express that to him, not in so many signs, but he must have detected my latent fury, for he wasn’t stupid. The ship’s armoury was huge, and I was fitted out with better armour and better weaponry. It didn’t wipe away the sense of injustice, but it did make me feel more lethal. I donned myself in golden armour with a rich purple cloak, just as my predecessors had worn, and replaced my old helm with a portcullis grille of pure auramite. I put my flamer aside and took up a greatblade. It was an insane weapon, almost as tall as I was, but the extravagance appealed to me.
All of us aboard spent long hours in training. There were other Custodians alongside Navradaran, and they worked obsessively in the practice cages. I had to admit they were impressive to watch. They moved incredibly fast for their size, and I guessed they would have taken out that Black Legionnaire on Arraissa far more efficiently than I had. I studied them for a long time, trying not to be too envious, and often failing. I came to hate their quiet, steady resolve. They never complained, they never got angry. Everything with them was polished and reverent, like diplomats somehow siphoned into the suits of warriors. I might have thought they were automata had I not seen the way they moved a blade. Throne, they were even well spoken, and they treated me with such relentless politeness and consideration that I wanted to scream.
That was the core problem – I needed an excuse to loathe them, and they wouldn’t give me one. So I did what they did, took up my blade, and worked myself into a lather of exhaustion. I absorbed everything I could from them all – the Custodians, my fellow Sisters, even the Black Ship’s senior garrison command – drinking in what my isolation had prevented me from learning across all those years.
I don’t know how long that journey lasted. It felt like weeks, but time in the warp passed as strangely as ever and so that might be wrong. Navradaran was sure the whole time that we were headed back for war. He told me that, over and over.
‘Terra was already on a knife-edge when I left,’ he said to me. ‘There were portents, but they led us astray. The Council was divided, and Valoris could see more clearly than anyone that we were heading for crisis. Hence this harvest.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘My apologies – that sounds disrespectful, but you take my meaning.’
I could have punched his big, elegant face. Now we were needed. Now we were wanted. I suppose that was what Lokk had picked up on, only too late to be useful. The Enemy had known more than we had, it seemed – one way or another someone would have come for us, and only we ourselves had been ignorant of where the tides were headed.
There’s a limit to how much resentment you can indulge in, however. I was a servant of the Emperor after all, and for all Navradaran’s infuriating manner I had no doubt he was right about the time of crisis. The galaxy had split in two and the Astronomican had gone out. Half of me expected to reach Terra to find it already lain waste, not that I would have ever disclosed that thought to my more pious companions.
So on the final approaches, when the Enduring Abundance crashed through the raging warp like a cetacean wallowing in crude oil, its engines spluttering and its ancient hull creaking, there were no illusions. We suited up, we prepared our blades, we prepped the landers.
We were travelling into the inferno, that we knew.
But nothing could have prepared me, not really. I might not have had a soul, but I had an intellect and I had emotions, and neither of them helped with what we found once we broke the veil.
The Enduring Abundance burned inwards from the Mandeville point at full speed, kicking in plasma drives the moment the warp bubble ripped open. The rest of the fleet came through with it, clustered together to make the best use of the Black Ship’s superior navigation and power.
I never saw any of this. I was already in my lander – a heavy slab of adamantium slung under a big launch-claw in the outer hull. I was there with four of my sisters. One of them, Reva, had come from a convent like me, one based on the