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  Her face showed no pain. She looked more angry than anything, as if the wound was an insult. ‘Break open the armoury! To battle stations and repel them! Do not let them into the anatomy theatre!’

  She lunged at Deiphobus, and her arm was jointed wrongly. The elbow bent the wrong way, the shoulder unfolding and giving her an extra joint that turned the point of the rapier under Deiphobus’s guard. The point punched between his ribs and speared him right through the torso.

  The pain was real. Deiphobus gasped down a breath, and the effort tore open two of his lungs further. The power field burned out a great channel of burned flesh and organ. Red flashes burst in front of his eyes as one of his hearts was ripped apart and his nervous system plunged into shock.

  But he was not dead. This was not real. He was not a Space Marine. He was a mental construct, psychically projected into the mind of an alien.

  For a moment, the thought created a break in the pain. He could move, he could act, for another half-second longer.

  He spent that half-second ramming his combat knife up into Carmillas’s throat. He twisted the blade and her head came off, revealing a shredded mass of grey-brown matter resembling the flesh of the xenos itself.

  The inquisitor – which was not an inquisitor at all, but the alien’s concept of a human being – slumped to the ground. Deiphobus looked up at the sky and saw it was turning white. The blood was draining from his eyes and the world was greying out. It lost its shape, for the only thing keeping this world resembling a jungle was Deiphobus’s own willpower.

  Deiphobus fell to his knees. He would have to give up on this projection. The xenos had been ready for him this time. But he had found out enough.

  The jungle disintegrated, and Deiphobus was yanked up through the freezing ocean as his self-image exploded into a million shards of colour.

  The apothecarion of the Fate of Stalinvast was dimly lit and cold. Many battle-brothers had breathed their last there, and their names were carved into the walls. This wing of the apothecarion was the Nerve-Glove Hall, and several devices, looking something like human-shaped casts split in two with their interiors covered in circuitry, were ranked in rows down the centre of the room. The nerve-glove was a tradition of the Imperial Fists – to anyone else it was a torture device, but to an Imperial Fist it was a means to express the strength of body and mind that Dorn’s example had instilled in them.

  Deiphobus sat beside the autosurgeon unit on which the alien lay, its wrists and ankles shackled. The alien was comatose – it appeared dead to the sensors of the autosurgeon, but Deiphobus knew better, for its mind was still alive.

  ‘Librarian,’ said Sergeant Ctesiphon, who stood by the doorway. ‘You are awake.’

  ‘Most astute of you, brother,’ said Deiphobus. He was aware that sweat was running down his face and his hand still hovered over the xenos’s skull. He withdrew his hand and pulled his gauntlet back on. ‘How long have you stood there?’

  ‘Long enough to know the xenos is putting up a fight.’

  ‘It is,’ replied Deiphobus. ‘But there was a path.’

  ‘A path? Does it mean something?’

  ‘Everything in there means something.’ Deiphobus stood. His body ached. Every muscle must have been tensed. ‘Have you news?’

  ‘Techmarine Krusse found something else in the data-medium from Carmillas’s body.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It was hidden, but in such a way that a standard Imperial tech-seance would find it. It was a single word.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Vermilion,’ said Ctesiphon.

  Deiphobus thought on this for a moment. ‘Vermilion,’ he repeated, as if searching for something concealed in the sound. ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘How far are we out from Beati Magnis?’

  ‘The crew say five days.’

  ‘That should be enough.’ Deiphobus looked down at the alien. It was disgusting. All aliens were, but this one had something particularly foul in its near-human proportions. ‘They know of us and what we look like.’ said Deiphobus. ‘But they know nothing of our anatomy. Carmillas may have been their first contact with humanity.’

  ‘Do they pose a risk?’ asked Ctesiphon.

  ‘Hopefully not so great a risk,’ said Deiphobus, ‘as we pose to them.’

  Deiphobus picked up the path as a deep channel scored through a charnel heap the size of a mountain. In the distance, more mountains rose, stretching off in a mighty range that seemed to touch the purple-black sky seething overhead. The bodies were those of the same alien species whose mind Deiphobus was traversing. They were all different, their skin a different hue of grey and brown, their facial features arranged in a different manner.

  This was not a sight from the alien’s imagination. Deiphobus had performed enough interrogations to tell the difference between fantasy and memory. The xenos had seen this once. It had witnessed mountains of its own dead. But the path had not been a part of that memory.

  To traverse this region of the alien’s mind Deiphobus had taken on the form, not of a Space Marine, but of a hardy Missionary, a leather-skinned wanderer leaning on a gnarled staff. He wore the once-white robes of the Missionaria Galaxia and his every step jangled with the gear he carried, enough to keep a man fed and sheltered through whatever wilds he might have to cross.

  The watchtower was ahead, where the path finally ended. It was obsidian and jade, squat and powerful, a bastion against the wind that howled through the heaps of xenos dead. The door was a solid black slab with a single gap at eye level.

  Deiphobus banged a fist on the door. A pair of eyes appeared at the slit. They were human eyes.

  ‘Speak the word,’ said a man’s voice.

  ‘Vermilion,’ said Deiphobus.

  A few seconds passed. The door swung open. Deiphobus walked inside.

  Out of the wind, it was warm. Light came from a circular hearth in the centre of the room. A few medicae orderlies were tending to wounded soldiers. Imperial Guard by the look of them.

  Deiphobus knew their wounds never healed. The orderlies’ work was never done. They symbolised the sacrifices made to put this place here, nestled so deep in the alien’s mind that without a path, no one could ever find it again.

  Inquisitor Carmillas sat by the fire, washing soiled bandages in a wooden pail of blood-pink water. She was not in her formal inquisitor’s garb. She war a long white dress, already stained with the soldiers’ blood. Her belt held a sword – not a power weapon but a functional warrior’s weapon. Her hair was down around her shoulders. Deiphobus noticed she did not have her bionic eye. Perhaps this was how she had looked when she was younger.

  ‘Inquisitor,’ said Deiphobus. ‘I have come here to speak with you.’

  ‘I am afraid,’ replied the inquisitor, ‘that I do not have much capacity for conversation. I am a psychic construct of the Carmillas, not the inquisitor herself. I am as she was in her unguarded moments, and I understand the likeness is very good, but aside from a few simple interactions I am unable to speak in her stead.’

  ‘That will not be necessary,’ said Deiphobus. ‘I imagine her psykers programmed you with the information I must request. I need to see the protocols with which this xenos was implanted.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Carmillas. She stood and wiped off her bloody hands on a cloth.

  Gleaming black slabs of crystal rose from the floor.

  OBSERVE, Deiphobus read from one slab. The words were carved in High Gothic. WAIT, GAIN TRUST, AND RETURN.

  Another read, BE SILENT ON MATTERS OF MANKIND.

  BE AS A SLAVE TO THE EMPEROR, read another.

  ‘I see,’ said Deiphobus. ‘This is as I suspected, but it is good to be certain. Were you given any knowledge on the xenos itself to impart?’

  ‘I was,’ replied Carmillas. Her eyes left Deiphobus and she seemed to be focusing far away. ‘The xenos has a cyclical notion of existence. Their attitude to civilisation reflects this. Whe
n their society reaches a pre-determined level of sophistication, they cast down their civilisation and put their cities to the torch, regressing to a feral existence. They then build up their civilisation again until it is time to cast it down once more. The xenos are currently towards the beginning of this cycle, approaching multi-system capacity. This species’ threat level will increase, and their reaction to contact with the Imperium is unknown.’ She turned back to Deiphobus. ‘Is this response to your satisfaction?’

  ‘It is, inquisitor,’ said Deiphobus.

  ‘Is there anything further for you here?’

  ‘No,’ said Deiphobus. ‘I have all I need.’

  ‘Then good day to you,’ said Carmillas. ‘The soldiers’ wounds must be dressed.’

  Into the shattered crag of Miser’s Peak was carved a chamber lined with lapis and gold, lit by a chandelier of pilgrims’ skulls. A great throne stood surrounded by choir-servitors, their hooded, hunched forms kneeling in eternal supplication.

  Here the air was chill, for this world was too far from its sun to permit normal human habitation. That fact helped keep it secret, for if there was one thing the Inquisition valued, it was secrecy.

  On the throne sat Lord Inquisitor Vortz of the Ordo Xenos. His regal robes were of glistening loxatl hide and his armour was cut from the bones of a dozen species. He was an old man, and his breath misted in the freezing air.

  His interrogators and explicators stood at attention beside his throne in the scarlet uniforms of his personal army. Vortz’s presence was such that his underlings might as well have not even been there.

  Deiphobus nodded in salute. He stood at the foot of the throne, a place intended to instil the observer with a sense of awe and inferiority to the inquisitor. Deiphobus felt neither. Behind him, Chapter serfs wheeled in the gurney on which the alien was strapped.

  ‘Lord Inquisitor,’ said Deiphobus. ‘The Space Marines of the Imperial Fists make common purpose with your Holy Ordos. We have brought you the xenos recovered from Inquisitor Carmillas’s outpost.’

  ‘So I see,’ said Vortz. ‘We were dismayed to hear of the death of Inquisitor Carmillas. She was once the most promising interrogators in our service, and in later years earned great praise from her brethren as an inquisitor. Pray tell, Librarian Deiphobus, how did she die?’

  ‘In battle,’ said Deiphobus.

  ‘That is something, at least. My explicators will receive the alien from you. And thus is our business concluded, in the name of the…’

  ‘This is not a simple xenos,’ said Deiphobus. Though Vortz was probably not used to being interrupted, even a man of his pride knew better than to take a Space Marine to task for it. ‘I have delved into its mind,’ continued Deiphobus. ‘Carmillas left information in datastores within her body in case she died with the alien’s mission unfulfilled. Her psykers built within its mind a set of commands of which it would be unaware. It was a spy, Lord Inquisitor. It was programmed thus to gather information on the aliens’ civilisation and report it back to the Imperium. But her spy’s fellow xenos tracked it down to acquire it by force, and in the battle the inquisitor lost her life. And all of this, I suspect, is of little surprise to Lord Inquisitor Vortz. Does not your own staff of psykers represent one of the Imperium’s finest resources in matters of the alien mind? Did not Carmillas learn from you?’

  Vortz thought about this. Unease, well-disguised, passed over the faces of his underlings. ‘It is what I would have done,’ he conceded. ‘This species has been turning up in mercenary bands around the Ghoul Stars. Carmillas was eager to discover what danger it presented to the Imperium.’

  ‘They despise civilisation,’ said Deiphobus. ‘When their own grows to great, they burn it to the ground and start anew. When they look on the Imperium, it is with whatever passes in their minds for hatred. Watch them, Lord Inquisitor. This specimen will help you. They are savages, but they were not always so.’

  Deiphobus turned and left the presence of Lord Inquisitor Vortz, leaving the xenos in the throne room.

  Deiphobus, wearing the image that most resembled his physical self, slid the volume of memories into its place on the shelf. This was the library of his memory, a vast and shadowy place, on the shelves of which every interrogation was carefully filed away. Some memories were gemstones arranged carefully in display cabinets, or paintings hung on the walls, but most were books like the one in which Deiphobus had contained the memories of his interrogation of Carmillas’s spy.

  ‘Is this one mine?’ said Inquisitor Carmillas.

  ‘It is,’ said Deiphobus.

  Carmillas was much as she had appeared in her sanctuary in the alien’s mind, although now there were no bloodstains on her dress. She had tied her hair back, as well, and looked a little more demure and official. ‘Might I read it?’

  ‘You may.’

  ‘My thanks. And, Librarian?’

  ‘Inquisitor?’

  ‘I cannot help but see how empty this place is. I take it that you do not make it a habit of bringing in new guests?’

  ‘Mostly the minds I examine have less savoury inhabitants,’ replied Deiphobus. ‘And I do not relish having them run loose in my mind. But you deserve to be remembered, inquisitor. And besides, this place has become rather overfull during the years. It needs a proper curator. If that work is not beneath you, inquisitor.’

  ‘Of course not,’ replied Carmillas – or at least, the memory that Deiphobus had of Carmillas, furnished by the echo of her he had met. ‘How many of us can help serve our Emperor after death?’ She look around and tutted. ‘This place is a mess, Librarian. You need me.’

  ‘Then I shall leave you to your work.’

  ‘I think that would be best.’

  Deiphobus let himself fade away, the image he wore becoming translucent, then ghostly, and finally no more than a shadow. He felt the cold and heaviness of his physical body around him again.

  He left all that remained of Inquisitor Carmillas in his mind, tending to the volumes of his memories.

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  First published in Hammer and Bolter Issue 17 (2012).

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