‘It hasn’t been the best company,’ she said, examining the dangling skull. ‘Maybe you can patch it up? It will make it seem like you’re useful.’

She tossed it to me. The skull landed in my lap, a stab of pain flaring from the impact. Then she turned from me, eyes fixed on the sky.

Awaiting the dawn and the death that would come with it.

Chapter twenty-four

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I could not sleep, but neither did I wish to. For if the dawn was to be my last, it seemed imprudent to waste it slumbering. But how should one spend their last night?

I see an argument for hedonism and debauchery. But I was crippled and trapped in a rotten tree deep in a perilous swamp, my only company a woman who detested me, even before her grip on sanity began to slip. Opportunities for indulgence were limited.

I considered praying, offering my soul to the God-Emperor. But there was no priest to hear my confession, nor abbot to exonerate my sins. And I felt a just deity should judge their servants on the life they lived, not their attempts to mitigate past transgressions in the final hours.

So, I spent the night as I would many others, attending to the seer-skull as I prepared to shoot one last pict. Iwazar had endured an impressive amount of damage, its survival a testament to the adepts of the Mechanicus. Though sanctioned to conduct repair and maintenance rites, I could not pretend I understood the device. I had never dreamt it could project such vast images across the clouds, a phenomenon I could only attribute to the power surge caused by the orks’ lightning. It did not seem to have inflicted systemic damage, but the light was poor and mechanisms stained by the swamp. I could not be sure without testing it, but I feared doing so might rouse Shard. Her mania had receded, and she seemed content to doze by the fire. I do not know if she truly slumbered or merely waited. But either way, she did not desire my company.

The pain worsened as the night receded, and the effects of the sedatives waned. I did not ask Shard for more, not wishing her to know I suffered. Besides, there was a poetry in my pain. Propagandist Fiwel Iwazar, the deceased propagandist whose skull I was presently clearing of silt, was familiar with infirmity. His front-line duties had ended when an errant frag grenade severed his spine. Some would have been diminished by such a setback, but Iwazar had taken confinement to a hoverchair as an opportunity to advance his craft. Unable to obtain his own footage, he became the master of splicing and manipulating existing data-files, retelling tales of the Imperium’s heroes, unconstrained by the limitations of facts and events.