A horrific, atonal chorus of screaming echoes through the Vow then, as every one of the remaining lumens shatters and dies, drowning the corridor in darkness. The scream goes on and on and on. I cannot hear the others. I cannot see anything. I taste blood and cold air and old, dry earth. Then the screaming stops, and in its wake I hear a whisper. Not in the walls, but right beside me.

Death is coming.

And then the emergency lumens flicker on, painting everything in red. I see Sister Evangeline, with her sword drawn and lit. Sister Ashava, her flamer held at guard. Zoric with his lasrifle raised and pointed. The graven door, its hexagrammic wards burned out. And around us, the limp forms of the dead twisting and splintering as shadows grow from the lakes of blood around them.

Dozens of shadows, with hellfire eyes.

Evangeline

EVANGELINE

The devils come from the darkness, blood-soaked and screaming.

They are formed from sinew and shadow with wicked, hooked black claws and backwards-jointed legs. Fire gutters inside them as their slack jaws work to speak in a brutal, slurring chorus.

Death. Is. Coming.

I answer them with three words of my own. A snarl that mists the air.

‘I. Deny. You.’

The first of them lunges for me, stretching out like smoke pulled by the wind. Claws scrape across my armour plate, finding no purchase on the blessed ceramite. I bisect the daemon-thing with my sword, spilling ash and smoke and the smell of death. To my left, Ravara moves with almost preternatural swiftness, her sabres flashing under the emergency lighting. Hers are not powered blades, but it hardly seems to matter. The inquisitor banishes the daemon-thing just the same, slipping past claws that mean to cut her with a fluid kind of grace that can only come from her seer’s gifts. One of her retinue, the man named Zoric, is two paces back, his lasrifle braced against his shoulder. He switches from target to target with the sort of deftness that comes from a lifetime of killing, every shot landing centre-mass.

‘This shouldn’t be,’ he says, and it sounds as though he is in pain. ‘They shouldn’t be.’

Ravara turns and plunges her left-hand sabre to the hilt into one of the daemon-things. It bursts into a pall of ash and dust. She spits onto the deck.

‘They must be destroyed. They will tear the ship apart otherwise.’ She cleaves another of the creatures asunder, her amber eyes furious. ‘They will tear us all apart.’

To my right, Ashava hefts her flamer and pulls the trigger. There is a gasp and a hiss and the flamer lights, exhaling a stream of cleansing fire into the corridor.

‘Back, devils,’ she shouts, the light reflecting in her dark eyes. ‘Back to the abyss!’