by Dan Abnett
Endor had taken Kara in his arms, and they were laughing and dancing a tight and playful zendov across the old travel rugs spread out around the fire. There was no music. They were dancing in time to the crackle of the flames, the steady chirring beat of invisible insects, the tick of an old clock, the hum of words unsounded. Midas was clapping along. Nayl was opening a bottle. Eisenhorn watched as Nayl got up, walked around the campfire and refilled Ravenor’s glass. Ravenor looked up at Nayl, smiled. They laughed at some remark.
‘Loyalty’s a funny thing,’ said Nathan Inshabel, perched on a rock nearby. The firelight flickered across his face. He looked at Eisenhorn. ‘Don’t you think so?’ he asked.
‘I do,’ replied Eisenhorn.
‘It is strong, yet it is fluid,’ said Inshabel. ‘Strong enough to drag a man to his death, yet fluid enough to flow from one man to another. And it’s heritable too. Passed down through the genes, I suppose, like a living idea that will not perish. Thus, it can survive a man’s death and pass, say, to his son or daughter, so she might know that loyalty too, and be dragged down in her turn.’
‘Not quite like that, papa,’ said Thea, sitting on the sand by his feet. ‘You can give your life to a cause, an ideal. You serve what you believe in, that’s what you taught me.’
‘That’s what he taught me,’ Nathan said, gesturing towards Eisenhorn with his glass.
Thea Inshabel looked at Eisenhorn with violet eyes. ‘But that’s true, isn’t it, sir?’
‘I have always thought so,’ said Eisenhorn softly.
‘I died for you,’ said Nathan. ‘I became a target because you were a target and, by association, any who stood with you were in the line of fire. In fact, I was bait. All your staff were. Murdered to draw you out. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I don’t care. I don’t blame you. The work we do is not easy. I haven’t come here tonight to twist your guilt.’
‘Does he have any?’ Endor laughed as he whirled past with Kara.
Nathan chuckled. He looked down and rested his hand on his daughter’s head.
‘I was so proud when she followed me into the service,’ he said. ‘Proud of a legacy. My child, in sworn service to the ordos. And to serve you, as I did…’
He looked at Eisenhorn.
‘Like father, like daughter,’ he said. ‘She became bait in turn. Gobleka knew what he was doing, didn’t he? He knew how to draw you out. How to play upon what little sentiment you have.’
‘Come off it, Nathan!’ roared Endor, as he and Kara danced past in the other direction. ‘He has none of that either!’
‘Or was it the other way around?’ asked Nathan.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Eisenhorn.
Inshabel shrugged. ‘You sent her after Gobleka. You knew he would find out about her. Find out who she was. The family tie, the legacy link. Father and daughter, sworn allies of the old bastard. He wouldn’t be able to resist killing her and using her as bait. Which means he’d show himself. What a cunning way for you to get Goran Gobleka of the Cognitae to give away his location.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Eisenhorn.
‘No, it wasn’t, papa!’ Thea cried.
‘He killed her with an ursid,’ said Nathan, staring straight at Eisenhorn. ‘In a cage. Threw her in alive. Oh, but not before he had tried the antigenic on her, and watched for days as she screamed through the Torment. Another failed test subject. So into the ursid cage with her.’
‘Nathan–’ Eisenhorn began.
‘My child, Gregor, my child. Used as an instrument to advance your obsession. Used and thrown away.’
‘As are we all!’ cried Nayl, toasting. Everyone raised their glasses, and shouted the words.
‘What kind of man uses his friends that way?’ asked Lores Vibben, standing at the edge of the firelight, staring at the flames.
‘No one uses his friends that way, Vibben,’ said Midas.
‘You had a daughter too,’ Vibben said to him.
‘I’m sure she’ll be here any moment,’ said Midas. He took a sip of his drink. ‘Won’t she, Gregor? My sweet little Medea. It can’t be much longer before she joins the party too.’
Eisenhorn turned from the firelight. Its raging heat was still inside him. He walked away from the little camp into the vast blue gloom of the desert night. The moon glared down at him. He heard laughter and voices behind him.
‘Gregor!’ Endor ran to catch up with him. ‘Gregor, where are you going?’
‘I’m not part of that,’ said Eisenhorn.
‘Don’t be daft. You’re the reason it’s happening,’ said Endor.
‘This is the Torment,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘This is the deep-stage corruption of the antigenic, breaking down my mind. Delusion. Collapsing memories. Psychic decay. Annihilation of will.’
‘Hey, we all have bad days,’ said Endor. ‘It’s not your fault, just circumstances.’
‘Titus?’
‘Yes, Gregor?’
‘Old Hapshant…’
‘Him? Throne rest his bones,’ said Endor. He took a swig from the bottle of joiliq he was carrying.
‘Why did he choose us?’ Eisenhorn asked. ‘To be his interrogators, all those years ago?’
‘Because we were the very best!’ Endor exclaimed. He raised his arms and did a little capering jig in a circle around Eisenhorn.
‘Seriously, Titus.’
Endor shrugged.
‘He saw something in us,’ he replied.
‘You know how he died,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘Throne, you know too well how he died. The cerebral worms, they destroyed his mind. His judgement. His cognitive function. The doctors said, after he died, that it was hard to tell how long they had been there. Possibly for years, impairing his critical faculties. He had served for far longer than he was fit. Long past the point when the ordos would have demanded an inquisitor’s retirement.’
‘What are you saying? That we were recruited by a madman?’
‘What if we were?’ asked Eisenhorn.
‘I think you’ll find the selection screening for ordo service is a little more rigorous than that,’ said Endor.
‘But he saw something in us,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘In his madness, long before the outward signs were obvious… in that collapsing mind of his.’
‘Yeah? Like what?’
‘The spark of something he’d been hunting all his life. The likeness of the Archenemy he had pursued for so long and so far into madness, he could no longer distinguish between light and dark.’
Endor frowned at him.
‘I’m no heretic, you arse,’ he snapped.
‘No,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘At worst, I think you’re a hedonist who never took anything in his life seriously enough. You liked the power of the rosette, the authority, the opportunities. Then, of course, your own madness came upon you.’
He looked at Endor’s hurt expression. He could still see the worms moving in Endor’s eyes.
‘What does that make you, then?’ asked Endor coldly.
‘I think that’s what I’m being asked to consider,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘I thought this was brainwashing, but it’s not. The Torment, the antigenic, it has no agenda. It simply lays a man bare. It reduces him to his base elements so he can see himself. That is how it breaks will.’
‘You’re kind of babbling, you know that?’ said Endor.
‘I am on fire, Titus,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘You can’t see it. Maybe you can with those eyes. I am in agony. I burn to the marrow from head to foot with a blood-froth. It is so intense now, I can scarcely feel it.’
‘Have a drink,’ Endor suggested.
‘No, thank you,’ Eisenhorn replied. ‘Titus, I’ve always hunted for the truth. My whole life. And now I think I may have found it, and it terrifies me. To see what I am. To see what… I may have always been. Gobleka and the Cognitae, all of them, they’re fools. They want to destroy and torture. They want to annihilate. Their motives were simply to hurt me. But there is, I fear, a truth in their philosophy.
Gobleka has shown it to me. It’s more than he knew. He dug into me to find something to break me, but he didn’t have the first clue what he was going to find.’
‘What’s that, then?’ asked Endor.
‘A man just like him,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘No, that’s wrong. More than him. Goran Gobleka is a hired killer with aspirations above his abilities. He found someone like the people he serves. Lilean Chase. The King in Yellow.’
He looked at Endor.
‘Could yellow mean flames, do you think?’ he asked. ‘A figure burning from head to foot? On fire entirely? A symbolic name for someone who has burned through and been transmuted? All that they thought they were, torched away, and only the truth left standing?’
‘Gregor,’ said Endor. ‘I want to say, just me to you, I have no bloody idea what you’re on about.’
Eisenhorn looked at him, hopelessly. He tried to put it into words, easy words, but no words would come out. Only strangled un-word noises. Endor looked puzzled for a moment, then his eyes slowly gave way, and small worms started to writhe and slide down his cheeks. He stood where he was, frozen.
The chirring of the insects grew into a roar, a strident loud, slow click beating time to their din, the mechanism of a clock beating out the seconds.
‘It’s almost time,’ said Ravenor.
Eisenhorn looked up. He was standing in shadow. The huge arch of the Spatian Gate was above him. The chirring of the insects was the roar of the crowds lining the eighteen-kilometre route of the Avenue Victor Bellum. Two billion cheering voices. He could hear the marching bands of the procession approaching, the grumble of the war machines, the thump-step of the Titan engines. He could feel the monumental noise vibrating his diaphragm.
This was Thracian, Hive Primaris. The Day of the Great Triumph. Ravenor was dressed in his finest raiment, his Inquisitorial rosette on his breast, just above the small tribe badge of Clan Esw Sweydyr.
The Spatian Gate was made of gleaming white ethercite, and it was so tall the great Titans could march beneath its span. Ravenor looked up at it. He seemed so young and invulnerable.
‘This is it,’ he said, smiling. ‘Just seconds now. The moment of transformation.’
He looked at Eisenhorn.
‘Mine,’ he said, ‘most particularly. But yours too. This moment changes you. You were always driven Gregor, but what happens here today – what happens to me – it propels you on from this point. With a fury, a rage you never lose. It sets you on the path into the dark places, and from here, there is no turning back for you.
‘Even though I try,’ he added. ‘I try my damnedest. You know what they will make me do, don’t you?’
‘Hunt for me.’
‘Hunt for you. Hunt you down as a heretic. It will take years, Gregor. It will cost us both. And then, at last, we will stand face-to-face in the King’s City of Dust, and it will end.’
‘How will it end, Gideon?’ Eisenhorn asked.
‘Oh, how do you think?’ replied Ravenor. ‘The pupil always outstrips the master.’
‘You… you see the future then?’
‘Farseeing,’ said Ravenor. ‘My personal heresy. My vice in the eyes of the ordos. That’s the walk into dark places that I’m going to take, because of this. Trapped in that box, struggling to free my mind and see into… into anything. It will damn me, and the ordos will have the leverage they need to make me track you down and finish you.’
‘If you see the future,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘Tell me this… Who is the King in Yellow?’
Ravenor smiled.
‘Haven’t you figured that out for yourself yet?’ he asked. ‘He’s been there all the time. Since the earliest days of everything.’
‘I feared he was me,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘What I would become somehow.’
‘Oh, he’s that too,’ said Ravenor. ‘Come on now, you know what you are. Forget the future, Gregor. No man ever really prospered knowing that. The past is much more interesting. Think hard. There are only seconds left. Think hard and see yourself. Consider the possibility that Master Imus was right.’
‘No, he–’
‘Just recognise what you’ve always been,’ said Ravenor. ‘It’ll make it easier for you. No more doubts, no more struggles. Your way will be clear. And it will make it far easier on me too, when the time comes.’
He looked up. They could both hear the screaming note of aircraft engines as they began their low pass along the avenue. Lightnings, twelve of them. There were petals in the air.
‘Here it comes,’ he said. He held out his hand.
Eisenhorn reached out to take it, but his hand met metal. He was looking at the armoured box of Ravenor’s support chair.
‘Transformation,’ the chair’s voxponders crackled. ‘Fire. Rebirth.’
Eisenhorn felt the flash. It was so bright he could see nothing but searing white.
Then the flames came. The flames and the wind and the shock wave. His clothes burned away, blowing like ash from his body. His skin blistered, peeled back and shredded. Muscle and sinew disintegrated. His bones, black with heat, buckled and flew like twigs in the wind.
She was holding his hand.
‘That was all a long time ago,’ she said.
Alizebeth.
The sky was white. Old trees shivered in the cold wind. They swayed, their leaves rustling like the chorus of insects. She led him across the wild fell towards the dark valley below.
‘Do you not suppose,’ she said, ‘it’s ironic? The only woman… the only person… you ever loved was a pariah? Untouchable and cast out, anathema to human contact?’
‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ he said.
‘The fire will end soon,’ she promised.
‘Too late,’ he replied. ‘It has unmade me. I have raked through my own ashes and I understand.’
‘So use that,’ she said. ‘You have never been able to save anyone, not really. Not me, not Gideon, not Midas… not even yourself. You are doomed and always have been, and so are all who know you.’
‘I should have stopped years ago,’ he murmured. ‘The magos was right…’
‘Sark?’ she asked.
‘No, Drusher.’
‘Him, I don’t know,’ she said.
‘He’s no one,’ Eisenhorn said. ‘Just a failed man, clutching at the scraps of life, bemoaning his lot. But he said to me that I had gone on far too long. That I had never worked out when to stop. He was very perceptive. He had given up, you see, far too early and far too easily. But he intuitively saw in me a man who had failed in completely the opposite way. A man who just kept going past any point of reason, his friends begging him to halt, then falling at the wayside as he left them in his wake.’
‘I didn’t think you had any friends?’ she mocked.
‘Not any more,’ said Eisenhorn.
‘So, you see, nothing holds you now,’ she said. ‘You can walk the last few kilometres without any burden. Nothing matters to you any more. Can you use that freedom for me?’
‘To save you?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘Far too late for that,’ she replied. She smiled. ‘But a part of me. I have… I will have… It’s hard to explain. A daughter, that’s the easiest word but it’s not accurate. She is of me, but she is also me. And another pariah. You’ve done enough, Gregor. Forget Chase and the King. If you keep going, determined to stop them, you will fail. You will never have the will, despite the uncommon will I know you have… You’ll never have the will to finish this alone. So do something simpler, for me. Save her. Save her from the King before the King claims her. Let me have some afterlife in her.’
‘Where is she?’ he asked.
‘She’ll be born two years from now,’ said Bequin. ‘Deep in the Maze, in the shadow of the City of Dust. She will walk the streets of Queen Mab.’
‘On Sancour?’
‘Yes, like the Jaff woman said. That’s where you’ll find her.’
‘Your daughter?’
&nb
sp; ‘She’s me, Gregor,’ said Alizebeth Bequin. ‘Beta to my alpha. Think of her that way, and find her.’
‘If it’s the last thing I do,’ he said.
‘It will be,’ she replied. ‘Stop hunting the Great Foe. You’ve done enough. You’ve changed the fate of the Imperium in significant ways. End your days with something smaller. One life.’
‘Will the torment end then?’ he asked her. ‘Will the fire go out then?’
‘Between you and me, it will never go out,’ she said. ‘But the pain will cease. Do you remember the Sameter Ninth?’
‘The Guard company?’
‘The veterans, yes. Their emblem was a wheatear. Do you remember how they kept fighting, years after the fight was done? They were loyal to the Throne, Gregor, utterly loyal, but their war had traumatised them so, they saw enemies everywhere. They fought against the notion of the dark, against every shadow, beyond all bounds of sense or reason.’
‘I remember,’ he said. ‘One of the saddest things I ever witnessed. One of the hardest tasks of my life. To stop men and women from being loyal.’
‘Imagine how I feel,’ she said.
‘You mean me?’ he asked.
‘I do,’ she said. Her smile was everything he remembered.
‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s the only time I’ll ever get to say those words to you.’
‘I do too,’ he whispered.
‘You’ve done enough big things in your life,’ she said. She faced him and brushed the soot and grit from his old coat. ‘Forget them. Do a small thing.’
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
‘I’m not the one going,’ she said. ‘This is where I stop. You go on. You always have. One last walk.’
‘I have to finish this first,’ he said. ‘Sark. Gobleka. Keshtre.’
‘You don’t,’ she replied.
‘To reach Sancour, I must be alive,’ he said. ‘To find this girl, this daughter of yours. I need to end Keshtre and get out so I can make my way to Sancour.’
‘You don’t,’ she repeated.
The rustle of the leaves had become the stirring of insects, and the stirring of insects had become a fizzling noise. The chuckle of an electrocorporeal storm. He hadn’t heard its eerie sound since Ignix, long ago.