He set his lure, a pulsing speck of light in the fathomless empyrean. Soon – hopefully not too soon – the tortured writhing of Cormack’s trapped, immolated soul, and the ghostlike promise of billions more, would prove irresistible to one of the warp’s mighty predators. They would take the bait, and Vorlese would cease to exist.

By which time, Radimir intended to be on a ship and well out of reach of the entity he had summoned. But he needed to ensure that the rite was completed properly, or else all this effort would come to nothing, and so the words continued to drip from his lips as he secured the sigils, bound them together with tendrils of his will and sent their power spearing down into the bedrock. It was not a process that came without cost, and Radimir felt it siphoning off his lifeforce as soon as he began, like the cold, sharp jaws of ocean predators closing on him. This was going to be harder than before, he could tell that much instantly. Gallimo had left him weak; Vorlese…

He looked down at his hands. The bones were standing out more starkly than before, the flesh around them beginning to sag and wrinkle as his very being was devoured. He might not recover from this, not fully. Perhaps with rejuvenat treatment he could regain strength enough to perform the ritual just once more, but he could feel the damage in his very soul, not just its physical shell…

‘For the Emperor!’

Radimir’s eyes snapped open, and he found himself staring into the equally shocked face of Aylen Marjuk. Both of them had uttered that phrase before, under radically different circumstances, and neither of them had expected to hear it here and now.

For the first time in many, many years, fear reached into Radimir Niklau’s chest and gripped his heart.

Faney’s shotgun rang out, and was answered by the spitting roar of a hellgun. Radimir turned, fighting to keep the structure of his incantation whole in his head, and saw the huge shape of Svet charging forwards, his massive fists raised. A moment later there was a soundless detonation that made Radimir’s ears pop and rippled the smog, and Svet was sent flying back the way he’d come.

The telekinetic. It had to be the telekinetic who’d been with the Brobantis Navigator, which meant that a small group of trained, dedicated warriors, loyal to the Emperor, had found Radimir’s work. Whether they had managed this by accident or design was immaterial; they clearly now knew that there was something here that they had to stop. They were still badly outnumbered by the Children of the Serpent, despite the deaths the cult had incurred in carving the Great Glyph into the ground, but numbers weren’t everything.