Flense found himself floundering for speech again. ‘I’ve never been admitted to a sacrosanctorium before, lord,’ he began.
Heldane extended his arms wide – too wide for anything but a skeletal giant like Heldane, Flense shuddered – to encompass the chamber. Those present were standing in one of the Absalom’s astropath sanctums, a chamber screened from all intrusion. The walls were null-field dead spaces designed to shut out both the material world and the screaming void of the Immaterium. Sound-proofed, psyker-proofed, wire-proofed, these inviolable cocoons were dedicated and reserved for the astropathic retinue alone. They were prohibited by Imperial law. Only a direct invitation could admit a blunt human such as Flense.
Blunt. Flense didn’t like the word, and hadn’t been aware of it until Lekulanzi had used it.
Blunt. A psyker’s word for the non-psychic. Blunt. Flense wished by the Ray of Hope he could be elsewhere. Any elsewhere.
‘You are discomforting my cousins,’ Heldane said to Flense, indicating the three astropaths, who were fidgeting and murmuring. ‘They sense your reluctance to be here. They sense their stigma.’
‘I have no prejudices, inquisitor.’
‘Yes, you have. I can taste them. You detest mind-seers. You despise the gift of the astropath. You are a blunt, Flense. A sense-dead moron. Shall I show you what you are missing?’
Flense shook. ‘No need, inquisitor!’
‘Just a touch? Be a sport.’ Heldane sniggered, droplets of spittle flecking off his thick teeth.
Flense shuddered. Heldane turned his gaze away slowly and then snapped back suddenly. Impossible light flooded into Flense’s skull. For one second, he saw eternity. He saw the angles of space, the way they intersected with time. He saw the tides of the Empyrean, and the wasted fringes of the Immaterium, the fluid spasms of the warp. He saw his mother, his sister, both long dead. He saw light and darkness and nothingness. He saw colours without name. He saw the birth torments of the gen-estealer whose blood would scar his face. He saw himself on the drill-field of the Schola on Primagenitor. He saw an explosion of blood. Familiar blood. He started to cry. He saw bones buried in rich, black mud. He realised they, too, were his own. He looked into the sockets. He saw maggots. He screamed. He vomited. He saw a red-dark sky and an impossible number of suns. He saw a star overload and collapse. He saw–
Too much.
Draker Flense fell to the floor of the sacrosanctorium, soiled himself and started to whimper.
‘I’m glad we’ve got that straight,’ Inquisitor Heldane said. He raised his cowl again. ‘Let me start over. I serve Dravere, as you do. For him, I will bend the stars. For him, I will torch planets. For him, I will master the unmasterable.’
Flense moaned.
‘Get up. And listen to me. The most priceless artefact in space awaits our lord in the Menazoid Clasp. Its description and circumstance lies with the Commissar Gaunt. We will obtain that secret. I have already expended precious energies trying to reach it. This Gaunt is… resourceful. You will allow yourself to be used in this matter. You and the Patricians. You already have a feud with them.’
‘Not this… not this…’ Flense rasped from the floor.
‘Dravere spoke highly of you. Do you remember what he said?’
‘N– no…’
Heldane’s voice changed and became a perfect copy of Dravere’s. ‘If you win this for me, Flense, I’ll not forget it. There are great possibilities in my future, if I am not tied here. I would share them with you.’
‘Now is the time, Flense,’ Heldane said in his own voice once more. ‘Share in the possibilities. Help me to acquire what my Lord Dravere demands. There will be a place for you, a place in glory. A place at the side of the new war-master.’
‘Please!’ Flense cried. He could hear the astropaths laughing at him.
‘Are you still undecided?’ Heldane asked. He stepped towards the curled, foetal colonel. ‘Another look?’ he suggested.
Flense began to shriek.
Nine
‘THEY’RE EXCLUDING US,’ Feygor said out of the silence.
Rawne snapped an angry glance round at his adjutant, but he knew what the lean man meant. It had been four hours since the rest of the officers had been called into their meeting with Gaunt. How convenient that he and his platoon had been excluded. Of course, if what Corbec said was true and there was trouble aboard, a good picket was essential. But in the natural order of things, it should have been Folore’s platoon, the sixteenth, who took first shift.