Licinia breathed in and out, her lungs wheezing and gurgling. She would have collapsed, but her framework held her up. Her face and neck were sticky with her blood. She forced calm back into the storm in her head. When she felt she could stand it, she opened her perception by the smallest crack, and took in the tally of the dead.

Bright lights had gone out. Many pews held slumped, broken shapes.

The message had been sent. Almost a quarter of her astropaths had died in the process.

They will kill us all, yet.

Six

Six

The Convergence of Fates

Datum: that was an ambush.

Corollary: they knew where to find us.

Corollary: they travel the immaterium at will.

Theoretical: their Navigators are able to do what ours cannot.

Practical: use them.

There were two Navigators from the Annunciation. That was unusual. Perhaps it had something to do with success of the ambush. They stood in chains and manacles in the interrogation chamber. The space was spare, the walls unadorned. A bank of focused lumen globes shone from the upper wall directly onto the prisoners. It illuminated them in a hard, unforgiving white light that bleached every shadow from them. They could hide nothing in the brilliance, and they could see nothing. To them, Guilliman knew, he was nothing but a huge silhouette. The guards at the four corners of the chamber would be dark masses. Lead bindings, thick with hexagrammic circuitry on their foreheads, covered their third eyes. The function of the Navigators was to see what others could not. Now they were blind.

Guilliman had the bitter sensation that they still saw more clearly than he did.

He studied them before speaking, surveying the field of battle to come. They were a man and a woman. Their names were Yathinius and Nekras. They were Terran, scions of important families of the Navis Nobilite. Guilliman made a note of their ancestry and the need to purge the families, root and branch, when the time came.

The two Navigators were old before their time, with only a few strands of lank hair hanging from their scalps. They were so weak the manacles had no strategic necessity. Their robes, burned and frayed when Hierax’s Destroyers took the Annunciation, were the crimson of their Legion, and threaded with passages from Lorgar’s writing. Guilliman had once seen that work as tragic, a philosophy of error consuming his brilliant brother uselessly. He knew better now. It was not futile. It was monstrous.

Yathinius opened his eyes wide into the light, daring it to burn his retinas. He smiled. Blood gushed from his mouth. He parted his teeth, and the front half of his tongue, bitten through, fell out.

Do you think you can use this creature? Guilliman asked himself. ‘You see through the Ruinstorm,’ he said.

Yathinius kept smiling while Nekras spoke. ‘We do,’ she said.

‘Tell me how.’

‘By the blessings of Chaos.’