Answers later, I decided, as another series of explosions rippled across the estate and lit the sky.
The stable block, which I used as a hangar and garage, had just gone up.
'What about one of their vehicles?' Aemos whispered, gesturing the fliers on the lawn.
It was too risky. We'd be out in the open and the speeders were likely to be guarded. I shook my head.
The water dock then?' he suggested. 'Maybe they haven't got to the boats?'
'No, they had everything else covered. They knew the layout, knew to hit the stables. They were briefed about this place inside and out/
We went back inside, through the kitchen and across the little walled herb garden into the scullery behind the dining hall. Smoke fumes strung the air like silk hangings. I had one last means of escape, one I believed they didn't - couldn't - know about.
Barbarisater twitched and I knew someone was coming. I pushed Aemos back behind me.
Two figures came into view. One was Eleena Koi, the untouchable assigned to the house. She was supporting Xel Sastre, one of Kircher's men. He had been wounded in the arm and shoulder.
'Eleena!' I hissed.
'Lord! Thank the Emperor! We thought you were dead!' Her narrow face was taut with panic and Sastre's blood was all over her brushed epinchire gown.
I took a quick look at Sastre's wounds. They were bad, but he'd live if we could get him to an infirmary.
'Have you seen any others? Kircher? Have you seen him?'
'I saw him die/ said Sastre. 'They were driving us back, and he stayed to hold the main hall. Took on twenty of the bastards.'
"You sure he's-'
They blew him apart. But not before he'd finished a good half dozen. He told me... told me Kronsky let them in.'
'What?'
'Kronsky. The new guy hired last month. He betrayed the whole house. Shut down the defence system.'
An inside job, as I had feared. Kircher had employed this Kronsky in good faith, and no doubt scrupulously vetted his background and subjected him to a mind-search. And I had welcomed Kronsky to my house. My respect for the resources, skill and preparation of my unknown enemy grew.
A speeder howled by close outside, and the sound of its sporadic fire shook the windows in their frames.
'Can you keep up?' I asked Sastre and Eleena. They nodded. Where are we going?' asked Eleena.
'Out through the dining hall, then quickly across the lawn of the rose garden into the orchard behind the maze. After that, we swing south, make our way to the front fence and then over the main road into the woods.'
I was describing a journey of over two kilometres, but no one balked. Staying put was suicide.
I wanted to try my vox again and try to raise Medea, but knew it was pointless. The raiders had all channels covered. Instead, I reached out with my mind.
Medea... Medea...
To my amazement, I was answered almost at once. It was Vance.
We're just outside the pugnaseum. Medea's going to try and take one of their fliers.
No! Stop her, Jekud. They're too well guarded. Tell Medea "The Storm Oak'. She'll know what it means. If we get there first, I'll wait as long as I can.
The dining hall was in darkness and the buffed wood floor was littered with glass. The windows had been blown in and the drapes rustled in the night breeze.
We made our way across to the windows. Outside, the rose garden was quiet and gloomy. The light of the fires cast long shadows across the immaculate lawn.
We ducked back inside as a flier flew over. It paused above the lawn, engines wailing, its downjets rippling the surface of the lawn. It was so close I could hear the crackle and sputter of the cockpit intervox. The searchlamp swung towards us, suddenly blinding, jabbing beams of frosty white light into the dining hall. The glass litter glittered like a constellation.
Then the speeder moved off again, thundering around towards the back of the house.
'Go!' I hissed.
We ran across the lawn. Aemos was surprisingly spry, but Eleena struggled with Sastre. I dropped back and helped her with him. He kept apologising, telling us to leave him.
He was a good man.
We reached the edge of the orchard and lost ourselves in the shadows of the arbors, following the back of the maze. The air was richly scented with the maze's pungent privet and the sweet, acid smell of the ripening fruit. Moths and nocturnal insects fluttered in the half light.
Well into the orchard, seventy metres from the house, we stopped for breath. Weapons fire and shouting still echoed from the residence. I looked around, trying not to look at the brilliant blaze of the buildings so I could adjust to the gloom under the trees. They were low, graceful apple, tumin and ploin, planted in orderly rows. The white bark of the tumin trees shone like snow in the dimness, and some of the early ploin clusters had been carefully bagged against scavenging birds. Scant days before, I had been out here with the junior staff, joking as we gathered up the first tumin crop. Altwald had been with us, taping the bags around the dark, swelling ploins. That night, Jarat had served a glorious tumin tart as dessert.
Jarat. I wondered what had become of her in all this.
I never did find out.
Sastre stiffened and brought up his laspistol at a movement nearby, but it was just a garden servitor, moving along the aisle of fruit trees, spraying pesticide. Oblivious to the carnage nearby, it was simply obeying its nightly programming.
We started forward again, but when I looked back, I saw several figures coming out of the dining hall windows and spreading out across the rose garden.
I bade the other three move ahead and crept back, staying as concealed as possible, in case they had night-vision lenses or motion detectors.
I came upon the slow-moving servitor from behind, opened a back panel as it trudged monotonously forward, and keyed in new instructions. It moved off towards the rose garden, adjusting its route only to avoid trees. I had increased its pace.
I was already on my way back to rejoin the others when I heard the first few shots: the raiders, surprised by the sudden appearance of the servitor. With any luck, it would delay or distract them. If they had been following
our movement, then maybe the servitor would convince them that was all they had detected.
We kept going until we were well clear of the maze and had left the orchard behind. We crossed dark, overgrown paddocks, fumbling blindly. The only light came from the haze in the sky behind us where Spaeton House blazed.
We turned south, or a rough estimation of south. This was still my estate - indeed the land I held title for stretched for several kilometres in all directions - but this was uncultivated wood and scrubland. I could hear the sea, tantalisingly out of reach beyond the headland behind us.
I wondered how far we could get before the raiders finished their quartering of the house and realised I had slipped through their fingers.
We hurried on for another twenty minutes, passing through glades of scrawny beech and wiry fintle. The ground was lush with nettles. We reached a waterlogged irrigation ditch, and it took us several minutes to manhandle Sastre across.
I could see the perimeter fence and the road beyond. On the far side of that, the rising mass of the wild woodland, the heritage forests that still covered two thirds of Gudrun, untouched and unmolested since the first colonies were built there.
We're almost there/ I whispered. 'Come on/
Tempting fate, as always, Eisenhorn. Tempting fate.
Las-bolts slashed the air over our heads. A few at first, then more, from at least four sources. They lowered their aim and the bright orange shots ripped into the nettles, kicking up mists of sap and pulp. Two young larches by the fence ditch were splintered. Dry gorse and fintle shuddered and burst into flames.
A flare went up, bursting like a star, and damning us all with its invasive light.
'The fence! Come on!' I cursed.
Behind us, by the light of die flare, I could see dark fig
ures wading mrough the nettles and emerging from the trees. Every few moments, one of the figures would halt and raise his weapon, spitting dazzling pulses at us.
Further away, back at the bright pyre of Spaeton House, 1 saw two white blobs of light rise and disengage themselves from the fireglow. Speeders, called in, heading this way, chasing their beams across the paddocks and woods.
We were at the fence. I channeled my fury into Barbarisater and slashed open a hole two metres wide.
'Get through!' I yelled. Aemos went through the gap. Sastre stumbled and fell, losing his grip on Eleena's arm. I pushed her through the gap too and went back for the wounded man.
Sastre had trained his pistol at the advancing killers, and was firing. He was sitting down, leaning his back against the fence. He made two kills as
I remember, cutting down figures struggling forward in the weeds and undergrowth fifty metres away.
'Go, sir!' he said.
'Not without you!'
'Go, damn it! You won't get far unless someone slows them down!'
A rain of las-fire fell around us, puncturing the fence and throwing up wet clods of earth. I was forced to turn and use Barbarisater to deflect several shots. The blade hummed as it twitched and soaked up the power.
'Go!' Sastre repeated. I realised he had been hit again and was trying to hide it. He coughed blood.
'I can't leave you like this-'
'Of course you can't!' he snapped. 'Give me a bloody weapon! This damn las-cell is nearly spent/
I crouched beside him and handed him my boltgun and my spare clips.
The Emperor will remember you, even if I don't live to/ I told him.
'You damn well better had, sir, or I'm wasting my efforts/
There was no time for anything further, no time even to take his hand. As I clambered through the fence, I heard the first roaring blasts of the boltgun.
Eleena and Aemos were waiting for me on the far side of the road in the fringes of the wild woods. I gathered them up and we ran into the darkness, stumbling over gnarled roots, clambering up loamy slopes, surrounded by the midnight blackness of the primordial forest.
The boltgun continued to fire for some time. Then it fell silent.
May the God-Emperor rest Xel Sastre and show him peace.
MINE
The Storm Oak.
Going back.
Making Midas proud.
For almost an hour, we plunged into the great darkness of the forest, blind and desperate. In what seemed an alarmingly short time, we lost all sight of the great conflagration we had left behind. The woodland, dense and ancient, blocked it out.
'Are we lost?' Eleena mumbled in a faltering voice.
'No/ I assured her. Kircher, Medea and I had spent many hours hunting and tracking in the wild woodlands, and I knew these fringes well enough, though in darkness, there was an unhelpful depth of mystery and unfa-miliarity.
Once in a while, I noticed a landmark: a jutting tooth of stone, an old tree, a turn in the terrain. Usually, I recognised such things once we were right on them, and took a moment to adjust our bearings.
Twice, speeders passed overhead, their stablights backlighting the dense foliage. If they'd possessed heat trackers, we would have been dead. But they were hunting by searchlight alone. At last, I privately rejoiced, the enemy has made an error.
We reached the oak.
Medea had named it the Storm Oak. It had been hundreds of years old when lightning had killed it and left it a splintered, leafless giant, like a shattered castle turret. The bark was peeling from its dead wood, and the area around it was crawling with grubs and rot-beetles. It had grown in a hollow, sprouting from the dark soil overhang of a scarp twenty metres
high. The oak itself was fifty metres tall from its vast, partly exposed root mass to its shattered crown, and fifteen metres across the trunk.
I scrambled down into the hollow beneath its roots. When the lightning had struck it, ages past, it had partially ripped the massive tree from the ground, creating a cavern under its mighty foundations. The dank hole was like a natural chapel, with roots serving as the crossmembers for the ceiling. The previous owners of Spaeton House had, I had been told, used it as a chancel for private ceremonies.
Medea and I had decided to use it as a hangar.
No one else knew about this, except Kircher. We had all agreed it was a dark, secret place to stow a light aircraft. A bolt hole. I don't think we ever really imagined a doom falling on Spaeton House like the one that overwhelmed it that night, but we had played along with the idea it might be wise to keep one transport tucked out of sight.
The transport in question was a monocoque turbofan flier, handmade on Urdesh. Light, fast, ultra-manoeuvrable. Medea had purchased it ten years before when she was bored, and had stored it in the main hangar at Spaeton until one notorious night while we were away on a case when several junior staff members had decided to take it for a spin, it being so much more racey than the house shuttles and bulk speeders.
They'd had the damage repaired by the time we got home, but Medea had noticed. Reprimands had followed.
Weeks later, when we found the Storm Oak during a hunting trip, and devised the notion of a last ditch transport, Medea had moved the craft here. We never actually thought we'd have to use it for escape. It was just an excuse to park it away from the envious juniors.
I stripped off the tarp and popped open the hatch. The cabin interior smelled of leather and the faint dampness of the forest.
Six metres long and finished in slate grey, the craft had a wedge-shaped cabin that tapered to a short, V-vaned tail. There were three turbofan units, one fixed behind the cabin under the tail for main thrust, the other two mounted on stubby wings that projected from the cabin roof on either side. The wing units were gimble-mounted for lift and attitude control. The cabin was snug, with three rows of seats: a single pilot's seat in the nose, with two high-backed passenger seats behind it and a more functional bench seat behind them against the cabin's rear partition.
I strapped myself into the pilot's seat and ran a pre-flight to wake the systems up as Eleena and Aemos installed themselves in the pair of seats behind me. The instrument panel lit up green and there was a low sigh as the fans began to turn.
Eleena closed the hatch. The leaf-litter in the root cave began to twitch and flutter.
We'd heard nothing from Vance since we entered the wild woodland. I reached out with my mind, urging them to hurry up. There was no answer.
The plane's power cells showed about seventy-five per cent capacity. There were no alert or disfunction runes on the diagnostic panel. I went
through a final check. The craft was armed with a light las-lance, fitted discreetly under the nose in a fixed-forward mount. We'd never used it, and the instruments showed it was off-line. I entered a code to activate it, and the screen told me it was stowed for safety and non-functional.
With the fans still idling, I got back out and went round to the flier's nose, crouching down to look beneath. The lance, little more than a slender tube, was capped with a rubberised sleeve to muzzle the weapon and keep dirt out of the emitter. I fumbled with the sleeve and removed it. Pulling the safety sleeve off broke a wire clasp that allowed a small pin to be yanked out. The lance was enabled.
I climbed back into the cabin, slammed the hatch and checked the instruments. The weapon was now showing as on-line and I activated the power-up function to charge its firing cells.
I'd just about finished when I felt it.
'Sir, what's wrong?' Eleena cried out as I gasped and lurched forward.
'Gregor?' said Aemos, alarmed.
'I'm okay... it was Vance...' A quick, terrible psychic shriek from the direction of the estate. A psyker in pain.
I tried to raise him again, but there was nothing except a blurry wall of background anguish. Then I heard, for a second, his mind urging Medea, urging her to run, run and not to look back.
Again I gasped as a second jolt
of agony rippled through the mental spectrum.
'God-Emperor damn it!' I cursed and threw the plane forward. The fans wailed. We were instantly surrounded by a maelstrom of leaves and dead twigs which rattled and pinged off the fuselage and windows. I nursed out just a few centimetres of lift to clear the ground, with the wing fans angled straight down, and we edged forward out of the Storm Oak's root cave on minimum thrust.
I kept one eye on the proximity scanner, which was throbbing red as it detected the structure enclosing us. As soon as it signaled that the tail boom had cleared the overhang of the root ball, I keyed in more lift and we rose, swirling the leaves of the clearing around us in a whirling eddy.
We hovered and turned slowly, once, twice, as I let the auspex's terrain tracker scan the area. Then I lined up.
'Uhm, Gregor?' Aemos said, leaning forward and pointing over my left arm at the illuminated compass ball. 'We're heading north.'
'Yes/
'It, uhm, goes without saying north is the direction we came from.'
'Yes. Sorry. We're going back/
I put the nose down, the wing jets whirred round to an aft three-quarter thrust in their socket mounts, and the craft raced off into the darkness.
I swept us through the forest at something like twenty knots, lights off. Visibility was virtually zero, so I flew using a combination of the auspex and the proximity scanner, reading the green and amber phantoms of
tree boles and branches as they loomed, steering around and under. Every now and then I cut it too fine, and the collision alert sounded as something swept across the screen in vivid red. There were plenty of near misses, but only once did I hit something - a small branch that snapped away, thankfully. Aemos and Eleena both cried out involuntar-
ily-
'Relax/ I urged them.
We'd have made better - and safer - progress above the forest canopy, but I wanted to stay concealed for as long as possible.
In vain, I reached out to find Vance's mind.
Barely avoiding a massive low branch, we came down a long slope under the trees, and the auspex showed me that we'd reached the edge of the woodland. The road was just ahead.
Through the tree-line, I could see light, pulsing white. Another flare. I cut the forward thrust, and crept forward on down-angled jets, just a drifting hover.