++ALL CHANNELS EMERGENCY BROADCAST – PRIORITY CODE ALPHA-I TO ALL SHIPS WITHIN THE VERIDIAN SYSTEM++

 	++IDENT: Ultramarines battle-barge Constellation of Tarmus, tethered at high anchor over Calth++

 	++TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS++

 	This is Brother-Captain Ruben Indusio of the XIII Legion. We have suffered a catastrophic systems failure. Requesting immediate assistance. We have zero reactor capability, no weapons, no auspex. Please confirm, greenskin presence? We saw noth-

 	Who’s firing? Vox-master, open a link to the orbital. I need shields now, damn it.

 	[Detonation, followed by severe signal distortion]

 	Throne, the Sons of Ultramar! They’re gone. We’re trapped. Cut the docking lines, you damned fool! Cut them or we die here and now.

 	Brothers of the XVII Legion, cease fire! In the name of the Emperor, this is a mistake! You’ve made a mis-

 	[Transmission terminated at Calth mark: -0.17.13]

 	++END TRANSCRIPT++

It started during his second week below ground.

 	Jassiq Blanchot was on digging duty. He was nearing the end of his shift. The ache in his limbs from hauling collapsed rock was so constant, so enveloping, that his arms and legs didn’t seem to belong to him anymore. For six hours, his work detail had chipped at the cave-in, dragging away hundreds of kilos of stone. The large chamber to the rear was filling up with debris, but the collapse was intractable. He could easily believe that the barrier went on forever. Still, he kept working. He loaded up a makeshift sled – just a plasteel door and rope – and began dragging it away from the dig. The rope worked deeper grooves into his neck and shoulders.

 	He leaned forward into his burden. As he was reaching the storage chamber, he crossed paths with Narya Mellisen. The lieutenant from the Numinus 61st Infantry was taking her empty sled back for another load.

 	‘You lead a charmed life,’ she said.

 	He stopped, brought up short. He’d just been thinking dark thoughts about eternity.

 	He was trapped in an underground arcology along with hundreds of other refugees. Over half the system had collapsed, hammered by the earth-shaking blows of the war on the surface, except ‘war’ was really too weak a word. ‘Cataclysm’ was closer to the truth. Could a simple war turn the universe upside down, and shatter his every taken-for-granted conception of how reality worked? He didn’t think so. That was what cataclysms did.

 	So there was the little matter of soul-deep trauma added to the overcrowding, the shortage of basic supplies, the isolation from the rest of Calth’s subterranean network, and the absence of any communication from the outside world since the warning voxed by Captain Ventanus of the Ultramarines. The surface of Calth was now being scoured by its agonised sun. Survival meant staying underground indefinitely – underground was where the war now raged – but it also meant escaping this particular arcology by somehow digging through who-knew-how-many thousands of metres of blocked tunnel. Blanchot was becoming quite comfortable with cataclysm.

 	A charmed life? Was Mellisen trying to be funny?

 	She didn’t strike him as the joking sort. Her face was streaked with sweat and grime. A long burn from glancing las-fire ran from right cheek to temple. Her eyes, a pale green, were serious. They were not laughing. They didn’t seem hopeless, though, either.

 	‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ Blanchot said. He ran a ragged sleeve over his brow. The cloth came away soaked.

 	‘I heard that you were on Veridius Maxim.’

 	Yes, he had been there. He had been there to see the Word Bearers cruisers Annunciation and Gospel of Steel, and the heavier Vox Finalis move up to bracket the fort. They unleashed an interlacing web of lance and destructor-cannon fire so dense, so cont-inuous, that it was as if the star fort were caught in the birth of a star. Retaliatory fire was a brief, pointless flare of impotent anger. Death had come quickly to the fort, the implosion of its core unleashing, in turn, a nova outburst of agony, searing the void with a terminal cry. Precious few shuttles and salvation pods were launched before the end. Many of them were vaporised by the fort’s destruction. XVII Legion fighters descended upon the others, predators striking at weak prey.

 	Blanchot’s shuttle made it through. His impression of the flight from the star fort was a smear of end-times fragments. He had no memory of conscious, rational thought from the moment of the attack to the terrible arrival on the surface of Calth. What he retained, instead, were jagged shards of sense impressions. The bone-rattling shaking of the craft, which tested the limits of the g-force webbing’s strength. The shriek of threat klaxons. The light and flame of the terrible revelation that so modestly called itself ‘war.’

 	The hunters had caught up with the shuttle in the upper atmosphere. Blanchot had one clear memory of that event. He saw, through a viewing block, the shuttle’s port wing sheared off by cannon shells. For a moment, the craft continued its controlled descent. Then it tumbled into a crazy, cartwheeling spin. The terror of that plunge was so absolute that it flooded all of his senses with white noise. There were no concrete images he could grasp until after the impact.

 	He had become self-aware again when he was standing on a rocky plain a dozen metres from the smouldering wreckage of the shuttle. He was surrounded by blackened, twisted remains – some from the craft, many from his fellow passengers. He was the only survivor.

 	He did not know how he had emerged from the crash. He’d been thrown clear, he supposed, by the providence of blind luck. Thrown clear into a world of newborn bedlam. Before him was a storm of black smoke, fire and a monster’s skeleton as big as a mountain range. It was a sight so colossal, so hideous in its contortions of ruin, that it defied comprehension. It was simply destruction, the concept given form, and it made him scream. It would not be until much later that he would learn that he had been looking at the infernal grave of Kalkas Fortalice.

 	He had stumbled away, then, through a shattered landscape, beneath a flaming sky. There had been no purpose to his steps, no direction, and no hope. He had moved through vistas of devastation that he revisited now every time he closed his eyes. He doubted that he would every truly escape them. Somehow, the luck that had deemed he should witness nightmare after nightmare, had guided him to this arcology in the last moments before the solar rage had reached Calth.

 	So yes, he had been on Veridius Maxim.

 	‘That’s right,’ he said, simply.

 	‘And you’re alive.’

 	With that simple statement, she brought home the immensity of his good fortune. He felt ashamed of his despair. He had experienced horrors, but survived them all. He was, to his knowledge, the one remaining soul who could bear witness to the star fort’s tragedy. His continued existence was so improbable; it could be nothing less than a miracle. He should be grateful.

 	With a swelling heart, he realised that he was.

 	The joy surprised him into a response more frank than cautious. ‘I don’t know if “charmed” is the right word,’ he said, then caught himself, hoping he had sounded casual, nervous that he had not. He glanced around, but they were alone. The rest of the detail was at the barrier, thirty metres away. No one other than Mellisen would have heard him over the din of improvised digging tools.

 	The lieutenant’s gaze was serious, unwavering. ‘Blessed, then?’ she asked, reading him easily and reassuring him at the same time.

 	So she, too, followed the Lectitio Divinitatus. He nodded. ‘Blessed,’ he agreed. The missing time wasn’t inexplicable at all if he viewed his survival as miraculous.

 	Mellisen nodded. ‘Then if you were spared, you are here for a reason,’ she said. ‘Why would you be saved only to die a slow, futile death here?’

 	‘There would be no point in that.’

 	‘Exactly. You have a destiny that must exist beyond this blocked tunnel. And if you do, then I must believe that so do the rest of us. Your presence here gives us hope.’

 	‘Us?’

 	‘Those with eyes to see,’ she said, and smiled. When she did, the battle-scarred soldier vanished, replaced by a worshipful recipient of the God-Emperor’s light. ‘We aren’t alone.’ She clapped him on the shoulder. ‘And we are getting out.’

 	‘Yes,’ he said to her as she moved away, ‘we are.’

 	He started pulling his sled again, and it felt lighter. It was then, as he saw the first glimpse of a bright, possible future since the war had begun, that / dark and ready / it happened.

 	He blinked away the passing splinter of a thought, but then / a voice of razors, needles on bone / he heard the whisper. He stopped moving. Perhaps it had been an echo of the sled’s grind against the stone floor. Perhaps his imagination.

 	He had thought whisper, but that was wrong, surely. No whisper sounded like that. Still, he looked around the space of the chamber. The cold light of guttering lumen orbs played over the heaps of broken rock. There was no one here. A doorway on the other side of the chamber opened onto another tunnel leading back to the main body of what remained of the arcology.

 	The scream came next. It was a howl of despair, of anger, of frustration, and of unending agony. Insects crawled down Blanchot’s spine. His flesh puckered at a sudden cold. He held his breath, straining to hear past the deafening beat of his own heart, yet desperate to hear nothing at all.

 	His prayer was answered. The scream was not repeated.

 	After a minute, his heart stopped trying to batter its way out of his chest. Idiot, he thought. Alarmed by a scream. In this place of suffering, it tended to be more alarming when the screams stopped.

 	He’d been frightened by the acoustic travels of the pain of his fellow refugees. His cowardice shamed him.

 	So did his lack of feeling.

 	He decided to do penance by spending an hour after his shift helping Tal Verlun in the medicae centre. The designation was a label of necessity, not reality. The arcology was one of the oldest on Calth, and one of the smallest – though there had been extensive under-surface construction, large portions of the complex had made use of the pre-existing honeycomb of natural caverns. And though living quarters and support facilities had also been constructed, this particular arcology was not primarily a hab. It was an archive, a repository of the bureaucratic, administrative and technological minutiae that had poured out of Kalkas Fortalice and Numinus City, as inevitable a by-product of those centres’ existence as smoke from a fire. Records had to be kept, history had to be preserved, but preferably not piling up in the way of the production of more records and more history.

 	So the unwanted, yet precious, information was sent to this city-sized vault, where a skeleton staff of adepts managed the flow of arrivals and occasionally made abortive attempts to catalogue the infinite for the day when someone, anyone, would come, needing a very specific taxation entry from a decade ago. Blanchot had heard tales, in recent years, of a naive curator who had not only convinced himself that stored here was a goldmine of future exhibits for the Holophusikon, but had mounted a campaign as wrong-headed as it was obsessive to make his dream a reality.

 	That dream was ash and dust now. Ash from fires that had broken out across the arcology as the battles in Numinus City had brutalised the surface, and what lay below. Dust that would gather on records sealed off from human eyes forever.

 	The archive had never been designed as a shelter, and it did not have the strength to stand up to the tremors created by gods at war. Almost all of the newer zones had been destroyed, levels pancaking one on top of the other, annihilating everything that had been designed for habitation, including the original medicae facility. What remained were the caves and some of the tunnels that had been built to rationalise the warren of chambers. A few storage warehouses had survived, and there was food that might have seen a dozen people through the crisis. But not hundreds. There was an underground stream that flowed through one of the outlying caves. There was plenty of water, then, to ensure slow death by starvation. There were no beds, and the mountainous stacks of records took up so much space that there was barely room to stretch out and die.

 	The new medicae centre was a small cave just off the largest chamber. As a location, it worked: close to the greatest number of refugees, while allowing Verlun to create some measure of order as he tended the wounded, the sick and the dying. As an actual surgery, the space made very little sense. Iron boxes of records were stacked up along the walls, creating some room in the centre of the floor, where tables had been set up for the patients. All Verlun had for equipment was what he had carried in his pack, and that pack was the surgeon’s last connection to his regiment. His uniform was gone, as were the men who had been under his charge. Blanchot knew, from fragments of conversation between Mellisen and Verlun, that the surgeon wasn’t from the 61st. Beyond that, he didn’t know what the man had gone through before arriving here. His eyes held the recent past contained behind iron doors. Blanchot respected the need to keep it there.

 	Blanchot made his way through the main chamber towards Verlun’s domain. The records here had been removed altogether and burned, history erased to create a bit more space for the witnesses of Calth’s agony. The shelving that had filled the chamber had been torn apart to create benches and other ramshackle sticks of furniture. Blanchot had to pick his way over sprawled limbs with every step. People slept where they fell, exhausted. The lucky ones found a wall to lean against, and the very fortunate had corners in which to curl up, as if becoming a ball would protect them from the misery of the universe for just a little while longer. The stench was a clammy mix of unwashed bodies and the gathering filth of collective living on the sword-edge of desperation. The floor was sticky with blood lying over other patches now dry and darkened. Time had passed since the onset of war, yet there seemed to be no end to the parade of wounds inflicted on that first, awful day. That end must come, Blanchot knew. The injured would heal, or they would die, and that parade would be finished.

 	But disease – disease lurked in the shadows, and it marched closer with every day the refugees spent sealed in the arcology. The smell in this cave was its herald.

 	The closer Blanchot came to the medicae centre, the more ruined were the people he passed. To the right of the entrance were those who had seen Verlun. To the left were those who waited. The only difference between many of them was the presence of bandages. The medic’s supply of drugs had been exhausted a few hours into the first day, so the most he could do was bind wounds.

 	The chorus of groans greeted Blanchot as he approached. This was what he had heard earlier. Of course it was. It was the constant music of the refuge.

 	On his left, Blanchot saw a family group: a middle-aged couple and an old woman. The man’s shirt was soaked in blood, and the woman – his wife, Blanchot guessed – was cradling his head. His breathing was very shallow. The older woman sat behind them, propped up on one of the shelving benches, slumped against the cavern wall. Her eyes were open, favouring Blanchot with the unblinking, empty stare of the dead.

 	He thought of saying something to the other woman, but then the screams came again, no louder than before, still in the distance, and clearly not in this chamber. He looked around. No one else reacted. Either the people here were too deep in their own pain to notice, or they hadn’t heard. Blanchot swallowed, throat very dry, and hurried into the medicae centre.

 	There was an infantry trooper on the table. His right leg was shredded below the knee, bone fragments sticking out like ivory hooks. Verlun was trying to hold him still with the help of his volunteer assistant, Krudge. The trooper’s breathing and his cries were one and the same, an agonised, frantic, high-pitched wheeze. He thrashed, tugging his shattered leg out of Krudge’s grip. Blanchot stepped forward to hold the man’s thigh down while Krudge immobilised the patient.

 	Verlun nodded and picked up a chainsword. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the soldier. ‘It has to be done, and at least it will be quick.’

 	‘Please...’ the soldier began, but Verlun drowned him out with the growl of the weapon.

 	The amputation was quick but messy / whispered hisssssss of satisfaction / and Blanchot almost retched. He kept his grip and stared hard at Krudge. The other man appeared to have his attention focused on his task. Blanchot kept watching him while Verlun worked to staunch the now unconscious trooper’s bleeding.

 	‘Will he live?’ Krudge asked.

 	Verlun shrugged, exhausted. ‘Long enough to have made this worthwhile? I don’t know. Maybe.’ The medic was a veteran, grey of hair, now grey of face, too. His shoulders were stooped, as if bearing the weight of the entire refugee population. ‘Citizen Krudge,’ he said, ‘you’ve been here eight hours. Go get some rest. Adept Blanchot can help me now.’

 	‘What about you?’ Krudge grunted.

 	Verlun straightened up and gave his head a shake to throw off the fatigue. It seemed to work, as if declaring himself refreshed made it so. ‘I’m fine for a bit longer, thank you.’

 	Krudge nodded to them both and limped out of the chamber. Blanchot wasn’t sorry to see him go. The man disturbed him. Krudge looked old. Whether he was as ancient as he seemed, or simply aged by manufactorum labour, Blanchot didn’t know. His face was cracked and weathered, like leather hide that was falling apart. At some point in the past, he had lost his left eye. The socket was covered over with a rusting metal plate. Scar tissue crept from beneath it all the way down to his cheek. His hair was long, sparse and fine, and the grey of oil-stained rockcrete. His mouth was an ugly, lopsided slash that dropped open on the right side. His legs were different lengths. So were his arms, though they were both long. His mere presence put Blanchot on edge. Even so, Blanchot didn’t think it was Krudge who had snake-whispered to him as the blade had bitten down.

 	‘Who’s next?’ Verlun asked, snapping him back to the moment.

 	‘Uh...’ he cleared his throat. ‘There’s a man with a chest wound. I think he’s still alive, but there’s a lot of blood.’

 	‘No,’ Verlun said. ‘Pointless.’

 	‘His wife is holding him, and they have an old woman sitting with them, and... and she’s dead, and I thought–’

 	Verlun cut him off. ‘Unfortunate. But I can’t waste my time on someone I know is going to die on my table. It will be over for him soon, and that will be a mercy. Find me someone I might be able to save.’

 	‘All right,’ Blanchot answered, but didn’t move right away. His mind was already chasing screams and whispers again. Screams and whispers heard by no one else.

 	‘What is it?’ Verlun asked.

 	Blanchot took a breath. ‘I’m hearing things that aren’t there,’ he said. ‘I think I’m seeing some, too.’

 	‘Is that right?’ Verlun sounded irritated rather than concerned. ‘Movement in the corner of your eyes, sounds that you can’t quite make out?’

 	‘A bit like that, but–’

 	‘And when was the last time you had more than a couple of hours’ sleep?’

 	It took Blanchot a moment to work out the answer. He had last slept in his own bed the night before the attack began. ‘I don’t really know,’ he said.

 	‘I’d be more worried if you weren’t hallucinating. Get some sleep when you can, but first make yourself useful instead of a nuisance, yes?’

 	He did his best. He spent the next hour engaged in crude triage, dragging in the wounded who looked like they might benefit from Verlun’s efforts, and cleaning up the spilled blood. Then he wandered through the communal caverns until he found a bare patch of floor. He slept / the darkness physical, a muscle and wave, a tide of flesh, rippling with strength / and awoke, sweating. Trembling.

 	He was tempted to go back to Verlun, ask him if it was unusual for hallucinations to follow people into their dreams. But he could imagine how the conversation would go. You saw the same thing? Well, no, not exactly. What did you see? It’s hard to describe. And the whispering? What’s being said? I don’t know. I can’t make it out.

 	Diagnosis? Stop wasting my time.

 	So he did the right thing. He did not see Verlun. He spent a couple of hours helping to distribute rations, and then he was back at the dig. Krudge was working there too. He nodded to Blanchot, who managed to return the gesture, but only just. It was not, he told himself, simply Krudge’s deformities that bothered him. There was something wrong with the man at a deeper level.

 	To his dismay, Krudge was on the tunnel detail with him again the next day, and the next. It was then, midway through that third shift, with the rubble still unmoving – still infinite – that Blanchot realised Krudge had something to do with the whispering.

 	He cursed himself for a fool, for having taken so long to see what was going on. Every time he heard the whispers, Krudge was somewhere nearby. He never saw the labourer speak the twisted, sibilant sounds. The screams had died away but the whispers were now his constant companions, always close, but never there, always just around the corner, behind a door, in the next cavern. The same with Krudge, at those moments: not far, but ever present.

 	The craven way the man went about his campaign was contemptible. Blanchot didn’t know if he was speaking with anyone else, or engaged in malevolent prayer – it was hard to tell if it was one voice or several. The echoes and syllables / prey, everywhere prey / twined around each other, overlapping, repeating, building into a choir and then falling back to a lone, barely audible maggot of sound. But he was hearing more all the time, and he was hearing more clearly. The whispering wasn’t just a rasp reaching into his ear and his soul like a gnarled finger of ice. The syllables were becoming more distinct. They were coalescing / meat for the teeth, blood for the claws, bones for the truth / into words, phrases. The terror he had first felt at the sounds was now joined by the horror of their meaning.

 	And there were other words. At least, he thought they were words. He didn’t understand them. They couldn’t have come from his mind. They were beyond alien. The mere sound of them drove a spike through the centre of his forehead. He didn’t know what they meant, and for that he was grateful. To understand those words, he was sure, would be to fall into madness.

 	There was one consolation. He knew, now, that he wasn’t hallucinating the whispers. He was incapable, at any level, of imagining / taste the worship of their little god-king, it grows and spreads and feeds us, yes yes let him be a god, smash the rational, plunge them into the dark / such blasphemies.

 	The situation was clear. Krudge was in league with forces inimical to the divine God-Emperor. He was working to bring death and ruin to the arcology, just as those forces had done to Calth.

 	He had to be stopped.

 	Major Devayne did not have a headquarters as such. But, as the senior officer in the arcology, with responsibility for all the lives within it falling to him, he needed a location where people could have a reasonable expectation of finding him. He had chosen the chamber adjacent to where the debris from the exit tunnel was being dumped, where the dig teams mustered. This put him close to the most vital operation in the arcology. If it failed, everything else became futile.

 	He had dozens of kilometres of tunnels and caverns to oversee, but Blanchot knew that if he waited long enough, Devayne would show up here. So he waited.

 	About two hours later, the major arrived. He was Verlun’s age, but carried his years and his fatigue with greater vigour. His posture and the lines of his movement were so precise that it was as if he had been assembled by a carpenter. He gave the impression that his uniform, as torn and stained as everyone else’s clothing, was still pressed and parade-worthy. While most of the other men in the refuge wore several days of stubble, he was clean-shaven.

 	Exhaustion had hardened his eyes into flints, and his expression was cold when Blanchot walked up to him. The adept understood: Devayne saw only a man who had been standing here, doing nothing. Idleness wasn’t a luxury in the arcology. It was treason.

 	Blanchot’s nerve wavered. He almost said nothing. But then Narya Mellisen entered the chamber from the side leading towards the cave-in, and the presence of another believer gave him the strength he needed.

 	He told Devayne everything. He tried to do so calmly, but he was so conscious of the man’s impatience that the words came in a torrent.

 	He sounded ridiculous.

 	Devayne did him the courtesy of looking to Mellisen for any sort of confirmation. ‘Have you heard these whispers, too?’

 	‘No, sir.’

 	‘And you’ve worked many of the same shifts as both men.’

 	‘Yes, sir.’

 	He turned back to Blanchot. ‘I don’t suppose a single other person heard any–’

 	‘They couldn’t have,’ Blanchot tried to explain, and heard himself making things even worse. ‘Except for once in the medicae centre, there has never been anyone else close by when they’ve been going on.’

 	‘I see.’ Devayne’s lip curled. He was about to dismiss a nuisance. ‘I hesitate to ask, but why do you suppose that is?’

 	‘I–’ Blanchot stammered. ‘I think Lassar Krudge knows I suspect him, and he’s taunting me.’

 	Devayne rolled his eyes. ‘Adept Blanchot,’ he said, turning each carefully enunciated syllable into the snap of a whip, ‘I would not be surprised to learn that there were traitors among us. Given the events that drove us to this location, there is very little that can still surprise me. But you are describing a conspiracy so ineffective, so trivial, I dearly wish you were right. We would be facing an enemy so incompetent that the war would already be over. But it isn’t, and if you take up another minute of my time, I’ll have you arrested.’

 	He was about to say something else, but then he cocked his head, listening to the vox-bead in his ear. The garbled, scratchy sounds made Blanchot’s skin crawl. They were too much like whispers.

 	Devayne touched the bead. ‘I’ll be right there,’ he said. He pointed at Blanchot. ‘Enough from you,’ he said, and turned to Mellisen. ‘Lieutenant, we’re needed at the medicae chamber.’

 	‘Sir.’

 	She gave Blanchot a sympathetic look as she began to follow the major.

 	Blanchot’s shoulders slumped under the weight of despair and anxiety. Then / a big kill, a worthy sacrifice, now, now, now, he does it now / the whisper shot across the room, strong / hhhhhiiihhhhhh / as pitiless laughter.

 	‘Stop!’ Blanchot pleaded, both to the voice and to the officers, but Devayne disappeared down the tunnel toward the main cavern. Mellisen hesitated, and Blanchot ran to her. ‘Something terrible is about to happen!’

 	‘Where?’

 	He didn’t know. ‘I heard it again,’ he said. ‘Just now. I don’t know how. I was wrong before. I see that. I can’t have been hearing people speaking. But the voices are real, lieutenant. I swear it on the book we both hold dear. You said my survival must have a purpose. This must be it. I have been blessed to hear these things so we can act against them.’ The words tumbled from him without forethought, but he knew them to be true. He spoke with the conviction of faith, and the urgency of prophecy.

 	There was uncertainty in Mellisen’s eyes, but he could tell that she wanted to believe. ‘Act how?’ she said. ‘You don’t know where the attack will occur.’

 	She was right. He wanted to weep. His vision blurred / a flash, limbs everywhere, a fanged smile the size of anguish / and in that blur, the truth became clear. ‘An explosion,’ he said.

 	Blood drained from Mellisen’s face. ‘The dig,’ she said.

 	Of course. A bomb planted there – triggering a second collapse – would be a death sentence for every soul in the arcology. Mellisen ran back to the cave-in and he took off after Devayne. That has to be it, he thought. We’ll stop it.

 	Yet doubt ate at the base of his fervour. There was something wrong with the answer. It had come from Mellisen, not him. It had the ring of logic, not revelation.

 	Devayne’s strides had carried him far. He had just reached the main cavern when Blanchot caught up with him. ‘Major,’ he began.

 	The officer gave him a murderous look and did not break his stride. Ahead of them, Verlun waited at the entrance to the medicae centre. Devayne moved through the chamber as though the floor were clear of the sleeping, the weeping, the groaning, the wounded and the dying. Blanchot stumbled as he tried to keep up.

 	‘Out of my sight,’ Devayne ordered.

 	‘You don’t understand,’ Blanchot tried again, but then stopped dead in the middle of the cave. He gasped as / intake of breath, hissing with eagerness, a world-eating serpent about to strike / he felt something rejoice in the moment. He saw that Verlun had suddenly crouched, curled tight in his doorway. The medic was laughing, and it was the ugliest sound Blanchot had ever heard a human being make.

 	There were a dozen explosions. They were almost simultaneous, two demolition charges and a cluster of frag grenades, concealed under wrecked shelving and discarded crates along the perimeter of the cavern, projecting their force and shrapnel inward. Another frag went off at Devayne’s feet. The major vanished in a mist of blood.

 	Blanchot was slammed to the ground. The huge cave was suddenly a confined space, filled with thunder, fire, slashing metal and wind like a fist. Light flared behind his eyes, and then there was darkness filled with the thunder of tonnes of falling rock, a shrieking rumble that buried the screams of the victims.

 	There was what seemed like an eye-blink of oblivion. It must have been longer, because when Blanchot opened his eyes, there were no sounds of ongoing collapse. He heard muffled voices, some yelling, some screaming. He could see nothing. He was lying on his back, pressed down onto the rock by a soft weight. It was warm, too, and wet. The liquid dribbled into his open mouth.

 	It was blood. He was buried under the bodies of the murdered.

 	He panicked. He clawed at slabs of butchered meat. He couldn’t push them away. They were held in place by a greater, immovable weight. There had been a collapse, he realised. He was trapped in a grave of stone and flesh. He tried to scream, but choked on a mouthful of bloody grit. He struggled harder, mewling, reason evaporating in the blast of claustrophobic horror. His fingers hooked into claws as they dug for purchase in the yielding, cooling flesh. They tangled in ripped clothing, tore into muscle. Blanchot felt like he was trying to swim in a quagmire of meat and blood. His mewling turned into a rasping whine.

 	But then the dead weight of flesh shifted. In tiny increments, he pulled it away from his face. He heard rock shifting. The rubble above him moved, but did not crush him. At last he could breathe properly, and at last he could scream.

 	His hands encountered dirt and stone. He dug and pushed, and the rubble moved just enough to let him change position. Perhaps that was an illusion of progress, but he grasped it, the sliver of hope restoring a sliver of sanity. He fought against the fallen rock, and it shifted again, and he could move again, and now he was beginning to crawl. He didn’t know if he was going in the right direction. In the absolute dark, the only sounds were his shrieks and the muttered grinding of settling rubble.

 	He fought with his tomb, feeling his hands tear and bleed. Wherever he felt something give, that was where he went. He told himself he was getting out. ‘Just a bit more,’ he whispered. ‘Just a bit more. Just a bit more.’ He needed the litany. It was the only thing that kept the image of the never-ending dig in the exit tunnel from his mind. It kept him from descending into howling despair when he struggled through more crushed bodies.

 	The despair came for him anyway. It was stronger than he, and it reached out for him.

 	Then, as he began to fall into its embrace, the miracle happened. He heard voices other than his own. He heard shouts, muffled but real. He heard the sounds of other hands pulling rocks away. He called out. He shouted with real hope.

 	And he was answered.

 	It was still hours before the rescue party hauled him out. He emerged into a dimness as welcome as daylight. Mellisen helped him to his feet. Reborn, slicked in the blood of many, he looked around at the shattered chamber. Dangling lumen strips and a few guttering fires provided a ghostly illumination through the still-hovering dust. The cavern had not collapsed, though large chunks of the ceiling had come away, dropping slabs of rockcrete and natural limestone down from the structural supports above. In the centre of the space there was a hill of jagged rock, rising halfway to the new vault. He was standing shakily at its base.

 	‘How many survivors?’ he asked Mellisen.

 	‘Only you,’ she answered.

 	There was something strange in the lieutenant’s voice. It was in her eyes, too, which he could see shining even in the wavering light of the cavern. At first, Blanchot didn’t know what this thing was. Then he realised it burned in the eyes of all the rescue party members as they gazed at him.

 	It was reverence.

 	The truth of yet another miracle jolted him. He had been standing only a couple of paces from the grenade that had disintegrated Devayne. He had been buried under tonnes of rock. He was bruised and cut, but in every important way, he was unharmed.

 	He shivered, feeling the touch of revelation. How many times had he cheated certain death since the war had begun? Could he really pretend that there was no purpose in his survival? No, he could not. He had been singled out for some special task by the will of the God-Emperor. Mellisen and the others understood this. Now, so did he.

 	But what was his purpose?

 	The answer came a few minutes later. He was washing away the blood with a rag Mellisen had handed him. The crowd was growing larger as word spread through the arcology of the man with the charmed life. The blessed life. Mellisen told him, ‘You knew this was going to happen.’

 	‘This?’

 	‘The attack. You knew there was a betrayer in our midst. You heard the whispers of treachery.’ She spoke softly, but her voice carried far over the awed silence of the crowd.

 	‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Yes, I did.’ His role in the destiny of the Imperium took shape before him. What he saw made him shake with excitement and coursing adrenaline. He understood the truth of his terrifying visions. He understood why he had to suffer the whispering corrosion. It was given to him to know the enemy.

 	Mellisen was still looking at him. So were the others. They were all waiting for him, he realised. They were waiting for guidance.

 	‘Is it over, then?’ Mellisen asked.

 	No. It was not. Behind Mellisen, in the doorway leading back towards the dig, Krudge stood. He was not much more than a silhouette in the dim light, but Blanchot knew that distorted figure. ‘Him!’ he shouted, stretching out his arm as if he could grab Krudge himself. ‘He’s part of it!’ Then a word rose to his lips, unbidden, foreign to his life until now, yet so perfect, so completely true.

 	‘Heretic!’ he screamed.

 	He didn’t have to do more than that. The people scrambled after Krudge, pouring into the tunnel like a river bursting a dam and plunging into a channel long denied. Krudge fled, and Blanchot and Mellisen were swept up in the current.

 	Blanchot kept losing sight of the fleeing man. He ran faster. The tunnel took a sharp turn to the right. Blanchot came around it, and straight into a milling, confused crowd.

 	Krudge had vanished.

 	‘He went in there,’ someone said, pointing up. A ventilation grille hung from an opening in the wall just below the ceiling. The hole was wide enough for a man to fit through, if the man was desperate enough. No one here seemed as desperate to follow Krudge as he had been to escape. The arcology’s ventilation system was an even more haphazard construction than the main network of caves itself. Shafts had been drilled, but there was also a tracery of fissures running from cavern to cavern. It had proven impossible to isolate one from the other. The result was a hugely inefficient network, one that was also a lethal rat’s warren.

 	‘Who’s going in after him?’ someone else asked.

 	‘No one,’ Mellisen answered. ‘If he’s crawling around in there, it’s only a matter of time before he picks the wrong path and gets stuck. If he wants to starve to death caught in a tight squeeze, let him.’

 	Blanchot nodded, thinking that Mellisen was right. Krudge hadn’t escaped. He had opted for a slower execution.

 	‘Is that it, then?’ Mellisen asked. ‘Is it over?’

 	There was no whispering coming from Krudge now. The cost had been high, but the treasonous conspiracy had been crushed. ‘Yes,’ Blanchot said. Trapped underground, covered in blood, unsure if he would ever see the light of day again, he had never been more proud.

 	And yet...

 	There was the aftermath of the bombing, and the discovery that Verlun had planted explosives in more than one cavern. They had all gone off at the same moment. One of the major living quarters had utterly collapsed, killing everyone inside. The medic had also rigged incendiary devices that had destroyed the arcology’s cache of emergency rations. The food was gone. If the exit tunnel was not opened up in the next few days, it would never be opened at all.

 	As those days fell into darkness, Blanchot felt his moment of triumph slipping away, its meaning turning to dust. The doubts crept back. Mellisen’s belief in his divine mission was unwavering, and through her it spread like a grass fire amongst people desperate for hope. She insisted that Blanchot keep to Devayne’s former haunt when he wasn’t working on the dig. He was important, and, as with Devayne before and herself now, he should be where he could be found. He was living his moment of glory.

 	It frightened him. He would accept his duty, if only he knew what it truly was. Perhaps it was over. He had issued the warning. But he had understood it too late.

 	This was what he believed when he finally curled up in a corner of the chamber, next to some broken digging equipment. The sound of the work at the cave-in was no more than a distant clamour, and he fell asleep within seconds. His dreams were disturbing, but they were the expected nightmares of shredded bodies and waves of blood.

 	He woke with a gasp, and / the strength of darkness reaching in from the walls, stone no barrier to the slayer of reality, and the tides of black sweeping through, devouring, jaws opening to reveal stars within, the maw of the universe coming for all / his illusions died, hammered to bloody shards by the force of the visions, images that now blinded him to the real world while they unveiled their parade of horrors. He moaned in terror, but he couldn’t hear his own voice because / the faithful servant of the path, he did well, yes yes yesssssss, we accept that sacrifice, but we have more to do, the work is just beginning / the whispers were back. Louder. More mocking. The words were perfectly clear now, if not their meaning.

 	Some of those words could not be spoken by humans. They could not be spoken by anything from this plane of reality. They were chanted by something with more than one mouth. Their letters were bones and glass, their syllables corruption and doom. When he heard them, Blanchot tried to scream, but he choked instead, his mouth filling with blood.

 	Mellisen found him there. He couldn’t stand without her help. Shifts at the dig changed while she walked him slowly back and forth until he found his footing and his breath again. He wiped the blood from his chin, aware of the looks he was getting. Mellisen waited until he had a measure of composure before questioning him.

 	‘There are more of them, aren’t there?’

 	‘Yes.’ He had to resist checking over his shoulder and peering into shadows. ‘There must be many more. I can hear them so clearly. I can see...’ He still didn’t know / python-black, dragon void / what he was seeing. The visions had to be symbolic. He shut down any thought that began to consider the alternative.

 	Symbols, then. Metaphors of coming catastrophe. Prophecies and warnings of what would come if he did not use his gift. The God-Emperor had blessed him with this perception and this duty. He must not lay this burden down.

 	‘Do you know who they are?’ she asked, gently.

 	‘No.’ So many faces in the refuge, all of them blurring together in a uniformity of filth, exhaustion, misery and despair.

 	Mellisen cursed. ‘What would you have me do, then? If Verlun was a traitor, anyone could be. How do we stop them?’

 	‘I’ll know,’ he said, speaking and realising the answer at the same moment. ‘They can’t hide their nature from me. Not now.’ The taste of blood in his mouth was a testament to his gift’s rising power. ‘I’ll see and hear who they really are.’

 	‘All right,’ Mellisen said after a minute. ‘All right. Then come with me. We’ll make a tour of inspection.’

 	They began with the exit tunnel, the site of the last ember of hope, and so of their greatest vulnerability. Blanchot stumbled as they approached / black swallowing the rock, the tunnel a drop into the hungry void, the rushing void, the void that was no void but a terrible presence, a thing whose being was the destruction / the work teams.

 	Once more, he couldn’t see the world in front of him. It was replaced by reality being ravaged by a thing he couldn’t name, couldn’t describe, and feared utterly. The visions did not last long, but they seemed to be growing in duration and intensity.

 	Mellisen caught him by the elbow, held him up. ‘What is it?’ she said. She was suddenly holding her laspistol. ‘Who is it?’

 	The whispers / he cannot see us, he looks and hears, but he cannot see us, he cannot see / arrived with the vision. They stayed. They were loud, mocking / small worship, hopeless worship, where is your god, boy, boy god, toy god / and came from all sides, but never in the direction he was looking. The words were nails and drums in his head. He held onto his concentration with slipping fingers. He was surrounded by hissing echoes that built upon one another, growing louder, prying deeper into his skull.

 	If he didn’t silence them, he was certain that his skull would split.

 	Blanchot stared at the people before him. All work had stopped. Everyone was staring back at him. Through the blood-pound behind his eyes, the faces lost definition, becoming a collection of abstracted expressions. Though he could no longer identify individuals, he could read their emotions as if they were signposts.

 	He saw belief. He saw hope. He saw a great deal of fear that blossomed the longer he looked at a single face. He saw scepticism, too.

 	No, he thought. That’s not what it is. Call it by its true name – unbelief.

 	In these desperate times, to deny the Emperor’s divinity was to turn away from him. There was no difference, then, between unbelief and treason. When Blanchot realised this, everything came easily. He began pointing. When he did, he read a surge of determination in the faces on either side of the people he singled out. Their belief in what he was, and in what he stood for – what they should all be standing for – hardened into diamond, and they expelled the accused from their ranks. Mellisen didn’t give them a chance to strike. She shot each one in the head. In a few seconds, there were four bodies on the ground, and the whispers had faded.

 	But they weren’t gone. They were scraping at the back of Blanchot’s mind, an abscess that would give him no rest until the purge was complete.

 	‘More?’ Mellisen asked.

 	‘Yes.’

 	She turned back to the dig team. ‘You’re sure about the others here?’

 	‘I am.’

 	There was a thrill in conferring grace. It felt like he was a direct conduit for the Emperor’s will. The pleasure he experienced in saving a life gave him the courage to admit that there had also been a rush when nothing more than a gesture on his part had ended lives. These were the realities of power. He must accept them. He must accept the power that was the necessary means to the ends of his duty.

 	Mellisen picked three of the strongest-looking members of the detail. ‘You’re with us,’ she told them. To Blanchot, she explained, ‘Word will get around to the traitors. They will fight back.’

 	‘Of course,’ Blanchot agreed.

 	They left the dig and headed back towards the main body of the arcology. Blanchot led the way, following the aural spoor of the whispers. The scratching mockery would grow loud in his ears and mind as he set foot in a cavern with more of the heretics. Then he passed judgement, and Mellisen’s laspistol did the rest. They purged chamber after chamber. Word of their march travelled before them. They encountered no resistance.

 	Mellisen didn’t have to conscript any further enforcers of justice. There were plenty of volunteers. And increasingly, they would reach a cavern to find that the guilty had already been identified and, sometimes, already beaten to death.

 	But even with so much of the arcology in ruins, there were still too many tunnels and caves, too many people, and not enough time. The whispering never stopped now. Blanchot felt a growing premonition of impending doom. Panic gnawed at the joy of duty fulfilled. The process was too slow. There were so many traitors. He didn’t understand how they could have infiltrated the shelter so quickly. But the devastation of Calth was proof of what the enemy could do.

 	Blanchot judged, and judged and judged, and still the whispering would not stop.

 	After twelve long hours, he had lost track of which caverns they had scoured, and which they had not. The whispers were becoming too insistent, the visions / closer and closer, the grasp of clawed night, smashing aside barriers and prayers, the terrible momentum of the unstoppable, the hunger of the night tearing bodies and souls and worlds / more frequent. Mellisen had to hold him up almost all the time now. His legs wouldn’t move properly. Each step was so beset / the slash, drawing blood, of a mind inhuman and vast, serpent coil, constrictor of light and hope / by the stabbing vistas / prey taken over an endless plain, the forever-land of bones and savage dying, madness given flesh and given force, devouring life, crunching its succulent skull / that his coordination fell apart, as if his body couldn’t remember what action it was taking from one moment to the next. What triumph he had felt earlier was leaking away. He was trying to hold back the tide, and he was beginning to drown.

 	Accompanied by a mob almost a hundred-strong, he and Mellisen moved through the ruined cavern. Blanchot wondered, hadn’t they been here already? He didn’t know. But people moved around, and by now the conspirators would be desperate to stay ahead of the hunting party. Exhausted, he looked at the hill of debris. ‘I can’t go on,’ he said to Mellisen.

 	‘We should rest,’ she agreed.

 	‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘There’s no time. We have to find them all. I’ll wait here.’ He pointed to the hill. ‘There are enough of us now.’ He winced as / hunger / a piercing virulence wracked his head. The blow was vision and shout, need and words. It was a prophecy / humanity a corpse, dangling, shredded, ribs exposed and broken by the crushing teeth of laughter, the corpse never released to peace, forever dancing to the wail of the cosmos, dead but agonised, no pain ever enough, no butchery ever enough to quench the thirst of the grinning rage / and it was a command. It was an assault. No, he thought, fighting back as best he could, but he barely knew what he was denying. As the intensity rose, the whispers became indistinguishable from visions. When the words were spoken in the language of the dark, it was all he could do not to scream.

 	He wiped blood / a drop a stream a torrent the deluge filling the galaxy the drowning that comes for all / from his nose. He found enough breath to speak to Mellisen again. ‘Split into teams,’ he said. ‘Cover more ground.’

 	‘Yes,’ said Mellisen. ‘We’ll bring everyone to you.’ She was concerned. ‘Will you be all right?’

 	He nodded. ‘Need to sit,’ he mumbled as he crawled up the rubble. Sharp edges of rockcrete cut the flesh of his hands and arms. He reached the top of the mound and collapsed, gasping. The whispers / listen listen listen listen lisssssssssssSSSSSS / sank their claws into his ears. They filled his head with / why hope, why reach for the sad and lifeless lie when there are greater lies, lies of majesty, the grandeur of absolute denial, the lie so magnificent that it tramples the real with its becoming-truth / poison. They were an endless round of hatred and chaos. Promises, rants, and seductions of blood / turn from the self-denying god, tear him down, break him into shards, taste the power of exultant betrayal / scrabbled over each other. Sentences broke apart / give me your mind your will your self your soul give me feast give me the waste of martyrs the capering never of dawn the roaring always of night-black blades / and devoured each other. Phrases lost all meaning / spider clutch of ripping flesh in bursting eye and sssssssliiiiiiiicccccccce the innocent with tooth of ending / except threat. But there were / dark-eye darkjaw darkclaw darkdown darkcall darkthought darksong darkgod darkgod darkgod DARKGOD / refrains, too. They were / soon soon soon oh the bloodtwist / the laughter of imminence. They were the smile / spineshatterkill / of a blade sawing through bone. Why, after all the good work of the day, were the whispers not dying down? Perhaps they were the voice of desperate evil lashing out as it died.

 	That had to be it. That, and they were proof of his growing power.

 	So was what happened next.

 	Mellisen and her expanding army fanned out through the arcology. They rounded up the population. An endless parade began under Blanchot’s eyes. This was a different sort of power. This was authority. He was sitting with his back against a slab of rock that jutted from the peak of the rubble heap, and it was as if he sprawled upon a broken throne.

 	He did not revel in the power. Through the mounting agony, he took a fragment of solace from the fact that he was no tyrant, that he was only doing what was right and necessary. Even that much came close to slipping from his grasp. The whispers gabbled with hysteria as the guilty were marched before him. He was horrified by how many people were involved in the conspiracy.

 	But what he felt didn’t matter. There was only the duty to stamp out the traitors.

 	He threw all that he had of strength and coherent thought into performing his task. The voices and the visions struck back, blinding him with / the walls of the real collapsing, an avalanche of reason and light smashed into crushing fragments, annihilating all that depended on them, and in their wake the darkness that moved and hissed, the dance of the murderous dreams / pain and monstrous sights. He saw little more than shapes going by, hearing only a vague din of protests and screams as he pointed and pointed and pointed, his hand palsied with pain and fury, and the executions filled the chamber with the clammy stench of blood and torn bodies.

 	He was the centre of a maelstrom of hatred, and in a moment of morbid irony he realised that his work – though it seemed like an eternity ago – as a shipping controller had prepared him for this trial. It had taught him the management of overwhelming levels of information and the making of instant decisions. Instead of guiding vessels in the void, he now guided souls, turning the guilty over to the black mercies of the innocent.

 	War-shattered and trapped, the people of the arcology loosed their passions and fears upon the traitors in their midst. They took revenge with fist and stone and blade, their fevered belief in Blanchot rising with every jab of his finger.

 	If he hadn’t been the agent of divine will, he would have recoiled in horror from the atrocities that surrounded him, and perhaps it was a blessing that the unseen enemy’s clawing of his ears and eyes and mind kept him from witnessing the worst of what was done at his behest.

 	But no matter how many criminals were found, no matter how many killed, the whispers / still whispers but whisper-howls, whisper-shrieks, whisper-roars, and the slithering approach of some great beast / grew in power.

 	Finally, with blood running from his eyes, from his ears, from his mouth, he screamed.

 	‘Enough!’

 	Mercy, or perhaps exhaustion, granted him a moment of oblivion. When he opened his eyes, the cavern was empty except for Mellisen. She sat at the base of the debris, watching him. The whispers were silent. He could see the real world again. His sigh of relief turned into a sob.

 	Mellisen stood. ‘Are you all right?’

 	He had to swallow a few times before his parched, lacerated throat let him speak. ‘I think so.’ He took in the litter of gore and body parts strewn throughout the rubble. Many of the dead were the victims of Verlun’s bombs, but it was easy to see that they had been joined by countless more.

 	‘How many?’ he asked.

 	She shook her head. ‘Too many. I stopped counting. I didn’t want to know.’

 	‘Where are the others?’

 	‘At the dig.’

 	‘All of them?’

 	‘Yes. There aren’t many of us true souls left. A few dozen perhaps.’ Her voice shrank to a murmur, as if shying away from the scale of the calamity. She looked down at the blood on her hands, then back up at him. ‘So?’ she asked. ‘Now is it over? Did we get them all?’

 	The blessed quiet. His heart swelled with hope. ‘I think–’ he began, and then the / slash the gibbering face of faith / silence ended. The whispers pounced upon him, raptors streaking to prey. They had been waiting for him to think them gone, so they might sink their talons in all the more deeply. Obscenity / life is a futile excrescence on the sublimity of Chaos, blind your tiny god, strike him down, he plays with your existence for his own purposes, you are nothing, he is nothing, everything is nothing / beat at him with huge wings, and his bludgeoned soul dragged his body down.

 	How could this be? How could the serpent voices be so loud? There was no one here but Mellisen and himself. There was no–

 	He froze. Realisation dawned, with a force to overpower the insinuations spreading like oil on water through his mind.

 	‘You,’ he gasped. He started down the slope towards her.

 	‘What?’ Mellisen said, the confusion and innocence of her words adding a knife-twist of mockery to the monstrousness of her betrayal.

 	‘It was always you,’ Blanchot said, horrified. Had he been doing her bidding all along? Had he been so short-sighted that he had delivered hundreds of unwitting sacrifices to her dark gods? No. Surely not. There had been no question as to the guilt of the people he had condemned. He had to believe that. Perhaps she had been getting rid of rival factions. Yes. There was a logic that would allow him to sleep, if that luxury ever came his way again. He stared at Mellisen with loathing. ‘Traitor,’ he hissed. ‘Heretic.’ Then, when he thought of how she must surely have savaged his mind, and of the powers she must have, he snarled, ‘Witch!’

 	‘Adept Blanchot!’ Mellisen warned him. ‘Stand down!’

 	He threw himself the rest of the way. She had combat training. He did not. She should have been able to make short work of him in that moment, but she seemed to be holding back. Instead of shooting him in mid-flight, she simply shrieked at him to stop.

 	He collided with her. They rolled together in the mire of death. He reached for her throat, but she kicked him away, scrambled backwards and stood, her laspistol drawn. This time, as he lunged, she did fire. That should have been the end of it – the experienced trooper killing the shipping controller who had never fought a day in his life.

 	But it wasn’t. Mellisen’s shot did not go wild. He saw the pistol flash, aimed squarely at his chest. Blanchot seemed to lose a fraction of a second / save this body / as though he had fallen into a momentary slumber. It was a tiny version of the vagueness that surrounded his survival of the death of the Veridius Maxim Star Fort. All he knew was that he was not hit. He was still flying at Mellisen, and she wore an expression of stunned shock.

 	Then he knocked the pistol from her grip, and had her by the neck.

 	She slammed her palms against his ears. Blood spurted from his mouth, and he understood that he should be down. He wasn’t. He was strong. He was the hand of justice, and he was not to be turned.

 	Movement in the ruined ceiling distracted him. He looked up. A face stared at him from above the debris: it took him a moment to recognise it as Krudge. Blanchot’s jaw dropped in surprise, and his grip loosened just enough for Mellisen to bring her elbows down on his forearms and break his hold. She rolled away as Krudge dropped from the fissures in the cavern roof, and he scuttled down the debris, more animal than human.

 	Blanchot turned to meet Krudge’s charge, but Mellisen kicked his legs out from under him. He fell backwards, and Mellisen held him down. Krudge raised a chunk of rock and brought it down at his head.

 	No. Blanchot’s soul cried out in despair at a duty left undone. Instinctively, he surrendered completely to the source of the strength that had taken him this far. Krudge’s rock was taking an age to complete its arc, all the time in the world for something to shift inside Blanchot. It squirmed like an eel, but it fit into his body like a hand / claw talon iron / in a glove.

 	Then / ahhhhhhhh, hello and farewell / the whisper smiled.

 	And Blanchot screamed.

 	He did not scream aloud. He no longer had that privilege. His body was no longer his. His mind screamed. It shrieked as he found himself in a prison he knew that he would never escape. It howled as it was smashed not by Krudge’s rock, but by the hard stone of truth. Blanchot saw now the truth of the whispers.

 	Always with you. Always the beat of your pulse.

 	The words were human, but they were borrowed. The voice was made of rotting dreams.

 	The thing in his body snapped out a hand and shattered Krudge’s rock to dust. Fingers splayed wide, and it grabbed Krudge’s face. It squeezed.

 	His mouth shut tight, his teeth splintering against each other, Krudge let out a rising whine of purest agony before the gripping hand crushed the front half of his skull to bloody pulp and bone shards.

 	Mellisen leapt back, but she wasn’t fast enough. No human could be. A single kick shattered her spine and sent her tumbling away to lie like a discarded rag doll in the rubble.

 	And then Blanchot was truly alone. He could still see through the eyes that had been his, but there was a writhing darkness at the periphery of his vision, the undulating blackness of night’s corruption. His body looked around the abattoir and smiled.

 	Work together. Kill together. As we did before.

 	The shade of a question was added to the tincture of Blanchot’s despair.

 	Remember, remember, flesh-dancer, your help to this traveller. Remember our words together.

 	They had not spoken. The thing was lying. Of this last shred of honour, he could be sure.

 	Words through the void, words from name to name, the flesh-dancer listening well on the dead-hope. On Veridius Maxim.

 	The enormity of it swept Blanchot up. He was carried by a monstrous wave as the memories surfaced and the pattern revealed itself. The wave was rushing him towards a mountain face. The words of the thing were irresistible – when it whispered, he understood it too well, and he saw then that the truth could be as dreadful as any lie.

 	Laughter slithering around the syllables of thought, the thing spoke the words it had uttered before, the words that had been its initial assault on Blanchot, the words that had been the act of his infection.

 	‘We have corrected vox failure, Veridius Maxim. Please respond.’

 	Blanchot had responded. He had spoken to what he had thought was a crew, and so let the thing complete its voyage of horror.

 	No. Not the crew, but this traveller. The darkness they had swallowed, and that had swallowed them. We spoke. I travel. In ships or along the links created by speech, it is all one to me. We spoke. You let me in. To Calth. To you. We have travelled far. We have travelled well.

 	The thing picked up Mellisen’s laspistol. A task to finish now. There will be visitors soon. More words. More travel.

 	It headed off in the direction of the dig.

 	Blanchot struggled. He fought for his body, and when that failed he fought to die. The traveller denied him both. It made him watch the final slaughter, and then it made him stare at the bodies for the three days it took before a rescue team from one of the other arcologies at last broke through the cave-in.

 	A squad of troopers entered, their uniforms grey beneath a layer of dust. With them was a single Ultramarines legionary officer.

 	The humans stared at the lone survivor. It had thrown away the laspistol and sat slumped in a position of carefully crafted despair. The giant warrior barely glanced at the Blanchot-thing, eyeing the bodies and already moving ahead, scanning for threats.

 	The thing’s eyes tracked the Space Marine.

 	Speak to me. 

 	An infantry sergeant squatted before it. ‘Are there other survivors?’ he asked.

 	The thing did not answer the human, but it did open its mouth.

 	‘The Campanile...’

 	The legionary froze at the ugly, croaking sound. His ferocious battle-helm turned.

 	Don’t speak to it! Blanchot’s mind howled. Kill it! Please! Please, please kill it! Kill it now! 

 	A clearing of the throat. A licking of the lips, and a crooked smile.

 	‘I let the Campanile in.’

 	The legionary was upon the traveller in a single stride. He picked it up by the neck. Blanchot’s hope flared that the massive gauntlet would now squeeze, crushing the unlife from the horrid thing. But instead the Space Marine spoke, rage blasting from the helm’s augmitter grille.

 	‘What did you say?’

 	The final dark was coming for Blanchot now, dragging him down into an infinite abyss of teeth and despair. And the screams. The screams returning in the full force of truth: the eternal screams of the crew of the Campanile.

 	His body kept grinning.

 	‘So pleased to finally speak with you, my lord,’ it said to the Legion warrior.

 	So very pleased.