They always did. He had tried before, almost every time Sark had started the Loom and begun to weave. Gobleka had never managed to learn any un-words that way. He’d always ended up with a nosebleed or a savage tension headache. The futile effort to learn had, over time, only done one thing. It had changed the colour of his eyes.

The few words Goran Gobleka did know, the few commands of power, had been taught to him by Lilean Chase, and each syllable had taken many painful weeks to master.

Gobleka realised he had been standing on the gantry for too long. The skin of his cheeks and brow was tingling and sore, as though he had been out in a strong sun. He’d been looking at the light for longer than he should have. He knew from experience that word-burn could be more painful than sunburn.

He picked up his autorifle and went down a small curved staircase to the monitor station, set up on a platform below and to the side of the main gantry. He checked the displays of the cogitators. Sark’s psychometrics and vitals were off the chart, the former too high and the latter too low, but that was fairly standard when an act of weaving was in progress. Other cogitators were trying to map and decipher the sounds coming from the magos, but their readings were void. Again, that was normal. The Cognitae had procured the most powerful cogitators possible, some taken by force from a Mechanicus facility in the Thracian System, but even these could not cope with the energy and raw data they had been set up to process.

Gobleka wondered how long Sark would last. No human body should have survived the extremes he had endured over the years. Indeed, none had prior to Sark. As a junior adept at Keshtre in the early days, Gobleka had often been tasked with hosing out the cage after a failed trial.

Sark should have died the first time he tried to harness the Loom. He certainly shouldn’t have been able to survive the many weavings he had conducted. But then, Gobleka was certain that the process had altered Sark in fundamental ways. Sark had ceased to be remotely human a long time ago.

What did that make him? A god? A daemon? A eudaemonic spirit? Gobleka was sometimes convinced that Sark’s soul had burned out years before, and something else, some etheric sentience, had taken up residence inside him, wearing Sark’s flesh like a borrowed coat. During the brief moments he became lucid, Sark always begged to be let out of the cage. Gobleka wasn’t sure it was Sark talking. It wasn’t the magos pleading to be let out of the metal cage, it was the thing inside him whining to be let out of the coat of flesh it was clothed in.