by Ben Counter
'So it has come to this.' he said in a low, quiet voice, as if speaking to himself. 'The threads are drawing taut. This death is the death of galaxies. You may begin.'
As if in response, the hand of the chief medicae reached for the switch that would begin the dismemberment. His hand never got that far.
There was a flash of silver, like a tiny sliver of lightning arcing across the room, and suddenly a long bright blade was stuck quivering into the seat behind the medicae and his severed hand thudded onto the floor beneath him.
Riggensen saw the chief medicae look up at his attacker and stare into the unblinking, unforgiving eyes behind the mask of a death cultist.
The mind-wiped troops standing by the pedestal reacted first. The lasblasts from the hellguns they carried spattered across the room but the death cultist had read their movements perfectly and she twisted like a gymnast, the blasts ripping through the air centimetres from her skin. A split second later both troopers were dead, sliced in two across the waist by the twin curved short swords of the second cultist.
Inquisitor Nyxos bellowed and took a silver-plated plasma pistol from beneath his robes, his servos screaming as they forced his limbs to move with supernatural speed. The young tactical officer beside him hit the ground, her Naval officer's cap flying.
The two remaining death cultists leapt from their seats, one heading for Nyxos, the other for the pedestal where Valinov lay. The preacher threw his old, frail body between the cultists and the pedestal, but he didn't even slow the cultist down as he was neatly bisected by the cultist's sword.
Riggensen carried an autopistol as a sidearm, and he took it out from beneath his plain explicator's uniform as he stood up. He snapped off a shot at the cultist who had just cut off the medicae's hand, but the cultist jinked to the side faster than the bullet.
The cultist by the pedestal flashed his sword down twice, and Valinov was out of his restraints. He rolled off the pedestal and Nyxos, quickly realizing that Valinov was the biggest threat in the room, fired. The cultist threw himself in front of Nyxos and the plasma pistol's blast ripped through the cultist, the power of the shot dissipating as it vaporised his midriff.
Gunfire shattered down from everywhere, from adepts' sidearms, from Nyxos, from Riggensen. The cultist whom Riggensen had so nearly killed flipped over the head of the adept in front of him. Riggensen felt sure the cold steel would slice through him but instead the cultist flipped over the heads of the audience and ran impossibly along the wall behind them, sprinting halfway round the circular room to slash her sword through the Malleus troopers.
Riggensen fired again at her but, as the autopistol kicked in his hand, he could see the cultist ducking the shots or stepping to the side, moving faster than anyone should.
Valinov was taking shelter by the slab he should have died on. He was showered in the blood of the cultist who had died for him, and his hard dark eyes were glancing back and forth as he evaluated all the many threats to his life that were unfolding. Nyxos with his plasma pistol, who would at least have to wait a few seconds while the weapon recharged. Nyxos's assistant, the tactical officer who would surely have a sidearm of her own. The mind-wiped troopers who would shoot him without hesitation if any of them survived long enough. The servitor-mangier which was still writhing lethally less than a metre over his head.
Riggensen, whose autopistol shots seemed to be moving slower than if he had thrown them.
The cultist heading for Nyxos leapt across the room, slamming into the ageing inquisitor. Mechanised limbs clattered to the ground. A blade shot out and rang against the bracing around his pistol arm. A second plasma bolt ripped out, scouring the black glossy mask off half the cultist's face.
The tactical officer leapt to her feet, plunging a glowing power knife (a beautiful weapon, something that would be awarded to an outstanding cadet at one of the Imperial Navy's finest academies) into the cultist's calf. A flick of the wrist and the cultist threw her across the room to slam into the front row of seats with a gruesome crack.
The third surviving cultist, the one who had cut up Valinov's guards, finished the job of killing the chief medicae with a thrown knife that thudded into his throat and pinned him to his seat. Riggensen fired again, three shots streaking towards the last cultist. The cultist ducked low and ran towards Riggensen - Riggensen was a well-built man, young compared to many of the aged adepts and veterans of the Ordo Malleus. He was a prime target, a definite threat.
The cultist crossed the room in a flash. A second flash and the cultist fell, the tactical officer's power knife still stuck through his ankle.
The cultist landed on top of the clerk in front of Riggensen. Riggensen flicked the shot selector and fired the whole magazine of his autopistol into the cultist's back, the cultist jerking as finally there was no more room to dodge and the bullets tore through him.
Riggensen had probably killed the clerk, too. The fact was a bleak, dark veil at the back of his mind. He couldn't let it stop him, slow him down. He would do penance later. Now, he had to survive.
One of the cultists had thrown Valinov a hellgun and he had it on full auto - a fan of glittering crimson blasts ripped across the chamber. By now everyone was in cover or firing back, yelling, screaming. Nyxos was struggling with the cultist on top of him, blades slicing into him time and time again, threatening to shut down even his multiple augmetic systems.
Riggensen pulled the power knife out of the cultist's calf. He scrambled over the mess, his eyes fixed on Valinov. Riggensen was a servant of the Emperor. Riggensen would not run. He would not cower. He had shown no fear in the interrogation room, when he faced Valinov not knowing fully what he was. He would show no fear now.
Valinov was firing at the troopers now coming in. They were returning fire, shots spattering against the pedestal. Valinov hadn't seen Riggensen.
Time was going by in slow, tortured heartbeats. Riggensen was not a trained killer like Valinov, but he was strong and capable. He just needed one good shot - Valinov was tough and had many augmetics that would help him resist injury, but he could not go through a wound from a power knife and carry on defending himself.
Valinov span round and quick as lightning he brought the butt of the hellgun slamming into Riggensen's ribs. Riggensen fell, the hard cold metal of the pedestal cracking into the side of his head.
Valinov was kneeling, looming over the sprawling Riggensen. But Riggensen was not dead yet.
He had one last weapon. Something no one else had. It was the death of Nyxos's astropath that reminded him - Riggensen felt the psychic feedback of the astropath's mind flitting out of existence, the psychic spark going out.
He had broken Valinov once. He could do it again.
Riggensen reached through the fog of pain and shock, into the part of his mind where he kept the weapon that had made him an explicator. The eye inside him opened and looked out at Valinov's mind, reaching a lance of perception into the ex-inquisitor's soul. He could crack him open again, lever open Valinov's mind, blind him, deafen him, and fill his head with noise and insanity.
Riggensen let everything he had flood out of his mind to crack that diamond at the heart of Valinov's soul. He dug into his half-remembered childhood amongst the dregs of Hydraphur, the even murkier months of testing and conditioning on the Black Ship that had picked him up, the pain, the humiliation, the fear of the power that grew inside his head that might see him executed at any moment.
He found it all and compressed it into a crystal-hard mental spear. With all the strength the Malleus had taught him, he hurled it at Valinov.
There was nothing for it to hit. There was nothing, nowhere, no one.
Riggensen's mind flailed hopelessly at nothing, because Gholic Ren-Sar Valinov had no soul.
That abyss, where Valinov's soul should be, was the last thing Riggensen saw. He couldn't even see beyond it to the writhing arms of the servitor-mangier as Valinov hauled his body up into its grip and it star
ted the quick, slippery work of cutting Explicator Riggensen apart.
WHEN GHARGATULOTH WAS young - relatively speaking, for a true daemon suffered neither birth nor death - it was said that he walked like a mortal man, sometimes striding through from the warp when there was a mind of sufficient psychic power for him to possess.
He did what so many daemons did. He gloried in the feeling of flesh wrapped around him. He danced with his new feet. He told stories with his new tongue, stories that the small-minded human beings called insanity. Everyone who met him knew that he was not human - whatever body he wore, power dripped like tears of blue fire from his eyes and he spoke in riddles that drove men mad. But Ghargatuloth was fortunate, for he made his first forays into real space in a time of unfettered destruction and war. They called it the Age of Strife and, for one of the rare times in the history of mankind, the name they gave their era was completely appropriate.
He saw whole cultures stripped away until only plains of charred bones remained. He saw madmen made kings, brutal warlords who burned whole worlds as fuel to generate their personal power. Mankind lost the means to travel the stars in the slaughter, and retreated to their planets like vermin into their burrows, to consume one another in their wars.
He saw them rediscover space flight, too, and mankind was suddenly divided into a million bloodstained factions thrust into the same melting pot. Ghargatuloth, in a series of madmen's bodies, was a hero. Billions worshipped him. He was the prince who wore a cloak of many faces, each cut from the head of a traitor. He was the woman who swam in an ocean of blood every morning, so the strength of her exsanguinated foes would leach into her. He was the pirate king who united a dozen star systems, only to set them on one another to see which one would survive.
The Age of Strife lasted for longer than human history could properly record. In those days, Ghargatuloth lived out several lifetimes of warfare, suffering and mayhem. He had striven and triumphed, he had been defeated, he had died. Every moment fed the lust for knowledge that infected every servant of Tzeentch.
But Ghargatuloth slowly came to understand the truth. He was just a child, and the Age of Strife was his playground. The more he understood mankind, the more he began to understand the will of the Chaos powers. For every victory he achieved while amusing himself with war, there was a defeat. For every empire that rose, there would be a fall.
Mankind was fundamentally weak. It was incapable of true victory - it would always fail. Always. In the warp, there were gods, beings that had gathered such power that they would be gods forever. But mankind could not emulate them. When Ghargatuloth realized this, he came to despise the species he had played with for so long.
He became bored. He would sometimes make forays into real space and cause wanton havoc, but it was empty and meaningless. There was no knowledge to be found there. No secrets to learn. Mankind was a crude and ignorant animal, incapable of gathering true, meaningful power.
Until the crusade.
A man calling himself the Emperor conquered the cradle of mankind, holy Terra, the homeworld. He led a crusade across the stars, conquering the space mankind had settled, reuniting the species into the Imperium. Every human being in the galaxy was declared an automatic citizen of the Imperium, whether they knew it or not. The crusade had never truly ended, for the Imperium throughout its entire history had striven to bring every human world into its oppressive embrace.
And suddenly, the galaxy was interesting again. For the first time mankind had secured enduring power for itself, a dominion over the known galaxy that had remained for well over ten thousand years. It had survived even the death of the Emperor himself at the hands of the Chaos-blessed Warmaster Horus, civil wars and invasions, everything the universe could throw at it. The Imperium endured, in spite of the dimness of the human intellect and the tiny scope of their minds.
And as Ghargatuloth had seen, every victory was followed by defeat. Every empire built, must fall.
Ghargatuloth's existence had meaning again. One day, the Imperium would fall. And Ghargatuloth would be there when it happened...
LIGEIA THREW HERSELF against the far wall of her bedchamber, her clothes drenched in sweat, her mouth dry and her breath hot and painful. She was shaking. On the table across the room, the book lay crackling the antique patina with its evil. It was a small, slim volume, small enough to hide in the palm of one hand, but written onto its pages were the revelations of Ghargatuloth, pure and undiluted, an unabridged tirade of madness. Ligeia had to forcibly shut down her mind to stop its meaning from seeping into her.
Her chambers were a mess. Clothes were strewn around and half-eaten meals curdled on silver plates balanced on every surface. There had been too much in Ligeia's head for her to keep up the appearance of a noblewoman - such things didn't seem to matter anymore, not when she had seen some of the full horror of the forces that were tearing at the fabric of reality.
Ghargatuloth was speaking to her. Ghargatuloth was not just a daemonic body - he was knowledge. He was all the knowledge that he had gathered in his immensely long lifetime. That was why he could not be killed, only banished - he left that knowledge in the hearts and minds of his cultists, so that even if he were banished from real space enough of him would remain written in books or madmen's minds to bring him back.
Ligeia couldn't beat him. She couldn't face something like that. The most basic understanding of Ghargatuloth was simply too vast and complex to fit into her mind.
She wished she had her death cultists still, so she could explain to them what she felt. They never answered, of course, but even just talking helped. She could not talk to the Grey Knights, not even Alaric, not about something like this. The Malleus crew who skulked through the guts of the Rubicon were no better, nor was Inquisitor Klaes or the rest of the Inquisition. Ligeia was completely alone, with no one but the afterimage of Ghargatuloth in her head for company.
But her death cultists were gone. They would not be coming back.
There was a loud bang from elsewhere in her chambers, as an explosive charge blew the door in. Ligeia heard someone yelling an order and armoured feet crunched through the antique furniture in the next room.
Ligeia straightened up. She still had her digital weapon disguised as a large ornate ring on her finger, and there was a needle pistol somewhere in her luggage that she could use competently. But she knew that neither of them would do any good. Tzeentch was going to swallow the galaxy. What good was any weapon?
The door to her bedchamber was kicked in. Splintered wood flew everywhere. Ligeia stepped back from the door, shaking, knowing what a pathetic figure she would cut - bedraggled, exhausted, ill, looking all her many years and more.
She recognized Justicar Santoro, the most straight-laced Grey Knight, barging his way into the room. He was just the person they would bring down from the Rubicon to face her. No imagination. No chance of listening to her pleas.
Santoro levelled his storm bolter at Ligeia's head. If she moved, if she spoke, he would kill her.
Somehow, she had known it would come to this. Even before she had ever heard of Ghargatuloth, as a junior investigator for the Ordo Hereticus before the Malleus had even found her, she had known she would end her days at the point of gun a held by someone who was supposed to be her ally. That was the way the Inquisition worked, how the whole Imperium worked - mankind always killed its own in the end.
Three more members of Squad Santoro moved into the room, their weapons trained at Ligeia, their huge armoured bodies filing the room. Ligeia shivered in a sudden cold.
'Clear.' said Santoro.
Inquisitor Klaes followed the Grey Knights into the room. He held a data-slate in one hand - the other hand was on the hilt of his power sword.
'Inquisitor Briseis Ligeia.' said Klaes carefully. 'We have received a communication from the Ordo Malleus Conclave on Enceladus demanding your immediate arrest. As the principal Inquisitorial authority in this area I am required
to carry out that order. The rules of your situation are now very simple, Ligeia: surrender or Justicar Santoro will kill you.'
Ligeia held her shaking hands up. At a hand signal from Santoro, a Marine Ligeia recognised as Brother Traevan stepped forward, grabbed her hand and pulled the ring off her finger, grinding its precious miniaturised technology beneath his boot.
'Do you have any other weapons?' said Santoro grimly.
Ligeia shook her head.
'Restrain her.'
Traevan pulled Ligeia's arms behind her and she felt manacles being clamped around her wrists. It was only professional courtesy from Klaes, she knew, that kept her from being strip-searched and put in chains.
'Inquisitor Ligeia.' said Klaes, reading now from the data-slate, 'the orders of the Emperor's Holy Inquisition are placing you under arrest for the crimes of grand heresy, association with enemies of the Emperor, corruption of the Emperor's servants, and other charges pending a full hearing. You will be taken to the facilities on Mimas where the truth will be drawn from you and your fate decided by the Conclave of the Ordo Malleus. You will be afforded no freedom that might lead to the furtherance of your crimes. Your authority as an inquisitor is revoked.
These charges relate to the assistance received by the condemned enemy of the Emperor, Gholic Ren-Sar Valinov, and the deaths of Imperial servants in the commission of this heresy. By the decree of the Ordo Malleus there can be no innocence of your crimes, only degrees of guilt, which shall be decided upon in due time. Until then you are no longer a citizen of the Imperium but a creature owned and disposed of by the Ordo Malleus. May the Emperor have mercy on you, for we will not.'
Klaes switched off the data-slate. Ligeia could see the sadness in his eyes. No inquisitor could enjoy persecuting one of their colleagues - it reminded them of how close they themselves were to falling. 'Tell me why, Ligeia, and I'll see that they treat you well.'
