TEN

Praetorians
Psychic Excavations
Blood Protects its Own

Beneath the peak known as Rakaposhi, the Legio Custodes kept their gaol – where those individuals deemed hostile to the Emperor were isolated from the world above. Dug into the rock of the mountain, its limestone walls were clad in adamantium plate, resistant to virtually all forms of weaponry and deaf to the pleas of innocence that echoed from its cells.

In an ancient, long-dead tongue, it had been known as Khangba Marwu, an all too literal name that gave some clue to its age. Only the most senior Custodians bothered to use its original name, and to those condemned to its cells, never again see the light of day, it had an altogether more prosaic name.

They knew it simply as the Vault.

Khangba Marwu had always been part of the mountain, or at least so it seemed to those who even knew of it. It had always been a site of incarceration, a hidden place to cage the most violent, the most dangerous, and the most reprehensible evils the world had known. No one knew who had first hacked its cells and passageways from the bedrock of the mountain, but its origins went far beyond the limits of memory and surviving documentation.

Stories of the heinous criminals incarcerated in its lightless depths stretched back thousands of years, their names now meaningless and their crimes long forgotten. Yet there were villains aplenty plucked from living memory who had darkened its sterile corridors and died insane within its unfeeling walls.

The lieutenants of the Pan-Pacific tyrant had been brought here, as had the Ethnarch of the Caucasus Wastes, the so-called ‘First Emperor’ and a being known only as the Reaper – a monster that legend said was an angel sent to cleanse mankind from the world. Uilleam the Red, the tyrannical blood-drinking prince of Albyon had been brought here for execution after his defeat at the Battle of the Blue Dawn. Uilleam’s debased followers conquered a quarter of the globe, but were finally halted by an army of powerful warriors raised by a Nordafrik warlord known as Kibuka, who was said to have called lightning from the clouds and granted his warriors superhuman strength. In time, Kibuka himself was hauled in chains to Khangba Marwu, but no history remained to tell of who had overturned his rule.

A persistent rumour told that the Emperor himself had designed a cell especially for Narthan Dume, but which had gone unused following the tyrant’s death during the final battle to bring down his inhuman regime. Scurrilous whispers maintained it had been the urging of Constantin Valdor that saw Durme executed in the ruins of his empire, a half-mad, half-genius psychopath deemed too dangerous to live.

Cardinal Tang had been bound for this specialised gaol, but like Durme he never saw the inside of his cell. Inmates who had suffered the worst tortures imaginable in his bloody pogroms broke open his isolation tank and tore his body apart with their bare hands before his transit from Nusa Kambagan could be arranged.

In all its long history, only one individual had ever escaped Khangba Marwu, a congenital dwarf named Zamora who was said to have once attained the rank of major in the proto-Legio Custodes, a fact that made the stories of his escape all the more ridiculous.

Since the beginning of the Great Crusade, Khangba Marwu had seen no shortage of inmates, deluded fools and doomsayers who raved and ranted of the Emperor’s folly or greedy opportunists who sought to exploit this new golden age for their own benefit. None of those incarcerated could boast a pedigree as infamous as Tang or Durme or Uilleam, but that would all change once this rebellion was put down.

Khangba Marwu’s most impregnable cellblock was even now being made ready to contain the most dangerous individual in the galaxy.

But could any facility on Terra hope to hold Horus Lupercal prisoner?

Primus Block Alpha-One-Zero was never dark. The diurnal phases of the planet above were inconsequential to the workings of the Vault or the needs of its inmates. Darkness was an aid to escape, and was thus banished. Uttam Luna Hesh Udar halted before the last security checkpoint before the cells, allowing the bio-metric surveyors in the walls, floor and ceiling to verify his identity.

Air-samplers tasted his breath, body-mass sensors registered his weight and radiation detectors measured the decay rate of isotopes in his blood and bones. Over a hundred such measurements and genetic markers were compared against real-time data logs to ensure no intruders were able to penetrate Khangba Marwu’s security net without detection.

Uttam wore the gold armour of a Custodian, the cheek plates of his full-face helm folded back into its layered structure. His features were unmoving and expressionless, the result of a greenskin bacteriological pathogen that had left the upper right quadrant of his face unresponsive to muscle stimulus. His enhanced metabolism had easily purged the toxin, but the after-effects of the injury had reduced his reflexive response times to a level below the minimum required for front line service.

A proud man, Uttam had taken his removal from the fighting ranks of the Legio Custodes hard, but he had adapted and taken to his new role as gaoler of the Vaults with the same determination and attention to detail that had seen him closest to full infiltration in a Blood Game until Amon Tauromachian Leng’s most recent attempt.

Uttam had studied the young Custodian’s route to the palace, finding no fault with any of his decisions until the final moment when he had chose to throw caution to the wind and leap to the attack like a common assassin. Uttam would have drawn his victim in like a struggling insect in an arachnid’s web.

Far better to let the prey do the work and subtly calve it from its protectors.

Uttam stared into the blank slate above the armoured doorway, letting the retinal signifiers examine his eyes. This part always took longer than usual, his damaged eye making the machines work hard to establish his identity. This deep in the Vault, such measures were virtually unnecessary, but protocol was protocol, and Uttam never willingly ignored protocol.

The thought made Uttam turn to glance at the procession of veteran soldiers following him. Chosen from the most professional regiments based on Terra, they were armed with a collection of strange weapons, ranging from web-guns, plasma nets, iso-capacitors and mass-crushers to more commonplace melta-guns and hellguns.

A full head and shoulders over even the tallest soldier, Uttam could barely contain his disdain as they filed past the signifiers. It sat ill with him that these men were not Custodians, for the threat rating of the prisoners kept in Primus Block Alpha-One-Zero was far too lethal for these men to face, regardless of what weaponry they carried. Significant levels of the Legio’s operational strength had been despatched on a mission to Prospero alongside the Space Wolves. The purpose of the mission had not been stated, but there could be only one reason to send so many of the Emperor’s praetorians from his side at such a time.

Two soldiers in crimson battle plate and gold-mirrored visors guided a metallic box shaped like an oversized coffin floating on repulsor fields. A standard nutrition dispenser, it had been modified by the Vault’s Mechanicum staff to provide the specialised foodstuffs of these prisoners. Uttam found it incomprehensible that these men had been allowed to live. They were the most dangerous men on Terra, and no good could come of their continued existence.

The signifiers confirmed the identity of last of the soldiers, and the armoured door slid upwards with a hiss of pneumatics and a gust of cool air that spoke of a vast open space ahead. Beyond the door, the iron-sheathed walls of the prison complex gave way to the rough-cut stone of the mountain’s footings. The smell of cold earth and stone that had once rested beneath the deepest ocean blew from within. Glaringly bright lumen globes provided stark illumination and banished shadows.

Thirty metres in, a pair of servitor-crewed turrets spooled up and snapped towards them, clicking and whirring as target locks were established. Heavy calibre autocannons whined with the rotational speed of their barrels as Uttam stepped into the killing box.

‘Uttam Luna Hesh Udar,’ he said, enunciating each syllable with precise modulation.

The augmetic eyes of the servitors changed from red to green, and Uttam ushered the soldiers through as his rearguard warrior approached.

Sumant Giri Phalguni Tirtha was a veteran Custodian, whose name was said to bear at least seventy-six awarded titles. His armour was polished and carved with words of approbation in addition to his earned honours. Uttam did not know how Tirtha had come to Khangba Marwu. He bore no obvious injury and was in prime physical condition, but rumour said he had once questioned an order from Constantin Valdor.

The master of the Legio Custodes was a stern, uncompromising man, and though Uttam had never had the honour of meeting him, he doubted Valdor was so petty as to banish another from his side for so slight an offence. The Legio valued thinking warriors, doggedly determined men who would question and question again until an answer was forthcoming.

‘Is there a problem, Uttam?’ asked Tirtha. ‘Why do you pause?’

‘No reason,’ said Uttam, ashamed at his lapse into speculation.

‘Then let us be on our way,’ said Tirtha. ‘I dislike being here, the air stinks of them.’

Uttam nodded. The air did taste different. The unique physiology of the prisoners made them different from mortals, even Custodians, in many obvious ways, but also in many less evident ones. Whatever crimes a man might have committed, he was still recognisably human, still clearly part of the human race. These prisoners smelled subtly different… almost alien, and that rankled almost as much than their betrayal.

Almost.

‘Biometrics confirmed,’ said Uttam, and the security door slid closed behind Tirtha. As the metres-thick locking bars slid home, he said, ‘Primus Block Alpha-One-Zero is now sealed and secure.’

‘So confirmed,’ said Tirtha, striding to the front of the column. Uttam now took up the rearmost position, and took short steps as Tirtha led them down the wide corridor. Though they were selected from the bravest and most professional regiments still based on Terra, there was no disguising the soldiers’ nervousness as they passed between the turrets. Though rigorous safeties had been engaged by Uttam’s command, they guns could open fire in a heartbeat, and the green eye-lenses of the servitors promised no mercy to anyone caught in the killing box.

Uttam followed Tirtha and the soldiers towards a wide archway lined with las-mesh emitters, through which came the bass note of colossal generators and the actinic tang of powerful energy fields. Uttam passed beneath the arch, emerging into an enormous cavern, a kilometre wide at its narrowest part, with glistening walls and a dizzyingly high roof. The cavern had no floor, simply a bottomless pit that spanned its entire width. Uttam knew that such a term was hyperbole of the worst kind, but it was apt for all intents and purposes.

He stood on a wide platform built at the edge of cavern, in the shadow of a slender bridge of latticed steel that reared up like the body of an enormous crane. Tirtha stood at its control console, and Uttam watched as he manoeuvred the bridge towards an island of rock that floated in the centre of the cavern, suspended on a hazy cushion of invisible energy.

Enormous machines like vast engines were bolted around the circumference of the cavern walls and Uttam felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention in the electro-statically charged air. At a moment’s notice, these generators could be disengaged and the island would be allowed to plummet into the depths of the world. With such dangerous prisoners, no chances could be taken.

The bridge made contact with the floating island, and a host of automated gun pods mounted in the walls of the cavern swung long barrels to bear on the island. Thirty isolated cells stood on the floating rock, but only twelve housed inmates.

With the bridge in place, Uttam marched onto the bridge, with the soldiers and Tirtha following behind him. The bridge rang with the sound of his armoured boots, and he kept his gaze focussed firmly ahead of him. He unlimbered his guardian spear from the quick-release sheath on his back and rolled the muscles in his shoulder to loosen them in readiness.

‘Expecting trouble?’ asked Tirtha over the helmet vox.

‘No,’ replied Uttam. ‘But I always feel better facing these bastards with a weapon in my hands.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Tirtha. ‘I almost hope one of them tries something.’

‘Don’t even joke about it,’ warned Uttam as he reached the end of the bridge.

The first cell was a square block of triple-layered and ceramite-laced permacrete that gave little clue to the nature of the inmate within. Featureless aside from an alphanumeric designation stencilled on its side and a transparent door of armaglas normally found in the viewports of starships, it was a box that no one entered or exited without the say so of the Legio Custodes.

Uttam approached the door, feeling a familiar knot of tension in his gut: the flush of endorphins and battle stims that preceded a combat engagement. The sensation was welcome, even though he did not expect to fight here.

A single figure sat cross-legged in the centre of the cell, his muscular physique barely contained by the bright yellow of his prison-issue bodyglove. Long hair, dark as oil, spilled around a broad face with genetically spread features that should be ugly, but somehow combined in a handsome whole.

Though this prisoner was deadly beyond words, he had a smooth grace that was disarming. Uttam knew better than to underestimate Atharva simply because he came from a Legion of scholars. Where the others raged or spat biliously at their gaolers, Atharva appeared to accept his incarceration without rancour.

Atharva opened his eyes, one a glittering sapphire, the other a pale amber.

‘Uttam Luna Hesh Udar,’ said the warrior. ‘You are interrupting my ascent into the Enumerations.’

‘It is time for you to eat,’ said Uttam, as the nutrition dispenser was slotted home in the clear glass of the door. A cellulose bag of foodstuff dropped into the cell, and Atharva watched it fall with a mixture of distaste and resignation.

‘Another day, another banquet,’ said the Thousand Sons warrior.

‘You are lucky we feed you at all,’ said Uttam. ‘I would let you starve.’

‘Then you would become the villain of the piece,’ said Atharva. ‘And as the Emperor’s praetorians that must never be the case, is that not so?’

‘Do not say his name, you are not fit to speak it, traitor.’

‘Tell me, Uttam, whom had I betrayed when I was brought here?’ said Atharva, uncoiling from his seated position to stand in one smooth movement. ‘When Yasu Nagasena led his three thousand into the Preceptory, who exactly had I betrayed? No one, yet here I am locked up in a cell with warriors whose Legions are rightly named oath-breakers.’

‘When a group has a plague-carrier in its midst do you only remove those who are sick or do you quarantine the entire group?’ asked Uttam.

‘Allow me to counter your example,’ said Atharva. ‘If a man develops a tumour, do you selectively destroy it with treatment or do you simply kill the man?’

‘The tumour dies either way.’

‘Then let us be thankful you are not a medicae, Praetorian Uttam Luna Hesh Udar,’ said Atharva.

They came back to him in the darkness, every face, every scream and every last, terrified breath. Kai lay on a hard stone bench that doubled for a bed, and curled in a foetal ball, rocking back and forth as he tried to forget the memories of pain they forced him to relive. A flyer had carried him from the Whispering Tower, high into the mountains, through starlit cloudbanks and moon-painted peaks of dizzying height.

That had been his ascent. Then had come the descent into the lightless depths of a mountain that seemed somehow darker, somehow more threatening than any mountain had a right to be. As though it carried a weight of anguish borne by those taken into its depths.

Down corridors and through echoing passageways he was taken. Into rumbling elevators and pneumo-cars that carried him deeper and deeper into the unknown reaches of the sullen mountain until at last he was deposited in a bare cell, cut directly from the rock, with only the most basic human functions catered for. A rusted pipe in the corner of the room dribbled brackish water, and a circular pit in the opposite corner appeared to be a receptacle for bodily waste.

The walls were painted a faint bluish grey, glossy and hard-wearing. Previous occupants had scraped their presence into the walls with broken nails and whatever else could make an impression in the paint. Primitive, primal things, Kai couldn’t make out what many of them were: random collections of lightning bolts and men with long spears for the most part. The carvings were little more than desperate pleas to be remembered by men now long forgotten and, presumably, long dead.

Kai wanted to add his own mark, but he had nothing with which to score the painted walls.

His captors had left him to sweat for an unknown period of time, letting the imagined horrors to be inflicted upon him do their work for them. Kai was not a brave man, and he had screamed that he would tell them what they wanted to know if he only knew what it was.

Though his mind was racing in a dozen different directions, Kai forced himself to sleep, knowing that whatever was to come would be more easily endured were he rested. He dreamed, but not of the Rub’ al Khali, not of the great fortress of Arzashkun, but of a cold void, populated by the voices of the dead. He saw a blonde-haired girl with a blue bandanna he had known on the Argo. He knew her name, they had been friends of a sort, but his memory was hazy, too overwhelmed with the chattering voices of the dead.

They swarmed his dream-self, begging to know why he had been spared and they had been taken. Why the monsters of the deep had come for them with their brazen swords and chitinous claws that tore meat from bones and left gouging wounds that would never heal.

Kai had nothing to tell them, but still they demanded answers.

Why, on a ship of innocents, had he been one of only two to survive?

What gave him the right to live while they were condemned to eternal torment?

Kai wept in his sleep, reliving the horror of their deaths over and over again.

Only one voice was free of accusation, a soothing, cultured voice that spoke without words, but eased him from memories of pain with visions of a paradisiacal world of high mountains, verdant plains and beautiful cities of glittering pyramids constructed from crystalline glass.

When he woke, it was to find two people standing in his cell, a man and a woman, blandly attractive and dressed in crisp white tunics that had the look of lab coats and hazmat gear all in one. The man was the kind of handsome that comes from fashionable cosmetic sculpting, whereas the woman had lavished all her attention on her eyes. Pale emerald orbs, they were the most captivating eyes Kai had ever seen.

‘You’re awake,’ said the man. Needlessly, thought Kai.

‘It’s time we found out what you know,’ added the woman.

Kai rubbed his face, feeling the sagging skin of his jowls and a day’s worth of stubble.

‘I told you, I don’t know anything,’ said Kai. ‘If I did, I promise I would tell you. I barely remember anything that happened in the mindhall.’

‘Of course, we don’t expect you to have any conscious recall of the information implanted in you by Aniq Sarashina,’ said the woman, her expression plastic and unchanging. ‘But it is in you, that much is certain.’

‘It’s our job to remove that information,’ said the man.

‘Fine,’ said Kai. ‘Hook me up to a psi-caster and let’s be done with it.’

‘I’m afraid it won’t be quite that simple,’ said the man.

‘Or that painless,’ added the woman.

‘Who are you?’ asked Kai. ‘You’re not part of the City of Sight, so who do you work for?’

‘My name is Adept Hiriko,’ said the woman, ‘and this is Adept Scharff. We are neurolocutors, psi-augers if you will. That’s auger with an e.’

‘As in a drill,’ added Scharff. ‘My role is to assist Adept Hiriko in boring into your psyche and rooting out whatever information has been secreted within your mind.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Quite serious,’ said Scharff, as though puzzled as to Kai’s meaning. ‘We are here at the behest of the Legio Custodes. Our orders come with the highest authority, giving us carte blanche to achieve our goals by any means necessary.’

‘I’m afraid it is likely you will not survive the process,’ said Hiriko. ‘But if you do it is more than probable that you will be left in a permanent vegetative state.’

‘This is insane!’ cried Kai, backing away from these monsters.

‘If you think about it clearly, it’s really the only option open to us,’ said Scharff.

‘We anticipated you would be reluctant to help us,’ added Hiriko. ‘How disappointing.’

Kai could not speak. A gum shield that prevented him from biting off his tongue filled his mouth with a rubberised, antiseptic taste. An air pipe plunged down his throat, and a leather headpiece studded with needles and electrodes enveloped his head like a pilot’s helmet. A wealth of intravenous drips fed into his veins and the blood vessels beneath his skull, while a lid-lock held his eyes open. Slender output jacks were plugged into the base of each orb, and bronze wires trailed to banks of ocular-visual recording equipment.

The interrogation chamber was horribly mundane, a simple metal box without windows or mirrors or anything in the way of character. Portable banks of monitoring equipment surrounded Kai as he lay back on a steel-framed gurney, each one telling a tale of his internal biorhythms.

A humming device like a gleaming scorpion’s tail was bolted to the metallic floor behind him, arching overhead and festooned with dangling instruments that seemed designed to terrify as much as provide any function. Hiriko and Scharff busied themselves with monitoring the drugs flowing into his bloodstream, while the gold-armoured figure of Saturnalia stood at the far end of the chamber, his guardian spear held loosely in one hand.

‘Are you ready to begin?’ asked the Custodian.

‘Almost,’ replied Hiriko. ‘This is a delicate procedure, and one doesn’t want to rush.’

‘The information you seek has been well hidden, Custodian,’ added Scharff. ‘We will have to go deep into his psyche, and such a journey requires faultless preparation.’

‘We risk breaking his mind without due care and attention.’

The Custodian took a step towards the psi-augers, his fingers clenching tightly on his guardian spear.

‘The Mistress of the Telepathica spoke of the Emperor,’ said Saturnalia, ‘and anything that concerns the Emperor is my business. Do not waste time in telling me of preparation and semantics. Find what she placed in his head, and find it now. Breaking his mind is a price that concerns me not at all.’

Kai wanted to rage at them, but his mouth couldn’t form the words. He wanted to yell that he was a human being, an astropath of value to the Imperium. But he knew that even if he could make them hear, they would not care, Saturnalia because his duty to the Emperor overrode all other concerns, Hiriko and Scharff because they were simply doing a job.

He tried to struggle, but the restraints and drugs held him utterly immobile.

Hiriko sat beside him on a wheeled stool, and consulted a data slate hanging from the side of the gurney.

‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘You’re making wonderful progress, Kai. We should be ready in just a moment.’

Adept Scharff sat opposite Hiriko and Kai saw him insert a screw-plug into the back of his neck, where he could just see the gleam of implanted cognitive agumetics. He took the other end of the cable and plugged it into a featureless black box fitted to the side of the gurney. He smiled at Kai, unspooling a thin cable from the box and snap fastening it to a connective port on Kai’s leather headpiece. His eyes lost their focus for a second, and Kai felt a stab of pressure in the frontal lobes of his brain.

‘Are you in the umbra?’ asked Hiriko.

‘Yes,’ answered Scharff, his voice distant. ‘Ready for your insertion.’

‘Good,’ said Hiriko, and likewise wired herself up to the featureless black box. She too fastened the end of a cable to the apparatus covering Kai’s skull and, once again, he felt the pressure of an invasive presence within his mind.

‘Now,’ said Hiriko. ‘Let us begin.’

She depressed an orange stud on the side of the box, and Kai’s mind filled with light.

The light grew to unbearable brightness, like the surface of a star viewed so close that it would burn his eyes away. Kai screamed, and the light faded until it became tolerable. He found himself standing in the middle of the desert, nothing around him for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. A hot wind feathered the lips of dunes around him, and the hammerblows of the searing sun were a welcome relief after the sterile environment beneath the mountain.

This was his place of safety, this was the Empty Quarter.

Whatever they had done to him hadn’t worked.

Kai knew this wasn’t real, knew it was an artificially conjured dreamscape, and in that realisation, he knew he should not have come here. This was what they wanted. They wanted him here, where his innermost thoughts were laid bare, and his deepest secrets might be revealed.

Though he had professed a desire to tell Hiriko and Scharff what they wanted to know, an unbidden imperative arose in his mind that warned him against that path of least resistance. His life depended on keeping what he had been given secret. Only the man with the golden eyes could be told what he knew, and only by keeping it safe from Hiriko and Scharff would that be possible.

No sooner had he given them names, than he felt their presence in his mind. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there. Lurking, waiting for him to lead them to what they wanted to know.

A figure appeared on the sand beside him, a robed woman with long silver-grey hair with eyes that were kind and warm. He knew her, but not like this, not with eyes of flesh and blood. They were emerald green, sparkling and full of life. It seemed perverse to have willingly exchanged such beautiful eyes just to have gained protection from the creatures of the warp.

‘Aniq,’ he said. ‘You’re dead.’

‘You should know better than that, Kai,’ said Sarashina. ‘No one is every really dead so long as someone remembers them. As the great poet said, “that which is imagined, need never be lost.”’

‘Sarashina told me that, but you are not Sarashina.’

‘No, then who would you have me be?’ said the woman, her features transforming in a heartbeat to those of his mother. Her eyes remained emerald green, but where before there was warmth, now there was only aching sadness.

Kai turned away from those eyes, remembering the looks of sorrow every time he and his father had left on another adventure across the globe. He fought to remain dispassionate, but it was difficult in the face of the woman who had raised him and helped shape him into the man he had become.

Except this wasn’t her.

His mother was dead, just as Sarashina was dead.

‘You are Adept Hiriko, aren’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said his mother.

‘Then look like you’re supposed to,’ snapped Kai. ‘Don’t hide behind disguises.’

‘I wasn’t hiding,’ said Hiriko, assuming the form with which Kai was more familiar. ‘I am simply trying to put you at your ease. This process will go much smoother if you don’t fight us. I know you don’t know what Sarashina told you, but I need to find it.’

‘I don’t know where it is.’

‘I think you do.’

‘I don’t.’

Hiriko sighed and linked her arm with his, guiding him towards the gentle slope of a sand dune. ‘Do you know how many psychic interrogations I’ve done? No, of course you don’t, but it’s a lot, and the subjects who fight us are always the ones who end up brain dead. Do you want that?’

‘What kind of stupid question is that?’

She shrugged and continued as though he hadn’t spoken. ‘The human mind is a dizzyingly complex machine, a repository of billions of memories, inputs, outputs and autonomic functions. It’s hard to break into it without causing irreparable damage.’

‘So don’t break in,’ said Kai.

‘I wish that were possible, I truly do,’ said Hiriko with a smile. ‘I like you, but I will tear the meat of your mind apart with my bare hands if I have to. Everyone yields their secrets in the end. Always. It’s just a matter of how much damage they’re prepared to live with at the end of it.’

They reached the top of the sand dune, and Kai found himself looking down at the shimmering fortress of Arzashkun. Its tallest towers wavered in the heat, and Kai shielded his eyes against the reflected glare of sunlight from its golden minarets.

‘Impressive,’ said Hiriko. ‘But it won’t keep me out. Don’t think for a minute it will.’

Kai stopped and turned about, scanning the sands for some sign that they weren’t alone. A suggestion of shadow moving under the sand on a far distant dune flickered at the corner of his vision.

‘Where is Scharff?’ he asked. ‘Doesn’t he join you?’

‘He’s here, but I’m leading this auger.’

Intuition surfaced in Kai’s mind like a sunrise, and a slow smile creased his features.

‘He’s here to pull you out if this gets too dangerous, isn’t he?’

A flash of irritation in her emerald eyes confirmed his insight.

‘You don’t know if you can do this, do you?’ he said.

Hiriko’s grip on his arm tightened. ‘Trust me, I can do this. The only question is how hard you want it to go. I’ll demolish that fortress in a heartbeat, tear down every fictive stone and brick. I’ll break it down to dust and powder until you won’t be able to tell its remains from the sand of the desert.’

She stretched out her hand, and the tallest tower of the fortress began unravelling. What had seemed solid only moments before was now dissolving into smoke and vapour. She clicked her fingers and another tower fell apart. Hiriko met his gaze as she undid in a heartbeat what had taken him years to perfect, but his eyes were on something far distant, something fashioned from dark memory and horror. It pushed through the sands towards them, the predator with the scent of blood in its nostrils.

Kai felt a spike of pressure behind his eyes and Hiriko turned in time to see the dark shape power to the surface of the sand. It came on a tide of blood, a subterranean river violently thrust to the surface of the desert. It roared, this river. It roared and screamed and filled the world with thousands of death cries and agonising last moments. Like a deluge of crimson oil it spilled over the desert, filling the depressions between the dunes with pools of stinking death fluids, washing up their slopes like an angry tide.

‘Is this your doing?’ demanded Hiriko.

‘No,’ said Kai.

‘Stop it,’ ordered Hiriko. ‘Now.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Of course you can, this is your mind. It bends to your will.’

Kai shrugged as the swelling lake of oily blood rose higher, its surface rippling with the motion of thousands of hands and faces pushing up from below. Until now, Kai had always feared this buried monster, its rages and its guilt, but now the sight of it was a blessed relief. The oozing tide rolled uphill in defiance of hydrodynamics, and gelatinous shapes at last broke the surface of its stinking substance. Tall and thin, with spindly limbs of red scale and volcanic breath, they folded themselves into existence with thin, screeching wails. Their distended skulls formed glossy and horned, their mouths ripped open with jagged fangs.

Creatures of memory to be sure, but no less dangerous for that in a place of dreams.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Hiriko.

‘I told you, it’s not me,’ said Kai. ‘It’s the Argo.’

The tide of night-skinned monsters roiled towards them, and Hiriko looked up to the sky.

‘Get me out of here,’ she said. ‘Now.’

The adept vanished, and the tide of darkness that billowed and seethed like a living curtain of endless darkness spilled over the top of the dune, swallowing Kai and plunging him into an abyss from which there could be no escape.

‘What just happened?’ demanded Saturnalia.

Hiriko lay on the floor of the interrogation room, her eyes rolling back in their sockets, and blood running from her nose like a tap. Scharff propped up her head and administered a hypo of clear fluid via a canula on her forearm.

‘I asked you a question,’ said Saturnalia.

‘Be silent!’ said Scharff. ‘I just extracted her from a hostile dreamspace without any of the proscribed decompressions. Her mind has gone into shock, and if I don’t bring her back we might lose her completely.’

Saturnalia bristled with anger at being spoken to like a subordinate, but bit back his anger. Consequences for speaking out of turn to a warrior of the Legio Custodes could wait.

‘What can I do?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ said Scharff. ‘It’s up to her now.’

Scharff continued to speak to Hiriko in low, soothing tones, stroking her cheek and holding her hand. Eventually, her eyes fluttered open and gained a clarity Saturnalia hadn’t been sure she would ever know again.

‘This is going to be harder than I thought,’ said Hiriko.