chewed on by gnawers.
I’d never seen such a ship before. It was enormous, more than twenty times bigger than the Cadamara, and obviously ancient. I could hardly read the Archaic Gothic inscriptions over the many cell doors, so mysterious were the cadences and vocabulary. The entire vessel was shrouded, the lumens kept low and the corridors blanketed in darkness. The term ‘Black Ship’ was not figurative – every part of it was formed of ebon metal, faintly reflective, adorned and studded with ward-patterns against corruption. Vast ether-sinks took up the bulk of the lower hull, thrumming with constant Geller processes to discharge and eject the build-up of psychic energy on board. The huge crew – three times what would have been present on a similar Navy battleship, I guessed – prowled the corridors incessantly. Most were human-normal, bearing the unmistakeable mark of psycho-conditioning and wielding strange weapons I didn’t recognise. Some, though, were blanks. And some of those, like me, were anathema psykana.
My first thought was that perhaps I knew some of them. Perhaps there were other refugees from Hestia’s convent. It did not take long to disabuse me of that hope. These were a mongrel mixture of refugees from the League of Black Ships, or Inquisitorial warbands, or such scattered convents as I’d been a part of. There were forty-five of us in total, drawn from twelve different units, each with its own armour and insignias and bitter histories.
Once I’d had a chance to adjust to my new reality, Navradaran had explained the situation. He had been sent out into the void, as had others of his order, following orders from his Captain-General. The ether had been growing more turbulent for decades, and portents of disaster had been growing in intensity. The Sisters of Silence, having been allowed to drift into memory, were being collected together again. The final actions had been taken just in time – any later, and the Rift would have made such a muster impossible. Even so, he suspected many hundreds of convents and Black Ships remained stranded on the far side, cut off from the light of the Astronomican and unable to force passage home.
As for us, we were little better off. The Enduring Abundance had a cadre of twenty Navigators, almost all of them stronger and healthier than Slovo. The entire ship was warded and buttressed against daemonic attack, with a crew of thousands all trained from birth to detect the slightest manifestation of the empyrean, and so they’d made better headway than us. Even so, Navradaran told me, they could not remain in the void for long. Each jump was escalating in danger, and they’d lost three of their Navigators to madness on the last major haul. He professed surprise that we’d lasted as long as we had, and even more surprise that we’d managed to plot a route in the absence of the Astronomican’s guide.
I didn’t tell him about the map, which remained under guard on the Cadamara. In truth I doubted whether it had been the thing that had saved us at all – Slovo claimed that it had been a poor compass, and that we had made our way largely through luck and instinct – but still I didn’t wish to have its presence disclosed. It was the one thing I had taken from the ruins of my past life, and I felt sure its existence meant something significant, but I would only share that with someone I could trust.
You might think that was foolish, given the situation, and perhaps it was, but you must remember this: I was furious. My anger with the universe, which had always been there, always bubbling under, had burst out now. I saw in the Enduring Abundance just what could have been, had the Imperium not inexplicably lost faith in us. I saw the huge resources, once placed under our direct control, that the old Sisters of Silence had been trusted to administer. I looked at this Custodian’s fabulously decorated battleplate, and saw the astonishing equipment he used, and looked at my chipped armour and thought of my rusting flamer.
Whenever we conversed, always in Thoughtmark, I felt that resentment clouding everything.
You were not fighting, I wanted to tell him. We were here, all the time, forgotten and left to fend for ourselves. You remained behind the walls, treated like gods. And now you presume to gather us to Terra, beneficent and indulgent, as if we had been wilful children ripe for scolding.
I didn’t