Clara was clearly working hard to keep a façade of calm. On the basis of her demonstrable skill I had forgotten the fact that she hadn't really been in the field before. Even my pitiful experience gave me an edge on her, and my psychic abilities gave me weapons and insights that she couldn't imagine. For a moment I felt both lonely and terrified, filled with an urge to squeeze Hadrian's hand, but he was already moving ahead. Selenica still seemed to be tracking, but her glassy eyes made me think that she was simply moving on autopilot. How much good would either of them be if things really went wrong? I had to bite back a laugh at the presumption that I would be much better.

We moved through another series of strange arches and once again I felt the taste of stale saltwater cloy at the back of my throat. We weren't in the Warp, we were still alive afterall, but we had entered into some kind of interstitial space. Had the ancient Xenos who built this place been chaos tainted? Was this a city of the dead that had slowly fallen into the shadow of the Warp? Was it a deliberate portal? I had too many questions and no data to work with. Not that I imagined that data would comfort me in any case.

"Watch yourselves," Hadrian murmured as we passed through another arch. This one seemed hung with long tendrils of something like seaweed, each ending in a small bilious yellow flower. They looked uncomfortably like mouths. There was evidence that similar vines had been removed, probably with flamers judging by the ash and the smell of prometheum. If this was new growth, it was hellish fast. Our pace slowed as we heard noises up ahead, a dull staccato chattering like the kind you hear from certain types of Administratum Cogitators. We entered the square through the ruins of what might have been a gate or blockhouse. In the center stood a massive stella, carved with a dizzying profusion of runes. It must have been a hundred feet tall, though such a thing was completely impossible owing to the fact we would have seen it from the levy wall. A half dozen servo skulls buzzed around it, scanning and recording. A semicircle of cogitators stood before it, each slaved to a servitor who wrote constantly with an auto quill. All of the servitors were covered with fungus. It grew from their eyes, from their mouths, from the pores of their skin, seeming to pulse with sickly energy as they transcribed the feed from the skulls. Guards in flak armor stood watching the servitors. As we watched we saw one begin to thrash against its connections, whipping cables free and keening like a lost soul. One of the guards stepped close and fired a stub pistol into its cranium, waited a moment, and then gave the twitching corpse a second shot. Two more guards used pincers to disconnect the corpse and drag it to a fire pit made of stacked cinder blocks. They levered it in, then drenched it in promethum and torched it, adding the smell of burning flesh and lubricant to the mycological miasma of the place. Another servitor was led forward. It was crude, probably one of the locals refitted by some low grade flesh butcher. He was plugged in and began to write. I wished Lazarus were here, though his afront at the tech heresy might outweigh his insights. 

"They are transcribing it," I breathed, eyes flicking to crates in which parchments were being lain down. They crackled with void shields, the kind I had seen in Hadrian's library that shielded prohibited texts. I wondered what it might say and of what use it might be. Before I could speculate a man walked out of a tent in a suit of body armor that would have made a Stormtrooper jealous. He was handsome and earnest looking and he pointed and gesticulated at the pillar, making violent gestures to his guards. A tech adept in a crimson robe emerged behind him, buzzing away from a vox caster too low for us to register. The first man turned to snarl something at the tech priest and I gasped despite my best efforts. Pinned to the collar of the new comers armor was a familiar badge of red and silver. An Inquisitorial rosette.