‘Yes,’ said Schenk. ‘That would be a true, fiery end.’
They raised their goblets.
‘Sebastian Yarrick,’ said Seroff.
‘The Emperor grant you were on that,’ said Schenk.
This was part of their nightly ritual. They watched for the best debris impacts, and then drank a toast, hoping for the death of the man they blamed for their fates.
Seroff acknowledged the mistakes he had made. Allying himself with Herman von Strab on Armageddon had been foremost among them. It was the error that had, for all intents and purposes, ended his career. He had, at least, cut ties with von Strab early enough in the Second War of Armageddon to have avoided the appearance of treason. Seroff had simply been part of the political establishment of Armageddon, though it was an establishment that had failed in every way that mattered. He had remained loyal to von Strab longer than he might have otherwise because of his opposition to Yarrick. Seroff had let decades of hatred for Yarrick blind him to his own self-interest, and to what was right for Armageddon.
Seroff and Yarrick had been friends once. They had come up through the schola progenium together, they had become commissars together, and they had served together under Lord Commissar Rasp. When Rasp had proven weak, Yarrick had shown how little personal loyalty mattered to him, and had put a bolt shell through Rasp’s skull. Seroff had never forgiven him for that, and when Seroff had ascended the ranks, becoming one of the youngest lord commissars on record, he had made it his mission to ensure Yarrick never received the same title. He had been successful in this. He only wished that Yarrick had cared.
It was hard for Seroff to believe that his career had once risen so far, so fast, and blazed like a comet. That was someone else’s life. His punishment after Armageddon had been this posting to Eremus. Here, he oversaw the conscription of troops to be sent off to fight for the Emperor. What Eremus could offer was very poor. Its soldiers were the weakest sort of cannon fodder, fit for nothing except to absorb enemy fire for a time while the Catachans or the Death Korps took the fight to the enemy.
Schenk had just as much reason to hate Yarrick as Seroff. Her encounter with him was also well over a century ago, when she too had been young. Schenk was a Revivificator. Her faction of the Inquisition dreamed of finding the way to restore the Emperor to true life. A worthy goal, Seroff thought, one that justified many extreme means. On the planet Molossus, Schenk and her fellow inquisitors had been experimenting with the Plague of Unbelief. In order to control it, they needed to understand it. In order to understand it, they needed to see it in action. They had unleashed it in an underhive. Yarrick had brought ruin to the experiment, to the plans and to the careers of the inquisitors involved.
Schenk still performed tests on the population of Eremus. Her means were limited, the material for her work barely acceptable as specimens. As far as Seroff could tell, she had succeeded in giving her subjects new and unpleasant ways to die, but had nothing to show for that work. He suspected that, for a long time now, she had really just been going through the motions. She had no real expectation that the torture she engaged in would lead anywhere.
It was all the same to Seroff. He was going through the motions too. Each found in the other someone who understood and shared their bitterness, and who was capable of intelligent conversation. They had both fallen from great heights into the most profound abyss of humiliation, and they had discovered that there was no comfort, but much resentment, in knowing that things could not get worse.
There was another sudden streak of light in the sky. The debris came straight down, striking the ground with purpose, only a few miles away to the south and east. The object was small, and the blast affected a much lesser area than the last impact. The tremors from the explosion barely shook the tower. But Seroff took notice.
‘That looked different,’ said Schenk.
‘Yes.’ Seroff stood and moved to the pitted, rockcrete parapet. ‘That hit like a torpedo,’ he said.
‘Are there any ships in the area?’
‘I have not been told of any.’ Seroff had given standing orders to the spaceport personnel to let him know of any traffic in the system that was not just more wreckage. Ships coming to Eremus were increasingly rare. Those who came were almost exclusively the freighters of low-end trading companies bringing meagre and substandard supplies, or troop ships arriving to take Seroff’s charges to a distant battlefield slaughterhouse.
Schenk joined him at the parapet. They watched the glow fade from the initial blast. The object had hit in a region that was, by the standards of Eremus, still quite densely populated. The secondary fires spread outward from the impact site, looking like angry candlelight in the darkness. They multiplied quickly.
Seroff frowned. ‘Do you see a glow over that sector?’
Schenk hesitated. ‘I can’t decide,’ she said. ‘Perhaps. The area seems brighter than it should be.’
A faint orange nimbus, tinged with green, hovered over the city.
Seroff put down his goblet. ‘Then we will have to have a closer look at this. I don’t know whether to feel interested or inconvenienced.’
‘I think both,’ said Schenk.
But there was still duty. There was always duty. Neither of them had ever turned from it. Nor will we, Seroff thought, even though every act in the performance of duty was another blow to injured pride. There would never be any reward for the loyalty of their service.
There were very few real streets now on Eremus. There were only their remnants, blocked every few hundred yards by the fallen shells of buildings. Seroff and Schenk wound their way through the wastelands, past jagged, rusted slabs of iron reaching fifty feet or more into the air. They took detours around hills of jumbled, indistinguishable refuse. Here and there, flames guttered, feeding on gas leaking from ruptured, mostly empty reservoirs. Rivulets of filthy, black, grease-thickened water ran down slopes and across fractured thoroughfares. The last maglev transports had ceased to run the year before Seroff had begun his exile. There was no way to get around the city except on foot.
Navigating at ground-level on Eremus meant weaving through the canyons of a planet-wide scrapyard. Seroff’s tower was one of the few landmarks in the region, and it was easy to lose sight of it behind the cliffs of wreckage. A newcomer to Eremus would be lost within moments, but there were no newcomers on the planet. There had been none for a very long time. Seroff had lost his bearings the first time he had strayed from the memorised route that took him from his quarters to the barracks. Now he barely needed a torch at all to find his way to the impact site.
Seroff wore the greatcoat of his rank, and Schenk had donned a dark cloak, her Inquisitorial rosette pinning it closed at her throat. Their clothes had seen better days, and soon were covered with dust and ash as Seroff and Schenk drew closer to the impact site. Seroff knew that he and the inquisitor had become shabby caricatures. But on this world, that still gave them god-like authority. They were escorted by twenty troopers of the Eremus Bayonets. They were the elite of Seroff’s current batch of recruits, in that they were at least competent. He had made them his detail until they were called off-planet.
They heard the sounds of unrest and violence. Screams echoed from the refuse gorges. There were other sounds that Seroff could not identify. They reminded him of the snap and crackle of logs in a wood fire, but they also sounded wet.
‘What do you think?’ Seroff asked Schenk.
‘I don’t know.’
In her voice was the same concern he felt. And also the same curiosity. Seroff couldn’t remember when he had last been curious about something.
They squeezed through a narrow pass between two slumped mounds of iron. On the other side, they found chaos. The impact site was half a mile away, and the fires here were raging. In the time it had taken to march from Seroff’s tower, the conflagration had spread over the entire sector. A wall of flame blocked the way forward.
‘This is not the result of a simple debris strike,’ Seroff said. ‘These are deliberate fires.’ There must have been a cache of promethium somewhere nearby. Seroff smelled its harsh burn, and the fires had clearly been set with purpose. They billowed from doorways and windows, and blazed in an unbroken line on the rooftops. Pools of flammable effluent had been spread in the gaps between the patchwork habs and ignited.
Seroff squinted against the glare of the fire. He thought he saw figures pushing others into the flames.
‘There is madness here,’ said Schenk. ‘I will need to interrogate one of the affected.’
‘There!’ Seroff shouted.
A man ran from a doorway and through a momentary gap in the flames. He stumbled towards the group, clothes and hair smouldering, eyes wide with pain and fear. Violent coughs wracked his frame. When they stopped, his vision seemed to clear and he saw the uniforms of Seroff and Schenk. He halted a few feet from them, wavering in uncertainty.
‘Take him,’ said Schenk.
Seroff nodded. Two soldiers moved forward. The man turned around as if he was actually contemplating running back into the fire. Then he stopped, his shoulders slumped, and he let himself be seized.
Schenk had the citizen brought to a low, squat bunker of a building less than a mile east of Seroff’s tower. It was Schenk’s quarters, her laboratorium, and her Inquisitorial prison. She led the way through ferrocrete corridors that stank of old blood and stale fear. The floors and walls were discoloured with dark splashes. The place had always been a prison. Schenk had simply diversified the pain it inflicted.
The troopers tossed the man into a bare cell. He curled up in a corner, trembling. His skin was patchy and red with burns and weeping blisters. His teeth chattered as if he were cold. His terrified, animal gaze was fixed on something outside the cell. He was barely aware of his captors.
