by Rob Sanders
‘Tell him,’ Torres insisted, now on her feet.
‘Silence woman,’ Klute growled back.
‘Tell him.’
‘Tell me what? What do you have to tell me, Raimus?’
‘You are so close to it; so involved in the intricacies of events that surround you that you fail to see the larger canvas, my friend,’ Klute told his mentor with jaw-tightened honesty.
‘What have you done, Raimus?’ Czevak said.
‘As I said before, it’s all a horribly predictable trap. We are being played by an evil hundreds of light-years away – all of us. And you, my lord are the most predictable of all.’
Czevak turned on Torres with grim, uncompromising eyes.
‘Speak now, captain.’
‘I destroyed the Black Sovereign,’ Klute admitted.
‘We destroyed it,’ the rogue trader captain corrected. Czevak’s face fell and his shoulders sagged.
‘You had no right,’ Torqhuil growled from the other side of the High Inquisitor’s quarters, the Space Marine’s own fury building. ‘That artefact could have done unfathomable damage to the Ruinous Powers and their minions…’
‘Do you have any idea what you have done?’ Czevak roared at them.
‘It was my decision,’ Klute said.
‘What? To condemn billions to death at the claws of a colossal, daemonic entity?’
‘You were half out of your mind, my lord and could not be consulted,’ Klute snarled back.
‘But if you had – I don’t think even I would have done something so insanely foolish.’
‘I beg to differ, High Inquisitor,’ Klute informed him, ‘but I think you just might have. You said as much yourself.’
Czevak seethed for a moment.
‘How?’ he said to Torres. ‘How did you destroy it?’
‘We shot it into a star.’
‘Which star?’
‘Lupratrix.’
‘Lupratrix? Lupratrix is on the Kroulx Circumpolar Drift,’ Czevak said dangerously. He burrowed into Klute with unforgiving eyes. ‘Are you taking me back to Nemesis Tessera, old friend?’
‘Listen to me, my lord,’ Klute pleaded but his words were cold like iron. ‘You have a once in a ten generation mind, a brilliant mind – brilliantly predictable. These daemons and monsters have hooked you and now are drawing you in. Can’t you see? You think you’re hunting Ahriman but in reality he is hunting you and this trap – this elaborate trap, elaborate enough to fox even you – is the game trail upon which you will be caught. He cannot acquire you on the labyrinthine webway so he has drawn you out. Out to Melmoth’s World, where he will finish what he started and take every last secret hidden in that brilliant mind. The Black Library will be his and the Imperium doomed.’
‘You wish to save me from a trap by walking me into another?’ Czevak said to his former student. ‘You think the Inquisition will do any less to me than Ahriman? They’ll kill us all, you fool.’
‘After transporting us to Nemesis Tessera, Captain Torres intends to sell her cargo of recovered artefacts, including the Lost Fornical of Urien-Myrdyss, on the black markets of the Rubicon Straits. There she will undoubtedly recover her family’s fortune. On the way she has agreed to take Brother Torqhuil, Epiphani and Hessian to any location they choose. They will live and so will we.’
‘You are deluded.’
‘You’re wrong, my lord. The Thirteenth Black Crusade has changed priorities in the Eye. Abaddon has his claws in Cadia’s sacred earth and the dark forces of the Despoiler are spread across the region, gaining ground every day. Necessity is our greatest ally at this desperate time. The Imperium needs you. I am confident that our ordo brothers will put aside their petty prejudice and see that our best hope to defeat Abaddon’s warhost, and finally put an end to these murderous Crusades, lies in your experience, your knowledge of the Black Library and your links to the eldar.’
‘Which they will extract on a rack!’ Czevak bawled.
The two men regarded each other, eyes aflame. Hessian beamed at the men, feeding on the hatred flowing between them. Epiphani looked bored and flicked open her snuff box. She took a lazy snort of Spook and her eyes began to flutter with psychoactive ecstasy. Czevak unscrewed the cogitator cable from the mind-impulse link in his skull and allowed the line to drop to the cluttered cabin floor.
‘We need to choose a side, sir,’ Klute argued back. ‘And there will never be a better time. For too long we have both been in the hinterlands of heresy, living a renegade existence. Remain and we will become what we swore to hunt down and destroy. It is inevitable. It is part of the essence of this damned place. It’s time to go home. It’s time to rejoin the ranks of our Holy Ordo and once again carry out the Emperor’s work, actually under his banner and in his name. It’s time, sir.’
For the longest time, Czevak stood still, staring at the floor and saying nothing. His face was a shattered mirror of emotions: anger, betrayal, exhaustion and fear. All eyes remained on him but no one spoke. When he did move, the gathering jumped slightly – not knowing what the High Inquisitor would do. Opening a nalwood wardrobe the High Inquisitor extracted his Harlequin coat and slipped it on. Pulling on Klute’s Cretacian hunting boots he extracted the gleaming bulk of the Atlas Infernal. He pointed the ancient tome’s gilded spine at Klute.
‘You really want to visit Nemesis Tessera?’ Czevak asked his former student with no little gravity.
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘And you would accept responsibility for the consequences of such a visit?’ Czevak put to him.
Klute hesitated. ‘Yes, High Inquisitor.’
Czevak nodded slowly.
‘Then I’ll go with you. But not through the front door. We aren’t going to just walk up to a secret, sub-planetary Inquisition fortress, hold out our wrists and give ourselves up – you understand me? This will be done on my terms.’
‘Fair enough,’ Klute replied with obvious relief. He would take what he could get from the High Inquisitor.
‘You,’ Czevak said, indicating Captain Torres. ‘Close on Nemesis Tessera and take station. Do not reveal yourself to the garrison vessels in orbit, as soon as they know what you are and where you’ve been they will blow you out of existence. May I suggest, Heinus Regula. It’s a barren moon, with a dense iron core, which should be sufficient enough to mask the Malescaythe’s signature from scans and patrols.’
‘Anything else?’
‘A squad of your most light-footed and light-fingered Guardsmen.’
‘As you wish,’ Torres replied coolly, looking to Klute for confirmation, which the inquisitor gave with a nod.
‘The rest of you with me. I want to show you something.’
With that, Czevak pushed past Torqhuil’s armoured form and exited the cabin for the archeodeck.
‘Inquisitor?’ the Relictors Space Marine asked. Epiphani and Hessian hovered, with Father humming overhead. Epiphani was holding Czevak’s empty cup.
‘Well?’ Klute asked her.
The warp-seer peered into the mug, her eyes still glossy with the future. She then angled it towards the inquisitor. Inside the bottom was speckled with tea leaves. ‘What do you see?’
‘A dagger. Unsheathed. I see a betrayal.’
Klute and Torqhuil exchanged grim, urgent glances.
‘Watch him,’ Klute told them as he went to follow the High Inquisitor. ‘And be ready for anything.’
Exeunt
ACT III, CANTO II
Reliquary chamber XIII.3, Dungeon archive, Nemesis Tessera Fortress
Enter CZEVAK with KLUTE, BROTHER TORQHUIL, EPIPHANI with FATHER, and HESSIAN, flanked by STEWARD-SERGEANT ROURKE and a SAVLAR CHEM-DOG SQUAD
‘Torches.’
‘Where the hell are we?’
With the Savlar penal legionnaires still fiddling with their barrel-slung lamps and torches, the only light in the chamber came from Father’s haunting, blue, bionic orbs and the faint, sickly glow of the daemonhost Hessian. The Guard
smen would have been faster but for the fact that without exception it had been their first experience of the webway and its inter-dimensional peculiarities. After the alien experience of the webway’s labyrinthine passages, getting used to solid ground, plain darkness and their scavenged equipment was quite a challenge.
At Steward-Sergeant Rourke’s sibilant insistence, beams snapped on and sliced through the blackness. The squad’s torches lanced about the chamber giving the gathering the fragmented impression of a large but cluttered subterranean chamber. As Brother Torqhuil brought his harness lamps to life their exit became illuminated. The Relictors Space Marine was still standing in the aperture of a wraithbone warp gate. The artefact was smaller than the Lost Fornical of Urien-Myrdyss and the craftsmanship culturally removed. It had been less fortunate in resisting the ravages of time and many of the osseous flourishes were smashed and stunted. The portal was halfway between an oval and a diamond in shape, sporting elegant bulb-bearing barbs and spurs from each elliptical corner. A large crack spiralled through one quarter of the structure like a torsion fracture and the dais it sat upon was little more than a mosaic tessellation of crumbling fragments. The gateway’s crackling energies and glowing wraithbone bulbs had faded to emptiness and Czevak and his team had found themselves in the cavernous gloom of a dungeon archive.
‘Where are we?’ Torqhuil echoed.
‘You said you had something to show us,’ Klute said to his master.
Czevak strode forward with confidence through the murky environs of the cavern, walking around, in between and ducking under the clutter that filled the colossal archive. He examined objects and precarious piles as he went, clearly looking for something in particular.
‘When I find it I’ll show it to you,’ the young Czevak insisted.
Klute bridled and then gestured to Steward-Sergeant Rourke. ‘Fan out and establish a perimeter.’
‘Right you are, sir,’ the burly Guardsman confirmed, slipping an aquila on a chain out from his flak vest and kissing the sacred image. ‘Pattern Citadel!’ he snarled at the Savlar Chem-Dogs idling about the chamber. The penitent Guardsmen began moving into a protective formation.
‘No,’ Czevak turned on them. ‘There hasn’t been anyone down here in at least two hundred years. But do fan out. You’re looking for a bell jar stasis casket, about so big, bearing a symbol in gold, an inverse horse shoe struck through with a horizontal line. Call me as soon as you find it.’
Klute watched the Savlar Chem-Dogs nod and wander off, their eyes glinting in the torchlight and with the prospect of scavenging valuables from the chamber. Czevak’s reason for summoning them became abundantly clear.
With Czevak and the Guardsmen lost to the darkness Klute felt strangely vulnerable and remained by the silent warp gate with Epiphani. The warp-seer had her hand on Father’s crown, using the servo-skull as both her eyes and a guide. As she turned slowly, taking in the chamber, Hessian approached nearby objects and sniffed at them like a predator on a scent. Torqhuil had taken long strides towards the nearby wall, his harness lamps throwing long shadows across the polished rock of the walls.
‘Inquisitor,’ he said, drawing Klute to him.
‘Anything?’ Czevak called distantly through the gloom only to have a succession of mumbled negatives return.
‘What have you found?’ Klute put to the Relictor. The Techmarine gestured at the wall with a meaty gauntlet.
‘We are far underground, I can tell you that,’ Torqhuil said. He let a ceramite fingertip drift high up the wall to a metal brace running across the chamber. It disappeared into the murk at the limit of the Space Marine’s illumination. ‘Reliquary Chamber XIII.3,’ the Adeptus Astartes read off the brace. Then both men’s eyes settled on the insignia of the Holy Inquisition.
‘Czevak!’ Klute hissed.
But the High Inquisitor was already standing there with them.
‘Where are we?’
‘Nemesis Tessera,’ Czevak answered plainly.
Fury and frustration erupted on Klute’s face. ‘Nemesis Tessera!’
‘Several kilometres below it actually,’ Czevak corrected him. ‘But we’re home. That’s what you wanted. To be among the cold stone walls of the Holy Ordos – in one of the safest places in the Eye of Terror, no less. Nemesis Tessera – built at the behest of the Emperor himself, so it is said, following Abaddon’s First Black Crusade.’
‘But,’ Klute stumbled, trying to find the words. ‘The Malescaythe… You said you needed to show us something.’
‘And I do,’ the High Inquisitor admitted with distraction, peering once again about the darkness of the cavern. ‘But now I think I left it in the other chamber.’
‘You’ve been here before?’ the Relictors Space Marine asked.
‘Many times,’ Czevak confessed with a cocky smirk.
‘The last place they would look for you,’ Klute said, slowly shaking his head. The urgency of the situation continued to dawn on the inquisitor. ‘Czevak, we can’t be here.’
‘I said I’d come,’ Czevak told his former acolyte, himself losing patience. ‘I came. I kept my word. As I said, one does not walk up to a top secret Inquisitorial fortress and knock on the front door.’
Klute snarled. ‘The Relictors have been declared Excommunicate Traitoris; Epiphani has an Ordo Hereticus kill-order across twelve sectors and Hessian – well, Hessian is the body of my mystic’s boy lover, host to the filth-evil incarnate of a daemonic force. Not exactly who I wanted to introduce to my brother inquisitors!’
‘Well, we’ll let them worry about that,’ Czevak said and began walking away.
Suddenly there was light and sound. Excruciating klaxons filled the air with murderous urgency while the chamber was bathed in bloody, rapid, red light from the reliquary roof. It crashed on and off in time with the alarm.
The inquisitors and henchmen stared at one another, searching for evidence of the alarm’s activation.
They found Hessian, sniffing his way amongst the damned and daemonic artefacts, standing astride an emblem carved into the floor, made up of concentric lines of High Gothic script. The crimson darklight revealed similar markings distributed evenly across the chamber floor space.
Torqhuil bound over to the daemonhost and grabbed it under one arm.
‘Purity seal,’ the Relictor confirmed. ‘Incursion alarmed.’
Klute regarded his former master savagely across the gathered artefacts and relics. ‘When they find us, they’ll declare us all heretics and rack us for eternity!’
‘They’ll do that anyway, my friend,’ Czevak told him grimly, ‘that is what you have failed to appreciate all along.’
‘Activate the warp gate,’ Torqhuil said.
‘Too late for that,’ Czevak shouted back as he strode up through the reliquary collection of arcana and warped objects. ‘But worry not. For when one door closes another door opens.’
Some distance across the cavern, in the direction the High Inquisitor was marching, the bloodshot sirens illuminated a colossal bronze bulkhead that was both a metal end-wall to the chamber and doorway separating one giant reliquary dungeon from another. The heart-stopping thunk of monstrous chains and gears thundered through the stone walls and handspan by handspan, the bulkhead began to judder for the ceiling.
A huge dust cloud erupted from the cavern floor, disturbed by the shifting air as the bulkhead shuddered skyward. One moment Czevak was there, the next he was a ghost – a shape swallowed by the rolling obscurity. Klute watched the silhouette duck beneath the rising metal partition and disappear completely.
‘Czevak!’ the inquisitor yelled.
The encroaching cloud, shot through with the flashing urgency of the sirens, billowed at them. ‘Sergeant,’ Klute directed, prompting Rourke to pull back and raise the scuffed barrel of his stubby lascarbine.
‘Pattern Citadel, you scrotes,’ he roared at the Savlar Chem-Dogs, but the penal legionnaires had already started backing away from the rising bulkhead and priming
their own collection of scavenged weaponry.
The colossal bulkhead continued to rise as the dust cloud began to thin. Beyond, new shapes were forming. Six hulking silhouettes that stomped forward through the swirl and shade like a small mountain range of ceramite, plasteel and adamantium. Their armour glinted silver brilliance through the dusty murk and pitted age of ancient plating. The relentless approach left the white skirts of their surcoats trailing. Their small helmets sat squat in a chest plate nest of power cables and life support lines. These, in turn, were dwarfed by huge globed shoulder plates that dominated the suit outline and lent the armoured figures an almost vehicular bulk.
Klute felt cold dread wash through him. With each ponderous step the markings on the globed shoulder plates hove into view, an ancient tome impaled on a crusader sword – the slashed pages of the volume bearing the ominous digits 666. About their chests swung the insignia of the Ordo Malleus on heavy metal chains, advertising their role as Chamber Militant to the Holy Emperor’s Daemonhunters.
‘Grey Knights…’ Torqhuil hissed upon sighting them.
Klute nodded stunned agreement. In Mark-I Tactical Dreadnought Armour no less – undoubtedly stationed on Nemesis Tessera thousands of years before. Torqhuil stepped forward, his servo-arms and mechadendrites immediately assuming an aggressive posture, like a cornered arachnid. The Grey Knights carried the long, thick shafts of halberds in their right gauntlets. They balanced hammer-like weights on one end and a broad flensing blade on the other, giving the weapon both the functionally and death-dealing capabilities of both axe and spear. This was not the worst, however – as Klute well knew. The Grey Knights were all powerful psykers and their weapons were psi-matrix interfaced so as to channel their immaterial energies, as well as their existing superhuman combat prowess. Klute could imagine few enemies he would rather face less.
‘Epiphani!’ Klute barked. The inquisitor had seen the warp-seer hitting the Spook hard from the snuff tin she secreted in her brassiere.
