Kys and Unwerth went the other way, looping around the north side of the templum. Dressed in a tight green skinsuit, her hair loose, Kys was forced to rein in her long stride so that the diminutive Unwerth could keep up. Patience had a twinned pair of laspistols, and she’d drawn them. Her four kineblades remained sheathed in the boning of her bodice.
‘Keep up, Sholto!’
‘In all affectation, I am racing as fast as my foreshortened under limbs can go! I am not provided with lissom leggage such as you display, mamzel!’
‘Lissom leggage?’ Patience said. ‘Did you just compliment me, Sholto?’
‘I believe something of that formature may have slid out.’
Suddenly there were shapes ahead of them. Figures. Riot marshals and at least two secretists in grey.
Kys didn’t hesitate. Running towards them, she began firing her laspistols. ‘Unwerth! Let’s go! We’re in it now!’
‘AND SO WE begin,’ Nayl said lightly, as the mass of marshals and secretists covering the main entrance of the grand templum spotted us.
No more hiding.
‘Fire at will, Harlon. Let’s see how many we can take with us.’
Massing forward, the agents of our enemy had begun bellowing challenges, but at least one of them clearly knew an armoured support chair was a warning sign. They began firing. Riot guns boomed in the mailed fists of Interior Cases officers, and the lasguns and pistols of the secretists quickly joined them.
‘Get down!’ I transponded and began to let rip with my psy-cannon. My shots ripped through the front rank of riot marshals at a distance of twenty-five metres, bursting their armour and sending them sprawling. I did not slow my pace. Shots struck my chair’s front and bounced off. Belknap had sensibly ducked in behind me, using my chair as a shield.
Nayl to the left of me hit the deck, rolled and came up on his knees as gunfire ripped over him and pummelled the sides of the Magistratum transporters parked behind us. He began to fire, raking with his plasma rifle, simultaneously pumping grenades from the under-barrel launcher.
Mayhem swept across the Templum Square in front of the great church. A ferocious ripple of explosions from Nayl’s launcher raised fireballs across the broken flagstones and up the entrance steps, sending bodies flailing into the air. His plasma bolts licked like daggers of sunlight, blowing men apart or ripping through them.
Sirens began to sound. Pausing only to reload his launcher from the pack on his hip, Nayl was up again, running and firing.
Boiling smoke now swathed the main entrance. The air was full of gunfire and confused yelling. I skimmed forward over tangled, crumpled bodies.
‘Carl!’ I voxed.
There was no answer. Somewhere off to my left, Nayl was exchanging a furious barrage of shots with the wrong-footed enemy. I heard the bang of shotguns, the crack of las-weapons, a melody syncopated by the fierce, squealing shriek of his plasma rifle.
Straight ahead of me, two weapon-servitors bounded out of the thick, black smoke raised by Nayl’s munitions. They were huge, chromed cannon-hounds, unslipped and ready to kill. Their pink recognition beams found my bulky shape at once.
+Belknap! Down!+
The medicae ducked behind my chair, not so much because I had told him to but because I had layered my will into the telepathic burst, forcing him to drop. The gunpods on the servitors’ backs began to fire, drizzling me with murderous fire from their four lasrifles.
Fortunately, the adepts of the Guild Mechanicus, who had manufactured my support chair at Gregor Eisenhorn’s personal request, had made it with the same care they used for main line battletanks and striding war titans.
The devastating onslaught spattered off my housing like rain. The cannon-hounds hesitated, bemused. I knew my chair would not easily withstand a second full-on salvo.
I reached out with my psy and lifted one of the hounds off its feet, activating its gunpods as I swung it around to face its companion. Crippled by the first blizzard of las-bolts, the other hound instinctively returned fire, and the two weapon-servitors destroyed each other in a searing exchange of close range shots.
I let the ruined servitor go and it crashed to the ground, parts of its mechanism spilling out and scattering across the flagstones. Its companion had been fused into a crater by the ferocity of fire.
I moved forward again. A secretist I had not seen came out of the whirling smoke to my left, aiming a longlas.
Behind me, Belknap raised his lascarbine out of his practice bag and shot the man three times through the torso, slamming him onto his back. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But I could have covered it.’
‘Just trying to be useful,’ Belknap replied.
THE SUSPENSOR BEAM shafted in through the open shutter and the lexicon, a tiny dark sphere, descended into the old sacristy. The suspensor rods below in the middle of the dais crackled as they activated and took the weight of it, lowering it gently until it sat at waist height in the middle of the chamber.
The beam from above snapped off, and the lifter pulled away. The shutter gradually began to lock back in place.
The Diadochoi stepped towards the slowly revolving lexicon held in the beam of light. The thirteen cipherists closed around him.
‘The first Enunciation will now begin,’ the Diadochoi said. ‘Jader, take your seat.’
Trice nodded humbly and backed away towards the seating.
‘Time?’ he asked.
‘Eight-oh-two,’ replied Revoke.
‘Send the signal to the axial temples. Tell the clerics to begin enunciating the anonymic wafers.’
‘Signal is sent,’ Revoke replied. Trice sat down in the front row of the dais seating. Beside him, Revoke took a seat and then immediately got to his feet again, his hand to his forehead.
‘Toros?’
‘An alert, sir. Trouble at the main entrance of the templum. And…’
‘What?’ Trice hissed.
‘Unleashed psychic power. Very strong, very urgent. I can taste him. It’s Ravenor.’
Trice went pale. ‘Go,’ he breathed. ‘Go now. And kill him, for damnation’s sake!’
Revoke hurried down off the dais, out of the sacristy and began to sprint down the cloister towards the grand templum.
BEHIND THE GRAND templum, Kys ceased fire. Faced by her brutal assault, the five marshals and three secretists she had encountered had tried to fall back into cover around the north porch so they might cut her down while she was still in the open. But she had nudged out with her telekinesis and frozen them all in their tracks: startled, immobile targets. The yard was now littered with their bodies.
Kys looked back at Unwerth. The barrel of the machine pistol he had tied to his hands was smoking. He had not hesitated when the shooting began.
‘Nice work,’ she said.
‘I try my part, as it goes.’
Ahead of them around the curve of the grand templum and the outcrop of the north porch, the back of the old sacristy was lit up by floodlights. Pulling away from the domed roof, a brightly lit lifter was beginning to climb up into the night sky.
‘I think we’re missing the main event,’ Kys said. ‘Follow me.’
‘I would, mamzel, excepting for that discomforting sound.’
Patience Kys came to a halt and looked around. A figure stood just inside the doorway of the north porch, urgently spinning a psyber lure around himself.
High above them, a furious clinking rang out of the night: the beating of steel wings. Called out of the air, from every building in the formal, the Unkindness formed into a seething ball overhead, glittering and flashing in the floodlights.
‘Not again,’ Unwerth stammered.
‘Sholto. Get behind me,’ said Patience Kys. ‘Get behind me now.’
Forming themselves into a slender arrowhead, the sheen birds banked upwards, then dipped and streamed down to shred them both.
WOUNDED IN THE thigh, limping, Harlon Nayl swung around and cut down two more secretists with his plasma rifle.
He could see the main entrance of the grand templum, swathed in smoke, most of which he had created. But he no longer had sight of either Ravenor or Belknap.
The Templum Square looked like a battlefield, like the streets of a city where civil war had raged. The fury of his one-man gun battle with the marshals and secretists had sent panic cascading through the already jumpy crowds at the edge of the square. A full-scale riot had broken out along the approach roads and boulevards. Nayl knew he had to get to the old sacristy. He limped forward, ignoring the distant echoes of gunfire and screaming issuing from the darkness and the smoke.
Then something more solid came out of the smoke and kicked him in the face. Nayl went down on his hands and knees and lost his grip on the plasma rifle.
Boneheart threw a killing punch down at Nayl’s spine, but Nayl rolled onto his back, his mouth bleeding, and captured the punch in the cup of his hands. Still on his back, he tightened his grip like a vice and fractured the hand bones and fingers in Boneheart’s fist.
Boneheart screamed in pain and staggered away, clutching his hand. Kicking himself back onto his feet, Nayl drew his Hostec autos and pumped eight shots through Boneheart’s body.
The secretist juddered and fell. A pistol in each hand, Nayl circled, checking for other surprises. There was no one in sight, no one alive, anyway. So why did he feel like—
A blade struck out of nowhere, so hard and fast Nayl had barely time to react. He lurched backwards and the blade sliced off the muzzles of both his weapons.
He tossed the ruined guns aside and hunched in low, turning, wary. Monicker, a scarcely-visible phantom in the smoky air, danced around him and stabbed with her serrated blade. Nayl felt the rip gouge his back, right through his armoured bodyglove.
Desperately, he turned around, but the phantom had already vanished.
Keeping behind the big man, always behind him, Monicker closed for the kill.
WITH BELKNAP BEHIND me, I hovered into the nave of the grand templum. It was an empty and silent space, in shocking contrast to the violent night outside.
‘This way,’ I said to Belknap.
A man in a grey suit ran in through the west entrance ahead of us. He had stale yellow eyes, like dying suns. He slowed down and began to pace towards us.
‘Imperial Inquisition!,’ I announced. ‘Surrender now.’
‘I know who you are,’ he said.
I knew who he was too. He wrenched out with his mind and slammed me backwards. Belknap tried to shoot him, but the yellow-eyed man merely nodded and tossed the good doctor twenty metres backwards through the air. Belknap cracked a pew as he landed. He rolled onto the floor, unconscious.
+Let’s go!+ I sent, and went fleshless. Revoke met me head on, forming a barbed, red spectral form that tasted of sour wine and ripped right through my mental shields. I foundered back, as exposed as the inner flesh of a seafood delicacy broken from its shell at a supper table.
Aware of the stench of my own mental wounds, I reinforced my armour and met Revoke again, lancing skewers of psy-force into his red mind form. They transfixed him like quills.
He howled.
The aftershock rattled the wooden pews of the grand templum and blew out several windows. I pushed the skewers deeper, becoming an urchin-form laden with metre-long spines. Revoke screamed again, and broke away, shattering the spines like glass. He circled into the upper limits of the grand templum taking the form of something vaguely bat-winged whose distressing shape was described by more than four dimensions. It extruded long, fibrous tentacles that lashed me, stripping away my perfunctory shielding, and savaged the edges of my mind. In desperate defence, I made my fleshless form blade-sharp and drove upwards through the flailing tentacles, severing some, until I punctured the wet core inside the bat-shape.
Shuddering, Revoke’s body fell to its knees. Blood drizzled out of his eyes and nose. He tightened his mind, folding the alien bat form up into a tiny red dot, then unfolding the dot as a complex geometric form. The shape began to self-repeat and fill the air with copies of itself at an exponential rate. The multiplying geometric forms smelled of burnt blood and old bones.
I tried to turn, seeking space to fight back. They were all around me.
There was a violent snap which felt like the entire planet had been pulled out of gravity like a fruit being plucked off a bough. The foul geometric forms, hundreds of them now, rushed in together, fitting tightly against one another like the teeth of a fractal dragon, catching my mind between them. This was constriction like nothing I had ever known. Not biting, but crushing, being caught between complex shapes that fitted against each other so perfectly that there was no space between them for anything else to exist.
I was being crushed into nothing, compressed so tightly that the only place I could go was outside reality to my doom.
I tried to break free. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.
KARA, CARL AND Plyton rushed the north door of the old sacristy and crouched in the shadows. From their point of concealment they could see the newly-built dais and the hooded cipherists gathered around the slowly turning sphere hanging in the column of light.
‘We should—’ Plyton began.
‘Wait!’ Carl cried. ‘Terra’s sake! That’s Governor Barazan!’
The Diadochoi reached his hands into the light and opened the metal leaves of the lexicon. He began to read, announcing the unannounceable.
Plaster fell from the ceiling. Lightning flared in the sky above. The Diadochoi enunciated the first few syllables of creation.
Fed with power, the resonating obelisks began to shine. With a numbing rush, ethereal white light flared out of the sacristy and soared in solid bands down the axes of the city. Every single one of the nine hundred and ninety-nine churches was lit up by the beams. The clerics had been halfway through reading out the anonymic wafers. Now they continued, as burning light suffused their congregations with auras of flame.
In the radiance of the old sacristy, the Diadochoi played his hands over the lexicon, declaiming the un-words of power, the anti-language that was Enuncia.
He paused and reached up to take off his public guise. The mask of Oska Ludolf Barazan flopped down to the floor of the dais.
The burned, scarred, true face of the Diadochoi was revealed, a vile mass of seared tissue, raw flesh and lipless teeth.
He fanned his hands out, fluttering the spinning metal pages of the lexicon again and read out the words so revealed.
A halo surrounded him. Piece by piece, his body was restored, flesh reknitting and recreating, gloving his hands in skin, sweeping across his raw skull to resculpt a face. Meat, skin, hair, all reformed, bright and new.
‘Oh Holy Throne!’ Kara cried.
‘What?’ asked Plyton. What is it?’
‘It’s Molotch,’ said Carl Thonius. ‘It’s Zygmunt bastard Molotch.’
EIGHT
KARA AND THONIUS ran forward into the sacristy, into the almost blinding radiance. Plyton was right behind them.
Their first shots cut down the secretists who tried to prevent them from reaching the dais. Some of the seated guests reacted in alarm, but most were too entranced by the cosmic wonder unfolding at the centre of the stage.
Carl was first on the platform, his Hecuter blazed into the light. Two of the officiating cipherists went down, bright red blood leaking from their bodies across the white platform. The radiant light flickered for a second and the lexicon vibrated, as if disturbed.
Molotch turned, the sudden displeasure on his face changing to a smile as he recognised Carl, and Kara behind him.
Hands still playing the pages of the lexicon, he formed new un-words that first froze and then evaporated the shots from Carl’s pistol and Kara’s bolter in mid-air before they could reach him.
Then he spoke another un-word .
The force of it hit them like a wrecking ball. Plyton was thrown right back off the dais. Kara, hurled into the air, crashed into the raised seating, breaking both it and herself. S
he felt ribs and collarbone go before pain blacked her out and left her sprawled amongst the broken wreckage of the seats.
Carl had taken the full force of the un-word. His coat and most of his clothing was shredded off, his skin blistered. His back had hit the platform so hard that it had dented under him. It felt as if all his internal organs had been pulped and his mind set on fire.
Carl Thonius screamed, partly in pain, but mostly in helpless fury.
They had left it too late. Molotch was now far too powerful for any of them to stop.
THE UNKINDNESS SLICED in and Patience Kys met it with a laspistol in each hand and four kineblades orbiting her lean figure. Her telekinetic gifts had never been tested by such a huge and complex threat before, but she didn’t falter. The guns began firing, flicking from target to target between shots. Exploded, smoking sheen birds fell out of the rushing formation. The four kineblades swept into the oncoming flock like surface-to-air missiles. She drove each one independently, slicing them through individual birds and immediately on into the next.
She also hit the birds themselves with her telekinesis. She caused collisions, impacts that sheered wings off, even hammered some sheen birds beak-first into their neighbours like iron nails.
In seconds, before the Unkindness had even reached her, hundreds of their broken chrome forms littered the flagstones.
But there were too many, too many even for her formidable talents. Suddenly they were all around her, and she was pushing the swirling mass away from her in every direction as she continued to shoot, and stab with her blades.
Rips began to appear all over her arms and legs. She heard Unwerth, right behind her, cry out in pain as part of the whirling metal blur ripped into his arm. Then another sheen bird struck his forehead square on and dropped him to the ground, barely conscious.