The other psykers moved with sudden speed, and Leilani recalled the flocking motion of arboreal birds on her home world. The disparate pieces of the group-mind moved like water, flowing away from the attacker, leaving the dead and injured among their number where they fell. Leilani realised she was already seeing them as a single entity, no longer thinking of the psykers as discrete people within a larger whole.
Cut off from the horde, the man with the missing hand suddenly screamed and there was cracking anew from the bones of his face as his flesh attempted to reset itself. Abandoned by his kind, he began to resemble the crazed remnant they had encountered outside. Herkaaze silenced him by opening his throat with her blade-tip.
‘Stay your weapons!’ This time it was a shout, every member of the gestalt bellowing as loudly as their lungs would allow. The sound was so strong in the low-ceilinged furnace chamber that it gave the Sisters pause.
Leilani experienced a moment of confusion. Any handful of the psykers present in the chamber would have been more than a match for two Oblivion Knights and a novice-sister, and as one in this strange meta-concert, they doubtless wielded enough power to kill them all in an instant, crushing them by bringing down the deck above, by burning off all air in the chamber by pyrokene firestorm or any one of a dozen methods.
Why then were they still alive?
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
The answer from a myriad of throats made her blood chill. ‘Leilani Mollitas. Emrilia Herkaaze. Amendera Kendel. I have been waiting for you.’
‘They know our names…’ The novice’s words seemed tiny in comparison to the voice of the crowd.
~Witchery!~ Herkaaze signed furiously. ~They have plundered our thoughts!~
~Impossible,~ Kendel replied silently. ~No telepath can penetrate the bastion of our minds. We are Untouchable.~
‘I know who you are,’ echoed the chorus, ‘and I must speak with you.’ The faces of the assembled mass moved and altered again, melting and flowing in meter to the mood of the words.
With each utterance, Leilani felt the ebb and drag of psychic force shifting about her like an ocean of clear oil. The presence of the group-mind rebounded around them in captured echoes. The novice gripped the flamer tightly, and struggled to keep herself from shaking. First, in the things she had read in the libraria, then in the living, breathing madness she had witnessed in the transformed Astartes on Luna, and now here, before her in this ship… Every half-truth and myth Leilani had heard about the powers that lurked within the empyrean were made true.
~Whatever dark corner of the warp spawned you, creature, you will not manifest here.~ Kendel sheathed her blade and in its stead drew her bolter to the ready.
Laughter pealed around the crowd. ‘This is not the face of Chaos. What you see here is only a message and the messenger.’
~What message?~ Kendel demanded her answer with savage jabs of motion.
‘A message,’ repeated the voices. ‘Once before a message came and it was too late to change the pattern of things. You were there, Amendera Kendel. You saw this.’
Leilani saw the Knight nod slowly, making the sign for an Astartes. ‘Garro…’ whispered the novice.
‘A new message. A warning.’ The breathy choir paused. ‘For the ears of the Emperor of Mankind. Darkness comes, Sisters. The great eye opens and Horus rises. The history of tomorrow is known to me.’
Kendel exchanged glances with her subordinate. Precognition was a known and documented psionic effect, although extremely rare and difficult to interpret. Leilani could imagine her mistress turning the words over in her mind; if this confluence of psychic had power enough to pierce the veil, perhaps… perhaps they might have some insight into the skeins of events yet to occur.
Herkaaze spat noisily on the deck and brandished her sword. ~Destroy this monstrosity!~ she signed. ~It is some ploy, either of the witches’ origin or even the turncoat Warmaster himself! We cannot ferry this abhorrence into the Emperor’s divine presence. It must be killed!~ She advanced with her blade raised high, head sweeping back and forth like a hunting hawk looking for her next prey.
Members of the group-mind broke apart from the main pack as she came at them, forming into smaller flocks that retreated from her along the ashen-stained walls. ‘I am not your enemy!’ came the multiple cry. ‘The storm is about to break, but the course of things can be changed!’
Herkaaze’s only answer was to lunge and strike down another psyker.
‘Millennia of endless warfare can be prevented!’ Panic and desperation entered the voice of the chorus. ‘Believe me!’
From out of nowhere, a cluster of figures rushed towards Leilani and she raised the flamer, ready to immolate them in a heartbeat; but their flowing, waxen faces turned to her, imploring as they altered, begging her to hear them out. ‘What do you want?’ she screamed out the question again.
In turn, they howled back at her. ‘I am only the portal, the messenger and the message. Across the madness of the warp, where time and space become unravelled and the tapestry of events falls apart. I call to you from then.’ Hands grabbed at her robes. ‘I warn you from your tomorrows. Your now is my past. I am living in the hell I wish you to uncreate, centuries gone and the fires still raging.’
Amendera Kendel had once believed that the universe could do nothing to shock her; the horrors that she had witnessed in service to the Silent Sisterhood, the years that matured her from a callow novice to an Oblivion Knight of rank and stature, these things had shown her much, from the glories of the human heart to the very depths of monstrosity that nature could create. But she had lost that arrogance, truly lost it when word had come of the Heresy, when she had looked into the eyes of a creature cut from the raw matter of corruption. She had known then that there was more that moved upon the face of the universe than could be encompassed in her judgement.
And here, now, she found herself challenged again. It would be easy for her to take the path Emrilia followed, to decry and shout for death. To question and wonder, even for a moment, that was beyond Herkaaze’s insight. There had been moments when Kendel had thought she too had become reactionary and hidebound – and this was one more reason why she selected the girl Leilani as her adjutant. At times, she saw the mirror of herself in the novice-sister, keeping her close so that she might reinforce that dormant sense of wonder.
But to comprehend this… A voice, speaking not from the here and now but a time yet to happen. A future? Try as she might, Sister Amendera could not find it in herself to deny that such a thing, as incredible as it seemed, was not possible. It was the warp, after all; and in the warp, all things were malleable. Emotion, distance, thought, reality. If dimensions such as these were distorted here, then why not time itself?
‘This place and this instant,’ cried the psykers. ‘I am here as you are, peering in from my unfuture to the shifting sands of the past.’ All together, they moved their hands to their faces, the tips of two fingers to their chins. ‘To give voice.’
Herkaaze was frozen, kneading the hilt of her sword, turning in place, daring the witchkin to come within reach of a cut. She did not see the cluster grouping around Sister Leilani, entreating the girl with open hands and upturned faces. Kendel moved towards the girl, unsure of how to proceed.
‘You know me,’ they told the novice, flesh shifting again, bones crackling. ‘Look. See.’