Deathwing (26 page)

S
OMETHING COLD AND
hard was pressed beneath her ribs where she lay. The inquisitor’s bolt pistol. She must have reached it before she passed out.

Delicately, as though she were made of brittle glass, Danielle coaxed her bruised body until she was sitting upright. She pulled the torn fabric of her tunic apart and inspected the wound. She would keep the scar forever, but the lesion was healed and dry.

She looked up and saw Valdez, wading slowly through the shallows to the shore. He saw her watching him and tried to straighten his beaten body. The inquisitor cursed and hugged his ribs, pain crushing his efforts. It was a while before he would look at her again.

‘The mutant?’ he asked, finally.

‘Gone. There’s no doubt of that.’ She remembered Tolmann’s unspoken fear of what lay below the waters of the lake. The One Who Waits.

Valdez gazed back across the pool. ‘So it’s finished. The infection’s destroyed.’

Her grip around the pistol tightened. ‘Maybe,’ she said.

Something was wrong with Valdez, or rather, with her perception of him. She reached out to his mind and realized, with a shock, that her power had gone.

Valdez stepped towards her. ‘What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘You fought the mutant. There was contact…’

Valdez made a clumsy grab for the weapon, swearing as she drew back. ‘Don’t be so foolish. Use your psyker’s eyes. You can see plain enough what I am.’

Danielle looked. All she saw was the semblance of a man. Suddenly she understood the universe, the dark sightless universe where only the few were given mindsight. And she understood the ways of the blind men who must guard the gateways of the Imperium.

‘Unbutton your tunic,’ she said, levelling the pistol.

Valdez stared at her as though she were mad. Finally, he drew back the thick fold of cloth covering his flank. A thick, bloody syrup oozed from lacerations where the mutant’s blows had struck.

‘How do I know that the infection has been stemmed? How do I know it hasn’t reached you?’ She forced herself to hold his gaze. ‘Tell me,’ she demanded. ‘What would an inquisitor do?’

‘Enough of this rubbish. Let’s contact the raft and I might just forget it,’ He took another step forward. Danielle raised the pistol until it was aimed squarely at his face.

Valdez halted. A half smile crossed his face. ‘That pistol,’ he said. ‘It’s jammed.’

‘Was jammed.’

‘And how can you suddenly be so sure of that?’

Danielle felt a tightening in her throat. ‘I can’t.’

Slowly, Valdez extended his one strong arm towards her.

Danielle squeezed the trigger.

T
HE VOICE ON
the voxcomm hesitated, sounding shocked. ‘Dead?’ Golun repeated. ‘Tchaq too?’

Danielle paused, then nodded firmly. ‘He gave his life in the service of the Emperor.’

Golun’s tone was flat, devoid of emotion. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘It appears you’re in charge. I’ve reached Kar Duniash on the freighter circuit. They’ll have a military channel patched back in to us in a few minutes. What’s the message going to be?’

A breeze rustled in the trees, freshening the air. Only the faintest shiver now disturbed the calm of the lake. The dead warrior of the ancient lost race had taken its token revenge. The spirit guardian lay again at rest. Waiting. Waiting for the cycle of battle to begin again. A battle without beginning, or without end. She was a part of it.

Danielle looked around at the new world of uncertainties that, for the moment at least, she must walk through. The flower of evil had been cut down. But what of the root, what of the Chaos infection borne on the warp storm to Cabellas? Could she be sure that the seed of evil had been destroyed?

‘Well? Can I tell them everything’s all right?’

‘No. Wait for the military channel to be restored, then put them through to me. I’ll tell them what needs to be done. In the meantime, get some help down here,’ She looked at the bodies of Valdez and the two soldiers. ‘There’s work that needs finishing.’

Something glinted in the reeds close to the Valdez’s body. Danielle bent down and picked up the tiny silver skull, badge of high office of the Inquisition. She placed it deep within a pocket where she could be sure it would not be lost.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for testing me. For teaching me the strength which must come from doubt.’

The voxcomm blinked red again. Sector command were ready to receive instructions.

SUFFER NOT THE UNCLEAN TO LIVE

Gav Thorpe

Y
AKOV CAUGHT HIMSELF
dozing as his chin bowed to his chest, lulled by the soporific effect of the warm sun and the steady clatter of hooves on the cobbled street. Blinking himself awake, he gazed from the open carriage at the buildings going past him. Colonnaded fronts and tiers of balconies stretched above him for several storeys, separated by wide tree-lined streets. Thick-veined marble fascias swept past, followed by dark granite facades whose polished surfaces reflected the mid-afternoon light back at him.

Another kilometre and the first signs of decay began to show. Crumbling mosaics scattered their stones across the narrowing pavements, creeping plants twined around balustrades and cornices. Empty windows, some no longer glazed, stared back at him. With a yell to the horses, the carriage driver brought them to a stop and sat there waiting for the preacher to climb down to the worn cobbles.

‘This is as far as I’m allowed,’ the driver said without turning around, sounding half apologetic and half thankful.

Yakov walked around to the driver’s seat and fished into the pocket of his robe for coins, but the coachman avoided his gaze and set off once more, turning the carriage down a sidestreet and out of sight. Yakov knew better – no honest man on Karis Cephalon would take payment from a member of the clergy – but he still hadn’t broken the habit of paying for services and goods. He had tried to insist once on tipping a travel-rail porter, and the man had nearly broken down in tears, his eyes fearful. Yakov had been here four years now, and yet still he was adjusting to the local customs and beliefs.

Hoisting his embroidered canvas pack further onto his shoulder, Yakov continued his journey on foot. His long legs carried him briskly past the ruins of counting houses and ancient stores, apartments that once belonged to the fabulously wealthy and the old Royal treasury, abandoned now for over seven centuries. He had already walked for a kilometre when he topped the gradual rise and looked down upon his parish.

Squat, ugly shacks nestled in the roads and alleys between the once-mighty edifices of the royal quarter. He could smell the effluence of the near-homeless, the stench of unwashed bodies and the strangely exotic melange of cooking which swept to him on the smoke of thousands of fires. The sun was beginning to set as he made his way down the long hill, and soon the main boulevard was dropped into cool shadow, chilling after the earlier warmth.

Huts made from corrugated metal, rough planks, sheets of plasthene and other detritus butted up against the cut stones of the old city blocks. The babble of voices could now be heard, the screeching of children and the yapping and barking of dogs adding to the muted racket. The clatter of pans as meals were readied vied with the cries of babes and the clucking of hens. Few of the inhabitants were in sight. Most of them were indoors getting ready to eat, the rest still working out in the fields, or down the mines in the far hills.

A small girl, perhaps twelve Terran years old, came running out from behind a flapping sheet of coarsely woven hemp. Her laughter was high-pitched, almost a squeal, as a boy, slightly younger perhaps, chased her down and bundled her to the ground. They both seemed to notice Yakov at the same time, and instantly quelled their high spirits. Dusting themselves down they stood up and waited respectfully, heads slightly bowed.

‘Katinia, isn’t it?’ Yakov asked as he stopped in front of the girl.

‘Yes, preacher,’ she replied meekly, looking up at him with her one good eye. The other was nothing more than a scabbed, red mass which seemed to spill from the socket and across her face, enveloping her left ear and leaving one half of her scalp bald. She smiled prettily at him, and he smiled back.

‘Shouldn’t you be helping your mother with the cooking?’ he suggested, glancing back towards the ramshackle hovel that served as their home.

‘Mam’s at church,’ the girl’s younger brother, Pietor, butted in, earning himself a kick on the shin from his sibling. ‘She said we was to wait here for her.’

Yakov looked at the boy. His shrivelled right arm and leg gave his otherwise perfectly human body a lopsided look. It was the children that always affected him the most, ever cheerful despite the bleakness of their future, the ghastliness of their surroundings. If all the Emperor’s faithful had the same indomitable spirit, He and mankind would have overcome all evil and adversity millennia ago. Their crippled, mutated bodies may be vile, he thought to himself, but their souls were as human as any.

‘Too early for church, isn’t it?’ he asked them both, wondering why anyone would be there at least two hours before mass was due to begin.

‘She says she wants to speak to you, with some other people, Preacher Yakov,’ Katinia told him, clasping her hands behind her back as she looked up at the tall clergyman.

‘Well, get back inside and make sure everything’s tidy for when your mother returns, you two,’ he told them gently, hoping the sudden worry he felt hadn’t shown.

As he hurried on his way, he tried to think what might be happening. He had heard disturbing rumours that in a few of the other shanties a debilitating plague had begun to spread amongst the mutant population. In those unhygienic close confines such diseases spread rapidly, and as slaves from all over the world congregated in the work teams, could leap from ghetto to ghetto with devastating rapidity.

Taking a right turn, Yakov made his way towards the chapel that was also his home. Raised five years ago by the mutants themselves, it was as ramshackle as the rest of the ghetto. The building leaked and was freezing in the winter, baking hot in the summer. Yet the effort put into its construction was admirable, even if the result was deplorable, if not a little insulting. Yakov suspected that Karis Cephalon’s cardinal, Prelate Kodaczka, had felt a perverse sense of satisfaction when he had heard who would be sent to tend the mutant parish. Coming from the Armormants, Yakov strongly believed that the edifices raised to the Emperor should be highly ornamented, splendid and glittering works of art in praise of the Holy Father of Mankind. To be given charge of something he would previously have declared unfit for a privy was most demeaning, and even after all this time the thought still rankled. Of course, Kodaczka, like all the native clergy of Karis Cephalon and the surrounding systems, was of the Lucid tendency, preferring poverty and abstinence to ostentation and excessive decoration. It had been a sore point between the two of them during more than one theological discussion, and Yakov’s obstinate refusal to accept the prevailing beliefs of his new world did his future prospects within the Ecclesiarchy no favours. Then again, he mused ruefully to himself, his chances of any kind of elevation within the hierarchy had all but died when he had been assigned the shanty as a parish.

As he walked, he saw the rough steeples of the chapel rising over the squat mute dwellings. Its battered, twisted roofs were slicked with greying mould, despite the aggressive efforts of the voluntary work teams who maintained the shrine. As he picked his way through a labyrinth of drying lines and filth-strewn gutters, Yakov saw a large crowd gathered outside the chapel, as he expected he would. Nearly five hundred of his parishioners, each mutated to a greater or lesser degree, were stood waiting, an angry buzz emanating from the throng. As he approached, they noticed him and started flocking in his direction, and he held up his hands to halt them before they swept around him. Pious they might be, but kind on the nose they were not. They all started babbling at once, in everything from high-pitched squeaks down to guttural bass tones, and once more he raised his hands, silencing them.

‘You speak, Gloran,’ he said, pointing towards the large mining overseer whose muscled bulk was covered in a constantly flaking red skin and open sores.

‘The plague, preacher, has come here,’ Gloran told him, his voice as cracked as his flesh. ‘Mather Horok died of it this morning, and a dozen others are falling ill already.’

Yakov groaned inwardly but kept his craggy, hawk-like face free of expression. So his suspicions were correct, the deadly scourge had arrived in the parish.

‘And you are all here because…?’ he asked, casting his dark gaze over the misshapen crowd.

‘Come here to ask Emperor, in prayers,’ replied Gloran, his large eyes looking expectantly at Yakov.

‘I will compose a suitable mass for this evening. Return to your homes and eat, starving will not aid you against this plague,’ he said firmly. Some of the assembly moved away but most remained. ‘Go!’ snapped Yakov waving them away with a thin hand, irritated at their reticence. ‘I cannot recall suitable prayers with you taking up all my attention, can I?’