Scourge The Heretic Read online

  The Emperor gave us these gifts, Elyra reminded him, just as she had in person, so painfully, all those years ago. What for, if not to use them doing His holy work?

  Right as always, my love. Carolus broke the link between them, unwilling to be distracted any longer by the echoes of past regrets. As ever, the exchange had been all but instant. The echoes of Elyra’s last verbal comment were still hanging in the air as his attention returned to the here and now. The derisive snort that broke in next scattered them, like the shards of broken light scintillating from every surface of the vitreous room.

  ‘They’re there, all right, believe me.’ The speaker was a young woman, the green eyes beneath her purple-dyed fringe hard and unforgiving. ‘I’ve been right down to the lower levels, several times. It’s crawling with muties.’ The other people in the room looked at her expectantly. Keira Sythree had been the last to arrive, and was still dressed in the skintight synsuit of an Officio Assassinorum operative, its chameleonic surface seeming to ripple in a vain attempt to match the ever-changing colours being reflected on it from the refulgent glass surrounding her. The only constant hue, apart from her pale face and purple hair, was the crimson bandana holding her fringe out of her eyes.

  Horst coughed diplomatically, the sound echoed a great deal more raucously a moment later by the tech-priest in the corner. As all eyes turned to him, Brother Vex shrugged apologetically. ‘Sorry. Still need to do a bit of work on the new respirator.’

  ‘As I was about to say,’ Horst went on, the merest trace of irritation entering his voice, ‘Keira’s just returned from another recon sweep in the Gorgonid.’ He gestured beyond the open doors, and the glass-tiled patio beyond. From where he sat, Carolus could clearly see the vast pit gouged into the mountains beneath the glass city, which hung suspended above it on innumerable cables slung between the highest peaks. Watching the sunlight scintillate from a thousand palaces and a million surfaces, he was reminded of an arachnid’s web dusted with frost on a crisp winter morning.

  Looking down was a vertiginous experience. Over a kilometre below, the vast opencast workings of the largest mine on the planet seemed to seethe and shimmer in the faint traces of sunlight that managed to force their way through the near constant cloud cover, thin wisps of dust and vapour rising here and there, apparently at random. For a moment, Carolus was at a loss, trying to understand how something so dark and shadowed could be obscured by heat haze. Elyra supplied the answer: it’s the people.

  Only then did the truly gargantuan scale of the workings impinge on his conscious mind, and he drew in his breath. The rippling motion he could see was the movement of countless serfs, too far away to discern as individual human beings, all hacking away at the mineral wealth of Sepheris Secundus with the most primitive of hand tools. The bottom of the pit was in complete darkness, too deep for the westering sun to penetrate, if it ever did, and the faint glow of innumerable flares, torches and luminators competed with the natural light, blurring his vision even more. How Keira had managed to penetrate that seething anthill of humanity undetected, and return again, he had no idea, but the girl’s talents were truly exceptional. Not for the first time, he thanked the Emperor for the insight that had allowed him to discern them, and the tutors of the Collegium Assassinorum for honing them so skilfully.

  ‘So I see,’ he said dryly. He gestured towards the crimson bandana. ‘I take it you haven’t been wearing that in public.’

  ‘No.’ Keira reached up to touch it reflexively. Red was the holy colour of the Redemption, the violent sect in which she’d been raised, and she always wore at least a trace of it. She glanced briefly at Horst before going on. ‘Mordechai explained the local dress code very carefully.’

  That must have been an interesting discussion, Carolus thought, and pushed aside the temptation to lift the memories from their minds. Instead, he nodded judiciously. ‘Thank you for your forbearance,’ he said. ‘I realise how important your faith is to you.’

  ‘No problem,’ Keira assured him, glancing again at Horst with what, in anyone else, Carolus would have taken for a fleeting expression of mischief. ‘I got some red underwear.’ Horst looked uncomfortable for a moment, no doubt unable to avoid picturing the effect it would have on the body that the girl’s synsuit already revealed in considerable detail. ‘Sort of a compromise.’

  ‘I see.’ Carolus hid his surprise. When he’d last seen Keira she wouldn’t have dreamed of making light of her Redemptionist principles, and would probably have killed anyone who did. Clearly, exposure to the wider galaxy was having unexpected effects on the girl. So long as that didn’t compromise her efficiency or her lethality, he could live with it. ‘What did you find at the bottom of the hole?’ Once again his eye was drawn to the human anthill so far below, and he suppressed a shudder.

  ‘The mutants seem organised,’ Keira reported, her mind recalled to business. ‘There are far more of them than anyone up here suspects, and they have the usual shrines to the Changer. I’ve pinpointed most of them for cleansing. No signs of widespread Chaos worship beyond that, though, and no sign of what you’re looking for, either.’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’ Carolus reached out to pick up a delicate crystal tea bowl from the low table in front of him, and sipped, ordering his thoughts. The blend was unfamiliar, but not unpleasant, a faint trace of spices behind the bitterness. Similar glass tables, their surfaces composed of interlocking panes of vibrant colour, forming abstract patterns that echoed one another without ever quite repeating, stood in front of the others, who sat or sprawled on their cushions according to their personal inclinations.

  Horst was cross-legged and straight backed, his brocade jacket hanging open to reveal his holstered bolt pistol as he reached forward to pick up one of the delicate sugared cakes from the plate the servants had placed in front of him along with his tea. Keira sat, like Carolus, on her folded calves, her weight forward, poised to move in an instant if any threat presented itself, the hilt of her sword within easy reach of her hand. She sipped her tea carefully, her eyes rising from the steam from time to time to regard Horst and the inquisitor in turn without expression. Hybris Vex simply sprawled, the plain robes of his calling and few visible augments looking utterly incongruous in this vulgarly polychromatic room, and Elyra… Elyra was simply as poised and elegant as the woman in his memories always was, her pale blue kirtle setting off her eyes to perfection. Her upright posture emphasised her faint stoop, a little more pronounced than it had been, as though the burden of her talent weighed physically upon her a little more with each passing year, but that didn’t diminish her at all. If anything, it seemed to call subtle attention to the inner strength he’d always admired in her. Meeting his eyes again, the blonde woman smiled.

  ‘Sorry, Carolus. It looks like you’ve come all the way from Malfi just to hear that we’ve hit a dead end.’ She tilted her head, acknowledging her colleagues. ‘We’ve been turning the planet upside down ever since we got here, and we haven’t found a trace of the kind of operation you told us to look out for.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s true, inquisitor.’ As always, Horst looked uncomfortable with Elyra’s use of their employer’s given name, and emphasised his title a little as he spoke. ‘There are undoubtedly heretical groups on Sepheris Secundus, which I’m sure we can root out given time, but nothing on the scale your message indicated.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Vex interjected, coughing again as he spoke. He balled his fist, and thumped something under his robe, which gave off a metallic echo. ‘Ah, that’s got it. I’ve been through the last five years worth of Arbites datafiles, and there’s been no mention of any psyker activity beyond the usual stuff. Latents and rogues have been rounded up for the black ships, and that’s about it.’

  ‘You secured the cooperation of the Arbites?’ Carolus asked, with a hint of surprise. Unlike most worlds of the Imperium, the Adeptus Arbites maintained a considerable presence here, maintaining law and order directly from the fortress garrison that the S
ecundans referred to as the Isolarium, rather than delegating the task to local enforcers as they usually did. The feudal nature of Secundan society made any conventional police force impossible to run, and the nearest equivalent, the Royal Scourges, were too martial in outlook and too hidebound by tradition to make effective investigators.

  Under most circumstances the handful of Arbitrators left to oversee the dispensation of the Emperor’s justice on an Imperial world would make useful allies for a team of Inquisitorial operatives, but on Sepheris Secundus, where their main concern was to ensure an uninterrupted flow of raw materials to the hive worlds of the Calixis sector, and riot control was a higher priority than intelligence gathering, confiding in them seemed like an unnecessary security risk.

  As if divining the inquisitor’s doubts, Vex shook his head. ‘Not as such. I just poked about a bit in their datanet.’ He shrugged. ‘They seem a bit busy anyway, keeping the serfs in line, so it would have been churlish to bother them unnecessarily.’

  ‘How very considerate,’ Carolus said, hiding his amusement. The tech-priest would have been able to gain unlimited access to the files he wanted simply by showing his Inquisitorial credentials, but he wouldn’t have found that nearly as much fun as outwitting the arbitrators’ encryption and security protocols, and his message dispatching the team had indeed emphasised the need for discretion. If his suspicions were correct, a very large and well-organised conspiracy was at work, and there was no telling how far its influence might have spread. ‘I’m sure you’ve all done more than I could possibly have asked of you, as usual.’

  ‘That makes it even more galling to have let you down,’ Horst said, ‘especially as you’ve just come halfway across the sector to get here.’ Like all his agents, the former arbitrator knew that keeping in touch with so wide a network of operatives as the Angelae Carolus was difficult and time-consuming, and the inquisitor would normally intervene in person only if things were getting desperate. Most of the time, they received their orders and dispatched their reports by astropath, like everyone else in the far-flung organisation.

  Carolus smiled reassuringly. ‘I wouldn’t say that, exactly,’ he said, and felt a tingle of Elyra’s amusement brushing against his mind.

  Here it comes. Whatever he hasn’t been telling us…

  How right you are, he responded, and began to speak.

  Forest of Sorrows, Sepheris Secundus

  087.993.M41

  ‘That’s good stuff.’ Drake took another pull at the bottle, and returned it to Kyrlock. The large man shook it, listened dolefully to the gurgling that indicated it was almost empty, and drank in turn. ‘Keeps the cold out all right.’ An unaccustomed sense of warmth and well-being suffused him, despite the bone chilling wind howling across the lip of the foxhole just above his head, driving its load of snow almost horizontally towards the barely visible fortress in the distance. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Vorlens,’ Kyrlock told him, naming one of the Chimera drivers. ‘He’s been distilling it round the back of the maintenance shed.’

  ‘Good old Vorlens,’ Drake said, forgetting for a moment how much he disliked the man, and trying not to wonder what Vorlens had been distilling it from. He narrowed his eyes, raising his head for a moment, and ducked back under cover, his eyes full of snow. ‘Looks like it’s setting in for a long blow.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ Kyrlock agreed, draining the last of the bottle, and sending it spinning into the dark. He’d spent most of his life in a forest like this one, and could read the weather easily. ‘It’s going to be a real mess by the morning.’

  Drake nodded sagely in agreement, although neither of them could possibly have predicted just how catastrophically accurate that forecast would turn out to be.

  The Citadel of the Forsaken, Sepheris Secundus 087.993.M41

  The intruder returned to its quarters inside the fortress, unnoticed and unremarked, and sat at a perfectly ordinary message terminal. Working quickly, for its task behind the panel had taken a little longer than expected, it picked up a set of tools and prised the back off.

  If Brother Polk could have seen what ensued, he would have been aghast at the desecration. The intruder worked rapidly and methodically, without even a hint of the proper prayers and rituals, modifying the circuitry and adding a few components that even the most senior acolytes of the Omnissiah would have been hard-pressed to recognise. At length, satisfied with its work, the intruder activated the messager, transmitting a single, highly focussed vox pulse, and began to return its internal workings to their original condition.

  High Orbit, Sepheris Secundus

  087.993.M41

  If much of the sky could ever be seen from the surface, and any of the ill-educated serfs were ever inclined to raise their gaze from the unremitting toil of the workface, they could have been forgiven for believing that the stars moved, or at least that a considerable number of them did. At any given time there were thousands of ore barges in orbit around the ravaged planet, their heavy lifters glutting their cargo bays with the mineral wealth wrenched from the cloud-wreathed surface below, swarming like metal flies around a choice piece of carrion.

  Externally, nothing marked one particular ship as anything out of the ordinary. It moved smoothly among its fellows, taking up its station with leisurely bursts of its manoeuvring thrusters, and broadcasting all the required authorisation codes.

  After a while, a shuttle departed, and fell towards the planet below, its hull plates glowing a deep, rich red as it began its long plunge through the atmosphere, following the coordinates contained in the vox pulse its carrier vessel had received a short time before. Had anyone been able to observe it, they would have been surprised by both its shape and function, but no one did. Exotic technologies shielded it against most forms of detection, and the more specialised auspexes at its intended destination had been blinded by subtle sabotage. As the landing craft penetrated deeper within the atmosphere of Sepheris Secundus, and the air began to thicken, imparting lift to its aerodynamic hull, its occupants readied their weapons.

  Two

  Icenholm, Sepheris Secundus

  087.993.M41

  ‘In the last twenty years,’ Carolus began, after another sip of tea, ‘the number of rogue psykers of Epsilon grade and above apprehended on Sepheris Secundus has fallen by almost three per cent. I sent you here to look for signs of an organised Chaos cult, because that seemed to be the most likely explanation.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘However, your lack of success in finding one of sufficient size and influence to offer that many wyrds a refuge leads me to suspect that we’re dealing with an even more insidious conspiracy.’

  ‘What kind of conspiracy?’ Horst asked at once, his investigator’s instincts piqued. By way of an answer, the inquisitor placed a data-slate on the table in front of him, and activated its built-in hololith. A face appeared in the air above it, rotating slowly, fading in and out of focus in the manner typical of such devices.

  ‘Tobias Vetch,’ Carolus said, ‘delta-grade wyrd, killed on Vaxanide by another team of my Angelae two years ago.’

  ‘Good for them,’ Keira said, ‘but so what? That’s parsecs from here.’

  ‘Quite.’ Carolus nodded. ‘But I encountered Vetch myself, eight years ago, on Iocanthus. He managed to slip away while we were rounding up his confederates.’

  ‘So he caught a ship,’ Keira said. ‘People do, even heretics.’ Her voice tightened with loathing on the last word.

  ‘Wyrds don’t,’ Elyra said. ‘Not easily, anyway. Starports are full of sanctioned psykers of one sort or another, and it only takes one to get close enough to feel what they are.’

  ‘Maybe he just got lucky,’ Horst said.

  ‘Possibly.’ Carolus nodded thoughtfully, as if considering the suggestion. ‘But if so, he got lucky twice. I have strong reason to suspect that he was also on Fenksworld for a while, along with her.’ Vetch’s face was replaced by that of a hard-faced woman, apparently in her early thirties. Ely
ra’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Ariadne Thane? I thought we killed her on Luggnum, along with the rest of her coven.’

  ‘So did I,’ Carolus said, ‘but this pict was taken in 989, six years after that.’ He called up an image of Thane leaning on the balcony of a hab block typical of an industrial hive. ‘Fenksworld again. By the time I learned of her presence there, and sent an Angelae cell to deal with her, she’d disappeared, along with Vetch. The search was commendably thorough. I have no doubt at all that they’d already left the planet before it commenced.’

  ‘Then someone must have helped them,’ Vex said simply. ‘It’s the only logical conclusion.’

  ‘That doesn’t alter the fact that we’ve been here for months without finding a trace of any group organised or powerful enough to mount an operation like that,’ Horst reminded everyone. He shifted his head slightly, squinting as the glass saint’s halo brushed yellow across his eyes, to address the inquisitor directly. ‘What makes you think they’re active here, on Sepheris Secundus?’

  ‘Two things,’ Carolus said slowly. ‘One being the state of servitude practically the entire population live under. Most accept their lot, it’s true, but a few refuse to do so, creating the never-ending problem for the local Arbites that Hybris has already alluded to.’

  ‘Which helps us how?’ Elyra asked.

  ‘A rebellious serf’s prospects here are limited, to say the least,’ Carolus explained. ‘Which leaves them only one recourse.’

  ‘Getting off-world,’ Vex said flatly. ‘Quite a trick if they can do it.’

  ‘A trick that a small but growing number of them seem to be pulling off,’ the inquisitor assured him. ‘Given the number of ships that depart from here each day it’s impossible to tell which may be involved, but it’s become abundantly clear in the last few years that at least a handful of shipmasters on a regular run aren’t averse to taking the odd unauthorised passenger with them when they leave. No doubt for as much remuneration as the market will bear.’