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The Path Unclear – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Path Unclear

Mike Brooks

The dig had once been the site of a tenement block but was now a chewed-up mess of red dirt. Occasional broken-off stumps of pale pillars flecked with pearlescence had been revealed. Alyss thought they looked like giant ribs covered in drying blood.

‘Xenos,’ Aberfell Duscaris said, kicking one.

‘Yes,’ Alyss agreed.

Fell raised a greying eyebrow at her. ‘And how would you know that, scholam girl?’

‘I’ve been studying the inquisitor’s texts,’ Alyss told him archly. ‘How do you know it’s xenos?’

Fell snorted. ‘I blew up something similar when campaigning with the Eighty-First Tarradis. Also, if it wasn’t xenos, Jonas wouldn’t have half-killed an astropath to contact us.’ He jumped down into the main dig site, his bionic arm steadying the combi-bolter slung over his shoulder.

‘Who is this Jonas, anyway?’ Alyss asked, following him. It galled her to ask the bluff ex-Guardsman so many questions, but she didn’t want to pester the inquisitor, and the rest of her new companions had their own idiosyncrasies.

‘Harral Jonas, archaeologist,’ Fell replied. ‘One of the boss’ contacts. If he finds something interesting or concerning, then he brings it to her attention. Given how hard we pushed to get here, I’d say she thought he was on to something.’

Alyss followed Fell across the mud. People and servitors were working around the edges and directly in front of her was a large case apparently made of plasteel-bound crystal, across which two people were talking. The man on the left had to be Harral Jonas: unshaven, pale-skinned and sporting a battered hat of dark felt. Alyss had come to know the other well already.

Inquisitor Zaretta Ngiri was tall, graceful and ageless, her dark skin smooth and her hair an almost-pure white cut into a blunt fringe at the front. She favoured sober, dark suits and a high-collared jacket in a vaguely military cut. At her shoulder lurked the imposing, armoured presence of Davis of Rawl, the Crusader sworn to her unto death.

Jonas stopped in mid-sentence and turned towards them, then relaxed when he saw Fell. Ngiri beckoned them closer.

‘Jonas, I’m sure you remember Fell. This is Alyssana Nero, whom I recently recruited from the schola progenium.’

‘Mamzel,’ Jonas greeted her, then turned back to Ngiri and gestured at the case. ‘This is why I asked you to come.’

Ngiri nodded. ‘Fell, Nero. Your first impressions, please?’

Fell looked down. ‘It’s an old sword. Not military, probably not mass-produced at all, actually. Blade just under a metre, hand-and-a-half grip. Looks perfectly normal. I can’t see a power source anywhere, or any manner of crystals for a witch to use it.’ He glanced sideways at Alyss. ‘No offence.’

‘None taken,’ she assured him.

Jonas blinked and looked at her again.

‘Another psyker, inquisitor? Has something happened to Carmine?’

‘No,’ Ngiri replied with a faint smile. ‘Carmine’s excellent at employing brute psychic force, but Nero has a more… intuitive gift.’

‘Would you like me to read the sword, milady?’ Alyss asked.

‘No,’ Ngiri said firmly. ‘Just your eyes for the moment.’

Alyss studied the sword, trying to look knowledgeable. In truth she could see nothing more than Fell had, but she didn’t want to let the inquisitor down in front of her associate so she kept looking… and suddenly, there it was. Not the sword itself, but its surroundings.

‘This is a stasis cabinet,’ she said, looking up, and knew from Ngiri’s nod that she’d got it right. ‘I imagine you have it for fragile relics, but the sword doesn’t look particularly fragile. Why is it in there?’

‘An excellent question,’ Ngiri said. ‘Jonas?’

‘As soon as we found it, the locals started claiming it was the Blade of Saint Aruba,’ Jonas said, wiping his brow with his hat. ‘She led the resistance against xenos slavers here in the thirty-third millennium. Sacrificed herself to kill their warchief, apparently. There might even be something to it, because then the dreams started coming.’

‘Dreams?’ Ngiri asked. ‘What manner of dreams?’

‘Can’t say – never had one,’ Jonas replied, ‘but several of the crew did. They couldn’t describe them properly but I couldn’t get decent work out of them after that – they always seemed distracted, off staring at something. Unrest has increased massively since the sword was found. The governor threw a public holiday in the saint’s honour to quell things, but it’s not done much. Half the population appears to have been overcome by some sort of fervour. You’ve got factory workers downing tools and demanding to sign up for the Astra Militarum then getting ugly when they’re told no. There’s been mysterious deaths. Everyone seems to want to fight for the Emperor, and that’s all well and good, but the timing of it made me nervous.’

‘So you put the blade into stasis?’ Ngiri asked.

‘Yes, milady,’ Jonas nodded. ‘Things have quietened down somewhat since, although not to where they were. I can examine an artefact and try to work out which xenos race might have made it, and even hazard a guess as to why, but saintly relics are outside my field of expertise. I don’t want to stand in the way of something holy, but I wanted to bring in someone with more knowledge.’

‘And did you touch it yourself?’

Jonas barked a laugh. ‘Throne, no! Everything gets lifted from the ground by servitors. You can’t be too careful in xenos ruins.’

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