The woman cocked her head to one side and let her eyes roam his face. They were quite magnificent eyes, genuine and likely gene-tailored in utero. Kai’s augmetic eyes saw the faint outline of an electoo just beneath the third dermal layer, and unconsciously brought it into clarity. Rendered in a familiar cursive, it was an italicised capital C, and Kai groaned as he touched the underside of his wrist, were an identical electoo had been applied.

‘You are from House Castana,’ he said.

‘I amHouse Castana,’ said the woman. ‘I am Aeliana Septmia Verduchina Castana.’

‘The Patriarch’s daughter,’ said Kai.

‘Just so,’ said Aeliana, lifting her fringe to reveal a bejewelled patch in the centre of her forehead concealing her third eye. ‘And you are an embarrassment to my house, Kai Zulane.’

‘I never meant to be, Domina,’ said Kai, quickly averting his gaze and employing the formal means of address. To look into the eye of a navigator was death, and he had more than earned such a fate in the eyes of the Castana family of the Navis Nobilite.

‘I am not here to kill you,’ said Aeliana. ‘Though Throne knows, that would solve a world of problems. I am here to give you a second chance. I am here to give you a chance to make amends for the loss of the Argoand the near-crippling loss of face my father has endured among the Conclave of Navigators.’

‘Why would you do such a thing?’

‘Because I dislike waste,’ said Aeliana. ‘For all the trouble you have caused, you are a skilled astropath and I would recoup the significant outlay my father incurred in securing your secondment to our House.’

‘You can secure my release from this place?’ asked Kai.

Aeliana smiled and shook her head as though amused at the naïve questioning of an infant.

‘I am Navis Nobilite,’ she said. ‘I speak and the world listens.’

‘Even the Legio Custodes?’

‘Even the praetorians,’ said Aeliana. ‘On assurance that I never allow you to return to Terra. A small price to see an end to this… unpleasantness, I think you’ll agree?’

Kai nodded. To never see the planet of his birth again would be no price at all.

‘And you can take me out of here?’ he said.

‘I can, but first you have to do something for me.’

‘What? Anything, Domina,’ said Kai, reaching out to take Aeliana’s hands.

Her skin was smooth, yet there was a hardness to it that spoke of subdermal haptic implants. Aeliana’s eyes bored into his, and once again he was struck by the lambent green of her perfectly circular irises.

‘I need you to look at me and understand that House Castana does not hold you responsible for what happened aboard the Argo. It was an old ship and well beyond its scheduled maintenance refit date. The vanes of its Geller field generators had been damaged in transit through the asteroid belt around Konor, and it was only a matter of time until they failed. It had nothing to do with you.’

‘I was transmitting just before they failed,’ said Kai, so softly he wasn’t even sure he’d spoken aloud.

‘What?’

‘I was in a nunciotrance,’ said Kai. ‘I was sending a message to Terra when the shields failed. I was the way in for those… monsters… those thingsthat live in the warp. The shields might have been cracked and ready to fail, but I was the hammer that finally broke them. The whole crew slaughtered and it’s my fault!’

Aeliana gripped his hands tightly and looked him straight in the eye.

‘It was notyour fault,’ she said. ‘The creatures of the warp are dangerous, yes, but you are not to blame for what happened. I have seen the shipwright’s report on the wreck that emerged from the warp, and it is a miracle the Argomade it back to realspace at all. You and Roxanne were all that brought it home at all.’

‘Roxanne…’ said Kai. ‘Yes, that was her name… I remember. We knew each other. What became of her?’

‘She is well,’ said Aeliana, but Kai caught the hesitation before her answer. ‘After a brief convalescence, she returned to her duties. As you must, but you need to tell the Custodians what Sarashina told you. There is no reason not to; you have my word as Mistress of House Castana that no harm will befall you, whatever words you speak to me.’

Kai tilted his head back and stared into the bright light filling his cell. He could see no source of illumination, yet the walls shone with reflected light. The grainy static noise swelled, and now he recognised it for what it was: a desert wind blowing through the valleys and troughs of a dune sea, reshaping the landscape with every gust.

‘Very good,’ he said. ‘You almost had me.’

Aeliana’s grip tightened, and the perfect cast of her bone structure wavered for the tiniest fraction of a second. But with awareness of its falsehood, the rest of the fiction fell away with increasing rapidity, and the walls of the cell fell away like the threadbare backcloth of a cheap playhouse.

In their place, the achingly empty expanse of the Rub’ al Khali stretched out to the edge of the world. The armed troopers melted away like wind-blown sand sculptures and Kai found himself seated upon a shelf of rock overlooking the fortress of Arzashkun.

‘What was my mistake?’ said Adept Hiriko, the guise of Aeliana falling away from her.

‘The eyes for starters,’ said Kai. ‘You can never change your eyes, and though I forget each time, you can never hide them.’

‘That is all?’

‘Well, no,’ said Kai. ‘You made one other mistake.’

‘Oh, what was that?’

‘Aeliana Castana is a complete bitch,’ said Kai. ‘She would never be so understanding to someone who had cost her house so dearly.’

Hiriko shrugged. ‘I have heard that, but gambled on you never having met her.’

‘I haven’t, but word travels.’

Hiriko still held his hands and she leaned in to him. Her skin smelled of cheap herbal soap, and the sheer ordinariness of it made Kai want to weep. If only he could.

‘Whether or not you believed the dreamscape is immaterial,’ said Hiriko. ‘The words I spoke with her lips are no less true. You were not to blame for what happened to the Argo. Only by accepting that will you be able to let go of what holds you here.’

‘Maybe I don’t want to let go of it. Maybe I feel I deserve to be punished just for surviving. Had you thought of that?’

‘Why would you do something so self-destructive?’ asked Hiriko. ‘This augering is killing you every day. You must know that.’

Kai nodded. ‘I know it.’

‘Then why do it?’

‘Aniq Sarashina bade me tell what I know to one person, and one person alone.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kai, scooping up a handful of sand and letting it spill between his open fingers. The wind snatched the falling grains, sending them out over the dunes to be lost among the endless desert. Kai imagined himself as one of those grains, carried away by the warm sirocco, to be lost beyond any hope of ever being found.

‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ said Hiriko.

‘It doesn’t have to,’ said Kai. ‘But a promise is a promise.’

‘Do you want to die here?’

Kai considered the question, wondering if death was truly what he wanted. A release from the nightmares and constant guilt at his survival would be welcome, but he was too much of a coward to let death claim him with such ease. Or was it strength that kept him struggling for life and the chance to give his survival meaning?

‘No,’ said Kai at last, as the answer came to him. ‘I don’t want to die here.’

‘Telling me what Sarashina told you is the only way you will live,’ promised Hiriko.

‘You’re wrong,’ he said, without knowing how he could be so certain. ‘I am going to pass on what I was told.’

Hiriko shook her head. ‘Saturnalia will kill you first.’

THE BLEED WAS tempestuous, but what else could he have expected after so potent a psychic burst as the arrival of the Crimson King? Magnus himself had manifested on Terra from half a galaxy away, and Evander Gregoras could not even begin to imagine what an expenditure of power such a feat had cost him.