by Dan Abnett
The psychic sting shocked him into silence, but he was generally protected by psi-dampers and ignored my next will-driven order to 'desist' completely.
The chainsword revved around and I threw myself aside as it cleft a bench pew in two. The backswing nearly caught me, but I dodged behind
a pier column that took the force of the blow in a splintering shower of sparks and stone chippings.
Ungish was still crying out in pain. The sound chilled and infuriated me. I fired my laspistol again, but the last few shots fizzed and spluttered, underpowered. The power cell was exhausted. I dived again, feinting past his slow-moving bulk, and grappled with him from behind. It was a desperate ploy. Unarmoured as I was, I stood little chance of overwhelming his brute force or hurting him. He got a steel-gloved paw round behind himself, grabbed me by the coat and tore me off him.
My coat ripped. I bounced hard off a pillar and crashed awkwardly through the delicate fretwork of a confessional screen. I had barely pulled myself out of the flimsy wooden wreckage when the chainsword swooped in again and chewed a deep gouge in the cathedral floor.
I ran from him then, across the south aisle towards the feretory. Two men of the cathedral's Frateris Militia, clearly seeking advancement by coming to the aid of the fearsome Ministorum witch-hunter, closed in to block my escape. They were both clad in Ezra's yellow and carried short stave-maces in one hand and temple lanterns in the other.
I think they both quickly regretted their enthusiastic involvement.
I didn't even bother with the will. I think my rage was too great to have used it cleanly anyway. I side-stepped the first mace, caught and broke the wrist that wielded it, and kicked the man down. The mace turned in the air as it flew from the sprawling oafs useless hand, and I caught it and turned it cross-wise in time to block the down-stroke of the other man's club. As he bounced back with the recoil of his own, negated strike, I smacked him in the side of the knee with my captured weapon. He fell over with sharp wail of pain, losing hold of his own mace and trying to beat me with his temple lamp instead. I took the lamp away from him and kicked him in the belly so he doubled up on his side, sobbing and trying to remember how to breathe.
The first man was back up, running at me. I spun and smashed the temple lamp in his face, sideways. Both its light and his went out.
The paving shook as Tantalid hove down on me. I used the captured mace like a sword, double-handed, to deflect his first strokes. It was iron-banded hardwood, and tough, but no match for a chainsword. After three or so clashes, the mace was chewed and mangled. I threw it aside and tore a church standard down from the wall beside the feretory door. Theo-phantus immediately shredded the old embroidered cloth and wood-frame titulus from the end, but that left me with three metres of cast-iron pole.
I held it like a quarterstaff, striking Tantalid hard on the side of the head with one end and then square on the opposite hip with the other. Then I stabbed the end at him viciously, like a spear-thrust, and managed to dent the chest-plate of his armour.
In response - and frothing mad with anger himself now - he put up Theophantus and shortened my pole by about half a metre. I wrenched
the remaining pole around one-handed and struck him on the other side of the head. Blood was spilling from his ears. He howled and made an attack that almost took my arm off.
My third attempt to clip his miserable head missed. He was wise to it now, and blocked with his chainsword. The chain teeth caught in the pole and plucked it from my hands, throwing it up ten metres into the air. It landed behind some pews with a loud, echoing clang.
I rocked back from the follow up, but the murderous saw caught my right shoulder and gashed me deeply. Clutching the wound, I ducked again, and Theophantus decapitated a statue of Saint Ezra's pardoner.
No matter what I did, it was going his way. He had the weapons and the armour on his side. And now I was bleeding badly, which meant I would progressively slow and weaken, and it was just a matter for him to keep pressing the onslaught and he would triumph.
I became aware of another commotion near the main doors of the great church. Many startled worshippers and hierarchs had retreated and gathered there to watch the holy combat. Now they were spilling aside, their huddle breaking. A figure stormed through them.
Medea.
She ran down the main aisle, calling to me, firing her needle pistol over the tops of the pews at Tantalid. The lethal rounds pinged and clicked off his armour, and he turned in annoyance.
Tantalid dragged out his boltpistol and fired at this new attack. Medea hurled the object she had been carrying in her other hand and then disappeared from view as she dived to evade the hammer blows of the bolt rounds. At least, I prayed it was a deliberate dive. If he had hit her...
The object she had thrown bounced off a pew near me and landed on the floor, spilling from its yellow cloth.
Barbarisater.
Risking dismemberment from the chainsword, I hurled myself at the Carthaen blade. My hands found its long grip and I rolled twice to avoid the next downstrike of Theophantus.
Barbarisater purred in my grip as I came up. The runes blazed with vengeful light.
Tantalid realised that the nature of the battle had suddenly changed. I saw it in his eyes.
My first swing severed his wrist, cutting clean through the power-armoured cuff, dropping his hand to the floor, still clutching the smoking boltgun.
My second met Theophantus and destroyed it, spraying disintegrating chain-teeth and machine parts into the air.
My third cut Witchfinder Tantalid in two from the left shoulder to the groin. Neither half of him made a sound as they fell apart onto the cathedral floor.
Barbarisater was still seething with power, and twitched as Medea emerged unhurt from behind a choir stall. I forced the hungry blade down.
'Come on!' she said.
Ungish was dead. There was nothing I could do for her. And there was so much I should have done. She had been right. Right about this. Right about her fate. I dreaded to think how much more of what she had said might prove to be true too.
Hearing my frantic glossia call when Tantalid first attacked, Medea had taken the launch up from Ezra Plain outside the city, despite all official warnings for her to abort, and flown it right in, setting down in the courtyard outside Saint Ezra Outlooking.
As we ran out now, into the evening, through crowds of stunned onlookers who leapt out of our path, the city arbites and the Frateris Militia were rising in alarmed response. There was no point waiting to face them.
The launch shot us skywards, back towards the Essene, to leave Orbul Infanta as fast as we could.
It was a mess, and I was terribly disheartened. The confidence with which we had all set out from Cinchare seemed to have dissolved. Orbul Infanta had been just the first part of a long stratagem, and thanks to Tantalid, it had ended badly. I'd failed to contact Gladus, and discovered that as careful as I had been, my communiques were not secure. The third task I had planned to undertake on Orbul Infanta, a search of the Imperial archivum for certain information relating to Quixos, hadn't even been started.
At least the weapons were consecrated. And Barbarisater had more than proved itself in combat.
Frigates of the Frateris Militia, along with several Imperial Navy guard boats, attempted to block the Essene, but Maxilla's navigator got us out of the system and real space before they could even close range. Some ships pursued us into the warp, and we were chased for eight days, finally losing our pursuers through a series of real-space decelerations and redirections. We went to ground. A month at a low-tech depot on a farming world, another two at the automated station at Kwyle. I was jumping at shadows by then, expecting enemies and rivals to loom out of every doorway. But it was quiet and we were unmolested. Maxilla had made a career out of passing unnoticed and avoiding attention. He lent that practiced art to our cause now, and reassured me into the bargain.
Three months after leaving Orbul Infanta in such haste, we risked a ru
n to Gloricent, an outlying but prosperous trade world in the Antimar sub-sector, another division of the Scarus Sector, just two sub-sectors over from the Helican sub itself. Though worlds like Gudran and Thracian Primaris were a good four months away by starship, it felt a little like being home. Disguised, Medea and I visited the sea-lashed stone piles of one of the main trade-hives, and procured a pair of astropaths, hiring their services from the local commercial guild on an open-ended lease.
Their names were Adgur and Ueli, both young males, both psychically capable but dull-witted and emotionless. Their young heads were shaved and their plugs shiny and new, and they spoke to me in overly formal ways that sounded like the parrot-learned etiquette it sadly was. But their eyes were ringed with darkness and their flesh was losing its youthful lustre. The rigour of the astropathic life was already taking its toll.
Using them, I sent fresh communiques that superceded the original ones and revised certain aspects of my scheme. None of the messages now suggested the sort of trial meetings I had attempted with Gladus. I would not give so much away now.
After a week, and no reponses, we left Gloricent and went, via Mimonon to Sarum, the capital world of the Antimar sub-sector. I managed to do some useful work in its libraries, but backed off when a sour little confessor on a research sabbatical took to following me as if he recognised me.
While at anchor off Sarum, I got my first responses, all coded: from Bequin on Messina, and from Aemos on Gudrun. Both reported that their parts of the plan were going much more smoothly than mine had. Two days later, a partially scrambled astropathic message came from Inshabel on Elvara Cardinal. What parts I got of it seemed to indicate some success. I was impatient to know more.
The week before we left Sarum, I received two more, both anonymous, one from Thracian Primaris, the other from a cluster of slave-worlds that owed fealty to the Salies Province of the Ophidian sub-sector. From the careful code and language of both, I recognised their senders.
My spirits lifted.
After that improvement, things again seemed to slow and stagnate. There was no progress, and no further communications. We were forced to quit Lorwen, our next stop after Sarum, with unseemly haste, when a flotilla of warships from Battlefleet Reaver arrived. I know now that the Battlefleet manoeuvres at Lorwen - and incidentally at Sarum and Femis Major too - were part of a major precautionary deployment against a pair of space hulks that had suddenly roamed into the sub-sector. But they caused us over thirteen weeks of anxious hiding amongst the brown and black dwarf stars of an extinguished stellar nursery.
Another Candlemas went by while we were in the empyrean, en route to the Drewlian Group. Medea, Maxilla and I marked it together, just the three of us. The two astropaths and the navigator were not invited to attend. I raised a glass to toast the continued success of our mission. I don't think I would have been so hearty if I had known it would be another full year before the final act of the plan would play out.
I spent the first four months of 342 fruitlessly engaged in a search for the celebrated precog-hermit Lukas Cassian in the stinking marshes of Drewlia Two, only to learn that he had been murdered by a Monodominant cult
four years earlier. During that quest, I terminated the activities of a plague-daemon sect infesting the marshlands. That was quite an undertaking in its own right, but my full account of it is filed in the Inquisition archives separately, and it has no bearing on this record. Besides, I still regard it bitterly as an interruption and waste of time. Neither will I set down here the full story of Nathan Inshabel's ventures on Elvara Cardinal, or Harlon Nayl's frankly extraordinary experiences on Bimus Tertius, though both tales connect to this record. Inshabel has written his own, refreshingly witty account of his exploits, which may be accessed by those with the appropriate clearance, something I recommend as illuminating and rewarding. Nayl asked me not to include his story, and has never committed it to record. It may be learned only by those with the temerity to ask him and the money to pay for a long night's serious drinking.
All this while, I remained an Imperial outlaw, wanted by the Inquisition for my heresies. It is interesting to note that at no time during this period did the Inquisition formally refute or overturn the carta I had declared on Quixos.
The year 343.M41 was half gone already by the time the Essene took me to Thessalon, a feudal world near Hesperus in the Helican sub-sector. It had been chosen by Nayl as the point for our secret congregation. Commanding a twenty man field team selected from my staff on Gudrun, he arrived a week before the rest of us to secure the location and make sure we were not compromised. His preparations were thorough and ingenious. No one entered the area without him knowing it, nor could anyone have done so. At the slightest sign of outside interruption or official interference, we would have ample time to withdraw and flee. As a final precaution, I was the last to arrive.
Thessalon is a tough little world whose population lives in a dark age and knows nothing of the Imperium or the galaxy beyond its skies.
The meeting place was a rained keep in the north of the second continent, two thousand kilometres from the nearest indigenous community. A few lonely animal herders and subsistence farmers undoubtedly saw the lights of our ships in their heavens, but to them they were just the portents of the gods and the bright eyes of fabulous beasts.
Medea deposited me at the edge of a conifer forest at nightfall, and then took the gun-cutter back to stand off as air-cover, ready to redeploy at a moment's notice. For the first time in over two standard years, I was dressed as an inquisitor in black leather, storm coat and proudly displayed rosette. I also wore my faith-harness with the engraving Puritus. Damn anyone who believed I wasn't worthy of it.
Nayl, in combat armour, with a laser carbine cradled over one arm, appeared out of the trees and greeted me. We shook hands. It was good to see him again. His men, who were all around I was sure, were invisible in the gathering darkness.
Nayl led me through the black woods into a break in the trees where the pine tops framed a perfect oval of starfilled mauve. The keep, a jumbled pile of grey stone, stood in the clearing, with hooded lamps glowing from the lower slit windows.
Nayl walked me past and around the alarm-sensors, the tripwires and the beams of motion detectors that webbed the structure. Servitor-skulls from my personal arsenal hovered in the shadows, alert and armed.
Bequin and Aemos met me under the broken entrance arch. Aemos looked pale and worried, but his face broke into a warm smile as he saw me. Bequin hugged me.
'How many?' I asked her.
'Four/ she said.
Not bad. Not great, but not bad. It rather depended who those four were.
'And everything else?'
All the preparations are now set. We can begin this undertaking at any time,' Aemos said.
We have a target?'
We do. You'll learn how when we brief everyone.'
'Good/ I paused. Anything else I should know?'
All three of them shook their heads.
'Let's do it then/1 said.
Despite all the precautions, I was taking my life in my hands. I was presenting myself, voluntarily, to four members of the Inquisition. I was trusting that my previous friendships and allegiances with them would count for more man the accusations Osma had laid at my door. These four were the only four who had responded out of the original twenty communiques. Nayl had vetted each one, but there was still a very real chance that any or all of them had attended simply to execute the declared heretic Gregor Eisenhorn. I would soon know.
As I stepped into the main, candlelit chamber, a hush killed the small talk and six men turned to face me. Fischig, imposing in black body armour, nodded me a half-smile. Interrogator Inshabel, in a bodyglove and lightweight cloak, bowed his head and smiled nervously.
The other four stared at me levelly.
I walked into their midst solemnly.
The first lowered the hood of his maroon cape. It was Titus Endor. 'Hello, Gregor/ he said
.
Well met, old friend/ Endor had been one of the first two to contact me anonymously the previous year, from the Salies slave-worlds. The other, who had written from Thracian Primaris, stood next to him.
'Commodus Voke. You honour me wim your presence/
The wizened old wretch sneered at me. 'For the sake of our history, and damn-his-eyes Lyko, and other matters, I am here, Eisenhorn, though the Emperor knows I am very suspicious of this. I will hear you out, and if I don't like what you have to say, I will withdraw... without breaking the confidence of mis meeting!' he added sternly with a raised finger. 'I will not betray this congress, but I reserve the right to leave and quit if I find it worthless.'
That right is yours, Commodus.'
To his left stood a tall, confident man I didn't recognise. He wore brown leather flak armour under a long blue coat of cavalry twill and his silver rosette was fixed on the left breast. His domed head was shaved, but there was a violet glint in his eyes that told me he was a Cadian.
'Inquisitor Raum Grumman/ said Fischig, stepping forward. Grumman took my proffered hand with a curt nod.
'Inquisitor General Neve acknowledges your communique to her, and asks me to express her true sadness that she could not join you here. She personally requested me to take her place, and render you the service I freely render her'
'I am grateful for it, Grumman. But right from the start, I want to be sure that you know what we're about here. Just being here because your provincial chief requested it isn't enough.'
The Cadian smiled. 'Actually, it is. But to reassure you, I have reviewed the matter carefully with Neve herself and your man Fischig. I have no illusions about the danger of being here and siding with you. Given the evidence, I would have been here anyway.'
'Good. Excellent. Welcome, Grumman/
The identity of the fourth and final guest took me aback. He was clad in polished battleware plating that looked custom-made and exorbitantly expensive. With gauntleted hands, he lifted the scowling houndskull helmet off his head. Inquisitor Massimo Ricci, of the Helican Ordo Xenos. He was hardly an old friend, but I knew him well.
