‘Really? The Crimson King told you of me?’

‘He did,’ agreed Atharva. ‘How else did I know to come for you? How else would I know that you were aboard the Argowhen it suffered a critical failure of its Geller field, allowing a host of warp entities to rampage through its halls to slaughter the crew, leaving you and Roxanne Larysa Joyanni Castana as the only survivors.’

Kai felt sick to his stomach at the mention of the massacre aboard the Argo, and he reached out to steady himself on the wall of a nearby building. His stomach flipped and though he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten anything solid, he felt as though whatever was in his stomach was about to be ejected.

‘Please,’ he gasped. ‘Please don’t talk about the Argo.’

Atharva held him upright and said, ‘Trust me, Kai, I know the dangers of the Great Ocean better than most, and believe me when I say that the loss of that vessel was not your fault.’

‘You can’t know that,’ said Kai.

‘Oh, but I can,’ said Atharva. ‘My subtle body has flown the farthest immaterial tides and plunged to the warp’s most secret dreamings. I know its limitless potential and I have fought the creatures that dwell in its darkest places. They are dangerous beyond your understanding, but to think that you alone could have doomed an entire ship is laughable. You credit yourself with too much.’

‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’

Atharva frowned. ‘It was a statement of fact. Whether it makes you feel better or not is irrelevant.’

Kai sank to his haunches and rubbed a hand across his brow. His skin was greasy with sweat and the roiling sensation in his stomach was continuing unabated. He retched up a thick rope of acrid saliva and spat it to the ground.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I need to stop. I can’t go on like this.’

‘No, you cannot,’ replied Atharva. ‘Pause a moment here.’

Kai took a deep breath and fought to quell the sickness in his belly. After a few minutes he began to feel better and looked up. Severian and Tagore were arguing, but he couldn’t hear their words. Asubha supported Gythua, whose features were ashen and corpse-like. Blood stained his thighs and even Kai could see he was living on borrowed time. Kiron kept watch on the rooflines with his rifle while Subha examined the Death Guard’s wound.

Of all the Legions, Kai imagined the World Eaters must know the most of battlefield injuries, that those who understood the mechanics of taking bodies apart should also understand the most about putting them back together.

‘He’s going to die, isn’t he?’ said Kai.

Atharva nodded. ‘Yes, he is.’

SMOKE AND THE smell of roasting meat filled the warehouse, gathering in a layer below the roof and wreathing the iron girders in a misty fog. The walls were hung with long strips of cloth and panelled with sheets of layered metal and ash. A long fire of glowing coals burned low in a trench in the centre of the space, and spits of questionable meat turned as the skins cracked and drizzled fat.

Hard men filled the warehouse, sitting on rough wooden benches or cleaning weapons and speaking in low voices. Each one was a broad-shouldered brute, made huge by unnatural muscle growth and a rigorous regime of fighting and tests of strength that would not have been out of place in the training halls of the Legiones Astartes. They dwarfed the slaves that served them, though none of the wretched individuals bound to the Dhakal clan were particularly diminutive.

Most of these hard men bore heavy-calibre pistols, and long, factory-stamped blades hung from their belts. The biggest carried weapons of a bygone age: leaf-bladed axes, long-hafted falchions and chain-length flails. Like the warriors who once roamed the wastelands of Old Earth, they were an anachronism in this golden age of scientific advancement and progress, but here in the heart of the Petitioner’s City, they ruled with the iron fist of might.

Weapon racks lined one wall and sheets of iron beaten into the shape of kite shields ringed a shallow pit at one end of the hall. It had the appearance of an arena, and the dark earth was stained a deep, muddy brown from the hundreds of frightened men and women who had been thrown in to die for the amusement of the hard men and their master.

Nor was this fighting pit the only indication that the occupants of the warehouse were bloodthirsty beyond imagining. A dozen long chains attached to windlass mechanisms of black iron descended from the roof, and mounted on each was a blackened corpse, pierced through by a hook intended for a meat-vendor to hang his butchered carcasses upon. The corpses reeked of putrefaction, but no one in the hall appeared to care or even notice them. In time they would be thrown out for the city’s feral dogs to devour, but there would always be fresh meat to fill an empty hook.

The master of this hall sat at the other end, upon a vast throne of beaten iron, though none of the hall’s occupants dared turn their gaze upon him.

To look upon the clan lord without permission was death, and everyone knew it.

Dim light penetrated the gloom of the warehouse as a shutter door in the centre of one wall rumbled open. The hard men barely looked up, knowing that no one would be foolish enough to come to this place with violence in mind. Even the arbitrators of the Emperor’s law did not come here.

A few heads nodded in greeting as the towering figure of Ghota entered, dragging a weeping man clad in rough, workman’s clothes. Ghota’s meaty fist was wrapped around the man’s neck, and though he was a stocky-built labourer, the clan lord’s chief enforcer carried his as easily as a man might hoist a wayward child.

Ghota was clad in a heavy bear pelt cloak and padded overalls unzipped to his muscled belly, and the crossed bandoliers of blades glittered in the red glow of the coals. His flesh shone with ruddy light that almost, but not entirely, gave his pallid complexion a more natural tone.

The tattoos cut into his flesh bunched and writhed as he approached the iron throne, and he spat a wad of gristly phlegm to the floor. Men avoided his gaze, for Ghota was a man of unpredictable moods, quick temper and psychotic rages. His blood red eyes were impossible to read, and to speak with Ghota at all was to dance with death.

Ghota halted before the throne and beat a barb-wrapped fist against his breast.

‘What do you bring me, Ghota?’ said the figure on the throne in a voice wet with the gristle of cancerous tumours. None of the dim light from the fire trench reached the speaker, as though understanding that some things were better left to the shadows.

Ghota hurled the labourer to the floor in front of the iron throne.

‘This one speaks of warriors drawing near, my subedar,’ he said.

‘Warriors? Really? Has the palace grown bold, I wonder…’

‘No ordinary warriors these,’ added Ghota, delivering a heavy boot to the labourers gut. The man screamed in pain and rolled onto his side, coughing blood and screwing his eyes shut. Ghota’s kick had ruptured something inside him, and even if the hard men didn’t kill him out of hand or toss him into the pit for a moment’s amusement, he would be dead by sunrise.

‘Speak, wretch,’ ordered the master of this hall, leaning forward so that the barest hint of light shone from a shaven scalp and glittered on six golden studs set in his thunderous brow. ‘Tell me of these warriors.’

The man sobbed and pushed himself up onto one elbow. He could barely breathe, and spoke in wheezing gasps.

‘Saw them out by the empty ranges to the east,’ he said. ‘Fell outta the sky and smashed down in a wrecked lifter. Cargo 9by the looks of it.’

‘They crashed, and yet they walked away unhurt?’

The labourer shook his head. ‘One of ’em was bloody and they had to carry him. A big man, bigger than any man I ever seen.’