Hero of the Imperium, page 58
‘Why were you out there?’ I asked, and the answer suddenly flared in my mind. Hunting. Krystabel had been...
‘Bait,’ Emeli’s voice rang silently inside my brain. ‘Enticing those Nurglite scum. But then you came instead. Much better.’
‘Better for what?’ I mumbled. It felt like one of those dreams where you know you’re asleep and try desperately to wake. Her voice danced through my mind like laughing windchimes.
‘That which wakes. It comes tonight. But not for you.’ Somewhere in the physical world our bodies moved together, caressing, enticing, casting a spell of physical pleasure I knew with a sudden burst of panic was ensnaring my very soul. Her disembodied voice laughed again. ‘Give in, Ciaphas. Slaanesh has surely touched your soul before now. You live only for yourself. You’re his, whether you know it or not.’
Holy Emperor! That was the first time I’d heard the names of any of the Chaos powers, long before my subsequent activities as the Inquisition’s occasional and extremely reluctant errand boy made them all too familar, but even then I could tell that what I faced was monstrous beyond measure. Selfish and self-indulgent I may well have been, and still am if I’m honest about it, but if I have any qualities that outmatch that one it’s my will to survive. The realisation of what I faced, and the consequences if I failed, doused me like a shock of cold water. I snapped back to myself like a drowning man gasping for air, to find Emeli staring at me in consternation.
‘You broke free!’ she said, like a petulant child denied a sweet. Now I knew she was a psyker I could feel the tendrils starting to wrap themselves around my mind again. I scrabbled for the laspistol at my belt, desperation making my fingers shake.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I prefer blondes.’ Then I shot her. She glared at me for a moment in outraged astonishment, before the light faded from her eyes and she went to join whatever she worshipped in hell.
As my mind began to clear I became aware of a new sound, a rhythmical chanting which echoed through the building. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but my tingling palms told me things were about to get a whole lot worse.
Sure enough, as I staggered down the stairway to the entrance hall, the sound grew in intensity. I hefted the pistol in my sweat-sticky hand and cautiously pushed the door to the great hall ajar. I wished I hadn’t. Every girl in the school was there, along with what was left of Grear and Mulenz. They were still alive, for whatever that was worth, rictus grins of insane ecstacy on their faces, as the priestesses of depravity conducted their obscene rituals. As I watched, Grear expired, and an ululating howl of joy rose from the assembled cultist’s throats.
Then Krystabel stepped forward, her voice raised, chanting something new in counterpoint to the other acolytes. A faint wind blew through the room, thick with that damnable perfume, and the hairs on the back of my neck rose. Mulenz began to levitate, his body shifting and distorting in strange inhuman ways. Power began to crackle through the air.
‘Merciful Emperor!’ I made the warding sign of the eagle, more out of habit than because I expected it to do any good, and turned to leave. Whatever was beginning to possess my erstwhile trooper, I wanted to be long gone before it manifested itself properly. Not that that seemed likely without a miracle...
Lasbolts exploded over my head, raking the room, taking down some of the cultists. I turned, the sudden stench behind me warning me what I was about to see. Sure enough the entrance hall was full of the pusbag troopers, and for the first time I realised that Slawkenberg was under attack from two different Chaos powers. No wonder they were more interested in killing each other than us. Not that I was likely to reap the benefit, by the look of things.
The Slaaneshi cult was rallying by now, howling forward to meet their disease-ridden rivals in what looked like a suicidal charge; but it was only to buy Krystabel enough time to complete her ritual. The daemonhost which had formerly been Mulenz levitated forwards, spitting bolts of energy from its hands, and laughing insanely as it blasted pusbags and schoolgirls alike. I fled, ignored by the Nurglites, who grouped together to concentrate their lasgun fire on the hovering abomination. Much good it seemed to be doing them. I could hear screams and explosions behind me as I sprinted across the lawn, shoulderblades itching in expectation of feeling a lasbolt or something worse at any moment.
‘Commissar! Over here!’ Jurgen’s familar voice rose above the roar of an engine, and the Salamander crashed through an ornamental shrubbery. I clambered aboard.
‘Jurgen!’ I shouted, dazed and delighted to see him. ‘I thought they’d got you too!’
‘No.’ He looked puzzled for a moment. ‘I ran into some of those enemy troopers in the woods. But they walked right past me. I can’t understand it.’ I caught a full-strength whiff of his body odour as he shrugged.
‘The Emperor protects the righteous,’ I suggested straight-faced. Jurgen nodded.
He crossed himself and gunned the engine.
‘At least we know what they were doing in this sector now,’ I said, as we raced down the paved track towards the road. ‘They were trying to stop the summoning... Oh frak!’ I grabbed the voxcaster. ‘Did you vox in our co-ordinates?’
‘Of course,’ Jurgen nodded.
‘Cain to command. Full barrage, danger close, immediate effect. Don’t argue, just do it!’ I hung up before Mostrue could start pestering me with questions, and waited for the first shells to arrive.
If being close to the first strike had been worrying, getting caught in a full barrage was serious change of undergarments time. For what seemed like eternity the world disappeared in fire and smoke, but I guess the Emperor was looking out for us after all or we’d never have made it to the road in one piece.
When we went back at first light the entire building had been obliterated, along with several hectares of woodland. I left out the bit about the daemonhost in my report; I’d been the only one to see it, after all, and I didn’t want the Inquisition poking around in my affairs. Instead I made up some extravagant lies about the heroism of the dead troopers, which, as usual, were taken as a modest attempt to deflect attention from my own valour. And, so far as I knew at the time, that was the end of it.
Except that sometimes at night, even after more than a century, I find myself dreaming of green eyes and a voice like velvet, and I wonder if my soul is as safe as I’d like to think...
THE TRAITOR’S HAND
Editorial Note:
To my great surprise, not to mention personal satisfaction, the first two volumes of material from the Cain archive which I have prepared for circulation among those of my fellow inquisitors who may care to peruse them have been quite widely read; although it must be said that many of my colleagues appear to regard them as light entertainment rather than the more serious food for thought I originally intended, finding it hard to believe that an imperial commissar could fall so far short of the ideals he was meant to embody. Given his public reputation I find this incredulity easy to understand, but thanks to our personal association, I can assure my readers that he was indeed very much as he depicts himself in these memoirs. I would point out, though, that perhaps as a result of his own awareness of these shortcomings, he does have a tendency to judge himself a little more harshly than he might actually deserve.
Hitherto I’ve concentrated my efforts on some of Cain’s encounters with alien enemies of the Imperium, although in the course of his long career he crossed swords with all manner of warp-spawned monstrosities as well, confounding the dark designs of the Ruinous Powers and their mortal minions on numerous occasions. It seemed fitting, therefore, especially given the interest in the previous volumes from inquisitors of ordos other than my own, to select one such incident to prepare for wider dissemination.
I was aided in this decision by the fact that it follows on chronologically from the previous two extracts, although Cain’s tendency to record his memoirs piecemeal, as different anecdotes occurred to him, means that the original material forms a somewhat extended digression. This happened in his account of the famous incident during the 13th Black Crusade, when he was dragged out of retirement to defend an entire world with little more than a handful of his Schola Progenium cadets. That will have to wait for a subsequent volume, of course; in the meantime, I believe I have successfully filleted the material relevant to the Adumbria campaign and present it here as a reasonably coherent narrative in its own right.
Like the earlier extracts, these events took place during Cain’s service with the 597th Valhallan and cover the fledgling regiment’s first encounter with the forces of Chaos. A particular point of interest is Cain’s description of the ordinary troopers’ reaction to the Great Enemy and the form its machinations took, which I hope will sound a much-needed note of caution to those of my readers who might fall prey to the pernicious tenets of Radicalism.
Since, as usual, Cain is infuriatingly vague about most things which don’t affect him personally, I have continued to insert extracts from other sources where necessary in order to present a more rounded account of events on Adumbria and in the system surrounding it. Unfortunately, as before, some of these are the logorrheic meanderings of Jenit Sulla, for which I can only apologise in advance; were any other alternatives available, you can be sure I would have used them.
In accordance with the previous volumes, I have broken Cain’s largely unstructured narrative into chapters for ease of reading, and once again I have been unable to resist prefacing them with a selection from the collection of quotations he maintained for the instruction and amusement of his schola students. Other than this I have confined my interpolations to the occasional footnote, leaving Cain to tell his story in his own inimitable manner.
Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos.
ONE
‘The wider he smiled and called us friend,
the tighter we clung to our purses.’
– Argun Slyter ‘The Wastrel’s Stratagem,’ Act 4 Scene 1
I’ve had more than my fair share of unpleasant surprises over the course of a century or so of fighting the Emperor’s enemies, whenever running away and hiding from them wasn’t an option, but the sudden appearance of Tomas Beije in the corridors of the Emperor’s Beneficence is one I still can’t recall without flinching. Not because the situation was particularly life-threatening, which I suppose made it unusual enough given the kind of surprises I usually got, but because of the associations the memory of it still triggers: a curious amalgam of anger at his subsequent pig-headed stupidity, which almost ended up handing an Imperial world to the Ruinous Powers neatly gift-wrapped with a pretty pink bow, and, more importantly, could have resulted in my ignominious execution had events not turned out as they did; and the flood of unpleasant memories his presence stirred up in me at the time. I hadn’t liked him when we were commissar cadets together at the Schola Progenium and I suppose I would have disliked him still if I’d spared him so much as a single thought in the years since we were judged fit to inflict ourselves on a regiment somewhere and sent off elsewhere in the galaxy. (Or in my case, I strongly suspect, handed a scarlet sash and politely shown the door because it seemed the easiest way of keeping my tutors from resigning en masse.)1
‘Ciaphas.’ He nodded a greeting, as though we’d always been on good terms, and a smile as sincere as an ecclesiarch distributing alms in front of the pictcasters smeared itself across his pudgy features. ‘I heard you were on board.’
That didn’t surprise me. By that point in my career, my reputation preceded me wherever I went, smoothing the way in a fashion which often made my life a great deal easier, and, as if to balance things out in some way, periodically dragging me into life-threatening situations of bowel-clenching terror. No doubt by now, three days out from Kastafore2, the entire ship would be aware that Cain the Hero of the Imperium was aboard, and either pretending not to be impressed by that sort of thing or trying to find some way of scraping an acquaintance in order to further their own careers by coat-tailing on mine. Well good luck to anyone daft enough to try the latter, I thought.
‘Beije.’ I returned the nod curtly, irked by his use of my given name. We’d never been friends at the schola and I resented the presumption now. Come to think of it, I don’t recall that he’d ever had any friends, just a small group of cronies as pious and self-righteous as he was, always whining on about the grace of the Emperor or running to the proctors with tales of the minor infractions of other students. The only time anyone was ever pleased to see him was on the scrumball pitch, where he got tackled enthusiastically at every opportunity whether he had the ball or not. ‘I had no idea you were part of this little jaunt.’
The smile curdled a little as he registered the snub, but he was bright enough to realise that making an issue of it in public wouldn’t be a good idea. The corridors were filling with senior Guard officers, the black coats and scarlet sashes of a handful of other commissars among them, all drifting towards one of the recreation halls where the lord general himself was expected to brief us in a few minutes’ time. Not in person, of course, as he’d be travelling in some style aboard the flotilla’s flagship, but the tech-priests had apparently rigged up some method for him to pictcast all the vessels in the task force simultaneously before we made the transition to the warp.
‘I’d hardly describe facing the enemies of humanity as a jaunt,’ he said stiffly. ‘It’s our holy duty to preserve the Emperor’s blessed domains from the merest taint of the unclean.’
‘Of course it is,’ I replied, just as unable to resist teasing the pious little prig now as I had been nearly thirty years before. ‘But I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if we had a bit of fun while we’re doing it.’ Of course, facing whatever horrors might be waiting for us wherever we were going was about as far from my idea of fun as it was possible to get, but it was the sort of thing a hero was supposed to say and it went down well with the crowd around us, most of whom were trying very hard to look as if they weren’t listening to the conversation.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt your socialising, commissar.’ Colonel Kasteen cleared her throat and glanced at her chronograph with studied nonchalance. ‘But I believe it would be impolite to keep the lord general waiting.’
‘Thank you, colonel,’ I responded, grateful for the intervention and conveying that fact with a glance no one else present other than Major Broklaw, her second-in-command, would have been able to pick up on. Our years of service together3 had given us a rapport which came as close to friendship as our respective positions allowed and which helped no end in the smooth running of the regiment.
‘This is your colonel?’ Beije asked with undisguised incredulity. Kasteen’s jaw knotted with the effort of reining in her instinctive response, which from long experience I expected to be short, pithy, and anatomically improbable.
Happy to return the favour she’d just done for me, I nodded. ‘She is indeed,’ I said. ‘And a damn good one too.’ Then I laughed and patted Beije on the back, which I remembered from our days at the schola was something he’d always detested. ‘Surely you haven’t forgotten how to read rank insignia?’
‘I hadn’t noticed them,’ he muttered, his face slowly crimsoning. Well, maybe that was true. Kasteen had quite a spectacular figure, in a trim, well-muscled sort of way, and perhaps he hadn’t bothered to look that high. ‘She was standing behind you.’
‘Quite,’ I said, unable to resist prolonging his discomfiture a little longer by making introductions. ‘Colonel, may I present Commissar Tomas Beije, an old classmate of mine.’ Kasteen nodded a formal greeting, which Beije echoed a little over-eagerly, trying to make up for his lapse in good manners. ‘Beije, this is Colonel Regina Kasteen, commanding officer of the 597th Valhallan. And Major Ruput Broklaw, her executive officer.’
‘Commissar.’ Broklaw stuck out a hand for Beije to shake, which he did after a moment’s hesitation, wincing as the major closed his grip. He’d tried the same thing on me the first time we’d met and I’d been grateful for the augmetic fingers on my right hand. ‘Any friend of Commissar Cain is always welcome in our quarters.’
‘Thank you.’ Beije retrieved his hand, although whether he was astute enough to realise Broklaw’s tone effectively ruled him out of that general invitation was unlikely. Trapped by social convention, he flapped it vaguely at the two men flanking him. ‘Colonel Asmar of the Tallarn 229th, and Major Sipio, his second-in-command.’
I glanced back at Kasteen and Broklaw, amused at the contrast between the two groups. While the Tallarns were both short and dark-complexioned, swathed in the loose tunics of their desert home world, the Valhallans were about as physically different as it was possible to be. Kasteen was wearing her red hair drawn back in a pony tail, blue eyes as clear as the skies above the ice fields of her home world, while Broklaw’s flint-grey gaze perfectly mirrored the night-dark hair which framed it. In deference to what they considered to be the stifling heat outside the areas assigned to us, which, as usual, they’d had refrigerated to temperatures which left the breath smoking, they were dressed in simple fatigues, only the rank pins on their collars denoting their status. So to be fair, I suppose Beije could have been forgiven for not realising who they were at first, but that wasn’t going to stop me enjoying his embarrassment.
‘A pleasure.’ I nodded to the two officers. ‘You have a formidable reputation as warriors. I look forward to hearing of the glorious victories of the Tallarn people.’
‘We prevail by the grace of the Emperor,’ Asmar said, his voice surprisingly mellifluous. Beije nodded, a little too eagerly.
