in his House colours. He had a long hooked nose and sunken eyes. We never managed to get the best to serve with us, only those who for whatever reason couldn’t secure service with a more palatable branch of our glorious Imperium, but he was competent enough and addicted to some of the less ruinous sense-dulling narcotics.
I gestured towards the great swath of human flesh, pinned up again between staves and now adorning the far wall of my chamber. Slovo limped up to it and looked hard across the swirls of blood.
‘A warp map,’ he sniffed. ‘Basic error. You can’t map the warp.’
My fingers flickered in a series of simple responses – he didn’t understand Thoughtmark, so we were limited to cruder phrases.
I don’t care.
Tell me what it means.
Keep it concise.
He looked more carefully.
‘I see what they’re doing,’ he said eventually. ‘These are representations, such as you can have them, of major channels. The kind of thing you’d bring a fleet down. They’ve been getting narrower, those channels – remember I told you that? Perhaps they know why.’
He traced a bony finger over the flayed cartograph, mumbling to himself. I let him carry on. I could never decide how much of this was for show or not – they liked to guard their secrets, did those old mutants of the warp.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, then trailed off again. ‘Perhaps, but maybe not.’
I sent my fingers into a Say it pattern.
He shot me an irritated glance. I could see how much he hated me then. He understood the origin of that hatred, and for that reason kept it suppressed as best he could, but it still spilled out from time to time.
‘Suppose they knew what was going to happen,’ he said. ‘Suppose they knew which way the tides were pulling. They might know that some channels would close, and some would open. Then they’d have to keep control over the ones that were open. There would be worlds, sitting at the mouths of those conduits. They could pour their filthy craft down those ways. It’d be difficult. They’d have to coordinate strikes over a huge span of space. And they’d have to be right, about it all. I don’t think this is a sensible scheme, though. I don’t think it’s possible.’
We had all got used to things thought impossible suddenly turning into reality, so I didn’t place much confidence in that judgement.
I looked at the map myself. It wasn’t easy to study, for the shapes slid and baffled, like optical illusions. I saw systems picked out in a script I didn’t recognise – some foul tongue of the Eye, no doubt. Their arrangement was not as it was in real space, or I might have been able to identify them from our cartographic records, but instead showed their ether-relationship – the way they stood set against the currents of the unseen realm. As this was forever in flux, so they told me, no static maps of it could be produced. The only use this had, then, was as the Navigator said: if they somehow knew the future alignment of things.
I drew closer to the centre of the diagram. The nearer I drew to that point, the more the circles and pentagrams overlapped, drawing the eye down towards a single world. Even I could see the significance of that one, lodged like a jewel at the nexus of so many interwoven lines of blood.
Terra? I indicated.
Slovo shrugged. ‘You can read this rubbish, can you? I can’t. There are other cardinal worlds – Cadia, Hydraphur, Mars. I wouldn’t want to make that judgement, not from what I see here.’
I pushed down my irritation. The man did not mean to be insolent, but he was doing what every mortal always did when talking with me – fighting against repulsion. He wanted to get out of this room, and that instinct coloured everything he said.
All the same, I signed.
He shrugged. I felt that I’d got everything out of him I was likely to. He’d be needed soon. He’d require at least some rest before I ordered us into the warp again.
So I sent him away. Then I looked over the marks again, as if a final look could give me what I needed.
I didn’t derive any great inspiration from it. Those signs had been made for corrupted eyes, steeped in significance that mine would miss. Nonetheless, I could at least tally up the names of the worlds, for that would give me something. There were places