“You indulge the woman, Ahzek,” said Hathor Maat. “It’s not thathot.”

“Easy for you to say,” replied Phosis T’kar, wiping sweat from his skull with a cleaning rag. “We can’t all be Pavoni. Some of us have to deal with this heat on our own.”

“With further study, meditation and mental discipline you might one day achieve a mastery equal to mine,” replied Maat, and though his tone was jovial, Ahriman knew he wasn’t joking. “You Raptora are belligerent sorts, but eventually you might be able to master the necessary Enumerations.”

Phosis T’kar scowled, and a dense cluster of salt crystals flew from the ground beside him, aimed at Hathor Maat’s head. Before it reached its target, the warrior’s hand flashed, quick as lightning, and caught it.

Maat crushed the mass of crystals, letting it spill from his hand like dust.

“Surely you can muster something better than that?”

“Enough,” said Ahriman. “Hold your powers in check, both of you. They are not for vulgar displays, especially when there are mortals nearby.”

“Then why keep them around?” asked Maat. “Simply send her on her way with the others.”

“That’s what I keep telling him,” said Phosis T’kar. “If she’s so damn keen to learn of the Crusade, send her to a Legion that cares about being immortalised, the Ultramarines or Word Bearers; she doesn’t belong with us.”

It was a familiar sentiment, and Ahriman had heard it a hundred times from all his fellow captains. T’kar was not the most vocal; that honour belonged to Khalophis of the 6th Fellowship. Whichever viewpoint T’kar took, Khalophis would emulate more vociferously.

“Should we not be remembered?” countered Ahriman. “The writings of Kallista Eris are among the most insightful I have read from the Remembrancer Order. Why should we be left out of the annals of the Great Crusade?”

“You know why,” said Phosis T’kar angrily. “Half the Imperium wished us dead not so long ago. They fear us.”

“They fear what they do not understand,” said Ahriman. “The primarch tells us their fear comes from ignorance. Knowledge will be our illumination to banish that fear.”

Phosis T’kar grunted and carved spirals in the salt with his thoughts.

“The more they know, the more they’ll fear us. You mark my words,” he said.

Ahriman ignored Phosis T’kar and stepped out from the shelter of the canopy. The sensations of travelling in his subtle body were all but gone, and the mundane nature of the material world returned to him: the searing heat that had turned his skin the colour of mahogany within an hour of the Stormbird touching down, the oily sweat coating his iron hard flesh and the crisp scent of the air, a mixture of burnt salt and rich spices.

And the swirling aetheric winds that swept the surface of this world.

Ahriman felt power coursing through his body; glittering comet trails of psychic potential aching to be moulded into something tangible. Over a century of training kept that power fluid, washing through his flesh like a gentle tide, preventing dangerous levels of aetheric energy from building. It would be too easy to give in and allow it free rein, but Ahriman knew only too well the danger that represented. He reached up and touched the silver oakleaf worked into his right shoulder-guard, and calmed his aetheric field with a deep breath and a whispered recitation of the Enumerations.

Ahriman looked up at the towering mountain, wondering at the vast power of its makers and what the primarch was doing inside it. Until the power to far-see was taken away, he had not realised how blind he was.

“Where ishe?” hissed Phosis T’kar, echoing his thoughts.

It had been four hours since Magnus the Red had followed Yatiri and his tribe into the Mountain, and the tension had been gnawing at their nerves ever since.

“You’re worried about him, aren’t you?” asked Hathor Maat.

“Since when could you master the powers of the Athanaean?” asked Ahriman.

“I don’t need to. I can see you’re both worried,” countered Maat. “It’s obvious.”

“Aren’t you?” asked Phosis T’kar.

“Magnus can look out for himself,” said Hathor Maat. “He told us to wait for him.”

The Primarch of the Thousand Sons had indeed told them to await his return, but Ahriman had a sick feeling that something was terribly wrong.

“Did you see something?” asked Phosis T’kar, noting Ahriman’s expression. “When you travelled the Great Ocean, you saw something, didn’t you? Tell me.”

“I saw nothing,” said Ahriman bitterly. He turned and marched back into his pavilion, retrieving his weapons from a long footlocker of acacia and jade. He bolstered a pistol that was as fine an example of the armourer’s art as any crafted by the artificers of Vulkan’s Salamanders, its flanks plated with golden backswept hawk wings and its grip textured with stippled hide.

As well as his pistol, he also bore a long heqa staff of ivory with a hooked blade at its end, its length gold-plated and reinforced with blue copper bands.

“What are you doing?” asked Hathor Maat when he emerged, accoutred for war.

“I’m taking the Sekhmet into that mountain,” said Ahriman. “Are you coming?”

LEMUEL GAUMON RECLINED against one of the deadstones in the foothills of the enormous mountain, trying to keep within its shadow and wishing his frame was rather less fulsome. Growing up in the mid-continental drift-hives of the Nordafrik enclaves, he was used to heat, but this world was something else entirely.

He wore a long banyan of lightweight linen, colourfully embroidered with interlocking motifs of lightning bolts, bulls, spirals and numerous other less easily identifiable symbols. It had been woven by a blind tailor in the Sangha commercia-subsid to his design, the imagery taken from the scrolls collected in the secret library of his villa in Mobayi. Dark-skinned and shaven-headed, his deep-set eyes carefully watched the encampment of the Thousand Sons, while he occasionally made notes in a pad balanced on his thigh.

Perhaps a hundred scarlet pavilions dotted the salt plains, their sides tied up, each home to a band of Thousand Sons warriors. He’d noted which Fellowships were represented: Ahriman’s Scarab Occult, Ankhu Anen’s 4th, Khalophis’ 6th, Hathor Maat’s 3rd and Phosis T’kar’s 2nd.

A sizeable war-host of Astartes warriors was encamped before the mountain, the atmosphere strangely tense, though Lemuel could see no cause for it. It was clear they weren’t expecting trouble, but it was equally clear something was troubling them.

Lemuel closed his eyes and let his consciousness drift on the invisible currents of power that rippled in the air like a heat haze. Though his eyes were shut, he could feel the energy of this world like a vivid canvas of colour, brighter than the greatest works of Serena d’Angelus or Kelan Roget. Beyond the deadstones, the mountain was a black wall of nothingness, a cliff of utter darkness as solid and as impenetrable as adamantium.

But further out into the salt flats, the world was alive with colour.

The Thousand Sons encampment was a blazing inferno of shifting colours and light, like an atomic explosion frozen at the instant of detonation. Even amid that blazing illumination, some lights shone brighter than others, and three such minds were gathered beneath where Lemuel knew Captain Ahriman’s pavilion was pitched. Something preyed upon these minds, and he dearly wished he was strong enough to venture closer. A bright mind, a supernova amongst guttering candles, normally burned at the heart of the encampment, but not today.

Perhaps that was the source of the Thousand Sons’ tension.

Their great leader was in absentia.

Frustrated, Lemuel’s mind drifted away from the Thousand Sons, and he let it approach the sunken dwellings of the Aghoru. Cut into the dry earth, they were as dark and lifeless as the Thousand Sons were bright and vital. The Aghoru people were as barren as the salt plain, without the slightest spark of a presence within them.