Something exploded behind me. I could hear Ravenor bellowing in rage and pain.
I ran after the Beldame.
The upper chapel, above ground, was silent and cold. Darknight flares glimmered through the lines of stained glass windows.
'You can't escape, Sadia!' I shouted, but my voice was thin and hoarse.
I glimpsed her as she skittered between the columns to my left. A shadow in the shadows.
'Sadia! Sadia, old hag, you have killed me! But you will die by my hand!'
To my right now, another skuttling shadow, half-seen. I moved that way.
I was stabbed hard from behind, in between my shoulder blades. I turned as I fell, and saw the manic face of the Beldame's arch-poisoner, Pye. He cackled and giggled, prancing, a spent injector tube clutched in each hand.
'Dead! Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead!' he warbled.
He had injected me with the secondary part of the poison.
I fell over, my muscles already cramping.
'How does it feel, inquisitor?' Pye chuckled, capering towards me.
'Emperor damn you/ I gasped and shot him through the face. I blacked out.
When I came round, Beldame Sadia had me by the throat and was shaking me with her augmetic mandibles.
'I want you awake!' she hissed, her veil falling back and the toxin sacs in her wizened cheeks bulging. 'I want you awake to feel this!'
Her head exploded in a spray of bone shards and tissue. The spider carriage went into convulsions and threw me across the chapel. It continued to scuttle and dance, her corpse jerking slackly from it, for a full minute before it collapsed.
I was face down on the floor, and I tried to turn, but the advancing effect of the poison was shutting me down.
Shutting me down hard.
Massive feet strode into my field of vision. Armoured feet, plated with ceramite.
I rolled as best I could and looked up.
Witchfinder Tantalid stood over me, holstering the boltgun he had used to kill Beldame Sadia. He was encased in gold-encrusted battle armour, the pennants of the Ministorum suspended over his back plate.
"You are an accursed heretic, Eisenhorn. And I claim your life.'
Not Tantalid, I thought as my consciousness spun away again. Not Tantalid. Not now.
TWO
Something so typically Betancore. My fallen.
The summons.
From the moment I slipped into unconsciousness at the feet of the vicious Witchfinder Tantalid, I knew nothing more until I woke, twenty-nine hours later, aboard my gun-cutter. I remembered nothing about the seven attempts to shock my system back to life, the cardiac massages, the anti-venom shots injected directly into my heart muscle, the fight to make me live again. I learned all about it later, as I slowly recovered. For days, I was as weak as a feline whelp.
Most particularly, I knew nothing about the way Tantalid had been denied. Bequin told me, a day or two after my first awakening. It had been something so typically Betancore.
Alizebeth had been hard on my heels up the stairs from the sacrarium, in time to see Tantalid's arrival. She had known him at once. The Witchfinder is notorious throughout the sub-sector.
He'd been about to kill me, and I was unconscious at his feet, going into anaphylactic shock with the venom bonding and seething in my veins.
She'd cried out, fumbling for her weapon.
Then light – hard, powerful light – had streamed in through the stained glass windows. There was a roaring sound. My gun-cutter, its lamps on full beam, rose to a hover over the rained chapel, lighting up the night. Guessing what was about to follow, Bequin had thrown herself down.
Betancore's voice had boomed out from the hull tannoy of the hovering gunship.
'Imperial Inquisition! Step away from the inquisitor now!'
Tantalid had squinted up into the glare, his stringy tortoise head turning in the rim of his massive carapace armour.
'Ministorum officer!' he had yelled back, his voice amplified by his suit's vox-unit. 'Back off! Back off now! This heretic is mine!'
Bequin grinned as she told me Betancore's response. 'Never argue with a gun-cutter, you asshole.'
The slaved servitors in the cutter's blunt wingtips opened fire, hosing the chapel with autocannon shells. The stained glass windows had all shattered, statues had been decapitated, flagstones had disintegrated. Hit at least once, Tantalid had fallen backwards into the dust and debris. His body had not been found, so I presumed the bastard had survived. But he had been smart enough to flee.
