Eisenhorn Omnibus Read online

  What's his name?'

  'Gorfal. But he's dead, three years gone. The current incumbent is a she. Inquisitor General Neve. Anyway, the cell has flared up a few times since then. Nothing a good team of riot-officers couldn't handle. Like I said, the Sons of Bael were pretty harmless, really. They were only interesting in one thing/

  Which was?'

  'Measuring the dimensions of the pylons/

  The pylon had been looming in our windscreen for a while now, and Fischig swept us around it, almost kissing the black stone.

  The moaning song of the wind as it laced through the geometries of the pylon was now so loud I could hear it over the racing turbines of the speeder.

  The pylon was vast: half a kilometre high and a quarter square. The upper facing of the smooth black stone was machined with delicate craft to form holes and other round-edged orifices no bigger than a man's head. It was through these slim, two hundred and fifty metre tubes that the wind moaned and howled.

  And the tubes weren't straight. They wove through the pylon like worm tunnels. Tech-magos had tried running tiny servitor probes through them to map their loops, but generally the probes didn't come back.

  As we banked up higher for another pass, I could see the distant shape of the neighbouring pylon, across the moors, sixty kilometres away. Five thousand, eight hundred and ten known pylons dot the surface of Cadia, not counting the two thousand others that remain as partial ruins or buried relics.

  No two are identical in design. Each one rises to a precise half kilometre height and is sunk a quarter kilometre into the ground. They predate mankind's arrival in this system, and their manner of manufacture is unknown. They are totally inert, by any auspex measure known to our race, but many believe their presence explains the quieting of the violent warp torrents that makes the Cadia Gate the single, calm, navigable route to the Ocularis Terribus.

  'They were trying to measure this thing?'

  'Uh huh/ Fischig replied clearly over the speeder's drive as we pulled another hard turn. This and several others. They had auspex and geo-locators and magnetic plumbs. Finding the exact dimensions… and I do mean exact… was the entire goal of the Sons of Bael.'

  'They connect with Cherubael… I mean, beyond the "Bael" part?'

  The interview logs I've read show they name "Bael" fully as a god called Cherub of Bael, who came amongst them and made demands that they measure the pylons in return for great knowledge and power.'

  'And the inquisitor general… this Gorfal? He suppressed this?'

  'Not deliberately. I think he was just sloppy'

  'I want to speak with the current inquisitor general… Neve, did you say her name was?'

  'Yeah. I thought you might.'

  While daylight remained, we flew west to Kasr Derth, the largest castellum in the region and the seat of provincial government for the Caducades. Fischig switched on the speeder's vox-ponder and broadcast the day's access codes to the sentry turrets as we passed the outer ring-ditch. Even so, Man-ticore and Hydra batteries traversed and tracked us as we went over.

  The vox-ponder pinged fretfully as it detected multiple target-locks.

  'Don't worry/ said Fischig, noticing my look. 'We're safe. I think the Cadians enjoy taking every possible opportunity to practise/

  We ran down the line of a slow moving convoy – drab, armoured twelve-wheeler transports escorted by lurching Sentinel walkers – and followed the highway up towards the ridge of the earthwork. Beyond it, and two more like it, the heavy, grey fortifications and shatrovies of Kasr Derth sulked in the twilight.

  Watch-lights on skeleton towers stood on the upper slope of the earthwork. More turret emplacements and pillboxes studded the defence berm like knuckles. Again, the vox-ponder pinged.

  Fischig dropped the speed and altitude, and swung us down towards the eastern barbican, a small fortress in its own right, bristling with Earth-shaker platforms. A bas-relief Imperial eagle decorated the upper face of the ashlar-dressed structure.

  We ran in through the barbican's gate, over the hydraulic bascule that crossed the inner moat, and into the castellum's deliberately narrow and twisting streets.

  Cadia's earliest kasrs had been built in the High Terra style, with the wide streets laid out on a grid system. In early M.32, a Chaos invasion had made wretchedly short work of three of them. The broad, ordered avenues had proved impossible to defend or hold.

  Since then, the kasrs had been planned in elaborate geometric patterns, the streets jinking back and forth like the teeth of a key. From the air, Kasr Derth looked like an intricate, angular puzzle. Given the Cadians' mettle and their skills at urban-war, a kasr could be held, street by street, metre by metre, for months if not years.

  We slunk along the busy, labyrinthine streets as the caged lamps came on and business began to shut for the night. I was about to remark to Fischig that it looked for all the world like a military camp, until I realised that even the civilian fashion was for camouflaged clothing. It soon became easy to pick out locals from visitors. The jag-white and grey of tundra dress or the panelled green and beige of moor fatigues marked out newcomers and off duty soldiery. The population of Kasr Derth wore grey and brown checkered urban camouflage.

  We passed the stilted horreums of the Imperial Cadian Granary, and the tight-packed baileys of the rich and successful. Even the townhouses of the wealthy had armouring on their mansard roofs.

  To the left lay the brightly-lit aleatorium, to which night crowds were already flocking to gamble away their pay. To the right, Kasr's senaculum with its gleaming, ceramite-plated shatrovy pyramid. Ahead, lay the minster of the Inquisition. The vox-ponder pinged again as the gun-walls along the deep approach followed us.

  Fischig settled the speeder down on the spicae testicae paving of the minster's inner yard, where sunken guide-lights stitched out a winking cross. Inquisitorial guards in gold-laced burgundy armour approached us as we swung back the speeder's canopy and climbed out.

  I showed the nearest one my rosette.

  He clipped his heels together and saluted.

  'My lord/

  'I wish to see the inquisitor general/

  I will inform her staff/ he said obediently, and hurried away across the herringbone paving, holding up his baldric so his power sword wouldn't trip him.

  'You won't like her/ Fischig said as he came round the parked speeder to join me. 'Why?' 'Ah, trust me. You just won't/

  It's late. I had finished business for the day/ said Inquisitor General Neve, stabbing her holoquill back into the brass power-well on the desk.

  'My apologies, madam/

  'Don't bother. I'm not about to shut my doors to the famous Inquisitor Eisenhorn. We're a long way from the Helican sub, but your fame precedes you.'

  'In a good way, I hope.'

  The inquisitor general rose from her writing desk and straightened the front of her green flannel robe. She was a short, sturdy woman in her late one tens, if my eye was any judge, with salt and pepper hair plied back tighdy into a bourse. She had the typical pale, tight flesh and violet eyes of a Cadian.

  'Whatever,' she snapped.

  We stood in her sanctum, an octastyle chamber with a black and white cosmati floor and aethercite walls inscribed with a waterleaf design. It was lit with rushlights and the flame glow accented the carved lotus motif.

  Inquisitor General Neve clumped around her desk to face us, leaning on an ornate silver crutch.

  'You'll want to be reviewing the Bael records, I suppose?'

  'How did you guess?' I asked.

  She favoured her weight on her sound foot and pointed the rubber-capped toe of the crutch at Fischig.

  'Him, I know. He's been here before. One of yours, I suppose, inquisitor.'

  'One of my best/

  She arched her spare, plucked eyebrows. 'Hah. Much that says about you. Come on. The archivum/

  A dim screw-stair led down to the basement archivum. The turning steps of the spiral were hard for her to manage,
but she shooed me away curtly when I offered to assist her.

  'I meant no insult, inquisitor general/ I said.

  'Your kind never do/ she snapped. I felt it wasn't the moment to inquire what kind that might be.

  The archivum was a long, panelled chamber lit only by the lamps of the double-faced desk-row that ran down its middle.

  'Light buoy!' Neve snarled, and a servitor-skull drifted down from the coffered ceiling, hovering at her shoulder and igniting its halogen eye-beams.

  'Bael, Sons of. Find/ she told it, and it coursed away, turning and dipping, sweeping the racks of the catalogue with its twin spears of light.

  It stopped, eight sections down, and began to buzz around a shelf groaning with data-slates, file tubes and dusty paper books.

  Fischig and I followed Neve as she hobbled over to join it.

  'Sons of… Sons of… Sons of Teuth, Sons of Macharius, sons of bitches. She glanced round at me. That passes for humour here, Eisenhorn/

  'I'm sure it does, madam/

  Her fingers went back to the stacks, running along the fraying spines and tagged slate-sleeves, following the skull-buoy's light beams.

  'Sons of Barabus… Sons of Balkar… Here! Here it is. Sons of Bael/

  She pulled a file case off the shelf, blew the dust off it into my face and handed it to me. 'Put it back where you found it when you've finished/ she said. She turned to go.

  Your pardon, wait/ I said.

  Two emphatic thumps of her cratch swung her around to face me again.

  'What?'

  'Your predecessor… um…'

  'Gorfal/ whispered Fischig.

  'Gorfal. He burned the members of this cult without examination. Have you never reviewed the case?'

  She smiled at me. It wasn't encouraging.

  'You know, Eisenhorn… I always imagined roving inquisitors like you had adventurous, exciting lives. All so very exhilarating, all that celebrity and heroism and notoriety. To think I used to dream of being like you. You have no idea, do you?'

  'With respect, inquisitor general… of what?'

  She gestured at the file case I was clutching. 'The crap. The nonsense. The bric-a-brac. The Sons of Bael? Why the hell should I review that case? It's dead, dead and nothing. A bunch of fools who were pulled off the West-moorland pylon in the middle of the night for playing around with geo-locators. Whoooo! I'm so scared! Imagine that, they're measuring us! Do you have any idea what this wardship is like?'

  'Inquisitor general, I-'

  'Do you? This is Cadia, you silly fool! Cadia! Right on the doorway of Chaos! Right in the heart of everything! The seepage of evil is so great, I have a hundred active cults to subdue every month! A hundred! The place breeds recidivists like a pond breeds scum. I sleep three or four hours a night if I'm lucky. My vox chimes and I'm up, called out to another nest of poison that the arbites have uncovered. Firefights in the street, Eisenhorn! Running battles with the foot soldiers of the archenemy! I can barely keep up with the day-to-day banishments, forget the past cases my crap-witted predecessor filed. This is Cadia! This is the Gate of the Eye! This is where the bloody work of the Inquisition is done! Don't distract me with stories of some engineering club gone bad/

  'My apologies/

  Taken. See yourselves out/ She limped away.

  'Neve?'

  She turned. I dropped the file case on to the reading table.

  They might have been idiots/ I said, 'but they're the only solid link I have to a daemonhost that could destroy us all/

  'A daemonhost?' she said.

  That's right. And the beast that controls it. A beast that, if I'm right… is one of ours/

  She lurched back down the archivum.

  'Convince me/ she said.

  THIRTEEN

  A reunion.

  War-bells.

  The long, slow task begins.

  Idon't know if i did convince the inquisitor general. i don't know if i could. but she heard me out and stayed around for another two hours, helping to locate the files of connected cases and other materials. Past nine, she was called away to a disturbance on an island community in the Caducades. Before she left, she offered accommodation for me and my staff in the minster, which I politely declined, and made it clear that 1 had her permission to continue my investigation in Kasr Derth, provided I kept her informed.

  'I've heard stories about your… adventures, Eisenhorn. I don't want anything like that happening on my turf. Do we understand each other?'

  We do.'

  'Good night, then. And good hunting.'

  Fischig and I were left alone in the archivum.

  'You were wrong/1 told him.

  'How's that?'

  'I did like her.'

  'Hah! That hard-nosed bitch?'

  'Actually, I liked her because she was a hard-nosed bitch.'

  I always took pleasure in meeting a fellow inquisitor who conducted their work fairly and seriously, even if their methods differed from mine. Neve was a thoroughbred puritan, and lacked patience. She was abrupt to the point of rudeness. She was over-worked. But she called things as she

  saw them, despised sloppiness, and took the threats to our society and way of life completely seriously. In my opinion, there was no other way for an inquisitor to behave.

  We worked on until midnight, studying and collating the contents of hundreds of case-files.

  By then, the gun-cutter had arrived from the landing fields at Kasr Tyrok, in response to my vox-summons. Fischig found one of Neve's rubricators and charged him with making data-slate copies of the most promising files ready for our return in the morning. Then we got back into the speeder and flew through the castellum's zig-zag streets to the town field.

  The stars were out, and it was cool. Noctule moths fluttered around the landing lights of the waiting cutter.

  There was a mauve smudge in the night sky, down low over the eastern horizon. The rising nebula of the Eye of Terror. Even from this great distance, just a blur in the heavens, it put a chill into me. If the two-headed eagle symbolises all that is good and noble and right about the Imperium of Mankind, that rancid blur symbolised all that was abominable about our eternal foe.

  Laughter and warm voices greeted Fischig as we went aboard. Aemos shook him repeatedly by the hand and Bequin planted a quick kiss on his cheek that made him blush. He exchanged a few playful put-downs with Nayl and Medea, and asked Husmaan if he was hungry.

  'Why?' the scout-hunter asked, his eyes widening in anticipation.

  'Because it's supper time/ said Fischig. 'Betancore, get this crate into the air/

  We were going to that safe place he had mentioned.

  I had not been aboard the sprint trader Essene for some five years. A classic Isolde-pattern bulk clipper, the ship was like a space-going cathedral, three kilometres long, and looked as majestic holding low anchor above Cadia as it had when I first saw it, nearly one hundred years before, in the cold orbit of Hubris.

  Medea coasted us in towards the cargo hatch of the gigantic craft.

  'A rogue trader?' asked Inshabel cautiously, looking over my shoulder at the ship ahead.

  'An old friend/1 reassured him.

  Ship master Tobias Maxilla was, I suppose, my most unlikely ally. He'd made his living shipping luxury goods officially, and unofficially, along the space lanes of the Helican sub-sector. He still did. He was a merchant, he maintained, to any that asked.

  But he had a pirate's taste for adventure, a yearning for the halcyon days of early space-faring. 1 had hired his ship during the affair of the Necro-teuch, to provide nothing more than transport for my team, but he had

  got involved, with increasing glee, and he'd stayed involved ever since. Every few years over the last century, I had hired him to run passage for me or some of my staff, or he had contacted me to ask if his services were needed. Just because he was bored. Just because he was 'in the neighbourhood'.

  Maxilla was an educated, erudite man with a subtle wit and a taste f
or the finest things in life. He was also a charming host and a good companion and I liked him immensely. He was in no way a formal part of my staff. But he was, I suppose, after all this time and all those shared adventures, a vital part.

  The year before, when it had been decided that Fischig would embark on this long chase after the Cadian leads, I had asked Maxilla to provide him with transportation, for as long as it was needed. He had agreed at once, and not because of the generous fee I was offering. To him, it sounded like a true adventure. Besides, it promised a chance to give the old Essene a proper long run out, beyond its normal route of the Helican stars.

  A genuine voyage. An odyssey. That was what Tobias Maxilla lived for.

  He was waiting in the cargo hold to greet us even before the extractor vents had finished dumping out the cutter's thruster fumes. He had dressed for the occasion, as was his way: a blue velvet balmacaan with huge sleeves and a jabot collar, a peascod doublet of japanagar silk, patent leather sabattons with gold buckles, and a stupendous fantail hat perched on his powdered periwig. His face was skin-dyed white and set with an emerald beauty spot. His cologne was stronger than the thruster fumes.

  'My dear, dear Gregor!' he cried, striding forward and taking my proffered hands with both of his. A signal joy to have you back aboard our humble craft/

  'Tobias. A pleasure, as always.'

  And dear Alizebeth! Looking younger and more fragrant than ever!' He clasped her hand and kissed her cheek.

  'Steady now, you'll smudge… your make up/

  "Wise Aemos! Welcome, savant!'

  Aemos just chuckled as his hand was shaken. I don't think he ever knew quite what to make of Maxilla.

  'MrNayl!'

  'Maxilla/

  And Medea! lavishing! Quite ravishing!'

  'You certainly are/ Medea said playfully, allowing one of her circuit-inlaid hands to be kissed.

  "You knew we were coming, Maxilla. You might have smartened up a bit/ said Fischig. Amid laughter, they shook hands. I realised their relationship had changed. They had been together for a year on this mission. Fischig had never really connected with Maxilla: their backgrounds and lives were too divergent. But clearly, a year in each other's company had brokered a true friendship at last.