Despite her words, Stern’s prayers felt like too little. Nothing she did felt like enough. The emptiness where the sense of the God-Emperor had been was too vast, too complete. Even if the Emperor still reigned, that did not change the fact that she had fallen from grace. What act by any mortal could possibly be an atonement? And if the nothing was not what she had believed, what was it?

  What terrified her was the prospect that she had been right all along, and that it was Dagover whose hope was deluded.

  When she had kneeled before every relic, Stern went with Kyganil to the top of the spire to look at the repentant masses for a final time.

  ‘Better a holy cremation than a corrupted existence,’ she said. The small population of the shrine world had, as far as she had seen, completely turned its back on the Emperor. To claim renewed faith because of their terror of her was not sufficient. There was no one on the planet worth saving.

  The sky in the distance glowed black and red. Though it was twilight over the Sepulchre of Iron Sleep, the region of the volcanic chain was trapped in an endless, blazing night. No light from Parastas’ weak sun could cut through the thick, warring clouds of ash. The rage of the mountains set the darkness on fire. The horizon pulsed an angry red. The peaks were jagged silhouettes, the fangs of a wrathful land. Stern imagined she could almost see the swarms of abominations cavorting on the slopes, revelling in the torment of Parastas. In her soul, she could hear the chanting of the cultists at the base of the mountains, wretches still singing their praise to foul gods, praying to be spared incineration by lava and burning clouds. ­Praying too, to be saved from the being of light and slaughter that had pushed them back and back and back until they had to seek shelter in the land of fire.

  On this day, she would show them how little their heretical prayers were worth.

  ‘The bombardment is almost upon us,’ she said to Kyganil. She had chosen to remain on the planet until it came. The cyclonic ­torpedo would hit the mountains, and there would be time to leave the ­Sepulchre for the Iudex Ferox before the destruction reached her.

  ‘Do you believe the words of Inquisitor Dagover?’ Kyganil asked.

  ‘I do not know yet if I believe anything he says. I trust him only as far as his most recent action. Set aside what I believe, though. What if he is right in what he believes? And what if it is no longer my duty and my fate to reach the Black Library? What then? If my destiny has changed, perhaps yours has too.’

  ‘To what?’ Kyganil murmured. The words were so soft. Behind their whispered calm lurked a terrible weight. Kyganil had needed Stern as much as she had needed him. They were both outcasts. Their callings had taken them on journeys that had them shunned and worse by those they fought to save. They had both found meaning in their lives by giving the other meaning.

  ‘My hope is that soon, I will know my path once again. And I hope that clarity for one of us will be clarity for both.’

  Kyganil glanced up at the sky. There was a break in the clouds over Iron Sleep, and the foul, discordant light of the enormous warp storm was visible at the zenith, slicing across the void like a festering wound. ‘I would welcome a return of clarity,’ he said. ‘We have been long without it.’

  Stern followed his gaze. A few stars shone faintly in the darkening evening, their light dimmed and tainted by the warp storm. One of them moved. It was the Iudex Ferox, approaching its firing coordinates.

  ‘One way or another,’ Stern said, ‘a form of clarity is about to break upon us.’

  She and Kyganil donned their helms.

  Stern did not see the moment that the battle cruiser fired the cyclonic torpedo. She saw the weapon, though, as it tore through the atmosphere. A spear of light rent the clouds. The diagonal streak burned through the air, the flash so quick and searing there was barely time to register what it was. Yet Stern felt a dizzying rush, a sense of tipping deliberately over the edge of an abyss.

  Surely, this fall would have meaning.

  The torpedo hit in the midst of the volcanic chain. Day – lethal, destroying, consuming day – broke over the landscape. The world flashed white. Stern winced, even with the shutters of her eye-lenses shielding her sight from the full burn of the flash. As the initial burst began to fade, and details of the land returned like the broken lines of an unfinished tableau, the sound came, and with it the wind. The roar of the explosion was the crack of a great ending. The eruptions of the volcanoes were mere sighs in comparison. The wind, furious and burning, slammed into the sepulchre’s spire. The tower wavered in the gale. It rocked back and forth, cracks running up its entire length. Stern leaned forward into the wind, her feet planted firmly. Kyganil was at her side, bearing full ­witness with her of the cataclysm she had called down on Parastas.

  The land heaved. Monuments danced and fell. The volcanic chain became a single eruption. Fireballs as big as cities built upon each other in a crescendo of destruction. A red wave rose, climbing twenty miles high, cresting, and then rushing forward. It was lava, surging from beneath the crust like blood from the burst heart of the shrine world. The wave swept over the land, a flood of annihilation. The shrines that still stood in its path vanished, drowned and melted beneath its advance.

  ‘Where are your prayers now?’ Stern raged at the heretics. She could not even hear herself. The cultist army at the base of the mountains was gone. The greatest height and strength of the wave would have faded before it reached the region around the Sepulchre of Iron Sleep, but it was high enough that the penitent would see what was coming, and know it for judgement.

  ‘This is all the forgiveness you deserve.’

  Where the torpedo had hit, the land writhed. Billions of tonnes of rock evaporated, melted, and twisted in the grip of monstrous tides. Mountains fell. Peaks gaped open, parting like a leviathan’s jaws. Where daemons had held their revels and gathered their armies, there was only the furnace of a dying planet.

  Soon the lava would reach the Sepulchre of Iron Sleep, and the ­sanctity of the relics would be preserved by purging fire.

  She hoped her despair would die here too.

  IV

  THE PATHS

  Stern wondered if she was looking at a reptile triumphant.

  In Otto Dagover’s study aboard the Iudex Ferox, she and Kyganil stood before the seated inquisitor. She wished the lizard had eyes of flesh. The lenses that looked back at her disguised his soul. The hook-assisted smile was there, and it could, perhaps, have been read as complacent, or merely grotesque. Dagover’s flesh was so ancient, so much a skin about to be sloughed off, that all but the most pronounced emotions were impossible to read.

  No doubt, Dagover liked things that way.

  He presumably liked having the silent, repulsive servitor present. It was in one corner of the study, motionless. It served no purpose that Stern could guess. Neither she nor Kyganil had commented on it. Dagover could do as he willed on his ship, as long as she did not sense that he was working against her.

  Stern wondered what victory she might have handed to Dagover by coming aboard his ship. Would she have reread her destiny if he had not urged her to? Likely not. She could not see any alternatives. Whatever the truth about the coming nothing, she had to fight it. And travelling with Dagover felt like forging a link to the hope that the Imperium still existed.

  Dagover seemed willing enough to assume a victory regardless of her hesitations. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you have chosen the new path of your destiny.’

  She did not answer him directly. ‘The darkness that approaches is a threat to us all. It will consume everything. It must be stopped. That is my task. I will not presume to claim that I know my destiny.’

  ‘Very wise of you,’ Dagover said with his dry croak. The hooks on his face twitched his lips. ‘Very humble and pious.’

  Was he mocking her? That would be unwise. Power ­crackled at her fingertips in warning.

  ‘What, then, of the Black Library?’ Kyganil asked.

  ‘Do you see a way forward to it?’ said Stern.

  ‘I do not,’ Kyganil confessed. ‘It seems farther away than ever before. Every webway route I think should bring us closer is blocked.’

  ‘Then we cannot go, for now.’ The words sounded like forever in her head.

  ‘More signs,’ said Dagover. ‘More and more signs that you should not go at all.’

  ‘I would expect that to be your interpretation,’ said Stern.

  ‘Of course it is. Because I am right. What value would there be in bringing that knowledge to this place, so inaccessible to the very peoples that need the knowledge most?’

  ‘There, the wisdom of the seven hundred would not be lost, should anything happen to me.’

  ‘Have you given any thought to how the knowledge held within you is to be extracted?’

  Stern and Kyganil exchanged a glance. ‘I have,’ said Stern. ‘We have discussed it. We do not know, though I am prepared to make whatever sacrifice might be required.’

  The grunt that emerged from Dagover’s voice box was clearly contemptuous for all that it was an electronic noise. ‘How pointless. Can you not see how pointless this is? Why do you resist what is so clear?’

  ‘Clear to you.’ Though she knew where he was going with his logic.

  ‘It should be clear to all. You are what can be done with that knowledge. You are what comes of that wisdom and power. Do you wish me to believe that you carry such power against daemons, and that you have been born three times, only so that you can make this potential vanish? The potential is realised in you.’

  ‘You insult me if you think I have not thought of this,’ Stern said coldly. ‘And of where following this path might lead.’ Dagover did not understand the corruption of power, or else he did not fear it. Either possibility made him dangerous.

  ‘Yet you have used your power. For centuries. And you must use it again, against the threat that you have foreseen.’

  ‘On that, at least, we must agree,’ said Kyganil.

  ‘I do not know what this danger is,’ said Stern. ‘All I can see is the all-consuming nothing. It is immense.’ She paused, and looked signifi­cantly at the aeldari and at the Ordo Xenos inquisitor. ‘It will devour the galaxy if it is not stopped. So great a threat is beyond what any one species can fight.’

  Kyganil’s face remained impassive. His eyes sparked with bitter amusement. ‘This is not an auspicious place to be discussing allian­ces,’ he said. He gestured, taking in the skulls mounted on the walls of the study.

  Dagover made a sound that might have been a laugh. ‘Do not let me stop you,’ he said.

  ‘You would in other situations,’ said Stern.

  ‘No doubt. But not this one. I believe in the danger you have seen, Sister Superior. We have seen too much that has happened to the Imperium in this past century not to imagine another great cataclysm.’

  Stern turned back to Kyganil. ‘I know this is a lot to ask.’

  ‘You ask only what is necessary, as you ever have.’

  ‘Is there still someone among the aeldari to whom you can speak?’ Kyganil was as isolated as she was. Dagover, though, was proof that the isolation was not total.

  Kyganil nodded slowly. ‘Yvraine,’ he said. ‘I believe I can find Yvraine. We have had dealings in the past. My ties with her are not broken. She understands the role of the outsider.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Dagover. Stern would have sworn that his eye-lenses gleamed eagerly. ‘Let us go at once.’

  In all their years together, Stern had never seen Kyganil laugh. He came very close just then, his eyes widening in utter disbelief. ‘You are not coming,’ he said. It was as close to sputtering as the aeldari had ever come.

  ‘I think I am.’

  ‘You are not,’ said Stern. ‘Consider who you are. Your presence would kill any possibility of an alliance before the first word had been uttered. You will wait here for my return.’

  ‘Is that a command?’ Dagover’s rasp sounded dangerous.

  ‘It is a statement of fact. Unless you have another destination you plan to travel to in my absence.’

  Dagover was silent for a moment. ‘You do not trust me, Sister Superior.’

  ‘I most certainly do not, inquisitor.’

  Stern and the aeldari left his study. At some point in the minutes that followed, they vanished from the Iudex Ferox. Dagover had given orders that they be kept under con­stant, but discreet, surveillance. Officers, distressed at their failure, contacted Dagover over the ship’s vox as soon as they had lost sight of the pair and could not find them again.

  ‘They’ll be back,’ Dagover instructed them. ‘Watch for their return.’

  He drummed a set of metal fingers on his desk. ‘They’ve entered the webway,’ he said to the corpse of Velthaus. ‘They did it from inside a voidship. That aeldari is both promising and a threat.’

  ‘Why do you think the aeldari is both promising and a threat?’ came the toneless question.

  ‘He appears to have determined his destiny as being shaped by hers. Which means, by my reckoning, he has subordinated himself to her will. That means his abilities are, for now, at the service of a warrior of the Imperium. Stern has a great deal of influence on him. That makes him useful, xenos or not. The question is how much influence he has on her. That was not an issue before I found her. It is, now. I grieve not to be travelling with them.’

  ‘Why do you grieve not to be travelling with them?’

  ‘This is a missed opportunity, despite the risks involved. Think about how much I might have learned, going so deeply into the aeldari realm. It is also a setback.’

  ‘Why is it also a setback?’ the corpse asked.

  ‘Because now Stern is completely away from my influ­ence, and completely in aeldari territory, and she is obviously ready to listen to them. If she is right about the scale of the coming threat, then it is good that, through her, we can have a line of communication with that xenos race. Good, with reservations. It would be better if I were there.’

  ‘Why–’

  ‘Silence.’ He’d had enough of Velthaus’ questions. He continued to address the servitor, though. Doing so helped him clarify his thoughts. ‘She does credit me with pointing the way to a new understanding of her destiny. That is important. I am associated with a transformative point in her life. No one shakes that off easily.’

  ‘No one?’ said Velthaus.

  Dagover stared at the servitor. He had told it to be quiet, hadn’t he? Maybe he had thought the words without saying them. But the echo was wrong. It didn’t follow the pattern of phrasing, the only pattern the servitor was capable of.

  Dagover rose and approached Velthaus. He peered into the dead man’s eyes, looking for something he knew could not be there, a sign of the inquisitor’s living self.

  The servitor returned his gaze with its blank, unblinking absence. There was no one there.

  ‘Did you speak?’ said Dagover.

  ‘Why did you speak?’ said Velthaus.

  Dagover took a step back, uneasy. The pattern was correct. Yet the question felt too pointed.

  ‘Silence.’ Dagover spoke clearly, deliberately, marking the fact that he did, leaving no room for ambiguity. And then again, for good measure. ‘Silence.’

  The servitor said nothing.

  What had just happened? Had anything happened?

  No. Nothing could have. He had made a mistake. That was all.

  But the servitor’s unprompted question whirled through his mind. No one? No one? No one?

  No one could shake off the transformative moment. Not Stern. Not him, either.

  Dagover thought again of his first sight of Stern in the Sepulchre of Iron Sleep. He remembered how he had felt, to see a being of such overwhelming power. He had tried to shove aside the soul-deep vertigo that had assailed him. He had acted as he had planned to do.

  But the vertigo was still there, deep inside.

  Who was changing whom?

  The servitor was still, yet the voice in his head belonged to Velthaus.

  Who was exerting what influence?

  He would have to make sure he knew, he thought. He must be watchful.

  It seemed to him there was another voice, very close and terribly far, that urged him to do the opposite – to give in to the vertigo and let himself be carried towards the great flame of Stern.

  ‘Where are we?’ Stern asked quietly.

  ‘From one world of holy memory to another. Indeed. I think that Yvraine being here is the reason I was able to find her with relative ease. The art of the dance we now perform is strong, for us to see it so clearly.’ The aeldari paused. ‘Tread carefully, Thrice-Born. You are a human treading on sacred ground.’

  ‘I will.’

  They were in a long wraithbone hall. The walls curved outward from the floor, and then came back together to form an elegant, pointed vault. The lines of the hall gave Stern a sense of flow. No matter which direction they walked, she would feel as if they were being carried along, as if the hall were the embodied essence of a river’s current. Kyganil looked around reverently. A sense of the sacred radiated from the walls. In a manner that Stern could not define precisely, she sensed a kinship between the nature of the wraithbone and herself as a vessel for seven hundred souls.

  Two guards were walking towards them from one end of the hall. They had left their posts before two large doors. They wore the crimson armour of the Guardians of the Ynnari. Kyganil bowed slightly as they approached, palms open and arms apart, his blades sheathed on his back. Stern followed his example. As he had said she should, she had left her weapons back on the Iudex Ferox.

  ‘The Visarch has told the Herald of Ynnead of your coming,’ one of the guards said before Kyganil could address them. She was looking at Kyganil, but speaking Low Gothic, implying that Stern was the one actually being addressed.

 

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