‘It does not play to lose. Like ourselves, it simply does not play to win.’
‘Why fight a war nobody wants to win?’
O’Seishin twisted his face into an approximation of a human smile. He had been practising the manoeuvre rigorously and thought it rather good. ‘I have a different question for you, Ensor Cutler. Who is your Imperium fighting on Phaedra?’
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Consider the facts. The Saathlaa indigenes are numerous, but primitive and militarily insignificant. Our mercenary auxiliaries are effective, but few. As to my own kind…’ O’Seishin extended his hands, palms upwards. ‘How many tau have you encountered on Phaedra, Ensor Cutler?’
‘I’d say one too many, Si.’
‘Then you are privileged, because I doubt there are more than two thousand of my kind remaining on the entire planet. Contrast that with nearly one hundred thousand of your Guardsmen.’ O’Seishin paused to let the numbers sink in. ‘I ask you again: who is the Imperium fighting on Phaedra?’
‘Turncoats,’ Cutler said bleakly, ‘but the scale you’re talking about…’
‘Has been precisely balanced,’ O’Seishin finished smoothly. ‘Over the decades we have stripped back our own troops as yours have swelled our ranks. Your Imperium casts its people into oblivion and we offer them hope. You have been fighting each other, Ensor Cutler.’
‘This really is just a game to you, isn’t it?’
‘On the contrary,’ O’Seishin demurred, ‘our purpose is serious and our message sincere. Phaedra is a feasibility study – a microcosm of a future happening as we speak. While your Imperium is diverted by this inconsequential war, our agents – human agents – are waging the true war beyond this gateway world, winning the hearts and minds of the subsector. Everywhere they go they find discontent and a desire for something better. Your species is not as unified as your Imperium pretends, my friend.’
‘And you’ve got all the answers?’
‘Not all,’ O’Seishin admitted, ‘but many. For example, the psychic malaise that plagues your race – you call it “the Chaos” I believe – this condition does not afflict the tau.’
Cutler stiffened visibly. ‘It doesn’t afflict you because you blueskins don’t have souls.’
‘Then perhaps the price of owning a soul is too high,’ O’Seishin said seriously. ‘I have more facts for you, Ensor Cutler. Your species is hardy, but riddled with the maladies of age. Mine is vigorous, but prone to the follies of youth. Separately we are vulnerable, but together we could become unbreakable. The tau are not your enemy.’
The ambassador sat back, awaiting the inevitable sarcasm, but Cutler was silent, his eyes glazed with thought. Surprised, O’Seishin pressed on.
‘Phaedra is a sacrifice for the Greater Good of both our races, Ensor Cutler. In your heart you know your Imperium is in its death throes. Do not die with it. Do not let your men die for it.’
The haunted look on the prisoner’s face was almost pitiful. In that moment O’Seishin was quite certain the gue’la were a doomed species. He leaned forward eagerly, sensing victory.
‘Tell me, Ensor Cutler, does the name “Abel” mean anything to you?’
The blizzard had returned with a vengeance, but the fire raging through the murdered town had pushed the temperature right up. Skjoldis, the witch woman, remembered that she had been sweating inside her heavy robes that night. And suddenly the sweat was there.
Trinity burns cold…
She sighed, reluctant to walk this memory yet again, but once the nightmare began it always ran its course. Resigned, she picked her way across the field of charred limbs jutting from the snow, making for the hated temple that waited across the square. Her weraldur was at her back, his axe unsheathed lest some stray cultist had survived the massacre to threaten her. She recalled that a chasm-faced maniac was due to rise from the snow when they were halfway across the plaza and pointed him out to her guardian in good time. The cultist was duly despatched. Her weraldur would have caught him anyway, but the warning speeded matters along.
The Whitecrow and old Elias Waite were waiting for her by the heavy oak doors of the temple. Three squads of the regiment’s finest were lined up alongside them, covering the entrance with lasrifles and bayonets while a pair of Sentinels prowled about, swivelling and tilting restlessly at the waist to scope the building. The rainbow light blazing from the stained glass window above transformed them all into torn shadows, insubstantial and fragile.
Which is nothing less than the truth, Skjoldis mused.
‘You summoned me, Ensor Cutler,’ she said, playing her part in the past once more.
‘That I did, Mistress Raven.’ It was the first time he had looked her in the eye, though he’d watched her covertly often enough, thinking she hadn’t seen it. From the day she joined the regiment he’d been drawn to her strangeness, but sanity had kept him away. Now, in this twisted town she was irresistible. Inevitable.
He pointed towards the coruscating light streaming from the window above. ‘As our sanctioned shaman, it occurred to me you might have some insights into this matter, lady.’
‘The Great Wyrm has poisoned this place,’ she answered. ‘You were wise to clip its wings, but the heart of the beast still beats. You must find it and destroy it.’
‘Well, I don’t expect the finding will be troublesome,’ Cutler said with forced lightness, ‘but as to the other part…’ He threw her a defiant grin. ‘That might prove interesting.’
‘I will come with you,’ she said.
Did I ever have a choice or was the past as fated as this dream is now?
‘I’ll be glad to have you along, Raven.’
‘That is not my name, Ensor Cutler.’
He nodded, weighing that up. ‘Then perhaps you’ll give me a better one when this is done, but right now…’ Cutler turned to face the temple. ‘I’ve a snake to crush under my boot.’
‘Now hold fire there, Ensor!’ Waite protested. ‘I say we torch this heathen nest like the rest of the town. We ain’t got no call to go in there…’
‘I’m afraid we do,’ Cutler said. ‘Burning won’t be enough, Elias. We have to be sure.’ He glanced at Skjoldis, seeking her approval for the first time. ‘Am I right, lady?’
‘You are correct,’ she said. ‘If the evil slips away it will take root elsewhere.’
‘Since when did her word hold any sway with you, Ensor?’ Waite looked at his friend askance. ‘She’s a witch in a town gone to the Hells with sorcery. For all we know the taint might be inside her too!’
‘That’s enough!’ Cutler snapped, then his tone softened as he recognised the fear in his friend’s eyes. ‘I’m not asking you to come with us, Elias.’
‘Now Ensor, you know that ain’t what I meant…’ But the relief in the old man’s voice gave him away. He was almost sick with terror, just like the greybacks facing the temple. They were all veterans of untold carnage, but the horror haunting this town was worse than any flesh and blood enemy. They all sensed that a man risked losing much more than his life in Trinity.
‘You know I’ll back you to the hilt,’ Waite finished weakly.
‘Of course, old friend, but I need you right here, watching our backs in case anything gets past us.’ Cutler turned to Skjoldis. ‘Any idea what we’re dealing with here?’
She sighed and spoke the litany of the nightmare: ‘The Great Wyrm has many hues and poisons, Ensor Cutler. Some will turn hearts sour with black passions or rose-scented deliriums. Others will twist the mind with impossible despair or desperate possibility. Rage and lust, anguish and ambition, all are playthings of the Wyrm at the Heart of the World, but all corrupt the soul equally and warp the body like putty in the hands of a lunatic child.’
She saw him grasping for mockery or humour – anything to blunt the peril of her words. ‘So tell me the really bad news?’ he want
ed to say, but her cold gaze wouldn’t allow him the mercy.
The Great Wyrm is not a thing to be mocked, Ensor Cutler. Will you ever learn that lesson, I wonder?
And then the daemon bell chimed once again and any hope of levity was gone. Terror congealed amongst the soldiers like bad blood. Skjoldis knew every one of them was praying he wouldn’t be called upon to enter that desecrated temple. She also knew they had nothing to fear on that count because the burden had always fallen on Cutler, herself and her weraldur alone and always would.
‘Psyker,’ a voice buzzed in the wind, bone dry and impossibly distant. ‘Are you there?’
The words sent a ripple of discord through the world. The swirling snow flickered into static and the memory of Trinity was swept away, carrying the men and the town back to limbo. Skjoldis sighed as a jagged shape twitched out of the chaos.
‘Hello Abel,’ she said.
Standing rigid on the riverbank like a rusting statue in his Zouave armour, Audie Joyce watched the returning Sentinels shepherd a gunboat into camp. A tall figure loomed at its prow, so still he might have been a statue himself. Though the newcomer’s peaked cap was missing there could be no mistaking his calling. This was the commissar Captain Vendrake had gone chasing after.
‘He’s got a face to raise the Hells,’ Audie Joyce muttered into the turgid waters where the murdered saint slept. He knew that Gurdy-Jeff had endured beyond death, as true heroes of the Imperium always did. The saint had followed his killers into the Coil, drifting along the silt bed and touching their dreams, but only Audie had been found worthy of his blessing. That blessing had carried him from green cap to knighthood and there was no telling where the path would end.
Blood… for… the God-Emperor…
‘You say something, preacher?’ a fellow Zouave asked over the vox.
Realising he’d left his armour’s vox-channel open, Joyce smiled. For all their airs and graces, the Zouaves hung on his every word. The day was fast approaching when Audie would replace that fossil Machen at the head of the brotherhood. Sure, there weren’t a whole lot of them left now, but it would still be a fine thing. The Emperor and Uncle Calhoun would be mighty proud of him.
‘Penance just sailed into camp, brothers,’ Joyce broadcast, reading the gunboat’s insignia, ‘and Pain won’t be far behind.’
‘What is this madness?’ the shape hissed, oscillating wildly as it struggled to find a form in limbo. ‘Where are you, psyker?’
‘I am dreaming, Abel,’ Skjoldis answered, ‘and you are intruding.’
The spectre considered her reply. ‘This is how you dream?’
Abel’s confusion was telling. He – if indeed Abel was a he – did not possess the wyrd. He had little understanding of the immaterium and even less interest. His presence in her mind was facilitated by an astropath, a human relay station trained to channel telepathic messages across the void. The astropath’s name had been eroded away by that corrosive flow of information long ago, along with everything else that had once made him human. He was a powerful psyker, yet he was also nothing. His mind was like a bright light shinning from an empty shell.
Abel was a remote ghost inside that shell, a shadow presence beyond Skjoldis’s reach. She had often extended covert feelers through the astropath, hoping to taste Abel’s mind, but had always met a blank. It was as if Abel had no psychic presence whatsoever. Forced to fall back on intuition, she had constructed a picture from his words alone, but that had proved equally frustrating. Abel did not talk like anyone she had ever encountered. His cadence was skewed and his expression stilted, his thoughts seemingly shaped by tactics and logistics alone, as if war was his sole concern.
‘You are not welcome here,’ Skjoldis said.
‘I require the Counterweight,’ Abel stated, dismissing the dream state as irrelevant, along with her reproach. ‘The Pendulum must fall upon the Crown.’
She frowned. Abel’s fondness for code words and allusions irritated her more than his coldness. ‘That is impossible,’ she replied. ‘Our force has become divided.’
‘Divided? How so? Why so?’ he snapped. ‘I instructed that you maintain cohesion of your assets at all times.’
Skjoldis bridled at his contempt. ‘Our situation here is volatile. There is disquiet amongst the officers. We have been waiting too long…’
‘And the waiting is over. A convoy of newly sworn janissaries is inbound for the Crown. They are due in three days time. I will divert them to your position.’
‘We are not ready.’
‘Another opportunity will not arise for many… months, psyker.’
‘Give me a week.’
‘I may not have a week,’ Abel said. ‘My position has become precarious. Certain of my agents have been exposed.’
‘Will they betray you? Do they know your identity?’
‘Nobody knows my identity,’ Abel said. ‘Not even this husk of a telepath who carries my voice.’
‘Then why are you so frightened?
‘I am not frightened,’ Abel hissed, displaying rare passion, ‘but the Water Caste are subtle and clever. That ancient monster O’Seishin is getting too close.’
‘Then why did you lure him to the Diadem?’
‘To make him vulnerable! He is the true engineer of this stalemate and he is the key to ending it.’
‘What of Wintertide and the Sky Marshall?’
The shape flickered, but said nothing.
‘Who are you, Abel?’ Skjoldis asked.
‘You’re a bloody fool, Vendrake!’ Machen snarled, stomping forward as his fellow captain leapt from his Sentinel. ‘You’ve brought a snake right into our camp!’ He thrust an ironclad paw towards the scarred man watching from the gunboat. ‘He’ll betray us the first chance he gets.’
There were murmurs of assent from the greybacks crowding the riverbank.
‘He’s a commissar, but he’s Providence born!’ Vendrake shouted over the growing hubbub. ‘He’ll give us a fair hearing!’ But there was no conviction in his voice.
‘We murdered an Imperial confessor and his retinue!’ Machen mocked. ‘There’s no going back from that!’
The greybacks roared their support and closed in on the gunboat like jackals.
‘You’re right,’ the commissar called as he stepped onto the gangplank. ‘There is no going back.’ He didn’t shout, yet his voice cut through the mob, snuffing out the clamour like a chill wind. None of them would meet his searching, glacial gaze. Even Machen looked away, blinking furiously.
The commissar nodded with infinite weariness, as if he had seen it all before. ‘This far down the road to Hell you can only go forward.’
‘Who are you, Abel?’ Skjoldis repeated firmly. ‘If you want my help you will tell me.’
‘I have already answered this,’ Abel said finally.
That was true, even if his answer had been a lie.
Abel professed to be a senior naval officer aboard the Sky Marshall’s battleship, a man with connections that ran right to the nerve-centre of Kircher’s inner cadre. He also claimed to lead a covert resistance movement dedicated to exposing the ‘Phaedran Lie’. He was playing a long and dangerous game that required staunch allies and perfect timing. With access to the records of all inbound regiments, Abel had been quick to spot the potential of the 19th Arkan.
‘You do not belong here,’ Abel had said during that first, fleeting psychic contact in orbit almost a year ago. ‘Your regiment has been betrayed.’
After the Arkan fled into the wilderness Abel had approached Skjoldis every night, wooing her with tantalising nuggets of information that offered a glimmer of hope. Finally she had told the Whitecrow and ever the gambler, he had taken a chance on Abel.
‘What do we have to lose?’ he’d said.
And so they’d listened and Abel’s counsel had proven sound. He had out
lined rebel patrol routes and supply lines, guided them to ammunition dumps and outposts, even revealed passwords that changed on a daily basis, always keeping them one step ahead of the enemy. But over the months his advice had grown more elaborate, his strategies bolder, and somewhere along the way their goal had changed from survival to striking back at the Sky Marshall.
You were right Hardin Vendrake, Skjoldis mused. The regiment is being moved about like a piece on a regicide board, but the Whitecrow and I were never the players.
‘Tell me you hate them,’ Skjoldis demanded. ‘Tell me you hate the Sky Marshall and his puppet masters.’
Make me believe it…
She sharpened her senses to a razorwire edge, eager to taste every nuance of Abel’s answer. It came without hesitation: ‘I despise them.’
‘Skjoldis!’ called another voice. Then again and again…
An insistent pounding reverberated through the dream. Briefly she wondered if it was the daemon bell chiming from lost Trinity. Then she heard her weraldur bellow and her eyes flicked open. Dazed, she saw her guardian striding towards the cabin door just as it was flung open. Vendrake stood at the threshold, looking half-dead and all damned, but it was the face over his shoulder that tore her fully awake. One of its eyes was a lustreless black sun, the other a corroded augmetic rammed through the eye socket. Both were bound in a lattice of scars that glowed like seams of magma beneath parchment skin.
Worst of all, she recognised that face.
‘He asked us to follow him into the heart of darkness,’ Audie Joyce whispered to the still waters of the river. ‘And then he promised he’d bring us out the other side if we had the guts for it.’
The Zouave was alone on the riverbank. While his comrades chewed over the commissar’s revelations in noisy clusters he was communing with the drowned saint.
‘He told us the Sky Marshall had broken faith with the Emperor and turned xenos lover,’ Joyce went on. ‘Told us the blueskins have been playing the Guard for fools, turning good men bad and chewing up the ones who stood tall.’ He sighed. ‘It’s a helluva thing if it’s true.’
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