Pariah: Eisenhorn vs Ravenor

by Dan Abnett

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  The first section of the story, which is called Queen Mab

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  The second section of the story, which is called a desired commodity

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The third section of the story, which is called Feverfugue

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  IT IS THE 41ST MILLENNIUM. FOR MORE THAN A HUNDRED CENTURIES THE EMPEROR HAS SAT IMMOBILE ON THE GOLDEN THRONE OF EARTH. HE IS THE MASTER OF MANKIND BY THE WILL OF THE GODS, AND MASTER OF A MILLION WORLDS BY THE MIGHT OF HIS INEXHAUSTIBLE ARMIES. HE IS A ROTTING CARCASS WRITHING INVISIBLY WITH POWER FROM THE DARK AGE OF TECHNOLOGY. HE IS THE CARRION LORD OF THE IMPERIUM FOR WHOM A THOUSAND SOULS ARE SACRIFICED EVERY DAY, SO THAT HE MAY NEVER TRULY DIE.

  YET EVEN IN HIS DEATHLESS STATE, THE EMPEROR CONTINUES HIS ETERNAL VIGILANCE. MIGHTY BATTLEFLEETS CROSS THE DAEMON-INFESTED MIASMA OF THE WARP, THE ONLY ROUTE BETWEEN DISTANT STARS, THEIR WAY LIT BY THE ASTRONOMICAN, THE PSYCHIC MANIFESTATION OF THE EMPEROR’S WILL. VAST ARMIES GIVE BATTLE IN HIS NAME ON UNCOUNTED WORLDS. GREATEST AMONGST HIS SOLDIERS ARE THE ADEPTUS ASTARTES, THE SPACE MARINES, BIO-ENGINEERED SUPER-WARRIORS. THEIR COMRADES IN ARMS ARE LEGION: THE IMPERIAL GUARD AND COUNTLESS PLANETARY DEFENCE FORCES, THE EVER-VIGILANT INQUISITION AND THE TECH-PRIESTS OF THE ADEPTUS MECHANICUS TO NAME ONLY A FEW. BUT FOR ALL THEIR MULTITUDES, THEY ARE BARELY ENOUGH TO HOLD OFF THE EVER-PRESENT THREAT FROM ALIENS, HERETICS, MUTANTS - AND WORSE.

  TO BE A MAN IN SUCH TIMES IS TO BE ONE AMONGST UNTOLD BILLIONS. IT IS TO LIVE IN THE CRUELLEST AND MOST BLOODY REGIME IMAGINABLE. THESE ARE THE TALES OF THOSE TIMES. FORGET THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE, FOR SO MUCH HAS BEEN FORGOTTEN, NEVER TO BE RE-LEARNED. FORGET THE PROMISE OF PROGRESS AND UNDERSTANDING, FOR IN THE GRIM DARK FUTURE THERE IS ONLY WAR. THERE IS NO PEACE AMONGST THE STARS, ONLY AN ETERNITY OF CARNAGE AND SLAUGHTER, AND THE LAUGHTER OF THIRSTING GODS.

  The first section of the story, which is called

  QUEEN MAB

  CHAPTER 1

  In which I make myself known

  This, I think, will be my life story, and it will start here. You will not learn much from me, or you will learn everything. I have not yet decided which.

  I know one thing, and that is that my life has too many stories within it. It is made out of stories, like a rope is wound from smaller strands, or a mosaic is made of little coloured tiles. I am made of stories. I must leave many of them out, otherwise the one that matters will not make a bit of sense. Some day, if I am alive, I might be persuaded to tell some of the stories I have omitted. But they are lies and fabulations and, anyway, I do not expect to live.

  My family’s name was Bequin, and this is the name I have always used when I am being myself. I was given to understand that proof of this heritage could be found in a marshland cemetery, for my family was a marshland family, but I never thought to check this, or visit the gravestone. This, I realise, makes me seem foolishly trusting. I am not. Besides, if I had seized, one day, upon the notion of taking a holloway down to Toilgate and entering the marsh beyond, I am sure that a gravestone would have been waiting for me in the waterlogged plot when I arrived, flecked with the lichen of ages though it had not stood there the previous sunset.

  It is said that I am very like my mother. That I was raised an orphan means that I cannot corroborate this either.

  My status as an orphan explains my situation. I was a ward of the city from a very young age, brought to the Scholam Orbus on Highgate Hill and raised there, and then transferred on my twelfth birthday to the Maze Undue, whose rambling accommodations adjoined the scholam. This was due to my selection as a promising candidate. Most of the scholam’s wards left the school and went down to the city when they turned twelve and were legally old enough to work. Promising candidates, one or two every few years, were transferred to the Maze Undue. I had, therefore, lived all of the life I could remember there on the hill, in one leaky, drafty building, or the other backing onto it.

  My name is Beta Bequin. The forename is an affectionate contraction of my full name, Alizebeth, and not an uncial label. It is said aloud with a long vowel as in Bay-tar, not as Beater or Better.

  I was found wandering in the marsh as a very young child by a kindly stranger, and upon investigation it was revealed that my mother had passed away of a distemper. The air of the marshes is noisome, and can afflict the lungs.

  If the city is not familiar to you, then let me tell you something about it. The marshes I spoke of are to the south, far to the south, beyond the crumbling bulk of Toilgate where the workers once passed to and from the shipyards. This was in the olden times. Sister Bismillah told me about it when I was a girl. By the time I lived there the shipyards were derelict, just rockcrete sheds of immense size standing at intervals along the old river slipway, and the lands had been partly reclaimed, or conquered, by the water, turning them into a grey and misty flatness of wet trees, and low, impoverished dwellings. To the west of the city, past Highgate, lay the mountains, which were only ever referred to as the Mountains, and to the north-east, beyond the grim structure of Coalgate, lay the emptied space, the great Sunderland, whose grey dusts, I was told, eventually give way to the scorched harrat of the Crimson Desert.

  The city is called Queen Mab. It is in the prefecture of Hercula, in the south part of the world, which is named Sancour, which itself is in the subsector of Angelus. Queen Mab was once very mighty and important, the mightiest city in the world, and its splendid towers and conspicuous gates were the envy of all other cities in the world, and on many other worlds besides. War made it mighty. But the war ended, and Queen Mab was left spent and exhausted. For as long as I have known it, and far longer than that besides, the city has been in its dotage. It is forever ailing and weak; it is worn out and withering. Many parts of it are crumbling, and there are some parts that are so decayed that no one dares visit them for fear of dislodging a wall or a ragged roof with no more force than the sound of footsteps. The city has always been an old place, with damp around its feet and dust in its mouth and a cold wind off the Mountains at its shoulder. From my early childhood, I rose up through it. Sister Bismillah often said I floated up, from the lowest, wettest part, all the way to Highgate Hill. I remarked to her that this makes me a strong swimmer.

  She suggested this simply makes me familiar with the functi
on of metaphor.

  When I was twelve, and not one day more, I entered the Maze Undue, and began my private instruction by the fourth, unspoken branch of the worshipful Ordos. I was selected for this because of certain aspects of my humour, which Mentor Saur refers to as my temper.

  I entered the Maze Undue, and the whole city of Queen Mab became my classroom.

  CHAPTER 2

  Which is of likenesses

  There was a quizzing glass in the top room of the Maze Undue, in which we could reflect upon those souls who, unwittingly, were going to teach us. We read their lives in it in preparation. I only cared to use the quizzing glass when Mam Mordaunt or the Secretary were present. They were the most senior of the Maze Undue’s four mentors. We could use the glass at other times, even unsupervised, but I never cared to. The glass was unsettling. I saw things in it that I did not wish to see.

  I had a mirror in my room, a hand mirror with a wooden frame. You could not quiz in it, and so I preferred it, because it showed only me. I think the mentors would have confiscated it if they had known it existed. The only mirrors we were supposed to use were the quizzing glass, and the full-length mirrors, old and silvered, that stood in the robing room.

  My hand mirror was the only thing that did not lie to me. I could see my face in it. I saw black hair, shoulder-length, and a good nose. I had a good nose, a nose of character. My mouth was not particularly full, or possessed of ripe lips like some powdered mamzel of worth in a romance portrait, but it was mobile, and most engaging when it was at its most up- or down-tilted. I often pulled these expressions in the mirror, so I knew them. My frown could be alarming, and could spur people into apology. My grin, with teeth exposed, was equally compelling. My eyes were dark and quite large.

  I was tall, taller than Corlam or Mentor Murlees, almost as tall as Mam Mordaunt, who I grew up thinking of as a tall woman, and I had a slender build because I maintained a trained condition. I did not know if I was attractive to men or women as Beta Bequin, because that did not matter, nor had it ever been tested. I knew I could be attractive to men and women in circumstances when I was not being Beta Bequin, and that was the point.

  The Maze Undue was a school. The Ordos established it in Queen Mab a long time ago, as a discreet place in which to conduct the unremarked-upon training of remarkable people. There are, I presume, many others like it in other cities on other worlds. There would have to be, wouldn’t there?

  It was not a school like the Scholam Orbus. That was a home for foundlings, instituted to clothe and feed, at the city’s expense, lost waifs, and teach them their letters, their numbers, and a sufficient measure of the Ecclesiarchy’s texts. To earn a place in the Scholam Orbus, one simply had to lack a family.

  To earn a place in the Maze Undue, one needed to be selected. We entered, usually singly, never more than two from any batch of foundlings. I never knew there to be more than twenty students.

  The Maze Undue had been, for a long time, a theatre or playhouse, because the remains of an arched stage still stood in the hall we used as a refectory, and in the undercroft there were traces of stage trapdoors and vaults for technical apparatus such as lights, scenery flats and winches. The building’s chequered past as a playhouse also explained how the robing room came to be so full of costumes and props.

  But it had no more always been a playhouse than I had always been an orphan, or a street messenger, or a mamzel’s chambermaid, or a rubricator’s assistant, or a shipping merchant’s lifeward, or any of the other things I have temporarily been.

  It was, I think, originally, a place of worship. A clandestine place of worship, raised by one of the old cults of Queen Mab, sponsored by a rich merchant or landowner who found spiritual alternatives to the rigid Imperial Cult inviting. This was before the war.

  I guessed this from the name. Maze Undue. I was studying texts of Old Terra, Ancient Terra in fact, works kept in the data stacks of the Maze Undue’s library. Some of these works were pre-Imperial, and dated to the time of the Great Crusade, the Unification, even to Old Night and the Age of Technology. They were often written in the languages of these epochs, and I swiftly gained a competency in Old Franc, enough to get by. I have an aptitude for languages. I believe it is an eidetic skill. My aptitude is one of the reasons I am writing this in the impoverished colloquial Enmabic, the argot of Queen Mab’s streets, rather than in Low Gothic, because no one uses Enmabic any more, and thus very few who find this will be able to understand it.

  Anyway, I mentioned to Mentor Murlees, who is the savant and librarian of the house mentors, that Maze Undue could easily be a corruption of the Old Franc phrase maison dieu, or ‘house of god’.

  Mentor Murlees was not very old, but he was extremely frail. He spent much of his time in a walking chair, though he was able to stand. He was no more than ten years older than me. He had a truly eidetic mind, one that made my talents in that direction pale into insignificance. Anything he saw, he learned. His head was full of data, all instantly absorbed, all instantly recallable. I sometimes thought his mind was responsible for his frailty, as if supporting so much data, so much mental power and knowledge, robbed his body of vigour and nourishment.

  When I told him my supposition, he smiled at the thought of it and nodded.

  ‘Indeed, there is no maze, Beta,’ he said.

  He was wrong, as it turned out, but not the way he might have supposed.

  The playhouse or maison or whatever it was when stone was first laid on stone, faced the dusty north-east on the top of Highgate Hill, and all the panes of windowglass that looked in that direction were permanently begrimed with desert soot, the grey murk of the Sunderland. Acids and other elemental agues had eaten away the stone and pecked out parts of the roof. Portions of the site were no longer fit for habitation. Rain and moonlight dripped down through broken ceilings. Corridors and floorboards were damp with rainwater and smelled of old cupboards. If it had originally been a temple, then the temple-ers who crafted it perhaps built what is now the Scholam Orbus as a companion faith school. The orphanage faced west and north, confronting – from the edge of the Highgate Hill crag – the black threat of the Mountains. It blunted, too, the worst of the northern weather, insulating the Maze Undue from the worst of the winters that came knifing south each year.

  The buildings leant together for support, stone pile against stone pile, and had seeped into each other. They were knocked through in obvious places: in courtyards and walkways. They were linked in secret ways too, secret ways only inquisitive urchins could find after curfew. Common attic spaces and mutual cellars made it harder to discern, in modern times, where one building ended and the other began.

  Each one of us – the candidates, as we were known – had his or her own room. When I turned twenty-four, I was one of the three oldest still in residence. The other candidates, eight of them at that time, ranged in age from twenty-two to thirteen. The year before, there had been two others older than me, Corlam and Faria, but they had left. They had been selected for service and transferred. We never saw them again, nor expected to. Twenty-six or twenty-seven years old seemed to be about the age when one finished one’s training and graduated.

  We never saw any candidates after they left the Maze Undue, except Judika.

  So, we had our own rooms. Then there was the top room, for briefing, the robing room, the refectory, washrooms, private quarters for the four mentors and a staff room, the library (which was actually an amalgam of four rooms), and the locker and the skirts, which were Mentor Saur’s province. The locker was a sturdy chamber in the basement where Saur kept the weapons and instruments. The door, like many in the building (staff room and private quarters especially) was a pain door, and worked according to the settings of our cuffs.

  I must remember to explain about the cuffs.

  The skirts were our term for the outlying and largely ruined parts of the Maze Undue along the eastern wing, where physical training and combat practice took place. These were several rooms
and several floors, a dead space not safe for use otherwise. One large chamber in the skirts, near to the locker, was weatherproofed and lit, and functioned as our most regular training room. We called this the drill.

  It was in the drill, during my twenty-third year, that I first saw a man die close up. And, in the main, he died because of me.

  CHAPTER 3

  In which I digress to recount the death

  Let me tell it, now that I think of it. Frankly, I think of it often, for it shocked me and left a mark. His death affected the development of my character, so I consider it worth recording, though I appreciate that it was part of a greater story. Thus it is worth recording in any case according to the rationale that I set to decide which stories should be included here and which are surplus.

  I didn’t realise it at the time. At the time, it was just a shocking thing.

  I was twenty-three. It was late in the day, getting dark. It was summer, though even summer was murky in Queen Mab, and the twilight that settled on the Maze Undue was always ugly. I had gone down to the locker to fetch a laspistol to practise with. Some bottles on a wall, that was all I intended. Mentor Saur had been critical of my marksmanship, saying that I lacked the hit rate of Corlam and Faria, and even (to think!) Roud, who was just fifteen. Also, I had just clumsily finished a function in the Iron Quarter where it would have been useful to shoot better. I had gone– no. That story is certainly surplus here. I needed to practise my pistol shooting. That is what matters.

  I had seen people die. Let’s be clear. Queen Mab is a violent city. I had seen fights. I had seen deaths. I had been obliged to draw or improvise weapons to defend myself and others. I had inflicted injury. It is entirely possible I had caused wounds that had led to death, or that my stray shots had, on occasion, slain some wretch that I wasn’t aware of.

  But I had not seen death like this.

  The drill was lit. The Maze Undue was generally lighted by wick lamps and candles, and by old glow-globes embedded in the ceiling panels. The globes were stained yellow with age, and hissed when they burned. In some hallways, we left out sticks or mop handles to strike the roof and jar them back into luminescence as required.