She did not trust her master as far as she could spit him.

When finally his message reached her, upon her return to the precinct, it was a short, prerecorded affair. He stared from a viewspex thick with distortion and white noise, and pointed a gloved finger down the length of the camera optic.

'Stay where you are, interrogator,' he said. 'Allow no other attacks upon the underhive. You understand me? No more failures.

'Remain in Cuspseal. I am sending a mutual friend to collect you.'

The image died with a clipped whine, and Mita sat back from the viewspex with a yawn.

She could no longer bring herself to care.

She slept poorly that night.

Orodai and his Preafects had returned from their subterranean predations with grisly armour and savage smiles, satisfied for now that the iron heel of the Preafectus Vindictaire had crashed whatever flames of rebellion still fluttered at the underhive's heart. She tried to quiz the commander personally — had he seen the Night Lord? Had they killed the traitor? — but the man's exhausted irritation at her continuing presence had earned her few answers, and only by skimming his mind had she tasted the seed of doubt that lingered there.

They had seen nothing of the shadowed monster. Oh, Orodai told himself that it was irrelevant, that he barely believed it was real anyway, that the aim of the assault had been to prevent any further incursions into his territory and to repay the horror of the starport massacre. He even began to believe his own reassurances, but when he ordered Mita out of his office it was with the look of a man who knew he was fooling himself, that his actions had achieved nothing unless perhaps to exacerbate the situation, and that the excesses of the day's violence had all been for nought.

She left him only when he vowed there would be no more attacks, and commandeered a small Preafect dormitory for her and Cog's exclusive use. She snapped at the giant's moronic prattling with more venom than it warranted, and fell into a shallow interrupted slumber to the sound of his suppressed sniffles.

She dreamed of embers — or eyes — burning in the darkness around the edges of her vision. She saw a great shark with blades for fins, cruise through inky water before turning away, rejecting her taste. And then the water was the void, and the spectral currents were eddies in the warp, and a shoal, a school, a pod — a swarm — punctured the nothingness, not of fish nor squid but eagles, silver and blue and black, swooping and gambling in the updrafts of nothingness.

A voice said: 'Seek me, my brothers...'

And out in the dark, where no light could fall, something heard the call. Something paid attention, and listened with a keen ear, then turned and cried into the deeper depths, where some other remote listener waited.

Again and again the cry was repeated, circulated, echoed from ear to mouth to ear, across time and void and warp, until it reached the eagles themselves. One by one they dipped their wings, flexed their steely claws, and raced towards the light.

Towards an island of pearly white. A planet. An icy world, with its face turned from the sun.

Equixus.

She awoke in the small hours of the early morning with the same old uncertainty: how much of a part had the gift played in her nocturnal fantasies? How much was dream, and how much prediction?

She did not sleep again after that.

The following day found her huddled over the steering pillar of an impeller bike, a great plume of ash towering behind her like the tail of a dusty rooster. She had cast off indolence, washed clean her indecision, and decided to act.

As she saw it, the distinction between observation and interference ran deep. She had been expressly forbidden from indulging in the latter. Kaustus's message had said nothing of the former.

In every city, and especially in every hive, Mita knew that there was a certain niche. Sometimes it was naturally filled. Often it was a position to be squabbled over, traded between those who felt inclined to occupy it. Inevitably there would come to each of these conflicts a natural resolution, a winner. Such characters were cunning. They were ruthless. They were scrupulous. They were clever.

She had made her enquiries discreetly, at the start. She had considered Cuspseal from the perspective of a social jigsaw, and had taken pains to direct her interest towards those pieces of a higher calibre – the guildhouse quartermasters, the merchant tsars of the docking quarters, the madams of Whoretown and the recruitment sergeants of the small Fleet Ultima offices adjacent to the precinct. She had thought such characters far more likely to be familiar with the goal of her enquiries than lesser souls.

She needn't have bothered to focus her attention so closely. In the minds of everyone she encountered, be they peon or bourgeoisie or authority, the existence of an information broker, a spymaster, a watcher, was as firm as cold rock. That none of them dared speak his name, or to be overseen in the act of betraying his identity, merely confirmed to Mita his monopoly.

His name was irrelevant. His whereabouts were not. She plucked it — ultimately — from the mind of a bounty hunter, drunk and leering, in a saloon on the outskirts of Cuspseal. He seemed to Mita to be a prime source of answers: such mercenary scum as he could be guaranteed to have had dealings with the broker, or at least his associates, at one time or another. She'd plunged her astral tentacles into his unresisting consciousness without thought for his safety, relishing the shouts of dismay from his fellow drinkers. Revulsion and disassociation were reactions to her mutation to which she had grown all too familiar, the ability to terrify was something she had had little chance to enjoy. Until now.

To skim a mind for the vaguest impressions of its inner workings was one thing, to hunt for specific detail was another, far more damaging thing entirely.

She shattered his mind and left his brain haemorrhaging — blood pouring from eyes and nose. Her own objectives outweighed everything now.

(Is this how Kaustus feels? she wondered This impunity? This endless authority?)

And so she found herself riding hard, impeller wheels grinding against litterflows and ash dunes, as she made her way towards the broker's home — deep in the teeming habzones of the eastern mezzanines.

Cog rode ahead, his primal instincts and hardwired reactions far superior to her own. When he swerved to avoid some hidden crevice, or jinked his impeller to one side just as other traffic passed — a cavalcade of bikes and trams, scuttling beetlemounts and garish servitor vehicles, dead torsos welded to chasses like fleshy steering columns — she followed suit immediately. Allowing him to lead was a pragmatic deference: on the off-chance that anyone was foolish enough to attempt an ambush, it would be he who absorbed the brant of the attack.

Practicality, even through affection. The stuff of the Inquisition.

They entered the Warren through a looping series of bridgebacks and checkpoints, where queues of impatient civilians gathered to pass. She kept her identity to herself at such times, slotting the cruciform ''I'' pendant of her office into the tiny fleshholster on her shoulder, enduring the sleazy searches of militiamen with uncharacteristic patience. It would not do to broadcast her presence ahead, and if the broker was as adept as his reputation suggested he would know they were coming long before they arrived.

The Warren was a honeycomb of stagnant architecture: hexagonal block after hexagonal block, interlocking in drab material harmonies, facets pressed together for support like stifled teeth in a cogged machine. Here the workers lived, the billion no ones. The antscum. Factory fodder, condemned to lifetimes of drudgery, but thankful to their Emperor for the same. Here the uncomplaining masses awoke, worked, and slept: every day, every year, every century. Termites in a concrete mound, as unique as grains of sand upon an endless island beach.