'Kyril, it's so good to see you again,’ she sobbed. 'You just vanished. I thought they'd got to you. I didn't know what had happened to you.'
'Hush, Mersadie,' said Sindermann, 'it's all right. I'm so sorry I couldn't send word to you at the time. You must understand that had I a choice, I would have done everything I could to keep you out of this, but I don't know what to do any more. We can't keep her down here forever,’
Mersadie looked through the doorway of the dorВmitory room they stood outside, wishing she had the courage to believe as Kyril did. 'Don't be ridicuВlous, Kyril. I'm glad you made contact, I thought… I thought Maloghurst or Maggard had killed you,’
'Maggard very nearly did,’ said Sindermann, 'but the saint saved us,’
'She saved you?' asked Mersadie. 'How?'
'I don't know exactly, but it was just like in the Archive Chamber. The power of the Emperor was in her. I saw it, Mersadie, just as sure as you're standВing here before me. I wish you could have seen it,’
'I wish that too,’ she said, surprised to find that she meant it.
She entered the dormitory and stared down at the still form of Euphrati Keeler on the thin cot bed, looking for all the world as if she was simply sleepВing. The small room was cramped and dirty, with a thin blanket spread on the deck beside the bed.
Winking starlight streamed in through a small porthole vision block, something greatly prized this deep in the ship, and without asking, she knew that someone had happily volunteered to give up their prized room for the use of the 'saint' and her companion.
Even down here in the dark and the stink, faith flourished.
'I wish I could believe,’ said Mersadie, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of Euphrati's chest.
Sindermann said, 'You don't?'
'I don't know,’ she said, shaking her head. 'Tell me why I should? What does believing mean to you, Kyril?'
He smiled and took her hand. 'It gives me someВthing to hold on to. There are people on this ship who want to kill her, and somehow… don't ask me how, I just know that I need to keep her safe,’
'Are you're not afraid?' she asked.
'Afraid?' he said. 'I've never been more terrified in my life, my dear, but I have to hope that the Emperor is watching over me. That gives me strength and the will to face that fear.'
'You are a remarkable man, Kyril,’
'I'm not remarkable, Mersadie,’ said Sindermann, shaking his head. 'I was lucky. I saw what the saint did, so faith is easy for me. It's hardest for you, for you have seen nothing. You have to simply accept that the Emperor is working through Euphrati, but you don't believe, do you?'
Mersadie turned from Sindermann and pulled her hand from his, looking through the porthole at the void of space beyond. 'No. I can't. Not yet,’
A white streak shot across the porthole like a shooting star.
Another followed it, and then another.
'What's mat?' she asked.
Sindermann leaned over to get a better look through the porthole.
Even through his exhaustion, she could see the strength in him that she had previously taken for granted and she blink-clicked the image, capturВing the defiance and bravery she saw in his features.
'Drop-pods,’ he said, pointing at a static gleaming object stark against the blackness and closer to Isst-van III. Tiny sparks began raining from its underside towards the planet below.
'I think that's the Andronius, Fulgrim's flagship,’ said Sindermann. 'Looks like the attack we've been
hearing about has begun. Imagine how it would be if we could watch it unfolding,’
Euphrati groaned and the attack on Isstvan III was forgotten as they slid across to sit beside her. Mersadie saw Sindermann's love for her clearly as he mopped her brow, her skin so clean that it pracВtically shone.
For the briefest moment, Mersadie saw how peoВple could believe Euphrati was miraculous; her body so pale and fragile, yet untouched by the world around her. Mersadie had known Keeler as a gutsy woman, never afraid to speak her mind or bend the rules to get the magnificent picts for which she was rightly famed, but now she was something else entirely. 'Is she coming round?' asked Mersadie. 'No,’ said Sindermann sadly. 'She makes noises, but she never opens her eyes. It's such a waste. Sometimes I swear she's on the brink of waking, but then she sinks back down into whatever hell she's going through in her head,’ Mersadie sighed and looked back out into space. The pinpoints of light streaked in their hundreds towards Isstvan III.
As the speartip was driven home, she whispered, Token…'
The Choral City was magnificent.
Its design was a masterpiece of architecture, light and space so wondrous that Peeter Egon Momus had begged the Warmaster not to assault so
brutally. Older by millennia than the Imperium that had come to claim it in the name of the Emperor, its precincts and thoroughfares were soon to become blood-slick battlefields.
While the juggernaut of compliance had made the galaxy a sterile, secular place, the Choral City remained a city of the gods.
The Precentor's Palace, a dizzying creation of gleaming marble blades and arches that shone in the sun, opened like a vast stone orchid to the sky and the polished granite of the city's wealthiest disВtricts clustered around it like worshippers. Momus had described the palace as a hymn to power and glory, a symbol of the divine right by which Isstvan III would be ruled.
Further out from the palace and beyond the architectural perfection of the Choral City, vast multi-layered residential districts sprawled. ConВnected by countless walkways and bridges of glass and steel, the avenues between them were wide canyons of tree-lined boulevards in which the citiВzens of the Choral City lived.
The city's industrial heartland rose like climbing skeletons of steel against the eastern mountains, belching smoke as they churned out weapons to arm the planet's armies. War was coming and every Isstvanian had to be ready to fight.
But no sight in the Choral City compared to the Sirenhold.
Not even the magnificence of the palace outВshone the Sirenhold, its towering walls defining the
Choral City with their immensity. The brutal batВtlements diminished everything around them, and the sacred fortress of the Sirenhold humbled even the snow-capped peaks of the mountains. Within its walls, enormous tomb-spires reached for the skies, their walls encrusted with monumental sculptures that told the legends of Isstvan's mythiВcal past.
The legends told that Isstvan himself had sung the world into being with music that could still be heard by the blessed Warsingers, and that he had borne countless children with whom he populated the first ages of the world. They became night and day, ocean and mountain, a thousand legends whose breath could be felt in every moment of every day in the Choral City.
Darker carvings told of the Lost Children, the sons and daughters who had forsaken their father and been banished to the blasted wasteland of the fifth planet, where they became monsters that burned with jealousy and raised black fortresses from which to brood upon their expulsion from paradise.
War, treachery, revelation and death; all marched around the Sirenhold in endless cycles of myth, the weight of their meaning pinning the Choral City to the soil of Isstvan III and infusing its every inhabiВtant with their sacred purpose.
The gods of Isstvan III were said to sleep in the Sirenhold, whispering their murderous plots in the nightmares of children and ancients.
For a time, the myths and legends had remained as distant as they had always been, but now they walked among the people of the Choral City, and every breath of wind shrieked that the Lost ChilВdren had returned.
Without knowing why, the populace of Isstvan III had armed and unquestioningly followed the orders of Vardus Praal to defend their city. An army of well-equipped soldiers awaited the invasion they had long been promised was coming in the western marches of the city, where the Warsingers had sung a formidable web of trenches into being.