‘Great.’ Elyra shouldered her pack, still keeping it where she could draw the laspistol if she had to. ‘Let’s get this crèche on the shuttle, shall we?’
Keira had thought she was prepared for any eventuality, but when she stepped into the room Adrin had conducted her to, it took all of her training to keep an expression of shock from her face. They’d been walking for several minutes, the rest of the gathering trailing in their wake like a comet tail of rustling silks, conversing in low voices, and she’d been surprised at how sprawling the underground mansion had turned out to be.
The luxurious corridors down which they’d passed at first had narrowed as they moved deeper into the labyrinth of tunnels, their rich hangings giving way to bare rock. The surface on which they trod was now the naked stone of the Gorgonid, the multitudinous footfalls of the assembly pattering from the solid surface like distant rain. It was evident that few people came this way, although the carpeting of dust along the corridors was a little thicker close to the walls, indicating that the passageways they were treading still saw a little traffic from time to time.
The illumination was dimmer too, the electrosconces, which had replaced the chandeliers, set at wider intervals than in the habitable part of the sprawling house, although they still gave enough light to see clearly by. Mindful of Horst’s description of the conditions he and Vex had found in the depths of the Fathomsound, Keira could only be grateful for that. At length, Adrin had paused in front of a plain wooden door, no different to Keira’s eyes than a dozen they’d already passed.
‘Go on ahead,’ he said to the rest of the group, who nodded their acquiescence, and disappeared further up the corridor, still conversing quietly among themselves. Once they were alone, he smiled at Keira. ‘I think you should prepare yourself for something of a shock.’
‘And I think you should stop watching those melodramas,’ Keira replied, still acting as if she regarded the whole situation as something of a joke. The weight of her throwing knives, and the sword she’d slung across her back, were comforting beneath the concealing fall of her tabard nonetheless.
‘What would life be without a little melodrama?’ Adrin threw open the door with a theatrical flourish, and ushered her through with a faintly self-mocking bow.
Whatever Keira might have been expecting, this wasn’t it. The room was large, and comfortably furnished, and a man sat within, reading a book. His age was indeterminate, and as he glanced up and met her eyes, the young assassin felt the force of the madness blazing in his own like a physical blow. Before she could fully comprehend what was happening, the book closed, and floated to a nearby shelf, where it nuzzled gently into place between two others.
Adrin looked at her closely, a faintly mocking smile on his face. ‘Remember, I asked you last night how you’d feel face to face with a real wyrd?’ he asked. ‘Is it at all like you expected?’
‘I haven’t forgotten my manners, even if you have,’ Keira replied coolly, taking refuge in her aristocratic persona. She inclined her head in formal greeting. ‘Since our host hasn’t seen fit to introduce us, I’m Keira Sythree, visiting from Scintilla.’
‘Is it time?’ the man asked, ignoring her completely. He rose awkwardly from the chair, leaning heavily on an ornately carved walking stick, and Keira could see that his feet were little more than frostbitten stumps. One of the escapees from the Citadel, then, left behind by the raiders, either by accident or because he was unsuitable for their mysterious purposes.
‘It is,’ Adrin answered him. ‘Are you fully prepared?’
‘Of course.’ The man stared at him, as though the viscount was an insect he’d just discovered in a forkful of salad. ‘The husks are waiting?’
‘They are.’ Adrin hesitated. ‘You do understand the risks involved? My cousin’s technique was far from perfected, and now that he’s gone we’re simply following the ritual he designed and hoping for the best.’
‘I understand you can increase my power,’ the psyker said, with an intensity that sent chills running down Keira’s spine. Subvocalising one of the litanies the Collegium had taught her, she kept her face impassive, and fought down the impulse to draw steel and put an end to the abomination in front of her at once. He was clearly a delta grade at the very least, and wouldn’t die easily. Even if she succeeded, she’d reveal herself as an agent of the Inquisition prematurely, and all too many of the cabal would escape before back-up arrived.
‘Can you really do that?’ she asked instead, letting her horror at being so close to incarnate blasphemy appear no more than incredulous surprise.
‘I really have no idea,’ Adrin said. ‘Gilden developed the technique. He found something on one of his archeotech forays that put him on the right track, I think.’ He shrugged. ‘Or it might have been his mentor from the Lathes. I gather they were conducting experiments together.’
‘This is irrelevant,’ the psyker said, flinging the door open with a passing thought, before hobbling past them without so much as a glance in their direction. ‘When I’ve fed on the souls of the husks, and added their power to mine, I will lead you all against the Isolarium. Its walls will crumble before me, and our brothers there will be liberated!’
Shocked beyond measure, Keira glanced at Adrin, surprised to see something of her own feelings mirrored on his face. Evidently the wyrd’s new agenda, and manifest insanity, had come as something of an unwelcome surprise to his host. ‘Hadn’t we better go with him?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ Jolted back to the present, Adrin nodded, his face ashen. ‘Yes, I rather think we should.’
‘What do you mean there’s going to be a delay?’ Elyra asked, her hand hovering close to the hilt of her laspistol. Out of the corner of her eye, she was relieved to see that Kyrlock was reaching unobtrusively for the haft of his chain axe, using the interposing bodies of the three juves to hide the fact from Greel.
Clearly aware of what the pack concealed, after witnessing Kantris’s fate the day before, Greel tried to force a placatory expression onto his face. ‘Nothing to worry about, I can assure you,’ he said, glancing around for the nearest guards, and manifestly taking heart from the close proximity of a couple of shotgun toting Franchisemen. ‘The muties brought in a bit more ore than we expected, that’s all. Got to get it loaded before we can lift.’
‘We lift?’ Kyrlock asked. ‘Does that mean you’re coming too?’
‘Damn right it does,’ Greel said, with a dismissive glance around the compound. Over a dozen men, sweating profusely despite the freezing night temperatures, were shovelling the pile of broken rocks onto a rattling conveyer belt, powered by a loudly snorting steam engine, the far end of which disappeared somewhere among the ore bins of the lander. The shuttle was huge, its angular metallic bulk almost filling the clear space in the middle of the enclosure, looming over the cluster of storage sheds like an ogryn in a crèche. ‘I belong on a civilised world, not a cesspit like this.’
Kyrlock spat derisively. ‘Thought you were a pansy city boy the moment I saw you.’
‘That’s right,’ Greel said, with a faint trace of malice. ‘I like my creature comforts. Which is why I’m travelling as a passenger, instead of cargo.’ He glanced around scornfully at the milling refugees, who were being kept in some kind of order by the Franchise guards.
‘How much longer?’ Elyra asked, before Kyrlock could respond to the insult.
Greel shrugged. ‘Fifteen, twenty minutes. We’ll be long gone by dawn, if that’s what’s worrying you.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Elyra said, trying to ignore the knot of tension drawing itself tighter in the pit of her stomach with every passing moment.
Above the Gorgonid, Sepheris Secundus
107.993.M41
‘Mordechai. We’ve got a problem.’ Vex’s voice crackled in Horst’s comm-bead. ‘It sounds like Keira’s walked right into the middle of some kind of Chaotic ceremony. I’d recommend immediate intervention.’
‘Noted,’ Horst responded crispl
y, glancing up from the auspex screen in the cockpit, and trying to ignore the sharp stab of alarm the tech-priest’s words had sent through him. It was hardly the first time Keira had been in mortal danger, and he was vaguely surprised at how concerned he felt. Forcing the unwelcome distraction away, he assessed their options. The lander from the Ursus Innare had already been on the ground longer than he’d expected, but the shuttle with Malakai’s storm troopers aboard was still several minutes away. After a second or so of agonised internal debate, he reached for the vox. ‘Talon one, this is Raptor. Bypass the primary target, and hit the house.’
‘Confirm that, Raptor.’ If Malakai was surprised, he was too consummate a professional to betray the fact, or question the change in his orders. ‘Diverting now.’
‘Good. Be advised that we could be facing psykers, or worse.’ Horst broke the link, certain that he’d made the right call, and that his confused feelings for Keira hadn’t been a factor in the decision. If Adrin and his confederates really were attempting to call on the power of the warp, they had to be stopped at all costs. The Franchisemen could wait. The Angelae had already seen how dangerous rogue psykers could be, and if their suspicions about the cause of Tonis’s death were true, the consequences of allowing the heretics to complete their ritual could be nothing short of catastrophic. He turned to Barda. ‘Get us down there, fast.’
‘I’m on it,’ the young pilot assured him, and a moment later Horst felt the shuttle bank sharply, already falling towards the pit beneath the city like an iron meteor.
‘Forcing an entrance might prove problematic,’ Vex said, his dry, pedantic tones forcing their way past the buzzing in Horst’s inner ear. ‘Judging by some of the remarks Keira made on the way in, the walls of the above-ground part of the structure are strongly fortified against the possibility of a peasant revolt. I doubt that our personal weapons would be able to breach them.’
‘Leave it to me,’ Barda said, glancing across at Horst with every sign of confidence. ‘I’ll get you inside.’
‘The outer wall, maybe,’ Horst said. ‘We can just fly over it, but Hybris is talking about the structure of the house itself.’
‘I know,’ Barda said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I know what I’m doing.’ He flung the agile little craft around a slower moving heavy lifter, bouncing a little in the backwash of the larger ship’s afterburners.
‘I don’t doubt that for a second,’ Horst assured him, unobtrusively making the sign of the aquila, and hoping it was true.
The Gorgonid Mine, Sepheris Secundus
107.993.M41
Keira wasn’t sure where she expected the ceremony to take place: a gloomy cave, perhaps, lit by flickering torches, its walls defaced with blasphemous sigils, like the shrines to the Ruinous Powers she’d discovered among the Shatters in her earlier scouting trips.
To her surprise though, she followed Adrin and the hobbling psyker through another anonymous door into what could have been a small but well-regulated medicae facility anywhere in the Imperium. Subdued lighting reflected from clinical white walls, and banks of instruments that she recognised from previous post-mission convalescence in the sanitorium of the Tricorn hummed and chattered, monitoring the vital signs of the occupants of three hospital beds ranged around the room. No sanitorium she’d ever been in before had had a warp-touched lunatic in the middle of it, though, or about a dozen overdressed aristocrats forming a loose circle around each of the invalids. As the rogue psyker entered they all bowed, a respectful murmur of ‘Magister’ rippling among them.
‘What’s going on here?’ Keira asked, partly because it would be the natural thing to do under the circumstances if she was really who she was pretending to be, but mainly because she hoped her colleagues were still listening, and the more information she could pass on to them the better the chance they’d have of surviving whatever they were about to get into. ‘Who are those people?’
‘They’re the husks,’ Adrin said. ‘Psykers we rescued too late to save their sanity.’
‘Unlike him,’ Keira said sarcastically, gesturing towards the hobbling wyrd.
Adrin scowled. ‘The magister sees deeper into the warp than any of us. I hardly think we’re qualified to comment on what that does to his state of mind.’
‘If you say so,’ Keira said, ‘but you don’t seem to have had much trouble making the same judgement with these poor souls.’ Mindful of the part she was playing, she corrected ‘damned’ to ‘poor’ just as the words left her tongue, and walked across to the nearest bed as she spoke. Its occupant was still wearing the grey robe of a Citadel inmate, which tended to confirm her guess at the origin of the wyrd apparently leading this coven. The shrunken figure in the cot appeared to be a man, although the degree of emaciation made it hard to be sure, the eyes in the pale face closed in sleep.
‘They were raving,’ Adrin said shortly. ‘We help the lucid ones as best we can. The rest, we sedate for their own safety, and everyone else’s.’ Picturing the havoc that might be wrought by a group of psykers lashing out at random with their powers, Keira could only nod. ‘We have another twenty like these in adjacent rooms, but we only need three for the ritual.’
‘Which does what, exactly?’ Kiera asked, an unpleasant crawling sensation prickling her scalp. The preparations for it were clearly well advanced, the aristocrats taking up positions around the beds, while a few of their number connected the cabling of a jumble of unfamiliar equipment in the centre of the room. No doubt Vex could have divined its purpose were he here to see it, but anything to do with the rites of technology was a complete mystery to the young assassin.
‘As the magister said,’ Adrin replied, ‘we hope to augment his power with that of the husks. Gilden thought we should use the technique to make the lucid wyrds stronger, so they have a better chance of survival, but that was before the Inquisition started poking their noses in.’
‘I see.’ Keira nodded briskly. ‘You think if you can make him strong enough he’ll be able to defend you against the wrath of the Emperor.’ She spoke without thinking, and, seeing a flicker of doubt in Adrin’s eyes, shrugged dismissively. ‘Or his errand boys, at any rate.’
‘Something like that,’ Adrin said, regarding her narrowly. Before he could pursue the matter, however, his attention was seized by the psyker.
‘Come!’ the madman’s voice was resonant, commanding obedience and respect. Even Keira felt a little of it, although the strength of her devotion to Him on Earth protected her from the worst effects. ‘It’s time!’
Adrin turned away at once, hurrying to the control lectern in the middle of the room, and beginning to check the settings of the levers and dials. Left alone for a moment, Keira risked speaking aloud, her voice low.
‘Mordechai,’ she said quietly, hoping the hidden vox was still working, ‘they’ve started. If you’re going to do something about this, you’d better do it fast.’
Twenty
The Gorgonid Mine, Sepheris Secundus
107.993.M41
‘Down there,’ Horst said, pointing to one of the gently glowing lights, which stood out clearly among the sharp-edged shadows littering the darkened expanse of the Gorgonid. The houses of the nobility were muted beacons in the broken landscape, easily distinguishable from the harsher lights of the industrial areas, which continued to hum with activity throughout the night, and the dimmer ones of the Commons, where the serfs snatched whatever meagre respite they could from their unremitting toil. Keira’s warning, relayed by Vex, still rang in his ears, and he prayed to the Emperor that they’d be in time.
‘I see it,’ Barda assured him, bringing the shuttle’s nose round, and skimming over the outer wall of the estate. Horst just had time to catch a glimpse of a formal garden flashing past beneath them, planted with whatever vaguely aesthetic plants might flourish in the perpetual gloom at the bottom of the vast pit, before the surface structure of the house loomed up ahead of them, external luminators striking polychromatic aurorae from the garish gl
ass mosaic encrusting its exterior. The young pilot hit the forward mounted retros, killing their momentum with an abruptness that slammed Horst against his seat restraints, to leave them hovering motionless a couple of metres above the ground, and what seemed like little more than a stride or two from the elaborately ornamented front porch. ‘Still think you’ll need help getting in?’
‘Looks like it,’ Horst said, as a group of armed men appeared by the wide front door, a slab of bronze embossed with the Adrin family crest, and began peppering the hull with ineffectual pistol fire. He glanced round the narrow cockpit. ‘Does this thing have an amplivox?’
‘Right there.’ Barda gestured towards the vox unit. ‘You use the same handset as the transmitter, you just need to switch over to the external speakers.’
‘Right.’ After a moment’s fumbling, Horst found the right controls, and cleared his throat. ‘Desist and surrender, in the name of the Inquisition,’ he declaimed, feeling a little self-conscious at the dramatic gesture. ‘The owner of this house is charged with treason and heresy, and any attempt to aid him will be treated as active complicity in his sacrilege.’
Barda glanced out of the armourcrys viewport, and shrugged. ‘They’re still wasting bullets,’ he reported. The shuttle had been built to military specifications, capable of withstanding even heavy weapons fire, and the light calibre small arms available to Adrin’s retainers would barely be able to scratch the paintwork. Unfortunately, from Horst’s point of view, it had also been built simply to haul troops and cargo, relying on the protection of specialist gunships in a war zone, and was as devoid of armament as Barda’s old Aquila had been. Belatedly realising that they couldn’t hope to down the shuttle, the liveried retainers scuttled inside and slammed the heavy metal portal behind them.
‘Just what I’d have expected,’ Drake put in, his head and shoulders appearing around the frame of the narrow door to the passenger compartment. ‘Their loyalties will be to the family they serve. Even the name of the Inquisition won’t outweigh ten generations of fealty.’
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