‘So do the people who follow me,’ said Eisenhorn.

‘Do they?’ asked Gobleka. ‘Do they really? Did you ever tell them, your friends, that you lied to them? That you’re mad and outlawed and obsessed? That the path you walk is one of pain, and it’s untrue? That your cause is doomed, and everyone knows it? Even the Rot-God-King. Your side is the losing side. You follow the False Emperor, Eisenhorn. You pledged your life to Him. You backed the wrong side in this struggle. And that’s just a fact.’

‘We’ll agree to disagree,’ growled Eisenhorn.

‘No,’ said Gobleka. ‘From day one, since before the Emperor was the Emperor, it was always going to go this way. Ordained, predicted, projected, prophesied. Chaos will always prevail. It’s a universal law. Order does not endure. Chaos overwhelms. Entropy, Eisenhorn. All systems break down eventually. Everything wears out, everything falls apart. The universe returns to its preordained natural state, and that’s Chaos, forever and always.’

Eisenhorn remained silent.

‘You don’t have to take my word for it,’ said Gobleka. ‘I’m going to show you. That’s part of my gift to you today. I’m going to share the truth with you, the truth that’s always been, so you can see it and know it for yourself. The scales will fall from your eyes, man, and you will think yourself such a fool to have believed otherwise.’

‘You don’t know me very well, do you?’ asked Eisenhorn.

‘See this?’ asked Gobleka, raising the injector. ‘Sark’s masterpiece. An engineered viral inoculant. A miraculous thing. He isolated it from samples collected by his grandfather–’

‘The Torment,’ said Eisenhorn.

Gobleka grinned. ‘A man of learning! Yes, the Torment. Uhlren’s Pox. It had so many wonderful names. A gift of the warp, a pestilence like no other. This is inert, of course. An antigenic Sark engineered from the original pathogen. It won’t kill you. Well, it probably won’t. It will transform you… what you are… how you think. It will remake you in wonderful ways. The way Sark remade himself so he could operate the Loom.’

‘Why?’ asked Eisenhorn.

‘Why what?’

‘Why are you giving it to me?’

‘Well,’ said Gobleka, ‘for one it will transfigure you and allow you to see the truth, and–’

‘Make me, what? Join you?’ asked Eisenhorn.

‘Pretty much,’ laughed Davinch.

‘That won’t work,’ said Eisenhorn.