Inferno Volume 2 - Guy Haley Read online

  Fifth Reflection

  I was compelled to divide the squad, for the mansion’s size vastly exceeded my estimates. It was almost as though its inner dimensions defied its exterior, or enlarged slyly around us, spawning new configurations out of sight. There was hazard in separating, yet also in lingering in this defiled place, so I was eager to find our prize, redact it and be gone.

  Yes, my brother-self, I am aware how absurd that now seems, but it was a lifetime ago and you fared no better, so do not presume to judge me. We are one in our folly!

  It was Laurent who found the mirror. I had assigned him the uppermost floors and taken the cellars myself, convinced the konteza would hide her darkest secrets underground, but that assumption dignified her with caution or shame. Even then, I should have known her better. While I wandered through a sprawling storehouse of condiments to sate or embolden mortal appetites, Laurent uncovered a temple… of a kind.

  ‘It is an abomination, Thorn Master,’ he continued after reporting his find. ‘How can such things evade the God-Emperor’s gaze?’

  I frowned at the static drenching his voice. Something had been interfering with the squad’s vox since we split up, becoming worse as the distance between us grew. Occasionally I heard an anomalous sound beneath the white noise – a voice perhaps? – but it slipped away whenever I tried to make sense of it.

  ‘Master, we cannot let this stand!’ Laurent pressed, his passion carrying through the distortion. ‘If we–’

  ‘The mirror, Thornblood?’ I snapped. ‘You have located it?’

  ‘I… Yes, Thorn Master, it is here.’

  ‘On route,’ I replied, dismissing his plea. ‘Brothers, converge on Laurent!’ Anselm and Salvatore voxed affirmatives. Veland’s clicked response followed several seconds later, but I was too intent on our prize to admonish his tardiness.

  The blizzard pressed close against the windows as I hurried towards the upper levels, its cloak now so dense the outside world might have been gone, erased by that swirling nothingness. And yet, despite its ferocity, I heard no wind beyond the casements.

  As I passed an open door something moved at the corner of my eye. I swung round, my crozius and bolt pistol raised. Beyond the threshold was a hexagonal chamber devoid of windows, its walls sheathed in black tiles engraved with floral coils. Serpentine lumen strips lined the walls, bathing every­thing in a soft indigo radiance that also appeared to heat the room, for the perennial ice was absent here – indeed my sensors confirmed the temperature was humid.

  My steps clattered loudly when I entered, for the floor was a smooth sheet of glass. Fibrous strands ran under its misted surface in a dense web, presumably extending under the whole room and possibly even beyond. Indeed, I imagined those tendrils insinuating themselves throughout the entire mansion, clustering beneath the plaster like rot.

  The lights brightened with my advance, revealing a bulbous urn at the chamber’s centre. A plant had erupted from the container’s neck in a rampant tangle of vines and leathery leaves that pressed against the ceiling. Vast flowers bloomed among the snarl, their fleshy bulbs fringed with black petals. I have never been more thankful for the sanctity of my sealed armour, for I had no wish to inhale the musk of those leprous blossoms.

  ‘Are you so sure of that?’ The voice surged up on a wash of static, its rich contralto timbre cutting through the distortion. ‘The boon of the Sable Kiss might spur you to profundity once more, Artisan Illuminant.’

  ‘Only to profanity, witch,’ I answered, for I was in no doubt about the speaker’s identity. That voice was the perfect match for the woman in the portrait. I realised I had been waiting for Urzelka Esseker to address me since seeing her likeness. But how did she know my old honorific, and the dishonour it celebrated? Had she plucked it from my mind? No – no, that was not possible… but perhaps from one of the others, though only Anselm and Salvatore would remember such things.

  ‘Paradise lost is all the sweeter rediscovered,’ the witch wheedled, ‘and damnation not nearly as sour as you might imagine.’

  The plant was rustling gently, all its flowers turned towards me. Its movements revealed several skulls nestled among its vines like pale bulbs. How many souls had surrendered willingly to its lure over the years? And how many who resisted had simply been hurled into its embrace?

  ‘Why so fearful of your own gifts, Bjargo Rathana?’ my tormentor asked tenderly. It sickened me to hear her speak my name, as if to a lover. Which of my brothers had betrayed it to her?

  ‘You are mistaken, heretic!’ I jabbed my crozius at the plant, as if the witch resided there. ‘By His holy name, I abjure you!’

  ‘You abjure nobody save yourself, broken thing,’ she mocked. ‘And whatever I will, will be!’ With a swell of static she was gone.

  ‘The Emperor knows you!’ I bellowed. ‘And He condemns!’

  The plant shivered, as if in empathy. To my disgust I realised its container wasn’t an urn at all, but the fleshy seedpod it had sprung from. Resisting the impulse to waste ammunition upon it – for I would not taint my crozius with its sap – I stalked from the room. Doubtless that malign growth was but one of many abominations cultivated in the witch’s domain.

  I found Laurent on the top floor, standing just beyond the stairwell, with Anselm and Salvatore to either side, all three shrouded in the same silence. I slowed my stride as I joined them, aghast at the enormity of the blasphemy before me.

  The whole level had been opened up into a single cavernous space under the mansion’s central dome, from which a vast chandelier hung. Thousands of cut-glass lumoglobes glittered in that baroque web of light, leaving no room for shadows, though they would have been welcome, for the entire chamber was devoted to depravity.

  I will not dwell upon the myriad engines of torture assembled in that unholy gallery, save to say their construction was masterful. Every one of them sported exhaustive controls to tweak and tune the laments they played upon the flesh, offering countless variations on every conceivable theme. I doubted any of the konteza’s victims had shared quite the same agony or perished before she was entirely satisfied.

  Oh, there was genius behind those machineries of misery – her genius – yet every one was an obscenity.

  As you well know, the Angels Penitent are no strangers to the virtues of torture. Applied with sobriety, the excruciation of the body is a righteous instrument of correction, coercion or execution. Indeed it is the sixth sacrament of the Trial of Thorns that our neophytes must endure to earn the black carapace. But the rites practised here were of a different order and their intent vile, for it was abundantly clear that the konteza’s engines powered not just suffering, but also pleasure of equal magnitude.

  Do not ask me to describe how she accomplished this perversion for I will not stoop to such vulgarity. Besides, you can see the devices on your side of the glass, so you know their methodology. Never have I been so repelled by mortal vice!

  Evidently the chamber had hosted one last great orgy of ecstatic torment, for there were corpses everywhere, frozen like the intruders below, but boasting the marks of far more outlandish deaths. They were displayed alongside the machines that killed them, posed like the mangled dolls of a diabolical child.

  ‘Their lips wear smiles their eyes deny,’ Anselm said bleakly, breaking the silence.

  ‘The Emperor condemns!’ Salvatore declared. We chorused the sacred words, drawing purity from them.

  ‘This was more than depravity,’ I judged, glaring at the curved runes inscribed upon the machines. ‘It was a ritual.’

  Despite my helmet’s filters I could smell those malefic sigils – the bittersweet aroma of poisoned dreams, pregnant with the promise of lies that might be true… if only I would drink deep of their charms.

  ‘She sacrificed her followers,’ Anselm gauged, examining the nearest cadaver’s finery.

  ‘Yes, Redactor,’ I
agreed, looking away from the runes. ‘And they offered themselves willingly.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Laurent said quietly. He had removed his helmet, as if in mourning. Doubtless he was remembering the words of the dying crone at the gates. The konteza took whatever she needed – her own and others. ‘There are innocents among them,’ he added.

  ‘Nobody is innocent, Thornblood,’ I rebuked him. ‘And it matters not who they were. They died for her regardless. That was enough.’

  ‘Enough for what, master?’ Salvatore asked.

  ‘To escape her people’s wrath! Sooner or later they would have come for her in numbers her thralls could not withstand.’

  ‘You believe she survived, master?’ Salvatore raised his flamer instinctively.

  ‘Oh, I know it, brother-sergeant! She is still here, though not as she was. Her escape was not flight, brother.’

  ‘We must destroy her,’ Laurent urged.

  ‘Yes, Thornblood,’ I assured him, but my attention was elsewhere, for I had seen our true objective.

  The Mirror of Athanazius stood upon a circular platform at the far side of the chamber, gazing upon the atrocities like a vast glass eye. Instinctively I understood it had been the ceremony’s focal point, one heresy used to amplify another. Though I was here to destroy the artefact I was outraged that our legacy had been defiled in such a way. The mirror’s sins belonged to the Chapter!

  We crossed the gallery in silence, wary of the narrow spaces between the machines, though I didn’t believe any conventional foes remained. The darkness haunting this place was no longer a creature of flesh and blood.

  As I climbed the platform’s steps I saw you rising through the glass ahead to meet me, the hollows of your iron skull fixed upon my own, the razor wire halo wreathing your cranium flecked with rust. A ring of runes encircled your window, carved into the wooden boards of the dais and filled with blood. Their power was enhanced by a plethora of occult paraphernalia – black candles, an antlered skull inlaid with gold, a desiccated six-fingered hand… They were the common trinkets of heretics, made uncommon here by one who knew her craft all too well.

  By unspoken consent we kicked the circle apart and crushed the foul baubles underfoot. Laurent’s expression was thunderous, but it was a righteous fury, free of the Black Rage’s mania. I felt pride in him then shame in myself, for pride begets the fall.

  ‘Master, we cannot leave the witch’s fate to chance,’ he said, turning to face me. ‘If we burn this place she may escape.’

  ‘The konteza is not our objective,’ I demurred, but not harshly.

  ‘Then what is our purpose?’ Laurent pressed. ‘If we suffer such heretics to live then why fight at all?’ The sensitivity of the Resplendent endured in him, yet he was unmistakably a Penitent. With time he might have become one of our staunchest voices. ‘Does the Testament not demand–’

  ‘Beware!’ I yelled as a grotesque figure appeared in the mirror behind him. It wore the black-and-umber armour of a Penitent, but its plates were warped into forms that looked organic, their surface whorled and veined with red. Mauve smoke gushed from spiny nodules atop its backpack, framing a backswept helmet sporting a quilled crest. The helm’s speaker-grille had elongated into a maw that yawned to the warrior’s breastplate and squeezed its eye-lenses into slits. Yet despite all these corruptions it was the symbol painted on its faceplate that appalled me – a white cross.

  ‘Brother Veland?’ Laurent asked, looking over my shoulder as the horror stepped onto the dais behind me. There was no trace of revulsion in his eyes as he greeted it, for while I saw its honest reflection, Laurent had his back to the mirror and merely saw its physical form.

  ‘Will you not agree–’ Laurent’s head disintegrated into a red mist as the thing that had been Veland opened fire, its bolter’s concussive bursts wringing strange harmonies from the air.

  I dived aside and the bullet intended for me struck the mirror and disappeared in a swirl of ripples, as if passing through a pool of water. In the same instant Anselm threw himself from the platform, returning fire with his own bolter as he leapt away from Veland’s assault. Salvatore simply stood his ground and brought his flamer to bear. As it belched fire an incoming round pierced the nozzle and detonated inside the weapon. I have never seen such an improbable shot, nor could I tell whether it was the result of dazzling marksmanship or outrageous misfortune, but the result was the same. The weapon exploded, drenching Salvatore in burning promethium and incinerating his arms from the elbows down.

  With a curse I spun round, my bolt pistol bucking furiously as I fired. I wasn’t facing the abomination I’d seen in the mirror, but a fellow Penitent. Veland was hunched in a feral stance as he targeted me, but his armour was unmarked by corruption. Nevertheless, the noise screeching from his helm’s speaker-grille was evidence enough of taint. That dissonant shriek wracked the soul as keenly as the ears, like a dirge channelled from the warp.

  Stumbling, I muted my auditory receptors with a coded word and the gunfire fell to a distant booming, but the sonic barrage was unabated. It swirled about my helmet like a swarm of infernal insects, gnawing at my senses and tearing my thoughts apart before they could crystallise. I felt the buffeting of Veland’s bullets slamming against my armour, ripping away chunks of ceramite while my befuddled aim went wide. Dimly I realised my eyes were bleeding.

  I barely heard Salvatore’s roar as his flame-ridden form barrelled into Veland. The sergeant’s back erupted as a slug tore into his midriff at close range, the spray of blood hissing into red steam from the heat. It was a dire wound, but Salvatore’s momentum carried them both over the platform’s edge.

  Freed from the sonic assault, I charged forward and saw them hit the ground in a flame-tangled sprawl that left Salvatore on top. With his arms scorched away and his spine severed, the Thornguard tried to hold Veland down with his bulk alone, but it was a hopeless struggle. With an ululating cry, the madman threw him off and reached for his fallen bolter.

  ‘The Emperor condemns!’ I cried, firing as I leapt from above. My explosive shells thudded into Veland’s chest a heartbeat before my boots followed, crashing onto the weakened armour like twin hammers. His breastplate caved in, rupturing the solid bone cage beneath. The impact threw his helmet free, revealing the travesty of my foe’s once handsome face. His mouth was distended into a rictus yawn, its lips drawn back from spiny shark-like teeth. The flesh framing that maw had stretched and torn to his ears, only held together by bloody strips. Black eyes glared at me from sunken, scale-rimmed sockets that wept purple smoke.

  ‘She… knows… you!’ The words bubbled up from the back of the creature’s throat, their intonation slurred and broken, for that razor-toothed maw wasn’t built for speech. ‘Knows… you… for… a…’

  I rammed my crozius between its jaws and silenced its blasphemy.

  Salvatore still lived, though only a sliver of vitality remained to him. Of Anselm there was no sign, nor any answer on the vox. It was perplexing, but I would have to address that later.

  Smoke wafted from the sergeant’s scorched armour as I removed his helmet to offer the Everlasting Sacrament. Flat on his back, he waited silently as I spoke the elegy.

  ‘Burn me, master,’ he rasped when I was done, turning his head to regard the nearest display of corpses. ‘Don’t let the witch… play… her–’ His appeal broke into a blood-flecked coughing fit.

  ‘It will be done, brother-sergeant,’ I promised. ‘She will not have you.’

  ‘The boy… was right. Have to… purge her.’

  ‘Yes, my brother.’

  His eyes clouded and the silence lingered until I thought he was gone, but then his gaze locked on me once more. ‘I have sinned, master.’ It was the faintest of whispers. ‘I used to… paint. Never any good… but…’

  ‘All the Resplendent have sinned,’ I assured him. ‘Our vanity damned us. Ther
e can be no forgiveness, only penance. Now and ever after, the Emperor condemns!’

  I expected him to repeat the blessed phrase, for there is no finer way for an Angel Penitent to pass into oblivion, and Salvatore Jacinto was among the most fervent of us. Instead, in that final moment, he smiled sadly and whispered the words that still haunt me.

  ‘I never stopped.’

  Sixth Reflection

  We are almost done now, mirror-brother. This has been a tortuous redaction, far exceeding any other I have presided over, but Athanazius’ mirror is an artefact of a different order, hence the ritual cannot be expedited. I have castigated the unholy glass with the entirety of the nine hundred and ninety-nine litanies of Reverent Banishment, repeating every word until the intonation was perfect. Black incense wafts from my armour’s censers, filling the air with the burnt stench of regret, while the Exhalation Excruciatis drones from the skull-bound speakers upon my backpack, its atonal groan lending weight to my words.

  Naturally, I divined the physical expression of the mirror’s redaction long ago. As witness Veland’s stray bullet, the glass cannot be broken directly, so I shall strike it from behind, where it is blind. My blessed crozius will make short work of the frame’s back-plate, and through it the glass itself. No, it is the spiritual aspect of the task that has challenged me, for I have been assailed by misgivings. Before I attempt the final step I must lay them to rest. And so I stand before you now, my first brother. Together we shall purge ourselves of doubt!

  The sorceress is the least part of my irresolution. She has returned often to haunt me – taunting, teasing, cajoling or threatening as the mood takes her, but I am dead to her words. I cannot deny she knows what I once was, for she never tires of parading my sins before me, but she understands nothing. Her mind is sharp, yet surprisingly shallow, eroded to pettiness by unbridled ambition. In time what little remains of her shall devour itself, as a rapacious serpent consumes its own tail. Oh, make no mistake, she is poisonous beyond measure, but she has no form or substance to administer her venom unless we open ourselves to her, as thrice-cursed Veland did.