We might get there faster. The thought assailed him through the leaps. It grew more insistent with every casualty to madness. It undermined the practical, shaking its foundations with the loss of each ship. One jump, Nekras had said. The practical of distrust was sound. He knew this to be true. Prayto had concurred. Yet there had been no sign that Nekras was lying.

And? What of it? You have been blind before. You did not see this war coming. You did not see Lorgar’s betrayal coming. And with a bitter pang, he thought back to before the war, to Thoas, and to the history of human civil war he had found and ordered expunged. The lessons had been there, and he had wilfully turned his eyes from them.

We might get there faster. If we use the enemy’s tools.

The concept should have been unthinkable. It was not. He confronted it, but could not put it aside. He left the bridge of the Samothrace and returned to his quarters. He needed to face what he was contemplating in a form that was not abstract. In the main chamber, he advanced to the stasis vault. It opened with a groan of metal and a hiss of escaping air. He stood before the two compartments that held the athames.

Theoretical. You postulated that careful study might lead to the successful use of these tools. Would the same not be true of the Navigators?

The train of logic was seductive. It would be easy to agree with it.

‘No,’ he whispered. ‘The theoretical is flawed. It ignores realities. It shapes itself to irrational hope.’

The truth did not have the convincing effect it should have had. The blades mocked him with the lethal secrecy of their being. They seemed to answer him with Nekras’ words. You walk your assigned path.

Guilliman’s right hand came up in an involuntary gesture. His fingers touched the point on his throat where Kor Phaeron’s dagger had pierced his flesh. He had been wounded, but he had resisted the power of the blade. He had not been corrupted.

Weren’t you?

He closed his eyes for a moment, then, staring at the blades, made himself work through the darkest theoretical. Perhaps he had deluded himself. Perhaps the athame had infected him. Perhaps every decision he had made since then had been shaped by the shadow that had entered his blood.

He looked back with horror on the Imperium Secundus, at its arrogance. The Lion and Sanguinius had been right to mistrust it. Yet he had insisted upon its necessity, and dragged them into his delusion.

He wondered how many of his brothers had been brought to make war on the Emperor in exactly the same way.

The conclusion of the theoretical was appalling. Corrupted, walking the assigned path, he had become a corruptor in his turn.