The killer stands thus poised, grisly mission complete, and perhaps she pauses to savour the moment. Perhaps she reflects upon the ease with which it was done.

Or perhaps she has more still to do.

She bends to the body and plucks at its dead limbs. A ring, she steals, and a silver blade worn in a flesh scabbard at its shoulder. And then she turns, hunched low on the writhing floor, seeking something.

And then she straightens, and in her hand she holds it. Dislodged from his person at the moment of death, she finds it and she takes it.

The prize.

The Corona Nox.

In the shadows, Sahaal gapes. His master had not foreseen this.

And then she is gone, as quick as a cobra. And it is then, only then, with grief overcome by sudden anger, with teeth rasping together and hot tears turning to ice on his cheeks, that Sahaal quits his vantage and races in pursuit.

'S-stolen?'

'Yes. By my master's killer. I should have known his enemies would try to take it...'

'H-he is here? That is who you pursue? This Slake — he is the one who killed your master?'

'No. No, this happened... many years ago. She is dead now.'

'S-she?'

'The killer. The assassin.'

Chianni had the look of one who was drowning in a sea of surprises, and still had not even sighted the shore.

'Then... my lord, why here?'

Sahaal hesitated. In truth the details of the subsequent calamities were still unfocused in his mind, a gamut of colour and light that no amount of mental dissection could unravel. He knew how it began — in fire and blood aboard the assassin's vessel, grappling with claw and fist against the bitch herself, wrestling the Corona from her grasping fingers then fleeing to the Umbrea Insidior...

He knew how it ended, crashing through the mists of Equixus, awaking in the vessel's ruptured guts, his prize stolen.

And between? A hundred centuries. Light. Colour. Capering figures of svelte form and slanted eye, with fluted helms and bright jewels, slipping between reality and warp, gathering around him.

The attack.

The flight.

The trap.

The prison.

Eldar.

'It has reached this world along... intricate pathways,' he said, clearing his mind of the jumbled impressions. 'It came to the Glacier Rats, and then to Slake. And from there...' he sighed, a blister of depression breaking apart, overwhelming even the freedom that had come from speaking with such candour, '...from there I do not know where it has gone.'

Chianni stared at him with wide eyes, and all around the silence of the underhive poured into the vacuum his story had left.

Hours passed, and Sahaal slept, disengaging the cycadian rhythms of his psyche, relaxing the catalapsean node at the centre of his spine that could oscillate so casually between the domes of his brain.

True sleep. And with it, true dreams.

He saw the ice-light of voidfire, capering and self-consuming as the Umbrea Insidior closed with the assassin's transport. He saw melta charges flare in the gloom, and Dreaddaw assault craft punch into soft, yielding iron.

He saw the boarding action, and the slaughter. He saw his raptors make a charnel house of the bitch's craft. He saw her eyes, wide and fearful, as he sliced her hand from her wrist — a bright filigree of blood and oil shivering from the rent — and with it reclaimed the Corona Nox. He saw himself lift a claw for the killing blow: bittersweet vengeance for his master's death.

And then...

Screams upon the vox. His sergeant's voice, fat with anger: 'Warpspit! Eldar, Talonmaster! Xenogen scum!'

They came like a bloody sword from the sky, breaking from dismal walls in light and warpfire, skimming realities like a pebble across water. Limbs wavering breathless guns coughing discs and coils. Like spiders, hatching on webs of Empyrean.

Aliens.

He saw the witch-lord. The dancing devil, with antlered helm and silver staff, blue-gold armour and feathered gown, a warlock-warrior, frozen in his pathway, sword alive with wyrdfire.

He saw himself breaking free from the maelstrom, leaving the assassin to cower, every shred of his being bent upon the Corona. They wanted it. They had come to claim it, in his moment of triumph.

They would not have it.

He saw himself, alone, returning to the Umbrea Insidior. He saw himself shutting out the cries of his brothers. He saw himself aboard his own vessel, fastening his prize in its casket, sealing it against alien hands.

He saw himself tasting, for an instant, triumph.

And then the warp opened its mouth, prised wide by alien hands, and a bubble of nothing intumesced around his ship. She shuddered, a protesting behemoth, a terrible beast floundering into sticky tar to sink centimetre by centimetre, shrieking as she drowned.

They pushed her deep into a timeless bubble, those xenogen spellsingers, and locked her from the warp: a water-filled belljar, sealed with hot wax, cast adrift in an ocean.

They could not enter. He could not leave.

He saw himself rage and roar for a full month. He saw his vassals lock themselves away from his wrath. He saw himself succumb to insanity.

And then finally he saw himself tasting bitter acceptance, piece by piece, until he resigned himself from reality, lost all hope of escape, and entered the trance.

He awoke in the Shadowkin encampment with the flavour of resignation and loss clouding his mind, and found a commotion in progress.

He found Chianni at the water's edge, staring out across the unquiet swamplands, shouting orders and imprecations at the flotilla of boatmen that approached.

She almost choked when he appeared silently behind her, and in the shallows two of the pugs overturned as their pilots glimpsed the apparition on the shore.

'What,' Sahaal hissed, ignoring the fearful splutters from the unctuous waters, 'is the meaning of this?'

They had gathered in their thousands. In makeshift shelters, beneath canvas bivouacs or else simply stretched upon the hard ground, with oily torches sputtering on rusted spars, wagons and litters clustered in protective circles, gang colours fluttering — half-heartedly — side by side, all sense of territory abandoned: the rustmud swamp teemed.

Even as he watched, Sahaal could see the human stream thickening. He had chosen his acolytes' realm with care, placing their encampment at the heart of a patchwork morass of bore-holes and smog vents, but now the winding path that led down from above, snaking from the north, appeared impossibly choked: a flow of humanity like sewage, blocking the pipe that carried it. They stepped from shattered girder to fungal plateau, homing on the great drowned drilling rig like pilgrims to a holy place.

Sahaal cast a brief glance to the south, working his jaw. There — set back from the swamp amidst a tangle of igneous formations and massive fungi — he knew there existed a second route from above: a tunnel so tight and twisting that it could accept only a single body at a time. It was his exit, his bolt-hole, his means of a rapid escape if this unfathomable territory was attacked, and he was pleased to see that its secrecy remained intact. He turned back to the refugees, gratified.

They came with heads bowed and wounds unhealed. They came with the dying carried on palettes behind them, with their faces clouded and their eyes filled with tears. Where once gangs had spat upon the face of their enemies, and died in the name of their totem, now they walked side by side, mutually ignored, hostilities redundant in the face of this harsher, more immediate exodus.