Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  Freed of fresh torment for almost a minute, the heretic strained against the bonds securing his limbs to the bloodstained table. His only reply, if indeed it was supposed to be one, emerged as a slurred moan of effort.

  ‘Jareth,’ Caius narrowed his eyes. The cadence of his storyteller’s voice altered, slowed, dropped a touch. He sounded like a spiteful parent telling a child that the monsters under his bed were all too real. ‘Jareth, I am offering you salvation. I have stood in this room for three days, forcing myself to breathe in the stench of your lies and listening to you howl. Again and again you rave in the name of daemons. Those false gods are coming to eat your soul. I offer hope.’

  As if on cue, the heretic launched into another shrieking tirade, calling upon unholy names that made the inquisitor’s mind ache. Caius silenced the blasphemy with a nod to the torturer servitor. Drills whined as they came alive, made mushy sounds as they forcefully entered flesh, and protested noisily against the resistance of bone. Caius breathed easier. Even screaming was better than ranting to the gods of the warp.

  When the noise subsided, Caius put away his pocket watch and tried again.

  ‘Jareth, tell me what I wish to know and I will kill you now in the Emperor’s grace. He will protect you. Or continue this performance, if you wish. I will seal you in this cell with my servitor, after programming it to skin you alive. When you finally die in several days’ time, your soul will fall into the maws of the Chaos-things that await you.’

  The heretic drew breath to speak, but convulsed in fevered thrashings, blood and spit spraying from his ruined lips. Several flecks spattered on the servitor’s face, which it ignored completely.

  ‘Every moment of pain is a prayer!’ he cried.

  ‘Is that so?’ Caius kept his hand away from his holster. The effort it took was supreme.

  ‘I am beloved of the Ruinous Powers!’

  ‘You are a heretic strapped to a table, moments from death.’

  ‘I suffer to prove myself worthy!’

  ‘Then you learn now how it was all wasted effort.’ Caius tilted his head slightly – a predator studying wounded prey. The psycannon mounted on his solid bronze shoulder pad whirred as it primed, building up power and auto-racking a bolt. As with the servitor, it responded to the inquisitor’s darkening mood, and as with the servitor, Caius willed the weapon into calmness.

  He watched Jareth with his dual sight: his natural eye seeing the bleeding, dying man, his red-washed false sight seeing the beginnings of a sickening blue corona dawning around the heretic’s face.

  Psychic energy. Powerful psychic energy.

  In the weeks to come, when Bastian Caius looked back upon the events that transpired here, he would recognise this moment as the second when everything slipped out of his control. To his dying day, he felt sick just recalling what followed.

  The heretic’s head snapped round to stare Caius full in the face. Red tears ran in erratic trails down Jareth’s lacerated cheeks.

  Is he crying blood? Caius wondered, through the intensifying thunder of his own heart.

  This was new.

  And this was not good.

  The inquisitor was about to speak when the dozens of pentagrammic wards acid-etched into the walls of the cell – which had taken an Ecclesiarchy priest over a week to complete in astonishing detail – flared with a dull light. Then they, too, started bleeding.

  Yes. This was definitely not good.

  For days, the room had reeked: a dank and obscenely biological smell. Now it soured further, the choking air turning thick with the taste of rancid copper. Caius rested a trembling hand on the aquila-shaped solid gold pommel of his sheathed and deactivated power sword.

  ‘Inquisitor Caius.’ The voice was a growl: an inhuman snarl from a human throat. Something ancient and deeply amused now spoke through Jareth’s lips.

  Oh, Throne of the God-Emperor. Possession…

  As if hearing the inquisitor’s thoughts, the entity wearing Jareth’s body cried out a sound as primal and inhuman as a great tide roaring in. It drowned out the building whine of Caius’s psycannon, and the hiss of the inquisitor’s power sword as it was torn from its scabbard, yet not ignited.

  Somewhere in the back of the wrath-driven howl, like an accompanying chorus, Caius heard Jareth – the real Jareth – sobbing. The sound made Caius’s skin crawl, pressing into his mind like a cold slug slipping through his eardrum. The sense of something else within the room, something palpable but unseen, turned Caius’s tongue thick in his mouth. His false eyes focused and refocused, trying to perceive the hateful blue miasma surrounding the heretic, burning brightest from his eyes, lighting his skull from within.

  Caius’s psychic strength saved him from a much worse fate. Unholiness battered against his skull, a wave of emotional malice projected with psychic force. The inquisitor sagged, but stood resolute. Unprotected from warp emanations, the torturer servitor shuddered as if shot in the head. Its left eye popped in a small welter of yellowing jelly and red juice.

  Caius chanted creeds of admonition and exorcism, yet the words caught in his mind, snagging half-forgotten between his thoughts and lips. The massing hate, thick as fog in the air, spoke volumes. This was so much more than some mere warp-beast.

  Daemon…

  The ragged form which had once been Jareth Kurr, chief factory overseer of Kantrael’s Gamma-19 Forge district, squirmed on the gurney, graceless yet perversely fluid in his motions. The petty heretic had pissed his soul away in sacrifice to a being far more powerful than Caius had predicted. The inquisitor’s muscles seized at the heretic’s laughter, spasming painfully. He couldn’t raise his blade to strike the daemon down where it lay. He couldn’t even take a step closer to the damn thing. The creature’s howling merriment in Caius’s mind fired his nerve synapses, rendering him unable to control his own body.

  Detecting the inquisitor’s panic through synapse-links, the psycannon mounted on his shoulder made a series of minor targeting adjustments. It pointed directly at the wash of blue energy invisible to mortal eyes, its ammunition feeds primed and the chime of readiness ringing in the inquisitor’s mind like an alarm.

  But it didn’t fire. It wouldn’t fire. His mind couldn’t order it to – the daemon’s psychic presence made sure of that.

  ‘Kill it!’ the inquisitor cried to the attendant servitor. The mono-tasked torturer moved forward, flesh drills and bone saws buzzing, oblivious to its ruined eye leaking a trail of dark fluid down its cheek.

  Caius saw, with painful clarity, the paradox playing out before his unblinking eyes. Jareth was a frail, stick-thin factory boss in his fifties who had spent his adult life in offices tallying figures of weapon shipments for the Imperial Guard. The thought of such a man being able to overpower an augmented Inquisitorial servitor was too ludicrous to contemplate. But it was no longer Jareth. Caius sensed the heretic, like a ghost or a shadow, outside his own flesh. The daemon-thing’s theft of the body was almost complete.

  The servitor flashed backwards, hurled through the air and meeting the wall with a wrenching snap of vertebrae. Caius didn’t spare it a glance, though he saw its dying twitches in the corner of his eye.

  Finally, the daemon spoke again.

  ‘My master is the death of worlds. He is the death of Scarus. His name is lost to you, lost to your pitiful brethren. Ten thousand suns have died since it was last spoken by the lips of men. Once it was known to many, in the era when your corpse-god reached out to reclaim the stars. My master was there then, and he laughed at your Emperor. He laughed as your corpse-god wept, finding nothing more than a galaxy that despised him.’

  With each word, Jareth seemed to calm down more and more, falling into a state of trembling inactivity. The room resonated with the unearthly echo of the daemon’s words forced through human vocal chords.

  ‘I will end you,’ Caius said through clenched
teeth. It was all he could do to speak through the muscle-lock. ‘In the name of He who sits upon the Throne of Holy Terra, I will end you.’

  The daemon turned its head and laughed, a rattlesnake sound, and vomited a stream of black blood. The bile washed over the prone servitor slumped against the wall, and though the slave ignored the treatment, its skin began to darken and blister as if washed in boiling water. The tender flesh where the servitor’s metal augments met nerve-dead human skin started to bleed. Its numbed brain registered damage, though not pain, and it started to emit monotone moans as the acidic gush ravaged its biological body parts. Its whines lacked both expression and emotion. It was, after all, capable of neither.

  ‘Ignorance,’ the daemon hissed. Hearing its voice was like standing in a room thick with flies. Caius felt each word like the unpleasant tickling of insect legs on his skin. ‘Such ignorance…’

  After throwing up the blackness, the daemon seemed to wither. Caius gasped as his muscles unlocked, immediately launching into a chant of the Fourteenth Creed of Admonition and Banishment. The words came to his mind now with ease, flashing behind his eyes like quicksilver, each hymnal sentence a brutal chastisement of all warp entities that defiled the perfection of human flesh by possession.

  He didn’t stop to wonder why the daemon’s strength was eroding. For the moment, he didn’t care. It didn’t matter.

  Jareth hissed through his teeth, letting out a terrible buzz as if someone had kicked a wasp nest into a snake pit. His flesh deflated, collapsing in on itself, and the air turned dense with the metallic scent of blood. ‘This is nothing! It means nothing! On the saint’s world it is fated! My master awakens! He will defile your holy world! Do you hear his cry echoing across the warp? He calls to many of us, across the stars… those with the senses to hear his cries… the diseased, the dying, the sickened… I will serve at his side! I will–’

  ‘You will die.’

  The buzzing ceased instantly as the shoulder-mounted psycannon barked once. The only sounds in the room were the echo of the gunshot and the final breath rasping from Jareth’s exploded windpipe. The bolt shell, personally inscribed with litanies of purity by Caius himself, had taken the heretic in the chest and detonated in his lungs. Caius wiped flecks of blood from his cheek, noting with a grimace how the wetness stung his flesh. Toxicology tests would need to be done on Jareth’s blood samples.

  A final word rang in his ears as the aftermath of the gunshot faded. Caius would never know if it came from the air or Jareth’s last breath.

  ‘Kathur.’

  He hefted his sword in hands that no longer shook, thumbing the activation rune on the hilt to wreathe the blade in crackling energy. Caius remained in the room only long enough to destroy the dying servitor with a precise beheading. Even if it could be saved, the thing was surely wretched with taint after such an assault.

  After that was done, the inquisitor left without looking back at the mess that had once been Jareth. Outside the solitary confinement cell, the prison warden stood with a squad of guards. They had been waiting some time, and fairly reeked of fear. The grunts did, at least. The warden did not.

  ‘Is all well, inquisitor?’ the warden asked. He was an aged man, appointed from the Cadian Shock some years before. Where others in his position might be fearful of His Divine Majesty’s Holy Inquisition, the warden was confident and strong-willed, taking an active hand in the running of his prison complex. It pleased him to serve the Emperor now, no matter how unpleasant the duty. No matter how unpleasant and cold the Inquisition’s own men were to deal with. Caius had not made a warm impression on the prison warden.

  ‘Burn the remains,’ Caius said. ‘Then seal the room. You will be contacted by the Ordo Scarus Inquisition when you are allowed to use the cell again. It may be several decades.’ He took a deep breath and met the warden’s eyes. ‘It may be never.’

  The warden nodded and gestured to one of his men carrying a flamer in readiness for this very order. ‘Let me do it,’ he said.

  Caius walked away, leaving them to their work. There was research to be done, and a journey to prepare for.

  The saint’s world, the daemon had said. A shrineworld in Scarus Sector.

  Caius sent warnings to the Ordo Scarus Inquisition, but on the shrineworld’s surface, it had already begun. The warnings came too late; the psychic pleas for help reached out only hours after Caius’s warnings reached his superiors’ ears.

  Caius was still in the empyrean, en route to Kathur, when the plague struck in full.

  And that was how he failed. All because he reached that accursed heretic a week too late.

  The minutes ticked by. Caius watched his pocket-watch, each tick of the second hand eroding his patience a little more. The captain’s meeting with the lord general was evidently taking some time.

  Caius looked to the other two men in the room, Colonel Lockwood and Major Crayce, both upright and at attention, both clad in the same winter grey fatigues and black body armour as every other soldier in the 88th. Their rank markings stood out in polished silver on their right shoulder pads and the front of their visorless helms.

  Finally, the door into Caius’s tactical chamber opened. This was the biggest room on his personal gunship – powered down not far from the Cadian tents – and the inquisitor used it for briefing his team and receiving visitors. Captain Thade walked in, making the sign of the aquila to his superior regimental officers, then repeating the gesture for Caius.

  ‘You are late, captain,’ said Caius, returning the Imperial salute.

  ‘I am. I apologise, inquisitor.’

  ‘No excuse?’

  ‘No excuse. As I said, I apologise, and I am here now.’

  Caius smiled. He liked that answer. ‘I have spoken to Colonel Lockwood and Major Crayce, here. And I have spoken to the lord general. I trust you have been informed of the results of those discussions?’

  Thade nodded. ‘My command, a full one-third of the regiment, is to be seconded to you, to use as you see fit in your duties to the Throne.’

  ‘Quite so, quite so.’ Caius returned his timepiece to his jacket pocket. His false eyes focused on Thade with muted whirring sounds. He dismissed the bio-scan readings that flashed up behind his retinas. Thade was healthy. Nothing else of interest.

  Colonel Lockwood, pushing fifty now and still as tenacious and fit as a soldier in his prime, watched the proceedings in respectful silence. He had a lot of time for Thade – the boy was a hero in his eyes, and brought great honour to the regiment with the silver that shone on his helmet. He offered the young captain a subtle nod of encouragement.

  Major Crayce, his thin face exaggerated by his drooping moustache, remained firmly at attention, violet eyes fixed on Caius. Specifically, he watched the inquisitor’s psycannon, intrigued as the thought-controlled weapon turned and pivoted with Caius’s movements, mirroring every motion of his head.

  ‘May I ask why, inquisitor?’ Thade finally asked.

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why you’ve chosen me and my men out of all the Reclamation’s forces.’ He knew the answer even before asking the question, but Thade had to be sure. Lockwood smiled. Crayce didn’t break attention. Caius remained seated, and without a shadow of a smile he tapped the centre of his own forehead, touching his fingers to his skin in the place where Thade’s silver shone on his own helm.

  ‘I imagine it’s easy to guess why. Now, gentlemen, the captain and I have much to discuss. I thank you for your time.’

  Lockwood and Crayce saluted and left, the former with another nod to Thade, the latter with barely a glance. The door closed behind them, and Thade looked back at the inquisitor.

  ‘Tell me, captain,’ Caius said, ‘what do you know of the Ordo Sepulturum?’

  ‘What in the Great Eye is the Ordo Sepulturum?’

  Ban Jevrian lay back on his bedroll and looked up
at the dark roof of the communal tent. The room smelled like what it was: a makeshift dorm for thirty dirty, sweating Guardsmen.

  Taan Darrick sat on the cot next to him, which just like the others was an uncomfortable affair of squealing springs and thin blankets. The lieutenant murmured litanies of devotion and apology as he dismantled his beaten lasrifle for cleaning.

  ‘Give me a moment,’ he said between verses. All Cadians were meticulous about the maintenance of their weaponry, but Taan made cleaning into an art. It was all very ritualistic. Each dismantled piece rested on a small scrap of paper scrawled with prayers in the lieutenant’s own messy handwriting. There each metal fragment of the rifle sat until it was cleaned, whereupon it would be washed, polished and re-blessed with whispered prayers of accuracy imploring to the machine-spirit within. Finally Taan would reassemble the rifle while speaking the Cadian variant of the Litany of Completion.

  ‘Spirit of the machine, know I honour you. In my hands you are complete, and all I ask is that you fire true.’

  ‘Does your rifle ever talk back to you?’ Jevrian asked. He was as diligent as any soldier in maintaining his overcharged weapons – even more so, due to the innate instability of hellgun-class armaments – but Darrick made one hell of a performance in his dutiful maintenance.

  Taan finished his work and left the gun resting loaded by his bed.

  ‘She sings every time I pull the trigger. Now what were you saying?’

  ‘The captain is meeting with the Ordo Sepulturum.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what is the Ordo Sepulturum?’

  ‘How should I know? Inquisition is Inquisition. A lot of locked doors and secrets I don’t want to learn.’