Eisenhorn Omnibus

We celebrated Candlemas in the little chapel of the Ministorum off the plaza, lighting candles to welcome the new Imperial year, and lighting ofhers to commemorate the town's dead. Aemos and Bequin read the lessons, for all of the Ecclesiarchs were amongst the remembered dead. Bure and his tech- adepts worshipped with us, and he hovered to the choir rail under the great statue of the God-Emperor to lead us in the devotional prayers.

I was fretful and edgy. Partly because I was anxious to get underway now, but also because of the lore in my head, the mysteries to which Glaw had introduced me. So much, so much of it dark. I knew I was a changed man, and that change was permanent.

But I considered that a year before – just a year, though it felt much, much longer – I had been a helpless prisoner in the bleak Carnificina, and Candlemas had passed me by before I had realised it.

I was not that man any more either, and that change had been nothing to do with Pontius Glaw's whispered secrets. For all the darkness swilling in my head, it was better to be here, strong and ready, fortified, in the company of friends and allies.

There was no choirmaster to play the organ, so Medea had brought her father's Glavian lyre, and played the Holy Triumph of the Golden Throne so that we could all sing.

That night, we feasted in the refectory of the Cult Mechanicus to honour the start of 341.M41. Maxilla, who remained on duty aboard the Essene, sent a banquet to us on a shuttle, along with servitors to wait upon us. One of them reported that a vast storm of meteors had swarmed across the sky at the stroke of midnight, lighting the night side of Cinchare with their fires. Nayl growled that this was a bad omen, but Inshabel insisted it was a good one.

I suppose it rather depended which part of the vast spread of the Imperium you came from.

The others spent the next two days packing up and making ready to leave, but Aemos and I attended the dedication ceremony in the cimeliarch of the Adeptus Mechanicus annex.

Machine Cult servitors chanted in a modulated binary code and beat upon kettledrums. Magos Bure was clad in his orange robes with a white stole over his shoulders.

He blessed the weapons he had made in turn, taking one then the other from the two tech-adepts who stood in attendance.

Barbarisater, the pentagrammatic power sword, lifted to the light that speared down from the eyes of the Machine God's altar. Then the runestaff, Bure's masterpiece.

He had fashioned a cap-piece for the rune-etched steel pole out of elec-trum in the form of a sun-flare corona. In the centre of it was a human skull, marked with the thirteenth sign of castigation. The skull was the lodestone, carved by Bure himself into a perfect facsimile of my own skull, as measured by radiative scans. He had tried and rejected over twenty different tele-empathic crystals before finding one he trusted would be up to the task.

'It's beautiful/ I said, taking it from him. 'What crystal did you use in the end?'

'What else?' he said. 'I carved that copy of your skull from the Lith itself

He came to see us off, to the docking barn where the gun-cutter had sat for so long. Nayl and Fischig were carrying the last things aboard. We had broken astropathic silence at last the night before, and informed Imperial Allied, Ortog Promethium, the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Imperial authorities of the fate that had befallen Cinchare minehead. We would be long gone before any of them arrived to begin recovery work.

Bure said farewell to Aemos, who shuffled away to the cutter.

'There's nothing adequate I can say/ I told the magos.

'Nor I to you, Eisenhorn. What of… the inmate?'

'I'd like you to do what I asked you. Give him mobility at least. But nothing more. He must remain a prisoner, now and always/

Very well. I expect to hear all about your victory, Eisenhorn. I will be waiting/

'May the Holy Machine God and the Emperor himself protect your systems, Geard/

'Thank you/ he said. Then he added something that quite took me aback, given his total belief and reliance on technology.

'Good luck/

I walked to the cutter. He watched me for a moment, then disappeared, closing the inner hatch after him.

That was the last time I ever saw him.

From Cinchare, the Essene ran back, fast and impatient, into the great territories of the Segmentum Obscurus, a three month voyage that we broke twice.

At Ymshalus, we stopped to transmit the prepared communiques, all twenty of them. Inshabel and Fischig left us too at that point; Inshabel to

secure passage to Elvara Cardinal to begin his work there, and Fischig for the long haul back to Cadia. It would be months, if not years, before we saw them again. That was a sorrowful farewell.

At Palobara, that crossroads on the border, busy with trading vessels and obscura caravans guarded by mercenary gunships, we stopped and transmitted the carta declaration. There was no going back now. Here, I parted company with Bequin, Nayl and Aemos, all of whom were heading back to the Helican sub-sector by a variety of means. Bequin's goal was Messina, and Aemos, with Nayl to watch over him, was bound for Gudrun. Another hard parting.

The Essene continued on for Orbul Infanta. This was now a lonely, waiting time. Each night, the remains of my company gathered in Maxilla's dining room and ate together: myself, Medea, Maxilla and Ungish. Ungish was no company, and even Medea and Maxilla had lost their sparkle. They missed the others, and I think they knew how dark and tough the time ahead would be.

I spent my days reading in the cabin library of the cutter, or playing regicide with Medea. I practised with Barbarisater in the hold spaces, slowly mastering the tricks of its weight and balance. I would never match a Carthae-born master, but I had always been good enough with a sword. Barbarisater was an extraordinary piece. I came to know it and it came to know me. Within a week, it was responding to my will, channelling it so hard that the rune marks glowed with manifesting psychic power. It had a will of its own, and once it was in my hands, ready, swinging, it was difficult to stop it pulling and slicing where it pleased. It hungered for blood… or if not blood, then at least the joy of battle. On two separate occasions, Medea came into the hold to see if I was bored enough for another round of regicide, and I had to restrain the steel from lunging at her.

Its sheer length was a problem: I had never used a blade so long. I worried that I would do my own extremities harm. But practice gave me the gift of it: long-armed, flowing moves, sweeping strokes, a tight field of severing. Within a fortnight, I had mastered the knack of spinning it over in my hand, my open palm and the pommel circling around each other like the discs of a gyroscope. I was proud of that move. I think Barbarisater taught it to me.

I worked with the rune staff too, to get used to its feel and balance. Though my aim was appalling, especially over distances further than three or four metres, I became able to channel my will, through my hands, into its haft and then project it from the crystal skull in the form of electrical bolts that dented deck plating.

There was, of course, no way I could test it for its primary use.

We reached the shrine world of Orbul Infanta at the end of the twelfth week. I had three tasks to perform here, and the first was the consecration of the sword and the staff.

With Ungish and Medea, I travelled down to the surface in one of the Essene's unremarkable little launches rather than the gun-cutter. We went to Ezropolis, one of Orbul Infanta's ten thousand shrine cities, in the baking heartland of the western continent.

Orbul Infanta is an Ecclesiarchy governed world, famously blessed with a myriad