by Dan Abnett
‘Too well,’ Trice said, with a tiny smile.
‘Shielded or not, untouchable or not untouchable, the Thief will locate him. It’s what it does. The Thief will certainly find Ravenor. And therein lies the quandary.’
‘How so?’ Trice asked.
‘Under regular circumstances, the Thief is summoned and controlled. This means it must be fed, and then instructed. The control apparatus requires a talented psyker to direct the Thief. However, that control will be lost if the Thief enters the range of Ravenor’s untouchable. In other words, we can unleash the Thief, send him after Ravenor, and then lose possession of him the moment he comes close to the target.’
‘So how do you propose we do this?’ asked Trice.
Culzean shrugged. ‘Here’s where the give and take comes in, sir. With your help, I can instruct the Thief in a different way. No need for feeding, no need for psyker manipulation. We command it using Enuncia.’
Trice paused. ‘Revoke told me you were remarkably well informed about our work here.’
‘I like to be well informed,’ Culzean said. ‘It was a chance deduction, actually. I observed Master Revoke’s efforts against the Brass Thief, and Enuncia was the only thing he could conceivably have been using.’
‘That’s quite a deduction,’ Revoke said. ‘Enuncia is extremely obscure, its appearance in Imperial records fragmentary. Even the most learned people have never even heard of it.’
Culzean maintained his calm, cordial manner. ‘I am a specialist operator in the workings of the arcane, Master Revoke. I am not most people. There are of course many things I don’t have an answer to. For example – as you said, there are probably no more than two dozen references to Enuncia in all of the Imperial archives, and all of those in extremely restricted works. Only a couple of those references actually contain any operable semantics or accidence. I presume therefore you have uncovered a significant new lexical source for you to be so fluent?’
‘In a way,’ Trice said. ‘But more by reconstruction than recovery. If our relationship bears fruit, Master Culzean, we will unfold the truth for you.’
‘That’s all I ask,’ said Culzean. ‘Bring me in on Enuncia and I’ll deliver anything you want. Call it payment for dealing with Ravenor.’
‘Done,’ said Trice simply. ‘And as a gesture of good faith…’ He nodded to the waiting cipherist. The cipherist opened the metal box and showed Culzean what lay within.
‘The commands required for the incunabula,’ Trice said. ‘Written in Enuncia and inscribed on an inert metal wafer. Don’t try to read it. Revoke will do that for you. He’s trained.’
‘Well, this is wonderful,’ Culzean said. ‘Let’s get started.’
‘Toros?’ Trice said as he got to his feet. ‘Have the psykers woken and brought to readiness.’
‘There’s no need, sir,’ Culzean said.
‘Maybe not, but I’d like them ready anyway.’ Trice straightened his gown. ‘If the Thief leads us to Ravenor, and Ravenor drops his guard, I want my psykers right there to finish the job.’
The choir was singing the nightsong counterpart. The sound rose into the upper rafters of the grand templum, pure and clear.
Kara walked out of the west entrance and along a cloister towards the old sacristy. In the blackness, the distant sound of the choir seemed like a mournful wind. Kara had her hand on the butt of her weapon.
There was nothing out here except darkness and dripping rain. The path was blocked with saw-horses and a sign read, ‘Old sacristy closed for renovations’.
She turned back, reaching for her hand-vox.
Behind her two, quick cracks of las-fire. Running feet in the dark.
She drew her weapon and ducked into cover. Another two snip-shots, blinking in the darkness. More pounding feet, clattering over gravel.
A figure appeared, walking right past her. A young man, skinny, with augmetic eyes. He was walking strangely, plodding, trudging almost. As he went by Kara’s hiding place, something fell out of his hand and bounced on the path.
A compact eight mil.
The young man fell over and lay still.
She crept over to him, rolled him over. His body was going cold. Two huge laser wounds had cut through his torso.
‘Oh, Throne,’ Kara said as her hand came up wet with blood.
There was someone behind her. She turned and saw the muzzle of a Tronsvasse 9 aiming right at her head.
‘You bitch,’ said a voice. ‘You killed him. You bloody killed Limbwall! You bitch!’
‘Now wait–’ Kara began.
Gunfire drowned her words.
Wind gusted over the rooftop landing pad. Culzean had insisted that the ritual had to be performed in the open. A ring of taper-flares had been lit, blue luminosity wafting up into the high-level air as smoke.
The wrought pyramid of the incunabula sat in the centre of the ring.
‘Master Revoke?’ Culzean said. ‘Begin please.’
Revoke took the inert metal wafer from the cipherist’s open coffer and stepped forward.
He read the words aloud. His lips split and blood leaked down the sides of his mouth.
The Brass Thief exploded into being and surged up into the night sky.
The hatch, once Unwerth had fiddled with it, opened. The hangar lay before them. One end opened to the sky and a row of armoured fliers sat in heavy deck clamps in front of the bay’s mouth. They started to run across the empty deckway towards the nearest flier.
A las-bolt smacked into the deck close to Unwerth, who jumped back with a squeal. Kys threw herself into him and rolled them into the cover of a repair cart. More shots zipped over them. From a hatch in the far corner of the hangar, a half-dozen secretists were running forward, firing.
Kys pulled her snub-las and returned shots over the cart, forcing the secretists to scatter into cover themselves.
‘Get in! Get it fired up!’ she yelled at Unwerth. He crawled on his belly into the shadow of the deck clamp and reached up to fuss with the flier’s door latches. More shots rained at them. One blew the lid off one of the repair cart’s panniers, another chipped the bodywork of the flier. Kys leaned out and raked fire back at them. She clipped one of the secretists as he attempted to rush into better cover.
‘Unwerth?’
The doors popped. Unwerth wriggled up into the tight cockpit. Kys fired off another salvo of shots and leapt in after him.
‘Now!’ Kys yelled. Shots were spanking off the rear of the machine. The window panel of one of the open doors shattered.
‘You requisite me to fly this?’ Unwerth asked.
‘Yes I sodding requisite so! Get us out of here!’
Unwerth thumped main power with his maimed hand. He grabbed the stick as the flier shot itself off the deck clamp. Safety systems auto-closed the doors. The flier, nose down, barrelled out under the arch of the hangar mouth and into the night sky.
Either deliberately or accidentally – Kys couldn’t tell – Unwerth pitched them into a steep dive. The vast lit side of the governor’s palace rushed past behind them like an illuminated cliff. Below, the canyons of the hive’s upper stacks yawned. Unwerth turned them down into an upper alt traffic flow. Fliers and lifters zipped about them. The collision alarm made at least three warning bleats.
‘Where?’ he asked, desperately.
‘Where what?’
‘Where would you produce us to go?’
‘Uhm…’ Kys began.
Back in the hangar, Molay turned to Boneheart, who had just entered at a run.
‘They’ve effected exit!’ Molay said. ‘Flier eighty-seven. We’ve got it tagged.’
Foelon, holding his psyber lure, was right behind Boneheart.
‘Sing them in,’ Boneheart ordered.
Foelon began to spin the lure.
Outside, swirling dark clouds billowed from the roofscapes and gargoyle-encrusted rain-gutters of the stack tops. The clouds coiled through the air like smoke wound into a vortex by an updraft
, and fused into one.
The Unkindness of sheen birds, turning together in a dense, unified swarm, swept down towards the speeding flier.
‘Unwerth! Watch it!’ Kys yelled. ‘What the hell is–’
The first two or three smacked against the flier’s canopy, cracking the glass.
‘Bother,’ said Unwerth, wrestling with the stick.
Then the rest came in, like a wave, like a chrome blizzard. Kys saw them coming, their wings glinting in the darkness.
‘Oh shit,’ she said.
Kara dragged the girl into cover as the shots ripped past.
‘Stay down!’ she said, and fired off a clip into the darkness of the cloister.
Silence, briefly, then confused shouts.
‘Move!’ Kara cried. The girl came with her. They sprinted down the outside walk of the grand templum.
Behind them, they could hear feet crunching on gravel. Another shot or two sang out.
‘Throne! Do you have an exit plan?’ Kara yelled.
‘My transporter! It’s just down here!’
They ran down an unlit side street to the parked Bergman. The running footsteps were closing behind them. Kara jumped in the moment the doors unlocked. The girl put it into drive and they roared down the street and out across the square. She had to haul on the wheel to avoid a big grey transporter that was just pulling out of the templum’s front approach.
‘That way!’ Kara shouted, pointing. The girl heaved the speeding vehicle round, its back-end sliding out slightly on the wet stone, and hammered them away down a link ramp towards the inter-formal arterial. Several transporters braked and sounded their horns as the Bergman dashed by, ignoring all the circulation control lights.
‘You drive like a marshal,’ Kara said.
‘I am a marshal.’
‘I’m Kara Swole. You?’
‘Maud Plyton.’
A laser bolt punched through the roof and out through the front screen. Plyton yelped and swerved.
The big grey transporter, with a man leaning out of the side window, training a hellgun, rushed down the high stack ramp after the speeding Bergman.
The hellgun began to fire again.
Nine
‘Signal from Kara,’ Carl said suddenly. ‘She’s in some kind of trouble.’
‘Let me speak to her,’ I said.
Carl didn’t get a chance to obey my instruction. The vox systems let out a painfully loud wail of distortion, and died. Simultaneously, Carl’s cogitators flickered and shut down. The house lights dimmed.
‘Oh, really not good…’ Carl began.
‘The stuff you know,’ Mathuin growled. He was already running from the room.
‘We’re under attack,’ Zael said.
‘It could be almost anything–’ I started to say.
Zael looked at me with a cold, calm certainty. ‘No, I’m telling you. We’re under attack.’
Outside the room, downstairs, a terrible rending impact sounded from the main door. The security systems warbled fitfully for a second and died. More crashing, tearing noises resounded.
I sped out of the room. ‘Carl, keep Zael here with you. Do everything you can to keep him safe.’
Carl had already drawn his handgun, and pulled Zael over into the corner of the room away from the doorway. Frauka hurried out after me and slammed the door.
I went out onto the landing and began to glide down the stairs. From halfway down, I could see the main body of the entrance hall and what was left of the front doors.
And I could see what was approaching across the hall.
It was the thing I’d sensed the fibre-traces of at the diplomatic palace. The primaeval throwback. The incunabula. A figure of gold and smoking brass, its helm high-crested and devoid of any mark except narrow eye-slits. It had broken in through the heavy wood and metal of the doorway, littering the floor with debris, and now padded forward, shoulders hunched, the crested helm switching to and fro. Gusting eddies of warp-vapour clung to its limbs like streamers.
It looked up and saw me on the stairs. It raised its hands, and with an odd wet, click, extended paired rhyming swords.
Behind me, I heard Frauka gasp, ‘Bollocks to this.’
‘Get back, Wystan,’ I said. With his limiter still off, I had no defence capabilities whatsoever.
The incunabula flew at me, its swords coming together to form a two-pronged spear held out in front of it.
A shockwave of immense firepower blew it backwards out of the air and clean across the hall, through a wall, into the lower lounge.
Zeph Mathuin strode forward across the hall below me, his rotator cannon slung in place, the multi-barrels still spinning as he came. He fired another blurt, destroying more of the wall, the rotating muzzles kicking out star-shaped flashes of ignited gas.
‘Get out of here,’ Mathuin yelled without looking up at us. ‘Get out while you still can.’
A scratching, slithering sound came from inside the lower lounge and the incunabula reappeared. There were sooty marks on its chest plating, but no sign it had been damaged at all. Mathuin opened fire again and threw it backwards once more, walking forward to press his attack, mercilessly blasting streams of high-velocity shells at the golden killer. It reeled, bucked, jerked, unable to ignore the kinetic impact, but was still undamaged.
Gradually, it began to crunch towards Mathuin, one foot after the other, weathering the blizzard of shots like a man trudging head down into torrential rain. The rotator gears of Zeph’s cannon were whirring shrilly. It was close to overheating, running out of ammunition, or both.
Three metres from Mathuin, two, shrugging off the hail of shells one struggling step at a time.
‘Wystan!’ I yelled. ‘Activate! Activate!’
The Brass Thief sliced around with its right-hand blade and cut Zeph’s rotator cannon in half. In the explosion that resulted, shards of shrapnel burst out of the ruined mechanism. Mathuin was thrown almost the full length of the hall. The incunabula ignored him and swung back to face me.
I was what it was after. Just me.
But now Wystan had activated his limiter. My mind surged free, unrestrained. With a pop, the psy-cannon deployed from the chair’s casing and I began to fire. My first two shots actually managed to dent its chest plating. My third slightly buckled its left cheek and left a scratch on the brass.
Still it came on.
In the chilly basement vault of the governor’s palace, the five psykers began to mumble and thrash in their lead tanks. Revoke pushed two of the handlers aside and took a look at the biometric display. Nearby, Culzean smiled and simply clapped his hands together. He already knew what was happening.
‘We’ve forced his hand,’ Culzean said. ‘Ravenor can’t deal with the Thief without his mind powers. He’s told his untouchable to limit. He should be very visible to you now.’
‘Is he?’ Trice asked.
Revoke nodded. ‘Ultra-solid return. A house in Formal E, ninth ward. I’m despatching elements right now.’
‘Never mind that,’ Trice said. ‘Send the psykers in.’
For a moment, for a fleeting second, I thought I had the measure of this monstrous incunabula. I was pinning it with my mind as I fired cannon shot after cannon shot into it, actually splintering slivers of gold off its armour. It fought back to break my grip on it with furious power, but my will was no trifling thing. I actually had it fast, tight in a vice of psy-energy–
Then the psykers swirled in. Bodiless, they burst into Miserimus all around me, streaking comets of vile white light that swirled and circled and laughed with gleeful inhuman voices. Every lamp, window, glow-globe and drinking glass in the house shattered. Floorboards ripped up like twigs. Doors burst off their hinges. Flying nails and screws and tacks peppered through the air like hail. The banisters behind me collapsed and I heard Frauka cry out as he was thrown off the stairs into the hall below.
‘Wystan!’
He was unconscious, or dead. Either way, he couldn�
�t deactivate his limiter and block these unholy wraiths out.
Two fell upon me at once, amorphous, crackling skeins of corposant coating the surface of my chair in heavy crusts of ice. They shook at me, ripping at my mind.
A mind that was already more than occupied holding the incunabula at bay.
The pain was immense. Invisible talons, cold as the intercosmic chill, tore through the outer defences of my soul. Peals of mirthless laughter echoed in from distant, insane worlds of warp-horror and abomination.
I tried to drive them back, prise their clammy grip off my shuddering mind. But it took strength, it took effort. My hold on the Brass Thief was slipping away.
Its rhyming swords raised to strike, it took its first step towards me.
In the upstairs chamber, Zael yelled in fear as Miserimus shook again and again.
‘Shut up!’ Carl bellowed, glancing around as objects vibrated and moved, or flew clean across the room. His work chair was turning in circles all by itself. His cogitator vomited sparks as the main screen shattered. Bulging shapes slid up and down under the wallpaper.
Holding Zael close to him, Carl stood in the centre of the darkened room, turning in frantic circles as the air churned and eddied around him. A flying data-slate hit him on the cheek. He ducked as a storage case spun across the room.
‘Begone! Begone!’ Carl yelled. His handgun – useless anyway – had already been yanked out of his hand by the maelstrom. He tried to form a hexagrammatic ward to fight the onslaught.
Invisible forces, laughing at the edge of hearing, grabbed Carl and slammed him hard against the wall, pinning him, spread-eagled, two metres up. Zael screamed out. The boy had fallen to his hands and knees and gazed up at Carl’s helpless body. Terrible pressures were crushing Carl into the wall.
‘Holy… God-Emperor…’ Carl shrieked in agony.
Zael buried his head in his hands and cowered on the floor. There was an odd, cracking sound that he was certain had to be bones breaking. A scatter of metal objects rained down on the carpet in front of him. Zael blinked.
They were Carl’s rings. The thirty or so rings that had adorned the fingers and thumb of Carl’s right hand. Every single one of them was twisted and snapped open, burst as if split from within.
