In two groups, my entire Distaff of untouchables, some fifty individuals all told, had moved in alongside the first ground-troop advances. Bequin, guarded by Nayl and twelve of my warrior staff, led one group, and Thula Surskova, protected by Fischig and a dozen more fighters, led the other.
The Distaff had never been used on such a scale before, but it proved to be the weapon I had always suspected. The blankness they generated contained and negated the engulfing psychic storm, effectively bottling it inside Site A and preventing it from threatening our closing forces.
* * *
With Inshabel, I moved underground, down the rock-cut steps into the inner sectors of Site A. For almost an hour we fought our way through the smoked-swathed surface structures, a metre at a time. Now, with the sun rising, we found our first access point to the lower levels: a stairwell exposed by a bomb crater.
The place was strewn with smouldering debris and a few unidentifiable bodies. In places, power cables were hanging, sparking, from the rockcrete roof. We both wore motion trackers, and switched left and right, gunning down cultists as they appeared. My boltgun was already running short of shells, and Inshabel was on to his second-to-last power cell. The level of resistance was unbelievable.
At a junction in the seemingly random jumble of tunnels, we encountered Endor. He had a couple of Thracian troopers and an Inquisition guardsman with him, but he'd lost both of his slow-moving attack-servitors. I knew what he was thinking just by the look in his eyes. We had come in strong and confident, but perhaps not strong enough. I thought I had anticipated the worst Quixos could throw against us. Maybe I had underestimated him after all.
Ferocious bursts of shooting alerted us to a firefight in a larger chamber to the left. We arrived in time to meet four wounded, terrified Thracian troopers fleeing towards us.
'Back! Go back!' they were screaming.
I pushed past them.
The chamber beyond was massive and half-filled with veiling smoke. Green, unnatural flames were licking up the walls. At the far end, the already huge chamber seemed to open out into something much, much vaster.
But that was not what occupied my eyes.
Surrounded by over fifty bodies, most of them Imperial Guards, Commodus Voke was standing his ground against Prophaniti.
The old inquisitor was shuddering, his robes stiffening with psychic ice. Corposant fire glowed from his mouth and eyes. The daemonhost, its cruel features just recognisable as a distortion of poor, lost Husmaan's face, hovered in front of Voke, struggling at an invisible barrier of telekinetic wrath.
We ran forward, abruptly drawing fire from cultists spreading into the chamber from the right. The Thracian beside me bucked and twitched as he was hit twice, and Inshabel cursed as he was winged.
Endor urged the remaining men to advance on his lead, and took the fight to the cultists, his laspistol blazing and his chainblade swinging.
Voke was close to breaking. I could see him wavering under the immense pressure.
I bolstered my boltgun and stumbled across the bodies and debris to aid him, praying that my runestaff would do what it was supposed to.
And a dizzying blast of white light and scourging heat blew me back through the air.
* * *
I tried то get up, half-realising that I had been blown clean out of the chamber, through a flakboard partition into some kind of dank chute. Invisible forces lifted me to my feet. Light bathed me.
Cherubael hovered before me.
'Gregor,' it said. 'You've come so far. I knew you had it in you.'
I held the runestaff in front of me. The green marble scroll of daemonic protection that Ravenor had sent had already been reduced to a shattered remnant by the force of Cherubael's opening attack.
'I've waited for this moment for such a long time/ said the daemonhost. 'Remember on Eechan I said you'd have to make things up to me? Well, this is the time. Now. This is the moment that everything's been about. The one I have seen coming since our paths first crossed. Destinies… our destinies, intertwined, remember that?'
'How could I forget?' I spat. 'You claim to have been using me all along! Guiding me! Even protecting me! I watched you kill Lyko on Eechan! So that I would live… for this moment? Why?'
Cherubael smiled. When the warp is in you as it is in me, you see time from all angles. You see what will be and what will come, what someone here now will do in a century or two, what someone there has done a thousand years in the past. You see the possibilities.'
'Riddles! That's all you ever speak!'
'No more riddles, Eisenhorn. From the moment I first met you, I saw you were the only one, the only one with the tenacity, the skill and the opportunity to give me what I want. What I want most of all. I saw that if I kept you safe, you would come and give me that most precious thing here, on this world, at this hour.'
'I would never help a daemon like you!'
Cherubael grinned, blank-eyed and utterly serious. 'Then destroy me, if you can.'
It lunged. I raised the runestaff and channelled my will down through the psi- conductive pole into the lodestone. The carved fragment of the Lith blazed with blue light.
Pontius Glaw knew a thing or two about daemonhosts. Their greatest weakness was the strength of the will that had bound them as slaves. The runestaff, so carefully prepared and constructed, so painstakingly etched with the ancient symbols of control, was a lever to topple that binding will by amplifying my own to levels that would overwhelm it.
For a brief moment, I felt how it must feel to be an alpha-plus psyker.
The scintillating spear of energy that shot from the lode-stone struck Cherubael in the chest.
The daemonhost smiled for a second, and then its flesh-vessel ruptured open, billowing a storm of Chaos-fire in all directions. I had cast it out of its binding and banished it back into the warp.
And in the moment as my amplified mind overmastered his, I saw the years of enslavement it had endured af Quixos's hands, the torments of its
binding, the great, forbidden text of the
And I realised that I had given Cherubael exactly what it wanted after all.
I stumbled back into the main chamber. By then, Voke, whose resistance to Prophaniti had been astonishing, was dead.
I remembered Voke's words after the atrocity on Thracian: 'I will make amends. I will not rest until every one of these wretches is destroyed, and order restored. And then I will not rest until I find who and what was behind it.'
He could rest now. That work was done.
The daemonhost was casting the valiant old man's empty husk of a body aside and gliding towards Endor and Inshabel, who were both already on their knees in agony. Cyan flames washed from Prophaniti's fingertips and wrapped my two friends in tight, burning psychic shackles. They were trapped morsels for it to feed off at its leisure.
