half tempted again. The decks of the Cadamara were like drumskins, resonating in a way that put my teeth on edge. We’d already lost one of our secondary drivetrains, dropping our speed through the galactic mire and amplifying every crash and slew that the unquiet abyss imposed on us.
I staggered down teetering corridors, feeling queasy from the weeks-long incessant movement. There was some irony to that – I spent most of my time making others nauseous, and now had some sympathy for how that felt.
My sense of dislocation had another cause. For a while after returning to the ship I had refused to mourn, preferring to channel my energy into activity. As the strange days in the ether had lengthened, though, my thoughts had turned increasingly to what had been lost.
I had loved my sisters. It was a fierce, almost desperate kind of love, born of the fact that we shared such a unique bond. All of us could remember the time when we had been dragged into the convent, filthy and starving, more used to blows than words of explanation, and then slowly realised that this place was safe, and that it had been made for us, and that we were not alone in the universe.
It was not a comfortable existence. We were trained, sometimes brutally. Hestia was not motivated by any benevolent sense of care, but by a pitiless vocation rooted in ancient doctrine. Some who found their way into the convent died soon afterwards, at times from exhaustion, at times by taking their own life. Those who survived became stronger in both body and mind. We learned secrets about the universe, ones that would have been our death sentence if ever uttered outside the walls of that place.
Before we took our vow of tranquility, we spoke and chattered and gossiped just as all juveniles did. We even laughed, whenever our regulated days would allow, sharing private jests about our humourless instructors. Even once the time for spoken words had passed, we still shared those bonds. Thoughtmark, in its fullest form, was an expressive language, in some ways more so than standard speech, and the friendships I made were all the stronger for the adversity in which they had been forged.
Now I could only recall their faces – Erynn, Catale, Ruja – bloodied by their untimely deaths. The memory of that was like a wound, gaping and blood-raw, taking me right back to my earliest days as a hunted infant, unable to understand why the whole world seemed intent on causing me harm.
I could share that grief with no one. I was as alone as I had ever been, surrounded only by the besoulled, who could never understand that it is hard for our kind to be isolated. We have less to draw on internally than others, and the great irony of our self-imposed seclusion is that we need human fellowship more, for it temporarily fills the void lurking within our own hearts.
I began to dread what I would find when we finally arrived at the Throneworld. I was under no illusions that the journey would be easy, or even that we would make it at all. Hestia had once told me that the pilgrim-route was only for the deluded, and that the chances of reaching Holy Terra as an individual were tiny. Now that the High Lords seemingly wished to forget all about the Sisterhood of Silence – how I hated that name! – we could be sure of no special treatment to ease our passage.
But I pushed the ship onwards, keeping it at the limit of its power, ignoring the warnings of Slovo and his acolytes to respect the turbulence of the warp.
In my mind, the three things were surely linked. The Old Legions making their return, the targeting of the convent, the gathering storm in the ether. You did not need to be a seer to realise that some new alignment was in progress, and that we had struggled on for too long with the old ways when their efficacy had long since ceased.
I subsumed everything else to this new goal. I took my grief and I made it into a weapon, just as we had been trained to do. If I had to break the Cadamara apart to do it, I would still make it to the golden spires of the shrine world and discover just what Lokk had seen before he died.
Perhaps I should have listened to Slovo’s warnings, but then temperance had