Voke, Roban and I headed out into the hive streets with a kill team of sixty that included the four White Consuls. Their squad leader was a
particularly large sergeant called Kurvel. We travelled on foot through the debris and smoke. Gangs of citizens jeered and pelted missiles at us, but the sight of four terrible Space Marines kept them at bay.
Esarhaddon, Voke warned me, was a being of dreadful intellect and not to be underestimated. When we saw the monster's choice of bolt-hole, I understood what Voke meant.
The noble family of Lange was prominent in the aristocracy of Thracian Primaris, and kept an ample summer palace in the east sector of Hive Pri-maris, near to the mercantile quarter where they had made their fortunes.
The palace rose proud of the lowhab streets around it, swathed in its own force bubble.
This had been one of the city areas we had supposed to be secure. With their power and resources, noble houses should have been able to protect themselves for the duration of the unrest.
But not against Esarhaddon. He was inside, with all the resources of the palace to protect him.
We met Heldane on the western approach road to the palace. He had a team of about twenty with him. The street itself was littered with bodies, most of them citizens.
'He's controlling the crowds as if they were puppets/ Heldane said curtly, with no word of greeting. Waves of them keep coming at us, preventing us getting to the garden walls and the servants' annex along there.'
As I may have said, I had little time for Inquisitor Heldane. A very tall, grim man, his face an unsightly mass of scar tissue since an encounter with a hungry carnodon back on Gudran. He'd been Voke's pupil when I had first met him; now he was a full inquisitor, with mental powers, it was said, that exceeded even his old master's. As I saw him there, I shuddered. He had undergone extensive surgery, not to disguise the damage to his face, but to exaggerate it. His skull seemed to have been extended into an almost equine shape, with a snout-like mouth full of blunt teeth, and dark, murky eyes. Fibre-wires and fluid tubes braided his cranium in place of hair. He wore plasteel body armour the colour of blood and carried a segmented power glaive.
'Eisenhorn/ he nodded, noticing me. It was like having a warhorse shake its head in my direction.
They're coming again!' The cry went up from Heldane's men. Down the street, moving through the fire spills, figures were lurching towards us.
Weapons! Stand ready! Heldane had spoken, but not with his voice. His psychic command shook through our skulls and some of our own troopers looked dismayed.
Missiles rained down on us, and the Interior Guardsmen raised an umbrella of riot shields. Small arms fired at us too, and an arbites near me fell with his knee buckled the wrong way.
Our attackers, some hundred or more, were hive citizens, blank faced and moving like marionettes. As Heldane had reported, some monumental
psychic force was making puppets out of them. The smoky night air ionised with the psionic backwash.
I take no pleasure in actions like the one that followed. The beast Esarhaddon was forcing us to fight innocent civilians just to protect ourselves.
Maybe he thought we'd shrink from the task and leave him alone.
We, however, were the Inquisition.
Kurvel led his White Consuls at the front, banging their weapons against their chest-plates and howling defiance through their helmet speakers. I saw a promethium bomb strike one and shatter, swathing him in liquid flame. He simply strode on.
We fired over the mob's heads, trying to break them, but they had no will of their own. Our firing became kill-shots. In ten minutes, we had reluctantly added a fair number to the planet's rising death toll.
That brought us to the corner of the street, facing the high walls of the garden and the edge of the palace's iridescent force shield itself.
I could hear a low chuckling in my head.
Esarhaddon.
Where's Lyko? I heard Voke ask Heldane psychically.
He took a team around the front to try and disable the force wall.
