Eisenhorn Omnibus by Dan Abnett
Flames belched across the chamber. Gonvax shambled forward, forever loyal to his master… and his master’s lover. He tried to squirt flames at the haemonculus, but it was suddenly somehow behind him. Gonvax shrieked as the glaive eviscerated him.
With a howl, Arianrhod threw herself at the dark eldar. I saw her, for a moment, frozen in mid-air, her sabre descending. Then the two bodies struck each other, and flew apart.
The sabre had taken off the eldar’s left arm at the shoulder. But his glaive…
I knew she was dead. No one could survive that, not even a noble swordswoman from far Carthae.
Bequin was pulling me up. ‘Gregor! Gregor!’
Beldame Sadia, her spider carriage limping, was fleeing towards the staircase.
Something exploded behind me. I could hear Ravenor bellowing in rage and pain.
I ran after the Beldame.
THE UPPER CHAPEL, above ground, was silent and cold. Darknight flares glimmered through the lines of stained glass windows.
‘You can’t escape, Sadia!’ I shouted, but my voice was thin and hoarse.
I glimpsed her as she skittered between the columns to my left. A shadow in the shadows.
‘Sadia! Sadia, old hag, you have killed me! But you will die by my hand!’
To my right now, another scuttling shadow, half-seen. I moved that way.
I was stabbed hard from behind, in between my shoulder blades. I turned as I fell, and saw the manic face of the Beldame’s arch-poisoner, Pye. He cackled and giggled, prancing, a spent injector tube clutched in each hand.
‘Dead! Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead!’ he warbled.
He had injected me with the secondary part of the poison.
I fell over, my muscles already cramping.
‘How does it feel, inquisitor?’ Pye chuckled, capering towards me.
‘Emperor damn you,’ I gasped and shot him through the face. I blacked out.
WHEN I CAME round, Beldame Sadia had me by the throat and was shaking me with her augmetic mandibles.
‘I want you awake!’ she hissed, her veil falling back and the toxin sacs in her wizened cheeks bulging. ‘I want you awake to feel this!’
Her head exploded in a spray of bone shards and tissue. The spider carriage went into convulsions and threw me across the chapel. It continued to scuttle and dance, her corpse jerking slackly from it, for a full minute before it collapsed.
I was face down on the floor, and I tried to turn, but the advancing effect of the poison was shutting me down.
Shutting me down hard.
Massive feet strode into my field of vision. Armoured feet, plated with ceramite.
I rolled as best I could and looked up.
Witchfinder Tantalid stood over me, holstering the boltgun he had used to kill Beldame Sadia. He was encased in gold-encrusted battle armour, the pennants of the Ministorum suspended over his back plate.
‘You are an accursed heretic, Eisenhorn. And I claim your life.’
Not Tantalid, I thought as my consciousness spun away again. Not Tantalid. Not now.
TWO
Something so typically Betancore.
My fallen.
The summons.
FROM THE MOMENT I slipped into unconsciousness at the feet of the vicious Witchfinder Tantalid, I knew nothing more until I woke, twenty-nine hours later, aboard my gun-cutter. I remembered nothing about the seven attempts to shock my system back to life, the cardiac massages, the anti-venom shots injected directly into my heart muscle, the fight to make me live again. I learned all about it later, as I slowly recovered. For days, I was as weak as a feline whelp.
Most particularly, I knew nothing about the way Tantalid had been denied. Bequin told me, a day or two after my first awakening. It had been something so typically Betancore.
Alizabeth had been hard on my heels up the stairs from the sacrarium, in time to see Tantalid’s arrival. She had known him at once. The Witchfinder is notorious throughout the sub-sector.
He’d been about to kill me, and I was unconscious at his feet, going into anaphylactic shock with the venom bonding and seething in my veins.
She’d cried out, fumbling for her weapon.
Then light – hard, powerful light – had streamed in through the stained glass windows. There was a roaring sound. My gun-cutter, its lamps on full beam, rose to a hover over the rained chapel, lighting up the night. Guessing what was about to follow, Bequin had thrown herself down.
Betancore’s voice had boomed out from the hull tannoy of the hovering gunship.
‘Imperial Inquisition! Step away from the inquisitor now!’
Tantalid had squinted up into the glare, his stringy tortoise head turning in the rim of his massive carapace armour.
‘Ministorum officer!’ he had yelled back, his voice amplified by his suit’s vox-unit. ‘Back off! Back off now! This heretic is mine!’
Bequin grinned as she told me Betancore’s response. ‘Never argue with a gun-cutter, you asshole.’
The slaved servitors in the cutter’s blunt wingtips opened fire, hosing the chapel with autocannon shells. The stained glass windows had all shattered, statues had been decapitated, flagstones had disintegrated. Hit at least once, Tantalid had fallen backwards into the dust and debris. His body had not been found, so I presumed the bastard had survived. But he had been smart enough to flee.
My prone body had not been touched, even though the chapel around me had been peppered with fire.
Typical Betancore bravado. Typical Betancore finesse.
She was just like her damned father.
‘SEND HER TO me,’ I told Bequin as I lay back in my cot, half-dead and feeling terrible.
Medea Betancore looked in a few minutes later. Like her father, Midas, she was clad in the red-piped black suit of a Glavian pilot, and she proudly wore his old cerise, embroidered jacket.
Her skin, like Midas’s, like all that of all Glavians, was dark. She grinned at me.
‘I owe you,’ I said.
Medea shook her head. ‘Nothing my father wouldn’t have done.’ She sat on the foot of my cot.
‘He’d have killed Tantalid, though,’ she decided.
‘He was a better shot.’
That grin again, pearl white teeth framed by ebony skin.
‘Yeah, he was that.’
‘But you’ll do,’ I smiled.
She saluted and left.
MIDAS BETANCORE HAD been dead for twenty-six years. I missed him still. He was the closest thing to a friend I had ever had. Bequin and Aemos, they were allies, and I trusted them with my life. But Midas…
May the God-Emperor rot Fayde Thuring for taking him. May the God-Emperor lead me to Fayde Thuring one day so that I and Medea may avenge Midas.
Medea had never known her father. She’d been born a month after his death, raised by her mother on Glavia, and had come into my service by chance. I was her godfather, a promise to Midas. Duty bound, I had visited Glavia for her ascension to adulthood, and watched her drive a Glavian long-prow through the vortex rapids of the Stilt Hills during the Rites of Majority. One glimpse of her skills had convinced me.
ARIANRHOD ESW SWEYDYR was dead. So were Gonvax and Qus. The battle in the sacrarium had been fierce. Ravenor had killed the raging haemonculus, but only after it had ripped open his belly and taken off Zu Zeng’s left ear.
Gideon Ravenor was in intensive care in the main city infirmary of Lethe. We would collect him once he was out of danger.
I wondered how long that would be. I wondered how he would be. He had loved Arianrhod, loved her dearly. I prayed this loss would not set him back too far.
I mourned Qus and the swordswoman. Qus had been with me for nineteen years. That Darknight in the chapel had robbed me of so much.
Qus was buried with full honours in the Imperial Guard Memorial Cenotaph at Lethe Majeure. Arianrhod was burned on a bare hill west of the salt-licks. I was too weak to attend either service.
AEMOS BROUGHT THE sabre Barbari
AS I WORKED my way back to health, I considered Tantalid. Arnaut Tantalid had risen from the rank of confessor militant in the Missionaria Galaxia seventy years before to become one of the Ministorum’s most feared and ruthless witch-hunters. Like many of his breed, he followed the doctrines of Sebastian Thor with such unswerving precision it bordered on clinical obsession.
To most of the common folk of the Imperium, there would be blessed little to choose between an Ordo Xenos inquisitor such as myself and an ecclesiarchy witchkiller like Tantalid. We both hunt out the damning darkness that stalks mankind, we are both figures of fear and dread, we are both, so it seems, laws unto ourselves.
Twinned though we may be in so many ways, we could not be more distinct. It is my personal belief that the Adeptus Ministorum, the Imperium’s vast organ of faith and worship, should focus its entire attention on the promulgation of the true church of the God-Emperor and leave the persecution of heretics to the Inquisition. Our jurisdictions often clash. There have, to my certain knowledge, been two wars of faith in the last century provoked and sustained by just such rivalry.
Tantalid and I had locked horns twice before. On Bradell’s World, five decades earlier, we had faced each other across the marble floor of a synod court, arguing for the right to extradite the psyker Elbone Parsuval. On that occasion, he had triumphed, thanks mainly to the strict Thorian mindset of the Ministorum elders of Bradell’s World.
Then, just eight years ago, our paths had crossed again on Kuuma.
Tantalid’s fanatical hatred – indeed, I would venture, fear – of the psyker was by then insurmountable. I made no secret of the fact that I employed psychic methods in the pursuit of my work. There were psychic adepts in my staff, and I myself had worked to develop my own psychic abilities over the years. Such is my right, as an authorised bearer of the Inquisition’s seal.
In my eyes, he was a blinkered zealot with psychotic streak. In his, I was the spawn of witches and a heretic.
No courtroom argument for us on Kuuma. A little war instead. It lasted an afternoon, and raged through the tiered streets of the oasis town at Unat Akim.
Twenty-eight latent psykers, none older than fourteen, had been rooted out of the population of Kuuma’s sprawling capital city during a purge, and sequestered prior to their collection by the Black Ships. They were recruits, a precious resource, untainted and ready to be shaped by the Adeptus Astropathicus into worthy servants of the God-Emperor. Some of them, perhaps, would have the ultimate honour of joining the choir of the Astronomican. They were frightened and confused, but this was their salvation.
Better to be found early and turned to good service than to remain undetected and become tainted, corrupt and a threat to our entire society.
But before the Black Ships could arrive to take them, they were spirited away by renegade slavers working in collusion with corrupt officials in the local Administratum. Vast sums could be made on the black market for unregistered, virgin psychic slaves.
I followed the slavers’ trail across the seif dunes to Unat Akim with the intention of liberating the youngsters. Tantalid made his way there to exterminate them all as witches.
By the end of the fight, I had driven the witchfinder and his cohorts, mostly foot soldiers of the Frateris Militia, out of the oasis town. Two of the young psykers had been killed in the crossfire, but the others were safely transferred into the hands of the Astropathicus.
Tantalid, fleeing Kuuma to lick his wounds, had tried to have me declared heretic, but the charges were swiftly overturned. The Ministorum had, at that time, no wish to court conflict with their allies in the Inquisition.
I had expected, known even, that Tantalid would return sometime to plague me. It was a personal matter now, one which his fanatical disposition would fix upon and transform into a holy calling.
But the last I had heard, he had been leading an ecclesiarchy mission into the Ophidian sub-sector in support of the century-long Purge Campaign there.
I wondered what had brought him to Lethe Eleven at so inopportune a moment.
BY THE TIME I was back on my feet, two weeks later, the Darknight was over and I knew the answer, in general if not specific terms.
I was hobbling around on a cane in the private mansion I had rented in Lethe Majeure when Aemos brought me the news. The great Ophidian Campaign was over.
‘Great success,’ he announced. ‘The last action took place at Dolsene four months ago, and the Warmaster has declared the sub-sector cleansed. A famous victory, don’t you think?’
‘Yes. I should hope so. It’s taken them long enough.’
‘Gregor, Gregor… even with a force as large as the hallowed Battlefleet Scarus, the subjugation of a sub-sector is an immense task! That it took the best part of a century is nothing! The pacification of the Extempus sub-sector took four hundred y—’
He paused.
‘You’re toying with me, aren’t you?’
I nodded. He was very easy to wind up.
Aemos shook his head and eased his ancient body down into one of the leather chairs.
‘Martial law still dominates, I understand, and caretaker governments have been established on the key worlds. But the Warmaster himself is returning with the bulk of the fleet in triumph, setting foot in this sub-sector again for the first time in a hundred years.’
I stood by the open windows, looking out from the mansion’s first floor across the grey roofs of Lethe Majeure which seemed to coat the hills of the Tito Basin like the scaled hide of some prehistoric reptile. The sky was a magnolia haze, and a light breeze breathed. It was almost impossible now to picture this place beset by the filthy, permanent shadows of the Darknight.
Now, perhaps, I knew why Tantalid had returned. The Ophidian war was over, and his holy mission concluded with it.
‘I remember them setting out, don’t you?’ I asked.
A foolish question. My savant was a data-addict, driven since the age of forty-two standard to collect and retain all manner of information thanks to a meme-virus he had contracted. There was no possibility of him forgetting anything. He scratched the side of his hooked nose where his heavy augmetic eye-pieces touched.
‘How could either of us forget that?’ he replied. ‘The summer of 240. Hunting the Glaw clan on Gudrun during the very Founding itself.’
Indeed, we had played a particular role in delaying the start of the Ophidian Campaign. The Warmaster, or lord militant as he had been back then, had been all but set to launch his purge into Ophidian space when my investigation of the heretic Glaw family had triggered a mass uprising later known as the Helican Schism. To his great surprise and displeasure, the Warmaster had been abruptly forced to redirect his readied forces in a pacification of his very own sub-sector.
Warmaster Honorius. Honorius Magnus they were calling him. I had never met him, nor had I much wish to. A brutal man, as are so many of his kind. It takes a special mindset, a special brutality, to crush planets and populations.
‘There is to be a great Jubilation on Thracian Primaris,’ Aemos said. ‘A Holy Novena congregated by the Synod the High Ecclesiarchy. It is rumoured that the Imperial Lord Commander Helican himself will attend, specifically to bestow upon the Warmaster the rank of Feudal Protector.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be very pleased. Another heavy medallion to throw at his officers when he’s annoyed.’
‘You’re not tempted to attend?’
I laughed. In truth, I had thought to return to the Helican sub-sector capital before long. Thracian Primaris, the most massive, industrialised and populated world in the sub-sector, had wrested capital planet status from ancient Gudrun after the disgrace and foment of the Schism, finally achieving the preeminen
There was work to be done, reports to be filed and presented, and those things could best be achieved by returning to my property on Thracian, my base of operations, near to the Palace of the Inquisition. But I had little love for Thracian Primaris. It was an ugly place, and I only made my headquarters there out of convenience. The thought of pomp and ceremony and festivals filled me with quiet dread.
Perhaps I would go to Messina instead, or to the quiet of Gudrun, where I maintained a small, comfortable estate.
‘The Inquisition is to attend in great strength. Lord Rorken himself…’
I waved a hand in Aemos’s direction. ‘Does it appeal to you?’
‘No.’
‘Are there not better uses for our time? Pressing matters? Things that would be more easily achieved away from such overblown distractions?’
‘Most certainly,’ he said.
‘Then I think you know my mind.’
‘I think I do, Gregor,’ he said, rising to his feet and reaching into the pocket of his green robe. ‘And therefore I’m fully prepared for the fact that you’re going to curse me when I give you this.’
He held out a small data-slate, an encrypted message-tile whose contents had been received and stored by the astropaths.
The official seal of the Inquisition was stamped across its front.
THREE
Capital world.
The Ocean House.
Intruders, past and present.
THRACIAN PRIMARIS, CAPITAL world of the Helican sub-sector, seat of government, Helican sub-sector, Scarus sector, Segmentum Obscurus. You can read that description in any one of a hundred thousand guidebooks, geographies, Imperial histories, pilgrimage primers, industrial ledgers, trade directories, star maps. It sounds impressive, authoritarian, powerful.
It does no justice at all to the monster it describes.
I have known hellholes and death-planets that from space look serene and wondrous: the watercolours of their atmospheres, the glittering moons and belts they wear like bangles and jewels, the natural wonders that belie the dangers they contain.