“Don’t look at me with those disgusted eyes, admiral. You don’t know. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Your... Your ‘order’, your structure... it’s transient. It crumbles. I understand. Given enough time, even the mightiest of endeavours comes to dust. Disorder out of order. You can’t fight nature. And everyone, in their secret souls, knows it. My masters merely seek to speed the process.

“It took me a decade. Hard years of rites and incantations, secretly studied and recited, chipping away at the songweave, crumbling the walls of the prison little by little. And then this... this ‘diplomatic disagreement’. My crowning glory — an orchestrated war. A thousand casualties, and more, all in the name of the daemon-lord!” The governor breathed hard, heart hammering excitedly in his chest. He forced himself to regain his composure and lit a bac-stick from his pocket, inhaling the scented fumes thoughtfully.

“There are rules, you see.” He blew a greasy smoke ring, enjoying the ethereal’s undivided attention on his every movement. “Oh, you stand and chant, you render the dispel icons and arrange the non-weave perfectly. You strike at the monoliths with deconsecrated swords and smear plagueshit across the altars... but you still need a gesture. Sorcery has a high cost, gentlemen. It’s paid in blood and souls and hate.

Thanks to your little conflict, thanks to all those tau killed by human hands — and vice versa — more than enough blood was spilled to fuel the final little act. The walls came tumbling down. I set the army free.

“Let me spell it out to you. I ordered your abduction because I expected reprisals, Aun, not because I value whatever worthless shreds of knowledge you have. I have to admit, mind you, the severity of the counterattack was impressive. Perhaps the tau aren’t entirely useless to the Dark Powers after all. And admiral... Admiral, admiral, admiral. Oh you poor, deluded thing. You really think you had any autonomy throughout this? You think you exercised free choice? I summoned you here, I involved you, stoked up the fire — I even crawled into a librarian’s mind, just to persuade that pompous fool Ardias to intervene. A delightful little peace conference was the only way I could get you both in the same room. All terribly sneaky, don’t you think?

“So the warhost was freed. The webway spat them out like rotten meat — wherever I commanded, of course — and now they’re up there on the surface, flexing their muscles. They’ve been waiting for three thousand years. It would be rude not to allow them some... ha... “venting” time.

“I couldn’t have done it without you. You both have my deepest gratitude. Still. No rest for the wicked, as they say. I have one little job left and then this whole sordid business is done with. One last seal to break. It has to be at sundown, gentlemen. Nineteen minutes past seven pm, by Dolumar’s clock. I checked. That’s three hours from now. Three hours until the last prison crumbles. Three hours until almighty Tarkh’ax — Tarkh’ax the Barbarous; Tarkh’ax the Iniquitor; Tarkh’ax the Defiler!—rises again to finish his holy work... Three hours until all of us — we who’ve done more than any others to bring about the daemonlord’s release — are rewarded for our faith.

“Don’t look so scared, admiral. You might even enjoy it.”

The servitor twitched briefly and turned its baleful gaze upon Captain Brunt. The bearded man, legs long since atrophied away to nothingness by years of seated command, mentally swivelled his chair cocoon towards the skeletal creature.

“Message, captain,” it clicked, cable bundles swaying as it moved.

“From?”

“Ardias. Space Marine. Very patchy.”

“Play it.”

Ghoulishly, the servitor’s dry lips moved in time with the relayed message, sharp voice suddenly dampened and bullied into Ardias’s gruff tones.

“...hear this, Fleet... an’t wait any longe... tramarines will evacuate in thirty secon... o more delays. No merc... eel no remorse at this, the vesse...onger part of the God-Emperor’s flee... tterly corrupted. It must be destroyed...”

The servitor’s mouth snapped shut with a dry crack and it turned back to its console. Brunt arched an eyebrow. On the viewscreen at the apex of the hot, dry bridge, the Enduring Blade hung enormously in the void. Its ruined generarium vented white hot promethium fuel in a ghostly trail as it lurched slowly, carcass prow splintered and battered, broadside weapons batteries reduced to gaping, toothless maws. More disturbing still, over the past hour an unnatural patina had begun to form across those obsidian faces of the hulk left undamaged; a green/red corrosion that matted every gloss, sullying every bright icon and gargoyle, wrapping threadlike pseudopodia of rust and mould and decay around it: strangling tendrils dragging its prey out of the light.

Brunt was put in mind of a tumour, breaking free of its initial lodging and spreading its cancerous cells throughout every network of fluids and flesh, grasping blindly, twisting and perverting and corrupting. Spatter clouds of sparks and minor detonations marred the crevices striating the broad hull, the corridor viscera within — black and fluid with whatever ruinous sorcery was morphing and infecting the ship — exposed like withered intestines.

He almost spat. The revulsion at seeing a vessel of the Enduring Blade’s ancient calibre — a beacon of purity and strength that had served the Emperor unstintingly for millennia — so corrupted and mired in evil, so defeated and violated, so utterly ruined... it was more than he was prepared to tolerate.

There were innocents still aboard. Hiding in their cabins, lurking in gloom-filled dormitories, shrieking and screaming as the last drop pods fell away without them and the Marines, their last vestige of hope, boarded their strikehawk and deserted them.

Brunt thought: Better off dead.

“Officer Jarreth. Prime the starboard arrays. Bring us into position. Contact the fleet. Tell them...

Tell them the Purgatus claims this lamentable duty as its own. Tell them to get clear.”

Kais slept. Dreamless and black. A sleep of exhaustion and confusion.

Unable to resolve himself, unable to discern his thoughts into some precise mental colloid of reality and absurdity, his brain took the only option open to it.

It shut down. It closed itself off from everything. It threw up walls of weariness, pulled the plug on consciousness and aborted for the time that it took to reset. To start again.

Total. Mental. Expurgation.

His father had spoken of machines. The machine. A machine that, refusing to operate and unable to diagnose its errors, will nonetheless maintain every outward appearance of efficiency after simply closing down and being switched back on again. But the error would remain. Secret and impossible to reach. No matter how many times the machine required restarting, reformatting refreshing it would continue to falter until the problem was tackled at its root.

Outside of his mind a recorded servitor voice announced calmly that the drop pod had just punctured the mesosphere. Crude target seeking arrays, in the absence of any user input coordinates, identified a major population/energy reading within the troposphere, probably surface-based, and adjusted its descent to accommodate. A klaxon trilled once, almost perfunctory in its lacklustre volume, and the servitor voice reminded its occupants to batten down any cargo and ensure that all vehicular freight was adequately secured. Human passengers, it droned, were advised to check the straps of their deployment booths.

Kais rolled over in his sleep, flaccid muscles sprawled liquidly across the deck, and dreamed of cool, dark nothingness.