by Dan Abnett
He squealed as the first of the dripping worm-limbs found him. They seized him with their beaks and suckers, and constricted around his body. Their touch spread virile corruption. Accelerated decomposition overtook Orfeo Culzean while he was still alive. He rotted in seconds and dissolved into a mass of wriggling worms and maggots.
Another writhing tendril, as fat as a man’s arm and as white as a sea-floor mollusc, snapped around Angharad’s neck and snatched her off her feet. She was sucked into one of the open maws in a single, gurgling inhalation. The flailing, pallid tentacles around the gulping orifice suddenly flushed bright red.
Evisorex clattered to the floor.
Nayl, in blind rage, ran forwards to where she had been standing a second before. He took up the fallen blade and hacked at the shuddering bulk, as if he could somehow cut it open and drag her back out.
Ravenor had moved clear of the collapsing chamber out onto the terrace. Molotch was with him, holding the leather case to his chest.
‘Go, Zygmunt. Make things ready,’ Ravenor said.
Molotch nodded and ran off down the terrace steps. Ravenor looked back.
+Harlon!+
Nayl just yowled back in answer, chopping with the sabre. He couldn’t see what Ravenor could see.
The towering wall of daemon flesh ploughing through the solar was just a small part of a vast mass manifesting on top of Elmingard, a mountain of infected meat, growing all the time. Towers and roofs collapsed under it. In the sheeting rain, it was hard to define any real detail of the mass except for the black, blistered bulk of it. Jagged tusks, as big as tree trunks, covered its upper flanks like battlements. Vast pseudopods, hundreds of metres long and dozens in girth, rippled and danced up into the sky above from the apex of the mass. The cyclone of storm clouds, many kilometres across, rotated around the dancing limbs like a crown.
Ravenor gazed up at the abomination the warp had disgorged onto Elmingard.
‘Oh Throne help us,’ he said.
Fifteen
‘Stop,’ pleaded Iosob. ‘Stop it. Stop it. It’s making my head hurt.’
‘Shut up,’ said Molotch.
‘Stop. Make him stop. Kys, make him stop.’
The girl looked up at Patience. ‘Please.’
‘Shhhhh...’ said Kys. ‘It’s all right.’
‘But he’s spoiling my door. He’s spoiling it.’
‘He has to do this,’ Kys told her softly.
Molotch was using a stick of chalk to inscribe runes and patterns on the door and the wall around it. He’d already got Kys to hold one end of a length of twine so that he could measure out distances along the wall and the wet flagstones and mark them out accurately.
He was working furiously, copying certain symbols from sheets of parchment that were beginning to disintegrate in the driving rain. The symbols were ugly. Kys didn’t want to look at them. They made her skin crawl. She stayed at his side, however, because the only alternative was to look up at the gargantuan horror bestriding Elmingard, and that was a far more disturbing prospect.
‘Are you done yet?’ she asked.
‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ Molotch replied. ‘There is a degree of precision required. This can’t be rushed. You want it to work, don’t you?’
‘I’m not sure what I want any more,’ said Kys.
Molotch patiently scratched with the tip of his chalk stub. ‘This is an art. One rune imprecisely drawn, one sigil out of alignment... that would doom us to failure.’
She didn’t reply. Molotch looked up at her. ‘I often think of “Lynta”, you know.’
‘Don’t.’
‘I was very fond of “Lynta”. She was with me for about a year. Yes, I was very fond of her, until I discovered that “Lynta” had infiltrated my team to betray me, and that her actual name was Patience Kys.’
‘I won’t tell you again. Get on with your work, Molotch.’
‘It was Zenta Malhyde. 397.M41. You were very good. Very, very good. The things you did to convince me you were loyal.’
‘Shut up,’ Kys spat. ‘Shut your damn mouth!’
‘All your efforts and sacrifices were for nothing,’ Molotch smiled. ‘Because although you and Thonius, and Kara and Nayl tore my team apart and left me for dead, I survived, as I always survive. I imagine that must have been hard to live with afterwards, “Lynta”.’
A kineblade was suddenly hovering, trembling, a thumb’s length from his left eye. ‘Why?’ Kys snarled through clenched teeth. ‘Why the hell would you try to goad me like this?’
‘My dear, if this all goes wrong, I want to be sure you’ll kill me quickly.’
‘Finish your work!’ she cried. Molotch shrugged and got busy with his chalk stick again. Another primordial roar rent the air. They felt the deep vibration of it in their chests. Iosob yelped. Insect vermin, black and whiskered, had begun to spill down the wall from above. A river of them ran down the nearby steps. Kys pulled Iosob to her. She stamped on a few of the bugs milling around her feet.
Ravenor appeared at last, soaring down the steps to join them. Nayl stumbled after him. Kys could both see and feel that Ravenor was waring Nayl. That was almost unheard of. The wraithbone pendant around Nayl’s neck was glowing. He held the Carthaen’s sabre in his hands.
‘Are we ready?’ Ravenor asked.
‘Nearly,’ Molotch replied.
‘Where are the others?’
Kys gestured beyond the monastic wall. Out on the landing, a lander’s thrusters growled.
‘They’re boarding the lander. Sholto came.’
‘Good,’ said Ravenor.
They all looked up as the bulk of Slyte roared again. It was a deep, atonal blast, like the blaring warhorn of savage gods. The huge, snaking tentacles of the titanic abomination had begun to flop down over the sides of the Elmingard cliffs and reach around. Swelling black flesh bulged over the crushed palace. The smell was intolerable. Terraces crumpled and gave way under Slyte’s putrescent folds.
+Harlon, I’m going to release you. Don’t be a liability.+
Nayl’s figure shivered and hunched slightly as Ravenor’s mind let him go. His knuckles whitened around the hilt of Evisorex and he uttered a terrible, heartbreaking moan.
‘She’s gone. I’m sorry, Harlon,’ Ravenor said.
Nayl didn’t reply. He was shaking.
‘There was nothing we could have done.’
Nayl nodded slowly, as if he understood, but Kys could see nothing left in him of the strong, vital man she knew.
‘I’m done,’ said Molotch, turning to face them and flicking a cockroach off his sleeve, ‘except for the blood, of course.’
The bowl of Culzean’s blood had long since been lost in the mayhem.
Harlon Nayl, without hesitation, raised Evisorex. He slid his left hand along its length. Blood ran from his sliced palm.
‘Use this,’ he told Molotch.
They stood and waited while Molotch anointed the door with Nayl’s blood. The red smudges immediately began to dilute in the rain.
‘Key, young lady?’ Molotch said to Iosob. Pouting reluctantly, she handed it to Molotch, and he fitted it into the lock.
‘Now we should leave, if we’re ever going to leave,’ said Molotch.
They headed out through the wall arch onto the landing. Sholto’s craft sat waiting for them, its engines throbbing impatiently. Kys could see Unwerth’s concerned face in the glow of the instrumentation, watching for them through the cockpit window.
Kys, Iosob and Nayl clambered aboard.
‘Is there not some incantation?’ Ravenor asked as he and Molotch stood beside the waiting craft.
‘Incantation?’ Molotch laughed.
‘I don’t, I’m happy to say, know much about these things. I assumed there would be some words to speak, some ritual.’
Molotch giggled. ‘What a strange notion your kind has of mine, Gideon. You picture us all, sheltered away on our covens, mumbling arcane phrases from decrepit tomes for the adulation of our masters.
’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ravenor. ‘I assumed–’
‘Actually, there is,’ said Molotch, holding out a shred of parchment, ‘and I want you to say it.’
Sixteen
Ravenor spoke the words, reading them from the paper Molotch held out in front of him. The blasphemy of them choked him, and polluted him. Every word was a taste of venom. He allowed Molotch this moment of triumph.
‘That wasn’t so hard now, was it?’ Molotch asked.
‘It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,’ Ravenor replied, truthfully. ‘You are an irredeemable bastard, Molotch. I think I might leave you here.’
‘That would just be unsporting,’ said Molotch.
‘It simply delays the inevitable.’
‘Then let’s delay it. Who knows, there may not be an inevitable anything.’
They boarded and closed the hatch. ‘Master Unwerth,’ Ravenor called, ‘if you please!’
The lander lifted, jets straining, into the night. Wind shear punished them, and threatened to dash them into the cliff or the surrounding mountains. Unwerth cursed, fighting the stick. Kys moved into the cockpit, and used her telekinetic strength to help him lever back the controls.
They rose into the storm, ailing and wrenching. Behind them, Elmingard had gone. Occupying its clifftop site like a nest, the vast, rugose mass of black flesh and flailing pseudopods roared and quivered.
‘Now!’ Molotch yelled over the wall of the struggling thrusters. ‘It has to be now!’
‘We’re still too close,’ Ravenor replied.
‘Better too close than too late,’ said Molotch.
Ravenor lashed out with his mind. He reached back down into the filthy hell pit, his mind blistering and curdling as it was forced to extend into the warping maelstrom. It was like dipping his arm into a boiling cauldron to reach something at the bottom. He yelled out in pain.
He saw the door. The pustular folds of Slyte’s distending form had almost crushed it. The old monastic wall had toppled, pushed out by the daemon’s stinking girth. Ravenor lunged for the door, for the key in the lock.
It was white-hot. He screamed again. It wouldn’t turn.
The lander jolted violently as a flailing tentacle struck it. They dipped and almost inverted. Dozens of alarm warnings began to shrill. Unwerth cried out with rage as he fought to right them again.
He brought them true, the thrusters maxing out at the limit of their power. Ice caked the front ports. Blow flies hatched from nowhere in their thousands and buzzed around the compartment. Iosob shrieked. Every metallic surface and object in the lander blackened and tarnished. The wounds Plyton and Nayl had taken suddenly began to bleed again. Belknap tried to staunch them. Kara’s nostrils spurted blood, and she fell back in her seat.
‘Damn it, and we were so close,’ Molotch said, flapping the flies away from his face.
‘The Emperor protects,’ said Ravenor.
He took hold of the key. He turned it. The door opened.
The door opened into a bright, cold, white void that was somehow more hideous and terrible than the blackness and the daemon, and the storm. The light poured out, alien and sterile. The marks Molotch had painstakingly inscribed around the doorway lit up like phosphorescent flares, burning down into the stone despite the rain. Straight lines of dazzling white power linked them together like las beams, shooting from one to another until a geometric web of frosty light surrounded the open door.
The old wooden door caught fire. Its frame combusted and burned. As it came apart in flames, the awful white light on the other side escaped, fracturing beyond the destroyed doorway and then out past the geometric web itself. A jagged white gash tore across the ground and up through the wall. It spread and split, faster and wider and longer.
A vast fissure of cold white light opened across the black rock of Elmingard.
There was a second of silence followed by a nuclear blink and a false dawn brighter than the sun.
The Kell Mountains ceased to be. They were sucked back into nothingness as the warp engulfed them and dragged them in. The gigantic storm was swallowed up along with them like ink in water, spinning down a drain. The night side of Gudrun lit up as clear as day.
A shockwave front two kilometres deep slammed out from the event across the countryside of Sarre.
It caught the tiny craft struggling to escape its wrath and hurled it, tumbling, from the sky.
AFTER
Thracian Primaris, 405.M41
I sit in the shadows of the cloister outside the hearing rooms. They will call me again soon, for the next round of questioning. I have lost count of the days now: thirty-one, thirty-two? My pardoner will know.
The court appointed him to me. His name is Culitch, an aspiring interrogator. He is reasonably efficient. As I go over the details with him in our briefings, his eyes widen as if I am telling him tall stories. He marks my comments down on his data-slate and wonders how he is going to recount them in open court without ridicule.
I wish him good luck.
My Lord Rorken still refuses to talk to me. I can understand his anger, although I had hoped he would affirm my actions without recourse to a formal hearing. His advisors privately assure me this is just for show, and that Lord Rorken is obliged to follow correct process. I am not so sure.
So, I sit in the chilly cloisters of the Palace of the Inquisition day after day. I have become used to its menacing, shadowy halls and unforgiving black marble floors. Inquisitorial guardsmen in burgundy armour, carrying their double-handed powerblades upright before them, stalk past from time to time, escorting solemn men and women in grim robes. They pretend not to look at me. They know who I am.
The rogue, the radical who saved Eustis Majoris by crippling it, and who spared Gudrun by wasting an entire province. Rogue, rogue, rogue.
I sit and wait for the next session to begin. My elders and betters will determine my fate. I trust they will make a good decision.
Footsteps approach. I assume it’s Culitch, but then I recognise the limp and the clack of the walking stick.
‘Hello,’ says Maud, sitting down on the stone bench beside me. She leans her stick against the armrest. She is young and strong, and still healing. Her arm is in a sling. There is a smile on her face.
‘How are we today?’ she asks breezily.
‘Fine. Did you find it?’
She nods. She has papers in her hand. ‘At last. Took me ages. The archives are immense, and I was going back a long way. The prefects thought I was mad to be searching for something so distant and insignificant.’
‘But you found it?’
‘Of course I did. Say what you like about the Munitorum, but they keep the most thorough records. Besides, I’m a detective. What was that, was that a laugh?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right then. Sometimes your voice box makes damn funny sounds.’
‘I laughed, Maud.’
It’s good to have her with me. I appreciate her loyalty. Most of my friends are gone now, some for ever. Nayl said his goodbyes to me two weeks ago. He was bound for Carthe, intending to return Evisorex to the clan. He was brooding and quiet. I doubt he will ever return.
Zael and Frauka left last week, in the care of Inquisitor Lilith. She took Iosob with her too. They will all be tested and processed. I think Lilith will be compassionate, but I entertain no real hopes of seeing any of them again.
Kara, my dear Kara, remains under arrest. They are keeping her here, somewhere. Her hearing will follow mine, and I hope by the Emperor’s grace I will be there to testify for her. She doesn’t deserve this.
Belknap took passage to Eustis Majoris while we were still on Gudrun, the day before I turned myself over to Lilith. There was nothing to be said. He was a noble man, but his heart was broken by the strength of his faith.
As for Unwerth and Preest, I have had no word from either of them. I wish them well in whatever voyages they undertake.
And Kys. Kys haunts the dining hous
es of the hive, loitering quietly, waiting for me to be exonerated. I have no idea what she will do if the Inquisition demands my incarceration or death. I wish she would come and see me.
‘So d’you want to hear this or not?’ Plyton asks, ‘after all the bloody effort I went to.’
‘Tell me, please.’
She shuffles the papers. ‘Rahjez, Fantomine sub. 404, M.40.’
‘Go on.’
‘Listening Station Arethusa. Service personnel. Service records for Bashesvili, Ludmilla. It... uhm... it lists her as deceased that year.’
‘Was there a raid?’
‘No. No actions reported until 405. The records suggest she was–’
‘Executed,’ I finish.
‘For treason, I think.’
The ku-kud bristles and whispers. Iosob has opened the door.
‘Will you come with us?’ I ask.
Bashesvili shivers. ‘Oh, no, Gideon, I don’t think so. The far future frightens me. I think I’ll be safer here.’
‘I owe you everything. If this works, the far future you’re so unsure of will owe you a great debt too.’
‘Go and do what you have to do, Gideon. It sounds important.’
‘Goodbye, Ludmilla.’
I hear footsteps. It is Culitch. ‘Sir, the hearings are about to recommence. Are you ready?’
‘Yes, young man.’
He walks towards the heavy doors and waits for me to join him. A session bell is ringing
‘I’m coming,’ I tell him. ‘Thank you for your work, Maud. I needed to know.’
Plyton rises, leaning on her stick.
‘I’ll wait here until you get out,’ she says.
THEN
Sarte Province, Gudrun, 404.M41
The lander was a broken, buckled mass of wreckage. It had impacted in a bare field eighteen kilometres away from the epicentre, cutting itself a sixty-metre long gouge in the earth before coming to rest.
Steam and smoke rose from the crumpled shape. Right until the last moment, Unwerth had fought to bring them in safely. His skills had prevented them from simply crashing into the ground. Even so, it had not been a comfortable touchdown.
