Atlas Infernal

by Rob Sanders

  The daemonhost smiled derision at them.

  ‘A Merry Feastday, to you all,’ he hissed with upturned lips and downcast eyes.

  When Klute had originally met Hessian, the entity had been bound in the body of the misshapen twist Phalanghast had used as an initial vessel. Where the beast had been before that, nobody knew. An inquisitor, Klute may have been – but inquisitive by nature he was not, particularly when it came to exchanging pleasantries with creatures of darkness. Some say that he was the tormentor of the Regulator Hvalken and saw that doomed family through forty generations of woe; some that he was responsible for the Mount Idas Massacre where thirty Sons of Horus lost their lives and the contents of their skulls to the monster’s appetite; a few even that he was in fact Gallkor-Teth the Decimate in all his different incarnations and was worshipped as a demigod across a hundred different barbarian worlds.

  Regardless of his horrific origins, Phalanghast had found him trapped in a solitary mutant by a common dirt shaman in the Ilk forests of Gorm. Years of service to the shaman and in turn to Phalanghast had taxed the poor mutant’s body beyond endurance so that when he crossed the sealstone of the Fornax Adventist Crusade, that day on Tancress Minor, the thing looked like a vivisectionist’s practice piece. The holy power of the stone split the flesh vessel apart and would have re-released the full horror of Hessian the Anathemic on the Imperium, had it not been for the embarring powers of the stone itself. Over three hours of maniacal struggle – the powers of the warp blasting forth from the daemonhost’s ruined, flaccid flesh – the creature managed to break the holy stone and its hold on it. By then, Phalanghast had imprisoned the entity in a fresh vessel, the body of one of his boyish vassals. It had been a hasty but necessary choice for the dark mystic – since no one else among the rogue trader’s crew or company would have volunteered for the job.

  It was the comely face of that youth – Klute had appallingly never bothered to ask his name before that point – that beamed at the inquisitor now, the only blemish to his Adonis-like complexion being the slight angularity of the letters under his skin. These occasionally caught the shadow and turned his fair features into a face-page from the Tabula Deletum. This was a further precaution Phalanghast had visited upon the poor youth’s tortured flesh, once he’d gotten Hessian back to the Malescaythe’s surgical bay. He’d grafted under his skin thousands of individual lawthorn characters from Erasmus Beltaine’s first printing press – the very same machine Beltaine had used to print faith tracts from the Biblia Incertitus during the Palatyne Sceptoclasm. The procedure had taken days, and undoubtedly limited the Anathemic’s more devastating capabilities, but everyone on board the rogue trader – including Klute – felt better knowing the daemonhost was secure.

  ‘She’s right,’ Klute told Epiphani, ignoring Hessian’s blasphemous greeting. ‘Explain yourself,’ he said sternly, adding to Captain Torres’s outrage, suspicion growing with the inquisitor’s every word.

  The warp-seer pursed her lips with petulance, whilst behind her the daemon smirked at Klute like some self-satisfied simpleton.

  ‘Hessian’s here,’ she began, pausing only to down the contents of Torqhuil’s flaming glass, ‘because something bad is going to happen and we’re going to need him.’

  And as always, the warp-seer was right.

  Flourish

  ACT I, CANTO II

  Archeodeck, Rogue trader Malescaythe, The Eye of Terror

  The same

  Something was wrong. Klute had already begun to sense it.

  Not a thought or a suspicion but an actual physical feeling of internal strangeness. Like surfacing too quickly, or the effect a loose airlock pressure seal has on the inner ear. Sound seemed to slow and become distorted and for a moment everything turned into its reverse negative. Black became white, faces became ghoulish contrasts. The inquisitor considered the possibility that it might be Hessian, but the daemonhost’s expression matched his own – one of mixed confusion and mild discomfort.

  As Klute’s senses returned to normal he became aware of a building sense of apprehension in his gut – again something corporal rather than emotional, a deep, alien trembling that seemed to grow in him and everything about him. There was no sound, yet the booming resonance was everywhere.

  Torqhuil’s ceramite arm suddenly came up. He was shouting – despite the deck plunging into a silent calm.

  ‘The Fornical!’

  Klute span.

  The Lost Fornical of Urien-Myrdyss… was alive.

  ‘Inquisitor…’ Torres began with growing trepidation.

  ‘They activated it? So soon?’ Klute gabbled at the Relictor, but the Space Marine was already striding past the inquisitor, towards the rumbling warp gate.

  ‘Not possible – they’ve barely begun,’ he snapped, ending speculation that the archeoxenologists had struck gold on their first examination of the ancient artefact.

  Klute had agreed to all precautions: the hangar location, the Savlar presence, the wired promethium – but that had all been built on the premise that one day Torqhuil and the Mechanicus might make the impossible possible and gain access to the gate. The inquisitor never really thought that the gate might be opened from the other side; it might have been ridiculously foolish of him, but he’d been listening to the Relictor’s long-odds estimations of success for so long in their search for the thing that he never really considered it feasible.

  Torres began barking orders to the ensign before cutting him off and yelling across the hangar at the Savlar Chem-Dogs.

  ‘Man the detonators!’

  ‘Belay that!’ Klute countered, his mind racing to catch up. He understood the captain’s caution, but he didn’t want the Fornical blasted to warp-dust. Not unless it was absolutely necessary. They’d risked so much to acquire it. ‘Secure the perimeter,’ Klute bellowed at the collection of shabby troopers, prompting the devout Steward-Sergeant Rourke to slip onto one knee and make the sign of the aquila before smacking skulls and pushing dozy Guardsmen into position.

  The rogue trader captain’s scowl softened slightly. The thought of the Chem-Dogs pointing their motley collection of scavenged lascarbines, autoguns and shotguns at the warp gate opening filled her with a little more confidence for the safety of her ship. Still, she was taking few chances and pushed the ensign away with orders to secure the hangar door and lock off the archeodeck from the rest of the rogue trader.

  With the captain and Torqhuil bawling a judicious mix of questions and orders at the Mechanicus and Savlar penitents, Klute was left with Epiphani and the void-spawn, Hessian. The daemonhost looked at him blankly with his youthful face and ancient eyes. Epiphani simply shrugged her slender shoulders.

  ‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’

  ‘What I want,’ Klute stormed at her, ‘is less in the way of riddles and more in the way of warning, Epiphani.’ He flung his glass at the metal decking and proceeded to stumble towards the Fornical. Epiphani and the daemon did not follow – and perhaps Klute should have taken this as a sign, but he had come too far, sacrificed too much and had spent too many years of his life working towards this moment to hide from it. The inquisitor crossed the hangar and marched towards his destiny.

  Slipping his fingers through his robes, Klute unconsciously grabbed for his sidearm. Klute believed that an inquisitor’s weapon was a measure of him and his own clearly showed how much he’d changed. Before his unhealthy occupation in the Eye and his dealings with the darkness, Klute was very much a Glavian man. Glavia produced some of the finest needle weapons in the known universe and as a young interrogator he was the proud owner of a brace of Glavian ‘Silver Tongue 770s’. This would be a fool’s weapon in the Eye, however, as he soon discovered. A needle gun is an elegant taker of lives, but with so many of the foes there of abnormal invention and capability, Klute found that he needed something that packed a little more punch and that could actually harm the warped and ungodly. What good was even the most advanced of toxins against the soulless
and often bloodless creatures that walked the fine line between the real and the unreal?

  So the Glavia had to go. They didn’t go, so much as were eaten by a catacomb angler-wyrm the inquisitor had found in the Flesh Mines of Marriar. Their replacement could not have been more different and belonged to a friend Klute had lost on Phibos IV. Obarbus Keene had been a Cadian Chastener whose cold, hard advice Klute had come very much to value but to whom he could never admit his real purpose in the Eye of Terror. Klute engaged his services under false pretences and sent a thoroughly good man to his death for a heretical lie. All the inquisitor had left of Keene’s uncompromising ways was his uncompromising weapon, a lever action Cadian Kasr close combat shotgun. Originally meant as a close quarters street silencer, in the cramped zigs and zags of the garrison world metropols, Keene cut down the weapon further to its pistol grip and carried it as a bombastic sidearm – as Klute did now – in part to honour a good man.

  The inquisitor began thumbing fat shells into the pistol. As a rule Klute didn’t walk about the ship with a loaded weapon. It wasn’t polite. Klute was old fashioned in that way – as in many others – and besides wasn’t much of a killer. His aim was average and his interest in weaponry only ever extended as far as the antiquity and worksmanship of the Glavian. As a man long trained in the arts of medicine, however, he knew how to incapacitate and execute, as he knew how to patch and revive. But this was little in the way of a handicap in the Eye, where the quick and ignorant died in their droves and a little knowledge could carry trigger-virgins a long way.

  Klute worked the slick lever action and sent the final cartridge home, thrice-blessed silver scatter shot embedded in a slug of Saint Vesta’s salts. Nowhere near as effective as bolt, stalker or penetrator rounds, which the Cadian Kasr could easily accommodate. The salt and silver shot did, however, have the advantage of soul-scalding the infernal and etheriate. It was no more pleasant for those who didn’t happen to be incorporeal or daemonic, which made the choice an ammunition for all seasons and situations and the deep pockets of Klute’s robes had fast became receptacles for as many of the blessed slugs as he could carry. Old-fashioned he may have been, but prudence was an old-fashioned value.

  No longer a dusty excavation piece, the Lost Fornical of Urien-Myrdyss blazed with bleach-bone brilliance. The grit and age that had once blemished its elegant arches now hung in the air about the relic in a cloud of warp static and excitement. A ghostly shimmer rippled through the wraithbone superstructure, rolling continuously from lancet to dais. Klute didn’t have to be an alien to understand this meant something was about to happen.

  Bolts of energy – of colours he’d never seen before, and had no words to describe – spewed forth from spines in the archways. The warp currents elegantly synchronised, finding each other across the central space of the arch, with tributary beams crackling across the air in between. As bolts connected they seemed to fuse the reality of the space inside their borders and piece by piece, like some diabolical puzzle, the inquisitor caught patchwork glimpses of the space beyond.

  The entire hangar was stricken, at once with the desire to see what the Fornical would vomit forth and the simultaneous gut-wrenching need to be ready to destroy it. Under Steward-Sergeant Rourke’s devotional drill, the Savlar Chem-Dogs were all goggles and barrels. Torqhuil stood like some great statue nearby, his hydraulic arms and servo limbs extended protectively in front of him; his actual arms supporting the weight of his rune-engraved power axe, which he gripped in his gauntlets, ready for battle. Torres hovered behind, her faith – as always – instilled in the simple, curved blade of her naval hanger.

  As the warp gate completed its jigsaw assembly of the reality on the other side of the portal, Klute became witness to the bitter, alien tenebrosity of the transdimensional tunnel beyond. The fabled webway…

  The inquisitor had little time to enjoy this mythical vision, however, as the Lost Fornical’s first sojourner in a thousand years was thrust upon the Malescaythe. A silhouette of light burned through the shadow of the alien tunnel and a figure vaulted forth through the miasma of warp static. He stumbled and rolled – his footing fleet and uncertain, until he fell into an untidy crouch in front of the sizzling archway, head down, the tips of his boots and fingers holding onto the solid surface of the wraithbone dais like a ship’s cat, unsure of its foothold.

  It could have been the shock of this gracefully clumsy entrance or simply the fact that the fingers of penal colonists were itchy as well as light, but it was at that point that several Savlar troopers unleashed a brief blast of auto and heavy stubber fire. The bullets tore up the warp gate platform in a line that ripped into the floor about the figure and ended their journey plucking harmlessly at the unreality through the gate.

  The figure was fast. It wasn’t so much his movements – he clearly could not outrun gunfire – but within a blink of the weapons silencing he was a blur of colour and then was gone, his back to one of the Fornical’s many runed totems and flourishes.

  Klute went to berate the wired Chem-Dogs, but Steward-Sergeant Rourke, the Savlar Top-Dog, was already among them, expressing his displeasure with correctional catechisms, fists and snarls. With the cavernous muzzle of Klute’s pistol leading the way, the inquisitor moved uncertainly up onto the dais. The wraithbone felt every bit as solid as the metal decking he’d just left, but Klute disliked the sensation and felt strangely vulnerable.

  ‘Make yourself known, visitor,’ he called to the figure beyond. Klute didn’t really want to venture up into the obelisks and needles of the gateway’s design and would much rather the interloper supplicate and walk out to him.

  A harsh laugh echoed around the alien architecture.

  ‘No thank you,’ the reply shot back in Low Gothic, although the tone was clipped and cultured. ‘I’ve already experienced enough of your particular brand of welcome today.’

  ‘A malfunction, I assure you,’ Klute returned with equal civility. There was a pause, but not much of one. Despite his diffidence the figure seemed hurried, perhaps even agitated.

  ‘Where would I happen to be?’ he asked casually.

  Klute was moving around the exterior totems and already thought he’d had him twice, only for the inquisitor to have found himself stalking empty space.

  ‘The Malescaythe,’ Klute informed him. ‘Registered rogue trader, under my jurisdiction. But she is in the Eye my friend, and here, there is no jurisdiction. Only force, which is what you will shortly experience if you do not present yourself.’

  Another corner; another empty space. Klute was glad he’d packed the silver-and-salt shot now; the visitor might speak Imperial but he didn’t move like any Earthly creature – that was for sure.

  ‘When?’

  A ridiculous question, but – Klute reasoned – was probably appropriate for someone who had just stepped out of a warp gate. The inquisitor obliged him with the information, but more just to keep the conversation going, so that he could get a lock on his position.

  Torres’s patience was up, however. ‘Raimus, just shoot him.’ No doubt she wanted the gate secured while it remained dangerously open – her men couldn’t do that while Klute played labyrinth with their guest.

  ‘Raimus… Klute?’

  Klute span. The question had drifted over his shoulder.

  Panic coursed through the inquisitor’s limbs and he instinctively brought the fat pistol up between the two of them. The figure had been there the whole time. Klute’s brain had known it but his eyes had lied; something about the figure’s attire rippled with chromatic disorientation. Something in the timbre of the voice was equally disorientating and familiar.

  ‘My lord?’ Klute blurted.

  Down the barrel of the street silencer Klute was staring at a face he’d long known and for the longest time, hoped to know again.

  The figure’s slender palm came to rest on the muzzle and he gently pushed it deckward, giving Klute a better look at his face. Impossibly, he was younger than he’d k
nown him, his sharp eyes keener than ever and the scornful lines that cut into his formerly ancient face were now smooth and taut; virgin territory for fresh disdain. Klute struggled with this youthful appearance and the bizarre logic of what he was seeing.

  Klute, on the other hand, must have appeared quite the reverse. Tried, tired and weather-beaten, with a scalp and moustache shot through with the silver of his years. The dark leather of his once gleaming armour and mantle was now scuffed and bolt-plucked.

  His opposite, on the other hand, was dressed in a trench coat of an outlandish alien fashion. While Klute stared directly at the material it seemed to be covered in a garish pattern of interlocking diamonds, making up a myriad of flamboyant colours. The garment sizzled with a form of field technology that played with the eye, trailing a diamond blaze as the inquisitor moved while fading and mirror-mimicking its surroundings at moments of absolute stillness.

  The two men stared at each other. Klute had looked forward to this moment for so long that now it was here – unexpected as it was – he could not help holding onto it.

  ‘Raimus Klute,’ the figure repeated, as though he could barely believe this meeting himself.

  ‘Czevak…’ Klute mumbled in wonder. ‘My lord… I…’

  Czevak’s features had never been soft – not at study, not at ease – but the High Inquisitor’s eyes did seem to flood with an uncharacteristic gladness. It was enough for Klute to assume that there might not be too many friendly faces to be found – even ones as haggard as his own – on the long, dark corridors of the alien webway.