Or he could be doing this for himself. That idea chilled me. Thuring was evidently a more significant player than I had estimated. He could have designs of his own, and with a Battle Titan at his command those designs
could be very bloody. He could hold cities to ransom, here on Durer or elsewhere. He could raze population centres, slaughter millions, particularly once the turbines of
Whatever the truth, the dismal fate of the ekranoplane's crew told me he wasn't intending to leave the island the way he had come in. A bulk lifter could easily land here, pick up the Titan and be away before the frankly paltry watch forces of Durer could react. Thuring was planning to leave here with the Titan. I knew that as a certainty. It didn't matter where he was going after that. Imperial blood would be spilled as a result. We had to stop him.
Which brought me back to my original problem.
How the hell were we going to fight that?
Frantically, with the Titan now turning back from the second diversion, I considered the tools at our disposal. It was hard to concentrate, because the angry flutter of the Titan's mind link was interfering with my mind. I suppose that's what gave me the idea. The desperate idea.
I reached to key my vox link and then paused. The behemoth would detect vox transmissions effortlessly. Instead, I stretched out with my mind, trying to find Rassi.
'Nayl?' I asked. 'What's the most secure structure here?'
The chapel,' he said. 'It's reinforced stone.'
I opened my mind fully.
After a long pause, the answer came.
'Let's move!' I told Nayl and Fischig.
We reached the chapel first. The dread Titan had begun to stride our way again by then, but Nayl fired the last of his diversions and distracted it east.
We tumbled into the ancient church. It was generally stripped bare and full of slimy black mold. A few remaining wooden pews were sagging with damp corruption. The double-headed eagle from the altar lay trampled on the floor. I noticed that its dented wings were polished brightly. Dronicus had tended this place fervently until Thuring's men had arrived and smashed up his diligently maintained shrine. It was a heartbreaking sight.
I bowed to the altar and made the sign of the eagle across my chest with both hands.
The others arrived in a hurry, weapons drawn, slamming the door shut behind them: Bequin, Haar, Begundi, Swole and Rassi.
Rassi was panting hard. Bequin was pale. Both Haar and Swole had cuts and contusions from near misses.
'You have a plan?' asked Rassi, almost immediately.
I nodded. 'It's a terrible long shot, but I don't know what else to do/ 'Let's hear it/ said Fischig.
I do not pretend, as I have already reflected, to have any specific understanding of the workings of a Battle Titan. No man does, unless he be a priest of Mars or, like Thuring, the owner of illicitly transmitted lore. Aemos probably knew a thing or two. I knew for certain he had seen Adep-tus Mechanicus mind- impulse units firsthand, for he'd told me as much, long before, in the cryogenerator chamber of the tomb-vault Processional Two Twelve on Hubris.
But he was not with me in that chilly, ransacked chapel, nor was a decent conversation with him viable.
However, I knew enough to understand that the function of a Titan depended on the connection between man and machine, between the human brain and the mechanical sentience. That was achieved – miraculously – through the psychic interface of the mind-impulse unit.
Which meant, in very simple terms, that the root of our problem was essentially a psychic one. If we could disrupt or, better still, destroy, the mind link…
This runestaff was made for me by Magos Geard Bure of the Adeptus Mechanicus/1 told Rassi, letting him feel the weight of the weapon. It was a long, runic steel pole with a cap-piece in the form of a sun's corona, fashioned in electrum. The lodestone at the cap's centre was a skull, a perfect copy of my own, marked with the thirteenth sign of castigation, that had been worked from a hyper-dense geode of tele-empathic mineral called the Lith that Bure had found on Cinchare. It was a psionic amplifier of quite devastating power.
'Indeed. And then?'
I glanced over at Alizebeth. Then Madam Bequin takes hold of the runestaff and delivers her untouchable blankness into the heart of it/
4Vill that work?' Kara Swole asked.
There was a long pause.
Bequin looked at me and then at Rassi. 'I don't know. Will it?'
'I don't know either/ I said. 'But I think it's the best chance we have/
Rassi breathed deeply. 'So be it. I don't see another hope, not even a remote one. Let's get on with it/
Poul Rassi and I took the runestaff between us, our hands clamped around the long haft.
He closed his eyes.
I tried to relax, but the instinctual barriers of self protection that exist in every mind kept mine from letting go. I didn't want to get inside that thing. Even from a distance, it stank of putrid power. It reeked of the warp.
'Come on, Gregor/ Rassi whispered.
I concentrated. I closed my eyes. I knew the Titan was treading nearer, because I could feel the chapel floor shaking.
I tried to let myself go.
It was like clinging to a precious handhold when you are dangling over a pit of corrosive sludge. I couldn't bear to submit and slide away. What waited for me down there was cosmic horror, a broiling mass of filth and poison that would dissolve my mind, my sanity, my soul.
Chaos beckoned, and I was trying to find the courage to jump into its arms.
I could feel the sweat dribbling down my brow. I could smell the rotten odour of the derelict chapel. I could feel the cold steel in my hands.
I let go.
It was worse than anything I could have imagined.
Drowning. I was drowning, face down, in black ooze. The sticky, foetid stuff was filling my nostrils and my ears, trying to pour like treacle down into my mouth and choke me. There was no up, no down, no world.
There was just viscous blackness and the unforgettable smell of the warp.
A hand grasped me by the back of the jacket and yanked me up. Air. I spluttered, puking out filmy strings of phlegm stained black by the ooze.
'Gregor! Gregor!'
It was Rassi. He stood beside me, knee deep in the warp mud. God-Emperor, but his mind was strong. I'd have been dead already but for him.
He looked drawn and weak. Warp-induced pustules were spotting his face and
