‘That journey is too far, the storm too great. It is beyond my reach.’

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘It is the truth. Do you prefer to believe I am omnipotent?’ the thing mocked. ‘Is that more comforting?’

The Lion lowered the chainsword, though he did not silence its engine. The teeth whirred around the edge of the blade. ‘Tell me what you have done,’ he said.

‘I have taken you where you must go, if you wish to find Terra.’

‘Have you?’ He was suspicious, but he had not known Tuchulcha to lie to him yet. ‘So where are we?’

‘Pandorax.’

The puppet smiled, and the Lion’s vox-bead buzzed for his attention.

‘My lord,’ said Holguin, ‘a warship is approaching.’

The bells tolled, and the daemons chanted. They spilled through the tear in the real and onto the bridge. Their voices were thick with phlegm and the buzzing of flies that flew in streams from between their lips. They were bulbous, rotting monsters. Their stench was an assault, a wall of gas emanating from ruptured organs and weeping innards. Clusters of open sores covered their flesh. The daemons were diseased. They were shambling creatures in the full blossom of decay. Yet their chanting, low and liquid and hollow, was also a kind of laughter, an expansive celebration of their condition and a promise to the universe that they had come to share the gift.

The abominations were joyful. Their joy was a horror, but it was also freely exultant in a way that Sanguinius could barely imagine any more. Joy had been foreign to him for so long, he was not sure he had ever truly experienced it. What happiness he could remember was a shadowed thing, haunted by the curse his blood had brought to his sons.

That monsters could revel in such unbridled joy was intolerable. In fury, Sanguinius launched himself across the bridge, wings opened wide, and came down in the midst of the daemons. Azkaellon called out to him as the Sanguinary Guard rushed forwards. Sanguinius barely heard him. He allowed himself the luxury of this moment of rage. Even then, he attacked with precision. The Angel struck the daemons midway between the front of their horde and the rear. A daemon burst apart under the impact of his descent. Bile, pus and rotting ichor splashed wide, liquid plague tainting the Red Tear’s bridge. Sanguinius swept the Blade Encarmine before him. It sliced through daemonflesh as if through air. Its purity burned the bloated tissue and boiled ichor to steam. Decapitated horrors fell, their pitted blades clattering to the deck.

‘Begone from my ship!’ Sanguinius bellowed. He thrust the Spear of Telesto before him. The blast from the tip cut a swath through the daemons, incinerating them in a line that reached to the mouth of the breach. The edges of the fissure trembled as if recoiling from the Angel’s wrath.