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  ‘Octavia,’ Septimus came to her, helping her to her feet. ‘The Covenant is being destroyed. We are all dead, unless…’

  ‘Unless… I guide us into the warp.’

  ‘Yes.’ He wiped flecks of blood from her face, his augmetic eye whirring as it focused. She heard it click once, very quietly.

  ‘Did you just take my pict?’

  ‘I may have,’ he said. His smile answered for him, slow and mournful.

  Octavia glanced at the bloodstained meditation couch, and did not look back at him. ‘You should go. This is never pleasant to watch.’

  He hesitated, reluctant to let her go even as the ship was being annihilated by Imperial guns. She pushed him away, not unkindly.

  ‘You know,’ she said, walking to the couch, ‘I’ll see you after. Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  She finally looked back, seeing him standing by the door. ‘I have no idea what I’m doing. I can find the Astronomican, guide by the Emperor’s light. But I have a feeling that would invite pursuit.’

  ‘It would. Just… do your best.’

  ‘I could kill you all, if I wanted to.’ She grinned. ‘You’re heretics, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You should go.’

  He didn’t know what else to say, so he left without saying anything at all. The door to Etrigius’s – no, Octavia’s chambers – sealed closed and locked tight.

  ‘Navigator,’ came a growl from the vox speakers around the room.

  ‘Here,’ she answered.

  ‘I am the Exalted.’

  ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘Do you know the region of space, close to the galactic core, that houses a warp wound known as the Great Eye?’

  Eurydice Mervallion, now called Octavia of the Covenant, took a deep breath.

  ‘Link me to the helm,’ she said, strength returning to her voice. ‘I will commune with your pilots.’

  It wasn’t so difficult, really.

  The ship hated her. Oh, how it loathed her presence. She felt its soul recoil from her probing meditation, like a viper protecting its young.

  I hate you, the Covenant hissed. Its presence thrashed in her mind, shrieking and hateful.

  I hate you, it warned again, far from the docile and sedate soul of Kartan Syne’s Maiden of the Stars.

  You are not my Navigator, it spat.

  ‘Yes,’ she spoke to the chamber, empty except the corpse of her predecessor. ‘I am.’

  Octavia closed her human eyes, opened the third, and dragged the Covenant of Blood into the space between worlds.

  ‘You feel that?’ Xarl asked as the ship seemed to slip forward in a strangely smooth lurch that had no similarity to weapons fire.

  Talos nodded. He’d felt the translation into the warp as well.

  ‘We made it,’ Cyrion grunted. ‘Most of us.’

  Malcharion was no longer moving at all. First Claw clustered around the ruined warrior, and Xarl’s chainblade revved again.

  ‘Should we?’ he asked Talos. ‘Deltrian might be able to save him, if he still lives within.’

  ‘No. Let him sleep, as he wished. We already have an image of him that should stay with us down the ages.’ The prophet’s eyes didn’t leave the triumphant engraving on the front of the sarcophagus for some time.

  ‘It was grand to see him fight,’ Uzas conceded, ‘one last time.’

  The others snorted or stared to hear such a thing from him.

  ‘I swear, I saw the fight at the Palace of Terra again,’ Cyrion said. ‘Not these… war machines clubbing each other.’

  Talos didn’t reply.

  ‘Deltrian,’ he voxed to the Hall of Remembrance.

  ‘Yes, One-Two-Ten. I am present, Talos.’

  ‘Malcharion the War-Sage has fallen in battle.’

  ‘Your voice indicates you grieve at this development. If condolences from others will ease your torment, I will offer them.’

  ‘The sentiment is appreciated, but that is not all.’

  ‘Your voice patterns now show a trace of amusement.’

  ‘Send two teams of lifter servitors to the aft mortals’ decks, to the area known as Blackmarket.’

  ‘Processing. One team is enough to recover the holy relic of the entombed Malcharion. I require reasoning for your request of two lifter teams.’

  ‘Because, honoured tech-priest,’ Talos turned his gaze to the wreckage of Raguel the Sufferer in his priceless war machine shell, ‘First Claw has a gift for you.’

  With the link cut, Talos narrowed his eyes at the corpse of one dead Blood Angel. The warrior’s breastplate remained intact despite grievous damage to his thigh, leg and shoulder armour. An Imperial eagle spread its wings proudly across the chestpiece, forged from platinum, gleaming gold in the dim light.

  The prophet nodded weakly at the dead Blood Angel’s beautiful armour.

  ‘That is mine,’ he said, and slid back down to the decking, too exhausted to move.

  EPILOGUE

  PORTENTS

  In the bowels of the Covenant of Blood, a mother and father wept.

  The human crew had not come through the battle unscathed. Some fell victim to the Blood Angel boarding teams, cut down as they fled from the righteous indignation of the Emperor’s finest warriors. Others perished in the explosions that wracked the ship as it sustained severe damage from other Imperial cruisers. Still more died as gangs of mortals used the chaos of the orbital war as a cover to launch attacks on the rival gangs that shared the blackness with them.

  One man clutched the body of his daughter, holding her light, lifeless form to his own scrawny chest. Blood still marked the girl’s lips and face from where she had choked out her last wet breath, less than an hour before. Her eyes, dark from the eternal gloom, stared sightlessly at the crowd that came to gather.

  She had no legs. These were lost to a Blood Angel chainblade as one of the Imperium’s heroes had sought to exterminate his way through the heretic crew of the Covenant. His grinding blade had claimed the lives of many before he was finally slain by Astartes from one of the Covenant’s claws.

  Her father cradled what remained of her, and cried out his sorrow.

  The witnesses began to whisper, speaking in quiet tones of curses, of omens, of the blackest portents. On the girl’s chest, a Legion medallion glinted in the dim light.

  Her father held what remained of the ten-year-old girl, and yelled at the walls of the silent ship all around.

  ‘This vessel is cursed! It is damned! She has been taken from us!’

  More humans gathered in the darkness, their eyes wide and wet with tears, each of them sharing the same thoughts and fears as the mourning father.

  Taisha was not at peace, despite the harmony of the garden.

  Beneath a dome that revealed the glory of the silent void, beneath the twinkling light of a million distant suns, Taisha came to the garden in search of answers. Her bare feet whispered over the cool soil, the grass soft on her toes. A robe of shimmering jade silk clung to her lithe figure, hanging off one shoulder to leave it bare. Hair the deep red of human blood, long enough to reach the small of her back, was tied up in a sharp topknot.

  Her slanted eyes regarded a figure kneeling upon the grass. His own robes were the black of the unending space between the worlds. He spoke without looking up at her.

  ‘Greetings, daughter of Khaine and Morai-Heg.’

  Taisha inclined her head to the appropriate angle, politely acknowledging his superior rank and the honour he did her by speaking first. She did not kneel beside him. Such would be a breach of decorum. Instead she stayed several metres away, her fingers lightly stroking the wraithbone sword hilt at her waist. The curved blade’s tip almost reached the ground, such was its length. The belt it hung from was all that kept her green robe closed.

  ‘Greetings, noble farseer. Are you well?’

  ‘I am well,’ he said, still not looking up.

  ‘Have I disturbed your meditatio
ns?’

  ‘No, Taisha.’ The kneeling male regarded the ground before him, where a spread of coin-sized rune stones lay among the dewy blades of grass. ‘You have come for answers, yes?’

  ‘I have, noble farseer.’ She was not surprised he knew of her unease, or that she would be coming to him. ‘My slumber is troubled.’

  ‘You are not alone, Taisha.’

  ‘So I have heard, noble Farseer. Several of my sisters are likewise uneasy in their hours of rest.’

  ‘Oh, but the turmoil reaches so much further.’ Now he looked up at her, his ice-blue eyes like frozen crystals. ‘War threatens the craftworld once more. A war that will see you shedding the blood of the mon-keigh, daughter of the Fate goddess.’

  ‘We are Ulthwe.’ She inclined her head again in respect. ‘We know little else but war. But who comes, noble farseer? Which of the mon-keigh?’

  The farseer scooped his runes from the grass of the garden, feeling them hot and portentous in his palm.

  ‘The Hunter of Souls, Taisha. The one who will cross blades with the Void Stalker.’

  THRONE OF LIES

  The Covenant of Blood tore through the warp, splitting the secret tides like a spear of stained cobalt and flawed gold. Its engines struggled, breathing white fire into the ever-shifting Sea of Souls. Pulsing like arrhythmic hearts, the thrusters laboured to propel the ship onwards. Its passage was a graceless dive, slipping through boiling waves of thrashing psychic energy.

  Tormented fields of kinetic force shielded the craft from the warp’s elemental rage, but the storm’s force was merciless. Reaching out from the hurricane, the claws of vast creatures raked across the shields, each impact hammering the vessel farther from its course.

  In a sealed chamber at the ship’s prow, a lone figure knelt in silent repose. Her human eyes were closed, yet she was far from blind. Her secret eye, the eye she hid from the world beneath sweat-stained bandanas and uncomfortable helms, looked out into the void. The ship’s hull was no barrier, and the crackling shields no obstacle. Her secret sight pierced them with effortless ease, and she stared into the storm beyond.

  Like oil on water, the seas outside roiled in a sickening riot of colour. A beacon of light usually pierced the chaos – a lifeline of ephemeral radiance splitting the swirling murk. All she had to do was follow it.

  There was no beacon this time. No radiant lifeline. The crackle of the shields buckling under pressure was all that illuminated the storm outside.

  The tides rolled against the ship in jagged, unpredictable waves, too fast for human response. By the time she saw a flood of migraine-bright energy spilling towards her, the shields were already repelling it. They sparked with pained fire as they sent the assaulting wave back into the psychic filth from whence it came.

  The Covenant of Blood trembled again, its engines giving a piteous whine as the tremor ran through the ship’s plasteel bones. It couldn’t take much more of this. The kneeling woman took a deep breath, and refocused.

  Her lapse of attention had not gone unnoticed. The voice, when it came, was an insidious whisper breaching her heart, not her ears. Each word resonated, echo-faint, through her blood.

  Centuries of conquering the void. Centuries of laying claim to the stars. The dance of hunter and hunted, predator and prey. You, Navigator, will be my end. The death of glory. The pain of failure.

  The ship was threatening her again. She didn’t take that as a good sign, and hissed a single word through clenched teeth.

  ‘Silence.’

  She swore that, somewhere on the edge of imagination, she sensed its laughter.

  Above all else, she loathed the crude poetry of the ship’s primal intelligence. The machine-spirit at the warship’s core was a bestial, dominant consciousness. It had resisted its new Navigator for weeks now. She was beginning to fear she would never rise as its master.

  The claws of the neverborn tear at my hull-skin, promising to bleed my innards to the void, it whispered. You are damnation. You are the bearer of blame. You will cast us into oblivion, Octavia.

  She bit back a reply, keeping her mouth as closed as her human eyes. Her third eye stared unblinking, seeing nothing but the storm raging outside.

  No. No, there was something more now. Something else sailed the Sea of Souls, more suggestion and shadow than form and flesh. She pulsed a warning at once.

  +Something beneath us, something vast. Evade at once.+

  Octavia sent the command with all her strength, a desperate plea to the ship’s pilots. At the speed of thought, she felt the response flash through the interface cables binding her to the throne of brass and bone. A dead voice, the tone of a lobotomised servitor at the ship’s helm.

  ‘Compliance.’

  The Covenant of Blood shuddered now, its burning engines forcing it to climb through the psychic syrup of un-space. The predator, the vast presence beneath them, stirred in the etheric fog. She felt it thrash, and saw a shadow the size of a sun ripple in the storm. It drew closer.

  +It’s chasing us.+

  ‘Acknowledged,’ the servitor replied.

  +Go faster. Go much, much faster.+

  ‘Compliance.’

  The vast presence broke through the lashing waves of psychic mist, unaffected by their density. She was reminded, for an awful moment, of a vast shark pushing through the open ocean, dead-eyed and forever hungry.

  +We have to break from the warp. We can’t outrun this.+

  This time, the answer was rich with emotion, none of it pleasant. It was deep, low, and tainted with inhuman resonance.

  ‘How far are we from the Torias system?’

  +Hours. Days. I don’t know, my lord. But we’re dead in minutes if we don’t break from the warp.+

  ‘Unacceptable,’ growled the Exalted, master of the Covenant of Blood.

  +Do you feel the way the Covenant is shaking? A psychic shadow made of black mist and hatred is reaching out to swallow us. I am the Navigator, my lord. I am dragging this ship from the Sea of Souls, no matter what you say.+

  ‘Very well,’ said the Exalted reluctantly. ‘All stations, brace for re-entry to the void. And Octavia?’

  +Yes, my lord?+

  ‘You would do well to show me more respect when Talos is not aboard.’

  She bared her teeth in a grin, feeling her heartbeat quicken at the threat.

  +If you say so, Exalted One.+

  The huntress moved through the chamber, one of many in the cavernous palace, clad in a stolen crimson gown and someone else’s skin. Her name, for the last two hours, had been Kalista Larhaven. This was even confirmed by the numeric identity code tattooed onto the flesh of her right wrist.

  The true Kalista Larhaven, the original owner of both the name and the exquisite dress, was now folded with graceless, boneless ease into a thermo-ventilation shaft. There she lay, silent in death, an unknown martyr to a lost cause. She had her own hopes, dreams, joys and needs – all of which had ended in the shallow thrust of an envenomed blade. It had taken longer to hide the courtesan’s body than it had to end her life.

  The huntress passed a flock of acolyte clerics. They shuffled along the carpeted floor, chanting in heretical murmurs. The first of them bore an incense orb on a corroded chain, the bronze sphere seething with coils of thin, sugary mist. This priest greeted the courtesan by name, and the huntress smiled with the dead whore’s lips.

  ‘Do you go to attend upon the master?’

  The huntress answered with wicked eyes and an indulgent smile.

  ‘I wish you well, Kalista,’ the priest replied. ‘Go in peace.’

  The huntress offered a graceful curtsey, subtly submissive, moving as one born to a life of giving pleasure. The true Kalista had moved this way. The huntress had watched it, gauged it, captured the essence of it – all in a handful of heartbeats.

  As she walked away, she felt the eager eyes of the whispering priests following her movements. She exaggerated the swing of her hips, favouring them with a last glance ove
r her bare shoulder. She read the hunger in their dark eyes, and much better, the idiotic conviction. Let them go about their business without knowing the truth: that the girl they desired was already dead, packed into a tube close to the thermal exchange processors elsewhere in the palace.

  The heat would accelerate the process of decay, so the true Kalista would become a quick victim to the bacteria that always laid claim to a human body in the hours after it drew its last breath.

  But the huntress was unconcerned. She would be gone by the time any discoveries were made, her duty done and her escape a source of infinite grief for the people of this worthless planet.

  Before she had become Kalista Larhaven, the huntress had worn the skin of a nameless maidservant for almost an hour, using the shape to reach the lower levels and move through the slave tunnels. Before that, she had been a trader in the palace’s vast courtyards, licensed to sell holy relics to pilgrims. Before that, a pilgrim herself, wearing the ragged clothes of a vagabond: a wandering beggar in search of spiritual enlightenment.

  The huntress had been on the world of Torias Secundus for a single day and a single night. Even as she drew close to completing her mission, she lamented the time spent so far. She was above this assignment. She knew it, her sisters knew it, and her superiors knew it. This was punishment – a punishment for the failures of the past.

  Undeserved, perhaps. Yet duty was duty. She had to obey.

  She moved on through the palace, passing chanting acolytes, scurrying clerks and raucous packs of intoxicated nobles. The halls were growing busy as noon approached, for with the coming of noon came the High Priest’s long-awaited speech.

  The woman who was not Kalista blended into the crowds, passing with smiles and feminine curtseys. Her irritation never showed on lips of rose-red, nor in eyes of ice-blue. The fact remained, though – this skin would not get her to the High Priest’s side at the right moment. Time was a vicious factor. If killing him was the only goal, he would be dead from a sniper’s kiss already, long before taking to the podiums later today and addressing the people of the city.

  But no. His death had to be choreographed along exact lines, played out like a performance for all to see.