanity forever, and leave veterans fearing the shadows, and the night and, sometimes, the nature of their friends and neighbours, for the rest of their lives.
The Guard of the Ninth Sameter Infantry had come home thirteen years before, broken by a savage war against mankind’s Archenemy and, through their scars and their fear, had brought their war back with them.
The Arbites mounted raids at once on the addresses of all the veterans on the list, those that could be traced, those that were still alive. It appeared that skin cancer had taken over two hundred of them in the years since their repatriation. Surealis had claimed them as surely as if they had fallen there in combat.
A number were rounded up. Bewildered drunks, cripples, addicts, a few honest men and women trying diligently to carry on with their lives. For those latter I felt especially sorry.
About seventy could not be traced. Many may well have disappeared, moved on, or died without it coming to the attention of the authorities. But some had clearly fled. Lund, Traves, Sodakis, Venik for starters. Their habs were found abandoned, strewn with possessions as if the occupant had left in a hurry. So were the habs of twenty more belonging to names on the list.
The Arbites arrived at the hab of one, ex-corporal Geffin Sancto, in time to catch him in the act of flight. Sancto had been a flamer operator in the Guard, and like so many of his kind, had managed to keep his weapon as a memento. Screaming the battle cry of the Sameter Ninth, he torched Arbites in the stairwell of his building, before the tactical squads of the judiciary vaporised him in a hail of gunshots.
‘Why are they killing?’ Bequin asked me. ‘All these years, in secret ritual?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You do, Eisenhorn. You so do!’
‘Very well. I can guess. The fellow worker who jokes at the Emperor’s expense and makes your fragile sanity imagine he is tainted with the warp. The rug-maker whose patterns suggest to you the secret encoding of Chaos symbols. The midwife you decide is spawning the offspring of the Archenemy in the mid-rise maternity hall. The travelling evangelist who seems just too damn fired up to be safe.’
She looked down at the floor of the Land Speeder. ‘They see daemons everywhere.’
‘In everything. In every one. And, so help them, they believe they are doing the Emperor’s work by killing. They trust no one, so they daren’t alert the authorities. They take the eyes, the hands and the tongue... all the organs of communication, any way the Archenemy might transmit his foul lies. And then they destroy the brain and heart, the organs which common soldier myth declares must harbour daemons.’
‘So where are we going now?’ she asked.
‘Another hunch.’
The Guildhall of the Sameter Agricultural Fraternity was a massive ragstone building on Furnace Street, its facade decaying from the ministrations of smog and acid rain. It had been disused for over two decades.
Its last duty had been to serve as a recruitment post of the Sameter Ninth during the founding. In its long hallways, the men and women of the Ninth had signed their names, collected their starchy new fatigues, and pledged their battle oath to the God-Emperor of mankind.
At certain times, under certain circumstances, when a proper altar to the Emperor is not available, Guard officers improvise in order to conduct their ceremonies. An Imperial eagle, an aquila standard, is suspended from a wall, and a sacred spot is marked on the floor beneath in yellow chalk.
The guildhall was not a consecrated building. The founding must have been the first time the young volunteers of Urbitane had seen that done. They’d made their vows to a yellow chalk cross and a dangling aquila.
Wrex was leading three fire-teams of armed Arbites, but I went in with Midas and Fischig first, quietly. Bequin and Aemos stayed by our vehicle. Midas was carrying his matched needle pistols, and Fischig an auto shotgun. I clipped a slab-pattern magazine full of fresh rounds into the precious bolt pistol given to me by Brytnoth of the Adeptus Astartes Deathwatch Chapter.
We pushed open the boarded doors of the decaying structure and edged down the dank corridors. Rainwater pattered from the roof, and the marble floor was spotted and eaten by collected acid.
We could hear the singing. A couple of dozen voices uttering the Battle Hymn of the Golden Throne.
I led my companions forward, hunched low. Through the crazed windows of an inner door we looked through into the main hall. Twenty-three dishevelled veterans in ragged clothes were knelt down in ranks on the filthy floor, their heads bowed to the rusty Imperial eagle hanging on the wall as they sang. There was a yellow chalk cross on the floor under the aquila. Each veteran had a backpack or rucksack and a weapon by their feet. My heart ached. This was how it had gone over two decades before, when they came to the service, young and fresh and eager. Before the war.
Before the horror.
‘Let me try... try to give them a chance,’ I said.
‘Gregor!’ Midas hissed.
‘Let me try, for their sake. Cover me.’
I slipped into the back of the hall, my gun lowered at my side, and joined in the verse.
One by one, the voices died away, and bowed heads turned to look at me. Down the aisle, at the chalk cross of the altar, Lund, Traves and a bearded man I didn’t know stood gazing at me.
In the absence of other voices, I finished the hymn.
‘It’s over,’ I said. ‘The war is over and you have all done your duty. Above and beyond the call.’
Silence.
‘I am Inquisitor Eisenhorn. I’m here to relieve you. The careful war against the blight of Chaos that you have waged through Urbitane in secret is now over. The Inquisition is here to take over. You can stand down.’
Two or three of the hunched veterans began to weep.
‘You lie,’ said Lund, stepping forwards.
‘I do not. Surrender your weapons, and I promise you will be treated fairly and with respect.’
‘Will... Will we get medals?’ the bearded man asked, in a quavering voice.
‘The gratitude of the God-Emperor will be with you always.’
More were weeping now. Out of fear, anxiety or plain relief.
‘Don’t trust him!’ said Traves. ‘It’s another trick!’
‘I saw you in my bar,’ said Lund, stepping forwards. ‘You came in looking.’ Her voice was empty, distant.
‘I saw you on the tannery roof, Omin Lund. You’re still a fine shot, despite the hand.’
She looked down at her prosthetic with a wince of shame.
‘Will we get medals?’ the bearded man repeated, eagerly.
Traves turned on him. ‘Of course we won’t, Spake, you cretin! He’s here to kill us!’
‘I’m not–’ I began.
‘I want medals!’ the bearded man, Spake, screamed suddenly, sliding his laspistol up from his belt with the fluid speed only a trained soldier can manage.
I had no choice.
His shot tore through the shoulder padding of my storm coat. My bolt exploded his head, spraying blood across the rusty metal eagle on the wall.
Pandemonium.
The veterans leapt to their feet, firing wildly, scattering, running.
I threw myself flat as shots tore out the wall plaster behind me. At some point, Fischig and Midas burst in, weapons blazing. I saw three or four veterans drop, sliced through by silent needles, and another six tumbled as shotgun rounds blew them apart.
Traves came down the aisle, blasting his old service-issue lasrifle at me. I rolled and fired, but my shot went wide. His face distorted as a needle round punched through it, and he fell in a crumpled heap.
Wrex and her fire-teams exploded in. Flames from some spilled accelerants billow
ed up the wall.
I got up, and then was thrown back by a las-shot that blew off my left hand.
Spinning, falling, I saw Lund, struggling to make her prosthetic fingers work the unmodified trigger of Traves’ lasgun.
My bolt-round hit her with such force she flew back down the aisle, hit the wall, and tore the Imperial aquila down.
Not a single veteran escaped the Guildhall alive. The firefight raged for two hours. Wrex lost five men to the experienced guns of the Sameter Ninth veterans. They stood to the last. No more can be said of any Imperial Guard unit.
The whole affair left me sour and troubled. I have devoted my life to the service of the Imperium, to protect it against its manifold foes, inside and out.
Not against its servants. However misguided, they were loyal and true. However wrong, they were shaped that way by the service they had endured in the Emperor’s name.
Lund cost me my hand. A hand for a hand. They gave me a prosthetic on Sameter. I never used it. For two years, I made do with a fused stump. Surgeons on Messina finally gave me a fully functional graft.
I consider it a small price to pay for them.
I have never been back to Sameter. Even today, they are still finding the secreted, hidden bodies. So very many, dead in the Emperor’s name.
BACKCLOTH FOR A CROWN ADDITIONAL
Lord Froigre, much to everyone’s dismay including, I’m sure, his own, was dead.
It was a dry, summer morning in 355.M41, and I was taking breakfast with Alizebeth Bequin on the terrace of Spaeton House when I received the news. The sky was a blurry blue, the colour of Sameterware porcelain, and down in the bay the water was a pale lilac, shot through with glittering frills of silver. Sand doves warbled from the drowsy shade of the estate orchards.
Jubal Kircher, my craggy, dependable chief of household security, came out into the day’s heat from the garden room, apologised courteously for interrupting our private meal, and handed me a folded square of thin transmission paper.
‘Trouble?’ asked Bequin, pushing aside her dish of ploin crepes.
‘Froigre’s dead,’ I replied, studying the missive.