Another burst of bolt fire; Tchaq was aiming shots at a target further down the path: Grunland.
‘Save it,’ Valdez commanded. ‘We’ve lost him for the moment.’
He gave the order to dismount. The Cabellan riders circled the remains of the sergeant then dismounted warily.
The inquisitor beckoned Danielle towards the breach in the wire. ‘Now’s your chance to serve the Imperium. Can you read any trace of them in there?’
Danielle closed her eyes to the night and concentrated on the ebb and flow of aura in the village below. She sensed evil stirring like a slow breeze through the blackened buildings, but only in a general, enveloping swell of unrest. She couldn’t focus it.
One thing was sure. However many living men had set foot inside the village, no flicker of a human soul now remained.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to get closer.’
Valdez grunted, a neutral tone that was neither acceptance nor displeasure. ‘You,’ he said to Tolmann. ‘Is there any other way in, except for this path?’
Tolmann hesitated. Like a thief, Danielle lifted a word from his mind. ‘Styrus?’ she asked. ‘Tell us about that.’
The Cabellan’s frightened eyes widened further in amazement. ‘Who gave you that name?’
‘You did,’ she said simply. ‘Now tell us.’
‘Mordessa lies in a valley,’ Tolmann explained. ‘But for this road, it’s cut off by a deep pool. Styrus.’
‘But the pool may be crossed?’ It was more assertion than question.
The Cabellan looked up at her and rightly guessed it was pointless to deny. ‘There’s a crossing, of sorts – west of the village. A line of stones. It’s said a man with a good eye can leap from each stone from the next.’
‘Said?’
Tolmann wrung his hands. ‘No one goes across there. The lake stands guard on Mordessa. Styrus is a name from old times.’
Styrus. A name from the old times – from before humanity came to this world. A psychic legacy left for the pioneers. Ancient, alien words took shape like a warning in Danielle’s mind.
Stoi Yn Ra.
The One Who Waits. She thought again of the strange, spiral structures lying in the village. For an instant her mind filled with another image, a scene frozen in time, plucked from the forgotten age. She saw battle rage amongst the silver-green facades where Mordessa now stood. She saw alien creatures, half-man, half-amphibian, beset by the forces of eternal darkness. She saw death; the silver structures laid to rain.
‘Old times,’ Tolmann repeated. ‘Dark times. Legend has it that—’
‘I don’t want your legends,’ Valdez interrupted. ‘Times are dark enough now. If there’s one small chance of getting into that village without walking naked into the hornets’ nest then we’re going to take it.’
Tolmann lapsed into gloomy silence, but Danielle read the unspoken words in his mind: the undead.
Emboldened by the same sense of doom, a second trooper approached. ‘Sir, wouldn’t it be better to return with reinforcements by daylight?’
Tchaq laughed, hoarse and rasping. ‘Daylight? None of us’ll see daylight again if we turn our backs now.’
‘Wise words,’ Valdez agreed. ‘Whatever abominations are in there, they won’t let us go now. We finish them, or they us. Got that?’
‘Nine against three,’ Tchaq goaded the Cabellans. ‘Aren’t the odds good enough for you?’
He lifted his gun and peered through the sights. ‘What about you?’ he asked Danielle. ‘Can you weave a spell or two with one of these?’
‘I call on other powers.’
Valdez loaded another machine clip into his pistol. ‘We’ll see about that, won’t we? Now, let’s move before they cut us down where we stand.’
They turned off the path and skirted through overgrown woodland rising above and away from the village. The forest was dark, air foul with the reek of the grey fungal cancer matted in a canopy over the brittle husks of dead trees, masking off the sky above. Occasional spears of moonlight pierced the gloom, casting pale silver pools amongst the rotting vegetation. Twice the ember glow of watching eyes blinked out on the riders, but there was no sign of pursuit.
At length the path turned downwards again. The forest thinned; the ground grew soft and marshy underfoot. Horse hooves sluiced through shallow, stagnant ponds.
‘There. Down below,’ Tolmann indicated beyond the edge of the trees where moonlight blistered on a screen of water. ‘Styrus.’
On the far side of the lake, the dark outlines of Mordessa. Between them and the village, just visible, a line of smooth stones across the water. The crossing wouldn’t be easy, and they would have to leave the horses behind.
Tchaq cursed quietly, distrustful of the slick, black water.
Valdez slapped the tech-priest across the back. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll see if we can’t save you a swim.’
‘No one swims in there,’ muttered Tolmann. Looking like a man condemned, he began to coax his horse down towards the water’s edge.
As they passed into the narrow clearing between forest and pool, Danielle felt a white-hot stab of warning. ‘Look out!’ she shouted. ‘They’ve seen us!’
A metallic whine cut open the night. A Cabellan trooper was catapulted from his horse. The others scrambled for the cover of the trees as the young soldier lay shaking on the earth, life pumping inexorably from a raw fissure in his guts.
Valdez leapt from his horse and dropped to the ground beside Tchaq. ‘Foul gods! What was that?’
Tchaq swore and spat a mouthful of dirt. ‘Nightfire rifle. If they’ve salvaged a couple of those they’ll pick us off like cattle.’
The Cabellans loosed off a volley of shots across the water. The answering blast struck Tolmann, pulling off an arm like meat ripped from a carcass.
The Cabellan captain lay on the ground, screams drowning the echo of the shot.
‘Shut him up in the Emperor’s name,’ Valdez commanded, ‘or they’ll have the lot of us.’
Danielle cradled the soldier’s head in her hands, dulling lobes of pain until death came. As she lowered Tolmann’s body with a silent prayer, a solid form shifted on the fringes of her mindsight.
‘There!’ she whispered. ‘I can sense one of them now. Across the lake. There’s a boathouse at the waterfront.’
Valdez raised his head a few inches from cover.
‘We’ll have to draw him out. No use blasting away at shadows.’
‘Seven to three,’ Tchaq commented grimly. ‘And narrowing.’
Valdez turned at the sound of wood crackling under hooves, just in time to see the Cabellans galloping back into the forest. ‘Make that even odds, Tchaq.’
Tchaq clambered to his feet. ‘Damn them. I’ve had enough of wallowing on my belly like some swamp beast,’ he declared. ‘If we’re going to draw them out, we’ll have to give them a tasty morsel to aim at.’
He began to advance into the open. ‘And let’s hope you shoot better than they do, inquisitor.’
The dark outline of an Imperial Guard shimmered in Danielle’s mind. ‘He’s seen Tchaq. He’s moving to the door of the house. Aim to the left. Further.’ The image solidified; she saw Franca squared within the sights of the inquisitor’s pistol.
‘Now!’
Bolt fire streamed across the surface of the pool. The boathouse ignited like tinder. A figure swathed in flame stumbled blindly from the wreckage. Valdez and Tchaq fired again, in unison. Gobbets of seared flesh sizzled in the waters of Styrus.
Valdez moved back under cover. He glanced up at the grey streaking the sky from the east. The short Cabellan night would soon be ending.
‘They’ll want to finish it before dawn. They’ll take risks; it could be our best chance.’
Danielle steeled herself against the carnage of death and searched the distant shoreline afresh. The images were coming more easily as her senses attuned to the dark power. She saw Granland and Plovitch behind the ruined waterfront houses, moving to opposite ends of the shore.
‘They’re spreading apart,’ she said. ‘I can’t focus on both of them.’
‘Then concentrate on one. We’ll take them as they come.’
She let the mindforce draw her, one image fading as the other came into sharper focus. ‘I see Plovitch now. He – he’s climbing. There must be a tower.’
Tchaq gripped the inquisitor’s arm. ‘The spire.’
‘All right. Hold your fire. We may get a look at him this time.’
The Cabellan moon emerged from a bank of cloud. For an instant the figure in the spire was clearly illuminated. Tchaq sprang from cover, dropping on one knee to take aim. In the same splintered second Danielle sensed a shadow emerging from the low clump of houses at the other end of the shore. Her warning shout was lost in the crack of weaponfire, two shots almost simultaneous.
Plovitch dropped from the spire. His body hammered against the stones and did not move again. Valdez struggled to reload his weapon, searching for Granland. Tchaq remained frozen in a hunter’s crouch.
‘Get under cover, man, in the Emperor’s name!’
The tech-priest turned, slowly. Blood oozed from a wound set like a red medallion in the centre of his forehead. His lips worked round a reply, but only a trickle of blood-flecked saliva emerged. Tchaq’s eyes gleamed momentarily, bright with the light of battle, before his head dropped in a warrior’s bow.
Valdez slammed a last ammunition clip into the bolt pistol. ‘By the Emperor, you’ll be avenged,’ he vowed. ‘Tchaq’s gun. See how many rounds are left.’
Gently, Danielle prised the heavy weapon from their dead comrade’s grip. She pulled the magazine from the long, rune-carved gunstock and examined it. ‘None,’ she said, flatly.
Valdez nodded. ‘Then we’d better make these count.’
The voxcomm hooked to his belt flashed red. The inquisitor stared at it in quiet disbelief before activating the channel open. The voice, slurred as if underwater, was Granland’s.
‘Inquisitor? Inquisitor, are you there?’
‘We can hear you,’ said Valdez.
‘Your ammunition must be running out. I have enough to kill you both several times over. You know you can’t win. It would be better to surrender now, I promise you.’
Valdez cut the link. ‘Get a fix on the mutant,’ he told Danielle. He raised the communicator to his lips. ‘And I promise to send you back to hell.’
Danielle watched him turning the pistol slowly in his hands, weighing every shot. Both of them knew Granland was almost certainly right. A grinning deathmask blossomed in her mind:
Soon, psyker, I’ll have your soul.
She shivered. The phantasm was gone, but so too was the image she had been tracking. ‘I’ve lost him,’ she said. ‘He – it – must be shielding itself from mindsight.’
‘Then it’s coming for the kill,’ Valdez got to his feet. ‘Come on. We’ll have to take chances too.’
Before Danielle could follow she was thrown back to the ground as though a great fist had struck her down. Dazed, she tried to sit up, but her strength had vanished. She looked down at the blood streaming across her tunic. She was dimly aware not only that she had been hit, but that the shot had been intended to wound, not kill. Not yet.
She recoiled from the stream of pain and tried to turn her healing powers inwards. The wound was slight; she could close it if only she could calm herself.
She saw Valdez, running as if in slow motion towards the water’s edge. The bolt pistol spat, then jammed. As the inquisitor tugged at the ammunition clip, a figure appeared on the far shore and stepped on to the stones.
Smiling serenely, Grunland began to leap across. One. Two. Three. Soon he’d be halfway. The trigger of the bolt pistol locked again in a dull, dead click. Valdez threw the weapon down, desperation in his eyes as Grunland closed on him with smooth, athletic bounds over the stones.
The inquisitor tried his footing on the first white rock jutting like a fist from the pool. Grunland laughed and spread his arms in welcome.
‘Come on, mortal man. Pit your puny strength against real power.’
Ice had set in Danielle’s limbs. Paralyzed, she lay watching as Valdez jumped to the second stone. Grunland’s face was shimmering under the moonlight, contours rippling as though a pupa was about to burst from the human shell. On a plateau of rock no more than six feet across, man and mutant met.
Grunland’s first blow nearly crippled Valdez; a vicious hammer punch into the bruised ribs below the inquisitor’s chest. Valdez rocked back, fighting to stay up, clawing for a grip on Grunland’s throat. Grunland lunged again and missed. For an instant he was off-balance.
Valdez stabbed at the mutant’s eyes, fist cracking hard against a socket. Grunland howled in sudden pain but grasped his attacker before Valdez could draw back for another blow, twisting his arm like a rotted branch. The mutant kicked out and knocked the inquisitor’s legs from beneath him, spitting savage curses.
Danielle tried to stand; she couldn’t even crawl. The mutant was straddling his victim, savouring the moment of victory. Grunland’s body was altering now. As the power that had held the chameleon mask was channelled into battle, the mark of the Lord of Decay was revealed. Grunland’s face began to blister and crack until the skin ruptured like an over-ripe fruit. Sores opened out over his body, weeping streams of stinking pus into the lake.
Danielle gathered her powers into a single image of light and fled from her body towards the mutant. Her light broke in a flare of incandescence in Grunland’s mind. The mutant cried out, blinded for an instant by white sun.
Valdez connected with a final, lunging blow, using his body like a battering ram. Grunland reeled; his feet slipped against the edge of the stone and he fell back into the dark waters of Styrus.
It was no more than a brief respite. Within seconds Grunland had regained his feet, the water barely rising above his thighs. He began to wade back towards the rock, but, as he did so, the waters around him seemed to boil, rising in a sudden tumult around the mutant.
Bewildered, Grunland grabbed at the edge of the rock, but the torrent hauled him back. Then, as Danielle watched, the waters seemed to rise up and take shape, moonlight glinting off the green-tinged flanks of a huge, amphibious warrior. Grunland thrashed out, but his blows passed through the cold glistening body without seeming to touch it.
The mutant slipped back into the raging foam. As he tried to stand, the warrior’s scaly arms encircled him, taloned fingers gripping his throat, forcing his body below the waters. The warrior shape collapsed into the turmoil. The waters frothed with heavy waves, then settled. The last thing Danielle saw before unconsciousness took her were the dying ripples on the surface of the lake.