by Dan Abnett
I jumped across the backs of several seats, and punched aside two servants who grabbed at me. On the steps of the seating tiers just above me, two household guards ran down, raising their autoguns to shoot at the creature loose in the crowd.
I felled one with a psychic lance powered by rage and adrenaline, and snatched his weapon from his hands. Before his companion could turn, I had blown him down the steps and over the rail into the pit with a short burst of gunfire.
I looked up at the seating where the Glaw nobles and their guests had been. Lord Glaw, Locke and the pipe-smoker had already disappeared and the guards were half-carrying Lady Fabrina and the ecclesiarch away. But Urisel Glaw was still there, bellowing at his men over the bloody tumult. He saw me.
The Inquisition will show you no mercy/ I yelled at him, though I doubted he could hear.
Urisel stared down at me for a moment, then shouted some more oath-laden orders and turned his attention to the camodon. It had ploughed beyond the common seating now and was disembowelling a member of the house militia. Multiple bloody gunshot wounds showed in its striped pelt.
Urisel snatched a hunting rifle that one of the men fetched for him. He took careful aim at the carnodon and fired.
The massive weapon roared and the huge bulk of the creature flipped over, its chest blasted open. Its falling bulk crushed the legs of a guard.
The crowd continued to flee, but the uproar decreased enough for me to notice that a series of bells had begun to ring. Metal bells, electrically triggered. From deeper in the vast mansion, other alarms sounded. Urisel lowered his rifle and gestured to some of his men to discover the meaning of the alarm. Those in the crowd not too far intoxicated or mindless with fear looked anxiously around.
There were distant, inexplicable sounds. I didn't wonder much about them. Urisel took aim again, at me this time.
I dived over and a section of wooden seats exploded.
I clambered up. Urisel was reloading the wide-bore hunting iron, and Terronce was heading down towards me, followed by other men.
Terronce fired. I aimed high and blew his head and his plumed silver helmet apart with another tight burst.
Urisel was about to fire again. He drew the hunting piece to his shoulder and found me in the crowd.
There was an abrupt, sizzling series of buzzing shots from somewhere behind me. Three of the militia guards at the pit rail juddered and fell, and Urisel Glaw was thrown backwards, his hunting rifle roaring as it fired wildly up into the dome. The crowd began to mob frantically again in a second, and the remaining soldiers swung their aim up, hunting for this new shooter.
I swept around and saw him at once. Midas Betancore, crouched up on the tiled slope of awning above the pit seating on the opposite side of the arena. His needle guns, one clutched in each hand, spat again, peppering the front stands with lethal shots. Members of the household and several more guards tumbled. One guard pitched over the rail and fell into the pit. Further along the front rail, the crowd's panic to get clear of the carnage turned into a stampede. The rail snapped and half a dozen pages and kitchen staff spilled down the side of the pit wall. One clung to a broken rail-end for a second before sliding off and dropping.
The remaining guards had found Midas now, and were firing up at the tiled awning with their autoguns. Tile chips exploded out in a haze of dust, but Midas was moving, sure-footed, along the terracotta shelf. Hol-stering his weapons, he slid down its length, grabbed the edge with both hands and executed a superb swing that carried him round and under the lip and into the emptying stands.
The guards tracked him, firing wildly, cutting down members of the screaming crowd.
I ran down to the rail. 'Cover! Cover!' I yelled down to Bequin and Aemos below. They were busy trying to drag Heldane's bloody form to the comparative safety of the pit wall. I ran to the nearby body of a guard and grabbed some more magazine clips from his harness.
A few shots whipped my way, but most were aimed across the pit at Midas. I took cover behind some seats and some of the carnodon's victims, and opened fire up at the stands, aiming short bursts at the militia. Return fire chopped my way and gobbets of wood and flesh sprayed up from my makeshift cover. Midas was moving again, his guns buzzing.
The alarms were still ringing, and now, behind them and the frenzy of the fleeing crowd, I could hear gunfire and the dull rumble of explosions.
Most of the arena had emptied now, except for the last handful of house guards trading gunfire across the pit with the stealthy Midas. The sounds of explosive fighting outside in the grounds and house were getting ever louder.
I reached the banks of seats where the masters of the house had sat. The Glaws and their honoured guests were now long gone. Urisel's hunting rifle lay on the ground, and blood flecked the seat. Midas had at least winged him with a needle round.
I pushed past the end of the seats and down into the stairwell, the auto-gun braced at my hip. The bodies of two staff members trampled in the press lay broken there.
Urisel Glaw had not gone far, bleeding badly from his shoulder wound. He heard me coming and staggered around, firing a small stub-pistol down the gloomy tunnel. Then he disappeared from view.
Gun-butt raised under my arm, I moved forward, searching the darkness of the dank stone tunnel. An opening to the left looked down into a stairwell that entered the cell bay below. To the right was a hatch that allowed access to the main house.
I pushed the hatch open with the barrel of the autogun.
Urisel came out of the cell-bay stairway, howling, and slammed into me from behind.
I hit the door frame face first, and the autogun fired off three shots as it twisted out of my grip.
Without even trying to turn, I doubled over and reached behind me, grabbing a fold of dress uniform cloth, and jerked Urisel Glaw around into the wall. He cried out.
I threw a left-handed punch that sent him reeling, then a right that smashed his teeth. He enveloped me in a bear hug and we stumbled back a few paces before I braced, kicked his legs out and jabbed a knuckle punch into his sternum.
The fight seemed to be out of him. I choked him with a clawing hand and cracked his skull back against the tunnel wall.
There will be no redemption for you, sinner/1 spat into his bloody face, 'or your foul house! Use your last breaths wisely and unfold your truths to me, or the Inquisition will teach you pain that Gorgone Locke has yet to imagine!'
Той-' he gurgled through blood and spittle and flecks of shattered teeth, 'you cannot even begin to imagine the Imperial misery House Glaw will wreak. Our power is too great. We will pitch the bastard Emperor from his golden throne and make him grovel and feed upon excrement. The worlds of the Imperium will blister and burn before Oberon and Pontius. Exalted will be the Great Darkness of Slaanesh-'
I cared little for his heretical ramblings, but the mention of that daemon-blasphemy turned my stomach and chilled my heart. I knocked him down, and looked around for something with which to bind his wrists.
Beyond the tunnel, the House of Glaw shook as if caught in a war zone.
Midas Betancore appeared at the mouth of the tunnel, and saw me lashing Urisel Glaw to a heating pipe with lengths of awning cord. He bolstered his needle pistols and walked down to join me. I heard him activate his vox-link and report his position. A curt response crackled back.
What's going on?' I asked him.
'A Batflefleet Scaras naval action/ he replied smugly.
* * *
He'd been out in the dark when Glaw's men came to seize Aemos, Bequin and Heldane. I was, by then, two hours overdue, and he'd slipped away from our apartment to look for signs of me. The militia had fanned out through the estate searching for him, but Midas was the sort of man who wouldn't be found if he didn't want it to happen. He had avoided the hunting parties, broke into the house's communication annexe and sent a brief but comprehensive report in code directly to Commodus Voke in Dorsay.
Voke's response had been immediate and aut
horitarian. The Glaw family had forcibly detained a servant of the Imperial Inquisition and his associates. That was all the excuse Voke had needed.
His demands, which brooked no refusal, swept clean over the heads of Fleet Admiral Spatian and his officio, and went straight to the Lord Militant Commander himself. The Lord Militant had mobilised a detachment of naval security troopers into Voke's remit within half an hour.
As an inquisitor, I know I have the right and authority to demand such supportive responses myself, even from a Lord High Militant. And I have done, on a very few occasions. But I was still impressed by the respect and fear the old inquisitor conjured in men of such supreme rank.
A confident move like this was characteristic of Voke, characteristic of his crushing, heavy methods. He'd wanted the slightest reason to come down upon House Glaw with the proverbial wrath of Macharius, and I had given it to him.
My capture, at least. Part of me was certain this show of influence and authority was Commodus Voke's way of establishing himself as alpha male, inquisitorially speaking.
I didn't care. I was glad of it, in truth. The bloodshed in the arena might have broken us out, but without the assault, we'd have never made it out of the Glaw estate and the clutches of the militia alive.
The operation was coded 'Pacification 505', 505 being the topographical signifier for House Glaw. The troops had run in before dawn in four armoured dropships, hugging the rolling terrain of the inland bluffs to avoid the more than competent sensor system of House Glaw.
The ships held off behind the neighbouring hills as the sun rose, about the time we were languishing in the cell, to allow a forward team of naval security troopers to ran ahead on foot and cut holes, electronically, in the perimeter defences of the great house. By then, they were in range of Betancore's personal vox set, and he had fed them logistic information and an insider's view of the militia's deployment.
At approximately the same moment when the first carnodon had lunged up out of its trap, the dropships had spurred forward from behind a long finger of copse and came powering up the vale towards the house. The Imperial Light Intruder Frigate Defence of Stalinvast, retasked by Admiral Spatian on the Lord Militant's instruction to hold geosynchronous orbit above target/Glaw/505, had obliterated the launch hangars behind the yard with pinpoint strikes from its lance batteries.
Two dropships, rocketing smoke charges and antipersonnel grenades, had settled in front of the main house, blowing out all the windows. Forty black-armoured troopers from naval security had then made an assault landing and struck at the main facade. Bewildered, more than seventy men of the house militia had attempted to repel them.
The other two dropships circled behind the house and spilled their troops into a landing yard still lit by the blazing ruins of the launch block. Within three minutes a running gun battle was shuddering down the halls and corridors of House Glaw. The alarms were ringing soundly by then.
House Glaw owned close on four hundred fighting men in its retinue, not to mention another nine hundred staff, many of whom took up weapons. Glaw Militia were all trained men, veterans, well armoured in green ballistic cloth and silver helmets, well equipped with autoguns, heavy stubbers and grenades. An army, by most standards. I know more than one commander in the Imperial Guard who has taken cities, whole planets indeed, with such a number. And they had the advantage of home soil. They knew the layout, the strengths, the weaknesses, of the old estate.
Naval security took them apart. The elite of Battlefleet Scarus, armed with matt-black hell-guns and iron discipline, they conquered and purged the great house room by room.
Some pockets of resistance were heavy. The troopers lost three men in a virtually point blank firefight around the kitchen area. A suicide run by two Glaw soldiers laden with tube charges vaporised another four and took twenty metres off the end of the east wing
Twenty-two minutes after the assault began, the militia had lost nearly three hundred men.
Numerous householders and low-ranking staff fled into the woods and valleys behind the house. A few made good their escape. Most were rounded up, and more than thirty killed by the tightening circle of Imperial Guard cordoning the estate. These men, two thousand of them, were recruits from the founding, Gudrunite riflemen roused from the barracks and shipped inland to experience a surprise taste of combat before ever leaving their birthworld.
The bloody resistance of the Glaw militia was mainly intended to give their nobles time to flee. The Glaws' off-world cousin and his retinue were cornered by the Gudrunite Rifles on the back path behind the house, arrested, and then massacred when they tried to fight their way out. Other traders and guests from the dinner surrendered to the enclosing forces.
Several orbital craft broke from the tree cover behind the main attack, launching from secret hangars in the woods behind the house. One was hammered out of the air by a trooper with a rocket launcher. Another two made it five kilometres down the valley before they were incinerated from above by the watchful Defence of Stalinvast.
Another, a fast and heavily armoured model, evaded the cover sweep and headed west. The Defence of Stalinvast launched a trio of fighters after it, and they eventually brought it down in the open sea after a lengthy
chase. Only weeks of forensic recovery might reveal who had been aboard any of those craft, and mere was no guarantee that an answer would be forthcoming even then. Smart money was on the likes of Lord Glaw, Lady Fabrina, Gorgone Locke, Dazzo the Ecclesiarch and the nameless pipe-smoking man. Certainly, none of those persons were among the anguished scum rounded up by the guard or by naval security.
Ninety minutes after it had begun, Pacification 505 was signalled as 'achieved' by Major Joam Joakells of naval security.
Only then did the launch carrying Commodus Yoke move in.
i
TWELVE
In the ruins of the great house.
Murmurings.
Uprising.
It was noon, but the night storm had persisted, and the fitful rain washed the colour out of the sky and doused the burning sections of House Glaw. A terrible, blackened ruin, it stood on the hilltop, its windows burned out, its roofs ragged, tiled lengths of beam, billowing grey and white smoke.
I sat in the yard, leaning back against the mudguard of an Imperial Guard troop carrier, sipping occasionally from a cut-glass decanter of amasec. My head was bowed. I needed medical attention and painkillers, a psychic restorative, a good meal, neural surgery to the hundreds of wounds Locke had inflicted, a bath, clean clothes…
More than anything else, I needed a bed.
Troops marched past, crunching their boots in time on the wet stone. Orders sang back and forth. Occasionally, a fighter ship made a pass overhead and vibrated my diaphragm with the throb of its afterburner.
My head swam. Fragments gathered and conflated in my unconscious and spilled over. Each time, I shook myself awake. The blank-eyed man was there, in the back of my head. I didn't want to think about him, and saw no place in this event for him, but his image lingered. Once, I was certain, he was standing across the yard from me, by the scullery door, smiling at me. I blinked him away.
I was still caked in blood, sweat and filth. Pain and fatigue clung to me like a shroud. A corporal from the naval security detail had recovered our
confiscated possessions from Urisel Glaw's apartment, and I had pulled on a shirt and my button-sleeved leather coat. The trooper had handed me my inquisitorial rosette, and I clutched it now, like a totem.
Eager men of the 50th Gudranite Rifles jostled Glaw House staff through the yard. The prisoners had their hands behind their heads, and some were weeping.
Somebody slid down next to me on the cold flagstones and leaned back against the greasy track assembly of the carrier.
'Long night/ Midas said.
I passed the decanter to him, and he took a long swig.
"Where's Aemos? The girl?'
'Last I saw, the savant was bustling around somewhere, maki
ng notes. I haven't seen Alizebeth since we freed them from the pit.'
I nodded.
'You're half-dead, Gregor. Let me call up a launch and get you to Dor-say/
'We're not done here/1 said.
Procurator Madorthene saluted me as he approached. He wasn't wearing his starchy white dress uniform now. In the coal-black armour of naval security, he looked bigger and more commanding.
'We've made a body exam/ he said.
'Oberon Glaw?'
'No trace/
'Gorgone Locke? The churchman Dazzo?'
He shook his head.
I offered him the decanter with a sigh. To my surprise, he took it, sat down with us and drank a mouthful.
They're all probably cinders in the craft that tried to escape/ he said. 'But I'll tell you this. Before it torched the two boats running the valley, the Defence of Stalinvast was sure it read no life signs/
'Decoys/ said Betancore.
The Glavian is right, for my money/ he said. Then he shrugged. 'But good armour can rob away signals. We may never know/
'We'll know, Madorthene/ I promised him.
He took another tug on the decanter, handed it back to me and rose, brushing down his seamless armour.
'I'm glad naval security could serve you here, Inquisitor Eisenhorn. I hope it's restored your faith in the battlefleet/
I looked up at him with a weak nod. 'I'm impressed you came to oversee yourself, procurator/
'Are you kidding? After what happened on the Essene, the admiral would have had my head!'
He walked away. I liked him. An honest man doing his best amid the conflicting political interests of battlefleet command and the Inquisition. In later years, I would come to value Olm Madorthene's honesty and discretion immeasurably.
A fragile hunched figure clomped across the yard and stood over me. 'Now whose methods seem wise?' Commodus Voke asked, with a sneer. 'You tell me,' I replied, getting up.
