Cog stiffened.

A warning bell rang in Mita's mind.

'What... What did you call him?' she said, bracing herself.

'Didn't you hear me? An ogr—'

Something blurred before her eyes.

The sounds of metal and flesh being ripped apart went on for a long time, even after Cog stamped on the servitor's voicebox and silenced its curses.

'He doesn't like being called that,' Mita muttered, needlessly. She went to find the broker.

They came seeking sanctuary. The underhive recoiled from its wounds, slinking in the dark like a crippled fox, and where before its people had held the Shadowkin in contempt — fearing their vigilante strikes, deriding their zealotry — now their perceptions were changed. Now they saw strength, fortification, protection.

There was not a single family untouched by the Preafect's pogrom, and without a spoken word, without vocal alliance or official consent, they gathered themselves in meagre packs, as best they could, and they trod the winding path into the depths, to where the snaking road descended no further, and there, on the shores of the rustmud swamps, they stopped.

In the heart of Sahaal's domain.

They came seeking sanctuary, and amongst the hordes of their number they brought with them their former masters, their warriors and outlaws and leaders. Their heroes and their villains.

At the start of the second day following the vindictor attack, when die stream had become a trickle, and then finally cleared, Sahaal stared out from his throne across the sea of seething refugees, tasted their stink upon the air, felt their fear and dispossession and dejection, and smiled his secret smile.

He would use them.

'What deception is this?'

'Curse you, Shadowbitch! I'll not stand for—'

'Back off! One more! One more push-!'

Snarls of aggression jittered throughout the Shadowkin encampment, a ring of torches and weapon-gloss glints tightening around twelve strange — and furious — figures. They had come in good faith. Dejected at their flight for sanctuary, ashamed, even, of the exodus from their own territories, they were proud nobles nonetheless. And now, as they stepped from cobbled barges onto the russet-brown island of their former enemies, to find themselves encircled by Shadowkin gunsmen, they reacted with all the outrage of displeased royalty. 'Slit your vile little throats, by the frogspirits—'

'Suggest you lower your weapons, Shadowscum—' And so on.

Condemnitor Chianni directed their corralling with the confidence of one born to lead, and as he watched the unfolding spectacle from the secret places of the island-drill's mouldering carcass, Sahaal reflected gratefully upon her transformation. She had come to him as a stammering under-condemnitor, a witness to her leader's casual slaying by a monstrosity from her nightmares. And now? Now she was a representative of divinity, no less. He had ordered her to gather their current guests in the Emperor's name and she had obliged him without complaint. In the unfamiliar waters of politics and diplomacy, she was his most valuable tool. 'Priestess! You get these guns out of my sight or—'

'Angry! Killing soon! Hiveshit Shadowkin blooding!' The Shadowkin warriors ignored the threats with patience borne of confidence, driving their charges on up the flanks of the rusted heap, towards the dark culvert at its heart where the vast throne of bone and rag — accruing new grisly pennants and morbid trophies with every day — stood empty. Its owner watched the visitors from other, secret vantages, and relished the fear their indignation concealed.

Since their arrival in the Shadowkin territories the swarm of refugees had maintained a fearful distance from the shade-slicked island with its black-ragged denizens and rumours of living horrors. Like mice clamouring at the entrance to a tiger's lair — grateful for its presence but too terrified to approach — they left their protectors well alone, and went about the re-establishment of their feudal structures in new, miniaturised empires, shanty towns and canvas camps pushed against the shores of the swamp. Shadowkin spies watched it all, and through them Sahaal had observed and calculated, and followed their petty dominions with interest.

It was, he supposed, a natural process. In the world above this dismal wasteland, before the Preafects came and changed everything, every aspect of underhive life was governed by the ganghouses. Underworld atristocracies, each as assiduous of its heritage and racial purity as the Steepletown nobles themselves. Their number were impossible to determine and their internecine squabbles, schisms and betrayals impossible to chronicle, but what was certain was this: of them all, seven houses had risen to dominate the rest: seven great clan-tribes of warriors and outlaws. And all — bar one — had swallowed pride and territory in the face of the vindictor raids and fled into the silent deeps of the Shadowkin lair. And thus they now stood, trivial empires scattered along the shores of Sahaal's domain.

First were the Quetzai — a brood of nimble warriors whose gaudy suits of colour and feather slipped amongst the refugees of the northern shore: tall totems moving above the raggedy shelters, each bearing a living kutroach with its limbs and fangs removed.

Second, to the east, the towering brutes of the Atla Clan: warriors ritually scarred from head to toe, poisoned quills worn at the tip of each finger, like the paws of great bears. Their guttural commands — demands for food and drink from the dispossessed peoples over whom they had claimed stewardship — resounded across the waters with irritating frequency.

Beyond them, isolated from the refugee swarm where other houses mingled (and terrorised) at will, the quiet albinos of the Pallor Steppes fashioned sturdy teepees and burnt strange herbs, soporific fumes mixing with those of the swamp. Their hunched forms — so frail, in appearance — belied a fierce martial tradition, and Sahaal found himself reminded of the white-skinned people of Nostramo Quintus, his master's ancient home.

To the south the exiled underhivers found themselves beneath the custodianship of the House Magrittha: genderless warriors with long limbs and high-boned faces, tall rifles clutched in elegant hands, uncertain physiques tattooed and naked, displaying their sacred androgyny for all to see.

In the shallows of the southern shores, where the weakest of the refugees had been pushed by the ungentle Brownian motions of the encampment, the shamanic savages of the Frog Princes had established their oleaginous quarters. Convinced that the bloated amphibians of their former territory were reincarnations of Imperial saints — through whom the Emperor could be contacted — their priests dressed in moist skins, eyes bulging with lugubrious scrutiny, demanding tithes from the hivers beneath their rule not of credits nor food, but unpleasant organic curios: hair from the head of a child, an old man's spittle, ingredients for their rituals of worship.

And finally, to the west, the haughty guards of the Sztak Chai Warlord moved amongst the throng, demanding respect and taxation in equal amounts. Their plain robes disguised bodies honed to teak hardness by decades of martial ''meditation'', and their dawn exercises had captured Sahaal's attention — and his appreciation — from across the waters.

The seventh noble house, un-represented in all of the rustmud caverns, was the Glacier Rat scum: piratical vermin wiped from the face of the hive in the blink of an eye.

Before the exodus these families, these wolf-pack brotherhoods, had ruled the underhive with a clench of iron and blood: and woe betide the settlement that neglected its taxes, or disrespected its territorial overlords.