Таггау leapt back from the table, knocking over her chair. 'Damnation!' she shrieked. 'He's got us! He's got us! How the hell did he know?'
You could talk like Nayl and use Glossia thanks to Jekud, but Jekud didn't know what Nayl knew. We fought Sadia on Lethe Eleven, not Eechan,' I had Etrik say.
Maria Tarray drew a plasma pistol and shot Etrik through the chest. The Vessorines all around opened fire with their autoguns and las-carbines.
As my puppet was torn apart, I let go of the warp vortex that had been spinning in my mind ever since I had summoned it.
It surged out of Etrik's collapsing body and expanded, annihilating the janissaries, Entipaul's Lounge and the entire level sixty deck of hive four in a radius of fifty metres.
Maria Tarray was atomised. In the last milliseconds of her life, her mental shields collapsed in terror and I got a precious snapshot into her powerful psyker mind. Not everything, but enough.
Enough to know that I had just annihilated Pontius Glaw's daughter.
FIFTEEN
Sanctum, Catharsis and Fischig.
Teht uin sah.
Promody.
Fifteen days later, we were a long, long way from New Gevae, a long way from Gudrun itself. I had, for the time being, evaded the clutches of Khan-jar the Sharp.
The morning before my meeting – or my puppet's meeting, I should say – with Maria Tarray in the mid-hive bar, Aemos and I had arranged passage on a packet lighter called the Spirit of Wysten, and by the evening, we were leaving the planet. Five and a half days out from Gudrun, in the vicinity of Cyto, we rendezvoused with the Essene.
My old friend Tobias Maxilla, eccentric master of the sprint trader Essene, had come in response to the Glossia code word 'Sanctum' without hesitation, breaking off from his merchant runs in the Helican spinwards and laying course for Gudrun. He had never been a formal part of my operation, but he was an ally of long standing, and had provided the services of his ship on many occasions.
He always claimed to do this for financial reward – I regularly made sure the ordos remunerated him handsomely – and to keep on the good side of the Imperial Inquisition. Privately, I believe his allegiance to me was the product of an adventurous streak. Getting involved in my business offered more diverting occupation than a trade voyage down the Helican worlds.
There was no ship, and no ship's master, that I trusted more than Tobias Maxilla and the Essene. With my life shattered, my back to the wall and an e nemy after my blood, he was the one I turned to for rescue and escape.