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Inferno! Volume 6 – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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RAISED IN DARKNESS

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Illustrious science fiction and fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky kicks off this volume with his Inferno! and Black Library debut.

The venerable Inquisitor Vulpern arrives on Shargrin, an agri-world dedicated to feeding the Imperium by cultivating enormous fungal growths in caverns below the planet’s crust. A fellow member of the holy Inquisition went missing on this world, and Vulpern is here to find out why. It is not long before the Inquisitor discovers that mushrooms are not the only thing growing beneath Shargrin’s surface; a deep corruption festers here, but does Vulpern have the fortitude to do what needs to be done?

Aftermath – Interrogation session one

They’d set the chair up, when Inquisitor Vulpern arrived. The subject was already installed, and a patient Mechanicus acolyte was testing the connections, running power down the cables to watch his muscles jerk. With his gag still in place, the only sound was the crackle of power and a strained grunting. It would not do, after all, to upset the technicians. There were only so many of them rated for this kind of work, and it was felt that their stomachs, though literally cast iron in many cases, lacked the strength for a true excruciation.

Also present: Inquisitor Jerrin. ‘Ah, this is a pleasant surprise!’ she exclaimed. ‘Shall I have the acolytes bring a second seat in?’

Vulpern gave her an urbane smile. ‘I’d assumed these loose ends fell to me.’

Jerrin brandished her writ, heavy with seals. The acolyte’s glassy gaze pitched between them, then he scuttled from the room with a hiss of building pressure.

‘I was given a remit to take the lead where I thought it appropriate,’ Jerrin said pleasantly. ‘I am not, of course, suggesting that you might be less than committed.’

She waited for him to take offence, but he shrugged tiredly. ‘You go ahead. If I’ve prised off a fingernail once, I’ve done it a thousand times, and it’s a formality here, anyway. I’m glad to have you take the tedium of it. Perhaps I can learn from your technique.’

Her eyes narrowed, suspecting mockery, but Vulpern just called for a chair, giving absolutely no window into his thoughts. There should be someone, at the end. Someone who doesn’t just hate.

‘Well, then.’ Jerrin rounded on the subject at last. ‘Let’s start with when Inquisitor Harghesh came to your filthy little world.’

Shargrin Inquisitorial intercession – Investigatory stage

Inquisitor Harghesh had not been hunting treason. He’d come to Shargrin to judge whether the planet’s tithe could be increased, given an upsurge in crop yields. Since the advent of the Cicatrix Maledictum had crippled the Imperium, every world was on the anvil to do what it could for the realm of man. Forge worlds turned out munitions, mining worlds ground ore, teeming feral and feudal worlds gave up whole kingdoms and tribes to the regiments, and agri-worlds like Shargrin fed them all. Except someone always went hungry, and holding back from the Emperor was treason sure as worshipping the Dark Gods.

Harghesh had sent one brief astropathic communique back. And then he and his retinue had vanished.

The Imperium had moved on, in its leviathan manner. The report had travelled through the warp, lagging across space tortured by the scar-line of the Cicatrix Maledictum, before languishing on one desk or another until it reached Vulpern’s own. Where, amongst the productivity figures and the demographics data, he noted a sentence, outwardly casual but freighted with import to an Inquisitorial eye. A sentence designed not to spark alarm, even in the astropath who had sent it.

…the existence of certain regular and persistent physiological deformities…

A suspicion, that was what it meant. A suspicion Harghesh would have gone on to investigate. Regular and persistent: not the taint of Chaos but no less dangerous for all that.

By the time Vulpern read those words, Harghesh had been missing for over a year. Vulpern, Jerrin and a full Deathwatch force were en route for Shargrin within hours of someone finally reading Harghesh’s last transmission.

Vulpern knew agri-worlds. Swathes of leathery-leaved crops packed together, horizon to horizon, so that never an inch of the earth could be seen, or else stepped tiers of paddies, the water tinted orange and violet by rank chemical fertilisers. Platoons of machines marching and turning as they harvested with a discipline that recalled the Adeptus Astartes. Nature, in other words. Shargrin looked like a death world. The surface was black rock covered with prickly coats of lichen constantly lashed by storms. Nobody lived there. Even the lichens probably didn’t enjoy it very much.

Certainly the lichens died, and their remains got scoured from the rocks by the rain and carried inside the labyrinth of caves that riddled the planet’s outer layer, where their collective decay fed a vast fungal ecosystem – from lakes of slime to mushrooms big as hive world hab-blocks. Amongst the profusion were edible species that could be minced up and boiled into tar, then rendered into great rubbery slabs. These, salted with preservatives and liberally laced with mood-stabilisers and anti-psychotics, were Shargrin’s contribution to the wellbeing of the Imperium.

Vulpern’s drop-shuttle muscled through the shoving of the weather until they reached a circular sinkhole four miles across, rimmed with cascading waterfalls. His stomach clenched as they fell into the vastness of it, spiralling towards the turbulent lake below before the pilot sent them scudding across the surface towards the shelter of the port. Up in orbit, his staff had already exchanged pleasantries with planetside Administratum and requested the governor’s presence, all open pomp and circumstance. Vulpern had taken out his best robes, the gold of the Emperor’s eagles somewhat tarnished. Old regalia for an old man.

He was aware he didn’t cut quite the figure he used to, half tempted to suit up in armour and military honours. The last blessing of heavy mail was that it hid the hollowing chest, the filling belly. He hadn’t shaved, either. His lean, lantern-jawed face always looked half flayed when he scraped away the stubble. I should grow a beard. Or would that change make his peers search his face and personnel record for deviation?

You didn’t make many friends in the Inquisition. And if you lasted forty years in the trade then most of those you did have ended up dead, and sometimes it was you who made them that way.

He had a couple of Deathwatch Space Marines at his back when he walked out into the rain, a black umbrella shadowing his face. He hadn’t known what sort of welcome a governor of Shargrin would be able to muster, but the man had done decently well. A couple of squads of planetary guard in dress uniforms, a clique of clerics singing an accented version of the 79th Hymn of Imperial Praise. The governor himself was a stocky man who marched forwards and saluted like a soldier. Linus Donaghl was no unctuous bureaucrat, but a war hero capping a remarkable career. Bluff enough to look an inquisitor in the eye, certainly. His eyes flicked to the looming Space Marines: not the escort he’d have expected for one weather-worn inquisitor’s visit.

Vulpern mustered a thin smile. ‘The galaxy has a thousand ways of betraying your trust, governor. Forgive an old man his worries.’

They walked down the doubled line of guardsmen, Donaghl upbraiding a couple on their uniform. There were refreshments, but Vulpern preferred not to get as far as drinks until he’d ruled out the possibility of assassination, especially on a planet full of fungi. And something had happened to Harghesh.

The rain beat down on his umbrella, and the heads of everyone else, for a good half-hour until Imperial ritual was satisfied, when they could at last go indoors like civilised people.

The crash of the water sealed away by sliding doors, Donaghl rounded on him. ‘Inquisitor, you are of course welcome to Shargrin. All my resources are at your disposal.’ As per your mandate. ‘I’m going to be blunt, if I may.’

‘Please do,’ Vulpern invited.

‘I know why you’re here,’ Donaghl told him. ‘Just like your colleague last year. You’re upping our tithe.’

Vulpern’s face remained entirely neutral.

‘Our output has increased by fifteen per cent year on year,’ Donaghl told him flatly. ‘I have made sure the Imperium is fed. I have exceeded expectations. A miracle, when you consider the conditions on this world.’

‘Some would say there are harsher worlds to govern than one given to agriculture,’ Vulpern noted mildly.

‘Some might perhaps not have read my reports,’ Donaghl spat out. ‘Five thousand strains of fungus in these caverns, inquisitor. Over a thousand are harmful to humans in some way. Poisons, diseases, allergic reactions, species that are happier growing in human flesh than the damned soil. Read my census returns and look at life expectancy, infant mortality. Just because they don’t class it as a death world doesn’t mean Shargrin doesn’t want to kill you. And still I’ve increased our yield every year of the last decade. But some clerk on some world where they don’t farm mushrooms every hour of the sunless day has looked at those reports and decided we can still give more. Am I correct, inquisitor?’

Vulpern was trying very hard not to grin, because it was a long time since anyone had just gone off at him like this, governor or not. ‘You can take the soldier from the Militarum,’ he noted. ‘But not the Militarum from the soldier.’

Donaghl paused, eyes narrow, wrong-footed. ‘You’re pleased to joke.’

Vulpern nodded. ‘Honestly, it’s a pleasure. So often we inquisitors have to work hard to get people to be honest with us.’ He let the words hang there, seeing the man consider a response, finally receiving a small, grudging nod.

‘Fair,’ Donaghl admitted, and some of the aggression went out of him. ‘We may as well sit down, and you can tell me what the Emperor demands and I can try to explain why we’re already giving as much as we–’

‘That’s not why we’re here.’ Vulpern watched the man’s face for any twitch, but Donaghl just waited for more intel, like a good officer. ‘You mentioned my colleague, Inquisitor Harghesh. I am indeed following in his footsteps, but not in the matter of the tithe. There is some confusion over precisely when and how – and indeed whether – he left your hospitality.’

Click here to buy Inferno! Volume 6.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Black Library.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Christian Byrne.

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