‘I can assign more choirs to reaching Prospero,’ offered Sarashina.

Zhi-Meng shook his head. ‘No. Magnus will re-establish contact before long, I am sure. As hurt as he was by the judgement, he loves his father too dearly to remain estranged for long. There, you are done.’

Sarashina turned onto her front, rolling her shoulders and rotating her neck. She smiled, feeling her joints and muscles flex and rotate freely.

‘Whatever the holy men of the mountain taught you, it has potency,’ she said.

Zhi-Meng laced his fingers together and flexed them outwards with a smile. ‘I taught you what they taught me, remember?’

‘I remember. Lie down,’ she said, sitting up as he lay face down in the space she had just vacated.

She straddled him, and worked her fingers along the length of his tattooed back. Hawk-headed men and grinning snakes stretched and swelled beneath her fingertips.

‘Tell me of Kai Zulane,’ he said. ‘I felt the power of his nightmares through the whisper stones.’

‘There were few in the tower who did not,’ noted Sarashina.

‘His mind is damaged, Aniq, badly damaged. Are you sure it is worth the effort to save him from the hollow mountain? The great beacon will always need fresh minds. Now more than ever.’

Sarashina paused in her massage. ‘I believe so. He was my best student.’

‘Once, maybe,’ said Zhi-Meng. ‘Now he is just an astropath who can send no messages. One who choosesnot to send or receive.’

‘I know that. I’ve assigned my best seeker to bring him back. I think you’ll approve.’

‘Who?’

‘Athena Diyos,’ said Sarashina. ‘She has a rare skill in rebuilding damaged minds.’

‘Athena Diyos,’ mused Zhi-Meng with a contented purr as Sarashina walked the heels of her palms over his shoulder blades. ‘Throne help him.’

‘MISTRESS SARASHINA TELLS me you can no longer master the nuncio,’ said Athena, her voice dripping with venomous scorn. ‘The most basic of the telepathic disciplines, without which no astropath can function. Not much of an astropath are you?’

‘I suppose not,’ said Kai, trying not to stare.

‘Is there something wrong?’

‘Ah, well, it’s just that you’re not quite what I expected.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Not… this,’ replied Kai, knowing how ridiculous that sounded.

To say that Athena Diyos was not what Kai had expected was an understatement of magnificent proportions. After a night of restless dreams, Kai had been summoned to one of the anonymous training cells on the novitiates’ level. Bereft of furniture beyond a single chair, the cell was as bare of signifiers as it was possible to be.

Athena Diyos had been waiting for him, and Kai immediately sensed the sharpness of her personality.

Her body reclined in a floating chair, contoured to the twisted shape of her spine and what little remained of her limbs. Athena’s legs had been amputated at mid-thigh, and her left arm was a puckered mass of scar tissue. In place of her right arm, a thin manipulator augmetic tapped an impatient tattoo on the brushed steel of the chair. Her skull was hairless and the skin there was like the weathered surface of an ancient ruin. The sockets of her eyes were concave hollows of vat-grown skin, the only part of her face that had escaped the trauma of whatever fate had seen her consigned to this chair.

‘Use those fancy ocular augmetics to blink-click a picture,’ snapped Athena. ‘You can study it at your leisure once we’re done. But for now we have work to do, understood?’

‘Of course. Yes, I mean, sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want your pity.’

Her chair spun around and drifted to the other side of the chamber, and Kai took the opportunity to apply a medical filter over his augmetics to examine her one remaining arm. Dermal degradation and scar density told him she had suffered these wounds no more than a few years ago. Evidence of tissue crystallisation indicated her wounds were at least partially caused by vacuum damage.

Athena had been crippled on a starship.

If nothing else, they had that in common.

‘Sit,’ said Athena, turning to face the room’s only chair.

Kai took a seat, and the padded chair encased his body. Pressure sensors shifted internal pads to match his bone structure. It was the most comfortable seat Kai had ever known.

‘Do you know who I am?’ asked Athena.

‘No.’

‘I am Athena Diyos, and I am a seeker. That means I am going to find the pieces of your ability that still work and put them back together. If I succeed you will be of use again.’

‘And if you fail?’

‘Then you will be sent to the hollow mountain.’

‘Oh.’

‘Is that what you want?’ asked Athena, her augmetic arm ceasing its relentless tattoo on the arm of her chair.

‘At this point I’m past caring,’ said Kai, crossing his legs and rubbing a hand across his stubbled cheeks. The light in the room was offensively bright and shadowless, making it feel horribly clinical. Athena’s chair hovered close to him, and he smelled the counterseptics and pain balms slathered on her ruined arm. He noticed a gold ring on her middle finger, and zoomed in on the tiny engraving at its centre: a feathered bird arising from a cracked egg in the midst of a raging fire.

She saw his glance, but didn’t acknowledge it.

‘Do you know what happens in the hollow mountain?’ she asked.

‘Of course not,’ said Kai. ‘No one speaks of it.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘How should I know? A rigorous code of silence?’

‘It’s because no one who goes into the hollow mountain ever comes out,’ said Athena. She leaned forward, and Kai fought the urge to press himself further back in his own chair. ‘I’ve seen what happens to the poor unfortunates who go in there. I feel sorry for them. They’re gifted with power, just not enough to be useful in any other way. It’s a noble sacrifice, but sacrifice is just a pretty way of saying that you’re going to die.’

‘So what happens to them?’

‘First your skin cracks, like paper in a fire, falling from your bones like dust. Then your muscles waste away, and though you can feel the life being drawn out of you, it’s impossible to stop. Piece by piece, your mind dies: memory, joy, happiness, pain and fear. It all gets used. The beacon wastes nothing of you. Everything you were is sucked from your frame, leaving nothing but a withered husk, a hollow shell of ashen, dry skin and powdered bones. And it’s painful, agonisingly painful. You should know that before you so lightly dismiss this last chance of life I’m offering you.’

Kai felt the heat of her breath on his skin, hot and scented with a sickly sweet aroma of medicines.

‘I don’t want that,’ he said.

‘Didn’t think so,’ said Athena, the manipulator augmetic pushing her away from Kai.

‘So how are you going to help me?’

‘How long since you entered a receptive trance?’ asked Athena.

The question took Kai aback. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘If I am going to keep you from the hollow mountain, then you need to give me something to work with, Kai Zulane. If you ever lie to me, ever hold anything back or make me think that in any way you are impeding my work or putting a single living soul within this city in danger, then I won’t hesitate to write you off. Am I making myself clear?’

‘Amply,’ replied Kai, now understanding that his life was in this disfigured woman’s lap. ‘It has been several months since I’ve entered a receptive trance.’

‘Why? That must be painful to you,’ said Athena. ‘Are you psi-sick?’

‘A little,’ admitted Kai. ‘It hurts in my joints and I have a low grade headache all the time.’

‘Then why avoid a trance?’

‘Because I’d rather be sick than feel what I felt on the Argo.’

‘So it’s nothing to do with any lack of ability. That’s a relief. At least I’ll have something to work with.’