of warp routes etched in a dark brown fluid.
‘Too late, anyway,’ she said, tracking me with her weapon, a standard-grade item that had no chance of troubling my armour. ‘Doesn’t matter now. It’s all ending, and very soon.’
I found her certainty intriguing. Most invective from cultists was bluster, designed to bolster their own courage more than anything else. This was different. She almost sounded sorry about it.
I looked back at her, and she recoiled. Her lip curled back, she took a step away almost before she’d realised it.
Let me tell you something. You never get used to it. You never lose the wounds. You grow up, your whole life, surrounded by people who loathe you for a reason they can’t even articulate, and it gets stuck under your skin. The training helps, of course. We learn techniques. We have old mantras to recite, telling ourselves that we are in reality the greatest of His servants, which is less about boastfulness than self-preservation, but you never really believe it, and every flinch, every appalled expression, twists the old knife a little bit.
‘I won’t tell you anything,’ she said, defiantly.
What a strange notion. She thought I was there to question her.
I opened the flamer up again, dousing her in a column of heart’s-blood-fire. For a moment I watched her writhe and jerk within the hot purification, her body a black clot against the screen of unleashed energy.
So look at me now, I thought, allowing myself a sliver of savage pleasure at the spectacle of this woman’s just and warranted suffering.
I let the execution go on too long. I used up too much sacred fuel, which was a sin Hestia would not find easy to forgive. By the time I was done, her body was a steaming heap of embers, laced with the last boiling remnants of her blood and elements.
I shut off my flamer’s promethium line. I took a long breath. I let the heavy clouds of heat dissipate.
Then I went over to the chart. Unsurprisingly, the material was not animal hide, but something fouler. More surprisingly, it was a coherent representation of warp space, such as might be used by a Navigator or an Imperial general. I was no scholar of the empyrean, but I could understand a great deal of what it depicted. To my eye, it looked like the kind of schema used by a tactical war-planner – an almanac of systems, arranged in the esoteric order imposed by warp currents.
I took a pict of the data for later study, and moved over to the piles of comm-canisters. Many were marked with runes of warding – smears of blood designed to invoke curses on anyone tampering with them without the proper initiation. I activated hololith-beams from their emitters, and got little back but fuzzy, scrambled images for my trouble. They were either erased, or my unsanctioned usage had automatically wiped the contents.
I had to revise my opinions of this rabble again. They were behaving almost professionally.
I went back to the smouldering body of the woman. She had been clutching something before I had burst in – what looked like a hand-mirror, framed in heavy bronze in the shape of a gasping mouth. As I picked it up, I felt a spark of energy curl across my fist. The flat surface was cloudy, marked with half-images that still scudded.
I was about to shatter it, recognising a proscribed device that could be dissected at leisure on my return to the home world, when the glass suddenly clarified. I found myself looking into the dead eyes of something much, much more troubling than the burned woman at my feet.
I will be honest – my heart missed a beat. There’s no shame in that. There are few among the living who can look upon the face of the Enemy directly and not feel a spasm of ice clutch at their hearts.
It was rare to see one of them in such a manner. I have killed their kind before, of course. I take no greater pleasure than seeing a cursed warrior of the Old Legions die at my hands, for they are among the greatest of the foes we face, and eminently capable of ending us just as we are capable of ending them. We made the study of their ways the focus of our scarce resources, scrutinising their ancient iconography and their base heraldry for anything that might help us understand their intentions.
So I knew what it was I looked at. It was