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Prophaniti writhed in agony, the blessed buck-shot burning into its flesh. It started to rise, wrathful and frenzied, but a grinding whir

rose from my left, a sound like a circular saw running up to speed.

Nayl's cycling drum-cannon raked the daemonhost and the earth around it, doing hideous damage. The blizzard of shots twisted it,

ripping off one of its legs at the knee and the fingers off its left hand.

Eldritch power, white-cold like frost, spurted from its wounds like lava, and burned the soil.

The other cultists were moving now, pulling weapons and firing wildly into the night. The place lit up with shooting.

Las-fire came from behind us, startlingly close, whipping past our elbows and shoulders. Two of the cultists crumpled, one of them

smashing over some of the erected floodlights.

Echbar and his Kasrkin charged in past us to engage.

In truth, I may say now that they were somehow more terrifying than the daemonhost. For Prophaniti was a supernatural thing, and

one expected it to be horrifying.

The Kasrkin were just men. It made their actions all the more astonishing. Six white blurs, they fell upon the cultists, lasguns barking

at close range. They wasted no shots. One shot, one kill. A cultist fled past me, and a Kasrkin swung to bring him down. His weapon

refused to fire as its sight-auspex detected my bio-spoor in the range-field. A second later, I was no longer blocking the shot and the

weapon spat.

The fleeing cultist tumbled over headlong in the brush.

More cultists had emerged from the other side of the pylon, and I could hear rapid exchanges of gunfire in that direction. Nayl's

combat-cannon was making its distinctive metallic whir between bursts of fire. Inshabel's las-cracks overlapped themselves.

'Fischig!' I yelled. 'Lead off round the back of the pylon. See what you can find. Maybe take a damn prisoner before the Kasrkin slay

them all!'

I turned back to deal with the ruined daemonhost. We had punished it badly, but I had no illusions as to its resilience.

Or rather… I had thought I hadn't.

Prophaniti was already gone, the ground still smoking and congealing where it had lain.

'Damn! Damn!'

Neve limped down the slope to me. 'Eisenhorn?'

'The daemonhost! Did you see it?'

She shook her head. A loud explosion rolled from the far side of the pylon.

'You killed it, didn't you?'

'Not even slightly,' I replied.

'Gregor!' Bequin shrieked.

Prophaniti was behind me, hanging in the air, incandescent with power. It was naked, and wore the terrible wounds we had inflicted

like medals. The right leg, frayed at the knee, dribbled glowing white ichor. Entry wounds and burns bubbled and smoked across its

chest. Its head hung slack on a neck broken by Husmaan's hot-shot. It spread its arms and a hand that was just a thumb and a mangled

palm sprayed lightning into the midnight grass.

'Nice… try…' the slack head gurgled.

With its robe gone, I could see its body was strung with chains, padlocks and bindings. Stitching needles and other iron awls were

pierced into its luminous flesh. Various amulets hung from the chains, or from the barbed wire looped around its neck.

'Run,' I said to Neve and Bequin. 'Run!'

Neve raised her silver cane and triggered the launcher.

The grenade hit Prophaniti in the lower torso and blew it back a few metres with a flash of fyceline.

It rushed back towards us, moaning and chattering in a warp-cursed language.

Bequin grabbed both me and Neve. Her untouchable quality was our only defence now, and she knew it.

Prophaniti stopped short of us, just a metre or so away, hovering in the air and shining like a star. I could smell the rank stench of

eternal murder about it.

Its broken neck made a sound like snapping twigs as it slowly turned its lolling head to look at us. The light of dead suns billowed

from its eyes and mouth.

Bequin's fingers bit into my arm. The three of us looked up at it, hair ruffled by the warp-winds it generated.

'Tenacious,' it said. 'No wonder Cherubael likes you. He said you employed untouchables. A wise move. You can't hurt me with your

guns, but with her around, I can't touch you with my mind.'

'Fortunately, I don't have to,' it added.

It lashed out suddenly with its maimed hand. Neve shrieked as she was hurled aside. There was blood on Prophaniti's thumb talon.

Alizebeth's psychic deadness blocked its psychic rage. But not its physical assault.

It lashed out again, and I leapt back, dragging Bequin.

Prophaniti cackled.

'Alizebeth!' I yelled, and grabbed her by the hand. 'Stay with me!'

I drew my hanger. The short curved blade shone in Prophaniti's glare. The runes inscribed on the blade by the Ministorum glittered.

I swung hard, skillessly and frantic, the blade of the hunting sword biting into its rib-meat. It howled and flew back, smoke issuing

from the gash.

I circled, hanger in my right hand, Bequin clinging to my left.

'You've done your homework. Pentagrammatic runes on your blade. A nice touch. They hurt!'

It lunged at me.

'But nothing like the hurt you will feel!'

Alizebeth screamed. She fell, and I struggled to hold on to her hand. If our contact broke, I would feel the full force of the

daemonhost's power.

I blocked with my falcate blade, shredding the flesh off the left part of its chest, exposing the ribs.

Its talons ripped into my left shoulder and down my flank, ripping my body-armour into tatters.

Blood cascaded down inside my clothes.

I swung again, trying for an uin ulsar. It gripped my blade fast, in its one good hand. Smoke rose from the clamping fist around the

blade.

It clenched its teeth in pain. 'The wards… hurt… but they are no… stronger… than the weapon… you should learn to… make your

weapons sounder… next time…'

'Not that there will be… a next time….' it added. The hanger had become so hot, I let it go with a howl. Prophaniti tossed the buckled,

molten steel aside. It had burned its hand terribly, but it didn't seem to notice.

'Now comes death,' it said, reaching for me.

THE NEXT FEW seconds are burned in my memory. I will never see such heroism again, I am sure. Captain Echbar and two of his

Kasrkin troopers assaulted Prophaniti from the rear. Their lasguns wouldn't fire because Bequin and I were in their range-field.

Echbar body-tackled the daemonhost, smashing it away from us. Prophaniti hurled him aside, and then incinerated the second Kasrkin

mid-leap with its eyes. The third jammed his Cadian bayonet up to the hilt in Prophaniti's breastbone. Fire exploded back from the

wound, down the trooper's arm and engulfed him.

He fell back screaming as Echbar came in again, a ragged hole in his cheek and throat. His knife, clenched double-handed, split

Prophaniti open down the back bone. The warp-energies that boiled out blew Echbar apart.

Screaming, Prophaniti writhed away through the air.

I knew it wasn't dead. I knew it couldn't really die.

But the Cadian elite had given me an opening by sacrificing their lives. They had fallen in the service of the God-Emperor, which is

what every Cadian is born to do.

'Aegis! By scarlet inferno! Thorn redux!'

I screamed the words into my vox, clinging on to Bequin's hand.

Prophaniti came hurtling towards us.

Lights blazing, the gun-cutter surged in overhead in a killing run. The downdraft blasted the icy bracken flat and threw us over. Medea

was low, so low…

The gun-servitors trained wing and chin turrets on the charging daemonhost.

When they opened up, their firepower was so monumental, they vapourised it.

The light went out.

I pulled Bequin to me as the drizzle of liquidised host-form rained on us out of the cold night.

I could hear Fischig calling my name.

'Help her,' I said to Fischig as I rose, and he scooped Bequin up.

I looked around. The place was littered with dead, most of them cultists. Inshabel had found Neve, lacerated but alive, twenty metres

up the slope, and was calling for a medic.

The aft thrusters of the gun-cutter winked hot-white in the night sky as Medea banked around out of her ran to come down again.

Nayl, who had taken a flesh wound to the arm, leaned against the pylon and shut off his whirring cannon-drum.

'We… we need to regroup,' I said.

'Agreed,' said Fischig.

'You have no idea what you're up against, do you?' asked Husmaan.

We all turned. The old skin-hunter from Windhover was stalking down the moor slope towards us, his long-las slung over one crooked

arm. Fierce graupel had begun to fleck down from the clouding sky.

'Do you?' he hissed again. I felt Bequin tense.

It wasn't Husmaan.

Husmaan looked at me. White light shone from his eyes. His voice was Prophaniti's.

'Not the slightest clue,' he said. 'You can destroy my physical host, but you cannot break the links to the master.'

'Husmaan!' Inshabel cried.

'Not here any more. He was the most open mind, so I took him. He will serve for a while.'

I took a step forward. Husmaan raised a hand. 'Don't bother, Eisenhorn,' said Prophaniti. 'I could kill you all here, now… but what's

about to happen is far more interesting.'

Husmaan, his arms held out from his body and his head back, suddenly rose into the air, dropping his prized long-las. Steadily, he

floated away into the sky until he had vanished over the moors into the dawn's counter glow.

'What did he mean?' asked Bequin.

'I don't—'

Floodlights mobbed over the rise and we suddenly heard the clank of armoured tracks.

Twenty Cadian APCs crested the brow, their floods beaming down at us. Cadian shock troops scrambled down the slope, covering us

with their guns.

'What the hell?' Nayl cried.

I was stunned. This was the last thing I had expected.

'Inquisitor Eisenhorn,' boomed a vox-amped voice from the lead APC. 'For crimes against the Imperium, for the atrocity at Thracian,

for consorting with daemonhosts, you are hereby arrested and condemned to death.'

I recognised the voice.

It was Osma.

SIXTEEN

THE HAMMER OF WITCHES.

THREE MONTHS IN THE CARNIFICINA.

FLIGHT FROM CADIA.

FLANKED BY SIX robed interrogators reading aloud from the Books of Pain and the Chapters of Punishment, Inquisitor Leonid Osma

came down the moorland slope towards me. Pink dawn light was beginning to spear lengthways across the bleak heath, and the gorse

and bracken was stirred by the early morning breeze. Distantly, heath grouse and ptarcerns were whooping and calling to the

midwinter sun.

Osma was a well-built, broad-shouldered man in his one fifties. He wore brass power armour that glowed almost orange in the ruddy

dawn. Ornate Malleus crests decorated his armour's besagews and poleyns and six purity seals were threaded around his bevor like a

floral wreath. A long cloak of white fur played out behind him, brushing the tops of the heather and gorse.

His face was blunt and pugnacious. His eyes were glinting dots set in puffy lids, fringed by heavy, grey eyebrows. His bowl-cut hair

was the colour of sword-metal. Some years before, he had lost his lower jaw during a fight with a Khornate berserker. The augmetic

replacement was a jutting chin of chrome, linked into his skull by feed tubes and micro-servos. The emblem of the Inquisition rose

above his head on a standard mounted between his shoulder blades. In one hand he carried a power hammer, the mark of his ordo.

In the other, a sealed ebony scroll tube. I recognised it at once. A carta extremis.

'This is insanity!' Fischig growled. The Cadians around us stiffened and jabbed with their weapons.

'Enough!' I warned Fischig. I turned to my companions. They looked so lost, so miserable, so dismayed.

'We will not fight our own,' I told them. 'Surrender your weapons. I will soon have this laughable error resolved.'

Bequin and Inshabel handed their weapons to the Cadian guards. Fischig reluctantly allowed the storm troopers to divorce him from

his riot-gun. Nayl undipped his drum-cannon's ammo feed, slid out the magazine box and passed that to the waiting troops, leaving the

disabled heavy weapon strapped around his torso on its harness.

I nodded, satisfied. 'Thorn bids Aegis, by cool water, soft,' I whispered into my vox and then turned to meet Osma.

He raised his power hammer in a brief gesture and the mumbling interrogators fell silent and closed their books. 'Gregor Eisenhorn,'

he said in precisely enunciated High Formal Gothic, 'In fealty to the God-Emperor, our undying lord, and by the grace of the Golden

Throne, in the name of the Ordo Malleus and the Inquisition, I call thee diabolus, and in the testimony of thy crimes, I submit this

carta. May Imperial justice account in all balance. The Emperor protects.'

I slid my storm-gun out of its holster, ejected the clip and handed it to him grip first.

'I hear full well thy charge and thy words, and make my submission,' I responded in the ancient form. 'May Imperial justice account in

all balance. The Emperor protects.'

'Dost thou accept this carta from my hand?'

'I accept it into mine, for that I may prove it thrice false.'

'Dost thou state thy innocence now, at the going off?'

'I state it true and clear. May it be so writ down.'

Vox-drones idling by the shoulders of the interrogators had been recording all this, but the youngest interrogator was transcribing it all

with a holoquill into a dispositional slate suspended before him on a grav plate. I noted this detail with some satisfaction.

Preposterous though the charges were, Osma was prosecuting with total and precise formality.

'I ask of thee thy badge of office,' Osma said.

'I deny thy asking. By the code of prejudice, I declare my right to retain my rank until due process is concluded.'

He nodded. His language changed from High Formal to Low Gothic. 'I expected as much. Thank you for avoiding unpleasantness.'

'I don't think I've avoided any unpleasantness, Osma. What I have avoided is bloodshed. This is ridiculous.'