A flicker of movement caught his eye, and Kai looked up to the cloister in time to see a figure move out of sight. He stood dumbfounded for a moment, unable to believe what he’d just seen. Someone else in his dreamscape? Kai had heard fanciful tales of powerful psykers who were able to invade the dreams of sleepers and alter their mindscapes, but the last such cognoscynth was said to have died thousands of years ago.

‘Wait!’ cried Kai, turning and taking the stairs two at a time. He was out of breath by the time he reached the landing, and turned ninety degrees to mount the last flight of stairs. The terrazzo floor was patterned in a square-edged spiral motif, a maze with only one way in and out, and Kai rushed along the cloister towards where he had last seen the mysterious figure.

Silken curtains bellied out from arched openings, carrying the beat of a distant drum that echoed like a heartbeat from another epoch of the world. Kai could see no musicians, and knew the sounds were as impossible as the sight of an intruder in his dreams. He ran along the cloister, leaving the sound of percussion in his wake, and passed through a curtained doorway into a chamber of light and verdant growth. Trees grew through the floor as though nature had reclaimed this fortress after thousands of years of neglect by man. Creeping vines hung like gilded wall hangings from the pilasters, and waving fronds garlanded the window openings.

At the far end of the chamber a tall figure in long robes of white and gold stepped towards a doorway. Too distant to make out his features, his eyes were pools of great sorrow and infinite understanding of the price men pay for their dreams.

‘Stop!’ cried Kai. ‘Who are you, how can you be here?’

The figure did not answer and stepped out of sight. Kai ran through the room, brushing drifting leaves and questing vines from his path as he fought towards the doorway through which the robed figure had passed. The scents of spices, fresh growths and old memory was strongest here, and Kai shouted out in triumph as he finally reached the doorway. The smell of salt water and hot stone came from beyond the door, and – now that he had reached it – Kai found himself strangely reluctant to pass through.

Summoning up what little courage he possessed, Kai stepped over the threshold.

He found himself on a balcony he had never known existed, high on the side of the central tower of the fortress. The sun was a burning eye of searing red, and a lake so vast it better deserved to be called an ocean stretched out before him, wondrously blue and almost painful to look at. Birds flocked over the water, and small fishing boats bobbed close to the shore.

The balcony was deserted, which was impossible, as there was no way the intruder could possibly have escaped. Save the door behind him, a drop of hundreds of metres was the only way off the balcony. Only the creator of the dreamspace had the power to alter the laws that governed the logic of a dream, and even then it was dangerous, so how this mysterious stranger had escaped Kai was beyond him.

Kai walked to the edge of the balcony and rested his hands on the sun-warmed stone. He took a breath of the clean air, sharp and free of the chemical tang that pervaded every breath of the Terran atmosphere.

‘Where is this place?’ said Kai, knowing somehow that the man he had been chasing would hear him.

A hand clamped his shoulder with a powerful grip. The touch was electric, and Kai had the sense that had he chosen to do so, the owner of this hand could break him into tiny pieces with a simple twist of his wrist.

‘It is Old Earth,’ said a voice at his ear. Soft, lyrical, but with a core of steel.

‘How?’ asked Kai, enthralled by the man’s voice.

‘The human mind is impossibly complex, even to one such as I,’ said the man, ‘but it is no great feat to share my memories with you.’

‘You’re really here?’ asked Kai. ‘I’m not imagining this?’

‘You are asking if I am really here? In a dream you created?’ said the man with a wry chuckle. ‘That’s one for the philosophers, eh? What is reality anyway? Is this any less real to you than your life in the Whispering Tower? Does fire in a dream not warm you just as well as one of timber and kindling?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Kai. ‘Why are you here? With me, right now.’

‘I wanted to see you, to know more about you.’

‘Why? Who are you?’

‘Always the obsession with names,’ said the man. ‘I have had many names over the long years, and one is as good as another until it is shed for the next.’

‘So what do I call you?’

‘You don’t call me anything,’ said the man, and the power of the grip on Kai’s shoulder increased exponentially. Kai winced as the complex arrangement of bones in his shoulder ground together. ‘You just listen.’

Kai nodded, and the pain in his shoulder eased a fraction. The birds over the lake swooped down over the fishing boats, their caws echoing from the water as though from a great distance. Kai narrowed his eyes. Staring at the vivid blue of the lake was hurting his eyes, and his augmetics had no power to help him in this dream.

‘Great and terrible forces are abroad in the galaxy, Kai, and the billions upon billions of threads they weave into the future are beyond the comprehension of even the greatest of the eldar seers, but one particular thread I have seen entwines with my own. Can you guess whose that is?’

‘Mine?’ ventured Kai.

The man laughed, the sound so infectious it made Kai smile despite the growing ache in his shoulder. Yet it felt somehow insincere, as though this man had not laughed in a very long time and had forgotten how it was supposed to sound.

‘You, Kai Zulane? No, you are not destined to be remembered by the saga-tellers of the ages yet to come,’ said the man, and Kai felt him look into the glaring red eye of the sun. ‘It is of another I speak, one who has the ability to undo all that I have achieved and cut my thread, but whose face is hidden from me.’

‘So why are you here talking to me?’ asked Kai. ‘If you are who I think you are, then there must be a million things more important than me for you to deal with.’

‘Very true,’ agreed the man. ‘But I am here talking to you because you will bear witness to my ending. I sense you are being pulled along by the unseen thread that leads to my death. And if you can see it, then I can know it.’

‘And you can stop it?’ asked Kai, as the red sun began to descend.

‘That remains to be seen.’

THE REGICIDE BOARD lay untouched. This was no time for games, and they all knew it.

Nemo Zhi-Meng paced his chambers with a harried expression creasing his already craggy and lined features. Since the Conduit had passed word of the disaster at Isstvan V, he had not slept, and the strain was beginning to show.

‘Sit down, Nemo, you’re wearing me out,’ said Sarashina.

‘And put some damn clothes on,’ added Evander Gregoras.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I do my best thinking on the move. And it helps being naked, the energies flow through me so much better.’

‘You know that’s nonsense,’ said Sarashina.

Zhi-Meng’s head snapped up and he waved her objections away. ‘You know as well as anyone that whatever works for you only works because you make it so.’

Sarashina lay back on a contoured couch, trying to let its massaging texture ease out the terrible cramps in her shoulder and neck muscles. It was a hopeless task. Days of constant telepathic communion with astropaths all over the Imperium had pushed them all to the end of their endurance. The Choirs were operating far beyond safe limits, and hundreds had burned out like quick-burning star shells fired over a midnight battlefield.

Over a dozen had suffered catastrophic intrusions that had required the intervention of Golovko’s Black Sentinels. Thankfully such incidents had been contained and the cells of those poor unfortunates were now sanitised by fire and sealed with psi-locks.