'Can you not hear it, son of Calth? Juddering along the bloodtracks, its hateful boxcars jolting along behind it?'

'I don't hear anything,' said Uriel, stepping around the cenobite and marching towards the chapel's iron door.

'You will,' promised the man.

Uriel turned as a monotonous servitor's voice crackled from the electrum-plated vox-units mounted in the shadows of the arched ceiling, announcing: 'All hands prepare for warp translation. Warp translation in thirty seconds.'

The cenobite laughed, spittle frothing at the corners of his mouth as he raised his torn forearms above his head. Blood ran from his opened wrists and spattered his face before rolling down his cheeks like ruby tears.

He dropped to his knees and whispered, 'Too late… the Lord of Skulls comes.'

A spasm of sickness sheared along Uriel's spine as the last words left the cenobite's mouth and he stepped towards the man, ready to chastise him for uttering such blasphemies in this sanctified place.

The lights in the chapel dimmed as the ship prepared for warp translation.

Uriel dragged the young preacher to his feet.

And the cenobite's head exploded.

CHAPTER TWO

Blood geysered in slow motion from the ragged stump of the cenobite's neck and Uriel pushed his spasming corpse away in disgust, backing away and wiping the sticky fluid from his face. The body remained upright, jerking and thrashing as though in the grip of a violent seizure. The cenobite's arms flailed wildly, yet more blood flickering from his opened wrists and spattering the statuary and altar.

Even as he stared in horrified fascination at the corpse's lunatic dance, Uriel felt the familiar sensation of his primary stomach flipping as the ship jumped into the treacherous currents of the warp. He gripped one of the chapel's pews as he felt a sudden dizziness, which vanished seconds later as his Lyman's ear adjusted for the sudden spatial differentiation between dimensions.

The hideous corpse continued to thrash and convulse, refusing to fall despite its lack of a head, and Uriel tasted the unmistakable sensation of warp-spawned witchery on the air. The man's fellow priests wailed in terror, dropping to their knees and spilling prayers of protection and mercy from mouths open wide in horror. Some, made of sterner stuff, drew pistols from beneath their robes and aimed them at the dancing corpse.

'No!' shouted Uriel, drawing his sword and leaping towards the hideous revenant. It lunged towards him, arms outstretched, but a sweeping stroke of Uriel's blade clove it from collarbone to pelvis and the shorn halves of the man fell to the marble floor, twitching, but mercifully free of whatever monstrous animation had possessed it before.

'Guilliman's blood!' swore Pasanius, backing away from the dead cenobite and making the sign of the aquila over his chest. 'What happened to him?'

'I have no idea,' said Uriel, kneeling beside the corpse and wiping his blade on the cenobite's chasuble as the lights in the chapel began flashing urgently. Wailing klaxons and ringing bells could be heard from beyond the chapel door.

Uriel smoothly rose to his feet, saying, 'But I have a feeling we'll find out soon.'

He turned and ran back to the chapel door, grabbing his bolter from the gun rack beside the entrance to the vestry. Pasanius scooped up his flamer and followed him out into the corridor, drawing up sharply as he saw what lay beyond the chapel door.

Both men stood transfixed as the arched passageway before them swelled and rippled, as though in a diabolical heat haze, its dimensions swelling and distorting beyond the three known to man.

'Imperator!' breathed Pasanius in terror. 'The Geller field must be failing. The warp is spilling in!'

'And Emperor alone knows what else,' said Uriel, his dread of the unknown terrors of the warp sending a shiver of fear along his spine. Without the Geller field to protect the ship from the predatory astral and daemonic creatures that swam in the haunted depths of the immaterium, all manner of foul entities would have free rein within the vessel's halls, ethereal horrors and shadowy phantoms that could rip men to shreds before vanishing back into the warp.

'Come on,' shouted Uriel. 'The gymnasia. We need to gamer as many soldiers as we can before it's too late.'

Uriel and Pasanius lurched their way along the passageway, stumbling like a pair of drunks as they fought to hold their equilibrium in the face of this spatial insanity. Screams and roars came from ahead, but Uriel found himself unable to pinpoint exactly where ahead was as sounds echoed and distorted wildly around him. The floors and ceilings of the stone passageways seemed to run fluid, swirling as though their very fabric was being unravelled before his eyes.

The sound of a tolling bell rang out, ponderously slow and dolorous one second, tinny and ringing the next. Using the wall as a guide, though it was a treacherous one, the two Space Marines fought their way onwards, each step bringing fresh madness to their surroundings.

Uriel thought he saw a tall mountain, wreathed in smoke, form from the floor before it vanished and was replaced by a roiling sea of snapping mouths. But even that disappeared like a fever dream as soon as he tried to look upon it. He could see Pasanius was having similar difficulties, blinking and rubbing his eyes in disbelief.

A grainy static filled Uriel's vision and an insistent buzzing, like an approaching swarm of insects, filled his skull. He shook his head, trying to clear the distortion and unable to comprehend the things he saw before him.

'How close are we?' yelled Pasanius.

Uriel steadied himself on a bulkhead, grateful for its transitory solidity, and shook his head again, though the movement made him want to vomit. 'How can we tell? Everything changes the moment I look at it.'

'I think we are almost there,' said Pasanius, pointing to where the passageway widened into a marble-flagged atrium, though at present, it appeared that the chamber had been inverted, its domed ceiling swirling below their feet, its dimensions skewed completely out of true.

Uriel nodded and pushed himself forward, an intense and nauseous sensation of vertigo seizing him as they stumbled into the flipped atrium. Uriel's eyes told him he was crossing the floor, but he could tell that his every step found him crossing the shallow concave bowl of the inverted dome. His booted feet trod the shielded glass of the atrium's dome that was all that lay between him and the warp.

Uriel looked down through the dome, the nauseous sensation in his gut surging upwards, and he dropped to his knees, vomiting explosively across the glass. A sickly mass of bruised colours foamed and swirled beyond the glass, the very stuff of the warp itself, noxious and toxic to the eye. Its bilious malevolence went beyond its simple hideous appearance, violating some inner part of the human mind that dared not comprehend its nightmarish potential.

Uriel found his eyes drawn to a loathsome stain of the warp, a vile, filthy sore of ash-stained yellow, he was unable to drag his sight from. Even as he stared at it, the warp shifted, stirred into life by the mere attention and echoes of Uriel's thoughts. Vile, terrible things began shaping themselves from the foul soup of raw creation and Uriel knew that were he to see what horrific thing would be born from its hateful depths, he would go mad.

Gauntleted hands gripped him and hauled him upright, and he could feel the warp's blind, impotent rage at being denied such a morsel as his sanity.

'Don't look at it! Keep your eyes closed!' shouted Pasanius, dragging Uriel over the surface of the dome. Uriel felt its insistent call: the seductions of its fecundity and the promises of power that could be his were he but to surrender to it. His eyes ached to see the awful magnificence of the warp, but Uriel kept them screwed tightly shut, lest they betray his soul to the immaterium.