Eisenhorn The Omnibus by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2022-09-30T12:12:07+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

THE HERETIC

AFTERWARDS

A bare hand’s breadth from my head, the blood-red blade came to a dead stop, blocked by the gleaming steel of Barbarisater.

Time seemed to stand still for a heartbeat. We faced each other, our blades locked together. Quixos had been a speed-distorted phantom until our swords had struck. Now he was frozen, glaring between the crossed blades at me.

The renegade’s armour was ragged and filthy, and ornate with warp-signs. His Inquisitorial rosette was displayed, incongruously, on his right shoulder guard. It revolted me to see it worn amongst such corruption.

His ancient face was a misshapen, pustular horror. Rudimentary antlers bulged from his brow. His skin was dark like granite. Wheezing augmetic cables and implants bulged at his throat and under the dirty head-cloth he wore. His eyes were shining balls of blood.

In honesty, he was a disappointing little monster compared to the notion of him that had built up in my mind. But there was no denying his inhuman strength and speed.

Eisenhorn, he said. It was psychic. His twisted mouth didn’t open.

Barbarisater felt him move before I did. It lurched in my hands. In the time it takes to draw a breath, we had exchanged a flurry of twenty or more blows. The talon-edged blade of Kharnager rang dully off the Carthaen steel. Barbarisater’s pentagrammatic runes flashed and flared with discharging energy. Kharnager groaned softly.

Heretic! Slave of Chaos! his raw, broken mind-voice railed in my brain.

You speak of yourself! I returned. Our blades continued to ring off one another, hunting for a gap, mutually denied.

Why would you try to end my work here if you were not a minion of the warp?

Your work? This thing?

We broke, and then came in again, blades striking so fast the noise became one long ringing tone. I barely made an ulsar in time to stop one of his rapid down-stabs. He blocked my response of a tahn wyla, and the uru arav that I followed it with.

This is just the test, the prototype. Once the trials with it are conducted, then my work will flower!

You carve up a mountain… for a prototype? A prototype of what?

The pylons of Cadia pacify the warp, he spat. By amplifying them using extreme-level psykers, they could be made into a weapon. A weapon to destroy the warp! A weapon to collapse the Eye of Terror in upon itself!

He was raving, insane. What patches of truth or sane notions might lurk in his words, I had no idea. There was no way to distinguish them from his lunatic fancy. All I knew was that a pylon, psychically super-charged, might do all manner of things, but its side-effects would be catastrophic. It could lay waste to the continent, the planet.

I think, and here lay the true horror of it, I think Quixos knew that. I think he considered that to be an acceptable price to pay, just as he had considered the atrocity on Thracian a necessary cost to obtain a psyker of such peerless quality as Esarhaddon. What

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