I fumbled for a weapon, any damn weapon.
There was a cacophony of gunfire.
Storm bolters blasting, the three Deathwatch Marines advanced towards the horror. Their black armour was rimed with psychic frost. Over his vox-speaker, Cynewolf could be heard, admonishing the foe and barking tactical instructions to his comrades.
Their chapter-wrought bolters continued to boom in unison until the unremitting fire had blasted the thing from the warp backwards in a scrambling, shrieking smear of blackness and bone limbs. It fell back off the plinth into the retreating astropaths, crashing dead and living alike.
Brother-Captain Cynewolf moved ahead of his companions, faster than seemed to me possible for such a heavily armoured form. Tossing aside his spent bolter, he drew his chainsword and hacked again and again into the writhing mass, driving it backwards into the adulatory stalls, which splintered like tinder wood.
Lord Rorken strode past me, wielding a ceremonial silver flamer he had snatched from one of his attendants. The acolyte ran behind, struggling to hold on to the gold-inlaid fuel tanks and keep pace with his master.
Rorken's voice sang out above the mayhem. 'Spirit of noxious immate-ria, be gone from hence, for as the Emperor of Mankind, manifold be his blessings, watches over me, so I will not fear the shadow of the warp…'
Holy fire spurted from the Lord Inquisitor's weapon and washed across the warp-spawned thing. Lord Rorken was chanting the rite of banishment at the top of his lungs.
Endor pulled me to my feet and we both lent our voices to the words. There was a tremor that seemed to vibrate the entire ship. Then nothing remained of the vile creature except a layer of ash and the devastation it had wrought.
As penance for the act of transgression that had led to this warp-invasion, Konrad Molitor was charged with rededicating and reconsecrating the violated chapel. The work, overseen by the arch-priests of the curia and the techno-adepts of the Glorious Omnissiah, took all of the first six weeks of our ten-week transit time to 56-Izar. Molitor took his duties seriously, dressed himself in a filthy sackcloth shirt of contrition, and had his retainers scourge him with withes and psychic awls between ceremonies. I thought he got off lightly.
I spent a month recovering from the physiological trauma of the auto-seance in one of the battleship's state apartments. The psychological damage I suffered during that event lasted for years after. I still dream of that geyser of blood, clothed in myriad eyes, filling the sky. You don't forget a thing like that. They say memory softens with time, but that particular memory never has. Even today, I console myself that to have forgotten would have been worse. That would have been denial, and denial of such visions eventually opens the doors of insanity.
I lay upon the apartment's wide bed all month, propped up with bolsters and pillows. Physicians attended me regularly, as did members of Lord Rorken's staff, dressed in their finery. They tested my health, my mind, my recovering strength. I knew what they were looking for. A taint of the warp. There was none, I was sure, but they couldn't take my word for it, of course. We had come close, Voke and I, close to the precipice, close to the edge of irreconcilable damnation. Another few seconds…
Aemos stayed with me, bringing me books and slates to divert me. Sometimes he read aloud, from histories, sermons or stories. Sometimes he played music spools on the old, horn-speakered celiaphone, cranking the handle by hand. We listened to the light orchestral preludes of Daminias Bartelmew, the rousing symphonies of Hanz Solveig, the devotional chants of the Ongres Cloisterhood. He warbled along with operettas by Guinglas until I pleaded with him to stop, and mimed the conductor's role when the Macharius Requiem played, dancing around the room on his augmetic legs in such a preposterous, sprightly fashion it made me laugh aloud.
'It's good to hear that, Gregor/ he said, blowing dust off a new spool before fitting it into the celiaphone.
