by Dan Abnett
In his private chamber, bathed in the light of the five oil lamps, the magus-clancular was taking his supper. Gawdel, a junior frater with a face mercilessly disfigured by disease, was feeding Lezzard liquidised nutrition supplements with a long-handled spoon. Lezzard’s exo-shell lacked the subtle motor control to feed himself, and his crumbling, back-peg teeth were long past dealing with solids. After every couple of spoonfuls, Gawdel sponged the magus-clancular’s chin with a cloth.
‘A little more wine,’ Lezzard wheezed and Gawdel obediently held the cup up to his mouth.
There was an urgent knock on the chamber door.
‘Come,’ Lezzard called.
Arthous entered, along with Frater Bonidar. They both appeared anxious. Each of them carried armfuls of paper scraps, seer papers, so many that some slipped from their grasp and fluttered to the floor.
‘Magus…’ Arthous began.
‘What’s the matter?’ Lezzard asked, elevating his exo-skeleton so he was standing.
‘A sudden… I don’t know what to call it…’ Arthous stammered. ‘A sudden flurry in activity from the menischus. We’re being inundated with new determiners.’
‘They’re coming so fast they’re contradicting themselves,’ said Bonidar.
Lezzard remained composed. ‘My brothers, my dear brothers, calm yourselves. When you have served the silver mirrors as long as I have, you will know that from time to time such urgency breaks out. A sea-change has occurred somewhere, perhaps a quiet, subtle thing. Someone has experienced a change of heart or inadvertently reckoned upon a new course of action. Some subtle thing. Its effects however, may be far-reaching for our prospect. So the future is reshuffling its deck, rearranging itself to compensate, a knock-on effect. That is what causes these occasional flurries of contradiction. By the morning, it will have calmed, just as this storm will pass and calm, and a new, true picture will be readable. Why, I remember a time on Gloricent, years ago when—’
‘I think,’ Arthous butted in. ‘I think it’s more than that. See for yourself…’
He held out a clutch of the papers in trembling fingers. Lezzard squinted to read them because the thin scraps were backlit by one of the lamps.
‘Ravenor. Ravenor. Ravenor,’ said Arthous. ‘And again here. And here. And see? Trice, again and again. Twenty, thirty times.’
The magus-clancular raised a metal-caged hand. ‘They are known determiners, both of them major focal points. This is to be expected.’
‘But new names are appearing too,’ Bonidar said. ‘Here, this name: Revoke. We’ve not seen it before now, but it has turned up eight times. And this one, Boneheart. And this one, Molay. And others besides.’
Lezzard frowned. ‘Show me,’ he said.
The two fraters dropped their paper scraps onto the floor, knelt down and began scrabbling through them, holding up certain readings to show to the magus-clancular.
‘Here,’ said Arthous. ‘Another new name. Zael Efferneti. It occurs, by my count… six times. And this. Kara Swole. Two instances.’
‘Three,’ corrected Bonidar. ‘Also this name: Siskind. And this one. Lilean Chase: And this, Zygmunt Molotch. His name is clouded, but it features on thirteen occasions.’
‘All will become clear once the future settles—’ Lezzard began, but the tone of his voice betrayed his concern.
Arthous rose from the floor and held out a scrap of paper in each hand. ‘Read these, then, magus, and understand our fear.’
Lezzard bent forward to look at the scribbled writing on the two scraps. One read, Orfeo Culzean. The other said simply, Stefoy.
There was a long silence in which only the wind and the rain and thunder spoke.
‘Bring Frater Stefoy to me,’ Lezzard said quietly.
The two fraters nodded and turned towards the door.
The front entrance of the lighthouse detonated.
Throughout the building, the brothers of the Divine Fratery barely had time to react before a second blast shook the place, then a third. The tang of smoke filled the lower chambers, and the brothers could hear cries and the blurt of gunfire. They ran to grab weapons of their own.
The killers broke into the lighthouse from all sides, kicking in doors, smashing through window shutters. The storm blew in along with them, and to the bewildered fraters it seemed as if the wind and rain had taken human form to invade their stronghold.
The first group of fraters to have found firearms clattered down the main staircase into the entrance hall and met the wrath of the invaders head on. Unarmoured, and firing only poor quality las-pieces and autoguns, the fraters were cut down without quarter. The intruding killers, grim figures in their black combat plating stalked forward out of the smoke billowing from the ruptured threshold, placing shot-bursts with their hellguns. Fraters were blown off their feet as they tried to return fire, or were hit in the back as they broke and fled. The hallway and stairs were quickly littered with tangled bodies.
‘Up,’ Revoke signalled to Boneheart. His mind already had a firm lock on the psy-trace somewhere in the basement area.
Boneheart led his squad up the staircase, firing from their shoulders at the landing above as they went. Clipped by the whining energy bolts, sections of the old wooden banister exploded and shattered. The body of a frater tumbled down, hit the stairs and slithered to a halt.
As Boneheart’s secretists reached the landing a group of fraters led by Bonidar pinned them briefly, establishing a ragged crossfire from the doorways of the first floor rooms. One of the secretists staggered back, wounded.
Boneheart got in behind the stairway wall and threw a grenade. The bang of light and pressure threw debris out across the landing and forced Bonidar and his men back, dazed and shaken. The secretists rushed them. They swung into each doorway, firing their hellguns on rapid. Fraters jerked and fell, blown backwards, some dismembered by the searing shots. Boneheart himself stormed the largest chamber. Firing from the shoulder, he killed the three fraters in the doorway, then swung round to slaughter two more who were trying to hide behind a table.
Bonidar was in the far corner. He ran at the looming secretist, firing his lasrifle. Two bolts scorched off Boneheart’s shoulder guard. With an amused grunt, he altered his aim and fired a single shot. It exploded Bonidar’s sternum, communicating such force to the frater’s body that it flew backwards across the room, smacked into the wall and dropped on its front.
A bitter hub of fighting now broke out on the back stairs as Molay’s team began to push in through the lighthouse’s undercroft. Frater Arthous and about twenty of the brothers, armed with autoguns and las-locks, were defending the stairhead, and they had the advantage of cover. The stairwell air became a thick fume of rising smoke through which jittering bolts criss-crossed and glittered.
Molay dropped back and signalled to the handlers in his team. The men released their cannon-hounds.
The quadruped weapon-servitors pounded forward, heavy and hunched as mastiffs. They came up out of the smoke and began to thump up the stairs, their eyes projecting the pink lances of their recognition beams. The fraters immediately began to concentrate their fire on them, but hard round and las-shot alike bounced off the servitors’ chrome armour. For a moment, both cannon-hounds were lit up with white sparks as ordnance spattered off them. Then they returned fire.
Each weapon-servitor was armed with a pair of gun-pods mounted either side of its hulking shoulders. The combined firepower of the four lasrifles shredded the stairhead and most of the defending fraters along with it. The cannon-hounds padded forward through the burning devastation they had wrought, playing their recog beams across the charred bodies, looking for anyone still alive. Any they found was despatched with a single close-range las-pulse.
Frater Arthous had lost most of a leg in the fusillade. He tried to drag himself clear, grunting in pain and fear as the hounds closed in behind. Arthous glanced over his shoulder just as the first pink beam found him. Then the las-pulse cracked and the frater’s he
ad vaporised.
On the floor above, Frater Gawdel and half a dozen other brothers were trying to carry the magus-clancular to a room where they could best defend him. A few other fraters ran ahead, frantically searching for sanctuary. Behind them, they could all hear the rattle of exchanged weapons-fire as armed brethren held a rearguard at the end of the passageway.
Monicker had taken the semblance of the first frater she’d seen on entering the lighthouse, and in that guise she now joined Gawdel and his fellows, apparently to help them with their efforts to carry the magus-clancular. As soon as she was in amongst them, she drew her serrated blade.
One of the fraters suddenly fell back against the wall, blood jetting from between the fingers he had clamped to his throat. Another to Lezzard’s left fell with a shriek.
‘What in the name of—’ Gawdel cried.
Two more fraters fell dead, and now Gawdel and Lezzard could see the bloodied blade in the hands of the brother who had most recently come to help them.
‘Kaska?’ Lezzard breathed, aghast. ‘What is this you do?’
Frater Kaska smiled, then trembled and wasn’t Kaska any more. There was just a vague blur in the smoky dark, a glimmer of silver like the ocean at night. The blade flashed out and sliced so deeply through Gawdel’s neck the serrated edge grated against his spine.
‘P-please…’ Magus-clancular Lezzard whispered.
Slowly, Monicker lifted Lezzard’s eye-patch and raised the blade towards his one good eye.
+LEAD ME TO this back way.+
Frater Stefoy gasped as the words dug at his brain. He stumbled back a few steps from Eumone Vilner. The psyker continued to glare at him.
‘I’m not sure I know of any—’
+I can see it right there in your head, you turd. There is a tunnel exit out of the basement levels to the west, running inside the flood defences. Show me. I have no intention of staying here for that to arrive.+
Vilner furnished the word that with a gesture at the roof and the sustained sounds of violence echoing down into the basement chambers. Almost all the fraters had left the basement to take up arms, but Stefoy and three others had been ordered to see to the welfare of the odious psyker. The dank chamber around them was empty but for the deserted tables laid out with scrying devices, the small silver mirrors and the bowls of paper scraps.
+Show me!+ Vilner emphasised, hard enough to make Stefoy and the other three wince.
Stefoy turned and hurried over into the far corner of the basement area and started to move aside old packing crates. He’d only been told about the tunnel, he didn’t know if it was even navigable. But he found himself agreeing with Vilner: it sounded a safer bet than venturing upstairs. Behind the crates, Stefoy found a boarded-up section of wall. He scrabbled at the old planks so hard he drew blood from his fingertips.
+Hurry up!+ The command came with a pain-goad this time, and Stefoy cried out. He kicked at the old planks until they began to come away and then pulled a few off until there was enough room to slide through into the wet darkness beyond.
‘Come on, sir!’ he shouted back. Stefoy could hear the booming of the sea, and the darkness smelled of salt.
Vilner and the other fraters started forward. The psyker shoved the brothers aside with his mind so he would be first to reach the gap in the planking.
Suddenly he turned. ‘Holy Throne!’ he hissed.
Revoke was striding across the basement chamber towards them. His hellgun came up and he started to fire. One of the fraters pitched over, his face blown off. Vilner grabbed the other two brothers with his potent telekinesis and dragged them together so they formed a shield of flesh and bone between himself and the oncoming secretist.
Revoke fired again and the psy-bound fraters convulsed as the energy rounds ripped into them. Vilner held their exploded carcasses in the air for a second with his mind, then threw them aside, spearing his telekinesis forward to wrench the weapon out of Revoke’s grip. It bounced off the ceiling and clattered into a corner.
Revoke and Vilner faced each other, rigid as statues. Their minds engaged. The basement around them shook with the psychic backwash. Glow-globes burst. Tables vibrated and shook precious scrying mirrors onto the floor. Bowls overturned and scattered seer papers into the air.
Shaking with effort, Revoke took one slow step forward. Veins bulged like hawsers in Vilner’s neck. His hands slowly came up at his sides, fists balled. Revoke took another step forward. Some of the paper scraps spontaneously ignited, swirling in the air like fireflies.
Table legs warped and buckled. A small stool tipped over and began to spin like a child’s top. Hundreds of the old stockbricks in the wall cracked and shattered, spilling out mortar and dust.
Revoke took a third, leaden step.
Vilner’s mouth moved weakly. He made a wet, rattling sound in his throat. Revoke closed his eyes and furrowed his brow with one final effort.
Eumone Vilner turned inside out.
It happened very quickly, like a sudden conjuring trick. There was a brief but intense noise of flesh tearing and bones fracturing, then the psyker burst in a huge shower of blood and gobbets of meat.
Revoke breathed out and wiped a spatter of gore from his cheek.
STEFOY COULD FINALLY see a frail light ahead. The tunnel was pitch-black, and he had already fallen twice and torn his hands and knees against the rough, salt-wet floor. The booming of the sea was louder now. He realised he could see a flight of stone steps leading up to a small door of metal bars. Backscattered lightning was peeping in through the bars.
Stefoy struggled up the slippery steps and fought to draw the rusty bolt on the bar-door. Outside, he could see the breakwater wall, the sea crashing over it in huge clouds of spume so white they seemed luminous in the night air. Rain was in his face, and wind. The bolt finally drew and he swung the door out, stumbling through onto the gleaming black stone of the sea wall. The force of the wind nearly picked him off into the roiling sea, but he staggered on, shielding his face from the breakwater sprays that exploded rhythmically over the lip of the wall.
Thunder boomed overhead. Stefoy turned to look at the lighthouse, three hundred metres back along the breakwater. Through the rain and the spray, he saw the dark armoured fliers hovering on stall-jets around it, the probing beams of their stablights, the amber glow of the fires now raging in the lower levels of the tower.
Up ahead of him, a metal ladder ran down the landward side of the sea wall. Stefoy clambered down it, and started to run through the midnight landscape of derelict drydocks and rope-maker barns back towards the city.
REVOKE TURNED AWAY from the smatters of Vilner spread across the basement chamber and started to search the room with his mind. It lighted on something almost at once. He walked over to a heavy, padlocked coffer standing in a side alcove. A single un-word blew the lock off. Revoke lifted the coffer’s lid and looked inside.
‘Well, well,’ he murmured. There was a sound on the stairs, crunching boots. Without looking round, Revoke knew it was Boneheart.
‘Are we secure?’ Revoke asked.
Boneheart nodded.
‘This wasn’t Ravenor,’ Revoke said. ‘It was a practising cult, with a hired psyker. Not what we hoped, but interesting nevertheless.’
‘So where is Ravenor?’ Boneheart asked.
‘Hidden,’ Revoke replied. ‘Hidden better than we can see. We have underestimated his talents. Call the teams. Tell them I want at least one of these cultist bastards kept alive for questioning.’
Boneheart did as he was ordered. Then he looked back at Revoke. ‘So what now? The chief provost won’t be happy that w—’
‘We’ll get Ravenor for him,’ Revoke said. ‘I believe I may have found a new way to do it. Help me with this.’
Revoke closed the lid of the coffer, and Boneheart took hold of the other end. Together, the two men carried it away across the basement, towards the steps.
Behind them, ignored, the seer papers tumbled in the breeze, s
ome of them burning.
Thonius, they read, every single one of them. Thonius, Thonius, Thonius…
SIX
HE TAPED THE gauze in place, then peeled off his surgical gloves as Kara pulled her top back down.
‘It’s looking much better,’ Belknap said. ‘The wound’s clean.’
‘Thanks,’ Kara said and got to her feet. Outside in the shabby waiting room of Belknap’s makeshift surgery, a man was singing loudly in a drunken slur and other voices were yelling at him to shut up.
‘Lively tonight,’ Kara said.
‘Pretty much the same as usual,’ Belknap said. ‘So, how are things?’
Kara shrugged. ‘Difficult. Tense. The direction of our investigation has changed and the work’s tough. Not dangerous per se, but boring in the worst way. And a member of our team is overdue. Missing.’
‘That’s not good,’ Belknap said. ‘But I actually meant you.’
‘Oh.’
‘You didn’t have to come all the way down to Formal I just to get that dressing changed. I presumed it was a cover story so we could talk about the… private matter.’
Kara smiled. ‘Oh, that. Yes, I suppose so,’ She sat back down on the old barber’s chair. ‘The medication you gave me, I don’t know if it’s working or not. I mean I don’t feel particularly better and in some ways I feel worse. I get tired very easily, and concentration is a problem. And when I try to sleep, no matter how tired I feel, I stay awake for hours. Could that be a side-effect of the drugs?’
‘Possibly,’ Belknap replied. ‘It is going to be difficult to distinguish as we go along what are effects of your condition and what are effects of the treatment. Let’s stick with it for a few days, then switch to another inhibitor if the fatigue is still an issue.’
‘I need to be sharp,’ Kara said.
‘Of course.’
‘Now more than ever. I was wondering if there was anything in there…’ she nodded her head towards his modest pharmacy stock. ‘Anything in there that might be a little stronger-acting.’
‘Kara, if you want to stay sharp, then morphiates and pain-masks are not what you need. You’d be better off managing any pain or discomfort. Anyway, the strongest thing I can prescribe doesn’t come out of the cabinet.’