‘I’m working on that,’ Chetta admitted. This was something different to anything she’d ever done before, despite all her experience at navigating the warp. Had she seen something like this from her throne, she’d have directed the craft she was responsible for to give it a wide berth and thought little more about it. Her career had always been focused on avoiding complex warp phenomena, not studying them: Navigators might be able to parse things that would have driven a normal human insane within moments, but there was a limit to even her kind’s mental resilience. Madness was far from unheard of within the great houses, and not all of it was the direct result of genetic instability.

The sky tore open, and the colours of the warp bled out through the smog, casting distorted, shifting shadows across the ground.

‘Can you see that?’ Chetta demanded. She was losing track of what she was perceiving with her human eyes and what with her warp eye, and was developing a splitting headache on top of everything else as a result, but she didn’t dare close either.

‘I see it, I see it!’ Ngiri assured her as she drew nearer. The inquisitor’s voice sounded ragged, which was a good match for Chetta’s nerves. ‘I think you need to work faster on how to disrupt this!’

‘You and me both,’ Chetta muttered. There was a sudden flicker of blue light past Ngiri’s shoulder: the glow of a powerblade. ‘Behind you!’

Ngiri whirled, igniting her own power sword as she did so. The movement was clumsy and pained, a far cry from the inquisitor’s former balletic grace, and it hit nothing. However, the other blade winked out of existence. Chetta frowned. Was that a faint echo of something again, away beyond Ngiri?

‘Chetta, I’ll cover you for as long as I can, but unless you can see a way to end this blasphemy soon then I’m going to have to just start swinging at things and hoping,’ Ngiri said, backing carefully towards her with her sword held in a two-handed guard position. ‘Given the end result of us doing nothing is going to be the destruction of the planet, I don’t think I can make things worse.’

‘Point taken,’ Chetta replied. This was infuriating! The power was coiling around itself, but also around something else… but what? What was the key?

Light blazed into existence to Chetta’s left and she swung around, raising her laspistol to target whatever this new threat was. She found herself confronted by a humanoid figure of walking flame, wreathed in fire that somehow didn’t consume it despite Chetta being able to feel the heat even from where she was standing.

It seemed the fire-witch had decided to join the fight again.