by Dan Abnett
Looked back.
And blinked.
THORN WISHES TALON
A RAVENOR STORY
THE PAST NEVER lets us go. It is persistent and unalterable.
The future, however, is aloof, a stranger. It stands with its back to us, mute and private, refusing to communicate what it knows or what it sees.
Except to some. On Nova Durma, deep in the leech-infested forests of the Eastern Telgs, there is a particular grotto into which the light of the rising daystar falls once every thirty-eight days. There, by means of some secret ministry and ritual craft that I have no ready wish to understand, the blistered seers of the Divine Fratery coax the reluctant future around until they can see its face in their silver mirrors, and hear its hushed, unwilling voice.
It is my fervent hope that what it has to say to them is a lie.
THAT NIGHT, THE waste-world called Malinter had six visitors. They left their transport, dark and hook-winged, on a marshy flood plain, slightly bowed over to starboard where the landing claws had sunk into the ooze. They proceeded west, on foot.
A storm was coming, and it was not entirely natural. They walked through streamers of white fog, crossing outcrops of green quartz, lakes of moss and dank watercourses choked with florid lichens. The sky shone like filthy, tinted glass. In the distance, a pustular range of hills began to vanish in the rain-blur of the encroaching elements. Lightning flashed, like sparks off flint or remote laser fire.
They had been on the surface for an hour, and had just sighted the tower, when the first attempt was made to kill them.
There was a rattle almost indistinguishable from the doom-roll of the approaching thunder, and bullets whipped up spray from the mud at the feet of the tallest visitor.
His name was Harlon Nayl. His tall, broad physique was wrapped in a black-mesh bodyglove. His head was shaved apart from a simple goatee. He raised the heavy Hecuter pistol he had been carrying in his right fist, and made a return of fire into the gathering dark.
In answer, several more unseen hostiles opened up. The visitors scattered for cover.
‘Were you expecting this?’ Nayl asked as he crouched behind a quartz boulder and snapped shots off over it.
+I didn’t know what to expect.+
The answer came telepathically from Nayl’s master, and seemed far from reassuring.
‘How many?’ Nayl called out.
Twenty metres away from him, another big man called Zeph Mathuin shouted back from cover. ‘Six!’ echoed his estimation. Mathuin was as imposing as Nayl, but his skin was dark, the colour of varnished hardwood. His black hair was plaited into strands and beaded. Both men had been bounty hunters in their time. Neither followed that profession any longer.
‘Make it seven,’ contradicted Kara Swole as she wriggled up beside Nayl, keeping her head low. She was a short, compact woman with cropped red hair. Her voluptuous figure was currently concealed beneath a long black leather duster with a fringe of larisel fur around the neck. ‘Seven?’ queried Nayl, as whining hard-round smacked into the far side of the rock. ‘Six!’ Mathuin called again.
Kara Swole had been a dancer-acrobat before she’d joined the band, and ordinarily she would defer to the combat experience of the two ex-hunters. But she had an ear for these things. ‘Listen!’ she said. ‘Three autorifles,’ she identified, counting off on her fingers. ‘Two lasguns, a pistol, and that…’ she drew Nayl’s attention to a distinctive plunk! plunk! ‘That’s a stubber.’ Nayl nodded and smiled. ‘Six!’ Mathuin insisted.
+Kara is correct. There are seven. Now can we deal with them, please?+
Their master’s mind-voice seemed unusually terse and impatient. Not a good sign. One of several not good signs that had already distinguished this night.
The two other members of the team sheltered against a gravel shelf some distance to Nayl’s left. Their names were Patience Kys and Carl Thonius. A slight fussy, well-bred young man, Thonius held the rank of interrogator and was technically the master’s second-in-command. He had drawn a compact pistol from inside his beautifully tailored coat but was too busy complaining about the weather, the mud and the prospect of death by gunshot wounds to use it.
Patience Kys suggested he might like to shut up. She was a slender, pale woman, dressed in high leather boots of black leather, a bell skirt of grey silk and an embroidered black leather shirt. Her hair was pinned up in a chignon with silver pins.
She scanned the view ahead, and located one of the hostiles firing from the cover of some quartz rocks. ‘Ready?’ she yelled over at Nayl. ‘Pop ’em up!’ he replied.
Kys was telekinetic. She focused her trained mind and exerted a little pressure. The quartz rocks scattered apart across the slime, revealing a rather surprised man holding an autorifle.
His surprise lasted about two seconds until a single shot from Nayl hit him in the brow and tumbled him leadenly onto his back.
With a spiteful grin, Kys reached out again and dragged another of the hostiles out into the open with her mind. The man yelled aloud, scared and uncomprehending. His heels churned in the ooze and he flailed his arms, fighting the invisible force that yanked him by the scruff of the neck.
There was a blurt of noise like an industrial hammer-drill, and the man ceased to be, shredded into pieces by heavy fire.
Mathuin had shot him. His left hand was a burnished-chrome augmetic, and he had locked it into the governing socket of the lethal rotator cannon that he was wearing strapped around his torso. The multi-barrels whirred and cycled, venting vapour.
The firing ceased.
+They have fled for now. They will return, I have no doubt.+
The master of the team moved up amongst them. To the uninformed, Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor appeared to be a machine rather than a man. He was a box, a smoothly angled wedge of armoured metal with a glossy, polished finish from which even the approaching lightning seemed unwilling to reflect. This was his force chair, his life-support system, totally enclosed and self-sufficient. The chair’s anti-gravity disks spun hypnotically as he advanced.
Inside that enclosing chair, one of the Imperium’s most brilliant inquisitors – and most articulate theorists – lay trapped forever. Years before, at the start of a glittering career in me service of the ordos, Gideon Ravenor had been struck down during a heretical attack, his fair and strong body burned and fused away into a miserable residue of useless flesh. Only his mind had survived.
But such a mind! Sharp, incisive, poetic, just… and powerful too. Kys had not met a psi-capable being remotely strong enough to master Gideon Ravenor.
They were sworn to him, the five of them. Nayl, Thonius, Kara, Mathuin and Kys. Sworn and true. They would follow him to the ends of the known stars, if needs be.
Even when he chose not to tell them where they were going.
THE DIVINE FRATERY practises a barbaric initiation process of voluntary blinding. Sight, as one might expect, is considered their fundamental skill, but not sight as we might understand it. Novices sacrifice one of their eyes as proof of their intent, and have that missing eye replaced by a simple augmetic to maintain everyday function. The one remaining organic eye is then trained and developed, using ritual, alchemic and sorcerous processes.
An initiated member of the Fratery may therefore be identified by his single augmetic eye, and by the patch of purple velvet that covers his remaining real eye at all times except for circumstances of cult ceremony. A novitiate, self-blinded in one socket, must work to fashion his own silver mirror before he is allowed his augmetic, or indeed any medical or sterilising treatment. He must cut and hammer his dish of silver, and then work it with abrasive wadding until it is a perfect reflector to a finesse of .0088 optical purity. Many die of septicemia or other wound-related infection before they accomplish this. Others, surviving the initial infections, spend many months or even years finishing the task. Thus, members of the cult may additionally be identified by blistering of the skin, tissue abnormalities and even significant nec
rotising scarring incurred during the long months of silver-working.
It is also my experience that few Fratery members have codable or matchable fingerprints. Years of scrupulous endeavour with abrasive wadding wear away hands as well as silver.
OVERHEAD, THE SKY flashed and vibrated. Kara could hear the thunder now, and felt the drizzle in the wind. Fog-vapour smirched out the distance.
With the toe of her boot, she gingerly rolled over the body of the man Nayl had shot. He was dressed in cheap, worn foul-weather clothes made of woven plastek fibre and leather. He had one augmetic eye, crude and badly-sutured into the socket, and a velvet patch over the other.
‘Anyone we know?’ asked Nayl, coming up behind her.
Unlike the others, Nayl and Kara had not been recruited for ordo service by Ravenor himself. They had originally owed loyalty to Ravenor’s mentor, Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn. Somewhere along the line, a decade or more past, they had become Ravenor’s. Kara often thought of Eisenhorn. Stern, fierce, so much harder to bear than Ravenor, Eisenhorn had still been a good man to follow. And she owed him. But for Gregor Eisenhorn, she would still be a dancer-acrobat in the circuses of Bonaventure.
She often wondered what had become of her former master. She’d last seen him back in ’87, during the mission to 5213X. He’d been a wreck of a man by then, supported only by his burning will and fundamental augmetics. Some had said he’d crossed a line and become a radical. Kara didn’t believe that. Eisenhorn had always been so… hard-line. She thought of him fondly, as she did the others from that time. Alizabeth Bequin, God-Emperor rest her, dear Aemos, Medea Betancore and Fischig.
They had known some times together. Great times, bad times. But this was her place now.
‘Face doesn’t ring any bells,’ she said. She reached down and lifted the eye patch, just out of curiosity. A real eye, wide and glazed, lay beneath.
‘What the hell is that about?’ Nayl wondered.
Kara reached up and sleeked the short, red strands of her rain-wet hair back across her head. She looked across at Mathuin and Thonius beside the other body. Thonius was, as ever, elegantly dressed, and as he crouched in the mud, he fussed about his shoes.
Thonius would Ravenor’s pupil, which supposed that one day Thonius was to be promoted to full inquisitor. Ravenor had been Eisenhorn’s interrogator. Kara wondered sometimes if Carl had anything like the same stuff.
‘If you’d left him a little more intact we might have made a more decent examination,’ Thonius complained.
‘This is a rotator cannon,’ Mathuin said bluntly. ‘It doesn’t do intact.’ Thonius prodded the grisly remains with a stick. ‘Well, I think we’ve got an augmetic eye here too. And what’s either an eyepatch or a very unsatisfactory posing thong.’
Thonius’s caustic wit usually drew smiles from the band, but not this night. No one was in the mood for laughs. Ravenor, generally so forthcoming with his team, had told them virtually nothing about the reasons for coming to Malinter. As far as anyone knew, he’d simply diverted them to this remote waste-world after receiving some private communiqué.
Most alarmingly of all, he’d chosen to join them on the surface. Ravenor usually ran his team telepathically from a distance via the wraithbone markers they all wore. He only came along in person when the stakes were high.
+Let’s move on.+ Ravenor said.
THE GROTTO IN the Eastern Telgs is deep in the smoking darkness of the forests. The glades are silent except for insect chitter, and wreathed with vapour and steam. There are biting centipedes everywhere, some as long as a man’s finger, others as long as a man’s leg. The air stinks of mildew.
Once every thirty-eight days, the rising star comes up at such an angle it forces its pale and famished light in through a natural hole in the rock face outside the grotto. The beams streak in down an eighty degree angle to the azimuth and strike the still freshwater of the pool in the grotto’s base, lighting the milky water like a flame behind muslin.
The Fratery cowers around the pool – after days of ritual starvation and self-flagellation – and attempts to interrupt the falling beams with their silver mirrors. At such times, I have observed, they remove the purple velvet patches from their real eyes and place them over their augmetics.
Their flashing mirrors reflect many colours of light. Having ingested lho seeds and other natural hallucinogenics, they glare into their mirrors, and begin to gabble incoherently.
Voxographic units, run on battery leads, are set around the grotto to record their ramblings. As the light fades again, the masters of the Fratery play back the voxcorders, and tease out the future truths – or lies – that they have been told.
THE TOWER, AS they approached it, was far larger than they had first imagined. The main structure, splintered and ruined, rose a full half kilometre into the dark, bruised sky, like an accusing finger. At the base, like the bole of an ancient tree, it thickened out and spread into great piers and buttresses that anchored it into the headland. Crumbling stone bridge-spans linked the rocky shelf to the nearest piers.
There was no way of defining its origin or age, nor the hands – human or otherwise – that had constructed it. Even its purpose was in doubt. According to the scans, it was the only artificial structure on Malinter. Older star maps referred to it simply by means of a symbol that indicated ruin (antique/xenos).
As they picked their way through ancient screes of rubble and broken masonry towards the nearest span, the rain began to lash down, pattering on the mud and driving off the raised stonework. The rising wind began to shiver the glossy black ivy and climbing vines clinging in thick mats to the lower walls.
‘This message. It told you to come here?’ Nayl asked.
+What message?+
Nayl frowned and looked at the floating chair. ‘The message you got.’
+I never said anything about a message.+
‘Oh, come on! Fair play!’ Nayl growled. ‘Why won’t you tell us what we’re getting into here?’
+Harlon.+ Ravenor’s voice sliced into Nayl’s mind and he winced slightly. Ravenor’s telepathy was sometimes painfully sharp when he was troubled or preoccupied.
Nayl realised that Ravenor’s thought-voice was directed at him alone, a private word the others couldn’t hear.
+Trust me, old friend. I dare tell you nothing until I’m sure of what we’re dealing with. If it turns out to be a trick, you could be biased by misinformation.+
‘I’m no amateur,’ Nayl countered. The others looked at him, hearing only his side of the conversation.
+I know, but you’re a loyal man. Loyalty sometimes blinds us. Trust me on this.+
‘What in the name of the Golden Throne was that?’ Thonius said abruptly. They’d all heard it. Ravenor and Kys had felt it.
High in the ruined summit of the tower, something had screamed. Loud, hideous, inhuman, drawn out. More screams, from other non-human voices, answered it. Each resounded both acoustically and psychically. The air temperature dropped sharply. Sheens of ice crackled into view, caking the upper sweep of the walls.
They moved on a few metres. The keening wails grew louder, whooping and circling within the high walls, as if screaming avian things were flying around inside. As lightning accompanies thunder, so each scream was accompanied by a sympathetic flash of light. The psychic shrieks seemed to draw the storm down, until a halo of flashing, jagged light coruscated in the sky above the tower. Corposant danced along the walls like white, fluorescent balls.
Kys, her psi-sensitive mind feeling it worse than the rest, paused to wipe fresh blood off her lip with the back of her gwel-skin glove. Her nose was bleeding.
As she did so, the hostiles began trying to kill them again.
THE DIVINE FRATERY, may the ordos condemn their sick souls, seek to chart out the future. All possible futures, in fact. With their mirrors and their abominably practiced eyes, they identify events to come, and take special interest in those events that are ill-favoured. Disasters, plagues,
invasions, collapses of governments, heresies, famines, defeats in battle. Doom, in any guise.
The masters of the Fratery then disseminate the details of their oracles to the lower orders of their cult. By my estimation, the Fratery numbers several thousand, many of them apparently upstanding Imperial citizens, spread through hundreds of worlds in the subsectors Antimar, Helican, Angelus and Ophidian. Once a ‘prospect’ as they call them has been identified, certain portions of the ‘cult membership’ are charged with doing everything they can to ensure that it comes to pass, preferably in the worst and most damaging way possible. If a plague is foreseen, then cult members will deliberately break quarantine orders to ensure that the outbreak spreads. If the prospect is a famine, they will plant incendiary bombs or bio-toxins in the Munitorum grain stores of the threatened world. A heretic emerges? They will protect him and publish his foul lies abroad. An invasion approaches? They are the fifth column who will destroy the defenders from within.
They seek doom. They seek to undermine the fabric of our Imperium, the culture of man, and cause it to founder and fall. They seek galactic apocalypse, an age of darkness and fire, wherein their unholy masters, the Ruinous Powers, can rise up and take governance of all.
Five times now I have thwarted their efforts. They hate me, and wish me dead. Now I seek to derail their efforts a sixth time, here, tonight, on Malinter. I have journeyed far out of my way, pursued by their murder-bands, to carry a warning.
For I have seen their latest prospect with my own eyes. And it is a terrible thing.
LASER FIRE SCORCHED across the mossy span of the bridge arch, sizzling in the rain. Some of it came from the ruin ahead, some from the crags behind them. Stonework shattered and split. Las-bolts and hard-rounds snapped and stung away from the age-polished cobbles.
‘Go!’ yelled Nayl, turning back towards the crags and firing his weapon in a two-handed brace. At his side, Kara Swole kicked her assault weapon into life. It bucked like a living thing, spitting spent casings out in a sideways flurry.
