Gaunt looked down at her.
‘I think if it wants to come out, it will,’ he replied. ‘I think it can come through that wall, or any wall, as easily as it can seal a door. I think killing the feth out of it is our only option. So kindly, inquisitor, shut the feth up.’
‘I’ll get charges,’ said Hark.
Auerben put a hand on Gaunt’s arm. He looked at her. She nodded her head to the back of the group behind them.
The Beati had been sitting on the floor beside Beltayn’s ruined vox-set the whole time. She hadn’t spoken a word. She hadn’t uttered a sound. She had just sat as if chronic fatigue had finally overcome her entirely.
She rose to her feet.
‘If we leave it in there, it will keep feeding and get stronger,’ she said in a hollow voice. ‘I’ve been trying to focus. Trying to… trying to know.’
‘Know?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Know what I should do.’
‘You should leave,’ said Grae. ‘You and the warmaster. All the vital personnel. It’s here to kill, to obliterate the command structure–’
‘It is,’ the Beati nodded. ‘It’s a Heritor weapon. An old one. A rare one. Asphodel made it. His finest and most nightmarish work. A woe machine like no other. It’s been growing this whole time, learning, maturing.’
‘How the feth do you know any of that?’ Curth snapped.
‘He told me,’ said the Beati. ‘Because I asked and I waited and he answered.’
‘Who?’ asked Curth.
The Beati looked at her with a sad smile as though the answer was unambiguous.
‘Move your poor savant,’ she said to Laksheema. ‘Captain Daur? I need you to move too. Stand back. Weapons up.’
Laksheema and Grae carried Onabel clear. Daur got up, and allowed Curth to walk him aside. The others raised their weapons in a clatter of charging bolts, released safeties and slotting clips.
The Beati approached the wall.
‘Wait,’ said Gaunt. ‘You’re too valuable.’
‘No one’s too valuable, Ibram,’ she replied, ‘and no life is disposable.’
She put out her hand and touched the spot where Onabel had been tapping. There was no ceremony, no fanfare, no warning. The stone work crumbled. It collapsed around her fingertips. Blocks fell out and bounced across the floor. Some disintegrated into dust. The rupture widened, radiating out from her touch. A section of whitewashed stone three metres wide flexed, folded and fell back into the darkness with a rumble like an avalanche.
Dust billowed around them, glittering the red target beams of the Scions’ aimed weapons.
There was a ragged hole, like the mouth of a cave. Beyond it, the air was a soft blackness tinged with red. They could smell smoke, the stench of waste water. Blood.
The Beati drew her sword. She looked weak and drained, as though collapsing the wall had sapped her fading strength even more, but her voice was strong.
‘We kill it,’ she said. ‘We kill it before it eats its fill and becomes strong enough to kill us.’
Ordinate Jan Jerik checked his timepiece again. Just over an hour until middle night. According to schedule, Corrod’s forces would be at the execution points by now. By sunrise, Urdesh could be a different world, a place of new prospects and possibilities. Indeed, the complexion of the Sabbat Worlds as a whole should have begun to change.
He snapped shut the engraved silver cover of the timepiece and slipped it back into his waistcoat pocket. An hour until middle night. It was quiet. The halls of House Ghentethi were almost silent, with only night staff at their stations. Outside, the rain had eased, and an easterly was spoiling in across the Great Bay, piling steep banks of dark cloud inland across the south-western limits of the city, black against the slate-black sky. Full dark. That, he gathered, is what soldiers called it.
It all seemed too still and silent for such a significant moment. The world, he thought, should be shaking apart as such fundamental changes were made.
There would be difficult and confusing times ahead, of course. He understood that. Existential transitions were painful. But Urdesh had weathered many such transitions in its history. It had grown resilient. His efforts would focus on keeping the house secure, and on ensuring that the Archon and his magisters appreciated and remembered the role of his clave appropriately. It would be an era of renewal, an end to the long conflict that had kept them cowering like starving dogs, an end to the decades of war that had convulsed the Sabbat Worlds. The chokehold of the Cult Mechanicus tyrants would be broken, and the claves would be free to prosper again in the ways they had done generations before. They would be the demiurge masters of the world-forge, and Urdesh would be the precious, beating heart of a new epoch. A new Archonate.
This had been explained and promised to him repeatedly by the intermediaries who had visited frequently over the last two months. Some had been insurgent chieftains, others rogue tech-shapers from the wasteland zones. Once or twice, Sekkite officers in hooded rain cloaks had appeared on the house loading docks in the dead of night. Some had conversed in Jan Jerik’s tongue, while others had brought servitors as translators. One had channelled a voice which had spoken out of him like the wheeze of ruptured bellows.
The promises had been consistent. In return for assistance and specialist intelligence, Ghentethi would be spared and favoured. In the aftermath, it would have priority access to food supplies and resources, and after that, a pact-bond granting it first pick of contract-projects and commissions of manufacture. Jan Jerik had already made a comprehensive list of the forge assets and industrial facilities he would demand as Ghentethi’s due recompense, as well as acquisition orders for the labour force he would require.
The war was about to end. It would not end all at once, and there would be lean years as the broken forces of the vanquished were prised out of the Sabbat Worlds and driven to flight. But it would be a victory, the victory long imagined, and it would begin in earnest tonight. Ruined and shamed, the crusaders would not attempt to return for generations to come. It would take lifetimes for them to recover from the loss, and gather strength enough to contemplate the prospect of a fresh campaign.
Lifetimes, if ever.
Jan Jerik took out his timepiece again, checked it, and put it away. Corrod would be in position. Hadrel would be in position. The future hinged on those uncanny creatures. There was no way to know how they had fared. One unscheduled venting of the thermal network could have ended them already, and no one would know. Dawn would come and the future would be unaltered. The hope of victory would have passed away invisibly.
But things needed to proceed on the assumption that they had prevailed. A data wafer lay beside his glass of amasec on the lacquered side table. On it was a code-burst written in Sekkite cipher, designed to be broadcast via wide-band vox on the lower frequency channel used by the Archonate’s communications network. Corrod had helped him to compose the specifics. A call to arms. An order of uprising to all the insurgent forces in the tattered skirts of the city and beyond. Eltath had been pregnable for months. There were cells embedded everywhere, even in the inner quarters, along with Sekkite combat packs that had gone to ground in the city rather than flowing out with the general retreat a few days earlier. The code-burst commended their mettle and loyalty, promised them spiritual reward and deliverance, and specified critical targets.
They would be no more than noise, a violent disruption intended to fog the situation and draw Imperial attention from the key objectives.
Of course, if Corrod was already dead, the uprising would be a meaningless snarl, swiftly put down by the Militarum divisions for no result. And the code-burst transmission would be tracked, and Ghentethi erased by crusade prosecution.