The woman nodded, and swept the sword around in a high guard that Molotch was fairly sure was called the ehn kulsar. She held it there. Over her shoulder, the vents boomed again.
Nayl reached forward. When he’d been down on his knees, Molotch had picked one of the heavy brass buttons off the cuff of the flier’s coat and palmed it. He fired it with a flick of his index finger up into Nayl’s left eye.
Nayl cursed and jerked backwards. Molotch sprang past him, hooking his toe behind the bounty hunter’s calf to turn the stagger into an outright fall. The woman was already moving, the sabre lunging.
‘Arianhrod,’ Molotch said, using the tone of command.
She hesitated. A hesitation was all he was ever going to get out of a Carthaen swordswoman, especially as he didn’t know her full clan name. But it was enough. A momentary wrong-foot. He chopped the edge of his hand into her neck between the lip of her armour’s collar and her braided hair. The muscles in her left shoulder went into involuntary spasm. As she recoiled in surprise, he lifted the sabre out of her hands.
It was like taking hold of the choke chain of an attack dog. The sabre fought him. It didn’t want his touch. It pulled like the reins of a bolting steed. Molotch knew he had absolutely no hope of mastering it. Instead, he let it pull away from him like a kite in a gale.
Straight into the bounty hunter.
Nayl had just recovered from his stumble, and was pouncing to snap Molotch’s neck. The Carthaen sabre impaled itself through his belly before he even saw it.
The bounty hunter made a soft sound, like a tut of disappointment. There was surprisingly little blood, even when he slid off the blade. It was so sharp that the lips of the wounds it had cut through flesh and bodyglove closed tight again, sealed along perfect incisions.
Nayl hit the dust, and lay there, one knee bent, his back arched. Molotch let go of the sabre and set it free. It flew away as if he’d thrown it. He didn’t bother to see where it fell. The woman was a more pressing concern.
She uttered no words or curses as she came at him, which seemed remarkably restrained. Molotch wondered just how many tenets of the Ewl Wyla Scryi he had just dishonoured by taking her blade from her and using it on her comrade. A seven-fold shame, he estimated. He’d spare her the drudge of penance and mortification by killing her.
Someone had trained her well. He barely avoided a two-finger jab that came at him like the blade of a chisel, and deflected the iron-hard edge of her other hand with a brush of his forearm. She pivoted, and swept around with her left leg – so long and shapely! – and he had to swing out with his hips, arms raised like a dancer, in order to miss it. Her weight came over onto her left leg as it landed, and she swung the right leg out after it, backwards, wheeling herself into the air.
This time, the flying right toecap almost connected. Molotch flopped right back at the waist, dropping his chin into his collarbone to minimise the profile of his face, and converted his body’s downward progress into a spring off his right hand that flipped him behind her as she landed.
Aware of him, she back-jabbed with her right elbow to crack his jaw. He stopped her elbow with the cup of his right hand – an impact hard enough to sting his palm – and drove his left fist in under her armpit with the middle finger extended like a beak.
She yowled and lurched away. He’d been studying her intricate body armour, the patterns of bronze studs, the leather ridges, the knot work. All designed to deflect a blade. Simple, very effective. When you fought a sword, the last thing you wanted to take was a scratch that would bleed you to weakness or death. All but the truest killing thrusts could be turned by her armour’s complex surface.
But a fist wasn’t a blade edge. A hand wasn’t a sword. A cluster of bronze studs placed perfectly to glance away a cut to the ribs simply provided a target for a beaked fist. They as good as marked out the mid axillery line, and that governed the autonomic supply to the heart.
She tried to turn, but she was hurt and, besides, he was enjoying himself too much. He kicked her in the back of the left knee, and met her falling body with the heel of his left hand, striking the sacral plexus and flaring pain through her pelvis and legs.
She screamed. She was strong, three or four times as strong as him. She tore away and tried to roll clear. Having exploited the disadvantages of her armour, Molotch turned his attention to her cloak. Who but a barbarian fought in a cloak?
He grabbed it, and pulled with both arms as he simultaneously raised his left leg in a sidekick. Arianhrod snapped backwards, throttled by her cloak-clasp, and the back of her head slammed into his kicking foot.
She was done.
The urge to linger and kill her was immense, but there was no time to relish it. No time to explore a truly complex death. Pleasure could wait. All that mattered was survival.
Molotch started up the rock-cut stairs into the cliff. The smell of the vents was pungent. Clouds of miasmal gas fogged the air. It was hot. He began to move more quickly, and took off the borrowed jacket, throwing it aside.
He was already making mental notes and annotations. The Cognitae trained a man to recognise defeat or failure the moment it happened, and to be empowered by that knowledge. Men are often crippled or undone by the prospect of defeat, and that makes them vulnerable. A Cognitae was never vulnerable unless he chose to make himself so.
A defeat was something to be identified, analysed and used. A defeat was a springboard to launch a man onwards. That was what Madam Chase had taught them. Schemes failed. Plans came apart. Nothing happened with dead certainty. But men only perished when they allowed themselves the weakness of disappointment or maudlin regret.
A waste of effort, when the effort expended on regret could be put to much better use.
Clinical, precise, his mind calculated. Next time, he would plan scrupulously, because next time, he would be in charge. Ordion had been a flawed choice as leader. Molotch had only gone along with it because there was a matter of seniority to be respected. Ordion was twelve years his senior; Molotch a new, unproven graduate. No matter his extraordinary achievements as a student – extraordinary even in a school of extraordinarily able souls – Molotch was still obliged to wait his turn. He fancied Chase had appointed him to Ordion’s team to keep an eye on the venture.
In which case, he had failed. The plan was ruined and Ordion was dead. The others too, as far as Molotch knew. He should have acted the moment Ordion started to lose perspective. Those little decisions, for instance, early on, that Molotch had disagreed with. He should have acted. He should have taken the initiative and confronted Ordion. If necessary, he should have killed Ordion and replaced him.
These things he was now learning. Do not rely on a leader. Be your own leader. And, as leader, do not rely on your subordinates to check your actions, for they may well be guilty of the first sin.
Next time, these things would be corrected.
All that remained to do was to make sure there was a next time.
He reached the upper levels of the crags. The limestone cliffs curved away beneath him like old, yellow bone. Far below, in the gnarled landscape of the lower vents, he could see the smudgy outline of their base camp. The gnosis engines were down there still, unless the inquisitors had smashed them; so tantalisingly within reach, so precious, even though they had barely half-loaded them to capacity. The vents had spoken much more slowly than Ordion had predicted. Two weeks, Ordion had estimated, followed by a return trip to Sarum with at least two if not three engines ripe and ready for use. But they had been on Sleef three months, more than enough time for the agencies of the Throne to track them, corner them, and bring them down.
The pale blue air shimmered with heat haze. The vents erupted periodically, boiling vast tides of super-hot plasmatic flow up from the planet’s ugly heart. They’d timed their visit to coincide with an eruptive period. The voices were said to be louder and more talkative at such times. Now, it seemed as if the plasma vents were booming and lighting up the sky in sympath
y with the afternoon’s violence.
Yellow smoke trickled back across the cliff top. Rock waste from the last surge pattered off the crags and skittered down the steeper drops. He could taste the hot stench in his mouth.
He paused by a large, ovoid boulder and took his link out of his pocket.
‘Are you still there?’ he asked.
‘Who is this? Ordion?’
‘It’s Molotch. Everyone’s dead. It’s time to leave, Oktober Country, before they find you in parking orbit.’
‘We appreciate the tip.’
‘Don’t think you’re going without me,’ Molotch said.
‘Of course.’ A pause. ‘We’ll do our best. Are you near transport?’
‘No. Fire up the teleport and lock onto my signal.’
‘The teleport’s too valuable to risk—’
‘I’m too valuable to leave here, you bastards. Fire it up.’
‘Molotch, I’m telling you, the vents are in flare. That activity is going to play hell with the teleport. Maybe even fry it, and that’s if we get a fix.’
‘That’s why I headed for high ground, to make it easy for you. I’m right up on the cliffs. Lock onto my signal.’
‘Move around. Into the open. Hurry.’
Molotch moved out from beside the rock. Plasma heat and the sunlight stung his face. The wind caught his hair. Holding the link out, he clambered up the rocks until he was overlooking two of the main vents. He walked to the edge of one. Plasma bloomed in bright clouds from the crags a couple of kilometres west. It would be another five minutes until a surge came here again.
He looked down. The drop was immense. The terror was stimulating. Such a long way down, a long drop, it seemed, into the bowels of hell. The vent was forty metres in diameter, its walls scorched black and smoking, and it fell away for thousands of metres, straight down. Far below, there was a glimmer of light as the flames began to rise again.
‘Hurry up,’ Molotch said.
‘We’re getting it,’ the vox crackled.
Hot, sulphurous gas billowed up out of the vent, and Molotch turned aside, wrinkling his nose. The rock underneath him was rumbling, vibrating with the deep subterranean pressure. The boom and flash of venting lit up along the far crags.
‘Come on!’
‘Getting a fix now. We’ve fixed your signal. We’re just…’
‘Oktober Country?’
A hesitation. ‘Molotch, confirm which bio-sign you are.’ Molotch didn’t answer. He swept around. The man facing him had almost got the drop on him. Very stealthy, very clever.
But he’d made one crucial mistake. He’d tried to take Molotch alive.
Molotch made a flicking gesture with his right arm. It was unexpected and subliminally fast, but so ridiculously obvious, it shouldn’t have worked. Except that, as with all things, Molotch had practised it to the point of obsession.
The flick knocked the man’s laspistol up out of his hand into the air. The man looked honestly surprised to be disarmed so foolishly, but he was far from defenceless. He was a psyker, a strong one. Molotch could feel it. Only the hexagrammic wards tattooed on Molotch’s scalp under the hairline were keeping the man’s mind at bay.
Molotch threw himself full length and caught the tumbling laspistol in his outstretched hand. He rolled on the rock to fire it, but the man had landed on top of him, forcing the hand holding the gun up and to the side. They were face to face, like lovers, for a moment. Molotch saw the man’s sculptural, high cheek-boned face, his long black hair tied back, the set to his eyes that was noble and faintly reminiscent of the eldar.
With supreme effort, the veins in his neck bulging, Molotch slowly dragged the hand holding the gun back towards the man’s head. The man grunted, trying to keep the arm bent away. Molotch pushed harder.
The man head butted Molotch squarely in the face and broke his nose. Molotch winced in pain, and felt the blood stream down his cheeks. His effort relaxed involuntarily. The man clubbed Molotch’s hand against the ground until the fingers broke and the gun fell out of them. Molotch gasped, hurt and furious. He threw a hasty left-hand jab that caught his adversary in the neck. It shifted the man’s weight off Molotch’s legs, but in delivering the jab, Molotch lost his grip on his link. The small, flat, golden device clattered away across the ivory rocks.
He could hear the shipmaster’s tinny voice croaking from the speaker. ‘Molotch? Molotch?’
Molotch pulled himself away from his foe, scrambling after the link. It was right on the rim of the vent. Gas was jetting up from the chasm. The ground was shaking more than before.
Sprawling on his belly, Molotch stretched for the link, but the hand his enemy had smashed against the rocks was useless and the fingers refused to close or grip. Molotch rolled, grabbing at the link with his left hand.
His scalp began to smoulder. The oppressive weight of psychic power was burning out the tattooed wards, turning them into bloody welts. In another few seconds, they would be gone and he would be open to the man’s mind.
He grabbed the link, and struggled to his feet, shouting into it. ‘Now. Now!’
His back was to the vent. The man was facing him. He’d retrieved his pistol and was aiming it at Molotch. No chances this time, no mistakes. The aim was square, the distance between them too great for Molotch to repeat his flicking trick.
‘Enough,’ the man said. ‘Drop the link. I want you alive, but not that much.’
Molotch raised his hands slowly, but he did not drop the link. He smiled at the man and shook his head.
‘Now!’
He stepped backwards off the rim.
He heard the man cry out in dismay. Then he was falling, head over heels, down and down into the deep, blackened pit, into the exhaling heat, into hell.
He screamed the shipmaster’s name one final time, fighting to keep his grip on the link.
He saw the plasma flare surging up to meet him. A rising fireball of blossoming yellow and green. He felt his hair singe. He was falling into it and it was rising to engulf him, to devour him, a searing, white wall of—
THE PLASMA FLARE boomed up out of the vents, and trembled the rocks. Heat wash licked back across the crag top. The inferno withdrew, and revealed the man, standing beside the rim. He had encased himself in a cone of frigid air, and held it there as the flare erupted around him. He had no wish to be burned away to nothing.
It had been close. If the flare had lasted a few moments longer, his psychic shield would have failed.
He turned. Arianhrod Esw Sweydyr was limping towards him. There was pain in her face. The man embraced her and kissed her mouth.
‘Nayl?’ he asked.
‘He’s bad. I don’t think—’
The man activated his link. ‘Talon wishes thorn, the colour of winter. Supplicant idol, with grace, reclining.’
‘Commencing.’
A moment later, they both heard the rising whine of the gun cutter’s engines echoing around the valley. ‘It’s all right, they’re on their way,’ the man told Arianhrod. ‘Besides, we got the last of them. The one who did it.’
‘Are you sure?’ she asked.
Gideon Ravenor glanced at the smoking vent. ‘Pretty damn sure.’ he said.
NOW
Tancred, Angelus subsector, 404.M41
I CAN’T IGNORE them much longer. I’ll have to speak to them. I’ve been blanking their polite messages for six months, and their stern demands for two. It is tiresome, but if I intend to carry on as an inquisitor of the holy Inquisition, I must make time for them. One can be on Special Condition for only so long.
I sit by the window and look out across the towers and high walls of Basteen, Tancred’s principal city. I do not need the window to see it. I feel it. I am much less than a man and much more.
My mind inhales the city. Basteen is basking under a lazy yellow sky. The sun is a molten ball. Red stone, red brick, and red tiles soak in the heat. I feel the sunlight on my soul. I smell the enduring, intricate, feud
al character of Basteen: ink and steel pins, silk, wax, obscura smoke, veils and screens, jet shadows and scalding light. The city is rambling and convoluted, a Byzantine network of streets, alleys and buildings wound around and over one another with no discernable pattern or plan, no symmetry or scheme. Cadizky would have abhorred it.
My mind wanders the winding lanes, passing between the cool shadows of overhung alleys into small courts and squares where the sunlight lies on the flagstones in glaring white panels. A trader, in the shaded gloom of his premises, clacks an abacus as he makes up his ledger. A food vendor snores under his stove barrow. The barrow’s oven is unlit.
No one purchases hot pastries in the heat of noon. It is time to rest before the brisk business of the evening.
Over here, a housekeeper steps home to her master’s mansion from the wash-house, a basket of damp linen on her head. She is wondering if she dares stop to take a glass of caffeine, but is fearful that the sun will dry the linen stale and creased if she does not get it hung up. Passing her, coming up the street, are two boys with a pet simivulpa on a string. They are laughing at a joke that I analyse but fail to understand. Here, a servitor paints a door. The servitor’s mind is empty, like an unused attic. Over there, an inker hurries to his next appointment, his wooden case of dyes and pens knocking against his hip. He is tired from a morning transcribing deeds that covered an entire shoulder blade.
Behind that wall, a cook dices root vegetables for a slow-braised stew. On a nearby chopping board, the three fish she bought at the dawn market lie, waiting to be cleaned and portioned. They look like three silver ingots. Behind that wall, a secret garden of fig trees, just four metres by four, a tiny pocket of green between high walled residences. Its owner looks down on it from his unshuttered windows, and covets it, and knows that no one else knows it is there. On a roof terrace, a young man plays a viol in the sun while his lover, another young man, sits in the shade of an awning and learns lines for his part in a play. In a cool basement lounge, a woman hesitantly questions a visiting physician about her aunt’s dementia.