The path to the bridge was littered with more corpses. All of them bore self-inflicted ritualistic wounds. The faces of the dead were ecstatic in the frozen moments of their last suffering. The ship was a tomb, and it was a monument to triumph. The dead of the Chorale were degraded things even in life. The Lion observed their clothing­ and their tools. He saw hides that would have been still bloody when worn. He saw icons of human flesh and bone. Their weapons were crude, though crafted with horror as their intent. He was surprised that these people were capable of piloting void ships, no matter how poorly maintained. They seemed to be a feral people. They were so in thrall to the gods of the warp, they should have had no ability to reason.

Just outside the entrance to the bridge, Holguin stopped and kneeled beside a brace of corpses. They had died with the runes incomplete on their foreheads. They had been gouging their flesh with their fingernails when the end came for them. ‘Those look rushed,’ Holguin said, pointing to the wounds. ‘And the clothes are different.’ There were none of the perverse icons. Their robes were still primitive, but unobjectionable.

‘They were meant to pass,’ said the Lion.

‘An infiltration?’ Holguin asked.

‘Perhaps. You are sure of all your refugees on Thrinos?’ the Lion asked Khalybus.

‘As sure as we can be of the flesh,’ the Iron Hands legionary grunted.

The Lion nodded. He turned his attention back to the bodies. ‘They were not meant to die here,’ he theorised. ‘When they realised they were going to, they tried to complete their ritual. But the sacrifice was supposed to occur somewhere else.’

‘On Pythos,’ said Khalybus.

‘That does seem to be the only destination in this system.’ A destination closed to everyone. There the warp storm was ferocious. Nothing could cross the frontier of the Pandorax System.

The Dark Angels and the Iron Hands legionary entered the bridge, and found the heart of the Chorale’s self-contradictory madness. There were many more bodies here, and they had all fallen in the same kind of mutual suicide that had consumed the inmates of the previous chamber. A stone altar on a dais occupied the front of the bridge. It was stained brown by blood. A brass eight-pointed star rose above it. A human head was mounted on each of the eight arms. Each spike end punched through the bridge of the nose, caving in the skull. The last victim of the altar lay across it, a man whose gaze had frozen into a sublimity of horror.