Choose Your Enemies, page 28
We caught up with Evander surprisingly fast, even though he knew the corridors intimately and Jurgen and I had only the sketchiest idea of where we were going. For one thing, my instinctive knack for staying orientated in a three-dimensional labyrinth seemed just as reliable when the floors were infested with carpet instead of rubble, and the walls with panelling and portraits instead of rust and the nests of things you didn’t want to poke – and for another he was making as much noise as a drunken ork.
‘Help! Help!’ he bleated, as Jurgen and I pelted after him round a right-angled bend, only to find ourselves facing a detachment of household guards, their hellguns levelled. ‘They’ve gone mad! They’re killing everyone!’
Reflexes honed in more firefights than I care to recall cut in, and Jurgen and I leapt for our lives, taking refuge behind the walls of the corridor we’d just left an instant before a volley of high-powered las-bolts cratered the panelling opposite the passage mouth and shredded a rather nice tapestry depicting the martyrdom of the Emperor at the hands of Horus.
My aide began to unsling the melta, and I forestalled him with a gesture. ‘Bad idea,’ I said. Fulcher might be understanding about the damage to his home if it was inflicted in self-defence, and we had a real live heretic to corroborate that under interrogation, but unleashing a melta on his retainers (and barbequing our alibi into the bargain) would probably hack him off considerably. Not to mention the mess it would make.
Jurgen nodded, let the support weapon go, and started rummaging through his collection of pouches. ‘I’ve got a few frag grenades?’ he suggested hopefully, holding one up for my inspection.
‘Not yet,’ I said. I adjusted my cap to its severest angle, stowed my weapons, and strode as confidently as I could counterfeit around the corner of the corridor. Fortunately, as I’d hoped, the household troops were sufficiently disciplined to hold their fire until they’d assessed the threat I presented, instead of blazing away at the first sign of movement.[184] I raised my voice. ‘Hold your fire!’
‘Shoot him! Shoot him!’ Evander yammered, but as I’d expected no one was taking orders from a civilian.
‘Call Commander Defroy,’ I said. ‘He’ll vouch for me. And if he won’t, Inquisitor Vail will.’
‘The commander’s on his way,’ the squad leader said, the barrel of her weapon not wavering by so much as a millimetre, before the second part of my statement percolated through her synapses. ‘Did you just say inquisitor?’
I nodded. ‘You must have heard the rumours,’ I said, ‘and they’re true. She’s here, on the orbital, and making her way to the mansion as we speak.’ No point complicating things by mentioning Vekkman, who probably wouldn’t thank me for blowing his cover if he didn’t want to break it himself.
‘He’s lying!’ Evander screeched. ‘He’s here to assassinate the governor!’
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘the inquisitor herself sent me here to ensure his safety.’ Which wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough, and the squaddies didn’t need to know any of the details.
The squad leader’s eyebrows furrowed as she tried to work this out. ‘Why you?’ she said. ‘You’re a commissar. Why aren’t you with your regiment, fighting the eldar?’
‘Because when an inquisitor asks you for a favour,’ I said, ‘the only possible answer is “yes”.’ For a moment I found myself wondering how Kasteen and the others were getting on in my absence, but as it was pointless to speculate, and I knew them well enough to be sure that they’d be acquitting themselves well, I dismissed the thought at once. ‘Besides, if anything happens to the governor, the defenders’ morale will plummet. Keeping him safe is a vital military objective.’ Actually, I rather doubted that, given that there was undoubtedly an heir or two poised to step in as soon as the throne became vacant, but this woman and the troopers with her were sworn to defend the man: hearing their mission validated by a Hero of the Imperium was the fastest and surest way to get them on side. And so it proved. Slowly, she lowered the hellgun, her subordinates following suit.
Evander seemed on the point of spontaneous combustion. ‘They’ve killed the governor’s servants! They tried to kill me! Shoot them, for Throne’s sake!’
The squad leader glanced from one of us to the other, clearly weighing our relative trustworthiness, and deciding to err on the side of caution. Her hellgun, though lowered, I noticed, was still being held ready for immediate use on either of us. Which was good; that showed her instincts were sound, and she wasn’t about to take anything for granted. She turned back to me. ‘Why were you chasing him?’
‘Because he’s a traitor, and a heretic,’ I said calmly, ‘who panicked when he thought we were on to him.’ Actually, now I came to think about it, I couldn’t see any logical reason for him to have attacked Jurgen when he did; all my suspicions had been focused on Defroy, and if he’d just kept his head, and continued to fade into the background, he could have expected to evade detection indefinitely. After all, he had no way of knowing that Vekkman had picked up enough information down at the docks for me to have identified him. But, as I’d observed on many occasions, anyone turning to Chaos was an Emperor short of a tarot pack to begin with; perhaps he’d jumped to the conclusion that he’d been rumbled, and just acted accordingly.
‘That’s ridiculous!’ Evander expostulated, sounding about as convincing as an ecclesiarch in a bordello claiming he’d just dropped in to collect a donation for the temple roof repair fund.
‘Is it?’ I narrowed my eyes, in the manner I’d long perfected while dealing with the defaulters in the regiment who’d come up on charges, and been foolish enough to offer an excuse with a hole in it big enough to have waltzed a Titan through. ‘Then why were you collecting interdicted eldar artefacts?’
The blood drained from his face. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘I’m talking about the spirit stones you collected from the transhipment docks,’ I said. ‘Probably for your cult to use in some blasphemous ritual.’ I paused theatrically, waiting for a reply, but the wretched fellow was beyond coherent speech by this time; his mouth moved, but nothing came out beyond variations of buh and duh, interspersed with the occasional squeak. I moved in for the coup de grace. ‘Not that I care. But the inquisitor will want all the details. And she’ll get them in the end. They always do.’
Looking back, I only had myself to blame for what happened next. The household troops were hanging on every word by this point and, savouring the sensation of being the centre of attention, I just couldn’t resist glancing at them for an instant to gauge how my performance was going down.
And that momentary break in eye contact was all it took. Up until that point Evander had been petrified, paralysed by indecision, nailed to the spot by my apparently detailed knowledge of what he’d been up to. Now he sprang with the alacrity of one of the face-eaters we’d encountered in the depths of the underhive, snatching at the hellgun of the trooper nearest to him. Taken by surprise, the trooper’s finger tightened reflexively on the trigger, unleashing a full burst[185] into Evander’s torso.
Which promptly, and quite naturally, disintegrated into gobbets of charred goo and gristle, that collapsed to the floor along with a tangle of momentarily flailing limbs and a head bearing a faintly surprised-looking expression.
The stench of overcooked meat became overlaid with a more familiar odour, as Jurgen ambled up to join me. He stared down at the mess on the carpet with a bemused expression.
‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘this is going to take some explaining to the inquisitor.’
TWENTY-SIX
‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Amberley said in a conciliatory tone, which stopped some way short of an assurance that she wouldn’t be doing it for me. We’d met on a terrace outside the mansion which, by this time, was becoming crowded with guests arriving for Fulcher’s little shindig. Quite where they’d all come from and how they’d managed to turn up at such short notice was beyond me, but I suppose the governor wasn’t really someone you said no to.[186] We were attracting a predictable number of furtive glances from both partygoers and the servants attending to them, although – equally unsurprisingly, given the power armour she still wore – no one cared to interrupt our conversation. ‘Following up his contacts within the household should be simple enough.’
‘I’m already working on that,’ Defroy assured her. I still wasn’t sure whether Evander revealing himself as the traitor had entirely removed the guard commander from Amberley’s suspect list,[187] but we needed his expertise now, so I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. He nodded an assurance at Amberley, then his eyes roved on, watching the crowd even as he carried on speaking. I had to admit I was quietly impressed; not many people could talk to an inquisitor while keeping their minds on the job. ‘It’ll take a little time, but we’ll round them all up, you can be sure.’
‘Can I?’ Amberley asked. ‘How very reassuring.’
Defroy nodded again, pretending to miss the sarcasm, and continued to scan the crowd for any potential trouble. ‘It should help our investigation into the attempted assassination of the commissar, too,’ he added. ‘It must have been orchestrated by one of Evander’s contacts in the spire establishment. Narrows down the suspects to a far more comfortable number.’
‘How very gratifying.’ Vekkman materialised from the shadows. ‘Where are the rest of your acolytes?’
‘Elsewhere,’ Amberley said, in a tone which was meant to close the subject. Fortunately Vekkman took the hint.
‘What about Rakel?’ I asked. The psyker was with us, staying as far from Jurgen as possible, but even that didn’t seem to help much. She was slouched in the corner, her elegant purple gown looking as though the contents had been stuffed in without much regard to its shape or capacity, her eyes unfocused. Not surprisingly, she was muttering to herself, the only phrases I could make out being ‘nearly here,’ and ‘it’s coming,’ neither of which I found particularly reassuring. ‘Has she located the spirit stones?’
‘They’re here,’ Rakel said, waving an arm which took in most of our immediate surroundings. ‘Close. And screaming in terror.’ Which wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I wanted to be hearing.
‘Can you narrow it down any more?’ I asked, but she’d returned to her own private universe, and I might as well have saved my breath.
‘There’s too much going on,’ Amberley amplified, echoing the gesture – with specific reference, so far as I could see, to the partygoers thronging the gardens. ‘All these minds are overwhelming her.’
‘But she seems convinced that something’s about to happen,’ I said, the palms of my hands beginning to itch, as they so often do when something’s going seriously wrong but I can’t quite put my finger on what. ‘We need to find the governor, and get him to safety.’ Which would give me the perfect excuse to get away from there as well, before it all went ploin-shaped.
Defroy laughed. ‘I know precisely where he is, commissar. I’d hardly be doing my job if I didn’t. And he’s as safe in the maze as anywhere.’
‘The maze.’ The thought I’d had before, and been unable to pin down, came trotting back, dragging a very unwelcome realisation with it. ‘The spirit stones are in the middle of the maze!’
‘How do you know?’ Vekkman asked, and I glanced at Amberley, wondering how I could explain the certainty I felt without revealing Jurgen’s secret to one of her fellow inquisitors.
‘There was a crate among the governor’s effects which was taken to the maze instead of the house,’ I said. ‘It stuck in my mind, because it was the one Jurgen was sitting on.’
Amberley nodded, and to my relief I realised she’d got it. The majority of the stones had fallen out of Rakel’s perception as we boarded the truck, and back into it again as we disembarked. If my aide’s unique aura had somehow blocked whatever she was sensing while he was close to it, then it had to have been in the crate he was sitting on.
Defroy, of course, had no idea of the significance of the exchange. ‘There’s nothing unusual in that,’ he said. ‘The governor always entertains his special guests in the heart of the maze. It’s traditional.’
‘The maze people occasionally disappear without trace in?’ I said, inflecting my voice with a trace of levity for the benefit of anyone who might have overheard.
Defroy laughed. ‘Those are just stories,’ he said. ‘I told you, the trick to finding your way around in there is childishly simple. No one can really get lost.’ But a quick glance at Amberley and Vekkman was enough to reassure me that they’d realised precisely what I’d meant. Chaos cults tend to go in for sacrifices, and however careful they are, little ripples of rumour and disquiet usually ensue, even if no one takes them seriously or recognises their true significance.
‘We need to get to the maze, now,’ Vekkman said decisively, and Amberley nodded.
Defroy looked confused, and a little petulant. ‘And you’re suddenly in charge because?’ he asked.
‘Because the Emperor says so,’ Vekkman snapped, revealing the electoo in the palm of his hand.
Defroy boggled at the universally recognised symbol of Inquisitorial authority for a moment, then back at Amberley. ‘I thought she was the inquisitor,’ he said.
‘She is. So am I.’
‘Hurry.’ Rakel looked up, her expression even more haunted than usual, the edge of fear in her voice all the more disturbing for her unusual lucidity. ‘Before it’s too late.’
‘Right,’ I said, reaching for my weapons and adopting the sort of resolute pose expected of me in this kind of situation, though with any luck the inquisitors would lead the way. I turned to Defroy. ‘Better get a squad or two of your people over there too.’
‘No.’ Amberley forestalled him before he could issue the order. ‘We’ll handle this ourselves.’
‘If you say so,’ Defroy agreed, clearly affronted by the implied slur on his troopers’ martial abilities.
‘I do. If there’s warpcraft involved, the fewer people exposed to it the better.’ She nodded at me as she spoke, and I divined her meaning at once: however comforting the extra firepower they might provide would be, she wanted the number of potential witnesses to Jurgen’s remarkable abilities kept to a minimum.
‘Good point.’ Defroy vacillated, thoroughly spooked by the casual reference to warpcraft, but determined to do his duty whatever that involved. ‘But at least let me get the maze sealed off once you’re in there.’
‘Sound suggestion,’ I said, reasoning that he’d be easier to keep on side if he was feeling appreciated. ‘The coven we found on Drechia had just summoned a daemon. Don’t want anything like that getting loose.’
‘No, we don’t.’ He considered this for a moment, looking a little green around the gills, then swept his gaze across the merry throng of partygoers. ‘And I’d better get the guests evacuated.’
‘Yes, you’d better,’ Amberley agreed. She glanced at the gibbering psyker. ‘And take care of Rakel.’ Who was clearly in no fit state to accompany us.
‘Of course.’ Now he’d got a definite job to do, Defroy was looking a lot happier. So, leaving him to it, the rest of us set off towards the maze.
The closer we got to it, the more sinister it seemed, the dense foliage looming over us like a wall of small, dark interlocking leaves. Cheerful partygoers in garish costumes, many of them carrying drinks or finger food, mingled and chattered around us, oblivious to the danger they were in, while faint strains of music drifted from the direction of the house, where the dancing had already begun. Blue-and-gold clad guards were beginning to fan out through the crowd, leaving little ripples of consternation in their wake, and I felt a faint stirring of relief at the thought that Defroy was already on top of things.
Which was more than I can say for myself. Remembering what we’d found in the caverns of Drechia, I was understandably reluctant to hurl myself at what looked suspiciously like another nest of cultists.
‘Do you think Fulcher knows what’s going on?’ I asked, and the two inquisitors turned identical expressions of pitying surprise in my direction.
‘Try to keep up, Ciaphas,’ Amberley said. ‘He’s the cult magister. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.’
‘Of course it is,’ Vekkman added, in case I wasn’t feeling quite stupid enough. ‘Who else could sneak an assassin into his household without leaving any trace an experienced investigator could uncover?’
‘And who had the authority to order the harvesting of spirit stones from the eldar casualties?’ Amberley added rhetorically. ‘The man who had a crate full of them in his personal baggage.’
‘That must be why he took the risk of running the blockade,’ I said, trying to show I was catching up at last. ‘To bring them here. But why now?’
‘I think we’re about to find out,’ Amberley said and, with a nod to the guards standing sentry at the archway leading within, strode past them and into the green-flecked twilight.
TWENTY-SEVEN
We all followed, and I found myself surrounded by high, green hedges, with a narrow slot of the dome above us and the planet beyond visible above my head. Neatly mown turf, short and springy, was under my feet, and I took a few cautious steps, while the others crowded in behind me. The chatter of the party outside was muted, already almost inaudible, making every breath and rustle of clothing sound preternaturally loud.
‘Which way?’ Vekkman asked, and I gestured in the direction Defroy had told me about.
‘Keep taking the second left, followed by the first right,’ I said. ‘According to Defroy, that should take us straight to the centre.’
