Scourge The Heretic Read online

  ‘What in the warp’s about right,’ Horst said grimly. ‘Something like the thing that attacked the inquisitor?’

  Keira grinned triumphantly at him. ‘Could have been a daemon,’ she agreed, looking at the residue, which had once been a body, with rather less distaste than Drake was entirely comfortable with. He’d seen death often enough before, inflicted it too, whenever the simmering resentment of the serfs boiled over into rioting or an over-confident baron tried to withhold part of his tithe from the Queen, but the sheer savage butchery that had happened here was something else. The thick, metallic stench of blood was clogging his nostrils, and the unfamiliar food he’d eaten earlier seemed to be curdling in his stomach.

  ‘Well, I’m guessing he didn’t cut himself shaving,’ Kyrlock said, and Drake grinned, grateful for his friend’s down to earth presence.

  Horst ignored the feeble witticism, and turned to Elyra. ‘Can you feel anything?’ he asked. ‘Like you did in the inquisitor’s room?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I can only sense an active presence. If you want to lift echoes, you’ll need a specialist.’

  ‘Could it have been the same creature?’ Drake asked, before wondering whether it was entirely sensible to be drawing attention to himself. He was still acutely aware that he and Kyrlock were here on sufferance, and that now Finurbi had rushed off to hitch a lift on some trading vessel due to leave orbit within the hour, Horst would be delighted to find an excuse to hand them back to the storm trooper corporal. However, the team leader was nodding thoughtfully.

  ‘Good point,’ he said, glancing across at Drake. ‘Nice to know someone around here’s using their head.’ Keira made a derogatory gesture behind his back, and Drake kept his face straight with an effort. ‘Elyra?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ the blonde woman told him, ‘but, yes, it sounds reasonable. I’d hate to think there were two of those things running loose around here.’

  ‘You have to admit it hangs together,’ Keira persisted, apparently unabashed by their leader’s dismissive attitude. ‘Daemon possesses the cogboy, makes him blow up the power plant, then…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Makes him explode? Why would it do that, do you think?’

  ‘To attack the inquisitor,’ Vex suggested. ‘It needed to be incorporeal to do that.’

  ‘But why?’ Horst clearly didn’t buy it. ‘Why not just walk up to him in Tonis’s body and put a bullet through his head?’

  ‘Because that would blow its cover?’ Keira suggested, and then took another look at the mess in the room. ‘Like this didn’t. Forget I said that.’

  ‘Gladly,’ Horst said.

  Kyrlock shrugged. ‘If it was a daemon, who knows how it thought?’ he said. ‘Maybe it just didn’t want this guy around to answer questions once it went back to hell, or wherever it’s gone.’

  ‘Come to that,’ Elyra said, ‘I’ve never heard of a tech-priest being possessed before. You hear all kinds of stories when you’re being trained for sanction, but nothing like that. They usually go after psykers, because their minds are already open to the warp.’

  ‘Could a tech-priest be a psyker?’ Horst asked.

  Vex shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard of one,’ he admitted, ‘but I would have thought that a mind turned towards the perfection of the Machine would be too far removed from such matters to manifest that kind of ability.’

  ‘He could have been a latent, I suppose,’ Elyra said, ‘but then something would have had to trigger his talent to attract a warp entity.’ She shook her head. ‘That doesn’t just happen spontaneously, not in adulthood, anyway.’

  ‘So we’ve hit another blind alley,’ Horst said. He turned to Vex, who was still methodically searching the room. ‘Have you found anything we can use?’

  ‘Very little,’ Vex admitted, ‘not even a personal data-slate.’ He picked something off the flat metal desk in the corner. ‘He had a personal vox unit, though. Perhaps that might tell us something.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Horst nodded. ‘If he was connected to the attack here, he must have been in touch to coordinate things. Maybe we can get a lead on his associates.’

  ‘It’ll probably take a while,’ Vex cautioned, already relishing the challenge to come. ‘Any incriminating data is bound to be heavily encrypted.’

  ‘Then you’d better get started on what you do best,’ Horst told him. He glanced around the room again, looking as eager as Drake felt to be somewhere else. ‘The rest of us might as well go to bed. The inquisitor took the last airworthy shuttle, and we won’t get another one in here before the morning.’ He took another look at the scraps of offal littering the room, and sighed. ‘Anyone got anything further to add?’

  Keira grinned at him. ‘Daemon,’ she said. ‘Cogboy. Told you so.’

  Eight

  Icenholm, Sepheris Secundus

  094.993.M41

  The villa was just as they’d left it: elegant, polychromatic, and deeply boring. Keira leaned on the glass balustrade, her chin in her hand, and looked down the glittering flanks of the suspended city into the shadowed depths of the Gorgonid mine kilometres below. The dizzying drop didn’t bother her. She’d grown up clinging to the belly of the walking city on Scintilla, and, if anything, she missed the constant movement, the endless need to keep adjusting her balance. Here there wasn’t the remotest chance of an incautious misstep plunging her into oblivion.

  ‘Nice view,’ Drake ventured cautiously, joining her at the waist-high barrier, but remaining far enough away not to crowd her. He was the only other member of the group who felt comfortable out here, but then he’d lived most of his life in Icenholm, and was no doubt as indifferent to the chasm below as she was. The others stayed well away from the balustrade whenever they ventured outside, and Kyrlock had never even set foot on the terrace, staying firmly within the security of the semi-transparent walls.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said. Drake nodded, not speaking either, and she wondered what had brought him out here this morning. He seemed friendlier than the other Guardsman, more relaxed now he was out of uniform, and he seemed less wary of her than the others did. She’d even caught him looking at her a few times in the manner of a man harbouring lustful thoughts, quite heedless of the fact that most Redemptionist women would have killed him on the spot for such blatant sinfulness.

  Not so long ago she probably would have done too, but the Collegium Assassinorum had honed her zeal. Now she was selective, reserving the Emperor’s judgement for heretics and traitors, instead of squandering her talents on the pitiful wretches who barely understood how much He despised them for their weaknesses. Besides, he was one of the Angelae, at least for the moment, like her, an instrument of the Inquisition. She could hardly slaughter him on a whim, just because she didn’t like his attitude.

  Nevertheless, she found herself picturing how easy it would be. One kick, the skirt she wore being loose enough not to restrict her movements, an elbow to the throat, and he’d be on a one-way trip to the Gorgonid before he even realised what was happening.

  ‘You look pensive,’ Drake said easily, sipping from the mug of recaf he’d brought out of doors with him.

  ‘Oh.’ She could hardly admit she’d been thinking about killing him. ‘Just mulling over some combat drills. I’m getting stale cooped up in here.’

  ‘I know what you mean, and I’ve only been here a day.’ Drake waved an expansive arm, taking in the houses on either side of them, and on the slope below. ‘I never thought I’d even set foot in a place like this: living in luxury, anything I want just a call to a servant away, and I never realised how much I’d hate it.’ He flung the recaf mug away, and watched it shatter on the roof of the house below. ‘I know what the price of it all is, in the wasted lives down there.’ He pointed to the deep scar of the Gorgonid. ‘I’ve seen it all in the Scourges. The corruption starts at the bottom of the Shatters, and gets worse and more deeply ingrained the higher it climbs. Up here it’s just hidden behind smart clothes and snobby manners,
that’s all.’ Conscious that he was beginning to raise his voice, he looked a little embarrassed. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to get carried away.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Keira said, a little nonplussed. ‘We all feel that way, I suppose. It’s why we do what we do.’ She looked at him again, surprised to find something akin to her own fervour in his eyes.

  Drake nodded, still looking a little sheepish. ‘I know. I feel lucky, really. I never thought I’d get a chance to make a difference, but I’d still rather be out there, doing it, than hanging around here waiting for Mordechai to come up with a master plan.’

  ‘He’s good at what he does,’ Keira said, surprised by the flash of resentment she felt at the implied disparagement of Horst. Emperor alone knew, he could irritate her readily enough, the patronising… Suddenly breathless, she turned, sitting on the balustrade, heedless of the vertiginous plunge behind her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Drake asked, moving a little closer.

  ‘I’m fine.’ A flash of movement by the sliding doors leading into the lounge caught her attention, and she focused on it gratefully. Elyra was standing there, beckoning, her violet kirtle almost the same colour as her eyes, which were looking at the two of them a little curiously.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ the psyker said. ‘Mordechai wants to see everyone in the lounge in five minutes. Sounds like a briefing.’

  ‘Good.’ Drake offered Keira an arm. Ignoring it, she jumped down from the balustrade. ‘Sounds like we might be getting out of here faster than we thought.’

  ‘So, what’s changed?’ Keira asked, lounging in her seat. With the inquisitor’s departure, Horst had lost no time in having the floor cushions their patron preferred replaced by more conventional chairs and divans. She was wearing a blouse the colour of the overcast sky, and a loose skirt, in the patchwork blue, green and grey currently fashionable among the minor Secundan nobility. One bare calf swung below the hemline, revealing embroidered slippers, and from where he sat Horst could just make out the tell-tale bulge of a knife sheath on her thigh, supported by a crimson garter. ‘Looks to me like we’re right back where we started.’

  ‘Not quite,’ Horst said, quelling his irritation almost by reflex. ‘Now that we’ve got a couple of new leads we can begin to work.’ He nodded towards Drake and Kyrlock, who were sitting slightly apart from the others on the fringes of the group. ‘Vos and Danuld know this city and the mines down there better than we could ever hope to. That gives us an edge.’

  ‘I’d like to think so,’ Drake said. ‘What would you like us to do?’ He seemed to have changed in the last day or so, Horst thought, but just how he couldn’t put his finger on. He’d discarded his old Imperial Guard uniform almost as soon as they’d arrived at the villa, but his black shirt and midnight-blue trousers still had something of a military cut about them, despite the high quality of their material. He was sitting upright, his right ankle resting on his left knee, looking alert and interested.

  Kyrlock, on the other hand, had disdained the luxury of fine clothing, preferring what Horst thought was probably the sort of thing he’d worn prior to his induction into the Guard: leather trousers, stout boots, and a coat of furs, apparently made up of the pelts of several small, forest-dwelling animals. Slouching in his chair, a crystal goblet of amasec in his hand despite the hour, he looked as though he’d have felt more at home in an Iocanthan warband than among these elegant surroundings.

  ‘Vos, I’ll get to in a moment,’ Horst said, ‘but you’ll be working with me. You know this city pretty well, don’t you?’

  ‘Parts of it,’ Drake said. ‘I know the royal palace inside out, and I’ve been to several of the barons’ estates for one reason or another.’

  ‘What sort of reasons?’ Keira asked, intrigued despite her pose of boredom, and Drake shrugged.

  ‘Honour guard, additional security when one of the royal family was paying a visit, that sort of thing, and a couple of raids, of course.’

  ‘Raids?’ Elyra asked.

  Drake nodded. ‘Every now and again one of the barons thinks he can withhold a portion of his tithe and no one will notice. When that happens, the Scourges go in to remind them that they’re wrong.’

  ‘For His vengeance will fall on the unworthy, and scour them from His holy realm,’ Keira quoted with relish, no doubt from one of her precious Redemptionist pamphlets. Horst had made the mistake of asking her about her beliefs once, in an attempt to while away the time during a tedious orbital transfer, and had found that they seemed to boil down to two basic propositions: everyone was a sinner, and the Emperor hated sin. Therefore it was the sacred duty of his most devoted followers to kill as many of their fellow citizens as possible, preferably with a great deal of collateral damage, in order to deliver them to the Golden Throne for final retribution.

  When Horst had pointed out that this sounded suspiciously like doing His enemies’ work for them, Keira had simply glared at him, and all but accused him of being a heretic. In the end, he’d only been able to silence her by unfastening his shirt, to reveal the aquila scar he’d cut into his chest with his combat knife during the vigil in the Cathedral of Illumination in Tarsus, which had preceded his graduation as a fully-fledged arbitrator.

  He wondered if that had been the moment when she first started to challenge his authority, but he couldn’t be sure; it had been so long ago, a year at least.

  ‘Possibly true, but unhelpful,’ Horst said, and she grinned at him again in that infuriating manner. Sighing under his breath, he returned his attention to Drake. ‘You know how the people here think, can read their reactions, so I’d like you with me while I’m asking questions. I’m hoping you’ll be able to pick up some of the subtle cues I might miss.’ Keira muttered something that sounded like ‘practically everything, then,’ and he ignored her, provoking a self-satisfied smirk.

  ‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ Drake said. ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘The Spire of the Golden Wing,’ Vex said, leaning forward to place the gutted remains of Tonis’s vox unit on a glass-topped table, next to a crystal vase of flowers and a half-eaten florn cake. ‘The late technomancer made several calls to an address there in the last few weeks.’

  ‘What sort of address?’ Elyra asked.

  ‘A private social club,’ the tech-priest said. ‘The Icenholm lodge of the Conclave of the Enlightened.’

  ‘That sounds like a nest of heretics if ever I heard one,’ Keira said eagerly. ‘Let’s get in there and take them down.’

  ‘I’m afraid they’re nothing of the kind,’ Horst said patiently, ‘so you’ll just have to restrain your enthusiasm for violence until an appropriate target presents itself.’

  ‘They’re philosophers, aren’t they?’ Drake asked unexpectedly. Noticing Horst’s evident surprise, he shrugged. ‘Prince Buchalas is an honorary member, so the Scourges keep an eye on the place, although the only studying he seems to do there is down the blouses of the female servants.’

  ‘I’m sure they’d like to think they’re genuine scholars,’ Horst said, ‘and it probably started out that way a few centuries ago, but these days the Conclave is basically a social club for rich dilettantes with intellectual pretensions. They have a lodge or two on most of the worlds in the sector.’ He shot a warning glance at Keira. ‘And before anyone points out that this is precisely the kind of gathering heretics habitually take advantage of, the Ordo Calixis monitors it closely for exactly that reason.’

  ‘So what’s the connection with our possessed tech-priest?’ Drake asked.

  Vex pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘He may simply have been a member. Several acolytes of the Omnissiah are, I’m told, hoping to further their understanding of the Great Machine.’

  ‘All right,’ Kyrlock said, having finished his drink, and no doubt feeling it was time he showed he was paying attention. ‘Who else did he call recently?’

  ‘Mostly colleagues within the citadel, or other members of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ Vex said. ‘T
he former group can be left to Captain Malakai to interrogate, and the latter seem unlikely to be involved. Nevertheless, I’ve noted their identities for further investigation should it seem warranted.’

  ‘You said “mostly”,’ Drake said, an instant before Horst could ask the question. ‘What about the rest?’

  Vex shrugged. ‘A few random locations, which I’m attempting to identify by comparison with the planetary records, and at least one that appears to have gone nowhere at all. The unit shows signs of tampering, however, so my best guess would be that some additional components were recently inserted, and then removed, possibly to enable him to communicate with whoever attacked the citadel.’

  ‘The conclave it is, then,’ Elyra agreed. She looked at Horst appraisingly. ‘So if you and Danuld are following that up, what about the rest of us?’

  ‘Back to our original assignment,’ Horst told her, eliciting a sigh of frustration from Keira.

  ‘The one we dead-ended on, you mean?’ she asked, with a touch of asperity. ‘Looking for off-world people smugglers, who probably don’t even exist?’

  ‘They exist, all right,’ Kyrlock said, refilling his empty goblet from a nearby decanter. ‘You just need to know who to ask.’

  ‘And you do, I suppose?’ Keira enquired sarcastically.

  Horst nodded, trying not to relish the petty point-scoring. ‘He does, or at least who to ask about asking.’

  ‘You hear things in the mines,’ Kyrlock told her, ‘if you keep your ears open, and if people know you’re a bit in the shadows yourself.’

  ‘A petty criminal, you mean,’ Keira said, looking at him coldly.

  ‘The barons might call me that,’ Kyrlock admitted, ‘but they’ve already got their hands on pretty much everything there is. Down there,’ he pointed momentarily to the floor, ‘trying to keep a bit back for yourself is just plain common sense.’