Shadowbreaker Read online

  At the end of the path, he entered the base of a minaret and began ascending a spiral staircase of old sandstone. The air inside was still and cool.

  He had climbed barely ten metres when, too late, he heard someone descending towards him in a hurry.

  He froze. The staircase was narrow. No cover.

  Suddenly, a figure in the dark brown fatigues of the ISF appeared around the curve of the central column. There was a blur of movement, a barked order to halt.

  Haluk’s veins flooded with ice.

  He looked down the barrel of a raised stubber.

  This was wrong.

  No one should have been here. Assurances had been made.

  The way should have been cleared.

  Three

  Thick walls of plasteel-reinforced rockcrete soaked up Lyndon’s desperate pleas. He did not fear death itself. Never that. He had served well. He believed in the Imperial creed. But the manner of his imminent death and the implications for Epsilon’s work… Those he rightly feared.

  Of all the myriad fates an Ordo Xenos field agent might face, he had never once imagined it would end like this.

  The synovermus would burrow into Lyndon’s nasal cavity, releasing a powerful psychotropic mucus as it went – a mucus that would radically alter Lyndon’s perception of time and simultaneously obliterate his will. Seconds would stretch out like days, and his mind would lose all hold on itself, become pliable. Inner walls would tumble. And all the while, the creature’s tiny beak would be carving a channel through flesh, nerve and bone to its eventual target, the cerebellum, there to lay its eggs before curling up to die.

  Despite the physical and mental trauma of the worm’s journey through his head, Lyndon would still be alive when the larvae hatched mere moments after being laid. They would emerge and feed, and that would be his end. By then, however, Bastogne would have the information he needed, and Lyndon would die having given up his handler and every secret in his head.

  Through bitter tears of resignation, Lyndon began praying to the Emperor.

  Bastogne reached out and gripped a handful of Lyndon’s sweat-soaked hair. He yanked his head back and held it tight as he inched the worm closer to the prisoner’s nose. Lyndon hadn’t the strength to resist. Bastogne moved slowly, eager to give the man as much chance as possible to speak out and forego the need for this. But only blood and prayer issued from Lyndon’s lips.

  Bastogne already knew in his heart that Lyndon would not break. Had things been reversed, he would have chosen the same path. The ordo asked much of its agents, but not without good reason.

  The future of the Imperium depended on men and women ready to die for it.

  Heart heavy, Bastogne pressed the worm to Lyndon’s nostril.

  Immediately, the creature plunged its cilia into the hole and began tugging itself up the dark channel of flesh. Bastogne had not released it quite yet. It strained hard against the tongs.

  Lyndon’s prayer became a scream through clenched teeth.

  ‘Where is Epsilon?’ shouted Bastogne desperately. ‘Where is she?’

  Lyndon struggled against every instinct for self-preservation he had. I will not give you up, my lady. For the Imperium. For mankind. Find what you are looking for. Make everything right. Do not let me die in vain.

  With a final curse, Bastogne released the creature and watched in fascinated horror as it hauled its soft, glistening body up into the nose of the doomed agent.

  Lyndon roared helplessly through gritted teeth, his nose bulging as the worm fought its way inside.

  ‘You did this to yourself, man!’ snapped Bastogne. ‘Not me. You!’

  Turning, he hurled the tongs angrily against the wall and stepped away. He didn’t want to be close enough to hear the first crunch of that tiny black beak.

  As it was, he was spared the sound, diverted from it by a louder one, a sudden clatter from behind.

  He spun to see Sartutius standing bolt upright, stool toppled, his blind eyes wide, face rigid with tension.

  ‘We are discovered, Bastogne,’ he gasped. ‘They have us!’

  Before the psyker had finished speaking, the voice of Bastogne’s master sounded over the vox-bead in his ear, tones clipped and harsh. ‘Perimeter breached, agent. Auspex monitors show multiple heat signatures converging on your location. Arm yourselves. They’re closing fast. None of you is to be taken alive!’

  Bastogne didn’t need to be told twice. Time was up. An opposition field team had found them. More bloodshed was inevitable now. He drew a fine master-crafted hell-pistol from the holster beneath his coat and spun to face the others.

  ‘We’re about to have company. Arm up. Now!’

  The two heavies released their ropes at once and raced over to a crate in the corner.

  Always against the clock, thought Bastogne as his men prepared to defend this place.

  The interrogation was in its final stage. If it were to bear any fruit at all, the next several minutes would be critical.

  Throne and saints, just give me a little more time.

  Lyndon collapsed in a heap, breath shallow, mind spinning, time and agony already beginning to stretch out before him like an endless road. He lay shaking and whimpering as the worm worked its beak against the first resistance it had encountered inside his head. The crunching and cracking from within was deafening to him, but in the sudden flurry of activity, the others didn’t even register it.

  Bastogne’s associates swept up a pair of big, drum-fed heavy stubbers from the cache, cocked them and moved, each covering one of the room’s two plasteel doors.

  Sartutius gripped his staff and cowered in the corner. His skills did not lie in combat witchcraft, but perhaps he might escape notice and slip away if he could manipulate the attackers’ senses once they were inside the room – if they got inside. The doors were solid plasteel and the locking bolts went deep… but no – he was lying to himself. They wouldn’t hold out against an ordo assault team for long. Entry was inevitable.

  How foolish, all of this, thought the psyker bitterly. We wear the same mark. We should be shedding xenos blood. Not our own.

  The seconds slowed. In the relative calm before the approaching storm, the air was thick and hot. Beams of burning sun seemed to creep across the floor. The four-man interrogation team was so tense that the sounds of suffering from the man on the floor became mere background noise.

  ‘How many?’ Bastogne asked his master over the link, but if his lordship answered, Bastogne never heard it, because at that moment the doors exploded inwards, slamming back against the rockcrete walls, thick hinges torn and twisted with the force of the breaching charges.

  Bastogne’s ears rang with the double crack of man-made thunder.

  Smoke and dust billowed into the room.

  He and his heavies tensed, muzzles raised, fingers on triggers, but no figures appeared through the doors. Instead, a crisp contralto voice rang out.

  ‘Throw down your weapons immediately and lie face down on the ground, by order of the God-Emperor’s most Holy Inquisition. Do not resist. Our authority is absolute. Disobey and die.’

  No one moved but Lyndon, curled up on the floor like a child, twitching and whimpering.

  Bastogne cursed and called back, ‘I am an agent of the Holy Inquisition, here on the direct orders of an inquisitor lord. You are interfering in a level-nine Ordo Xenos operation. Leave the area at once. Do not attempt to enter this building or we will open fire.’

  Again, the voice of the other. ‘You are performing an unsanctioned interrogation of a friendly asset. This will not be tolerated. I say again, throw down your weapons and lie down on the ground now. If you do not comply by the count of ten, we will enter with lethal force.’

  At that, the voice from outside began its countdown.

  Inside the building, Bastogne looked at the wretch by h
is feet. He crouched beside him and placed the muzzle of the hell-pistol to his head. When the opposition assault squad stormed the room, he would have to execute Lyndon immediately. It would leave him open, unable to fire on the attackers, but he could not risk the man falling into their hands.

  One last time, he hissed at his prisoner, ‘Where is Epsilon? Can you hear me, Lyndon? Where is your damned mistress?’

  Lyndon lay shuddering and howling in pain.

  ‘Sartutius,’ barked Bastogne. ‘Last chance. Do a mind-rip! We’ve got seconds only before they–’

  ‘Beyond my power!’ snapped the psyker. ‘It will kill us both!’

  ‘Damn you, witchblood. I’m ordering you to try!’ He swung his muzzle up towards the psyker. ‘Or I’ll paint that wall with your brains!’

  Hissing with rage, but knowing the threat for truth, Sartutius scurried forward and crouched by the prisoner’s curled form.

  A mind-rip, Throne damn it! Didn’t this bastard know what he was asking? Even if Sartutius didn’t die, the line between his soul and the prisoner’s could be blurred forever. He might lose himself, become someone else, an amalgam. In Terra’s holy name…

  ‘Psyker!’ barked Bastogne as he thrust his pistol’s muzzle against Sartutius’ left temple.

  Sartutius swallowed, thrust a hand out, grabbed the prisoner’s head, closed his eyes and began to channel every last bit of power that was available to him.

  Bastogne stepped back, giving the psyker room, but he kept his hell-pistol raised. When he was sure Sartutius was doing as commanded, he turned his eyes back to the ruined doorway in front of him.

  Over the vox-bead in his ear, Bastogne’s handler spoke once again.

  ‘There must be no evidence linking me to this operation. None.’

  Bastogne knew exactly what that meant. ‘Thy will be done, my lord.’

  ‘Make your last appeal to the God-Emperor for His mercy,’ said the voice, ‘and know that I honour you for your sacrifice. Your work has been righteous. Your rewards will be eternal.’

  ‘Ave Imperator,’ replied Bastogne. ‘It has been an honour and a privilege to serve, my lord.’

  Outside, the assault team’s countdown reached two, then one, then zero. Four hissing canisters bounced into the room and began belching out clouds of stinging green gas. It quickly filled the air, billowing into every corner, causing the defenders to double over and collapse, their bodies wracked by painful muscle spasms. Bastogne raged, even as his lungs began to burn. He should have expected gas. Sartutius dropped to his knees beside Lyndon and coughed wetly into his sleeve. He kept his right hand pressed hard to the prisoner’s skull, pushing forward with the attempted mind-rip. Pale psychic fire licked upwards across his forehead from the sockets of his sightless eyes.

  Through stinging, gas-induced tears, Bastogne thought he saw something ephemeral, something ghostly and vague, ebbing upwards from the prisoner’s skull.

  Sartutius was screaming now, tone and pitch matched perfectly to those of the dying prisoner, and the faint, ghostly stuff poured upwards into his mouth, nose, ears and eyes. Then, suddenly, it stopped, and all sound and motion from the tormented prisoner stopped with it, shut off like a light.

  He collapsed, dead, in peace at last.

  But no peace for Sartutius. The psyker reeled backwards, his wiry muscles locked, his skin stretched tight, his face a terrible rictus of pain. The witchfire flames from his eyes died out. Blood ran in streams from his ears.

  He collapsed in a heap on the floor at Bastogne’s feet.

  ‘Tell me you got something, witch!’ roared Bastogne.

  Sartutius was gasping hard, barely able to breathe. He was a ruin. He felt his life flooding from him. This was death. As expected, the effort of the mind-rip had broken him. It had been too much. Voices in multitude bubbled forth in his mind, rising rapidly, clamouring to dominate, drowning out his own inner voice. Louder and louder. Soon he would be lost completely, his soul buried under the boiling depths of so many monstrous, inhuman others fighting among themselves to possess him, to become manifest in the physical realm.

  But before that, a single word.

  ‘Tychonis,’ he gasped. Control over his body was almost gone.

  ‘Tychonis,’ he managed one more time. ‘Now kill me, damn you. Before it’s too late!’

  Bastogne heard him, saw the white eyes turn black as tar, saw the lips pull back over teeth now sharp and triangular where seconds ago they had been flat and even. He watched raw red seams split open along the psyker’s cheeks from lip to ear, and gasped as the mouth hinged open far wider than any human jaw ought to. The tongue, twice the length it should have been, began lashing around like a red whip, cutting itself raw and bloody on the razor-like teeth.

  A dozen voices laughed and growled and shouted in strange and ancient languages from that hideous maw.

  Horror gripped Bastogne. He could scarcely comprehend what he was seeing, but he managed to press his pistol to the fallen psyker’s head.

  ‘In Terra’s holy name,’ he muttered as he pulled the trigger.

  The pistol kicked hard. The psyker’s head vanished in a blast of light and heat. The body rolled on top of the dead prisoner’s, smoke curling from the cauterised neck.

  The long-range vox-link was still open to his lordship. Bastogne had but a second now.

  ‘Tychonis, my lord. Do you hear me? She’s on Tychonis!’

  If there was any answer, Bastogne never heard it. At that moment, eight respirator-masked figures in body armour stormed the room, four through each doorway, weapons raised. They raced towards each of the incapacitated defenders, savagely kicking the hell-pistol and heavy stubbers out of their hands. One of the intruders hoofed Bastogne hard in the side and he collapsed face down on hot rockcrete. Another immediately knelt on his back, driving down viciously with one knee, pressing him hard into the floor.

  Not one shot was fired. These men had orders to take everyone alive. The prisoners would need to be interrogated if their handler was to be unmasked. Bastogne would, in all likelihood, find himself facing a synovermus of his very own. Would he resist? Would he be as strong and resolute as Lyndon had been?

  It was not a question Omicron could allow him to answer.

  Far away, an order was given.

  From a stealth-cloaked ship high above the planet, something metallic dropped. As it streaked towards its target, it left a thin ribbon of white, a bright contrail cutting vertically through the deep azure of the mid-afternoon sky.

  Twelve seconds later, an area over one kilometre wide in the western slums of Falcara City, the northern capital of the planet Syrion, was utterly obliterated.

  The city lay shrouded in thick ash, smoke and dust for days afterwards. When a wind from the south-east finally picked up, drawing back that smoky veil, the citizens left alive surveyed the damage in grief and confusion. Of the homes, the businesses and the people which had brought life and noise and colour to the area, only burning embers and an eerily perfect crater remained.

  Such sudden and mysterious devastation. Over eighty thousand dead. The planetary inquiry would last decades, but the truth would never emerge. Those who came close to it would vanish, and the event would eventually pass into local legend.

  All of it for the sake of a single, simple word – the name of an insignificant backwater planet that was no longer part of the Imperium of Man.

  ‘Tychonis,’ muttered the old inquisitor lord.

  He rose from his command throne, ignoring the stiffness in his joints, ordered a course set through the warp and left the bridge in the hands of the ship’s captain.

  As he stalked the gloomy stone corridor back to his quarters, he turned it over in his mind. The flames in the wall sconces danced and guttered as he swept past them.

  ‘Why Tychonis? What drew you there?’

  And why
now?

  Four

  Haluk tried to swallow in a mouth suddenly dry.

  His heart raced.

  The black port of the gun barrel pointed right at his face seemed to swallow him.

  Time slowed to a crawl.

  There they stood – two men, one in civilian robes, death-commando from the north, and the other…

  What? ISF? A t’au-aligned Tychonite traitor?

  The man was hard-faced, flint-eyed, roughly ten years Haluk’s senior. He was tall and broad like most of the men that policed the capital alongside the fire caste troopers.

  For a long moment, the two simply stared at each other, barely breathing, nerves jangling.

  Then words. ‘Long we bled upon the open sand.’ His tone was low, his voice gruff.

  Haluk breathed. The tension in his neck eased. He knew the response. ‘And from that sand,’ he said, ‘shoots of truth and purpose did grow.’

  The man lowered his weapon.

  Not ISF. Haddayin. An infiltrator. A fellow servant of the cause.

  Still, he should have been gone already.

  ‘The drones just finished a pass.’ He tapped a metallic t’au glyph on his uniform. ‘All they found was a member of the security forces running last-minute diligence. You’ll have the window you need.’

  Haluk nodded. He wondered if the infiltrator was a city-born sympathiser or had come from the rebel tribes. Kashtu, Ishtu and city-born – all were of tan skin and black hair. There was no way to know; any giveaway in speech or manner would likely have got the infiltrator killed or imprisoned already. Haddayin service to the cause depended on a flawless facade.

  Haluk respected such men. He knew the rawness of his hate for the pogs precluded him from the kind of vital work they did.

  ‘You’ll find the weapon at the top,’ said the infiltrator. ‘Don’t miss.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Haluk, the mere suggestion of it irking him. ‘But why are you here? I was not told to expect you.’