by Dan Abnett
There are three dead here, three more outside,' I said softly, looking into the train master's electric-shuttered eyes and pointedly ignoring the guards. 'All armoured, all armed... combat warriors. Do you really think it's a good idea to mess with the man who killed them?'
Silence fell on the corridor, colder and harsher than the ice storm still gusting in through the shattered window. All eyes were on us, including, to Suko's discomfort, the last of the gawping passengers still being herded out.
'Shall we continue this in private?' I suggested.
We went into one of the vacated cabins. I opened the hinged wooden cover of the suite's little cogitator, switched it to hololithic mode and pressed my signet ring against the data-reader. The little desk projected a hologram of the Inquisitorial seal, overlaid by credential details, followed by a slowly turning three dimensional scan of my head.
'I am Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn of the Ordos Helican/ Suko and his guards were speechless.
'Do you accept that, or would you like me to rotate slowly in front of you until you're convinced?'
The train master looked at me, so taken aback he barely knew what to say. 'I'm sorry, my lord/ he began. 'How can Trans-Continental assist the work of the mighty ordos?'
'Well, sir, you can get this train moving again for a start.'
'But-'
I'd had enough. 'I have been travelling incognito, sir. But not any more. And if I'm going to reveal myself as an inquisitor, I'm damn well going to behave like one. This train is now under my control/
We remained halted long enough for the engineers to service the brakes and secure the exploded windows. And long enough for the train guards, under my direct supervision, to search the entire vehicle for any other passengers without tickets.
Wrapped in crew-issue foul-weather gear, I went outside and retrieved Barbarisater, which complained fractiously about being left in the blizzard. I sheathed the whining blade and went to check on the three janissaries who lay sprawled and stiffening in the snow.
The express resumed progress at five and there were no more interruptions. We thundered out of the night and into a more temperate dawn where the land was thick with snow but the ice storms had abated.
Suko raced the locomotive right up to the safety margins to make up time. The express cut down through the southern extremities of the Ate-nate Range, descending through hill country and rocky glacial plains. If I'd been awake, I would have seen hard pasture and scree slowly blooming into forest and deciduous woodland, and then the first little hamlets of the vast Southern Plateau, sunlit in the morning air.
But I was deep asleep, my wounds dressed, Barbarisater slumbering fitfully at my side and Crezia watching over me.
I woke after five, with the express still making excellent time. We were due in at New Gevae at midnight. I'd given Suko strict instructions to send no word ahead of our plight.
It was likely that Pontius would try again at New Gevae. I studied the route map and thought about getting Suko to make an unscheduled stop at one of the satellite stations in the towns north of New Gevae. We could disembark and hire air transport, and the train could run on to the city.
I thought my implacable and attentive enemy might anticipate this move. And I also considered that arriving in plain view at a major city terminal might be the safer plan.
I lay on my cabin's cot, meditating as the lowland scenery of the plateau zipped by outside. Medea was up and around by then, hobbling painfully and using, of all things, my runestaff as a crutch. Only she would have the wit to dare such disrespect.
She limped into my cabin and flopped down on the edge of my cot, nursing her sore back. Crezia was asleep in the opposite berth.
'Never a dull moment, eh?' said Medea.
'Never/
She nodded over at Crezia. 'She didn't leave your side, Gregor. All day/
'I know/
'She's more than just an old friend, isn't she?'
Yes, Medea/
'You and your secrets/
'I know/
You never told me/
'I never told anyone. Crezia Berschilde deserved the privacy/
She glanced at me. 'Gregor Eisenhorn deserved the privacy too, don't you think? You may be a great and terrible inquisitor and everything, but you're a human being too. You have a life outside this awful work/
I thought about that. Sadly, I didn't agree.
'But you're together again, then. You and the good doctor/
'I have renewed a friendship I should never have allowed to lapse/
"Yeah, right. Renewed/ She made a surprisingly coarse and graphic gesture.
I couldn't help but smile. 'Was there something else, or did you just come in to demonstrate the vulgar extremes of your miming ability?'
Yeah, there was something else. What do we do when we get there?'
New Gevae was a cluster of monolithic hive pyramids covering the delta of the Sanas river. We could see its twinkling lights in the distance over an hour before we arrived. The Trans-Atenate Express rattled and hissed into the main terminal at two minutes to midnight. I got out ahead of the crowds and strode across the wide concourse under the arched glass roof to the Astropathic Guild's office near the freight cargo pens.
I accessed the Aegis account and read the reply from Nayl. He agreed that it was like the trouble on Eechan, and cursed Sadia's name. He said the Caucus was ready to ship out, and that he would be at a bar called Entipaul's Lounge at noon the next day. The bar was in hive four, level sixty.
I looked at the communique sadly and then glanced at the waiting adept. 'Two word reply. "Rosethorn attends". Send it.'
I walked into Entipaul's Lounge the next day at a minute before noon. It was a cage of aluminium tubes and spray-painted flakboard panels artfully wired up so that the ropes of lights pulsed in time to the pound music the place pumped through the caster system. The place wanted to seem tough and underhive and dangerous, but it was all for show. This was a lunchtime and after-work watering hole for mid-hive clerks and Adminis-tratum graders, a place for assignations with winsome girls from the logosticator pool, the celebrations that accompanied promotions or retirements, or rowdy birthday drinks. I'd been into real twist bars and heard genuine pound. This place was just sham, theatre.
I was shrouded in Aemos's over-robe, the hood pulled up, wearing a rebreather mask I'd borrowed from the express. I wanted to look like some tech-adept on his lunch break, or a warewright stealing off for a tryst with his girl.
The place was largely empty. A bored-looking steward polished glasses behind the narrow sweep of the bar, and two uniformed waitresses chatted in the rear doorway, holding their glass trays like riot shields. Half a dozen men sat in the booths that radiated off the bar's central hub, and a hooded figure was sitting, drinking alone, with its back to the door.
I sat at one of the hub tables. One of the waitresses approached. She smelled of obscura and her pencilled eyebrows framed wildly dilated eyes.
'Choice?'
Tunderey clear-grain, double, in a chill-sleeve.'
'Dokey-doke/ she returned as she stalked away.
The music continued to blast. She returned with a single shot glass on her suspensor tray. The glass was actually a cup of pressure-moulded ice. She tonged it onto my table and caught the coin I flipped at her.
'Keep the change/ I murmured.
'Big spender,' she mocked and paced off, wiggling a backside that had no business being wiggled.
I didn't touch the drink. Gradually, the ice melted and the oily liquid began to seep out over the table top.
The hooded figure got up and wandered over to me.
'Rosethorn?'
I looked up. That's me.'
She dropped the hooded cloak away from her shoulders. She had sharp features and long, straight black hair. Her kohl-edged eyes glinted like jade.
Not Harlon Nayl at all. Maria Tarray.
She sat down opposite me and knocked back my drink, licking the ice-wa
ter off her long fingers.
'You knew we'd get you sooner or later.'
'I guess so. Who's we?'
The other drinkers in the bar had got up and formed a circle around us, sitting at adjacent tables. Maria Tarray clicked her fingers and they all drew back coats or cloaks to reveal the handguns they carried. She clicked again and the weapons disappeared.
'So this is a trap?'
'Of course.'
The astrograms weren't from Nayl?'
'Evidently'
"You've broken Glossia?'
'How clever are we?'
I sat back. 'How did you do that?'
'Wouldn't you like to know, Mr Eisenhorn?'
I shrugged. 'Seeing as you've got me cold, yes. These men are more of your damned Vessorine, aren't they? I'm dead in my seat. I can't see the harm.'
'I imagine you've guessed already' she said. She smiled. I could feel her powerful mind trying to delve into mine.
'Jekud Vance.'
That's right, Mr Eisenhorn. Your astropath proved to be very useful. With the right persuasion. And the Janissaries excel at persuasion. Vance sent the communiques, pretending to be Nayl. He knew Glossia.'
She probed at my mind again.
You're using shielding techniques,' she said, her face darkening.
'Of course I am. You would be too if the situation was reversed. I have to say though, I'm disappointed. I was hoping mat Pontius might be here himself. This is a trap after all. Eisenhorn's last stand. He might have been civil enough to come and watch me die/
'Pontius is busy elsewhere/ she snapped, and then realised what she'd said.
Thank you for that confirmation/ I said.
'You bastard!' she snapped. You're dead! What good will it do you? This is a trap!'
'Yes, it is. A trap/
She hesitated. The janissaries had all risen, guns out, aiming at me. The bar staff were fleeing, terrified.
Maria Tarray slowly reached out and took the rebreather mask off my face.
'Etrik?' she stammered, her jade eyes wide.
Yes/ I said, three kilometres away in a locked lodging house room, sweating and straining as I channeled my will via the runestaff and animated the body of Clansire Etrik.
leapt back from the table, knocking over her chair. 'Damnation!' she shrieked. 'He's got us! He's got us! How the hell did he know?'
You could talk like Nayl and use Glossia thanks to Jekud, but Jekud didn't know what Nayl knew. We fought Sadia on Lethe Eleven, not Eechan,' I had Etrik say.
Maria Tarray drew a plasma pistol and shot Etrik through the chest. The Vessorines all around opened fire with their autoguns and las-carbines.
As my puppet was torn apart, I let go of the warp vortex that had been spinning in my mind ever since I had summoned it.
It surged out of Etrik's collapsing body and expanded, annihilating the janissaries, Entipaul's Lounge and the entire level sixty deck of hive four in a radius of fifty metres.
Maria Tarray was atomised. In the last milliseconds of her life, her mental shields collapsed in terror and I got a precious snapshot into her powerful psyker mind. Not everything, but enough.
Enough to know that I had just annihilated Pontius Glaw's daughter.
FIFTEEN
Sanctum, Catharsis and Fischig.
Teht uin sah.
Promody.
Fifteen days later, we were a long, long way from New Gevae, a long way from Gudrun itself. I had, for the time being, evaded the clutches of Khan-jar the Sharp.
The morning before my meeting - or my puppet's meeting, I should say - with Maria Tarray in the mid-hive bar, Aemos and I had arranged passage on a packet lighter called the Spirit of Wysten, and by the evening, we were leaving the planet. Five and a half days out from Gudrun, in the vicinity of Cyto, we rendezvoused with the Essene.
My old friend Tobias Maxilla, eccentric master of the sprint trader Essene, had come in response to the Glossia code word 'Sanctum' without hesitation, breaking off from his merchant runs in the Helican spinwards and laying course for Gudrun. He had never been a formal part of my operation, but he was an ally of long standing, and had provided the services of his ship on many occasions.
He always claimed to do this for financial reward - I regularly made sure the ordos remunerated him handsomely - and to keep on the good side of the Imperial Inquisition. Privately, I believe his allegiance to me was the product of an adventurous streak. Getting involved in my business offered more diverting occupation than a trade voyage down the Helican worlds.
There was no ship, and no ship's master, that I trusted more than Tobias Maxilla and the Essene. With my life shattered, my back to the wall and an e nemy after my blood, he was the one I turned to for rescue and escape.
One could also always rely on Maxilla to lift a company's spirits. In truth, the mood in my little group had been uncomfortable since New Gevae. And that was largely my own fault.
As soon as I had realised that 'Nayl' was just another of Glaw's deceits, a ruse to lure me into a trap, I had set my trap in return. Certain sections of the Mains Codicium concerned the creation and remote animation of thralls - human beings psionically controlled as puppets. I had never tried the technique, for it seemed ghoulish. The Codicium suggested the process worked best with a freshly killed cadaver. But on the other hand, it was simply an elaborate extension of my use of will, and it suited my purpose.
I didn't go into detail about what I was going to do, but Medea, Eleena, Crezia and Aemos knew something unorthodox was afoot, and they were all concerned when I had Etrik's body covertly taken from the train to a lodging we had rented in hive four. Crezia mumbled something about body snatching, and Medea was dubious. Back aboard the Pulchritude, she'd shrugged off as a joke the idea that I was dabbling too far. She seemed to have accepted the whole business with Cherubael.
Now she seemed less confident about esoteric psyker tricks.
Even Aemos seemed reserved. He had not said a word about the Malus Codicium since he'd seen me remove it from the safe in my study. And he'd made it clear on several occasions that he trusted my judgement.
But there had still been a feeling in the air.
I kept them out of the room while I performed the rituals, and that may have been a mistake too. Except for Eleena, who was spared the sensations, they all felt the unnerving, creeping backwash of the act.
I had also never used a warp vortex before, but it seemed the only weapon I could equip my thrall with that would trap the trappers. In hindsight, I wonder if the Malus Codicium had planted the idea in my head.
The vortex worked. It destroyed the enemies who had tried to snare me. I doubt I will use one again. The feedback left me unconscious, and I was ill and weak for two days afterwards. My friends had to break down the door of the room to get at me, and they must have been shaken by the sight that greeted them. The burnt circle on the floor, the psy-plasmic residue trickling off the walls, the symbols I had painted. I think they felt for the first time that I had attempted something I wasn't quite in control of.
Perhaps they were right.
None of them had wanted to talk about it. Aemos had found the Malus Codicium on the floor beside me and slipped it into his pocket before the others could see it. Later, aboard the Spirit of Wysten, he'd handed it back to me privately
'I don't want to touch it again,' he said. 'I don't think I want to see it again.'
I was unhappy at his reaction. His life was devoted to the acquisition of knowledge - it was an actual clinical compulsion in his case - but there he was rejecting a source of secret data, albeit dark, that could be found
almost nowhere else in the galaxy. I thought he alone might appreciate its worth.
'It's the Malus Codicium, isn't it?'
Yes.'
They never found it. On Farness Beta, after Quixos fell, the ordos searched for it and never found it/ That's true/
'Because you took it for yourself and never told them/ 'Yes. It was my decision/
/>
'I see. And that's how you learned to control daemonhosts too, isn't it?'
'Yes/
'I'm disappointed in you, Gregor/
Maxilla was, as ever, the perfect host, and the general spirit did pick up a little once we were in his company. He met us at the Essene's fore starboard airgate, dressed in a chequered sedril gown-coat, a blue silk cravat pinned with a golden star pin and a purple suede calotte wifh a silver tassel. His skin dye was gloss white with black hearts over his eyes, and a fine platinum chain ran between the diamond earring in his left lobe to the sapphire stud in his nose. Behind him, gold-plated servitors waited with salvers of refreshments. He greeted us all, flirting with Medea and making a particular fuss of Crezia and Eleena, two females he had not met before.
"Where to?' was his first question to me.
'Let me use your astropath, and set course for the place we first met/
I sent word, in Glossia, to Fischig, telling him to alter his route to avoid Gudran and meet me at a new rendezvous point. Thorn wishes Hound, at Hound's cradle, by sext/ Maxilla's cadaverous, nameless Navigator performed his hyper-mathematical feats of divination, and set the Essene thundering into warp space as fast as its potent drive could carry it.
As always, I was unable to rest easily while travelling in the hellish netherworld of the warp, so instead I retired with Maxilla to his stateroom. He was a terrible gossip and always relished a few hours catching up whenever we were reunited. Surrounded as he was by a crew that was more servitor than human, he did so crave company.
But I had been looking forward to a private talk. I'd never confided in him particularly before, but now I felt he might be the only man in the Imperium who would give me a fair hearing. And if not fair, then at least one free of harsh judgment. Maxilla was a rogue. He made no excuses about it. His entire life had been devoted to testing the ductile qualities of rules and regulations. I wanted, I suppose, to find out what he thought of me.
His stateroom was a double-storey cabin behind the Essene's cathedrallike main bridge. A ten-seat banquet table of polished duralloy that I had dined at many times before occupied a mezzanine area at the far end under a domed section of roof that could peel back shielding at the wave f a control wand to become an observation blister.
