Execution Hour by Matthew Farrer & Gordon Rennie

Author:Matthew Farrer & Gordon Rennie [Farrer, Matthew & Rennie, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780743411653
Google: tH3FAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 074341165X
Publisher: BL Publishing
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FIVE

'MASTER, YOU MUST come! The last of the shuttles is about to leave. The arch-deacon himself has commanded you to board it!'

The frightened voice of the novice initiate roused Sobek from the light trance that he had placed himself in, although his astropath's senses had warned him of the boy's scurrying approach through the now eerily empty and abandoned corridors and chambers of this section of the Ecclesiarchy cathedral. From outside the cathedral walls, the astropath's finely attuned ears picked out the now familiar sounds of combat, while his psychic senses dimly told him of the even greater chaos in the city beyond; dimly, only because he had deliberately closed off those levels of his inner vision with powerful mental blocks, fearing that the psychic Shockwaves generated by the confusion and terror of the doomed planet's population would overwhelm his own mind.

'I have already spoken with the arch-deacon, Lito. I have told him that it is my wish to remain here on Belatis.' Sobek turned his blind face towards the frightened boy, favouring him with a rare smile. 'I have been on this world for sixty-eight years. Before that, I saw the faces of many other of the Emperor's worlds with these blind eyes, but after so long I can scarcely recall which of them was the face of my own birth-world. This world is really all I have ever known. I have served the Emperor well, but I am old and tired, and I know that soon the Emperor will call me to him. Leave me be, Lito. I do not wish to see the faces of any new worlds.'

The boy lingered in the doorway, afraid to return without him; clearly, thought Sobek, the arch-deacon's proclamation that any adept-brothers who wished to remain to defend the Emperor's sacred house was not meant to extend to brethren as unique and valuable as an astropath of Veneratus rank.

From far below in the cathedral square came the sounds of renewed gunfire, and, from closer in the inner courtyard, the roar of powerful thruster engines firing up.

'You should go now, Lito,' warned Sobek. 'They will not wait for you, whether I am with you or not. Go now. We both have our separate destinies to follow,' he added, wondering from where those last words had sprung unbidden.

The boy hesitated, took one last despairing look at his master, and then vanished, running pell-mell along the high-vaulted corridor and towards the sound of the shuttle engines. He had been genuinely fond of the boy, Sobek thought, even if he had been clumsy and inattentive, with all the signs of becoming yet another dull-witted catechism-mumbler, a breed of which the Ministorum had more than enough of already in Sobek's despairing opinion. But, all the same, he had been fond of the boy, and thought it a pity that he had even less time to live than Sobek himself.

The astropath again consulted the mystically-charged cards of the Imperial tarot, using them as a tool to unlock the prescient images that his psychic senses had plucked from the face of the warp.

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