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‘Is this how she wanted to go?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think she wanted to go at all,’ I said.
‘You–’ he gurgled through blood and spittle and flecks of shattered teeth, ‘you cannot even begin to imagine the Imperial misery House Glaw will wreak. Our power is too great. We will pitch the bastard Emperor from his golden throne and make him grovel and feed upon excrement. The worlds of the Imperium will blister and burn before Oberon and Pontius. Exalted will be the Great Darkness of Slaanesh–’
‘This man is a fiend. This man is nobility. He has seen into the darkness we so fear, and he knows what power feels like. The promise of what lies at stake for him and his collaborators is enough to steel him.’
She exposed old tiles, made of a dull, metallic substance I couldn’t identify. The tiles were perfectly fitted, despite the fact that they were irregular octagons. They were strangely unsymmetrical, with some edges overlong. Yet they all fitted almost seamlessly. We could not begin to account for it, and the pattern they made was intensely uncomfortable.
I focused on the data-file for Obol that I had punched up on the screen – nickel, zinc, selenium, smallest of fourteen – not because I wanted to know but because the facts would act as psychopomps, little fetishes of detail to occupy my mind and steal it away from the hazard.
These men weren’t cowards. They just needed a purpose and a sense that they were fighting for a worthy cause.
I shot down a trooper who ran past me, and another nearby who turned in dismay. Past them, I saw the tall, spare form of the rogue captain, Estrum, gazing at me through the smoke wash with incredulity. His eyes bulged more than ever. ‘What the hell are you doing, trooper?’ he managed to bark, his pronounced Adam’s apple bobbing furiously. ‘Performing the ministry of the sacred Inquisition,’ I told him and shot him through the head.
I may applaud his rigorous efforts in thwarting Glaw and his conspirators, but this erasure of occult lore earns only my opprobrium.’
The veil of the warp drew back. I looked as if down a pillar of smoke, ghost white, which rushed up around me. In my ears, the harrowing screams of infinity and the billion billion souls castaway therein. Blue light, streaked with storm-fires. A sound that mingled seismic rumbling and the ethereal plainsong of long decayed temples. A smell of woodsmoke, incense, saltwater, blood… A cosmic emptiness so massive and ever-lasting, my mind numbed as I raced across it. It was gone in a blink, just fast enough to prevent the sheer scale taking my sanity with it.
I have encountered several alien races in my career, and found most to be utterly undeserving of the hatred that the Inquisition and the church reserves for anything that is not human. You are blinkered fools. You would kill everything because it is not like you. But in this case, you are right.
