[Ravenor 03] Ravenor Rogue - Dan Abnett

by Dan Abnett

  "Hurry up," Molotch said.

  "We're getting it," the vox crackled.

  Hot, sulphurous gas billowed up out of the vent, and Molotch turned aside, wrinkling his nose. The rock underneath him was rumbling, vibrating with the deep subterranean pressure. The boom and flash of venting lit up along the far crags.

  "Come on!"

  "Getting a fix now. We've fixed your signal. We're just..."

  "Oktober Country?"

  A hesitation. "Molotch, confirm which bio-sign you are." Molotch didn't answer. He swept around. The man facing him had almost got the drop on him. Very stealthy, very clever.

  But he'd made one crucial mistake. He'd tried to take Molotch alive.

  Molotch made a flicking gesture with his right arm. It was unexpected and subliminally fast, but so ridiculously obvious, it shouldn't have worked. Except that, as with all things, Molotch had practised it to the point of obsession.

  The flick knocked the man's laspistol up out of his hand into the air. The man looked honestly surprised to be disarmed so foolishly, but he was far from defenceless. He was a psyker, a strong one. Molotch could feel it. Only the hexagrammic wards tattooed on Molotch's scalp under the hairline were keeping the man's mind at bay.

  Molotch threw himself full length and caught the tumbling laspistol in his outstretched hand. He rolled on the rock to fire it, but the man had landed on top of him, forcing the hand holding the gun up and to the side. They were face to face, like lovers, for a moment. Molotch saw the man's sculptural, high cheek-boned face, his long black hair tied back, the set to his eyes that was noble and faintly reminiscent of the eldar.

  With supreme effort, the veins in his neck bulging, Molotch slowly dragged the hand holding the gun back towards the man's head. The man grunted, trying to keep the arm bent away. Molotch pushed harder.

  The man head butted Molotch squarely in the face and broke his nose. Molotch winced in pain, and felt the blood stream down his cheeks. His effort relaxed involuntarily. The man clubbed Molotch's hand against the ground until the fingers broke and the gun fell out of them. Molotch gasped, hurt and furious. He threw a hasty left-hand jab that caught his adversary in the neck. It shifted the man's weight off Molotch's legs, but in delivering the jab, Molotch lost his grip on his link. The small, flat, golden device clattered away across the ivory rocks.

  He could hear the shipmaster's tinny voice croaking from the speaker. "Molotch? Molotch?"

  Molotch pulled himself away from his foe, scrambling after the link. It was right on the rim of the vent. Gas was jetting up from the chasm. The ground was shaking more than before.

  Sprawling on his belly, Molotch stretched for the link, but the hand his enemy had smashed against the rocks was useless and the fingers refused to close or grip. Molotch rolled, grabbing at the link with his left hand.

  His scalp began to smoulder. The oppressive weight of psychic power was burning out the tattooed wards, turning them into bloody welts. In another few seconds, they would be gone and he would be open to the man's mind.

  He grabbed the link, and struggled to his feet, shouting into it. "Now. Now!"

  His back was to the vent. The man was facing him. He'd retrieved his pistol and was aiming it at Molotch. No chances this time, no mistakes. The aim was square, the distance between them too great for Molotch to repeat his flicking trick.

  "Enough," the man said. "Drop the link. I want you alive, but not that much."

  Molotch raised his hands slowly, but he did not drop the link. He smiled at the man and shook his head.

  "Now!"

  He stepped backwards off the rim.

  He heard the man cry out in dismay. Then he was falling, head over heels, down and down into the deep, blackened pit, into the exhaling heat, into hell.

  He screamed the shipmaster's name one final time, fighting to keep his grip on the link.

  He saw the plasma flare surging up to meet him. A rising fireball of blossoming yellow and green. He felt his hair singe. He was falling into it and it was rising to engulf him, to devour him, a searing, white wall of-

  The plasma flare boomed up out of the vents, and trembled the rocks. Heat wash licked back across the crag top. The inferno withdrew, and revealed the man, standing beside the rim. He had encased himself in a cone of frigid air, and held it there as the flare erupted around him. He had no wish to be burned away to nothing.

  It had been close. If the flare had lasted a few moments longer, his psychic shield would have failed.

  He turned. Arianhrod Esw Sweydyr was limping towards him. There was pain in her face. The man embraced her and kissed her mouth.

  "Nayl?" he asked.

  "He's bad. I don't think-"

  The man activated his link. "Talon wishes thorn, the colour of winter. Supplicant idol, with grace, reclining."

  "Commencing."

  A moment later, they both heard the rising whine of the gun cutter's engines echoing around the valley. "It's all right, they're on their way," the man told Arianhrod. "Besides, we got the last of them. The one who did it."

  "Are you sure?" she asked.

  Gideon Ravenor glanced at the smoking vent. "Pretty damn sure," he said.

  NOW

  Tancred, Angelus subsector, 404.M41

  I can't ignore them much longer. I'll have to speak to them. I've been blanking their polite messages for six months, and their stern demands for two. It is tiresome, but if I intend to carry on as an inquisitor of the holy Inquisition, I must make time for them. One can be on Special Condition for only so long.

  I sit by the window and look out across the towers and high walls of Basteen, Tancred's principal city. I do not need the window to see it. I feel it. I am much less than a man and much more.

  My mind inhales the city. Basteen is basking under a lazy yellow sky. The sun is a molten ball. Red stone, red brick, and red tiles soak in the heat. I feel the sunlight on my soul. I smell the enduring, intricate, feudal character of Basteen: ink and steel pins, silk, wax, obscura smoke, veils and screens, jet shadows and scalding light. The city is rambling and convoluted, a Byzantine network of streets, alleys and buildings wound around and over one another with no discernable pattern or plan, no symmetry or scheme. Cadizky would have abhorred it.

  My mind wanders the winding lanes, passing between the cool shadows of overhung alleys into small courts and squares where the sunlight lies on the flagstones in glaring white panels. A trader, in the shaded gloom of his premises, clacks an abacus as he makes up his ledger. A food vendor snores under his stove barrow. The barrow's oven is unlit.

  No one purchases hot pastries in the heat of noon. It is time to rest before the brisk business of the evening.

  Over here, a housekeeper steps home to her master's mansion from the washhouse, a basket of damp linen on her head. She is wondering if she dares stop to take a glass of caffeine, but is fearful that the sun will dry the linen stale and creased if she does not get it hung up. Passing her, coming up the street, are two boys with a pet simivulpa on a string. They are laughing at a joke that I analyse but fail to understand. Here, a servitor paints a door. The servitor's mind is empty, like an unused attic. Over there, an inker hurries to his next appointment, his wooden case of dyes and pens knocking against his hip. He is tired from a morning transcribing deeds that covered an entire shoulder blade.

  Behind that wall, a cook dices root vegetables for a slow-braised stew. On a nearby chopping board, the three fish she bought at the dawn market lie, waiting to be cleaned and portioned. They look like three silver ingots. Behind that wall, a secret garden of fig trees, just four metres by four, a tiny pocket of green between high walled residences. Its owner looks down on it from his unshuttered windows, and covets it, and knows that no one else knows it is there. On a roof terrace, a young man plays a viol in the sun while his lover, another young man, sits in the shade of an awning and learns lines for his part in a play. In a cool basement lounge, a woman hesitantly questions a visiting physician about
her aunt's dementia.

  There, a girl and a boy make love for the first time. There, an ageing thief wakes up and takes a drink to steady his nerves. There, an ecclesiarch's servant scrapes wax from the temple candlesticks. There, a visiting businessman, late for his appointment, realises he has taken a wrong turn, and hurries back down the street the way he came. There, a woman sews. There, a man wonders how he's going to explain it to his wife.

  There, a man worries how the meeting to renew his employment contract will go at five, not realising that he won't make the meeting because a heart attack is going to kill him, quite suddenly, in twenty-six minutes.

  And somewhere out there...

  I cast my mind wider. Forty streets, fifty, a radius of two kilometres... five. Thousands of minds, thousands of lives, twittering on, en masse but individual, lit up to me like the stars in the heavens: some hot, some cool, some clever, some stupid, some promising, some doomed, all contained within the warren of red stone, red brick and red tiles, soaking in the heat.

  And not one of them Zygmunt Molotch.

  I know he's here. I can't taste him, or breathe him, or sense even an afterthought of him, but I know. I can't say why. I won't be able to tell the envoys why either, when I finally decide to stop ignoring them. But this is where he's hiding. Six months, faint leads, false trails, and here is where I'm drawn to. I have been a servant of the Inquisition since 332, and an autonomous inquisitor since 346. A long time. Long enough to be confident that I am good at what I do. I have faith. Or am I just obsessing?

  The nagging idea that I have been fooling myself has come and gone with increasing regularity these last few weeks. The others feel it, I know. I see it in their faces. They're tired and frustrated with my quest.

  I rein back my mind, and pull it in like a trawler's nets until it covers only the house around me. A leased residence, red brick built, well made. Three floors, a grand walled courtyard, a well. There's Patience Kys, my telekine, reclining on a stone bench in the covered walk. She has the plays of Clokus open on her lap, a first folio, but inside it is a copy of my early work, The Mirror of Smoke. She doesn't want me to know that she's been reading it. She is too embarrassed to admit she likes what I composed. I am too embarrassed to admit I know, and that I am flattered.

  In the yard, there's Sholto Unwerth, my erstwhile shipmaster, and his elquon manhound, Fyflank. Fyflank is throwing a ball for the little man to chase. Shouldn't that be the other way around?

  Overlooking the yard, Harlon Nayl thinks the same thing. He's laughing at the antics as he cleans the mechanism of an autopistol on a small desk. I hear him call out "Look at this, now!" to Maud Plyton, and she gets up from the bowl of salad she was eating and comes to join him, munching, wiping her mouth. She laughs too. It's a deep, dirty snort. I like Maud. I'm glad she left the Magistratum of Eustis Majoris to come with me in the service of the Ordos. I have hopes for her. She's as canny as Kara and, I suspect, every bit as tough as Nayl.

  Where's Kara? Not in the library. That's Carl Thonius' domain. He's working at his cogitator, winnowing down the latest crop of leads I fed him. He's changed a lot, these last few years. Since Flint, I suppose. The prissiness has gone. He's hard now, like glass, almost unreadable in his determination and reserve. He's dressing differently, behaving differently. He looks Kys and Nayl in the eye these days, and gives as good as he gets. I doubt it will be long before Interrogator Thonius is ready for his next career step. I'll sponsor him, without question. Inquisitor Thonius. It will suit him. I will miss him.

  I find Kara Swole, in the rear bedroom. I look away again instantly. Belknap is with her. The moment they are sharing is... intimate. I have no wish or right to intrude.

  Belknap, the medicae, is a useful addition to my party, though his manner of joining was improvised. He's a good man, fiercely religious, wonderfully skilled. He came to us when we needed a doctor to tend Kara, and stayed, I think, through love for her. They make a pretty pair. He makes her happy. I question his resolve: such a devout, centred man might not condone some of the things that an inquisitor and his party are forced to do.

  I worry about Kara. There is a guarded quality to her, a guarded quality and an unspoken need, and it's been there since we were billeted in the house called Miserimus, in the ninth ward of Formal E, Petropolis. She was hurt and we needed a doctor to save her. I don't like to pry, and I don't like to rifle through the minds of my friends without their consent, but she's hiding something from me. A heavy secret.

  I can guess what it is. She wants to leave. An inquisitor can only hold on to his followers for so long. Death is the most usual end to service, I'm sorry to say, but there are other circumstances: disenchantment, incompatibility, fatigue. With Kara, it's fatigue. Kara Swole has served me loyally for a long time and, before that, served my master, Gregor. She has been nothing but a credit, and has nothing left to prove. Tchaikov's vampiric blade almost killed her, and that gave her pause. Then Patrik Belknap came along, her literal saviour, and brought the prospect of a viably different lifetime commitment with him. She wants to live. She wants to live a life where hazard is not a daily expectation. She wants to step back from the duty, her duty done, and embrace the ordinary, miraculous world of love and parenting and, I wager, grand-parenting.

  I don't resent that. In moments of private despair, I yearn hopelessly for the same thing myself, truth be told. She's done her part, done more than the Emperor himself could have expected of a no-prospects dancer-acrobat from Bonaventure. I wish her that happiness, and delight in the fact that now, for a brief moment, she has the opportunity to seize it. That opportunity won't last, once we get going again. It's now, or, I fear, never. I just wish she'd decide. I wish she'd pluck up the courage and tell me. I won't rant or sulk or try to change her mind. She knows me better. I will give her my blessing, heartfelt. An inquisitor seldom gets that privilege.

  That said, I won't suggest it to her either. She's too good to lose. She has to tell me herself, in her own time. This is, I suppose, petulant and controlling of me. I make no apologies. I am an Imperial inquisitor. Gregor Eisenhorn taught me this control, and I can't change the way I am. Emperor knows, I'd love to.

  There are two other people in the house with us.

  I roll my support chair away from the window and coast across the floor of the room. The armoured chair is dark-matt, ominous, sleek, suspended and propelled by the ever-turning grav hoop's whispering hum. I have lived inside it, essentially bodiless, for almost seventy years, since that day at the Spatian Gate, that day of hideous alchemy when triumph changed to atrocity, and I changed from an able, upright young man to a fused mass of burned flesh that required an armoured support chair to allow me to function. It's not much, but I call it home.

  I slide, frictionless, down the hallway to the room where Zael sleeps. Zael is one of the other two people in the house. Wystan Frauka is the other. Wystan is sitting at Zael's bedside, his customary place. Wystan is my blunter, my untouchable, leadenly impervious to any and all psychic operation. He smokes lho-sticks incessantly, affects a disdainful manner, and amuses himself by reading lurid erotica.

  He's quite wonderful. The disdain is an act. I can read that despite Wystan's unreadability. He has looked after Zael since the boy fell into his fugue state, his coma, his trance... whatever it is. He has carried him, washed him, read to him, watched him.

  And he has promised me that he will kill Zael the moment he wakes up. If Zael is what we fear he is.

  Zael Efferneti. Zael Sleet. A low-hab stack-runt from Petropolis, a vagabond kid, and also a nascent psyker, undetected by the periodic sweeps and examinations. Not just a psyker, a mirror psyker, that rarest of rare beasts.

  And - and this is the big "and" - potentially the most dangerous being in the sector. There exists a complex and involved series of predictions that concern the manifestation of a daemon in our reality, a daemon called Sleet or Slyte or some such variation. It was reckoned that Slyte would incarnate because of me, or bec
ause of one of the people close to me, on Eustis Majoris, between the years 400 and 403.M41. Hundreds, perhaps millions, were predicted to perish if Slyte got loose. So I was warned. I took precautions. Fate can be changed, predictions denied.

  At Miserimus, during the attack that took Zeph Mathuin from us, Zael collapsed under psychic assault. At the time, the psykers bombarding him shrieked the name Slyte. Zael has been catatonic ever since. Perhaps his mind couldn't take it. Perhaps his fugue state is a result of him being too weak a vessel to host a daemon.

  When he wakes, we will know. He will wake as Zael, or he will wake as a daemon clothed in flesh. If the latter is the case, then my untouchable is standing by to blunt the power of the waking daemon. There is also an autopistol in Wystan's coat pocket, so he can kill the host before it's too late.

  Many of my fellow inquisitors, including my beloved ex-master, would chastise me for this. They would say I am being too lenient. They would say I am a fool, and I should take no chances whatsoever. I should extinguish Zael's life, right now, while he is helpless.

  I choose not to. For one thing I cannot predict how such a course of action might provoke a sleeping daemon.

  For the other, I cannot, in all conscience, murder a teenage boy in his sleep. Zael may not be possessed. Zael may not be Slyte. While there is still a chance, I will not be party to his execution.

  Does that make me weak? Charitable? Foolish? Sentimental? Perhaps. Does it make me a radical? Yes, I think it does, though not in the way the term is usually used. I cannot, will not, sanction Zael's death on the basis of "what if?". I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Throne help me.

  If I'm wrong, pray Terra I can contain the damage. If I'm right... it begs the question "Where is the real Slyte?". Have we aborted his birth? Is his threat passed? It's 404, and that puts us outside the time span of the prophecy. Far enough outside? I don't know. Does Slyte lurk somewhere else, beyond my knowing? Like Molotch? I don't know that either. I just have to go with what I have.