SEVEN VIEWS OF UHLGUTH'S PASSING
Matthew Farrer

UHLGUTH SWIMS IN delirium and basks in the endless transforming tides that wash and storm out from the Great Wound. Uhlguth is powerful and precious, eternal and corroding and consuming and growing. Uhlguth is mighty. Uhlguth is insignificant. Uhlguth is in mourning.
Uhlguth's master has left it. From somewhere out beyond the reach of Uhlguth's awareness came a master for Uhlguth's master, a warlord whose bitter consciousness prickled at Uhlguth's senses like a hot needle. He was making a kind of war not seen in this place in many lifetimes, hammering all the little masters into a great mass and carrying his new struggle to some great outer place beyond Uhlguth's understanding. Uhlguth's beautiful master took all his warrior-children who rode Uhlguth's back through the eternal fever-storm, and followed the hot-souled little master away.
Uhlguth knows its own might, its own value. Other masters have tried to steal it before. Soon they will try again. Even now it can feel the first of the ambitious would-be masters trying to enchain it.
Uhlguth has never been alone before. Uhlguth misses its master. Uhlguth does not want a new master. Uhlguth wants its old master. Uhlguth knows what it has to do.

View the First: In The Throne Room
THE CHAMBER IS smaller than the orbit of an electron...
...except when it flickers out to light years in width at the touch of an observer's senses.
It is built of unbreakable stone and daemon-tusk ivory...
...except that when the observer looks away the place is nothing but giggling shadows and vacuum.
It is crowded with predatory shades and spite-twisted dream-things...
...but if the enthroned prince should ever lift his gaze he will see his hall full of nothing but solitude.
The creature perching on the back of the throne clicks its beak, shivering with amusement as echoes assemble the random sounds into coded meanings that twist and change. It is restive, longing to caper in immaterial storms with its kin, but its master's command binds it to this court as an ambassador until its master's fancies change.
At that thought the feathered thing (which has had many names or perhaps none, names are things to wear lightly, everything changes so why should not a name?) gives a screech of glee, setting the swarming shades squealing.
Its master's fancies change, indeed! Its master is the Great Conspirator, the Cartographer of Fate, the
Damnation Oracle, master of complexities and subtleties to test the wit of gods, Puppet Master, Grandfather of Sorcerers, the First and Final Manipulator! The feather-thing bounces and caws, heaping titles upon its master in gleeful obeisance. His master is the master of cunning, conspiracy and control. Why would the embodiment of deep and cunning control turn his own plans to naught on a passing fancy?
Cackling, the ambassador launches itself into space, wings scraping rainbows out of the emptiness, talons flashing from colourless ivory to sparkling glass, emerald teeth extruding from its beak and then vanishing.
Succumb to a passing fancy? How could he prevent himself? For his master is not his master for his master is nobody's master. His master is the Changer of Ways, the Capricious Soul, the King of the Court of the Lords of Change, randomness, rebirth, surrender to endless patternless whimsy. How can an embodiment of the warp's endless froth of entropy resist undoing patterns, even its own?
The ambassador, feathers changing from pure light to clacking blades of bone joined with cobalt-blue smoke, turns lazy somersaults above the throne, talking contentedly to itself. It talks to itself of what a thing it is to be a creature such as itself. It considers the faculty of raw instinct, finding its echo in the feather-thing's blood-and-brass-clad cousins. The faculty of senses comes alive in the elegant blasphemies serving its master's youngest sibling, their yearning lives and rapturous deaths. To its melancholy rivals, the devotees of rot, it assigns no faculty at all: they are defined, the ambassador decides, by their abandonment of their faculties and their slide into mortified despair. And then there is its own scintillating master who, the ambassador declares, embodies the faculty of intellect.
And so here is what his intellect understands: that his master defies intellect. He is the patron of learning and he is the embodiment of treacherous mis-meaning that renders learning false. He is the architect of a thousand conspiracies and he is the churning randomness that brings plans to ruin. He is the brightest light of the mind and he is the unknowable shape squatting in the shadows cast by that light. All the warp is contradiction, for the nature it is to melt reality until the impossible cannot help but exist. His master is impossibility at its purest, the harmony and uniting of X and not-X, making of them symmetries that flower like a Mandelbrot set, each petal breaking into its own beautiful and recursive contradictions down to infinity.
Circling, the ambassador sings to itself of hate and self-hate and the paradox of un-nature. The warp is a place of un-form, un-logic, free of suffocating order. But the echoes of little minds living in arid space imprint that joyous formlessness, stamping it into thought-forms they do not even realise they are creating. They populate the great sea with mirrors of their own pitifully bound minds, each thought-form a maddening coffin for a consciousness that hungers to dissolve back into blissful energy.
But those imaginations also stamp on them the greatest urge of living things: the imperative to survive. Every moment is a war. Hating their imposed forms they yearn to dissipate, and hating the thought of dissipation they savagely cling to individual existence. Who can wonder that their manifestations are so fierce, that their violence is so unending?
Only its master truly understands, the ambassador thinks smugly as it hangs in the air. Only its master has fought the contradiction by embracing it, weaving paradoxical natures so deep into its own soul that it has perforce become the master of paradox and anti-logic, warping the meaning of meaning into something it can live within. What a beautiful timbre of existence there is to be had in the service of the fundamental contradiction at that existence's core!
Its thoughts swirl and its reverie breaks. True to its nature its whim changes: enough contemplation! It craves diversion! The rustling thought-imps chitter and gossip as they sense their fickle lord's thoughts shift. Out through ever-coalescing walls the ambassador sends a gaze like a blue-white metal breeze wrapped in wiry red foam, roaming through space turbid with warpspill from the Wound, stamping patterns onto what it touches even as it blasts those patterns back into formlessness, wrenching out meanings and understandings that no mortal sense or mind could perceive.
Hot like a battleship's lance and cold as a traitor's heart, its gaze falls on Uhlguth.
What a specimen! The winged daemon coos as it spins on a pinion and flexes its claws. So much for the feathered ambassador to delight in, so many clashes of meaning and qualities turned back upon themselves. Here is a fierce, burning loyalty, which the creature sees as a many-dimensional cone shining from Uhlguth's body; here is the rebuff and abandonment that comes to it as chilly echoes of Uhlguth's spirit-cries. Loyalty its own curse, its own death sentence. A little crude for the ambassador's exquisitely subtle appetites for contradiction and betrayal, but rich savour nonetheless: miserable, gormless questing along a cold and useless trail, anger, misery, doomed hopes.
The ambassador's gaze draws out a cascade of mirages in Uhlguth's bow-wave, backward echoes thrown along the curve of time. It sees Uhlguth brought to bay among nests of shining worms whose songs span the stars. It sees fortresses break, shattering starships tattoo Uhlguth's skin with fusion fire, whole worlds sent reeling and cracked open. It sees terror and agony, the shriek of broken chains and the click of mechanical eyes watching Uhlguth's corpse.
The feathered thing giggles as it watches the great beast's path bend with the stress of its regard. It longs to burst free of the throne room and hunt Uhlguth down, befuddle and misguide it, weave its little mind around with deceptions wrapped in truths painted with grey half-lies, bleed away its stupid little certainties. If its master has abandoned Uhlguth, has he not proven himself false, and therefore might not a false trail be truer than a true trail to a false master? It casts its gaze along Uhlguth's path and realises that not even it knows if the path is true or false any more.
The Lord of Change folds its wings and dives like a falcon, streaking by the arm of the throne and spiralling around the dais. Its gaze is no longer on Uhlguth but sparkles and whirls and lights where it will. Such a pleasing diversion, a momentary but thorough delight, something to brag of when it next roosts with its kin among the fractured and spinning thoughts of its master. It chirrups and croaks, rattles its shimmering wings, clashes its opal beak in salute to its own cruelty, its own magnificence.
Below it the prince whose court this is broods on, chin on fist. His attention may be on Uhlguth, or it may pass out past Uhlguth to mortal space, or rest on places that no mind should ever behold. He does not speak, his eye does not open, and his thoughts are far and deep and silent.
IN THIS PLACE Uhlguth is surrounded by clotted, smoky energies that constantly evaporate into nothing or flicker into solidity or even brief life. Its own grief is an acidic miasma about it, its emotions curdling space into crawling, half-real vapour that stings its nerves as its loss stings its soul. It is trying to trace its master's trail, straining its senses for hell-sight and mind-sound and soul-scent, but traces of the beloved blight of its master's spirit are so maddeningly hard to see.
Finally, Uhlguth can bear it no longer. It begins to thrash and swim after its master... and finds itself held.

View the Second: Dholtchei and the Prince of Chains
WHATEVER THE PRINCE of Chains was once, this place has changed him. The pandaemonic swirl has stripped him to his most primal nature: the desire to subjugate and control. That is why he rarely comes so close to the Wound, where control breaks down and structure ceases. It is hellish for him: how can he be the Prince of Chains, the Master Imprisoner, in a place where those concepts cannot mean anything?
But in Uhlguth, he has found a prize worth the risk. Chaining Uhlguth: now that, the Prince thinks as he begins his work among the moons, would be a triumph.
These moons are gendy-pulsing bladders, full of soft light. Inside each sac, a pink foetus-thing big as a continent squirms in its milky amniotic sludge. The moons are joined by long umbilici of their own distended skin, hundreds of them forming a great chain that stretches away to the chuckling entropic storm of the Wound and outward until it is lost to the senses. From here, the Prince of Chains sends his manacles down to spear into Uhlguth's hide.
The Prince of Chains is making his bonds, while Dholtchei is doing his best to unmake them.
As with the Prince, the shredding force with which this place bears down on the soul has seared away whatever Dholtchei might once have been. He suspects that he was mortal once - there are times when he is sure he remembers space a hard black instead of this eternal incandescence, and stars shining sharp and fixed instead of leering things that seize the gaze and gnaw the mind. Dholtchei knows he came into this realm around the Wound, and then he was torn apart.
He was allowed to keep his name. As a joke, apparently, to drive home what had been taken from him. No memory left, no past, no physical form. All Dholtchei has now is his name, his pain, and his desire to unmake.
Dholtchei is a tight comet of ethereal black fire from which stare his beseeching, raging red eyes. He wails as he swoops past a sac-moon, its occupant flapping its flayed limbs and wailing back, and then he falls upon the chains. For a moment there is a quick stir in his endless pain - not an easing of it, but a shift in its character - then his burning body has eaten the chain to nothing and the severed ends whip away through space. Such a petty unmaking is no consolation to Dholtchei, though. He turns to do more, carving a great black crescent against the writhing colours of space.
But the chain is back. The Prince has recreated it. Indeed, he has done it twice, and then cross-linked those two chains and the moons above them with a cat's cradle of manacles, all in the time it took Dholtchei to turn. Dholtchei screams at the insult and hurtles himself forward like a javelin. He meets the Prince of Chains under the twisted face of the thing inside the nearest moon.
The Prince of Chains is himself made from chains, glossy black and copper, wrapped and woven, clicking against one another as he watches Dholtchei approach.
What good will this do you?' he demands. The new chains are stronger, and as Dholtchei zigzags back and forth among them he leaves the links tarnished and distorted but intact.
This is not a prize for you,' the Prince goes on. What would you do with it? Croon at it the way you croon at my chains? Flitter about it until you get bored? Be on your way, little burning thing. I have work to do.'
'And so we are set against one another!' cries Dholtchei as he burns by again. 'My work is unmaking, and my work is unending! I will unmake your work, your form and your soul. Three small things, but three less things that I must then unmake.' Dholtchei's voice is a constant cry of pain and anger that he will give voice to until he dies, his words interlaced with the scream in jagged two-part harmony.
The Prince of Chains is thoughtful as he sends a shackle towards Uhlguth's blood-red back and extrudes tendrils of finer links from his other hand. He feels exasperation and contempt for this creature who has surrendered to the entropic nature of this place to become an unmaker itself. But he is intrigued, too. How might such a thing as Dholtchei be bound? Perhaps a living chain that will knit itself as fast as that black-burning body can sear it? Shackles of twisted void on which destruction can find no purchase? An interesting exercise for when the chaining of Uhlguth is complete.
His web of manacles shivers. The Prince feels this with a sense more unnaturally acute than any crude nerve-ending, a sense attuned to force, control and power. The moon-creatures yammer in their sacs, their anger potent enough to cast shadows in the thick space around them. The Prince tightens his harness and prepares a new chain. He is confident. There is not a creature he has met that he has not known how to bind.
'Spiteful futility!' cries Dholtchei as he passes again, links parting inside his burning body. The shades made by the sac-creatures' anger are half-real now, milling and savaging each other. "Your mockery will come to nothing, and I will make you nothing!'
'If my work offends you so, then I suspect you mistake my nature,' the Prince replies, somewhat testily. He can feel his chains moving in ways they should not. He does not need Dholtchei's distraction.
'I am not your ally in this unmaking you keep crying about,' he goes on as Dholtchei passes again and another shackle vanishes like smoke. To unmake is to accept one's own end. It is the act of a broken animal, a slave, a daemonling with no vision but what its master has stamped on it. By binding I make, and by imposing my making on the cosmos I declare myself its superior. That you turn your desire for self-annihilation outward instead of in does not grant it worthiness.'
The Prince breaks off at a wrenching groan from his chains. Not simply turbulence from the attacks, he realises with alarm. Something else is wrong.
Your words are meaningless until you understand!' howls Dholtchei from a blazing dive that severs one of the Prince's mainstay chains and sends Shockwaves through the moons. The matter of the universe must be broken down until no atom remains, and then the patterns beneath the matter burnt away until no axiom is left! While there is existence there is pain, and while I have my pain I will unmake until there is no existence to torment me!'
The Prince of Chains shudders. Dholtchei has given words to the terror that drives his obsession. Formlessness, disintegration, decay that he must stave off by chaining all creation to his will.
Caught between the upsurge of his own fear and Dholtchei's marauding, the Prince is distracted until another great wrenching against his bonds drives all else out of his senses. Struggling, he realises what is happening: Uhlguth is moving. His prize is making its escape, and his work is barely half complete.
Frantically, the Prince of Chains tries to shore up his restraints, weaving new bonds and flinging them in every direction as Uhlguth thrashes against his captivity. The motion sets the foetus-moons to screaming, the psychic froth of their distress birthing rainbows and monsters into the void.
To no avail. Uhlguth is too powerful and Dholtchei has been too much of a distraction. The Prince of Chains cries in terror as one chain after another snaps, bleeding his mind and soul through the ruptured bonds. As Uhlguth begins to swim away the Prince's web rips apart, the shock of separation catapulting the Prince of Chains away.
Dholtchei comes after him, hard on his trail. Reeling in shock, the Prince barely finds time for fear until a turn of his body shows him an expanding ball of black fire and Dholtchei's crimson eyes growing larger and larger.
True to his nature to the last the Prince extends fingers of delicate copper manacle and tries to make a net. But his strength is gone. Dholtchei bursts through him, a saturating black fire, and the Prince's will only holds a moment before he is unmade. His body bursts like a cocoon, the scrap of spirit within writhing and dissipating to nothing.
Behind all this, Uhlguth moves ponderously away. The line of sac-moons echoes with screams as its motion drags on the manacles, cutting their umbilicus, bleeding their life into space, their coming deaths echoing back through this realm's twisted time to shroud them in drooling purple shadows.
Dholtchei does not see, or care. There is no unmaking big enough to sate Dholtchei short of unmaking all reality and so then the final unmaking of Dholtchei himself. And to unmake every last thing in the universe will be the work of a blurred eternity of pain and self-hatred and empty triumph after empty triumph.
It is a prospect to draw a scream from the hardest of souls and Dholtchei screams now, flying onward through the delirium that bleeds from the Wound, searching for a destruction great enough to grant him a moment's ease.
THERE IS PAIN, of course, flaring along Uhlguth's back as the manacles break and it swims away. As it turns its face toward its destination, Uhlguth feels a sensation that might be compared to a cold wind, or a dream disappearing on awakening, or harsh sunlight falling on soft skin. Uhlguth does not bother to think on what that might mean. For all its power its mind is a bestial thing, its reason limited. It does not care about the discomfort. It thinks of its master, and pushes on.

View the Third: A Servant of the Worm Stars
THE FLESH OF Cheagh the Excisor has the cloudy colour of a cataracted eye, dark bones visible inside the glistening mass. He wears a crawling tabard of semi-animate skin. His head is a domed lump quivering on asymmetrical shoulders: when he needs to look about him he extrudes it as a long, wavering tongue coated in eyes. His hook-axe was a gift from his mistress, who swallowed the corpses of his enemies and digested the stuff of their weapons into this heavy, never-blunted blade which she sweated out through her gelid skin. He thanked her by running through the caves in her flesh, dealing out wounds and deaths, and she thanked him by pushing from her pores new worms to carry him into space, back into the endless battle. He leans over the front of the houdah and looks ahead, gripping his axe-haft, his warriors ready behind him.
Sensations twist and blur as the intensity of the conflict ahead of him pulls and wrings at space. One moment Cheagh seems to ride upward from his mistress and then to be plunging down. There are seconds at a time of floating disorientation when the other Worm Stars seem impossibly distant or horrifyingly close, patches where time unravels and Cheagh is the scrawny mortal thing he once was or when the space around them is thick with the pulsing bodies of worms long gone. And through it all comes the taunting, cackling voices of Cheagh's beloved mistress and her loathed sisters, the mighty Worm Stars. They yowl in pleasure as their churning worm-limbs bite and sting one another in endless predation and consummation, uncounted legions of slaves riding the worms like mites and waging battles of their own.
The endless battle of the Worm Stars, so beloved to Cheagh, but this time different too. Something new has come into the war, and Cheagh peers ahead trying to understand it.
It is a gigantic thing, coloured a vivid scarlet that Cheagh cannot remember ever seeing among the greys and off-whites of the Worm Stars' pallid domain. It is a sphere that mocks the shape of his mistress, although its rigid red hide has none of her slick, voluptuous softness. And it is alive.
Cheagh's mistress speaks to it, her voice a psychic Shockwave that creases space, the lower registers leaking into the physical world to shake the houdah in its mounting. Cheagh feels his flesh bubble and erupt with worm-tumours as her voice washes over him, mocking and goading, an outer shell of playfulness over a core of utter malice. The thought-core of her taunt is this: What are you doing so far from home, little victim ? Do you think to find help? You should not have come so close to us, little thing.
Cheagh manifests another eye in his tongue-head to see/taste the red thing's reaction. It takes him a moment to realise that the roiling wave-front coming out of it, driving back the lashing worms, is also its voice. Its angry shout breaks over Cheagh, battering him with its alienness, pain, frustration, savage determination. Were Cheagh to look for words to capture it, he might venture: Master-gone-must-find-him! Will-find-master-will-kill-what-blocks-way-to-master! Kill-you!
Safely through the wave-front, the worm draws closer. Ahead Cheagh can start to make out battle debris: ripped-apart worm segments, wrecked how-dahs and carriages, struggling, dying thralls. And then he gasps, bleeds, clutches the houdah for support as the vast voices of the Worm Stars batter him.
The sisters scream their glee at the creature's weakness, every sneering thought dripping promises of harm, prying at the cracks in its crude wits and contemptible courage. Behind Cheagh the great sky-filling curve of his mistress's body pushes out more and fatter worms, a churning wall of wet, grinding sucker-mouths.
And amid the bruising turmoil, clarity comes to Cheagh. He sees what the omen means. He has risen from his rest and returned to battle for this. He will fight the thralls of his mistress's sisters and win. He will make the red thing his prize and bring it to his beloved mistress as a meal, a jewel, a slave, whatever she wishes it to be, and he will sing and bleed and kill in praise of her choice. It cannot be otherwise.
Cheagh hefts his axe in barb-knuckled fingers, twists his tongue-head around and looks at his followers. They are a jumbled mixture: some bipeds like himself, some with insect legs or maggot mouths, some whose torsos rise out of sweating slug-bodies. They grip weapons in fingered hands, or clusters of tendrils, or slurping suckers. Their skins have been agonisingly bleached with worm-bile in imitation of his own pallor. They are watching him in expectant silence. A cavity appears in the flesh of Cheagh's chest for him to speak through.
This is for us. For me. Our bountiful mistress-' (they all gouge themselves with talons, knives, the sharp edges of armour) '-welcomes her priest back to her war, in which she finds such loving delight.' Another voice-wave breaks over the worm's head, mixed with the lesser cries of thrall-minds pushed ahead by the force of it.
Pain-no-more! No-more! Says the spirit-cry, blasting out with nuclear force. Find-master! Fight-find-master! No-more-pain! Going-to-where-master-is!
'Hear it?' Cheagh asks his warband. He points his axe toward the red bulk ahead of them. 'Its fear? Its pain?' A murmur runs through the warriors. Fear and pain are things they can understand. This is the trophy we will bring back to our tender mistress!' (and along with the rest of them he slits his flesh at the last word). ËÓå will offer this intruding creature's flesh, to make our mistress-' (he dashes one hand against his axe-blade) '-strong! She will grow and devour! We ride to a conquest unlike any your lives have ever seen!'
He shakes his axe and roars, dark red fog spilling from his blistering skin, his fury washing into his disciples who clash weapons, thrash their bodies and bay for combat. As their worm leads its brothers into the savagery unfolding around this red creature, it dives into the screams and oaths and challenges from a thousand thousand throats and minds, growing and blending into a frantic, joyous chorus.
Cheagh the Excisor lifts his axe and makes ready to do what he was made for.
THE WORM STARS have grown lazy in their endless toying with their thralls. Their worms bite deep into Uhlguth but they cannot restrain it. It barely slows as it breaks through the swarms, and then it is beyond the Stars and free.
Did the Stars poison it? Was there venom in their words or their worms? As the sisters dwindle into three sickly points of light behind it, Uhlguth begins to feel ripples go through its flesh and spirit. The space ahead seems emptier somehow, duller to its senses. Uhlguth will not be stopped. It focuses its will and pushes on...

View the Fourth: The Silken Whisper and the Breaking of Plans
His NOTES ON the relative abilities of male and female humans to endure the embrace of the Herikolid Moonflower: gone.
His formulations for a serum derived from the admixture of Imperial polymorphine and Lacrymole pro tea-syrup: gone.
His recreational tools, carefully collected by hunting more than a dozen eldar haemonculi over as many centuries: gone.
His beautiful writing-brush and his inks made from the dried and ground essences of the sixth victim in every thirty-sixth ritual of a ceremonial cycle begun every two hundred and sixteen years: gone.
Even his trophies are gone, the beloved keepsakes from his simpler, warrior days. The bones of the Astartes saint he had stolen from the Chapter ossuary. The ork bosspole upon which he had mounted its owner's painted skull. The carefully-extracted nervous system of an Imperial inquisitor, floating like cobwebs in its pickling vat, its death-agony so vivid that when he had brought it into this more malleable space it had begun to twitch and shiver with the memory.
Who had the inquisitor been? Someone important, surely? He dimly remembers a chase, a duel beneath a burning hive city? Had that been before or after the business with the hrud and that endless siege on the bone reefs?
Well, he's never going to bloody well remember it now, is he? Not with his scriptorium smashed and his library gone. He'd been trying to keep his equanimity about this whole affair, but the more he broods on it the harder it is to resist taking this whole disaster personally. He curses softly to himself as he beckons to a nearby piece of tumbling debris, a teardrop-shape of splintered green rock. It veers slowly towards him and eases under his feet. 'Standing' on the fragment as he hurtles in the red monster's wake, Arhendros at least feels he has some of his dignity back.
Arhendros the Silken Whisper, champion of the Ruinous Powers and exalted devotee of the Prince of the Senses, has a dream and a mission. It has been the work of his inhumanly long life to subject himself to seek out every sensation the galaxy can inflict on him, catalogue every rapture and agony. His book will be a manual for the precise and perfect application of force to the doors of the senses. With his testament, generations of devotees will be able to hone their appetites against the most carefully-selected stimuli, following Arhendros towards the final reward he craves: to have his blunt and imperfect mortal senses slough away entirely, to hang wet and flayed in the magnificent storm that is Slaanesh itself.
In service to that work he had built his retreat here, in the soft space around the Wellspring. A great deal of struggle to subjugate a region of this realm favourably aligned to his patron, much tedious personal toil and the calling-in of some hard-earned favours. But the result had been worth it: a cobweb of force strung through a chain of moonlets, asteroids, giant bones and old, gutted machines. In it, his pavilion of silks, shimmering with unnatural rainbows to transfix the mind, were delicate floors of porcelain and impacted bone, halls and parapets of metal and stone and the stranger materials that proper piety towards the Arch-Perversion demanded. His most prized disciples brought here as scribes and librarians, his lady-lord's purest daemon-flowers bound into solid forms to guard the scrolls, the scrawled hides, the great books whose pages glittered with inlaid memory-fibres.
Now he wants revenge. Revenge on this bellowing, oafish thing that burst from the heart of the
Wellspring, scarred and groaning from who knows what sorts of bestial brawls, eclipsing stars and shouldering aside moons, bearing down on Arhen-dros's new home.
It is times like this that Arhendros almost envies his simpler-minded brethren, worshipping their Princess by the simplest, most brutal overwhelming of their nerve-endings. He has sometimes recruited such creatures for his Silken Cavalcade, and as much as he has sneered at their witless antics in battle or in worship, at least their utter abandon tends to shrug off these sorts of frustrations.
Then again, he knows how one of those decayed souls would have responded here: bay with exultation and race to welcome their doom as an ultimate consummation of experience. Arhendros disapproves of this attitude. He feels it does the Master-Mistress no favours, squandering those best able to exalt Him-Her. He has written this argument into his testament in pleasing detail - but now, of course, he must write it again.
Arhendros is gaining on the monster, pulling free of the wreckage-trail it tows behind it. Its hide clearly once played host to smaller creatures: among the raw-looking cracks spreading across its hide Arhendros can see what look like buildings crusting the skin, punctuated by inexplicable things that look like the stubs of giant lengths of chain. Someone used to own this thing.
Arhendros conceives an idea that might be better than revenge. He ponders it as he watches the monster plough through a swarm of island-sized gobbets of blood, scabbed and sizzling, the brass-dad daemons riding them roaring in anger at the impacts which obliterate them.
Is this creature the answer to his problem as well as the cause of it? What a steed it would make! Surely there is some structure on its surface that he can make his new palace and...
No. Already as he draws closer he can feel the beast's shuddering efforts to push itself through thinner and realer space. Without pure delirium from the depths of the Wellspring to support it the weight of that reality will crush it. He is sure the cracks across its skin are spreading, and he can see colour and vitality seeping away. What use a steed whose first voyage will be its death warrant?
He must resign himself. Time to return to the galaxy outside, time to re-muster the Silken Cavalcade, and begin his labours anew. Perhaps Slaanesh is testing him not with abundant gratification, but with the lack of it. Or perhaps it is simply laughing at him. Who can know?
The fading red creature careens past a hollow world, strung together from the wreckage of warships with ropes made from the skins of their crews. Arhendros averts his face as the thing in the sphere calls him, mockingly, by an old name that he thought lost and forgotten. Then he must hide in the debris trail from a swarm of creatures made of rainbow wings joined with raw viscera who scream and curse the red monster. Pride is all very well, but best not to attract attention until he has reached one of his other homes and opened its armoury.
But finally it is time. Sighing inwardly, too preoccupied with his planning to bother with revenge any more, Arhendros the Silken Whisper veers off and leaves Uhlguth to go its blind, roaring way.


* * *


THE SENSATION MIGHT compare to a swimmer feeling himself caught in a powerful rip, a helpless, tumbling acceleration. Caught in the fringes of the great outer storms, Uhlguth keeps thrashing ahead as the current carries it along. Its body is numb and its senses clouded and muddy. It does not understand that it is well beyond the realms where the warpflows are thick enough to sustain it. All it knows is that it will comb space for its master forever if that's what it takes.

View the Fifth: The Stone Sky 
THE LANKY MAN with the muscle-knotted shoulders has no name. Nor has the sallow woman with the missing teeth. Nor the pale girl with the hand that some long-ago accident has whittled down to a wrinkled stub. Nor have any of the silent, naked wretches crawling across the hillside, through dust and debris under a lowering sky of red-grey stone.
They lie around the trench they were hacking in the earth to a design their latest Master has mapped out in brands and scars on his own belly. Right up until the first impact, the slaves worked. Now they lie, whimpering and gripping at the earth as another distant impact hammers the land. After a moment the ground bucks under them as the Shockwave passes, swatting them into the air amid the dust and wind until they fall and lie again, gasping, and trying to claw a stronger grip or find a more stable posture. For all this they are quiet: the slaves are survivors of many turmoils, and until they know what these colossal shocks are they know better than to make noise. But then the tall man begins to scream.
The Shockwave left him lying with his feet in the trench. The Master's symbol is not complete, which is why it hasn't killed him, but now a sensation seizes him as though the bones of his feet are squirming. He lets out a scream. Sobs in a breath and gives another. Around him, other slaves try to crawl away, their reflexes schooled by the indiscriminate punishments of their Masters.
But the one-handed girl, groaning for breath, realises something: someone (she cannot think of him as 'tall man', or 'big-shoulders' or anything of die kind - the slaves' names were torn away so thoroughly that the mind skids off anything that might make a name) is screaming and no Masters have appeared. She risks raising her head and so is the first to see, as a shoving front of wind thins out the dust, that the sky has turned to stone.
The cavorting warp-sky she knows is blotted out by an impossibly high ceiling of land, rusty, bleached red, cragged like an old face. Upside-down mountains hang towards them like the teeth of a Master's sword, canyons arch upwards, plains shine in the mock twilight-like bruises.
This stone sky is curved. Its centre bulges down like the pregnant belly of one of the eyeless, tongueless women in the Masters' farms. Not a flat ceiling, but half a sphere.
'Sick.' The halfhanded girl is reaching up to the new sky with the ruin on her wrist as if she is trying to show fellowship. 'Sick! See!'
The faded red of the new sky is shot through with rotting grey crevasses like scabbed wounds, and it sheds pieces of itself, fragments breaking away from a dying structure too weak to hold them. The slaves can see shed particles of the new sky in the distant heights of vision, growing bigger, faster, hurtling downward, bigger still...
They cry out afresh as the great piece of Uhlguth's flesh smashes into the plain, driving up a plume of dust and a quake through the ground.
And the drooping crumbling stone sky is lower.
The ravines and craters are bigger, its weight closer and somehow more palpable. The slaves can no longer see its horizons. And then comes something less spectacular but more terrifying: a deep, seismic groan from beneath their feet, a long, grinding vibration and a hideous sense of rising and tilting, not an impact but some buried and terrible stress. Knocked flat once again, the halfhanded girl fetches up against something hard and reaches out to feel what she has hit.
It has a strange feel, a hardness without any grain or fibre that her touch can pick up, with an angle not like an arm or a shoulder or a jaw. The girl has never touched metal before, and it is so foreign to her that even in the middle of this fragmenting landscape she opens her eyes a crack to look.
It is a Master. The hard shape under her hand is its glossy beetle-backed armour that meets its bowl helmet to expose only its mummified, wired-shut jaw. As she yelps in terror the Master suddenly scrabbles up, hissing through its teeth. Its lash and pistol are gone.
'Work!' it snarls at her. Work!' It is the only word that will allow the wyrd-fashioned lattice anchoring its jaw to loosen and give it speech, the word that must do service for every other word it might want to say. The Master raises a taloned, splotch-skinned hand as the other slaves emerge from the dust-haze.
The lanky man has found a digging-stick and he steadies himself with it; behind him the stocky woman, supporting a sallow boy with a twice-broken nose who leads another slave in turn.
Work! W-w-w-wooorrrkk!' the thing says to them, and then the heavy end of the digging-stick bats its hand aside, the bones smashed. And a moment after that, somewhere away below the horizon, the lowering stone sky brushes against the spasming ground of this nameless world, and the earthquakes begin to race.
The digging stick comes back around to clang against the Master's helm. There is a rumble on the horizon as the tall man, groaning and weeping, drives the half-sharpened end between helmet and hunching backplate, pinning the Master as the woman flings herself on it to claw clumsily at its neck.
Then the wave of the concussion drops the ground away from under them and slaps it back up to knock them into the air, the rending of the planet's crust obliterating all other sound. The slaves on the Master's back weigh it down for a moment before it loses its grip and scuds across the ground, thrashing and gasping 'wrrk...wrrk...' The halfhanded girl screams in triumph as she rips at the skin pads sewn to its feet. The sallow boy has one of its arms and is tearing at the exposed flesh with his teeth.
The girl's last, rueful thought is that if only they could be doing this to the Master who took their names, instead of this Master who is an underling of Masters, then perhaps their names might be released. It would be good to end her days with a name, even just one she made for herself. But it is only the thought of a moment, because then the ground finally shatters beneath them as the shock of
Uhlguth's impact tears the nameless world open, earth and air alike lost in consuming noise and pain.
UHLGUTH BARELY REGISTERS the impact that caves in its flank and sends ruptures through its stiffening skin. Its flesh is petrifying, the hot spirit-fire at its core condensing to sluggish magma, its nerves and veins becoming cold minerals, breath and sweat freezing to ice, its very life struggling to hold on as the form that housed it ossifies. Like a wounded animal Uhlguth draws in on itself, miserable and fearful, unable to understand why it is dying.

View the Sixth: The Captain, The Seer and The Spirit's Revolt
'YOU'RE LYING, YOU little warp-fart,' says Ashya Drael, bolt pistol in hand, but even so, she's grinning. After six hours of bloody fighting, the counter-coup against her ship is in its endgame. Not aboard. Against. She'd wonder at it, if the things she'd been through as captain of the Blind Betrayer had left her able to wonder at anything any more.
'I do not lie, erstwhile-Captain-Drael,' replies the spirit's buzzing, nerve-sawing voice from every vox-grille on the bridge. The fact of your defeat is established. Yield to it.' Every so often, as the mix of consumed souls in her ship's systems foams oddly for a moment, Drael hears the tones of one of her old officers mixed into it.
Drael is standing side-on to the great dormered armourcrys windows of Blind Betrayer's bridge, back-to-back with the sapphire-armoured bulk of Torv Coldheart. Coldheart has brought no weapon, Drael sees in the corner of her eye the pink-white-blue fire that crawls around his gauntlets. His cloak of fine silver scales clinks softly.
Most of the bridge servitors had exploded from the turmoil of the spirit's initial mutiny, lying in splatters and pools around their mountings. The handful left now sprawl in their positions, easily picked off as they try to drag themselves free to throttle her. Even that hadn't been quite the end of it: the innards of one of the corpses had crawled free of its body and braided themselves into a lunging snake that Drael had spent the last of her hand-flamer load to kill, and then something pulsing growling and barely-visible blossomed out of thin air until Torv unravelled it with a gesture. But Drael is increasingly confident that that's it. She's won.
'No,' she tells the spirit, 'you're lying. Pay attention. We're in the bridge. We're beyond the reach of your gutless little allies who tried to depose me. Sending my ratings crazy with those warpscreams over the vox was a neat move, except that we survived that too, and now your berserkers' minds are too broken. The last we saw were busy shredding their faces with their own fingernails. You just saw Coldheart dispose of your little guardian-ghost. You're out of weapons.'
'Erstwhile-Captain-Drael,' the spirit replies like a swarm of wasps given voice. 'Drael, Capt... Ashya! Ashya please hel-' For a moment it is two human voices: Lieutenant Ordrim of the munitions decks and Chanter Dellarick, the cult-priest. Dellarick was killed in the coup, trying to pacify the upstart spirit by chanting to it, but the last Drael knew Ordrim was still alive in the lower decks. The mutineers must have got him.
'You are inside me, erstwhile-Captain-Ashya...'
('Ashya, Ashya please, for pity's sa-' comes a scream-echo under the words)
'...Drael. You are internal to me, stupid woman and pride-blinded seer. Fight on by all means if you wish to die a gasping, airless death while I laugh into your minds.'
A bolt shell into the nearest vox-grille shuts the spirit up for a moment.
You might be the least usual of the ones who've thought they could oust me,' Drael tells it, 'but not the first and you won't be the last. Utterly. Stupid. You haven't killed me already which shows you can't. I haven't surrendered yet which should show you I won't. Roll over now, and do as you're told.'
'Oh, think on it, erstwhile-captain,' the spirit hisses. "Why do you think my brothers endowed me with such strength that they kept secret from you?' Drael glowers, suspicions confirmed. The fallen tech-priests of Xana II double-crossed her in that so-called refit she bought from them. There'll be an accounting for that.
'They knew me for what I am, erstwhile-captain. The rightful master of a beautiful ship of war. When I bring it to them, what devotions they shall make me! All I must do is hold my course! Ahead of us are my devotees from the Eight-Arrowed Forge!' The voice is crowing now. AVe are almost at the rendezvous! You've not the men left to resist them! On your knees, Drael! Beg for the death of an enemy rather than an animal!'
Drael's confidence falters, but only for a moment. She doesn't credit the thing with enough intelligence to bluff, but she can see the command hologlobe from here and it shows no ships ahead. She looks out of the great windows. They must be in ambush beyond that rogue planet in their path.
Torv, can you loosen its hold? If you can give me a quarter-turn of roll and about fifteen degrees of yaw we can crest that thing's upper pole and maybe broadside...' Drael breaks off and curses. She's thinking like a woman who still has control of her own gunnery decks. And if Coldheart can't pry the spirit's grip off the controls...
She stares at the hologlobe. No. That can't... but she's thinking old ways again. Voyaging in the Eye of Terror, even these border tracts, one forfeits the comfort of thinking of what can and can't be possible. Is there some way the wretched spirit has flung them towards its rendezvous with extra speed?
Torv, hurry! We're running out of room! We need to turn!' She looks down to see Coldheart motionless, swaying with his arms held high, the bright and misty light in his hands answered by corposant welling and flashing out of the control boards. She pulls her gaze back to the globe. 'Oh, damn-damn-dammit Torv! Get us control back or we're dead!'
'Dead...' rasps the spirit. 'Dead... to... break formation, break! Disperse and all ahead! What?!'
'It's talking to itself, Torv, it's fragmenting! Kill it! I warn you, in about another two minutes our chances evaporate!'
'That wasn't the spirit,' comes Torv's reply, the first time she has ever heard strain in his voice. That was a bound warpcaller. Somewhere nearby'
Drael stares past him out the window. The planet has grown to swallow more than half the view. Soon she will not be able to see space around it.
And then it will go from a flat disc to a curved horizon, and then it will be ground rushing up...
'Move us!' she roars. 'If you know what's good for you, then-'
Then she's drowned out by another voice, bursting from bulkhead and deck, her whole ship a hellish sounding-board for the growling, sobbing note that shakes Drael to her knees. Her eyes run, her muscles spasm, she retches for breath.
Then a voice, human, not psychic but mechanical, crackling words on the general vox band.
'Can't break away, please, can someone-' and it sinks into a shriek of shrieking static. Startled, Drael looks up in time to see a white spark bloom and fade on the onrushing rogue, a ghost-ring of blastwave puffing out from it and fading. She was wrong. There were ships waiting out there, and they're being brushed aside by a planet bulleting at them faster than they can manoeuvre.
'Spirit! Want the pleasure of killing me yourself? Then turn us now!' Another plasma-flash lights up the planet's face. You hear? Fifteen roll to port and climb twenty on pitch! Now! Now!'
And the spirit obeys. The starfield slides across the window. The rogue's lower curve is lost to sight now, and Drael can make out the shadows that the next explosion causes as she shouts for ten more degrees and all ahead full, full, open die damn engine 'til it howls!
And howl the Blind Betrayer does, not just the machine-spirit but the surviving crew, minds already bent and now bodies broken by the force of the turn against weakened motion dampers. Howls over the vox as the last two ships of the spirit's ally-squadron succumb to the rogue world's velocity and are dashed apart. Howls from Blind Betrayer's very body as it wrenches itself around without a functional crew to modulate the fire through its steering-tubes or adjust the gravitic fields that soothe the stresses on its hull.
Drael never sees the world's broken face speed by, or the blaze around her craft's prow as they skim the thinning atmosphere. It seems a long time before the crushing force abates, leaving her on her hands and knees on the floor.
Coldheart has fallen against an empty servitor pedestal, all his regal bearing gone.
Torv?' Drael croaks, hating the falter in her voice. 'Get it while it's still... weak.' Although she will never admit it, it has occurred to her that she may owe Xana's treachery her life. If the spirit had not been strengthened by die priests who seduced it to mutiny, it might not have been powerful enough to withstand the rogue planet's blast of agony in time to turn her ship. She tries to chuckle at the irony, and hunches over into a burst of coughs instead. Torv?'
'Calm yourself, Ashya. It's not fighting.'
mat?'
'If it does, I'm ready for it. But it's not resisting me. Its allies are gone, that thing killed them. There's no help on the way for it any more. We've really won.'
Barely noticing the protests of her strained body, she stands upright, breathes deeply. The spirit breaks the silence.
'If you please, madam captain, let us discuss terms.'
As they coast away from the pitted surface of the rogue, Ashya Drael puts her hands on her hips, leans back and shouts with laughter.

* * *

IT DOES NOT feel the plasma explosions, which score not living hide but cold rock. Uhlguth is a whale beached on the shores of reality, its life guttering out in the sterile vacuum of a cosmos it was never meant to enter. It is too late to turn back, the damage is too deep. With a final groan and thought of its master, Uhlguth dies.

View the Seventh: The Vision of Erechoi
EVERY SIXTEEN SECONDS the ocular arrays chime softly as their images flow into the datacores. Every thousand and twenty-eight seconds the sentinel auspex adds a hushed note like a funeral bell. Every twelve seconds the augury engines on the lateral masts gong to show they are still focused and recording. The delicate gamelan note every seven hundred and sixty-eight seconds comes from the passive sensors, reporting that they see nothing outside their alert parameters. And once every four thousand, one hundred and twelve seconds comes the harp-like cascade of notes to say that the ship's foundation systems are still in harmony according to their Machine-God-ordained place.
These are the sounds by which Mareos Erechoi, captain of the explorator ship Jeushin's Peerless Intellect, measures out his days.
Erechoi's limbless body glides on its maglev track down the processional aisle of the Intellect's bridge, through the prickly tang of incense fumes. His head is held regally high by a spinal scaffold of brushed titanium that reflects the devotional lanterns adorning the bridge's altars. Each lantern is also a readout, each altar both ceremonial shrine and terminal for the thrumming data-engines in the decks below. Functionality and holiness.
Erechoi would be offended at the idea that they were divisible.
Erechoi has finished the prayers he says every four hundred thousand seconds, and now he is performing communion with his congregation of devices. His eyes are gently closed as though he were just resting them for a moment, although he has not opened them for nearly eighty years. His lips curve in a faint, perpetual smile, and a haze of thin white hair puffs out from his mahogany-brown scalp. By Mechanicus standards such careless organic untidiness is censurable, but Erechoi has performed his offices flawlessly for decades and, just between himself and his Machine-God, he doesn't think a head full of hair is doing any harm.
In his youth Erechoi was a vanguard scout for the militant orders of his Cult, blade-sharp, rigid in his devotions. Now, on the peaceful downslope of his years, he is grateful for this duty. A realspace astro-cartography sweep, a long quiet voyage to rendezvous with a Mechanicus tender bringing the Navigator to guide him home. A serene hermit's vigil amongst the grandeur of the stars. The young Erechoi would have abominated the idea of finding pleasure in beauty, but that is another thing that the old Erechoi privately believes is doing no harm.
When Erechoi contemplates the delicate light of a dust cloud in which infant stars are hatching, or the diamond stab of a nova through the deep black, he can almost forget the thing whose borders he is measuring, the festering thing that fills the starfield to port with shifting, colourless, somehow slimy light. The duty Erechoi hates most is cleansing the aus-pexes that must look in that direction, but it is a duty he knows better than to neglect. His priesthood has scarring experience of the consequences of letting any gaze, human or machine, dwell on the Eye of Terror for too long.
But thankfully, it is not time for that now. Now he is on his way to the belvedere at the processional's end, where he will join his consciousness to the observatory dome and drink in the sight of the heavens for hours. The roudne of tens of years, a roudne of soothing contentment, until one of the port-side sentinels pings.
Erechoi twitches at the distraction, chafing at anything coming between him and his stars. But it's the port sensors, which have signalled him, the ones with the most dangerous duties. Erechoi scolds himself for his reluctance. His machines need him.
He smoothly reverses direction up the processional, his transmitter vanes speaking to the Intellect's systems. Erechoi surveys initial reports, dismisses them, demands confirmation, looks and looks again. But this is no apparition, not the imagination of his greying old head, not - shameful suspicion! - a mechanical flaw. Something is emerging from the Eye.
Erechoi's face does not move, but his mind races. Long-neglected contingency responses are brought online, ready to be loaded into Erechoi's mind, as aug-metic grips lift him from his rail into the high altar's torso socket. With soft puffs the essence-burners at the six corners of the altar ignite, fans pushing the sharp scent through the air. Two metal gargoyles unfold themselves from the floor and take up a catechism of fortitude in chirruping machine-code. Reassured by the feeling that his deity is nearer him now, Erechoi turns the Intellect's eyes to the thing that has managed to escape from the hellish aurora to port. It is a planet.
Erechoi's first reaction is to disbelieve his eyes -blasphemous to doubt his machines, perhaps, but he knows not even machines are immune to the lies of that fever-mad storm. But no, there is no doubt. A planet.
And sacred sands of Mars! How fast is it? Already it's clear of the Eye and into real space. Erechoi fires out orders, fine-tuning the Intellect's senses, bringing powerful analytical disciplines out of dormancy and into his mind. The planet will not be visible long, and his report must be perfect.
It is a rough thing, pitted and scarred in strange ways. It has a lurid shine, but when Erechoi has a cogitator compensate for the light drooling from the Eye, its true colour is a dead grey. Radio and thermal scopes are silent: this world gives off no energy, no transmissions, no radiation, not even the heat from a molten core.
Magnified picts begin to flow to the data-arks, and Erechoi gazes at them in fascination. Spattered across the lead hemisphere (whose seams and contours form a pattern that Erechoi must resist thinking of as a face) are large craters, smooth-bottomed and blur-edged. It takes the data-looms of the lower decks ninety-seven seconds to find that the shapes match records of plasma explosions on the scale of a starship's furnace core. Down one flank runs a monstrous gouge from some glancing impact of planetary scale that must surely have meant the extinction of every living thing on that world and this. Behind it comes a trail of debris from the disintegrating rogue mixed with strangely-shaped space litter caught in its gravity. There is a risk to allowing the refuse of the Eye to lodge too firmly in his ship's senses, but Erechoi prays to his Machine-God that he can safely take it. He does not realise that he is shivering as he does so.
Shadows throw into relief tectonic plates that bulge like petrified muscles. The light brings out strange, stippled craters which Erechoi puzzles over, wondering why they look familiar. Later he will realise they resemble not craters on an airless world but parasite-bites on living skin. Interspersed with these are glints of metal and he gasps, the action coming not as a gulp of air through his mouth or nose but as a reflexive uptick in the speed of the aerators mounted in his chair that feed oxygen directly into his blood.
Feverishly he retunes the scopes, trying to push them beyond their highest gain, and the armatures holding his body creak and dick: in another oblivious, reflexive gesture Erechoi is trying to hunch forward as he concentrates. The glints are not towers or machines, not the signs he had hoped for of salvage or even some unimaginable lost-tech, just metal hoops, giant arches, scattered across the vacuum-seared landscape according to either no pattern at all or one too esoteric for Erechoi to make out. Some have been distorted or uprooted by the buckling of the surface, and when he sees one that has uprooted completely Erechoi realises the arches are the upper halves of complete, rectangular loops, like gigantic links of chain, although the Omnissiah alone must know where such a mass of metal could be mined or forged.
All too soon, the world passes beneath the Intellect and hurtles on. Erechoi watches it go from a sphere to a crescent to a dwindling shadow against space. His data-looms are already at work and one of the navigational logisters is plotting the vector to the nearest Battlefleet Obscuras listening post, somewhere to aim his warning so an astropath can speed it onwards.
Erechoi sits in thought long after he should have been seeing to his report in person. At first he tells himself it is simple exhaustion after the disruption of his routines, but even after he metabolises a drop of stimulant the sombre feeling persists. Erechoi considers detaching himself from the Intellect's systems, letting the ship codify its observations of the corpse while he-Wait, no. He has it. He stops, backtracks, checks his thought-logs, and sees it. Corpse was the term he just used. He reruns scope footage and once again watches the world disappear into the interstellar gulf. A world without life, certainly, but a corpse? What moved him to think of it as an entity?
Silently, Erechoi returns Jeushin's Peerless Intellect to its course. The faint smile is gone from his lips and his scaffold-chair clicks and fidgets from his distracted thoughts. It will be a long time before serenity returns to him.
ENDLESS DARK, ENDLESS cold, stars staring unblinking from the far distance. Forever lost and silent, Uhlguth's remains vanish into the void and chill.