My prone body had not been touched, even though the chapel around me had been peppered with fire.
Typical Betancore bravado. Typical Betancore finesse.
She was just like her damned father.
'Send her to me/ I told Bequin as I lay back in my cot, half-dead and feeling terrible.
Medea Betancore looked in a few minutes later. Like her father, Midas, she was clad in the red-piped black suit of a Glavian pilot, and she proudly wore his old cerise, embroidered jacket.
Her skin, like Midas's, like all that of all Glavians, was dark. She grinned at me.
'I owe you,' I said.
Medea shook her head. 'Nothing my father wouldn't have done.' She sat on the foot of my cot.
'He'd have killed Tantalid, though,' she decided.
'He was a better shot/
That grin again, pearl white teeth framed by ebony skin.
'Yeah, he was that/
'But you'll do/ I smiled.
She saluted and left.
Midas Betancore had been dead for twenty-six years. I missed him still. He was the closest thing to a friend I had ever had. Bequin and Aemos, they were allies, and I trusted them with my life. But Midas…
May the God-Emperor rot Fayde Thuring for taking him. May the God-Emperor lead me to Fayde Thuring one day so that I and Medea may avenge Midas.
Medea had never known her father. She'd been born a month after his death, raised by her mother on Glavia, and had come into my service by chance. I was her godfather, a promise to Midas. Duty bound, I had visited Glavia for her ascension to adulthood, and watched her drive a Glavia long-prow through the vortex rapids of the Stilt Hills
during the Rites of Majority. One glimpse of her skills had convinced me.
Arianrhod Esw Sweydyr was dead. So were Gonvax and Qus. The battle in the sacrarium had been fierce. Ravenor had killed the raging haemoncu-lus, but only after it had ripped open his belly and taken off Zu Zeng's left ear.
Gideon Ravenor was in intensive care in the main city infirmary of Lethe. We would collect him once he was out of danger.
I wondered how long that would be. I wondered how he would be. He had loved Arianrhod, loved her dearly. I prayed this loss would not set him back too far.
I mourned Qus and the swordswoman. Qus had been with, me for nineteen years. That Darknight in the chapel had robbed me of so much.
Qus was buried with full honours in the Imperial Guard Memorial Cenotaph at Lethe Majeure. Arianrhod was burned on a bare hill west of the salt-licks. I was too weak to attend either service.
Aemos brought the sabre Barbarisater to me after the pyre. I wrapped it in a vizzy-dofh and a silk sheet. I knew I was duty bound to return it to the tribal elders of the Esw Sweydyr on Carthae before long. That would mean a round trip of at least a year. I had no time for it. I put the wrapped sword in my safebox. It barely fitted.
As I worked my way back to health, I considered Tantalid. Arnaut Tantalid had risen from the rank of confessor militant in the Missionaria Galaxia seventy years before to become one of the Ministorum's most feared and ruthless witch-hunters. Like many of his breed, he followed the doctrines of Sebastian Thor with such unswerving precision it bordered on clinical obsession.
To most of the common folk of the Imperium, there would be blessed litde to choose between an Ordo Xenos inquisitor such as myself and an ecclesiarchy witchkiller like Tantalid. We both hunt out the damning darkness that stalks mankind, we are both figures of fear and dread, we are both, so it seems, laws unto ourselves.
Twinned though we may be in so many ways, we could not be more distinct. It is my personal belief that the Adeptus Ministorum, the Imperium's vast organ of faith and worship, should focus its entire attention on the promulgation of the true church of the God-Emperor and leave the persecution of heretics to the Inquisition. Our jurisdictions often clash. There have, to my certain knowledge, been two wars of faith in the last century provoked and sustained by just such rivalry.
Tantalid and I had locked horns twice before. On Bradell's World, five decades earlier, we had faced each other across the marble floor of a synod court, arguing for the right to extradite the psyker Elbone Parsuval. On that
