The air seemed to thrum with a sudden tension. It wasn’t a physical thing; most of the fools around him wouldn’t have noticed a change. It was something deeper, the faintest echo of the beginning of a song that called to his blood and his bones. There was a great and powerful potentiality lurking around him, waiting to be seized and directed: the product of eight-times-eight-times-eight sigils carved into Vorlese’s surface by the Children of the Serpent, painstakingly following the deliberately piecemeal directions he’d given Sulaman Eichner.

The last line had been drawn, and the Great Glyph was ready.

‘Everyone stand where you are!’ he shouted into the night air, cursing the rebreather that muffled his voice. He didn’t fancy his chances of not coughing his lungs up without it, though. ‘The work has been completed! I can begin the rite!’

An excited murmur grew from the various figures half-hidden in the murk around him, but they obeyed his instruction. Just as well: the last thing he needed now was for a careless footstep to crush a critical line, and they were all critical. At least, until the ritual began. After that… well, the very nature of Chaos was its unpredictability. He was building a beacon to lure a mighty predator of the warp. It couldn’t break through into the material universe as such, but through the power of the Great Glyph it could get enough of a hold on the bones of the planet to drag it under, like the blunt snout of a colossal ocean predator breaching to engulf a boat and carry it down into abyssal waters.

As things stood, Radimir could leave a slow-burning lure, one that should give him enough time to abandon ship and leave everyone else to their fate. Should the glyph be damaged once the rite was started, it could spin out of his control. It might fail completely, it might doom Vorlese far more quickly than he planned – or something else altogether could happen.

Meddling with the very fabric of reality was never without its risks.

He moved with haste tempered with caution, stepping between the individual sigils and never letting his eyes linger on their lines for too long, lest his conscious mind be seduced and drawn out of him. Radimir knew well the power of the tools he wielded; that was why he took such care.

He placed one of the stolen eyes at each of the eight apex points, muttering eight consecutive charms as he did so. Then, holding each point separate in his mind as a glowing, writhing sphere of power, he walked to the centre of the Great Glyph.

‘Aylen,’ he ordered, beckoning. ‘Bring him forth.’