‘Do you think so?’ Sanguinius asked. He took a breath. It grated with the effort. A huge stone weighed down his chest. ‘Are you telling me you can’t feel its presence?’

‘Perhaps,’ Guilliman said after a pause.

‘That is nothing we can fight.’ The Lion’s evasion betrayed his unease.

His brothers’ uncertainty disturbed Sanguinius. It was possible for them to view the phantom as a mirage. He could not. ‘Do not dismiss it,’ he said.

Before he could continue, the shadow appeared directly before the Red Tear. Elongated, made of night, it dwarfed the battleship. It fired a single shot. The defensive scans of the Red Tear recognised the attack, but not its nature. It appeared on the screens as a line, direct as lascannon fire, but it was dark, a lightning strike of black hitting the battleship.

The Geller field flickered. The failure’s duration was less than a microsecond, but the shot came through. It pierced the shielding. It slashed onto the bridge.

A thin beam. Black as despair. Precise. Unerring.

It struck Sanguinius in the chest.

The shadow passed over the Night Haunter in his cell. He caught his breath. His eyes widened, staring into nothing, and in that nothing he felt dread. He had foreseen the shadow’s arrival, but now that it was here, the future turned into a cascade of doubt. Possibilities multiplied, then winked out. The certainty of the implacable succession of moments vanished. They were replaced with a blank.

Nothing.

Curze frowned. He shook his head, the only movement he could make, trying to clear the amorphous, mocking fog that billowed through his thoughts. Anticipation, the bleak, remorseless companion of his consciousness, fell silent. He fell into limbo. The future left him.

He gasped. His body convulsed with psychic pain. He had foreseen the arrival of ignorance only in the last few seconds before it descended on him. He had thought he was mistaken. He had not believed in the loss of the fundamental principle of his life, of the nightmare bedrock of his existence.

Yet it had come. And he did not know what came next.

‘You’re a barrier,’ he whispered to the shadow. ‘You conceal, but you change nothing. There is nothing that can be changed.’

The tremor of a memory ran through him. He saw himself again on Macragge, the Angel transformed with rage, descending upon him to kill with his bare hands. He had lost the thread of the future in those seconds. The stream of futures had stuttered, paused. The moment of his death, the absolute that defined all others, had begun to slip from his grasp. For those terrible seconds, fate had seemed mutable. He had been confronted with the horror of a universe that not even fatalism could explain.