‘Do it quickly, World Eaters,’ said Gythua.

‘Don’t you worry about us,’ Subha told him. ‘You just mind your own self.’

Kai put his hands over his ears, but could still hear the terrible scraping of metal on bone, the awful suction of pierced flesh. The World Eaters strained with the effort of pulling Gythua clear, but to the Death Guard’s credit, no more than a grunt of pain escaped his lips as he came free of the metal spars.

Kai felt pressure on his arm, and let himself be guided from the wreckage. Gythua gave out great shuddering breaths as his body tried to fight the inevitable, and Kai let out an involuntary cry of horror as he saw the monstrously bloody ruin of Gythua’s body.

‘Don’t know what you’ve got to be bothered about,’ said Gythua, climbing to his feet with help from Kiron. ‘It’s me with the hole right through me.’

‘Sorry,’ said Kai, stepping from the remains of the crashed cutter.

Kai blinked his augmetic eyes, and he smiled at the simple pleasure of sunlight on his skin. The cutter had come down in a wide courtyard space between a series of abandoned structures that might once have been warehouses. The ground was hard-packed earth and bare rock, the buildings that clustered close like curious onlookers at the scene of an accident.

No two were the same, constructed from sheets of corrugated metal and crudely shaped stone. Even over the reek of scorched iron and burning fuel, Kai could smell the wretched aroma of human waste, sweat and bad meat. How far had they travelled from the gaol? This surely could not be part of the Emperor’s palace.

‘Where are we?’ he asked, as Atharva joined him.

‘My guess would be the Petitioner’s City.’

‘It’s awful,’ said Kai. ‘People actually live here?’

Atharva nodded. ‘A great many of them.’

‘A good place to stay hidden,’ said Severian, moving to the edge of the courtyard in which they had crashed.

‘Hide?’ said Tagore. ‘I don’t plan on hiding from anyone.’

‘No? Then what isyour plan?’

‘We make our way to the nearest port facility and capture another flyer, one capable of getting into orbit without getting its arse shot off.’

‘And then what?’ asked Severian.

Tagore shrugged. ‘We have an astropath,’ he said. ‘We get him to send for our brothers.’

‘You make it all sound so simple,’ said Severian with a wry grin. ‘And I was worried for a moment that it would be difficult to escape from Terra.’

‘I am World Eater,’ said Tagore, a warning in his tone. ‘Do not mistake simple for stupid.’

Severian nodded and turned away as Subha and Asubha helped Gythua from the cutter. Kiron emerged from the wreckage with his upper body now bared to the elements, and Kai was reminded of the marble statues with perfect physiques that flanked the steps of the Circus Athletica on the island crag of Aegina. Where the other Space Marines were bulky to the point of being ungainly and grotesque, Kiron was more akin to the proportions of a mortal, albeit one whose body was shaped to an idealised form. The torn fabric of his bodyglove now plugged the hole in Gythua’s stomach, and Kai saw the yellow cloth was already stained crimson.

The Death Guard warrior had an arm around the twins’ shoulders, and he took in their surroundings with a stoic shrug.

‘So this is the Petitioner’s City,’ he grunted. ‘Don’t suppose there’s much chance of finding a Legion apothecary around here?’

THEY TORCHED THE wrecked cutter with three blasts from Kiron’s plasma carbine and moved into the winding streets of the city. Severian led the way, putting as much distance between them and the crash as was possible, given that the wounded Gythua limited their speed. They kept to the shadows and the farther they travelled into the city, the more Kai lost track of the age in which he lived.

The lanes were dark, cool and filled with shadow, the buildings between which they travelled ancient and dilapidated, stone facades crumbling and grimed, patched with ad-hoc repairs and haphazard necessity. Wirework traceries of cabling skeined the surfaces and roofs of the buildings, a fragile network of illicit power that looked as fragile as silken cobwebs.

Between the wires, the sky diminished to a thin brush stroke of deepening blue.

All signs of technology began to vanish, and the air grew sharper with spices and perfumes and sweat, undiminished by the stale, metallic smell of the Imperium. The sounds changed too: echoing noises of children reciting nonsense verse, the hectoring voice of a man sounding like he was preaching, the buzz and whirr of stone on stone, knife sharpeners and a hundred other hawkers.

They turned into older streets, so narrow that the Space Marines had trouble moving two abreast. Ragged awnings and sagging balconies jutted into the passageways, making it difficult for Kai to see more than a few meters in any direction. His mental map spun, flipped around and turned inside out. Everything around him looked so different, but, perversely, it all began to blur together until he had no idea in which direction they were heading.

Those few people who saw them stared in wonder at the giants, and pressed themselves to the sides of the ramshackle buildings or turned and ran for their lives. Children in bright robes and tattooed faces gawped at them as women in orange shawls hurried them away. A multitude of skin tones dwelled here, from the exotic to the mundane, and he saw styles of dress from every corner of the globe: turbans, baggy silk pantaloon, all-enclosing robes that left only the eyes open to the world, labourers’ clothes and clothes that looked fit for any royal palace. Kai wondered what these people thought to see warriors in their midst, towering figures of heroic might that now passed through their slums.

Did they fear them as much as he did?

Kai stumbled after Severian in a daze, losing track of his surroundings. He had been psychically mauled and chemically subdued by his captors, both of which had weakened his body to the point of ruination. Kai’s body felt like one enormous wound, and he put one foot in front of the other mechanically, too exhausted to care where they were going or what they were going to do when they got there.

Tagore expected to send an astropathic message to his brothers off-world, but he was going to be disappointed if he thought Kai could be that messenger. By the last test Athena had set him, Kai could barely manage to reach a receiving astropath one tower distant. What chance did he have of reaching one on a far-distant world? The World Eater did not look like the kind of warrior who would take disappointment well, and Kai felt a numbing dread take hold of him at the thought of his anger when he discovered Kai’s limitations.

How had his life taken such a strange turn?

Kai had been honoured to serve the XIII Legion, happy to be part of so vast an undertaking as the conquest of the galaxy, and content in the knowledge that there was no better astropath in the service of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. Now he was a hunted man, shorn of his abilities and travelling in the company of warriors the Imperium counted as base traitors.

He thought back to when this had all begun, the moment his life had turned to shit.

‘The Argo,’ he said.

‘A helot vessel of the Ultramarines,’ said Atharva. ‘Its keel was struck in the shipyards of Calth a hundred and fifty six years ago.’

‘What?’ said Kai, unaware he had spoken aloud.

‘The Argo,’ said Atharva. ‘You served on her for eleven years.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know a great deal about you, Kai Zulane,’ said Atharva, tapping the side of his head.

‘You read my mind?

‘No,’ said Atharva. ‘My primarch told me of you.’

Kai searched Atharva’s face for any sign of mockery, but it was hard to read his features with any degree of accuracy. Though Kai and Atharva shared the same basic physiognomy, the features of the Space Marines were subtly different from those of mortals and the same visual cues did not quite hold true between the two branches of humanity.