Black spheres were forming in her sight, and she could hear a voice calling to her out of the depths of her mind, coming closer like the sound of pistons onrushing through a tunnel.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said. ‘The… the thing I brought here, it needs me, you see. It needs a door and for that door to be open. And while the door is open, it cannot be defeated. It’s like a memory, or a story – it carries on for as long as it is told. But it’s going to be all right.’

She saw the shadow fall across his face, then. Saw the flash in the night depths of his eyes.

‘I am sorry,’ she said, before he could speak. ‘I am sorry, but I doubt anyone will ever know your story.’ She laughed. ‘Maybe for the best – it’s a good tale, but I have always thought that I would struggle to do it justice. Ignace would have been better. It would have looked fine in verse. The making and undoing of a dream by beings greater than men, but weaker than gods.’

She saw him twitch. Blood coughed from his mouth. He spat, shook his head.

‘I have always struggled with poetry,’ he said. He looked at the sword lying on the deck between them.

A heartbeat of time passed. He did not move. The sword lay still on the metal of the gantry.

Mersadie smiled one last time.

‘Thank you, old friend,’ she said.

And let herself fall back into the glow of the plasma conduit.

A howl of rage tore into her mind as a presence like night poured back into her soul.

She fell, and the voices of her past spoke one last time.

‘I understand you have a story… I’d like to remember it, for posterity.’

‘Which story?’

Oblivion swallowed her, and the past fell silent.

Twenty-two

So fall the walls of heaven
Thirteenth of Secundus

The Phalanx, Inner System Gulf

Su-Kassen felt the world expand around her. Shrill pain stitched her skin. The fire and shadow filling the Phalanx’s bridge became a flat sheet stretched taut over the world. She breathed in. Sulphur and the reek of burnt metal filled her lungs. She felt bile rise to her tongue. Her head was spinning, echoing with the hiss of voices that sounded as though they were draining into the distance. She retched. Shipmaster Sora lay in a heap of many parts across the command dais. Lights pulsed red on consoles. Some of the human crew around her were sobbing; some were not moving. Some would never move again.

But the daemons were gone. Vanished away like nightmares after waking.