‘Then I’ll see to it,’ said Krule.
The eldar pranced into a squad of Lucifer Blacks, slaying seven with its sword. Not one of them came close to landing a return blow. Vangorich grabbed Krule’s shoulder. ‘Beast, this is one of their warrior dancers. I thought them a legend, but evidently they are not.’
‘And?’ said Krule.
‘And be careful.’
Krule looked at him incredulously. ‘You’ve never warned me before.’
‘There is, as they say, a first time for everything. This is one of those times.’ Vangorich released his Assassin. Krule snorted dismissively.
Krule came at the eldar when it was only metres from a wide service vehicle exit. Three dirty yellow power loaders had been drawn across the exit to prevent the eldar’s escape, the gaps between jammed haphazardly with crates of algal feedstock. Soldiers fired wildly over their barricade, desperate to bring the killer down before it got among them. The eldar leapt out of the way of every shot with stunning agility, every flip and twist bringing it nearer. A final leap, a sword of bright silver glinting in the dim light. Shurikens whickered through the air. In moments the Guardsmen were dead.
Their deaths, though quick, gave Krule the time he needed to draw near.
‘Stop!’ he called.
The eldar halted, poised on the cab roof of a wheeled loader. It cocked its head at Krule. A white domino mask covered its face, one black tear sliding down the cheek over and over again. Close-fitting motley clad its body. For all the eldar’s otherworldly slenderness its limbs rippled with muscle.
Krule advanced. The eldar leaped backwards over his head, its body shattering into a blizzard of geometric shapes. The alien somersaulted through four complete turns as it flew, its true form barely visible as a fuzzy outline in a field of spinning diamonds. Krule’s chronaxic implants kicked in, chemical stimulants overloading his metabolism and sending his heartbeat into a continuous blur. His sense of time slowed to the point he could have slipped between the raindrops of a storm. The alien was still faster.
A hail of discs shot out of the alien’s pistol, the feed-mag disappearing upwards. Krule dodged three; a fourth sliced into his bicep, embedding itself in the adamantium reinforcing his humerus. He suppressed the pain, wheeling over in a scissoring cartwheel, driving his feet at the alien. The eldar leaned back so far his crest of hair brushed the bloodied floor. Krule sprang off his hands onto his feet, and aimed a devastating punch, but the xenos wove out of the way, spinning around and bringing its pistol to bear again. Krule slapped the gun off target just as a spray of deadly discs hissed from its snout. He evaded the humming power sword that followed. The eldar flipped backward over and over, firing as it went. Krule dived aside, a storm of shurikens following him. His eyes flicked to the creature’s broad girdle. Some kind of grav-belt.
The eldar spread its arms and flipped towards him, bouncing lightly from the catwalk guardrail. Krule charged at it, dropping to his side and sliding under a further fusillade of discs. He scooped up a lasrifle still sticky with blood, and fired. The eldar leaned casually out of the shot’s way and bisected the lasgun with its sword. The metal and plastek came apart with a bang. Krule fended off further strikes with the smoking butt of the gun. He swung at the flat of the eldar’s blade, more of his improvised weapon disintegrating with every parry.
The eldar cartwheeled at him, flicked its sword down into the ground and used it as a pivot to swing around the hilt, feet out, catching Krule full in the face. The Assassin staggered back, and the eldar moved in for the kill, but Krule was feigning concussion. As the eldar drove its sword at Krule he stepped sideways, shifting his stance so that he came outside the eldar’s arm. He grabbed the alien’s girdle, and tore it free. The eldar danced back, but not fast enough. Krule grabbed its sword wrist and slammed the heel of his palm into its elbow, shattering the delicate bone. It took the blow without a sound. The sword fell from its limp hand to dangle by its power feed. The alien rolled along Krule’s arm, until the two were as tightly pressed as dance partners.
‘You fight well for a human,’ it said in accented Gothic. The smooth golden snout of its weapon pressed under his chin.
A crack shattered the moment. The eldar fell, a smoking hole in its temple beside its mask.
Vangorich stood behind, his hand out, the ring of his digital laser exposed over his knuckle. He sucked at his flesh where the discharge had singed his skin and shook out his fingers with a pained expression.
‘I told you to be careful.’
Krule looked at his fallen foe. It seemed so fragile dead, its limbs thin as reeds, more like the doll of a rich upper-hive child than a creature that had lived and breathed. His hand went to the disc embedded in his bicep. He cut his fingers on it as he tried to pull it out, for it was lodged fast in the metal and bone of his upper arm.
Vangorich strode over to the dead alien. ‘These are their elite of elite. We were lucky to kill it.’
Krule left the disc where it was. He flexed his fist. ‘It hurts like hell.’
‘Do you know, Krule, one of the reasons I have always enjoyed your company is that you never say anything asinine like “I had it covered” or other such nonsense.’
‘I didn’t. I’d be dead without you.’ Krule spoke quietly. He was panting hard, and sweat and blood ran from his skin. He had never come this close to being beaten.
‘Quite. The question is, what is it doing here? I wanted to interrogate it. It’s a shame I had to kill it to save you, but I had no choice. I could not cripple it. Their weapons are mentally operated, so it was the head or it was nothing.’
‘You have my thanks.’
‘Save them. In not too long a time the ork ambassador will be back aboard the attack moon, and you may yet die today.’ Vangorich stroked at his scar in thought. ‘Only seven or so, Mercado said. That’s an awfully small number to try anything meaningful at the Palace, even for xenos as arrogant as the eldar. I am not so sure all is as it seems here. Come, we had better go, or there will be none of the xenos left to question.’
Four
Before the Throne
Lhaerial came to the outer precincts of the Sanctum Imperialis. Bho the death jester followed her, close as a shadow. For as long as they could they avoided combat, she clouding the weak minds of the humans where possible, detouring to avoid them where it was not. They followed half-forgotten conduits and filthy service ducts, coming ever closer to their target. The blazing light of the Emperor’s beacon grew in her mind’s eye, blotting out her limited ability to read the skein. Her future was a mystery to her now, and she must act cautiously.
One by one she felt the death songs of her fellows, fallen in solo dances with no audience to applaud. A black wave of despair rose in her heart, but she froze it. Sorrow could wait for a time when it could be turned into laughter, a celebration of her troupers’ joining with Cegorach.
There came a moment when they could hide no more, at the place where the architecture of the Palace opened up and became dominated by the vast avenues radiating from the Throne Room. The weak infantry in black were replaced by armoured giants, their golden plate draped in sombre black cloaks. Their species aside, there was nothing similar between the two breeds of warrior. These were the Adeptus Custodes, and few could stand against them.
Lhaerial had expected to encounter them sooner, for Ulthran had told her they guarded all parts of the Palace in the days when the Emperor lived. Time had made them cautious, and they gathered now only around the Throne Room of their lord, careful of what little mortal life remained to Him.
The secret tunnels turned away from the Throne Room, and Bho and Lhaerial were forced out. They avoided the main processional way and its progression of mighty, symbolic gates, taking a lesser avenue — still many hundred lengths across, the vaulting of the ceiling lost to smoke and distance. Only one gateway barred this avenue, at the entrance to the antechamber. Far away down the mighty road it hid in clouds of incense.