by Dan Abnett
The rain pelted down on him. It was the last hour of Carl Thonius’s human existence. It would be the most miserable and ghastly sixty minutes anyone would ever endure.
NINE
THEY WALK OUT into the storm to greet us. Gunmen, hireling guards, weapons ready. I count twenty of them. I taste the old, high wall behind them, and find it full of automated weaponry. I fear I am too weak for this, too slow. A different me, a younger me, might have done this. Not any more. Not after the door. Words are all I have left.
I hope they will be enough.
Below me, amongst the armed men, I see Culzean and Molotch, coming out through the wall’s gate, their hands raised to fend off my cutter’s downwash.
It’s a bad night. I’ve seldom seen a storm this wild.
‘Set us down, Master Unwerth,’ I say. His flying has been superlative.
‘With directness,’ he replies.
We drop, thrusters gunning. We settle beside the other lander lashed to the rock-lip landing.
‘Thank you, Sholto,’ I say as I move towards the hatch.
The hatch folds open. Rain sprays in. It’s a really bad night. I hover down outside onto the landing and face Culzean and his waiting troops. Molotch himself hangs back, peering at me. This is a strange moment.
+Hello, Zygmunt.+
‘Gideon.’
+There’s no time to fight each other, Zygmunt. That goes for you too, Culzean. Slyte is here.+
‘Here?’ Molotch echoes me. ‘How could he be here?’
‘That’s enough of that.’ Culzean cries out, walking forwards to take control of the standoff. There’s a small, robed woman beside him. She’s a blunter; not a good one, but the best Culzean could afford, and she’s good enough to keep my mind back.
‘Gideon!’ Culzean cries, as if welcoming an old friend. He approaches across the rain-swept rock, arms wide, accompanied by his gunmen and his blunter. ‘Gideon! So wonderful to see you! I thought I’d killed you!’
‘You came close,’ my voxsponder crackles back. ‘Very close.’
‘No harm done, then,’ he laughs. ‘What brings you here?’
‘As I said quite plainly, Slyte,’ I reply. I see Molotch take a step forwards. In all our encounters up to this point, I’ve never seen him scared. He’s scared now.
‘Slyte?’ chuckles Culzean. ‘Gideon, he’s not here.’
‘Oh, he most surely is,’ I answer. ‘I can taste him. Turn off your blunter and feel the truth.’
‘Turn off my blunter? Seriously, Gideon, you’re an alpha-plus psyker. What makes you think I’d do something as suicidal as that?’
‘Self preservation.’ I reply. ‘My interrogator, Carl Thonius, is hosting Slyte. If he’s not here already, he will be soon. You’re going to die, Culzean, all of you. The warp is not selective in its predations.’
‘Thonius?’ asks Molotch, pushing forward through the gang of gunmen. ‘Your man, Thonius?’
‘Yes, Zygmunt. Carl Thonius. I don’t know how or why, but he was the one infected.’
Molotch approaches my chair. He crouches down in the fierce rain and embraces it. It is a strange gesture for a mortal enemy to make, but it is earnest. He is friendless and he is scared. ‘Gideon,’ he whispers, ‘Culzean can’t be trusted.’
+Oh, and you can be trusted, can you, Zygmunt?+
He leans back and gazes dully at the hull of my chair. ‘Of course I can’t, Gideon, but this is a different scale of trust. I understand what Slyte means, Culzean doesn’t. We need to… we need to be of one mind and one purpose now.’
+I agree.+
‘Oh, good, good.’
‘Orfeo,’ I venture, ‘can we reach some compact here? Against a mutually destructive foe?’
Culzean shrugs. A woman with a hard face and close-cropped hair walks out onto the landing behind him and hands him a control wand.
‘You sent for this, sir?’ she says.
‘Thank you, Ley.’
‘Last chance, Culzean,’ I say. ‘I’m agreeing with the proposal you made to me.’
‘It’s too late,’ he says. ‘As of about half an hour ago, I got everything I ever wanted.’
He clicks the wand and a void shield suddenly covers him, opaque and fizzling in the rain.
‘Kill them,’ he says. ‘Kill them all. Molotch too.’
The sentry guns clatter. The gunmen raise their weapons.
They open fire.
Culzean, shielded, walks calmly back into the rambling hulk of Elmingard.
TEN
THE BROADSIDE OF automatic fire hammered down on the landing area. The gunfire was deafening, and the strobe of muzzle flashes blinding. Ravenor’s cutter took several punishing hits.
‘Get away! Get away, Sholto!’ Ravenor yelled.
The cutter took off and dropped away out of sight over the lip of the cliff, wounded and pluming smoke. As the firestorm began, Ravenor had desperately raised a force wall with the last of his strength. The hard rounds and las fire laid down by Culzean’s men and the wall defences spanged off it. Ravenor projected the psi barrier wide enough to shield Molotch as well as himself. It seemed odd to be expending precious effort trying to protect a man he had spent a large part of his life trying to kill.
Shells and las-bolts continued to punch against Ravenor’s shield, rippling and dimpling the air in brief crater patterns.
‘You can’t hold this back forever!’ Molotch yelled.
‘If there’s any luck left in this accursed galaxy,’ Ravenor replied, ‘I won’t have to.’
+Now would be a good time!+ he sent with as much willpower as he could spare.
ON THE OTHER side of the monastic wall, more hired guns were massing at Slade’s orders to protect the landing. They came running from several directions, arming weapons and running link checks. The gunfire beyond the wall was a rattling, coughing blurt of sound.
‘Fan out!’ ordered Eldrik, in charge of the support unit. ‘Some of you get on the wall top. Heavy weapons to the gate!’
Eldrik paused suddenly. Some of his men ran on past him. ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ he asked.
There was a door in the lower terrace wall. It was made of wood, a very ordinary old door in a very ordinary frame. It looked as if it had always been there, but Eldrik was quite certain he’d never seen it before.
The door opened. A small girl, barely a teenager, stepped out into the rain and looked around with innocent fascination. She held an ornate key in her hand.
‘Hello!’ she said to Eldrik with a bright smile.
‘Who the hell are you?’ asked Eldrik.
‘She’s with me,’ said Angharad Esw Sweydyr.
The towering Carthaen swordswoman came out of the open doorway with such virile speed, Eldrik didn’t have time to raise his weapon. His eyes went wide at the sight of her, a goddess in armour.
Evisorex cut him in half.
‘Get back, child,’ Angharad hissed, and Iosob scooted into the shadows by the door. Angharad became a blur in the rain and lightning, her cloak and her braided hair flying, her sabre flashing. She ripped into the squad Eldrik had been assembling. In the confusion, few of them were able to tell exactly what was happening, although it was patently obvious that they were being slaughtered. A few got off hasty shots. Screams echoed, and lopped limbs spun into the air. Arterial blood squirted up into the torrential rain.
Nayl and Kys followed Angharad out of the door. He wore an armoured bodyglove and carried a Voss-pattern automatic grenade launcher, heavy and pugnacious, with a fat drum magazine. Patience was wearing a dark green bodyglove with long black boots, and a billowing overskirt. The pleats of the skirt contained dozens of concealed kineblades. Four needle blades already circled around her.
They moved fast, following Angharad’s trail of destruction. The flagstones were slick with rain and swilling blood. The steam of entrails and opened bodies fumed in the cold air. Nayl fired two rounds from the launcher, lobbing them down the length of the approach. H
e was rewarded by a meaty fireball that hurled rock chips in all directions. He sent another round over into the gate itself, throwing two of Culzean’s gunmen headlong with the blast, and then ran forwards, firing single grenades up at the backs of the sentry pods built into the old wall.
The grenades were magnetic. Each one thumped onto a pod’s metal cowling and stuck fast. A sentry gun exploded, blown out of the wall top in a fire shock and a rain of bricks. A second blew out, and then a third. Each pod had been firing on full auto until the moment it was obliterated. Nayl took out a fourth pod, and paused to reload the drum mag. His handiwork had torn holes along the monastic wall, like a gum with the teeth extracted. There was a sharp tang of fycelene in the air. Kys brought down a gunman on the wall steps with her kineblades, and then reached out with her telekinesis into the mouldering bricks and stones of the wall itself. She found the hot, heavy power cables and datawire bundles that fed the rest of the wall’s automatic defences. Gritting her teeth, she pulled.
A long, fat snake of armoured tranking tore out of the wall in a shower of plaster and masonry. It came clean out like the spine of a cooked fish and then snapped in two places, sheeting electrical sparks and voltage flashes across the wet stone.
The remaining wall defences went dead.
+Gideon?+
+That’s better, thank you.+
Outside, on the gale-swept landing, Ravenor began to move forwards, Molotch close behind him. The ground in front of them had been chewed to smoking pulp by the bombardment that had, until a moment before, been hammering them relentlessly. Ravenor was able to slacken his shield at last, and did so with relief. The only shots coming their way were from the blue-suited gunmen Culzean had left on the landing. Ravenor popped his chair’s cannon-pods from their recesses and cut down two of them. The others began to flee back through the gate into Elmingard, firing as they went.
Kys, Nayl and Angharad were waiting for them. By the time Ravenor and Molotch came through the gate, the only gunmen still alive were the ones who had been wise enough to flee up into the banked terraces of the cliff top fastness.
+Start moving. Start searching.+
‘Are you sure he’s here?’ asked Nayl.
+I’m sure. He’s hard to read, hard to pinpoint, because he’s not really Carl any more, but he’s here. I can hear him screaming.+
‘What do we do if we find him?’ asked Kys.
+Call for me.+
The three of them ran off up the steps onto the terraces. In under a minute, Ravenor and Molotch could hear more shooting, and the ominous crump of Nayl’s launcher.
‘Iosob, stay here, by the door.’ Ravenor told the girl. She nodded.
+Let’s follow the others,+ Ravenor sent to Molotch.
‘Do you have a plan?’ asked Molotch.
+No. This is entirely improvised. I am just hoping we can find Thonius before it’s too late.+
‘What weren’t you telling your people?’ Molotch asked.
+I don’t know what you mean, Zygmunt.+
‘Come on, Gideon, don’t try to trick a trickster. What were you keeping from them?’
They moved up a mouldering flight of steps and onto one of the lower terraces. The dark, interlocking bulk of Elmingard rose above them in the storm.
+That it’s already too late. This place is radiating a psychic force that’s off the scale. I daren’t probe it in any detail, because it would burn out my mind. There is no question that Slyte is here.+
‘So I return to my original question. Is there a plan?’
+I was hoping you might have some suggestions. Daemonology is one of your specialties, Zygmunt. I was also hoping that Culzean might have tools or resources to help us.+
‘Culzean’s playing his own game,’ Molotch replied, dismissively, ‘but his house is full of arcane trinkets and talismans. It’s possible there might be something that could aid us. However, I’ve been studying Culzean’s collection for weeks, and I haven’t found anything so far that would do. Believe me, I’ve searched diligently.’ He paused, thoughtfully. ‘As for my own talents… I don’t know. I have dabbled. I have studied. I have bound certain lesser fiends, and created a daemonhost or two over the years. I understand the basic principles of gate and portal rituals, but Slyte is a Daemonicus Arcana Majoris. I would never try to summon him, because even with the correct rites and wards, he would be too powerful to bind. As it is, he’s already here. It’s long past the time for prophylactic rituals.’
Thunder splintered the sky.
‘The only control a man can ever have over a daemon is by way of transaction,’ Molotch said. A man provides the daemon with a way into our dimension, and in exchange, the daemon is bound by the terms of that favour. It is a very complex, hazardous thing to do, and takes years of precise preparation to pull off. If a daemon is already here, in our universe, there is no transaction left to hold it to. No terms, Gideon. There’s no way of asserting power or command over it, because it owes us nothing and wants nothing from us. It is simply a material fact, ungoverned by mortal powers.
+What about banishment?+
Molotch laughed. ‘Like binding, it’s a complex process. It takes months or years of preparatory study. It also requires the correct time and place.’
+And this isn’t the correct time or place?+
‘Does it look like it to you?’
+I’m not going to give up. We have to try, while we still have life in our bodies. We have to try something. You know the layout of this place, Molotch. Take me to Culzean’s trinkets and help me search for that something.+
CULZEAN’S HIRED GUNS offered resistance to the bitter end. Nayl came up some crumbling stone steps onto a paved terrace several levels above Ravenor and Molotch, and immediately came under renewed fire. Las shots shrieked at him from a large doorway across the terrace, forcing him into cover behind a stone urn that quickly became a shapeless lump.
He, Kys and Angharad had been obliged to fight every step of the way up into Elmingard, and he was down to his last few grenades. He switched to his heavy autopistol, keeping the launcher in reserve.
There was no backup to call for. Kys had split to the left a few minutes earlier, heading into what looked like the domestic quarters. They’d both lost touch with Angharad before that. In her warrior fury, she’d simply stormed ahead, expecting them to keep up. From the screams emanating from a nearby wing of the place, she’d found suitable work to occupy herself.
The rain was getting worse. Nayl had seen lightning strike the roofline of Elmingard at least twice in the last five minutes. A black cloud, blacker than the night itself, whirled like a halo around the upper ramparts of the building. He didn’t like to dwell on what might be causing that. Nayl also didn’t want to notice the sweet, rancid smell that he kept catching on the wind. Putrefaction, the cloying scent of the warp.
The gunmen at the doorway had him pinned. With a grunt of resignation, Nayl hoisted up his launcher and banged a grenade into the air. It landed in the doorway and detonated in a sheet of fire and grit.
He was up and running at once. Two gunmen lay dead, mangled by the blast. Another staggered, deafened, in the ruin of the doorway. Part of the building facade had collapsed and smoke poured out of the broken door.
Letting his slung launcher bang against his hip as he ran, Nayl drew his autopistol and capped the staggering man as he went in past him. The hall inside was thick with smoke. Another survivor was crawling around on the debris-strewn floor on his hands and knees. Nayl put the wretch out of his misery, and then headed on. The smoke began to clear. He found himself in the door arch of a large room with a high roof. Lightning backlit the large, leaded windows. The room was a dining hall of sorts. It was dominated by a huge refectory table of old, sturdy timber, big enough to seat thirty. There were the chairs to prove it.
Nayl took a step forwards, and two heavy rounds exploded against the wall beside him, blitzing out plaster and stone chips. Nayl hurled himself forwards and rolled across the fl
oor, using the end of the hefty table as cover. Another heavy shot whooshed past. He knew the distinctive sound: a bolt pistol.
From the other end of the chamber, Lucius Worna came out to play. The flashes of lightning outside glinted off his pearly armour. He fired his bolt pistol as he advanced, blasting splintered holes in the table.
‘That you, Nayl? Is that you?’ he roared.
‘Oh, probably,’ Nayl replied, crouching under the table end and looking around desperately for an option.
Worna snorted. ‘I’m gonna mess you up, Harlon. Don’t frig with me. Be a man, and come out and take it.’
‘I’m going to say no,’ Nayl answered. Another bolt round tore clean through the table top and fractured the floor tiles beside him.
Worna grabbed hold of the long table with his left hand. The fingers of his metal gauntlet sank into the wood. With a whine of power armour, he hurled the huge table right over. It left the ground and crashed down on its side, shattering some of the chairs.
Nayl was left, crouching, on the open tiles, his cover removed.
He looked up at Worna, five metres away.
‘Nayl,’ Worna growled, a smile crossing his face. ‘You know what this is?’
‘Yeah. End of story,’ said Nayl. He fired the grenade launcher he was clutching against his chest.
The grenade round hit Worna in the sternum, with enough kinetic force to knock him back several steps.
Recovering his balance, the grizzled bounty hunter looked down. The round had magnetically attached itself to his breastplate. Worna scrabbled at it to knock it off.
It exploded.
The blast sent Nayl sprawling along the floor. It threw Worna’s mighty, spread-eagled form violently across the chamber in the other direction, demolishing the far doors as he ploughed into them.
Nayl picked himself up and hobbled down the room to the wreckage of the doors. Smoke threaded the air. He could see Worna’s corpse on its back, half buried in broken hardwood door panels. The armour of his upper torso was buckled and blackened, and his face was a raw, red mask of burnt flesh.
