Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘Wait,’ I cautioned, being completely ignored for my pains. ‘Why are the stones here?’ They were the key to all this, of that I was certain, although I couldn’t for the life of me see how.

‘She comes! She comes!’ An ecstatic shriek cut across the sound of chanting and gunfire, and a capering figure clad only in blasphemous sigils daubed in substances I didn’t care to speculate about the origins of leapt onto the dais in front of the heap of shimmering, ailing stones. It was Fulcher, although fortunately Amberley was too far away and too occupied with despatching heretics to say ‘I told you so.’ Even before the echoes of the governor’s cry had time to die away, the air directly above the heap of stones crackled with energy, then ripped, and something inchoate stepped or slithered through. My breath stilled, a sense of soul-stifling horror rippling through me at the sheer blasphemous wrongness of whatever it was intruding on the real world. I glanced at Amberley and Vekkman, who ceased their butchery to turn and stare at it, then at Jurgen, who simply raised the melta he carried and waited for an order to fire.

This wasn’t like the daemon we’d seen on Drechia, although something about it suggested a common origin, the kind of kinship you might notice between a gretchin and an ork, say. There was nothing tangible about it for the eye to actually fix on; rather the suggestion of a presence, which hovered in the air with a palpable sense of gloating anticipation. Fulcher fell to his knees, his arms outstretched, his face upturned towards the nebulous horror floating over the altar. His voice quavered with the passionate eagerness of the truly demented.

‘In Slaanesh’s name I welcome thee. In Slaanesh’s name I bind thee–’ Then, with one voice, the cultists screamed.

Fulcher was the first to go, and serve him right if you ask me, blood, flesh and bone flowing like candle wax as he was sucked into the void where the thing hovered just above his head. Then the cultists closest to the dais were consumed, their intertwined bodies melting together as they were drawn out into one melded gobbet of writhing flesh, which grafted itself onto and engulfed what was left of the erstwhile governor. After that the process accelerated; before any of the heretics had time to realise how comprehensively they’d been betrayed, they were snatched up and added to the roiling mass of floating flesh. Even the bodies of those summarily executed by the inquisitors were seized on, adding their scattered blood and bone to the ghastly conglomeration.

‘Those rocks are getting darker,’ Jurgen said, while Amberley and Vekk­man redirected their fire at the Chimera-sized tumour floating in the air above our heads. He was right, too, the dark patches I’d noted before spreading even faster across and within them. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I’m consuming the souls they contain.’ A mellifluous voice drifted across the open space, and I felt a thrill of sheer terror coursing down my back. It was horribly familiar, all the more so for the number of times I’d heard it in my dreams recently. The floating mass of flesh began to shift again, taking on a more defined shape, different to the one I remembered in my nightmares about the confrontation on Adumbria, and completely unlike the human witch I’d first encountered on Slawkenberg, but somehow echoing and amplifying both. ‘Which makes me a thousand times stronger than the last time we met.’ A ripple of laughter escaped the partially formed mouth, so light-hearted and alluring that I found my mouth beginning to smile in response before my rational mind clamped down hard on the impulse. ‘So you can forget all about sending me back to the warp this time, even with that horrid little friend of yours here.’

‘Is that who I think it is, sir?’ the horrid little friend in question asked, frowning in perplexity, and aiming the melta as he did so. ‘Only I thought they weren’t supposed to be able to come back for a thousand years after you banished them.’

‘It’s Emeli all right,’ I said, as the towering daemon solidified completely and stepped down off the dais. I fought down the terror which threatened to overwhelm me as her shapely hoof struck the ground, envying my aide his simple and unshakable faith that the Emperor protects, and would continue to do so even in circumstances as dire as this. The inquisitors were holding their ground, although I knew Amberley well enough to be aware of the effort this would be costing her.

The spirit stones were flickering more feebly now, as their essence continued to drain into the hideously alluring abomination. ‘Don’t ask me how.’