Scourge The Heretic

by Sandy Mitchell

  ‘Great,’ Horst said. He turned back to Barda. ‘Whatever you had in mind, you’d better try fast.’

  ‘Right.’ The young pilot hesitated, looking troubled, and Drake scowled at his back.

  ‘Any time before we become daemon bait would be good,’ he suggested.

  ‘I’m on it,’ Barda assured him, his hands hovering over the controls. ‘It’s just that I never thought there’d be people in the way. They’ll all be killed.’

  ‘If their master summons a daemon they’ll be a lot worse than that,’ Horst told him. ‘They’ll be damned, along with Emperor knows how many other innocent souls.’ He patted Barda sympathetically on the shoulder. ‘Doing His work isn’t often easy, but the alternatives are unthinkable.’ For a moment he wondered if perhaps he was overdoing it, but the young pilot merely nodded tightly by way of a response.

  ‘You’re right, of course. In His holy name…’ The shuttle lurched as he worked the flight controls with expert precision, spinning the hovering craft in place on its landing thrusters. The house rotated out of view, the armourcrys in front of them being filled instead with the dressed stone of the six metre high outer wall of the estate, and the scrubby planting that filled the intervening space.

  ‘What are you…’ Drake began, just as the retros in the nose fired without warning. Despite the flare of retarding energy the shuttle jerked forwards, sending the Guardsman sprawling in the aisle of the passenger compartment, and pinning Horst back in his seat with a wave of vertiginous motion. Though he couldn’t see what had happened to Vex the arbitrator distinctly heard the tech-priest utter an uncharacteristic curse, in a tone that betrayed rather more emotion than an acolyte of the Omnissiah was supposed to acknowledge. An instant later the vessel shuddered to a halt, what looked to Horst like a mere handful of metres from the looming wall.

  ‘Oops,’ Barda said. ‘Cut that a bit fine.’ It seemed that he had. They were close enough for Horst to be able to identify the individual stones making up the huge rampart in front of them.

  ‘What the rut was all that about?’ Drake demanded, reappearing in the doorway rubbing his head.

  ‘Getting us in,’ Barda replied, rotating the shuttle again. As the house came back into view, Horst felt the breath catch in his throat.

  ‘Emperor on Earth,’ he breathed. ‘What did you do?’ The front of the building around the metal door had completely disappeared, leaving a wide tunnel spattered with molten bronze and liquefied glass blasted deep into the structure. The orange glow of flames flickered around the periphery of the hole, which Horst could have driven a Rhino through, secondary fires started by the intense blast of heat from the shuttle’s engines.

  ‘Cut in the afterburners, just for a second,’ Barda said, his face paling as he took in the full extent of the destruction he’d wrought. ‘Like taking a blowtorch to a dolls’ house.’

  ‘Great idea,’ Drake grumbled. ‘I particularly liked the bit where you nearly rammed us into the wall.’

  Barda shrugged. ‘We’re doing the Emperor’s work, right? I knew He’d protect us.’ He cut the power, and the shuttle settled on the seared ground beneath it as gently as a snowflake.

  ‘Good thinking.’ Horst patted the young man on the back, with rather more sincerity this time. ‘Keep the engines running. If the heretics really do summon another daemon, we might want to leave here in a hurry.’ If that actually happened, he rather doubted that they’d get the opportunity to flee, but even a slim chance was better than none, and it would avoid wasting precious moments arguing Barda out of accompanying them.

  ‘Will do.’ The pilot nodded grimly, and made the sign of the aquila. ‘Good luck, and may the Emperor protect.’

  Keira felt the faint trembling of what she guessed was her comrades’ arrival through the soles of her feet, and glanced around the chamber, but engrossed in the preliminary stages of their ritual, none of the cultists surrounding her seemed to have noticed. The fops and ladies had all joined hands, forming circles around each of the comatose psykers in their hospital beds, and were chanting quietly, fragments of the ancient language of the tech-priests she’d sometimes heard Vex use among his colleagues, interspersed with the liquid cadences of a tongue she’d never encountered before. Unlike the harsh gutturals of the Khornate cult she’d helped Inquisitor Finurbi eliminate in the bowels of Ambulon, it seemed eerily beautiful, raising a storm of strange and unwelcome emotions in her chest. Successive waves of melancholy swept over her as she listened, receding a little each time the congregation lapsed into the occasional phrases of tech, and she felt her eyes stinging with unshed tears for the first time she could remember since childhood.

  Moving as far as she could from the nearest group, she began to subvocalise a calming litany, but that didn’t seem to help. At least they hadn’t expected her to join one of the circles, familiarity with the ritual apparently being an essential precondition of taking part in it, so there was little chance of her prayers to the Emperor being overheard and challenged. She exhaled, hard, fighting for calm, seeing her breath puff into visibility as a thin film of frost began to crackle across the floor.

  ‘Magister, we have a problem,’ Adrin said. He glanced up from a book of handwritten notes, his expression apprehensive, and gestured towards the patchwork of apparatus his acolytes had assembled. ‘There appears to be a component missing.’

  ‘Then find a replacement,’ the wyrd demanded, a localised wind ruffling his robes and hair as his anger manifested itself physically. ‘I refuse to be thwarted, with our hour of victory at hand!’

  ‘At once, magister.’ Adrin began to rummage through the haphazard assemblage of equipment, his agitation growing as he searched the leftover pieces. ‘The problem is, I don’t know what I’m looking for. Gilden would have, but–’

  ‘Just find one that fits!’ the wyrd shouted, the eldritch gale intensifying. Keira felt his rage brushing against the fringes of her mind, and seized on it eagerly, allowing it to counteract the debilitating effect of the chanting. Giving up on the litany she’d learned at the Collegium Assassinorum, she sought refuge in the creed of the Redemptionists instead, allowing the holy wrath of the Emperor to fill her with righteous fury. He was blood, and He was fire, and He was vengeance incarnate. As she allowed the familiar words to roll through her mind, the lassitude induced by the chanting receded. The Emperor was all, the Emperor was pure, and every last trace of the sin that stained His galaxy would be swept away so that the righteous could bask in His radiance forever.

  Moving slowly, careful not to attract any attention, Keira reached beneath the tabard and drew a knife from its sheath. The Emperor was clearly incensed by the cultists’ blasphemy, His holy rage pounding in her temples, just as it used to do in the lurching bowels of Ambulon every time her family’s congregation prepared to purge another nest of Sinners, and she was His judgement made flesh.

  ‘I’ve found it,’ Adrin said, grabbing something more or less at random, and jamming it into the mechanism. A shower of sparks erupted, and the dials on his lectern flickered for a moment before steadying.

  The wyrd nodded, a cold smile playing across his face. ‘Then we begin!’ he howled.

  The heat was intense as the small group of Angelae hurried into the depths of the house, skirting gently glowing puddles of solidifying metal, and dodging the occasional burst of flame, which erupted as the spreading fires in the rest of the house reached something else combustible. At least the blaze gave enough light to see by, although the flickering illumination was accompanied by thick, choking smoke, and Drake had paused almost at once to tie a scarf across his face. Horst had done the same, and both men coughed repeatedly as they ran, their eyes stinging and their lungs raw from the acrid fumes, despite their makeshift masks. Only Vex seemed comfortable, trotting between them, his autopistol drawn, the breath hissing easily through his respirator unit. Under more propitious circumstances Drake might have savoured the irony of that, but now was hardly the time for idle reflection
.

  ‘Ten o’clock!’ Horst warned, swinging his bolt pistol up, but Drake was faster, spraying a burst from his lasgun that made the pair of looming figures up ahead duck for cover behind the smouldering remains of an overturned banqueting table. Both were carrying pistols of some kind, so it seemed that, despite his untimely attack of conscience, Barda hadn’t quite managed to eliminate all the security staff after all.

  ‘I see them,’ Drake said, wishing he’d had the foresight to bring a grenade or two with him as well as his guns, but Horst had no need of anything so crude, the first bolt from his pistol blowing a hole through the thick slab of wood, and the second finding a softer target beyond in a spray of blood and viscera. ‘Second one’s mine.’ He snapped off a single shot, taking the other man in the head as he tried to flee.

  ‘The air seems to be clearing,’ Vex said, and to his relief Drake found that the tech-priest appeared to be right. The pall of smoke was thinning, and the yellow gleam of artificial light was beginning to overwhelm the redder glow of combustion. ‘We must be into the bedrock.’ He hesitated, coughed loudly, and looked faintly surprised. ‘I really must adjust that properly.’

  ‘Time and place, Hybris,’ Horst said, and, his mind recalled to the mission, the tech-priest nodded, consulting the screen of his data-slate. Horst tapped his comm-bead. ‘Malakai, where are you?’

  ‘Three minutes out,’ the storm trooper captain assured them, his voice buzzing slightly in Drake’s ear like an irritable wasp, although whether that was due to some defect in the tiny transceiver or the effects of smoke inhalation making him light-headed he couldn’t be sure. ‘If you’ve torched the place already, we’ve got you on visual.’

  ‘That’s us,’ Horst confirmed. ‘We’re inside, moving on the objective. As soon as you’re down, seal the perimeter, and take out everything that tries to leave and isn’t carrying a rosette. If we need back-up we’ll call for it.’

  ‘You’ll get it,’ Malakai promised.

  ‘This way,’ Vex said, beginning to move off down a corridor still illuminated by strongly glowing electrosconces. ‘She’s about two hundred metres ahead.’

  ‘Her vox is, anyway,’ Drake said, trying not to think about the possibility that the girl was no longer attached to it.

  Horst glanced at him, his expression grim. ‘She’s fine,’ he said, in the tone of a man not prepared to accept any other alternative. To Drake’s relief, the tech-priest was nodding in confirmation.

  ‘She’s praying,’ he said. ‘Some Redemptionist credo, by the sound of it.’

  ‘She’s doing what?’ Horst asked, his face a mask of astonishment. ‘Can’t the heretics hear her?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Vex said, in the manner of a man evaluating the possibilities carefully. ‘I imagine the screaming is enough to drown it out.’

  Whatever the heretics thought they were doing, Keira thought, this was certainly not it. As Adrin had pushed home the final switch, the bodies of the comatose psykers had spasmed, keening in unison, a raw, ugly sound, which ripped through the air, disrupting the gentle cadences of the chant. The levitating wyrd had howled too, even louder, the crackle of arcane energies surrounding him intensifying, shrouding him in what seemed to be a miniature lightning storm a mere couple of metres across. Confused, their concentration broken, the cultists fell silent, staring in horrified bafflement at the ghastly apparition.

  ‘Cut the power!’ Keira yelled, flinging the knife in her hand at the shrieking, flailing madman at the centre of the maelstrom. She couldn’t be certain that killing him would avert whatever catastrophe was about to befall them all, but it was what she was good at, and she couldn’t think of any other options. The knife spun through the air, straight at the magister’s heart. Then, to her dismay, it reached the penumbra of mystical energy surrounding him and stopped, fingers of lightning reaching out towards it. Crackling electrical discharges earthed themselves through the razor-edged steel, for what felt like several seconds, but in all probability had been the merest of instants, and then the twisted lump of metal spun away to impact somewhere in the corner of the room.

  ‘I can’t, it’ll kill them all!’ Adrin snapped back. Still engrossed in his flickering and barely understood instrumentation, he glanced up in shock, just in time to see her rip off her tabard and draw the sword from across her shoulder. The crimson sigil of her Inquisition rosette, on a chain around her neck, flamed brightly as she bounded towards him, cutting down a stray heretic who’d had the misfortune to be standing in her way in a welter of blood and viscera.

  ‘Good!’ Kiera replied, slashing at the nearest cable. The monomolecular edge of the master-crafted weapon sheered through it easily, sending a jolt of energy up her arm even through the insulating glove of her synsuit, and she staggered momentarily before recovering. The three husks fell silent, and the wyrd plunged headlong to the rock floor behind her with a faintly liquescent smack, as the storm around him was abruptly curtailed, his body burned and twisted beyond all recognition as something that might once have been human. ‘This abomination ends now, in the name of the Emperor!’

  ‘She’s Inquisition!’ one of the fops shouted, catching sight of her badge of office, and the cultists began bleating in panic, some running for the door, while others, mainly the faces she’d picked out by her stratagem in the salon, began to close in on her with obviously murderous intent. The fops with swords drew their blades, dropping into formal fencing stances better suited to affairs of honour than a genuine fight for survival, and several of the others produced hidden weapons from places of concealment. Keira noted with some amusement that the two women in the group seemed to favour long metal hair combs, which turned their hands into razor-edged claws, no doubt with venomed tips. Fine, if they expected to get within an arms’ length of her, but the extra metre of reach the sword gave the young assassin made that possibility distinctly remote. So far, no problem.

  ‘Get a grip,’ Adrin said, with studied disdain. ‘She’s just one woman.’ He drew a compact autogun from the depths of his sky blue blouson, and aimed it at her, his finger tightening on the trigger.

  ‘That’s true,’ Horst’s familiar voice put in from the door, and Keira felt her heart begin to race with something more than the usual fierce rush of exhilaration she normally felt in combat, ‘but I think you’ll find she’s quite an exceptional one.’

  Adrin turned to confront the unexpected intruder, bringing his gun around to seek a fresh target, and the overdressed mob around Keira rushed her as one.

  ‘Why, Mordechai, you say the nicest things.’ Keira pivoted gracefully, evading a clumsy sword thrust and disembowelling her first would-be murderer with casual ease, before turning to reap a rich harvest of heretic souls for the Emperor’s judgement in a flurry of blade strokes. One of the men managed to nick her arm before she ran him through. Furious with herself for leaving him an easy opening, she resolved not to make the same mistake twice, and pivoted, taking one of the women in the stomach with a spinning kick as she attempted to take advantage of Keira’s momentary distraction and strike her down from behind with her venomed claws. As the woman fell, Keira leapt across her, kicking down to snap her neck, and engage the third and final swordsman face to face.

  ‘Drop the gun,’ Drake advised, raising his Guard-issue weapon to cover Adrin, while Horst and Vex casually shot a brace of heretics who’d attempted to charge them with hastily drawn swords.

  ‘Why don’t you drop yours?’ Adrin suggested. Drake looked as if he was about to reply with some equally sarcastic comment, when his expression changed abruptly to one of surprise and alarm.

  ‘What the hell…?’ he expostulated, before the weapon twitched easily out of his hands and spun away, to fall noisily to the floor several metres from him. Heartened by this sudden reversal, the cowed cultists began to look more belligerent, and one of them stooped to pick up the fallen lasgun.

  ‘You’re a wyrd too,’ Horst said, as though it should have been obvious, his knuck
les whitening with the effort of trying to bring the bolt pistol round to aim it at Adrin. Despite his best efforts, it was moving off-target. A second later, it tore free of his grasp, to be sent skittering into a corner with a casual flick of Adrin’s mind. ‘Malakai, get in here!’

  ‘Calling for help?’ Adrin asked, ripping the comm-beads from everyone’s ears with another thought, and sending them spinning across the room. ‘Hardly the die-hard heroism you expect from the Inquisition’s lackeys, given their reputation.’ Another psychokinetic shove sent Vex and Keira sprawling, their weapons flying from their hands as they hit the floor. He shrugged, glancing regretfully at the young assassin. ‘Any more surprises for us before we kill you?’

  ‘How about this one?’ Drake asked, drawing the Scalptaker and pulling the trigger in one fluid movement, while the psyker’s attention was momentarily distracted. The rugged revolver cracked loudly in the confined space, its heavy dum-dum bullet ripping a hole through Adrin’s torso that Keira could have put her fist through. She rolled lightly to her feet, drawing another knife from the sheaths around her waist.

  ‘Pretty good,’ Adrin admitted, staggering, an expression of bemusement beginning to flicker across his face, ‘but not quite good enough.’ He must have been drawing on the power of the warp to stay on his feet. Drake’s aim began to waver again, an instant before Keira buried her knife in his eye socket up to the hilt. Horst straightened, his bolt pistol back in his hand, and the back of the psyker’s head exploded in crimson mist. He fell heavily to the floor, and the light in his remaining eye clouded at last.

  ‘Anyone else fancy their chances?’ Keira asked, picking the sword up in one lithe motion. The cultists around her paled, and fell back, and she grinned ferally. ‘Didn’t think so.’ The impulse to slaughter them all anyway was almost irresistible, her blood singing with the old Redemptionist fervour, and she fought it down with a hint of regret. Once she wouldn’t have hesitated to bring them all to the Emperor’s judgement, but her duty to the Inquisition overrode her desires. The survivors would have to be interrogated, the intelligence they provided assessed, and the knowledge used to make sure that this particular cancer in the soul of the Imperium had been excised forever.