It was the most appalling thing Mazho had ever seen.
The dais faced the main doors. Behind it, the lower stalls were a reserved quire, the curved bench seats were packed with lekts, the Sekkites’ macabre psyker caste. They chattered and gibbered, their mouths covered by hand-print brands. Many were veiled. Mazho could feel the scalding throb of their minds, amplifying the whispers that buzzed and crackled in his ears.
He tried to control his frantic breathing. Iron bars of terror were locking him rigid.
A loud boom caused a temporary hush. The towering excubitors had closed and barred the doors. They took their places amongst the crowds on the equatorial walkway, gazing down, their power lances held upright.
He was in now. The only way out was shut. It had become a dream that didn’t belong to him.
A figure stepped up onto the dais. Mazho had no idea where it had come from. It had just emerged from the crowd packing the auditorium.
It was the Anarch. It was Sek.
Holofurnace found a place to stand at the bone-railing of the equatorial walk. He’d lost Mazho. From under his cowl, he surveyed the tiers below, his acute, post-human eyesight searching for detail. Where was he? Where–
There. Off to the right and down in the thick of it. A tiny figure, packed into an overcrowded stall. The poor damn bastard.
The excubitors were preparing to shut the doors. What of Mkoll and the Saint’s man? Had they come back in time? He studied the crowd again. Damogaurs, etogaurs, packson tribunes with tribal standards, a quire of cackling lekts, excubitors, cult shamen, Blood-fare officers and steersmen. The host was still taking its places, thronging the staircases, shuffling into stalls, milling around the base of the obscene dais.
‘D’har voi vehen kha,’ the V’heduak beside him said, and laughed.
Holofurnace nodded. He knew none of the words. He made a laughing sound and hoped it would be enough.
There. There was Milo. He was moving down one of the staircases, slipping through the crowd. Holofurnace watched. Unnoticed by those around him, Milo paused to re-strap his boot. Just a feint. Holofurnace saw him quickly, furtively slide a small object under the lip of the stall. A mine. Milo rose again. He threaded his way on down the steps.
Good boy.
The Snake scanned the throng. There. And there was Mkoll. Down on the floor beside the dais, moving through the gathering, pausing, looking out into the Oratory as he fished a hand behind his back and anchored a mine to a dais post. Right in plain sight, but no one saw. Mkoll moved with confidence, as if he was supposed to be there.
Mkoll looked up. He’d spotted Holofurnace across the packed chamber. A hunter’s sharp eyes. No chance to sign or signal. Just an exchanged nod.
‘Voi vehtah sahk!’ the V’heduak beside him exclaimed, nudging him.
‘Kha,’ Holofurnace said.
He’d lost sight of Mkoll. There was Milo again, though. Three-quarters of the way down the stairs. Another casual stoop to adjust his boot. A quick pass, sleight-of-hand. Another mine set, locked in the shadows of a stair riser. Milo rose again. Holofurnace tracked him as he edged into a lower stall. There was Mkoll too. They jostled through the press until they were side by side.
The main doors shut. The excubitor guards stepped to the rail. One pushed in just metres from Holofurnace, a terrible ghoul with stub-horns, taller than any Adeptus Astartes, his ornate lance held proud and straight.
There was a figure on the dais suddenly. The buzzing whispers grew louder.
Sek was here.
A hush fell. They watched him take his place.
‘Oh, Throne,’ Milo whispered.
Mkoll said nothing.
Fifty metres from them, and higher up, Mazho gazed in silent horror. This wasn’t the thing he had glimpsed through the madness of the vortex at Oureppan. It was worse.
A skeletal giant, its skin a mummified and flaking brown stretched taut and paper-thin around its bones. A ragged robe, decayed from centuries in a tomb. A crown of iron spikes. No lower jaw, just a yawning void.
Mazho sank deeper into the numb depths of terror. He tried to mumble a penitential prayer, but he couldn’t remember any of the words.
Holofurnace watched too. From the high rail, he saw his enemy in person for the first time. He considered the sheer bulk of the Anarch, the ungodly mass, a lumbering daemon that hauled itself into place. It was female in aspect, throat, shoulders and hunched back fledged in iridescent plumage. A carrion bird’s beak, big as a power-claw, snapped and yawned to reveal the blue, rasping dagger of its tongue. A spiked silver crown formed a band above its dozens of glittering eyes. Neon-yellow pupils flashed and shone. It spread its arms, its daemon wings. It possessed a terrible beauty that speared Holofurnace’s heart like a cold blade.
He could not look away.
Brin Milo shivered as he watched the magister take his place. Sek was just as he had seen him, the glaring demiurge that had haunted his dreams since the vortex. Upright, strong, with the power and build of an Astartes warrior, clad in black and yellow silks. His head was a bald mass of scar tissue. Black thorns grew from the gnarled flesh of his scalp, surrounding the top of his head like a spiked crown. The tubes and pipes of augmetic support systems knotted the back of his head and neck like vines. His face was a steel mask, sutured in place, a visage of cruel angles and sharp lines. Filthy light shone from the eye slits and the yawning, down-turned mouth. A chrome vox-mic, the tannoy speaker from some battle-engine, was fixed to his chest-plate and positioned so that the caged disc was set in front of his mouth.
Sek was about to speak.
Mkoll gazed, eyes narrowed, his gorge rising. This was the foe at last, barely six metres away. All that power, all that authority, invested in such a wretched thing. It came as little surprise. Mkoll thought of Macaroth. For all that great Macaroth was warmaster, commander of crusading hosts, they said he was just a man too, an ordinary man of flesh and blood, of weaknesses and flaws, just another mortal who happened to wield the greatest authority in the sector.
Anakwanar Sek was just a man. An old man, run to fat, of average height and sloping build. His robes were filthy and lacquered with grease. His hands were cased in shining silver gauntlets, clawed and segmented masterpieces of antique armour that he had stolen from some corpse, and wore to boast he was a figure of great importance. He looked like a gutter-gang vagabond who had chosen to wear ill-fitting, polished, regal boots he’d looted from the body of a high-hive noble. His body twitched with a palsy. His skin was scabbed and diseased. Mkoll couldn’t see his face because Sek, with one ostentatiously gloved hand, was holding up a cracked porcelain mask on a slender stick. The top of the stick was fashioned into a golden hand that wrapped across the mask’s mouth. Some twitching darkness lurked behind the serene mask.
Just a man. Just a vile old man. Mkoll could kill that.
The ceaseless chattering of the lekt quire increased. A buffet of psyker force welling out across the Oratory. Everyone winced, all of the Sekkite seniors and four Imperial interlopers lurking amongst them.
‘Let my voice drown out all others,’ the lekts hissed in unison. Now the constant, scratching whispers wove together into one set of words.
‘Anarch I am. Anarch of all,’ the lekts sang.