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where the accompanying wave of overpressure from the void collapse had blown them in. All of the windows were smashed holes too.

Photo-receptors and climate controls in the portico's polished blue-wood panels were fused and charred. Smoke and the glow of

flames issued from deeper in the palace.

We pushed further in, finding dead house staff and inert servitors. A whole suite of state rooms on the first floor was burning where

ornate promethium lamps had been knocked over.

We checked the rooms on each side as we progressed. Roban led the way, sweeping his braced laspistol from side to side.

'How long?' Inshabel asked me.

'Until?'

'Until he recovers from the pulse?'

I didn't know. There was no telling how badly we'd hurt Esarhaddon, or how resilient his mind was. We hadn't got long.

On the second floor, a flight of aethercite steps brought us up into a grand banqueting hall. The roof, a turtleback of toughened glass,

had fallen in and the psi-storms crackled and surged in the sky far above. Every step crunched glass or disturbed debris.

There were bodies here too, the bodies of nobility and servants intermingled.

I heard movement and sobbing from an adjoining antechamber.

The wretched occupants of the room gasped in terror as our flashlights found them. A handful of survivors from the household,

cowering in fear in the dark. Many displayed signs of psychic burns or telekinetic welts.

'Imperial Inquisition,' I said firmly but quietly. 'Stay calm. Where is Esarhaddon?'

Some flinched or moaned at the sound of the name. A regal dowager in a torn pearlescent gown curled up in the corner and began

weeping.

'Quickly… there's little time! Where is he?' I thought to use my will to spur them into an answer, but their minds had been tortured

enough already that night. Even a mild mental probe might kill some of them.

'W-when the lights went out, he ran… ran towards the west exit,' said a blood-soaked man dressed in what I presumed was the

uniform of the House Lange bodyguard.

'Can you show us?'

'My leg's broken…'

'Someone else then! Please!'

'Frewa… you go. Frewa!' The bodyguard gestured to a terrified page boy crouching behind a column.

'Come on, lad, show us the way,' Roban said encouragingly.

The boy got to his feet, his eyes white with fear. I wasn't sure if he was more afraid of Esarhaddon or the inquisitors looming over

him.

A COMMUNICATING HALLWAY ran from the rear of the banquet hall west towards the house's private landing platform. Specks of blood

and glass twinkled along its tiled floor.

I felt what seemed to me a breath of wind on my skin. An exit to the outside, perhaps?

Heavy blast shutters were prised open in the entrance to the gloomy loading dock. Past the shadowy shapes of several slumped,

dormant cargo servitors, stood a main hatchway through which cold exterior light flickered.

My weapon raised, I waved Roban and Inshabel round to the right. The page boy cowered back in the doorway. The air quality was

changing, as if the atmosphere itself was stiffening and drawing tight. Like some great force gathering its breath.

Esarhaddon was recovering, I was certain.

Livid green light suddenly bathed the loading dock, a psychometric flare accompanying a burst of savage psionic power. Roban and I

staggered, our lungs squeezed and fingers of telekinesis thrusting at our minds. Inshabel cried out as he was bowled over from behind

by the page boy, Frewa. Dull-eyed and frothing at the mouth, the boy had been reduced, in an instant, to a mindless puppet. Inshabel

fought, but the boy was feral, and despite the interrogator's superior bulk he was pinned.

The pain in my head was intense, but I knew Esarhaddon must still be way below full strength. I raised the strongest mind shield my

abilities were able to conjure and moved forward.

There was a sudden grind of servo-gears. A large steel paw swung at my head and I dived back.

A cargo servitor, its metal carapace caked with verdigris, rose up to its full height of three metres and clanked across the deck towards

me on squat hydraulic legs. Plumes of steam squirted from its broad shoulder joints as it pistoned its arms at me again. Hot yellow

dots of light burned in the eye sockets of its dented visor.

Despite its mechanical appearance, the cargo drone, like all servitors, was built around human organic components: brain, brain-stem,

neural network, glands so Esarhaddon could control it just like a standard human.

It swung at me again, and missed. The slicing limb had cut the air with a distinct whistle.

It was built like a great simian: squat legs, barrel chest, wide shoulders and long, thick arms. Ideal for hefting heavy cargo items into

the belly-hold of a liftship.

Ideal for smashing a human body into gory paste.

Roban cried out a warning. A second, larger cargo servitor with a long quadruped body, was also moving. Its body casing was pitted,

brown metal and it had a fork-lifter assembly where its head should have been, giving it the appearance of a bull. The greased black

forks of the lifter lurched at Roban, who fired six or seven shots that dented or bounced off the machine's chassis.

I ducked two more slow, heavy blows from the ape-servitor. We were losing precious time. With every tick of the clock, Esarhaddon

was recovering and becoming more powerful.

I put a bolt round into the thickest part of the servitor's body and rocked it back, the gears and pistons of its legs whining as they

compensated for the recoil.

My power sword was out now, the blade burning. Blessed for me by the Provost of Inx, it was my weapon of choice. My

swordsmanship had always been good, but Arianrhod had instructed me in the Carthaen Ewl Wyla Scryi before her death. Ewl Wyla

Scryi, literally, ''the genius of sharpness'', the Carthaen way of the sword.

I made a figure of eight turn, the ghan fasl, and then a back-hand crosscut, the uin or reverse form of the tahn wyla.

The stroke was good. The energised blade sliced clean through the servitor's left forearm, sending the massive manipulator paw

clattering to the deck.

It lurched bodily at me, as if enraged, clawing with its remaining hand and lashing with the fused, smoking end of its recently

truncated limb.

I made a head-height horizontal parry called the uwe sax, and then left and right block strokes, the ulsar and the uin ulsar. Sheets of

sparks cascaded from each hit against its metal body. I ducked right under the next huge blow, spun round out of the crouch and came

up to face it again in time to follow through with the ura wyla bei, the devastating diagonal downslash, left to right. My blade edge

and tip sawed the servitor's torso plating wide open in an electrical flash.

The exchange had given me long enough to mentally identify the seat of the servitor's brain-stem component, lit up and glowing in my

mind's eye with the psionic power that drove it. It lay deep under the carapace between the collar bones.

One more uwe sar and men the ewl caer, the deathstroke. Tip first, plunging clean through the bodywork, impaling the organic brain. I

rested the crackling blade there for a moment while the yellow dot eyes went out and then ripped it clear again, sidestepping as the

servitor slammed down onto the flooring.

'Roban!' I called out, leaping over my despatched foe.

But Roban was dead. The servitor's forks had his limp body impaled through the belly and it was shaking it as if trying to dislodge

him.

Inshabel was on his feet, tears streaming down his face as he blasted at the servitor with his autogun.

Cursing, I ran forward, raised the power sword with both hands and swung it down over the servitor's back. I doubt the Carthaens, in

all their wisdom, have a name in the most hallowed Ewl Wyla Scryi for an enraged downstroke that severs the backbone and torso of a

servitor.

Inshabel ran to his dead master as the servitor collapsed, trying to pull the corpse clear.

'Later! Later for that!' I said, spiking the command with my will. Inshabel was close to losing his wits to anger and grief, and I needed

him.

He snatched up his weapon and ran after me.

'The page boy?' I asked.

'I had to hit him. I hope he's just unconscious.'

WE CAME OUT into the storm-wracked night on the palace landing pad. Psychic lightning splintered the sky above us and the wind

lashed us. There was no one on the pad itself, but a fight was raging on the lawns beyond. I could see eight figures, some robed, some

dressed in the body armour of the Interior Guard, closing to surrounding a lone humanoid who crackled and glowed with spectral

light. Thorny jags of flame lit out from the cornered figure and dropped one of the guardsmen as we watched. Esarhaddon. They had

Esarhaddon cornered.

Inshabel and I leapt down from the pad - a three metre drop onto the wet grass - and ran to join the fray.

I could see Esarhaddon clearly now despite the rain. A tall, almost naked man with wild black hair and a lean, stringy body, corposant

gleaming and sliding around his capering limbs.

We were just ten metres from the edge of the fight when one of the robed figures raised a bulky weapon and blasted at the rogue

psyker.

A plasma gun.

The violet beam, almost too bright to look at, struck Esarhaddon. In his weakened state, he had no defence against it.

He ignited like an incendiary round and burned from head to foot in the middle of the lawn.

LOWERING OUR WEAPONS, Inshabel and I walked to join the ring of figures standing around the white hot pyre. As his robed and

hooded acolytes murmured prayers of grace and deliverance, Inquisitor Lyko set down his plasma gun.

'The Emperor will thank you, Lyko,' I said.

He glanced round, seeing me for the first time. 'Eisenhorn.' He nodded. His narrow face was lined and taut and his blue eyes hooded.

He was only about fifty years old sidereal, a mere youth by inquisitional standards. Young enough for his promising career to survive

the way this day's atrocity would tarnish his achievement on Dolsene.

'I do not serve the Emperor for his gratitude. I do it for the glory of the Imperium.'

'Quite so,' I said. I looked back at the molten heat that had been our quarry. It mattered little to me that I'd made this opportunity for

Lyko. He could take the glory. I didn't care. The escape of the psykers had stolen much of the glory he had received of late. Hunting

them down was the only way he could make amends.

PLANETWIDE, THERE WAS some sense of rejoicing when it was announced that Lord Commander Helican had survived the carnage

unscathed, and that Warmaster Honorius would live. That announcement came on the sixth day of unrest, by which time the Imperial

authorities had begun to reimpose order on the stricken citizens of Thracian Primaris. But it helped. Common folk who assumed

themselves to be lost were calmed into believing law was back in the hands of the great and good. Panics died away. Arbites units

unleashed their last few suppression raids against the die-hard recidivist looters in the lowhabs.

My own spirits were not much lifted. For a start I was privy to the confidential fact that Lord Commander Helican had actually died

screaming and shitting himself under a crash-diving Imperial Navy Lightning on the Avenue of the Victor Bellum. A double had been

arranged by the Ecclesiarchy and the Helican Senatorum, and that double continued to act in his place until, several years later, he

''died naturally of old age'' and a successor was established in less-turbulent circumstances.

I can speak of that public deceit now in this private record, but at the time, communicating that secret was a death-crime for even the

highest lord of the Imperium. I was not about to break that confidence. I am an inquisitor and I understand how fundamental it is to

maintain public order.

IN ADDITION TO fatigue and the pain of my wounds, what darkened my mood was the news about Gideon Ravenor. Now, of course, we

all understand what a priceless and brilliant contribution he was to make to Imperial learning, and how that would never have

happened if he had not been confined to a life of mental rumination.

But back then, in that stinking hospice ward off the Street of Prescients, all I saw was a young man, burned and crippled and

physically paralysed, a brilliant inquisitor ruined before he could fulfill his potential.

Ravenor, in the eyes of some, had been lucky. He had not been amongst the one hundred and ninety-eight Inquisition personnel killed

outright by the crashing fighter that fell into the Great Triumph beyond the Spatian Gate.

He, like fifty others, had been caught on the edge of the explosion and lived.

My pupil was barely recognisable. A blood-wet bundle of charred flesh. One hundred per cent burns. Blind, deaf, mute, his face so

melted that an incision had been made in the fused meat where his mouth should have been so he could breathe.

The loss touched me acutely. The waste even more. Gideon Ravenor had been the greatest, most promising pupil I had ever taught. I

stood by his plastic-sheeted cot, listening to the suck and drool of his ventilator and fluid drains and remembered what Commodus

Voke had said in the arbites sector house on Blammerside Street.

'I will make amends. I will not rest until every one of these wretches is destroyed and order restored. And then I will not rest until I

find who and what was behind it.'

Right then, there, for Ravenor's sake, I made that promise to myself too.

At that time, I had little idea what that would mean or where it would take me.

I RETURNED TO the Ocean House at last on what would have been the ninth and final day of the Holy Novena. There was no one to

greet me, and the place seemed empty and forlorn.

I stalked into my study, poured a too-large measure of vintage amasec and flopped down into an armchair. It felt like an eternity since

I had sat here with Titus Endor, worrying over speculations that seemed now so insignificant and remote.

A door opened. From the instant chill in the air, I knew at once it was Bequin.

'We didn't know you'd returned, Gregor.'

'Well, I have, Alizebeth.'

'So I see. Are you alright?'