Scourge The Heretic

by Sandy Mitchell

  Icenholm, Sepheris Secundus

  096.993.M41

  ‘The lady Keira?’ Drake asked, leaning on the rail of a cable car station he’d led them to shortly after leaving the buttery. The evening was well advanced, and the projecting platform was almost empty, affording an uninterrupted view of the softer splendour that Icenholm presented by night. Everywhere the two men looked, the lights of the glass city were coming on, turning the daytime jewel into something more closely resembling the galaxy that the scudding clouds permanently obscured, lit from within by a myriad of individual lanterns, which together cast a warm, serene glow across the vitreous landscape.

  Horst shrugged, feeling faintly embarrassed. ‘It was just the first name that came into my head,’ he admitted. Hardly surprising, given how often his thoughts had returned to the girl following his disconcerting conversation with Elyra that morning. If the psyker was right, and the young assassin really was infatuated with him, he didn’t have a clue what to do about it. The obvious, and entirely dishonourable, course of action was out of the question. Even if, by the Emperor’s grace, they did manage to make it work, it would split the team, dividing loyalties and imperilling the operation. And if they didn’t, which was far more likely, the fallout was going to be lethal.

  Besides, he didn’t feel that way about the irritating little brat, did he? He couldn’t deny that he found her attractive, in a purely physical sense, but they had nothing in common beyond their dedication to the Inquisition. The physical side of things might be fine, for a while, but sooner or later you had to start talking as well, spending time together, caring about one another, and that simply wasn’t going to happen. They were just too different.

  ‘I can understand that,’ Drake said casually, oblivious to his comrade’s inner turmoil. ‘She does make a bit of an impression, doesn’t she?’ Then he shrugged. ‘Are we heading straight back?’

  Horst started to nod, but thought better of it. ‘Not directly,’ he said. He needed guidance, and from a source far more authoritative than mere human advice. ‘Do you know of any temples on our way down?’

  The Gorgonid Mountains, Sepheris Secundus

  096.993.M41

  The ground came up so fast, in a blur of motion, Elyra barely had time to register it. It was almost completely dark, a faint swirl of windborne snow battering into her face, and the faint air of detachment she’d felt floating above the world was abruptly gone. With shocking suddenness, the mountains below were rising above her, the smooth snowfields dappling their flanks rushing past.

  Minor blemishes in their smooth white perfection resolved into potentially lethal outcrops of grim grey rock that seemed to be reaching out to snatch her from the sky. She swung her legs frantically, dipping a wingtip as Keira had shown her, and to her relief the rig she wore responded at once, turning to follow the barely visible silhouette of the assassin ahead of her. A second shadow paralleled her own, projected by the artificial star field of the city above, and she glanced up, seeing Kyrlock a few metres higher and almost a body length ahead, his great physical strength conferring a surprising degree of control over the wings he wore.

  They were heading for a narrow valley, where the trees seemed thinner, and Elyra found herself reciting one of the catechisms she’d learned as a child, invoking the protection of the Emperor. Keira rose a little, soaring easily over a copse ahead of them, and Kyrlock followed, appearing to gain confidence with every passing second.

  Almost caught unawares, Elyra altered the angle of her wings, felt the sudden rush of lift, and barely made it, high branches reaching up to snag her hair and clothing, leaving stinging scratches across her face and hands as she skimmed the top of the arboreal obstacle. At least her eyes hadn’t been struck. For a heart stopping moment she wondered if her harness would be fouled, or the fabric of the wings ripped, but the rig held together, and then they were dropping fast towards an open expanse of snow surrounded by trees.

  Keira landed first, kicking her boots free of the steering stirrups to drop lightly onto her feet, killing her forward momentum with a couple of steps. As she came to a halt, and shrugged free of her harness, she turned to watch the approach of her protégés.

  Kyrlock hit hard, in a flurry of snow and profanity, losing his balance and stumbling forward before falling face down in the welcoming drifts. Elyra had no time to worry about the red-headed Guardsman, though, as the ground suddenly rose up from nowhere to smack her hard in the face. She tumbled, feeling the brace of her left wing snap under the weight of her forearm, trying instinctively to tuck into a roll, but the harness and the glass fibre skeleton of the gliding rig encumbered her, inhibiting her movements. Something slammed into the side of her head, and darkness descended.

  ‘Sin and damnation,’ Keira’s voice said, from what sounded like a long way away. ‘I told Mordechai this was a stupid idea, but does anyone ever listen?’

  ‘Is she all right?’ Kyrlock asked, sounding even more distant.

  ‘She will be.’ Something grabbed Elyra around the torso, rolling her over. Feeble light skewered her smarting eyes, and she blinked them clear, as Keira’s face appeared above her. For a moment she thought the young assassin’s head was surrounded by a halo, like the icons of the saints in her father’s chapel. Then Keira moved, to reveal the shining constellation of the city, impossibly far above. ‘A few cuts and scratches, and that’s going to be one hell of a bruise, but I don’t think anything’s broken.’

  ‘Then we might as well get started,’ Elyra said, forcing herself to sit up, astonished at the number of places it was possible to hurt. She scrabbled for the release of her harness, and found it distorted into uselessness.

  ‘Allow me,’ Kyrlock said, reaching down to cut her free with what looked like a Guard-issue combat knife.

  ‘Thank you.’ Elyra accepted his proffered arm, hauling herself upright, and tried to ignore the little firecrackers of pain that erupted all along her left arm as she shrugged free of the buckled remains of the glidewings. They’d never fly again, that much was certain. Kyrlock’s looked a little battered, but still serviceable, and Keira’s, of course, were still in perfect condition. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘The lower slopes, above the main mine workings,’ Keira said. ‘I’ve touched down here before, on scouting trips.’ She began to fold her wings, in the faint glow of light from the city above them, and gestured to Kyrlock to do the same. Elyra limped around to hers, and began to follow their lead, but the assassin forestalled her. ‘No, leave that one out in the open. It’ll back up your cover story if anyone thinks to check.’

  ‘Fine.’ Nursing her throbbing head, Elyra watched her companions stow their gear. ‘Where are you going to hide the others?’

  ‘Just inside the treeline.’ Keira gestured towards the surrounding forest, and Kyrlock nodded approval, as a few more snowflakes flurried past in the stiffening breeze.

  ‘Good idea. We’ll be getting more snow soon, and they won’t get buried too much by the drifting.’

  ‘More snow? Good.’ Keira finished stowing her kit. ‘That’ll cover our tracks nicely.’ She tapped the comm-bead in her ear. ‘Hybris, can you hear me?’ The answer was evidently in the affirmative, because she nodded once, briskly. ‘Good. We’re down.’ There was a short pause, during which she glanced in Elyra’s direction with a faint air of amusement. ‘That’s right. No problems at all.’

  Ten

  Icenholm, Sepheris Secundus

  096.993.M41

  ‘Well, Adrin was definitely on the premises whenever Tonis was,’ Vex said, looking up from the overly ornamented data-slate lying beside his own on a convenient table in the lounge of the villa. He’d been examining the files it contained for several hours, and was beginning to draw some tentative conclusions, despite the faint irritation he still felt at the way the casing of the poor machine had been so insensitively adorned with pointless frippery, instead of the iconography properly dedicated to the Omnissiah that such a fine piece of equipment d
eserved. ‘Of course he spends a lot of time there, but that holds true for the majority of the members.’

  ‘But we know he had some kind of connection to Tonis,’ Horst reminded him; quite unnecessarily, so far as Vex was concerned, but he refrained from remarking on the matter. Those unblessed with the clarity of thought bestowed by the Omnissiah often kept stating and restating the obvious. He’d grown so used to it since leaving the quiet of the Mechanicus shrine to begin his association with the Angelae Carolus that it barely registered with him any more. If anything, he found it either amusing or perversely reassuring, like a system with multiple redundancies, ensuring that the relevant facts kept reasserting themselves despite any distractions that might occur. Signal to noise, the vox chaplains called it, and he found the comparison apt. Unmodified humans certainly made enough of the latter.

  ‘Quite so,’ Vex said, having observed that people said that kind of thing to acknowledge the receipt of packages of redundant input. ‘That means our next goal should be to gather as much information as possible on Adrin.’

  ‘That’s your job,’ Horst told him, to his complete lack of surprise. ‘Get into the data systems, and pull up everything you can on him. There should be plenty, given his influence and connections.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather a tall order?’ Drake asked. ‘It could take days to assemble a complete picture. Have we got that long?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Vex assured him. ‘I have some powerful filtration algorithms, which ought to distil anything relevant without too much difficulty.’

  ‘Good.’ Horst nodded slowly. ‘And while you’re doing that, there’s another approach we might try.’ He glanced at Drake. ‘Something one of Danuld’s informants said gave me an idea. We might just have given ourselves the opening we need to plant an agent inside the Conclave.’

  ‘What was that?’ Drake asked, a moment before amused comprehension dawned across his face, and for no reason Vex could see his voice suddenly became a nasal falsetto. ‘Sounds like she’d fit right in with our lot.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Horst said, grinning. Since neither of them seemed inclined to share the joke, Vex ignored it, and returned to work.

  The Gorgonid Mountains

  096.993.M41

  They’d worked their way slowly down to the edge of the foothills, keeping in cover, relying on the wind and the flurrying snow to cover their tracks. Kyrlock had moved with surprising assurance, manifestly happy to be back in an environment he knew well, and Keira had been little more than a ghost in the darkness. Only Elyra had struggled, wading through the snow, sinking deep through its crust with every step. This was nowhere near as unpleasant as the blizzard they’d fought their way through after their shuttle had been downed, but it was still bad enough, made worse by the stiffness in her limbs and the jolts of pain that jarred through her with every stumbling footfall.

  The cold was acute, too, sapping her strength, and she fought down a brief stab of envy at the thought of other pyrokines she’d known who were able to project a thin aura of warmth around themselves. Her talents, however, lay in a more direct and destructive direction, and, Emperor knew, she’d been grateful for that often enough. At least she’d had the foresight to don thick, weatherproof clothing. Down here, Kyrlock’s furs didn’t seem like such an affectation any more.

  ‘Is it much farther?’ she asked, and Kyrlock looked back at her, an unexpected expression of sympathy on his face.

  ‘Almost there,’ he reassured her, for the third or fourth time.

  Keira nodded, her face pale in the all-pervading glow that surrounded them, enabling them to progress ever more quickly as it had grown in strength. The closer they’d come to it, the more brightly the city above them had illuminated the landscape, so that the small group of Angelae were able to move as confidently as they would have done in the bright moonlight of a more Emperor-favoured world. ‘Just beyond that stand of trees,’ she confirmed. ‘I’ve been this way before.’

  Elyra stumbled through the last patch of woodland, and stopped suddenly, awestruck. In front of her, less than a hundred metres away, a vast precipice yawned, falling away farther and deeper than the eye could see, the trees and snowfields ending as abruptly as if they’d been cut away by the stroke of a sword. Kilometres distant, the opposite face stood stark and drear, shadowed in the gentle illumination of the city above, speckled with the winking lights of the uncounted hovels and workings that clung to it. ‘Golden Throne!’ she breathed.

  ‘You think that’s something, wait until we’re close enough to smell it,’ Kyrlock said, although how much he was joking Elyra couldn’t tell.

  ‘Which way?’ she asked, recalling her mind to the mission.

  Kyrlock gestured to the left. ‘We can get down into the Tumble that way,’ he said confidently, before glancing across at Keira. ‘All right with you?’

  ‘Fine.’ The young assassin shrugged, her outline blurred by the synsuit. ‘This is your ground. You call it.’ She stood casually, her eyes sweeping the desolate landscape. ‘Go have a drink. I’ll watch your back.’

  ‘Works for me,’ Kyrlock said. He glanced at Elyra. ‘Coming?’ Without waiting for an answer, he strode off in the direction he’d indicated.

  ‘Of course.’ After a moment’s hesitation, and a final glance at Keira, Elyra limped after him, feeling almost the same as she had done before making her leap from the villa, what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Icenholm, Sepheris Secundus

  096.993.M41

  ‘Now, that’s interesting,’ Vex commented. He’d managed to download most of the pertinent information from the offensive looking data-slate to his own, which was making the most of its Inquisition level access protocols to scour the Icenholm datanet for any relevant records it could plunder. ‘A distinct anomaly.’

  ‘Something about Adrin?’ Drake asked, sipping his third mug of recaf. He was looking tired, but refusing to go to bed until the surface party checked in again. Omnissiah alone knew what he expected to be able to do about it if they were in any sort of trouble, but Vex supposed his zeal was commendable. Horst, the veteran of innumerable such vigils, had turned in some time before, preferring to sleep while he could.

  ‘No, about Tonis,’ Vex said. Out of politeness he moved aside, to give Drake an uninterrupted view of the pict screen, although he doubted that anyone unschooled in the theology of data retrieval would be able to make much sense of the icons it was displaying. ‘I factored him into the filters, in an attempt to prioritise any other connection there might be between the two of them, but it’s thrown up something rather curious.’

  ‘Which is?’ Drake asked.

  Vex shrugged, and coughed loudly, making a mental note to adjust his respirator unit again at the earliest opportunity. ‘His security clearance was issued by the Inquisition office on the Lathes, like most of the Adeptus Mechanicus personnel at the Citadel, but he has a local birth record.’

  ‘Tonis was a Secundan?’ Drake asked, apparently needing confirmation of the fact before he could accept it.

  Knowing this for another common trait of those unblessed by the Omnissiah, Vex merely nodded. ‘That appears to have been the case. However, both his parents were minor members of the local aristocracy, with no apparent connection to the Adeptus that I can find.’

  ‘But their son became a tech-priest.’ Drake frowned thoughtfully. ‘I’ve never heard of a Secundan noble doing that.’

  ‘Perhaps he simply had a calling,’ Vex said. ‘But it might well be worth looking into.’

  The Tumble, Gorgonid Mine, Sepheris Secundus

  096.993.M41

  Kyrlock hadn’t been joking about the smell. As she limped into the wilderness of spoil heaps fringing the mine, Elyra caught her first faint whiff of it, the unmistakable odour of too much unwashed humanity living in too close a proximity, and the sweet, sulphurous stench of raw sewage. Other, equally noxious, smells were intermingled with it, rising and falling like the melody line of a symphony of stench
: the smoke and grease of uncountable cooking fires, the acrid tang of the pall of dust that hung over everything, and the sharp stink of burned promethium from the loaded trucks that still growled past in a steady stream even at this time of night. The racket of their engines was supplemented by the Waymakers who squatted on rickety platforms lashed to the front fenders or clung precariously to some makeshift perch, hallooing loudly, blowing horns, or banging drums to warn of their approach.

  Suddenly the unmistakable shriek of a shuttle engine rose over the cacophony, drowning it out entirely, and snatching at her attention. Elyra glanced up, seeing the blocky silhouette of a bulk cargo lifter descending from somewhere above them, following the line of labouring transporters towards wherever they were going. Presumably there was a landing pad a kilometre or so in that direction.

  ‘Better keep your eyes on the surface,’ Kyrlock advised, not even appearing to register the spacecraft’s approach, and Elyra nodded. There were people everywhere, trudging up and down the road, mostly men but there were a few women amongst them, keeping firmly to the fringes of the narrow strip illuminated by randomly scattered arc lights. The gaps in between had been plugged for the most part by flickering torches, in sconces nailed to posts driven into the ground. The mine’s denizens barely seemed human, plodding along in almost complete silence, their clothes, skin and hair ingrained with the omnipresent dust. They walked, heads down, with occasional wary glances into the deeper patches of shadow fringing the highway. Occasionally one would speak, a short, mumbled sentence or two, falling silent again as their companion replied equally tersely, or merely shrugged in response.

  At first, Elyra had been alarmed at the sight of so dense a crowd, expecting to attract attention, perhaps even trouble. There was no doubt that both she and Kyrlock stood out among the drab, shuffling host. Even uninjured she would have been distinctive, her stout boots, thick jacket and trousers, and rucksack as out of place as a ball gown would have been. Her limping gait, and the cuts and bruises on her face, only compounded that. Her companion simply looked like trouble, his chain axe slung across his back, and a shotgun from the Angelae’s armoury held ready for use with all the assurance of his military training. He’d slipped it from his shoulder as they first entered the fringes of the Gorgonid, without comment.