The Daemonologist

[Mohauk]

A Prologue: he came to us after the iron men.

When all was once more still, and Iron rested again beneath rock
We took the sprouting lichen, and we ground it and ate it.
And the brothers among us who had touched spirits
They ate the most, and they dusted it into their nostrils with brushes.

We were told we would see old Gods, and new. We saw nothing.
We ate the meat of those who had been killed by the Iron
And for two months we would eat and breathe the sprouting fungus
And though we saw strange lights and strange sights
We saw no Gods, old or new.

But on the seventh day of the third month the one called Tfus
Who had eaten and breathed much of the sprouting fungus
Saw a great skull lain on the ash across a stream.
Thinking it an ordinary skull, the one called Tfus crossed the stream
He took up the skull, which was as great as his body
And which had two curling horns spreading from its mouth like teeth
(For it was a beast unlike anything that had been seen in life)

And with mighty strength Tfus placed the skull across his shoulders
And over his head.
And we who watched saw then that here was not Tfus
But a God, though whether new or old we did now know.
Large in the body, and with the skull of the beast as its head
The creature spoke with the voice of Tfus and also of many others.

We learnt much that day from this God
He came, he said, from the great running river
Where there were six others of his like.
Though one of them he despised as his enemy who was named Perun.
We knew he did not mean river but the river of spirits
For he was greatly feared of fast-moving water.

He had tried to seek us out and aid us in our plight
(For the meat of those who had died was quickly decaying
And nothing new grew in its place) and we starved
But he had been halted by the stream, in terror of its moving waters.

For many months we spoke with the god who wore the body of Tfus
And the head of the beast
But soon the body of Tfus took rot and dripped from his bones.
So another placed the skull upon his head and was our God
Whom we called Volos as he had told.

And Volos guided the tribe.
He took us not to new food, but to places where there was water
And when we drank of the water we knew we did not need the food
While we were under the eyes of Volos.

When we travelled, we covered the skull of Volos with cloth
For it was wrong to see him when he was not a God and only a skull.
And he took many bodies from us for the power of the God could not be held.
He feared the high places also, and though we saw lights
Which flickered and flared over the great hills and mountains
And heard sounds like those of other tribes awakening
We heeded the words of Volos and stayed away from these places.

In time the skull of the beast grew cracked and rotted and we grew weak
And our skin was grey and broke to the touch and our hair fell out
And our bodies bulged with air and liquid and earth within
But we felt no pain or hunger or thirst and we knew it was
Because we were watched over by Volos whose power only grew.

When the great tusked skull broke, he appeared to us as a man with the head of a cow
And sometimes as a great fat snake the like of which we had never seen.
Though we needed no food, he grew often hungry
And we gave our children willingly for him to devour
And sometimes he would suckle on the teats of our women for milk
For without him we would not live and none would be conceived.

Soon we forgot the one called Tfus, who had found our God
And we forgot the lands of snow that our feet had loved and known.
And one day we forgot that we were Pisutsiti, which is those who walk
And we sat around the figure of Volos or the one he spoke through
And we watched and listened when sometimes he spoke and we honoured him
For without him we would not live.

And soon we forgot that we had fire, and it died out for want of wood.
And we forgot our bodies that shredded and bubbled and spouted flies and liquids
And when Volos left us we forgot the sound of his voice
We merely sit now, and wait for new gods.



Only I, it seems, still see the girl.

It's not difficult to understand why. Skin like stained oak. Eyes blazing with faith and zeal. Armour gleaming and proud and scratched and battered. Her sword still sheathed at her side, even here. She was an ideal, a symbol on which to pin hopes like prayer paper. A revenant angel who brought death and fire crashing down on the unbeliever, who purged the heretic from our ranks, who made the Imperium seem briefly possible by her mere presence. She brought order to the anarchy with her words and sanity to the lunacy with her actions. Ruthless, powerful, utterly fixed on her sacred duty and draped with an aura of terror that could make men who commanded entire worlds crawl.

The perfect Inquisitor. But I still saw the girl.

She stared at them for a moment longer, her words still ringing silently round the hushed ranks of her audience. Those her eyes fell on were glad of the shadows that dripped from the deeply carved auditorium walls. The moment expanded, stretched, hung. Then in a flurry of bright metal, Inquisitor Tyaernya left the room. I followed, notesheath in hand.

We reached the set of rooms she had been allotted, but I waited for the hiss of the door's hermetic seal before I spoke.

'You didn't give them any of our information?'

Her eyes were hard as she turned to reply.

'I don't want them cutting too close to the mark. I just want some action to help cover our tracks. If we do find anything, we'll also have plenty of resources ready to be called on – mobilised already.'

I nodded. The recycled air felt like linen being dragged in and out of my lungs, scraping across my throat. The faint urge to retch loomed then subsided.

'Surely,' came a voice from the other part of the room, 'we can't afford to misdirect any help we can get? Our own information is painfully limited.' The voice was the cool drawl of Gelmann Meer, a new addition. I noticed one of Tyaernya's eyebrows drop slightly; her lips withdrew to reveal a glimpse of white teeth. She had hoped, I guessed, that Meer would respond. I slid back a photoweave partition and stepped into my cell, replacing my notesheath and then, on a whim, flicking to the current page.

'Solutor,' she replied (never used names now, only tags, titles,) 'if the Arbites' qaestors or the Cornican had the resources to divine the source of these phenomena then I would think that a matter for investigation in itself. No, they are negligible other than for their raw numbers, and as such that is how we will use them. Perhaps, rather than challenging me on this, you will revert your attentions back to the streamed feed.'

I moved past my mistress, pulling my cotton gloves from a pocket and slipping them over my hands. Meer, muscles rippling beneath the wire-framed cloth of his tanal, bent once more over the pict-screen set in the bronze workstation. As always looking at him I was reminded of some sort of deep-sea fish. It was not his appearance as such, but a sort of imbalance in the focus of energy through his body that I had never seen in a human before. His features were small and sharp and dangerous, and they were set closely in the centre of his selachian face, a knot of concentration. Combined with his thick, muscle-bound neck and the expanding curve of the tanal on his back, it was as if his entire body existed to lead to his questing face. Had you cut his head off and discarded the body his presence within the room would have been much the same.

His focus drew me in turn to the screen. Half-formed images and fragments flickered, repeated, reversed, withdrew. Again and again a screaming face – man, woman or child it was impossible to tell – swallowed its own arm, the serpentine limb seemingly endless as it slid between stretched lips. Windows melted as if an invisible beam of heat had suddenly been directed their way. A maniacally laughing man's head twitched left and right like a pendulum. Tendrils and leaves from some kind of plant were sucked towards the sky, quivering and dancing. A cow yawned, unaware that a huge spider was creeping into its mouth. We had allowed an adjutant to mute the sound: the vague human murmuring and howling winds had been more unnerving than useful, and heard as if under water they were impossible to clarify. Meer had quickly computed their irrelevance

'There!'

The sudden exclamation didn't make me start so much as the jerk of movement that accompanied it. The solutor's hand slammed down to pause the feed, his body whiplashing forwards. I leant in, across the bright silk tanal, and stared at whatever it was that had attracted his interest. The egg-like cluster of delicate machinery that sat in the deep pit in his skull was chittering wildly as it processed and cross-examined information. I felt uncomfortable with it so close to me and out of sight as I leant closer still to the screen. The chittering was uncomfortably biological, like some insect preparing to leap onto my bare neck. Such high-pitched noise, I had quickly worked out, generally meant a connection had been made at a basic level and new data-bridges and mneme-junctions were being rapidly constructed.

Finally, we had made a breakthrough.

On the screen, a series of blurred shapes formed a rough circle. As Meer's hand tapped the runic display, the image changed slowly and incrementally. He was moving backwards towards the moment when the image had been still on the screen and therefore clear. As he reached it, I saw what it was. Nineteen sleeping figures, their bodies arranged into an approximate ring, with arms and legs extended into and out of the ring here and there so that it looked a little like a twist of barbed wire.

I let my breath out slowly before speaking. 'The pleasurecults on Simii – they used that mark.' The Inquisitor appeared beside me, attracted by the change in tones, and peered down at the symbol, her expression unreadable.

Meer twisted round to look up at me, eyes dark.

'No... savant... I recognised the symbol from documents on the Bezour heresy in the Hara subsector. That's the Goroite seal. The Sororitas must have burnt millions of these. All just a few systems away...' He was beginning to smile as I slowly saw the significance of his words.

'You didn't know about the pleasurecults?'

'No, I didn't.' His neurocluster began to whirr more smoothly, and I knew it was the sound of pieces beginning to fall into place.

[Mohauk]

I watched from the balcony as Inquisitor Zorua Ny Tyaernya carefully wrapped her fists, the slow winding of the cloth hypnotic. Across the other side of the training hall, which had been requisitioned from the Arbites earlier this morning, the trainer was already prepared, stripped to the waist to reveal the strangely configured muscle-like structures beneath his skin. I guessed, from the shape and apparent consistency, that I was seeing some sort of rubber armour surgically inserted to protect the drone from his perpetual batterings.

Several decades ago, on Bezour, a dormitory planet for the forgeworld Hara after which the subsector was named, there had been a massive uprising that quickly overpowered planetary authorities and threatened to shut down arms production on Hara. A quick response from a nearby Sororitas Basilica, elicited no doubt because Hara's chief produce was sororitas-grade bolters and other small arms, brutally crushed the revolt, killing over three billion Imperial citizens, fifteen percent of the planetary population, and destroying beyond viable reconstruction a major hive.

I only became aware of the event three years later when a certain Inquisitor Mei Dhow, following leads on a high-placed Ministorum figure whom had vanished (presumed corrupted) uncovered that the priest had used Ecclesiarchy funds to secure transit to Bezour around the time of the uprising. At the time I had only just been certified as an Inquisition-umbrella lore-savant. Tyaernya's predecessor, Inquisitor Numeniar, had requested an expert on daemonology from the Escolus and within a month of my certification I was already involved in the study of an artefact he had recently obtained.

Absently, I watched as the Inquisitor drew close to the drone, balancing high on her toes and twitching left and right, never staying still. The drone tensed, her proximity alerting him to prepare to fight.

When I first entered Numeniar's service I was barely twenty-five and eager to quickly begin to accumulate information with my new indigo-level access. But I recognize now, looking back, that somewhere in the recesses of my mind I was still afraid of true knowledge. Analysis and theory were things I had already shown I excelled at, but I was afraid to actually encounter those nightmares I had studied and archived so carelessly in my youth. I think Numeniar knew it: he had been impressed with my work, himself as knowledgeable as one would expect from a well-travelled Malleus Inquisitor. But he also sensed my fear of what his position entailed for me, of what might be asked of me. However, or perhaps (I often wonder) as a result, I was lifted from the examination and sent to Bezour, where Dhow informed me that he had requested assistance from Numeniar in a matter where the expertise of the Ordo Malleus was needed.

The two figures before me circled, Tyaernya occasionally throwing a testing feint jab as she eased herself into the rhythm. Despite his aggressive stance, the drone showed no signs of making an attack. The fight would only start in earnest once Tyaernya made a genuine strike. The trainer had not undergone rites of servitorhood or any sort of lobotomy, but his mind was utterly saturated by his thorough conditioning, and it ruled him with a leaden grip.

It appeared, after several months of stalled searching and the requisition of a great deal of resources, that Dhow's priest (for I was, of course, never informed of exactly who we were dealing with) was neither truly corrupted nor turned, but merely insane. His extreme fanaticism and over-zealous self-flagellations had gone beyond whips and thorn-belts and moved him to repeatedly poison and drug himself into stupors of pain and redemptive terror. His mind had broken under the torment and, for reasons that Dhow had been unable to fathom, he had come to Bezour. There he had been contacted by several characters including a free-trader named Iart Lefer.

Suddenly, Tyaernya threw a punch, which crunched meatily against the drone's jawbone and snapped his head sideways like a clockwork toy. Almost straight away she came in for another but the trainer reacted fast, blocking with both forearms before driving the raised left elbow hard into her chin. She staggered backwards, almost knocked over by the force of the blow, and for a second I thought it was over already. But, shaking her head as if to dislodge her disorientation, the Inquisitor fell back into her swaying rhythm and advanced again.

After hundreds of failed leads on each of the people the priest had contacted, Dhow had uncovered Lefer's membership of a free-trading cartel based in Goro whose narcotics-running had been nothing but a flimsy cover for a far more sinister substance of unknown origin. From Dhow's considerably researched point of view, no such drug had ever been encountered before.

From the evidence Dhow had collected, what had happened was very clear. The Goroite cartel had manipulated the priest, taking advantage of his insanity to use him as a figurehead for the indentured forgeworkers. Using the traders' resources, the priest had quickly drawn around him a circle of men vulnerable to their own ambitions and petty grudges. His words had rapidly metamorphosed, under Lefer's guidance, from talk of secret anti-faith meetings to sermons on other sources of power beyond the material. Over time, the group became a cult and the cult, under the too-lazy eye of the Adeptus Mechanicus, became a ready source of custom for the Goroites and their new narcotic.

The drone moved first this time, slamming a volley of solid strikes into Tyaernya's shielding arms and into her torso. She waited for a pause and responded with a blow to the stomach which made an odd noise against the subdermal armour, and one which slipped past the drone's defences to crunch against his teeth.

Things began to get out of the traders' control. The cult grew in power and the priest, the one source of Goroite influence, was killed in a hallucinogenic orgy. They were disinclined to intervene because of fear of punishment and reluctance to stunt the explosively expanding demand for their substance. When the population finally boiled over into full revolution, their rage fuelled both by years of indentured servitude and by heavy exposure to the damaging influence of the narcotic now dubbed FW, or Free Will, the Goroites burnt all their links to the disaster and fled. They killed, amongst others, Iart Lefer, knowing that the deaths would be attributed to the violence breaking out across the planet.

I noticed that Tyaernya was bleeding from her nose and mouth; black crusting lines whose colour was invisible under the glaring orange lights. Forcing the drone to raise his arms with a wide feint with her right fist, she drove her knee into his solar plexus and, as he doubled over despite the protective armour, she unleashed a pair of brutal hammer strikes to either side of his head one after the other. When he rose, the trainer was also bleeding, from a small cut below his left ear. Both of them were shining with sweat and grunting with every exertion.

In that very first meeting between Lefer and the priest, the free-trader had foolishly showed the madman the Goroite seal which he kept along with his free-trade charter, claiming it was the symbol of a new god for whom Lefer was the messenger. Unbeknownst to the Goroites, every inducted cult member had the symbol psychically burnt into their minds in the belief that this, along with FW use, would give their new god access to their minds. Only because the sisterhood had somehow allowed one cultist to slip through their unforgiving purges did Dhow discover this incriminating psychic tattoo, finally allowing him to unravel the web and detect the traders at the centre of the entire Heresy.

The Inquisitor was pressed up against the hard ferrocrete wall now, the two locked together in a messy brawl as they grappled and wrestled to get the space to throw another blow. The drone found it first, managing to crack a forearm into her bloody face and, as she blinked and tried to clear the blood from her eyes, stepped back and began to throw slow, powerful blows at her face and chest, again and again and again.

Finally the violence ceased. I could hear the Inquisitor's breath bubbling in her throat as she panted. Blood trickled over her lips, pattering on the cold floor. The drone turned and moved back towards the centre of the hall, his steps unhurried. I saw the liquid blackness in my mistress' eyes thicken, and knew what she would do.

Her clumsy two-footed flying kick caught the trainer in the side of his head as, hearing her running steps, he turned. The recoil of the impact sent her sprawling across the floor, but the drone was slung a few metres before the dull crunch as his body hit the floor, unconscious. Tyaernya scrambled to her feet to stand, panting, dripping blood and sweat onto the floor. Her eyes flicked up at me aggressively, and then to Meer and Phrygur. The drone lay still, drops of blood from the side of his head tapping in the sudden silence.

'So no-one had ever made the connection to Simii?' Tyaernya demanded, suddenly. She began to unwind the cloth from her bruised knuckles. 'No-one?'

I allowed Meer to speak. In her current mood it would be treading dangerous ground to answer when not questioned.

'According to records the cult on Simii developed almost twenty years later, and it's almost the other side of the sector. The Ministorum routed the pleasurecults: the Inquisition wasn't involved. The savant only knows of it because there was a reference...' he glanced at me, authorising.

'-in some material on artefact classification,' I continued, taking my cue. 'The pleasurecults were using legal narcotics, but by Lex Imperialis their use in heretical ritual outlaws them on the planet for ten years and a day. The obscura, I think it was, becomes an ex legis artefact with all the accompanying retributions for ten years-'

'And a day, yes,' the Inquisitor interrupted tersely, dropping the cloths and reaching up to touch her split lip with a grimace. 'Try and keep it relevant. So what we have here is the Goroite seal, also used symbolically by the Simii cults, appearing in the psychic stream from the sleepers. Is it any use, solutor?'

'Yes and no, Lady. We have to make assumptions to access any conclusion, but if the Simii cults were formed by escaped Bezour heretics, then the suggestion is that we're dealing with the same thing here.'

'Yes, but after so long?'

'Why not? Growth of organisations like cults and narc-circles is unpredictable. On Bezour it was comparatively rapid because the Goroites were guiding it to create demand for FW.'

'On Simii,' I ventured, 'it was a slow, incremental growth as the various houses were corrupted.'

Tyaernya grabbed a medical pack and made for the door. Pausing before leaving the room, she glanced at the heavyset swordsmith beside me.

'Phrygur, contact the marshall, and meet me with three or four men by the Precinct entrance in ten minutes. And Kolec, get to work on the sleepers immediately. I need information on the disease fast.'

The dark-haired bull of a man nodded and left. I turned to follow him, but Meer's hand gripped my arm, spinning me to face him as Tyaernya left.

'Come with me first,' he said, neurocluster whirring, 'I have a theory.'

[Mohauk]

The entire landscape was like some forgotten hell from the fevered imaginings of such heretical writers as Hessian or Del Vegar. The bladelike mountains, impossibly narrow, revealed their reddish stone only at the peaks, succumbing to the greys and greens of shrubs and lichen lower down so that they appeared ever more like weapons dripping blood. The ruins, perched in a hollow near the sloping base of one of these mighty outcrops, had seemed insignificant from the lander. But close-to, and on foot, the five simple concentric circles of pale crumbling stone loomed over the heads of the loosely ranked group of uniformed men.

Above all this, the sky burnt white hot, searing an eye unwittingly turned upwards, and pressing down and in on the horizon with a malicious intent that defied reason and inspired claustrophobic fear. Nothing moved, nothing seemed to live except the small party of combat-dress Pratec High Guard, and the Yeoman of the Law who stood grimly, surveying the ancient edifice.

The event itself had not been quick, as many of those who had seen such things before would have predicted once they examined the set-up. The sniper's shot (as plumb, the investigators declared when they found the killing position they had thought did not exist, as any of a similar distance) had gone somewhat astray, striking the targeted duchess not in the throat or head or chest but in the left kneecap. The second shot, too, caught the target low in the stomach and bucked her violently off the back of the podium, leaving a smear of crimson and taking her out of the would-be-killer's line of sight.

Gas grenades of some sort from an untraceable member of the crowd had been placed accurately, their pale hissing emissions almost immediately enveloping the prone, screaming woman. But a timely wind change had sent a powerful breeze gusting between the back of the raised podium and the administration building behind, clearing the majority of the poison from around the wounded noble.

Only when one of the Lady's own security Ghorkas turned on her, laspistol raised, was she finally fatally wounded. Throat opened by the searing shot, the Lady Aenea died of asphyxiation; a flailing, agonising end even as her eventual killer was ripped apart by fire from the other, faithful Ghorka guards.

Godric Lexer, Law'Yeoman to the Imperial government of Pratec, turned and, signalling the assembled elite troops to follow, began to make his way around the first wide ring-wall, towards the opening near the other side. From the air, he had ascertained that the five ring-walls, each separated from the one outside it by somehow distressingly uneven distances, had been built for defence. The fifth, inner ring-wall had once been a covered structure, with the four walls as its defence. But over time the ceiling had collapsed leaving it yet another circle in the ruin. With reconnaissance, however, Godric had seen that someone had replaced it with a similarly shaped modern covered building: a simple squat metal cylinder with only one entrance.

Each of the first three walls had gaps (which might once have held gates but now lay open) at alternate ends of the ruins, so as to make it as difficult as possible for attackers to enter. The fourth and final wall had no opening – it remained uniformly solid through its entire circumference. However, Godric's pilot had identified two small structures, one outside the fourth wall to the east and one inside and to the west, which he believed to be the entrances to some sort of tunnel system, a final hurdle for the assaulting force to overcome before they had access to the central building.

Now, Godric knew that they had to navigate this system of entrance in order to track down the final lead on the orchestrator of the near-failed assassination of the Lady Aenea. But he trusted to the skills and discipline of the thirty-or-so High Guard, the stormtroopers of the Pratec Imperial Governor.

The group reached the first entrance. Inside, the ground was covered in grasses and a thick scattering of bushes and thorny vine-like plants. Picking their way between the vegetation, the High Guarders broke ranks. Their high-end las-carbines all hung in compact firing harnesses allowing ease of movement but also rapid deployment of fire. Their flexible array of equipment – from solid-ammunition pistols to personal auspexes to ceramite body armour – was all sound-deadened, and other than the quiet tramp of booted feet and the accumulated breathing of thirty one men, there was oppressive quiet within the ruins. Godric's sharp eyes searched constantly for signs of technology: a pict-capturer set into the looming wall, perhaps, or a melta-trip wire stretched between two woody fray bushes. But there was nothing. Crumbled and overgrown, the ruins could have been untouched since they were abandoned millennia ago.

The second entrance and the third were reached without event or sign of life. Godric could see unease in the eyes of some of the men. They had been told that a traitor of significant resources had used these ancient structures as a hide, a base of operations. Yet there was no resistance, no sign of modern use in the site. Nothing. In the body language of the others, Godric could read contempt. This high-ranking Law'Yeoman, acclaimed as one of the most persistent and unfailing of the feared exacters of Pratec's Imperial rule, had lead them here on the final, conclusive information exacted from a month-long investigation. Yet there was no sign of the traitor. Clearly there had been a mistake – the assassination's puppeteer had long-since abandoned Pratec, his task fulfilled, and their search was futile, desperate, in vain.

Godric ignored these looks. His information was solid, and he suspected that the traitor worked alone or with only a few faithful servants, hiring mercenaries and ancillaries for his heretical works before moving on once more, difficult to detect behind each crime. So the fact that there were no signs of inhabitation or defence was unsurprising.

And there was the tunnel entrance, a simple stone portal in the ground with a set of deep stairs leading into the shadow. Doyder, the High Guard lieutenant, moved up front with Godric, and they lead the narrow line of troops slowly under the ground.

The stairs levelled quickly off into a corridor, which ran for a short distance before ending in a door. The stone of the walls was similar in type and wear to the ruins themselves. But the door was modern, set in hinges attached to bolts cracked into the stone. Godric smiled. He had resisted the urge to order the ruins bombed to destruction out of the suspicion that there might be a complex of tunnels in which the traitor could shelter before making good his escape. The assumption now seemed reasonable.

Doyder moved forward and, finding the simple door handle-less, pushed. It swung smoothly open, revealing only darkness. The High Guarders all lifted their rifles and, after a second, thirty torches clicked into life, their narrow beams vanguard to the menacing snub barrels of the weapons themselves.

Doyder lead the way into the room. It was dark, and disorientating: somehow, glints and flickers of light appeared in mid-air before vanishing. With the entire squad through the doorway, Godric whispered for stillness, trying to define what it was his confused eyes were seeing. He took his own bolt pistol from its holster and, clicking a smaller, wide-beam torch into place, he pressed the rune for light. Understanding almost immediately dawned.

'Mirrors...' he whispered. And it was true. The entire room, though its exact size was impossible to tell, was filled with plates and shards and hanging fragments of mirror. In places large sheets stretched from ceiling to floor. Everywhere stalactite-like shards hung from the roof or rose from the floor. A million broken, distorted High Guarders flickered and loomed around the real men, and Godric grimaced to see himself everywhere, apparently moving with the light though he remained still. Most of the shards were razor-sharp and, gazing ahead, the Yeoman knew they would have to move extremely slowly and carefully if they didn't want to be sliced to shreds.

As if the punchline to a cruel cosmic joke, the heavy metal door slammed shut. There was a silence while the spooked Guarders tried to retain discipline. Then, reminiscent once again of the dreams of the nightmare-prophets, the darkness issued a long, low, animal hiss, reverberating weirdly from the million mirrors and seeming to continue impossibly long before dying away to leave silence once again.

Every weapon was raised, darting nervously here and there so that every shadow was full of flickering lights and half-reflected figures; every shard contained another deadly enemy ready to spring. Godric knew it fell to him to issue instructions, but he did not know what instructions to give. Finally, he spoke.

'Find the door. If you can ope-'

He was cut off by a sudden, terrified shriek from one of the men, a flurry of movement, a splatter of hot liquid that caught his cheek. The room exploded into panic.

Several of the Guarders, losing their wits, ran. They quickly tripped and fell, throats slashed or impaled on rising shards of mirror, so that their own images would stare at them for all eternity. Other opened fire, the spitting fury of their weapons unleashing a white-hot spray which sent the entire scene into a flickering chaos and was accompanied by the sound of millions of panes of glass smashing. Unable to distinguish between reflections and reality, the supposedly highly-trained men slaughtered each other, every movement or noise provoking another burst of fire.

Others were inexplicably and brutally slaughtered just as the first had been – strange pale figures drew out of the shadows, reflected to surround the victim with a thousand eyeless pale faces before they were sliced into pieces in a flare of blood. Doyder thankfully kept his head and turned back to back with Godric, blazing at any stumbling figure that came near and yelling with barely-controlled terror.

Something with a face that had no eyes lunged out of the shadows at the Yeoman and, not thinking, he stumbled away, firing as he did so with his bolt pistol. The nightmare spun with unnatural speed out of the path of the bolts but was forced away. Godric felt hot pain on his arm and saw that he had sliced a long, clean cut on a sharp fragment. He turned and saw the thing again. But this time his shots only smashed the mirror that had fooled him.

The noise, he suddenly noticed, had all but gone. They were all dead. All but Doyder and himself. Shaking with adrenaline, the lieutenant turned and, suddenly seeming to see Godric, he screamed and raised his weapon to fire. Godric laid him low with a shot straight to the forehead, which exploded the officer's skull in a welter of gore and bone fragments. He had no alternative, but the image, repeated a hundred times in the surrounding mirrors, horrified him.

Now there was silence. He could sense the blind demons around him, stalking. Even as his death approached, the irony was not lost on him. In a place where sight quickly caused madness and death, the blind assassin was invincible.

But Godric Lexer wasn't finished yet. Keeping his boltpistol raised, and trying to ignore his own distracting reflection, he hefted a dead-man's lasgun and unleashed a coughing spray of fire which sent a rain of smashed glass to the floor. He held down the trigger until the gun fell silent, battery emptied. Ahead of him, the torch showed a door. He was sure it was different to the one by which he had entered, but any door was better than staying put. He made for it slowly, keeping his toes angled upwards so that his metal-studded soles crushed any fragments still sticking from the floor.

He heard it behind him, a sharp hiss of breath, and turned, eyes closed, to empty an entire clip at the sound. Death didn't come to him, even as he waited, the seconds lengthening. He opened his eyes.

The creature lay before him on the floor, dead. Its neck had been destroyed and its head hung by a tendon from bony shoulders. It resembled a naked human, androgynous and skeletally thin. Its face was nothing more than a gaping, square-toothed mouth beneath slitted nostrils. Its hands were blades, long and bloody. Even as he watched, it was growing somehow indistinct, liquid. Melting into the ground. He stepped back with a hiss of disgust. Daemon.

Suddenly terrified that he might encounter another of the horrific things, he discarded his useless empty bolt pistol and slammed through the door, leaving the nightmare room behind him.





So many sleepers, spreading away from me in seemingly endless rows and ranks. I have always found it eerie to be awake around others who are asleep. Time, I think, moves differently for them. And I have more experience of it than most. Here the air thickened with it, turned sour as a thousand sleeping minds let time slip away.

The sisters were pitiful, helpless. They could do nothing and yet still they worked on, weary with failure. The medicae were less painful to watch – impotent against the spreading effects of the plague, they sat vacant against the walls. Their aquila-imprinted paper-torcs and brass thuribles were clutched tightly while the needle-gloves and medi skulls lay discarded and deactivated. Faith was, I imagined, more of a comfort than knowledge when no solution could be offered.

But the sisters, bless their purity, still tried. Beatific, imposing, haggard; they wandered between the thousand beds sprinkling warm foreheads with cool water and finely tuning the balance of the liquids which hung from the hovering sanguo-skulls. Their artificial probosci pierced inner arms and jugulars as if they, not the invisible plague, were draining the wakefulness out of the sleepers.

There was nothing, it was clear, to be done. Physiology was broken. Anatomy was only one of a million veils pulled across the truth. From my unique position of knowledge within the room, I knew that the only possible place a cure might be effected lay deep in the souls of each of those suffering. And that was a place I feared to tread.

We had come to this wretched place a year previously, to refuel, rejuvenate, review. I had known, then, that it was to be here that I would see my Inquisitorial charter torn in two, and with it the life Tyaernya had once led. Her humanity was to be left here as she ascended to greater things. A shining example, a paragon of ultimate authority. All those with wisdom could see the unique potential that her future held. And we, men like myself and old Phrygur, were imperfections to be cast off, to be replaced with the precision offered by metal tools like Meer, like the combat drone. It would happen here, on Iyo.

But then the troubles came. The embattled Cornican, hardened to public discontent by years of unchallengeable authority and comfortable in their routine duties, discovered the first and most severe of the disasters before anyone else. Fools one and all, they kept it from the Inquisitor. Her aid, present on Iyo only by good fortune, should have been called immediately, but the governing council ensconced in the ancient Cornican, whose traditions date to a time before the Emperor's light, hoped to use the Arbites to solve the problem without our becoming aware of their failure. They believed, correctly, that something of this magnitude might be great enough to finally threaten their position of power.

As I said, fools to a man.

But the Arbites, who have long been content here on Iyo to sit in the government's pockets, forgetting their true duties to rise above local power, acted truly. Tyaernya was informed. They had made the only step that might save this poor planet from disaster.

The plague was unlike anything seen before. A sickness that spread in a bubble, somewhat geographically but often making impossible leaps, its only affect was an unbreakable sleep. Each and every victim lay unharmed in body and apparently sound in mind (other than the strange and unnatural dreams which our astropaths had streamed to create the images for Meer's analysis). But each sufferer slipped slowly into a deeper and deeper sleep, the levels of the drowse-hormones on which the medicae had briefed Tyaernya accumulating in ever greater concentration. By the time we had been informed, it seemed, many of the first sufferers already carried amounts of the chemicals in their blood that would normally cause instant death. And yet nothing changed. They slept on.

The other disasters had been smaller. A terrible, continent-wide lightning storm which had turned glass to sand and left strange shards of ice that didn't melt sunk deep into the ground. An unexplained firestorm in a major city, which left some buildings untouched and others as mere piles of ash. Many of the events had been unnoticed at first – during a routine inspection of the trans-planetary monotrak by some mechanicus adept, it appeared that an entire small dormitory town had inexplicably shifted eighteen yards exactly eastwards.

It bore all the signs of warp-magick, of the daemonic. But such seemingly unconnected events, without theme or intent... it was beyond my mind to decipher.

Fortunately, it seemed, Meer had done so for me, his strangely-set thoughts finally fitting together a piece of the puzzle as I had blankly watched Tyaernya batter at her training drone. Perhaps she was right to leave my kind behind for his.

The spread of the disease did follow a pattern. But it took a strange intellect indeed to solve it. Using his neuro-cluster, Solutor Meer had accessed the Cornican's exhaustive records first hand, and had seen the connections between victims begin to unfold. Here were mothers and sons, addicts and dealers, adepts and masters, friends. Some links were harder to define, but this was the man who had purchased a trak ticket three days ago and this was the servitor who had supplied it. And this was the mechanicus adept who had only days before recently refreshed the servitor's neuro-conditioners.

The links were not geographical. They were chronological. The sleeping sickness was moving between people who had had some sort of vocal or physical contact. Backwards.

It seemed impossible but the more data Meer had shown the more convincing his argument. As I had left, he had constructed a mental model that already accounted for sixty-eight percent of sufferers across the planet. By now it might be approaching completion.

A man visits his nephew. Then he takes a monotrak back to his home. In the station, he drops his spectolenses, and a woman retrieves them for him. A week later, she falls into a plagued sleep, infected by some other association. Only a day or so later will the old man also suddenly show the symptoms and succumb. And only a few days after that will his nephew do so. The disease followed a web of encounters backwards through time. Physically impossible, it confirmed the involvement of psykery somehow.

Most importantly, however, Meer's model had finally discovered the first person to fall into the plagued sleep, a detail that, of course, even the now cooperative Cornican officials could not have known. It seemed that the disease and the backwards-ticking clock that guided its hand had begun simultaneously. The first sufferer had set the plague's unnatural contagion-pattern running just as he had contracted it.

Dmitr Cater. That was his name, and Meer had located his sleeping body as amongst those tended in this administratum hall, emptied and sterilised as a makeshift holding area for the sufferers. Already the Cornican was beginning to stop creating such holding areas – the disease could not spread from contact in the present, and the past could not be changed, so why not allow the victims to sleep at home. It was cheaper that way. But the Sisters Hospitaller still insisted that they be allowed to continue their duty, in vain or otherwise. And Tyaernya had supported them.

I counted fifteen rows of metal bedspreads along, and then stepped into the ranks, counting the columns now as I moved slowly through them. One, two, three... each held fifty Imperial citizens who, if I could not solve the puzzle, would never again wake, but would sleep for ever, unable to die. Four, five, six.

I felt the sensation rising before I was approaching the nineteenth column, where Cater lay. The heat in my stomach and the cold in my head. A psyk-analyst's thin, reedy voice rang in my ears, the first warning of my vision as always. So clear, so tangible, that he could have been standing beside me again after more than thirty years.

'Young Achan Kolec. A preterspector.'

And my overseer's flawlessly remembered deep, accented tones, even as I watched the room, the sleepers and the sisters sway dizzyingly before me: 'I haven't encountered that term before.'

'No,' came the nasal reply 'it is not common, even amongst witches. He sees occasional, uncontrollable visions of the past. They might be from any time period, any place. They can strike at any time. But his subconscious has some control – they will never be entirely irrelevant, even if their irregularity renders them so.'

Sometimes I remember the conversation further, but not this time. Quickly I began to experience the physical sensation of matter drawing away from me, sucking back in the way water does before the wave crashes forward. Then the resultant pummelling rush of matter and time, flickering past me as I was whipped by tendrils of my mind and the warp back, back, back...

Back to the place I had visited more than any other, seen a thousand times in a thousand visions. To the one moment that had defined my future and plagued my past, and the one moment that I could never understand.

[Mohauk]

The weight of time, displaced, throbs and crashes in my ears like a second pulse. The agonisingly familiar scene floods outwards before me; at its centre the Inquisitor’s heavy figure is illuminated by multiplying light-sources as the spreading boundary, transmuting rushing darkness into reconstituted, remembered matter, reveals a string of halogen globes suspended from the roof one after another, all the way into the depths of the warehouse. Not Tyaernya, of course. Numeniar. As always, sounds are muted and twisted in the vision as if through water or fierce winds, but by now I don’t need to hear the words clearly. They ring out in my nightmares.

‘Lucky, this time, then. But I have no idea what I’m dealing with, here. We’re out of our depth.’

His words are directed to Ndimi Beye, a tough ex-arbites gunman Numeniar used as reliable muscle. A man I never really knew. His cheek, as always, is bleeding, a crimson bruise blooming already in one eye. The loyalty gleaming in his expression is agonising to watch.

‘What orders, Lord?’ Beye’s voice is so muted and bubbled through the vision that if I hadn’t heard it a thousand times I might not even have noticed his words. The visions have a kind of gravity, making it hard to focus away from their centre. I have experienced this one more than any other and from innumerable angles, but always it turns on Numeniar’s slightly hunched, nevertheless powerful figure. Detail and sound is clearer nearer to him. Beye is at the edge of my vision, hard to detect. The Inquisitor speaks.

‘The vox is damaged. Fetch Zorua, as fast as you can. And tell her to alert Marshal Ike. He should have men standing by. Be quick.’

Even as the fully-armoured Inquisitor seems to be physically relaxing, nudging with a foot at one of the cowled bodies strewn across the scene and sliding a half-full clip out of his bolt-pistol to check its contents, there is a tension in his voice that I never once heard there in life. Fear in a man I once believed incapable of such an emotion is terrifying to hear.

‘Yes, Lord. But My Lord, I… I…’ The pock-faced warrior’s words peter into silence. The scene thickens with my terror as Numeniar turns, first to look at Beye and then to follow his stricken gaze. From here, I cannot see into the corner where they are looking, but I have seen it from other angles. I know what is causing the colour to drain from the gunman’s face. The dead body, pulled into the air by some invisible force. The twitching, the peeling. Blood red, flickering light suddenly paints the entire scene. I remember the body twisting back folding away into dimensions of space that shouldn’t exist. And finally the massive, muscular form that unfurls itself into reality with an electrical crackling and the stench of cold metal.

Beye opens his mouth to scream but in a crackling of air and cracking of elastic space the beast – and what other word better describes it I do not know – is on him and he is ripped in two, a brief fountain of arterial gore. Now the daemon is within my sight, turning sinuously to watch the Inquisitor with impenetrable black eyes. Numeniar is speechless. I follow the familiar motion of his eyes from black hoofed feet up muscle-bound calves and powerful thighs, blood-stained torso carved with unhealed sigils and rippling with weird little otherworldly twitches, to that unspeakable face, that unspeakable hunger.

The Escolus records call it a Bloodletter. It is a good enough name for something that words cannot contain.

The Inquisitor is helpless. The gravity of the scene draws me to his face, sharply remembered and realised, his thoughts turning over and over and over. One hand holds a bolt pistol. The other holds a half-full clip. He knows, and I know, that he cannot possibly be fast enough. His eyes glance to the right, then the left, and a sudden understanding seems to come over him, a revelation that opens his body, changes his stance.

‘Of course,’ he murmurs to himself. ‘Of course…’ Something sickeningly like a grin twists his mouth for a moment. Still directing his gaze not at the looming, silent form of the daemon but into the rushing, howling darkness beyond it, he raises his pistol-wielding hand, and taps the gun’s barrel lightly against his temple twice. His mouth is smiling quite unreservedly, now, though his eyes remain cold. The air in the room throbs as the beast takes a heavy step forward. Its breath hangs as vapour in the air like that of livestock on a cold night. Something in the Inquisitor’s gaze suggests that he can see the whipping tendrils of nothingness at the edges of my vision, as if he felt, in that last moment, the million replayings of this moment that would haunt the rest of my life.

His grin turns into an incongruous bark of laughter, and he suddenly twists the bolter towards the dripping monstrosity, his other hand sweeping the clip towards its berth. Both pieces of metal are sent clattering to the ground as in another unnatural rush the daemon smashes the heavyset man aside like a doll, then in a frenzy of warp-driven fury, tears his lifeless body to pieces.

The unbearable pressure of the scene suddenly breaks, and in a blind, rushing flurry it withdraws, leaving me with only rows of pallid lights above me, the cold metal of the administratum hall against my face and the sharp, alien taste of my own blood in my mouth.

[Mohauk]

Something huge loomed over me and then receded, sliding out of sight to reveal the cold strip lighting high above. It swooped again, in the other direction, like some massive gleaming bird of prey. Except that it was more like some kind of machine, bulbous and glinting. It swung over me again.

'Acolyte...' A voice was ringing out somewhere near me. Gentle but striated with a hardness that spoke of authority. 'Acolyte... can you hear me? Acolyte?'

The metal behemoth wafted over me again, bringing a sharp clearness to my vision, stinging my brain into activity with some sort of pungent aroma. And now my aching eyes could see that it wasn't huge, but merely very close to my face. It was beautiful – a tiny, skilfully worked brass orb, no more than an inch or so across, and evenly covered with tiny perforations. A delicate chain extended up towards the blurry heights above me, attached between three artfully embossed Imperial eagles, joined at the wing and glaring down at me in tripartite judgement. Their eyes saw everything.

It was a thurible, wafting awakening agents as it swung gently above my face. With a start I sat up, instinctively snatching it from the hand of the Sister above me. For a terrible second I saw the beast, standing just beyond the little gathering of people around me. Steaming breath curled between lips drawn back in a rattling snarl. Liquid dripped from its hulking form. Black eyes watched me. But then it was gone, a remembered horror conjured by my confusion.

Reaching out to brace myself against some sort of cold metal frame – a bed – I pushed myself suddenly to my feet, then stumbled, drawing a gasp from the onlookers, several of whom stepped forward to brace me. My vision swam.

I was here for a reason, I knew. I had to do something. But what?

'Acolyte, you should lie down. You collapsed. You were unconscious. Give yourself a few minutes to recover.'

The voice came from one of the women holding me upright. It was the same that had spoken to me before. I could feel a multitude of hands on me, gripping my arms, pressed against my back, supporting my neck. Why am I here? A waft of female scent found my nostrils. The disorientation was receding, slowly. But I couldn't yet answer. I leant into the sea of cloth and hands and plain-soap cleanliness. Why am I here?

'Acolyte please! You should lie down! We don't know what caused your fainting. You may have injured your head-'

'Dmitr Cater!' The present came rushing back to me, driving away my remaining intoxication, bringing the world sharply into focus. I pulled myself away from the Sisters, and turned to talk to the matron who was addressing me.

'Acolyte, I-'

'There is a man here, in one of these beds, named Dmitr Cater. I need to examine him. Immediately.'

The expressions around me changed. This was the voice of Inquisitorial authority speaking again. This was not the man who had fallen, suddenly, and lain twitching, perhaps murmuring, before suddenly lurching awake, eyes unfocussed and mind clearly bewitched somehow. This was the Acolyte of Inquisitor Tyaernya, giving orders once again, clear-eyed and clear-headed. The group dispersed.

' Cater...' the matron muttered as she consulted a long scrip drawn from her habit, 'yes... this is the bed.' She led me along a few rows, then took a step back, iron eyes appraising me. 'Are you sure you're all right, Acolyte? You were lost to us for several minutes? Are you sure you aren't hurt?'

'A fainting sickness, Sister, which I have suffered since I was a small child. Thin blood. Please don't be concerned: it is not dangerous, and I don't seem to have suffered more than a few bruises.' I smiled, to reassure her, then moved over to the bed.

Dmitr Cater was much as Meer's records had described him: olive-skinned but fair-haired, slightly built but with a hint of sinewy toughness to him. A somewhat hawk-like nose and small chin gave his entire profile the look of a blade, an edge that curved down his forehead, along the length of his nose and back into his neck over thin lips and chin. He was probably not unattractive, but in a drawn, intense way. He looked ill, his skin sickly and his cheekbones jutting above hollows. But there was nothing exceptional in his appearance at all.

"Do you want any information about him, Acolyte?' the matron inquired, looking again at her scrip. 'I don't have much – half the city is falling to the sickness – but I can give you his registered address.'

'That won't be necessary, Sister. My colleague has requisitioned records and already knows everything there is to know about him, which is little enough anyway.'

But nothing Meer had learnt helped to explain his relevance. Nothing singled him out from any other inhabitant of the city or the planet. The only detail of any interest was that he had been born offworld, and only been living on Iyo for five or six years. The massive, short-hop migration barges that plied their trade between the planets of the subsector's local division were the only ships on which a plebeian of Cater's insignificance could have found passage, and unfortunately the practice of bribing barge officials to allow anonymous, unrecorded transit had become so engrained that it was now treated as an automatic addition to the already extortionate Migration Tax. So we had no way of tracking Cater's life before his arrival and registration here on Iyo. Tyaernya had agents investigating his hab now, looking for acquaintances. But in my experience men like this don't let others into their lives.

I dropped my pack on the ground and withdrew my psi-reader, carefully clipping the nodes onto the sleeping man's temples and activating the handpiece. I sensed the matron tensing behind me, evidently uneasy with this strange technology. She tended to the body. The mind was a more dangerous thing, a nest for temptation and witchery.

'If you could take a few steps back, Sister. This device is extremely delicate and the presence of too many people will upset the readings.'

Calming my own slightly fluttering heart, I tapped my code into the reader's rune panel, and it hummed into life, the machine spirits within waking and turning their attention to Cater's sleeping consciousness. I heard the matron take another step back behind me.

I had expected to have to wait for some time to learn anything of interest. In fact, I hadn't expected to learn anything. The minds of the sleepers, Tyaernya's astropath had briefed me, were suffused with the stream which Meer had been trying to decipher. The reader, a far weaker and less dextrous probe than the astropathic choir that the Inquisitor had set to explore the sleepers, would be entirely incapable of penetrating it.

But I had barely set the device working when it suddenly emitted a high pitched whirring, startling me a little. Static flickered across the readouts, and then with a whine they shut down. The little window was blank except for some sort of fluctuating reading, dark red, in the bottom corner, a number that flickered steadily between 6.68 and 6.9. I glanced at the Sister behind me, stout, dark-haired and clearly apprehensive. It would be unwise, in a room tended by devout healers of the Ministorum, to make known what the device was revealing.

But how could no one have known this yet? Surely it must have been discovered already?

'Sister, have the sleepers been examined, at all? Do they undergo any sort of... assessment?'

She looked at me perplexedly. 'No... Acolyte, you have to realise there are millions asleep now, and the number is ever growing. How could we possibly examine each sufferer individually?'

I nodded. Of course. After all, Cater had not previously been of any special interest anyway. But he was now. The might of Tyaernya's inquest would be turned, unblinkingly, towards this one, unexceptional man, sleeping an unbreakable sleep. The sickness had spread in an impossible manner, and if contact in the past was its mechanism for contagion, it would not be long before the entire planet was sleeping. Perhaps I had suspected it. Perhaps the Inquisitor had already deduced as much. But now we knew. The disease had started with a psyker.