Nayl peered down at his old partner in crime for a moment. He’d always wondered how this story would end.
The corpse grabbed him by the right ankle. With a whipcrack snap, it jerked Nayl down onto his back. Winded, Nayl tried to struggle, but Worna was already rising, black eyes burning savagely out of the blast-flayed remains of his face. Blood wept from the seared flesh.
Worna picked Nayl up by the throat, and lifted him off the floor. With his left hand, he tore the grenade launcher off Nayl’s body and chucked it aside. Then he threw Nayl back into the dining room.
Nayl landed hard, dazed. Worna came to him and picked him up again, with both hands this time. He raised him high, and threw him a second time. Nayl’s flailing body hit one of the dining room’s grand windows and smashed through it in a blizzard of glass and broken leading. Nayl fell six metres and landed on the grey slates of an annex roof below. His impact shattered some of the slates and made a dent. He lay on the damaged roof in the torrential rain, twisted and unconscious.
Lightning flared. A fork of it struck the ridge of a nearby roof, exploding the heavy tiles and exposing black rafters that began to burn.
Worna turned away from the shattered window, breathing in long, sucking rasps. He walked slowly across the dining room, found his bolt pistol, and picked it up. He returned to the window. Small fragments of glass were still falling out of the remaining twists of leading, tinkling as they hit the ground. Rain blew in, stinging Worna’s ruined face.
He slammed a new clip into his bolt pistol, racked it, and leaned out of the window to take aim at Harlon Nayl’s helpless form.
ELEVEN
‘I HOPE YOU know what the hell you’re doing,’ Leyla Slade said to Culzean as they advanced briskly up through the northern layers of Elmingard.
‘I always know what I’m doing,’ he replied jauntily. ‘Now, you put him where I told you to put him, didn’t you?’
‘In the old tower, yes.’ Slade looked at Culzean. ‘Believe me, if I’d known what he was when I was doing it, I wouldn’t have gone near him.’
A squad of six hired guns were escorting them. At her words, they exchanged troubled looks.
‘Everything’s all right,’ Culzean said. ‘Everything’s all right, gentlemen. Believe me, you’ll all be receiving triple pay for tonight’s work.’
‘We’re getting reports, sir,’ said Tzabo, leading the fire team. ‘The inquisitor’s forces have taken the gate and are inside Elmingard. We’ve lost men. A lot of men.’
‘Our distinguished foe won’t trouble us much longer,’ Culzean said confidently. ‘Now come along.’ They ran across a courtyard, braving the relentless rain, and entered another wing of the sprawling building.
‘Thonius is really Slyte?’ Slade asked Culzean as they strode along. She kept her voice low.
‘This is what I have learned from the Swole woman, and she was in no position to lie. It’s sweet, I think she’d actually been trying to protect him.’
‘Orfeo, Slyte is—’
‘Slyte is perfect. Slyte is the thing I’ve spent my life working towards and look, Leyla, he comes to me in the end almost by chance. Ah, the irony!’
‘I don’t understand what you think you can achieve. Molotch—’
‘Zygmunt was a fine enough distraction, but there was no real future in that relationship. I believed for a long time he would be an invaluable asset to my work, but I hadn’t taken into account his character. So difficult. So hard to govern.’
‘So smart,’ said Slade darkly.
‘Yes, that too. You must have noticed, these last few weeks, how we were falling out? It was just a matter of time before it turned nasty.’
Slade shuddered. ‘I think it’s turned nasty already,’ she remarked.
‘Oh, poo, Ley. You know what I mean. He was so paranoid.’
‘Was he?’ she asked. ‘Or was he the only one who really knew what kind of disaster Slyte represented?’
Culzean stopped and turned to face Slade. The men came to a halt behind them.
‘Ley, listen to me. Have I ever let you down? Have I? You’ve seen some of the shining weapons I have at my disposal. They’ve taken me years to collect and years to learn how to use. Molotch, for all his smart mind, is just a dabbler. I am a professional in these things. Experienced, informed, detached. Slyte is just another asset for me to exploit. Another shining weapon… albeit the brightest and shiniest I’ve ever acquired.’
‘You think… you think you can control a daemon of the Major Arcana?’
Culzean laughed. ‘Oh, I know I can. Control him and bind him. Subjugate him. I sent our savants up to the tower just before Ravenor made his grand entrance. As we speak, they are completing the necessary rituals and enslaving Slyte’s power to my command.’
Slade hesitated before responding. ‘Sir, I advise caution,’ she said, taking out her handgun and fitting it with one of the specially prepared clips. ‘I have always admired your ambition—’
‘Thank you, Ley.’
‘May I ask… what you intend to do?’
‘That’s just it.’ said Orfeo Culzean with a winning smile. ‘I can do anything I want. Anything at all. With Molotch as an ally, I might have taken down a government or seized control of a world. But with Slyte… oh, Leyla. The whole Imperium is mine. Start dreaming. I’ll soon be able to grant you any heart’s desire.’
‘Right now,’ she replied, ‘I’d settle for being somewhere else. What about Ravenor and his people?’
‘Slyte will destroy them, at my order. I’d like you to contact the Divine Fratery later tonight. I’ve kept a line of communication open with Frater Stefoy. They will want to know of Slyte’s birth. They may wish to come and worship him. Encourage them. The Fratery, with their long-standing knowledge of Slyte, will be useful to have around, an added guarantee. Now, can we proceed?’
They left the northern wing and stepped out into the storm. Tzabo’s men lit lamp packs. Rain swirled into their faces as they struggled up the track to the astronomer’s tower. Incandescent lightning boomed like atomic blasts overhead in the murk.
The ragged tower formed an ominous black shape through the sheeting rain. They soldiered on, their clothes drenched, arms raised to protect their faces. Culzean reignited his void shield for cover against the elemental fury, and the rain sizzled and steamed off its field.
Then the rain stopped, and there was utter calm.
They stopped outside the tower’s base, steam rising off their soaked clothing. There was shocking peace and silence.
‘Eye of the storm?’ Culzean suggested, with a nervous laugh.
Slade looked back down the track. Ten yards away, the rain was falling. It was falling like a monsoon deluge all across the black silhouette of Elmingard. Lightning jagged the sky. They could hear none of it.
‘This is, this is…’ one of Tzabo’s men said, raising his weapon.
‘Oh, Throne,’ said Tzabo, looking up. The sky directly above the tower was bare of clouds. The black weight of the thunderhead hung over the mountains, but had swirled and parted to form a deep chimney of clear air over the astronomer’s broken edifice. Alien stars glittered high above. They were moving, circling like fireflies, forming and re-forming constellations and the spirals of unknown galaxies.
‘Let’s go back,’ said Slade, her voice hollow in the still air. ‘Orfeo, please.’
‘It’s just the binding,’ Culzean told her. ‘Our savants have done their work. This area is becalmed because of the rites they have performed. Slyte is bound.’
‘What’s that stink?’ asked Tzabo. A noxious odour oozed out of the black tower, a charnel air.
Slade moved forwards, her weapon aimed. Culzean followed her. They stepped through the doorway into the base of the tower. Rainwater dripped down from the upper levels. Scraps of torn parchment, sodden and limp, littered the floor.
Slade saw the stone block she’d shackled Thonius to an hour before. The remnants of the chain trailed from it, bro
ken and bent.
‘Orfeo?’
‘What?’
‘Orfeo, look.’
The walls around them were decorated with something dark and sticky. It took them a moment to comprehend what they were looking at. Culzean’s savants were dead. Their pulverised meat and bones were smeared in a thin, clotting layer onto stone all around the tower. Blood ran down and congealed at the base of the walls.
‘Leyla?’ Culzean whispered.
She grabbed his hand and dragged him back out of the tower. Tzabo and his men were waiting there.
‘We’re leaving,’ she told them.
‘Sir?’
‘She’s right,’ mumbled Culzean, trying to think straight. ‘She’s right, Tzabo. We’re leaving.’
So soon?
They turned.
Something that had once been Carl Thonius stood in the doorway of the tower. He was naked, his clothes burnt off him. A ghastly red light radiated from the core of his being, illuminating him from within. His skin had become transparent and his skeletal structure was revealed like a medicae’s scan. His right arm was fleshless from the middle of the upper half. What remained was a scorched bone limb that ended in vast, black talons.
Culzean, he said. When his mouth opened, they could see flames dancing inside.
‘Slyte?’ stammered Orfeo Culzean. ‘Slyte, I command you—’
‘Don’t be such an idiot!’ Slade cried.
The thing’s mouth opened. It kept opening. It stretched and distended like a snake’s jaw, far wider than any human mouth could ever open. Then it exhaled with a dull, buzzing roar. A wave of wretched vapour streamed out of its maw and engulfed them. Tzabo’s men recoiled, gasping and vomiting. All of the silver buttons on their smart blue outfits tarnished and went black. Two of them fell down, overcome with nausea.
Gagging, Slade raised her weapon. ‘Run!’ she gasped. ‘Run, Orfeo!’
She started to fire. Tzabo and his remaining men added their firepower to hers. Their las shots bounced off the daemonic figure, but Slade’s special loads had been aimed low, into the soil at its feet. They burst on impart, releasing their contents from their bondage in the specially engraved shells.
Gibbering warp-forms bloomed like unholy flowers, sprouting from the earth. Hooktors and clawbrils and other hideous sub-daemons that Culzean had painstakingly captured and imprisoned over the years manifested as they were released, and struck at Slyte in mindless wrath.
Cackling, Slyte dismembered them, shredding their bodies like wet sacks, spraying ichor and pus in all directions. His black talons ripped through their writhing masses and reduced them to dissolving ectoplasmic sludge.
Slyte stepped forwards through the last of the warp-things. He made a barking sound, like a dog-fox, and the ground split. Insectile vermin, glittering black, some the size of lobsters or small felines, poured out of the ground in a frenetic, clicking flood.
‘Run!’ Slade screamed.
Culzean started to run. The insects enveloped him, burning and falling away as the void shield threw them back.
Tzabo and his men were engulfed. The seething mass of chittering bodies covered them from head to toe, and stripped them of clothing and meat. Bare skeletons, crawling with black things, collapsed onto the ground and disarticulated. Tzabo was the last to fall. He turned his gun on himself and blew off his own head.
The air was full of flies, buzzing and swarming.
Culzean ran. Slade ran after him, wailing. There were things on her, on her arms and her legs, biting and scurrying.
‘Orfeo!’
‘Leyla! Protect me!’
She turned, loyal to the end, clapped a fresh clip into her weapon, and faced the burning daemon striding after them. She started to fire.
Culzean ran on regardless. He heard Leyla Slade shrieking, and shuddered when that shrieking cut off abruptly.
He kept running.
IN THE HEART of Elmingard, Siskind and the others heard awful roaring and baying coming from outside. A dire stink suddenly permeated the place.
‘That’s it,’ Siskind told Ornales. ‘We’re leaving.’
The rest of Culzean’s staff and employees were already fleeing. Tables and chairs were overturned in their efforts to exit. There was screaming and shouting. The noises echoed down the hallways.
‘Is the flier locked?’ Siskind asked his first mate as they hurried along.
‘It’ll only open to our voice prints,’ Ornales assured him. ‘What in hell is happening?’
Siskind drew his laspistol. ‘I have no idea and no wish to know,’ he said. A man slammed into them. The silver buttons of his blue wool clothing had turned black. Siskind saw how every metal surface in the place was tarnished and soiled. The air had gone bad. The stink was everywhere.
‘Take me with you! Take me with you, shipmaster!’ the man pleaded. Siskind shot him.
‘This is madness!’ he growled.
Ornales said nothing, but drew his own weapon.
They reached a stairwell that led down into the southern terraces. Scullery boys and domestics ran past them, trying to find a place of refuge. Siskind and Ornales started down the steps.
Plyton appeared on the staircase below them, hauling Kara Swole. She cried out as she saw Siskind.
Siskind started shooting. Plyton dropped Kara and fired her shotgun. The blast took Ornales in the chest and hurled him back up the stairs. He landed, limp, and rolled back down a step or two.
Siskind kept firing. He hit Plyton in the right hip and the left shoulder, and spun her back down the staircase. She screeched in pain as she bounced off the wall and fell on her face. Leaping down two steps at a time, Siskind came to a halt over Kara’s body.
She looked up at him, blankly.
‘Kara!’ Plyton yelled in pain, doubled up and writhing at the base of the stairs. Siskind pointed his hand weapon at Kara Swole.
The first las-shot blew out his spine. The second chopped the back off his head as cleanly as an axe blow. Siskind staggered, gaping, smoke streaming out of his mouth. Blood poured down the back of his expensive coat of Vitrian glass.
He toppled over the stair rail and fell.
Belknap clattered down the staircase to reach Kara, slinging his lasrifle onto his shoulder. He grabbed her, and covered her face with kisses.
‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he whispered.
‘Pat, Patrik…’ she moaned. ‘Help Maud.’
He looked over her head at Plyton thrashing in anguish on the deck below.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
LEANING OUT OF the broken window, Lucius Worna fired his bolt pistol at Nayl on the cratered roof below. Nothing happened.
He glanced at his weapon. It was a trusty tool and had never malfunctioned before. He tried again. He realised that something was preventing his finger from squeezing the trigger.
He turned instinctively. A kineblade impaled him through one eye like an arrow. Two more struck into his chest.
Patience Kys walked towards him across the ruined dining hall, her skirt flowing.
‘There’s more where that came from,’ she promised.
Worna tried to fire at her. She lashed out with the full fury of her telekinesis and grabbed him around the neck, throttling him.
Worna choked.
Kys raised her arms like a sorcerer casting a spell and propelled him up off the floor and out through the window. Advancing, she lifted his struggling bulk up into the sky and suspended him there.
A bolt of lightning slammed into his metal-clad form. A second later, two more monumental lightning strikes hit him.
‘End of story?’ she asked sarcastically, her hands raised.
‘You… wish…’ Worna gasped, blood streaming out of his mouth.
Kys determinedly held the bounty hunter in the sky a little longer. Eight more forks of lightning slammed into Worna in rapid succession. His armoured carcass began to burn.
Once it was blazing like a torch, she hurled it
away. It arced across the rooftops of Elmingard like a comet, leaving a trail of fire behind it.
Kys leaned out of the window. ‘Harlon?’ she yelled. ‘You alive down there? Harlon?’
TWELVE
THEY HURRIED ACROSS the rose terrace into the solar. Ravenor led the way.
‘Of course, I knew it was Thonius all along,’ Molotch said.
+What?+
‘Oh, not at the time, but now… it all makes sense.’
+How?+
‘At Petropolis, Gideon. In the Sacristy. I came so close to my dreams.’
+I know you did.+
‘Gideon, you’d have enjoyed them too, admired them. Enuncia was so perfect, so clean.’
+Zygmunt…+
Molotch shrugged. ‘At the point of creation, I was interrupted by your people. Kara Swole and Carl Thonius. Of course, I dealt with them quickly. Then Slyte appeared.’
+Slyte was there?+
‘Yes, Gideon. Did you not realise what actually thwarted my efforts on Eustis Majoris? Slyte stopped me. Slyte hurt me. But for Slyte, I would have triumphed.’
+Holy Throne.+
‘The daemon just appeared, and I was too scared to think. Culzean and his woman helped me escape. But now it’s so obvious. Slyte was there because Thonius was there. Thonius was Slyte. He destroyed my plans for Enuncia.’
Ravenor’s chair coasted to a halt in the middle of the solar. Rain spattered in through the open doors behind them.+I thought it was me, Zygmunt. I thought I was the one who’d beaten you. Slyte takes the credit for that, does he?+
‘Rather, I think, Carl Thonius,’ Molotch replied. ‘Now let’s get on with this.’ He started to rummage through the crates Culzean had left stacked in the chamber. ‘Come along, Gideon.’
Molotch paused in his search and looked back at the support chair.
‘What’s the matter?’
+Nothing.+
‘You never told me how you found out,’ said Molotch.
+A nascent psyker called Zael. He knew it all. I have a feeling he left it too late to tell me.+
‘What’s the matter?’
+You keep asking me that, Zygmunt.+