‘We do face a crisis, that is true. I do believe that the Inquisition has an important role to play in its resolution. But the Inquistion — young, eager and growing in influence — will not use this crisis to grab the power your organisation craves’; for it craves it no less than the ancient offices and institutions already serving their self-interest. Your allies, through their action or omission of action, are endangering Imperial worlds. You will check their ambitions or you will force me to check them for you. In turn, I will be your check, your balance. For the good of the Imperium, the Officio Assassinorum will carry out one of the duties for which it was created and for which it is expertly suited — keeping the rest of the officios honest. Now,’ Vangorich said, turning and heading for the ablutorials. ‘Please excuse me. The wine, you see. It goes straight through me.’
As the Assassin walked through the gaggles of sycophants, towards the antehalls, he stopped a passing servitor-servant and took the final chalice of fortified wine from its silver tray. As he put the rim of the cup to his lips and drank, he watched the servitor mindlessly hold the polished platter at its side — as Vangorich had noticed the chamber drones do many times before. In the mirrored surface of the tray, the Grand Master saw the Inquisitorial agent watching his exit and a second figure, similarly robed and hooded, join her.
Vangorich studied the interloper’s height and build: her slenderness and upright carriage obvious and her step light, even in the heavy robes. He had spent time studying that figure before for knowledge of her weight, balance, ambidexterity and reflexes; all he would need to know to get past her practiced defences and kill her with his bare hands. As she turned and the light picked out the sharpness of her cheekbones, Vangorich knew that he was looking at Inquisitorial Representative Wienand. The real Wienand: ghosting the chamber floor as a busy-body official, while some surgically-crafted double occupied her throne at the centre of the Great Chamber.
Vangorich watched her lips. He read their motions; the way they formed about words for which she had clear distaste. The pair studied him, little knowing that he was studying them right back. He watched Wienand’s agent give the briefest of reports.
‘Unfortunate,’ he read from the light catching Wienand’s lips.
‘For you, my lady,’ Vangorich said to himself, ‘if you don’t heed my warning.’
As Wienand and her bodyguard melted into the crowd, Vangorich gave the servitor-servant back the empty chalice. The withered thing replaced it on the silver tray and walked off, its service done. Passing the politics and double-dealing of the vestablutae fonts, Vangorich entered his reserved ablutory. Even the restrooms of the Imperial Palace had a grandness about their architecture and ornate fittings.
‘Wait outside,’ Vangorich commanded upon entrance, prompting a brass-masked servitor who performed the function of attendant to leave the small chamber. His privacy thus assured, the Assassin produced a vox-bead from his robes and slotted it into his ear.
‘Beast…’
‘Sir?’
‘Mesring’s found a way to screw us without screwing us,’ Vangorich said.
‘He told the Lord High Admiral.’
‘The border fleets are being recalled but not redeployed,’ the Grand Master spat. ‘He’s forming an armada.’
‘A grand gesture,’ Esad Wire voxed back. ‘He can play galactic hero without risking a single vessel.’
‘Or his influence in the Senatorum,’ Vangorich said.
‘Do you want me to withhold the antidote?’ Esad Wire put to the Grand Master. Vangorich considered.
‘He delivered half a solution,’ he voxed to Beast. ‘Issue him with the same. Have the antidote solution delivered at half concentration. Something to keep his Grace alive but still useful to us.’
‘Consider it done.’
‘Beast.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Meet me at Mount Vengeance.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘It’s time we got to work.’
TWELVE
The void, usually so black and empty, was crowded with cataclysm. Colossal fragments of planetary rock tumbled through the darkness, smashing into and through one another. Shard storms of hull-punching regolith blossomed from such collisions, showering the tightening spaces between the gargantuan chunks of shattered planetoids with death. This was the edge of the Aspiria System, for Aspiria was no more.
An astrotelepathic distress call had drawn Marshal Bohemond’s small crusader fleet to Aspira from the Vulpius region. The Black Templars’ Vulpius Crusade had been in the Weald Worlds as part of a purgation action against the Noulia. The Adeptus Astartes had been the punch needed to break the xenos and had acted in support of a flotilla of Imperial Navy vessels under Commodore DePrasse, whose orbital bombardments had failed to obliterate the Noulia from the surface of the wooded, backwater moons.
Aspiria had been a large Imperial mining world that dominated the system. Now, in its place, sat the ugly attack moon of which the astrotelepathic distress call had warned. The abominable thing bristled with gargantuan weaponry and fluxed with field shielding that routinely seemed to short and crackle away before returning with a blinding flash. Part of the monstrous moon was missing — perhaps the victim of a former planetary collision or malfunctioning weapon. In its place was a ramshackle framework of rusted girders and scaffolding, revealing the horrors of the planetoid interior: fleet bays and an internal anchorage for a barbarian armada of greenskin cruisers, attack ships and scrap-clads. Tearing the mine-riddled Aspiria to rubble with its great gravitic weaponry, the attack moon — like a spider’s nest disgorging its young — streamed gunships, capsules and rocks at the surviving worlds of the system. What the bombardment of planetary debris didn’t destroy, the swarms of delivered greenskins swiftly decimated. By the time the combination Black Templar and Imperial Navy fleet arrived, there was nothing but the enemy left.
Marshal Bohemond’s gauntlets dug into the arms of his pulpit throne. It was not fear or concern for his safety that prompted his tightening grip, despite the tremors that felt their way through the battle-barge’s superstructure and the command deck. It was anger. It was hatred. As the Black Templars battle-barge Abhorrence banked as sharply as its blunt prow and length would allow, a gargantuan piece of Aspiria tumbled by. Castellan Clermont, the battle-barge’s commanding officer, had ordered the evasive manoeuvre. Never one to miss an opportunity to smite the xenos enemy, Clermont bawled at the bondsmen on the bridge to smash the battle-barge straight through a ragged vanguard line of ork ram ships and boarding hulks. Bohemond had allowed himself a moment of satisfaction with the castellan’s strategy, imagining the xenos’ surprise at the vessel they were intending to ram turning and crashing clean back through them. As the Abhorrence banked about the obstacle, however, with greenskin junkers detonating against the battle-barge’s void shields, the bridge lancet screen revealed the xenos attack moon. Bohemond felt bile climb the back of his throat. Like the tug of tiny threads in the muscles of his face, his mouth formed an involuntary snarl.
Bohemond had fought the greenskins many times before. Gililaq 3-16. Horner’s World. Gamma Phorsk. Draakoria. It had been on Draakoria that a feral greenskin shaman had taken his eye. With its unnatural powers the creature had set everything around it alight, but Bohemond had strode through the strange flame using his hatred of the thing as his compass. The marshal had slain its chieftain and thousands of its depraved tribe-kin, and had promised himself that the witch would suffer the same fate. With his blade encrusted with greenskin gore, the marshal had charged through the inferno.