takes to draw a breath, we had exchanged a flurry of twenty or more blows. The talon-edged blade of Kharnager rang dully off the Carthaen steel. Barbarisater's pentagrammatic runes flashed and flared with discharging energy. Kharnager groaned softly.
We broke, and then came in again, blades striking so fast the noise became one long ringing tone. I barely made an
He was raving, insane. What patches of truth or sane notions might lurk in his words, I had no idea. There was no way to distinguish them from his lunatic fancy. All I knew was that a pylon, psychically super-charged, might do all manner of things, but its side-effects would be catastrophic. It could lay waste to the continent, the planet.
I think, and here lay the true horror of it, I think Quixos knew that. I think he considered that to be an acceptable price to pay, just as he had considered the atrocity on Thracian a necessary cost to obtain a psyker of such peerless quality as Esarhaddon. What other abominations had he caused in acquiring the others?
As Grumman had said, just before his death, this simply had to be stopped.
I looked at his face.
We rained blows at each other, drawing sparks and little curls of vapour from the blade edges. I tried a low swing, but he leapt over it, and alternated a series of scissoring blows that drove me backwards across the dusty ground. I thought my feet would slip. He was a whirlwind.
I saw my moment. Barbarisater saw it too. A slight underswing on his blade return that opened a gap for a
I thrust in, putting all my will into the blade. Somehow, dazzlingly, he still managed to turn Kharnager and block me.
Barbarisater struck the daemonsword and broke in half.
And it was the ultimate failure of the ancient Carthaen blade that gave me victory. If it had stayed intact, the block would have stopped it and the fight would have continued.
Breaking around Quixos's sword-edge, the truncated half of Barbarisater in my hand continued on, with all my mustered force behind it, until the
broken end plunged through his cloak, his body armour, his augmetic implants and ran him through the torso.
The
It took almost equal force to break the suction of his flesh around the blade and rip it out.
Quixos staggered backwards, polluted blood spurting from the wound, his augmetics shorting out and exploding.
Then he fell to the dusty floor of the undervault, and became dust himself, until there was nothing left but rotting augmetic devices and empty armour twisted under his lank cape.
Coming from him, the word felt like a compliment.
Site A was dismantled and destroyed by the taskforce, and the faux pylon smashed by sustained orbital fire. Quixos's psykers, and his surviving servants, were imprisoned, and then turned over to the Black Ships of the Inquisition, six of which arrived a few days later, once we had published news of our achievement. Most of the captives were deemed too dangerous or too tainted to keep, even under the closest guard, and were executed. Esarhaddon was one of those.
Many precious texts and artifacts were recovered from Site A, and many more that were diabolic and abominable. He had accumulated a vast resource of esoteric material, and there was supposed to be a great deal more at his fastness on distant Maginor. A further purge would reveal the truth of that.
As the report has it, no trace was ever found of the
By the time I had returned to Gudrun with my followers and allies, the carta issued against me had been abolished. None of Osma's allegations could stand up in the face of the evidence gathered at Farness, or the many statements collected by the Inquisition, statements pleading my innocence made by such individuals as Lord Procurator Madorthene, Inquisitor General Neve, Interrogator Inshabel and, God- Emperor help him, Titus Endor.
I was never offered any sort of official apology, not by Grandmaster Orsini, or by Bezier, and certainly not by Osma. His career didn't suffer one bit. Twenty years later, he was elected Master of the Ordo Malleus Helican after Bezier's sudden, unexpected death.
Grumman's remains, and the remains of his Kasrkin, were buried in one of the lonely field-grave plots on Cadia, to be remembered as long as the Law of Decipherability allowed. Ricci had a library named after him on his home world of Hesperus. Voke was buried with full honours at the Tho-rian Sacristy adjoining the Great Cathedral of the Ministorum on Thracian Primaris. A small brass plaque commemorating the achievements of his long and dedicated career remains on the sacristy wall to this day.
He and I had never been friends, but I own that in the years after he was gone, I missed his caustic manner from time to time.
EPILOGUE
Winter, 345.M41.
The voice was like the sound of some eternal glacier – slow, old, cold, heavy.
It asked simply, 'Why?'
'Because I can.'
The silence lasted for a long time. The thousand candle flames flickered and rippled the carefully inscribed stone walls with echoes of their moving glow.
'Why? Why… have you done this… this wretched thing to me?'
'Because I have power over you where once you had power over me. You used me. You orchestrated my life. You moved me like a regicide piece to the place where I best served your desires. Now, that is reversed.'
It thrashed against its chains and shackles, but it was still too weak from the ordeals of the snaring, the entrapment.
'Damn you…' it whispered, falling limp.
