of scholarship where I might be able to decipher that list, which would then go some way towards deciphering the map.
But in truth there were now very few places to go. We had been operating alone, sundered from the rest of our Sisterhood – if indeed any still remained. I couldn’t just set course for the next convent and hope to find refuge. I would have to make a choice.
He calls His daughters Home.
I went back up to the bridge, feeling the tremor of the decks under my boots as the ship burned out into the deep void. By the time I arrived back at station, Erefan was waiting for me.
‘Your orders?’ he asked.
Run silent, hold once out of system range, I signed.
Then I looked up at the real-viewers above me, already black and scattered with stars.
‘But we’re heading into the warp,’ Erefan said. ‘That’s the intention?’
I gave him no signal. I looked at the stars, and I tried to imagine how they would overlay onto that map.
It is, I signed. To the Throneworld.
That was a long way. The routes would all be perilous, clogged with pilgrim traffic and watched by the Enemy.
I was certain, though. As certain as I was about anything in those confused times. Some of it was established protocol in the event of a catastrophe, some of it was a vaguer sense of the way things were going, but most came from Lokk’s blood-scrawled message, something he had meant me to find, I remain sure of it.
Having seen that, I could hardly have done otherwise. If He had truly called us, after so many millennia of painful silence, then I was surely bound to answer.
Tieron
I had been so fixated on the problem of Cadia. We all had. That was perhaps why we all missed Fenris.
I had barely even thought about the Planet of the Wolves. To me it was a semi-mythical place. I had heard plenty about its fearsome Chapter, of course, but even then I had never met one of its members.
Space Marines of any description were not common on Terra. I find it almost amusing to remember now, but the ancient prohibition on their presence here was one of the things that lingered after the old rationale for it had long since faded. It was said that the Throneworld still carried the scars of the Great Heresy, and so had kept its distance from the Chapters out of a lingering sense of remembered terror.
There was a little truth in that, and much nonsense. The visible scars of that old war were all still there, all the way from the highest domes of the Palace down to the slum-pits of the equatorial zone, but very few of the ordinary people, even many of the priests, had any clear idea what they represented. In the face of all that forgetfulness, the Angels of Death had long since ceased to be any kind of terror for the great mass of the population here. Indeed, if they read their Ecclesiarchy catechisms they probably near-worshipped them as mythical saviours.
What lingered was the wariness of the ruling classes. They knew their history, such as it still existed for us. They knew that even after the great reforms of the first Lord Commander, the combined strength of the Adeptus Astartes was still phenomenal, and that if those hundreds of miniature armies ever made common cause then they would be by far the most powerful single bloc within the Imperium. And so the High Lords worked hard to maintain a distance between the Throneworld and the Chapter Masters. The Inquisition was not above sanctioning any that got too close for comfort, though in any case the antipathy was generally mutual – the Chapters themselves preferred to be out in the void, able to fight the enemy where it persisted.
And so I had never laid eyes on a Space Wolf. I had never laid eyes on a Dark Angel or a White Scar. The only ones I had ever witnessed – from a distance – were the golden warriors of Dorn’s Imperial Fists, who still maintained a monastery on the world they had once garrisoned alone, and who were now the most frequent visitors to the glittering halls of the Inner Palace.
Just like everything else, that would change. On that day, though, the tidings of strife were still coming in from a long way away.
‘Fenris?’ I asked, for a moment assuming Jek had made a rare mistake.
‘Undoubtedly,’ she replied, calm as ever. ‘Something