He lifted his hand off the communicator button, cutting short the primal, triumphant howl that had echoed from the docking crew. You were painfully aware of the lamplights of thalergy signifying the Cohort officers in the dock—ten of them in a cluster a mere forty metres away: too close to be doing anything to aid the shuttle, but praying, maybe. There were more of them, farther away. An orderly line, flushed with blood, pattering with gut flora. They were perhaps working the mechanisms. There were muffled booming sounds as the shuttle clamps were loosed.

The engines behind the blood-daubed wall groaned to life in a huge, dull roar; those thalergy lights fell farther and farther away as you were lowered out the airlock on long struts of plex and steel. Mercy eased a lever upward, nose wrinkling in concentration, and then the thalergy rose away entirely. You dropped through space. The shuttle might as well have been empty for all that you could sense within, except for that single foetal bundle of thanergy lying still inside the coffin. As you looked through the plex window behind you, you saw the Erebos, and for the first time you got a sense of the enormity of the flagship: its scintillating, dark, and rainbow-hued steel, like an oil spill; the interlocking skeletons tessellated over the whole boxy structure, so that the vessel seemed an enormous moving ossuary. The iris of light from the fuel ignition hurt your eyes as it sped away.

Artificial gravity meant you were perfectly still and stable, but you still felt ill from the idea that you were drifting and tumbling through space like an abandoned piece of cargo.

God said, “Children, attend.”

You hardly needed the invitation. The Emperor was drumming his fingers on the back of the pilot’s seat, his curious black-on-black eyes not focused on you. He said, “You are both going to have to listen to me very carefully. The Mithraeum is far away, and our route is not typical. I’m about to teach you the first lesson, and this lesson will be the foundation of the most important lesson you will ever learn as a Lyctor. There will be a time for you to learn through questioning—a time for you to learn through trying and failing—but right now you’ll learn by doing exactly what I ask of you. The only other option is your destruction.”

This did not give you much pause. You were a daughter of the Locked Tomb. The option of destruction had been your constant companion since you were three years old. Ianthe, whose voice was low with barely suppressed excitement, said: “I thought there might be a stele.”