Impossible colours, undreamed of light from the universe’s beginning and the knowledge of all things hung in the centre of the chamber like the frozen pulse of a neutron star. Even those without ability would have seen its glittering beauty had they somehow survived the initial blast wave of immaterial energy.

The last surviving members of the choir shrieked as geysers of light erupted from their scalps. Howling monstrosities and nightmare aberrations were carried on the light, searing their way into the material universe through living hosts. The majority of these formless spawn withered in the face of the hostile environment of the material universe, but others devoured the flickering remains of their dying brethren and grew stronger. They flocked in dirty scraps of debased light as Sarashina picked herself up from the floor, wiping drooled bile and vomit from her chin.

Klaxons and warning bells were sounding throughout the City of Sight and she heard gunshots from somewhere nearby. Evidently this mindhall was not the only place within the Whispering Tower to suffer breaches in the fabric of reality.

The warp creatures descended from the upper reaches of the mindhall, surrounding the sphere of impossible light where Abir Ibn Khaldun had once sat like weary travellers gathered around a cookfire. None of them were a threat to her, their substance too insubstantial and weak to trouble her, but their presence would draw the Black Sentinels. Already she could hear the soldiers beating at the locks of the sealed mindhall, but she paid the sound no mind, her attention firmly fixed on the shimmering, glittering light in the centre of the chamber.

It swirled like a ball of liquid gemstones, blue and white, green and red and every other colour imaginable. Inconstant and insubstantial, it appeared as dense as a black hole and as transient as mist in the same instant. Sarashina felt the siren song of its magnificent power and felt herself drawn to it as carrion-eaters are drawn towards rotten meat. The imagery disturbed her, for it was not of her own making, but conjured from the depths of this coalesced energy.

Sarashina had been fortunate never to suffer the pain of psi-sickness, but faced with this potency, her mind ached like a novitiate shorn of his power. Her entire being craved this, and with every step she took, Sarashina knew she would not be able to resist its incredible potential.

It swam in the air before her, the warp creatures parting before her like a curtain at a production of the Theatrica Imperialis. She felt their unthinking hunger for her, a mindless desire to drain her of her very essence. With a thought they retreated from her like whipped hounds. A crashing detonation sounded behind Sarashina, but she was oblivious to everything except the wondrous light before her.

It promised so much, this doorway into a realm of infinite possibilities.

Truth, knowledge, power.

The Vaticaspect of her powers saw the potential to know the course of the future in perfect clarity. With that knowledge she could forewarn the Emperor’s armies and be instrumental in stamping out the rebellion of Horus Lupercal. In the space of a breath, she could know the future of all things.

One touch was all it would take.

Yet still she hesitated, knowing on a primal and conscious level that nothing of the warp could be trusted. The psi-sickness in her gut intensified, and the unclean scraps of warp-life swirled around her in streamers of ghostly light. No matter what warnings her higher brain functions were screaming, she hadto touch this power, just to feel the heat at the heart of creation for one fleeting instant.

Sarashina reached out with trembling fingers and touched the raw energy of the warp.

And screamed as she saw the red chamber in all its infinite horror.

NINE

Sentinels

Where You Will Not Go

Saturnalia

EVANDER GREGORAS DRAGGED Kai through the chaos of the Whispering Tower like a child. Almost paralysed by choking terror, Kai stumbled through a red mist of horror as the sights and sounds and smells of the Argoreturned to him with evil clarity. They had long since left Athena in their wake, darting along low-roofed corridors and narrow tunnels that seemed designed for emaciated midgets. The cryptaesthesian knew the tower intimately, bypassing the commonly trod halls and screaming mindhalls as the psychic shockwave echoed and roared within the city of the astropaths.

Kai had no idea what had just happened, but every scrap of self-preservation was begging him to find a place of safety. Screams clung to the air, the whisper stones carrying them around the interior of the tower like horrible secrets. Alarum bells rang and barking gunshots swiftly followed angry bellows from the Black Sentinels.

‘Throne!’ bellowed Gregoras. ‘Pick up your feet, Zulane.’

‘I can’t,’ sobbed Kai. ‘I can’t do this again.’

Gregoras stopped and backhanded Kai across the face. The slap was shocking and sharp, the sound like splitting wood. Kai flinched from the blow, blood and snot mingling on his top lip as he dropped to the floor like a beaten slave.

‘Get up, damn you,’ said Gregoras.

‘Why?’ hissed Kai. ‘We’re all going to die here. The daemons are coming in and they’re going to kill everyone. I won’t survive a second time.’

Gregoras hauled him to his feet, his previously bland and unremarkable face now clenched in fury. ‘I said, get up! This is the pattern. Get up or so help me I will hand you over to Maxim Golovko myself and laugh as he puts a bullet in your brain.’

Kai wiped his bloody nose with the sleeve of his robe, understanding only a fraction of what Gregoras was saying.

‘Why do you need me?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ admitted Gregoras. ‘I wish I did not, but this is what I have been searching for all my life. You have glimpsed a portion of it, and you will help me understand it. Do you understand?’

‘No, not even a little bit.’

Gregoras shrugged. ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘You’re coming with me anyway.’

He hauled Kai by the scruff of the neck, propelling him along an iron-framed corridor that looked as though it ran between one of the mindhalls and a section of the Oneirocritica Alchera Mundi. Whisper stones bled thoughts of rape and murder, torture and degradation, and Kai fought to keep them out. It had been thoughts like these that had turned the crew of the Argointo debased monsters, cannibals and violators of the dead.

Kai had only lived by isolating himself in his astropathic chambers, to which no one but the captain and his equerry had access. They had been the first to die when the protective shields collapsed, and though the fiends had clawed at his chambers, none could reach him.

While the monsters and maddened crew could not drag him from his sanctuary, he could not shut his mind to the horrors that devoured their humanity. He heard every scream from their murderous orgies and tasted the loathsome appetites of the creatures that emerged from their bloody murders.

Aboard the Argohe had a place of refuge. Here he was horribly exposed.

How could he possibly survive this?

He followed Gregoras blindly, dragged along in his wake, not knowing where they were going or what had happened to the tower. Were they under attack? Had the forces of Horus Lupercal already reached Terra and begun their invasion by crippling the Telepathica?

‘What in the Emperor’s name is happening?’ he shouted.

Gregoras didn’t answer, and Kai saw him crouch to run his fingertips over the notched marks on the wall next to him.

‘Do you even know where we are?’

‘Of course I know,’ snapped Gregoras. ‘We are in the bleed channels under the Zothasticron.’

‘The what?’

‘The bleed channels,’ said Gregoras, running his hands along the opposite wall. ‘The whisper stones gather the excess energies of communion and carry it down to the trap chambers beneath the towers. How else do you think we dissipate the psychic energy?’