He stormed his mind into mine, frantic to tear the truth out of me. I think he was truly realising how far into damnation he had cast himself.
I blocked his feverish mind-assault, and countered, driving an augur of psychic rage into his hind brain. It was in there. I could feel it. His true master. The face, the name…
He realised what I was doing, realised that I outclassed him psychically. He tried to shoot me with his plasma gun, but by then I had shut down his nervous system and blocked all autonomous function. I scoured his mind. He was frozen, helpless, unable to stop me ransacking his memory, despite the blocks and engram locks he had placed there. Or someone had.
There. There. The answer.
He uttered an agonised, oddly modulated scream.
Lyko tumbled away from me.
Cherubael hovered above us, high in the roof space of the factory chamber, casting a glow of filthy warp-light.
Choking, twitching, his limbs limp, Lyko was rising up towards him. Smoke was coming out of his mouth and nostrils.
'Now, now, Gregor/ Cherubael said. 'Nice try, but there are some secrets that must remain.'
With a nod of his head, he tossed Lyko aside. The traitor-inquisitor flew down to the front of the factory space, bounced hard off the inner hull and then fell down into the churning reaper blades in the factory harvester's maw.
His body was utterly disintegrated.
Cherubael hovered lower, grabbed the comatose, bound form of Esarhaddon like a child picking up a doll.
'I won't forget what you did/ said the daemonhost, looking back at me one last time. 'You'll have to make it up to me.'
Then he was gone, and Esarhaddon.was gone with him.
TWELVE
At Cadia, by terce.
The pylons. Talking with Neve.
A bitter autumn wind was coming down off the moors, and the turning ribbon- leaves of the axeltrees were beginning to fall. They fluttered past me like dry strands of black kelp, and collected in slowly decomposing drifts on the windward side of the graves and the low stone walls.
Above, the overcast sky was full of racing brown clouds.
I followed the old, overgrown path up the wooded slope, under the hissing axeltrees, and stood for a while alone, looking down at the wide grave field and the little shrine tower that watched over it. There was no sign of life, and, apart from the wind, no movement. Even the air-shay that had brought me here from the landing fields at Kasr Tyrok had departed. I almost missed the driver's grumbles that the place was so far out of town.
Far away, almost out of sight beyond the glowering moors, I saw the nearest of the famed, mysterious pylons, an angular silhouette. Even from this distance, I could hear the strange, moaning note the wind made as it blew through the pylons' geometries, geometries that thousands of years of human scholarship had failed to explain.
This was my first time on the world they called the Gatehouse of the Imperium. So far, it was not endearing itself to me.
'So, Thorn… you were none too sharp, were you?'
I turned slowly. He had arrived behind me, as silent as the void itself.
'Well?' he asked. 'What time do you call this?'
'I consider myself suitably chastened/ I said.
He was impassive, then the scar under his milky eye twitched and he smiled. 'Welcome to Cadia, Eisenhorn/ said Fischig.
Aside from Aemos, Godwyn Fischig was my longest serving companion, though he and Bequin often disputed that record. I'd met them both on Hubris, during my hunt for the Chaos-broker Eyclone, which led in turn to the whole bloody affair of the Necroteuch.
I'd actually encountered Fischig first. He'd then been a chastener in the local arbites, ordered to keep a watch on me. He became my ally through circumstance. Bequin had crossed my path, if my memory serves, about a day later, but I had co-opted her almost directly into my service, while Fischig had remained, technically, a serving arbites officer for some considerable time before resigning to join me.
Which is why Bequin claimed the prize, and why they sometimes fell to disputing it when the hour was late and the amasec unstoppered.
His was a big man, of my own age, his cropped blond hair now turning silver. But he was as robust as ever, clad in a coat of black fur, a mail sur-coat and steel-fronted boots.
He shook my hand.
'I was beginning to think you wouldn't make it.'
'I was beginning to think so too/
He cocked his head slightly. 'Trouble?'
'Like you wouldn't believe. Let's walk and I'll tell you/
We wandered back down the tree-shrouded path together. He knew something of the atrocity on Thracian, which was by then some seven mondis past, but he had no idea I had been caught up in it.
When I told him the details, especially about Ravenor, his face darkened.
He had admired Gideon – frankly, it had been difficult not to admire Gideon – and I sometimes felt that Gideon was the man Fischig would have liked to have been.
Fischig's great strength was his self-knowledge. He understood his own limitations. His strengths were loyalty, physical power, fine combat skills, observation and a nose for detail. He was not quick witted, and his abhorrence of book-learning meant that even the rank of interrogator was beyond him. Though he would have loved to rise formally through the ranks of the Inquisition, he had never tried, contenting himself with becoming one of the fundamental components of my staff.
To try, he knew, would have meant failure. And Godwyn Fischig hated to fail.
We crossed the narrow funeral lane and went into the grave field by the old lychgate in the low wall. I told him about Lyko, and Esarhaddon. I told him of the warnings from Endor and Lord Rorken. I told him
about the bloody, inconclusive mess on Eechan. I told him about Cherubael.
'I would have come as soon as I received your message. But Rorken practically forbade me. And then, as you have heard, matters got out of hand.'
He nodded. 'Don't worry, I'm a patient man.'
We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast field of graves. Several shivering priests in ragged black robes were wandering through the lines of crumbling gravestones, pausing to study each one.
'What are they doing?'
'Reading the names/ he said.
'What for?'
To see if they can be read.'
'Okay… why?'
'As you might imagine, a martial world like this produces many dead. Long ago, an edict was made by the planetary government that only certain fields of land could ever be used for burial. So cemetery space is at an optimum. Hence, the Law of Decipherability.'
'Which is?'
