Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘It probably would. But if it set this lot on fire we’d go up like kindling.’ Which, on the whole, was a pretty compelling argument for doing it the hard way. And I had to admit, harder was what it was getting. The hedges were getting more and more flesh-like, oozing viscid secretions, and now my whirling blade seemed to be drawing blood rather than sap. The going underfoot was getting harder too, slippery and uneven, and I fought to keep my footing firm as I advanced.

Then, abruptly, I was through, stumbling into the wide glade at the heart of the labyrinth in a spray of blood and viscera, the others hard on my heels. The walls around us had completed their transmogrification, becoming palpitating flesh in their entirety, limned with pulsating veins which formed shapes suggestive of images of staggering depravity. Images which, in many cases, were being enthusiastically enacted by men, women and androgynes of all shapes and sizes. It made the debauches I’d witnessed on Drechia look like a gathering of tech-priests debating a fragment of machine-code.

As I tore my eyes away from the unedifying spectacle in search of an immediate threat, a strange sense of disorientation swept over me. After a moment of puzzlement, I realised that the space into which we’d intruded seemed bigger than it should have been, apparently covering an area larger than the exterior of the maze we’d entered such a short time before.

Like the cavern we’d stumbled into on Drechia, the cultists were arranged about a central altar, at which dimly seen figures muttered and capered with an air of fell purpose.

‘Yanbel.’ Amberley tapped her comm-bead. ‘Send the message.’

‘I’ll try,’ the voice of the tech-priest assured her, ‘but I can’t be sure I’ve broken the encryption on their system. And even if I have, they may not listen.’

‘They’ll listen to this,’ Amberley said, and added a few incomprehensible phrases in the lilting eldar tongue. ‘Transmit that.’

‘Consider it done,’ Yanbel said, and cut the link. I might have wondered what the cryptic exchange was all about, but under the circumstances, as you’ll no doubt appreciate, my attention was elsewhere. I fell naturally into a guard position with my humming chain-blade, and raised my laspistol, searching for a target. Fortunately none of the orgiasts seemed to have much attention to spare for our abrupt arrival, although that was a state of affairs none of us expected to last for much longer, and we formed up in a tight defensive knot.

‘There are the stones, sir,’ Jurgen pointed out helpfully, raising his voice a little to cut through those of the celebrants, which were beginning to mingle into a single, unified chant. I felt the palms of my hands tingling again; this was a sound I’d heard far too recently to be unaware of the implications.

My aide was right. Dozens of the shimmering crystals had been piled up in a heap on a raised dais at the exact centre of the maze, surrounded by writhing, gibbering cultists. They glowed just as brightly as before, their colours shifting and fluctuating in the same manner as the one Amberley had shown me, but something seemed different about them; faint threads of darkness were drifting across them now, like dribbles of ink in water. At first I wondered if I was imagining it, but gradually the blemishes spread, like a fungal infection slowly consuming a rotting ploin.

‘This is bad,’ Vekkman said, raising the obsidian rod. The energy discharges were more visible now, racing up and down it, and I glanced round to make sure that Jurgen was far enough away not to affect whatever it was supposed to do. After all, this was Vekkman’s area of expertise, and our very souls probably depended on it. ‘They’re generating too much warp energy for the null rod to dissipate.’ And, for the first time, he and Amberley exchanged a glance of complete mutual agreement. ‘So we’ll just have to disrupt the summoning the old fashioned way.’ At which point he opened fire with his bolt pistol, targeting the nearest cultist.

‘What?’ I said, more than a little taken aback by this development. The memory of being swarmed by the cultists on Drechia was still vivid, and provoking these ones into attacking us seemed unwise in the extreme.

Vekkman looked at me, his eyes cold even for an inquisitor.

‘They’re opening a pathway for a daemon. One that makes the last specimen you encountered seem like a gyrinx kitten. Our only chance of saving this world from damnation is to stem the flow of energy from their corrupted souls before it’s too late.’

‘What he said,’ Amberley agreed, opening up with the storm bolter in the forearm of her suit. The two inquisitors began to advance behind a barrage of bolts, felling cultists all around them as they went.