‘I have never seen the dead rise of their own accord, have you? I try not think about why the dead would become so angry as to rise from their sleep and walk the earth. What could have wronged them? What influence makes these old ancestors restless? The walking dead are a by‐product, an effect of influence. The answers escapes me and I am disturbed.’
‘Do you think the enemy will fear us?’
‘No, Barsabbas, I don’t think they do,’ Sargaul replied without taking his eyes off the scope.
‘That’s a shame,’ said Barsabbas matter‐of‐factly. ‘We look terrifying.’
At first, Barsabbas had taken pleasure in the carnage of the fight. After so many months of slithering through the cramped training tunnels of the ship, it felt good to finally be uncaged and administer so much destruction. But now he felt hollow. The walking dead were not living beings who feared him, nor breathing creatures who felt the despair at the sight of a charging Traitor Marine. They were ‘the dead’, a thoughtless horde no more sentient than a tide or the weather. It was a pointless fight. But there would be something else here. As Sargaul had said, the dead did not rise of their own accord. Something was causing this. Perhaps if Squad Besheba could find that cause, then they could put the fear into them.
MUHR HAD NOT seen the artificial light of the ship in days, only the darkness of his tower and the glow of his scrying lens. Despite the rituals of deployment and warp transit of the Cauldron Born, Muhr remained cloistered, refusing any contact beyond his own sanctuary.
His hair, unwashed and long, hung like a greasy mantle from his armoured shoulders.
He was sweating fat beads that ran down his neck. His head was throbbing. Yet still he hung on, wringing the last efforts of psychic strength from his mind.
The mirror was set in a heavy frame, a free‐standing structure of sculpted white meerschaum. But the frame was not important, for the mirror itself had had many frames throughout its long existence. It had once belonged to a prophet of the eldar race, or so the story went, and had since changed hands. In the hands of the eldar, it was said to have been an oracle, a scryer and a means of entering the webway, but Muhr dismissed these tales as fanciful. He had never been able to use it for anything more than astro‐telepathy, and even then, the image was often poor.
As he waved his hand in an arc, the mirror surface became cloudy and changed. Muhr peered deeply.
He saw a settlement in Hauts Bassiq. A colony of wagons and carts tucked beneath the shade of a red, dusty hill. The image was murky, appearing fractured in some places and layered with ghost images. Muhr tapped the mirror and an image of the huts blossomed across the lens. He saw the corpse of an old man, withered and dry, crouched by the wood frame of a caravan. Periodically, the corpse gnawed on a femur before discarding it, as if it couldn’t remember what it was doing, before picking it up and repeating the process.
53
Muhr tapped again. Now he saw a mass exodus of people. Plodding with stiff gaits, they moved in a single direction as if they were a great herd in migration. Flies settled on their slack lips and eyelids and they did not react. These were the walking dead, victims of the black wilt who spread the disease southwards.
Sudden footsteps intruded upon him. Distracted, Muhr shed the psychic link and turned from the mirror.
‘My lord.’
It was Nabonidus, one of his coven. Nabonidus, the Chirurgeon and sorcerer attached to 5th Company.
‘My lord,’ Nabonidus repeated. ‘I report that the scouting element has been deployed.
They made landfall thirty‐one hours ago, but you were not present at the ceremony.’
Muhr smiled. ‘I have been reviewing a joint operation.’
Nabonidus paused. He was a direct man, blunt and obtuse, and often did not understand Muhr. Like the smooth, faceless iron mask that Nabonidus wore, he was very straightforward. Although Muhr relied upon him as an enormously powerful psyker who had a natural affinity for daemonology, and a deft Chirugeon, there were some jobs that Muhr did not entrust him with, for Nabonidus lacked cunning. Muhr perceived him as no more than an effective automaton. Had his latent psychic abilities not been discovered during his neophyte induction, Nabonidus could have become a squad sergeant or even company captain. As a sorcerer of the coven,