in two. The backswing nearly caught me, but I dodged behind
a pier column that took the force of the blow in a splintering shower of sparks and stone chippings.
Ungish was still crying out in pain. The sound chilled and infuriated me. I fired my laspistol again, but the last few shots fizzed and spluttered, underpowered. The power cell was exhausted. I dived again, feinting past his slow-moving bulk, and grappled with him from behind. It was a desperate ploy. Unarmoured as I was, I stood little chance of overwhelming his brute force or hurting him. He got a steel-gloved paw round behind himself, grabbed me by the coat and tore me off him.
My coat ripped. I bounced hard off a pillar and crashed awkwardly through the delicate fretwork of a confessional screen. I had barely pulled myself out of the flimsy wooden wreckage when the chainsword swooped in again and chewed a deep gouge in the cathedral floor.
I ran from him then, across the south aisle towards the feretory. Two men of the cathedral's Frateris Militia, clearly seeking advancement by coming to the aid of the fearsome Ministorum witch- hunter, closed in to block my escape. They were both clad in Ezra's yellow and carried short stave-maces in one hand and temple lanterns in the other.
I think they both quickly regretted their enthusiastic involvement.
I didn't even bother with the will. I think my rage was too great to have used it cleanly anyway. I side-stepped the first mace, caught and broke the wrist that wielded it, and kicked the man down. The mace turned in the air as it flew from the sprawling oafs useless hand, and I caught it and turned it cross-wise in time to block the down-stroke of the other man's club. As he bounced back with the recoil of his own, negated strike, I smacked him in the side of the knee with my captured weapon. He fell over with sharp wail of pain, losing hold of his own mace and trying to beat me with his temple lamp instead. I took the lamp away from him and kicked him in the belly so he doubled up on his side, sobbing and trying to remember how to breathe.
The first man was back up, running at me. I spun and smashed the temple lamp in his face, sideways. Both its light and his went out.
The paving shook as Tantalid hove down on me. I used the captured mace like a sword, double-handed, to deflect his first strokes. It was iron-banded hardwood, and tough, but no match for a chainsword. After three or so clashes, the mace was chewed and mangled. I threw it aside and tore a church standard down from the wall beside the feretory door. Theo-phantus immediately shredded the old embroidered cloth and wood-frame titulus from the end, but that left me with three metres of cast-iron pole.
I held it like a quarterstaff, striking Tantalid hard on the side of the head with one end and then square on the opposite hip with the other. Then I stabbed the end at him viciously, like a spear- thrust, and managed to dent the chest-plate of his armour.
In response – and frothing mad with anger himself now – he put up Theophantus and shortened my pole by about half a metre. I wrenched
the remaining pole around one-handed and struck him on the other side of the head. Blood was spilling from his ears. He howled and made an attack that almost took my arm off.
My third attempt to clip his miserable head missed. He was wise to it now, and blocked with his chainsword. The chain teeth caught in the pole and plucked it from my hands, throwing it up ten metres into the air. It landed behind some pews with a loud, echoing clang.
I rocked back from the follow up, but the murderous saw caught my right shoulder and gashed me deeply. Clutching the wound, I ducked again, and Theophantus decapitated a statue of Saint Ezra's pardoner.
No matter what I did, it was going his way. He had the weapons and the armour on his side. And now I was bleeding badly, which meant I would progressively slow and weaken, and it was just a matter for him to keep pressing the onslaught and he would triumph.
I became aware of another commotion near the main doors of the great church. Many startled worshippers and hierarchs had retreated and gathered there to watch the holy combat. Now they were spilling aside, their huddle breaking. A figure stormed through them.
Medea.
She ran down the main aisle, calling to me, firing her needle pistol over the tops of the pews at Tantalid. The lethal rounds pinged and clicked off his armour, and he turned in annoyance.
Tantalid dragged out his boltpistol and fired at this new attack. Medea hurled the object she had been carrying in her other hand and then disappeared from view as she dived to evade the hammer blows of the bolt rounds. At least, I prayed it was a deliberate dive. If he had hit her…
The object she had thrown bounced off a pew near me and landed on the floor, spilling from its yellow cloth.
Risking dismemberment from the chainsword, I hurled myself at the Carthaen blade. My hands found its long grip and I rolled twice to avoid the next downstrike of Theophantus.
Barbarisater purred in my grip as I came up. The runes blazed with vengeful light.
Tantalid realised that the nature of the battle had suddenly changed. I saw it in his eyes.
My first swing severed his wrist, cutting clean through the power-armoured cuff, dropping his hand to the floor, still clutching the smoking boltgun.
My second met Theophantus and destroyed it, spraying disintegrating chain-teeth and machine parts into the air.
My third cut Witchfinder Tantalid in two from the left shoulder to the groin. Neither half of him made a sound as they fell apart onto the cathedral floor.
Barbarisater was still seething with power, and twitched as Medea emerged unhurt from behind a choir stall. I forced the hungry blade down.
'Come on!' she said.
Ungish was dead. There was nothing I could do for her. And there was so much I should have done. She had been right. Right about this. Right about her fate. I dreaded to think how much more of what she had said might prove to be true too.
Hearing my frantic glossia call when Tantalid first attacked, Medea had taken the launch up from Ezra Plain outside the city, despite all official warnings for her to abort, and flown it right in, setting down in the courtyard outside Saint Ezra Outlooking.
As we ran out now, into the evening, through crowds of stunned onlookers who leapt out of our path, the city arbites and the Frateris Militia were rising in alarmed response. There was no point waiting to face them.
The launch shot us skywards, back towards the
It was a mess, and I was terribly disheartened. The confidence with which we had all set out from Cinchare seemed to have dissolved. Orbul Infanta had been just the first part of a long stratagem, and thanks to Tantalid, it had ended badly. I'd failed to contact Gladus, and discovered that as careful as I had been, my communiques were not secure. The third task I had planned to undertake on Orbul Infanta, a search of the Imperial archivum for certain information relating to Quixos, hadn't even been started.
At least the weapons were consecrated. And Barbarisater had more than proved itself in combat.
Frigates of the Frateris Militia, along with several Imperial Navy guard boats, attempted to block the
