'Yes. You didn't know?'

'No,' said Pascal. 'She hasn't said much that's made sense since we found her.'

'Found her? You didn't take her from her house?'

'No, she was wandering the streets of Junktown, screaming and tearing at her body.'

Nisato frowned, clearly not having considered the possibility that the woman had wandered off by herself. His first thoughts had been of kidnap.

'Her mind's gone if you ask me,' offered Pascal.

'If you've hurt her…'

Pascal waved a placatory hand. 'Of course we didn't hurt her. Any hurt that's been done, she did to herself.'

'What do you mean?'

'Just what I say,' replied Pascal. 'She was in a pretty bad way when we found her.'

Nisato leaned back and took a drink of his raquir. 'How did you know I was looking for her? Your message was pretty specific.'

'Come on, this was my city before it was yours. People tell me things. The head of the enforcers going to visit the witch woman doesn't go unnoticed. Why were you looking for her?'

'None of your business.'

'Is she your woman?' asked Pascal. 'Does the chief enforcer like getting his ya-yas from dangerous women?'

Nisato sneered. 'I told you, it's none of your business.'

'Fair enough,' said Pascal, holding up his hands.

The enforcer was visibly struggling to hold onto his cool and Pascal decided it was time to end this period of baiting. He took a deep breath and said, 'You want the truth? The woman means nothing to me. On any other day, I'd have left her in the street to die, but I knew she meant something to you.'

'So you want a favour, is that it? Blackmail?'

'No, nothing like that,' said Pascal.

'Then what?'

Pascal leaned over the table and placed his hand on Nisato's arm. The enforcer looked down at his hand as though it was a poisonous viper.

'I want the killing to end,' Pascal said. 'I want to end this grubby, dirty war with honour and if helping you out buys me a little goodwill, then it's a trade I'm willing to make.'

Nisato tried and failed to hide his surprise. 'This is a gesture of goodwill?'

'Exactly,' said Pascal, leaning back.

Nisato took a moment to consider what he had heard and Pascal could see that the idea was appealing to him. He remained silent, sensing that to intrude on the enforcer's thought processes would be a mistake.

At last Nisato leaned forward and said, 'Take me to her.'

'I don't like this,' said Verena Kain. 'Not one bit.'

'Governor Barbaden does not share your misgivings,' said Uriel.

'Governor Barbaden,' she said, placing undue emphasis on his tide, 'no longer commands the Achaman Falcatas. The regiment is mine to command and it is my right to decide what is acceptable and what is not.'

'It was my understanding that the Achaman Falcatas were no longer a serving regiment, that they were now designated a Planetary Defence Force,' said Uriel, unable to resist the barbed comment. 'As such, they are Governor Barbaden's to command.'

Kain glared at him and Uriel felt a guilty satisfaction at her anger. Beside him, he could feel Pasanius's grim amusement at Colonel Kain's discomfort.

'It is my understanding that you were exiled from your Chapter.'

'Ah, but we are going home,' said Pasanius. 'The Falcatas will always be PDF.'

Uriel tried, unsuccessfully, to hide a smile as Kain angrily turned on her heel and stalked away to join her adjutant, a put-upon looking man named Bascome. Ever since Uriel had met Verena Kain, she had been bitter and spiteful, as though he somehow wronged her by his very existence. Since hearing of the slaughter that had taken place at Khaturian, the Killing Ground as it was known, he had little time for Kain or her ill-temper.

Uriel put Kain from his mind as he watched a number of servitors and the few remaining enginseers of the Falcatas prepare the coupling heads of the generators.

The air in the Screaming Eagles' vehicle hangar was cool and stank of metal and electricity. A pair of parked Leman Russ battle tanks sweated oil and fumes, with coiled and ribbed cables snaking from beneath their hulls to a coughing generator.

Uriel paid no heed to the powerful war machines, his attention firmly fixed on the suit of armour that stood in the centre of the hangar. Its surfaces had been cleansed and returned to their former glory by Leto Barbaden's craftsmen and, like the last warrior standing after a battle, the armour stood immobile, its joints locked and its strength existing only as potential.

The armour's backpack was bereft of power and no solution the palace adepts could devise would restore it. Pasanius had suggested that perhaps the military grade generators and couplings might have a better chance, and, after a petition to Governor Barbaden, a convoy of vehicles had traversed the city to the Screaming Eagles' barrack compound.

The enginseers there had jumped at the chance to work on the problem and their solution had been elegantly ingenious. The chargers for the onboard electrics of a Leman Russ had been adapted to run a powerful generator's output through a manually calibrated transformer, which would allow an enginseer to adjust the power supply to a level that the armour's backpack could use.

At least that was the theory. Whether or not it would work, was another matter entirely.

Uriel forced himself to be calm as he watched the enginseers work, taking solace in their apparent relish for the task. He could only hope that their competence matched their enthusiasm.

Pasanius stood beside him, resplendent and towering in his cleaned and polished armour, a bolter held tightly in his gauntlets like a talisman. The palace artificers had done a magnificent job in undoing the damage that had been done on Medrengard and Uriel felt a surge of pride as he looked at the gleaming plates of his friend's armour.

His left shoulder guard had been repainted with the symbol of the Ultramarines and a laurel wreath. He looked every inch the Ultramarines hero he was.

The armour in the centre of the hangar had also been repainted in the colours of the Ultramarines, although Uriel had been careful to leave the helmet in the original colours of the Sons of Guilliman. To do otherwise would insult the heritage of the warriors who had worn it before him and Uriel had no wish for the armour to fail him in battle through any lack of respect done to it.

'You think this will work?' asked Pasanius.

Uriel considered the question before answering. 'It will,' he said.

'You sound awfully sure.'

'I know, but I can't believe the armour would have drawn us to it if this wasn't going to work.'

Pasanius simply nodded and Uriel could tell that his friend had felt a similar pull towards the armour in the Gallery of Antiquities. Some things were just felt in the bones and although it went against Uriel's training to believe in things he could not see and touch and know were real, he felt sure that he was meant to wear this armour.

'We are ready to begin,' called Imerian, one of the enginseers, a hybrid being of flesh and metal who was swathed in red robes and whose arms were partially augmetic. Uriel felt his muscles tense and walked over to the armour, placing his hand in the centre of the golden eagle upon the breastplate.

'You will live again,' he said.

'Captain Ventris,' said Imerian, 'you might want to step away from the armour. If we are unable to calibrate the energy flows correctly then it would be advisable to be some distance from the backpack. Ceramite makes for deadly shrapnel.'

Uriel nodded and stepped away from the armour, moving to join the rest of the personnel within the vehicle hangar behind a hastily erected bulwark of sandbags. Imerian unspooled a length of cable from a heavy, brass-rimmed wooden box carried by a serious-faced servitor and made a number of complex, last minute adjustments to the dials on the front of the box.