exploded, blown apart by the violence of my assault, flying into scraps of torn fat and spittle. My armour was coated in it, my sword sopping, my loose hair caked.
I endured the deluge, waiting for the rain of slops to subside. The chamber was rancid now. The corpse of the second menial was almost lost under a pile of steaming viscera. Slovo cowered in the corner, scratching at the closed door, his eyes still staring in the stop-start lumen glare.
I had to be sure. I rooted through the remnants of the kill, blade at the ready. They were vicious things, always, and could revive after cursorily lethal amounts of punishment if you were unwary.
The main lumens came back on, stronger this time. I heard the rapid clatter of boots from the corridors outside, and guessed that Erefan had stabilised the ship and sent a security detail to aid me.
A bit late, I thought, but at least we’re fully into real space.
I turned to face Slovo. I must have looked half-daemonic myself, caked in a skin of black inky blood and scales.
He was in bad shape, but I was in no mood to go easy on him.
Answers, I signed, and I truly think that command was the thing that scared him most of all.
Perhaps I should have been more sympathetic. Even for a Navigator, one who stares into the abyss as a vocation, it is very hard to look upon a true instantiated shedim. Up close, they are the weft of nightmares, and they send the mortal mind into paroxysm.
The rest of the crew were little better. Erefan’s detail skidded into the chamber with their guns drawn and were soon gagging and vomiting and trying to keep their bowels under control. They weren’t particularly cowardly or foolish, they were just human, and so weren’t designed to be confronted by a denizen of the undiluted ether.
I understood too that we were all of us seeing very different things. I experienced the shedim, the daemon, in its corporeal aspect only – the matter it had taken and reshaped from the unfortunate acolyte and turned into its new body. That was horrific enough, in a biological kind of way, but it didn’t possess any further terror for one of my experience. The besoulled, on the other hand, could perceive its psychic aspect too, and that – I was told – was where the true fear lay. Even the smell of it could evoke that crushing sense of nausea and dread that made them lose their minds and surrender control over their bodies, and the sight was ten times worse.
Humans found so very much in the galaxy uniquely repulsive – the pariah and daemon and the xenos. I sometimes wondered how the fragile creatures ever lived long enough to breed.
I ordered the soldiers out, and they were just about able to understand battle-sign enough to comply. Then I wiped the ichor from my helm and dropped down to look at Slovo.
He was coming around. I guessed that being ripped from the warp-trance made it doubly difficult, but I needed to know what was going on.
Clean yourself, I signed to him again. Five minutes.
I pulled him to his feet and helped him walk out of there. I sealed the doors behind us, handed him over to his own surviving House menials and went to find a hose.
Five minutes later I was sitting opposite him in one of the ship’s lead-lined interrogation chambers, with Erefan present too. The three of us sat around a bolted-down table and tried to ignore the stench emanating from two of us.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Slovo started, his eyes flickering between Erefan and me. He had calmed down a lot, but was still febrile. ‘I don’t even know how to describe it.’
‘Try, please,’ said Erefan sourly. The captain had done well to bring us out of the warp so quickly without scattering the hull across a swath of space-time, but he wasn’t happy that he’d had to.
Slovo drew in a miserable breath. ‘The warp’s growing,’ he said.
I didn’t understand how that could be possible. The warp, I had always been told, was a mirror of reality – the one was the size of the other.
‘Very, very bad,’ Slovo went on. ‘Was watching it happen – tearing space like a sheet of paper. We were heading right down the fault line. It blew the outer aegis. I could hear them. Throne, I could hear them.’
‘Can’t you always hear them?’ asked Erefan.
‘Not like this.’