by Dan Abnett
I swung hard, skillessly and frantic, the blade of the hunting sword biting into its rib-meat. It howled and flew back, smoke issuing from the gash.
I circled, hanger in my right hand, Bequin clinging to my left.
'You've done your homework. Pentagrammatic runes on your blade. A nice touch. They hurt!'
It lunged at me.
'But nothing like the hurt you will feel!'
Alizebeth screamed. She fell, and I struggled to hold on to her hand. If our contact broke, I would feel the full force of the daemonhost's power.
I blocked with my falcate blade, shredding the flesh off the left part of its chest, exposing the ribs.
Its talons ripped into my left shoulder and down my flank, ripping my body-armour into tatters.
Blood cascaded down inside my clothes.
I swung again, trying for an uin ulsar. It gripped my blade fast, in its one good hand. Smoke rose from the clamping fist around the blade.
It clenched its teeth in pain. The wards… hurt… but they are no… stronger… than the weapon… you should learn to… make your weapons sounder… next time…'
'Not that there will be… a next time….' it added. The hanger had become so hot, I let it go with a howl. Prophaniti tossed the buckled, molten steel aside. It had burned its hand terribly, but it didn't seem to notice.
'Now comes death/ it said, reaching for me.
The next few seconds are burned in my memory. I will never see such heroism again, I am sure. Captain Echbar and two of his Kasrkin troopers assaulted Prophaniti from the rear. Their lasguns wouldn't fire because Bequin and I were in their range-field.
Echbar body-tackled the daemonhost, smashing it away from us. Prophaniti hurled him aside, and then incinerated the second Kasrkin mid-leap with its eyes. The third jammed his Cadian bayonet up to the hilt in Prophaniti's breastbone. Fire exploded back from the wound, down the trooper's arm and engulfed him.
He fell back screaming as Echbar came in again, a ragged hole in his cheek and throat. His knife, clenched double-handed, split Prophaniti open down the back bone. The warp-energies that boiled out blew Echbar apart.
Screaming, Prophaniti writhed away through the air.
I knew it wasn't dead. I knew it couldn't really die.
But the Cadian elite had given me an opening by sacrificing their lives. They had fallen in the service of the God-Emperor, which is what every Cadian is born to do.
'Aegis! By scarlet inferno! Thorn redux!'
I screamed the words into my vox, clinging on to Bequin's hand.
Prophaniti came hurtling towards us.
Lights blazing, the gun-cutter surged in overhead in a killing run. The downdraft blasted the icy bracken flat and threw us over. Medea was low, so low…
The gun-servitors trained wing and chin turrets on the charging daemonhost.
When they opened up, their firepower was so monumental, they vapourised it.
The light went out.
I pulled Bequin to me as the drizzle of liquidised host-form rained on us out of the cold night.
I could hear Fischig calling my name.
'Help her/ I said to Fischig as I rose, and he scooped Bequin up.
I looked around. The place was littered with dead, most of them cultists. Inshabel had found Neve, lacerated but alive, twenty metres up the slope, and was calling for a medic.
The aft thrusters of the gun-cutter winked hot-white in the night sky as Medea banked around out of her ran to come down again.
Nayl, who had taken a flesh wound to the arm, leaned against the pylon and shut off his whirring cannon-drum.
'We… we need to regroup,' I said.
'Agreed/ said Fischig.
You have no idea what you're up against, do you?' asked Husmaan.
We all turned. The old skin-hunter from Windhover was stalking down the moor slope towards us, his long-las slung over one crooked arm. Fierce graupel had begun to fleck down from the clouding sky.
'Do you?' he hissed again. I felt Bequin tense.
It wasn't Husmaan.
Husmaan looked at me. White light shone from his eyes. His voice was Prophaniti's.
'Not the slightest clue/ he said. 'You can destroy my physical host, but you cannot break the links to the master/
'Husmaan!' Inshabel cried.
'Not here any more. He was the most open mind, so I took him. He will serve for a while/
I took a step forward. Husmaan raised a hand. 'Don't bother, Eisenhorn/ said Prophaniti. 'I could kill you all here, now… but what's about to happen is far more interesting/
Husmaan, his arms held out from his body and his head back, suddenly rose into the air, dropping his prized long-las. Steadily, he floated away into the sky until he had vanished over the moors into the dawn's counter glow.
'What did he mean?' asked Bequin.
'I don't-'
Floodlights mobbed over the rise and we suddenly heard the clank of armoured tracks.
Twenty Cadian APCs crested the brow, their floods beaming down at us. Cadian shock troops scrambled down the slope, covering us with their guns.
"What the hell?' Nayl cried.
I was stunned. This was the last thing I had expected.
'Inquisitor Eisenhorn/ boomed a vox-amped voice from the lead APC. 'For crimes against the Imperium, for the atrocity at Thracian, for consorting with daemonhosts, you are hereby arrested and condemned to death/
I recognised the voice.
It was Osma.
SIXTEEN
The Hammer of Witches.
Three months in the Carnificina.
Plight from Cadia.
Flanked by six robed interrogators reading aloud from the Books of Pain and the Chapters of Punishment, Inquisitor Leonid Osma came down the moorland slope towards me. Pink dawn light was beginning to spear lengthways across the bleak heath, and the gorse and bracken was stirred by the early morning breeze. Distantly, heath grouse and ptarcerns were whooping and calling to the midwinter sun.
Osma was a well-built, broad-shouldered man in his one fifties. He wore brass power armour that glowed almost orange in the ruddy dawn. Ornate Malleus crests decorated his armour's besagews and poleyns and six purity seals were threaded around his bevor like a floral wreath. A long cloak of white fur played out behind him, brushing the tops of the heather and gorse.
His face was blunt and pugnacious. His eyes were glinting dots set in puffy lids, fringed by heavy, grey eyebrows. His bowl-cut hair was the colour of sword-metal. Some years before, he had lost his lower jaw during a fight with a Khornate berserker. The augmetic replacement was a jutting chin of chrome, linked into his skull by feed tubes and micro-servos. The emblem of the Inquisition rose above his head on a standard mounted between his shoulder blades. In one hand he carried a power hammer, the mark of his ordo.
In the other, a sealed ebony scroll tube. I recognised it at once. A carta extremis.
This is insanity!' Fischig growled. The Cadians around us stiffened and jabbed with their weapons.
'Enough!' I warned Fischig. I turned to my companions. They looked so lost, so miserable, so dismayed.
'We will not fight our own,' I told them. 'Surrender your weapons. I will soon have this laughable error resolved.'
Bequin and Inshabel handed meir weapons to the Cadian guards. Fischig reluctantly allowed the storm troopers to divorce him from his riot-gun. Nayl undipped his drum-cannon's ammo feed, slid out the magazine box and passed mat to the waiting troops, leaving the disabled heavy weapon strapped around his torso on its harness.
I nodded, satisfied. 'Thorn bids Aegis, by cool water, soft,' I whispered into my vox and then turned to meet Osma.
He raised his power hammer in a brief gesture and the mumbling interrogators fell silent and closed their books. 'Gregor Eisenhorn/ he said in precisely enunciated High Formal Gothic, 'In fealty to the God-Emperor, our undying lord, and by the grace of the Golden Throne, in the name of the Ordo Malleus and the Inquisition, I call thee di
abolus, and in the testimony of thy crimes, I submit this carta. May Imperial justice account in all balance. The Emperor protects/
I slid my storm-gun out of its holster, ejected the clip and handed it to him grip first.
'I hear full well thy charge and thy words, and make my submission,' I responded in the ancient form. 'May Imperial justice account in all balance. The Emperor protects.'
'Dost thou accept this carta from my hand?'
'I accept it into mine, for that I may prove it thrice false.'
'Dost thou state thy innocence now, at the going off?'
'I state it true and clear. May it be so writ down.'
Vox-drones idling by the shoulders of the interrogators had been recording all this, but the youngest interrogator was transcribing it all with a holoquill into a dispositional slate suspended before him on a grav plate. I noted this detail with some satisfaction.
Preposterous though the charges were, Osma was prosecuting with total and precise formality.
'I ask of thee thy badge of office,' Osma said.
'I deny thy asking. By the code of prejudice, I declare my right to retain my rank until due process is concluded.'
He nodded. His language changed from High Formal to Low Gothic. '1 expected as much. Thank you for avoiding unpleasantness.'
'I don't think I've avoided any unpleasantness, Osma. What I have avoided is bloodshed. This is ridiculous.'
They all say that,' he muttered snidely, turning away.
'No,' I said levelly, stopping him dead. The guilty and the polluted fight. They deny. They straggle. In my lifetime, 1 have brought down nine marked diabolus. None went quietly. Mark that fact in your record/ I said
to the scribing interrogator. 'If I was guilty, I would not be submitting to your process so politely/
'Mark it so!' Osma told his hesitating scribe.
He looked back at me. 'Read the carta, Eisenhorn. You're guilty as sin. This show of understanding and co-operation is exactly what I would have expected from a being as canny and clever as you/
'A compliment, Osma?'
He spat into the bracken. 'You were one of the best, Eisenhorn. Lord Rorken actually pleaded for you. I acknowledge your past triumphs. But you have been turned. You are Malleus. You are an abomination. And you will pay/
This is insane…' Neve muttered, limping towards us.
'And none of your business, inquisitor general/ Osma replied.
Neve faced him, her torn armour wet with her own blood.
This is my province, inquisitor. Eisenhorn has proved himself to me. This charade is interfering with Inquisition business/
'Read the carta, inquisitor general/ Osma told her. 'And shut up. Eisenhorn is clever and convincing. He has fooled you, lady. Be thankful that you're not implicated/
My companions were arraigned at Kasr Derth, under Neve's recognizance. No such luxury for me. I was flown south aboard a Cadian military lighter, through the dawn, to the furthest islet of the Caducades group, to the infamous Cadian prison, the Carnificina.
They had fettered my hands and feet. I sat on a bracket-bench dropped from the wall of the lighter's armoured hold, surrounded by Cadian guards, and read the carta by the shifting light that sheared in through the window slits.
I could scarcely believe what I was reading.
Well?' grunted Fischig from his seat in the corner. I had been allowed one spokesman, and I had selected Fischig, with his legal background.
'Read it/ I said, holding the carta out to him.
One of the impassive Cadians took it from me and passed it to the scowling Hubrusian.
After a few moments spent reviewing the scroll, Fischig blurted out an incredulous profanity.
'Just what I thought/ I said.
The Carnificina jutted up from the thrashing sea like the molar of a massive herbivore, the gum eaten away.
It had not been built so much as hollowed out of the upthrust crag. There wasn't a wall on the prison isle thinner than five metres.
Vicious plungers broke in white spray around its granite base and the western aspects were open to the worst of the pelagic abuse from the oceans beyond. Icebergs from the calving glaciers at Cadu Sound and the distant Caducades Isthmus jostled and splintered in the open water between the prison isle and the barren atolls opposing it.
Kelp and hardy, lean axel trees decorated its lower slopes.
The lighter swung in over the eastern ramparts and settled on a pad cut from the stone. I was marched under guard out into the cold sunlight, and then into the dank hallways of the rock. The white-washed walls sweated and stank of seawater. Rusting chains ran down from the ceiling to the hatches of forgotten oubliettes.
I could hear the shouts and screams of prisoners. The demented and infected of the Cadians lived here, mostly ex-servicemen who had been driven mad in the wars of the Eye.
The Cadian troops handed me over to a squad of red-uniformed prison guards who reeked of unwashed flesh and carried pain-flails and leather whips.
They opened up a fifty centimetre-thick hatch cover riven with studs, and pushed me into a cell.
It was four paces by four, cut from stone, with no window. It stank of piss. The previous incumbent had died here… and never been removed.
I pushed aside his dry bones and sat on the wooden bunk. I knew nothing. I had no idea if the Cadian Interior had captured that rogue starship, or if anyone had managed to track the flight of the thing that had been poor Husmaan.
The path to Quixos, the path we had been so lucky to strike at last, was disappearing by the second as we played these games. And there was nothing I could do about it.
When did you first decide to consort with daemons?' asked Interrogator Riggre.
'1 have never done so, or decided to do so/
'But the daemonhost Cherubael knows you by name/ said Interrogator Palfir.
'Is that a question?'
'It-' Palfir stammered.
'What is your relationship with the daemonhost Cherubael?' cut in Interrogator Moyag sternly.
'I have no relationship with any daemonhost/1 replied.
I was chained to a wooden chair in the great hall of the Carnificina, winter sunlight shafting down from the high windows. Osma's three interrogators stalked around me like caged beasts, their robes swirling in the draft.
'It knows your name/ Moyag said testily.
'I know yours, Moyag. Does that give me power over you?'
'How did you orchestrate the atrocity at Thracian Hive Primaris?' asked Palfir.
'I didn't. Next question/
'Do you know who did?' asked Riggre.
'Not precisely. But I believe it was the being you have referred to. Cherubael/
'He has been in your life before/
'I have thwarted him before. One hundred years ago, at 56-Izar. You must have the records/
Riggre glanced at his colleagues before replying. 'We do. But you have been searching for him ever since/
'Yes. As a matter of duty. Cherubael is a repellent abomination. Do you wonder that I would seek him out?'
'Not all your contacts with him have been recorded/
'What?'
'We know some contacts have remained secret/ Moyag rephrased.
'How?'
The sworn testimony of an Alain von Baigg. He states that you sent an operative code-named Hound out to make contact with Cherubael, one year ago, and that you refrained from telling your ordo master about it/
'I didn't think to bother Lord Rorken with the matter/
'So, you don't deny it?'
'Deny what? Hunting for Chaos? No, I don't/
'In secret?'
What inquisitor doesn't work in secret?'
"Who is Hound?' asked Palfir.
I had no wish to make Fischig's life more difficult just then. I said, 'I don't know his real name. He works clandestinely/
I thought they would press me, but instead Moyag said, 'Why did you survive the Thracian horror?'
'I was lucky/
Palfir walked a circle around me, his polished boots squeaking on the worn floor. 'Let me make it clear. We are just beginning here. In respect to your rank and career, we are employing interrogation of the First Action. The First Action is-'
I cut him short. 'I have been an inquisitor for many years, Palfir. I know what the First Action is. Verbal interview without duress/
Then you know of the Third and Fifth Actions?' sneered Riggre.
'Light physical torture and psychic interrogation. And by the way, you just utilised the Second Action – verbal threat of and/or description of Actions that may follow/
'Have you ever been tortured, Eisenhorn?' asked Moyag.
Yes, by less squeamish men than you. And I have interrogated too. Second Action methods really won't work on me/
'Inquisitor Osma has authorised us to use any methods up to and including Ninth Action/ spat Palfir.
'Again, a threat. Second Action. It won't work on me. 1 told you that. I am trying to be co-operative/
'Who is Hound?' asked Riggre. Ah, there it was, the follow-up, designed to wrong-foot by coming out of sequence. For a moment, I began to admire their interrogation skills.
'I don't know his real name. He works clandestinely/
'Is it not Godwyn Fischig? The man you chose as your second here. The man who waits outside this chamber?'
There are times when the injuries Gorgone Locke did to my face on Gudrun have their benefits. My face simply couldn't show the reaction they were hoping to see. But inside, I balked. Their intelligence was good, good enough to have cracked Glossia, if only partially. I was sure of the source. They had already mentioned that weasel von Baigg. Months before, on Thracian right before the atrocity, I had begun to suspect von Baigg. At that time, I merely assumed he was Lord Rorken's plant to watch over me. Now I realised he was happy to talk to anyone. I had recognised von Baigg's weakness and stalled his career. Clearly he had decided to seek advancement from other inquisitors by selling me out.
'If you are telling me Fischig is the operative I know as Hound, I am truly surprised/ I replied levelly, choosing my words with extreme care.
"We will talk to him in time,' said Palfir.
'Not while he is my recognised second. That would break the code of prejudice. If you wish to interview him, I must be allowed a new second. Of my choosing.'
