Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘Are you all right, sir?’ Jurgen took my arm as I stumbled, light-headed from the intoxicating scent and on the verge of getting lost in the complexities of the melody, almost pitching myself headlong into the abyss. As he did so the sound changed abruptly. Suddenly it seemed sinister, greedy, the melodic runs twining around one another like a nest of hissing serpents. I shook my head, clearing it, inhaling the unusually welcome odour of his seldom-changed socks as though it were pure oxygen.

‘That singing was starting to get to me,’ I admitted. There was definitely something hypnotic about it, almost predatory, and my sense of unease grew exponentially.

My aide nodded, with a grimace of distaste. ‘Sounds like ice weasels on heat,’ he said, something I was quite willing to take his word for.51 The way my perceptions had so suddenly changed could have only one explanation: the sound which had so beguiled me was somehow linked to the warp, and I was now close enough to Jurgen to be reaping the benefits of his protective aura. That thought shivered its way down my spine like liquid ice, and I tapped the comm-bead in my ear again, on the verge of transmitting a warning to everyone else down here.

Then I hesitated. How could I warn Grifen and the others we were facing some warp-spawned horror without exposing Jurgen’s peculiar gift – something Amberley would take a very dim view of. Things got sticky enough if I was a bit late for a dinner engagement,52 so her reaction to having her most valuable and secret asset exposed was something I really didn’t want to contemplate. If my suspicions were true, the only way I could plausibly claim to know about it was if I’d witnessed some piece of warpcraft at first hand.

Not a comforting thought, but it made the necessity of finding out exactly what we were up against even more urgent.

I took a deep breath, almost regretting it given how close I was still standing to my aide, and slowed my hammering heart. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s find out who’s strangling the cats.’

Jurgen nodded, looking faintly bemused, but at least didn’t ask which cats and which tunnel they were lurking down, as I’d half suspected he would the moment I’d voiced the metaphor.

‘At least they’ll shut up if we shoot them,’ he said, pragmatic as always, and I found myself nodding in agreement. Right now, with that infernal dirge gnawing at my synapses, the suggestion seemed to have a lot going for it. Of course chanting and warpcraft tended to go together like salt grox and a bap, so the sooner we found out what was going on and disrupted it – or, better still, sent a couple of squads of Grifen’s people in to disrupt it while I called out encouraging platitudes from a safe distance – the better.

‘Right,’ I said, pausing only to check my chainsword once again, being reassured to find it still loose enough in the scabbard for a fast draw and the speed selector already flicked over to maximum revs. ‘Let’s go and put a stop to this.’

A few hundred metres further on, we rounded another gentle curve in the rock wall to find ourselves facing the entrance to a cavern. Clearly once a natural cleft in the side of the tunnel – which continued on into the distance towards Emperor knew what – it had been enlarged and elaborated into an organic-seeming orifice, decorated with carvings which positively oozed sensual decadence.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck beginning to bristle. I’d seen its like on Adumbria, and in a few other secret corners of the galaxy where the decadent minions of the Great Enemy gathered to worship their god of excess and depravity. All at once I remembered where I’d smelled that cloying scent before, in the temples of Slaanesh I’d had an invariably reluctant hand in cleansing. We walked illuminated by the flickering pastel light that spilled from the cleft ahead of us.

Which undoubtedly explained why the shade of Emeli had begun to slither into my dreams again of late, although up until then I’d been putting it down to Kasteen’s remark about our time on Adumbria during the briefing a few days before. With a shrine to her patron power pulsing beneath our feet like a malignant tumour in the bowels of the mine, it was hardly surprising that its psychic influence would seep out, looking for some way to manifest itself.53

I tapped the comm-bead in my ear, heedless of my earlier scruples. This was evidence of heresy no one could have missed; moreover, it was an immediate threat which had to be contained. In my experience, chanting in temples full of heretics never ended well, particularly for the chanters – which only went to show how barmy they were to begin with.

‘Cain to all squads,’ I voxed, keeping the tremor of bowel-clenching terror out of my voice with a little more effort than usual, ‘home in on my signal. Contact with heretics, repeat, heretics, invoking warpcraft. I need backup and a priest ASAP. Respond.’