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‘You are asking me to envisage a concept alien to the material universe.’
    ‘It’s cold,’ she said, breaking eye contact. ‘How can a colour be cold? In the blackness, I could feel the usual disgusting presences: the shrieking of souls against the hull, and the distant cancers, swimming alone in the deep.’
    ‘Cancers?’
    ‘It is the only way I can describe them. Great, nameless entities of poison and pain. Malignant intelligences.’
    Talos nodded. ‘The souls of false gods, perhaps.’
    ‘Are they false if they’re real?’
    ‘I do not know,’ he confessed.
    She shivered. ‘Where we’ve sailed before, even away from the Astronomican… those places were still dimly lit by the Emperor’s beacon, no matter how far from it we sailed. You could see the shadows and shapes gliding through the tides. Daemons without form, swimming through liquid torment. Here, I can see nothing. It wasn’t about finding my way through the storm, the way I’ve been trained. This was a matter of tumbling forward into blindness, seeking the calmest paths, where the shrieking winds were lessened, even if only for a moment.’
    For a moment, he was struck by the similarity between her experiences and the sensation of falling into his own visions.
    ‘We are here,’ he said. ‘You did well.’
    ‘I felt something else, though. The faintest thing. These presences, warmer than the warp around them. Like eyes, watching me as I brought the ship closer.’
    ‘Should we be concerned?’
    Octavia shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It was one aspect of madness amongst a thousand others.’
    ‘We’ve arrived. That is what matters.’ Another silence threatened between them. This time, Talos broke it. ‘We had a fortress here, long ago. A castle of black stone and twisting spires. The primarch dreamed of it one night, and set hundreds of thousands of slaves to making it. It took almost twenty years.’
    He paused, and Octavia watched the passionless skull of his facemask, waiting for him to continue. Talos exhaled in a vox-growl.
    ‘The inner sanctum was called the Screaming Gallery. Have any of the others ever spoken of this before?’
    She shook her head. ‘No, never.’
    ‘The Screaming Gallery was a metaphor, of a kind. A god’s torment, expressed in blood and pain. The primarch wanted to reshape the external world to match the sin within his mind. The walls were flesh – humans moulded and crafted into the architecture, formed as much from sorcery as from ingenuity. The floors were carpeted in living faces, preserved by feeder-servitors.’
    He shook his head, the memory too strong to ever fade. ‘The screaming, Octavia. You have never heard such a sound. They never stopped screaming. The people in the walls, crying and reaching out. The faces on the floor, weeping and shrieking.’
    She forced a smile she didn’t feel. ‘That sounds like the warp.’
    He glanced at her, and grunted acknowledgement. ‘Forgive me. You know exactly what it sounds like.’
    She nodded, but didn’t say anything else.
    ‘The foulest thing was the way you’d become immune to the wailing chorus. Those of us who attended the primarch in his last decades of madness spent much of our time in the Screaming Gallery. The sound of all that pain became tolerable. Soon after, you found yourself enjoying it. It was easier to think when surrounded by sin. The torment first became meaningless, but afterwards, it became music.’
    The prophet fell silent for a moment. ‘That was what he wanted, of course. He wanted us to understand the Legion’s lesson, as he believed it to be.’
    Octavia shuffled again as Talos knelt by her throne. ‘I see no lesson in mindless brutality,’ she said.
    He unlocked his collar seals with a breath of air pressure, and removed his helm. She was struck, once again, by the thought that he’d have been handsome but for the cold eyes and the corpse-white skin. He was a statue, a scarred demigod of clean marble, dead-eyed,