by Dan Abnett
Sejan Karyl was lifting the Keeler image off its stand. His hands were gloved. An armoured carry-casket lay open at his feet, ready to receive it.
‘Helping yourself?’ I asked. I aimed my Tronsvasse at him.
Karyl smiled ruefully.
‘I think the sale is off,’ he said, ‘and this is something I am anxious to obtain.’
He laid the glass plate gently in the casket, and turned back to the display stand. Under the velvet cushion was a small packet. Keeler’s writings, the real prize.
‘I can’t let you take that,’ I said. ‘Halanor Kurtecz… Have you seen her?’
‘No,’ said Karyl. He was busy with the packet, opening the seal.
‘Leave that,’ I said. ‘Think carefully, Karyl. When did you last see Kurtecz?’
‘She fled, I think,’ he said. He smiled. ‘It’s funny… I never thought I’d be grateful to the Ordo Hereticus, but thanks to them, this is now mine.’
Nayl took a step towards him, his hellgun aimed.
‘My boss said put it down, so put it down. You’ve got some front. There are two guns trained on you and you still think you’re going to walk out of here with that?’
I glanced around. Karyl was confident in something. But what?
‘I should thank you too, I suppose,’ Karyl said to me. ‘But for you, the ordo would not have driven this operation, and Kurtecz–’
‘She isn’t Ordo Hereticus. She isn’t Halanor Kurtecz,’ I said. ‘Her name is Lilean Chase.’
Karyl looked at me. An expression of delight filled his face.
‘Oh,’ he said, laughing. ‘I had thought so highly of you, but now I find you’re a dolt like all the rest. Lilean Chase? You’re so wrong, it’s hysterical.’
He opened the packet and began to read.
‘Delightful,’ he murmured. ‘Keeler is quite explicit. The Emperor is not a god. He disavows any effort to name Him so. You see, here? She states that it was her encounter with daemons in the presence of Horus Lupercal that drove her to extremes of belief. If daemons exist, then to her a god must exist too. The universe could not be so cruel, otherwise. The existence of a god was necessary to counterbalance the horror of the warp. The Lectitio Divinitatus is based on a lie. Imperial faith is based upon fear. The “saint” admits it.’
‘Hand that to me,’ I said. ‘It is a deeply heretical text. It’s going nowhere.’
‘This?’ Karyl smiled, gesturing with the papers. ‘This is just the bonus prize, our reward for being patient today. It will make a nice addition to our library. It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.’
‘You are Cognitae,’ I said.
‘Yes, Gregor. Lilean sends her regards. She had hoped to meet you in person one day, given the years you’ve been searching for her. But she’s busy elsewhere. She sent me to collect this. Your road ends here.’
Nayl raised his hellgun, and aimed it at the man’s head.
‘I don’t think you’re in much of a position to issue threats like that,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ said Karyl. ‘Today… this sale, it was a sting operation. The Ordo Hereticus learned that Medonae had the image. They knew it would be an irresistible lure to heretic groups. They coerced him into announcing an auction rather than trying to sell it privately. They knew the Cognitae would send an agent to get it.’
He grinned.
‘That’s me, by the way.’
‘Halanor Kurtecz–’ I began.
‘Is an inquisitor,’ he replied. ‘Ordo Hereticus. She’s running this operation. This sale was bait for the prize she’s after.’
‘The Cognitae–’
‘Gods, no! A far greater heretic. The renegade psyker, the diabolus… Gregor Eisenhorn. This was all for your benefit, Gregor. You are the wanted man here. Your ex-masters, the Ordo Hereticus, want you ended.’
From the halls behind me, I heard screams, and the sound of weapons-fire. With Nayl covering Karyl, I went back to the chamber door to look.
Ordo Hereticus kill-teams were sweeping into Medonae’s palace, slaughtering every living thing they could find. They had co-opted Tempestus Scions to do the bloodwork. I saw Inquisitor Kurtecz among the storm troops, ordering them on, relaying messages to find me and detain me at all costs.
I had believed I was setting a trap for Chase and the wretched Cognitae, but in truth it was a trap set for me. I was impressed at the skill and flair with which Kurtecz and her colleagues had lured me out of hiding.
I was horrified to see, now more clearly than ever, how much of an outcast I had become. To the Ordo Hereticus, I was as abominable as the Cognitae.
Today, the Cognitae were but a footnote, and Chase had used her opportunist cunning to lift a great treasure while the ordo and I kept each other busy.
I had been outplayed by both sides: the Cognitae and my former masters.
I felt sick. The ordos were blind if they could not distinguish between me and a threat as malevolent as the Cognitae cult. I had been right to cut my ties and continue my work alone. That knowledge gave me some small comfort.
Harlon cried out. I turned to find him knocked to the ground. Karyl had the sealed carry-casket in his hand, and was aiming a lasgun at Nayl.
Impressive. It took a lot to outsmart Harlon Nayl, especially when he had a gun to your head.
‘I’ll be leaving now, Gregor,’ said Karyl.
I shot at him. My blasts withered in mid-air. Karyl – or whatever his true name was – was a high-function psyker. That’s how he’d floored Nayl, and why he had seemed so confident. He’d hidden the power earlier, but now it was boiling out of him. I took the brunt of it, and it hurled me back into the wall.
I felt several ribs break.
But, at last, someone had underestimated me. I was a high-function psyker too. Karyl had power, but Chase should have sent someone with considerably more. Staying in the dark places had its advantages. People didn’t know what I was truly capable of. Chase did not appreciate who she was dealing with.
My power had been blocked earlier by the Inquisition’s mind-shields. Now it was free, and it was fuelled by my anger and frustration.
I yelled a single word of power.
The force of it, like a flaming shock wave in the air, struck Sejan Karyl, and threw him not just into the chamber’s back wall but through it. Stonework ruptured. A terrible, blinding light shone in through the demolished hole.
I pulled down my glare shields, and helped Nayl to his feet. He pulled on his goggles too, and we drew up the heavy hoods of our coats.
Outside, the desert was too bright to look at. The heat was immense. While we had been inside the palace, lowday had ended, a brief night had flickered past, and burnday had begun.
Karyl lay on his back on a heap of rubble. Every bone in his body was shattered, but he was still alive. Blood from his wounds was cooking off him, and his exposed flesh was frying. He held the packet of Euphrati Keeler’s ancient manuscript in one blackened claw of a hand, but the paper was already burning.
He was trying to put it out, but he was on fire too.
I watched his body burn, the papers with it.
‘Get Medea on the vox,’ I said to Nayl. ‘Tell her to bring the gun-cutter in. We need rapid extraction.’
He nodded, and I heard him speaking Glossia into his vox-headset.
I opened my mind.
+Cherubael? Can you hear me?+
+Of course, Gregor.+
+I need your assistance.+
+My, my, Gregor. Do you need me to come and kill lots and lots of people for you?+
I hesitated. I thought for a moment of the Tempestus Scions and Inquisition teams ploughing through the palace at our heels, just minutes away from finding us.
‘Yes,’ I said, with great reluctance.
+I didn’t quite hear that, Gregor.+
+Yes.+
Nayl and I took the armoured carry-casket, and set off into the burning desert. Medea was en route, less than a minute away.
We got a fair distance clear of the palace, and I turned to look back, in time to see a light come down from the sky that was brighter and more dreadful than the burnday glare of the three suns.
Medonae’s palace began to die with volcanic finality.
I looked away.
From somewhere, I heard a deep, satisfied laugh.
It was probably the daemonhost, delighting in his slaughter, but just for a moment, I thought it had come, echoing, from the casket in my hand.
From the smiling, noble image that Euphrati Keeler had made so long before.
PERIHELION
An hour into the symposium it became clear we weren’t all going to get out alive.
I’d come to watch. To spectate. Covering my identity with the paperwork of an archaeolinguist from Shurfath, the local universitariate, and disguising my face and build with scholar’s robes and a falsehood, I’d come to sit among the academics and the savants in the gallery.
I lie. I hadn’t come to watch. I’d come to see him. It had been a long time since I’d last seen him. Fifty years? A century? I lose count.
Bader Vecum had died. That was the start of it. Bader Vecum, eleventh son of an eleventh son, the last discernible branch of a noble house line that had ruled the island nation of Maelificer for thirty generations, had died. You know the island, I’m sure. In the cold, green northern oceans of Gudrun, in the Helican sub; a place of mild summers and dark winters, of ice-capped peaks and geothermal power, of ancient towns etched into the steep sides of dead volcanoes. To the north of the island, the jagged black walls of the continental shelf can be seen on a clear day, three hundred kilometres away across a forbidding polar sea.
House Vecum had a seat in Gudrun’s Upper Legislature, but it had never been one of the most powerful or influential of Gudrun’s noble families. Over the centuries, Maelificer had been sustained by the export of preserved fish, seabed ores, and by geothermic power, but it had always maintained a reputation as a seat of learning. In those steep, cliff-side towns, there flourished Shurfath Universitariate, two academies of rubrication, six museums, and four distinguished library collections, all thanks to the scholarly enthusiasms of the noble Vecums, amateur philologists all.
Now the last was dead, without issue, of terribly old age, and Maelificer was to be administered by the Vecum’s mainland cousins in House Courel. Bader Vecum’s famous private library was to be broken up and dispersed into the discipline libraries of Shurfath, as well as several mainland scholams.
There had always been talk that House Vecum’s private library contained some items of unusually esoteric merit and, as is often the case with old collections long held in private hands, the Inquisition had appointed an emissary to oversee the disbursement of its contents. One can never be too careful. Even without any malicious intent on the part of its owners, a thousand-year-old collection might have something pernicious festering at the back of a shelf. I have personally seen great tragedies unfold because of the unwitting ownership of the blasphemous.
I have seen a page of faded manuscript kill a world.
We gathered in the empty house, high on the steepest scarps of the island’s peaks. It was the end of autumn, and the first ice was glinting in the harbour, the first dark, deep-ocean gales were building out in the west. Migratory birds mobbed the skies outside the high windows, preparing for departure. Servants hurried from draughty room to draughty room, nursing warmth out of the corroding heating systems that Bader Vecum had allowed to ail alongside his health.
Inquisitor Cyriaque led the symposium. With his interrogator, Voriet, and three savants, he had spent two months sifting the collection. He was now presenting his conclusions to a body of his peers from the ordos, along with an invited audience of academics, for deliberation. Eighteen volumes had already been sequestered without consultation. The Inquisition does not invite opinion on some matters. But there remained one hundred and fifty-one items where a strong argument could be made for careful academic study rather than strict prohibition. Chancellor Manivar of Shurfath was particularly insistent on this possibility.
‘Shurfath’s reputation,’ he said, rising to his feet at the start of the symposium, ‘which I may be so bold as to suggest extends beyond Gudrun and the subsector to the local Imperium Sector range, depends so much upon the quality of our collection. And that collection, at its core, has been the great work of House Vecum, whose broad and admirable curiosity has allowed them to accumulate a vast and irreplaceable archive of books down the ages. While we understand the necessity of restricting some volumes, from time to time, for the social good, we urge the worthy ordos not to sequester the entire catalogue. It is not all contaminated because of one or two unwise inclusions. Please allow as much of the whole as possible to be transferred to the academic files of Shurfath and its fellow institutions at home and abroad.’
I was broadly in agreement with the chancellor’s wishes. I had reviewed the questionable pieces, and there was nothing in them that warranted censorship. Depriving scholars of access to such material blunts our collective knowledge.
But, you may remark, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
I also liked Shurfath. There was something about the cold, hard climate of Maelificer that focused scholarly intent. Some of the most learned members of the sector’s ordos had studied there at one time or another: I myself had spent nine months there, trawling its stacks. That was many, many years previously, when I was attempting to do some background research on a matter that had occupied a colleague of mine during a visit to Elvara Cardinal. Though answers had eluded me (and the man was long since dead), I had come to appreciate Shurfath’s atmosphere and learning.
Inquisitor Cyriaque leant towards the chancellor’s way of thinking too, but he was young, and this was one of his first formal duties. He knew that the eyes of seniors were upon him. He could not afford to seem lenient. He could not afford to appear radical.
There’s a potent word: Radical.
The first volume was brought out for examination and discussion, the first of the one hundred and fifty-one in question. It was going to be a long process. Cyriaque had chosen a small lecture room in the upper levels of the vertical palace, a gloomy, wood-panelled chamber of uninterrupted brown. It had once been used by medicae students for anatomy lessons, and there were tiers of seats around the central stage. The tiered gallery stalls, like a little box theatre, were almost as sheer as the cliffs outside. We leant on the wooden handrails and peered down into the gas-lit arena where Cyriaque’s savants, their hands white-gloved, were laying the first questionable book on a piezo-charged neutralising cloth. Voriet, the interrogator, had placed aversive wards around the lip of the wooden stage. There were guards too: Inquisitorial servants in the stern robes of the ordos, and the more ostentatious men-at-arms of House Vecum.
Cyriaque began his review. The book was a copy of a copy of Unacius’ Readings, one from which the notorious ‘poetry’ had long since been expunged. It was undoubtedly harmless, an unloaded gun. The mezzopict illustrations were, however, charming and rare, and deserved to be held for the benefit of students of the visual arts. The chancellor rose and, once Cyriaque had finished his summary, said as much.
The ordos seniors seemed unmoved. Old Karnot Vesher would be, I knew well, monodominant to the end, hardline, bitter. Adrianne Corwal was harder to read. An elegant, diligent woman, she had her psyber drone hover over the pages as the savants turned them, relaying close-ups to her optic implants. Zaul Gaguach seemed bored. I distinctly heard him twice ask an aide what the palace kitchens were preparing for supper.
And then there was him, of course. Faceless, implacable, as unreadable as a blunt. It is not weakness to confess that I felt a certain emotional response when he moved from the shadows, onto the stage. It had been a very long time, and we had once been very close.
His career had been blighted by the affair of Slyte. His career, and the Kell Mountain region of Sarre Province. Gudrun, and Eustis Maj
oris too, bore the scars of his work.
I knew full well those modest scars were far preferable to the fatal exit wounds that would have been the consequence of his inaction, but Lord Grandmaster Rorken had been obliged to censure him. In the service of the Throne, and the Holy Ordos, he had been required to operate on a rogue status. He had saved, at a conservative estimate, trillions of lives. Even so, the aftermath had been a terrible mess. In order to continue in service with the Ordos Helican, he had agreed to suspend his active status and fulfil an advisory role in the Inquisition’s headquarters.
A waste. A waste of a huge talent. At least, I had heard, he was writing again.
The Readings were finally passed for collation. His vote swung it, though his aye was the only word he uttered. I was glad to see that a fear of accusations of radicalism, a fear that he was the rogue they had always suspected, did not stay his hand. He knew what was right and what was foolishly wrong, and the mezzopicts belonged in a decent library.
The second work was brought out and introduced by Cyriaque. It was a ‘tarnished’ copy of an M.39 Ennead, where old, block-printing transposition errors had created quasi-blasphemous images of the Emperor.
I had honestly thought we would get all the way to item sixteen – a prayer pamphlet of the Technotic Sect that had a genuinely heretical tone – before there would be any real dissent or argument. That would probably take up the whole of the first day. In one of the scheduled breaks, or perhaps after the evening session, I would steal my chance to talk to him.
But it didn’t go anything like that.
As Cyriaque’s savants turned the pages of the Ennead with their white-gloved hands, one of the House Vecum guardsmen at the back of the room, a tall fellow with a lugubrious expression, shifted uneasily. He was wearing a long green coat, a white sash, and copious gold braid, and his tall silver helm was festooned with the feathers of the oceanic greywing. He was holding a ceremonial poleaxe.
I noticed him twitch for a second time, and thought perhaps he was suffering from indigestion or other gastric discomfort. Then he hoisted the poleaxe and, with a slightly bemused frown, plunged it into the nearest ordos guard.