‘You can do this, Kai,’ said Athena, glancing down at the sand. ‘Hold on to my voice.’

Athena began reciting the basic exercises of the nuncio, and the soothing cadence of her voice was like a calming soporific. ‘This is the dream I craft for myself. It a place of tranquillity. I am the master of this domain. Say it with me, Kai.’

‘I am the master of this domain,’ said Kai, trying to force himself into believing it. The shadow of the thing beneath the sand spread on the surface, a gathering darkness that wouldn’t fade. It was circling beneath them, rising to the surface with lazy sweeps of its metallic body. It knew its prey was vulnerable, and was in no hurry to rush the kill.

‘Say it like you mean it!’ hissed Athena. ‘I don’t want to see that thing any more than you do.’

‘I am the master of this domain!’ yelled Kai.

‘Now craft us somewhere safe,’ said Athena.

Kai tried to clear his thoughts as the sand shifted beneath them. The screaming voices were closer to the surface now. A leviathan moved beneath him, and its bulk was impossibly vast, stretching out kilometres to surround Kai and Athena.

He knew what it was, but that knowledge only made him more determined to avoid it.

‘I know somewhere safe,’ he said.

‘Show me,’ said Athena.

Slowly, stone by stone, Kai pictured the construction of a fortress of light in the raw fecundity of his mindscape. Fictive turrets, domed towers, pleasure gardens and tree-lined processionals erupted from the sand around them, rising higher and higher with every passing moment. Gilded arches, ornamented balconies and minarets of jade, mother of pearl and electrum formed from the building blocks of imagination and recall.

This was a fortress of ancient times, a wonder of the world that no longer existed.

Athena’s eyes widened at the sight of the magnificent fortress, its walls glittering with hoar frost and polished smooth as though formed from vitrified sand. The ground rose beneath them and they were carried into the air on a high wall, hundreds of metres from the undulant sand.

‘What is this place?’ asked Athena as their dizzying ascent halted.

A fierce wind whipped around them and Kai held her tight as it sought to hurl them from the walls.

‘It is the Urartu fortress of Arzashkun,’ said Kai. ‘It once stood at the headwaters of a great river that was said to have its source in the garden that birthed humanity.’

‘Does it still stand?’ asked Athena as more towers, higher walls and yet more barred gateways formed from the shimmering sand of the dreamscape.

‘No, it was destroyed,’ said Kai. ‘A great king razed it to the ground many thousands of years ago.’

‘But you know its likeness?’

Kai heard the rumble of something vast approaching the surface of the sand, but kept his attention firmly focussed on Athena’s question. If he allowed his thoughts to stray beyond the walls of the fortress they would come crashing down. Instead, he cast his mind back to the glass walls of an incredible library that nestled amongst towering highland forests.

‘Not long after I took up my position with the XIII Legion, I was lucky enough to be allowed access to the Crystal Library on Prandium,’ said Kai, focusing on the past to avoid the present. ‘You should see it, Athena, tens of millions of books and paintings and symphonies contained within resonant crystals set all along the length of the canyon walls. The warden showed me one of Primarch Guilliman’s works, just set in the cliff like it was nothing out of the ordinary. But it was incredible, and it wasn’t what I’d expected either. There wasn’t any illuminated scriptwork or exquisite calligraphy, just a painstaking attention to detail that no mortal writer could ever match.’

‘And this fortress was in the book?’ said Athena.

‘Yes. On a page that told of Lord Guilliman’s time on Terra before his Crusade fleets set out into the galaxy. I saw a sketch of this fortress, so real that I could feel the hardness of its stone and the strength of its walls. It was a footnote really, a veiled reference to when the primarch’s father had travelled there and studied its architecture. I have been to those lands, and nothing remains of Arzashkun now, not even memory, but Lord Guilliman’s skill had rendered it as clearly as if Rogal Dorn himself had handed him the plans.’

‘If only that were true,’ said Athena, and Kai followed her gaze beyond the walls.

His breathing quickened and he struggled to keep his equilibrium as a bloom of red appeared on the sand, like a splash of blood in milk. His racing heart rate increased still further, and he swallowed as he felt the furious tugging of memory. A child’s pleading voice intruded on his thoughts and the red stain expanded at a geometric rate.

The shadowy hunter beneath the ground surged towards the spreading crimson mass, hot and urgent in its desire. It broke the surface beyond the walls, all angles, blades and red noise. A ghost ship brought to the surface of the deepest ocean, it breached like an ambush hunter and crashed back down with a thunderous boom. Its flanks were iron and blue, gold and bronze. It was a world killer, a monster capable of unimaginable destruction, and his fortress of light was no match for its terrible power.

It came on a tide of screams, ten thousand voices shrieking in terror and pain. It knew his name and it wanted him to join the dead whose bones and blood filled its wailing corridors and chambers.

Kai was catapulted from his dreamspace with a terrified shout as the fortress was overwhelmed in a terrifying crescendo of leering faces, black blades and tearing fangs.

His eyes flicked open and he jack-knifed upright in his chair. The whisper stones glowed angry red as they dissipated the psychic residue of their connection into the trap chambers beneath the tower. Kai pressed the heels of his palms into his face, feeling the chill ceramic and steel of his artificial eyes against his skin. Revulsion, guilt, sorrow and terror vied for space in his frontal lobes and a strangled sob burst from a throat that was raw from screaming.

No tears fell, but the anguish he felt was no less potent.

The desert was gone and the blunt, geometric forms of Athena’s chamber rushed to fill his senses with bland, clinical reality.

‘That was the Argo?’ said Athena.

Kai nodded. He realised he was still holding her hand, his knuckles white with tension. Tiny crescents of blood welled from where his nails had cut the thin layer of her regrown skin. Instantly contrite, he pulled his hand away.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean…’

Athena closed her fingers into a pained fist.

‘I felt it,’ she said, taking his hand again. ‘Everything you felt as they died. I felt it all.’

Kai wept tearlessly for the lost souls of the Argo.

But most of all he wept for himself.

FOUR

Ghota

Old Gods

Faces of Death

WORKING WITH THE dead was thirsty work, and Palladis Novandio took a sip of brackish water from the wooden barrel set up at the door of the crematorium. The men who worked to load the bodies into the incinerator were hard men, inured to the cold, stiff reminders of their own mortality. They worked without words, hauling the pallets of the dead towards the giant furnace built into the rock, stripping them of their clothes and dignity before taking them by ankles and wrists and swinging them into the fire.

The Petitioner’s City had no shortage of dead, one of the few commodities it had in abundance.

The piles of clothes were sorted and cleaned by the women of the temple before being distributed to those in need. On some days it seemed as though the population of the city never changed, and you might stop someone, thinking they were miraculously returned to life, but who was simply wearing the coat of a dead man. Palladis took a measure of comfort in knowing the dead could yet give something to those they left behind.