The belt was out. He brandished the sentry gun like a cudgel, cracking skulls and knocking Sekkites into the stalls below. Several las-rounds hit him in the lower back, shunting him forwards.
Milo’s first mine went off, annihilating a section of staircase in a blizzard of fire and bone shrapnel. The second mine detonated an instant later, obliterating another section of the staircase further down, and rippling flames along two blocks of stalls. Sekkites staggered, blundering, blinded, their clothing on fire.
The mine Mkoll had fixed to the dais fired, destroying half the spine railing and causing the entire platform to slump sideways. Upwashed flame boiled across the Anarch’s flailing figure.
Mkoll was near the bottom of the staircase. The blast shock knocked him off his feet. A body fell across him. He struggled to get the dead weight off his legs.
Milo saw Mkoll go down. He wanted to rain more fire at the Anarch, but Sekkites were rushing him from all sides. He switched furiously from target to target, chopping each one down as they came at him. Cinders and burning ash drifted around him like snow.
The exterior mines went off in a quick, staggered, uneven series of muffled roars. The Oratory rattled in its socket. Men sprawled off their feet. Dislodged skulls rained down from the dome, shattering like pottery on the floor and stalls beneath. Flames surged up in a dozen places around the dais and the lower stalls.
Gripping the rail, the Anarch hauled himself upright, braced against the drunken slope of the damaged dais. His maw uttered a roar of rage, and the remaining lekts echoed it in shrill chorus.
He had been betrayed. Deceived. Wounded in his own sanctum. His victory would only matter if he survived to see it.
Sek howled again. The uncouth noise of his voice drowned out everything around him. Some Sekkites simply fell dead, ears and brains pulped by the volume of his wrath.
He tore off his silver gauntlets and bared his hands. He focused his magisterial powers, invoking the dark eminences of the outer warp that he served. The quire took up his supplication, chanting words and conjurations that pre-dated mankind. The Saint had wounded him at Oureppan, and drained his psykomantic potency. He channelled all he had left to preserve himself.
The immaterium flexed, splitting the air around him. Foul winds sucked and screeched. Tendrils of yellow lightning flickered around his gesturing hands.
He was opening a gate to flee. He was folding the curtain of the warp aside through willpower alone, gouging through the subspace membranes, and throwing wide a door to step through into safety.
Milo saw reality bending around the demiurge. Another vortex. Smaller than the one at Oureppan that Sek had opened to destroy the Beati, less controlled, less stable. But a doorway all the same. A way out.
Milo yelled out, rushing forwards, hands grabbing at him from all sides, pulling him down.
Mkoll ran towards the burning dais, emptying the last of his autopistol’s clip into the Anarch’s back. They had to stop him. That had been the point of everything. They had to kill him here, now, before he slipped away and became invisible and untraceable for another decade or more.
Holofurnace punched a raving etogaur aside and grabbed the dead excubitor’s fallen power lance. Other excubitors were rushing at him, lances raised to strike.
The lance was long and heavy, more a halberd than a spear. Its blade tip was as wide as a cleaver and as long as a tactical gladius. Its weight and balance were poor.
But it was not so different from the wyrm-spears he had learned to handle back on Ithaka.
He pulled it back, right arm crooked, left extended before him, the lance horizontal beside his face. He saw Mkoll, far below, skzerret in hand, clambering onto the dais to grab at the fleeing magister.
The Tanith huntsman had been right. It had come down to straight silver at the last.
To bare blades.
Holofurnace let his fly. The cast was good. The shaft flew as true as a sea-lance. He saw it strike, slicing into the Anarch’s back, driving deep, cutting through, transfixing the daemon’s feathered torso.
He saw the daemon stumble forwards. He saw the subspace gate shatter, unfurl and then collapse in a wash of obscene light.
The excubitors fell on him, striking him down with hacking, butchering blows. He fought at them, clawing and punching. Their hands were on him, inhumanly strong, pinning him, gripping him. He could not break free.
Holofurnace looked up, blood streaming down his face, and met the eyes of the excubitor who would end him.
‘Vahooth voi sehn!’ the excubitor screamed as he brought the lance blade down.
‘Ithaka!’ Holofurnace replied with the last breath he would ever take.
Twenty: Blood for Blood
Gaunt and Baskevyl bounded up the undercroft steps with Blenner trailing behind them.
‘Grae!’ Gaunt yelled.
Colonel Grae and his complement of Urdeshi field troops were milling in the lamplit hallway, clutching their weapons and looking up in dismay at the sounds of destruction rumbling through the palace above them.
‘What is this, my lord?’ Grae asked.
‘Another one,’ said Gaunt. ‘Another woe machine. Stronger than the first. Is the palace evacuated?’
Grae shook his head.
‘We’d barely begun,’ he said. ‘The power has only just been restor–’
Gaunt pushed past him. ‘Where’s the warmaster?’
‘I don’t know,’ Grae called, hurrying after him. ‘I think, still on site.’
‘Dammit, Barthol,’ Gaunt murmured. He looked at Grae. ‘And the Beati?’
‘Taken above,’ said Grae. ‘The medicae have her–’
‘It’s loose in the palace,’ said Gaunt. ‘Up there. Hunting for every target it can find. It’ll be seeking out Macaroth, the Saint… that’s its purpose.’
‘How do we stop it, my lord?’ Grae asked.
Gaunt was already running up the steps into the main hall of the wing.
‘I don’t know if we do,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen it.’
‘It’s an abomination,’ Baskevyl said to Grae. He shrugged at the intelligence officer. ‘This night has been long enough, I think.’
‘Don’t go up there!’ Blenner wailed from behind them. ‘Fething hide!’
‘The best we can hope is to slow it down,’ Gaunt told Grae. ‘Buy any time we can to get Macaroth and the Beati clear.’
‘And you, sir, surely?’ said Grae.
‘Where did my daughter go?’ Gaunt asked.
‘Quartered with the Saint,’ said Grae. ‘The chapel. That’s where she was taken. All the survivors–’
Gaunt looked down the steps at the Urdeshi troops.
‘All of you, with me,’ he said.
‘You heard the Lord Executor!’ Baskevyl yelled.
They swept into the main hallway, Baskevyl forming the Urdeshi into firing lines at Gaunt’s heels. Grae and Blenner ran after them. Broken glass littered the floor. Gaunt could smell burning. He could hear the rip and chatter of gunfire, and then the answering wail of a blade on a whetting wheel.
Palace staff stumbled past in the opposite direction, fleeing, panicked. Some were injured and bleeding.
‘Don’t go that way!’ one man yelled.
‘Get clear! Get out!’ Gaunt told him as he ran past. Gaunt didn’t break stride. Sword in one hand, bolt pistol in the other, he stormed down the long hall towards the source of the uproar.