by Maugan Ra » Thu Jan 26, 2012 8:39 am
Below is the first part of my intro piece. Its not complete - still got to do the part where Monn shows up and captures Schiffer, but its what I managed to scribble down at some ungodly hour of the morning
~~~~~
Sorcery has a very distinctive smell, one that no servant of the Inquisition could ever mistake. To anyone who has ever fought against the powers of the warp and survived, there could be no mistaking the scent. It was quite unlike anything else, greasy and electric and in some indefinable way distinctly otherworldly. It burned the back of your throat and made your teeth itch with its sheer malevolence, until the merest instant of exposure made you want to take a long bath.
The air was thick with that smell as Victoria Schiffer kicked down the ornate metal door and strode out onto the roof of the Luminous Cathedral. The wind howled madly all around her, causing the leather storm-coat that she worn to billow wildly while her long white hair rippled and writhed. She’d lost the distinctive pointed hat of her office over an hour earlier, duelling something cackling and nameless in the entry hall of the cathedral she now stood atop, but the gleaming badge affixed to her chest left no doubt as to her office.
A pair of the Royal Guard rushed to stop her, the golden plates of their carapace armour scorched and ruined by the billowing clouds of smoke that rose from the ruined city all around them. The halberds in their hands were still glittering and perfect, however, preserved by the crackling power fields that surrounded the blades. With a disdainful snort, Schiffer raised the bolt pistol in her left hand and placed a booming shot right between the first one’s eyes. The initial impact pulped his entire head, an almost certainly fatal wound that was compounded a moment later as the delayed charge in the bolt shell detonated, spraying grey pieces of brain tissue and razor sharp bone fragments over a surprisingly wide area.
The Guards were well trained, at the least – the second attacker didn’t even spare a glance for the messy demise of his comrade, instead swinging his pole-arm around in a vicious cutting gesture that would have cut her completely in half had it actually connected. Moving far faster than should have been physically possible, Schiffer stepped forwards and rammed the sword in her right hand into his gut. The obsidian blade keened softly as it drank in the dying man’s pain, scarlet runes flaring into life along its edge as the Guard paled and then crumbled into a cloud of drifting ash. The Inquisitor didn’t spare her fallen foe as much as a glance, walking through his disintegrating form with cold contempt on her face. Her target was up ahead.
Bishop Ortega liked to think of himself as an intelligent man. And certainly there was a wealth of evidence to support that claim. He had risen from a lowly birth to become one of the youngest members of the Planetary Council through little more than willpower and an ability to say the right things to the right people at the right times. He had woven himself a web of contacts, both political and mercantile that stretched across half a sector in under a decade – a feat that some Inquisitors had failed to pull off. And he had created for himself a career that promised to take him to ever greater heights without accumulating the near-infinite legion of enemies that most people in his position picked up as a matter of course.
Unfortunately for him, he had also come to believe that he could dabble in sorcery, ritual murders and at least one diabolic pact without the Inquisition ever discovering him. The lie of that statement could be found in the burning city that stretched out all around the base of the cathedral now, an unfortunate by-product of any well conducted Inquisitorial purge. The bishop’s agents had evidently dug themselves in deep at every layer of the religious and civil administration, and Schiffer had given her forces very specific orders not to let anything stand in their way of digging them out.
To his credit, at least, the Bishop remained calm as he watched her stalk closer to him across the open roof of the cathedral. His secret had been uncovered, his agents were compromised and soon to be dead, and the last of the personal bodyguards that he had managed to secure for himself from the office of the Planetary Governor lay dead behind the Inquisitor. And yet, he still faced her down with the utmost confidence, a faint smile on his lean face.
Schiffer didn’t bother with the formalities of the issue – she’d never had the patience for such things, and this was not a man who was going to surrender quietly for interrogation and a painful death on the pyre. She simply raised her pistol once more, and shot him twice in the chest.
Ortega waved a pale hand in a lazy gesture and the two bolt shells slid to a halt in front of him, hanging motionless in the air before detonating prematurely and falling to the stones beneath with a faint tinkle of shattered metal. Schiffer sighed and released her pistol, letting it dangle from the silk cord that bound it to her waist and hefting the menacing looking sword once more. The Bishop shook his head in a pitying manner at the sight, like a teacher deigning to explain something to a particularly slow pupil.
“That won’t work either.” He said softly, the faint smile never leaving his face. “That’s the trouble with Inquisitors – you never see more than you expect to see.” With that, Ortega raised one hand above his head, as though grabbing at the clear skies above them. The greasy stench of sorcery filled the air once more as a writhing tendril of blood red lightning appeared to coalesce out of nothing into the bishop’s hand. With a sneer, the heretical clergyman swept the hand down and the energy snapped towards his foe like a whip.
Victoria Schiffer sighed, reached up with one gloved hand and caught it. The lightning coiled around her arm for a moment, then dissipated on the wind like so much smoke. She smiled at the stupefied expression on Ortega’s face for a moment. “That’s the problem with heretics like you. You never consider the fact that someone else might actually be better than you.”
Still smiling, she levelled the obsidian blade at Ortega’s heart and spoke a single word that seemed to twist and writhe in the air. The scarlet runes along the edge of the blade flared into unholy life once more, and several metres away the bishop started to twitch and thrash madly. The Inquisitor slashed the sword upwards and watched with no small degree of satisfaction as her prey exploded apart violently, all the blood in his body tearing its way vertically upwards in a great fountain of gore.
Maugan, your slow descent into madness is starting to look more like a BASE jump...
- Rahvin
The 210th Cadian - Tanks, heavy weapons, and an ongoing hatred of Land Raiders.
W: 41
D: 6
L: 14