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Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Warp Shock

Shadow-Walker

Gallimo

Children of the Serpent

Azariel’s Wake

Pieces

The Star Lounge

Opening Doors

Sea of Names

Slipping the Leash

Applying Pressure

Into the Shadows

In Absentia

Preparations

The Enemy Within

The Emperor’s Ascension

Shedding Light

The Unmasking

A Shot in the Dark

The Holy Ordo

Revealing the Serpents

Escalation

The Novator Cortex

Descent Into Chaos

The Smog Deeps

Final Preparations

Hunting for Witches

Enlightenment

For the Emperor

The Lidless Stare

Navigation

A Matter of Honour

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Lords and Tyrants’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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.

WARP SHOCK

They were forty-seven hours out of Necromunda when the warp shock took hold.

Chettamandey Vula Brobantis jerked awake from cloying dreams of roaring giants and blood-flecked axes as the Solarox shuddered violently, the entire starship spasming like some mighty aquatic beast impaled by a hunter’s harpoon. She rolled to her right, ignoring the pain in her shoulder, and reached out with her left hand to slap the lumens on. Pale light sprang up at the gesture, as torches held aloft by bronze images of Terran saints illuminated her private chambers. The rays glinted dully off the gilded surfaces of her dressing table – built of wood from a planet liberated from the savage aeldari – reflected from the gilt-edged mirror presented to her as a gift by Admiral Venuza of the 19th Pacificum Sector Fleet, and got tangled in the folds of black Azantian lace that hung around her huge, pillar-cornered bed. The bed that until a matter of days ago, she’d shared with her husband of forty-three Terran years.

But then there had been that unpleasantness with the rogue House Goliath pit fighter on Necromunda, and the life-voyage of Azariel, Novator of Navigator House Brobantis, had been abruptly and quite dramatically truncated, courtesy of an extremely large edged weapon. Chetta actually missed him a little, despite the fact that she’d orchestrated the whole thing. She’d had to kill the fighter concerned to ensure her involvement didn’t come to light, but no one seemed to doubt that she’d opened her warp eye and blasted his mind into fragments in self-defence.

Well, it had been self-defence, after a fashion. There was no question that Chetta would have died, if he’d been allowed to live and had suffered from loose lips.

The Solarox bucked again, and Chetta frowned. The Navigator for this segment of the voyage was Vora, a scion of one of the minor branches of House Brobantis. He wasn’t scintillating conversation, but he was highly competent at the business of guiding starships through the screaming, roiling mass of malignant energy that constituted the warp, else he’d have never been selected to pilot his Novator’s personal ship. For the Solarox to be acting like this either meant that Vora had steered them extremely carelessly into a warp storm an order of magnitude worse than any Chetta had ever experienced first-hand, or…

She keyed her bedside vox-set. ‘Captain Arqueba.’

There was nothing but the faintest of crackles of an open line for a few seconds, and then Anja Arqueba’s voice replied.

‘Lady Chettamandey.’

‘What’s going on?’ Chetta demanded bluntly. ‘I haven’t been tossed around this badly since taking fire from an ork cruiser in Tennyson’s Reach.’

‘We’re… not certain, my lady.’ Anja’s voice was as clipped and professional as always, but Chetta had known her for over a decade, and could hear the tension in it. ‘We’re still in the warp, and the Geller field is holding, but we’ve lost all communication with Lord Vora. We’re steering blind.’

Chetta swore, and rolled out of bed. ‘Have you got a reading on his vitals?’

‘No, my lady. As I said, we’ve lost all communication.’

‘Either that, or the links are working just fine, and he’s dead.’ Chetta sighed, running through the possible scenarios in her mind. The ravages of the empyrean could scour a Navigator’s skull clean of sanity, but one of her kind actually dropping dead mid-voyage was less common, although not unheard of. Heart failure, perhaps? Or possibly a fit, or some other madness that had caused him to tear himself from his throne and the machines that monitored him? ‘I’m heading up there. Prepare a team.’

There was of course one other possibility: that something unholy had manifested out of the shifting currents of the warp and was even now eating Vora’s soul. It was unlikely, but possible. However, leaving the ship blind in the immaterium was as good as a death sentence for everyone on board anyway. Chetta had calculated the mathematics of risk in her head and come to the same conclusion that she had so many times in the past.

If you wanted something done right, it was best to do it yourself.

‘Yes, my lady,’ Anja acknowledged her, and that was an end to the conversation. Chetta shrugged her way into a heavy robe and belted it securely, then eased on the diamond-encrusted slippers Azariel had gifted her for their tenth wedding anniversary.

The Solarox rocked again, and spilled Chetta sideways into her dressing table. She steadied herself on it, wincing at the jolt to her knee and ankle joints, and made a mental note to dispose of it as soon as she could get away with doing so. Collecting relics linked to the aeldari had been one of her husband’s few real vices, and the damned things made her decidedly uncomfortable.

The next jolt nearly sent Chetta tumbling backwards onto her bed again. She gritted her teeth, and took up her cane of blackened tachydon ivory from its resting place. She needed it some days more than others, but she’d be damned if she was going to try to make her way through a warp-tossed starship without it.

‘I cannot,’ she muttered, stumping towards her cabin door, ‘be having with this foolishness.’

The Solarox was not a large ship by the standards of the Imperial Navy vessels Chetta had served on, but nor was it a tug. Even using the express elevators, it took her several minutes to get to the forecastle, by which point her joints were protesting bitterly and her mood had worsened significantly. She’d been met along the way by the team Captain Arqueba had assembled at her instruction: a dozen Brobantis armsmen and women in midnight carapace, armed with suppression shields and combat shotguns. Thus flanked, Chetta approached the Navigator’s chamber: a heavily shielded, ingrowing barnacle in the ship’s structure, its external walls encrusted with pipes and power cables, and dotted here and there with readouts attended to by the Solarox’s crimson-robed tech-adepts. One of them looked up at the tap-tap-tapping of Chetta’s steel-shod cane on the deck.

‘High lady,’ the adept buzzed in greeting through the voice-synth that had replaced their vocal cords. It was an alteration most likely made by choice rather than necessity, but Chetta didn’t regard the Adeptus Mechanicus’ habit of replacing their body parts with machines with the same distrust or disgust as many humans did. There were many days when she’d have given her right hand for artificial hips, knees and ankles, but for the moment she was still stubbornly determined to stick with her natural body, despite her regular disagreements with it.

Besides, Chetta knew well what it was like to be regarded as a disgusting aberration. Navigators might be essential to the functioning of the Imperium, but that didn’t prevent the ill-informed and overly superstitious from regarding her and her kin as heretical mutants, rather than the finely tuned results of countless centuries of jealously guarded gene-lore.

‘What is the Navigator’s status?’ she asked, eyeing the chamber warily. The walls weren’t coated in frost, which was something – the very worst manifestations of the warp tended to drop the local temperature to something approaching a Valhallan summer.

‘Insufficient data to be certain,’ the adept replied simply.

‘Your best estimate?’ Chetta said. She’d learned long ago never to use the word ‘guess’ around the initiates of the Martian priesthood, since it tended to upset them.

‘There are no indications of abnormal atmospheric conditions within the chamber,’ the adept told her. ‘Readouts suggest a steady temperature of nineteen point two five degrees Celsius, with humidity at thirty-two per cent. However, we have no readings for pulse, respiration or brain activity. The probability of these monitoring mechanisms all failing at once while others are unaffected is approximately seven per cent. Ergo, I believe it is reasonable to assume that Lord Vora has expired.’

‘Marvellous,’ Chetta muttered. ‘The viewing shields?’

‘Still open, high lady.’

‘Whatever happened must have happened fast, then,’ Chetta said, more for the benefit of the others around her than anything else. She looked sideways at the sergeant and pointed at the outer blast door in front of them. It appeared ludicrously solid, but it wasn’t a Navigator’s frail frame that it was intended to contain. ‘Remain here, and shoot anything that comes out of that door unless you’re absolutely certain that it’s me.’

‘And if we think it’s Lord Vora, high lady?’ the sergeant asked.

‘Shoot it anyway,’ Chetta grunted, walking forwards. ‘It’s the only way to be sure.’ That had happened once, on one of her first voyages. Old Scara had ridden them through a warp storm, then when the time came to hand over to the next shift and he’d emerged from the chamber, something – some thing – made of torn flesh and jagged bone spurs had started to claw its way free from his skin. Three ratings had died before someone had managed to turn a heavy bolter on it, and even then it had nearly got to Chetta to open her throat with its teeth before it had finally been brought down.

She barely thought about it, these days. She’d seen far worse inside the chamber.

The first blast door slid aside and Chetta stepped through it, then gathered her robe around her as it slid shut behind her. She’d never yet had an item of clothing get caught, but it remained a tiny, irrational fear of hers, one that not even all her years of starfaring could shake.

The blast door in front of her opened, and Chetta took a cautious step into the Navigator’s chamber.

It wasn’t a large space, for a Navigator was required to do very little in there that involved any form of physical activity. It was dominated by the throne: an imposing seat of metal and animal leather, utilitarian yet menacing. Chetta absent-mindedly tugged her robe well clear of the closing second door and scanned the walls and ceiling. They were largely bare metal, and she could see nothing out of place there, no gibbering creature of malice and shadow waiting to spring the moment her attention was diverted. With that precaution taken, she stepped forwards cautiously to inspect the throne’s occupant.

Vora Brobantis was slumped in the seat, and quite definitely dead, if the trails of blood leaking from his nose and ears were anything to go by. Chetta prodded him suspiciously with her cane, but he didn’t spring up and try to murder her while screaming warp-riddled heresy.

‘Thank the Emperor for small mercies,’ Chetta muttered. Vora was dead, sure enough, but at least it looked like he might stay dead. Such things were never entirely certain, when the warp was involved.

With those details taken care of, Chetta turned to the side of the chamber she’d studiously been ignoring so far, and opened her third eye to gaze upon the warp.

The warp; the immaterium; the empyrean – all names that humanity had conjured and tried to apply to the roiling, boiling, raw energy that lay over and under and around the material universe in which the flesh and blood and bone of their species existed. It was a lexical effort to apply order and definition where there was none, the notion that by naming something it could be understood, perhaps even tamed and mastered.

The problem with that was that regular humans were blind and blunt, little more than mewling infants adrift in a hostile universe that would swallow them without mercy or compunction should they trail so much as a toe in the waters that bore them. Only Chetta and her three-eyed kin could look into the face of the warp and see anything of meaning; only a Navigator could hope to do such a thing and survive with their mind intact, and even then it wasn’t certain. The key to Chetta’s genetics lay many millennia in the dim and distant past, even further back than the rise of the Emperor and the formation of the Imperium itself. Perhaps, somewhere on Holy Terra in the most secure vaults of the Paternova, the most senior of her people, lay the true nature of the Navigators’ history. Then again, perhaps the knowledge was lost, along with so many other secrets.

Chetta frowned at the warp, trying as ever to make sense of what she was experiencing. Colours without name exploded and whirled, then died in starbursts of melting hues. Sounds chased each other past the viewport, then returned to sink their claws into it. The shifting, kaleidoscopic light momentarily turned every shadow in the chamber into a face, familiar but unplaceable, screaming in agony. She winced as a stabbing pain assaulted her forehead, seeming to reach right through her third eye and into her brain, twisting at its substance with ephemeral claws.

‘All quiet, then,’ Chetta snorted. She reached behind her, and her grasping fingers encountered Vora: still dead, she was delighted to find. She hauled him out of the throne and onto the floor with a grunt of effort, then forced her knees to raise her up so she could take his position. The throne, recognising that it had a new and living occupant, subtly extended its biometric devices to begin monitoring her vital signs.

‘Captain Arqueba?’ Chetta called, activating the vox.

‘High lady?’

‘Vora is dead,’ Chetta said, ‘but I’m a jokaero if I can work out why. The warp isn’t exactly calm, but this wouldn’t have bent the mind of a green acolyte.’ She frowned, drumming her fingers on the throne’s arm. ‘You’ll have to cope without direction for a little while longer. Something took a swipe at us, and I’d like to know what it was.’

‘As you wish, high lady.’

Chetta gripped the armrests of the throne, gritted her teeth and concentrated.

The fact that the throne room only had a narrow field of vision was of no consequence. The warp was not the material universe, where light travelled in straight lines. There were very few rules that applied to it. A skilled Navigator could gaze out and perceive a threat that might affect the rear or underside of the craft, or something which could engulf it entirely. Distance and direction were subjective at best in the warp, as was time, and that was something Chetta could use.

She wrestled with the immaterium’s presentation into her mind, hardening her will into the psychic equivalent of an adamantium-tipped drill. In the same way as a warp-blind human might concentrate on focusing their eyes to see the finest detail at very close range, or their ears on detecting a single sound amidst others, Chetta chased down the thread of time in the white noise of images and sensations she was being barraged with, and followed it backwards.

There. A series of shock waves, ripping through the warp and buffeting the Solarox, lines of what she could only internally verbalise as a glistening dark brown against the shifting yellow background. She fought against the feeling of her skin itching on the inside, and clung on to the images in her head. That was no warp storm; it was like no natural phenomenon of the empyrean she’d ever witnessed, if ‘natural’ was a term that could even be applied to this place. The shock waves were radiating outwards from another event; something else had birthed them. But what?

She forced her third eye to follow the ripples back to their origin, rolling back her subjective notion of time through sheer bloody-mindedness coupled with long practice. It was like trying to get a grip on a bubble in a hurricane, but…

‘High lady, are you well? Your pulse is accelerating rapidly.’

‘Not now, Anja!’ Chetta snapped, trying not to lose the thread. Talking to someone in the present while peering into the past was not unlike trying to juggle with one hand while fencing with the other. She was nearly there; she could feel the shock waves converging on a single point.

They met, and formed a distinct image in Chetta’s mind, one of uncommon focus and clarity for someone used to wrestling with the warp’s abstracts. It was almost as though the trigger event didn’t exactly involve the warp at all…

‘Oh crap,’ Chetta breathed. She took a quick check on the position of the Astronomican, that great beacon of psychic light and noise radiating out from Terra to guide the Imperium’s starships through the shifting morass of the immaterium. The Solarox had been knocked off course from its planned route to Vorlese, where House Brobantis had its primary holdings, but not far. It wouldn’t take much time to get them back into the most favourable currents, on course to return home as quickly as possible. After all, she had a husband to bury, and important decisions to make. There was little point in going to all the trouble of arranging Azariel’s death in order to carefully steer her adopted house away from his plotted route, only to then not capitalise on it.

And yet, despite it all, Chetta was still a dutiful citizen of the Imperium. Some things were more important.

‘This is Lady Chetta Brobantis,’ she said, relaxing her grip on the past. Now she knew where she was looking, she could see the ugly wound that still pulsed in the warp’s fabric. It wasn’t near, as she comprehended such things, but it wasn’t far either. In fact, she was fairly sure she knew where it was in relation to the material universe, and that unnerved her. ‘We have a new heading. Prepare to alter course on my mark.’

‘Are we far off course, my lady?’ Anja replied.

‘I said we have a new heading, captain,’ Chetta said firmly, rolling her neck in an attempt to loosen some of the tension in it. ‘Vorlese is going to have to wait. Unless I miss my guess completely, something has just sucked an entire planet into the warp. I rather think we should go and find out what’s occurring.’

SHADOW-WALKER

He stepped off the transport shuttle, a lone man in a long weathercoat and a rebreather mask: unremarkable garb, such as anyone might wear to head into the Smog Deeps of Ascension City, down near the planet’s surface where the pollution clung thick and sticky around the base levels of the great tenement blocks and chrome-chased windscrapers of Vorlese’s capital. He stepped off the transport shuttle and filed through the perfunctory customs checks using the identity documents in the name of Radimir Niklau, easily able to demonstrate that he was not in possession of any contraband items or xenos lifeforms. He stepped off the transport shuttle, a lone man in a crowd of hundreds, each with their own purpose and destination.

He stepped off the transport shuttle and walked down the ramp even though, strictly speaking, he had no need to do any such thing.

That was how the Imperium worked, though. So long as the numbers balanced, no questions were asked. There was no surer way to draw attention than to unbalance an equation, even an equation as apparently minor as the passenger tally on a transport ship. So Radimir Niklau left the ship in the same manner in which he’d boarded it, past mirror-visaged proctors with their riot-guns and cyber-mastiffs, alert for threats but completely blind to the one he posed, and disappeared into the teeming medley of humanity and near-humanity that made up the Mids of Ascension City.

Twenty-three minutes later, he was in a booth in a spider market, sipping a hot, spiced beverage with a higher-than-average caffeine content. The market was so named because it had been built onto the outer skin of one of the towering, mile-high buildings, and patrons had to negotiate it by clambering up and down levels like the giant arachnids that apparently lived in the choking smog lower down. It was a precarious existence, both fiscally and gravitationally, and Radimir was here quite deliberately.

His contact was late, but not immensely so. They arrived five minutes past the agreed time, feet first down the ladder. Radimir took note of that; they’d come from an upper level, suggesting that they were of higher social status. Unless, of course, they were late because they’d taken the time to climb higher and then descend to the meeting, in order to mislead him.

‘You are Niklau?’ the new arrival asked. They had a hood drawn over their face, which wasn’t uncommon here, since the air held a biting chill even at this altitude. However, shadows held no mystery for Radimir. He could make out skin so pale it nearly gleamed like marble, and a pair of dark brown eyes.

‘I am.’ He took a sip of his caffeine. ‘You are Kell?’

‘It’s as good a name as any.’ Kell cast a nervous glance at the window, which was little more than a square of transparent sheeting, and then down at the floor of hardened, reconstituted organic waste pulp. Somewhere underneath, presumably, were the struts that anchored it to the building. ‘What possessed you to meet here?’

‘The possibilities for eavesdropping are extremely limited,’ Radimir pointed out. It was true enough; the booth was big enough for two people, plus a light-limbed juve to clamber in and serve drinks, then clamber out again. One side was the three-foot-thick rockcrete wall of the building, and on the other three was the open air.

However, Radimir also liked to get the measure of people, and this was a good way to do so. He had few concerns about the location, even if it detached from the wall and began to fall. Kell, on the other hand, didn’t like being here. Radimir strongly suspected Kell had never visited a spider market before. Just from that, and his contact’s arrival down the ladder instead of up it, he was fairly certain his initial impression had been correct.

‘Let us be brief,’ he said, and didn’t smile as the lines on Kell’s forehead eased slightly. ‘You have a problem that needs eradicating. I can perform that function.’

‘Pressure must be brought to bear,’ Kell replied. A token flicked out of one sleeve and skidded across the narrow table to come to rest in front of Radimir. He picked it up between thumb and forefinger and inspected it: a winged triangle, with two stylised stars at the base and a larger one equidistant between them, higher up, spaced to suggest two regular eyes and then a third in a forehead. The symbol of the Brobantis house of Navigators.

He nodded and tucked the token away. ‘Members, or associates?’

‘Members,’ Kell replied earnestly. Radimir nodded again, as though he hadn’t been going to target Navigators in any case.

‘I will require payment.’

Kell’s fingers flickered once more, and a small oblong of plant fibre slid across the table. Radimir unwrapped one side and ran his fingernail down the stack of tokens bound within: two thousand, in high denominations of the local scrip.

‘The agreed fee was five times this.’

‘The rest of the fee will be paid when results are satisfactory,’ Kell retorted. ‘Fear not – your patron has deep pockets.’

The threat in the promise was implicit: you are a tool. If you prove to be a problematic or ineffective tool, other tools can and will be employed to remove you. You are simply the tool we happened to choose, and you should consider yourself lucky to have the work.

Radimir simply nodded for a final time. This payment sufficed, and his aims would coincide with his patron’s for long enough. Until then, they could think that they owned him.

‘Then I shall get to work.’

GALLIMO

The Solarox juddered again, but not like before – this was the regular strain of warp travel, and something it had been built to withstand. Chetta massaged her temples, intent on the point she had been focused on since she’d set her ship on this course, very determinedly not concentrating on the Other Things lurking near it.

‘Prepare for translation,’ she ordered. ‘In ten, nine…’

Warning klaxons sounded, even inside the Navigator’s chamber, as Captain Arqueba activated the pre-translation procedure. All through the Solarox, passengers and crew would be bracing themselves. Translations could vary from a chill feeling in the bones and momentary nausea to half the ship’s occupants clawing at themselves to get the insects out of their veins – and indeed, in extreme cases the insects might actually manifest physically. It all depended on the translation point, but Chettamandey Brobantis had been doing this for decades, and she could sense the exact spot that would bring them out closest to their destination with the least amount of psychic trauma. But it would take split-second timing to ensure they managed it without attracting the attention of the Other Things.

‘…five, four, three…’

The safe point shifted suddenly, lurching towards her.

‘–crap, mark!’

The Solarox translated. Chetta felt her teeth swell in her gums, pushing her jaws wider and wider, beginning to split her cheeks… And then it was done, and her face was back to normal with nothing but a phantom ache lurking in the back of her mind.

‘That was a little sudden, my lady,’ Anja commented. Her voice sounded loose, as though she were trying to speak through a mouth that her brain insisted was larger than it should be.

‘Blame the Emperor-damned warp,’ Chetta muttered, rubbing her cheek. The view in front of her showed nothing but pinpricks of light now, dozens if not hundreds of distant stars shining for an apparently unchanging eternity, and the loss of the warp’s life and motion was both a relief and an aching absence. Coming back to real space was always like having one of her senses violently disconnected, mainly because that was exactly what had just happened. ‘If we did that correctly, we should be in the Gallimo System. What do your readouts say?’

‘We…’ Chetta heard other voices in the background: those of the bridge crew making reports. ‘We’re picking up location beacons from Gallimo Prime’s moons, but nothing from the planet itself. And the system is full of distress signals.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Chetta said wearily, ‘let me guess. They’re all saying something along the lines of, “Where the hell did Gallimo Prime just go?”’

There was a brief pause before Anja answered her. ‘Yes, high lady.’

Chetta sighed and rubbed her two human eyes. She’d hoped that she was wrong. Even as the Solarox had approached the translation point and she’d perceived the writhing, pulsating forms of the warp’s psychic predators, drawn to the sudden arrival in their midst of tens of billions of souls, she’d hoped that she was wrong.

She hadn’t been wrong.

Gallimo Prime, the largest and most important world in the Gallimo System, had been sucked into the warp, taking all its citizens with it. Right now, on the other side of the veil of reality that separated the material universe from the immaterium, monstrosities the likes of which Anja Arqueba and her warp-blind crewmates couldn’t even begin to fathom were glutting themselves. The Solarox was the merest crumb of a morsel in comparison, and Geller-shielded to boot; their brief dance past the predators and into real space had been, in all likelihood, comparatively safe. But that didn’t mean that Chetta was going to tell Anja what it was her helmsman had just steered around, blindly following the directions Chetta had transmitted. There were some things – many things – that the two-eyed were simply better off not knowing.

‘How far out are we from where Gallimo Prime would be, if it were here?’ Chetta asked.

‘Our best estimates suggest eight hours at sublight, my lady.’

‘Take us there,’ Chetta ordered. ‘I want to look at it from this side. And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this, captain, but watch out for the moons. With their planet’s gravity well gone, who knows where they’ll end up.’

‘Acknowledged, my lady.’

‘Navigator out,’ Chetta said, completing protocol. She eased herself down from the throne and limped towards the door, leaning heavily on her cane. The act of navigation itself had become steadily easier over her life as her mastery of it increased, but the physical after-effects were getting more draining. Nothing she couldn’t handle, at least for now, but there would come a time when she couldn’t move around under her own power any longer.

Not yet, she thought fiercely, as she always did, and reached out with her free hand to key the opening combination for the chamber doors. Not yet, and not next time. After that… we’ll see.

The security team were still waiting outside for her, as though she’d been gone for five minutes instead of over twelve hours. Chetta flapped her free hand in acknowledgement of their steadfastness.

‘Lord Vora’s in there,’ she said without preamble. ‘He’s dead. And before you ask, he was like that when I found him.’ She knew her ferocious reputation with House Brobantis’ servants, and saw no harm in playing on it, even in a self-deprecating manner. ‘See that he’s removed and prepared for burial. Lay him with my husband, for now – they shared blood, at least.’

‘Yes, my lady,’ the sergeant nodded, and the team began to file past her. Chetta thrust her hand out to stop the last one in his tracks.

‘Not you,’ she said. ‘You go and find DeShelle and tell her to attend me immediately.’

‘Where will you be, high lady?’ the armsman asked, saluting.

‘The bridge, of course,’ Chetta replied through gritted teeth as she made for the nearest service elevator while her hip ground in its socket. She waited until she was out of earshot, then continued under her breath. ‘There’s a hole in the universe, and I need to take a closer look at it.’

Chetta had appointed DeShelle DuVoir as her personal aide approximately one Terran year ago, and had been thoroughly satisfied with her performance ever since. She was a mere slip of a girl, with skin a few shades lighter than Chetta’s own deep brown, and very short dark hair into which she shaved patterns that were apparently of some significance to her parent culture – as was the delicately engraved collar of ebony metal she always wore around her throat. She was warp-blind, of course, and far from bold, but remarkably intelligent and very capable.

Chetta was standing on the bridge of the Solarox, gazing out of the main viewport at where Gallimo Prime had once been. All around them was a mess of running lights: ships that had taken off from the planet just before the disaster, ones that had arrived expecting to find it, and various panicking fools who’d apparently decided that no solid ground was safe.

Of course, they might be correct. What was to say that Gallimo’s moons, the orbits of which Captain Arqueba was watching very closely indeed, wouldn’t go next? Anecdotal data suggested that everything up to the very outer limits of Gallimo Prime’s atmosphere had been pulled into a sudden yawning chasm, but ships beyond that level had escaped. Perhaps flying about and weeping in fear was actually the safest course of action. It would make about as much sense as anything else that was going on.

‘What do you see, my lady?’ DeShelle asked.

‘Foolishness,’ Chetta muttered. ‘Foolishness and panic.’ She fought down the clawing sense of unease in her own gut. Leadership was about setting an example. House Brobantis might not be hers by birth, but so far as she was concerned it was hers now. The ailing House Dacastos had married her off for a short-term political gain that had availed them little in the years since, and were now heading towards becoming a footnote in history. Her children, each of them a hard-won victory against her body and her advancing age, were Brobantis, she was Brobantis, and she owed it to the house to lead it as well as she could.

‘We’re being hailed by a patrol boat,’ Arqueba reported. ‘They want to know why we’re passing so close to the planet’s former location.’

‘Ask them whose authority they’re questioning us under, given that the planetary governor, every member of his staff and the entire planet’s Administratum are currently lost in the warp somewhere,’ Chetta grunted.

‘Or you could perhaps inform them that the Lady Chettamandey of Navigator House Brobantis is using her warp-sight to assess the situation and determine whether it poses any further threat,’ DeShelle suggested mildly.

Arqueba snorted a laugh. ‘What would we do without your diplomacy skills, DeShelle?’

‘Since I appointed her, those skills are technically mine via delegation,’ Chetta pointed out. ‘I’m sure you can deal with them, Anja. Just hold our position steady for a little longer. I need to take a proper look at this.’

She turned away, closed her physical eyes to shut out all distractions, and opened her third eye. It always felt blind at first in real space, as if she were staring into a lightless void, but as the seconds passed things started to come into focus. There were the very faintest sparks of life from other ships, the souls of their crews as they skimmed the warp by the nature of their very existence. Here and there shone brighter lights – astropaths, perhaps, or other psykers, whose essences were more closely connected to the empyrean and so attracted her gaze more. But they weren’t what she wanted to see.

She focused past and around them, looking for the warp echoes of Gallimo Prime’s fate, and saw it almost instantly. It was a flickering wound hanging in space – not active, not a portal through which a ship could pass, for example, but still something from which the energy of the warp could infinitesimally bleed. It was a ragged tear in–

No. No it wasn’t. Chetta clenched her fingers on the head of her cane until her knuckles protested and looked closer, forcing herself to concentrate. She had to be absolutely certain about this.

She was absolutely certain about it. It wasn’t a tear.

It was a cut.

‘My lady?’

Chetta realised she’d spoken aloud. She closed her warp eye and opened her physical ones, then turned around to see DeShelle regarding her with a look of concern. She debated whether to keep what she’d just learned to herself, then instantly decided against it. Such information was too important to risk on the continuing good health of one Navigator.

‘Captain,’ she called, motioning to Arqueba. ‘Would you care to join us, please?’

Anja Arqueba’s command throne floated majestically over to them, borne aloft by a combination of anti-grav motors and suspensor cables that disappeared into the bridge’s vaulted ceiling. Arqueba was another Navy veteran, although she and Chetta had never seen combat together, and what could be seen of her hair amidst the neural interface cables dotting her scalp was an iron grey.

‘High lady?’

Chetta cleared her throat and kept her voice low. ‘Keep this to yourselves for now. I don’t want word to spread among the crew, because the crew will talk when we get back to Vorlese. Which, incidentally, I want us back in the warp and heading for as soon as this conversation is over. I’ll handle the translation here, but then I’ll need whoever is next on the duty rota to take the rest of the journey.’

DeShelle and Arqueba both nodded dutifully.

‘This was no accident, or random warp storm,’ Chetta said simply, nodding in the direction of the absent planet. ‘From what I can see, someone intended to drag Gallimo Prime into the warp.

‘And they found a way to do just that.’

CHILDREN OF THE SERPENT

Even among the mighty windscrapers of Ascension City, the Navigator halls stood tall and proud. The mighty edifices, each stretched over multiple city blocks, were built of ferrocrete for structural strength, but clad in square miles of the finest marble and punctuated with windows of glassaic that would have taken up the entire sides of buildings on lesser worlds. Sentinel-sized gargoyles clung to cornices and leered over precipitous ledges. Gold leaf and filigree had settled on surfaces like great colonies of roosting insects. House sigils were picked out in platinum and precious stones, and subtly illuminated so that they blazed out into the night of Vorlese’s twenty-seven-hour rotation. As a planet on one of the main warp routes to Holy Terra, and a proud survivor of the Despoiler’s assault during the Thirteenth Black Crusade, Vorlese was the seat of power for several of the largest Navigator houses, and they advertised that power.

Despite their appearance, however, the halls were not mere ostentatious frippery. They stood independent of the webwork of enclosed gantries and procession ways that linked the other buildings around them, and any flyer not broadcasting approved security codes would be shot down in short order if they approached too closely. At ground level, razor wire and other, less obvious deterrents prevented the curious or malicious from drawing near. Even the most desperate denizens of the Smog Deeps knew better than to approach a Navigator hall, even if they had no concept of what one actually was, or who dwelled within. Navigators were paranoid, and as mutants in an Imperium that widely reviled and hunted mutants, they were wise to be so.

All these things would pose a severe obstacle to most people who intended to harm a Navigator, but Radimir Niklau was not most people. He could get inside every one of these heavily defended palaces should he choose to, but such a venture was not without risk, and Niklau had not gained the favour of his patrons – his true patrons – by being careless. There were easier measures that could be taken for now. Later, when the prey became more cautious, he could utilise his more esoteric skills.

For now, he needed information.

He let his instincts take him past the teeming marketplaces; down the great thoroughfares where the faceless, grey-souled masses of the Imperium’s chattel dragged themselves to or from their place of employ at the sound of the shift-change klaxon; over a spindly looking crossway that swayed in the wind between blocks, and was clustered with lights in an effort to prevent flyers from colliding with it; around the gently humming sealed chambers where the power generators throbbed. After a while, he became consciously aware of what was guiding his steps.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ Radimir murmured, eyeing a sigil in the smear of graffiti and gang signs that crawled down one wall of a throughway. It was a crude depiction of a crowned serpent – not particularly large or ostentatious, and not created with any remarkable degree of artistic skill, but it had caught his eye. There had been another, one block back, in the same style and with its head pointing towards this one.

A trail, perhaps. But leading where?

This serpent had a kink in its neck, suggesting that he should turn right at the next junction. He did so, and found his next guide some way down the passage, nestling beside a flickering strip lumen in the ceiling. That one sent him on to its fellow, scratched into the wall above a garbage compactor. He nearly missed the next, half-concealed as it was by a wanted poster for an outlaw going by the name of Emerson Tobias, who from the look of the bad pict seemed to be some sort of foppish dandy with an over-fondness for knives. However, a quick easing aside of the text describing Tobias’ misdeeds gave Radimir the direction he needed to take at his next turning, up a long flight of stairs into a wide public atrium.

Here he slowed, feeling uncertainty gnawing at him for the first time. There looked to be only one way in or out of this hall, so presumably here was where he would find what he sought. But there was always the possibility that the sigils were old or, worse, had already been deciphered by one of the Imperium’s watchdogs, yet been left as bait. The luminators on the walls and ceiling here were close-spaced and in good condition, and there were few places to hide. A very bad place for a fight, should it come to one.

Radimir calmed his breathing, and ran through a quick mental focusing exercise. Discovery was always possible, but it was highly unlikely that a constant watch was being kept, even if someone had realised what the sigils meant. Besides, entrapment of that sort was incredibly unlikely: the Imperium would almost always destroy such things, if they realised their true nature. Destruction was one of the few things the Imperium excelled at, and the only thing about it that he admired.

There. Another crowned serpent, but this one was coiled into a circle and eating its own tail rather than leading him anywhere further. Radimir headed for the door it sat next to, with the easy confidence of a man who had merely taken a moment to get his bearings, and ascended the wide steps of dark stone that led to the pillared entrance.

It was a public library. Radimir snorted in quiet amusement. Perhaps there would actually be some true knowledge contained within.

The desk clerk was a skinny woman with thick streaks of grey in her black hair, and whose sense of self-important duty was tangible. She held up a hand as Radimir made to walk past the counter at which she sat, and he paused, studying her.

‘Are you a member?’ she demanded, fixing him with a stare that would doubtless have rooted a lesser person to the spot.

‘No.’

‘Open browsing is five ducats,’ the clerk sniffed, jerking her head at a displayed list of prices behind her. ‘Borrowing is two ducats per item.’

Radimir dug into his pocket and pulled out the appropriate coin. He’d already broken down some of the money he’d received from Kell – Vorlesian ducats, apparently – precisely to avoid being remembered as the man who’d tried to pay for something as mundane as library admittance with a high-denomination piece. He slid it across the counter and the clerk took it, tucking it into a till that clicked as its inbuilt counter registered it. There were no opportunities for light-fingered employees here, clearly.

The clerk returned to her filing, ignoring him now that he’d paid his way. There was nothing about her to indicate that she was who he sought; she was merely another unthinking wheel in the Imperium’s enormous, corroded machine. Radimir moved on.

It was some ten minutes later when he found what he was looking for. Two rows away from where the data crystals sat on dusty shelves interspersed with cogitators, in among the genuine books that reeked of leather and paper, old glue and mouldering dust, a tall man with angular cheekbones and eyes of quiet hazel was replacing tomes on a shelf. As he did so, the light glittered for a moment off a ring on his left forefinger: a crowned serpent wrought in silver, eating its own tail.

‘A fine place you have here,’ Radimir remarked, approaching him from the right. The man turned to him, a gentle smile on his face.

‘I like to think so. Sulaman Eichner, senior archivist.’ He proffered a hand, which Radimir took.

‘Radimir Niklau.’

‘And what brings you to our collection today, Goodsire Niklau?’ Eichner smiled.

‘Serpents.’

Eichner, on the verge of withdrawing his hand, stiffened involuntarily. Radimir tightened his grip.

‘That’s a very poor tarot face you have there, senior archivist,’ he murmured. ‘Just imagine the trouble you could be in if I were a servant of the Inquisition, instead of the Eightfold Path.’

The corner of Eichner’s mouth twitched, but his smile was transfixed, like an insect pinned to a display card by a magos biologis.

‘Our masters have been watching,’ Radimir continued, the lies slipping easily through his teeth. ‘Your efforts have been noted, and your rewards will follow.’ He looked into Eichner’s eyes, measured the man, considered their surroundings and took a leap of faith. Many things drew people away from the Emperor’s lies, but it was often relatively easy to work out what. For a senior archivist… ‘The knowledge you have been seeking will be made available to you.’

Eichner’s stiffness dissolved into limp relief. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you…’

‘But first, I will require your assistance,’ Radimir said, holding up a finger to silence Eichner’s quiet joy. ‘Your assistance, and that of your… associates.’

All things considered, Radimir thought that the Children of the Serpent were a fairly poor collection of worshippers. Sulaman Eichner had been seduced by the search for forbidden knowledge – Radimir hadn’t ascertained exactly what – but he hadn’t yet fully thrown himself into the work of overthrowing the Imperium and bringing about its downfall. He viewed it as overbearing and constraining, and felt that the dogma of the Ministorum limited humanity’s potential to learn and grow, and wanted to bask in the knowledge and glory of the Ruinous Powers. Radimir agreed wholeheartedly with all of that, but Eichner had yet to wholly understand or commit to the path he’d begun to tread. In time, with the right development, Sulaman Eichner might become the sort of man the Inquisition hunted mercilessly – the sort of man who unlocked the secrets of the warp and inducted multitudes into them. At the moment, however, he was merely a morbidly curious senior archivist with an anti-authoritarian streak and the ability to organise and coordinate a cult.

Radimir might take him along when he left Vorlese to its fate. Or he might not.

The rest of them, at least of those Eichner had been able to call together at short notice, were the usual mix of malcontents, deviants and self-important fools who had completely failed to understand what they were getting involved in. There were a handful of sociopaths who simply wanted to hurt and kill people, and weren’t particularly bothered about what framework it was that allowed them to do it; put them in carapace and give them an Ordo Hereticus sigil, and they’d probably be just as content to serve as Inquisition shock troops. There were a few mutants of the less obvious sort, the kind that could move about with relative security in hooded cloaks and with respirators over their faces. Then there were a couple of dozen of what Radimir thought of as the family types: folks for whom the worship of Chaos had been passed down by previous generations with the same sort of ditchwater-dull lack of imagination that most Imperial citizens worshipped the Emperor. Give them an autogun, point them at the governor’s guards and tell them their day had come, and they’d start a riot, a revolution or whatever you needed them to, but you couldn’t trust a one of them to think up anything that would actually bring glory to the Ruinous Powers.

There were four who really stood out to Radimir, aside from Eichner. Svet was a huge mutant, and apparently the brother of three of the family types. He was as large as an ogryn, and had been blessed by the Changer with what looked to be razor-sharp spurs of bone dotted across his body, particularly from his knee and elbow joints. Unlike an ogryn, however, he appeared to have undiminished intellect compared to his fellows, although he struggled to get words out around his enlarged, tusk-like teeth. Radimir could see that Svet was accorded great respect by the others on account of his blessed appearance, and was offered seating appropriate to his mighty frame and the best of the available food, which would certainly be preferable to the death by burning promethium he’d suffer if anyone in authority laid eyes on him.

Evelyn Darke was a wyrd, an unsanctioned psyker missed by the sweeps and purges and therefore not taken by the Black Ships to be drained to a husk for the benefit of the Corpse-Emperor on his Carrion Throne. She was a hollowed-out young woman with dark circles around haunted eyes, and in many other places she’d have been the leader of the group, as the one with the most obvious power. However, it seemed she preferred to simply sit as far back into the shadows as she could, which was an approach Radimir could identify with. She’d stared at him distrustfully, but appeared to defer to Eichner’s judgement.

‘And what do you do?’ Radimir had asked, when Eichner introduced them. Darke had looked at Eichner and the archivist had gestured encouragingly, like a father keen for his child to demonstrate their latest trick.

‘I burn things,’ Darke had replied. Then she’d looked away from him, and that had been that.

Then there was Aylen Marjuk, whom Radimir had pegged immediately as a stone-cold killer. Former Astra Militarum, he’d either seen something during his service that his commanding officers hadn’t realised he’d seen, or had come to enlightenment at some point after his discharge or, more likely, desertion. He watched everyone, always had one hand on the military-issue laspistol he kept holstered on his left hip, and radiated the sort of passionate belief that Radimir thoroughly approved of. Aylen Marjuk wanted the Imperium to die, even if he wasn’t forthcoming about exactly why. He also stuck close by the shoulder of Sulaman Eichner, and was possibly one reason why the apparently amiable senior archivist hadn’t endured a serious challenge to his position.

Finally, to Radimir’s complete lack of surprise, there was Emerson Tobias.

Tobias looked even worse than on his wanted poster. Hair that had once been artfully unkempt was now an unwashed mop; cheeks that had been smooth had become gaunt; eyes that had been shadowed had become sunken. He was a killer as well, Radimir could practically smell it on him, but Tobias was a self-aggrandising blowhard. Had Radimir been a gambling man, he’d have wagered good money that Tobias had fallen in with the Children of the Serpent simply because he had nowhere else to go. He didn’t have the spine for what was coming.

‘What do you need from us?’ Eichner asked respectfully, when Radimir had taken his measure of the room. They were gathered in the halls of a generator chamber. It was apparently where Svet lived, on the basis – according to Eichner – that the only people who ever came in to clean or maintain it were his three brothers.

‘I need access to the logs at the space port,’ Radimir said. ‘Specifically, I need to know the movements of Navigators from House Brobantis. Which ships they are assigned to, when they are scheduled to arrive and depart. The space port will have that information because the security forces need it. I also need it.’

‘Why?’

It was Emerson Tobias, predictably. He sneered as Radimir looked over at him, displaying a set of even white teeth that had remarkably escaped the decline visible on the rest of his face.

‘What sort of glory can come from that?’ Tobias demanded. ‘Sulaman said you were here to reward us for our loyalty. I think you’re here to use us to pursue a personal grudge.’

‘Do not confuse your lack of comprehension for my lack of purpose,’ Radimir told him coldly. ‘Your reward will come, if you prove true. If I were to try to explain the details of my purpose to you, your brain would ooze out of your ears.’

Tobias stood, with a dramatic flourish of his coat sleeves. ‘I’ve killed seventeen men and women, stranger. Seventeen! All for the glory of the Great Powers! You?’

Radimir sighed, and got to his own feet. He scratched his cheek, considering. ‘Somewhere upwards of fourteen.’

‘Hah!’

‘Billion.’

Tobias blinked.

‘I’ve killed entire planets, little man,’ Radimir said softly, walking slowly towards Tobias with his hands in his pockets. The other cultists leaned away, none of them eager to get involved. Marjuk still had one hand on his service laspistol, but he didn’t draw. ‘I’ve consigned more souls to screaming torment than you could possibly meet in a thousand lifetimes. I have purpose. What I don’t have is patience with amateurs.’

Tobias reached backwards into the shadows under his coat, his hands searching for his knives. But shadows held no secrets from Radimir.

He drew two long blades from his pockets: the finest plasteel, with what was presumably the symbol of Tobias’ house of minor nobility worked into the hilt. Tobias gaped at seeing his own weapons in another man’s hands, then turned to run.

Radimir plunged the first blade into his liver. Tobias screamed and staggered sideways, his knees buckling.

The second blade reached around and opened his throat, sending a sheet of blood cascading across the floor, which one of Svet’s brothers had apparently mopped only that morning.

Radimir kicked Tobias in the back, knocking him onto his face, then dropped the knives and left him to die. He turned back to the rest of the group. Aylen Marjuk still hadn’t drawn, but the tension in the man’s face and neck was obvious. Radimir could tell that the rest of them had recognised Tobias’ blades – he’d probably brandished them often enough – and were even now wondering how Radimir had stolen them into his own pockets.

He had their attention, and almost certainly their obedience.

‘The space port,’ Radimir said calmly. ‘Do you have any contacts there? Any influence?’

Sulaman Eichner looked around, then nervously shook his head. ‘No, Sire Niklau. Not to my knowledge.’

Radimir flexed his fingers and began to calculate how best to kill them all. If they couldn’t help him, they were a liability. He’d have to deal with Darke first…

‘But Mamzel Bettan and her husband are indentured to House Brobantis itself,’ Eichner continued hastily. ‘We rarely see them, due to the nature of their service, but they are loyal to our cause, and we can get messages to them.’

A slow smile began to spread across Radimir Niklau’s face.

AZARIEL’S WAKE

The sky was the colour of grief, and spat rain like insults.

The voyage home to Vorlese from the Gallimo System had taken the best part of a month: considerably longer than the journey from Necromunda would probably have been, but that was just the way the warp flowed. Chetta didn’t regret the detour, and had taken the time to make a full report on her best understanding of the nature of Gallimo’s fate to the representatives of the Adeptus Arbites as soon as she’d made planetfall in Ascension City, despite the fact that she was reasonably certain they wouldn’t have understood one word in three. It would undoubtedly be flagged for the attention of the Inquisition, and her stomach turned at the notion of one of them tracking her down for further questioning, but it was necessary.

Unfortunately, the delay meant that her late husband’s funeral and wake could not be held quickly and discreetly, as she’d have preferred. News of her bereavement had preceded her, and she’d come back to a boiling insects’ nest of activity. Most critically, various other houses had received enough notice to send their condolences – or gloatings dressed up as condolences – in the form of representatives too high-ranking to simply be acknowledged and then shunted away somewhere. And so they all assembled on one of the great dining roofs of the main palace of House Brobantis, under the oppressive sky, and proceeded to subtly posture at each other around the casket of black crystal where Azariel’s body lay, and where her two children, Felicia and Ranovel, wept over the father whose death she had arranged. It wrung at her heart to see them so distraught, but she would never have done it had she not been absolutely convinced that it was in their best interests.

‘How many are we up to?’ she asked quietly. She was dressed in a mourning gown of black lace, encrusted with midnight sapphires from the Night Mines of Amatryx, which left her right shoulder bare. Her veil was anchored in place by a blacksteel diadem set with black onyx stones, and she wore long, black silk gloves reaching to above her biceps. Her tachydon ivory cane was an appropriate fit with the ensemble, and in any case Chetta was far too stubborn to forgo her favourite walking aid for the sake of propriety. Besides, she needed it: the floor was slippery, because she’d instructed her servants to disengage the void shield which would have kept the rain off. If she had to put up with all these visitors, then she wanted them just as miserable as she was.

‘Four Novators now, my lady,’ DeShelle murmured back. ‘Balevolio…’

‘Stuck-up prigs,’ Chetta muttered.

‘Xan’Tai…’

Chetta grunted in mild surprise. ‘He’s a long way from home.’

‘The Celestarch of House Belisarius…’

‘Now that is a shock,’ Chetta commented. ‘But I suppose you can only spend so long with the Space Wolves before you want some civilised company.’

‘And of course, Dukarr,’ DeShelle finished.

‘Of course,’ Chetta sighed. Sen Uru Dukarr was the person she least wanted to speak to right now, and so naturally he’d turned up. ‘What about Jo’Sin? Is Veel coming, or has he foisted the Leech off onto us?’

‘Lord Veel has sent his apologies and condolences, and his son Lord Jalamar.’

‘The Leech,’ Chetta corrected her aide, taking a petty pleasure in using the name she couldn’t say in public. Jalamar Jo’Sin was his house’s great hope for the future, seeing as how he’d managed to ensnare and marry the Lady Morandia, Azariel Brobantis’ younger sister, after her arranged marriage to a different house had come apart when they’d suffered a terminal case of the Ordo Hereticus. Chetta respected Jalamar’s ambition, but it didn’t mean she had to like him. What made matters worse was that Morandia had always viewed Chetta’s marriage in the exact same way, despite the fact that Chetta had never had any say in the matter whatsoever, short of taking her own life to avoid it. Morandia was always going to be here, of course – she and Azariel had been genuinely fond of each other – but if Veel had come then Chetta could have at least dealt primarily with him, rather than his son.

And Azariel’s siblings didn’t end with Morandia. Over on the other side of the roof, brooding like one of the rain clouds above, was Vittariel. As ambitious as his brother-in-law Jalamar, but with a considerably worse temper, Vittariel Brobantis was the firebrand of the house’s ruling arm. Chetta actually quite liked him, despite herself; he was impetuous enough that he often said what he meant, unlike most high-born Navigators. He was also, if she was being entirely honest with herself, considerably more attractive than Azariel had been. She’d often reflected that her marriage might have been more enjoyable, albeit less influential, had she ended up betrothed to the younger Brobantis brother.

‘Has anyone offered their condolences on the… other matters?’ she asked quietly. Two members of her house had been found dead in Ascension City shortly before her return. On one occasion the body had been decapitated and then burned, presumably in an attempt to avoid it being identified. The other had been found with anti-mutant scrawls around it, and actually carved into the flesh, with the warp eye removed. Such sentiment wasn’t uncommon, of course, but it was a surprise for it to be prevalent on Vorlese, where so many Navigator houses had a prominent presence.

‘No one yet, my lady,’ DeShelle replied. They hadn’t made news of the deaths public. Anyone offering commiserations would know considerably more about it than they were supposed to.

DeShelle’s comm beeped faintly, just audible to Chetta above the rain, and she pressed it a little further into her ear with one finger. Her slight frown, nearly ever-present, deepened somewhat.

‘DeShelle?’

‘Another Novator has arrived, my lady,’ DeShelle said, her voice suddenly uncertain. ‘I… Forgive me, perhaps my service with you has not been long enough, but… House Xudine?’

A chill ran down Chetta’s spine that had nothing to do with the rain. House Xudine had tried to undercut Brobantis on a trade deal some twenty years ago, not long after Azariel had ascended to the rank of Novator. Everyone had assumed that it was a power play on Xudine’s part, looking to test the new Novator’s mettle.

Azariel had destroyed them.

He’d taken them apart remorselessly, using every piece of House Brobantis’ influence and resources to not only damage their holdings and assets, but also to discredit them. Their ventures failed. Their collateral mysteriously vanished. Crimes were found to lead inexorably back to them. Within eighteen Terran months, House Xudine had been forced to abandon their sumptuous palaces and flee from an assortment of creditors, the Arbites and the angry congregations of three particularly vehement preachers. They’d become a vagabond house, the last Chetta had heard, plying their trade around the edges and gaps of the Imperium, wherever they could find someone whose need for a Navigator outweighed any concerns about their pedigree. For them to reappear now, at Azariel’s wake, could be no coincidence.

Chetta couldn’t help but wonder if the deaths of her kin-by-marriage were a coincidence either.

‘Allow them entry,’ she said crisply. ‘It appears that the game has changed. Let’s take our measure of the new players.’

She strode forwards, not bothering to hide her grimaces as her hip complained at her. Let the others gathered here see what she lived with, day to day. Let them think her weak, if they wanted. Those foolish enough to believe appearances would find that they’d sorely underestimated her.

Everyone flocked forwards, having previously hung back respectfully. Chetta nodded soberly at the greetings and commiserations she received, keeping in place her mask of stoic pragmatism. No one who knew her in any way would believe that Chettamandey Brobantis would be tearful or hysterical about her husband’s death, or anything else for that matter, so at least she didn’t have to act that part. She attempted to give off an aura of distracted, inner pain – which, in fairness, wasn’t far from the truth.

‘Vittar!’ Chetta called, motioning to her brother-in-law as he looked around. He scowled at her, but stomped across the roof in her direction. He had her husband’s gangly build, so common amongst Navigators, but he was a little less twig-slender, and his human eyes were not so large in his skull. He too wore black, a high-collared jacket of a style similar but not identical to the uniform of certain Imperial Navy officers, with diamonds for buttons, and he cut a dashing figure in it.

‘You want him to greet Xudine with you, my lady?’ DeShelle subvocalised into her comm, her tone as close to outright disbelief as she ever got.

‘Better to have him close at hand than risk him going off somewhere I can’t restrain him,’ Chetta murmured back. ‘Get Luc here, too. Just in case.’

DeShelle pressed a stud on her bracelet, and Chetta saw another figure detach itself from the wall surrounding the rooftop garden. Luc Krane was House Brobantis’ head of security, and took a hands-on approach to it. He was a veritable monster of a man, and Chetta wasn’t entirely certain that her late husband hadn’t been supplying him with questionable supplements sourced from House Goliath on Necromunda. Should the representatives of House Xudine have anything treacherous planned, Chetta could rely on Krane to resolve it with extreme prejudice.

She halted a little way back from the grand staircase that rose up from the hall beneath, and waited. The crowd of well-wishers now hung back, becoming aware that a new notary was about to arrive. Vittariel and his aide Subrala joined her a moment later, and Luc Krane pushed through the crowd to take up position at her back.

‘Your worships,’ the servant at the top of the stairs declared, her voice amplified through vox-speakers cunningly worked into her Brobantis livery, ‘the Novator Kennevario Den Jennu Bal Xudine…’

Chetta heard Vittariel’s sharp intake of breath.

‘…and his guest Indrinian Vass, a rogue trader of the Ixaniad Sector.’

A head rose smoothly into view. It was pale, gaunt-cheeked and entirely hairless, with the warp eye covered, as Chetta’s was, with a diadem: a concession to the non-Navigators present, for whom the stare of a Navigator was a pathway to madness and death. The reason for the evenness of ascension became clear a moment later, as the rest of Kennevario Den Jennu Bal Xudine came into view, flanked by two aides in Xudine uniforms.

The Novator was sitting in a throne-like chair borne aloft by anti-grav motors. His body was swathed in rich blue cloth, with so much gold thread he almost looked as if he were trying to dress like one of the Adeptus Custodes depicted in the ancient glassaic windows of House Brobantis’ private chapel, but even the volume of his robes could not disguise the spindliness of his body. Chetta would be surprised if he could stand unaided. The ravages of exposure to the warp had hit this one hard, and she suspected he’d be for the catacombs before another decade was out, assuming House Xudine had such things.

A chatter arose behind her. Most of her guests knew of the history between her husband and House Xudine, and it sounded like those that didn’t were quickly getting brought up to speed by those that did.

‘Lady Chettamandey,’ Kennevario Xudine intoned. His voice was heavy, like leaden slabs dropping into place, and sounded thoroughly incongruous coming from his wasted form.

‘Lord Kennevario,’ Chetta replied, keeping her tone neutral. She felt Vittariel bristle beside her, presumably at not being addressed.

‘Your husband was a ruthless and highly competent man,’ Kennevario said bluntly. ‘He oversaw the ruin of my house, after my predecessor went beyond both his authority and his wisdom. I come to you today, not to offer insincere condolences, but to appeal for your mercy. We have settled with those that pursued us, though it took us years, but we knew we would still have no peace while Lord Azariel ruled. I humbly offer you an alliance, in which my house would act as the junior partner, in exchange for your forbearance in allowing us to resume our place with no further persecution by your agents.’

Chetta heard Vittariel inhale.

‘I thank you for your honesty and your offer, Lord Kennevario,’ she replied quickly, before her hot-headed brother-in-law could speak. ‘As well as your acknowledgement that it was your house that precipitated the previous… unpleasantness.’

Kennevario inclined his head very slightly, but his eyes remained fixed on hers.

‘You and I will need to discuss your offer in more detail, of course,’ Chetta continued, ‘but I am minded to receive it. Further conflict seems unnecessary.’ She placed one hand on Vittariel’s wrist and felt the thrum of tension in his flesh. ‘As a gesture of my house’s goodwill, be welcome here at this time of mourning for us.’

Let the others see her restrain Vittariel. Let them notice how she spoke for her house. Chetta held the authority of her dead husband for the moment, but that would evaporate like morning dew under a summer sun. The Brobantis elders would choose a new Novator, and even confined to the vaults as they were, Chetta had no doubt that they would have their ways of learning who had done what, and said what to who. Chettamandey Brobantis had no intention of letting that title go to anyone except her.

‘My lady,’ Kennevario acknowledged her with another slight bow of his head, and began to float off to one side. ‘May I introduce my guest?’

In Chetta’s experience, rogue traders were always odd. This one was no different, in that she was very different.

Indrinian Vass was nearly six and a half feet tall in her suit of what had to be artificer-made power armour, which was a rich, regal blue, gilt-edged and festooned with ribbons and medals. Her skin was as dark as Chetta’s own and smooth as a mirror, and her eyes were a deep green flecked with amber. Her hair was nearly pure white and brushed her shoulders, save at the front where it was cut into a blunt fringe, and the corners of her mouth quirked insouciantly upwards.

She looked like nothing so much as an Adepta Sororitas who had decided that the galaxy was a giant joke no one else had yet understood, stolen the canoness’ armour, vandalised it, and burned the priory down on her way out. Chetta disliked her instantly.

‘My lady and lord of House Brobantis,’ Vass said, gracefully taking a knee. ‘My condolences on your loss.’

Chetta smoothed the scowl that threatened to cloud her features. ‘It’s not often that one meets a rogue trader who kneels.’

‘Manners cost nothing, particularly in someone else’s house,’ Vass replied, rising again.

‘And yet you come here dressed in full armour,’ Vittariel said, his voice a hair short of a growl. He was still locked in the anger stage of dealing with his grief, and sooner or later someone would suffer for it.

‘My Lord Xudine was uncertain of the reception his offer would receive,’ Vass replied with a smile. ‘I have found that manners avail one little against gunfire.’

‘Has your family long been associated with House Xudine?’ Chetta asked. Vass flashed her smile again.

‘Indeed not, my lady. I am the first of my family to bear my rank, since my Letter of Marque was awarded only a few years ago, although I hope not to be the last.’

An upstart rogue trader, then, in the company of a vagabond Novator. Chetta couldn’t deny the appropriateness of the arrangement, and yet there was something about the woman that bothered her.

‘And these are…?’ she asked, gesturing at the two figures hovering behind Vass. One was a pale-skinned male, grizzled and well muscled, with his hair cut short and his right arm replaced by a bionic: military-issue, judging by the equivalents Chetta had seen when serving with the Navy. The other was a much smaller, slighter figure in the hooded red robes of the Adeptus Mechanicus, who could have been any enginseer on half a million worlds.

‘My assistants, Fell and Sef,’ Vass said casually. ‘May I have your leave to join Lord Xudine?’

Chetta nodded. ‘Be welcome, Lady Vass.’ It was a delicate dance. Even a freshly minted rogue trader carried enormous authority – potentially the equal of a planetary governor, although it would depend on the exact wording of the individual Letter of Marque. Vass had shown every courtesy, but Chetta couldn’t know if she actually had the power to refuse any of the rogue trader’s requests unless she read the Letter. And of course, to demand to do so would be the greatest insult.

Indrinian Vass was an unknown quantity, and there was very little that Chetta hated more than unknown quantities.

‘“Assistant”, my arse,’ Luc Krane growled from above Chetta’s ear, as Vass and her two associates moved away. ‘That Fell’s a bodyguard, ex-Militarum, clear as day.’

‘I’m not disagreeing with you,’ Chetta murmured, watching Vass’ fluid stride, ‘but why does someone who moves like that in power armour need a bodyguard in a flak vest?’ She nodded at the red-robed Sef. ‘And why bring the cogboy?’

‘Never mind them,’ Vittariel bit out, turning to her. He towered over her, because while Brobantis genetics tended towards the tall and gangly frame, Chetta’s own Dacastos bloodline ran more towards short and stout. ‘What in the Emperor’s name did you think you were doing with the Xudine?’

‘Strengthening our position,’ Chetta told him bluntly. At least he was keeping his voice down. ‘These aren’t mourners around us, Vittar, they’re carnodons with the scent of blood in their nostrils. A new alliance with a house that has openly declared us to be their superior–’

‘Is nothing more than an admission of weakness!’ a new voice declared. Chetta restrained herself from rolling her eyes, and looked around at the new arrival.

‘Hello, Morandia.’

Morandia Jo’Sin was dressed in a manner that put Chetta in mind of a giant, carrion-feeding avian, with great sweeps of dark cloth hanging from her wrists and shoulders, but unattached to her bare arms between. Her sleeveless gown was an iridescent black studded with chunks of jagged obsidian, and she wore a ruff of black feathers around her neck. All three of her eyes were obscured by tri-lensed darkened eyeglasses, for Morandia could no longer bear bright light, and even the current gloom would cause her pain should the clouds part.

‘My brother broke those animals for daring to stand against his house!’ Morandia hissed. ‘Now you invite them in, you accept an alliance with them, with him still unburied? Do you truly wish to look so desperate?’

‘Desperation and magnanimity are hardly the same thing,’ Chetta countered. ‘Xudine’s pledge not only strengthens us, but also shows other houses that they view us to be strong. If they thought us weak, they would seek alliances elsewhere to take revenge on us for Azariel’s actions.’

‘You assume that they don’t intend to pursue this alliance with the intention of betrayal,’ Morandia snorted.

‘Which is why I will conduct those negotiations,’ Vittariel declared. Chetta glanced sideways at him, but held her tongue. Vittariel would have his own ambitions to be Novator, she was sure of that. Very well, let him get his hands dirty with the finer points of diplomacy. Such negotiations could take months, and the new Novator would be decided before their conclusion, so he wouldn’t be able to gain any political capital from it to use to challenge her. If he made a mess of it, his threat would be diminished. If he succeeded, she could still take credit for having agreed to it on behalf of the house in the first place.

‘Vittar,’ Morandia acknowledged him, her tone softening.

‘Mor.’ Vittariel reached out and touched her shoulder, briefly. ‘How are you coping?’

‘I’ll hold together,’ Morandia replied, with a fragile smile. She turned her opaque lenses on Chetta again, and her mouth tightened. ‘How could you let this happen? To go to that vile planet…’

‘I warned him not to,’ Chetta said sharply, which was the absolute truth. ‘I told him Necromunda was a lawless place, and that the visit was a foolish extravagance.’ She sighed heavily. ‘I never agreed with his fondness for blood sports, and it seems the participants didn’t either. He simply had the misfortune to be sitting next to the beast’s true target, the fightmaster.’

‘It is a tragedy,’ Jalamar Jo’Sin declared from behind his wife, accompanied as always by his alabaster-pale aide. There was a faint sheen to Jalamar’s skin, too, although of a different sort: the first hint of scales, which were a common feature of Jo’Sin Navigators as they aged. Jalamar was still robust and healthy, though, and the rumours were that he and Morandia had hopes for more children in addition to the three they had already.

‘Jalamar,’ Vittariel said, extending his hand.

‘Vittariel.’ Jalamar took the proffered hand and shook it, once, then released his grip. The brothers-in-law had never seen eye to eye, but they buried it under a tight politeness for the benefit of their sister and wife, respectively.

Chetta abruptly realised that she, Azariel’s widow, was standing between Azariel’s two bereaved siblings. They were an obvious target for anyone more interested in being seen to pay their condolences than respecting family privacy, and so–

‘Chetta, my dear!’

‘Emperor preserve us,’ Chetta muttered, and took a firm grip on her cane. One way or another, this was going to be unpleasant.

She turned on the spot, and had barely finished her rotation before Sen Uru Dukarr was upon her, taking her by the shoulders and placing a kiss onto her veil just over either cheek. The Novator of House Dukarr was hale, loud and bluff, but whereas Vittariel merely spoke his mind, Sen Uru employed such mannerisms to establish dominance, or force others into confrontations for which they were not prepared.

‘A terrible thing,’ Sen Uru boomed, ‘terrible.’ His moustaches drooped in sympathy as he looked to each of them in turn. ‘So sorry to hear of your loss. Azariel was a great man, and I was proud to count him as a friend.’

He hated your guts, you two-faced heap of aeldari droppings, Chetta thought bitterly. You were politically convenient, nothing more. She frowned as she saw Sen Uru’s companions. There were three of them, all male and all apparently naturally bald, with the sort of heavy bone structure that made them appear to loom even when several paces away. They had to be related to each other, and just looking at them made her skin itch. Could any of them be a psyker? She daren’t open her warp eye to see if she could sense any spark of its touch on them, not with Sen Uru right there. A warp gaze was what traditionally constituted a Navigator duel, and to open’s one eye directly in front of another Navigator was considered careless bad form at best, and an act of aggression severe enough to warrant an official duel in any case, at worst.

Maybe she’d guard her thoughts a little more closely, just in case.

‘But perhaps some good can be achieved here, some happiness found even at this tragic event,’ Sen Uru continued, and Chetta realised with a sinking stomach that he wasn’t speaking loudly because that was just what he did; he wanted their conversation to be heard. ‘I brought my two children with me.’

Why would he bring children to the funeral of a man they’d never met? Chetta frowned in confusion as Sen Uru beckoned them forwards. She’d never met them either, but knew them well enough. Ban Uru, the boy, was the elder; Del Iri, the daughter, was the younger. Both had reached puberty – Ban Uru was nearly a man, in fact – and neither looked at all comfortable in their stiff mourning clothes, on this miserable rooftop.

Sick realisation dawned.

‘Oh, you are not doing this here!’ Chetta hissed, but Sen Uru either didn’t hear her or ignored her.

‘My friends, it was many years ago now that Lord Azariel, Lady Chettamandey and myself agreed to join our houses,’ Sen Uru boomed, abandoning all sense of decorum in favour of his more natural showmanship. ‘But it has not yet been officially mandated. As a gesture of support to my dear friend Chetta at this sad time, I would like to declare, here and now, the betrothal of our children. My son Ban Uru to her daughter Felicia, and my daughter Del Iri to her son Ranovel.’

It was completely within the man’s usual operating methods, of course. Establish dominance. Show up to your rival’s funeral and commandeer it to announce your children’s pre-agreed betrothal to his, framing it as a happy event and a gesture of support. Leave the other family compelled to either cede control of the event to you, or to oppose it and portray themselves as currently emotional and weak – after all, the gene-scholars had long ago proclaimed the mingling of the bloodlines to be an excellent choice, with a high likelihood of healthy, viable offspring. It wasn’t a matter of if the official betrothal was going to go ahead, it was simply a matter of when.

What Sen Uru Dukarr probably didn’t realise was that Chetta had arranged for her husband’s death. She’d wrested control of the house from the most charismatic, ruthless and successful Novator it had enjoyed in four centuries, and one that she’d been passing fond of, at that; she’d invite the Ordo Xenos on a guided tour of Azariel’s aeldari relics before she would let herself be outmanoeuvred at his funeral.

‘I am afraid,’ Chetta said, raising her own voice, ‘that this is simply impossible.’

‘But my dear Chetta,’ Sen Uru said, turning back to her. His face showed dismay, but his eyes were sharp. He’d pushed her; now he wanted to see how she was going to react. ‘There is no reason to delay.’

‘I’m not delaying the betrothal, Sen Uru,’ Chetta said, leaning on her cane and staring up at him. She waited for the faintest hint of a smirk to form beneath his moustaches.

‘I’m calling it off entirely.’ You absolute arse, she added silently, without caring whether the man’s aides could read her mind or not.

Utter human silence fell across the rooftop. The only sound was the gentle sighing of the rain as it struck rockcrete, and the occasional flutter of mourning fabric as the wind caught it.

Sen Uru Dukarr’s tongue flickered out momentarily, moistening his lips. He hadn’t expected this. He’d thought he was forcing a confrontation for which he was prepared, but he’d blundered into a solar system expecting human pirates and had encountered an ork warfleet instead.

‘The gene-scrying was clear–’ he began, but Chetta had no interest in letting him regain the initiative.

‘The gene-scrying was,’ she snapped, ‘but every reading my clairvoyants have made over the last three years points to nothing but despair and ruin for my children should they marry yours.’

‘The Tarot can be misinterpreted,’ Sen Uru scoffed.

‘Not every reading for three years, conducted by four different readers,’ Chetta said witheringly. ‘I don’t know what has changed in your house, Lord of Dukarr, but Brobantis does not intend to be caught up in it.’

Sen Uru’s cheek twitched, his nostrils flared, and the lid of his warp eye parted, ever so slightly. Chetta stiffened, and sensed Luc Krane do the same. She could almost picture her security chief’s hand slipping to the haft of The Wolf, the mighty power axe he kept at his side. If Sen Uru Dukarr lost his head at this insult enough to attack her, here on this rooftop…

‘This agreement was made with Lord Azariel, the Novator of your house!’ Sen Uru roared.

Chetta pounded the butt of her cane on the rockcrete beneath her feet, then lifted it to point at her husband’s casket.

‘Then I suggest you take it up with him.’

Sen Uru’s eyes flashed, but he mastered himself. He drew himself up to his full height and glowered at her as regally as he could, although the fluttering of his moustaches betrayed the quickness of his breathing.

‘So be it,’ he bit out. ‘You wish to doom your house in this manner, and your children with it?’

‘Sen Uru, you have no idea what I will do to protect my children,’ Chetta spat.

‘Very well. If you wish to break a contract fifteen years in the making, I have no alternative. Such impudence cannot be borne. Henceforth, a trade war shall exist between our houses. My factors will contact yours in due course with the terms and conditions.’ He spun on his heel. ‘Come!’

His aides moved as one in his wake, each one silently staring at Chetta for a moment as they passed her. Ban Uru and Del Iri followed too, their eyes wide with shock. Chetta felt a momentary pang for them; they’d not harmed her, and they’d just been publicly shamed because their father was an arrogant fool. But the fact remained that so far as her seers could determine, both children of the Dukarr ruling family were going to be ensnared in pain and misery, and Chetta would die before she’d see her own children dragged down with them.

‘I will be prepared to reconsider, should anyone with sense wish to speak for House Brobantis!’ Sen Uru roared without looking back as he began to descend the stairs. Chetta kissed her teeth at the back of his head. Just let someone try to marry her children out from under her. She’d bury them before the planet had completed another turn on its axis.

A muttering swept across the rooftop, and the guests unfroze. Several, the ones with the closest ties to Dukarr, began to head surreptitiously for the stairs. Others clustered together to hastily discuss what had just happened. Chetta saw Kennevario Xudine staring at her expressionlessly. Was he wondering what he’d just got himself into?

The Celestarch of Belisarius flashed Chetta a vicious smile. Perhaps running with the Vlka Fenryka gave one an appreciation for such head-on conflict.

‘What have you done?’ Vittariel demanded, grabbing her by the shoulder and hauling her around to face him. Chetta winced and hissed in pain as her hip stabbed at her, and she steadied herself with her cane to avoid falling. Luc Krane stepped forwards instinctively, then paused, uncertain how to proceed when one Brobantis Navigator was laying hands on another.

‘I’ve changed the rules of the game,’ Chetta snapped at Vittariel, shaking his hand loose. ‘Now we adapt, or we die.’

PIECES

Chetta had ensured that the ceremony had finished properly, although perhaps a little quickly. The mortal remains of Lord Azariel would now be taken down into the House Brobantis catacombs, down where outsiders would never be permitted, and interred with great honour. Somehow, Vittariel had kept a lid on his temper for that long.

It had just come off.

‘You are a reckless fool!’ he spat at her. She’d at least managed to get him into the family-only areas, away from prying eyes and ears, but now he stood and raged.

‘I appear to be the only one with the will and foresight to do what needs to be done!’ Chetta shouted back at him. ‘Doom other children of this house to misery if you wish, Vittar – I will not see it done to mine!’

‘If Azariel knew–’

‘Oh, he knew!’ Chetta snapped. ‘I told him! I told him many a time! “Wait,” he always said, “perhaps the omens will change again.” Well they didn’t, and now my husband is dead, and I will not lose my children as well!’

‘Perhaps,’ Jalamar Jo’Sin put in from further up the corridor, ‘your grief has affected your judgement?’

‘Krane!’ Chetta shouted, rounding on Jalamar. ‘Can you please explain to me why this man has been allowed into the Brobantis residence?’ He’d at least had the decency to leave his aide outside, but that wasn’t good enough.

‘He is here as my guest,’ Morandia said coldly, interposing herself between Jalamar and Chetta, as though she’d been about to strike him. Which in truth, currently greatly appealed.

‘And why,’ Chetta asked, unable to restrain herself from drawing the proverbial knives, ‘are you in here, my lady of Jo’Sin?’

For the second time in the space of an hour, everything went very quiet. Morandia’s throat muscles moved as she fought to restrain herself.

‘I was born and bred in this palace, you ignorant grox-fondler–’

‘And you are now married to him!’ Chetta shouted, pointing past her. ‘You are Jo’Sin, not Brobantis! Just as I am Brobantis, not Dacastos! In fact, Morandia, I have publicly declared my intention never to return to the house of my birth! I have pledged myself to Brobantis in life and in death!’ She raised her chin, daring the other woman to reply. ‘Where do your loyalties lie? Have you set them out for all to see?’

It was a tender subject, and not polite to bring it up. Most Navigators who married into other houses would return to the house of their birth shortly before their deaths, to be interred in their own catacombs, which meant there was always the possibility of them taking secrets with them. As a result, many marriages were little more than long-term, mutually arranged hostage situations, undertaken only due to the need to diversify the bloodlines and keep Navigator gene-stock as strong as it could be, for the good of the Imperium.

Chetta’s approach to the tachydon in the room was usually to kick it as hard as possible, and Sen Uru Dukarr wasn’t the only one who could force people into an uncomfortable choice. However much truth was in her reply, Morandia could either remind her husband that she might one day abandon his house, or she could acknowledge that, for the moment at least, she had no place here.

Jalamar saved her the trouble of answering. ‘Come, my dear,’ he said, taking his wife’s arm. ‘Tempers are high. Perhaps we should go.’

‘I will not forget this, Chetta,’ Morandia said icily. She turned, the cloth hanging from her arms sweeping out like wings, and strode away with Jalamar trailing her.

‘Luc,’ Chetta said quietly, ‘have your men see them out.’

Krane nodded, and the two of his armsmen who’d been accompanying them set off to tail the Jo’Sin couple at a polite distance.

‘How secure from surveillance is this hallway?’ Chetta asked Krane.

‘We sweep it regularly,’ the security chief said. ‘To be honest, my lady, any random stretch of hallway may be more secure than one of the meeting chambers, for all our efforts. No one has a specific reason to try to bug it.’

Chetta nodded, and turned back to Vittariel. ‘I believe you were shouting at me.’

‘You return here with my brother dead, and now you drive my sister from the halls of her birth,’ Vittariel snarled. ‘You form a new alliance without consulting me, and end another that my brother organised, leaving us weak and embroiled in a trade war. I wonder what your agenda truly is.’

Chetta glanced sideways to make sure that Morandia and Jalamar had gone, then leaned in closer to him. ‘Morandia is going to make a play to become Novator.’

Vittariel blinked. ‘What?’

‘Why else would she try so hard to still be seen as Brobantis?’ Chetta demanded. In truth she had no idea whether it was true, but it was plausible, and she needed her brother-in-law distracted from her. ‘She’ll paint me as an outsider, and you as a hot-head. And she’s older than you, is she not?’

‘Age doesn’t determine who becomes Novator,’ Vittariel objected, but Chetta could see his eyes narrowing. He wasn’t stupid, but he did sometimes need prompting to start thinking.

‘It doesn’t,’ Chetta agreed, ‘but it can help. And she’d have all three of her children with her, to help the dynasty.’

Vittariel grimaced. With typical straight-forwardness, he’d avoided the uncomfortable dance of loyalties with his wife by simply meeting semi-regularly with her to couple, before they both returned to their houses. She was raising the first child as hers, and the second would come to Brobantis when he reached five years of age, which had not yet occurred. ‘You say this as though you don’t intend to be Novator yourself.’

‘You are Brobantis through and through,’ Chetta told him. ‘I have no other loyalties to go back to. Both of our futures are here. Morandia has ties elsewhere, and the Leech has no loyalty to Brobantis whatsoever.’

Vittariel grunted. ‘She would bring him, wouldn’t she?’

‘It would be a grave insult if she did not,’ Chetta pointed out.

‘I do not relish the thought of that man having any influence in my house,’ Vittariel muttered, rubbing his chin. ‘Very well. I will keep my sister’s ambitions in mind. But that doesn’t mean that your actions today have not been foolhardy at best, and traitorous at worst.’

He was like a sumpkroc, Chetta reflected. When he had his jaws into something, it was very hard to make him let go. ‘I think we have even greater concerns than the wisdom of my actions today.’

Vittariel raised his eyebrows dubiously. ‘Indeed?’

‘You’re aware of the two deaths?’ Chetta asked. Of course he was; with her and Azariel away, Vittariel had been the senior member of the ruling family.

‘Yes. Warp-damned puritanical sentiment is getting stronger again, it seems.’

Chetta tilted her head. ‘What if it’s not? Did the first killing happen before or after news of Azariel’s death reached Vorlese?’

Vittariel blinked again. ‘After. I… may have paid more attention had it occurred before, I must confess.’

‘It’s not impossible that they have been intended to weaken us further,’ Chetta said. ‘Think of who was there today, Vittar, and tell me that you can’t imagine some of them doing it.’

Vittariel was looking at her oddly. ‘I think you’re jumping at shadows, Chetta. The ignorant and warp-blind have always hated us, and always will.’

Chetta made a neutral noise in her throat, and prepared to drop the subject. Perhaps Vittar was correct, or perhaps he just couldn’t see the truth. Or perhaps…

Perhaps he saw it all too well. Vittariel wouldn’t shirk at the deaths of a couple of low-ranking, distant relatives if he thought it would put pressure on her and clear his path to the top. Chetta was pretty sure of that.

‘Very well,’ she said, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her. ‘If you would conduct the negotiations with House Xudine, as you said, I will ask DeShelle and Luc to investigate the deaths of our kin. No matter the motive, the perpetrators must be caught and dealt with.’

‘Of course,’ Vittar said with a nod. He didn’t look nervous. Was that because he was innocent, or because he had no confidence in Krane’s and DeShelle’s abilities to track down the killers? For that matter, how far could Chetta trust Luc Krane? The man had always seemed completely loyal to her husband, but Chetta was not Azariel. Another thing to worry about.

‘And what will you be doing?’ Vittariel demanded. ‘Other than presumably trying not to get this house into an even worse position than it already is?’

‘I need to make some investigations,’ Chetta said, tapping her fingers on the handle of her cane. She lowered her voice, just in case it would help. ‘I haven’t told anyone except the Arbites, but I’m convinced Gallimo Prime was pulled into the warp deliberately.’

‘Throne of Terra!’ Luc Krane breathed, his eyes wide. To Vittariel’s credit, he didn’t ask her if she was sure. His mouth just set into a grim line.

‘I’ve had… further thoughts about it,’ Chetta admitted. ‘What if whoever or whatever did it wasn’t still on the planet when it happened? What if they – or at least the knowledge that was used to do it – got off-world first?’

‘Then if it was anything other than a specific grudge against that planet or someone on it, they’d do it again,’ Vittariel said immediately. He certainly wasn’t stupid.

‘And we aren’t far from the Gallimo System,’ Krane added. ‘If the intention was to disrupt the Imperium, Vorlese would be a tempting target.’

‘There’s so much shipping that comes through here,’ DeShelle piped up. She’d remained quiet and hung back during the arguments of her betters, as a good aide should, but she wasn’t afraid to speak when she thought she could offer something of use. ‘The record-keeping can’t be as tight as, say, a garrison world, or a Space Marine home world, a more obvious military target like that. We’re far more open.’

‘I’ll worry about that,’ Chetta said. ‘I’m going to need to knock on some doors. And send a few messages as well,’ she added, as something else occurred to her. ‘DeShelle, vox ahead to the astropathic choir – tell them to expect me.’

‘Do you want me to deliver your messages for them myself, my lady?’ DeShelle asked.

‘No,’ Chetta replied, gritting her teeth at the thought of the walk that awaited her. ‘There are some people who will only respond to my personal cipher. At least when it comes to the questions I intend to ask.’ She nodded to the other three in turn. ‘I have a nasty feeling that we’re going to start turning up some things that don’t want to be found. Watch your backs, all of you.’

‘And you, my lady,’ Luc Krane replied, saluting her. He turned on his heel and strode off, with DeShelle trotting beside him to keep up. Vittariel nodded to her and went his own way, his long legs eating up the richly carpeted ground. Chetta sighed, took a firm hold on her cane, and set off.

I’ll watch my back, don’t worry about that, she added in the privacy of her own head. My only question is just who I need to be watching out for.

THE STAR LOUNGE

It was Della Terrell, one of the family types, who’d told Radimir about the Star Lounge. She was a furtive sort, all twitching eyes and nervous lips, who spoke side-on as though eyeing her escape routes. Radimir would have thought that she’d been scared by his butchery of Emerson Tobias, but he’d seen her acting in exactly the same way towards other Children of the Serpent, ones who could surely pose her no immediate threat.

‘Your pardon, goodsire,’ she’d muttered hesitantly. ‘But there’s this place my sister Nansi runs, a bar you see, but there’s a secret room beyond where they keep the narcs for those as can pay.’

‘I have no need of such things,’ Radimir had said shortly, intending to dismiss her.

‘But, goodsire, there’s a pair of ladies what go there often, high-born by their clothes, though they try to dress plain. They meet there, and we’re sure they think they’re being all secret about it, but we see them well enough. And though they always keep their foreheads covered, Nansi swears they’re Three-Eyes!’

Radimir had paused at that. Imperial citizens on many a world would have no knowledge of what a Navigator was – many primitive planets didn’t even understand space travel, or the concept of the Emperor as anything other than whichever nearby star gave light and warmth to their wretched, void-bound rock of a home. On Vorlese, however, the houses flaunted their power and presence in their incessant displays to their rivals, like jungle-dwelling avians claiming a tree as their own. A Vorlesian, relatively prosperous and well educated compared to many of their fellows across the galaxy, and understanding their place as one Imperial world amongst millions, would likely have at least a fair idea of what a Navigator might look like.

Such lack of caution from his quarry warranted investigation.

And so he was here in the Ascension City mid-levels, sitting on one end of a velour bench-seat worn down to an unappealing dirty red colour, and sipping low-grade amasec that smelled like it had been distilled from grox piss. The bar itself was grimy, the sort of patina that accumulated when sticky alcohol was left to dry and attracted the dirt and dust borne in on the clothes and bodies of its patrons. Nonetheless, it was doing a roaring trade. Burly shift workers in the sturdy, monogrammed overalls of their manufactorums rubbed shoulders with Administratum scribes seeking intoxicating release before their next back-bending, finger-cramping shift hunched over auto-scribers or cogitators. Gaudily dressed merchants, their clothes and jewellery glitteringly fine unless subjected to close scrutiny, huddled in groups where each tried to put a braver face on their fiscal wellbeing than their fellows, while nearby, knots of pierced, tattooed or branded gangers knocked back shots and discussed the next hit on their rivals in hushed tones. Joygirls and thrillboys took turns walking the floor, trailing seductive fingers across shoulders or leaning to whisper into ears before leading their marks away, while those unsuccessful in finding business on this pass returned to their cluster of near-naked companions and the raucous laughter and improbable anatomical discussions that emanated from them – not far from a pinch-faced man in the robes and aquila of the Ecclesiarchy, nursing a flavoured water and probably composing his next sermon on the evils of the flesh.

Radimir was thoroughly disappointed by the lack of the evils of the flesh, in actual fact. Despite Della’s presence in the Children of the Serpent, and her relationship to the owner, Nansi – visible behind the actual bar itself, taking orders and serving drinks while addressing every customer by name, yet somehow never losing the ever-present lho-stick from the corner of her mouth as she did so – there was no sign that anything in the Star Lounge paid homage to the Great Powers. Radimir had developed a nose for finding his fellow worshippers, and none of his senses were tingling. The booze, the sex, the low-level corruption, extortion and violence being plotted all around him – even the concealed narcotics lounge – none of it was the result of anything more than human nature, petty mewlings that were oblivious to the glorious possibilities of Chaos. It was almost enough to make him weep.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that this was his third time here, and there had still been no sign of the alleged Navigators. Della had been around on the first two nights, waiting tables and standing ready to draw his attention to them, but she wasn’t here this evening. Radimir wondered whether she hadn’t dared come, given that her tip-off had failed to deliver the goods so far.

He was wasting his time. This had sounded like a good way to get two kills at once, on top of the three he’d already managed. He had no doubt that two of them had been found by House Brobantis. He’d dropped the third into the river, after harvesting their warp eye, and he was fairly certain that the chemicals and currents in that body of fluid would combine to ensure that they wouldn’t surface again, or at least wouldn’t be identifiable when they did. However, the names Mamzel Bettan had supplied of House Brobantis Navigators with a tendency to regularly venture outside of their palaces with little or no security had been exhausted. The careless, rebellious or overly bold had been eliminated, and the house itself must surely have realised that someone was targeting them. They would take counter-measures. There would be no easy Brobantis kills from now on, and this lead on incautious Navigators from houses unknown had proved worthless. Radimir would achieve nothing by sitting in this sinkhole of substandard depravity.

He finished his drink, grimaced at the after-taste and was about to stand up, when movement caught his eye at the door. A tall, thin person had entered, probably a woman judging by their build, draped in light, figure-hugging robes of saffron and a veil that was nearly opaque in the bar’s lighting. Gloves disappeared into the figure’s sleeves, and their feet were shod in finely made boots of leather. Not a scrap of skin was directly visible to an observer.

Navigator. Radimir was certain of it. They stared into the Sea of Souls, then tried to hide the gifts the Great Powers bestowed upon them. The wretched ingrates! They, of all humans, should best know the power and majesty of the True Gods, and yet the vast majority clung to the lies and fake protection offered by the Corpse-Emperor. In most circumstances Radimir would have embraced such an altered one and celebrated their mutations as a blessing from the Changer, but he had no compunctions about killing Navigators, none whatsoever.

The Navigator glided across the bar’s floor, attracting a couple of stares but no lasting attention; most of the clientele were more interested in their fellows’ conversation or the contents of their glass than one stranger, no matter how they were dressed. Radimir watched as she reached the bar and exchanged a few words with Nansi, before being ushered quietly through a door marked ‘Authorised Personnel Only’.

It seemed that Della may have been right after all. Radimir sat back in his seat and waited.

No more than a few minutes had passed before another irregularly proportioned individual arrived. This one was stockier, wearing a half-mask that covered her from the nose upwards, and the artful cut of her burgundy robes, gathered at her shoulders, couldn’t quite hide the hump on her back. Nor could the extravagant, wide-brimmed hat conceal the fact that the head beneath it was somewhat larger than the norm – at least, not to someone who was looking for such things. This woman limped across the floor, her right leg dragging a little, and was trailed by a soberly dressed individual in subtle body armour with what looked like a Sulymann Encarmine autopistol in a shoulder rig. Radimir watched them go through the same ritual at the bar, and be shown through the same door.

Good enough. Radimir waited a couple more minutes, then left his empty glass on the table and stood up to make his way across the bar to the latrines.

The room was small – barely large enough for its two cubicles, metal trough and wash basin with a broken spigot and a faded sign reminding citizens of the importance of correct sanitisation procedures – and reeked of old urine, much of which must have dried on the floor judging by how sticky it was underfoot. It had no windows, since the nearest edge of the hab block was several hundred yards away. Radimir cast a quick glance upwards at the ceiling and gave the ventilation system a cursory glance over, but it wasn’t worth his time. It might connect to the private narc lounge, but it might not. He had neither the time nor the patience to go crawling through air ducts, so he flicked the switch to turn the flickering ceiling lumen off, and plunged the latrine chamber into darkness.

But darkness held no secrets from Radimir Niklau.

Its cool kiss on his skin was like the gentle caress of a lover from whom he’d been away for too long. He gained some relief from simply being inside his clothes, of course, but that was a weak and watery pleasure compared to being bathed in a true absence of light. He luxuriated for a moment, simply soaking up the absence of photons and listening to the sensual song of darkness as it rippled through his brain. Voices calling him, imploring him to stay this time, to never leave…

He shook himself free from the brief reverie. One day, perhaps. One day, when his masters’ grand work was completed and the Imperium was little more than burning, screaming worlds littered across the galaxy in brutal, miserable isolation. Until then, he had work to do.

He reached out into the lack of light, not with his hands but with his mind, searching for his quarry. He had only a short reach, at least compared to the great shadow-walkers of the past, but he was strong enough for what was needed.

There. Images danced before his eyes. On the other side of this wall, a stockroom. On the other side of that was the shadowy gloom of an obscura lounge, the lumens turned low to aid the drug’s dreamlike effects. That was where they’d be.

In some respects, a pervasive low light was more difficult. A single bright light cast deep shadows, but in the fuzzy gloom everything was merely shades of darkness. He couldn’t slip through easily, he had to concentrate hard and work on holding reality apart.

But he could do it.

He thrust himself into the darkness, forcing himself through the in-between, the gaps where light wasn’t. He felt his head breach into the tickling touch of faint illumination, the muted rays deadening him, pressing on him and trying to force him back, but he gritted his teeth and kept going. Then his eyes made it out, showing him the room, for they were still his method of sensing things visually even though they no longer relied solely on light to do so. Finally he dragged his body through, fighting the cloying light all the way, until he lay supine and concealed in the space beneath a reclining couch in the corner. It wasn’t dignified, but it was the best option available to him.

The room wasn’t large, but it was large enough for a dozen or so couches, each one separated from the rest by diaphanous curtains of gauze. It was undoubtedly supposed to look opulent and debauched, but merely managed tatty and rundown. Not that this seemed to bother the occupants: several of the couches supported punters in varying states of intoxication, including the one under which Radimir now lay. It was the centre of the room, however, where his quarry was. Radimir thought he could just make out the vertical shape of the bodyguard, stiff and alert despite the obscura fumes in the air – presumably using filter plugs, or something similar, to keep his head clear. He’d have to be dealt with first.

Radimir scuttled out from under his shelter, his arms and legs splayed wide like one of the man-eating stone-drakes of Illustria IV, then burst up to his feet as soon as he was clear. A startled noise, somewhere between a hiccup and a moan, emanated from the drugged occupant of the couch he’d just emerged from. It wasn’t much, but as he burst through the first set of gauzy curtains Radimir saw the bodyguard’s head snap around, and the man reach for his holstered weapon.

Twenty-one feet. That was the safe distance required by a trained person armed with a holstered pistol to be able to draw and shoot before a charging attacker reached them, assuming neither party was using performance-enhancing stimulants.

Radimir was quicker than most, and had been less than sixteen feet away when the bodyguard noticed him. The remaining curtain separating them didn’t slow him any, and he ripped his power knife in a diagonal downward cut across the man’s belly. The bodyguard’s armour parted under the crackling blade like flesh under a las-scalpel, and he staggered forwards as Radimir flowed to one side with the force of his own blow. To his credit, the man persisted in trying to draw his weapon, but Radimir simply reversed his grip on the knife and plunged it into the bodyguard’s spine. The man dropped onto his front, his right arm trapped beneath him and still clutching the grip of his gun.

One or two other users had become aware that something was going on and were making confused, ill-defined noises of alarm, although several were completely lost in their personal haze and were completely oblivious. Radimir turned his attention to the two women in front of him, who were only just coming out of a companionable embrace to stare at him in shock. The shorter one held an obscura bowl in her right hand, from which purple-grey fumes were rising. Radimir advanced on them, ready to finish this quickly.

The taller, thinner Navigator exploded forwards and slammed her open hand into his chest as soon as he came within her considerable reach, knocking him from his feet and sending him flying backwards into the gauze surrounding the couch. The curtains ripped out of their anchors in the ceiling and collapsed on him, entangling him for a moment before he fought his way free of them.

By the Changer! Of all the damnable luck! At least one of these two was nowhere near as fragile as she’d appeared; the gifts of the warp were fickle, indeed, and the taller Navigator must have been blessed with muscles of rockcrete and tendons like adamantium hawsers beneath her skin. Radimir felt like he’d taken a thunder hammer to the chest, and dark spots that even he couldn’t penetrate swam in front of his eyes for a moment.

‘Help!’ the shorter one called desperately. ‘Nansi! Nansi!’ She was clinging to her taller companion, and in doing so was hindering her in pressing the slender advantage she’d gained with her surprising strength.

Radimir sucked in air. He didn’t dare go for her with his knife again; she was too quick and too strong to be sure of it, and her reach was too great. If she got her fingers on his wrist he’d lose his blade, and if she got her hands around his throat…

There were no shadows nearby deep enough to fall into and emerge again behind her, as he’d have preferred. The prey was already shouting. His initial plan of doing this quietly had been ruined, so he might as well adapt to it.

He grabbed the bodyguard, rolled the man over and pulled his autopistol free, then thumbed it to full auto and fired a burst at each of his quarries. Dark wounds opened on their torsos as the small-calibre shells found their mark, and the acrid tang of chemical propellant abruptly filled the air. Whatever blessings the Great Powers had given either of them, they didn’t extend to invulnerable skin or near-immediate powers of healing. Both wavered and fell, making breathy, bloody noises through punctured lungs.

Time. Time was key now. Radimir scrambled to the first one, the shorter and stockier of the two, and opened her throat with his knife. Then, as light faded from her human eyes, he tore off the half-mask that still covered her forehead and plunged his blade into her skull.

The electro-sheathed knife made as short work of bone as it had of body armour, and it was the work of a few moments to prise her warp eye free. Radimir averted his gaze from it, working by touch, for his was a dangerous harvest. It was hard between his fingers, toughened through years of staring into the immaterium, and he dropped it into his belt pouch, heedless of the blood that stained it. Then he reached for her companion.

She ripped her veil free, spitting a bubbling curse as she did so, and Radimir found himself staring straight into the void.

Only his reflexes saved him. Even he, servant of the Great Powers though he was, didn’t have the strength of mind to endure the gaze of a Navigator’s warp eye and keep his sanity. He felt the edges of his psyche starting to unravel and managed to close his eyes in the split second before he was lost in her stare for what would surely have been a subjective eternity, then lashed out with his knife. It was a blind strike, and Radimir wasn’t used to fighting blind, but it was good enough. His blade found its mark, punching up and through her jaw, and he felt the wash of warm blood over his fingers. Her hand flailed at his for a moment, but it had lost its previous strength, and he drove the blade deeper with a grunt and a shove. It must have passed a critical threshold into her brain: the Navigator went limp with a sigh, and moved no more.

Radimir withdrew his knife and cautiously opened his eyes, then went to work on her forehead as well, covering her warp eye with his hand as he cut, just to be sure. He got her eye out in a matter of seconds, dropped it into his belt pouch and wiped his blade clean on the taller Navigator’s robes. Now it was definitely time to leave…

The door crashed open to admit a woman with a shotgun, who slapped the wall as she entered. There must have been a settings switch there, as the room’s illumination suddenly kicked up to full. Radimir blinked desperately as the song of darkness ceased entirely.

‘Who the–?’ Nansi began, raising her shotgun to her shoulder and bringing both barrels to bear on him.

Radimir was faster. He snatched up the autopistol again and fired, half-pulping her skull. Nansi fell backwards, collided with the door and knocked it shut as she slumped to the floor, the shotgun slipping from her hands.

Screams from outside, running footsteps, and light, cursed light everywhere. Radimir had been trained in combat by his masters, but he’d seen how many people were in the bar. The gangers, the manufactorum workers… If they decided to investigate, and wanted vengeance for the woman who served them alcohol every day, then he would die. The gangers would probably be armed, too. The door was out of the question, and he couldn’t stay here.

There were four uplighters, one on each wall. He took aim at each in turn and pulled the trigger. The first one dissolved in a shower of sparks, then the second. Then the third.

The Encarmine buzzed an alert as he turned to the fourth. It was out of ammunition.

Radimir muttered a prayer to all of his gods and threw the cursed thing. It struck the lumen true, smashed it, and the room was plunged into total, blessed blackness.

There was no time to look; someone could push the door open at any moment. Radimir threw himself into darkness’ embrace, trusting to chance and the mercy of his true patrons.

OPENING DOORS

Prefect Bezamor Gurrit was in charge of the Administratum’s functions across Vorlese, at least so far as Chetta could work out, and she’d already decided that he was about as much use as a hydraulic wrench in a void battle. Which was to say, he had a specific function, and he was very well suited to it, and he would not benefit her in any way. He was ninety-seven Terran years old, apparently, with only one remaining human eye. The stare from his bionic was possibly warmer.

‘High lady,’ he rasped, with all the respect and reverence that might infuse a proctor’s utterance of the word ‘citizen’ when addressed to someone in possession of goods that weren’t strictly theirs. ‘Do you have any idea, any whatsoever, of how ridiculous this request is?’

‘I feel that you and I may have differing opinions on that, prefect,’ Chetta replied dryly. ‘In a similar vein to how we each view matters like “urgent”, or even “critical to planetary security”.’

‘If the matter is as critical as you say, and somehow linked to the awful events at Gallimo, then why am I speaking to you, and not to Judge Arctos?’ Gurrit demanded.

‘Judge Arctos is, I’m certain, pursuing his own investigations into this matter,’ Chetta said. At least, I certainly hope so. ‘However, the Adeptus Arbites have many things to occupy their attention. I am in the position of being extremely intelligent, extremely worried and in need of something to occupy my brain in the aftermath of my husband’s death. I can assist the judge, if you assist me.’

‘That would be quite impossible,’ Gurrit snorted. ‘Passenger records are strictly controlled and may only be accessed by adepts of appropriate rank within the Administratum, or by law enforcement officials upon the presentation of appropriate documentation. You are neither, high lady, and I strongly suggest that you keep your nose out of that which does not concern you.’ He glanced at the gilt-chased chrono which hung on the wall, making an obnoxious ticking noise. ‘Thus far you have taken up three minutes and forty-nine seconds of my time. I can allow no more. Data waits for no man, and nor may I.’

Chetta was in the mood for a blazing row with someone, and this dried-up jigfruit of a man would have served admirably, but it would achieve nothing. She sighed pointedly and hauled herself to her feet, leaning heavily on her cane and wincing at a twinge in her elbow. That was all she needed: her hip wasn’t so bad today, but if her main supporting arm decided to start playing up as well then she might as well get a grav-chair like Kennevario Xudine and have done with.

Not today, she thought fiercely as she turned to leave Gurrit’s chambers without dignifying him with a farewell, flanked by two of Krane’s best and preceded by obsequious, black-robed menials of the Administratum whose only purpose appeared to be making Gurrit and his visitors feel important. Not today, and not tomorrow. After that… we’ll see. She’d repeated the same mantra for the last fifteen years, and it had kept her going so far. It seemed you really could fool yourself, even if you knew you were doing it.

She allowed herself to be ushered through the grand doors of bronze-plated Catachan teak, and out of the presence of the man whom countless adjuncts had breathlessly told her she was so unbelievably lucky to be able to see at such short notice, at her request, and what a grand honour was being afforded to her in recognition of her rank as spouse of the former Novator of House Brobantis…

The warp take them all, Chetta thought bitterly, as she stumped across the prefect’s antechamber where his other appointments were waiting, then hastily recanted it inside her head when she remembered that what she was trying to achieve was to make sure that in fact the warp didn’t take them all, herself included. It wasn’t that she was superstitious, but there was no use in borrowing trouble, as Azariel would have said. A sensible adage in uncomfortable times.

Her eyes lighted on a young man whom she’d seen on the way in. He was clearly Administratum: middle-ranking, to judge by the shade of grey of his robe, although Chetta couldn’t keep up with the almost indeterminable levels of nuance in their system. He wasn’t wearing the black robes of the menials or the ice grey of the prefect, but was probably closer to the latter than the former, so far as her eyes could tell. He was pleasingly plump, with a pale complexion and sandy hair that was just starting to thin at the temples. Most importantly, he didn’t look to have yet had the soul sucked out of him by his work. Most of the Administratum scribes that Chetta encountered bore the haggard expressions of people who’d been the channel for so many words and numbers that it was as though some of their essential personhood had been taken along for the ride, leaving them a hollow husk that could spell and add up, but little more besides.

This one, checking his data-slate, looked like he cared about whatever it was he was doing. Caring was important. Chetta knew full well that if she’d presented Prefect Gurrit with a squalling, naked infant, he could have told her its length and weight and estimated its age, but wouldn’t think to ask where its parents were, whether it needed feeding or why no one had put any clothes on it.

She tutted. She’d tried to do things the right way; now she’d have to do things her way. As usual.

‘Goodsire!’ she called, angling her progress towards the adept. She sensed more than saw her guards exchange a glance. They were smart enough to know that proper protocol here was for her to leave forthwith, since she’d been dismissed by the prefect and this was very much his domain, and they were also smart enough to keep their mouths shut about that fact.

The adept automatically looked up from his data-slate, one finger still poised over it, and his brow furrowed in confusion when he realised that he was indeed the person being addressed. Chetta saw his eyes skim over her – taking in the richness of her black mourning attire, the presence of her guards and the House Brobantis heraldry pins that she was wearing prominently on each breast – and watched him very rapidly come to the conclusion that he was dealing with someone far above him in terms of social station.

‘High lady,’ he said with a bow of surprising fluidity, and unlike Prefect Gurrit he sounded both honoured and slightly overawed. ‘How may I assist you?’

‘What is your name and title, goodsire?’ Chetta asked him. ‘I must confess I get lost with all these shades of grey.’

‘I have the honour to be Junior Sub-Prefect Tekoa Yunn,’ the adept said, rising from his bow.

‘Lady Chettamandey Brobantis,’ Chetta said. ‘As for how you can assist me, Junior Sub-Prefect Yunn…’ She paused, considering for a moment how best to word her next sentence. Well, DeShelle wasn’t here to paint pretty pictures with words, and Chetta always had believed in being direct with people. As much as anything else, it meant they weren’t prepared for it if you had to obfuscate in the future. ‘How would you like to die a horrible, painful death?’

Yunn swallowed visibly, his eyes flickering nervously from her to her guards, and back again. ‘High lady, I…’

‘It’s a simple enough question, junior sub-prefect,’ Chetta said mildly, ‘and I assure you, it is not a trick.’

‘I… would not like that to happen?’ Yunn ventured.

‘Marvellous,’ Chetta beamed at him. ‘It seems we’re in agreement, then. I also don’t wish to die a horrible, painful death, Tekoa, and I need your help to ensure that both of us, along with anyone we’ve ever loved, can avoid that.’

‘High lady, I confess I do not understand.’

‘Walk with me for a few moments, Tekoa,’ Chetta said. ‘I’m none too steady on my feet, after all.’

‘High lady, I have duties here–’

‘I’m well known to be a foul-tempered battleaxe, Tekoa,’ Chetta told him bluntly. ‘Being accosted by me is a thoroughly understandable reason to have to leave your duties briefly. Listen to what I have to say, and then you can return to them if you wish.’

She saw Tekoa Yunn weighing up his options for a moment, glancing surreptitiously around at the rest of the antechamber, and she took the opportunity to do the same. Gurrit’s seneschal was already calling the names for his master’s next meeting. The guards at the doors were staring blankly ahead, clearly not caring about anything taking place in front of them unless it was going to threaten those doors. None of the other adepts in the chamber, taking notes or checking data-slates or hurrying from someplace to someplace else, were paying Yunn any attention at all. In fact, several of them appeared to be deliberately avoiding his gaze, presumably in case they got roped into having to deal with the First Lady of House Brobantis.

‘Very well, high lady,’ Yunn said, reaching out to take her hand. His grip was warm and firm, and his eyes twinkled for a moment with the light of a man daring to step outside his routine for the first time in years. ‘I would be happy to assist you. For a few minutes.’

‘What do you know of the warp, Tekoa?’ Chetta asked quietly as they walked through corridors filled with grey-robed scribes, blank-eyed servitors and even the occasional buzzing servo-skull.

‘I know it is the medium through which the Imperium’s starships travel,’ Tekoa said carefully. ‘I know that Navigators such as yourself guide those ships through it. I… have heard that sometimes ships become lost in it.’

‘And the Cicatrix Maledictum?’

‘The work of our enemies,’ Tekoa said fiercely. ‘But Lord Guilliman will throw them back and heal the skies!’

Chetta managed not to laugh. Oh, to be that hopeful, and that naive. ‘So you understand that sometimes the warp can be dangerous?’

‘I suppose that would make sense,’ Tekoa replied, nodding. ‘You would of course know far more about such things than I.’

Chetta decided that she definitely liked him. ‘I am not boasting when I say that I do, Tekoa. Now, you’re aware of the loss of Gallimo Prime?’

Tekoa nodded again, a somewhat haunted look coming over his face. ‘Yes, high lady. We’ve been instructed not to talk of it, but what can you do in the face of such a tragic misfortune? Besides, the cessation of shipping traffic alone would cause too many questions for anyone here to remain ignorant of it for long.’

‘Tekoa, I’m going to be honest with you,’ Chetta said, lowering her voice further. ‘I asked Prefect Gurrit for access to the passenger logs for the last few transports from the Gallimo System, because I fear that someone involved in that world’s fate may have come here.’ She watched his eyes grow wide in horror at the sheer concept. ‘He refused me.’

Tekoa Yunn wasn’t stupid. His eyes narrowed again and his mouth tightened. ‘If Prefect Gurrit refused you–’

‘Tekoa, someone needs to do something about this, and right now I am the only person whom I know is willing to,’ Chetta snapped at him. ‘It may come to nothing, but I need to try!’

‘But, high lady, I could access the logs, but when my involvement is discovered–’

Chetta rounded on him and pinned him up against the wall with the butt of her cane. She couldn’t have held him there had he struggled, but the shock – and possibly the presence of her guards – did the job for her.

‘Junior Sub-Prefect Tekoa Yunn,’ Chetta hissed into his face. ‘If you’re trying to tell me that you’d place your continued career in the Administratum higher than the fate of this entire world, then first of all I’m confident in saying that Lord Guilliman would be ashamed of you, and secondly I fear you have woefully overestimated your ability to survive the planet disappearing from under your feet!’

Tekoa took a couple of breaths, then nodded cautiously. ‘As you say, high lady. As you say. The Emperor forgive me, you speak wisely. I will assist you.’

Chetta smiled and patted his hand, and leaned somewhat gratefully on her cane once more. ‘Thank you, Tekoa. Thank you.’ She waited for another moment, then added, ‘And of course, should your superiors here disagree with the necessity of your actions, I’d be happy to find you employ in House Brobantis.’

Tekoa looked like he’d been hit with a shock maul. ‘H… high lady?’ He looked both ways, abruptly terrified, but there was no sign that anyone at all was remotely interested in the grey-robed adept being alternately harangued and praised by the angry old Navigator. ‘You would do such a thing?’

‘I’m sure you’ve seen my home, Tekoa,’ Chetta said. ‘I’d wager we could pry some of the external decoration off and give it to you, and it would still be worth more than your wages here. I think we can stretch to another name on the payroll, if that name has proved their usefulness.’ She gestured vaguely with her cane. ‘Lead on, do. I have no wish to stand around for longer than absolutely necessary.’

Tekoa still looked slightly shell-shocked, but he sketched a quick bow to her and then, with a deep breath to compose himself, turned his back on his post and his duties, and set off down a different corridor with renewed purpose. Chetta followed along behind, the dull clack of her cane on the floor marking every other step she took, and tried not to smile too widely to herself.

It was amazing how much good could be achieved with a carefully judged mix of threats and honesty.

SEA OF NAMES

The Hall of Records was the repository of the Administratum’s knowledge on Vorlese, and it was stupendously large. Much of it was under the Administratum’s main building in Ascension City, buried beneath the planet’s surface, and consisted of mile upon mile of tunnels and archive rooms, all lit with the same lumens that were slightly too dim and spaced slightly too far apart for human eyes to be truly comfortable. Dust lay thick, save where furrows had been tracked through it by the repetitive steps of servitors, or it had been brushed clear by the trailing hem of an adept’s robe, and it hung in the air, tickled the throat and threatened to clog the nose. The archives were heavy with an oppressive hush: not silence, clean and pure, but a grey-tinged anti-noise made up of the faint hum of cogitators, the barely audible whisper of the environmental recycling system, and the occasional faint sputter of a flickering lumen. Sound felt like an insult.

Chetta coughed up the dust now lining her throat into her mouth and spat it out, ignoring the look of shock and disgust from Tekoa. ‘And why,’ she asked with some acidity, ‘did we have to come all the way down here to access this information?’

‘Data security,’ Tekoa replied. ‘Only authorised adepts can enter the Hall of Records.’

‘And servitors,’ Chetta pointed out, leaning on her cane. ‘My guards have to stay outside, but servitors can come in.’ They’d come down from the prefect’s palace above in an elevator, a clanking, grumbling thing with a brass grille across the door and a machine-spirit that had struck her as recalcitrant at best, but she was really starting to regret making this journey on foot. If she had to call for a sedan chair and bearers to be sent down into the bowels of the Administratum, just so she could make it back to her flyer to get home…

‘Why would servitors be a problem?’ Tekoa asked, puzzled. ‘Their programming is clear.’

‘I’ll take it from that statement that you’ve never had one try to kill you,’ Chetta grunted. She’d never discovered whether the servitor had experienced a spectacular malfunction or had been tampered with: Krane had blown its head off with his bolt pistol, which had stopped it very effectively, but had left little for the tech-adepts to work with in terms of finding out what had gone wrong. She rubbed her throat absent-mindedly at the memory. The thing’s metal fingers would have only needed a second or so more to break her neck quite thoroughly.

Tekoa was staring at her, wide-eyed. Chetta snorted a humourless laugh and waved her free hand at him. ‘Carry on, young man. Don’t mind me. Suffice to say that being the spouse of a Novator isn’t all unusual alcohols and fine delicacies at decadent parties.’ Although I preferred nearly being killed by a servitor to some of the parties I’ve had to attend.

‘I see,’ Tekoa replied, in a tone of voice that made it clear he really didn’t, and was quite happy with that. He consulted the data-slate in his hand, trying to get back to business. ‘The cogitator we need is the one linked to the immigration records, and is…’ He squinted up through the gloom at the numerals on the shelves they were currently between, which declared the aisle to be ‘X/CLIII’. ‘It should be just at the end of this row.’

‘Wonderful,’ Chetta said, trying not to sound too sarcastic. Tekoa’s help was better than Gurrit’s flat refusal, and it wasn’t the boy’s fault that the record-keeping was so infuriating, or that her hip hurt. She plodded after him, imagining that every stab of pain was somehow being psychically redirected onto Sen Uru Dukarr.

The cogitator was an old-fashioned affair, but Tekoa’s invocation of the Litany of Activation, his burning of the sacred incense, and his administration of the ritual blow to its side, appeared to appease the machine-spirit, and it flickered into life readily enough. He flexed his fingers and typed in a few commands, then looked around at Chetta expectantly.

‘What precisely are you looking for, high lady?’

‘Inbound records for every person off every ship that arrived here from the Gallimo System,’ Chetta told him.

‘In what time period of arrival?’

‘I’m not bothered so much with when they arrived here, as when they left there.’ She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. Assuming that Gallimo Prime’s fate had indeed been caused by a hostile actor in real space, rather than an unfeasibly neat warp predator or accident, and that said actor hadn’t stayed around to be sucked into the warp along with their handiwork, how much time would they have had to get clear? Chetta was as familiar with the immaterium as a sane Navigator could be, but not with the foul practices of witches.

She had to be sensible about this. If Gallimo’s disappearance had been the culmination of some unholy ritual that had been set in motion a year before and then left to come to fruition, she couldn’t hope to track the culprit down. She needed to focus quite tightly, else she’d never find anything anyway.

‘The warp route from Gallimo is fairly stable, so they should have all got here by now. Let’s say, any ship that left there between five days before Gallimo Prime vanished, and the day of it,’ she offered. That should be a manageable amount of data.

‘That gives… two mass transit ships.’

‘Only two?’ Chetta frowned. ‘I thought we got more workers in from the Gallimo hives than that.’

‘The reparative works to the northern continent’s infrastructure following the Despoiler’s invasion have largely been completed,’ Tekoa said absently, ‘and workforce attrition was reduced by forty-seven per cent over the last quarter. Only a few hundred die per week, now.’

Chetta grunted. ‘Will wonders never cease?’

‘Aside from the mass transits, in terms of ships that left the Gallimo System between the times you stated, and from which at least one person has been processed by immigration control, there were fifteen cargo haulers, six private vessels and an Adeptus Mechanicus vessel,’ Tekoa said. He frowned at the screen. ‘Why would so many ships be putting people planetside?’

‘Shore leave,’ Chetta chuckled. ‘Crewers coming down to sample the local atmosphere, so long as it includes alcohol, fornication and carbohydrates. Not necessarily all at once, although I’ve known it to happen.’

‘High lady?’ Tekoa squeaked.

‘I used to fly with the 19th Pacificum,’ Chetta informed him. ‘I heard stories from the petty officers that you likely wouldn’t believe.’ She pulled her attention back to the matter at hand, and reached into a concealed pocket for a data crystal. ‘Very well. Let’s have the names. I’ve no doubt they’ll be the warp’s own pain to sift through, but it’s a starting point.’

Tekoa took the crystal from her and slotted it into the cogitator’s download port, then returned to tapping keys. After a moment, however, he started back in apparent shock.

‘There’s… nothing there.’

Chetta frowned and leaned closer to inspect the display herself. ‘I cannot be having with this foolishness. What’s the problem?’

‘There’s no data, high lady!’ Tekoa said, in a tone of some alarm. ‘The initial information, the names and number of ships – that is present. But when I try to access the names that the system says were recorded by the immigration scribes… there’s nothing.’

The hairs on Chetta’s arms were standing up, and she realised that her breathing had quickened. ‘Do a search for another time period. I don’t care when – three months ago, something like that.’

Tekoa obeyed, muttering something soothing under his breath to the cogitator as he did so. The data flashed up: lines and lines of glyphs that detailed names, occupations, system of origin…

‘It’s been removed,’ Chetta breathed. ‘It’s been removed deliberately.’ She rubbed her chin, trying not to get sucked into a dead-end thought process, but she couldn’t see another explanation. It was too much of a coincidence. How long had it taken her to convince Tekoa? How long had it taken them to get down here? Long enough for Prefect Gurrit to send out an order to get someone to delete the very information she’d just told him she wanted?

Yes. Yes, easily. It would have had to involve rather more efficiency than the Administratum usually demonstrated, but it could have been done. Which meant that Gurrit hadn’t expected her to take no for an answer. It also meant that he’d expected her to come down here, into this subterranean warren of poor lighting and no witnesses.

Chetta became aware of a monotonous, heavy tread approaching. She looked around, but she already knew what she was going to see.

A servitor.

It had been a woman, from the look of it, and judging by the prison stamp across its forehead it had been a murderer as well, before its sentience had been scrubbed away and its organic parts repurposed. Its eyes had been replaced with lenses and its hands with heavy-duty servo-claws, while its legs were braced with metal – presumably to afford better control to whatever balance systems controlled its motion. It was designed for lifting and carrying, and would undoubtedly be strong, but slow.

Slower than a Navigator who was relying on a cane to walk today, and whose hip was already registering somewhere between ‘painful’ and ‘excruciating’?

Possibly not.

‘Get up, get up!’ she spat at Tekoa, pulling him away from the cogitator. ‘Move!’

‘High lady, what–?’

‘Move, unless you want your neck broken!’ Chetta snapped. She tried to run, but her hip screamed at her and she tottered sideways into the shelves of sealed storage cases. She wasn’t going to get far, and servitors didn’t tire. She grabbed a shelf with her left hand to try to steady herself and reversed her cane, holding it upright like a bludgeon by the handle. She’d have the chance for one good swing, if she was lucky…

‘Halt,’ Tekoa said, holding up one hand as the servitor bore down on him.

It halted.

‘State your function,’ Tekoa commanded it, looking over his shoulder curiously at Chetta.

‘Records storage and disposal,’ the servitor intoned in a flat, dead voice.

‘Continue.’ Tekoa stepped aside and it carried on again as though nothing had happened, clumping past Chetta with no recognition that she was there. It wasn’t until it was a full thirty feet away and had made no attempt to turn around and murder her that Chetta’s body finally seemed to get the message that it wasn’t in danger, and she was able to relax enough to let go of the shelf and lean on her cane again.

‘High lady?’ Tekoa ventured, cautiously.

Chetta exhaled shakily. The sudden adrenaline dump was doing nothing for her general stability, as her arms and legs were trembling like the branches of a white asper in a gale. ‘Pardon me, Tekoa. I… may have overreacted.’ She felt weak, and ashamed. She was one of the most skilled Navigators in House Brobantis! She would guide a starship past ravaging horrors that would suck the marrow from her bones and the soul from her body should her concentration slip, and consider it nothing more than a day’s work! And here she was, shaking from the after-effects of terror because she thought a dead woman’s shell with metal prostheses was going to attack her.

The difference is, the starship will usually obey my commands. My body will not.

‘So, then,’ she said, trying to master herself. Just because the servitor hadn’t been sent to murder her didn’t mean that the rest of her concerns were unfounded. One of the delicate balancing acts of her life was working out exactly how paranoid she needed to be in any given situation: whether or not she needed to be paranoid at all had never been in question. ‘The records I want are gone, whereas others are still present. That tells me that I may be on the right track, may the Emperor preserve us.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Tekoa replied, staring at the cogitator.

‘Yes, and perhaps not,’ Chetta snapped irritably, ‘but are you willing to risk the planet on it?’

‘You pardon, high lady,’ Tekoa said, raising his hands apologetically. ‘I meant that perhaps the records are not lost. Not all of them, at any rate. The hard copies of the Ascension City port records are stored here, and will be marked down as destroyed now they’ve been entered into the databanks, but…’ He gestured at the aisles of shelves, stretching away in all directions.

‘They could still be here?’ Chetta asked, a flicker of hope rekindling in her chest.

‘They should,’ Tekoa nodded. ‘For them to have been destroyed so soon, when there is such a backlog on everything else… That, high lady, really would imply hostile action.’

‘How many of the ships we were looking at landed passengers or crew at Ascension City?’ Chetta asked. Tekoa leaned over the cogitator again, tapping runic keys.

‘Most of them. The two mass transit ships, seven of the cargo haulers and every one of the private vessels.’

‘Not the cogboys?’ Chetta asked, rubbing her chin. It would be just like the Adeptus Mechanicus for them to have found a strange machine, made lots of excited clicking noises over it, managed to turn it on and only worried too late about whether or not it was going to tear a hole in the very fabric of reality.

‘No. Port Barbarus,’ Tekoa reported. ‘Their hard records won’t come here.’

Chetta grunted. ‘Hnh. That’s a shame. But we have work enough.’ She looked again at the aisles, and her heart sank. ‘Where would we even begin to search?’

In the end, Tekoa bustled off and returned trailed by the same servitor that had nearly sent Chetta into cardiac arrest. Upon reciting clearly what records he was searching for, the machine led them both to a specific storage case on a shelf nine aisles away, and even got it down for them. Chetta regarded the servitor suspiciously as Tekoa opened the case and began hunting through the documents within, but it still appeared benign.

‘They’re here!’ Tekoa exclaimed with delight, pulling out binders filled with pages of the close-packed scrawl of an auto-scriber. He looked up at her from where he was kneeling on the floor. ‘Perhaps the Emperor is still with you, high lady!’

‘Perhaps,’ Chetta murmured. The archives were still making her nervous, despite the servitor resolutely not trying to kill her. ‘It’s time we were on our way, Tekoa.’

‘But…’ He held up the records helplessly.

‘Oh, bring them with you,’ she told him. ‘We can’t look at them here, it would take far too long.’

‘We can’t just remove them!’

‘According to the data systems, they’ve already been destroyed,’ Chetta pointed out. ‘We’re doing the place a favour.’ She tapped the floor with her cane, thinking. ‘When you fired up the cogitator earlier… did you have to identify yourself?’

‘Of course,’ Tekoa said, with a puzzled frown.

Chetta nodded. She’d suspected as much. ‘I rather think you should move into new quarters in the Brobantis palace, Tekoa. Immediately.’

Tekoa’s eyes widened in shock and, quite possibly, alarm. ‘B-but I have an assigned apartment! Designated as appropriate for my rank.’

‘You can have a new one, and I promise you that it will be nicer,’ Chetta told him bluntly. ‘I acknowledge that I may be a foolish old woman who’s jumping at shadows, Tekoa, but if someone did remove those records to prevent me – or anyone else – from finding them, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that they might be keeping a very close eye on who goes looking for them. If so, I’d suggest that the people they send after you are unlikely to be interested in conversation.’

‘But my husband, Ama, he–’

‘He can come too,’ Chetta said briskly. ‘You’ll both be subject to strict security at first, but so long as you don’t try to assassinate any of us, or pass any information you may learn on to outsiders, you’ll both be considerably safer within my walls than outside them. That I can promise you.’

Tekoa gaped at her, but Chetta could almost see his thoughts. What citizen of Ascension City hadn’t seen the Navigator palaces and marvelled at the wealth and majesty of them? Who hadn’t fantasised about venturing within, of experiencing the unthinkable luxury that must surely lie behind those thick, heavily guarded walls? Which of them hadn’t dreamed of a day, just one day, when they didn’t have to work in the Emperor’s name? Not that anyone begrudged Him their labour, of course, but perhaps there were those in the Navigator’s palaces who didn’t have to do it all the time…?

Of course, it would mean Tekoa voluntarily leaving behind everything he’d built in his life so far, but Chetta could already tell that he’d weighed that up and, apart from his husband, found it wanting.

‘High lady, it would be the greatest honour,’ Tekoa said hurriedly, as though the words would run away from him if he didn’t get them out all at once.

‘Marvellous,’ Chetta said, managing to force a smile onto her face over a wince of pain. ‘Now, I’m going to have to ask you to carry those…’

SLIPPING THE LEASH

Radimir’s desperate, blind jump from the Star Lounge had brought him out into the cloying, sweat-scented air of a hab with broken climate controls. It was a tiny, two-room affair. A battered bed, that looked like it might have been ripped out of a barracks at some point and sold off, sat three feet away from a kitchenette spotted with grease and old food, while behind a door lurked a washroom with a small collection of fat, buzzing flies. The owner wasn’t home, and Radimir had used the washroom to clean what blood he could from his clothes and skin. He’d managed to avoid the worst of it, but he’d still not wanted to trail through the Mids looking like the killer that would soon be hunted by the proctors.

As it turned out, however, it wasn’t the proctors who found him first. Even he needed to sleep, and he knew the dangers of a city well enough to want walls and a locked door between him and the mass of humanity around him when he did so. He’d found lodgings in a wall of identical apartments, only a little larger than the one he’d blundered into after the Star Lounge fiasco, although undeniably cleaner, and it was to these lodgings that he’d returned.

He jerked awake from sleep and lay still for a moment, wondering what had roused him. No alarm was sounding, and his heart rate was raised. His body had recognised a threat and had alerted him to it.

He closed his eyes again and reached out. The bedchamber was still dark, as was the living space beyond… but there were two, no, three people moving cautiously through it. They had no good reason to be there, and two of them were armed. Foolhardy thieves, or hostiles who had somehow tracked him down?

Radimir plucked his power knife from the bedside unit and disappeared into the dark, leaving the bedclothes to settle into the void where his body had been only a moment before. He emerged in the corner of the living area, directly behind one of the armed intruders.

The power field on his knife snapped into blue-white life as he brought it around and across the first intruder’s throat, the same move that had ended the life of Emerson Tobias, a practised cut he’d performed a hundred times before. The man went down, but Radimir was already stepping past him. The second intruder was turning, alerted by the sudden light as much as anything else, and Radimir caught a momentary glimpse of infra-goggles in the fizzing glow of his knife.

The man’s reactions were good, but he flinched as he caught sight of the powerblade – probably a reaction to the infra-goggles burning the image into his retinas rather than fear of the weapon itself – and that gave Radimir the opening he needed. He ducked under the barrel of the autopistol tracking towards him and grabbed the other man’s wrist, then slashed downwards with his knife. The power field sliced through flesh and bone alike in the forearm and the man’s hand came away; then Radimir’s back-cut opened his throat as well, and he too collapsed.

It had taken less than two seconds. The third intruder backed away from him clumsily, blindly, tripping over a table and falling against the wall, which was thin enough to take a dent from the impact. Radimir lunged at them, ripped away the respirator they wore and clamped his hand over their mouth to prevent them from crying out…

He held his strike. Even without the glow from his knife, he recognised Kell’s eyes, eyebrows and forehead. She looked terrified, and confused. Understandable: so far as she was concerned, the man she’d hired was merely a very efficient contract killer, one with a reputation that covered multiple systems. She’d have no idea of how he’d suddenly come to be in the room with them.

‘Why are you here?’ he demanded, blade poised. He removed his hand slightly, confident that the threat of death would keep her voice down.

‘Two deaths,’ Kell hissed, her eyes wide and pupils sharp as pins as they tried to adjust to the burning light of the power knife.

‘Three deaths,’ Radimir corrected her. ‘I dumped one in the river – Brobantis won’t find the body.’

‘Two deaths,’ Kell insisted, her gaze momentarily leaving the knife and meeting his. ‘Two Navigators killed in a backroom narc lounge, in the Mids of Decimus Block. Neither of them were Brobantis.’

Radimir snorted. ‘And why is that a problem?’

‘Your contract was for Brobantis!’ Kell hissed desperately. ‘Only Brobantis!’

Ah. So his patron was one of the other Navigator houses then, as he’d suspected, and they now feared that their own members would fall victim to him. Or indeed, perhaps at least one already had. He wondered which families the Navigators at the Star Lounge had belonged to. It would be good to know whose lackeys were likely to come gunning for him in the future.

‘Who do you work for?’ he murmured, moving his knife down slowly until the crackling blade hovered just above Kell’s heart.

‘I have sworn loyalty,’ she whispered shakily, ‘unto death.’

He nodded, seeing only truth in her eyes. She’d come here with two thugs to… what? Persuade him to stick to the targets she wanted? Or simply to kill him? Had she come because she was the only employee of his nominal patron who had seen his face, and the thugs needed to be sure they’d killed the right man?

It didn’t matter, he realised. If he let her walk away then she would surely come for him again, at some point, and next time she wouldn’t bring just two men with her. She’d sorely underestimated him, and wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

He’d always known that he’d have to go rogue at some point.

He covered her mouth with his hand again, and plunged his knife into the top of her skull. She went limp instantly.

Radimir looked down at himself. There was blood on him again. He’d paid rent up until the end of the local month, which was still some twenty days away. The best-case scenario was that Kell was acting largely independently and had come to deal with her own contractor to avoid losing face with her superior, without telling others of where she was going or how she’d kept track of him, and no one would find her body until the landlord came to chase up the next payment. The worst-case scenario was that this apartment was under surveillance and another, greater force was even now moving in on him, perhaps summoned by the flatlining of a bio-monitor. The middle-case, and probably the most likely, was that Kell’s failure to check in would be noted after a matter of hours, not immediately. If Radimir tried to flee straight away then a cyber-mastiff or sharp-eyed proctor on patrol might well notice the blood on him, and his problems would only increase.

Play the percentages. Don’t panic. Clean himself up the best he could with the facilities here, abandon the apartment, start again. There was no way to move the bodies without being noticed, and dragging them through the darkness with him to dump them somewhere else nearby would exhaust him – he’d had to do that with the third Brobantis Navigator, and the effort had nearly floored him. Besides, he couldn’t spare the time to clean the apartment, and he didn’t have the materials. If they were found, they were found.

His goal wasn’t easy. It had never been easy, and it would only get harder from here. But it was possible, and it was getting closer. He had to hold on to that fact.

He had to have faith.

APPLYING PRESSURE

‘…and in conclusion, he calls us leaderless, rudderless and spineless!’ Vittariel snarled. He drew back his arm to hurl the data-slate at the wall, but Chetta managed to pluck it out of his hand before he could do so.

‘I’m not bothered about the names he calls us,’ she told her fuming brother-in-law. They were in an antechamber off one of House Brobantis’ main dining halls, waiting to make their entrance. ‘I’m more concerned by what criteria he’s outlined for the conflict.’ She thumbed through the long and venomous missive that had just arrived via personal courier from Sen Uru Dukarr. As usual, Vittariel had been distracted by the emotional content and hadn’t paid attention to the pertinent details. ‘Ah, here we are. Very brief, really.’ She squinted at the text. ‘“…by all methods economic and cultural, but through no force of arms”.’

Vittariel scowled down at her, but didn’t snatch the data-slate back. ‘Is that “through no force of arms”, or “through no open force of arms”?’

Chetta double-checked. ‘No force of arms. He thinks he can use Azariel’s own tactics against House Xudine on us, and break us without a shot being fired.’ She snorted. ‘He’s ambitious, I’ll give him that.’

‘No assassins? No saboteurs?’ Vittariel scoffed. ‘From Sen Uru? I’ll believe it when I fail to see them. More likely that he wishes to play the slighted noble who takes the higher road, and will blame his other tactics on a third party seeking to use the trade war as a cover to advance their own agenda.’

‘Or he could just be being cautious,’ Chetta pointed out. ‘He must think that I would have anticipated this reaction from him when I called off the betrothals. For all he knows, I could have been planning this with Azariel for five years or so. We could have always intended to do this, to goad Sen Uru into declaring a trade war for which we were already very well prepared, as a means of destroying Dukarr.’

Vittar nodded slowly, conceding the point. Trade wars between Navigator houses were always closely proscribed, as was entirely necessary for organisations that could have influence across half the Imperium or more. Declaring a trade war that involved force of arms against House Belisarius, for example, was an open invitation to have a mob of Space Wolves show up and tear your holdings apart. The sons of Fenris took the ancient oaths of loyalty that bound them and their Navigators to each other very seriously, and rarely needed much of an excuse to start a fight.

‘I take it that this wasn’t planned out between you and my brother?’

‘No, more’s the pity,’ Chetta muttered. ‘But hopefully, Sen Uru is simply trying to save face while limiting the possibility of waking up with a knife in his heart.’ She tapped her chin thoughtfully with her finger. ‘We’ll need to look at our investments. He’ll try to undercut us where he can, even if it means taking a loss himself. He’ll flood markets with goods that our captains transport, so they can no longer afford to run, or buy up the raw materials and stockpile them so they have nothing to ship.’

‘Only if he knows where our interests lie,’ Vittar said. ‘A little misdirection could waste him a lot of time, effort and money, if he targets the wrong things.’

‘The leaks would have to look genuine,’ Chetta mused. ‘I’ll speak to Krane. We’d need to massively increase our counter-espionage resources, but focus on misleading potential moles, not eliminating them…’

‘Speaking of Krane, have you been told about Avomarr?’ Vittar asked. The question sounded innocent, but the hairs were suddenly standing up on Chetta’s arms again.

‘Which one?’ she asked, trying to keep her tone neutral. ‘Avomarr Reli, or Avomarr Du-Choi?’ There were two Avomarrs in the Brobantis family, distinguished by the middle names that indicated to which sub-branch they belonged.

‘Du-Choi.’

‘No,’ Chetta was forced to admit. The context of Krane led to an obvious conclusion as to why Vittar had mentioned him. ‘He’s not been found dead as well, has he?’

‘Missing,’ Vittar said, fiddling with his cuffs and not looking at her. ‘It’s been a week, now.’

Chetta cursed inwardly. She should have been told! How did Vittar know, and not her? Was he insinuating himself with the more distant family branches, seeking to garner support for his claim to becoming Novator? ‘Is it out of character for him?’ she asked, hating herself for having to do so, but she had never known the man well.

‘He has gone off before,’ Vittar admitted. ‘He’s a maudlin type, by all accounts, and prone to wandering. But he’s usually back within a few days, and will often send his siblings some over-dramatic message now and then. This time, they’ve had nothing but silence.’

Chetta glowered at the date-slate. ‘Do you suspect Sen Uru?’

‘I wouldn’t like to say,’ Vittar said quietly. ‘But it seems too much of a coincidence, bearing in mind the previous two deaths, for this to be an isolated incident. And yet, the first two occurred before you so drastically burned our bridges with Dukarr.’

‘Xudine, perhaps?’ Chetta offered, ignoring his accusatory choice of words. ‘How go the negotiations?’

‘Slowly,’ Vittar admitted. ‘Kennevario is long on words and short on content. Tonight’s dinner is more for the sake of form than because we have any great breakthrough to celebrate.’ He eyed her. ‘It’s almost as though he’s stalling. Waiting for something.’

A new Novator to be confirmed, most likely, so he can know for sure who he’s dealing with, Chetta thought to herself. The Brobantis elders were still ‘in council’ over the matter of succession, having shut themselves off from direct contact with any senior member of the family in order to avoid being unfairly influenced, and Chetta got the impression that they were waiting to see which way the house’s fortunes went in the aftermath of her two dramatic decisions. It was better than them immediately confirming Vittariel as Novator, and also implied that they might support her if everything panned out well, but she couldn’t help but feel that it showed a lack of certainty. Sen Uru’s accusation of the house being ‘rudderless’ might not be far from the truth, at present.

But it was possible that House Xudine had set a grand plan of their own into motion, or were the tools of someone else’s. Perhaps Kennevario was waiting for Brobantis’ fortunes to take a sudden nosedive to make his own negotiating position stronger. It was also possible that he’d been recruited by Dukarr to find out details of Brobantis’ economic interests, which would naturally come up during the discussions over an alliance contract. It would be fast work if that were the case, though, given Sen Uru had declared the trade war spontaneously, and after Xudine had already pledged allegiance to Brobantis. Unless, of course, Xudine’s entire presence at Azariel’s wake had been Sen Uru’s idea, and Sen Uru had already been hoping to use his fellow Novator to gain insight into Brobantis’ interests anyway, with promises of help to rebuild Kennevario’s ruined house…

Chetta was a Navigator, and used to concentrating on multiple things at once, but this arachnid’s web of potential betrayal made even her head spin. It didn’t even take into account Vittariel’s agenda, or Morandia’s, or–

There was a polite but firm knock at the antechamber door, interrupting her thoughts.

‘Come!’ Vittar barked, and a page stepped inside, dressed in Brobantis livery.

‘Your eminences, the guests have arrived and are seated,’ she declared, making a deep curtsey. ‘They are ready for you.’

‘Time for a united front,’ Vittar muttered to Chetta. He held his arm out to her. ‘Are you ready, dear sister?’

‘But of course, dear brother,’ Chetta replied, linking her arm through his. ‘Let us treat them to the glory of House Brobantis.’

There had been seventeen courses, three musical interludes, half a dozen speeches and a lot of damassine, although Chetta had taken care to pace herself so as not to get drunk. Kennevario Xudine had indeed proved to be a wordy type without much to actually say, despite his verbose declarations of goodwill towards his hosts, but then again it would be foolish to openly announce the details of an alliance contract to all and sundry. Vittar had been his counterpart, representing Brobantis, and Chetta had been quite content to let him be the focal point for once. Now, as the evening had progressed into true night, the gathered dignitaries had left the dining tables to move into the lavishly furnished entertainment rooms – or ‘the mixing bowl’, as Azariel had laughingly called them – and Chetta was free to stalk her prey.

‘Portmaster,’ she purred, doing her best to sidle up alongside him, although in truth it was more of a lurch. Grand Master Alexun van Sennit, who bore overall responsibility for the operation of Ascension City’s space port, started in surprise, then took a drag on his cigar. Chetta could tell from the scent that it was one of the newer nicomoss strains, developed on an agri world in the Abella System. House Brobantis actually jointly owned the planet in question, although that detail was not common knowledge.

‘High lady,’ van Sennit acknowledged her, with a click of his heels and a slight bow that suggested he’d never been closer to a military vessel than watching one land. He was a thin man with lustrous sideburns that had remained a stubborn black, as opposed to the silver that was creeping into the hair on his scalp. ‘I must thank you for the invitation to this wonderful event, and congratulate your house on this new alliance.’ An expression of dismay washed across his face. ‘Oh, and of course, my condolences! On your loss! Forgive my thoughtlessness.’

‘No apology is necessary,’ Chetta assured him with a smile. The man was a little drunk, but only a little. Excellent. She looked around casually. ‘Was your wife able to join us this evening?’

‘Ah, alas, no,’ van Sennit replied. He didn’t look too unhappy about it. ‘Her health is not what it once was. The chirurgeons have performed wonders, truly, and we have high hopes that she will be back to her old self soon, but for now there is little that can be done save for her to rest, and let her body heal at its own pace.’

‘Indeed,’ Chetta nodded sagely. ‘I am most familiar with the limitations of the flesh. Why, I’ve often wished that I could exchange this old shell of contrary bones for a younger, fresher model, at least for a while.’

Van Sennit laughed politely.

‘Which is, in fact, exactly what I hear you have done,’ Chetta continued in the same conversational tone, and watched his smile freeze in place. ‘Tell me, portmaster, do you care for her, or is she merely an amusement while you wait for your wife to get better? After all, I imagine you will not continue with your infidelity once dear Lyatta is back on her feet. She’d easily be sharp enough to realise what was going on.’

Van Sennit had gone quite pale, and his fine cigar was smouldering away unheeded between the first two fingers of his left hand.

‘It would be a terrible shame if someone were to tell her,’ Chetta mused, staring off across the room. A troupe of acrobats had made an entrance and were performing slow cartwheels and walking on their hands: simple tricks to attract the guests’ interest, before building up to a grander performance. Given the deep pockets of the assembled notaries, they could potentially amass a small fortune in tips before the end of the night, on top of their regular fee. ‘As I recall, her family are still very influential. It wouldn’t completely end your career, I’d imagine, but you’d certainly rise no higher.’

‘High lady, why are you doing this?’ van Sennit whispered, barely able to force the words past his lips.

‘Because I want something, of course,’ Chetta replied, still not looking at him. ‘I want something, and I want to make very sure that no one else knows that I’ve got it. If you can get me what I want, and keep your mouth shut about it, then you can continue with your amusement, should you wish to, and Lyatta won’t learn of it from me or mine.’ She sighed, rolled her neck and felt something click. ‘If you can’t provide what I need, or someone else learns of the details of my request, then your young mistress will testify about all the things that you and she have done together. She doesn’t know that yet,’ Chetta added with a shrug, ‘but please believe me when I say that I can make it happen.’ Even most of the employees in Brobantis’ flesh-houses didn’t know the identities of their true masters, let alone punters like van Sennit, which made them very useful places for Chetta to have her hooks into.

Van Sennit seemed to remember that he had a cigar. He took a long drag and exhaled the smoke in twin blooms through his nose, to steady his nerves. ‘What do you want?’

‘Pict-feed data from the immigration channels,’ Chetta told him. She slipped a scrap of paper into his right-hand jacket pocket. ‘These dates. Unencrypted, unedited, to be put onto a standard data crystal and ready for collection by my factor from your office by the end of tomorrow.’

‘Chetta,’ van Sennit said, and there was real hurt in his voice. ‘I would have done this for you. You know I would. There was no need for… this.’

Chetta nodded as she toyed with the head of her cane. ‘I thought you might. But I needed you to understand how serious I am about this. I have no patience for the “I was going to, but–”, which sometimes happens in these situations. Favours can be retracted or withdrawn, Alexun. I find that loyalty – be it out of love or duty – and fear are the only true motivators. I couldn’t be certain of your loyalty, so I had to employ fear.’ She turned her head to look at him again, and smiled brightly. ‘I’m sure that after tomorrow evening we need never speak of this again.’

‘Indeed,’ van Sennit said shortly. He took another drag on his cigar, then coughed. ‘Well, I find that my appetite for socialising has been satiated. Begging your pardon, high lady.’ He turned to go.

‘Oh, portmaster! You’re not leaving us already, surely?’

The new arrival sweeping down on them was a stunning figure in an open-backed dress of teal narfenna silk, and had precious gems scattered with contrived artlessness through her hair. Every finger was bedecked with rings, and she was attended by a hovering mini-servitor: not a skull, or even a cherub, as was more common, but a construct in the form of a small avian. Its feathered wings were a blur, but there must have been some anti-grav tech at work as well, and probably gyro-stabilisation, for it gripped the long stem of its owner’s glass between its tiny clawed feet, in order to leave her hands free, yet didn’t spill a drop.

‘The entertainments are only just beginning!’ Indrinian Vass exclaimed, even as van Sennit opened his mouth to make an excuse. ‘You can’t possibly leave so soon!’ The rogue trader looked a totally different person out of her power armour, but still moved with the same languid grace as she snapped open a fan with one hand and laughingly blocked van Sennit’s progress with her other arm laid across his chest. She gently steered him around, despite his attempted protestations, until he was once more facing the room at large, by which point her arm had migrated to lying across his shoulders.

‘High lady,’ Vass said, somehow managing to curtsey to Chetta without either looking ridiculous or releasing her gentle hold on van Sennit. ‘I hadn’t yet had a chance to thank you once again for your hospitality. Your home is truly awe-inspiring! I hope that one day my own family may have the merest fraction of this…’ She paused and gestured around with her fan, taking in the marble columns, decorative fountains, carefully cultivated indoor fruit trees, ancient tapestries and the small army of sober-liveried servants moving amongst the spectacularly attired guests.

‘This…?’ Chetta prompted.

‘Just this,’ Vass laughed. ‘All of this.’

‘I’m certain that your alliance with House Xudine will bring you great fortune,’ Chetta said, with a completely straight face.

‘Oh, I’m sure it will,’ Vass agreed with a smile. ‘Especially given that Kennevario seems so happy with the progress made so far in his talks with your brother-in-law! I owe you a debt for agreeing to end the dispute between your houses, although of course I understand that the decision wasn’t taken with any thought to my benefit.’ Her smile widened. ‘I suppose the Emperor guides the hand of happy coincidence.’

‘I’m certain that He does,’ Chetta agreed, with a smile of her own. Everything about Vass’ presentation suggested that Chetta was looking at a flighty, insubstantial woman who’d been awarded a Letter of Marque as… what? A bribe? As the result of a bribe? As a convenient method of getting her out of the way, by compelling her to comply with the Letter’s requirements of exploration and conquest in the name of the Imperium? It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened.

And yet she’d worn power armour like she’d been born in it, and for all its richness and frippery, the suit hadn’t been unmarked. The dents and scratches had been lovingly smoothed out, filled in and painted over, but they’d still been there. The armour itself had seen action; the only question was, had Vass been inside it at the time?

This exuberance was a few steps up from the smoothly urbane rogue trader laughing at a secret joke, whom Chetta had met at Azariel’s wake. Either Vass was drunker – possible – or she’d been deliberately restraining her more effusive nature due to the solemnity of the event – also possible – or this evening’s version of Vass was a performance. In which case, Chetta mused, as Vass curtseyed again in farewell and steered the still-reluctant Alexun van Sennit away across the room, she was fairly certain that she wasn’t its intended audience.

‘This is Lady Chettamandey,’ she sub-vocalised into the comm-bead worked into her choker. ‘I want constant surveillance on Rogue Trader Vass. Where she goes, but particularly who she talks to, and what gets said.’

‘Acknowledged, my lady,’ came the response into her ear. There was a brief pause and then the same security guard spoke again, slightly hurriedly. ‘My lady, please be advised that Lord and Lady Jo’Sin are behind you.’

Chetta quelled the small smile that tugged at the corner of her mouth, and made a mental note to find out which staffer it was who’d just warned her of her sister-in-law’s approach and reward them in some small way. She turned on the spot.

‘Morandia, Jalamar,’ Chetta said amiably, managing to hide how amused she was by their clear disappointment at being unable to surprise her from behind. ‘How good of you to accept our invitation.’

‘Your hospitality will be remembered,’ Morandia replied, in a tone frosty enough to make a Valhallan reach for their coat. ‘Now, and before.’

‘I’m so glad,’ Chetta smiled, letting the reference to her dismissal of them in the aftermath of Azariel’s wake bounce off her. She changed her expression to one of slight puzzlement as she noticed that none of their usual shadows were hovering behind them. ‘No aides this evening, Jalamar?’

‘They have duties elsewhere,’ Jalamar replied stiffly. ‘And after all, I’m sure we can count on House Brobantis to accommodate any needs we may have whilst we are within these walls.’

‘Of course,’ Chetta smiled. ‘I understand. I’ve given DeShelle the night off, myself.’

INTO THE SHADOWS

‘So that’s the last place that we know he was seen alive,’ Krane said, jabbing his large finger at the map displayed on the data-slate that DeShelle was holding. ‘Wexler’s Antiquities Emporium.’ He ran his tongue over his teeth and grunted irritably. ‘And then he disappears, with not a soul able to tell us how or why. A Navigator of Brobantis is simply, what? Swallowed by the shadows? It’s not like he isn’t conspicuous.’

Indeed he was, DeShelle reflected. Avomarr Du-Choi Brobantis displayed little outward sign of his genetic heritage. He had no obvious mutations or deformities, save for his warp eye, which he kept covered. His build, although tall and spare, was certainly not outside the realms of regular humankind. However, he made up for that with his dress sense, which the word ‘flamboyant’ barely began to do justice to. The images she’d seen of him – and which they’d shown to various merchants, shopkeepers and bartenders – depicted a sombre, ruddy-skinned face in the heart of a riot of colours. Feathers, jewels, scales and ribbons, Avomarr had worn them all, often at the same time.

And yet they couldn’t find him.

The vox had come from Lady Chettamandey herself a few hours before, when she’d managed to get a private moment during the dinner House Brobantis were throwing to celebrate the ongoing forging of their new alliance with House Xudine. She’d directed Luc and DeShelle to change their focus and ignore, for now, the two Navigators whom were known to have died. Instead she wanted them to concentrate on this one, newly believed to have gone missing.

‘Well, something must have happened to him,’ DeShelle offered. ‘He’s well known around here, and his usual haunts remember seeing him up until roughly a week ago. He hasn’t been back to the palace since. Someone’s either got to him, or he’s drastically changed his habits all of a sudden, and people don’t do that without a reason.’

‘He’s a Navigator, though,’ Luc muttered. ‘Never try to apply normal human logic to Navigators, DeShelle. They think all twisty. It’s just how they’re made.’

DeShelle suppressed a sigh. Ever since she’d left the scholam, her life seemed to have consisted of being condescended to by large men with guns. She wasn’t entirely certain that was ever going to change, no matter how high she might rise.

‘So let’s not try to think like Navigators,’ she said. ‘We work on the basis that someone attacked him. If we assume that whoever did that wasn’t a Navigator, it means they were probably human.’ She looked up at Luc. ‘If you’re a human who wants to attack someone very conspicuous, moving around on foot, how do you do it?’

‘It depends on my motivations,’ Luc replied immediately. ‘If my intention is to kidnap, I balance ease of access to the victim with the possibility of being seen, and my ability to get them either to where I intend to hold them, or a vehicle with which I can transport them to where I intend to hold them. If I’m killing to send a message about my own impunity, or I intend it to be a warning to others, then I do it openly, in front of witnesses. If my intention is to kill and avoid notice, then my primary concern is for the victim to be isolated when I attack. If my intention is to kill and to avoid the body being found, then the victim needs to be alone when I attack and I need easy access to a method of disposing of the body.’

DeShelle looked at him for a moment. ‘And of course, the level of thought that you’ve given this has been solely to protect House Brobantis from the attentions of others.’

Luc just snorted.

‘Well, he hasn’t been attacked openly, we can say that with reasonable certainty,’ DeShelle mused, studying the map. ‘We think he was last seen here, here and here,’ she drew her finger across it, ‘and although we can’t be sure of the times of each sighting, it seems reasonable that he was moving in this direction.’ A bar where the patrons knew him, and didn’t care he was a Navigator; a massage parlour with optional extras available for purchase, or DeShelle was a High Lord of Terra; and an emporium where Avomarr apparently liked to shop for antiques and curios, the stranger the better. There had been at least two objects on sale that DeShelle had been reasonably certain were xenos in origin, although the proprietor hadn’t advertised them as such, and may well have not been aware of their true nature. Not that that would do him any good should someone with proper knowledge come calling.

‘We know he also frequented here,’ she said, pointing to another location on the map, a little to the east of their current position and in the same general direction as Avomarr’s suspected route. ‘But he never got there.’ It was the Desert Rose, an eatery that claimed to specialise in Tallarn cuisine, although DeShelle hadn’t detected a single authentic spice in the aroma that filled it. It had smelled tasty enough though, and her mouth watered slightly at the memory. The owner had recognised Avomarr immediately, but claimed not to have seen him for a month.

‘So either they’re lying,’ Luc agreed, ‘or whatever happened to him happened between Wexler’s and the Desert Rose. Or he changed his usual route for some reason we can’t guess at,’ he added.

‘Well, since we can’t guess at it, let’s investigate what we can guess at,’ DeShelle said. She absent-mindedly rubbed her neck where her ebonwood collar usually sat. ‘Come on. We’ll start at the Desert Rose and work back westwards. I could do with a meal, anyway.’

‘I’m impressed,’ Luc admitted, shining his luminator at the wall. ‘How did you spot this?’

They were in a service alley that ran between two retail units on Saint Kazarine’s Processional. It was dark, thanks to the lumens in the ceiling having failed, and it reeked of the rubbish dumped into it from either side. Luc played his light over a spatter of dark drops strung across the rough rockcrete wall, and at the far end of the alley a trio of oversized rats hissed and spat at the intruding photons.

‘My observational skills were one of the reasons Lady Chettamandey hired me in the first place,’ DeShelle replied. She swallowed, and grimaced as her stomach threatened to reintroduce her to the Desert Rose’s evening special.

Luc looked over at her, frowned, looked at the wall again, then back at her with a disbelieving expression on his face. ‘You’re not bothered by this, are you?’

‘No,’ DeShelle told him. ‘I’m not sure that meal agreed with me.’ That was a lie, but Luc seemed to buy it, or at least was going to pretend that he did.

‘We’re in the right place,’ he said, inspecting the wall again and looking up and down the alley. ‘If Avomarr was going from Wexler’s to the Desert Rose then he’d have probably walked right past the entrance to this.’

‘A good place to snatch him,’ DeShelle agreed. Her nausea was subsiding now. ‘It’s a quieter street, the lighting out there isn’t too good either…’ She took a deep breath, ignoring the smell of putrid garbage.

‘We’ll have to get a gene-hound down here, see if this matches his,’ Luc said, jerking his thumb at the wall. It wouldn’t be hard to do, DeShelle knew: every Navigator house had the gene sequences of all their members thoroughly mapped out, to best identify the most beneficial reproductive pairings. ‘But if it’s his, then he was killed here. So what happened to the body?’

‘Dragged or carried back up the alley, then loaded into a transport?’ DeShelle suggested, but Luc shook his head and tracked his luminator back the way they’d come.

‘The ground’s clear. No trail of blood.’ He looked at the piles of refuse that took up the dead end of the alley, and his lip curled in distaste. ‘You don’t think…?’

DeShelle sighed, and rolled up her sleeves. ‘Only one way to find out.’

‘You’re not serious?’ Luc said in dismay. He clearly felt that the position of head of security did not warrant getting his hands dirty in rubbish.

‘Trust me,’ DeShelle said fervently, ‘I’ve been in worse. I spent a few hours in a sewer system, once.’ She plunged her hands into a pile of mouldering vegetable peels and other, more decayed and less identifiable debris.

‘You continue to surprise me,’ Luc muttered. He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head in resignation. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’

DeShelle’s questing hands found innumerable putrid objects, but none of them were the flesh of Avomarr Du-Choi Brobantis. Her fingers did once close on a hard, slick object she recognised as bone, but when she pulled it out it clearly wasn’t human: the femur of some animal killed for meat, presumably.

‘Anything?’ she asked Luc, who glowered at her.

‘If I’d found anything, I’d have told you.’

He pulled a refuse sack aside and something leapt at his face as it was caught in the beam of his luminator – a rat, three feet long including its tail, with incisors the length of DeShelle’s little finger, and its dark fur sleek and wet with rancid fluids.

Luc snatched it out of the air with his free hand, and hurled it at the wall with a yell of disgust. It hit with a gruesome cracking noise, and dropped unmoving into a heap of old gutrot bottles.

‘Emperor-damned vermin,’ Luc muttered. His nostrils flared as he exhaled deliberately and slowly. DeShelle was astonished at the speed of his reactions, and the precision of his hand-eye coordination. She wondered what cocktail of drugs was mingled with his blood to have enhanced his reflexes like that. Was it always there, or was it released in response to external stimuli? If the latter, the dispenser – wherever it was – must have an unbelievable trigger rate, since an unenhanced human body could have barely begun its physiological response by the time the rat was already in the air…

She realised she was staring, and dragged her attention back to the refuse pile. They’d gone through inch by stinking inch of it and were almost at the back wall, but there was still no sign of the missing Navigator. She didn’t like to think what Luc would say if this turned out to be for nothing.

She frowned. ‘What’s that?’

‘Something else that stinks worse than grox dung,’ Luc grunted, not looking up.

‘No!’ DeShelle insisted. She took two unsteady steps forwards, her boots sinking into the unstable mess. The rat’s leap had caused another sack to fall sideways, spilling its rotten guts, but it had revealed a section of the alley’s back wall that was stained a darker colour. ‘Look here! Is this blood?’

Luc turned his luminator on it and joined her, squinting sceptically down at it. ‘Could be,’ he admitted, somewhat grudgingly. He leaned down and took a closer look. ‘I mean, blood’s blood. Two of those rats could have killed a third.’

‘There’s a puddle,’ DeShelle said, poking with her boot at the alley’s surface. ‘Dried up, but it’s there. A bleeding body rested here for a short time.’

‘Or was left here,’ Luc muttered. ‘They wouldn’t have got far on their own bleeding like that, if they were human.’

‘Or a Navigator,’ DeShelle added quietly. She looked back up the alley. ‘Why drag someone off the street, knife them halfway down an alley, then drag them to the other end of it and leave them here for a short time before moving them again? And where to?’

Luc grunted, and shone his luminator’s beam on the service doors that flanked them, one in the wall of each building. ‘I think perhaps we need to have conversations with the owners of these establishments.’

DeShelle shook her head. ‘No. It doesn’t feel right.’

Luc’s face screwed up perplexedly. ‘It doesn’t feel right? We think a Brobantis Navigator might have been murdered in this alley, and you’re telling me that investigating the two most likely places the body got dumped doesn’t feel right?’

The nausea was back. DeShelle dug out her data-slate and activated it again, bringing up the map.

‘What are you doing now?’

‘I’m checking what’s on the other side of this wall,’ she told him, expanding the readout with a swipe of her grimy fingers.

‘What’s…? It’s a wall! There’s no door! What the warp does it matter what’s on the other side of it?’

DeShelle ignored him while she double-checked their location, then held it up for him to see. ‘Look. We’re right near the edge of the block. On the other side of this wall is a hab zone that’s been abandoned since the redscale outbreak last year.’

‘Fine,’ Luc said. ‘So what?’

‘So trust me,’ DeShelle told him, turning around and heading for the relative light of Saint Kazarine’s Processional. ‘We can always come back, but for now, just trust me.’

It took them three blocks to find a cut-through to the hab area, and only a handful of ducats to bribe the bored watchmen who’d been set to ensure that no one got in or out. There was no current risk of infection: the Administratum simply didn’t want anyone unauthorised to get in and set up home without permission in what would be desirable residences, once the correct post-infection protocols had finally been run. Had the redscale still been active then they’d have encountered proctors, who would have likely responded to attempted bribery with the business end of a riot-gun.

‘The alley ends behind that wall,’ DeShelle told Luc, directing her luminator across an open space of real grass, still watered by hydration systems but now growing long and unchecked. She turned around to look at the source of the wind that was buffeting them, and through which could be seen the blaze of lights that constituted Ascension City at night. ‘And here–’

‘Is an external-standard-thickness reinforced crysglass window, that’s been cut open with an Emperor-damned power tool or blade, by the looks of it,’ Luc said slowly. ‘What in the name of Holy Terra is going on here?’

‘There’s blood on the lower half of the cut,’ DeShelle said, directing her luminator at the dirty rivulets that stained the underside of the large oval which had been hacked right through the window. ‘And on the other side of it, a fifteen hundred-foot drop directly into Ascension River. Which is exactly where I’d dump a body, if I could get to it. We’ll need to check this blood matches Avomarr’s, of course. And the blood in the alley.’

Luc shook his head in disbelief. ‘You’d make a damned fine inquisitor, DuVoir.’

‘Don’t say that too loudly around her ladyship,’ DeShelle said with a snort.

IN ABSENTIA

The corridors of hab block 274-Delta were pitch-dark at night. When the lighting protocols had been set, centuries before, it had been decided that the public lighting levels should mimic those of the outside world, hundreds of yards away beyond the block’s outer walls. So it was that in the daytime the halls were lit by the acid-yellow glow of the ceiling lumens, and at night the ceiling lumens died away completely. In those hours, when someone standing under the sky would have benefited from the faint glimmer of the moons, or Ascension City’s light pollution that hid the stars from view, the residents of 274-Delta existed with no light in their hallways other than whatever they brought with them.

Not everyone that passed through those hallways needed light, however.

There were three of them, walking with the soft, practised tread of professionals. Amateurs would have crept along, moving unsteadily on tiptoe and brushing along the walls, and attracting more attention by dint of their unnatural movements had they been heard through the thin doors that separated them from the residents. Instead the trio walked quickly and with purpose, so that if anyone thought they’d heard something and stopped to listen, the footsteps from outside would already be fading. And in these halls, rarely patrolled by proctors and where the watchmen were little more than semi-legitimised extortionists, it was rare for someone to take an interest in anything that did not directly concern them.

They came to a halt outside a hab’s front door and took up positions, one standing on either side and the third kneeling directly in front of it. A data-slate briefly glowed green as the kneeling figure activated it to double-check the number, then was darkened again and put away. The face thus momentarily revealed was hooded, with the grille of a metal breath mask and lenses that either covered their owner’s eyes, or possibly replaced them entirely.

The kneeling figure leaned forwards, a long, multipronged tool held between their fingers. The door was secured by only a cheap, primitive mechanical lock – there were no sophisticated code entry or fingerprint recognition systems in hab block 274-Delta. The tool probed into it, expertly manoeuvred by deft digits, and the lock clicked open in a matter of seconds.

The figure on the right-hand side of the door went through first, the long-nosed shape of a silenced autopistol raised and tracking across firing arcs. His opposite number followed, snapping out a long, thin rod that crackled into blue-white life – a shock baton. The kneeling figure waited for their companions to enter before following, closing the door behind them and gently locking it from the inside. From arriving at the door to being inside the hab with the door shut again had taken less than ten seconds.

There was little enough space inside the hab, and the trio covered it expertly and quickly, but clearly didn’t find what they sought. They came to a frustrated halt after a brief flurry of activity.

‘Lights,’ said one of them, the first to enter.

‘They will not be voice-activated in these domiciles,’ replied the one who’d picked the lock.

‘I know that,’ the first speaker replied, exasperation audible in his tone. ‘But you’re standing next to the switches.’

The lock-picker reached out a hand, and a moment later the hab’s lumens flickered into life. Two of the intruders reached up to remove infra-goggles from their faces, but their naked eyes showed nothing further to what they’d already seen.

The hab had clearly been occupied until very recently, as was evidenced by the plate of half-eaten but not-yet-mouldy food on the floor, the scattering of old devotional pamphlets and the faint aroma of unwashed clothes. However, the dresser with what looked to be hastily emptied drawers, the loose floor panel which might have been levered up to remove valuables secreted beneath it, and the empty space surrounded by burned incense which was just the right size for an effigy of the God-Emperor, strongly suggested that whoever had lived here was gone, with little intention to return in the immediate future.

‘You’re certain this is the right place?’ the first speaker asked.

‘This residence is registered to Tekoa and Ama Yunn,’ the hooded figure by the switches replied. ‘Any error lies with the records.’

‘Yunn clearly had some idea of what might follow his actions,’ said the second man to enter. He deactivated his shock baton, retracted it and replaced it on his belt. ‘The question is, what motivated him to try to access those records in the first place?’

‘Brobantis,’ the first speaker said, pinching the bridge of his nose with his left hand in apparent irritation. ‘It’ll be Brobantis. It seems that woman just can’t keep her nose out of anything.’

‘If she has relocated the junior sub-prefect to within her own premises, we are very unlikely to be able to reach him,’ said the hooded figure.

‘We would not,’ the second man said. ‘But…’

‘Too risky to break cover at this point,’ the first man broke in firmly. ‘Besides, what’s done is done. Either Brobantis has the records, or they don’t. We should find out soon, either way.’ He shrugged, and holstered his autopistol. ‘You never know. Emperor willing, it could work to our advantage.’

A hissy, crackling wheeze that was probably sarcastic laughter emanated from the hooded figure.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ the first speaker muttered. ‘When did you become so cynical?’

There was a momentary pause.

‘That wasn’t a literal question,’ the first speaker added in a tone of mild disgust. He shook his head. ‘Come on, we’re wasting time here. And the boss isn’t going to be pleased.’

PREPARATIONS

The Children of the Serpent were gathered again. Sulaman Eichner had sent out word at Radimir’s urging, and they’d assembled inside Svet’s generator chamber once more. Their numbers were greater, this time. Radimir wasn’t sure if this was because the last meeting had been so rushed, or whether the pull of the cult had actually increased. He was uneasy, regardless of the cause. More people meant a greater chance of unknowns, of outsiders slipping in and everyone assuming that they were there with someone else. He watched as worshippers arrived, one after another, and was pleased to see that Aylen Marjuk appeared to be in charge of security. The former Guardsman vetted each new arrival, waving past those he knew personally and holding others until someone else could vouch for them.

It was an efficient and well-ordered process. How ironic was it, Radimir mused, that even the greatest bastions of order could be twisted to benefit Chaos? Some of the most gifted tactical minds the galaxy had ever seen had worked in its service. There was a place for the blind rage of a berserker, of course there was, but such power needed to be brought to bear in the right place, at the right time, and for the right purpose. An enemy understood was an enemy already half-defeated. The systems of the Imperium could be turned against it like a corrupted knife twisting in its gut, a malign canker against which its bloated body had no defence, for it thought it to be part of itself.

Some of his own might call him radical. Some of his own might even call him heretic. But Radimir Niklau had been taught to use his enemy’s weapons against itself, and he understood the wisdom of those teachings.

He let Eichner address them first. The archivist had a charming, earnest and almost childlike wonder to him as he spoke of the power and glories of the True Gods. He made believing sound so easy, Radimir realised. He was positive, uplifting. He was preaching to ranks of downtrodden workers – faceless manufactorum grunts, thoroughfare cleaners and boiler stokers – and telling them that when the Great Powers held sway, they would all be beautiful and unique.

The Imperial Creed was a lie, Eichner maintained. It was blinding and suffocating, demanding worship to one god when in fact there were many. It offered only miserable slavery, and not for reward, but simply under the threat of punishment for straying. A glorious new world awaited them, and they could be a part of bringing it about.

It was true, in a sense. When Vorlese was pulled into the warp, when the great beasts of the empyrean descended to glut themselves on the planet’s dullard souls, it would indeed be glorious. They would all be beautiful and unique: each one a delicate morsel, a singular blend of fear and torment that would be savoured. Radimir still hadn’t decided whether to take Eichner with him or not. He was leaning towards not. Let the archivist experience what he so deeply desired. Otherwise Radimir would have to explain why they weren’t staying to witness the glory, and that could get awkward.

The Children were hanging on Eichner’s words. Radimir could see the eager gleam in their eyes, the edge of delighted smiles on their faces. They had the courage to look past the fear that had been drummed into them since the moment of their birth, to hear the message and accept it into their hearts.

It was time.

He stepped out of the shadows of a generator stack – literally out of the shadows, concealing his amusement at the gasps of wonder and shock that momentarily filled the place – and strode forwards to appear at Eichner’s shoulder just as the archivist finished speaking.

‘I’ve been making preparations,’ Radimir said, looking around at them. ‘Gathering what I need to call down the attention of the gods, the True Gods, to this miserable rock. When we can do that, when we can prove ourselves worthy of their notice, they’ll accept each and every one of you, and reward you richly and justly.’ He paused. Took a breath.

‘But to carry out the final part, the ritual that will allow us to commune with them, I will need your help.’

He let that sink in for a moment. Let them feel needed. Let them feel important. Give them a taste of agency, the notion that their insignificant lives could truly affect their world. They were used to endless labour without reward. Salvation presented on a plate might taste too sweet, might put them off. Better to dress it up in terms that they were used to, of labour with reward: better rewards, and coming oh so soon.

And besides, it would give him a wall of bodies to put between him and anyone who might come investigating, should that come to pass.

‘What do you need from us?’ Eichner asked eagerly. It wasn’t play-acting: Radimir hadn’t told Eichner the next stage of his plan, and the archivist was genuinely excited. He looked as though he could almost taste the forbidden knowledge that he craved… whatever it was.

‘We will need a large, open area on the planet’s surface,’ Radimir said, to a few gasps from his audience. ‘It must be at least seventy yards across in all directions, and cleared of debris. We will have to inscribe runes and wards, and trust me when I say that you do not want them to be disrupted because someone left a rock in the wrong place.’

He let them dwell on that for a moment. Of course, the runes and wards would be doing nothing to ensure their safety. Radimir didn’t want them disrupted because otherwise the ritual simply wouldn’t work. But they didn’t need to know that.

‘But Goodsire Niklau,’ someone spoke up, ‘we can’t be certain that our work will go uninterrupted. The Smog Deeps are dangerous!’

‘So am I,’ Evelyn Darke retorted, from the corner where she’d ensconced herself. There was a muttering and mumbling, but a general nodding of heads. Most people knew the Children’s resident pyromancer, and the notion that she’d be there to protect them seemed to go some way to reassuring the gathered crowd.

‘Aylen, Evelyn and Svet will be with you,’ Radimir said, receiving nods from the three that he’d named. ‘Take whatever weapons and protective gear you have, but do not fear the foul air overmuch. Soon the gods will come, and then whatever hardships you may suffer in the meantime will be as nothing. They will be seen as badges of loyalty and devotion!’

He pulled a data-slate out of his pocket. ‘Sulaman.’

‘Yes, Goodsire Niklau?’ the archivist said expectantly.

‘These files are of the designs that must be made,’ Radimir told him, handing it over. ‘Each one shows but a section of it. Do not attempt to collate the files together to make a whole. Do not try to look at the whole thing when it has been set in place. Without the proper training, your mind would be destroyed long before you could receive the knowledge that you seek, such is the glory of the gods.’

Eichner swallowed nervously. ‘But that would be a badge of loyalty and devotion, would it not? And the gods would heal me?’

Radimir shrugged. ‘There is loyalty, and then there is carelessness, my friend. Do not take the gods’ mercies for granted. They don’t appreciate it.’

Eichner nodded, his expression apologetic. ‘Of course, of course! And, uh, if you will forgive me, Goodsire Niklau… It sounds as though while we are doing this, you will be elsewhere. May we know your intent?’

Radimir considered. This wasn’t his cult, not really. They were Eichner’s. He was in good standing so long as he had the archivist’s backing, but Eichner was intelligent and independently minded. It might be wise to mollify him, and Radimir trusted that Marjuk had ensured there were no imposters present.

He unbuckled one of his belt pouches and reached into it, pulling out five small, dark objects. They were glossy and opaque, nearly spherical, and refracted the light oddly.

‘Do you know what these are?’ he asked Eichner. The archivist shook his head. All around them, members of the cult leaned in a little closer, fascinated by this potential disclosure.

It was an unwise move. Even removed from the skulls of their previous owners, the eyes had power. One man, perhaps weaker of mind than his companions, began to tremble and then fell to the floor, thrashing. The other Children drew back, making noises of concern and alarm.

‘These are the warp eyes of Navigators,’ Radimir explained, raising his voice to regain their attention, and drawing a collective intake of breath from his audience. ‘Look too closely at your peril!’

‘Help him,’ Eichner directed, looking embarrassed at one of his cult being so easily overwhelmed. Two others towed the thrashing man out of view, and Eichner deliberately looked at Radimir’s face rather than what was in his hands, returning the floor to him. ‘Navigators, goodsire?’

‘Navigators,’ Radimir repeated. ‘The useful mutant. The accepted mutant.’

There was a muttering and grumbling, and several sympathetic glances cast at Svet, or the other members of the cult who exhibited traits that had taken them beyond the accepted boundaries of humanity.

‘These eyes represent the Imperium’s most finely honed genetic advances into harnessing and navigating the warp,’ Radimir continued. ‘These eyes have gazed upon the realm, perhaps even the very faces, of the gods themselves. And what do their owners do with that blessing?’ He snorted derisively. ‘They move starships around.’

The rumblings grew louder, and there were cries of ‘Shame!’

‘These are our keys,’ Radimir said, holding his hand up. ‘We will use their connection to the warp to draw the gaze of the gods here to Vorlese, and then we shall receive our rewards!’

Excited cheers, applause and self-congratulatory exclamations ensued. Radimir smiled, knowing full well that they’d take it as pleasure rather than him laughing at their gullibility.

‘But in answer to your question, Sulaman,’ he continued, pocketing the eyes again, ‘I still need three more. So while you make our preparations, I will be hunting these pampered tools of the Imperium’s will through their gilded corridors and pleasure lounges, ready to make them serve truly worthy masters.’

Sulaman Eichner fell to one knee and bent his head in awed devotion, then bounded back to his feet and waved his arms at his congregation. ‘Go! Get whatever you need! We have our purpose!’

The gathering of humanity, subhumanity and abhumanity began to shuffle and move, excitement rippling through it. Radimir caught snippets of conversation: excited talk of the glories to come; discussion on exactly how dangerous the gangs that patrolled the Smog Deeps were, and indeed whether they could be recruited; a plan being hatched by Svet’s three brothers to steal a food transport so he could be moved down through the block without being noticed, at least until they were deep enough that the watchmen and proctors would no longer be present to trouble him.

Everything seemed to be going well. Limited though their understanding was, the Children might just serve his purpose, and it even sounded like he might not need to come up with every single detail of the plan himself–

Something slammed into his ribs, a narrow impact barely turned aside by the concealed body armour he wore. He staggered sideways, turning to face his attacker and clawing at his belt for his powerblade, already reaching out to find the closest area of darkness in case he needed to retreat…

Della.

Knife in hand, eyes red from sobbing, her previously hidden face now revealed by the hood she’d just thrown back. She lunged at him again, screaming her dead sister’s name. The one who’d died in her own bar, her head blown apart by autopistol shots that he’d fired.

Radimir raised his left hand to catch her clumsily descending knife hand by the wrist, drew his right arm back to plunge his own blade into her chest and–

She caught fire.

There was no starting point to the flame; it didn’t suddenly catch, or start licking over her. One moment she wasn’t on fire, and the next moment she was. Blue-white flames erupted all across her body and robes, turning her from a sobbing avatar of vengeance into a staggering, screaming human torch that reeked of burning hair and cooking fat. Radimir scrambled aside as Della’s movement carried her forwards, flailing, until she collided with a generator stack and bounced off it. She stumbled a few more steps, beating uselessly at herself, then fell forwards onto what had once been her face and lay still while her body continued to burn and cook.

‘Would anyone else like to raise an objection?’

Evelyn Darke stepped into view, her right fist clenched and a shimmering heat haze rising from around it. There was a mass shaking of heads and muttered negatives as her dark eyes raked slowly across the stunned crowd.

‘Good,’ she said, and unclenched her hand. The ferocious blue-white flames faded, to be replaced with comparatively gentle yellow ones. She held Radimir’s gaze for a few seconds, then turned to head for the exit. He watched her go. A powerful talent, that one. It would be a shame to let it go to waste… but potentially dangerous to keep it around. Radimir’s gifts had been honed by his masters, and he’d been trained to keep his mind safe from those beings that might seek to use him as a doorway into this reality. Darke might be powerful, but she would have had no such training.

But that didn’t mean that she couldn’t be taught. Perhaps it was time to take on a pupil of his own, Radimir thought. Darke’s raw, destructive power could be of great use to him, for when stealth was no longer an option. He’d have to consider it. For now, let her guard the site of the ritual and keep that safe for him.

He resheathed his powerblade and checked his body armour, fingering the hole in his jacket where Della’s knife had struck. Behind him, one of Svet’s brothers shuffled forwards and, with a nervous glance at the nearby generator stack, smothered Della’s merrily burning corpse with his own cloak.

THE ENEMY WITHIN

‘I don’t want her here any more,’ Chetta said irritably as she stumped along the corridor, trying to keep up with Vittariel’s long strides. Her hip wasn’t giving her too many problems today, but her brother-in-law’s stubborn refusal to walk at a considerate pace was taxing her.

‘We don’t have a choice,’ Vittar replied, his own tone equally short. ‘She’s the honoured guest of Kennevario, and, need I remind you, a rogue damned trader. She can in all likelihood go where she pleases.’ He glanced sideways and downwards at her. ‘It’s the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension in a few days, and she’ll be there too. Why does she bother you so badly, anyway?’

‘Gut instinct,’ Chetta replied, staring straight ahead and glaring at the next turning as though she could bring it closer through sheer willpower.

‘Gut instinct?’ Vittar scoffed. ‘Really, Chetta.’

‘Yes, Vittar,’ Chetta snapped. ‘You’ve flown enough to trust your gut, I hope? When you can’t perceive a threat, but you know that it’s there? I can feel it in my bones at those times, I don’t know about you.’

‘We’re not in the warp now, Chetta,’ Vittar said quietly. ‘I won’t deny that I fly by instinct sometimes, but this is real space. We have to use our eyes and our ears and our minds. If we try to fly by instinct here, we’ll fly blind.’

‘Foolishness,’ Chetta muttered. ‘Are you truly that enamoured of the woman that you can’t perceive the threat she poses, with your eyes and your ears and your mind?’

‘Enamoured?’ Vittariel barked a laugh. ‘She’s fair to look on for a warp-blind, I won’t deny that. Is that your problem with her, Chetta? Envy?’ His smile turned vicious. ‘After all, she is all the things that you are not – tall, thin, graceful, polite and courteous…’

‘Courteous?’ Anger flared up inside her, and Chetta grabbed Vittariel’s arm and hauled him to a halt, just short of the next junction. ‘Courteous, you overlong bag of bones?! Let me tell you how courteous your lady love is, shall I? I instructed security to monitor her at the dinner last night, to record her conversations, because I knew full well she was up to something.’

‘Go on,’ Vittariel said. He shook his sleeve free of her grip, but made no other move. He could recognise when Chetta had something important to say.

‘They couldn’t,’ Chetta said simply. ‘Audio sensors were foiled by some sort of disrupter field, almost certainly emanating from that avian servitor she had with her. And our observers couldn’t read her lips for more than a second or so at a time because of that damnable fan.’ She shook her head. ‘These aren’t coincidences, Vittar. She knew exactly what she was doing, and she somehow predicted how we might try to monitor her.’

Vittariel frowned. ‘I think you’re jumping at shadows, Chetta. Kennevario’s no fool, and he’d not have taken up with a rogue trader who was one. There are plenty of reasons why she might not want her conversations monitored, and our surveillance methods aren’t so unique.’

Chetta raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, you’ve spent more time around her than anyone else has.’ She began walking again, and rounded the next corner. Vittariel caught up to her a moment later, his face tight with anger.

‘If you think that I told her–’

‘No, you were quite clear.’ Chetta cut him off with a wave of her hand. ‘No fool, perfectly understandable reasons, etcetera, etcetera.’ She came to a halt in front of a door and palmed the release panel, which read her handprint and slid open to allow her entry. Vittariel followed her in, ducking his tall frame through the doorway and muttering furiously under his breath.

Tekoa Yunn looked up from a datascreen. ‘High lady.’ He saw Vittariel looming behind her and ducked his head again. ‘My Lord Vittariel.’ He’d swapped his grey Administratum robe for the black-and-gold livery of House Brobantis, which Chetta thought suited his complexion rather better and meant he looked less like he’d just walked through an entire passageway of dusty cobwebs.

They were in what was a modest accommodation suite by the standards of Brobantis Palace, but still three times the size of the one Tekoa and his husband had been living in previously. It was also considerably more secure, which was just as well: Krane had sent someone to check on the Yunns’ old place that morning, and they’d found the front door kicked in and the few possessions they’d left behind strewn around. It could have been a coincidence, of course – that hab zone was hardly crime-free – but Chetta wasn’t convinced. She was quite certain that someone had put an alert on the files that Tekoa had tried to access in the Administratum’s archives, and that they’d then sent some goons to silence him.

‘Tekoa,’ she said, coming to a halt and leaning on her cane. ‘How goes the progress?’ She still wasn’t sure how far she trusted Vittariel over the murders and disappearances of other Navigators, but the search for a potential threat from Gallimo Prime was a different matter entirely. Family politics be damned: her brother-in-law knew what horrors lurked in the warp just as well as she did, and she couldn’t believe that he’d want to see any planet doomed to such a fate, let alone the one he was currently residing on.

‘Slowly,’ Tekoa admitted. ‘I’ve been entering the names from the records into the system to give us a framework. Most of them are indentured labourers – criminals from Gallimo sent here for the last of the restoration work gangs.’

‘We can probably discount those, then,’ Vittariel said, crossing the floor of rose-coloured tiles in a few long steps to look over Tekoa’s shoulder at the display. ‘The gang foremen won’t lose their charges.’

Chetta snorted. ‘They work with numbers, Vittar, not names. If they find they’re down a head or two then they’ll just grab someone off the street who doesn’t look too rich and put chains on them. We’d never know what happened to the escapees.’

‘All the workers from Gallimo are fitted with penal collars,’ Vittar told her, either not trying hard to keep the condescension off his face, or failing at doing so. ‘If they stray more than fifty yards from a foreman’s control node…’ He mimed an explosion with his long, delicate fingers.

‘If the collars work,’ Chetta grunted.

‘They work,’ Vittar said absently, turning back to the screen. ‘We build them.’

‘Very well then, we ignore the workers, at least for now,’ Chetta conceded. ‘There were several other ships that put people ashore, and I imagine some other arrivals from the mass transits who weren’t indentured.’

‘Indeed, high lady,’ Tekoa acknowledged. He tapped a few keys, then grimaced. ‘That leaves us with… two thousand, seven hundred and forty-two potentials.’

Vittariel swore under his breath. Chetta sighed, and rubbed around her warp eye. ‘Well, that’s better than nothing, I suppose. We’ll have to see if this can help us at all.’ She pulled a data crystal out of her pocket. ‘It’s the pict-feed from the star port over the dates we’re looking at. Everyone who arrived on this planet through Ascension City will be recorded here.’

‘How did–? Oh,’ Vittariel said, cutting himself off. ‘Alexun.’

‘Alexun,’ Chetta confirmed, handing the crystal to Tekoa.

‘What do you hope to gain from this, though?’ Vittariel asked her. ‘Are you expecting someone to walk through the immigration controls in a robe with letters reading “I AM HERE TO DESTROY THE PLANET”?’

‘Of course not,’ Chetta snapped. ‘But we only have the records for who came in. We have the pict-feed covering who comes in and goes out, and we can match up the names to faces based on time of arrival. If someone arrives but hasn’t yet left, and the ship that brought them is no longer in orbit, then they’re still here somewhere. Perhaps we can narrow down a suspect field, at least in terms of people we can possibly do something about.’

Vittariel shook his head in disgust. ‘You’re clutching at straws, Chetta.’

‘I’m doing what I can to ensure we’re safe,’ Chetta told him. ‘If you have any better ideas then feel free to contribute them.’

‘High lady?’ Tekoa put in nervously. ‘Your idea… it is good, of course, but there are days of footage to watch, and multiple different entry and exit gates. I couldn’t possibly cover it all in any sort of timescale.’

‘I’m well aware of that,’ Chetta told him, ‘which is why you’ll be getting some help. I’m going to put together a team of staff to review the footage with you. You’ll be in charge of organising them – I thought that would play to your strengths as a former junior sub-prefect.’

Tekoa’s face brightened. Emperor help her, the man actually enjoyed that sort of thing! ‘High lady, it would be my honour to serve.’ He took the crystal from her and slotted it into the cogitator’s interface, then bent over his work again. Vittariel watched him for a second longer, then moved away and jerked his head at Chetta to follow him to the far side of the room. Chetta sighed, but obliged him.

‘Well?’

‘You’ve not shared much with me about what Krane and DuVoir have turned up,’ Vittar murmured.

‘There’s been precious little,’ Chetta replied softly. ‘The killer or killers have left few traces.’

Vittar made an unconvinced noise in his throat. ‘Luc Krane is tasked with keeping all of House Brobantis safe, Chetta. I hope that his report won’t differ from what you’ve just said, should I demand an update from him. I’d hate for you to be seeking to gain a political advantage by keeping me in the dark.’

Chetta smiled humourlessly at him. ‘I assure you, Vittar, we are all in the dark on this one.’

THE EMPEROR’S ASCENSION

The Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension was the greatest public holiday across many worlds of the Imperium. Chetta could say that with some authority, since her service with the sector fleet had taken her to quite a few, not to mention the times the Feast had been celebrated on board ship and the diverse local traditions for the day amongst the various crewers had come together to create a riot of noise and colour, festivity and devotion. Vorlese’s relative proximity to Holy Terra meant the Ecclesiarchy held strong sway over the hearts and minds of its citizens, and the fact that the capital was named Ascension City had not been an accident. Vorlese might not have the purity of faith of a cardinal world, but it certainly didn’t lack enthusiasm. The great cathedrals that topped some of Ascension City’s hab blocks had unfurled mighty banners, some of them hundreds of feet high, that depicted the victories of the Emperor and His greatest heroes, while bells the size of tanks tolled in a never-ending peal of worship. Cherub automata, held aloft by busily beating wings and anti-grav technology, circled around the rooftops, along the connecting processionals and into the internal halls, all the while broadcasting hymns and prayers from inbuilt vox-speakers.

And the parades! Tens of thousands strong, as the population of Ascension City was granted brief respite from the drudgery of their servitude, and dressed in their best clothes to march and declare their undying devotion to the Master of Mankind. Sometimes, through poor planning, bad luck or simple spite, the parades ran into each other. Then they might join together to create impromptu street parties of love and fellowship. Or, if tempers flared, accusations of malicious obstruction could fly, or declarations of superior piety, at which point the proctors had to descend swiftly to prevent the eruption of what would essentially be a small-scale civil war. Even below, down in the Smog Deeps, worship of the Emperor was not forgotten by many. Every now and then primitive fireworks would blossom to briefly illuminate the grey-brown clouds from within, or sometimes even clear them completely before bursting into showers of sparks around the level of the lower Mids.

All through the day, the common folk of Vorlese danced and sang and ate and drank, giving thanks to the Lord of the Golden Throne for their very existence. As dusk fell the ruling elite began to gather in the manses and palaces, drifting together in their very finest clothes to give worship to the Emperor like a swirling, spiralling mass of gas and dust starting to coalesce inside a beautiful nebula. While the reveries of the labourers might dissolve into drunken brawls over long-standing family feuds, the nobles and dignitaries favoured other, more subtle methods of asserting dominance.

Usually.

The greatest gathering of all was held in the palace of the planetary governor. To be invited was an acknowledgement of one’s standing within society. To attend was to indicate a willingness to be involved in the political games that were played by the elite, and there were no opportunities given to learn the ropes. However, to refuse an invitation was at best a sign of weakness, and at worst could be taken as a direct insult to the office of the governor. So it was that invitations had become a commodity and currency in and of themselves, a way of gaining access to the uppermost social circle or, in contrast, of forcing someone into a position that left them vulnerable and prone to exploitation.

‘I’ve heard that Sen Uru Dukarr is not in attendance this evening,’ Chetta said to the usher escorting her and Vittariel to the waiting area where they would be presented to the crowd. After some discussion they’d agreed to arrive together in order to present a unified front to society in general. Chetta had wondered whether people would assume that she’d in fact taken up with her deceased husband’s brother, and had decided that if that would strengthen the image they wished to portray then she was fine with it. And truth to tell, all things being equal she’d not have objected.

‘I couldn’t possibly comment, high lady,’ the usher replied smoothly. Chetta sighed and palmed him a hundred-ducat piece – a small fortune for a labourer, little more than a handsome tip for a servant in the governor’s household. Even loose proximity to power held the potential for high rewards, if the power was great enough. ‘Perhaps I misspoke. I have heard the same, and from my colleagues whose jobs are to organise such things, so I doubt they are incorrect.’

‘And do your colleagues know why he has declined the invitation?’ Chetta inquired.

‘That would be a private matter between Lord Dukarr and Governor Taranthis.’

Chetta rolled her eyes and slipped him another coin. ‘Honestly, why do we even continue this farce?’

‘Forgive a servant his amusements, high lady,’ the usher smiled. ‘I have heard that Lord Dukarr is claiming ill health, although there is speculation – and I should stress that it is purely speculation – that he wishes to avoid your company, given the recent declaration of a trade war between your two most noble houses.’

‘Bloody coward,’ Vittariel muttered.

‘I’ll not be complaining,’ Chetta declared. The evening was going to be complicated enough as it was, without the potentially disrupting presence of Sen Uru Dukarr to factor in. ‘But let’s see, shall we? I wouldn’t put it past him to turn up anyway. He’s never had much time for propriety.’

They were ushered into a waiting room, which in truth was little more than a richly upholstered dome some thirty feet across. A mirror adorned the back wall, and Chetta took a moment to check her appearance in it. She still wore her veil, and would do so when on Vorlese until a year had passed since Azariel’s death. The tradition was supposed to denote grief and piety, of course, and a lack of concern for outward appearances, but Chetta knew full how the games of society were played. Widow or not, mourning or not, she needed to keep up the appearance of someone in full control of her emotions, and that included making sure that her clothes were hanging correctly and nothing was askew. She brushed a small fleck of dust from her left shoulder as a chime sounded.

‘Stop fussing with yourself,’ Vittariel told her, apparently unconsciously adjusting his own collar. ‘That’s the signal.’

Chetta took up position by his side just as the panels of the dome’s far wall began to peel outwards, like the petals of a mechanical flower. The day’s warmth was already beginning to flee from the evening air, as it tended to at the altitude of Ascension City’s rooftops, but enough remained that it was merely refreshing rather than actively chilling. Chetta smelled the citrusy tang of anelle blossoms, and the pervasive, sharp odour of woodsmoke.

‘Lord Vittariel of the House of Brobantis! Lady Chettamandey of the House of Brobantis!’ bellowed a vox-speaker immediately above them as they stepped forwards, accompanying the announcement with a fanfare. Chetta rolled her eyes and concentrated on not stumbling as they emerged from their waiting dome, but the segments of wall folded down seamlessly into the floor and the footing remained level.

Governor Taranthis had clearly had considerable work done to the gardens since the previous Feast. Due to Vorlese’s orbit being considerably slower around its parent star than Terra’s around Sol, the last celebration had occurred in midwinter, and the gardens had been filled with ice sculptures and delicately frozen water features. There had been beds of the hardy but beautiful Vorlesian snow lilies in full bloom, and even semi-tame herds of the six-legged, thickly furred quanga from the southern tundras that had foraged through the snow in the middle distance, cropping the grass of the great, rolling lawns. Chetta hadn’t trusted her own footing in such an environment and had grudgingly employed a powered, wheeled chair; she’d felt slightly compromised, but had been able to use her inexperience in operating it as a reasonable excuse to run over the toes of no fewer than three people whom she disliked, including Jalamar Jo’Sin.

Now, however, it was late summer. The water features weren’t frozen but were instead tinkling merrily, and what looked to be a whole orchard of mature, purple-leaved greach trees had been brought in and planted at what must have been an astronomical cost. Their fruits were just starting to ripen, and Chetta knew from a glance that when plucked from the low-hanging branches they’d be just sweet enough to be palatable, yet still pleasingly tart. The quangas were absent, but in their place were socoros, knee-high reptilian creatures that hopped around on two almost comically overlarge hind legs at startling speeds when alarmed, but otherwise shuffled along lazily as they sought out untrodden grass to eat, or tidbits dropped by the assembled guests.

The main body of the gardens was sunken, to better shelter it from the elements, and was bordered by a series of terraces through which wound steps and ramps so guests could, if they wished, venture up to the palace’s ramparts and look out onto the rest of Ascension City. Most, however, had congregated down in the centre, where the true cut and thrust of social positioning was taking place.

‘Ezallien went for a restrained approach, then,’ Vittariel commented as they left their dome, which began to refurl behind them. The domes were on a mid-level terrace and spaced at roughly fifty-yard intervals. After a few seconds the one to their left began to open, and a message similar to the one that had announced them began.

‘I rather like it,’ Chetta admitted, as they headed towards a ramp leading downwards. ‘It’s nice to have a bit of nature. Better than that time when everything was gold, anyway.’

‘I thought that was good,’ Vittariel said. ‘It looked impressive.’

‘That’s because you have the subtlety of a thunder hammer,’ Chetta snorted. ‘Ah, and speaking of a complete lack of subtlety, look who it is.’

Indrinian Vass was slinking towards them in a dark purple dress made from a scaled fabric that was so figure-hugging, a simple glance would have satisfied security that she possessed no concealed weapons. She wore gloves of the same fabric that reached up to mid-bicep, but still wore her plethora of jewelled rings from the dinner at Brobantis Palace over the top of them. She carried not one but two fans, currently folded, each one as long as her forearm and hand combined, and she was circled once more by her avian servitor. Kennevario Xudine was floating along behind her, but he stopped to converse with another small group of dignitaries, leaving Vass to approach them alone.

‘My lord and lady,’ Vass said cheerfully, curtseying almost like a dancer, with a fan outstretched in either hand. ‘A pleasure to see you here, and may the Emperor’s grace light your way.’

‘The pleasure is ours, Lady Vass,’ Vittariel replied quickly, before Chetta could say anything remotely barbed. She contented herself with a nod of what would hopefully be considered agreement at her brother-in-law’s words. ‘And may the Emperor smile upon you, as well. Have you been to many events such as this before?’

‘A handful,’ Vass replied, looking around as though taking in her surroundings anew. ‘Rarely anything with quite so many predators.’

Vittariel smiled indulgently. ‘The socoros are vegetarians, my lady.’

‘Oh, I meant the guests,’ Vass replied with a laugh. ‘Why, Kennevario and I have barely been here for half an hour and I have already received innumerable compliments on my appearance, several poorly veiled enquiries as to the exact nature and depth of my resources, and at least one suggestion that perhaps the noble House of Xudine is not best-suited to providing my fledging dynasty with Navigators.’

‘I will confess to curiosity,’ Chetta said as she and Vittariel took their last steps off the ramp and joined Vass on the level path of the main gardens. ‘Prior to the arrangements that are even now being forged, Xudine was what we refer to as a vagabond house.’ They paused for a moment, then all three began to walk towards a series of bonfires, around and sometimes over which tumbled gymnasts and acrobats. ‘As you say, you are looking to forge a new dynasty of rogue traders. You likely could have entered partnership with any number of houses, many of whom may have had greater resources and status than Xudine. Why choose them?’

‘Chetta,’ Vittariel chided her, but Vass waved a hand to dismiss his concerns.

‘It is a fair question, my lord, and I do appreciate the openness of it, compared to the conversations I have endured so far.’ She looked down at Chetta as they walked alongside each other, and Chetta was suddenly struck by the clarity of the other woman’s gaze. It very much felt like she was, for the first time, the subject of Indrinian Vass’ full attention. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience.

‘I value loyalty most highly, Lady Brobantis,’ Vass said simply. ‘House Xudine have amply demonstrated theirs.’ She looked up and ahead of them again, and the hint of her playful smile returned at the corners of her mouth. ‘Ah, is this our host I see ahead of us?’

Indeed, Chetta saw, it was. Governor Ezallien Taranthis was dressed in a magnificent coat of scarlet and silver, with a high collar that soared up even beyond the bald dome of vis head. Vis chain of office sat proudly on vis chest, and ve was holding court in front of the largest of the bonfires, with a gaggle of guests hanging on vis every word and laughing at appropriate moments.

‘My lord and lady of Brobantis!’ Taranthis said, turning and taking a few steps towards them with every appearance of delight, which could well have been genuine. Chetta had had little contact with ver beyond the occasional social function, and on the one hand their conversations had never been anything less than cordial. On the other hand, you didn’t get to be the planetary governor of somewhere like Vorlese without significant politicking ability, and Taranthis wouldn’t look to anger a powerful Navigator house without very good cause.

‘Your excellency,’ Chetta replied, bowing her head in what she hoped would be considered a respectful enough manner. ‘What a wonderful place you have created for the evening, as ever. May the Emperor’s light guide you.’

‘And you also,’ Taranthis said with a smile. ‘And, forgive me, your companion…?’

‘Indrinian Vass, rogue trader,’ Vass said, making another curtsey. ‘I have the honour to be the business partner of Lord Kennevario Xudine, your excellency.’

‘Ah yes,’ Taranthis nodded. ‘Be welcome here, Lady Vass.’ Behind ver, Chetta noticed a ripple of interest pass through the governor’s audience, disguised with varying degrees of success. One girl on the end was outright gawping, which was perhaps only to be expected: rogue traders were a comparatively rare breed, after all, and somewhat romanticised by those who had not travelled amongst the stars enough to meet one.

And there in the middle, of course, were Jalamar and Morandia. Jalamar wore a fully covering bodysuit, and his face was swathed in make-up, the better to reduce the scaly appearance of his skin. High-ranking socialites on a world as cosmopolitan as Vorlese were unlikely to take offence at the minor mutations of a senior Navigator, but a little grease to the wheels never hurt. Beside him, liquid reflections of flame washed across the dark lenses of Morandia’s eyeglasses. Chetta suppressed a smirk at the petty realisation that, between bright fires and darkening night, her sister-in-law would be essentially blind.

‘Speaking of Lord Xudine,’ Taranthis continued, and Chetta pulled her attention back to ver, ‘I wondered if I might have a few words with you both? And perhaps Lady Vass as well, since you’re here.’

‘Of course, governor,’ Chetta replied, deliberately not glancing at Vittariel. Such a request from the planetary governor was no request at all. Taranthis nodded gratefully, as though it had been, and turned to the rest of the nobles.

‘Pray excuse us for a moment. I will be back shortly – in the meantime, refreshments are being served in the orchard.’

The assembly broke up in ones and twos as it dawned on them that they were being dismissed. Chetta caught sight of Jalamar’s face as he turned to go, but couldn’t read his expression. Was he angry at them getting to be alone with the governor? Or was he happy? How exactly was this conversation about to go?

‘Walk with me, please,’ Taranthis said, turning away from the largest bonfire and beginning to stroll across the grass. Chetta obliged, glad that the ground was at least firm underfoot. Vittariel flanked her on her right, while Vass, now looking all business, walked on her left beyond the governor. Ahead of them, two gymnasts turned backflips in the grass, apparently so lost in their art that they cared not whether they had an audience.

‘I was very sorry to hear of the death of Lord Azariel,’ Governor Taranthis began. ‘You have my condolences.’

‘Thank you,’ Chetta murmured, hearing herself echoed by Vittariel.

‘I was, however, very glad to hear that the enmity between House Brobantis and House Xudine has finally been brought to an end,’ Taranthis continued, with perhaps the slightest stress on the word ‘finally’. ‘I commend everyone involved in that decision. Such friction rarely benefits anyone.’

Chetta said nothing. She felt that praise was more for her than Vittariel, since she had agreed to Xudine’s offer, while her brother-in-law was merely hashing out the details of it. But did Taranthis see it that way? A new bloom of light ahead signalled a fire-eater: a woman in a double-horned hat sending out great gouts of flame higher than the fires themselves.

‘But now, of course,’ Taranthis said with a sigh, ‘I hear of a new problem. This disagreement between House Brobantis and House Dukarr. That won’t involve any… unpleasantness… will it?’

‘All disputes are unpleasant, governor,’ Chetta replied bluntly. ‘However, House Dukarr and ourselves have been very clear that there should be no violence employed.’

‘That is good to know,’ Taranthis said, clasping vis hands behind vis back and frowning at the ground some ten paces ahead. ‘And yet Lord Dukarr, having previously confirmed his attendance tonight, has returned his invite at practically the last minute.’ Vis frown deepened. ‘He refused me! I’ve known Sen Uru for many years, and he is a man of many and varied characteristics, but not one of those, not one, is that of a man who would miss the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension at the palace of the planetary governor. And so I have to wonder… what does he fear?’

‘Whatever he may fear, it is unfounded,’ Vittariel said hotly. ‘Sen Uru is the man who feels that insult has been given, your excellency. He laid out the initial terms of our dispute, and we have countersigned them. If you require a copy of the document–’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Taranthis said, waving vis hand dismissively. ‘I must trust that you, and he, will abide by your words, but I should tell you this – I respect the ancient autonomy of the Navigator houses, and the great services you render the Imperium on a daily basis. However, I must think about the wellbeing of my own world. I have already spoken with Judge Arctos on this matter. I will not stand for violence, or violent disruption that may endanger life or productivity. This world is still barely recovered from the predations of the Despoiler. I won’t have conflict initiated here again – not by our own citizens, no matter how small the scale of it. I will employ any and all forces I have at my disposal, should I need to, and I will not be pausing to determine fault.’ Ve paused for a moment. ‘Or should I perhaps contact the Paternova? I find that there is nothing like the presence of true authority to swiftly settle a minor quarrel.’

Chetta moistened her mouth where it had dried a little. Taranthis could command the Vorlesian Hearthguard, and Arctos the full might of the local proctors and Adeptus Arbites. House Brobantis had considerable force of arms at its disposal, probably more than the governor realised, but enough to hold off the planetary defence forces and the Arbites? And even if they succeeded in that, such an act would make them outlaws, worse even than House Xudine had been. Taranthis could legitimately call in the Astra Militarum, or even appeal for aid from the Space Marines…

As for the Paternova… that had to be a bluff, surely? Even a planetary governor didn’t just whistle up a High Lord of Terra. But if Taranthis did, and if the Paternova listened, that could prove to be just as disastrous for Brobantis as open rebellion against Vorlese. Chetta had no intention of coming to the attention of her kind’s overlord unless it was on her terms.

She should purge all of Azariel’s xenos curios from the vaults, and sooner rather than later. Best not to have such potential blackmail material lying around if Dukarr was looking to make trouble, let alone if there was the faintest chance of the Paternova’s agents turning up.

‘You are aware, your excellency,’ Vittariel said tightly, ‘that such a statement from you could be just the catalyst for violence from those who would benefit from ourselves and House Dukarr falling from favour? If they were to make it look like part of our dispute–’

‘Of course I am aware of that, Lord Brobantis,’ Taranthis replied shortly. ‘That is why I am not having this conversation with you in front of anyone else.’ Ve fell silent for a moment as four acrobats tumbled towards them across the grass in a riot of effortless-looking handsprings.

Chetta frowned. They weren’t changing direction…

‘Down!’ Vass shouted half a second later, pushing in front of them all. At the top of a tumbling arc through the air, one of the gymnasts flung out a hand and a glittering silver sliver streaked from it, directly at the rogue trader.

SHEDDING LIGHT

The recaff was stale, the air was moist from captured breath and scented with sweat and the sickly ritual incense used to keep the cogitators functioning smoothly, and DeShelle DuVoir hadn’t slept properly for three days. She was sitting in an annex of one of the Brobantis palace’s main security suites, which had been turned into an investigative hub for the twin mysteries currently plaguing them: who had been killing Brobantis Navigators, and whether anyone with hostile designs on the planet of Vorlese might have arrived from the doomed Gallimo Prime.

Tekoa Yunn looked even more tired than DeShelle felt, but the former Administratum official was still doggedly searching through hours of pict-feed footage with the small team that Lady Brobantis had assigned to him. They pored over their screens on the other side of the unit, painstakingly matching faces to names as they cross-referenced with the recorded arrival times and gate numbers.

DeShelle had been studying her data-slate, trying to get things into some semblance of order in her mind, when the door opened and Luc Krane entered. The head of security looked agitated, but that wasn’t uncommon: Krane’s emotions often bubbled near the surface.

‘Guess what I’ve just found out,’ he said, sliding his large frame onto the bench next to her. DeShelle studied his face, noticing the tics and tells. He was excited, yet also uncertain.

‘Go on.’

‘There was a multiple murder a few days ago in a bar in the Mids called the Star Lounge,’ Krane said quietly, bringing up the details on his own data-slate and setting it in front of her. ‘A grim little place, frequented by all sorts of gutter-types. The news has been squashed heavily and word is that it was gang-related violence, but I leaned on a few sources. The main word on the street is a false trail, put out by someone with enough money or influence to get a lot of people to say the same thing. But not everyone.’

DeShelle frowned. ‘If you have most people saying one thing, and a few people saying another, then normally they’re the ones who are wrong.’

‘Not when the ones who are saying the second thing are people who were actually there,’ Krane argued. ‘My sources are solid. The people they’ve talked to who were at the Star Lounge say it wasn’t a gang issue. There were gangers there, but they weren’t involved. The whole thing sounds impossible, and here’s the part that’s relevant to us – two of the victims were Navigators.’

DeShelle choked on her recaff, and took a moment to get her breathing working correctly again. ‘Say that again,’ she croaked, when she could get words out.

‘Two Navigators,’ Krane repeated. There was the hint of a tight grin at the edge of his mouth. He’d found something disturbing, it seemed, but potentially useful. ‘In a dive bar, in the Mids. There was a secret narc lounge in the back, apparently. Two Navigators in disguise and one bodyguard murdered in the lounge, plus the bar’s owner when she went charging back there to find out what was going on. But the room had only one way in or out, no one saw the murderer arrive or leave, and all of the other punters were too far gone to have been the culprits. Half of them didn’t even know it had happened.’

DeShelle set her cup down and scrolled through the information Krane had gathered. ‘Who were the Navigators?’

‘We don’t know,’ Krane said with a shrug. ‘The fact they were even there at all has been clamped down on. Someone’s been pushing the other story hard, presumably to drown that out. My money is on at least one other house, trying to save face. All we can say is that they weren’t ours, thank the Emperor.’

‘And why were they in a bar in the Mids?’ DeShelle asked, but her mind was already throwing up possibilities. The simple kick of experiencing the grime-encrusted life of the proles, some sort of clandestine romance – perhaps they were from different houses, or at least one of them was already married? – or even conducting their own intrigue in a place they thought no one would look for them. When it came to the circuitous thought processes of Navigators, the possibilities were essentially endless. ‘Never mind, it’s probably not important. But they’re definitely not ours?’

‘Everyone’s accounted for,’ Krane confirmed.

‘So perhaps Lord Vittariel was right,’ DeShelle mused. ‘Perhaps this isn’t someone targeting House Brobantis specifically. Perhaps it really is an anti-mutant group, or an anti-Navigator group.’ She squeezed her eyes shut tight for a moment, fighting against the sandy feeling in them, and ran a finger around her neck, beneath the collar. ‘I wish we could talk to the other houses and compare notes. If there are people out there picking off Navigators one at a time we might be able to stop them if we combined forces, but I already know that her ladyship would say it would be too much of a risk, that we’d lose face…’

‘And she’d be right,’ Krane put in. He glanced over his shoulder at Yunn’s team, then turned back to her and lowered his voice further. ‘But I think you’ve missed the real issue, here.’

DeShelle frowned, cursing the weariness in her brain that fogged her thoughts. What was so obvious, that she’d failed to pick up on?

Then it hit her. ‘Wait, you said that there was no obvious culprit, but the bar owner was killed when she went to investigate? So she disturbed the killer, and then they couldn’t be found?’

‘Yes.’ Krane tapped a pict of a woman’s body, minus most of its head, with a shotgun still held loosely in slack hands. ‘This wasn’t a murder discovered after the fact. Witnesses say this woman took up her gun and went through a staff-only door when there were sounds of disturbance, and got herself killed. By the time anyone else followed her in, all that was left were dead people and narc addicts. Someone had a picter on them, and got this.’

‘Autopistol,’ DeShelle muttered instinctively. Krane nodded his agreement as she scrolled. ‘What are you thinking? In and out through the air ducts?’

‘Could be,’ Krane said, noncommittally. ‘But we still haven’t worked out how the killer got Avomarr to the window, and I don’t think there were air ducts near there. What if they were hiding in plain sight? Some sort of advanced cameleoline, something like that? Sneak in, kill people, sneak out again, uncover when you’re away from the site.’

DeShelle frowned. ‘So what are you suggesting when it came to Avomarr? That they killed him, then somehow sneaked down the processional and past the watchmen with his body, with both of them hidden under something so advanced that they couldn’t be detected while moving, by people who were specifically watching out for anyone trying to get past them?’

‘You saw the watchmen,’ Krane snorted. ‘They weren’t exactly vigilant, and they took a bribe easily enough.’

‘That’s my point,’ DeShelle said. ‘If you’re looking to get bribed by people, you’re not going to let anyone sneak past you. You’d just be losing money.’

Krane shrugged. ‘Short of walking through walls, that’s the best explanation we have. The bloods checked out – Avomarr’s body got from the alley to the window somehow.’

DeShelle’s heart sped up. ‘Oh shit.’

Krane blinked in surprise. ‘What?’

‘That’s it,’ DeShelle said numbly. How could she have been so stupid? She scrolled back through the data-slate, looking for the detail she’d skimmed over a moment ago. ‘That’s how they did it.’

‘How they… Wait, walking through walls?’ Krane barked a laugh, causing a few heads to turn towards them. ‘DuVoir, I think you need to get some rest. I wasn’t being serious.’

‘No, but I am,’ DeShelle told him. There it was: the passage she’d seen in passing. She put her finger on it. ‘There. Did you see that?’

Krane frowned, read where she was pointing. ‘The bit about their warp eyes being removed? Yes, a couple of witnesses said that.’

‘The first death we had,’ DeShelle told him. ‘Tanomariel? Her warp eye was cut out as well.’

‘Not uncommon for an anti-mutant mob,’ Krane said dubiously. ‘It’s a mutation, and that sort of gutter-slime don’t care that it’s endorsed. And Tanomariel’s body was defaced with the usual filth.’

‘But these ones weren’t.’ DeShelle pointed out. ‘No one mentions that. The death wounds, the eyes being removed, nothing else.’

‘The killer was interrupted,’ Krane said. ‘Or fled before they could be discovered.’

‘But they removed the warp eyes first!’ DeShelle said urgently. ‘That was the most important thing for them! They didn’t remove the eye from one and start going to work on the body, then get interrupted before they could touch the other. They took the eyes from both bodies, and left them otherwise untouched.’

Krane wrinkled his nose, considering. ‘So what are you saying? That it’s not the same killer as the person who did for Tanomariel?’

‘I’m saying that the defacing of Tanomariel’s corpse was probably a smokescreen,’ DeShelle said. ‘It was the eye that was important. Tanomariel’s gets removed and anti-mutant screeds are cut into her flesh. These two mystery Navigators are killed and their eyes are removed. Zulantis was burned to death, and I’m willing to bet that no one looked too closely at any of his eye sockets to see what was left in there. And Avomarr was tipped into the river. Five Navigators have been killed, three have definitely had their warp eye removed, and two conceivably could have done and we just don’t know.’

‘All right,’ Krane said. He was clearly following her logic to an extent. ‘But how does this relate to someone walking through walls?’

‘This is ritual activity,’ DeShelle said, chewing her lip nervously. She was walking a very fine line here. ‘People who kill for themselves, not for hire or self-preservation, have routines. They do things the same way. It might be the same method of murder, or the same method of disposing of the bodies, or something. The only constant here is the removal of the warp eye. This means something to whoever is doing this – this is the most important thing, possibly more important than the deaths.’

‘When you say “ritual”,’ Krane said slowly, ‘do you mean a ritual for the person? Or do you mean… something else?’

‘You know the sermons as well as I do,’ DeShelle told him, although that probably wasn’t true. She didn’t know Krane’s background, but the scholam had been very thorough with her knowledge and retention of the Imperial Creed. ‘We’re warned about the heretic, the alien– ’

‘And the mutant,’ Krane finished grimly. ‘You think we’re dealing with a witch?’

There was no mistaking the disgust in his voice. It wasn’t surprising, since even sanctioned psykers were treated with fear and suspicion, except perhaps by those who dealt with them every day. But the difference between a sanctioned psyker and a wilder witch was similar to that between a Navigator and some claw-handed, three-eyed mutant from the Smog Deeps: one was tested and validated, and served the God-Emperor, and one was an aberration that must be purged for the good of humanity.

DeShelle tugged at her collar again. ‘It would explain a lot. Untrained psykers often don’t understand their powers, and attribute them to the performance of ritual acts. I’ve certainly heard tales of psykers who can pass through solid objects.’

‘You know a lot, DuVoir,’ Krane said. The words were delivered neutrally, but DeShelle heard the question behind them. She smiled self-deprecatingly.

‘I’m older than I look. And I had a… very thorough education.’

‘Where?’

The word was a touch too sharp and too isolated to be merely a casual question asked by one colleague of another. DeShelle kept her smile in place.

‘A little place you’ve probably never heard of, and which I don’t like to talk about. Her ladyship knows the details,’ she continued, when Krane opened his mouth to reply. ‘I’m sure that she’ll tell you, if she wants you to know.’

Krane’s eyes narrowed, but after a second he nodded and dropped the subject. ‘Very well. So if we’re dealing with a witch who can walk through walls, why haven’t we found more Navigators dead in their beds?’

‘Security in here is tight,’ DeShelle pointed out. ‘You’re good at your job. It would be far easier to ambush a Navigator out in the city.’

‘Only if you know where they’re going,’ Krane grunted. ‘If you can get in here, you have victims to choose from.’

DeShelle looked at him while her mind raced on. ‘So perhaps they did know.’

Krane’s brow furrowed. ‘What?’

‘You’re right,’ DeShelle said, and as she uttered the words she knew that he was right. ‘There’s seventy million people in Ascension City. If you think Navigators are being targeted by anti-mutant groups then yes, you could say that perhaps each one of our three ran afoul of a different group by bad luck. But if we think that all five murders we know of were committed by the same individual…’

‘Then there has to be a data leak,’ Krane finished. ‘Someone who knew where and when the Navigators were going to be outside our walls.’

‘Heretics band together in groups,’ DeShelle said urgently. ‘They form cults, Luc! That’s how they survive, that’s how they corrupt others!’ She cast a quick glance over at Yunn’s team, then leaned in close to the big security chief and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘We’ve got cultists inside the palace!’

Krane’s face set into a furious mask.

‘Not for long.’

THE UNMASKING

Vass had already snapped her fans open, and she swatted the projectile aside. Chetta saw it bury itself into the grass, and then the attackers were on them.

The one who’d thrown something at Vass tried again as he landed, with an equal lack of success, then rushed the rogue trader. Vass turned side-on and whipped her right-hand fan upwards, and the assassin stumbled down to his knees with a sheet of red already streaming from the long, diagonal cut that had opened across his torso. With the same movement, Vass spun into a crouching, backhanded swirl that dragged the open fan in her left hand along the rib line of another assassin rushing past her. That one fell as well, clutching at her side as half of her core muscles abruptly ceased obeying her brain’s commands.

There were still two attackers coming, and they were past Vass now, one on either side of her. Chetta met the eyes of the woman bearing down on her and drew back her cane. She’d only get one chance at this.

The assassin’s face split into a grin as metallic subdermal claws sprouted from her fingertips. They weren’t long, but they were long enough to rip Chetta’s throat out, and the assassin had already recognised that even Chetta’s strongest blow wouldn’t be enough to inconvenience her.

Chetta thumbed the secret switch on her cane’s handle, and swung it.

The power field erupted into life from the delicate filigree of projection lines that ran through the cane’s body, just before it made contact with the assassin’s ribs. Chetta’s right arm was thrown back so hard she felt her shoulder click, and she stumbled from the impact. The assassin was sent flying sideways to land in a stunned heap on the grass just in front of the shocked Ezallien Taranthis.

Vittariel slapped the Brobantis crest on his left breast and was immediately engulfed in a shimmering field of light as his personal refractor field activated. The last assassin rushed at him, arms wide as though seeking an embrace with a long-lost love, and Vittariel clenched his fist to extend the concealed blade from the vambrace beneath his coat sleeve.

There was a thunderous discharge, a flash that seared itself into Chetta’s retinas, and a blast of heat so fierce it felt as though a doorway had opened into the fiery netherworld of some primitive religion. Chetta was knocked off her feet by it, and the lush grass was not enough to cushion her fall. Her hip flared with agony, and she cried out as a spasm tore up her spine. She flailed, fighting against her body’s demands that she lay still and not move, desperately trying to get back to her feet and regain what limited mobility she could muster. She was too experienced a campaigner to think that the danger had passed.

She was correct. As she clawed her way over onto her front, looking to at least get her arms under her and push herself up, she saw the fire-eater slow from a running approach to tip something into her mouth and raise the lit taper with her other hand…

Four beams of ruby light stabbed out from the rings on Indrinian Vass’ right hand – digi-lasers, Chetta realised, the damned rogue trader had been wearing eight fully charged digi-lasers into every social engagement! – and punched their way through the woman’s torso. She slumped like a puppet with its strings cut, and as she landed on the grass some of the fluid must have leaked out of her suddenly slack mouth and met the sputtering flame of the taper, because there was another flash and her head exploded.

Vass scrambled back to her feet and tapped one of her earrings. ‘Jekri, I need extraction, now.’ Then she snapped her monomolecular-edged fans open again and took off the heads of the two assassins she’d previously injured. She followed up by doing the same to the one Chetta had struck.

‘No!’ Chetta shouted, a moment too late. ‘We need to know who sent them!’

‘I’m taking no chances,’ Vass replied grimly, nodding beyond the woman’s body. Chetta finally managed to struggle up, and her heart dropped into her stomach when she saw what the rogue trader was gesturing at.

Past where Ezallien Taranthis was picking verself up from the ground, wide-eyed and somewhat singed, lay two more bodies. One was barely recognisable as human any more, since most of the torso was missing, what was left was charred, and the limbs were only loosely attached.

The other had never been fully human, but was now certainly fully deceased.

‘No!’ Chetta shouted again, as the reality of Vittariel’s blasted corpse sank in. His refractor field had been overloaded by the explosion, and hadn’t saved him. The sheer kinetic force had dismembered his spindly body. Chetta had a sudden flashback to his brother’s death, carved apart in front of her by a huge axe, and fought against the sudden pricking in her tear ducts. She couldn’t start weeping, not now: she might still need to see clearly in order to survive…

‘Governor!’ Vass barked. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I… yes, but…’ Taranthis floundered, staring around wide-eyed. Other guests were running towards them, far too late to be of any assistance. The whole thing had taken only a few seconds. ‘What…?’

‘There is a gunship incoming,’ Vass said, apparently deciding that Taranthis wasn’t hurt badly enough to be concerned about. ‘It will be taking me away from here. Give whatever orders you must to ensure that it is not challenged in any way.’

‘I… You can’t talk to me like this!’ Taranthis retorted, snapping out of vis shock. ‘I am the governor of this planet!’

‘And I am a rogue trader of the Imperium who has just foiled an assassination attempt in the middle of the shambles that is your security,’ Vass sneered at ver. ‘We can compare the exact powers of our respective authorities later, should you wish to be so foolish, but at this moment I, and my honoured allies, will be leaving!’ She leaned into Taranthis’ face, and any shadow of the jovial, flighty woman who had curtseyed so prettily had disappeared. ‘I strongly suggest that you do not try to stop me.’

Taranthis swallowed and looked away. As guests reached them, all clustering around the governor and enquiring desperately after vis welfare, Taranthis reached to activate vis comm.

‘My condolences on your loss,’ Vass said quietly, turning back to Chetta. ‘Once again.’ Her eyes flicked upwards to the sky immediately afterwards, and Chetta saw the other woman’s jaw clench in the first sign of nerves she’d ever displayed. ‘Come on, come on…’

Chetta leaned on her cane. She felt like she’d been beaten all over with hammers, and her hip had been replaced by a chunk of jagged ice. She was already shaking with the after-effects of the adrenaline dump, and she was still reeling from what had just happened. It wasn’t that she’d never experienced an attempt on her life before, but here…? ‘Do I count as one of your “honoured allies”?’

‘Unless you’d rather stay behind,’ Vass replied. She looked over her shoulder at the approaching shape of Kennevario Xudine in his grav-chair.

Chetta glanced around. The gardens were dissolving into panic as the rich and well-to-do abruptly realised that they weren’t safe, and that they were surrounded by a mixture of nominal friends and very definite enemies. Guards were coming now, but they’d been too far away to interfere: you couldn’t have the proles overhearing the private conversations of their betters, after all.

And if someone had got to the entertainers, who could say they hadn’t got to the guards as well?

‘I accept,’ Chetta said. Running lights hove into view in the sky above, blinking as the craft banked through the air. She heard the whine of its engines a moment later, just as other guests started to notice it. There were screams, and the general chaos around them increased as most people changed from hurrying towards the disturbance to fleeing from it. Chetta saw Jalamar and Morandia in the group nearest to the governor. Jalamar was looking up at the sky in slack-jawed shock.

Searchlights snapped on, racing over the grass until they lighted on Vass’ tall figure. The rogue trader waved, and the craft began to descend vertically. It was a gun-cutter, Chetta now saw, an armed shuttle capable of entering and leaving planetary atmospheres. She briefly wondered exactly what sort of clout Vass had to be able to get one of those flown around Ascension City’s airways as she chose, but the answer was fairly obvious: no one who’d be concerned about it had the sort of standing necessary to challenge a rogue trader on exactly what right she had.

The downdraught was so powerful that Chetta began to wobble where she stood, and it was only Vass’ firm grip on her left shoulder that kept her properly upright. The noise was incredible as well, but just as the whining howl got so loud Chetta thought her ears were going to explode, the engines died down and the gun-cutter settled onto its landing skids.

‘Everyone out,’ Chetta heard Vass say, through the ringing in her ears. ‘We need to clear up.’

The boarding ramp descended, and four figures emerged with a variety of gaits. First came Fell, the big ex-Guardsman with the bionic arm, striding out with a face like thunder and wielding a bolter-flamer in the middle of the governor’s palace as though he were disembarking into a warzone. Next came an equally large man in ornate carapace armour that had been coloured a regal dark blue and bore crossed golden swords on the breastplate. He had a storm shield strapped to his left arm and a long powerblade belted on his left hip. Behind him was the small, red-robed shape of Sef, the enginseer who’d been with Fell at Azariel’s wake. Finally came a bald, bearded man in the robes of a sanctioned psyker, carrying what looked to be a force staff.

‘Get the bodies inside,’ Vass ordered with a snap of her fingers, and her minions hurried to obey. She looked past Chetta as Kennevario Xudine arrived, the smooth movements of his throne strangely at odds with the human jerkiness on display everywhere else. ‘My lord, we are taking our leave.’

‘Travelling with you is never dull, my lady,’ Xudine remarked in his leaden voice, then his face fell in shock as Fell bustled past with Vittariel’s upper body clutched in his arms. ‘Throne of Terra… Lady Brobantis, I am so very sorry. You have my cond–’

‘I neither want nor need your condolences,’ Chetta snapped, turning her face away as Sef struggled past her with the rest of her brother-in-law’s body. ‘By the Astronomican, Vass, would it kill your men to show some respect!’

‘Possibly,’ Vass replied, looking over her shoulder again. She was checking the perimeter, Chetta realised through her anger: Vass still didn’t feel safe. ‘Respect can wait until we’re away from here.’

‘You can’t take them!’ Taranthis shouted as the man in carapace began hauling an assassin’s corpse up the boarding ramp, although ve didn’t make any move verself to stop him. ‘I demand to inspect the bodies!’

‘I killed them, I keep them,’ Vass retorted. She surveyed the area of the short-lived fight once more, then nodded. ‘We’re done here. Everyone on board.’ She half-turned to look down at Chetta. ‘If you still wish to come, my lady?’

Chetta wavered, but she had no real options. Vittariel’s body was on board the gun-cutter, and to stay would leave her alone. Taranthis wasn’t looking too pleased, either, and vis recent promise of indiscriminate retribution for any hostilities was still fresh in Chetta’s memory.

‘I’m coming,’ she said, forcing herself up the ramp and staring las-bolts at the back of Xudine’s grav-chair as he glided up in front of her.

The gun-cutter’s main hold was a well-ordered place, even as Vass’ men broke out corpse webbing to wrap the bodies in. It was neat, almost sterile. There was an old adage that a person’s own space was a reflection of their mind, and if that held any water, then the Indrinian Vass who’d surfaced in the moments of the attack was a far truer person than the one Chetta had met before. Chetta turned, wincing, to face Vass as the other woman reached the top of the ramp and slapped the control to close it behind her.

‘Take us up, Jekri,’ Vass declared into her earring, which was clearly a disguised comm-bead. She looked at Chetta as she continued instructing her pilot. ‘Take us to the Brobantis palace.’

Something snapped inside Chetta as the gun-cutter lurched upwards. ‘No.’

Vass raised an eyebrow. ‘No?’ Behind her, Chetta heard the soft sounds of bodies being wrapped in fabric come to a halt. She was on the edge of she knew not what.

But she was tired, and upset, and angry, and in pain, and completely past caring.

‘You are not setting foot inside my family’s home again until I get some answers,’ Chetta declared, glaring up at Vass.

‘This is curious gratitude for saving your life,’ Vass remarked.

‘I saved my life,’ Chetta snorted. ‘You saved your own, and didn’t act fast enough to save Vittar. I owe you nothing for that.’

The corner of Vass’ mouth twitched, but the rest of her face gave no clue at all as to her feelings. ‘Very well. What answers do you think you are entitled to?’

Vass had dropped all honorifics, Chetta realised. There were no ‘my lady’s, no ‘Lady Brobantis’. They were past the dance of courtly politeness, and into something new altogether. She just had to hope she knew enough of the steps.

‘I sent out some messages via our astropathic choir, the night after I first met you,’ Chetta declared, sticking her chin out. ‘To a contact of mine who sits rather high up in the Administratum in the Ixaniad Sector. And last night, I received a reply.’

Vass’ face gave nothing away, but that in and of itself told Chetta something. The rogue trader was waiting for the next sentence before she responded, which meant she wasn’t fully at ease with where the conversation was going.

‘I’m sure you’re aware how hard it is to get a clear message through the warp,’ Chetta continued. ‘Even the best astropaths struggle at times, but please believe me when I say that House Brobantis has the resources to get the very best. The question I asked was not a complex one, and the reply was simple. I can be absolutely certain when I tell you this – according to my source, who has access to all the records they would need to answer my query, no new rogue traders have been created in the Ixaniad Sector for the past twenty years, as Terra measures it.’

Deathly silence filled the hold, save for the thrumming whine of the craft’s engines.

‘In fact,’ Chetta continued, ‘there are no rogue traders by the name of Vass at all based in the Ixaniad Sector, and so far as I can tell, there never have been.’ She winced as her hip and back complained at her, but gritted her teeth and remained standing. ‘What there have been are quite a few deaths that I’m aware of in Ascension City, that roughly coincide with your arrival on Vorlese – most recently, that of my brother-in-law. So, my lady, can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t inform Governor Taranthis that the arrogant rogue trader who just called down her armed transport into the middle of vis palace is, in fact, nothing of the sort?’

Vass said nothing for a few long seconds. Then she raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. ‘Well, the one that first springs to mind is that you are very much alone here with my crew and me.’

‘Pfah!’ Chetta spat. ‘Firstly, every noble worth a damn on this planet saw me get into this craft with you. They don’t all have my best interests at heart, I’ll grant you, but if I don’t return home then the culprits couldn’t be more obvious. And secondly, I’d already set down what I knew before I went to the party – if I don’t return, my factors have instructions to deliver messages to Governor Taranthis, Judge Arctos and certain other notables.’

Vass nodded slowly. ‘I knew you were intelligent and resourceful, Lady Brobantis, but it seems that I still underestimated you. That’s a shame. I do hate being wrong about someone.’ She raised her left hand between them and, with the other, reached towards the ring on her middle finger.

‘Killing me with a digi-laser won’t make what I know go away,’ Chetta warned her, but Vass just chuckled.

‘Chetta, you have no idea what I can make go away, if I want to.’

She twisted the setting of the ring and the gem within began to glow. However, instead of discharging a one-shot blast of supercharged light such as had slain the fire-eating assassin, it sent up a flickering light display: a revolving hololith.

Of a three-barred, capital ‘I’.

‘Chettamandey Brobantis,’ Vass said. Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. Chetta was staring at the hololith in horror, transfixed. ‘The reason you could find no mention of rogue trader Indrinian Vass is because the woman is a total fiction. Please allow me to introduce myself.

‘My name is Zaretta Ngiri, and I am a loyal member of His Divine Majesty’s Holy Inquisition.’

A SHOT IN THE DARK

‘Why didn’t you just call them in?’ DeShelle asked. It had been a while since she’d had a laspistol strapped to her right hip, but the weight of it was comforting as they hurried along the richly carpeted corridor, flanked by miniature Turraken palms with their constantly moving yellow-green leaves.

‘If you’d been passing information to someone outside who was using it to kill Navigators, and you were called in for a non-routine briefing by the head of security, would you go?’ Krane pointed out. He wore a bolt pistol, and The Wolf was mag-clamped across his carapace backplate. ‘I’d have an escape plan if it were me, and I don’t want to bet that we can predict it.’

It was a fair argument, DeShelle conceded. Luc had called up staff rotas and had hastily analysed which servants had access to all of the Navigators who’d been killed so far – Tanomariel, Zulantis and Avomarr Du-Choi – and would therefore have been able to communicate their comings and goings. For the moment, they were working on the hope that there was a single culprit. If each victim had been sold out by a different servant, then the odds of tracking down those responsible were minuscule.

The halls of Brobantis Palace were quieter than usual. They were down to a skeleton staff, due to most of the servants being given leave to celebrate the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension. DeShelle felt ashamed that she’d not yet taken the time to offer up proper worship to the God-Emperor today, but she was hunting down His enemies, and she simply had to hope that He would understand.

Unfortunately, the low staffing levels applied to security as well. The palace was far from undefended – that would never happen – but certain things had been prioritised. External security, at gates and landing pads, was of course still at full strength. Likewise, the celebrations for Brobantis Navigators – minus Lady Chettamandey and Lord Vittariel, who’d been invited to the governor’s feast – would be well guarded and patrolled, in the main dining halls and leisure chambers. But the incidental security, the armed guards standing at corridor junctions or located in the small guardhouses throughout the complex, was less prominent.

This was why Luc Krane was hunting down Mamzel Fortuna Bettan, who’d served all three of Tanomariel, Zulantis and Avomarr Du-Choi, with no backup except Lady Chettamandey’s personal aide and her laspistol. They’d come up with nearly two dozen possible suspects, many of them still on duty despite the celebrations, and other security duos were locating the rest. DeShelle had tried to persuade Krane to send more guards for the jobs, but he’d been loath to pull any more away from their stations. The suspected cultists weren’t their only enemies, Krane had pointed out: Dukarr had declared a trade war, and might have agents within the palace as well. It wouldn’t do for them to become aware that security’s attention was largely focused away from their primary responsibilities.

According to her rota, Fortuna Bettan was currently assigned to Savomir Tej Brobantis, an elderly Navigator with very limited personal mobility who generally shunned the social events of his kin. Savomir resided on the lower levels of the palace when he wasn’t in service to a ship, and that was where they were heading now.

‘You have the binders?’ Krane asked for the second time. A pair swung at his own belt too, but he’d insisted that DeShelle take some. Quite why, DeShelle wasn’t sure; if Krane couldn’t secure this servant for whatever reason, she didn’t feel that she’d have much hope.

‘Yes,’ she replied, instead of arguing.

‘And if you see any hint of witchcraft, shoot her,’ Krane added. DeShelle rubbed her bare neck uncomfortably as they turned onto a wide, ornate staircase leading down to the next level. She really didn’t like to think about that.

They were halfway to the bottom, and DeShelle’s weight was just coming down onto the next step, when the lights below went out.

‘That’s not supposed to happen, is it?’ she said, coming to a halt behind Krane. The light from above was still steady, and cast a long pool of colour in front of them into which their shadows stretched, broken up into zigzag shapes by the stairs. Beyond that, though, was the utter darkness of an unlit corridor with no windows.

‘These aren’t the quarters for Navigators with visual oversensitivity,’ Krane agreed.

DeShelle cursed silently. ‘Have you got a light?’

‘Of sorts.’ Krane unslung The Wolf and activated it. The power axe flared into life, casting a shimmering blue-white glow out into the darkness. It didn’t seem to illuminate so much as it did pick out shadows, but it was something.

‘We should call for backup,’ DeShelle offered, unholstering her laspistol. It felt cool and reassuringly solid in her hand, and she was relieved to realise that her palm wasn’t sweaty. Once upon a time, she’d have been alarmed by the prospect of even holding a gun. Those days were long, long behind her though, and it didn’t seem as if her time spent as Lady Chettamandey’s aide had blunted her readiness.

‘It could be a malfunction, or a distraction,’ Krane argued. ‘We don’t have the bodies to go jumping at shadows this evening.’

‘These shadows jumped at us,’ DeShelle pointed out, but she didn’t push it. ‘Very well. You first.’

Krane advanced down the rest of the staircase, bolt pistol in his left hand and The Wolf in his right. DeShelle followed, laspistol held low in both hands, scanning behind them. If this was a hostile move, it wouldn’t be out of the question for an attacker to get them peering into the dark and then jump them from behind, out of the light.

‘You know what I said about how tight the security is here?’ she asked. A nasty thought had just occurred to her, and was even less comfortable for the fact that it had come when she was feeling her way cautiously backwards down the staircase with her left foot. ‘And how that meant that even someone who could walk through walls wouldn’t try their luck?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Well, it’s not so tight tonight. And anyone who’s been passing them information would know that.’

DeShelle heard a slow intake of breath behind her, then a noisy exhalation followed by the barely audible click of a comm-bead activating.

‘This is Krane. Activate lockdown – I want eyes on every Navigator until further notice, and I mean eyes. Watch for trickery, and don’t assume a room is clear just because it looks like it.’

‘Thank you,’ DeShelle said after a moment of silence had passed.

‘You’ve got a good brain, DuVoir,’ Krane replied. ‘Her ladyship takes your counsel, I’d be a fool not to do the same.’

DeShelle had reached the last step now, and she was somewhat relieved to find level floor behind her. Tumbling backwards down a few steps might not have been a disaster in and of itself, but it could have critically disrupted Krane’s concentration had she collided with him. Or, if he was feeling particularly tightly wound, caused him to strike at her with The Wolf before registering that she wasn’t an assailant.

‘Come on,’ Krane said, gesturing with his axe. ‘Lord Savomir’s chambers are in this direction.’ He set off at a jog – quick enough to eat up the ground, but not a headlong charge. DeShelle followed, trying to watch everything around them as the deep shadows cast by The Wolf’s power field jerked around in time with Krane’s strides. She felt horrendously claustrophobic, which wasn’t an experience she’d ever had before, because the walls on either side of her could well be no protection from the enemy they thought they might be hunting. If they were dealing with a witch who could walk through walls, could the intruder also see through walls? Were they being stalked by a psyker who could monitor them and pick a moment to strike? Or would their quarry be coming through blind – if, indeed, their speculation about the murderer was at all accurate? Could it in fact be some species of xenos that was hunting Navigators, and not a human mutant at all?

Krane came to a T-junction and cut left, then came to an abrupt halt. ‘You! Stop!’

DeShelle reached the junction a moment later and swung to face right, sweeping her laspistol across the gloom there just in case it should disgorge a threat. The sound of running feet on thick carpet pulled her attention around, and a moment later she jerked involuntarily as Krane’s bolt pistol roared and the walls were lit up for a moment by the bolt’s propellant flame.

DeShelle had heard a bolt weapon discharged in an enclosed space before, but the sheer force of the noise still nearly buckled her knees. There was a crash from further down the corridor, and as she peered past Krane’s imposing frame she saw a slight figure disappearing around the next corner, at the furthest reaches of the illumination cast by The Wolf. Half a yard away from where the figure had just vanished was a large hole in the wall, beyond which further darkness lurked; closer to them, the carved and gilded door of what had to be Savomir Brobantis’ chambers stood ajar.

‘Come on!’ Krane barked, breaking into a flat-out run. DeShelle did her best to keep up, but the head of security was moving quicker than anyone she’d ever seen.

‘Is it the killer?’ she called at his receding back. By the Emperor, she didn’t want him to get too far ahead and leave her alone and in the dark, away from the light of The Wolf…

‘It’s Bettan!’ Krane shouted. He’d reached the next corner already and was going so fast he actually jumped up and took two quick steps along the wall on the far side, bounding off to continue his pursuit with a minimum of loss of momentum. He disappeared around the corner, and so did the light of his axe. DeShelle gritted her teeth and tried to speed up, even though her brain was whirling. Should she go back and check on Savomir? But his chamber had looked pitch-dark as well, and if there was a killer close by then she’d be better off sticking close to Krane – if she could.

She skidded around the corner, giving brief thanks for the thick carpet that actually afforded her some traction, rather than the polished wood or stone that was favoured in some areas of the palace, and stumbled to a halt just before she collided with Krane’s broad back. He was only a few paces past the corridor junction, and standing over a sprawled body.

‘You got her?’ DeShelle asked breathlessly, covering the body with her laspistol just in case.

‘Not I,’ Krane said, his voice heavily weighted with unease. He leaned low over the body, bringing The Wolf down in close proximity to it to maximise the illumination the weapon could provide. His head and upper body was directly over it, lighting him up in cold blue-white and casting a deep shadow onto the ceiling. He reached out with the muzzle of his bolt pistol and prodded Bettan’s head, which lolled limply. ‘Broken neck. But how–?’

DeShelle recognised the sudden surge of nausea that rose up within her, a split-second warning of danger. ‘Look out!’ she screamed, not knowing what she was warning of, nor from where it was coming.

It dropped from the black morass of shadows that hid the ceiling and plunged a glowing powerblade of its own into Krane’s back.

The head of security threw himself to one side, but the knife still sheared through his carapace armour and bit deep, just to the left of his spine. Krane roared and spun, throwing his assailant off him. The other man’s power knife winked out, and he was lost in the shifting shadows as Krane swung The Wolf through where the attacker had been a moment before. DeShelle stumbled backwards in alarm as the axe cut through the air within a hand’s span of her face, then raised her laspistol as the power knife snapped into life again.

‘Behind you!’

She couldn’t get a clear shot. Krane staggered sideways as the powerblade plunged into his ribs, then was yanked out to release a gout of blood, terrifying in its ferociousness. Whatever stimulants had supercharged Krane’s metabolism weren’t enough for him to lay a weapon on his adversary, and would merely ensure he bled out far quicker than he otherwise might.

‘Run!’ Krane rasped at her, turning and cutting clumsily with The Wolf but hitting nothing except empty air. He raised his bolt pistol and fired wildly as he staggered in a circle, sending bolts into the ceiling and the walls. DeShelle dropped to her knees as he swung towards her, suddenly cut off from her escape route by the wavering muzzle of his gun.

The tip of the power knife burst through the front of Luc Krane’s throat in a sizzle of burned meat and flash-drying blood.

DeShelle sprang up from the floor, firing her laspistol one-handed at and around Krane in the hope that she might hit something, and fleeing back down the corridor along which she’d come, away from the murderous phantom with a glowing powerblade who could apparently appear and disappear at will. She’d not had time to call for help, but what should she say? If she called reinforcements here, would she not leave others unguarded? If the attacker could move so freely–

Another nauseous lurch, another instinctive scream of warning inside her skull. She dived forwards and rolled as she’d been trained to, just as a blue-white power knife flashed into life and slashed through where her head should have been. She didn’t stop to gape at the impossibility that someone who’d been behind her had got ahead of her, didn’t stop to shoot, just kept running as she heard a snarl of apparent frustration. Luc Krane had tried to fight this killer, and he’d died. She wouldn’t stand a chance, gut warnings or no.

The blue-white glow of the powerblade snapped out again behind her, just as she turned into the first corridor where the lights had gone out, with the still-lit staircase at the end. She accelerated, expecting at any moment to feel a searing pain in her spine, or see a knife-wielding silhouette lunge from the walls at her, with her intuition abruptly and fatally silent.

THE HOLY ORDO

Chetta couldn’t say anything for a few seconds, while her brain desperately tried to recalibrate itself. Then she turned painfully on the spot, away from Vass’ – no, Ngiri’s – calm expression, which was underlit by the dancing hololith, until her gaze landed on Kennevario Xudine in his grav-chair. The cadaverous old Navigator looked utterly unsurprised.

‘You!’ Chetta spat, pointing at him angrily with the hand that wasn’t clutching her cane. ‘You knew!’

‘I knew,’ Xudine confirmed in that sonorous voice of his, with an acknowledging dip of his head. ‘Lady Ngiri identified herself to me, and requested that I aid her disguise as a rogue trader. I was, of course, only too happy to be of service to His Imperial Majesty’s Inquisition.’

‘I did tell you that House Xudine had demonstrated their loyalty,’ Ngiri commented from behind Chetta. ‘I didn’t say that it was to the Emperor, not to me personally. Although of course in real terms, that’s the same thing.’

‘So, why?’ Chetta demanded, rounding on Ngiri again. ‘Why the pretence? Were you pulling the strings all along? Why did you insinuate yourself into my family’s home?’

‘The Imperium has many enemies, Chetta, within and without,’ Ngiri replied. ‘Some inquisitors concern themselves with the “within”, and hunt down heretics, mutants and witches. I deal with the “without”. I deal with the alien.

‘Everywhere humanity goes – barring freak warp phenomena, or occasional blasphemous xenos tech – Navigators go too. You’re more widely spread than any other group within the Imperium, even the Administratum. Virtually any time that humanity has contact with an alien civilisation, a Navigator is present. And the alien can be so, so subtle, Chetta. Aeldari minds…’ The inquisitor’s words trailed off, and she shook her head. ‘They play regicide over millennia, while we bet on coin flips. Any xenos adversary with insight into our society wouldn’t take on our armies. They’d attack our infrastructure – disrupt the supply chains, leave planets starving and weak, or prime for corruption by an alien bearing food and friendly words.

‘Your late husband was fascinated by the aeldari, wasn’t he?’

Chetta’s throat tightened to the point that oxygen was suddenly something of an issue.

‘That wasn’t a question,’ Ngiri continued levelly, although she seemed to be waiting for a response.

Chetta forced her neck muscles into a nod. ‘Yes, he… he had a burning curiosity in that regard.’

‘Not one that you shared?’

The tightness in Chetta’s chest eased very slightly. She felt back on safer ground here. ‘Not in the same manner. I saw action against a couple of their raiding parties in the Pacificum fleet, and any fascination tends to burn away quite quickly when something’s trying to kill you. Azariel was a civilian. He’d never fought them.’

Ngiri nodded slowly. ‘And the various relics that he managed to acquire during his life?’

Emperor on the Throne, how does the woman know about them? Chetta bared her teeth in a humourless grin. ‘Would you believe me if I said that they made me very uncomfortable, and that I’d intended to dispose of them as soon as I felt it would not be seen as callous?’

‘Perhaps.’ Ngiri tapped her lips with a finger. ‘Is it fair to say that you disagreed with your late husband’s view of the aeldari?’

‘We disagreed on a number of things,’ Chetta pointed out. ‘Including, as you witnessed at his funeral, the marriage arrangements for our children.’

‘Is that why you had him killed?’

Ice gripped Chetta’s heart. She opened her mouth to protest, to demand that Ngiri provide some proof of her allegation, but it would serve nothing. An Imperial Inquisitor needed no proof. Their authority was essentially limitless, although they presumably had their own hierarchy. However, since no other, more senior inquisitor seemed likely to pop up in Ngiri’s gun-cutter and come to Chetta’s defence, that was something of a moot point.

‘I have very little doubt that you arranged for your husband’s death on Necromunda,’ Ngiri said flatly. ‘And quite frankly, if you did that on your own then it’s the concern of the Arbites, not me. You’re an intelligent and capable woman, and would presumably have a plan to assume power with the minimum of disruption.’

Chetta had to try twice before she could form words. ‘You’re telling me that you think I killed my own husband… and you’re fine with that?’

‘If it was your plan,’ Ngiri said. She leaned a little closer. ‘Your husband’s death had the prospect of throwing all sorts of things into utter mayhem, if someone didn’t assume control soon afterwards. The disruption to House Brobantis, the inevitable jockeying for position amongst the other houses… It could have had a huge impact on the operation of the Imperium, in this sector and beyond. Without reliable service from the Navis Nobilite the Imperium would fall apart. We’d go back to the days of Old Night, and be picked off by whatever xenos warlords fancied taking a bite.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve had my eye on the Navigator houses of Vorlese for a while, Chetta, thanks to some disturbing trends in xenos goods that I’ve become convinced are passing through here. I needed to make sure that you were acting of your own accord.’

Chetta stared at her. Of course she had been… hadn’t she? Was it possible that some malicious agent had guided her hand? Had played on her unease with Azariel’s choices, and her opposition to his plans for their children, to ensure that she attempted to supplant him and thereby threw everything into turmoil?

‘Truly, I believe that I was,’ she said soberly, reflecting how unlikely it was to be hoping that an inquisitor would believe her when she said that she was acting entirely of her own volition when she’d planned to murder her husband. ‘Azariel was a good man in many respects, and skilled, but I disagreed strongly with some of his choices, and as for the marriages… I spoke truly at his funeral. Dukarr is heading for shadow and pain, but Azariel was too concerned with our political gains to care what that meant for our children. The Tarot’s warning was too clear to ignore, and I may be a three-eyed mutant, but I still accept the Emperor as the guiding light of humanity. I refuse to believe that any xenos could have corrupted that.’

Ngiri pursed her lips. ‘Perhaps I place too much trust in my ability to judge character. But you don’t strike me as a person easily influenced by others, Chetta. Perhaps I can, for now at least, take your words at face value.’

Chetta released a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding.

‘Besides,’ Ngiri added, ‘we have other, more pressing concerns.’

‘We do?’

‘Well, there’s the matter of Gallimo Prime, for one,’ Ngiri said. ‘And the possibility that whoever managed that particular atrocity might have similar designs on this planet. Don’t look so surprised,’ she continued. ‘I am an inquisitor, after all, and you gave a statement to the Arbites. I was hoping you’d stay out of it after that, but it appears you are as persistent as you are perceptive. How is Goodsire Yunn? Gurrit adhered to my instructions not to engage you, but it appears he neglected to pass those instructions on to his underlings.’

Chetta shook her head in disbelief. She’d thought herself mentally adept, but it was hard to keep up with Ngiri’s parade of revelations. ‘It was you who removed the data files! And broke into Yunn’s old hab!’

‘Actually, it was my associates,’ Ngiri corrected her. ‘Perhaps it’s time for you to be introduced properly.’ She stepped past Chetta, who turned to follow. At least the pilot was keeping the gun-cutter steady. One sharp bank and Chetta would be on the floor.

‘Aberfell Duscaris,’ Ngiri said, nodding at the grizzled ex-Guardsman with the bionic arm, ‘commonly known as Fell. Formerly with the 81st Tarradis.’

‘My lady,’ Fell said gruffly.

‘Sef Lentzen, student of Mars,’ Ngiri continued, and the deep, red cowl of the enginseer bobbed in acknowledgement. ‘Carmine is a telekine of the scholastica psykana, and Davis of Rawl is my sworn shield.’

The bearded man with the force staff described a solemn bow, while Davis – bald-headed, and sporting a ferocious moustache – splayed his fingers together in what was presumably some sort of greeting gesture from his culture. Chetta studied him for a moment. She knew enough about weapons and armour to realise that he bore the very finest, and suppressed a small smile. Did Zaretta Ngiri, after her own talk about how widespread Navigators were, truly think that Chetta didn’t know what a Crusader was? It was quite charming, the things people thought they could hide from the ones who piloted them through the stars. She was tempted to make a deliberately casual, off-hand remark about it, but restrained herself. She’d already got away with spoiling an inquisitor’s secret once this evening, twice might be pushing her luck.

‘So, Gallimo Prime,’ she said. It was sobering, not to mention a little disconcerting, to realise that Ngiri apparently thought her suspicions were correct. ‘I’d hoped I was being paranoid, but I couldn’t make myself believe that I was.’

‘I don’t think we can rule it out,’ Ngiri said. She looked down at the corpse-bags that now contained the bodies of the assassins. ‘And besides, it does seem that someone wants you dead. Perhaps they realised you were on to them.’

Chetta stiffened. ‘Wants me…? They were going for the governor, surely?’

Ngiri shook her head dismissively. ‘I thought as much, at first, but ve wasn’t targeted. You and your brother-in-law were. Neither of you, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, appeared to pose much offensive threat. They didn’t need to neutralise you to get to Taranthis. The only reason to attack you was if you were their true objective.’ She leaned down and picked a cuff up from the deck, turning it over in her hands. Looking closer, Chetta could see that it was designed as a decorative item, but the beautiful lengths of crystal that adorned it were clearly twins to the ones Ngiri had deflected with her fans. It must have been taken from an assassin’s body before they were packed away.

‘Salludo shards,’ Ngiri said, studying it. ‘Xenos origin. They’re shavings of cultured crystal. Incredibly toxic to humans, and most other life with anything like our chemical make-up. Quite rare. The source seems to be somewhere in Segmentum Obscurus, but I’ve yet to ascertain exactly where, or which warp-blasted grox-fondlers are trafficking them.’ She looked up at Chetta, who got the distinct impression that the other woman’s gaze was weighing, measuring and categorising her anew.

‘These aren’t cheap,’ Ngiri said, holding the cuff up. ‘And they’re not easy to find. Whoever hired these killers had considerable resources, in terms of both finances and contacts, and had no compunctions about using them to try to kill you.’

The face of Sen Uru Dukarr swam up into Chetta’s forebrain. ‘Considerable resources. You mean, such as a Navigator house?’

‘This is the sort of filth that I’ve been tracking,’ Ngiri agreed. ‘I had wondered if Brobantis was responsible, given Lord Azariel’s leanings. However, he’s now dead, and the assassins who bore these killed Lord Vittariel. I might have suspected you, but you’d have to be the greatest fool in the sector to stage an assassination attempt on yourself with Salludo shards involved.’

‘I can assure you,’ Chetta told her bitterly, ‘I had nothing to do with Vittar’s death.’

‘Sef, look over the rest of their effects and see if there’s anything that can give us a firmer lead,’ Ngiri instructed her enginseer. ‘It’s unlikely that we’ll find out much,’ she added, addressing Chetta again. ‘Anyone who can pay for Salludo shards can pay for operatives professional enough to leave no clues as to who hired them. Still, it’s worth a try.’

‘Of course, there is every possibility that this was completely unrelated to whatever may have happened to Gallimo Prime,’ Chetta said. She smiled, without much humour. ‘One of the advantages of being such a prominent citizen of the Imperium is that there is never a shortage of suspects for an attempt upon your life, no matter how outlandish.’

‘Perhaps we should compare notes,’ Ngiri said dryly.

‘The opportunity to swap stories with an Imperial inquisitor?’ Chetta snorted in amusement. ‘I might take you up on that, if I thought you meant it.’

‘I was not speaking wholly in jest,’ Ngiri replied. ‘Although I was not referring to how outlandishly we may have cheated death. I have resources, but so do you, and different ones at that. The fate of Vorlese is of concern to us both. I could theoretically commandeer your staff, but I prefer to keep my true identity hidden where possible, I have satisfied myself that you are no enemy of the Imperium, and I find that allies are more useful when they don’t consider themselves to be under duress.’

She proffered her hand, long and slim. ‘Lady Brobantis, I propose an alliance between us, with the aim of determining what happened to Gallimo Prime, and whether or not the culprit or culprits have made their way to Vorlese.’

Chetta looked down, then up into Ngiri’s face. ‘If I shake that, there’s no chance of your rings firing accidentally, is there?’

‘That hand’s already been used up,’ Ngiri replied, with no hint of a smile.

‘Very well.’ For all her talk of ‘no duress’, she made clear she’s perfectly capable of imposing her will if I refuse. ‘An alliance, then.’ Chetta reached out and gripped the inquisitor’s hand in her own, feeling a certain thrill as she did so. Ever since she’d been a slip of a girl, the Inquisition had been a threat hanging over her head – a shadowy, remorseless group of fanatics so blinded by hatred that they sought any excuse to persecute the Navigator houses, no matter how loyal they were to the Emperor. And indeed, Chetta still had no doubt that many inquisitors and their retinues did indeed fit that description.

But that didn’t change the fact that having your childhood daemon suddenly proclaim itself to be on your side was a powerful rush.

‘So,’ she said, leaning on her cane. ‘Where should we begin?’

‘Brobantis Palace would seem the logical place,’ Ngiri suggested. ‘I assume you have any information regarding this investigation there? I can pull the appropriate data that I have from the gun-cutter’s memory banks, and–’

‘And?’ Chetta prompted, as the inquisitor suddenly stopped speaking and tilted her head slightly to one side.

‘…and we have a problem,’ Ngiri said, her face falling. ‘Sef! Prep my armour, I might need it. Davis, Fell, Carmine – prepare yourselves. Chetta, if you’d mind accompanying me to the cockpit?’

The inquisitor’s followers moved quickly, a well-coordinated machine, free of panic or uncertainty. Ngiri herself was already making for a hatch in the bulkhead, and Chetta headed after her as fast as she was able to.

‘What’s this all about?’ she shouted at the inquisitor’s retreating back.

‘My pilot’s just intercepted a communication,’ Ngiri called over her shoulder. ‘I think you should hear it.’

‘And you couldn’t patch it down to where we were?’ Chetta grumbled, wincing as her hip complained at her. She stumped hastily past a couple of other hatches – doorways to personal quarters, perhaps, although there would be little enough room for such things on a shuttle this size – then tailed Ngiri into the cockpit.

It was a starlit cave of blinking lights, wavering gauges and mysterious levers. A high-definition auspex glowed on the main control panel, and Chetta could see the illuminated towers of Ascension City through the armourglass, like artificial cliffs rising out of the sea of murkier darkness that was the Smog Deeps. There were two pilot stations, but only one was occupied. Another red Adeptus Mechanicus hood turned towards her as she entered, and judging by the skeletal bionic hands gripping the controls, this one had no more flesh to them than Sef Lentzen.

‘Lady Brobantis, this is Jekri,’ Ngiri said. ‘They were skitarii before accompanying me, but they’ve shown a considerable talent for piloting. Jekri, if you would play the recording?’

The skitarius reached out and flicked a switch, and suddenly a panicked voice filled the cockpit.

‘…repeat, this is a code one emergency! Intruder in east wing, abnormal abilities, possible teleportation, armed and dangerous. Chief Krane is dead, I repeat, Chief Krane is dead…’

Chetta’s mouth was dry. She knew that voice, and she prayed to the Emperor that DeShelle was still alive. But she had another concern as well.

‘How in the warp’s name did you get access to our encrypted security channels?’ she snarled at Ngiri.

‘You didn’t think Sef was with me at the funeral as a bodyguard, did you?’ Ngiri snapped in response. ‘Chetta, there’s apparently an assassin loose in the Brobantis palace as we speak. We can go there to address matters, but you’ve already survived one attempt on your life this evening. Our other option is the ship Kennevario and I travelled here on, which is in orbit. I can safely say that’s the last place any assassins will have expected you to be, so I think the likelihood of security being compromised there is very low.’

Chetta stared at the speaker as though she could somehow see through it and get a picture of what was happening, but it was a futile endeavour, and she had an inquisitor waiting on her word. She took a deep breath.

‘My people are in danger. Get us to the Brobantis palace as quickly as you can.’

REVEALING THE SERPENTS

Security hadn’t wanted to let Ngiri’s gun-cutter land at first, refusing to believe that Chetta was on board until she got onto the vox herself, and then they hadn’t wanted to let her land due to the ongoing security breach. Chetta had to threaten each and every one of them with summary dismissal before they capitulated. Now she hurried towards the security control centre as fast as she could, with a loose screen of house troops ahead and behind her, and the imposing, armoured shapes of Zaretta Ngiri and Davis of Rawl to her right and left respectively.

‘My lady!’

It was DeShelle, hurrying towards them and fiddling with her ebony metal choker. ‘My lady, you shouldn’t be here! We–’

‘Vittariel’s dead,’ Chetta snapped, without slowing her pace, ‘and I’m only alive thanks to Lady Vass.’ Ngiri had requested that her identity stay secret for now, and Chetta was willing to oblige. It was precious little leverage to hold over an Imperial inquisitor, but she’d take what she could get, just in case she ever needed it. ‘I’m not safe anywhere, it seems, so I may as well be at home. Where are my children?’

‘Lord Vit– Your children? Yes, my lady,’ DeShelle stammered, cutting herself off in mid-sentence and reversing the direction of her walk to keep ahead of them. ‘I had them brought to the control centre as soon as we realised the nature of the breach.’

‘And what is that?’ Ngiri asked. DeShelle opened her mouth as if to respond, then looked at Chetta.

Chetta flicked her fingers, irritated at the delay. ‘Go ahead. Lady Vass has ably demonstrated her loyalties this evening.’ Which were to the Emperor, not House Brobantis, but Chetta considered that to be unimportant for the moment.

‘I don’t exactly know, your ladyships,’ DeShelle said, after a moment where she was apparently trying to marshal her thoughts into words. ‘It was one man, so far as I could see. He could move… unnaturally, is all I can say. The hallway was dark, but he was in places he should not have been, and not in places that he should. The only explanation that I can muster is that he was a witch.’

The blasted stars take it all! Chetta ground her teeth. Witchcraft was a popular explanation for the mysterious or sinister amongst the laypeople of the Imperium, but DeShelle was bright, well educated and distinctly lacking in superstition. She wouldn’t make such a statement without reasonable evidence.

‘Is the intruder still at large?’ she demanded. They’d reached the main security centre now, and the thick plasteel doors swung open to admit her party.

‘We don’t know for sure,’ DeShelle admitted. ‘We have teams searching the building, but how can we declare an area as clear, when we think he can move as he pleases?’

The Vaults. The thought struck Chetta like a warp storm front. The chambers beneath the palace where the elders of Brobantis, those Navigators too wracked by catastrophic mutation to leave any more, languished in luxurious isolation… and where the disastrous genetic by-blows of failed marriages were examined by the house’s gene-scholars, the strands of their identities and very existence teased apart to understand what went wrong, and why, and how to avoid it in the future. If the intruder reached the Vaults, the house itself could be as good as lost. They were sealed and guarded so tightly that most foes would require a small army to get in, but a single man who could teleport would have little trouble in gaining access. The security measures inside might give him pause, but then again, they might not.

Brobantis’ only hope was that the intruder wouldn’t know of them. Very few of the servants were even aware of their existence. Chetta certainly couldn’t start talking about them in front of an inquisitor.

‘Mama!’

Felicia and Ranovel came running towards her as soon as she got through the door, trailed by a pair of anxious-looking guards who’d clearly been assigned to them. The tightness in Chetta’s chest loosened a touch as her children reached her, slowing before they embraced her so as not to knock her off her feet, for they knew how frail their mother could be. She hugged them one at a time with her left arm, taking some small comfort in their presence and good health.

‘Where have alarms been raised?’ she asked DeShelle after a moment, one arm still around Ranovel’s shoulders and trying to keep her voice calm. DeShelle wasn’t privy to the true nature of the Vaults. Chetta trusted DeShelle with many of her secrets, but that one was hers alone.

‘The only alarm raised was by me,’ DeShelle said. ‘No one has seen him since I ran when he was fighting Chief Krane.’ She said the words without shame, and with good reason. No one would expect a Navigator’s aide to fight and die against a foe who was outmatching the head of security.

‘And reported deaths?’ Chetta asked, bracing herself.

‘Two guards, found with their throats cut at their station,’ DeShelle said. ‘Luc Krane, obviously. Savomir Tej–’

‘Great-Uncle Sav?’ Ranovel declared in horror. Chetta sighed. Her children had loved Savomir Tej, and to be fair, the old boy had tolerated them when he generally had little to do with most people. She’d have preferred to spare them these details, but then she’d have preferred to spare them a lot of things that she couldn’t afford to. Felicia and Ranovel had to understand the dangers of the galaxy, or they’d never survive them.

‘The intruder also apparently killed Fortuna Bettan, one of the servants,’ DeShelle continued, with an apologetic glance at Ranovel. ‘However, we… I think that she may have been in league with him, and he killed her to prevent her from talking to us.’

Chetta frowned. She didn’t know Bettan, but that was a serious allegation to make of any Brobantis servant. ‘Explain.’

‘It may make more sense if I show you,’ DeShelle said, leading them to one of the terminals. She lit the incense and struck the ritual blow, and it shimmered into life. ‘Krane and I had noticed an alarming pattern, which was why we went in search of Bettan in the first place. I gathered what we knew, or suspected, together before we went, to show you when you returned, or for someone to hopefully find if…’

She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to.

‘Three Brobantis Navigators killed before today,’ DeShelle said, bringing up their faces. ‘Tanomariel, Zulantis and Avomarr Du-Choi.’ She cast an uncertain glance at Ranovel and Felicia.

‘Get on with it,’ Chetta told her. She placed her arms around her children’s shoulders, resting some of her weight on Felicia. ‘My darlings, I’m sorry for this, but you need to understand what we face.’

‘Tanomariel was mutilated,’ DeShelle said briskly. ‘Zulantis was burned, Avomarr Du-Choi was killed and dumped into the river. Then Krane found out about two other Navigators who were murdered by an unknown assailant in a dive bar in the Mids. Someone – presumably their house or houses – had tried hard to hush it up, but there were two pertinent details. The first was that, like Tanomariel, their warp eyes were removed.’

‘Animals,’ Ngiri muttered. Chetta glanced sideways at her, but the inquisitor seemed completely genuine in her disgust.

‘Indeed,’ DeShelle agreed. ‘What we realised was that due to the burning, or being unable to find the body, Zulantis and Avomarr Du-Choi may have suffered the same fate and we hadn’t previously realised it. If so, that struck us as ritualistic.’

Chetta grimaced. ‘That does indeed sound concerning. What was the second pertinent detail?’

‘All accounts of the deaths in the bar, garbled though they were, agreed that there was no way the attacker could have entered or, particularly, left the scene of the crime by conventional means,’ DeShelle said. She swallowed, and looked at Ranovel again. ‘And… when Savomir Tej was found, his warp eye had been removed.’

Ranovel let out a low wail. Chetta hugged him tighter, but her own pulse had quickened. ‘You’re saying it was the same attacker who struck here? You think all the deaths are linked?’

‘It seems like the obvious conclusion,’ DeShelle said. ‘There could be other explanations, of course, but this appears the most likely – there is a witch who is killing Navigators, especially, it seems, Brobantis Navigators, and removing their warp eyes. The reason we think Fortuna Bettan was involved is that she personally served each of the dead Brobantis Navigators, including Savomir Tej, and so would have potentially been able to pass on information about their locations.’ DeShelle swallowed uncomfortably. ‘And when guards were sent to apprehend and question her husband, he began to spasm and died within seconds. We suspect a hidden poison capsule, although the chirurgeons have not yet had time to examine the body.’

‘Throne of Terra!’ Chetta swore. ‘Yes, that seems conclusive.’ She glanced around the chamber. Brobantis security staff were talking over vox-channels, coordinating the security sweeps and watching security pict-feeds with every appearance of diligence. ‘So you’re suggesting we may not even be able to trust our own people?’

DeShelle shrugged helplessly. ‘I cannot say, my lady. I’d love to think that we had but two conspirators, and that both are now dead, but it would feel foolish in the extreme.’

‘The trick in such situations is always to find the balance of a healthy suspicion, partway between reckless naivety and paralysing paranoia,’ Ngiri said firmly. ‘I would suggest a complete overhaul of your security arrangements. Staff are switched on their shifts, existing teams and working partnerships are broken up, from cleaners to guards. If conspirators have found each other, and are covering for each other, you need to remove that element of safety for them. Let everyone’s habits and behaviours come under fresh scrutiny, and–’

‘Shh!’ Chetta said without thinking, holding up one finger. She had the momentary exhilarating thrill of witnessing an Imperial inquisitor fall silent at her command, probably through sheer surprise more than anything else, but the churning in her stomach quite ruined any enjoyment she would normally have garnered from the moment. ‘A thought occurs. DeShelle, you said the behaviour seemed ritualistic?’

‘Yes, my lady,’ DeShelle nodded. ‘The killer appears to have had a compulsion to remove the warp eye, even when in danger of discovery. This sort of trophy-taking is concordant with other known mass-killers in social environments, such as–’

‘Never mind the background,’ Chetta cut her off, before DeShelle could show off her education any further. ‘I’m not concerned with the killer’s mental state. I’m more worried about it being for an actual ritual.’

Ngiri’s eyes had gone wide. ‘Gallimo.’

‘Gallimo,’ Chetta said grimly, nodding. ‘DeShelle, did you get a good look at the killer’s face?’

DeShelle nodded, her mouth tight.

‘Right.’ Chetta detached herself from her children and stumped over to the annex where Tekoa Yunn and his party were still buried in their work, under the watchful eye of an autogun-armed guard. She pressed the door release and it slid open, releasing a warm waft of body odour and recaff fumes. ‘Tekoa! I want the face of every single suspect who came in through immigration ready for DeShelle to look at.’

Tekoa jerked at the sound of his name, like a cyber-mastiff on auto-recall. ‘Yes, high lady! But, that’s hundreds of people…’

‘Best get moving then,’ Chetta said briskly. ‘Can you narrow it down before she starts, if she gives you a rough description?’

Tekoa nodded. ‘To a certain extent, yes. We already have some preliminary cross-referencing classifications based on skin tone, hair colour, height and so on.’

‘I knew there was a reason I rescued you from Administratum obscurity,’ Chetta told him with a tight smile. ‘DeShelle, get to it.’ She looked at Ngiri. ‘Lady Vass. If we get a name, and an image, can you use your influence with Judge Arctos to get a manhunt going?’

Ngiri was staring at the banks of cogitators, her expression thoughtful. ‘You set this up with… what?’

‘Paper records from the Administratum archives, after you so inconsiderately removed the data files, and pict-feeds from the portmaster,’ Chetta said impatiently. Ngiri’s brows lowered in response.

‘Van Sennit, you rat,’ Ngiri said softly, still looking at the screens. ‘I’m going to have your hide…’ She looked back at Chetta. ‘I told him not to give that footage to anyone else. I suppose you got to him just before I did? You must have had a powerful hold over him, to get him to ignore a rogue trader’s orders.’ She waved a hand with a whirr of armour servos. ‘Of course, Chetta, of course. If you can get us something to work with, then I’ll have Arctos combing the streets himself, if that’s what it takes.’

‘Good,’ Chetta said shortly. ‘I just hope it won’t be too–’

‘Lady Brobantis!’

She looked around sharply, wincing as her neck cracked. A vox-operator on the far side of the main room was waving at her. It was a grave breach of decorum, but in Chetta’s experience it was generally worth paying sharp attention on such occasions, because it meant someone had encountered something they thought was more important than avoiding the risk of disciplinary action.

‘What?’ she demanded. ‘Has the intruder been found?’

‘No, high lady,’ the woman called back. ‘But there is an urgent communique from Lady Jo’Sin! She’s approaching in a craft and demanding permission to land, else she threatens a trade war of her own!’

Chetta groaned inwardly. Of course, Morandia had seen her boarding Ngiri’s gun-cutter, and even if she hadn’t witnessed what had happened to Vittariel in the press of the action, she’d have realised that her brother was no longer anywhere to be found after Ngiri’s craft had departed. If she didn’t know already, then Morandia was suddenly about to find herself as an only child, with Chetta being the last person to see either of the Brobantis brothers alive. Chetta would be the first to admit that it seemed suspicious. That was the problem with arranging for your husband’s murder: it only needed one more unlikely death to occur in your vicinity for people to start asking awkward questions.

‘We’re going to need my brother-in-law’s body off your ship,’ she told Ngiri. Vittariel would have needed to be interred in the Vaults anyway, but Chetta hadn’t intended to unload his remains until she knew what the situation was in the palace. Now, however, Morandia was forcing their hand.

‘I’ll have Fell bring him out, if your people will be ready to receive him,’ Ngiri replied. ‘You’re intending to let them land, I take it?’

‘If the intruder is still here, that’s two more potential victims for him that I don’t particularly care about,’ Chetta muttered. ‘Morandia’s got enough of Vittariel’s temper that she might just try to get Old Man Veel to start a trade war against us, if she thinks I’m being obstructive. And with Dukarr already set against us, Veel might just consider it worth the risk.’ She snapped her fingers at the vox-operator. ‘Authorise them to land!’

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Ngiri murmured.

Chetta snorted. ‘How much worse can the day get?’

ESCALATION

‘No, I’m not going to meet them,’ Chetta told the guard irritably. ‘Send a team and escort them here. Protocol might dictate the reception chambers, but we don’t have the personnel to secure–’

‘That’s him! That’s him!’

It was DeShelle’s voice, from behind her. Chetta turned to see her aide jabbing her finger at a pict-screen in Yunn’s annex, which was displaying a still from immigration control: a pale-skinned man, with narrow cheeks and scraggly dark hair that reached past his shoulders. He had a respirator, but it was pulled down to expose his face as the official compared his appearance to that of his ident.

‘Name?’ Chetta demanded, limping towards them, the guard completely forgotten.

‘Radimir Niklau,’ Tekoa said, checking and checking again against the notes in his hand. ‘Yes. The gate and time stamp match up. Whoever he may really be, he travelled here using an ident in the name of Radimir Niklau.’

Chetta looked at Ngiri. ‘Your ladyship?’

Ngiri subvocalised something into the comm wrapped around her throat, then spoke clearly. ‘This is rogue trader Indrinian Vass. Get me Judge Arctos immediately.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Yes, I know that it’s midnight on the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension, because I am not a complete imbecile. You apparently are, however, since despite my authorisation code you have replied to me instead of immediately patching me through. This is a security issue of the utmost urgency, pray do not delay me any further!’

There was a moment of silence. Ngiri must have muted her comm, for her mouth quirked into a wry smile as she looked at Chetta. ‘Proctors. Even I can’t intimidate them much, on a personal level. Make them worry that they’re delaying the Emperor’s justice, however…’ Her face became alert and stern again. ‘Arctos, it’s Vass. I’m going to send you a pict-file of a man identified as Radimir Niklau. Consider him to be the prime suspect for the concerns we have spoken of previously. He is armed and extremely dangerous, and I want a shoot-on-sight order for anyone who even vaguely resembles him until we have one hundred per cent confirmation that he’s dead.’ Another pause. ‘Yes. So long as the city is still in one piece by the time we get him then there is no such thing as too much collateral damage. And I’m prepared to be flexible about the city.’

‘Good work,’ Chetta murmured to DeShelle and Tekoa. Her aide still looked a little disturbed, which was only to be expected if you’d just caught another glimpse of the face of the man who’d killed your colleague in front of you. Tekoa Yunn simply had the beam of a man who had been working hard and could now see that all his effort had apparently paid off. ‘Tekoa, as soon as everything settles down, feel free to leave here and go back to your rooms.’

‘For how long, high lady?’ Tekoa asked, uncertainly. Chetta tutted.

‘Until I say otherwise. This isn’t the Administratum. You work for me when I need you to do something, so long as you keep out of trouble the rest of the time I don’t care what you get up to.’ She turned away from his awestruck expression, and back to Ngiri. ‘Did he agree?’

‘He’s mobilising every proctor in the city,’ Ngiri confirmed with some satisfaction. ‘The watchmen are being promised bonuses for it too, although they’ll likely just end up shooting each other. One way or another, though, I’m hoping we can flush this man Niklau out. At the very least, he’s a dangerous witch. At worst…’ She shrugged, the massive pauldrons of her power armour exaggerating the movement. ‘Well, I almost hope he is the worst, in this case. Then at least we’d know we’d dealt with it.’

‘You’re prepared to put a lot of faith in the word of my aide,’ Chetta remarked, lowering her voice a little as Yunn’s assistants began to shut down the cogitators around them.

‘She seems sensible,’ Ngiri replied. ‘You appointed her yourself?’

‘I did,’ Chetta nodded.

Ngiri flashed a quick smile. ‘That says a lot, as well.’ Her expression sobered. ‘Are you going to explain the situation to your sister-in-law and her husband?’

‘I most certainly am,’ Chetta said. She rubbed her right shoulder with her left hand. The damned thing still ached from when she’d struck the assassin with her cane. ‘I may not be especially keen on either of them, but they’re no fools, and they’re as fond of this planet as I am. Jo’Sin’s resources could be critical in finding Niklau.’

She didn’t have long to wait. It was a matter of minutes before the heavy main doors of the security chamber opened once more, admitting Morandia and Jalamar amidst a knot of Brobantis security personnel.

‘Chettamandey!’ Morandia called, storming across the room. Chetta should never have let them in here, by rights, not into the nerve centre of Brobantis security, but she’d meant what she’d said about not having the guards available to safely meet them anywhere else. Chetta liked her warp eye exactly where it was. ‘Where is my brother?’

‘If you’d like to come in here?’ Chetta asked, smiling sweetly. She turned and jerked her head at Tekoa and his assistants. ‘Out. Now.’

The surveillance personnel filed out hurriedly, and Chetta ushered DeShelle, Ngiri and Davis in, then held the door for Morandia and Jalamar before shutting it behind her. Jalamar was eyeing the two towering, armoured warriors uneasily, but Morandia was concentrating only on Chetta.

‘Well?’

‘Vittar is dead,’ Chetta said bluntly. She felt a momentary twinge of guilt as the other woman’s face crumpled, but only a momentary one. ‘There was an assassination attempt when we were with the governor.’

‘And how convenient that Vittar died, and you yet live!’ Morandia hissed venomously, the lumens above flashing off her glare-shades as she tilted her head.

‘Lady Brobantis would have died also, were it not for my intervention,’ Ngiri put in. Chetta started to object – she’d handled that one with the claws quite readily, she thought – but clamped down on the words. Ngiri was only trying to help, after all.

‘You?’ Morandia scoffed, rounding on her. ‘The rogue pauper attached to the beggar Xudines? Of course my brother’s death would aid your patron, since it would leave this fool in a position of power!’ She pointed at Chetta, who fought very hard to control her urge to swat Morandia’s arm away with her cane, and possibly have her finger slip over the activation stud at the same time. She managed to keep control of herself, however,

‘So I am both a snivelling incompetent and a manipulative schemer?’ she demanded. ‘Morandia, you need to choose one or the other for me. And lest we forget, now my husband and my brother-in-law are both dead, you are the sole surviving scion of the ruling branch of House Brobantis! Don’t pretend that you do not stand to benefit from this state of affairs!’

Well. Perhaps she hadn’t fully kept control. Morandia’s mouth had lolled open for a second in utter shock, but then her nostrils flared as she drew in breath, ready to retaliate–

‘There is an unregistered psyker called Radimir Niklau at large in Ascension City, and he is killing Navigators and cutting out their warp eyes,’ DeShelle DuVoir said loudly, inserting herself between Chetta and Morandia. ‘Including in a dive bar called the Star Lounge in the Mids, despite the efforts of at least one house to keep it quiet. We believe that he is attempting to replicate a ritual that pulled the entire planet of Gallimo Prime into the warp, which means we could all die at any moment.’

It was the Star Lounge that got them. As soon as those words left DeShelle’s throat, Morandia’s mouth began to close again, and Jalamar visibly paled. They knew she had the truth, or at least part of it. Morandia licked her lips.

‘How many other deaths have there been?’

‘Were they yours?’ Ngiri asked. ‘In the Star Lounge, I mean.’

‘One of them was,’ Morandia admitted. ‘We never identified the other. I didn’t remember her as being Brobantis, either. A visitor from off-world, we thought.’

‘We know of six in total, as of this evening,’ DeShelle said. ‘There may be more, of course.’

‘We have only just ascertained the killer’s likely identity,’ Ngiri said. ‘I have already instructed Judge Arctos to begin a citywide manhunt.’ She let that sentence hang in the air for a moment, while Morandia and Jalamar registered the fact that this rogue trader was capable of, and willing to, dispense instructions to the system’s highest-ranking representative of the Adeptus Arbites, and the implied fact that he’d obey. ‘Any resources that House Jo’Sin could lend to the search would, of course, be very much appreciated.’

Morandia and Jalamar exchanged a look. Quite what could be communicated between them with those circles of darkened glass in front of Morandia’s eyes, Chetta couldn’t be entirely sure. Perhaps they simply knew each other well, however, for Morandia turned back with a determined expression.

‘Your words about my brothers,’ she said to Chetta, raising a shaking finger, ‘are insulting in the extreme, and I shall consider my response to them carefully. However, in the circumstances, it seems clear that other matters require our immediate attention. Never let it be said that House Jo’Sin’s first loyalty is not to the Imperium. We have heard of the horror that was Gallimo Prime. If you have compelling evidence that this man is a genuine threat, we shall of course mobilise to aid in his apprehension.’

‘Never mind apprehension – we want the bastard dead,’ Ngiri said flatly. ‘If we provide you with the details, you can get your house to assist?’

‘My father trusts me implicitly,’ Jalamar said, with a jerk of his head that was more of a twitch than a nod.

‘Good,’ Chetta said. She mentally gritted her teeth. ‘You have my thanks.’

‘I am not doing this for you,’ Morandia snorted. ‘I simply do not suffer from sufficient hubris to risk the safety of an entire planet over an insult from a grasping, duplicitous harridan.’

‘Then that makes two of us,’ Chetta replied, baring her teeth in what anyone could take as a smile, if they so chose. Morandia and Jalamar clearly didn’t, but Chetta couldn’t give a grox’s left testicle for either of them. ‘Lady Vass, shall we–’

The door to the annex flew open to reveal the same vox-operator that had alerted Chetta to the Jo’Sin’s imminent arrival. She hesitated as every eye turned on her, and began to visibly wilt.

‘I am not exaggerating,’ Chetta said deliberately, ‘when I say that this had better be good.’

‘It’s… not good, my lady,’ the woman stammered. ‘It’s…’ She trailed off, eyeing Morandia and Jalamar uneasily.

‘Out with it!’ Chetta snapped.

‘Forgive me, my lady,’ the vox-operator said miserably. ‘Some of our… interests… have come under attack.’

Chetta stared at her, not comprehending. ‘Attack? What do you mean, precisely?’

‘Armed troops, my lady,’ the woman said, looking as though she wanted the floor to swallow her up. ‘It’s an open offensive.’

‘What?’ Chetta strode towards her, and the woman hastily backed out of the doorway before she got trampled. ‘Whose troops? What’s going on? An open offensive? They’re not acting covertly? We’ve seen insignia?’

‘Yes, my lady,’ the woman said. ‘It’s… they’re Dukarr’s, my lady.’

THE NOVATOR CORTEX

Chetta stared in horror at the screens in front of her. Grainy images, taken by security picters and, now, by surveillance servo-skulls that her people had scrambled into the air, showed violence erupting in no less than five places across Vorlese’s capital city. The pleasure house where Alexun van Sennit had been compromised was already in flames, and a group of warehouses on the north side of Delta Block was under attack: even as Chetta watched, a transport flyer tried to take off but was hosed down with autocannon fire, and pitched sideways to disappear out of view into the Smog Deeps. One of the manufactorums in which House Brobantis had a controlling interest was coming under fire too, although the workers stuck on the overnight shift on this holiest of days had reacted badly to such aggression and had managed to close the distance on their attackers, fighting back with lascutters and oversized wrenches. A chem refinery in Gamma Block, which Chetta was quite frankly amazed that Dukarr had managed to track back to her house, had already been bombed out. They were also shooting up a strip of bars a few levels below, which was actually nothing to do with Brobantis, but this failure on her enemy’s part did little to comfort her.

‘This is insanity,’ she breathed. ‘That maniac is going to doom us both! Taranthis will see to it!’

‘You asked how much worse the day could get,’ Ngiri remarked from behind her right shoulder. ‘Now you know.’

‘I do not appreciate your insolence, Lady Vass!’ Chetta snarled, swinging around to glare at her. ‘Innocent people are dying!’

Ngiri leaned down and spoke quietly, her lips barely moving so that only Chetta could hear her. Her eyes were cold and dark as splinters of flint.

‘Do you have any idea how many innocent people I’ve killed, or have ordered killed?’ the inquisitor asked softly.

Chetta felt her lip curl. ‘I wouldn’t care to guess.’

‘Nor would I,’ Ngiri said, just as quietly as before. ‘I lost count many years ago. But it has always been to ensure that my duties are adequately performed. To ensure the safety and security of the Imperium. And I would order all those deaths again, without question.’ Her eyes flicked past Chetta to the pict-feeds. ‘You wanted to make sure your children didn’t get dragged down in whatever doom your soothsayers claim awaits Dukarr. Now your people are paying the price of your decision to humiliate a vain, powerful man in front of his peers.’ She looked back at Chetta. ‘I hope it’s worth it.’

Anger swelled in Chetta’s chest. ‘No. No, it is not worth it, and I will not stand for it! Sen Uru is vain, yes, but he is not beyond reason! There has to be another explanation for him to do this now!’ She banged her cane on the floor angrily, ignoring the jolt of pain that it sent up her arm, and turned to make her way over to the other side of the control chamber. She’d refused to let Morandia and Jalamar see the details of Dukarr’s offensive, and so had ordered DeShelle to show them the evidence they’d gathered on the actions of Radimir Niklau. Both Jo’Sin Navigators were looking grim-faced when Chetta reached them.

‘I need to make contact with Sen Uru,’ she stated flatly. ‘My house cannot contribute to the search for Niklau while we are under direct attack, and such events will only confuse the efforts of Judge Arctos and his proctors. I need you to stand with me and present a unified front to him. You as well, Lady Vass,’ she added to Ngiri.

‘Agreed,’ Morandia said immediately. Chetta wasn’t that surprised; Morandia might threaten a trade war with the house of her birth while her temper ran high, but news of Dukarr’s open offensive had clearly shocked her. She had once viewed House Brobantis’ assets as her own… and indeed, if Chetta’s suspicions about the woman’s ambitions were accurate, hoped to do so again.

‘Yes,’ Jalamar said, a moment later. ‘This must take top priority.’

‘It seems the wisest course of action,’ Ngiri agreed. ‘How do you propose to make contact?’

‘The Novator Cortex,’ Chetta replied simply.

‘Outrageous!’ Morandia declared, all vestiges of cooperative spirit abruptly draining out of her expression. ‘You are not the Brobantis Novator! You have not been confirmed, and I will not stand for this!’

‘I don’t see anyone else in a position to do the job,’ Chetta said bluntly. ‘And unless you’re having second thoughts about your marriage and wish to declare yourself a Brobantis again, you have no right to object to anything.’

‘If I may interrupt,’ Ngiri said, a shred of impatience in her tone, ‘what is a Novator Cortex?’

‘A private vox-channel used by house Novators to communicate in situations of emergency,’ Morandia bit out, not taking the stare of her darkened eyeglasses from Chetta. ‘To ignore such a communique is unheard of, even when the parties concerned are in a state of open warfare. However,’ she continued, ‘they are coded to the incumbent Novator, so despite my sister-in-law’s desire to piss all over tradition, she would be unable to do a thing without invoking the appropriate rites, which would take time that we do not have.’

‘True,’ Chetta agreed sweetly, ‘had my husband not told me the codes.’ She raised her eyebrows at Morandia’s expression of outrage. ‘I can get hold of Sen Uru, at the very least. A few moments ago you were prepared to stand with me to persuade him to stand down, and hopefully join the hunt for Niklau. Are you going back on your word so soon?’

Morandia ground her teeth. ‘Do it, then.’

The chamber for the Novator of House Brobantis’ private communications was ostentatious, but surprisingly small, intended as it was for a single person, with perhaps one aide on hand should they be required. Chetta levered herself down into the throne, which to her eye looked like an exact replica of the polished obsidian one in the Grand Hall, although it presumably lacked the inbuilt conversion field. What idiots had decided to make House Brobantis’ throne out of obsidian, anyway? The damned stuff was far from comfortable, and as slippery as a downhive merchant. Jalamar and Morandia stood to her left, pressed uncomfortably close to her arm, while Ngiri loomed on her right. The inquisitor’s power armour wasn’t making the chamber feel any more spacious.

‘Let’s begin, then,’ Chetta said. There was a keypad in the arm of the throne, and she pressed the activation glyph, then ran through the identification sequence. She’d only seen the code written down once, but she’d always had a near-perfect memory for text and numbers.

The wall facing them shimmered into life, becoming a huge screen littered with icons depicting the other houses that held significant holdings on Vorlese. She selected Dukarr’s, and waited. She’d never witnessed the Novator Cortex in action, certainly not from this end. She presumably wouldn’t have to wade through layers of underlings to get to Sen Uru; that was the point of it, after all. But how did it actually work? Did the technology somehow link directly to his personal comm? If so, could the right mind find a way to pinpoint his location by using the signal as a marker? That might be a useful tool…

The icon flashed white, and a voice spoke. Chetta almost didn’t recognise it as Sen Uru Dukarr at first, so ragged was it.

‘Have you no shred of humanity left in you?!’ Dukarr’s Novator raged. There was no picture accompanying his words, which was unsurprising given that it was unlikely he’d been sitting in his own communication chamber. ‘Must you torment me in the hour of my grief?’

‘Sen Uru!’ Chetta snapped, thoroughly alarmed. Why did the man sound as though his heart had been torn out, when his troops were attacking her holdings? ‘Kindly explain yourself! What is the meaning of your aggression, in violation of the terms of engagement that you laid out yourself?’

‘You speak of terms of engagement to me, when my son lies dead?’ Sen Uru bellowed. ‘You dare, when your very actions spit my terms back in my face?!’

‘Your… What?’ Chetta faltered. What was the man talking about? ‘Ban Uru? Ban Uru is dead?’

‘I curse your name and your house with the fury of a thousand suns, you she-daemon! I will have my revenge, even if I have to take this planet with–’

‘Sen Uru!’ Morandia shouted, interrupting his rant. Dukarr’s Novator fell silent for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was thick with suspicion.

‘Who speaks?’

‘Morandia Jo’Sin,’ Morandia said clearly. ‘I am here with my husband, and the fact that we are contacting you on the Novator Cortex with Lady Brobantis should tell you that this is no ordinary matter!’

‘Do you all conspire against me, then?’

‘Lord Dukarr!’ Ngiri said. ‘This is Lady Indrinian Vass, rogue trader allied with House Xudine. I appreciate your pain, but this is vitally important. We have reason to believe that the entire planet is in danger, from a man who has been killing Navigators and removing their warp eyes. Was this unholy mutilation performed on your son, by any chance?’

A wracking sob answered them. Chetta glanced sharply up at Ngiri, whose expression was grim.

‘Sen Uru,’ Chetta said cautiously. ‘If what Lady Vass said accurately describes your son’s death, then first of all you have my deepest sympathies, and secondly the situation may be worse than you think, despite how hard that must be for you to believe.’

‘Just words. Just words designed to confuse a grieving father!’

‘Sen Uru, stand down your troops. Stand them down until we can show you the evidence we have. Your grief and anger are real, but I swear to the God-Emperor Himself, I am not your true target.’ Chetta licked her lips. ‘I will come to you. I will come to you and place my safety in your hands, to show you this evidence myself.’

‘We will all come,’ Morandia said firmly. Jalamar started in apparent surprise, but didn’t raise his voice to argue. Ngiri nodded in agreement.

‘Very well. You wish me to humour you? I will humour you.’ A little of the raw emotion in Sen Uru’s voice vanished, although it was replaced by venom. ‘I trust you as much as I trust a naked blade in the hand of an assassin, Chetta. I will order my troops to stand down when I receive word that your transport has left the Brobantis palace. Should you deviate from your route, or I come to believe that you are trying to stall me, I shall rescind that order immediately.’

‘We shall leave as soon as is possible,’ Chetta said. She levered herself up off the obsidian throne, swearing silently at its creators as she did so. ‘Be ready for us.’

DESCENT INTO CHAOS

Ngiri’s gun-cutter rose smoothly off the landing pad, its powerful engines causing the body of the craft to vibrate as it climbed into the midnight sky under Jekri’s careful ministrations. Chetta watched from the flight deck as Brobantis Palace receded beneath her. She never got tired of the sight of it, ever since she’d first arrived here as a youth to meet her husband-to-be. She’d heard that some people experienced a sense of lessening when they saw their home getting smaller and smaller beneath them, but she never did. Probably because a Navigator palace could never really be described as ‘small’, whatever the context.

‘You are certain this is the best course of action?’ Ngiri asked from beside her. The inquisitor hadn’t removed her power armour, on the basis that the welcome they were expecting from Dukarr was no more certain than the welcome she’d been prepared for when she first set foot in Brobantis Palace with Kennevario Xudine.

‘I am,’ Chetta said, and was almost surprised to find that she was telling the truth. ‘We need Sen Uru to cooperate with us, or at the very least not to muddy the waters. We are not, by and large, a reckless people. Placing my safety in his hands should be a powerful indication of my sincerity, when we would normally deal with such matters at distance, or through intermediaries.’

Ngiri nodded. ‘And you prefer my craft to one drawn from your own household?’

‘It pains me to admit it,’ Chetta said grudgingly, ‘but I may trust your people more than I trust any of mine at the moment, save for DeShelle. And Tekoa, I suppose.’ She raised an eyebrow at Jekri as they made a stuttering, mechanical sound that Chetta interpreted after a moment as laughter. ‘Did I say something funny?’

‘Jekri,’ Ngiri said, a note of warning in her voice.

‘I am not used to being held in such positive regard,’ the former skitarius said. ‘That is all. The people we meet are rarely glad to see us.’

‘Well, given the Bettans’ betrayal, how can I be sure that any pilot of mine is not secretly a fanatic of some sort?’ Chetta pointed out.

‘I, an agent of the Inquisition, am so glad to be told that I am not a fanatic,’ Jekri replied. ‘It is a refreshing change.’

‘You are not secretly a fanatic,’ Chetta told them dryly. ‘And a devotion to stopping the rogue psyker attempting to pull this planet into the warp is a fanaticism I can thoroughly support.’ She craned her neck, but could no longer get the angle of view she wanted. ‘Are the Jo’Sins following us?’

‘Yes,’ Ngiri confirmed, her greater height allowing her to see what Chetta could not. ‘I have contacted Judge Arctos again, and have asked him to have any reports on progress passed on to us.’

‘“Asked”?’ Chetta said, looking up at the taller woman.

‘Asked,’ Ngiri replied firmly. ‘Diplomacy is a far more useful tool than intimidation, save in the direst of circumstances. As I’m sure you understand.’ She turned, and squeezed her ceramite-armoured form past Chetta and through the hatchway that led off the flight deck. ‘Come, let us rejoin your honour guard before Fell attempts to engage them in a dice game.’

Six of the TriStar Guard, those House Brobantis troops specifically assigned to shield the ruling family from harm, awaited them in the main hold. Each one wore carapace armour with their masters’ insignia on the breast, and each cradled a hellgun across their chest. They stood in a rigid line, their backs to the main door, awaiting instructions. Not exactly opposite them, but grouped together and too-casually doing apparently unimportant things with weapons and other paraphernalia, were Fell, Davis of Rawl and Carmine.

The TriStar were taken in as orphans, and raised with House Brobantis as their only family. Unless their childhood instructors had also been corrupted, Chetta felt it was highly unlikely that they’d have been compromised. Their loyalty should be beyond question, as was their martial skill: Brobantis’ standard practice was to hire ex-Militarum officers to train them.

However, had Chetta needed to pick a winner between the two groups in a fight, she might still have gone with Ngiri’s retinue. A combat-trained psyker could be worth ten men on his own, Fell practically radiated danger, and Crusaders weren’t let out into the galaxy unless they could fight. Besides, good training alone was little substitute for training combined with experience.

Beyond both groups, and huddled together in the far corner of the hold, were Sef Lentzen, Kennevario Xudine and DeShelle. Brief introductions had been made when Chetta, Ngiri, DeShelle and Davis had come aboard, and Chetta was pleased to see her aide trying to make connections. She was naturally timid, but played on it to portray herself as engagingly naive, which had been of use more than once. People saw DeShelle as unthreatening, when in fact the risk she posed them was far more subtle than a simple physical one.

‘If I can have everybody’s attention,’ Chetta said loudly, leaning on her cane, and all eyes turned towards her. ‘I need to impress upon everyone here that etiquette will be of the utmost importance when we reach Dukarr Palace. Sen Uru is angry and grieving, and he is likely to perceive any slight as an act of disrespect worthy of restarting hostilities. That would be bad for my house, and potentially disastrous for attempts to locate and neutralise Radimir Niklau.’ She looked over to the trio in the far corner. ‘Lord Xudine. Are you willing to join your voice to ours?’

‘Indeed I am,’ Kennevario Xudine confirmed, floating towards her. ‘We must stop this menace, and my house still stands in alliance with yours.’

And when this current emergency is resolved, you and I will need to have a discussion about how much of your overture was prompted by the inquisitor, Chetta thought grimly. However, she nodded respectfully, for the sake of her audience. ‘I am glad. Upon arrival, my honour guard will disembark first. I will follow, and then–’

‘Lady Brobantis, I hate to interrupt you,’ Ngiri cut in, ‘but Jekri informs me that we’ve had a message from one of Judge Arctos’ senior proctors. They’ve managed to trace Niklau to a property rented with his ident, and they have a live feed.’

Chetta’s mouth went dry. ‘Can you display it?’

For answer, Ngiri took three quick steps to a section of the wall and tapped it twice, with surprisingly delicate dexterity for someone in power armour. A hidden screen flickered into life, showing grainy footage of a row of low-grade hab buildings, each little more than a box with a door and the most basic of facilities, inside which a person might exist for a while. The picture source looked to be a servo-skull or similar remote imager, judging by the way it bobbed slightly, but smoothly, as it followed the approach of five dark-suited proctors to one of the doors.

‘In the Emperor’s name!’

The door was blown in by a shotgun blast at point-blank range. The proctors poured in and the servo-skull floated in after them. Scanning lumen beams picked out blood and bodies, and then someone found the control for the apartment’s main light source.

‘Three bodies, all deceased through violent means,’ someone said dispassionately. ‘Estimated time of death, three to five days. Wounds appear to have been inflicted by a short-bladed power weapon.’

‘That’s what he had,’ DeShelle said urgently, a note of alarm in her voice. ‘That was what he used in the corridor!’

‘Bedroom is clear.’

‘Washroom is clear.’

The pict-feed lingered on one face-down body, with a sheet of dried blood that had spilled out from it across the floor, scanned over another, then descended slightly to focus on the face of the third. This one was definitely female, and was sitting propped up against a wall with a wound in the top of her skull.

Chetta felt as if someone had a hand around her throat. The face of the third body had been distorted and the flesh discoloured by the interim between death and discovery, but she still recognised its features, and the remarkably pale shade of its skin.

‘Emperor on the Throne,’ DeShelle breathed beside her. ‘That’s Jalamar’s aide!’

If Jalamar had known of Niklau, and had sent people hunting him, why feign ignorance earlier that evening? Why not seek plaudits by bringing the threat to the authorities earlier?

Unless…

‘These pictures,’ she said desperately, turning to Ngiri. ‘Are they being broadcast to the Jo’Sin shuttle as well?’

‘They should be,’ Ngiri said grimly, and Chetta could tell by the expression on the other woman’s face that she’d just come to the same alarming conclusion. The only convincing reason for Jalamar Jo’Sin’s aide to be where she was, when she’d been there, was if she’d had prior contact with Niklau. If she had, for example, facilitated his arrival and activities on Vorlese.

If at least some of Radimir Niklau’s actions had been sponsored by House Jo’Sin – the house that had a flyer tailing Ngiri’s craft at this very moment.

‘Jekri,’ Ngiri voxed into her comm-bead, ‘evasive–’

There was a roar from the stern of the gun-cutter, and it shook as though in the hands of an angry god. Chetta’s legs gave out beneath her and the deck came up with punishing force to strike her in the hip, the arm and the side of her head. She tasted the tang of blood in her mouth where her teeth had momentarily dug into her cheek. Her shoulder was numb.

The lights flickered and died, and, with a stomach-churning lurch, the gun-cutter began to fall out of the air.

THE SMOG DEEPS

‘Jekri!’ Ngiri shouted in the sudden near-darkness. Bars of acid-yellow light strobed past outside as the exterior lumens of the hab blocks began to rise past them, faster and faster.

‘Acknowledged,’ Sef Lentzen said a second later, and set off across the deck towards the rear of the craft with the mechanical clanking of mag-enabled feet. Chetta, struggling up into a sitting position, took a moment to work out that he must be responding to Jekri’s instructions over his comm-bead.

The reason for Lentzen’s clumsy, magnetic running became clear a moment later as the deck began to tilt away from her. The gun-cutter was in uncontrolled freefall, and ‘down’ no longer had any particular relationship to the angle of the craft. Chetta clawed desperately at the deck as it yawed beneath her, and the other occupants of the hold began to slide with various yelps of alarm. She had neither their strength nor their durability: she’d be dead before they even hit the ground.

Light suddenly flooded the hold, and the start of her fall was intercepted by the grav-chair of Kennevario Xudine. The Xudine Novator had turned his chair’s lumens on, and Chetta blinked as she grabbed desperately at his seat. He took hold of her wrists and heaved, grunting with the effort.

‘Climb aboard,’ he puffed, as the gun-cutter rotated further around them. Chetta forced her legs to assist, and she ended up sprawled half across his lap. He floated backwards as a wall of storage lockers accelerated towards them, and his chair bobbed and wobbled as the sensors controlling its anti-grav motors attempted to adjust to the constantly shifting environment around them.

‘How does this work when we hit the ground?’ Chetta asked him above the panicked shouts of their companions. She could feel the thin bones of his skeletal thighs under her, and knew she must be causing him pain.

‘I don’t know,’ Xudine admitted. There was a resounding thump, and Chetta grunted in pain as the chair jolted and jarred her. One of her TriStar guards rebounded off the back, having struck it while tumbling.

‘Carmine! Get us stable!’ Sef Lentzen shouted from beyond the hatchway at the rear of the cargo bay.

‘I don’t know which way is up!’ Carmine replied desperately, trying to hold on to some crash webbing as the gun-cutter rolled again.

‘Just do it!’ Ngiri yelled at him. It seemed the inquisitor had managed to activate mag-clamps in her armour’s boots as well, as she was now anchored to what was, at least nominally, the ceiling.

Carmine let out a great groan of effort as he exerted his psykana gift. The air temperature plummeted… and the gun-cutter levelled out.

There was a moment where, had it not been for the dark, dirty clouds rushing up past the portholes, Chetta might have thought that they were floating peacefully in the air.

Then the main lights crashed back on, the drives roared into action, and gravity tore hungrily at the ship as though angry at being denied its prize. Everyone slumped to the deck, flattened by the deceleration. Chetta gasped as her body tried to crush itself, and Kennevario bellowed as her weight crushed him. Hanging from the ceiling, Ngiri let out a moan of pain as her blood flooded to her head. And through the aft hatchway, there was an electronic-tinged scream of agony that lasted one, two, three seconds…

The lights died again, there was another brief moment of weightlessness as the gun-cutter fell the remaining few feet, and then it hit the ground with a tremendous and quite terminal-sounding crash. Its forward momentum carried the craft onwards for a short way with a grinding, tearing roar of metal on rock, before it slewed to a final halt.

‘Throne of Terra!’ Chetta groaned, rolling off Kennevario’s lap and onto her feet. Her right leg threatened to give out beneath her and she grabbed at the arm of Xudine’s chair to steady herself. She’d lost her cane somewhere in the preceding chaos. She raised her voice. ‘Who still lives?’

There was a muddled, pained chorus of acknowledgements, mainly from one corner of the hold where a pile of carapace-armoured bodies had been gathered together by the ship’s tumbles before Carmine had managed to flatten it out. The psyker himself was collapsed in a sitting position, his arms still tangled in crash webbing and his chest heaving after the exertion of levelling the entire craft.

‘Wha…?’

The form of Zaretta Ngiri jerked suddenly, and Chetta belatedly became aware that the inquisitor had been hanging limp, arms straight downwards. Kennevario turned his chair, with Chetta limping around after it, and the beams of his lights picked Ngiri out. The inquisitor blinked furiously. ‘I… must have passed out. Are we down?’

‘Oh, we’re down,’ Chetta told her dryly. She looked around again, and puffed her cheeks out. ‘I’ll say this for your team, Ngiri – they know how to cheat death.’

There was a clattering of footsteps from fore, and Jekri appeared. The former skitarius didn’t pause but simply ran straight through the hold, disappearing through the aft hatch. Chetta frowned, turning her head to follow them. ‘Is there a problem? Beyond the obvious, I mean.’

‘Sef.’ Ngiri deactivated the mag-clamps in her armour and fell from the ceiling, twisting in mid-air as she did so. She must have still been slightly woozy, or else the fall was not quite a great enough distance to manoeuvre as she’d intended, because instead of landing in a crouch she ended up sprawled across the floor with a clatter of ceramite. She scrambled back to her feet with an agility and ease that Chetta thoroughly envied, and ran after Jekri. A moment later, a furious beeping erupted from beyond the hatchway. Chetta didn’t speak the strange language of the Adeptus Mechanicus, but she thought she could recognise the cadence of swear words when she heard them.

The reason for Jekri’s agitation became clear very quickly, when Ngiri returned with Sef Lentzen’s body over one armoured shoulder. She set the enginseer down on the deck gently, but neither bionics nor flesh were moving under their own power. Chetta stared down at Lentzen’s hands, where wisps of smoke were rising from the silvery whorl marks of electoos.

‘He told me he could get power back to the drives for a few seconds,’ Jekri said, the voice from inside their hood sounding even hollower than before. ‘He didn’t say he’d do it by routing it through his own body.’ They made a circular symbol over their breast: the sign of the cogwheel, unless Chetta missed her guess. ‘His spirit is with the Omnissiah now.’

‘He was a loyal servant, for many years.’ Ngiri made the sign of the aquila over her own chest, her face stern and unyielding. Chetta bowed her head in respect; she might not have known Lentzen, and he might have played a key part in Ngiri’s surveillance of Chetta’s own damned home, but she could spare a few seconds of silence for someone who’d given his life to save hers, even if she probably hadn’t been his primary concern.

Everyone else was approaching now, in various states of injury. The TriStar guards and Davis of Rawl had been reasonably well protected from the battering they’d suffered by their carapace, although one of the TriStars – Anthons, Chetta thought – was having to be supported due to what looked like a broken leg, and another had a nasty gash on her cheek where something hard-edged had caught her in the gap between shoulder and helmet. DeShelle was looking rather worse for wear, which perhaps wasn’t surprising if she’d been anywhere near all those armoured bodies crashing into each other, and was being held up by Fell with one arm over his broad shoulders. Chetta’s aide, limping and holding her ribs, laid eyes on Sef Lentzen’s gently smoking corpse in the beams of light coming from Kennevario Xudine’s grav-chair.

Her eyes widened, her free hand flew from her ribs to her mouth, and she let out a strangled gasp of horror at the same time as Fell let rip with a foul Guardsman’s oath.

Chetta might not have paid DeShelle’s reaction much mind. They’d all just narrowly avoided death, she was clearly in pain – and, unlike Chetta, wasn’t used to that being her general baseline of existence – and it was understandable that the sight might unsettle a person at the best of times.

However, a moment after her reaction, DeShelle’s eyes flew guiltily to meet Chetta’s. The contact only lasted for a moment, but Chetta’s mouth abruptly dried. She knew what it looked like when someone realised that they’d just betrayed themselves. She’d been the cause of it often enough.

DeShelle DuVoir had been there when Azariel Brobantis had been killed by Jax of House Goliath, pit fighter of Necromunda. DeShelle DuVoir had seen Chetta’s reaction in the immediate aftermath of that death. DeShelle DuVoir had access to the encrypted security channels of House Brobantis. DeShelle DuVoir had seen the dressing table of aeldari wood in the Novator’s private quarters on the Solarox.

DeShelle DuVoir could be the reason that Zaretta Ngiri knew an awful lot of the things that Zaretta Ngiri knew. And it was curious, too, that the things DeShelle hadn’t known about – such as Chetta’s astropath call looking into the background of rogue trader Indrinian Vass – had been things that Ngiri hadn’t known either.

‘DeShelle,’ Chetta said crisply. ‘Come here, girl.’

DeShelle hesitated. She didn’t immediately remove her arm from around Fell’s supporting shoulders and make her way to her mistress. She hesitated and, in her moment of indecision, her eyes flickered to Zaretta Ngiri.

Rage rose within Chetta. The TriStars had kept hold of their hellguns, or had picked them up again after the gun-cutter had come to rest. ‘Guards–’

‘Chetta, think very carefully about what you are about to say,’ Ngiri interrupted her, taking three quick steps to place herself between Chetta and DeShelle. ‘We are in a ship without power, in what is probably the most hostile part of this planet, and, unless I am much mistaken, we have just been shot down by a powerful rival of yours who may yet be coming after us to finish the job. Let us not quarrel.’

‘Tell me,’ Chetta ground out between her teeth, pointing past Ngiri, ‘tell me that the serving girl I hand-selected, that I poached from the court of Baron Zellanin on Ardemis and groomed to be my personal aide, was not planted there with the express intention of her infiltrating House Brobantis.’

Ngiri’s mouth tightened.

‘Tell me!’ Chetta raged. She released the arm of Xudine’s grav-chair and took an unsteady step towards Ngiri, then prodded the taller woman in the breastplate of her armour. ‘Tell me the tru–’

She didn’t see Ngiri’s hand move, but something struck her in the chest. She sat down hard, and let out a cry as her hip flashed white-hot in its socket.

There was a flicker of movement as the TriStar guards raised their hellguns. Fell’s combi-bolter appeared in his hand, Jekri produced an arcane-looking pistol from their robes, and the air temperature dropped again as Carmine lurched to his feet.

‘Enough!’ Ngiri shouted. She reached for her belt and pulled out something that flashed as she opened it up: her rosette of office. She turned slowly on the spot, displaying it to the TriStar guards, and the muzzles of their guns wavered as she did so.

‘I am an inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos,’ Ngiri declared forcefully, ‘and I speak with the authority of the Emperor Himself! I will tolerate anger. I will tolerate emotion. I will not tolerate…’

She finished her rotation to face Chetta again, and her lips twisted in distaste.

‘…foolishness.’

Chetta glowered up at her, but Ngiri stood tall and powerful, like a war god of ancient Earth. She replaced her rosette on her belt and stared down at Chetta, her face an emotionless mask.

‘I pursue my duty how I see fit,’ Ngiri stated coldly. ‘Do I play the long game, for years at a time? Yes. Do my deceits run deep? Yes. When dealing with the traitor, or the alien, you must always think one step ahead, else you will always be running to catch up. Did I plant DeShelle in Zellanin’s court, with her specific goal being to attract your attention, find her way into House Brobantis and feed me information from the inside?’

She squatted down, bringing her eyes somewhat closer to a level with Chetta’s own.

‘Yes.’

Chetta looked over at DeShelle, or the girl she knew as DeShelle, and spat on the deck. ‘I’ve been a fool.’

‘A fool?’ Ngiri repeated. ‘Perhaps, in a specific way. But a traitor? No. And that is why I will overlook your display of temper, so long as you can accept that what DeShelle did was not done out of malice towards you, but in the service of the God-Emperor, and instead focus your not inconsiderable intellect on helping us all get out of here alive.’

Chetta felt hollow. The secrets DeShelle knew, the secrets that Chetta had given her access to! She’d always kept some back, of course she had; she wasn’t a complete fool, no matter what she said. But the things the girl had worked on with her, and for her…

Well. They were, at least, not necessarily things that would be of great interest to the Inquisition. All Navigator houses had their secrets, but Brobantis were no renegades. Ngiri likely wouldn’t care much about trade deals, shipping contracts or clandestine operations to blunt other houses’ political capital. And DeShelle didn’t know about the Vaults, or exactly what fate awaited Navigators who lived long enough to need them.

‘At least do me the courtesy of telling me your true name,’ she said coldly, fixing her former aide with her most ferocious stare. Ngiri looked over her shoulder and nodded.

‘My name is Alyssana Nero.’ The woman who’d played DeShelle DuVoir reached up and removed her black metal collar, dropping it onto the deck. Chetta frowned, then, as suspicion dawned, opened her warp eye the tiniest fraction.

Every human form in the hold had the faintest spark to her vision, where their minds brushed the warp with a featherlight touch through simply existing – all bar Sef Lentzen. Carmine was brighter, of course, a white-hot furnace gradually cooling as he released his hold on his power now the flashpoint had passed.

And now Alyssana Nero was brighter as well. Not as bright as Carmine, but clearly no ordinary human.

‘You’re a psyker,’ Chetta breathed in disbelief. ‘But how did I never see this before? The collar?’

‘A dampening device,’ Ngiri said. ‘Made with extracts of the same psi-shielding substance as the Black Ships. Suitable for muting the gift of a low-level psyker to ensure she could pass unnoticed in a place where we could never know exactly what scrutiny might be brought to bear on her.’

‘I hated it,’ Nero commented, staring at the collar with some distaste. ‘It was like being half-blind, all the time.’

‘Can all Navigators detect psykers?’ Ngiri asked Chetta, her tone one of genuine curiosity.

‘Every warp eye is unique in terms of the gifts it imparts,’ Chetta replied. She tapped her forehead. ‘I was past thirty years before I found I could do this. I thought I was going mad, at first.’

‘I hate to break into this discussion,’ Fell said, ‘but can we please focus on what the boss said about getting out of here alive? And don’t forget, we’ve got a heretic to stop.’ He turned his head to address Jekri. ‘Don’t suppose the comms are working on this thing?’

‘Short answer? No, we’ve no power,’ Jekri replied. ‘Has anyone tried voxing?’

‘It won’t work,’ Chetta grunted, looking around for her cane. ‘The smogs are so thick they disrupt vox traffic. The ship’s transmitter might have got through – your comm-beads will be useless over a couple of yards.’

‘This leaves us with a choice,’ Ngiri said. ‘We stay and wait for rescue, or we head out to try to improve our position ourselves.’ She grimaced. ‘The second option is more in my nature, but I do not know if it’s the wisest course of action.’

‘With the ship’s comm out, the only way someone will find us if we stay here is by sight,’ Jekri commented, gesturing pointedly towards the window. ‘It is still several hours till dawn, and that is without the smog taken into consideration.’ They shrugged. ‘I do not have the gift for numbers that Enginseer Lentzen possessed, but I would suggest that the chances are marginal.’

‘My house will have been monitoring our flight,’ Chetta argued. ‘They should have at least a vague idea of where we came down, based on our last position.’ An ugly thought occurred to her. ‘The question is whether anyone will come. With the Dukarr offensive… And who will take charge? The head of security is dead. I was the last of the ruling family branch. My husband’s most prominent kin may already be angling to step into my shoes, in which case they will have no wish to see me rescued.’

‘Perhaps a compromise?’ Kennevario Xudine spoke up. ‘My chair’s powercell is not limitless and is drained more quickly by motion, and were it to fail in the course of a venture away from here then I should be left exposed, else become a burden for someone to carry. I shall stay. Decide upon a direction and a destination, and should I be discovered by rescuers then I shall direct them to you. Should you find assistance first, I would expect you to extend me the same courtesy.’

‘Any search party may not be rescuers,’ Chetta reminded him. ‘And don’t forget the danger posed by the local scavengers.’

‘In which case, I shall not direct them to you,’ Xudine said firmly. The corner of his mouth twitched in a tired, pained ghost of a smile. ‘And again, I would ask you to extend the same courtesy.’

‘Staying here is likely to be a death sentence if you’re alone,’ Chetta said grimly. The thought of Kennevario, helpless in his chair when the smog spiders or the mutants came calling, made her shudder. The man had been part of a grand deception played on her, but he’d done it in the service of the Emperor, and he didn’t deserve such a fate. Chetta looked at her TriStar guards. ‘I want two volunteers to stay behind with Lord Xudine.’

Anthons, with his broken leg, and Sica, who’d cut her cheek, volunteered to remain. That left Wroze, Grangar, Viller and Hickett from Chetta’s honour guard, who all donned respirators. Chetta selected one from the gun-cutter’s lockers as well, as did all of Ngiri’s crew, with the exception of Jekri who maintained that they would be fine without.

‘You’re very well equipped,’ Chetta commented as she settled the mask into place over her face. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, but it would undoubtedly be better than attempting to breathe the polluted soup outside.

‘Simple practicalities,’ Ngiri replied. She’d completed her armour by donning her helmet, with a quick and well-practised flick of her hair to get it clear of the neck seal, and now spoke from behind red-lit eye-lenses on which would undoubtedly be superimposed telemetry from sensors such as range-finders and heat sensors. ‘There could be a catastrophic coolant gas leak in any part of the ship, for example. You need hazard gear readily available in all locations. Happily, that means we have spares.’ The inquisitor looked around. ‘Comm check.’

They’d all synchronised their personal comm-beads, and sounded off one at a time. Then, with Fell leading the way, they began to negotiate their way out of the dead craft.

The ship’s hatches had to be operated manually, to prevent the choking atmosphere from leaking into the hold where Kennevario, Anthons and Sica were to remain: a task mainly completed by Fell’s bionic arm with nudges from Carmine’s powers. Then once the final hatch had been opened, Chetta found herself faced with what remained of the rear of the ship.

Whatever the Jo’Sin craft had fired at them had been effective. It had torn a huge rent in the rear fuselage, ripping right through into what must have been the galley. Chetta picked her way carefully over the warped metal beneath her feet, then out through the mangled hull, and finally onto the barren ground of stones and dirt beyond. She activated the luminator in her left hand, which did little more than turn a cone of smog from a big dark blur to a big light blur.

‘I’ll say this for the Vorlesians,’ the shape that was Ngiri commented, her visor turning this way and that. ‘When they set about polluting a place, by the Emperor do they do a job of it. I can barely make out a thing.’

‘We were flying through the city,’ someone said. Carmine, Chetta thought, although with his voice coming directly into her ear, and everyone little more than shadows in the gloom and their mouths covered by respirators, it was virtually impossible to say for sure. ‘Surely we must be surrounded by hab blocks?’

‘We will be,’ Chetta confirmed. ‘But the distances involved are deceptive. They’re built further apart than you think. This was all meant to be a pleasant parkland once, but someone didn’t realise that if you build a city in a valley, the smog has nowhere to go.’ She looked around, but nothing met her eyes except creamy-green murk. ‘Finding a hab block at least means we’ll have somewhere we can start climbing out of this mess, but we’ll likely encounter people, too. And down here, I don’t fancy our chances for them to be friendly.’

‘You’re saying we may as well pick a direction at random?’ Ngiri asked. Chetta shrugged, despite the fact that no one would see it.

‘Had I been paying attention to exactly where we were when we started to lose altitude, I may have been able to hazard a better guess as to our location. As it is, the best I can do is that we’re somewhere between the Brobantis and Dukarr palaces, which means my home is somewhere to the south-east of here.’

‘That sounds like as good an idea as any,’ someone said. Chetta recognised Fell’s gravelly tones. ‘So, does anyone know which way south-east is?’

‘The auspex is blank,’ Jekri said, when no one else spoke.

‘Fine, we do this the hard way,’ Chetta muttered. ‘Fell, I want you three paces in front of me and to my left, because there’s no way I’m having that flamer pointing anywhere near my back. Hickett, you three paces in front of me to my right.’

‘What are you doing?’ Ngiri demanded.

‘Navigating,’ Chetta told her bluntly. ‘I’ve found my way home flying blind through warp storms before – if a bit of dirty fog is enough to throw me off then I may as well end it all here and now.’

There was a moment of silence.

‘Fine,’ Ngiri said. ‘Fell, do as she says. You’re on point with Hickett. Wroze and Grangar, you’re rearguard. Viller and Carmine, left flank. Jekri and I will take the right. Nero, you stay in the middle with Chetta, and warn us if you sense anything.’

‘Yes, my lady,’ Nero said, and her form – somewhat slighter than the others – shuffled closer. Chetta didn’t think she was imagining the reluctance in her former aide’s body language.

‘“Sense anything”?’ she asked, disabling her comm-bead for a moment as Nero came within proper earshot, even of words spoken into a respirator mask.

‘I have mild precognitive abilities,’ Nero replied primly, ‘and sporadic divination talents.’

‘A shame you never used them for me,’ Chetta bit out.

‘Oh, I did,’ Nero hissed back. ‘Just not when you could see. I was told to be the best damned aide for you that I could be, and I was.’

‘Ready,’ Ngiri announced, cutting off Chetta’s reply. ‘Let’s move out.’ Her glowing red eye-lenses seemed to focus on the pair of them. ‘And everyone keep your comm-beads active, please. We don’t want to get separated out here.’

They began to trudge across the ground. It was hard going, Chetta was prepared to admit. She hadn’t been having a good day anyway, and it had been compounded by being on her feet for longer than usual – and surviving a shuttle crash was never going to help matters. Although, she conceded to herself, it was better than not surviving a shuttle crash.

In short, what it all added up to was that she was getting near the end of her strength, and even her usual bloody-minded stubbornness wasn’t going to be able to carry her much further. For a moment she thought wistfully of the gun-cutter’s hold, and staying behind with Kennevario, but idly awaiting rescue would have driven her to distraction in short order. Half her body might be in agony out here, but that was at least something she could set herself against.

‘Do you require any assistance?’ Nero muttered. She hadn’t turned her comm-bead back to broadcasting, in apparent defiance of the inquisitor’s instructions.

‘Your ribs didn’t appear to be in great shape,’ Chetta said shortly, wincing as another twinge shot up her right side. ‘I have my cane. You look to your own aff–’

The spitting snarl of a hellgun tore through the air. Chetta spun, her body objected, she started to fall and then Alyssana Nero was there, catching her and grunting in pain herself at the effort of supporting Chetta’s bulk.

‘Report!’ Ngiri was snapping.

‘It came from behind me,’ Wroze replied immediately.

‘And me,’ Grangar added. Chetta could just see her helmet, twitching this way and that.

A beam of ruby light stabbed out through the darkness, occluded but not smothered by the smog, and accompanied once more by the weapon’s distinctive report.

It was coming from the wreckage of the gun-cutter.

FINAL PREPARATIONS

Radimir had already lost half of the Children, but he wasn’t overly concerned. After all, by the time this was through, he’d have lost them all. And weren’t even these small offerings still to the glory of the Great Powers?

The Smog Deeps were a grim environment, true enough, and many of the cult hadn’t had the proper equipment to survive it. Those with proper respirators were still with him, although a couple were starting to get short of breath as the devices were taxed to their limits. Many of those with old or corroded models had died. Every Child who had braved the choking atmosphere with no protection at all had perished within minutes… with two notable exceptions.

Svet, the huge mutant, was still going strong. Whatever had caused his immense size and altered appearance, be that genetic deviation or divine intervention, it seemed to have given him the ability to survive even in this polluted pit. One of his brothers had succumbed, but Svet powered on.

More surprising, perhaps, was Aylen Marjuk. The ex-Guardsman had donated his respirator – military-issue, by Radimir’s guess, which along with the laspistol was a further suggestion that he’d deserted – to Evelyn Darke when her own had started to fail and she’d fallen to her knees, fighting for breath. Radimir had expected Marjuk to suffer the same fate, as Darke had sucked in clean air greedily and guiltily, and judging by his grim expression, Marjuk had as well. Instead, he’d lapsed into a coughing fit that had rasped wetly, but then seemed to recover. Now he walked around bare-faced, breathing in the smog as though it were the cleanest air of the upper levels. Radimir, for whom shadows held no secrets, could see that the whites of the man’s eyes were turning green, as were his teeth. His tongue looked longer, more pointed. He rubbed at his forehead now and again as well, as though something which pained him lurked beneath the surface of his skin.

It seemed as though the Lord of Disease had found a favourite amongst Sulaman Eichner’s sorry bunch.

It wasn’t just the pollution that had claimed victims. The work of carving the great glyph into the skin of the planet was not an easy one, and it had taken its toll. Had they done it in the light, Radimir had no doubt that he’d have precious few lives left to play with. As it was, when even in daytime the smog reduced the local star’s rays to a dirty brown smear of light in the sky, the Children of the Serpent had, in the main, managed to avoid seeing too much at once of the eight-times-eight sigils they’d been marking out.

And yet, there had been fatalities. One woman had simply slumped down, blank-eyed and unbreathing: a burst heart, had been Eichner’s assessment. Radimir had seen one man grow catatonic and rock for minutes on end, until he suddenly removed his respirator and began trying to eat his own arm until he choked on blood and smog. Svet’s second brother had started screaming without warning, and bludgeoned another man to death before anyone had properly gathered what was happening. When Svet had approached, his brother had turned the shovel he wielded on his mutated kin, with no sign of recognition. Marjuk, his tongue lolling out of a green-toothed grin, had put a las-bolt through the man’s head even as Svet wrapped his huge arms around his brother in an attempt to restrain him.

Radimir had needed to interpose himself quickly, before Svet could reach Marjuk and two of Radimir’s most gifted followers could come to blows. From then on, they had worked on opposite sides of the great glyph.

Now the work was nearly complete. Seven sides were ready, and the eighth was almost done. Without the correct triggers it would be nothing more than a corruption of the natural order writ large in Ascension City’s barren topsoil, something to blast the sanity from any that witnessed it. With those triggers, though – Radimir fingered once again the seven hard orbs in his pouch – it could destroy the planet. After he’d killed the most recent Brobantis Navigator he’d turned his attention on the Dukarrs, partly for amusement and partly because Fortuna Bettan had told him about the trade war, and it made sense to set such powerful entities at each other’s throats. The youth he’d slain had been richly dressed even by the standards of Navigators, so he’d presumably been important, at least as such things were measured.

‘Is this hell that you’ve brought us to?’ asked Evelyn Darke through her respirator. She was working alongside Radimir, scratching lines in the ground with a length of twisted metal under his direction while Wanden, another of Eichner’s Children, stood nearby with a luminator.

‘Enlightenment doesn’t come without suffering,’ Radimir told her. It was an easy platitude, used by thousands if not millions of sects across the galaxy, from the most ardent of the Emperor’s fools to the purest worshippers of Chaos, and all in between. Let the chattel think that there was a purpose to their misery, a good reason why you were not providing joy and comfort here and now, and they’d carry blindly on with the grim determination of a person dying of thirst who’s been told that a spring lies just over the next hill.

‘I never asked for enlightenment,’ Darke replied dully, although her implement didn’t stop moving. ‘I just wanted to be accepted.’

‘Chaos accepts us all,’ Radimir told her. He frowned down at her hands, which were starting to glow, ever so slightly. The first hints of a self-taught pyro whose temper was beginning to fray.

That was concerning. Wyrds were always dangerous tools, but a pyro in full flame could be a particular problem for Radimir. Darke could leave him truly isolated, with no place to hide and no easy way to run. He drew in stale, rubber-scented air through his respirator in preparation of saying something soothing, and then walking away until she calmed herself again.

His half-formed sentence evaporated as the choking smog was shaken by a thunderous detonation from somewhere above them. He reached for his powerblade instinctively, already scanning the skies. Darkness might hold no secrets from Radimir Niklau, but he could see through the smog clouds no better than anyone else. He felt suddenly, uncharacteristically blind.

‘What was that?’ Darke asked. Anyone else might have clutched the length of metal tighter in the face of such an event, potential threat as it could be. She dropped it, to free her hands.

‘It’s the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension,’ Wanden said. ‘Could it be a firework?’

‘That was no firework, you imbecile,’ Darke snapped. ‘We’ve been hearing fireworks all evening! That was something exploding!’

‘Quiet!’ Radimir said, holding up his hand. He strained his ears as, for a wonder, they both obeyed him. ‘There!’

It was faint, but just discernible: a whistling, rushing noise, distant but growing closer. Something large and heavy was falling through the air, without any noise of engines. Radimir had a sudden image of one of this world’s flyers, the victim of a catastrophic engine overload, falling out of the sky and obliterating all his careful handiwork. Truly, his gods could be fickle, but would they possibly be so cruel? Had they turned their faces from him so spectacularly?

No.

There was a sudden loud hum that lasted for only a few seconds – Radimir recognised the sound of an Imperial anti-grav drive – and then a muffled crash of metal on rock and dirt. It wasn’t close, but neither was it far.

Darke looked at him, and her hands began to glow again.

‘None of that!’ Radimir told her sternly. ‘We don’t want to attract attention.’ He raised his voice a little, to carry to the nearest of his followers. ‘Pass the word! Everyone stay still and quiet. I’m going to investigate.’

He turned and walked quickly, out of the light cast by Wanden’s luminator and away from Darke’s fading hands, and then sent his senses questing through the darkness that surrounded him. He reached out in the direction the last noises had come from, but fell short. He found a small pack of mutated canines, squabbling over the corpse of something that had perhaps once been human, and steered his attention away from them. So too did he avoid the lurking presence of a smog spider, the top of its abdomen on a level with his chest, waiting in a fallen water tower for something warm and juicy to wander carelessly past. He wanted to draw as little attention as possible.

It was so dark down here that he could move virtually anywhere within range of his powers. He stepped easily, slipping through the darkness to his new location, then reached out once more as soon as he’d orientated himself.

Ah, yes. Now he could see what had happened.

A flyer had indeed fallen from above. It was something of a miracle that it had managed to land in any form of controlled manner, so damaged was its stern. It was a gun-cutter, a shuttle capable of breaking atmosphere and docking with a larger, warp-capable ship for transport between systems. It didn’t bear any identifying logos, which was odd for Vorlese, where the wealthy and powerful flaunted their badges for all to see. Perhaps it was an off-worlder’s craft. He reached out, intending to look inside…

…and recoiled in pain and confusion as he attempted to pass his consciousness through the metal of the hull. The damned thing was… blessed? Psi-shielded? He couldn’t be sure, but either was enough to throw him back. Who put that much effort into protecting their shuttle from esoteric threats?

Radimir waited, hovering his conscience around the craft’s perimeter. The landing didn’t seem to have killed the occupants, or at any rate not all of them: lights were moving around within. Were they calling for aid? Were rescue parties about to descend, quartering the ground in search of these unfortunates? That could prove problematic in the extreme.

Still he waited, concentrating to keep his focus on the ship while his physical form stood in another location. This was why he’d stepped through well away from the canines, or the spider: to be attacked by a starving predator in a moment of inattention would be most ignominious.

There. The craft’s occupants were moving, filing carefully and cautiously out of the ruined rear section. It appeared that they, at least, had no thoughts that rescue parties would be coming. Good news. Radimir waited to see what direction they would go in. Anything other than directly towards the great glyph would be of no concern to him.

They milled about briefly, then set off on a route roughly at right angles to the one that would have led them to his work. Radimir felt the lips of his distant body twitch into a smile. A close call, but nothing to be concerned about, in the end. He took a last look, to check they weren’t doubling back for some reason.

Wait.

He’d seen one of them before.

There was a woman in the middle of their small group whom he recognised. She’d been in Brobantis Palace, accompanying the big security chief!

She was the one who’d known when to duck.

She had to be a psyker of some sort, there was no question of it. But she also had to be part of House Brobantis. In fact, now that Radimir looked closer, he could see their logo on four of the others: armed guards, judging by their matching armour and weaponry. What were Brobantis guards doing in an unmarked shuttle that was so well defended? That would only make sense if there was a Brobantis Navigator close at hand.

There was.

In the middle of the group, next to the psyker girl. Radimir’s fingers began to itch. He needed one more warp eye, just one, and then he could trigger the great glyph. He would be able to procure it through other means, but to have one right here, virtually within arm’s reach, was a huge temptation. And perhaps he could take another swing at the psyker who’d foiled him last time. He’d have been able to get all the eyes he needed in Brobantis Palace, had she not somehow been able to evade him for long enough to bring the whole insect nest of guards and, crucially, their lights, down on him.

No. That was ego talking, and even servants of the Ruinous Powers could be killed by ego. He was too close now to be sunk by pride. Even in this dark, stepping into the middle of such a group of warriors was foolhardy at best, and in all probability suicidal. He could see another man there in the livery of the scholastica psykana: a telekinetic, judging by the design of his force staff, unless Radimir badly missed his guess. He could be a dangerous foe indeed. Radimir would let them go, ignorant of his presence.

A light flashed in the hold of the gun-cutter, drawing his attention. There were still people inside, then? Curiosity warred with caution. He couldn’t pass his consciousness through the hull, but the hull was no longer intact. What if he threaded his way in, very carefully, through the ruined aft section?

He was thrown back twice, as he strayed too close to shards of metal that retained their protection, but he managed to penetrate the shuttle’s defences at the third attempt. He slithered past the ruined circuits and scorched walls, and into the main hold.

One corpse: some minor Adeptus Mechanicus lackey. Two more Brobantis guards, one with a broken leg and one with slightly glassy eyes that spoke of a mild concussion. And, slumped painfully in an anti-grav transport chair that carried most of the available lights, was a cadaverous-looking Navigator. Isolated, virtually undefended and in possession of the eighth warp eye that Radimir needed.

He smiled, and stepped through.

HUNTING FOR WITCHES

They’d turned and made their way back to the gun-cutter as quickly as they could.

It hadn’t been fast enough.

By the time Chetta got there, flanked by Hickett and Viller, and with Alyssana Nero hovering uncertainly nearby, they’d heard the shouts of rage and sorrow over their comm-beads. Wroze and Grangar had burst into the ship, and hadn’t liked what they’d found.

Neither did Chetta, once she laid eyes on what awaited them.

‘By the Emperor,’ she breathed. Sef Lentzen was no longer the only dead body in the hold. Anthons and Sica had both died thanks to stab wounds from a powerblade, although not before discharging their hellguns; however, with one broken leg and one head wound between them, it seemed they hadn’t managed a great degree of accuracy. Not enough, at least, to prevent their attacker from killing both of them, along with Kennevario Xudine.

Chetta wasn’t surprised to see that his warp eye had been cut out, but that didn’t help with the sudden wave of nausea that swept over her. Encountering it in the flesh, with a still-bleeding wound in the forehead of someone to whom she’d been speaking only a few minutes beforehand, was a very different proposition to seeing a holo of a mutilated body.

‘Niklau,’ she hissed, gripping the handle of her cane so tightly her fingers began to cramp. ‘He was here.’

‘So perhaps he isn’t far,’ Ngiri said. The inquisitor sounded as icily calm as might be expected of her breed, but Chetta was sure there was a raging fire burning beneath Ngiri’s apparently serene exterior. ‘He may be able to move unnaturally, but he must have limits.’

‘Don’t tell me that you want to go hunting for a witch in this?’ Chetta demanded, waving a hand to encompass the pollution surrounding them. One of the hellgun blasts had punched a hole through the thick armourglass of a porthole – the blast that they’d seen outside – and the Smog Deeps’ choking atmosphere had leaked into the hold.

There was a faint click in the comm-bead in her ear.

‘Want to?’ Ngiri replied, and Chetta realised the inquisitor had switched her comm to Chetta’s personal channel. Sealed inside her power armour’s helmet as she was, none of the others would be able to hear what Ngiri was saying. ‘No. No I do not. I’m Ordo Xenos! I deal with aliens! I can identify twenty xenos species from their architecture. I’ve studied the fighting styles of the Scythian warrior monks. I can converse with the aeldari. I can explain the societal schisms within the T’au Empire and how they can best be manipulated for the Imperium’s advantage, and I can tell you the five fastest ways of killing an ork warrior. This warp-damned groxshit is not my area of expertise! But I cannot turn and walk away from such a threat when I believe it to be so close.’

‘So what is your suggestion?’ Chetta asked wearily. By the Emperor, but she felt old! The inquisitor was right, though, damn her eyes. The thought of trying to hunt down such a creature in the smothering darkness of the Smog Deeps at night was terrifying, but Niklau had already demonstrated that he knew they were here, and was prepared to prey on them. There was nothing to say that he wouldn’t harry them further should they try once again to recover to the upper levels, nor that their efforts to do so would take them away from him instead of towards. ‘How do you propose that we proceed? Send me out alone, as bait, then pounce on him when he appears to kill me and take my eye?’

Ngiri paused, and for a horrifying moment Chetta wondered whether the inquisitor was going to take her at her word. She was just preparing a hasty retraction of her sarcasm when Ngiri spoke again.

‘It occurs to me that we may have another option. Namely, your ability to see psykers.’

Chetta grimaced. ‘That’s an oversimplification. I can sense the minds of humans touching the warp, and it’s a stronger sensation for a psyker, but I’d have a hard time anchoring it without being able to see them with my human eyes. I’m not some cyber-mastiff with a tracking protocol.’

Ngiri made a noise of irritation in her throat, which her vox picked up. ‘Hngh. Would you at least be willing to try?’

‘I have no wish to take a knife to the forehead, or be pulled into the warp along with the rest of this planet,’ Chetta told her bluntly. ‘I can try to locate this monster, but I would suggest that if we find a way to get out of this place, or summon assistance, then we take it.’

‘Agreed,’ Ngiri replied instantly. ‘The moment I find a way to throw more bodies at this problem, I will. For now, though, I believe we are the best placed to achieve something.’

‘Very well,’ Chetta said heavily. ‘Let us get outside again.’ She eyed the smog that was curling through the gun-cutter’s interior. ‘For all the difference it will make.’

Alyssana Nero took Anthons’ hellgun, slinging the back-mounted power pack across her shoulders with a surprising familiarity. She held out the laspistol she’d been carrying, offering it to Chetta.

‘The odds of me being able to hit anything are minimal,’ Chetta told her bluntly. ‘I can barely hold my arm steady.’

‘I would still feel better if you had a weapon,’ Nero said. Whether or not it was the effect of the comm-bead, or simply her long history of deception, she sounded entirely genuine. Chetta grunted a grudging thanks, and took the pistol from her. It was well made, as she’d have expected from something originating from the House Brobantis armoury, and the powercell was nearly fully charged.

‘Have you ever experienced combat?’ Ngiri asked her as they traipsed out through the ship’s ruined stern for a second time.

‘The ship I served on was boarded once,’ Chetta told her. ‘Half a dozen ork troop ships, or however they refer to them. The rest of the Navigator corps and I were given laspistols, and told to face the door to our quarters and shoot anything green that came through it. The orks never made it to us, but it was a nerve-wracking few hours, I can promise you.’ She stumbled slightly, and suppressed a grunt of pain as her hip made its presence more keenly felt for a moment. ‘Out of interest, what is the fastest way to take down an ork warrior?’

‘In my experience?’ Ngiri paused, as if in thought. ‘Lascannon.’

‘Hnh.’ Chetta snorted a humourless laugh. ‘I must admit, I was hoping for something slightly more insightful.’

‘In the same vein, we’re hunting a psyker, and you’ve spent much of your life dealing with the warp,’ Ngiri said. ‘What would you say is the best way to deal with the threats it poses?’

‘In my experience?’ Chetta shrugged. ‘Being inside a Geller field.’

The eye-lenses of Ngiri’s helmet regarded her steadily for a moment.

‘I know, I know,’ Chetta grunted. She puffed her cheeks out, and her own breath reflected back at her off the respirator’s interior in a warm gust. ‘So here we are. The unprepared, arraying ourselves against the unfathomable, on behalf of the unaware.’

‘Welcome to His Majesty’s Divine Inquisition,’ Fell commented darkly.

‘Fell!’ Ngiri snapped.

‘Sorry, boss.’

Ngiri exhaled breathily over the comm, which Chetta took to indicate both the inquisitor’s irritation with her armsman, and her preparation for what was to come next.

‘Very well. Lady Brobantis, if you would be so good?’

‘No one look at my face too closely,’ Chetta warned the others. She took the head of her cane in both hands, braced it in front of her and opened her warp eye.

The disorientation was immediate, and worse than usual. She couldn’t tell if it was because of her weariness, or injuries, or simply the fact that the smothering smog made it hard to anchor herself using her senses of sight and hearing. As ever, her warp eye sought the roiling maelstrom of the empyrean but found nothing, and the disconnection from her other senses was all the more pronounced.

She could focus on the pain in her body, though. That was nowhere near as far from her as she’d like it to be.

‘I don’t think… he’s anywhere immediately near,’ she said. Her mouth felt clumsy and her tongue thick. Faint sparks brushed at her awareness like the trailing tendrils of unseen cobwebs when moving through a room long-abandoned: a fleeting sensation that had changed by the time it was focused on.

‘Can you walk?’ Ngiri asked.

‘I was having a hard enough time with that anyway,’ Chetta replied, making a conscious effort not to snap. ‘Right now, standing upright is… Oh, my…’

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Nero commented.

Chetta stared, trying to focus with her warp eye, shifting her feet around to face in the right direction just in case that would help. Something had erupted into being: a silent glow that bled the colours of the warp through into real space. Tendrils of the immaterium were reaching out, and for all that they were tenuous and nebulous now, Chetta could sense the power inherent in them, the power that they would soon possess. This flower of malignant energy would continue to grow, and gain strength, and when it achieved its full form…

‘I think I’ve found him,’ she told the others. ‘And I think we have a new problem.’

ENLIGHTENMENT

Radimir stepped back through the darkness, his fingers dripping red with blood and the final warp eye clutched, still warm, in the palm of his hand. The pit of his stomach was twisting in excitement and anticipation, as it always did when he was on the verge of another great act of worship. Soon, very soon, he would set in motion the events that would consign this planet to the warp and offer up another grand sacrifice to his masters. And then…

The Imperium would barely notice the loss of Gallimo Prime. In an empire of a million worlds, the Administratum would shuffle some papers and before long the hole in space would be nothing but a dusty footnote in what passed for their record-keeping. Billions of souls swallowed into an eternity of torture, and the ailing behemoth of which they had been a part wouldn’t so much as blink.

Vorlese, though… Vorlese was different. A far more prominent world, made all the more so by its narrow rescue from the fleet of the Despoiler, especially since it had taken the intervention of the accursed Guilliman to do so. The psychological blow of its loss would be exponentially larger than that of Gallimo Prime, and – if Radimir’s suspicions were borne out – Vorlese’s absorption into the warp would greatly disrupt one of the major warp routes to Terra on which it sat, and from which it acquired its prominence.

After Vorlese… well, there were many possibilities, should the gods grant that he survive. Radimir was a weapon of Chaos, and he would not stop striking blows for it until his life was exhausted and he took his final reward from the Ruinous Powers. Perhaps he could further isolate the Throneworld, or disrupt another crucial point elsewhere in the galaxy. The Great Rift and its siblings meant that some narrow corridors of real space clung only tenuously to existence, bordered on all sides by the howling warp; a cut in reality, in just the right place…

‘Who’s there?’ a muffled voice shouted, and the beam of a luminator snapped on and swung towards him through the smog.

‘Radimir,’ he called, making sure he could be heard despite the impediment of his respirator. The guard must have recognised his voice, because they lowered their weapon and the luminator attached to it. As Radimir approached, and the obstruction of the smog diminished, he made out the features of Faney. She was a local ganger, and handled her shotgun as though she’d been born with it in her hands, but the fingers of those hands were tipped with claws that marked her out as a mutant. She’d fled from her gang before she could be found out, and ended up falling in with the Children of the Serpent in the interests of survival as much as anything else.

Radimir clapped her on the shoulder as he walked past. A certain camaraderie had been a crucial part of the unseen glue that held the Children together so far, and he needed that to continue. The Children would have to guard and oversee the ritual once he’d set it in motion, while he made his escape off-world. If they trusted him, they would protect the very spell that would end up killing them all, until it was too late. If they didn’t trust him – if, for example, he’d put their backs up by being overly aloof – then there was always the risk that the canker of suspicion would take hold. Nothing angered a betrayer so much as believing themselves to be betrayed in turn, and the followers of Chaos knew best of anyone that no plan was foolproof, and there was no scheme that could not be undone by chance events.

He was a few paces past Faney when he felt it.

The air seemed to thrum with a sudden tension. It wasn’t a physical thing; most of the fools around him wouldn’t have noticed a change. It was something deeper, the faintest echo of the beginning of a song that called to his blood and his bones. There was a great and powerful potentiality lurking around him, waiting to be seized and directed: the product of eight-times-eight-times-eight sigils carved into Vorlese’s surface by the Children of the Serpent, painstakingly following the deliberately piecemeal directions he’d given Sulaman Eichner.

The last line had been drawn, and the Great Glyph was ready.

‘Everyone stand where you are!’ he shouted into the night air, cursing the rebreather that muffled his voice. He didn’t fancy his chances of not coughing his lungs up without it, though. ‘The work has been completed! I can begin the rite!’

An excited murmur grew from the various figures half-hidden in the murk around him, but they obeyed his instruction. Just as well: the last thing he needed now was for a careless footstep to crush a critical line, and they were all critical. At least, until the ritual began. After that… well, the very nature of Chaos was its unpredictability. He was building a beacon to lure a mighty predator of the warp. It couldn’t break through into the material universe as such, but through the power of the Great Glyph it could get enough of a hold on the bones of the planet to drag it under, like the blunt snout of a colossal ocean predator breaching to engulf a boat and carry it down into abyssal waters.

As things stood, Radimir could leave a slow-burning lure, one that should give him enough time to abandon ship and leave everyone else to their fate. Should the glyph be damaged once the rite was started, it could spin out of his control. It might fail completely, it might doom Vorlese far more quickly than he planned – or something else altogether could happen.

Meddling with the very fabric of reality was never without its risks.

He moved with haste tempered with caution, stepping between the individual sigils and never letting his eyes linger on their lines for too long, lest his conscious mind be seduced and drawn out of him. Radimir knew well the power of the tools he wielded; that was why he took such care.

He placed one of the stolen eyes at each of the eight apex points, muttering eight consecutive charms as he did so. Then, holding each point separate in his mind as a glowing, writhing sphere of power, he walked to the centre of the Great Glyph.

‘Aylen,’ he ordered, beckoning. ‘Bring him forth.’

Aylen Marjuk stepped forwards, dragging a battered, bleeding man in dirt-stained garments that had once been the uniform of a medic behind him across the unmarked ground that formed the central octagon of the design. Cormack, the man’s name was – an unimaginative, unremarkable follower of the True Gods, who’d lived a life of quiet blasphemy amidst the bustle of Ascension City until Eichner had mobilised his followers. Cormack had lost his nerve, however; perhaps he’d seen a little too much of the sigils, or perhaps he’d always been craven and had found this purpose too great for his mind to comprehend. Regardless of the cause, he’d tried to flee. Faney had clubbed him into unconsciousness with the butt of her shotgun, and Marjuk had stood guard over him since.

Now, Cormack would serve a grander purpose.

‘Enlightenment cannot come without sacrifice,’ Radimir declared, as Marjuk pulled Cormack into a kneeling position and held the medic’s arms behind his back. Cormack stared up at Radimir from beneath the ugly welt left on his forehead by Faney’s gun, but there wasn’t a great deal of understanding in his eyes. Faney had struck him quite hard, and Radimir wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if Cormack couldn’t remember what day it was.

‘You have all worked hard,’ Radimir continued. ‘You have all showed your devotion. Now, the path to enlightenment will be opened by the blood of one who did not share your steadfastness.’

He took hold of Cormack’s tunic and ripped it open to reveal the man’s chest, then ignited his powerblade. Now Cormack’s eyes registered panic, but Marjuk held him fast as he groggily attempted to struggle.

Radimir made four cuts, swift and true, carving the eight-pointed star into Cormack’s flesh. The man screamed into the respirator that he’d been allowed to keep so that he might stay alive long enough to fulfil this purpose.

Blood ran down over the curve of his stomach. Much of it began to soak into the waistband of his lower garments, but a few drops fell to the dusty ground.

All around them, the sigils of the Great Glyph ignited into witch-light.

On Cormack’s chest, the centre of the wound Radimir had inflicted began to emit an answering glow, which spread along the arms of the star and then began to crawl outwards across the rest of his body: writhing tongues of corposant that burned without consuming the flesh. Arlen Marjuk released Cormack before the glow reached where his hands had gripped the man’s arms, but the medic did not slump forwards. Instead he began to rise into the air, his eyes bulging and his mouth open in a scream that was not sounding in the same reality as his body.

Radimir closed his eyes, tilted his head back and began to recite his incantation. He’d learned it by rote from the Grimoire of Tarrowdark, the pages of which were formed from the skins of eighty-eight warriors slain by treachery, and he had been the first of seventy-two masters in three centuries not to die in the attempt. As he spoke the words of power, he braided the glowing spheres of the stolen warp eyes into the tapestry he wove in his mind, anchoring it in Cormack’s body and simultaneously reaching out into the immaterium. The long-forgotten bio-alchemy that had twisted genetics to create the Navigator race millennia ago, in order to enable humanity to transcend the boundaries of their solar system and spread out across the stars, was now wrenched into the service of the Great Powers.

He set his lure, a pulsing speck of light in the fathomless empyrean. Soon – hopefully not too soon – the tortured writhing of Cormack’s trapped, immolated soul, and the ghostlike promise of billions more, would prove irresistible to one of the warp’s mighty predators. They would take the bait, and Vorlese would cease to exist.

By which time, Radimir intended to be on a ship and well out of reach of the entity he had summoned. But he needed to ensure that the rite was completed properly, or else all this effort would come to nothing, and so the words continued to drip from his lips as he secured the sigils, bound them together with tendrils of his will and sent their power spearing down into the bedrock. It was not a process that came without cost, and Radimir felt it siphoning off his lifeforce as soon as he began, like the cold, sharp jaws of ocean predators closing on him. This was going to be harder than before, he could tell that much instantly. Gallimo had left him weak; Vorlese…

He looked down at his hands. The bones were standing out more starkly than before, the flesh around them beginning to sag and wrinkle as his very being was devoured. He might not recover from this, not fully. Perhaps with rejuvenat treatment he could regain strength enough to perform the ritual just once more, but he could feel the damage in his very soul, not just its physical shell…

‘For the Emperor!’

Radimir’s eyes snapped open, and he found himself staring into the equally shocked face of Aylen Marjuk. Both of them had uttered that phrase before, under radically different circumstances, and neither of them had expected to hear it here and now.

For the first time in many, many years, fear reached into Radimir Niklau’s chest and gripped his heart.

Faney’s shotgun rang out, and was answered by the spitting roar of a hellgun. Radimir turned, fighting to keep the structure of his incantation whole in his head, and saw the huge shape of Svet charging forwards, his massive fists raised. A moment later there was a soundless detonation that made Radimir’s ears pop and rippled the smog, and Svet was sent flying back the way he’d come.

The telekinetic. It had to be the telekinetic who’d been with the Brobantis Navigator, which meant that a small group of trained, dedicated warriors, loyal to the Emperor, had found Radimir’s work. Whether they had managed this by accident or design was immaterial; they clearly now knew that there was something here that they had to stop. They were still badly outnumbered by the Children of the Serpent, despite the deaths the cult had incurred in carving the Great Glyph into the ground, but numbers weren’t everything.

Aylen Marjuk snarled and snatched his laspistol out of its holster, then turned to run towards the invaders, picking his way through the glowing sigils with the expertise of a man who was no longer just a man. There was something else behind Marjuk’s eyes now, and it could see on a different wavelength to mere mortals, Radimir had no doubt of that.

He also doubted that it would be enough, whatever it was.

Radimir could have helped to turn the tide, perhaps. Alone, he wouldn’t have fancied his chances. As part of the Children, stepping in and out of the darkness while his enemies were busy with other attackers, he might have wreaked havoc. He could certainly have thinned their numbers out, perhaps to the point where the remnants of the Children could have simply overwhelmed these followers of the Corpse-Emperor.

Except he couldn’t, while the rite was unfinished. It could fizzle and die like one of the cheap fireworks that had been going off in the sky above them all evening. Vorlese had to fall, to strike a new psychological blow at the Imperium and tax its already-strained infrastructure to breaking point. Let them see how vulnerable they were, even this close to their beloved Throneworld. Let them learn that the threat of Chaos was not always as obvious as the Despoiler and his power-armoured minions. Let them never know safety again.

Radimir crouched down, dug his fingers into the bloodstained dirt and poured all the power and fury of his spirit into the renewed incantation. He would not fail. No matter the cost, he would not fail. The aching hollow in his chest expanded as the ritual sucked greedily at his soul, but he was ready to die, and his soul was already commended to the True Gods. If being drained to a husk in the smog-stained dirt of this planet was the price for his success, then he would consider it a fair trade.

Besides, if escape was impossible then there was no reason to draw the predators in slowly…

FOR THE EMPEROR

The smog lit up ahead of them, an ethereal glow of sickly, pale luminescence.

‘You can see that?’ Chetta panted, gesturing vaguely with the laspistol in her left hand. She felt like she’d near killed herself, guiding her companions this far this quickly, and her lungs were no longer replenished in the way they once had been by the air she was sucking in through her respirator’s grille.

‘We can see it,’ Ngiri confirmed grimly. The inquisitor was a brooding shadow beneath glowing red eyes, holding a plasma pistol in one ceramite gauntlet and a long, ornate power sword in the other. ‘That is the location of this foulness?’

‘That’s it,’ Chetta told her. The skeins of power were thickening and becoming more vivid to her warp-sight, but she could sense that they had a long way to grow yet before they reached their full potential. On the one hand, that was encouraging: the rite didn’t look to be near completion.

On the other hand, as a hurting, tired woman on foot, without the protection of a Geller field or a spacecraft, the scope of what was coming terrified her.

‘I can make out a few heat signatures ahead, but the smog is confusing most of my sensors,’ Ngiri announced over the vox. ‘We don’t know how many of them there are, or what abilities they may have, but I don’t think we have the time to reconnoitre. On my signal…’ The inquisitor paused, as though considering, then appeared to come to a conclusion.

‘Kill everything that isn’t us,’ she finished, decisively.

‘What about Niklau?’ Chetta asked.

‘Kill him too,’ Ngiri replied, her tone clearly suggesting that she thought the question to be a redundant one.

‘Yeah, I’d say we should definitely try to kill him,’ Fell put in.

‘Are you certain that killing him will stop the ritual?’ Chetta asked.

‘No, but I don’t have any better ideas,’ Ngiri said shortly. ‘If you, Carmine or Nero gain any insights on that front, then please feel free to share them. Otherwise, I find that killing a Chaos witch rarely makes things worse. Is everyone ready?’

There was a quiet chorus of assent over the vox.

‘Very well, then. Let us bring righteous fury and death to these heretical scum.’ Ngiri raised her power sword. ‘For the Emperor!’

‘For the Emperor!’ echoed the rest of Chetta’s companions, and they all surged forwards. Ahead of them, the darkness and gloom was split by a momentary muzzle flash and the booming sound of a simple but powerful firearm. Grangar sprawled backwards, blown off her feet by the force of the shot, and didn’t rise again. Wroze fired his hellgun from the hip in response, and the muffled scream that sounded indicated that he’d hit his target. Chetta fired blindly, working on the basis that so long as she avoided her fellows’ backs then she was unlikely to do any harm, and might actually hit something; but she was already being left behind and her available angles of fire were narrowing considerably. In a few more moments, her guards and Ngiri’s team would be scarcely more distinct than the shadowy shapes of the cultists picked out against the witch-light of the ritual. She tried to increase her pace. The ground was uneven and her reserves of strength were low, but she didn’t want to be left behind in case Radimir Niklau decided to step out of thin air and add another warp eye to his collection.

Something huge shifted in the smog, and a stentorian roaring reached her ears. By the Emperor, the cultists had a monster with them!

She saw a figure that must have been Carmine make a sweeping motion with his force staff, and then she winced and wobbled as a crushing pressure enveloped her head for a moment. The huge shape was thrown backwards, but Carmine dropped to one knee from the effort it had taken and the others formed up around him protectively. Hellguns spat supercharged las-bolts and were answered by the bang and chatter of crude stubguns and auto weapons. In the smog-occluded darkness, it seemed everyone’s best chance of hitting an enemy was to target muzzle flash. Her companions looked to be better armed, but were there enough of them?

‘Burn, heretics!’ Fell shouted, and suddenly the darkness was lit up by a tongue of brilliant flame. He swept his combi-weapon back and forth, heedless of the panicked shots that whined around him. Burning shapes staggered away, screaming.

Then fire erupted around Fell himself, and he collapsed to the ground, howling in agony.

For a moment Chetta thought that the ex-Guardsman had fallen victim to some sort of horrendous malfunction of his weapon, but then she saw twin points of flickering fire, over to one side, past the coiling tendrils of power that were reaching out from where the ritual had been conducted. It was hard to focus her pineal eye in the material realm when that warp energy was so prominent in her vision, but she thought she could detect the spark of a psyker there. It wasn’t a great leap of logic to assume that the two things could be related, and she lifted a trembling hand to fire her laspistol as she stumbled forwards. Half a dozen bolts of highly focused light seared away into the gloom; Chetta had no idea if she hit her target, but if she didn’t then the psyker could not have been anywhere near as calm when being shot at as Fell had been. The twin points winked out, as did the flames that had been consuming Fell.

‘The enemies are this way!’ Jekri snapped at her, discharging their arc rifle with a sizzling crack.

‘Maybe the ones that you can see,’ Chetta muttered, but then again the former skitarius didn’t have a warp eye to pick out psykers. Wroze and Viller knelt down in an attempt to tend to Fell’s smoking flesh, but Wroze jerked and slumped sideways: his helmet hadn’t stopped the las-bolt that had just pulped his skull. Davis of Rawl sprang in front of Viller and Fell, his storm shield deflecting further hostile fire, and he charged forwards with his powerblade crackling in his hand. Chetta saw multiple shadowy shapes throwing themselves at him, wielding crude bludgeons or swinging guns by the barrel in an attempt to succeed by brute force where projectile weapons had failed. Davis’ blade eviscerated them all.

Chetta caught sight of another approaching shape, firing a weapon not dissimilar to her own. Three las-bolts spanged harmlessly off Ngiri’s power armour before the inquisitor fired back with her plasma pistol. A bolt of incandescent energy at the temperature of a small star left a blinding white after-image in Chetta’s human eyes as it burned a hole clean through the torso of this new foe.

Her warp eye, however, saw something ancient, cruel and malicious begin to unfold from the wreckage of its human shell.

‘Daemon!’ she screamed as a single, jet-black horn erupted from the figure’s head. It shambled forwards, its awkward gait a mockery of human perambulation, and reached out with clawed hands that were twice the size they had been a moment before. Chetta could clearly see the melted ends of ribs in the gaping wound that had been punched clean through its torso, but the damage didn’t appear to be slowing it.

Davis of Rawl charged the thing from its left and sank his power sword deep into its flesh with a thunderous thrust that skewered it completely, but it paid the blow no mind. Then the blade began to hiss and smoke, and, in front of their horrified eyes, the power field winked out. Great blobs of plasteel began to drip to the ground as the weapon started to melt.

Davis, to his credit, adapted quickly. He swung his storm shield at the daemon with a roar, discharging the power of its inbuilt electrical generator into the monstrosity as the ceramite slab connected. The daemon staggered back a step, but that was the only sign that Davis’ attack had affected it in any way. Before the Crusader could strike again, or retreat out of reach, one of its black-taloned hands reached out and grabbed him by the throat. Then it seemed to breathe in, with an audible buzzing noise, before it exhaled a swarm of fat black flies into Davis’ helmeted face.

Flies, with their soft bodies, should not have been able to penetrate a Crusader’s ceramite armour. They should not have been able to pierce his helmet, flay the flesh from his screaming face, and then shatter his very skull.

And yet, as Davis of Rawl slumped lifeless and nearly headless to the ground, it was very clear that this was exactly what they’d done.

The daemon turned back to the rest of them. Hellgun blasts slid off its oily, rainbow-sheened aura, or were somehow intercepted by the cloud of flies that had now come back to encircle its nightmare form. Jekri’s arc rifle didn’t slow it. Chetta’s companions began to back away from the warp creature, and towards her, still firing. Nero had grabbed hold of Fell’s flak vest and was hauling the badly burned big man across the ground. Hickett went down, as a cultist got lucky with a shot now they weren’t coming under fire.

‘Oh, Throne!’ Chetta hissed as the backs of her party got closer. They were going to blunder into her at any moment, and she could barely navigate this terrain going forwards, let alone backwards.

Carmine broke ranks, stepping into the path of the daemon, and his force staff glowed with sudden light as he swung it two-handed.

‘Ave Imperator!’

The blow neatly bisected the daemon at chest height, and this time its sickening aura gave it no defence. Its head, upper chest and arms sailed through the air for a few feet before splatting wetly to earth, while the legs tottered forwards for two more steps and then collapsed. The cloud of flies abruptly fell from the air, instantly dead. Carmine let out a fierce bark of laughter and raised one hand, preparing for another kinetic assault on the few cultists still arrayed against them.

This time, he wasn’t quick enough when the monster Chetta had dimly sighted before came storming out of the smog.

It grabbed each of Carmine’s arms in one of its huge fists, just below the shoulder, then wrenched. Carmine came apart like a rag doll, both arms torn from their sockets before he could summon his powers to defend himself. He screamed in utter agony as twin fountains of blood spurted from his flanks. The monster raised a massive, clawed foot and kicked Carmine in the chest, crushing his ribcage and sending him flying backwards. Whatever precognition Alyssana Nero might have possessed didn’t aid her enough to get clear of the grisly missile: Carmine’s broken body flattened her.

Chetta raised her laspistol and fired. She couldn’t really miss, despite the adrenaline and weariness that sent her hand wobbling, but her shots achieved nothing. Then the monster was on them.

Viller’s head was engulfed and crushed by one clawed fist, and the last of Chetta’s guards went limp. Jekri’s arc rifle burned the monster’s side, but it snatched them up by their legs and dashed them down on the ground once, twice, thrice, until the former skitarius’ body came apart and their upper torso went tumbling away across the ground with a wail of mechanical agony.

Ngiri’s power sword took the monster’s left hand off at the wrist.

The monster’s right fist struck the inquisitor so hard that she sailed twenty feet through the air and came to rest in a heap with a clatter of buckled ceramite.

Chetta fought to keep her bladder under control as the foul mutant’s huge head swung towards her. It took one step, two steps, dust and gravel crunching beneath its clawed feet. Its massive mouth opened, drool spilling from between malformed, beast-like tusks.

‘MURDERERTH!’

Even in the grip of spine-numbing fear, Chetta could still feel shock. Had the thing just… spoken?

‘LEAVE UTH ’LONE!’

The words were poorly formed, but they were words. The creature could speak Low Gothic! If it could speak, it could reason. Did it know what was happening here? Did it realise how it was being used? Could Chetta appeal to whatever humanity might still lurk within its altered form? She became abruptly aware of the laspistol in her hand; it was clearly useless against such a being, but the monster was unlikely to have forgotten the burn marks she’d left on its chest mere moments before.

She met the monster’s eyes, held the weapon out from her body, and dropped it. Perhaps a show of good faith would–

A series of explosions ripped up the creature’s torso, blasting chunks of flesh out of its body and culminating in a final shower of gore and bone as the massive mutant’s jaw disintegrated. It swayed for a moment, then slumped sideways.

Fell’s bionic arm, the only part of his body not burned by the fire that had engulfed him, shakily lowered his combi-weapon. The effort looked to have taken everything he had left; he rolled from his back onto his right hand side in a semi-foetal position, frantic breaths whistling audibly through his respirator.

Chetta took a deep and somewhat shaky breath. ‘Ngiri?’

The vox was silent.

Chetta gritted her teeth, braced her right arm as best she could against her cane and began to crouch, reaching her left hand out for the laspistol she’d just discarded. ‘Ngiri!’

The vox grunted. ‘Chetta?’

‘You’re alive?’ It was another stupid question, but the pistol was nearly within her reach and most of Chetta’s brainpower was focused on not overbalancing sideways.

‘I’m fairly sure that being dead wouldn’t hurt this much. Emperor’s blood.’ There was another huffed grunt, and Chetta heard a faint scrape of ceramite from away to her right. ‘You killed that thing?’

The question was an incredulous one, and Chetta was unsurprised. The notion of her killing anyone or anything was fairly ludicrous. ‘No, Fell did.’

‘Wait, Fell is alive?’

‘For the moment,’ Chetta grunted. ‘Although he’ll need a medicae soon if he’s going to stay that way.’ Her questing fingers finally closed on the laspistol’s still-warm barrel, and she clawed it closer until the grip was within reach. ‘I think we’re the only ones left.’

A shape, moving ahead of her in the gloom. Panic gripped Chetta’s chest and she fumbled at her newly regained weapon, trying to raise it.

The spitting hiss of an arc rifle rang out, and the figure screamed and fell. Chetta blinked the white after-image away. ‘Jekri! Was that you?’

‘Jekri, I saw you torn apart,’ Ngiri stated flatly.

‘The severe structural damage I sustained was primarily to my mechanical components,’ Jekri’s voice replied weakly. ‘I also retained my weapon.’

‘Primarily to your mechanical components?’ Chetta asked, contemplating the struggle that would be getting fully back to her feet again, and wondering if it was worth the effort.

‘My biological health is also failing,’ Jekri admitted. ‘I can currently brace my weapon sufficiently to fire, but I cannot achieve significant locomotion, due to no longer being in possession of my lower limbs. However, I can detect no additional hostiles.’

Chetta frowned. ‘What about–?’

The ghostly light of the ritual in front of her blazed into full life, drying the words up in her mouth. She squeezed her human eyes shut against it, but she realised after a second that it made little difference: the witch-light was unaffected. This was warp energy, potent and strong, and only her pineal eye could detect it. Something had happened, something that had whipped the slow-burning blasphemy before them into a raging inferno of power. It spiralled around itself, the tendrils thickening and intertwining until it became something that was part-flower, part-serpent, part-beacon, and all-enrapturing.

It was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most terrifying thing she’d ever seen.

‘It’s begun properly,’ she said, forcing herself up and fighting back tears as she did so. ‘Ngiri, get up, Emperor damn you! We have to stop it!’

‘Inqui–!’

That hadn’t been Ngiri; it had been Jekri’s voice, and abruptly cut off. Chetta scanned the darkness around her desperately, but her human eyes were still near-blind and the blazing power of the ritual that her warp eye could see illuminated nothing in the material world. She squinted, trying to focus. Was that the faintest echo of something, over there…?

‘Jekri?’ Ngiri voxed. Chetta heard the clatter of armour as the battered inquisitor finally pulled herself back to her feet. ‘Jekri, come in.’

‘Too late,’ Chetta said, knowing in her heart that it was true as soon as the words left her lips. ‘He’s still here, Ngiri.

‘Niklau is still here.’

THE LIDLESS STARE

‘Chetta, stay where you are,’ Ngiri instructed over the vox. Shadows shifted in the gloom, and the faintest spots of glowing red became visible. ‘I’m coming to you.’

‘Ngiri, this is important,’ Chetta said. The swirling tendrils of the rite were almost transfixing in their beauty, but there was a pattern there, she was sure of it. ‘Niklau is not the key. Not any longer. We have to disrupt the rite itself.’

‘Where in the names of all the saints is my pistol?’ Ngiri grunted, her helmet scanning from right to left as she limped forwards. ‘Disrupt the rite? Any ideas how?’

‘I’m working on that,’ Chetta admitted. This was something different to anything she’d ever done before, despite all her experience at navigating the warp. Had she seen something like this from her throne, she’d have directed the craft she was responsible for to give it a wide berth and thought little more about it. Her career had always been focused on avoiding complex warp phenomena, not studying them: Navigators might be able to parse things that would have driven a normal human insane within moments, but there was a limit to even her kind’s mental resilience. Madness was far from unheard of within the great houses, and not all of it was the direct result of genetic instability.

The sky tore open, and the colours of the warp bled out through the smog, casting distorted, shifting shadows across the ground.

‘Can you see that?’ Chetta demanded. She was losing track of what she was perceiving with her human eyes and what with her warp eye, and was developing a splitting headache on top of everything else as a result, but she didn’t dare close either.

‘I see it, I see it!’ Ngiri assured her as she drew nearer. The inquisitor’s voice sounded ragged, which was a good match for Chetta’s nerves. ‘I think you need to work faster on how to disrupt this!’

‘You and me both,’ Chetta muttered. There was a sudden flicker of blue light past Ngiri’s shoulder: the glow of a powerblade. ‘Behind you!’

Ngiri whirled, igniting her own power sword as she did so. The movement was clumsy and pained, a far cry from the inquisitor’s former balletic grace, and it hit nothing. However, the other blade winked out of existence. Chetta frowned. Was that a faint echo of something again, away beyond Ngiri?

‘Chetta, I’ll cover you for as long as I can, but unless you can see a way to end this blasphemy soon then I’m going to have to just start swinging at things and hoping,’ Ngiri said, backing carefully towards her with her sword held in a two-handed guard position. ‘Given the end result of us doing nothing is going to be the destruction of the planet, I don’t think I can make things worse.’

‘Point taken,’ Chetta replied. This was infuriating! The power was coiling around itself, but also around something else… but what? What was the key?

Light blazed into existence to Chetta’s left and she swung around, raising her laspistol to target whatever this new threat was. She found herself confronted by a humanoid figure of walking flame, wreathed in fire that somehow didn’t consume it despite Chetta being able to feel the heat even from where she was standing.

It seemed the fire-witch had decided to join the fight again.

‘You should never have come here,’ the witch snarled from inside a respirator that was somehow also immune to the fire. That was a shame: if Chetta could have left her to choke on smog then that would have simplified matters immensely.

‘I’m inclined to agree,’ Chetta replied, and pulled the trigger.

The las-bolt flashed harmlessly two feet over the witch’s left shoulder. Chetta swore, corrected her aim and fired again, but only succeeded in missing the heretic’s right shoulder by an even greater margin. Muscles shifted in what was visible of the witch’s flame-engulfed face, suggesting a malicious smile.

‘My turn.’

The ground shook. Chetta staggered, briefly wondering what new power the witch was displaying now, but the heretic looked just as shocked as she struggled to keep her balance. Then, as the seismic rumble began to pitch upwards slightly into the very lowest registers of human hearing, Chetta realised the truth. It wasn’t an earthquake or a ground tremor.

It was a voice.

Chetta was unable to stop herself. She turned her head to look at the rent in the sky.

Something looked back.

A monstrous eye, the colour of an angry bruise and slashed diagonally across with triple night-black pupils, focused on her. The surfaces of the pupils rippled, and the suggestion of shapes, mere darker shadows somehow cast without light, rose up within them: screaming faces, distended in terror and agony. The iris was changing too, the shifting colours forming and reforming into endless hungry mouths that devoured each other. The air shimmered as though in a heat haze, and Chetta suddenly got an impression of the vast distance that still lay between her and this thing, but it wasn’t an encouraging realisation: she knew, knew deep in her bones, that whatever distance there still was between this being and the rift in Vorlese’s sky would ultimately mean little.

Also, given how colossal it appeared to her now…

The fire-witch screamed, a sound of primal, animalistic terror, and the flames around her flared white-hot. She turned away from Chetta, lifted both her hands towards the warp rift, and flung twin streams of fire at the creature that lurked beyond it. To Chetta’s astonishment, the enormous eye flickered and flinched, and another bone-shaking bellow rang out. It was unlikely to do much more than infuriate the warp predator, if it could even have such human emotions attributed to it, but at least they could affect it in some way…

‘What is tha–?’

‘Don’t look at it!’ Chetta snapped, turning towards Ngiri as the streams of fire spluttered out and were replaced with the sound of terrified sobbing from the direction of the witch. Ngiri was only a couple of steps away from Chetta now, staring up at the rent in the sky with her power sword held loosely in her right hand and looking as astonished as was possible when wearing expressionless power armour. Chetta reached up and grabbed Ngiri’s head, trying to force the helmet away from the impossible abomination. Chetta had seen approximations of such things before, albeit in less personally vulnerable circumstances. No matter how rigorous her mental training, Ngiri had admitted that she had little experience in dealing with the warp. The sight of such a thing could surely break even an inquisitor.

Slowly, Ngiri managed to tear her gaze away, and her glowing red eye-lenses turned towards Chetta. Chetta could hear Ngiri’s breath coming quickly over the vox.

‘I… Thank you, I–’

Chetta’s warp eye caught the disruption in the material world, the ripple in the depths of the long, dark shadow being cast out behind Ngiri by the light from the rift. She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but she was too slow. Ngiri must have seen her expression change, because she began to turn, but she was too slow as well.

Radimir Niklau, his long hair now streaked with grey but still fierce-eyed above his respirator mask, burst out of the darkness with astounding speed and fury. His power knife flared into life a split second before he buried it in Zaretta Ngiri’s ribs.

Ngiri screamed.

Niklau wheeled away, leaving a smoking rent in the inquisitor’s power armour. Ngiri slumped down as blood began to leak out of the gash in her ceramite. Chetta raised her laspistol, but Niklau had already retreated. As she tried to draw a bead on him with her warp eye, every part of his essence vanished.

‘How bad is it?’ she asked, still scanning their surroundings as though she’d have the reflexes or accuracy to shoot Radimir Niklau before he could saunter casually up to her and cut her throat.

‘I’d like to be able to say… that I hadn’t expected to die like this,’ Ngiri replied in a voice tight and breathy with pain. ‘But that would be a lie.’

Bleak despair took hold of Chetta. The last warrior with her had fallen. She could possibly, possibly work out a way to slow down or stop the ritual, but she couldn’t do that and fight off Radimir Niklau. She was vulnerable, and he would surely know it. He’d only need to take one look at this old, broken-down woman, barely able to stand, and…

‘Give me your sword,’ Chetta told Ngiri.

‘Use… your pistol,’ Ngiri replied, somehow managing to sound dismissive even while bleeding to death.

‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing,’ Chetta snapped. Which was mainly a lie, but she must have sounded convincing. Ngiri hesitated for a moment, then, shaking with the effort, managed to raise the hand in which she held her power sword high enough for Chetta to drop her laspistol and take the handle of the blade from her.

The sword was surprisingly light: a superior plasteel blend that weighed perhaps as much as Chetta’s cane. Not that it made a great deal of difference, since Chetta wouldn’t have been able to attempt any sort of fancy swordswomanship even had she been in her best health. She had one trick, and just had to hope that would be enough.

The power field was still shimmering. Chetta held the blade low in front of her, in both hands, and faced the whirling power of the rite.

Then she closed her human eyes.

The ritual dominated her vision, and she could make out the malicious nature of its energy now she was seeing it purely through her warp eye; could see the faint, spectral claws that it was sending down into Vorlese’s crust. The monstrosity looming in the sky above it was just as visible, but somehow less horrifying now. Chetta had seen such things before through her warp-sight, and although that was never a good thing, if she made herself ignore the fact that she wasn’t currently shielded by a Geller field then she could suppress her fear, and concentrate.

Crucially, although she was facing the rite, her warp-sight didn’t have the same field of vision as her human eyes. Just like when she was immersed in the empyrean on her navigation throne, she could sense the warp all around her. Unlike those occasions, however, the vast majority of the warp’s presence was in front of her.

But not all of it. Behind her, in the long, dark shadow she was casting on the ground, Chetta saw a whisper of the warp as Radimir Niklau emerged from whatever unholy method of travel his heretical powers granted him. Her back was turned to him as she stood, apparently transfixed by the ritual, next to the crumpled body of a dying inquisitor. An easy target to approach from behind.

Chetta forced herself to wait for one more torturously long second, then spun around.

It was certainly more of a stumble than a pirouette – one in which she started falling halfway through – and she didn’t make a cut with Ngiri’s power sword so much as she just held it out in front of her while she turned. Against a wary, well-balanced opponent who was on his guard for a desperate, last-ditch move, it would likely have failed.

Against a malicious Chaos-worshipper caught in the midst of an incautious advance, unaware that his intended prey could detect his teleportation, it proved to be good enough.

The power sword sliced across the front of Niklau’s torso, the molecular disruption field that gave the blade its preternaturally sharp edge carving its way through fabric and skin, bone and flesh. Niklau let out a strangled grunt as they fell to the ground at the same time. The shock of landing on her right side jarred Ngiri’s power sword out of Chetta’s hand and sent it skittering across the ground out of her reach, and she felt the heretic’s bodily fluids spray over her legs. Blood? Viscera? She fought down a wave of nausea and panic that was nearly strong enough to overwhelm the pain. She’d just delivered Niklau a mortal wound, but he’d take time to die, she was still within his reach, and she no longer had her weapon. She kicked as hard as she could with her left leg, desperately trying to knock him further away from her, make it that bit more difficult for him to get hold of her…

A hand closed on her calf. She tried to kick again, but couldn’t get enough power to shake the heretic off. His fingers dug into her flesh. Chetta screamed abuse at him, grabbed a desperate handful of dust and gravel with her left hand and threw it blindly in his direction.

Another hand landed on her left hip, gripping hard enough to add one more layer of pain on top of that which already wracked her. Niklau tugged, seeking to pull her towards him or him towards her. He was clawing his way up her body with the clumsy, desperate strength of a dying man.

Chetta reached down to grab his hand, trying to pry his fingers loose, but she couldn’t move them. Niklau heaved, with a screaming grunt of effort. Stones dug into Chetta’s skin as she was pulled over onto her back, and Radimir Niklau’s heavily bleeding torso landed across her upper legs. He could no longer use his legs properly, with his abdominal muscles sliced apart. His hair was not just greying, it was falling out and leaving bald patches on his scalp. His skin was liver-spotted, his eyes were sunken in wrinkles, and what could be seen of his cheeks were positively cadaverous, but he still possessed a fearsome strength, even after his body had been ravaged by his own foul sorcery. He reached up towards her face, his eyes flashing with hatred, his fingers clawing towards her respirator. He wanted to see her choke to death.

Chetta opened her warp eye as far as she could, and fixed him with the full force of her stare.

It took Niklau a moment to realise what was happening, and Chetta felt the faint twitch of his muscles as he tried to look away, but he wasn’t quite quick enough to avoid being ensnared. He was a man used to the madness and boiling chaos of the warp, to the extent that any mortal human could be, and she could feel his soul bending, flexing and resisting rather than shattering into brittle shards like that of her husband’s murderer, back on Necromunda. For a couple of terrifying seconds, she thought that he would shake off the effects, and live long enough to kill her.

Then something in the heretic’s blasted psyche gave way. His pupils dilated, his straining muscles relaxed, and he slumped sideways off her to collapse onto his back. Whatever had made him Radimir Niklau had been sandblasted away by the power of the warp, and now he was nothing more than some misfiring neurones in a shell of ailing meat.

Chetta fell backwards as relief washed through her. Finally, after all the pain and misery he’d caused, Radimir Niklau was…

Her gaze came to rest on the rent in the sky, and the malignant triple pupil that glared out from it.

‘Shit.’

NAVIGATION

‘I cannot,’ Chetta growled, gritting her teeth. ‘Be having,’ she continued, forcing herself to roll over onto her left side. ‘With this foolishness!’ she spat, propping herself up on her left arm. She gave Radimir’s body a quick kick out of spite, which achieved nothing except making her knee twinge. The rite was near completed, she could sense that much. The abomination waiting in the warp was closer now, by some unfathomable metric, and simply waiting for the moment when it could get enough of a hold on Vorlese to drag it to its doom in the immaterium.

Ngiri was a prone form in ceramite, over which washed the unnatural colours of the warp. Jekri was in two parts, Carmine in three; Fell was primarily charred meat; Wroze and Viller both lacked heads; Granger was missing most of her chest, and Hickett had simply bled out. All around them, and in the smoggy gloom beyond, lay the bodies of heretics.

The only living person Chetta could see was the trembling form of the fire-witch, cowering in a ball.

‘You!’ Chetta shouted. ‘Witch!’

There was no response.

‘Look at me!’ Chetta raged. ‘Look at me, you warp-damned, daemon-loving, slime-sucking, pestilential sack of cowardly, putrescent filth!’ She grabbed a rock and threw it. It missed, but clattered noisily across the stones. ‘Look at me!’

The fire-witch’s head jerked up, and even across the distance between them Chetta could see the faint light of flames in those dark, sunken eyes.

‘Good,’ she continued, in a more measured tone. ‘Now that I have your attention – do you want to die here?’

The witch’s eyes narrowed.

‘Because if you don’t, you need to get me,’ Chetta jabbed herself in the chest with her thumb, ‘into there!’ She pointed at the swirling power of Niklau’s ritual.

The witch began to involuntarily turn her head.

‘Don’t look at the sky!’ Chetta yelled. ‘Look at me! Focus on me!’

The witch looked back at her.

‘Get up!’ Chetta urged. ‘Get up and help me! I can save us both. I can save everyone. I can make all of this go away, but I can’t move. I can’t do this by myself. So if you want this entire planet to die, and if you want to suffer an eternity of screaming torment in the warp, then you stay right where you are. If you want a chance at living for a while longer, then help me up!’

For a long moment, the heretic didn’t move. Then, just as Chetta was about to either scream in frustration or simply lie down and give up – she honestly wasn’t sure which – the other woman scrambled to her feet and ran towards her. She arrived in a clatter of stones and dust, and Chetta shielded her eyes with her hand. When it had settled, she looked up at the slight figure looming over her.

‘You killed Radimir,’ the witch said, looking down at Niklau’s body. Her voice was flat, dispassionate.

‘He was trying to kill me,’ Chetta grunted.

‘I never liked him,’ the witch commented. ‘I should have trusted my instincts.’ She crouched down next to Chetta, dark eyes scanning over her. ‘Why can’t you move? Are you injured?’

‘My body and I are not currently on speaking terms,’ Chetta said acidly. ‘No, I’m not injured, as such. I just… can’t, any more.’

The witch nodded, and reached out. Chetta stamped down on the revulsion she felt at having the heretic touch her.

‘This may hurt.’

‘Every day hurts,’ Chetta replied, gritting her teeth. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

It did hurt: the witch was neither skilled nor experienced at helping a battered Navigator in chronic pain to her feet. However, it hurt less than it would have done had Chetta tried to get up on her own. She clung to that fact, even while her head was spinning and she was fighting the urge to throw up into her respirator.

‘Right,’ she gasped, when she could speak again, with the witch supporting her on one side. ‘Now, we’re going to need to get inside the ritual.’

‘I… We… I can’t walk into that,’ the witch said in a small voice. ‘I can’t.’

‘What’s your name?’ Chetta asked.

‘What?’

‘Your name,’ Chetta repeated. She felt like she was wasting valuable seconds, but this would all be for nothing if she couldn’t get the witch to do as she wanted.

‘Evelyn.’

‘Evelyn, I need you to trust me,’ Chetta told her seriously. ‘I’m a Navigator. I guide starships through the warp – that is literally what my kin and I were created for. For anyone else, trying to walk into that ritual would be suicide, but I can find us a way through. I know that the only chance we have to stop it is from the centre, I can see that.’

‘What if you’re wrong?’ Evelyn asked.

Chetta kissed her teeth in frustration. ‘Then we die a few minutes before everyone else does. Unless you have a shuttle parked within half a mile, and you’re a fast runner, you’re dead anyway. What have you got to lose?’

‘My soul is damned anyway,’ Evelyn said darkly.

‘Most of us are, if you listen to the preachers,’ Chetta retorted. ‘That just makes me want to live as long as possible to avoid what comes afterwards. Are you with me?’

Evelyn screwed up her eyes for a second, then nodded decisively. ‘All right. I’m with you.’

Relief washed through Chetta, although her chest tightened up again a moment later when she considered what she was about to attempt. ‘Good. Let’s get–’

‘Step away from her!’

The voice was ragged and pain-wracked, but recognisable. Chetta twisted her head around with a pop of protesting joints, and saw a figure staggering out of the smog. It was covered in blood, and one of its arms hung at an unnatural angle, but the other still clutched a hellgun that was aimed, somewhat haphazardly, at the pair of them.

‘DeShe– Alyssana!’ Chetta snapped, correcting herself. Her former aide had the woozy look of someone who’d taken a far harder blow to the head than it was healthy for a human to receive, and her left arm was clearly broken: both probably suffered when she’d been struck by the flying, bleeding missile that had been Carmine’s dismembered body. ‘Alyssana, lower your weapon!’

‘She’s a witch,’ Nero said, her voice groggy but determined. Her comm-bead was still active, since her words reached Chetta’s ears muffled by her respirator, but also with the faint crackle of interference.

‘And you’re a witch, and I’m a damn mutant,’ Chetta told her wearily. ‘We’re also the only ones around here with any chance of stopping this insanity, so perhaps we can all work together in the interests of saving the planet?’

‘I don’t want to die today,’ Evelyn added, plaintively.

Whether it was the force of habit of obeying Chetta’s instructions, Evelyn’s naked truthfulness, the head trauma Nero had suffered or a combination of the three, Chetta wasn’t sure. Whatever the reason, the last member of Inquisitor Zaretta Ngiri’s band stood indecisively for a second, then flicked the safety on her hellgun and trudged closer to offer Chetta the shoulder of her non-broken arm for support.

‘My cane,’ Chetta told them. ‘I need my cane.’

‘You have us,’ Nero replied.

‘For now,’ Chetta pointed out. ‘At least get me some way of holding myself up if something happens to you!’

They shuffled over, and with Nero now able to take Chetta’s weight for a moment, Evelyn knelt down for a second to grab Chetta’s cane from where she’d let it fall. Chetta gripped the handle of it in her right hand, with the length of it dangling down Evelyn’s back, and felt a momentary rush of almost entirely unwarranted security as a result. She also kept her thumb near the stud that would turn the cane into a shock maul, just in case the witch proved treacherous or in some way disastrously craven.

‘Forward, then,’ she instructed, eyeing the curtain of swirling power before them. ‘Remember, tread only where I say to tread, and only when I say.’

It was, without a doubt, the most nerve-wracking experience of Chetta’s life.

There was an illusion of security when on her navigation throne in the vestibule of a starship. The Geller field was always her primary protection, of course, but there was the ever-present risk of it failing, at which point the warp drive might turn into a giant hunk of rotting meat, or the corridors could start to digest the sanitation teams, or the bridge crew might begin to fuse with the deck. The sturdy walls of the ship itself, that protected her so well from the hard vacuum and radiation of the void, and the guns of enemies, would do nothing against the warp. And yet, even though she knew that on an intellectual level, there was still a part of her that gained some comfort from that perceived protection.

Staggering through shifting walls of warp energy, with nothing between her and them save for scant inches of particulate-suffused air, and relying for propulsion not on a well-drilled bridge crew used to responding instantly to her direction, but a heretical fire-witch and a badly concussed agent of the Inquisition whose loyalties she had been so badly wrong about for so long…

‘Stop!’ she ordered, and the three of them lurched to a halt. It would look to a warp-blind observer as though they were simply staggering drunkenly across the ground, veering to avoid imagined threats, and Chetta suspected that even the psykers on either side of her could detect nothing more than a crawling sensation on their skin, or similar. To her, however, the barriers that were thrown up in front of, behind and around them were luridly visible.

‘Right!’

They shuffled in the direction she’d indicated, as a tendril of power lashed down where they’d been standing a moment before. It was a complicated pattern, but it was a pattern, and Chetta could see it. She just had to make sure that her concentration didn’t slip.

And all the while, the looming threat that hung in the sky above them grew slightly more tangible.

‘Forwards two steps… Left one step… Turn left!’ They pivoted, with Chetta as the agonised centre point. ‘Now right, three steps! DeShelle, get behind me!’

Nero obeyed, moaning in pain as her left arm banged against her side, but she managed to avoid the next wall of power that sprang up.

‘Could your precognition let you walk through this?’ Chetta asked her as they paused for a moment in a brief gap. ‘This would be a lot easier if you knew where to tread.’

‘It’s not reliable,’ Nero mumbled.

‘Why are these things never easy?’ Chetta grumbled. She frowned, eyeing a new surge building within the maelstrom. Easy enough to avoid, by stepping there, there and… But wait, there was a different wall of power sweeping around from that direction, which would pass through that space at exactly the moment they’d need to be there, so…

The first surge was getting closer, sweeping inexorably around the octagram of power. She was out of time to plan.

‘Crap, backwards!’ Chetta ordered, and the other women obeyed.

‘How far?’ Evelyn demanded.

‘Until I tell you!’ Chetta snapped. ‘Now right! Keep going! Forwards! And stop!’ It was like flying through the worst warp storms, when she was literally just reacting to what the empyrean threw at her, with no ability to plan her best route. Those had always been the times when she’d felt most alive, probably because they’d also been the times when she’d been the closest to death.

‘Right again!’

They staggered sideways once more, but that tail end of that damnable second wall was catching up with them fast. Chetta could see the internal border of the huge octagram of power, mere yards away. They could get close to it, but the gaps just weren’t going to sync up. No matter where they trod, no matter how quickly they moved, there was no way to get past that final barrier before another sweep of power caught them.

She’d misread the pattern.

Going back and starting again wasn’t an option. Even if their muscles and reflexes held up, it would take too long. Sometimes you simply had to buckle up and give the bridge the order to go full ahead.

‘Nero, stay here in case this doesn’t work,’ Chetta ordered, shaking her arm loose of her former aide’s support. ‘Evelyn, forwards now!’

Alyssana Nero was, apparently, not quite quick enough on the uptake to protest in time. Chetta heard her begin to voice an objection, but by that point her heart was thumping in her ears as she stumbled forwards with her right arm over the heretic’s shoulders.

‘Bear left!’

Closer and closer, but the ritual’s power was closing in on them – not like the jaws of a predator, which implied voluntary action, but like the moving parts of a vast machine that was heedless of the rats it might crush in its internal wheels and gears as it fulfilled its assigned task.

‘Forwards!’

Chetta braced herself as the wall of power loomed up in front of her. Realistically, how much worse could it hurt than everything else she’d experienced today…?

It was searing ice.

It was crushing sharpness.

It was every cell in her body being pierced by a high-frequency drill.

It was agony.

It was ecstasy.

It was eternal.

It… was over.

They broke through, stumbled. Chetta was jolted as Evelyn managed to get her legs under the Navigator again and prevented her from falling.

‘What was that?’ the witch panted, clutching at her chest.

‘We were too slow,’ Chetta lied. ‘But we made it.’

Above them, directly above them now, was the rent in the sky and its malign occupant. In front of them, turning slowly in the air, was a figure in the ripped uniform of a medicae, wreathed in corposant and with an unholy design carved into his chest. To Chetta’s eyes, he was connected to the ground by eight tendrils of power that flowed to him from the eight corners of the octagram in which they now stood, and a thicker rope of it flowed upwards from his silently screaming head. She focused her warp-sight on the nearest corner, and saw that the glowing orb focusing the power of the glyph around them was a Navigator’s warp eye. Should she move them?

‘Nero!’ she snapped, suddenly aware of impending peril behind her. ‘Two steps back!’

‘You’re not even looking at me!’ Nero’s voice retorted, but she did as she was instructed.

‘Yes I am, you stupid girl,’ Chetta grunted. She focused again, and tutted. Sometimes the simplest solutions really were the best.

‘Burn it,’ she told Evelyn, pointing at the floating body.

‘What?’ Evelyn replied breathlessly. She seemed to have been more severely affected by being caught up in the ritual’s power than Chetta had. Perhaps her inherent psychic powers had something to do with that?

‘Burn it!’ Chetta snapped. ‘That’s the focus! If we destroy the focus, the ritual should fail!’

‘Should?’ Evelyn retorted incredulously.

Chetta swung her arm clear of the other woman’s shoulders and planted her cane on the ground to catch herself before she overbalanced. ‘This is our chance. Take it, or don’t.’

‘I’ll take it,’ Evelyn muttered. She took a couple of steps forwards, still determinedly not looking up at the rift above them, then spread the fingers on each hand.

Fire, not pale corposant but a hale yellow-orange, sprang into existence and licked across her fingers. A moment later and it was running up her arms as though she’d been dipped in it: then, with an audible whoomp, flames ignited all across her body. She raised her hands, shouted in apparent effort and closed her fists again.

The suspended body began to rotate faster, the power flowing upwards from it into the rift increased, and the rift itself began to bulge lower.

‘Burn it!’ Chetta shouted again.

‘I’m trying!’ Evelyn responded, her voice tight with effort. ‘It’s… it’s like it’s just swallowing my fire!’

Chetta’s stomach twisted. ‘Well, try harder!’ This was the key, she knew it. ‘Overload it!’

Evelyn screamed, and the fire surrounding her body brightened from yellow-orange, to yellow, to white, to blue-white. Chetta could feel the heat radiating off her as the body in the air above them spun faster, and faster…

Dust began to float upwards. It was barely noticeable at any distance in the smog, but Chetta could see it rising directly in front of her eyes. The finest particles that lay on the ground were being drawn into the sky. A faint breeze was building as well, as air was sucked in from all sides.

The predator above them was starting to close its jaws on Vorlese.

‘What’s happening?’ Evelyn demanded, her voice panicked.

‘Keep going!’ Chetta ordered. The body in the air was spinning so fast now that she couldn’t see it clearly, but she was sure that there was a dark patch on its front that was starting to occlude the eight-pointed star carved into its flesh.

Soil began to rise. Then small stones. Everything was drawn together into a column that snaked upwards into the rift, and disappeared into the leering, screaming mouths that made up the surface of the monstrous eye. It was almost as though Chetta could reach up and touch it.

‘Keep going!’

The charred patch was definitely spreading across the medicae’s body, but Evelyn’s body was shaking with effort. Chetta bit her lip with anxiety until she tasted blood for the second time that evening.

‘Come on, come on…’

Fire caught. The corposant was pushed aside by white-hot flames that consumed, burning the clothes, melting the flesh, charring the bones.

‘Yes!’ Chetta shouted jubilantly. ‘More! More! You’re doing it!’

Larger rocks were flying upwards now. One caromed off Evelyn’s right shoulder, drawing a cry of pain, but the fire-witch’s concentration didn’t break. Chetta began to feel the draw herself. Not enough to pluck her from the ground, not yet, but enough to tug against Vorlese’s gravity. Any moment now, the ritual would complete and this slow devouring would become the same near-instantaneous destruction that had claimed Gallimo Prime.

The floating skeleton charred into ash and was sucked upwards, into the ravening maw.

Without their focus to direct them onwards, the tendrils of power from the eight warp eyes met and gathered for a moment into a single point, invisible to human eyes but brighter in Chetta’s warp-sight than any of Evelyn’s flames.

Then it exploded.

The backwash of power, accompanied by a gale-force howl of wind, knocked Chetta off her feet. As she landed she saw Evelyn crashing backwards onto the ground, and then dust and gravel and rocks were raining down out of the sky. Above her, Chetta caught a momentary glimpse of triple pupils narrowing in rage before the rent in the sky ravelled up to reveal not the inky blackness of half-mile-thick smog, but the light-studded flanks of Ascension City’s titanic hab blocks and, far above even them, the faintly twinkling points of the stars.

They’d done it.

‘Chetta!’

Hastily stumbling feet, a hand threaded beneath her armpit. Chetta groaned as Alyssana Nero helped her up off the ground.

‘You did it,’ Nero said, her voice awed. ‘You… you actually did it? It’s over?’

‘It’s over,’ Chetta confirmed, planting her cane wearily. Her warp-sight could see no remnants of power, save for the faintest of sparks that was Nero’s gift. ‘But I didn’t do it.’ She nodded at Evelyn. ‘She did. I just told her what to do.’

Nero made a noise in her throat that Chetta didn’t like the sound of. She liked it even less when her former aide unslung the hellgun from across her good shoulder and took a step towards Evelyn with the weapon’s stock tucked between her unbroken arm and her ribs.

‘Witch!’

Evelyn scrambled up to her knees and raised her palms outwards. Chetta flinched, expecting to be caught in the flames that the fire-witch would surely hurl at Alyssana Nero.

Nothing happened. Evelyn stared at her hands in disbelief.

Nero’s first shot flew wide. She grunted with effort, trying to steady the bulky hellgun with one hand.

Chetta activated the power switch on her cane and struck Nero in the ribs with it. The shock setting on the weapon sent the Inquisitorial agent slumping to the ground, temporarily unconscious. Chetta followed her a moment later as her balance failed. She felt something in her chest snap as she hit the ground, probably a collarbone.

More pain. Nothing unusual there.

Grimacing with the effort, she managed to look up at where Evelyn was getting to her feet, still staring shakily at her hands.

‘I’m empty,’ the witch stammered. ‘I’m empty!’

‘Run,’ Chetta croaked at her. Evelyn’s eyes met hers.

‘Why?’

Chetta knew that the other woman wasn’t asking why she should run.

‘The Inquisition are single-minded and inflexible,’ Chetta managed. ‘I am capable of slightly more nuance. You saved this planet. They won’t care about that, I do. Run, before someone who isn’t me arrives.’

Evelyn gave her one brief nod, then turned and ran. It was a limping, staggering run, but it served to get her out of sight before Alyssana Nero came around with a jerk, and a moan of pain as reality asserted itself in her consciousness once more.

‘Gah!’ Chetta gasped as one of Nero’s thrashing limbs caught her in the shoulder.

‘What happened?’ Nero demanded, fighting up to her knees and fumbling with her hellgun.

‘The witch must have had a trick left,’ Chetta gasped. ‘Took us both down. Not hard to do, in my case.’ She pawed at Nero’s side, trying to push her away. ‘Ngiri. She took a knife to the ribs, but she may still live. Go, see if you can help her.’

Nero staggered to her feet and made for her mistress. Chetta took a couple of breaths to compose herself, then, doing her best to ignore the stabbing pain in her upper chest, reached up to her comm-bead and keyed it to the highest broadcasting level she could.

‘This is the Lady Chettamandey, Novator of House Brobantis,’ she declared to the sky above her, free for the moment of the vox-blocking smog, thanks to the explosion of warp energy. ‘I am very much not dead, and will pay a reward of ten thousand ducats to the first person or persons who follow this signal and return my companions and me safely to Brobantis Palace.’ She paused, and glanced to her right.

‘In addition, if you can hear this, Judge Arctos, you may be interested to learn that I have killed Radimir Niklau…’

A MATTER OF HONOUR

‘He was turned in by his own wife?’ Chetta asked. She was peering through a viewing slot into a stone cell, in which Jalamar Jo’Sin sat strapped to a bare metal chair. The temperature in the room was being gradually lowered. It didn’t look as though Jalamar’s scales were providing him with much protection from the elemental torture, judging by the shivering. Soon, his flesh would begin to freeze to the metal, at which point the questioners would enter. Scion of a powerful Navigator house or not, the Adeptus Arbites took a very dim view of Imperial citizens who hired sorcerers that destroyed entire planets.

‘Indeed,’ Judge Arctos confirmed. He was a tall, pale man, with an impressive beard of light blond hair that dangled some way below his chin. ‘Lady Morandia apparently overpowered him shortly after he ordered his craft to fire on yours. The evidence we have uncovered so far suggests that she was ignorant of her husband’s schemes involving Niklau, and the assassins who murdered Lord Vittariel and made an attempt on your own life, although we are continuing our investigations.’ He scratched his cheek. ‘Of course, she was not ignorant of many other things, including the fact that their personal flyer had been modified to carry twin-linked autocannons in violation of Ascension City ordinances, which is why she is also currently being detained.’

‘I have sent word to my colleagues in the Holy Ordos,’ Zaretta Ngiri said. The inquisitor had lost a lot of blood from Niklau’s attack, but Chetta’s vox-call had led to a veritable frenzy of activity, and chirurgeons had been amongst the first on the scene. She was currently using a cane not dissimilar to Chetta’s own, but there was every indication that within a few weeks she’d be back to her previous level of health. Fell had also survived, although the amount of synskin grafts he’d required meant that he wouldn’t be returning to duty any time soon. ‘There are others who will have a pressing interest in what has happened here, and a greater level of expertise than my own in the nature of those involved.’

Chetta exchanged a glance with Judge Arctos. He undoubtedly had as many reasons to be uneasy about the prospect of new inquisitors arriving as she did, given the notoriously individual and mercurial nature of that particular breed. However, neither of them were going to show that openly.

‘They will receive our full cooperation, of course,’ Arctos said smoothly. ‘Will you be staying to facilitate the handover, Lady Ngiri?’

‘I may be present,’ Ngiri said. She took a step to the side, and winced. ‘Honestly, Chetta, I don’t know how you manage this.’

Chetta, who was currently on her feet solely through a combination of extremely strong painkillers and sheer bloody-mindedness, masked her reflexive acid response with a half-smile. ‘Long practice.’

‘However, my duties may require me to be elsewhere,’ Ngiri continued, either not noticing or choosing to ignore whatever irritation might have slipped through Chetta’s expression. ‘Apropos of which, I believe that you have another guest waiting?’

‘Indeed.’ Arctos turned and headed for the elevators, the long robes of his office flowing around him. ‘If you would follow me?’

The ride up from the interrogation cells to Judge Arctos’ personal audience chamber was a quiet one. The judge’s two bodyguards, clad in top-of-the-line carapace that wouldn’t have been out of place on a senior Astra Militarum officer, were as silent and unobtrusive as two deadly warriors could be. Ngiri seemed to be in no mood for idle chat, and Chetta was too exhausted to break the silence herself. Her sleep in the two nights since Vorlese’s near destruction had been patchy and pain-filled, and her days had been hectic and even more pain-filled. She had, at least, stamped down hard enough on any vestiges of political ambition amongst her remaining immediate family that her confirmation as Novator had gone unchallenged, although the elders of Brobantis universally hailing her as the saviour of the house and planet certainly hadn’t hurt. Scheming would break out amongst her inferiors soon enough, she had no doubt, but for now she was riding a wave of gratitude despite the fact that most of her house had only the sketchiest idea of what had actually occurred.

The doors of the elevator slid open and Arctos’ bodyguards swept out first. Arctos followed on their heels, effortlessly giving the impression that he hadn’t been first not for any fear of his safety, but simply because he had chosen not to move that quickly. Chetta allowed Ngiri to go next, and brought up the rear herself. She wasn’t relishing what she knew was coming.

Sen Uru Dukarr rose from the seat he’d been occupying. He was clearly attempting to give the impression of studied calm, but Chetta saw his hands fussing at the sleeves of his robes. He was nervous, and she didn’t blame him. He’d instigated violence in the streets that Judge Arctos was sworn to protect, and hadn’t even had the sense to do it surreptitiously. He could join the Jo’Sins in Arctos’ cells at any moment, and Novator or no, the likelihood was that the rest of his house would let him hang rather than risk themselves trying to protect him, given that he’d stuck his neck out so very far and so very foolishly.

‘Judge Arctos,’ Sen Uru said, his usual showy boom completely absent. He was alone; there was no place for aides in Judge Arctos’ private audience chamber. Chetta wasn’t unhappy about that. The memory of his three eerily quiet bald assistants still gave her chills, for some reason. ‘Lady Vass. And Lady Brobantis, of course.’

No more overfamiliar ‘Chetta’ from you, then, Chetta thought with satisfaction. Good. Use my title and choke on it, you buffoon.

‘Lord Dukarr,’ Judge Arctos replied, politely but with steel. ‘I would have seen you before now, but you are aware that other matters required my immediate attention.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Sen Uru replied, with a nod. He knew as well as anyone else that Arctos was not apologising for the delay: rather, he was reminding Sen Uru exactly how lucky he was not to have already come under his scrutiny. ‘I…’ He glanced at Chetta, somewhat sheepishly. ‘My lord, I understand the severity of these issues, but might we not speak of them in private?’

Arctos sighed. ‘Make no mistake, Lord Dukarr, under normal circumstances this conversation would be conducted in a very different manner, and it would most certainly not be in private – rather, it would be witnessed by Imperial prosecutors and recorded by court clerks.’ Now it was Arctos turn to glance sideways, although his expression was carefully neutral. ‘However, I have received a representation from House Brobantis requesting that I refrain from such an approach. Given that the vast majority of your actions were directed against House Brobantis property and personnel, I have agreed… in theory.’

Sen Uru’s expression froze. He didn’t look relieved; he looked like a man who was certain he’d just been outmanoeuvred but hadn’t yet worked out how. He turned to look directly at Chetta, his lips tight.

‘Lady Brobantis. I must confess my gratitude…’ His lip twitched, but he forged ahead with what Chetta might have considered to be commendable honesty in someone whom she didn’t dislike so much. ‘My gratitude, and my confusion.’

‘A trade war benefits neither of us,’ Chetta said flatly.

‘Agreed,’ Sen Uru said immediately. ‘Although you gave my house great insult, since I learned from Lady Vass of your heroic role in saving Vorlese, not to mention killing the man who took the life of my dear boy…’ He swallowed back what appeared to be genuine tears. ‘All honour is more than satisfied. In front of these witnesses, I declare House Dukarr’s part of the trade war to be at an immediate end. I will gladly offer payment for the damages caused by my operatives when I, grieving and, I must confess, not in my right mind, erroneously believed you to be responsible for my son’s murder.’

‘I accept,’ Chetta replied. A House Dukarr that was humbled, but still considered itself to have got off lightly, served her purposes far better than one brought low but which seethed with longing for revenge. ‘Let us draw a line under this.’

‘With pleasure,’ Sen Uru replied, and for a moment Chetta caught sight of the man he could have been: bluff, yes, perhaps a little overbearing at times, but warm and genuine. Perhaps it was simply the demands of his role that had turned him into the bullish, callous manipulator he had become.

What, then, does that say for me?

On the face of it, that I am more natural at manipulating people than he is.

She shrugged internally. The Emperor gave everyone gifts, and it was up to each person to use them as best they could. Chetta had talked a heretical witch into saving one of the Imperium’s most vital planets; she figured that gave her some leeway in other matters.

‘In that case,’ she continued, ‘in the interests of renewing the good relationship between our houses, I would like to extend to you an opportunity.’

Sen Uru’s eyebrows twitched in a hastily suppressed frown. He was instantly suspicious, and with good reason.

‘Lord Xudine is dead,’ Ngiri said soberly. ‘I cannot be certain that his successor, whomever that may be, will be willing to honour the contract I have with the house.’

‘Oh, come now,’ Sen Uru said. ‘I’m certain that no honourable house would–’

‘Lord Dukarr,’ Ngiri interrupted him gently, ‘House Xudine’s honour is… not perhaps as clear as that of some others. They have been in the wilderness awhile, now. Lord Kennevario was a good and noble man, and I had high hopes that he could have led them back to grand things. Sadly, he was killed before he could do so, by the very same man who took your son’s life.’

Sen Uru nodded sadly. He was genuinely affected by Ban Uru’s death, Chetta could tell; it hadn’t simply been a smokescreen for an assault on her house. The man’s genuine love for his children was one of his few redeeming features.

‘Lady Brobantis and I have discussed this matter,’ Ngiri continued, ‘and although we have recently, as you are aware, found ourselves working alongside each other, we have decided that there are various matters that would prevent us from making this relationship an official one.’

‘My house has certain pre-existing agreements which would preclude such an arrangement,’ Chetta put in.

‘And there are other considerations as well,’ Ngiri said coolly. Sen Uru’s eyes flickered between them as they stood a little way apart, not looking at each other. Their body language screamed of polite but deep disagreement.

Which was, of course, exactly the point.

‘You… your Letter of Marque refers to the Ixaniad Sector, is that correct?’ Sen Uru asked in a conversational tone.

Ngiri nodded. ‘Indeed.’

‘A most interesting area, I’ve always thought,’ Sen Uru remarked. Chetta could imagine his thought processes: clearly, there was some deep personal disagreement between Lady Brobantis and Lady Vass; each wished to avoid a working relationship, but to maintain face they had to find a good reason for it. A proposal to House Dukarr would look like Brobantis being magnanimous, yet would also allow Vass to attach herself to a prominent, stable house, thereby allowing face to be saved whilst benefitting both parties. The question would be whether Sen Uru felt that allying himself with a rogue trader with influence in the Ixaniad Sector would be worth further deepening the debt his house owed to Brobantis.

It looked like he did.

‘My house would be most honoured to consider such a proposal,’ Sen Uru said with a bow. ‘I appreciate that you suffered injuries while you were most nobly defending us against the foul threats we have faced over the last few days, but please feel free to call upon me when you feel able, and we can begin discussions.’

‘My dear Lord Dukarr,’ Ngiri said with a small smile. ‘I am more than recovered enough to discuss such matters. The timing is purely at your convenience.’

‘Well then.’ Sen Uru looked at Judge Arctos, who uttered no word and made no motion. ‘In that case, my lady, I would be honoured if you would accompany me back to my palace, where my factors will make you welcome with the highest honour. You will forgive me, I hope, if I do not treat with you myself immediately – time and trade wait for no man, it is true, but the claws of grief have a greater claim on me for now.’

‘Of course, my lord,’ Ngiri said with a gentle smile. Sen Uru surreptitiously checked once more that he was not about to be stopped and arrested, then bowed to Arctos and Chetta, and turned to leave. Ngiri followed behind him, her cane clacking across the floor as she did so.

Arctos waited until the heavy door of his audience chamber had swung shut behind them, then turned to look at Chetta. ‘What does she want with him?’

‘He must have warranted investigation in some way,’ Chetta said wearily. ‘I played the part she asked me to play, that’s all.’

‘Yes, but why?’ Arctos demanded. ‘What has Dukarr done?’ He shook his head. ‘Damn it all, my lady. I understand that you Navigators have your secrets. So long as you don’t break the Emperor’s laws, I maintain that those secrets are your business. But now I have the Inquisition investigating a Navigator house in my city! That suggests to me that there is something I should know.’

‘I don’t know!’ Chetta snapped at him. ‘And even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you.’ She winced as her collarbone protested the effort of raising her voice. ‘Don’t let her fool you, Arctos. She seems nice enough, I’ll grant you, and perhaps she is, as inquisitors go. But they’re all stone-hard bastards underneath, I promise you. Do not meddle in their affairs, unless you have no alternative.’ She sighed. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have my own house to put in order.’

Chetta limped into the Brobantis security hub, flanked by two security guards and with Tekoa Yunn shadowing her. She looked around, then grunted in satisfaction as she saw that the person she’d been looking for was on shift.

‘You!’ she said, pointing at the vox-operator who had informed her of the Jo’Sins’ arrival, and then of House Dukarr’s attacks. ‘Come with me.’

The room went quiet. The woman’s cheeks paled, but she stepped away from her station and followed Chetta out into the corridor.

‘What’s your name?’ Chetta demanded.

‘Layal Jonas, my lady,’ the vox-operator replied, looking as though she’d dearly like the floor to open up and swallow her.

‘You’ve served Brobantis for how long?’

‘Twenty-two years, my lady,’ Jonas replied. ‘I’ve been in service to the house since my majority, like my mother before me.’

‘You gave me a lot of bad news a few days ago,’ Chetta said bluntly.

‘Yes, my lady,’ Jonas nodded meekly.

‘Were you the only one who knew about the news?’ Chetta asked.

‘No, my lady,’ Jonas said. ‘There’s always three of us on vox duty.’

‘So why is it that it was you who came to me both times?’

Jonas licked her lips nervously, but said nothing, while her eyes darted around as though looking for a way out.

‘Could it be,’ Chetta suggested, ‘that your colleagues didn’t dare tell me what was happening?’

Jonas looked at the floor.

Chetta sighed. ‘There have been a lot of changes around here, lately. Many of them, I will grant you, because quite a few people have died unexpectedly. One of those was my head of security.’

‘Yes, my lady,’ Jonas agreed quietly.

‘He was appointed by my husband,’ Chetta told her, leaning on her cane. ‘My husband apparently believed that the most important quality a head of security could possess was the constitution to take an enormous amount of performance-enhancing drugs without suffering a heart attack. I, on the other hand, am more inclined to give the job to someone who is prepared to tell me something that they are absolutely certain I don’t want to hear, simply because they know I need to hear it.’

Layal Jonas looked up, her eyes wide.

‘You start right now,’ Chetta told her bluntly. ‘I appreciate that it will be something of a shift in your responsibilities, but I expect you to give it your best. Should I feel that you aren’t up to the job then I’ll replace you, but we’re in need of a new perspective. See if you can provide it.’

‘I… yes, my lady!’ Jonas replied. She saluted smartly.

‘Isher, Parlecc,’ Chetta said, addressing her guards. ‘Accompany Chief Jonas back in there and inform everyone of her new role, will you? I need a word with Yunn, here.’

A few seconds later, the corridor was empty save for the two of them. Chetta turned to Tekoa, then snorted a laugh.

‘You look nervous.’

‘The last couple of weeks have been considerably more eventful than practically my whole life prior to meeting you, my lady,’ Tekoa said. ‘My life used to be predictable. Boring, perhaps even soul-destroying, but predictable.’ He gave a helpless smile. ‘I have no idea what’s going to happen from one day to the next, now.’

‘A fair point,’ Chetta conceded. ‘Did anyone plant you in my household, Tekoa?’

‘I… What…? I…’

‘It’s a simple enough question, Tekoa,’ Chetta said mildly, ‘and I assure you that it is not a trick. If the answer is “yes”, and you say so now, then you can go and collect your husband and your possessions, and you can go to the hangar, and I will instruct a flyer to take you anywhere you like in Ascension City. You helped us catch Radimir Niklau – that was a worthy achievement. If you are honest with me, I will ignore the deception and thank you for the valuable contribution you made.’

Tekoa continued to be unable to form words.

‘If your answer is “no”, but I later find out that it was actually “yes” and you lied to me, then I will personally see to it that both you and your husband suffer quite the most exquisitely painful tortures that I can devise,’ Chetta continued conversationally. She hadn’t been able to take her frustrations out on Alyssana Nero: the girl was now keeping a low profile on board Ngiri’s ship, given that there was no way she was going to continue as Chetta’s aide, and for her to serve the same role for Ngiri would have instantly put Sen Uru Dukarr onto the defensive. So far as anyone else was aware, DeShelle DuVoir had died in action in the Smog Deeps, and her body had been lost to scavengers.

However, Chetta was going to try to avoid making the same mistake again.

‘My lady,’ Tekoa said carefully. ‘No one planted me. I was a humble Administratum scribe, nothing more, and nothing less. I swear this by the Emperor and all His saints. If you wish me to leave your employ, then–’

‘Do you wish to leave my employ?’ Chetta interrupted him.

‘No,’ Tekoa said flatly. ‘I… like it here. So long as I’m not going to be tortured.’

Chetta studied him. He seemed truthful. She could be wrong, of course. A foolish old woman, making the same mistake for a second time.

But she could also make the mistake of never trusting anyone again. Of relying only on herself, until she either burned out or simply missed something that someone else, someone she could have trusted, would have seen before it was too late.

‘Then you shall stay,’ she told him. ‘And you shall be my new aide.’

Tekoa’s hands flew to his mouth. ‘High lady! I…’ He dropped to one knee. ‘I do not deserve this honour!’

‘Oh, get up,’ Chetta grunted, nudging him with her left foot. ‘It’s not an honour, it’s a bloody hard job. But I think you could do it well.’

‘I am still honoured,’ Tekoa replied, rising with a big, stupid-looking grin plastered over his face. ‘What is my first task?’

‘Work with Jonas,’ Chetta instructed him. ‘We need a comprehensive overhaul of our security procedures. She’s got the mindset to do what needs doing, but you’ve got the analytical skills to work out what needs doing in the first place.’ She took a step forwards, then winced as her right hip stabbed at her. ‘Emperor on the Throne…’

‘My lady?’ Tekoa asked nervously, caught halfway between reaching out to help and standing back respectfully. He cleared his throat. ‘I… Forgive me if this is too forward, but as your aide… Perhaps you could consider a device such as that used by Lord Xudine.’

‘No!’ Chetta snapped. Emperor take her, but her body was not going to defeat her now! ‘Not today! Not today, and not tomorrow. After that…’

She grimaced, and tightened her grip on the head of her cane.

‘After that, we’ll see.’

EPILOGUE

He’d been keeping a safe distance from any other humans or near-humans, eating vermin and fungus, siphoning clean water from a nearby pipe, and generally making himself as scarce as possible. He’d thrown his ring away the moment he’d fled the Smog Deeps, although he’d later regretted that, thinking that perhaps he could have risked a brief visit to somewhere more civilised in order to pawn it and get some better supplies.

But he hadn’t seen another person. Which made it all the more surprising when he came around with a start and an attempted thrashing of his limbs to realise that, rather than waking from another nightmare-filled sleep, he’d been knocked unconscious and tied up.

His vision was abruptly filled with a silhouette, thin and ragged-haired. He leaned away, whimpering in fear.

Oh no oh no oh no, not him not him not him…

‘Hello, Sulaman.’

He froze. The voice wasn’t the one he’d dreaded. Then, despite the ache in his head, despite the bonds around his wrists and ankles, he melted into relief.

‘Evelyn?!’

The figure made no confirming noise or movement, but Sulaman Eichner recognised her voice.

‘Evelyn, you made it out as well!’ He smiled: widely, frantically, falsely. ‘By the Emperor, I’m so gla–’

He stopped speaking when he felt the blade of a knife at his throat. Not a glowing power knife, not the weapon that he had used. Just a common metal knife, sharp and utilitarian. And pressing into his neck.

‘Evelyn…?’

‘Did you know?’ Evelyn Darke said, her voice barely above a whisper. ‘Did you know what he was, Sulaman? Did you know what he intended to do?’

‘No,’ Sulaman whispered back. ‘No, Evelyn, I swear.’

‘Did you ask him?’

Sulaman licked his lips nervously. He knew Darke was a witch. He knew she could set things on fire. He had no idea if she could tell if he was lying or not.

‘I didn’t,’ he admitted. ‘He… he said he was bringing enlightenment, he said–’

‘We trusted you!’ Evelyn Darke shouted. She slapped his face with an open hand, sending his aching head ringing anew. ‘We trusted you, Sulaman! Our stupid little cult, with our stupid little signs, gnawing away at Ascension City’s entrails like a worm. I thought you were my family! I should have known better – people like me don’t get to have families, Sulaman! Anyone who speaks kindly to us wants something!’

‘Evelyn…’ He tried to protest, but she leaned down until her face was a mere hand’s breadth from his own, and he couldn’t form the words.

‘I burned Della alive for him,’ Evelyn hissed, ‘because I trusted you!’

Sulaman swallowed painfully. Everything was painful at the moment: his head was throbbing. ‘Evelyn,’ he asked, hearing the tremble in his own voice, ‘what are you going to do to me?’

‘I walked through his ritual, Sulaman,’ Evelyn said quietly. ‘I wasn’t going to, but the old Navigator woman convinced me. She said we weren’t quick enough. I think she lied. I think she always knew we couldn’t get through without getting caught. She told me something so I’d do what she wanted. The galaxy is the same everywhere.’

‘Evelyn,’ Sulaman whimpered, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘It tore me, Sulaman.’ Evelyn’s eyes were darker and more hollow than he remembered. ‘I felt it, although I didn’t realise it at the time. After that, when I burned Cormack’s body, when I stopped the ritual, I was empty. My power had gone. I’d have died, but that old Navigator woman saved me. I don’t know why. I know I don’t deserve saving. But she did, and now I’m here.’

‘Your powers are gone?’ Sulaman breathed. Perhaps this wasn’t quite as bad as he thought. Evelyn Darke was not a large person. If he could get free, he could perhaps overpower her.

‘They were gone,’ Evelyn replied with a smile. She raised one finger, yellow flames sprang into life around it for a second, and Sulaman Eichner’s heart dropped. ‘They came back. But the tearing didn’t heal. That damn ritual took part of my soul, Sulaman. I know that now. I can feel it. I can feel where it isn’t.’

‘Evelyn,’ Sulaman said. He tried a smile. ‘Evelyn, I don’t think you’re well.’

‘I know I’m not well, you imbecile!’ Evelyn snarled. ‘My soul has been torn up, and I don’t think I’m getting it back! So I thought to myself, what do I do now? Do I go back to lurking around Ascension City, eating scraps and waiting for someone to fool me again? Or do I take control? Do I do what I want to do, for the first time?’ The right side of her face quirked up into a lopsided smile.

‘I decided to do what I want to do.’

‘What do you want to do?’ Sulaman asked, playing along. To his surprise, Evelyn sat back.

‘There must be others like us, Sulaman. Other groups. Other cults. Other fools. You were our leader. It strikes me that you might know about them. How to recognise them, how to get in touch with them. That sort of thing.’

Sulaman had read certain texts, it was true. He’d been able to get his hands on a few restricted items without bringing himself to the attention of the authorities. There were a couple of dealers who quietly trafficked in heretical pamphlets, who might indeed have links to other groups.

He ventured a smile, a more genuine one this time. ‘Perhaps we can help each other out, Evelyn?’

‘Help each other?’ Evelyn laughed. ‘No, Sulaman. You’re going to tell me everything you know, everyone you know, and then I’m going to kill you – and then I’m going to go and kill as many of them as I can.’

Sulaman’s chest tightened with fear. ‘Evelyn, I’ve known you since you were twelve. You can’t mean that! You’re Evelyn Darke! I took you in when your family threw you out.’

‘I’m not Evelyn Darke any longer!’ Evelyn snarled, and her right hand burst into flame anew. ‘I’m Evelyn Halfsoul now – your friend Niklau saw to that.’

‘He wasn’t my friend!’ Sulaman squealed, wriggling desperately, but she’d tied his bonds well.

‘Then tell me all about the ones who were your friends,’ Evelyn said, reaching down with her flaming hand. ‘Tell me about every last one of them, and perhaps this will be over quickly.’

Sulaman Eichner screamed for a long time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike Brooks is a speculative fiction author who lives in Nottingham, UK. His work for Black Library includes the Necromunda novella Wanted: Dead, and the short stories ‘The Path Unclear’, ‘A Common Ground’ and ‘Choke Point’. When not writing, he works for a homelessness charity, plays guitar and sings in a punk band, and DJs wherever anyone will tolerate him.

An extract from
Lords and Tyrants.

No matter how often Voyle relives it, the end always begins the same way. A deep clang reverberates through the airlock as the Sable Star’s boarding umbilical latches on to the derelict ship. Voyle checks the air tank strapped to the back of the trooper beside him, then turns so his comrade can return the gesture. The routine is mirrored by every member of the squad with practised swiftness. They have run through it twice already, yet nobody hesitates. Nobody complains. A Void Breacher’s life hangs by the integrity of his tank as much as his weapons.

‘Squad Indigo is bloodtight,’ Voyle reports into his helmet vox when the ritual is complete. ‘Repeat, bloodtight.’

‘Bloodtight confirmed, Indigo,’ Lieutenant Joliffe acknowledges from the bridge, unable to hide the tension in his voice. Captain Bester took his own life fourteen days ago. Nobody knows why, but they all sense Joliffe isn’t ready to lead the company – not on this warp-cursed patrol. Voyle has considered seizing command. No one would stand in his way, least of all Joliffe, but then the burden of choice would be his to carry. No, it is better to live or die with clean hands.

‘Commence breach,’ Joliffe orders. ‘Emperor walk with you, Indigo.’

With a hydraulic hiss the external hatch slides into its recess, revealing the metal tube of the umbilical. Most of the strip lumens running its length have failed and those that still work flicker fitfully. The company’s five-month tour of the Damocles perimeter has taken a heavy toll on both supplies and men, including both its enginseers. The Sable Star was just three days out from Kliest when it found the intruder, silent and powerless, yet perfectly intact. Its markings designate it as the Halvorsen, but though the massive derelict is evidently Imperial in origin, they can find no record of it. That is not unusual, for numberless ships ply the vast tracts of the Imperium and countless more have been lost over the millennia. Factoring in the contortions of the warp, the derelict might be decades or even centuries old. It is a cumbersome hulk devoid of guns or advanced sensor arrays – probably a civilian cargo freighter and certainly no match for a warship like the Sable Star, but that is little reassurance for the men tasked with boarding it. With derelicts it is what lies within that matters, for the void crawls with phantoms seeking the solace of metal or flesh.

Let it rot, Voyle wants to say. Better yet, blast it back into the warp!

But instead he says what he always says: ‘Acknowledged, crossing commences.’ And enters the umbilical. He is a Void Breacher. This is what the Astra Militarum has trained him for.

They lied to us! Voyle yells at his former self, but it is a silent cry, for if the ghosts of the past are without eyes, so those of the future are without voice.

The Void Breachers’ magnetised boots clatter on the corrugated decking as they advance along the narrow tunnel one by one, their helmet lights slicing back and forth. The concertinaed tube creaks and shudders around them as it strains to keep the ships conjoined, the living to the dead. Despite their sealed carapace armour and therma-padding, the cold is gnawing at them within seconds and their movements grow sluggish before they are halfway across. The rasping exhalations from their helmets are like steam in the frigid air, forcing them to wipe their visors clean after each respiration, lest breath becomes blinding frost.

Voyle halts as his light finds the derelict’s access hatch. The metal is dark and pitted, contrasting starkly with the gleaming umbilical clamps that encircle it. One glance tells him the locking mechanism is hopelessly corroded.

‘Cut us a door, Hoenig,’ he orders, moving aside as the squad’s specialist steps forward. He watches as the trooper engraves a glowing oval around the hatch with a las-cutter. The tool’s power pack whines and Voyle wills it to fail, knowing it won’t. It never does. The nightmare won’t allow it.

‘Done, breach sergeant,’ Hoenig says, then shoves the hatch. With a screech of harrowed metal it crashes into the darkness beyond. As the reverberations subside, Voyle levels his meltagun and steps through.

His own shriek wrenched him back from the brink.

But I’ve already fallen, Voyle thought wildly as he surged to his feet. There’s no coming back…

The nightmare fractured and fell away in sluggish fragments, revealing a large windowless chamber. Its walls were tessellated with hexagonal panels that glowed softly, washing the space in subdued blue light. Voyle stood at its centre, his bare feet tangled in a silvery blanket. He tore himself free and spun around, trying to make sense of things.

Where–

He froze as he caught sight of something watching him from one of the walls.

Black eyes gleaming with a hunger colder than the void…

The sound that rose in his throat was somewhere between a scream, a snarl and a sigh, born of fear and loathing and… longing? Voyle stifled it as the predator dissolved into a human form. A woman. She was crouched in a recess in the opposite wall where a hexagonal panel had retracted, her eyes glinting in the gloom as she appraised him. Her face was tattooed with concentric rings, the first shearing through her forehead, cheeks and chin, the second encircling her eyes and mouth and the third set directly between her eyes. Voyle knew she bore a fourth and final ring, but its lines were invisible, for it embraced the mind.

‘Unity,’ Voyle breathed, naming the symbol… and remembering. The woman’s tattoos mirrored those on his own face. With that recollection the rest flooded back and he scanned the chamber quickly, but the other serenity cells were still sealed. Only the woman, who always slept with hers open, had been roused by his nightmare and she wouldn’t say anything to the others.

‘Forgive me, sister,’ Voyle said. ‘I was walking old roads.’

Her expression gave nothing away. Sometimes she seemed as inscrutable as their liberators. Though they had been comrades since Voyle’s emancipation from the Imperium almost five ago, they had exchanged few words. Other than her name – Erzul – he knew little about her save her loyalty to the cause and her talents as a pathfinder. But that was fine by Voyle. He wasn’t much inclined to talk about his own past either. Remembering was bad enough. Dreaming even worse…

Why now? he wondered, reluctantly considering the old nightmare. It hadn’t troubled him in years – not since he’d mastered the mantras of self-sublimation during his induction. He’d almost convinced himself it was a false memory, as his instructors had encouraged.

Almost.

Voyle rubbed the old scar under his chin. It was itching furiously, as if inflamed by the sting of the past. He wasn’t going to sleep again this cycle. Maybe the sour-sweet tranquillity wafers the liberators issued their auxiliaries were losing their potency.

I should report it, Voyle brooded, knowing he wouldn’t. He trusted the liberators of course, but his weakness shamed him. Void dammit, he should have taken a cell. At least that way he’d have kept his nightmares to himself. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and a head taller than anyone else in his squad, let alone the liberators, but that wasn’t why he shunned the serenity cells. If his commander had demanded it, he would have squeezed into one of the hexagonal coffins, but the Stormlight had not pressed the issue. That wasn’t his way.

‘It is your shadow to burn,’ the xenos had said, identifying his subordinate’s dread with an acuity that would have confounded the Imperial officers Voyle had served under. ‘You alone can light the fire.’

But the ship was already five days into its voyage and that fire remained unlit. Every sleep cycle Voyle had bedded down at the centre of the chamber, ignoring the questioning looks of his squad as they clambered into their cells.

It doesn’t matter, he thought as he pulled his boots on. His loathing of tight spaces was only a whisper of the shadow that stalked him.

‘I’ll be in the Fire Grounds,’ he told Erzul as he stepped towards a wall. It split open at his approach, revealing a brightly lit corridor. Nothing could hide in that crisp, sane light.

Void black eyes.

Why now? Voyle asked again. A new life and purpose hadn’t dispelled the shadow. It had simply lain dormant. Waiting for him to wake up.

The Seeker faced the maelstrom of swirling, prismatic mist with his back straight and his staff extended horizontally before him at eye level. Its lifeless metal was untarnished by the farrago of colours assaulting him so he kept his gaze locked upon it, using its truth to filter out the lies. He had diffused his breathing to a low susurration, each exhalation extending across several minutes, yet encompassing no more than eleven heartbeats. His master had attained seven beats in the ritual of the arhat’karra, but Aun’el Kyuhai knew he would never match such serenity. Nor would he ever ascend beyond his current station in the Ethereal caste’s hierarchy. That knowledge brought neither resentment nor sadness, for he had cast aside all desire save service to the Tau’va. All else was as illusory as the storm that raged around him.

And behind illusions prowled beasts…

They came for him together, springing from the mist in perfect synchronicity, one from behind, the other from his left, which they had identified as his weaker side. Traditionally their kind attacked in a cacophony of squawks and hoots, yet this pair came in silence, denying their prey any warning.

They are learning, Kyuhai approved. He spun to his left, thrusting his staff towards the dark shape flanking him, but it sprang away into the fog like a gangling acrobat. He felt a rush of air at his back as the other assailant’s blade hacked through the space he had occupied a moment earlier. The ferocity of the swing committed the attacker for a second too long, chaining it to the impotent arc as Kyuhai whirled his staff over his shoulder. It was a blind strike, but the displaced air had told him all he needed to know. When he entered the arhat’karra, every moment stretched into many and every whisper shouted.

‘Ka’vash!’ he pronounced as his staff brushed his opponent’s throat. Had the weapon’s blades been extended it would have been a killing blow. Before his foe could offer the ritual response, the second beast lunged from the fog, its cranial quills erect with rage. Beady, deep-set eyes glared at him from either side of a prognathous, serrated beak. The creature was naked save for a leather tabard and its sinewy form was riddled with tribal tattoos and piercings. This time it didn’t attack in silence.

Rukh expects defeat, Kyuhai recognised as he swept his staff around to meet the avian warrior’s scimitar. When Zeljukh falls, Rukh always falls with her.

The creature struck in a whirlwind frenzy that would have overwhelmed a lesser foe, yet none of its blows passed the gliding, almost languid parries of Kyuhai’s staff. To the Seeker the onslaught was akin to an infant’s tantrum, but he allowed it to run its course. Perhaps it would be instructive.

Once again anger blinds Rukh, Kyuhai gauged as he blocked. He was disappointed, but unsurprised, for they had played out this scene many times before.

It was Zeljukh who ended the hopeless duel, bringing her bonded mate to heel with a derisory tirade of hoots and clicks. With a squawk of frustration, Rukh threw his scimitar aside and proffered his neck.

‘Ka’vash,’ Kyuhai said, gently tapping the creature’s throat. ‘End simulation.’

The swirling fog vanished instantly, revealing the ochre coloured expanse of the Fire Grounds. The Whispering Hand’s training bay was divided into six sectors, some housing demi-sentient sparring machines, others devoted to low-tech challenges like climbing frames or ropes. Kyuhai and his opponents stood in the simulation arena, where a large saucer-like machine hovered overhead, its underside bristling with sensors and projectors that tracked their movements. This late in the ship’s sleep cycle the bay was almost empty, yet Kyuhai and his companions were not quite alone. A human was training on the far side of the bay – the big man who led the expedition’s second gue’vesa support team. Their paths had crossed here before while their fellow travellers slept, but they had never spoken.

‘Reflect upon this defeat,’ Kyuhai told the avian warriors. ‘Leave me.’

The pair inscribed the symbol of Unity with their claws then loped towards the climbing arena, where they would continue training until he summoned them. Once they would have berated each other for their defeat, but they were past such foolishness. He had brought them that far at least.

‘Your honour guard is formidable, exalted one,’ the expedition’s ranking Fire Warrior had observed when Kyuhai had come aboard the ship. ‘The kroot are fierce allies.’

‘I am a Seeker, Shas’el Akuryo. I have no honour guard,’ Kyuhai had replied. ‘Rukh and Zeljukh are simply companions on my path.’

Many of Kyuhai’s fellow t’au were repelled by the avian auxiliaries, but he had detected only respect in the Fire Warrior’s voice. Though Akuryo and he were of the same rank within their respective castes, the Ethereals were elevated above all others, creating a gulf of authority between them. Had the Seeker commanded it, Akuryo would have taken his own life without hesitation. Such blind faith had troubled Kyuhai when he had first stepped onto his path, but he had soon learnt that it was not blind at all, for his caste was the living embodiment of the Tau’va.

‘We rule to serve,’ he said, echoing the words of his former master.

The sounds of combat drew him from his reflection. While his mind had wandered, his body had followed its own path, carrying him to the arena where the big gue’la was duelling with a pair of drones. The saucer-like machines buzzed around the man, harassing him with low intensity lasers as he whirled about, blocking their beams with the mirror shields strapped to his wrists. His only method of retaliation was to reflect the lasers back at their source, but only a direct hit on an emitter would disable a drone, while three strikes to his torso would end the bout. Judging by their tenacity the machines had been set to maximum aggression – a challenge even for seasoned Fire Warriors. Though the man moved with a speed that belied his bulk, it was apparent that his ambition exceeded his ability.

Like Rukh, he fights in the expectation of defeat, Kyuhai judged.

He anticipated the gue’la would meet failure with a curse, but when it came he simply said, ‘Start over.’

‘Hold,’ Kyuhai interjected and the drones froze.

The gue’la turned, surprised, then bowed his head. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude…’ He faltered, evidently unsure of the correct form of address. ‘Lord,’ he ventured. He spoke in a hoarse growl, as if his throat was damaged.

‘Seeker,’ Kyuhai corrected. His sharp eyes scanned the identity disc on the man’s tunic. ‘And the intrusion is mine, Gue’vesa’ui Voyle.’

‘I am honoured, Seeker.’

Even by the standards of his species, with their jutting snouts and curled ears, Voyle was ugly. Like all the expedition’s gue’vesa, he was shaven-headed and his skin was stained blue to mirror his liberators’ complexion, but such contrivances couldn’t soften the brutish cast of his features. His eyes were set deep in a craggy, scar-crossed wasteland that terminated in a slab-like jaw. It was a strange canvass to bear the concentric rings of Unity, yet also an eloquent one, for if such a damaged being could be redeemed then surely there was hope for the rest of its species. To the Seeker’s mind the gue’la were infinitely more dangerous than honest savages like the kroot, but equally their potential was far greater.

‘They are an ancient race, crooked with the malignancies of age,’ Kyuhai’s master had taught, ‘and yet the aeons have not diminished their passion. In time they will either become our most ardent allies or our most dire foes.’

‘You fought with skill, but chose your battle without wisdom,’ Kyuhai said. ‘To overextend oneself is to welcome defeat.’

‘I stand corrected, Seeker. My thoughts were clouded.’

‘Sleep evades you?’

‘I don’t like what it brings. Or where it takes me.’ The man rubbed at his neck and Kyuhai spotted a pale scar under his jaw. It was circular, almost like another ring of Unity. ‘There are things… things I thought I was done with.’

‘Are you having doubts, gue’vesa’ui?’

‘Doubts?’ Voyle looked up sharply, evidently surprised. ‘No, no doubts… I want to see the Imperium burn, Seeker.’

‘That may not serve the Greater Good. Our mission here in the Damocles Gulf is peaceful. We may yet find common cause with the people of your Imperium.’

‘It’s not my Imperium, Seeker,’ Voyle said, his expression hardening. ‘It never was.’

There it is, Kyuhai saw, the potential for terrible light and darkness.

‘That is why awakened minds like yours must strive to reclaim it for the Greater Good,’ he said.

Voyle didn’t answer, but the denial in his eyes was apparent.

He is correct, Kyuhai reflected. His species yearns for strife. There will be no accord with their Imperium. And yet we must attempt it, even if it only delays the inevitable. This is an inopportune time for war. When it comes it must be of our choosing, not the enemy’s.

A melodious sequence of chimes reverberated through the bay, announcing the dawn cycle.

‘We will talk again, Gue’vesa’ui Voyle,’ Kyuhai said, studying the man’s face. ‘Think upon my words.’

As the Seeker turned and strode towards the door he felt the man’s shadow-wracked eyes following him.

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 Maria Zolotukhina.

Rites of Passage © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Rites of Passage, 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: 978-1-78999-456-8

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.

This novel is for all my friends who let me use bastardised versions of their names for my secondary characters.

I’m sorry so many of you die.

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