injector tube clutched in each hand.
'Dead! Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead!' he warbled.
He had injected me with the secondary part of the poison.
I fell over, my muscles already cramping.
'How does it feel, inquisitor?' Pye chuckled, capering towards me.
'Emperor damn you/ I gasped and shot him through the face. I blacked out.
When I came round, Beldame Sadia had me by the throat and was shaking me with her augmetic mandibles.
'I want you awake!' she hissed, her veil falling back and the toxin sacs in her wizened cheeks bulging. 'I want you awake to feel this!'
Her head exploded in a spray of bone shards and tissue. The spider carriage went into convulsions and threw me across the chapel. It continued to scuttle and dance, her corpse jerking slackly from it, for a full minute before it collapsed.
I was face down on the floor, and I tried to turn, but the advancing effect of the poison was shutting me down.
Shutting me down hard.
Massive feet strode into my field of vision. Armoured feet, plated with ceramite.
I rolled as best I could and looked up.
Witchfinder Tantalid stood over me, holstering the boltgun he had used to kill Beldame Sadia. He was encased in gold-encrusted battle armour, the pennants of the Ministorum suspended over his back plate.
'You are an accursed heretic, Eisenhorn. And I claim your life.'
Not Tantalid, I thought as my consciousness spun away again. Not Tantalid. Not now.
TWO
Something so typically Betancore. My fallen.
The summons.
From the moment I slipped into unconsciousness at the feet of the vicious Witchfinder Tantalid, I knew nothing more until I woke, twenty-nine hours later, aboard my gun-cutter. I remembered nothing about the seven attempts to shock my system back to life, the cardiac massages, the anti- venom shots injected directly into my heart muscle, the fight to make me live again. I learned all about it later, as I slowly recovered. For days, I was as weak as a feline whelp.
Most particularly, I knew nothing about the way Tantalid had been denied. Bequin told me, a day or two after my first awakening. It had been something so typically Betancore.
Alizebeth had been hard on my heels up the stairs from the sacrarium, in time to see Tantalid's arrival. She had known him at once. The Witchfinder is notorious throughout the sub-sector.
He'd been about to kill me, and I was unconscious at his feet, going into anaphylactic shock with the venom bonding and seething in my veins.
She'd cried out, fumbling for her weapon.
Then light – hard, powerful light – had streamed in through the stained glass windows. There was a roaring sound. My gun-cutter, its lamps on full beam, rose to a hover over the rained chapel, lighting up the night. Guessing what was about to follow, Bequin had thrown herself down.
Betancore's voice had boomed out from the hull tannoy of the hovering gunship.
'Imperial Inquisition! Step away from the inquisitor now!'
Tantalid had squinted up into the glare, his stringy tortoise head turning in the rim of his massive carapace armour.
'Ministorum officer!' he had yelled back, his voice amplified by his suit's vox-unit. 'Back off! Back off now! This heretic is mine!'
Bequin grinned as she told me Betancore's response. 'Never argue with a gun- cutter, you asshole.'
The slaved servitors in the cutter's blunt wingtips opened fire, hosing the chapel with autocannon shells. The stained glass windows had all shattered, statues had been decapitated, flagstones had disintegrated. Hit at least once, Tantalid had fallen backwards into the dust and debris. His body had not been found, so I presumed the bastard had survived. But he had been smart enough to flee.
My prone body had not been touched, even though the chapel around me had been peppered with fire.
Typical Betancore bravado. Typical Betancore finesse.
She was just like her damned father.
'Send her to me/ I told Bequin as I lay back in my cot, half-dead and feeling terrible.
Medea Betancore looked in a few minutes later. Like her father, Midas, she was clad in the red-piped black suit of a Glavian pilot, and she proudly wore his old cerise, embroidered jacket.
Her skin, like Midas's, like all that of all Glavians, was dark. She grinned at me.
'I owe you,' I said.
Medea shook her head. 'Nothing my father wouldn't have done.' She sat on the foot of my cot.
'He'd have killed Tantalid, though,' she decided.
'He was a better shot/
That grin again, pearl white teeth framed by ebony skin.
'Yeah, he was that/
'But you'll do/ I smiled.
She saluted and left.
Midas Betancore had been dead for twenty-six years. I missed him still. He was the closest thing to a friend I had ever had. Bequin and Aemos, they were allies, and I trusted them with my life. But Midas…
May the God-Emperor rot Fayde Thuring for taking him. May the God-Emperor lead me to Fayde Thuring one day so that I and Medea may avenge Midas.
Medea had never known her father. She'd been born a month after his death, raised by her mother on Glavia, and had come into my service by chance. I was her godfather, a promise to Midas. Duty bound, I had visited Glavia for her ascension to adulthood, and watched her drive a Glavia long-prow through the vortex rapids of the Stilt Hills
during the Rites of Majority. One glimpse of her skills had convinced me.
Arianrhod Esw Sweydyr was dead. So were Gonvax and Qus. The battle in the sacrarium had been fierce. Ravenor had killed the raging haemoncu-lus, but only after it had ripped open his belly and taken off Zu Zeng's left ear.
Gideon Ravenor was in intensive care in the main city infirmary of Lethe. We would collect him once he was out of danger.
I wondered how long that would be. I wondered how he would be. He had loved Arianrhod, loved her dearly. I prayed this loss would not set him back too far.
I mourned Qus and the swordswoman. Qus had been with, me for nineteen years. That Darknight in the chapel had robbed me of so much.
Qus was buried with full honours in the Imperial Guard Memorial Cenotaph at Lethe Majeure. Arianrhod was burned on a bare hill west of the salt-licks. I was too weak to attend either service.
Aemos brought the sabre Barbarisater to me after the pyre. I wrapped it in a vizzy-dofh and a silk sheet. I knew I was duty bound to return it to the tribal elders of the Esw Sweydyr on Carthae
