On any other day, the beauty of it might have struck a chord in Sister Miriya, but at this moment her heart was immune to the sight. From the battlements, she stared out over Noroc's cathedrals and habitat clutches without really seeing them, watching the day dissipate, observing nothing but the moments fading away from her in the march of shadows over the city's giant sundial.

A grim smile rose and fell on her lips as she recalled her words to the trampship's captain. You measure your life in ticks of the clock. Perhaps she had meant that as much to herself as to him. The time fast approached when she would be called to the Canoness and made to answer for her errors.

Miriya's gaze dropped to the plaza beyond the convent's gates. There were penitents there, robed in hair shirts and cloaks of fishhook barbs. Some of them moaned and growled their way through verses of Imperial dogma, while others took to picking out hapless members of the public who tarried too long, for shouted condemnation and censure. There were flagellators who whipped at children wearing the wrong kinds of hood, and men bearing spears that ended in festoons of candles.

She frowned. Parts of the rites at play down there were known to her. The Battle Sister recognised the Commemoration of the Second Sacrifice of the Colchans, the Litany Against Fear and one of the Lesser Prayers to Saint Sabbat - but there were other cantos that seemed strange and hard against her ears. The iconography the penitents bore brimmed with images of wine-dark blood, and unbidden the stark, lifeless face of Lethe rose to the surface of her thoughts, the dead woman's throat open like a second raw mouth.

They do things differently here,' Cassandra's voice drifted to her on the evening breeze as she approached. The woman threw a nod at the people in the plaza. 'I've not seen the like on other worlds.'

Miriya made an effort to shake off her black mood. 'Nor I. Like you, this is my first venture to Neva. But each planet beneath the Emperor's light embraces Him in its own way'

'Indeed.' Cassandra joined her at the balcony's edge. 'But some embrace with more fervour than others.'

The Sister Superior eyed her. 'Do I detect a note of disquiet in your tone?'

From a different squad leader, such a comment might have been a caution but from Miriya it was an invitation. Cassandra's commander demanded and respected honesty in the women who served the church with her. 'It troubles me to hear, but I have been told that in some of Noroc's less... civilised districts, there are women who will mutilate and murder their third child if it is revealed to be a female whilst still unborn. This is done in the name of some aged, arcane idolatry.'

'It is not our place to question their ways.’ said Miriya. 'The Ecclesiarchy works to ensure that the veneration of the God-Emperor meshes with the doctrine of each and every planet. Some distasteful anomalies of belief are inevitable.'