Death is coming.
The whisper is right by my ear as two of Sister Evangeline’s half-squad brace and pull open the graven doors that lead to the Navigation quarter. A sliver of crimson light spills out from inside. Screams do, too, carried on the warm, damp air. I smell blood, and decay. It’s like looking into an open wound. One that has started to turn rotten.
I follow Sister Evangeline as her half-squad move forward into the darkness in pairs, each covering the other. Sisters Haskia and Ashava, Eugenia and Qi-Oh. I recall their names and temperaments from the briefings and meetings we have had since leaving Terra and from the files I requested under ordo authority, because it pays to know your allies as much as your enemies. As we press forward together, the space resolves from the red light and redder shadows. The chamber is a kind of reception hall. A place where visitors might wait to speak with the Navigators of House Oraylis. There is no bare iron here. Instead the chamber is clad in gold and marble and hung with heavy, void-silk drapes marked with the three-eyed icon of the Navis Nobilite and the House Oraylis crest. Statues cast from coloured glass stand everywhere, depicting robed figures holding handfuls of stars.
It should be regal, this place, but instead it’s a ruin. The gold is running like candlewax, and the marble is split and smoking. The banners are burning slowly, embers consuming the priceless cloth. The statues are shattered. House Guard lie everywhere in slick pools of their own blood. There are dozens of them. More than there should be, as if they were called here just like we were. As we pick our way through the dead towards the next set of doors I see that the guards have been utterly brutalised, even compared to those we found outside. Their faces are a mess of ragged, torn flesh that has peeled back to expose bones and teeth and bloodied ligaments. Their eyes are gone, messily removed as if by the point of a blade.
‘Mercy and grace,’ Sister Eugenia says. ‘They did this to each other?’
Sister Qi-Oh shakes her head, her narrow face set in a snarl. ‘They failed,’ she says. ‘They were weak, and that weakness became rage.’
‘Perhaps that’s what killed them,’ Zoric says, looking down at one of the bodies. ‘But that’s not what made this mess. Something’s been eating them.’
‘We must reach the Lady Oraylis,’ Sister Evangeline says.
The others start to move, but I find that I can’t. That I am made still by a prickling awareness of imminent threat that is immediately justified when something drips from the ceiling and hits my armour plate. A fat drop of dark liquid. I put my fingertips to it and then look up. We all do.
‘Oh, shit,’ Zoric says.
Above us, clinging to the rafters and the tops of the pillars, are dozens of shadow-black beasts with balefire eyes. They bare rows of needle teeth, all strung with blood and sinew.
Death is coming, whisper the words in my ears.
‘Purge them!’ Sister Evangeline shouts, loud and clear, as the creatures snap their leathery wings and descend on us, a storm of claws and teeth and shrieking rage. My threat-sense flares, and I turn to meet one of the creatures as it lands heavily and lunges at me, claws outstretched and jaws wide and waiting. I slip its grasp, and then sever its head with a clean strike from my main-hand sabre. The creature roars and screams and then discorporates with a deafening bang.
Around me, the Sisters are an inviolate wall of faith and hate. Sister Ashava burns the things from the very air with her flamer, while Sister Qi-Oh cuts left and right with her chainsword. The others fire their bolters, the muzzle-flare illuminating their snarling, war-torn faces. In the midst of the melee, Sister Evangeline carves one of the daemons in two with her power sword. The ashes burst against the blade, burning away to nothing.
‘The Navigators,’ she shouts to me. ‘Go to them! We will hold them off!’
I nod and push on through the press of wings. The storm of teeth. I am constantly moving. Turning. Leaping. Spinning. It is the way I was trained. The way of the Marleyan sword-song. I cut and cut until my blades turn black. Through the press I see Zoric shoot one of the creatures out of the air, the high-powered lasfire shattering its elongated skull. It crashes to the ground, still trying to claw its way towards him. Still snapping its mangled, broken jaws. He fires again and again until the creature’s skull shatters. Until I shout his name.
‘Danil!’
He looks at me, his eyes filled with an animal kind of dread. I know that it’s because of the breach. Because the creatures we face are of the warp. Daemons. Zoric has spent his life killing for one master or another, but this is more than killing. This is a violent enlightenment of the worst kind. It’s the reason that I have had Efrayl remove every previous encounter with creatures like this from his memories.
The more you know, the more you risk madness, or worse.
‘Stay with me!’ I shout to him, as I cut another of the creatures from withers to hips. It falls tumbling to the deck, smoking and snarling and coming apart at the seams.
Zoric starts to speak, but my threat-sense is flaring again. Not just for me, but for him.
‘Up!’ I shout.
He snaps his lascarbine upwards as another of the creatures folds its wings and drops towards him. He fires three times. Hits it centre-mass twice. The third round blasts one of the creature’s twisted horns from its skull. It should be enough to kill, but it isn’t. Not for something born of the warp. The creature lands hard, claws first, and knocks Zoric flat on his back. His lascarbine goes skittering across the deck, and I throw myself through the melee, but there are so many of the creatures between us. Too many for me to cut through. I hear Zoric’s pistol bark twice, and then he cries out, ragged and wordless, and I think that must be why I haven’t seen him in my dreams of Dimmamar. Because this is where he dies.
But then something whips past me. A small blade, about as big as the flat of my hand, attached to a length of Illithian killcord. It punches deeply into the creature directly in front of me. Straight through the eye. Yumia follows the dart and handsprings over the daemon even as it discorporates beneath her. She lands in a run, catching the loops of killcord as she does so, then she looses the dart a second time. It punches into the throat of the daemon crouched over Zoric. Instead of jumping on it, or cutting it with her other dart, Yumia leaps again, jumping over the top of the daemon and pulling the dart with her. It carves up and around the creature’s thick neck, separating its head from its shoulders. As she lands and rolls, it slumps and breaks apart, becoming nothing more than a thick fall of ash.
Yumia is back on her feet in an instant. She picks up Zoric’s rifle and makes it to his side as I cut down the last of the creatures between us. At first I think Zoric must be dead, but then he stirs. Swears.
‘Come on,’ Yumia says, as she puts his gun back in his hand and helps him to his feet. ‘This is not the time for rest.’
Zoric’s jacket and flexi-armour are a mess, blood oozing slowly from several ragged wounds across his chest and arms. He shakes his head and says something that neither of us catch.
‘What?’ Yumia asks.
‘I said I had it,’ he manages to say, and he laughs. It turns quickly into a cough.
Yumia snorts. ‘Of course,’ she says, unlooping her killcords again as the daemons circle closer, their maws wide and bloody. Zoric swears again as he braces his gun against his injured shoulder. I raise my swords, ready to cut them down. But then Sister Evangeline speaks, her voice so clear and melodious that it even cuts through the sound of the daemons screaming.
‘You have no power here,’ she cries, raising her sword. All around Sister Evangeline, her Sisters echo the last three words. The daemons falter. They hiss and recoil. Some of them tumble to the deck, trailing ashes. The Sisters march forward as one.
‘Where we walk, so does He,’ Sister Evangeline says.
The daemons flicker momentarily, like candle flames pulled by the wind. The screaming wavers and then stops, and in the silence that follows, Sister Evangeline speaks once more. Her voice isn’t raised this time, but it carries just as clearly regardless, with all of the purity of prayer-time bells.
‘And under His eyes you will burn,’ she says.
And the remaining daemons hiss and recoil, their skin bubbling and sloughing away from their bones. They flap their wings and try to fly, but they cannot escape. The Sisters destroy the creatures utterly with blade edges and promethium flame and the holy detonations of bolt rounds. Their wrath is gold and thunder. It is blinding. Beautiful. I don’t want to drag my eyes away, but I have to, because beyond the second set of doors the Navigators are still screaming.
‘The Navigators,’ I shout to Zoric and Yumia. ‘Let’s go.’
But before we can reach the doors, a new sound splits the air. A slow shifting. A splintering, like old trees being felled, or a landslide beginning.
Like a field of glass, cracking underfoot.
I stop and look back, and this time it’s me who curses. ‘Saint’s blood,’ I say hollowly.
Something is growing from the deck of the Vow. From the ashes, blood and bone fragments. From all of that shattered glass. The Sisters fire on it as it twists together, shimmering and coated with warpfire, but it doesn’t break or weaken. It just soaks up the holy shells and the blessed flame like storm clouds swallow the sky. Then one large central eye opens in its chest. Eight more blink open in a circle all around it, lidless and staring and full of tiny lights that look all too much like stars.
DEATH IS COMING.
The words make my mind ache. Make my soul ache. They put me on my knees. Then I see what is reflected in the mirror-thing’s silver skin, and my heart aches, too. In every facet, and every fragment I see Sofika’s face, blood-spattered and staring. This isn’t the Sofika from my dreams, or from my past. It is my dream-taker as she is now. Coiled in the cables of her support machine, her pupils swollen and dark.
Ahri, she says, a thousand times over. Where are you?
I feel blood trickle out of my ears as I try to reach for the pendant at my chest, but my arms are leaden. I can’t tell if it’s real, or a dream. If it has happened or is yet to happen. I can’t tell if I am watching Sofika die in the underdecks where I left her with only Efrayl to keep her safe.
I never should have left her.
Ahri, she says, again. Please. I’m so afraid.
Shadows begin to flicker around her. Shadows with claws. Sofika’s mountain-sky eyes grow wide with fear. With a roar of effort, I get to my feet. My heart is loud in my ears. Labouring.
Where are you? Sofika asks, over and over again. Where are you, Ahri?
‘I’m here,’ I say, the words a slurring mess. ‘I’m coming.’
But before I can take a step a voice cuts through.
‘You have no power here!’
The voice is melodic and clear. Pure.
It belongs to Sister Evangeline.
Everyone around her is reeling and recovering, but not Sister Evangeline. The Sister Superior is standing and staring up at the mirror-thing, her sword held en garde. Her face is set, those eagle scars stark white against her skin. Patterns play over her armour, picked out by reflected light from the warpfire spiralling up around the mirror-thing as it grows yet larger. The way the patterns move, Sister Evangeline looks as though she is already burning.
No, not burning.
Ablaze.
The mirror-thing lashes out at her with a fractal claw. It has wings, now. Feathers made of shards of glass. Multiple splinter mouths that are all whispering as one.
Deathiscomingdeathiscomingdeathiscoming.
Sister Evangeline catches the claw on her sword blade. The power field flares, and sparks fly. She looks at me. Haloed by all of that witch-fire, it’s like looking at the sun coming over the mountain crowns.
‘The Navigators,’ she shouts. ‘Go!’
I glance briefly towards the graven doors. The way we came in. The way back to Sofika. Her voice echoes in my head.
Where are you, Ahri?
But I can’t go to her. Not this time. I turn away from the graven doors as Sister Evangeline’s squad regain their senses and marshal themselves against the mirror-thing. Zoric and Yumia are both bleeding from their noses. Their eyes. Yumia is shaking and murmuring. Scratching at the brands of exile that loop around and around her muscular arms. When I get close enough to grab hold of her, I realise that she is just muttering one word over and over again in Illithian. The same word that makes up those brands, and her explanation for joining my service in the first place.
Dishonour.
I shake Yumia hard and she snaps out of it with a snarl. When I take hold of Zoric’s arm to do the same he tries to shrug me away. He shouts about Idoney and Tian and how they are alive. How they need him. I have to roll my fist and hit him to make him stop.
‘Stay with me,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not real.’
He blinks and takes in the apocalypse all around him. The mirror-thing, circled by the Sisters. The ruin and warpfire. Yumia, staring at him. His pale eyes clear and he nods.
‘It’s not real,’ he says back to me.
As we run through broken glass and hellfire towards the Chamber Awaiting, I can’t help but pray that the words are true.