‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Palladis, tousling the hair of the boy beside Maya.

‘His name’s Arik,’ said Maya, reaching out to stroke the child’s cheek.

‘A good strong name,’ said Palladis, addressing the boy. ‘Do you know what it means?’

The boy shook his head, and Palladis made a fist. ‘Arik was one of the Emperor’s lightning-bearers in the first epoch of Unity,’ he said. ‘They say he was taller than the hollow mountain and that he carved the pass at Mohan with his fists. Give it time and I think you might grow as big.’

The boy smiled and made a fist too. Maya reached out and placed a palm on her son’s shoulder.

‘Emperor love you,’ she said. ‘Are you blessed with children?’

Palladis sighed wearily, but nodded. ‘Two boys.’

‘Are they here?’ asked Maya. ‘I would love to meet them and tell them what a kind father they have.’

‘They were here,’ said Palladis. ‘They died.’

‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ said Maya. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘What happened to them?’ asked Arik.

‘Hush now, Arik!’ cried Maya.

‘No, it’s alright,’ said Palladis. ‘He should know and understand such things.’

Palladis took the boy by the shoulders and looked him straight in the eye, wanting him to understand the gravity of what he was about to hear.

‘I once worked for a powerful man who desired I work for no other,’ said Palladis. ‘I did not like such restrictions, and secretly accepted a commission from another, though I knew the price of discovery would be high. The powerful man learned of my other work and sent men to my house to express his displeasure. I was working in a limestone quarry west of the palace, but my wife and two boys were home. The men cut my wife’s throat and shot my boys in the heart. I returned from the quarries to find all three lying where they had fallen.’

The boy’s eyes widened, and Palladis knew he had frightened him. That was good. Fear would keep him alive to the many ways in which death was stalking him.

‘You poor man…’ said Maya, while pulling her son away from Palladis.

He deflected her fearful sympathy and his own rising grief by looking over at her husband, who sat to one side. His face was expressionless, crushed and empty, as though all the life had had been drained from him.

Palladis knew that expression well. Sometimes he felt it was the only one he wore.

‘Estaben?’ said Palladis, but the man didn’t look up.

He repeated the man’s name, and at last his head came up.

‘What?’

‘Your sons are recovering, Estaben,’ he said. ‘You must be relieved.’

‘Relieved?’ said Estaben with a shrug. ‘Vali and Chio are with the Emperor now. If anything, they’re the lucky ones. The rest of us have to live in this world, with its suffering and pain. Tell me, priest, why should I be relieved?’

Anger touched Palladis. ‘I am sorry for your loss, but you have two sons who need you. And I am not a priest.’

‘You are,’ said Estaben. ‘You don’t see it, but you are a priest. This is a temple, and you are its priest.’

Palladis shook his head, but before he could rebut Estaben’s words, the crack of splintering timber filled the building, followed by the heavy thud of a door falling from its frame. Cries of alarm sounded, and people began moving from the entrance.

Seven men stepped over the ruin of the door. Big men. Hard men. Dangerous men.

They were swathed in furs, leather straps and plates of steel beaten into the semblance of armour. Two wore spiked helmets, one carried a vicious, flanged mace of pig iron, while another carried a bulky gun with a flared barrel and lengths of copper piping running along the barrel to a sparking cylinder filled with tiny arcs of lightning. Swirling tattoos writhed on the muscles of their beefy arms, and each man bore a jagged brand of a lightning bolt above his right eye.

‘Babu Dhakal’s men,’ hissed Roxanne, but Palladis waved her to silence.

He stepped into the central aisle, his hands held up before him.

‘Please,’ he began. ‘This is a place of peace and solemnity.’

‘Not any more,’ said a broad-shouldered figure, entering the building behind his vanguard. He towered over the seven dangerous men, making them look small in comparison. Crossed bandoliers of knives made an X on his chest, and a trio of jangling meat hooks hung from his belt next to a holster containing a wide pistol that was surely too heavy for any normal man to fire without losing his arm to recoil. Barbed iron torqs encircled his biceps, making the pulsing veins throb like writhing snakes beneath the skin.

The man’s flesh was emblazoned with the tattooist’s art, myriad representations of lightning bolts, hammers and winged raptors. What little of his natural skin tone remained was the unhealthy pallor of a corpse, and a thin line of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.

But it was the man’s eyes that told Palladis who had come for retribution. Pupils so fine they were little more than black dots in a sea of petechial haemorrhages, the man’s eyes were literally red with blood.

‘Ghota,’ said Palladis.

ATHENA ROSE THROUGH the central spine of the Whispering Tower, carried aloft on the double helix of gravity-defiant particles. It made her skin itch abominably, and the scar tissue that capped her amputated thighs throbbed painfully in the flux. Why the Whispering Tower’s builders had thought a pneumatic lift was unnecessary was a constant mystery, and she never failed to curse them whenever she was forced to move vertically through its structure.

She badly needed to see Mistress Sarashina, and rose through the levels of the tower towards the upper wing of the Oneirocritica Alchera Mundi, the great dream library of the City of Sight. A stack of papers and dream logs rested in her lap, a volatile record of her latest flight into the Immaterium that required a second interpretation. No one had a better understanding of Vaticprognostication than Aniq Sarashina, and if anyone could provide clarification of her latest vision, it would be her.

At last the stream of particles came to a diffuse end, and she used her manipulator arm to work the controls of her chair. It lurched as one repulsor field was exchanged for another, and Athena winced as the drum-taut tissue of her ravaged limbs pulled tight.

Passing through the arched entrance of the library, Athena nodded to the detachment of Black Sentinels stationed by the heavily armoured doors. She felt the humming machine spirits set into the arch cast their unfeeling eyes over her, ensuring she brought nothing forbidden into the library.

Towering shelves, rearing hundreds of metres into the air filled this section of the Oneirocritica Alchera Mundi, groaning stacks radiating from the central hub filled with interpretive texts, dream diaries, vision logs and the many books of common astropathic imagery. Every vision received and sent from the City of Sight was here, a complete record of communication that passed between Terra and the wider galaxy.

Scores of hunched astropaths drifted through the stacks like green ghosts, seeking clarification of a vision, while elder telepaths added freshly approved symbols to the ever-growing library. Every addition to the library was ratified by Artemeidons Yun, the Custodian of this invaluable repository, and Athena saw the corpulent old telepath shuffling through the stacks with a gaggle of bobbing lumen globes and harried aides following in his wake.

Athena circled the hub until she sensed Sarashina’s presence in the section devoted to elemental symbolism in visions. She floated towards Sarashina, and her former tutor looked up as Athena approached. Though astropaths lacked traditional visual acuity, their blindsight allowed them to perceive the world around them just as well as sighted individuals.

‘Athena,’ said Sarashina with a smile of genuine warmth. ‘How are you?’