Part 5 (1/2)

The s.h.i.+ning Spear pressed herself lower against the cha.s.sis of her jetbike, streamlining herself until she seemed indistinguishable from the bike, as though they were together the brilliant spear of Khaine himself, flas.h.i.+ng through the darkness. She willed her bike up to an incredible speed, feeling Shariele fall slightly behind to her right, and hoping all the time that the mon-keigh would not be able to keep up. She knew that the Seer Council had instructed her to guide them, but her very soul screamed in defiance at the thought that they would pa.s.s into the spirit of Ulthwe. To her considerable irritation, she realised that the crude, roaring mon-keigh bikes were keeping pace.

She rolled her bike along its axis as it banked around the last corner, bringing Ghreivanas Gate into view at the end of the corridor. It was roughly circular in shape, although its frame was decorated with ornate runes and twisted as though stretched through several dimensions at once. Within the frame was a curtain of liquid night, s.h.i.+mmering and oily. As the nose of her jetbike broke its surface, submerging as though into a pool, Dhrykna caught a glimpse of the scene on the other side, distorted by the interdimensional refraction and riddled by the surface ripples. She could see the Black Guardians engaging the darkling raiders down in the lowest levels of Ulthwe a they were not winning.

There was not even a splash as the pristine jetbike plunged through the gate and vanished from the corridor.

As usual, the room was barely lit and Inquisitor Lord Seishon sat quietly in the middle of it, as though in meditation. His eyes were half open, but even those who knew him well would not be able to tell whether he was sleeping or awake. Most of the light in the room was tinged with red, as though filtered through a pool of blood. It was a weak light, little more than a glow emanating from the viewscreen that dominated the far wall.

Ever since they had first spotted the anomaly in the Circuitrine system, Seishon had kept a watchful eye on the lashes of the Eye of Terror, as the ruddy, red mist wisped and plumed through the nebula. On the screen, it looked like little more than a pattern of ink swirling through a tank of water. Seishon exhaled and shook his head: how incredible to believe that the swirling tendrils of ink engulfed hundreds of stars.

It was not just the maelstrom of the Eye that clawed at Seishonas soul as he watched the image on the viewscreen zoom through an incredible ratio of magnification. The last communication from Librarian Ashok before the Deathwatch team had finally vanished into the ma.s.sive docking bay of the eldar craftworld had sent Seishonas mind reeling. He had been concerned about the trustworthiness of their erstwhile allies even before he and Vargas had reached the decision to despatch the Deathwatch, but the latest news had added whole new levels of suspicion and doubt.

Ashok had suggested that the dark eldar might also be involved in the plot, and that was not an eventuality for which Seishon had been prepared. He was absolutely certain that Vargas would have given it no thought whatsoever, and he was equally certain that the cunning, arrogant and insightful aliens would have expected the human keepers of the Coven of Isha to ask few questions. Vargas, imagined Seishon with a faint disgust edging into his thoughts, probably asked no questions of the messenger at all. Vargas had claimed that the messenger had been Eldrad Ulthran himself, but Seishon was beginning to doubt even that. Vargas would believe anything. And how could that ancient sorcerer still be alive after all these millennia? Eldar may be long lived, but this Ulthran would have to be virtually immortal.

A faint chime sounded from the main door into his chambers, but Seishon ignored it for a moment, endeavouring to compose his thoughts. It would not do to confront an agent of the Inquisition in this unbalanced frame of mind. This was one of the many drawbacks of being based on Ramugan a no matter where you went and no matter to whom you spoke, there was always a chance that they would twist your actions or words into those of a heretic. Heresy was everywhere, and it was only a small leap of logic to reach the conclusion that heresy was also everything.

aEnter,a he said at last, keeping his back to the door as it slid smoothly open. He knew it was Vargas. The dulled, almost impotent psychic stench oozed into the room even before it opened.

aSeishonaa started Vargas, breaking into voice even before the door had sealed closed. Seishon silenced him by slicing his hand out to one side, before turning to face his honoured guest.

aCareful, old friend,a he cautioned, indicating the door with his eyebrow. For a moment, and not for the first time, Seishon marvelled at the fact that Vargas had risen to the exalted rank of inquisitor lord. They had known each other a long time, and Seishon could not remember a time when Vargas had demonstrated the kind of political edge or subtlety demanded of his position. And he was one of the very few senior inquisitors in this sector that had almost no psychic ability at all. He made no secret of it.

aOh, of course,a replied Vargas hastily, shuffling into the room and slumping down into one of the chairs around the table in its centre. He looked up at Seishon, fl.u.s.tered and clearly exhausted, before letting his gaze drift to the image on the giant viewscreen.

The door closed and Seishon activated a series of purity seals with a casual wave of his hand. They would not keep out the most determined of spying devices, but he had any number of more painful ways to deal with anyone or anything that actually dared to breach the integrity of his chambers.

Taking two weary steps, Seishon joined Vargas at the table, lowering himself stiffly into the chair opposite his old friend, watching him rattling a gla.s.s against a crystal carafe as he tried to pour himself some wine. A cunning thought occurred to him at that moment, and he kicked himself mentally for not having thought of it before: perhaps all of this b.u.mbling innocence was just a front? Perhaps Vargas just used this image to disarm his adversaries?

He would not be the first to attempt such a ruse, reflected Seishon, narrowing his eyes as the logical implications of the theory started to play out in his head. If this personality was a ruse, which seemed necessary as an explanation for Vargasa position and rank, then the chief victim of the ruse was probably Seishon himself, since he had known Vargas longer than anyone. Not only that, but Seishon had taken the old fool into his confidence. If Vargas was not who he purported to be, then Seishonas already precarious position regarding the Coven of Isha was even more precarious than he had realised.

aSeishon?a inquired Vargas. His wine gla.s.s was already drained and he was busily pouring himself another, a concerned smile playing over his lips.

aYes? Oh, yes, sorry,a replied Seishon, composing himself, immediately aware that he was making exactly the mistake he had striven to avoid for decades on Ramugan. It was all well and good to be suspicious a indeed, it was essential to be suspicious a but it was no good to show your suspicion, and it was even worse to let your suspicion compromise your attentiveness. The stress of the situation was clearly having an effect on him.

aAre you sick?a asked Vargas, his voice tinged with what appeared to be genuine concern.

aNo. Iam fine, Vargas. Thank you. I am merely concerned about this situation,a he finished, flicking his head to indicate the image on the screen behind him, before reaching for the carafe.

aAs am I, old friend. There has been no further word from Lord Ulthran.a aDid you expert to hear more?a asked Seishon, raising an eyebrow and then sipping his wine.

aI am not sure what to expect, Seishon.a aExpectations are not always the allies of faith, old friend.a Vargas nodded thoughtfully, but Seishon felt sure that he had not understood him.

aI have reason to believe that the dark eldar are somehow involved in this affair, Vargas,a he continued, watching the otheras face for some sign of recognition.

aReally? Why?a It appeared to be genuine surprise, although not necessarily alarm.

aLibrarian Ashok sent a communique from just inside the Circuitrine nebula. The Lance of Darkness detected small, fast guns.h.i.+ps emerging from the Eye of Terror as it approached, possibly fitted with shadowfields.a aDid they engage?a aNo. The flyers fled when Ulthwe launched its own escort vessels to guide the Lance home.a Seishonas mind was racing again, shot through with a tirade of implications and possibilities. aThe alien witch said nothing about his dark brethren, I suppose?a aNothing,a answered Vargas a little too hastily. His mind was already wandering into new areas. aThese guns.h.i.+ps, were they large enough to be detected by the Malleus sensor arrays?a aI doubt it, Vargas a the distance is too great. In any case, as you must know, the Lance of Darkness had to time its run in counterphase with the sensor sweep, otherwise we would have had Lord Aurelius storming in here before they had even got out of this system. Anything they encountered on that route would be invisible to us, I hope.a Seishon was getting sick of explaining things that Vargas should already know.

aI have heard from Aurelius,a said Vargas, almost incidentally. aWhat?a aHe asked me why you are so interested in the Circuitrine nebula.a For a moment, Seishon was at a loss for words. aAnd what did you say to him, Vargas?a A heavy, sinking feeling had settled into Seishonas stomach. He should have been able to antic.i.p.ate that Caesurian and Aurelius would have approached Vargas to confirm his story. He would have done the same thing, especially considering the apparent likelihood that Vargas would spill his soul. aWas Caesurian with him?a The Hereticus lord was far more dangerous to him personally, if not to the mission itself.

aI told him that I was not aware of any particular or special interest in that nebula, and I implied that I would naturally be aware of any such interest if indeed it were to exist. I a.s.sured him of our cooperation with the Ordo Malleus here on Ramugan, in keeping with the conventions of the eons.a Seishon nodded, his mind elsewhere. aA good answer, Vargas.a aAnd no, Caesurian was not with him. He did, however, mention a young Hereticus Inquisitor Perceptia. Evidently she has been asking some questions of junior interrogators in the Malleus compound. This is why Aurelius came to me.a aPerceptia? Never heard of her,a sighed Seishon, a note of relief easing into his voice.

The front of Octaviusa bike burst out of the liquid curtain of the infinity portal, roaring like a wild animal hungry for a kill. As the fat tyres crunched down onto solid ground once again, the captain shook his head rapidly, scrunching his eyes shut and trying to reorient his senses. Flas.h.i.+ng through the fringes of Ulthweas infinity circuit, or wherever it was that those portals went, was not something for which the untrained human brain was well equipped. It took a couple of seconds for Octavius to regain crisp vision and proper balance.

Before he could see what was going on around him, he could hear it. The noise was incredible. There were yells and screams, shouts in languages that Octavius had never heard. Terrible, shrill wails tore through the air, slicing through the other sounds as though cutting through water. Explosions shook the ground, and the unmistakable sizzling hiss of shuriken fire was pervasive in the background.

Hitting the brakes, Octavius slid his bike to a halt, not willing to charge forward blindly. In less than a second, Ashok skidded his own bike around, bringing it to rest less than a metre from his captainas, but he was already blazing with fire, his staff alive with power. Almost instantaneously, Atreus pulled his bike up on the other side of Octavius, his own staff spitting with a constant stream of blue energy. Immediately, Octavius realised that the librarians were better able to adjust to the oddities of travelling around Ulthwe and he was again thankful that Seishon had insisted on them both. He also realised that the two librarians were flanking him to protect him from the enemy while his senses returned to normal.

With a roar, Octavius unholstered his bolter and let rip into the semi-resolved haze before him. aPrimarch a Progenitor, to your glory and the glory of Him on Earth!a No son of Rogal Dorn needed the protection of another Marine.

In a matter of seconds, the Deathwatch team was a.s.sembled, and it found itself in the midst of a fierce battle between a bank of Ulthwe eldar on one side and a scattering of dark eldar on the other. Even after his sight had returned, it took Octavius a moment to work out which side he was supposed to be on. Both groups looked like eldar to him. Both were dressed in dark armour and firing tiny projectiles from hissing weapons. He noticed that Atreus and Ashok showed no hesitation at all a they immediately directed their fury towards the scattered distribution of aliens to the left. The others in the team took their lead from the librarians: Chaplain Luthar suddenly gunned the engine of his bike and powered off to one side, trying to out flank the dark eldar and get around behind them. Kruidan of the Mantis Warriors took his valour in his hands and roared forward directly into the heart of the dark eldar formation a as he closed on their line, his jump pack ignited and he blasted up away from his bike, sending it careening into the aliens, where it exploded into a ma.s.sive fireball.

Sulphus, the Iron Father of the Red Talons, manoeuvred his land speeder with two of his arms, punching the trigger for the front mounted heavy bolters, while his other arms unleashed volleys of fire from bolt pistols.

Only Pelias stood at Octaviusa shoulder. He seemed to hesitate for a moment, glancing back towards the formation of Ulthwe warriors who were even now beginning to disengage from the battle, as though a.s.suming that they no longer had a role to play in this encounter. Octavius watched the scene unfold, calculating his next move. The dark eldar force was not as powerful as he had thought at first a the aggression of his team had already splintered it. Kruidan had wiped half of it out by himself with his bike stunt a at least, half of what had been left of it after the onslaught from Ashok and Atreus. The Mantis Warrior fought as though he had a point to make.

Watching closely, Octavius could see that the dark eldar and the eldar of Ulthwe did appear slightly different from each other. The former seemed less organised and more anarchic a las.h.i.+ng out with barbs and blades as though fighting entirely for themselves, or perhaps out of a desperate fear of an invisible master. They laughed and brayed, shrieking with reckless abandon. Their armour was artistic and stylised, as though designed as much for their own sensory pleasure as for protection a some of them, particularly the females, displayed more skin than armoured panels. They seemed to decorate themselves with flashes of colour a usually red headbands, bracelets, anklets or scarves.

Looking more closely, Octavius could see that the decorations were red with blood a some of them still edged with bone or finished with shrunken skulls. And they seemed to show a marked preference for bladed weapons, particularly the females who danced and spun with such breathtaking precision. They were like dancers of death.

The Ulthwe, on the other hand, were disciplined and coherent. Their armour was almost like a uniform, immaculate and polished, baring strange runic markings that seemed to bind them together as a single force.

Most of the warriors looked like males, but it was difficult to tell under the seamless black armour, since both genders were slim and elegant creatures. They seemed to prefer projectile weapons and most sported long rifles, which they fired in banks and disciplined volleys. These eldar did not look like the ones that greeted the Deathwatch team up in Calmainocas dock. The only figures that Octavius could recognise were the das.h.i.+ng forms of his two guides: one was a flas.h.i.+ng streak of brilliant white, darting through the scattered dark eldar, cutting down her foe with javelins of lasfire; the other had long since abandoned his jetbike and was standing defiantly in the heart of the combat zone, las.h.i.+ng out at his dark brethren with crackling bursts of lightning from his fingertips.

Despite himself, Octavius nodded his approval. He was learning a great deal from this first encounter. It was a rare opportunity for a Deathwatch captain to see the eldar and dark eldar pitted against each other, and he felt that he was beginning to get a sense of some of their differences, at least in battle. But he was also beginning to realise that the eldar of Ulthwe themselves were not a h.o.m.ogeneous gaggle of aliens. There were depths to the actions of these creatures that he could not guess at, at least not yet.

However, the thing that struck him most was the fact that he wasnat sure why he was there. The eldar seemed to have enough firepower and enough talent to confront the smattering of dark eldar raiders that attempted to threaten their position. Of equal concern was the fact that the Ulthwe eldar seemed content to disengage when Octaviusa team showed up a all of them except the white warrior and the warlock. Perhaps this was simply a test? Whatever it was, he felt certain that the eldar had not summoned the Deathwatch just to fight a handful of alien raiders for them.

Some people curse when they get angry or frustrated. Some people hit things or lash out. Perceptia was not one of these people. When she got angry, she went to the librarium and read a good book. Actually, when she got angry, she went to the hidden depths of the Hereticus librarium of Ramugan and read bad books. Very bad books indeed.

She hated talking to the subordinates of inquisitors, especially to those outside of the Ordo Hereticus. It was bad enough trying to get sense out of her own colleagues and peers; even when she had been part of Caesurianas retinue, she had never really managed to get an honest answer out of any of the others. When it came to explicators and interrogators from the Ordo Malleus or Xenos, they would often simply not speak at all, or just walk past without even acknowledging her.

It was one of the oddities of the Ramugan station that agents from each of the services would occasionally come into contact with each other. It was not peculiar to Ramugan, however, that these agents would have absolutely no trust in each other when they did cross paths. There were all kinds of questions, suspicions and compet.i.tions between the ordos a in addition, each agent wanted to a.s.sert the superiority of its own by demonstrating its casual or studied disregard for everyone else.

As an interrogator, everyone could ignore her, but now that she was an inquisitor she could at least demand a few moments of time from the junior staff of others. Inquisitors may still be able to ignore her, and inquisitor lords might not even notice that she existed, but she could pester a few explicators for snippets of information. Now, however, she hated doing it a it was beneath her to deal with these underlings. Besides, the stupid explicators in the Ordo Malleus had not understood anything. They had not even known that there was anything they did not know, which seemed like the height of stupidity. She had always hypothesised that the agents of the Malleus were probably the least intellectually able of all, and it seemed to her that she had now found proof of her theory. All brash and no brains.

So, Perceptia had given up on the living for now. Caesurian had told her not to return until she had some evidence, so she was going to find some. The lowest levels of the Hereticus librarium contained the rantings and confessions of heretics that had been caught on Ramugan station itself over the centuries. The existence of such files was hidden from just about everyone on the station, even from most of the Ordo Hereticus.

They were twofold secrets: first, because the Ordo Hereticus of Ramugan did not want to advertise the fact that they kept intricate and detailed records about personnel from the other local branches of the Emperoras Inquisition; and second, because n.o.body liked to admit that even a place as saturated in the sacred light of the Emperor as Ramugan a a station uniquely blessed by the Inquisitorial trinity a could grow its very own heretics in such large numbers. The latter, of course, was not much of a secret and certainly no surprise, but it was treated as a secret for diplomatic reasons, to prevent the Ordo Hereticus from being seen as a police presence on the station.

Dropping the bundle of ma.n.u.scripts onto the table between the doc.u.ment stacks, Perceptia took one last look around the shadows that crept between the shelves, peering through her dirty gla.s.ses and the cloud of dust that billowed up off the metal desk. Satisfied that she was alone, she pushed her spectacles back up towards the bridge of her nose and sat down.

She brushed the dust off the loose cover and stared down at the seal that was still faintly visible in the paper, pressed in with the stamp of an Inquisitorial curator many centuries before. Next to it, even fainter than the seal, was the image of a pale and over-stylised eye. Untying the string that bound the bundle together, Perceptia leafed through the pages in between the covers, looking casually over the confessions and last breaths of hundreds of souls, each meticulously recorded, verified and filed by the agents of the Ordo Hereticus.