The blast, a series of explosions piled on top of one another, ripped back down the colonnade and blew out the galleries and the glass roof. Debris and ash washed back through the arch.
Before the smoke even began to clear, the Volpone stormed the room, yelling and firing. Whatever else he thought about them, Gaunt had to give the Bluebloods their due. They were finely trained, ruthlessly effective heavy troops. He’d seen their worth on Monthax. Now they were proving it again.
With his bolt pistol and chainsword drawn, Gaunt ploughed into the colonnade after them, followed by Isak and the Croe guards, with Daur and Sturm left to assist Chass. Kowle simply wandered along behind.
The place was a ruin. Dismembered or support-severed servitors littered the wooden wreckage. One puppet, which had been standing on a now-collapsed balcony, swung above their heads like a corpse in a gibbet.
The Bluebloods fanned out, moving down side halls, exchanging fire with lifeless defenders.
“Which way?” Gaunt asked Chass, but the wounded man was only semiconscious.
“The audience hall is down to the left,” Isak said.
“What did you mean, the smell was Chaos?” asked Chass suddenly swimming awake.
“The filth that corrupted Ferrozoica is here. It’s got inside House Sondar, permeating everything. Probably why the bastard turned the Shield off. Kowle said Sondar was wired directly into the hive’s systems. I’d lay bets that’s how it got to him, infecting him like a disease.”
“You mean the hive systems are corrupted too?”
“No—but Sondar has listened to lies that have come directly into his mind. The fact they say he was mad to begin with can’t help.” He checked ahead and saw the large double-doors to the chamber. “With me!” Gaunt yelled, his chainsword buzzing murderously. The Volpone fireteam formed up behind him and had to run to keep up.
Gaunt burst through the doors and clashed directly with more servitor puppets in the entrance lobby. His chainsword cut through support wires and flesh. He hacked clear of their murderous attentions as Gilbear and his men came in behind, finishing the rest.
The audience chamber was large and softly lit. The air was warm and now so much thicker with the taint-smell. Muslin wall drapes twitched in the ventilator breeze. On the far side of the room sat a large, iron tank—its shell rich with verdigris from its brass fittings—fashioned with a single, baleful porthole in the front.
“I see you. What are you?” asked an electronic voice that came from all around.
Gaunt walked towards the awareness tank. “I am the agency of Imperial authority on this world.”
“I am the authority here,” said the voice. “I am the High Master of Vervun-hive. You are nothing. I see you and you are nothing. Begone.”
“Salvador Sondar—if you still answer to that name—your power is ended. In the name of the God-Emperor of Mankind and for the continued welfare of this subject planet, I order you to surrender yourself to the Imperial Guard.”
“Surrender?”
“Do it. You will not enjoy the alternative.”
“You have nothing that threatens me. Nothing to tempt me. Heritor Asphodel has promised me this world in totality. The chatter has told me this.”
“Asphodel is the spawn of the warp, and his promises are meaningless. I give you one last chance to comply.”
“And I give you this.”
The servitor came into the room through a doorway concealed by muslin drapes. Sondar’s macabre fascination with his meat-toys was infamous in the noble houses, and many efforts had been made to curtail his surgical whims and clone-farming over the years.
This thing was far more than that, more even than the deluded creation of a mad flesh-engineer. The insanity of the warp was in it: eighteen hundred kilos of scarred meat and gristle, bigger than a Hyrkan antlerdon, a jigsaw of human parts fused into the carcass of a wild auroch from the grasslands. Limbs twisted and writhed around it, some human with grasping hands, some animal, some wet, glistening pseudopods like the muscular feet of giant molluscs. The massive head was an eyeless mouth full of needle teeth, that smacked slackly and gurgled. The donor auroch’s vast horns swept outwards from the low skull crest. A multitude of cables, feeds and wires suspended it, but unlike the other meat puppets, this thing moved of its own volition, pawing and stamping the soft carpet, writhing and pulsing.
The smell was overwhelming.
Gilbear and the Volpone backed off a few paces in astonishment. Sturm cried out in horror and one of the House Croe bodyguards turned and ran.
The meat-beast came for them, moving with a speed and fluidity that seemed impossible for something so vast. It howled as it came, a piercing, sibilant shriek of rage. Gaunt leapt aside and was knocked over by a flailing pseudopod. The slime burned through his leather coat where it touched.
Gilbear fired twice, blowing open holes in the lower belly of the thing. These issued spurts of stagnant pus onto the carpet. Then the Blueblood colonel was flying through the air, tossed aside by a twist of the huge horns.
Backing frantically, the other Volpone fired wildly. Blubbery, wet punctures appeared in the creature’s flank, some oozing filmy fluid, others erupting with sprays of tissue and watery blood. A cloned human arm was blown right off and lay twitching on the ground.
A screaming Volpone was hoisted into the air and shaken violently to death, impaled through the chest on one of the horns. Another was crushed under the meat-beast’s bulk, leaving a trampled mess of blood, bone and broken armour pressed into the carpet. Grasping limbs and curling pseudopods caught hold of a third and began to pull him apart, slowly and inexorably. His agonised wailing drowned out the meat-beast’s keening roar.
Gaunt scrambled up, dazed, and shot the clasped Volpone through the head to end his drawn-out death. He fired again and again, until the sickle clip of his bolt gun was empty, the powerful close-range shots blowing chunks of raw meat and translucent fat out of the creature. Blood and ichor spurted from the wounds.
The monster wheeled round at Gaunt, wailing. Head down, it charged him and the horns, one still decorated with the limp corpse of the Volpone soldier, smashed into the chamber wall, gouging the ceramite facing. Gaunt dived aside, swinging his chainsword round with both hands. The purring blade sliced through the top of the skull and chopped one of the horns off. Then Gaunt was rolling away again, trying to stay out of reach of the biting maw that chased after him, drooling spittle. With its attention on Gaunt, the meat-beast had turned away from the remaining Volpone and they resumed firing, ripping into the thing’s hindquarters but apparently doing nothing to slow it down.
Gaunt knew that daemonic force pulsed inside the beast, a life-energy that animated it beyond any considerations of physical function. If there was a brain or any vital organs at all, they would be useless as targets. The thing wasn’t alive in any real sense. It couldn’t be killed the way a human could be killed.
Daur was firing too now, as were the remaining House Croe guards, and Kowle had scooped up the weapon of a dead Volpone, adding his own shots to the fight. Chass was slumped limply in a corner, unconscious. There was no sign of Sturm.
Gaunt hacked into the thing again, ripping through ribs. His
