Xenos, page 33
Qus called a halt and pointed towards the steps of an undercroft that led away below ground. I waved him back, indicating the tiny strip of red ribbon placed under a stone on the top step. A marker, left by Ravenor, indicating this was not a suitable entry point. Peering into the staircase gloom, I saw what he had seen: the half buried cables of a tremor-detector and what looked like bundles of tube charges.
We found three more entrances like it, all marked by Ravenor. The Beldame had secured her fastness well.
‘Through there, do you think, sir?’ Qus whispered, pointing towards the columns of a roofless cloister.
I was about to agree when Arianrhod hissed ‘Barbarisater thirsts…’
I looked at her. She was prowling to the left, towards an archway in the base of the main bell-tower. She moved silently, the sabre held upright in a two-handed grip, her tasselled cloak floating out behind her like angelic wings.
I gestured to Qus and the women and we formed in behind her. I drew my prized boltpistol, given to me by Librarian Brytnoth of the Adeptus Astartes Deathwatch Chapter on the eve of the Purge of Izar, almost a century before. It had never failed me.
The Beldame’s minions came out of the night. Eight of them, just shadows that disengaged themselves from the surrounding darkness. Qus began to fire, blasting back a shadow that pounced at him. I fired too, raking bolt rounds into the ghostly opposition.
Beldame Sadia was a heretic witch and consorted with xenos breeds. She had a particular fascination with the beliefs and necromancies of the dark eldar, and had made it her life-cause to tap that foul alien heritage for power and lore. She was one of the only humans I knew of who had struck collaborative pacts with their wretched kabals. Rumour had it she had been recently initiated into the cult of Kaela Mensha Khaine, in his aspect as the Murder-God beloved of the eldar renegades.
As befitted such a loyalty, she recruited only convicted murderers for her minions. The men who attacked us in that blighted yard were base killers, shrouded in shadow fields she had bought, borrowed or stolen from her inhuman allies.
One swung at me with a long-bladed halberd and I blew off his head. Just. My body was tired and my reactions were damnably slow.
I saw Arianrhod. She was a balletic blur, her beaded hair streaming out above her flying cloak. Barbarisater purred in her hands.
She severed the neck of one shadow with a backward slash, then pirouetted around and chopped another in two from neck to pelvis. The sabre was moving so fast I could barely see it. She stamped hard and reversed her direction of movement, causing a third shadow to sprawl as he overshot her. His head flew off, and the sabre swept on to impale a fourth without breaking its fluid motion. Then Arianrhod swept around, the sword held horizontally over her right shoulder. The steel haft of the fifth shadow’s polearm was cut in two and he staggered back. Barbarisater described a figure of eight in the air and another shadow fell, cut into several sections.
The last minion turned and fled. A shot from Bequin’s laspistol brought him down.
A pulse was pounding in my temple and I realised I had to sit down before I passed out. Qus grabbed me by the arm and helped me down onto a block of fallen wall stone.
‘Gregor?’
‘I’m all right, Alizebeth… give me a moment…’
‘You shouldn’t have come, you old fool! You should have left this to your disciples!’
‘Shut up, Alizebeth.’
‘I will not, Gregor. It’s high time you understood your own limits.’
I looked up at her. ‘I have no limits,’ I said.
Qus laughed involuntarily.
‘I believe him, Mistress Bequin,’ said Ravenor, stepping from the shadows. Emperor damn his stealth, even Arianrhod had not seen him coming. She had to force her sabre down to stop it slicing at him.
Gideon Ravenor was a shade shorter than me, but strong and well-made. He was only thirty-four years old. His long black hair was tied back from his sculpted, high cheek-boned face. He wore a grey bodyglove and a long leather storm coat. The psycannon mounted on his left shoulder whirred and clicked around to aim at Arianrhod.
‘Careful, swordswoman,’ he said. ‘My weapon has you squarely.’
‘And it will still have me squarely when your head is lying in the dust,’ she replied.
They both laughed. I knew they had been lovers for over a year, but still in public they sparred and sported with each other.
Ravenor snapped his fingers and his companion, the festering mutant Gonvax, shambled out of hiding, drool stringing from his thick, malformed lips. He carried a flamer, the fuel-tanks strapped to the hump of his twisted back.
I rose. ‘What have you found?’ I asked Ravenor.
‘The Beldame – and a way in,’ he said.
Beldame Sadia’s lair was in the sacrarium beneath the main chapel of the ruin. Ravenor had scouted it carefully, and found an entry point in one of the ruptured crypts that perhaps even she didn’t know about.
My respect for Ravenor was growing daily. I had never had a disciple like him. He excelled at almost every skill an inquisitor is meant to have. I looked forward to the day when I supported his petition to Inquisitorial status. He deserved it. The Inquisition needed men like him.
Single-file, we entered the crypt behind Ravenor. He drew our attention carefully to every pitfall and loose flag. The stench of salt and old bones was intolerable, and I felt increasingly weak in the close, hot air.
We emerged into a stone gallery that overlooked a wide subterranean chamber. Pitch-lamps sputtered in the darkness and there was a strong smell of dried herbs and fouler unguents.
Beings were worshipping in the chamber. Worshipping is the only word I can use. Naked, daubed in blood, twenty depraved humans were conducting a dark eldar rite around a torture pit in which a battered man was chained and stretched.
The stink of blood and excrement wafted to me. I tried not to throw up, for I knew the effort would make me pass out.
‘There, you see him?’ Ravenor whispered into my ear as we crawled to the edge of the gallery.
I made out a pale-skinned ghoul in the distant shadows.
‘A haemonculus, sent by the Kabal of the Fell Witch to witness the Beldame’s practices.’
I tried to make out detail, but the figure was too deep in the shadows.
I registered grinning teeth and some form of blade device around the right hand.
‘Where’s Pye?’ asked Bequin, whispering too.
Ravenor shook his head. Then he seized my arm and squeezed. Even whispers were no longer possible.
The Beldame herself had entered the chamber.
She walked on eight, spider legs, a huge augmetic chassis of hooked arachnid limbs that skittered on the stones. Inquisitor Atelath, Emperor grant him rest, had destroyed her real legs one hundred and fifty years before my birth.
She was veiled in black gauze that looked like cobwebs. I could actually feel her evil like a fever-sweat.
She paused at the edge of the torture pit, raised her veil with withered hands and spat at the victim below. It was venom, squirted from the glands built into her mouth behind her augmetic fangs. The viscous fluid hit the sacrificial victim full in the face and he gurgled in agony as the front of his skull was eaten away.
Sadia began to speak, her voice low and sibilant. She spoke in the language of the dark eldar and her naked brethren writhed and moaned.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ I whispered. ‘She’s mine. Ravenor, can you manage the haemonculus?’
He nodded.
On my signal, we launched our attack, leaping down from the gallery, weapons blazing. Several of the worshippers were punched apart by Qus’s heavy fire.
Whooping the battlecry of Carthae, Arianrhod flew at the haemonculus, way ahead of Ravenor.
I realised I had pushed it too far. I was giddy as I landed, and stumbled.
Her metal spider legs striking sparks from the flagstones, Beldame Sadia reared up at me, ululating. She pulled back her veil to spit at me.
Abruptly, she reeled backwards, thunderstruck by the combined force of Bequin and Zu Zeng who flanked her.
I gathered myself and fired at her, blowing one of the augmetic limbs off her spider-frame.
She spat anyway, but missed. The venom sizzled into the cold stone slabs at my feet.
‘Imperial Inquisition!’ I bellowed. ‘In the name of the hallowed God-Emperor, you and your kind are charged with treason and manifest disbelief!’
I raised my weapon. She flew at me.
Her sheer bulk brought me down.
One spider limb stabbed entirely through the meat of my left thigh. Her steel fangs, like curved needles, snarled into my face. I saw her eyes, for an instant, black and without limit or sanity.
She spat.
I wrenched my head around to avoid the corrosive spew, and fired my bolt pistol up into her.
The impact threw her backwards, all four hundred kilos of wizened witch and bionic carriage.
I rolled over.
The haemonculus had met Arianrhod’s attack face on, the glaive around his right hand screaming as the xenos-made blades whirled. He was stick-thin and clad in shiny black leather, his grin a perpetual consequence of the way the colourless skin of his face was pinned back around his skull. He wore metal jewellery fashioned from the weapons of the warriors he had slain.
I could hear Ravenor crying out Arianrhod’s name.
Barbarisater sliced at the darting eldar monster, but he evaded, his physical speed unbelievable.
She swung again, placing two perfect kill strokes that somehow missed him altogether. He sent her lurching away in a mist of blood. For the first time since I had known her, I heard Arianrhod yelp in pain.
Flames belched across the chamber. Gonvax shambled forward, forever loyal to his master… and his master’s lover. He tried to squirt flames at the haemonculus, but it was suddenly somehow behind him. Gonvax shrieked as the glaive eviscerated him.
With a howl, Arianrhod threw herself at the dark eldar. I saw her, for a moment, frozen in mid-air, her sabre descending. Then the two bodies struck each other, and flew apart.
The sabre had taken off the eldar’s left arm at the shoulder. But his glaive…
I knew she was dead. No one could survive that, not even a noble swordswoman from far Carthae.
Bequin was pulling me up. ‘Gregor! Gregor!’
Beldame Sadia, her spider carriage limping, was fleeing towards the staircase.
Something exploded behind me. I could hear Ravenor bellowing in rage and pain.
I ran after the Beldame.
The upper chapel, above ground, was silent and cold. Darknight flares glimmered through the lines of stained glass windows.
‘You can’t escape, Sadia!’ I shouted, but my voice was thin and hoarse.
I glimpsed her as she skittered between the columns to my left. A shadow in the shadows.
‘Sadia! Sadia, old hag, you have killed me! But you will die by my hand!’
To my right now, another skuttling shadow, half-seen. I moved that way.
I was stabbed hard from behind, in between my shoulder blades. I turned as I fell, and saw the manic face of the Beldame’s arch-poisoner, Pye. He cackled and giggled, prancing, a spent injector tube clutched in each hand.
‘Dead! Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead!’ he warbled.
He had injected me with the secondary part of the poison.
I fell over, my muscles already cramping.
‘How does it feel, inquisitor?’ Pye chuckled, capering towards me.
‘Emperor damn you,’ I gasped and shot him through the face.
I blacked out.
When I came round, Beldame Sadia had me by the throat and was shaking me with her augmetic mandibles.
‘I want you awake!’ she hissed, her veil falling back and the toxin sacs in her wizened cheeks bulging. ‘I want you awake to feel this!’
Her head exploded in a spray of bone shards and tissue. The spider carriage went into convulsions and threw me across the chapel. It continued to scuttle and dance, her corpse jerking slackly from it, for a full minute before it collapsed.
I was face down on the floor, and I tried to turn, but the advancing effect of the poison was shutting me down.
Shutting me down hard.
Massive feet strode into my field of vision. Armoured feet, plated with ceramite.
I rolled as best I could and looked up.
Witchfinder Tantalid stood over me, holstering the boltgun he had used to kill Beldame Sadia. He was encased in gold-encrusted battle armour, the pennants of the Ministorum suspended over his back plate.
‘You are an accursed heretic, Eisenhorn. And I claim your life.’
Not Tantalid, I thought as my consciousness spun away again. Not Tantalid. Not now.
Click here to buy Malleus.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
First published in Great Britain in 2001.
This eBook edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK.
Produced by the Games Workshop Design Studio.
Xenos © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. Xenos, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-85787-069-8
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com
Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com
eBook license
This license is made between:
Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and
(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)
(jointly, “the parties”)
These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:
* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:
o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;
o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and
* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.
* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:
o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;
o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.
* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.
* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.
* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.
* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.
* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.
* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.
* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.
