Atharva knew his mortal gaolers better than they knew themselves. He knew their fears, their desires, their guilty secrets and their ambitions. He knew everything about them, and it amused him to know how simply their minds were assembled. How could any living thing that professed self-awareness function with such basic cognitive faculties?

Ah, but the Custodians…

Their minds were things of beauty, artfully-wrought arrangements of psychic engineering and genetic perfection. Like the most complex machines imaginable, they were like steel traps ready to snap shut on an unwary intruder. Like a cogitator protected from infiltration by a skilled infocyte, their minds were fully able to defend themselves from attack, and Atharva had not even attempted to do more than drift the outer edges of their brilliant consciousnesses.

Yet even though the Custodes were fascinating beyond measure, Atharva’s thoughts were forever drawn to the mind the psi-augers were attacking. At first glance, there was little to distinguish this person from the hundreds of others incarcerated here, save the modicum of psychic ability and the glassy scarring left by the Soul Binding.

He understood the man’s selfishness, the entitled conceit bred by years spent with Guilliman’s Legion. Understandable, but not the man’s true self. He was better than he knew, but it was going to take great hardship to strip that away, a process that had already begun, but would likely be left undone before his death.

Kai Zulane was the man’s name, the man the Eye had spoken of, but it was a name unknown to Atharva. Even with all the man’s memories laid bare, there was little to indicate what interest anyone could have in him. Yet there was something buried within him that not even Atharva could see, something wrapped in a black horror of raw aetheric rage and guilt that would be impossible to remove without the right tools.

Force was useless, this horror was stronger than any threat of violence. Likewise, it could not be appealed to by external reason or promises of gratification. This was an ordeal that could only be ended from the inside, yet what treasures might lurk within so heavily guarded a prison?

Atharva loathed mysteries, and this was one that demanded to be revealed. His scholar’s brain had to unravel this secret. The Crimson King had taken an ill-advised step in coming to Terra, but his arrival had shown Atharva what needed to be done. Kai Zulane was vital to the future in ways no one could understand, but if there was anyone who would relish the chance to prise open his mind, it was a mystic of the Thousand Sons.

Atharva opened his eyes as a pack of guards moved past the glass door of his cell. All but one managed to avoid looking in his direction, and Atharva flicked a barb of his consciousness into the man’s mind.

He was called Natraj, and Atharva smiled at the appropriateness of the name. Natraj was a soldier in the Uralian Stormlords, an elite drop-troop regiment that had served the Imperium since the early years of the wars of Unity alongside the gene-septs of the southern musters. His wife was raising their five sons in a hydro-farm collective on the slopes of Mount Arkad, and his brothers were all dead. Natraj was an honest man, a good man, but a man who no longer wished to serve in the Imperium’s armies.

His devotion to his fellow soldiers and the oaths he had sworn before the regimental Ark of Wings bound him to his role as soldier and gaoler, but Natraj was nearing his fortieth year, and desired only to return home to his family and see his boys grow to men.

A simple desire. An understandable one.

An open door to an Athanaean.

KAI LAY ON the floor of his cell, sweat layering his skin and his heart racing as though he had sprinted the entire height of the Whispering Tower. His body ached and his eyes felt as though the sutures binding them to his skin were tearing loose. The bilious taste of vomit caked the inside of his mouth and his robes stank of urine and uncontrolled bowel movements.

Every portion of his anatomy ached, and micro-tremors in his muscles kept him from any form of rest. Bright light filled his cell and harsh static blared from an unseen vox grille. Kai wanted to pick himself up, to face his interrogators with dignity and courage, but he had nothing left in him for defiance.

His clawed hand scratched at the floor, and the ghost of a smile creased Kai’s face as he finally made a mark of his own in the fabric of the cell. His parched tongue rasped over his cracked lips and he blinked away the raw, infected tissue gathering at the corner of his eyes.

Kai had no idea how long he had been lying here in pools of his own ejected matter, and, in truth, had stopped caring. He watched the patterns his breath made in the vomit, like ripples on the surface of a vast lake that sweltered beneath a glaring red sun.

Then, a change. A shiver of air movement. A door opening.

Kai tried to move, but he could no longer move his limbs. He saw a pair of boots, heeled and fashioned from expensive materials available only to the moneyed and influential of Terra. He heard a woman’s voice, dull and indistinct, then hands were under him, grabbing him and hauling him upright. Kai flinched at their touch, his body a morass of pain that shied away from human contact. Dragged across the floor of the cell, he was deposited on the edge of the bunk. Two figures in bulky black armour, layered bands of what looked like leather and bonded ceramite plate, took a step back from him as the most exquisite woman Kai had ever seen appeared between them.

Kai squinted through the glare of his cell’s lights. His visitor was unknown to him, a woman of undoubted noble breeding and subtly judged cosmetic surgery. Her eyes were vivid green, the surgically enhanced structure of her features framing them perfectly with high cheekbones. She wore her blonde hair in an elfin bob, asymmetrically cut and laced with amethyst beads.

A black bodyglove enclosed her lithe form, and a purple weave of shimmering fabric spiralled around her body like a frozen whirlwind. She was dressed for one of the grand Merican ballrooms, not a gaol beneath a forgotten mountain, and Kai wondered what she could possibly want from him.

‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked.

Kai licked his lips with the little moisture left in his mouth.

‘No,’ he said, his voice a barely audible whisper. The dusty rattle of a desert corpse.

‘And why should you? I move in circles far beyond your limited understanding,’ said the woman, picking her way carefully through the matter on the cell floor and kneeling beside him. Her dress moved with her, slithering around her form like a snake and ensuring it never touched the ground.

She saw him notice and smiled. ‘Nanofabric programmed to remain a fixed position and distance from my body at all times.’

‘Expensive.’

‘Monstrously,’ she agreed.

‘What do you want?’

The woman snapped a finger.

‘Give the man a drink. I can barely hear him.’

One of the woman’s protectors knelt beside Kai and offered him a plastic tube he detached from the shoulder of his armour. A droplet of moisture beaded the end of the tube, and Kai gratefully sucked cool liquid from the trooper’s recyc-pack. That the water was reconstituted from the man’s sweat and bodily waste did not bother Kai one iota. He felt it flowing through his body, along his limbs and revitalising him like a stimm shot.

Instantly, his thoughts sharpened and the sickness that plagued him abated.

‘That’s more like it,’ said the woman. ‘Now I don’t have to get so close to you to hear what you’re saying.’

‘That wasn’t water,’ said Kai, indicating the trooper as he snapped the clear plastic pipe back to his shoulder plate.

‘No, it wasn’t, but you feel better, don’t you?’

‘Much better,’ agreed Kai.