There was a moment of silence.

'He's lying!' Mita cried, heart pounding. 'He's lying! He wants us to fear him! He's no child of the Emperor!'

She might as well have tried to whisper in the face of a hurricane. No one was listening to her.

They were too busy screaming.

It was the same all across the city. Wherever she went, wandering unseen — as only the vagrant can truly be — the sobbing and screams rang out in the dark. In the frantic colours of the klubzones, in the srnoggy wastes where the factories clamoured with downmarket habs, in every street and every stairway: unbridled horror. Whispers. Rumours.

The Citizen Worship broadcasts were resumed quickly, control of the station clearly regained. The stammering denials and assurances — 'All is well, all is well' — did little to quell the storm. Indeed each authority that attempted placation and denied the corruption of the hive merely fed the dissent, branding themselves as partisans to the iniquity by attempting to conceal its existence. Only a sliver of the teeming masses had been present to see the broadcast, but it hardly mattered. The mouth-to-ear machine worked its cogs to nothingness as the story was told and retold, mutating and growing with each hour.

Chapels groaned with bodies: crying out for forgiveness, demanding mercy from unprepared priests, themselves shaken to the core of their faith by the threat of divine justice. On streets the purgatists found themselves outdone by the sudden zeal of those seeking absolution, wailing and gnashing, striking themselves with thorny canes until every tramway and stairwell was moist with the blood of flagellants.

But most... most of the hive did not resort to such excesses. Most slunk home with faces pale, deserting the factories in their droves, locking doors and bolting shutters, whispering fearful reassurances to sobbing infants and telling spouses over and over, 'I love you, I love you...'

Just in case.

The Emperor's angel was abroad, and in his path all sin would burn, all unrighteousness would bleed itself dry, all mercy would be denied.

And not a single thing that Mita said could convince the city otherwise. The Night Lord had outmanoeuvred her.

Where is your— 'It is being dealt with' —now, Kaustus?

Skulking in the gloom of a frightened city, she realised with her heart sinking that the time had come to deploy the one ace she still held. She found a secluded spot in the dark beneath the struts of a mezzanine stairwell, and sat with her legs crossed, clearing her mind.

This was going to hurt.

When she had visited the information broker, days before, when his servitors had come so close to finishing her and Cog, she had watched it dawn upon him with amusing slowness that all the arrogant bluster in the world would do him little good.

She plucked his secrets from his mind.

She'd found him enmeshed at the heart of a great room/machine, cursing the destruction of his cybernetic warriors. Like a fat spider in its web, the cords of his data-empire snaked from every corner, a morass of sensoria consoles, augaria readouts, clattering logic engines, auspex monitors, fluttering dials and bank upon bank of viewspex screens: meeting in a knot, a tangle, a halo of rubber and metal, at his head. From here he controlled photo-optics, cameras, servitors and communicators hive-wide. From here he intercepted transmissions, he eavesdropped like some digital god, he watched a thousand transactions in a thousand places, and he stored it all away like a bee, hoarding its honey.

He had thought himself implacable. He had tamed a Space Marine, by the hiveghosts, how could a mere woman hope to hold any sway over him?

In his world of computations and logic, of bitter numbers and black/white divisions, of strength and weakness, there was of course one parameter he could never hope to calculate: the realm of the psyker.

And yes, he may have spent his life severing his ties with humanity, rebuilding his body time and time again, augmenting and reshaping his mind like a sculptor working clay — but he could not escape from the raw biology of his brain. It was an emotive organ, and if his media were metal and mathematics, then Mita's were thoughts themselves.

She had slid into his consciousness before his smugness could even take flight, and he had been powerless to stop her. He'd told her everything: who he was, how he had been created, the extents of his empire. He'd told her about his meeting with the Space Marine, about the creature's quest for the Glacier Rats, about the ongoing hunt — spreading rumours across the entire underhive — for the Slake collective: always in pursuit of some unknown package. He had bared his steely soul before the scalpel of her astral self, until she'd had him exactly where she'd wanted him.

She'd threatened him with the one thing that was guaranteed to scare him — informing his former masters at the Adeptus Mechanicus of his existence and whereabouts, reminding him that it wasn't too late to undergo the puritens lobotomy a second time — and he had capitulated like the unctuous little worm he so clearly was.

He would find the Night Lord, she'd insisted. He would report every movement — every orkspoor word — back to her. She arranged times and places, and then she let him go.

He would betray her, of course. It was inevitable — that was just the sort of mind he had. She imagined he would wriggle his way into the Night Lord's debt, seeking protection and power from the beast she had sent him to spy upon. It was of little consequence. She had taken... other precautions.

The tutoria of the Scholastia Psykana called the procedure inculcati. It involved depositing a fragment — a parsus — of one's own astral self, like a souvenir, within the subconscious of another human. Once detached, the psyker could form a brief link with their target — location and distance notwithstanding — and ride, like some insidious piggyback signal, upon their very senses. It was a poor alternative to remote viewing at the best of times, but — given her difficulty with that discipline, and the Night Lord's guardian warpthings — that was no longer an option.

The inculcati was difficult. It was painful. And it allowed only one chance.

When she'd pushed her way inside Pahvulti's mind, revolted at his cold ambition, acknowledging the probability of his betrayal from the start, she had screwed up her courage, braced herself, and cut away a piece of her soul, pushing it down into the efficient columns of his brain. If she could no longer spy on the Night Lord herself, she'd decided, she'd send this fool on her behalf: to stare through his eyes and hear through his ears.

Which, seated beneath the mezzanine, sweat pricking her brow, moaning with effort and agony as if on some secret childbirth, she did.

And his external temperature at 30.4°C: the result, no doubt, of coolants within his armour. His throne is built of rusted iron and bone, decorated in feathers, and stands at 3.1 metres from base to tip.

Pahvulti's clipped thoughts, spiralling around her like a river. She fixed her fingers into the rush and concentrated, overwhelmed by alien impressions and thoughts. To see through Pavhulti's eyes was to be immersed in a sensory ocean, ridged by tsunamis of detail and analysis.

At a depth of 1.5km below ice-level, the rock is warm. He is the lord of the underhive — undisputed — and I am at his left. To his right sits his condemnitor. I recognise her from my surveillance locus as Avisette Chianni. She is one of the Shadowkin.