tasks I had set him. Though he never said, I think he saw it as returning with interest my efforts in the battle with the Lith.
He had also listened without alarm when Aemos and I had related the history of the recent past. It felt like a confession. I explained the carta out against me, my rogue status. He had accepted my innocence without question. As he put it, 'Hapshant wouldn't have raised a radical. It's the rest of the galaxy that's wrong.'
That was good enough for him. I was quietly moved.
One day in the sixth week of our increasingly prolonged stay, he called me to his workshop.
It lay beneath the main chapel of the annex and was two storeys deep, a veritable smithy alive with engineering machines and apparatus the purposes of which baffled me. Steam-presses hammered and banged, and screw-guns wailed. Quite apart from my own projects, there was much work to do repairing the annex and the translithopede. I walked down through the swathes of steam and found Bure supervising two servitors who were machining symbols into a two-metre long pole of composite steel.
'Eisenhorn,' he said, raising his bright green eye-lights to look at me.
'How goes the work?'
'I feel like a warsmith, back in the foundries of the forge worlds, when I was flesh. The specifications you have asked for are difficult, but not impossible. I enjoy a challenge.'
I took several sheets of paper from my coat pocket and handed them to him. 'More notes, taken during my last interview with Glaw. I've underlined the key remarks. Here, he suggests electrum for the cap piece.'
'I was going to use iron, or an iron alloy. Electrum. That makes sense.' He took my notes over to a raised planning table that was littered with scrolls, holoquills, measuring tools and data-slates. Pages of notes that I had already provided him with were piled up, along with the psychomet-rically captured images Ungish had drawn from my mind of the Cadian pylons, Cherubael, Prophaniti, and the ornaments he had worn.
'I'm also pondering the lodestone for the cap. I considered pyraline or one of the other tele-empathic crystallines like epidotrichite, but I doubt any of them would have the durability for your purposes. Certainly not for more than one or two uses. I also thought of tabular zanthroclase/
'What's that?'
A silicate we use in mind-impulse devices. But I'm not convinced. I have a few other possibilities in mind.' It was a measure of the trust Bure showed me that he felt he could mention such Cult Mechanicus secrets so freely. I felt honoured.
'Here's the haft/ he said, showing me to the etching bench where the two servitors were machining the decoration of the long pole.
'Steel?'
'Superficially. There's a titanium core surrounded by an adamantium sleeve under the steel jacket. The titanium is drilled with channels that carry the conductive lapidorontium wires.'
'It looks perfect/ I said.
'It is perfect. Virtually perfect. It's machined to within a nanometre of your measurements. Let me show you the sword.'
I followed him to a workbench at the far end of the smithy where the sword lay on a rest under a dust sheet.
What do you think?' he asked, drawing the cloth back.
Barbarisater was as beautiful as I remembered it. I admired the fresh pentagrammatic wards that had been etched in the blade since I had last seen it, ten on each side.
'It is a remarkable artifact. I was almost unwilling to make the alterations you requested. As it was, I wore out eight adamantium drill bits on this side alone. The hardened steel skin of the blade around the solid core has been folded and beaten nine hundred times. It is beyond anything we can manufacture today/
I would owe Clan Esw Sweydyr for this weapon, as I already owed them for Arianrhod's life. I should have returned it to their care, for it was part of their clan legacy and
not to take, and certainly not to deface this way. But face to face with Pro-phaniti at Kasr Gesh I had learned two things. Indeed, that monstrous thing had told them to me. Pentagrammatic wards worked against dae-monhosts, but they were no stronger than the weapon that bore them.
To my certain knowledge, there were few finer, stronger blades in human space. I would make my peace and apologies to the clans of Carthae in time, fates permitting.
I went to touch it, but Bure stopped me. 'It is still resting. We must respect its anima. In a few days, you can take it. Train with it well. You must know it intimately before you use it in combat.'
He accompanied me to the door of the forge. 'Both weapons must be blessed and consecrated before use. I cannot do that, though I can ceremonially dedicate their manufacture to the Machine God.'
'I have already planned for their consecration,' I said. 'But I would welcome your ceremony. When I go against Quixos, I can think of no more potent a patron god to be looking down over me than your Machine Lord.'
'We will be leaving in a few days/ I told him.
The casket was silent for a while. 'I will miss our conversations, Eisen-horn/
'Nevertheless, I have to go.'
'You think you're ready?'
'I think this part of my readiness is complete. Is there anything else you can tell me?'
'I have been wondering that. I cannot think of anything. Except…'
'Except what?'
The lights around the engram sphere twinkled. 'Except this. Apart from everything you've learned from me, the secrets, the lore, the mysteries, you must know that going after this foe is… dangerous/
I laughed involuntarily. 'I think I've worked that much out already, Pontius!'
'No, you don't know what I mean. You have the determination, I know, the ambition, I know that too – you have the knowledge, we assume, and the weapons too, we hope – but unless your mind is prepared, you will perish. Instantly, and no ward or staff or blade or rune will save you/
You sound like… you care if I lose/
'Do I? Then consider this, Gregor Eisenhom. You may deem me a monster beneath contempt, but if I do care, what does that say about me? Or you?'
'Goodbye, Pontius Glaw/1 said, and closed the cell hatches behind me for the last time.
I will record this thought now, because I feel I must. For all that Pontius Glaw was… and for all that came later, I cannot shake my bond to him, though I try. There, in the cell on Cinchare, and a century before in the dim hold of the
hours. I had no doubt that he was an unforgivably evil thing, and that he would have killed me in a second during those times had he been allowed the chance. But he was a being of extraordinary intellect, wit and learning. Admirable in so many, strange ways. But for that tore, Aaa's tore, back on that spring day on Quenthus, his life may have been different.
And if it had been different, and we had met, we would have been the greatest of friends.
We had stayed on Cinchare for three months. Too long, in my opinion, but there had been no way to speed the preparatory work.
