One was just an arm's length from me when my desperate rain of bolts finally defeated it. A shot exploded the armoured matrix of chemical dispensers on its shoulder, spraying fluid into the air. In a second, it fell convulsing to the ground at our feet as the damage robbed it of its drug-source and left nothing but agony behind.
The other barely felt the punctures of Midas's too subtle needles. Frantically, we split to either side, out of its path. Braying and thrashing its
whip-limbs, it pounded after Midas, who ducked left and right between pillars, trying to evade it. Only his Glavian-bred grace and speed kept him out of its inexorably advancing grip.
He knew he had seconds left. Bequin and I were moving, but there was precious little we could do.
Midas pulled off his pouch of grenades, priming one as he twisted and side-stepped between the pillars, scarcely avoiding a withering lash of flexible metal whips that scored gouges in the stone.
Midas feinted left and then threw himself directly at the beast, snagging the strap of his pouch around its neck as he vaulted over its shoulder head first.
The grenades detonated in one stunning flash and atomised the ravening man-beast. Caught in the Shockwave, Midas was thrown into a pillar and dropped unconscious.
'Eisenhorn! Eisenhorn!' Molitor was wailing as he and his remaining servant hunted for me. His voice was cracking with pain and fury.
'Stay at my side,' I told Bequin as we ran deeper into the chamber. That psychic can't touch me while I'm close to you.'
Half the ceiling and a significant part of the wall blew in. For a second the air was solid with billowing orange fire.
Deafened, our skins scorched by the blast, Bequin and I were back on our feet in a moment. The chamber was open to the sky now, and cold white light poured in, heavy with smoke.
'Come on!' Together we scrambled towards the blast-damaged wall, picking our way up the smouldering slope of broken stone and whatever material the saruthi used for construction. This material was fused and bubbling, like plastic or flesh.
We headed for the light.
We emerged high on the curving upper face of the saruthi edifice. It was cold, and the wind that came across the segmented ridges of the polished white roof was brisk and full of the odours of smoke, fyceline and prome-thium.
We were at a dizzying height. The pearly flanks of the vast structure arced away to a ground far below and the surface was hard and polished like ice. Bequin slipped, and I managed to grab her before she slid away down the curve.
From up here, high in the alien sky, we could see across the lakes of fire and the vast smoke banks that roiled away for hundreds of kilometres. We could see flocks of troopships soaring up and away through the smoke cover towards the parent ships in orbit. On the flats of white mud far beneath us, Imperial troops ran to waiting dropships, discarding packs and helmets and even weapons in their haste to leave. Tanks and armoured carriers wallowed and puffed through the wet mud and up onto the tongue-like ramps of heavy lifters. Shells and las-fire flickered across the lakes and mud as the remaining heretic forces fought on heedless.
Lances and forks of dazzling energy bit down from the clouds, murdering the landscape. Obeying Molitor's instructions to the letter, Admiral Spatian was levelling the area. All five of us inquisitors, along with Cynewolf and key Deathwatchers and selected officers of the invasion force, had been given the code words to unleash this doom. Molitor had sealed our fate. Once given, Sanction Extremis could not be revoked, even if my vox had been working instead of crippled by the electromagnetic bursts that accompanied every orbital strike. As per the battle plans, Spatian was systematically wasting the invasion site as fast as possible, even at the cost of his own retreating ground forces.
Another saruthi edifice, twenty kilometres away, died. Shaped in a form that suggested a nautilus shell, its opalescent curves were cracked and split by blue-hot heavy lasers. The die-straight beams came down through the clouds from ships so far up they were invisible, and tore through the edifice like testamental judgment. Waves of fighter-bombers swept in, sowing payloads of munitions that bloomed in rippling seas of explosions. Guided warheads, sleek like airborne sharks, whined overhead on the last stage of their first and final journey from starship to target.
