known as the Darknight.
The effect is quite striking. For the space of fourteen days, the sky goes a cold, dark red, the hue of dried blood, and the moon, Kux, dominates the heavens, a peerlessly black orb surrounded by a crackling corona of writhing amber flame. This event has become – students of Imperial ritual will be unsurprised to learn – the key seasonal holiday for all Letheans. Fires of all shape, size and manner are lit as Darknight begins, and the population stands vigil to ensure that none go out until the eclipse ends. Industry is suspended. Leave is granted. Riotous carnivals and firelit parades spill through the cities. Licentiousness and law- breaking are rife.
Above it all, the dark fire of the eclipsed sun haloes the black moon. There is even a tradition of fortune-casting grown up around the interpretation of the corona's form.
I had hoped to catch the Beldame before Darknight began, but she was one step ahead of me. Her chief poisoner, Pye, who had learned his skills in early life as a prisoner of the renegade dark eldar, so the story went, managed to plant a toxin in my drinking water that would remain inert until I ingested the second component of its binary action.
I was a dead man. The Beldame had killed me.
My savant, Aemos, accidentally discovered the toxin in my body, and was able to prevent me from eating or drinking anything further. But graceless death beckoned me inexorably. My only chance of survival was to capture the Beldame and her vassal Pye and extract the solution to my doom from them.
Out in the dark streets of the city, my followers did their work. I had eighty loyal servants scouring the streets. In my rooms at the Hippodrome, I waited, parched, unsteady, distant.
Ravenor came up trumps. Ravenor, of course. With his promise, it wouldn't be long before he left the rank of interrogator behind and became a full inquisitor in his own right.
He found Beldame Sadia's lair in the catacombs beneath the derelict church of Saint Kiodrus. I hurried to respond to his call.
'You should stay here/ Bequin told me, but I shook her off.
'I have to do this, Alizebeth.'
Alizebeth Bequin was by that time one hundred and twenty-five years old. She was still as beautiful and as active as she had been in her thirties, thanks to discreet augmetic surgery and a regime of juvenat-drugs. Framed by the veil of her starch-silk dress, her handsome face and dark eyes glared atme.
'It will kill you, Gregor/ she said.
'If it does, then it is time for Gregor Eisenhorn to die.'
Bequin looked across the gloomy, candlelit room at Aemos, but he simply shook his ancient, augmented skull sadly. There were times, he knew, when there was simply no reasoning with me.
I went down into the street, where canister fires blazed and masked revellers capered and caroused. I was dressed all in black, with a floor length coat of heavy black leather.
Despite that, despite the flames around me, I was cold. Fatigue, and the lack of nourishment, were eating into my bones.
I looked at the moon. Threads of heat around a cold, black heart. Like me, I thought, like me.
A carriage had been called for. Six painted hippines, snorting and bridled, teamed to a stately landau. Several members of my staff waited nearby, and hurried forward when they saw me emerge onto the street.
I assessed them quickly. Good people all, or they wouldn't have made the cut to be here. With a few wordless gestures I pulled out four to accompany me and then sent the rest back to other duties.
The four chosen mounted the carriage with me. Mescher Qus, an ex-Imperial Guardsman from Vladislav; Arianrhod Esw Sweydyr, the swordswoman from Carthae; and Beronice and Zu Zeng, two females from Bequin's Distaff.
At the last moment, Beronice was ordered out of the carriage and Alize-beth Bequin took her place. Bequin had quit active service with me sixty-eight standard years before in order to develop and run her Distaff, but there were still times she didn't trust her people and insisted on accompanying me herself.
I realised this was just such a time because Bequin didn't expect me to survive and wanted to be with me to the end. In truth, I didn't expect to survive either.
The carriage started off with a whipcrack, and we rambled through the streets, skirting around ceremonial fires and torchlit processions.
None of us spoke. Qus checked and loaded his autocannon and adjusted his body armour. Arianrhod drew her sabre and tested the cutting edge with one of her own head hairs. Zu Zeng, a native of Vitria, sat with her head down, her long glass robes clinking with the carriage's motion.
Bequin stared at me.
'What?' I asked eventually.
She shook her head and looked away.
The church of Saint Kiodrus lay in the waterfowlers' district, close to the edge of the city and the vast, lizard-haunted salt-licks. The darkness throbbed with insect rhythms.
The carriage stopped in a street of blackly rotting stone pilings, two hundred metres short of the church's wrecked silhouette. The sky was amber darkness. Behind us, the city was alive with bright points of fire. The neighbourhood around us was a dead ruin, slowly submitting to the salty hunger of the marshes.
Talon wishes Thorn, rapturous beasts within/ Ravenor said over the vox- link.
Thorn impinging multifarious, the blades of disguise/ I responded. My throat was dry and hoarse.
Talon observes moment. Torus pathway requested, pattern ebony.'
'Pattern denied. Pattern crucible. Rose thorn wishes hiatus/
'Confirm/
We spoke using Glossia, an informal verbal code known only to my staff. Even on an open vox-channel, our communications would be impenetrable to the foe.
I adjusted my vox-unit's channel.
Thorn wishes aegis, to me, pattern crucible/
'Aegis arising/ Betancore, my pilot, responded from far away. 'Pattern confirmed/
My gun-cutter, with its fabulous firepower, was now inbound. I looked to the others in the shadows as I drew my weapon.
'Now is the time/1 told them.
We edged into the gloomy, slime-swathed ruins of the church. There was a heady stink of wet corruption in the air and sheens of salt clung to every surface. Clusters of maggot-like worms ate into the stones, and flinched back as the fierce beams of our flashlights found them.
Qus ran point, his autocannon swinging from side to side, hunting targets with the red laser rangefinder that projected from the corner of his bionically enhanced left eye. He was a stocky man, rippling with muscle under his harness of ceramite armour. He had painted his blunt face in the colours of his old regiment, the 90th Vladislavan.
Arianrhod and I tailed him. She'd dulled her sabre's blade with brick dust but still it hooked the light as she turned it in her hands. Arianrhod Esw Sweydyr was well over two metres tall, quite the tallest human woman I have ever met, though such stature is common amongst the people of far away Carthae. Her long-boned frame was clad in a leather bodysuit embossed with bronze studs, over which she wore a long, tasselled cloak of patchwork hide. Her silver hair was plaited with beads. The sabre was called Barbarisater and had been carried by women of the Esw Sweydyr tribe for nineteen generations. From the braided grip to the tip of
