Athena reached up with her twisted arm and took hold of his elbow.

‘Of course it can,’ she said. ‘Mistress Sarashina told me to bring you back, but I can’t do that if the cryptaesthesians have reduced your mind to a fractured mess. Kai, think, reallythink about what you’re doing.’

‘I have,’ said Kai, rapping his knuckles on the brushed steel door.

The sound drifted down the corridor with mocking echoes, and Kai waited for the door to open with held breath. Finally it slid into the wall, and Kai found himself face to face with Evander Gregoras.

Looking at the man’s sallow, pinched features he could see why so few sought him out. Though his features were completely unremarkable to the point of being bland and forgettable, there was a calculating sharpness to his gaze that made Kai feel like a specimen on a dissection table.

‘The whisper stones are awash with your incessant chatter, and I need to rest,’ said Gregoras. ‘Why are you disturbing me?’

Kai was momentarily taken aback, and struggled to find his voice. Beyond Gregoras, he saw a room at odds with the bland-faced man, but Gregoras quickly stepped between Kai and his view of the interior.

‘I am a busy man, Kai Zulane, as are we all in these times,’ said Gregoras. ‘Give me one reason not to send you on your way with a reprimand.’

‘I want to know about the cognoscynths,’ said Kai, and the dismissive expression in the cryptaesthesian’s eyes was replaced with one of guarded interest.

‘The cognoscynths? Why? They are long gone.’

Kai took a breath and glanced at Athena, aware that he was crossing a very dangerous threshold. He shucked the fabric of his robe from his shoulder to reveal a yellow purple bruise in the shape of a powerful man’s hand.

‘I think I met one,’ he said.

THE INTERIOR OF the cryptaesthesian’s chambers were superficially similar to a novitiate’s: walls of cold stone and iron, an uncomfortable bed, whisper stones set in copper settings, but there the resemblance ended. This chamber was much larger, filled with rack upon rack of shelves, and where a novitiate’s shelves would be empty, awaiting the amassing of a dream library through time and experience, Gregoras boasted an impressive collection.

Leather bound books, data-spikes and rolled up parchments vied for space on bookcases overflowing with scraps of paper, celestial charts and handwritten lists. Scores of Oneirocriticalay strewn across the floor, and every square inch of wall was covered in a looping pattern of chalked curves, angles and scrawls that at once seemed dreadfully familiar and utterly unknown to Kai.

Evander Gregoras was a man Kai had known of before he’d left the City of Sight, but he was not a man he had ever required to meet.

Right now, he wished that were still the case.

‘Move some of those books if you want somewhere to sit,’ said Gregoras, sorting through a pile of papers stacked at random on a wide desk of scuffed dark wood. ‘Not you, Mistress Diyos, you don’t need to bother.’

Kai wondered if Gregoras was being cruel, but decided he was simply being factual. He shifted a heap of parchments on the bed to make room. He craned his neck to look at the writing on the wall, seeing that the handwriting was the same as filled the parchments. At first glance the designs looked like star charts or some form of celestial cartography, or perhaps the most complex genealogical record imaginable, but none of the symbols and intersecting lines made sense of that interpretation.

‘Don’t bother trying to understand it, Zulane,’ said Gregoras lifting a book from the desk and sweeping a layer of dust from its cover. ‘I have been trying for nearly two centuries and I understand only a fraction of it.’

‘What is it?’ asked Athena, gliding next to him as her manipulator arm tapped a nervous tattoo on the silvered armrest.

‘Please stop that, Mistress Diyos, it is most irritating,’ said Gregoras before continuing without missing a beat. ‘I call it the pattern, and as to what it is…’

Gregoras pulled a chair from the desk and sat before Kai with the book in his lap. He gazed up at the symbols and lines on the wall like a man seeing the landscapes of Kozarsky for the first time. ‘I believe it is a fragmented vision of a coming apocalypse. A vision of the future experienced by humanity aeons ago and shattered into billions of unrelated shards that have been spinning in the species consciousness for hundreds of thousands of years. I have been trying to piece it together.’

He had the certainty of a zealot in his voice, and Kai wondered just how much of what he had heard of the cryptaesthesians was due to this man.

‘So when is this apocalypse?’ said Kai. ‘Not for a while, I hope.’

‘It is happening now,’ said Gregoras.

Kai almost laughed, but thought the better of it when he saw the seriousness of Gregoras’s expression.

‘You’re joking, yes?’ said Kai.

‘I never make jokes,’ replied Gregoras, and Kai believed him.

‘Is it about Horus?’ asked Athena.

‘Possibly, or one of his brothers, but there are many potential interpretations, so I cannot know for sure. There are still too many variables, and much of what I can glean is… of questionable veracity at best. Now, tell me again why you are interrupting my rest cycle.’

‘The cognoscynths,’ said Athena. ‘What can you tell us of them?’

Gregoras leaned back in his chair and shook his head with a sigh. ‘The last of the cognoscynths was slain thousands of years ago,’ he said, ‘Why do you wish to know of an extinct discipline?’

Kai hesitated before answering. Though there was nothing overtly threatening to Gregoras, he exuded bureaucratic threat with his clinical detachment. The kind of man who would sign a hundred death warrants in the same breath as asking for a pot of fresh caffeine. He had a bland, authoritarian coldness that warned Kai not to let his guard down and say anything foolish.

‘I told you, I met one,’ replied Kai.

Gregoras laughed, a dry cough of a laugh, and said, ‘Impossible.’

‘Does this look like something impossible?’ asked Kai, pulling his robe away from his shoulder and once again revealing the bruise in the shape of a man’s hand. The cryptaesthesian put down his book and examined the bruising on Kai’s flesh. Against the paleness of his skin, it was a stark discolouration.

Gregoras laid his own hand on top of the mark. It fitted easily within the bruise. He reached down and pulled Kai’s hand up to his shoulder. It too was smaller then the bruise.

‘A big man with a large hand,’ said Gregoras. ‘Are you sure you did not fall afoul of one of Golovko’s Black Sentinels and get frogmarched back to your cell? Be truthful, I will find out if you lie to me.’

‘I swear to you that mark was not there when I went to sleep,’ said Kai. ‘I was getting dressed the next morning when I saw it. I can’t explain how it got there.’

‘Except by the presence of a psyker breed whose powers have been extinct for thousands of years or more,’ said Gregoras. ‘That is quite a leap of logic.’

‘Well how do you explain it?’ asked Athena.

‘I don’t have to explain anything,’ said Gregoras, lacing his delicate fingers together on his lap. ‘You are the ones who come to me. I couldgo into your mind and look for any lingering traces of another psi-presence, but it is not a delicate procedure, and it is not painless. Are you sure you are ready for such a painful intrusion to your mind?’

‘I need to know for sure if I was just dreaming or if it was real.’

‘Of course you were dreaming,’ said Gregoras, as though that explained everything. ‘You had a dream, Zulane, nothing more. As if wasn’t bad enough that you return to us broken, you now tell me that you have lost the ability to tell dream from fantasy.’

‘It was more than a dream,’ insisted Kai.

‘Any novitiate would say the same thing.’