Eisenhorn Omnibus - страница 183
Inshabel ran to his dead master as the servitor collapsed, trying to pull the corpse clear.
'Later! Later for that!' I said, spiking the command with my will. Inshabel was close to losing his wits to anger and grief, and I needed him.
He snatched up his weapon and ran after me.
'The page boy?' I asked.
'I had to hit him. I hope he's just unconscious.'
We came out into the storm-wracked night on the palace landing pad. Psychic lightning splintered the sky above us and the wind lashed us. There was no one on the pad itself, but a fight was raging on the lawns beyond. I could see eight figures, some robed, some dressed in the body armour of the Interior Guard, closing to surrounding a lone humanoid who crackled and glowed with spectral light. Thorny jags of flame lit out from the cornered figure and dropped one of the guardsmen as we watched. Esarhaddon. They had Esarhaddon cornered.
Inshabel and I leapt down from the pad – a three metre drop onto the wet grass – and ran to join the fray.
I could see Esarhaddon clearly now despite the rain. A tall, almost naked man with wild black hair and a lean, stringy body, corposant gleaming and sliding around his capering limbs.
We were just ten metres from the edge of the fight when one of the robed figures raised a bulky weapon and blasted at the rogue psyker.
A plasma gun.
The violet beam, almost too bright to look at, struck Esarhaddon. In his weakened state, he had no defence against it.
He ignited like an incendiary round and burned from head to foot in the middle of the lawn.
Lowering our weapons, Inshabel and I walked to join the ring of figures standing around the white hot pyre. As his robed and hooded acolytes murmured prayers of grace and deliverance, Inquisitor Lyko set down his plasma gun.
The Emperor will thank you, Lyko,' I said.
He glanced round, seeing me for the first time. 'Eisenhorn.' He nodded. His narrow face was lined and taut and his blue eyes hooded. He was only about fifty years old sidereal, a mere youth by inquisitional standards. Young enough for his promising career to survive the way this day's atrocity would tarnish his achievement on Dolsene.
'I do not serve the Emperor for his gratitude. I do it for the glory of the Imperium/
'Quite so,' I said. I looked back at the molten heat that had been our quarry. It mattered little to me that I'd made this opportunity for Lyko. He could take the glory. I didn't care. The escape of the psykers had stolen much of the glory he had received of late. Hunting them down was the only way he could make amends.
Planetwide, there was some sense of rejoicing when it was announced mat Lord Commander Helican had survived the carnage unscathed, and mat Warmaster Honorius would live. That announcement came on the sixth day of unrest, by which time the Imperial authorities had begun to reim-pose order on the stricken citizens of Thracian Primaris. But it helped. Common folk who assumed memselves to be lost were calmed into believing law was back in the hands of the great and good. Panics died away. Arbites units unleashed their last few suppression raids against the die-hard recidivist looters in the lowhabs.
My own spirits were not much lifted. For a start I was privy to the confidential fact that Lord Commander Helican had actually died screaming and shitting himself under a crash-diving Imperial Navy Lightning on the Avenue of the Victor Bellum. A double had been arranged by the Eccle-siarchy and the Helican Senatorum, and that double continued to act in his place until, several years later, he 'died naturally of old age' and a successor was established in less-turbulent circumstances.
I can speak of that public deceit now in this private record, but at the time, communicating that secret was a death-crime for even the highest lord of the Imperium. I was not about to break that confidence. I am an inquisitor and I understand how fundamental it is to maintain public order.
In addition to fatigue and the pain of my wounds, what darkened my mood was the news about Gideon Ravenor. Now, of course, we all understand what a priceless and brilliant contribution he was to make to Imperial learning, and how that would never have happened if he had not been confined to a life of mental rumination.
