‘The Emperor guided my arm,’ Fell muttered. He shifted his bionic, possibly unconsciously. ‘One of them, anyway. Besides, I had help.’
Ngiri pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘For these to resurface here and now… Are we being taunted?’
‘There’s something else,’ Alyss said, picking the box up from where Fell had let it fall. She pulled out a scrap of paper and passed it to Ngiri. ‘Milady? This looks to be a signature.’
Ngiri took the paper and nodded, turning it over in her hands. ‘Indeed. There’s nothing else on here. I wonder why it was included.’
‘Someone wants us to go running around on a wild grox chase,’ Fell growled.
‘Then let us oblige them,’ Ngiri said decisively.
Surprised, Alyss looked up at her mistress. ‘Ma’am?’
‘I know that look in your eye, Fell,’ Ngiri said. ‘You want to get to the root of this, and I can’t say I blame you. However, I need to study the blade Jonas found and speak to Governor Steban. Take Alyss, Jekri and Hurzley and hunt this down. Just make sure to do it with your eyes open.’
Fell rolled his neck, producing an ugly cracking sound. ‘Eyes open and guns loaded, as always.’
Alyss looked from one to the other. ‘If whoever sent this means us harm then won’t we be walking into a trap? Surely they’ll be prepared for our response?’
‘They may predict it,’ Fell countered. ‘They won’t be prepared for it.’
The sun had set, but the eastern sky still held a rich glow. The tenement blocks of Verbaden City’s central slums were stark silhouettes in the distance, and in sharp contrast to Alyss’ surroundings. Grand Triumph Way was a wide boulevard lined with ancient trees, gene-spliced to always be in flower. The manses here belonged to Verbaden’s wealthy, each one set back from the street and surrounded by gardens. To Alyss, still adjusting to her new life outside the austerity of the schola progenium, it seemed ridiculously extravagant.
‘You can almost taste the money,’ drawled Alfrett Hurzley, dropping down from the flatbed at the rear of their groundcar. He gave a short whistle and his cyber-mastiff Razorfang joined him with a whirr of servos. The Adeptus Arbites officer had been with Ngiri since she’d recruited him in the aftermath of a xenos incursion on a mining planet some three years previously.
‘You’re sure this is the right place?’ Fell demanded of Sef Lentzen, who was acting as driver. The diminutive enginseer muttered a binaric swear word.
‘Owner is listed as Phinius Speltmann of the local Merchant’s Guild,’ Lentzen said. One of his mechadendrites reached out of the cab window, proffering a data-slate displaying a hololith of a narrow-cheeked, pale-skinned man. ‘Handwriting analysis confirms ninety-four-point-five per cent probability that is the name signed on the paper, which is of the specific type used locally for important documents such as large trade deals. Furthermore, examination of public records shows Speltmann’s name is linked with the consortium that funded the dig, albeit somewhat indirectly. That is, however, in accordance with his reputation as a wealthy recluse–’
‘A “yes” would have done,’ Fell grunted, slotting a magazine into his combi-bolter. It was a brutal weapon with a flamer attachment, and only his bionic arm allowed him to fire it without dislocating his shoulder.
‘“Yes” would have been inaccurate–’
‘Jekri, are you in position?’ Fell voxed, cutting Lentzen off.
‘Affirmative.’
‘Then we’re moving in.’
The manse’s gates were a black lattice of plasteel three times the height of a human and secured by a heavy, automated bolt. Fell clamped a melta-charge to the main lock and stood back.
‘One question occurs,’ Alyss said to him.
‘Which is?’
‘Why would a merchant guilder tear up a trade deal document just to provide their own signature?’
‘Very good, Nero,’ Fell replied with a slight smile. ‘Let’s find out, shall we?’
The melta-charge fired with a whoomph, instantly reducing the centre of the gate to slag. Lentzen sent their sturdy groundcar forwards, striking the gates and throwing them wide open, then revved the engines and withdrew again. Fell sprang through the gap and sprinted up the gravel drive past beds of turquoise rock-roses and under the trailing tendrils of the local trees, which looked to Alyss like giant cephalopods. Hurzley followed, shotgun clamped under his arm and Razorfang loping at his side, while Alyss brought up the rear with her finger hovering near the trigger of her laspistol.
They were barely halfway to the manse when Alyss stumbled, momentarily overcome by a flash behind her eyes and a familiar surge of nausea.
‘Gun!’ she yelled, a moment before an alarm began trilling and an automated cannon rose up out of the undergrowth ahead of them. Alyss recognised it as a heavy stubber variant just as its automated targeting sensors focused on the closest threat and opened fire.
Her warning had potentially saved all their lives. Fell dived sideways into an evasive roll while Hurzley’s sharp whistle sent the cyber-mastiff bounding forwards. The security gun’s barrel locked onto Razorfang, its shots kicking up gravel as it tried to track the fast-moving patrol dog. The moment of distraction was all Fell needed: his combi-bolter roared once and the explosive shell slammed into the ammunition hopper. The resulting explosion blew the stubber apart and sent pieces of metal spattering into the surrounding foliage with a noise like a short but extremely violent rain shower.
‘Nice shot,’ Hurzley commented.
‘Nice spot,’ Fell said, acknowledging Alyss. He was already back on his feet and pressing on towards the manse, weapon held at the ready. Alyss hurried after him and after a few more seconds, they were standing in front of the imposing, three-storey home of Phinius Speltmann. It was clad in the dark, local stone with a front door that looked to be made of wood.
‘Door?’ Fell asked Hurzley.
‘Two blisters in the archway,’ Hurzley replied, checking his auspex. ‘Probably anti-personnel mines.’
‘Windows?’
‘Look clear.’
Fell shrugged. ‘Window it is.’
The bolt shell smashed the crystalflex into razor-edged splinters. Fell used his metal hand to punch more of it inwards, then vaulted through with Hurzley and Alyss on his heels.
They were in a dining room containing a long oval table surrounded by richly upholstered chairs. The ponderous tread coming from the hallway, however, did not sound like a dinner guest. The door slammed open to reveal a heavyset humanoid figure, a large-bore shotgun clutched in one hand and the other replaced by a whirling chainblade.
‘Imperial Inquisition!’ Fell snapped at the combat servitor.
For answer, the servitor raised its weapon and fired.
It was too slow – Fell hadn’t assumed his words would hold it and had already brought his weapon up. His snap shot pulped the construct’s right shoulder instead of its head, but the impact caused the shotgun shell to blow a large chunk out of the ceiling rather than his chest.
‘Down!’ Hurzley yelled. Fell hit the floor and Razorfang pounced, latching metal jaws onto the servitor’s forearm and yanking it aside, causing the next shot to discharge into the floor. The servitor raised its chainblade but Hurzley’s own shotgun shell shattered the weapon, scattering rending teeth everywhere.
‘There’s another!’ Alyss shouted as a second appeared. She threw herself down behind the table and a blast thundered into the wall where she’d just been standing, blowing a hole as wide around as her waist and showering her with plaster. She saw the servitor’s feet change position as it turned towards Fell and Hurzley so she sprang back up, levelled her laspistol and pulled the trigger.
The combat servitor had fired first, its shot booming out and catching Hurzley in the chest, blowing the ex-Arbites backwards off his feet. A moment later Alyss’ shot burned its
way clean through the construct’s skull and it staggered sideways, but to her horror it remained standing and turned to target her again.
Fell’s return shot obliterated its head. Even a combat servitor’s heavily altered processes still required some form of working brain to function, and the construct toppled to the floor in an abruptly motionless heap. Alyss shifted her aim towards the first threat only to see the cyber-mastiff finish ripping its shotgun arm off in a spray of blood and coolant before Hurzley, firing from his prone position on the floor, blew a hole right through its chest. The servitor crashed backwards through a sideboard and didn’t move again.
‘You alright?’ Fell asked, looking back at Hurzley.
‘Winded,’ the other man grunted, peering down at the now-dented armaplas of his chest-plate. ‘Alyss?’
‘Fine,’ she answered, calming her breathing again. She eyed Fell’s combi-bolter with some envy. Unsubtle though the weapon undoubtedly was, there was something to be said for its sheer brute force.
‘Jekri, any rats bolting?’ Fell voxed, stepping over the bodies and easing out into the hallway, weapon at the ready.
‘Negative,’ the skitarii ranger replied. They were covering the rear of the property, and had Alyss been a betting woman, she would have wagered that Jekri’s arc rifle would end any attempted flight. Fell jerked his head to give the all-clear and Alyss followed him out of the dining room.
‘“Wealthy recluse”,’ Fell quoted grimly. ‘Let’s see what he’s got to hide.’
The manse seemed deserted, right up to the second floor. Alyss opened doors onto a study, a personal gymnasium and a sitting room with shelves of ancient-looking books of real paper and decanters of amasec without finding anyone, alive or dead. She could, however, detect a distasteful scent.
‘I smell corruption,’ she said. It was faint but it was there, rank yet sickly sweet.
‘Razor has something, too,’ Hurzley confirmed, checking the readouts from the cyber-mastiff’s olfactory sensors.
Fell grunted an acknowledgement. ‘One more door on this floor. Let’s see if it provides any answers.’
The door in question was the largest and most ornate yet: a monument of dark wood carved into an exquisite representation of Holy Terra and its system, down to the last moonlet and planetary ring. It was securely locked.
Fell blew it in without a pause.
The wood splintered and he burst through the remains, his combi-bolter tracking in a cover pattern. Alyss followed and found herself in a large, airy bedchamber with decorative support beams and wide windows overlooking the grounds, a bed easily large enough for four full-grown adults, and the more pressing issue of a body lying face-down on sheets soaked red. Alyss turned its head to one side and immediately recognised Phinius Speltmann from the hololith, his cheeks even more sunken in person.
‘Dead,’ she said, checking his pulse. She rolled the merchant onto his back and the arms flopped like the limbs of some gelatinous deep-water creature. ‘No rigor mortis. Time of death would be six hours ago at most.’
‘Stabbed?’ Hurzley asked, pointing to the front of the man’s bloodstained shirt. Alyss tore the fabric aside to reveal a small puncture wound in Speltmann’s gut.
‘A gut wound like that wouldn’t kill him for hours, maybe days.’ She peered closely at it. ‘A basic medi-kit could have patched him up, there’s no way a rich man in his own home should die from this.’ She frowned. Hadn’t Jonas mentioned mysterious killings?
‘Here’s the source of the signature,’ Fell said from the other side of the room where he was studying a wall housing many framed pieces of paper. The glass protecting one had been smashed and the bottom of the paper torn away. ‘They look to be contracts, a wall commemorating his great business successes.’ Fell spat and kicked the leg of a chair. ‘Why send a message to me, a message with personal significance to me, just to… to taunt us about the murder of a trader I don’t know?’
‘They moved fast,’ Alyss commented, frowning. ‘To get that paper to us so soon after killing this man…’ She paused. Something wasn’t adding up, and after a moment realisation dawned. Speltmann hadn’t been dead for long enough to be the source of the corruption she and Razorfang had smelled.
Or at least, not through his death.
She tore the trader’s shirt back further and grimaced. The skin around his shoulders was reddened and bore weeping pustules.
‘Could be a skin condition,’ Hurzley commented, although he didn’t sound convinced. Alyss rolled the body back onto its front and pulled the shirt down to reveal Speltmann’s back.
‘Still think it’s a skin condition?’ she asked, swallowing back the taste of bile in her mouth. The sores here were larger and angrier-looking, and the most prominent formed a disturbing pattern across his shoulder blades.
‘Emperor’s grace,’ Hurzley growled, making the sign of the aquila. Alyss realised that what she’d thought was a smell was at least in part the psychic spoor of Speltmann’s corruption, although now she was this close to the body, the rotting flesh around his sores certainly had its own disgusting odour.
‘Huh,’ Fell grunted. He’d crossed the luxuriously carpeted floor to stand at Alyss’ shoulder and was now looking down at Speltmann’s body. ‘Oh, that’s not good news. That changes the game.’
‘It does?’ Alyss asked, looking up at him.
‘I don’t think we were being taunted at all,’ Fell said, scanning the room again as though expecting an unpleasant surprise at any moment. ‘I think we were being warned.’
‘Warned of what? This wretch?’ Alyss said, releasing Speltmann’s shirt and wiping her hands on her fatigues.
‘There’s never just one, that’s the problem.’ Fell pointed at a small, dark tattoo of unpleasantly flowing lines at the base of Speltmann’s spine. ‘I’m not Karamazov, but that looks like a cult symbol to me.’
‘So we’ve got a dead, rich cultist killed by a wound that shouldn’t have been fatal, in his own bedroom that was locked from the inside and protected by security we had to destroy just to get here,’ Hurzley said flatly. ‘That shouldn’t be possible.’
‘He could have known the killer,’ Fell said, ‘but that wouldn’t explain the locked door.’ He looked thoughtfully over his shoulder at the balcony. ‘The window’s a potential way in and out.’
‘You’d need a grapnel,’ Hurzley commented. ‘Or a jump pack. It wouldn’t be subtle.’
‘We should report in,’ Alyss said, reaching for her comm-bead.
‘We search the place first,’ Fell corrected her, slinging his combi-bolter behind his back. ‘Let’s find out what we’re reporting.’
It took half an hour before the cyber-mastiff detected a strong scent coming from what proved to be a hidden door in the wine cellar. The passage behind it sloped steeply downwards and was roughly hewn, clearly not the work of Imperial engineers.
‘Nero?’ Fell asked, shining his luminator into the tunnel. ‘You’ve got almost as good a nose as the dog.’
Alyss grimaced as she got a whiff of effluent. ‘I’d say it leads to the sewers.’
‘And if Speltmann had a secret passage to the sewers, that suggests there’s something down there we need to see.’
Fell called up a schematic of the system to his data-slate and activated his comm. ‘Jekri, Sef. Speltmann’s dead and a heretic. Killer unknown. Get back to the inquisitor and warn her that we’ve got suspected cult activity. We’re following a lead and going underground.’
The stench in the sewer was overwhelming, even behind a respirator, and the only light was from their luminators. Filthy moisture dripped from the arched ceiling and oozed from walls, and the narrow service paths bordering the main channel were slippery and treacherous. All in all, it was one of the most unpleasant places Alyss had ever set foot in.
‘You’re sure it can’t smell anything?’ Fell
asked Hurzley again, staring disapprovingly at his cyber-mastiff.
‘It can smell everything, that’s the problem,’ Hurzley replied testily. ‘This is probably the highest concentration of biological odours on the planet. There’s nothing it can scan for that isn’t already surrounding us.’
‘Wonderful,’ Fell muttered, sweeping his combi-bolter around. The luminator affixed to it revealed nothing but dark, unmarked stonework. ‘Any ideas?’
‘Let me try,’ Alyss said. She closed her eyes and concentrated as she’d been taught. One by one she blocked out the sensations of the clothes on her skin, the faint liquid sounds of the sewer and, finally, the stench of the place. Thus centred she began to push her mind outwards, searching. Fell and Hurzley were two sparks of intellect, tangible mainly through familiarity; Razorfang was an odd, subdued glow where the remaining hunter’s instincts still registered faintly. She ignored them and searched further, trying to look everywhere at once but not focus anywhere in case she missed something…
There. A whiff of corruption. Now she focused, trying to get a fix on it. This wasn’t a physical smell creeping in through her concentration, she was sure of it. This was something different, a sense of wrongness that her mind was interpreting in a familiar way.
She raised an arm, not certain of where she was pointing but knowing it was correct. ‘That way.’
Fell didn’t ask her if she was sure. When she opened her eyes he was studying the schematics. ‘Can you hold the connection while we move?’ he asked, his voice buzzing oddly in her head.
Alyss wobbled a nod. Her head felt loose on her neck. ‘I think so. It affects my other senses, though, including my balance.’
‘Make sure she doesn’t slip,’ Fell told Hurzley. ‘All right, let’s see what else is down here.’
The access hatch to the purification centre didn’t open when Fell slapped the activation rune. ‘The hydraulic cables must have been cut from the inside,’ he growled. ‘Someone doesn’t want anyone official getting in here.’
Lords and Tyrants Page 35