‘The tumour dies either way.’

‘Then let us be thankful you are not a medicae, Praetorian Uttam Luna Hesh Udar,’ said Atharva.

THEY CAME BACK to him in the darkness, every face, every scream and every last, terrified breath. Kai lay on a hard stone bench that doubled for a bed, and curled in a foetal ball, rocking back and forth as he tried to forget the memories of pain they forced him to relive. A flyer had carried him from the Whispering Tower, high into the mountains, through starlit cloudbanks and moon-painted peaks of dizzying height.

That had been his ascent. Then had come the descent into the lightless depths of a mountain that seemed somehow darker, somehow more threatening than any mountain had a right to be. As though it carried a weight of anguish borne by those taken into its depths.

Down corridors and through echoing passageways he was taken. Into rumbling elevators and pneumo-cars that carried him deeper and deeper into the unknown reaches of the sullen mountain until at last he was deposited in a bare cell, cut directly from the rock, with only the most basic human functions catered for. A rusted pipe in the corner of the room dribbled brackish water, and a circular pit in the opposite corner appeared to be a receptacle for bodily waste.

The walls were painted a faint bluish grey, glossy and hard-wearing. Previous occupants had scraped their presence into the walls with broken nails and whatever else could make an impression in the paint. Primitive, primal things, Kai couldn’t make out what many of them were: random collections of lightning bolts and men with long spears for the most part. The carvings were little more than desperate pleas to be remembered by men now long forgotten and, presumably, long dead.

Kai wanted to add his own mark, but he had nothing with which to score the painted walls.

His captors had left him to sweat for an unknown period of time, letting the imagined horrors to be inflicted upon him do their work for them. Kai was not a brave man, and he had screamed that he would tell them what they wanted to know if he only knew what it was.

Though his mind was racing in a dozen different directions, Kai forced himself to sleep, knowing that whatever was to come would be more easily endured were he rested. He dreamed, but not of the Rub’ al Khali, not of the great fortress of Arzashkun, but of a cold void, populated by the voices of the dead. He saw a blonde-haired girl with a blue bandanna he had known on the Argo. He knew her name, they had been friends of a sort, but his memory was hazy, too overwhelmed with the chattering voices of the dead.

They swarmed his dream-self, begging to know why he had been spared and they had been taken. Why the monsters of the deep had come for them with their brazen swords and chitinous claws that tore meat from bones and left gouging wounds that would never heal.

Kai had nothing to tell them, but still they demanded answers.

Why, on a ship of innocents, had he been one of only two to survive?

What gave him the right to live while they were condemned to eternal torment?

Kai wept in his sleep, reliving the horror of their deaths over and over again.

Only one voice was free of accusation, a soothing, cultured voice that spoke without words, but eased him from memories of pain with visions of a paradisiacal world of high mountains, verdant plains and beautiful cities of glittering pyramids constructed from crystalline glass.

When he woke, it was to find two people standing in his cell, a man and a woman, blandly attractive and dressed in crisp white tunics that had the look of lab coats and hazmat gear all in one. The man was the kind of handsome that comes from fashionable cosmetic sculpting, whereas the woman had lavished all her attention on her eyes. Pale emerald orbs, they were the most captivating eyes Kai had ever seen.

‘You’re awake,’ said the man. Needlessly, thought Kai.

‘It’s time we found out what you know,’ added the woman.

Kai rubbed his face, feeling the sagging skin of his jowls and a day’s worth of stubble.

‘I told you, I don’t know anything,’ said Kai. ‘If I did, I promise I would tell you. I barely remember anything that happened in the mindhall.’

‘Of course, we don’t expect you to have any conscious recall of the information implanted in you by Aniq Sarashina,’ said the woman, her expression plastic and unchanging. ‘But it is in you, that much is certain.’

‘It’s our job to remove that information,’ said the man.

‘Fine,’ said Kai. ‘Hook me up to a psi-caster and let’s be done with it.’

‘I’m afraid it won’t be quite that simple,’ said the man.

‘Or that painless,’ added the woman.

‘Who are you?’ asked Kai. ‘You’re not part of the City of Sight, so who do you work for?’

‘My name is Adept Hiriko,’ said the woman, ‘and this is Adept Scharff. We are neurolocutors, psi-augers if you will. That’s auger with an e.’

‘As in a drill,’ added Scharff. ‘My role is to assist Adept Hiriko in boring into your psyche and rooting out whatever information has been secreted within your mind.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Quite serious,’ said Scharff, as though puzzled as to Kai’s meaning. ‘We are here at the behest of the Legio Custodes. Our orders come with the highest authority, giving us carte blanche to achieve our goals by any means necessary.’

‘I’m afraid it is likely you will not survive the process,’ said Hiriko. ‘But if you do it is more than probable that you will be left in a permanent vegetative state.’

‘This is insane!’ cried Kai, backing away from these monsters.

‘If you think about it clearly, it’s really the only option open to us,’ said Scharff.

‘We anticipated you would be reluctant to help us,’ added Hiriko. ‘How disappointing.’

KAI COULD NOT speak. A gum shield that prevented him from biting off his tongue filled his mouth with a rubberised, antiseptic taste. An air pipe plunged down his throat, and a leather headpiece studded with needles and electrodes enveloped his head like a pilot’s helmet. A wealth of intravenous drips fed into his veins and the blood vessels beneath his skull, while a lid-lock held his eyes open. Slender output jacks were plugged into the base of each orb, and bronze wires trailed to banks of ocular-visual recording equipment.

The interrogation chamber was horribly mundane, a simple metal box without windows or mirrors or anything in the way of character. Portable banks of monitoring equipment surrounded Kai as he lay back on a steel-framed gurney, each one telling a tale of his internal biorhythms.

A humming device like a gleaming scorpion’s tail was bolted to the metallic floor behind him, arching overhead and festooned with dangling instruments that seemed designed to terrify as much as provide any function. Hiriko and Scharff busied themselves with monitoring the drugs flowing into his bloodstream, while the gold-armoured figure of Saturnalia stood at the far end of the chamber, his guardian spear held loosely in one hand.

‘Are you ready to begin?’ asked the Custodian.

‘Almost,’ replied Hiriko. ‘This is a delicate procedure, and one doesn’t want to rush.’

‘The information you seek has been well hidden, Custodian,’ added Scharff. ‘We will have to go deep into his psyche, and such a journey requires faultless preparation.’

‘We risk breaking his mind without due care and attention.’

The Custodian took a step towards the psi-augers, his fingers clenching tightly on his guardian spear.

‘The Mistress of the Telepathica spoke of the Emperor,’ said Saturnalia, ‘and anything that concerns the Emperor is my business. Do not waste time in telling me of preparation and semantics. Find what she placed in his head, and find it now. Breaking his mind is a price that concerns me not at all.’

Kai wanted to rage at them, but his mouth couldn’t form the words. He wanted to yell that he was a human being, an astropath of value to the Imperium. But he knew that even if he could make them hear, they would not care, Saturnalia because his duty to the Emperor overrode all other concerns, Hiriko and Scharff because they were simply doing a job.