Then the man chokes and shudders and falls silent. Falls onto his face. Blood spreads slowly from beneath him towards me.

‘This is a cruel duty.’

The words belong to Haskia, and she does not speak them to me, but to herself, as she looks down at the body at her own feet. One clad in the white remnants of medicae clothes.

‘This is the price of failure,’ Qi-Oh says.

She lowers her chainsword slowly, the teeth still turning. They are stained dark, as is the deck. As are the walls of the corridor. As are my gauntleted hands. The smell of all of that blood washes over me, carried on the warm, wet air of the lowdecks. It smells sour, and old. Rotten.

‘It is a mercy,’ I say, to both of them. ‘Nothing more.’

Haskia nods slowly. Qi-Oh says nothing. None of my Sisters do. No words. No praises. Just solemn silence. I turn to Ashava. Her face is streaked with dirt, her eyes turned gold by her flamer’s pilot light. Beyond her the corridor is littered with the bodies of vassals and ship’s crew. Of serfs and savants. Of those like the crewman I just killed, who could not stand the sight of the abyss. Who gave in to madness and murder the moment the lights went out. Disgust blooms outwards from my core, but the emotion is not alone. Another feeling clings to it, inseparable.

Guilt.

‘Sister Superior?’ Ashava says. ‘Your orders?’

I tear my eyes from the bodies and look at her.

‘Burn them,’ I say, just as I have in every chamber and every corridor before this one.

Ashava nods and hefts her flamer as I turn away to continue on into the ship. I hear the rush of flame at my back even as I hear more screaming from up ahead. Those same few strangled words that echo through the hollow bones of the Unbroken Vow on every deck. In every chamber, hall and corridor.

I saw it.

I saw the abyss.

It takes three hours for my Sisters and I to cut our way through to the place that we saw in the mirror-daemon’s crystal skin.

Just like everywhere else, the corridor that leads to the lowdecks chapel is littered with the dead. Here, though, mercy has already been given. The cruel duty already done. The bodies of the lost have already been burned, reduced to little more than black stains on the decking. The air is cooler here, too. It smells of smoke and burning, and it carries on it the sound of voices. Of singing.

Of my Sisters.