Concentrating hard, Kys howled out in frustration. She was killing a dozen birds every second, but it just wasn’t enough. She felt a metal flight feather rip across her temple, a beak tear one knuckle, a fluttering chrome edge slice through her left shoulder.
Still she fought on, blasting point blank and sewing her kineblades through the dense storm of bodies.
Then she staggered backwards as a bird got past her and hit her in the face. Blood poured down her left cheek. With a desperate grunt, she flared out her telekinesis and billowed the entire flock away from her for a second’s respite.
But only for a second. It immediately rushed back. She no longer had the strength to drive it away.
THE PHANTOM WITH the knife put another deep cut into Nayl’s body and he hollered in pain. He was fast for a man of his size, but this half-there daemon was a great deal more nimble.
The only thing Nayl had going for him was experience.
He couldn’t see his opponent, not well enough to fight back effectively.
So he didn’t try. He closed his eyes. And there she was.
He could smell a sweet, female scent that showed him her position as clearly as if he’d seen her.
Monicker lunged in, her blade about to rip into Nayl’s liver. A fist hit her instead.
She fell, shocked, hurt, suddenly frantic. He was on her, pinning her with his weight.
Nayl looking down at the transparent shape he held, pressed to the ground beneath him.
‘What are you?’ he growled.
For a moment, Monicker flashed like a mirror and was him, another Nayl looking back at himself. That usually worked. That usually disorientated an opponent quite long enough for her to finish her wetwork.
Nayl looked at himself.
‘Fancy that,’ he said, and broke her neck.
SECRETIST FOELON, SPINNING his psyber lure, stalked across the square towards the swirling ball of the Unkindness, grounded like a dust-devil over the flagstones. The shooting from inside the flock had stopped. The targets were undoubtedly dead by now.
Foelon felt his spinning lure twitch oddly. It abruptly began to ignore the laws of centrifugal physics. Dragging hard against his struggling arm, it lashed backwards in a whip crack and wrapped five times around his throat.
Foelon gagged out a terrified gasp. The lure pulled tight, so tight it lifted the secretist off the ground and lynched him in mid air.
The Unkindness burst apart, the mass of it exploding away in all directions from the central focus, spilling out across the square, dissipating.
It left in its wake thousands of dead or damaged sheen birds, carpeting the flagstones like autumn leaves. And Patience Kys, still standing, her clothes ragged, her flesh covered in scratches and cuts.
She bolstered her spent laspistols, mind-called her now-buckled kineblades back to her, and looked up at the hanged man dangling in the air.
Kys turned her back on Foelon and let him fall to the ground. She bent down beside Unwerth. He was groggy and covered in cuts himself.
‘We’ve got to move,’ she said. He nodded and got up.
Side by side, they struggled round to the old sacristy. It was lit up, not so much by the massive floodlight arrays, but by the huge beams of white-light radiance that poured out of it and blazed away along the axial strands of the city.
They hobbled to the doorway. Plyton lay on the threshold, badly knocked about.
‘What happened?’ Kys yelled over the hurricane roar of the light.
‘Kara and Thonius are inside,’ Plyton gasped. ‘But the man hurt us all bad. I fell. I managed to crawl here.’
‘What’s going on in there?’
‘Some kind of ritual,’ Plyton yelled back. ‘So bright. So much power…’
‘We’ve got to get in!’ Kys said.
‘That isn’t permissive,’ Unwerth shouted to her. He’d already tried to walk into the light flaring out of the doorway, but it was like a solid barrier.
Kys pushed her hands against it, felt the light crackle and pulse like a telekinetic field.
There was no way in.
CARL TRIED TO move, tried to rise. It felt as if the howling light was pushing him down into the decking of the dais. He fought against it, drawing mental strength from his long hatred of Zygmunt Molotch and the shock of seeing the bastard alive.
He sat up.
His hands still flitting over the lexicon’s metal pages, Molotch looked round as he noticed Carl stir. He whispered an un-word, almost as if he were blowing Thonius an affectionate kiss.
Carl fell backwards, screaming. It felt as if his entrails had been ripped out.
Molotch returned to his enunciation.
Up in the seating, Culzean suddenly jumped up.
‘Diadochoi! Diadochoi!’ he yelled, trying to make himself heard over the monumental clamour.
‘Take your seat!’ Trice yelled, getting up too. ‘How dare you disrupt the—’
‘Look! Look, you fool!’ Culzean bellowed back in his face. ‘Look!’
Carl Thonius had risen to his feet. A filthy red light throbbed out of him, backlighting his skin and making silhouettes of his bones. In the ethereal brilliance of the sacristy, he was like a drop of blood in a pail of milk.
He raised his right arm and the flesh crisped away like burning paper, exposing the blackened arm bones and the long fingers that sprouted into talons.
‘That’s Slyte,’ Culzean stammered. ‘In the name of darkness, that’s Slyte!’
NINE
MOLOTCH SAW WHAT faced him. Disbelief twisted his face. He opened his mouth and blasted the glowing red figure with a stream of Enuncia so violent it made the dais shake.
Carl withstood it and his own dark, red light seemed to grow stronger as if he was drinking the power in. He moved forward, his black talons rising.
The remaining cipherists broke and fled, except for one who was too slow. Carl’s black bone-claws shredded him and spattered the white staging with wide patterns of blood.
Molotch tried a final un-word, but Carl clawed at him. Molotch staggered back across the dais, yowling, the left side of his face torn off. Carl lashed round and ripped his claws through the spinning metal pages of the lexicon, tearing them away. Metal sheets shivered into the air, tumbled out of the suspensor beams, and fluttered onto the deck. Ripped and incomplete, the lexicon itself toppled off its support and crashed to the deck.
The storm of noise grew louder. An infernal red quality now began to tinge the white radiance, as if that one drop of blood was staining the milk pink.
Tears streaming down his face, Jader Trice ran forward and tried to gather up the torn and buckled pieces of the lexicon. They burned his hands. He looked up.
Carl bent down over him and gently placed his black, bone-hand on the top of Trice’s head, like a temple deacon administering a benediction.
Jader Trice rotted away into a dry, mummified husk, then that too disintegrated, and scattered away as dust on the wind.
Carl turned and moved towards the dignitaries in the seating sections. Most were fleeing for their lives, jumping over the back of the dais.
‘Ley!’ Culzean cried. ‘Cover us now!’
Leyla Slade pulled out her custom handgun and fired six times, not at the oncoming daemon, but at the dais stage in front of it. As each specialised bullet impacted, there was a burst of green vapour.
The hooktors bubbled into being. Six of them, each one twice the size of a large man, released from their bondage in the painstakingly engraved bullets.
They were slaughter-daemons of Nurgle, mindless warp-forms of immense physical power, each one a noxious, sticky cluster of diseased eyes, bulging from a swollen, panting body sack of reptile flesh and pulsing viscera. The hooktors moved on tripods of long, membranous limbs, like the furled wings of ancient flying lizards. Each limb culminated in a huge, hooked toenail, a hoof-claw as heavy and grey as stone.
They made their terrible gibbering. The wretched, faecal stink of th
em filled the air. Thumping forward on their hideous toenails, they attacked Carl with unthinking frenzy.
Culzean and Slade together grabbed hold of the gravely disfigured Diadochoi.
‘Time to go, lord!’ Culzean yelled. ‘The hooktors will hold it off long enough for us to make our escape!’
The Diadochoi mumbled out some mangled words, blood pouring from his ripped face.
‘No arguments now,’ Culzean cried. They manhandled the Diadochoi off the dais.
Behind them, Carl and the hooktors tore each other apart.
WHEN HARLON NAYL limped into the grand templum, the first thing he saw was my support chair, motionless, halfway down the nave. Facing it, ten metres away, knelt a dark-haired secretist, blood running from his nose and the corners of his staring, stale-yellow eyes.
Nayl knew what this was. He could feel the queasy trembling in the air around him that told him these two, motionless figures were engaged in a titanic, invisible battle.
As fast as he could move his injured limbs, Nayl ran forward, hoping he could slay the secretist psyker while he was still out of his skin and physically vulnerable. The only weapon Nayl had was Monicker’s serrated dagger.
Revoke’s psy-control was staggering. He had left a sliver of his mind aware of his surroundings, to protect it from harm. He saw Nayl coming forward, and barked an un-word that punched Nayl in the stomach and dropped him to the ground.
But not before Nayl had hurled the dagger.
It stuck through Revoke’s right shoulder. Revoke yelped in pain and his grip on me slipped. I felt the clenching geometric forms loosen ever so slightly as Revoke fought to retain control and grind me to oblivion.
All of my mind’s power was focused on the one, stark desire to pull free. As Revoke’s hold slackened, that single impulse squirted out and expressed itself physically instead. For a moment, my entire will channelled itself into the motivator systems of my chair.
My armoured chair slammed down the nave, crunching straight into Revoke’s kneeling body and dragging it along. Revoke was still draped across the front of my chair when it struck the massive bronze altar at the end of the nave at close on forty kilometres an hour.
My chair rebounded, shivering backwards. Revoke’s limp, broken corpse tumbled off onto the flagstones.
I fought to regain my wits. I was hurt, exhausted, my mind trembling from the agonies of the fight.
Back down the nave, Nayl was helping the unsteady Belknap to his feet. I powered out through the west entrance and on towards the old sacristy.
It was blazing with light, but that light was now stained with red, and the stain was spreading along the sizzling axial beams blasting out across the city. Flames licked at the shattered windows, and sections of the dome, crackling and ablaze, were falling in.
Ahead of me I saw Kys, Plyton and Unwerth.
‘There’s no way in!’ Kys yelled at me.
There had to be.
KARA BLINKED AND looked up. The energised wind was shrieking around the buckled dais, and flames were gusting up the sacristy walls, reducing the ancient, precious frescoes of the caving dome to billowing particles of glowing ash.
The light was red, not just from the flames, but from the energy radiating from the centre of the platform. What had been white and pure was now crimson and thick.
She tried to move, but her body was too badly hurt. Bones broken, internal organs flaring with pain.
‘Oh, God-Emp— ahh! God-Emperor!’ she gasped out. She turned her head and saw the splattered gore and torn flesh of hook-nailed daemon-things covering the dais. What the hell had happened while she had been—
Carl stood over her. Kara screamed.
It wasn’t Carl. It was a red luminosity wearing his body like a robe, lighting his skin from within, exposing his skeleton like a medical scan. His right arm was denuded to the blackened bones, right up to the place where the Hinterlight’s medicae had surgically reattached it.
‘Oh Throne! Oh Holy Throne!’ she cried, terrified. The glowing daemon began to reach its taloned hand out towards her.
‘Please, Carl! Please, don’t!’ she wailed.
The hand hesitated. The red glow inside Carl Thonius diminished for a moment. ‘Kara?’ he said, his voice sounding like it was coming from a long way off. ‘Oh, Kara, the stuff I know. I can see into your mind. You’re afraid of me. You’re afraid I’m going to kill you…’
Carl’s eyelids fluttered. Shock and pain crossed his face. ‘No, no… you’re dying already! I can see it, that awful lump in your skull. Oh, Kara, no! Not you! Not like that!’
Suddenly, the fierce red glow swelled inside him again. His voice became a rasping growl. ‘Let me make it better, Kara. Let me finish it quickly.’
The black talons swept towards her face.
OUTSIDE, I SAW the light change. It swirled darker, as if gallons of red ink or blood was mixing into it. The axial beams were now almost crimson. I felt the shudder of an enormous psychic force burst inside the collapsing sacristy.
‘Back!’ I cried. ‘Get back all of you! Do it!’
The ground shook, as if an earthquake was striking. The immense light inside the sacristy went out, leaving nothing but the swirling fire. Every floodlight around the square blew apart in sprays of glass, and the windows of all the buildings around the grand templum shattered.
The dome of the sacristy ruptured and fell. Flames belched out of the doorways and window-holes. The force of the eruption threw my companions into the air and flung my chair backwards.
Crackling like forked lightning, the disconnected axial beams boiled out across the city of Petropolis. The nine hundred and ninety-nine temples and churches along Theodor Cadizky’s fearful lines of godless symmetry detonated like bombs, destroying many buildings around them. Firestorms engulfed entire hab blocks and stacks. At the governor’s palace, the monumental energy feedback incinerated the Encompass Room and engulfed the uppermost twenty floors of the tower in a gigantic fireball.
It blazed like the raw summit of an angry volcano, hurling white flames up into the blackness of the sky.
TEN
THOUSANDS DIED THAT night. Thousands of people, and some of them were innocent Imperial citizens, victims caught in the horror and the devastation. To most inhabitants of Eustis Majoris, it was an infamous disaster, a night of cataclysm. Most histories record it that way too.
Certainly the planet was plunged into civil chaos. Months of rioting and unrest followed, and spread throughout a subsector terrified that Imperial rule had been overturned. It led to civil wars, to famines, to plagues. Two decades later, the effects were still being felt.
I content myself with the knowledge that, even at so great a cost, it was a small price to pay. I know what might have been if that cabal of madmen and their ruthless secret keepers had managed to complete their pernicious ritual to acquire the power they craved.
Do not presume this means I am happy about the outcome. I deplore the destruction and the deaths. I console myself with the knowledge that every planet in the Imperium would have suffered the same or worse had Zygmunt Molotch achieved his apotheosis.
Martial law was imposed on Eustis Majoris. It took a year to return Petropolis to a state resembling order. In that time, the ordos intervened, led by my Lord Rorken himself. They purged, they cleaned, they excised the last taints of Jader Trice’s corruption wherever it could be traced. Thousands more died, executed for heresy or complicity to that offence. Subsector governance was switched to Caxton for two terms, until a new lord governor subsector was found and elected under the supervision of the Inquisition.
Even before the Inquisitorial intervention arrived and took charge of the wounded world, I had departed, taking my battered and wounded warriors with me. There was a final business to be dealt with, one that could not wait. Molotch, by Culzean’s manipulative contrivance, had fled Eustis Majoris. We would not rest until we had hunted him down and destroyed him once and for all.
Medicae
Belknap, perhaps the staunchest, truest soul I have ever met, urged me to stay and employ my influence and authority to restore control to the ravaged city. But that is not my area of expertise, and we were the only ones ready and able enough to begin an immediate pursuit of Molotch while he could still be traced. I would not allow him to remain free, or escape me once again. He had done that too many times already.
We left Eustis Majoris the day after the destruction of the sacristy, travelling aboard Master Unwerth’s Arethusa.
Nayl, Patience and Unwerth himself were recovering from their injuries. Maud Plyton came with us, seconded to my service. I was happy to have her.
Zael remained in a coma. We transferred him to life support aboard the Arethusa. Frauka seldom left his side.
The one miracle in it all, of course, was Kara and Carl. We found them unconscious in the burning ruins of the old sacristy, with barely a scratch on either of them.
Somehow, perhaps by the divine providence of the God-Emperor himself, they had been spared in that final moment of catastrophe, as the ritual of Enunciation tore itself apart.
SOON
Aboard the Arethusa, in warp transit, 404.M41
‘IT’S STRANGE,’ SAID Belknap.
‘Good, though?’
The medicae nodded. ‘Of course. But I’ve never seen anything like it. The mass is just shrinking. Disappearing. Look, I’m going to the lab to check these results. Perhaps there’s a fault with Unwerth’s rickety old medical systems.’
‘I hope not,’ said Kara, sitting up on the infirmary cot.
‘So do I,’ he replied. ‘I’ll be back in five minutes.’
‘I’m glad you came with us,’ Kara said.
He looked back at her. ‘You’re my patient,’ he said. ‘I told you that I’d stay with you as long as you needed me.’
‘Right,’ she shrugged.
Belknap smiled and coughed. ‘What I meant to say was… I’m glad I came with you too.’
He left the infirmary. Kara lay back on the cot, breathed deeply, and closed her eyes.