Four Thracian Guardsmen were directly ahead of me, using the charred corpse of a fallen aurochothere for cover as they blasted into the press.
I was a few steps away from them when the gigantic dead animal reanimated, a psychic puppet, killing them all.
My weapons were useless. I focussed my mind and blew the thing apart with a concussive mental wave.
An Aurora Marine flew through the air over me, ten metres up, his legs missing.
I ran on, scything my blade at the escaped prisoners who menaced me.
The road was covered with the dead. Humans, on fire from head to foot, stumbled past me and collapsed on their faces.
The Trojan tractor team was on fire, its massive trailer slewed around. Three of the enemy pyskers lay dead on the payload space, and four void shields remained intact, their occupants frantic within.
But the others…
Upwards of twenty-five alpha-level enemy psykers had escaped.
I saw the first, a stumbling, emaciated wretch of a man, near the end of the trailer. Corposant flickered around his head and he was trying to eat a screaming astropath novitiate.
My boltgun stopped his daemonic work.
I dropped to my knees, gasping and crying as the second found me. She was a stringy female, clad in a gauzy white veil, her fingernails like talons.
She cowered behind the end of the trailer, sobbing and lashing out at me with her foul power. She had no eyes.
I am not alpha-class. My brain was broiling and bubbling.
A Thracian guardsman ran at her from the left, and instinctively, she turned her attention to him. His head popped like a blister.
I shot her through the heart and knocked her flat on her back. Her limbs continued to thrash for over a minute.
Electrical discharge spat out at me from nearby in the crowd. People, screaming and burning, tumbled frantically back from a male psyker who was striding, head down, towards the hives. He was a dwarf, with stunted limbs and an enlarged cranium. Ball lightning crackled around his pudgy fingers.
I stabbed at him with my mind, just to get his attention and then exploded his face with a pin-point bolt.
Emperor save me, he kept coming. I had blown the front off his skull, but he kept coming. Blind, his features a gory mess. He stumbled across the ground towards me, his still-active mind boring into mine.
I fired again, almost panicking myself, and blew off one of his arms. Still he came on. My jacket, hair and eyelashes caught fire. My brain was about to explode out of my skull.
A Space Marine in the colours of the Aurora Chapter came at him from behind and shredded him into pulp with his boltgun.
'Inquisitor?' the Marine asked me, his voice distorted by his helmet mic. 'Are you all right?'
He helped me up.
'What insanity is this?' he rasped.
"You have a vox-channel, Marine? Alert Lord Orsini!'
'Already done, inquisitor,' he crackled.
Behind us, the tractors exploded en masse, flinging fire and debris high into the air.
A scalded child ran past us, shrieking.
The Marine grabbed the child in his massive arms.
This way, this way, out of danger…'
'No/ I said slowly. 'Don't… don't…'
His visored face swung up at me in confusion, the child cradled in his arms.
'Don't what?' he asked.
'Look at the brand! The mark there!' I yelled, pointing to the Malleus rune burned into the child's ankle. The hammer of witches. The brand-mark of the psyker.
The Chaos child looked up at me and grinned.
'What mark?' asked the Marine. What mark are you talking about?'
'1…I…'
I tried to fight it, please know that. I tried to repel the unholy power of the child's mind as it groped into my head. But this thing, this 'child', was far beyond my powers to contain.
Kill him, it said.
My hand was shaking, resisting, as I swung the boltgun around and shot the Marine through the head. A searing white agony flooded my horrified being.
Now kill yourself, it suggested, chortling.
I put the smoking muzzle of the boltgun against my own temple, my vision filled with the giggling face of the child, perched on the knee of the collapsed, headless Marine.
That's it… go on…
