‘You speak of witchery,’ I say. I dare a little more. ‘You know nothing of it. There are subtleties to the Great Ocean that only we understood. We could peer into the very stuff of the warp and make sense of the patterns there. We saw glimpses of the future, of possibilities more magnificent than there are words to describe.’

I begin to enthuse myself. I remember the devices that we used for learning, for discovery, for healing – the enormous potential that they had. We were like children, stepping into a dimension of wonder, our eyes glistening from the reflected glory.

‘I thought that, if some of those things survived, then we could retrieve them. If the fates determined that we were to be cast adrift, we could at least make some use of the tools that we’d accumulated.’

‘Did you find any?’

He is still eager, hungry for information now. The scorn has left his voice, replaced by something like need. Perhaps he has no idea how transparent he is. Odd, that he should be so brittle. I’d always imagined the Wolves being more sure of themselves.

‘No,’ I say, deflating his hopes as bluntly as I can. ‘We had no time. And, in any case, I doubt anything could have survived the mess you made of this place. You have destroyed everything. If I’d known it was you behind this carnage, I’d have expected nothing less. You are butchers and psychopaths, sadists and morons, the lowest of the–’

I know what I’m doing. His psychology is increasingly open to me. I raise his hopes, then dash them. I sense the fragility of his mind, and strike where I know the pain will be greatest.

I only stop speaking as the fist crashes into my jaw. Even inured as I am to physical shock, it staggers me. He moves fast; far faster than I could have done. I feel bone breaking, my jawline fragmenting, and my head jarring back against the metal of the chair. Pain flares up, hot and bright behind my eyes. Then a secondary bloom of agony, rolling across my face.

‘You know nothing of us!’ he roars, and the voice is instantly unhinged with rage.

Groggily, I realise I have unleashed something of incredible magnitude, and my stomach tightens.

He strikes me again, using his other fist, and my head bounces painfully from its bonds. What little vision I had disappears, to be replaced by a red-black, blotchy haze. Something else – a boot? – thuds into my exposed midriff, cracking my fused ribs and driving the plates in.

‘Nothing!’ he bellows, and a whole curtain of saliva slaps across my ruined cheeks. He is screaming into my face.

I can summon nothing against this. I have moved too soon, and he will surely kill me. More hammer-blows impact, breaking my skin, tearing my muscles, shivering the bone beneath. My head rocks on my neck like a top, cracked back and forth by the casual, deadly fists. If it were not for my restraints keeping me in check, my neck would be severed clean by now.

Then he stops. Merciful Throne, he stops.

I hear him raging still, incoherent with mania. He paces back and forth, trying to rein in whatever dark forces I have unleashed. I gasp for breath, feeling my punctured lungs labour. My head feels swollen with blood. The world reels around me, thick and dizzy with pain.

His breathing is like an animal’s, ragged and laced with moisture. For a long time, he doesn’t speak. I don’t think he can. It takes time for the rage to subside.

‘You know nothing of us,’ he growls again, and the voice has resumed its terrifying, purring threat.

I cannot respond. My own lips are puffy and cracked, and I feel my blood clotting in hard nodes within my wounds.

‘So certain,’ he spits, and I feel a slug of oily phlegm hit my body. ‘You’re so damned certain. And yet, as it turns out, you know even less than you think.’

He comes close again, and I smell his sour aroma. That odour gives much away. There is a bestial quality to it, like the sodden flank of an old hunting dog, but there’s something else. Chemical, perhaps.

‘You still don’t know why I brought you here,’ he says. His contempt is needle-keen. ‘Time to shed some light.’

As he says it, wall-mounted lumens flare into life. The sudden exposure only adds more pain to the riot of it in my head, and my bruised eyes screw shut. It takes time for them to open again, gingerly, the lids trembling under flakes of dried blood.

For the first time, I can see my questioner. As I look into his face, blurry and floating amid the harsh lights, I finally make out some detail, some identity.

It is then that I realise, just as he said I would, that I know nothing at all.

REVUEL ARVIDA RAN fast, keeping his head low, watching where his boots fell carefully. He reached his destination, a tall column of semi-melted metal on the corner of what had once been an intersection between two transit corridors.

He slid down against the broken column and risked a look round the corner. The body of Orphide lay in the middle of the open street. On either side of him the hollow carcasses of buildings stretched away down the long avenue. There was no visible movement.

He glanced at the proximity readings on his helm display. No enemy signals, and three of his battle-brothers dead. Three other active signals were converging on Kalliston’s location, a few hundred metres distant. Arvida was furthest away, out of position and isolated.

The city was whisper-quiet, but Arvida’s aural amplifiers picked up a faint shuffling from a long way down the street. Something was moving towards him, sheltered by the drifting smog and the urban ruins.

He crouched down with his back against the metal. Arvida was Corvidae, a master of the shifting patterns of the future. Back on his home world and surrounded by its familiar resonance, he felt particularly powerful. He allowed his consciousness to rise quickly through the enumerations.

He saw paths stretching away from him, overlaid onto the pattern of the streets around him. There were many clear possibilities, each running amid the others like a herd of panicked, stampeding prey. Some routes were obscured, but many were clear. He saw the approach of his enemy, their movements and their tactics. They had encircled Kalliston’s position. There were dozens of them.

‘Brother-captain,’ he voxed. ‘Advise retreat to the lander. There’s too ma–’

Arvida broke off, sensing footfalls closing rapidly. The footfalls hadn’t happened yet, but they would soon. His future-sense was shadowing the world around him, exposing the immediate course of events in a ghostly superimposition on the present.

He got to his feet and retreated back the way he’d come. He went quickly, keeping his bolter held ready at chest height.

There was no reply from Kalliston over the comm. Jammed, perhaps. The enemy seemed to know all their weaknesses. How long had they lain in wait, planning for this?

He reached the end of another shattered avenue. Four roads met there, and a blackened statue of Qeras the Episteme still stood at the intersection. The charred eyes gazed east, though lines of oil ran down the stone.

Arvida saw the incoming future-trails of the enemy like hololiths, and acted accordingly. They were moving to intercept him. Several had come down the street where Orphide lay. Two others had tracked back across a block and were heading towards his current position, closing fast.

Arvida shrank back into the shadow of the statue, waiting for them to come into view. They arrived in moments, only just behind their future-trails, hunting eagerly as if they knew their own doppelgangers were almost within blade-range.

Arvida let them pass him, then whirled round and out of cover. He took aim quickly, loosing two shots from his bolter. They were locked at the heads of the enemy, one for each. The first shell impacted perfectly, exploding as it snapped into the back of a pale, bloodstained helm. The target rocked, stumbled forwards, and smashed heavily to the ground. A flurry of glass shards flew up as he crashed earthwards.