“Have you found anything yet?” asked Khalopis. “These ruins bore me.”

“Nothing yet,” said Camille.

“We should go. This valley has seen some psychneuein activity of late.”

Lemuel had mentioned psychneuein once. They sounded vile, but with a warrior like Khalophis to protect her, she wasn’t unduly worried.

“We can’t go yet,” she said, ducking into the shadows of a largely intact structure that echoed with shadows and decay. “So far, everything I’ve touched has been machine-formed and without memory. They’re no use to me. This one’s in pretty good condition, so it might house something of value.”

The interior of the building stank of neglect and damp, its shadows refuges for the wild animals that called the Desolation of Prospero home. Light broke in through holes in the walls and speared down from above. Dust hung in the air, drifting motes of light in the splintered breeze.

Camille drew in a deep breath, tasting the age of the structure in the musty fragrances. There was history here, stories she could unlock if she could only find something that had once belonged to a living, breathing person.

“This way,” she said, heading towards a sagging steel stairway that led to the next level.

“That doesn’t look safe,” said Khalophis, eyeing the rusted handrails.

“I’m touched by your concern,” said Camille, “but it’s lasted a thousand years like this. I expect it’ll last another afternoon, don’t you?”

“I don’t know, I’m not an engineer.”

She tried to figure out if he was joking, but gave up when his expression didn’t change.

“Okay then,” she said, turning away. “I’ve climbed my share of rickety stairs, and this one looks fine.”

She turned and made her way upstairs, hoping that the forces of comedic timing weren’t about to deposit her in a heap of broken stairs and embarrassment. Fortunately, they held, though they creaked and groaned alarmingly as Khalophis put his weight on them.

The upper level was as desolate as the lower, the grey floor covered in dust, droppings and debris from the levels above. Most of the higher floors had collapsed, leaving the building as little more than a hollow chimney, with occasional nubs of floor slabs and structural spars jutting into thin air. Birds fluttered above, and she caught the faint rustle of wings from high up nests.

“What do you hope to find here?” asked Khalophis. “Everything’s decayed. If there was something to be learned here, don’t you think we would have found it by now?”

Camille flashed him a confident smile.

“You can’t look the way I can,” she said.

Khalophis grunted, “None of you remembrancers have done anything worth a damn since you joined us. It was a waste of time bringing you here. I haven’t seen anything special yet.”

She ignored him and moved through the remains of the building, stopping every now and then to examine the debris for anything that might prove useful. Assorted pieces of what might once have been personal effects lay in some of the piles, but they were as lifeless as the ruins themselves.

Something moved above her, a creak of stone and a soft, animal growl. Camille looked up, seeing a flitting shadow, a startled bird whose nest she’d unwittingly approached too closely. She peered into the corner of the building, seeing a collection of wooden spars and what looked like sheet metal arranged too neatly to be random.

“Do you have any lights in that armour of yours?” asked Camille. “Or a torch?”

“I can do better than that,” said Khalophis with relish.

He extended his hand, and a flaring ball of light appeared in the air before him. It burned brighter than a welder’s torch, and shone stark light throughout the derelict structure.

“Very impressive,” said Camille, squinting against the brightness.

“This is nothing. It’s almost insulting to use my powers for something so trifling.”

“Fair enough, but it’s a little bright. Can you dim it down a little?”

Khalophis nodded and the light’s intensity dimmed to a level where Camille could see. High-contrast lighting threw deep black shadows and revealed the decay of the structure in all its glory. For all that the ruined building had little in the way of memory, Camille felt a momentary pang of sadness for the civilisation that had passed away thousands of years before her birth.

People had lived and died here, spending the span of their years dreaming of better days, and working to provide for themselves and their families. They were now dust, and to be so forgotten struck a real chord in Camille. She moved around the barricades – there could be no other purpose for such an assembly of items – and saw a host of cobwebbed skeletons, the bones held together by what looked like some kind of hardened resin.

“They didn’t realise how easily it could all be taken away,” she said.

“What?”

“The people who lived here,” said Camille, kneeling beside the nearest body. Though she was no expert in the study of bones, its size suggested it was a man’s.

“I’ll bet none of them woke up and thought, ‘This is the day our world ends, so I’d better make it count.’”

She looked up at Khalophis and said, “Nothing is permanent, no matter how much we might think it is. I suppose that’s what I’m learning here.”

“Some things will endure,” said Khalophis with the certainty of a zealot. “The Imperium.”

“I expect you’re right,” said Camille, not wishing to get into a discussion on the Imperium’s future with him.

She peeled off one of her gloves and gingerly touched the skeleton, half-expecting it to crumble to dust at her touch. It was a miracle none had succumbed to the ravages of time already, but the hardened resin appeared to be the cause of their preservation.

She heard a rustle of frightened birds from high above, but shut out the noise as she ran her hand over the hardened clavicles to the dead man’s skull, noticing that the cranial lid was detached. It hung from one side of the skull, like a hinged door that had been pushed open from the inside.

She closed her eyes, letting the familiar warmth flow from her hand and into the relic of past times. The power moved within her, and she felt the urgency of the man whose skull she touched pulling her down into his life, sensing the swell of his emotions as they reached out to her.

Too late, Camille saw they were of pain and madness. She tried to withdraw her hand, but the red rush of agony was too swift for her, and searing pain stabbed into her brain like a hot lance. Blood streamed from her mouth as she bit her tongue. Camille screamed as the man’s last, anguished moment ripped through her. Horrible images of feasting white maggots, ruptured flesh and dying loved ones burned their way into her consciousness.

She shook as though seized by a high-energy current, her teeth grinding and her sinews cracking as her mouth tore open in a soundless scream.

Then it was over. She felt rough hands pull her away, and the moment of connection with the dead man was broken. Bruised afterimages remained imprinted on her vision, and she gasped with the horror of his last moments. She had touched the dead before, and had always been able to insulate herself from their endings, but this had been too dreadful and too intense to ignore. She tasted metal and spat a mouthful of blood.

“I told you we should not have lingered,” snarled Khalophis.

“What?” was all she could manage, seeing Khalophis towering over her. One heavy gauntlet gripped her shoulder. The other was wreathed in flickering orange flame.

“Psychneuein,” hissed Khalophis, dragging her towards the stairs.

Then she heard it, a droning buzz like a hive of vespidae, and the excited flutter of what sounded like an explosion of wings as a flock of predatory birds took flight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Pyrae Unleashed/If You’re Dead/The Reflecting Cave