It lashed out with its long, clawed limbs. Then tendrils whipped out from the half-seen body mass too. They were organic and boneless: tentacles, or pustular cords, or maybe ragged loops of intestine. Drusher could smell the stench of rot and faecal waste.

One of the huge limbs struck the gun-cutter a glancing blow, it veered hard to the right, jets howling to compensate. The engines shrieked.

‘She’s too low!’ Nayl yelled.

The gun-cutter was ploughing sideways, ripping through treetops and pulverising trunks. It was beginning to shake and rotate, unable to pull clear. There was no room to gain lift and energy.

‘Oh Throne!’ Voriet wailed.

+Medea!+

There was a long, terrible crashing noise of trees uprooting. The gun-cutter vanished behind the treeline.

The thing from the warp pulled itself clear of Keshtre’s walls on its vast legs.

Twenty-Eight

TWENTY-EIGHT

Unwoven

‘I think this is probably all my fault,’ said Drusher. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No,’ said Eisenhorn. ‘If you hadn’t pulled me out of the cage, Sark would have killed me in it. Taken control of the Loom again. And the thing inside him… It is a greater daemon, Drusher. And one not bound and trapped by the King in Yellow’s conjurations. It has used Sark as a loophole, a door into our space, freed from the proscriptions of summoning and binding. Sark has unwittingly unleashed a greater and far more immediate threat to Imperial space than the damned King in Yellow.’

They had reached the clearing. It was an old patch of hill pasture that sloped down to the woods at the base of the valley.

Drusher looked back. He couldn’t see the daemon, but a vast fog of buzzing blackness veiled the sky beyond the nearest trees. A mass swarm. Trillions of insects, bathed in filthy light.

The ground vibrated. Footsteps, thought Drusher. Giant, scuttling footsteps. In the distance, landslips kicked off by the vibrations thundered down the mountains, raising plumes of dust.

Behind them, something in the black fog screamed. A bellow, an exhalation. An exaltation. It boomed out across the Karanines, echoing from peak to peak. A deep, wet, clotted pulsing howl like the droning note of a giant Udaric war-horn, but one big enough to swallow the world.

Drusher wondered how to face his death. He wondered how a man did that, and if it mattered. He felt like sinking to his knees, but that was just the exhaustion. He doubted there was a protocol for facing death when your death was an abomination the size of a city.

He decided to stand and face it, whatever it was going to be. He damn well wasn’t going to cry. It had been a good life, really. Hard work, some insane adventures. A few, sweet, maddening years somewhere in the middle that he wouldn’t have given up for anything. Shouldn’t have given up for anything.

Macks was tugging at his arm.

‘What?’ he asked.