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The Sins of My Brothers - Peter Fehervari

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’

A Black Library Publication

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THE SINS OF MY BROTHERS

Peter Fehervari

The pursuit of knowledge rivals the pursuit of beauty in its arrogance. Both quests are born of hubris, yet of the two, the sin of curiosity cuts deeper and leaves the greater wound.

– Sixteenth Psalm, The Testament of Thorns

The story I have for you is not a good one. Not in any sense of that slippery word. It has no rising arc of drama or moral point to drive home, let alone a potent resolution to reward your attention. Such fine sagas belong to my Chapter’s past, along with the heroes they exalt. The chronicles of the Angels Resplendent are abundant with them!

But the Resplendent are no more.

There, it is said, though the admission tastes bitter, as will my tale. In truth it is more a collection of threaded fragments than a story in the traditional sense. Nevertheless it must be told and I trust no others to listen and remember. Those I once called brothers are now either betrayers or betrayed, blinded by a false prophet or branded as heretics for their dissent. Radiant Malpertuis, the Painted World, has become a pious wasteland of gallows and pyres, where bodies, books and dreams are burned with equal fervour.

Oh, I do not doubt there are others like myself secreted among my degraded brotherhood – unbelievers who toe the line in watchful silence, scheming to break the chains that bind us, but they are the last I would confide in. Whoever they are, I can play no part in their hopes of insurrection. I forfeited such camaraderie long before our fall from grace, if ever I shared it.

My loyalty has always been to another cause. I believe it is a higher one, but that does not absolve my deceit. I chose to abet a tragedy that I might have averted. In doing so I became a betrayer of the worst kind – one who cannot plead ignorance or misplaced ardour in his defence.

Unlike my brothers, I knew what was coming for us.

The betrayer stood at the threshold of the narrow colonnade, whispering into the wind dancing between its pillars. This passageway was among the most secluded in his brotherhood’s citadel, as befitted his confession, yet it wasn’t caution that drew him here. Though Kanvolis was a nest of righteous snakes, where a loose tongue could quickly unravel itself, its overlords shunned the devices that would have made surveillance pervasive. Only the machineries of war were tolerated by the new order – arms, armour and the vessels that carried its crusaders into battle – and even those essentials were distrusted and ceremonially excoriated. All technology was sinful in the God-Emperor’s eyes, decreed the zealots who claimed to be His mouthpiece.

No, it wasn’t privacy the betrayer sought in this forsaken place. It was the crowd.

Even in a city of poisoned dreams some places were distinguished in their malevolence, and few rivalled the Colonnade of One Hundred Dragons. There were only two entrances – one at either end, each framed by a pair of arching reptilian wings carved from opal. By tradition visitors never left by the one through which they entered.

Many never left at all.

Over the centuries countless souls had embraced oblivion on this long and lonely stretch, for it was always lonely to those who craved its solace, and far longer than they imagined when they began their journey. And though they packed its length in death, they remained alone, each phantom oblivious to its kin, as purgatory required.

‘You will linger here until Kanvolis falls,’ the betrayer informed the spectral throng. ‘Until then you shall bear witness, as I must.’

Invisible, intangible and torn, the dead wailed against their fate, given inchoate voice by the wind, yet they listened. What else was left for them? They were the legacy of a bygone era, mortal dreamers cast into shadow by the Shining Ones they once venerated. The Resplendent never desired this doom for their devotees, but nor did they strive to avert it. Most never even noticed, for human lives were too fragile and fleeting to dwell upon. One way or another, whether by accident or intent, the brotherhood always led its followers to ruin. That alone remained unchanged.

‘We are destroyers by nature,’ the betrayer observed, ‘no matter how softly we tread.’ His eyes glittered in the gloom, unblinking despite the haunted flurries assailing them. They were designed to weather far harsher assaults than this. In essence that was the conceit of his entire body, its every organ, muscle and sinew engineered to endure punishment and mete it out in greater measure. It was an almost archetypal construct – the perfect human warrior made manifest, but in manifesting it had ceased to be human at all. Transhuman, scholars called his kind, as though the Adeptus Astartes were biological way stations to something even more exalted.

And perhaps we are, the perfected warrior mused. Perhaps that’s all we were meant to be. The notion didn’t offend him. He was an agent of the ineffable, was he not? Indeed, despite his lineage he didn’t think of himself as a warrior, at least not in the coarse physical sense his body was forged for.

His body? No, the vessel he inhabited would never truly be his. Though his command of its motor functions was complete, its original occupant lingered somewhere bone-deep and inviolable, raging against the theft.

‘Blood for blood,’ the betrayer murmured to his captive. ‘So it goes, brother.’

He stepped into the passageway, his fingers weaving the winged pyramid of the Architect Arisen as he crossed the threshold. The gesture was prohibited, but he wouldn’t intrude upon this rarefied place without offering due respect. Unlike the superstitions that governed his brotherhood now, the esoteric practices of the Resplendent were rooted in reason.

‘I know your name and nature,’ he declared, addressing the colonnade through those it had snared. ‘I taste your hunger and smell your spite.’ He breathed deeply of the spirit-saturated air. ‘We walk as one.’

He felt the colonnade relent, its hostility sinking back into the stones, appeased for now. It ran along the southern face of Kanvolis’ penultimate tier, overlooking the distant churn of the River Tristesse, whose cliffs the citadel straddled. The outer wall was low and windowless, enticing the wind as it once enticed broken dreamers to hurl themselves over into perdition. Their names were carved along its length, each marking a point of departure. Many were scrawls, others inscribed with painstaking finesse, some merely initials, but all spelled despair, for only the lost ever took that final leap of broken faith.

‘My story begins in reflection,’ the betrayer said, closing his eyes. He didn’t require sight to walk this path and its absence invoked the past. ‘As within, so without.’

‘As above, so below,’ my mentor intoned, raising a hand to the shining oval before us. The mirror was affixed to his sanctum’s wall, its span yawning from floor to ceiling, like a portal. Though we were giants beside common men we could have stepped through it without stooping.

‘My will over the world,’ the mirror’s maker continued, skimming his hand over the glass. His fingertips never quite touched the surface, but it rippled in sympathy beneath them, briefly softening to liquid then hardening again, its weave subtly altered by their passing. ‘The world by my word.’

‘As within, so without,’ I answered, completing the incantation. ‘So it goes.’

This formula encapsulates the fundamental principle of the Arc Resplendent, the codex that has shaped my Chapter since its renaissance, and continues to do so even now, deep into its decline, working covertly through instruments like myself. Once its teachings were available to all our brethren, embodied in myriad tomes; however, its most profound insights were veiled in metaphor and scattered among thousands of lesser passages. Our warrior-artisans would scour the text assiduously, hunting for those hidden verses, but few outside the Librarium Radiant ever glimpsed them, let alone grasped their meaning. They resonate with the psychically gifted, you see, for we feel the malleability of the world more intimately than most. That is why the Resplendent exalted its Librarians above all others.

We were more than our Chapter’s battle psykers or the keepers of its lore – we were its Architects, entrusted with our brothers’ fate by the First Magister himself. And like the codex he authored, we were layered, embodying mysteries within mysteries. A rising spiral of coteries ran through our order, its every coil penetrating a higher stratum of truth, each more tenebrous than the last. The pursuit of enlightenment is a perpetual ascent into the infinite, like soaring into an inverted abyss. So it goes. How could it be otherwise?

At the apex of this noble endeavour stood the Paladins Luminous, whose nature and number were known only to themselves. Membership of our coterie could not be pursued, only offered, and never refused. Our power was discreet, yet when required, absolute, though its exercise went unrecognised.

But I digress. It is the mirror I wanted to tell you about, and what I saw there.

Though its glass was beautiful, the frame that caged it was not. Carved from dark, yellow-stained wood, it still reeked of its origins despite its antiquity. That resinous stench permeated my mentor’s sanctum, stirring memories of the forest that spawned it. We call that oblique realm the Reverie, though the zealots who rule us now have outlawed the name, along with any mention of the place. It offends them, as all true mysteries do.

Nameless or not, the forest lies nineteen leagues downriver from our stronghold, caged within the valley beyond the Severed Ridge.

It also lies… elsewhere.

My recollections of the Reverie are troubled, yet smeared with yearning, for part of me will always wander there, eager to learn more. All who have ventured into that riddle of snowbound trees share this longing, but it is more tenacious in some than others. The infatuation is both a blessing and a curse, capable of invigorating or eroding a soul. As always, the balance lies within the seeker. Not so long ago, crossing that precarious territory was the trial we set the Chapter’s recruits, for there is no finer measure of an aspirant’s calibre.

But perhaps you already understand the Reverie’s allure? I have spied its radiance from your parapets on many a night, distant yet insistent. Was it longing that awakened your stones? Was it denial that made you so spiteful?

Well, no matter, I have not come to judge you.

The mirror, you say? Yes, as you have no doubt surmised, it wasn’t forged to reflect the mundane world. Occasionally I saw myself in its glass, though never as I was – or imagined myself to be – but more often it was the Reverie I saw there, for it preoccupied the mirror’s maker. My mentor had travelled further along the forest’s coils than most, yet whatever he sought there still eluded him. Though I’d served him in secrecy since my Ascension to the brotherhood, almost two decades ago, he had never revealed the nature of his quest. Whenever he summoned me to ponder the glass I wondered whether the time had come. Was this to be the revelation? Was his trust in me finally complete?

After so long in his shadow I should have realised the truth. Trust was not in Master Satori’s nature. I sometimes wonder whether he even trusted the cause we served, though his dedication never wavered. Perhaps that is the truest measure of loyalty – to serve without conviction.

‘What do you see?’ he asked, stepping away from the mirror.

‘A forest,’ I answered. But not the one I expected. The glass brimmed with a flood of rampant, waterlogged vegetation. Fungal trees sagged like sickly giants, their branches drooping with creepers, their trunks glistening with slime. Lesser growths vied for space between them, clotting the water in cancerous tangles or reaching for the canopy on slender stalks. Flowers leered from the snarl, their fleshy petals haloed with insects. Everything rippled through a grey-green haze that lent the plants an uncanny quality of animation. They looked vigorous yet also wasted, as though they were devouring themselves in their eagerness to propagate.

‘A swamp,’ I amended my answer as mist seeped from the glass – hot, wet and quintessentially filthy. Beside this quagmire the ambivalent abyss of the Reverie seemed pristine. ‘Or a jungle perhaps.’

‘What do you see?’ my mentor repeated, without inflection.

I embraced my disgust, tasting voracity… decay… imbalance…

‘Corruption,’ I said, understanding. ‘What is this place, Master Satori?’

‘Another world, I think. Probably a distant one, though I cannot say for sure. It has plagued the glass for some months now. I call it the Morass.’

‘You didn’t summon it?’

He shook his head. ‘It comes and goes of its own accord.’

‘You intend to find it?’

‘No.’

His answer surprised me, though I was relieved, for I had no desire to walk that mire, as duty would have required if my mentor made the journey. The stain it left would likely be perpetual.

‘There is no need to find it,’ Satori added. ‘It will find us.’

‘Find us?’ I frowned, unsettled by the thought.

‘I believe so.’ He turned to regard me, his eyes as empty of emotion as they were of colour. Their sockets were heavily wrinkled, yet the skin beyond them was smooth, sheathing the refined features of a warrior-artisan in his prime. Amongst our bloodline that might be a century or so, for most Resplendent are short-lived by the measure of the Adeptus Astartes, yet I knew this was only a fraction of Satori’s actual span. Our coterie was exempt from the toll of years the Reverie took upon our brothers.

‘What does this filth want of us, master?’ I said, fighting the urge to drive a fist through the mirror and shatter its portent.

‘Everything,’ Satori said quietly. ‘This is where our end begins.’ He indicated the glass. ‘It is our future.’

The betrayer released the memory. Even now, decades later, he didn’t know whether that grey-green jungle was an actual place or a metaphor made manifest. Radiant glass didn’t make such distinctions. It scried meaning over matter, and the meaning of the vision had been clear. Voracious corruption.

‘Satori was right,’ he told the phantoms gusting about him. ‘The Morass found us.’

Opening his eyes, he realised he’d drifted to a halt. The colonnade was washed in moonlight now, its pillars gleaming softly. The remnants of winged serpents coiled about them, carved from the same luminous opal as the entranceway. They had been ‘exorcised’ during the zealots’ purge of the citadel, their majestic forms battered into abstracts. He was accustomed to such sights, but this particular desecration always moved him, for the Celestial Serpent symbolised the Chapter’s First Rhapsody.

Company, he corrected himself. They are called companies now.

Glassy debris crunched under his ceramite-shod boots as he pressed on. He was fully armoured, as the new laws required, his helmet nestled in the crook of an arm. In the Resplendent Age it was considered vulgar to wear battleplate within the citadel’s walls, but those civilities were gone, along with the culture they once enshrined, abolished by the Chaplains who presided over the brotherhood now. The Crown of Thorns, those grim puritans called themselves. Their authority was absolute, yet they weren’t the real power here. No, that lay with the stranger who’d poisoned the Chapter’s spirit. Scarcely two years had passed since the Undying Martyr’s arrival, yet so much had already been lost.

‘He has made us kin to you,’ the betrayer murmured to the phantoms. ‘Shadows of ourselves.’

One by one the Resplendent Battle Rhapsodies were being dissolved and purged from the Chapter’s records. Soon they would simply be Penitent Companies, stripped of the colours and customs that defined them, their leaders slain or turned to the Martyr’s cause. Only the Second Company, the Vigilant, would retain a semblance of its former identity. Its dour warriors had been the first to embrace the Testament of Thorns, drawn to penitence by the old dishonour they nursed, for they had failed the brotherhood before. In recognition of their self-loathing they were permitted to retain the silver trim of their armour, though they tarnished it diligently.

The other companies were allowed only black, as plain and lustreless as the new creed. The decree had come shortly after the Martyr took power. All armour was to be repainted with a tarry pigment mixed and degraded by their saviour himself. Every trace of ornamentation was to be ritually expunged and atoned for with self-flagellation.

More edicts followed regularly, growing more stringent with every passing month. There were rules of conduct for eating, washing, training and meditation – even solemn rituals governing the pious voidance of waste matter. No action could be undertaken without its supporting liturgy, no emotion entertained without misgivings. Even contempt was suspect, for it flirted with pride, just as fury courted bliss. Shame itself could become a vice if taken to excess. Recently their prophet had announced his dissatisfaction with the Chapter’s new colouration. Apparently the God-Emperor deemed black too pure for penitence.

Will he command us to smear our armour in excrement next? the betrayer wondered sourly, but without anger. His Chapter’s humiliation was painful, but deserved. More to the point, it was necessary.

‘We are what we are,’ he whispered. ‘What we must be.’ It was the mantra of the Paladins Luminous. He believed it more completely than his mentor ever had.

‘Do not oppose it,’ Satori warned. ‘When the storm comes you must stand aside.’

‘I understand,’ I answered.

My former master studied me in the paradoxical fashion I knew so well – his eyes distant, yet piercing, seeing through to the heart of things, much like his glass. I made no attempt to shield my thoughts, though I might have succeeded. Seven years had passed since he shared the portent of corruption. He was unchanged, but I was not. Since then I had risen from a Codicier to an Epistolary and forged my own mirror. Our talents were more evenly matched now. Perhaps mine even exceeded his. My conviction certainly did. I had nothing to hide.

‘I will become a shadow amongst shadows,’ I said. ‘I will bear witness.’

‘Yes.’ Satori accepted my answer without intruding deeper. He knew what I was. After all, he had primed me for this role. I was his creation.

No… That isn’t quite right. This has always been my purpose, fused with my spirit more intimately than my body ever was, for I have abandoned the flesh I was born to without faltering in my course. Satori honed my sight and hastened my step, but he was my guide, not my maker, just as the First Magister was his.

My gaze drifted past him to the colossus towering over us, climbing the folds of its robes to the cavernous cowl shrouding its face. The statue of the First Magister, Xøren Castaneda, rose from the citadel’s pinnacle like a silver mountain, wings unfurled and arms raised to the stars. The wings alluded to our celestial heritage, but I have always considered the figure’s pose more intriguing. Were those arms raised in command or supplication? Summoning or worship? Like so much else about our founder, there was no absolute answer, which was entirely the point. That enigmatic figure represented more than Castaneda himself – it was the embodiment of the Resplendent way of life. Every warrior-artisan carried its likeness on his armour.

‘This is where he departed,’ I whispered. It wasn’t a question. I knew the visionary had left our world – possibly all worlds – from this exalted site, but my choice of words would have been contentious outside our select circle. The accepted term for Castaneda’s disappearance was ‘transcended’.

‘It is,’ Satori concurred, following my gaze. ‘This is where the First Magister tore himself from the thread of being.’ A pause. ‘Or was torn.’

Naturally we had discussed this momentous event often over the years, but never here, at its epicentre. Indeed, we rarely met outside the seclusion of Satori’s sanctum; however that wasn’t what lent the matter greater weight on this occasion. No, it was the presence suffusing the starlit plaza.

‘He is here,’ I breathed, feeling it for the first time, though I’d visited the Apex Solaris many times, as befitted my rank. The citadel’s summit was the province of senior Architects and Knight Exemplars alone, reserved for the gravest meditations on our Chapter’s course. ‘Still here…’

‘Yet also not,’ Satori countered.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, feeling this too.

We contemplated the paradox in silence, understanding the contradiction was only illusory. The material world is not what most dreamers imagine it to be. Nor is it anything more.

‘You must take command of the Librarium,’ Satori said finally. ‘Otherwise it will resist the coming storm. Our Architects are strong, especially when united. It is possible they would prevail. That must not happen.’

‘It will not,’ I replied. The matter was in hand, as he well knew. I had been gathering support among our brethren for years. When Chief Architect Trémier stood down I would be named his successor. That time was imminent, for Trémier’s longing for the Reverie was becoming overpowering – something I’d heightened through subtle suggestion since winning his trust. He would soon undertake his final pilgrimage and my path would be clear.

‘It is a breach of tradition and trust,’ Satori observed, ‘but a necessary one.’

Indeed, it was forbidden for one of our circle to hold the Librarium’s highest office, but only Satori knew of my true affiliation. To all others I was simply the ranking Architect of the Ninth Rhapsody. I had distinguished myself in both scholarly and military pursuits, yet I was always respectful of my rivals, cultivating allies where I might have made enemies. My brothers called me the Whisperlight in recognition of my ‘tranquil clarity’, never imagining the irony of the title.

‘I am sorry,’ Satori said, turning from the statue to face me. ‘It is a terrible thing I ask of you, to hasten our brotherhood’s fall.’

‘It is not you that asks,’ I said, meeting his gaze. I took no pride in my machinations, but I didn’t share my mentor’s guilt. It was always there, that guilt, like a rash of shame beneath his composure, though he rarely let it show so openly. Today was different. Today he wanted me to see.

‘You are leaving,’ I said, unsurprised. I’d been expecting his departure for some time and it explained his choice of venue for this meeting. He was always partial to excessive symbolism.

‘I am.’ Satori offered no explanation. Neither did I require one. I had outgrown my curiosity about his secrets, as I’d outgrown his tutelage. Doubtless he would return to the Reverie to continue his long hunt. Whatever – or whomever – he pursued there wasn’t mine to know, but it would surely further our cause.

‘It will not be as easy as you imagine,’ Satori cautioned.

‘Easy?’

‘To bear the burden of betrayal, Whisperlight.’ That was the first and only time he ever used my soubriquet. I couldn’t tell whether he was mocking or honouring me.

‘Necessity is the highest authority,’ I answered, deploying one of his favoured aphorisms. ‘We are what we must be.’

‘So it goes,’ Satori conceded, turning away.

‘So it goes,’ the betrayer affirmed. He would never meet his mentor again. They had both foreseen that. On every viable thread of possibilities their roads parted irrevocably. Such prognostications grew more uncertain the further they stretched, for the future was a tangled and frangible territory, liable to snap into unforeseen configurations if studied too closely, but a few constants could be mapped, among them this divergence. Navigating it was more a matter of art than science – one the Paladins Luminous excelled in.

‘I was true to my word,’ he told the expectant dead. ‘But false to my oath of Ascension.’

He had claimed the mantle of Chief Architect shortly after Satori’s departure. There was no opposition. Indeed most of his peers backed him enthusiastically. Even the volatile berserker mystics of the Rhapsody Conflagrant fell into line, never imagining he belonged to the secret circle they despised. Only the representatives of the Astral were equivocal, but that elusive cabal was equivocal about everything. The nine Battle Rhapsodies were as diverse in character as they were in heraldry, yet all recognised themselves in the betrayer’s words.

‘Mine was the voice they wanted to hear,’ he confided. ‘That is the subtlest trick of power.’

With his authority secured he had continued the long game, nudging prominent pieces towards the positions they must occupy when the crisis came. Success was never in doubt, but it smelled more like defeat with every advance, for Satori’s second warning proved as astute as the first. Like the corruption revealed by the mirror, guilt was inevitable.

The thought drew the betrayer’s gaze back to the desecrated columns. His stride slowed as he pictured the warriors who bore the dragon on their standard. The Rhapsody Celestial had been gone for decades now, following the Chapter’s mercurial master on yet another of his ‘dream quests’. They had been declared lost, but the betrayer knew better. The weave would have screamed with the death of Varzival Czervantes.

‘You remember him, don’t you?’ he asked the phantoms. ‘Czervantes?’

The sirocco wailing grew fiercer, spiked with fury. Yes, they remembered. Few of the brotherhood had intruded on their territory as often as Czervantes, but that wasn’t why they hated him. No, it was the curb he’d imposed on their appetites that enraged them. He had closed the colonnade to Kanvolis’ human citizens, cutting off its sustenance. The stones hated him out of hunger and the spirits out of pique.

Misery craves company, the betrayer reflected. The suicides had thrilled these shades, fleetingly vindicating their own folly. That was the nature of wounds – if left untended they festered and spread their poison through the wider body.

‘Be still,’ he hissed, sharpening the command with a spike of psychic contempt. Chastened, the spirits subsided, but the stones continued to radiate malice. He ignored them. They couldn’t harm him. Nor would anger deafen them to his tale. They wanted to hear more, especially about the knight they hated.

‘He did not come here for you,’ he murmured. You were nothing to him.

It was time, for this was the place. His feet had come to a halt of their own accord, recognising their destination while his mind wandered. He sighed as his eyes caught up, settling on the scorched patch marring the outer wall. The heat hadn’t quite cracked the marble, but its mark would endure, for it had been an unnatural fire.

‘You still feel it, don’t you?’ he murmured, placing his hands on the blackened parapet. It was much colder here, as though the colonnade’s bitterness was focused on its scar, yet his palms prickled with a borrowed memory of scalding.

‘What happened here?’ Always the same question, asked whenever he returned, but never answered, for his empathy with the stones was purely tactile. He felt their pain, but saw nothing of the cause. Nevertheless he was certain this burning hadn’t been accidental. The scar was roughly midway along the colonnade, far from prying eyes or the possibility of escape. This violence had been premeditated. There was a name etched into the scorched patch, but someone had scraped it into illegibility.

‘Tell me,’ he urged, but the stones were jealous of their secret. They couldn’t be tricked, cajoled or threatened into sharing it. He’d tried often enough to know attempting it was futile.

Why did the mystery matter? That at least was easy to answer. It mattered because it had obsessed his friend. It might even have solved the riddle of Varzival Czervantes.

The betrayer’s gaze drifted over the parapet to the bones littering the tier below. They were strewn about like seeds, glowing faintly, energised by their restless progeny. Were any of them connected to the burning? It was doubtful. That heat would have carbonised bone, yet these shards were pale.

He let the mystery go. It wasn’t why he’d returned tonight. He was here to confess, not absolve himself of the unknown.

‘Czervantes never wanted the Chapter’s command,’ he began. ‘He never wanted to be our Magister. It was imposed on him by chance and obligation.’

The chances and obligations I sowed. The fate I spun…

Despite his part in the knight’s rise he still found it strange to think of his friend as the Chapter’s liege. Czervantes had many talents, but he was unsuited to a role that required diplomacy, pragmatism and commitment. Indeed, he’d dedicated precious little time to governance since his inauguration. Most of the brotherhood believed his heart lay among the stars, driving him to chase after far-flung mysteries. Some claimed he was on the trail of a prize that could raise the Chapter to new heights. More than a few simply thought him mad. There was some truth in all these views, but they were only part of the reason for Czervantes’ wanderings. The greater part was loathing.

‘He hated this world,’ the betrayer whispered into the wind. ‘And feared it.’ Naturally his friend would never admit as much, even to himself. Fear was anathema to the Adeptus Astartes, supposedly purged from their psyches along with other blemishes of the human spirit, but sometimes the excisions were imperfect, especially among those who aspired to perfection.

‘It clung to him like a shadow, that fear.’ The betrayer looked beyond the bones, following the dark ribbon of the fjord to the lip of the land, his supernal vision reaching farther than the sharpest eyes ever could. An unruly radiance seeped over the distant ridge, staining the sky with dancing colours, like ink swirling through water. A lesser witness might have called those deviant hues impossible, but he knew better. In the Sea of Souls such phenomena were not merely possible, but entirely probable.

Like every shade of delirium…

‘It is restless tonight,’ I said, studying the aurora on the horizon.

‘Yes,’ agreed the knight who stood beside the scorched wall. His hands were on the balustrade alongside his helmet, their fingers tapping fretfully at the marble. He was armoured, as he always was when he visited the colonnade. It defied convention, but nobody would challenge him. Varzival Czervantes had earned the right to walk his own path long before the Chapter made him its master.

‘The Reverie senses your elevation, brother,’ I judged.

‘You think it cares for such things?’ His tone was harsh, betraying dread and the resentment of it.

‘It echoes our dreams,’ I replied. ‘As to whether it cares… I doubt the concept applies. Does the ocean care whether its tides carry a voyager to a safe harbour or drag them down? Does the storm delight in the devastation it wreaks?’ I shook my head. ‘No, they are simply true to their nature.’

It was the best answer I had, and remains so, though my mentor disagreed. I regard the Reverie as an elemental force, devoid of desire or intention, but to Satori it was always a foe.

The knight was silent, evidently considering my reply, though his conclusion would be the same as it always was. His loathing of the Reverie wouldn’t allow otherwise. In this single respect, my liege and my mentor were alike.

I waited, watching the flowing illuminations of Czervantes’ armour while he brooded. Its plates shifted hue languidly, washing through blues that never quite softened to green then back through purples that flushed just shy of vermillion, never settling on a shade for long. Sometimes the colouration was homogenous, sometimes patterned in multiple swatches, but always shimmering. Neither paint nor heat could erase those colours, for they ran much deeper than the ceramite plates, infusing the wearer’s blood and spirit, binding him to their source until death, and quite probably beyond. Only the warriors of the Rhapsody Eternal were marked with the Umbra Scintillant. They chose to wear it with pride, for it was a legacy of their leader’s most audacious campaign. Wherever they went, the Reverie followed.

‘I think you’re wrong, my friend,’ Czervantes answered finally. ‘That warped land knows its own mind. It cares for the same things as any other predator – survival and a ready supply of prey.’ His voice twisted into a snarl. ‘I’ll starve it as I starved these stones!’ He rapped the wall, striking a blow against the entire colonnade, then swung round to face me. ‘I’ll send no more aspirants into that hell.’

I was accustomed to his outbursts so I met this with equanimity. ‘You plan to end the Mirrored Trials?’

‘Will you oppose me?’ he challenged, his violet eyes glittering.

‘I advise against it, but I will abide by your decree, Chapter Magister.’

Czervantes’ anger deflated, punctured by the unwanted title. Age swept in to fill the vacuum. He’d been at the tail end of his youth when he recruited me, but that was over half a century ago, and unlike my mentor, he carried the years heavily. His face was still handsome, but harried by deep lines and shadows, the long hair framing it streaked with white.

‘Don’t call me that,’ he said quietly.

‘It is what you are.’

‘Not to you, Athanazius.’

And so it is done. I have given you my name. Since the purge I have avoided acknowledging it, but I cannot speak honestly of Czervantes without relenting, for he never used another. Never Whisperlight or some banal abbreviation, nor any of the formal titles I progressed through in his service. No, it was always the name I’d given him when we first met – a boy who was never a child and a giant who was never a man, standing vigil over a world beyond redemption. That planet of fire and nightmares is where the Rhapsody Eternal is garrisoned now, ignorant of its Chapter’s fall.

But let us return to the subject of names. They are of great significance to the Resplendent, hence our aspirants are gifted fitting ones upon completing their trials. These ‘risen names’ are drawn from the list of renowned dreamers in the Nomen Honoris, a compendium that predates our brotherhood. Thus we dignify our future with the glories of mankind’s past. The practice continues even now, though I cannot fathom why the zealots preserve it. Perhaps they consider it a mockery of sorts.

In any case, my comrade’s blood-born name wasn’t ‘Varzival Czervantes’, nor was my surname ‘Calvino’, but I have always been Athanazius, for the name our Architects drew randomly from tens of thousands of possibilities was already mine.

Make of that what you will.

‘Brother?’ my friend prompted, for I had drifted into introspection. It is a common affliction among those with a fluid perspective of time. To us the present often loses its prominence, seeming merely one angle among many, all equally sharp. That is why my memories are so vivid and my mind wanders.

‘You are now Magister to all the Resplendent,’ I answered, recovering my focus, ‘even to its Chief Architect.’

‘Did you have a hand in it, Athanazius?’

‘You know I did, but not out of friendship. I advocated for the best candidate.’

‘Even if I didn’t want it?’

‘Because you didn’t want it,’ I corrected. ‘Our Chapter is in decline – a leisurely, prosperous decline, to be sure, but a decline all the same. In mastering our bloodline’s curse we have become decadent.’ I imbued my voice with a passion I didn’t feel. ‘Our vitality is lost! Aldyss, Giacommeti, Vonegath – any other Exemplar – would preside over a golden fall. You alone have the vision to reawaken us, Varzival!’

He scowled, but I could tell my words pleased him.

‘Your spirit is restless,’ I pressed on. ‘You are driven to tear aside the veil of ignorance and defy the unknown, as the Arc demands. That is why you led the Ninth into the Reverie’s heart, brother!’

‘But it was folly, Athanazius. A disaster…’ His eyes clouded and his armour darkened to indigo in sympathy. ‘I lost half my command in there.’

‘And immortalised those who returned! The Rhapsody Eternal eclipses all others, even the Celestial.’ I dropped my tone to solemn gravitas. ‘Your instincts are sound, brother. You will lead the Resplendent into a new era.’

It was the truth alloyed with lies and gilded in hyperbole. Satori would have approved. And yet, for all my fine words, doubt lingered in Czervantes’ eyes.

‘Trust in yourself, Varzival.’ I brushed his mind with my will, galvanising the pride that skulked beneath his honour. He was aware of the flaw, but too ambitious to outgrow it. Not that I would have allowed such an evolution. Pride is a pliable string to play, and too profitable to sever. He was my friend, but he was also a pivotal piece in the game. And the game eclipses all else.

‘The Chapter’s destiny is in your hands.’ I extended mine, palms upwards, as though offering a gift. ‘You know this, Magister.’ I clenched my fists fiercely. ‘Seize it!’

Inevitably he did and the Chapter slipped through his fingers, as I knew it would.

‘So it goes,’ Athanazius whispered, stepping away from the scorched wall. He had always resisted prising its story from his friend’s mind. The secret wasn’t relevant to his purpose so it would have been an intrusion too far.

I am a betrayer by necessity, not nature.

Somewhere deep down, the prisoner inside him laughed, mocking the avowal.

‘Czervantes proved to be a poor Magister,’ Athanazius said, ignoring the scorn. ‘He was aloof, impulsive and impatient with his fellow Knights Exemplar, deeming them blind to the Arc’s message, though he couldn’t articulate it himself. They resented him in return, but the Architects stood by him and our word was final. There was a price for our loyalty, of course.’ Athanazius cast a hand through the wind, indicating the distant valley. ‘The Mirrored Trials continued. He never forgave me for that.’

The Chapter’s cardinal tradition had survived until the coming of the Undying Martyr. Under the outsider’s aegis aspirants faced the so-called Rites of Atonement in the citadel’s catacombs. They were harrowing ordeals to be sure, yet superficial beside the Reverie, only testing the body and the will to endure. The soul itself passed untried.

Thus we create monsters and name them angels, Athanazius brooded. The ravenous, self-devouring Morass he’d seen in the mirror slithered before his mind’s eye. It was growing inside every newly anointed battle-brother now, along with most of the old guard, seeded by the zealot, who named it penitence. Moreover, the blight was spreading beyond Malpertuis, carried by the Chapter’s missionaries, as though the Imperium were short of fanatics.

It is necessary, he told himself. And it won’t last.

But lately he’d begun to doubt that. What if he’d misread the weave of possibilities? What if nothing rose from his Chapter’s ashes except the Morass incarnate? Maybe there was no spiritual phoenix waiting to be born.

I won’t accept that. I won’t allow it.

The shades wailed, growing impatient with his silence. His tale might be baffling, but it was the only one on offer. The stones were more reserved, but no less eager, anticipating the wretchedness of his conclusion.

‘Czervantes sealed the Chapter’s fate,’ Athanazius said, resuming his walk. ‘He took his place at the head of the Rhapsody Celestial, as tradition demanded, but his spirit belonged to the Eternal. Severing that tie soured him.’

There had been no alternative. The Eternal were committed to a different fate, bound by a primal oath that couldn’t be broken.

And who made that bargain? Who damned them? Why not tell it all?

No, that wasn’t something to be shared, now or ever. Besides, they were doomed either way. If they had remained here the Martyr would have purged them.

Or they would have purged him, a treacherous thought suggested. And cleansed the stain before it spread.

‘As the years passed, Czervantes’ absences grew longer,’ he pressed on, ‘until he was effectively gone, taking the Celestial with him, yet there was no impetus to replace him. The remaining Rhapsodies were too divided to rally behind a successor, while those with the authority to intervene declined. The Librarium was mine and our Chaplains were mired in a crisis of faith.’ Unconsciously, Athanazius’ fingers made the sign of the thorned aquila. ‘I had seen to that.’

The haunted visage of Master Chaplain Malvoisin flashed before him, ravaged by radiation and self-loathing. Nobody would see that face again, for its wearer had riveted his iron death mask to the bones beneath, inspiring a grisly custom among his order. If the Martyr was the messiah of the fall, then Icharos Malvoisin was surely its herald.

‘Without a Chapter Magister to bind them, each Rhapsody followed its own path, which carried them far from Malpertuis. When the stranger appeared outside our walls, near death yet afire with revelation, only the Vigilant remained to meet him, bound by their duty as the citadel’s custodians.’

And primed by disgrace to betray it…

Like a plague, the malignant creed had passed from the stranger to Malvoisin and his fellow Chaplains, who contaminated the garrison. All were fertile soil for the seeds of corruption to grow. Athanazius sensed the Morass everywhere – nesting inside his brothers and extending intangible, questing tendrils towards fresh conquests, eager to infest more souls. Always more…

It is necessary, he reminded himself, but now the faithful axiom felt brittle. Perhaps saying it aloud would fortify it.

‘It is ne–’ Athanazius froze as another memory surfaced, unbidden and unanchored to the past, overwhelming him with the force of a tsunami.

I stand atop a massive slab of obsidian, my face upraised to a roiling, soot-choked sky that stares back blindly. Seven distant spires pierce the smog, encircling the monolith like the points of a sundial, each proclaiming a virtue staked in vice. Lightning plays about their pinnacles, sporadically arcing between them in a vast ring that lights up the entire lava-locked archipelago. This is where my journey began and must someday end.

But not this day!

Veins of magma spread through the slab’s black crust as I begin my incantation. The words taste like old ink and splintered certainties and promises made in pain – and so much more and less, as the most puissant ones always do. They inspire and repulse me, elevating then debasing my spirit by turns, amplifying the best and the worst of myself.

I am the master of my own enslavement!

The eight mortal acolytes gathered around me take up the chant, shuddering as they spit syllables like thorny morsels, for human tongues are not meant for such vocalisations. Streamers of mist ooze from their mouths, wafting about them in penumbral, blood-flecked halos. Soon they are bent beneath the weight of their robes, drained by their exertions, yet none falter. Sacrifice is a sacrament to them.

I have made it so!

The air ripples as living figments hatch from its currents like crystalline birds. Trilling bittersweet nonsense, the dream shards flit about us, spinning contrails of delirium. Their myriad facets glitter with transient eternities that gnaw and claw at each other, vying for supremacy. Each is a lens into a divergent thread of events that defies all rivals. No two are ever the same. Sometimes the differences are frivolous, sometimes prodigious, but only a few thousand configurations serve my purpose.

So it flows!

Gathering my will, I seize those precious few prospects and drive them towards becoming, channelling the archipelago’s energies into the endeavour. Corralled by my words, the dream slivers shiver towards a consensus. It is a skittish accord at best, for the infinite abhors absolutes, but most of the surviving variants are acceptable.

So mote it be!

As the ritual approaches its zenith, the monolith quakes then cracks, spewing molten blood from multiple fissures. Two of my acolytes catch fire, but continue chanting until they are consumed. A third slips through a widening fracture and a fourth shatters like glass, shredding those to either side. None of my coven will survive the ceremony. None of them care to, for they understand this life is only a fable. I myself am lost on some spins of the Great Wheel, ending the game prematurely, but fate usually favours me, for nothing is truly chance and I have plotted my course meticulously.

So it goes!

The figments shriek as my will draws them together into a vast, manifold lens. It whirls above my head, weaving bold probabilities from the ether. The last of my followers are annihilated by the revelation, their bodies unravelled in crimson spirals as their spirits soar into the crystal sun, eager for transcendence.

‘As above, so below!’ I beseech and demand, raising my arms to the shackled infinite. ‘As within, so without!’

Beneath my feet something dark-bright and broken stirs, then meets my mind.

‘The Emperor condemns!’ the betrayer shouted, banishing the world of fire and spires. His gauntleted hand lashed out, shattering the remnants of a dragon and cracking the pillar beneath. The impact dulled the emotions bedevilling him. The shame was his, but not the fury, and certainly not the odious credo it had elicited. Those belonged to the warrior whose body he had stolen. Incensed by the vision, the captive soul strained against the psychic bonds binding it. As always, anger empowered it, but it had never broken through to speech before.

He saw it too, Athanazius realised, then frowned at the colonnade. They all did.

The wind had ebbed, its riders cowed by the vision he’d inadvertently shared. It had overcome him like a fugue state, more immediate and visceral than the episodes he’d recounted – a wilful, hungering glimpse of the future. Not a memory, but a prophecy…

‘Heretic… filth…’ his prisoner rasped, forcing the words through its captor’s lips like sludge. ‘Sorcerer!’

The accusations were warranted, but didn’t sting Athanazius. Yes, warpcraft could be corrosive, but only to those who revelled in its mechanisms. To a sober practitioner like himself it was purely another discipline of science, albeit the most fundamental and potent of them all. Like the Reverie, it was neither inherently good nor evil.

And yet… That vision had reeked of atrocity, as though he were–

‘Intention alone bears moral weight,’ Athanazius declared, quashing his doubts along with the prisoner’s voice. As always, the Arc’s wisdom restored his balance. Shame was irrational. Irrelevant. He might feel it, but he didn’t believe in it.

But you do, his prisoner urged, silenced yet not. You know what you are. What we all were! Its thoughts tasted liked spoiled wine, heady with ruin. We were the worst of sinners. Apostles of the Golden Heresy!

The Golden Heresy… It was the Martyr’s name for the Resplendent path, but it encompassed any belief in beauty, nobility or the hope of something better. The fanatics were nothing if not generous with their contempt.

‘You are wrong,’ Athanazius whispered, tightening the chains binding his captive. The vision had shaken them loose. It had shaken him. Though he’d committed many questionable acts in service to the Arc, nothing approached that apocalyptic ritual. Its scope and complexity were far beyond his current abilities, but that wasn’t what troubled him. No, it was the ambition behind it.

The arrogance, his prisoner suggested.

‘Yes,’ Athanazius agreed, nodding. The vision had been instructive. It was too lucid to be a false prophecy; however it only foretold a possible future. He would ensure that strand never blossomed into being.

‘Perhaps you are fated to serve as my conscience, brother,’ he told his prisoner gravely. ‘Even if your own has withered.’

The ghost in his body – its rightful owner – was called Tomaz Carriére, which was the name Athanazius went by now. He had seized Carriére’s memories along with his body and built upon them, securing his host’s place in the new order. While many warriors had fallen foul of the Martyr’s laws, even true believers, Carriére always prospered. The thief behind his eyes guided his course with glacial precision, plotting a path through the tangle of rites and regulations like a virtuoso regicide player. That road was circuitous, but its trajectory crept ever upwards. Someday it would lead to the Crown of Thorns, and through it to the false prophet himself.

I am fortunate, Athanazius reflected. I had strong foundations to build upon.

Carriére had been primed for advancement. Though he was young and only recently ascended from neophyte status, he had been a prominent champion of the new creed. Even now his faith was unwavering. Athanazius felt the boy’s fury like an emotional echo, distant yet insistent, demanding free rein.

‘No,’ he admonished, strangling the tantrum with a twist of his will. He felt no remorse over stealing the youth’s life. After all, it was Carriére who’d taken his. ‘You will–’

He reeled as another memory seized him.

The doors of our inner sanctum are flung open. Those great portals would have held for days if sealed with arcane wards, but we didn’t even lock them, or defend the Librarium’s walls when the zealots stormed its gates. No, we have invited this desecration.

There are only eleven of us, but we are all Architects of formidable ability. We have been observing our city’s torment with astral eyes, following the devastation as it spiralled towards us. Together we could have smothered the anarchy at its inception or blunted its force even now. Indeed, my colleagues argued for such courses, but they acceded to my veto, trusting my judgement unto this most bitter of ends. They will never know that I fostered our fall.

So it goes, because it must.

Droning psalms of castigation, the zealots surge into our most sacred space, flowing around the pentagonal dais where we stand. Herded by skull-masked Chaplains, they surround us yet keep their distance, like leashed attack dogs. Their human prophet is not among them. He has not left the Cathedral Elegiac since the unrest began, though I am certain it isn’t fear that restrains him. Whatever else the Undying Martyr may be, he is no coward. He believes his creed with all his heart. His faith permeates the city like a miasma, stinking of the grey-green Morass. Doubtless he is communing with his god, though perhaps not the one he imagines he worships.

We meet the trespass with apparent tranquillity, but I can feel my companions’ tension. Their desire to respond to this outrage is almost physical. The Librarium is forbidden to all save its Architects.

+No,+ I urge my brothers silently, speaking with my mind. +Rise above yourselves and they shall follow.+

What is one more lie among the legion I have already told? Nothing, yet this one tastes particularly sour, for my love of the Librarium is sincere. Bringing it to ruin is the worst of my sins, but also the most imperative.

The zealots fall silent before our serenity. Unlike us they are armoured, though they wear no helmets and carry only daggers, trusting that faith will empower their blades. Their faces are a savage tapestry of rapture, loathing and rage, occasionally frayed by doubt. All are stained with blood, sweat and smoke, for these fanatics have not washed since their crusade began. That was seven days ago – merely the blink of an eye in our Chapter’s annals, yet enough to despoil the endeavour of centuries. Destruction is so effortless beside creation, as though the grain of existence leans towards its own unmaking.

In a perversion of our Chapter’s heritage the destroyers have named themselves the Angels Penitent, supplanting majesty with misery, yet clinging to the conceit of superiority. Intoxicated by their messiah’s rhetoric they have scourged Kanvolis – wrecking, burning and cursing the works of their forebrothers in praise of shame. Their Chaplains call it the Great Purge, evoking the worst instincts of the wider Imperium, which we Resplendent have always rejected. Thousands of the Chapter’s mortal followers were slaughtered in the process. Many died defending the galleries or gardens they tended so lovingly. Most confronted the marauders with reason or pleas in the name of art, but some tried to fight, though they knew nothing of warfare. Remarkably few submitted to the squalid mercy of thraldom. Their defiance came to nothing, yet I take more pride in their courage than my own achievements. They were only human, yet we made them glorious!

There were also detractors amongst the Resplendent themselves of course – indomitable souls who rejected the madness and fought back, mostly alone, occasionally in small bands, but they were too few to hold back the tide, let alone turn it. The best of the Resplendent were not there. I had seen to that.

The zealots left the Librarium until last. It wasn’t caution or strategy that informed their decision, but malice. They wanted us to behold their work and despair before granting us death. But now, with nothing else left to burn, they have come for us.

And so we face each other across a gulf that can no longer be bridged, even if I attempted it. We have travelled too far for amnesty or reconciliation. We are Resplendent and Penitent now, opposites that must collide and subtract one another from the Chapter’s essence. Through this alchemical annihilation our brotherhood shall arise once more, renewed and purified as the Arc’s most veiled passages predict. I believe this absolutely, yet at this moment of no return I cannot feel it.

No matter, duty must suffice, as it did for my mentor.

‘We rise on burning wings,’ I say, extending my hands to the intruders, palms upwards, offering the Chapter’s credo like a self-evident truth, as I once offered Varzival Czervantes the lie that led us here. I speak softly, yet my words reverberate through the chamber, finding purchase in hearts that threats could never pierce. That noble phrase will always have power, even over the fallen.

I watch strands of doubt spreading through the throng, weaving remorse among the best of them. Here and there guilty eyes are lowered, followed by daggers. A blunt-faced veteran with shorn grey hair shakes his head, as though trying to dislodge something from his skull. He is uncommonly ugly for a Resplendent, but there is a sober dignity about him that draws my gaze. His eyes meet mine and I see the sickness isn’t deeply rooted in this one, and probably never will be. That is good. Some of our brothers must cleave to the old ways while the shadow reigns.

But not too many…

For a few fleeting moments I wonder if I have gone too far – and a craven part of me hopes I have – then Master Chaplain Malvoisin steps forward and I see the madness resurging with renewed hunger. My attempt to prevent it was disingenuous, a symbolic gesture to give my lost brothers pause so they shall reflect and grieve in the years to come, knowing the offer of peace was made. It is a cruel curse to bestow upon them, but an essential one, for it will linger in the Chapter’s collective conscience. Someday it will be the spur that rouses these sleepers from their nightmare.

But that day is distant. Today there is only ruin. So it goes.

‘The Emperor Condemns!’ Malvoisin bellows, his voice amplified to a roar by the yawning skull-speakers on his pauldrons.

‘The Emperor Condemns!’ his congregation howls in response, charging forward. The grey-haired veteran hangs back, his expression anguished, then I lose sight of him.

+Be still,+ I urge my companions, throwing my will behind the command. For a few crucial heartbeats they are frozen, then it is too late. The fanatics are upon us.

I immediately recognise the one who will kill me, not because I know him, but because my death shines in his eyes as they meet mine. He is at the forefront of his brothers, his youthful features twisted into a scar by hatred, his sandy hair matted with blood. An inverted aquila is carved into his forehead, ragged and raw, signifying the God-Emperor’s contempt.

‘Heretic!’ he snarls, raising his dagger. As it slashes towards me I speak the words of power I have prepared, then abandon my body, hurling my spirit into his before the blade connects. For a heartbeat there is darkness and shrieking silence, then I am restored. Through stolen eyes I see the blade plunge into my own throat, extinguishing an empty vessel.

‘Penitence is pain!’ I proclaim as my fellow Architects are butchered.

‘No,’ the betrayer gasped, tearing himself out of the past. He wouldn’t relive that carnage to its conclusion. The event was an inescapable part of his confession, but he’d planned to recount it from a distance, presenting the facts without touching them – without letting them touch him. Taint him…

Too late for that!

Athanazius wasn’t sure whether the retort belonged to him or Carriére. His head was pounding, as though his prisoner were trying to batter a way out. The vile memory had skewed his equilibrium. Like the prophecy, it had struck with the violence of a seizure.

Or a psychic attack…

Instinctively he glanced over the parapet, searching the horizon for a shimmering stain, but the Reverie was quiescent now. Or playing dead? No, that ascribed too much volition to it. It was dangerous, but it wasn’t a sentient entity. Not like the colonnade…

‘Was it you?’ he asked, laying a hand on the wall. The wind had picked up again, though it veered around him, scarcely brushing his face. Its phantoms were still wary of him. But not the stones… No, they watched him with a rapt intensity quite unlike their previous animosity. Reverence, he realised. His blasphemies had impressed them. He had impressed them.

‘I don’t want your worship,’ he muttered, ‘or your kinship.’

Suddenly he was eager to be gone from here. He had lingered in this toxic place too long. It had grown stronger since his last visit, feeding off the citadel’s sickness.

I must be more careful next time, Athanazius decided, weighing up the dark passageway. The way out wasn’t far now, yet the journey stretched improbably in his imagination, urging him to delay the attempt. Why not stay a little while longer? Surely he had more to tell?

‘No,’ he lied wearily. ‘You have it all.’

Inevitably there would be more disgrace to come. So much more… The Chapter was systematically devouring its scattered Rhapsodies, recalling each to face the Crown of Thorns alone, like errant children. Three had already been ‘reformed’. The Astral would likely be purged in its entirety when its turn came, along with much of the Empyrean. Both burned too brightly to fade gently into the darkness. And after that, when he rose to become the prophet’s trusted advisor, what then? What horrors would he expedite to secure the Chapter’s future?

Whatever I must, Athanazius admitted.

‘But I won’t prove false,’ he murmured, echoing a promise he’d made long ago. It predated his service to the Arc, yet it remained his most sacred oath.

‘I will be a redeemer,’ the betrayer added, renewing that precious vow.

His obligation here was complete, even if its conclusion had come in a fragmented storm. The phantoms would soon forget his tale, as they forgot everything except their own grief, but the colonnade would remember, as it remembered every sin that passed through its maw. That was good. Someone – something – beside himself needed to know the truth. Preserve it. The desire to share it had become a compulsion over the past few days, though he couldn’t say why. Perhaps–

‘Tomaz Carriére,’ a voice called over his shoulder. ‘The Arc sees you.’

Turning, Athanazius glimpsed a flash of steel. ‘Who…?’

A dagger rammed into his throat, precisely as Carriére’s had once done.

Again, he thought, shocked by the absurdity as much as the blow itself. Again…

No, this time it was different. This time he felt it. This time he was inside the dying vessel. Trapped. Blotting out the pain, he fought to untether his spirit and leap into his attacker’s body as he’d done before, but blood drowned the needful words.

‘You were the worst of us, boy,’ growled the warrior who’d been stalking him. ‘Because you killed the best.’

Athanazius stared at his assailant, recognising that heavyset face and those mournful eyes. It was the veteran who’d impressed him in the sanctum. The doubter. He was still free of the taint. Still Resplendent.

Bitter laughter bubbled up inside Athanazius as his prisoner clawed its way out of darkness to die alongside him.

‘We rise on burning wings,’ their killer hissed, yanking his dagger free. Was this attack premeditated? How long had this warrior been nursing his hatred, watching for an opportunity to avenge the slaughter?

Wait! Athanazius tried to say as the veteran seized his shoulders and swung him towards the wall. You don’t understand, brother! But nothing came except Carriére’s wet crimson mirth.

Then they were over the parapet, plunging towards the tier below, blood streaming in their wake. The phantoms howled with delight, welcoming another soul into their limbo, never realising it was actually two. Ordinarily an armoured transhuman might survive such a fall, but Athanazius was plummeting with a speed that mocked gravity, as though an unseen hand were yanking him down. He wouldn’t bleed out slowly.

The Emperor Condemns! Carriére gloated.

Perhaps He does, Athanazius conceded, making no effort to shield his head.

In those final beats, just before his twin hearts ruptured, the betrayer understood he would never be anything more.

So it goes, the colonnade breathed, echoing his mantra. So it always goes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Fehervari is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Requiem Infernal, Cult of the Spiral Dawn and Fire Caste, as well as the novella Fire and Ice from the Shas’o anthology. He has also written the Warhammer Horror novel The Reverie, as well as many short stories for Black Library, including the T’au-themed ‘Out Caste’ and ‘A Sanctuary of Wyrms’, the latter of which appeared in the anthology Deathwatch: Xenos Hunters. He also wrote ‘Nightfall’, which was in the Heroes of the Space Marines anthology, and ‘The Crown of Thorns’. He lives and works in London.

An extract from Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.

‘I was there at the Siege of Terra,’ Vitrian Messinius would say in his later years.

‘I was there…’ he would add to himself, his words never meant for ears but his own. ‘I was there the day the Imperium died.’

But that was yet to come.

‘To the walls! To the walls! The enemy is coming!’ Captain Messinius, as he was then, led his Space Marines across the Penitent’s Square high up on the Lion’s Gate. ‘Another attack! Repel them! Send them back to the warp!’

Thousands of red-skinned monsters born of fear and sin scaled the outer ramparts, fury and murder incarnate. The mortals they faced quailed. It took the heart of a Space Marine to stand against them without fear, and the Angels of Death were in short supply.

‘Another attack, move, move! To the walls!’

They came in the days after the Avenging Son returned, emerging from nothing, eight legions strong, bringing the bulk of their numbers to bear against the chief entrance to the Imperial Palace. A decapitation strike like no other, and it came perilously close to success.

Messinius’ Space Marines ran to the parapet edging the Penitent’s Square. On many worlds, the square would have been a plaza fit to adorn the centre of any great city. Not on Terra. On the immensity of the Lion’s Gate, it was nothing, one of hundreds of similarly huge spaces. The word ‘gate’ did not suit the scale of the cityscape. The Lion’s Gate’s bulk marched up into the sky, step by titanic step, until it rose far higher than the mountains it had supplanted. The gate had been built by the Emperor Himself, they said. Myths detailed the improbable supernatural feats required to raise it. They were lies, all of them, and belittled the true effort needed to build such an edifice. Though the Lion’s Gate was made to His design and by His command, the soaring monument had been constructed by mortals, with mortal hands and mortal tools. Messinius wished that had been remembered. For men to build this was far more impressive than any godly act of creation. If men could remember that, he believed, then perhaps they would remember their own strength.

The uncanny may not have built the gate, but it threatened to bring it down. Messinius looked over the rampart lip, down to the lower levels thousands of feet below and the spread of the Anterior Barbican.

Upon the stepped fortifications of the Lion’s Gate was armour of every colour and the blood of every loyal primarch. Dozens of regiments stood alongside them. Aircraft filled the sky. Guns boomed from every quarter. In the churning redness on the great roads, processional ways so huge they were akin to prairies cast in rockcrete, were flashes of gold where the Emperor’s Custodian Guard battled. The might of the Imperium was gathered there, in the palace where He dwelt.

There seemed moments on that day when it might not be enough.

The outer ramparts were carpeted in red bodies that writhed and heaved, obscuring the great statues adorning the defences and covering over the guns, an invasive cancer consuming reality. The enemy were legion. There were too many foes to defeat by plan and ruse. Only guns, and will, would see the day won, but the defenders were so pitifully few.

Messinius called a wordless halt, clenched fist raised, seeking the best place to deploy his mixed company, veterans all of the Terran Crusade. Gunships and fighters sped overhead, unleashing deadly light and streams of bombs into the packed daemonic masses. There were innumerable cannons crammed onto the gate, and they all fired, rippling the structure with false earthquakes. Soon the many ships and orbital defences of Terra would add their guns, targeting the very world they were meant to guard, but the attack had come so suddenly; as yet they had had no time to react.

The noise was horrendous. Messinius’ audio dampers were at maximum and still the roar of ordnance stung his ears. Those humans that survived today would be rendered deaf. But he would have welcomed more guns, and louder still, for all the defensive fury of the assailed palace could not drown out the hideous noise of the daemons – their sighing hisses, a billion serpents strong, and chittering, screaming wails. It was not only heard but sensed within the soul, the realms of spirit and of matter were so intertwined. Messinius’ being would be forever stained by it.

Tactical information scrolled down his helmplate, near environs only. He had little strategic overview of the situation. The vox-channels were choked with a hellish screaming that made communication impossible. The noosphere was disrupted by etheric backwash spilling from the immaterial rifts the daemons poured through. Messinius was used to operating on his own. Small-scale, surgical actions were the way of the Adeptus Astartes, but in a battle of this scale, a lack of central coordination would lead inevitably to defeat. This was not like the first Siege, where his kind had fought in Legions.

He called up a company-wide vox-cast and spoke to his warriors. They were not his Chapter-kin, but they would listen. The primarch himself had commanded that they do so.

‘Reinforce the mortals,’ he said. ‘Their morale is wavering. Position yourselves every fifty yards. Cover the whole of the south-facing front. Let them see you.’ He directed his warriors by chopping at the air with his left hand. His right, bearing an inactive power fist, hung heavily at his side. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles, back forty yards, single firing line. Prepare to engage enemy breakthroughs only on my mark. Devastators, split to demi-squads and take up high ground, sergeant and sub-squad prime’s discretion as to positioning and target. Remember our objective, heavy infliction of casualties. We kill as many as we can, we retreat, then hold at the Penitent’s Arch until further notice. Command squad, with me.’

Command squad was too grand a title for the mismatched crew Messinius had gathered around himself. His own officers were light years away, if they still lived.

‘Doveskamor, Tidominus,’ he said to the two Aurora Marines with him. ‘Take the left.’

‘Yes, captain,’ they voxed, and jogged away, their green armour glinting orange in the hell-light of the invasion.

The rest of his scratch squad was comprised of a communications specialist from the Death Spectres, an Omega Marine with a penchant for plasma weaponry, and a Raptor holding an ancient standard he’d taken from a dusty display.

‘Why did you take that, Brother Kryvesh?’ Messinius asked, as they moved forward.

‘The palace is full of such relics,’ said the Raptor. ‘It seems only right to put them to use. No one else wanted it.’

Messinius stared at him.

‘What? If the gate falls, we’ll have more to worry about than my minor indiscretion. It’ll be good for morale.’

The squads were splitting to join the standard humans. Such was the noise many of the men on the wall had not noticed their arrival, and a ripple of surprise went along the line as they appeared at their sides. Messinius was glad to see they seemed more firm when they turned their eyes back outwards.

‘Anzigus,’ he said to the Death Spectre. ‘Hold back, facilitate communication within the company. Maximum signal gain. This interference will only get worse. See if you can get us patched in to wider theatre command. I’ll take a hardline if you can find one.’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Anzigus. He bowed a helm that was bulbous with additional equipment. He already had the access flap of the bulky vox-unit on his arm open. He withdrew, the aerials on his power plant extending. He headed towards a systems nexus on the far wall of the plaza, where soaring buttresses pushed back against the immense weight bearing down upon them.

Messinius watched him go. He knew next to nothing about Anzigus. He spoke little, and when he did, his voice was funereal. His Chapter was mysterious, but the same lack of familiarity held true for many of these warriors, thrown together by miraculous events. Over their years lost wandering in the warp, Messinius had come to see some as friends as well as comrades, others he hardly knew, and none he knew so well as his own Chapter brothers. But they would stand together. They were Space Marines. They had fought by the returned primarch’s side, and in that they shared a bond. They would not stint in their duty now.

Messinius chose a spot on the wall, directing his other veterans to left and right. Kryvesh he sent to the mortal officer’s side. He looked down again, out past the enemy and over the outer palace. Spires stretched away in every direction. Smoke rose from all over the landscape. Some of it was new, the work of the daemon horde, but Terra had been burning for weeks. The Astronomican had failed. The galaxy was split in two. Behind them in the sky turned the great palace gyre, its deep eye marking out the throne room of the Emperor Himself.

‘Sir!’ A member of the Palatine Guard shouted over the din. He pointed downwards, to the left. Messinius followed his wavering finger. Three hundred feet below, daemons were climbing. They came upwards in a triangle tipped by a brute with a double rack of horns. It clambered hand over hand, far faster than should be possible, flying upwards, as if it touched the side of the towering gate only as a concession to reality. A Space Marine with claw locks could not have climbed that fast.

‘Soldiers of the Imperium! The enemy is upon us!’

He looked to the mortals. Their faces were blanched with fear. Their weapons shook. Their bravery was commendable nonetheless. Not one of them attempted to run, though a wave of terror preceded the unnatural things clambering up towards them.

‘We shall not turn away from our duty, no matter how fearful the foe, or how dire our fates may be,’ he said. ‘Behind us is the Sanctum of the Emperor Himself. As He has watched over you, now it is your turn to stand in guardianship over Him.’

The creatures were drawing closer. Through a sliding, magnified window on his display, Messinius looked into the yellow and cunning eyes of their leader. A long tongue lolled permanently from the thing’s mouth, licking at the wall, tasting the terror of the beings it protected.

Boltgun actions clicked. His men leaned over the parapet, towering over the mortals as the Lion’s Gate towered over the Ultimate Wall. A wealth of targeting data was exchanged, warrior to warrior, as each chose a unique mark. No bolt would be wasted in the opening fusillade. They could hear the creatures’ individual shrieks and growls, all wordless, but their meaning was clear: blood, blood, blood. Blood and skulls.

Messinius sneered at them. He ignited his power fist with a swift jerk. He always preferred the visceral thrill of manual activation. Motors came to full life. Lightning crackled around it. He aimed downwards with his bolt pistol. A reticule danced over diabolical faces, each a copy of all the others. These things were not real. They were not alive. They were projections of a false god. The Librarian Atramo had named them maladies. A spiritual sickness wearing ersatz flesh.

He reminded himself to be wary. Contempt was as thick as any armour, but these things were deadly, for all their unreality.

He knew. He had fought the Neverborn many times before.

‘While He lives,’ Messinius shouted, boosting his voxmitter gain to maximal, ‘we stand!’

‘For He of Terra!’ the humans shouted, their battle cry loud enough to be heard over the booming of guns.

‘For He of Terra,’ said Messinius. ‘Fire!’ he shouted.

The Space Marines fired first. Boltguns spoke, spitting spikes of rocket flare into the foe. Bolts slammed into daemon bodies, bursting them apart. Black viscera exploded away. Black ichor showered those coming after. The daemons’ false souls screamed back whence they came, though their bones and offal tumbled down like those of any truly living foe.

Las-beams speared next, and the space between the wall top and the scaling party filled with violence. The daemons were unnaturally resilient, protected from death by the energies of the warp, and though many were felled, others weathered the fire, and clambered up still, unharmed and uncaring of their dead. Messinius no longer needed his helm’s magnification to see into the daemon champion’s eyes. It stared at him, its smile a promise of death. The terror that preceded them was replaced by the urge to violence, and that gripped them all, foe and friend. The baseline humans began to lose their discipline. A man turned and shot his comrade, and was shot down in turn. Kryvesh banged the foot of his borrowed banner and called them back into line. Elsewhere, his warriors sang; not their Chapter warsongs, but battle hymns known to all. Wavering human voices joined them. The feelings of violence abated, just enough.

Then the things were over the parapet and on them. Messinius saw Tidominus carried down by a group of daemons, his unit signum replaced by a mortis rune in his helm. The enemy champion was racing at him. Messinius emptied his bolt pistol into its face, blowing half of it away into a fine mist of daemonic ichor. Still it leapt, hurling itself twenty feet over the parapet. Messinius fell back, keeping the creature in sight, targeting skating over his helmplate as the machine-spirit tried to maintain a target lock. Threat indicators trilled, shifting up their priority spectrum.

The daemon held up its enormous gnarled hands. Smoke whirled in the space between, coalescing into a two-handed sword almost as tall as Messinius. By the time its hoofed feet cracked the paving slabs of the square, the creature’s weapon was solid. Vapour streaming from its ruined face, it pointed the broadsword at Messinius and hissed a wordless challenge.

‘Accepted,’ said Messinius, and moved in to attack.

The creature was fast, and punishingly strong. Messinius parried its first strike with an outward push of his palm, fingers spread. Energy crackled. The boom generated by the meeting of human technology and the sorceries of the warp was loud enough to out-compete the guns, but though the impact sent pain lancing up Messinius’ arm, the daemon was not staggered, and pressed in a follow-up attack, swinging the massive sword around its head as if it weighed nothing.

Messinius countered more aggressively this time, punching in to the strike. Another thunderous detonation. Disruption fields shattered matter, but the daemon was not wholly real, and the effect upon it was lesser than it would be upon a natural foe. Nevertheless, this time it was thrown backwards by the blow. Smoke poured from the edge of its blade. It licked black blood from its arm and snarled. Messinius was ready when it leapt: opening his fist, ignoring the sword as it clashed against his pauldron and sheared off a peeling of ceramite, he grabbed the beast about its middle.

The Bloodletters of Khorne were rangy things, all bone and ropey muscle, no space within them for organs. The false god of war had no need for them to eat or breathe, or to give the semblance of being able to do so. They were made only to kill, and to strike fear in the hearts of those they faced. Their waists were solid, and slender, and easily encompassed by Messinius’ power fist. It squirmed in his grip, throwing Messinius’ arm about. Servo motors in his joints locked, supplementary muscle fibres strained, but the White Consul stood firm.

‘Tell your master he is not welcome on Terra,’ he said. His words were calm, a deliberate defiance of the waves of rage pulsing off the daemon.

He closed his hand.

The daemon’s midriff exploded. The top half fell down, still hissing and thrashing. Its sword clanged off the paving and broke into shards, brittle now it was separated from its wielder. They were pieces of the same thing, sword and beast. Apart, the weapon could not survive long.

Messinius cast down the lower portion of the daemon. There were dozens of the things atop the wall, battling with his warriors and the human soldiery. In the second he paused he saw Doveskamor hacked down as he stood over the body of his brother, pieces of armour bouncing across the ground. He saw a group of Palatine Sentinels corner a daemon with their bayonets. He saw a dozen humans cut down by eldritch swords.

Where the humans kept their distance, their ranged weapons took a toll upon the Neverborn. Where the daemons got among them, they triumphed more often than not, even against his Space Marines. Support fire rained down sporadically from above, its usefulness restricted by the difficulty of picking targets from the swirling melee. At the western edge of the line, the heavy weapons were more telling, knocking daemons off the wall before they crested the parapet and preventing them from circling around the back of the Imperial forces. Only his equipment allowed Messinius to see this. Without the helm feeds of his warriors and the limited access he had to the Lion Gate’s auspectoria, he would have been blind, lost in the immediate clash of arms and sprays of blood. He would have remained where he was, fighting. He would not have seen that there were more groups of daemons pouring upwards. He would not have given his order, and then he would have died.

‘Squad Antiocles, engage,’ he said. He smashed a charging daemon into fragments, yanked another back the instant before it gutted a mortal soldier, and stamped its skull flat, while switching again to his company vox-net. ‘All units, fall back to the Penitent’s Arch. Take the mortals with you.’

His assault squad fell from the sky on burning jets, kicking daemons down and shooting them with their plasma and bolt pistols. A roar of promethium from a flamer blasted three bloodletters to ash.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius commanded, his words beating time with his blows. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles to cover. Devastators maintain overhead fire.’

Squad Antiocles drove the enemy back. Tactical Space Marines were retreating from the parapet, dragging human soldiers with them. An Ultramarine walked backwards past him, firing his bolter one-handed, a wounded member of the Palatine Guard draped over his right shoulder.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius roared. He grabbed a human by the arm and yanked him hard away from the monster trying to slay him, almost throwing him across the square. He pivoted and punched, slamming the man’s opponent in the face with a crackling bang that catapulted its broken corpse over the wall edge. ‘Fall back!’

Mortal soldiers broke and ran while Squad Antiocles held off the foe. Telling to begin with, in moments the assault squad’s momentum was broken, and again more bloodletters were leaping over the edge of the rampart. The Space Marines fired in retreat, covering each other in pairs as they crossed the square diagonally to the Penitent’s Arch. The mortals were getting the idea, running between the Adeptus Astartes and mostly staying out of their fire corridor. With the fight now concentrated around Squad Antiocles, the Devastators were more effective, blasting down the daemons before they could bring their weight of numbers to bear upon Antiocles. Sporadic bursts of fire from the retreating Tactical Marines added to the effect, and for a short period the number of daemons entering the square did not increase.

Messinius tarried a moment, rounding up more of the humans who were either too embattled or deaf to his orders to get out. He reached three still firing over the parapet’s edge and pulled them away. A daemon reared over the parapet and he crushed its skull, but a second leapt up and cleaved hard into his fist, and power fled the weapon. Messinius pumped three bolts into its neck, decapitating it. He moved back.

His power fist was ruined. The daemon’s cut had sliced right through the ceramite, breaking the power field generator and most of the weapon’s strength-boosting apparatus, making it a dead weight. He said a quick thanks to the machine’s departed spirit and smashed the top of his bolt pistol against the quick seal release, at the same time disengaging the power feeds by way of neural link. The clamps holding the power fist to his upper arm came loose and it slid to the floor with a clang, leaving his right arm clad in his standard ceramite gauntlet. A century together. A fine weapon. He had no time to mourn it.

‘Fall back!’ he shouted. ‘Fall back to the Penitent’s Arch!’

He slammed a fresh clip into his bolt pistol. Squad Antiocles were being pushed back. The Devastators walked their fire closer in to the combat. A heavy bolter blasted half a dozen daemons into stinking meat. A missile blew, lifting more into the air. Messinius fell back himself now, leaving it to the last moment before ordering the Assault Marines to leap from the fray. Their jets ignited, driving back the daemons with washes of flame, and they lifted up over his head, leaving four of their brothers dead on the ground. Devastator fire hammered down from above. Anti-personnel weapons set into casemates and swivel turrets on the walls joined in, but the daemons mounted higher and higher in a wave of red that flooded over the parapet.

‘Run!’ he shouted at the straggling human soldiery. ‘Run and survive! Your service is not yet done!’

The Penitent’s Arch led from the square onto a wall walk that curved around to another layer of defences. His Space Marines were already making a firing line across the entrance. A gate could be extended across the arch, sealing the walk from the square, but Messinius refrained from requesting it be closed, as the humans were still streaming past the Adeptus Astartes. Kryvesh waved the banner, whirling it through the air to attract the terrified mortals. The Space Marines fired constantly into the mass of daemons sprinting after them, exhausting their ammunition supplies. Shattered false bodies tumbled down, shot from the front and above, yet still they came, overtaking and dismembering the last warriors fleeing away from the parapet.

Squad Antiocles roared through the arch, landing behind their brethren. Messinius passed between them. For a moment he surveyed the tide of coming fury. Endless red-skinned monsters filling the square like a lake of spilled blood, washing over a score of brightly armoured Space Marine corpses left behind in the retreat. Several hundred humans lay alongside them.

He opened a vox-channel to Gate Command.

‘Wall batteries three-seven-three through three-seven-six, target sector nine five eighty-three, Penitent’s Square, western edge. Five-minute bombardment.’

‘On whose order?’

‘Captain Vitrian Messinius, White Consuls Chapter, Tenth Company. I have the primarch’s authority.’ As he dealt with gunnery control, he was also datapulsing a request for resupply, and checking through layered data screeds.

‘Voice print and signum ident match. Transponder codes valid. We obey.’

The far side of the square erupted in a wall of flame. Heavy cannon shells detonated in a string along the rampart. High-energy beams sliced into the square, turning stone and metal instantly to superheated gas. The approaching daemons were annihilated. A few bolt-rounds cracked off as the last daemons nearing the Space Marine line were put down.

‘Company, cease fire. Conserve ammunition.’ Nobody heard him. Nobody could. He re-sent the order via vox-script. The boltguns cut out.

Penitent’s Square was a cauldron of fire so intense he could feel the heat through his battleplate’s ceramite. The ground shook under his feet and he considered the possibility that the wall would give way. The noise was so all-consuming the idea of speech lost relevance. For five minutes the Lion’s Gate tore madly at its own hide, ripping out chunks of itself in a bid to scrape free the parasites infesting its fabric, then, as suddenly as it had begun, the bombardment ceased.

Where the Penitent’s Square had been, a twisted mass of black metal and shattered stone remained. So formidable were the defences of the Lion’s Gate that the structure beneath had not been penetrated, but it was like this, in small bursts of destruction, that they could lose this war.

Messinius accessed the gate’s noosphere. No daemons had as yet rounded the projecting Penitent’s Spur to come up against their new position. When the attack came again, which it would, it would come from the front.

An ammunition train raced down the walkway from the fortress interior and came to a squealing stop fifty yards away. Medicae personnel jumped down. A Space Marine Apothecary came with them. Human peons rushed about with heavy sack bags full of bolter magazines, passing them out to the transhumans. Spent magazines clattered to the floor. New ones were slammed home. Messinius contacted his squad leaders, taking a quick census of his surviving men, not trusting the digits that read ‘Company Casualties 23%’ blinking in the upper right of his visual field.

Through the smoke given off by burning metal on the far side of the ruined square, he saw movement. Auspex returns tripped his armour’s machine-spirit, and it blinked warnings in his helm.

<threat detected.>

‘They’re coming again,’ he said.

‘My lord?’ A soft voice, one that did not belong in that moment. He ignored it.

‘Engage at fifty-yard range. Make every shot count.’

The ammunition train was hurriedly relieved of their allotted supplies, and sped off, bearing the worst-wounded, to aid whichever beleaguered unit needed it next.

‘Stand ready.’

‘My lord?’ The voice became more insistent.

The voidships in orbit were beginning to fire. Their targeting systems were perturbed by the boiling warp energy and the vortex in constant motion over the Imperial Palace, and many shots went wide, crashing down into the Anterior Barbican, a few falling as far out as Magnifican.

Red monsters bounded towards them, as numerous as before, as if their efforts to thin them had been for naught.

‘Fire,’ he said coldly.

‘My lord, your duty rotation begins in half an hour. You told me to wake you.’

This time he heard. Bolters boomed. Messinius froze them with a thought, and with another he shut down the hypnomat entirely.

Vitrian Messinius awoke groggily.

‘My lord,’ his servant said. Selwin, he was called. ‘You are returned from your recollections?’

‘I am awake, Selwin, yes,’ Messinius said irritably. His mouth was dry. He wanted to be left alone.

‘Shall I?’ Selwin gestured to the hypnomat.

Messinius nodded and rubbed his face. It felt numb. Selwin flicked a number of toggles on the hypnomat and it powered down, the steady glow of its innards fading to nothing and winking out, taking the immediacy of Messinius’ memories with it.

‘The wall again?’ Selwin asked.

The hypnomat’s primary use was to instil knowledge without active learning on the subject’s part, but it could reawaken memories to be lived again. Full immersion in the hypnomat required cooperation from Messinius’ catalepsean node, and coming out of the half-sleep was never as easy as true waking. Reliving past events dulled his wits. Messinius reminded himself to be guarded. He forgot sometimes that he was not on Sabatine any more. The local saying ‘This is Terra’ encompassed a multitude of sins. Spying was among them.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Personal debriefing.’ He shook his head and unplugged the hypnomat’s input cables from the neural ports set into his arms and neck. ‘Nothing new learned.’

Selwin nodded, then hesitantly said, ‘If I may be so bold as to ask, why do it, my lord, if you expect to learn nothing?’

‘Because I can always be wrong,’ Messinius said. He pointed at the hypnomat. It was a bulky machine set on a trolley, but not too big for an unaltered man to move. ‘Take that away. Inform my armourer I will be with him in a few minutes.’

Selwin bowed. ‘Already done, my lord.’

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