The Mowing-Devil

  “You could see that dust storm comin',
  The cloud looked deathlike black,
  And through our mighty nation,
  It left a dreadful track.”
   - Woody Guthrie

 The giants came to Arepo at the end of summer. The first sign was a smoke-signal, across the sky: the vapour trail of an armoured landing craft. The wheat forest rippled as the craft passed, stirring up a plume of dust that would take days to settle.
 The craft wasn’t quiet, like a harvester drone. It roared as it flew, and wheezed as it set down on the flagstones in the town square. Three giants disembarked. Each had a huge rifle slung across his breastplate, and I could make out ironclad fingers resting on trigger-guards.
 I anticipated some diplomatic difficulty, so I took up my walking stick and hurried down the conduit, to greet them.
 “Arbiters, ma’am?” asked my neighbour, as I passed his door.
 Astartes, I said. He didn’t know what that meant.

 Perhaps, my children and grandchildren, you’ve never seen a giant either. I’d seen them only once before. A few had visited Arepo in deep autumn, decades earlier. They’d worn blood-red armour then, but the plate of the new visitors was black and dull, and marred like the walls of old fortresses. The left arms were silver, and the immense pauldrons yellow, scarlet, and gold, emblazoned with griffon, or bull’s head, or bird. Skull-like helmets covered the giants’ faces. These aspects reflected the times, because the Eastern Reaches were gnashing in woe in those days, and feeling bloodless.
 A crowd had gathered in the square. Husbands and wives of harvester technicians had already greeted the giants according to custom, offering sprigs of snapwyrm for a buttonhole, and tiny copper charms of Saint Thedra to hang around the neck. A fourth giant had emerged from the craft: a female, smaller than her brothers, and without a helmet. I was the tallest woman on Arepo, and the oldest, but this young giantess was a head taller than I. This giantess declined all gifts, insisting that sororal vows forbade her to accept. But one of her brother-giants reacted less graciously, calling the offerings a pagan insult, and flinging the proffered Thedra charm over the nearest rooftop. Such was the strength in his arm that the charm was probably flung out of Nehen and into the wheat forest.
 Nehen’s marshal, Ambervale, took exception to that. “You don’t know what’s good for ye, ‘startees,” Ambervale snarled, brandishing his rusty lasgun. “If ye won’t wear Saint Thedras, you best go on home, we ain’t zeeners, we ain’t hurtics, we pay our tithes, go bother some’ else!” His own Saint Thedra was on a choker around his sunburnt neck – and an unkempt young son was clinging to the hem of his long duster coat.
 The giantess produced a holoscroll. “I have here a mandate from Inquisitor Mycos,” she said, calmly. “My master needs an audience with your planetary governor!”
 “Bugger off, you and yer ‘quisters!” Ambervale snarled. “’Fore you end up chopped up an’ mixed inta’ the harvest!”
 “Are they here to catch the mowing-devil?” said the marshal’s son, wide-eyed.
 I am the planetary governor, I said, quickly.
 The giantess inspected me, and I her. I was bone; she was muscle. My hair was grey; she had none. My skin was wrinkled; hers was only scarred. The worst mark ran up from above her right eye, back over her skull. She wore mechanized chainmail. At her shoulder was a heraldric sign, a fleur-de-lys. I doubt she was older than eighteen years.
 Who’s this Mycos, I said.
 “Lord Mycos---” she replied, but was interrupted. A fifth giant descended the ramp from the dark maw of the landing craft, and his voice was like the grinding of tank treads. “Mycos, Governor Verona,” he said, “is a Lord of the Ordo Xenos, of the Emperor’s Inquisition.”
 This fifth giant had no rifle, nor helmet. He had close-cropped grey hair, and stubble, and his face was a map of many old campaigns. There was a sword on his back, a pistol on his hip, and a silver watch-chain across his breastplate. A bristled brown cloak, slung about his shoulders, revealed his silver arm, but hid the livery on the other.
 You are leader of this company, my lord? I said. I knew that he was.
 “I am Reynias of Thrax,” he said, and approached me. I expected a giant’s tread to shake the ground, but he walked softly. The gears and pistons of his armour hissed and clicked a little. “I hold the rank of Watch Captain in the Deathwatch.”
 Welcome to Arepo, Reynias of Thrax, I said. I am Verona, governor of this planet. This is William Ambervale, marshal of my planetary defence force. When he is sober, I might have added, and if there were one. The captain looking around, watching the comings and goings of the harvesters. To offworlders the drones are an odd sight, flitting back and forth silently on membranous wings, climbing in and out of silo towers. "How many are you, on this world?” the Captain said.
 Fewer than five hundred citizens, lord, I said, All in this one settlement, which is Nehen, and servicing a vast multitude of the harvester machines.
 This answer confused the giants. The young giantess scanned her scrolls. “I understood that ten thousands lived here,” the captain said. “You pay high tithes – your export of grain is enormous! So said the census bureau.”
 Aye, I said, but no census-taker has come here since our Founding, or certainly none in my long lifetime. The workforce has dwindled. Many families went spinward, to the hiveworlds on the borders of Ultramar. Only as many stay as are needed to tend the harvester mechanisms.
 One of the helmeted giants stepped forward. “Watch Captain, there’s pagan idolatry here,” he said, indignantly. “Th’women offer’ witch-charms!” declared another, in oddly clipped and slurred speech. Reynias only tutted at this, and waved dismissively at the offended giants. For that, and from that moment on, I nearly liked him.
 Why have you come here, my lord? I said. Is there a problem with our yield – our tithe?
 A rumble of worry passed through the crowd.
 “I must speak with you in privacy,” said Reynias.

- - - - - - - - - -

 The facts of Arepo’s Founding are lost to memory, but somewhere in the vaults of the Administratum a holoreel may tell of a huge plascrete cog, a mile wide, poured on the surface, or dropped from low orbit, and of prefabricated silos and docking arches speared through its teeth. The town Nehen had congealed around the machinery, in accordance with the old Reachworld tenet that permanent structures seldom last, but temporary ones are never gotten rid of.
 By the time I settled on Arepo, most of the towers and arches had tilted or collapsed, and been repurposed as habitation. My home was a defunct conical silo, with curved and angled walls, hatches for doors, and huge old fan-ducts for windows. Tolerable quarters, but I had no separate administerium, the Founders having neglected to build one.
 As such, I was treated to the sight of Watch Captain Reynias twisting to squeeze his immense shoulders through my front hatch into my kitchen. Through the fan vent I could see his three dark giants and his dark giantess waiting in my allotment, standing vigilant among my marrow-pods, probably trampling my sativas and tea-leaves.
 On entering my home, Reynias’ demeanour changed markedly: the stern soldier was gone, replaced with a gentleman of the civilized type that we don’t see much of in the Reach – or not anymore. He examined my quarters through small spectacles perched on the end of his nose. That perplexed me, because Astartes legions require anatomical perfection, yet here was a giant with an astigmatism.
 “You must forgive my brothers for their rudeness in the square,” Reynias said. “They’ve lived only in monasteries and on battlefields. Brother Caecus has bled for the Emperor on half the worlds between here and Mancora. And Surdus has his own troubles.”
 No apology is necessary, my lord, I said. I set about brewing some blackleaf tea, and offered the captain a pipe, saying that I knew him for a pipe-smoker when I heard his voice. He declined, graciously – and quickly changed the subject. “You’re not a native Arepoan either, are you, governor?” Reynias said. “Your bone structure speaks of weak gravity, or none. You were voidborn – raised on long-haul merchantmen?”
 Astute! Yes, lord, I said, My childhood home was a universalis-class. My parents were hullwrights, and they swam in the void like fish in the sea.
 He clapped his hands. Clang! “We do have something in common!” he said. “I was raised in orbital starscrapers. Our old sacristan regarded gravity as an indulgence, which could only lead to self-abasement and daemon-worship.”
 May I ask, lord, I said, Which order you belong to?
 “Have you met brothers of the Adeptus Astartes before?” he said.
 Once only, I said. Their armour was red. They visited, oh, decades ago.
 “The ninth legion!” he said, cheerily. “The ‘blood angels’. Yes, it was a captain called Montresor. He’s regarded as a bit of a rascal, now – for not having reported back. Still, you’re a lucky world, to have so much attention from the Emperor’s Chosen!”
 You’ll forgive me, Watch Captain, I said, if I do not share your enthusiasm.
 He smiled, and sipped his tea – then coughed and grimaced. “By Terra!” he said, “Strong stuff!”
 On Arepo, it’s all we ever drink, I said, For it disguises the taste of the local groundwater. You do grow accustomed to it.
 I took some tea to the giants in the garden, who were less than grateful, except the female. Back inside, I found Watch Captain Reynias examining the talisman on my mantel. A Saint Thedra is a small misshapen brass disc, with holes poked through it, so that it resembles a spoked wheel.
 That’s what the women in the square tried to give your men, I said.
 “‘Thedra’…” said the captain, studying closely. He shook the talisman next to his ear, and it rattled a little, as they tend to. “One of the first colonists?”
 Saint Thedra collected the first harvests, centuries ago, I said. The story is that the settlers want to give their crops to secret, evil gods instead. So they conjure up a devil, with a scythe of flame, and it harvests all of Arepo’s wheat in one night. Then Thedra relents, or perhaps punishes them, depending on how frightened one wants one’s children to be.
 “An inauspicious beginning to a colony!” Reynias said, amused. “I had a book of colonial myths when I was a novice… they can be revealing. Tell me about the harvest routine here.”
 Now we’re getting to it, at last.
 Three-fifths of the planet is covered by Demetic squat-wheat, I said, Of the strain pioneered in Ultramar. The name is misleading: the stalks reach a hundred feet, and unharvested patches grow a lot higher. The yield is collected by harvester machines, which you’ve seen. They return the grain to silos here, and we send grain-pods up to orbit, to be collected by longhaulers.
 “For a small colony, the yield is staggering,” Reynias said. “I suppose you know that you are feeding all of Minea and Sisiphrax? And Ichar, and its moons, and many other worlds across the Eastern fringe, and beyond.”
 So I’m told, I said, But once the grain-pods are sent up skyhooks, we don’t give them much thought. Is there a problem with the quality?
 I must have sounded a fool. Reynias stood up. “I’m not a Prefect of the Tithes Chamber, Governor,” he said. “A contaminant of xenos origin has been discovered in grain exported from Arepo.”
 For the governor of an agriworld, this news was the darkness nightmare. I babbled many useless questions, and the captain told me what he could. On Ichar, a year ago, a grain ship had ‘raised the yellow jack’. Planetary administrators realized that the contaminated shipment correlated with outbreaks of sickness, or hysteria, or mysterious toxicity. Vast Inquisitorial wheels turned, and now, months later, here was Captain Reynias at my table, and giants in my garden. The unknown source of the contaminant had been assigned a cryptonym: LARKSPUR.
 “The contamination is not merely chemical,” Reynias said, “But of a spiritual kind. All along the Eastern rim, hiveworlders live under black clouds, experiencing strange fears and bad dreams, and falling into bad habits. Arepo’s grain is the cause. If there was no mowing-devil at the Foundation, there is one now. LARKSPUR is somewhere in your harvest-chain, exerting a miasmatic influence. I require your aid, to find this threat. Then I will destroy it. My order is deathwatch. My brothers and I are a kill-team.”
 He consulted his pocket-watch, which was an antique with the shape of a flattish skull. Then: “That’s all for now. I’m late for vespers. Expect me at dawn.”
 He departed. His giants had stood vigil outside, and dusk had fallen around them, so that they vanished into its shadows – except for the eyes, which gleamed like dark lanterns. The giantess had insisted that her three battle-brothers drink my tea, out of diplomatic courtesy, though it hadn’t been to their tastes. Now they went to their ship to say vespers.
 When they had gone, I spotted Marshal Ambervale lolling at my gate, lasgun slung over shoulder, flask of rye in hand. It was cold. Nights in Nehen are always cold and black, because the wheat forest drinks the clouds before they reach us.
 “Is it the tithes?” Ambervale said.
 No. And what happened to calling me ma’am?
 “Ain’t right inviting ‘em for tea,” he said, angrily. “Shoulda made ‘em wear Saint Thedras. Iron sons-a-bitches… What if they sees circles in the wheat, an’ fly round lookin’ for mowin’ devils… You had any brass left, you’da helped me run ‘em off-world on a hook! Me and the boys coulda done it!”
 This sort of nonsense is why I’m governor, Bill, I said, wearily. Your huffing and puffing won’t impress an Astartes. As for the other thing: a man in your office shouldn’t believe ghost stories.
 He cursed governors and women, and stumbled away. If you want cheering up, I called after him, Think on this: when Terra’s dissatisfied with yields, they don’t send decorous knights, in spectacles. They just send arbiters to bash the governor’s head in!
 Later that night, I wrapped myself in a flax coat and took my own small flyer up over the town, to flit with harvesters for a while. Nehen was quiet, and dark, except for the odd lamp carried down a conduit, or yellow glow leaking through a cracked shutter. The giants’ dropship still sat in the square, and from the air I saw light spill as its forward hatch opened. One of the giants – the brother Caecus, I think – disembarked, the hatch closed again, and I lost sight of him in the darkness.
 Then I flew out over the wheat forest, far to the west, where the unfarmed stalks rustled and creaked and sighed. Out there, I could forget about tithes and armoured giants, and pretend just once more that the warm wind in my hair was a breeze from the distant ocean.

- - - - - - - - - -

 On the second day, I expected Reynias. It was the young giantess who knocked on my hatch, two hours after dawn. “I am Celsa,” she said, as soon as I opened up. “My Watch Captain has given me an errand.” The errand took us to the centre of Nehen, to the primary silo – a vast fat cylinder, covered with dark windows, through which the harvester drones crawled from dawn until dusk. We climbed the exterior stair (I’m not quite as frail as my stick makes me appear – at my age one must look the part) but found the access bulkhead rusted shut.
 I paused to take in the view of Nehen’s rim, and our yellow sun playing across the wheat forest. My companion looked up, then around. “This is the only door that goes inside?” she said. I nodded.
 Close to the bulkhead, but out of our reach, was an umbilical gantry, protruding down at an angle from an aperture in the silo wall. It was a receiver by which drones could pass through the silo sheath and crawl up through tunnels they alone knew, to empty their abdomens into the hoppers.
 Celsa clambered over the stair’s railing. “Wait here,” she said.
 Don’t be daft, girl, I said. I can go back down and fetch my flyer!
 “No need,” she said, and leapt from the railing. My heart leapt with her – the drop below was precipitous! It was a wider gap than I could have leapt, even in my youth, and unarmoured. Still, she landed safely, clinging to the side of the umbilicus. She ducked between its struts and began to climb the inside.
 Careful, girl! I called. It’s a harvester-tube! You’ll be squashed!
 Prophetic. A harvester drone landed heavily, facing backwards, at the bottom edge of the umbilicus.
 It had been a few years since I had been close to one of our mechanical benefactors. They are insectile, and large: as big as a grox, or bigger, with a black hull. The eyeless head has one long antenna. From the hexagonal winged thorax dangle the blunt triangular limbs that weave the collection mesh. The abdomen is a huge cube, stamped with illegible Mechanicus glyphs, and caked with wheat dust.
 Such was the machine that reversed clumsily up the umbilicus toward Celsa. Its abdomen fitted neatly into guiderails, filling the gantry, and ascending faster than Celsa could climb. Realizing her peril, she at once tried to haul herself out through the upper struts.
 Stop, harvester, stop, I shouted! I had an awful premonition of the drone crushing Celsa against a gantry strut, so that she would fall dead in two halves! I fished in my pockets and pelted loose coins at the creature. Some pattered off its carapace, but it paid no heed.
 Celsa was halfway out of the gantry, when the drones’ swollen abdomen reached her: she braced against it with her legs, and grunted, but couldn’t possibly have the strength to slow it. Desperate, I remembered my Saint Thedra charm, so snapped its cord and threw it.
 It was a good throw, for its accuracy, but another force was at work too. When the charm struck the drone’s head, it had the effect of a lightning bolt. The drone emitted a terrible scratching bleeeep of alarm, and slid back down the umbilicus, spraying sparks where its feet met the gantry. It bounced off the side of the silo and tumbled all the way to the ground. Why it didn’t flap its wings, I cannot tell. Celsa was relieved, but lowered herself back into the umbilicus. Come out, I shouted, Another will come in a moment!
 Instead she scrambled up the gantry with greater haste, and vanished from view through the silo wall. For a few minutes, I waited with great concern. Several more drones arrived at the umbilicus, and these completed their ascents inside it, also disappearing from view.
 At last there was a muffled clang from behind the silo wall, and the rust on the bulkhead cracked. Gloved fingers, caked with grain-dust, appeared in the gap, and wrenched the door open from within.

 Celsa thanked me for assisting her, and lit a lamp on her armour, and we ascended the inner staircase. The clangs and thumps of drone-tasks echoed around us.
 This bald giantess interested me now. She was evidently no scribe or scroll-keeper. Yet I was sure that we women were forbidden in the ranks of Astartes knights.
 I studied her as best I could, as we climbed in dust and gloom. (My eyesight, thankfully, has never waned either – perhaps it is even superior to that of Captain Reynias.) Her armour was scratched in many places, and the metal that shone through in the lamplight had a bluish-silver lustre – perhaps one of the secret alloys known only to Martian smiths. The weapons that dented it must have been fearsome, and the girl’s skin – the few patches I could see - was just as scarred. I mused on how I would punish one who had carved such scars into a granddaughter of mine.
 How did you ever come to join this Deathwatch order? I asked. Surely you’ve not had your genes tampered with, or your bowels stuffed with Astartes mechanisms?
 “I’m a special dispensation!” Celsa said, with some pride. “I was a novice in the Priory of the Red Mask, which is when I had my accident.” She tapped that scar on her head. “My sisters died, and I was confined for a long time. Then my master was sent to get me, so that I could learn his methods. The highest authorities have entrusted him with my education - I’m the subject of a fiat ineffibilis!”
 I did not understand that, but the girl seemed talkative, so I mentioned the cryptonym, LARKSPUR.
 “Oh! My master really has taken you into his confidence!” Celsa said, immediately. “If you know that name, you know as much as my brothers and me! LARKSPUR might be a xenos, or a disease, a magic spell, a heretical cult… even a wyrd or a daemon!”
 I thought your Ordos dealt only with xenos threats, I said.
 “So it should,” said Celsa, We had reached the upper bulkhead. This one was rusted open. “But this wouldn’t be the first time that my master has strayed from his mandate. Ah, this is the place!”
 The panopticon was at the summit of the silo, directly beneath the aetheric transmitter that spoke to the skyhooks. In the centre of the room, facing every which-way, was the huge cogitator that monitored Arepo’s harvesting machinery. When I had begun as governor, I’d spoken to the cogitator daily – then it was weekly – then yearly. Repair and upkeep of drones and silos was all done from the ground, or from a long ladder, with a multiwrench in one’s hand, and the analytic faculties of the cogitator were useless for that. I’d been told that the panopticon was the ‘nerve centre’ of Arepo, but really the nerve centre is the silo itself, where the drones speak their routine to each other in the waggling of metal abdomens. For this and other reasons, the cogitator was switched off. We stepped through thick dust, and over trailing cables. No-one’s been up here in years, I said, But stragglers and sleepwalkers.
 Celsa flicked a switch, back and forth and back. Nothing. “Did it ever work?” she said.
 Yes, I said. It used to be very good at computing, and drawing maps. Then it became uncooperative. I dispatched a data-packet to Mars once, notifying the tech-priests of the problem – but that was years ago. I suppose they must have a backlog.
 “That’d be putting it mildly,” said Celsa. She took out her dataslate, lay down on her back, and hauled herself into the dark space under the tabulation board.
 It could just be slow to wake, I said. It’s been asleep for years.
 “No, there are broken wires,” said Celsa, immediately. “But I can repair it.”
 A few minutes later, the coolant fans stirred, and the cogitator’s panels flickered to life, one at a time. Machine-code streamed across them, faster than I could read. A Mechanicum sigil glowed at the centre of each panel. The cog-and-skull stared down at us, waiting for something.
 “I expected this,” Celsa said. She indicated a black square of glass at the edge of the tabulation board. “It detects genetic patterns. Any skin contact should be sufficient.”
 I pressed my hand to the glass, uneasily.
 -- ERROR // INVALID GENEPRINT --
 It used to recognize me, I said, scratching my head. Celsa blew the dust away, and polished the glass and we tried again. This time a chime sounded, and the panels displayed a fidelitous view of Arepo’s wheat forest, undulating below a blue sky.
 Celsa coupled her dataslate to the cogitator and rapidly put in many commands. The panels drew a familiar geodesic map of Arepo in glowing amber lines. More commands summoned an exhausting analysis of the wheat harvest, filling the panels with three-dimensional etchings of sugar and starch structures.
 “Triticum demeticum tarentum. Saccharide fibres, water, glycerides, globulins, albumins… harmless impurities within tolerances…” said Celsa, “This shouldn’t take long. There it is: unidentified impurities, one part in ten millions.”
 That is high, I said.
 “My master thought it would be – and that’s only what can be detected. Analysis of impurities, unsuccessful. Isolation of sample, unsuccessful. Comparisons to catalogue, unsuccessful: requisition history not found. Contaminant threat level estimate, nil. Hah!”
 She transcribed everything to her dataslate, uncoupled it, and switched off the cogitator. But she was excited, now. As we descended, she told me – perhaps to impress me - that there had been neither rust, nor char, nor patina, on the severed wires that she’d had to repair. Those wires had not been frayed away in some ancient accident: they had been cut deliberately, and recently.

 In daylight and at ground level, Reynias and brothers Surdus and Mutus were coming down the street. As they approached, the citizenry of Nehen – which had been gawking at the fallen harvester drone – vanished into doors and conduits, and closed its shutters, and kissed talismans in worry.
 The drone that had nearly crushed Celsa had not been destroyed in its fall, but was wriggling on its back, near the foot of the stair. Its rear box had cracked open, scattering huge wheat grains across the street. I found my walking stick lying there, and kicked through the grains, hoping to see my Saint Thedra illuminated in a ray of sunlight. No luck.
 There was one who was not worried by the drone, or the giants: Ambervale’s son, a scruffy boy whose name I couldn’t recall. He was perched on the shoulder of Surdus’ armour as he walked. He had the air of a feudal lord surveying the realm from his castle’s highest tower.
 “Good morning, Governor Verona,” said Reynias, then, “Oh, flip that warped thing over, will you, Mutus? It’s driving me mad.”
 Mutus slung his rifle under his arm, ducked past the fallen drone’s twitchy wings, braced against the thorax, and shoved. Typically this job would have to be done by a work gang with prybars, but Mutus’ exertion was enormous, and successful: the drone tumbled over with a thump, then struggled upright and took off in a billow of dust, without once showing gratitude.
 Now we will have to catch it to mend it, I thought.
 “Who is your new friend, brother?” said Celsa, to Surdus, and gesturing to the boy, who had watched Mutus’ feat of strength with awe.
 “This is William Ambervale, Jr.,” said Reynias, “The newest honorary battle-brother of the Deathwatch, and already prepared to die for the Throne. We found him looking for his feckless father, and he’s been telling us about the mowing-devil. Have you heard that story, Celsa? It has a scythe of fire, and it was conjured by Saint Thedra, to teach the lazy farmers of Arepo a lesson.”
 This friendliness, on his part and on theirs, disturbed me. Come down now, child, I said, to the boy. Surdus lowered him into my arms and I set him on the ground. He clasped my hand, but I told him to run home – not expecting the poor waif to find much of a welcome there.
 “Watch Captain, I have valuable intelligence,” Celsa said.
 “I’ll say. Report, novice!”
 She gave her captain a brief sketch of our morning’s adventures, and showed him the transcriptions from the cogitator. But she added an observation I had not been aware of. “Each harvester machine,” she said, “Is branded with Mechanicus numerals. The numbers are a serial, correlating with flight-paths, and the cogitator confirmed that the numbers correspond to sectors of the planetary surface. I’ve observed more than four hundred different machines this morning; higher-order machines that departed before matins have not returned yet, whereas lower-order machines in each range fill their bellies and return much more frequently.”
 “So?”
 “From my observations, the behaviour of drones in the particular range 0101111 to 11001000 seems anomalous.”
 “Reynias looked around for several seconds, up at the torrents of drones flowing through the sky. “I can’t see any in that range,” he said.
 “That’s what is anomalous,” said Celsa.
 “The captain suddenly grabbed the sides of her bald head, and kissed it, paternalistically. “Magnificent!” he said. “Where don’t they come back from?”

- - - - - - - - - -

 The giants’ dropship took us westward, chasing the sinking sun. Captain Reynias insisted that I accompany the expedition, although I could not imagine what use he thought I could be.
 The harnesses in the ship’s belly were too slack to hold me in any safety or security, and the engine was deafening – although Celsa and Brother Surdus seemed able to carry on a discussion only using hand gestures.
 Brother Mutus was strapped into the harness facing me. From take-off until landing, he said nothing, nor moved. I noticed, for the first time, that the segments of his armour and helmet were not merely snugly fitted, but actually nailed together, with large crooked iron nails. Stowed around and above us was the giants’ arsenal, neatly stowed: rifles, plasma cells, grenades, and a colossal belt-fed gun of exotic design.
 Our pilot, Brother Caecus, flew a zig-zag across a sector that Celsa had identified. I still didn’t know what they expected to find – and for hours they did not find it. Reynias became visibly irritated. But Brother Surdus had a hawk’s eye: at last he tapped his captain on the shoulder, and pointed out of the window, tracking something on the horizon. Celsa and I craned our necks to see out of the viewing ports.
 From the air, the wheat forest, which covers all the land of Arepo, looks less like a forest than like an ocean, vaster than the planet’s water-ocean. The autumn storms even cause currents and ripples in it, which can propagate for many miles, through the denser reaches. Where the soil is fertile, the wheat grows higher, so that the contours of its canopy form valleys and hills, and even cliffs and crags and mountains, all made of dappled ochre and gold. Of a landscape of wheat stalks, no map can exist, and in it there should be no permanent landmarks.
 Yet there was a pattern, below. Caecus took us around it in a wide arc, and the sinking sun saw wonder and disbelief as its light tracked across our faces. Shadows had been carved into the surface of the wheat, and at first I gave no thought to the enormous scale, and was awed only by the geometric precision, which banished any notion that it might be the product of nature.
 Wheat had been felled, in concentric circles, crescents and equilateral triangles that intersected and branched off from one another, joined by long lines at precise angles, and dotted with dark specks, which might be patches of bare earth. The arrangement defied human understanding, hinting irresistibly at the occluded, the alien, the celestial. My world had been used as a parchment, for the writing of sigils!
 “It might be eldarin,” said Celsa, very close to my ear. That made me shudder.
 “Set us down,” said Watch Captain Reynias.

 We landed in a punctuation point, at the end of an alien sentence. There was nothing but rustling wheat for miles around – but the giants still barrelled out of the craft with their bolt-rifles raised, and the three battle-brothers swiftly fanned out ahead, searchlights sweeping the ground.
 They advanced to the edge of the clearing, to the mouth of a long alley which had been trampled through the wheat forest, and Surdus and Mutus stood guard there. Caecus returned. “Nothing,” he said.
 Celsa retracted her helmet. Reynias had never donned his. He put on his spectacles, girded his cloak, and crouched down to inspect the wheat under our feet. Celsa did the same.
 The stalks in this sector of the forest were not high: five or six times the height of a human, at most, which generally meant a girth twice that of my arm. The fallen stalks gave the impression of having been pushed flat quite gently, so that they bent only and the base, and did not break or uproot. Dark blackish-red leaves had begun to poke up between the flat stalks: weeds and ferns from the wheat forest’s underbrush were enjoying more sunlight now, in a crop-circle, than they had ever known before.
 “Something big,” said Reynias, to his novice. “Tall, and strong, but not heavy. Here frequently, recently.”
 He stood up, looked around, and consulted his pocket-watch. “This is a labyrinth,” he said, “And it’s the work of years. Governor, we go on foot from here. Come with us, or wait for us in the ship, it’s up to you.”
 Certainly I would go with them. “Which way?” said Caecus. Reynias looked at the ground around them, then pointed down the alley that Surdus and Mutus were watching. “That way, and keep it quiet. It’s ahead of us, moving away.”
 Mutus retrieved the huge automatic gun from the ship, and carried it with ease, the ammunition belt slung over his shoulder. When we had begun to advance, and when the Watch Captain was a little distance away, Brother Caecus growled at me: “Fall behind and be left behind, old woman. Give our position away, and I’ll leave you here for good.”
 We’re used to hardship on the agriworlds, boy, I said. I was out-marching soldiers when you were still bawling at your mother’s tit.
 For a long time we did march, in the amber dusk, over the flattened wheat stalks, down a wide avenue of that alien writing. We came to immense clearings, circular, or triangular, where lines intersected, and everywhere Reynias made minute examinations of the ground, before directing us onward. Whatever traces he detected were invisible to me.
 We found those ‘black specks’ which I had seen from the air. They weren’t bare earth: they were the missing harvester drones, in the range whatever-it-was to such-and-such. Smashed and scorched machine-carcasses, some of them half-buried in wheat and earth. Drones had been dying here for a long time. Most seemed to have been struck and partially incinerated by some terrific heat. “A scythe of fire,” Celsa whispered.
 As night fell, the wrecked drones became a more common sight, and the resurgent ferns beneath out feet indicated that we had entered an older region of the crop-pattern. The wheat was far higher, now, and the alleys narrower. A few living drones were visible in the sky, but paid us no heed. Still the giants’ pace did not waver, nor their vigilance. My old bones ached, but I did not give Caecus the satisfaction of my saying so.
 At length, Reynias led us off the beaten path: we departed the flattened alleyways, and entered the wheat forest proper, though it felt that we were cheating the architect of the labyrinth by doing so. Our progress was slower, away from those alien roads, and the black ferns underfoot were now a tangle. Still the captain was sure he was on the right scent.
 We came to a glade where caps and clouds of luminous fungus burned in the darkness among the wheat stalks. Fox-fire spores wisped idly through the warm air, dodging any hand that tried to catch them. Here Reynias stopped, unexpectedly, and when I approached him I saw why.
 His foot had struck an object on the ground – a stone – no, too artificial, too shaped – scrap metal, a piece of armour, unrusted, so, steel or better. Celsa shone her lamp. The object was a helmet, caked in harvest-dust, but blood-red. Within it, half-sunk in the earth of years, was an ancient skull.
 Reynias span around, peering, scanning, every direction. “Caecus!” he hissed, “Beware!”
 A white star flared ahead of us, a false dawn in the night of the wheat forest. For an instant the wheat seemed like the marbled columns of an immense temple, and threw impenetrable shadows.
 A beam of light from the new star swept silently through the air, spurting flame where it struck a wheat stalk. I threw myself to the ground in terror.
 The armoured giants were not dazzled: they raised their rifles instantly. “For the Emperor!” Caecus screamed, and I was deafened by the chatter of heavy bolts sent into the dust and shadow ahead. Mutus’ weapon was a terror itself, spewing muzzle-flame as its blasts tore up wheat-stalks and shattered stones. The light-beam from the mowing-devil must have passed over my head – then ceased, and so blinded me a second time, by its absence. The gunfire ceased too, and the only sound was the deep hum of harvester drones, overhead.
 Celsa appeared beside me, and lifted me to my feet without the least effort. She and her captain exchanged urgent words above my head, and seemed to loom as gigantically as the wheat stalks.
 “K----e’s hounds!” the captain swore. (Blasphemy, from a monk!) His eyes were wide, even excited. “It’s an elder-ghost, Celsa! Bolt shells are useless – damnation and Chaos, we need the hydra’s teeth–––!”
 The ghost’s laser blazed out of the shadows again, searing a flawless arc across the ground toward us. Celsa shoved her captain back, and pulled me also to one side without the slightest effort – and as I staggered in the dust, grasping for my stick, the laser passed close to me again. Through the wheat stalks I glimpsed the giants’ enemy: skeletal, pale, and twice or thrice the height of a man, branched and fronded, a tree that walked! It vanished from my sight.
 The hum of harvester drones! We had marched out of the territory from which they had not been returning, the region in which the mowing-devil had been destroying them! We were back in harvest-country!
 A flock of the drones was swarming far above us, in the daylight above the canopy – but they did not hum and buzz like that in normal flight, or their constant sorties would have driven me mad years ago.
 No, that rising sound, now a roar, was a peril greater than any laser-weapon – it was the unspooling of microplastic threshing wire, nanowarp and nanoweft. Electricity tickled my hands and neck and hair, and mortal dread seized my heart. The harvesters were deploying their collection meshes! In moments, the meshes would descend, and every scrap of living matter within a mile would be flayed to ribbons for its grain!
 Habit drew my hand to my throat, clutching for a charm of Saint Thedra – but I had lost it, of course! I shouted desperately, trying to warn the giants, and gestured upward wildly with my stick, as fibrous flax and chaff began to fall around us, but it was hopeless: the ghost had chosen the same moment to renew its attack. The white laser swept out at us again, and struck one of the giants – Brother Surdus or Brother Caecus, I could not tell – transforming that poor wretch into a glowing, fusing statue, his black armour incandescent and bubbling. The flesh within surely scorched to charcoal – and the blazing heat of that incineration washed over me – but I heard no scream.
 The buzz of the harvesters became deafening, and beneath it was the awful swish and click and slice of the threshing wires. The filaments gleamed as they scoured vicious paths up and down the wheat stalks, stripping off chaff, shaking and winnowing, until fallen husks heaped around my ankles. The swirling dust was unbearable to my lungs and my eyes, and I’m one who has breathed and blinked grain-dust all her life.
 Caecus and Surdus and the other – whichever of them still lived – were lost to me, and a yard was as impenetrable as a mile. I saw the muzzle flashes of the giants’ boltguns, but I couldn’t hear them. Still the mowing-devil’s laser struck back and forth.
 Electrostatic coils span down among the threshing wires, and wheat grains the size of my fist tumbled and danced, sticking and being dragged upwards in seething, churning bunches. I staggered through the tempest, and fell helplessly at the feet of the mowing-devil, itself, expecting only to die. It stared down, emotionless, faceless, a smooth, domed head, a death-mask, entwined with vines and roots, dark leaves and petals blossoming and churning, scattering upward from its terrible branched horn, which curved like a scythe-blade. A long, bonelike weapon-arm stretched down to crush me –
  – and was parried by a bolt of lightning! Storm-fires danced across the mowing-devil’s flesh, and it swivelled and flexed, recoiling, screeching terribly. Watch-Captain Reynias was beside me, holding the lightning bolt in his hands – it was the blade of his longsword!
 Now Reynias dropped, and rolled. The mowing-devil raised a titanic leg to step on him, but his grip on the lightning-sword shifted, and he flicked the blade upward, spearing the monster’s abdomen, transfixing it. The sword was wrenched from his grip as the mowing-devil vanished backward into the howling dust. He followed it, bellowing, and I saw and heard him no more.
 The giantess Celsa and I were drowning in rising chaff. I struggled toward her. She had discarded her boltgun, and was fumbling with an object from her belt – scrubbing it furiously against the fabric of her cloak. With a deft underarm throw she pitched the something, small and dark and round, at one of the electrostatic coils. The coil caught it as it withdrew upward – and pulled it into the belly of a harvester.
 Light and fire and smoke burst out above, in great confusion. The chaff that fell around was burning. Wheat grains burst and blackened, and the stalks themselves were toppling, sheared cleanly by the wild flailing of a collection mesh. A mass of fire fell toward me – my head struck a rock – I was dimly aware of being picked up by a giant’s gauntlet, and tucked under a silver arm –
  – where I lost consciousness. Later, to my surprise, I was alive.

- - - - - - - - - -

 The destruction of that airborne drone set a fire in the wheat forest that burned for two days and three nights.  I remember little of those days and nights. I was told that we escaped that inferno only narrowly, when Brother Surdus summoned the giants’ landing craft to lift us out. At first I thought that Nehen and the whole colony was threatened by the flames. But a long-forgotten subroutine stirred in the cortices of the harvester drones, and they rallied in huge numbers to extinguish the blaze, spraying immense quantities of phosphate powder. When the flames were quelled, the Watch Captain and his remaining able-bodied soldiers took me out over the wheat forest again. This time, Reynias himself was the pilot. The alien patterns in the flattened wheat had been largely obliterated by the fire, but here and there I could still see the edge of a rune, or the side of the sigil, and wondered aloud if there was any meaning left, if ever there had been any. With the wheat forest canopy also burned away, Reynias quickly found the site of the ambush, and the corpse of the mowing-devil, not quite where he had left it.
 It was an alien thing, immensely tall, half-skeletal, the smooth face and scythe-horn melted and charred and shattered. The roots and vines around it were not simply forest growth, but a product of the thing’s own alien flesh, and charred scraps of leaf and frond crumbled and fluttered to the ground even as I looked. A huge tubular weapon was in its hands – no – was part of its hands. The creature had died almost upright, slouched, with Reynias’ sword stuck neatly upward through its body. It had succumbed to the sword, and fire, and the bolter-shells, and the lash of the harvesters’ mesh, which seemed fortunate for the Deathwatch, because any one of those things might not have been enough.
 A few of the smaller wheat stalks around the creature had been bent flat, as they burned: it had tried to trudge out its odd circles and patterns even as death overtook it.
 This is LARKSPUR, then, I said. What is it, Captain? A daemon?
 “A devil, perhaps!” said Reynias, grimly. “But one that sows more than it reaps, I think!” He grasped the hilt of his stuck sword with both hands, and kicked against the mowing-devil’s twisted leg, hauling the sword free. He staggered back. The devil’s remains collapsed, became a pile of strange bones and ashes. He inspected his unbloody blade, sniffed, and looked around. The stench of charred wheat was horrible.
 Young Celsa had brought an odd metal box with her from the ship, which she now set on the ground. “My master means that the creature is a product of xenos alchemy,” she said. “Made not made of the common clay, but of sculpted warpstuff, sometimes called or witch’s-bone, or wraith’s-bone, and possessed…” – here she hesitated, and I saw real horror in the curl of her lip – “…and inhabited by a xenos ghost.”
 She rummaged in her bodice for a charm that hung on the chain – a silver double-eagle, of course, but one which was apparently also a key to the box’s padlocks. “My master and I destroyed a similar abomination on Syracu, a year ago. The shells from our bolters – even those blessed by Mechanicus rites – bounced off its bones like spring raindrops. It succumbed only to the hydra’s teeth.”
 From inside the box she had picked out a carbine bullet of immense size, rifled for the cavernous chambers of the giants’ boltguns. The bullets from the box even looked rusted and old, and ornate, which are things that I did not know a bullet could be.
 These ‘hydra’s teeth’ were dispensed to the two silent giants, Mutus and Surdus. Mutus loaded his boltgun without ceremony, but Surdus stared at the bullets. “Why’s the Emper’r’s blessin’ scratch’ from the casings?” he asked.
 “It wasn’t the Emperor’s blessing, brother,” said Celsa, and made some sign with her hands, which I suppose was an abjuration.
 Reynias was kicking idly through ashes some little distance away. “Needs must, when daemons drive!” he called. “It was stupid of me not to issue them on the night of our sortie. Do your duty!”
 Surdus loaded the hydra’s teeth, warily. Then he and Mutus raised their rifles and blasted the mowing-devil’s carcass until not one rib or bone or joint was still attached to another, and there was nothing left that could house even the hardiest alien spirit. I had to turn away, when that shooting began; the act repulsed me a little, as the mowing-devil had been handsome thing in life, in spite of the terrors it had brought to Arepo.
 When the shooting ceased, Reynias retrieved something small from the remains, but I did not see what it was. Then Celsa set another of her incendiary explosives, and we retreated as the devil’s remnants were vaporized. Surdus raked dry earth over the spot, and he and Celsa recited a prayer in High Gothic, in mechanical unison. Mutus stood by, seemingly indifferent.
 “Is that all, master?” said Celsa, when they had finished.
 “Not quite,” said Reynias. “There are the remains of Montresor’s squad to send home. And I still have one more question for the governor, here. I was expecting to find – aha, look, look!”
 With the tip of sword, he pushed over a misshapen object among the ashes. The smell of cooked flesh wafted up. The lasgun had melted, and the duster coat burned away, and the skin was scorched, and the throat bare and gashed open, and the eyes wide and lifeless, but there could be no mistake: it was the corpse of my planetary marshal, William Ambervale.

- - - - - - - - -

 “A chaotic hunt,” Reynias said, lighting the pipe with a wooden match, “But order has prevailed, praise the Emperor.”
 He was perched on a chair in my kitchen again, stretching his immense legs in front of my heating duct. He and Celsa had entered accompanied by an enormous monk, in heavy but plain robes, who now sat cross-legged on the floor. This monk had astonishing musculature, odd-shaped black tattoos, blue eyes, and dark shaggy hair. Fibrous bandages adhered to one side of his face. When I greeted this man as a newcomer, he replied “I am Caecus.” He was the giant who had been struck by the mowing-devil’s laser, whose armour had melted to slag with him in it, yet he lived! His comrades had cut him from the ruins of his armour with a thermic lance, and he’d tumbled out scorched and agonized, but was expected to recover completely. He told me he had endured the pain by singing songs, “to fortify himself”, and that he’d soon fight at his brothers’ side again. I believed it.
 It had been a trying few days for me, as well, so as Reynias filled his pipe, I had brewed myself more tea, in a preparation even stronger than that which I served to the giants on their arrival. Concerns lingered in my mind. Caecus is wise; it’s always best to fortify oneself.
 Arepo owes you much, Captain, I said. The mowing-devil’s destruction has likely spared us much bloodshed. But I am curious about what could have motivated Ambervale to err so terribly, in trafficking with it, if that was what he did.
 Reynias chewed his pipe. “Here on Arepo,” he said, “Is brain-work of the sort that Brother Mycos likes to find for me, because he thinks my logis implants will atrophy without it, and he’s correct. Celsa’s report, when she writes it, will make me look very slow-witted, and deservedly. The legend of the mowing-devil – ”
 “Master,” said Celsa, patiently, “They will expect us on Talasa...”
 “Yes they will. The legend of the mowing-devil, I heard twice. Governor Verona, you said that it was the farmers who were dissatisfied, and threatened to give their grain to gods of Chaos, and conjured a daemon to prove it. That story didn’t interest me much, until I heard a mirror-image of it, from Ambervale’s boy. In his telling, it was Saint Thedra who was upset at the quality of the harvest, and threatened to have Arepo mowed by devils.”
 That story exists in many variations, I said, and blew on my tea, to cool it. Every child on every conduit has concocted their own version. But can that be what Ambervale was doing – offering our crop to dark powers?
 “No. Knowing some High Gothic, we can – strip away the chaff, can’t we? Come on, Celsa. ‘Thedra’…”
 “A corruption of cathedra,” said the novice, slowly. “Meaning the chair, or the place of the chair...”
 “Exactly. Such distortions occur across the galaxy, and are hardly impious: the farmers of Arepo are acknowledging the Supreme Throne of Terra. The ‘mowing-devils’ in the story never were daemons, but those harvester drones, which the Chamber Exactio sent to replace a troublesome workforce. So Thedra was as good as His word.
 “And devils those drones certainly are! This planet’s harvest apparatus, although built with the best intentions, is one of the surest death-traps ever set. We might even call Arepo an honorary Deathworld! It’s the perfect neighbourhood for LARKSPUR. If a pious fool like me or Montresor blunders in, all that’s needed is a pretext to send us to the cornfield.”
 You think the Blood Angel was sent to his death deliberately? I said. Ambervale wouldn’t even have been born at the time of the ninth company’s visit!
 Just then, a worrying thought struck me.
 “Indeed not,” said Reynias, “Which is just one problem with identifying the late marshal as LARKSPUR. Another is that when he found his body, he was without a charm of Saint Thedra.”
 I do not follow, Captain, I said. Celsa and Caecus, too, had the expression of being utterly lost.
 “I hoped you wouldn’t!” Reynias said. He had a Thedra charm in his hand, and passed it back and forth between his fingers. “Every native of Arepo wears one of these, and visitors too. And they rattle! Did you notice that, Celsa? They’re part of the harvest-machinery, in a very practical way. The Swallowtail’s cabin instruments could tell, once I told them what to look for. The charms contain tiny transponders. If you’re wearing one, the harvester drones can see you, and will avoid you. If you’re not, they can’t – and won’t. Celsa, you weren’t carrying one when you climbed the silo gantry, and one of the blind brutes didn’t know to stay out of your way until the Governor bounced a charm off its brain. The drones probably scan for charms before each a harvest – but Montresor’s squad refused to wear pagan amulets, and so did we!
 “Ambervale must have known all this, but his Thedra charm wasn’t on his body. He wouldn’t venture into the wheat forest without it - not for all the gold in the sector. And he was leagues from the town, with no transport… no, he was dead before he ever went into that glade, and not from harvester-wires: his throat was gouged by a small vibro-knife, or something like it. His death was an improvisation, on the part of LARKSPUR – who is still alive.”
 If you’re suggesting that Ambervale was part of a heretical coven, I said, Your hunt can hardly be over.
 “I didn’t say that it is.”
 Celsa stared at me vacantly. She had a heavy pistol on her hip; the holster was fastened. Caecus was sitting quite still. In in spite of his injuries, he reminded me of a crouched cat, waiting to pounce.
 You had a question for me, I said, feeling uneasy. What is it?
 “It’s one I’ve been asking all over the segmentum,” Reynias said. He set down the pipe, and leant forward. My poor grainwood table creaked under his armoured arms. He flexed his gauntleted fingers, adopting a pose less of the warrior, than of the ingratiating diplomat, and stared at me over his eyeglasses.
 “Redam s’as iyanden?” he said, in the tongue of my mothers and grandmothers.

- - - - - - - - - - -

 Mine was a good run, all things considered.
 The mon-keigh’s words struck me like a thunderbolt, like that sword of his, my children and grandchildren. It had been years since I heard my native tongue spoken out loud, and the Space Marine’s words stirred a raft of memory, stifling me, Iyanden, a city of gold, her towers gleaming in the dawnlights of a million suns, towers higher and more numerous than the creaking, dusty grain stalks of Arepo -
 I beg your pardon, captain, I said.
 “Redam s’as iyanden?” he repeated. Horrible, to hear eldarin trip neatly from a human tongue. Iyanden, a city of ghosts, Iyanden, where I was born, and to which I will return, the city where my Path began. If the mon-keigh knew that ancient name, his inquisitions had proceeded further than the scores who had tried before him. I was surrounded, with no way out, nor back, except one way.
 The burden of years was sliding from my shoulders, and at last I could loosen a mask that had eaten away the face. I slurped my tea, set the empty cup down. Cupped my hand below my eyes. Blinked loose the horrible milky lenses. Pulled the false grey hair from my head – real human hair, it was, which had taken some weaving! I scratched the lobes of my ears, mutilated of old.
 “You’re a xenos,” Celsa said, meekly, staring. She and Caecus, at least, I had astonished.
 “Governor Verona is LARKSPUR,” said the captain, without taking his eyes off me. “It follows what its kind calls ‘the path of the sleeper’, and it’s been on post here for a length of time that puts our service to the Deathwatch into the shade. It is an agent of sorcerers, and the horrors on Ichar and Minea and across the sector are the fruits of its toil on Arepo.
 “You did remarkably well, eldar,” he said, gravely. “Your disguise is a good one, though I am still a fool to have been taken in. Now we need to talk. If you won’t, Caecus must call in his battle-brothers, and we’ll take you to Talasa, to Inquisitor Mycos. His methods are severe.”
 So I would expect – but there are fates worse than torture and death, and I have always counted failure among them. Fail in your task, the autarchs say, and the Enemy deserves your soul.
 You have nothing with which to threaten me, mon-keigh, I said.
 “I can make it talk,” said Caecus.
 “Hrrmmm, well, I can say a little on its behalf, first,” Reynias said. “You’re not as frail as you appear, eldar, but you are far older. You erred badly in mentioning Montresor and his Blood Angels, because they came to Arepo nearly a hundred years ago! I was slow to notice that, but your position was precarious, and you knew it. You sabotaged the silo cogitator, fearful that it could reveal the nature of the contaminant. But you were hasty and your sabotage was not thorough. Later you killed Ambervale as a scapegoat, and dumped his body near the rune-circles.”
 (I told you, children and grandchildren, that I met Ambervale in the street, and later took my flyer out for a spin. All true; but between those two events I also followed Ambervale into a dark conduit, and slashed his throat! It was not simply to give the Deathwatch a dead heretic: the marshal was the only other who was aware of the runes in the wheat forest, and he even had some conception of what made them, though it frightened him. If his nerve had failed, he could have warned the Astartes of dangers which I was desperate to exploit.)
 “The next day,” Reynias continued, “You saved Celsa from a drone at the silo because her death could have led to my discovering the secret of the talismans. You knew we would find the glade where the creature dwells, just as Montresor found it, a hundred years ago, and it was essential that we went there naked, into the path of the harvesters. You could not even take a Thedra-charm of your own, as it might have protected us all. I commend your devotion to duty: you were prepared to die to ensure our doom.”
 Yes, I said.
 Celsa gaped. “You vicious old cow!” she said.
 “As for the monster,” Reynias went on, “I presume it came with you when you travelled to this planet. Its odd behaviour is the product of senescence, or separation from the sympathetic energies of your homelands. The Ordo Xenos is not entirely ignorant of these creatures, you know: I retrieved its receptor-crystal, which will interest them greatly. Where is yours, incidentally?”
 That sickened me the most. I said nothing.
 “This is getting us nowhere!” Caecus snarled, nostrils flaring. “There are worlds dying! Where’s the poison, eldar?” Then, to his captain: “Let me and Surdus at it. It’ll sing, I promise.”
 I would not.
 “Hush, brother,” said Reynias. “You’ll open your wounds. We’ve already found the opiate – and tasted it! It’s that blackleaf tea plant, which grows on the Governor’s trellises. It grew on the monster, too, and was sown widely by its wanderings, and harvested with the grain. It was under our feet in the crop circles.
 “Its fronds, when ground up, are a reddish-brown snuff-like powder – a supremely resilient narcotic, addictive and psykoactive. Undetectable to the puritifactia of most harvest mechanisms. Indeed, unknown to the Arch-Genetors and to all human science! It even fooled the refined palates of we Emperor’s Chosen. The fire in our bellies must have burned away the worst of it.
 “What I don’t understand is how LARKSPUR could be so incautious as to show us the drug on our arrival! We couldn’t succumb to its addictive properties instantly. Were you mocking us, eldar?”
 There were limits to the mon-keigh’s powers of reason, after all! No, mon-keigh, I said, The purpose was to kill you all!
 (I drank no tea myself, that first day. I suspect that Celsa drank none either, though she was too polite to admit it.)
 The preparation you drank came from the root-crystals, not from the leaves, and was so concentrated that it would have killed you ten times, if you were natural creatures...
 – Reynias leapt from his seat, sweeping the table aside –
  ...and it is the same brew that I drank a few moments ago.
 Giant gauntlets seized my wrist, my throat. I was lifted into the air, strangled, choking. The cup flew from my hand and shattered. But I felt the first pangs of the poison. “Where’s Iyanden?” Reynias roared, into my face. “Where’s the craftworld? Where is it?”
 The Space Marine’s unarmoured head was in front of me. I flicked the vibro-knife from my sleeve. Had he been as slow as an Arepo farmer, I could have opened his throat easily. But he jerked backwards, and the knife sparked on his iron collar, and caught his chin. Still, a scar to remember me by! Celsa showed her quality again: her gloved hand struck my wrist, with tremendous force and precision, deadening the muscles. I dropped the knife, and Reynias let go of me.
 I flexed as I fell, looking for the knife. The fall from a Space Marine’s grip is a long one. I landed on my feet.
 Long-limbed Caecus swung down at me, but I dodged, and his huge fist struck the floor. Then the door burst inward, as I expected. Mutus and Surdus aimed their boltguns. My hand found the knife.
 “No!” the captain said, “We need it alive---!”
 But his brothers were too zealous.
 I reflected on my accomplishments. Across the constellation, the mon-keigh Emperor’s hiveworlds hungered for an alien drug that was repugnant to Him. If Arepo’s wheat were cleansed, the addicted worlds would starve, and riot. The mon-keigh might cultivate the narcotic themselves – but to make the drug thrive on Arepo has been the work of half a lifetime for me. Blackleaf is the fruit of a world far distant, where it grows in the red fields of Yavanna, in groves sacred to the exodites, and only the love of the eldar can nurture it – or the hate.
 But I did not think the mon-keigh would try. Only the eradication of the tainted forest would appease their Emperor. Arepo would be made a dustbowl. That, I felt bad about, so I was glad to have tasted the poison myself, before the end. I hoped that its effects would yet give sleepless nights to the alien-hunters and their masters, and weaken their Emperor’s worlds at the hours my autarchs required.
 Still, in that last moment, I still wished that Reynias of the Deathwatch, and Celsa, had not come to Arepo.
 The bolter-shells tore me from my flesh, and sent me here, to the bones of my city, to the river of my ancestors.

The End