Prophaniti froze when I appeared, instinctively knowing I posed a more serious threat. The Lith-stone was still smoking with blood-red light.
The daemonhost surged through the air at me, teeth bared, arms spread, incandescent with light, baying my name. It was like facing the attack run of a supersonic warcraft firing all guns. I know so. It is my misfortune to have experienced that too.
Prophaniti whooped with glee.
'At Kasr Geth, you told me to make my weapons sounder next time, monster!' I howled, and impaled its charging form on the steel pole of the runestaff. 'Is this sound enough?'
Prophaniti screamed and exploded, blowing me off my feet. I don't think I banished it. I think I obliterated its essence forever.
The runestaff was, miraculously, unscathed, and lay amid the rubble. But Prophaniti's dissipating being had made it white hot from base to cap, and I could not pick it up again.
I ran across to Titus Endor and Inshabel, both of whom lolled weakly on the floor.
Inshabel was dazed but intact. Endor had daemon gashes across his chest and neck. He looked up at me blearily.
'You got them both, Gregor…'
'I pray there are no more,' I replied, trying to staunch his bleeding. His rosette slid out of his coat pocket and I leaned to pick it up.
The inquisitorial symbol was decorated with the ornate crest of the Ordo Malleus.
'Malleus?' I hissed.
'No…'
When did you transfer, Endor? Damn you, when did you change ordos?'
They forced me…' he wheezed, 'Osma forced me! When he had me on Messina… there were certain matters from a case a few years ago. He'd got
his hands on them somehow… He… he promised I would burn if I didn't help him get to you/
'What matters?'
'Nothing! Nothing, Gregor, I swear! But he had Bezel's backing! He could have made anything look heretical! I transferred orders to stop him breaking me. He said I would be rewarded, advanced. He said Ordo Malleus was a better prospect for me.'
'But you were to keep an eye on me?'
'I told him nothing! I never sold you out. I did just enough to keep Osma satisfied.'
'Like coming here. No wonder you hid your rosette. He wanted you to take me down, didn't he?'
Endor was silent. Inshabel looked on in stark disbelief.
'I… I was to go along with this operation, in the hope that it might be successful. Orsini's under no illusions that Quixos is a menace, and this was an expedient way, perhaps, of eliminating him. If you were still… alive at the end of it, I was told to arrest you on the carta charges. Or, if you resisted…'
'Get him up to ground level,' I told Inshabel quietly. 'Find him a medic. Don't let him out of your sight/
'Yes sir!'
'Gregor!' Endor gasped as Inshabel lifted him. 'By the God-Emperor, I never meant-'
'Get him out of here!' I growled.
The assault on Ferell Sidor was three hours old when Grumman, Ricci and I entered the undervault of the excavation pit. Madorthene's forces were still locked in a monumental struggle with the renegade's warriors throughout the warren of tunnels and chambers in the table mountain.
Ricci was weak from a blade wound, and all of his bodyguards were dead. Grumman had just two Kasrkin left with him, both of them armed with lasrifles.
The vast undervault was an excavated pit almost a kilometre deep, open to the sky. The serebite copy of the Radian pylon rested in the base of it, surrounded by adamantite scaffolding. Gibbet cages, hundreds of them, hung from the scaffolding on chains. In each one, trapped and helpless, was a human body.
They were Quixos's carefully collected arsenal of rogue psykers, secretly acquired from all over the Imperium. It must have taken him decades to accumulate so many. One of them, I had no doubt, was Esarhaddon
'What is he doing?' Ricci asked, a touch of awe in his voice.
'Something we have to stop/ said Grumman, with a direct simplicity ! appreciated. It was the only answer any of us needed.
We had been living at our nerve ends since the assault began, and were wired with combat sharpness. Even so, despite our combined experience and skill, what happened next took us all totally by surprise.
One moment there was nothing. The next, a robed, armoured form was in amongst us, moving so fast it was simply a blur.
So fast. So accursedly fast.
Instantly, Ricci was split open down the length of his spine. As he was still in the process of falling on his face, choking on his own blood, one of the Kasrkin was severed at the waist, and toppled in halves, his gun firing spasmodically. The other Kasrkin folded up around the impaling thrust of a long, dark blade, spontaneously combusting from the belly out.
Grumman pushed me out of the way as the devastating blur turned again, and fired his laspistol at it three times. Snapping round faster than my eyes could follow, the long, dark blade the blur was wielding deflected each crackling shot.
Grumman's head left his shoulders.
Quixos, the arch-heretic, the renegade, the unforgivable radical, whirled on me before Grumman's butchered body had even started to slump.
I had one fleeting glimpse of the long daemonsword, Kharnagar. It was gnarled and knotted and thick with abominable runes and irregular clawlike serrations.
That's all I saw as it came whistling towards my face.
TW E N TY-T H RE E
The heretic. Afterwards.
A bare hand's breadth from my head, the blood-red blade came to a dead stop, blocked by the gleaming steel of Barbarisater.
Time seemed to stand still for a heartbeat. We faced each other, our blades locked together. Quixos had been a speed-distorted phantom until our swords had struck. Now he was frozen, glaring between the crossed blades at me.
The renegade's armour was ragged and filthy, and ornate with warp-signs. His inquisitorial rosette was displayed, incongruously, on his right shoulder guard. It revolted me to see it worn amongst such corruption.
His ancient face was a misshapen, pustular horror. Rudimentary antlers bulged from his brow. His skin was dark like granite. Wheezing augmetic cables and implants bulged at his throat and under the dirty head-cloth he wore. His eyes were shining balls of blood.
In honesty, he was a disappointing little monster compared to the notion of him that had built up in my mind. But there was no denying his inhuman strength and speed.
Barbarisater felt him move before I did. It lurched in my hands. In the time it
