Hero of the Imperium, page 69
Zyvan nodded. ‘Our interrogators were very thorough. If he knew anything he would have told us.’ I didn’t doubt it, and said so. Zyvan smiled bleakly. ‘Under any normal circumstances I would have agreed with you. But we were dealing with the possibility of warpcraft, remember. I had to be sure his memories were real ones.’
‘I see,’ I said, shuddering in spite of myself. I nodded cordially to the colourless young man in neatly-pressed fatigues devoid of insignia who Zyvan hadn’t bothered to introduce. Hekwyn, Vinzand and Kolbe were all seated as far away from him as they reasonably could be, and I must say I didn’t blame them. I’d met psykers before, and it had rarely ended well. Luckily I’d dispatched Jurgen to prepare my quarters immediately on our arrival, so there was no possibility of his secret being abruptly revealed by accident; I made a mental note to keep him as far away from the lord general’s staff as possible, since there was no telling how many other mind-readers he had lurking about the premises.
‘His mind was intact,’ the young psyker assured me. ‘At least to begin with.’ He must have read something of what I was thinking on my face, because he smiled without humour. ‘I was as careful as I could be. He’ll recover, more or less.’
‘Sieur Malden is one of the most capable sanctioned psykers on my staff,’ Zyvan said.
I nodded again. ‘I’m sure he is,’ I agreed. Like I said, I’ve met several, albeit not exactly socially in most cases, and Malden (I noted the use of the civilian honorific as protocol demanded)47 was clearly one of the sharpest blades in the scabbard. Rakel, Amberley’s tame telepath, for instance, was as barmy as a jokero and made about as much sense most of the time.48
Now you might think that someone with as much to hide as I have would have been terrified at the prospect of sharing a conference table with a telepath, but one thing I’d picked up about them over the years was that they’re not going to be listening to your deepest, darkest secrets. Not without trying very hard, anyway.
Rakel once told me in one of her more lucid moments that catching stray thoughts from the people around her was like trying to pick a single voice out of a crowded ballroom, and even then it was just the surface thoughts she could detect. Going deeper takes a lot of effort and concentration, almost as dangerous to the psyker as the person they’re trying to read, and for someone as practiced as I was at dissembling there was nothing on the surface for them to pick up on anyway.
‘I’ve been to the installation you found,’ Malden told me, his voice curiously toneless, which at least matched his appearance. The only word which fitted him was ‘nondescript’. I must have been in the same room as him scores of times over the years, but I still can’t recall his height, build, or the colour of his eyes and hair. ‘I found the experience… interesting.’
I felt a faint tingling in the air, like the charge before a thunderstorm, and the hololith flickered into life without anyone touching the controls. Vinzand and Kolbe both flinched, no doubt muttering prayers to the Emperor under their breath, and I noticed the faint smile, genuine this time, which Malden almost succeeded in masking. Only Hekwyn failed to react, no doubt inured to unpleasant surprises as a result of his duties with the arbities.
‘That’s not quite the word I would have chosen,’ I said casually, determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeming in any way disconcerted.
‘Really?’ The young psyker’s eyes drifted towards me. ‘What word would you have used?’
‘Terrifying,’ I admitted. ‘It reminded me…’ I glanced at the trio at the end of the table, and Zyvan nodded.
‘Under the circumstances you can take it that everyone in this room is cleared for any information you may wish to contribute,’ he said. ‘Even that pertaining to the nature of Chaos.’ I nodded soberly, conscious of the expressions on the three men’s faces; a peculiar mixture of curiosity and apprehension. They all knew they were about to hear things that few citizens of the Imperium were ever made privy to, and were not exactly sure that they wanted to know them.
‘Some years ago,’ I began, ‘I encountered a coven of Slaaneshi cultists, who were attempting to create a daemonhost.’49 Kolbe almost choked on his recaff and Vinzand went pale, even for an Adumbrian. Hekwyn raised an eyebrow a millimetre or two and began to look marginally more interested. ‘There was something about that hab dome which reminded me of them.’
‘What happened to the daemonhost?’ Hekwyn asked.
I shrugged. ‘Destroyed, I assume. I called in an artillery barrage and levelled the place.’ Almost killing myself in the process, I might add.
Malden nodded once. ‘That might work,’ he said with a casualness which only intensified my unease.
‘Excuse me.’ Vinzand coughed hesitantly. ‘When you say create a daemonhost, you mean…’ he waved his hands vaguely. ‘I’m sorry, I’m rather new to all this.’
‘They were summoning a daemon from the warp and confining it in a host body,’ I explained, trying not to remember that the body in question had been one of the Guard troopers accompanying me. He still looked baffled, so after a sidelong glance at Zyvan for an almost imperceptible nod of approval I elaborated a little. ‘Daemons are creatures of the warp, and draw their power from it. But dangerous as they are, they can’t exist in the material universe for long without being drawn back to where they came from.’ And a good thing too, if the ones I’d encountered before were anything to go by. ‘Trapping it in a mortal body allows it to remain here, although its powers are diminished, and it’s usually under the control of whoever summoned it in the first place.’
‘Up to a point,’ Malden agreed, and I deferred to his greater knowledge of warpcraft with relief. ‘Any control over it is tenuous at best. You’d have to be insane to try it.’50 He shrugged. ‘But the commissar is substantially correct. The only other way for a daemon to interact with the materium for a prolonged period is to find a world or a region of space where the two realms intersect one another. Fortunately such places are rare.’
‘The Eye of Terror,’ I said, making the sign of the aquila as I spoke.
Malden nodded again. ‘The vast majority are there,’ he said. ‘And the few exceptions are interdicted by the Inquisition.’51
‘Who are far better qualified to worry about such things than we are,’ Zyvan said, dragging the meeting back to the point at last. Knowing a little more about the Inquisition and its methods than he did I had my doubts about that, but if I voiced them it might have been bad for my health, so I said nothing and waited for Malden to turn back to the hololith. Just for once the image was still and crystal clear, and I found myself staring at a perfect miniature replica of the hideous chamber I’d discovered behind the wall.
‘What are those symbols?’ Kolbe asked, trying not to look too hard at them. I couldn’t blame him for that as I was doing the same thing myself, although their hololithic representations were far less disconcerting than the real things had been.
‘Some of them are wards,’ Malden replied. ‘If you wanted my best guess, I’d say that something had been confined in there. Something touched by the warp.’ This time, I noticed, mine wasn’t the only hand which moved reflexively to invoke the Emperor’s protection.
‘And the others?’ I asked.
For the first time the young psyker seemed unsure of himself. ‘I’ve never seen anything like them before,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘My best guess would be to channel warp energy, perhaps to summon something.’ He shrugged. ‘The warp currents around here are strange enough at the best of times. You’d be better off asking a navigator or an astropath, to be honest. It’s more their department than it is mine.’
‘Perhaps they were trying to affect the flow of the currents,’ Kolbe suggested. ‘To speed up their invasion fleet or delay your reinforcements.’
‘That would make sense,’ Zyvan conceded, nodding slowly in a manner which told me just how much he didn’t like that idea. ‘I’ll discuss it with the senior representative of the Navis Nobilitae.’ It went without saying that the navigator of his flagship wouldn’t lower himself to converse directly with the likes of us, and I have to say I was heartily glad of that fact. They’re spooky little bastards at the best of times, and snobbier than a planetary governor with a pedigree going back to before Horus. And on top of that they can kill you with a look. Literally.
‘What about the bodies?’ Vinzand asked, looking at them with a visible effort.
‘Lunch?’ I suggested. ‘For whatever was stuck in there?’
Malden favoured me with a smile which actually contained a modicum of warmth. ‘Possibly,’ he conceded. ‘Or something to pass the time. But my guess would be a sacrifice. Heretics are big on sacrifice, especially when they’re summoning things.’
‘Maybe one of the prisoners we took can tell us,’ I said.
We’d ended up with half a dozen relatively intact specimens in the end, which wasn’t a bad haul, and Hekwyn’s promised experts from the Arbites were crawling over the entire dome looking for Emperor knows what, so at last it looked as though we were getting somewhere.
‘Perhaps,’ Zyvan said.
I raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought your interrogators would have extracted everything they knew by now.’
‘They appear to be unusually resilient. Some of them even seem to be enjoying themselves.’
‘In the meantime,’ Hekwyn said, with an audible sigh of relief as the hololith clicked off, ‘we have at least been able to start rounding up the smuggling ring from the Glacier Peak end.’ He favoured me with a smile and a nod of the head. ‘Despite my scepticism, it seems Commissar Cain’s assessment of the situation wasn’t too wide of the mark after all. He just assumed the weapons were flowing into the town from Skitterfall instead of the other way round.’
‘I’m pleased to hear your confidence in the security of the starport was justified,’ I replied graciously.
‘Up to a point.’ The arbitrator frowned. ‘The shuttle you scared off must have come from somewhere. My guess is it was one of the freighters in orbit.’
‘We’re already combing the traffic control records,’ Vinzand chipped in. ‘But with thousands of shuttle flights a day, it won’t be easy to track. Let alone the previous landings.’
‘If it’s even one of those,’ Kolbe suggested gloomily. ‘Perhaps it came from one of the raiders, lurking in the outer system.’
‘No.’ Zyvan shook his head decisively. ‘If there was a Chaos ship here already we would have detected it when we dropped out of warp. And our pickets would have intercepted anything emerging into realspace once we got here that wasn’t in one of the shipping lanes.’ I remembered the myriad of dancing lights I’d seen from the observation window of the Emperor’s Benificence, and didn’t envy whoever got the job of trying to identify which of them was our smuggler.
‘Do we have any more of an idea when the raiders are due?’ I asked.
The lord general shook his head again. ‘Three to twelve days is the best estimate the navigators can give me. Assuming General Kolbe isn’t right about their confederates on the coldside having found a way of speeding up the warp currents, of course.’
‘Then we’d better assume they’ll be here any time,’ Kolbe said. He seemed surprisingly happy at the prospect, until it dawned on me that all this talk of daemons and warpcraft had him thoroughly spooked and he was grabbing the opportunity of returning the conversation to matters he understood with unconcealed alacrity. ‘I’ll put all our PDF units on full alert the moment I return to my headquarters.’
‘A wise precaution,’ Zyvan said, activating the hololith the traditional way by pressing the runes on the lectern and thumping it with his fist until it sputtered into life. This time the image was as fuzzy as usual, which I found vaguely reassuring, the almost preternatural clarity of the images Malden had shown us bringing back the sense of unease I’d felt in the habdome. A three-dimensional image of the planet appeared, with hundreds of green dots indicating the presence of the PDF forces arrayed in its defence. Most were in the shadow belt, of course, clustered most thickly around major population centres and sites of strategic importance, although a few were scattered across the hotside and coldside, where towns and other installations made convenient spots to place a garrison in the unforgiving landscapes.
After a moment of studying the coldside I was able to find Glacier Peak and the reassuring amber rune which marked the presence of my own regiment, although the handful of similar icons making up the rest of our expeditionary force were all but lost in the rash of PDF locations. The Valhallan tanks were easy to find of course, being overlaid on Skitterfall, and the Tallarns stood out reasonably clearly in the sparsely-garrisoned hotside, but I had to search for some time before I found either of the Kastaforean regiments. It was a sobering moment.
‘How long before the reinforcements arrive?’ I asked.
‘Five to eighteen days, according to the last message we received.’ Zyvan hesitated a moment before going on. ‘And that was three days ago.’
‘Three days?’ Vinzand asked, the quiver of apprehension in his voice fortunately drawing everyone’s attention and saving me the bother of controlling my own expression. The palms of my hands were tingling, which never augurs anything good. ‘I was under the impression that you received updates on their deployment every twenty-four hours.’
‘Normally that’s true,’ Zyvan admitted, with the expression of a man sucking a bitterroot. ‘But our astropaths have been unable to get through to the rest of the fleet.’
‘They say there seems to be some kind of disturbance in the warp,’ Malden chipped in helpfully, which did absolutely nothing to calm my fears, I can assure you. Clearly whatever the cultists had been up to in Glacier Peak (apart from stockpiling Emperor alone knew how much lethal ordnance, which was bad enough) had succeeded. What that was I had no idea, but I knew enough about the Great Enemy to know that it would be nothing good, and just hoped I wouldn’t be the one to find out the hard way. (A hope in which I was to be grievously disappointed, as things turned out.)
‘So we’re on our own until further notice,’ Zyvan concluded.
Kolbe squared his shoulders. ‘My men won’t let you down, lord general. They might lack the experience of your Guardsmen, but they’re fighting for their homes. That makes up for a lot.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Zyvan said, although probably only I knew him well enough to see that he wasn’t entirely convinced.
‘What worries me is that we’re spread so thinly,’ I said without thinking, then realising what I’d said I carried on as smoothly as if I’d never meant to pause. ‘If we’re going to back up General Kolbe’s troops effectively, we’ll need to deploy as soon as we know where they’re coming under pressure. By the time the dropships get down to us, loaded and away, we’ll just turn up in time to join in with the victory parade.’ Or bury the bodies, more likely, but saying that wouldn’t be tactful. I didn’t have to anyway – Zyvan knew the score well enough to know what I meant.
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said. The image of the planet in the hololith shrank to make room for a couple of icons in orbit above the capital. His flagship and the Emperor’s Benificence, I assumed. I was correct as it turned out, as his next act was to point out the troopship. ‘Holding the dropships in reserve as I’d intended won’t help, as the commissar has just pointed out. They’ll be sitting waterfowl in orbit once the enemy fleet arrives anyway.’
‘So what’s the alternative?’ Vinzand asked, probably only just realising that all those civilian starships above us would be giving the raiders some easy target practice on the way in as well.
Zyvan sighed. ‘Five dropships, five regiments. I’m attaching one to each. That way at least one company can be ready to deploy in a matter of moments. With a bit of luck they can ferry Guard reinforcements in to wherever they’re needed, and return to the staging area for another load.’ He looked at me, thinking he could read my reaction in my face, and shrugged. ‘I know, Ciaphas. It’s a messy option, but it’s the best we can do.’
‘I suppose it is,’ I said, trying to sound grave. It would leave the lucky company in question out on a limb, of course, but a formation that size ought to be able to take care of itself until the second or third run arrived. More to the point, all I had to do was find an excuse to stick close to the dropship and I’d have a way off the planet if things went sour, which they looked very like doing at that point. All in all things seemed to be getting a bit brighter so far as I was concerned.
I should have known better, of course.
NINE
‘His loyalty couldn’t be bought at any price; but it could be rented remarkably cheaply.’
– Inquisitor Allendyne, after the execution of
Rogue Trader Parnis Vermode for trafficking
in interdicted xenos artifacts
Jurgen, efficient as ever, had managed to get my personal effects neatly stowed in the suite I’d occupied on my last sojourn in the lord general’s headquarters, so once the conference finally broke up I lost no time in heading back there to avail myself of a hot bath, a good meal and a large soft bed, in that order. About the only thing missing was some feminine company, which would have rounded things off nicely, and as I drifted into sleep I found myself wondering what Amberley was doing at that moment.52 That should have led to some very pleasant dreams, but seeing that damned hololith of the chamber I’d found in the heretics’ hab dome had apparently stirred up deeper, less pleasant memories, and my slumbers were to be far from restful.
As I’ve mentioned before, I still had occasional nightmares about my earlier encounter with a nest of Slaaneshi cultists. Usually vague, formless things in which I felt my sense of self slipping once again under the psychic assault of the sorceress Emeli, who would appear as an insubstantial wraith as a rule, urging me on to damnation until I would wake with a shudder, entangled in sweat-soaked bedding. This time, however, the dreams were lucid, and vivid, and remained with me on waking, so that even now I can recall them in some detail.
