by Ben Counter
‘Lord Hexal,’ began Talaya grandly, ‘my Lord Shalhadar the Veiled One, Sovereign of this city and claimant to all of Malodrax, gives you leave to enter his city.’
‘My Legion does not indulge in your pleasantries,’ replied Hexal. Talaya did not flinch at his bluntness. ‘I am here to make demands, as befits one who speaks for Warsmith Kraegon Thul, true lord of Malodrax.’
‘Then in the name of the Veiled One, I may hear them,’ said Talaya.
Lysander had stayed near the back of the pavilion, wary that Captain Hexal might recognise in this crimson-armoured warrior something of the bearing of an Imperial Fist. Seeing Hexal again this close gave him an empty, dead feeling, and he recognised it now as the knowledge that his duty was not being done. Hexal had taken the lives of his brothers and stood for a Legion whose very existence was an insult to every Imperial Fist – and yet Lysander was standing back and letting Hexal speak. Lysander forced the feeling down, with its mingled threads of anger and shame. Hexal was going to die. Lysander would be the one to kill him. He was letting Hexal live for the time being, because if he tried to take him on now Lysander would die in the attempt and Kraegon Thul, the true enemy, would live on.
‘Ten thousand sacrifices,’ Captain Hexal was saying. ‘Dominion over the Kalinik Reach and the passes through the Vorn Mountains. The mutants of this city as slaves for our forges. The fealty of Shalhadar the Veiled One, expressed in obeisance to the throne of Warsmith Thul.’
‘I see,’ replied Talaya. ‘I shall convey your suggestions to the Veiled One. Now I believe this is a fine opportunity to communicate the demands Shalhadar has of your Warsmith.’
At this Hexal held out his hand and the mutant cowering beside his throne handed him his bolter. The mutants standing at guard closed in around Talaya. Talaya’s face changed, from unflustered and diplomatic to a violent scowl. Noxious fog billowed around her, filling the pavilion with a toxic darkness. Lysander heard the bellowing of mutants and the sound of metal talon through flesh. Bodies pressed around him and he drew his blade, hacking at the mutant hands trying to drag him down.
He turned and cut a long slit through the skin of the pavilion’s side and forced his way out. A billow of poisonous fog followed him. Outside the people were panicking, shoved back and clubbed to the ground by the cordon of mutants. They were already fleeing across the stadium’s seats, or crying out as they were trampled beneath the feet of their neighbours.
One mutant rounded on Lysander. It was huge, half again as tall as a Space Marine, larger than any Lysander had spotted in the depths beneath Kulgarde. Lysander ducked under its swinging paw and cut up at its bull neck. The sword sliced through skin and sinew, lodging in the spine – Lysander twisted it and the vertebrae parted, sending the mutant tumbling to the ground with its partially severed head flopping over one shoulder. He reminded himself this was a mundane blade, not a chainsword.
Talaya emerged through the torn pavilion behind him, clambering on her talons up the side of the tent. Her double-headed halberd was in her hands and her armour’s mask had slid up over her face. She spun the halberd in her hands, the sweep of the weapon passing over Lysander’s head and slicing off the arm of a mutant lumbering towards her. Before the arm had hit the arena floor the blade had carved down and split the mutant’s head in two.
Talaya dropped down onto the sand of the arena. Still her feet did not touch the ground – instead her clacking mechanical legs carried her.
‘That went well,’ she said.
Lysander was not sure if Talaya was being sarcastic and did not pause to ask her. He forged into the gap in the mutant line and was among the fleeing people in a handful of seconds. Mutants tried to pursue but were caught up in the cultists scrambling to get out of their way. One mutant, with the body of a giant and a multi-legged, spiderlike growth taking up everything above its shoulders, picked up a cultist and threw it aside, its compound eyes swivelling to focus on Lysander. He ran on, reaching the edge of the arena seating, before clambering onto the first row and turning. The mutant was almost on him, a trail of trampled bodies behind it.
Lysander leapt at the mutant. Its segmented upper limbs unfolded to catch him. Lysander rammed an armoured foot down into the centre of where its head should have been – bristly, gnarled flesh crunched where he hit. He grabbed a leg with his free hand and grappled himself upright, the mutant’s huge humanoid hand reaching up to grab him and throw him off. Lysander cut off a handful of spider’s legs and crushed one of the compound eyes with a stamp – it broke like glass, the individual facets raining down. The mutant reeled and Lysander was finally able to reverse his grip on the sword and drive it down.
He did not take a chance this time. A chainblade would have made a gory mess but he had to make sure this normal blade hit something vital at first blow. He drove the hilt down hard, feeling the tip punching through insect organs, collarbone and heart. He pulled the blade out half its length and plunged it down again. This time he could hear the juddering heartbeat vibrating up the blade, hammering haphazardly as the muscle of the heart was torn open.
The mutant lurched to one side, then the other, and toppled over. Lysander jumped off onto the front row as it crashed to the sand.
The arena was in bedlam. The mutants were rampaging through the crowd, clubbing and butchering at random. The sand was wet with blood. Fleeing citizens were streaming to the arena exits or swarming over the seating.
It was, Lysander realised, its own form of worship. Just like cultists hurling themselves to their deaths or the dark rituals held hidden from the city’s eyes, this was an act of devotion. The citizens had come here in no small part hoping that violence would break out, so they might die as martyrs to Shalhadar and his city, or that their deaths would illustrate the treachery of Kraegon Thul and demonstrate Shalhadar’s right to rule Malodrax.
Talaya was already on the stadium roof, watching the carnage from a safe vantage point. She had killed her way to safety even more quickly than Lysander, and her halberd blades were slick with mutant blood. Her armoured mask slid down and Lysander was sure she was smiling, not the sly smirk she used with him but an expression of true joy. To her, this slaughter was beautiful. The death of the city’s people pleased the Veiled One, and so it pleased his herald, too.
The palace was hung with the colours of mourning. White was the chosen colour, with accents of red, representing desolation and bloodshed. Mourning banners hung over the frescoes and tapestries, and a singer wailed a funeral dirge from the upper balconies.
Shalhadar wore the veil of a broken old man, the last of his line, surrounded by the keepsakes and heirlooms of the family he had lost. It was an obvious role to take but the one the palace entertainers and artisans expected of him. His face was long and wrinkled, the features almost lost in the weight of its age, his shoulders hunched, his clothes long-faded velvet finery. His eyes should have been watery but instead they were hard and black, the one feature that reminded an onlooker that the old man was not truly what he believed him to be.
‘Come,’ said Shalhadar. ‘Sit. Mourn with me.’
Lysander had entered the palace to find Talaya waiting for him. He paused only to clean his blade at the palace threshold before following her to the inner rooms of the palace, the layout of which he was sure had changed since he had witnessed the blasphemous opera here. Lysander obeyed Shalhadar’s command and sat on an upholstered bench covered in torn diary pages, while Talaya settled on her mechanical haunches beside a broken clock and a pile of mouldering dolls and toys. Lysander wondered where the trappings of this veil had come from. Was there a storeroom with all these symbolic knick-knacks waiting for an appropriate occasion? Were they illusions conjured by Shalhadar’s will?
‘No doubt,’ said Shalhadar, ‘sorrow fills your hearts at the offence done to this city by Ambassador Hexal. Alas, he escaped the city by force while the wounded were yet crying out for succour. An
d so our thoughts must turn not only to the suffering of our people, the woes of our city, but to the restitution of balance. I speak not of the healing of our scars, of the interring of the dead. I speak of revenge.’
The old man’s fist balled up and the veins stood out on the back of his hand, a gesture of defiance all the more powerful for the ancient body’s weakness.
Shalhadar looked Lysander in the eye, and there was no trace of true sorrow there. ‘Good?’ he asked.
It was Talaya who answered. ‘Convincing enough for the citizens,’ she said. ‘But then they live in the story. We who live outside it know the truth.’
‘And what is the truth?’ asked Shalhadar. He held up a hand before Talaya could answer. ‘Lysander?’
Lysander still felt an internal shudder to hear his name spoken by the daemon prince. ‘It is a cycle,’ he said. ‘No power on Malodrax can permit any other to exist without trying to impose its superiority. This turn of the wheel, it was Kraegon Thul who sought to remind you. Next it will be you who sends an envoy to antagonise the Warsmith, or whatever other power might have risen on Malodrax. It is its own sort of performance. Hexal probably thinks he is truly striking a blow against your city but Kraegon Thul knows the game he plays.’
‘And are the Iron Warriors content to play the game, do you think? Your kind know them well. The Imperial Fists have history with Perturabo’s brood. Is he a creature of Malodrax, content to perform his role until his story ends?’
‘No,’ replied Lysander. ‘He plays it as long as is necessary. He has a plan in place to win all of Malodrax. He will turn the whole planet into a forge for his war machines, or just mine it dry and move on. This world alone cannot satisfy Thul’s ambitions. I doubt anything truly would.’
Shalhadar smiled, all pretence of sorrow gone. ‘Then we had better kill him,’ he said.
‘Plenty have tried,’ said Talaya. ‘Simply walking up to Kulgarde’s door would do nothing, even with the whole population of this city armed behind us. And Thul himself will not be easy to kill. In all honesty, I do not think there is a being on Malodrax that has a meaningful chance of slaying him face to face. Not to mention those he keeps close to him.’
‘The alien,’ said Lysander.
‘Ah,’ said Talaya. ‘You have met.’
‘He watched over my vivisection,’ said Lysander. ‘I am sure Thul sent him to make sure I suffered before I died.’
‘You speak of Karnak,’ said Talaya. ‘The warp alone knows his species, but he has served as advisor and castellan to Thul since the Iron Warriors laid the first blocks of Kulgarde. You are the first I have met to have seen him in the flesh and lived. Every one of the scum and vermin in that fortress answers to Karnak, and he answers to the Iron Warriors. Then, of course, there are the other Iron Warriors, Hexal and his ilk, to get through. Imperial Fist, as deep as your hate might run, I think even you would see ill sport in getting a foot past Kulgarde’s threshold.’
‘And that, dear child,’ said Shalhadar, ‘is why you will remain ever a mortal vessel, and never ascend to the glories of daemonhood. You have no imagination! Lysander, you say, has no chance of entering Kulgarde. But did not Thul’s underling, Hexal, enter my city? Did he not set up camp in my stadium, as bold as a painted whore? Thus have the enemy shown us how we might put our living weapon here into the presence of Kraegon Thul.’
‘Will not Kulgarde be closed to an envoy of ours?’ asked Talaya. ‘We could hardly dance in and start reading off demands. Kulgarde is in the ascendance, they have no obligation to receive us.’
‘But they do have a desire to humiliate us,’ said Lysander. ‘Hexal demanded you kneel before Thul’s throne. We might deign to give him the next best thing, an envoy sent to grovel and beg for mercy. Would Thul not be eager to let such an envoy through the gates, if only for the chance to execute him as he kneels?’
Shalhadar gave Lysander an evil, toothless grin, the daemon’s malice bleeding through the old man’s body. ‘And who would be the damned soul to be sent as such an envoy?’ he asked.
‘That would be me,’ replied Lysander.
‘I feel I must write of Talaya.
‘Of her qualities I have already spoken. She was a fine Inquisitorial agent in her own way. Her ambition was to carry the Inquisitorial Seal herself, and though she would never have reached those heights she served the Holy Ordos as faithfully as any of us. She was a fine shot, an outstanding swordswoman, a fearsome interrogator and a possessor of a fine analytical mind. In spirit she was pure and as close to incorruptible as any of her rank.
‘In those days when I first glimpsed the court of Shalhadar, granted access for a few hours to the library of his palace, I came to think about all the other qualities she had. The above are true and wondrous, but could apply to hundreds of acolytes that have served me or other inquisitors of my conclave. And yet it was only to Talaya that the human thoughts, those that still exist unguarded in the mind of an inquisitor, turned in my mind during that time.
‘I cannot say what she truly meant to me. I will not trot out the words of the great poets and playwrights, of which every civilised world seems to have two or three. I will say only that she occupied my mind, that part of it I permit to wander, while I laboured there in the darkness of Shalhadar’s library.
‘This was the prize for which I had given up Talaya. A lower floor of the palace housed Shalhadar’s library, and there I was taken by the herald from the arena. My task there was to seek out the sacred writings that would give Shalhadar dominion over the whole of Malodrax, and which it was certain lay somewhere in the stacks there. It was an ancient, rarely walked part of the palace, and while I was aware of obscene finery just outside my sphere I was immersed entirely in its decrepitude and darkness. I delved into the volumes held there, ancient decaying tomes each one full of fouler lies than the last. Transcriptions of madmen’s raving I found there, and collections of observations from dream-journeys into the warp.
‘I guarded my mind with prayers. I put a drop of holy water, consecrated at the foot of the Golden Throne, on my forehead to ward off the tendrils of profane knowledge that might try to find root there. My acolytes were not permitted to join me, and I would not have let them into the library in any case, so I laboured alone. For this I was grateful, because it meant I could be alone with my Emperor and bore the responsibility only for His work rather than the souls of my acolytes.
‘Each tome was connected to those beside it by a tenuous link of subject or concept that rendered them almost, but not quite, entirely random, thus creating a maddeningly vague sense of direction which would drag me astray as often as it would lead me onwards. As I forged on, seeking the bound collections of unholy pacts and contracts where I felt sure my quarry would lie, I became aware of another task being performed.
‘Day after day I stayed there, working. Agent Sildyne passed on messages to me by means of an arrangement of dead drops, through which I learned that he, Grun and Thol, and Maskelin had set up in an abandoned tower having left our previous lodgings. Archivist Grunvelder had by that time disappeared, for which I was both sorrowful and relieved. According to Sildyne, Grunvelder had run off into the city’s night, crying out about worms eating his brain. I prayed that he died soon after, one more corpse in the city’s gutters. I fear there can have been no less grim fate for him.
‘And yet through this, thoughts came unbidden, telling me that I was not merely there to perform a task for Shalhadar that might ingratiate me into his court. Often it was Talaya who voiced such thoughts, for it was she I saw often when I closed my eyes or when a gust of wind blew out my candle and all was darkness. Thus I associated such doubt with her, and she became to me an advisor always voicing caution.
‘I had suffered much, I think. There is no mind so holy that it can remain free of the mental sludge that comes with contacting such corruption as I found in those books, just as there is no sain
t’s garment so holy that it will not be besmirched by filth if it is cast down. I burned away the grime with prayer and contemplation, but while the flame of the soul can cleanse it must also burn, and in agony I lay haunted by angry nightmares born of the knowledge I purged from myself. My body, always kept in the peak of human condition, atrophied and became pale, like that of a thing that had lived its whole life in a cave. I do not know how long I was there, but to put the stretch of time in months would be conservative.
‘It was this degeneration that first gave me the clue as to the truth. It was in a thought of Talaya that I was reminded that everything on Malodrax is a test. The planet, so jealous of all those who walk on its surface, puts all its inhabitants to a trial so they might prove their worth to the powers of the warp. Was my labour there a test as well?
‘Of course it was. I cursed myself for a fool. Corvin, you wretched old heretic, you blind and ignorant student of stupidity! Thus I cried to myself as I recoiled from the hateful tome I was reading through at that moment.
‘A trial this was, and my first task was to discover what faculty of mine was being tried. Was I being put through an ordeal of the will, exposed to volumes of corruptive horrors to see if my mind broke? No, I said. That was too crude, too obvious, for Malodrax. Perhaps Shalhadar was doing that to me for his amusement, but the powers of the warp would never be satisfied with tormenting an inquisitor thus.
‘Was this a physical test? My body was suffering. Was this a trial to exploit the inquisitor’s belief in the mind as the ultimate weapon, challenging my mental faculties in the hope I would neglect my body and cause me to waste away or starve? Such would tickle the humour of the daemonic and perverse. But no, I did not think this was the cruellest fate to which I could be condemned. A physical trial concocted by the powers of the warp would have to compete in malice with the trials by ordeal used by many of my fellow inquisitors, and wasting away in this pit of corruption, while not the end I would choose, could not compare to the Test of Flame or of the Sliding Blades.