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possibilities.'

'Riddles! That's all you ever speak!'

'No more riddles, Eisenhorn. From the moment I first met you, I saw you were the only one, the only one with the tenacity, the skill

and the opportunity to give me what I want. What I want most of all. I saw that if I kept you safe, you would come and give me that

most precious thing here, on this world, at this hour.'

'I would never help a daemon like you!'

Cherubael grinned, blank-eyed and utterly serious. 'Then destroy me, if you can.'

It lunged. I raised the runestaff and channelled my will down through the psi-conductive pole into the lodestone. The carved fragment

of the Lith blazed with blue light.

PONTIUS GLAW KNEW a thing or two about daemonhosts. Their greatest weakness was the strength of the will that had bound them as

slaves. The runestaff, so carefully prepared and constructed, so painstakingly etched with the ancient symbols of control, was a lever

to topple that binding will by amplifying my own to levels that would overwhelm it.

For a brief moment, I felt how it must feel to be an alpha-plus psyker.

The scintillating spear of energy that shot from the lode-stone struck Cherubael in the chest.

The daemonhost smiled for a second, and then its flesh-vessel ruptured open, billowing a storm of Chaos-fire in all directions. I had

cast it out of its binding and banished it back into the warp.

And in the moment as my amplified mind overmastered his, I saw the years of enslavement it had endured af Quixos's hands, the

torments of its binding, the great, forbidden text of the Malus Codicium whose arcane knowledge Quixos had used to create his

daemonhosts.

And I realised that I had given Cherubael exactly what it wanted after all.

Freedom.

I STUMBLED BACK into the main chamber. By then, Voke, whose resistance to Prophaniti had been astonishing, was dead.

I remembered Voke's words after the atrocity on Thracian: '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.'

He could rest now. That work was done.

The daemonhost was casting the valiant old man's empty husk of a body aside and gliding towards Endor and Inshabel, who were both

already on their knees in agony. Cyan flames washed from Prophaniti's fingertips and wrapped my two friends in tight, burning

psychic shackles. They were trapped morsels for it to feed off at its leisure.

Prophaniti froze when I appeared, instinctively knowing I posed a more serious threat. The Lith-stone was still smoking with bloodred

light.

The daemonhost surged through the air at me, teeth bared, arms spread, incandescent with light, baying my name. It was like facing

the attack run of a supersonic warcraft firing all guns. I know so. It is my misfortune to have experienced that too.

Prophaniti whooped with glee.

'At Kasr Geth, you told me to make my weapons sounder next time, monster!' I howled, and impaled its charging form on the steel

pole of the runestaff. 'Is this sound enough?'

Prophaniti screamed and exploded, blowing me off my feet. I don't think I banished it. I think I obliterated its essence forever.

The runestaff was, miraculously, unscathed, and lay amid the rubble. But Prophaniti's dissipating being had made it white hot from

base to cap, and I could not pick it up again.

I ran across to Titus Endor and Inshabel, both of whom lolled weakly on the floor.

Inshabel was dazed but intact. Endor had daemon gashes across his chest and neck. He looked up at me blearily.

'You got them both, Gregor…'

'I pray there are no more,' I replied, trying to staunch his bleeding. His rosette slid out of his coat pocket and I leaned to pick it up.

The inquisitorial symbol was decorated with the ornate crest of the Ordo Malleus.

'Malleus?' I hissed.

'No…'

'When did you transfer, Endor? Damn you, when did you change ordos?'

'They forced me…' he wheezed, 'Osma forced me! When he had me on Messina… there were certain matters from a case a few years

ago. He'd got his hands on them somehow… He… he promised I would burn if I didn't help him get to you.'

'What matters?'

'Nothing! Nothing, Gregor, I swear! But he had Bezier's backing! He could have made anything look heretical! I transferred orders to

stop him breaking me. He said I would be rewarded, advanced. He said Ordo Malleus was a better prospect for me.'

'But you were to keep an eye on me?'

'I told him nothing! I never sold you out. I did just enough to keep Osma satisfied.'

'Like coming here. No wonder you hid your rosette. He wanted you to take me down, didn't he?'

Endor was silent. Inshabel looked on in stark disbelief.

'I… I was to go along with this operation, in the hope that it might be successful. Orsini's under no illusions that Quixos is a menace,

and this was an expedient way, perhaps, of eliminating him. If you were still… alive at the end of it, I was told to arrest you on the

carta charges. Or, if you resisted…'

'Get him up to ground level,' I told Inshabel quietly. 'Find him a medic. Don't let him out of your sight.'

'Yes sir!'

'Gregor!' Endor gasped as Inshabel lifted him. 'By the God-Emperor, I never meant—'

'Get him out of here!' I growled.

THE ASSAULT ON Ferell Sidor was three hours old when Grumman, Ricci and I entered the undervault of the excavation pit.

Madorthene's forces were still locked in a monumental struggle with the renegade's warriors throughout the warren of tunnels and

chambers in the table mountain.

Ricci was weak from a blade wound, and all of his bodyguards were dead. Grumman had just two Kasrkin left with him, both of them

armed with lasrifles.

The vast undervault was an excavated pit almost a kilometre deep, open to the sky. The serebite copy of the Radian pylon rested in the

base of it, surrounded by adamantite scaffolding. Gibbet cages, hundreds of them, hung from the scaffolding on chains. In each one,

trapped and helpless, was a human body.

They were Quixos's carefully collected arsenal of rogue psykers, secretly acquired from all over the Imperium. It must have taken him

decades to accumulate so many. One of them, I had no doubt, was Esarhaddon

'What is he doing?' Ricci asked, a touch of awe in his voice.

'Something we have to stop,' said Grumman, with a direct simplicity I appreciated. It was the only answer any of us needed.

We had been living at our nerve ends since the assault began, and were wired with combat sharpness. Even so, despite our combined

experience and skill, what happened next took us all totally by surprise.

One moment there was nothing. The next, a robed, armoured form was in amongst us, moving so fast it was simply a blur.

So fast. So accursedly fast.

Instantly, Ricci was split open down the length of his spine. As he was still in the process of falling on his face, choking on his own

blood, one of the Kasrkin was severed at the waist, and toppled in halves, his gun firing spasmodically. The other Kasrkin folded up

around the impaling thrust of a long, dark blade, spontaneously combusting from the belly out.

Grumman pushed me out of the way as the devastating blur turned again, and fired his laspistol at it three times. Snapping round faster

than my eyes could follow, the long, dark blade the blur was wielding deflected each crackling shot.

Grumman's head left his shoulders.

Quixos, the arch-heretic, the renegade, the unforgivable radical, whirled on me before Grumman's butchered body had even started to

slump.

I had one fleeting glimpse of the long daemonsword, Kharnagar. It was gnarled and knotted and thick with abominable runes and

irregular clawlike serrations.

That's all I saw as it came whistling towards my face.

TWENTY-THREE

THE HERETIC.

AFTERWARDS.

A BARE HAND'S BREADTH from my head, the blood-red blade came to a dead stop, blocked by the gleaming steel of Barbarisater.

Time seemed to stand still for a heartbeat. We faced each other, our blades locked together. Quixos had been a speed-distorted

phantom until our swords had struck. Now he was frozen, glaring between the crossed blades at me.

The renegade's armour was ragged and filthy, and ornate with warp-signs. His inquisitorial rosette was displayed, incongruously, on

his right shoulder guard. It revolted me to see it worn amongst such corruption.

His ancient face was a misshapen, pustular horror. Rudimentary antlers bulged from his brow. His skin was dark like granite.

Wheezing augmetic cables and implants bulged at his throat and under the dirty head-cloth he wore. His eyes were shining balls of

blood.

In honesty, he was a disappointing little monster compared to the notion of him that had built up in my mind. But there was no

denying his inhuman strength and speed.

Eisenhorn, he said. It was psychic. His twisted mouth didn't open.

Barbarisater felt him move before I did. It lurched in my hands. In the time it takes to draw a breath, we had exchanged a flurry of

twenty or more blows. The talon-edged blade of Kharnager rang dully off the Carthaen steel. Barbarisater's pentagrammatic runes

flashed and flared with discharging energy. Kharnager groaned softly.

Heretic! Slave of Chaos! his raw, broken mind-voice railed in my brain.

You speak of yourself! I returned. Our blades continued to ring off one another, hunting for a gap, mutually denied.

Why would you try to end my work here if you were not a minion of the warp?

Your work? This thing?

We broke, and then came in again, blades striking so fast the noise became one long ringing tone. I barely made an ulsar in time to

stop one of his rapid down-stabs. He blocked my response of a tahn wyla, and the uru arav that I followed it with.

This is just the test, the prototype. Once the trials with it are conducted, then my work will flower!

You carve up a mountain… for a prototype? A prototype of what?

The pylons of Cadia pacify the warp, he spat. By amplifying them using extreme-level psykers, they could be made into a weapon. A

weapon to destroy the warp! A weapon to collapse the Eye of Terror in upon itself!

He was raving, insane. What patches of truth or sane notions might lurk in his words, I had no idea. There was no way to distinguish

them from his lunatic fancy. All I knew was that a pylon, psychically super-charged, might do all manner of things, but its side-effects

would be catastrophic. It could lay waste to the continent, the planet.

I think, and here lay the true horror of it, I think Quixos knew that. I think he considered that to be an acceptable price to pay, just as

he had considered the atrocity on Thracian a necessary cost to obtain a psyker of such peerless quality as Esarhaddon. What other

abominations had he caused in acquiring the others?

As Grumman had said, just before his death, this simply had to be stopped.

I looked at his face.

This was where radicalism led. This was the true face of one who had reached the place and crossed the line. This was the obscene

reality behind Pontius Glaw's jaunty glorifications of Chaos.

We rained blows at each other, drawing sparks and little curls of vapour from the blade edges. I tried a low swing, but he leapt over it,

and alternated a series of scissoring blows that drove me backwards across the dusty ground. I thought my feet would slip. He was a

whirlwind.

I saw my moment. Barbarisater saw it too. A slight underswing on his blade return that opened a gap for a sar aht uht, a slice to the

heart, just for a microsecond.

I thrust in, putting all my will into the blade. Somehow, dazzlingly, he still managed to turn Kharnager and block me.

Barbarisater struck the daemonsword and broke in half.

And it was the ultimate failure of the ancient Carthaen blade that gave me victory. If it had stayed intact, the block would have stopped

it and the fight would have continued.

Breaking around Quixos's sword-edge, the truncated half of Barbarisater in my hand continued on, with all my mustered force behind

it, until the broken end plunged through his cloak, his body armour, his augmetic implants and ran him through the torso.

The ewl caer.

It took almost equal force to break the suction of his flesh around the blade and rip it out.

Quixos staggered backwards, polluted blood spurting from the wound, his augmetics shorting out and exploding.

Then he fell to the dusty floor of the undervault, and became dust himself, until there was nothing left but rotting augmetic devices

and empty armour twisted under his lank cape.

Heretic! his mind screeched out as he died.

Coming from him, the word felt like a compliment.

SITE A WAS dismantled and destroyed by the taskforce, and the faux pylon smashed by sustained orbital fire. Quixos's psykers, and his

surviving servants, were imprisoned, and then turned over to the Black Ships of the Inquisition, six of which arrived a few days later,

once we had published news of our achievement. Most of the captives were deemed too dangerous or too tainted to keep, even under

the closest guard, and were executed. Esarhaddon was one of those.

Many precious texts and artifacts were recovered from Site A, and many more that were diabolic and abominable. He had

accumulated a vast resource of esoteric material, and there was supposed to be a great deal more at his fastness on distant Maginor. A

further purge would reveal the truth of that.

As the report has it, no trace was ever found of the Malus Codicium, the foul grimoire on which his power had ultimately been based.

BY THE TIME I had returned to Gudrun with my followers and allies, the carta issued against me had been abolished. None of Osma's

allegations could stand up in the face of the evidence gathered at Farness, or the many statements collected by the Inquisition,

statements pleading my innocence made by such individuals as Lord Procurator Madorthene, Inquisitor General Neve, Interrogator

Inshabel and, God-Emperor help him, Titus Endor.

I was never offered any sort of official apology, not by Grandmaster Orsini, or by Bezier, and certainly not by Osma. His career didn't

suffer one bit. Twenty years later, he was elected Master of the Ordo Malleus Helican after Bezier's sudden, unexpected death.