‘Get out of here,’ Mathuin yelled without looking up at us. ‘Get out while you still can.’
A scratching, slithering sound came from inside the lower lounge and the incunabula reappeared. There were sooty marks on its chest plating, but no sign it had been damaged at all. Mathuin opened fire again and threw it backwards once more, walking forward to press his attack, mercilessly blasting streams of high-velocity shells at the golden killer. It reeled, bucked, jerked, unable to ignore the kinetic impact, but was still undamaged.
Gradually, it began to crunch towards Mathuin, one foot after the other, weathering the blizzard of shots like a man trudging head down into torrential rain. The rotator gears of Zeph’s cannon were whirring shrilly. It was close to overheating, running out of ammunition, or both.
Three metres from Mathuin, two, shrugging off the hail of shells one struggling step at a time.
‘Wystan!’ I yelled. ‘Activate! Activate!’
The Brass Thief sliced around with its right-hand blade and cut Zeph’s rotator cannon in half. In the explosion that resulted, shards of shrapnel burst out of the ruined mechanism. Mathuin was thrown almost the full length of the hall. The incunabula ignored him and swung back to face me.
I was what it was after. Just me.
But now Wystan had activated his limiter. My mind surged free, unrestrained. With a pop, the psy-cannon deployed from the chair’s casing and I began to fire. My first two shots actually managed to dent its chest plating. My third slightly buckled its left cheek and left a scratch on the brass.
Still it came on.
IN THE CHILLY basement vault of the governor’s palace, the five psykers began to mumble and thrash in their lead tanks. Revoke pushed two of the handlers aside and took a look at the biometric display. Nearby Culzean smiled and simply clapped his hands together. He already knew what was happening.
‘We’ve forced his hand,’ Culzean said. ‘Ravenor can’t deal with the Thief without his mind powers. He’s told his untouchable to limit. He should be very visible to you now.’
‘Is he?’ Trice asked.
Revoke nodded. ‘Ultra-solid return. A house in Formal E, ninth ward. I’m despatching elements right now.’
‘Never mind that,’ Trice said. ‘Send the psykers in.’
FOR A MOMENT, for a fleeting second, I thought I had the measure of this monstrous incunabula. I was pinning it with my mind as I fired cannon shot after cannon shot into it, actually splintering slivers of gold off its armour. It fought back to break my grip on it with furious power, but my will was no trifling thing. I actually had it fast, tight in a vice of psy-energy—
Then the psykers swirled in. Bodiless, they burst into Miserimus all around me, streaking comets of vile white light that swirled and circled and laughed with gleeful inhuman voices. Every lamp, window, glow-globe and drinking glass in the house shattered. Floorboards ripped up like twigs. Doors burst off their hinges. Flying nails and screws and tacks peppered through the air like hail. The banisters behind me collapsed and I heard Frauka cry out as he was thrown off the stairs into the hall below.
‘Wystan!’
He was unconscious, or dead. Either way, he couldn’t deactivate his limiter and block these unholy wraiths out.
Two fell upon me at once, amorphous, crackling skeins of corposant coating the surface of my chair in heavy crusts of ice. They shook at me, ripping at my mind.
A mind that was already more than occupied holding the incunabula at bay.
The pain was immense. Invisible talons, cold as the intercosmic chill, tore through the outer defences of my soul. Peals of mirthless laughter echoed in from distant, insane worlds of warp-horror and abomination.
I tried to drive them back, prise their clammy grip off my shuddering mind. But it took strength, it took effort. My hold on the Brass Thief was slipping away.
Its rhyming swords raised to strike, it took its first step towards me.
IN THE UPSTAIRS chamber, Zael yelled in fear as Miserimus shook again and again.
‘Shut up!’ Carl bellowed, glancing around as objects vibrated and moved, or flew clean across the room. His work chair was turning in circles all by itself. His cogitator vomited sparks as the main screen shattered. Bulging shapes slid up and down under the wallpaper.
Holding Zael close to him, Carl stood in the centre of the darkened room, turning in frantic circles as the air churned and eddied around him. A flying data-slate hit him on the cheek. He ducked as a storage case spun across the room.
‘Begone! Begone!’ Carl yelled. His handgun – useless anyway – had already been yanked out of his hand by the maelstrom. He tried to form a hexagrammatic ward to fight the onslaught.
Invisible forces, laughing at the edge of hearing, grabbed Carl and slammed him hard against the wall, pinning him, spread-eagled, two metres up. Zael screamed out. The boy had fallen to his hands and knees and gazed up at Carl’s helpless body. Terrible pressures were crushing Carl into the wall.
‘Holy… God-Emperor…’ Carl shrieked in agony.
Zael buried his head in his hands and cowered on the floor. There was an odd, cracking sound that he was certain had to be bones breaking. A scatter of metal objects rained down on the carpet in front of him. Zael blinked.
They were Carl’s rings. The thirty or so rings that had adorned the fingers and thumb of Carl’s right hand. Every single one of them was twisted and snapped open, burst as if split from within.
‘C-Carl?’ Zael stammered. He looked up.
I WAS ALMOST insensible with pain. The cold hands of the psykers were upon me, guzzling at my strength, dragging me down to hell. My hold on the incunabula finally gave way.
Its first strike raked across the front of my chair. The second blow, with the other blade, scored the metal deeper. The third punched through, severing vital systems and shooting more pain into my besieged brain stem.
Something knocked the Brass Thief back away from me. I tried to focus through the swirling mayhem of light and wind and debris.
I saw Zeph. He was wounded in the left side from the detonating cannon. His clothes were tattered and bloody, and his augmetic left arm hung in sparking ruins. In his right hand, he clutched Kara’s shivered sword.
He struck the Brass Thief again, drawing a prickle of sparks from its armour, and then blocked the rhyming swords as they cut at him. Stab and parry, one frantic sword against two.
He’d given me a moment’s grace. I focused my will on the most immediate psyker and drove it off me with a barbed psy-lunge. The rotting ghost squealed and retreated a little. But at least two more were there, bleating and greasy.
I could feel some huge psychic force gathering above me, focused on the floor above. Carl’s room. Something born of the darkest warp was boiling into fury up there. I heard screams. Inhuman screams.
IN THE BASEMENT vault, Trice and Culzean looked around at the lead holding tanks. All five were vibrating, like pots on a stove. Warning lights were flashing on all across the biometric consoles. At least three of the handlers had collapsed, blood pouring from their tear ducts and nostrils.
‘What the hell is happening?’ Trice yelled over the uproar.
There was a loud bang and one of the tanks cracked. Suspension fluid squirted out. The fluid was boiling.
‘We’ve lost a psyker!’ Revoke yelled, trying to harness the remaining units.
‘Lost?’
‘He’s dead! Burned out!’
The lid blew off another tank, gushing scalding fluid over the lip. The fleshly body of the psyker inside had just exploded.
‘Is this Ravenor?’ Trice yelled.
‘No,’ said Culzean, his face quite pale. ‘Listen.’
The three remaining psykers were screaming. Screaming out one word, over and over, a name.
Slyte! Slyte! Slyte! Slyte!
POWER SEEMED TO leave the psykers assaulting me for a moment. I threw them away from me, summoning my strength to re-engage the Brass Thief.
Z
eph Mathuin ducked under one sweeping blow, then sliced the shivered sword upwards with a deft undercut.
It drove entirely through the incunabula’s torso. Miasmal energy, like ichor, dribbled and ran from around the impaling blade.
Zeph tried to pull the sword out, but it was wedged fast.
The Brass Thief lunged.
Mathuin blinked.
The incunabula slowly slid its rhyming swords out of Mathuin’s chest.
Zeph looked around at me, hopeless and lost, and fell dead on his face.
PART THREE
CITY OF MEN, CITY OF GODS
ONE
LATER, I CAME to understand that was the moment that fury seized me. Fury, grief, outrage and an all-consuming hatred I had never tasted before. I speared my telekinesis out along the devastated hallway and grasped the one parting gift Zeph Mathuin had left me.
The shivered sword stuck through the incunabula’s torso.
I wasn’t thinking any more. I was all but insensible with rage. My will was stronger and more ferocious than I had ever known it. It was as if I were drawing vast supplements of strength from the psychic powers loose in the house around me, or as if some vengeful force of balefire from the most alien recesses of the warp was invigorating my mind.
I wrenched the transfixed sword upwards and split the incunabula’s chest armour through its brass sternum. The golden cage of its ribs broke open, releasing a gout of fetid, violet light from the daemon’s inchoate core.
The Brass Thief twisted and writhed on the impaling sword, merely opening the chest wound wider. It made a mewling, whining sound.
I fired my chair’s psy-cannon. Not just once, perhaps a dozen times, two dozen even. Every scalding bolt I aimed into the incunabula’s ruptured chest cavity, and I kept firing until the relentless salvoes had the desired effect.
The brass and gold mechanism of the incunabula’s form ripped apart in a blossom of fire, whizzing fragments in every direction. The blast was of such force that the shivered sword came spinning away to thump, tip down and quivering, into the floorboards beside my chair. The empty helm was driven upwards by the fireball and embedded itself in the ceiling by its crest.
The feral essence of the incunabula, the azoic daemon-spark, came shrieking out of the blast, free from the ancient device that had bound it for so long. It vanished, never, I imagine, to be found or enslaved again.
The broken brass remains clattered to the floor, like so much scrap metal, smouldering.
I sank back, exhausted, my powers ebbing. There was a noise behind me and I turned my chair quickly.
Wystan Frauka, bleeding from the side of the head and covered with plaster dust, was pulling himself out of the wreckage beside the staircase.
‘H-hello?’ he was mumbling. ‘Ravenor? Anyone?’
‘Wystan!’ I transponded at full volume. ‘Your limiter! Now!’
Foul psychic manifestations were still churning about the upper floors of the house, making torn, keening noises, and we were dreadfully exposed. Frauka fumbled with the small device at his throat and switched it off.
A decompressive boom shook the walls as his untouchable effect closed the area down. The bodiless forms of the invading psykers were banished, negated by the sudden deadness. I heard roof tiles dislodge and shatter as the forces were ejected from the building. Within seconds, a torrential rainstorm began to drench the ninth ward of Formal E.
Frauka gazed across the demolished ruin of the hallway, the shattered walls, the torn floorboards, the shot-up plaster. He saw the body lying near the entranceway.
‘Mathuin…’ he began, then went quiet, realising how pointless his question was.
I powered back up the staircase, or what was left of it. I prayed to the Golden Throne of Earth that I would find Thonius and Zael alive. I was puzzled and disturbed too. The psykers had come for me initially, and then at least half of them had concentrated their attacks on Carl’s room on the first floor, whereupon that loathsome psychic force had begun to gather up there. Why?
The door was closed. Smoke, or vapour of some sort, drifted up from under the door, and a thick coating of rime iced the door and the walls either side, steaming as it began to thaw and slide to the floor.
The door handle rattled, stopped and then rattled again more urgently.
Something was in there, trying to get out.
KYS HOWLED AS Unwerth banked the flier hard to evade the swirling flock, but the birds turned as one, like a glittering shoal of pelagic fish, and spurted after them.
Unwerth pulled the nose around again, racing them along an up-stack canyon, missing oncoming air-traffic by the most horrifying of close margins. Heavier lifters, entering the canyon flow from above on guided descent, were forced to abort violently, and rose away from the stacks, sirens sounding. Unwerth yawed frantically from side to side, just avoiding a flier that came head-on, lights blazing, and banked them around the tail end of a massive cargo lifter by executing a virtual stall-turn.
The armoured flier’s jetpods wailed to gather lift as Unwerth drove it on down a crossway. The Unkindness billowed in a sparkling ball as it changed direction to follow them. Swiftly, the sheen birds were gaining again, forming a mercurial ribbon of silver in the air that flowed in and out of the high alt traffic faster than Unwerth could weave the flier between, under and over the slower-moving vehicles in the skyway.
‘What in altercation are they?’ he yelled, fighting with the stick.
‘Birds!’ Kys shouted back.
‘But machines?’
‘Yes!’
‘Yet they fly like birds?’
‘Yes!’ she screamed. ‘Why? What does that matter?’
The front part of the beating swarm closed around them. They heard thousands of impacts as beaks and wings struck at the fuselage. Alarms sounded. Some of the sheen birds had gone into one or more of the engine intakes, mangled by the jet screws.
‘Hold on!’ Unwerth cried out. He slammed the nose down and hit the boosters.
The flier broke away from the Unkindness swarm and dropped like a missile into the depths of the stack-way burners lighting blue-hot. The fluttering stream of metal forms spiralled and dived after it.
They were dropping into the lower depths of the towering street, far too fast. Cross-bridges and pedestrian overwalks shot by, Unwerth going over some and under others. Kys could see the multi-lanes of surface traffic coming up to meet them, saw the headlights, the illuminated indicator boards, the jagged neon pointers detailing sink ramps and off-arterial sub-lanes.
‘Unwerth…’ she began.
Still at full boost, the shipmaster grimly kept the nose down.
‘Unwerth!’
The flier levelled and rocketed along five hundred metres of surface street, passing at roof level over the traffic queue so violently that the concussion of its jet-wash rocked transporters on their axles and blew out screens and door windows. Outraged citizens spilled out of their vehicles, only to duck back immediately, screaming in terror as the sheen storm rushed past a second later.
Unwerth sliced the flier between the roof of a cargo-10 and a massive over-road indicator board. Kys covered her eyes.
Unwerth pitched to the left suddenly, leaving the main surface arterial, and powered down over the traffic of a descender ramp. Within moments, they were chasing into the deep chasms of the undersink, into the inter-stack gulfs below the nominal surface level. Flier traffic in the undersink was seriously restricted: it was darker and tighter, and there were many, many more bridges and crosswalks. Roadside klaxons and hazard lamps began to hoot and flash. Indicator screens lit up red with notices to Abort flightpath or Slow down.
Unwerth did neither. He dropped lower, avoiding bridge spans that loomed suddenly out of the blackness, lower still, as if intent on plunging them into the very bottom-most sumps and pits of the hive-sinks.
Still the Unkindness beat down after them.
‘Birds, you said?’ Unwerth repeated, concentrating as har
d as he could given the limited view ahead, his hands twisting and yanking the stick, the flier rocking and banking violently.
‘Yes,’ Kys said, holding on tightly. She looked across at him. ‘Why do you keep—’
She yelped as the flier hit something with huge, glancing force. Unwerth had misjudged an overhead duct and the collision had torn part of the upper control surface from the flier’s tail.
He fought to retain command, feeling the machine buck and try to spin out. Debris and crackling plumes of electrical discharge flurried back in the wounded craft’s slipstream. They were losing speed. The front of the flock was beginning to bang and clatter against the hull again.
A last turn, down yet another dim sub-level, right into the bilges now. Trailing a swirling, mobbing cloud of sheen birds, they gunned down a deep trench of rusted girderwork, moss-black rockcrete and dripping acid, their rushing lampbeams picking up the accumulated filth and trash that trickled down through the undersink. There was no more ‘down’ they could go.
And now, Kys realised, no more ‘on’ either. She saw the end of the trench ahead of them, a chainlink barrier, decaying hazard notices that were coming up too fast to read. The sump trench was a dead end.
Over the din of the sheen birds hammering and chipping at the hull, she cried out Unwerth’s name at the top of her voice.
If he heard her, he didn’t react in time.
The armoured flier hit the barrier fence, taking most of the chainlink along with it like a veil. It inverted, engines flaring, as it went over the sump wall.
And hit the dark, black water beyond in a huge cone of spray.
‘THEY’RE CLOSING STILL!’ Kara warned.
Plyton downshifted. ‘This is a Bergman Amity Veluxe,’ she said. ‘No one closes on a Bergman Amity Veluxe.’ The big black transporter surged forward down the steep, high stack ramp, its engine making the most spectacular roar.
Behind it, the grey transporter dropped back a little, then began to push forward again.