The Huscarls began to fire up at it. Bolts burst in the congealing shadow of its torso. Casually, with speed that somehow blurred like an image drawn in a flick-book, it lashed out with a clawed hand. Bodies flew back, split open, blood showering from them. It picked one of the warriors up, cradling him as the legionary fired into its face. It closed its hand. Red sludge and shards of armour fell from its fingers.

Rogal Dorn looked up at the daemon. He paused for an instant and then ran to meet it, sword in hand and face set in rage.

The daemon laughed in a voice stitched together from static and gunfire.

Dorn leaped. Claws blurred towards him, but he was already past the blow, already slicing – once, twice, a dozen times. Black fluid and ash fell to the floor and the daemon seemed to recoil. Then it snapped forwards and its claws were tearing sparks from Dorn’s sword blade.

Across the bridge, corpses lifted into the air. Red fire lit in their dead eyes. Sora had drawn his serpenta pistol and was firing down at the dead as they rose. Su-Kassen found herself reloading and firing without thought. The daemons were clawing up the command dais.

Rogal Dorn was a figure of gold half-submerged in a sea of darkness. There was blood on his armour, but he was still striking, lightning flaring from where his sword met the daemon’s claws.

‘Can you see?’ asked the voice just next to her. Mersadie tried to turn her head but could not. ‘No, out there,’ said the voice that sounded like Nilus and Loken and Keeler and Horus, and like the wind sawing through the teeth of dry skulls. ‘Do you see?’

She looked. It was all she could do. She was still there, but separated from everything around her, a shadow out of sync with the reality it watched. It was like staring out through a window at a fog-filled street. And her senses stretched beyond. There was the great slice across the night, stretching wide, breathing out swarms of ships and spills of energy. There was the Phalanx, engines burning to push it wide of Luna and Terra even as it tumbled. Beside it, clouds of winged and clawed things scrabbled through the wreckage of its escorts. Across the dark, the barbed shapes of ships that had just come through the rift came closer, racing each other to be the first to cut the last threads of hope from the flagship of the VII Legion.

And down and down through the layers of stone and metal that were the ship, she saw the black tide boiling through cracks and walls. It was a flood, a mass of daemonic energy that would swallow the Phalanx and all in it. Then it would seep into its bones and make the mighty fortress its own. And she was the gateway.

‘I did not do this,’ she said.