Hecatoncheires

[Inquisitor Sargoth]

Here I lie, at the end of all things. My legs and spine are shattered and I am paralysed, unable to cry out for help, for mercy or death, though there is no-one around to hear.

I can feel it approaching again. My murderer. The ageless abomination that will drag all of mankind into hell.

My eyes are clouding as it rears above me, a small mercy, and I find my last thoughts stray to another deathbed, to a broken promise.

***

I had been in the service of Inquisitor Annabelle Vyzier for twenty years. She was a venerable old crone, approaching her fourth century of life when I had first met her. And now she was dying. For all her age, I had never imagined that she would die.

Her body was rejecting the bionic implants she had accrued over her long life. This was unusual, a million-to-one chance. It was a testament to the old bitch's intolerance that her body was rejecting the very implants that were keeping it alive. 

"Erich. So glad you could join me. Now I can finally find the time to die."

"I came as soon as I could, my lady. My warp-crossing was not short."

"No. I've been waiting for you some months now, you realise. Take this mask off me, doctor."

"My lady..."

"Is still an Inquisitor."

The doctor complied, handing me the mask.

"Leave us. I will call you when we are done."

The doctor left without a backward glance.

"Still making friends, I see."

"So they tell me. You'll forgive me if I skip over the small talk? I have an appointment with another gentleman I am already late to, and frankly I don't give a damn how you've been."

"Very well, my lady. What is it you require of me? I am, as ever, your servant. For a little while longer, at least."

"You're an impish one, child. I should have had that tongue of yours pulled years ago."

"Did they ever say the same of you?"

"Some still do."

"I was referring to 'child'."

She laughed, quietly.

"I'm glad we found time to trade insults, my lady. I would hate for you to have died with your ego intact."

"Oh, I think you'll find it quite unassailable," she smiled, but before she could retort a coughing fit overtook her.

"I wish you didn't have to see me like this. Even at my age, I never expected I'd die this way. I always assumed I'd be murdered. "

"You sound almost disappointed."

"I've always judged people by the calibre of their enemies. I killed most of mine, true, but still. It's a poor show that I should die of semi-natural causes."

"Surely the Adeptus Mechanicus – "

"The cogheads won't help. I doubt they even can. Those superstitious fools see rejection of this type as something profoundly unholy. Their Omnissiah has abandoned me, it seems. Perhaps they think I am cursed. Perhaps they are right.

"Time grows short. I will be brief. I have made the necessary arrangements for you to become a full Inquisitor. Ordinarily this would require the sponsorship and sanction of a living Inquisitor and you would have to spend some time finding a new sponsor upon my death, but time is a luxury you cannot afford and in any case I doubt any of my peers would take on a former student of mine."

"Surely you must have at least one ally left?"

"I never had time to make friends when I could be making enemies. Lazy ones, apparently. Still, I've accrued a few favours over the years, and I've got leverage over quite a few of the Holy Inquisition's hoary old veterans. I've pulled strings. Three of my old colleagues will ensure you are given your own rosette. They will present it at my funeral, in two months time. That should give them time to arrive."

I couldn't help but smile. She'd even planned her funeral. The old bitch had spent her final weeks blackmailing old political rivals, perhaps the closest thing she had ever had to friends, from her deathbed. It was impossible not to admire her.

"I've made the necessary arrangements – my body will be held in stasis until then. They will all want to see it. They will want to be certain I'm dead," Vyzier said, chuckling to herself again. The laughter gave way to further coughing, but she waved away the oxygen mask as I proffered it.

"Thank you, my lady. You honour -"

"I've no time for thanks or – Throne forbid - flattery. You are to be my heir, yes, but you'll soon find it more punishment than reward. I have granted you access to all of my records and resources. My secrets, such as they are, are yours. There is one thing I must tell you myself, however. I destroyed the records years ago – the information was too sensitive, too dangerous to be committed to paper. Listen carefully, boy.

"Almost two centuries ago, when I was a young woman – try not to strain your mind overmuch imagining it – an agent of mine, a brilliant young man by the name of Tillinghast, stumbled upon a chaos cult on some hive world. Hardly unusual, but his investigation and purges slowly painted a picture that was profoundly disturbing. These cultists were not your usual gutter-trash or bored nobles caught up in something beyond them. They were predominantly educated men and women. Adepts, tech-priests, academics, doctors and the like formed the core of this cult. They were not worshipping dark gods or summoning daemons, though Tillinghast later made a passing mention of some fell patron, the Hundred-Handed One. They were studying the warp. As my agent put it, they were trying to master the science of sorcery.

"Even that was nothing especially unusual. What was different was that, in appearance at least, they had succeeded. Each of them was, by his description, as dangerous as an alpha-plus psyker. It took psycannons and psyk-out grenades to bring them down, he said, and not one of them had been detected by the Black Ships when they'd past not three years hence. Lasbolts passed through them, flames could not burn them. The laws of our material universe no longer applied to them. Evenutally Tillinghast claimed they had learned new rules of reality, or perhaps they were bringing a new reality with them. He said... he said it was easy for these rules to be learned. I have little patience for metaphor, but indulge me; imagine an optical illusion, a stereogram. Meaningless, then suddenly one sees the underlying pattern. 

"I should have seen the warnings, perhaps, but I was young. His reports began to stop making sense. He was beginning to understand, he said, to see as they did. He was being corrupted merely by witnessing these cultists. Such things have happened before, of course, but in my experience only in the aftermath of daemonic incursions and warp-breaches. Then messages he sent began to corrupt my astropath in a similar fashion. As far as she was concerned each message was encrypted to the point of being gibberish or a sequence of meaningless numbers, and yet somehow the meaning bled through. I stopped reading them, of course. Other astropaths around that world were affected the same way, an expanding bubble of madness... It was a plague. A mental, psychic plague of sorcery and madness that threatened to spread to every astropath in the Imperium and perhaps from there to every citizen within it.

"I acted quickly. I had the astropaths that had received the messages killed – the final communiqué most delivered was their own kill-order. I even sent assassins to ensure the job was done, that none had been missed by accident or design. Then I went to this world myself, led by own purges. Cities burned in my wake before I declared it clean. I saw those corrupted, witnessed their terrible power. Their bodies were beginning to warp. We performed an autopsy on one. She had fingers growing inside her skull and vestigial tendrils protruding from her vertebrae. I saw another one with a second face growing out of the side of his skull. I ordered all of their bodies burned immediately. I made no effort to understand what had happened because I knew it would invite madness."

"Did you ever find Tillinghast?"

"What was left of him, aye."

Her face darkened.

"And there it ended, should have ended. Months later the world was embroiled in a warp storm, a storm which raged for so long even I began to forget that world's importance."

She paused for a moment, composing herself and taking a few careful breaths.

"Five years ago that warp storm ended. A taskforce led by some fool Inquisitor went to investigate, a taskforce spearheaded by an entire company of the Night Watch Chapter. They planned to investigate the planet and, in all likelihood, destroy it. They arrived at the world – I intercepted astropathic messages which confirm this – and did not return. All communications ceased shortly after they began preliminary auspex scans and sent the several Astartes squads for preliminary reconissance."

"You want me to find out what happened to them."

"No. I want you to burn that world down to the bedrock, smash open the crust and ensure whatever evil dwells there is destroyed. I want you to do what I should have done two centuries ago. Do not allow another loyal soul to set foot on that world and stop any fool who would try to understand what has happened there."

Vyzier paused, regarding me critically for a moment.

"Do you understand the enormity of what I am asking, boy? It is possible I am placing the future of the Imperium in your hands."

"I am honoured, my lady. And, frankly, surprised. I have a question."

"Let me guess; why did I choose you?

"Indeed."

"In truth, I have no-one else to ask. I would never have entrusted this task to you were I not on my deathbed, but do not take this as an insult. You have served me loyally, proven yourself time and time again. Crucially... There are two things that set you above all others in my esteem. Firstly, you have faced the daemonic before, seen its taint with your own eyes, and overcome it.

"Secondly... You lost someone once, didn't you?"

"My brother," I replied, quietly.

For the first time, I heard her voice shake.

"I... I was married, once. Before I was an Inquisitor."

For a moment, I saw pain cloud those dark eyes. For a moment the twisted old woman struggling to breathe before me was actually vulnerable.

"You're like me. You understand. You understand what it is we must face. What we're fighting for."

"The Emperor's soul, you said, once."

"Blessed be His name."

"Trying to grab a few last points before you pass away?"

"I should be so lucky. I'm afraid I think it was time I was gone, Erich. Send the doctor back in – I refused his painkillers when I heard you had arrived, but now I think I should like to rest."

"If you desire confession, last rites or a final argument, my lady, there's a Cardinal Iulanius outside the door. By the look of him he's preparing for an exorcism; is he an old friend  -enemy - of yours?"

"Julian! Really? Ha! I remember when he was just a young catamite. Send him away. My soul has been prepared for death for almost three hundred years."

I carefully replaced her mask and called the doctor in.

"Time for me to die, I think. Try not to enjoy it too much, doctor."

"I am not trying to kill you, madam. Quite hard," the young man said in the familiar the weary tones ofanyone who had spent more than a day in my lady's company. 

"I'll be sure to have you canonised, then. Just give me something for the pain."

The doctor produced a syringe and inserted it carefully into an IV line.

"Promise me, Erich. Promise me you'll carry out a foolish old woman's last order."

"I swear it."

"Good. Pull up the blanket for me, would you, boy? I'd like to enjoy warmth while I still can. I imagine it'll be very cold where I'm headed."

To my surprise, I realised I was crying.

Vyzier saw, and smiled. She might have winked, but her eyelids began to flutter. Her lips traced a litany of names I had never heard before.

I cannot be sure, but I suspect it was the names of her lost family.

All brain activity ceased a few short hours later. Her bionic heart continued to beat for thirty minutes after her death.

***

I can feel my own heart failing.

It reaches out for me now, lifting me from the dirt. I flop in its arms like a ragdoll, a broken toy.

There is blood in my mouth, and yet I know the last thing I shall taste is my failure.