Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

Which was pretty conclusive if you asked me. I circled round the corpse, a little warily, looking for anything which might provide a clue as to what had done this. Now my eyes were adjusting to the lower light levels we were standing in, I could make out a couple of other indistinct shapes in the darkness ahead, and I didn’t need the tingling of my palms to apprehend what they might be. I peered into the gloom, hoping my guess was wrong, but uncomfortably certain that it wasn’t. Preoccupied, I failed to notice where I was putting my own feet until I stumbled, my right boot stubbing against something hard and faintly yielding.

‘What’s that?’ Amberley asked, her attention attracted by my muttered profanity, and Zemelda obligingly redirected her luminator, momentarily dazzling me and frakking up my almost-restored night vision in the process.

‘Looks like a bag,’ Jurgen said, taking the question as literally as ever, and poking it with the barrel of his melta as he spoke – which I suppose was one way of finding out whether the contents were toxic or explosive, though not one I’d have chosen to use myself. ‘Seems to have pebbles in.’

‘Really.’ Amberley seemed surprisingly interested in the prospect. She gestured to Mott. ‘Could they be what I think they are?’

‘That would depend on what you’re thinking,’ Mott said, predictably enough, ‘but given the similarity of these garments to the ones worn by the scavvies we encountered at the site of the webway portal, there’s an eighty-seven per cent probability that these are indeed spirit stones.’ Which meant nothing to me, of course.

‘Spirit stones?’ I asked. I knew that the eldar generally carried a jewel of some kind as a good luck charm,138 and would make strenuous efforts to recover those of their fallen comrades, but the strength of their attachment to their trinklets meant that I’d never seen one up close.

Amberley nodded, as Mott picked up the bag. It seemed to fluoresce faintly in response, although I couldn’t be sure at first whether it really was glowing, or whether I was merely seeing the after-images of Zemelda’s luminator. Then he moved a layer of padding aside, and I was left in no doubt. The collection of fist-sized stones within really were giving off a soft refulgence, a breathtaking display which seemed oddly compelling, holding my attention until Mott closed the bag again.

‘Every eldar carries one,’ she said, although any Guardsman who’d ever faced the pointy-ears could have told me that. Her next statement came as a bit of a surprise, though. ‘Something to do with their funeral rites. No one’s sure why, but they seem to believe it protects their souls from Slaanesh.’

‘No wonder they trashed the temple on Drechia,’ I said. Come to that, it probably explained why the farseer was willing to offer the truce which had seemed so baffling at the time. Given the choice between slaughtering a few more humans and protecting the souls of his people, he could hardly have done otherwise.

‘That probably had something to do with it,’ Amberley agreed, while Mott redistributed the contents of his backpack to make room for the bundle of stones.

‘Two more dead ones,’ Pelton called, from a few dozen metres further down the tunnel. ‘Flesh eaten away on the front of the heads, no obvious cause of death.’ He paused. ‘Other than that, of course.’

‘Any more spirit stones?’ Amberley asked, and Pelton shook his head.

‘No. I’ve already checked.’ Of course he had, careful searches of a crime scene were second nature to him.

‘So,’ I said, glancing down at the corpse I was standing beside, ‘they were coming uphive from down the tunnel there. Something attacked them.’ I called across to Pelton. ‘Any weapons near those bodies?’

‘Both of them,’ he confirmed, ‘much good it seems to have done them.’

‘Right.’ A picture was beginning to emerge which I really didn’t like the look of. ‘They were ambushed. The two back there tried to hold off whatever it was,’ because as sure as the Emperor’s immortality it hadn’t been a who, ‘while these two made a run for it with the loot. Getting all of a hundred metres.’

‘Before whatever it was caught up with them,’ Amberley finished, and I nodded.

‘It definitely wasn’t the eldar, because they’d have taken the stones.’ I glanced at Jurgen. ‘And whatever it looks like it can’t have been ’nids, because it doesn’t make sense for them to be here in the first place. Mutants or gangers would have looted the bodies, and pretty much anything else I can think of liable to be down here would have eaten the whole corpse, not just the flesh on the heads.’ I shuddered at a very uncomfortable thought I wish I hadn’t had. ‘Which leaves the cultists.’

‘Nothing human did that,’ Zemelda said decisively.

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But maybe they summoned something. Like that daemon on Drechia.’