by Henry Zou
‘Heretic…’ a voice whispered, almost into his ear. The voice was silky, smoky and shrouded in shadow.
A lesser man would have hesitated, perhaps even turned to find the source of that voice. Roth knew better.
He launched himself into a headlong tumble as something cord-sharp and whisper-fast sliced the air above his head. Rolling into a crouch, Roth pivoted and took aim with his plasma pistol.
His assailant kicked the weapon cleanly from his grasp. It was, Roth thought with self-admonishment, too easy.
‘Be still heretic, we’ll make this quick.’
Roth rolled onto his arse in a backwards tumble to create distance. The assassin stalked him into the courtyard. Out there, under the watery light of the moon, Roth saw his killer clearly.
She wore a black-grey bodyglove, the polymer fabric swirling like iridescent petroleum, blending in and out of the shadows. Roth estimated at least a dozen various types of blade, hook and shuriken were attached to her various slings and harnesses although he couldn’t be sure – his head was pounding with adrenaline.
The assassin stalked towards him, hunching like a coiled feline. Her face was an inscrutable mask painted in the macabre form of a laughing jester. Roth recognised a death cult assassin when he saw one. She did not possess the techno-wizardry of a temple trained Assassinorum agent, but what she lacked she made up for with ferocity. For a death cult assassin, it was not a matter of eliminating a target; she was less calculating, less programmed than a Culexus or a Callidus assassin. Instead, she used her rudimentary arsenal of blades with a creative splendour that heightened murder into the realm of theatrics.
Kicking backwards across the tiles, Roth sprung up onto his feet, adopting a fist-fencer’s orthodox stance. He would not lie to himself: unarmed, he was as good as dead.
The assassin flicked something at him.
A throwing needle pierced his forearm, sinking deep into his muscle spindles. The pain sent sparks of shock down into his elbow.
‘No poison?’ Roth mused, trying to maintain his wavering composure.
‘I said keep still. You didn’t. So we can make this slow and painful,’ she replied.
Slowly, purposefully, the Assassin unsheathed a razor’s edge from her back. It was not a murder implement; this was a weapon for close-quarter combat. A slivered oblong of metal, the wafer-thin slice of monofilament blade was exactly a metre in length and a uniform one finger’s width wide. In the night, it somewhat resembled a broken sword with a two-handed rubberised grip.
As the Assassin slashed the air with it, the razor emitted a shrill humming resonance. It was so sharp it was splitting the air, Roth mused.
‘At least humour me, tell me who sent you,’ said Roth, backing away and biding for time.
‘I am doing the Emperor’s work,’ she hissed. Without telegraphing her movements, in a single mercurial surge of energy, the Assassin aimed her razor at the gaps between the tessellating panes of his obsidian tabard. The blow was so fast, so precise, without an iota of wasted effort. One stroke, one kill.
Roth moved forwards on his opponent, his fist-fencing instincts possessing him. Had he tried to slip backwards, the razor’s edge would have surely taken off his trunk, cleanly above the hip. As it was, he moved inside of her blow. The razor teethed into the black glass, glittering fragments exploding into the air. The tabard was not armour, not against physical attacks anyway, but it was enough to deflect the weapon’s finite edge.
Roth would not get another chance like that. He seized on his fleeting advantage, grabbing the hand that wielded the razor’s edge. It was all he could do to delay her. Like a coordinated chess game, the Assassin somersaulted out of his grip, landing four or five paces away.
Then the air erupted with the hammering report of gunfire, sparking and roaring into the still night air. Both Roth and his assassin went to ground as tracers lit up the atrium. The shots almost seemed indiscriminate in nature.
On his stomach, Roth peered up at the muzzle flash. He saw Madeline de Medici, under the atrium arches, standing in her chiffon nightgown, firing away with a greasy machine pistol. Her marksmanship was enthusiastic yet poor, the gun bucking under her barely contained grip.
Judging by her frantic rate of fire, her gun would be spent in several seconds. Roth had to act quickly. Shimmying on his hands and knees, he retrieved his Sunfury from the base of the fountain.
He gripped the pistol just as Madeline’s weapon clicked empty. The Assassin was already up, sprinting towards Madeline with long, floating strides. Her razor’s edge was raised like a scorpion’s sting, coiled to strike.
‘I am Inquisition!’ Roth bellowed, emphasising his announcement with a shudder of psychic will.
He could not see the reaction beneath her jester’s mask. But judging by the slight shift in her shoulders, the tiny recoil of her step, it was not something she had known. The Assassin halted, her mask peering impassively at Roth.
It was her mistake. Roth fired four successive shots, a steady draw of the trigger – tap tap tap tap. It unleashed a pillar of incandescent energy, trailing threads of atomic afterburn. The Assassin was vaporised, her constituent atoms dispersing into the curtain of heat and steam. Within seconds, all that remained were the molten puddles of metal blades, cooling rapidly on the atrium tiles. The wall of consecrated mud behind her was now a crackling web of burnt, flaking clay.
Madeline dropped her gun, her hands and expression frozen in a mixture of terror and shock. A door swung open. Vandus Barq, a sheet wrapped around his naked self, stumbled from his room.
‘Where in Throne’s name were you?’ growled Roth, adrenaline still glanding hot through his veins.
‘Sweet merciful…’ Barq gasped, his eyes wide as he took in the carnage.
The others of the Task Group rushed into the atrium in their sleepwear, evidently roused by the skirmish. Celeminé and Pradal stopped as they neared Roth, wordless. Neither could do anything but stare at the meticulous arranged corpses. Celeminé’s shoulders began to tremble. Pradal hugged his lasrifle close to his chest.
‘Where were you?’ Roth repeated, shouting this time.
Barq shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sorry, Roth. I must have slept through it,’ he admitted guiltily.
‘Look around,’ Roth snarled, pointing at the dead, at the jagged seams of bullet-holes, the blood that laced the tiles in glistening starburst patterns. ‘You slept through this?’
‘Yes. I did. What happened?’
Roth shook his head. He didn’t know who to trust any more. Someone close to him had marked him for death, marked his Task Group for elimination. Someone with tremendous Imperial authority. He wished his old mentor, Inquisitor Liszt, were with him to soothe his fears, to tell him what to do. Or even Gurion, to lend him guidance. For the first time in his career, Roth thought he might have been too young for a task of such magnitude. For the first time, he realised there were those who did not fear the Inquisition.
‘Vandus. I’ll be making for Kholpesh come dawn. Do not follow me.’
‘Obodiah, please, tell me what’s happening?’
‘I can’t. But I think it would be best if you did not accompany me to Kholpesh. I fear betrayal.’
Barq blinked in disbelief. ‘You do not trust me?’
Roth steadied his breath and levelled his gaze first on Celeminé, then Pradal and finally locked eyes with Barq. ‘There is a betrayer amongst us. It’s not that I think it is you, Vandus. But that I do not want to kill you if you are. I’m sorry, old friend.’
Chapter Fifteen
The truck rolled to a shuddering stop. Trapped though he was, Silverstein felt the lurch of deceleration and heard the squealing protest of the brakes. He did not know how long they had been travelling for. Perhaps two hours, perhaps eight. It was impossible to tell.
‘No, Silverstein, don’t try,’ Asingh-nu ple
aded in the dark. Silverstein couldn’t see him but he could recognise the drawling Cantican vowels of a former rural labourer.
‘Perhaps, if we wait a while, we will have a better chance for escape,’ Temughan stuttered. He did not sound so sure. For a former clocksmith with steady hands, steady rifle-firing hands, the guerrilla fighter lacked a steadiness of nerve, Silverstein noted. He would be a liability in the event of escape.
‘Silverstein, you decide what to do. I will follow you,’ said Apartan. He was a former soldier, a sergeant in the CantiCol Second Division. Despite the over-enunciation of his syllables in the Cantican accent, his terse staccato speech was unmistakeably military. Nerseh, a dust-hunter and trapper from the Outbounds of Cantica, nodded in agreement. In their time together, Silverstein knew both men to be coarsely dependable and he was glad that of everyone, those two were with him.
‘You do what you want. I have no intentions of meeting the warlord. I don’t think it sounds particularly pleasant. Do you?’ Silverstein said, addressing the others.
Aghdish, the oldest of the captives, a coarse labourer with heavy hands from the ports of Cape Cantica, made the decision for all of them. ‘Do what we said we’d do, Silverstein. It’s that, or we die,’ he said flatly.
The hatch swung open on its hinges. Unrelenting sunlight streamed into their temporary prison. Silverstein shuttered his augmetics and went over the plan in his head for the hundredth time, visualising it in minute detail.
An Ironclad leaned into the lorry. ‘Aram gadal, aram! Aram!’
Silverstein replied by slamming his jackboot into the throat of the Ironclad. He aimed his heel into the soft point between the soldier’s gorge plate and his face-bindings. The Ironclad gurgled wetly behind his mask, stumbling with rearward steps as he clutched at his crushed windpipe.
Without a second thought, Silverstein hurled himself out of the truck. It would be his only chance. His fellow captives piled off after him. The huntsman landed awkwardly on his shoulder, his hands still bound. He looked up, assessing the situation.
They were in dense wilderness. Colossal trees with thick craggy trunks like inverted mountains branched up around him. Banks of gingko and fern clustered in tiered shelves amongst the tremendous root systems. Silverstein was a huntsman and the wilderness was his trade, but he did not recognise this place.
Around the disorientated captives, the vehicle convoy had stopped to refuel. Ironclad hauling battered jerry canisters of fuel stared at him. They saw him. He saw them. In the scramble to draw weapons, several of the Ironclad dropped their fuel containers. Shots, angry and hissing, snapped at the edges of his clothes. A las-round dropped Aghdish, puncturing the Cantican as he made a dash for the trees. Another shot punched clean through Nerseh’s abdomen, folding him over. Now there were three.
Silverstein dived for the fallen Ironclad, still writhing on the ground, blood and froth seeping from his face-bindings. He wrenched a laspistol from the Ironclad’s hip holster.
The huntsman aimed as he steadied his entangled wrists. Las-shots fizzled next to Silverstein’s ear, so close he could feel the prickling heat of its afterburn. He aligned the shot at the toppled jerry cans, gurgling fuel onto the hard-packed earth. One precise round was all he needed.
The tightly focused beam of las sparked into the fuel. The effect was instantaneous. Swooning fire rose into multiple growths of searing gas clouds blossoming into the air. There was a low crump of pressurised oxygen, an expanding shell of corrosive heat. It ignited a chain reaction.
Smoke, solid and black boiled in gagging clouds. Fire washed on the wind, sheeting in orange swirls. Men staggered about, blinded and choking. It was exactly what Silverstein needed. With a click, his augmetic shutters opened and his low-visibility vision revealed the scene before him in shades of monochrome green.
He locked onto an Ironclad outrider, astride his bike, pawing at the air with blind, groping hands. Silverstein dispatched him with a snap of his laspistol. One after another, in vivid two-dimensional optics, Silverstein searched out the outriders, took aimed and killed them with headshots. He put down six of them in about as many seconds.
Turning to his fellow captives, Silverstein pushed them in the direction of the fallen outriders. ‘Seize the bikes, grab as much fuel as you can!’
Rendered senseless by the inferno, the guerrillas fumbled against the heat and fumes. ‘Go! Faster!’ Silverstein urged, pushing them along. A las-shot fizzed over his shoulder, dangerously close.
The huntsman rolled the corpse of an outrider off his mount. It was a quad-bike, with deeply treaded all-terrain wheels. Silverstein slid onto the seat and gunned the throttle, his wrists still bound. The quad-bike snarled in response.
‘Follow my lead,’ Silverstein called out. With a sharp lurch, the bike shot off into the rocky wilderness, weaving between the ossified trees. He looked behind to see the bikes of his guerrillas storming out of the oily smoke, tracer and las chasing them.
The heating grate in Gurion’s stateroom fluttered low, exuding its dim murky warmth. The tittering woodwind symphony of Cavaleri’s Summer Garden Allegro drifted softly in the background. The old inquisitor was asleep at his desk, pillowed by mounds of tactical readouts and war reports. The last weeks had been hellish; the campaign was faltering. Intel reported that the invasion had begun on faraway Sinope. His nights were marked by endless war conferences and urgent debriefs as the High Command agonised over their successive defeats. Gurion snatched irregular naps when he could. At two hundred, he was not the young man he used to be.
It was during his slumber that Roth came to him. Or rather, an astropath appeared in the eye of his mind in the visage of Inquisitor Roth, a mere mouthpiece of psychic conveyance. The astral projection broke through a physical distance of three hundred thousand kilometres, painted directly into his frontal lobe.
‘Lord Gurion,’ said the ghost image, his voice reverberating with mind echoes.
Gurion’s subconscious woke with a start, although his physical body sunk into deeper sleep.
‘Roth. What time is it?’
‘Late. Is that Cavaleri I hear?’
‘Oh yes. Of course. Music is the only thing that keeps me sane these days,’ Gurion chuckled gently.
‘Then I think I must be already mad, Gurion. Things are very bad here. Soured up, as you would say.’
‘Is anything the matter?’
‘Where do I start?’ Roth uttered with a watery sigh. ‘There is a betrayer within my ranks. There have been too many close attempts on my life so far.’
‘How do you know it is betrayal? You are, after all, in a warzone that is nothing if not on the edge of conquest.’
‘Because my murderers are Imperial agents. A death cult assassin, local mercenaries last under the employ of the Medina war effort. The nicest kinds.’
‘I see,’ Gurion reflected thoughtfully. When he was thoughtful, he rolled the words on his tongue like he was evaluating a complex wine.
‘I can only assume that the location and the activities of my Task Group remain a secret of the Conclave?’
‘Yes of course. Only I know the status of the Conclavial Task Groups–’
‘Which would mean I have an infiltrator in my ranks, leaking out my intelligence and keeping two steps ahead of the game grid,’ Roth finished.
‘Are you safe now?’
Roth’s astro-vision shrugged its wispy, translucent shoulders. ‘I will continue on to Kholpesh tomorrow. But I will not be leaving with Inquisitor Barq’s team. I cannot afford to…’
‘I understand. You are caught in a vice. Transiting between battlefields with a betrayer at your side warrants a special kind of caution,’ Gurion mused.
‘I suspect Varuda,’ Roth admitted bluntly.
‘Well then you are not alone. He does everything short of admitting foul play. But I cannot act without premise. Not at a time li
ke this. The campaign hangs by a thread and summary punishment of its highest-ranking general is a risk I cannot take. Not without solid cause.’
‘Of course. Do one thing for me, Lord Gurion.’
‘Anything.’
‘Follow Varuda, and you’ll find the rat.’
Gurion nodded thoughtfully. ‘I won’t let him out of my sight.’
Chapter Sixteen
Kholpesh, geographically and architecturally, had much in common with Cantica and the grapevine worlds of Medina. Civilisation clustered on a dispersed chain of archipelagos, mid-ocean ridges immersed in a churning sea of milk. The triangle suns of Medina pivoted constantly in the bleached sky. As a consequence, the protein-rich water that covered much of the planet was subject to mass condensation and the formation of attendant thunderstorms. There was no night or day on Kholpesh, only the searing glare of sun and the boiling black clouds of tempest.
It was for this geographic reason that the Archenemy conducted war on Kholpesh in a different way. Through the absence of open ground to facilitate mass aerial deployment, the Ironclad heralded the invasion with aerial bombardment. Squadrons of Archenemy interceptors and bombers skimmed on the shrieking turbines of slam-propulsion engines. They slashed through the sky like bats in formation. Archenemy escort cruisers, ones that had slipped through the Imperial Navy picket, lurked in the sky like ghostly floating continents.
The bombing had laid waste to Kholpesh. It left a trail of blast-flattened destruction from the citrus groves of the sandy coastal plains to the tiered domes and minarets of the Kholpeshi city-states.
The enemy strategy had been to disrupt, disorder and wound. It had achieved this objective within just three days of sustained bombing. Roads and transit systems were destroyed, rural districts were isolated, cities were burning and four million citizens became displaced and homeless. The death toll reached one hundred and twenty thousand.
In a way, the initial bombardment fortified the morale and spirit of the Kholpeshi people. In Mantilla, the axial city of Kholpesh, the streets became congested with citizens rushing to donate blood and food to the outlying regions. So thick was the congestion that the Governate issued an unprecedented mandate for citizens to return to their homes, lest they hamper the organised relief efforts.