by Dan Abnett
MALLEUS
For Kyle Foster and the Taken, wherever you may be.
BY ORDER OF HIS MOST HOLY MAJESTY THE GOD-EMPEROR OF TERRA
SEQUESTERED INQUISITORIAL DOSSIERS AUTHORISED PERSONS ONLY
CASE FILE 442:41F:JL3:Kbu
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CLASSIFICATION: Primary Level Intelligence
CLEARANCE: Obsidian
ENCRYPTION: Cryptox v 2.6
DATE: 337M41
AUTHOR: Inquisitor Javes Thysser, Ordo Xenos
SUBJECT: A matter for your urgent consideration
RECIPIENT: Lord Inquisitor Phlebas Alessandro Rorken, Inquisition High Council Officio, Scarus Sector, Scarus Major
Salutations, lord!
In the name of the God-Emperor, hallowed he his eternal vigil, and by the High Lords of Terra, I commend myself, your Highness, and hope I may speak plainly, in confidence, of a delicate matter.
To begin generally, my work on Vogel Passionata is now complete and my noble duty to the Great Inquisition of Mankind discharged successfully. My full, documented report will follow in a few days, once my savants have finished compiling it, and I trust that your Highness will find it satisfactory reading. To summarise, for the purpose of this brief missive, I am proud to declare that the malign influence of the so-called wyrd-kin has been expunged from the hive cities of Vogel Passionata, and the inner circle of that obscene xenophile order broken forever and put to cleansing flame. Their self-proclaimed messiah, Gaethon Richter, is himself dead by my hand.
A matter, however, has arisen from this. I am troubled by it, and unsure as to the best course of action. For this reason I am writing to you, Highness, in the hope of receiving guidance.
Richter did not go without a fight, as you might expect. In the final, bloody throes of the battle, as my combined forces stormed his fastness beneath the main hive, he called forth to oppose us a being of dreadful power. It slaughtered nineteen of the Imperial Guardsmen assigned to my purge-team, as well as Inquisitor Bluchas, Interrogators Faruline and Seetmol, and Captain Ellen Ossel, my pilot. It would have slain me too, but for the strangest mischance.
The being was an unholy thing, made like a man, but gleaming with an inner light. Its voice was soft, its touch was fire. I believe it was a daemonhost of unfathomable power, with the most vile propensity for spite and cruelty. My report will recount in detail the particular abominations this being subjected Seetmol and Ossel to before it destroyed them. I will spare you those dreadful facts here.
Having disposed of Bluchas, it cornered me on an upper landing in the fastness as I was penetrating the inner sanctum of the wyrd-kin 'messiah'. My weapons did no harm to it, and it laughed gleefully as it threw me backwards down the length of the staircase with a casual flick of its wrist.
Dazed, I looked up as it descended towards me, unable to conceive of a defence against it. I believe I may have clawed around to find my fallen weapon.
That gesture caused it to speak. I report the words exactly. It said, 'Don't worry now, Gregor. You are far too valuable to waste. Indulge me, just a little scar to make it look authentic!
Its talons tore across my chest and throat, and ripped away my rebreather mask. The wounds will heal, they tell me, but they were deep and excruciating. The being then paused, as it saw my face properly for the first time, free from the mask set. Dreadful dark anger flared in its eyes. It said - forgive me, Highness, but this is the fact of it - it said, 'You are not Eisenhorn! I have been tricked!"
I believe that it would have killed me there and then, but for the frontal assault of the Adeptes Astartes Aurora chapter, which tore into the hall at that precise moment. In the mayhem, the being fled, though I cannot even now say how. Whatever the terrifying strength of the Astartes, this thing was a hundredfold more powerful.
Later, on his knees, with my weapon to his head, seconds before his execution, Gaethon Richter begged for 'CherubaeY to return. He wailed he could not understand why 'CherubaeY had abandoned him. I believe he was speaking of the daemonhost.
I trust your Highness can see my trouble. Mistaking me for another of our kind - and an unimpeachably worthy example, I might add - this thing spared my life. It seemed to me, indeed, that it did so with pre-arranged connivance.
Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn is highly regarded, numerously honoured and justly praised as an example of all that is good, strong and dogmatic about our brotherhood. However, since this circumstance, I have begun to wonder, to fear that-
I feel I cannot say what I wonder or fear. But I thought you should know of this, and know it soon. It is my belief that the Ordo Malleus should be informed, if only as a precaution.
I hope and pray this matter will be found empty of truth and consequence. But, as you taught me, sir, it is always better to be sure.
Sealed as my true word by this, my hand, this 2 76th day of the year 337.M41.
The Emperor Protects!
Your servant,
[Message ends.]
ONE
I discover I am dead.
Under dark fire, the lair of Sadia.
Tantalid, unwelcome.
As I grow older, may the Emperor protect me, I find I measure my history in terms of milestones, those occurrences of such intense moment they will never pass from one's memory: my induction into the blessed ordos of the Inquisition; my first day as a neophyte assigned to the great Hap-shant; my first successful prosecution; the heretic Lemete Syre; my elevation to full inquisitorial rank at the age of twenty-four standard years; the long-drawn out Nassar case; the affair of the Necroteuch; the P'glao Conspiracy.
Milestones, all of them. Marked indelibly onto the engrams of my memory. And, alongside them, I remember the Darknight that came at the end of the month of Umbris, Imperial year 338.M41, with particular clarity. For that bloody end was the start of it. The great milestone of my life.
I was on Lethe Eleven under instruction from the Ordo Xenos, deep in work, with the accursed xenophile Beldame Sadia almost in my grasp. Ten weeks to find her, ten hours to close the trap. I had been without sleep for three days; without food and water for two. Psychic phantoms triggered by the Darknight eclipse were roiling my mind. I was dying of binary poison. Then Tantalid turned up.
To appraise you, Lethe Eleven is a densely populated world at the leading edge of the Helican sub-sector, its chief industries being metalwork and shield technologies. At the end of every Umbris, Lethe's largest moon matches, by some cosmological coincidence, the path, orbit and comparative
size of the local star, and the world is plunged into eclipse for a two week period known as the Darknight.
The effect is quite striking. For the space of fourteen days, the sky goes a cold, dark red, the hue of dried blood, and the moon, Kux, dominates the heavens, a peerlessly black orb surrounded by a crackling corona of writhing amber flame. This event has become - students of Imperial ritual will be unsurprised to learn - the key seasonal holiday for all Letheans. Fires of all shape, size and manner are lit as Darknight begins, and the population stands vigil to ensure that none go out until the eclipse ends. Industry is suspended. Leave is granted. Riotous carnivals and firelit parades spill through the cities. Licentiousness and law-breaking are rife.
Above it all, the dark fire of the eclipsed sun haloes the black moon. There is even a tradition of fortune-casting grown up around the interpretation of the corona's form.
I had hoped to catch the Beldame before Darknight began, but she was one step ahead of me. Her chief poisoner, Pye, who had learned his skills in early life a
s a prisoner of the renegade dark eldar, so the story went, managed to plant a toxin in my drinking water that would remain inert until I ingested the second component of its binary action.
I was a dead man. The Beldame had killed me.
My savant, Aemos, accidentally discovered the toxin in my body, and was able to prevent me from eating or drinking anything further. But graceless death beckoned me inexorably. My only chance of survival was to capture the Beldame and her vassal Pye and extract the solution to my doom from them.
Out in the dark streets of the city, my followers did their work. I had eighty loyal servants scouring the streets. In my rooms at the Hippodrome, I waited, parched, unsteady, distant.
Ravenor came up trumps. Ravenor, of course. With his promise, it wouldn't be long before he left the rank of interrogator behind and became a full inquisitor in his own right.
He found Beldame Sadia's lair in the catacombs beneath the derelict church of Saint Kiodrus. I hurried to respond to his call.
'You should stay here/ Bequin told me, but I shook her off.
'I have to do this, Alizebeth.'
Alizebeth Bequin was by that time one hundred and twenty-five years old. She was still as beautiful and as active as she had been in her thirties, thanks to discreet augmetic surgery and a regime of juvenat-drugs. Framed by the veil of her starch-silk dress, her handsome face and dark eyes glared at me.
'It will kill you, Gregor/ she said.
'If it does, then it is time for Gregor Eisenhorn to die.'
Bequin looked across the gloomy, candlelit room at Aemos, but he simply shook his ancient, augmented skull sadly. There were times, he knew, when there was simply no reasoning with me.
I went down into the street, where canister fires blazed and masked revellers capered and caroused. I was dressed all in black, with a floor length coat of heavy black leather.
Despite that, despite the flames around me, I was cold. Fatigue, and the lack of nourishment, were eating into my bones.
I looked at the moon. Threads of heat around a cold, black heart. Like me, I thought, like me.
A carriage had been called for. Six painted hippines, snorting and bridled, teamed to a stately landau. Several members of my staff waited nearby, and hurried forward when they saw me emerge onto the street.
I assessed them quickly. Good people all, or they wouldn't have made the cut to be here. With a few wordless gestures I pulled out four to accompany me and then sent the rest back to other duties.
The four chosen mounted the carriage with me. Mescher Qus, an ex-Imperial Guardsman from Vladislav; Arianrhod Esw Sweydyr, the swordswoman from Carthae; and Beronice and Zu Zeng, two females from Bequin's Distaff.
At the last moment, Beronice was ordered out of the carriage and Alize-beth Bequin took her place. Bequin had quit active service with me sixty-eight standard years before in order to develop and run her Distaff, but there were still times she didn't trust her people and insisted on accompanying me herself.
I realised this was just such a time because Bequin didn't expect me to survive and wanted to be with me to the end. In truth, I didn't expect to survive either.
The carriage started off with a whipcrack, and we rambled through the streets, skirting around ceremonial fires and torchlit processions.
None of us spoke. Qus checked and loaded his autocannon and adjusted his body armour. Arianrhod drew her sabre and tested the cutting edge with one of her own head hairs. Zu Zeng, a native of Vitria, sat with her head down, her long glass robes clinking with the carriage's motion.
Bequin stared at me.
'What?' I asked eventually.
She shook her head and looked away.
The church of Saint Kiodrus lay in the waterfowlers' district, close to the edge of the city and the vast, lizard-haunted salt-licks. The darkness throbbed with insect rhythms.
The carriage stopped in a street of blackly rotting stone pilings, two hundred metres short of the church's wrecked silhouette. The sky was amber darkness. Behind us, the city was alive with bright points of fire. The neighbourhood around us was a dead ruin, slowly submitting to the salty hunger of the marshes.
Talon wishes Thorn, rapturous beasts within/ Ravenor said over the vox-link.
Thorn impinging multifarious, the blades of disguise/ I responded. My throat was dry and hoarse.
Talon observes moment. Torus pathway requested, pattern ebony.'
'Pattern denied. Pattern crucible. Rose thorn wishes hiatus/
'Confirm/
We spoke using Glossia, an informal verbal code known only to my staff. Even on an open vox-channel, our communications would be impenetrable to the foe.
I adjusted my vox-unit's channel.
Thorn wishes aegis, to me, pattern crucible/
'Aegis arising/ Betancore, my pilot, responded from far away. 'Pattern confirmed/
My gun-cutter, with its fabulous firepower, was now inbound. I looked to the others in the shadows as I drew my weapon.
'Now is the time/1 told them.
We edged into the gloomy, slime-swathed ruins of the church. There was a heady stink of wet corruption in the air and sheens of salt clung to every surface. Clusters of maggot-like worms ate into the stones, and flinched back as the fierce beams of our flashlights found them.
Qus ran point, his autocannon swinging from side to side, hunting targets with the red laser rangefinder that projected from the corner of his bionically enhanced left eye. He was a stocky man, rippling with muscle under his harness of ceramite armour. He had painted his blunt face in the colours of his old regiment, the 90th Vladislavan.
Arianrhod and I tailed him. She'd dulled her sabre's blade with brick dust but still it hooked the light as she turned it in her hands. Arianrhod Esw Sweydyr was well over two metres tall, quite the tallest human woman I have ever met, though such stature is common amongst the people of far away Carthae. Her long-boned frame was clad in a leather bodysuit embossed with bronze studs, over which she wore a long, tasselled cloak of patchwork hide. Her silver hair was plaited with beads. The sabre was called Barbarisater and had been carried by women of the Esw Sweydyr tribe for nineteen generations. From the braided grip to the tip of the curved, engraved blade, it measured almost a metre and a half. Long, lean, slender, like the woman who wielded it. Already I could sense the vibration of the psychic energies she was feeding into it. Woman and blade had become one living thing.
Arianrhod had served with my staff for five years, and I was still learning the intricacies of her martial prowess. Ordinarily I'd be noting every detail of her combat trance methods, but I was too fatigued, too drawn out with hunger and thirst.
Bequin and Zu Zeng brought up the rear, side by side, Bequin in a long black gown with a ruff of black feathers around the shoulders, and Zu Zeng in her unreflective robes of Vitrian glass. They stayed back far enough so the aura of their psychic blankness would not conflict with the abilities of Arianrhod or myself, yet close enough to move forward in defence if the time came.
The Inquisition - and many other institutions, august or otherwise - has long been aware of the usefulness of untouchables, those rare human souls who simply have no psionic signature whatsoever and thus disrupt or negate even the most strenuous psychic attack. When I met her on Hubris, a century before, Alizebeth Bequin had been the first untouchable I had ever encountered. Despite her unnerving presence - even non-psykers find untouchables difficult to be around - I had added her to my staff and she had proved to be invaluable. After many years of service, she had retired to form the Distaff, a cadre of untouchables recruited from all across the Imperium. The Distaff was my own private resource, although I often loaned their services to others of my order. They numbered around forty members now, trained and managed by Bequin. It is my belief that the Distaff was collectively one of the most potent anti-psyker weapons in the Emperor's domain.
The ruins were festering with shadows and dank salt. Rot-beetles scurried over the flaking mosaic portraits of long-dead w
orthies that stared out of alcoves. Worms crawled everywhere. The steady chirrup of insects from the salt-licks was like someone shaking a rattle. As we probed deeper, we came upon inner yards and grave-squares where neglect had shaken free places-tones and revealed the smeared bones of the long interred in the loamy earth below. In places, rot-browned skulls had been dug out and piled in loose pyramids.
It saddened me to see this holy place so befouled and dreary. Kiodrus had been a great man, had stood and fought at the right hand of the sacred Beati Sabbat during her mighty crusade. But that had been a long time ago and far away, and his cult of worship had faded. It would take another crusade into the distant Sabbat Worlds to rekindle interest in him and his forgotten deeds.
Qus called a halt and pointed towards the steps of an undercroft that led away below ground. I waved him back, indicating the tiny strip of red ribbon placed under a stone on the top step. A marker, left by Ravenor, indicating this was not a suitable entry point. Peering into the staircase gloom, I saw what he had seen: the half buried cables of a tremor-detector and what looked like bundles of tube charges.
We found three more entrances like it, all marked by Ravenor. The Beldame had secured her fastness well.
Through there, do you think, sir?' Qus whispered, pointing towards the columns of a roofless cloister.
I was about to agree when Arianrhod hissed 'Barbarisater thirsts...'
I looked at her. She was prowling to the left, towards an archway in the base of the main bell-tower. She moved silently, the sabre held upright in a two-handed grip, her tasselled cloak floating out behind her like angelic wings.
I gestured to Qus and the women and we formed in behind her. I drew my prized boltpistol, given to me by Librarian Brytnoth of the Adeptus
Astartes Deathwatch Chapter on the eve of the Purge of Izar, almost a century before. It had never failed me.
The Beldame's minions came out of the night. Eight of them, just shadows that disengaged themselves from the surrounding darkness. Qus began to fire, blasting back a shadow that pounced at him. I fired too, raking bolt rounds into the ghostly opposition.
