Other stories and audio dramas featuring the Adepta Sororitas

OUR MARTYRED LADY
Gav Thorpe

CELESTINE
Andy Clark

SISTERS OF BATTLE: THE OMNIBUS
James Swallow

THE BLOODIED ROSE
Danie Ware

REQUIEM INFERNAL
Peter Fehervari

SHROUD OF NIGHT
Andy Clark

CULT OF THE WARMASON
C L Werner

IMPERIAL CREED
David Annandale

THE DEATH OF ANTAGONIS
David Annandale

BLOOD OF ASAHEIM
Chris Wraight

Other stories from the Warhammer 40,000 universe

HONOURBOUND
Rachel Harrison

SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR
Aaron Dembski-Bowden

BLACKSTONE FORTRESS
Darius Hinks

• DARK IMPERIUM •
BOOK 1: DARK IMPERIUM
BOOK 2: PLAGUE WAR
Guy Haley

• THE HORUSIAN WARS •
BOOK 1: RESURRECTION
BOOK 2: INCARNATION
BOOK 3: DIVINATION
John French

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

The Last of Days

Book One

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Book Two

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Book Three

Evangeline

Evangeline

Evangeline

Book Four

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Evangeline

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Evangeline

Ravara

Acknowledgements

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Horusian Wars: Divination’

A Black Library Publication

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.

Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

The Last of Days

Evangeline

The sky overhead is raining fire.

I stand beneath it with my limbs aching and my lips parted just so that I can breathe. Blood runs in rivulets down my face and into the collar of my blessed armour. I hurt from countless cutting edges and the touch of warpfire. From the scorching, whispering wind that stings my skin and tears at the oath seals affixed to my shoulder guards and weapons. But most of all, I hurt because of what lies before me. Because of what lies ahead. I tear my eyes from the nightmare sky and look at my surroundings.

At my home.

Before me, Ophelia VII burns. The grand, gothic buildings of the Convent Sanctorum and its surrounding city-state are fractured and aflame. Smoke rolls up towards me in thick plumes from the tiered city-levels, as if the world is trying to exhale. Trying to breathe, just as I am. The smoke smells of perfume and rotting flowers. It makes me want to spit. To scream. The sounds of battle roll up with the smoke. Of bolters and battle tanks and bellowing. Of other squads of Sisters, fighting to defend their own corner of our Convent Sanctorum – our home. Many-coloured bolts of lightning twist up from the ground in answer, tethering themselves to the underside of the bleeding sky. Each bolt landing makes a sound like laughter.

‘Evangeline.’

I look away from my despoiled home at the sound of my Sister Superior’s voice. Adelynn’s armour is as much a ruin as the cardinal city. The gilding has all but flaked away, and the ceramite is split. Adelynn’s face is painted with blood that settles into her old scars and the lines around her eyes. It mars the beautiful, intricate faith-brands on her part-shaved scalp. Her emerald eyes are clear, though. Clear and furious.

‘They draw near once more,’ Adelynn says, in her accented, rasping voice.

She is right. I can hear them. The vile enemy, gibbering and chattering in tongues. Heretics and fanatics and things wrought from smoke and shadow and hate. My heart burns with rage now, as well as pain. Adelynn puts her gauntleted hand on my shoulder guard and locks me with her emerald eyes.

‘Are you ready?’ she asks.

It is a question that Adelynn has asked me countless times since she made a warrior of me. A question that there is only ever one answer to.

I nod my head. ‘I am ready,’ I tell her.

Adelynn draws me close and presses her forehead to mine, eyes closed. For a moment, I cannot hear the laughter of lightning or the wicked words of the enemy. All is still, and I catch the scent of sacred oils, even over the ruination.

‘Stand until you cannot,’ Adelynn says to me softly.

‘I will,’ I reply.

‘Good,’ she says, then lets me go.

Together, we turn and walk back to where the rest of my Sisters wait under the shattered spine of a cathedral. They number just three, now. The last defenders of the eighty-fifth preceptory’s upper tier, together with myself and Adelynn. Like me, my Sisters are all hurting, their blades broken and their weapons all but spent. Their black armour is peeled back to the bare ceramite, and their crimson vestments are tattered and torn. I catch the eyes of each of them in turn. First Gytha, who bears our Simulacrum Imperialis, and who has been wounded near to death in the name of protecting it. Her shorn head is split open, and her bionic eye has long since failed, but even so, she still smiles at me. Gytha always smiles. Then I look to Ashava, as much a knight as anything. She offers me a solemn nod. Ashava’s dark brown skin is bruised, and she holds her snarling chainsword in an easy grip. Isidora is last. She does not smile, nor does she nod. She holds her meltagun at ease, her pale face bloodied and her ice-blue eyes still locked on the burning sky and on the massive shapes moving beyond the clouds. Devils, in the heavens.

When I fall in step beside her, Isidora speaks. Her voice is sing-song, and softer than you would expect, given her severity.

‘It looks to be the Last of Days, after all,’ she says.

It is a story that Isidora carries with her from the world where she was born. It says that on the Last of Days, the sky will catch fire and the Emperor will return from His seat in the heavens to take every worthy soul to His side. It is a story I have asked her to tell countless times, but one that I never believed I would witness myself.

‘It does,’ I tell her.

A tear traces from the corner of Isidora’s eye, cutting through the drying blood on her face.

‘Will you sing once more, culfre,’ she says. ‘At the end?’

It is what she has always called me. Never ‘Evangeline’, like Adelynn does, or ‘Eva’ like Gytha and Ashava, but ‘culfre’. It is a word Isidora brought with her from the world where she was born, just like her story of the Last of Days. It means dawning bird. She calls me that because I am the youngest. Because she finds comfort when I sing the praises.

‘I will,’ I promise.

We walk through the ruins until we emerge from the shattered spine of the cathedral onto a vast marble dais inlaid with gold.

‘Here,’ Adelynn says. We all nod.

The dais is one of the convent’s many Contemplations. A place usually used for reflection and meditation. For prayer. Today, though, it will be used for vengeance.

For our last stand.

Around the Contemplation stands a circle of saints wrought in stone. They are depicted holding swords and shields and wearing defiant, solemn expressions. As we walk into the centre of the dais, I catch their gilded eyes, just as I did those of my Sisters. I look upon Alicia Dominica. Silvana and Lucia, Arabella and Mina and, last of all, Saint Katherine.

Our Martyred Lady.

Adelynn looks to Saint Katherine too before she speaks again.

‘We have suffered greatly here, my Sisters,’ she says. ‘As we suffered at Okassis, and at Armageddon, and on one hundred other battlefields.’ Adelynn looks at me. Her emerald eyes are alight. ‘But suffering is not to be lamented,’ she says. ‘Suffering is to be celebrated. Where there is suffering, there is life. There is spirit and fire and all of the things for which He made us. Where there is suffering, that is where we must fight with every ounce of the strength He gave us until it is time to join Him in eternal glory.’

Gytha roars a cheer, as she always does. In the wake of it I hear the enemy, even closer now. Perfumed, reflective smoke begins to steal between the statues. Adelynn raises her sword.

‘Fight,’ she says. ‘Suffer. Stand, until you cannot.’

We all roar together then, as the enemy finally show themselves. There are dozens of the warp-spawned horrors, all wide-mawed and amorphous and ever-changing, with their ruddy skin shifting and burning.

‘In His name,’ Adelynn cries.

We echo her together, and we charge into the tide.

In. His. Name.

I raise my bolter and fire it into the swell of horrors. The holy shells impact one of the creatures and detonate with bursts of flame. Daemonflesh disintegrates with a hiss and a spray of glittering ashes. The horror comes apart at the seams, unravelling until it is extinguished altogether, like a candle flame. The laughter only seems to grow louder. I turn and fire again as another of the horrors conjures a boiling tide of warpfire. It spills across my armour, stinking and burning. For a moment, I cannot breathe. Despite that, I fire on the horrors again and again, my bolter kicking in my hands until the magazine empties with a cough. Several of the horrors unravel, torn asunder by my bolter fire. Yet more are banished by the crackling edge of Adelynn’s power sword as my Sister Superior cuts open a space around me.

‘It is not time, Evangeline,’ she says to me.

I eject my bolter’s spent magazine and replace it with the last spare that I carry.

‘No, it is not,’ I say, and plunge back into the fray.

Amid the tide, my Sisters fight and bleed with me. Isidora’s meltagun gasps with pure, cleansing heat, tearing horrors asunder. Gytha is bellowing scripture. She has one hand on the banner pole of the Simulacrum Imperialis, curled tightly around the fingerbones of martyrs. The enemy cannot touch the standard, nor can they touch Gytha. She fires her bolter one-handed, obliterating them before they get close. Ashava lays about herself with her chainsword. She uses the churning blade with deft strokes, so quick they are hard to see. Her armour is coated in that otherworldly, glittering ash. Adelynn is a light in the darkness, carving her way into the tide, banishing the horrors left and right. Every movement is exacting, and deliberate. Every blow direct and deadly. Her rasping voice echoes across the Contemplation.

‘We stand, and He stands with us,’ she shouts. ‘Do not falter, my Sisters.’

My heart lifts. It always does when Adelynn speaks. And together we keep fighting and bellowing and pushing against the horrors, no matter how they sing and chatter and burn us. We do so until the air is thick with ashes and smoke. Until the tide starts to recede.

In the quiet that follows, Isidora speaks.

‘Perhaps the Last of Days will wait, after all,’ she says between gasping breaths.

But then something large and shadowed moves in the smoke. It laughs, like the lightning does, and I feel a peculiar sort of calm fall over me like a shroud.

‘Perhaps not,’ I tell her softly.

The shadow moves closer. Silence falls.

‘Hold,’ Adelynn says, as the smoke parts.

The beast that steps onto the dais is monstrous. A creature cast not from flesh and blood, but from wickedness. From the warp itself. All of mankind’s madnesses and murders, manifested together and channelled in terrible unity. Vast wings unfold from its back with a crack, scattering smoking feathers. Its toes are clawed and feverishly tapping. In one gnarled hand it holds a hooked, mirrored sword. The other is locked around a staff topped with an ever-shifting, wicked sigil. The creature tilts its avian head, opens its beak and laughs again. Its voice is the chorus of a whole world’s suffering. Its scent is that of a charnel house. The mere presence of the creature prickles at my heart and my soul. It makes my ears ache and my nose bleed thickly down my face. But I do not look away. Instead, I stare up at this hateful, wicked creature that has taken my home from me and settle my bolter’s sights between the greater daemon’s depthless eyes.

‘No,’ I tell it simply.

I squeeze my bolter’s trigger, firing on the greater daemon as Gytha and Ashava and Adelynn charge to meet it. Isidora’s meltagun breathes heat, and the greater daemon catches fire, its iridescent feathers deforming and tearing and snapping at the quills. Where they break away, the beast bleeds thick ribbons of molten silver, droplets scattering like a handful of half-crown coins.

But it does not stop laughing.

The greater daemon crashes its staff against the dais, and everything changes. Time itself seems to slow. I see everything with absolute, painful clarity. Every coil of smoke. Every mote of idling flame cascading from the greater daemon’s hateful form. I see the teeth of Ashava’s chainsword turning slowly, and the firelight reflecting from the Simulacrum Imperialis. Then I see the greater daemon move, exempt from this slower stream of time. It raises its gnarled, feathered hand and conjures a torrent of hellfire.

Then it turns and immolates Isidora.

My scream of rage is locked inside me by the slowing of time. I cannot go to her. All I can do is watch her burn, her armour melting and running like candle-wax. She turns, slowly, and catches my eyes with her own.

‘S-sing,’ Isidora manages to say.

Time releases its hold on us, then. Isidora falls to her knees with a crash of armour plates. I want to scream rage, but I cannot. I made a promise. So instead I sing as Isidora breathes her last. It is an old hymnal. One that Isidora would ask for, again and again.

‘O God-Emperor, who is strength. I devote this life to you.’

I fire on the greater daemon, sending feathers and oil bursting into the air. The beast bellows at me in reply and kaleidoscopic colours flood my vision. My armour cracks along the seams and my vestments burn and tear. I feel my bones flex inside my skin and blood boil up my throat and I cannot help but stagger and slow. But I do not stop singing. Hurling the words at this hateful creature that has broken my home, and broken my Sisters.

‘O God-Emperor, who is grace. I devote this life to you,’ I sing as Ashava slips through the greater daemon’s guard and leaps to meet it, despite her injuries and her armour’s weight. Her chainsword cuts deep along the creature’s flank, scattering ashes. It clacks its beak and catches hold of her in a clawed hand before slamming her down against the dais. My heart breaks as her bones do. As Ashava falls still, not to rise again, Adelynn roars, all rage. Her power sword blazes as she strikes at the greater daemon, scattering blood that is black like tar.

I keep singing. Keep firing my bolter, the holy shells tearing daemonflesh. Gytha does the same beside me. Smoke rolls out from the creature like a tide. The smell of it is choking. My lungs feel as though they are trying to collapse and my bolter clicks empty a second and final time as the greater daemon turns on Gytha. Magick roils from the staff it carries and washes over her. The Simulacrum Imperialis is obliterated, turned to slag and molten bone. Gytha’s armour boils, too. She screams in pain as it runs and melts and reshapes itself.

As it changes, and her flesh changes with it.

Dread halts the song in my throat as the infernal magicks turn Gytha’s hands to claws. As her spine breaks and resets itself and her jaws open wider and wider until there is nothing left of her save for her screaming. Gytha lets the standard fall and turns to look at me with multi-faceted, hungry eyes. She lunges towards me and my limbs and mind and heart freeze. I freeze. The maw that’s left of her face opens wide. Wider. Then it tears apart with a boom and a burst of ashes that scatter over me like an anointing rite. The creature that was once Gytha crashes to the ground, and I see Adelynn, her bolter held tightly in her fist, the barrel trailing smoke.

‘Sing, Evangeline,’ Adelynn says, a tear tracking through the blood and dirt on her face. ‘Do not stop.’

I take a breath that tastes of blood and of death. Of the ashes that are all that remains of my Sister. A tear traces down my face, too. A mirror of Adelynn’s.

‘O God-Emperor, who is valour,’ I sing. ‘I devote this life to you.’

Adelynn nods, and turns away from me, levelling her sword at the devil on the dais. The creature raises its hooked, barbed sword in answer. It looms over her, sloughing crystalline feathers and molten silver. Laughing through its jagged beak. I stagger towards Adelynn on fractured legs, but I am too slow. The greater daemon’s sword comes down with a scream, and there is a flare of blinding, blue light.

‘No,’ I say, through the blood in my mouth.

But when the light fades and my vision clears, Adelynn is still standing. Her power sword is broken in her hands.

She turned the blow aside.

‘Adelynn!’

I shout her name over the clamour of the Last of Days, and my Sister Superior looks at me. Her emerald eyes are clear even now.

‘Stand,’ I somehow hear her say. ‘Until you cannot.’

And then the greater daemon’s sword descends, and Adelynn falls. Her broken blade clatters to the ground.

‘No!’ I shout the word this time. ‘No!’

I stumble forwards, half blind with agony, and take up what remains of Adelynn’s sword, before turning to face down the greater daemon. Magicks course along its staff and warpfire blooms along my limbs, coursing over my skin. The remnants of the sword melt and flow away over my gauntlets, painting them silver and gold. That peculiar calm descends over me once more as I burn, awaiting the fall of the sword. I am ready to join my Sisters in death. I want it.

‘O God-Emperor, who is light,’ I murmur through blood and smoke and agony, as a golden light blooms on the Contemplation, filling my failing vision edge to edge. Thunderclaps resound, buffeting me, and I think that perhaps Isidora is right. That this is the God-Emperor returning from the heavens to claim my soul.

Despite the agony, I smile. I finish my song.

‘I devote this death to you,’ I sing, raising my hands in the shape of the aquila.

Book One

The First
Pilgrimage

Evangeline

Darkness surrounds me, complete and heavy. Suffocating. I cannot see. Cannot hear. I cannot remember, either. Not how I came to be here, or where I came from. Not who or what I am. I am nothing, and no one. Little more than a heartbeat, inside a hollow shell. I try to speak. To make a noise of this nothingness, but I am mute as well as blind and deaf. No words will come. No voice, save for that locked tightly inside my mind.

Please.

And then, a sound. A voice, answering my silent plea.

Evangeline.

The name falls across me like a cloak, and I know instinctively that it is mine. I know the voice, too, despite how distant it sounds. How distorted.

‘Adelynn?’

My Sister Superior’s name escapes my throat and disappears into the unbroken darkness. Adelynn answers me once again with my own name, but this time she sounds even more distant. More distorted. I start to run, though I cannot see. Though the darkness mires me and pulls at my limbs like deep, cold water. But then I see it. A tiny pinprick of golden light, growing larger and closer until it resolves into a shape. A stone pedestal, draped in crimson cloth. That is where the light is coming from, only it is not light at all. It is an object. A shield, cast in steel and gold and engraved with the image of an armoured warrior bearing blade and aegis with a ten-pointed halo around her head. My heartbeat grows loud at the sight of it, for it is not a shield at all. It is the Shield. The Praesidium Protectiva.

The Shield of Saint Katherine.

‘Evangeline.’

I look up from the Shield and I see her. Adelynn is standing on the opposite side of the hallowed relic to me. Uplit in gold, she could as well be a statue, were it not for her emerald eyes.

‘Are you ready?’ she asks me, and she gestures to the Shield.

It is a question to which there is only ever one answer, but this time I find that I cannot give it. Because I am not ready. Not for this. I try to tell her so, but even that proves impossible. All that I can manage is an empty oh sound. The very definition of nothing. Adelynn’s face turns wrathful, then.

‘Are you ready?’ she asks, again. ‘Are you ready?’

Adelynn repeats the question over and over and over until the sound of it surrounds me. It suffocates me, just like the darkness. I cannot bear it, nor the disappointment in her emerald eyes, so I scream for her to stop and I thrust out my hands to take up the Shield, but the very instant that my fingertips come into contact with the gold and steel, I catch fire. It blossoms on my fingers first, before blooming across my hands and up my arms, golden yellow and flickering. It tracks over my shoulders and engulfs my body and travels up my throat until I am consumed by it in the same way that the air around me is. The fire burns fiercely, melting my armour and searing my flesh. It blinds me with its brightness, and deafens me anew with a roar that is not the roar of the fire at all, but that same dreadful question rendered in an inferno’s voice.

Are you ready?

I wake with a gasp, lying flat on my back. Still blind, no matter how I blink. Still deaf to everything but the overloud beat of my thundering heart. My teeth are chattering and my body is trembling completely from my head to my toes. I am soaked with sweat. I try to cry out, but no words will come. No sound at all. I get up, but something mires me. I fall hard onto my hands and knees, completely unable to breathe. Someone takes hold of me, firm hands printing cold onto my feverish skin.

And then, a voice.

‘Be still, Sister. You are safe.’

It is a woman’s voice. One that I do not recognise. I try to speak. To fight her. But those hands hold firm and the voice speaks again.

‘Breathe,’ she says. ‘Just breathe.’

Left with little choice, I do as the voice commands me. I breathe. I allow myself to be still. And little by little, my senses return.

Touch, first. The cold floor under my hands and knees. Then sight. Bare steel treadplate, and my own hands, wrapped tightly in blood-speckled bandages. Scent. Incense and blood and the harsh tang of counterseptic. Other sounds filter in. I hear the click and hum of machinery, and the soft murmur of prayer. I am in a hospitaller’s ward. I exhale, slowly.

‘There we are,’ says the voice.

I look up at the owner of the voice. She is of the convents. Non-militant, but a Sister nonetheless. The hospitaller is pale as new marble, clad in robes as white as her hair. I cannot tell the colour of her eyes, because she will not meet mine.

‘You were dreaming,’ she says. ‘That is all.’

I try to tell her that I do not dream. That I haven’t since I was a child. Since before my Sisters and before Adelynn and before the convents. But all that I can make is the shape of the words. A rasp in my throat, like steel on stone.

‘My name is Lourette,’ the Sister Hospitaller says, her voice patient and calm. ‘Let me help you.’

I do not resist as Lourette helps me to my feet and sits me down again on the edge of my cot. This place is not so much a ward as a private room. The walls are clad with whitewashed flakboard and hung with linen drapes. Lourette gives me a plastek cup to drink from. The water is so cold that it makes me cough myself double. Lourette holds out a silvered bowl for me as I spit clots of blood and blackness into it until I can breathe again. When I do, I taste stale air. Recycled. All at once I know that I must be aboard a starship. That I am no longer on Ophelia VII.

At the thought of my home world everything returns to me. The Contemplation. The Last of Days. Losing my Sisters, one by one. I wait for grief to strike me, to sweep over me, but all I feel is emptiness.

‘Are you in pain, Sister?’ Lourette asks.

I wish I were. Pain is honest. It gives you focus. I am not in pain. In its place, all I feel is emptiness. That deceitful nothing. I cannot explain that to Lourette, so I just shake my head and ask a question in return. It takes three attempts, because my throat is so unused to speaking.

‘What ship is this?’

Lourette still does not look me in the eyes. She sets about changing my bloodied bandages with slow and deliberate care. Even that does not hurt.

‘The Unbroken Vow,’ she says. Her voice is soft and patient, with the clipped pronunciation of the convents. ‘It is a Dauntless-class cruiser sworn to the commandery of Canoness Elivia. We are holding at high anchor over Ophelia VII.’

The information sinks in slowly. Canoness Elivia. Like so many of my Order, she was far from Ophelia VII when the Rift opened and the darkness descended.

Very far.

Dread settles over me like a shroud.

‘How long have I been here?’ I ask.

‘You have been under our care for six weeks,’ Lourette says. ‘We kept you dreaming so that you could heal.’

I take a breath that hurts. Six weeks of slumber, as my world burned beneath me. Six. Weeks.

‘Then, the cardinal world?’

I say the cardinal world but I think my home. I steel myself, expecting Lourette to tell me that it is gone. Burned and broken to nothing, like my Sisters. But she doesn’t. Instead, Lourette smiles a small smile.

‘It was spared at the final hour,’ she says.

I remember the thunderclaps. The golden light that I mistook for the God-Emperor’s final mercy. ‘By who?’ I ask.

Lourette stops in her work and makes the sign of the aquila. Her bloody hands begin to shake, and the moment before she speaks seems long and charged, like the quiet before a storm breaks.

‘By Roboute Guilliman,’ she says softly. ‘The God-Emperor’s son is arisen.’

I feel blinded all over again at her words. Unable to catch my breath. My skin begins to burn as though I have a fever. I start to shake, too. From my core outwards.

The God-Emperor’s son.

‘Arisen,’ I say, because it is all that I can say.

Lourette nods. She does not try to prevent me when I pull away to make the sign of the aquila, too.

‘The primarch came from Terra, and brought with him a new crusade to wrest back what has been taken from us by flame and by sword. Countless warriors follow with him. The Adeptus Astartes. The Silent Sisterhood and the God-Emperor’s own Custodian Guard.’ Lourette takes a breath. Another awestruck smile pulls at her scarred face. ‘And our Sainted Sister.’

Her words settle slowly on me. The God-Emperor’s son arisen. The Silent Sisters and the God-Emperor’s watchmen treading the stars. Saint Celestine, returned.

‘It is a miracle,’ I say.

Lourette goes back to removing the bindings around my arms. She still has not looked at me directly. Another long moment passes before she speaks again.

‘I have heard the same word whispered about you, now and then,’ she says.

I blink. My eyelids are still sticking. ‘Why?’

‘Because of how they found you. Ablaze, but alive.’ Lourette finishes unwinding the bandage from my left arm and lets it drop onto a silvered tray in loops. ‘I have never known a soul to be burned the way you were and live, much less heal.’

I look down and see where my skin has run and set again from the touch of the warpfire. In places, I am patchworked to stark white, all of the pigment gone. There is no blood, though.

No pain.

‘And then there is the matter of the mark,’ Lourette says.

‘Which mark?’ I ask, because there are so many.

Lourette finally looks at me, then, and the expression on her face makes me wish she hadn’t. Her limpid eyes are wide with fervour.

‘You do not know,’ she says. ‘Of course you do not know.’

She stops her work and goes to fetch a mirror-glass from one of the equipment trays. She holds it up in front of my face, and I notice that her hands are trembling now too.

‘Do you see?’ Lourette asks.

I take the mirror-glass from her and look at my reflection, and the patchwork that the warpfire has made of my face. All of the pigment is gone from around my eyes and across my cheeks, leaving bright white streaks against my skin that almost look like wings.

‘It is the God-Emperor’s mark,’ Lourette says. ‘A blessing.’

I stare at my reflection. At the shape of the eagle, so clearly writ into my skin. It is the God-Emperor’s mark, just as Lourette says. A blessing.

‘Do you see it?’ she asks.

I nod, because I cannot speak. Because I can see the mark, but I cannot feel it. I cannot feel anything. I am nothing, and no one.

Just a heartbeat, in a hollow shell.

I realise that Lourette is still speaking, her words hurried by zeal.

‘The God-Emperor saw you, Evangeline,’ she says. ‘He sent His son to spare you. Graced you with His mark and His favour.’

I put the mirror-glass face down on the cot and ask Lourette the only question I can think to ask. The only one that matters.

‘And my Sisters?’

Lourette frowns, taken aback by my words, and the implied dismissal in them. ‘They were lost,’ she says. ‘All save for one.’

My thoughts slow to a crawl once more. It is all that I can do to ask her who survived, and Lourette’s frown only deepens when she says the name.

‘Ashava,’ she says.

Lourette is reluctant to let me leave my cot, but I insist on it. Six weeks of sleep is enough for a lifetime, and I will wait no longer to see my Sister. Lourette uncouples the pain relief and fluids before bringing me a set of robes. I stand, for the first time in weeks. My legs buckle and try to give under my weight, but I refuse to fall. I refuse Lourette’s offer of help.

Stand, Adelynn’s voice says, in my head. Until you cannot.

So I do, because I must. Because I want to see my Sister.

‘Where is she?’ I ask.

Lourette’s frown is still in place. ‘The training halls,’ she says.

I blink, surprised. ‘Then, she is healed?’

‘Ashava lives,’ Lourette says, though that is not what I asked, and then she beckons me to follow her.

We leave the quiet and the sanctity of the Vow’s hospitaller ward behind and go out into the ship proper. The Unbroken Vow is ancient. Ironwork shows through the gilding and plaster all along the vaulted corridors. Candles burn in sconces leaving long, overlapping trails of wax to run down and pool and thicken on the deck floor. Cherubim thrum their artificial wings amongst the rafters and iron supports, playing repeated loops of hymnals through their tinny vox-casters. The arterial corridors are long, and made longer by the slowness of my still-waking limbs, and the constant flow of ship’s crew and priests and others of the Orders. Everywhere I go, there are whispers and sideways glances. I catch sight of one of the ship’s crew making the sign of the aquila as I pass, and it takes all of my self-control not to lash out and put him against the wall.

Eventually, we reach the Vow’s training halls. They are vast and vaulted, made to accommodate dozens of Sisters at any one time, but inside Hall Tertius we find only two, standing alone in the middle of the massive space. The first is another Sister Hospitaller, clad this time in the crimson vestments of the Bloody Rose. The other is Ashava. Looking upon her, I understand Lourette’s answer, because my Sister might indeed live, but she is not healed.

Ashava is clad in loose training clothes that are cut short to mid-thigh and shoulder. Both of her legs are encased in brutal wire and steel support frames that catch the candlelight. Long, ridged scars run down the lengths of her arms and her legs, and her skin is marked with fading bruises. Ashava leans heavily on a pair of gnarlwood crutches, limping slowly towards the Sister Hospitaller. The crutches toll against the exposed decking like funerary bells. As we approach across the training hall floor, the Sister Hospitaller turns. Her augmetic eye glows in the dim light.

‘Sister Lourette,’ she says, and then looks at me. Her human eye widens, just a little. That makes me want to lash out, too. ‘Evangeline,’ she says.

Ashava stops limping, but she still does not turn.

‘Melanya,’ Lourette says, in reply. ‘A word, if I may.’

The Sister Hospitaller nods. As she passes Ashava, she puts her hand on my Sister’s shoulder.

‘Keep strong,’ she says to Ashava. ‘All pain must pass.’

I do not know if Melanya is referring to Ashava’s injuries, or to me. The two Sisters Hospitaller leave the training hall, their boots echoing on the deck. The door slides closed behind them with a thud, and only then does Ashava turn to look at me. It is an awkward, unsteady movement. Her crutches toll against the deck again. She locks her eyes with mine. Her scarified face is still and unreadable. For a moment neither of us says a word. I have known Ashava for the better part of a decade. I have fought and trained and prayed with her, but in that moment, I am unsure of what to do.

I am unsure of her.

Ashava limps over to me slowly and stops, less than an arm’s reach away. This close, I can see the way the frames around her legs are secured by pins that go straight into the bones. All that I can think about is how swift she was before, and it makes me want to weep.

‘Sister–’ I begin, but Ashava cuts me short with a sudden and fierce embrace. Her crutches fall against the deck with a clatter. She falls against me a little, too, without them. I hold her up, and hold onto her, and for the first time since waking in the hospitaller’s ward I don’t feel quite so alone, or quite so empty.

‘It is good to see you, Eva,’ she says in her soft, edgeworlds burr.

‘And you, Sister,’ I say, and I mean it.

Then Ashava lets me go, and I stoop down and give her back her crutches. She leans on them anew, and I can see the relief written plainly on her face. Merely standing is agony for her, now.

‘Do you want to rest?’ I ask her.

She shakes her head. ‘As I recall it, Adelynn bade me to stand.’

A small, sad smile finds its way onto my face. ‘Yes, she did.’

‘And Melanya bids me to walk,’ Ashava says. ‘So, let us walk.’

I nod, and together we walk the training hall deck. I slow my pace to match hers. Neither of us acknowledge it.

‘They were set to take my legs,’ Ashava says. ‘To carve me like a kill and replace the broken parts.’ She shakes her head, her face set in a scowl. ‘They said it would be less pain.’

‘And what did you say?’ I ask her, though knowing Ashava I can guess.

‘That it would be kinder to kill me,’ she growls. ‘That I would stand again on flesh and bone or not at all.’

The answer does not surprise me. The world where Ashava was born is far from the galaxy’s heart. Triumph is dominated by a singularly martial understanding of the Faith that sees them raise warriors without peer. Ashava’s people see the body as an extension of the God-Emperor’s will, scars, wounds and weaknesses all. That is their creed, and even after being taken from there and raised in the convents, she has not forgotten it.

‘They could have gone against my wishes,’ she says. ‘But they didn’t.’

‘Do you think that the Canoness intervened?’

Ashava shrugs. ‘Or perhaps they did not wish to take anything more from me.’

‘Perhaps,’ I allow.

We are quiet for a moment then, accompanied only by the rapping of Ashava’s crutches on the deck.

‘The mark,’ she says, after the moment passes. ‘You truly can see the God-Emperor’s sign in it.’

I cannot find words with which to answer her, so I don’t.

‘It troubles you, doesn’t it?’ Ashava asks.

‘The mark does not trouble me. It is everyone else. They watch and whisper and look to me as though I am blessed. As if I am worthy of praise.’

‘Aren’t you?’ Ashava asks. ‘You bear His mark, Eva. You stand where others have fallen, without the aid of cages or crutches or butchery.’

I stop walking, and so does she. I look at the mess that’s left of her.

‘I am sorry, Sister,’ I say. ‘I meant nothing by it.’

‘Neither did I,’ she says. ‘I do not begrudge my injuries. Things are what He shapes them to be, through blade or clay.’

It is another of the Triumphal creeds. One that Ashava has written into her skin in scars.

‘And what of me?’ I ask her, before I can stop myself. ‘What is He shaping me to be?’

Ashava smiles in a patient sort of way, as she often would when we trained. You must be swifter, Eva. Always swifter.

‘Only two can know that,’ she says. ‘You, and Him.’

The door at the far side of the training hall slides open again. I look, expecting to see Lourette and Melanya returning, but the woman who enters the room is clad for war, in ornate black battleplate. A crimson half-cloak stirs at her back like a bloodied shadow, and a gilded longsword is sheathed at her hip. Her face is dominated by a deep, knotted scar that starts at her throat and ends when it reaches her cropped white hair. That alone is enough to tell me who she is, though we have never met. I duck into a shallow bow and Ashava does the same beside me, though it clearly pains her.

Canoness Commander Elivia shakes her head. ‘Please, Sisters,’ she says as she crosses the room to stand before us. Elivia’s voice is warm, and war-torn. ‘We bow for no one save the God-Emperor.’

I know that Ashava smiles at her words without having to look.

‘How may we serve, your grace?’ I ask.

‘That is why I have come,’ she says. ‘I must speak with you, Evangeline.’

I nod my head. ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Though if I may, what is it that you wish to speak of?’

Elivia smiles at me, fractionally. It reminds me of a blade’s edge.

‘The matter concerns a sword,’ she says.

I go with Elivia to her quarters, high on the Unbroken Vow’s spine. The room is large and vaulted, like the rest of the Vow, and kept as cold as the stone towers of the convents. It is lit scarcely by tall, slender candles, leaving deep shadows at the edges of the room. The only adornments are the prayer scrolls and the many weapons that hang in rows on the walls. I see fine swords and flails and a massive, star-headed mace.

The far wall of Elivia’s quarters is made up of a dimmed armaglass viewport that looks out over the prow of the ship and the void beyond, allowing starlight in to augment the flicker of the candles. Dozens of warships hang in the blackness, all void-blackened and bull-snouted and bristling with weapons. Some are painted with the white ultima of the Ultramarines. It occurs to me that the Lord Commander could be aboard any one of them at this moment. Arisen. Moving amongst the living. The thought of it is so overwhelming that the ships become difficult to focus on, so I drag my eyes from the viewport and concentrate on the tangible. On what is in front of me.

Canoness Elivia’s quarters are dominated by a large gnarlwood table, laid with maps and star charts and tools for tide-taking. Other than that, there is no furniture at all. Not even a chair. It does not surprise me. From everything that I have heard, the Canoness is not the type to be found in repose.

I stand and I wait for her to speak as she makes her way to the weapons hanging on the walls. Elivia puts her armoured fingertips to each blade in turn as if she is checking their quality.

‘You and Ashava are to be taken into my commandery, as are the other survivors of Palatine Helia’s Mission,’ she says bluntly.

My heart skips at the word survivors.

‘If I may, Canoness, how many others survived the incursion?’

Elivia nods. She still isn’t looking at me, but at the swords. ‘At the time of the incursion, there were over five thousand serving Sisters at the Convent Sanctorum. More than twenty times that in adjutants, auxiliaries and serfs.’ She pauses. ‘We cannot be sure, but early estimates suggest that almost half of those defending the convent were lost.’

My heart more than skips, then. It feels as though it stops as I think on all of those losses. On all of those martyr’s deaths.

‘Only six of Helia’s fifty-strong Mission were recovered from the ruins of the eighty-fifth preceptory,’ Elivia continues. ‘That is counting yourself and Ashava.’

‘And the Palatine herself?’

‘Taken unto Him, sword in hand,’ Elivia says, her voice much softer than I would have guessed it could ever be.

I blink. Breathe out.

‘May her blade never dull,’ I say, finishing the old adage.

Elivia nods, before reaching out to take a power sword from the wall. It is beautiful. A slender, double-edged blade with spread wings wrought into the hilt in gold. Elivia weighs it in her hand, nods, and then turns away from the wall of weapons and looks at me.

‘Precious little remains of Helia’s Mission,’ she says. ‘And no Sisters of rank.’

I can see what she is about to say looming large.

No, I think. Not me.

‘Effective immediately, I confer upon you the rank of Sister Superior,’ Elivia says, approaching me with that sword. ‘The survivors will be yours to lead, as well as five Sisters from my own commandery.’

Elivia holds out the sword towards me by the neck of the blade, offering me the hilt.

‘Take up the blade,’ she says. ‘And take up the mantle, under the sight of Saint Katherine, and of the God-Emperor, whose realm is everlasting.’

I want to say no. The word rises up from within me so quickly and urgently that it takes everything I have to stop it from spilling out. I was the youngest of my Sisters, before. The least experienced. The one who was trained and taught. I was the dawning bird. I do not seek progression, nor do I want it. I am not ready. But Elivia is not asking me what I want, and this is not an offer to be refused. It is a duty, so I push down my doubts and the word no and I answer how I am expected to.

‘Under their sight,’ I say, and I reach out and take the sword from her. The blade catches in the starlight from the viewport, illuminating the words engraved along the blade’s length.

Inventi sumus in fide.

In faith, we are found.

With the sword granted, Elivia turns away from me and crosses to the opposite side of the gnarlwood table. Under other circumstances, the rite would have been much grander. There would have been readings and hymnals and praises sung, but this quieter method fits what I know about Elivia as much as the lack of places to sit does. I was always told that she is abrupt and direct, and that ceremony irks her. It is a strange thing, for someone raised amongst the Orders. We are surrounded for our entire lives by ceremony of one kind or another.

‘Ophelia VII is as good as recaptured,’ Elivia says, reaching out and tracing her armoured fingers over the maps before her. ‘The Lord Commander’s crusade will soon move on.’

I take a few steps forwards and join her at the table, the sword heavy in my hand. My sword. The maps chart a multitude of systems and pathways from across the God-Emperor’s domain. I see the Armageddon system. Badab, and Tallarn. At the heart of the largest of the charts, Holy Terra is wrought in gold leaf. But it is not just our worlds and fiefdoms that I see. Every one of Elivia’s maps has been amended and revised. I see Cadia, blotted out in red. Great warp storms, wrought in ink, and across all of Elivia’s charts and maps a vast, red scar that touches everything in one way or another.

The Cicatrix Maledictum. The Great Rift.

‘Where will the crusade go?’ I ask, because I would not know where to begin.

‘To the galaxy’s edge,’ Elivia says. ‘To liberate more worlds as it did our home.’

Her words run fingers down my spine, because this might look to be our darkest hour on maps and charts, but even so, it is a time of miracles. True miracles, like the Lord Commander, returned. The need to fight sets a fire inside me.

‘And we will accompany it,’ I say.

Elivia lifts her fingertips from the map. Her battleplate hums discontentedly.

‘No,’ she says. ‘We will not.’

Elivia’s response is like being struck. I cannot help but ask, ‘Why?’

Elivia picks up a slim roll of parchment marked with the seal of the open eye. ‘Because we have received an astropathic communication from the Convent Prioris on Terra,’ she says. ‘The message was sent months ago. It was delayed by the opening of the Great Rift. Distorted by distance, and by the storms. It killed half of our choir just to hear it, but they divined the meaning nonetheless.’

Dread grows large in my chest.

‘What did it say, your grace?’ I ask.

‘That the Shield of Saint Katherine has been lost beyond the Great Rift,’ Elivia says.

All in an instant, I am consumed by my dream. By the fire and the question, and the gold and steel face of the shield.

‘I dreamt of it,’ I say, before I can stop myself. ‘In the hospitaller’s ward, as I healed.’

I expect Elivia to challenge me, or at least to frown, but instead she surprises me by smiling her blade’s-edge smile.

‘And so we come to the second part of the message,’ she says, unrolling the parchment and passing it to me. It is spattered with ink, written in violent, instinctive scrawl by several different hands.

‘The Shield rests where the light began,’ I say, reading from the parchment. ‘In the space between spaces. It will bestow itself upon a worthy soul. One who was burned, but not butchered. Spared by Him.’

I pause, because I cannot bring myself to say the words. Cannot bear to see them, bound there in ink. It is worse than the whispers. Worse even than the crewman and his holy sign.

‘It will bestow itself upon she who bears the mark of His favour,’ Elivia says, finishing the message for me as the parchment starts to tremble in time with my hands.

‘This cannot be,’ I say.

‘This message comes from Terra, Evangeline,’ Elivia says. ‘From those who see the furthest and the most clearly. They cannot be wrong.’

‘But the Rift could have distorted the message, as well as delayed it.’

‘I thought the same, at first,’ Elivia says. ‘But the message has been ratified by every choir within the flotilla. Even the astropaths in service to the Lord Commander heard it.’

My scars burn all over again. I have to fight the urge to put my hands to my face. If accepting the sword felt heavy, then this feels crushing.

Suffocating.

‘It cannot be me,’ I say.

‘It can be no one else,’ Elivia replies. ‘Burned, but not butchered. Spared by Him. The mark. The dream you had. It can only be you.’

I blink, still struggling to breathe. ‘But I do not know where the Shield lies.’

Elivia smiles. ‘The answer will come to you in time,’ she says. ‘The God-Emperor chose you, Evangeline.’

I cannot dispute that. I will not, no matter how hollow I might feel. So instead I roll the parchment slowly, put it back on the table and ask the only question that is appropriate to ask.

‘What happens now?’

‘We break with the fleet and set sail for the Throneworld as fast as the tides can take us,’ Elivia says. ‘Once there, we will meet with the cardinals senior for our duty to be blessed. We will pray for guidance. Resupply and prepare the Vow for the test to come. Then you will lead us to the Shield.’

On any other day, my heart would sing joy at the notion of standing on the Throneworld, under His skies. But not today. Today, all that I can think about is the sword at my hip. The great red scar that has taken so much from me, and those echoing words from the dream.

Are you ready?

Ravara

I have always had dark dreams.

As a child I would walk the halls of our household for hours at night, carrying a lantern with me to keep the shadows at bay. My father would often find me in the spire tower with the hunting birds he kept because I found their keening calls a comfort. From there you could see the dawnrise over Marleya’s mountain peaks. He would sit down on the floor beside me, though his wartime wounds pained him, and ask the same question, every time.

What troubles you, my daughter?

I would tell my father of my dreams and the devils in them, and he would listen while the birds keened above us, turning their wings. When I finished speaking he would rest his hand on my head and smile, and say the same few words.

They are just dreams, Ahri, and nothing more.

For a long time, I believed him. I stopped walking the halls and paying visits to the spire tower, and when one night I dreamed of winged creatures who came to speak death in my father’s ear, I didn’t tell him; I just took comfort in those words of his.

They are just dreams, Ahri, and nothing more.

But they were not just dreams. They rarely are.

My father collapsed and died the following day when flying his hunting birds from the spire tower. When I found him, his birds had settled all around him, keening and turning their wings. The physician and the priest who came after said that my father’s heart had failed him. They blamed his wartime wounds and the drinks he would take in the evenings, when he missed the war and missed my mother. They even blamed the responsibility of governorship, but none of those things were to blame. Not really.

I was, because I did not heed my dreams. Because I kept them to myself.

Since then I have always spoken of my dreams. At the schola progenium I spoke of them to the drill-abbots, and when I was selected by Inquisitor Faral Sharvak of the Ordo Hereticus for service as his acolyte, I shared them with him. Sharvak taught me how to find the meaning in my dreams and together we prevented uprisings and toppled cults. We spared lives and damned others, all in the God-Emperor’s name. In the end, I dreamt of Sharvak’s death just as I had my father’s, only this time his death came by blades, not wings. This time I made sure to heed the dream. When I told him, it made him smile.

Well, isn’t that a fine thing, Ahri, he said.

Sharvak was well into his two hundredth year, then, and the sort of tired that serving the ordos makes you if you do it for long enough. He made me swear that I would allow his death to happen. I couldn’t deny him that, not the master who had taught me how to read my dreams. So when those blades came for him only days later, I did not intervene. I allowed it to happen. I remember the moment with absolute clarity. As Sharvak died, he had that same tired smile on his face.

Since then I have earned my own rosette and my own acolytes, and I have followed my dark dreams wherever they might take me. Since the opening of the Rift it has become a trial to watch them unfold. I have scratched at my face and my throat in my sleep. I have shouted myself hoarse. Shouted my retinue awake. But not this time. This time, when I wake to the grey darkness of my chambers, I am smiling.

I get up from the carved wooden chair I fell asleep in and start looking for the words that will prove it. My desk is covered in rolled scrolls and star charts and books and binders, as is the floor around it. As is almost every surface in my chambers, save for the cot in the corner, which I haven’t slept in for weeks. It’s a bad habit, keeping everything in such disarray. I haven’t always been this way. This much of a mess.

I go through the texts on my desk at speed. Lifting them and turning them and dislodging stacks of parchment in my search for those words. Every book and scroll and scrap of paper here is ancient, and immensely valuable. Almost certainly unique. But none of them are what I’m looking for. I step over and around the stacks of books and scrolls on the floor, too, moving and disturbing each of them in turn until finally I find it.

‘There you are,’ I say to the book in my hand.

It is small and slim and bound in battered old leather. It has no title. No author. There is no imprint or printer’s mark. It is hand-bound, and handwritten, and just holding it brings back the smell of mountain air, and cold, old stone. It brings back my father’s voice.

What troubles you, my daughter?

I open my father’s journals, and flip through to the last pages. To the verses I remember so clearly from my childhood. I trace my finger along the old words written in faded blue ink. My hand shakes as I do it, just a little. I reach the end of the page and realise that I am holding my breath. I let it go, slowly. Close the book slower. I want to believe that this is it. But I can’t. Not yet. I have been fooled before.

I reach up to my collar and pull the pendant I wear from beneath my indigo tunic. It is something else that once belonged to my father. A skull wearing a ten-pointed halo. I roll the pendant in my hand, feeling the weight and the texture of the Marleyan smokestone. The way it warms to my hands. Every tiny toolmark and imperfection. Then I curl my fingers around the pendant and squeeze it tightly. So tightly that the spiked halo pierces my skin.

I open my hand again and look at the ten tiny points of blood welling up in my palm. It’s a test. The method by which I can prove that I’m awake, and this isn’t just a continuation of my dream. In my dreams, the points of the pendant never make me bleed. Knowing I’m awake is only the first test, though. Knowing I’m right is much more crucial. For that, I need a second opinion.

I get to my feet, quickly donning my lightweight, overlapping armour plate. I bind my hair and take my sabres from the weapons rack by the door. They are kin-swords. Identical curved sabres made from steel and polished bone, the lengths of the blades etched with prayers and with wards. I have carried them since I was a girl. Since my father trained me in the way of the Marleyan sword-song. I don’t expect to need the blades. Not here. But it’s always a comfort to carry them.

I leave my chambers and go out into the cool, stone halls of the Fortress Meridia. The halls are empty. The lumens are on the night-cycle, burning low and starlight-pale. The seamless obsidian floor and walls swallow the light as surely as they swallow the sound of my footsteps. The place has the hush of holiness about it, like a tomb. Like a monument to silence. It was not always like this. When Sharvak claimed Meridia as his own, it was a place of purpose and activity. He kept scores of acolytes and sworn swords. Savants and mercenaries. He laid roots here, but that was Sharvak’s way. It is not mine. I prefer to range just as my father’s hunting birds did, returning to roost only when I must. Only when the sky grows too violent to stay aloft.

I walk swiftly through Meridia’s silent halls, going where I always go when I need to speak of my dreams. To my interrogator, and my dream-taker. Sofika. There was a time when she would have simply shared my chamber, but not now. Not after what happened on Hellebore. Now Sofika rests in a chamber of her own, five turns of the stair down from mine, in Meridia’s depths.

As I follow the stairway down, the light begins to change, turning to a soft, yellow glow. It looks like dawnrise, but it isn’t. It’s just the lumens cycling. There are no windows in the Fortress Meridia. Not a single skylight or embrasure. There is little point, with the fortress buried so deep in Terra’s eastern hive-sprawl. Meridia lies far beyond the bounds of the Outer Palace, in the overbearing and overpopulated district of Lamataya. It’s a working district. One of Terra’s multitude of tertiary Administratum hubs, where most people will never live to see the sky. I feel the weight of it bearing down on me as I head further down into the depths. It is a weight of ages, and of significance. When Sharvak first brought me to Meridia, I found it overwhelming. I was born on a world with mountains and gales and with sky enough to spare. That is why Sharvak set Meridia’s lumens to run cycles, to give me a night and a day and alleviate the sense that the Throneworld could crush me without collapsing. Just by merely being. It helps enough, and no more.

When I reach the door to Sofika’s chambers, I give my clearance by voice-print.

‘Ahri Ravara,’ I say. ‘Clearance code, nightsky.’

The cogitator churns and ticks over, and then the lumen flicks from red to green and the heavy door slides open. The room inside is circular, with the same obsidian walls and floor as the rest of Meridia. In here, though, it is not dawnrise. It is a permanent nightscape, with hundreds of tiny string-lumens hanging in loops and whorls against the black stone like stars against the void. Sofika stirs as I cross the room and take the same seat I always take. A simple wooden stool. I lace my hands in my lap.

‘It looks like a good evening, Sofika,’ I say.

‘It is,’ she replies absently. ‘With such bright stars.’

I look up at her then. At my confessor, and my dream-taker. My loyal interrogator of fifteen years’ service. My Sofika.

Or what remains of her.

Sofika Vorros is held upright, connected by tubes and braces and cables to the support system built around her. Her legs are gone, as is most of her body below the abdomen. A set of bellows breathes for her, and machines pump a constant supply of blood and fluids around what remains of her body. Sofika’s robes hang from her, and her cheeks have lost their colour. Her fair hair has thinned and fallen out in clumps, and there is a distance in her eyes, that fogs the mountain-sky blue of them. One thing hasn’t changed, though. She still smiles at the sight of me.

‘More dreams?’ Sofika asks.

‘Aren’t there always,’ I reply.

She nods. The movement is diminished by her connection to the machine that has kept her from dying since Hellebore, months ago.

‘Let me see,’ Sofika says, and she reaches out and puts both of her thin, cold hands on my face.

The connection is instant, and strong. Sofika’s gifts were the only part of her not to suffer on Hellebore. Instead, they grow stronger with every passing day. With every moment that Sofika spends in the machine. Her power washes over me like a storm surge, and it feels as though I have lost my balance. Like floating and sinking, all at once. The chamber and the false nightscape and Sofika’s machine bleed away, and the world upends and inverts. I taste iron and ice, and cannot help but blink reflexively.

When I open my eyes again, it is to another vaulted hallway. Not Meridia. This one is lit by flickering candles. Hundreds of them. Thousands, perhaps. The floor and the walls are made from a pale, veined stone, the pieces crazed together like pottery shards. The sound of a storm echoes through the hallway, sending a bitter wind to pull insistently at the candle flames, and at the light of the lantern in my hand.

‘This place…’ Sofika says.

I glance at her. As always, Sofika is whole again in the dreamscape. She is clad in lightweight, flexible armour like mine, her pale hair bound with a series of gold cuffs. She carries not a sword, but a bladed polearm that she leans on like a staff. Her body is rounded and well-muscled and her blue eyes are pin-sharp and keen. It is how she looks when I remember her. How she looked on the day that she should have died.

‘This is Marleya,’ she says. ‘The governor’s palace.’

I nod. ‘Home,’ I say.

We set off down the hallway together, Sofika murmuring softly beside me as she takes in every part of the dreamscape. Often in dreams the shape of a place is different and distorted, but not here. Save for the candles, this fragment of my home is exactly as I remember it, right down to the smell. Candle smoke and rain and cold air, and beneath that the earthy tang of whisperpines. Every hanging drape is where it should be. Every book and roll of parchment posted into the niches in the walls.

‘I have spent so many years inside your dreams,’ Sofika says. ‘Never once have I seen this place.’

‘Because I have not dreamt of it since I left it,’ I say. ‘Not for forty years.’

I raise the lantern a little higher. The wind tugs at the flame, trying its best to blow it out, but the light perseveres.

‘Here,’ I say, and I point to the stairway leading off and upwards. The bare stone steps are smoothed by the passing of feet over generations. If I listen carefully, I can hear the keening cries of birds echoing down from above.

‘Ahri,’ Sofika says, because she knows of the spire tower, and what it means. She knows almost everything about me, for better or worse.

I shake my head, and start up the steps. They are steep and narrow and curl around and around in a spiral. The keening of birds grows louder and louder until the stairs give way to the roost at the top of the spire tower. The floor is littered with feathers and flakes of straw that turn in the wind coming through the large, glassless windows. Several hunting birds sit with their claws hooked around their resting posts, crying into the storm. I don’t look at them. Neither does Sofika. We are both looking at the two figures standing with their backs to us, gazing out over the mountains and the terrible storm that crowns them.

The first is tall, with broad shoulders that suggest a strength he once had. He is clad in robes of regal blue and leans his weight on a gilded wooden cane, easing the pressure on his old wounds. The other is just a child, barefoot and clad in nightclothes with a lantern in her hand. She looks strangely fragile with her long, dark hair catching in the wind just as the flame inside the lantern does. Sofika follows me as I move to stand beside them at the open window.

‘You need not carry the lantern much longer,’ my father says, to my younger self.

Just like the hallway and the stairs and the spire tower, his voice is exactly as I remember it, even if his words are not. His profile is, too. His steep, dark brows and the broken step of his nose. His deep, old scars. It is almost too exact for a dream. I rest my hands on the worn stone sill of the window, feeling the cold stone under my hands. The mountain air on my face is colder still, and flecked with rain.

‘Why?’ the younger me asks.

My father nods out towards the distant mountain range. I can see the tiny shape of a single bird approaching through the storm. I shouldn’t be able to see it, because it is still dark, but the bird bears its own light like the lantern in my hand does. Its feathers burn brightly against the violet thunderheads and pre-dawn shadows. It sheds them with every beat of its wings, leaving a glittering trail in its wake.

‘She is returning to the spire,’ he says. ‘Dawnrise will follow soon after.’

‘How do you know?’ the younger me asks. ‘What if dawnrise never comes, and the night stays in its place?’

My father smiles and looks at the younger me with patience.

‘Dawnrise will come,’ he says. ‘It is inevitable. For there to be such a thing as night, there must be a day, after all. You just have to wait.’

The younger me shakes her head. ‘But I am afraid,’ she says, with the sort of honesty that I have long since left behind. ‘It has been dark for so long.’

My father leans his cane against the tower wall and picks up the younger me, holding her up so that she can better see the sky beyond. I clearly see the pain in his face as he does it.

‘Follow the eagle ablaze, Ahri,’ he says, and points. ‘You will see. The light will not be far behind, and it will burn all of the shadows away.’

I do see it, then. A blinding golden light behind the eagle that fills the sky, edge to edge. It banishes the storm with ease. It makes my eyes well with tears. It is more than gold, really. More than light.

It is divine.

The light rolls onwards with the eagle at its heart until it is all I can see. Until I am surrounded by light and heat and an incredible warmth, not just on my skin, but my soul. Everything else starts to bleed away in the face of it. My father’s birds go first, then the spire tower and the mountains. The younger me disappears too, leaving Sofika and I standing with my father, bathed in that divine, golden light.

‘Follow the eagle, Ahri,’ my father says again, and this time I could swear that he is speaking to the now-me, and that he sees me just as clearly as I do him, but then the eagle vanishes and so does my father, and I am returned in a dizzying instant to the Fortress Meridia.

Sofika lets her hands fall from my face, slowly. They are so cold that it feels as though they leave prints.

‘You have not dreamed of anything but Hellebore for months,’ Sofika says, as blood runs slowly from her nose. ‘About the Resonance, and the Conduit. About the monster in the serpent’s mask.’

I can’t help but think of it as I get to my feet and pick up a knot of medicae cotton from a silvered tray. Of finally uncovering the ancient chamber buried beneath Hellebore’s surface, only to find a monster already waiting there, intent on using it for himself. An echo of the oldest war, clad in cobalt battleplate and a serpent’s mask. Sorcerer. Traitor.

Thousand Son.

Hate floods me like dawnrise floods the horizon. Edge to edge. Hate for the sorcerer, and what he did. What he took from me. But my hatred is not reserved for the heretic alone.

I hate myself, too, for failing to see it coming.

‘But now you dream of the dawnrise and of the light returning to burn away the shadows.’ Sofika says, oblivious to my anger. To my guilt. ‘It is just like before.’

I dab at her bleeding nose with the knot of cotton. Her blood is very dark, and half clotted already. I ignore it, as I have for weeks, just as I ignore Efrayl when the medicae tells me that the machine won’t keep Sofika alive forever. I put the wad of cotton down on the tray, Sofika’s blood sticking to my fingers.

‘I know,’ I say.

Sofika smiles. She looks at me the way she always has. The same way she looks at a starlit sky.

‘It all aligns,’ she says. ‘Darknesses are always accompanied by light. Cadia. The Rift. One who slumbers, arisen. Devils at the Throneworld’s gates. Scholars have spoken of it for almost a thousand years. The scrolls of Simir, and the Evangelis of Phrati. Your father’s journals. It is a sign, Ahri. I am sure of it.’

I want to smile too. I want to agree with her, but I can’t help looking down at her blood on my hands.

‘Like I was sure about Hellebore?’ I ask.

‘This is different,’ she says.

I shake my head. ‘You can’t know that.’

Sofika takes hold of my face so that I can’t help but look at her. Her pale eyes are bright and keen, like they are in my dreams.

‘I can,’ she says. ‘And I do.’

‘How?’ I ask.

She smiles again. ‘Because I believe,’ she says softly. ‘And I know that you do, too.’

I think of the divine light, filling the sky to the edges. Of the warmth, not just on my skin, but on my soul.

‘I do,’ I tell her. ‘I believe.’

‘Then it is time,’ she says softly.

I nod. ‘Time for the God-Emperor to return to us.’

A tear traces from Sofika’s eye and I dab that away too, with the pad of my thumb this time. I let my hand linger on her face, tracing the curve of her cheek to the line of her jaw.

‘I knew that I would live to see you find the Conduit,’ Sofika says, after a moment. ‘To see the Rebirth.’

I let my hand fall away from her face. ‘I swore it to you, didn’t I?’

Sofika smiles absently. ‘You did,’ she says. ‘And we do not break vows.’

I think about all of the things that I have seen and done and said. I have broken many things in my long lifetime, but never a vow, no matter how much it might pain me to keep it.

‘No,’ I say to Sofika. ‘We do not break vows.’

Evangeline

The Unbroken Vow’s main cathedral is a massive space, easily the equal of the minor halls of worship on Ophelia VII, with thick, armaglass windows stained with depictions of saints and martyrs, of the history of our Order, and of the Imperial Cult. In most of them I see Saint Katherine. In one she stands alongside Alicia Dominica as the tyrant Vandire is beheaded. In another, she bears a flaming sword, cutting down a mirrored mutant. In yet another, she holds her own heart in her hands, burning brightly.

Beyond the armaglass the stars track slowly as the Vow moves away from the rest of the crusade fleet, and away from our home, accompanied by two Navy escorts, the Wanderer and the Northward Star.

‘My Sisters.’

The Canoness’ voice draws my eyes from the saint, and the void. Elivia stands at the pulpit, her gauntleted hands resting on the carved stone. One of the Vow’s cherubim lingers by her shoulder, a vox-amplifier grafted into its chest and throat to propel Elivia’s voice to all of those arrayed before her. Not that she needs it. Elivia’s words carry with ease across the vaulted hall.

‘Our astropaths have received a message from the Convent Prioris, on Terra.’

Nobody in the cathedral speaks a word, but I feel a tensing in my Sisters at the utterance of those names. A fervour. Few amongst us have ever set foot in the Sol System. Never mind on the Throneworld itself.

‘The message was harried and tattered by the storms, but the meaning remains clear.’ Elivia pauses, and frowns. ‘The Praesidium Protectiva, the Shield of Our Martyred Lady, is lost beyond the Great Rift.’

This time, there are words muttered. Prayers, and benedictions. The cherubim keen and there is a hum of armour plate as my Sisters make the aquila sign all around me.

Elivia holds up her hand, and all falls quiet again. All falls still.

‘Even now, the cardinals senior and the servants of the Orders seek the Shield’s whereabouts,’ Elivia says. ‘We will go to Terra to receive their guidance before striking out into the darkness beyond the Great Rift in search of the Shield.’

Elivia pauses again. Her eyes find me in the crowd.

No, I think, all over again. Please do not say it.

‘The Shield’s location is as yet unknown,’ Elivia says, her eyes still fixed on mine. ‘But there is one amongst us who is set to find it. She who is marked by His favour. Burned but not butchered. Sister Evangeline.’

Nobody moves to look at me, but I feel their attention nonetheless. It is like waking in the hospitaller’s ward all over again, with a light shining so brightly upon me that I cannot speak or move. My lungs refuse the cold, smoke-spiced air.

‘See to your preparations, my Sisters,’ Elivia says. ‘Arm and armour yourselves for the crusade yet to come.’

She lifts her hands from the pulpit and closes the right over her heart, her eyes still fixed on me.

‘The God-Emperor expects,’ she says. ‘Let us not keep Him waiting.’

After the briefing, I speak to no one. Not Elivia, nor Ashava, nor the squad I have been given. For three days, while the Unbroken Vow makes preparations to sail the sea of storms, I seclude myself in prayer, first in my chambers, and then in the chapel. I kneel for hours in the cold, listening to the ship’s engines burning and the cherubim singing, and ask the God-Emperor for guidance. Ask Him what He intends for me and what the mark I am left with means. Ask Him where I will find the shield. But my mind is unquiet and unstable, and His answers are not easy to hear over the noise. Frustrated, I find myself needing to act. To fight. So I leave the chapel behind and go down to the training halls to worship through blades instead of words.

The sword Elivia gave me is lighter weight and longer than any other I have ever used. It doesn’t have the heft of a chainsword, or the hollow feel of a training blade. It crackles instead of churning, and it is perfectly balanced, despite the length of the blade. It is this latter thing that makes it so hard to use, because the sword might be perfectly balanced, but I am not. My long sleep has made me slow and unsteady, and my muscles tire easily. My lungs feel shallow. Despite this I still set the training servitors to draw blood. To test me. I set them to come in groups of three, on random attack patterns. I fight without pause, sweat soaking through my tunic and robes and my heart hammering in my ears. The air in the training hall is cold and stale and feels as though it clings to me. My ragged breathing mists the air. Far above, cherubim flutter artificial wings and chant as I disable, despatch and destroy.

Through trials, may the God-Emperor make me resolute, they intone.

Three more servitors come. One bears a shock-mace, one a hook-blade and one a polearm. My sword shatters the polearm easily, and kills the servitor wielding it in three cuts. They are not artful, or deft. The polearm-servitor dies messily, because I am putting too much weight behind the blade. It causes me to overstep and overbalance, which lets the servitor with the hook-blade catch me across my ribs. Blood mingles with my sweat and I stagger. The shock-mace connects, too, sending a jolt of numbing pain through my body. My hand wants to spasm open and release the sword.

Through suffering, may the God-Emperor make me strong, the cherubim say.

I refuse to let my hand open. Instead I force myself to turn and clash my sword against the shock-mace, pushing the servitor back on its spidery replacement limbs. I follow up by punching the hilt into the iron mask of the mace-servitor’s face, denting the metal inwards. It staggers now, mutely juddering. The blade-servitor sees this as an opening to attack. I duck the hook-blade this time, feeling the air shift as it rushes by my ear, then cut the servitor’s lumpen head from its shoulders. This time it takes only one strike, though the death is no less messy. Oil and blood spray the deck and spray me too.

I lurch through the oil-blood rain to where the mace-servitor is juddering and twitching with its faceplate crumpled. It is the only kill with any grace. A heartstrike, straight through the necrotised skin and metal plating. A mercy. I let the servitor’s remains fall clear of my blade, and stand for a moment, just breathing.

Through pain, may the God-Emperor make me worthy, the cherubim say.

My bones are aching, and the cut across my ribs burns. My arm throbs from the touch of the shock-mace and from swinging the sword. Sweat stings my eyes, and my heartbeat is louder than the Vow’s engines. All of these things are blessings, just as the cherubim say. Pain, after all, is honest. Suffering is to be celebrated. But today I find no peace in it, because despite fighting for hours and hours, I am still unbalanced. Not just because of the blade, or my injuries, but because of what lies ahead. Before the Last of Days I would have entered into any battle or trial without hesitation, but now? Now, I am not so sure.

And that in itself is a sin.

I hear the sound of footsteps and turn from the mess that remains of the servitors to see Ashava approaching across the training hall. My Sister is back in her black armour plate and crimson vestments.

‘No more crutches,’ I say, stepping out of the training circle. The bell rings to end the fight-cycle. ‘Then you are healed?’

‘They have removed the cages,’ she says, as if that is the same thing. ‘I will never be what I was, but I can stand. I can fight.’ Ashava looks around at the ruin I have made. ‘As can you, it seems.’

‘I will not be found wanting a second time,’ I say, putting my hand to the wound at my side. It comes away bloody.

Ashava’s eyes narrow at the sight of it.

‘I know,’ I say, though she has not said anything. ‘I must be swifter.’

She chuckles. ‘I am hardly the one to speak to you of speed now, Eva.’

My face must betray my discomfort, because she tuts at me.

‘Come now,’ she says. ‘If we cannot laugh at cruelty, then it has already bested us.’

‘Is that another of Triumph’s creeds?’ I ask.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It is just common sense.’

That does make me smile, despite everything.

‘And besides,’ Ashava says, ‘it is not swiftness you are missing with a blade such as that.’

‘Then what?’

‘It is certainty you lack,’ she says. ‘Self-assurance. It is not in the hand that you hold the sword. It is the heart. The blade is a part of you now, as much as any other.’

‘As much as the mark,’ I say.

Ashava is quiet for a moment. The fight-cycle might have stopped, but the cherubim never do.

Through trials, may the God-Emperor make me resolute, they say.

‘It is a gift, Eva,’ she says. ‘The God-Emperor has chosen to spare you for a greater purpose.’

‘But I do not know how to find the Shield,’ I say.

Ashava’s face does not change. ‘You will,’ she says, just as Elivia did.

‘You make it sound so simple,’ I say, before I can stop myself. ‘But this feels anything but. Everything has changed, Ashava. I have changed.’

She shakes her head and shifts her weight on her injured legs, just a little. ‘We all have,’ she says. ‘But we cannot go back. Only onwards.’

Shame pulls at me, looking at my Sister who has lost so much, but accepts it so readily. I look down at the sword in my hand.

‘Perhaps I lack certainty because I should never have been given the blade,’ I say, then I look up at her. ‘It should have been you.’

‘Adelynn chose you,’ she says simply.

I blink. ‘What?’

‘She told us each in turn, long before the opening of the Rift. If she were to fall, the sword and the title were to come to you.’

Through suffering, may the God-Emperor make me strong, the cherubim say.

‘She never told me,’ I say. ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’

Ashava shrugs. ‘That, I do not know, but I do know this. Adelynn never doubted you, Evangeline, so you had better find that certainty, and find a way to take that blade and what it stands for into your heart. To do anything else is to dishonour her.’

I feel as though she has struck me. As though I would deserve it if she did.

‘I will not dishonour her,’ I say, firmly. ‘I cannot.’

‘I know,’ Ashava says. ‘So tell me what you want me to do.’

I glance down at the sword once more. My sword.

Through pain, may the God-Emperor make me worthy, the cherubim say.

I exhale, slowly.

‘Call for the others,’ I say. ‘The survivors of Helia’s Mission, and Elivia’s few. We will be amongst the tides soon, and it is time that I spoke with my squad.’

Ashava nods, and half bows.

‘Aye, Sister Superior,’ she says.

My armour awaits me in my quarters. It hangs from a stand, rebuilt and reconsecrated. Relacquered, in void-black and arterial red. My two armoury vassals await me too. Wyllo and Dallia are both void-born slender, with eyes that are dark to the edges. They keep those eyes downcast as I secure my sword on the rack on the far wall, shed my tunic and robes and step down into the armoury circle in the middle of the small, spare room. Only then do my vassals look up and see the marks left on me by Ophelia VII. I wait for them to say something, to mutter a prayer, or a catechism, but they remain silent and begin the armouring as they always do.

For that, I will always be grateful.

Wyllo and Dallia move around me in perfect, silent synchronicity. They wash me clean of blood and sweat and dress the wounds I took in the training halls, before blowing coils of scented smoke and scattering blessed ashes over my body. When that is done, Wyllo steps forward and I close my eyes so that she can pass her blackened thumbs over them gently.

‘Blessed are the eyes that see His works,’ she says.

I open my eyes and hold out my hands, palm up. Wyllo draws her hands over mine, leaving ash-prints behind.

‘Blessed are the hands that do His work,’ she says.

They clad me first in the flexible bodysuit that will sit under my armour. This, too, is blessed with smoke and ashes. Then they clad me in my vestments before beginning with my armour proper, piece by intricate piece, from my toes to my throat. Sabatons. Greaves. Poleyns. Cuisse and tassets. My armoured chestplate, shoulder guards and vambraces. My gauntlets. As Wyllo and Dallia work, I turn my left arm to let the vambrace catch the candlelight. A pattern plays across the black lacquer – one of coils and ripples, like oil cast into water.

‘We did our best with the marks, my lady,’ Wyllo says, as she secures the vambrace on my other arm with her slender augmetic fingers. ‘To remove them entirely would necessitate stripping the outer layers completely. Going right back to the bone, as it were. The marks do not affect integrity. Just the aesthetic.’

I very nearly smile at that.

‘It can still be done, of course,’ Dallia says, in her vox-rig rasp. ‘Should you demand it.’

As they continue working I turn my arm again and watch that pattern play across the surface. It matches exactly to the scarring on my skin. Ashava’s words come back to me.

We cannot go back. Only onwards.

‘It can remain as it is,’ I tell them.

‘Very good, my lady,’ Wyllo says.

‘Yes,’ says Dallia. ‘Very good.’

The pair of them utter the last words together: ‘Blessed is the heart that knows His protection.’

And then they light my armour’s reactor. My suit sets to humming that rises slowly to a steady, familiar growl, and I realise how much I have missed it. With my armour complete, Wyllo and Dallia are left only with the cloak to affix. It is new, a weighted fall of black and crimson cloth that they secure under my shoulder guards as a sign of my rank. Though it is impossible given my power armour’s boons, I fancy I can feel the extra weight when they hang it. Wyllo offers up my helm, which I lock to my belt. Dallia follows suit with my bolter. Even though she is strong from augmentation and service, it still takes all of her effort to lift the weapon. I take it from her easily with one armoured hand.

My bolter has been rebuilt, too. Reconsecrated. Dallia has wrapped lengths of prayer-parchments around the stock with care. The script is delicate, and tiny. Perfect.

‘Thank you,’ I say to them both. ‘This is fine work. All of it.’

They both flush crimson and bow to me.

‘You needn’t bow,’ I say, like I always do.

‘Apologies, my lady,’ they say, together. It is as much a rite as the armouring is. I have been asking them not to bow for almost a decade.

I leave the armoury circle, then, and take up my sword once more from the rack on the wall. With the boosted strength of my armour plate, it feels feather-light. Those words on the blade catch the light again.

‘In faith we are found,’ Wyllo says, reading them too.

I nod, and slide the blade into the scabbard at my waist.

‘Yes. We are.’

My Sisters await me in one of the Vow’s small, spare chapels. It seems only right, given that we are to be bound together in blood and in service, to do so under His sight.

The chapel is on the spine of the Vow, towards the rear of the ship. It is close enough to the engines that everything hums along with them as the ship burns hard for the system’s Mandeville point. When I push open the doors, coils of candle smoke steal out, drawn from the chapel’s sanctity by the cool air of the spinal corridor. Like everywhere else on the Vow, the iron of the ship’s ancient skeleton is exposed in the chapel, looming darkly from the shadows like leviathan bones. Candles burn everywhere. There are no pews or benches here, because worships should be made on your feet or your knees. The floor is bare and hard, just like the walls.

My Sisters stand waiting, all clad for war in their full armour plate, but with their helms locked at their belts and their blades and bolters slung. I look upon faces old and young, tattooed and scarred, and they all look back at me, expectant. Waiting. Some of these faces I know, like Ashava and the others who once served Palatine Helia as a part of her Mission. Brave, fierce Qi-Oh, with her long-limbed strength, and her head shaved to the bare scalp. One of her eyes is hazel-coloured and full of fire, the other a brass augmetic, nested in a deep, old scar. With her is Calyth. The only other survivor of Qi-Oh’s squad is pale and mountainous, her armour adjusted to best fit her strength and height. Calyth’s eyes are silver-pale and contemplative against her strong-jawed, well-scarred face. Next to her are Sarita and Munari. Both are taller even than Ashava is, with long, slender features and large, dark eyes. They are sisters in blood as well as service, the only two I have ever known. Before, it might have been easy to mistake one for the other, but not now. Not since the Last of Days. Now a knot of scar tissue twists across Sarita’s face, coiling down onto her throat and disappearing into her armour. Munari did not escape unscathed, either. I know that beneath her armour, she bears a silver augmetic in place of her left arm.

Then there are those of Elivia’s mission, who I do not know yet, but whose names and likenesses the Canoness spoke to me. Burn-scarred Haskia. Smiling Joti, who will bear our blessed battle-standard. Severe Veridia with half of her scalp wrought from steel, and last of all small, quiet Eugenia. The last of my Sisters is also the youngest, her tan skin marked only by the simple fleur-de-lys tattooed under her right eye in red ink. I find her the most difficult to look at, somehow.

‘My Sisters,’ I begin, thinking of how I was sworn into Adelynn’s squad, and of all of the speeches I have heard before battles and campaigns. I think of readings and sermons and swearings-in. Grand words rise up inside me, but I find I can say none of them. They feel dishonest. Empty, as I have felt since waking.

‘I should have called for you days ago,’ I find myself saying instead. ‘I should have done so the moment that I was granted the sword.’

I draw it then and hold it out in front of me.

‘I wanted to learn the art of such a sword before I stood before you,’ I say. ‘I wanted to understand it. But it is only in standing here now that I think I do, because the sword means nothing without the nine of you.’

I look at them in turn.

‘We have all lost. All suffered. And we will do so many more times as the God-Emperor intends, blessed be His name. All that I ask is to suffer with you, as your Sister.’

There is a long, aching moment of silence where all that I can hear is the crackling of candles, and the hum of the Vow’s engines, but then one of them speaks. I expect it to be Ashava, who knows me best, or Qi-Oh, who is known for being quick with her words, but it isn’t.

‘Aye, Sister Superior.’ Eugenia’s voice is soft and measured and carries the sort of stillness that makes me think of prayer. She is the first to speak, but not the last. Every one of the women standing before me echoes her words. They bow their heads, just a little, and make the sign of the aquila with their gauntleted hands.

‘We have all lost,’ I say again, ‘but I swear to you now that we will all have vengeance against the darkness and those that take shape in it, by blade and by fire. By the will of the God-Emperor of Mankind.’

There is no momentary silence this time. They all answer me immediately.

‘Vengeance,’ my Sisters say, as one. ‘By His will.’

After the chapel, I meet with each of my squad alone, in turn. I let them choose the place and the means of it because it is what Adelynn did when I first joined her squad all those years ago. She said that it helped her to see the truth of me, and what I needed from her.

Calyth is first. Her choice of meeting place is one of the lowdeck chapels. It is a place used not by Sisters of the Orders, but by the crew. The little chapel is not so solemn as our halls of worship. Hundreds and hundreds of votive decorations in the shape of fleurs-de-lys are pinned all along the walls, so many that they have started to overlap. They turn gently in the recycled air, each one made from offcuts of different coloured cloth. Yellow, blue, red and green. I even catch sight of the gold worn by officers amidst the riot.

‘The vassals pin them here for the dead,’ Calyth says, when she sees me looking. ‘As a mark of their passing.’

I say nothing. I am watching a man wearing Navy colours as he affixes another scrap of cloth to the wall. This one is red as blood. His hand lingers on the fleur-de-lys for a long moment before he turns away.

‘I think it is like a meadow,’ Calyth says. ‘Don’t you?’

I shake my head. ‘I have never seen a meadow,’ I say, looking away from the wall. ‘I was born on Ophelia VII, where all is marble and memorial, and all I have seen since are the fields of war.’

‘Truly?’ Calyth asks.

I nod. ‘Truly.’

Calyth’s pale eyes go distant. ‘I was raised amongst meadows,’ she says. ‘On a world that was made to grow the flowers for a system’s worth of memorials. Golden heartfires, eagle’s claws and cloud-lilies. Every colour imaginable, from horizon to horizon.’

‘Is that why you come here?’ I ask her. ‘Because it reminds you of the world where you were born?’

She nods slowly. ‘In part, I suppose. But that is not the only reason why. I come here because it is simple. Quiet. Because of the words, too.’

‘Which words?’

‘Come,’ she says. ‘I will show you.’

She nods for me to follow her, and together we go to the middle of one of the chapel’s rows. Just like in our worship halls, there are no benches. Here, though, there are small, thin cushions to spare the congregation the cold of the deck. Each cushion has a stitch-bound text lying on it. They are well-thumbed and dog-eared, and when I kneel beside Calyth and open the book, I catch the scent of reconstituted parchment. The lettering inside is so haloed and faded that it can only have been copied from a copy. My eyes snag halfway down the list of verses, and I flip gently to the middle of the book. On the page turn, my fingertips linger under the faded header.

‘The Virtues of Service,’ I say, softly. ‘My mother used to sing this verse to me when I was a child.’

Calyth looks at me. ‘Are you certain?’

I let my fingertips trail down the page. The act conjures the sound of my mother’s voice, high and clear. The darkness of our tiny hab, lit only by a single candle. The smell of ink and of old parchment. Copies of copies.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘She would sing it to me when I could not sleep. It was one of her favourite verses.’

‘It is one of my favourites, too.’ Calyth smiles absently, her pale eyes contemplative. ‘Was she kind, your mother?’

I think of my mother’s ink-stained hands, and her low, intelligent voice. Her eyes a vivid green, like Adelynn’s were. I think of how she always seemed to be smiling, especially when she looked at me.

‘Yes, she was.’ I glance at Calyth. ‘Wasn’t yours?’

Calyth shakes her head. ‘I do not remember my mother,’ she says. ‘Nor my father. I do not remember anything much from my time before the convents, save for the meadows. The sound of all those flowers, moving in the wind.’

I try to imagine it, but I have no frame of reference. No understanding of that many beautiful things.

‘Would you like to sing the verse?’ Calyth asks. ‘For the memory of your mother?’

I look at the page. At my armoured hands and the spirals burned into the ceramite, and I think of Isidora’s last words.

S-sing.

I close the book of verses gently.

‘I would like to hear you sing it,’ I reply.

Calyth nods. She takes up her own book of verses and begins to sing. Her voice is a surprise. It is soft and comforting and when Calyth comes to the last line of the verse her voice is joined by another inside my mind. One that should be my mother’s, but could just as well be Adelynn’s.

And death is a virtue earned and not owed.

One only granted, for those who are bold.

The next of my Sisters to call for me do so together.

Sarita and Munari do not so much choose a place, as choose the Vow herself. I meet them at the midships junction of the spinal corridor and together we set to walking towards the bridge.

‘What would you like to know, Sister Superior?’ Sarita asks.

‘Something of yourselves,’ I say. ‘Something true.’

‘Something of ourselves,’ Sarita says.

‘Something true,’ finishes Munari.

Their sharing of sentences is a habit I noticed long before the Contemplation, before the Rift, when we would undertake briefings and prayer together as a part of Helia’s Mission. I do not know the twins well, but it is impossible not to see the ways in which they are connected beyond even the way the rest of us are.

‘What about Gellax, sister?’ Munari says. ‘Why don’t you tell Evangeline of the eradication of the Cult of Drowning?’

Sarita shakes her head. ‘I loathe that story. You know I do.’

Munari grins. ‘All the more reason to tell it. We rarely love our own truths.’

‘Philosophy, sister,’ Sarita says. ‘Really?’

Munari laughs. ‘Always. Now tell the story.’

Sarita ignores her, looking at me instead. ‘Do you have any siblings, Evangeline?’

I shake my head, because it has always been just me.

‘Would you like one?’ Sarita asks.

Munari scoffs. Sarita laughs, and I do too, for what might be the first time since I awoke. It immediately makes me feel guilty, as though my right to laugh died with my own Sisters.

‘If you won’t tell the story then I will,’ Munari says, oblivious to my discomfort. ‘I will tell Evangeline of how you alone pushed beyond the battleline to reach the heart of the corruption. I will tell her of how you killed seven of the Archenemy who were swollen with dark power, all by yourself. I will tell her how you burned their fane to the ground, and walked out of the flames unscathed.’

‘I know this story,’ I tell them. ‘But I did not know it was you.’

Sarita clucks her tongue. ‘That is because I don’t like others to know,’ she says. ‘It feels self-aggrandising.’

‘There is such a thing as too humble, you know,’ Munari says.

‘The verses would beg to differ,’ Sarita replies, and she pushes gently at her twin’s shoulder with the flat of her hand. ‘Besides, what about you, little sister?’

‘Little,’ Munari says, shaking her head now. ‘You say that as if there’s a candlewick between us.’

‘Fourteen minutes is much more than a candlewick,’ Sarita says. She is smiling now that their roles are reversed. ‘If you must bring up the Cult of Drowning, then perhaps I should speak of the Bladed Wastes.’

Munari blushes. ‘That is different.’

Sarita looks at me. ‘It isn’t,’ she says. ‘Munari was the one who led the train of pilgrims across the Bladed Wastes on Vilium to keep them from the teeth and knives of the drukhari. The xenos came upon the train five times, and every time they did, Munari killed their reavers and raiders. She did not lose a single soul. Not one.’

Sarita’s eyes soften as she looks at her sister.

‘If you have come here seeking a truth, Evangeline, then that is the one I would give you. Munari is selfless, and strong. She will serve you well.’

Her voice is serious, now. No more laughter. Munari must recognise this because her eyes soften, too. A perfect mirror for those of her twin.

‘Not as well as you,’ she says.

They clasp hands for a moment, and I find that I have to look away because it is not just sentences that Sarita and Munari share, but everything. They are one heart, cast in two bodies. Each completely defined by the other. It makes me think even more about the things I have lost. About what it would mean if one of them were to die under my watch.

‘Are you all right, Sister Superior?’ Sarita asks.

Munari nods. ‘You seem troubled.’

I look at them in turn, and try not to think about them dying.

‘I am sorry,’ I tell them. ‘But I have to go. Thank you for your stories.’

They smile and nod and I leave them to keep to their patrol, matching each other’s stride and pace perfectly and talking in their low, warm voices.

Each completely defined by the other.

I meet with Veridia at the spinal viewport as the Vow’s shutters close in preparation for our first jump towards the Throneworld.

‘I am afraid I have little to offer you in the way of truths, Sister Superior,’ she says, as the shutters grind inexorably downwards. ‘I lost most of mine when I gained this.’

She puts her fingertips to the steel plate that dominates one side of her skull.

‘I remember who I am, and how I am, but not how I came to be.’

‘Do you remember how it happened?’ I ask her.

She frowns on the side of her face that still can. ‘Only because others told me,’ she says. ‘I took the injury in the commandery’s last battle before being called home to Ophelia VII. We were suppressing a heretic uprising in the border worlds of the Segmentum Pacificus.’

‘And you were victorious?’ I ask.

Veridia smiles faintly. ‘Reportedly,’ she says.

The Vow’s artificial lumens bloom to compensate for the lack of starlight as the void shutters approach their final position.

‘It is strange,’ Veridia says. ‘I only know that those memories are missing because of the spaces left by them. I realise that probably sounds like foolishness.’

I think of the spaces within myself, left behind by the Last of Days. The things that I only know are missing by the absence they left behind.

‘No,’ I say, as the shutter locks itself into place with a heavy thud. ‘It doesn’t.’

Qi-Oh petitions me several times to meet her in the training halls in the Vow’s lower decks. Her fervour does not surprise me. We may have been in separate squads before, but I know Qi-Oh well enough to know that the God-Emperor did not bless her with patience. When I arrive, she is waiting in the marked circle with a training blade in hand, which does not surprise me, either.

‘You asked for honesty,’ she says. ‘I could not conceive of anything more honest than combat.’

I nod and take up a training blade from the rack on the wall. I test the weight of the longsword, and step into the marked circle.

‘Not the other sword, then,’ Qi-Oh says, nodding towards the one belted at my hip.

I shake my head. ‘Not against my own.’

She tilts her head as if considering it, then shrugs. The sparring bell tolls and Qi-Oh does not hesitate, impatient even now. She darts forward and strikes at me, so swift it is hard to stop. Almost as swift as Ashava once was. Where Ashava used artistry, though, Qi-Oh uses ferocity. It is easier to see, and to counter. I catch her blade on my own, turning it aside. Qi-Oh paces back, frowning. The expression pulls the scarring around her bionic eye taut.

‘So, how does this work?’ she asks, as she circles.

I am the one to attack, now, with a crossing strike that she parries. ‘Just speak your mind,’ I tell her. ‘Tell me what it is that you need.’

Qi-Oh tilts her head again, and I feel then that this is as much her testing me as anything else.

‘I need only orders, Sister,’ she says. ‘Enemies to fight, and wars to win. Vengeance, as you said.’

‘For Ophelia VII,’ I say.

Her frown deepens. ‘Not just Ophelia VII,’ she says. ‘For everything. What happened on Ophelia was because of the Rift. The Rift exists because of sin and weakness. Decades and decades of it.’

It is then I start to see the truth of Qi-Oh. Not just her fervour, or ferocity, but her anger. I know then that if I am going to give orders, I need to know the root of it. I dart forwards, and this time it is Qi-Oh who has to work to catch my blade and force it aside.

‘We will have vengeance,’ I tell her. ‘That is our purpose. What He made us for.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘That I do not doubt.’

‘Then what do you doubt?’

She breaks away, breathing through her teeth. ‘I do not doubt,’ she snarls. ‘I will do as He intends, until the God-Emperor sees fit to take me up to His side.’

It is an evasion, and I will not have it.

‘But something troubles you,’ I say.

Qi-Oh snorts. ‘You asked for honesty?’

‘I did.’

She paces around me, gauging the best time to act. Qi-Oh moves with enviable lightness, even in full plate.

‘What troubles me is the fact that the weakest amongst humanity will go on sinning. They will go on doubting. They will make new wars for us to fight and new enemies for us to face, born from their wickedness.’ She spits on the training hall floor. ‘It will go on and on and on, until the stars themselves are stained with our blood, all because of those who are too weak to keep faith.’

Qi-Oh attacks again, this time with a feint intended to make me turn and leave myself open for a second strike. Instead I turn into her attack and push her backwards.

‘All of that weakness,’ she says. ‘It is abhorrent.’

‘It is the way of things,’ I say. ‘You know that.’

Qi-Oh lashes out, opening up the space between us, before coming for me again and again with that same ferocity. With all of that anger. There is no chance for artistry. It is all I can do just to block the weight of her attacks as she pushes me back across the circle, towards the edge.

But she is not just propelling me towards the edge.

I twist my body and slip past her. The edge of her training blade skitters across my armour, shoulder to hip. It would be enough to grant her victory, were it not for the fact that her momentum sends her over the edge of the marked circle. At once, the fight bell tolls and I lower my sword. It takes Qi-Oh a moment to do the same. She is looking down at her feet. At their position over the circle’s edge, her shoulders rising and falling with each breath.

‘You are not what I expected,’ she says, in a low voice.

Her words surprise me. ‘What did you expect?’

She looks up. ‘You asked for honesty?’ she asks, again.

I nod. ‘I did.’

‘I expected a miracle,’ she says. ‘What else could I expect of one who is marked by His favour, who is meant to find the Shield of our Saint?’ Qi-Oh shakes her head. ‘They all said the same thing. Lourette. Calyth. Even Veridia said it, of all souls. You will see, Qi-Oh. When you see the mark you will understand. But you are not a miracle.’

It is almost enough to make me laugh, because I have looked at the mark a dozen times or more, and I do not understand. But I cannot tell Qi-Oh this when it seems I have already fallen so far short of her expectations.

‘I never claimed to be,’ I say, and I glance down at the blade in my hand. ‘But I am your Sister Superior.’ I look back to Qi-Oh, making sure to hold her eyes with mine. ‘If you have quarrel with me, I would hear it now. We have enough enemies without finding them in each other.’

A long moment of quiet stretches out between us. Qi-Oh tilts her head again, gauging me, but before she gets the chance to speak, a massive tremor shakes the deck underfoot. Thunder builds around us as the Vow’s warp-drives come to life. The sound rises to a crescendo, and the overhead lumens in the training hall flare and then flicker off momentarily. A sensation comes over me like a thousand hooked blades snagging all across my skin and beneath it, too, as if they are trying to tear at my soul. I mutter a benediction as tectonic shudders run through the Vow’s old bones.

God-Emperor, armour my soul.

Qi-Oh looks up at the training hall’s distant ceiling.

‘Once more, into the domain of devils,’ she says absently.

‘You did not answer me,’ I say. ‘Do you have quarrel with me?’

Qi-Oh looks back at me. Her hazel eye has cooled like an ember left behind in the wake of a fire.

‘There is no quarrel, Sister Superior,’ she says. Her voice is cooler now, too. Less angry. ‘I should like to return to my training, now, as atonement for my failure.’

I cannot tell if she means her failure to defeat me, or her failure to keep her temper, but the way Qi-Oh says my title is careful, and measured. It is a small offering from someone who finds it hard to give in, even just a little, so I swallow my own pride and I nod.

‘That will be all, Sister,’ I say. ‘I will leave you to your swords.’

There is a flicker in her hazel eye and then Qi-Oh nods and goes back to the circle. I take my leave, hearing the fight bell toll again as the door grinds closed behind me.

Ravara

As an inquisitor, I have few people that I can trust, and even fewer that I can call friend. One thing I do have, though, is contacts. After Sharvak’s death I took on his associates as well as the Fortress Meridia, but I have worked hard to build my own network, too. I have worked with fixers and with assassins, with loremasters and lawmakers. I have curried favour with the powerful and the powerless alike, because in the ordos you never know who you might need next.

After speaking with Sofika I reach out to my whisperers, and my listeners, those that monitor open-channel vox-traffic and wide-beam astrotelepathy, and I arrange the payment of one silver eagle apiece to my ganger contacts in Lamataya’s underhives in exchange for words spoken in the tunnels and the sumps. I tell them all to seek out the particulars of the dream. The eagle, ablaze. Last of all, I call for my transport and my standing retinue, because some contacts require a more direct approach if they are to be of any use.

Contacts like Dagra Thul, who amongst his other titles likes to call himself the Master of Dreams.

Fortress Meridia’s primary landing platform is technically outside, though you wouldn’t know it, standing there. The hive blocks and spires stacked around it are so tall that none of the Throneworld’s pale grey sunlight can reach the platform, so it is lit only by blinking guidance lumens and floodlanterns that cast a glare off the puddles of runoff and rainwater that have settled all across the platform’s surface. The air out here is cold and wet, and carries with it the scent of inorganic decay and spiralling clouds of pollutant fog. Two members of my retinue await me amongst the rain and fog and darkness, armed and armoured and ready to fly.

Zoric discards the lho-stick he is smoking and grinds it out with his boot. ‘What’s the mark, lord?’ he asks, in a voice as blunt as his face.

Zoric is tall and corded, with a strong, square jaw and a nose that’s been broken one time too many. His skin is pale and badly scarred, his fair hair prematurely silvered. Zoric has long since left his old life behind, but he still dresses like a mercenary. His clothes are military-issue. All black, save for the lightweight, grey flexi-armour plates he wears under his battered leather jacket. Zoric has a heavy calibre Valedictor-pattern stub-pistol holstered at his hip and his old, uniquely modified lasrifle slung over one shoulder on a worn strap. The guns were the only thing he brought with him when he came into my service. I offered him replacements for them, but he declined. Zoric was willing to give up everything else about his life to serve the ordos, but not that.

‘We aren’t killing,’ I tell him. ‘Not today.’

‘And yet you called for killers, inquisitor.’

Those words are Yumia’s, and they come with a smile. My bladeward could never be described as at ease. She holds herself in permanent tension, as if she is about to sprint or leap as soon as take a breath. Beside Zoric, Yumia looks almost feather-light. Her dark hair is bound up at her crown, her light brown skin scored with tattoos and faith-marks. Her features are as sharp and fine as the blades she carries. Yumia wears no armour. She is clad only in leather and cloth and scars, her wrists wrapped in lengths of grey cord. Her feet are bare, despite the rain and dirt. No matter the conditions, she never seems to feel the cold.

‘That I did,’ I say to her, as we move together towards where my transport waits.

The Crypsis is crouched on stanchion legs in a fall of dismal grey light from above. The craft is gloss-black and seamless, just like Meridia. Its wings are elegant and forward-swept in a way that reminds me of a hunting bird steadying itself before a strike. There are no visible weapons on the Crypsis’ exterior. One could easily mistake it for a hive-runner or a noble’s speedcraft, which was exactly my intent when I commissioned it to be built. The pilot, Tomo, is already cycling the engines as we board via the rear ramp.

‘Ready, lord?’ Tomo says, over the internal vox.

‘Ready,’ I say.

The rear ramp eases closed, and the passenger compartment falls quiet, thanks to the same sound-swallowing technology that keeps Meridia so silent. I can only just feel the thunder of the aircraft’s engines through the seat.

‘So then, inquisitor,’ Yumia says. ‘If we are not to kill, then what duty awaits us?’

I lace my hands together in my lap and look at my companions in turn.

‘I have been shown a dream,’ I say. ‘Not of Hellebore, or the Rift. Something else. Something new.’

I tell them most of what I saw in the dream. The tower and the storm, and the eagle, ablaze. The divine, golden light. I do not mention my father. Zoric leans forwards in his seat, his elbows on his knees. He is completely intent on my words. Yumia listens closely, too, somehow more alert than ever.

‘Sounds like a miracle in waiting, lord,’ Zoric says, when I am done speaking.

‘Provided we can hunt down this eagle ablaze,’ Yumia says.

I nod. ‘That is why we are going to speak with the Master of Dreams.’

Zoric’s expression changes from intent to open disdain. ‘Terra’s mercy,’ he says, with a shake of his head.

‘Who is the Master of Dreams?’ Yumia asks, because she hasn’t served me long enough to know.

Zoric sits back against the wall of the transport and scowls. ‘Dagra Thul,’ he says. ‘He’s a black market dealer. A criminal.’

Yumia laughs. ‘So were you, once.’

Zoric shakes his head. He’s definitely not laughing. ‘Not like Thul,’ he says. ‘He’s not in it for the coin. Not really. He’s in it for the kicks. He’s a cruel-hearted bastard.’

‘There is more to Thul than simple cruelty,’ I tell them. ‘He keeps a choir of psykers in his holdings in Tashkent Hive who have a strength of sight that’s rare to find outside the ordos.’

‘Because he keeps them asleep, and pipes them with drugs to open their minds wider,’ Zoric says, still scowling. ‘Then Thul harvests their dreams and sells them to those who will pay for it. He takes pleasure in it.’

Yumia is frowning, now. ‘And the ordos do nothing to stop him?’ she asks.

‘He is being monitored,’ I tell her. ‘But as of right now, Dagra Thul is more useful than he is dangerous.’

Yumia’s frown deepens. ‘But he is a monster,’ she says.

‘He is,’ I allow. ‘But a necessary one.’

Yumia shakes her head, but she doesn’t argue. ‘Then his due will be paid in time,’ she says. ‘As with all monsters.’

Zoric’s eyes fall to his hands as he flexes his burn-scarred fingers. ‘You’re damned right,’ he says absently. ‘The God-Emperor finds them all, in the end.’

I nod, though I can’t help but idly consider if they would name me monster, too, if they knew my secrets and all of the things I have done.

If they knew that Sofika was still alive, and that I chose to keep it from them.

Dagra Thul’s palatial estate is high in the spires of Tashkent Hive. Up here, above the pollutant-line, Terra still has the heart to snow. I see the dense cloud of white and grey enclosing us through the armaglass viewports in the doors of the Crypsis as Tomo sets the craft down on the landing pad.

‘Keep her cycling,’ I tell the pilot over our discrete comms network. ‘The engines will freeze out up here, otherwise.’

‘As you wish, lord,’ Tomo replies. I hear him start humming before he cuts the link, and know he will be sat with his boots up on the control panel, reading. Tomo is always reading.

The back ramp of the Crypsis eases down onto the snowy landing platform, and a cold rush of air blows in. Snow dashes against my face and armour, and I am reminded of my dream again. Of the cold wind and the rain, and my father’s words.

You need not carry the lantern much longer.

‘Looks like a warm welcome,’ Zoric says flatly, drawing me from my thoughts.

‘And you wondered why I asked for killers,’ I say as we approach the party of three that await us in the storm. Two are bodyguards; gene-bulked monsters with thick brows and overmuscled, tattooed arms. They are armed with gilded shields and shock mauls. The third is a richly dressed, cord-thin woman, who smiles when we hit the bottom of the ramp. Her hair is strung with gold wire, and her teeth are black and blunted.

‘Hello, Viskia,’ I say to her, over the noise of the storm.

‘Madame Ravara,’ Viskia says, with a nod of her head. The heavily augmented cyber-mastiff at her side burrs a growl, its muzzle a mess of frozen drool and necrotised flesh. It stops when Viskia rests one of her thin hands on the crown of its head.

‘Welcome back to the Reverie,’ Viskia continues. ‘The Master awaits you inside.’ Her smile flickers as she takes in Zoric and Yumia. ‘Weapons,’ she sniffs, and I can’t say for sure if she means the two of them, or what they carry. ‘I very much doubt that you will find the need for them here.’

I laugh. It is something I do sparingly, and usually for show. ‘Only a fool would find themselves unarmed in these times.’

There is a pause, but then Viskia laughs, too. It is a ritual as much as anything. There are only two things that Dagra Thul and his staff respect. Displays of wealth, and displays of power. To arrive without weapons would suggest that I lacked in both.

‘Very good,’ she says, before turning for the Reverie, her cyber-mastiff at her heel.

The gene-bulked bodyguards flank us on either side as we follow Viskia through the vast old-oak doors. The incredibly rare true-wood of the doors is just the first sign of extravagant wealth. The inside of Thul’s Reverie is grander than most cathedrals, with overbearing, tasteless gilding and plasterwork cladding every surface. Tapestries hang in heavy columns, and water pours constantly into a decorative spiral display in the heart of the entry hall, the thrumming of it accompanied by the delicate sound of servo-creatures plucking at bone and gold harps with their wastrel arms. Zoric grunts in disdain, though he has seen it before. Yumia is less discreet. She wears her disgust plainly on her face.

‘Monstrous,’ she mutters. ‘It is monstrous.’

I know it is the water she means, because I feel the same. I have seen great acts of cruelty and more deaths than I would care to count, but nothing else turns my stomach in the way that wasted water does. It is an unmatched act of ugly privilege.

If Viskia hears Yumia’s words, she ignores them, leading us in silence up a flight of thickly carpeted stairs to a waiting set of heavy doors. They are painted with an ornate frieze of sleeping figures, their dreams painted ten feet high. A pair of serfs stand in waiting, their faces hidden behind silk veils set with stones.

‘Your weapons,’ Viskia says. ‘They must be peace-bonded before you may enter.’

I allow the serfs to bind my sabre hilts, and Yumia does the same with the short swords at her hips. Zoric won’t let them touch his rifle or his pistol, but he makes a show of removing the powercell from the former, and every one of the custom hard rounds from the latter.

‘The Master awaits you,’ Viskia says again when it is done, and she gestures to the gene-bulked bodyguards, who take hold of the doors and open them for us in perfect synchronicity.

Beyond the heavy doors lies the heart of the Reverie. The chamber is circular and vast, the ceiling so high that it is lost to shadow. It is gilded, too, decorated with sculptures of dreamers contorted in agony, cast in gold and set with glittering stones. Thickly scented smoke coils and drifts around the statues from incense burners all around the edge of the room.

‘By His watchful eyes,’ Yumia says, as the heavy doors grind closed again behind us.

She is not looking at the gilding, or the sculptures. She is looking at the floor. It is made of armaglass, through which Thul’s choir of dreamers can be seen. Dozens of psykers, pale and wasted, their eyes bound with silk blindfolds. They lie in cushioned cradles with injector lines pushed under their skin, murmuring and stirring in their sleep.

‘A sight to behold, isn’t it?’

The voice comes from the centre of the room, from the lean, lightly muscled man sitting amongst a heap of furs and silken cushions and patterned bolsters, his hands laced in his lap. He is being watched over by four silent guardians. They stand either side of him in pairs, lightly armoured in gold and steel, their faces hidden behind silk veils just like those the serfs were wearing. Each of them holds a finely made curved sword, the point facing down to the glass. As we cross the chamber, Dagra Thul gets to his feet and smiles.

‘Madame Ravara,’ he says. ‘It has been quite some time.’

‘Long enough for your choir to grow, it seems,’ I reply, with deliberate delicacy. It is another facet of the illusion I present to Thul, along with the Crypsis. As far as the Master of Dreams knows, I am just another benumbed highblood with too much wealth and a dwindling number of vices.

Thul waves his hand as if dismissing a compliment. It makes his silken robes stir with a whisper. Thul is ageless in a way that speaks of heavy use of rejuve. His hair is thick and richly dark, and his eyes have none of the yellowing associated with those who live amongst the spires. Unlike Viskia, his teeth are white and even. When it comes to Dagra Thul, all of the rot is on the inside.

‘Just a handful of new acquisitions,’ he says, as if it hardly matters. As if the psykers are little more than gilded statues to be collected. ‘But I am not the only one, it seems.’ He smiles again and nods at Zoric. ‘Your marksman I know, though he was not so damaged before.’

Zoric doesn’t acknowledge the remark. His blunted face is still and set in a practised kind of calm, though I can see the hatred he feels for Thul in the tautness of his scars.

‘But this one,’ Thul says, gesturing languidly at Yumia now. ‘This one is not known to me.’

Yumia is incapable of calm, practised or not. She coils like a mountain-cat beside me.

‘This one is a bladeworker of Illithia,’ she says coldly, ‘and she belongs to no one.’

Thul laughs. ‘Illithia,’ he says. ‘Impressive. From what I hear there are no swifter fighters.’

‘No,’ she says, her voice low and dangerous and her hands tensing almost imperceptibly. ‘There are not.’

I glance at Yumia and her hands relax, though her scowl stays fixed in place. Thul merely laughs again.

‘You always do keep such valuable company, madame,’ he says to me with a tilt of his head. ‘But you are missing a companion, I see. Where is your dream-taker?’

Yumia more than coils beside me this time. She is as taut as tension-wire. Even Zoric shifts his posture a little.

‘She was killed,’ I say. It is an easy lie now, after so many months of saying it. ‘I have yet to replace her.’

The words sound callous, because callousness is what Dagra Thul understands. He sighs and nods his head.

‘An impossible task indeed, to replace such a prize.’

‘Indeed,’ I say, because although the word prize makes me want to spit, there is some truth to what he says. Replacing Sofika Vorros is impossible. ‘But I have not come here to speak of what is lost. I have come here to speak of dreams.’

‘Of course,’ Thul says, showing those white, even teeth again. ‘Please, sit.’

I join him amongst the furs and finery. Zoric and Yumia stay standing, two paces back. Thul’s guardians remain immobile, the veils concealing their faces stirring in the scented air. Thul pours a cup of dark wine from a silver carafe and offers it to me. I take it, and pretend to drink. The scent of the wine is heavy and deep and reminds me of blood.

‘I seek a very particular dream,’ I say.

Thul pours his own cup and takes a drink.

‘The slumber has been rich of late. Full of potency.’ Thul smiles, his teeth pinked by the wine. ‘It damaged some of my stock. I have replaced them, of course, with better dreamers. Stronger sleepers. I am sure that whatever it is you seek, we can provide it. For a cost, of course.’

I smile back at him. That too is an act.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘What I seek is a stormy sky. A great darkness.’ I take a breath. ‘And an eagle, ablaze.’

Dagra Thul puts his cup of wine down slowly. In that moment, I see his careful composure flicker. His confidence. He looks as old as he must be under all of that rejuve.

He looks afraid.

‘An eagle, ablaze,’ he says. ‘Is that what you said?’

I smile, demure. ‘That’s what I said.’

Thul’s throat works, and he glances down at his choir. ‘That is a particular dream indeed,’ he says. ‘Very particular.’

His mouth becomes a thin line. No more smiling.

‘I fear the cost of such a dream is too great for you, Madame Ravara.’

‘No cost is too great,’ I reply, and it feels like the first truth I have spoken since entering the Reverie. ‘Name your price.’

Thul considers it a moment, his dark eyes flooding with an ugly, obvious greed. For a moment I think he will succumb to it and yield, but he doesn’t.

‘No,’ Thul says, waving his hand at me, dismissively. ‘Some things are beyond simple wealth, even for a man such as myself. Take your companions, and take your leave, Madame Ravara.’

Ordinarily, perhaps I would. I have a myriad contacts, after all. A dozen ways or more to find the eagle, ablaze. But not this time. I made a vow to Sofika Vorros that I would do whatever it takes. That she would survive to see the dream fulfilled.

And I do not break vows.

‘I will not ask again,’ I say, firmer now. ‘Show me the eagle, ablaze.’

‘I have given you my answer,’ Thul replies sourly. ‘So now I am afraid I must bid you farewell.’

He clicks his fingers, and the veiled guardians on either side of him raise their swords and move, swift and silent. I don’t move. I just sigh.

‘Yumia,’ I say.

My bladeward darts past me, shrugging the ropes from around her wrists with deft movements of her arms. Each rope is three times as long as Yumia is tall, and made of strong, flexible Illithian killcord tipped with a pointed blade smaller than the flat of my hand. Yumia leaps, the twin ropes cutting the air around her as she spins and loops them with nothing but her own bodyweight. Yumia slits the throat of one of Thul’s guardians in the same moment that she plants her second dart in another’s chest. Neat little clouds of blood huff into the air, scattering over Thul.

Yumia lands on the deck, silent as a mountain-cat. The third guardian lunges for her, swinging and missing as Yumia ducks under the sword blade by arching her body backwards. Too close for the full length of the rope, she uses her dart like a dagger, punching it up under the guardian’s silk veil and into his lower jaw. The guardian goes over with Yumia on top of him.

The last of Thul’s guardians turns and lunges towards her, but Zoric is already moving. My marksman draws his pistol, loads it, settles his sights and fires in a series of brisk, practised actions as Yumia looses her second dart. The Valedictor’s high-calibre round lands first with a wet crack and a spray of blood and bone fragments. The last of Thul’s guardians turns on his heel, trailing smoke, before crashing unceremoniously to the floor.

Yumia stands up, looks at Zoric and tuts. ‘I had him,’ she says.

‘I know,’ he replies, and he smiles thinly.

Thul’s hand goes to his face. He puts his fingertips to the blood scattered there, and then looks at his hand in dumb shock.

‘You dare,’ he stammers. ‘You dare to spill blood in my Reverie?’

Thul puts his hand into his robes, draws a gilded pistol and fires it at me. I knew he would do it, and not just because of his obvious, telegraphed movements, but because of my abilities. The precognition gives me a moment’s warning. An instinct for imminent threat. In a swordfight it would save my life, but here it has an altogether different application.

Intimidation.

I don’t blink, or move. I just let Thul’s las-rounds burst harmlessly against the disruption field projected by my armour plate.

‘Oh, Throne,’ Thul says, and he scrambles away from me amongst the silks and bolsters, putting his hand to the brooch on his robes. I don’t move to chase him.

‘Viskia,’ he says, into the vox-relay concealed there. ‘Viskia. Answer me.’

‘She can’t hear you,’ I tell him. ‘Your transmitter is being blocked.’

Thul is sweating now. His dark eyes are wide and full of tears.

‘Sit down,’ I tell him.

Thul stops scrambling and does what I say, slowly. His eyes keep sliding to the dead bodies of his guardians. I can smell their blood over the incense burners. It has a sour note that comes from geneboosting and stimm-shunts.

‘They must have been very valuable,’ I say to Thul.

He nods dumbly. ‘They were.’

‘Not valuable enough,’ I say, then look at my own guardians. ‘Mind the doors, would you?’

‘Aye,’ they say in unison.

‘You are not highblood,’ Thul mumbles, still watching me and not them. ‘You are not a vice-seeker or a dream-eater.’

‘No.’

‘What are you, then?’

I watch him carefully when I speak again.

‘I am an inquisitor,’ I say. ‘Of the Ordo Hereticus.’

The noise Thul makes then is almost animal. A shapeless, frightened groan of dismay.

‘You know, then, what it is that the Inquisition does?’

He nods. Those tears slide free of his eyes and paint their way down his face.

‘Good,’ I say. ‘Now, I will ask you once more, Master Thul. Show me the eagle ablaze, or I will burn you and your Reverie to the ground.’

‘It will kill them all,’ he says softly. ‘My choir.’

I glance down through the armaglass floor at the dreamers, murmuring beneath the surface. My own words come back to me.

No cost is too great.

‘Show me.’

Dagra Thul performs the rites quickly with shaking hands, lighting the circle of ten candles and scattering sanctified water around us from a golden ewer before sitting down again amongst the silks. He takes the heavy pendant from around his neck and presses it to a matching hollow at the centre point of the dais. He is not crying any more, but his face is pale and creased with concern. He glances once more at his choir beneath the glass. Takes a deep breath.

‘We begin,’ Thul says, and he turns the pendant. There is a hiss and a rush like that of wasted lungs as psychotropic drugs are pumped down from the golden vessels around the room’s edge to the psykers below. The temperature drops like a stone as the dreamers begin to dream. As what they are seeing begins to wash upwards through the conductive crystal inlays in the dais.

‘The eagle,’ Thul says. ‘Show us the eagle, ablaze.’

The choir begins to sing, then. To scream. The Reverie washes away like blood in the rain to be replaced by the otherworld of the dreamscape. While my body sits cross-legged on the silks in Thul’s Reverie, my mind inhabits the dream. I find myself standing in a vast darkness where hundreds of thousands of tiny lights surround me, flickering like candles. I can barely register them because of what waits before me. A livid coil of hateful unlight that splits the darkness from edge to endless edge. A false horizon.

‘The Great Rift,’ I say, tasting iron.

‘Yes,’ says Dagra Thul, from beside me. Despite his unwillingness to show me the dream, he is smiling now, in the idiot way of an addict feeding their craving. Blood trickles slowly from his nose. Screams surround us, echoing into the distance.

The Rift pulses. It seems to grow larger. Or closer. Or both. I feel it as heat on my skin, and inside my mind. The pressure is immense.

‘Where is the eagle?’

Thul is still smiling that idiot smile. ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Just wait.’

The Rift pulses again, growing larger. My nose starts bleeding, too.

‘Thul,’ I say in warning.

He shudders beside me and I cannot tell if it is in pleasure or pain. ‘She approaches,’ he says.

And then I hear it, cutting through the screams. The cry is clear and pure, almost songlike. I look up as the eagle soars overhead, shedding feathers of fire. It flies straight towards the Rift, as unerring as one of Yumia’s darts.

‘No,’ I say, because the eagle will surely be consumed.

‘Watch,’ Thul says, his voice slurring.

The eagle strikes the Rift, and there is a flare of light. For a moment, I am blind, but when I blink my eyes clear I see. The eagle did not strike the Rift. It cut through it into the darkness beyond.

Follow the eagle, Ahri, echoes my father’s voice.

I do not hesitate. I run through the dreamscape with Thul at my heels, shouting at me to stop. To turn back. I don’t. I can’t. I have to know what waits beyond the Rift.

I have to know if I am right.

Thul grabs hold of my arm as I plunge into the Rift just as the eagle did. As we fall together through the livid scar, I catch glimpses of a dozen bloody moments in Thul’s past. I see him trading for dream-slaves. Killing to get what he wants. I see that cyber-mastiff of his worrying a rival to death while he watches, smiling. I see him discarding those dreamers too weak to remain in his choir, their minds addled by the drugs he feeds them.

But Thul’s bloody moments are not the only ones I see. Mine boil up through the darkness, too. The tortures I underwent while training at the schola progenium. Mind-tricks and interrogations and drug-induced numbness. My first purges with Sharvak. A dozen worlds, burning. I see assassinations and interrogations. Executions. I see Zoric and Yumia screaming as their minds are scrubbed of what they have witnessed in my service. The things that they have done.

Then comes Hellebore. I see the undercrofts. The Resonance. A hollow chamber built ages past by long-dead disciples of the Thorian dogma. Resurrectionists, like me. The chamber lies forgotten, buried deeply beneath Hellebore’s surface by war and by time. It is preserved perfectly, down to the aquila signs painted onto the stone in gold. I see the four of us enter the chamber together, expecting to find the Conduit, but instead finding a monster clad in cobalt and gold, wearing a serpent’s mask. I see him reshape the Resonance into a vastness of fractured glass. I see a gateway open wide overhead like an unblinking eye. A doorway to the abyss beyond. From it, devils descend in droves.

We were wrong, Sofika says, from beside me, her mountain-sky eyes filled with tears. This isn’t the place.

Then Sofika is torn away from me by the sorcerer. I go after her, just as I did then. I cut my way through the devils and the storm itself. But I can’t change it. The sorcerer turns his staff, and the storm strikes my dream-taker. Sofika screams, haloed by blood and lightning, and then she crashes to the ground, landing crumpled and still. Broken, like the multicoloured glass. I cut down the last of the devils and stagger to where she lies, falling to my knees beside her only for everything to stop. The storm, the screaming. The wind. Everything is frozen, save for me and the sorcerer. I look up, just as I did then to see him standing over me, clad in cobalt and gold. His serpent’s mask tilts downwards and he speaks in a voice like shifting sand. A voice that has haunted me since that day.

Not yet, he says, and he sounds as though he’s smiling.

But then the storm goes and the sorcerer with it and I am no longer falling through my own memories and mistakes. I am standing with Dagra Thul in a vast and vaulted hall, surrounded by thousands of crooked candles. Tiny lights. Statues line the walls on either side of me, all draped in heavy crimson cloth that stirs in the cold, stale air. Gilded bones set into the walls and floor catch the candlelight. No skulls, or longbones. Just countless skeletal hands, all making the sign of the aquila, like those painted in the Resonance on Hellebore. One statue stands alone in the middle of the chamber. It is hung with a crimson shroud, just like the others. A figure stands before it, perfectly still.

‘This cannot be,’ Thul murmurs. The Master of Dreams lets go of me and falls to his knees, his face a mess of blood and tears and drool. ‘You changed the dream. This is impossible.’

‘Clearly not.’

‘Where have you taken me?’ Thul asks.

A soft whickering echoes down from above. I look up to see birds sitting in the rafters, turning their wings.

‘To the end,’ I say. ‘And the beginning.’

A cry splits the air, then. Pure, and songlike. The eagle ablaze streaks overhead, shedding her feathers of fire. She snaps her wings and settles like blown embers on the shrouded statue in the centre of the hall. I draw my main-hand sword and follow her, picking my way through the field of devotional candles towards the statue. I am dimly aware of Thul getting to his feet and stumbling after me. Asking me to stop. Pleading. But I ignore him, all of my attention focused on the shrouded statue and the person standing before it. A man, clad in regal blue and leaning on a bronzed walking cane.

‘Father,’ I say.

He turns from the statue and looks at me.

‘Hello, Ahri,’ he says.

I keep my blade up, in guard. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

My father smiles, and his golden eyes soften, like metal under heat. Like a sunrise.

‘I am wherever you go, Ahri,’ he says. ‘We only leave one another behind by choice.’

I remember him saying those words to me before, one night in the spire tower, just after my mother died. I lower my blade, slowly.

‘What is this place?’ I ask him.

‘It is a Resonance, just like the one you uncovered on Hellebore. A place where the walls between worlds are thin. Where deeds and words have power. This is where it is meant to happen.’

‘The Rebirth.’

My father nods. He turns back to face the statue, and I approach to stand beside him. The shroud is burning now, thanks to the eagle’s touch. I feel the heat of it on my face.

‘How can you be so sure that this is the place?’ I ask. ‘I believed the same of Hellebore, but I was wrong.’

My father shakes his head. ‘You were not wrong, Ahri,’ he says. ‘The timing was. You cannot make the sun rise before it is ready to, no matter how fearsome you may be.’

I remember him saying those words to me before, too. More times than I care to count. I think of Sofika caught in the cradle of her machine and I wish desperately that I had listened.

‘But the time is upon us, now,’ he says. ‘You simply need to find the place.’

‘How?’ I ask.

‘Follow the eagle, Ahri,’ my father says. ‘She will lead you to it.’

The crimson cloth curls and tears and falls away then to reveal the statue beneath, only it isn’t a statue at all. It is a woman. A warrior. One clad in the armour of the Adepta Sororitas. She is utterly still. Around her closed eyes the Battle Sister is scarred. Marked. And just like the gilded bones that surround me, the marks on the woman’s face make the sign of the aquila.

‘The eagle, ablaze,’ I say.

My father nods. ‘Burned but not broken.’

A chill wind stirs the stale air, snuffing out the candles in crowds. The darkness grows deeper. Closer. I glimpse eyes within it. Eyes and claws and teeth.

‘The darkness seeks to smother her,’ my father says. ‘You must not let it.’

More candles blow out and I raise my sword, just a little. ‘I won’t,’ I say.

‘Good. Without the eagle, the Rebirth will fail. The Conduit will only reveal itself when blood is willingly given. You need a martyr, Ahri.’

At his words, the Battle Sister catches fire. It engulfs her quickly but she does not move, or scream. She does not open her eyes, though that is where the fire burns brightest. Hottest. I feel the heat of that too, not just on my face, but on my soul. The shadows around us recoil with a hiss. They start to tear, just like the cloth did.

‘The eagle, ablaze,’ I say. ‘She is the blood willingly given. The martyr we need.’

My father nods. ‘She will herald the Rebirth,’ he says, and then he looks at me. ‘And when it unfolds, our mistakes will be unmade. What has been broken will be whole again.’

I blink, dizzied by the heat and the light and his words. ‘You are talking about Sofika.’

He nods. Smiles again. ‘You can restore her, Ahri. You just need to find the eagle.’

The fire blooms outwards then, and my vision turns to gold. I am returned to the Reverie, and to the real. To the smell of candles burning and the feeling of silk beneath my hands. I retch a thick clot of dark blood and bile onto the floor and try to catch my breath. Through the frost-covered glass I see Thul’s choir, still and silent. Dead.

‘Inquisitor.’

I look up to see Zoric offering me his hand. I get to my feet without taking it.

‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We can go.’

‘Good,’ Zoric says, and I can tell he means it.

‘What of this one, lord?’ Yumia asks.

She is standing over Thul, watching him with vague fascination the way one might watch an animal shake itself to death in a steel trap. The Master of Dreams looks almost pitiable, slumped there on his knees, his face a mask of blood and drool, his dark eyes wide and staring.

‘Leave him to me,’ I say. ‘I will grant him mercy.’

Yumia nods and moves aside as I unhook the peace-bond and draw my main-hand sabre from the scabbard at my belt. I take hold of Thul by his collar, but before I can make the killing cut, he fixes me with his staring eyes and speaks.

‘I saw you,’ he says softly. ‘In the space between spaces. All of those terrible things you have done in the name of dreams. I saw the blood you have shed. The lines you have crossed.’ He takes a waterlogged breath. ‘I saw what you did to Sofika Vorros.’

I thrust my sword into his chest, then pull it free again. Blood soaks my hands and my sleeves as I lower Thul to the floor amid his finery. I am aware of Zoric and Yumia staring at me, but I ignore them, dropping to one knee beside Thul as he shakes and snorts more blood onto the silks.

‘Monster,’ he slurs accusingly. ‘You are a monster.’

‘Perhaps,’ I mutter, as the light goes out of his eyes. ‘But a necessary one.’

We leave none alive in Thul’s Reverie. This too is necessary. Yumia killing the power to the constantly pouring fountain in the lobby is less so, but I do not stop her doing it.

That, at least, feels right.

Once it is done, we leave the Reverie and the snow-capped heights of Tashkent Hive behind. As the Crypsis lifts off from her stanchions and points into the freezing, smog-choked wind towards the Fortress Meridia I expect one of them to say something about Thul’s last words, but they don’t. They speak only when spoken to, Yumia busying herself with cleaning the blood from her killblades, and salting her wounds with grains from a pouch she wears at her waist. It’s an old Illithian practice that’s meant as much to remind the fighter of their mistakes as anything else. Yumia barely flinches as she does it, though it must hurt. Zoric sits beside her, lost in his own routine, methodically etching another in a series of tiny twin-headed eagles into the stock of his battered rifle. He started doing it after he came into my service. At first, I’d taken them for kill-marks, but I know better now. There is one nick out of the paint on Zoric’s rifle for every day he has spent in my service.

Or at least every day that he is aware of.

They both keep their quiet even upon landing, saying nothing as we leave the Crypsis and cross the platform back into the fortress under a deluge of dirty rain and runoff from above.

‘I need you both to report to Efrayl for debriefing,’ I tell them, once we are inside. ‘I must speak with my contacts at the Convent Prioris about what I saw.’

They both nod, but neither of them move. Instead they just stand there dripping rainwater onto Meridia’s obsidian floor. The silenced fortress makes the drumming of the droplets into little more than whispers.

‘Unless there is anything else?’ I ask, knowing full well that there is.

As I expect, it is Yumia who speaks. She is the more wilful of the two. The less fractured from being rebuilt in the name of service.

‘The Master’s last words,’ she says.

‘What of them?’

‘Mia,’ Zoric says, calling her by the short of her name. ‘Leave it.’

She shoots him a glance. ‘Danil,’ she says. ‘Do not pretend that you do not care what happened to Madame Sofika.’

‘We know what happened,’ he says. ‘I was there. So were you. You saw the storm that took her.’

Zoric sounds tired, as if this is a conversation they have had before. It’s a possibility. They spend a lot of time together, my bladeward and my marksman. Time they try to hide from me, without success. No matter the mess that mind-wiping makes of their memories or their personalities, they are always drawn back to one another. If I didn’t already know the truth of predestination, watching them re-establish the same strange combative affection for one another over and over again would be enough to convince me.

‘I remember some of it,’ Yumia says, and her eyes go back to me. She is even more tense than usual. As tightly wound as the killcords around her wrists. Her hand goes to her temple.

‘I remember the sight,’ she says. ‘The sound. But I do not remember the feeling of it. Was it cold? Was there wind? Rain? Was there earth between my toes, or stone beneath them?’

The answers swell in my head, though I say none of them.

No, it wasn’t cold, I think. It was warm as blood. Wind, yes. Rain, no. It was neither earth nor stone, but glass. Multi-coloured, fractured glass.

Yumia lets her hand fall away. ‘I remember seeing Sofika swallowed by the storm. By darkness.’

‘What you remember is true,’ I say, and it is, in abstract at least. It was the detail of it that I had Efrayl take from them. The sorcerer that I could not allow my retinue to remember any more than I could the gateway and the unliving storm of daemons he had summoned. I resist the urge to shake my head. I had been so wrong about Hellebore.

So wrong.

‘If what I remember is true, my lord, then what did Thul’s words mean?’ Yumia asks.

I blink, and push Hellebore back under the surface of my mind. I try not to think of what came after. Of Sofika’s agonised whisper as she spoke my name through the blood in her mouth.

‘Thul merely saw what happened to Sofika when he joined me in the dream,’ I tell them, because all of the best lies are sewn together from truths. ‘What he said were the spiteful words of a dying man, and that’s all.’

Yumia watches me for what feels like a long moment. I can see from her face that she doesn’t believe me. For a moment I think that she might even challenge me. I almost want her to. There’s certainly a part of me that deserves it. But then Zoric speaks.

‘Yumia,’ he says, patiently. Carefully. ‘You knew how this life would be when you swore the oath.’

She takes a moment to answer, and when she speaks it sounds a little sorrowful.

‘I did,’ she says, and then the sorrow disappears and her face sets again like a mask. ‘I meant it only as a question, of course.’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Will there be anything else?’

She shakes her head. ‘No, inquisitor. No more questions.’

I nod, and she walks away with Zoric, leaving me alone in Meridia’s silent halls with rainwater dripping from my armour in whispers.

Evangeline

I have sailed the sea of storms many times since my ascension to the Sisterhood, but never like this.

After just one day, every soul on the ship seems subdued, as if in mourning, despite the protection of the ship’s Geller field. I have seen warp-sickness before, but this is more than that. After two days, thirty per cent of the food stores have spoiled. After three, the weeping starts. It comes from the Navy crew, and the Order vassals. From the cherubim in the rafters. The augmented familiars refuse to fly. Instead, they take refuge amongst the ironwork beams in little flocks, pulling out clumps of their own feathers with their pale, necrotised hands. Sisters Hospitaller walk the decks offering guidance and comfort, but the quiet never lasts long, as though the ship itself is wracked with sorrow.

I endure the journey by meeting with my remaining Sisters. First I take repast with Joti in the refectory halls after morning prayer. We sit together at a long table eating gruel from shallow dishes, accompanied by dry, heavy pieces of grey meal-loaf. The food reminds me of my time in the convents. Of early rises and howling gales, and hours spent at prayer, or at lesson. Joti talks and talks, but she hardly mentions herself at all. Instead she fills every empty second of air with kind words devoted to the others. About their strength, or their ferocity. Their skill-at-arms. Their devotion. She says it all with a smile, and with light in her eyes. When I ask her of herself, she merely shakes her head.

‘There’s nothing much to tell, Sister Superior.’ She picks up her piece of meal-loaf, and smiles. ‘I am just glad to serve.’

Haskia awaits me in the armoury quarter.

The chamber in which we meet is one of several where the armourers perform the decoration and sanctification of the commandery’s armour and weapons. The chamber is cool and quiet in a way that reminds me of a chapel. Not a single one of the dozen armourers looks up from their task as I enter and cross the room to where Haskia awaits me at one of the wooden workbenches. She is bending pieces of lightweight, silvered metal with her hands to create tiny loops of interlinking chain like those that are already secured around different parts of her armour. Haskia keeps working even as I take a seat beside her, and when she speaks, it is in a low voice, so as not to disturb the armourers in their work.

‘I started making them after Veridia was injured,’ she says. ‘After she lost so much of herself in an instant.’

‘Then they are meant as memory,’ I say. ‘The chains.’

‘As memorial,’ she says. ‘I make one after every warzone to commemorate those we lost.’

She pauses in her work and gestures to the chain around her right vambrace.

‘These are for Armageddon,’ she says. ‘Each link represents a Sister lost at Tempestora, or Helsreach. Or out in the wastes.’

‘And this chain?’ I ask, though I am certain I know the answer.

She holds up what she has made so far, the dozens of tiny links flashing under the flexi-lumen mounted on the workbench. ‘This one is for Ophelia VII,’ she says.

We fall quiet then, and stay that way. I remain with Haskia until her work is done, and then I hold the start of the chain in place for her while she wraps the length of it around her left vambrace over and over again. I try to keep count of the tiny links as she does so, but there are so many of them that I lose my place after three hundred and six.

The place Eugenia chooses for our meeting is her quarters. As I make my way there with the Vow’s bones groaning around me and the weeping following at my back, I realise that I am uneasy, and that it is not just because of the pressure of the warp, or because of my destiny.

It is because of Eugenia.

When I reach Eugenia’s quarters, she welcomes me inside without hesitation. Like mine, Eugenia’s quarters are spare and mostly dominated by a rack for her weapons and armour, the armoury circle, and the low cot that sits in the corner. Against the opposite wall there is a simple devotional table made of heavy-grained wood with a tall candle sitting on it that fills the air with thin, spiced smoke. Around it stand a handful of small trinkets made from candlewax. Fleur-de-lys and red roses and a small, perfect eagle, its wings spread wide.

I am so distracted that it takes me a moment to realise that Eugenia is speaking to me.

‘Sister Superior?’ she asks. ‘Is everything all right?’

I drag my eyes from the table, and look at her. Eugenia is kneeling on the floor of her quarters, a frown creasing her brow. Her eyes are wide. I see concern in them, so I smile.

‘Of course,’ I say, and I go to kneel with her.

‘I confess,’ she says, ‘I am not quite sure what you would like me to say.’

‘Just be honest,’ I say. ‘Tell me something of yourself. Something true.’

Eugenia does not frown, but I can tell she wants to. She still has the careful composure given to her by the schola progenium. That eagerness to give only perfect answers that tempers with time and experience. She hesitates.

‘It is not a test,’ I tell her, because I know that is what she thinks this is. ‘I am not here to judge you.’

Eugenia nods slowly. ‘Then I would like to speak of the time before the scholam. Before the convents. The first time I felt the God-Emperor’s divine guidance.’

I cannot help but feel a certain weight in her words, given that the God-Emperor’s guidance is exactly what I am searching for.

‘I would be honoured to hear it,’ I tell her.

Eugenia smiles slightly. ‘I was born on a dying world,’ she says. ‘It was called Illuminance because of the precious metals once buried there. Gold and silver and platinum. By the time I was born, though, the metals were all but gone, leaving behind empty hollows. The great caverns and tunnels and open pits where we made our homes.’

‘The spaces left that showed you what once existed,’ I say softly.

‘Yes, Sister Superior. Just so.’ Eugenia nods. ‘Few people remained on Illuminance. Our livings were made trading what little the world could offer. Most died young, from sickness or starvation, or from collapse in the caves.’

‘It sounds a hard life,’ I say. ‘One blessed by suffering.’

She nods. ‘Was it so where you were raised?’

‘I was raised on Ophelia VII,’ I say. ‘It was my home even before the convents. My childhood was spent amongst the spires, and the saints.’

Eugenia tilts her head. ‘But there was suffering,’ she says.

I think of the cold tiers of the spires and that terrible, harsh winter in my tenth year. I think of my mother’s swollen, permanently ink-stained fingers and my father’s yellowed eyes.

Of the sound of them both coughing, late at night.

‘There was,’ I say. ‘But I would hear your history before I speak my own.’

Eugenia nods before continuing.

‘Not everyone on Illuminance saw our suffering as a blessing,’ she says. ‘My mother and father resented it. They had lost everything because of our world’s decline. Their wealth, their privilege. Power. They used to say there was no light left to be found on Illuminance.’ She shakes her head. ‘But there were those amongst us who held faith. In the past, the labourers had been permitted to keep just a little of Illuminance’s gold, and they had made that gold into an icon of the God-Emperor. That is where the elders would take prayer. I would go with them, though my mother and father would not, because I could not see how things would ever get better unless we strove for it. Unless we prayed.’

Eugenia’s eyes go distant as she remembers.

‘The statue was five times my height and stood in the oldest of the caverns, where the ceiling was high enough to seem like a sky, and the cave-water would feel like rain on our skin.’

‘It sounds beautiful,’ I say.

She nods, again. ‘It was. I felt whole there. Hopeful. So I would go and I would pray every night after my labours were complete, but though I felt happy I never once heard the God-Emperor’s voice. When I told the elders so, they smiled and said that it was not a voice I was looking for, but a sign. I was just a child then, and I did not understand. When I told them so, they smiled again and told me that I would, in time.’

This time her words have more than just weight. They settle on me like the cloak at my back.

‘It takes patience,’ I say softly.

She nods. ‘It does, but my mother and father did not think so. They thought it a waste of time. Something that filled my head with hope beyond our means. They forbade me from attending worship. The first few times, I slipped out anyway. After that they shut me in the store-nook every night and bolted the door.’ She shakes her head. ‘I prayed anyway, and kept waiting for my sign.’

Her face has softened now, something close to sadness.

‘One night, weeks later, I was sleeping in the store-nook when I felt a drop of cold water hit me,’ she says, and puts her hand to her cheek, where she bears the tattoo of the fleur-de-lys. ‘Here.’

She lets her hand fall away.

‘Another followed, and another. I got up and tried to move but the water fell wherever I looked to lie down. In my frustration, I tried the door and found that it was open. Thinking that my parents had forgotten to bolt it, I went out into our home and found that all was quiet, the candles extinguished. It was late. Too late for worship, but I found myself wanting to go anyway. So I lit a candle, and took the tunnels down to the oldest cavern. I knelt. I prayed. The cave-water fell across me like rain. I felt whole and hopeful, and then I went home.’

Eugenia pauses again, for longer this time. I can see the path that the story will take, but I ask anyway.

‘What did you find?’

‘I knew before I reached my home that there had been a collapse,’ she says. ‘I could tell because of the dust. It was everywhere in clouds, thick and choking. There were people everywhere, too. Other children. Some of the elders were there, called by the noise and the quaking that I had been too far away to feel.’

She has gone back to looking at her hands.

‘My home was gone,’ she says. ‘Buried beneath tons and tons of stone, and my mother and father with it. The elders were all weeping, thinking me lost as well until they noticed that I was standing in the dust alongside them. When they asked where I had been, I told them about the water waking me, and the unbolted door. I asked them whether this was what they meant by a sign.’

‘And what did they say?’ I ask.

‘That it was more than that. That I had been spared by the God-Emperor for a purpose, because nothing He does is without reason.’

‘And do you think you have found it?’ I ask. ‘Your purpose?’

Eugenia looks up from her hands. ‘I think I find it anew every day,’ she says. ‘And that when I have fulfilled it, I will be granted the glory of a martyr’s death.’

For a moment, I cannot speak. I came here to find the truth of Eugenia, but it feels as though all that I have done is find the truth of myself.

‘I was spared, too,’ I say softly. ‘Not just on the Last of Days, but before then.’

‘That is the suffering you spoke of,’ Eugenia says.

I nod. ‘I was born in the cardinal city’s Administratum quarter,’ I tell her. ‘My mother and father were sixth generation quintus-graded scribes. They recorded the histories of the Sororitas orders.’

‘Then they were people of faith,’ Eugenia says.

I smile. ‘Everyone on Ophelia VII is a person of faith,’ I tell her. ‘But yes. Our habitation chamber was small, but spare. We had little, but wanted for nothing.’ My smile fades. ‘Until my tenth year, when a blight swept the spire. Something that caught in the lungs. Over half the spire succumbed to it within a week. The hospitallers and the medicae could not cure it, nor could they slow it, so the spire was quarantined to allow the sickness to burn itself out.’

I shake my head. ‘All three of us contracted the sickness, but it affected my mother and father much more keenly than it did me. Their work quotas dropped and dropped until they could not work at all, and I took to caring for them. Even then, as ill as she was, my mother would still sing to me. She would still allow me my favourite story.’

‘Which story was that?’ Eugenia asks.

‘The Martyrdom of Saint Katherine,’ I say, remembering the way my mother would tell it. No grand words. Just a simple, reverent retelling of the saint’s glorious death and of what it meant to her followers. ‘When the story was done, my mother would blow out all of the candles save for one in memory of Katherine’s fiery heart. I would watch the light until I fell asleep. When I woke, I always expected it to have burnt out overnight, but the candle would always keep its fire.’

‘Just like the saint’s heart.’

I nod. ‘On the fourteenth day of quarantine, I woke to find that my fever had broken. That I could breathe easily again. I went to tell my mother and father only to find that they had passed in their sleep. It took another five days for the quarantine to lift, and for the mistresses of the spire’s orphanage to come and find me.’

‘You stayed with your mother and father all that time,’ Eugenia says softly.

‘Yes, and I lit the candle every night, just as my mother had. When the mistresses took me to the orphanage to train in my family’s trade I tried to do the same, but they forbade it. So I spent my days in service and my nights in darkness, but after just a few weeks I started to dream, for the first time in my life.’

‘What did you dream of?’ Eugenia asks.

‘Of standing alone in a vast darkness, carrying a single candle. Of a path to follow, that ended at iron gates made in the saint’s image.’

Eugenia’s dark eyes are wide, and rapt. ‘Like those at the Convent Sanctorum,’ she says.

I nod.

‘So, what did you do?’ she asks.

‘I left the orphanage behind. I left everything behind, save for the clothes on my back and a single candle. Winter still held its grip on the cardinal city, and the streets were slick with ice. The kind of cold that burns. I walked and I walked, and I kept the candle lit despite the wind and the cold until I reached the gates of the Convent Sanctorum as the sun was rising over the spires.’

‘That must have been an incredible sight,’ Eugenia says.

I think back to how the convent had looked, lit by the fires of the sunrise, all marble and iron and water-stained stone. To how it had sounded. The marching of the Sisters’ boots, and the prayer bells so loud that they hurt my ears. I think back to the tears I had been unable to prevent, freezing on my cheeks.

‘It was,’ I say. ‘I passed through the gates and approached the convent proper only to be stopped by two Battle Sisters clad in black and red. One young and the other old and scarred. The older one introduced herself as Mortina. She tried to send me away, telling me that the Orders Militant could not afford to concern itself with strays.’

‘So what did you do?’ Eugenia asks.

‘I told her no,’ I say. ‘I told her that I had come to offer myself up to serve, and I showed her the candle that I had managed to keep lit all the way from the orphanage.’

‘And what did the Battle Sister do?’

‘She stooped to my height, and told me that I was surely brave and devoted to have come so far with so little, but that it could not change her answer. She told me to go back to my family.’ I shake my head. ‘I told her that I could not. That they were dead.’

‘And did it change her mind?’

‘No. They walked away and left me there.’

‘But you did not go back,’ Eugenia says.

‘No. I took myself over to an alcove in the wall, and I sat down with my candle and I waited. When night came I curled myself around it so it would not go out, and slept until the morning. The prayer bells woke me and the same two Battle Sisters passed me by and saw that I was still there. Mortina told me to leave, and I told her no. This continued for three days, until the candle was burned almost to nothing and I was so weak that all I wanted to do was leave as Mortina kept telling me to.’

‘But you didn’t,’ Eugenia says.

I shake my head. ‘No, because of my dream. Because my mother had told me many stories over the years, but never once had she told me one in which Saint Katherine chose to turn away from a trial, or take the easy path. So I stayed, and one last time I curled around the candle until dawn. This time, when the bells woke me I was so weak that I could scarcely move. The candle had burned itself to the barest stub of wax. There was almost nothing left of it. Just a tiny, weak flame.’

‘And the Battle Sisters?’ Eugenia asks.

‘They came to see me, but this time it was not Mortina who spoke, but the younger Sister.’

‘And what did she say?’

I remember looking at her through half-lidded eyes, this warrior clad in black and silver and arterial red, with her piercing, emerald-green eyes.

‘She asked me to stand.’ I pause, remembering the cold stone under my hands and feet. The whistling of the wind and the ringing of the bells. Those green, patient eyes watching me. ‘At first my arms tried to give, and then my legs. My stomach cramped and my heart thundered and my vision blurred and turned black at the edges, but I got on my feet, just as she asked me to.’

‘Then what happened?’ Eugenia asks.

‘The Battle Sister smiled,’ I tell her, and I smile too, despite everything. ‘She told me that was the first lesson. That we must always try to stand, until we cannot. She told me that she would take me as her ward until I was strong enough to be made her Sister.’

Eugenia is smiling too, captivated by my story. ‘What was her name?’ she asks. ‘This Battle Sister who taught you the first lesson?’

I think of her then as I saw her last. In the dream I had whilst healing, cast in golden light.

‘Adelynn,’ I say. ‘And she taught me more than just the first lesson. She taught me everything. She made me her Sister just as she promised and I found that I no longer had the need for dreams.’

‘You found your purpose,’ Eugenia says.

I nod. ‘I fought beside Adelynn in a dozen wars, on a dozen worlds. We prayed together. Trained together. Sometimes, she would speak to me of her stories when I could not sleep.’ I pause, my heartbeat seeming loud all of a sudden. Loud and slow, like remembrance bells. ‘And then I watched her die on Ophelia VII.’

Eugenia makes the sign of the aquila with her unscarred hands.

‘May He keep her always,’ she says.

‘Heart and soul,’ I reply.

Eugenia gets to her feet, then, and goes over to the small devotional table against the far wall. She picks up the little eagle made from red wax. As she returns to kneel opposite me I see that it is clutching a wreath of flowers in its talons. She turns it in her hands.

‘This was meant for my Sister Superior.’ She checks herself. ‘For Sister Juliana. I did not get the chance to give it to her, though.’ She shakes her head. ‘I thought to leave it at the Convent Sanctorum, in the Hall of Remembrance, but I never had chance to do that, either. When we arrived at Ophelia VII, it was already burning.’

Her words pierce the fog of my thoughts like a lance.

‘When we reach Terra, the dead will be laid to rest at the Convent Prioris. Perhaps you could leave it there.’

‘Perhaps,’ Eugenia says absently, still turning the eagle. ‘Though…’

‘Though what?’ I ask.

She looks at me. Her dark eyes are unsettling. They are so earnest.

‘I intended this for my Sister Superior,’ she says. ‘But that is not Juliana now. It is you. You are the one who will lead us to the Shield. You are the one who bears the God-Emperor’s mark.’

Eugenia holds out the little eagle with his wreath of flowers. ‘Please, take it,’ she says.

For a moment, all I can do is stare at it. The last thing I want to do is accept it, this gift that was made for someone she loved and respected and then mourned for. But then I think about why I am doing this. To understand who my new Sisters are, and what they need from me.

I hold out my hand and let Eugenia press the eagle trinket into it.

‘I am glad to serve you,’ she says, with that earnest look in her eyes.

‘Thank you,’ I say, closing my hand carefully around the eagle so as not to break it.

‘Will there be anything else?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘This is enough.’

By the time I return to my quarters, I am exhausted and my scars are burning as if they have been made anew. It is so painful that I have little choice but to kneel, so I choose to do so with purpose. I light the cluster of candles on my devotional table and kneel before it, hoping that might ease the ache. I breathe deeply and slowly, catching the scent of smoke and of running wax, but the pain does not fade. It is persistent, just like the hollowness at the heart of me. The shameful sensation of grief and loneliness that I expected to fade after meeting with my squad, which has somehow only grown larger. I had hoped to feel closer to them. To feel like a leader. But I feel neither of those things. I feel nothing but pain, and that deceitful emptiness.

So I do what I always do when I am lost. I take a deep breath, knit my hands in my lap and bow my head to pray. My eyes flicker closed. The sound of the ship recedes. Everything recedes.

And then I feel the cold wind against my scars.

I open my eyes to find myself alone in a vast and edgeless darkness. In my hands I hold a single slender candle topped with a yellow, wending flame that flickers as the cold air pulls at it. The cold air pulls at me, too, despite my armour and my vestments. I take a deep breath, smelling candle smoke and cold stone. Dying flowers. I look around, but the candle flame only offers enough light to see the stone of the floor by. It is grey and old and set in place with mortar that has blackened with age. Inlaid into each stone is the God-Emperor’s aquila, wings spread as if it is about to fly. That is when I recognise this for what it is. A dream. The dream. The one I used to have as a child, before the convents and before Adelynn.

The dream that showed me my purpose.

I start walking through the darkness, following the path laid out by the aquila-stones and shielding the candle from the cold air with my hand, just as I would all of those years ago. I know that I only have to walk as far as the iron gates. That it takes ninety-nine stones to reach them. So I keep walking, and I keep the candle lit and I count my steps until I find myself looking at the iron gates. They bear the same design they always have. The iron likeness of Saint Katherine, with her burning heart in her hands.

I reach out and push against the gate as I would when I dreamed the dream before. I expect to wake, as I always did back then, but I don’t. Instead, the gate swings open and I step into the chamber beyond it. This space is vast too. Dark, just as the path to reach it was. But the darkness here recoils as I pass through it, rolling away like battlefield smoke to reveal a pedestal in the centre of the room. One that is draped with a crimson cloth, a glimmering object resting amongst the folds of the fabric.

The Shield of Saint Katherine.

My scars burn as I approach the pedestal and the shield. The surface of it is gilded. Reflective. It throws my image back at me. My uncertainty.

‘Are you ready?’

I did not see her appear. All at once Adelynn is just there, standing before me on the opposite side of the pedestal. She looks just as she did on the Last of Days, her armour scorched and battered and her scarred face blackened with blood.

‘Adelynn,’ I say, and I reach out to clasp wrists with her. But she flickers like a hololith and I realise that I am still alone. My heart thumps slowly with sorrow.

‘Are you ready?’ she asks me, again.

That sorrow wells up from my heart and spills out of me. ‘Please,’ I tell her. ‘Stop asking me that.’

Adelynn does not acknowledge my words. She does not blink or breathe. Her eyes are so flat they might as well be painted. ‘Are you ready?’ she asks.

With my scars burning and my heart aching and her eyes unblinking, I cannot help but answer her. ‘I do not know how to be!’ I shout the words, hoarse. ‘You left me the sword. Left me your legacy.’ I take a ragged breath. ‘Please, Sister, just tell me what it is I must do. Tell me how to find the Shield!’

Adelynn flickers then, like quickly turning pages. Her emerald eyes soften, and she looks at me in the way she did when she trained me. Raised me. Made me what I am.

‘Trust in yourself, Evangeline,’ she says. ‘You already have the answer.’

Around us, the chamber begins to glow as if the sun is coming up.

I shake my head. ‘What answer?’ I ask her. ‘Sister, I do not understand.’

Adelynn does not reply. She merely turns away from me and begins to walk away.

‘Sister!’ I shout. ‘Please!’

She stops. Turns. Looks back at me once more with her emerald eyes. ‘You already have the answer,’ she says.

And then the chamber fills with blinding, golden light that engulfs Adelynn completely. Consumes her. I shout her name and throw myself into the inferno. It is so bright that I cannot see. So hot that it steals the air from my lungs. My skin is on fire, and my armour is sloughing away like candlewax, but still it does not hurt.

None of it hurts.

‘Adelynn,’ I say, as the fire steals my words from me and turns the tears on my cheeks to salt crystals. ‘You left me the sword. Left me your legacy.’

I crash to my knees.

‘You left me,’ I murmur.

I wake with a start to realise that I am still kneeling in my chambers aboard the Unbroken Vow. That there is no chamber. No fire. No Adelynn. I am completely alone. I look up at the devotional table to see that all of the candles have blown out. All but one.

‘What is the answer?’ I ask. ‘Please.’

There is no response, save for the flicker of the candle flame as it catches in the air.

I am kneeling in the Unbroken Vow’s main cathedral and turning the little wax eagle in my hands when Ashava comes to join me. It takes her a moment to kneel, and she breathes out slowly with the pain of it, despite the support of her power armour. Once again, neither of us acknowledge it.

‘This seems a grand place to meet,’ she says.

I tried to have Ashava suggest a place as the others did, but she refused me, saying that we knew each other well enough already. She bade me choose, and said that she would follow.

‘It is grand,’ I tell her. ‘But it reminds me of the convents.’

‘Of home,’ she says.

I nod, and for a moment we both remain silent, listening to the agony of the Vow as it fights the tides. Everything around us trembles with it in a terrible, asynchronous rhythm. The constant sound of weeping follows us even here, echoing up through the ship’s ventilation systems and spiralling up to the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling.

‘I have never known tides like these,’ Ashava says.

‘Another blame we can lay upon the Great Rift,’ I reply.

‘Surely,’ she says, and then she looks at me. ‘You look troubled, Eva, and I think it is by more than just the tides.’

I glance sidelong at her. ‘I thought this meeting was meant to expose your thoughts, not mine.’

She smiles thinly. ‘Very well,’ she says. ‘I will tell you what I think. I think I understand better why Adelynn chose you.’

I look at her properly, now. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We all of us were fierce. Strong fighters, full of faith. But you have no pretensions, Eva. You stood before us in that chapel and began by admitting your mistakes. That shows humility. It is honest. You have always been that way. That is why Adelynn chose you.’

Honest. Perhaps the word might have fitted me before, but not now. Now I am anything but honest. I am as much made of secrets as I am scars. I very nearly tell Ashava so when she speaks again.

‘You need to have faith in yourself. Adelynn did. I do.’

‘Not Qi-Oh,’ I say, before I can think better of it. ‘I think she finds me a disappointment.’

Ashava shrugs. ‘Save for the God-Emperor Himself, Qi-Oh finds everything a disappointment,’ she says. ‘She is prideful, and closed-minded.’

‘If her mind is so closed, how do I change it?’

‘Challenge her. Fight her. Or be so kind to her that she has no choice but to listen,’ Ashava says. ‘Just do not accommodate her, Eva. Do not allow disrespect. Adelynn never would have.’

I shake my head. ‘No,’ I reply. ‘She wouldn’t.’

Ashava glances down at my hands, where I am still turning the wax figure.

‘Where did the little eagle come from?’ she asks.

‘Eugenia,’ I say.

‘Ah. Of course.’

‘I thought it would be the others who I struggled with,’ I say. ‘Qi-Oh, certainly. Perhaps Haskia who has lost so much, or Veridia who has forgotten herself. But it is Eugenia that I cannot take. She is so young. So earnest. Hungry to prove herself.’

‘Hmm,’ Ashava says. ‘That sounds like somebody else I know.’

I shoot a look at her. ‘That is poor humour.’

‘It was not intended to be a joke,’ Ashava says. ‘Merely an observation that perhaps you struggle with Eugenia because she is so much like you. Because you are to her what Adelynn was to you.’

I shake my head. ‘Adelynn was a hero.’

‘And you are not?’ Ashava asks. ‘You survived Ophelia VII.’

‘So did you,’ I reply. ‘So did plenty of others.’

‘Not like you did,’ Ashava says simply. ‘You are a symbol, Eva.’

I feel my face flush, and it makes the edges of the mark on my face prickle as though they are alight. ‘How is it that we are talking about me again?’

‘Because that is what I need from you, Eva,’ Ashava says, looking down at herself. ‘I cannot be swift for you now. I cannot use the sword how I once could.’

‘Ashava–’ I begin.

She shakes her head. ‘I look not for pity. It is merely fact. I will find another way to fight, but I do not need my swiftness or my blade to listen to you. It is something I can do just as well as I could before.’

‘All right,’ I say. ‘If that is what you need.’

‘I think it is what we both need,’ she says. ‘Burdens shared are more easily borne. That is why we are a Sisterhood. We are stronger together.’

‘You are right,’ I say, thinking of what I told Eugenia earlier, about my Sisters being my family.

‘So tell me what is troubling you,’ Ashava replies.

I exhale a slow breath. It clouds the air, just as it did in my dream.

‘I have been dreaming,’ I tell her. ‘For the first time since I was a child. The first came to me as I healed, the second as I knelt to pray.’

Anyone else would drown me with devotion, but not Ashava. She remains calm, and kind.

‘What was it you saw?’ she asks.

‘The same thing I saw all that time ago,’ I tell her. ‘A path of ninety-nine aquila-stones that lead to a set of ironclad gates, wrought in Saint Katherine’s likeness.’

‘Do you think you dream this way because of how you arrived at the convents?’

‘It is what led me to the convents,’ I say. ‘As a girl, I thought it a sign, but tonight when I dreamt it again, it had changed.’

‘Changed,’ Ashava says. ‘How?’

‘When I was a child, the dream would always end at the gates,’ I say, keeping my eyes fixed on the tiny eagle and his laurel wreath. ‘But this time, I went beyond them.’

I tell her then about the pedestal and the Shield and about Adelynn, too. I tell her everything save for those three words.

Are you ready?

‘I asked Adelynn to tell me how to find the Shield,’ I say. ‘But she told me that I already have the answer. That I need to trust in myself to find it.’

Ashava smiles absently. ‘I could not tell you the number of times that Adelynn said those words to me.’

I nod, remembering.

‘So do you have it?’ Ashava asks. ‘The answer?’

I shake my head. ‘No. All that I know is all anyone knows. That the Shield will be found where the light began.’

‘The answer will come to you, Eva,’ Ashava says. ‘I am sure of it.’

‘How can you be so certain?’

‘Because He chose you,’ she says. ‘And because she did, too.’

I smile, then, despite myself. Despite everything. ‘Thank you for listening to me,’ I say to her.

Ashava nods her head. ‘It is as I said. It is what we both need.’

We get to our feet, and step on to the chancel to make our devotions. The altar is a wide slab of white marble, inlaid with gold. Arrayed on it are three candles, surrounded by scraps of oath paper and coins of different metals. Offerings, from souls of every standing.

I pick up the candle lighter, and touch it to the wick of the tallest candle. It catches easily, burning strong. A bright arrow of flame, pointing to the heavens. But I am no longer looking at the candle. I am looking beyond it.

‘The light,’ I say. ‘Where the light began.’

‘What?’ Ashava asks. ‘Eva, what is it?’

I put down the candle lighter and walk around behind the altar and all of the devotions left there to look up at the fresco behind it. The image is almost five times my height, and depicts a number of things. At the top is the God-Emperor in the moment of His Sacrifice, taking his place on the Holy Throne. Beneath it are the martyrs. Alicia Dominica, Lucia, Silvana, Mina, Arabella. Katherine. Those once known as the Daughters of the Emperor. At their backs, Holy Terra. Beneath them, a golden arrow parting the darkness, trailing fire in its wake as it soars towards the Throneworld. I put out my hand, stopping just short of actually touching the fresco, and follow the tail of the arrow down to its origin point. A circle of silver, dulled and cracked from age.

‘I already had the answer,’ I say, breathlessly. ‘It is Dimmamar. The Shield is on Dimmamar.’

‘Where the light began,’ Ashava says, and I hear her get to her feet too, slowly. ‘The Confederation of Light.’

‘Yes,’ I say, my fingertips hovering over the silver circle. My scars prickle on my skin. ‘The birth world of Sebastian Thor.’

‘You must speak with the Canoness immediately,’ Ashava says.

I nod and let my hand fall away from the silver disc. I turn from the fresco to see Ashava looking up at me. She is not keeping her fervour in check, now. I can see it clearly in her eyes.

‘What made you want to meet here?’ she asks. ‘Before this image, under Katherine’s eyes?’

I shake my head. ‘I told you. I just wanted to, because it reminded me of home.’

‘I knew it,’ she says. ‘I told you, Eva. He chose you.’

A massive, tectonic groan rattles the Vow. The lumens flicker out, and every candle on the altar dies. Re-entry chimes start to ring, and then the lumens flicker back up as the shutters over the cathedral’s armaglass windows roll back slowly to reveal the void beyond. I look out to see not just stars, but ships. Hundreds of battle cruisers, escorts and gunships, floating in clouds of ancient debris around a bare, dun-brown planetoid pockmarked with old scars. There are orbitals, too. Deep-space relays and memorials. Beyond it lie gold-clad defence fortresses and the distant, tiny points of light that mark other planets. As I watch, two bull-snouted cruisers peel away from the picket on an approach course with the Vow.

‘This is it,’ Ashava says, softly, from beside me.

Around us, the chapel has fallen quiet. I realise that I cannot hear weeping any more.

‘Yes,’ I say, in a reverent whisper. ‘The Sol System.’

Ravara

When I meet with Arch-Cardinal DiCrimio, it is in the cloying, damp heat of the hanging gardens in the upper tiers of the Ecclesiarchal Palace. Insects thrum their wings here, thronging around thriving plant life the likes of which I have never seen on any other world. Not even the wild ones. I pass by banks of wildflowers, twisted trees and thick, glistening swathes of algae on water, all tended by semi-artificial constructs of metal and bone that walk on spider-limbs, crooning to the plants as they trim and cut and tend them. The overhead lumens are glaring and artificial, and the air strangely clear. It feels lacking to me after months of breathing the rest of the Throneworld’s exhalations.

When I find DiCrimio, he is tending cloud-lilies. Seeing him cutting away their leaves, I am momentarily reminded of Dagra Thul and his choir. Just as with the Master of Dreams, this meeting place is a display of power, and of wealth. Unlike Dagra Thul, though, I am not here to intimidate the arch-cardinal. Some bridges are better off unburned.

‘You must not cut the weaker leaves away until they have curled and died,’ DiCrimio says, as I join him by the bank of lilies.

‘You aren’t concerned that the weakness will spread?’ I ask, as he makes another deliberate, careful cut with the silver-plated secateurs in his gnarled hand.

Marius DiCrimio looks at me. The arch-cardinal is old, even as high priests go. Much older than any mortal man has a right to be. His face is all hollows and creases, his eyes replaced long since with very expensive gold and silver bionics that click and whirr as he focuses on me. His hair is white and thin, sitting atop an age-marked scalp like mist around a mountaintop. DiCrimio’s crimson and white robes hang loose from his body, weighed down by icons in gold and silver and platinum. By bleached skulls and parchment scrolls. When he smiles at me, the arch-cardinal’s teeth are the characteristic grey of those who spend their lives under the Throneworld’s skies.

‘Not if the plant is tended correctly,’ he says. ‘The leaves too weak to thrive will feed the rest of the structure, and the next blooming will be all the stronger for it.’

I put out my armoured hand and run my fingers over one of the blooms. It comes away yellow with pollen.

‘That seems a dangerous philosophy, cardinal,’ I say.

DiCrimio smiles again. ‘Who said anything about philosophy, inquisitor? You asked me about plants.’

That is DiCrimio’s truth. He is not just a holy man, but a politician of considerable merit. One does not reach the heights of the Holy Synod without that sort of skill.

‘But you are not here to speak of such things,’ he says, going back to cutting his lilies. ‘You are here in search of one amongst the Adepta Sororitas. The one you call the eagle, ablaze.’

I nod. ‘I believe that she is the key to establishing a bastion of light beyond the Rift.’

‘And what makes you think so?’

‘I have dreamt it,’ I say. ‘You know that my dreams are not to be taken lightly, cardinal.’

The secateurs close with a click.

‘No,’ he says. ‘They are not.’

‘Tell me where she is.’

DiCrimio turns to look at me. His mechanical eyes are incapable of expression, but I still feel as though he is trying to divine the truth of me. He isn’t the first to try, and he won’t be the last. Only one soul has ever seen the truth of me, though, and she is resting in the depths of the Fortress Meridia, surrounded by stars I made for her.

‘First, tell me why you seek her,’ he says.

I hold his mechanical gaze. ‘I already have,’ I say. ‘Because I believe that we have a chance to strike back at the darkness. To wrest back what the Rift has taken from us.’

The arch-cardinal’s eyes whirr again, and then he nods and turns back to his cloud-lilies.

‘She is already on her way here,’ he says. ‘A transmission was received only hours ago from a ship that translated into the Sol System after journeying from Ophelia VII. It is said that one amongst the combined commandery of Adepta Sororitas on board was burned, but not broken. Marked by His favour.’

‘Burned, but not broken,’ I say, echoing his words. My father’s words. ‘Why do you say that?’

DiCrimio’s eyes hiss. ‘Because her coming is prophecy,’ he says. ‘Seen by the most pious and powerful of Telepathica scryers. This Sister Evangeline will be the one to recover the Shield of Saint Katherine from the darkness beyond the Rift. According to the transmission we received, she has already been blessed with a vision of the Shield’s whereabouts.’

‘And where does she believe the Shield to be?’ I ask.

‘Dimmamar,’ DiCrimio says.

My ears ring in the wake of the name. I have to resist the urge to put my hand to the place where my pendant rests beneath my armour. Rebirth. The Resonance, built by those who believe as I do. Thorians, on Thor’s own world. I could curse myself for a fool. Of course it is Dimmamar. How could it be anywhere else?

‘When will the commandery arrive?’ I ask.

‘Within the day. Their weapons will be replenished, their voyage blessed and then they will go into the Rift.’

‘And I will go with them.’

DiCrimio sets about putting away his secateurs in a case made from oakwood and trimmed in gold. Another display of wealth.

‘If that is where your dreams must take you, inquisitor.’ He shakes his head. ‘Though it will not be an easy journey.’

‘They rarely are, if they are worth it.’

DiCrimio chuckles. ‘Now that is philosophy,’ he says.

Somewhere far above, the Convent Prioris’ bells begin to ring. It is a doleful, melodic sound. Beautiful and old.

‘That is my calling,’ DiCrimio says. ‘Unless there is anything else?’

‘The name of the ship,’ I ask, before he can go. ‘What is it?’

DiCrimio looks at me one last time.

‘The Unbroken Vow,’ he says.

Then the arch-cardinal turns and shuffles away, leaving me alone with the cloying smell of cloud-lilies and the ringing of bells, and the name of the ship echoing over and over in my ears because of what I have always said to Sofika, especially since Hellebore.

We do not break vows.

When I return to the Fortress Meridia, I find Efrayl sitting in a folding chair outside Sofika’s chambers. The medic is asleep sitting up, his head lolling and his arms folded tightly across his narrow chest.

‘Efrayl,’ I say.

He startles awake and looks up at me. Efrayl was an uphive noble’s house medicae before I took him into my service. He is tall and thin and greying, with expensive haptics laid into the fingers of his right hand that he has a habit of clicking against one another when he talks.

‘What are you doing sleeping here?’ I ask him.

‘Waiting for you,’ Efrayl says, getting to his feet.

Efrayl is still talking, but I’m not listening. All that I can hear is my pulse rushing in my ears because now that the medic is standing I can see the blood spattered on his apron. Dark, old blood.

Sofika’s blood.

I turn to the door and give my clearance. The locks disengage and the lumen over the door blinks from red to green.

‘Inquisitor,’ Efrayl says, urgently. ‘Lord, please. Wait.’

I ignore him and rush inside, convinced that I will see Sofika’s machine sitting empty. That I will have lost her for good this time. But the machine isn’t empty. Sofika is still there, coiled in its cables. She doesn’t wake at the sound of me approaching. Her skin is pale as mountain snow.

‘Sofi,’ I say softly.

She is so still. I put my hand out and touch her face and say her name again, and only then does she stir. Only then does she raise her head and look at me. Her eyes are artificially dark, the pupils swollen to swallow the blue. I can’t help but think of Thul’s wretched choir of dreamers.

‘Ahri,’ she says. ‘You were gone so long.’

I let my hand fall away. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘Did you find her?’ Sofika asks. ‘The eagle, ablaze?’

I nod.

Sofika’s face lights with a broad smile. ‘You did?’

‘I did,’ I tell her, smiling too, despite myself. ‘Now all we need to do is follow her.’

Sofika nods, a lolling motion.

‘We will find the Conduit,’ I say. ‘You will see the Rebirth, just as I promised.’

She blinks slowly, her eyes misted by distance.

‘Inquisitor, please,’ Efrayl says, from behind me. ‘You must let her rest.’

I hold my hand up and Efrayl falls quiet as Sofika stirs again.

‘Ahri,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘You were gone so long,’ she says, as if I have only just arrived.

It takes me a moment to answer her.

‘I know,’ I tell her, softly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Have you come to see them?’ she asks, her words blurred by sleep and whatever Efrayl has given her.

‘See who?’

She smiles absently and I realise that she isn’t looking at me, really. She is looking through me. ‘The stars,’ she says. ‘It feels as though you can see them all from here.’

I have heard her speak those exact words to me once before. It was before we set sail for Hellebore. Before we knew what a mistake that would be. We were sitting together on the observation deck of my system-runner, the Pandion, watching the stars turn through the armaglass. She wore blue that night. The same blue as her mountain-sky eyes.

‘Every single one,’ I tell her, because it’s what I said all that time ago, too.

She nods, slowly, and her eyelids flicker and then drop closed. Her head lolls again and then I turn to look at Efrayl.

‘What have you done to her?’

‘She was in distress, so I gave her something to stop it. Pain relief. A little kalma.’

I take a step closer to him, my blood boiling. ‘You have her drugged like one of Thul’s psyker-mules.’

‘I saved her life,’ he snaps at me. ‘She was delirious, Ahri. Pulling at her cables and drips, trying to get clear of the machine. She would have died if I’d let her.’

His words sting as though he’s hit me, and my heart does what it always does when it hurts. It shrinks in response.

‘Lord,’ I say.

Efrayl frowns. ‘What?’

‘You will address me as lord.’

He blinks, and I hear him start clicking those haptics together. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Lord.’

‘I want you to prepare Sofika to travel,’ I tell him. ‘We leave Meridia by nightfall.’

Efrayl pales. ‘Travel,’ he says. ‘Where?’

‘We are going through the Rift,’ I say. ‘To Dimmamar.’

I start to leave the room, but Efrayl puts out a hand. He stops just short of touching me.

‘You aren’t listening to me. Sofika cannot possibly leave Meridia.’

‘Use the cradle-casket,’ I tell him. ‘Rebuild the machine aboard the ship.’

Efrayl shakes his head. ‘You are not listening to me,’ he says. ‘It is not about the machine. It’s the stress of it. It will kill her.’

I don’t lay a hand on him. I don’t move at all. I just fix him with a stare instead.

‘No, it won’t,’ I say. ‘Because you will make sure of it, or you will die with her. Do you understand me?’

Efrayl’s throat works and his eyes fall to the Marleyan blades I carry.

‘Understood,’ he says. ‘It will be done, lord.’

I find Zoric and Yumia in the mid-level training suite. It is an open space made from the same muted stone as the rest of Meridia. It almost swallows the sounds of Yumia’s movements completely as she runs through her blade rites on the rubberised mat in the centre of the room. Stretches, handsprings and balance poses. Zoric is sitting cross-legged on the floor at the edge of the chamber with his kit arrayed in front of him, etching prayer words into the solid shells he uses with a microtool, a lho-stick hanging from his lips. When I enter the room, he stops working and looks up at me. His left eye is circled with a darkening bruise, and his nose looks even more broken than it did before.

‘What happened to you?’ I ask him.

Zoric exhales a thin coil of smoke and nods towards Yumia. ‘Your Illithian doesn’t know what the word sparring means,’ he says.

Yumia drops out of the hand-balance she is holding with easy grace and wipes her chalk-dusted hands on her training clothes. ‘We do not spar on Illithia,’ she says, with a pointed smile. ‘We only fight. Perhaps if you were quick enough to avoid being hit, it would not matter. Perhaps you would have fewer scars.’

Zoric snorts a laugh. More smoke. ‘Perhaps,’ he says.

Yumia laughs with him. Perhaps under other circumstances I would too, but not today. My blood is still burning too badly from seeing Sofika.

‘Enough,’ I say, and they both stop.

‘What’s the word, lord?’ Zoric asks. ‘Did you find our mark?’

I nod, and tell them what DiCrimio told me about Sister Evangeline and her imminent arrival on Terra. They both become very still. As muted as Meridia.

‘How long do we have?’ Zoric asks, when I have said all I have to say.

‘Until the night cycle,’ I tell him. ‘The commandery won’t be here for long, and we must be ready to go into the darkness with them.’

‘Through the darkness,’ Yumia says, and she puts a hand to her side absent-mindedly. It’s the place she was cut badly on Hellebore. I remember the way the wide circle of blood grew wider on her dun-coloured tunic as she helped Zoric and I carry what was left of Sofika back to the Crypsis in the wake of my mistake.

‘We will find the Conduit on Dimmamar,’ I tell her. ‘Then the darkness will have to answer for everything it has done to us. Everything it has taken.’

‘Aye, lord,’ Zoric says.

He gathers up his ammunition kit and gets to his feet, before grinding out the stub of his lho-stick on the training suite’s floor. Yumia doesn’t move, though. She just stands there looking at me, the flat of her hand still pressed to her side. I don’t need my gifts to sense that she has something to say.

‘Speak,’ I tell her.

Yumia presses her lips together. ‘We will find the Conduit on Dimmamar,’ she says. ‘That is what you said.’

‘That is what I said.’

She shakes her head. ‘You said the same of Hellebore,’ Yumia says. ‘But we found no Conduit there, lord. Just blood and darkness. Just death.’

A long moment of silence stretches out between us. First Efrayl challenges me, and now this. I lock Yumia with a stare, just as I did my medicae.

‘Do you doubt me?’ I ask her.

Yumia is still for a moment, her hand still pressed to that old wound.

‘Answer me,’ I say coldly.

Yumia lets her hand fall away slowly. ‘I do not doubt you, inquisitor.’

‘Then why speak at all?’

She isn’t frowning at me now. There’s another kind of expression on her face that I can’t quite place. This time, when she speaks, it’s softer.

‘I think you wish for this as much as you believe in it,’ she says. ‘And I think that kind of desperation is dangerous.’

Silence falls again in the wake of her words. Zoric shakes his head. Yumia holds my gaze with her narrow face uptilted. Unafraid, as always. It is part of the reason I recruited her in the first place.

‘And you?’ I say to Zoric. ‘What do you think?’

He exhales slowly. ‘You didn’t recruit me to think,’ he says. ‘You recruited me to hunt and track and kill, and because you knew I’d jump for the chance to make good on a bad life.’

Yumia scowls and shakes her head at him. She mouths the word coward.

‘But,’ he says, ignoring Yumia with a marksman’s patience, ‘I can tell you what I see.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Something is eating away at you,’ he says. ‘Whether it’s guilt, like Yumia says, I don’t know. It’s not my business to.’

He looks down at his hands. At the patchwork of old burn scars criss-crossing them that he earned long before he took up service with me. Back when he made his way as a killer for hire, and a gunrunner, and he made powerful enemies. The sort of enemies that don’t kill you to make their point, but kill everyone you care about instead. For Zoric, that was Idoney, the woman he’d sworn himself to.

And their son, Tian.

‘There’s no undoing what’s been done,’ he says. ‘But you can level the scales. Make rights out of wrongs. That’s the best hope to stop whatever has its teeth in you from tearing you to pieces. From swallowing you whole.’

They both speak to me as if they know what’s best. But they haven’t dreamed my dreams, or seen what awaits us.

They aren’t the ones with a vow to keep.

‘This is doing right,’ I tell them. ‘What we do here could change everything, and I will not turn away from that.’

I look at them both in turn.

‘This is where you make your choice,’ I say. ‘Follow me, or don’t, but know the alternative if you choose the latter.’

It’s presented as a choice, but both of them know it’s an ultimatum. I was honest with them when they swore to serve me. They both know full well what it means to turn away from the Inquisition.

‘I’m with you, lord,’ Zoric says.

I look to Yumia. ‘And you?’

She is quiet a moment longer than Zoric, but I can sense the answer in her bearing well before she speaks it.

‘I swore to you my blades,’ she says. ‘I will not break faith, no matter the torments we must go through.’

In that moment I come the closest to telling them the truth. To walking them down to Meridia’s depths where Sofika is sleeping. But I don’t. I can’t. Not yet. They wouldn’t understand.

‘Swear it anew,’ I tell them. ‘That no matter what we might face or what we might need to do, we do not stop. We go onwards, until it’s done.’

There’s a charged pause, but then they both nod.

‘Aye, inquisitor,’ they say together. ‘Until it’s done.’

Evangeline

My first sight of the Throneworld is a cracked rockcrete landing pad built into the upper tiers of the Convent Prioris. As I disembark the lander alongside my Sisters, the wind snags at my cloak and vestments. It lashes my hair against my face. The air smells of cold and smoke and soot, and carries with it a micro-fine dust that rings from my armour like rain. Where it hits my skin, it stings. Where it hits my scars, it burns. I stop for a moment, letting it. Letting where I am standing sink in.

Beyond the landing platform the tiers of the Convent Prioris drop away again and again, disappearing into murky fog. To my right, the basilicas and cathedrals go on, ever upwards, like mountains of marble and iron, their summits lost to Terra’s yellow-grey skies. It is both like my home and so unlike it, all at once. Far above me, the bells are tolling, the sound of it echoing out into the sky.

And somewhere, far beyond a horizon that is wracked by storms, the God-Emperor rests upon His Golden Throne. The truth of that carries in the air here, as much as the dust or the scent of smoke, making every breath feel as though it has weight.

I walk to the edge of the platform. The wind is even stronger here, pulled into twisting spirals by the shape of the convent. It sings and sings, like a tireless choir. I look out to the horizon, all mist and murk and thunderclouds, and I feel as though I know where He rests. I focus on that far-distant point. Somewhere beyond sight.

‘Is this what I am meant to do?’ I ask Him, letting the wind carry my words. ‘Am I on the right path?’

I wait a moment, though in reality I do not expect an answer. Not a literal one, anyway. But just as I am about to turn away from the edge, a burst of marble-white birds take flight from below the lip of the platform. They flurry upwards into the angry sky, scattering feathers. One drifts and twists, caught in the updraught, until it comes to rest at my feet. I stoop and pick it up.

‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’

I turn to see Ashava standing at the edge beside me, staring out at the distant horizon. I look at the ancient, crumbling face of Terra stretching out below us. At the smog and fog. The curves of void shields casting lambent light over the statues and spires and triumphal avenues. Over the fortifications, and furnaces. The manufactories and mortuaries. Some of the structures are blasted and broken. Some are still burning as they have been ever since the Great Rift opened, because even the Throneworld is not immune to suffering. Like me and my Sisters, it is deeply wounded. Scarred by what has been visited upon it. Even so, there is only one answer to Ashava’s question.

‘It is beautiful,’ I reply. ‘More so than I ever thought it could be. I am glad I had the chance to see it, if only once.’

Ashava glances at me. ‘Perhaps you will again,’ she says. ‘If the God-Emperor wills it.’

There is a moment of silence between us in which the bells toll on.

‘If He wills it,’ I say, after a moment.

‘Evangeline.’

I turn away from the edge at the sound of my name to see Canoness Commander Elivia standing there with her two Celestians, her crimson cloak snapping in the high winds. The rest of the commandery, almost four hundred Battle Sisters, are standing in ordered rows at the landing platform’s edge, waiting. Watching me expectantly.

‘It is time to go,’ Elivia says.

I run my thumb over the edge of the marble-white feather and then let it go, allowing the wind to take it wherever it may. It rushes back over my shoulder, heading for the edge, and the storm-wracked horizon.

The tertiary worship hall of the Convent Prioris is a vast space. So tall that I cannot catch sight of the ceiling. Far above us, cherubim drift in circles, singing their songs and carrying lit candles that cast light and shadow around the chamber. It gives the vaulted space a peculiar sense of constant motion. The walls are age-stained marble and flaking gold, lined with statues not unlike those that I saw in my dream. Saints and saviours, clad in robes and armour, that watch over us in silence as together we are given our holy duty by a high priest clad in red and white. An arch-cardinal of the Holy Synod, who calls himself DiCrimio. He is flanked by a group of devotees in the same white and crimson robes, some laden with strips of parchment, others with high, iron collars that obscure their scarified faces. All are weighed down with reliquary cases, and the weighted pewter trinkets of the penitent.

All except DiCrimio. His trinkets are gold and cut stones. Bits of sanctified bone. Precious, not penitent. The cardinal’s aged voice carries easily across the vastness of the worship hall, amplified by the circling cherubim as he tells the gathered strength of the commandery what I told Elivia aboard the Unbroken Vow.

‘The Shield of Saint Katherine awaits on Dimmamar,’ he says. ‘On the very birth world of Sebastian Thor.’

DiCrimio opens his arms wide, as if to embrace us all.

‘Dimmamar lies in darkness,’ he says. ‘Beyond the abyss. An abyss which only those of faith could hope to cross, which is why this task falls to you.’

Just as with the briefing on board the Vow, I feel as though I am being spoken to specifically. My scars prickle.

‘This undertaking will require blood,’ he says.

Blood, say the devotees in beautiful, perfectly pitched voices.

‘It will require suffering.’

Suffering.

DiCrimio looks around the hall until I am certain that his bionic brass-and-silver stare lands upon me.

‘It will require sacrifice,’ he says.

Sacrifice, echo the devotees, as one, and then my Sisters and I answer in kind, bellowing the word in reply. Our voices are not perfectly pitched, but they are beautiful in unison. A thundered chorus, like the tolling of the convent’s bells. In the wake of it, we make the sign of the aquila as one. I notice that some amongst the commandery are crying silent tears of fervour. My burn-scarred hands are hot and stinging under my armour, and they only sting more as the devotees begin to sing a hymnal in those pitch-perfect voices. I recognise it from the opening notes alone. The Words of the God-Emperor. My Sisters pick up the hymnal around me, but I find that I cannot sing with them. All I can do is remember.

O God-Emperor, who is strength. I devote this life to you.

I remember singing with Isidora as first light turned the convent’s towers to gold. Then I remember watching her burn to death on the Contemplation.

O God-Emperor, who is grace. I devote this life to you.

I remember training with Ashava, as she clattered my sword aside and laughed good-naturedly. I remember the splintering crack of her bones breaking.

O God-Emperor, who is valour. I devote this life to you.

I remember Gytha smiling as she recited scripture to me when I could not sleep. Then I remember the smell and sight of her changing, and that single tear on Adelynn’s face as she lowered her smoking bolter.

O God-Emperor, who is light. I devote this life to you.

I remember standing on the high parapets of the Convent Sanctorum with Adelynn, the evening before my first war. The wind was so cold as to take my breath away. So cold there was snow in it. I remember asking her how I would know that the training was enough. How I would know I was ready. She had turned to me and smiled, a rare expression on a face as stern as hers. I remember what she said.

You already have the answer, Evangeline.

Then I remember a flare of light. A broken sword. I remember watching Adelynn fall, her blood scattering across the marble.

Just like snow.

‘Eva.’

I am so caught up in the memory that I scarcely hear Ashava saying my name. Everyone else is getting to their feet around us. I nod, and stand with her. I try not to think about the sound of her bones breaking.

With the hymnal over, each member of Elivia’s commandery is called one at a time to the chancel to be sanctified. It begins with Elivia herself. The Canoness climbs the steps to stand before DiCrimio. She is marked with blessed ashes by a devotee who wears a veil of prayer scrolls. The scrolls rustle like whispers as the devotee reaches up to trail her ash-covered fingers over Elivia’s face, painting stripes of grey over her closed eyes and down her cheeks. Once that is done, the arch-cardinal speaks.

‘And under His sight you take this oath,’ he says.

And Elivia answers, ‘To remain unbroken, even unto death.’

Elivia moves to stand beside DiCrimio, and the rite continues. First Elivia’s Celestians, Beatris and Radah, are called up, bearing their longswords and cloaks. They are marked and blessed, and then they leave through a gilded doorway that sits underneath the vast, golden statue of the God-Emperor at the head of the hall. Sister Wilemina and her Seraphim are next. Then the Dominions, under Sister Mikah. On and on, until only my squad and I remain. Then my Sisters are called up in turn, as the others were. They are painted with ashes and they speak the words, and then they, too, leave the worship hall and DiCrimio turns to look at me.

‘Sister Evangeline,’ he says.

I leave my place and walk the marble path to the chancel under the dancing light of the candles. It catches the spirals and whorls that were laid into my armour on Ophelia VII and illuminates them, making them look for all the stars like shifting smoke. I climb the steps, but before I can approach the devotee to be marked, DiCrimio holds up his hand.

‘Wait,’ he says.

I see a frown cross Elivia’s face, but the Canoness says nothing as the devotee bows her head and backs away, and the arch-cardinal approaches me. His artificial eyes focus with a hiss, a series of delicate brass and crystal lenses rotating around one another. He is quiet for a long moment as he studies me, his age-lined face set in careful neutrality.

‘I have heard much about you and your blessing, Sister Evangeline. From Canoness Elivia, and from others of my order. From seers and astropaths. If you would permit me, though, I would rather know it from you. I would like to ask just a handful of questions, if I may?’

Elivia’s frown deepens, her eyes turning steel-hard, but she does not challenge the arch-cardinal. Nobody does.

‘Of course,’ I say, careful to keep my face as neutral as his.

‘The battle in which you earned this mark killed all but one of your Sisters. Is that true?’

The memories come back again. Not the good ones. Just the bad. The fire. The acrid stink of burning flesh. The bright light and the broken sword.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It is true. They died defending the Convent Sanctorum from the creatures of the warp.’

DiCrimio nods again, solemnly. ‘They died with honour, then.’

‘Yes,’ I say stiffly.

‘And the other. She was left crippled?’

‘She was badly injured,’ I say. ‘But she stands. She fights. Ashava remains unbroken.’

‘I do not doubt it, Sister,’ DiCrimio says, with a patient smile. ‘And be assured I mean no insult. I seek only to understand. I will ask just one more question, if I may?’

I nod, though my pride still burns on Ashava’s behalf. ‘Of course.’

‘Much was taken by the battle you fought that day,’ DiCrimio says. ‘For most of your Sisters it was their life. For one it was her swiftness.’ He tilts his head, and his eyes hiss again. ‘But what did the battle take from you?’

I cannot lie in this place, where every breath is weighed down by the God-Emperor’s nearness, so I tell the arch-cardinal the truth.

‘Everything,’ I say.

For a moment, all is silent, even the cherubim. Then DiCrimio smiles his patient smile again and nods.

‘Thank you,’ he says, before turning to the veiled devotee. ‘Perform the blessing.’

The devotee steps towards me, and I close my eyes, though my mind is alight with DiCrimio’s questions, and with my answer. It was the truth, but was it enough? The devotee’s ash-stained fingers brush over my eyelids. Over my mark. I feel her fingertips linger there for less than a heartbeat, before her hands fall away. I open my eyes and realise that the devotee is shaking from head to toe under her robes and her parchment veil. I catch the sounds of whispered breathing. Of weeping.

‘And under His sight, you take this oath,’ DiCrimio says, drawing my attention from the trembling devotee.

‘To remain unbroken,’ I say. ‘Even unto death.’

DiCrimio’s eyes hiss and I see the intersecting lenses turn once more. Wheels within wheels.

‘Even unto death,’ he says.

As Elivia and I make to leave the memorial hall and join our Sisters, we are approached by a lone figure who did not partake in the blessing, but who must have been watching it unfold from the hall’s shadowed edges. The woman is not clad in the robes or vestments of the Faith, but in blue cloth and overlapping silvered plate that must have been made for her, and her alone. Her posture is scholam-straight, her hair dark and long and loosely curly, bound up into a topknot using a series of fine silver rings. I could not begin to guess her age. Her copper-coloured skin is only faintly lined around the eyes, and her amber eyes are as sharp as the twin swords she wears at her hip. The woman wears no icons save for a discreet enamel clasp affixed to the inside edge of her shoulder guard. As she reaches us and nods her head in greeting I see that the enamel clasp is wrought in the shape of a tri-barred ‘I’, surrounded by a halo of inward-facing blades.

An inquisitor, then.

‘Canoness Elivia,’ the woman says, before looking to me. There is a momentary flicker in her eyes as they meet mine. ‘Sister Evangeline. My name is Ahri Ravara, of the Ordo Hereticus.’

Unease sets in at Ravara’s words. At the mention of her ordo. I wonder if this is the test I am yet to face. If I failed when I spoke plainly to DiCrimio upon the chancel. If I am to be denounced. Marked as a witch, under the God-Emperor’s skies.

‘What do you want, inquisitor?’ Elivia asks. Her tone is firm. Guarded.

‘Merely an introduction,’ Ravara replies. ‘My retinue and I will be accompanying you beyond the Rift to Dimmamar.’

Elivia shakes her head, her expression unchanged. ‘Our duty is one laid down by the God-Emperor Himself,’ she says. ‘It is prophecy. Our mission is sanctioned and sanctified. What possible cause might you have to accompany us?’

‘Because of my dreams,’ Ravara says, patient where Elivia is not. ‘Since I was a child I have seen what is to come.’

‘You are a seer,’ I say.

Ravara fixes me with her amber eyes, and she nods. ‘More often than not my dreams are dark,’ she says. ‘I have seen corruption, and war. Death. Destruction. Darkness. But I have seen light, too. I have seen hope. I have seen you, Sister Evangeline.’

My scars prickle under the inquisitor’s gaze. Not just across my face, but my hands and arms and throat too.

‘My sources tell me that you, too, have been dreaming, Sister Evangeline,’ Ravara says. ‘Is this true?’

I am reluctant to admit it, but I have no choice. After all, I cannot lie here.

‘I have,’ I tell her.

Ravara smiles faintly. ‘I would speak with you of those dreams, Sister. Alone.’

‘On whose authority?’ Elivia asks.

Ravara looks at her, that smile still in place. It does not reach her eyes. ‘The only one that matters,’ she says. ‘That of the Throne.’

Elivia’s face sets, but she cannot argue. Not against those words, and especially not under these skies.

‘Speak swiftly, inquisitor,’ she says. ‘Our landers depart within the cycle. We will not linger.’

Ravara bows her head. ‘Understood, Canoness commander,’ she says.

Elivia turns to me, then. She puts one hand on my shoulder and draws me close. I catch the scent of gun oil and incense.

‘He chose you, Evangeline,’ she says, in a low voice. ‘Remember that.’

Then the Canoness turns and stalks away to join the rest of the commandery, leaving me alone with Inquisitor Ravara, who is watching me carefully with her unsettling amber eyes.

‘Shall we?’ Ravara asks.

Ravara

‘Is this to be an interrogation, inquisitor?’

Sister Evangeline asks me the question as we walk through the halls of the Convent Prioris together, past murals and memorials and candle sconces. I stop and look back. It’s a strange thing, finally seeing her. Sister Evangeline is younger than I imagined she would be. The Battle Sister is tall and lean, with contemplative hazel eyes and a naturally solemn face. That same air of solemnity carries in her voice and her manner. She wears it like a shroud. Like a mantle.

And then, of course, there is the mark. The feathered shape is bright white against her olive skin. Brighter than I’ve ever known a scar to be, as if Sister Evangeline is alight from the inside out.

Ablaze.

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘Just a conversation.’

Her face remains impassive, but she tilts her head, just a little. ‘About my dreams,’ she says.

‘Not just that,’ I reply. ‘I want to speak about you, too. And about what lies beyond the Rift.’

She watches me a moment. ‘And what do you believe that to be?’ she asks.

I think about golden light filling the sky, from edge to edge. Pushing back the darkness.

‘Something important,’ I reply, and then I wave her on. ‘Come, I have something to show you.’

I walk up through the stairwells of the Convent Prioris with Sister Evangeline until we reach an ancient spire tower right in the heart of the cathedral sprawl. It isn’t gilded and grand like the worship halls; instead the marble is threaded with fine cracks and softened by mosses. As we reach the top of the steps, a flock of grey doves takes flight from the rafters, blustering their way out of the tower through one of the arched windows. A handful of shed feathers blow and wend through the air like snow. I cross to the window to try and catch sight of the birds, but they have already disappeared between the towers and spires and statues. Grey amongst the grey. Evangeline joins me by the window, her tread power-armour heavy. This close, I can see that the Battle Sister’s armour is as scarred as her face. The hum of the power pack prickles at my skin.

‘It is vast,’ she says. ‘The convent. The Palace.’

‘Surely the Convent Sanctorum is much the same,’ I say.

She narrows her eyes. ‘It is different,’ she says. ‘It feels different. Unknowable.’

I begin to understand what she means, then. ‘Because of Him.’

Sister Evangeline nods, and then crosses her hands to make the aquila.

‘I felt the same when I first set foot on this world,’ I tell her. ‘Even the air felt as though it could crush me.’

‘Have you grown used to it?’ she asks me.

I can’t help but smile. ‘No.’

That makes her smile, too. It is gone again so quickly that I wonder if I saw it at all.

‘I expect that you want to know about the mark,’ Evangeline says.

‘I do,’ I tell her.

‘There are reports,’ she says. ‘Records.’

I nod. ‘There are, but I want to hear it from you. Stories are like water. Pure at the source, but muddied the further they get from it. Reports and records can be falsified, or inaccurate.’

Sister Evangeline glances at me, her hazel eyes curious. ‘So can people, now and then,’ she says.

I hold her gaze. ‘Not to me,’ I say.

Sister Evangeline watches me for a moment, then she nods, and her eyes go back to the horizon. Rain has started to fall. It blows around the spires of the convent in misting clouds, darkening the grey, old stone. She tells me in her level, melodious voice about the devils that conquered Ophelia VII. About her last stand at the Contemplation with her Sisters, and the monster that came to kill them. She describes her Sisters’ deaths in turn with reverence in her tone. Isidora, Gytha. Then Evangeline pauses a moment. She shifts her hand to rest on the hilt of her sword.

‘And then there were only two of us standing,’ she says. ‘Myself, and Adelynn.’

‘Your Sister Superior.’

She glances at me. ‘Then you have read the reports.’

I nod. ‘Of course. But it’s as I said.’

‘Stories are purer at their source,’ she says, finishing my phrasing for me.

‘Just so.’

She nods. Her solemn face grows a little more so. ‘I have never seen a devil as forbidding as the one that stood on the Contemplation that day.’ She pauses, and shakes her head. ‘But the first time it tried to strike Adelynn down, she caught its sword on her own.’

I have seen plenty of devils in my time, but her words send a chill through me regardless.

‘That must have been an incredible sight.’

Sister Evangeline nods. ‘It was beautiful,’ she says.

‘What happened next?’ I ask her.

Sister Evangeline’s hand falls away from the sword hilt. ‘The greater daemon struck again,’ she says. ‘And Adelynn fell.’

The grief in her melodious voice is barely audible, unless you know what you’re listening for. Unless you recognise it, like I do.

‘She is what you meant on the chancel,’ I say. ‘Adelynn was the everything that you lost.’

Sister Evangeline’s mouth sets in a thin line. ‘Death is a gift,’ she says. ‘It is not something to be mourned.’

‘And yet you do.’

Another silence falls between us, broken only by the drumming of the rain and the sound of distant bells. Sister Evangeline exhales slowly, her breath misting in the cold air.

‘Adelynn believed in me when nobody else would,’ she says. ‘She took me in when others refused to, risking her own honour to do so. She raised me. Trained me. Stood beside me as a Sister, though I am not noble-born, or schola-raised.’

‘She must have seen something in you.’

Sister Evangeline frowns. It pulls at her scars. ‘She always said so. My Sisters say it is humility. Honesty.’

‘And you?’ I ask her. ‘What do you see?’

Sister Evangeline’s frown deepens. ‘What I have always seen when I look at myself.’

‘And what is that?’

‘Something incomplete,’ she says. ‘Unfinished, like a blade awaiting the fires.’

‘And yet you survived the Contemplation.’

Sister Evangeline looks at me. ‘I was spared.’

She says the words softly. Levelly. Just like before, the grief in her voice is almost inaudible.

‘But you wish you hadn’t been,’ I say.

Sister Evangeline’s hazel eyes turn fierce amongst those bright white scars. ‘This conversation is finished,’ she says flatly.

She turns and walks away from me, the wind snatching at her cloak, and I see the truth of her, then. Not the armour, or the mark, but the woman beneath it all. One who had found her place and her family only to have it all taken from her.

‘You feel as though you failed,’ I say, before she can leave.

She stops. ‘You know nothing of it,’ she says.

I think of Hellebore. Of Sofika, and that damned machine.

‘I do,’ I tell her. ‘You’re not the only one to have failed. To have lost their everything.’

Sister Evangeline’s armoured shoulders rise and fall as she takes a breath, but she doesn’t walk out.

‘We can make it right,’ I tell her. ‘There is more waiting for you beyond the Rift than the Shield. I have seen it.’

Sister Evangeline finally turns and looks at me once more.

‘What have you seen?’ she asks.

I consider my answer carefully, as one should with all answers.

‘In my dreams Dimmamar is cold, and shrouded in darkness. Shadows with teeth and claws draw closer, putting out every light. Every single candlefire. Save for one source of light.’

Sister Evangeline watches me intently. Cautiously. ‘What source of light?’ she asks.

The eagle’s cry echoes inside my mind.

‘You,’ I tell her.

Sister Evangeline’s lips part as if she might speak, but she says nothing.

‘Where you stand, you bring the light,’ I tell her. ‘Light as bright as the dawnrise. It pushes the darkness back. Tears away its teeth and its claws. It turns everything to gold, edge to edge.’

Sister Evangeline blinks. ‘How?’ she asks. ‘How do I bring the light?’

I think then not of the eagle’s cry, or the shadows, but of the fire that engulfs her until all that I can see is the white of her scars amid the gold and red.

The eagle, ablaze.

‘Faith,’ I tell her. ‘And sacrifice.’

She holds my gaze for a long moment.

‘Sacrifice,’ she says softly.

I nod. ‘The death you were spared from awaits you on Dimmamar, Sister Evangeline.’

She blinks, her hazel eyes glossy. ‘Thank you, inquisitor,’ she says, and then she goes, leaving me alone with the rain and the rooftops and the distant flocks of birds, grey on grey.

Book Two

The Second
Pilgrimage

Ravara

The Unbroken Vow is in agony.

I hear it all around me as I walk alone through the ship’s freezing corridors. Her engines are roaring without pause and her superstructure is creaking. Flexing and clicking. Groaning. I stop and exhale a slow breath. I am in agony, too, just as the ship is. My head is pounding and my ears are ringing. My limbs ache as if my bones are growing. The pain might be different, but the cause is the same.

The Great Rift.

It presses in on all sides as it has for three standard days, the tides tearing at the Unbroken Vow as if they are trying to find purchase on the hull. On our souls. Everything shudders constantly and over half of the ship’s lumens have failed. Food has begun to rot. Water has soured. Candles have extinguished themselves, as have several of the ship’s crew.

I reach the end of the corridor and stop. Before me is a set of adamantine doors clad with heavy panels made of carved wood. The design is cracked and flaking, breaking up the figures sculpted there. Thin, willowy men and women in long robes, with their faces upturned to the stars above them. Navigators. I put my hand to the rough surface of the wood, feeling the thrumming of the ship travel up into my hand. It is irregular and stuttering, almost as if the Vow is a living thing. A dying thing. This close, I realise that I can hear something else, too. Something nearly drowned out by the sounds of the ship. I lean in slowly, and put my ear to the wall and I hear it truly, then. A chorus of whispered voices.

Death is coming.

I step back from the door and draw my main-hand sabre from the scabbard at my hip as another shudder shakes the Vow. There is more creaking and a clicking, and then a bubbling hiss as one of the seals in the wall to my left splits and black, tarry liquid pushes its way through. It starts to spill down the face of the wall. It stinks of death and decay and where it hits the floor, it puddles thickly.

I go to press my free hand against the breach to stop it, but more seals split and burst, and more darkness spills into the corridor, flowing down the walls and forming puddles around my feet. Around my legs. I try to fight my way free of it, but the liquid clings tightly, holding me in place. I shout for Zoric. For Yumia. But the darkness swallows my words whole and then it shifts and boils and takes the shape of a figure that rears to loom over me, swollen and oil-slick and blank as an unfinished statue. I react in a heartbeat, driving my sword straight through the figure of darkness. But it doesn’t split, or slough away. My sword does, until I am left empty-handed with the dark liquid creeping up around my waist. My chest. The weight of all that liquid makes my bones creak and flex, just like the Vow.

‘I am not afraid,’ I snarl at the figure.

You should be, it says. Death is coming.

And then it starts to scream in a thousand voices, as the darkness climbs higher and higher until it fills my mouth and nose and ears. My eyes. Until it drowns me entirely.

Until I wake with a desperate, deep breath.

The chamber I find myself in is wrought in black iron and old plaster and lit by a thousand tiny lights that burn half-heartedly around me, flickering and shuddering in time with the Unbroken Vow’s engines. The dream fades away quickly, but the screams don’t. It’s not a thousand voices I hear now, though. Just one.

Sofika.

I get up unsteadily from the folding cot I was sleeping on and go to her. She is shaking in the grip of the machine that supports her. Shuddering, like the Vow. Her screaming is rasping and hoarse as if it has been going on for a long time. Her eyes are squeezed closed. She must still be dreaming. I put my hands on her shoulders and her eyes snap open, but she doesn’t stop screaming. Instead Sofika lashes out at me with a thin, pale hand.

‘Get away from me!’ she yells.

I don’t. I keep hold of her, because I won’t let her hurt herself. I won’t let her go.

‘Sofi, it’s me.’

She fixes me with her mountain-sky eyes. Her pupils are dilated. Darker than darkness.

‘You were dreaming,’ I say to her.

‘Of black water and the stink of death,’ she says. ‘Of the darkness, pushing through the cracks. It wants to kill us, Ahri.’

I nod. It’s been the same since we set sail into the Rift. Sofika doesn’t need to touch me to see my dreams any more. She suffers them with me, as she has so much else.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘I saw it too. But I won’t let it. We are going to find the Conduit. We are going to fix everything.’

She grabs hold of my arm, then. Her broken nails dig in through my sleeves and I am struck by a sensation of intense cold. By the swooping feeling of inversion. Of vertigo, more extreme than it ever has been before. It is as though I’ve been cast out into the void. As though I’m spinning into nothingness without a tether. Images stutter in front of my eyes, loud and bright. Overwhelming.

The Resonance, on Hellebore.

A gateway opening overhead.

Devils descending in droves.

A monster, in a serpent’s mask.

The mask draws closer until it fills my vision, edge to edge. So close that I can see my reflection in the heretic’s crimson eye-lenses. Only it’s not me that I see. It’s Sofika, screaming as she is torn apart by the sorcerer’s warpcraft. I feel everything. All of her pain. Her terror. Her grief. I hear the sorcerer speak, with a smile in his voice.

Not yet.

At the words, the images disappear, and I realise that I have pulled free of her grip. That my nose is streaming blood. That my eyes are running with tears. Sofika’s head is lolling, her eyes rolled back. She starts to shake again, then, in a way I can’t stop. Whole body tremors, from the inside out.

‘Ahri,’ she says, and just like before my name comes with blood. That is dark, too, painting a thin line from the corner of her mouth down to her chin. I let go of her and hammer the emergency buzzer for Efrayl. I don’t release it until I hear the door open at my back and the medicae comes rushing in.

‘Do something,’ I shout at him. ‘Do something, now!’

He pushes me aside, opens his emergency kit and pulls out an injector that he connects to one of the lines feeding her. Efrayl depresses the plunger, and I see the dark liquid press its way out of the glass injector and into the plastek line. Into her veins. It reminds me so much of the dream that I nearly stop him, but then Sofika stops panting and shaking and she settles as if she is going to sleep, her blue eyes sliding closed slowly.

‘What is that?’ I ask hollowly. ‘More kalma?’

‘No,’ Efrayl replies. ‘She is too far gone for that. This is sedation. A chemical sleep, where dreams may not find her.’

I look at her face, and I know he is right about the dreams because Sofika isn’t frowning or shifting. Her face is still, and calm. Her breathing is even. Efrayl sets about checking the machine. He checks fluid levels and taps his fingertip against glass vials. His shoulders slump.

‘I will have to keep her under,’ he says. ‘As Sofika’s body grows weaker, her powers grow stronger. She will not be able to tell what is real from what is not.’

‘How long will she have to stay like this?’

Efrayl turns and looks at me. His eyes are heavily shadowed, his fingernails bitten down to stubs. ‘Until we reach the other side,’ he says. ‘She cannot take the Rift’s pressures.’

I blink. ‘That might mean days.’

‘It might,’ he says. ‘But I won’t risk another seizure like that.’

My heart feels as though it shrinks as I imagine days without Sofika.

Days of dreaming alone.

Efrayl looks at Sofika sleeping, and he shakes his head. ‘I told you,’ he says softly. ‘I told you this journey would kill her.’

‘And I told you that it wouldn’t.’

Efrayl looks back at me. ‘Her blood is dying,’ he says. ‘It is turning bad, just like the water. Just like the food. It is poisoning her.’

‘The machine is meant to cleanse her blood,’ I say. ‘So the machine is failing.’

He laughs without a trace of humour. ‘The machine is working as best it can. I am working as best I can. You have to understand, lord. This has always been about management. About limiting Madame Sofika’s suffering. The machine cannot prevent death. Only the God-Emperor can do that.’

I look at Sofika, sleeping peacefully. At the dark blood pushing around the plastek lines that feed her. I think of my dreams. Of my father’s promise.

You can restore her, Ahri.

‘You’re right,’ I say.

Under other circumstances, I might have laughed at the expression on Efrayl’s face in that moment. At his complete and utter surprise at being told he is right.

‘You cannot prevent death,’ I say. ‘But you will ensure that Sofika reaches Dimmamar.’

He frowns at me. ‘And then you will switch off the machine?’ he asks. ‘After Dimmamar?’

I can’t help but glance at her a moment, sleeping between us.

‘And then I’ll switch off the machine,’ I say.

He breathes a heavy sigh. ‘Good,’ he says.

I nod, and then unhook the holster at my hip and take out my pistol.

‘Here,’ I say.

Efrayl blinks, and shakes his head. ‘I do not carry arms,’ he says. ‘Call for Zoric, or Yumia.’

‘You know that I’m not going to do that.’

He shakes his head again. ‘You should tell them,’ he says. ‘They both care for her.’

His tone isn’t admonishing now, it’s just sorrowful. Part of me knows that he is right, too. About both things.

‘Not until the time is right,’ I say, and I hold out the pistol. ‘Take it.’

He hesitates. Like Zoric and Yumia, Efrayl’s life before this one ended with a bad choice. One that took everything from him. His home, his fine clothes. His status. But it changes nothing.

‘I won’t leave her unprotected,’ I tell him. ‘Not with the warp screaming all around us.’

Efrayl breathes out slowly, and then takes the gun from me.

‘What exactly do you think I am going to need to shoot?’ he asks, as he checks the pistol’s safety once, then twice.

‘Anyone who tries to get to her that isn’t me,’ I tell him.

Evangeline

The Unbroken Vow creaks and groans as if it is being twisted by great, invisible hands as Ashava and I patrol the spinal corridor. All of the arched viewports are shuttered to keep the madness of the warp from spilling in, so the only light comes from the stuttering overhead lumens and from the oil lamps carried by the few cherubim who still have the heart to fly. With the tremors and the strange, wending light taken together, it feels as though we are trapped inside some kind of paper game. A vast zoetrope.

‘Adelynn once told me that the warp exists to hate us,’ I say to Ashava. ‘She said that the devils don’t so much dwell in the warp as wait there, like caged animals.’

‘That travelling through the abyss is like willingly slipping through the bars and challenging the beasts in their own den,’ Ashava says, with a nod. ‘She told me something similar, once.’

The ship shakes again around us, more fiercely this time. There is a scraping and a clattering that echoes up through the ventilation. The lumens flicker and for the dozenth time since our patrol began I put my hand to my sword’s hilt in the anticipation of a threat. Ashava tenses, and her hands move on the stock of the flamer she carries. Her new weapon, in the wake of Ophelia VII. But nothing materialises, and after a moment the noise and the shaking recedes back to how it was before. The sense of threat lingers, vaguely, as it has for days.

‘Adelynn was so right,’ Ashava says, easing her stance.

I nod, letting my hand fall away from the hilt of my sword. ‘So very right.’

Another noise echoes along the corridor then. This one is not violent, but melodic. A dolorous chorus of ship’s bells, set to mark the hour in Terran standard time.

‘Eight bells,’ Ashava says, when they have finished tolling. ‘I would have called it later.’

I shake my head. ‘I would not have known well enough to guess.’

In times long gone, there would have been a watchman on the ship who called out in the wake of the bells to let everyone on board know they were safe. But even if we had such a watchman, he would not have a thing to say because we are not safe, and nor is the Vow. Nothing is, while we are inside the Great Rift.

I activate my suit’s vox-link.

‘Hail, Sisters,’ I say. ‘What have you to report?’

The vox squalls for a long moment before my Sisters answer in turn from their positions all across the ship, where they are patrolling just like me and Ashava. Qi-Oh is first, because her pride permits nothing else.

‘Nothing to report from the starboard batteries,’ she says.

Sarita and Munari are next. ‘Nor the billets, Sister Superior.’

‘Or from the lowdecks,’ Calyth says, from where she patrols with Veridia and Joti.

The vox hisses again, and I see Ashava frown, but then Eugenia’s voice breaks through.

‘Labour halls reporting clear, Sister Superior.’ Eugenia pauses, and I hear her take a breath over the link. ‘Though I feel as though it is anything but. The people here are restless and unsettled.’

Qi-Oh scoffs over the link. I can almost see the derision on her face.

‘There have been riots in the past days,’ Eugenia says. ‘Murders, even.’

‘But nothing since you arrived?’ I ask.

‘No, Sister,’ she says. ‘Though I feel as if it is not for lack of wanting.’

‘It is the same here,’ Calyth says. ‘As though there is a pressure building.’

‘Exactly,’ Eugenia replies. ‘Or a great heap of stone, waiting to collapse.’

I glance around me, at the wavering light from the cherubim who fly but will not sing, and the slick, sweating walls of the spinal corridor.

‘I know,’ I tell them. ‘And if it does collapse then we must be ready to endure it. To have the cascade shatter against our bolters and blades. Be vigilant, Sisters. Be strong, for those who cannot.’

‘Aye, Sister Superior,’ they say in sequence until the connection breaks down and their voices are swallowed up by static. That has been the case for days, too. The vox. The lumens. The air purification. Just like the crew, everything is faltering in the face of prolonged exposure to the Great Rift.

I sever the vox-link, and Ashava and I set to walking again under that wavering zoetrope light. The spinal corridor is no longer a hectic, noisy press. The crew we do see are few and far between. They hurry by with their heads bowed and their eyes downturned, going about their work without a word or a song, just like the cherubim.

‘They look exhausted,’ Ashava observes. ‘As though they are sleeping as little as we are.’

I nod. Since entering the Rift we have patrolled relentlessly. That much I am used to. It is our calling to endure. To fight for days without respite or relief. To suffer. It is not so much the lack of sleep I find exhausting, but the act of sleep itself.

‘The darkness is close enough as it is without welcoming it by closing your eyes,’ I say.

‘Then you have dreamed badly, too?’ Ashava asks.

I glance at her. ‘Have you?’

She nods. ‘Of the Last of Days,’ she says. ‘Of watching Isidora burn. Of lying flat on my back and listening to the greater daemon laugh.’ She shakes her head. ‘Each time I hope to dream differently. I hope to cut the greater daemon down, or slip its grasp, but it always plays out the same.’

‘We cannot go back,’ I say. ‘Only onwards.’

Ashava laughs at me, and for a moment it feels as though there is light in the corridor, after all.

‘You think yourself unlike Adelynn,’ she says with a smile. ‘But sometimes you might as well be a mirror. She would always offer my own words back to me, too.’

‘I know,’ I say, and I cannot help smiling too. ‘She would do the same to me. Especially if it meant learning a lesson.’

‘Because often you already have the answer you seek,’ Ashava says, and I find myself reliving all the times my mentor spoke those words to me. In the cold marble grounds of the Convent Sanctorum, and under the stained glass and statues lining its great halls. Aboard ships and in warzones.

And, of course, in the dream that led us here.

‘And what of your dreams?’ Ashava asks, as if she knows my thoughts. ‘Have they been troubling, too?’

I hesitate, before remembering what I promised her. What she needs from me, and what I need from her.

‘I have not had any,’ I tell her. ‘Not since the last time.’

Ashava does not exclaim, or take a sharp breath. She just lets me speak.

‘I have tried again and again, but nothing visits me when I close my eyes save for emptiness.’ On saying it, I see it again. The pure darkness that awaits behind my closed eyes. A deceitful nothing, just like I felt upon waking after Ophelia VII.

‘I have not seen Dimmamar, or the Shield,’ I tell her. ‘I have seen no more signs.’

Ashava tilts her head. ‘Perhaps you are merely looking in the wrong place,’ she says.

We approach a crossway in the corridor, then. Left leads to the docking bays. Right to the starboard batteries. Ashava and I are to go on ahead, straight on towards the Vow’s expansive Navigation quarter, the forecastle and the bridge, but our way is blocked by two Navy security personnel clad in well-maintained blue carapace plate with lascarbines slung across their chests.

‘Hail, Sisters,’ the first of them says, as we approach.

He is unhelmed, scarred and sallow, with dark shadows under his deep-set eyes. The hand resting on his carbine’s stock is a scuffed, plated augmetic. The name stencilled in neat letters on his armour plate says Pvt. Sandir, A.

‘Apologies,’ he says, holding up his other hand. ‘But the way is closed.’ This close, I can see that Sandir’s uniform is crumpled under his carapace.

‘Why?’ I ask.

The second guard steps forward. She is also unhelmed. Her name is marked as Ligues, and the bars on her carapace indicate that she holds rank. Her skin is sandy and freckled, her hair a tidy crest of curls. Ligues’ uniform is neater than Sandir’s, but the shadows under her eyes are just as dark.

‘There’s been an incident,’ she says. ‘The shipmaster has ordered the way closed.’

‘What sort of incident?’ Ashava asks.

Ligues’ face colours a little, as if in unease. ‘A death,’ she says.

Ashava frowns. ‘An accident?’ she asks.

Ligues shifts her weight. ‘No,’ she says stiffly.

‘Is the corridor impassable?’ I ask.

‘No, my lady.’

‘Then it is not closed,’ I reply. ‘Not to us.’

There is a moment of silence, but then Ligues bows her head. ‘Of course,’ she says, and she steps aside. Sandir parts the temporary barricades and then steps aside too. Before we can pass, though, Sandir speaks.

‘Apologies,’ he says, again. ‘But may I ask a question?’

I stop. ‘Yes, of course.’

He looks up at me. ‘You are Sister Evangeline, aren’t you?’

The Vow seems quiet then, as if it too is waiting for me to answer.

‘Yes,’ I tell him.

Sandir’s tired eyes widen, just a fraction. He puts his augmetic hand to his chest by way of a salute.

‘God-Emperor go with you, blessed Sister,’ he says. ‘Praise be to Him.’

Ligues does the same. My scars prickle under their attention. Under their devotion.

‘Praise be to Him,’ I say, and Ashava and I pass through the barricades and into the dimly lit corridor beyond.

A short distance from the barricades guarded by Ligues and Sandir, we come across the site of the incident.

The still form of a man lies on the deck, a short distance from a discarded laspistol. I only know that he is one of the Vow’s watch officers by his uniform. There is not enough left of his face to recognise him otherwise. Another watch officer stands nearby, his arms folded tightly across his chest as he watches two attending medicae staff wrap the body carefully in black plastek so that it can be moved. A pair of maintenance crewmen clad in coated overalls and heavy aprons are working hard to scrub away the wide, messy circle of blood from the wall that marks the spot where the officer chose to end his life, and above it, the words painted on the wall in black, angry strokes.

All hope is lost, it says. Death is coming.

‘Blasphemy,’ Ashava murmurs.

The crew all stop what they are doing at the single spoken word. At the sight of us. One of the medicae staff drops the corner of the sheet he is holding and makes the sign of the aquila, his eyes wide above his healer’s mask. The other stands and pulls down his own mask. The man is squarely built with the practised neutral expression of a healer on his face. The gold pins on his white uniform mark him as one of the ship’s senior medicae staff.

‘Sisters,’ he says. ‘Please, pass through. We are working as quickly as we can to deal with this…’ he pauses, and glances at the body on the deck, ‘mess.’

The watch officer who is standing by and observing shakes his head. ‘He had a name,’ he says.

The senior medicae turns to look at him. ‘Not any more,’ he says. ‘You know what happens to the names of the faithless.’

The officer laughs in the way of the grieving. A harsh, humourless bark. ‘He wasn’t faithless,’ he says. ‘Not before this.’

‘Your name,’ I ask the officer. ‘What is it?’

He blinks. Blanches.

‘Marton Kallis,’ he says. ‘I am second watch officer for this deck.’ Kallis pauses, and his eyes slide to the body on the deck. ‘First officer, now.’

‘Then this man was your superior,’ I say.

Kallis nods. I see his throat work. ‘His name was Alisdar Van Roys. He had twenty-seven years’ service. Exemplary. Prayers at morning, noon and night.’

‘These words would suggest different,’ Ashava says.

‘He’d been pulling double rotation,’ Kallis says. ‘We all have, since we made the translation. It didn’t seem to bother him overmuch, but when I made my way up for relief at five bells he wasn’t at his post. I thought perhaps there’d been unrest as there has on other decks, so I went looking. When I found him there was no unrest, though. Just Van Roys.’

‘What was he doing?’ I ask.

‘Just standing in the corridor,’ Kallis says. ‘He was preoccupied. He kept murmuring to himself over something.’

‘Over what?’ I ask.

Kallis’ eyes stay on Van Roys’ body. ‘Whispers,’ he says. ‘In the walls.’

I hear Ashava hiss air through her teeth. Some of the crew make the sign of the aquila as a warding gesture.

‘I reported it, of course,’ Kallis says absently. ‘But by then it was too late. By then he’d already done this.’

He gestures emptily at the words scrawled on the wall. I cannot help but think of Eugenia’s words. Of the great heap of stone waiting to collapse, and of the darkness that waits behind my eyes in place of dreams. I realise that perhaps there are signs to see, after all.

‘Where did you relieve Van Roys?’

Kallis frowns. ‘At the cross-wards corridor,’ he says. ‘Sub-section eight.’

‘The Navigation quarter,’ I say.

‘Yes.’

‘We must go,’ I say to Ashava. She nods, her eyes fierce.

‘Sisters,’ Kallis says, before we can leave.

I pause and look back at the watch officer. His eyes are shadowed. Guilty.

‘He wasn’t faithless,’ he says, again, as if he is trying to prove it to himself as much as us.

I glance down at the body of Alisdar Van Roys and the pool of thickening blood creeping out from under the black plastek. At the ruin that was once a man, who was so broken by the Rift that he could not resist the siren song of death.

‘The God-Emperor will be the judge of that,’ I say.

Ravara

My boots ring from the decking as I hurry through the lowdecks towards the midships junction, attempting to raise Canoness Elivia, or the shipmaster. Naval Security. Anyone at all. No matter how many times I try, nothing answers me save for a wall of white noise. An assault of emptiness.

‘Nothing?’ Zoric asks when I curse and cut the link. I went straight to find him and Yumia after leaving Sofika to her slumber. I didn’t need to look for them, or vox them. Zoric and Yumia were exactly where I knew they’d be. Together.

‘Nothing,’ I say.

I want to believe it’s just the same disruption that has been happening for days, but I can’t. Not after the dream. Not with the corridor yawning empty before me. It should be bustling while we are in transit, but I see no crew. No Sisters or vassals. No cherubim, even. We are alone, save for our shadows.

‘It is the storm,’ Yumia says. ‘It sees us.’

At her words, the Vow trembles and the lumens flicker out. There are a series of pops and clicks, and I smell cold air. Mountain air. Then the lumens flicker back on, but the mountain smell lingers. I see then that we are no longer alone.

I see him.

My father stands facing us at the midships junction, his right arm held outstretched as if he is pointing the way. His eyes aren’t gold. They are white. Rolled back, like the day I found him in the spire tower. I stop running. Stop breathing. I draw my main-hand sabre in one smooth motion and point it at him.

But he is already gone.

I stand there a moment, breathing hard, dimly aware of Zoric and Yumia speaking to me. Asking me what is wrong. What I see. Sweat runs between my shoulder blades. With my free hand I tug the pendant from beneath my armour and my tunic and roll it in my hand. I squeeze it hard enough that the spiked halo pierces my skin and blood wells up in ten perfect, tiny dots from the same old scars. I look at the icon in my hand. The chips and forms of it. Every tiny engraver’s mark, too complex to replicate.

‘It’s real,’ I say, as my nose starts to bleed slowly, thick and clotting.

‘What is?’ Zoric asks.

‘Lord?’ Yumia says.

I turn to her. She is looking at me, wide-eyed. ‘Go to the command deck and find the Canoness,’ I tell her. ‘Tell her what I told you about the dream. Tell her she must be ready to fight. Once you have done so, come and find us at the graven door.’

She blinks, but then nods her head. ‘Aye, inquisitor,’ she says, and then she sets off at a sprint towards the forecastle, her bare feet making hardly a sound on the deck.

‘What did you see?’ Zoric asks.

I wipe my nose on the back of my gloved hand. ‘A sign,’ I say. ‘One we must follow.’

He looks concerned, but he doesn’t question me. He just nods and together we take the left-hand corridor. The way my father was pointing. After that I see my father five more times. He is always blank-eyed and still. Always pointing. I follow him all the way to the foot of a wide spiral stairway made of iron and steel. I look up through the levels to see a light flickering at the top. I take a ragged breath and taste cold mountain air again.

‘We go up,’ I say.

I put my feet on the stairs and follow the spiral up and up through the darkness with the air getting colder and colder until I reach the top and find myself standing under a flickering yellow light and stencilled set of words.

DECK ONE, the words say. SUB-SECTION EIGHT.

I override the access key and duck under the bulkhead door as it grinds upwards. The corridor before me is vast. Long and vaulted, like the nave of a cathedral. At the far end of it I can see the graven door, bracketed by guard-posts on either side. Hexagrammic wards flicker in its surface. Beyond the door lies the Navigation quarter and the ten scions of House Oraylis we brought with us from Terra. A whole host of sanctioned mutants to burn out and discard in turn, in order to cross the Rift.

Between us and the door lie six very still forms clad in polished silver plate and cerise cloth. Oraylis House-Guard.

‘Well,’ Zoric says, softly. ‘This isn’t good.’

The bulkhead door grinds closed again as we approach the bodies. The guards are sprawled awkwardly on the deck like marionettes with their strings cut, blood painting wide circles around them. They are all still clinging to their curved ceremonial blades.

I crouch down beside the first of them. The guard has been cut dozens of times. Shallowly and deeply.

‘The blood is still wet,’ I tell Zoric. ‘They haven’t been dead long.’

‘It’s messy work,’ Zoric says, keeping half an eye on the corridor. He has his lasrifle drawn. ‘Whoever killed them must have been angry. Or crazed.’

I shake my head, still looking at those marks. The shape and the depth of them. Curved, just like the blades they are holding.

‘They did this to each other,’ I say, straightening up. ‘Which I’d say makes it the latter.’

Zoric whistles, low. ‘This really isn’t good,’ he says.

‘Inquisitor.’

I turn to see Sister Evangeline approaching with another of her Sisters from a side corridor. The one named Ashava. The only other survivor of the battle that should have killed Sister Evangeline. Under the flickering, failing lumens the scars around Sister Evangeline’s eyes look more stark than ever. Almost as though they are moving.

‘Sister Superior,’ I say, and I squeeze the icon in my hand tightly again because I am still unsure what’s a dream and what isn’t. But the icon cuts me easily, blood making my palm slick. It’s real. She is here too. It cannot be coincidence. There is no such thing.

Which means this is very, very bad.

‘Something is wrong,’ Sister Evangeline says. ‘What brought you here?’

‘The graven door,’ I say. ‘I saw it in my dreams. Saw darkness, pressing through the cracks. Heard whispers–’

‘In the walls,’ Sister Evangeline says, in the same moment I do.

A horrific, atonal chorus of screaming echoes through the Vow then, as every one of the remaining lumens shatters and dies, drowning the corridor in darkness. The scream goes on and on and on. I cannot hear the others. I cannot see anything. I taste blood and cold air and old, dry earth. Then the screaming stops, and in its wake I hear a whisper. Not in the walls, but right beside me.

Death is coming.

And then the emergency lumens flicker on, painting everything in red. I see Sister Evangeline, with her sword drawn and lit. Sister Ashava, her flamer held at guard. Zoric with his lasrifle raised and pointed. The graven door, its hexagrammic wards burned out. And around us, the limp forms of the dead twisting and splintering as shadows grow from the lakes of blood around them.

Dozens of shadows, with hellfire eyes.

Evangeline

The devils come from the darkness, blood-soaked and screaming.

They are formed from sinew and shadow with wicked, hooked black claws and backwards-jointed legs. Fire gutters inside them as their slack jaws work to speak in a brutal, slurring chorus.

Death. Is. Coming.

I answer them with three words of my own. A snarl that mists the air.

‘I. Deny. You.’

The first of them lunges for me, stretching out like smoke pulled by the wind. Claws scrape across my armour plate, finding no purchase on the blessed ceramite. I bisect the daemon-thing with my sword, spilling ash and smoke and the smell of death. To my left, Ravara moves with almost preternatural swiftness, her sabres flashing under the emergency lighting. Hers are not powered blades, but it hardly seems to matter. The inquisitor banishes the daemon-thing just the same, slipping past claws that mean to cut her with a fluid kind of grace that can only come from her seer’s gifts. One of her retinue, the man named Zoric, is two paces back, his lasrifle braced against his shoulder. He switches from target to target with the sort of deftness that comes from a lifetime of killing, every shot landing centre-mass.

‘This shouldn’t be,’ he says, and it sounds as though he is in pain. ‘They shouldn’t be.’

Ravara turns and plunges her left-hand sabre to the hilt into one of the daemon-things. It bursts into a pall of ash and dust. She spits onto the deck.

‘They must be destroyed. They will tear the ship apart otherwise.’ She cleaves another of the creatures asunder, her amber eyes furious. ‘They will tear us all apart.’

To my right, Ashava hefts her flamer and pulls the trigger. There is a gasp and a hiss and the flamer lights, exhaling a stream of cleansing fire into the corridor.

‘Back, devils,’ she shouts, the light reflecting in her dark eyes. ‘Back to the abyss!’

A series of impossible thunderclaps echo as the daemon-things are obliterated by the torrent of flame. Ashava is somehow deft, even when wielding fire. She strides forwards, panning the flamer in slow, perfect arcs, consuming swathes of the creatures. They hiss and burst into clouds of ash that thicken the air. It scatters across my face and throat as I cut and parry, pushing my way into the press of shadows. All I taste is smoke and death. All I see is wickedness. But for the first time since the Contemplation I feel a fire light inside me, too.

I feel alive.

So I drive forward into the daemon-things, following in the wake of Ashava’s fire. I lean into my sword’s weight. I cut and parry. Riposte and counter. Claws dig furrows in my armour and tatter my vestments. They cut my face and throat. But I do not stop. I cannot stop. This is my chance for vengeance. To punish the warp and the creatures that wait within it for everything they have done to me. To my Sisters. This is my chance to prove myself worthy of the sword. Worthy of command. Worthy of the marks on my face, and of the God-Emperor’s blessing. It is my chance to prove that I am ready.

‘I deny you!’ I cry, as I cut and I cut until the daemon-things roll together to loom over me, a tidal wave of claws and teeth and whispers.

Death is coming, they say.

I stare up at the daemonic tide, my limbs aching and my sword slick with black oil.

‘By the might of Saint Katherine, I deny you,’ I roar, as the wave crests and breaks and the devils spill towards me, their jaws yawning and their whispers echoing around me.

Death. Is. Coming.

My world becomes one of violence and hatred as the tide breaks against my blade and my will. As Ashava burns the daemon-things and Zoric shoots them down and Ravara banishes them with her silvered swords. As the daemons fracture my battleplate with their claws. My scars are alight. I am alight. And I think I feel it, then. The God-Emperor’s watchful eyes, piercing the depthless dark.

‘By the will of the God-Emperor, I deny you,’ I cry.

And I am answered by more thunder. This time, it is the roar of guns coming from the far end of the corridor. From my Sisters, purging their way through to reach us. Instants register between the flashes of my blade as I swing it. Qi-Oh is a storm of anger, cutting this way and that with her chainsword. Haskia is cold and precise. Last is Eugenia. She kills her way through the furore just as quickly and purposefully as the others, repeating my words in high, clear tones.

I.

DENY.

YOU.

And together we send the wicked things screaming back to the warp that spawned them, until the corridor is slick with oil and fouled by ashes.

‘The others?’ I ask. ‘Calyth and Joti? Sarita and Munari? Veridia?’

Qi-Oh shakes her head. ‘I have seen nothing. Heard nothing. Not since the alarums began.’

‘What happened?’ Ashava asks. She is breathless, her brow creased with effort, and with pain. ‘How can this be?’

‘The Geller field,’ Haskia says. ‘It must have collapsed.’

‘If it had collapsed, we’d all be dead,’ Ravara says. The inquisitor’s face is blanched and drawn. ‘It must have grown weak, or flickered, just momentarily. Enough to allow the darkness to press through the cracks.’

‘Then the warp is aboard the ship,’ Zoric says. He is breathless, too. Bleeding, from shallow cuts and from his nose. I wonder how it is that he is still standing in the face of such things. I wonder what else he must have seen in Ravara’s service, for this not to kill him outright.

‘Yes,’ Ravara says softly. ‘The warp is aboard the ship.’

In the wake of her words the screaming begins anew, echoing all around us from the ship’s ventilation, from the Vow itself. From beyond the Navigators’ graven door. The vox snaps live, too, broadcasting overlapping, frantic fragments from other members of the commandery in their positions all across the Vow. I hear Mikah, and Wilemina. Even Elivia.

‘The stoke-halls are overcome!’

‘We have sustained multiple casualties!’

‘…incursion under way in the gunnery halls!’

‘…falling back to defend the bridge!’

The last of my Sisters’ voices is familiar. Clipped and measured. Calyth.

‘The lowdecks are lost,’ she says. ‘Lost to the devils and the dead. We are falling back to–’

Her transmission ends with a bellow and a scream, and before I can try to re-establish the connection another voice cuts in. Not one of my Sisters, this time. The voice is female, and one that I recognise, despite the distortion and the terror in it. Lady Tornella Oraylis. Novator Primus, and first of her House.

‘This ship is damned,’ she slurs, from the grip of her throne. ‘Death is coming.’

Then the vox cuts out with a squeal, leaving us alone with the screaming. No matter how I try I cannot reach my Sisters. Not my squad. Not the Canoness.

‘Mercy and grace,’ Eugenia says. ‘It is a slaughter.’

‘We must go to the aid of our Sisters,’ Qi-Oh says.

I shake my head, certain now of the signs that I have been sent, just as I was on the chancel.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I was called here to defend the Navigators.’

Qi-Oh’s face twists in anger. ‘You heard Calyth,’ she snarls. ‘They are overwhelmed. They could die.’

‘And if we lose the Navigators we will all die,’ I say. ‘Dimmamar will remain in darkness, and the Shield will be lost.’

Qi-Oh stares at me for a moment, that hazel eye of hers aflame with rage, and I feel this is more a test of me than any number of swordfights.

‘We defend the Navigators,’ I say coldly.

Qi-Oh’s mouth sets in a thin line, but she bows her head.

‘Yes, Sister Superior,’ she says.

Ravara

Death is coming.

The whisper is right by my ear as two of Sister Evangeline’s half-squad brace and pull open the graven doors that lead to the Navigation quarter. A sliver of crimson light spills out from inside. Screams do, too, carried on the warm, damp air. I smell blood, and decay. It’s like looking into an open wound. One that has started to turn rotten.

I follow Sister Evangeline as her half-squad move forward into the darkness in pairs, each covering the other. Sisters Haskia and Ashava, Eugenia and Qi-Oh. I recall their names and temperaments from the briefings and meetings we have had since leaving Terra and from the files I requested under ordo authority, because it pays to know your allies as much as your enemies. As we press forward together, the space resolves from the red light and redder shadows. The chamber is a kind of reception hall. A place where visitors might wait to speak with the Navigators of House Oraylis. There is no bare iron here. Instead the chamber is clad in gold and marble and hung with heavy, void-silk drapes marked with the three-eyed icon of the Navis Nobilite and the House Oraylis crest. Statues cast from coloured glass stand everywhere, depicting robed figures holding handfuls of stars.

It should be regal, this place, but instead it’s a ruin. The gold is running like candlewax, and the marble is split and smoking. The banners are burning slowly, embers consuming the priceless cloth. The statues are shattered. House Guard lie everywhere in slick pools of their own blood. There are dozens of them. More than there should be, as if they were called here just like we were. As we pick our way through the dead towards the next set of doors I see that the guards have been utterly brutalised, even compared to those we found outside. Their faces are a mess of ragged, torn flesh that has peeled back to expose bones and teeth and bloodied ligaments. Their eyes are gone, messily removed as if by the point of a blade.

‘Mercy and grace,’ Sister Eugenia says. ‘They did this to each other?’

Sister Qi-Oh shakes her head, her narrow face set in a snarl. ‘They failed,’ she says. ‘They were weak, and that weakness became rage.’

‘Perhaps that’s what killed them,’ Zoric says, looking down at one of the bodies. ‘But that’s not what made this mess. Something’s been eating them.’

‘We must reach the Lady Oraylis,’ Sister Evangeline says.

The others start to move, but I find that I can’t. That I am made still by a prickling awareness of imminent threat that is immediately justified when something drips from the ceiling and hits my armour plate. A fat drop of dark liquid. I put my fingertips to it and then look up. We all do.

‘Oh, shit,’ Zoric says.

Above us, clinging to the rafters and the tops of the pillars, are dozens of shadow-black beasts with balefire eyes. They bare rows of needle teeth, all strung with blood and sinew.

Death is coming, whisper the words in my ears.

‘Purge them!’ Sister Evangeline shouts, loud and clear, as the creatures snap their leathery wings and descend on us, a storm of claws and teeth and shrieking rage. My threat-sense flares, and I turn to meet one of the creatures as it lands heavily and lunges at me, claws outstretched and jaws wide and waiting. I slip its grasp, and then sever its head with a clean strike from my main-hand sabre. The creature roars and screams and then discorporates with a deafening bang.

Around me, the Sisters are an inviolate wall of faith and hate. Sister Ashava burns the things from the very air with her flamer, while Sister Qi-Oh cuts left and right with her chainsword. The others fire their bolters, the muzzle-flare illuminating their snarling, war-torn faces. In the midst of the melee, Sister Evangeline carves one of the daemons in two with her power sword. The ashes burst against the blade, burning away to nothing.

‘The Navigators,’ she shouts to me. ‘Go to them! We will hold them off!’

I nod and push on through the press of wings. The storm of teeth. I am constantly moving. Turning. Leaping. Spinning. It is the way I was trained. The way of the Marleyan sword-song. I cut and cut until my blades turn black. Through the press I see Zoric shoot one of the creatures out of the air, the high-powered lasfire shattering its elongated skull. It crashes to the ground, still trying to claw its way towards him. Still snapping its mangled, broken jaws. He fires again and again until the creature’s skull shatters. Until I shout his name.

‘Danil!’

He looks at me, his eyes filled with an animal kind of dread. I know that it’s because of the breach. Because the creatures we face are of the warp. Daemons. Zoric has spent his life killing for one master or another, but this is more than killing. This is a violent enlightenment of the worst kind. It’s the reason that I have had Efrayl remove every previous encounter with creatures like this from his memories.

The more you know, the more you risk madness, or worse.

‘Stay with me!’ I shout to him, as I cut another of the creatures from withers to hips. It falls tumbling to the deck, smoking and snarling and coming apart at the seams.

Zoric starts to speak, but my threat-sense is flaring again. Not just for me, but for him.

‘Up!’ I shout.

He snaps his lascarbine upwards as another of the creatures folds its wings and drops towards him. He fires three times. Hits it centre-mass twice. The third round blasts one of the creature’s twisted horns from its skull. It should be enough to kill, but it isn’t. Not for something born of the warp. The creature lands hard, claws first, and knocks Zoric flat on his back. His lascarbine goes skittering across the deck, and I throw myself through the melee, but there are so many of the creatures between us. Too many for me to cut through. I hear Zoric’s pistol bark twice, and then he cries out, ragged and wordless, and I think that must be why I haven’t seen him in my dreams of Dimmamar. Because this is where he dies.

But then something whips past me. A small blade, about as big as the flat of my hand, attached to a length of Illithian killcord. It punches deeply into the creature directly in front of me. Straight through the eye. Yumia follows the dart and handsprings over the daemon even as it discorporates beneath her. She lands in a run, catching the loops of killcord as she does so, then she looses the dart a second time. It punches into the throat of the daemon crouched over Zoric. Instead of jumping on it, or cutting it with her other dart, Yumia leaps again, jumping over the top of the daemon and pulling the dart with her. It carves up and around the creature’s thick neck, separating its head from its shoulders. As she lands and rolls, it slumps and breaks apart, becoming nothing more than a thick fall of ash.

Yumia is back on her feet in an instant. She picks up Zoric’s rifle and makes it to his side as I cut down the last of the creatures between us. At first I think Zoric must be dead, but then he stirs. Swears.

‘Come on,’ Yumia says, as she puts his gun back in his hand and helps him to his feet. ‘This is not the time for rest.’

Zoric’s jacket and flexi-armour are a mess, blood oozing slowly from several ragged wounds across his chest and arms. He shakes his head and says something that neither of us catch.

‘What?’ Yumia asks.

‘I said I had it,’ he manages to say, and he laughs. It turns quickly into a cough.

Yumia snorts. ‘Of course,’ she says, unlooping her killcords again as the daemons circle closer, their maws wide and bloody. Zoric swears again as he braces his gun against his injured shoulder. I raise my swords, ready to cut them down. But then Sister Evangeline speaks, her voice so clear and melodious that it even cuts through the sound of the daemons screaming.

‘You have no power here,’ she cries, raising her sword. All around Sister Evangeline, her Sisters echo the last three words. The daemons falter. They hiss and recoil. Some of them tumble to the deck, trailing ashes. The Sisters march forward as one.

‘Where we walk, so does He,’ Sister Evangeline says.

The daemons flicker momentarily, like candle flames pulled by the wind. The screaming wavers and then stops, and in the silence that follows, Sister Evangeline speaks once more. Her voice isn’t raised this time, but it carries just as clearly regardless, with all of the purity of prayer-time bells.

‘And under His eyes you will burn,’ she says.

And the remaining daemons hiss and recoil, their skin bubbling and sloughing away from their bones. They flap their wings and try to fly, but they cannot escape. The Sisters destroy the creatures utterly with blade edges and promethium flame and the holy detonations of bolt rounds. Their wrath is gold and thunder. It is blinding. Beautiful. I don’t want to drag my eyes away, but I have to, because beyond the second set of doors the Navigators are still screaming.

‘The Navigators,’ I shout to Zoric and Yumia. ‘Let’s go.’

But before we can reach the doors, a new sound splits the air. A slow shifting. A splintering, like old trees being felled, or a landslide beginning.

Like a field of glass, cracking underfoot.

I stop and look back, and this time it’s me who curses. ‘Saint’s blood,’ I say hollowly.

Something is growing from the deck of the Vow. From the ashes, blood and bone fragments. From all of that shattered glass. The Sisters fire on it as it twists together, shimmering and coated with warpfire, but it doesn’t break or weaken. It just soaks up the holy shells and the blessed flame like storm clouds swallow the sky. Then one large central eye opens in its chest. Eight more blink open in a circle all around it, lidless and staring and full of tiny lights that look all too much like stars.

DEATH IS COMING.

The words make my mind ache. Make my soul ache. They put me on my knees. Then I see what is reflected in the mirror-thing’s silver skin, and my heart aches, too. In every facet, and every fragment I see Sofika’s face, blood-spattered and staring. This isn’t the Sofika from my dreams, or from my past. It is my dream-taker as she is now. Coiled in the cables of her support machine, her pupils swollen and dark.

Ahri, she says, a thousand times over. Where are you?

I feel blood trickle out of my ears as I try to reach for the pendant at my chest, but my arms are leaden. I can’t tell if it’s real, or a dream. If it has happened or is yet to happen. I can’t tell if I am watching Sofika die in the underdecks where I left her with only Efrayl to keep her safe.

I never should have left her.

Ahri, she says, again. Please. I’m so afraid.

Shadows begin to flicker around her. Shadows with claws. Sofika’s mountain-sky eyes grow wide with fear. With a roar of effort, I get to my feet. My heart is loud in my ears. Labouring.

Where are you? Sofika asks, over and over again. Where are you, Ahri?

‘I’m here,’ I say, the words a slurring mess. ‘I’m coming.’

But before I can take a step a voice cuts through.

‘You have no power here!’

The voice is melodic and clear. Pure.

It belongs to Sister Evangeline.

Everyone around her is reeling and recovering, but not Sister Evangeline. The Sister Superior is standing and staring up at the mirror-thing, her sword held en garde. Her face is set, those eagle scars stark white against her skin. Patterns play over her armour, picked out by reflected light from the warpfire spiralling up around the mirror-thing as it grows yet larger. The way the patterns move, Sister Evangeline looks as though she is already burning.

No, not burning.

Ablaze.

The mirror-thing lashes out at her with a fractal claw. It has wings, now. Feathers made of shards of glass. Multiple splinter mouths that are all whispering as one.

Deathiscomingdeathiscomingdeathiscoming.

Sister Evangeline catches the claw on her sword blade. The power field flares, and sparks fly. She looks at me. Haloed by all of that witch-fire, it’s like looking at the sun coming over the mountain crowns.

‘The Navigators,’ she shouts. ‘Go!’

I glance briefly towards the graven doors. The way we came in. The way back to Sofika. Her voice echoes in my head.

Where are you, Ahri?

But I can’t go to her. Not this time. I turn away from the graven doors as Sister Evangeline’s squad regain their senses and marshal themselves against the mirror-thing. Zoric and Yumia are both bleeding from their noses. Their eyes. Yumia is shaking and murmuring. Scratching at the brands of exile that loop around and around her muscular arms. When I get close enough to grab hold of her, I realise that she is just muttering one word over and over again in Illithian. The same word that makes up those brands, and her explanation for joining my service in the first place.

Dishonour.

I shake Yumia hard and she snaps out of it with a snarl. When I take hold of Zoric’s arm to do the same he tries to shrug me away. He shouts about Idoney and Tian and how they are alive. How they need him. I have to roll my fist and hit him to make him stop.

‘Stay with me,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not real.’

He blinks and takes in the apocalypse all around him. The mirror-thing, circled by the Sisters. The ruin and warpfire. Yumia, staring at him. His pale eyes clear and he nods.

‘It’s not real,’ he says back to me.

As we run through broken glass and hellfire towards the Chamber Awaiting, I can’t help but pray that the words are true.

Evangeline

Every breath burns.

The air is scorching and dry and soured by the taste of warpfire and wrongness. It makes my eyes sting as I fire my bolter one-handed at the devil that has manifested before me. This conjuration of wickedness and hate. This monstrosity of mirrors. The daemon is vast. Swollen to fill the space, its mirror-bulk grazing the vaulted ceiling of the Navigation quarter. Its body is a coil of bloody crystal and its wings are faceted, fractured glass. Four long arms erupt from it, ending in colourless glass talons. Where they touch the deck they set the marble alight.

But the daemon is alight, too. Blessed promethium clings to its limbs and its thick, serpentine tail. The daemon thrashes in the heat and the purity of it as Ashava angles her flamer upwards, directing the jet of fire up and across its body. The rest of my Sisters are firing on it, too. Dozens of bolt shells detonate against its crystal hide, sending a fine, glittering powder into the air. The thing does not break, though. It does not shatter, it just continues to grow and swell, and the whispers grow with it.

Deathiscomingdeathiscomingdeathiscoming!

It moves, then, more quickly than anything of such a size has a right to, propelling itself forwards on the coils of its body like a great glass serpent. Warpfire winds around its claws and its many mouths open wide as if in hunger.

‘Do not let it break through!’ I shout.

We stand together as the daemon rears, lashing out with its claws. Eugenia blasts holes through its faceted wings even as Qi-Oh tears one of the daemon’s claws away with a volley of bolter fire. Haskia roars as she fires her own bolter, the shells impacting against the creature’s bulk and scattering clouds of glittering glass mist. Beside me, Ashava turns her flamer on the daemon and burns it anew. Lightning flares and arcs to the deck where her blessed promethium meets the creature’s warpfire.

The creature screams from its jagged mouths and twists around to face her. It lunges for Ashava, its remaining colourless claws lit with warpfire. She will not be able to dodge it. She does not even try to. Ashava merely grits her teeth and holds her ground, the firelight reflecting in her dark eyes. Between heartbeats, the Contemplation resurfaces in my mind. The warpfire and the laughter. The sound of her bones breaking, and the sight of her still body on the marble.

‘No,’ I say, the word stolen by the fire as I throw myself between them. Heat washes over me, blackening my vestments and immolating my oath seals. It takes my breath away. Scorches the inside of my nose and my throat as I bellow my hate at the daemon.

But it does not stop me.

My sword blade connects with the daemon’s massive, hooked claw and shatters it before it can reach my Sister. Crystal and glass explode outwards, ringing from my armour and cutting my face. Still I do not stop. I push through the flurry of shrapnel and plunge my power sword into one of the daemon’s nine lidless eyes. The blade punches inwards and starlight spills out from inside. Starlight, and screams. I roar and twist the blade and then the daemon screams too, rearing backwards. It drives another of its claws into me, hitting me in the chest hard enough to crack my armour and lift me clear off my feet. I land hard on my back on the ruined marble, my grip still tight around my sword’s hilt. Something has cracked inside my chest, too, making it all but impossible to breathe.

Stand.

The word floats up inside my mind, and through bleary, blinking eyes, I could swear that I see Adelynn standing and watching me with her emerald-green eyes, just as she would when she trained me. When she would not offer her hand to help me up, but wait for me to do it on my own.

Stand, Evangeline.

I do not know if the words are hers or mine, but I grit my teeth and drag myself upright. When I do Adelynn is gone and it is Ashava that I see in her place. She is bloodied and breathing hard, her face creased with pain.

‘You blessed fool,’ she says. ‘You really are so much like her.’

‘I might as well be a mirror,’ I say, between breaths, looking past her to where the daemon is coiling and recovering. Regrowing its mutilated limbs. I raise my sword again as it twists at its core and fixes its lidless eyes on me, its jagged mouths opening in perfect synchronicity.

You, it says. You are the one who was burned. Believed to be blessed, you think yourself a prophet.

The daemon’s voice comes from everywhere. From inside my mind. It holds me in place as it looms forwards, eyes unblinking. My Sisters are frozen, too. Locked in place by its wicked power as dozens of images play across the daemon’s reflective, silvered surface. I see the lowdeck chapels, burning. The stoke halls made into slaughterhouses. I see whole swathes of the ship frozen with void-lock, and the gunnery decks awash with blood. I see the crew murdering one another and laughing.

But you do not see the truth of fate, or time. You cannot see the fullness of the path that lies before you, because you are nothing more than a pinprick of fire in the ever-darkening void, it says. A tiny, insignificant light.

The images change again to show me Beatris and Radah cut down by a flurry of shadows. Canoness Commander Elivia on her knees, bleeding, her sword shattered.

Look upon the cost of your prophecy, little light.

My heart thunders with rage. I am breathing through my teeth. Straining against the daemon’s hold on me.

They will all die, it says. One by one. Light by light, until only you remain.

The images change again, and this time I see my own Sisters. The ones I swore to lead and protect. Calyth. Joti. Veridia. Sarita and Munari. They are fighting their way through a corridor choked with a horde of warp-maddened vassals and members of the Vow’s crew. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Enough to be a danger, even to my Sisters in their blessed armour. I watch my Sisters kill their way through, offering the mercy of death. But it is not enough. The crowd are too many. Too mad. One by one, my Sisters are overwhelmed and dragged to their knees, where they are cut to bloody ribbons. Slaughtered, like animals.

Such a price to pay, it says, and the daemon’s mouths all smile. All for the want of your martyr’s death.

‘I deny you, creature of darkness.’

The words press their way between my gritted teeth. Heat rushes through my body all over again, like a fever. Like being burned alive on the Contemplation. It courses from my core outwards, along my limbs. It sets my scars alight, and despite the daemon’s hold on me, I manage to raise my bolter and pull the trigger. The gun bellows, the round detonating against the creature’s crystal skin. It is not enough to break the daemon, but it is enough to break the spell.

‘Destroy it!’ I roar, firing again as my Sisters do the same around me. ‘By bolt and blade. By the God-Emperor’s grace!’

‘By His grace!’ my Sisters answer.

The daemon recoils from our words. From our righteous fury. I hold down my bolter’s trigger until the magazine clicks dry, the last of my blessed shells finding a home in another of the daemon’s lidless eyes. It reels and screams as we hold the line together. Ashava. Haskia. Eugenia.

But not Qi-Oh.

‘Qi-Oh!’ I shout at her. ‘Stay with us!’

I know she hears me, because she meets my eyes with hers. One crimson and steel. One hazel. Both full of rage. I could never hope to hear her over the screaming and roaring and the thunder of guns, but I see her mouth set in a thin line. I see her shake her head. And then Qi-Oh breaks the line, charging the daemon with her chainsword in hand. Just as when we fought in the training halls she is solely focused on her target, at the cost of all else. Her charge weakens our line. Haskia cannot shoot lest she hits her. It leaves the daemon an opening to knock Haskia from her feet with its long, segmented tail. A cloud of blood blows into the air as Haskia goes down, and Eugenia has to stop firing in order to drag her clear of the daemon’s claws.

With that, our line is broken. But Qi-Oh is close now. Her speed has taken her within the daemon’s reach. She whirls her chainsword left and right in brutal, cleaving strikes, severing first one of its arms, then another. I see her eyes light with fierce battle-joy, and her mouth open in a war cry that I cannot hear. But as she leaps into the air, propelled by the strength of her powered armour, the creature splinters and twists and moves. It laughs.

‘Qi-Oh!’ I shout, but it is too late.

The daemon catches her from the air, impaling her on the bladed point of its segmented tail, before slamming her onto the deck. Qi-Oh loses her grip on her chainsword, but even pinned and disarmed, she still fights it, her breathing ragged and erratic over the vox-link. Haskia is still down, with Eugenia at her side. The youngest of my Sisters has one hand stemming Haskia’s wounds while she fires her bolter up at the daemon with the other. Our line is more than broken, now. The daemon’s words echo in my mind.

They will all die. One by one. Light by light, until only you remain.

I cannot allow those words to be true. I will not. I turn and look at Ashava through the blizzard of glass and ashes.

‘When I give the word, burn it.’

Her dark eyes go wide, but she nods. ‘Aye, Sister Superior.’

‘Eugenia!’

She looks over at me. Her unscarred face is covered in blood.

‘The eyes!’ I tell her, as I push a fresh magazine into my bolter.

She nods and sets her jaw, getting to her feet as I start forwards, not towards Qi-Oh, but towards the daemon. I fire on it in the same moment that Eugenia does.

‘God-Emperor, be my blade,’ I shout as we advance together, our bolt shells painting points of bright light on the daemon’s crystal hide and bursting three of its unblinking, milky eyes. They spill black liquid and shadows, and the daemon writhes and lashes out, propelling itself towards me on the jagged, swollen coils of its body.

‘God-Emperor, be my armour,’ I cry as the daemon strikes at me with its claws and with its wings. With everything left to it save for that long tail that is still pinning Qi-Oh to the deck. Some blows I turn aside with the blade of my sword. Some I do not. Cuts open on my face and scalp, hot blood running into my eyes and into the collar of my armour. My broken ribs flex in my chest. My heart thunders and my ears ring as the mirrored monstrosity knocks my sword blade aside and rears, ready to tear my head from my shoulders.

‘God-Emperor, be my strength!’

Eugenia screams the words as she pushes me aside. The daemon’s claws strike her instead of me with an explosion of light that makes the daemon reel backwards, showering fragments of crystal. Eugenia is thrown bodily from her feet, her power armour splintered and her blood blowing into the air like smoke. She lands heavily, and goes still.

‘Eugenia!’ I shout.

She does not answer, but the daemon does. It laughs. Righteous anger lights inside me, burning me from the inside out.

‘You will die, creature!’ I roar at the daemon as I charge towards it through the storm of glass and death. It gives me the strength to shatter one of the daemon’s fractal wings, and to turn another of its clawed limbs to dust.

I do not fight like Qi-Oh, with ferocious speed. Or like Ashava once did, with artistry. I fight like Adelynn bade me to when she took me into the convent all those years ago. With a sheer, bloody-minded resolve. So when the daemon batters me to the deck with a snap of its remaining wing, I do not stay there. I get back up, my power armour whining as it lends me its strength. As Adelynn lends me strength, too, her voice echoing in my ears.

Stand, Evangeline.

I stand. I run. I bring my sword down so hard on the creature’s remaining wing that it sends a vertical crack along my vambrace from my wrist to my elbow. My bones splinter in concert with it. But the daemon’s wing breaks too, right back to the joint.

Fight, Evangeline.

Glass shards burst over me. I push through them and raise my bolter, my fractured arm creaking and my chest burning and my heartbeat pounding in my ears. I fire twice, blinding two more of the creature’s eyes. The bolter’s recoil turns my arm from fractured to shattered. My fingers go numb, and I lose my grip on my gun. It falls to the deck, but I do not stop. I cannot stop. The daemon is so close that I can smell it. Ozone and spoil and the cold ice of the void.

Never give up, Evangeline.

‘Now, Ashava!’ I cry.

She does not speak, but nor does she hesitate. Purifying fire blooms all around me, travelling over my armour and coursing down my blade as I roar wordlessly and plunge my sword through the storm of glass and into the daemon’s membranous central eye. Screams spill out again. A huge wave of invisible force hits me hard in the chest and threatens to take my legs from under me. I cannot breathe. Cannot blink. All is fire and smoke and the acrid stink of the daemon. But I do not stop. I do not give up. I put both hands on the hilt of my sword and lean all of my power-armoured weight on it. The blade squeals as it inches inwards, slowly.

‘You have… no… power here,’ I tell the mirrored monstrosity as we burn.

The daemon’s remaining eyes shatter, one by one. But still, it laughs.

You think this a victory, little light, the daemon says. But this is simply a step on the path that fate has set for you.

‘Fate does not set my path,’ I say, between breaths. ‘The God-Emperor does.’

And then I drive my sword the rest of the way into its hateful, slitted eye. Right to the hilt. This time, there is more than a thunderclap. There is an instant of absolute violence. Sound and sight.

And then silence. Blessed silence.

I pull my sword free and the daemon shatters from its central eye outwards. Not violently, this time, but calmly, the cracks travelling all across its surface like a fine lace shroud. It breaks into fragments that fall away until all that is left of it is a great black stain and Ashava’s fire, burning itself out on the deck and on my ceramite plate.

I look around to see that Haskia is back on her feet and helping Ashava sit Eugenia up. At the sight of her, all words escape me. The left side of Eugenia’s face is open to the bone, masked with blood. I cannot even make out the shape of her eye amongst the mess.

‘Is she alive?’ I ask. ‘Is Eugenia alive?’

My youngest Sister stirs, somehow. She rasps her reply through the blood in her mouth.

‘I am alive.’

I freeze, just staring at her. At all of that blood that was meant for me.

‘We have her,’ Ashava says, cutting through my thoughts. ‘Go to Qi-Oh.’

I tear my eyes from Eugenia and all of that blood and manage to nod, before limping across the stain on the deck to where Qi-Oh lies. A circle of her own blood surrounds her. Her armour is a smoking ruin, ruptured at the waist where the daemonglass pierced it. She is so pale and still that I am certain she must be dead, but then her hazel eye flickers open and she takes a great, ragged breath.

‘Stand,’ I say.

Qi-Oh coughs and rolls onto her side, one hand clamped over that wound in her abdomen. Then she struggles to her knees. To her feet. She looks past me. Around me.

‘You killed it,’ she says, her voice a blood-wet rasp.

‘Not just me,’ I reply. ‘Ashava and Eugenia. Haskia. We killed it together.’

She swallows. It looks as though it hurts her.

‘But not me,’ she says.

‘You broke the line.’

‘They were dying,’ she says raggedly. ‘Calyth. Veridia. Joti. Sarita and Munari. They were being torn apart in the lowdecks by those they swore to protect. I saw it in the crystals, and I know that you did too. Yet you asked me to ignore it. To ignore them.’

‘I did not ask you anything,’ I tell her. ‘I gave you an order.’

‘To leave my Sisters to die,’ she says.

Her words cut as deeply as the daemonglass did.

‘They are my Sisters too,’ I tell her. ‘My responsibility.’

Qi-Oh stares at me. ‘And yet you would not go to them,’ she says.

She makes to walk away from me, then, but I take hold of her by the arm.

‘Daemons lie, Qi-Oh, you know this. It showed you those things with the intent to turn your heart against you, and you let it.’

Qi-Oh’s cheeks colour with the blood that is left to her. Her hazel eye is alight with fury.

‘And if it is not a lie?’ she asks. ‘What then?’

I think about it for the sparest of seconds. About the hollowness at the heart of me growing larger.

‘Then that will be my responsibility too,’ I tell her.

Ravara

The walls of the Chamber Awaiting are running with ribbons of impossible colour. Frost and fire play across every surface, casting everything in dancing, intermittent light. Where the two elements meet, the iron bones of the ship melt like candlewax. Silvery gobbets of it slough away, raining down all around us with a series of irregular thumps like the beating of a struggling heart.

I move through the mess towards the Chamber of Sail, with Zoric and Yumia at my side. We are all breathing hard, winded by wounding and by what the mirror-thing showed us. The whispering is even louder in here, but I can hear Sofika’s words anyway, playing on repeat between my ears like a corrupted recording.

Where are you, Ahri?

The Chamber Awaiting is bigger even than the hall we fought through to reach it, lined on either side with gilded alcoves that contain ornate slumber-caskets. Nine of them. One for each of the Navigators Awaiting. I run towards the first one even though I can see that the armaglass is broken. Pushed inwards. When I reach it I find the casket empty, and what remains of the lid is slick with bloody handprints. A long, gory trail paints its way down the side of it and across the floor.

‘Damn it,’ Zoric says.

It’s the first thing he’s said since I dragged him away from the mirror-thing. From Idoney and Tian. He is looking into another of the caskets, shining his stablight over the mess. In the reflected glare I see the way his face is set, everything locked away somewhere inside.

Sofika used to call that look his killer’s mask.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘Check the rest, quickly.’

I do. They do. It doesn’t take long, because every one of the nine caskets is broken and bloodslick. Empty.

‘They are all dead.’ Yumia says it as though she needs to in order for it to sink in.

‘Not all of them,’ Zoric says, in a low voice.

He is standing and looking up the central aisle, his lascarbine raised and pointed. The stablight mounted on it illuminates a figure crouching over something in the middle. One with its back to us. I can see from here that they are long-limbed and hairless, clad in fine silk robes in the colours of House Oraylis. Cerise and silver. The last of the Navigators Awaiting. We approach slowly and quietly until we are close enough to see what they are crouching over.

What they are eating.

‘Throne,’ Zoric says.

The Navigator stiffens at the word and stops dipping its bloody hands into the carcasses at its feet. Eight more bodies, all robed in cerise and silver. My threat-sense flares.

‘Kill it!’ I say.

Zoric is already firing his lascarbine. The high-yield rounds punch through the Navigator’s robes and into its flesh. It screams and thrashes, flailing its thin limbs. Zoric keeps firing until the air is full of smoke and superheated blood. Even warp-maddened, it should be more than enough to kill the Navigator.

But it isn’t.

The Navigator judders upright and twists at the waist with the snapping of bones. All three of its eyes have been ripped out and its jaws are strung with blood and saliva. It swells and grows and screams as if it doesn’t need to breathe, its jaws opening wider and wider until its skull breaks apart, and then the Navigator’s body opens wide, too. It splits right down the middle, making a new mouth with which to scream. With which to whisper.

This ship is damned, it says. Death is coming.

Shadows begin to move inside the Navigator between the snapped ribs that make the teeth of its new mouth. Clawed fingers curl outwards as twisted things made of silvered crystal and sinew start dragging their way out, as if the mouth isn’t a mouth at all, but a gateway, just like the one on Hellebore. The creatures are humanoid in shape, with angular, stilted legs and overlong, slender arms that end in hooked claws. They are preceded by a stink of spoiled meat and turned earth. Their faces are blank and smooth save for large, round lamprey mouths lined with needle teeth.

This ship is damned, the whispers say.

Death is coming.

‘Send them back to the darkness,’ I shout, as the abominations of meat and glass lunge towards us, their crystal joints clicking. More of the creatures spill out of the gateway-mouth as I sprint to meet them, leading with my main-hand sabre in the way I was taught. My sabre clashes against the first of the creatures and cuts deep into its chest, splintering glass and splitting sinew alike. My second blade impacts less than a heartbeat later, following in the wake of the first. That shatters the creature altogether. I let my momentum carry me into a spinning leap and turn a full circle in the air, catching another of the creatures across its core with a downward strike from my right-hand blade. It bursts apart too, showering me with glass as I land.

To my left, Zoric fires his lascarbine in controlled bursts, the high-yield rounds scorching flesh and melting glass. He banishes two of them before the powercell empties with a hiss. His last cell. Zoric lets the rifle fall by its shoulder strap and draws his pistol in its place. The Valedictor’s prayer-etched shells shatter crystal and bone alike, scattering micro-fine cutting dust. To my right, Yumia’s rope dart flits by. It hits one of the abominations in the chest and sticks hard. Her second dart hits it in the middle of its lamprey mouth. She follows the dart with a leap, landing a powerful kick that propels the dart the rest of the way through the abomination’s head. It explodes into fragments and the creature topples backwards. Yumia leaps through it, landing in a run, already winding her killcords for her next attack.

My threat-sense is a constant blare. An unceasing alarum playing inside of my mind. I duck and twist and leap, striking out with first one sabre, then the other. Zoric fires his pistol over and over again, reloading from the brace of cartridges on his belt with brisk, practised movements. Yumia barely seems to touch the silver-slicked deck, her killcords a constant blur of motion. We do not pause. Between us we keep cutting and shooting and running until the floor is littered with glass and spattered with blood. Our blood.

But it’s not enough.

Even more of those things crawl their way out of what was once the Navigator but is now a doorway. Too many to count. Too many to kill. My threat-sense is useless. Overwhelmed. Over the gunfire and whispers, I hear Yumia cry out as one of the abominations catches her out of the air. Zoric turns and fires on it, blasting chunks of glass from its head and torso. The creature staggers under the assault, and then it falls, Yumia still snarled in its claws. Lost to the melee.

‘Mia!’ Zoric roars.

He tries to shoot his way through to her. The Valedictor goes off four times in quick succession, and then stops. I can’t see him any more through the crowd.

‘Not here,’ I say, breathless. ‘We don’t. Die. Here.’

I push forwards, cutting down another of the abominations by severing its head. It cuts me back along my left arm as it falls, its claws carving easily through my armour plating and into my arm beneath it. Blood wells up fast and hot, spilling down my arm and making my hand slick on my sabre’s hilt. But I don’t stop. I can’t stop. I banish the next creature with a single, graceless horizontal blow that bisects it at the waist. The two halves of the thing fall away and I leap through them to strike at a third. My main-hand sabre cuts deep and sticks hard in the creature’s torso, rattling my injured arm to the shoulder. It arrests my momentum and unbalances me, but I am already cutting downwards with my second sword for the follow-up strike. The killing cut of the sword-song. The blade lands, following the path of my main-hand sword.

But it doesn’t go through.

The second sword sticks beside the first, deep in the creature’s glass core. The abomination gurgles liquid silver from its lamprey mouth and lashes out in response. Its claws punch through my armour and stick, too. Stick into me. My world narrows like a closing iris as the creature pulls its claws free again with a welter of blood. It reels backwards, my blades still lodged in its chest. I try to go after it, but I can’t. Instead I crash to my knees amid the ruin, barely able to breathe. Barely able to see. Bleeding out slowly, surrounded by whispers and wickedness and an expanse of fractured glass.

Just like Hellebore.

A shadow falls over me and I look up, determined to look my death in the eyes. But I don’t see the abomination with its lamprey mouth and its hooked, bloody claws. I see a figure wearing a blue tunic, and trousers braided with bronze cord. His golden eyes flicker like candles caught in cold air.

‘Not here,’ my father says. ‘This is not the place.’

He holds out his hand, but I don’t reach for it. I reach for the pendant around my neck instead. It takes two tries to close my numb fingers around the iron halo. I squeeze it with the strength I have left to me and watch blood bubble over my fingers.

‘This isn’t real,’ I tell him, though the pendant says different.

‘Come now, Ahri,’ my father says, smiling. ‘You know better than anyone just how real dreams can be.’

I hesitate for a moment, but then I let go of the pendant and reach out to him. He takes hold of my hand and pulls me to my feet with ease, somehow stronger now than I ever remember him being in life. I realise that the whispers have stopped. That everything has stopped. The abominations are all frozen. Locked in place, like statues. Zoric and Yumia are frozen, too. They are downed, caught mid-struggle. Bloodied, but alive.

‘How?’ I ask.

My father doesn’t answer me. He merely nods towards the mess that remains of the last Navigator Awaiting. To the doorway yawning in its flesh. That is frozen, too. My father puts a blade in my hand. I look down at it. It is mine, though I didn’t see him pull it from the crystal creature. I curl my fingers around the hilt of it.

‘The killing cut,’ my father says.

I nod. Sway on my feet, and then I stagger forwards through the frozen storm of blood and glass. I run, though I’m still bleeding. Jump, though it dazzles my vision. I raise my sword and bring it down through the Navigator. Through the doorway. The moment that my prayer-etched sword touches it, time reasserts itself with a deafening boom. The Navigator screams so loudly that it knocks me backwards onto the decking. But it is done. Light blares out of the cut I made, and the doorway – and what remains of the Navigator – folds in on itself with a crunching of bone and a tearing of flesh until there is nothing left of either. All around me, the abominations splinter and come apart, turning to little more than glittering glass dust.

‘We don’t die here,’ I say absently, and I look up at my father.

He smiles as though he is proud, then he turns and walks away. ‘I will see you again soon,’ he says.

I open my mouth to answer him, but he has already disappeared. I heave myself back to my feet as Zoric and Yumia reach my side. Getting up should hurt, but it doesn’t, which probably means I’ve lost a good deal of blood.

‘Throne,’ Zoric says, between breaths. ‘You killed it.’

I look down at the blade in my hand, and nod.

‘I didn’t even see you move,’ he says.

‘You were caught in the spell,’ I tell him. ‘That’s why.’

Yumia frowns too, the expression limited by the long, deep cut that runs across her face from her chin to her nose. Her left eye is half-closed by blood and swelling. She extends her hand to me, offering my second sabre as I tear a ragged strip of fabric from my tunic and wind it around my waist.

‘How did you break it, lord?’ she asks. ‘The spell?’

I think of my father pulling me to my feet. Of his words.

You know better than anyone just how real dreams can be.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell them, pulling the fabric tight and tying it.

The sound of boots approaching on the deck pulls my attention back the way we came.

‘By His watchful eyes,’ Yumia says absently.

I follow her stare to see Sister Evangeline and her squad approaching through the smoke. The Battle Sisters are bloodied and limping, their vestments torn and burned, their armour splintered and split along the seams. Sister Eugenia is unable to stand unsupported. The youngest Sister’s face is cut deeply. Deeply enough for sinews to show through the blood.

‘You banished it,’ I say. ‘The mirror-thing.’

Sister Evangeline nods. Her scars are stark against the blood and ash on her face, as if nothing can conceal or dull them.

‘The Navigators?’ Sister Evangeline asks.

‘All dead,’ I say. ‘Save for the Novator Primus.’

As if my words are what causes it, the ship yaws violently like a boat in a storm. I barely keep my feet. Pipes burst in the walls, and a massive fracture opens across the length of the deck. The superstructure creaks and groans and my stomach turns as the Vow goes into something like a formless freefall and everything starts to slide sideways.

‘The Chamber of Sail,’ Sister Evangeline says. ‘Quickly!’

We run through the destruction together, the deck twisting and tilting. Cracks start to spread up the walls, along the ceiling. Water and steam flood in, in equal measure. Air hisses out.

‘She isn’t whispering any more,’ Zoric says to me as we run. ‘The Novator Primus.’

I realise he is right. Over the sound of the Vow creaking and crying and tearing itself apart I hear no whispers. No pleas from beyond the last set of graven doors.

Just silence.

Evangeline

Beyond the last set of graven doors, the Chamber of Sail is dark. The chamber is small compared to all of those that preceded it, with a low ceiling. It is dominated by the Navigator’s throne, an ancient construct of iron and bone that sits on a raised dais in the centre of the chamber, facing away from us towards the shuttered viewports. Cables and wires coil around the throne’s base, snaking down to connect to the banks of cogitators around the edge of the chamber, all of which are blinking red and showering hails of sparks. The air is warm. It smells of blood and sweat and fear. Of death. From my angle of approach I can see nothing of the Navigator save for the still, pale hand resting on the arm of the throne.

‘Is she dead?’ Ravara asks.

‘I cannot say.’

I hold up my hand for the others to stop, and Ravara does the same. We approach the throne together as the deck tilts again underfoot. Fine cracks trace their way across the floor here, too. Across the walls. They reach for the shuttered viewports like climbing vines. I keep my sword en garde and Ravara does the same with her sabres. The prayer words engraved into the silvered steel catch the light as we reach the dais. Bodies lie at the foot of it, dressed in House Oraylis silks. They are all serf-class. Retainers and attendants, meant to mind the lady as she sails. Their eyes and noses and ears are bloody, their limbs contorted as if in seizure.

‘The third eye,’ Ravara says.

I nod, and then the two of us turn and climb the steps leading to the throne without looking directly at what lies in its grasp. I glimpse everything but the Novator Primus’ face. Her thin figure, draped in fine cerise robes that are stained near black with blood and sweat. Her chest rising and falling fitfully.

Alive, then. One hand rests in her lap, wound tightly around something made of gold and set with precious stones.

A pendant, in the shape of the aquila.

I lower my sword, just a fraction.

‘Lady Oraylis?’ I say, as the Vow moans and tilts and shakes all around us.

She stirs in her throne, her hand tightening around that aquila pendant. She holds it up in a shaking hand as if to ward us off.

‘Who is there?’ she asks. Her voice is a dry rasp, like pages turning.

‘Battle Sister Evangeline,’ I say. ‘Inquisitor Ravara is with me.’

‘And the devils?’ Oraylis asks.

‘They are gone.’

‘You swear?’

‘I swear.’

‘In the God-Emperor’s name?’

I nod, and sheathe my sword. Close my fist over my heart. ‘In His name.’

She hesitates, but then lowers the pendant slowly. Her other hand moves, and I hear the rustle of cloth. ‘You can look up,’ she says, her voice a dry rasp, like pages turning.

Ravara puts her hand out as if to stop me, but I ignore her. I look up at the Novator Primus. At what remains of her.

Lady Tornella Oraylis’ face is streaked with blood from the jagged gouges across her cheeks and brow. Her lips are split and broken, her teeth cracked. Her third eye is concealed behind a strip of black silk, but her human eyes are gone altogether. Clawed out to leave empty, gory sockets. Lady Oraylis puts her empty hand to her face as if she senses me looking.

‘They turned on me,’ she says. ‘Mndara and Gehsk. Lura. Men and women I have known and loved for years. They cut my face and took my eyes.’

‘And your Navigator’s eye?’ Ravara says.

Oraylis’ hand moves up to rest where her third eye lies, beneath the bandana.

‘No,’ she says. Her mouth turns down at the corners. ‘They tried, but I stopped them. I had to use it to kill them. Mndara. Gehsk. Lura. I had to look upon what they were made of in order to unmake them. I had to stain my soul.’

‘Then you can still sail,’ Ravara says.

Oraylis’ hand drops away from her face. She breathes raggedly, and a moan escapes her lips. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Don’t ask me to. Call for one of the others.’

‘The others are dead,’ Ravara says. ‘And I am not asking. Either you find us a path out of the Rift, or we all die. And I guarantee that will do more than stain your soul.’

Lady Oraylis lowers her head as if she is looking at her hands. ‘The ship is half-dead. The crew more than half. The tides of the Maledictum are unlike anything else. It is so vast. So full of hatred and horror, and my blood is in the water now. It knows me.’ Blood runs slowly from Oraylis’ nose. ‘You have no idea what it is like to try and read tides that you cannot see. To stare into a ceaseless darkness that stares right back. I will not survive it. We will not survive it.’

Ravara’s mouth narrows to a thin line, and her eyes turn flat, like dull metal. ‘Yes, we will,’ she says. ‘I have seen it in my dreams. All of us, standing under the light of the cardinal world’s sun.’

‘Including me?’ Oraylis asks.

‘Including you,’ Ravara says.

Oraylis shakes her head. ‘I cannot do it alone,’ she says.

I go to one knee before the throne, and reach out to the Novator Primus, closing my gauntleted hands around hers and tightening her grip on that aquila pendant. Oraylis flinches at the sudden contact.

‘You are not alone,’ I tell her. ‘I know it can feel that way when you are surrounded by darkness, but you are not alone. None of us are.’

Lady Oraylis takes a deep breath. ‘Sister Evangeline.’ Oraylis says my title and name slowly, as if she is sounding it out. ‘Would you pray with me?’

‘Of course.’

She smiles faintly, and we both bow our heads. Beside me, Ravara does the same.

‘O God-Emperor, be with me as I walk the darkness.’

Oraylis’ hands shake in mine as the ship shakes around us.

‘O God-Emperor, watch over me as I serve the light.’

The lumens flicker and bloom.

‘O God-Emperor, armour me as I battle the wicked.’

Oraylis’ hands settle in mine, and for a moment the ship is quiet, too.

‘O God-Emperor,’ I say. ‘Surround me, restore me and deliver me so that I may serve you always. In life, and in death.’

Oraylis and Ravara echo the last five words together.

In life, and in death.

‘Thank you,’ Oraylis says, then she lifts her head and looks at me, though her eye sockets are empty. She is not shaking any more.

‘It is so bright,’ she says.

‘What is?’

‘Your mark,’ she says. ‘I do not need to see you to see it. I can feel it, like a brazier’s warmth. Like the beacon’s light in the darkness.’ Oraylis frees her hand from mine and lifts it towards my face. ‘May I?’

‘Of course,’ I say, though the last thing I want is for her to touch me.

Oraylis raises her shaking hand and puts it to my face. Her breathing turns ragged and I realise that she would be weeping, were it still possible.

‘He truly loves you, Battle Sister Evangeline,’ she whispers.

Her words strike my heart and make it ache.

‘He loves all loyal souls,’ I say to her.

She lets her hand fall away from my face. Around us, the Vow is momentarily, blessedly silent.

‘Will you sail, Lady Oraylis?’ I ask her.

She smiles sadly.

‘I will sail.’

When we emerge from the Chamber of Sail, others are waiting for us amongst the smoke and ruin. Canoness Elivia and her Celestians are as damaged as the Chamber Awaiting, bloodied and bruised, their armour peeled back to the base layers. They are accompanied by a handful of the Vow’s armsmen. Men and women whose carapace plate has been repainted crimson by their bloody work, and whose eyes have been repainted with dark shadows by what they have seen. But they are alive, which makes my heart lift. If they yet live, then so might my Sisters.

At the sight of us, Beatris breaks the line and approaches me, asking of those who are injured. I tell her that my wounds will wait and ask her to see to Eugenia, and to Qi-Oh. She nods and sets to work as I approach the Canoness with Ashava at my side. Ravara follows me, but her retinue do not. They both look as exhausted as the armsmen do. Zoric leans on the wall, sliding down it until he is sitting. He produces a crumpled packet of lho-sticks from the inside pocket of his tattered jacket and lights one as Ravara’s bladeward, Yumia, busies herself by binding her own wounds with strips torn from the sleeves of her tunic.

‘Evangeline,’ Elivia says, her voice hoarse. She has been cut badly across her face from her jawline to her nose. A new scar to keep the old one company. ‘The Navigator?’

‘She will sail,’ I say. ‘But she is weak. Injured. Her retainers are dead.’

Elivia nods. ‘I will call for the priests we have left to us. They will care for her, and pray for her.’

‘What of the incursions?’

‘The devils either broke or fled,’ Elivia says. ‘We were defending the bridge when they shattered, like so much weak glass. Early reports suggest it happened all at once, on every deck.’

‘As though the tether that kept them here had been cut,’ Ravara says.

Elivia nods, and I think back to the thunderclap, and the mirror-daemon falling away like dust.

‘Do we have a measure of the casualties, Canoness?’ Ashava asks.

Elivia shakes her head. ‘It is too early to say, but we have certainly suffered. Liana’s and Sheemah’s squads are below half-strength, and I have heard nothing from Mikah or her Dominions since the lumens went out. The crew decks are a slaughter, and a great deal of the Vow’s hull integrity is compromised. There is little more than tenacity holding the ship together.’

‘She is too stubborn to die,’ Ashava says.

Elivia nods. A brief, thin smile passes across her face.

‘What of the shipmaster?’ I ask.

‘Vallien will survive long enough to get us clear of the Rift,’ she says. ‘Your Sisters?’

I remember what I saw in the daemon’s mirrored flesh. The pushing, thrashing crowd. The thunder of bolters. The screams.

‘I do not know,’ I tell her.

‘Find them, if they are still standing,’ she says. ‘I need purgation squads to clear the ship, deck by deck.’

‘Clear the ship of what, your grace?’ Ashava asks, from beside me. ‘I thought the devils had fled.’

‘She isn’t talking about the devils,’ Ravara says, looking at Elivia. The inquisitor’s face is bloodless, and she has one hand over the tightly wound cloth bandage at her waist. ‘She is talking about those who saw them. The crew, and the vassals. Anyone whose mind has been broken.’

Elivia nods. ‘It is a mercy,’ she says, without a trace of cruelty.

Ashava nods, solemn. ‘Aye, Canoness, of course.’

‘The purgation squads do not touch my team,’ Ravara says, still looking at Elivia. ‘Not a single one of them.’

Elivia shakes her head. ‘If they pose a danger to the ship–’

‘Then I will deal with them myself,’ Ravara says. ‘You have my word.’

Elivia holds her gaze for a moment, but then she nods. ‘Very well. See to your own, inquisitor. I am certain that you understand the consequences if you do not.’

Ravara stares at her. Her eyes have taken on that strange, flat quality again.

‘I do,’ she says, and then she calls for Zoric and Yumia. The two of them heave themselves away from the wall and follow her out of the Chamber Awaiting.

Elivia reaches out and puts her hand on my shoulder. There are flecks of green in her eyes amid the blue.

‘I must go to the bridge to watch over the shipmaster and the crew. Find your Sisters, Evangeline. We must regain control of what is left to us.’

I cannot help but feel she is speaking of more than merely the Vow.

‘Aye, Canoness,’ I say, and I bow my head.

Elivia lets me go and turns away, Beatris and Radah following in her wake.

‘Be watchful, my Sisters,’ she says. ‘We are not out of the darkness yet.’

Ravara

The lowdeck corridors are choked with the dead.

I step over and around them, my boots slipping and sticking on blood and bullet casings and bits of bone. Everything is washed in emergency lumen red, and the smell of death is overwhelming. My whole right side is alight with pain that radiates out from the deep cut the daemon gave me. The makeshift bandage I tied around my waist is soaked through and cold against my skin. My hands are shaking. I am sweating and freezing all at once. Struggling to breathe. The corridor tilts around me, and I have to put my hand out to keep myself upright.

‘Whoa,’ Zoric says. He tries to help me, as does Yumia, but I shrug them both away.

‘Efrayl,’ I say, into my vox-link. ‘Do you read me?’

There’s no answer but static.

‘Efrayl,’ I say, again. ‘Do you read me?’

I wait for what feels like an age, but he doesn’t answer. All I hear is that white noise rush, like the sound of a mountain storm. I let my hand fall away from my ear and start moving again. Zoric calls after me to wait. To stop. But I don’t. I can’t. Not with Sofika’s whispered words growing louder and louder in my ears.

Where are you, Ahri?

I make it ten steps before the corridor tilts again. More than tilts. It runs like wet paint. I hear my sabre hit the deck, and I end up on my hands and knees amongst the blood and bullet casings. Amongst the silent, still dead. I can’t fight Zoric and Yumia off this time when they move me so that I am sitting up against the corridor wall, nor can I stop Yumia from pushing aside the makeshift bandage at my waist to get a better look at the wound the daemon left me with. She hisses through her teeth.

‘She is bleeding badly,’ she says to Zoric, as if I am not here.

‘So seal it,’ I say.

Yumia shakes her head. ‘I have nothing to seal it with, and even if I did, it would not matter. Something inside is split or severed. This is a killcut.’

I shake my head, the action printing Yumia’s image across my vision over and over.

‘It’s not a killcut,’ I tell her. ‘I’m fine.’

I push her away and get to my feet by leaning on the wall, then I pull the binding around my waist tighter, spattering blood onto the deck. I push myself away from the wall and set to moving again, but this time I only make it two paces before Zoric has to catch me to keep me from falling. It looks as though it hurts him to do it.

‘Efrayl could be anywhere. You’ll bleed out before you find him,’ he says.

I shake my head again, though a part of me knows that there’s a good chance Zoric is right. Yumia, too. My fingers have gone completely numb, and my whole body is trembling, not just my hands. Clouds are stealing in at the edges of my sight, but I can’t stop. Not even the thunder-loudness of my own heart can drown out those whispered words.

Where are you, Ahri?

I need to go to Sofika, but I won’t get there. Not on my own.

‘I don’t need to find Efrayl,’ I tell Zoric. ‘I know exactly where he is, because I told him to stay with her. To keep her safe.’

Zoric frowns at me. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asks. ‘Keep who safe?’

I blink. Take a ragged breath. And then I open my mouth and speak.

‘Sofika,’ I say.

‘Throne,’ Yumia says, to Zoric. ‘I told you, it is a killcut. The blood loss is speaking for her.’

‘It’s not the blood loss,’ I snarl. ‘For Throne’s sake, let me go. I have to get to her.’

Zoric sighs. ‘Sofika isn’t here, lord,’ he says. ‘She died months ago, on Hellebore. You know that.’

I grab hold of the front of his jacket. ‘She is alive,’ I tell him, my voice low and urgent. ‘She has been, all of this time. Sofika is here, aboard the Vow. If you do not let me go to her, she will die.’

Zoric starts to speak again, but I don’t let him. I can’t.

‘It’s the truth, Danil,’ I tell him. ‘I swear it.’

Yumia’s eyes are wide. ‘This is delirium,’ she says. ‘The blood loss.’

Zoric doesn’t answer her. Doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes fixed on mine, searching. Then he shakes his head, his pale eyes glassy.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Sofika is alive.’

The corridor that leads to Sofika’s chambers is just like the others. Fouled with blood and shell casings and broken, lifeless bodies. Zoric helps me pick my way through it. I can hardly stand without him now and my breathing is short and shallow, but neither of those things stop me from trying to fight free of him when we get close enough to see that the bulkhead door is locked partway open, false starlight spilling out from inside.

‘Mia,’ Zoric says. ‘Check the chamber is clear.’

She nods, without looking at him or me. She hasn’t since she found out the truth. Yumia approaches the chamber silently, her rope darts held in her hands like knives. She crosses the threshold without a sound, disappearing into the starlit dark.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Let me go.’

But Zoric doesn’t, no matter how much I fight him, so I stop struggling and just wait for what feels like minutes before Yumia speaks again.

‘Clear,’ she says.

Zoric eases his grip on me and then helps me the rest of the way to the door. Yumia is standing stock-still inside, surrounded by the still forms of dead crewmen and vassals. I barely even spare a glance for them, or for her. My eyes go straight to Sofika.

‘Throne,’ Zoric says, softly.

My dream-taker is still, and silent, coiled in the pipes and cables of her machine. Tiny speckles of blood paint her pale skin with a pattern like stars.

‘Sofi,’ I say, and I shrug free of Zoric’s grip. This time, he doesn’t try to stop me.

Despite my shallow lungs and my numb legs I make it most of the way across the chamber before I have to stop. This time it’s not because I’m dizzy. It’s because one of the bodies at the base of Sofika’s machine moves. Breathes. Speaks.

‘S-stop,’ Efrayl says, holding up the pistol I gave him in shaking hands.

‘Efrayl,’ I say raggedly. ‘It’s me.’

‘Ahri?’ he says.

I nod. ‘Ahri.’

He lowers the pistol slowly and puts it down in his lap. Efrayl’s pale face is a mess of deep, ugly cuts. Deep enough to see through to the workings beneath his skin. His tunic and trousers are soaked black with blood.

‘Is she alive?’ I ask.

Efrayl picks up a device from the floor beside him. An external monitron, with a blood-splattered screen. He smears the blood obscuring the display with his thumb, and then nods.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She is alive.’

I go to my knees, then, from the impact of his words alone. A single tear rolls down my cheek, hot and stinging. ‘You kept her safe,’ I say.

He nods, a lolling motion of his head. ‘You said to shoot anyone who tried to get to her,’ he says thickly. ‘So I did.’

I look around at those he killed. At the makeshift weapons in their hands. Bits of broken glass, and cutting tools.

‘You did well, Efrayl.’

He nods again. His breathing is ragged and fitful. ‘What you said before, about switching off the machine,’ he says. ‘Did you mean it?’

I glance up at Sofika, coiled in the cables of her machine. My dream-taker. My soulmate. The only person who knows exactly what I am and what I’ve done, and still has the heart to smile at the sight of me.

‘She won’t suffer any more,’ I say, looking back at Efrayl. ‘Not after Dimmamar.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘That is good.’

‘Thank you, Efrayl,’ I say. ‘For everything you have done.’

He smiles faintly. ‘I did my best,’ he says, between breaths. ‘That’s all.’

And then my medicae takes a rasping breath and starts to shake just like Sofika did before. A seizure.

I try to get up to help him, but my legs won’t obey me and neither will my lungs. They are so shallow now that I can’t get air at all. I fall properly onto the deck, face down. Zoric runs over and crouches down beside me. He rolls me onto my back and puts his hand to that wound in my side and I hear him shout at Yumia to run for a medicae. I try to tell him that I don’t need one. That it doesn’t hurt, really. That I just need a moment. But the words won’t come. I don’t have enough air to speak them. I can’t move. Can’t breathe. All that I can do is lie still on my back and watch as Sofika’s stars disappear from the edges inwards, swallowed by darkness.

Evangeline

The furious eyes of the crewman go wide and white as I cut him down with my sword. The man falls to his knees, still murmuring. Still trying to claw at my vestments and my armour with bloodied hands.

‘I saw it,’ he slurs. ‘T-the abyss.’

Then the man chokes and shudders and falls silent. Falls onto his face. Blood spreads slowly from beneath him towards me.

‘This is a cruel duty.’

The words belong to Haskia, and she does not speak them to me, but to herself, as she looks down at the body at her own feet. One clad in the white remnants of medicae clothes.

‘This is the price of failure,’ Qi-Oh says.

She lowers her chainsword slowly, the teeth still turning. They are stained dark, as is the deck. As are the walls of the corridor. As are my gauntleted hands. The smell of all of that blood washes over me, carried on the warm, wet air of the lowdecks. It smells sour, and old. Rotten.

‘It is a mercy,’ I say, to both of them. ‘Nothing more.’

Haskia nods slowly. Qi-Oh says nothing. None of my Sisters do. No words. No praises. Just solemn silence. I turn to Ashava. Her face is streaked with dirt, her eyes turned gold by her flamer’s pilot light. Beyond her the corridor is littered with the bodies of vassals and ship’s crew. Of serfs and savants. Of those like the crewman I just killed, who could not stand the sight of the abyss. Who gave in to madness and murder the moment the lights went out. Disgust blooms outwards from my core, but the emotion is not alone. Another feeling clings to it, inseparable.

Guilt.

‘Sister Superior?’ Ashava says. ‘Your orders?’

I tear my eyes from the bodies and look at her.

‘Burn them,’ I say, just as I have in every chamber and every corridor before this one.

Ashava nods and hefts her flamer as I turn away to continue on into the ship. I hear the rush of flame at my back even as I hear more screaming from up ahead. Those same few strangled words that echo through the hollow bones of the Unbroken Vow on every deck. In every chamber, hall and corridor.

I saw it.

I saw the abyss.

It takes three hours for my Sisters and I to cut our way through to the place that we saw in the mirror-daemon’s crystal skin.

Just like everywhere else, the corridor that leads to the lowdecks chapel is littered with the dead. Here, though, mercy has already been given. The cruel duty already done. The bodies of the lost have already been burned, reduced to little more than black stains on the decking. The air is cooler here, too. It smells of smoke and burning, and it carries on it the sound of voices. Of singing.

Of my Sisters.

I pick up my pace, and so do the rest of my squad. Smoke billows and coils around us as we reach the lowdecks chapel and go inside. This place too is anointed with ashes. The fleurs-de-lys pinned to the wall are all grey with it. But in amongst the ruin and destruction I see them. My Sisters are bruised and battered, their vestments torn, but they are still standing. I was right. What the daemon showed us was a lie. Relief rushes through me like cold, clean air and I cross the chapel to greet them. I start to smile. Open my mouth to speak. But then I realise that I am looking at four Sisters and not five. That I see Joti and Veridia. Sarita and Munari.

But not Calyth.

‘Where is she?’ Qi-Oh asks the question before I can. She is right beside me despite her injuries, her voice as taut as the muscles in her face. ‘Where is Calyth?’

Not one of them says a word, they merely step aside to let us see the shallow steps leading up to the chancel. Calyth lies on her back on the steps, her armour punctured and split. Scored, by dozens of blades. Blood has spread around her like the wings of the saint, running down the steps in thin red rivulets. Her hair is dyed dark by it.

Qi-Oh lurches forwards as if she is being propelled. She goes to her knees beside Calyth on the steps and puts out her hand, resting it on her fallen Sister’s brow. I do not move. Nor do I look away. I am held in place by an ugly, shameful feeling. One that has no place in the chapel, or in my heart.

Envy.

‘How did it happen?’ I ask.

‘The darkness drove them mad,’ Joti says, without a trace of a smile in her voice. ‘The crew. The vassals. Even the chapel wardens and the priests.’

‘She was killed by civilians,’ Qi-Oh says, without looking up. ‘By those she was sworn to protect.’

‘Yes,’ Sarita says, and she nods. Her slender face is a mess. Her nose is badly broken, and her left ear has been as good as torn off. ‘They were many.’

‘And we were few,’ says Munari. She is as much a mess as her twin, her lips split and ragged, and her teeth pinked with blood.

Qi-Oh looks up. Not at Joti, Sarita or Munari, but at me.

‘You need not have been,’ she says. ‘You should not have been.’

‘Qi-Oh.’ I say her name in warning, but she ignores me. Instead Qi-Oh gets to her feet and stalks down the steps towards me. She is breathing fitfully from her injuries, and from her anger.

‘Daemons lie,’ she snarls. ‘That is what you said.’

‘It is the truth.’

‘Calyth is dead!’

Qi-Oh bellows the words. They echo around the ruined chapel, and echo between us, too. I stare at her in disbelief.

‘Death in battle is an honour,’ I say. ‘The greatest honour.’

Qi-Oh stands there a moment just breathing, her shoulders rising and falling with it.

‘Evangeline is right, Sister,’ Joti says to her, softly. ‘Death draws the God-Emperor’s eye to us. It is a blessing. You know this.’

Qi-Oh does not look at her. Her eyes stay locked on mine. One crimson, and one hazel. There’s a slim line through the blood and ash on her face where a tear has painted it clean. A rivulet, like Calyth’s blood on the steps.

‘Not like this,’ she says. ‘Not this death.’

And then Qi-Oh strides past me, heading for the chapel exit. Joti tries to stop her, as does Ashava, but I hold my hand up.

‘Let her go,’ I say.

And they do, allowing Qi-Oh to leave the chapel without another word. All falls quiet, then, save for the Vow’s creaking and the stirring of thousands of votive flowers. I sheathe my sword, and approach Calyth’s body. I kneel beside her and take hold of the sleeve of my vestments, tearing away a strip of the crimson fabric. I fold it three times to make a fleur-de-lys and place it in Calyth’s hand before closing her fingers around it gently. I look at her face. Despite the manner of her death, Calyth’s expression is peaceful. Beatific. As if she is looking up into warm sunlight.

‘Taken unto Him, sword in hand,’ I say.

From behind me, seven voices speak as one.

‘May her blade never dull.’

I stand then, and turn away from the chancel and from Calyth, lying still in her meadow made of ash-coloured flowers. My Sisters look to me, expectant.

‘Sister Superior,’ Ashava says. ‘Your orders?’

I hesitate before answering, my jaw aching.

‘Burn them,’ I say.

We cut and we kill and we burn our way from one end of the Unbroken Vow to the other, sparing the few members of the ship’s crew that we can and delivering mercy to the rest. Our cruel duty takes us through the ship’s gunnery decks and the crew billets. Through respite areas and training halls. Through furnace chambers and fighter berths. Like my Sisters, my ammunition quickly runs dry, leaving me with nothing but my sword. The blade weighs heavy in my hand, almost completely blackened from use, making the words engraved there illegible.

Some resist the mercy we bring. Those for whom the line was already drawn, who gave in willingly at the sight of devils from the abyss. They fight and claw, their eyes rolled back to white and their jaws slack and unhinged. But they are the minority. Most of those who failed do not resist. Instead they plead for death, pressing their bloodied hands to my armour. They weep and they speak my name, though I have not given it to them. They thank me. With each utterance and with each kill I feel that same ugly envy I felt over Calyth’s death, and the beatific look on her face. I grow more empty with it. Hollow, like the halls of the ship without the crew to fill them.

Qi-Oh does not return, and I do not vox for her. I tell myself it is because I am allowing her temper to cool, but in truth I am just unsure what I would say to her if I did hail her. In the wake of the battle, I am unsure of everything. The decisions I made during the fight. The blade in my hand. My purpose, and my destiny. But I can speak of this to no one. To doubt is to sin. So I do not speak. I do not stop. I do what I have been bidden, leading my Sisters as we cut and kill and burn what is left until we finally reach the ship’s stern, and the armourers’ workhall.

Inside, the workhall is dark. There are no candles. No lumens. Particles of ice turn and glitter under our stablight beams. Save for that, it is still as the grave.

‘I hear no screaming,’ Ashava says. ‘No blasphemous words.’

I listen a moment, my sword held in guard. Ashava is right. There are no screams, but there is another sound carrying on the air.

Sobbing.

‘With me,’ I say, and I follow the sound past the hollow, half-built armour suits, and the racks and racks of weapons. My breathing mists the air, and my boots crush the rough, heavy frost that has formed underfoot.

There are bodies here, too. Stories told in bloody handprints that streak along the walls and the edges of workstations. My heart sinks at the sight of it, and only sinks further still when I finally come upon the source of the sobbing. A woman sitting with her shoulders hunched, cross-legged on the floor. She is void-born thin, with long, augmetic fingers. Another woman lies sprawled out on the deck in front of her, her limbs bent in ways they shouldn’t, a pool of blood slowly painting itself wider around her.

‘Wait here,’ I say to the others.

My Sisters hold position as I approach the two women. One sobbing, and one still.

‘Wyllo,’ I say.

My armourer turns and looks up at me, her dark eyes wide in the lambent light cast by my sword’s power field. Wyllo’s pale face is streaked with blood. Darker than darkness.

None of it hers.

‘M-my lady,’ she says, prostrating herself before me, hands flat on the frozen deck.

‘You needn’t bow,’ I say softly.

Wyllo sits back on her bended knees and looks up at me. ‘The Geller field. It–’

‘Flickered,’ I say. ‘I know. Did you see it? The abyss that waits beyond?’

Wyllo nods. A muscular tic pulls her lips back from her teeth. ‘It saw me,’ she says. ‘Saw all of us.’

Wyllo looks to her left, where Dallia lies, broken.

‘She wouldn’t stop screaming,’ she says absently. ‘On and on. I had to make her stop.’

My heart more than sinks then. It collapses slowly, like fuel at the heart of a fire.

‘You killed her,’ I say.

‘I can still hear it,’ Wyllo says. ‘I shouldn’t be able to hear it.’

She looks up at me again, tears spilling from her edgeless eyes. She gets to her feet, unsteadily.

‘M-make it stop,’ she says. ‘Please.’

That tic is worse now, baring her teeth for her. Her hands are curling into tight, shaking fists.

‘Inventi sumus in fide,’ she stammers, looking at my blade. ‘In faith, we are found.’

‘Yes, we are.’

And then I take hold of her and plunge my sword into her chest. A heart-strike. A clean kill.

A mercy.

Wyllo coughs blood. Struggles for air. Then the life goes out of her eyes. I pull the blade free and lower her to the deck gently, so that she is lying beside Dallia. I hear footsteps at my back. Slow, and uneven. Ashava kneels beside me, though it must hurt her to do it. She does not speak, and nor do I, but something breaks the silence in our stead. The solemn, distant tolling of the Vow’s bells.

‘Eight bells,’ Ashava says, when it stops.

I look down at the sword in my hand. At the blackening of the powered blade.

‘I would have called it later,’ I say softly.

Ravara

I wake, for the first time in a long time, without a dream clinging to me. I am lying flat on my back, as I was when the darkness took me, but there are no false stars overhead now. The light that shines in my eyes in their place is bright and stark and flickering. It makes my eyes stream and I have to blink to clear them. The walls around me are clad with whitewashed flakboard panels that are blood-spattered and scuffed, marked with the distinctive scorching patterns left behind by las-fire.

The hospitaller’s ward, then. I take a deep breath and smell incense and counterseptic. Blood and metal. And second-hand lho-smoke.

I let my head loll to the side and see Zoric asleep sitting up in a chair by my cot. I can’t have been out long, because the bruises on his face haven’t turned black yet. I sit up slowly and look around to see that save for Zoric I am alone in the small, single room. There are no medicae staff. No Sisters Hospitaller. Nor is there any sign of Yumia, or Efrayl. There’s no machine.

No Sofika.

My heart starts thundering and I lurch upright and out of the cot. The instant my bare feet hit the cold deck my head starts spinning and shooting pains lance up and down my body from the wound in my side. I lose my balance, falling against the bank of monitron readers and the equipment trays, sending needles and cutting blades to the floor with a clatter. Zoric wakes with a start at the sound of it. He gets up and out of his chair and grabs hold of me by the arm to keep me from falling.

‘Throne,’ he says. ‘Are you mad?’

He tries to get me to sit back down, but I fight him.

‘Where is she?’ I ask. ‘Where is Sofika?’

‘She’s safe,’ he says, holding onto my shoulders. ‘She’s all right.’

I stop my fighting and search Zoric’s face. He doesn’t look as though he’s lying, but then again, they never do. Not in dreams. I reach up and take hold of the pendant around my neck.

‘It’s true,’ Zoric says. ‘You’re not dreaming, lord.’

I ignore him, tightening my grip around the iron-pointed skull until it breaks the skin. Until it hurts. I look down at my hand as I uncurl my fingers and my heart slows to normal at the sight of the ten points of blood in my palm.

‘Seems not,’ I say absently.

‘It’s getting harder for you to tell the difference, isn’t it?’

I ignore the question. ‘Tell me where she is.’

‘Not far from here,’ he says. ‘The hospitallers brought her up from the lowdecks, machine and all. They are watching over her now in Efrayl’s place.’

My hand aches as I let it fall by my side, and I am surprised when my heart does too. Just a little.

‘He’s dead, then,’ I say.

Zoric nods. ‘He’s dead.’

I sit back down on the edge of the cot slowly. ‘And Yumia?’

Zoric drops into the folding chair. He looks exhausted. Wounded, in a way that isn’t just physical.

‘Salting her wounds, if I had to guess. She helped me carry you up here, and then she vanished.’

‘She didn’t say anything?’

He shakes his head. ‘Not a word.’

‘She’s angry.’

Zoric fixes me with his pale, bloodshot eyes. ‘So am I,’ he says. ‘Yumia and I would have protected Sofika too, you know, if you’d let us.’

I stare at him. ‘Careful, Danil,’ I say.

Zoric shakes his head. ‘You looked us in the eyes and told us she was dead,’ he says. ‘We stood together on the Pandion’s observation deck and gave her memory up to the stars. We mourned her. Bid her goodbye. And all the while you had her hidden in the underdecks. Hidden from us.’

The memory rushes back, overwhelming. Standing under all of those tiny lights as we sent a casket containing Sofika’s weapons out to spend eternity amongst the stars. Zoric and Yumia didn’t say a word. They let me speak the eulogy because of what Sofika was to me. And with every utterance my heart grew colder, until it felt like little more than a mountain stone.

‘I don’t need to explain myself to you,’ I tell him.

‘No,’ he says, his voice hard-edged with anger. ‘You don’t. Because it’s obvious why you did it. You’re going to tell me it’s about finding the Conduit. That it’s about duty. But it’s not. Not entirely. You kept Sofika alive because you couldn’t bear to let her go, because you love her. And you kept it a secret from the two of us because you blame yourself for what happened.’

‘Because it was my fault!’

I don’t mean to say it, much less shout it. The words just roll up like a storm front. Like thunder. Unstoppable. In the wake of them I feel as though I can breathe more easily. As though the air has changed to make way for rain. Zoric has changed, too. When he speaks again, his voice has lost all of its edges.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he says.

I shake my head. ‘I led you all to Hellebore on the promise of my dreams,’ I tell him.

‘Because you believed it,’ he says. ‘We all did. None of us saw the truth of it. The danger.’

‘You aren’t meant to,’ I say, my voice hoarse. ‘Nor is Yumia, or Sofika. I am the one who is meant to see. To prevent death, and destruction.’

I look down at my hands. At the blood dried into the creases of them. Some of it mine. Some of it theirs.

‘I felt it,’ I tell him. ‘From the moment we set foot on Hellebore I knew that something was wrong, but I pressed on regardless because I so desperately wanted to be right. Because I swore to Sofika long ago that we would find the Conduit, together. But I was wrong. I led you all into darkness and I almost got Sofika killed because I allowed myself to be fooled. The Resonance. The Conduit. It was all a lie.’ I shake my head again. ‘It was all what they wanted me to see.’

‘They,’ Zoric echoes. ‘You’re talking about the warp, aren’t you? About devils and ghosts, like those we faced in the Chamber Awaiting. That’s what we found on Hellebore. That’s why you took our memories.’

I think about the gateway opening overhead, and the horrors crawling out of it. About the sorcerer in his serpent’s mask, his voice like shifting sand.

Not yet.

‘Not just devils and ghosts,’ I tell him. ‘Something worse.’

Zoric’s pale eyes are wide and wary. ‘What could be worse than devils?’ he asks.

‘The Archenemy,’ I say. ‘Ancient warriors sworn to false gods, led by a sorcerer clad in cobalt and gold.’

Zoric stares at me. ‘Cobalt and gold,’ he says. ‘With a serpent’s mask.’

I watch him carefully. ‘You do remember.’

He sits back in his chair, his hands loose in his lap. ‘Just the mask,’ he says. ‘I dream about it sometimes. Wake up fighting for air and I don’t know why. Yumia is the same.’ He shakes his head as if he’s trying to shake out the memory. ‘You said that they showed you what you wanted to see. Why?’

The sorcerer’s words echo in my head again.

Not yet.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell him. ‘But I allowed myself to be blinded. Fooled. And Sofika paid the price.’

‘That’s why you ordered Efrayl to spare her,’ Zoric says.

I shake my head, remembering. ‘When we brought Sofika back on board the Pandion, Efrayl said that he could save her life. He told me the cost. That she would be bound to the machine. That it would breathe for her and bleed for her. That she would never walk again. That it would only be a temporary measure, and that eventually even the machine would stop working and she would die anyway.’ I shake my head again. ‘I looked at what my blindness had done to her and I wanted to tell him no, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.’

‘So what happened?’ he asks.

I remember it. Efrayl looking at me, desperate, blood-soaked to the elbows. Sofika lying there in pieces, her pale hair matted with blood and her mountain-sky eyes growing distant and dim.

Even then, she still smiled at the sight of me.

‘Sofika spoke before I could,’ I tell him. ‘She said that we swore to find the Conduit, together, no matter the cost.’ I take a breath, and close my hands into fists. ‘I tried to tell her no. That this was too much. But she wouldn’t have it. She gave me an answer that she knew I couldn’t deny.’

‘What was that?’ Zoric asks.

I don’t think of almost losing her, then. I don’t think of Hellebore. I think of a wide night sky through viewport glassaic. Of starlight, and the warmth of Sofika’s hand in mine.

‘That we do not break vows.’

‘Ahri,’ Zoric says softly. Not lord, or sire, but my given name. I don’t pull him up on it. Not this time.

‘So I must do this,’ I tell him. ‘I have to find the Conduit, and make this right. I can still make it right.’ I look up at him. ‘I don’t expect you to understand.’

His pale eyes go flat like glass. ‘You know that I do,’ he says. ‘I’ve made promises, too. I’ve lost everything trying to keep them.’

Zoric looks down at his own hands, and the burn scars criss-crossing them.

‘Have I ever told you what happened to them?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I reply, knowing he’s having to ask because he can’t be sure. Because it might be a memory I’ve taken from him, like Hellebore and so many others.

He takes a slow breath and nods. ‘I told Idoney and Tian that one day we’d make it out of the sinks and the spires. That we’d go off-world. Leave Vyze behind for somewhere better.’

He rolls the sleeve of his jacket back to the elbow, where the burn scarring gives way to another mark. An older one. A brand, in the shape of two crossed daggers surrounded by fire.

‘Everyone on Vyze is sworn to one House or another,’ he says. ‘You make product for them, or you run guns. You intimidate or you kill for them. Whatever you’re good at, you do it for the Houses.’ A half-hearted smile flickers on his face. ‘It’s how I met Idoney in the first place.’

‘She was a mercenary?’

‘Gunsmith,’ he says. ‘A good one, too. Idoney knew how things worked. How to take something that was damaged or dangerous or badly made and make it better. Get twice the worth out of it.’

‘It sounds like you’re talking about more than guns.’

He smiles again in that same way. In a way that doesn’t last.

‘I’d never known anything but the Houses and the work,’ he says. ‘Killing, and coin. But when I was with Idoney and Tian, I felt like I could be more than that.’

I think about the viewport glass. A sky full of stars.

‘As if you could be good, too,’ I say. ‘Not just what you’d been made into.’

He nods. ‘So we started talking about leaving Vyze. About what it would take. I kept back a little from every job, and so did she. I took more jobs, too. Worse jobs. All of the bloodiest ones. Idoney made timepieces and clockwork toys. Anything she could make with spares and sell without consequences. But it wasn’t just coin we needed. It was a moment, too. The moment. Nobody walks away from the Houses on Vyze. If we chose badly, they’d kill us. All of us.’

‘So you waited.’

‘For years,’ he says. ‘Long enough for Tian to start talking. Understanding things. To start asking where I went at night, and what I did.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘That I was a soldier,’ Zoric says. ‘He believed me, because why wouldn’t he? Begged Idoney again and again to build him one out of spares. It took her weeks to gather the pieces and put it together. A little clockwork soldier with a flashpin that made the lasgun barrel light up.’ He opens and closes his hand, miming the on-off action of the light. ‘I came back late one night after a bad job. A killing, for the lord’s son. Idoney was sitting on the floor with Tian while he made the little soldier march up and down the floorboards, over and over. He was laughing and smiling and so was she. Something about seeing them like that changed things. Changed me. I thought that was it. The moment.’

He pauses. Shakes his head.

‘I told Idoney to get Tian ready while I went down to the portlands to find an off-worlder. Someone who wasn’t of Vyze. Wasn’t of the Houses. I gave nearly everything we had to a rogue trader for passage for three on his black market junker. And then I went back to the hab to fetch them.’

He takes a breath. I know what he’s going to say, because of his scars and how we found him. Because he might not have told me the story, but Sofika has. She couldn’t help but see it all written on his soul, the moment she met him.

‘When I got back, I found two crossed daggers painted on the outside wall of our hab. I tried the door, but it was locked. I shouted for them, but they didn’t answer. So I broke it down.’

He pauses. Flexes his burn-scarred hands.

‘They must have cut a leak into the gas lines, because the whole place went up like that.’ He snaps his fingers. ‘I tried to get to them, but I couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. I fell. Blacked out.’

His voice has changed. Turned low and soft. Distant.

‘When I came to I thought it was snowing because of all the ash and the dust. I was covered in it, head to toe. The ceiling had come down in places and the walls had folded like parchment. It all missed me, somehow. I got up and dug through the debris until my hands were bloody, but I couldn’t find Idoney. Couldn’t find Tian.’ He shakes his head, and puts his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘All that was left was this.’

He holds out his hand and I take what he offers me. It’s a tin box the size of a lho-stick pack. I open the lid to see something inside made of silver and brass. Of spares. The little clockwork soldier’s limbs are fused and frozen, and the paint is all but gone, but when I press on the lasgun I see the flashpin flicker.

On.

Off.

‘She knew how to make things work,’ he says. ‘Even when they shouldn’t.’

I hold out the box. Zoric takes it back and looks at it once more before closing the lid and putting it back in his jacket pocket. His hand lingers in that place a while. Just over his heart.

‘If you could bring them back, would you?’ I ask him.

‘Of course I would,’ he says. ‘But you can’t go back. Can’t change what’s done.’

‘What if you could?’

He drops his hand into his lap. ‘You believe you can do that for Sofika, don’t you?’ he asks. ‘That it’ll be part of the deal when we find the Conduit.’

I nod. ‘My dreams told me so.’

Zoric sits forward in his chair. ‘Then you have to make it happen,’ he says. ‘Take the chance.’ He shakes his head. ‘I couldn’t keep my promise, but I want to help you keep yours. I want to prove that I can be more than what they made me. That I can be good, or something like it.’

I think about the things I have done in the name of my dreams. The blood on my hands.

‘Perhaps both of us can,’ I say.

Zoric nods, then he gets up out of the chair and offers me his hand.

‘I can show you to where she is sleeping,’ he says.

I hesitate a moment before I reach out. Before I accept his help.

‘I can’t stop,’ I tell him. ‘I won’t. Not until it’s done.’

‘I know,’ he says.

Then I take hold of his hand and let him pull me to my feet.

Sofika’s new chambers are a long way sternward, right at the far end of the hospitaller’s ward. It’s so far that even with a cane to support me, Zoric has to help me walk there. The room is sealed behind a voice-printed bulkhead door, with a heavy spinning lock. When Zoric opens it I see that the chamber is clean and quiet, even if it is small enough to be dominated by Sofika’s machine. The lighting has failed here as it has across the rest of the ship, but there are lit candles in the wall-sconces and in shallow dishes all around the foot of the machine. Tiny lights, to watch over her while she sleeps. The lambent glow lights my dream-taker in warm tones, turning her pale hair to gold and putting colour back in her cheeks.

‘The candles,’ I say to Zoric. ‘Was that you?’

He nods. ‘I know she likes the stars,’ he says.

I think about that night on the Pandion. The warmth of her hand in mine.

‘She does,’ I reply.

‘I’ll let you be,’ he says. ‘Vox for me when you’d like to go back, lord.’

I nod, and he goes, closing the door behind him. With the bulkhead sealed, it is silent in the room save for the flickering of the candles and the breathing of Sofika’s machine. I take an ungraceful step closer to her, only then noticing the torn scrap of parchment tacked to the machine. The script on it is dense, and hurried. Illithian. I know enough of Yumia’s home world and customs to recognise it as a warding script. One for safety. It’s a kindness, as much as it is for Zoric to light the candles. A sign that no matter what they might think of me, both members of my retinue care deeply for Sofika Vorros.

‘I should have told them sooner,’ I say, though Sofika cannot hope to hear it.

‘You couldn’t have, Ahri.’

My father’s voice echoes, though the room is too small to carry it far. He steps up to stand beside me, looking up at Sofika’s machine. The candlefire reflects in his eyes, making them even more golden.

‘They react badly now. Imagine how it would have been when the grief was raw,’ he says. ‘Sorrow can make people do terrible things.’

‘I think that might be the truest thing I have ever heard,’ I say.

He nods. ‘The light makes her look whole again.’

‘Like she was before,’ I say.

‘As she will be again, after Dimmamar.’

I glance at my father. There is little point in using the pendant to determine if I am awake or asleep, as it doesn’t seem to matter where he is concerned.

‘You shouldn’t be here.’

He smiles and it blurs his edges, making him hazy like the dawnrise, or an overexposed pict. ‘I told you before, I am wherever you go.’

‘Because we only leave one another behind by choice,’ I reply.

My father nods.

My eyes go back to Sofika, sleeping. The candles flicker and wend, casting long, shifting shadows. ‘I know that you aren’t real,’ I say. ‘That you are made up of my memories, and dreams, but I need to tell you something.’

My father laughs softly, but he doesn’t challenge me. ‘What is it?’

I think of that dawnrise, so long ago. Of the spire tower and his still form. Of birds, turning their wings.

‘I saw your death,’ I tell him. ‘The night before it happened. But I kept it to myself. I convinced myself it was just a dream.’

‘I know,’ he says softly, because of course he knows. Because he is made of my memories and dreams, and nothing more. Even so, I still find myself breathing a heavy sigh. Apologising.

‘I am sorry,’ I tell him. ‘Truly.’

My father looks at me. He puts his hand on my arm, though it should be impossible. His image flickers.

‘I am not,’ he says, and his voice is flickering too. Distorted. ‘Some things need to die, Ahri. They have to, to ensure the future.’

He looks back at Sofika.

‘And some things don’t.’

I don’t blink or look away, but I miss the moment he vanishes, anyway. Some of the candles go out with him, so I set about relighting them one at a time. It takes a long time with the cane, and the injuries, and how shallow my breathing still is. When it is done, I lower myself slowly into a sitting position in front of Sofika’s machine. Cross-legged, like when I would sit and watch the dawnrise. Like when we would sit and watch the stars.

Evangeline

The hospitaller’s ward is a ruin.

Over half of the antechambers are locked down, or sealed behind closed bulkheads. Some are guarded. Those that are still in service are crowded with the wounded and the dying. With those who cannot stop weeping, or pulling at their hair. Sisters Hospitaller pace to and fro unceasingly, healing and soothing. Giving mercy.

‘There are so many,’ Ashava says, looking out across the chamber.

I do the same, but I cannot see Eugenia. I do see a familiar figure, though. One clad in hospitaller’s robes, her long hair bound up with a series of rings. I pick my way through to Sister Lourette with Ashava at my side. The Sister Hospitaller’s gloves and smock are slick with blood. Her face and hair are dashed with it as though she has been anointed. When I speak her name over the noise and she looks up, I see that her pale eyes are circled with shadows.

‘Evangeline,’ she says, and she smiles as you might at the dawn. With relief.

‘I am looking for Sister Eugenia. She was wounded during the incursions,’ I say.

She was wounded to spare me, I think.

Lourette nods, removing her bloodied plastek gloves with a snap. ‘Come with me,’ she says.

As Ashava and I follow Lourette through the chamber, I notice a change in the people around us. A quiet that spreads like fire does, tracking quickly through the chamber in the wake of our passing. And then, a moment later, a chorus of whispers.

‘Evangeline,’ they say. ‘Evangeline.’

Ashava’s limping pace slows, and she looks around the chamber. ‘They speak your name,’ she says, as if I cannot hear it.

I do not slow my pace. I do not look around. I cannot bear to.

‘I know,’ I say.

The antechamber in which Eugenia is being cared for is reserved for those of the Sisterhood. It is small, and spare, and blessedly quieter than the main wards. Nobody here whispers my name. Lourette indicates where Eugenia is resting.

Eugenia is sitting upright in her cot, her head bowed. Her face is patchworked with bruising, her left eye concealed by thick pads of sterile dressing that are taped to her cheek and to her scalp. They have had to cut away a good deal of her hair to do it. More bandages show at the collar of her gown, and around her slender arms.

‘Most of her wounds will heal with time and with treatment,’ Lourette says, in a low voice.

As I watch, Eugenia lifts her hand and moves it from left to right, in and out of her narrowed field of vision.

‘And the eye?’ I ask.

‘It was too badly damaged to save,’ Lourette says. ‘We have replaced it with an augmetic. It is crude, but much kinder than the alternative.’

It is the answer I was expecting, but it settles on me like a penitent’s weight nonetheless. Ashava is discomforted by it too. By the word replace. I can feel it in the way she shifts her weight from one foot to the other as the vox-bead Lourette is wearing pips insistently.

‘I must return to my duties,’ the Sister Hospitaller says.

I nod and thank her. Lourette bows her head and goes, leaving Ashava and me alone with the wounded. With Eugenia.

I approach her cot, slowly. Speak her name. Eugenia’s hand falls away from her bandaged eye, and her face lifts to look for me. She throws back the sheet and stands before I can stop her. Eugenia wavers on her feet, but she does not fall. She salutes me, instead. One bandaged hand over her heart.

‘Sister Superior,’ she says, her hoarse voice carrying the same misplaced awe as the whispers did on the other wards. She looks to Ashava next, and nods. Smiles, as best she can. ‘Sister Ashava,’ she says.

Ashava nods in return. ‘Hello, Geni,’ she says.

Eugenia looks back at me. She does that as best she can, too. Her good eye is so lidded by the bruising that it is almost closed.

‘You broke the monster of mirrors,’ she says. ‘Spared the Navigator.’

I nod. ‘The Navigators Awaiting were killed, but the Lady Oraylis will sail. She will get us clear of the Rift.’

Eugenia nods. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘Qi-Oh said as much, when she came to see me.’

I blink. ‘When was she here?’

‘Before the ringing of the bells,’ she says. ‘She told me of the purgation. That she left the lowdecks, though she shouldn’t have.’

‘She told you of Calyth,’ I say.

Eugenia nods. ‘Qi-Oh said it was an ugly death. Meaningless.’ She shakes her head and frowns, as much as her injuries allow. ‘But there are no ugly deaths. No meaningless deaths. To die is to know His grace. To have served the purpose He set for you. You cannot reach the God-Emperor’s side otherwise.’ She pauses, and looks at me, her good eye fixed on mine. ‘Is that not so?’

My heart thumps slowly in my chest, and I find that I cannot answer her.

‘Yes,’ Ashava says, in my stead. ‘Of course that is so. We all know it.’

‘Qi-Oh knows it, too,’ I say belatedly, feeling as though I am talking about myself as much as I am her. ‘I will speak with her. But first I must know of you, Sister. How do you feel?’

What I can see of Eugenia’s face flushes. Her hand strays up towards her bandaged eye.

‘There is some pain from the eye,’ she says. ‘But such is to be expected, given the trauma, and the work done to replace it.’ She pauses. ‘It is hard to sleep with an eye that won’t close, but the Sisters Hospitaller say that is to be expected, too. That it will get easier as I grow used to it.’

I try not to imagine it. Eugenia lying awake, waiting for sleep that never comes.

‘How long until you may return to service?’ I ask.

Eugenia frowns again. ‘The hospitallers say a fortnight, to allow time for the augmetic to settle. Though I do not know how I can grow used to something without using it.’

‘I will speak with them, as well,’ I tell her.

She smiles faintly. ‘That is a kindness, Sister Superior,’ she says, and then her smile falls away again. ‘Though I fear it is one I do not deserve.’

It is my turn to frown. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You asked me to defend you in the Navigation quarter,’ Eugenia says.

My frown deepens. ‘You did defend me,’ I tell her.

‘I allowed the creature to land a blow,’ she says. ‘To knock me down. I left you exposed, and then I lay here sleeping while you undertook the purgation.’

‘You did more than defend me,’ I tell her. ‘You spent your blood and sacrificed your sight to get me close enough to kill it.’

‘And that is enough?’ Eugenia asks, her voice a whisper.

I remember asking Adelynn the same question all those years ago as we looked over the convent’s spires and the sun sank low in the sky. I remember how I felt as I asked it. The yearning for approval. For a place. For a purpose.

For a family.

I realise then that the hollowness at the heart of me has always been there, really. That I was merely made whole for a time by my Sisters. By Adelynn. By acceptance. A temporary fix, like a mortar patch for broken stone. I cannot show that, though. Not to Eugenia. Not even to Ashava. So instead I nod.

‘You did well, Eugenia,’ I tell her.

Before I can react, or prevent her, Eugenia moves. She embraces me, though it must hurt her to do it. It certainly hurts me.

‘Thank you, Sister Superior,’ she says, and that hurts me too. Not because of my wounds, but because of that hollowness at the heart of me.

‘She looks up to you, Eva.’

Ashava says the words to me the moment we leave the hospitaller’s ward and go back out into the spinal corridor. It is half-dark, the deck fouled by filthy water from leaks and breaches. The air is soured with the smell of it. That, and the smell of blood coming from the waiting wounded. There are dozens upon dozens of them, all sitting huddled against the walls, bruised and bandaged and as filthy as the water on the deck. As we pass by, the people fall quiet, just like before. The whispering of my name begins again, a constant susurrus like oath-papers caught by the wind. Just like before, I cannot stand the sound of it.

‘As I once looked up to Adelynn,’ I reply. ‘I know.’

‘It sounds as though that troubles you,’ Ashava says.

I stop walking and look back at her.

‘All of this troubles me.’

I find Qi-Oh in one of the lowdeck training halls. The same one where we fought before. When I enter the chamber she is not training, or pacing. She is not moving at all. Qi-Oh kneels in the heart of the training circle with her head bowed, tending to the toothed blade of her chainsword with a set of precision tools. All around her lie the remains of combat servitors that have been hacked to pieces. The deck is slick with oil and vitae, but I see as I approach her that not a drop of either has crossed the circle’s edge.

‘Sister Superior,’ Qi-Oh says, without looking up. Her tone is cold.

‘So you do recognise my rank.’

She raises her head and looks at me. Her eyes are cold, too. ‘Are you here to reprimand me?’

I try to think for a moment how Adelynn would answer such a question, but I realise swiftly that I do not know, because I never once saw her disobeyed, or disregarded. Not once.

‘You would deserve it,’ I say. ‘You disobeyed me, Qi-Oh. You let your anger get the better of you.’

‘My anger,’ she says. ‘You know nothing of my anger.’

Qi-Oh gets to her feet, standing a head taller than me, her chainsword held loose in her gauntleted hand.

‘Daemons lie, Qi-Oh,’ she says. ‘That is what you said.’ She starts to pace the circle, her voice hoarse and raised. She punctuates every word by pointing her finger at me. ‘But you are the one who lied.’

‘I have never lied to you.’

‘You promised me vengeance!’ she shouts. ‘In the chapel. In this circle. You swore it.’

‘Enough!’ I shout back at her. ‘I will not have this from you, Qi-Oh.’

I stare her down.

‘I asked you before we set sail for the Throneworld if you had quarrel with me, and you told me no. Yet you looked me in the eyes and disobeyed my direct orders. You put all of our lives at risk for the sake of your own pride.’

Qi-Oh stops her pacing. ‘Pride,’ she says, in a low, dangerous voice. ‘You think this is about pride?’

She approaches me, stopping just short of crossing the circle.

‘Calyth is dead,’ she says. ‘She was hacked apart by weaklings. By those who shed their faith like a cloak the moment the darkness got close. And for what?’

I hold her stare. ‘For the sake of our duty.’

Qi-Oh shakes her head. Her hazel eye is glossy. ‘No,’ she snarls. ‘It’s all for your sake. The slaughter. Calyth’s death. Everything. It is all because of you.’

Those last six words echo in the hollowness of the training hall. They seem to echo in my head, too. To settle heavily on me, like the cloak on my back and the sword at my hip.

Like the blood, all over my hands.

‘You’re right.’

Qi-Oh blinks. She lowers her sword, just a little.

‘What did you say?’ she asks.

‘I said that you are right. None of this would be happening were we not taking the path laid out for me.’

Qi-Oh shakes her head. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘Be so humble,’ she says. ‘So damned forgiving. I disobeyed you. Disrespected you. You said it yourself. I deserve a reprimand. I should bleed for what I’ve done.’

It is my turn to shake my head now, because I see what she wants from me, and I will not give it to her. ‘I won’t fight you, Qi-Oh. Not this time.’

‘Why?’ she shouts. ‘Because you are blessed? Because you are chosen? Because you are so much better than me?’

‘Because you are my Sister,’ I shout back.

Those words echo between us, too. They resonate, like a struck chime. Qi-Oh watches me for a long moment before lowering her blade.

‘No,’ she says. ‘I have no Sisters. Not any more.’

She turns her back on me and limps towards the centre of the circle, and I realise that she is much more than just the anger I saw before. That rage is just the exposed, ragged edge of something buried much deeper. Something she is ashamed of, as I am.

Grief.

‘I know that it hurts,’ I say.

Qi-Oh stops walking. ‘No, you don’t,’ she says. ‘I lost everything on Ophelia VII. My eye. My home. All of my Sisters, save for Calyth. And now she is gone too.’

Her words conjure my own Sisters. Gytha. Isidora. Adelynn.

‘You are not the only one who lost everything.’

Qi-Oh turns on the spot and looks at me. ‘No,’ she says, again. ‘You have Ashava. You have the sword.’

She points her finger at me. At the scars on my face.

‘You gained everything,’ she snarls. ‘The rank. The blade. The mark on your face. You are blessed, Evangeline.’

I try to keep my temper. To breathe, and let her words wash over me, but I cannot. Qi-Oh’s words snag easily on my own ragged edges, exposing my grief. My shame. The hollowness, at the heart of me.

‘I didn’t want any of it,’ I tell her. ‘All that I wanted was to die. To follow my Sisters to the God-Emperor’s side. But I couldn’t. I failed. Everyone praises me and expects of me and calls the mark a blessing, but I do not feel worthy, and it does not feel like a blessing.’

The words are so raw and so shameful and so utterly true that I feel weak in the wake of saying them. It is all that I can do to stay standing, and to answer Qi-Oh when she speaks again. Her voice is different, this time. It is gentle.

‘What does it feel like?’ she asks.

I should lie to her. I should at the very least denounce my doubts. But I find that I cannot. That somehow the answer I kept from Ashava and Elivia and even Arch-Cardinal DiCrimio will not be kept from Qi-Oh.

‘Hollow,’ I say. ‘It feels hollow.’

She is quiet for a long moment, her remaining eye narrowed and unreadable. Then I see her blink. See a tear paint a clean line through the blood on her face.

‘Perhaps we are Sisters, after all,’ she says softly, and she extends her hand. Neither of us says a word as we clasp wrists, in the old way. The way that proves a lack of weapons. As I drop my hand away from Qi-Oh’s arm a loud rumbling splits the air. A wracking of the ship’s bones, as though the Vow is being twisted from bow to stern. The remaining lumens flicker out, one at a time, and when they reassert themselves with the loud thump of activation, they are accompanied by another sound. One that is as welcome and heartening as prayer-time bells.

Re-entry chimes.

‘We are out,’ Qi-Oh says absently, when the chimes die down. ‘We made it through the abyss.’

I nod. All around us, the Vow is creaking from the stress, venting air and coolant and long trails of condensation. Sighs, and tears.

‘Out of the abyss, and into the darkness beyond,’ I say.

Book Three

The Darkness Beyond

Evangeline

Canoness Elivia’s quarters have been devastated. The deck is ruptured and deformed, and the supporting arches are cracked and blackened. Every weapon is missing from the racks on the walls. Nothing remains of Elivia’s maps and charts but scraps of vellum. Only the gnarlwood table is left. It is burned, and blackened. Split across its face and limbs. But it still stands in spite of the damage wrought upon it, as do those summoned to gather around it.

Elivia’s two Celestians take up position on either side of the Canoness commander, as always. Beatris and Radah are both newly scarred, in flesh and in armour. Inquisitor Ravara is the next to arrive. She goes without her lightweight, layered armour, clad solely in her indigo tunic and trousers, and soft, flat shoes. Her face is set and still, but her gait is awkward and slower than it should be, and she has to use a cane to walk. Ravara only has one member of her retinue with her. Just the marksman. Zoric is limping, too, his pale eyes deeply shadowed. Lastly come two representatives of the Vow’s crew. The first is Ulivar Okash. The second is the Vow’s new senior security officer and master-at-arms, a broad-shouldered, badly scarred woman clad in carapace whose ident marker names her as Quinn. As is the case all across the ship, the lumens have failed, so the only light comes from the clusters of tall, twisted candles and the half-hearted starlight filtering in through the frosted armaglass of the viewport. It grants Elivia a faint and flickering halo as she leans forward, gauntleted hands resting on the surface of the gnarlwood table.

‘Let us begin with the obvious,’ she says. ‘Our location.’ She looks at Okash. ‘I trust you have an answer for me, first officer?’

Okash nods. The Vow’s first officer has all the traits of the void-born. He is tall and slender in an angular way, as though he has been made solely from straight edges. Okash’s eyes are large and deep-set and entirely dark. Looking at him reminds me of Dallia and Wyllo. Of cold blood, and the sound of sobbing.

‘Our capacity to determine our exact coordinates is diminished, Canoness, but I can offer an estimated location based on what information we do have.’

Elivia does not prompt him other than to stare at him. Okash nods again, and his eyes go back to the slate in his hand.

‘The charts and data put us somewhere in inter-sector space, corewards of Cypra Mundi, well within the Segmentum Obscurus.’

‘That’s good,’ Zoric says. ‘Right?’

‘It is and it isn’t,’ Okash says. ‘We have a long way to go before we are even close to Dimmamar.’

‘So we jump again,’ Ravara says, fixing Okash with her amber eyes. ‘And then again, if we have to. We keep making warp translations until we reach our destination.’

Okash’s thin cheeks colour. ‘I beg forgiveness, inquisitor, but it’s not so simple.’

Ravara does not break eye contact. ‘Enlighten me,’ she says.

‘The stress of sailing is killing the Navigator,’ Okash says. ‘According to the medicae staff assigned to her care, Lady Oraylis has suffered seizures and multiple minor heart failures.’ Okash pauses. He takes a breath. ‘They have had to bind her arms to her throne to prevent her from scratching out her seer’s eye.’

‘Does she refuse to sail?’ Ravara asks.

Okash blinks. He looks down at the slate. ‘No, lord.’

‘Then I don’t see the issue.’

Okash looks to Elivia as if to plead with her, but the Canoness merely shakes her head.

‘The inquisitor has it right,’ Elivia says. ‘We have made an oath to find the Shield, Okash. The sacrifices made by House Oraylis are noted, but they need not be subject to sorrow. The God-Emperor loves all martyrs.’

Everyone around the table bows their heads momentarily at the mention of Him, and so do I, but I cannot help thinking of the words Qi-Oh spoke in anger in the training halls.

It is all because of you.

‘How many translations do you expect it will take for us to reach Dimmamar?’ Elivia asks, after the quiet moment passes.

Okash frowns. ‘That depends on the Navigator,’ he says. ‘And on the Vow herself. The ship is ailing badly from our passage through the Rift. Hull integrity is averaging no more than sixty-five per cent. We can have either lances or shields, but not both. Main propulsion drives are operating at reduced capacity. The Vow is coming apart at the seams.’

‘What about the Geller field?’ Zoric asks. ‘If it fails again–’

Okash shakes his head. ‘It did not fail. It flickered.’ He checks his slate again. ‘According to reports, the field was compromised for less than a thousandth of a second.’

Zoric stares at him, his scarred arms folded. ‘I think we’d all agree that was plenty,’ he says.

‘Enough,’ Elivia says. ‘Will the Geller field hold, Okash?’

The first officer takes a breath. ‘It is currently stable, Canoness. That is all that I can offer you by way of an answer.’

‘The ship will hold,’ Ravara says simply. ‘I have seen it.’

‘And the crew?’ Quinn asks. Her accent is not clipped and studied like Okash’s. Quinn’s rough-edged voice is broad and lilting. Almost lyrical. ‘We lost near thirty-six per cent of the active crew to the incursions suffered during transit, then another twelve per cent of those remaining to the purges that followed.’

‘They are not the only ones to have lost,’ Elivia says. ‘We left Terra with a combined commandery of near four hundred Sisters, plus non-militant auxiliaries. There are fewer than two hundred and fifty of us, now.’

The Canoness’ voice is cold and impatient, but Quinn does not waver.

‘But your Sisters are not afraid, Canoness,’ she says. ‘They are not broken. The people are starving and wounded. They are coming apart, just like the Vow.’

‘We will aid them.’

I speak the words so instinctively that I hardly realise that they are mine until everyone looks at me.

‘We will lead prayer for those who are fearful,’ I say. ‘We will give up our rations to feed the hungry and we will ease the passing of the injured.’

Quinn looks at me, but not quite in the eyes. Her gaze, like everyone else’s, alights on my scars. ‘Blessings be with you, Sister Superior,’ she says, as if I am benevolent, and not selfish. As if I have not made the offer in order to quash my own guilt at the deaths and the torment and the blood spent.

It is all because of you.

‘It is settled, then,’ Elivia says. She straightens up from the table and looks at Okash. ‘We go onwards to Dimmamar.’

‘No matter the cost,’ Ravara says.

Okash’s dark eyes are shiny. Reflective, like polished armour plate, but he does not argue. He merely nods.

‘Aye, lords,’ he says. ‘No matter the cost.’

Evangeline

The Chamber of Sail is cold. So cold that my words mist the air as I kneel and pray with Lady Oraylis. This time, my hands are not laced in hers. The Novator Primus’ wrists are bound to the arms of her throne, just as Okash said they would be. The priests have washed her skin and bound her blinded mortal eyes. They have doused her robes with the scent of flowers. They intend it to restore a fraction of the lady’s nobility. To me, though, it just makes the Chamber of Sail seem all the more like a funerary hall, and the Lady Oraylis entombed here.

‘O God-Emperor,’ I say, completing the prayer. ‘Surround me, restore me and deliver me so that I may serve you always. In life and in death.’

I look up at Oraylis. The Navigator takes a shuddering breath that gurgles in her chest like water at the foot of a well.

‘In life. And in death,’ she says, and then her head lolls as if she is looking down at me. ‘Thank you, Evangeline. For praying with me.’

I shake my head. ‘It is as I said before. You are not alone.’

Oraylis nods her head. ‘None of us are.’

‘Will you sail, Lady Oraylis?’

The question is a formality. A courtesy. We both know the answer to it.

‘I will sail,’ she says. ‘I will deliver you to Dimmamar. It is His will.’

I frown. ‘You will stand on Dimmamar with us,’ I tell her. ‘Under the cardinal world’s sun. Ravara foresaw it.’

Oraylis smiles faintly. Sadly. ‘Oh, my dear,’ she says. ‘Ravara was lying.’

I blink, suddenly as cold as the room around me.

‘How can you be certain?’

Oraylis’ breaths come in a wet rasp. ‘Because nothing hurts any more,’ she says. ‘Even though it should. Because the tidesong is getting further and further away. Because I am dying, Evangeline.’

I shake my head. ‘But why would Ravara lie?’

‘Because she needed me to sail,’ Oraylis says. ‘She just told me what I wanted to hear.’

I think of my own conversation with the inquisitor as we overlooked the Convent Prioris. Was that, too, just her telling me what I wanted to hear?

‘It is what He made her for, Evangeline,’ Oraylis says. ‘To lie. To hide things, and to seek what is hidden by others. Just as He made you to fight, and me to sail.’ Oraylis shifts in her seat and takes another one of those guttering, clotting breaths as the ship’s bells begin to chime. ‘Speaking of which,’ she says. ‘It is time.’

The priests return as I get to my feet, Ravara’s lie still large in my mind.

‘You cannot hate her for it,’ Oraylis says. ‘No more than you can hate a falcon for flying.’

I nod, and then bow my head as the priests slide cables into the tethers in the Navigator’s skin.

‘God-Emperor guide you, Lady Oraylis,’ I say.

Oraylis looks at me, though she is blind.

‘And you, Sister Evangeline,’ she says.

The warp jump lasts for one solar week. One week of utter darkness, where candles offer the brightest light and the Vow is filled with the sound of weeping. For the entirety of the journey we patrol the decks that are left to us, waiting for the shadows to resolve into devils. There is no chance to rest. To reflect. There is certainly no time to seek out Ravara and speak with her. I do not see the inquisitor once during my patrols. Not Zoric, either. I catch sight of her bladeward once or twice, though. Yumia stalks the corridors like a felid might. Alone, and distrustful.

I am patrolling the spinal corridor with Qi-Oh and Ashava when the weeping becomes a long, protracted scream that can only, impossibly, be Lady Oraylis. The Vow does its best to tear itself apart as it tears its way out of the warp, juddering and shaking and resounding to a series of deep, thunderous explosions as the hull breaches in multiple locations along the ship’s five-kilometre length. We lose every level below deck twelve, along with another fifteen per cent of the crew.

In the days following the destruction, my Sisters and I tend to the survivors while the Vow’s diminished crew attempt to reset the warp drives and shore up the hull for our next jump. We pray, and we give up our rations. Ashava tells stories. Even Qi-Oh spends time amongst the people. But it is not enough. The crew starts to come apart, just as Quinn said it would. First come suicides. Then murders. Then bloody, desperate riots. My Sisters and I stop our singing and our stories and we go to the furnace halls to assist the remaining naval security troops in suppressing the unrest. We suppress. We destroy. We burn what is left, or eject it into the cold of the void.

In the aftermath, when the drives are cycling and the Navigator has stopped screaming and the ship is preparing once more to sail the tides, I find Haskia in the armoury, attending to the links of chain around her vambrace. I sit and watch as she runs together a new loop of chain made of tarnished copper links. It is almost crude, compared to the others. I count the links as she winds the chain around her vambrace, just as I did before. This time, though, I do not lose count. I memorise each copper link, and each loss along with it.

The second warp jump is even darker than the first. More violent. The lights aboard the Unbroken Vow this time are those of blades and of gunfire. This jump ends with a breach, just as the first one did. This time it is the sternward cathedral quarter that comes apart at the seams. Three worship halls are destroyed in the explosive decompression, and hundreds of faithful souls are lost to the void. More murders follow. More suicides. More riots. The shipmaster orders curfew. He orders double-rotation, then triple-rotation. He orders penitent service and execution after execution, and then barely moments after the voidlocks have expelled the turncoats and cowards, Vallien orders another jump. The senior navigation officer answers by shooting the shipmaster four times in the chest.

The mutineer is killed by naval security, but it comes too late to save the shipmaster. Arcoh Vallien dies in the throne he spent his life serving, and then his body is allocated for the furnaces, along with the rest of the faithful dead. It is left to Ulivar Okash to take the position of shipmaster. The throne, and the responsibility that goes with it. It is Okash who sits in a seat still tarnished with his predecessor’s blood and repeats Vallien’s last order, to make the jump towards Dimmamar.

No matter the cost.

During the third warp jump, the Unbroken Vow’s training halls and corridors and hangar decks are repurposed as refuge halls and holding pens and makeshift hospitaller’s wards. People pack into them as if they are seeking sanctuary, though there is nowhere to go to escape the storm. They lay out bedrolls and build temporary altars for prayer. They huddle around snapped and twisted candles, their hands outstretched for warmth and for any kind of light.

As I walk through what was once the tertiary training hall with Ashava and Qi-Oh, I see Order vassals and armourers. Priests and serfs. Ship’s crew whose responsibilities disappeared when the lower decks were breached. I see the old and the young. Those who are alone, and the rare but inevitable families that arise when an old ship is served by the same crew for long enough. Some are wounded. Some are dying. All are desperate. They huddle together, wrapped in blankets and jackets because the temperature is falling with each passing hour. There is little talking, so the chamber resounds to the groaning of the Vow’s tormented structure, and her labouring engines. To the sounds of murmured prayer, and of weeping. As I pick my way carefully through the crowd, I hear my name whispered amongst the prayers, though I never catch sight of those speaking it. It seems to surround me, like the wind might. Follow me, like smoke might follow fire.

Evangeline, they say. Evangeline.

‘Eva,’ I hear Ashava say softly. ‘Look.’

I look where she is looking, and I see them. Dozens of people in amongst the crowd, watching me. In the dim and wending candlelight I see that they have all painted their faces with chalk or blood or dirt. The old and the young. Those who are alone, and those who are not. They all wear the same markings.

Spread wings, around hollow eyes.

‘This is idolatry,’ Qi-Oh says in a low voice.

Ashava shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘This is hope.’

At her words, one of the marked figures slips through the crowd and approaches me. It is a girl, too young to be of the crew. Too young to be without a family. She seems tiny to me. Just skin and bones, wrapped up in an outsized tunic and trousers and a Navy jacket that is larger still. Her pale brown hair is cut roughly, as if by hand, and her feet are bare and bruised. She is holding a single, unlit candle in her hand. I can hardly stand to look at it. At her.

‘Sister Evangeline,’ she says, her words misting the air.

The Vow seems to quiet itself at her words. The marks on the girl’s face are smeared and smudged. Between the streaks of ash, her eyes are dark and wide. Intent on me. I crouch down in front of the child as Qi-Oh and Ashava continue the patrol ahead of me.

‘Speak,’ I tell her. ‘Please.’

‘I mean to ask you something,’ she says, and she glances at the crowds of people. All silent. All watching. ‘They mean to ask, too. But they don’t. They won’t.’

‘Ask me what?’

She looks down at the candle in her hand. The flame is weak and flickering, the wick burned nearly away. ‘For a miracle,’ she says.

‘What is your name?’ I ask.

She looks up from her candle. ‘Kati,’ she says.

‘For Katherine?’ I ask.

She nods.

‘That is a good name,’ I tell her. ‘The name of our saint. She was brave, and she was strong. Full of faith.’

‘Like you?’ Kati asks.

‘I am not a saint,’ I tell her.

She shakes her head. ‘The others said you were,’ she says. ‘They said that your marks came from the God-Emperor. They said that you would deliver us from the abyss. That it would be a miracle.’

My scars burn, as if they know they are being spoken of.

‘My scars did come from the God-Emperor,’ I tell her. ‘But I cannot perform miracles, Kati. Nor am I a saint. Saints are martyred. They die and live again, by His grace.’

Kati looks at me, her dark eyes catching the firelight.

‘Then what are you?’ she asks.

Something left behind, I think. Something hollow. But I can say neither of those things to this child who wears my scars by choice, so instead I give Kati the only truth I have.

‘I am a child of the God-Emperor,’ I say. ‘Just like you.’

Kati blinks and nods. She glances once more at the candle in her hands. ‘Then you can’t deliver us from darkness,’ she says.

I go to one knee, then reach out and put my hand on her shoulder. She really is just skin and bones beneath that woven jacket.

‘We will find our way out soon enough,’ I tell her. ‘You will see.’

‘You promise?’ she asks.

Once again, I give the child the only answer I can.

‘I promise.’

A chill wind stirs the candle in Kati’s hand, then. It pulls at the weak, tiny flame, snuffing it out. I hear her whimper as the other candles in the chamber all blow out, too, plunging the vaulted space into darkness. I start to tell the child not to move. To stay with me. But my voice is stolen by an ear-splitting roar that sounds like a whole choir of devils. It is so loud that I can hardly hear the people scream as the deck flexes and bucks beneath us and objects made invisible by the darkness crash down all around us. I cannot see. Cannot hear anything but the roaring. So I take the child into my arms and I hold her tightly and I murmur words that are as lost to the noise as the screams.

‘God-Emperor,’ I say. ‘Deliver us from darkness.’

And then the roaring stops, and the shaking with it. There is a moment where all is silent, save for breathing. Then people begin to cough and cry out for one another.

‘Eva!’ Ashava shouts.

‘I am here,’ I reply, as one by one the Unbroken Vow’s overhead lumens flicker back on, illuminating the chamber once more to reveal the deep cracks crazing their way up the walls. The clouds of dust, spiralling in the air.

And the three jagged spars of shipsteel that have buried themselves deeply in the deck around me, missing Kati and me by inches.

‘Blood and tears,’ Qi-Oh says, putting her fingertips to one of the pieces of twisted metal. It is almost as long as she is tall. ‘That was close.’

I look up at the Vow’s vaulted ceiling, and the ragged hole that remains of one of the supporting arches. Dust spirals outwards from it like an exhaled breath. I release my hold on Kati.

‘Are you hurt?’ I ask her.

She shakes her head, her eyes wide. I get to my feet and bring her with me, away from the site of the collapse. Kati stays in my shadow, one hand snarled tightly in my vestments. Around us, those who can are stirring. Sitting up, or getting to their feet. Others stay where they have fallen, their bodies broken open in the collapse.

Qi-Oh spits on the deck, her skin and hair greyed with dust. ‘That felt like an exit.’

‘Like an ending,’ Ashava says.

The vox-emitters crackle, then, for the first time in days. A sound emits over them. The clear and bright pealing of the ship’s bells fills the chamber. Everyone stops and looks and counts each ringing, and when it stops, the people around us begin to murmur and smile and embrace one another.

‘Twelve bells,’ Ashava says.

‘Taken in threes,’ Qi-Oh finishes.

I am still looking up at the emitter, though it has fallen silent now.

‘We found our way out,’ I say. ‘That was the last jump.’

‘The miracle.’

I look down at Kati. She is still clinging to my vestments.

‘They said you would deliver us from darkness,’ she says. ‘That it would be a miracle.’

I make to speak, to tell this child who wears my scars by choice that she is wrong, but my words are stolen from me by another sound. Not a roaring. Not a devil’s choir, but a swelling murmur that steals between the people in the chamber like smoke.

Miracle. It is a miracle.

Those who can stand, do. Those who cannot, crawl or drag themselves closer. They crowd around me, putting themselves between me and my Sisters. Qi-Oh starts forward, but Ashava holds her back as the crowd close around me. As they reach for me, fingertips brushing against my greaves and trailing across the edges of my vestments.

Evangeline, they say. Evangeline.

I hate the sound of my own name. I hate the whisper of their robes and clothes, and the gentle trailing of fingertips along my armour plates. My scars burn constantly, and my heart even more so. It feels perversely like the Contemplation to me. Pressed in on all sides, and surrounded by whispers. The pressure of it makes me want to scream. To lash out. But I cannot, because Qi-Oh was right. They are all here because of me. So I do not scream. I do not push them away, or turn my back. I stand. I endure. I suffer their devotion until the vox buzzes in my ear and I finally have cause to slip its grasp. As I move, the crowd parts before me, that whisper still following me.

Evangeline. Evangeline.

‘Evangeline.’ Elivia speaks my name too, her voice undercut by static. ‘I need you to come to the Navigation quarter immediately.’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘For what cause?’

I hear Elivia breathe over the link.

‘The Navigator is dying,’ she says. ‘And she is asking for you.’

It is not just cold in the Chamber of Sail, now. It is frozen. Entombed in ice. It patterns every surface. The deck. The walls. The shuttered viewport and the Navigation throne.

It patterns Lady Tornella Oraylis, too, turning her skin and her blood-spattered cerise robes to silver. The priests attending to the Navigator take their leave as I make my way up the steps towards the foot of her throne. Oraylis is so still that for a moment I think I must be too late. That the God-Emperor has already seen fit to take her. But then the Navigator stirs, cracking the frost on her robes. She smiles, though she cannot see me.

‘Evangeline,’ she says, her voice hoarse. ‘You came.’

I kneel in front of the throne.

‘You called for me,’ I say.

‘He will come for me soon,’ she murmurs, and I notice the thin, dark trails of blood running from her ears. The fitful rise and fall of her chest. ‘But I had to speak with you. To tell you.’

I frown. ‘Tell me what?’

Oraylis moves, then, though she should not be capable of it. She leans forward in the throne and puts her thin, cold hands on my face, her spread fingers making a second set of wings.

‘The darkness here is absolute,’ she says urgently. ‘The beacon too dim to see. And yet I found the way. I knew exactly where to place my feet, though I could not see the path.’

Her hands are trembling, now. So cold they make my scars burn.

‘I do not understand,’ I tell her. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

‘That I found a path through the abyss and beyond it,’ Oraylis says. ‘That it shouldn’t have been possible, but it was.’

My scars burn more fiercely. ‘Like a miracle?’ I ask her.

‘Like the draw of a tide. Like the pull of something inescapable,’ Oraylis says, and then she coughs. Gasps for air she cannot get. The Navigator’s hands fall away from my face and she falls back in her throne.

‘E-Evangeline,’ she stammers.

I take her hands in my own and hold onto them tightly as her body trembles and her breathing falters and blood runs from her nose. Her ears. Her sightless eyes.

‘He is coming for me,’ she murmurs, through chattering teeth. ‘The G-God-Emperor.’

I cannot help it. I have to ask. I have to know.

‘What do you see?’

Lady Tornella Oraylis smiles again, despite the blood and the tremors and the rattle of her chest.

‘Light,’ she says. ‘N-nothing but l-light.’

And then the Navigator falls completely, blessedly still.

Evangeline

‘The Lady Oraylis is dead,’ Elivia says.

The Canoness is leaning heavily on the gnarlwood table in her chambers, backlit by starlight. Haloed by it. Those standing around the table react differently to her words. Okash makes the sign of the aquila with his pale hands, head bowed. Quinn mutters a curse under her breath. Zoric shakes his head. Inquisitor Ravara does not move at all. Not even to blink. I have not seen Ravara since before the jumps. The inquisitor looks to be hurting less. She no longer needs a cane to stand or walk, and though her face is hollowed by her injuries, her eyes are bright and keen, like those of something that hunts.

‘With no Navigator, we are limited to realspace travel,’ Elivia says. ‘Which means we need to work out exactly where we are, and how far we have yet to go.’ She looks at Okash. ‘I trust you have an answer for me, shipmaster?’

Okash hesitates a moment before he nods. It is a hesitation I recognise. One that signifies the disassociation he feels regarding his new rank. It is apparent, too, in the way he looks. Since inheriting the command throne from Vallien, Ulivar Okash has become even more angular. Even thinner. His edgeless eyes are surrounded by circles so dark they could be bruises.

‘The Vow’s augeries were damaged during translation, but according to the charts and data, we have exited the warp at the Aschen-Proxima Mandeville point.’ Okash pauses, as if he is making certain of his next words. ‘Which puts us within a week’s realspace sailing of Dimmamar.’

There is a moment of quiet around the table.

‘You are sure?’ Elivia asks.

Okash nods. ‘As sure as I can be, Canoness,’ he says.

‘Then where’s the fleet?’ Quinn says. Like the shipmaster, she too has been affected by the weight of her new role. Quinn’s eyes are bloodshot, her cropped hair untidy and matted. ‘At the very least there should be a picket line at the system’s borders.’

Okash does not answer. Instead he takes a palm-sized device and places it on the table, activating it with a push of a heavyweight key. A fragmented hololith flickers to life, populated with what looks like shreds of parchment, scattered to the winds.

‘What am I looking at, shipmaster?’ Elivia asks.

Okash’s eyes are locked on those slivers of green light.

‘The Navy picket line,’ he says. ‘Or what’s left of it.’

‘Mercy and grace,’ Quinn mutters.

‘It would seem both have been in short supply out here,’ Ravara says, then she looks at Okash. ‘Can you say what killed them?’

Okash shakes his head. ‘Not with certainty.’ He reaches out and presses the hololith key again, and the projection flickers a second time, resolving a closer look at one of the broken ships. Despite the distortion, I can see how violent the ship’s death must have been. How swift.

‘From what is visible, I would hazard a guess at lances and cannons.’ Okash rotates the hololith with a slender hand and frowns. ‘Going by the dispersal of the wreckage and the degree of destruction, whatever hit them did so with a great deal of power and accuracy. They blew straight through the line.’

Ravara’s eyes go back to the hololith, and the rotating wreckage of the Navy ships.

‘And where did they go, after they blew straight through the line?’ she asks.

Okash shakes his head. ‘Impossible to say,’ he says. ‘There are no signs of any warp-wake, and the remains of the picket have drifted too far to determine anything much else. Even accounting for how we might have affected the wreckage with our own arrival, the dispersal pattern suggests that the damage is weeks old. Months, even. And that is without adjusting for time and spatial dilation. Whatever it was, it’s long gone now.’

‘I suppose we should count ourselves lucky,’ Quinn says. ‘We’re in no shape to fight.’

Ravara shakes her head. ‘There is no such thing as luck,’ she says. ‘There is only destiny. A thousand paths might take you to it, but the ending is already set.’

‘Inescapable,’ I say.

Ravara looks at me through the hololith. The green light recasts her amber eyes in jade.

‘Before she died, the Lady Oraylis told me that she should not have been able to find the way through the darkness, but that she did anyway. That it felt like the pull of something inescapable.’

Zoric frowns. ‘That sounds ominous.’

Ravara ignores him, still focused on me. ‘Did Oraylis say how she did it?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘All that Oraylis said was that she knew exactly where to place her feet, even though she could not see the path.’

Ravara’s hand goes to her collar and rests there a moment.

‘Our mission is ordained,’ Elivia says. ‘It is the God-Emperor’s will. That is how the Navigator found the path. It is how the Vow survived the tides. It is intended.’

‘Yes,’ Ravara says, as her hand falls away again. ‘It is destiny.’

‘And ours awaits on Dimmamar,’ Elivia says. ‘So we had better hasten towards it.’ She looks at Okash. ‘All speed, shipmaster.’

He nods. ‘As much as I can give, Canoness.’

Then Okash takes his leave, and Quinn follows him. Before Ravara can do the same I approach her.

‘I would speak with you,’ I tell her.

Ravara’s face remains impassive, but she nods. She dismisses Zoric with a word and we walk from the Canoness’ chambers together into the Vow’s transitways until we are far enough from others to be considered alone. Up here, on the ship’s spine, the walls are built from armaglass as well as iron, so starlight takes the place of candlefire. I see the tiny points of light reflected in Ravara’s eyes as she looks out into the void.

‘The Navigator spoke to you of me, didn’t she?’ Ravara asks.

‘Is that foresight, inquisitor?’ I ask.

‘Just an educated guess,’ she replies. ‘Your tone suggests that whatever she said angered you.’

‘You lied to Oraylis,’ I say. ‘You told her she would stand under the cardinal world’s sun with the rest of us. Why?’

Ravara looks at me. ‘Because we needed to get out of the Rift,’ she says simply. ‘Because sometimes telling someone what they want to hear is the best way to have them do what you need them to.’

‘And what you told me in the bell tower?’ I ask. ‘Was that you telling me what I wanted to hear, too?’

Ravara does not move, or blink. ‘You will find the death you are looking for on Dimmamar, Evangeline. That is the truth. You will be consumed by the light, as you should have been on Ophelia VII.’

I look up and down the corridor to ensure we are still alone, my jaw aching because I daren’t speak those wants aloud myself. Those needs.

‘How can I trust you?’ I ask her.

‘What is trust other than working together towards a single goal?’ Ravara asks.

‘A set ending.’

‘Exactly.’

I shake my head. ‘But you have yet to tell me your goal. I do not know what it is you seek on Dimmamar. Not truly.’

‘I seek the closure of the Great Rift, Evangeline,’ Ravara says, her voice low and intense. ‘I seek the end of this era of darkness, and for everything to return to how it once was. I seek restoration, but that requires sacrifice.’

‘My sacrifice.’

‘Yours. Oraylis’. Vallien’s. Every death that has led us to this point.’

I think of the greater daemon’s laughter. Of Adelynn’s eyes, through the fire.

‘Even my Sisters.’

Ravara nods. ‘It’s not just the paths we might take that number in the thousands. It’s the steps we take on those paths, too. Choices, events and actions that seem unrelated, but they aren’t. They are all a part of the journey. That is why I do what I do, and say what I say, because I have to.’

‘Whatever the cost,’ I say.

She nods again. ‘I will make it right,’ she says. ‘I will make it all right.’

Her words are convincing. Tempting. Yet still, I hesitate. Ravara sees it in me, and she glances back out at the stars for a moment. I see that same flicker in her eyes that I saw when we first met in the Convent Prioris. An instant of guilt, and of grief. She exhales a slow breath, and then looks back at me.

‘You ask how it is you can trust me,’ she says. ‘I will show you.’

She turns away then, heading back down the transitway towards the main stairwells.

‘Come, Evangeline,’ she says. ‘There is someone I would like you to meet.’

I follow Ravara through the ship to a chamber at the sternward end of the hospitaller’s wards. The bulkhead door is sealed additionally by a voice-print system.

‘Ahri Ravara. Clearance code, nightsky,’ Ravara says.

The door locks transition to green, but before she opens the door, Ravara looks at me.

‘This is me trusting you,’ she says.

I do not know what to say to that, so I just nod. Ravara spins the lock, and opens the door, and we both step into the chamber beyond. It is small, and temperate, and dimly lit by dozens of flickering candles. In the centre of the room is something it takes me a moment to understand. A large matt-black machine mounted with tubes and bellows and monitron screens. It hisses and clicks and it sounds as though it is breathing, and I realise swiftly that that is precisely what the machine is doing. Breathing, for the still figure at the heart of it. The woman, coiled in the nest of cables. What is left of her is clad in blue robes. Her skin is as pale as a dove’s feathers, and her hair is tangled and blonde. A pendant glitters around her neck. One that matches Ravara’s own.

‘She is who you spoke of in the bell tower,’ I say. ‘The one you lost.’

Ravara approaches the machine, and the woman at the heart of it.

‘Sofika Vorros is my interrogator,’ she says. ‘She helps me to determine the meaning of my dreams. But she is so much more than that.’

Ravara reaches up and brushes Sofika’s hair back from her face.

‘She is clever. Not just learned, but sharp in a way that bests even the finest of blades. She is powerful, and strong. Driven, just as I am.’ She smiles. ‘But she is patient, where I am not. Kind, where I might be cruel.’

She lets her hand fall away.

‘She is my everything,’ she says. ‘I love her, with all of my heart.’

Ravara’s voice is different, saying those last words. Softer, and more melodic. It is almost like hearing her speak for the first time. Like seeing the woman she is, and not what her life has made of her.

‘I am sorry,’ I tell her.

She turns to look at me. ‘It was my failure that made her this way,’ she says. ‘I was searching for the same thing then as I am now. A means to bring light back into the Imperium. To wrest back everything the Rift has taken from us. I thought that I had found the means to do it on a world named Hellebore, but I was wrong.’

‘What happened?’

Ravara glances at Sofika. ‘The enemy got there before we did,’ she says. ‘An arch-traitor, of the old Legions. A sorcerer, sworn to darkness.’

I ache at her words, disgust rising up from the heart of me. My hands reflexively meet to make the sign of the aquila.

‘A servant of Chaos,’ I say. ‘That creature was the one who hurt her.’

Ravara exhales slowly. ‘He was the one to hurt her, but only because I didn’t see it coming.’

She looks back at me, her amber eyes circled with shadows.

‘I failed, and Sofika paid the price. Afterwards, I made her a vow that she would live to see our work complete. That I would make everything right. And that is what I intend to do.’

‘For her,’ I say.

‘For everyone,’ Ravara replies. ‘But yes. For her, too. I might lie and kill. I might keep secrets, but when I make a vow I do not break it. I swear to you now, you will find what you seek on Dimmamar. We all will.’

She extends her hand to me.

‘Trust me,’ she says.

I hesitate, knowing that this is one of the choices Ravara mentioned. One of the steps on the journey. I am on the edge of making the choice when a voice cuts in. One that is soft, and whispered and almost lyrical.

‘She means it,’ says the woman in the machine. ‘You can trust her. Ahri keeps her promises.’

Ravara’s cheeks colour, and her eyes gloss with tears. She looks to Sofika in disbelief.

‘Sofi,’ she says. ‘You should be sleeping.’

Sofika smiles, and in it I can see the way she must have been before. ‘How could I when it is so bright,’ she says, and then she looks at me. ‘When she is so bright.’

‘Bright,’ I say. ‘You mean the mark.’

‘No,’ Sofika says. ‘I mean you.’ She lifts her slender hands. ‘Come closer.’

I glance at Ravara, and she nods. I step forward and allow Sofika to put her hands on my face. The instant of contact makes my scars burn. It makes the room melt away, and Ravara with it. Memories blizzard around me, good and bad. I see my mother’s smile, and the storyscrolls she would read to me. I see my first days training with Adelynn in echoing stone halls. I see myself battle alongside Ashava on a world of red earth and storms. I hear songs, and prayers. I see Isidora burn on the Contemplation, and see Qi-Oh’s face contorted in anger as she walks away from me in the Vow’s underdecks. I see the crowds surround me in the training hall-turned-refuge, all reaching for me and whispering.

Evangeline. Evangeline.

I see a darkening sky. A roiling storm. Ninety-nine steps. White feathers, turning in the wind. A pair of crossed hands in the shape of the aquila, covered in blood. A solitary candle, burning in the darkness. I hear screams and smell fire and then I see it. The Shield of Saint Katherine, its glory surrounded by coiling shadows. By fangs and by burning eyes.

Are you ready?

The question echoes all around me, formed not just from Adelynn’s voice, but from many. I draw my sword and push forwards into the shadows, cutting them down. Putting out their blazing eyes. They hiss and recoil and break apart, greying me with ashes and with dust. But they cannot stop me. They will not stop me. I reach out towards the Shield and catch sight of myself reflected in its golden surface. I am bright, just as Sofika said. Ablaze.

Evangeline, say the whispers as my fingertips graze the metal. Evangeline.

‘Evangeline.’

My eyes snap open and I see Ravara’s face. She is crouching in front of me, because I am on my knees.

‘What did you see?’ she says urgently.

I tell her everything. Everything but the question. If Sofika notices the omission, she keeps it to herself.

‘Crossed hands,’ Ravara says. ‘In my dreams of you, I saw a vast stone hall, decorated with crossed hands.’

She smiles. Not faintly, but broadly. It seems as much like meeting her for the first time as the change in her voice did, earlier.

‘Can you stand?’ Ravara asks.

Stand, Evangeline.

‘Yes,’ I say, and I get to my feet unsteadily and look at Sofika. There is a dark line of blood tracking its way from her nose. ‘How did you do that?’ I ask. ‘Make me see those things.’

‘I didn’t,’ Sofika says, as Ravara takes a cloth and wipes the blood from under her nose. ‘All that you saw was already within you. You already have the answer.’

I flinch. ‘What did you say?’

‘She knew,’ Sofika says. ‘All along, she knew that you would have the strength to bear it. You, who bore the light through the darkness to find your purpose.’

Then Sofika’s eyes flutter closed, and she falls quiet. Ravara lets her go gently.

‘What did she mean?’ Ravara asks. ‘About you bearing the light.’

‘It was how I found my way into the Sisterhood,’ I tell her. ‘I carried a single candle to the Convent Prioris. They tried to send me away, but I would not leave.’

‘And that was when she took you in,’ Ravara says. ‘Adelynn. She was the one who knew.’

I nod.

‘A thousand paths,’ Ravara says. ‘A thousand actions, and choices, all of which have led you here.’

It takes me a moment to answer her, because I am not looking at Sofika any more, but at the candles around the base of her machine, all of which have extinguished themselves.

Save for one.

‘To my purpose,’ I say.

Ravara nods.

‘And it will all end as it began,’ she says. ‘With you bearing the light.’

Book Four

Purpose

Evangeline

‘This is it. The Vow is dying.’

It is Shipmaster Okash who says the words, though we can all feel that they are true in the way the ship’s drives labour as she limps towards Dimmamar’s orbit. In the rattling and guttering of the air filtration, and the flickering of her remaining instrument panels. The cathedral world is large in the bridge’s front viewport. Large in my head and my heart, too, because this is it. The set ending. The place where I will find my purpose.

‘It seems she will not be the only one to have died in Dimmamar’s orbit,’ Ravara says.

She is standing on the opposite side of Okash’s command throne from myself and Elivia, watching the planet approach, just as we are. Watching the slowly turning circle of wreckage haloing the cathedral world.

‘What am I looking at, helm?’ Okash asks.

The Vow’s helm officer refers to the auspex registry, juddering in time with the data feed as it spools directly into his cognitive link. It occurs to me that he might be dying, too. Just as the Vow is.

‘The ring consists of the remains of the p-planet’s orbital defences, sir,’ he says, his voice juddering too. ‘And of their g-guardian fleet. Imperial-classes. Gothic-class. Lunar-class. A-Armageddon-class. Some unregistered silhouettes.’

‘Unregistered,’ Okash says. ‘Identify.’

The helm officer twitches fitfully. ‘N-negative, shipmaster. Insufficient data to identify. They are old. Their standard t-template constructs out of s-service.’

‘Are they enemy ships?’ Okash says.

The helm officer makes a wet, pained sound through his teeth.

‘T-they are old,’ he says again, as though it is an answer.

‘But they are all dead,’ Elivia says. ‘There are no energy signatures within the debris.’

The helm officer twitches again. His jaws crash together, saliva stringing his teeth.

‘Energy readings negligible,’ he says. ‘They are d-dead, Canoness.’

Elivia looks at Okash. ‘Hail the cardinal world,’ she says.

Okash nods his head. His skin is sallow, and his lips are split so badly that they bleed anew when he speaks. ‘Aye, Canoness,’ he says, before looking to his vox-officer. ‘Broadcast repeat identification hail on all bands and ranges.’

‘Aye, sir,’ says the vox-officer, before turning in her seat. The woman’s head is bound in old bandages stained with blood. ‘Though we’ll need more power for all bands and ranges, sir.’

Okash settles back in his throne. ‘Cut power to all shields save the forward facing,’ he says. ‘The state we’re in they’ll make little difference anyway.’

A chorus of hoarse, exhausted aye, sirs answer Okash as the vox-officer begins the broadcast.

‘This is Dauntless-class cruiser designate Unbroken Vow approaching Dimmamar high orbit,’ she says. ‘Please acknowledge.’

The only answer is the hiss of static, so the vox-officer sets about repeating the hail. As she does so, the cathedral world grows closer. Larger. Larger in my head. Larger in my heart. It grows close enough for me to be able to see a single, tiny point of golden light between its thunderous, shifting clouds. My scars burn as I step down from the command dais, and approach the viewport slowly. I am dimly aware of Elivia saying my name. Ravara, too. It runs together as it did in the refuge halls and the hospitaller’s ward and the corridors. As it did in my dreams.

Evangeline. Evangeline. Evangeline.

As I reach the viewport I catch sight of myself reflected in the frost-patterned, treated armaglass. My outline is warped and wavering as though I am on fire. Ablaze. Through my reflection I see Dimmamar. I see the single point of light. It is wavering too, like a candle might. I reach out towards the light. Towards myself.

Evangeline. Evangeline.

As my fingertips make contact with the armaglass the burning stops and the world seems to stop with it. All sensation. All sound, save for one. Adelynn’s voice, in my ear.

Are you ready?

‘Evangeline.’

The world returns in an instant. All sensation. All sound. I am still standing, my hand against the viewport. Two more figures are present in the reflection. Elivia, and Ravara. Their eyes are not fixed on Dimmamar, but on me.

‘I saw a light,’ I tell them, turning away from the viewport. ‘Between the clouds.’

Elivia smiles her blade’s edge smile. Ravara’s hand goes to the pendant at her throat. But before either of them can say a thing, the Vow’s vox-officer speaks.

‘Transmission from within the debris field, shipmaster,’ she says. ‘It’s a gamma-encrypted channel. Ident-codes cleared.’

‘Put it over the emitters,’ Okash says.

There is a crackle and a hiss of white noise, but then the channel comes clear and a voice cuts through.

‘Hailing Dauntless-class cruiser, designate Unbroken Vow,’ it says. ‘This is watch officer first class Topher Gallion of defence post Lux Terminalia. Make full-stop, and resubmit ident-codes immediately.’

Okash frowns. ‘Do as they say,’ he says.

The bridge crew set to slowing the Vow. The stress of it makes the ship’s bones creak. I am certain that I hear the armaglass at my back flex.

‘How did we miss them?’ Okash asks his bridge crew.

The helm officer shakes his head. That, too, is a judder. ‘A-apologies, shipmaster,’ he says. ‘The d-debris field concealed their signature.’

‘Are they running out their guns?’ Okash asks.

The helm officer nods. ‘Aye, s-sir.’

Okash looks to his vox-officer. ‘Run a second check on their ident-codes, and then open the return link, but maintain the encryption.’

She nods, and sets about rechecking the codes.

‘I beg forgiveness, Lux Terminalia,’ Okash says. ‘But I fail to see the need for such hostility.’

There is another crackle. Another hiss.

‘I’m afraid we do see the need, shipmaster. Since the opening of the Great Rift, the enemy have come over and over again, seeking to desecrate this place. It has cost us everything just to keep them from reaching the surface.’

The vox-officer turns in her seat and mouths the word clear at Okash. It does nothing to dispel his frown.

‘But we are not your enemy. We have been sent here on a sacred duty to recover the Shield of Saint Katherine. Our mission is ordained by the Holy Synod, and the Convent Prioris. By the God-Emperor, Himself.’

The vox-link hisses for a long moment, but Gallion’s voice does not return. He does not answer. Okash stands from his throne.

‘Arm the lances,’ he says to his bridge crew.

‘We cannot fire on them,’ Elivia says, her voice clear and cold. ‘They are people of the faith.’

‘I know, Canoness,’ Okash says. His pale skin is waxen under the bridge lumens. ‘With the God-Emperor’s grace, I won’t have to.’

He looks again to his crew. ‘Arm the lances.’

The helm officer turns, trailing cables. ‘We w-will have to siphon power f-from the forward shields, sir.’

‘Do it,’ Okash replies.

The helm officer turns back to his station, and does as he’s told.

‘Okash,’ Ravara says. ‘This is a risk.’

The shipmaster looks at her from the command dais, his dark eyes even more so under the harsh light.

‘I beg forgiveness, inquisitor, but I swore that I would get you to the surface, no matter the cost.’ He looks to his helm officer. ‘Finalise a targeting solution on the Lux Terminalia, but do not fire until I say. Until we must.’

I cannot stand by any more. I start to protest, only to be cut off by a squall of vox as Gallion’s voice returns.

‘You are here to seek the Shield of Saint Katherine,’ he says. ‘Is that what you said?’

‘That is what I said,’ Okash replies.

‘Then Sister Evangeline is with you,’ Gallion says. ‘The one who was burned, but not broken. Marked by His favour.’

I look at Okash, and he nods. I step forward and speak up so that Gallion can hear me.

‘I am Sister Evangeline,’ I tell him. ‘The one who bears the mark of which you speak.’

‘Evangeline,’ Gallion says, by way of reply. His voice is different, now. Filled with that same sort of fervour that I have heard from so many others.

‘How do you know my name?’ I ask him.

‘Prophecy, blessed Sister,’ Gallion says.

There is a sound over the link that could as well be breathing, or a sob. The helm officer turns and looks at Okash.

‘L-lux Terminalia is disarming,’ he says. ‘They are w-withdrawing their g-guns.’

Okash breathes a sigh. The shipmaster sits back down slowly in his throne as the vox crackles again and Gallion’s voice comes clear.

‘You are clear to proceed, Unbroken Vow,’ he says. ‘Go with grace.’

Ravara

They have to put Sofika under again in order to transfer her from Efrayl’s machine to the cradle-casket. It takes three Sisters Hospitaller to perform the disconnection procedure and move her. The time in which Sofika is between machines and has to rely on what’s left of her body to support her frightens me more than anything else I have ever witnessed. More than the devils and the damned. More even than the burning of worlds.

‘She will survive this, Ahri,’ my father says. ‘She is meant to.’

He stands amidst the Sisters Hospitaller as they settle Sofika into the cradle-casket and set about reconnecting her cabling and support mechanisms. The cradle-casket is bulky, laden down with machinery and its inbuilt power source and the grav-suspensors to enable it to move. At its heart, though, it is just a chair. One that reminds me of the one that my mother had, towards the end.

‘She won’t share that fate,’ my father says, as if he is reading my thoughts. Which I suppose he is, in a way. Because he is my thoughts.

I ignore him, instead focusing all of my attention on the monitron display mounted on Sofika’s cradle-casket, and on her sleeping face. As the last connection is made and the bellows begin to sigh, the monitron pulses green.

‘It is as I said,’ my father says, with a joyless smile. ‘Some things need to die.’

‘And some things don’t,’ I say absently.

‘Inquisitor?’

I look to the Sister who is speaking to me. Her hair is long and blonde. It shines like pale gold. Like Sofika’s used to.

‘The machine is ready,’ she says. ‘My Sisters and I are unfamiliar with the intricacies of it, but it will support Madame Vorros for forty hours at full capacity. After that time, it will begin to fail. I am sure I do not need to explain what will happen when it does, or if you do not find another way to maintain her.’

I look back at Sofika, sleeping.

‘No,’ I tell her. ‘You don’t.’

‘I would recommend keeping her asleep unless it is absolutely necessary to wake her,’ the Sister says. ‘Transferring her from one machine to another will have put a great deal of stress on her body.’

I don’t need them to tell me, really. I can see it in Sofika’s skin and hair. In the frown that creases her brow, even as she sleeps.

‘I’ll let her rest,’ I tell them.

The Sister nods and she leaves, taking the others with her. My father goes too, though as always, I don’t see it happen. He just disappears between blinks. I stoop down and push Sofika’s hair back from her face.

‘Almost there, now,’ I say.

I straighten up again at the sound of footsteps at my back. They are feather-light, and accompanied by the scent of worn leather and second-hand lho-smoke.

‘I was starting to think you had broken your oaths,’ I say.

Yumia comes to stand beside me, her bare feet near soundless on the deck. It is the first time that I have seen her since revealing the truth about Sofika, though going by that faint smell of smoke, it is only me she has been hiding from, and not Zoric. Her narrow face is pinched and drawn, and the wound she took in the Navigation quarter has healed messily. It will leave a considerable scar.

‘No, lord,’ she says. ‘Once is unforgivable. Twice would be beyond repentance.’

‘Nonetheless, there will be consequences for your actions when this is done.’

She nods. ‘I know.’

‘So, you will serve.’

It isn’t a question, and Yumia doesn’t treat it like one.

‘On my honour, lord. My blades are yours, as is my life.’

‘Good.’

A silence falls between us that is not necessarily companionable, but that is more than merely master and servant.

‘Danil said that you believe Madame Sofika can be restored,’ Yumia says, after a moment. ‘Is that true?’

‘Yes, I believe it is.’

‘I was always taught that what is done cannot be undone,’ she says.

I look at her. At the exile brands that spiral around her arms and throat that she earned when she failed to defend her people. Her family. Her home.

‘If you knew there was a way to undo your greatest failure, wouldn’t you? If you knew that you could excise those brands from your skin and return to Illithia to be with your sisters, wouldn’t you do it?’

She looks down at her hands. The gesture is so like Zoric’s that I think perhaps I am unfair in considering their relationship merely affection.

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘But would I also be undone?’

I frown. ‘What do you mean?’

Yumia traces the shape of the brand on her left arm. ‘Before I had these marks I was selfish,’ she says. ‘I was arrogant. I put my own desires before those of my people. I was chosen by rite to lead. To defend them. But I did not want a tether, or a duty. I wanted glory. So I left. I took to the hunt in search of trophies.’

She shakes her head.

‘When I returned, it had already happened. My home was burning and my people were gone. Taken in the darkest hours by the pale blades from beyond the stars, all save for one.’ She curls up her hands. ‘Nimia was dying when I found her. So covered in blood that all I could catch were her eyes. She had little life, and only one word left to her.’

‘Dishonour,’ I say.

Yumia nods. ‘I took her last word and made it a part of me. It tempered my selfishness. My arrogance. It taught me that my path is not my own to choose. So, you ask me would I go back?’ She exhales, somehow seeming no less tense for it. ‘Not if it meant returning to what I was before.’

‘So you would rather live with guilt?’

Yumia shakes her head. ‘I would rather know myself.’ She reaches out and places her hand on the shell of Sofika’s cradle-casket. ‘But for Madame Sofika, I hope it is true. The stars are bleaker without her.’

She looks at me.

‘As are you, lord.’

Her comment isn’t intended to rile me, so I don’t let it. Yumia’s parent tongue is a blunt one, and she has never made any accommodations for that in Gothic, either. She is not the type to make accommodations at all. It is one of the reasons I chose to take her for my bladeward.

‘I am what I need to be,’ I tell her.

Yumia nods. ‘Exactly,’ she says.

The Vow trembles, then, deep in its bones. The sensation is followed by a low, throaty whine that sounds like a wounded animal.

‘What is that?’ Yumia asks.

I look up at the ceiling as the noise slows and grows lower and fades altogether and the ever-present rumble of the ship’s engines ceases altogether.

‘It’s the Vow,’ I tell her. ‘She is ready to give herself up to the stars.’

Evangeline

Saying goodbye to the Unbroken Vow feels almost like saying goodbye to a Sister.

I stand in the belly of one of four bulk landers that have been sent from the surface to convey Elivia’s combined commandery and all of its wargear to the planet below. Nearly two hundred and fifty Battle Sisters. Dominions and Seraphim, Celestians and Retributors. With us come the auxiliaries. The Sisters Hospitaller, and the Naval armsmen. Our Rhino tanks and Immolators. A good part of the crew follow with us, too. Those who have no place aboard a dying ship. No purpose. Only Okash and a skeleton crew remain behind to oversee the debarkation and wind down the Vow’s systems. As the ship grows small enough to see in its entirety through the bulk lander’s viewport, I catch sight of the damage done to her. The cost she paid to get us here. The scars and burns. The gaping, toothed holes in the hull. The thousands of tiny viewports, lightless. The dim hollows of her engines, lifeless. Despite all of that damage, though, she is still holding together. Just.

I keep my eyes on the armaglass and the ship beyond it as Ashava approaches to stand beside me at the viewport. Her armour has been patched and repainted, as mine has. The work is indelicate and hurried, sufficient only to make the suit functional.

‘The others are asking for you,’ she says. ‘Eugenia especially.’

Guilt pulls at me. ‘I know.’

‘I told them to let you be. At least until we land.’

I glance at her. ‘Thank you.’

Ashava nods, as though accommodating me is merely a part of her duty.

‘What will happen to her now?’ she asks, nodding towards the retreating shape of the Unbroken Vow.

‘She will be recovered and taken apart,’ I tell her. ‘Then she will be sent for refit at Cypra Mundi, or one of its sister worlds. Okash and his crew will go with her.’

‘It is not so much repair as rebirth, with damage such as that.’

The stars wheel as the bulk lander turns in preparation for atmospheric entry and I lose sight of the Vow amongst the debris. Then I lose sight of the debris altogether as the lander hits the upper limits of Dimmamar’s atmosphere.

‘It will take decades, in all likelihood,’ I say. ‘But she will see service again.’

The lander begins to thrum and shake with the stress of re-entry, and the viewport fills with roiling cloud and flame, so bright that it hurts to look at it.

‘Death comes only to those who have fulfilled their purpose.’

For a moment, neither of us say a thing. The only thing to hear is the roar, like that of something awoken.

‘That is what you are hoping to find on Dimmamar, isn’t it?’ Ashava asks. ‘You are looking for your death.’

I keep my silence for a moment, looking out into the fire raging beyond the armaglass. At my reflection, printed onto the flames.

‘Would you try to prevent me if I were?’

Ashava keeps her eyes on the fire too. It doesn’t keep me from seeing the sorrow in them, even in her reflection.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not if that truly is your purpose.’

Tears threaten at my eyes, making me blink. ‘How long have you known?’ I ask.

‘I was certain of your intent the day we set foot on Terra,’ she says. ‘But in truth I think that I have always known. You have always loved others more than yourself, Eva. Always pushed yourself further than anyone else ever could. Those are the makings of a martyr.’

She shakes her head.

‘So no, I will not prevent you. Death is the greatest glory that we can hope for. Suffering is to be celebrated.’ She catches the eyes of my reflection. ‘I will stand beside you as your Sister, no matter what is to come.’

The lander breaks through the atmosphere and into Dimmamar’s storm-wracked sky, where the fire is replaced with streaks of rain. Bright, to cold, in an instant. The cathedral world stretches out below. Dimmamar is a place of spires and of sanctuaries. A great grey edifice of marble and stone that stretches as far as the eye can see. Worship halls and cathedra completely cover its surface and jut upwards into its stormy skies. Like the Throneworld, Dimmamar, too, has suffered. As the cityscape grows larger and closer, I see the kind of damage wrought by bombardment, and by orbital debris. I see whole wards of the city blackened by fire. Burned, until there is nothing left but bones.

I turn away from the viewport and look at Ashava. My Sister.

‘Thank you,’ I tell her.

She does not smile, or weep. Instead, Ashava draws me into an embrace, just as she did all those weeks ago, when we were reunited aboard the Unbroken Vow.

‘I will miss you, Eva,’ she says in my ear.

A tear escapes my closed eye.

‘I will miss you too,’ I tell her.

The bulk lander puts down at a landing zone inside the borders of the largest cathedral-city in Dimmamar’s southern hemisphere. It is the closest landing point to the approximate location of the light I saw from the Vow’s bridge.

All around me, the commandery prepares to move out. We perform the same rites we would before a war, though we expect no conflict here. It is part of our dogma, as warriors of the faith. As I make my way to where my squad are gathered, I pass by others of the commandery checking and rechecking their bolters. Making oaths, and taking prayer. Pinning parchment seals to their armour and lighting candles. I see those we have brought with us, too. The ship’s crew and civilians. The families. They turn to watch me as I pass, and I am certain that more of them have marked their faces to match mine than before. I catch sight of Kati at the head of one of the groups. She is holding a lit lumen stick like a candle, her dark eyes catching the light from it. Her mouth opens and makes the shape of my name, but I do not stop. I do not speak to her. I just keep walking.

My Sisters stand ready in the shadow of the lander’s exit ramp, their bolters slung and their swords sheathed. I take my place before them and look at each of them in turn. Sarita and Munari. The twins who differ from each other more with every battle. Veridia, and her missing memories. Haskia, and her vambraces wound with memorial chain. Joti, who I haven’t seen smile since we lost Calyth. Qi-Oh, who looks at me differently now. Ashava who will miss me when I am gone.

And then there is Eugenia.

It is the first time I have seen her since the hospitaller’s ward. Like our armour, she has been hastily repaired. The bionic she bears in place of her left eye is crude and basic, and the synth-skin used to bed it in is mismatched, doing little to diminish the severity of the ridged scar that runs from her jawline to her hairline. Her good eye hasn’t changed, though. It is still wide and dark and full of devotion as she looks at me and smiles, and I realise then what it is that I want to say.

‘We come here in search of the Shield of Saint Katherine,’ I tell them. ‘A relic beyond value. Beyond worth. But it is more than that, too. The quest for the Shield unites us. It draws us together at a time when we have lost so much. It offers purpose, and redemption. Not just for me, but for all of us. The Shield of Saint Katherine reminds us of what we truly are.’

I look at each of them again. Qi-Oh, Eugenia, Haskia, Joti, Veridia, Ashava. Sarita and Munari.

‘We are strong. We are devoted. We serve, in the honour of those that we have lost, though it may take everything we have. We are strong, together. We are Sisters.’

I think of Calyth, singing in the chapel.

‘We are women of faith,’ I tell my Sisters. ‘And in faith we are found.’

Evangeline

As the lander’s ramp lowers, a smell carries into the hold on the wind. Cold air and old stone. Mortar and marble. Dying flowers. The smell of a cardinal world.

‘It smells like home,’ Ashava says.

She is standing beside me with the rest of my squad at the head of the commandery. Canoness Elivia stands in front of us with her Celestians, ready to step out the moment that the ramp is down.

‘Do you hear that?’ Elivia asks. ‘The sound on the wind?’

I listen, and I realise that I can hear wailing. Dim and distant at first, it grows louder and clearer by the second.

‘What is that? Alarums?’

The question belongs to Yumia. She is standing nearby with Ravara and the rest of her retinue. Ravara’s bladeward is wary. Tense, like a length of chain under torsion.

‘No,’ Ravara says, watching the ramp come down. ‘It’s devotion.’

I look out as the lander’s ramp hits the earth. The landing zone is a vast expanse that has been panelled flat. It sits between the inner and outer walls of Dimmamar’s south-western cathedral province. Not in the holiest place, or the poorest, but somewhere between. A huge crowd is gathered around the edges of the landing zone. A sea of humanity, clad in the colours of pilgrims. They are the ones wailing, like a choir that cannot control its song.

A short distance from the foot of the bulk lander’s ramp, two figures wait, separate from the crowd. Unlike the pilgrims, who are held back by barriers and security troops, these two men are standing on a greeting drape of violet and gold. They are clad from head to toe in fine, heavy robes of white and gold and red. A pair of cherubim hover above them, trailing parchment scrolls, while veiled faith-serfs crouch at their feet, scattering flower petals.

‘Hail, Blessed Sisters,’ comes a voice, broadcast from the fluttering cherubim. It is fine and heavy, just like the robes of the men waiting for us.

‘Ceremony.’

Elivia speaks the word as though it is another name for sin, before looking to me, and then to Ravara.

‘Come,’ she says. ‘Let us get this over with.’

Elivia starts down the ramp with Beatris and Radah at her side. Ravara follows, leaving her retinue behind. Before I step out on to the ramp, Ashava puts her hand on my arm.

‘He chose you,’ she says in a low voice. ‘And so did she.’

Then she drops her hand away and bows her head and steps back to wait for her summons.

I turn away from my Sisters and look out at the gathered crowd and the face of Dimmamar beyond it. The cathedral world does not just smell like home, but looks like it too. The sky is stormy in the way that spire worlds often are. Heavy and purpled and illuminated by occasional arcs of lightning. The gothic spires beyond the inner walls are made from marble and black iron and grey stone, so tall that they disappear into the thunderheads. Thousands of tiny lights glitter across the surface of the spires between the ancient statues of saviours and saints, and the vast banners crease in the high winds, cracking and snapping like the wings of colossal birds.

Are you ready?

Adelynn’s voice is so close and so real that I almost turn to look for her. That I almost answer her. But of course she isn’t here. She cannot hear me. So I give my answer in the only way I can.

By stepping out onto the lander’s ramp.

As soon as I set foot into Dimmamar’s grey daylight, the wailing of the crowd pitches upwards and takes the form of a word. A name.

Evangeline.

It hits me like a wave. Like a rush of heat from a fire. It steals the air from my lungs. It is an effort to make my way down the ramp to where Elivia and Ravara wait. When I reach them, Elivia smiles, but Ravara does not. She merely nods. Then the three of us approach the figures waiting on the greeting drape together. As we draw close, the taller of the two men holds up his hand. The wailing stops almost immediately, though the crowd could not have hoped to see him do it. The man is strangely ageless, his skin even and unscarred and his eyes as dark as his neatly parted hair.

‘Canoness Elivia,’ he says, looking to each of them in turn. ‘Inquisitor Ravara. I am Judicale Castanne, cardinal-principal of the south-western cathedral province.’

Elivia makes the aquila sign. Ravara nods. Castanne’s eyes slide away from them, settling on me. His eyes linger on mine for a moment. On my marks. I catch the glittering of tears within the darkness of them.

‘You are Sister Evangeline,’ he says softly. ‘Then it is true.’

‘Was there any doubt?’ Elivia asks flatly.

The man beside Castanne bows his head at her words. He is not ageless, but aged. What remains of his hair is thin and grey, and his face is weather-lined and weather-tanned, his silver eyes set deeply in their sockets. Unlike Castanne, nothing about this man matches the richness of his robes. And unlike Castanne, he cannot look me in the eyes at all.

‘My apologies, Canoness,’ he says. ‘Blessings have been few and far between since the opening of the dread scar. We are not doubting, but merely gladdened.’

Elivia remains unmoved. ‘And you are?’

The man smiles patiently. ‘Agon Silvera,’ he says. ‘I am Master of Trails for the pilgrims and penitents.’

Castanne nods. ‘The Master of Trails and I will assist you in your calling, but first we must direct you to the cathedra majoris, where we shall undertake the feast and reception ceremony.’

‘We have come to recover the Shield of Saint Katherine,’ Elivia says, interrupting him. ‘We have no time for ceremony.’

Castanne blinks. ‘Very well, Canoness,’ he says. ‘But first we must divine the whereabouts of the Shield.’ He looks at me. ‘Has it been shown to you, blessed Sister?’

I think of my dream. Of cold air and old stone. A single candle, flickering in the darkness.

‘In part,’ I reply.

Castanne blinks again and opens his mouth to speak, but before he can say anything Ravara interrupts.

‘She will know it,’ she says. ‘I have seen it, as have Terra’s own scryers.’

‘As have ours, honoured inquisitor,’ Silvera says, still smiling his patient smile. ‘Again, we mean no mistrust. The mark alone is proof enough.’ He looks at Castanne. ‘Perhaps we begin with the Archivia Primus, Judicale,’ he continues. ‘It is as good a place as we could hope for.’

Castanne considers it a moment, and then nods. ‘Very well,’ he says. ‘We go to the Archivia Primus.’

He makes the sign of the aquila with his unscarred hands.

‘With grace and purpose,’ he says.

We all mirror his gesture and his words, and then the cardinal turns away and so does Silvera. All around us the crowd begin to wail again, their voices swelling to fill the sky, louder than the distant thunder or the roar of engines or the march of booted feet as my Sisters begin to disembark from their landers. Loud enough to prompt a single tear to slide down my face, leaving a cold streak against my burning scars.

‘It will be over soon,’ Ravara says.

The inquisitor’s amber eyes are fixed on the horizon. On the thunderhead clouds, and the crackling storm. She is smiling, faintly, though her cheeks are painted with the tracks of tears too.

‘Just a little further to go,’ she says softly.

Evangeline

The Archivia Primus is located in one of the tallest spires in the south-western quarter’s fifty-third district. Like much of the architecture around it, the spire is made up of black iron and water-stained marble. It is so old that the gargoyles and statues adorning it have given up their features to the wind and the rain. To time itself. The balconies and balustrades are sagging, breaking slowly under the weight of ages. There is damage visible on the spire, too. Some of its windows are without glassaic, and its skin is scored with impacts. Doves wearing white feathers have settled in every crack and every hollow, so bright against the damage that they look like lantern lights.

‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’

The words belong to Silvera. The Master of Trails is standing beside me, his face upturned to take in the height of the spire. Rainwater settles in the creases of his aged face.

‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘It is. Though it seems as though it has suffered.’

‘Everything has, since the opening of the dread scar,’ Silvera says. ‘There have been a thousand blades aimed at the world’s heart. Evil creatures came to test us, again and again. Xenos, and heretics. Servants of darkness in ships of black iron.’

‘But you withstood them,’ I say. ‘You turned them away.’

Silvera blinks rainwater from his eyes.

‘Humanity is possessed of a will to survive like that of no other,’ he says. ‘We fight, tooth and nail. We bleed, and die. We make sacrifices.’

He lowers his eyes from the spire and fixes them on the floor once again.

‘The cost to keep our world safe has been great,’ he says. ‘But keep it safe we did. And now you are here, blessed Sister.’

Silvera passes his hand over his aged face to push away the rainwater.

‘Perhaps you can save us all over again.’

I frown at the words. I am about to ask Silvera what they mean when I am interrupted by a voice, calling my name.

‘Eva.’

I turn my head to see Ashava approaching me through the rain. My Sisters are with her, their weapons slung and their black armour pearled with water droplets.

‘I thought you were proceeding to the billets with the rest of the commandery,’ I say.

Ashava shakes her head. ‘We are Sisters, Eva,’ she says. ‘We are stronger together.’

‘Our place is with you,’ Qi-Oh says. ‘Come what may.’

I smile before I can think twice about it. It is not a hollow smile. It is not tinged with guilt. It is just a smile.

‘Thank you,’ I tell them.

Ashava puts her hand to my shoulder a moment. ‘We shall await you inside,’ she says, then she performs a shallow bow, and my Sisters troop away into the spire. I turn back to speak with Silvera, meaning to ask him what it is he needs saving from, but the Master of Trails is gone, leaving me alone in the avenue save for the rain and the calling of birds.

In order to be permitted access to the Archivia Primus, we must first divest ourselves of our armour, and the dirt of the road. The task is undertaken in a series of small, spare purification chambers that are tiled with white ceramic, like a hospitaller’s ward. Two attendants await me in my designated cubicle. Both are female, with dark hair and pale skin. They are clad in robes as white as the ceramic walls, stooped yet strong from years of service. At the sight of them I cannot help but think of Wyllo and Dallia. Of sobbing.

‘Shall we begin, my lady?’ they ask, as one.

‘Yes,’ I reply.

The women set to work in silent concert, removing each piece of my armour with great care. Gauntlets. Vambraces and shoulder guards. My chestplate, cuisse and tassets. My poleyns and greaves. My sabatons. They remove my vestments and the flexible body suit beneath them. Then together they cleanse my skin, this time scattering me not with ashes, but with scented, blessed water. They do all of this without ever looking me in the eyes. Then I dress myself in the heavy white robes that they give me. In soft leather shoes, and the same pale gloves that they wear, which are intended to keep the Archivia’s records from harm. Then the two women step back, their eyes still averted. They bow, as one, and I see that they are trembling.

‘Speak,’ I tell them. ‘Please.’

Neither one of them looks at me, but they do speak. This time, it does not happen in perfect concert, but staggered.

‘Your marks,’ says the first. ‘You are Evangeline.’

‘She who is blessed by Him on Terra,’ says the second.

Even after all this time, I cannot bring myself to say it.

‘I am Evangeline,’ I say, instead.

‘If we may, my lady,’ says the first. ‘We mean to ask a question.’

I nod, and the second woman speaks.

‘What does it feel like to be blessed?’ she asks.

I cannot bring myself to tell them what I told Qi-Oh. Not in this place. Not when I am so close. But I cannot ignore their question, so in place of one truth, I offer another.

‘It feels like an ending,’ I tell them.

Ravara

The Archivia Primus is situated in the upper levels of the spire, so high up that the only view through the arched windows is of the inside face of a thunderstorm. As I stand in the east wing and wait for the others to pass through purification, I watch lightning bolts arcing from the thunderheads to the grounding rods that jut from the spire’s plating on the other side of the reinforced glassaic. They are all colours, and no colours, all at once. Bright, migraine flashes that look for all the stars like questing fingers trying to pry their way inside.

‘Do you remember the mountaintop storms, Ahri? The ones we would see in summer?’

My father does not appear this time. He is already present, just as he has been ever since we set foot on Dimmamar. Following me, closer even than a shadow can. He exists on the edges of my vision, like a mote of dust on the surface of my eye, carrying with him the scent of whisperpines, and of cool air.

‘I remember,’ I reply. ‘The lightning would strike the slopes, and set them on fire.’

Another flash strikes the tower and dissipates before I speak again. Before I ask a pointless question of the spectre conjured from my mind.

‘I am going mad, aren’t I?’ I ask. ‘That’s why I can see you all of the time, now.’

He shakes his head. ‘You are not going mad, Ahri. Far from it. I told you before. I am here because we only leave others behind by choice. You choose to see me, therefore, you see me.’

I see my smile reflected in the rain-slicked glass. ‘That sounds a lot like madness to me.’

My father smiles too. ‘You are almost at the end of your journey now,’ he says. ‘After the Rebirth, you will have no more need to see me. Everything will change.’

The lightning flares again, crazing over the surface of the glassaic like a power field does over a sword’s blade. It outlines the floor and the walls anew, but not him, because he’s not really here.

‘Do you remember what would happen after the mountaintop storms?’ he asks me.

I nod. ‘The peaks would burn for days. Sometimes weeks. When the fires died down the mountains would be grey with ashes.’

My father nods. ‘It would always seem like devastation. Like the end. But the fire would only ever clear away the deadwood, and the plants closest to the end of their life cycle.’

I watch the rain run down the glassaic, painting tears onto the reflection of my face. ‘And the mountaintops would be reborn stronger because of it.’

My father nods again. ‘Remember that, Ahri,’ he says. ‘Endings are little more than beginnings by another name.’

I hear the approach of feet, then. Before I even turn from the glassaic, I know that it is Sister Evangeline because of the sound. Not of her feet, but the crackling of fire.

‘Inquisitor,’ she says.

I turn away from the rainstorm to look at her. At the flames that only I can see, playing across her skin. That has been the same since we set foot on Dimmamar, too. I can even see it when I close my eyes.

‘It is beautiful,’ my father says gently. ‘The fire.’

Sister Evangeline doesn’t react, because she can’t hear him.

‘They are calling for us,’ she says, instead.

‘Follow the eagle, Ahri,’ says my father.

‘Very well,’ I say, in answer to them both.

Evangeline

The central vault of the Archivia Primus is so tall that I cannot see the ceiling. It must extend to the very top of the spire, where the clouds grow too thin to make rain. The vault is circular and lined with bookcases and shelving. Servitors mounted on slide rails move up and down the racks, turning the scrolls and books to keep them from wearing unevenly. Cherubim hover and hum softly, carrying lanterns in their bionic hands. The lumen strips set into the walls are yellow and dim so as not to bleach the texts, and the few narrow windows are set with coloured crystal and sealed with heavy bolts to keep out the cathedral world’s moods. In the middle of the circular space is a massive table carved from a single piece of marble, the surface of which has been polished to remove any imperfections or flaws. Any snags, or hollow spaces.

Standing on the opposite side of the table to me and my squad are the cardinal-principal and his Master of Trails. Silvera avoids my eyes even more determinedly than before, as if he knows I am wondering about his earlier words. Canoness Elivia stands at one head of the table, while Ravara stands at the other. All of us are clad in white, like the doves that make their homes in the hollows of the Archivia. Like memorial statues.

Placed on the table is a map made of a dozen or more sections of parchment. On it are depicted hundreds of spires and thousands of lesser structures, the miles-wide avenues merely fine lines running between them. Placed around the edges of the map are dozens upon dozens of texts and maps and rolled scrolls in leather wraps. Some are handwritten. Some are replicated. Copies of copies.

‘What you see before you is our entire collection of records concerning the construction and disposition of the south-western cathedral quarter,’ Castanne says.

‘Are they unbroken?’ Elivia asks. ‘The records?’

Castanne reaches out, stopping just short of touching the closest of the scrolls. We are all wearing the same pale gloves for the purposes of handling the ancient texts, but Castanne still wears his multitude of heavy, studded rings on chains around his neck. Ruby and platinum. Topaz and gold. I am certain that the cardinal has more wealth on one of those chains than most of the people in the district he serves.

‘No, Canoness,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately they are not.’

Silvera nods. ‘Few things are, in these times.’

‘Perhaps there is something to be done about that, if we find the Shield.’ Ravara looks at me. ‘Evangeline, tell them what you have seen.’

For the first time in a long time, I do not look to anyone else before I speak. I do not seek permission. I just take a breath, and begin to talk. I tell every soul standing around the table of the absolute darkness. The single candle, and the path made from ninety-nine aquila-stones. I tell them of the iron-wrought gates and Saint Katherine’s image, and the vast chamber beyond. The smell of cold air and candle smoke and dying flowers. I tell them of the pedestal draped in crimson cloth, bearing the Shield of Saint Katherine. I tell them about catching fire and about the golden light that filled my vision. About crossed hands, covered in blood.

In the wake of my words they are all quiet. Reverent. Everyone is watching me closely, save for Silvera, who still declines to look at me directly.

‘The Mark of Martyrs,’ Castanne says. ‘That is the meaning of the crossed hands, seen alone.’

‘An unsurprising vision, for one of our Order,’ Elivia says.

Ravara shakes her head. ‘I dreamed of them too,’ she says. ‘Set into the walls of a vast hall. Hundreds of thousands of human bones, all gilded.’ She pauses, and looks down at her own hands. ‘I have seen places painted in such a way before, too. Old places.’

Silvera nods. ‘It is used in different ways on different worlds. Sometimes as a warding sign, sometimes to seal something in.’ He starts sorting through the texts with gloved hands. Unlike the cardinal, Silvera wears no jewellery. No signs of status. ‘Most often the Mark of Martyrs is cast in the walls of tombs, and of memorials. Particularly those that were constructed in the wake of the Apostate period.’

The cherubim overhead wail at his words. A long, atonal keen. All of us bow our heads and cross our hands for a moment in recognition of the name. Of a period of such darkness.

‘We are looking for somewhere ancient,’ Ravara says, when the cherubim stop their crying. ‘Somewhere likely buried by the weight of ages. The entrance might be hidden, or blocked off altogether.’

‘There must be a thousand such places in the low districts alone,’ Castanne says.

Silvera nods. ‘More than likely.’

‘Then how can we possibly hope to find it?’ he replies.

‘Faith.’

The word belongs to Elivia, and it is so flatly spoken that the cardinal recedes a little further from her. He bows deeply.

‘Of course, Canoness,’ he says. ‘Of course.’

He casts his eyes around those present.

‘We seek the specifics,’ he says. ‘The gate and the path to find it. The Mark of Martyrs.’

Everyone nods and sets to busying themselves with consulting the texts and scrolls. My Sisters pore over prayer scrolls and verses while Silvera and Ravara talk in low voices about the use of iron to make gates, and the setting of stepped paths in stone. About the Mark of Martyrs. I search through histories, and records of building, and battle. I read the apocryphal tales of the Renouncement. Of Thor, and the Confederation of Light. Of the Great Defence of 858, which made an icon of Sister Amelda of the Bloody Rose. Time ticks on, and the rain lashes against the spire. Lightning flashes. The servitors turn their scrolls and the cherubim hum and time still ticks on, but I find nothing of the ninety-nine steps, or the iron-wrought gate. I find nothing to tell me where to find the Shield.

I close the last of the tomes on my side of the table, my hand lingering on the cover. Ashava pauses in her work beside me.

‘Anything?’ she asks, in a low voice.

I shake my head, because I cannot bring myself to say it. She folds closed the book in front of her, and puts her hand flat on top of mine.

‘Adelynn told you that you had the answer,’ she says. ‘Perhaps we are all looking in the wrong place.’

‘Or looking too hard,’ Eugenia says.

Qi-Oh nods. ‘Frustration does nothing but quiet His guidance.’

‘He wants you to find the Shield, Eva,’ Ashava says. ‘Not me, or us. Not Elivia, or these others. You.’

‘But I do not know where to begin,’ I reply.

‘You do,’ Sarita says.

‘You just don’t know it yet,’ says Munari.

‘Listen to your heart,’ Veridia says. She puts her fingertips to the steel plate in her scalp. ‘The mind can fail you. It can be changed or broken, but the heart cannot. That is where the God-Emperor truly rests.’

I hesitate, wavering under the weight of their expectations, and everyone else’s. Of my own. Ashava squeezes my hand tightly. Her eyes are full of warmth.

‘He chose you, Eva,’ she says. ‘And so did she.’

I take a deep breath of the cool, smokeless Archivia air, and nod. Ashava lets go of my hand as I turn back to the table. To the vast, sprawling map of Dimmamar’s south-western cathedral quarter. Almost thirty thousand square kilometres of city, rendered painstakingly in ink and leaf. I walk around the map’s edge, taking in the spires and the slums. The cathedra and the avenues. The pilgrims’ paths and workhalls. I do not think. I do not question. I just keep walking until I reach the far side of the table. Until I recognise a shape made by the buildings and the roads. The same shape that I bear around my eyes, that has started to burn again under the Archivia’s yellow lighting.

The Imperial aquila is made purely by the shapes of the city. It has habitation towers for claws, and avenues for wings. Its body is made of memorials, and its twin heads are spires. The murmur of voices and turning of papers fades away. All sound does, save for the cherubim humming far above me. I lean closer to read the names of the avenues and of the buildings, and as I do, my scars begin to burn more fiercely. Not just my face, but my throat and chest. My legs and arms.

My hands. They are the worst. The most painful. It is as though they are aflame all over again. Ablaze. I pull off my gloves just to allow the air to touch my skin, though I am dimly aware of Castanne raising his voice and then Ravara doing the same. I ignore them both. I ignore everything, save for the burning, and the humming of the cherubim. Save for my hands. I turn them and look at the scars lining and discolouring my palms, made by the melting of Adelynn’s sword on the Last of Days. And in them, too, I see a shape. I cross my hands as if I am about to make the sign of the aquila, and every single line and every discolouration matches up with the map beneath my hands. Everything save for one mark on the inside of my left palm.

Right where the eagle’s heart would be.

‘I already had the answer,’ I say numbly.

At my words, sound filters back in and I become aware of the others all gathered around me. All making the same mark as me. They are all looking at the map, save for Ravara, whose amber eyes are shining. She mouths two silent words, meant for nobody but me.

Thank you.

‘What district is this?’ Elivia asks. Her voice is possessed of a softness I have not heard since we first stood together in her chambers aboard the Unbroken Vow.

‘The fifty-fourth,’ Castanne replies. ‘It is a burned district.’

Ravara looks at him. ‘Burned,’ she says. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It was struck by debris from the fleet battle in the wake of the Rift,’ Castanne says. ‘When the enemy came in great numbers. The district was on fire for days. Perhaps weeks. We had no course but to isolate it and let it burn.’ He shakes his head. ‘It ravaged the surface structures. Killed tens of thousands.’

‘But what lies beneath likely remains intact,’ Silvera says. ‘District fifty-four was not always named so.’ He reaches out, stopping just short of touching the map. ‘It is old. Old enough that once it had a name and not a number.’

‘And what was the name?’ Elivia asks.

‘Canderum,’ Silvera says, his fingertips lingering over the map. ‘It means light.’

Ravara

The burned and blasted remains of Canderum tower over us like the bones of something vast. Something that died violently, thrashing as it did so. Everything around us is grey with ash. It lies thickly over the avenues, stirring into clouds as the commandery press further through the district towards the location marked by Sister Evangeline’s scars. The air smells of burning and of ages. Of death. Ashes settle and stick against my armour. On my face and hair. They lessen the already weak light from Dimmamar’s distant sun, and cut short our stablights and torches. Only one light remains clear to see, at least to me.

Sister Evangeline walks at the fore of the column, her sword drawn and held in a loose grip at her side. She is back in her armour now, but it doesn’t stop me seeing the flames crawling over her figure. Her squad follow a few paces behind her with Canoness Elivia and her honour guard. Cardinal-Principal Castanne walks with them, lifting his robes a little so that they don’t trail in the dirt. At our backs, the commandery stretches back along the road. Dozens upon dozens of Sisters marching in lockstep, their banners held high. Beyond them, the armoured transports and the auxiliaries. All around us, the faithful.

‘Every time I look, there are more of them,’ Zoric says.

The crowds of people stay clear of the roadway, and the commandery. Instead, they cut through the ruins, treading through rubble and wreckage and bits of broken glass. Bits of broken bones. I catch sight of pilgrims and priests. Of people who once called the Unbroken Vow their home. I even see children flitting between the remains of walls and windows. The faithful are all different, but they have all marked their faces in the same way, with the aquila, just like Sister Evangeline.

The Mark of Martyrs.

‘What could they hope to do?’ Yumia asks. ‘They are not warriors, or scholars.’

‘They come for the same reason as the rest of us,’ Silvera says. ‘To see a miracle.’

The Master of Trails looks at the people trudging through the ruins as he speaks. Silvera doesn’t bother keeping his robes clear of the dirt like Castanne. He is barefoot, as Yumia is, his feet blackened by the path he has taken.

‘They are hoping for blessings for their children,’ he says. ‘For the sick and injured to be healed, just by witnessing Sister Evangeline’s miracle.’

He glances at me without ever truly catching my eyes.

‘Is that what you are seeking, too, honoured inquisitor?’ he asks, before indicating the cradle-casket. To Sofika. ‘Is that why you have brought her all this way?’

I hold his gaze without blinking. ‘Sofika is my interrogator,’ I tell him. ‘That is reason enough.’

Silvera inclines his head. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I mean no insult.’

‘And you, priest,’ I ask. ‘What are you hoping for?’

Silvera’s eyes fall back to the road and I notice for the first time that the Master of Trails wears a pair of barbed clasps around his ankles. The bonds of penitence. The wounds they make are bleeding slowly, staining his feet red as well as black.

‘What all of us hope for,’ he says. ‘Forgiveness for foolish mistakes.’

Then Silvera turns away and slips back into the procession. I watch him go. Watch the bloodied footprints he leaves behind.

‘He seems full of guilt,’ Yumia says, her hand resting on the short sword belted at her hip.

‘Don’t we all,’ Zoric replies.

Yumia smiles humourlessly. I don’t. I stay focused on Silvera, waiting for my threat-sense to stir. But it doesn’t. I feel nothing, save for the anticipation of what’s to come. I exhale slowly, and rest the flat of my hand on Sofika’s cradle-casket as it drifts forwards beside me, propelled by grav-suspensors that mean it is virtually untouched by the dirt of the roadway. The machine hums beneath my palm, helping Sofika breathe as she sleeps, coiled in its cables. She is even paler now than she was aboard the Vow. Barely more than bones, just like Canderum. As I watch, the display mounted on the machine’s carapace depletes again.

Nine hours left.

‘At the end of this day, she will stand with you once more.’

My father is walking on the opposite side of Sofika’s machine to me, his robes a riot of teal and gold amidst all of the grey. The further we go, the more resolved his image becomes. His edges more refined, like a painting undergoing restoration.

‘The cost to do this will be great,’ my father says. ‘Greater than just Evangeline. But you have always known that, haven’t you, Ahri?’

I let my hand fall away from the machine and look at the faithful, stumbling through the ruins around me. At the commandery, marching with fierce joy in their eyes. At Zoric and Yumia. The two of them are walking just a little way ahead now, talking in low voices. Arguing, good-naturedly. I think about everything they have done. Everything they have become, simply because I asked it of them. I think of blood and death, but of laughter, too. Comradeship. Respect.

Trust.

The vox buzzes in my ear, then, and Evangeline’s voice cuts through.

‘Inquisitor,’ she says. ‘I need you to come to the head of the column.’

‘Are we close?’ I ask her.

There is a moment in which I clearly hear Evangeline breathe before she speaks again. It sounds as though it hurts her to do it.

‘I believe so.’

Evangeline

The roadway opens in the footprint of what must have once been a spire.

Now, in its place, lies a vast piece of an Imperial starship. The ashes around the impact site are finer and darker. They stir in the wind, making momentary, transitory shapes. Figures and claws. Wings and teeth. The air is filled with the sound of the ashes moving. A constant shifting, like a chorus of whispers. Beneath that noise is another. The constant, tectonic groaning of the ship’s superstructure as it slowly collapses in on itself under the cathedral world’s atmosphere.

‘It is like sand,’ Ashava says, stooping down to put her fingers to the ground.

‘I have seen the like before. It is typical of when something so vast makes ground at such speed,’ Haskia says. ‘Everything in the surrounding area would have died before the fires even began, just from the pressure.’

‘Cheering thoughts, Sister,’ Munari says, clucking her tongue.

‘Factual,’ Haskia replies, without even a blink.

‘If it is fact, then what does that mean for us?’ Qi-Oh asks.

‘It means that the Shield is likely not on the surface,’ Haskia says.

I am only half-listening to them as I walk forward into the shadow of the wreckage. The tower of twisted metal is hundreds of metres tall, hardly more than a fraction of the ship it must have fallen from. It eliminates what remains of the sun, creating a darker darkness for me to stand in. The remains of the ship are burned black, reshaped by the heat of re-entry and the force of its landing. From this angle, it makes a familiar shape.

‘Another mark,’ says Ravara. ‘Another aquila.’

I look back to see the inquisitor standing behind me in the shadows, the ash-sand coiling around her legs in thin wisps. Her retinue are with her. All three of them.

‘Yes,’ I say, looking back at the spire-that-is-not-a-spire. At what you could call the eagle’s twin heads, and its spread wings. At its claws, planted in the ground.

I set off towards the foot of it, and Ravara follows me. The closer we get, the darker it becomes. The louder the creaking of the ship and the whispering of the ashes. The more my scars burn. I activate the stablight on my armour, but it only serves to illuminate the area immediately around us, as the candle did in my dreams. It is enough to see that the ashes are moving. Trickling like water might, towards the base of the wreckage. I follow them with Ravara at my side until it becomes clear where the trail is leading.

At the foot of the wreckage, a slope of rubble leads down into Canderum’s undercrofts. Into darkness. The slope is wide, the gradient shallow. It is easily large enough to accommodate the full commandery at marching strength.

‘It must have been exposed during the impact,’ Ravara says.

My stablight picks out the ashes running down the slope in rivulets, seeking out the hollows and pathways in the rubble.

‘Left for us to find,’ I say.

Ravara nods. Her amber eyes are the brightest thing about her in shadows like these.

‘Inescapable,’ she says.

The space beneath the crash site is a vast hall that echoes to the sound of our boots. The air is cold enough to make your breath catch. Where it meets my battleplate it condenses, leaving trails like tears. Marble statues twice my height line the hall on either side. Some are shrouded with fraying, aged cloth. Most have cracked or collapsed. All are depicted with bindings around their eyes and their swords held pointed towards the far end of the vast hall.

‘Their blades are all pointed inwards,’ Ashava says. ‘Why would they be made that way?’

I look at the statues, frozen in silent accusation. In readiness. It reminds me of the circle of swords on the icon Ravara wears. All blades pointing inwards.

‘Perhaps they are meant to show you the way,’ Veridia replies.

‘Perhaps,’ I say, still looking at the blades. At the blindfolds.

‘The Mark of Martyrs,’ Ravara says, her words misting the air. ‘Look.’

The inquisitor shines her stablight up at the wall to reveal countless pairs of skeletal hands, all gilded and set to make the shape of the aquila.

‘How can it be that the Shield lies here?’ Castanne looks ill at ease. ‘This place must have been sealed for centuries.’

‘The same reason that we are here, cardinal,’ Ravara replies. ‘Destiny.’

Castanne blinks. Despite the cool air of the undercroft, he is prickling with sweat. Beside him, Silvera is trembling.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘The eagle’s path. Just as Evangeline said.’

He raises a shaking hand and points just as the statues do to the large stone slabs set into the floor, inlaid with golden aquilas. I look to Elivia, but the Canoness shakes her head.

‘Lead on, Evangeline,’ she says.

So I do. The moment I step onto the first of the aquila-stones, I feel a certainty I have not felt since Ophelia VII. A pull, just like that which drew the ashes into the undercroft. I follow the path through the darkness. Past the statues, and the collapse. My certainty grows and the pulling on my soul grows with it, and I keep walking until at last I find myself standing in front of the iron-wrought gate. The last thing standing between me and the Shield of Saint Katherine.

The gate looks different to how I have seen it in my dreams. It is heavier, and thicker. Made from two solid pieces of black iron. Saint Katherine is still sculpted there, but she is not beneficent. The saint is baleful, her eyes cut from the same red stones as her fiery heart. She is surrounded by ten concentric circles of prayer words in the old script. The same words are repeated in a half-circle at the foot of the gate, inlaid into the stone in silver. The loop of the door is a coil of thorns. All cutting edges.

‘That’s a blood-lock,’ Ravara says. ‘An old one. It will only open to those it was made for.’

‘But that is not me,’ I reply. ‘It can’t be.’

‘Perhaps it is not so much the blood it requires, but faith.’ Silvera steps forward and gazes up at the gate. At the script surrounding Saint Katherine. ‘“Blessed be those who enter”,’ he says. ‘It is written to seem like a benediction, but perhaps it is a requirement.’

Silvera looks at me truly for the first time. His pale eyes are deep-set and rheumy, but I can still catch sight of flecks of gold amid the grey of them.

‘Perhaps it means that only one who is blessed can open it,’ he says.

I nod slowly.

‘Are you ready?’ Ravara asks, as I unbuckle my gauntlet and remove it.

It feels strange hearing that question in a voice other than Adelynn’s. Strange enough that I cannot help but hesitate. I turn and look back at my Sisters to see that they are all watching me intently. Some are holding positions, their bolters raised on Elivia’s order. Some are making the sign of the aquila. Some are weeping silently. Only one stands out amongst the rest. Ashava is not intent, or weeping. She is smiling, a small, sad smile.

Go, she mouths to me.

I nod to her before I can change my mind, and turn back to face the door.

‘I am ready,’ I say.

Despite there being over two hundred and fifty people in the vast hall, not a single soul speaks a word as I step up to the door and take up the loop, the thorns immediately puncturing my skin. Compared to the burning of my scars, I barely feel it at all. There is a grinding all around me. Dust falls in columns. And then, slowly but surely, the gate begins to open. Golden light spills out through the widening gap between the dark iron slabs, faint at first, but growing brighter.

In the middle of the vast underground chamber is a raised dais, on which sits a pedestal made from white stone. That is where the light is emanating from. The light warms my scars and my skin. It finds its way inside my heart. I am no longer hollow. No longer just a heartbeat. I cross the vastness of the chamber floor, between more of the blindfolded statues and the marble columns that support the vaulted ceiling.

The others follow in silence. They take up position a respectful distance from the foot of the steps, standing in rows like worshippers in a chapel. Elivia. Ravara, and her retinue. Castanne and Silvera. Both priests go to their knees. They weep openly and without shame. The commandery do not kneel. They stand, their weapons at parade rest. Behind them, too fearful to cross the threshold of the gate, are the faithful. Castanne has had his security forces set a cordon to keep them out of the undercrofts, but a handful have slipped by all the same. I catch sight of a familiar figure in the shadows. One whose face is marked with the eagle, and who carries a single candle in her hand.

Kati.

Even across the vastness of the hall, I see the girl smile at me. I nod and turn away, putting my foot on the first of the steps that lead up to the pedestal. They are shallow, and old. Made from the same white stone as the pedestal and the statues and the aquila-stones. As I climb them I feel whole. I feel strong.

I feel ready.

I keep my eyes downwards as I reach the top of the steps and approach the pedestal, looking up only when I feel warmth against my scars. Before me, on the pedestal, lies the Shield of Saint Katherine. It is cast from a single piece of ancient and gloried adamantine that is painted with a representation of Saint Katherine herself. A mighty warrior, bearing blade and aegis. The Shield glows from within, casting a warming light that suffuses me, pouring into the hollow at the heart of me like molten gold until I cannot help but smile. I reach out slowly, as I have so many times in my dreams, finally ready to take up the Shield. To fulfil the destiny that the God-Emperor spared me for. My fingertips linger for a moment, a hair’s breadth from the surface of it. From my reflection, wrought in gold. Then I put my palm flat on the Shield’s mirrored face.

And it disappears, in a flare of light.

Ravara

It all happens in the blink of an eye. One moment I am standing at the foot of the steps watching Sister Evangeline reaching for the Shield, her hand lingering above the face of it. The next, she is engulfed by a bright, blinding light that fills the chamber. Fills my vision, edge to edge. I feel the heat of it against my face. My soul.

In the wake of it, the hall echoes to the sound of raised voices. My vision clears one blink at a time to reveal Sister Evangeline lying on the stone floor in front of me, thrown backwards by the force of the blast. She is completely still, save for the smoke coiling from her armour plates. There is no fire now. No flame. Sister Evangeline is glowing like old coals, the light fading by the moment.

I look around, expecting to see the Conduit but seeing only those we brought with us. Canoness Elivia is shouting orders, her Sisters raising their boltguns and blades. Sister Ashava is limping towards the steps. Towards Sister Evangeline. Castanne and Silvera are prostrated before the stairs and before the Battle Sister’s body, still weeping.

Zoric is down on one knee, shaking his head as if he’s trying to clear it. Yumia has hold of his arm, trying to drag him back to his feet.

‘Where is the Conduit, lord?’ she asks over the noise.

I blink, my ears ringing and unease building in my chest.

‘I don’t know,’ I tell her.

Yumia’s eyes go wide, but before she can answer me, another voice cuts in. An impossible voice.

‘The end,’ Sofika says. ‘This is the end.’

I turn and look at Sofika with my heart in my throat. My dream-taker is awake, though she shouldn’t be. She can’t possibly be. Her mountain-sky eyes are wide, her pupils like pinpricks in amongst all of that blue.

‘He draws near,’ she says, as blood tracks slowly from her nose.

A sensation overcomes me, like fingertips trailing up my spine. It’s not just threat, it’s more than that. Anticipation. I turn to see a thin line of golden fire manifesting in the air at the top of the steps, where the pedestal used to be. It loops around to connect with itself, to consume itself, until it becomes a circle. A doorway. A gate. Through it steps a single figure, haloed by light so bright that my eyes stream just from looking. My heart swells in my chest, and I smile. A real smile. A wide one. Wide as the mountain sky.

I look around and see that everyone else in the room is on their knees, frozen in place. Everyone but me and Sofika. I reach out and take hold of her hand. Hers is paper-thin and cold. Barely more than bones. But not for much longer.

I approach the foot of the steps with her at my side as the light flickers and wavers and recedes, exposing the silhouette of the figure. Of a man. One clad in well-made cobalt robes and finely crafted boots. One who uses an ornate cane just to walk, and smiles at the sight of me, his golden eyes alight.

‘Hello, Ahri,’ my father says, his voice carrying easily across the hall.

‘I followed the eagle,’ I tell him. ‘Just as I was meant to.’

‘You walked with her to the place she would die,’ my father says.

I look backwards momentarily to Sister Evangeline, lying still on the stone. To Sister Ashava, frozen in the moment of running to help her, her eyes wide and wounded.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I did.’

I look away from Sister Evangeline’s still form. From her Sisters’ grief.

‘This place is a Resonance,’ I say. ‘Just like the one I found on Hellebore.’

My father nods. ‘Built by those who believed as you do,’ he says. ‘A place where the walls between worlds are thinner. Where deeds and words have power.’

He smiles.

‘It has been sealed for centuries,’ he says. ‘Bolted shut by blood-lock because of what happened here.’

Images stutter before my eyes as Sofika’s fingers wind tight around mine.

People in white robes kneeling on the dais.

A psyker suspended in chains as a gateway opens overhead.

Devils descending in droves.

The images vanish as quickly as they come, leaving me reeling, my nose bleeding down my face. Sofika’s breathing is laboured now. Her head is lolling forwards, her eyes half closed. As I watch, the display on the carapace of my dream-taker’s machine depletes again. I look up at my father, flickering on the dais.

‘Those who came before failed because they didn’t have all of the pieces,’ he says. ‘But we do.’

I shake my head. ‘No,’ I reply. ‘We still need the Conduit. You told me it would reveal itself when I brought Sister Evangeline to this place, but I see nothing.’

He smiles patiently. In a way that makes him look quite unlike himself.

‘Then you are not looking closely enough,’ he says.

I blink. ‘What do you mean?’ I ask. ‘Where is it?’

‘Where she has always been,’ he says. ‘Right beside you.’

His words hit me like a blow to the chest. Like a blade to the heart. My eyes fall to Sofika, struggling to breathe in the grip of her machine.

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘Not her. It can’t be her.’

‘It can be no one else,’ my father says.

He thrusts out his free hand, then, and beside me Sofika’s machine disassembles itself in an instant, separating into its component parts. My dream-taker hangs in the air, her pale hair floating around her head like a halo, her robes rippling like lakewater. I try to move. To stop him. But I can’t. My limbs are locked, just like everyone else’s, so that all I can do is watch as he draws Sofika towards him through the air. All I can do is listen to her cry out for me with her voice and her mind.

‘Ahri!’

Ahri!

‘Ahri!’

Ahri!

I strain, trying so hard to move that it feels like my muscles might tear. I scream at him, in a way that’s more raw and painful than I ever have.

‘No! Not her! Not her!’

My voice fails me on the last word, turning hoarse.

‘Father,’ I say. ‘Please.’

He looks away from Sofika, floating in the air before him.

‘It is time to stop deceiving yourself, inquisitor,’ he says.

I look around again at everyone else in the chamber, and this time I truly see them. They are frozen, but they are all on their feet. All caught in the middle of a moment. Zoric is mid-shout, bringing his rifle to his shoulder. Yumia has already unslung her blades. The Sisters have all raised their bolters, their faces locked in rictus snarls. Only Castanne and Silvera remain on their knees. The cardinal-principal and the Master of Trails are both in tears, staring up at the dais.

I look back at him and a tear escapes my eye, too. Not from sadness, but from shame.

‘You are not my father,’ I say. ‘You’re a lie.’

At my words, my father’s image sheds away to reveal the truth. The cobalt blue of his uniform becomes armour of plate and metal, his jewellery of office the golden trim. My father’s cane becomes a coiled staff, topped with a violet crystal. He grows and swells, becoming vast and terrible and ancient.

Becoming a heretic monster, wearing a serpent’s mask.

Evangeline

Everything hurts.

I lie on my back, staring up at the arch-roofed ceiling of the Convent Sanctorum far above me. The cross beams, and the buttresses. A cold wind blows across my skin, stirring my roughweave clothes and chilling my bare feet. It brings with it the sound of hymnals, and of boots on stone. The ringing of bells. I let my head fall to the side, so that I can look across the floor. I see a training sword, out of reach on the stone floor. It is short, and wooden. Broken in two. My limbs are heavy and aching. My heart even more so.

All I want to do is cry.

‘Evangeline.’

Adelynn’s voice catches in the vaulted space, surrounding me. She is standing over me, her own sword held loosely in her gauntleted hand. Her emerald eyes are cold, but not unkind. Never that.

‘Stand, Evangeline,’ she says.

I try to do as she says, but I only make it as far as my knees before I fall again.

‘I can’t,’ I tell her. My voice is soft and blurred by sorrow. ‘It hurts too much.’

Adelynn shakes her head. ‘Everything hurts, Evangeline,’ she says. ‘It means you are alive. Pain is a blessing.’

‘Then I don’t deserve it,’ I reply.

‘Why?’ she asks.

‘Because I failed,’ I tell her, and I do cry then, my tears betraying me by painting silent trails down my face. I look down at my hands. At the scars that led me to a lie, because this isn’t really the Convent Sanctorum, and Adelynn isn’t really here. This is just a dream. A misfiring of my mind as my body tries to die.

‘I thought I could do this,’ I tell her. ‘Lead. Find the Shield. Be worthy of first one, then the other. Earn an honourable death. But I could not. You never should have put your trust in me. You never should have granted me the sword.’

‘The words you just spoke are precisely why I granted you the sword, Evangeline.’

I look up at her. Adelynn is haloed by the sunlight coming through the tall glassaic windows at her back.

‘You are humble,’ she says. ‘Earnest. You will never have more cruel a master than you are to yourself.’

‘That is why you gave me the sword?’ I ask her. ‘Because I am unkind to myself?’

‘Because you strive. Because you will not allow yourself to fail.’

‘But I did fail,’ I tell her. ‘The Shield was nothing but an illusion.’

Adelynn shakes her head. ‘That is not failure, Evangeline. The only way we fail is to give up.’

I shake my head, now. ‘You always say that,’ I tell her. ‘You always have. But the Shield isn’t here, Adelynn. It never was.’

Adelynn smiles softly, her eyes creasing at the corners.

‘Isn’t it?’ she asks.

‘What do you mean?’ I say.

‘Look around you,’ she says. ‘You already have the answer.’

I look around to see my Sisters frozen in place like statues, their blades and bolters raised. Not just those who are living, but those who are gone, too. They are all standing tall, their weapons drawn. All painted in gold, by the dawn light spilling through the glass.

‘Do you see?’ Adelynn asks.

I nod, my tears coming freely now.

‘It is us,’ I reply. ‘That is why He brought me here. My purpose was not to find the Shield, but to be the Shield. To protect this world.’

‘Yes, Evangeline,’ Adelynn replies. ‘That is why.’

I look back at her to see that Adelynn is holding out a sword for me to take. My sword. The words inscribed on the blade catch in that golden light.

Inventi sumus en fide.

‘In faith, we are found,’ I say, and I get to my feet though my limbs ache and my bones protest and my vision dazzles.

‘Are you ready?’ she asks.

It is a question that Adelynn has asked me countless times since she made a warrior of me. A question that there is only ever one answer to. An answer that I finally find that I can honestly give.

‘I am ready,’ I tell her, and I take up the sword.

Adelynn draws me close and presses her forehead to mine, eyes closed. For a moment, all is still, and I catch the scent of sacred oils.

‘Stand, until you cannot,’ Adelynn says to me softly.

‘I will,’ I reply.

‘Good,’ she says, and she smiles at me. ‘Now go. Finish it, and I will see you when your work is done.’

I nod. ‘At the God-Emperor’s side, Sister.’

‘At the God-Emperor’s side,’ she says.

And then she lets me go.

Ravara

‘You!’

I hurl the word at the sorcerer like a thrown dagger. My muscles strain against nothing, and my skin beads with sweat as I fight to reach for my twin swords.

‘Heretic filth,’ I manage to say, through my teeth. ‘You did this. You led me here.’

The sorcerer tilts his head, regarding me with patient crystal lenses.

‘My name is Amenthas,’ he says, as though offended. His true voice is cultured and softly accented. ‘And I did not lead you anywhere, inquisitor. You came to this ending of your own free will. Just as the priests did.’

He looks down at them, frozen in their weeping. Now that he is kneeling, I see that Castanne wears the penitent’s bonds around his ankles, just as Silvera does.

‘They wanted to protect their world,’ Amenthas says. ‘After the Rift was born they sent plea after plea into the darkness, but received no answer. No aid, from your liar god or His awoken son. But I knew that the Resonance lay here. That given time you would bring the Conduit and the martyr to find it. So I granted the priests protection, for a time.’

‘They trusted you,’ I say, disgusted. ‘Though they knew what you were.’

He shakes his head. ‘They were desperate,’ he says. ‘And in their desperation they saw only what they wanted to see. They chose to ignore the cost. Just as you did, for Sofika and for yourself.’

‘Don’t you say her name,’ I snarl. ‘You did this to her. To me.’

Amenthas nods. ‘I did,’ he says. ‘Because it had to be done.’

He glances at Sofika.

‘She is so much stronger now that her mind is all that is left to her,’ he says. ‘Now that there is no other purpose for her to serve.’

‘You cut her apart just to make her stronger,’ I say. ‘To use her.’

Amenthas nods, and I scream through my teeth, straining against his hold on me. I feel the muscles in my forearms pull and tear with the need to draw my swords. With the need to destroy him, body and mind and soul.

‘You do love her so,’ he says absently. ‘There is no wonder you came apart so readily when she did.’

‘You speak as though you know what it is to feel,’ I snarl. ‘You don’t.’

‘I don’t?’ Amenthas says, fixing me with his crimson eye-lenses. He rings his staff against the stone and my vision is overtaken by his past. By everything he has done. By worlds burning, and gateways that open in the sky. By the nightmares that spill out of them. I see heresy and wickedness. Witchcraft and slaughter. But I see something else, too. Something from a time long past. From a time before our myths were made.

I see Amenthas clad not in archaic armour, but in cloth. Not cobalt, but crimson. He wears no serpent’s mask. Instead, the same design is painted artfully onto his skin with gold pigment. The face beneath it is unscarred, and unassuming. Not human, but not so different, either. He steps into a circle of sand where another of his kin awaits. This one’s face is painted too, with the bright eyes and feathers of a hunting bird. Amenthas and his brother are both wielding short, curved swords not so different from mine. I see them fight. Fast, and graceful. Deadly, even when they are sparring. I see Amenthas win without shedding a single drop of blood, then I see him offer his hand to the warrior he defeated. As he pulls his brother to his feet, both of them are laughing.

‘I know precisely how it is to feel,’ Amenthas says, as the memory disappears like dust on the wind. ‘To be alone, when you are surrounded by others. To be driven by regret and by guilt.’

I shake my head, disgusted. ‘I am nothing like you.’

Amenthas rings his staff against the stone again and this time it is my past that overtakes me. I see Dagra Thul, choking on his own blood. Lady Oraylis and her blinded eyes. Efrayl, his limbs locked in seizure. Shipmaster Vallien, shot dead by his own crew. The thousands we lost to the abyss, and to the void afterwards. I see Sofika in pieces, speaking my name through the blood in her mouth. I see worlds burning, and people pleading. Executions and interrogations. I see Sharvak, dying with a smile on his face. Then, last of all, I see my father, lying still in the spire tower while his birds sit around him, turning their wings.

‘You are exactly like me,’ Amenthas says. ‘You are driven by the past. Focused on the future. You search the stars for a way to undo your own mistakes. The only difference between the two of us is time.’

He shakes his head.

‘Long ago, I watched my brothers turned to dust,’ he says. ‘I saw their souls shattered and scattered across the ether-tides. Since that day, they have spoken not a word to me save for assent. No laughter. No companionship. For ten thousand years I have walked the stars in the company of empty shells. I have been alone.’

Amenthas turns his staff once, and another portal opens on the dais beside him. An armoured warrior strides out. Another Thousand Sons legionary, just like him, though this one doesn’t wear a serpent’s mask. This warrior’s armour is much more plain than the sorcerer’s, save for his mask, which is shaped to resemble the face of a hunting bird. Amenthas looks at him a moment.

‘Ishilan,’ he says.

The warrior doesn’t answer at the sound of his name. He doesn’t look at Amenthas. He merely moves to stand beside him. Then Amenthas turns his staff a second time, and more portals open all around the edges of the chamber. More Thousand Sons stride out and take up position around the commandery. There are dozens of them, but not a single one speaks. They are all completely silent, save for a sound like shifting sand.

‘I thought that I would restore my brothers on Hellebore,’ Amenthas says. ‘But it was merely a means to find you. To have you gather a whole host of martyrs to your cause and bring them here.’

He raises his staff and Sofika jolts in the air, her arms flung out like wings.

‘I did not lie to you, inquisitor,’ Amenthas says. ‘There will be rebirth, and restoration, but it will not be that of your God-Emperor, or of your dying dreamer. This day belongs to me and my brothers. To those who serve the True Gods.’

At his words, lightning arcs upwards from Sofika, tearing a new gateway far above the dais that grows wider by the moment. Dread swells inside me as my nose starts to bleed. I strain against the bonds that the sorcerer has placed on me, my bones creaking and my eyes streaming.

‘First, the Conduit,’ Amenthas says, and then he lowers his gaze to look at me. ‘And now for the blood.’

He lifts his hand, and all of the silent warriors save for Ishilan move as one, as if they are impelled by the sorcerer’s will. They raise their ancient weapons, but before they can fire, a boom splits the air. Blood gouts upwards and Amenthas reels. His silent brothers falter and stall, and the sorcerer’s hold on me fails. I look back to see Sister Evangeline getting to her feet, her bolter in one hand, her sword in the other. She is no longer glowing like coals. Nor is she merely ablaze. The Battle Sister is a conflagration. Brighter than the dawnrise. She spits blood onto the stone floor of the chamber. She speaks, without raising her voice. It carries easily anyway, light and clear.

‘I deny you,’ she says between breaths. ‘Witch.’

On the dais, Amenthas straightens, leaning on his staff to do it. He pulls away his shattered mask, revealing his face. The sorcerer’s skin is crystalline and faintly reflective, like the dais around him.

‘Time to meet your destiny,’ he snarls.

He crashes his staff against the dais, and the stone begins to bubble and shift and change. Amenthas arcs his staff through the air as Sister Evangeline fires on him again. He conjures a stormfront in an instant that catches every bolter round and detonates it. All the while, the dais resculpts itself around the sorcerer to become a jagged ziggurat of marble and mirrors and blinking eyes. Massive shards of glass thrust upwards from it, curving around Sofika and the two Heretic Astartes like claws. The conjured storm grows larger and darker, cutting me off from the steps. From Sofika. Even then, I somehow still catch sight of the sorcerer’s eyes as he looks down from his altar of mirrors. As he speaks with the voice of a storm.

‘Kill them,’ he says.

My threat-sense flares as the Thousand Sons start forward, firing their boltguns. Warpfire bolts cook the air by my head as I throw myself to one side, into the shadow of one of the chamber’s marble pillars. I draw my pistol and fire around the pillar even as several of Canoness Elivia’s Battle Sisters are immolated by enemy bolter fire.

But Amenthas’ hold on the commandery is broken, now, and the Sisters will not die quietly. The Sisters rouse themselves, and the air fills with the deafening roar of guns as they pace backwards, forming ranks as the Canoness bellows orders.

Castanne and Silvera haven’t moved. The two priests remain on their knees, gunfire setting the air alight around them. They are caught between the Battle Sisters and the Thousand Sons. Between condemnation and damnation. Castanne must realise this, because he gets to his feet and tries to run. The cardinal-principal doesn’t get far. He is torn apart and spun by bolter fire from both sides. Castanne crashes to the ground unceremoniously, his rich, heavy robes soaked with blood and his jewellery of office scattering like offering coins. Silvera remains on his knees. The Master of Trails does nothing to prevent the approach of the Thousand Sons. He opens his arms wide as if in acceptance, but the Heretic Astartes pay him no heed. They simply crush the Master of Trails underfoot as they march forward, breaking the old man’s bones and body to pulp.

‘Evangeline,’ I shout. ‘The sorcerer!’

The Battle Sister is pacing backwards, too. Firing her bolter. As I watch, she ducks aside, taking cover behind a shattered statue. A bolt of warpfire clips the edge of it, showering her with marble shards. I catch her eyes through the blizzard of stone fragments.

‘Wait,’ she shouts. ‘We go together!’

I glance around the column’s edge to where Sofika hangs above the dais, her arms spread like wings. Her pleading voice echoes over and over inside my head.

Ahri! Ahri! Ahri!

‘Ravara!’ Sister Evangeline shouts in warning. ‘Wait!’

I ignore her. I ignore everything, save for Sofika.

I break from the cover of the column and run headlong at the storm and the steps. My threat-sense screams as warpfire scorches the air all around me. I duck and twist aside with every blare of my mind, moving as quickly as I can. So quickly the traitors have to turn to track me. It’s still not enough to prevent one of the warpfire rounds from grazing my right shoulder, just barely. Even that is enough to send me blind. To make me lose my grip on my pistol. I hear it hit the ground, but I don’t stop running. I can’t. I hit the bottom step half blind and trailing smoke.

The instant I do, the storm shifts and my threat-sense blares again as lightning arcs from the clouds, hitting me square in the chest. It steals my vision. My hearing. It steals the air from my lungs. I am launched backwards off my feet by the force of it, the chamber blurring around me until I land hard on my back on the stone floor, smoke rising from the flash-burn on my armour. For an instant I can’t see anything. Can’t hear, or speak. When my vision goes from black to blurry, I see the horned silhouette of one of Amenthas’ silent brothers turn its head towards me and approach with its bolter raised. I try to get to my feet, threat-sense ringing in my ears, but I only make it as far as my knees. The silent warrior fixes me with eyes of green fire. Raises its bolter to its shoulder.

And then the point of a blade punches through its eye-lens from the other side.

The warrior stumbles and staggers and puts one gauntleted hand to where the blade is jutting from, only for several high-calibre solid rounds to slam into its chest, punching holes in the armour there. Grey dust spills out in ribbons as I catch sight of robes and braids and bare feet. Of exile brands, as Yumia vaults up onto the Heretic Astartes’ back and cuts the rubberised seal with her second dart. She bares the Heretic Astartes’ throat as if bleeding an animal, encouraging dust to spill out freely. She throws herself clear again even as the traitor collapses backwards. Even as Zoric puts his hands under my arms and drags me into cover behind one of the chamber’s marble statues. He sits me up against the relic, and stares me in the face.

‘Are you mad?’ Zoric asks, as Amenthas’ storm grows larger all around us. ‘What were you trying to do?’

‘I was trying to reach her,’ I say, getting to my feet. ‘To save her.’

‘And you,’ he says to Yumia, as she ducks into the shadow of the statue with us. ‘You’re no better, jumping onto that damned thing like that. I could have hit you.’

‘No you couldn’t,’ she snaps. ‘Not in a month’s worth of moons.’

Then Yumia pushes past him and grabs hold of me by my shoulders, slamming me back against the statue. I feel the cold steel edge of one of her darts against my throat. Pressing against my pulse.

‘We will find the Conduit on Dimmamar,’ she snarls at me. ‘That is what you said.’

‘Because I believed it,’ I shout, my voice faltering because of the shock and the fall and all of the dust in my throat. ‘I let myself believe it.’

‘Then you didn’t know?’ Zoric asks, mortar dust and chips of stone bursting into the air around us from gunfire and the growing storm.

‘No, I didn’t. I just wanted to make it right.’

I take a breath. Force the words up from inside me.

‘But I failed,’ I tell them. ‘Just like on Hellebore. I led myself down the wrong path. Saw what I wanted to see. I let her get hurt, all over again.’

Yumia shakes her head, her dark eyes unchanging. ‘It sounds like truth,’ she says. ‘But it always does. There is no way to be sure.’

‘Yes there is,’ Zoric says, and then he looks at me. ‘Swear it,’ he says. ‘Swear that you didn’t know about the witch.’

I stare into his pale eyes. ‘I swear it.’

Zoric nods slowly. His pale eyes soften with sorrow. ‘Let her go, Mia,’ he says. ‘She’s telling the truth.’

‘How can you be sure?’ she asks.

‘Because she swore her heart to Sofika,’ he says. ‘And she doesn’t break vows.’

Yumia’s eyes soften too, then. She drops her dart from my throat and her hands from my shoulders.

‘I need you both to get me close enough to save her,’ I tell them. ‘To kill that thing that took her.’

Both of them nod and help me heave myself away from the statue at my back. My vision dizzies, and my body floods with heat. I am certain that I have torn my stitches and reopened old wounds, but it hardly seems to matter now. Nothing does, save for Sofika.

‘If we survive this, then I’ll consider your service done,’ I tell them. ‘All debts paid. I’ll give you a clean slate and let you go back to your lives.’

Yumia unslings her darts. ‘But these are our lives,’ she says. ‘There are no clean slates.’

Zoric loads a new magazine into the Valedictor and racks the slide. ‘And there’s no going back, either.’

There’s nothing I can think to say to that. To them. Not after all they’ve done, and all I’ve done to them. So instead I hold up my hand. I take a breath. Count to three, then I turn back out into the fight.

Into the storm. It has grown larger now, as if buoyed by the bloodshed. Impossible rain lashes my face, a gale tearing at my hair and my clothes. The Battle Sisters and the Heretic Astartes are engaged in battle. Bolters howl and flamers roar as the Dominions brace and fire, their special weapons doing little more than slowing the Thousand Sons. The Heretic Astartes keep coming even with their armour punctured and punched through and burning. They crash against the Battle Sisters, armour against armour. I see one of the Heretic Astartes take hold of a Battle Sister by the throat, lifting her clear of the ground. The Battle Sister drives her chainsword up through the heretic’s throat even as the Thousand Son breaks her neck. They crash to the ground together, trailing blood and dust.

All around us, the Seraphim take flight, their jump packs lifting them clear of the melee. The hollow heretics raise their weapons to track them, filling the air with blazing arcs of warpfire. I see one of the Sisters caught by the fire. She catches light and her jump pack detonates. The Battle Sister is completely annihilated in the blast, as are two of the other Seraphim. The remainder cut their engines and fall like stars, pistols and hand-flamers blazing. Where they land, dust sprays into the air in thick arcs. The Heretic Astartes stagger and slow, their ancient, overwrought armour taking killcut after killcut until they fall, only for another Thousand Son to take their place.

Two of the sorcerer’s silent brothers turn their warpfire eyes on me and fire without hesitation, loosing volleys of flaming rounds that scorch the rain from the air as I drop into a roll and spring back to my feet, bringing my swords up with me. I scream as I cut the first one from hip to mid-chest with my main-hand blade. The prayer-etched sword carves a deep furrow in the ancient plating, which I follow with the second sword. This one goes through into the hollowness at the heart of the suit. Dust sprays out, and the silent warrior reels.

‘Now!’ I shout, turning aside from the heretic.

Zoric fires the Valedictor pistol four times, landing all four shots centre-mass. They turn the cut I made into a tear. A mess. Dust gouts from it, and the silent warrior crashes forwards, the warpfire light in its eyes guttering out.

I turn to see Yumia throw her Illithian dart at the second one, propelling herself into a leap that follows the line of the killcord. The dart sticks in the Heretic Astartes’ eye lens, just like before. But this time the silent warrior doesn’t stagger. This time, it grabs Yumia out of the air by her throat. She punches her second dart deeply into the side of its mask and pulls it downwards with a squeal, opening the traitor’s mask from temple to chin, kicking her bare feet bloody against the traitor’s armour. I run towards them as Zoric opens fire. He hits the Heretic Astartes twice in the chest, missing Yumia by less than a hand’s span. The rounds barely make a dent in the traitor’s armour. It doesn’t even flinch. It merely raises its own bolter one-handed, the maw of it lighting blue. A blinding light grows large in my vision, blooming heat across my skin, and for a moment I think that the Heretic Astartes must have fired, and that I’m dead, but then I realise that it doesn’t hurt. That the light is gold, not blue.

I realise that it is coming from Sister Evangeline.

The Battle Sister’s first strike severs the traitor’s arm at the shoulder. This time the Heretic Astartes does stagger, gouting dust. It releases Yumia, who falls to the floor and drags herself clear, struggling to breathe, as Sister Evangeline cuts the monster twice more with heavy, overhand strikes from her sword. Chest. Head.

The silent warrior crashes to the ground, and Sister Evangeline turns to face me, soaked with impossible rain and greyed with dust, save for those blazing scars. Her Sisters are with her. They, too, are anointed with dust. It fills in the scars they bear on their battleplate. It settles in the creases of their skin as they snarl and fire their weapons, forcing back the heretics from around us. I knew that I would feel something at the sight of her. Awe, perhaps. Purpose. But I surprise myself when what rises to the surface first is guilt.

‘I misread the signs,’ I tell her. ‘I only saw what I wanted to see.’

I expect her to be angry. Distrustful. I expect her to challenge me over the promises I made her, but she doesn’t. Her hazel eyes are calm as a cloudless sky.

‘We were both lost,’ she says. ‘But I know my path, now. My purpose.’

She looks to the ziggurat. To the claw of crystal at the top of it.

‘I have to put a stop to it,’ she says. ‘The sorcerer. The rite. All of it. I have to protect this place. This world.’

I look too. To where Sofika hangs suspended at the heart of the storm.

‘I won’t let you kill her,’ I say. ‘You know that.’

‘I do,’ Sister Evangeline replies.

‘I can save her,’ I say. ‘I can still make this right. Just help get me close enough.’

She looks at me. ‘Make it right for who?’ she asks. ‘For you, or for her?’

I know the answer she wants. The answer I should give. Even so, it’s an effort just to say it.

‘For her,’ I say.

Sister Evangeline nods.

‘With me, then, inquisitor,’ she says. ‘To the end.’

Evangeline

‘What in the stars is the witch hoping to do?’ Eugenia asks.

She is staring up at the widening gateway over the dais even as she fights, her remaining eye wide with revulsion.

‘He means to resurrect his brothers,’ Ravara says. ‘To use Sofika to drag what’s left of their souls out of the gateway. Out of the abyss.’

‘Is that even possible?’ Eugenia asks, appalled.

‘It does not matter,’ Ashava says. ‘Because he will not have the chance. We will stop him.’

She turns deftly and levels her flamer, loosing a stream of fire at two of the slow-moving heretics. Their ancient baroque armour catches, their eye-lenses cracking under the heat.

‘Evangeline will stop him,’ she says, catching my eyes.

I nod, turning aside as the heretics raise their boltguns and fire, even as they burn. The rounds are lit with the same searing blue magicks as their eye-lenses. I feel the incredible heat of it as the bolts miss me narrowly, impacting against the column to my left instead, obliterating the centuries-old stone in an instant and showering me with mortar dust and slivers of marble that flake the finish from my armour and cut my face. The wounds are superficial, but the pain is bright and keen. Pure.

I answer with my own bolter, firing three times at the closest of the heretics. The explosive rounds find their homes in its abdomen and its chest, shredding the ancient armour plate. Either wound should be enough to kill, but the heretic does not die. Not until I follow up by cleaving my sword through its neck seal, and separating its head from its body. Only then does it crash to the ground. Even then, it does not bleed. All that the heretic has to offer me are thin wisps of fine, grey dust that blow into the air like candle smoke. It takes Haskia, Joti and Veridia firing their bolters as one to lay the second heretic low. Even then, it still tries to drag its way across the stone towards them until Qi-Oh rams her chainsword down through its head. The heretic’s armour breaks open with a flash of warp light and an infernal scream. Dust blows up in a dense cloud. The air is thick with it. With the cries of my Sisters as they fight all around me.

‘Evangeline.’

Elivia and her Celestians are right beside us in the heart of the melee. Elivia’s bolter is gone, her power sword burned black from use. Her right greave is shattered in a way that means her leg beneath it must be, too. Her Celestians have also suffered. Beatris’ right eye is nothing but a bloodied vacancy, and Radah’s left arm has been torn away at the elbow. Even so, Elivia and her Sisters still match us step for step. Kill for kill.

‘This is what He chose you for,’ Elivia says, as she crashes her blade against one of the heretics. ‘This is why He gave you the mark.’

She catches my eyes as she brings her sword down again, splintering ceramite. Even through the melee and the smoke, I see the tiny flecks of green in her eyes.

‘We will get you close,’ she says. ‘Close enough to kill the witch.’

‘Aye, Canoness,’ I reply.

‘This is why He spared you,’ Elivia says. ‘Remember that.’

She turns away and looks to Liana. The Retributor Superior is dragging a limp, her face cut open to the bone.

‘Liana,’ Elivia shouts, as several of the heretics claw and stagger and rear back to their feet, spilling dust and warp light. As more march in lockstep from the edges of the chamber, looking to cut us off from the crystal stairs. ‘Carve us a path!’

The Retributor Superior’s response is short and curt.

‘Aye, Canoness.’

Liana and her Retributors move into flanking positions on either side of us. They open fire as one, their heavy bolters roaring. The high-calibre explosive rounds punch the hollow warriors from their feet, sundering their armour and shattering their helms. But still, some of them manage to fire back. First one of Liana’s Sisters falls. Then another, and another. The Retributors take the brunt of the enemy fire, their armour and flesh splintered and set alight by the heretics’ ensorcelled guns, but still their formation does not break. The Retributors keep limping forwards, their armour and faces scattered with blood.

‘Evangeline!’ Ravara shouts. ‘The gateway!’

The inquisitor is looking up at the portal that hangs over the crystal dais. Tiny motes of light are falling from it, trickling downwards to land on Sofika. Where they touch the interrogator’s skin, Sofika begins to glow. Lightning sparks, lighting the storm around her from the inside.

‘The stars,’ Ravara says absently, from beside me. She looks at me, her amber eyes wide. ‘We have to get to Sofika. Now.’

But the stars are not the only thing emerging from the gateway. There are devils, too. Creatures of flame and fury, studded with multifaceted, unblinking eyes. They disgorge themselves from the gateway and spiral down all around us, lit from within by warpfire and wickedness.

‘Go,’ Elivia says to me. ‘Make for the dais, and the sorcerer.’

I start to speak, but she stares at me, fiercely.

‘He chose you, Evangeline,’ she bellows. ‘Now, go!’

I do as she commands as the creatures descend, my Sisters following with me. We catch the edge of the daemontide, carving through it with blades and with blessed fire. Ravara keeps pace, with Zoric and Yumia at her side. The two members of Ravara’s retinue are wide-eyed and bloody, their breathing shallow with fear, but still they fight. Still they protect their master, even against these creatures of the abyss. Even though perhaps a dozen of the sorcerer’s silent warriors still stand between us and the crystal stairs.

‘Do not stop,’ I cry, as we run. ‘This is why He led us here. This is where we will find our vengeance, by blade and by fire. By the will of the God-Emperor of Mankind!’

‘By His will,’ bellow my Sisters in reply, as we crash against the traitor lines like a storm against stone.

Qi-Oh and Eugenia give themselves over to blades, their chainswords snarling through armour plating and sending arcs of pale dust into the air. Ashava fires her flamer with that same grace and deftness that I saw aboard the Vow. Each short, controlled burst catches one of the heretic warriors, lighting their cobalt plate ablaze. The flame does not stop them, but it deforms their armoured suits under heat and pressure. It marks them for Veridia and Haskia. For Joti. The three of them turn their bolters on whichever of the Heretic Astartes Ashava chooses to burn, shattering their armour plates and ornate masks and sending them crashing to the ground.

The three of them are in turn defended by Sarita and Munari. The twins fight as though they are of one mind, though they are both wounded badly. Munari’s face is crumpled around her right eye, the swelling already trying to steal her sight. Sarita’s chestplate is cracked along its length, her breathing coming in sawing rasps.

‘It looks as though this shall be a story for the both of us, Sister,’ Munari says, as she turns on her heel and fires again at a cobalt-clad heretic looming through the smoke. She hits the silent warrior three times, even with her eye as good as closed.

‘That does not mean I will let you tell it,’ Sarita replies, as she reloads her own weapon.

Munari laughs. Sarita doesn’t. She probably couldn’t, even if she were to try. I heave my sword downwards, splitting another of the heretics open from collar to hip. Grey dust blows out in a thick plume, scattering across my scars. I expect to see something inside. Something corrupt, and debased. But there is nothing inside the suit of armour save for that dust. The warrior is hollow, just as I once was. Even so, I still feel something like sorrow bleeding from it as it collapses to its knees.

I end that sorrow and the stream of dust in the same instant by taking the heretic’s head. Even then, I do not pause. I keep going, striding straight through the fires that Ashava sets as she washes the Heretic Astartes with promethium, cracking their eye-lenses and making their armour run like wax. Eugenia shatters her chainsword’s teeth churning the blade through a heretic’s mask, while beside her Qi-Oh plunges her own sword deep into another’s chest, the blessed steel breaking deeply what bolters and las-bolts cannot hope to pierce. We gain ground, pace by pace, pushing the traitors apart. Pushing through their lines, ever closer to the crystal steps.

But then Veridia cries out.

I turn in time to see her stagger back from one of the Heretic Astartes, her bolter lost, and her sword with it. Veridia’s armour is pulverised. Crushed inwards, as is her chest beneath it. Blood dribbles freely all over the chamber floor as she struggles to breathe. To stay upright.

‘Sister!’ Haskia bellows, as the Heretic Astartes steps forward and takes hold of Veridia by the throat, lifting her from her feet. I see Veridia’s hand move as she frees a promethium charge from her belt and primes it, before driving it straight through the heretic’s eye-lens. It detonates immediately, fire blooming out in a bright, terrible instant. The traitor’s armour squeals and crumples, and then both it and Veridia are consumed.

Immolated.

‘Sister!’ Haskia shouts again.

She turns and fires on the closest of the heretics until her bolter empties and she draws her sword in its place. Haskia cleaves to and fro, cutting through armour and spilling dust, her pale face set with rage. She is so intent on vengeance, on reaching what remains of Veridia, that she does not take cover when the heretics fire on her. The ensorcelled shells blast Haskia backwards, burning. She lands on her back on the floor, her armour shattered and her skin smouldering. She tries to rise, but she cannot.

I hesitate, just for a heartbeat.

‘Keep going,’ Sarita rasps to me as we fight. She is struggling to breathe now, too. She wavers on her feet, her skin slicked with sweat. ‘I will go to her.’

‘Not alone, you won’t,’ Munari says, as she fires her bolter one-handed. ‘I told you, this is a story for both of us.’

‘Stay together,’ I tell them. ‘I want to hear you tell it when it is done. Both of you.’

They nod to me, and then we separate. The twins disappear amongst the heretics while I turn to the storm and the stairway, my eyes fixed on what lies ahead.

‘We go onwards!’ I shout to the others as we push our way through the last of the sorcerer’s silent brothers. To the foot of the crystal stairs, and the edge of the storm. It is a thick swathe of cloud now. A wallowing thunderhead, bristling with lightning.

‘How will we get through?’ Ravara shouts, over the roar of it.

I look at the storm. At the roiling clouds that tumble over one another like serpents. At the tiny light, flickering in its depths. My eyes fall to the sword in my hand. To the words, inscribed along the length of the blade.

‘We cut our way through,’ I say.

I raise my sword, and stride towards the storm. Lightning arcs all around me, cracking marble and shattering stone. The clouds roar and twist into the shapes of wrathful faces. They scream.

But they cannot stop me.

I plunge my sword to the hilt into the face of the storm. Lightning crackles and squeals all around me as I draw the blade downwards. It grinds against the clouds, and the shapes inside them, and then the clouds peel back like eyelids opening, drawing apart to reveal the crystal stairs and the claw of mirrors that was once the dais. The storm recoils further as I step through it with the others in my wake. Once we are through, the stormfront closes behind us and the sounds of battle fall away to be replaced by the song of the wind. By chanting, and whispers. By Sofika, screaming. It echoes from every one of the glass shards on the dais. A single word that resounds over and over and over again. A single name.

Ahri. Ahri. Ahri.

‘Sofi!’ Ravara yells, and she starts off up the steps with Zoric and Yumia following close behind. I follow after her, my Sisters beside me. Just four now, as there were on Ophelia VII. Ashava and Eugenia. Joti and Qi-Oh.

The moment I set foot on the crystal stairs, everything changes. Shapes move in the mirrored glassaic, hunched and toothed and clawed.

Horrors, just like those we saw on Ophelia VII.

They peel themselves out of the glassaic and begin to scream. To gibber and laugh. They retch up streams of warpfire that spill down the stairs and spill over us, too. My armour creaks under the pressure and the heat as I keep pushing forwards up the steps, even as the stairway loses its form, becoming a river of silver and flame. We wade upwards through molten metal and glass, surrounded by laughter. Claws cut furrows in my armour and my flesh beneath it. I answer with the edge of my sword, even as Ashava purges the creatures with a torrent of promethium. Qi-Oh lunges forward, swift even when slogging through liquid metal. Eugenia is reduced to using her shortblade and her fists, her face a mask of blood and dirt. Joti fires her bolter one-handed even as she lifts the banner clear of the silver and the smoke. Ahead of us, Ravara is a blur of swords and layered silver plate. The inquisitor is out ahead of the tide. Out ahead of her retinue, too.

‘Ravara!’ I shout.

She glances back at me, and I catch her amber eyes between the arcs of her swords. She has the exact same look in them as she did before, when she ran for the dais. She opens her mouth and speaks. The words are too distant to hear, but simple enough to read the shape of.

I’m sorry.

I bellow after her as she turns away, separated from us by the horde of gibbering daemons. Dread takes hold of me, heart and mind and limbs, because I understand now what Ravara has wanted all along. Why she fought and bled and almost died to reach this place. The inquisitor’s desire is no different to the sorcerer’s.

To restore what was taken from her, no matter the cost.

Ravara

I throw myself the rest of the way up the crystal stairs with my heart screaming in my chest, and Sofika screaming in my ears. In my mind.

Ahri. Ahri. Ahri.

I’m aware of Sister Evangeline shouting after me. Zoric and Yumia, too. But I can’t stop. I can’t break my vows. Not here. Not when we are this close. The crystal stairs are little better than liquid, now, pulling at my feet as I run, aiming to drag me down and remake me in silver and mirrors. But I won’t let it. I can’t.

Ahri. Ahri. Ahri.

I hit the top step bleeding and breathless and see Amenthas standing there on what was once the dais, but is now an upturned claw of mirrored glass. The sorcerer’s attention is completely focused on his silent brother. Ishilan stands immobile at the centre of the dais as tiny shards of light fall down from above. From the gateway, and from Sofika. The Heretic Astartes is glowing like a lantern flame. Like the dawnrise. With every new star that lands on his armour, Ishilan grows brighter, and Sofika’s screams grow louder and more desperate.

Ahri! Ahri! Ahri!

I don’t wait. I don’t think. I lunge forwards and sprint across the dais, my muscles burning. I propel myself into a leap, throwing myself towards Amenthas with my sword raised to make the killing cut.

And then my threat-sense blares.

Amenthas turns, catching me out of the air by my throat, stopping me so suddenly and violently that it jars my spine, making my eyes rattle in my head and my teeth crash together. I bite my tongue, flooding my mouth with blood. Even then, I still try to cut him with my blades.

‘Enough,’ Amenthas says, tightening his grip until I drop the swords. This close, I see that his skin is iridescent, like serpent scales. ‘You cannot stop it now. You should know better than anyone that some endings are set.’

Amenthas tightens his grip, compressing the cords of my neck. My world narrows to a point. To just his eyes.

Which is how I see them widen with surprise when Yumia’s rope dart flashes by. She doesn’t go for Amenthas, but for his silent brother, the dart burying itself in Ishilan’s chestplate. Yumia is less than a heartbeat behind the cord, planting her feet on Ishilan’s chest before kicking off into a backflip that pushes the dart even deeper. As Yumia turns in the air, she pulls the dart with her. It squeals as it tears up the front of Ishilan’s armour. Up through the seal at his neck, before pulling free again. Ishilan staggers, dust spraying out of the rent in his armour in a thick arc. He looks to Amenthas as the light behind his eye-lenses flickers, then fails.

‘No!’ Amenthas roars, and his silent brother collapses forward, spilling dust onto the dais.

The sorcerer releases his hold on my throat and I fall to the ground, landing hard on my back. Air rushes back into my lungs, but it’s agony. It’s all I can do to drag myself towards my swords as Amenthas moves to protect his silent brother, warp light crackling around his curled hand and his staff. He thrusts out his hand, casting a bolt of warp light at Yumia, but staggers when a burst of gunfire hits him centre-mass. The high-calibre, prayer-etched rounds from Zoric’s Valedictor pistol do little to damage Amenthas’ chestplate, but they do throw out the sorcerer’s aim, causing him to miss Yumia.

Amenthas turns and slams his staff against the dais, hitting Zoric with a blast of warpfire that cooks off every round in the Valedictor’s magazine. The gun detonates, knocking Zoric backwards in a welter of blood and shards of bone.

‘Danil!’ Yumia shouts, but he doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. I can’t even tell if he’s breathing. Yumia starts to run, then, not towards Zoric, but towards Amenthas. She unslings her darts, coils her muscles and uses every ounce of her strength to loose them at the sorcerer. Her first dart buries itself in Amenthas’ armoured shoulder. The sorcerer grunts, and twists back around to face her.

Only for her second dart to embed itself deeply in his right eye.

Amenthas roars in pain and my threat-sense flares, dizzying me as I finally lay my hands on my twin swords. A burst of instinctive force blows out from the sorcerer that throws Yumia backwards, snapping her killcords and leaving the darts behind. Yumia lands hard and goes still as Amenthas reaches up and pulls the dart from his eye. He drops it to the ground with a clatter and crouches down beside his silent brother as I drag myself back to my feet.

The glow has gone out of Ishilan’s armour, leaving his cobalt plate cold. Inert. Amenthas rests his hand on the back of Ishilan’s head for a moment. Fire blooms from Amenthas’ hands, coursing over the still form of his silent brother. It crumples Ishilan’s armour. Immolates him in moments. Then Amenthas gets to his feet and looks at me with the one eye left to him, his crystalline skin smeared with blood.

‘Ten thousand years of silence,’ he says, his voice low and threatening. ‘I just wanted to hear him speak.’

Amenthas turns his staff, and lightning arcs from the crystal at the top of it, striking me in the chest. It blinds me. Deafens me. Puts me back on my knees. He approaches me slowly, striking me with lightning a second time, filling my lungs with the scent of my burning hair and skin.

‘I will take you apart,’ he says. ‘I will tear your soul into a thousand tiny shreds, and scatter them for the ether-tides to take.’

As Amenthas raises his staff, warmth spreads through my body. Pure, and bright. I look up at the sorcerer and shake my head. Smile.

‘This is not my ending,’ I tell him, as a golden light rises over the stairs at my back. ‘It is yours.’

Evangeline

The witch roars at the sight of me.

He straightens, fixing me with a single golden eye. Turns his staff to shield himself with storms and with spells. With his dark gifts. But I am already pulling my bolter’s trigger, and I have the God-Emperor on my side.

The explosive rounds slam into the sorcerer, cratering his ancient armour and blowing blood and chips of ceramite into the air. I stride forward with my Sisters beside me, forcing the witch backwards across the crystal dais, away from Ravara. Forcing him to use his sorceries just to defend himself, until he cannot even do that any more. As my bolter coughs empty, his spells finally fail him and the sorcerer crashes to his knees, his staff splintered in his hands and blood dribbling from the ruin of his chestplate in thick black cords.

I approach him with my sword drawn. The sorcerer is shaking as if he is going into shock, one clawed gauntlet pressed to his chest in a futile effort to keep from bleeding out. He does not fight me when I kick him onto his back, but he does speak.

‘Evangeline,’ he says, his words coming between rasping, clotting breaths. ‘She who is burned, but not broken. Marked by the favour of a false god.’

I do not honour his words with an answer save to raise my sword and plunge it through his chest hard enough that I feel the point of the blade hit stone. The sorcerer coughs a welter of black blood that scatters over his face and his throat. He looks up at me, the light in his golden eye fading. Then he draws a guttering breath and smiles.

‘Are you ready?’ he asks, and his eye rolls back.

Warpfire explodes from the sorcerer’s body, throwing me backwards through the air. I land on my side on the dais, the question ringing in my ears. I am burning all over again, my armour and skin smouldering. Pain radiates from my chest and arms and legs. From the bones that must be broken there. I hear my Sisters shouting my name as they come running to aid me. See through lidded eyes as the sorcerer reshapes himself with a splintering of bones and armour, becoming a monster. A devil. He rears upright, growing vast and jagged, my sword still buried in his chest.

Stand, Evangeline.

It is not Adelynn’s voice that echoes inside my mind this time, but my own. I roll onto my hands and knees as a pair of tattered, feathered wings unfold from the sorcerer’s back. As he pulls my sword from his chest and snaps it, throwing the pieces to the ground.

Stand. Evangeline!

I scream, and push myself to bended knee. I force myself to stand on splintered bones. To draw the shortblade at my waist. The last of my weapons. I stare the sorcerer down, though my soul is recoiling and my eyes are streaming.

I force myself to sing.

‘O God-Emperor, who is strength. I devote this life to you.’

Around me, my Sisters roar a cheer. They echo my words in battle-worn voices, even as the sorcerer snaps his wings and lunges towards us.

Qi-Oh runs and leaps, drawing her snarling chainsword across the sorcerer’s changed form. The churning teeth gouge his armour and his crystalline flesh, showering Qi-Oh in sparks and fragments and silver ichor. The sorcerer snatches her from the air, his clawed hand closing around her chest. As the sorcerer tightens his grip, cracking Qi-Oh’s armour, she meets my eyes with her own. One crimson. One hazel. Both full of devotion.

‘O God-Emperor, who is grace,’ she sings, still looking at me. ‘I devote this life to you.’

Qi-Oh brings her chainsword down, plunging it deeply into the sorcerer’s chest. It sticks, still churning as the sorcerer bellows and hurls her against one of the crystal claws around the edge of the dais. Qi-Oh lands hard and goes limp. Joti empties her bolter’s magazine into the sorcerer’s chest and wings only for him to answer in kind with a blast of warpfire that shatters the Simulacrum Imperialis, and my Sister with it. Eugenia cries out, picking up the verse along with the snapped remains of the banner pole.

‘O God-Emperor, who is valour,’ she sings. ‘I devote this life to you.’

Eugenia drives the banner pole into the sorcerer’s crystal flesh like a lance. He conjures a blast of warpfire that hurls her backwards, her armour smouldering.

Ashava roars the words of the hymnal at the heretic as she turns her flamer on him, washing the sorcerer with a stream of holy fire.

‘O God-Emperor, who is light,’ she shouts. ‘I devote this life to you!’

Ashava’s flames stick and cling, making the sorcerer’s crystalline skin flow like molten metal. Making him scream. He lashes out at my Sister even as he burns, sending Ashava crashing to the dais. I stagger forwards on my broken legs and fall to my knees beside her. Ashava is breathing fitfully, her armour crumpled and split.

‘All this way you have come,’ the sorcerer says, as he approaches me. ‘Only to find yourself back at the beginning.’

‘Eva.’

I glance to my side to see Ashava looking at me through lidded eyes. Her pupils are dilated, what little remains of the whites of her eyes flooded red by trauma. She reaches up and takes hold of my arm. Puts something in my hand. Something wrought from gold and steel.

The hilt of my broken sword.

‘Be swift,’ she murmurs, as her eyes slip closed.

‘Ashava,’ I say to her. I shake her, but she does not stir. Her breathing is so shallow I cannot tell if it has stopped. ‘Ashava!’

I hear the sorcerer laugh. He drops to one knee before me, stinking of corruption and magicks. He reaches out and tilts my head up with a clawed hand.

‘You sing of your so-called God-Emperor, but He does not care, Evangeline of the Order of Our Martyred Lady. He does not love this Imperium He has built, nor those who exist within it. He does not love you.’

‘You are wrong,’ I tell the sorcerer, my scars burning and my fingers curled tightly around the hilt of my broken sword. ‘The God-Emperor loves all martyrs.’

I drive my fist upwards. Drive the broken shard of my blade into the sorcerer’s remaining eye. He rears back, blinded and screaming. Fire spreads from the blade outwards, coursing over the sorcerer’s armour and flesh. The sorcerer’s wings tatter in the heat, his armour and flesh and bones sloughing away until all that remains is a shadow, burning inside the fire. One with golden eyes.

‘Some things have to die,’ the sorcerer says, his voice no longer that of a devil, but of a man. ‘And some things don’t.’

And then the shadow blows away with the fire, leaving nothing behind but the remains of my broken sword.

‘You destroyed him.’

I look up to see Ravara standing there. The inquisitor’s skin and hair are scorched, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps.

I nod. ‘It is done.’

Ravara shakes her head. She is not looking at me any more, but at the gateway, which is growing wider by the moment. At the shape made of starlight, hanging beneath it. Lightning arcs downwards from Sofika to ground itself on the dais, a constant, furious storm.

‘No, it isn’t,’ Ravara says. ‘Not quite.’

And then she sets to running. I get to my feet and try to follow her, only for one of the lightning bolts to find me. It knocks the air from my lungs. Knocks me back to my knees.

‘Ravara!’ I shout after her.

This time, the inquisitor does not even glance back at me.

She just keeps going, into the storm.

Ravara

Lightning arcs down all around me as I run towards the centre of the dais. It shatters glass and powders stone, missing me only by the moments afforded to me by my gifts. Wind tears at my clothes and lashes my hair against my face as I reach the centrepoint and look up at the gateway, lightning crashing down all around me. Sofika hangs beneath it, her arms thrown out like wings. She is lit brighter than stars. Too bright to look at.

‘Sofi!’

I scream her name as loud as I can. Louder than the wind and the lightning. Louder than my heartbeat in my ears. At the heart of the storm, my dream-taker stirs. She looks down at me from above, her pale hair spread around her like a halo. Everything falls quiet. The wind. The lightning. My heartbeat. Quiet enough for me to hear her speak.

‘Ahri?’ she asks.

‘It’s me,’ I tell her. ‘Sofi. It’s me.’

She turns away from the gateway, then, descending towards the dais surrounded by tiny motes of light. The glow within her dims enough for me to really see her.

To see that she is whole again.

Sofika lands lightly on the dais in front of me and her robes and her hair settle around her. She is different. Her robes remade in a thousand colours, her skin glittering like crystal. Like countless captured stars. But not everything has changed. Her eyes are exactly as I remember them. Still that same mountain-sky blue.

She still smiles at the sight of me.

‘Sofi?’ I say, and I put my hand to the pendant at my neck, but before I can take hold of it Sofika reaches out and stops me. Her hand is warm against mine.

‘But I don’t know if this is real,’ I tell her.

‘Does it feel real?’ she asks.

I nod slowly.

‘Then that is all that matters,’ she says.

‘Opening the gate restored you,’ I say. ‘How can that be?’

Sofika’s eyes soften. ‘No, Ahri,’ she says, and she glances up at the widening void. ‘The gateway is just keeping me here.’

I flinch as if she’s hit me. ‘What are you saying?’

She looks back at me with tears in her mountain-sky eyes.

‘I’m saying that I can’t stay. That if I do, the gateway will grow until everything else is gone.’

I shake my head. ‘Then let it,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t care about everything else.’

She takes my face in her hands. ‘Yes, you do,’ Sofika says. ‘You are an inquisitor, Ahri. Long before we met you swore yourself to service. To defend those too weak and too frightened to defend themselves. And what do we say about vows?’

I know that she’s right, really. Sofika is always right. A tear traces from my eye as I give her my answer. Our answer.

‘That we do not break them.’

Sofika nods, and brushes her thumb across my cheek. Brushes the teardrop away.

‘I have to close the gate,’ she says. ‘But before I do, I want you to make me one last promise.’

My heart thumps slowly. Achingly.

‘What sort of promise?’

‘That you will keep looking, even when I am gone. That you won’t give up.’

I shake my head. ‘Sofi,’ I say. ‘I can’t.’

‘Yes, you can,’ she says. ‘Please, Ahri.’

I blink the tears from my eyes. Force the words up from my heart.

‘I swear it,’ I tell her. ‘On my blades and my honour. I will go on looking. I won’t give up.’

She smiles again. ‘When your work is done, come and find me,’ she says. ‘I’ll be waiting.’

She kisses me, and for just a few heartbeats we are together again. Whole. Then she pulls away and glances up at the gateway as shards of light tumble down all around us. Her hair begins to drift, and so do her robes.

‘It looks like a good evening, Sofika,’ I say, my heart slowly breaking.

Tears slide freely down my cheeks as I let go of her hand. Let go of her. As Sofika smiles at me one last time, a light amongst lights.

‘It is,’ she says. ‘With such bright stars.’

Evangeline

I stand on the Contemplation looking out over the tiers of Dimmamar’s south-western cathedral quarter as it turns to gold, a little bit at a time, repainted by the sunset. It warms my skin. My scars, and my aching bones.

‘Sister Evangeline.’

I look away from the cathedral city to see Kati standing beside me on the Contemplation. She is being turned to gold by the sunset, just like the city. The girl is not wearing rags any more, but robes. Her hair is cut short in the way of the Sisterhood.

‘Have you been taken into the commandery?’ I ask her.

‘Wherever the Sisterhood goes, I will follow,’ Kati says, then she looks at me. The girl’s eyes are strange. Dark and intent. ‘Do you know where you will go?’ she asks.

‘The only way we can,’ I tell her. ‘Onwards. After all, I have not found my purpose, yet.’

‘You will,’ Kati says, her voice as intent as her eyes. ‘The God-Emperor loves you, Evangeline.’

I smile at Kati. ‘He loves all loyal souls,’ I tell her.

The girl nods and gives a shallow bow. Then she takes her leave and sets to lighting the Contemplation’s candles.

‘Eva.’

I turn at the sound of a second voice. One that makes me smile to hear it. It is the first time that I have seen Ashava standing in the weeks since the undercroft. She is clad in new scars. New armour and vestments, too. Her old suit was ruined beyond repair, just as mine was. Ashava bears no weapons, because I asked her to come without them.

‘How are you, Sister?’ I ask her.

‘Standing,’ she says, and she smiles. ‘They put me back together. Scars and wounds and weaknesses all.’

I nod. ‘And the others?’

Ashava looks back to the spire as if she can see them.

‘Joti, Haskia and Eugenia have returned to service. Sarita and Munari are well enough to bicker with one another.’ She pauses, and shakes her head, still smiling. ‘Qi-Oh has gone back to training, despite the hospitallers forbidding it.’

‘Of course she has,’ I say, and I shake my head in turn, smiling. ‘I am glad to hear it.’

Ashava looks back at me. ‘That cannot be the reason you called me here, Eva,’ she says. ‘So what is it that you really want to speak about?’

I take a breath, knowing that once I say it, it cannot be unsaid.

‘I called you here to speak about a sword,’ I say, unclipping my scabbard and drawing my blade. Like my Sisters, it has been rebuilt since the undercroft, the damage hidden.

‘Eva,’ Ashava says warily. ‘What is going on?’

‘I felt doubt after Ophelia VII,’ I tell her, my eyes still on the sword. ‘After the Contemplation. I sought death, not for the God-Emperor, but for myself. Those things are sins.’

‘You led us to victory,’ Ashava says. ‘You defeated the witch, even after he changed. You bear the marks.’

I shake my head. ‘None of that changes what I did. What I felt. Sins are sins, and they must be paid for.’

‘You mean to take the mantle of Repentia,’ Ashava says.

I look up from the blade, meeting her eyes without shame. Without regret.

‘I do,’ I tell her. ‘But I cannot leave my Sisters without a leader.’

‘Eva,’ Ashava says again. ‘I am not the right choice. You know that I cannot wield a sword as I once could. Especially not now.’

I shake my head. ‘It is not in the hand that you hold the sword,’ I say. ‘It is the heart.’

Ashava shakes her head. She laughs, her dark eyes shining with tears. ‘You are so much like her,’ she says.

I hold out the sword by the blade, offering her the hilt.

‘Take up the blade,’ I say to her. ‘And take up the mantle, under the sight of Saint Katherine, and of the God-Emperor, whose realm is everlasting.’

Ashava blinks, and a tear rolls down her scarred cheek. ‘Under their sight,’ she says, putting her hand on the grip of the sword and taking it from me as the sun rises over the Contemplation’s edge.

‘Go with grace, Sister Superior,’ I tell her.

Ashava slides the sword into the scabbard she wears and then embraces me fiercely, just as she did aboard the Unbroken Vow, all those weeks ago.

‘I will miss you, Eva,’ she says, in my ear.

I close my eyes in the warmth of the sunset and the closeness of the embrace.

‘I will miss you too,’ I tell her.

Ashava withdraws from me, the sword sitting easily in the scabbard at her waist. More easily than it ever sat with me, even at the end. Ashava smiles at me, creasing the scars on her face.

‘When I arrived, I could have sworn you were speaking with someone,’ she says.

I frown. ‘I was,’ I tell her, and I turn back to the Contemplation’s edge to find that Kati is nowhere to be seen.

‘Who was it you were speaking to?’ Ashava asks.

My heart grows loud in my ears as I approach the low wall that circles the Contemplation. There are candles arrayed all along the edge of it, but only one of them remains lit. I pick it up gently, the flame wending and crackling in the cooling air.

‘A Sister,’ I reply absently.

Ravara

I stand on the observation deck of my system-runner, looking out at the stars. At my reflection in the armaglass. I am still thinner than I’d like. Still recovering from Dimmamar, and the undercroft. From letting go of Sofika. For weeks, I have eaten little, and trained less. I have slept the sleep of the dead. No dreams. Just darkness. Edgeless and depthless, like the gateway Sofika closed on Dimmamar.

Until last night.

‘What was it you saw, lord?’

I glance at Zoric’s reflection in the viewport. He is standing beside me with his arms folded across his chest.

‘Mountains,’ I tell him, thinking of my dream. ‘With the sun coming up behind them.’

I look at him sidelong. The scarring on his face is clearer to see, then. Even deeper, in reality.

‘A spire tower, burning.’

Zoric unfolds his arms, the bionics catching the starlight. The replacement limbs go as far up as the elbow, his house-brand and his burn scars all lost when the Valedictor was destroyed.

‘Sounds like a bad sign,’ he says.

I shrug. ‘Perhaps,’ I say. ‘Perhaps not.’

‘But either way, it is a sign,’ Yumia says.

She is standing on the other side of me, her new killcords laced around her arms. Yumia’s narrow face is even more so, now. Her eyes are circled with shadows. Like me, she has yet to regain the strength she lost in the undercroft.

‘So,’ Zoric asks, ‘where is it that you want us to go?’

I pause for a moment, certain for just the barest instant that I can see another reflection in the armaglass, beside my own. One with pale hair, and mountain-sky eyes.

I shake my head. Shake the image away.

‘Home,’ I tell him. ‘Back to Marleya.’

Acknowledgements

This book was written by me, but it was made possible by the unceasing support of my friends and family. Special thanks must go to my husband and to the families Docherty, Bailey and Harrison for patience, kindness and always being in my corner. To Kat, Michael, Kate, Hannah and Tim for kind words, cups of tea and keeping me sane. To Chris, John and Aaron, for invaluable and timely reassurances. And to my editor, Nick, who cheered me along right up to the final full stop.

Thanks, too, to the Black Library team, who turned my words not only into an honest-to-goodness book, but a special edition to boot. And finally thanks to both artists – Christian Byrne, who illustrated the stunning special edition jacket, and to Igor Sid, whose incredible cover artwork brought Eva and her Sisters to full, battle-scarred life.

About the Author

Rachel Harrison is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novel Honourbound, featuring the character Commissar Severina Raine, as well the accompanying short stories ‘Execution’, ‘Trials’, ‘Fire and Thunder’, ‘A Company of Shadows’, and ‘The Darkling Hours’, which won a 2019 Scribe Award in the Best Short Story category. Also for Warhammer 40,000 she has written the novella Blood Rite, numerous short stories including ‘The Third War’ and ‘Dishonoured’, the short story ‘Dirty Dealings’ for Necromunda, and the Warhammer Horror audio drama The Way Out.

An extract from
‘The Maiden of the Dream’.
Taken from The Horusian Wars: Divination
by John French

Mylasa Yaygus stepped from the shelter of the doorway as the grey man passed. It had started to snow, white shards falling from an iron sky to carpet the city streets. Crisp whiteness crunched under her boots. The black chimneys rose above her, scraping the cold sky. A layer of cold mist had begun to form in the air, pulling halos from the streetlights atop their iron poles. The street was almost empty, just a few scribes from the broker houses, their black velvet robes gathering a scattering of white as they carried out whatever task their masters had set them. A message runner stalked past her, sprung bladed legs hissing, eye lenses fixed on its distant destination. The grey man moved between the scattered pedestrians like water, his movements unhurried and fluid. A long cloak hung from his shoulders, its hood lowered around his neck to allow for the tall hat that marked him as a debt broker of the second order. Under the cloak he wore layered coats of grey velvet and silk. His gloves were soft leather the colour of storm clouds; his neckerchief and waistcoat were slate grey with silver buttons. The cane in his left hand was burnished steel capped with jet. Thus clothed he fitted the world he moved through without seam and wrinkle. He did not belong here, though. He was not a debt broker. In a sense he was not even human.

The snow began to fall more heavily; Mylasa quickened her step. Ahead of her the man in grey stepped out of the way of a pair of tracked servitors pulling a cart heaped with scroll tubes. He glanced behind him and for an instant she had a view of the pale flesh of his face and his hook-nosed profile. She saw the glint of a dark eye.

A cluster of chained scribes came out of the thickening swirl of snow. The grey man slid behind them. Mylasa swore to herself, and dodged forwards. The scribes’ silver chains jangled as she jostled them. Curses followed her. The shadow of the grey man was vanishing into an alley mouth. She ran, shedding pretence, knife sliding into her right palm, green cloak and skirts swirling behind her. He had seen her, and that meant that he needed removing now. Never mind the fact that the rest of his allies were still out there, never mind that it would mean that more might come. He had to die here and now.

She came round the corner. Black iron walls rose up and up and up above her. The grey man was ten paces down the alley, his back still to her. She ran at him, footsteps muffled in the thickening snow. She reached for his shoulder. Heavy flakes were swirling down. High above, the flare fires from the promethium works breathed fire and orange light into the dull metal sky. She gripped his shoulder and yanked back. The knife in her right hand rose, point first to meet his back as he fell.

He did not fall.

He spun. The thick grey fabric of the cloak yanked out of her hand. The steel cane in his left hand came around with him and hit her forearm with a crack of shattering bone. She cartwheeled back through the white-flecked air, shutting down the pain and shock flooding her. The man in grey seemed still as the world turned around her. She had an impression of sharp features framed by dark sideburns.

Mylasa landed and threw the knife in a single movement. The blade slid to a stop in mid-air. The snow slowed its fall. Frost covered the floating dagger’s blade. The man in grey looked at her for a long instant. Mylasa leapt, muscles flicking her body into the air as her left foot extended into a kick.

A wall of invisible force punched her from the air. More bones broke inside her. More pain. She hit the snow-covered ground, tried to roll, but found the point of the steel walking cane pressed into her neck. The man in grey stood above her. He held her own dagger in his left hand with the casual ease of a killer.

She took a breath. Something wet clicked in her chest, she spluttered, and tasted iron on her lips. She tried again and, rather than defiance, a question came from her mouth.

‘Who are you?’

‘I am Covenant,’ said the grey man. ‘Or rather that is the name of the person who stood here when this encounter occurred between him and his would-be killer. But you were not here, Mylasa. When the gene-assassin called Yaygus came out of the snow-filled night to kill Covenant, you were far above the clouds from which this remembered snow falls. So, to answer your question, my girl, I am the voice of someone you don’t remember.’

‘What–’

‘But the real question, Mylasa,’ said the mouth of the man in grey, ‘is who are you?’

And before the reply could come the snow swirled, and the steel cane lashed down, and the world was blank whiteness.

Click here to buy The Horusian Wars: Divination.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Igor Sid.

Mark of Faith © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Mark of Faith, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78999-466-7

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

For my husband, Andrew. You kept me sailing, even through the storms.