‘Who’s there?’ a muffled voice shouted, and the beam of a luminator snapped on and swung towards him through the smog.

‘Radimir,’ he called, making sure he could be heard despite the impediment of his respirator. The guard must have recognised his voice, because they lowered their weapon and the luminator attached to it. As Radimir approached, and the obstruction of the smog diminished, he made out the features of Faney. She was a local ganger, and handled her shotgun as though she’d been born with it in her hands, but the fingers of those hands were tipped with claws that marked her out as a mutant. She’d fled from her gang before she could be found out, and ended up falling in with the Children of the Serpent in the interests of survival as much as anything else.

Radimir clapped her on the shoulder as he walked past. A certain camaraderie had been a crucial part of the unseen glue that held the Children together so far, and he needed that to continue. The Children would have to guard and oversee the ritual once he’d set it in motion, while he made his escape off-world. If they trusted him, they would protect the very spell that would end up killing them all, until it was too late. If they didn’t trust him – if, for example, he’d put their backs up by being overly aloof – then there was always the risk that the canker of suspicion would take hold. Nothing angered a betrayer so much as believing themselves to be betrayed in turn, and the followers of Chaos knew best of anyone that no plan was foolproof, and there was no scheme that could not be undone by chance events.

He was a few paces past Faney when he felt it.

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!’