990.M30.
The Gaumon family estate, Mobai District, Terra.
A mahogany door, made from wood long extinct on Terra, shut the roar of voices outside the bedroom.
The dark hardwood bedposts were thick and exquisite, their shafts carved with clusters of grapevines, their tops draped in heavy brocade.
Brocade sheets covered the feather mattress, and on a silk pillow embroidered with the Gaumon family crest lay a beautiful, pallid face.
"Lemuel," Marika softly called her husband's name.
"Give up," she said weakly, her gaze gentle and calm.
"There's nothing more to be done. You've tried everything."
"No!" Lemuel wore a light linen robe covered in interlocking colored embroidery—spirals, bulls, lightning bolts, and many patterns too obscure to identify.
It had been woven to Lemuel's design by a blind tailor from the Sanga region, while the patterns came from scrolls kept in the secret library of the Mobai mansion.
After exhausting every known treatment in the world and still failing to cure his beloved Marika, Lemuel had turned his eyes to forbidden occultism, many of whose books were expressly banned by the Imperium.
In secret, he had performed eleven dangerous rituals, five of which involved prayers to evil deities passed down in North Africa and other regions.
The Imperial Truth condemned them as falsehoods and errors, and the Imperium strictly forbade all of it.
If the Adeptus Arbites learned of it, even a wealthy merchant like him would be put to death.
Beneath his cuff, he clenched at the marks left by reconstructive surgeries, scars branded with the traces of four blood-sacrifice rituals.
He had performed rituals to summon evil gods.
But he had been disappointed. No deity answered him, not even the evil god he had sought with reckless desperation—Morlo, worshiped in this land before the floating Hive Cities of North