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  ‘Throne and Blood!’ spat Kora. ‘What must we do to end these things?’ She ducked as she ejected a spent clip from her bolter, slamming a fresh magazine into its place.

  ‘If in doubt,’ said Miriya, recalling the words of a venerable abbess who had once been her weapons instructor, ‘aim for the head.’ She thumbed her bolter’s fire-select switch to its fully automatic setting and squeezed the trigger. Rounds thundered from the gun and punctured the skull of the advancing mechanoid, this time splintering the steel into shimmering fragments, decapitating it. Even though it was robbed of a mouth with which to scream, the necron finally emitted a death-howl. It was a grating, static-laced skirl of noise, a synthetic parody of a shriek that vibrated out from its entire body. Like the xenos machines themselves, the sound was a mockery of something born of flesh.

  And it was just a single kill among a force of attackers that outnumbered the Battle Sisters two to one. The warriors had shifted into a skirmish line and now they advanced inexorably, drawing in to block any path of escape, forcing the humans towards the circle of glassy panels and the sheer rock walls.

  Somewhere down in the tunnels, a massive concussion sounded, swiftly followed by the long, drawn-out rumble of collapsing rock. The ground beneath their feet trembled, but the necrons did not stumble.

  ‘What was that?’ called Verity. ‘An earthquake?’

  Clouds of heavy dust billowed from the tunnel mouth, but no one answered the hospitaller’s question.

  ‘Concentrate your fire!’ called Imogen, stabbing a finger towards the machines. ‘Knock them out of the line, one at a time!’

  ‘They shrug off bolt shells like rain,’ snarled Cassandra.

  Miriya saw Verity trying her best to engage with the attackers, the hospitaller’s aim true but her skills lacking. ‘Stay close to me,’ she called.

  ‘The tech-guard…’ began the other woman. ‘That noise…’

  ‘They fled and paid for it,’ Miriya broke in. ‘So we fight or die alone in this.’

  As she said the words, something moved in the gloom above their head, and a shape unfurled like a raptor’s wings. A figure was falling into the alien light cast by the undamaged panes. A hooded shape carrying a black sword that reflected nothing.

  The woman Verity had glimpsed inside the Great Chapel was transformed. The hesitant, stuttering figure who had wept and prayed before the broken altar was a killer now. For the first time since they had arrived, the necrons showed something akin to confusion, disrupted by the sudden appearance of a new enemy that had come as if from nothing.

  Two of them pivoted to fire and the black sword spun. Viridian sparks flared as the muzzles of gauss flayers were cut away by the passage of the blade. The dark edge slashed at the machines, opening them to the air. Verity saw bisected parts of a necron warrior fall away, the cut ends polished and mirror-bright. The mechanoids collapsed to their knees, shuddering. She watched them grasping for severed limbs, trying to reconnect them to fresh stumps.

  ‘The intruder…’ said Miriya, the same flash of recognition on her face. ‘From the convent.’ The Battle Sister shot Verity a questioning look and found her confirmation.

  ‘Keep firing!’ yelled Imogen, for the moment unwilling to question the actions of this new arrival.

  Every gun the Sisters had poured bolt-rounds and sun-fire into the enemy line, and like a cable stressed to breaking point, their unit coherence abruptly snapped. The necrons dispersed, regrouping. Those with heavy damage dropped back, protected by their comrades as they entered regeneration cycles.

  The hooded woman dodged the slicing claws of a warrior and made it to the middle of the cover where the Sisters were gathered, protected by the lee of the rock in the glow of the glass panes.

  ‘No time,’ she spat, her voice thick with venom. Verity could see some of her damaged face, she could smell the stale human odours of her. ‘No time no time no time.’

  ‘In the name of the God-Emperor,’ said Imogen, ‘who are you?’

  ‘No time!’ she screamed back, grabbing the Sister Superior’s arm. ‘More are coming. Coming back!’ She jabbed the sword in the direction of the tunnel. The steady clattering steps of necron footfalls were echoing ever closer. If the earlier noise had been a cave-in, then the machines sent after the skitarii would be doubling back, soon to bolster the numbers they had left to deal with the Sisters.

  With strength that belied her form, the ragged-clothed revenant shoved Imogen towards the nearest portal-pane. ‘Go now,’ she shouted, her words slurred. ‘We all go now, or die here!’

  ‘Through that… gateway?’ cried Sister Kora. ‘To where? This is insanity!’

  Verity looked away. In the gloom of the tunnel mouth, countless dots of green light were growing distinct. The damaged necrons in the chamber were reforming into attack groups, and they were waiting. Waiting for their brethren.

  ‘That is where they came from!’ Imogen retorted, pointing at the machines. ‘You would have us venture deeper into danger?’

  ‘Go now,’ said the hooded woman, slow and deliberate, ‘or die.’ She raised the black sword and held it threateningly at the Sister Superior. The blade did not resemble any kind of metal; it was like a river of ink, a shadow made solid.

  ‘What choice do we have?’ Miriya insisted. ‘Anywhere is safer ground than here! You said it yourself, Eloheim. We must choose the circumstances of our fight.’

  Imogen’s eyes flashed. ‘Don’t twist my words against me, Sister Militant!’ She put hard emphasis on Miriya’s rank. ‘This circumstance is accorded to you! I should have left you behind at the convent.’ The Battle Sister glared at the hooded figure. ‘And you. Why should we listen to you?’

  ‘A spiritu dominatus.’ The scarred woman uttered the words like a curse, guttural and harsh. ‘Domine, libra nos.’ The utterance sent a shock through the assembled Sororitas, but then the revenant was moving, shouldering Imogen aside at the last moment. ‘Stay and die.’

  ‘It is the only way we can survive,’ Miriya pleaded. Behind her, the necrons began to advance across the chamber once more. There were dozens of them now.

  Imogen very deliberately spat on the dirt. ‘The Saint will curse you for this,’ she growled, and turned towards the woman with the blade.

  The cloaked figure did not look back, and stepped across the glowing glass threshold.

  One by one, they followed her.

  The passage was terrifying. The transition could only have lasted for a fraction of a second, but from Sister Miriya’s point of view it felt like an eternity. The watery green light engulfed her, seeming to lap over her flesh like a slow tide of oil, and then everything became distorted.

  Her perception was twisted and useless. She saw dreamy shapes, colours and synesthesic effects that her mind could not interpret, giddy vivid impressions that could have been motion, heat, terror or some mixture of all. Miriya screwed her eyes shut and repeated The Emperor’s Prayer over and over, clinging to the rote words and her unshakable – so she still hoped – faith.

  This portal, this alien gateway, was not meant for unprotected humans, and she could sense it trying to reject her. Miriya felt as if the power of the thing was actively repelling her flesh and blood, acting on it like the disparate poles of a magnet. Her skin crawled with sickening sensations that threatened to crack the Battle Sister’s iron resolve. This tunnel through nothingness skirted close to the psychic maelstrom of warp space, and she could feel the incredible pressure of the immaterium just beyond the walls of her own mind. It was so close.

  And then, just when it seemed as if she could stand it no more, she was staggering, her boots ringing on a metal deck. Miriya tried to open her eyes, and found her skin layered with a coating of frost that crackled as she moved. Patches of steaming ice covered her wargear, sloughing off in sheets as she stumbled.

  Miriya beat off the shock and took a deep, shuddering breath. The air was tinny and thin, harsh in her throat. Her blurred vision cleared and the fir
st face she saw was a jigsaw of shadows and scarification. The hooded woman turned away and Miriya moved, finding Danae, who was rising from where she had fallen to one knee.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ gasped the other woman, making the sign of the holy aquila. ‘He delivered us…’

  ‘To where?’ Miriya wondered aloud, echoing Sister Kora’s earlier question.

  Jade light flowed over everything before them, rendering a landscape made of tarnished steel into something even more alien. They stood upon a square iron platform as big as one of the Tybalt’s loading bays, and it was suspended in the air by no visible means. Along one end were a line of glass panes identical to the ones in the cavern, most of them dark and unlit, but a handful – including the portal they had just passed through – throbbing with power. Some distance away there was a crescent-shaped section where the deck rose up as it had been pressed out of giant mould. It sported what had to be controls of some kind.

  ‘This is some sort of staging area,’ Danae muttered, her thoughts following Miriya’s.

  The Battle Sister cast around, for a brief moment feeling a flash of gratitude to her Emperor as she counted Verity and the rest of the squad all safely there with her; but then she realised what she was seeing beyond the edges of the floating platform.

  The open space inside the rock chamber had been massive enough, but this void dwarfed that by a magnitude of several thousand times.

  An iron sky ranged above her head from horizon to horizon: a great metal dome broken into clean geometric sectors by lines of that familiar dark stone, cut in perfect, mathematically precise segments. Off in the distance, a massive obsidian spike emerged from the inside of the dome. It reached out across the open air towards them like a mountain placed on its side, and rods of brilliant light stabbed out from it at what seemed to be random intervals. Pools of white glow fell on rectilinear shapes, pyramids and ziggurats crested with gold filigree and emerald crystals. Others found silver monoliths discoloured by time that glittered dully.

  These beams were what provided most of the illumination inside the vast chamber, although it seemed as if every shadowed structure had a soft glow of its own. Miriya tried to estimate distances and scale, but it was hard to reckon without something familiar to compare it to, and the deep shadows and stark illumination conspired to trick the eye.

  ‘Step back,’ said the revenant, appearing at her side. She was crack-throated and hoarse. ‘This must be done.’

  Before the Sororitas could react, the hooded figure had the black sword drawn. Miriya retreated, realising that she had ventured close to the raised console. At the far end of the platform where the other Sisters were gathered, she heard Kora call out in alarm. Something had followed them back through the gateway.

  A necron warrior was emerging from the closest of the glassy portals, backlit by the flow of powers that deformed space-time. Even as it placed its leading foot on the metal deck, it already had its gauss flayer aimed directly at Sister Cassandra.

  The black sword fell in silence, describing a shallow curve that sliced cleanly through the metal panel. All power in the device vented with a crackling shout and the alien console went dead; at the same moment, all energy fled from the active portals and they became panes of flat, seamless glass once again.

  Pieces of the necron warrior remained fused in place, half out of the gateway as it returned to its solid state. The light in the warrior’s dead eyes winked out.

  Miriya turned back to the revenant. ‘You closed the passage.’ The hood bobbed once. ‘Then how will we be able to leave this place?’

  ‘I did it once before,’ came the distant reply. There was a strange sense of old pain and sorrow beneath the words. ‘I will do it again.’

  ‘We’re moving!’ called Cassandra. Perhaps it was because of the damage to the console, but now the platform was in motion, dropping slowly, descending towards a wide ring of steel that resembled a great cog wheel laid flat.

  Miriya chanced a look over the side of the platform and saw a near-identical reflection below of what existed above. She had a sudden flash of understanding; they were inside a colossal iron sphere, as if the alien architects of this monstrosity had built themselves a small world and then turned it inside out. The Battle Sister struggled to hold on to the idea and she felt a giddy echo of the portal transit shiver through her. It was difficult to grasp the concept that something so alien, so contrary to the true order of things, could actually exist.

  ‘Do you see those?’ Cassandra asked as she came closer. She pointed with her bolter. ‘There.’

  At first, Miriya could not grasp what the other woman was showing her, but then one of the light beams caught something nearby, and in the overspill from the blinding glow Cassandra’s subject became illuminated.

  In the half-dark, what the Sororitas had first thought to be shadows cast by support columns and stanchions was revealed as a great open cradle of metal claws and sinuous cables. There, hanging like a player’s puppets at rest, were countless numbers of identical humanoid shapes, silver-sheened, eyeless and dormant. She saw the skeletal forms of warriors like the ones they had fought in the cavern, but there were dozens of other variants that stood taller and more muscular than their spindly cohorts. Her breath tight in her chest, Miriya brought up her bolter and peered down the optical sight to gain a closer look.

  She saw hulks that aped human shapes, seamless heads with single cyclopean eyes, and gleaming, beetle-like things. There were strange craft cut from arcs of black steel and carbon, great constructs that resembled open ribcages made of metal, drifting at anchor in the thin air next to huge tetrahedral carvings like giant tombstones.

  ‘Ghost Arks,’ hissed the hooded woman, naming the necron monstrosities. ‘Monoliths and Night Scythes. Wraiths, immortals, scarabs…’ She trailed off. ‘Sleeping now. Waiting to come again.’

  ‘How many can there be?’ whispered Cassandra, awed and horrified in equal measure. ‘This is not just one army. There could be legions of these machines in here.’

  ‘You must see,’ said the revenant, in a dead voice.

  ‘We will,’ Imogen insisted, striding towards them with fire in her eyes. ‘We will see who brought us this madness!’

  Before anyone could stop her, the Sister Superior’s hand shot out and tore at the hood concealing the other woman’s face. She gave it a savage jerk and pulled it back. The scarred woman let out a low moan, as if the action of light upon her pallid flesh caused her physical pain.

  Imogen recoiled at what she saw beneath the hood, and Miriya could not stop a gasp from escaping her own lips.

  They each saw a human aspect, but one that had been dismantled like a jigsaw puzzle, pieces of it opened and then reattached with thick lines of purple scarring and melt-burns. The face was a page across which cruelty had been written, over and over again. She had no hair, and her skin was translucent, taut across bone; but most shocking was the arc of dull steel – necrontyr steel – that crossed her cheek and covered the orbit of her right eye, the metal a setting for a bloodshot orb.

  ‘You must see,’ she repeated blankly, as the platform thudded to a halt above the great dock.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ++They are going to kill you++ said the Watcher.

  ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘No.’

  The red-haired one, the one with the strident voice and hard eyes, glared at her. ‘What are you?’ Disgust oozed from her words.

  ++You have saved them for nothing++

  The Watched shook her head back and forth, pulling at her hood. ‘There is something you must see,’ she told the Sororitas, ignoring the voice in her head.

  But her words fell on deaf ears. The other women were threatened and distrustful, their circumstances pushing them to seek violent options before any that required deeper thought. She could not blame them, suddenly finding themselves here in the belly of the alien enemy. But that could not be allowed to change the course of things. They had to see. They had to.

/>   ‘Sister Imogen,’ said the one with the dark hair, the scarred face and the serious gaze. ‘Perhaps we should–’

  The one called Imogen did not listen. Instead she aimed her bolter squarely at the Watched. ‘You serve them. Is that why you enticed us here, so you could give us to your xenos masters? You are one of them!’

  ++They are going to kill you++ repeated the voice.

  Fury flashed into life behind her eyes. ‘No!’ she roared, hard and loud. ‘You do not understand! Look! Look!’ She brought up the dark edge of the voidblade in her hand, slow and careful. ‘See!’ she spat.

  The periphery of the sword’s cutting field, existing a microsecond out of phase with the rest of the weapon, buzzed as she lay it across the palm of her other hand. The entropic aura disintegrated the rags wrapped around her skin and made a perfect line along her dirty flesh. Bright crimson blood welled up and ran in streaks down her fingers.

  ‘I took this weapon from them.’ She stepped forwards and ran her hand over the chest-plate of the other woman, smearing her vitae over Imogen’s armour. ‘I am human.’ It had been an eternity since she had dared to voice those words. ‘Like you.’

  ‘Not like us,’ muttered another of the Sororitas, cradling a heavy meltagun.

  She forged on, driven by some emotion welling up from deep inside, something she could not quantify. ‘You must trust me. You must see!’

  ++They will not follow you++ the voice mocked. ++You cannot make them understand++

  ‘See what?’ demanded the Battle Sister; but the Watched was already leaping off the lip of the floater platform, down to the cog-shaped docking ring.

  The hooded woman dropped and for a moment Verity was afraid she had stepped into the empty air and to her death. Then she heard the clank of boots on the metal decking and saw her running, a loping sprint across the dock, weaving between the metal spars and gleaming stone plinths.