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ONE
Masters and apprentices
The sound of her wings
Ciro
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Cracked ferrocrete patched over a thousand times. Crumbling hab-blocks that leaned and staggered like a chorus line of wavering drunks, their creaking, groaning song picked up on stormy nights and carried down the winding streets. Inhabitants who were half-ghosts already, who moved through an unregarded world with downcast, dead eyes.
Corpses and corpses-in-waiting.
The end was near. It could be glimpsed down Brandt Avenue on a clear day, hovering over the habs in gentle blue aurora. Alien hands were rebuilding Sartheno. Gentle fingers brushed away ash and blood from the face of the city, passed over the bruises and scars, and wiped away welling tears. All would be made right again.
Ciro Lazh would have laughed if she could, but she didn't have the breath. She kept her head down, arm up to ward off the worst of a driving downpour, and staggered onwards.
The lies of alien oppressors weren't her department. Around her neck, cold against her throat: a silver hammer pendant. Ordo Malleus. Daemons first. Politics never.
She was losing her daemon.
She could sense it slipping away, feel the trail going cold. Not in the way the driving gale was cold, not in the way the wind froze her skin beneath her bodysuit, but like the breaking of a fever. The slipping away of sickness. A cleansing she could not allow. Not yet. She gritted her teeth, forced herself to stop and think. Goethe was always telling her that: *stop and think, Ciro. Your mind is a weapon sharper than any knife.*
She still had the knife.
Shivering ectoplasm clung to the runed steel. She'd cut the thing as it ran. The supernatural essence yearned to be whole again.
A risk. Ciro had the barest spark of talent before the opening of the Great Rift, and even that flicker had been buried deep. Now things were different. Dangerous. But she hadn’t forgotten the old ways. The hard ways.
She drew the blade across her palm. Fed a crimson trickle to the plasm. It shimmered, substantiated, grew solid - anchored by this small sacrifice. Sacrifice. Goethe…
No. Do not think of Goethe.
The ritual wavered with her will. She put all other thoughts from her mind. She cut again.
She spoke the word of focus.
Think instead of a fleeing, bleeding man wrapped in leprous rags - his one bloodshot eye. Think of the festering lump on his forehead: bursting boil or nascent horn? Think of the way he never stopped counting as he ran, an endless tally of all he saw, all his master would one day subvert. Remember that feverish scent: rot and madness. Reach for it.
There. Blood calls to blood.
Ciro sheathed the knife and ran on, unerring, through the rain.
Few lumens had ever functioned on Butcher’s Row.
The long street was a vale of shadow, pricked by the tiny haloes of dim street-lamps. The occasional candle wavered behind the thick glass of shopfronts where someone was working late. Ciro didn’t fear discovery. The only people out on the street at this hour, in this downpour, were those on the most desperate or foolish of business. They wouldn’t be stopping to gawk. Those in the questionable safety and meagre warmth of their homes and businesses had not survived so long by peering out into the darkness looking for trouble.
Trouble found the Row often enough. As it had tonight.
Ciro slowed her pace. She was close, and growing closer. Her quarry had gone to ground here. It wasn’t what she would have done: she would have headed for the industrial slaughterhouses, the darkness and discomfort of row after row of hanging or packaged meat. A thousand places to hide or to flee.
The Row wasn’t like that. It was a boutique, a lair of specialised tradesmen - as close to middle class as it got in the Old Quarter.
This was not a comforting thought. This was a place of means, however rude they might be. An island of hope in a sea of misery. That sharpened her focus. She stalked, now, ignoring the sleet. She listened at each doorway, trusting her senses. Here, an elderly cobbler and his bedridden wife - Ciro felt the warmth of the broth and quiet laughter they shared. Next, an apprentice polishing their skills in secret, their envy a bright and febrile green. A family of five. Lovers in bed. A kicked canid.
Down the Row she went, tasting tiny moments of hope and fear and hate, searching for that fetid, familiar flavour.
When she found it, her gorge rose, and she was carefully, quietly sick in the gutter.
Wiping her mouth, Ciro looked up at the cheerful frontage of Carver & Sons Chandlery. Someone had made a good effort at decorating the frosted glass with votive Sanguinala iconography. A selection of oils and soaps featured in the display, but candles were the main attraction - beautiful, dark candles with prayer carved into the wax, to be released as they burned. Singular items. Far better than the rough tallow Ciro had shaped in her youth.
The door was wrong. A casual glance would have revealed little, but Ciro could sense more than see the sickly sheen of the hinges, new worms in the wood, the warping of the frame that rendered the lock useless. Tainted. Unclean. Subtle.
Too subtle for a heedless flight. Too deliberate to be new. A lair.
A lair in her city.
Ciro’s furious kick splintered the rotten door at the latch. Her shoulder took her through the rest, shrugging off wreckage as she went.
The chandlery was dark, dank and fetid. Mould crept up through groaning floorboards, spiderwebbed across planked walls. Shelves of inventory buckled beneath stained jars and spilt slurry. Some had collapsed, their contents forming stinking, fly-speckled mounds at random about the room. The smell hit her like a physical thing - but it was only physical, and she’d shielded her other senses.
A growling, guttural voice slunk through the gloom. Words spoken as if through a mouthful of damp bread and broken teeth.
‘Seven,’ it said. ‘Seven times seven, seven is the number, seven is the power.’
It waxed and waned, fell and rose, as it tallied an inane and endless list. Parchment for the books. Leather for the binding. Ink for the words. If it had not been delivered in that chanting rhythm, if it had not been spoken in the supernatural squalor, it would have passed for no more than a pedantic scribe’s monthly utilities.
Numbers had almost as much power as names. They were the wavelength of the Great Ocean - the frequency by which one could attune themselves to the Immaterium and the patron that granted them power.
But to come closer to the Warp was to bring the Warp closer to the real. The chandlery was evidence of that: a decaying wreck, a paling, insignificant shadow compared to the Black Manse and the putrid master that dwelt within. Though the Dark Powers rarely answered directly, their vast armies of minions were each a fragment of the Gods themselves. All power ultimately came from the Pantheon, and they always asked an impossible price.
Coming forward, knife in hand, Ciro could see how dearly the wretch had paid for theirs.
They knelt - buckled - before what had been a cashier’s counter, now daubed in foul ichor and symbols that burned the eye and itched madly at the brain. A shrine, of sorts, for a bargain struck. Ciro saw now, more clearly, than she had at the first fleeting confrontation, the man had not been a leper or an unfortunate after all. What she had taken for rags were the stained remnants of a fine robe, the silk parting in thick, web-like strands. There was a tarnished golden comb buried in the matted hair, and the ravaged, sunken features that turned to her had once been handsome.
One eye was gone: a black and empty pit. The other rolled, crazed, desperately seeking, never finding. The boil had burst. A black nub of bone peeked through the pale skin. His mouth was wet and foam-white with what Ciro identified as wax. Crownless stubs came together as he chewed.
All around him, piled high, were devotional candles.
‘Grandfather asks so much,’ he wheezed. ‘So much. More. Always. More.’
He swallowed painfully and reached for another taper.
Ciro blinked as the hungry mouth came down on another prayer.
Daemonology was old science. The oldest science, never mind what the Martians said. Before the first hairless ape had wielded fire and driven back the darkness, they had gnawed bones and buried them at the mouths of their caves. They had drawn in fat and grease on stone walls. Before the wheel had come the ward, for mankind had known the Neverborn, contested with them in days primordial. And where daemons were creatures of magic, man was a creature of spells, a writer of grimoires, a maker of runes. It was in the soul of the species. In the blood.
This should not be.
The creature should not be able to stand the presence of so much scripture, sanctified or not, much less consume it. Ciro’s mind whirled. It went against all she had known, all she had been taught.
‘Seven,’ the ruined man sighed. ‘Enough.’
His bloodshot eye fixed and focused, finally. His cracked lips spread in a rictus that approximated a smile. He began to rise.
‘One,’ he said. ‘Just you.’
Ciro hissed a curse. She hadn’t prepared for this. She grabbed a pouch from her belt and threw it towards the creature, who caught it easily in one withered hand. The fabric darkened and went slack in his grasp. Decaying threads slackened. A stream of mouldering rice grains cascaded out, thousands upon thousands falling on, down, and through the floorboards.
The man stared, his mouth falling open, half-chewed wax dribbling down his chin. He looked at the filthy grains as though they were priceless gemstones.
But he didn’t stop.
‘No need,’ he chuckled. ‘They are already his.’
A lurching step forward.
‘As you will be.’
Oh, Throne.
The consecration had not held. It should have worked. She had worked the blessing herself, in the way she had been taught. Where did she go wrong? Goethe would have known.
But Goethe wasn’t here.
Ciro threw the knife.
It was a decent throw. Runed steel cut through the fetid air. It slammed into the man’s chest, piercing his black heart. It would have killed a mortal being in an instant: the organ clenching and seizing on the blade that held it. It would have been brutal, but it would have been quick.
No such luck for those that straddle the line between worlds.
The blade shone. It shone brightly enough to be seen through diseased flesh and putrid robes. It burned, a consuming fire, a hungry fire, as though drinking the essence of the Immaterium fuelled it. The man screamed, then as the fire bit, his pain rose in scale, his desperate hands slapping at the hilt but seemingly unable to find purchase.
Ciro wasted no time.
She stalked closer, just outside the range of a sudden lunge, and began to circle.
‘Who taught you?’ she asked. The words were wrong. No: they were the right ones, recited from the memory of many such interrogations, but the power was in the way they were spoken. Commanding. Righteous. Not high and hoarse from half-panic.
The man screamed.
‘How many in your cult?’ she demanded.
He only screamed. He wasn’t listening. She couldn’t make him listen.
He fell back to his knees, then collapsed to his back, hands like claws still clutching at his chest.
‘Answer me,’ Ciro said,’ And I’ll end you now.’
The man gritted his teeth.
His heels beat the broken boards.
‘It hurts,’ he ground out.
‘I know.’
‘Grandfather, it hurts!’
He wasn’t talking to her. He wasn’t even seeing her. His world had contracted to a single point of searing agony in his chest, and he cried out against it. He called to his patron.
Every candle lit at once. The half-gnawed stubs. The tapers on collapsing shelves. Rotten boxes in dark corners burned from within. The light was wrong: green-tinged, sickly, flush with foul, fruiting promise. Ciro pulled her will close, shielding herself, but still the wash of power was staggering.
A voice scratched at the back of her mind, a chorus of tiny claws and teeth working patient ruin.
**You call for succour in your suffering,** it said, **and Grandfather’s mercy you shall have.**
Thick, greasy smoke began to choke the chandlery, fire catching even damp, rotten wood. Emerald flame spread up the walls, across the floor, and licked at the screaming man while he writhed. Tasted his agony and found it sweet.
The screams turned to mewling, pathetic sounds - then to laughter.
Rising laughter, high and mad, that shook the ruin of his body.
Ciro drew her snub-nosed autogun from its shoulder holster. She fired at the wretched man. She burst his remaining eye. His head snapped back.
The laughter never stopped.
The man’s hands finally found a grip on the runed knife. Silver sparks tore at his flesh, but he was beyond pain now. It came from the black, grisly ruin of his chest with a small, withered thing on its gleaming blade. He looked at it with empty sockets, brow furrowed in curiosity.
A thin patina of rust had begun to spread along the blade. The runes flared briefly, furiously, then flickered out. He nodded, satisfied, and cast it away to shatter in the shadows.
He rose on broken bones. Ooze rather than blood bubbled, trickled from the bullet holes in his abdomen, the neat hole in his forehead. That flow, too, soon stopped.
Then he turned that black gaze on Ciro.
The laughter dribbled away into giggles, into a chuckle, then ceased.
**One,** he began.
Terror swept over Ciro - shivered her spine, jellied her legs. The daemon plodded forward.
She couldn’t run. No: she wouldn’t run. She was Malleus. She had hardened her will, shielded herself from the daemon’s corrosive presence, but that was wrong. The symbol of her order was not a fortress - it was a hammer.
She reached for the Warp to forge her will into force.
An open door.
The newborn Plaguebearer looked at her. Into her. It beheld her soul - and reached back.
Pain. A foul grasp enclosed her mind and began to squeeze.
And then the world was fire.
Everything burned.
Ciro curled into a tight ball against the heat, making herself as small as possible, but the pain only worsened. A headache pounding hard enough to crack her skull from the inside. She choked on the blood leaking freely from her nose, filling her airway. But with that pain came clarity. The dark grasp had flinched away at the touch of flame. The foulness of it was gone. All that remained was a blasted shadow against the walls of her mind, and then that, too, was gone - cleansed by ungentle light.
She dreaded opening her eyes. What if the chandlery was gone? What if she’d been dragged through that open door into the Warp itself and her soul was damned to an eternity of torment?
Something nudged her leg. Against all wisdom, she opened her eyes and looked down.
One of the defiled candles lay there, wick aflame, black wax melting into a lumpy puddle. A stub should not be able to scream, and yet it did, like a shackled soul in inescapable torment. Hot red flame overtook the unnatural green, wrestled it down, and consumed it. The fire burned brighter for the feast as though the unholy energy were mere fuel for a far greater fire.
All the candles burned the same way, their chorus rising as prayers charred from their skin.
The monster - where was the monster? Focus. She wasn’t dead yet.
Ciro rolled back from where she had seen the Plaguebearer last. Glass crunched under her boots, stray shards prickling at her bodysuit. Glass? She risked a glance around, disoriented, spitting out blood, ready to run if she could. The last thing she expected was rain, blessed, cleansing rain to wash her face and sweat-matted hair.
The storefront was gone but for smouldering framing. The shop was open to the street. She felt the oncoming presence before she saw it, a wave of directed psychic energy. Not an uncontrolled release, not the omnipresent gloom of a daemon, but a true spell. A proper casting.
It took the form of a vengeful eagle. It loosed golden flame with every beat of its wings. It was, like all good hate, silent but for the fizzling of rain upon its splendid plumage. It soared over her head, close enough to prickle her skin with heat and power.
Ciro tracked it back towards the Plaguebearer, where it joined its mate.
The monster still stood, clad in dark smoke. A sick heart nestled within the chandlery’s cracked ribs. It *grappled* with the first burning eagle. Talons and beak gouged great strips of blackened flesh from the daemon’s scabrous hide. The Plaguebearer struggled to find the construct’s throat, to choke the immaterial life from it. The daemon was losing, but not quickly. Ciro held her breath as she watched. Half-remembered litanies came unbidden to her lips. For the first time in many years, she believed them.
The second eagle stooped into the fray with a triumphant screech.
It melded seamlessly into its twin. A second head, blind and scarred, erupted from the thickening neck and plunged its beak straight into the Plaguebearer’s single red eye. The flaring wings enfolded the struggling daemon and lit with renewed, blinding light.
Ciro shielded her eyes against the glare.
Shelving caught fire. Bottles shattered. The chandlery burned as the daemon burned, fierce and bright with rapturous psychic flame. The twin-headed construct, now a perfect aquila, met the daemon’s limit and passed it with a snapping of bone and tearing of flesh. Again and again the twin beaks flashed, darting, stabbing, tearing and chewing. Ciro dared not look, not truly, not with her bruised will or her natural sight.
The thing that was now a hump of tortured gristle and rotten meat had been a man minutes before. A wicked man. A twisted man. He had sold his soul for power, had made sacrifices untold for strength, and had ascended, after a fashion, straight into a raptor’s gullet. His power was nothing before the psyker that had vanquished him.
And now, as the smear of a soul whispered away to nothingness, an eternity of agony in the realm of the Power he had called patron.
Footsteps, slow and considered. Ciro shook her head, bone-tired and thought-sore. She fixed her face into a proper Inquisitorial scowl and turned.
Her rescuer stood there, rosette out in one trembling hand and an exhausted, giddy grin on his pockmarked face. Puckered scar tissue picked out around his eyes in a crude domino, rising to form the tell-tale burns of removed electoos in the shape of the holy aquila across his forehead. An old slave brand. He was tall, thin, his body shrouded by a heavy raincape.
The twin-headed construct continued its consumption as the man spoke.
‘Interrogator Quist, Ordo Hereticus,’ he said, voice cracking slightly, looking down at her. ‘Goethe’s girl, aren’t you?’
Goethe’s girl.
The heat in Ciro’s cheeks had nothing to do with the gathering inferno around them.
*Goethe’s girl.*
She had tracked the cultist. She had brought the daemon to battle. She had come prepared. She had not triumphed - Throne, she’d nearly died, and she shied from that, for now, though recrimination would surely come later - but she had fought. She had put her life before the feet of Him on Terra. She had done her duty and more.
But that’s how it would always be. The shadow ran inescapably long.
‘Yes,’ she ground out between clenched teeth and rose to meet Quist face to face. Almost. Ciro was tall, for her world and for her sex, but the Hereticus bastard must’ve been a good, gangly six five or more. ‘Interrogator Lazh, Ordo Malleus. Have we met?’
‘Not formally.’ Quist’s eyes unfocused slightly as one head of the construct trilled. He wavered on his feet. ‘At the Surrender. I saw you with his retinue.’ A thin trickle of blood from one nostril. ‘He spoke well.’
Well. That took some of the sting out of it.
He’d remembered her, picked her out of all those there when Sartheno was ceded. And he’d named her before mentioning Goethe’s brimstone speech. The excoriation of the Ordos. All the arguments that followed. Everything that had led to this day, to one Interrogator Lazh running through the storm alone on a mission far beyond her experience.
She wiped quickly at her eyes. Damn rain.
‘I caught your seeker spell halfway across the district,’ Quist continued, ignorant or uncaring, his face brightened by flame as he watched his eagles eat. ‘Wish I’d arrived sooner. Hard for me to work in this downpour.’
Ciro managed to keep jealousy out of her voice and ended up striking stilted formality instead. ‘Pyromancy in the rain. Impressive.’
‘What can I say?’ A lazy smile spread across the Hereticus Interrogator’s scarred face. ‘I’m a man for all seasons.’
That did it. The tension punctured like a bladder. Ciro couldn’t keep the giggle down, and she didn’t try. Throne. She’d nearly died. Her meticulous preparations had failed. Her will had failed. She should have died.
What was she going to do now?
‘We should go.’
Quist’s smile had faded. He looked around at the blazing chandlery, as though the heat had only just registered. Despite the Row's usual discretion, curtains were being pulled back. Children were starting to wail, roused from their slumber by etheric discharge and the nightmares that followed. There would be questions if they stayed.
Questions if they left.
Ciro flinched back from the fire, towards the street, but she needed to know. She had to ask.
‘Is there anything we can do?’
Quist shook his head. ‘Whatever corruption was here, it’s gone. Not my first purge.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’ Not entirely.
Quist almost looked surprised. ‘What?’
‘The fire. Can’t you…’ Ciro gestured helplessly. ‘The people. It’ll spread.’
‘Sorry. I’m tapped out.’
She had to accept that. She nodded.
‘But our occupiers will have a fire brigade down within the hour, I’d wager. They’ve been looking for a chance to modernise the Quarter. Pushing people back block by block. But now…’ Quist shrugged. ‘They’ll seize on this, accelerate the program, and Throne knows, the ungrateful lot here will thank them for it.’
He looked at her. Their eyes met.
'Almost,' Quist said slowly, meeting her eyes, 'couldn't have gone better if they'd planned it.'
Daemons first. Politics never. She was Malleus - not Xenos, not Hereticus. But the candles, the shopfront, the lair… this wasn’t isolated. There was more to it than one madman and the unexpected grace of his patron. But it wasn’t her job. It wasn’t. That was the sort of thing *Goethe’s girl* would pursue, that bright-eyed scribe with her ink-stained fingers who saw the connections that her master couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
Quist broke the silence, thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if this manifestation might have anything to do with the sickness that’s been running the Quarter, too?’
Ciro blinked. What would Goethe say? Don’t get involved. Remember your duty.
Know your place.
The distant whine of approaching sirens.
Goethe wasn’t here.
‘Your bolthole or mine?’ Ciro asked, and felt *right* again for the first time in an aeon.