by Dan Abnett
The flash and bang of the blast obscured the bombardment outside for a moment. A heretic was flung upwards, limbs flailing, and glanced brokenly off a pillar before hitting the ground.
Midas's 'tempest' of covering confusion had allowed me to get within ten metres of Locke. I could no longer see him, however. Keeping my grip on my bolt pistol, I drew my power sword in my left hand and came around the block.
Locke and one of his men had chosen the exact same moment to plough forward into me. We broke from cover and came face to face in the narrow gap between pillars. My pistol's first shot missed the lunging Locke and tore the left arm off his accomplice. Before the wailing man had even hit the ground, Locke's laspistol had put a round through the meat of my right arm. A long-bladed dagger flashed forward in his other hand. We slammed into each other. I tried to sweep my power sword around, but it struck something and Locke side-stepped. The basket hilt of his dagger smashed into my face and knocked me over onto my back. With a grin that he knew 1 could never copy, he raised his laspistol to fire down into my brain.
Two tonnes of xenos-quarried stone pillar, sliced through at hip-height by my power blade, crushed him into the flaking ground.
I rose.
Gorgone Locke was still alive. His belly and pelvis were smashed under the fallen pillar and his arms were pinned. He gazed up at me through blinking, bewildered eyes.
'Gorgone Locke, in the eyes of the Holy Inquisition, you are thrice damned by action, association and belief/ I said, beginning the catechism of abolition.
'N-no...' he whispered.
As I completed the exclamation, I cut the mark of heresy into the flesh of his brow with the tip of my sword. By the time I had finished, he was dead from his crush injuries.
The shattering chamber still shook. On their long chains, the hooks swung. Dust and fragments dribbled down from the tears in the roof, falling through the bars of cold light. I reached down and found the pearl polyhedron in Locke's blood-soaked coat. The primer. 1 slipped it into my pocket and turned to see Midas approaching.
The last of his rats have fled/ he said, holstering his pistols. He looked down at the dead ship master. 'So perish all heretics, eh?'
I reached up with on hand to take the xenos Necroteuch from its shelf - and found myself unable to move. Some enormous psychic force froze me rigid.
'So perish all heretics indeed/ said a voice. 'Turn him so he can see me/
Involuntarily, I swung round, my hand still raised in the act of reaching out. I saw Midas, also paralysed and rigid, his dark features locked in a rictus of dismay.
Konrad Molitor, my brother inquisitor, was standing before me, smiling. His three hooded servants were at his side.
'Such valour, Gregor. Such dedication. I thought you'd be the one to find the prize/
I tried to answer, but my mouth refused to obey me. Spittle bubbled between my clenched teeth.
Molitor looked around at his cowled companions. 'Let him speak/ he said.
The psychic constraints on my voice slackened. Speech was still an effort. W-what are you d-doing, Molitor?'
'Recovering the priceless Necroteuch, of course. We really, really can't have you destroying another copy now, can we?'
'W-we?'
There are many who believe mankind will benefit more from the study of this artefact than from its destruction. I have come to safeguard those interests/
'R-rorken will n-never allow... y-you will b-burn for-'
'My estimable Lord Brother Rorken will never know. Feel how this place quakes. See how the roof splinters and collapses? Ten minutes ago, I signalled to the fleet that the primary objective was achieved. I gave the code for Sanction Extremis. They believe the Necroteuch had been found and safely disposed of. Our forces are withdrawing, with all haste. The batteries of the fleet have begun to level these xenos places. No one will know that the divine Necroteuch has been carried off safely. Not a shred of evidence will survive the bombardment. Not a shred of evidence... nor any voice of dissent/
His yellow-pupilled eyes regarded me. 'How brave of you to give your life in the assault on 56-Izar. Your name will be remembered on the roll of honour. I assure you, I'll see to that myself/
'B-b-b-bastard...' I fought with my mind to break free, but it was impossible. This was not Molitor's hold on me. One of his retainers, or all three in concert, supremely powerful.
'Fetch it for me/ Molitor said to one of his men, gesturing to the Necroteuch with a wave of his checked sleeve. We would be well to leave promptly/
The hammering bombardment was now a perpetual shaking roar. The robed figure slid forward and took down the blue octahedron, cupping it
in elegant, long-nailed fingers. He seemed to study it, and looked round at Molitor.
'It is useless/ he said.
'What?'
'Unreadable. Locked within an impenetrable xenos language code.'
Molitor stammered. 'No! Impossible! Break the code!'
'Would that I could. It is beyond even my ability'
'There must be a means of translation!'
The hooded man holding the Necroteuch looked round at me.
'He has a primer. The only primer. He's trying not to think about it, but I can see it in his mind. Look in his coat pocket.'
The smile returned to Molitor's face. He came close to me, reaching out a hand towards my coat. 'Devious to the last, Gregor. You whoreson wretch.'
A las-round blew his hand off at the wrist.
Molitor screamed and stumbled back, clutching his smoking stump.
Bequin, her face pursed grimly, her las-carbine at her shoulder and aimed at his heart, appeared beside me.
'Kill them! Kill them!' Molitor screamed. I felt the immediate pressure of the psychic vice tightening to finish me. Then I reeled away, freed. The psychic blank of Bequin's untouchable nature shielded me now she was at my side. The servant holding the Necroteuch took a step backwards in surprise.
Molitor, frantic with pain and anger, saw that his powerful psychic was thwarted somehow and yelled 'Albaara! T'harth!'
Code words. Trigger words. The pair of servants who had remained by his side sprang forward, their robes shredding away.
Arco-flagellants. Heretics reprogrammed and rebuilt with augmetics and bionics to serve as murderous slaves. The trigger words woke them from their calming states of bliss and plunged them into maniacal rages.
Out of their robes, they were foul, hunched things, encrusted with crude surgical implants and sacred charms. Their hands were lashing clutches of electrowhips, their eyes dull, bulbous orbits under the rims of the tarnished pacifier helmets bolted to their skulls.
Midas, Bequin and I fired our weapons together, raking them with punishment as they charged forward. The damage they suffered was immense, but still they came on, their bodies pumped with intoxicating adrenal fluid, pain-blockers and frenzy-inducing chemical stimulants. They didn't feel what we were doing to them.
One was just an arm's length from me when my desperate rain of bolts finally defeated it. A shot exploded the armoured matrix of chemical dispensers on its shoulder, spraying fluid into the air. In a second, it fell convulsing to the ground at our feet as the damage robbed it of its drug-source and left nothing but agony behind.
The other barely felt the punctures of Midas's too subtle needles. Frantically, we split to either side, out of its path. Braying and thrashing its
whip-limbs, it pounded after Midas, who ducked left and right between pillars, trying to evade it. Only his Glavian-bred grace and speed kept him out of its inexorably advancing grip.
He knew he had seconds left. Bequin and I were moving, but there was precious little we could do.
Midas pulled off his pouch of grenades, priming one as he twisted and side-stepped between the pillars, scarcely avoiding a withering lash of flexible metal whips that scored gouges in the stone.
Midas feinted left and then threw himself directly at the beast, snagging the strap of his pouch around its
neck as he vaulted over its shoulder head first.
The grenades detonated in one stunning flash and atomised the ravening man-beast. Caught in the Shockwave, Midas was thrown into a pillar and dropped unconscious.
'Eisenhorn! Eisenhorn!' Molitor was wailing as he and his remaining servant hunted for me. His voice was cracking with pain and fury.
'Stay at my side,' I told Bequin as we ran deeper into the chamber. That psychic can't touch me while I'm close to you.'
Half the ceiling and a significant part of the wall blew in. For a second the air was solid with billowing orange fire.
Deafened, our skins scorched by the blast, Bequin and I were back on our feet in a moment. The chamber was open to the sky now, and cold white light poured in, heavy with smoke.
'Come on!' Together we scrambled towards the blast-damaged wall, picking our way up the smouldering slope of broken stone and whatever material the saruthi used for construction. This material was fused and bubbling, like plastic or flesh.
We headed for the light.
We emerged high on the curving upper face of the saruthi edifice. It was cold, and the wind that came across the segmented ridges of the polished white roof was brisk and full of the odours of smoke, fyceline and prome-thium.
We were at a dizzying height. The pearly flanks of the vast structure arced away to a ground far below and the surface was hard and polished like ice. Bequin slipped, and I managed to grab her before she slid away down the curve.
From up here, high in the alien sky, we could see across the lakes of fire and the vast smoke banks that roiled away for hundreds of kilometres. We could see flocks of troopships soaring up and away through the smoke cover towards the parent ships in orbit. On the flats of white mud far beneath us, Imperial troops ran to waiting dropships, discarding packs and helmets and even weapons in their haste to leave. Tanks and armoured carriers wallowed and puffed through the wet mud and up onto the tongue-like ramps of heavy lifters. Shells and las-fire flickered across the lakes and mud as the remaining heretic forces fought on heedless.
Lances and forks of dazzling energy bit down from the clouds, murdering the landscape. Obeying Molitor's instructions to the letter, Admiral Spatian was levelling the area. All five of us inquisitors, along with Cynewolf and key Deathwatchers and selected officers of the invasion force, had been given the code words to unleash this doom. Molitor had sealed our fate. Once given, Sanction Extremis could not be revoked, even if my vox had been working instead of crippled by the electromagnetic bursts that accompanied every orbital strike. As per the battle plans, Spatian was systematically wasting the invasion site as fast as possible, even at the cost of his own retreating ground forces.
Another saruthi edifice, twenty kilometres away, died. Shaped in a form that suggested a nautilus shell, its opalescent curves were cracked and split by blue-hot heavy lasers. The die-straight beams came down through the clouds from ships so far up they were invisible, and tore through the edifice like testamental judgment. Waves of fighter-bombers swept in, sowing payloads of munitions that bloomed in rippling seas of explosions. Guided warheads, sleek like airborne sharks, whined overhead on the last stage of their first and final journey from starship to target.
The edifice ruptured and blew out. Light-shock lit the hemisphere. A towering column of white ash-smoke rose, folding into a fifteen-kilometre torus-shaped cloud.
The sight was stunning, shocking. Bequin and I gazed at it. A few heartbeats later it was repeated behind us, forty kilometres distant, as another saruthi edifice was annihilated.
The edifice on whose smoothly curving upper surfaces we now stood was undoubtedly going to go the same way soon. Even now, I knew, the co-ordinates were being loaded into the fleet's gunnery servitors.
We ran along the lip of another curved segment. Afterburners red against the black smoke, more dropships came in, heading towards cheering, gesticulating huddles of Mirepoix infantry out on the flats. I was astounded at the selfless courage of the dropship crews. Spatian's bombardment wasn't waiting for them to move in and pull out. They were risking everything to make the surface run and retrieve as many troopers as they could.
'Gregor!' Bequin shouted in my ear.
I turned. Down the shell-form span of the roof behind us, Molitor and his henchman had appeared out of the blast hole. Unsteady, they scrambled up after us.
A las-shot whined past me, kissing the pearly surface and leaving a burn-scar.
'The primer, you whoreson bastard! Give me the primer!' Molitor yelled.
I gave him a full clip of bolt rounds instead.
The first of the thundering tracer shots splintered chunks out of the edifice roof. Then I hit and exploded his left thigh, his belly and his throat.
Konrad Molitor bucked and twitched as the rounds tore through him, and then fell. His mauled body slid down the curve of the roof and disappeared, leaving a smear of blood behind it.
His henchman advanced, heedless of the shots, throwing off his hooded robe.
He was naked beneath it. Tall, well muscled, with a golden cast to his skin. His face was handsome and tiny residual horns sprouted from his skull.
His eyes were blank.
My prophetic dreams were made flesh.
Terror seized me, turned my heart inside out.
TWENTY-SIX
Cherubael.
The brink.
Exterminatus.
The blank-eyed man - though in truth he was not a man, but a daemon in human form - strode up the shining curve towards me. The glowing octahedron of the saruthi's unholy text was clasped in one nimble hand.
'I would like the primer now please, Gregor.'
What are you?'
'This is no place for introductions/ He gestured about himself. Lances of annihilation blasted down into the mud-flats nearby.
'Humour me...' I managed.
Very well. My name is Cherubael. Now, that primer. Time is ticking away.'
Time will always tick away/ I said. 'Who made you?'
'Made me?' The blank-eyed man smiled at me duplicitously.
'You're... a daemonhost. A conjured thing. Tell me who made you and who commanded you and Molitor to come after this prize... and I might give you the primer/
He laughed and licked his thin lips with a glossy forked tongue.
'Let us both be abundantly clear about this, Gregor. You will give me the primer. Either you will hand me the primer now, or I will come over to you and take it. And break every bone in your body. And rape that girl at your side. And break every bone in her body too. And then drag your jiggling carcasses down into the chamber below and string you both up on the
hooks, and burn out your agony centres as I wait for the bombardment to flatten this place/
He paused.
'Your choice/
You've been in my dreams for a long while now. Why is that?' I pressed.
'You are gifted, Gregor. And time is not the arrow that humans like to think it is. A second in the warp would show you that. Why, a second in the four-dimensional habitats of the saruthi should have proved it too. Your dreams were just nightmares of something yet to happen/
'Who made you?' My voice was insistent. His answer was the one I least expected, and it left me all but stunned.
The Holy Inquisition made me, Gregor. A brother of yours made me. Now, for the last time, give me that-'
The daemonhost swung around suddenly as voices called out from lower down the roof. Brother-Captain Cynewolf was clambering up out of the blast hole, flanked by Midas and another Deathwatcher carrying the limp form of Titus Endor.
Cynewolf raised his storm bolter and fired at the blank-eyed man.
Cherubael reached out and caught the glowing shells, plucking them out of the air.
'Go home, Astartes bastard!' he yelled down the sloping roof at Cynewolf. 'This has nothing to do with you!'
The fiend came up the ridge until he was facing me. I could see the tiny arcs of power darting across his glowing skin
. I could smell the stink of corruption.
Eye to eye now.
He held out his hand, palm up, fingernails long and polished like claws.
'Clever of you to find an untouchable to cancel me out/ He looked over at Bequin. 'How did you manage that?'
'Fate, like time, is not linear, Cherubael. Surely you know that. I found Bequin in the same way that the dreams of you found me/
He nodded. 'I like you, Gregor Eisenhorn. So very challenging and stimulating - for a human. I wish we had leisure to discourse and break bread... But we haven't!' he snapped suddenly. 'Give me the primer!'
I took out the polyhedron. His smile broadened.
I dropped the artefact onto the silky roof and, before it could slide away, crushed it under the heel of my boot.
The daemonhost took a step backwards, gazing down at the crunched dust.
He looked up at me again with his blank eyes. You are a man of singular dedication, Gregor. I would have enjoyed killing you, when the day and hour came. But you're dead already. This edifice is two hundred and forty seconds away from destruction. Cherish this-'
He tossed me the xenos Necroteuch and I caught it in one gloved hand.
'You've won. Take that consolation to the afterlife/
He started to run, towards the lip of the roof, and then threw himself out in a perfect dive, arms raised. For a moment, he hung in space, then
he forked his body in, executed a precise roll and disappeared into the lake of fire below.
I pulled Bequin to me as Cynewolf, Midas and the other Deathwatch Marine approached. Endor, crumpled in the Astartes's arms, looked dead. I prayed he was, for in a moment this place would dissolve in fire.
'Rosethorn from Aegis, above and... well, above, for Emperor's sake! Damn this Glossia crap! Move!'
My gun-cutter swung in over the edifice roof, ramp-jaws open. I could see Fischig at the helm through the cockpit screens, yelling at me. Aemos was at his side.
I watched 56-Izar die from the bridge of the Saint Scythus as we left orbit. Petals of flame, the size of continents, spread out under its milky skin. Sanction Extremis. Exterminatus.
After the deluge of fire, the virus bombs. The seething storms of tailored plagues. The nuclear atrocity.
