The last ascension of Dominic Seroff
David Annandale

The debris dropped from orbit and fell beyond the horizon. The explosion of its impact lit up the night, the flash reflected by the toxic clouds of Eremus. Dominic Seroff lifted his goblet of amasec. ‘To your health, inquisitor,’ he said to Ingrid Schenk.
 	She raised her drink in return. ‘And to yours, lord commissar.’
 	The amasec was a poor vintage. It made Seroff’s tongue curl against its sweetness, and it tasted of machine oil. It was the best he and Schenk could manage. There was no good amasec to be found anywhere on Eremus. This poor synthetic was the least offensive that could be had. It had the benefit of being potent, at least. It warmed Seroff’s chest as it went down.
 	Commissar and inquisitor were seated on the balcony of Seroff’s quarters at the top of a thin tower of blackened rockcrete and iron. It overlooked the endless vista of wreckage and decay that covered the entire surface of Eremus. If the planet had once had individual hives, they had long since blended together, their names lost to history. Eremus did not even have the filthy grandeur of Armageddon’s towering hives. The mounds of this human anthill were low. The higher structures that had existed had been scavenged for parts over the course of the last few thousand years. On Eremus, everything and everyone had been brought low.
 	The planet was dying. Its population had been in decline for centuries. There were fewer than five billion citizens struggling in the wastes now, a tenth of what there had been five hundred years ago. There were no more resources, no more ore, and very little coin for the few imports that still arrived. Eremus’ civilisation had become cannibalistic, everything used and used again, until it broke down into nothing. 
 	The world was moving towards extinction, but the process still took time. Seroff did not expect the end to come in what remained of his life span, and he did not care what happened after that. There wasn’t very much he did care about. There hadn’t been since Armageddon, and that was a very long time ago now.
 	Seroff leaned back in his chair. The leather cracked. The rusted iron framework squealed. He took a healthy swallow of the amasec. ‘Do you know,’ he said to Schenk, ‘I can no longer remember if we use each other’s titles out of respect or as an insult.’
 	Schenk nodded. She brushed a strand of lank, grey hair out of her eyes. Her face was gnarled with age, clenched and hard as a mummified fist. ‘I think it was about ten years ago,’ she said, ‘that I last asked myself that question. I couldn’t remember then, either.’
 	Seroff shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’
 	‘Does anything?’ Schenk asked.
 	They toasted each other again.
 	Debris streaked the clouds again, but it burned up before reaching the surface. The wastes of the land were mirrored by the graveyard of Eremus’ orbit. The planet moved through an endless cloud of broken ships, military and civilian, of satellites, and of dead defence platforms. Eremus’ Mandeville point was little better than a cosmic sewage outflow. Seroff sometimes felt that the wreck of every ship caught in the warp found its way out of the immaterium and into this system, and then to Eremus. The derelicts fed the scavenger economy, and were, for Seroff, yet another symbol of the world’s identity. Eremus was decay. It was a refuse dump for the galaxy, and Seroff and Schenk were just as much refuse as the debris burning up in the atmosphere.
 	A large chunk came down midway between the tower and the horizon. The blast was huge. The fireball filled the night for a satisfying length of time. Seroff listened carefully. Faintly, over the night wind, came the screams of the wounded and dying. There would be many casualties from that blow, though the deaths would barely be noticed outside the zone of destruction. Life on Eremus meant accepting the fact that death could come at any moment. Seroff was at ease with the knowledge that every day he was granted was the result of blind chance. He nodded at the expanding fire. ‘What about that one?’ he said. ‘Shall we say he was on that one.’
 	‘Yes,’ said Schenk. ‘That would be a true, fiery end.’
 	They raised their goblets.
 	‘Sebastian Yarrick,’ said Seroff.
 	‘The Emperor grant you were on that,’ said Schenk.
 	This was part of their nightly ritual. They watched for the best debris impacts, and then drank a toast, hoping for the death of the man they blamed for their fates.
 	Seroff acknowledged the mistakes he had made. Allying himself with Herman von Strab on Armageddon had been foremost among them. It was the error that had, for all intents and purposes, ended his career. He had, at least, cut ties with von Strab early enough in the Second War of Armageddon to have avoided the appearance of treason. Seroff had simply been part of the political establishment of Armageddon, though it was an establishment that had failed in every way that mattered. He had remained loyal to von Strab longer than he might have otherwise because of his opposition to Yarrick. Seroff had let decades of hatred for Yarrick blind him to his own self-interest, and to what was right for Armageddon.
 	Seroff and Yarrick had been friends once. They had come up through the schola progenium together, they had become commissars together, and they had served together under Lord Commissar Rasp. When Rasp had proven weak, Yarrick had shown how little personal loyalty mattered to him, and had put a bolt shell through Rasp’s skull. Seroff had never forgiven him for that, and when Seroff had ascended the ranks, becoming one of the youngest lord commissars on record, he had made it his mission to ensure Yarrick never received the same title. He had been successful in this. He only wished that Yarrick had cared.
 	It was hard for Seroff to believe that his career had once risen so far, so fast, and blazed like a comet. That was someone else’s life. His punishment after Armageddon had been this posting to Eremus. Here, he oversaw the conscription of troops to be sent off to fight for the Emperor. What Eremus could offer was very poor. Its soldiers were the weakest sort of cannon fodder, fit for nothing except to absorb enemy fire for a time while the Catachans or the Death Korps took the fight to the enemy.
 	Schenk had just as much reason to hate Yarrick as Seroff. Her encounter with him was also well over a century ago, when she too had been young. Schenk was a Revivificator. Her faction of the Inquisition dreamed of finding the way to restore the Emperor to true life. A worthy goal, Seroff thought, one that justified many extreme means. On the planet Molossus, Schenk and her fellow inquisitors had been experimenting with the Plague of Unbelief. In order to control it, they needed to understand it. In order to understand it, they needed to see it in action. They had unleashed it in an underhive. Yarrick had brought ruin to the experiment, to the plans and to the careers of the inquisitors involved. 
 	Schenk still performed tests on the population of Eremus. Her means were limited, the material for her work barely acceptable as specimens. As far as Seroff could tell, she had succeeded in giving her subjects new and unpleasant ways to die, but had nothing to show for that work. He suspected that, for a long time now, she had really just been going through the motions. She had no real expectation that the torture she engaged in would lead anywhere. 
 	It was all the same to Seroff. He was going through the motions too. Each found in the other someone who understood and shared their bitterness, and who was capable of intelligent conversation. They had both fallen from great heights into the most profound abyss of humiliation, and they had discovered that there was no comfort, but much resentment, in knowing that things could not get worse. 
 	There was another sudden streak of light in the sky. The debris came straight down, striking the ground with purpose, only a few miles away to the south and east. The object was small, and the blast affected a much lesser area than the last impact. The tremors from the explosion barely shook the tower. But Seroff took notice.
 	‘That looked different,’ said Schenk.
 	‘Yes.’ Seroff stood and moved to the pitted, rockcrete parapet. ‘That hit like a torpedo,’ he said.
 	‘Are there any ships in the area?’
 	‘I have not been told of any.’ Seroff had given standing orders to the spaceport personnel to let him know of any traffic in the system that was not just more wreckage. Ships coming to Eremus were increasingly rare. Those who came were almost exclusively the freighters of low-end trading companies bringing meagre and substandard supplies, or troop ships arriving to take Seroff’s charges to a distant battlefield slaughterhouse. 
 	Schenk joined him at the parapet. They watched the glow fade from the initial blast. The object had hit in a region that was, by the standards of Eremus, still quite densely populated. The secondary fires spread outward from the impact site, looking like angry candlelight in the darkness. They multi­plied quickly.
 	Seroff frowned. ‘Do you see a glow over that sector?’
 	Schenk hesitated. ‘I can’t decide,’ she said. ‘Perhaps. The area seems brighter than it should be.’
 	A faint orange nimbus, tinged with green, hovered over the city.
 	Seroff put down his goblet. ‘Then we will have to have a closer look at this. I don’t know whether to feel interested or inconvenienced.’
 	‘I think both,’ said Schenk.
 	But there was still duty. There was always duty. Neither of them had ever turned from it. Nor will we, Seroff thought, even though every act in the performance of duty was another blow to injured pride. There would never be any reward for the loyalty of their service.
 	There were very few real streets now on Eremus. There were only their remnants, blocked every few hundred yards by the fallen shells of buildings. Seroff and Schenk wound their way through the wastelands, past jagged, rusted slabs of iron reaching fifty feet or more into the air. They took detours around hills of jumbled, indistinguishable refuse. Here and there, flames guttered, feeding on gas leaking from ruptured, mostly empty reservoirs. Rivulets of filthy, black, grease-thickened water ran down slopes and across fractured thoroughfares. The last maglev transports had ceased to run the year before Seroff had begun his exile. There was no way to get around the city except on foot. 
 	Navigating at ground-level on Eremus meant weaving through the canyons of a planet-wide scrapyard. Seroff’s tower was one of the few landmarks in the region, and it was easy to lose sight of it behind the cliffs of wreckage. A newcomer to Eremus would be lost within moments, but there were no newcomers on the planet. There had been none for a very long time. Seroff had lost his bearings the first time he had strayed from the memorised route that took him from his quarters to the barracks. Now he barely needed a torch at all to find his way to the impact site.
 	Seroff wore the greatcoat of his rank, and Schenk had donned a dark cloak, her Inquisitorial rosette pinning it closed at her throat. Their clothes had seen better days, and soon were covered with dust and ash as Seroff and Schenk drew closer to the impact site. Seroff knew that he and the inquisitor had become shabby caricatures. But on this world, that still gave them god-like authority. They were escorted by twenty troopers of the Eremus Bayonets. They were the elite of Seroff’s current batch of recruits, in that they were at least competent. He had made them his detail until they were called off-planet.
 	They heard the sounds of unrest and violence. Screams echoed from the refuse gorges. There were other sounds that Seroff could not identify. They reminded him of the snap and crackle of logs in a wood fire, but they also sounded wet.
 	‘What do you think?’ Seroff asked Schenk.
 	‘I don’t know.’
 	In her voice was the same concern he felt. And also the same curiosity. Seroff couldn’t remember when he had last been curious about something.
 	They squeezed through a narrow pass between two slumped mounds of iron. On the other side, they found chaos. The impact site was half a mile away, and the fires here were raging. In the time it had taken to march from Seroff’s tower, the conflagration had spread over the entire sector. A wall of flame blocked the way forward. 
 	‘This is not the result of a simple debris strike,’ Seroff said. ‘These are deliberate fires.’ There must have been a cache of promethium somewhere nearby. Seroff smelled its harsh burn, and the fires had clearly been set with purpose. They billowed from doorways and windows, and blazed in an unbroken line on the rooftops. Pools of flammable effluent had been spread in the gaps between the patchwork habs and ignited. 
 	Seroff squinted against the glare of the fire. He thought he saw figures pushing others into the flames. 
 	‘There is madness here,’ said Schenk. ‘I will need to interrogate one of the affected.’
 	‘There!’ Seroff shouted.
 	A man ran from a doorway and through a momentary gap in the flames. He stumbled towards the group, clothes and hair smouldering, eyes wide with pain and fear. Violent coughs wracked his frame. When they stopped, his vision seemed to clear and he saw the uniforms of Seroff and Schenk. He halted a few feet from them, wavering in uncertainty.
 	‘Take him,’ said Schenk.
 	Seroff nodded. Two soldiers moved forward. The man turned around as if he was actually contemplating running back into the fire. Then he stopped, his shoulders slumped, and he let himself be seized.
 	Schenk had the citizen brought to a low, squat bunker of a building less than a mile east of Seroff’s tower. It was Schenk’s quarters, her laboratorium, and her Inquisitorial prison. She led the way through ferrocrete corridors that stank of old blood and stale fear. The floors and walls were discoloured with dark splashes. The place had always been a prison. Schenk had simply diversified the pain it inflicted.
 	The troopers tossed the man into a bare cell. He curled up in a corner, trembling. His skin was patchy and red with burns and weeping blisters. His teeth chattered as if he were cold. His terrified, animal gaze was fixed on something outside the cell. He was barely aware of his captors. 
 	‘Leave us,’ said Schenk. 
 	The soldiers obeyed. Seroff remained and slammed the iron door shut. Schenk crouched before the man while Seroff stood beside him, looming.
 	‘What is your name?’ said Schenk.
 	The man’s lips moved silently. He was shaking his head in short, rapid jerks, his eyes fixed on a greater terror than the inquisitor.
 	Schenk snapped her fingers in front of his face and squeezed his burned forearm. The man jolted in shock. He blinked, and looked directly at Schenk.
 	‘What is your name?’ she repeated.
 	‘Remmis,’ he rasped. ‘Arven Remmis.’
 	‘Good,’ said Schenk. ‘Citizen Remmis, why is your district on fire?’ She kept his left arm in her grip, and squeezed again to keep his fear focused on her.
 	‘Burn the dream,’ Remmis said. He shook his head more violently. The words came out in a rushing, desperate mutter. ‘We have to burn the dream.’ His eyes fastened onto Schenk, and he gripped her arm with his right hand. ‘Promise me I won’t dream. You won’t let me dream. Promise me, promise me.’ He sobbed. ‘They were all dreaming… my children… such dreams…’ He began to keen. ‘I can’t dream. Will you promise, will you promise, will you promise?’
 	The inquisitor shook his arm off and straightened, taking a step back. Remmis wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth, muttering about dreams and fire. 
 	‘This is getting us nowhere,’ said Schenk.
 	‘Maybe not,’ Seroff said. ‘But it does confirm there was something in that object.’
 	Schenk tried another tack. ‘What landed? Was something let loose?’
 	‘Dreams,’ Remmis whispered. ‘No, not dreams. Dreams of the end of dreams. Dreams of decay. Catching.’
 	Seroff exchanged a worried look with Schenk. ‘Catching,’ he repeated.
 	‘A plague?’ Schenk murmured.
 	‘This is more your territory than mine,’ Seroff pointed out.
 	Schenk nodded slowly, thinking. ‘I will need to see,’ she said. ‘When the fires die down, I’ll go back in.’ She grimaced. ‘He keeps talking about dreams. This does not sound like a plague.’
 	‘No!’ Remmis shouted. ‘NO!’ He looked back and forth between Seroff and Schenk, his eyes staring wide, looking as though they might jump from his skull. ‘Don’t let me,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t let me dream. Why won’t you stop the dream? You mustn’t let me dream.’ He scrabbled forward, reaching for the hem of Seroff’s coat. A second later, he shrank back. Eyes closed, he clawed at the walls, breaking his fingernails. ‘Stop the dream!’
 	Remmis shrieked. He reached for his eyes. Bloody fingers hooked. As Seroff recoiled, Remmis’ cries turned into a single, unending scream. He sank his fingers into his eyes, and the eyes welcomed the fingers. Remmis’ eyelids liquified, and his eyeballs sucked at the fingers. His eyeballs became soft jelly, and then his eyelashes became tendrils, and sliced through skin and muscle, and then bone. With a splintering, sucking sound, his fingers came off his hand and disappeared into the hungry substance of his eyes. His arms fell back, the flesh around the stumps of his fingers turning black and flaking away. Rot gnawed its way along his hands and up his arms, spreading onto his torso. 
 	Remmis’ eyes ground his fingers to pulp, and then blossomed. Black, furry petals unfolded, their edges sharp as blades, their surface wet as tongues. A heady, cloying perfume filled the cell, and Seroff felt as if his nose were packed thick with buzzing flies. The unholy flowers kept unfolding, pulling themselves further and further out of Remmis’ skull. Soon they were a yard long, trembling and flapping against the ground. His screams finally choked off when his tongue swelled and coiled into a thick rope coated with slime and mould. The bones of his skull turned brittle and they collapsed in on themselves. It looked as though his head were deflating. The black petals kept growing until there was nothing at the junction of their stems but a trembling grey sludge. The petals slapped against the floor, the sound sharp, hard and slick, wet palms clapping. Then they, too, fell still and succumbed to the decay that had taken the rest of the body. 
 	After a few moments more, there was only ash. It drifted back and forth, caught in a nonexistent breeze. Seroff thought he heard something whisper.
 	Seroff had his back against the door. His breath came in short, hitching gasps. Schenk had turned pale. She met his gaze, and they rushed out of the cell. ‘You’ll need to have this sealed,’ Seroff said as he slammed the door shut again. ‘What kind of plague is that?’
 	‘I don’t know,’ said Schenk. ‘I’ve never encountered anything like that before.’ Given what she had encountered, her ignorance alarmed Seroff almost as much as what he had just seen.
 	‘Airborne?’ Seroff asked. ‘Are we infected?’
 	‘I don’t know. I feel nothing. Do you?’
 	‘No. Not yet, at any rate.’
 	‘The symptoms seem to develop quickly. A few hours at most.’
 	Grimly, they moved to another cell and sealed themselves in. They waited out the next few hours in silence, trapped in their expectation of monstrous change. Seroff braced himself with every breath to feel a fluttering in his lungs, a swelling of his tongue. Towards the end of the third hour, when no symptoms had developed, he began to relax.
 	‘The dust,’ Schenk said, half to herself. ‘Airborne, but larger particulates? I don’t know. I think we’re fortunate we didn’t breathe it in.’
 	‘If what we saw are the effects of the contagion,’ Seroff said, ‘we’re lucky the residents set their quarter on fire.’
 	‘A needed step, but we don’t know if that was enough. I’ll have to go in.’ 
 	‘And we don’t know how much further it might have spread,’ said Seroff.
 	‘Do you have the means to quarantine the zone?’
 	‘I hope so. Troop numbers aren’t the problem. But quarantining any sector is not going to be easy or certain.’ With no real roads, his perimeter would be a ragged zigzag around the mountains of wreckage, and the boundary might still be porous. To do this right, he would need, at the very least, the means to dig a clear ditch all around the infected area. That would require an army of excavators he did not have. In the immediate, he would have to make do with infantry, and hope that Schenk could do something effective against the plague. ‘Do you think there is any chance of an immunisation?’
 	‘No. Not quickly.’
 	‘Amputation, then.’
 	‘Yes,’ said Schenk. ‘Purge the infected and the region they are in.’
 	A thought occurred to Seroff. ‘It is worth investigating further, though, yes? I could just order an immediate bombardment.’
 	‘That step will be necessary. But you are correct. There will be something of value to learn first.’
 	‘Valuable in more than one way.’
 	‘Precisely,’ said Schenk.
 	For the first time since Armageddon, Seroff felt the thrill of hope run through his old veins. ‘A new plague catalogued, analysed and contained,’ he said.
 	‘A threat to the galaxy halted,’ Schenk added.
 	With the hope came Seroff’s first real smile in living memory. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it may be that what has fallen from the skies will make us rise again.’
 	‘The Emperor protects,’ said Schenk.
 	‘And He avenges.’
 	Schenk’s rebreather was a bulky piece of equipment, a thing of brass that turned her head into an avian skull with a blunted beak. It was a relic of her early days in the Inquisition. She would never have been able to acquire a tool like this on Eremus. It filtered out almost every known toxin. The tinted goggles cycled through a wide range of light wavelengths, letting her see shifts in temperature and radiation that might point to sites of infection and vectors of contagion. They were controlled thanks to an interior mechadendrite that plugged into a socket in the base of her skull. This was the first time she had had cause to use it in the field on Eremus, though she wore it often during her experiments in the laboratorium. 
 	The rebreather felt heavy on her shoulders, and the weight of her greatcoat pulled at her too. The juvenat treatments available on Eremus were flawed, and she was old now. Everything was heavier, and she was slower. The same was true of Seroff. They were both bent figures now. They weren’t shuffling, at least, but they could no longer run as they once had. If she had to sprint, she didn’t think she would be able to. 
 	She doubted that would be necessary. The fires in the infected zone were dying down. Seroff had established a perimeter of sorts a mile away from the nearest fire. His perimeter was wider than it had to be, expanding the region that needed to be bombarded. Still, Schenk approved of the precaution. A few thousand more casualties lost to artillery shells was barely worth mentioning. What mattered was to contain the threat, identify it, and then eliminate it.
 	Perhaps she could learn from it, too. The symptoms were profoundly disturbing, and understanding what caused them would, she thought, make them less fearsome. She was relieved that it was not the Plague of Unbelief that had come to Eremus. The nature of the impact still bothered her. It felt so purposeful. Had the Plague of Unbelief appeared, it would have seemed like her past reaching out to claim her.
 	Schenk advanced beyond the perimeter with a squad of troopers. They were using rebreathers. If the plague travelled on airborne particulates, those masks would not offer much protection. Schenk was not convinced it did, though. It seemed extremely lucky that she and Seroff had not inhaled anything at all in that cell. 
 	Schenk hadn’t advanced more than a hundred yards from the perimeter’s edge when she heard the cries. The screams were too close to be from the burned region. The heaps of metal wreckage scattered the echoes, and the screams were scattered too. They came from ahead and from the sides. They were rising moans and falling gurgles. They were grief and terror and agony, and they blended together in a tapestry that surprised Schenk by having a clear identity. The precise nature of the pain she heard was new to her, yet she knew it immediately for what it was. She was hearing the violent decay of a city.
 	She signalled to her escort. ‘We may have to fight,’ she said. She could hear panic too, in the blend of shrieks. And there would be no question of letting anyone past. She might want a few specimens, though she was doubtful about the utility of trying to capture one. Remmis had died within less than a minute of the symptoms appearing. She would have to content herself with observing the effects, and trying to gauge the extent of the infection and the speed of its spread. She had hopes of collecting samples of contaminated matter for later study, but for now, knowing how to contain the plague was her priority.
 	Schenk headed for the nearest screams. As she and the troopers rounded the gutted shell of a hab-block, the shrieks blasted through the empty window frames of the structure. The sound grew louder, and also harder to identify. Schenk frowned. Some of those voices did not sound human.
 	Around the corner of the building, she found the source of the screams. There were twenty or thirty people here. Most were dragging themselves along the ground, gouging their flesh open on the sharp edges of refuse, trying to scrape away ponderous masses of tumours. The infected were moving away from the centre of the contagion, and they were changing as they went. There was no pattern to the metamorphoses. One man had lost his legs, and was leaving behind a thick trail of slime that boiled and bubbled, lashing back and forth like a thing alive. The body of the woman ahead of him was spreading and flattening out, her ribs pushing out of her flesh and turning into pale blind snakes. Schenk saw tentacles sprouting from necks, heads that had become nothing but gaping, snapping jaws, and flesh that sluiced away like melting candle wax. The only constant was transformation followed by immediate decay. The sticky, squirming stench of the plague forced its way through the rebreather filters and stung Schenk’s eyes. Her breath hitched in anxiety, but she did not fall to the plague.
 	Some of the infected were still running, fleeing their more corrupted kin. They sped towards Schenk and the troopers, but did not see them. Their eyes, the ones that were still truly eyes and not sprouting vines or snapping insects, were blank with horror. Perhaps they saw the world around them enough to keep moving, but visions of a greater horror assailed them.
 	The troopers opened fire before Schenk could give the signal. She did not object. Las cut into the bodies of the fleeing people. They dropped, their wounds smouldering, and their bodies erupted into sudden, explosive change. The dust of their final disintegration whipped up into the air. It spread in every direction, and Schenk saw that it was not carried by any wind, but driven by some other, unnatural impulse. Where it landed, the plague spread. The dust was how the contagion spread. She and Seroff had escaped its taint, but now she saw the unmistakeable evidence of its power.
 	It was more than the infected that made her start to back away. It was more than the dust arcing up from the bodies in plumes. It was the other way the plague spread. It was the other kind of infection she saw taking hold.
 	Schenk believed in the possibility of returning the Emperor to life, in having him walk again among his children. She had never abandoned her faith as a Revivificator, even though the Inquisition in its totality, her faction included, had abandoned her. She had continued her work on Eremus, still looking for the way to bring life to the dead. She never stopped believing such a miracle was possible, but she had ceased to believe she might be the one to discover the secret. She had vented her frustration, her anger and her bitterness on her subjects, dispassionately observing atrocious suffering and death on her medicae tables. That sour, petty vengeance on the galaxy that had betrayed her was all that she had left.
 	And now she saw the miracle. Now she saw life spring out of dead matter. Only it was the wrong sort of miracle. This was not revival, for the matter that cried out in the pain of birth had never been alive before. It was stone and rockcrete and iron and glass that stirred and screamed. The flat surfaces of building facades, of the broken road and of sheets of debris wrinkled like flesh. With grinds and cracks, rigid materials bent, tore and parted, revealing the glistening of teeth and the staring horror of eyes. What had been inanimate came to life, and it screamed and writhed to feel itself diseased and dying. Wherever the dust of bodies fell, new life stirred, and the pangs rippled outward along the full length of the girders or the stone blocks, infecting whatever they touched. The disease was rushing over the industrial landscape of Eremus like a consuming tide.
 	Schenk turned her gaze from the abomination transpiring close to her. She looked back towards the impact site, and saw the rise of more and greater ash plumes. Entire hills were moving, sliding down as they decayed, and struggling to lurch forward as if they might escape their doom. There was movement every­where she looked, and it was spreading quickly. Somehow, a critical mass had been reached, and the plague was reaching out to grasp all of Eremus. The futility of her mission and of Seroff’s efforts at quarantine hit her so hard she staggered.
 	She and the troopers were still backing up, still holding on to a form of order. The soldiers had killed almost all the mutating civilians. The bodies no longer crawled. They were not the threat. The dust they were turning into was the danger, the dust rising and spreading and grasping at the world. 
 	‘Run,’ Schenk said. There was no mission to accomplish here. Her revived ambition turned to ash in her chest. ‘Back to the perimeter,’ she said. That would be no protection, but that wasn’t her concern. She could barely think past that point. She found that she could run. Terror gave her energy, and she could ignore the pain in her limbs. She had to outrun the spread of the plague.
 	Outrun it to where?
 	She suppressed the thought. If she despaired now, she would die before she had a chance to think of a way to make good a true escape.
 	‘The dust is contagious,’ she warned the troopers. ‘Do not let it touch you.’ 
 	The troopers heard her, and they ran. They had held true to their training until now, but when she broke and fled, they revealed the limits of how far Seroff had been able to shape them. Schenk had been their one shield against panic. She was the Inquisition, the authority who had the ability to end the crisis. If the Inquisition was helpless, there was no hope. They dropped their weapons and ran, quickly outpacing her. They glanced back in fear at the rotting transformations spreading over the land, and ran faster.
 	More and more dust rose up. As the larger buildings and mountains of refuse caught the infection, their decompositions hurled tons of dust into the air, like ash from a volcanic eruption. For the moment the dust was relatively contained, climbing up directly above the bodies and mounds that produced it, but spreading only a short distance outward. As unstoppable as the contagion was, its spread was advancing in incremental stages, as if it were gathering strength for a shattering blow.
 	The sense of volition lurking behind that hesitation chilled Schenk’s blood even further. The expanse of her ignorance before this plague was staggering. After a lifetime of study, she understood nothing. She was helpless before this foulness. She was no better than the lowest, most ignorant serf. She was just another tiny figure fleeing in panic, as if running would somehow be enough to save her life.
 	The troopers pulled further ahead of Schenk, though the way the path twisted through the industrial dereliction slowed them down. They were still in her sight when the plague caught them. One fell, then another, and then the rest in quick succession, the contagion jumping faster between them as more became infected. Schenk slowed down, her lungs rasping like rusted metal in her chest, her breaths thunderous echoes inside the rebreather helm. The twisting bodies blocked her path. 
 	She stopped, exhausted and puzzled. She glanced back and up at the dust cloud. Its leading edge was still a short distance to the rear. As far as she could tell, no dust had fallen here yet. And if it had, why wasn’t she infected too? Perhaps her rebreather was keeping the dust away from her, but that would not matter if it turned into a dying, snarling monster around her skull. She could see no reason for the soldiers to be convulsing before her, their bodies opening up, their organs snapping at each other with stingers and claws, their bones whiplashing into contortions of ecstatic pain.
 	She was missing something. Even her diagnosis of her helplessness was lacking. She was failing to grasp even the most basic elements of the plague’s contagion.
 	Think later. Run now. Even if she was wrong about how humans contracted the plague, she had seen the dust infect stone and metal. If she was caught in dustfall, she would die in gibbering rockcrete jaws. She hesitated a moment longer. The route blocked by the dying troopers ran between two long hab-blocks. It would take her half an hour to try to detour around either building and find her way back onto a route towards the perimeter.
 	Go now, before they turn into dust.
 	The mad hope of an immunity danced through her mind and she ran. There was no choice. Irrationally, she held her breath as she passed between liquefying humans. Her skin prickled in the anticipation of being clutched by disease. Then she was past the dying soldiers and running between the stained, leaning walls of the hab-blocks. She ran for the other end of the passage between the buildings as if it were a meaningful goal.
 	As if Seroff’s quarantine line represented actual refuge.
 	And yet, even though terror snapped at her heels and squeezed her heart, she still felt immune. At her innermost core, where the bitter stone of her being had been shaped and polished by year upon year of frustrations and disappointments, she could not really believe she would succumb to the plague. Such an end was not permissible. The Emperor and fate would not allow it.
 	So she struggled onward, clad in the armour of soured pride. Behind her, the clouds of monstrous transformation gathered and thickened.
 	‘What have you done, inquisitor?’ Seroff muttered. One plume of dust after another climbed into the sky. From this position, on the perimeter of the quarantine, it was impossible to see their origins, other than being in the infected zone. This section of the perimeter was somewhat elevated, though, and Seroff caught glimpses of large movements. He thought he saw a hill of detritus drop out of sight with a plunging motion, then more dust shot upwards. All of this had begun within minutes of Schenk entering the contaminated sector.
 	‘Lord commissar,’ the trooper on Seroff’s right said, pointing. ‘Inquisitor Schenk is returning.’
 	Returning was not the word Seroff would have used. He would have said fleeing or retreating. His heart sank as he watched Schenk stagger uphill the rest of the way. She pulled her rebreather off when she reached Seroff’s position. ‘We have to go,’ she hissed. ‘Now. This cannot be contained.’
 	Seroff hesitated. Whatever his mistakes had been, he had never abandoned a post. To do so was contrary to everything that defined him. He was still a lord commissar. He still had the duty of that identity, and that was to hold the position, no matter what the cost.
 	‘Remaining is futile,’ Schenk said, and it struck home to Seroff that it was a member of the Inquisition urging him to flee. ‘There is no duty here. There is nothing that can be fought. There is only death.’
 	‘What happened?’
 	‘The plague is spreading everywhere. I cannot fathom how it functions, but I know we cannot stop it.’
 	Seroff looked again at the thickening dust clouds overhead. The moaning from the quarantined zone was growing louder and more and more inhuman. Schenk looked terrified. His mouth went dry. Duty fell away from him, ambition crumbled, and he was merely an old man who didn’t want to die. ‘We’re pulling back,’ he announced. ‘Regroup at barracks and prepare for new orders.’ Those orders would never come. He wanted the troops to leave the way clear for his own retreat. Then a finger of shame made him add one more command. ‘If I fall, then do as necessity requires.’ Meaningless words, but he used them as a shield against his guilt as he and Schenk began to run.
 	The quarantine line broke apart. The growing cries from inside the infected zone and the sounds of strange, heavy movement made Seroff’s orders the signal for all-out flight. The soldiers ran with the moaning of doom at their backs. They were young and fast, and in moments Seroff and Schenk were alone. Seroff felt that he was, at least, spared being seen fleeing by his own troops.
 	Schenk pointed north as they struggled past an abandoned Administratum complex.
 	‘The spaceport?’ said Seroff.
 	‘There will be no refuge anywhere on Eremus,’ said Schenk. ‘The only refuge is off-planet.’
 	‘How long do you think we have?’ The spaceport was more than ten miles from their position. It would take hours to reach it.
 	‘I don’t know,’ said Schenk. She was breathing very hard, and Seroff slowed to match her pace. She had not had the chance to catch her breath back at the line. ‘All we can do is try,’ she continued. The words were a desperate prayer. ‘We have no choice. It is our only option.’
 	Seroff nodded. He did not look back. The dust storm would come before they were ready, or it would not. There was nothing he could do about it.
 	Yet he wanted to understand. ‘How have we not been infected?’ he asked. ‘Are we immune?’
 	‘I have wondered the same thing. That both of us should be so lucky, and for no apparent reason, seems unlikely.’
 	‘Even so…’
 	‘Even so,’ she agreed. ‘And immunity does us no good when the city itself is infected.’
 	They cut through the site of a manufactory that had been so completely stripped of usable material that it had become an empty quarter. It was quick to pass through. The ground sloped upward, and they came to a rise, from which they were able to see the next few miles. To the north-west, on their left, Seroff’s tower was just visible over the jagged hills. The spaceport was still far out of sight, but dead ahead, directly in Seroff and Schenk’s path, another plume of dust was rising to the clouds. 
 	‘The prison,’ Schenk groaned. 
 	‘We sealed the cell,’ said Seroff.
 	‘That doesn’t matter. The dust spreads the plague to inanimate matter.’
 	As if the dust, or the will it embodied, had been waiting for them to bear witness, and to know their way was closed, the storm struck. The cloud over Schenk’s quarters fell upon the city with a dark embrace of change and death. Seroff did look back now, and the gritty clouds behind them billowed, expanded, and came down too. In seconds, the vistas of Eremus before and behind them erupted with screams. Downslope from the manufactory shell was a group of malnourished scavengers. They stopped what they were doing and looked around. From where they were, they could not see the dust, but they could hear the cries. They dropped the scrap metal they had been piling up and broke into blind, panicked flight. 
 	Seroff and Schenk ran too. They made for the lord commissar’s tower. There was no logic in this decision either. There would be no shelter there. The tower was not immune to change. When the dust came for it, it too would fall to monstrosity and decay. But there was nowhere to go, and the familiarity of the tower created the illusion of refuge. They moved as quickly as they could, though they were slowed by obstacles and age.
 	The cries of the transforming city drew closer. It seemed to Seroff that they were caught in a tightening noose of plague. Despair and exhaustion dragged at him, urging him to lie down and accept his end. Fear drove him on. So did resentment, and bitterness. Containing a new plague would have been the chance to rise again. Instead, a world would fall under his watch. 
 	‘What is this plague?’ he demanded. ‘How have we avoided contagion?’ That was the last shred of hope he had, that their luck might continue.
 	‘I don’t know,’ said Schenk. ‘I can’t make sense of the infection’s form. There is no clear pattern to what it does. It is irrational. The only constant is horror, as if that could be the contagion. The plague behaves more like the dream of a disease than the reality of one.’
 	The nightmare closed in on them. The sky was thick with the terrible dust everywhere Seroff looked. As they drew close to the tower, they passed another manufactory complex, one of the few still working. Its chimneys screamed. Maws opened midway up their height. Fire burst from between the teeth, and then came a torrent of black and green liquid that burned and writhed in pain. Even the molten, reclaimed metal was infected, coming to life only to die.
 	They reached the tower just ahead of the dustfall. Seroff slammed the iron door behind them. There was no power in the city any longer. The only light in the dim entranceway came from the narrow slits of windows. Seroff stared at the inquisitor and saw his own terror and helplessness reflected back at him. His knees buckled. His legs felt like lead. He could barely draw breath. They had run, they were here, and there was nothing left to do.
 	Now what? Seroff wanted to say, crying out to Schenk to give him an answer different from the one he already knew. 
 	Now what?
 	The tower answered. The walls began to glisten. They twisted and groaned. Mould sprouted from the rockcrete and along the iron framework of the staircase. It grew tendrils with claws that jabbed into the new flesh of the tower. Foul-smelling blood ran in rivulets from the wounds. The tower swayed back and forth, moaning and gurgling wetly. The floor became spongy. Seroff lost his footing. He fell to his knees, his hands sinking into matter that was soft, gelid. It split, and red-flecked yellow pus oozed between his fingers.
 	The tower trembled as if in an earthquake. The floor heaved, throwing Seroff and Schenk off their feet. Deep fissures opened in the bleeding walls. The entire building was about to collapse, and it also seemed to be trying to uproot itself from the ground, as if it might walk.
 	The upheavals became more violent. The tower was not trying to walk, Seroff thought. It was trying to leap.
 	Over the deafening shrieks of the tower, Seroff heard what sounded like the roar of heavy engines. The moment was a brief one, and the howl of the tower’s legion of mouths overwhelmed him. His ears bled. He could hear nothing except the screams.
 	The tower fell, and it wrenched upward at the same time. Rockcrete masses plunged down on Seroff, but they did not crush him. They were too soft now. They were flesh, turning to slime and soon to dust. They smothered and they choked. He was trying to swim through something that was midway between avalanche and waterfall. The foulness slammed down on him, but he was also rising. The sensation was dizzying. Gravity crushed him, and he knew they were ascending, and his words came back to him. What has fallen from the sky will make us rise again.
 	Seroff choked on the slime of the tower. He struggled, squeezed by liquefying flesh, the screams tight around his skull like an iron band. The foulness forced its way into his nose and mouth and filled his lungs. Decay was drowning him, and his bones cracked under the pressure of the ascension. He tried to cry out, but only inhaled even more deeply of the slime, and he blacked out.
 	Seroff came to, retching and coughing up dust in thick, blackened wads of phlegm. His ears still rang with the screams. He was coated in dust, and lying deep in filth. Every bone ached. He felt as if he had been used as the clapper in a huge bell. He managed to get to his knees, then rubbed at his face, cracking the layers of dust. He began to breathe again, and he managed to pry his eyes open. The ringing in his ears faded to an insect buzz.
 	Schenk was a few feet away, also regaining consciousness. They helped each other up, then turned around slowly, taking in their new surroundings. They were no longer in the tower. It was dead and gone and dust. They were in a huge, dark space. There was a faint vibration beneath Seroff’s feet. ‘We’re on a ship,’ he said.
 	‘Yes,’ said Schenk, her voice cracking with despair. ‘We are cargo.’
 	The details of the immense hold came into focus for Seroff. He was surrounded by disease. The buzzing in his ears was insects. Bloated, thick-bodied flies, overfed and sluggish, droned in clouds over the suffering in the chamber. The stench was rich and layered, and thick as honey. The suffocating moistness of vomit and rot and roses wrapped itself around Seroff and forced its way into his lungs. The floor was deep in the muck of ruined flesh. It gave off a dim, green phosphorescence, as did the mould growing on the walls and drooping in furred stalactites from the ceiling. There were bodies everywhere. Most were human, though there were xenos as well. They lay half-submerged, groaning with the fevers that changed them. Tumours as long as Seroff’s arm grew from bodies, twitching like blind worms. Some of the sufferers were arranged in pairs. Cataracts of maggots fell from the wounds of one victim, and twisted over each other in their hunger to climb inside the body of the other. In the centre of the hold, the bodies, many of them still moving, were heaped into a mound. On the top, haloed by huge swarms of flies, a gigantic figure sat on a throne of squirming, oozing, rotting bodies. The silhouette was armoured, and a single curved horn rose from its helm. It carried a massive, serrated, pitted scythe.
 	When Schenk saw the figure, she stiffened in shock. To Seroff’s horror, he saw her grow even more afraid. ‘Typhus,’ she whispered. ‘We’re on the Terminus Est.’
 	Typhus. Seroff knew the name the way children know the names of the monsters that haunt their nightmares. Typhus was a whisper, a myth that must be shunned, yet insisted upon being told. He was the shadow that lurked behind the plague-deaths of countless worlds, the herald of endless decay.
 	Schenk was sobbing.
 	‘So you know me,’ said Typhus, with a voice that was deep and humming, like a pipe organ filled with insect wings. ‘I thought perhaps you didn’t. That would have explained your presumption.’
 	Typhus descended the mound of bodies. He approached, holding his scythe like a staff of office. His armour bulged and split, spewing insects and crawling abominations. Schenk took a step back, though there was nowhere to go. Typhus loomed over her, a colossus of plague. ‘Perhaps you thought you had escaped judgement. After the first century had passed, I expect you did. It took me a long time to find you. And longer to watch you, and to tailor your sentence.’
 	‘Judgement?’ Seroff croaked.
 	The red eyes of Typhus’ helm looked down on the lord commissar. Seroff felt himself wither even further before the contempt he felt behind those lenses. Something vital, more important and deeper than bone, began to fracture inside his chest.
 	‘Yes, judgement,’ Typhus said. ‘She used my plague on Molossus. I will not allow such presumption to go unpunished.’ He turned back to Schenk. ‘I did you the honour of creating a plague specifically for you.’
 	‘I don’t understand. I wasn’t infected.’
 	There was a sound like thunder heard under depths of slime. Typhus was laughing. ‘Your ignorance is the point. You seek to understand and control, and you fail. I have killed Eremus with a nightmare. Its transmission from human to human was through fear. Once their terror was great enough, the people were consumed by nightmares, and they became nightmares. And then the dust of horror gave life and death to the inanimate.
 	‘But you, in your wounded pride, you already believed you were living a nightmare. You, who were strangers to Eremus, who had known heights no native citizen of this dying world ever had, you believed you had fallen so far that only ascension was possible. Your bitterness was always there, a shield against your fear. Until now.’
 	Schenk dropped to her knees, the full weight of despair at last bringing her down.
 	‘That’s right,’ said Typhus. ‘Now you see. Time to end your immunity, then.’ Insects with long, multi-jointed bodies streamed out of a rent in his right pauldron. They surrounded Schenk’s head. They stung her, and when she cried out, they rushed into her mouth. She fell into the muck, thrashing in pain. Her greatcoat tore as hard-edged fungi emerged from her shoulder blades.
 	Seroff clapped his hand over his mouth and stumbled away. Typhus laughed again. ‘You flatter yourself, lord commissar. This is her punishment, not yours.’
 	‘I am immune too,’ Seroff said, the sting to his pride making him speak in spite of himself. 
 	‘For the same reason, but your pride is misplaced. The fall of Eremus is Ingrid Schenk’s tragedy. Not yours. You do not matter.’
 	The thing in Seroff’s chest broke. The last blow snapped his pride, and he saw himself for the vain insect that he was. His self-worth fled, and the nightmare came for him.
 	Seroff fell, snakes rising up his throat and coiling in his lungs. His last sight before his eyes turned to dust was of the agonised Schenk being dragged off by Typhus, leaving him alone to be consumed by the nightmare of his unimportance.