The mortals below did not have the same strength. They saw the saviours they had prayed for leave Thrinos. Even the Iron Hands departed, leaving the fortress empty. So there was no celebration as three fleets raised anchor. The people looked up at the vessels, at the daylight stars that stood between them and the violent sight of the Ruinstorm. Then the stars began to move away.

The lights of hope departed Thrinos, and the wail of a great mourning followed them.

Part II

Eight

Eight

A Great Work

The barrier appeared across the nav screens of the Invincible ­Reason a second before the fleets fell from the warp. From his throne, the Lion saw every readout collapse into static and darkness. Every one of the Reason’s senses was blinded in an instant, as if they had slammed into something impenetrable that spanned the empyrean. That was the only warning before the ship transitioned.

Colossal gravity seized the Reason. Proximity klaxons blared. The pict screens flashed and strobed, as cogitators fought to process a sudden, overwhelming influx of data. The ship jerked forwards, rushing despite itself towards the thing that had seized it.

‘Shutters open!’ the Lion shouted. They parted over the bridge’s great oculus, and he beheld what had pulled the fleets from the empyrean.

The Invincible Reason plunged towards the wall of an impossible fortress. The Lion stared at the vision, and for several seconds his mind was unable to reconcile the structure with its size. It would have inspired awe had he seen it from the cockpit of a Thunderhawk. From the bridge of a ship, it beggared belief. He looked upon twisted, spiked battlements and towers of brass and iron. They rose from a wall that stretched to port and starboard as far as the Lion could see. The wall bristled with what, from this distance, looked like thorns and claws. The glow of ugly fires shone from innumerable apertures, a galaxy of pinprick flames. Light the colour of blood and hate moved over the fortifications, a nebula of horror.

The fortress filled the oculus, the wall dropping beyond the frame. There was nothing to see except the battlements, nothing to give the structure scale, but at last the Lion grasped its full monstrosity. The fortress spanned a system. The wall was tens of millions of miles high. It was billions of miles long. And though the proximity was lethal, it was still millions of miles away.

The fleets were caught in its gravitational well. They sailed across the void before it, pulled towards a collision, minute specks of dust blown at a mountainside.

‘Hard to starboard,’ Captain Stenius ordered. In his command throne one level below the Lion’s position, he leaned forwards, pulling at the mechadendrites that linked him to the Invincible Reason, as if he could lend the ship greater mobility by the actions of his body.