ELUCIDIUM
Simon Spurrier

Excerpt One:
Opening passage, 'Primacii: Claviculus Matri'

We are the unclean.
We are reviled (so they say). We are despicable and pestilent and abominable. We are known as ''thing'', as ''freak'', as ''heretic''. The derision is as tedious as it is endless.
Is there truth in their words?
Am I, then, a freak? By their standards, yes. And if ''heresy'' lies in considering their atrophied carrion-god detestable then yes, I suppose I qualify there also. Mine is a higher calling.
But am I a 'thing'? Am I but an object to be culled, a flawed specimen to be dissected and terminated? Am I, then, unimportant?
No. No, against that charge at least I will defend myself. I am a child of the Mother's divine will. They may cast rocks and aspersions and labels upon me all they wish. It will do them little good.
Behold: The Great Sky Mother approaches. Blessed be.

* * *

THE LATCHCRAFT TOUCHED down on the icefield with dignified relief, unsettling a compact torus of snow and pistoning at its jointed landing legs. A thin gurgle of vapour - little more than ethereal spittle - undulated vertically from its warm engines, lost to the flurrying weather.
Its descent from the orbit-platform - ice-studded winches guiding it ponderously along the guide-chord like some rappelling invader - had been excruciatingly slow. Buffeted violently by atmospheric whimsy, sent spiralling around the axis of the cable with every contradictory gale and snow-filled gust, only the craft's gyroscopes - newly blessed by a trio of tech-priests - had allowed its passengers to retain any semblance of formality in their bearing. They disembarked with varying degrees of concealed nausea, green faces closed and rigid, unwilling to betray their obvious discomfort: a gaggle of merchants and pilgrims, clutching at their belongings with white knuckled possessiveness, peering sullenly across the bulging citydome.
A man - of sorts - lurked in a nearby doorframe, breath steaming beneath the shadows of his cowl. Notably tall with a thickset build betrayed by the movements of his robes, his ogreish stature was moderated only by the perpetual hunch with which he carried himself. His name was G'hait, and as he watched the dissipating crowd of passengers he couldn't help but wonder abstractly upon what strange sights they'd seen, what distant worlds they'd returned from, what marvels and horrors lurked above the opaque snow clouds that blanketed the sky.
Garial-Fall was a world without sunlight.
Oh, there was light, of a kind: a wan diffusion of halfhearted brightness that murdered every shadow and obstructed any view of the stars. But there was no sense of solar direction, no sunrise or sunset: only a gradual waxing or waning of the blanketlight to distinguish between day and night. In its wisdom the Plureaucracy of the Hive Primus (shoehorned, no doubt, by the Imperial Governor) had commissioned from the Adeptus Mechanicus a geostationary orbit-platform, its battered solar cells drawing energy from the distant sun, feeding it by means of the guide-cables into the power-hungry hivedome below. In one fell swoop the tech-priests had provided Garial-Fall with energy, a strategic weapons platform and a stardock. Only the latchcraft, with their uncomfortable descents through the cloud layer, marred the smooth running of an otherwise efficient system.
One of the merchants, running short of restraint, vomited noisily across the snow at his feet, melting a splatter-work pattern into the frost. G'hait rolled his eyes and returned his gaze to the steaming vessel, its two final passengers disembarking silently from a private cabin on the starboard face.
The first was tall, wearing an acolyte's robe. Like G'hait the figure's head was hidden beneath a sackcloth cowl, threadbare symbols and scriptures embroidered around its hem. What little movement the robe betrayed revealed a certain wiriness to the figure's physiology; a thinness and scarcity of movement that could easily be confused with undernourishment or uncertainty. G'hait was not so easily fooled: he recognised the calculated movements of a warrior, every motion executed with efficiency and slow grace. The figure collected a few items of light luggage and stood silently, awaiting the command of its companion.
Dressed from head to toe in robes of Imperial purple, neck ringed with a mantle of hawk feathers and platinum baubles, leaning without a trace of infirmity upon an obsidian staff, Cardinal Ebrehem Arkannis was an impressive sight. Before G'hait could even step from the doorway the Cardinal's aquiline features were twisting in his direction, raptor eyes flashing with arctic intelligence.
'There you are...' he tutted. 'So much for the grand welcoming committee.' His voice seemed to puncture the wind, rustling uncomfortably across the air. 'Out you come.' A thin finger crooked, drawing G'hait from the shadows.
He stepped into the squalling snow with a nod, suppressing his distaste at the Cardinal's attention; inspected like a grox-stud at the agriquarter livestock auctions.
'I take it you were expecting me?'
He nodded.
'Then lead the way, child.'
G'hait worked his jaw, thoughtful. The nascent sense of unease troubled him: so instinctive was his predatory confidence that to find himself awestruck by a stranger was a... challenging sensation. But then, G'hait had always been cursed by the need to consider; the compunction to over analyse and over think every situation. He frowned and remembered the advice of his master: to obey without thought, and to be thankful in so doing.
Drawing his robes tight against the cold, waving the two figures after him, he turned and stalked through the frosted bulkhead, entering the ancient and rambling lens of the citydome. The Cardinal and his tall companion followed wordlessly behind, their movements punctuated only by the rhythmic striking of the obsidian staff against the icy floor.

GARIAL-FALL, LIKE so many Ultima segmentum colony worlds, owed much of its existence to the forbidden enterprise of ancient technologies. Some forgotten society - in some forgotten millennium - had erected the heatdome to protect the city within, stretching its languid camber like some glutinous bubble, ossified and pitted by time. Beneath its intricate surface, striated by chattering logic engines and grinding gears, the city clustered in a haphazard confusion of tiers and stacks, substantially warmer (albeit still uncomfortably cold, by human standards) than the ice wastes beyond.
At the exit from the port G'hait hired a rickshaw, barking directions at the half-sentient servitor that drew it. Its legs and arms pistoned and hissed as they took the strain, grossly thickened by metallic cords to take the weight of its passengers. G'hait steered the moronic creature across gantries and plunge streets, rising through ghettoes and trade quarters, stepping aboard steam-driven elevators and dodging rattling tramways. The diffused light of the sky, made febrile by the scarlet tint of the dome, was bolstered throughout the city by gaslights and hovering illuminators: an ugly blend of cadmium taints and tungsten stains. G'hait's companions regarded their environs in silence - skirting the Heatsink with its decorative gang totems; bisecting the Foildom and its well guarded excavations; passing the foundations of the towering Apex Block where the Plureaucracy met each day.
The rickshaw delivered them to the icy plain at the heart of the central plaza, pausing in the frozen shadows of its single, brooding structure. The Cathedral was typical: a swollen facade of jutting pylons and steeples, meticulous frescoes and jagged ornamentation scattered like acne across its bulk. It stood isolated, bulkily dressed stallholders and hawkers peddling their wares raucously around it.
In stolen glances G'hait's impressions of the Cardinal had grown, absorbing his etched features, his hatchet-like nose, his bloodless lips, his etiolated pate. More than anything his eyes set him apart, deeply shadowed beneath prominent brows, they nonetheless contrived to glow, catching the light in strange ways.
G'hait scowled in the darkness of his robe, thinking: We don't need you, you smug bastard. We were doing fine on our own.

WITHIN, TO G'HAIT'S mind, the Cathedral was unremarkable. A buttressed stronghold of ostentatious architectural filigree, intricate frescoes, decadent gold and silver ornamentation and regularly re-dyed tapestries. Glorious, gaudy and pompous: G'hait barely even glanced inside as he diverted to the small stairwell at the Cathedral's leftmost periphery.
Beneath, the structure's true design was manifest.
Through archways and down stairs, past buried cloisters with an air of carefully arranged antiquity, below lost treasuries of antediluvian relics and walkways thick with synthesised cobwebs - the Cathedral bared its cancerous guts and the infestation that had taken root there. It festered.
Guided by machinations and grand designs beyond the ken of a mere maelignaci, the Anointed Congregation of the Celestial Womb met in shadowfasted chambers and rough hewn cells, whispering and praying together, chanting with quiet solemnity and spreading, always spreading, the Good News.

THE COUNCIL WAS waiting.
G'hait shuffled - in as much as a figure of his enormity could shuffle - into the Chamber of Voices with a glance across the throng. His master, Primacii Magus Kreista, stood at one end of the semicircle, betraying not a flutter of recognition at the entrance of his preferred acolyte. G'hait admonished himself for having expected any.
Beyond the primacii magi stood a waiting rank of favoured maelignacis of all generations, cowled and robed appropriately, and at either edge of the chamber - where the wan luminescence of stolen illuminators failed to penetrate - the suggestive rustling of a purii brood marred the shadows.
Foremost, though arranged artfully to one side so as not to detract attention from the magi, massive and corpulent upon its wheeled platform, the Broodfather lolled with animal stupidity, mewling and salivating. Great wattles of sagging flesh - segmented and wormlike - gathered beneath its limbs, splattered by the oleaginous secretions of its maw. A swatch of maroon silk, embroidered with the New Dawn iconography favoured throughout the underchurch, was secured carefully across its bulk, disguising the intricacies of its obesity. Thus cloaked - cocooned like some truculent grub - it thrashed and gurgled in a psychic torpor, made soporific by the mental spoor of its flock. Its head was a brachycephalic contusion of wrinkled flesh and cartilage, slack with age and flecked with spittle, bristling nonetheless with stiletto fangs and recurved canines. It hissed and hummed, utterly moronic, ignored resolutely by all those present.
A congregation, G'hait mused, unlike any other.
'Elucidium Magus Arkannis,' he announced, gesturing the Cardinal within.
Arkannis, followed by his silent attendant, crossed the threshold into the cavern, movements predatory - a coiled ice-serpent nuzzling through snow, homing upon its prey.
If the council had hoped to intimidate their visitor, if they had hoped to temper his authority with a display of solidarity and solemnity, regarding his entrance with collective disapproval; if they had hoped in some way to visibly manifest their physical majority, measuring it deprecatingly against his solitude - then they failed.
He reached the centre of the chamber, and he smiled.
'There will be changes,' he said.

ACROSS THE CITY, in the blackened alleyways of the Heatsink, a figure thumbed an activation rune on the grip of a power maul and spat on the ground.
'The way I look at it,' he said, 'you kids got no respect for your elders.'
'N-no law against that...' The breathless reply appeared to filter from a disarrayed heap of litter at the bulky man's feet; upon closer inspection resolving into a body, curled in foetal pain, bruises intumescing on cheeks and brows, nose ebbing with a gentle stream of blood. It groaned.
The looming giant, light catching dully on its segmented plates of black armour and the dome of an ebony faceplate, shook its head and tutted slowly, like a cog tooth jumping its sockets. 'I'll decide what's against the law, kid, not you.'
The power maul flared phosphor-blue, stitching a lightning-strike glare across the alley and throwing its shambling architecture, its detritus-strewn base and its pair of occupants into sharp relief. Shadows crawled across walls, flickering in time with the mace's irregular current.
It arced vertically, dragging the shadows with it, and when it connected with the crumpled figure's skull it sizzled sharply, spitting a bright fountain of sparks and detonating the shrieking head like a ripe fruit. Fragments of splintered bone and gobbets of brain matter sheared outwards, pooling and mixing with a thick soup of cranial fluids. The wielder of the maul scowled, deactivating the weapon with a sigh, irritated by the moist splattering across its armour.
Another figure, similarly dressed in midnight-black armour, stepped from a connecting alleyway. It saluted.
'Marshall. Heard a discharge - you need any help?'
The first figure shook its head, kicking the headless wreck at his feet. 'Negative. I caught up with the pickpocket, that's all.'
The new arrival nudged the corpse with a booted foot, grin smearing across the visible portions of his face. 'Self defence, right, Marshall?'
'Heh. You know it, deputy.' The man glanced at an auspex display mounted on his wrist and swore.
'Problem, Marshall?'
'I'm running late. Got an appointment with the Plureaucracy.'
'Serious...?'
'Nothing to it. The pompous bastards couldn't find their arses with both hands, let alone pin me for anything worth a damn.'
'You in trouble, Marshall?'
'Ha! Vigilators are here to keep the peace and uphold the Emperor's law, deputy. We do not bow to the tastes of fat politicians. Remember that.' He nudged the corpse again with his foot, spitting into the slick of blood and brain on the floor. 'Get a team to clean up this mess.'
'Yes sir. And good luck with the Plureaucracy, sir.'
Marshall Delacroix shook the loose blood from his power maul, stamping into the dark knot of streets that surrounded the imposing Apex Block.
'Vigilators make their own luck, Deputy.'

SPLENDID AND TERRIBLE, Arkannis's gaze raked across the gathering. He grinned, he blinked, and he spoke.
'I represent the Elucidium,' he said.
His voice held its audience awestruck, forgoing the practicalities of sound and resonating instead somewhere within; sinking claws and pincers into the mind itself.
'Think of me as a... a wayfarer. A trailblazer, if you will. I go ahead of her, preparing her way, and She is forever at my heel.'
Arkannis turned his gaze - more potent than the barrel of any weapon - and fixated the semicircle of primacii magi. Even those wearing expressions of unconcealed disdain seemed spellbound: brows accreting with crystal concentration, eyes misting with the strength of the words. G'hait, watching with a hammering heart from the doorway, felt the air turn greasy once more. Psychic puissance unsettled the staleness of the chamber.
'Finally,' the Cardinal trilled, beaming with what little warmth his cold features could generate. 'Finally, She is upon us. Her hour is at hand.
'The Great Sky Mother is Coming. Blessed be!'
'Blessed be!' the congregation echoed. In that instant, in that unthinking response to his proffered litany, the gathering silently bestowed upon Arkannis all the seniority he would need. He seized control of the Underchurch without so much as a confrontation, just as he had known he would.
The assurance - the certainty of his authority - was palpable, and as he talked and talked and talked G'hait felt it filling his mind like a drug.

THE CARDINAL OUTLINED the Plan. He admonished the listeners for their laxity, but praised their resolve. He detailed the days that would follow. He wielded his oration with the skill and grace of a swordsman, earning respect before demanding results, beguiling them before commanding them.
He told them how the Blessed Liberation would arise, how they must contribute to its success, where they must be stationed and in what numbers, with what provisions and equipment... He allowed no margin for uncertainty or alternative: he told them, and they believed.
Even the purii, their understanding of language dissolved upon a froth of base instincts, seemed roused by the address, hissing from their shadows and drawing soft fingers across crystalline carapaces, chittering in the gloom. G'hait was glad of the pall of shade concealing them - at once prideful and revolted by his heritage.
Only the Broodfather, the swollen patriarch of the Underchurch, went unaffected by the newcomer's words. It merely flexed and mewled, too glutted by the psychic feast its congregation unwittingly provided to react with intelligence.
Secret and parasitic, lurking with malevolent hunger beneath the frosted streets of the Garial-Fall hivedome, the cult of the Celestial Womb rustled and flexed, fingering weapons and gnarled talons with a growing murmur of accord at Arkannis's words.
Presently the crowd dissolved, orders received.

Excerpt Two:
Section II (''That You May Know Us''), 'Primacii: Claviculus Matri'

We are an uncanny breed, by the standards of humanity. Our ancestry is our life, and our life is forfeit. We give it willingly in the name of the Mother, and in so doing assure our place at her side.
If we must die, let us die. If we must suffer, let us suffer. The Skymother will endure. Always. She hurls her seeds before her, harbingers of her arrival, couriers of her celestial design. She sows. She spawns.
A man, then, or woman, is seeded. Their friends, their peers, their colleagues; they would call it ''infection'', if they knew. The host is tainted.
He or she is contagii, favoured with the flesh seed. Still human - largely - yet simplified. Distilled by the desire to serve. The Celestial-Womb gifts its carriers with Purpose - an endowment impossible to the withered Carrion God.
The host breeds. He takes a woman, or she takes a man. Gripped by instincts they cannot hope to understand they are united; purified by the simplicity of their urges. To nest. To reproduce. To multiply. Their child is not human.
We are an uncanny breed, yes.
We are a race of eugenic coalescence. Ours is the realm of amalgam: of blend, of segue, of mix. Neither this nor that, we are divine mongrels.
Hybrids, all.

'IT WAS YOU. YOU invited him here, didn't you? I checked the transmission records.'
'I never sought to hide it. I could have done.'
To G'hait the voices seemed strained; just one part of the psychic exchange that filled the room. Archmagus Jezaheal - first among the Cult's magi - stabbed out towards Magus Kreista with an angry finger and pursed her bloodless lips. Her single braid of hair - an ebony cascade from an otherwise depilated skull - dragged across the jade mantle covering her shoulders.
'You forgot yourself, Kreista,' she spat, furious. 'This was not your decision to make.'
'I forgot nothing.' Kreista said, voice slow and controlled. 'I simply feared that without my intervention the decision would go unmade.'
'Meaning what?'
The man sighed, shoulders stooped. 'Meaning that the inadequacies of our operation are painfully obvious. I have neither taste nor time for disobedience but... I won't condone wilful ignorance. The council closets away our failures, pretending there are none. I couldn't let it continue, archmagus. I made this decision to aid us, not to undermine your authority. I have no regard for such things.'
G'hait lurked massively at one end of his master's private suite, carefully veneering his interest in the voices across the room. The two magi faced each other, framed with an unhealthy cast from the sputtering coal stove in the corner.
G'hait had served as Kreista's personal attendant since his infancy had finished. In as much as he was in the practice of bestowing his respect upon individuals rather than the Underchurch as an aggregate, he owed much of it to his master. The wizened man was an uncharacteristically pragmatic primacii, desiring in his attendants intelligence and edification as well as brute aggression. In every other maelignaci of the congregation the seeds of creative intelligence were muted; replaced by a servile subjugation and obedience to the goals of the community, guided by the psionic resonances of the Council.
To them, G'hait thought, he must seem freakish. The product of teratosis, of genetic imperfection, of embryonic mutation. In him the human side of his ancestry had conspired to leave his mind capable of imagination and disobedience, of reactions beyond the biological criteria of instinct. That he had not been terminated as soon as his individuality manifested itself was due to Kreista, who held the values of uniqueness - normally the remit of the primacii magi alone - in high esteem.
In Kreista's service G'hait had - against the rules of the church - learned to decipher and craft the spidery characters that formed text: and even to master the rudiments of Underchurch scriptology. He owed his master a great deal.
Jezaheal, her lip curling with irritation, hissed. 'This is insubordination! I should have you flogged!'
Despite the woman's seniority, G'hait felt bunched chords stirring beneath the irregular musculature of his shoulders. His obedience to the Underchurch and its primacii council was without question, but he would tolerate no harm to his master.
'Do what you will,' Kreista replied, waving a dismissive hand. 'It's too late. He's here now. All this venom won't change a thing.'
G'hait allowed his muscles to relax. Even separated by the smoggy breadth of the room, he could see that Jezaheal was defeated. Her shoulders slumped with bad grace.
'Then I hope you're proud,' she spat, half-hearted. 'You've invited a stranger into our congregation - mother alone knows what shadows he brings with him. He could be a spy, for all that we know.'
'His reputation precedes him, archmagus.'
'You think that matters? You're a fool, Kreista.'
'He's no spy! The Elucidium are our allies! Why don't you see it?'
'All I see is a fop, dressed in the... the peacock robes of the Withered God!'
The tiny hairs at the nape of G'hait's neck, a vestigial gift from his human parents, bristled coldly. Even as he turned to investigate the discomfort a sharp voice was speaking over his shoulder. He tensed.
'Then you are not looking hard enough,' said the Cardinal, sweeping into the musty cell with hawkish features set and robes dragging, like some limaceous trail, on the flagstones.
Jezaheal rallied magnificently. 'Arkannis,' she said, voice cold. 'It does not suit such an... honoured guest to resort to eavesdropping...'
The Cardinal smiled, icy features curling in an almost convincing parody of mirth. 'Oh, archmagus, I assure you... Had I the inclination I could eavesdrop on your conversation from orbit.' His eyes flashed. 'Alas, I am here to speak with Magus Kreista, not to pander to your neuroses.'
The archmagus hissed, her knuckles clenching at her sides. 'You need to learn some respect.' Her manner put G'hait in mind of a cat, arching its back in grandiose outrage at some perceived threat. 'I am the senior magus here.'
'And you, my good woman, need to learn when you are outgunned.'
Across the room G'hait watched Jezaheal's expression cooling, becoming an ice cold lance of fury. 'Is that so?' she whispered.
G'hait saw what she was doing a split second too late to brace himself.
The air surged around her, a shivering blast of psionic disruption that lurched outwards from the gaunt woman's eyes, filling the chamber. G'hait staggered against the doorframe, momentarily stunned, blinking lights from his eyes. Even Kreista rocked in his spot, moaning quietly in his throat.
The Cardinal, who had absorbed the brunt of the petulant assault without betraying so much as a flinch, chuckled lightly.
'Good,' he said, in the manner of a doting parent congratulating their child. G'hait half expected him to pat the astonished archmagus on her head. 'I'm gratified that the primaciis of this world still practice the Vocis Susurra... All too many of the Mother's magi allow the Arts to go unlearned.'
Jezaheal all but snarled at the patronisation, stalking for the doorway with her pallid cheeks burning. G'hait, despite his astonishment at the mental barrage, suppressed a smile at her humiliation. The threat to flog his master still rankled.
She swept past him, nose in the air.
'Archmagus...' the Cardinal said, moments before she crossed the threshold.
She spun on her heel, struggling to summon the appropriate ire. 'What?'
'Fops - even those that are dressed as peacocks - are given free rein to travel amongst the unenlightened. You might remember that, next time you skulk through your tunnels like a worm.'
'You d-'
'That is all.' The Cardinal's voice allowed no room for disobedience.
Primacii Archmagus Jezaheal strode from the room, dismissed like a lowly contagii.
'Well,' Kreista allowed himself to sink into a padded seat at his desk, old features crumpling in arthritic gratitude at the support. He stroked his hircine beard with a thoughtful rhythm, regarding Arkannis shrewdly. 'Well, well.'
'It is my understanding,' the Cardinal said, returning the old primacii's gaze with an amused twinkle, 'that I have you to thank for the invitation to this world.'
'You do.'
'Tell me... What made you contact my order?'
Kreista pursed his lips, considering his answer. A gnarled finger extended towards G'hait, surprising him from his silent reverie.
'Acolyte...' he said, voice thick. 'Where are your manners? Fetch the Cardinal a chair.'
G'hait scurried to comply, struggling to reconcile his distrust of the gaudy stranger with a burgeoning respect for his obvious talents. The memory of the archmagus's exit, disgrace and venom shrouding her features, was too delicious to ignore.

THE APEX-BLOCK, so named for its position beneath the zenith of the citydome, was a pillared assortment of offices, administrative strata, tiered arrays of Arbites precincts and, surmounting it all like some whitewashed mushroom, the colossal bulk of the Plureaucracium.
Somewhere deep within its cloistered perimeter, drenched with the splatterings of icemelt from the dome, the Torus Room resonated with the pompous conjecture of the Elect-Plureaucrats. Wide and round, steeped on every side into a bowl-like depression, the room seemed to emit an almost palpable sense of sloth; lined by comfortable recliner benches and inflate mats. Its decadent comfort, dotted with bowls of fruit and sweetmeats, stood confined within alabaster walls and archways, overseen by ceiling frescoes of Imperial heroes and villains.
Meeting daily, the wheezing mussitation of the Plureaucrats provided Garial-Fall with its policies and its problems; endlessly debating moot issues as their supposed inferiors, the whips and adepts, scurried about them in the pursuit of progress. Little of any great value was ever decided in the stagnant warmth of the Torus Room, but the citizenry of the hivedome remained fiercely proud of their administration, gracefully overlooking the ''final say'' authority of the Imperium-appointed Governor, who chaired the debates on the public's behalf - and executed the true administration of his planet in private.
Today's debate was far from extraordinary - a three-bench sub-party languidly petitioning the Plureaucracy for funds to maintain their skein of the orbit-platform's tether cables - and those 'crats not actually asleep lounged with an air of soporific contentment, like ruddy-cheeked hogs recovering from a meal. Even the speaker, chubby digits curled together, seemed to struggle against bleary-eyed lippitude, stumbling over words and wheezing after every sentence. The Plureauracracy basked happily in its own ineffectual laziness, just as it had always done.
Above them, via mildewed gantries and frosted mezzanines that dribbled icicles with frozen incontinence, on the highest roof plateau of the building, a squad of vigilators patrolled with the mechanical disinterest of those who are neither expecting nor afraid of trouble, muttering unfunny anecdotes to one another and fiddling with the triggerheads of their power mauls. If any of them had noticed the mobile shadow that crept stealthily towards them, detaching from the gloom of the chimneystack forest - which they did not - they might have remarked upon its almost supernatural silence, its spectral movements, its implausible speed.
The first of the lawmen felt an icy breath across his throat, flourishing in sudden warmth with a sharp, bewildering tug. He was dead before he could even cry out, jugular fluids smearing in horrific, beautiful patterns across the ice.
The vigilators died, one by one, and when it was finished with them the shadow that had danced through them like mist, fingers sliding with razor precision across sinews and bones, dejointing and eviscerating, twirled happily at the centre of a splatterwork spiral; a circle of heaped bodies and lubricious gore that steamed upon the ice and ran in snaking rivulets across the rooftop.
Its cloak gradually settled around it, unsoiled by even a single droplet of blood, and the figure murmured its satisfied nonsense into the astonished night and slid back into the shadows.

'THE HIVE SECUNDUS is four days north of here. It's not like the City-dome. It's.... it's what you might call a typical hive. Sticks from the ice like a dagger, all twisted metal and rock. An ugly thing. I was born into the Underchurch there and served it all my life... And in all that time, in all those hard years, only one thing remained constant. Struggle.'
Magus Kreista sat back with a sigh, eyeing the sputtering coal stove with a preoccupied distance. His audience - the hawk-like Cardinal, stooped and raptor-like in his own chair - regarded him with hooded intensity, every movement and inflection noted and stored. Arkannis, in turn, was himself studied: pondered over abstractly by G'hait, lurking as convention demanded at the periphery of the cell's lit area.
Kreista continued with a slow breath, absently tapping at the tirchwood stanchions of his seat.
'More than anything else, I struggled against hierarchy. To my mind the Council had become a Gerontocracy, too glutted by its own self-importance to notice its inadequacies. Efficiency fell prey to ceremony, efficacy was lost behind religious dogma. They couldn't understand that a custom first conceived two centuries ago might now be ineffectual, or superfluous. I struggled to contemporise the Underchurch of the Hive Secundus, and failed.'
G'hait studied the listening Cardinal's face. He was watching Kreista's hand, G'hait saw, tap-tap-tapping at his armrest. The old primacii didn't notice the razor attention applied to his mannerisms, too lost in his narrative.
There was an inquisitor in our midst.
'My entreaties to the Council to review our security policies had gone ignored, my interrogation of new recruits dismissed as overzealous... The servants of the Carrion God spotted our weakness and took advantage. I don't know who the inquisitor was posing as. A lowly contagii, a maelignaci. Who knows? One morning I went to inspect a sleeper cell in the upper-hive, and by my return in the evening the Underchurch was slaughtered. Blown apart, shot to hell. A mess, Cardinal. A royal mess.'
The old man's jaw tightened, clenching down on the sadness his voice couldn't hope to disguise. G'hait - long familiar with his master's tale - nonetheless felt his muscles bunch in anger at the genocide.
'I spent a week as an outlaw... The underhive was thick with rumours: Inquisitorial purges, whole families being burnt at the stake. Hysteria gripping the entire city, slaughtering what few shreds of the Mother's congregation remained. I considered my position. It was useless to stay - I could see that. I wouldn't have lasted another week. I resolved to travel to the Hive Primus, carrying news of the defeat, in the hopes that I could save the Underchurch here from the same fate. My acceptance here was... slow to come, but I fought hard and claimed my place on the Council. And now... now, as the great Sky Mother finally approaches... I see it all happening again.'
For the first time since he'd begun his narration, Magus Kreista tore his eyes from the dancing flames and met Arkannis's stare.
'The Underchurch here is failing, Cardinal. Contagii cells go for weeks without report, the maelignaci are under-trained and under-equipped, and the purii... They're allowed to roam at will throughout the tunnels. How long before one is spotted in the city above? How long before our inadequacies are exposed and the Mother's church crumbles here, just like in the second hive? You understand, Cardinal - I couldn't allow that to happen.'
Arkannis pursed his lips and, with a sort of slow exactitude that rendered every movement full of importance, said: 'Go on.'
'When I was ordained as a magus, here in the Hive Primus, I was granted access to the library; the gathered knowledge of centuries. I sifted through records expecting to find no more than the writings of long-dead magi, the... the nostalgic clutter of the years. Instead I found letters. Astropathic transcriptions, encoded and sealed, dispatched from other worlds. Hundreds of them, stacked one upon another, covered in dust. They went back a decade, by my estimate. Maybe more. Not one had been opened.'
Kreista fidgeted, his old frame afflicted by some inner anxiety. G'hait allowed his eyes to wander from the Cardinal's rigid form to that of his master, troubled by the wizened figure's growing frailty.
'You have to understand - as far as I knew, we were alone. In all the... the sickness and decay of the Imperium, Garial-Fall, I thought, was the only refuge of the Mother's faithful. To discover that someone, somewhere out there, knew of us.... it... it was beyond my comprehension. I suppose I can't blame the Council for ignoring the communiques. We've grown used to our secrecy, insulated from the world by our own suspicions and fears. My entreaties to contact your order were flatly refused. The Council didn't want the help that the Elucidium offered. They cited a lack of knowledge, sowed suspicion, denied the explanations that the letters contained. I listened to their prattling with a hollow heart, seeing again the... the intractability that claimed the Hive Secundus. So I went ahead and contacted the Elucidium anyway, and now here you are.'
G'hait shifted his weight from one leg to the other, uncomfortable at the tension.
'Mm,' said the Cardinal finally, cradling his fingers beneath his chin with a slow, reptilian smile. 'Here I am.'
'Cardinal.... I have to know: are there really others? Other churches? Other congregations on other worlds?'
The Cardinal's smile spread, betraying a flash of immaculate ivory beneath his bloodless lips. Slowly, effortlessly commanding the attention of both individuals that watched him, Elucidium Magus Arkannis leaned forwards, features openly amused. 'More,' he said, 'than you could ever imagine.' G'hait felt his head spinning, struggling to maintain the instinctive suspicion he felt towards the outsider; all the while conducting himself with the rigid disinterest expected of his lowly caste.
'Your acolyte there,' the Cardinal said to Kreista, jerking a dismissive thumb towards G'hait (who hissed at the sudden attention), 'is unconvinced. Or, rather, he feels that he should be unconvinced. Distrust has been drilled into him, like all the others. I can feel it, oozing from him like sweat from his pores.' He licked his lips absently, glancing directly at G'hait with a brief smile.
'You were right to contact me when you did, Magus Kreista. Your congregation is stagnating. The Elucidium make it their personal mission to provide solutions in these circumstances. A brave man will stand alone to face any challenge, but... it takes a wise man to seek the aid of others. The Elucidium cherish the wise, Kreista.'
The Cardinal cupped his hand into a loose pocket on the cuff of his robes, withdrawing a finely detailed brooch of silver and platinum. Folded into its iridescent surfaces were the ghostly images of intertwined serpents; a knot of perfect symmetry without beginning or end. The Cardinal flipped it over, admiring its intricate faces. 'Should you wish it,' he said, not taking his eyes from the bauble, 'there is an unfilled position aboard my vessel. As Elucidium it is ever my lot in life to move ahead of the Great Mother, never dawdling to greet her arrival. When I leave this world, magus, as Her shadow falls across its horizons, you would be welcomed into our order.' He proffered the brooch with a smile, pale eyes twinkling, spare hand indicating an identical trinket pinned discreetly amongst the ecclesiastical medallions and ostentatious gewgaws of his costume. 'Should you wish it, of course.'
Kreista took the jewel thoughtfully, ridged eyebrows bunching in surprise. 'Y-you honour me, Cardinal,' he said, voice quiet. 'I am merely a primacii...'
Arkannis grinned, teeth flashing again. 'So was I.' He pursed his lips, eyes flicking to the dancing firelight. 'Kreista, the Elucidium is a... a disparate society. An institution of individuals. Upon each of us is placed two responsibilities: to aid the Mother's faithful wherever we find them, and to recruit those who may serve our order in the years ahead. I believe you are such a one.'
Kreista bowed his head, face flushed with pride.
They each stood, sensing the meeting drawing to an end. Kreista inclined his head respectfully, still shaken by the enormity of what he'd learned. G'hait regarded his master from the shadows with a mixture of feelings, glad that his master's wisdom had been recognised but alarmed at the Cardinal's invitation. He tried to tell himself that his anxiety was based upon a distrust of the Elucidium, and concern at his master falling foul of their tricks. But inside, he knew, his apprehension was the product of selfishness: he couldn't bear for his mentor to leave him behind.
Returning from his thoughts, G'hait was astonished to find the Cardinal staring directly at him, head tilted to one side.
'I have one final favour to ask, magus...' the Cardinal said, turning back to the wizened primacii.
'Anything, my lord.'
'Your acolyte. I should like to borrow him.' 

Excerpt Three:
Passage, Volume III ('Angels and Abominations), 'Primacii: Claviculus Matri'

Let me speak of humans.
We must acknowledge at all times their regard for us. We are the stuff of their nightmares. We are their shadow gargoyles, their bogey-men. They hate us with the collected bile of millennia, and yet we must understand that their hate is merely a product.
It comes not from their hearts nor their minds, but from their god. It is a product of that which separates us from them with more polarity, more obviousness than any mere physical difference: their faith.
Their belief is a thing of nails and whips, of cords and chains - binding them, punishing them, driving them to acts of martyrdom and abasement. It makes them small.
It is an illusion. A sham-mindset of efficiency that degrades and crumbles upon closer inspection. It hides a labyrinth-gut of doubt, a meandering-bowel of hypocrisy, an imperfect and flawed tumour of hollowness and prejudice that sits and ferments in a soup of blood and shit. Faith is their crutch. Their support. It is a scaffold that they erect with morbid exactitude around their fragile minds, a safety net to catch them when they fall.
We will always be stronger than them, because we do not need their faith.
Theirs is the domain of belief, of hoping for that which cannot be seen nor felt, of pissing away the strength in their souls upon whimsy and chance. We do not believe, we children of the Mother. We know.
We need believe in her no more than we need believe in the sky, or the ground, or the air that we breathe. She simply ''is''.
And she is drawing nearer. Always.

THE SENSATION OF helplessness was not something that G'hait relished. Thick cords of chain, matte-black with gunmetal joists and finger-pinioning handsockets, locked him in an aspect of eternal supplication; head bowed, shoulders hunched, every footstep a metallic percussion as the shackles around his ankles pulled taut. His heavy cowl slipped across his forehead, and thus blinded he was forced to flick his head spasmodically to clear his vision, grumbling.
'You look like you've been stabbed in the arse,' the Cardinal said, poking him in the back with his staff. 'Hunch over more. You're playing a prisoner, child - you could at least look a little miserable.'
G'hait huffed loudly, too irritated by the ignominy of his role to act the penitent captive. Still, remembering that he'd promised his master to serve the Cardinal with the utmost obedience, he arched his spine further still, pantomiming the uncomfortable gait of some withered hunchback. The Cardinal inspected him with an imperious eye, nodding once.
'Much better. Now... You understand the plan?'
G'hait scowled. 'No,' he said, 'I told you. I don't know a bloody thing.'
'Such hostility...' Arkannis stroked his chin, amused. 'Allow me to rephrase, child: do you understand your role in the plan?'
'I'm to do as I'm told.'
'Perfect.'
'And it's ''G'hait''.'
'Excuse me?'
'My name. It's G'hait. You keep calling me ''child''. You're not that much older than me, I reckon.'
Another lightning smile, tugging uneasily at G'hait's confidence.
'Tell me...' The Cardinal leaned forwards, genuinely interested, 'do you take the same tone with your master? Is respect so undervalued on this world?'
G'hait refused to be cowed by the piercing eyes, pushing all his distrust and suspicion to the forefront of his mind. 'No,' he said, frowning. 'But you're not from this world, are you? And you're not my master.'
Arkannis leaned back, smile spreading. Again G'hait felt his confidence wobble; the brief stab of uncertainty. For a moment he saw himself as a precocious infant, toying with some chimera-serpent that would hold off striking at him only so long as he amused it. There was venom beneath those arctic eyes, and it froze him to his spot without effort, draining away every last droplet of his assurance.
But it was a fleeting thing, an ephemeral slash of insecurity that was hastily resolved, guzzled up by the racial confidence that was thick in his genes.
'No,' the Cardinal said, teeth again flashing their electric grin. 'I'm not from here. But you are still, I'm afraid, merely a child. I'm older than I look. Come.'
He took a step forwards, arranging his robes with all the ceremony of a hawk preening its feathers, and left the small warehouse - connected remotely to the network of tunnels beneath the city - where he and G'hait had lurked. G'hait stumbled after him, staggering against the impediment of the heavy fetters.
Night came to the hivedome not as the cessation of light and the dominion of darkness, but as a stark polarisation of colour. With the ruby tint of the dome extinguished only the lurid illuminator lamps remained, smearing their infectious yellow pall across every surface, twisting gradients and curves into hard edges of highlight and shadow. Worse, the garish riot of blinking tones and oscillating spectrums that fronted the beatklubs contrived to add their tinted leprosy to the night: rendering every hurrying figure in flat tungsten obscenity, their thick coats and padded jerkins striated by a chessboard of purples and blues and greens.
G'hait sniffed, ignoring the sights and enjoying a lungful of the sharp, cold air, unstagnated by years of subterranean filtration like that of the Underchurch. He wished he could come to the surface more often.
'Ah,' the Cardinal said, staring away from him into the shadows. 'There you are. Take him, please.'
A cluster of forms quit the darkness in a gaggle, descending on G'hait before he could even register their appearance. Gaslight caught at gunmetal stocks and muzzles, picking out the simple grey fabric of military greatcoats and helmets. Storm troopers, G'hait realised, alarms ringing in his mind. Loyal servants of the Withered God.
He staggered backwards with a hiss, mind reeling, berating his idiocy in trusting the Cardinal. 'Bastard!' he shouted, a great glut of anger bubbling in his chest. 'Imperial bastard!'
On instinct, lights flashing in his mind, he ratcheted open his jaw, unhinging the concealed array of razor canines that lurked within with a mechanical clatter. His secondary tongue - a prehensile spear ridged with hooks and barbs - stretched taut. He snarled at the onrushing guards, body and soul fizzing with feral desperation.
'Hey,' said a voice at his back. 'Look around.'
A hellgun stock - wielded like a club by the foremost amongst the second group of troopers, who had crept up on him from behind - struck him with all the finesse of a descending mallet, spinning him in his place and dropping him to the ground.
A calm voice, lost somewhere in the nebula of pain-mist and fury, asked: 'Good. You brought the cage, I trust?'
'Of course, my lord.'
G'hait struggled to sit upright, snarling.
'Watch him,' the voice said, its amused drawl burning in G'hait's mind. 'I assure you, he's quite the rogue.'
The gun-stock loomed over his face again, still bloody from the first strike, and when it came down G'hait tumbled out of consciousness into the welcome murk of sleep.

THE NOCTURNAL BUSINESS of Garial-Fall - an endless human mantra of tragedy and triumph at any other time - was that night marred by a low uncertainty: a discordant note that went unnoticed by the citizens whose lives it bordered, like a familiar tune played a half-key too low. The Brownian motion of revellers and drunkards, whores and gigolos, slouching gang-scum and petty criminals: in and around it all something dark moved and festered, some subtle evanescence of behaviour that spread, like an invisible ripple, across the city.
Cowled figures hurried, alone and in groups, through alleyways thick with shadow. Staggering narc-junkies paused in their moronic undulations to dip in and out of apparently random doorways, then resumed their senseless tottering as if nothing had happened. Here a posse of juves checked the relative desertion of a particular street before ferrying heavy crates from one warehouse to another; elsewhere a richly dressed businessman clumsily fell against a platinum whore, surreptitiously transferring a clutch of parchments in the process.
All across the hivedome an industry of secrecy and conspiracy proliferated, and if any regular citizen suspected a thing it was immediately dismissed as just another underhand deal; another shady business transaction; another borderline illegality in a city that had grown accustomed to corruption and laxity years before.
Silent and secret, disguised behind the myriad idiosyncrasies and insanities of hivecity life, the Mother's congregation slunk from their holes and made their preparations in earnest, filled with divine purpose.

G'HAIT STRUGGLED BACK to awareness with a violence bordering on insanity. Like a child impatient for its own birth he ripped howling from the cool shade of his dreams, every muscle tightening, every neurone burning in hunger for revenge. In the sludge of his ancestral memories he found a surfeit of predatory instincts and reactions, and even before the fog of sleep had cleared from his eyes the identity of his intended prey had crystallised in his mind. Betrayer. Enemy. Arkannis.
He screamed and howled and shook, eyes bulging, his betrayal as insidious as any tumour, spreading frills of malignancy throughout his thoughts. Gripped by hostility, his senses swarmed with impressions: a kaleidoscope of images, sounds and smells, each and every one focused upon identifying and obliterating his target.
On every side of him shallow auditoria slanted upwards like the walls of some civilised crater, the torpidity of the air and the languid circulation of dust characterising the chamber's obvious ancientness. From every quarter, rows and columns of inquisitive faces bore down upon him; withered features whose lifeless skin seemed perfectly indigenous to this archaic environment: a product of its own stagnancy.
G'hait at first mistook his audience for statues, or corpses in the grip of rigor mortis: grotesque homunculi arranged to some morbid design, curled eyebrows bunched together, dust settling on their musty robes. But no; as his senses blossomed their combined odour assailed him - the unmistakable stench of human assemblage, with all its overtones of sweat and decay, flatulence and halitosis, expensive scent-effervescents and all the untidy detritus of recent meals.
Besides, with his every movement - snarling and flexing as he was - the crowd would jump almost imperceptibly, darting worried glances from side to side, unable to maintain their imperious disposition in the face of such immediate rage. They were scared of him, then. Good.
Of more pressing urgency, however, was the growing obviousness of his own ineffectuality. His muscles boiled, impelling limbs to lash out with talons extended, gashing and slicing, splitting sinews and dejointing these geriatric meatsacks; letting the monster inside run riot, delighting in the butchery... He could see it in his mind, could almost taste the iron tang of blood-mist hanging in the air, could almost hear the aborted screams of his victims.
But, no. He was immobile. Locked in a rib-like cage of adamantium pinions and restraints, arms squeezed so tight to his chest that every breath grated his elbows against his sides and every surge of adrenaline was vented uselessly against his metal prison. Worse still, his screams were muffled - reduced to little more than the petulant bleatings of a fractious lamb. The metallic tang of a fat steel-wool gag filled his mouth, bundled tightly beneath his canines, confining the barbed extrusions of his tongue. He cursed and snarled uselessly; colourful invective lost to the meaningless prattlings that were all he could manage.
He was a specimen. A Mother-damned exhibit.
As the last cloying smog of unconsciousness was borne away by waking awareness, he realised where he was. Even as a child of the Underchurch, raised by a community far removed from that of the hivedome itself, he had heard of the Torus Room. The Plureaucracy, demonised by generations of his peers, were symbols of all that G'hait had come to despise: the ineffectuality, the pettiness and hypocrisy, the bloated elitism and decadence of rank. The blind faith. The cruelty. He found himself a captive of the very enemies he'd been taught since birth to hate and fear, and as their multifaceted attention drilled into him from every angle his yowls and impotent furies abated, leaving him surly and silent; an insect regarded through a lens by a higher order of authority.
'If you've quite finished?' a familiar voice trilled into the silence.
G'hait stiffened, recognising immediately the sardonic drawl of the Cardinal. His purple robes rustled into view from one side, hairless pate catching at the bright spotlights that lit the floor of the auditorium. He was altered subtly: the ivory complexion characteristic of primaciis and maelignacis alike gone, replaced with a warmer hue of skin, far more human in appearance. G'hait curled his lip, sickened that he had been deceived by a thing so simple as a layer of makeup.
A ten-strong squad of guardsmen, those same who had immobilised him, G'hait assumed, stood at precise intervals around the inner perimeter of the chamber. Arkannis stalked across the marbled floor with the practiced nonchalance of a showman; an exhibitionist providing a spectacle for his excited audience.
G'hait was smart enough to stay silent, refusing them the satisfaction of a further tantrum. Inside, where even the incisive attention of the plureaucrats couldn't penetrate, he shrieked and committed bloody murder upon the smug features of his betrayer.
'As I was saying,' Arkannis said, addressing the withered politicians with a sharp smile, 'my investigations have yielded results of a most concerning nature... As a Cardinal it is the least pleasant of my holy duties to tend to the sanctity of my own flock. I came to this world, sirs, in response to matters that might otherwise be considered unimportant. Inconsistencies in the administration of the Cathedral, difficulty in collecting funds, poor attendance at sermons, that sort of thing. Sirs, I have served the most beloved Emperor - praise be upon him - for longer than I can remember. This pattern of degradation and corruption is familiar to me. I've witnessed it too often in the past to ignore it now. I came here, gentlemen, in the hope that my suspicions would prove unfounded; that I could dismiss my concerns as symptoms of paranoia or zeal. Alas, my fears were confirmed.'
At this the gaudy figure spun on his heel and stalked towards G'hait's cage, thin fingers reaching to grasp through the bars. It took every last part of G'hait's willpower to suppress the surge of rage at the Cardinal's proximity; biting down on the nascent banshee howl of fury that would, he knew, achieve nothing more than an exacerbation of his own sense of helplessness. He experienced the contact of the Cardinal's fingers against the fabric of his robes at an almost atomic level, glaring with as much malignancy as he could muster at the man's aquiline features.
Arkannis tugged at the robes, surprising him: his strength was unexpected. The cowl ripped, clearing G'hait's shoulders and exposing his head in its entirety to the glare of the Torus Room.
The plureaucrats, predictably, gasped.
G'hait allowed himself to imagine their impressions of his physiology, correctly concluding that, to them - to their blinkered and unchallenging view of what comprised normalcy - he must appear to be nothing less than a monster. The concept amused and depressed him at once: it would never occur to them that he regarded their moist biology in the same light.
His head, elongated and sleekened compared to their own, sloped - upwards from his acute brows in a series of gnarled ridges, culminating in a wide frill of cartilaginous growths, like ossified scales from some deep sea leviathan. His hairless scalp, uniformly etiolated to the same wan shade as his hands and legs, segued in unsettling patterns with the bony crown of chitin that locked the base of his skull to the hunching plates of his back. There, where his simple jerkin revealed his shoulders, the spiny joints of his secondary limbs were revealed - thus far concealed carefully in grooves of overlapping keratin that segmented as he moved. He scissored the talons of his secret arms, earning another disgusted and terrified hiss from the audience.
It was his face, he supposed, that bothered them the most. Beneath his lugubrious brows, and despite the almost albinoesque complexion of his skin, he was just like them. A symmetrical and well formed human face with a fine nose, proud jawline and prominent cheekbones, rounded by smoothly structured lips. He smiled at them, imagining their disgust.
In him they could see themselves. Humanity, purity, innocence: however they chose to define the essence of their own being. In G'hait they saw it contaminated, mutated; infected by the taint of xenogeny. His monstrousness was all the more pronounced for its familiarity.
'Behold,' said Arkannis, gesturing expansively towards him, nodding into the crowd. 'The heresy that festers beneath your noses.'

SOMETHING WITHOUT OBVIOUS shape, bundled extrusions hinted-at beneath its voluminous shroud, as dark as the void, coiled its way between long deserted ventilation grilles and miasmic waste outlets that sputtered and gurgled into the silence.
Here, between mildewed building struts and grille floor divisions left organic and sagging by years of rust, the only sounds were the hollow retorts of the pipeways, resonating endlessly along kilometres of ducting and ventilation. Fat bundles of cables bulged and drooped listlessly; electrical hernias breaching the diaphragmatic walls of their plastic channels. Silent vermin, their black-pearl eyes twinkling in the gloom, darted to clear the pathway of the unformed shade that drifted, wraithlike, through their petty kingdoms.
And finally, its haphazard route complete, the shape sagged gratefully into a steam-fissure recess, methodically tensing and slackening each of its muscles in turn, avoiding the cramps that threatened to overwhelm it.
Here, at least, there was sound. A tinny parody of Voices, corrupted by the unkind acoustic of the tight crawlspace, wended its way upwards from the bright chamber beneath.
The figure settled for the wait, passing the time by casually skewering and skinning those foolish vermin bold enough to approach.

'THAT'S QUITE ENOUGH of the dramatic gestures, thank you Cardinal.' A resonant voice divorced itself from the clamour of the Torus Room, incidentally forcing the scared Plureaucrats into silence. G'hait, increasingly uncomfortable within the confines of his cage, noted a tall man, ostentatiously dressed in Imperial finery, standing at the centre of the front row. The figure gestured distastefully in his direction. 'What's the meaning of this... abomination, Cardinal?'
'Ah, Governor Ansev,' Arkannis smiled, the mirthless grin that G'hait was beginning to associate with irritation flashing across his face. 'An explanation. Yes, of course. In as much as I possess any expertise in these matters - which is to say, not a great deal - I believe you are looking at a genestealer hybrid of the third generation.'
At the mention of the word ''genestealer'' the room erupted in hissed litanies and mumbled prayers, horrified expulsions of breath and terrified curses. G'hait regarded their horror with predatory interest despite his own fears and furies, bewildered by their recognition of the term. He'd never heard the phrase before and was confused by its association with his self. What, he wondered, were ''genestealers'' - and if indeed the nomenclature did apply to his race, how had these ineffectual fops come to hear of their existence before?
'You have proof to back this claim?' the Governor said from his seat, face ashen and voice tight.
'The evidence of your own eyes, Governor,' Arkannis replied. 'You've seen the xenogen archive material, I trust? The specimen-dissections from the wreck Harbinger, which passed through this sector two centuries ago? The similarities in physiology are striking, even to the layman without knowledge of xenobiology. Then, of course, there's the matter of the Hive Secundus... I understand a genestealer cult was uncovered and purged there some decades ago. Is it really so implausible that the tendrils of the Great Devourer have penetrated this city also?'
By now the murmuring was reaching an almost cacophonic level, fearful voices running together. The Governor, fiddling with an ornamented case of 'bac sticks, rounded on the crowd with a snarl. 'Be silent, confound you!'
G'hait worried at the bitter gag with his coiled tongue and waited, hungry for even the slightest opportunity to escape, to turn this disaster to his advantage, to do anything. He was scared - for himself and for his church - and it was a sensation that didn't sit easily in his gut. Mentally he recited catechisms to the Mother, appealing for the comforting certainty of her love that had been present in every aspect of his life thus far.
'You will forgive me, Cardinal,' the Governor said, standing with his features closed and serious, the faux pomposity of his syntax entirely failing to disguise his distrust, 'if I seem... incredulous. There are, to my mind, inconsistencies in your words. Details that do not seem to add up. Perhaps you might address them?'
'Oh?'
'Under what circumstance, I wonder, would a Cardinal of the Ecclesiarchy take it upon himself to investigate an abomination so grievous? A man of such stature could hardly claim ignorance of the correct procedures, in these situations.'
'Make your point, Governor.'
'As I understand it, Cardinal, the blessed Inquisition are more than adept at investigations of this nature; certainly it was they who delivered the Hive Secundus from its infection - and yet you consider yourself sufficiently qualified to do their job for them? You arrive here in our midst, unannounced like some rogue trader, bringing with you your caged freak and your tall tales - hinting at a knowledge of xenobiology, no less! Hardly the behaviour of a holy man, in my experience. An individual of your wisdom, Cardinal - if indeed that's what you are - can surely appreciate my bewilderment.'
G'hait studied Arkannis's face, struggling to decipher the emotions that his wry smile concealed. Its meaning remained opaque. Besides, G'hait considered the Governor's questions entirely pertinent: Arkannis's actions thus far had not been those of an Imperial Cardinal, and his profound psychic talents only served to make his appointment in such a role even more unlikely.
Who or what, then, was he?
'My congratulations, Governor,' Arkannis said, the smile spreading wider still. 'Your wisdom is a credit to this world.'
Moving again with slow ceremony, he raised his right hand, fingers fanned, to the audience. A peristaltic ripple moved across the crowd, heads craning downwards, eager to see whatever bauble he displayed. A thick silver ring on his centre finger, surmounted by a ruby that glimmered like a perfect droplet of blood, snagged at the auditorium lights. Arkannis muttered a word beneath his breath, clenching his fist then opening it again.
The ring flickered, pulsing with some inner life. And then, to a hushed chorus of hisses and gasps, it blossomed: radiating a dazzling stream of light directly upwards, flaring at the dust in long ruby-red motes. A shape formed within the light stream; an effervescent illusion that held every person in the auditorium spellbound, that elicited a wave of mouths hanging agape, of low moans of recognition, of perfect and undiluted authority.
Even G'hait recognised the symbol, stomach turning over as the magnitude of Arkannis's betrayal became manifest.
It hung aloft, rotating around its vertical axis with solemn magnificence: a silver-black quadrilateral, bisected horizontally with three sharp slashes of blackness.
A serif-bearing ''I'', thrice struck-through, surmounted at its centre by an ivory skull.
'I am Inquisitor Arkannis of the Ordo Xenos,' the Cardinal said. 'And my authority will be questioned no further.'

Excerpt Four:
Interior passage, Volume II ('Angels and Abominations'), 'Primacii: Claviculus Matri'

Of the Orders of the Mother's children.
The lowliest and most numerous are the contagii: the infected. They are the blessed meat-puppets of the congregation, gifted with the freedom that comes with service. When they accept the Kiss, when their imperfect flesh is laced with the Mother's legacy, they taste divinity. Influence, power, wisdom: these are the goals of the contagii.
The second order are the maelignaci: in whom the Mother's flesh is a birthright, a gift of a shared lineage. Those of the first generation, the sons and daughters of contagii, are animals.
I will not glorify their idiocy, nor condemn it. They are unsullied by the distraction of intelligence, their worth measured in procreation and destruction. They are the Mother's engines of war and vessels of multiplication, lumbering and moronic, executing their orders without callousness nor cruelty. Their existences are brief, filled by the exigence of combat and breeding. They burn brightly, and are gone.
Their children, hybrids of the second generation, are the truest of predators. The whimsy of the lineage is manifest in them - a culture of unique specimen and unpredictable bearing, with no two alike. They can be selectively bred; their parents studded like prize livestock to exploit a particular trait. Speed, strength, aggressiveness. These are the virtues of the second children.
And the third generation. The truest of hybrids.
They are the children in whom the defences of the human genetype are all but overcome. The Mother's fleshgift may Operate to whatever design it chooses, spared the erratic successes and failures of eugenic inconsistency. Their bodies are carefully formed, their minds developed to favour obedience and cunning, their spirits strong. They are the praetorians of the Mother's will, and in her name they serve and grow mighty.

'YOUR CITY IS compromised. Your security is shattered. Your purity undone. The seeds of heresy and rebellion have flourished in the shade of your laxity, and we must pray to Him-on-the-Throne that this discovery does not come too late.'
Arkannis paused, basking in the attention of the combined Plureaucracy. He wet his lips slowly, taking time to run his shrewd gaze across the rows of transfixed faces.
'Answer me now, men of Garial-Fall. Will you place yourselves beneath the jurisdiction of the Ordo Xenos? Will you do as I tell you, when I tell, how I tell you? Will you obey me, in the certainty that to do otherwise would amount to your destruction? Tell me. Tell me now.'
Silence draped itself across the gathering, a velvet shroud that bristled along every spine and raised goose-flesh bumps across every fat inch of flesh. Even G'hait, listening as his blood roared for butchery and carnage, felt the power behind Arkannis's words.
The Governor stood, face pale.
'We are yours to command, my lord inquisitor.'
Arkannis smiled, and as his teeth twinkled like a constellation of daggers the pale skin of G'hait's knuckles began to bleed, thinning and splitting at the sheer fury with which he clenched his fists.
'Good.' Arkannis said, pursing his lips. 'Which of you speaks for the security resources of this city?'
A rotund man stood, sweating visibly through brightly coloured robes, their ludicrous blotches of pattern - perhaps in deference to his role - arranged in a gaudy imitation of militaristic camouflage. He squirmed, putting G'hait in mind of nothing more than a maggot, writhing at the tip of a hook. 'N-Nylem Versel, my lord.'
'And your post?'
'Chairman. Uh, c-chairman of the primary sub-committee for the Provision of Civilian and Military Defence.'
The newly-revealed inquisitor cocked an eyebrow, shaking his head. ''Primary sub-committee?'' he parroted, voice sharp with scorn.
The plureaucrat wilted beneath the glare, lip trembling, nodding maniacally.
'It's no wonder your world is infected, sir.' Arkannis's disdain was merciless, forcing Versel back into his seat. 'You pampered fools were too busy voting to notice the adders nesting beneath your fat arses.'
Hot indignation filled the auditorium, its stagnant dustmotes gyrating with a new tension and urgency.
'Is there no one here that speaks for your military?' Arkannis snarled, brows knotting together.
'Aye,' said a voice.
A grizzled man stood at the periphery of a minor bench, scarred features and lean frame entirely incongruous with those corpulent figures that shared his row. He nodded professionally to Arkannis: one equal greeting another.
'You're no politician, I think...' Arkannis said, smiling.
'I'm Marshall Delacroix of the vigilators, Commander of the Precinct.' His voice, in keeping with his appearance, seemed casual to the point of slackness: clipped of the pompous formality with which the Plureaucracy conducted itself. G'hait thought he looked like a man perpetually angry with the world but unable to discern why.
'Do you make a habit of listening-in on the administrative nonsense of fat men, Marshall?'
'No, sir. I don't. I was summoned to answer charges of brutality, as it happens. Some of your ''fat men'' aren't too keen on my methods, if you catch my drift. Not that they've got the authority to stop me.'
One or two of the politicians muttered disgustedly beneath their breaths, until the vacuum-like tension of the room compelled them to silence.
'How very fortunate for the pair of us, marshall.' Arkannis's gimlet eyes twinkled. 'Tell me - how far does your jurisdiction extend?'
The marshall cracked his knuckles pointedly, cruel mouth spreading into a sneer. 'Technically? As far as you want it to. Local customs don't give me much say over the PDF, but in theory I could commandeer the lot.'
'Mm. I need a General, Delacroix. I need someone to follow my orders. Someone with authority over every military resource.'
Delacroix's sneer spread even further. 'Then I'm your man, sir.'
Governor Ansev blustered to his feet, waving his wad of notes and files like some dishevelled fan. 'This is ridiculous, Arkannis! You can't hand over the armed forces of the entire hive to him! The man's a psychopa-'
'Governor,' the inquisitor's interjection silenced the incensed official, robbing him of every trace of his indignation. 'A moment ago you sanctioned my absolute authority over every resource at your disposal. Your objections are too late. Sit down and shut up, or I'll have you ejected.'
The Governor sank into his seat, mouth opening and closing in wordless astonishment. G'hait was put in mind of a fish, drowning in the air.
'Congratulations, Marshall. As of now you are Commander-in-chief of the combined vigilator and Defence forces of Garial-Fall. Your first act will be to declare a state of martial law. Impose a curfew, if you must. Keep citizens off the street and civil disorder to a minimum. Impress upon them the... urgency of the situation. Use whatever means are necessary.'
Delacroix's smile, already a crooked feline grin, spread further still.
'As you command, my lord.'
'Good. Spread the word. I want every enforcer, every PDF sergeant, every plebeian grunt and gunner to know:
from this moment we are at war. There is a community of evil thriving at the heart of this city, and I intend to crush it. Utterly. There will be a Command briefing. Every officer of rank lieutenant or above to be included. See to it that there are no absentees. I will address them in...' Arkannis glanced at a gold timepiece suspended from one sleeve of his robe, 'four hours.'
'Where?'
'I assume you have a control bunker at the precinct?'
Delacroix nodded, staggered at the speed with which his promotion had unfolded, unnerved by the utter assurance of the inquisitor's orders.
'Then be on your way. I dare say you have a great deal to prepare.'
Delacroix quit the chamber at a half-run, the vast frescoed doorways booming closed behind him, lifting a thin layer of dust from their moulded surfaces.
'Well,' said Arkannis into the silence, beaming. 'That was easy enough.'

THE QUIESCENT PRESENCE trembled then tensed, thin limbs pausing in their grisly pastime. A semi-disembowelled rat was tossed aside, gelatinous innards trailing behind.
The shape peered from its alcove warily, slender talons gripping at either edge of the damp ducting that enclosed it, lifting itself clear like some horrendous larva, quitting its cocoon.
Nearby, thick with decades of dust and mould, a sturdy grille punched slatted lines of light into the crawlspace; parallel bars of warm luminescence, bleeding up from the chamber below.
In its mind, through brutalised and dissected layers of alien contemplation and abstraction, past thick boundaries of utter insanity, it could feel its master calling to it. The tiny, impotent voice at the pit of its brain that struggled to disobey, that railed against the psionic commands that gripped it, was drowned.
The creature placed a hooked claw against the grille's bars and, filled with the anticipation of action, tugged.

G'HAIT TRIED TO flex a limb, suppressing the insidious cramps that crept across his muscles. The cage constricted him on all sides, imprinting its lattice of coarse bars onto his exposed flesh, a chequerboard of bruises that quickly flared blue and purple against his albino skin.
Despite the pain he kept his eyes fixed squarely upon Arkannis, sick with hatred that no number of venomous glares nor bestial snarls could hope to assuage. The so-called ''Cardinal'' stood beaming at the silent audience, resolutely ignoring his captive, all the rigid formality that he'd displayed moments before suddenly and startlingly surrendered - lost the very instant that Marshall Delacroix had left the chamber. To G'hait's mind his posture and bearing now was that of an excitable child; happily awaiting some forthcoming spectacle.
The Imperial Governor, losing patience with the protracted silence, stood with an audible sigh, exasperation palpable in his voice. 'Inquisitor - what exactly are you intending to do?'
Arkannis rolled his eyes. 'Governor, I'm growing a little bored of your outbursts. I told you to be silent.'
'But-'
'Sit!' The word resonated beyond the material plane, thick with psionic puissance, rippling and alive in the air. On every side of the auditorium those plureaucrats who were half standing to discuss matters quietly with their neighbours, or who sprawled too far from the vertical, or who knelt in the footwells of their benches in prayer, collapsed into their seats with a startled yelp. Like an expanding ring of movement the gathered politicians found themselves compelled to sit bolt upright, unable to disobey the mental command that ripped at their very brains. Even the guards, standing upright at the periphery of the chamber, collapsed to the ground like boneless meat, sitting cross-legged for a moment before clambering to their feet, confused. To G'hait the psionic command was a torture, impelling his cramped legs to fold away, forcing him to push himself harder still against bars that refused to bend or break.
Arkannis, watching the madness with a wry smile, chuckled to himself. 'Oops.'
And then a noise filled the Torus Room - a sharp squeal that plucked moans of terror from the gathering, slowly rising in volume.
'E-emperor, preserve!' the Governor burbled, eyes locked upwards. 'What is it?''
'That,' said Arkannis, not bothering to crane his neck with the rest of the crowd, 'is the sound of adamantium tearing. There's something almost... primal about it, don't you think?'
'Guards!' the Governor squealed, terrified.
'Yes... Yes, that's a good idea.' Arkannis smiled. 'Guards - prepare yourselves.'
The ten storm troopers racked their hellguns with a succession of mechanical clatters, planting themselves firmly in sturdy firing positions. Not one of them said a word, or tilted the muzzles of their weapons upwards to track the source of the keening noise.
G'hait's mind reeled, lost in a web of confusion. He was certain that he was missing something, some piece of this puzzle; but all his focus was bent upon anger at the Cardinal's betrayal, blinding him. The need to understand - itself a product of his unique and freakish biology - was crushed; buried beneath a landslide of rage.
And then Arkannis winked at him.
And then a ventilation duct high above the auditorium Collapsed and dropped, like a gunmetal corpse with its spine severed.
And something followed it down. And the world went mad.

SOMEWHERE, AT THE back of its spinning mind, the insane creature registered the sounds of gunfire. Percussive and ugly, the rhythmic pounding of hellgun shells reverberated across the air, as tangible to the creature's hypersensitive skin as repeated blows of a hammer.
It crooned delightedly to itself, already detecting the unmistakable stink of blood, spreading wide its limbs like some rappelling spider, plunging vertically from the ruptured vent. It landed on its feet - of course - and smiled. And kept on smiling.
Obese meat-things shrieked and burbled before it, or else froze with dinner plate eyes and mouths gaping. It articulated its limbs without effort or conscious thought; razor blurs of dark skin and exoskeletal chitin, silent and impossible to track.
The head of a nearby preymorsel - its fat wattles quivering as it screamed - fell from its attendant neck, an expression of intense confusion spreading across its jugulated face. Carnage, silent and precise, rippled across the throng; robed in black and impossible to define. Here an arm was sheared at its elbow; a perfect incision that swept a porous plateau across muscle, sinew and bone. There a set of intestines were released from the tight confines of their abdominal prison, springing forth with elastic joy to tumble and collect across the floor.
The creature danced through the crowd like a laughing god, humming and giggling to itself, and wherever it passed men died before their minds even registered the presence of their deranged killer.

G'HAIT WATCHED IT all unfold with slow horror and mounting confusion, adrift on a sea of nonsensical events and contradictory impressions. The screams rose to an almost unbearable pitch, eclipsed only by the relentless hellgun salvoes, stalling his whirligig thought process before it even began.
Like vultures lurking at the periphery of some exquisite execution, the storm troopers that perched at the rim of the auditorium bowl gunned down any bustling plureaucrat that dared approach. Despite the roaring weapons the politicians fled ever upwards, porcine eyes wide and limbs scrabbling across the steep tiers of seating. Bright fabrics ripped and singed, fluids splattered with explosive momentum, sheared and punctured bodies flopped and toppled backwards, crushing their neighbours, shards of bone and jewellery tumbling in their wake.
And behind them, fuelling their terror, provoking their clumsy, comical ascent, a storm cloud boiled through their midst. Somewhere at its heart was a figure - G'hait's darting vision could discern that much - but its features and shape were beyond even his ability to perceive. As it knifed its grisly way through the throng, flipping and ducking around geyser-gouts of arterial spray and dissected flesh, G'hait recognised the funereal shroud of the Cardinal's attendant - the wiry figure who'd accompanied Arkannis from off-world. He remembered noting the warrior's stance, the disciplined movements, the aura of control.
The transformation was breathtaking. The figure had become a god of knives, a scalpel-jester; an incision-dervish that parted musclecords like water and hewed bone like soft wood. A swell of carnage billowed outwards in concentric rings, a scarlet mandala that blossomed to incorporate every bench, every marbled expanse, every shredded body. A set of disembodied fingers flittered through the air, striking at G'hait's cage with a series of sharp, ballistic crackles. He barely noticed, spellbound by the devastation.
'She's enjoying herself...' a dry voice said, near enough to G'hait's ear to startle him. He twisted his head as much as the cage would allow to find Arkannis standing close, regarding the frenzied butchery with a quiet smile. A lace-like trail of blood, gusted from some impossible-to-follow incision elsewhere in the Torus Room, painted itself across his face in a delicate ruby stripe. 'Hmm,' was his only reaction.
G'hait, unable to speak, thought: she?
'Oh yes,' Arkannis said, unprompted, withdrawing a silk kerchief from a pocket and elegantly wiping at the bloodsmear. 'Her name is Trikara. She's quite the artist.'
An eyeball tumbled past Arkannis, ocular nerve orbiting like some frenzied lassoo. 'Mind you...' he said, leaning in towards G'hait with a conspiratorial smirk, 'she does rather tend to show off.'
The stink of blood and gunsmoke invaded G'hait's senses, firing instinctive reactions buried deep in his genes, drawing tendrils of saliva across his gag-bound chin and tensing his cramped muscles still further.
'I shouldn't try fighting it, child,' Arkannis said, regarding him with lidded eyes. 'It's in your blood. One can't escape their lineage.'
G'hait thought: You're reading my mind...
The Cardinal chuckled, like a parent amused by the naivety of their child. 'You've only just worked that out?'
Bastard! You betrayed the Mother!
'Did I? Did I really? Perhaps you'd care to look again.'
G'hait glanced away from the frost-toned irises, astonished by the devastation that, scant moments since the assault had begun, already littered the room. It seemed like some callous whirlwind, composed of a thousand spinning razorblades, had swept through the Torus Room. Few plureaucrats remained alive now, fleeing and tumbling in disarray as the blurred assassin closed upon them.
'It seems to me,' Arkannis said, ignoring the few remaining screams, 'that I haven't betrayed the Mother at all.'
G'hait's mind spun, exhausted and bewildered. The thought surged at the centre of his brain, impossible to conceal: I don't understand!
'Alas,' Arkannis sighed, brows dipped in a passable imitation of sympathy, 'understanding is overrated. Today, with your help, we have obliterated the mightiest of the Mother's enemies and instigated the downfall of all others.'
With my help? You caged me... I haven't done anything!
'Oh, but you have. You remember my good friend Marshall Delacroix? When the news reaches him that the entire administration of his world has been found thus - slain, ripped to shreds by some wild animal.... how do you think he'll react? He'll remember the snarling beast that was presented to the Plureaucracy, and he'll draw an entirely inaccurate conclusion...'
H-he'll think that I broke free... He'll think that I did this!
'Very good, G'hait. You aren't as stupid as I feared. Yes, Marshall Delacroix, newly-promoted General of the Garial-Fall defence force, whose colourful records credit him with a history of overreaction and overzealousness, will spread the word that a cult of vicious heretics, able to break through adamantium and overcome an entire squad of storm troopers, has blossomed at the heart of his world. He'll impose his wretched martial law and he'll come down on criminals and curfew-breakers like a shower of boulders... I've met men like him before, G'hait. They think that panic can be bottled-up, corked like some rare vintage. It can't. The harder you repress it, the stronger it becomes. Our friend Delacroix, believing all that he heard in this room today, and burning with power and vengeance, will sow the seeds of discord and unrest far more effectively than you or I ever could. When the Mother's faithful flock rises up, it will be to find a population already in disarray, stamped underfoot by a martial regime, terrified of shadows and begrudging the tyrants who are supposed to be protecting them. What better circumstances could exist for the rebellion?'
But Delacroix will be prepared! He'll attack the church!
'Those were not my orders to him, G'hait. You heard what I said. I told him to organise a command briefing, remember?'
But...
'Tell me, child. How else could we - the Mother's faithful children - have conspired to collect every ranking officer amongst our enemy in one place, at one time?'
G'hait almost gagged, appalled and awestruck at the depth of the deception, forming an impossible conclusion: You knew he'd be here today... It was no coincidence at all...
'Very good. There are no coincidences in my work. I checked the Plureacracy's schedule from off-world, weeks ago, and timed my arrival to coincide with the marshall's hearing. Simple.'
And what is your work, ''Cardinal''?
Arkannis's face straightened, wry smile annihilated. He stared directly at G'hait, leaving no room in the hybrid's mind for doubt or uncertainty, filling all of his consciousness with the penetrating depths of his eyes. 'I am Elucidium,' he said, and, lifting a key from a chord at his belt, unlocked the cage that held G'hait prisoner.

IN ITS LAIR, lounging with vapid obesity upon a palette of decaying meats, splattered with the coagulated resin of its own spittle, the patriarch stiffened.
Its nonsensical gurgling faltered; the spasmodic rotations of its tiny porcine eyes resolved with something like focus, and, as the three contagii selected to clean and tend to the grotesque messiah milled in empty-minded confusion, it straightened.
Frills of atrophied flesh, segmented and creased by centuries of flaccidity, gathered and hung like waterlogged carcass-meat, dislodging the slime of sweat and dead skin that puddled across the shifting behemoth. Flakes of eroded cartilage - little more than sawdust shards of pallid and brittle chitin - rained from its pied carapace like a fine snow. It flexed the humanoid hands of its secondary limbs, knuckles crackling like dry timber, ossified talon nails clicking together.
Never before in living memory had the corpulent gargoyle appeared anything other than vegetative. To the congregation its existence was iconic rather than practical: an avatar of the Mother around whom to centre their worship and respect. It was an idol: as insensible and incommunicable as the stylised statues of the humans' Emperor, carved in alabaster and ivory in the Cathedral above.
The patriarch was a glyph; a symbol; a focus of worship. Nothing more. It had ever been thus. But not so now.
It squatted enormously on its haunches, regarding and flexing its limbs with mute fascination - a child achieving self awareness for the first time. The recurved hooks of its principal limbs, long sickle claws with glistening muscle cords at their bases, scissored with a slow rasp, cutting edges playing across one another musically.
The contagii, not understanding this new situation and lacking the relevant orders to confront it, seemed to switch off, gazing vacantly into nothingness in the absence of other regulation.
The purii had no such idiocy. Out from the shadows they slunk, scuttling from myriad tunnels and drains, long arms and wicked talons extended in some horrific parody of human celebration, summoned by the awakening of their strongest, most ancient brother.
Sensing the burgeoning excitement of its congregation, plucked from its comatose insensibility by the surge of focus and anticipation that they generated, the patriarch awoke to preside over the eve of his flock's long awaited rebellion.

G'HAIT'S BODY MOVED independently of his mind, surging with a burst of animal frenzy that bypassed his intellect and fed instead upon the most feral of his instincts. Before his senses were even fully engaged and he could register the opening of his cage, his hands were locked around Arkannis's throat, his secondary claw-limbs poised to incise across the man's exposed neck. He pounced like some venomous reptile, pushing his enemy onto the ground and straddling his chest, tensing for the blow that would open the so-called Cardinal's jugular in a glorious, beautiful fountain.
'Maelignaci,' Arkannis said from beneath him, voice tight, face betraying not a hint of fear or anger at the assault. 'Wait.'
G'hait ripped the gag from his own face with a spasmic swipe of a claw, not caring for the long gash he scored into his own flesh in so doing. He spat the balled wad of steel-gauze with relish, ratcheting his jaw to relieve its ache.
'You die, inquisitor!' he snarled, lost in the storms of his own mirid, claws raised above his head.
'I'm no inquisitor, child. You know that.'
'You're a liar!'
Arkannis smiled. 'There are two reasons,' he said, 'that you will not kill me. The first is that. I am not lying. I've just ordered the genocide of an Imperial administration, G'hait. Use your brain.'
'I saw the ring! ''I'' - the symbol of the Inquisition!' His certainty wobbled dangerously, threatened by too many unanswered questions, too much confusion.
'A souvenir. I've killed more of the Inquisition's holy fools than I can remember. They part with their little trinkets with poor grace, in my experience.'
'That's... Y-you expect me to believe you now? You think I'm an idiot?'
'No, child. Quite the reverse... Which brings me to the second reason that you won't kill me.'
'Oh yes?'
'Oh yes. Because you'll be dead before you move an inch.'
A sharp pressure against his throat - not hard but... insistent - registered vaguely at the back of G'hait's mind. Distantly, as though it were happening in another world, he noticed that the shrieks and screams of the Plureaucracy had been silenced. A hand gripped his shoulder with mock familiarity, tightening the razor contact beneath his chin.
Arkannis's grin widened further. 'G'hait, meet Trikara. Trikara, this is G'hait.'
The thing behind him hissed and giggled beneath its breath, airy tones vaguely feminine in their delirious cadence. The sniggering wasn't helping G'hait's confidence - or his concentration.
'Now,' said Arkannis, apparently unaware of the ignobility of his position, prone against the marble. 'You are a maelignaci of unusual intelligence, G'hait. I suggest you use your brain.'
'But... I don't...'
'You don't understand - yes, we've established that.' Another smile lit the pinioned face. G'hait fought the urge to cut it in half. 'But consider the evidence. In one fell swoop, with no more cost than your damaged pride, I've created the exact set of circumstances that your ineffectual little congregation should have established years ago. I've undermined the stability of this city, I've sliced off its fat head, and I've forced the long arms of its military into a trap... And now you, G'hait, want to kill me because I made you stand in a cage? Not quite the selfless devotion I'd expect of the Mother's faithful, boy.'
G'hait felt his cheeks burning, hating the grinning figure. 'So why me? And why not tell me what you planned?'
'Because I needed a reaction. I needed a convincing little monster.'
G'hait scowled, still not understanding. Arkannis rolled his eyes.
'Outrage, G'hait. I needed outrage. I needed someone to scream and shriek like a beast. All that... that betrayal and fury that you're clinging to so nicely... I wanted it boiling out from every pore. You've seen the other maelignacis of the Underchurch. Empty-headed things, G'hait. Puppets. They lack your spirit.'
'You needed me as an alibi.'
'Quite. The slightest hint that you trusted me... that we were allies... would have ruined everything.' He chuckled. 'No hard feelings, eh?'
G'hait glared at him, hatred sputtering and beginning to die, swallowing his bruised pride with a conscientious effort. His sense of betrayal was nothing compared to the Mother's duty.
'You have proof for all this?' he snarled, the last few traces of ire bubbling tenaciously in his guts.
Arkannis smiled indulgently, cold eyes flashing. 'Consider this, child: I could have had you terminated at any point. I still could, at that. And yet here you are, alive and angry and ugly. Hardly the work of a betrayer, I dare say... Besides... There's the evidence of your own eyes. Look around.'
For the first time since the extraordinary conversation began, G'hait slid his eyes away from the recumbent Cardinal and surveyed the devastation. The figure behind him, still pressing its scalpel-like claw against the all-too-human skin of his throat, giggled into the silence.
Bodies lay like ruined sculptures, intermingling, their fat joints coagulating across the marble. Disembodied hands sprouted like wan saplings, clutching lifelessly at the air. Decorticated faces grinned from lipless mouths, eyeballs lolling with lifeless intensity amongst the liberated mess of intestinal trauma. On all sides the Torus Room had become an obscenity: an artwork of such glorious viciousness and aesthetic perversion that even G'hait, burdened as he was by human inadequacies like revulsion and fear, could not help but be impressed in the feral pit of his mind. Only the storm troopers, guns finally lowered, remained standing; grey uniforms macerated with patches of blood and flesh.
Arkannis watched G'hait absorb it all, and with only the merest flicker of attention silently ordered his murderous companion to release her grip. G'hait staggered upright, too stunned to speak, and the Cardinal stood before him with a sweep of violet fabric.
Still reeling, G'hait allowed his wandering attention to fall upon the figure that Arkannis had called ''Trikara'', not sure what to expect. That she was lithe and athletic beneath the cloak was entirely expected, yet still her fragile form - so thin that to G'hait she appeared little more than some skin-hung skeleton, emaciated to the point of brittleness drew a hiss of surprise from his throat. Clad in a textureless ebony bodysuit, stitched crudely with black wire to accommodate the extraordinary length of her limbs, her movements were like oil shifting across rocks; like the subtle play of darkness at the heart of overlapping shadows.
Her hands caught immediately at G'hait's attention, if only for their sheer incongruity: beside the lissom blackness of her wardrobe they seemed at once monstrous and elegant: flesh so pale it was almost white, calcifying and segueing with the ridged plates of chitin particular to his race. Long segmented digits, like the legs of some ivory crustacean, ended in hooked claws like scythe-blades, slick with blood and gore. They retracted into the insectile fingers with a wet rasp, eliciting another giggle from their owner.
Her face, even more than her butcher's claws, astonished G'hait. Perched imperiously upon a swanlike neck, it was composed with an almost feline aesthetic: eyes wide and tilted, nose merely a fine ridge, cheekbones extraordinarily prominent, mouth little more than a tiny underscore. Even the dimpled crests of cartilage above her brow, characteristic of the Mother's taint, couldn't destroy the exotic allure of the face, its skin almost luminous. Her ears, arching proudly from beneath a shock of jet black hair, tapered upwards into long, languid points.
She dribbled and giggled, instantly destroying what brief beauty - no matter how alien it might have been - she possessed. Extending a long finger towards the random heaps of cooling meat that had so recently been the Plureacracy of the Hivedome, she caught G'hait's eye and snickered like a flirtatious adolescent, drawing a moist tongue across her lips. Something moaned.
'Ah...' Arkannis said from behind him, amused. 'A gift for you, G'hait. I think Trika' must like you.'
It was the Governor, and he was dead. Almost.

* * *

Excerpt Five:
Interior passage, Volume II ('Angels and Abominations'), 'Primacii: Claviculus Matri'

The first order are my brethren, the primacii: scions of the fourth generation.
In our biology the lineage reaches its zenith, withdrawing its eccentricities and crudities to the inside, working its labile craft upon the mind, the soul, the anima. We, of all the Mother's flock, are best able to create, to innovate, to imagine. We, who have tasted sentience and promised its heady gifts to the service of Her godhead: we are truly the most blessed of her children.
The primacii are bred with a disposition towards gauntness and intellectualism; our minds are honed to an incisive edge, our tastes and pleasures unbridled by the Mother's credence. We may exercise our intellects in whatever way we see fit, shepherding the entirety of the Mother's flock towards that most divine, most perfect, most profound conclusion:
Her ascendancy.
She comes; blessed be!

THE RETURN TO the cool tunnels of the Underchurch filled G'hait with more relief than he could have imagined. Still reeling from the unexpected events of the evening, his head pounded with the thoughts and sensations that were his particular disability. As he followed Arkannis and Trikara through the wending catacombs, the muffled scurrying from resin-coated shadows around him broadcast the attention of other maelignaci; lumbering and moronic or sleek and vicious, they regarded his passage with disinterest that - he fooled himself into thinking - bordered on disdain. In truth they were no more interested in him than in anything: servile only to the direct orders of the Council.
He would never be like them; spared the complexity and grief that came with sentience. Theirs was an animalistic simplicity, an utter devotion and supplication to the Mother's will (channelled, the council regularly crowed, through the primacii) that G'hait found himself envying.
The memory of Governor Ansev's execution (mewling like vermin through G'hait's thoughts, the thick sinews of his elbows and knees sliced and raw) filled G'hait with guilty satisfaction. A gift, Arkannis had called it. A gift to help him vent the anger and rage that had accreted in his mind like a tumour, dizzying his thoughts and tripping his senses. He was astonished at the speed with which events had darkened, trapping him at the heart of some impossible and complex ruse. A magus posing as an inquisitor posing as a Cardinal; G'hait had relished the opportunity to divorce himself from the confusion, lost in a haze of a bloodlust.
Briefly he'd tasted the feral simplicity of his brethren. Briefly he'd allowed the monster out of its emotive cage, stampeding through the frail shell of abstraction and intelligence that was his particular weakness. Briefly he'd tasted what it meant to be maelignaci, true and sincere and unsullied, rather than a mere Mother-damned freak with the mind of a human.
Briefly he'd tasted slaughter, and when he'd looked down at his work, at his claws slick and sticky with human blood, at the shredded jelly-flesh that was all that remained of Governor Ansev, he'd exalted in the sheer animal obviousness of it.
It didn't last, of course. How could it? Within moments the tangle of hopes and dreams was re-established, the complexities and deceptions of pride and trust and sentiment reformed, the illusory ganglia of emotion suffused itself again through his brain like some tentacled predator. And now, an hour later, thick with the blunt stink of drying blood, he walked again through the Mother's congregation as a pariah, a monstrositly, a freak.
His feelings towards the purple-robed Cardinal too were difficult to classify. In some dark corner of his mind he couldn't deny that a core of resentment still burned, but he'd long ago learned that such sentiments were symptomatic of his anomaly, and fought hard to ignore it. Surrounding it, confused and effervescent, a nebula of trust and distrust circulated; skeins of impressionable awe and distaste, of astonishment. He admired the cunning of the ''inquisitor'' ruse, appreciated the circuitous logic of Arkannis's deception but - above all else - struggled to reconcile his regard for the man's motives. Cardinal, inquisitor, magus: which was the true Arkannis?
G'hait remained a step behind his companions, equally as awestruck by Trikara - once again hooded and cowled - as her master. He'd asked the question that had burned through him upon seeing her, of course, back in the charnel house ruin of the Torus Room:
'What is she?'
Arkannis had blinked, face filling with the sort of slow indulgent smile that again had G'hait anticipating some untrustworthy half truth, some questionable response. 'Have you heard,' the man said, 'of the eldar?'
G'hait had not. The Cardinal's dizzying explanation had left him clutching at what few ideological solidities remained in his life. To discover so late that humanity were not the only race amongst the Mother's enemies, that indeed there were myriad civilisations and cultures scattered throughout the stars, that they were just as powerful and fearful as one another - each as cruel, as blinkered, as hostile to the simple affections and devotions of the Mother's church... G'hait had felt, briefly, as though he were falling.
'The Mother's seed, G'hait, is sown amongst every race. You think the taint is confined to the soft-meat of humanity? You think the Mother's Chosen don't flourish elsewhere?'
'W-what?'
'Eldar, ork, tau, hrud... The contagii are an adaptable breed, child.'
'I don't und-'
'Trikara is maelignaci, like you.'
'B-but... But her ancestors weren't human?'
Another smile, at that - acknowledgment of a correct answer. 'Very good...' Arkannis had pursed his lips, regarding Trikara with a frosty intensity as she'd dribbled and giggled nearby. 'Sadly,' he said, 'Eldar biology is rather less... crude... than that of humanity. The taint requires many more generations to achieve the primacii mutation. By which time, typically, the hybrid community has been discovered and purged. The eldar are nothing if not vigilant. I found Trikara by chance in the course of my travels. She's of the fifteenth or sixteenth generation, as far as I can tell. Heh - utterly insane of course, but quite devastating, I think you'll agree. And she does what she's told. The eldar mind is a strange thing, G'hait... Brilliant, sharp, multifaceted... but easily broken. Like a fake diamond.'
With that Arkannis had snapped from whatever trancelike introspection he'd entertained and, clicking his fingers impatiently, had ordered the squad of storm troopers into the centre of the Torus Room.
'Contagii,' he'd explained in response to G'hait's oblique stare, peeling a gasmask from one typically vacant, empty-eyed face in demonstration. 'I had the Council place them in my care. Think of them as sacrificial lambs.'
Without so much as a spoken command Trikara had blurred in her place; a succession of fleeting impressions scattered in jigsaw patterns across G'hait's vision. Here he glimpsed a limb, there a claw, there a flashing smile or twinkling eye. And then there was nothing but meat, and red mist, and Trikara's giggle.
'It will seem as though there was a firefight,' Arkannis said, surveying the scene with a shrewd eye. 'They'll find bodies with bullet-wounds and assume the troopers were panicking, firing wild. Trying to kill an enemy that - heh - dodged their bullets and cut them to shreds. They're always blind to the most obvious explanations, these humans.'
G'hait had looked around and seen, with a realisation that churned from his steel-capped boots to the crown of his ossified, skull like a great bloody wave, crashing against his consciousness, that he was one of only three beings alive in a room of diced, disjointed meat. He wasn't sure how it had made him feel, and when Arkannis led him and Trikara away into the stagnant night of the city, he couldn't deny that a part of him, some dark feral piece that lived despite his sentient curse, yearned to remain in the abattoir playground.
Now, back in the cool of the Underchurch, such abstractions seemed distant and ethereal, eclipsed behind the reality of the resinous dips and alcoves of the tunnelways. Arkannis's stride, measured in the rhythmic striking of his staff, carried G'hait and his companions deep into the private chambers of the primacii council; past the cell of his master and onwards, inexorably approaching the cullised doorway into the personal domain of Archmagus Jezahael.

MARTIAL LAW CAME to Garial-Fall with all the discretion of a steel boot, administered with calculated violence entirely sanctioned by its wearer. Marshall Delacroix and his cadre of advisors authorised long-repealed excesses of control and repression, enforcing a hastily fabricated curfew in the pursuit of civilian containment. It didn't work.
Delacroix's operation had been characteristically unsubtle. Charged with preparing his city for a potential war he'd stoked the population's fears with an almost arrogant disdain: proclaiming his remit via media tubes and broadcast pavilions, booming from public announcement speakers, glaring down with grizzled menace from viewscreens and news-auspexes alike. Evil was abroad, he'd warned. Heretics and seditionists - a nest of killers in the city's midst. He'd assumed, perhaps, that his charges would respond with a docility born of their fear: submitting gratefully to a police-administration determined to provide them with security and deliverance.
His understanding of human nature was entirely naive.
Even as sleek Arbites tanks clawed their way from underground depots, pintle turrets swivelling with slow malevolence, the first riots sparked in the Heatsink. Erupting with apparent spontaneity (although perhaps, had they paused to consider, the rioters might recall cowled figures moving amongst the throng, whispering urgently and chanting their anger into the night), they accumulated quickly. Crowds accreted in xanthic-yellow streets, the beatklubs emptied their surly patrons into the city like a tide of braying wolves, and citizens made sick and angry with fear howled their indignation - demanding protection, liberation, freedom.
An hour after the first stone was hurled, as steamcarts were overturned and the plush hovcars of rich merchants set alight, as the bedraggled masses of the Slumquarters added their voices to the mob, as shop fronts were shattered all along the central strasse of the well-to-do Foildom and the reaction to Delacroix's pronouncements spread to encompass every locality within the city's lenticular cover, the first shots were fired.
Faced with a mass of angry rioters, backed into a walled culvert by the press of shouting, terrified bodies, a vigilator enforcement squad surrendered their power mauls and instead brought their shotguns to bear. The first volley - aimed deliberately low at their conscientious sergeant's command - shredded the knees and shins of the foremost rioters, dropping them in a tangle of broken bone. They thrashed and moaned in puddles of their own blood, shivering, too stunned to register the damage to their bodies. For a moment the crowd was arrested in its advance, drawing a single collective breath of horror and outrage. For a moment it might have gone either way.
Then the rioters surged forwards howling, the vigilators tilted their shotguns upwards, and the city was filled with thunder and blood.

ARCHMAGUS JEZAHAEL MADE no attempt to disguise her displeasure at Arkannis's visit. Entering her chambers both uninvited and unannounced, with Trikara and G'hait in tow, his arrival was as imperious and flamboyant as G'hait had come to expect.
'Ah, primacii!' he declared, smiling broadly, bowing with a mock flourish. 'Do excuse my intrusion, won't you - I'd hoped to discuss a... sensitive matter. I trust I'm not interrupting anything important?'
Jezahael arched an eyebrow, indicating the scraps of parchment and flickering auspex littering her desk.
'I'm completing the plans for your premature uprising, as it happens. If I'm to be sidelined by my own congregation in favour of a stranger, I at least have the right to arbitrate his movements.' She sneered. 'So no, nothing important.'
Arkannis waved a hand with genial dismissal. 'Of course, of course... But, tell me: what use are plans when events are already in motion?'
Her icy demeanour faltered, confusion fleeting across her features. 'What?'
'Oh, come now. Surely you were aware?'
'Aware of what?'
'That the uprising is already underway...'
'I- you.... What? It can't be...'
'I assure you it is.'
'But... but it's too soon! Mother damn you, Arkannis - you've only been here one day and already you've undone years of pla-'
'Alas, the Mother waits for no one. A reason to celebrate, surely?'
'No! I- I mean, yes - yes, of course we should celebrate her arrival, but we're not ready! We haven't even begun to infiltrate the administration! It takes time! It's too soon!'
G'hait, watching Arkannis's face closely, felt the air thicken. The Cardinal's hawkish smile dwindled and died, leaving only his stark glower, burning into Jezahael with razor malevolence.
'Your leadership of this church is no longer required,' he said, icy voice entirely bereft of its previous sardonic trace.
Jezahael's astonishment bordered almost on the ridiculous - hissing and reddening with a disbelief impossible to confine. G'hait felt his blood burn, glutted with adrenaline at the Cardinal's extraordinary proclamation.
'W-what do... who...' The archmagus was reduced to spluttering breathlessly, searching for words. 'How dare you!'
'I dare,' Arkannis said, 'because I am Elucidium. I answer not to you, nor your church, nor your peers. I answer to the Mother alone, and in her name I say you are a failure, an embarrassment, an unnecessary resource.'
For an instant G'hait thought Jezahael might strike the Cardinal, drawing herself up with feline bluster and drawing back her lips, a feral mannerism he would normally expect from the purii, not their supposedly ''civilised'' masters.
But her attack, if indeed it was pending, never came.
A single sound - like an expulsion of breath - filled the room. Even as the unmistakable scent of ozone wrapped itself around G'hait's senses, tinged with the tang of blood, Jezahael was crumpling to the ground, face set in an astonished rictus of confusion, eyes crossed in a dying attempt to focus upon the neat hole in the centre of her forehead - where a solitary wisp of smoke preceded a thick spout of cranial gore. She collapsed in disarray, sludgelike fluids pattering heavily across flagstones. She jerked twice, grunting spastically, and was still.
Arkannis replaced the ornate laspistol in a holster-pocket within his robe and hemmed, satisfied, beneath his breath. G'hait struggled against waves of astonishment, as if wading in a heavy stream, desperate to react.
'Wh... You... She's...'
Arkannis turned to him, face blank. 'G'hait,' he said, utterly calm, 'I need you to trust me.'
G'hait's mind spun. He wondered if anything would ever seem real, or solid, or stable again. Honesty seemed the best policy. He spluttered: 'But I don't!'
'Listen to me, child. This is for the best. The congregation needs a figurehead, a... a rallying point, if you like. Jezahael can be far more valuable to her church dead than she ever could in life. Every new endeavour needs its sacrifice, G'hait. Trust me.'
'I can't! I don't know who you are! I don't know anything any more!'
Arkannis almost smiled. 'You know...' he said, quietly, 'I don't believe I've ever come across a maelignaci quite like you before...'
'How can I trust you? You just... You killed the archmagus!'
'Yes. She was an inefficient fool.'
'She was still the archmagus!'
'G'hait - to whom are you loyal?'
'Wh-?'
'To whom?'
'To the Mother!'
'Good. Who else?'
'To the Underchurch!'
'Excellent. Who else?'
'T-to my master...'
'Magus Kreista?'
'Yes.'
Arkannis nodded, smiling. 'Yes... Yes, extraordinary. An independent-minded maelignaci, no less. Able to form its own loyalties, its own suspicions... Fascinating.'
'Stop it! Stop talking about me!'
'G'hait, be calm. In each of your loyalties this act is justified. In the Mother's name, the archmagus was weak. To the Underchurch she was a poor leader, stalling its progress. And surely you haven't failed to notice her contentions with your - ha - beloved master? Your loyalty does you credit...'
'Y-you still killed her... oh Mother... I- I...'
'Just trust me, G'hait,' the Cardinal's voice, briefly, became emotive: almost warm in its request. 'For a few hours, that's all I ask. Until then you remain in my service, as your master commanded you. He told you to be obedient, G'hait, you remember? So, you will hold your tongue. Is that clear?'
So subtly that G'hait immediately doubted its relevance, Trikara brushed against him. For a split second he was certain that one exquisite claw, with a clumsiness entirely out of keeping with all that he had seen of her previously, drew itself lightly across his chest; like a razor breath of wind. The movement seemed innocent - the random gesture of a deranged mind, but when G'hait returned his gaze to Arkannis, the Cardinal's shrewd stare told him everything he needed to know.
He thought: A warning, then.
'I'll hold my tongue,' he croaked, boiling within.
'Good. Now - go to your master. Tell him I have need of you a while longer. Tell him I'll address the Council within the hour.'
G'hait turned on his heel and strode away.
'G'hait,' the voice followed him. 'Be quick. We have a meeting to attend.'

HIS MASTER'S CHAMBERS were empty.
The silence of the dingy room gave G'hait a sense of profound wrongness, and only by casting back his mind could he discover its source: he realised with a start that as long as he'd known Magus Kreista the wizened primacii had never, to his knowledge, left this low febrile cell; except to attend the Council's occasional meetings and Mind Choir ceremonies. It was Kreista's home, G'hait knew, and the ancient man belonged to it as fully as he did the Underchurch itself.
In this room G'hait had been taught to read. Here he'd gripped an inky stylus with awkward fingers, growing in confidence and assurance with each inelegantly scribbled character. Here he'd been taught the sacred scriptures, had digested the catechisms of the Mother's faith, had absorbed the holy texts central to his beliefs.
Here he'd learned to respect his mentor, to place his trust in a magus who recognised some purpose in him where others saw only biological monstrosity and freakishness. Here he'd learn to bequeath upon his master a portion of loyalty that was, he realised now with a guilty jolt, greater than that with which he regarded his Church, his people, his legacy. Were his priorities then irretrievably corrupted?
Did he care?
And now his master was not here. At his moment of crisis, as his world overflowed with confusions and horrors, as the purple-shrouded stranger that had entered his life systematically destroyed each and every thing he held dear; at that moment, when he'd needed his master more than ever to provide stability in his time of chaos - he found himself alone.
'P-primacii?' he mumbled from his customary position of guardianship by the door. Only the empty silence of the room greeted him.
As he left he paused at the next chamber door along the spittle-walled corridor, brusquely informing its inhabitant - some Council primacii whose name he neither knew nor cared to learn - of Arkannis's orders.
There would be a Council meeting inside the hour, whether Kreista's disappearance was resolved or not.

Excerpt Six:
Passage, Volume IV (The Carrion God'), 'Primacii: Claviculus Matri'

Hate them.
Hate the unblessed, the unshriven, the untouched. Hate them for their cruelty, hate them for their dismissal, hate them for their ignorance. Hate them for their god.
Hate them because, be you primacii or maelignaci or Contagii, you may guarantee this, reader: They hate you.
Content yourself thus, noble hybrid: they will learn. At some time, be it near or far, they will learn their folly. They will embrace the Mother as she fills their world, and she will peer upon them and say: ''You are too late!''
To all things she comes, and to all things she delivers oblivion.
Only her faithful children will be gathered to her side, there to bask for eternity. We welcome the death she brings, for it speeds our union with her Godhead!
I feel it in my blood, I feel her call, I feel her approach.
And so shall it be.

MARSHALL DELACROIX ENTERED the briefing room of the Central Precinct in sullen idiotropy, struggling to concentrate on the sharp ringing of his footsteps rather than dwell on the news he'd just received. The communique - its short text abrupt and cryptic but given undeniable authenticity by the security code at its head - felt as though it would burn a hole in his pocket. He fingered it anxiously; as if to double check its reality.
The room - a claustrophobic environment even at the best of times - was busier than he'd ever seen it. Assembled commanders of no less than five PDF regiments jostled nervously with tacticians, savant servitors, all manner of support staff and comms-operatives, vigilator luminaries and his own grim-faced aides. Hard lighting scribbled unflattering highlights across cheekbones and brows, dropping perplexed gazes into impenetrable shadow, underlining lips with hard, unbroken slashes of shade. The combined military might of Garial-Fall regarded Delacroix in mute expectation, blank faced and nervous; every head twisting to follow his arrival. He swallowed, throat dry.
'Gentlemen,' he said, startled by the volume of his own voice. 'We have a situation.'
A grimfaced general in the front row replied archly, voice thick with cynicism. 'I think that's a given, Delacroix. We heard your announcements. It's a warzone out there, by the Throne...' The man's crooked bionic eye snapped its iris open and closed. 'What's this all about?'
'Everything I said in the announcements is true.'
The general's incredulity bubbled in his voice. 'Xenogens on Garial-Fall, eh? I had no idea you were an enthusiast of the ridiculous.'
A nervous gust of laughter rippled across the throng.
Delacroix's lip curled. He didn't number diplomacy amongst his strengths and frankly lacked the patience for discussion. His fingers clenched at his side, grasping subconsciously for the power maul that was typically holstered there. 'So ridiculous,' he snarled, 'that the Imperial Governor and all the Plureaucracy are dead. Killed by a warpshit alien.'
The silence exploded, exclamations of horror puncturing the air on all sides.
'Dead!'
'...mperor's tears!'
'...o who's in charge? What's going to...'
'...man's obviously taken leave of his sen...'
'Xenogens...'
'...don't believe a pissing word of...'
Delacroix snatched a small controlbox from a cowering aide and stabbed at the switch on its surface. An ancient projector - coiled circuitry looping with arterial complexity around brass gauges and lens controls - came to life with a dry rustle. The indignant crowd, yowling in disbelief, turned as one to regard the image thus projected.
'Oh...' a voice said.
'You're looking,' Delacroix hissed, 'at a forensic slate-pict taken in the Torus Room an hour ago.'
Exact details, were difficult to distinguish, so elaborate was the arrangement of forms represented. Despite the unevenness of the depicted elements - composed with whimsical artistry in disturbing whorls and geometrical arrangements that dragged at the eye, calling it to absorb every horrific touch, every abattoir flourish - it maintained nonetheless a sense of unity; a universal aspect that married every facet together: its colour. It was red.
'Skinned,' Delacroix said, answering the group's unspoken question. 'Every last one of them.'
'God-Emperor have mercy...'
Someone near the back vomited with as much discretion as the tight confines allowed.
'Three hours before the... before that was discovered, I was in the Torus Room.' Delacroix sighed, torn between a natural dislike of attention and a secret enjoyment of the captivation of his audience. 'We were presented with a xenogen specimen by a... a man called Arkannis. He claimed to belong to the Holy Inquisition.'
'The Inquisition, here?' the fearful hiss worked its way amongst the crowd; the mere mention of that dreaded organisation inspiring almost that same awe and fear as had the news of the xenogen threat itself.
'He told me to gather you all together. He said he'd lead us. He said we should be ready for a fight...'
A young PDF lieutenant gestured in horror at the screen. 'How can we fight that? W-where's this inquisitor now?'
Delacroix felt bile in his throat. He hadn't worked out how to present this part yet.
'Not here,' he said, sighing. 'He won't be leading us anywhere.' He pushed a hand into his pocket and pulled out the note, its incontrovertible code marking its header. 'I received this five minutes ago. It's from... well, from another inquisitor, also here on Garial-Fall.'
'Another one?'
'Isn't one enough?'
'They'll bring the Emperor's wrath down o-'
'Quiet.' Delacroix fought for the right words. 'It says... It says that Arkannis is a fraud. It says he's planning a trap.'
'W-what?'
'A trap? What kind?'
'I don't know. Message doesn't say.'
'It's a fake!'
'It's not a fake, by the Throne! Listen - it was sent from a public callbooth using a security code so high that my comms-servitor overheated and shut down. It's genuine. No doubt.'
'Then-'
'Look,' Delacroix said, wrestling with the hubbub, 'whatever's going on here we need to move carefully. I was appointed to command this rabble and I inten-'
'You! On the word of a fraud? Ha!'
'I intend to do so! I've issued orders to my men. Zero tolerance. Our priority must be civilian control!'
'You can't control them, you fool!' the stone faced general dipped his brows in anger, waggling a fat finger. 'They're too busy panicking at your Throne-damned announcements!'
Delacroix felt a vein throbbing in his temple, temper shredding like a rush of water. Everything seemed to be spiralling out of his grasp.
'They will be controlled, Emperor's Grace, or they'll suffer the consequences! I can't fight a war when the streets are full of peasants!'
'He's right, you know.'
Silence settled.
The new voice - somehow contriving to override the throng of hurled invective despite its serenity - belonged to a figure leaning calmly in the doorway. Heads craned.
'You!' Delacroix hissed.
'Me,' said Cardinal Arkannis, a faint smile playing across his earthworm lips. 'How charming to see you again, marshall. I see the meeting I requested is right on time.'
'Y-you should be dead.'
'Oh?'
'You were in the Torus Room!'
'Ah... that.'
'That! A-and the letter!' Delacroix brandished the communique like a weapon, utterly out of his depth. 'It says you're a fraud! It says you're with the enemy!'
'Does it? Does it indeed?' Arkannis pursed his lips. For a moment Delacroix thought the man's cold facade had been punctured, so intense was his expression. He remained, nonetheless, utterly unconcerned with the marshall's growing air of confrontation. 'How very fascinating.'
Delacroix glared at him in disbelief, grizzled features turning almost purple. 'You don't deny it?'
'Should I?'
'You die!' A pistol was in Delacroix's hand before any of his astonished comrades could react. Acquainted for too long with the comforts of command, the sudden promise of violence left many of them startled; hissing in fear. Not so the marshall, whose finger closed on the trigger without so much as a doubt passing his mind.
Arkannis tutted, eyes flashing. 'Put it down, you silly man.'
The gun clattered noisily to the floor, discharging with an angry boom and the insect-whine of a ricochet, its spastic course culminating in a thudding impact into the rockcrete ceiling. The marshall was left agog; staring in silent befuddlement at his own rebellious fingers.
'Wh... how...'
'Quiet. Gentlemen, my name is Arkannis. As our good friend the marshall has already ascertained, I'm not here to help you.'
'How did you get in here? I... I posted guards.'
'Yes... I'm afraid they had a falling-out with some of my colleagues.'
The grim-faced PDF general, mustering his dignity with far more aplomb than Delacroix, pushed his way to the front and regarded Arkannis with a scowl, voice almost - but not entirely - concealing its quaver.
'Listen. Look here. What do you want?'
Arkannis seemed surprised by the question. 'Want? Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.' He smiled. 'I just came to pay my respects to the dead.'
'The...?'
'Enough talk, gentlemen. I'd like to introduce you to some friends of mine.'
The door pushed open behind him, something hard and sharp scraping along its exterior surface with a velvet gride. The silence thickened. Hunched and slow, prowling, a trio of shapes slunk with tiger grace into the chamber.
Stalking on doubled-kneed legs, each step a birdlike jolt of controlled energy, their entry seemed to suck the very light from the room; warping every shadow around coiled, alien carapaces, knotting around uneven spines and ridges of bone. Their arms, two on either side of each insectile thorax, pistoned in time with each step, uppermost raptor claws scissoring together, secondary extremities - perversions of human hands and fingers - clutching the air. In jointed gaps between cartilaginous claws, segmented flesh glistened with a sticky film of moisture. Their heads, hung low against bony shoulders, seemed by contrast smooth and organic: flesh so pale it was almost translucent, stretched across a constellation of purple capillaries - like the skin of a waterlogged corpse. Tiny porcine eyes glared beneath knotted brows, surmounted upon a prominent jaw thick with needle teeth.
'These are purii,' Arkannis said conversationally, regarding their slinking forms with an arched brow, exoskeletal frills and chords deepened and roughened by the unkind shadows. 'You would call them ''genestealers'', though they aren't in the business of theft. Not the most scintillating of conversationalists, I'll give you that, but they're loyal enough. In their own way.'
The creatures hissed together, a sussurant chorus of malevolence that seemed to quiver the air itself. Time stretched; extending with the elastic precision of grasping limbs; tentacles of some cold-coiled leviathan. Cowled in shadow and almost silent, the predators approached their cowering preythings hungrily, beady eyes focused and sharp, stooped shoulders bobbing. The foremost amongst them, old flesh pitted with whorls of colour and bony protrusions, twisted its chorded neck towards Arkannis, rasping a low murmur of enquiry.
'Be about your business,' the Cardinal said.

G'HAIT LISTENED FROM outside the door, lurking in the gloom of the hallway with Trikara, willing himself not to listen to her deranged gibbering. A small group of vigilator sentries - previously guardians of the heavy bulkhead through which Arkannis and his... ''companions'' had passed - lay at his feet. Mostly.
In truth G'hait's regard for his purestrain cousins was becoming increasingly indefinable. The rush of recognition and genetic pride he felt at their presence was tempered always by a spasm of disgust; a nameless horror at his association with such ''otherness'' that left him stunned by their mannerisms and movements.
He'd never seen them outside the spittle-resin context of the Underchurch before. Returning from the fruitless search for his master, the discovery of Arkannis awaiting him with a brood of slinking, hissing beasts... it had stunned him to silence. The Cardinal had merely grinned wider at his reaction.
And now here they were. Entombed (or so it felt) at the heart of the Central Precinct, its obsidian towers and impregnable walls pressing in like unkind ribs, constricting his confidence, asphyxiating his ability to think. To be so deep within enemy territory, to be conducting such missions with the nonchalance characteristic of Cardinal Arkannis; it left G'hait dizzy.
And then the sounds began from the next room, and his thoughts were cleaved in two. Wet noises, mostly, but now and then the dry splintering of bone would pronounce itself; the garish creak of tensioned bodies that, succumbing to whatever murderous pressures assaulted them, sang their popping-corn chorus into the air.
Someone, startling G'hait from his fascinated audience, summoned the presence of mind to scream - a desperate shriek of such raw emotion that it transcended any boundary of language and rushed, like electricity, through his senses. It was aborted almost immediately; its arrest coinciding with a great scrabbling at the door, spiralling downwards from an unearthly howl to a far more mundane gurgle, bubble-flecked and lugubrious, surmounted by a pathetic thump - as of a wet mass tumbling to the ground. G'hait shuddered - but whether through discomfort or desire he couldn't tell.
It lasted one minute. One minute of quiet, if frantic, noises. Of silken snips and zip-like slices, of mute struggling and fluid disruption. And then, silence. And then just the moist pattering of working jaws, of tongues lapping greedily at pooled liquid; of hungry predators reaping the harvest of a successful hunt.
Arkannis stepped into the hallway with a nod.
'Well,' he said. 'That's that, then.'

THE CALL WAS unavoidable now. Pushing consciousness through long dormant neurones, spasming and twitching its way across vast slabs of coiled medulla, colossal lobes of intestinal meat, counter-veined and cross-arteried.
Somewhere at the peak of this electric barrage - this maelstrom of thought, crystallised within its brainmeat vessel - a curved cylinder of moist flesh, itself striated by convulsing polyps, flexed and heaved. Its elaborate structure reticulated, absorbing from the very air a matted tangle of psionic residues; each and every one growing in focus, in aggression; in unity.
Across Garial-Fall the children of the Underchurch rushed about their secret business, hearts racing with racial anticipation, filled with the excitement of pending ascension. The uprising was imminent. They could taste it. They could feel it on the air.
And their patriarch - no longer moronic, no longer vapid and obese upon its rotten palette - listened to their unified chorus with relish, muscles eager, eyes focused.
It listened and feasted on the unwitting call of its brood, and in so doing channelled its meandering waveform out and away; out into the endless void, where a swarm of intricate shapes ploughed a furrow across the vacuum, slouching ever nearer.

EVEN TO G'HAIT, unfamiliar with their cerebral idiosyncrasies, the primacii council were manifestly in a state of anxiety. They shuffled and fidgeted in their places, their aura of psionic intensity fluctuating, as if uncertain. They had congregated as instructed to await Arkannis's arrival, and as the Cardinal and his companions stalked into the Chamber of Voices G'hait could predict the cause of their agitation.
'Friends,' Arkannis greeted them with a flourish, then peered left and right with a frown, as if seeking a face amongst the crowd. 'Where is Archmagus Jezahael?'
G'hait looked at the ground, keeping his thoughts blank.
Magus Kreista cleared his throat, brows dipped. 'The archmagus is dead,' he said, jaw clenching. 'Murdered in her office.'
Arkannis absorbed this information with convincing astonishment, kneading at his chin. The Council regarded him with thinly-veiled suspicion.
'I see...' Arkannis said, nodding. 'Yes. Yes, it all makes sense.' He sighed. 'I had hoped to avoid this but... no, my hand has been forced. Friends, there is an inquisitor in our midst.
A whispered exchange flittered through the magi, quickly dissipating.
Arkannis went on. 'This traitor, this servant of the Carrion God... Twice he's attempted to wound us. I shan't allow a third injury.'
Kreista's eyes narrowed. 'Twice?'
'Oh yes... In the first instance he has stolen from us Magus Jezahael; a finer and more courageous servant of the Mother we would be hard pressed to find. Let us give thanks for her life, and pray that her soul rests with the Mother. Blessed be.'
The phrase brought its equal echo from the Council - clear and strong despite their uncertainty. 'Blessed be.'
Arkannis drew a breath and continued, not slowing. 'The traitor is also guilty of alerting our enemies to our plans. With the ascendance so near at hand, an intelligence leak could be nothing short of disastrous.'
A young magus at the edge of the Council, an intricate tattoo dissecting her pale brow, spoke up: 'And you know this how? Forgive us, magus, but the time has come for some proof of your assertions.'
'Am I then doubted?'
'You are unfamiliar, which is much the same thing. In your short time on our world you've affected more change and upheaval than... than any of us can recall before. At present these changes appear to be bearing fruit - and so you receive our thanks. But don't make the mistake of considering yourself above suspicion, Cardinal. You are a stranger, after all.'
'And there you betray your ignorance, my young friend.' Arkannis smiled. 'Oh, please, do not be offended. You - none of you - have travelled between worlds. You've not seen what the Inquisition can do. You've not learned its tricks.'
'We fail to see how this is releva-'
'They are devious, magus. The inquisitors of the Emperor's Throne are cunning creatures, not to be underestimated. Do not fear the unknown, in seeking their work. Fear that which is familiar. That which is closest to you. That which seems above suspicion.'
'You have a culprit, then?'
'I have. I'd hoped his actions might condemn him rather than having to go through all this tedious melodrama, but...' He shrugged.
The Council exchanged glances. G'hait frowned, watching Arkannis closely. The Cardinal's thin lips broke into another smile.
'Magus Kreista,' he said, 'I should like to hear your excuses.'
G'hait felt a rush of angry adrenaline in his mind, even as the Council turned as one to regard his master. Unable to repress the venom, he blurted a furious 'No!', drawing startled glances from the primaciis.
Arkannis glanced at him for a split second, annoyed. 'Be quiet.'
Something twisted, like a knife, in his mind. His mouth wouldn't open.
The Council returned their astonished gazes to Magus Kreista, who in the brief interim had moved some small distance from their group.
He was holding a laspistol.
He was aiming it at the Council.
'Now's as good as time as any, I suppose,' he said.
Something dark and ugly broke in G'hait's mind.

THE ELEGANCE OF the orbit-platform, its fluted towers and sweeping archways rotating with lazy grace against the procellous cloudcover of Garial-Fall, was reduced somewhat by the haphazard components of its construction. Solar cells plundered from ancient hulks glittered with a broken incandescence, baroque viewing towers and stout lance arrays jibbed with mangled asymmetry from unexpected pits and tiers. It was a cobbled mansion, pirouetting vastly above the world that was its anchor, tethers snaking away through miles of atmosphere to find the hivedome below.
Arcane devices, twitching across the platform's upper surfaces, paused briefly in their exertions; realigning upon a distant locale according to their disinterested logic engines. Something had been discovered.
In a red-lit control bunker within, squashed into a seat riddled with mechanical paraphernalia, Tech-priest Acolyte Teriqol felt something unexpected flit across his mind. The logic-engine interface, squeezing raw data into his memory, spiked with a warning tone. He sat upright with a small gasp, frowning behind cable-strewn brows.
'Commander?' he called, voice quavering. 'Commander Larkan?'
A junior communications officer slouched over, picking his way between servitors and tech-priests, equally as engaged in their observations. He sniffed. 'What is it, acolyte?'
'I need to speak to the commander.'
'He's not here. What have you got?'
'Sir - with respect... This is a command-level observation. The Anima machina has imposed a classification level.'
The officer sighed. His eyes seemed glazed.
'Acolyte, the commander left to attend a meeting on the surface two hours ago. We haven't been able to raise him since. How urgent is this... ''command-level observation''?'
'Utmost, sir.'
'Then you'll have to make do with me. I'm the highest ranking officer, for now.'
Acolyte Teriqol twitched, weighing his options through mechanically enhanced thought paths. Eventually a decision arose and he nodded, copper wiring bouncing like hair around his temples.
'The long-range scanners have an inbound contact, sir. There are no arrivals scheduled.'
The officer raised an eyebrow. 'Can you get an ID?'
'No.'
The man bit a nail, fidgeting. 'Probably nothing. There was another one two days ago, wasn't there? An unannounced Ecclesiarchy shuttle, if memory serves.'
'Yes, sir. But this is... This contact is different. Larger. Multiple objects.'
The officer's eyes narrowed.
'A fleet?'
'Probably sir, yes. It seems... well. It's bigger than anything I've ever seen.'
The officer nodded. 'What's the ETA of the contact, acolyte?'
'Sir... At present speed... Early morning. Ten hours, maybe less.'
'You haven't told anyone else about this?'
'No sir. Of course n-'
'Good. You know, I didn't really believe it, when I was told. But it's true. She's coming. She's finally coming. Blessed be.'
The petty officer drew a knife from his belt and lurched towards Tariqol, eyes empty.

'I'D BE VERY surprised if you're not armed, Arkannis. Let's see it.'
Kreista's gun held the Cardinal firmly in his place. Very slowly, face blank, he reached into a pocket and removed the ornate laspistol.
'Kick it towards me,' Kreista said. 'Don't try anything clever. I've seen it all before.'
Arkannis appeared to consider for a moment, regarding the intricate weapon in his palm. Kreista arrested any thoughts of rebellion pointedly, arming his gun with a cold clatter. Arkannis nodded and placed the laspistol on the floor, kicking it daintily towards his enemy.
G'hait, watching as though from another world, wanted to scream.
He wanted Kreista to deny that he was an inquisitor.
He wanted his master to put down the gun, to diffuse the situation, to prove his innocence.
He wanted Arkannis to say that it was all a misunderstanding, that everything was going according to plan, that there were no inquisitors on Garial-Fall.
He wanted someone to explain what was going on. To decode the confusion in his mind. To unlace the layer upon layer of bluff and double bluff that he'd been exposed to since Arkannis arrived.
He wanted his master to tell him everything would be alright.
He wanted to run and rip and tear his way through the world.
He wanted to understand. None of it happened.
The Council stood like a gaggle of geese, white skin and tall necks rigid with fear. Kreista half smiled, bowing with a mock flourish.
'You might as well know.' He said. 'My true name is Ariale. I'm an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos.'
He silenced the Council's uproar with a vague wave of his weapon. They floundered, indignant and betrayed.
Arkannis was not so easily cowed, standing apart from the others with eyebrows knotted. He tutted. 'It was you, then. The inquisitor in the Hive Secundus. You pulled the same trick there, didn't you?'
Ariale chuckled. 'Very good. But the, ha, trick is rather older than that. I've purged more of your Mother's sordid little congregations than I can remember. Always from the inside. Like cancer.'
'Nobody suspected? Nobody tasted the...' (Arkannis almost spat the word) ''humanity'' in your mind?'
'Of course not. I learned how you primaciis think years ago. I've seen dissections, Arkannis. I've tortured a hundred magi to an early grave, and extracted every secret they had to give. I assure you my mind is perfectly safe from the likes of you.'
'Hm.' Arkannis didn't sound convinced. 'Still - it was an audacious plan. Hiding amongst the enemy. It must have turned your stomach.'
'The Emperor's devotion breeds a strong constitution. I happily tolerate the association with deviants if it leads to their destruction.'
'So you planned to expose the Underchurch. When? As it rose up against the city?'
'Exactly. Merely infiltrating and destroying the Council isn't enough - one must force every hybrid, every infected abomination, every last Emperor-damned freak into the light. Only then will the purge be complete. This church is - and has always been - a poor excuse for an insurgence. It would have failed with or without my intervention.'
The inquisitor was gloating now, enjoying his own cleverness. G'hait, still reeling in misery at his master's treachery, realised that Arkannis was keeping him talking. Trikara, meanwhile, was inching forwards. He wondered if she could move faster than a finger tightening on a trigger, and decided that she probably could. His heart raced.
'Ha,' said Ariale, staring directly at him, eyes flashing with psychic incision. 'My thanks, G'hait. Your thoughts always have had a habit of getting you into trouble, haven't they?'
G'hait groaned inwardly.
Ariale aimed his gun directly at the Cardinal's head, taking careful aim. 'Call off your freak, Arkannis. She might be able to dodge bullets, but I sincerely doubt that you can.'
Without a word exchanged, the giggling hybrid slunk away behind Arkannis. The Cardinal curled a lip.
'Better,' Ariale grinned. 'You know, until you arrived, this was shaping up to be a rather humdrum project. I can't tell you how delighted I was at your acceptance of my invitation. We've been investigating the Elucidium for decades, did you know that?'
'I did.'
'Ha, yes. Yes, you would. Quite the bright spark, aren't you? Things have been much more, heh... challenging, Since you showed up. Still, it's all over now. The vigilators know the Underchurch is here and I have a truly fascinating prize. I shall enjoy interviewing you in my workshops, Arkannis. I'm very interested in your organisation. Very interested indeed.'
'You think I'd tell you anything?'
'They all do, sooner or later. I think that's enough talk for now. I want you to walk very slowly to the door. I want you to keep your hands - and your acolytes, at that - where I can see them. No sudden moves, no sharp sounds. No mind-tricks. We are leaving.'
'You're quite wrong. About it being over, I mean.'
'Spare me, Arkannis. I've won.'
'I'm afraid not. You say you sent a communique to the Vigilators. That would be Marshall Delacroix, then?'
'I told you. Enough talk.'
'That would be the same Marshall Delacroix that I just watched being cut into thirteen pieces. I could have his head fetched, if you'd like.'
Beads of sweat sparkled on Ariale's head. He flicked the gun angrily, like some semaphore signal. 'Enough lies!'
'It's no lie, inquisitor. I had every military officer in this city torn to shreds. It's over. The armies are beheaded. You warning didn't get through.'
'It's not over, warpshit!' Ariale's eyes narrowed, sinister. 'Even if you're telling the truth, you think I can't command the grunts myself?'
'Indubitably. You might even be able to prevent the uprising, if you reach a comms-post fast enough. But you aren't going to.'
'What?'
Now slick with sweat, the inquisitor brandished his gun with the insectile jerks of a desperate man. G'hait regarded him with contempt, silently praying that Arkannis's icy cool wasn't a bluff.
'Inquisitor Ariale,' Arkannis said, utterly unconcerned with the weapon fixated upon his head. 'The Elucidium have known your name for some time. We learned of your presence in this sector years ago.'
'Shut up! I'll shoot you, Emperor's oath! I'll shoot you where you stand!'
'I want to thank you, inquisitor, for making my search so much easier. I had despaired of ever unearthing you when you did me the courtesy of inviting me to your side. It was an... entertaining moment.'
'That's enough.' Ariale was beginning to recover his composure, resolve hardening. 'That's enough, you freak. Y-you xeno-spawn bastard. That's enough!' Only his eyes remained wild; full of the uncertainty of his own success. His knuckle, drawing on G'hait's attention with morbid fascination, turned white upon the trigger.
'Since the beginning of their supposed evolution,' Arkannis intoned, lip curled with distaste, 'humans have had a weakness. A ridiculous thing. A flaw, I say. An oversight in their minds. It turns the most acute intelligence into a thing of dumbstruck naivety. Don't you want to know what it is?'
'Shut u-'
'I'll tell you. Here. Listen. It's a fascination, like the magpie, for anything that glitters.'
Slowly, like planets rolling out of their orbits, like icebergs overbalancing and tilting, base-over-tip, into an arctic sea, the inquisitor's eyes swivelled downwards. Pinned to his own lapel, a work of exquisite beauty, the brooch gifted to him by Arkannis shimmered in the gloom.
'Goodbye.' Arkannis said, and tapped the tiny trigger stud of the remote detonator he'd cradled in his hand since entering the chamber.
Inquisitor Ariale fragmented like an overripe fruit.

Excerpt Seven:
Interior passage, Volume V ('Matriarch Ascendant'), 'Primacii: Claviculus Matri'

Let it thus be known:
I am a prisoner here. I am stolen from my world, my congregation, my church. They are dead, I expect. They are victims of the Carrion God, crushed utterly by his unhappy attentions. I am a prisoner of his demagogue son, his secret disciple. I am the captive of his Inquisition, and - behold - I have not denied the Mother's love.
She is within me. She resides. She endures, yes.
They call for my confession. They strip me and gag me and strike me, they beat me with barbed rods and cut at my flesh with hooked knives. They say that I shall be redeemed, if only I recant. If only I renounce my patroness. If only I betray Her glory, Her honour, Her mercy.
They are fools.
Behold, inquisitor and soldier and peasant. Behold, disciple of the withered messiah. Behold, you frail thing, you ugly thing you loveless thing you empty thing: The Great Sky Mother is coming! Blessed be!
I die.

THE LATCHCRAFT SWAYED horizontally, its grip upon the tether-cable sustaining its upward motion despite gyrating freely along its central axis. G'hait resisted the urge to vomit.
Sitting opposite him, head buried in a sheaf of yellowing papers, nodding or ''ah''ing to whatever material interested him, Cardinal Ebrehem Arkannis paid no attention whatsoever to his travelling companions. At his side Trikara licked a thick syrup of blood from her claws, long tongue coiling and slurping at razor edges with snakelike prehensility.
There had been a minor battle at the launchsite when the crowds saw that one final craft was due to travel. Trikara had been obliged to cut her master a pathway.
G'hait sat in silence, sullen and confused and angry all at once, and remembered:

HIS MASTER'S DEATH barely even registered. Even as his shattered body, pulverised and violated by the force of the brooch-charge, slid to the ground, G'hait's mind felt nothing but rage at his betrayal.
There was nothing beyond his master. He'd as much as admitted it to Arkannis: his loyalty was owed to Kreista first and the Church second. A chasm had opened in his mind.
Before even the echoes of the detonation had faded, before the Council had recovered their decorum and wiped themselves clean of the blood-drizzle that covered them, a scurrying Contagii arrived with the news:
The patriarch was ascending from its lair.
'About time.' Arkannis said, turning to face the Council. 'Spread the word. It's started.'

A HEAVY LURCH rocked the craft, dislodging G'hait from his seat. He righted himself silently, neurotically imagining Trikara laughing at him from the shadows of her robe. Arkannis had barely moved.
'We've left the ionosphere, I imagine,' he said, not taking his eyes from the paperwork.
G'hait fidgeted, uncomfortable with the decision he'd taken. He wondered how it would be for his maelignaci brothers and sisters when She arrived. He wondered if their absorption would be as wondrous as he'd been taught to expect. He wondered if they would truly ascend to sit at Her side.
He wondered whether he'd ever find out.
The memories of his last hours on Garial-Fall became a cavalcade of impressions, speeding to a single point, and G'hait lost himself in their fractured kaleidoscope.

WHEN THE REMAINS of the traitor-magus had been dragged away and hurled into the purii pits, to be fought over and split amongst the hungry predators, the Council sang. A choir of psychic instruction that effervesced through air and stone, embedding the commands that Arkannis provided in each distant Contagii, in each hissing maelignaci, in each slouching purii brood.
They sang their call to arms, and in every district of every quarter, in every neighbourhood and ghetto-tier, in every slum and archeotech skyrise: the Mother's faithful responded.

THE PDF REGIMENTS did not last long. Those few companies whose remaining petty officers had been able to affect some degree of command quickly schismed as the contagii hidden in their midst revealed themselves; stalking with blank expressions through dormitories and mess halls, serenely fingering autogun triggers or slashing out with jagged combat knives. If they enjoyed or regretted their betrayal of men who had once been counted amongst comrades, if indeed they were even conscious of it, they gave no sign.
Other groups were less fortunate still. Lacking their commanders they fragmented across the city; separating into twos and threes to combat the growing anarchy or to feed it, as whim dictated. The riots exploded to cover every district, and at every street corner uniformed men were set upon by mobs, dragged screaming through the streets with regs tearing and bare flesh shredding upon the icy rockcrete.
To an outsider it might seem as though the insurgents were already amongst the crowds, but no: at this early stage any violence was the product of fear and anger - natural and indiscreet. There was no xenogen agenda here, no whispering psionic voice to direct the carnage.

IT WAS MIDNIGHT when the cultists emerged. Singing joyful hymns to their approaching godhead, draped in white and red robes with the embroidered mark of the New Dawn, they spilled from secret meetings and impromptu prayer session across the city.
Only the Vigilators, leaderless and run-ragged from its perpetual clashes with the angry crowds, were left to face them.
The Church of the Celestial Womb broke upon their synthiplex shields like the first breakers of an onrushing tsunami, and by the time the first heavy stubbers were in place, the first long-hoarded Leman Russ had crawled from its secret depot, the first scripture-daubed flamers had reached the front of the crowd; the armoured judges were backing away and dropping their power mauls, scrambling for cover.
It was carnage.

* * *

AND ARKANNIS HAD asked G'hait. 'Will you come with me?'
And G'hait had looked at the blood-slick-smear that was all that remained of his master, and had nodded without thought.

AN HOUR AFTER the congregation first unfurled its banners and began to chant in anticipation of the Mother's arrival, the civilian militia (now swamped with amateurs and hotheads that had seen the vigilators' massacre), together with the few scattered morsels of the PDF that remained, regrouped in the vast plaza beneath the Foildom's mezzanine-tier. They were a horde of ants, parading and drilling at the heart of a mighty nest, and when their petty officers and sergeants gave their awkward, stilted speeches they were received with all the rage and venom of the mightiest orations by the greatest of heroes.
These people had been deceived. They'd been attacked from within by a cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated. They were angry, above all, and as they marched upon the holding zones that the Church had captured it seemed briefly that they might turn the tide and spare the city.
Then the patriarch led his blood-relatives to battle.

TO THE CITIZENS, it must have seemed as though nightmares had risen from the ground.
From bolt-holes and sewage conduits, from steaming ventilators and ruptured charnel pipes. Scuttling with crustacean dryness, drawing back ossified segments of chitin to leer with gumless canines bared. Clacking and clattering, claws scissoring together. Formicating. Swarming.
The purii were at their head - snaking forwards, long limbs propelling them onwards, talon-claws curled inwards. Spider-like, they came. Across walls and ceilings with as much grace and speed as across the body-strewn floor, grappling claw-over-claw, barbed shoulders roiling with each effortless motion.
The maelignaci were a misfit army: a gallery of variety. Here the ogre-like broods of the first generation battered aside an Arbites tank, there the slinking raptor-packs of second generation hunter-killers snapped at their squealing prey through the collapsed remains of a PDF encampment.
And towering above, bloated, shrieking and roaring and crackling with psionic spoor, the patriarch rode on a surf of blood and bone, hot breath curling with red mist, ice settling then steaming from his gore-streaked flanks.

G'HAIT AND TRIKARA and Arkannis rode the last latchcraft to the orbit-platform. G'hait had boarded without a single backwards glance.

IN COMPARISON TO the insanity, spreading like some infectious pox throughout the city below, the orbit-platform was a silent mausoleum. Slipping through automated docking doors, each new clash of metal-on-metal threatening in vain the totality of the quiet, the three found themselves invaders within a frozen grave.
Bodies lay casually discarded, crooked limbs cut and broken by imprecise blades. Thick chords of blood, congealing in viscous swirls where the uneven deck dipped or rucked, were smeared broadly, as though some deranged redecoration had been attempted.
Cross-legged in the reception chamber they found the contagii - eight men and women, singing hymns, splattered with meat and blood. Their mission complete, they ignored Arkannis's small group as if it didn't exist, and briefly G'hait found himself again considering the nature of vapidity. Not for them the pain of doubt, the recognition of betrayal. They might as well be machines - and G'hait envied them.
The Cardinal's shuttle, the Mawgetair, was a small affair: a long-tubed craft, dwarfed by its bulging generarium and warp engines, ribbed around its central portion with a filigree of struts and pylons, minor ventricles comprising domestic chambers - austere cabins, perfunctory mess hall and sickbay - to either side. To G'hait, to whom the notion of ever seeing beyond the perpetual clouds of his home, let alone stepping foot upon a spacecraft, was unthinkable, it was a peculiar space, filled with inexplicable components and obtuse machinery. Lights flickered like burning constellations, auspexes chattered and glowed, brass gauges ticked with heartbeat regularity, or else oscillated in time to the weird fluctuations of the engines.
There seemed to be nobody else aboard.
F'How do you... How do you travel in the warp?' G'hait asked, surfacing briefly from the melancholia that had struck him mute since his master's death.
Arkannis regarded him with a shrewd smile.
'How do you mean, acolyte?'
'I... I've read documents, my lord. My master, he...'
'Your master taught you rather more than most primaciis ever know, let alone maelignacis.'
G'hait relapsed into silence. Even the memories were painful now.
'In answer to your question, G'hait, I carry aboard a Navigator of the noble house Predantir, to negotiate the eddies of the warp. He lies entombed above the bridge, sustained by servitors and logic machines, where he has remained inert during my absence.'
'And he serves you freely?'
'Of course. His loyalty is commendable.'
'Then... he is contagii?'
The Cardinal's gaze bored into G'hait. He imagined his skin flaying, peeling back in protest at the razor glare. 'No, G'hait. He is not contagii.'
'Then how d-'
'Rest. You've been through a great deal. All will become clear.'

THE MAWGETAIR PEELED from the orbit-platform with solemn magnificence, jointed holding-limbs retracting, folding away like the spines of some void-birthed urchin. It pitched sideways across the silent satellite that had anchored it, dipping a flank in unthinking salute before moving glacially away, engines flaring in the void.
G'hait pressed his face against a small porthole, the bony ridges of his brow clicking lightly against the cold synthiplex. The vast pearl that was Garial-Fall, clouded surface a mass of white and grey whorls, tumbled slowly below him. For a second his mind lurched with the scale of the world before the corkscrew-whirl of the vessel carried its horizon-terminator from view, filling his window with nothing but endless inky black.

G'HAIT SAT MOROSELY, glaring into the middle distance, when Arkannis returned to the round gallery where he had left his two companions. He smiled broadly at G'hait.
'We're underway,' he proclaimed needlessly. 'I suggest we take the opportunity to rest before entering the warp. It can be... difficult to sleep whilst crossing the Empyrean.'
He dropped the sheaf of papers he'd been inspecting into a chair and crooked a finger at Trikara, who regarded him with her head cocked.
'Come, my little fiend,' he trilled. 'Back into your cage.'
G'hait frowned, introspection interrupted. 'Cage?'
'Heh. Oh yes. You didn't think I'd allow her the run of the ship whilst I slept?'
'But... You said she's loyal to y-'
'I did no such thing. I said that she does what she's told. And I can't control her when I'm asleep.'
Trikara hissed, pearly fangs glinting from the shadows of her cowl. For a second her deranged giggling faltered; leaving in its stead just a whipcord monster, filled with rage and hate. She glared at Arkannis as if confused.
'She'd slice me limb from limb, given the chance. I told you: her mind is a broken jewel. She's a puppet, G'hait. An insane, beautiful, terrible puppet. And I've been pulling her strings so very, very long.'
'H-how?'
'A simple little illusion. I poke around in her skull and reclothe myself in her eyes. To her, I'm a magus-farseer, a primacii of her long dead brood. Her mind tends to wander somewhat, but I assure you it doesn't take her long to remember my true identity when the illusion slips.' His eyes flashed, that same amused grin painting his lips, and without appearing to change at all Trikara's venomous rasp petered away.
A question surged in G'hait's mind, heavy with portent. 'Have... have you ever...?'
'Have I played with your mind?' The cold eyes filled his world. 'No. And for a very simple reason.'
'What reason?'
'I haven't needed to.'
Without another word Arkannis led Trikara away, leaving G'hait profoundly disturbed. Again what he had regarded as certainty crumbled around him, and at the centre of the deception was Arkannis. Something wasn't right. Something didn't add up. He felt it in his blood.
His eyes fell upon the paperwork that the Cardinal had been reading. Frowning, feeling exposed and lost and childlike, he reached out and focused on the first page.
It was a letter. It began:
We are the unclean.
We are reviled (so they say). We are despicable and pestilent and abominable. We are known as ''thing'', as ''freak'', as ''heretic''. The derision is as tedious as it is endless.

G'HAIT CHEWED HIS lip, confused. And then, with his heart sinking, he read the rest.

* * *

ARKANNIS RETURNED TO him as he reached the final page. The Cardinal sat silently, not interrupting, and watched. G'hait's literacy was far from perfect, and at times he would pause to squint at the characters, lips moving soundlessly as he wrestled with a difficult word. Arkannis regarded every movement of his eye, every crease in his ossified brows, every tremor of his lips.
And then G'hait was finished, and he stacked the papers carefully, placing them on the seat beside him.
'What do you think?' Arkannis asked.
G'hait worked his jaw. 'I think... I don't know. I'm not sure. Where are these excerpts from?'
'They come from a book. A volume titled ''Primacii: Claviculus Matri''. It's the testimony of a magus, G'hait. His life, in his words.'
'And he wrote it of his own free will?'
Arkannis chuckled. 'No. He was a prisoner. He was captured by a man named Agmar. An inquisitor.'
'He was forced to write this?'
'My research suggests he was... given a choice. Write an honest testimony or return to the interrogation suite. Agmar was notoriously... skilled, in the art of pain.'
'What happened to him? The magus, I mean.'
Arkannis peered at G'hait through shrewd eyes. Appearing to make some form of decision, he dug a hand into his robes and withdrew a single sheet of paper, folded with bladelike precision. He opened it out and handed it G'hait.
'The epilogue of the volume,' he explained. 'Agmar's chance to pass judgement on what his little pet had written.'
G'hait frowned as he took the sheet, then craned his neck and read.

Epilogue, 'Primacii: Claviculus Matri'

Let it be recorded that on this day, 02.05.750.M41, the prisoner that has composed this volume was discovered at first light dead in his cell. I am told by the sisters of the Order Panacear, whose efforts have sustained him throughout his interrogation, that his expiry is attributable to a devastating brain haemorrhage, caused (they suggest) by exposure to intolerable excesses of physical pain. I remain unconvinced.
Regardless of how the heretic succumbed, he went to his doom unabsolved; and if it should please the reader to know, I am confident his soul remains ungathered to that Brightest of lights; the Golden Throne. Long may he dwell in damnation in payment for his sin.
His final testimony, this testimony which you now read, is all that remains of him. I shall not hide it. I shall not seek to deny his eulogy from the light of scrutiny for, heretic though he be, it is in our interests to know his mind.
The Imperium, reader, is a vast thing. One might almost be forgiven for confusing its scale with its strength; for is it not simple to believe that something so massive, so mighty, so sprawling, must also be impenetrable; unbreakable; stalwart?
Would that it were so. The Imperium, great as it is, is a flickering light in a sea of darkness. It is a thing so fragile that to look upon its facets, like some brittle jewel, brings even me - I, an inquisitor of the Emperor's divine law - to the verge of tears and terror.
The race of man must acknowledge its fears, It must face the darkness that creeps at its edges. Only in acceptance are we strong. Only in conflict may we prevail.
Seek not to ignore or hide the heresy that abounds on every side. Expose it! Bolster it! Feed it with false strength, so that in its purgation the Emperor's heart is swollen with mighty victory!
Herein lies the testimony of a heretic. I urge that it be absorbed, for only in knowing their ways can we hope to crush our enemies.

Inquisitor Agmar, 750.M41

G'HAIT LOOKED UP from the text, more confused than ever. A question nagged at his mind.
'How did you come to possess this?' he said. 'All of these excerpts... They can't be just... just freely available.'
Arkannis brushed aside the question with a wave of his hand. 'That's not important. What do you think of it all?'
'I... I don't know. I can't see why these things matter. Not here and now.' A thought occurred. 'Is Agmar still alive?'
'No, no. He died long ago. But his legacy lives on. He was a great man, in many respects.'
'He was human! He served the Withered God!'
'Mm. Yes. Yes, he was.'
A fear gripped G'hait's chest abruptly. Something formless but cold, a certainty that evaded him but that grew in specificity with every moment, that sat in his guts and began to rise.
'Agmar,' Arkannis said, cradling his fingers like the spars of a ribcage, 'was renowned for his pragmatism. He believed in knowledge. He believed in revealing the enemy. He believed in strength through conflict.'
The fear slipped into G'hait's throat. He felt as though he was falling.
'Agmar's philosophies were passed, through the years, to his novices. Most notable amongst them was a man named Istvaar. He took Agmar's ideas, his theories, his disparate records of muse and whimsy, and structured around them a modus. A way of working.'
'H-how do you know all of this...?' The fear gripped G'hait's tongue and he wondered briefly whether he might choke.
'Today the Istvaanian inquisitors are a secret society, G'hait. Their ways are considered extreme - and they would be the first to agree. Extremism is sanctioned, they would say. Extremism is required. Are the enemies of the Imperium concerned with moderation? With liberalism? Of course not!'
The fear struck G'hait's mind like a mallet, and the truth that had crept into his blood and limbs and bones invaded his consciousness as a cancer, digging claws of ice into his brain.
'You aren't a magus,' he said, voice dead. 'You... you're a....'
Arkannis smiled, and his teeth twinkled like super-novae in the half gloom of the vessel.
'The Instvaanians gave a name to their secret society, so that they could organise their movements away from the spying eyes of other, less enlightened members of the Emperor's faith...'
'This is.... you can't.... Oh, Mother...'
'We called ourselves the Elucidium.'
Something exploded behind G'hait's mind. One final betrayal, one final act of confusion and treachery. He'd been played for a fool - and (he could see it now) he was. Oh, Mother, he was! Such a fool! Such an idiot to believe the lies of the Emperor's agents!
His legs lifted him from his seat, unbidden. He would set things right, he told himself. He would finish this. His claws snapped open.
'You die!' he hissed, feeling the world turn red around him.
A gun barrel pushed itself into his forehead and Arkannis stared down upon him from beyond its dark circle.
The thought hit him: It doesn't matter! Better to die than submit!
His heart didn't agree.
'I know you, G'hait.' Arkannis said, a world away. 'Any other maelignaci wouldn't stop. They'd be lashing out right now, not caring about dying. They're born for it. Born to kill or be killed, at the Mother's whim. Not you. You're a mistake. A freak. You're too human.'
G'hait sobbed, telling himself not to listen, wrestling with the fear, with the self-preservation, with the self-disgust.
'You don't want to die, G'hait.' Arkannis said. 'That's your weakness.'
'...kill you...' the words didn't work, lost behind snot and tears.
'No you won't, child. We both know you won't. I want you to do something for me, G'hait.'
And though he mumbled and trembled and spat, G'hait knew that he'd do whatever the inquisitor asked.
'I want you to look through the window.' The voice was a cold knife, slicing through his defences, cutting at his control. Unable to disobey, G'hait pressed his face for the second time against the cold plate, a delicate fresco of ice scuttling across its exterior surface. 'Tell me what you see.'
Aching blackness, without form or end or distinction. It swallowed his eyes, it sucked at his mind, it made a lie of perspective.
And then something moved. Impossibly, something shifted, and had form. As it clarified against the blackness something beside it arose from the murk, and another. And another. The void blossomed with faint ghostlight, reflected from the planet surface now lost from G'hait's view, playing across uneven surfaces of a dozen, a score, a hundred vast shapes...
Here the wan luminescence played across a fronded gill, there a vast tentacle coiled with colossal precision. Scattered across the blackness without end, the shapes drew near. A fierce triumph gripped G'hait, like a fire rising in his chest.
'It's the Mother!' he crowed, all thoughts of Arkannis's betrayal scattering. 'She comes! She approaches! Blessed be!'
The Cardinal's expression didn't change. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'you should look again.'
The shapes in the void were closer now; easier to discern.
The fronded gill, at this distance, seemed less fluted, less organic in its sweeping rills. One might be forgiven for instead imagining the chromic spars of a sensor array, or the brandished muzzles of atmospheric cannons. The tentacle, unravelling across the vacuum, a million tiny clavicules dotting its surface, now seemed more regular; segmented in slabs of connected metal. A fuel umbilicus.
Great leathern wings became lance arrays and bridgeheads, gaping spoor-mouths at this distance were rendered as flight hangars and torpedo tubes. Scales became buttresses, spines were the steeples and turrets of human construction, gaudy skin-colourations became the blocky designs of heraldry and symbol.
'Battlefleet Ultima Secundus,' Arkannis intoned over G'hait's shoulder, 'incorporating the fifteenth, seventieth and ninety-third regiments of the Karadmium Guard, plus the principal attack vessels of the Tarantulas Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. I requested their presence in this system one week ago.'
G'hait sagged to his knees.
'The Mother is not coming, G'hait. Not today.'
The world fell from his eyes. Bile rose in his throat, bitter and hot against his teeth.
'Why...?' he choked, strangled by the duplicity.
Arkannis patted him on the shoulder, almost fatherly. 'Because Garial-Fall was a weak world. A weak world with a weak Governor, ruled by weak laws and weak politicians. Its Vigilators were second rate, its PDF regiments lacklustre. And to top it all it harboured a weak inquisitor - an enemy of the Istvaanian school - whose execution I have pursued for some time. Call it... call it personal, if you will. That the city also hid your Underchurch was a happy bonus.'
'Y-you... you used us...'
'Of course. I told you, G'hait: one doesn't cure the cancer of indolence through repair, or supplementation. One must destroy before rebuilding can begin. I lit the spark, G'hait. I swept away everything that the hivedome thought was stable and secure. Imagine their surprise!'
'You're mad....'
Arkannis stared, eyes bulging, cloak billowing. 'Wrong. Wrong, G'hait. There's a distinction between madness and pugnacity. I have done exactly what was required. That world, down there, that useless ball of rock and snow... It will be purged! The ferocity of its cleansing will be a sight to behold. Your petty little church won't stand a chance. There will be fire and blood and death. Oh yes, it will be carnage, to both sides. But from the ashes a new Garial-Fall will arise. Tighter, more secure. And those that have survived will be stronger for it!'
G'hait was a husk. He felt it: a profound emptiness that gnawed at his skin from inside. All that was left was betrayal - and it swirled in his mind like a storm.
'Why me?' he croaked, 'why spare me? Why involve me!'
Arkannis smiled his lazy, reptile smile, and blinked.
'Because you're special, G'hait. A maelignaci whose loyalty can be bought by an inquisitor - even one as ineffectual as Ariale - is a worthy prize indeed.'
'Y-you... you expect me to be loyal to you?' the notion sickened him, squeezed at his consciousness, lifted the bile into his mouth again.
Arkannis shook his head, slowly, lips pursed. 'No. No, I think you're beyond trusting me.'
'Then what?' Great tears snaked across his human nose and lips.
Arkannis lifted the sheaf of papers from where G'hait had left them, flicking across the crisp sheets with a wry smile.
'I should like to add my own research to that of Inquisitor Agmar. Knowledge is power, G'hait.'
'R-research...?'
'Yes. It shall be titled 'Maelignaci: Abnormalities and Weaknesses''.
He dipped his spare hand into his robes and withdrew a long, bone-handled stylus.
'Here,' he said, eyes flashing, gun barrel yawning menacingly. 'You'll be needing this.'