the whirlwind of the hive-zones, forced to open fire not on xenos or heretics, but on their own kind storming supply bunkers or ransacking cathedrals for gold.
Thirty-three days seems such a short time, set against the span of years before and after, but in truth it felt like an eternity. I barely slept during the whole period, and only staved off mania due to heavy self-dosing of narcotics. The air fizzed with fevered energies, making true rest or contemplation impossible. Every glance seemed to disclose fresh terrors in the dark. I would wake from snatched half-hours of slumber crying out, clutching at my sweat-dank sheets. On one occasion I looked in the mirror while shaving to see a leering daemon-face staring back at me, and I had to shatter the glass to get rid of it. Another night I nearly choked on my own nightmares of being skinned alive by laughing butchers in winged helms, and it took Jek to calm me down and stop me chewing my own tongue off.
Yes, Jek was sharing my bed. Do not judge us harshly for that – we had not given into base lust, but had been thrown together by something like need. Back then she was the only one I could trust completely, and I think she felt the same way about me. If she had not been there, I do not know what would have happened to me. I clung to her, and she clung to me. We were like neophytes again in the face of that maelstrom, stripped of our offices and pretensions and reduced to what we had always really been.
‘I should be able to shake free of it,’ I told her, lying in the dark.
‘The worst will pass,’ she said, not sounding at all certain.
I chewed my lip nervously. The shadows in my chamber seemed unnaturally black, as if they would suddenly slither up on to the bed and strangle me.
‘I was so sure,’ I said.
‘Sure of what?’
‘The Council. I was so sure the Legio would be remade, and I would be its architect, and then all would be well.’
‘There was never a guarantee.’
But I remembered what Valoris had told me. He had thought I was the conduit for His will. I had come to believe it too. What else could explain my extraordinary certainty, emerging from a life in which certainty had always been absent?
Such hubris.
‘Perhaps He no longer even lives,’ I murmured.
‘Hush!’ Jek chided urgently, sitting up and pressing her finger to my mouth. ‘Do not even think it.’
Once I would have found the notion itself absurd. I would not have uttered it even in private, wary of the listening devices of the Ordo Hereticus. Now I found I cared nothing for spies and inquisitors. All was undone, and there was no greater terror to be unleashed than that which already had been.
I rose. It was still early, several hours before dawn, but the sickly red glow, now permanent, leaked through the drapes and across my chamber. I padded to the pulse-shower cubicle and washed the worst of the night-sweat from my skin. Under the harsh lumens I looked pastier and flabbier than ever, and my cheeks hung from my bones like rags.
By the time I returned to dress, Jek had fallen asleep again. I looked at her for a while. She was so much younger. Perhaps that made it harder for her. I had seen too much hope drain away over the years already – she should have lived to see better times.
I could not linger, of course. Despite the fatigue and the sickness, we were busier than we had ever been. The Council was feverish with activity, passing resolution after resolution. Martians were crawling through the deeps of the Throne and the conduits of the Astronomican, prying and testing and trying whatever they could to restore the sacred beacon. I had guessed for some time that they were charlatans in many ways, dabbling in things they no longer understood, and their hapless tinkering during that time only reinforced my view. When I looked Raskian in the eye – or rather, what passed for his eyes – I detected a real fear there: not of death or pain, but of being discovered, found out as ignorant and deluded about that which they so jealously guarded as their own realm.
Once I had made myself as respectable as possible, I left my bedchamber and limped to the audience rooms. Guards were everywhere, all carrying their weapons unholstered