safety. Above all, Sabtah would be viewed as an indiscriminate tyrant. They would never accept him as a rightful Champion. The fabric of Blood Gorgon unity would erode through mistrust and paranoia. Brother would turn against brother, blood bond against blood bond. It would force history to repeat, and that was what Sabtah feared the most.
‘All squads, lower your weapons,’ Sabtah said quietly. Both squads continued to threaten each other with their guns. ‘Now!’ Sabtah warned, spiking his vox with amplitude.
Once the squads cowled their weapons, he approached Muhr with open palms.
‘This can only be resolved by invocation.’
Muhr bared his teeth. ‘You dare rouse Yetsugei for this?’
‘Why, are you frightened of judgement? The Prince sees all,’ Sabtah snorted.
Muhr licked his lips with a serpentine tongue. ‘Then we will summon him. The one who survives judgment will stand as ward of this Chapter.’
‘You should be dead, Muhr,’ Sabtah spat. ‘By all rights you should be dead. I should kill you. Now the Prince will have that honour.’
‘We shall see, Sabtah. We shall see.’
THE WARP. THE warp was no place to walk barefoot.
There, the sky was constantly expanding, allowing him to glimpse overlapping time loops of the universe’s ending. The land curved away from him, never‐ending. Crushed stone bit his soles. He could see a citadel. Its towers and parapets sat atop the shell of a turtle like a hive stack. The turtle was ponderous, marching tirelessly across the horizon.
How large was it? A thousand kilometres long?Perhaps a million? With each lethargic step, it levelled mountains and bevelled cliffs into biting, crushed stone shards. The scale was hypnotic.
Muhr knew he was dreaming. He was dressed in a cloak of black velvet, but nothing else. At his hip was a sword he did not remember owning.
Sabtah’s threats still rang in his ears. Muhr had been thinking about them before he drifted into his psy‐trance. Now, even as his spirit waded through the warp, the troubles of the physical world followed him.
He knelt down to pick up a flint. It crumbled at his touch, exploding into powder as if age had stolen its integrity. Muhr stood up quickly, his black cloak snapping. The simple movement caused a rippling wind that puffed a stand of dry, leafless trees into ash.
Everything in this world was dead, preserved only by tranquillity.
‘Welcome to my home,’ said a hollow voice. ‘It is as much yours as it is mine.’
‘Opsarus!My Overlord!’ Muhr gasped. He fell to his knees, pressing his forehead to the powdered stone.
Opsarus appeared to him as old as the world itself. His power armour had a petrified, granular texture, as if a mantle of minerals had risen from the ground to streak it with 92
opaline, jade and sickly lime and white. Its surface was studded with bolts, weeping with rust. Looming over Muhr, Opsarus was a rising ocean wreckage, dragged from the bottom of a powerful sea.
‘Get up, Muhr. Act like my lieutenant for once.’ The turbines of Opsarus’s power pack whirred with a rhythmic hum, constant and powerful. His face was a deathmask of sculpted turquoise, its moulded features noble, almost angelic in bearing and set in the middle of his hulking shoulders. When he spoke, the voice that issued through the metal lips was garbled and distorted.
Muhr got up quickly. ‘Why do you bring me here, Overlord?’ he asked.
‘Be quiet, sorcerer. Listen first, then ask questions,’ Opsarus snapped impatiently. ‘Too much talking, that’s your failing, sorcerer.’
Muhr lowered his head.
‘Sabtah seeks to invoke Yetsugei to reveal your true ambitions?’ Opsarus chuckled.
Muhr nodded.
Opsarus chuckled again. ‘And you are frightened? Yes?’
‘Of course, lord. Yetsugei sees all, and the Chapter will listen to the daemon’s words.
They will discover the truth. It will lay bare our plans.’
‘Yetsugei is a jester. A king among men, but a fool among daemonkind.’
‘Yet the Chapter heed his words. They will know.’
‘Another failing of your Chapter and your gene‐seed, sorcerer.’
The words stung, but Muhr knew it was the truth. The Blood Gorgons lacked the favour of the gods. While Opsarus could invoke the power of the Great Unclean One, the Blood Gorgons were left to grovel to some petty daemon prince. It reminded him of their inferiority.
‘What can we do, Overlord?’
‘All part of the plan,’ Opsarus said, laying a hand on Muhr’s head. ‘I have known this for some time.’
‘I’m sure, Overlord. Your wisdom has never led me astray.’
‘Take this.’
Opsarus pressed a small, hard object into Muhr’s palm. It was a crystal. Unremarkable and entirely mundane. Yet when Muhr peered closer, he saw a scintilla