Eisenhorn Omnibus

position as anonymous mutants. One flash of my credentials would speed us past any arbites red-tape. But it might also alert Lyko.

I'd insisted on full concealment for the mission. No one knew we were here, officially. Aemos had done some surreptitious checking, and there was no official trace of Lyko either. But that was to be expected, and there was no telling how many mainhive officials he might have back-handed to alert him of any Inquisitorial presence.

Nayl and I turned west at the next junction, and followed the maze of alleys and breezeways between the rents and mill-habs to reach the Twist and Sleep by a circuitous route that would keep us off the main thoroughfares and away from arbites patrols.

And, as it turned out, bring us right into trouble.

It didn't look like trouble at first. A short, flat-browed runt in rags stepped

into our path, grinning like a salesman. He held his hands open, as if he

was going to curtsy. Twists, my twists, my friends… spare a few 'perials for a poor badgene

down on his luck/ I heard Nayl begin to say, 'Not tonight, twist. S'get you to one side/ But I had already tensed. How had this scabscum known to ask for

Imperial coins if he hadn't seen us at the bar and followed us on purpose?

His accomplices came out of the gloom and sap-rain behind us.

I rammed the word Evade! hard into Nayl's mind with a 'pathic surge and dropped.

A massive, spiked weapon sailed through the space our heads had just been occupying and connected with nothing but air.

The rant who had waylaid us uttered quite the most obscene series of curses I have ever, ever heard and dived on me. He had a double-headed dagger with a nurled hand-guard.

I caught his upflung wrist as he made to gouge at me, broke his elbow and kicked him through a nearby fence while he was still screaming in pain.

'Boss! Move!' I heard Nayl sing out and I rolled hard aside in the mud as the spiked weapon slammed down into the mire.

It was a thick length of timber with dozens of nails and knife blades hammered through it.

The friendly end of it was held by two amazingly large paws. The paws belonged to a hulk, a two hundred kilo monster covered wim blistered fish-scales and bony scutes. It wore only a pair of ragged blue trousers held in place around its midriff, almost comically, by a pair of red braces.

It swung the spike-post at me again, and I had to dive and shoulder-roll to escape it.

Nayl was going toe-to-toe with two others: a snouted female in black leather whose mouth and nose were hideously combined into one drooling, snarling organ, and a tall, thin male with a face peculiarly distorted by bone and gristle.

The female had a reaping sickle in each hand, and the tall male was armed with a mace made out of a reinforced strut toothed with the rusting blades of two wood saws.

Nayl had drawn his serrated shortsword and duelling knife and was fending off thrusts and strikes from both of them.

A power sword, a boltgun, a lascarbine… they would all have finished this unnecessary encounter fast enough. But we had agreed to carry nothing that would mark us out from the twist population. Tech-levels were low in the shanty. A plasma gun might have ended this quickly, but stories would have got round.

The scaly giant was on me again, and I fell through the rotting flakboard of a fence in my efforts to evade his swing. I found myself lying amid the debris in the back yard of one of the loathsome hab-rents. A light went on in an upper window and abuse, stones and the contents of a chamber pot were hurled at me.

The giant came on, swinging his club from side to side. The nails and blades were darkly caked with dried blood.

He backed me towards the rear of the rent dwelling and made to swing again.

No I commanded, using the will. He stopped dead. The rain of abuse and excrement from above stopped too.

It would take him a moment to reconfigure his mind and find his anger again. I moved right at him, punching a knuckle-curved fist at the place where his nose should have been. There was a crack of bone and a spray of blood.

The giant went down hard on his back, his nasal bone slammed back into his brain.

Nayl seemed to be enjoying his uneven duel. He was jeering at his attackers, deflecting the sickles with his sword and blocking the strenuous attacks of the mace with his knife. I saw him spin and belly-kick the male away, then turn to give the ghastly, snorting female his full attention.

But more figures were emerging from the night.

Ugly, abhuman scum dressed in rags. Three, four of them.

I called a warning out to Nayl and pulled out my blackpowder pistol. It was a clumsy antique I'd acquired from the black market on Front's Planet, but even so I'd dumbed it down to Eechan tech levels by replacing the engraved furniture with a shaped piece of packet-wood.

The flintlock mechanism was in good order, though. It cracked loudly with a fizz and a flash, the recoil punishing my wrist, and the ball went point-blank through the forehead of the nearest twist, exploding the rear of his cranium in a surprisingly messy fountain.

But it was a one-shot piece and there was no time for reloading.

Two of the remaining outlaws came right at me, the other turning to come in on Nayl's flank.

I broke the teeth of the first one to reach me with the rounded butt of the pistol, and ducked the second's poorly judged slice with a rapier.

Backing away, I drew my own blade. Also a rapier. Shorter by a good ten centimetres than my opponent's but balanced and guarded with a hand-net of articulated metal struts.

Our blades clashed. He was good, trained to his skill by a life of slaughter in the underhive. But I… I had me on my side.

I dazzled him with the ulsar and the uin ulsar, and then drove him back with a four-stroke combination of pel ighan and uin pel ihnarr before ripping the blade out of his dazed fingers with a swift tahn asaf wyla.

Then the ewl caer. My blade transfixed his torso. He looked confused for a second and then fell down, sliding dead off my blade.

His broken-faced accomplice, blood spilling from my pistol whipping, flew at me and I span, decapitating him with the edge of my blade. The Carthaens believe side-blade work is lazy, and stress the use of the point.

But what the hell.

Nayl had killed the third attacker with a bodypunch, and as I turned, he locked both of the female's sickles around his twisting knife and ran her through with his main blade.

He turned to me and raised his bloody shortsword to his nose in a salute. I returned it with my rapier.

The siren of an arbites groundcar was wailing along the alley. Time to be gone/ I said to Nayl.

'I thought you were dead!' Bequin cursed as Nayl and I burst in to the room in the Twist and Sleep.

We had some fun on the way home/ Nayl said. 'Don't worry, Lizzie, I brought the