WINTER, 345.M41
The voice was like the sound of some eternal glacier – slow, old, cold, heavy.
It asked simply, ‘Why?’
‘Because I can.’
The silence lasted for a long time. The thousand candle flames flickered and rippled the carefully inscribed stone walls with echoes of their moving glow.
‘Why? Why… have you done this… this wretched thing to me?’
‘Because I have power over you where once you had power over me. You used me. You orchestrated my life. You moved me like a regicide piece to the place where I best served your desires. Now, that is reversed.’
It thrashed against its chains and shackles, but it was still too weak from the ordeals of the snaring, the entrapment.
‘Damn you…’ it whispered, falling limp.
‘Understand me. I said I would never help a thing like you, but you tricked me into doing so and almost got away with it. That’s why I have done this. That’s why I have expended the considerable time and effort involved in raising you, snaring you and binding you. This is a lesson. I will never, ever allow my actions or my life to benefit the Archenemy. You said that from the outset, you knew I was the one who would free you from Quixos’s service. It’s a shame for you that you failed to see what I might do to you instead.’
‘Damn you!’ the voice was louder.
‘There will be a time, Cherubael, daemon-thing, when you will wish with all your putrid soul to be Quixos’s plaything again.’
Cherubael threw itself at me as far as it could before the chains went taut and snapped it back. Its scream of rage and malice shook the cell and blew every last one of the candles out.
I sealed the vacuum hatch, engaged the warp dampers and the void shield, and turned the thirteen locks one by one.
From far away in the house, Jarat was ringing the bell for dinner. I was bone-weary from my exertions, but food and wine and good company would refresh me.
I climbed the screwstair from the deep basement stronghold, code-locked the door and wandered to my study. Outside, the snows had come early to Gudrun. Light flakes were blowing in through the twilight, across the woods and paddocks, and settling across the lawns of my estate.
In the study, I returned the items I had been carrying to their places. I put the bottles of chrism back on the shelf, and the ritual athame, mirror and lamens in the casket. The Imperial amulet went back on its velvet pad in the locking draw, and I slid the tube-scrolls back into their catalogue rack.
Then I placed the runestaff on its hooks in the lit alcove above the glass case containing the broken pieces of proud Barbarisater.
Finally, I opened the void safe in the floor behind my bureau, and gently laid the Malus Codicium inside.
Jarat was ringing the bell again.
I sealed the safe and went down to dinner.