第 17 页

'And why did I spare you? If it had been you on Vogel Passionata, I would have let you live. I let you live on Thracian.'

'What?'

'You stopped to pay homage at Spatian's tomb, and the Gate shielded you from the disaster. Why did you stop? You don't know. You

can't explain it, can you? It was me. Watching over you. Planting the suggestion in your mind. Making you pause for no reason. We've

been working together all along.'

'No!'

'You know it, Gregor. You just don't know you know it.'

CHERUBAEL FLOATED AWAY a short distance, and looked around. The auction site was frozen, all eyes on him. No one dared move,

not even the most weak-willed twist guard. Even those present who didn't know what he was recognised the extraordinary evil and

power he represented.

'What are you waiting for?' a voice yelled from nearby. Several armed men stepped out of their cover in the chew-after tangles and

approached. It was Lyko, with six gristly examples of hired muscle.

'Look who I found, Lyko. I sprang this trap, just like you suggested, to discover if anyone was on your tail, and look who it turned out

to be.'

'Eisenhorn…' Lyko murmured, fear crossing his face for a second. He looked over at Cherubael.

'I said, what are you waiting for? Kill them and we can be gone.'

It was suddenly clear to me Lyko wasn't the daemonhost's master. Like Konrad Molitor all those years before, Lyko was another

pawn, a corrupted agent of someone… something… else.

'Must I?' asked the hovering figure.

'Do it! No witnesses!'

'Please!' cried the elderly Merdok. 'We only meant t—'

Lyko whipped around and incinerated the old man with his plasma gun.

That broke the impasse. Phant's people and the other buyers broke in panic, drawing weapons, shouting. Indiscriminate shooting

began. Lyko's gunmen, all ex-military types with autocannons, hosed the staging area and cut down the fleeing twists. I saw Phant

Mastik hit by a burst of fire and collapse in rough sections backwards off the platform.

His horn-headed minder ran at Cherubael, firing a grubby old laspistol.

Cherubael hadn't moved. He was simply watching the murder around him. The las-shots sizzled off his skin, and he glanced down at

the twist, as if his reverie had been broken.

The daemonhost didn't even move a hand, a finger. There was just a slight nod in the direction of the horned minder, and the miserable

twist was somehow filleted where he stood, waves offeree stripping off his flesh and popping out his skeleton, parts of it still

articulated.

I felt the warp churning around that dismal place as Cherubael went to work. Once he had started, his fury was unstinting. Merdok's

war-rena ferns disappeared in a sudden vortex and died, fused together. The mud beneath Vassik's feet boiled, and she and her

bodyguards sank, screaming and thrashing, into it.

I was frozen, rigid. I felt Bequin pulling at me.

Shots seared past my face. I snapped round, and saw two of Lyko's men charging us. One dropped suddenly, headshot by what could

only have been a sniping round from Husmaan out in the torn undergrowth.

Nayl flew past me and gunned the other down with his Tronsvasse para-bellum.

'Come on! We've got to get out of here!' he yelled at me.

There was blood and filth and swirling plant-fibre in the air. A warp storm was crackling around us, so dense and dark we could barely

see, barely stand against its churning force. But I could make out the glowing shape of Cherubael through it all.

I drew my power sword and ran towards him.

'Gregor! No!' Bequin screamed.

I had no choice. I had waited the best part of a hundred years. I would not let him go again.

He floated around to face me, smiling down.

'Put that away, Gregor. Don't worry. I won't kill you. Lyko has no power over me. I'll deal with his complaints later, and—'

'Who does have power over you? Who is your master? Tell me! You caused the atrocity on Thracian, didn't you! Why? On whose

orders?'

'Just go away, Gregor. This is not your concern now. Go away.'

I think he was honestly surprised when I hacked the power sword into his chest.

I don't really know if I had imagined I could do him any harm.

The blessed blade almost disembowelled him before it exploded and hurled me backwards.

He looked down in dismay at the wound across his torso. Warp energies, bright and toxic, were spilling out of it. In a second, the

wound closed as if it had never been.

'You little fool,' said Cherubael.

I found myself flying backwards through the air, blood in my mouth.

The impact of landing shook my bones and smashed the breath out of me. My head swam. The daemonhost's power had thrown me a

good thirty metres across the site, into the underbrush.

Furious psychic detonations went off all round. Screaming, semi-sentient winds from the deepest warp snaked around the field,

destroying the last of the twists and the fleeing buyers.

I tried to rise, but consciousness left me.

WHEN I CAME to, the chew-after was on fire. There was no sign of Cherubael. Inshabel and Aemos were pulling me to my feet.

'Bequin! Nayl!' I coughed.

'I'll find them,' Inshabel said.

'Where's Lyko?' I asked Aemos, as Inshabel ran off, weapon drawn.

'Fled, with his men, in two of the land speeders.'

'And the daemonhost?'

'I don't know. It seemed to just vanish. Maybe it had a displacer field.'

I started to ran back into the site, though my body was burning with pain. Aemos cried out after me.

MOST OF THE vehicles were smashed or overturned, but a couple were still intact.

I scrambled into a small, black speeder; a sleek, up-hive sports model that had presumably belonged to Vassik. I cued the thrasters,

lifting off before I'd even strapped on the seat harness.

The craft was powerful and over-responsive. It took a moment to master the lightness of touch needed to accelerate without sudden

blurts of speed. I turned it unsteadily in the air as I climbed too fast above the blasted site. Below, I could see Nayl, ragged and

bloody, shouting up at me to come back.

Banking out of the cone of smoke at a hundred metres, I got my hearings. On every side, the acreage of the chew-after spread out until

it became lush greencover again. There was the mainhive, looming in the distance. Where were they? Where were they?

I saw two dots in the air three kilometres to the west and gunned the machine after them. Heavy land speeders, making towards the

bulk of the nearest harvester factory.

I pushed the turbines to their limit, coming in low and fast behind the slower lift-machines. I knew they'd seen me the moment autofire

chattered back in my direction, wildly off target.

I began to jink, the way Midas had taught me, before they got their aim in. I thought about shooting back at them, but it took both

hands on the stick just to keep the sports speeder level.

We were passing over green crop land now, an emerald sea that raced away below in an alarming blur. More tracer shots howled back

past me.

A big shadow passed across the sun.

'Want them splashed?' crackled from the vox.

Downjets flaring, the streamlined bulk of my gun-cutter settled in beside me, matching my speed. It seemed huge compared to my

insignificant little speeder; one-fifty tonnes, eighty metres from beak nose to finned tail, landing gear lowered like insect legs. I could

see Medea grinning in the cockpit.

I daren't lift my hands from the jarring stick to activate the vox.

Instead, I opened my mind directly to hers.

Only if you have to. Try and get them to land.

'Ow!' answered the vox. 'Warn me next time you're gonna do that.'

The great bulk of the cutter suddenly surged forward, afterburners incandescent and landing gear raising, and banked away to the

right. Its thrust wake wobbled me hard. I watched it turn out in a wide semi-circle, low over the crops, furrowing them with its

downwash. It looked like a vast bird of prey swooping round for the kill.

With its interplanetary thrust-tunnels, it easily outstripped the racing speeders, and came in towards them, head on.

I felt a surge of psychic-power. My enemies had nothing but their minds with which to combat the gun-cutter.

The cutter suddenly broke left, dipped and then righted itself. They'd got to Medea, if only for a moment.

She was angry now. I could tell that simply from the way she flew. With a wail of braking jets, she turned the cutter on a stall-hover as

the speeders flashed past.

The chin-turret crackled, and heavy-gauge munitions tore the second of the two speeders into a shower of flames in the air.

Hitting the throttle, I zipped in behind the hovering gun-cutter, chasing down the other speeder.

No more! I sent to Medea. I want them alive if possible!

The remaining speeder was close ahead now. I could feel Lyko's mind aboard it.

He was closing on the armoured bulk of the harvester, which now dominated the landscape ahead. It was a giant, six hundred metres

long and ninety high at the peak of its humped, beetle-back. It was kicking a vast wake of sap-spray and smoke out behind it. The

rattle of its threshing blades was audible above the scream of my speeder's engines.

My quarry dipped, and flew in along the spine of the huge factory machine, heading for a rear-facing docking hangar raised like a wart

on the hull's back. Warning hails were beeping at me over the speeder's vox-set, the alarmed challenges of the harvester.

The heavy speeder braked hard and landed badly in the mouth of the docking hangar. Turning in to follow it, I saw figures scrambling

out. They disappeared, into the hangar, all except one man, who dropped to his knees on the approach slip and began firing back at me

with his autocan-non.

Streams of high-velocity rounds whipped past on either side. Then a bunch of them went into my port intake with a clattering roar that

shook the speeder and threw shards of casing out in a belch of sparks.

Warning lights lit up across the control board.

I dropped ten metres, put the nose in.

And bailed.

I BROKE MY left wrist and four ribs hitting the topside of the harvester. With hindsight, I was lucky not to have been killed outright,

lucky even to have hit the harvester's hull at all. It was a long way down. I managed to grab a stanchion cable as I began to slither

down, and wrapped my right arm around it.

My speeder glanced once off the approach slip, and bounced up again, tail up, beginning to tear apart. Trailing debris, the machine

cartwheeled in, vapourised the gunman, hit Lyko's parked land speeder, and shunted it right into the hangar, which exploded a second

later in a sheet of fire and metal.

I limped along the approach slip, sidestepping chunks of burning wreckage, and climbed over the smashed, smouldering speeders into

the hangar. Impact klaxons were rasping out, and automatic fire-fighting sprays were still squirting out dribbles of retardant foam.

At the back of the hangar, a hatch was half open, next to the cages of the service and cargo elevators.

I pushed through the hatch. A metal staircase descended into the factory. At the bottom, it opened out into a companionway that ran

the length of the harvester. Stunned work-crews, most of them twists in sap-stained overalls, gazed at me.

I produced my rosette.

'Imperial Inquisition. Where did they go?'

'Who?'

'Where did they go?' I snarled, enforcing my will without restraint.

The effect was so powerful, none of them could speak, and several passed out. All the others pointed down the companionway

towards the head of the factory.

Another hatch, another staircase. The noise of the internal threshers was now shudderingly loud. I came down into the vast internal

work line, a long chamber that ran the length of the harvester. It was a huge, deafening Place, the air thick with sap mist. A massive

processing conveyor carried the harvested produce along from the reaping blades at the harvester's mouth, at a rate of several tonnes

every second. Twist workers in masks and aprons worked the front part of the line with chaintools and cutting lances which were

attached to overhead power systems by thick rubber-trunked hoses. They sorted and cut the larger sections of root and stalk before the

crop went through the great vicing rollers and stamping presses into the macerating vats further back down the factory.

With the alarms sounding and warning lights flashing, the line had come to a halt, and the workers were looking around, liquid

cellulose and sap dripping off their gauntlets, overalls and work tools.

I blundered through them, overseers shouting at me from gantry stations far above. I could see Lyko, thirty metres away down the line,

pushing through with one last gunman and a bound, visored figure that could only be Esarhaddon.

The gunmen turned and fired at me down the length of the line vault. Three workers crumpled, one spilling over onto the belt. The

shots spanged sparks off the metal walkways and machinery.

As the other workers dived for cover, I dropped to my knee and reached for my boltgun. It wasn't there. In fact, the entire holster was

ripped open. I wasn't sure when I lost it: during Cherubael's assault or slamming off the hull of the harvester, but it was long gone.

And my beloved power sword had been disintegrated on contact with the daemonhost.

More shots whizzed down the work-line and dented the metal facings of the belt-drivers. I crawled into cover behind a drum of

hydrobac tool-wash.

I pulled my back-up weapon from the ankle-holster built into the side of my boot. It was a compact, short-frame auto with a muzzle so

short it barely extended beyond the trigger guard. The handgrip was actually longer than the barrel, and contained a slide-magazine of

twenty small-calibre rounds.

Selecting single-fire, I cracked off a couple of shots. The aim was lousy and the power poor. It really was meant to be a close-range

last ditch.

The gunman down the line, undeterred by my pathetic display, switched over to full auto and raked the deck area and working space

beside the stationary belt. Workers, all pressing themselves into cover, began to scream and yell.