As an inquisitor, I have few people that I can trust, and even fewer that I can call friend. One thing I do have, though, is contacts. After Sharvak’s death I took on his associates as well as the Fortress Meridia, but I have worked hard to build my own network, too. I have worked with fixers and with assassins, with loremasters and lawmakers. I have curried favour with the powerful and the powerless alike, because in the ordos you never know who you might need next.
After speaking with Sofika I reach out to my whisperers, and my listeners, those that monitor open-channel vox-traffic and wide-beam astrotelepathy, and I arrange the payment of one silver eagle apiece to my ganger contacts in Lamataya’s underhives in exchange for words spoken in the tunnels and the sumps. I tell them all to seek out the particulars of the dream. The eagle, ablaze. Last of all, I call for my transport and my standing retinue, because some contacts require a more direct approach if they are to be of any use.
Contacts like Dagra Thul, who amongst his other titles likes to call himself the Master of Dreams.
Fortress Meridia’s primary landing platform is technically outside, though you wouldn’t know it, standing there. The hive blocks and spires stacked around it are so tall that none of the Throneworld’s pale grey sunlight can reach the platform, so it is lit only by blinking guidance lumens and floodlanterns that cast a glare off the puddles of runoff and rainwater that have settled all across the platform’s surface. The air out here is cold and wet, and carries with it the scent of inorganic decay and spiralling clouds of pollutant fog. Two members of my retinue await me amongst the rain and fog and darkness, armed and armoured and ready to fly.
Zoric discards the lho-stick he is smoking and grinds it out with his boot. ‘What’s the mark, lord?’ he asks, in a voice as blunt as his face.
Zoric is tall and corded, with a strong, square jaw and a nose that’s been broken one time too many. His skin is pale and badly scarred, his fair hair prematurely silvered. Zoric has long since left his old life behind, but he still dresses like a mercenary. His clothes are military-issue. All black, save for the lightweight, grey flexi-armour plates he wears under his battered leather jacket. Zoric has a heavy calibre Valedictor-pattern stub-pistol holstered at his hip and his old, uniquely modified lasrifle slung over one shoulder on a worn strap. The guns were the only thing he brought with him when he came into my service. I offered him replacements for them, but he declined. Zoric was willing to give up everything else about his life to serve the ordos, but not that.
‘We aren’t killing,’ I tell him. ‘Not today.’
‘And yet you called for killers, inquisitor.’
Those words are Yumia’s, and they come with a smile. My bladeward could never be described as at ease. She holds herself in permanent tension, as if she is about to sprint or leap as soon as take a breath. Beside Zoric, Yumia looks almost feather-light. Her dark hair is bound up at her crown, her light brown skin scored with tattoos and faith-marks. Her features are as sharp and fine as the blades she carries. Yumia wears no armour. She is clad only in leather and cloth and scars, her wrists wrapped in lengths of grey cord. Her feet are bare, despite the rain and dirt. No matter the conditions, she never seems to feel the cold.
‘That I did,’ I say to her, as we move together towards where my transport waits.
The Crypsis is crouched on stanchion legs in a fall of dismal grey light from above. The craft is gloss-black and seamless, just like Meridia. Its wings are elegant and forward-swept in a way that reminds me of a hunting bird steadying itself before a strike. There are no visible weapons on the Crypsis’ exterior. One could easily mistake it for a hive-runner or a noble’s speedcraft, which was exactly my intent when I commissioned it to be built. The pilot, Tomo, is already cycling the engines as we board via the rear ramp.
‘Ready, lord?’ Tomo says, over the internal vox.
‘Ready,’ I say.
The rear ramp eases closed, and the passenger compartment falls quiet, thanks to the same sound-swallowing technology that keeps Meridia so silent. I can only just feel the thunder of the aircraft’s engines through the seat.
‘So then, inquisitor,’ Yumia says. ‘If we are not to kill, then what duty awaits us?’
I lace my hands together in my lap and look at my companions in turn.
‘I have been shown a dream,’ I say. ‘Not of Hellebore, or the Rift. Something else. Something new.’
I tell them most of what I saw in the dream. The tower and the storm, and the eagle, ablaze. The divine, golden light. I do not mention my father. Zoric leans forwards in his seat, his elbows on his knees. He is completely intent on my words. Yumia listens closely, too, somehow more alert than ever.
‘Sounds like a miracle in waiting, lord,’ Zoric says, when I am done speaking.
‘Provided we can hunt down this eagle ablaze,’ Yumia says.
I nod. ‘That is why we are going to speak with the Master of Dreams.’
Zoric’s expression changes from intent to open disdain. ‘Terra’s mercy,’ he says, with a shake of his head.
‘Who is the Master of Dreams?’ Yumia asks, because she hasn’t served me long enough to know.
Zoric sits back against the wall of the transport and scowls. ‘Dagra Thul,’ he says. ‘He’s a black market dealer. A criminal.’
Yumia laughs. ‘So were you, once.’
Zoric shakes his head. He’s definitely not laughing. ‘Not like Thul,’ he says. ‘He’s not in it for the coin. Not really. He’s in it for the kicks. He’s a cruel-hearted bastard.’
‘There is more to Thul than simple cruelty,’ I tell them. ‘He keeps a choir of psykers in his holdings in Tashkent Hive who have a strength of sight that’s rare to find outside the ordos.’
‘Because he keeps them asleep, and pipes them with drugs to open their minds wider,’ Zoric says, still scowling. ‘Then Thul harvests their dreams and sells them to those who will pay for it. He takes pleasure in it.’
Yumia is frowning, now. ‘And the ordos do nothing to stop him?’ she asks.
‘He is being monitored,’ I tell her. ‘But as of right now, Dagra Thul is more useful than he is dangerous.’
Yumia’s frown deepens. ‘But he is a monster,’ she says.
‘He is,’ I allow. ‘But a necessary one.’
Yumia shakes her head, but she doesn’t argue. ‘Then his due will be paid in time,’ she says. ‘As with all monsters.’
Zoric’s eyes fall to his hands as he flexes his burn-scarred fingers. ‘You’re damned right,’ he says absently. ‘The God-Emperor finds them all, in the end.’
I nod, though I can’t help but idly consider if they would name me monster, too, if they knew my secrets and all of the things I have done.
If they knew that Sofika was still alive, and that I chose to keep it from them.
Dagra Thul’s palatial estate is high in the spires of Tashkent Hive. Up here, above the pollutant-line, Terra still has the heart to snow. I see the dense cloud of white and grey enclosing us through the armaglass viewports in the doors of the Crypsis as Tomo sets the craft down on the landing pad.
‘Keep her cycling,’ I tell the pilot over our discrete comms network. ‘The engines will freeze out up here, otherwise.’
‘As you wish, lord,’ Tomo replies. I hear him start humming before he cuts the link, and know he will be sat with his boots up on the control panel, reading. Tomo is always reading.
The back ramp of the Crypsis eases down onto the snowy landing platform, and a cold rush of air blows in. Snow dashes against my face and armour, and I am reminded of my dream again. Of the cold wind and the rain, and my father’s words.
You need not carry the lantern much longer.
‘Looks like a warm welcome,’ Zoric says flatly, drawing me from my thoughts.
‘And you wondered why I asked for killers,’ I say as we approach the party of three that await us in the storm. Two are bodyguards; gene-bulked monsters with thick brows and overmuscled, tattooed arms. They are armed with gilded shields and shock mauls. The third is a richly dressed, cord-thin woman, who smiles when we hit the bottom of the ramp. Her hair is strung with gold wire, and her teeth are black and blunted.
‘Hello, Viskia,’ I say to her, over the noise of the storm.
‘Madame Ravara,’ Viskia says, with a nod of her head. The heavily augmented cyber-mastiff at her side burrs a growl, its muzzle a mess of frozen drool and necrotised flesh. It stops when Viskia rests one of her thin hands on the crown of its head.
‘Welcome back to the Reverie,’ Viskia continues. ‘The Master awaits you inside.’ Her smile flickers as she takes in Zoric and Yumia. ‘Weapons,’ she sniffs, and I can’t say for sure if she means the two of them, or what they carry. ‘I very much doubt that you will find the need for them here.’
I laugh. It is something I do sparingly, and usually for show. ‘Only a fool would find themselves unarmed in these times.’
There is a pause, but then Viskia laughs, too. It is a ritual as much as anything. There are only two things that Dagra Thul and his staff respect. Displays of wealth, and displays of power. To arrive without weapons would suggest that I lacked in both.
‘Very good,’ she says, before turning for the Reverie, her cyber-mastiff at her heel.
The gene-bulked bodyguards flank us on either side as we follow Viskia through the vast old-oak doors. The incredibly rare true-wood of the doors is just the first sign of extravagant wealth. The inside of Thul’s Reverie is grander than most cathedrals, with overbearing, tasteless gilding and plasterwork cladding every surface. Tapestries hang in heavy columns, and water pours constantly into a decorative spiral display in the heart of the entry hall, the thrumming of it accompanied by the delicate sound of servo-creatures plucking at bone and gold harps with their wastrel arms. Zoric grunts in disdain, though he has seen it before. Yumia is less discreet. She wears her disgust plainly on her face.
‘Monstrous,’ she mutters. ‘It is monstrous.’
I know it is the water she means, because I feel the same. I have seen great acts of cruelty and more deaths than I would care to count, but nothing else turns my stomach in the way that wasted water does. It is an unmatched act of ugly privilege.
If Viskia hears Yumia’s words, she ignores them, leading us in silence up a flight of thickly carpeted stairs to a waiting set of heavy doors. They are painted with an ornate frieze of sleeping figures, their dreams painted ten feet high. A pair of serfs stand in waiting, their faces hidden behind silk veils set with stones.
‘Your weapons,’ Viskia says. ‘They must be peace-bonded before you may enter.’
I allow the serfs to bind my sabre hilts, and Yumia does the same with the short swords at her hips. Zoric won’t let them touch his rifle or his pistol, but he makes a show of removing the powercell from the former, and every one of the custom hard rounds from the latter.
‘The Master awaits you,’ Viskia says again when it is done, and she gestures to the gene-bulked bodyguards, who take hold of the doors and open them for us in perfect synchronicity.
Beyond the heavy doors lies the heart of the Reverie. The chamber is circular and vast, the ceiling so high that it is lost to shadow. It is gilded, too, decorated with sculptures of dreamers contorted in agony, cast in gold and set with glittering stones. Thickly scented smoke coils and drifts around the statues from incense burners all around the edge of the room.
‘By His watchful eyes,’ Yumia says, as the heavy doors grind closed again behind us.
She is not looking at the gilding, or the sculptures. She is looking at the floor. It is made of armaglass, through which Thul’s choir of dreamers can be seen. Dozens of psykers, pale and wasted, their eyes bound with silk blindfolds. They lie in cushioned cradles with injector lines pushed under their skin, murmuring and stirring in their sleep.
‘A sight to behold, isn’t it?’
The voice comes from the centre of the room, from the lean, lightly muscled man sitting amongst a heap of furs and silken cushions and patterned bolsters, his hands laced in his lap. He is being watched over by four silent guardians. They stand either side of him in pairs, lightly armoured in gold and steel, their faces hidden behind silk veils just like those the serfs were wearing. Each of them holds a finely made curved sword, the point facing down to the glass. As we cross the chamber, Dagra Thul gets to his feet and smiles.
‘Madame Ravara,’ he says. ‘It has been quite some time.’
‘Long enough for your choir to grow, it seems,’ I reply, with deliberate delicacy. It is another facet of the illusion I present to Thul, along with the Crypsis. As far as the Master of Dreams knows, I am just another benumbed highblood with too much wealth and a dwindling number of vices.
Thul waves his hand as if dismissing a compliment. It makes his silken robes stir with a whisper. Thul is ageless in a way that speaks of heavy use of rejuve. His hair is thick and richly dark, and his eyes have none of the yellowing associated with those who live amongst the spires. Unlike Viskia, his teeth are white and even. When it comes to Dagra Thul, all of the rot is on the inside.
‘Just a handful of new acquisitions,’ he says, as if it hardly matters. As if the psykers are little more than gilded statues to be collected. ‘But I am not the only one, it seems.’ He smiles again and nods at Zoric. ‘Your marksman I know, though he was not so damaged before.’
Zoric doesn’t acknowledge the remark. His blunted face is still and set in a practised kind of calm, though I can see the hatred he feels for Thul in the tautness of his scars.
‘But this one,’ Thul says, gesturing languidly at Yumia now. ‘This one is not known to me.’
Yumia is incapable of calm, practised or not. She coils like a mountain-cat beside me.
‘This one is a bladeworker of Illithia,’ she says coldly, ‘and she belongs to no one.’
Thul laughs. ‘Illithia,’ he says. ‘Impressive. From what I hear there are no swifter fighters.’
‘No,’ she says, her voice low and dangerous and her hands tensing almost imperceptibly. ‘There are not.’
I glance at Yumia and her hands relax, though her scowl stays fixed in place. Thul merely laughs again.
‘You always do keep such valuable company, madame,’ he says to me with a tilt of his head. ‘But you are missing a companion, I see. Where is your dream-taker?’
Yumia more than coils beside me this time. She is as taut as tension-wire. Even Zoric shifts his posture a little.
‘She was killed,’ I say. It is an easy lie now, after so many months of saying it. ‘I have yet to replace her.’
The words sound callous, because callousness is what Dagra Thul understands. He sighs and nods his head.
‘An impossible task indeed, to replace such a prize.’
‘Indeed,’ I say, because although the word prize makes me want to spit, there is some truth to what he says. Replacing Sofika Vorros is impossible. ‘But I have not come here to speak of what is lost. I have come here to speak of dreams.’
‘Of course,’ Thul says, showing those white, even teeth again. ‘Please, sit.’
I join him amongst the furs and finery. Zoric and Yumia stay standing, two paces back. Thul’s guardians remain immobile, the veils concealing their faces stirring in the scented air. Thul pours a cup of dark wine from a silver carafe and offers it to me. I take it, and pretend to drink. The scent of the wine is heavy and deep and reminds me of blood.
‘I seek a very particular dream,’ I say.
Thul pours his own cup and takes a drink.
‘The slumber has been rich of late. Full of potency.’ Thul smiles, his teeth pinked by the wine. ‘It damaged some of my stock. I have replaced them, of course, with better dreamers. Stronger sleepers. I am sure that whatever it is you seek, we can provide it. For a cost, of course.’
I smile back at him. That too is an act.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘What I seek is a stormy sky. A great darkness.’ I take a breath. ‘And an eagle, ablaze.’
Dagra Thul puts his cup of wine down slowly. In that moment, I see his careful composure flicker. His confidence. He looks as old as he must be under all of that rejuve.
He looks afraid.
‘An eagle, ablaze,’ he says. ‘Is that what you said?’
I smile, demure. ‘That’s what I said.’
Thul’s throat works, and he glances down at his choir. ‘That is a particular dream indeed,’ he says. ‘Very particular.’
His mouth becomes a thin line. No more smiling.
‘I fear the cost of such a dream is too great for you, Madame Ravara.’
‘No cost is too great,’ I reply, and it feels like the first truth I have spoken since entering the Reverie. ‘Name your price.’
Thul considers it a moment, his dark eyes flooding with an ugly, obvious greed. For a moment I think he will succumb to it and yield, but he doesn’t.
‘No,’ Thul says, waving his hand at me, dismissively. ‘Some things are beyond simple wealth, even for a man such as myself. Take your companions, and take your leave, Madame Ravara.’
Ordinarily, perhaps I would. I have a myriad contacts, after all. A dozen ways or more to find the eagle, ablaze. But not this time. I made a vow to Sofika Vorros that I would do whatever it takes. That she would survive to see the dream fulfilled.
And I do not break vows.
‘I will not ask again,’ I say, firmer now. ‘Show me the eagle, ablaze.’
‘I have given you my answer,’ Thul replies sourly. ‘So now I am afraid I must bid you farewell.’
He clicks his fingers, and the veiled guardians on either side of him raise their swords and move, swift and silent. I don’t move. I just sigh.
‘Yumia,’ I say.
My bladeward darts past me, shrugging the ropes from around her wrists with deft movements of her arms. Each rope is three times as long as Yumia is tall, and made of strong, flexible Illithian killcord tipped with a pointed blade smaller than the flat of my hand. Yumia leaps, the twin ropes cutting the air around her as she spins and loops them with nothing but her own bodyweight. Yumia slits the throat of one of Thul’s guardians in the same moment that she plants her second dart in another’s chest. Neat little clouds of blood huff into the air, scattering over Thul.
Yumia lands on the deck, silent as a mountain-cat. The third guardian lunges for her, swinging and missing as Yumia ducks under the sword blade by arching her body backwards. Too close for the full length of the rope, she uses her dart like a dagger, punching it up under the guardian’s silk veil and into his lower jaw. The guardian goes over with Yumia on top of him.
The last of Thul’s guardians turns and lunges towards her, but Zoric is already moving. My marksman draws his pistol, loads it, settles his sights and fires in a series of brisk, practised actions as Yumia looses her second dart. The Valedictor’s high-calibre round lands first with a wet crack and a spray of blood and bone fragments. The last of Thul’s guardians turns on his heel, trailing smoke, before crashing unceremoniously to the floor.
Yumia stands up, looks at Zoric and tuts. ‘I had him,’ she says.
‘I know,’ he replies, and he smiles thinly.
Thul’s hand goes to his face. He puts his fingertips to the blood scattered there, and then looks at his hand in dumb shock.
‘You dare,’ he stammers. ‘You dare to spill blood in my Reverie?’
Thul puts his hand into his robes, draws a gilded pistol and fires it at me. I knew he would do it, and not just because of his obvious, telegraphed movements, but because of my abilities. The precognition gives me a moment’s warning. An instinct for imminent threat. In a swordfight it would save my life, but here it has an altogether different application.
Intimidation.
I don’t blink, or move. I just let Thul’s las-rounds burst harmlessly against the disruption field projected by my armour plate.
‘Oh, Throne,’ Thul says, and he scrambles away from me amongst the silks and bolsters, putting his hand to the brooch on his robes. I don’t move to chase him.
‘Viskia,’ he says, into the vox-relay concealed there. ‘Viskia. Answer me.’
‘She can’t hear you,’ I tell him. ‘Your transmitter is being blocked.’
Thul is sweating now. His dark eyes are wide and full of tears.
‘Sit down,’ I tell him.
Thul stops scrambling and does what I say, slowly. His eyes keep sliding to the dead bodies of his guardians. I can smell their blood over the incense burners. It has a sour note that comes from geneboosting and stimm-shunts.
‘They must have been very valuable,’ I say to Thul.
He nods dumbly. ‘They were.’
‘Not valuable enough,’ I say, then look at my own guardians. ‘Mind the doors, would you?’
‘Aye,’ they say in unison.
‘You are not highblood,’ Thul mumbles, still watching me and not them. ‘You are not a vice-seeker or a dream-eater.’
‘No.’
‘What are you, then?’
I watch him carefully when I speak again.
‘I am an inquisitor,’ I say. ‘Of the Ordo Hereticus.’
The noise Thul makes then is almost animal. A shapeless, frightened groan of dismay.
‘You know, then, what it is that the Inquisition does?’
He nods. Those tears slide free of his eyes and paint their way down his face.
‘Good,’ I say. ‘Now, I will ask you once more, Master Thul. Show me the eagle ablaze, or I will burn you and your Reverie to the ground.’
‘It will kill them all,’ he says softly. ‘My choir.’
I glance down through the armaglass floor at the dreamers, murmuring beneath the surface. My own words come back to me.
No cost is too great.
‘Show me.’
Dagra Thul performs the rites quickly with shaking hands, lighting the circle of ten candles and scattering sanctified water around us from a golden ewer before sitting down again amongst the silks. He takes the heavy pendant from around his neck and presses it to a matching hollow at the centre point of the dais. He is not crying any more, but his face is pale and creased with concern. He glances once more at his choir beneath the glass. Takes a deep breath.
‘We begin,’ Thul says, and he turns the pendant. There is a hiss and a rush like that of wasted lungs as psychotropic drugs are pumped down from the golden vessels around the room’s edge to the psykers below. The temperature drops like a stone as the dreamers begin to dream. As what they are seeing begins to wash upwards through the conductive crystal inlays in the dais.
‘The eagle,’ Thul says. ‘Show us the eagle, ablaze.’
The choir begins to sing, then. To scream. The Reverie washes away like blood in the rain to be replaced by the otherworld of the dreamscape. While my body sits cross-legged on the silks in Thul’s Reverie, my mind inhabits the dream. I find myself standing in a vast darkness where hundreds of thousands of tiny lights surround me, flickering like candles. I can barely register them because of what waits before me. A livid coil of hateful unlight that splits the darkness from edge to endless edge. A false horizon.
‘The Great Rift,’ I say, tasting iron.
‘Yes,’ says Dagra Thul, from beside me. Despite his unwillingness to show me the dream, he is smiling now, in the idiot way of an addict feeding their craving. Blood trickles slowly from his nose. Screams surround us, echoing into the distance.
The Rift pulses. It seems to grow larger. Or closer. Or both. I feel it as heat on my skin, and inside my mind. The pressure is immense.
‘Where is the eagle?’
Thul is still smiling that idiot smile. ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Just wait.’
The Rift pulses again, growing larger. My nose starts bleeding, too.
‘Thul,’ I say in warning.
He shudders beside me and I cannot tell if it is in pleasure or pain. ‘She approaches,’ he says.
And then I hear it, cutting through the screams. The cry is clear and pure, almost songlike. I look up as the eagle soars overhead, shedding feathers of fire. It flies straight towards the Rift, as unerring as one of Yumia’s darts.
‘No,’ I say, because the eagle will surely be consumed.
‘Watch,’ Thul says, his voice slurring.
The eagle strikes the Rift, and there is a flare of light. For a moment, I am blind, but when I blink my eyes clear I see. The eagle did not strike the Rift. It cut through it into the darkness beyond.
Follow the eagle, Ahri, echoes my father’s voice.
I do not hesitate. I run through the dreamscape with Thul at my heels, shouting at me to stop. To turn back. I don’t. I can’t. I have to know what waits beyond the Rift.
I have to know if I am right.
Thul grabs hold of my arm as I plunge into the Rift just as the eagle did. As we fall together through the livid scar, I catch glimpses of a dozen bloody moments in Thul’s past. I see him trading for dream-slaves. Killing to get what he wants. I see that cyber-mastiff of his worrying a rival to death while he watches, smiling. I see him discarding those dreamers too weak to remain in his choir, their minds addled by the drugs he feeds them.
But Thul’s bloody moments are not the only ones I see. Mine boil up through the darkness, too. The tortures I underwent while training at the schola progenium. Mind-tricks and interrogations and drug-induced numbness. My first purges with Sharvak. A dozen worlds, burning. I see assassinations and interrogations. Executions. I see Zoric and Yumia screaming as their minds are scrubbed of what they have witnessed in my service. The things that they have done.
Then comes Hellebore. I see the undercrofts. The Resonance. A hollow chamber built ages past by long-dead disciples of the Thorian dogma. Resurrectionists, like me. The chamber lies forgotten, buried deeply beneath Hellebore’s surface by war and by time. It is preserved perfectly, down to the aquila signs painted onto the stone in gold. I see the four of us enter the chamber together, expecting to find the Conduit, but instead finding a monster clad in cobalt and gold, wearing a serpent’s mask. I see him reshape the Resonance into a vastness of fractured glass. I see a gateway open wide overhead like an unblinking eye. A doorway to the abyss beyond. From it, devils descend in droves.
We were wrong, Sofika says, from beside me, her mountain-sky eyes filled with tears. This isn’t the place.
Then Sofika is torn away from me by the sorcerer. I go after her, just as I did then. I cut my way through the devils and the storm itself. But I can’t change it. The sorcerer turns his staff, and the storm strikes my dream-taker. Sofika screams, haloed by blood and lightning, and then she crashes to the ground, landing crumpled and still. Broken, like the multicoloured glass. I cut down the last of the devils and stagger to where she lies, falling to my knees beside her only for everything to stop. The storm, the screaming. The wind. Everything is frozen, save for me and the sorcerer. I look up, just as I did then to see him standing over me, clad in cobalt and gold. His serpent’s mask tilts downwards and he speaks in a voice like shifting sand. A voice that has haunted me since that day.
Not yet, he says, and he sounds as though he’s smiling.
But then the storm goes and the sorcerer with it and I am no longer falling through my own memories and mistakes. I am standing with Dagra Thul in a vast and vaulted hall, surrounded by thousands of crooked candles. Tiny lights. Statues line the walls on either side of me, all draped in heavy crimson cloth that stirs in the cold, stale air. Gilded bones set into the walls and floor catch the candlelight. No skulls, or longbones. Just countless skeletal hands, all making the sign of the aquila, like those painted in the Resonance on Hellebore. One statue stands alone in the middle of the chamber. It is hung with a crimson shroud, just like the others. A figure stands before it, perfectly still.
‘This cannot be,’ Thul murmurs. The Master of Dreams lets go of me and falls to his knees, his face a mess of blood and tears and drool. ‘You changed the dream. This is impossible.’
‘Clearly not.’
‘Where have you taken me?’ Thul asks.
A soft whickering echoes down from above. I look up to see birds sitting in the rafters, turning their wings.
‘To the end,’ I say. ‘And the beginning.’
A cry splits the air, then. Pure, and songlike. The eagle ablaze streaks overhead, shedding her feathers of fire. She snaps her wings and settles like blown embers on the shrouded statue in the centre of the hall. I draw my main-hand sword and follow her, picking my way through the field of devotional candles towards the statue. I am dimly aware of Thul getting to his feet and stumbling after me. Asking me to stop. Pleading. But I ignore him, all of my attention focused on the shrouded statue and the person standing before it. A man, clad in regal blue and leaning on a bronzed walking cane.
‘Father,’ I say.
He turns from the statue and looks at me.
‘Hello, Ahri,’ he says.
I keep my blade up, in guard. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
My father smiles, and his golden eyes soften, like metal under heat. Like a sunrise.
‘I am wherever you go, Ahri,’ he says. ‘We only leave one another behind by choice.’
I remember him saying those words to me before, one night in the spire tower, just after my mother died. I lower my blade, slowly.
‘What is this place?’ I ask him.
‘It is a Resonance, just like the one you uncovered on Hellebore. A place where the walls between worlds are thin. Where deeds and words have power. This is where it is meant to happen.’
‘The Rebirth.’
My father nods. He turns back to face the statue, and I approach to stand beside him. The shroud is burning now, thanks to the eagle’s touch. I feel the heat of it on my face.
‘How can you be so sure that this is the place?’ I ask. ‘I believed the same of Hellebore, but I was wrong.’
My father shakes his head. ‘You were not wrong, Ahri,’ he says. ‘The timing was. You cannot make the sun rise before it is ready to, no matter how fearsome you may be.’
I remember him saying those words to me before, too. More times than I care to count. I think of Sofika caught in the cradle of her machine and I wish desperately that I had listened.
‘But the time is upon us, now,’ he says. ‘You simply need to find the place.’
‘How?’ I ask.
‘Follow the eagle, Ahri,’ my father says. ‘She will lead you to it.’
The crimson cloth curls and tears and falls away then to reveal the statue beneath, only it isn’t a statue at all. It is a woman. A warrior. One clad in the armour of the Adepta Sororitas. She is utterly still. Around her closed eyes the Battle Sister is scarred. Marked. And just like the gilded bones that surround me, the marks on the woman’s face make the sign of the aquila.
‘The eagle, ablaze,’ I say.
My father nods. ‘Burned but not broken.’
A chill wind stirs the stale air, snuffing out the candles in crowds. The darkness grows deeper. Closer. I glimpse eyes within it. Eyes and claws and teeth.
‘The darkness seeks to smother her,’ my father says. ‘You must not let it.’
More candles blow out and I raise my sword, just a little. ‘I won’t,’ I say.
‘Good. Without the eagle, the Rebirth will fail. The Conduit will only reveal itself when blood is willingly given. You need a martyr, Ahri.’
At his words, the Battle Sister catches fire. It engulfs her quickly but she does not move, or scream. She does not open her eyes, though that is where the fire burns brightest. Hottest. I feel the heat of that too, not just on my face, but on my soul. The shadows around us recoil with a hiss. They start to tear, just like the cloth did.
‘The eagle, ablaze,’ I say. ‘She is the blood willingly given. The martyr we need.’
My father nods. ‘She will herald the Rebirth,’ he says, and then he looks at me. ‘And when it unfolds, our mistakes will be unmade. What has been broken will be whole again.’
I blink, dizzied by the heat and the light and his words. ‘You are talking about Sofika.’
He nods. Smiles again. ‘You can restore her, Ahri. You just need to find the eagle.’
The fire blooms outwards then, and my vision turns to gold. I am returned to the Reverie, and to the real. To the smell of candles burning and the feeling of silk beneath my hands. I retch a thick clot of dark blood and bile onto the floor and try to catch my breath. Through the frost-covered glass I see Thul’s choir, still and silent. Dead.
‘Inquisitor.’
I look up to see Zoric offering me his hand. I get to my feet without taking it.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘We can go.’
‘Good,’ Zoric says, and I can tell he means it.
‘What of this one, lord?’ Yumia asks.
She is standing over Thul, watching him with vague fascination the way one might watch an animal shake itself to death in a steel trap. The Master of Dreams looks almost pitiable, slumped there on his knees, his face a mask of blood and drool, his dark eyes wide and staring.
‘Leave him to me,’ I say. ‘I will grant him mercy.’
Yumia nods and moves aside as I unhook the peace-bond and draw my main-hand sabre from the scabbard at my belt. I take hold of Thul by his collar, but before I can make the killing cut, he fixes me with his staring eyes and speaks.
‘I saw you,’ he says softly. ‘In the space between spaces. All of those terrible things you have done in the name of dreams. I saw the blood you have shed. The lines you have crossed.’ He takes a waterlogged breath. ‘I saw what you did to Sofika Vorros.’
I thrust my sword into his chest, then pull it free again. Blood soaks my hands and my sleeves as I lower Thul to the floor amid his finery. I am aware of Zoric and Yumia staring at me, but I ignore them, dropping to one knee beside Thul as he shakes and snorts more blood onto the silks.
‘Monster,’ he slurs accusingly. ‘You are a monster.’
‘Perhaps,’ I mutter, as the light goes out of his eyes. ‘But a necessary one.’
We leave none alive in Thul’s Reverie. This too is necessary. Yumia killing the power to the constantly pouring fountain in the lobby is less so, but I do not stop her doing it.
That, at least, feels right.
Once it is done, we leave the Reverie and the snow-capped heights of Tashkent Hive behind. As the Crypsis lifts off from her stanchions and points into the freezing, smog-choked wind towards the Fortress Meridia I expect one of them to say something about Thul’s last words, but they don’t. They speak only when spoken to, Yumia busying herself with cleaning the blood from her killblades, and salting her wounds with grains from a pouch she wears at her waist. It’s an old Illithian practice that’s meant as much to remind the fighter of their mistakes as anything else. Yumia barely flinches as she does it, though it must hurt. Zoric sits beside her, lost in his own routine, methodically etching another in a series of tiny twin-headed eagles into the stock of his battered rifle. He started doing it after he came into my service. At first, I’d taken them for kill-marks, but I know better now. There is one nick out of the paint on Zoric’s rifle for every day he has spent in my service.
Or at least every day that he is aware of.
They both keep their quiet even upon landing, saying nothing as we leave the Crypsis and cross the platform back into the fortress under a deluge of dirty rain and runoff from above.
‘I need you both to report to Efrayl for debriefing,’ I tell them, once we are inside. ‘I must speak with my contacts at the Convent Prioris about what I saw.’
They both nod, but neither of them move. Instead they just stand there dripping rainwater onto Meridia’s obsidian floor. The silenced fortress makes the drumming of the droplets into little more than whispers.
‘Unless there is anything else?’ I ask, knowing full well that there is.
As I expect, it is Yumia who speaks. She is the more wilful of the two. The less fractured from being rebuilt in the name of service.
‘The Master’s last words,’ she says.
‘What of them?’
‘Mia,’ Zoric says, calling her by the short of her name. ‘Leave it.’
She shoots him a glance. ‘Danil,’ she says. ‘Do not pretend that you do not care what happened to Madame Sofika.’
‘We know what happened,’ he says. ‘I was there. So were you. You saw the storm that took her.’
Zoric sounds tired, as if this is a conversation they have had before. It’s a possibility. They spend a lot of time together, my bladeward and my marksman. Time they try to hide from me, without success. No matter the mess that mind-wiping makes of their memories or their personalities, they are always drawn back to one another. If I didn’t already know the truth of predestination, watching them re-establish the same strange combative affection for one another over and over again would be enough to convince me.
‘I remember some of it,’ Yumia says, and her eyes go back to me. She is even more tense than usual. As tightly wound as the killcords around her wrists. Her hand goes to her temple.
‘I remember the sight,’ she says. ‘The sound. But I do not remember the feeling of it. Was it cold? Was there wind? Rain? Was there earth between my toes, or stone beneath them?’
The answers swell in my head, though I say none of them.
No, it wasn’t cold, I think. It was warm as blood. Wind, yes. Rain, no. It was neither earth nor stone, but glass. Multi-coloured, fractured glass.
Yumia lets her hand fall away. ‘I remember seeing Sofika swallowed by the storm. By darkness.’
‘What you remember is true,’ I say, and it is, in abstract at least. It was the detail of it that I had Efrayl take from them. The sorcerer that I could not allow my retinue to remember any more than I could the gateway and the unliving storm of daemons he had summoned. I resist the urge to shake my head. I had been so wrong about Hellebore.
So wrong.
‘If what I remember is true, my lord, then what did Thul’s words mean?’ Yumia asks.
I blink, and push Hellebore back under the surface of my mind. I try not to think of what came after. Of Sofika’s agonised whisper as she spoke my name through the blood in her mouth.
‘Thul merely saw what happened to Sofika when he joined me in the dream,’ I tell them, because all of the best lies are sewn together from truths. ‘What he said were the spiteful words of a dying man, and that’s all.’
Yumia watches me for what feels like a long moment. I can see from her face that she doesn’t believe me. For a moment I think that she might even challenge me. I almost want her to. There’s certainly a part of me that deserves it. But then Zoric speaks.
‘Yumia,’ he says, patiently. Carefully. ‘You knew how this life would be when you swore the oath.’
She takes a moment to answer, and when she speaks it sounds a little sorrowful.
‘I did,’ she says, and then the sorrow disappears and her face sets again like a mask. ‘I meant it only as a question, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Will there be anything else?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, inquisitor. No more questions.’
I nod, and she walks away with Zoric, leaving me alone in Meridia’s silent halls with rainwater dripping from my armour in whispers.