by Dan Abnett
By then, we were already deploying in the second wave. Medea landed Inshabel and myself on the edge of the strike zone, along with Endor and his two weapon-servitors. Ricci's shielded pinnace settled in close by, kicking up dust and delivering him and Commodus Voke, along with a bodyguard of twenty inquisitorial troops. Grumman, using a Navy drop-ship loaned by Madorthene, was the last to make groundfall, but the first to engage. Grumman's ten-man squad were all ex-Kasrkin specialists.
As we hurried forward through the backwashing smoke, our landing ships rising back into the pre-dawn sky behind us, there was a tremor and a palpable upwelling of psychic force. Frighteningly powerful waves of psyker power erupted from the epicentre of Site A, killing over thirty of the forward troops… and then suddenly cut off.
We had all anticipated Quixos would have vast psychic defences – he had, after all, been collecting psykers like Esarhaddon – and it seemed likely that active psychic assaults would be a key element of his resistance, perhaps even more significant than his daemonhosts. I had taken no chances.
In two groups, my entire Distaff of untouchables, some fifty individuals all told, had moved in alongside the first ground-troop advances. Bequin, guarded by Nayl and twelve of my warrior staff, led one group, and Thula Surskova, protected by Fischig and a dozen more fighters, led the other.
The Distaff had never been used on such a scale before, but it proved to be the weapon I had always suspected. The blankness they generated contained and negated the engulfing psychic storm, effectively bottling it inside Site A and preventing it from threatening our closing forces.
* * *
With Inshabel, I moved underground, down the rock-cut steps into the inner sectors of Site A. For almost an hour we fought our way through the smoked-swathed surface structures, a metre at a time. Now, with the sun rising, we found our first access point to the lower levels: a stairwell exposed by a bomb crater.
The place was strewn with smouldering debris and a few unidentifiable bodies. In places, power cables were hanging, sparking, from the rockcrete roof. We both wore motion trackers, and switched left and right, gunning down cultists as they appeared. My boltgun was already running short of shells, and Inshabel was on to his second-to-last power cell. The level of resistance was unbelievable.
At a junction in the seemingly random jumble of tunnels, we encountered Endor. He had a couple of Thracian troopers and an Inquisition guardsman with him, but he'd lost both of his slow-moving attack-servitors. I knew what he was thinking just by the look in his eyes. We had come in strong and confident, but perhaps not strong enough. I thought I had anticipated the worst Quixos could throw against us. Maybe I had underestimated him after all.
Ferocious bursts of shooting alerted us to a firefight in a larger chamber to the left. We arrived in time to meet four wounded, terrified Thracian troopers fleeing towards us.
'Back! Go back!' they were screaming.
I pushed past them.
The chamber beyond was massive and half-filled with veiling smoke. Green, unnatural flames were licking up the walls. At the far end, the already huge chamber seemed to open out into something much, much vaster.
But that was not what occupied my eyes.
Surrounded by over fifty bodies, most of them Imperial Guards, Commodus Voke was standing his ground against Prophaniti.
The old inquisitor was shuddering, his robes stiffening with psychic ice. Corposant fire glowed from his mouth and eyes. The daemonhost, its cruel features just recognisable as a distortion of poor, lost Husmaan's face, hovered in front of Voke, struggling at an invisible barrier of telekinetic wrath.
We ran forward, abruptly drawing fire from cultists spreading into the chamber from the right. The Thracian beside me bucked and twitched as he was hit twice, and Inshabel cursed as he was winged.
Endor urged the remaining men to advance on his lead, and took the fight to the cultists, his laspistol blazing and his chainblade swinging.
Voke was close to breaking. I could see him wavering under the immense pressure.
I bolstered my boltgun and stumbled across the bodies and debris to aid him, praying that my runestaff would do what it was supposed to.
And a dizzying blast of white light and scourging heat blew me back through the air.
* * *
I tried то get up, half-realising that I had been blown clean out of the chamber, through a flakboard partition into some kind of dank chute. Invisible forces lifted me to my feet. Light bathed me.
Cherubael hovered before me.
'Gregor,' it said. 'You've come so far. I knew you had it in you.'
I held the runestaff in front of me. The green marble scroll of daemonic protection that Ravenor had sent had already been reduced to a shattered remnant by the force of Cherubael's opening attack.
'I've waited for this moment for such a long time/ said the daemonhost. 'Remember on Eechan I said you'd have to make things up to me? Well, this is the time. Now. This is the moment that everything's been about. The one I have seen coming since our paths first crossed. Destinies… our destinies, intertwined, remember that?'
'How could I forget?' I spat. 'You claim to have been using me all along! Guiding me! Even protecting me! I watched you kill Lyko on Eechan! So that I would live… for this moment? Why?'
Cherubael smiled. When the warp is in you as it is in me, you see time from all angles. You see what will be and what will come, what someone here now will do in a century or two, what someone there has done a thousand years in the past. You see the possibilities.'
'Riddles! That's all you ever speak!'
'No more riddles, Eisenhorn. From the moment I first met you, I saw you were the only one, the only one with the tenacity, the skill and the opportunity to give me what I want. What I want most of all. I saw that if I kept you safe, you would come and give me that most precious thing here, on this world, at this hour.'
'I would never help a daemon like you!'
Cherubael grinned, blank-eyed and utterly serious. 'Then destroy me, if you can.'
It lunged. I raised the runestaff and channelled my will down through the psi-conductive pole into the lodestone. The carved fragment of the Lith blazed with blue light.
Pontius Glaw knew a thing or two about daemonhosts. Their greatest weakness was the strength of the will that had bound them as slaves. The runestaff, so carefully prepared and constructed, so painstakingly etched with the ancient symbols of control, was a lever to topple that binding will by amplifying my own to levels that would overwhelm it.
For a brief moment, I felt how it must feel to be an alpha-plus psyker.
The scintillating spear of energy that shot from the lode-stone struck Cherubael in the chest.
The daemonhost smiled for a second, and then its flesh-vessel ruptured open, billowing a storm of Chaos-fire in all directions. I had cast it out of its binding and banished it back into the warp.
And in the moment as my amplified mind overmastered his, I saw the years of enslavement it had endured af Quixos's hands, the torments of its
binding, the great, forbidden text of the Malus Codicium whose arcane knowledge Quixos had used to create his daemonhosts.
And I realised that I had given Cherubael exactly what it wanted after all.
Freedom.
I stumbled back into the main chamber. By then, Voke, whose resistance to Prophaniti had been astonishing, was dead.
I remembered Voke's words after the atrocity on Thracian: 'I will make amends. I will not rest until every one of these wretches is destroyed, and order restored. And then I will not rest until I find who and what was behind it.'
He could rest now. That work was done.
The daemonhost was casting the valiant old man's empty husk of a body aside and gliding towards Endor and Inshabel, who were both already on their knees in agony. Cyan flames washed from Prophaniti's fingertips and wrapped my two friends in tight, burning psychic shackles. They were trapped morsels for it to feed off at its leisur
e.
Prophaniti froze when I appeared, instinctively knowing I posed a more serious threat. The Lith-stone was still smoking with blood-red light.
The daemonhost surged through the air at me, teeth bared, arms spread, incandescent with light, baying my name. It was like facing the attack run of a supersonic warcraft firing all guns. I know so. It is my misfortune to have experienced that too.
Prophaniti whooped with glee.
'At Kasr Geth, you told me to make my weapons sounder next time, monster!' I howled, and impaled its charging form on the steel pole of the runestaff. 'Is this sound enough?'
Prophaniti screamed and exploded, blowing me off my feet. I don't think I banished it. I think I obliterated its essence forever.
The runestaff was, miraculously, unscathed, and lay amid the rubble. But Prophaniti's dissipating being had made it white hot from base to cap, and I could not pick it up again.
I ran across to Titus Endor and Inshabel, both of whom lolled weakly on the floor.
Inshabel was dazed but intact. Endor had daemon gashes across his chest and neck. He looked up at me blearily.
'You got them both, Gregor…'
'I pray there are no more,' I replied, trying to staunch his bleeding. His rosette slid out of his coat pocket and I leaned to pick it up.
The inquisitorial symbol was decorated with the ornate crest of the Ordo Malleus.
'Malleus?' I hissed.
'No…'
When did you transfer, Endor? Damn you, when did you change ordos?'
They forced me…' he wheezed, 'Osma forced me! When he had me on Messina… there were certain matters from a case a few years ago. He'd got
his hands on them somehow… He… he promised I would burn if I didn't help him get to you/
'What matters?'
'Nothing! Nothing, Gregor, I swear! But he had Bezel's backing! He could have made anything look heretical! I transferred orders to stop him breaking me. He said I would be rewarded, advanced. He said Ordo Malleus was a better prospect for me.'
'But you were to keep an eye on me?'
'I told him nothing! I never sold you out. I did just enough to keep Osma satisfied.'
'Like coming here. No wonder you hid your rosette. He wanted you to take me down, didn't he?'
Endor was silent. Inshabel looked on in stark disbelief.
'I… I was to go along with this operation, in the hope that it might be successful. Orsini's under no illusions that Quixos is a menace, and this was an expedient way, perhaps, of eliminating him. If you were still… alive at the end of it, I was told to arrest you on the carta charges. Or, if you resisted…'
'Get him up to ground level,' I told Inshabel quietly. 'Find him a medic. Don't let him out of your sight/
'Yes sir!'
'Gregor!' Endor gasped as Inshabel lifted him. 'By the God-Emperor, I never meant-'
'Get him out of here!' I growled.
The assault on Ferell Sidor was three hours old when Grumman, Ricci and I entered the undervault of the excavation pit. Madorthene's forces were still locked in a monumental struggle with the renegade's warriors throughout the warren of tunnels and chambers in the table mountain.
Ricci was weak from a blade wound, and all of his bodyguards were dead. Grumman had just two Kasrkin left with him, both of them armed with lasrifles.
The vast undervault was an excavated pit almost a kilometre deep, open to the sky. The serebite copy of the Radian pylon rested in the base of it, surrounded by adamantite scaffolding. Gibbet cages, hundreds of them, hung from the scaffolding on chains. In each one, trapped and helpless, was a human body.
They were Quixos's carefully collected arsenal of rogue psykers, secretly acquired from all over the Imperium. It must have taken him decades to accumulate so many. One of them, I had no doubt, was Esarhaddon
'What is he doing?' Ricci asked, a touch of awe in his voice.
'Something we have to stop/ said Grumman, with a direct simplicity ! appreciated. It was the only answer any of us needed.
We had been living at our nerve ends since the assault began, and were wired with combat sharpness. Even so, despite our combined experience and skill, what happened next took us all totally by surprise.
One moment there was nothing. The next, a robed, armoured form was in amongst us, moving so fast it was simply a blur.
So fast. So accursedly fast.
Instantly, Ricci was split open down the length of his spine. As he was still in the process of falling on his face, choking on his own blood, one of the Kasrkin was severed at the waist, and toppled in halves, his gun firing spasmodically. The other Kasrkin folded up around the impaling thrust of a long, dark blade, spontaneously combusting from the belly out.
Grumman pushed me out of the way as the devastating blur turned again, and fired his laspistol at it three times. Snapping round faster than my eyes could follow, the long, dark blade the blur was wielding deflected each crackling shot.
Grumman's head left his shoulders.
Quixos, the arch-heretic, the renegade, the unforgivable radical, whirled on me before Grumman's butchered body had even started to slump.
I had one fleeting glimpse of the long daemonsword, Kharnagar. It was gnarled and knotted and thick with abominable runes and irregular clawlike serrations.
That's all I saw as it came whistling towards my face.
TW E N TY-T H RE E
The heretic. Afterwards.
A bare hand's breadth from my head, the blood-red blade came to a dead stop, blocked by the gleaming steel of Barbarisater.
Time seemed to stand still for a heartbeat. We faced each other, our blades locked together. Quixos had been a speed-distorted phantom until our swords had struck. Now he was frozen, glaring between the crossed blades at me.
The renegade's armour was ragged and filthy, and ornate with warp-signs. His inquisitorial rosette was displayed, incongruously, on his right shoulder guard. It revolted me to see it worn amongst such corruption.
His ancient face was a misshapen, pustular horror. Rudimentary antlers bulged from his brow. His skin was dark like granite. Wheezing augmetic cables and implants bulged at his throat and under the dirty head-cloth he wore. His eyes were shining balls of blood.
In honesty, he was a disappointing little monster compared to the notion of him that had built up in my mind. But there was no denying his inhuman strength and speed.
Eisenhorn, he said. It was psychic. His twisted mouth didn't open.
Barbarisater felt him move before I did. It lurched in my hands. In the time it takes to draw a breath, we had exchanged a flurry of twenty or more blows. The talon-edged blade of Kharnager rang dully off the Carthaen steel. Barbarisater's pentagrammatic runes flashed and flared with discharging energy. Kharnager groaned softly.
Heretic! Slave of Chaos! his raw, broken mind-voice railed in my brain.
You speak of yourself! I returned. Our blades continued to ring off one another, hunting for a gap, mutually denied.
Why would you try to end my work here if you were not a minion of the warp7 .
Your work? This thing?
We broke, and then came in again, blades striking so fast the noise became one long ringing tone. I barely made an ulsar in time to stop one of his rapid down-stabs. He blocked my response of a tahn wyla, and the uru arav that I followed it with.
This is just the test, the prototype. Once the trials with it are conducted, then my work will flower!
You carve up a mountain… for a prototype? A prototype of what?
The pylons of Cadia pacify the warp, he spat. By amplifying them using extreme-level psykers, they could be made into a weapon. A weapon to destroy the warp! A weapon to collapse the Eye of Terror in upon itself!
He was raving, insane. What patches of truth or sane notions might lurk in his words, I had no idea. There was no way to distinguish them from his lunatic fancy. All I knew was that a pylon, psychically super-charged, might do all manner of things, but its side-effe
cts would be catastrophic. It could lay waste to the continent, the planet.
I think, and here lay the true horror of it, I think Quixos knew that. I think he considered that to be an acceptable price to pay, just as he had considered the atrocity on Thracian a necessary cost to obtain a psyker of such peerless quality as Esarhaddon. What other abominations had he caused in acquiring the others?
As Grumman had said, just before his death, this simply had to be stopped.
I looked at his face.
This was where radicalism led. This was the true face of one who had reached the place and crossed the line. This was the obscene reality behind Pontius Glaw's jaunty glorifications of Chaos.
We rained blows at each other, drawing sparks and little curls of vapour from the blade edges. I tried a low swing, but he leapt over it, and alternated a series of scissoring blows that drove me backwards across the dusty ground. I thought my feet would slip. He was a whirlwind.
I saw my moment. Barbarisater saw it too. A slight underswing on his blade return that opened a gap for a sar aht uht, a slice to the heart, just for a microsecond.
I thrust in, putting all my will into the blade. Somehow, dazzlingly, he still managed to turn Kharnager and block me.
Barbarisater struck the daemonsword and broke in half.
And it was the ultimate failure of the ancient Carthaen blade that gave me victory. If it had stayed intact, the block would have stopped it and the fight would have continued.
Breaking around Quixos's sword-edge, the truncated half of Barbarisater in my hand continued on, with all my mustered force behind it, until the
broken end plunged through his cloak, his body armour, his augmetic implants and ran him through the torso.
The ewl caer.
It took almost equal force to break the suction of his flesh around the blade and rip it out.
Quixos staggered backwards, polluted blood spurting from the wound, his augmetics shorting out and exploding.
Then he fell to the dusty floor of the undervault, and became dust himself, until there was nothing left but rotting augmetic devices and empty armour twisted under his lank cape.
