Like most buildings in the Petitioner’s City, the temple had been constructed from random materials appropriated from the endless cycles of construction, repair and rebuilding that now engulfed the palace. Its walls were raised with marble offcuts stacked and mortared by itinerant migouexpelled from the Masonic Guilds for habitual usage of narcotics.

That stonework had been shaped and carved into a menagerie of forms: distraught angels with upraised arms, weeping cherubs with silver trumpets and great birds with golden wings dipped in sorrow. Mosaics of mourners fashioned in Gyptian pebble looked down from brick corbels and death masks of stillborn children stared out from painted frescoes assembled from crushed glass.

A mish-mash of pew-like benches filled the temple, many occupied by wailing families gathered round the body of a loved one. Sometimes these bodies were old, mostly they were not. Roxanne kept her head bowed as people looked up at the sound of the door slamming. She was known here, but not known enough for people to want to speak to her, which was just how she liked it. Someone like her would attract attention, and that was the last thing she wanted.

At the far end of the temple was its crowning glory, a tall statue of dark-hue that had come to be known as the Vacant Angel. Thanks to some imperfection in the Syryan nephrite, the warmasons had rejected the base material and cast it on the spoil heaps. Like most things discarded by the palace, it had found its way to the Petitioner’s City.

Carved in the form of a kneeling man, its muscular body was classically proportioned and in need of finishing. The face was blank, no doubt intended to be completed in the likeness of some Imperial hero by a Masonic sculptor. It had stood in the temple for over a year, but Palladis had – for reasons he kept to himself – chosen not to give it a face, though Roxanne could never shake the feeling it was looking at her with eyes just waiting to be carved.

Compared to the chambers in which Roxanne had spent her youth, the temple’s ornamentation was crude and unsophisticated, yet the grieving statues possessed a grace that far surpassed anything she had grown up around. What made it all the more incredible was that it was all the work of one man.

Palladis Novandio stood beside Maya, who knelt weeping at the feet of the Vacant Angel. She cradled an unmoving infant close to her breast, as though expecting to suckle it once again. Maya’s tears fell on the child’s eyes and rolled down its cold cheeks. Palladis looked up and gave Roxanne a nod of welcome as she took a seat to one side of the nave. She sat within sight of the Imperium’s secular heart, and yet here she was in a temple. The thought made her smile, as precious little else had done since she had returned to Terra in disgrace.

A stoop-shouldered man touched her arm, and Roxanne jumped. She hadn’t heard him approach. He stood next to her, his face draped with the emptiness of loss.

‘Who have you lost?’ he asked.

‘No one,’ she replied. ‘At least no one recently. You?’

‘My youngest sons,’ said the man. ‘That’s my wife at the statue.’

‘You are Estaben?’

The man nodded.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she said.

The man shrugged, as though the matter were of no consequence. ‘Maybe better this way.’

Before Roxanne could ask him what he meant, Estaben handed her a folded sheaf of papers and made his way down the nave. He limped over to Maya and lightly took her by the shoulder. She shook her head, but her husband bent to whisper in her ear and her wails took on a new pitch of misery as she put down her dead son.

Estaben led her away from the statue, and Roxanne bowed her head as they passed, ostensibly leaving them to their sorrow, but secretly fearing their grief and ill-fortune might be contagious. She looked up in time to see Palladis taking a seat in the pew in front of her. She gave him a weak smile.

‘Did you get the medicine?’ he asked without preamble.

She nodded. ‘Yes, though it took a while to rouse Antioch from a qash stupor.’

‘The man likes to sample his own wares,’ said Palladis shaking his head. ‘Foolish.’

‘Here,’ said Roxanne, handing over a cloth bag the size of her fist. ‘It should be enough for both children.’

Palladis took the medicine and nodded. His hands were rough and callused, the nails permanently edged in black from long years working stone with rasp and chisel. He was a man of middling years, with greying hair and a face weathered like the side of a cliff from a lifetime spent in the open air, carving statues, columns and detailed adornments for pediments and vaulted arches.

‘Maya will be grateful to you,’ said Palladis. ‘Once she has finished her mourning.’

‘You paid for it, I just went to get it.’

‘At no small risk to your person,’ pointed out Palladis. ‘You encountered no problems?’

She lowered her head, knowing she had to tell him what had happened, but fearing his disappointment more than any censure.

‘Roxanne?’ he said when she didn’t answer.

‘I ran into some of Babu Dhakal’s men,’ she said at last.

‘I see,’ said Palladis. ‘What happened?’

‘They attacked me. I killed them.’

He sighed. ‘How?’

‘How do you think?’

Palladis raised a placatory hand. ‘Did anyone see you?’

‘I don’t know, probably,’ said Roxanne. ‘I didn’t mean to kill them, not at first, but they’d have cut my throat as soon as they were done with me.’

‘I know, but you must be more careful,’ said Palladis. ‘The Babu is a man of great rages, and he will find out what happened to his men. He will come here, that much is certain.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to bring you trouble. That’s all I ever seem to do.’

Palladis laced his big, callused hands in her fingers and gave a slow smile.

‘One problem at a time, Roxanne,’ he said. ‘Let tomorrow look after itself. Today we are alive and have medicine to give two children a chance to see another dawn. If you learn anything in your time here, let it be that death surrounds us in all its myriad forms, just waiting to catch you unawares. Bend all your efforts to keeping it at bay. Honour death in all its forms. Appease it and you will be spared its cruel attentions for a time.’

He spoke with the passion of a zealot, yet there was kindness in his eyes. Roxanne knew little of his past, save that he had once been a master craftsman under the suzerainty of Warmason Vadok Singh. That he had suffered loss was obvious, but he had never spoken of what had driven him to raise a temple from the ashes and debris of the Petitioner’s City.

Roxanne bowed her head. She knew all too well how easily death could reach out and completely change the course of a life, even one spared its attention.

‘What did Estaben give you?’ asked Palladis.

She looked at the papers as though seeing them for the first time. The paper was thin and looked like whatever was printed on it now wasn’t the first ink it had known.

‘The usual,’ she said, flicking through the palimpsest and picking out phrases at random. She read them aloud.

‘The Emperor of Mankind is the Light and the Way, and all his actions are for the benefit of mankind, which is his people. The Emperor is God and God is the Emperor, so it is taught in the Lectitio Divinitatus, and above all things, the Emperor will protect…’

‘Let me see that,’ said Palladis, with a sharpness she had not heard in his voice before.

She held out the pamphlet, and he snatched it from her hand.

‘Not this Lectitio Divinitatus nonsense again,’ he said with a sneer of contempt before ripping the pamphlet in two. ‘A bunch of desperate people beguiled by a glittering light and who have yet to discover that all that glitters is not gold.’

‘They’re harmless enough,’ said Roxanne with a shrug. ‘It’s comforting even.’