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are in order?’
    ‘I am ready in all but mind,’ answered Karras.
    Cordatus smiled. ‘No one is ever truly ready for such a duty, and I can do little more to prepare you. The Deathwatch holds rigidly to its protocols of secrecy, and for reasons I’ll not venture to question. But you will adapt. You are worthy at least to try. Before you leave, the Megir has asked that you attend him.’
    The Megir.
    First Spectre, Grandmaster of the Order, Lord of Occludus…
    …The Eye that Pierces the Veil.
    It was very rare for the Megir to see anyone but the First Captain, the High Chaplain, or Cordatus himself. Karras had not laid eyes on the First Spectre since his ascension to that position, but his power could be felt everywhere. Logopol pulsed with it. One could feel it resonating even in orbit. To Karras, it was part of being home.
    ‘Go,’ said Cordatus. ‘Robed as you are. Enter the great dome barefoot and kneel before him to make your obeisance. When you exit, send me a thought and I shall meet you back here.’
    ‘It will be as you say, my lord. I go with haste.’
    One did not keep the Megir waiting.
    Dismissed, Karras left the hangar, taking the great archway by which Third Company had departed. His mind was reeling. He had never imagined the Megir would call upon him before he entered service with the Deathwatch. In truth, he was unsettled and utterly unprepared. His khadit had spoken of the Shariax only occasionally, and all warmth seemed to bleed from him whenever he had.
    It is the Throne of Glass from which no First Spectre ever rises alive. It is both the Chapter’s greatest burden and its greatest gift. Without it, all hope of the Great Resurrection is lost. Ah, what a price we pay for faith.
    On the very day of his ascension, the First Spectre had gone alone into the darkest depths of Logopol and had never come back. It was always so, a custom thousands of years old, beginning with Corcaedus the Founder who, driven by a vision from the Emperor Himself, had brought his Death Spectres to Occludus.
    The vision had shown him exactly where to delve. He had found the great dome – the Temple of Voices – sitting silent, patient, in its vast cavern many kilometres below ground. Within the dome, he found the ancient secret it had kept hidden since before the dawn of the Imperium.
    On his command, Logopol had been built directly above it.
    So much history. So much significance. The destiny of the Chapter. Its purpose.
    Karras didn’t feel ready. Not for this.
    But he kept walking.

6
    Athio Cordatus watched his khajar emerge into the hangar, dressed now in dark blue fatigues and black boots, flanked by serfs and servitors carrying his wargear and the limited belongings permitted by the Deathwatch.
    Karras looked hollow, stunned even. It was clear he had been profoundly disturbed by his time with the Megir. Cordatus didn’t need to ask why. The Megir as Karras would have remembered him was a vision of strength and power, of boundless vitality and an insatiable hunger for victory in battle. Not so the figure that now led the Chapter from his life-leeching throne. There in the depths sat a withered thing, muscles atrophied, bone structure starkly visible beneath skin that was gradually turning black. His beard and hair, white as Occludian snow, had grown long and thin. He no longer moved, no longer spoke with lips and breath. His body was undergoing slow petrifaction. In due course, he would turn completely to stone. The Shariax did this, but the power it offered in return, a power unknown anywhere else in all the worlds of man, made such suffering a dark necessity. The Chapter could not fulfil its destiny without it.
    We waited so long for him , thought Cordatus . So many others were lost along the way. But in Lyandro Karras, the calculations, the breeding, the manipulation; it has all come together at last. The sacrifice of the Chapter Masters will not be in vain.
    Whatever visions or words the First Spectre had