Malcador gives a sad smile, and nods to concede the point.

‘Farewell,’ says the Emperor, pulling on His cloak of fur, and turning for the small door out into the night and winter.

Malcador stays where he is, looking at the black space beyond the crude arch of stone. After a moment that in reality lasts no more than the span of a thought, he looks back at the pattern of cards laid out on the stone bench beside him. Then he reaches down and picks up the image of the high tower shattering beneath a thunderbolt.

‘Can we survive this? Can anything?’ he asks, and closes his eyes.

The idea and the image of the cave folds out of being, and the howling dark rushes in to claim the place it left.

PART THREE

Twelve

Solatarium
I am here
Battlefield of time

Battle-barge Ankhtowe, Supra-Solar Gulf

Ahzek Ahriman, Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons Legion, watched as blood formed in the crystal sphere. Crimson puffed into being within its polished depths, swirled and then ran to the edge of the orb. Cold light gathered around it, and Ahriman heard the melody in his mind change as notes and harmonies shifted. He watched the orb for another second as it spun on through the space above him.

+Does that fall within the necessary conjunction?+ Ahriman spoke in thought.

+It does,+ croaked Menkaura’s thought-reply. Ahriman could feel fatigue bleeding out of the sending. He understood why. To be in this chamber was to feel and hear the flow of the immaterium without break or moderation. It was a solatarium like those once used by long-dead scholars to predict the movements of the heavenly bodies across Terra’s skies. In those devices, stone and glass spheres had turned around a crystal simulacrum of the sun. In this chamber the same basic principle applied, but there the similarity ended. Just as the telescopes of ancient astronomers concentrated the light of the heavens, so did this chamber draw the infinite resonance of the warp down to the point where its patterns were visible.