‘Sorry, boss.’

Ngiri exhaled breathily over the comm, which Chetta took to indicate both the inquisitor’s irritation with her armsman, and her preparation for what was to come next.

‘Very well. Lady Brobantis, if you would be so good?’

‘No one look at my face too closely,’ Chetta warned the others. She took the head of her cane in both hands, braced it in front of her and opened her warp eye.

The disorientation was immediate, and worse than usual. She couldn’t tell if it was because of her weariness, or injuries, or simply the fact that the smothering smog made it hard to anchor herself using her senses of sight and hearing. As ever, her warp eye sought the roiling maelstrom of the empyrean but found nothing, and the disconnection from her other senses was all the more pronounced.

She could focus on the pain in her body, though. That was nowhere near as far from her as she’d like it to be.

‘I don’t think… he’s anywhere immediately near,’ she said. Her mouth felt clumsy and her tongue thick. Faint sparks brushed at her awareness like the trailing tendrils of unseen cobwebs when moving through a room long-abandoned: a fleeting sensation that had changed by the time it was focused on.

‘Can you walk?’ Ngiri asked.

‘I was having a hard enough time with that anyway,’ Chetta replied, making a conscious effort not to snap. ‘Right now, standing upright is… Oh, my…’

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Nero commented.

Chetta stared, trying to focus with her warp eye, shifting her feet around to face in the right direction just in case that would help. Something had erupted into being: a silent glow that bled the colours of the warp through into real space. Tendrils of the immaterium were reaching out, and for all that they were tenuous and nebulous now, Chetta could sense the power inherent in them, the power that they would soon possess. This flower of malignant energy would continue to grow, and gain strength, and when it achieved its full form…

‘I think I’ve found him,’ she told the others. ‘And I think we have a new problem.’

Enlightenment

Enlightenment

Radimir stepped back through the darkness, his fingers dripping red with blood and the final warp eye clutched, still warm, in the palm of his hand. The pit of his stomach was twisting in excitement and antici­pation, as it always did when he was on the verge of another great act of worship. Soon, very soon, he would set in motion the events that would consign this planet to the warp and offer up another grand sacrifice to his masters. And then…

The Imperium would barely notice the loss of Gallimo Prime. In an empire of a million worlds, the Administratum would shuffle some papers and before long the hole in space would be nothing but a dusty footnote in what passed for their record-keeping. Billions of souls swallowed into an eternity of torture, and the ailing behemoth of which they had been a part wouldn’t so much as blink.