“I know,” she said, through moist eyes. “It’ll break my heart, but I’ve made my mind up.”

“Good girl,” said Lemuel, hating that it had taken him this long to understand the truth.

Camille nodded towards Daedalus Street and said, “Looks like your friend’s here,” as a servitor-borne palanquin emerged and turned towards them. The servitors were bulk-muscled things, broad shouldered and wearing silver helmets and crimson tabards. The crowds parted for the palanquin, and it stopped before Lemuel and Camille.

The velvet curtain parted and Mahavastu Kallimakus emerged. A set of bronze steps extended from the base of the palanquin and he climbed down to join them.

“A grand conveyance,” said Lemuel, impressed despite himself.

“A waste of time that only serves to draw attention to my irrelevance,” snapped Mahavastu, sitting next to Camille on the bench. “Sobek insisted I travel in it to save my old bones.”

The venerable scribe patted Camille’s hand, his skin gnarled like old oak.

“I was sorry to hear of Mistress Eris’ death,” he said. “She was a quite lovely girl. A real tragedy.”

“No it’s not,” said Lemuel. “It would have been a tragedy if she died thanks to a weakness of her own making, but she was murdered, plain and simple.”

“I see,” said Mahavastu. “What do I not know?”

“The Thousand Sons burned her out,” said Camille. “They used her, and she died so that they could glimpse echoes of the future. Fat lot of good it did them. All she did was talk in riddles before it killed her.”

“Ah, I was told she had another of her unfortunate attacks at Voisanne’s?”

“She did, but that was only the beginning,” said Lemuel, standing and pacing back and forth before the bench. “They killed her, Mahavastu. It’s that simple. Look, what do you want me to say? You were right, there is a curse upon the Thousand Sons. If what Kallista said means half of what we think it means, this world is doomed and it’s time we were gone.”

“You wish to leave Prospero?” asked Mahavastu.

“Damn right I do.”

Mahavastu nodded. “And you feel the same, Mistress Shivani?”

“Yeah,” she said. “When Ankhu Anen moved me away from Kallista, I felt something of his memories, a fragment of something that passed between him and the other captains. I didn’t get more than a flash, but whatever they know has them terrified. Something very bad is happening, and it’s time we put some distance between us and the Thousand Sons.”

“Have you given any thought as to how we might do this, Lemuel?” asked Mahavastu.

“I have,” he said. “There’s a mass-conveyer in orbit right now, the Cypria Selene. It’s completing an engine refit and is resupplying in preparation for despatch to Thranx. She’s scheduled to depart in a week, and we need to be on that ship.”

“And how do you propose we manage that?” asked Mahavastu. “Its crew will be monitored, and we have no legitimate reason to be on the Cypria Selene.”

Lemuel smiled for the first time in weeks.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve learned a thing or two that should help with that.”

THE BOOKS WERE scattered like autumn leaves across the floor of his chambers, their pages torn and crumpled. The orreries were shattered and the astrological charts torn from the walls. The globe of Prospero was broken, its ochre continents lying in broken shards amid the cracked cerulean fragments of its oceans.

A torrent of destruction had swept through Magnus’ chambers, but no thoughtless vandal or natural disaster had wreaked such havoc. The architect of this destruction squatted amid the ruin of his possessions with his head buried in his hands.

Magnus’ white robe was stained and unkempt, his flesh worn with weeks of neglect, his body wracked by inconsolable grief. The shelves behind him were shattered, the timber splintered and broken to matchwood. Almost nothing remained in once piece. The mirrors were cracked and reduced to shattered diamonds of reflective glass.

Magnus lifted his head, out of breath from his rampage.

The exertion was nothing; it was the scope of what he had destroyed that took away his breath, the sheer, mind-numbing horror of what had been lost and could never be retrieved.

Only one thing had escaped his destructive rampage, a heavy lectern of cold iron upon which was chained the Book of Magnus, the grimoire of all his achievements, culled from the unexpurgated texts penned by Mahavastu Kallimakus. Achievements.

The word stuck in his throat. All his achievements were lies in the dust.

It had all been for nothing. Everything was unravelling around him faster than he could weave it back together.

Magnus rose to his full height, his body diminished from its former glory, as though a fundamental part of him had been left on Terra after his confrontation with his father. The moment of connection they had shared had been sublime and horrendous. He had seen himself as others saw him, a monstrous, fiery angel of blood bringing doom down upon those mortals unlucky enough to fall beneath his gaze.

Only his father had recognised him, for he had wrought the life into him and knew his own handiwork. Magnus had experienced that awful self-knowledge in an instant, feeling it sear his heart and crush his soul in one dreadful moment of union.

He had tried to deliver his warning, showing his father what he had seen and what he knew. It hadn’t mattered. Nothing he could have said would have outweighed or undone the colossal mistake he had made in coming to Terra. The treachery of Horus was swept away, an afterthought in the wake of the destruction Magnus had unwittingly unleashed. Wards that had kept the palace safe for a hundred years were obliterated in an instant, and the psychic shockwave killed thousands and drove hundreds more to madness and suicide.

But that wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long way. It was the knowledge that he had been wrong. Everything he had been so sure of knowing better than anyone else was a lie.

He thought he had known better than his father how to wield the power of the Great Ocean. He believed he was its master, but in the ruins of his father’s great work, he had seen the truth. The Golden Throne was the key. Unearthed from forgotten ruins sunken deep beneath the driest desert, it was the lodestone that would have unlocked the secrets of the alien lattice. Now it was in ruins, its impossibly complex dimensional inhibitors and warp buffers fused beyond salvage.

The control it maintained on the shimmering gateway at his back was ended, and the artfully designed mechanism keeping the two worlds apart was fatally fractured. In the instant of connection, Magnus saw the folly of his actions and wept to see so perfect a concept undone.

Unspoken understanding flowed between Magnus and the Emperor. Everything Magnus had done was laid bare, and everything the Emperor planned flowed into him. He saw himself atop the Golden Throne, using his fearsome powers to guide humanity to its destiny as rulers of the galaxy. He was to be his father’s chosen instrument of ultimate victory. It broke him to know that his unthinking hubris had shattered that dream.

Without will, the spell that had sent him to Terra was nothing, and Magnus had felt the pull of flesh dragging his spirit back through the gateway. He did not fight it, but let his essence fly through the golden lattice to the tear he had so carelessly torn in its fabric. Vast shoals of void predators were already massing, swirling armies of formless monsters, fanged beasts and awesomely powerful entities that lived only for destruction.

Would the Emperor be able to hold them back?

Magnus didn’t know, and the thought of so much blood on his hands shamed him.

He’d flown back through the timeless depths of the Great Ocean and awoken within the Reflecting Caves in the midst of a vast hall of the dead. The Thralls were no more, each and every one reduced to a withered, lifeless husk by the power of his spell.