by Dan Abnett
The window rattled again. Then, distinctly, something tapped on the glass. Tap-tap-tap. Not the brisk knuckle-rap of a caller at a door, but the furtive pattering of fingertips, the gentle knock of an illicit lover at a bedroom casement.
Tap-tap-tap.
‘Do not respond,’ said Ravenor.
The tapping came again. Three of the candles around Timurlin’s corpse died into feeble strings of smoke.
‘They test our bindings,’ said Ravenor. ‘Kara?’
She nodded, and moved quickly to relight the candles that had failed. Like me, she was unnerved. Her hands fumbled with her little tinderbox as she struck and lit a taper. The candles began to glow again, but the light from them, from all of them, was frail, their flames a very pale yellow, as though the air was growing thin.
I glanced around as the tapping came again, now from a different window pane. The window bumped in its frame, as if pressed by hands seeking to unseat the latch.
Then silence again.
We heard a flutter suddenly, from the direction of the grate, and all turned. Some soot and grit scattered down the chimney into the hearth, as though the very chimney pot had been probed and tested as a means of entry. Another rattle, and another fall of grit. Then, quite quickly, footsteps again, circling the muniment room on the pavement outside.
‘Remain calm,’ said Ravenor softly.
‘I am calm,’ I replied.
‘I meant Kara,’ he said.
Kara nodded, and forced up a cheery grin that did not convince.
‘We have come to someone’s attention,’ Ravenor whispered. ‘I would know who we have drawn out.’
Footsteps came again, heavy but soft. They seemed to pass the end window. A shadow flitted. Then the tone of the footsteps changed. They were moving slowly, upon floorboards, not the pavers of the street. They were in the house, in the hall outside the room. They seemed to have passed from street to hall without ever a door opening, and certainly there was no exterior door in the hall at the end of the muniment room.
The footsteps came, and went, then came again. We heard a faint noise, the sound of palms sliding gently across the panelled wall between hall and muniment room, either side of the main door, testing, feeling for some catch or hinge.
Then the footsteps resumed. Someone, something, walked the hall outside from one end to the other, then returned to the main door. The handle rattled as someone tried to turn it.
‘The way is barred,’ said Ravenor very clearly.
The handle stopped its rattling. A second later, the brass knob of the side door tried to turn instead. It quivered and clicked, but the door remained shut. The footsteps walked back down the hall.
A hand knocked on the main door. Four, heavy knocks.
‘You may not enter,’ said Ravenor.
A pause, then another series of four knocks.
‘The way in is closed to you,’ said Ravenor. ‘But you may identify yourself.’
Something slid against the outside of the heavy main door, fingertips perhaps.
‘You know us,’ said a voice from outside. It was muffled by the thickness of the door, but quite remarkable: a low, bass voice, like that of some giant, dense and heavy as iron yet somehow also hollow.
‘I do not,’ Ravenor replied.
‘You do,’ said the voice from outside. ‘You called to us.’ The voice had such oppressive weight, like lead pressing down upon us. It was also marked by a distinct accent that reminded me of the speech of the dry Herrat, but it was not that. It was an accent of some faraway place, and I did not know it. It spoke in formal Enmabic, but with the careful precision of someone using a learned tongue or a second language.
‘I called to no one and no thing,’ said Ravenor.
‘You did. Our name, you have spoken. Our name, we have heard. We have come to find who calls us. Let us in.’
‘I called to no one.’
‘Our name was spoken and we heard it.’
‘I spoke no name,’ said Ravenor. ‘Not any with power. None that should draw anyone.’
‘You have little wit, then, and little lore,’ replied the voice.
Both door handles rattled at the same moment.
‘This is my house,’ said Ravenor. ‘No guests may enter uninvited, and I invite in only those I know. I know you not, and have not spoken your name.’
‘You have!’ said a voice at the side door. It was a different voice, crisp and brittle, like flaking ice, an angry hiss.
‘You have,’ agreed the first voice, from behind the main door. ‘We are of the College.’
The side door shivered in its frame: a more frustrated and annoyed effort to open it.
‘I see,’ said Ravenor calmly. ‘The name was mentioned. But it is just a name. Two words, both quite common, neither a word of power. Even in conjunction, they could not have summoned you.’
‘The working of vile sorcery can invest any words with power,’ said a third voice from outside the end window. It was solemn and stern. ‘This much I have learned. You are a fool to think otherwise, and lacking in talent.’
‘Cease your prattle and let us in!’ snarled a fourth voice from the side window. It was a deep growl, like that of a predator.
‘I do not think I will,’ said Ravenor. ‘The way is barred, and you are not invited. So, you have charged the name of your fraternity by means of sorcery, such that it lights like a signal-fire when uttered. I see how that may be done… by those unwise enough to tinker with magics.’
‘We are no fraternity,’ declared the solemn voice at the end window.
‘Let us in!’ hissed the voice at the side door.
‘Let us in now,’ demanded a new voice, the sharp tone of a carrion bird, which echoed from the grate. Dust and soot showered down the chimney.
‘We grow tired of your lack of compliance,’ came the snarling tone at the side window.
‘What is your business?’ asked Ravenor.
‘Our business is to know you for what you are,’ said the heavy, hollow voice outside the main door. ‘To know why you spoke our name. To know what part you play.’
‘My business is my own,’ replied Ravenor.
‘We will enter if we please. No door is closed to us.’
This was a new voice, a sixth voice, as distinct as all the others. It was as solid and dull as a block of rockcrete. It too came from the main door.
‘I can assure you, it is–’ Ravenor began.
The main door shook in its frame, as though it had been dealt a huge blow. More came, rapidly, fierce pounding blows of immense force. The old wooden door seemed to bulge and distort in its frame, bending like a reflection in a trick-glass. I flinched, and knew without doubt that whatever was striking the door was doing so with such inhuman power, it should have splintered the wood into kindling. It was not the physical door that was withstanding the assault, it was the wards of power that Ravenor had placed upon it.
The hammering continued for almost a minute. Kara and I jumped involuntarily at every impact.
I glanced at Ravenor.
‘Not yet,’ he said mildly.
The hammering stopped abruptly.
The icy, hissing voice at the side door laughed cruelly.
‘You idiot,’ it said.
‘Shut up!’ replied the dull, rockcrete tones of the voice at the main door. I sensed anger simmering.
‘Enough, both,’ said the hollow voice in its curious accent. It seemed, despite its ominous calm, to hold some authority over them. Footsteps shifted.
‘Let us in, or we will enter anyway,’ it said to us.
‘Unless you state your business in less enigmatic terms, and identify yourselves by more than a meaningless name,’ said Ravenor, ‘you are denied.’
‘You are in no position to deny us,’ said the hollow voice.
A creeping sense of dread began to ooze into the muniment room. I felt my hairs stand up, and gooseflesh rise. Cold sweat came, unbidden, to the small of my back.
‘Brace yourselves,’ Ravenor said to both of us.
The air became drowsy and charged, like a late afternoon before a storm. The darkness thickened. One by one, the candles around Timurlin’s corpse went out. They did not flutter and extinguish: they burned down rapidly. Thick templum candles made to burn for days exhausted themselves in a matter of seconds, descending unnaturally into puddles of molten wax until the struggling wicks drowned and the flames vanished. All the windows and door handles began to quiver and shake. The charms of herb sprigs on the window latches, door handles and grate began to wither, drying and shrivelling away to dust, as though an entire autumn and winter had flown past in a few seconds. The air filled with the scent of mould and decay, of rotting leaves and spoiled herbs. Then a fouler stench came.
I looked, and saw that Timurlin’s corpse was decaying too. It was shrivelling and rotting, first bloating, then shrinking into an emaciated, twisted rigor. Then the flesh submitted to putrefaction, blotched green and puce, and liquefied, like the wax of the ruined candles. Rotting organs shrivelled like the sprigs of herb, and reduced to sticky tar. The smell was brief but noisome. In less than thirty seconds, mere bones remained, blackened, then bleached, then clattering apart into disarticulation; then even those loose parts eroded and became dust.
A wind arose from nowhere that chilled our faces, and fluttered my hair, and Kara’s too. It eddied the dust that had once been bones; then it began to blow up the sand and salt, and even the dust of the chalk, like a sea-wind fretting a beach. The lines of the ritual diagram blew away, and so did the outer circle. Only the faint trace of chalk marks remained on the old floor.
The main door twisted. It did not open, nor did it break or collapse or burn. The old, heavy wood that composed it simply flowed like water, like the surface of a still pool as something deep below rises up into the air. It rippled like quicksilver around a figure that was slowly but inexorably pushing through it.
A face first, then chest and shoulders, then one hand, straining to pass through the barrier. The figure was tall, huge, in fact, a being of titanic stature. It looked as though it was made of glass, or lead crystal, a smooth, milky white with a bluish, lambent glow within. It reminded me of the pretty ornamental perfume bottles in Kara’s collection.
There was little detail to it, except a noble formation to its head, and a sense of concentration to its features. It strained against the barrier, forcing more and more of itself through into the muniment room. A foot appeared, part of a leg. It had the bulk and physique of Comus Nocturnus, and the strength too, for it was heaving its way through a warp-warded perimeter by sheer force of will.
Half through, the door rippling around it, it stared at us.
‘I see you,’ it announced in its hollow voice, with some slight sign of effort and struggle. ‘I see you. Three human souls who defy us. You are nothing. Inconsequential. A disappointment.’
‘Then why do you struggle so to reach us?’ asked Ravenor.
‘Because you defied us,’ it replied. It made another surge, and brought more of itself through the door.
It was not alone. A second figure, of similar stature and milky-glass countenance, was sliding its way through the side door. Its long fingers were hooked like glass claws. A third began to lean through the window and wall at the end of the room, and a fourth through the side window. A fifth, quite the largest and most broad, began to slide through the panels of the wall beside the main door. From the grate, dust and stones scattered down, and the fireplace itself began to bulge and distort as the sixth made entry.
‘Gideon!’ Kara gasped.
‘Keep your place,’ he replied.
‘They are coming in,’ I said. I had a Hecuter auto holstered at my hip, but thought not to draw it, for what good would a hard-round gun do against such an invasion?
‘Keep your place,’ Ravenor repeated steadily.
The Chair was facing the main figure as it bulged through the door.
‘You test me well,’ Ravenor said to it. ‘Your command of sorcery is profound, and dismaying in its heresy. Nevertheless, you are not invited, and you are not welcome. By edict of the Holy Inquisition, your entry is forbidden.’
‘The Inquisition be damned,’ the glassy figure replied with utter venom.
‘Most likely,’ said Ravenor, ‘but not today. You were warned.’
Until that moment, I had known Gideon’s power, and been impressed by it, though I had wondered why he used it with such restraint. Now, he set restraint aside. I became one of very few people to witness him unleash his full potency.
And thus, I came to understand why he kept it in check, and rationed its use, and doled it out sparingly. It was the most terrible thing.
The air burned, as though we had plunged suddenly into the blinding heart of a main sequence star. There was a brightness that was impossible to bear. A screaming filled the room, so loud it shattered window glass and cracked flagstones. Gideon’s power, may the Emperor protect me, was a monstrous force, more monstrous even than the dreadful figures clawing and straining their way into the muniment room to reach us.
A beam of radiant energy seared out from Ravenor’s armoured chair, and struck the advancing figure in the chest. The beam was constant, like a column of light, a glistening rod of silver power that crackled and sizzled.
The advancing figure shuddered, stopped in its tracks. It pressed against the unstinting beam, but could not staunch its flow. Its white crystal form began to bubble and melt where the beam touched it, flowing and spattering like superheated glass at a blower’s furnace.
The figure roared, and redoubled its efforts. The intensity of Ravenor’s beam increased. Around the besieged room, the other figures faltered and began to writhe. The one with the icy, hissing voice shrieked in pain or rage. Invisible power forced each of them back through the walls, doors and windows, their forms contorting and undulating, spattering into drips and blobs that fell to the ground, and seethed like spats of magma. One by one they were driven out in anguish, deformed and distorted. As each one was forced back, it disappeared with a pop of decompression, as though spat through the bending skin of one reality back into another. The huge figure bearing in through the wall was the last to go, and then only the main intruder, speared by Ravenor’s beam, remained.
It would not desist. Impossibly, with staggering determination, it took a step forward, driving itself into the torching force of the beam. It reached out a hand to try to block or cap the relentless psykanic ray, but its fingers and part of its palm melted like ice where it came into contact.
Still, it did not desist. It managed another, superhuman step, stooping into the beam like a man fighting into a hurricane.
‘Beta?’ Ravenor said in a small voice I could barely hear above the screeching roar of psykanic fire.
‘Yes, Gideon?’
‘Now, please.’
I switched my cuff to off.
The slap of pressure shook the room, throwing both Kara and me to the ground. What was left of any window glass blew out. The light vanished, and the terrible beam of energy flicked off. The muniment room was plunged into an ice-cold vapour.
The advancing figure squealed in rage, and disintegrated, the shards and fragments of its form showering to the ground and vanishing.
I rose, my ears ringing with overpressure. The intruders had all disappeared. The drapes had collapsed from the broken windows, their poles buckled, and the pale light of dawn washed in. Steam wisped from the hull of Ravenor’s chair.
The main door opened. Kara and I snapped around, weapons raised.
Nayl stood there, with a heavy assault las in his hands.
‘What the hell’s going on in here?’ he as
ked.
CHAPTER 19
Upon an empty pathway
‘What does this change?’ I asked.
‘It changes almost everything,’ Gideon replied.
‘How so?’
‘If what Timurlin told us is correct–’
‘And is it?’
‘I believe so,’ he replied, ‘for it is almost impossible for a soul to lie under those conditions. Between my mind and the charms we inscribed, almost all scope for mendacity and evasion had been stripped from his mind. Connort Timurlin couldn’t lie, and indeed was clearly distressed by some of the things he was being forced to confess.’
‘You mean Verner Chase,’ I said.
‘Indeed, him. One of the elusive Chase dynasty, brought to light for the first time.’
‘It seemed–’ I began.
‘What?’
‘Rather cruel,’ I said. ‘We tormented his soul.’
The Chair turned to me gently. Once again, I found it curious that Ravenor made such efforts to use his armoured physicality as one might use one’s face or body. He was trying, I believe, to remind us all that he was still human, though the opportunities for expressive body language were limited.
‘I have come to think much of you, Beta,’ he said, ‘even in the short time we have been in collaboration. You are clearly highly trained and very competent, and you seem to possess a level of determination and composure that rivals that of Patience. Perhaps the mentors of the Ordos have much to learn from Cognitae training regimens.’
‘A low blow,’ I replied.
‘My apologies. My point was, you seem to have true steel in you. Yet, from time to time, you seem to display a dismaying weakness – a level of sympathy for–’
‘A level of compassion, I prefer to think,’ I returned.
‘Call it what you will,’ he replied. ‘Connort Timurlin, or Verner Chase, was an agent of heresy, and his life’s work was predicated on the overthrow of the Imperium. That much he admitted. Yes, we dealt with him ruthlessly. But the Inquisition cannot falter. It cannot. The constant threat we face, and the traitors we pursue, are dedicated to the destruction of our way of life. The Ordos are harsh. The Inquisition is no one’s friend. Emotion plays no part in our work. No one ever said this would be easy or pleasant.’
