‘Primarily to your mechanical components?’ Chetta asked, contemplating the struggle that would be getting fully back to her feet again, and wondering if it was worth the effort.

‘My biological health is also failing,’ Jekri admitted. ‘I can currently brace my weapon sufficiently to fire, but I cannot achieve significant locomotion, due to no longer being in possession of my lower limbs. However, I can detect no additional hostiles.’

Chetta frowned. ‘What about–?’

The ghostly light of the ritual in front of her blazed into full life, drying the words up in her mouth. She squeezed her human eyes shut against it, but she realised after a second that it made little difference: the witch-light was unaffected. This was warp energy, potent and strong, and only her pineal eye could detect it. Something had happened, something that had whipped the slow-burning blasphemy before them into a raging inferno of power. It spiralled around itself, the tendrils thickening and intertwining until it became something that was part-flower, part-serpent, part-beacon, and all-enrapturing.

It was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most terrifying thing she’d ever seen.

‘It’s begun properly,’ she said, forcing herself up and fighting back tears as she did so. ‘Ngiri, get up, Emperor damn you! We have to stop it!’

‘Inqui–!’

That hadn’t been Ngiri; it had been Jekri’s voice, and abruptly cut off. Chetta scanned the darkness around her desperately, but her human eyes were still near-blind and the blazing power of the ritual that her warp eye could see illuminated nothing in the material world. She squinted, trying to focus. Was that the faintest echo of something, over there…?

‘Jekri?’ Ngiri voxed. Chetta heard the clatter of armour as the battered inquisitor finally pulled herself back to her feet. ‘Jekri, come in.’

‘Too late,’ Chetta said, knowing in her heart that it was true as soon as the words left her lips. ‘He’s still here, Ngiri.

‘Niklau is still here.’

The Lidless Stare

The Lidless Stare

‘Chetta, stay where you are,’ Ngiri instructed over the vox. Shadows shifted in the gloom, and the faintest spots of glowing red became visible. ‘I’m coming to you.’

‘Ngiri, this is important,’ Chetta said. The swirling tendrils of the rite were almost transfixing in their beauty, but there was a pattern there, she was sure of it. ‘Niklau is not the key. Not any longer. We have to disrupt the rite itself.’

‘Where in the names of all the saints is my pistol?’ Ngiri grunted, her helmet scanning from right to left as she limped forwards. ‘Disrupt the rite? Any ideas how?’