Fybes walked towards me. He reached up and pulled his face off. The flesh disintegrated like gossamer as he pulled it away, revealing his blank, piercing eyes.
'Oh, Gregor. You do so like to make an entrance, don't you?' said Cherubael.
ELEVEN
Face to face.
No witnesses.
Death along the line.
His was the last face I had expected to see here, though it had been in my mind and my nightmares for nearly a hundred years.
'It's been a while, hasn't it, Gregor?' the daemonhost said softly, almost cordially. 'I've thought of you often, fondly. You bested me on 56-Izar. I... held a grudge for a while, I must admit. But when I learned you had survived after all, I was quite delighted. It meant there would be a chance for us to meet again.'
The orange cooler-suit began to burn and collapse off him in molten hanks until he was naked. He rose gently, arms by his side, like a dancer, and hovered on the wind a few metres above the churned soil. He was still tall, and powerfully made, but the aura that shone from him was more sickly green than the gold I remembered.
Unhealthy bulging veins corded his body, and the nub-horns on his brow had grown into short, twisted hooks.
'And so we meet again. Aren't you going to say anything?'
I could feel Bequin shaking in terror beside me.
'Stay calm, stay still/ I told her.
The daemonhost glanced at her and his smile widened. 'The untouchable! How wonderful! An almost exact repeat of our first encounter. How are you, my dear?'
'What do you want?' I asked.
'Want?'
You always want something. On 56-Izar, it was the Necroteuch. Oh, I forgot. You never want anything, do you? You're just a slave, doing another's bidding.'
Cherubael frowned slightly. 'Don't be uncivil, Gregor. You should treasure the fact that I have taken a personal interest in you. Most things that cross me get destroyed very quickly. I could have hunted you out years ago. But I knew... there was a bond.'
'More of your riddles. More nothings. Tell me something real. Tell me about Vogel Passionata.'
He laughed, an ugly sound. 'Oh, you heard about, that did you?'
'Reports of the incident have made me suspect in the eyes of many.'
'I know. Bless you, that wasn't my intention. It was just a tiny error on my part. I'm sorry if it's inconvenienced you.'
'I have no wish to be seen as a man who would form a compact with daemons/
'I'm sure you haven't. But that is what's happening, whether you like it or not. Destiny, Gregor. Our destinies are entwined, in ways you cannot even begin to see. Why else would you dream about me?'
'Because it has become a central goal of my life to hunt you down and banish you/
'Oh, this is a lot more than simple professional obsession. Think, why do you really dream of me? Why do you search for me so diligently, even hiding the extent of that search from your masters?'
'I...' My mind was racing. This thing knew so much.
'And why did I spare you? If it had been you on Vogel Passionata, I would have let you live. I let you live on Thracian/
4Vhat?'
"You stopped to pay homage at Spatian's tomb, and the Gate shielded you from the disaster. Why did you stop? You don't know. You can't explain it, can you? It was me. Watching over you. Planting the suggestion in your mind. Making you pause for no reason. We've been working together all along/
'No!'
'You know it, Gregor. You just don't know you know it/
Cherubael floated away a short distance, and looked around. The auction site was frozen, all eyes on him. No one dared move, not even the most weak-willed twist guard. Even those present who didn't know what he was recognised the extraordinary evil and power he represented.
'What are you waiting for?' a voice yelled from nearby. Several armed men stepped out of their cover in the chew-after tangles and approached. It was Lyko, with six gristly examples of hired muscle.
'Look who I found, Lyko. I sprang this trap, just like you suggested, to discover if anyone was on your tail, and look who it turned out to be/
'Eisenhorn...' Lyko murmured, fear crossing his face for a second. He looked over at Cherubael.
'I said, what are you waiting for? Kill them and we can be gone.'
It was suddenly clear to me Lyko wasn't the daemonhost's master. Like Konrad Molitor all those years before, Lyko was another pawn, a corrupted agent of someone... something... else.
'Must I?' asked the hovering figure.
'Do it! No witnesses!'
'Please!' cried the elderly Merdok. 'We only meant t-'
Lyko whipped around and incinerated the old man with his plasma gun.
That broke the impasse. Phant's people and the other buyers broke in panic, drawing weapons, shouting. Indiscriminate shooting began. Lyko's gunmen, all ex-military types with autocannons, hosed the staging area and cut down the fleeing twists. I saw Phant Mastik hit by a burst of fire and collapse in rough sections backwards off the platform.
His horn-headed minder ran at Cherabael, firing a grubby old laspistol.
Cherabael hadn't moved. He was simply watching the murder around him. The las-shots sizzled off his skin, and he glanced down at the twist, as if his reverie had been broken.
The daemonhost didn't even move a hand, a finger. There was just a slight nod in the direction of the horned minder, and the miserable twist was somehow filleted where he stood, waves offeree stripping off his flesh and popping out his skeleton, parts of it still articulated.
I felt the warp churning around that dismal place as Cherabael went to work. Once he had started, his fury was unstinting. Merdok's war-rena ferns disappeared in a sudden vortex and died, fused together. The mud beneath Vassik's feet boiled, and she and her bodyguards sank, screaming and thrashing, into it.
I was frozen, rigid. I felt Bequin pulling at me.
Shots seared past my face. I snapped round, and saw two of Lyko's men charging us. One dropped suddenly, headshot by what could only have been a sniping round from Husmaan out in the torn undergrowth.
Nayl flew past me and gunned the other down with his Tronsvasse para-bellum.
'Come on! We've got to get out of here!' he yelled at me.
There was blood and filth and swirling plant-fibre in the air. A warp storm was crackling around us, so dense and dark we could barely see, barely stand against its churning force. But I could make out the glowing shape of Cherabael through it all.
I drew my power sword and ran towards him.
'Gregor! No!' Bequin screamed.
I had no choice. I had waited the best part of a hundred years. I would not let him go again.
He floated around to face me, smiling down.
'Put that away, Gregor. Don't worry. I won't kill you. Lyko has no power over me. I'll deal with his complaints later, and-'
'Who does have power over you? Who is your master? Tell me! You caused the atrocity on Thracian, didn't you! Why? On whose orders?'
'Just go away, Gregor. This is not your concern now. Go away'
I think he was honestly surprised when I hacked the power sword into his chest.
I don't really know if I had imagined I could do him any harm.
The blessed blade almost disembowelled him before it exploded and hurled me backwards.
He looked down in dismay at the wound across his torso. Warp energies, bright and toxic, were spilling out of it. In a second, the wound closed as if it had never been.
"You little fool,' said Cherabael.
I found myself flying backwards through the air, blood in my mouth.
The impact of landing shook my bones and smashed the breath out of me. My head swam. The daemonhost's power had thrown me a good thirty metres across the site, into the underbrush.
Furious psychic detonations went off all round. Screaming, semi-sentient winds from the deepest warp snaked around the field, destroying the last of the twists and the fleeing buyers.
I tried to rise, but consciousness left me.
When I came to, the chew-after was on fire. There was no sign of Cherabael. Inshabel and Aemos were pulling me to my feet.
'Bequin! Nayl!' I coughed.
'I'll find them,' Inshabel said.
"Where's Lyko?' I asked Aemos, as Inshabel ran off, weapon drawn.
'Fled, with his men, in two of the land speeders/
'And the daemonhost?'
'I don't know. It seemed to just vanish. Maybe it had a displacer field.'
I started to ran back into the site, though my body was burning with pain. Aemos cried out after me.
Most of the vehicles were smashed or overturned, but a couple were still intact.
I scrambled into a small, black speeder; a sleek, up-hive sports model that had presumably belonged to Vassik. I cued the thrasters, lifting off before I'd even strapped on the seat harness.
The craft was powerful and over-responsive. It took a moment to master the lightness of touch needed to accelerate without sudden blurts of speed. I turned it unsteadily in the air as I climbed too fast above the blasted site. Below, I could see Nayl, ragged and bloody, shouting up at me to come back.
Banking out of the cone of smoke at a hundred metres, I got my hearings. On every side, the acreage of the chew-after spread out until it became lush greencover again. There was the mainhive, looming in the distance. Where were they? Where were they?
I saw two dots in the air three kilometres to the west and gunned the machine after them. Heavy land speeders, making towards the bulk of the nearest harvester factory.
I pushed the turbines to their limit, coming in low and fast behind the slower lift-machines. I knew they'd seen me the moment autofire chattered back in my direction, wildly off target.
I began to jink, the way Midas had taught me, before they got their aim in. I thought about shooting back at them, but it took both hands on the stick just to keep the sports speeder level.
We were passing over green crop land now, an emerald sea that raced away below in an alarming blur. More tracer shots howled back past me.
A big shadow passed across the sun.
'Want them splashed?' crackled from the vox.
Downjets flaring, the streamlined bulk of my gun-cutter settled in beside me, matching my speed. It seemed huge compared to my insignificant little speeder; one-fifty tonnes, eighty metres from beak nose to finned tail, landing gear lowered like insect legs. I could see Medea grinning in the cockpit.
I daren't lift my hands from the jarring stick to activate the vox.
Instead, I opened my mind directly to hers.
Only if you have to. Try and get them to land.
'Ow!' answered the vox. Warn me next time you're gonna do that.'
The great bulk of the cutter suddenly surged forward, afterburners incandescent and landing gear raising, and banked away to the right. Its thrust wake wobbled me hard. I watched it turn out in a wide semi-circle, low over the crops, furrowing them with its downwash. It looked like a vast bird of prey swooping round for the kill.
With its interplanetary thrust-tunnels, it easily outstripped the racing speeders, and came in towards them, head on.
I felt a surge of psychic-power. My enemies had nothing but their minds with which to combat the gun-cutter.
The cutter suddenly broke left, dipped and then righted itself. They'd got to Medea, if only for a moment.
She was angry now. I could tell that simply from the way she flew. With a wail of braking jets, she turned the cutter on a stall-hover as the speeders flashed past.
The chin-turret crackled, and heavy-gauge munitions tore the second of the two speeders into a shower of flames in the air.
Hitting the throttle, I zipped in behind the hovering gun-cutter, chasing down the other speeder.
No more! I sent to Medea. / want them alive if possible!
The remaining speeder was close ahead now. I could feel Lyko's mind aboard it.
He was closing on the armoured bulk of the harvester, which now dominated the landscape ahead. It was a giant, six hundred metres long and ninety high at the peak of its humped, beetle-back. It was kicking a vast wake of sap-spray and smoke out behind it. The rattle of its threshing blades was audible above the scream of my speeder's engines.
My quarry dipped, and flew in along the spine of the huge factory machine, heading for a rear-facing docking hangar raised like a wart on the
hull's back. Warning hails were beeping at me over the speeder's vox-set, the alarmed challenges of the harvester.
The heavy speeder braked hard and landed badly in the mouth of the docking hangar. Turning in to follow it, I saw figures scrambling out. They disappeared, into the hangar, all except one man, who dropped to his knees on the approach slip and began firing back at me with his autocan-non.
Streams of high-velocity rounds whipped past on either side. Then a bunch of them went into my port intake with a clattering roar that shook the speeder and threw shards of casing out in a belch of sparks.
Warning lights lit up across the control board.
I dropped ten metres, put the nose in.
And bailed.
I broke my left wrist and four ribs hitting the topside of the harvester. With hindsight, I was lucky not to have been killed outright, lucky even to have hit the harvester's hull at all. It was a long way down. I managed to grab a stanchion cable as I began to slither down, and wrapped my right arm around it.
My speeder glanced once off the approach slip, and bounced up again, tail up, beginning to tear apart. Trailing debris, the machine cartwheeled in, vapourised the gunman, hit Lyko's parked land speeder, and shunted it right into the hangar, which exploded a second later in a sheet of fire and metal.
I limped along the approach slip, sidestepping chunks of burning wreckage, and climbed over the smashed, smouldering speeders into the hangar. Impact klaxons were rasping out, and automatic fire-fighting sprays were still squirting out dribbles of retardant foam.
At the back of the hangar, a hatch was half open, next to the cages of the service and cargo elevators.
I pushed through the hatch. A metal staircase descended into the factory. At the bottom, it opened out into a companionway that ran the length of the harvester. Stunned work-crews, most of them twists in sap-stained overalls, gazed at me.
I produced my rosette.
'Imperial Inquisition. Where did they go?'
Who?'
'Where did they go?' I snarled, enforcing my will without restraint.
The effect was so powerful, none of them could speak, and several passed out. All the others pointed down the companionway towards the head of the factory.
Another hatch, another staircase. The noise of the internal threshers was now shudderingly loud. I came down into the vast internal work line, a long chamber that ran the length of the harvester. It was a huge, deafening Place, the air thick with sap mist. A massive processing conveyor carried the harvested produce along from the reaping blades at the harvester's
mouth, at a rate of several tonnes every second. Twist workers in masks and aprons worked the front part of the line with chaintools and cutting lances which were attached to overhead power systems by thick rubber-trunked hoses. They sorted and cut the larger sections of root and stalk before the crop went through the great vicing rollers and stamping presses into the macerating vats further back down the factory.
With the alarms sounding and warning lights flashing, the line had come to a halt, and the workers were looking around, liquid cellulose and sap dripping off their gauntlets, overalls and work tools.
I blundered through them, overseers shouting at me from gantry stations far above. I could see Lyko, thirty metres away down the line, pushing through with one last gunman and a bound, visored figure that could only be Esarhaddon.
The gunmen turned and fired at me down the length of the line vault. Three workers crumpled, one spilling over onto the belt. The shots spanged sparks off the metal w
alkways and machinery.
As the other workers dived for cover, I dropped to my knee and reached for my boltgun. It wasn't there. In fact, the entire holster was ripped open. I wasn't sure when I lost it: during Cherubael's assault or slamming off the hull of the harvester, but it was long gone. And my beloved power sword had been disintegrated on contact with the daemonhost.
More shots whizzed down the work-line and dented the metal facings of the belt-drivers. I crawled into cover behind a drum of hydrobac tool-wash.
I pulled my back-up weapon from the ankle-holster built into the side of my boot. It was a compact, short-frame auto with a muzzle so short it barely extended beyond the trigger guard. The handgrip was actually longer than the barrel, and contained a slide-magazine of twenty small-calibre rounds.
Selecting single-fire, I cracked off a couple of shots. The aim was lousy and the power poor. It really was meant to be a close-range last ditch.
The gunman down the line, undeterred by my pathetic display, switched over to full auto and raked the deck area and working space beside the stationary belt. Workers, all pressing themselves into cover, began to scream and yell.
The shooting stopped. I dared a look out. There was a clunk and a whirr and the conveyor started moving again.
The gunman was following his departing master again. Lyko was almost out of sight, pushing his captive ahead of him.
Why was Esarhaddon a captive, I wondered? I still didn't understand the relationship between Lyko, the psyker and Cherubael.
I ran on. The gunman, Lyko and his captive psyker had all disappeared through a bulkhead door. To follow them, I'd have to go in blind. And if I'd been in Lyko's place, I'd have used the bulkhead as a point to turn and wait.
My gut readings of his actions had not been wrong so far.
I leapt up onto the wide conveyor belt, ignoring the shouts of the cowering work crew, and slithered across it through the matted, sticky crop load. The sap and the moving belt made it nigh on impossible to stay upright. For a moment, I thought I might slip and be carried along under the nearest roller press.
I leapt off the far side onto the solid deck, dripping with green mush and vegetal fluid. Now I was following the work-line down the other side of the wide conveyor, which divided the harvester centrally.