Yet still he refused to let go.
His consciousness was everywhere. He knew everything. He was being consumed by a realm known as the immaterium. The other names by which it was known flashed through his mind before turning to smoke in his memory. The warp, the ether, the empyrean, a sea of souls composed of pure psychic chaos. A realm traversed by a race of gods in floating iron ships, navigated by a terrible beacon of pure thought projected by a being upon a mountain throne. Yet more truths swarmed him, complexities and contradictions, and the impossibilities that made a mockery of it all. The beast was right. The truth was myriad.
Yet still he refused to let go.
Cade’s consciousness alighted on a shard of truth. In its prism he saw Abi. He saw himself. Splinters of their past, their present and future. He also saw the reason why their world had tonight become a nightmare. The horror of that truth froze what little was left of him.
He let go.
But something else would not let go of him.
Something was channelling his energy for him, focusing it.
He flinched at the brilliance of the dawning sun. He was on his back, his body steaming as he convulsed in the dirt, grinding his teeth as he strained to lift himself. He managed to turn his head and saw the beast raging nearby, its body shredded with wounds.
Abi clung to its horns, her hair and tattered skirts flung to and fro, like a sailor clinging to the mast of a squall-tossed ship. She had saved him, pulled him back from the warp before his mind could be consumed entirely, sustaining the energy he had summoned, holding it in place like a cork in a bottle. The beast staggered and thrashed, too weak to claw his tormentor from her perch.
Cade felt a familiar dullness creeping over his senses. The Sisters of Silence were coming, cutting him off from the energies of the warp. Abi slid from the beast’s crown, exhausted. The creature was now barely a skeleton clothed in rags of smoking meat, though it rose in dignity to meet its executioner. It went to swing a claw at One-Ear, but the woman had already cleaved a leg out from under it. Its great horned head followed, bursting to ash as it spun through the air.
Cade screamed at his limbs to move, but they remained frozen, buckled like the legs of a dead spider. That part of his brain which motivated his body had been scoured by his exposure to the warp. Yet it mattered not. What dominated his mind was the last thing he had seen in that realm of Chaos, those glimpses of the future, of the present. They had shown him the reason why the Sisters of Silence had come for them.
Abi was beside him, gasping as she tried to comfort him. She tried to calm him as he puffed spittle from his teeth, struggling to scream a warning.
Run, Abi! Run while you can!
She smiled down at him, brushing hair from his eyes, deaf to his pleas.
As the Sisters of Silence fanned out to secure the ruins, One-Ear gestured something to Maia. The armoured novice nodded and approached Abi with caution. Cade watched, horrified as Abi’s expression flickered between fear and fascination.
‘As your valiant friend may have already told you, I am Sister Maia,’ she said. ‘And you have led us a merry dance.’
‘You need to help him,’ said Abi.
Cade wriggled, gagging as he fought to release a scream from his throat.
‘That’s why we are here,’ said Maia. ‘If you’ll just come with us, all shall be explained.’ She inched towards Abi.
‘Who are you? Where do you come from? I’m not leaving here until you tell me.’
Maia paused, gazing at Abi in mutual curiosity. ‘You are not afraid of us at all, are you?’
‘Being afraid never does anyone much good,’ said Abi.
‘A fine philosophy,’ said Maia. ‘You’re her, aren’t you? The one who we spotted crossing the boundary. If not for you, we would never have found the others.’
Abi frowned.
‘You misunderstand,’ said Maia. ‘Your people are unharmed, I promise you. You’re the strongest of them all, did you know that?’
Abi glanced about her. She looked as though she was calculating her options, though clearly she had none.
‘If you say so,’ she said.
‘We can show you how to harness those talents, that formidable intelligence of yours. We can teach you to wield your strength.’ She smiled like a serpent. ‘Lest others wield it for you.’
‘You make it sound like I have a choice,’ said Abi.
‘No one has a choice,’ said Maia. ‘But I sense your destiny is the one you’ve always wanted.’
Abi looked down at Cade.
‘All I’ve ever wanted is the truth,’ she told him.
Those words made something crack like an egg deep in Cade’s chest, slipping a terrible bitterness into his belly until he felt he might die.
Abi’s hair rose to veil her face as a sudden wind stirred the air and a strange pressure stiffened the atmosphere. Cade watched in terror, helpless to prevent the vision he had beheld in the warp from coming to pass before his eyes.
He had always thought it to be nothing more than a thundercloud. When he had first seen it in the distance from the cliffs yesterday afternoon he had been too innocent to think it anything but an approaching storm. The world had been so much smaller back then. Cade had seen it in the sky again when they emerged from the Tor, a tide of black blotting out the moon above the cornfields. Now, as it obscured the dawning sun, the thing was unmistakable.
Wreathed in cloud, the great black ship resembled some fossilised behemoth, another monster out of legend come to threaten his world. It grumbled overhead, a landmass of iron machinery. Countless dwelt within. Cade had seen them in his vision. Witches, millions upon millions of them, soul crops yielded by innumerable worlds just like this one. They languished in chains, their powers sedated. Like the boundary stones that surrounded the Cradle, the ship cast a protective aura that hid it from the warp. Like him, these innumerable wretches were gifted, but their powers were limited, unfocused, distracted by primal emotion. Their destiny would be to lend their screams to that great psychic beacon Cade had felt blazing through the immaterium. That was their function within the awful machinery of the universe. Their souls would be added to the pyre, to blaze for an instant and then become nothing.
This was the fate from which his parents had sought to protect him. The Cradle was a sanctuary for witchkind, erected to save gifted innocents from the grim farmers of the Imperium, who would one day arrive to gather their harvest.
‘Wondrous,’ Abi murmured. ‘What is it?’
‘The truth,’ said Maia. ‘Yet this is just the beginning. You have so much yet to learn. We have so much yet to teach you.’
The warp had already shown Cade the fruit of Maia’s promise. He had seen Abi, recognisable though her face was lined with age and scars. She remained wild and strong, bolstered by decades of training, her full potential unleashed. He had seen her driving bolts of lightning into the ranks of some unearthly foe, again and again, careless that her comrades had fallen, that she was alone. Eventually the enemy swarmed her, pulled her to the ground and tore her down to her bones. All Cade had known of her – of her potential, the future he had imagined she could achieve – had come to nothing, ruined in an instant.
