I felt bile rising in my throat at Garm's words. The Ordos of the Holy Inquisition had nebulous but vast responsibilites, but at its core the Ordo Malleus, with which I had become associated, was concerned with the Daemon. I had almost died at the hands of Bahometus and his abominations, and the wrongness of what he had summoned lingered in my mind. All psykers lived with the knowledge of what lived just beyond the prosaic veil of reality. It was a private fear that lurked at the back of the mind. To see it made manifest, to see the doom of all life, was difficult to bear.

"The Emperor Protects," I intoned without any real conviction. Hadrian reached back and squeezed my hand and we slicked on across the dark water.

We began to pass villages, identical in every respect to Garm's home, save they were all abandoned. Some had red dye smeared on the walls of their rude huts, others were smouldering ruins, torched by their neighbours, or by their own hands in a vain attempt to stamp out the contagion. We saw only one living soul. An old man sitting against a clump of trees. His eyes were rolled back and his breathing laboured, great red sores covered his body, weeping clear sera which had attracted thousands of tiny black insects. If they bothered the old man he was too far gone to do anything about it.

"The Sickness," was all Garm would say, stroking harder to steer us further away from the dying man.

We continued on for another hour before, abruptly the mangrove ended. Just ended. Prefabricated ferrocrete blocks had been set up in a vast wall. It curved away to both sides too irregular for me to estimate the area beyond. My breath caught as the boat grounded against the concrete. The area beyond wasn't cleared. It was drained. Millions of gallons of water had been pumped, revealing a landscape of dried mud beyond. Patches of it were blackened where organic matter had been piled and burned. Great trenches had been dug and they still flowed with brackish sea water. The skeletons of marine life encursted the recovered earth like mould, imparting their iodine stink to the vista.

"What in the name of the Throne," Selenica breathed. It wasn't just mud and ash. In the center stood a city. It rose in a series of structures carved of some greenish basalt. Obelisks rose at oddly irregular intervals like quills on a porcupine. At the edge of the ruins I could see men with las guns, standing watch over other men, passing buckets of mud out and tossing them into the trenches. Slaves put to excavating the city, captured tribesmen or subjugated members of Nagrip's allies.

"What the fuck is this..." I breathed.