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encounters over the years, and were now even when it came to owing each other our lives.

He knew me well enough not to press this.

Not now, at least.

An interrogator hurried into the room.

'Sirs,' she said. 'Inquisitor Roban wishes you to know that we have made contact with one of the heretics.'

AS FAR AS could be learned, the rogue was an alpha-plus psyker called Esarhaddon, one of the leaders of the coven. Sowing tumult

and woe in his wake, he had fled into the hive with a group led by Lyko and Heldane in pursuit. Heldane had managed to contact one

of Voke's astropaths with a scrambled summons for help.

Voke, Roban and I headed out into the hive streets with a kill team of sixty that included the four White Consuls. Their squad leader

was a particularly large sergeant called Kurvel. We travelled on foot through the debris and smoke. Gangs of citizens jeered and pelted

missiles at us, but the sight of four terrible Space Marines kept them at bay.

Esarhaddon, Voke warned me, was a being of dreadful intellect and not to be underestimated. When we saw the monster's choice of

bolt-hole, I understood what Voke meant.

THE NOBLE FAMILY of Lange was prominent in the aristocracy of Thracian Primaris, and kept an ample summer palace in the east

sector of Hive Primaris, near to the mercantile quarter where they had made their fortunes.

The palace rose proud of the lowhab streets around it, swathed in its own force bubble.

This had been one of the city areas we had supposed to be secure. With their power and resources, noble houses should have been able

to protect themselves for the duration of the unrest.

But not against Esarhaddon. He was inside, with all the resources of the palace to protect him.

We met Heldane on the western approach road to the palace. He had a team of about twenty with him. The street itself was littered

with bodies, most of them citizens.

'He's controlling the crowds as if they were puppets,' Heldane said curtly, with no word of greeting. 'Waves of them keep coming at

us, preventing us getting to the garden walls and the servants' annex along there.'

As I may have said, I had little time for Inquisitor Heldane. A very tall, grim man, his face an unsightly mass of scar tissue since an

encounter with a hungry carnodon back on Gudran. He'd been Voke's pupil when I had first met him; now he was a full inquisitor,

with mental powers, it was said, that exceeded even his old master's. As I saw him there, I shuddered. He had undergone extensive

surgery, not to disguise the damage to his face, but to exaggerate it. His skull seemed to have been extended into an almost equine

shape, with a snout-like mouth full of blunt teeth, and dark, murky eyes. Fibre-wires and fluid tubes braided his cranium in place of

hair. He wore plasteel body armour the colour of blood and carried a segmented power glaive.

'Eisenhorn,' he nodded, noticing me. It was like having a warhorse shake its head in my direction.

'They're coming again!' The cry went up from Heldane's men. Down the street, moving through the fire spills, figures were lurching

towards us.

Weapons! Stand ready! Heldane had spoken, but not with his voice. His psychic command shook through our skulls and some of our

own troopers looked dismayed.

Missiles rained down on us, and the Interior Guardsmen raised an umbrella of riot shields. Small arms fired at us too, and an arbites

near me fell with his knee buckled the wrong way.

Our attackers, some hundred or more, were hive citizens, blank faced and moving like marionettes. As Heldane had reported, some

monumental psychic force was making puppets out of them. The smoky night air ionised with the psionic backwash.

I take no pleasure in actions like the one that followed. The beast Esarhaddon was forcing us to fight innocent civilians just to protect

ourselves.

Maybe he thought we'd shrink from the task and leave him alone.

We, however, were the Inquisition.

Kurvel led his White Consuls at the front, banging their weapons against their chest-plates and howling defiance through their helmet

speakers. I saw a promethium bomb strike one and shatter, swathing him in liquid flame. He simply strode on.

We fired over the mob's heads, trying to break them, but they had no will of their own. Our firing became kill-shots. In ten minutes,

we had reluctantly added a fair number to the planet's rising death toll.

That brought us to the corner of the street, facing the high walls of the garden and the edge of the palace's iridescent force shield itself.

I could hear a low chuckling in my head.

Esarhaddon.

Where's Lyko? I heard Voke ask Heldane psychically.

He took a team around the front to try and disable the force wall.

'You idiot!' I said, out loud, looking over at Heldane. 'This monster can control a crowd that big and you mind-speak this close to

him?'

'This monster,' Heldane replied, 'can read every mind in the city and beyond. He knows what we're all doing. There is no point in

secrecy. Just effort. Is that beyond you?'

'How long until the next attack?' Kurvel asked, reloading his weapon.

'They've become less frequent since we first arrived,' replied Heldane. 'However long it takes Esarhaddon to mind-search the

surrounding habs and recruit another puppet force. He's having to cast his net wider each time.'

'How did he get in there?' Roban asked.

Heldane simply shook his head and shrugged. Roban, a robust inquisitor of middle years dressed in brown and yellow layered robes,

was a good man, though I didn't know him well. But he was an outspoken Xanthanite and the ultra-puritan Heldane had little time for

him.

Voke and Heldane fell to discussing possible assault plans with Kurvel as the soldiers around us formed a defensive position.

'This is a damned thankless task,' Roban said to me. 'I don't even know why we're here!'

'Cannon fodder,' said his youthful interrogator, Inshabel, bluntly, and it made us both laugh.

'There has to be something…' I said. I took out my pocket scope and tried to read the energy patterns and spectrums.

'You!' I called to one of the arbites in our party, a grizzled precinct commander in full riot gear.

'Inquisitor?'

'What's your name?'

'Lucius, sir.'

'Dear God-Emperor!' I sighed again and Roban laughed once more.

'Okay, Luckless - this palace must come into your precinct's patrol area.'

'Yes, sir.'

'So street security around it is your responsibility.'

'Again, yes sir.'

'So… just as a matter of procedure, your section house will have on file the shield type and harmonics for the palace, in case of

emergencies.' In my experience, it was standard protocol for any arbites precinct to know such things about key structures within their

purview.

'It's classified, sir.'

'Of course it is,' I sighed again. 'But now would be a good time.

He got on his vox-link and after a lot of effort, managed to get a channel open to the section house.

'You're on to something, aren't you?' Roban asked me.

'Maybe.'

'The wily Inquisitor Eisenhom—'

'The what?'

'No offence. Your reputation precedes you.'

'Does it now? In a good way?'

Roban grinned and shook his head, like a man who might have heard something, but who had decided to make up his own mind.

'IT'S AN OLD type-ten conical void,' Arbites Commander Lucius reported presently. 'Tangent eight-seven-eight harmonic wave. We

don't have an override code. Lady Lange wouldn't permit it.'

'I bet she wishes she had now,' said Interrogator Inshabel, caustic and to the point once again. I was beginning to like him.

'Thank you, Luckless,' I said.

'It's… Lucius, sir.'

'I know.'

I tried to remember everything Aemos had counselled me about shields over the years. I wished I had his recall. Better still, I wished I

had him here.

'We can collapse it,' I said, with fair confidence.

'Collapse a void shield?' Roban asked.

'It's conical… super-surface only. And it's old. Voids shrug off just about anything, but they don't retain their field if you take out one

or more of the projectors.

'That buttress there, the one the garden wall is built around, that's got to be one of the projector units, seated down into the ground.'

Roban nodded, apparently impressed. 'I see the logic, but not the practice.'

I walked over to Brother-Sergeant Kurvel, interrupting his conversation with Heldane without apology, and explained what I wanted

to do.

Heldane scoffed at once. 'Lyko's already trying that!'

'How?'

'He's located the outer controls at the front gate and is trying to break their coding…'

'Coding and controls that will be dead and locked out thanks to Esarhaddon. Lyko's wasting his time. We can't switch this off. We

can't break Esarhaddon's control over its system. But we can undermine the system itself.'

Heldane was about to speak again, but Voke shut him up.

'I think Gregor may be on to something.'

'Why?'

Voke pointed. Close to five hundred citizens were now advancing towards us from streets on all sides.

'Because as you pointed out, Heldane, the monster can hear us, and he clearly doesn't like the sound of this plan.'

IT TOOK KURVEL about ten minutes to gouge out the pavement and a section of garden wall with his lightning claw, and all the while

we were under attack from the growing mob of puppets.

'Sewer!' Kurvel announced.

I turned to the others as shots and missiles rained down. 'Commodus… you have to hold them off a while longer.'

'Count on it,' he said.

'Roban, get a small squad and follow me.'

Heldane wasn't happy. But by then, Heldane wasn't calling the shots any more. I believe he took his rage out on the enslaved citizens.

I DROPPED INTO the sewer hole with Kurvel, Roban, Inshabel and three troopers of the Interior Guard. The defence on the street above

could barely spare any of them.

The filthy sewer tube went in under the wall itself before dropping sharply away. Old, patched stone swelled around the base of the

buttress. The stone was warm, and foamy clumps of fungus were growing on it.

Inshabel trained a spotbeam in so I could see.

Kurvel could see in the dark. He took out his last two krak grenades and fixed them to the stonework with smears of adhesive paste

from a tube he carried in his pack.

'I wish we had more. We could blow the wall right through.'

'We could, brother-sergeant, but this might be better.'

'Why?'

'Because if we can simply make this projector fail, the energies of the shield will short out before they collapse. Rather than blowing

outwards, that'll cause an electromagnetic pulse within the field itself. And I think an EM pulse is the last thing Esarhaddon wants

right now.'

As if to prove my suspicions right, a stabbing sheet of psychic power lashed at us. Esarhaddon had realised his vulnerability, and was

turning his immense power on us now. The puppets had been sport, but now it was time to control or blast out the minds of his hunters

before they stopped being playthings and became a danger.

The psyker attack was devastating. Two of the Interior guardsmen simply died. Another started firing, hitting Kurvel twice and

wounding Inshabel. Regretfully, Roban blasted the trooper down with his laspistol.

Our minds were harder to attack, especially given the shield formed by the rock above us and our proximity to the energy flux of the

shield.

But Roban, Inshabel, Kurvel and I would be dead or homicidal in seconds.

How I wished for Alizebeth, or any of the Distaff right then.

'Trigger it! Trigger it!' I gasped, the blood vessels in my nose and throat opening yet again that day.

'We're right on top of the—'

'Just do it, brother-sergeant! In the name of the God-Emperor!'

THE BLAST TOOK out the projector. It filled the sewer tunnel with flickering destruction. It would have killed us but for the fact that

Brother-Sergeant Kurvel shielded us with his massive armoured body.

It cost him his life.

I have made a point to have his name and memory celebrated by the Primarch of the White Consuls.

WITH THE GENERATING projector killed, the void shield collapsed in on itself, blacking out the palace systems with the thunderclap of

electromagnetic rage.

Blacking out Esarhaddon's seething mind too.

My research into untouchables, through Alizebeth and then through the Distaff she created and ran, had indicated to me that perhaps

psychic power, no matter how potent, relied in the final analysis on the electrical workings of the human mind, the firing of impulse

charges between synapses. Untouchables somehow blanked this, and triggered a disturbing and disarming vacancy in the natural and

fundamental processes of the human brain. That, I had initially concluded, was why psykers don't work around untouchables… and

why forgetfulness and unease is prevalent in their company. And, ultimately, why they disturb and upset humans so, and psykers

doubly so.

I'd turned the old void shield into a brief, bright untouchable event.

And now, Emperor damn him, the heretic psyker Esarhaddon, temporarily rendered deaf, blind and mute, was mine.

EIGHT

ESARHADDON?S LAIR.

LYKO THE VICTOR.

A VESTIGE.

WE WENT INTO the grounds of the Lange palace over the wall. There was a harsh stink of ozone from the ruptured shield, and the

trimmed fruit trees and laraebur hedges of the gardens were singed and smouldering.

With Roban and Inshabel, I ran down a flint-chip path between the servants' wing and the east portico. Flashlights and under-muzzle

torches bobbed in the gardens behind us as Heldane led the main force of our troop round to the garden terrace.

The house was dead and dark, all power killed by the pulse. The main doors on the east portico lay splintered on the mosaic floor