'Good/1 said.
He chuckled. 'You're a brave man, Gregor Eisenhorn. Come on, now –I'll make it quick/
His blades clinked.
'I suppose, then/ I added, 'I'd have been mad to bring it with me/
He froze.
With a shaking, bloody hand, I reached into my coat and took out the Malus Codicium. I think he gasped. I held it out, half open, so he could see, and riffled the pages through with my fingers.
'You foolish, foolish man/ he said, smiling.
That's what I thought/ I said. With one brutal jerk, I ripped the pages out of the cover.
'No!' he cried.
I wasn't listening. I fixed my mind on the loose bundle of sheets in my hands and subjected them to the most ferocious mental blast I could manage. The pages caught fire.
I threw them up into the air.
Glaw screamed with despair and rage. A blizzard of burning pages fluttered around us. He tried to grab at them. He moved like an idiot, like a child, snatching what he could out of the air, trying to preserve anything, anything at all.
The pages burned. Leaves of darkness, billowing across the plinth, consumed by fire.
He snatched a handful, tried for more, stamping out those half-burned sheets that landed on the ground.
He wasn't paying any attention to me at all.
Barbarisater tore into him so hard it almost severed his head. Electricity crackled from the rent metal. He rasped and staggered. The Carthean blade sang in my hands as I ripped it across his chest and shattered part of his cloak.
He fell backwards, right at the edge of the plinth, his finger hooks shrieking as they fought to get a purchase on the smooth onyx. I swung again, an upswing that ripped off his golden mask and sent it spinning out over the gulf. The interior of his head was revealed. The circuits, the crackling, fusing cables, the crystal that contained his consciousness and being, set in its cradle of links and wires.
'In the name of the Holy God-Emperor of Terra/ I said quietly, 'I call thee diabolus and here deliver thy sentence/
My own blood was dripping off Barbarisater's hilt between my doubled handed grip. I raised the blade.
And made the ewl caer.
The blade split his head and shattered the crystal into flecks of glass.
Pontius Glaw's metal body convulsed, jerked back and fell off the edge of the plinth, down into the gulf, into the blackness of the daemon-king's tomb, its cloak-blades chiming.
* * *
I was sitting on the plinth, with my back against the tomb wall, blood slowly pooling around me, when a flight flashed out in the darkness of the vault.
It came closer.
At last, Cherubael floated down and hovered over me. Its face, limbs and body were hideously marked with weals, burns and gashes.