‘Not telling Nayl what you know,’ said Voriet. ‘About me, I mean. About what Eisenhorn said about me.’

‘Not my business,’ said Drusher.

‘You blurted it out well enough down at the cages,’ said Voriet.

‘Yeah, well, we’re beyond that now,’ said Drusher. ‘And there’s more than enough trouble to go around as it is.’

They hobbled on together, Drusher’s arm around Voriet’s back.

‘You should tell them, though,’ said Drusher.

‘Who?’

‘The ordos. Your masters,’ said Drusher. ‘If you get out of here, you should go to them and tell them what you know. What you’ve seen. What you believe.’

Voriet nodded.

‘That’s not good,’ said Macks from up ahead. She was looking at the Great Machine above them.

High above, at the very top of the tower, a strange glow was filling the air. It expanded, growing brighter and brighter.

A breeze started to rise. The humming all around them increased.

With a sudden but steady motion that startled them all, the huge wheels and cogs and gears of the Loom began to turn faster, until they were spinning and rattling and whizzing. The slowly cycling machine had suddenly burst into frantic, industrial life.

‘Yeah,’ Nayl yelled back over the clattering roar of the spinning cogs. ‘Not good at all.’

Twenty

TWENTY

Mindless

Eisenhorn stopped for a moment and crouched in the shadows. The sudden and furious din of the Loom around him was making it hard to focus.

Harder than before. The mere background hum of the cycling machine had worn him down and deadened his mind. It had taken him much longer than he had hoped to clamber up to the high levels of the tower. He was painfully aware of how old and unreliable his body had become. It was held together with augmetics and metal bracing. The slow climb had left him tired and short of breath.

Now his mind, the part of him he’d always been able to trust, seemed as faulty as his body. He felt muffled, swathed in a darkness that limited his gifts. A migraine pain stabbed behind his eyes.

The noise of the suddenly active Loom was intense. It was like being at the heart of a Mechanicus factory plant. Sark, or Gobleka, or both, had begun something. There were various possibilities, but the most obvious was that they were moving against him.

He had considered simply sabotaging the Loom. He carried two automatic pistols: the big Hecuter .45, loaded with standard munitions, which was in his hand, and a smaller Scipio compact, loaded with custom rounds, which was strapped in his chest rig. A few shots with the engraved rounds of the Scipio might damage the Loom, possibly even destroy it. They were notoriously volatile devices. And he still had what scraps of his psykana talent remained, and his small but potent vocabulary of Enuncia.