So, we found Heinrix's heresy machine in a hall right next to the bay with the fused mutants. I half-expected some obviously monstrous mechanical creature like the Daemon Engine we had fought on the Mechanicus ship, or an assembly line that churned out cursed objects by the minute, but in the end it was just a cogitator. A big one, that grew like a tumour on the metal bulkheads; a massive one, many meters long, with a sort of Chaos shrine built over its main screen and command panels — so tall it disappeared in the gloom, icons and lights blinking all over it like a hive city at night. Candles and braziers, set in the shrine, flickered and reflected the purple haze of the Immaterium. Looking at them awoke a pulsating migraine in my temple. Argenta advocated for us to run back to the ship and grab several flamers to purge the place. I privately agreed with her, but Heinrix snapped that he needed to study the thing before we destroyed it. Now, I understand that he trained his whole life for this, that while it wasn't safe he, of all people, would know how to get away with it… but I hated the thought. Every step closer to the device built nausea in my throat. Something deep in my belly screamed that this wasn't for us humans; not faith, faith had nothing to do with it. Call it a survival instinct. This cogitator's shape felt wrong, as if I couldn't see it fully, as if by blinking its angles would change. It felt distorted, like those grotesque mirrors that bend reality, and bloated, and evil. There was a mind in there. A mind that roared with enough electric might to power a continent; a mind that hated us and to which we were nothing but pawns.

I shook my head to clear my own mind. The others had already fallen behind, but I still followed Heinrix. There was no way I would let him near that thing unsupervised.

Well, the Master Interrogator of the Inquisition raised his hand in a warning gesture and, his voice slightly tense, told me to stop. I must have looked fairly unimpressed, because he added: 'This is a creation of the Archenemy. Don't go near it. You have done enough for me and my mission — don't put yourself at risk now.'

I rolled my eyes, but getting hurt merely to piss him off would have been counterproductive, so I just readied my laspistol. At that range, I couldn't miss either the cogitator or, Emperor forbid, Heinrix himself anyway if he turned rabid with scrap-code, or the Warp, or both at once.

As soon as Heinrix took another step towards the cogitator, the thing emitted a shriek like metal needles driving over glass, as though it sensed danger approaching. The sound made my teeth hurt. Heinrix winced, but managed to approach the control panel and bend down towards the screens, covered in running binharic gibberish. Despite the heat clogging the room, I felt an ice-cold breeze; he must have been using his powers to ward off the pernicious effects of the Chaos artefact. The screens blinked like eyes. Black graffiti seemed to hover at the edge of my perception.

In the purple half-gloom, Heinrix's face was stern, his attention fully focused on the cogitator — reading things I could not conceive on its screens, interpreting glowing runes, guessing, reflecting. His hands darted from reel to lever, sometimes hovering with uncertainty over the next switch, which immediately received a coating of frost. He whispered to himself. The Veil thinned; the air became thick as molasses, but still he studied. The need to run away tickled my back.

At last, Heinrix half-turned to me, haggard and pale, his eyes almost black. 'Hecatombe determinans,' he said. 'Sacrifices. More and more sacrifices every minute. The womb of this cursed machine is down on the lower levels. It is fuelled by the energy harnessed from thousands of people — who are flowing beneath our feet like slag waste as we speak. And I know why the Fabricator-Censor prized this monster so highly; it is a thing that goes beyond the limits of the Omnissiah's power. It is designed to process myriad possibilities using warp sorcery. It has almost finished its task.' Lower, he added: 'It… it predicts the future, Katov.'

Predicting the future! Some use the Emperor's Tarot to that end — or tea leaves, or the entrails of the condemned — with variable success, but a machine? I would have asked how it was possible, but Heinrix had already said it: warp sorcery. Nothing I could comprehend. Or want to comprehend, for that matter. It was enough to know it was powered by a thousand murders a minute. The scope of this crime against humanity was so terribly large it left me numb. A whole world, sacrificed. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of living, breathing people — men, women, tech-priests, old, young, happy, weary, hopeful or vain — all the tapestry of society, turned into kindle. The horror on Heinrix's expression reflected my own, but there was something more there, in the frown of his brow.

'Are you all right?' I asked.

He answered with a grimace. 'I'll be fine. I have encountered the heretic's mechanical abominations before.' Slowly, almost reluctantly, he continued. 'The fruit they bear… no matter how abhorrent their instruments, the fruit they bear could be useful.'

A bucket of ice tightened around my heart. I bared my teeth in revulsion. 'You have to be joking.'

'Knowing one's enemy is the path to destroying them, Katov. If, in order to prevent countless future calamities, I must perpetuate my own, such is my duty to the Golden Throne.'

I hate the Inquisition. Despite how hard it was with the Warp acting up, I closed the distance between Heinrix and me and hissed: 'Are you out of your fucking mind?'

'No. I labour, however, both under an oath and an order.'

'We need to stop this cogitator for the sake of those still alive down there! You cannot seriously consider allowing this, this murder machine to finish its calculations! It's using people!' I was so angry I nearly stuttered, but not so angry that I missed the haze glassing over Heinrix's eyes, now that I was closer. I grabbed his collar, forcing him to look away from the cogitator screens, to look at me instead.

Heinrix vacillated for a second. He closed his eyes and shook his head as though clearing away mental fog. 'You can't use the Archenemy's device to foil him,' I continued. 'I don't care what orders Calcazar gave you, if he specifically asked you to do this he's an idiot. And if you can think, even for a minute, that you can look straight into the heart of the most disgusting witchery I've ever heard of, and use it for good, Emperor! That's beyond arrogance!'

Like a man who wakes up, Heinrix rubbed his face. The haze had passed. He looked his usual self: a normal asshole (all right, an attractive asshole), not one who slaughters innocents before breakfast.

'You are right. I… I almost succumbed to the Archenemy's old trick — the lure of the unattainable — the primary of all traps that Chaos sets for unwary souls.' He looked down; a wry smile stretched his lips when he saw the laspistol in my hand. 'Thank you,' he said.

'How do we shut this thing down?'

'Like this.' Turning back to the control panels, he started working on them again, his movements exacts and purposeful. One by one, the cogitator screens began to fade to black. The roar of its insides quietened to a barely perceptible howl. It whined in dejection and Heinrix worked furiously over the keys, silencing it. He struggled: some screens lit up again, and he cursed like a voidsman. Little by little, though, the terrible pressure against my mind faded and we all breathed more freely. Soon, the hall was silent, dark… and empty. I didn't know if the twisted machine spirit was slain or just asleep, but its presence was gone. At last.

The rasping sound of Pasqal's vox made me jump like a startled lagomorph. He suggested we got moving: the Fabricator-Censor was bound to notice his beloved murder cogitator had fallen silent. A good suggestion, that we immediately followed.

Our search for the Fabricator-Censor brought us deeper still inside the manufactorum; we twice had to fight our way through.

The first was when we walked into what was, in retrospect, a trap set up at a choke point. Skitarii, lost to the scrap-code infection, had mounted a near perfect ambush, hiding between pillars in a hall we had to cross. They were led by a heretek who claimed to be Dementz Haneumann; I thought Pasqal and Abelard would fight to decide who got to take him down. In the end, it was Argenta who did it, a volley of bolt-rounds tearing through the heretek's half-mechanical guts, and I have seldom seen two grown men sulk that much for so little. Pasqal consoled himself by picking his homonym's neural cogitator from his skull. I don't get why he is so worked up about people sharing a name with him, but if elucidating the mystery of his family tree makes him happy, who am I to judge?

The second fight was against a Chaos Marine. Well, the lexmechanic had said there was one, after all.

Unlike Aurora — that mountain of a warrior on Rykad Minoris — he wasn't waiting for us. The first clue we had to his presence had been the drone of a deep voice that echoed down along the bays, a voice that sent shivers down my spine. Wordlessly, we got closer, hiding behind bulkheads, weapons at the ready.

The tone, the cadence… even before I heard the words themselves, I knew: the man was preaching a sermon. About a dozen men and women — not tech-priests, normal people — stood before the Marine, looking up at him in adoration. Here was no scrap-code, no compulsion to worhsip the Archenemy: just people who made the wrong choice and consorted with creatures whose goal is to eradicate humanity. People who thought this would put them up the food chain. In their attitude of abject devotion, I saw nothing worth saving. They had made their bed; I would make sure they lay in it. They were complicit in the murder of millions.

As soon as we were in position, we rushed in. The cultists were badly armed which, on a forge world, was ridiculous, and we tore through them leaving nothing but trails of blood. Their patron, in armour inscribed with heretical sigils, threw away the book from which he had been reading; he towered over us like a phantom of rage and might. But I knew we could take him: formidable as Aurora had been, we had been victorious in the end. His chainsword wailed uselessly, missing Abelard by an inch, and Abelard's power hammer rang when he struck back, cracking ceramite plating. My seneschal is nothing short of a menace.

A tempest of fire and blows filled the bay. In its heart was our foe. He fought well — this I admit. He bloodied Cassia's chest with a chainsword blow that tore through her bodyglove. He cracked Heinrix's ribs, kicking him away with such force that the impact dented a bulkhead. His bolter rounds found a rent in Argenta's silver armour and her left elbow became useless. Still, we overcame him. Tearing his armour away, piercing his augmetic flesh, crushing his skull when he fell. He expired cursing the Emperor. Argenta spat on him.

We needed rest. I called to the shuttle that they relay a message to the Emperor's Mercy: we would camp there, rest until morning and lick our wounds, and I asked for the ship to send down people to hold the parts of the manufactorum we had already been through, under Jae's and Yrliet's command. To send a chirurgeon and a medicae, too. And a few inferni armed with flamers to clean that horrible place with the mutated piles of limbs — people — in cages. The shuttle pad could only accommodate a single craft, so all this would take time.

What I wouldn't have given for a squad of assault troops to support us! But there was none to be had aboard the ship. Only glorified enforcers and guards who were only beginning to master the basics of combat strategies. To bring them along to face the Fabricator-Censor would have been a waste of life. Still, they could stand guard and allow us to have an uninterrupted night's sleep.

Bedrolls were rolled out. Rations were distributed (to everyone save Pasqal, who had already sustained himself seven days ago and wouldn't need to do so again for about another week). We allowed ourselves to relax. Cassia seemed to approach the experience of sleeping on the field with equanimity; although the lack of decorum made her ill at ease, she still kept an excellent grasp on her emotions, so that I barely felt a lurch of her own discomfort when Abelard kindly explained that yes, she was expected to sleep in her clothes.

After the atrocities we had witnessed, we needed some levity, so I found a funny story to tell from my time with the 12th Fusiliers of Nihra IV. It involved a gormless colonel, a sentry too clever for their own good, and had led me to spell out that burning out loose threads from one's uniform (or worse, a superior officer's) was forbidden. Particularly if the goal was to find an excuse for having a lighter out because one wasn't meant to smoke lho-sticks on duty. Soon, Abelard and Argenta were swapping stories; the sister's dry humour was wonderful and she had Cassia laughing in no time. With me, Argenta was guarded at all times, as if she were afraid of getting close, and she watched me like a hawk. Seeing her relaxed made me long for the friendship that could have been. Heinrix had chosen to sit by me.

'I can absolutely picture you telling the colonel that he had it coming,' he said.

'Second-degree burns are a small price to pay to learn dress uniforms are flammable and that gold tresses are not actually made of metal.' I drank some of my soup (probably mushroom-flavoured). 'He was lucky I didn't recommend the sentry for promotion for being an effective teacher of notions usually acquired before the age of ten.'

Heinrix's eyes crinkled when he smiled. Our feet touched — the most daring thing either of us would have risked in public then: that was long before Commorragh. When he turned his attention back to the storytellers, I thought he would fall back to his usual dispassionate self, but he shot me back a sheepish glance.

'People are often lucky around you,' he said clumsily.

I waited for the nastiness that was sure to follow. It didn't come. To fill the silence, Heinrix thanked me for saving him from the lure of Chaos. I shrugged and replied: 'Thank yourself for being so insufferable that I need to keep an eye on you.'

The barb didn't feel as satisfying as usual. The laspistol at my hip was suddenly a cumbersome burden. Deep down, I wasn't so sure I would have taken him out had the scrap-code infected him. Or, if I had, I would have been properly pissed off about it. Not sad or guilty, no, those are difficult feelings and I dislike difficult feelings. Anger would have been safer. I put my bowl down on the floor, between us, and squeezed his gloved hand.

'I'm just glad that you resisted temptation,' I told him low. This, this felt right to say.

Morning was no different than night. The light, the noise, it all was the same. We started early, feeling refreshed and much more ready to deal with a Fabricator-Censor who had, in all probability, established serious defences. Or would have, if he had been clever about it. To think I had been worried of facing guerrilla soldiers entrenched throughout the manufactorum! Hives like this are the perfect place for guerrilla warfare; a small force that knows the terrain can hold for a very long time and inflict very high losses to any assailant. But tech-priests are no strategists. The Fabricator-Censor had killed too many and corrupted too few, and those he kept even that Chaos Marine of his hadn't known how to use. So his incompetence explains why we weren't met with barricades and snipers and instead wandered right into the Fabricator-Censor's lair. Fighting idiots is infuriating, because you always have to worry they're about to do something so blindingly stupid it will surprise you, and by the look of it the Fabricator-Censor had sworn to test my temper. Just in case murdering people by putting them through a cursed meat-grinder to power a cogitator shat out by the Warp hadn't done it already.

On an open floor, wide as a plaza, Fabricator-Censor Cubis Delphim stood, waiting for us, his arachnid metal form surrounded by a few hovering servo-skulls that spouted heresy in binharic. Two Daemon Engines were behind him, too far to effectively cover the way in, and the handful of corrupted skitarii and technomats he had left were arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way that did fuck all to protect him. He straightened when he saw us, pistons and mechadendrites clanging and groaning, and instead of shooting us the instant we came within range, he began another speech.

'You!' He shouted, and probably would have pointed a dramatically accusatory finger in our direction if he had remembered how normal humans behaved. Or had any finger left. 'The probability of navigating your way… of reaching the inner line… was negligible!'

Repellent scrapes and screeches punctuated his speech. Not even bothering to hide my gestures, I signed for my companions to get in position while Cubis Delphim moaned that something he called the Primordial Truth (and I could hear the majuscules) guarded him and his work, and wondered why we hadn't been eliminated. If he had genuinely wanted tactical feedback, I could have provided him with at least three tomes of it in small print, but instead Abelard and Heinrix charged, Argenta's bolted roared, Cassia threw a curse of the Immaterium at a minion, pushing their soul through a metaphorical strainer, Pasqal called a blessing upon our weapons and imparted us, through our comm-beads, with his situational analysis, and I was just left to steady my longlas on a crate before picking out a target. Cassia's victim, already disoriented, made an excellent choice. Our enemies weren't defenceless, though, and retaliated with gusto. Thankfully, by the time the heavy, clunky, slow Daemon Engines reached our position, the skitarii had fallen. I once again made a private note to never get between Abelard and his quarry. His power hammer was red as the dead priests' robes.

What little cover there was got blown to smithereens soon afterwards. We began by methodically targeting one of the Daemon Engines while the Fabricator-Censor, who had completely lost it, trilled an awful tirade of binharic mixed with plain old Gothic that probably would have earned him several death sentences had anyone bothered to keep count. His metal pincers, that painfully reminded me of the Janus daemonettes, were much more worth tracking than his words: a lightning bolt of pale electricity, surging from a mechadendrite, singed my hair just as I rolled away from my cover. I became deaf, because of the detonation, and felt lightly stunned. Argenta got him to fall back before he could push his advantage.

We were all glad of having met a Daemon Engine before: finding and targeting their weak points was easier. We knew to look out for their counterattacks. Those machines were oblivious to the suppressive fire Argenta and I unleashed upon them, so that while Heinrix and Abelard got to work on the first one we kept the other at bay and readied it for them. I had to blink several times, as Cassia worked the Veil in an unsettling way, confusing and weakening the Fabricator-Censor. Pasqal had shelved his great axe — such a pretty thing, with gold inlays of skulls and cogs, and deadly, too — in favour of a melta. I couldn't hear his warnings to look away in time and had the dubious privilege of getting the afterimage of a mechadendrite — burned to white and then vaporised — etched on my retina for long minutes. There would be no more lightning bolts.

We fell back once, to regroup and breathe, and to draw out the limping Fabricator-Censor away from his slow demonic protectors. When he made the mistake of stepping into our snare, a krak grenade fractured the plate that protected whatever organics were left in his torso. Pasqal finished him while the rest of us redirected our efforts to the Daemon Engines, one of which leaked promethium and set fire to itself on accident. Clouds of black smoke choked the air until its engine failed under repeated assaults. The second one wasn't much easier to bring down, and when the fight was over we all sat down of the metal floor, sweaty, dirty, bruised and sometimes bleeding. The water I drank from my canteen tasted like ash, because of the black smoke on my lips. We were victorious… yet, it felt underwhelming. It was all over, strangely.

'Is this all that was necessary to retake a whole planet?' I asked. 'Kill one single heretic?'

'Affirmative,' replied Pasqal. 'The nature of this particular deviation from the holy tenets of the Omnissiah put the burden of leadership on the apostate Cubis Delphim. His demise means queries shall remain unanswered. This shall enable a widespread purge of his remaining followers at a very low casualty cost.'

'How do you know?'

Beneath his red hood, Pasqal raised the eyebrow over his biological eye. 'The organisation of the cult was very clearly stated in the many treaties of doctrine I accessed over the local noosphere. My assessment is a simple rationale pushed to its natural conclusion. It holds a ninety-four point three percents of certainty within the usual confidence interval.'

Tech-priests. I wasn't sure I was so fond of them anymore, present company excluded. Perhaps changing their chain of command, removing power from a single entity, would be a good idea. Rising with a groan, I considered the destruction around us: dead bodies, dead Fabricator-Censor, dead piles of junk that had once been Daemon Engines. I had a headache — the smell of promethium, maybe — and the bay swayed a bit once I was up. Had it been this gloomy when we fought? I turned to ask Abelard if he had noticed anything; he was close enough that I could have touched him, and yet by some trick of perspective he appeared very far away. A smog, purplish, noxious, had invaded the bay; discharges of static created lightning that stank of ozone. When I tried to speak, my tongue was locked in my mouth. When I tried to scream, the air in my lungs ran out. And scream I wanted to, in primeval horror, because a giant monster in the shape of a man — deformed by power armour, deformed by his own corruption, but powerful, so powerful, mighty as Death itself — stepped towards me. His pauldrons carried braziers that burned blue and gave out a sickeningly sweet smell — the smell of ripe cadavers made into perfume. A cursed metal crown — or horns, maybe? — grew from his bald head, tattooed with unholy sigils and lit with a golden gaze like smouldering brands. The fleshless heads of his enemies hung from his belt, worms feeding on their eyes. He held a sceptre adorned with an eight-pointed star and, when he took a step towards me, the ground trembled. My legs buckled and I fell, retching with nausea, dimly aware that my companions rushed around me. But I barely saw them, never heard them; the grey, shadowy ashes of ageless destruction were all that was around me. The ashes roared in tempest, burning my eyes, and through my tears I glimpsed the colossal silhouette walk towards me. I saw lavish bas-reliefs of snarling demons on his armour, of a blood red so deep it was black. The warrior's inhuman eyes bore into mine, and when he spoke his voice rumbled deep in my bones.

'I am the master of those who have been felled by your hand in the halls of the Primordial Truth. I am Uralon the Cruel. The souls of my followers returned to the fount of power they served, crying out for me to cast my gaze toward this sacrilege. And what do I see?'

With his steel-covered hand, he grabbed my hair, forcing me to look up. Pain, oh the pain that tore through every nerve in my body! I screamed like in a dream; I howled like no human can. He let me go and flung me on the ground, saying, every word dripping with disdain: 'Yet another lackey of the corpse emperor.' The sound of his voice was enough to make the whirlwind subside. The raging storm quieted around him — around us. The manufactorum had disappeared. I was lost in a wasteland of death where shadows, bound in misery, wailed.

'Kiava Gamma is my world, under my protection. It is no dominion of Chaos.'

The giant laughed. 'Clinging to illusions will do you no good. The rituals have already been performed. The mortals are already singing the litanies of the Primordial Truth and decorating the sacrificial altars with their flesh. Kiava Gamma, as you call it, is already saturated in the nectar of the Truth — a fate that awaits all worlds that would stand in our way. The Final Dawn has risen over it as it did over Rykad Minoris.'

Horrified, I looked at him and I remembered Rykad Minoris. I remembered the purple tides of Immaterium engulfing the planet, changing it to a pustule of Chaos. I remembered that I had had the chance of destroying it, and that I had given it away to save a few thousands. Now that I saw Uralon and heard his raucous laugh as he remembered his victory, I was petrified by the scope of my mistake.

'What do you want with me?'

'I want to look upon the one who has disrupted my flock's duties and my master's plans. That warrior from my Legion, the Fabricator-Censor… You think of their deaths as a triumph; it is but a minor hindrance on our path. There are other worlds that serve our goals. There are other sources of plasteel and adamantine. Revel in you victory — it will change nothing. You, are nothing. Nevertheless, the blood in your veins whispered to the spirits that you warrant a closer look.' I couldn't fight, I couldn't rise, I couldn't hope to make it out alive, so I listened, because as long as he spoke he wouldn't unsheathe his scimitar and add my head to his collection. His voice fell to a purr; he mused about my ancestry and the Warrant of Trade Kunrad, the Master of Whispers, had tried to get when he rose against Theodora. 'By defiling the relic and binding it to himself with the tethers of the Empyrean, he was meant to become my servant — a Rogue Trader who would do the work of the Truth… but then you interfered.'

His hand closed on my jaw and he pulled me up. The smell from his braziers went to my head, bringing unwanted images of might. The pain where he held me, right under the angle of my jaw, was unbearable. His voice became a caress. 'Could it be,' Uralon asked, 'that you are the one destined to gain the true gods' favour instead of the worm Kunrad? Do you wish to present the corpse's relic to me and serve the Truth?' He let me go; I stumbled, but managed to stand. He walked around me, staring at me like a hungry wolf, undressing my soul like a rapist, and he spoke, softly, kindly, almost.

'Do you hear your very blood calling, begging you to submit to me — what would be the point of futile defiance? Von Valancius, serve me, and take your rightful place below my throne.'

I don't know what sorcery he used, but he gave me visions. People bowing to me, people toiling for me, people begging for mercy and being slain when they refused to serve. A life free from the Imperium; rich as I was, mighty as I was, nothing would stop me! And in turn I would serve a lofty goal to understand the universe. Not obsessively collect knowledge like the Priesthood of Mars does — peek behind the Veil, and truly understand how the gods of the Warp toil to one day reign supreme. The rewards I would get then! Immortality would only be the beginning! My every pleasure fulfilled, my every ambition accomplished, my every vengeance bloody and full!

It was repulsive.

We are born, we live, we die, and the worth of our souls is counted in the golden tapestry of the bonds we share with those we cherish and help. The galaxy is a terrible place, full of suffering; adding to its pain is despicable. What did I care for higher powers if all they wanted was for me to crush the unwilling? Why would I further their goals of domination over a humanity that did an excellent job at oppressing itself? They held nothing of worth in my eyes.

And destiny doesn't exist. My blood didn't call for anything. Chance and Theodora's machinations had brought me to the Koronus Expanse, but I had had no higher calling. I was my own mistress. Uralon's offer filled me with disgust — enough to overcome the bonds he had placed on me. I rebelled. My soul bursting with outrage, I said: 'You waste your time trying to tempt me. It is not blood that defines a person's fate, but their own deeds.' I breathed in the ashy air and growled. 'Only their will leads them. And my will is thus: begone from my mind!'

Uralon's expression twisted in pain as he stared at me in rage and bafflement. 'Pitiful insect! You dare —'

The wind obeyed me now. It swept Uralon's figure with a hail, pushing him back in the depths of the Warp in screaming fury. He vanished without a trace, and the mist around me began to dissipate, revealing once again the comfortably solid reality of the manufactorum. I was lying on the cold floor, the taste of iron in my mouth. When I moved, my every muscle hurt. Abelard gave a sigh of cantankerous relief.

'Oh, Holy Terra! The seizure has passed!' he cried out. 'If I had lost a second Rogue Trader in such a paltry span of time, my only option would have been to shoot myself out of unending shame. Are you all right, lord-captain?'

'Yes.' My voice came out as a croak. I struggled up and searched for my canteen, but it had fallen and spilled. Cassia handed me hers. I drank with relish. Heinrix helped me get up, a stern worry on his face.

'I sensed the presence of another psyker,' he said. 'Someone mentally made contact with you with indescribable power, then tried to harm you with sorcery. I did what I could… you at least appear unharmed. Can you remember what you saw?'

'A Chaos Marine. He… he said something about how the blood in my veins will lead me to serve Chaos. Uralon the Cruel was his name.'

Abelard bristled and called that nonsense. 'House von Valancius is absolutely free of Chaos taint, lord-captain! Look, the late lady Theodora…'

'Let the Ruinous Powers take hold of two of her major colonies,' I snapped. 'Abelard, her own cousin — my own cousin too — tried to nick the Warrant of Trade to bind it to some Chaos god. I have proof she dealt in artefacts so cursed Jae wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole, and that were a copy of some Final Dawn device. Theodora was more than grossly negligent. She had heretical tendencies herself, and it does seem to run in the family. I won't blame anyone who makes a polite exit at our next stop.'

You would have heard a pin drop. Argenta said: 'The lord-captain is right, seneschal. Lady Theodora was a heretic. That is the reason why I tied my steps to lady Katov — to ensure the dynasty would not fall again to the Ruinous Powers.' Her face hardened in a snarl. No one asked how she knew. I remembered the precise wound in Theodora's head and began piecing things together.

'But,' stuttered Abelard, his own expression awash with grief. 'But lady Theodora closely worked with the Inquisition! Surely, the Lord Inquisitor would not have tolerated… or would have noticed…'

I shot a glance at Heinrix and said: 'The Lord Inquisitor sent his acolyte to investigate the Final Dawn in the Koronus Expanse, by using Theodora's ship. Calcazar has enough resources that he could have asked anyone to play taxi without having to wait for the Emperor's Mercy to come back in the Expanse carrying the new dynastic heirs.'

'I wasn't specifically told to investigate lady Theodora,' added Heinrix to soften the blow, as Abelard appeared to be on the verge of tears. 'Although I wasn't instructed to trust her either.' Oh, not softening the blow, then. Just making its boundaries more precise. 'Did the renegade make you an offer, Katov?'

'Yes. The Warrant itself — as if it weren't bolted down to the ship — and servitude in exchange for very nebulous things they were certain I'd like, if I were someone else.'

'But,' Abelard interjected, 'how could I have seen nothing, noticed nothing? I… yes, she was often gone, leaving the protectorate in my custody, and what she did on these journeys I didn't always… Oh, Throne! When we traveled together on the Emperor's Mercy, she left the day-to-day running of the ship to me and I never thought to ask what she did… How blind I was!'

Now he looked old, truly old, pacing and wondering, blaming himself. There was no doubt he had been deceived, and suddenly I despised Theodora all the more. To take such an upstanding man, remove him from his life's work in the Navy, dangle in front of him the many ways a Rogue Trader's seneschal can advance the cause of the Imperium, free from its regulations… and then, to hoodwink him and let him believe you're the Gyrinx's larynx while you're flirting with powers best left alone. I would have pitied him, but he would have found it insulting.

'Theodora deceived you because she knew that she couldn't corrupt you,' I said. I winced, turning, as my jaw still hurt, and slid my arm under Abelard's. 'Come, Abelard, let us get back to the ship, it's no use staying here. We still have work to do.'

We took a few steps together. I supported Abelard, guiding him as he was too lost in worry to look where he went, until we reached the shuttle. There, Cassia took my place and she helped him to his seat. I turned to Heinrix and, very low, asked: 'As soon as we are on board, I would like you to debrief me in the most extensive manner you know. I need to be sure of what's in my head.'

He bowed. 'Of course, Rogue Trader.'

Argenta sat by my side. She kept her bolter on her lap, and it was primed to fire. Yes, now I knew how Theodora died.