Eisenhorn Omnibus

extremity of my position. I shook it off. It was unthinkable. The notion was revolting, inexcusable.

But it was also true. I did have something.

I had something more powerful than a Titan.

If I dared use it. If I had the audacity to unleash it.

Unthinkable. Unthinkable.

Cruor Vult thundered towards me through the ebbing steam.

I could hear the whine of the autoloaders in its massive gatling assembly connecting up fresh munition hoppers. I could see the beach pebbles at my feet, thousands of them, skipping slightly with every step it took.

'Bex…'

'Sir?'

'Get Kara and run. Go for the chapel.'

'Sir, I-'

Do it now, I willed and he sprang up, running fast.

I crawled over to the runestaff and grabbed its haft. It was hot to the touch, and sticky with blood.

Duclane Haar and Poul Rassi would have to serve as the sacrifice, I realised pragmatically, already disgusted with myself. There was no time, no opportunity to do anything more elaborate. As it was, I had scarcely any of the tools, devices, unguents, charms or wards that I would normally have believed necessary to undertake an action like this.

I caught myself. Until that very moment, I had never even considered undertaking an action like this, no matter the preparations.

Kneeling on the vitrified ground in the path of an oncoming Chaos Battle Titan, holding upright in bom hands a runestaff slick with the blood residue of two beloved friends, I began the incantations.

It was hard. Hard to remember word-perfect the pertinent verses of the Malus Codicium, a work I had studied on and off for years in secret. These were writings I had been eager to learn and understand, but which filled me with dread all the same. After my first sabbatical to study the Codicium, just a few months after the execution of its previous owner Quixos, I had been forced into retreat to recover, and required counselling from the abbots of the Sacred Heart monastery on Alsor.

Now I was trying to remember the same passages. Driving myself. Struggling to repeat writings I had once struggled to erase from my mind.

If I got even a word wrong, a phrasing, a point of vocabulary, we would all be dead at the hands of an evil far worse than Cruor Vult.

SIX

Chaos against Chaos.

The price.

The consequence.

A moment. A freezing classroom many years before. Titus Endor and myself, shivering in our seats at ebonwood desks eroded by the scratchings and carvings of a thousand previous pupils. We were merely eighteen days into our initial training as junior interrogators. Inquisitor Hapshant had stormed in, slammed the door, cast his stack of grimoires down on the main lectern – which made us both jump – and declared: A servant of the Inquisition who makes Chaos his tool against Chaos is a greater enemy of mankind than Chaos itself! Chaos knows the bounds of its own evil and accepts it. A servant of the Inquisition who uses Chaos is fooling himself, denies the truth, and damns us all by his delusion!'

On the lakeshore at Miquol, I was not fooling myself. I knew how desperate this gamble was.

Commodus Voke, dead fifty years by then, had once said to me… and I paraphrase for I did not record it word for word at the time – ''Know your enemy' is the greatest lie we own. Never submit to it. The radical path has its attractions, and I admit I have been tempted over the years of my life. But it is littered with lies. Once you look to the warp for answers, for knowledge to use against the arch-enemy, you are using Chaos. That makes you a practitioner. And you know what happens to practitioners, don't you, Eisenhorn? The Inquisition comes for them.'

* * *

On that desolate beach, I felt sure I could sort truth from lies. Voke had simply misunderstood the fineness of the line.

Midas Betancore had once, during a late night of drinking and Glavian rules regicide, said, 'Why do they do it? The radicals, I mean. Don't they understand that even getting close to the warp is suicide?'

With the runestaff in my hands, on that frozen island on Durer, I knew it wasn't suicide. It was the opposite.

Godwin Fischig, in a grave-field shrine on Cadia, had once warned me to stay away from any hint of radical sympathy. 'Trust me, Eisenhorn, if I ever thought you were, I'd shoot you myself!

It wasn't that simple. Emperor damn me, it just wasn't that simple! I thought of Quixos, such a brilliant man, such a stalwart servant of the Imperium, so totally polluted by treasonous evil because he had tried to understand the very filth he fought against. I had declared him heretic and executed him with my own hand. I understood the dangers.

Cruor Vult thundered towards me. I uttered the last of the potent syllables and dipped my mind into the warp. Not the simmering warp-scape of the Titan's mind-link, but the true warp. Channelled by the runestaff and warded by the prayers I had ritually intoned, I flowed into a vaster, darker void. I reached across the fabric of space towards Gudrun, far away, an entire sub-sector away, towards a private estate on the Insume Headland.

I reached into it, into a secret oubliette that had been vacuum sealed, warp- damped, void-shielded and locked with thirteen locks. Only I knew the codes to break down those barriers, for I had set them myself.

It was crumpled in the middle of the floor, wrapped in chains.

I woke it up. I set it free.

I jerked out of my trance. The runestaff bucked in my hands as the unleashed daemon energy flared through it.

I fought to retain my grip and to enunciate precisely the words of command and the specific instructions.

Like a small sun dawning, the enslaved daemon poured out of the head of the runestaff. Its radiance lit up the dismal shore and cast a long shadow out behind the Titan.

'Cherubael?' I whispered.

'Yessss…?'

'Kill it.'

* * *

Lightning crackled. A freak storm suddenly erupted over the lake, swirling the heavens and driving rain down in sheets, accompanied by fierce winds and catastrophic electrical displays.

A ghastly white thing, moving so rapidly it could only be registered as an afterimage on the retina, surged out of my staff and went straight into the black bulk of Cruor Vult.

The Titan hesitated, mid-step, one foot raised. It shuddered. Its great arms flailed for a moment. Then its chrome skull-face cracked, crazed and shattered, blowing out in a burst of sickly