‘I already had the answer,’ I say, breathlessly. ‘It is Dimmamar. The Shield is on Dimmamar.’

‘Where the light began,’ Ashava says, and I hear her get to her feet too, slowly. ‘The Confederation of Light.’

‘Yes,’ I say, my fingertips hovering over the silver circle. My scars prickle on my skin. ‘The birth world of Sebastian Thor.’

‘You must speak with the Canoness immediately,’ Ashava says.

I nod and let my hand fall away from the silver disc. I turn from the fresco to see Ashava looking up at me. She is not keeping her fervour in check, now. I can see it clearly in her eyes.

‘What made you want to meet here?’ she asks. ‘Before this image, under Katherine’s eyes?’

I shake my head. ‘I told you. I just wanted to, because it reminded me of home.’

‘I knew it,’ she says. ‘I told you, Eva. He chose you.’

A massive, tectonic groan rattles the Vow. The lumens flicker out, and every candle on the altar dies. Re-entry chimes start to ring, and then the lumens flicker back up as the shutters over the cathedral’s armaglass windows roll back slowly to reveal the void beyond. I look out to see not just stars, but ships. Hundreds of battle cruisers, escorts and gunships, floating in clouds of ancient debris around a bare, dun-brown planetoid pockmarked with old scars. There are orbitals, too. Deep-space relays and memorials. Beyond it lie gold-clad defence fortresses and the distant, tiny points of light that mark other planets. As I watch, two bull-snouted cruisers peel away from the picket on an approach course with the Vow.

‘This is it,’ Ashava says, softly, from beside me.

Around us, the chapel has fallen quiet. I realise that I cannot hear weeping any more.

‘Yes,’ I say, in a reverent whisper. ‘The Sol System.’

RAVARA

When I meet with Arch-Cardinal DiCrimio, it is in the cloying, damp heat of the hanging gardens in the upper tiers of the Ecclesiarchal Palace. Insects thrum their wings here, thronging around thriving plant life the likes of which I have never seen on any other world. Not even the wild ones. I pass by banks of wildflowers, twisted trees and thick, glistening swathes of algae on water, all tended by semi-artificial constructs of metal and bone that walk on spider-limbs, crooning to the plants as they trim and cut and tend them. The overhead lumens are glaring and artificial, and the air strangely clear. It feels lacking to me after months of breathing the rest of the Throneworld’s exhalations.

When I find DiCrimio, he is tending cloud-lilies. Seeing him cutting away their leaves, I am momentarily reminded of Dagra Thul and his choir. Just as with the Master of Dreams, this meeting place is a display of power, and of wealth. Unlike Dagra Thul, though, I am not here to intimidate the arch-cardinal. Some bridges are better off unburned.

‘You must not cut the weaker leaves away until they have curled and died,’ DiCrimio says, as I join him by the bank of lilies.