by Dan Abnett
No, they weren’t. The evidence was plain. Keshtre was a vital facility, but the Cognitae had only staffed it with a handful of operatives. Just enough to keep it running. So they had to be good, the very best. Elite cult soldiers, hand-picked for their skills. Eisenhorn knew from the case file that Gobleka was a fine marksman. He’d cut down Interrogator Arfon Kadle on Gudrun with a single headshot at three thousand metres.
These men weren’t trying to kill him. They were trying to drive him.
He kept low and scanned for movement. He glimpsed Blayg, the short, jowly one, switching positions. Eisenhorn got off a single shot. Blayg dropped out of sight. A moment later, he reappeared and hammered the deck beside Eisenhorn with autofire.
Eisenhorn fought back the pain clouding his head and made a decision. He had to change tactics. He had to use whatever edge, whatever chance, however desperate, to seize back some advantage. They were trying to drive him. They wanted him alive. If he was their prisoner, he might be taken closer to the very place he was struggling to reach. But it had to be convincing.
He rose to his feet, clearly visible.
‘You want to drive me, do you?’ he yelled. ‘Herd me?’
He fired two shots in Blayg’s direction.
‘I won’t play your game!’ he shouted. Another fierce burst of autofire rattled into the decking beside him. Eisenhorn remained standing. He didn’t even flinch.
Blayg reappeared, peeking down, his combat autorifle aimed at Eisenhorn.
‘Comply now, or we drop you!’ Blayg shouted.
‘What the hell makes you think I’ll cooperate?’ Eisenhorn yelled back.
‘Look down!’ Blayg called back, his aim fixed.
Eisenhorn glanced down. He saw the gently wavering red dot of Blayg’s targeter floating on the centre of his chest.
‘We’d like you alive,’ Blayg called, ‘but it’s not essential. Take the stairs up. Do it! Or I take the shot!’
‘Go to hell,’ said Eisenhorn.
Blayg had pushed it as far as he wanted to. He had no illusions about Gregor Eisenhorn’s brutal and relentless reputation. He’d heard all the stories. He’d seen Jaff’s body. The man was inhumanly dangerous.
Damn Gobleka’s preferences. Enough chances. Enough playing with fire.
Blayg squeezed the trigger, ripping out a tight burst from his autorifle.
The rounds hit Eisenhorn precisely where the marker had painted him, full in the chest. Eisenhorn reeled backwards in a puff of red vapour, hit the back rail of the platform and slumped down.
Blayg slowly rose to his feet.
‘Davinch!’ he shouted. ‘He’s down!’
Sprawled on his back against the rail, Eisenhorn lifted his head and his Hecuter.
‘That’s right, show yourself, idiot,’ he murmured, and fired.
The large-calibre round burst the top of Blayg’s skull. He swayed, then folded up in a heap.
Eisenhorn slowly heaved himself to his feet. It was hard to breathe. His chest plating had stopped most of the burst, but his ribs were cracked, and his chest felt as if it had been crushed. One of the high-velocity rounds had punctured through the plate and done some soft tissue damage.
Another had gone low under the plate, punching clean through him below his ribs. Blood was weeping down the front of his coat. He could feel more soaking his back. He concentrated and tried to use his will to block the pain, and seal the bleeding.
His will was gone. The Loom had taken it from him.
Davinch was standing behind him.
Eisenhorn started to turn, but he was far too slow. Davinch whirled a spin-kick that knocked Eisenhorn sideways, then another that flicked away the Hecuter. A third kick, straight to the sternum, put Eisenhorn on his back. Agony from the gunshot trauma flooded him.
The tattooed man stood over him, looking down, both laspistols aimed at Eisenhorn’s face.
‘Look at you,’ Davinch sneered. ‘The famous Gregor Eisenhorn, scourge of heretics. It’s over, you old bastard. What are you, without that famous psykana gift of yours? Eh? Frigging nothing. Just an old, worn-out shell. A ruin. A nothing.’
Davinch peered closer. He grinned.
‘And you’re shot too. Dear old Blayg plugged you. That’ll be a through-and-through. You’re going to bleed out like a pig. That is, if I let you.’
Davinch’s smile grew broader.
‘And you’re going to wish,’ he whispered, ‘that I had.’
They climbed to the next platform and stopped to let Voriet rest. Nayl kept watch. Drusher and Macks eyed the hurtling gears of the Great Machine all around them with both fear and wonder.
Macks said something.
‘What?’ asked Drusher. It was hard to hear over the clattering roar of the machine.
‘I said it’s giving me a headache,’ said Macks, raising her voice.
Drusher nodded.
‘The noise,’ he said.
‘And the light, and the heat,’ she grimaced. The light shining down from above was brighter than before. It looked sickly and unclean, like the glow of something toxic and contaminating. It made Drusher remember a day, years before, before he had first met Macks, when he’d been caught out in the middle of the steppes of Lower Udar. He had hiked north from a grim livestock town called Kellikow, hoping to find a grazing station the men at Kellikow had mentioned. The station was long gone and derelict, and he’d been looking for alternative shelter when the thunderstorm came in. The light, the whole sky, had turned an extraordinary shade of yellow, a fulminous twilight to herald the fury.
The light filling the tower looked the way the light had done that day. Threatening and unnatural. He’d managed to trudge back to Kellikow, soaked, and spent a week in the infirmary, fighting off pneumonia.
Drusher missed those simpler times.
‘It’s not just that,’ said Voriet from nearby. He was leaning heavily against the metal handrail. ‘The mechanism’s generating an interference pattern. Background psionics. It’s messing with us.’
Macks wasn’t listening. ‘What the hell’s that?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Nayl? Nayl!’
She pointed. There was a figure on a parallel catwalk some distance away. They could just see it, moving out of sight behind part of the Loom mechanism. It was a human figure, walking quite fast, determinedly, arms at its sides.
‘I don’t know,’ said Nayl, moving along the platform to get a better look, gun in hand.
‘Cognitae?’ asked Macks.
The look on Nayl’s face was doubtful.
‘Another one!’ Voriet called out. A second figure had appeared on a platform several stages below them. This one was limping, almost shuffling, but though slower than the first, it seemed equally determined.
‘Get behind me,’ said Nayl.
They turned. A third figure had appeared. It was coming up the steps towards them. It had once been human. It had taken considerable damage to the left side of its body and head. Its flesh was beginning to rot and discolour. Its good eye fixed them with an eager glare. What was left of its face was expressionless.
It was moving fast, striding up the steps and onto the platform.
‘Throne’s sakes!’ Macks exclaimed.
‘Back up!’ Nayl shouted at the advancing thing. He aimed his gun. The figure did not slow down.
Nayl fired. Centre mass. The heavy round had no effect. Drusher saw a telltale green shimmer around the figure, a pinprick green light in its empty socket. A crackle like electricity.
‘Nayl!’ he yelled. He pulled the gun out of his pocket and aimed. One shot.
The autosnub jerked in his hand. Drusher discovered it was surprisingly hard to hit a target, even one as big as a human being coming right at him, just a few metres away. His shot simply clipped the figure’s right shoulder.
He was about to curse at himself when the figure went down. It went from walking to falling without an interruption. Suddenly slack, as dead as it looked, it crumbled, bounced off the handrail and lay
still.
‘An animation,’ said Drusher.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Nayl. He was taking the clip out of his gun and opening his pocket to fish out custom rounds.
‘Like before,’ said Drusher.
‘Indeed so, magos,’ said Nayl. ‘Don’t let them touch you!’ he yelled to Macks and Voriet.
‘Nayl!’ Macks called. Another figure was mounting the staircase at the other end of their platform. Before death it had been a stern, older woman. Corruption had bloated and blackened her flesh. Green electric sparks floated in her dead eyes and fizzled around her bared teeth. She too was moving rapidly, coming right at them without hesitation.
Macks squeezed off two las-bolts at her. They were solid shots, but the energy just radiated away.
‘Don’t waste it!’ Nayl told her. ‘It won’t have an effect.’ He had slammed a specialised round into the chamber of his Tronsvasse. He stepped in front of Macks and Voriet, aimed at the woman as she reached the head of the stairs and shot her between the eyes.
There was an ugly puff of matter. The woman’s head snapped back, and she toppled down the stairs. She ended up at the foot of the steps, on her back, her legs tangled in the side rails.
‘They’ve sent these things to get us, haven’t they?’ Drusher asked Nayl.
‘Yes,’ he replied. He was loading another round. ‘Raised them. That might be why the Loom’s working.’
‘But we can stop them,’ said Drusher.
Nayl nodded.
‘But it depends how many of them there are,’ he said. ‘We’ve only got a few custom rounds between us.’
‘How… how many could they have made?’ Drusher asked.
‘Depends how many people the Cognitae have killed,’ said Voriet. ‘How many bodies they have.’
‘Let’s move,’ said Nayl. ‘Only shoot if you have to.’
They hurried to the steps where the first figure had appeared. Macks and Drusher helped Voriet between them. They moved down, but another figure had appeared, striding towards them. It was hard to tell if this one had been male or female in life. Its death appeared to have involved being flayed.
‘Up! Up!’ Nayl urged them, guiding them to the side and up a link staircase to a higher catwalk. He waited as the flayed thing drew closer, then dropped it with a single shot.
He hurried after the other three, up the steps and onto the higher catwalk.
‘Be wary,’ he advised. ‘These devils are much faster than the thing that came for us in Helter.’
‘Because they’re more intact,’ said Drusher.
‘What?’ asked Macks.
‘The thing in Helter was just old bones. This force animates them, but it can only use the structure it’s got to work with. Simple mechanics, really. It can make disarticulated bones rise and shuffle along. But these poor creatures are intact–’
‘More or bloody less,’ said Macks.
‘They’re articulated,’ said Drusher. ‘They have tendons, sinews, muscle mass. The force can use that framework to move them faster.’
‘I think he’s right,’ said Nayl.
‘I think he’s writing a frigging paper on them,’ growled Macks.
‘Keep moving,’ said Nayl.
They followed the catwalk over a massive, spinning drum of brass, then ascended another staircase to the next gantry. Voriet was struggling to keep pace. Twice, he slipped and cried out as his broken arm struck the handrail.
Another figure was waiting for them on the gantry. It was just dry, white bones. Green swirls of light imaged the organs missing from its torso. It shuffled towards them, feet dragging.
Drusher raised his sidearm.
‘Don’t waste a round,’ said Nayl, grabbing his arm. ‘We can outrun this one.’
They left it behind, hustling Voriet along, and took another flight of stairs up to a wide catwalk that circled the base of a huge, burnished gyroscope.
‘Oh Terra!’ Macks exclaimed.
Another figure was pacing inexorably towards them. Its face had been blown away by point-blank shots.
But it was Hadeed Garofar.
TWENTY-ONE
A Very Suitable Candidate
In his cage, on his knees, his head tipped back, Magos Sark crooned un-words into the gulfs of the empyrean, and the words echoed back like the chirring of a trillion insects. The light flooding the tower was coming from inside him, so bright his skin was translucent, and Gobleka was sure he could see the shadow of the magos’ skeleton.
Gobleka stood at the edge of the platform for a while, watching. The un-words stirred something primordial in him, as if some deep and vestigial part of his lizard brain was responding. It was the language of infinity, the prehuman, inhuman instructions for creation and negation. He tried to mouth the un-words he heard, to copy and repeat them, to learn them, but they were coming too fast.
They always did. He had tried before, almost every time Sark had started the Loom and begun to weave. Gobleka had never managed to learn any un-words that way. He’d always ended up with a nosebleed or a savage tension headache. The futile effort to learn had, over time, only done one thing. It had changed the colour of his eyes.
The few words Goran Gobleka did know, the few commands of power, had been taught to him by Lilean Chase, and each syllable had taken many painful weeks to master.
Gobleka realised he had been standing on the gantry for too long. The skin of his cheeks and brow was tingling and sore, as though he had been out in a strong sun. He’d been looking at the light for longer than he should have. He knew from experience that word-burn could be more painful than sunburn.
He picked up his autorifle and went down a small curved staircase to the monitor station, set up on a platform below and to the side of the main gantry. He checked the displays of the cogitators. Sark’s psychometrics and vitals were off the chart, the former too high and the latter too low, but that was fairly standard when an act of weaving was in progress. Other cogitators were trying to map and decipher the sounds coming from the magos, but their readings were void. Again, that was normal. The Cognitae had procured the most powerful cogitators possible, some taken by force from a Mechanicus facility in the Thracian System, but even these could not cope with the energy and raw data they had been set up to process.
Gobleka wondered how long Sark would last. No human body should have survived the extremes he had endured over the years. Indeed, none had prior to Sark. As a junior adept at Keshtre in the early days, Gobleka had often been tasked with hosing out the cage after a failed trial.
Sark should have died the first time he tried to harness the Loom. He certainly shouldn’t have been able to survive the many weavings he had conducted. But then, Gobleka was certain that the process had altered Sark in fundamental ways. Sark had ceased to be remotely human a long time ago.
What did that make him? A god? A daemon? A eudaemonic spirit? Gobleka was sometimes convinced that Sark’s soul had burned out years before, and something else, some etheric sentience, had taken up residence inside him, wearing Sark’s flesh like a borrowed coat. During the brief moments he became lucid, Sark always begged to be let out of the cage. Gobleka wasn’t sure it was Sark talking. It wasn’t the magos pleading to be let out of the metal cage, it was the thing inside him whining to be let out of the coat of flesh it was clothed in.
Now, even the coat was wearing out. They needed a viable replacement, especially if they were going to honour the King’s request to increase productivity.
Gobleka heard footsteps on the metal stairs behind him, despite the roar of the Loom.
Davinch was ascending to the control platform, half dragging a heavyset man in a black coat. The man’s hands were cuffed in front of him, and he was hunched over in pain. Davinch was all but having to force him to walk.
But Davinch had a supremely satisfied look on his scrawny, tattooed face.
‘I got him,’ he said.
Gobleka walked over. The man in the black coat was standing with his shoul
ders down and his head bent forwards. He was breathing hard as if he had just run a marathon. Gobleka saw blood dripping from his hands and from the chain of his cuffs.
Gobleka reached out, grabbed the man by the jaw and forced his head up so he could look him in the eyes.
Eisenhorn. The great and mighty Gregor Eisenhorn. His eyes were dead and lifeless. His skin was pale and blotchy, and blood ran from his nose. He was having trouble breathing. Gobleka looked him up and down, and saw the years of scar tissue, the old augmetics under the coat, the leg braces and strapped servo-reinforcement. The man was withered and broken, and had been long before Davinch had got his murderous hands on him.
‘I’ve looked forward to this moment,’ said Gobleka. ‘Imagined it, you know. What I’d say, what you’d say. All that. But you’re a lot less than I expected. Damaged and weak. And old. Bit of a disappointment, really.’
‘Imagine,’ replied Eisenhorn, grunting the words out between rasping breaths, ‘imagine how little I care.’
‘Ooh!’ grinned Gobleka, play-acting scared. ‘Still got it, have you? Still got the old edge, eh? Or that’s what you’d like to think. Give me some more, so I can tell people afterwards that breaking you was noble labour, not a piece of piss.’
Eisenhorn didn’t reply.
‘Where’s the blood coming from?’ Gobleka asked Davinch.
‘Blayg plugged him,’ Davinch replied. ‘Body shot.’
‘Did you patch it?’
‘I didn’t have a med-pack with me,’ said Davinch.
‘Well, get one, now,’ said Gobleka. ‘And get the kit too.’
Davinch nodded and moved to the lockers at the end of the bank of cogitators.
‘Where is Blayg?’ Gobleka called out as he stood studying Eisenhorn.
‘Head shot,’ replied Davinch, sorting through supplies.
‘Have you seen Streekal?’
‘Not a sign,’ Davinch replied. He came back with a trauma pack. Gobleka opened it, took out a tube of wound sealant and rammed the applicator nozzle into the glistening hole in Eisenhorn’s abdomen. Eisenhorn winced, but remained on his feet.
Gobleka pressed the activator and pumped sealant into the wound. Then he walked around Eisenhorn, yanked up his old, black coat and did the same to the exit wound.
