Dan Abnett - First and Only

'Sergeant Blane has brought visitors to you, sir. We've checked them for weapons, and they're clean. Will you see them?'

Gaunt nodded, pulling on his cap and longcoat. He stepped out into the corridor. When he saw the identity of the visitors, Gaunt waved his men back and walked down to greet them.

It was Colonel Zoren, the Vitrian commander, and three of his officers.

'Well met, commissar,' Zoren said curtly. He and his men were dressed in ochre fatigues and soft caps.

'I didn't realise you Vitrians were aboard,' Gaunt said.

'Last minute change. We were bound for the Japhet but there was a problem with the boarding tubes. They re-routed us here. The regiments scheduled for the Absalom took our places on the Japhet once the technical problems were solved. My platoons have been given the barrack decks aft of here.'

'It's good to see you, colonel.'

Zoren nodded, but there was something he was holding back, Gaunt sensed. 'When I learned we were sharing the same transport as the Tanith, I thought perhaps an interaction would be appropriate. We have a mutual victory to celebrate. But—'

'But?'

Zoren dropped his voice. 'I was attacked in my quarters this morning. A man dressed in unmarked navy overalls was searching my belongings. He rounded on me when I came in. There was a struggle. He escaped.'

Gaunt felt his anger return. 'Go on.'

'He was looking for something. Something he thought I might have, something he had failed to find elsewhere. I thought I should tell you directly.'

Milo, Uan and everyone in the corridor, including Zoren himself, was surprised when Gaunt grabbed the Vitrian colonel by the front of his tunic and dragged him into his quarters. Gaunt slammed the door shut after them.

Alone in the room, Gaunt turned on Zoren, who looked hurt but somehow not surprised.

That was a terribly well-informed statement, colonel.'

'Naturally.'

'Start making sense, Zoren, or I'll forget our friendship.'

'No need for unpleasantness, Gaunt. I know more than you imagine and, I assure you, I am a friend.'

'Of whom?'

'Of you, of the Throne of Terra, and of a mutual acquaintance I know him as Bel Torthute. You know him as Fereyd.'

EIGHT

'It's…' Colonel Draker Flense began. 'It's a lot to think about.'

He was answered by a snigger that did nothing to calm his nerves. The snigger came from a tall, hooded shape at the rear of the room, a figure silhouetted against a window of stained glass imagery which was lit by the flashes and glints of the irnmaterium.

You're a soldier, Flense. I don't believe thinking is part of the tob description.'

Flense bit back on a sharp answer. He was afraid, terribly afraid of the man in the multi-coloured shadows of the window. He shifted uneasily, dying for a breathe of fresh air, his throat parched. The chamber was thick with the smoke from the obscura water-pipe on its slate plinth by the steps to the window. The nectar-sweet opiate smoke swirled around him and stole all humidity from the air. His mind was slack and torpid from breathing it in.

Warrant Officer Lekulanzi, stood by the door and the three shrouded astropaths grouped in a huddle in the shadows to his left didn't seem to mind. The astropaths were a law unto themselves, and Flense had recognised the pallor of an obscura addict in Lekulanzi's face the moment the warrant officer had arrived at his quarters to summon him. Flense had lead an assault into an addict-hive on Poscol years before. He had never forgotten the sweet stench, nor the pallor of the halfhearted resistance.

The figure at the windows stepped slowly down to face him. Flense, two metres tall without his jackboots, found himself looking up into the darkness of the cowl.

'Well, colonel?' whispered the voice inside the hood.

'I— I don't really understand what is expected of me, my lord.'

Inquisitor Golesh Constantine Pheppos Heldane sniggered again. He reached up with his ring-heavy fingers and turned back his cowl. Flense blinked. Heldane's face was high and long, like some equine beast. His wet, sneering mouth was full of blunt teeth and his eyes were round and dark. Fluid tubes and fibre-wires laced his long, sloped skull like hair braids. His huge skull was hairless, but Flense could see the matted fur that coated his neck and throat. He was human, but his features had been surgically altered to inspire terror and obedience in those he… studied. At least, Flense hoped it was a surgical alteration.

You seem uneasy, colonel. Is it the circumstance, or my words?'

Flense found himself floundering for speech again. 'I've never been admitted to a sacrosanctorium before, lord,' he began.

Heldane extended his arms wide – too wide for anything but a skeletal giant like Heldane, Flense shuddered – to encompass the chamber. Those present were standing in one of the Absalom's astropath sanctums, a chamber screened from all intrusion. The walls were null-field dead spaces designed to shut out both the material world and the screaming void of the Immaterium. Sound-proofed, psyker-proofed, wire-proofed, these inviolable cocoons were dedicated and reserved for the astropathic retinue alone. They were prohibited by Imperial law. Only a direct invitation could admit a blunt human such as Flense.

Blunt. Flense didn't like the word, and hadn't been aware of it until Lekulanzi had used it. Blunt. A psyker's word for the non-psychic. Blunt. Flense wished by the Ray of Hope he could be elsewhere. Any elsewhere.

'You are discomforting my cousins,' Heldane said to Flense, indicating the three astropaths, who were fidgeting and murmuring. 'They sense your reluctance to be here. They sense their stigma.'

'I have no prejudices, inquisitor.'

Yes, you have. I can taste them. You detest mind-seers. You despise the gift of the astropath. You are a blunt, Flense. A ^ense-dead moron. Shall I show you what you are missing?'

Flense shook. 'No need, inquisitor!'

'Just a touch? Be a sport.' Heldane sniggered, droplets of spittle flecking off his thick teeth.

Flense shuddered. Heldane turned his gaze away slowly and then snapped back suddenly. Impossible light flooded into Flense's skull. For one second, he saw eternity. He saw the angles of space, the way they intersected with time. He saw the tides of the Empyrean, and the wasted fringes of the Immaterium, the fluid spasms of the Warp. He saw his mother, his sister, both long dead. He saw light and darkness and nothingness. He saw colours without name. He saw the birth torments of the genestealer whose blood would scar his face. He saw himself on the drill-field of the Schola on Primagenitor. He saw an explosion of blood. Familiar blood. He started to ay. He saw bones buried in rich, black mud. He realised they, too, were his own. He looked into the sockets. He saw maggots. He screamed. He vomited. He saw a red-dark sky and an impossible number of suns. He saw a star overload and collapse. He saw-Too much.

Draker Flense fell to the floor of the sacrosanctorium, soiled himself and started to whimper.

'I'm glad we've got that straight,' Inquisitor Heldane said. He raised his cowl again. 'Let me start over. I serve Dravere, as you do. For him, I will bend the stars. For him, I will torch planets. For him, I will master the unmasterable.'

Flense moaned.

'Get up. And listen to me. The most priceless artefact in space awaits our lord in the Menazoid Clasp. Its description and circumstance lies with the Commissar Gaunt. We will obtain that secret. I have already expended precious energies trying to reach it. This Gaunt is… resourceful. You will allow yourself to be used in this matter. You and the Patricians. You already have a feud with them.'

'Not this… not this…' Flense rasped from the floor.