The Chamber Awaiting is bigger even than the hall we fought through to reach it, lined on either side with gilded alcoves that contain ornate slumber-caskets. Nine of them. One for each of the Navigators Awaiting. I run towards the first one even though I can see that the armaglass is broken. Pushed inwards. When I reach it I find the casket empty, and what remains of the lid is slick with bloody handprints. A long, gory trail paints its way down the side of it and across the floor.

‘Damn it,’ Zoric says.

It’s the first thing he’s said since I dragged him away from the mirror-thing. From Idoney and Tian. He is looking into another of the caskets, shining his stablight over the mess. In the reflected glare I see the way his face is set, everything locked away somewhere inside.

Sofika used to call that look his killer’s mask.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘Check the rest, quickly.’

I do. They do. It doesn’t take long, because every one of the nine caskets is broken and bloodslick. Empty.

‘They are all dead.’ Yumia says it as though she needs to in order for it to sink in.

‘Not all of them,’ Zoric says, in a low voice.

He is standing and looking up the central aisle, his lascarbine raised and pointed. The stablight mounted on it illuminates a figure crouching over something in the middle. One with its back to us. I can see from here that they are long-limbed and hairless, clad in fine silk robes in the colours of House Oraylis. Cerise and silver. The last of the Navigators Awaiting. We approach slowly and quietly until we are close enough to see what they are crouching over.

What they are eating.

‘Throne,’ Zoric says.

The Navigator stiffens at the word and stops dipping its bloody hands into the carcasses at its feet. Eight more bodies, all robed in cerise and silver. My threat-sense flares.

‘Kill it!’ I say.

Zoric is already firing his lascarbine. The high-yield rounds punch through the Navigator’s robes and into its flesh. It screams and thrashes, flailing its thin limbs. Zoric keeps firing until the air is full of smoke and superheated blood. Even warp-maddened, it should be more than enough to kill the Navigator.

But it isn’t.

The Navigator judders upright and twists at the waist with the snapping of bones. All three of its eyes have been ripped out and its jaws are strung with blood and saliva. It swells and grows and screams as if it doesn’t need to breathe, its jaws opening wider and wider until its skull breaks apart, and then the Navigator’s body opens wide, too. It splits right down the middle, making a new mouth with which to scream. With which to whisper.

This ship is damned, it says. Death is coming.