He was gone.
The night was wretchedly black.
In the small watch room of the Plade Parish vapour mill, the night watchman dozed across his console, stirring every now and then to wipe drool from his mouth. A single lamp burned, his only comfort. Rain beat against the room’s broad window ports, a blur of streaming water.
Nade Oysten appeared at the window, soaked through and out of breath. She yelled at him. He didn’t stir. The watch room was sealed and soundproof against the thunder of the mill when its turbines cycled every two hours.
She beat on the glass, yelling, hands flat and frantic. Her mouth moved silently. The thick glass just flexed slightly in its frame.
The watchman dreamed on.
Oysten tried the door, yanking at it, screaming silent profanities. It was locked.
She stepped back, defeated, and stared through the windows for a moment at the slumbering man. The rain had washed Rawne’s blood off her face.
She raised her cut-down riot gun, reached into her bag of shells, and loaded a breaching round. She stepped back, almost vanishing from view.
The big flash was silent.
The damage was not. The window in the door blew in with a smash like a dozen lead-crystal decanters hitting a stone floor. The metal door ruptured in its frame, and buckled, its handle and lock torn out in one lump that sailed clear across the room.
The watchman hurtled awake, yelping, blinking and confused.
Oysten kicked open the ruined door and stepped in out of the rain.
She glared at him.
‘Wha– wha–’ he stammered.
‘You have a fething vox somewhere, you idle fething ball-bag,’ she said. ‘Where the feth is it?’
The sun had risen thirty minutes ago, though it was still an hour before dawn half a world away in Eltath.
Orchidel Island, a flat rock of wind-swept salt-scrub and gritty beaches, lay at the southern end of the Faroppan archipelago. Few came there. It was a long way from the volcanic systems that fired Urdesh’s precious forges.
Once in a while, agriboats passed by, heading for the rich, offshore blooms in the southern ocean during the late summer algae season.
It was not late summer. No boat had passed by in six months.
The sky was clear, a soft grey-green. No cloud. Visibility out ten kilometres across the breakwaters. The waves rolled in along the broad shingle beach, hushing on the stones as it had done since the world was born.
Ten metres from the shore, the air blistered with a noise like spitting fat. For a few seconds, reality wrenched open and debris crashed out into the shallows. Smoke billowed with it. The scent of burning bone that the wind swiftly carried away. For a moment, the beach rang with the echoes of a distant, shrieking quire.
Then space closed again with a sledgehammer thump, an implosion of pressure so fierce, the sea beneath withdrew briefly, baring its bed of silt and algae-crusted stones.
Then rushed back in, and all was as it had been before.
A ragged figure stirred, half-swamped in the rolling waves. He crawled and clawed his way up the beach, the waves breaking around him in crossing plumes of foam.
Sek paused, panting, on his hands and knees, his feet in the water, blood trailing from his wheezing mouth onto the shingle. He was soaked through, engulfed in the pain of his wounds, and maimed by the violence of the translation. His power was reduced to an ember. It had taken everything to break away and escape to this remote and unregarded spot.
He crawled on, the shingle crunching and scattering under his hands. Clear of the water, he rose to his knees, reached back, and slowly drew out the power lance that skewered his torso. He gasped with the effort, and dropped the weapon on the beach beside him.
Out in the breakers, metres from the beach, Mkoll floated, rocked by the surging waves. He was gazing up at the sky. Daylight. A dawn. He knew he should move. That he had to move. He knew he had come there to finish something.
But his memory was vacant. He couldn’t remember anything. He had no idea why he was floating on his back in a cold sea, or how he had come to be there. His body was numb from the savage trauma of subspace bilocation, a process few mortals would ever choose to endure, even when armoured or cushioned by protective invocations.
He let the sea lift him and drop him, over-and-over, the soothing motion of the breakers.
Someone waded past him, staggering and splashing. A shadow blotted out the sky.
Milo reached down and clawed at Mkoll’s jacket, searching his pockets. He found the two grenades. One smoke, which he tossed aside.
One anti-personnel.
He gripped it, and waded ashore, teeth clenched, dazed and staggering. The Anarch was just ahead of him, crawling on his hands and knees. No demiurge now, no towering god. An old man in tattered robes, wounded in a dozen places, blood spotting the grey and green pebbles in a trail behind him.
Panting, unsteady, Milo reached him.
He grabbed Sek by the shoulder and threw him over, rolling him onto his back. The Anarch whined, and winced in pain.
He looked up at Brin Milo.
Milo stared down.
The old man had no face. Small eye sockets gazed up at the Tanith soldier. Beneath them, the rest of his face was a gaping hole. It was fringed with writhing, jointed claws like tiny human fingers. They twitched, holding the gaping mouth wide. Inside the maw was an endless blackness that the morning light could not illuminate. There was nothing in the blackness except the voice.
Enkil vahakan, it said.
The words buzzed at Milo’s ears, making him flinch.
‘You’ve said enough,’ Milo whispered. ‘You’ve spoken all you have to speak. It’s time for silence.’
He dropped astride the old man’s chest, pinning him to the loose shingle. Sek tried to fend him off, beating at him with his bare hands.
Milo fended the blows away. He clenched his fist around the grenade, thumbed out the pin, and stuffed his hand into the yawning maw.
Sek thrashed, choking. Milo held on, shoving his hand deeper.
Sek refused to submit. A surge of neon light lit his empty sockets. He hurled Milo off him.
Milo landed badly, rolling, spraying pebbles. The grenade flew out of his hand, and bounced across the shingle. He tried to scramble clear.
The grenade detonated. It threw up a cone of flame and rained shingle in all directions. Milo was half-caught by the blast and flung across the beach, dazed and limp.
He tried to rise, his ears ringing, his head spinning. He slumped down on his side.
Anakwanar Sek rose to his feet slowly. It took effort to get up. He clutched at his wounds, blood dribbling from the damage his foes had inflicted.
His maw-fingers twitched and fidgeted.
He had picked up the power lance. For a moment, he leaned on it, panting, using it like a staff to support his weary weight. He stared at the fallen warrior who had almost killed him. Milo wasn’t moving.
Sek stood up straight. He raised the lance, and spun it slowly with both hands in a skilled figure around his body that betrayed the weapon skills of his early years as a damogaur in the Archon’s host, four centuries past.
He brought the lance to his shoulder, haft up and back behind his head, blade tipped down, hands clasped and spaced for an expert down-strike.
This man would die first. He would be the first mark of Sek’s vengeance. Others would follow, one-by-one, then scores, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions.
He would make them pay for his defeat. He would make the corpse-prophet’s minions pay, until they wished that he had won at Urdesh so that suffering would not be multiplied a thousandfold upon their defiant kind.