It took Niklau a moment to realise what was happening, and Chetta felt the faint twitch of his muscles as he tried to look away, but he wasn’t quite quick enough to avoid being ensnared. He was a man used to the madness and boiling chaos of the warp, to the extent that any mortal human could be, and she could feel his soul bending, flexing and resisting rather than shattering into brittle shards like that of her husband’s murderer, back on Necromunda. For a couple of terrifying seconds, she thought that he would shake off the effects, and live long enough to kill her.

Then something in the heretic’s blasted psyche gave way. His pupils dilated, his straining muscles relaxed, and he slumped sideways off her to collapse onto his back. Whatever had made him Radimir Niklau had been sandblasted away by the power of the warp, and now he was nothing more than some misfiring neurones in a shell of ailing meat.

Chetta fell backwards as relief washed through her. Finally, after all the pain and misery he’d caused, Radimir Niklau was…

Her gaze came to rest on the rent in the sky, and the malignant triple pupil that glared out from it.

‘Shit.’

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‘I cannot,’ Chetta growled, gritting her teeth. ‘Be having,’ she continued, forcing herself to roll over onto her left side. ‘With this foolishness!’ she spat, propping herself up on her left arm. She gave Radimir’s body a quick kick out of spite, which achieved nothing except making her knee twinge. The rite was near completed, she could sense that much. The abomination waiting in the warp was closer now, by some unfathomable metric, and simply waiting for the moment when it could get enough of a hold on Vorlese to drag it to its doom in the immaterium.

Ngiri was a prone form in ceramite, over which washed the unnatural colours of the warp. Jekri was in two parts, Carmine in three; Fell was primarily charred meat; Wroze and Viller both lacked heads; Granger was missing most of her chest, and Hickett had simply bled out. All around them, and in the smoggy gloom beyond, lay the bodies of heretics.

The only living person Chetta could see was the trembling form of the fire-witch, cowering in a ball.

‘You!’ Chetta shouted. ‘Witch!’

There was no response.

‘Look at me!’ Chetta raged. ‘Look at me, you warp-damned, daemon-loving, slime-sucking, pestilential sack of cowardly, putrescent filth!’ She grabbed a rock and threw it. It missed, but clattered noisily across the stones. ‘Look at me!’

The fire-witch’s head jerked up, and even across the distance between them Chetta could see the faint light of flames in those dark, sunken eyes.

‘Good,’ she continued, in a more measured tone. ‘Now that I have your attention – do you want to die here?’

The witch’s eyes narrowed.