Tanks and armoured carriers wallowed and puffed through the wet mud and up onto the tongue-like ramps of heavy lifters. Shells and las-fire flickered across the lakes and mud as the remaining heretic forces fought on heedless.
Lances and forks of dazzling energy bit down from the clouds, murdering the landscape. Obeying Molitor's instructions to the letter, Admiral Spatian was levelling the area. All five of us inquisitors, along with Cynewolf and key Deathwatchers and selected officers of the invasion force, had been given the code words to unleash this doom. Molitor had sealed our fate. Once given, Sanction Extremis could not be revoked, even if my vox had been working instead of crippled by the electromagnetic bursts that accompanied every orbital strike. As per the battle plans, Spatian was systematically wasting the invasion site as fast as possible, even at the cost of his own retreating ground forces.
Another saruthi edifice, twenty kilometres away, died. Shaped in a form that suggested a nautilus shell, its opalescent curves were cracked and split by blue-hot heavy lasers. The die-straight beams came down through the clouds from ships so far up they were invisible, and tore through the edifice like testamental judgment. Waves of fighter-bombers swept in, sowing payloads of munitions that bloomed in rippling seas of explosions. Guided warheads, sleek like airborne sharks, whined overhead on the last stage of their first and final journey from starship to target.
The edifice ruptured and blew out. Light-shock lit the hemisphere. A towering column of white ash-smoke rose, folding into a fifteen-kilometre torus-shaped cloud.
The sight was stunning, shocking. Bequin and I gazed at it. A few heartbeats later it was repeated behind us, forty kilometres distant, as another saruthi edifice was annihilated.
The edifice on whose smoothly curving upper surfaces we now stood was undoubtedly going to go the same way soon. Even now, I knew, the co-ordinates were being loaded into the fleet's gunnery servitors.
We ran along the lip of another curved segment. Afterburners red against the black smoke, more dropships came in, heading towards cheering, gesticulating huddles of Mirepoix infantry out on the flats. I was astounded at the selfless courage of the dropship crews. Spatian's bombardment wasn't waiting for them to move in and pull out. They were risking everything to make the surface run and retrieve as many troopers as they could.
'Gregor!' Bequin shouted in my ear.
I turned. Down the shell-form span of the roof behind us, Molitor and his henchman had appeared out of the blast hole. Unsteady, they scrambled up after us.
A las-shot whined past me, kissing the pearly surface and leaving a burn- scar.
'The primer, you whoreson bastard! Give me the primer!' Molitor yelled.
I gave him a full clip of bolt rounds instead.
The first of the thundering tracer shots splintered chunks out of the edifice roof. Then I hit and exploded his left thigh, his belly and his throat.
Konrad Molitor bucked and twitched as the rounds tore through him, and then fell. His mauled body slid down the curve of the roof and disappeared, leaving a smear of blood behind it.
His henchman advanced, heedless of the shots, throwing off his hooded robe.
He was naked beneath it. Tall, well muscled, with a golden cast to his skin. His face was handsome and tiny residual horns sprouted from his skull.
His eyes were blank.
My prophetic dreams were made flesh.
Terror seized me, turned my heart inside out.
TWEJMTY-SIX
Cherubael.
The brink.
Exterminatus.
The blank-eyed man – though in truth he was not a man, but a daemon in human form – strode up the shining curve towards me. The glowing octahedron of the saruthi's unholy text was clasped in one nimble hand.
'I would like the primer now please, Gregor.'
What
'This is no place for introductions/ He gestured about himself. Lances of annihilation blasted down into the mud-flats nearby.
'Humour me…' I managed.
Very well. My name is Cherubael. Now, that primer. Time is ticking away.'
Time will always tick away/ I said. 'Who made you?'
'Made me?' The blank-eyed man smiled at me duplicitously.
'You're… a
He laughed and licked his thin lips with a glossy forked tongue.
'Let us both be abundantly clear about this,
hooks, and burn out your agony centres as I wait for the bombardment to flatten this place/
He paused.
'Your choice/
You've been in my dreams for a long while now. Why is that?' I pressed.
'You are gifted, Gregor. And time is not the arrow that humans like to think it is. A second in the warp would show you that. Why, a second in the four-dimensional habitats of the saruthi should have proved it too. Your dreams were just nightmares of something yet to happen/
'Who made you?' My voice was insistent. His answer was the one I least expected, and it left me all but stunned.
The Holy Inquisition made me, Gregor. A brother of yours made me. Now, for the last time, give me that-'
The daemonhost swung around suddenly as voices called out from lower down the roof. Brother-Captain Cynewolf was clambering up out of the blast hole, flanked by Midas and another Deathwatcher carrying the limp form of Titus Endor.
Cynewolf raised his storm bolter and fired at the blank-eyed man.
Cherubael reached out and caught the glowing shells, plucking them out of the air.
'Go home, Astartes bastard!' he yelled down the sloping roof at Cynewolf. 'This has nothing to do with you!'
The fiend came up the ridge until he was facing me. I could see the tiny arcs of power darting across his glowing skin. I could smell the stink of corruption.
Eye to eye now.
He held out his hand, palm up, fingernails long and polished like claws.
'Clever of you to find an untouchable to cancel me out/ He looked over at Bequin. 'How did you manage that?'
'Fate, like time, is not linear, Cherubael. Surely you know that. I found Bequin in the same way that the dreams of you found me/
He nodded. 'I like you, Gregor Eisenhorn. So very challenging and stimulating – for a human. I wish we had leisure to discourse and break bread… But we haven't!' he snapped suddenly. 'Give me the primer!'
