‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Merity. ‘You didn’t break like that bastard Meryn.’
They looked across the chapel at Meryn, sitting alone, a brooding look on his face as he stared at nothing.
‘I think he saw more than us,’ said Fazekiel.
‘Maybe,’ Merity said.
She looked at Fazekiel.
‘It’s not important now. Throne knows, it’s trivial. But when this is done, you need to talk to him,’ she said.
‘To Meryn?’
Merity shrugged. ‘About the incident. I couldn’t say down there because he was with you. You kept asking. But that’s why I came to find you. I remembered hearing him speaking to Dalin just outside the shower block. Just before it happened.’
‘You think Meryn was involved?’
‘Yes,’ said Merity. ‘He almost admitted it to me in the undercroft. He warned me to keep my mouth shut.’
Fazekiel nodded.
‘I’ll break him,’ she said. ‘I’ll end his career. Once he’s confessed, it’ll be sanction for him.’
Meryn sat alone. On the far side of the chapel, Merity Chass sat with Fazekiel, orderlies bustling around them. They were talking.
That’s how you get treated, he thought. That’s the privilege right there. The daughter of the Lord Executor. So fething special. People give thanks to see she’s survived.
She was nothing. Just a high-hive aristo bitch, born into wealth and power. She knew nothing about real life, and certainly nothing about soldiering.
Meryn did. He’d been a Ghost since Tanith. He’d come all that way, watching his own back because no other bastard would. He had the skills. He’d learned them along the way. How to fight to survive. How to defeat an enemy that was going to kill you. How to use a blade.
And, thanks to the damaged bastards they’d brought in after Vervunhive, how to read lips.
He watched them. Merity Chass and Luna Fazekiel.
He watched them talk.
Gaunt held on to Curth’s arm and dragged her through the darkness. The air was freezing and howling around them, and the water in the chamber was thrashing, like waves driven by an ocean gale.
They could hardly see. The bad shadow was everywhere, lashing out tendrils of hideous fractal darkness, folding light into void-blackness along sharp, straight edges.
Gaunt hauled her against one of the chamber’s stone columns and lashed out into the elemental fury. Whatever his power blade struck, it caused a huge spray of sparks, as though he had shoved the sword of Hieronymo Sondar into a grinding lathe.
There were flashes in the churning darkness. Weapons discharging. Over the shriek of the bone saw, Gaunt heard the rasp of Hark’s plasma gun, and the rapid snap-roar of hellguns. The Scions.
‘Yoncy!’ Curth yelled in disbelief. ‘Yoncy!’
‘Hold on!’ Gaunt yelled back over the tumult.
Sariadzi suddenly appeared, staggering through the crashing waves. His upper body had been slashed in a dozen places and all his fingers were missing. He tried to cling to them. Curth attempted to hold on to him and pull him close. He looked at them in desperation, pleading in his eyes, no words coming from his gaping mouth.
The sharp edges of the darkness seized him from behind, jagged and piercing like negative lightning. It ripped him away from them. In the split second before he vanished from sight in the lofting spray, he disintegrated as though his entire body had been pushed through a mincer.
Light suddenly bloomed through the chamber, a fierce golden glow that began in the heart of the place and flowed outwards. The tendrils of shadow retreated swiftly with an angry crackle.
The surging water calmed to rocking waves.
Gaunt looked around. He saw Hark two pillars away, leaning against the stone column for support. His leather coat was shredded, and his cap was gone. His augmetic arm had been torn off, leaving only a stump of sparking, torn biomech. With his one good arm, he clung onto Inquisitor Laksheema. She was limp and drenched in blood, and her augmetics, even her beautiful gold mask, were crazed and scratched as though they had been sand-blasted. Smoke was billowing from the golden cuff on her left wrist where intricate and powerful digital weapons had overloaded and burned out.
There was no sign of Auerben or Daur, or any of the Scions, except Sancto, who was on his knees, the water up to his sternum. He was clutching his torso, bloody spittle drooling from his agonised mouth.
The Saint was in the centre of the chamber, at the very heart of the light. It shone out of her. All around her, the frothing churning water had smoothed to a mirror stillness.
She was locked in combat, her sword flashing as she swung two-handed into the beast attacking her.
The woe machine.
It was a shadow mass three times her size, a focus of darkness penned in by her radiance, but still lashing and rending with razor tendrils. It was hard to look at, and harder still to define: a cloud of knife-edged shadow that shifted and swam in supple, geometric patterns. It had a constantly changing texture, like rippling mirror scales, part absolute void, part iridescent black, like the wing-cases of some daemonic beetle. It was a storm of whirling, midnight-black thorns surrounding a super-dense core of immaterium darkness.
But the worst part wasn’t the look of it, the churning, abstract nightmare. It was the feel of it. The intense quality of primal horror that radiated from it. The eager, inhuman malice of pure annihilation.
It was Asphodel’s perfect vengeance weapon.
It was the Anti-Saint.
The Beati was covered in lacerations, blood streaming from a thousand knife cuts. Her clothing was shredded, and her breastplate and armour pitted and scoured. Her sword whirled in her hand, deflecting the oil-thick darkness that lashed and tore at her. Her sword was not especially large, nor was it particularly extraordinary. Just a standard, bulk-issue officer’s weapon.
It was the force she imbued it with that counted. A crisp, green aura shone around the blade, and where it struck, the darkness burned. She was drawing on all her power, channelling from a distant and almighty source. The divine light pouring out of her had caged and contained the woe machine, at least temporarily. She thrust and stabbed to end its existence. A phantom shadow of wings, huge and made of emerald light, had sprouted from her back. A halo of bright light surrounded her head.
‘We have to help her,’ said Daur, appearing at Gaunt’s side. He was soaked to the skin, his uniform torn. He was covered in small wounds.
Gaunt nodded.
‘She has it pinned,’ he said. ‘She’s contained its power.’
He and Gaunt moved forward together.
‘Don’t be fething idiots!’ Curth yelled after them.
Sancto saw them moving forward. He got up with a raw growl, clutching his hellgun with one hand and a terrible belly-wound with the other. Something had slashed clean through his body armour and almost gutted him.
All three of them fired into the shadow assaulting the saint. It barely seemed to notice Daur’s shots or the blasts from Sancto’s weapon, but the explosive round from Gaunt’s bolt pistol blew a hole in it. Thorns spiralled away, like a swarm of insects driven from a nest.
In seconds, the damage had re-formed, and the thorns had re-joined the main, whirling mass.
They all fired again, repeated shots. Auerben stumbled up to join them, her hair matted with blood. She added her own shots to the fusillade.
‘It won’t die!’ she wailed.
‘It’s gonna die,’ Sancto snarled. ‘It took all my men. Took ’em all and shredded them!’
The woe machine dropped back, still whirling and keening. The water under it rippled and seethed.