by Dan Abnett
An afterimage of the victim had appeared to me. She was wearing a cheap, revealing dress and had taken a seat on a nearby freight trunk, one leg crossed over the other. The raised foot was swinging impatiently.
+Lana? Can you hear me?+
‘How do you know my name, mister?’ the image asked, watching me.
+Administratum files. Lana, who was it?+
‘Who was it that what? Come on, I’ve got punters waiting. What are you on about?’
+Lana. Please let me see. Who did this to you?+
‘Who did what to me? Look, I haven’t got all night,’ she breathed. ‘Show me some money, mister.’
I reached into my pocket, and produced three crowns. The air was very cold. My breath was steaming, and so were the open wounds on the corpse in front of me. On the trunk, image Lana swung her leg.
‘That’ll do it,’ she said. ‘What do you want? Full service, all the stuff?’ She stood up abruptly and reached down to pull her dress off over her head. It was only then that she seemed to notice the body on the floor.
The image stared down at it for a long time, her hands frozen in the act of bunching up her dress to drag it over and off. When she looked at me again, her eye makeup was blotted and running.
‘When?’ she asked.
+Not long ago.+
‘Oh, Throne. What did I ever do to deserve that?’
+Nothing. Lana, I want to know who it was. Will you show me?+
She showed me.
She showed me, her voice growing steadily quieter and quieter, and when she was done, she faded altogether without any protest, casting me one last, hurt look with her makeup stained eyes.
I took off my storm coat and laid it over the corpse.
Outside, dawn was no more than an hour away. The rain had eased off and the Cackle had dropped in intensity. Zelwyn stood by the waiting militia transports, taking repeated draws from an old hip flask. When I walked up, he offered it to me. I took a big swallow.
‘Are you– ?’ he began
‘I need a moment.’ The work had drained me, not so much sapping my will as abrading my emotions.
‘Can the details move in, at least?’ he asked.
I nodded. Several militia officers and two coroners with a stretcher went into the warehouse at Zelwyn’s nod. After a few minutes, someone brought me my coat.
I gestured to Zelwyn and walked away in the direction of the New Bridge.
‘It’s a good thing I stayed,’ I told him. ‘This turns out to be an ordo matter after all.’
‘A cult?’
‘No, and not a hunter either… at least it could be either of those things, but that’s not what makes it an ordo matter. We’re dealing with a regia occulta.’
‘Hidden way,’ he translated. Zelwyn was no fool, he had High Gothic.
‘That’s the literal translation. In the ordo Malleus, it has a more specific meaning.’
‘Go on.’
‘A regia occulta is a pathway… A tunnel or portal, if you like, that links our reality with that of the warp.’
‘Is it a deliberate thing?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps. Cults and heretics do sometimes open them deliberately. But it could be a natural occurrence. Most are. The fabric of space is thin in places, you see, and sometimes there are leaks.’
He shook his head and a sad smile appeared under his heavy moustache. ‘I don’t actually know much about the warp, sir,’ he said.
‘Nor should you, commissioner. It’s forbidden lore. I’m just telling you what you need to know. There is a regia occulta in Jared County Town, and it’s right here.’
We were standing at the Commercia end of the New Bridge.
It took Zelwyn just a few minutes to have the bridge and its feeder roads closed off and barricaded by the militia. Another hour, and it would have been teeming with traffic heading in for work.
‘Can you tell me why this only happens when the bridge is up?’ Zelwyn asked. ‘I mean, surely that would block a crossing?’
‘I’ll do better than tell you,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you.’
We took up a position at the Commercia end; me, Zelwyn, and four men from the militia armed with powerful autorifles. At my nod, the commissioner signalled to the bridge machine room on the far bank, and the operators engaged the hydraulics. Ponderously, with a dull squeal like gates opening, the massive spans began to lift.
The Cackle fluoresced in the dawn sky over our heads. Blue ropes of fizzling corposant writhed and trickled like snakes around the iron finials of the bridge towers and traced their way along the rising edges of the gigantic metal spans.
The hydraulics cut out when the spans were at a standard lifted position, at about forty degrees from the horizontal. We waited, looking up the steep metal slope of the span facing us. Below us, out of sight, the fast-running river gurgled and hissed.
We waited for ten minutes. Corposant gathered in increasingly heavy ribbons around the raised tips of the bridge span, as if attracted there in concentration, like lightning drawn to a conductor.
There was a dry electric crack, and we smelled ozone. One of the militiamen pointed. A whip of corposant had flicked out from the tip of one span and connected with the tip of the other, like a squiggle of electrostatic voltage crackling between two insulated orbs. It remained there, jerking and sizzling, like a bright, twisting rope tying the two halves of the raised bridge together. This feature had not been evident in the patchy disposition Lana Howey had shown me, but I suddenly felt I had discerned the key mechanism of the infernal regia occulta.
One of the militia men started to say something, but I already knew ‘it’ was happening. The hairs on my neck had risen. I felt something akin to a ball of ice in my stomach, and a searing pain behind my eyes.
The killer came into view. He simply manifested out of nowhere, as if the air had parted like a curtain and let him through. He appeared high up on the span ahead of us, and began to plod down the steep slope. He did not see us at first. We heard his feet slapping heavily on the metal roadway.
Though humanoid, he wasn’t human. I was the largest man in our party, and he was twice my mass and half my height again. He came wrapped up in a heavy, ragged cloak of animal skins with a hood drawn up. His shoulders were very broad.
The pain behind my eyes was getting worse by the second. I could barely focus.
‘Kill it,’ I said.
We opened fire: four military grade autorifles, firing reinforced rounds with fifty per cent more grain in them than standard, Zelwyn’s lasgun, and my Tronsvasse assault pistol. The noise was stunning and the muzzle flash a strobing flutter. The killer was dead in just a few seconds. Our firepower tore him apart and shredded his foul cloak, though he possessed such astonishing strength that he actually managed to walk into our fusilade a step or two, trying to shrug it off, before it overcame him.
He fell heavily, and rolled down the slope.
‘He’ was a mature ork warrior. Released by his spasming paws, a huge cleaver and a large metal cudgel lay on the roadway beside him. We approached slowly. Greenskins are notoriously hard to kill, and though we had blown this one wide open, I fired three more rounds into its skull to be on the safe side. Ichor, almost black in the dawn light, ran down the slope. The mangled corpse showed signs of body paint, tribal markings and lots of crude piercings and bangles. Fresh human ears were strung around its throat on a wire.
‘A greenskin?’ Zelwyn murmured. ‘But this isn’t green space. There haven’t been any orks in this sub for generations.’
‘It didn’t come from this sub,’ I said. I was finding it hard to speak or concentrate. The pain behind my eyes was even worse than before. It felt like a hot wire. ‘It came from whatever random site this regia occulta connects to. This beast went out hunting one day, and ended up here. We’ll never know, I fancy, where… where…’
‘Inquisitor? Inquisitor Eisenhorn?’ I heard Zelwyn say. I felt his hand catch my arm. The pain behind my eyes had turned
into full-blown psyk agony. I could barely stand, let alone speak.
And I really wanted to speak. I needed to. I needed to yell out, ‘It’s not over!’
The regia occulta was still open. While we had been standing there, gawping at the ork’s cadaver, a second one had walked in through the hidden way.
For such a massive thing, it moved very fast. I moved like lead, transfixed by the pain the seething warp gate was lancing into my receptive mind.
I heard a feral roar, and smelled a foul animal scent. I fell, shoved aside, I think. An autorifle fired.
The ork slew the first militiaman as he landed amongst us, splitting the fellow straight down through the crown with his jagged cleaver. The man collapsed under the force of the blow, his sectioned skull spilling open as the blade jerked back out, his heels drumming the ground. The ork caught another man by the throat, yanked him off his feet, and bit away his face.
It is awful to reflect that this unfortunate lived for at least another ten minutes.
The ork broke the back of a third militiaman with a stinging cudgel blow, before making off in great bounding leaps towards the unlit buildings of the Commercia. Zelwyn and the sole remaining militiaman fired after it. The man with the broken back lay on the ground, screaming.
‘Eisenhorn?’ Zelwyn yelled.
+Lower. The. Bridge.+
I didn’t want to use my will on the poor fellow, but I had no choice. My mouth wouldn’t work. Zelwyn wet himself as my mind intruded upon his. To his credit, he rallied and signalled the machine room.
The New Bridge slowly rattled and clanked back into place. The corposant charge between the spans shorted out and vanished as the opposite ends touched.
My mind cleared at once, the pain draining back. The regia occulta was shut.
Blood had streamed out of my nose and soaked the front of my jacket. I got up and ran towards the warehouses. The ork had vanished from sight. I had to find it, before it found anyone else. A greenskin is dangerous enough. This one was enraged, possibly wounded, and knew it was cut off and pursued by its mortal foe, man.
Zelwyn ran after me. The remaining militia man stayed put, too shocked to move, his rifle limp in his white-knuckled hands.
‘Get back, Zelwyn!’ I shouted. ‘Gather your militia in full force.’
‘Like hell!’ he yelled back. He shouted over at the units waiting behind the barricades, and they moved forwards after us. We entered the most likely venue, a warehouse stacked with mineral hoppers. Glow globes hung from the rafters, but not all of them worked. Frail daybreak glimmered through the rooflights.
‘In here?’ Zelwyn whispered, panting.
I held up my hand for hush. The place was quiet, except for the mocking chuckle of the Cackle. I tried to reach out with my mind, but I was drained, and no human psyker can read the greenskin mind. They are blunt to us. I took a deep breath instead, and smelled the air: mineral stink, wet rocks, and a hint, just a hint, of animal odour.
We edged forwards. I saw dark, wet spots on the rockcrete floor, leading between the piled hoppers. Unless someone had recently carried a leaky promethium drum through the place, Zelwyn had managed to wound the creature right enough. I touched one of the spots. It oozed warmth.
‘It’s here,’ I whispered.
Zelwyn already knew that. It had come out of the shadows, nightmarishly silent for something so big, and seized him by the throat. I turned slowly.
The ork had pulled the Jared commissioner in against its massive chest like a mother hugging a baby to its breast. Its left paw entirely encircled the man’s neck. Zelwyn’s eyes were wide, and his face was pale. The ork raised its right hand and gently rested the massive cleaver on Zelwyn’s scalp. Tiny trickles of blood ran down Zelwyn’s face.
The bull-ork’s yellow eyes, deep in the brow-ridged sockets, glared at me. Its heavy, flaccid lips wrinkled and twitched. Its tongue, huge and greasy, worked behind its rotting peg teeth. Each one of those teeth was the size of my palm.
The ork was not a bright beast, but it was smart enough, instinctive enough, to recognise its predicament. It was bargaining with me, a life for a life. This much I knew. Otherwise, Zelwyn would have been dead already.
I thought about taking a shot, but dared not risk hitting the commissioner. I was too spent, and it was no time to try my aim. Besides, greenskins are notoriously hard to kill. Even if I hit it, one round from a Tronsvasse would not do the trick.
All I had was my will. I couldn’t impel the ork in any way, but Zelwyn was a different matter.
Without hesitation, I reached into the commissioner’s panicking mind. He was still clutching his laspistol, dangling at his side. I squeezed his finger for him. The shot blew clean through the arch of the ork’s slabby right foot.
The greenskin convulsed in pain, but I already had a grip on Zelwyn’s motor function, and I threw him forwards. I felt his astonishment as his body acted without his permission. He flew out of the ork’s briefly weakened grip so fast and hard, he careered forwards and bounced face-first off the hopper to my right.
I was already firing, my weapon braced in a two-handed grip. I emptied the assault pistol’s clip into the greenskin’s chest, filling the air with drenching black mist and driving the monster back into the stack of mineral hoppers behind it. It smashed heavily into the metal siding, but remained on its feet.
I ejected the dead clip, and let it drop and clatter onto the floor as I snapped home a reload from my coat pocket. I tore off the second clip in one go, firing into the ork’s face and neck. The back of its vast skull banged repeatedly against the hopper behind it. Spray-patterns of ichor splashed out across the hopper’s side.
It swayed, then took another step towards me.
‘Oh, for Throne’s sake,’ I hissed, ‘just die.’
It died. The stack of hoppers, unsettled by the repeated impacts, creaked and toppled, crushing the ork in an avalanche of rock ore, clinker and iron crates. The noise was deafening. I shielded my face. Dust billowed up and slowly settled.
I helped the Jared commissioner to his feet. He was quaking badly. Both of us were coated with a film of rock dust. He looked at the mangled heap of wreckage, where dark, clotted ichor seeped out from under the heaps of spoil.
‘Holy shit,’ he murmured.
There was no way, or no way in the understanding of the ordos, anyway, to close a regia occulta. I made it quite clear to Zelwyn that the New Bridge should never, ever be raised again, for it was that very raising, during the Cackle, that produced the unique combination of effects necessary for the regia occulta to function. He needed no persuasion. The day before I left Jared County Town, he had the machine room dismantled and the heavy gauge hydraulics uncoupled. I understand, though I cannot confirm the fact, that the New Bridge was swept away in a freak flood tide some years later. It was never replaced. The regia occulta never reoccurred in Jared County Town.
Commissioner Zelwyn, who went on to serve his community for six and a half decades, kept one of the ork cleavers on his office wall, and enjoyed telling visitors that the dried blood on its points was his.
The morning I left, he came to see me off.
‘I hope I never see you again, inquisitor,’ he said, shaking my hand.
‘I hope so too, commissioner.’
He paused. ‘I meant that in a good way,’ he added.
‘So did I,’ I said.
I crossed over into Foothold County via the pass at Kulbrech. The reluctant motorised unit of the local militia was there to meet me, the engine of the Centaur idling. They weren’t glad to see me, but I was glad to see them. The Cackle was dying away, and I would soon be gone from Ignix.
The Cackle was dying away, but it insisted on having the last laugh. Many years later, at the end of my life, the mocking elements of Ignix would return to haunt me again. But this was – oh – 223.M41, and I was only just out on my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Abnett is a multiple New York Times bestselling aut
hor and an award-winning comic book writer. He has written over forty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His Horus Heresy novel Prospero Burns topped the SF charts in the UK and the US. In addition to writing for Black Library, Dan scripts audio dramas, movies, games, comics and bestselling novels for major publishers in Britain and America. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Originally published in 2011 as an audio drama.
This edition published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
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Cover illustration by Alexander Ovchinnikov
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