‘Why did he do that?’ hissed Kai between strangled sobs and pained gasps as Severian halted them at a junction of three streets.

‘What?’ said Subha. ‘Who?’

‘Your twin, why did he take my eyes?’

Subha was visible as an angry blur of red and gold, a confused jumble of sharp edges and confusion, his aura rippling with almost crippling sense of isolation. Subha missed the brotherhood of his Legion, and that weakness was killing him inside.

‘You were a spy,’ said the warrior.

‘What? No! I wasn’t. I don’t understand.’

‘Your eyes,’ explained Subha. ‘The people hunting us were using your eyes to watch us. They heard and saw everything in that ruined place.’

He took a breath and forced the pain down to a manageable place.

‘How could they do that?’ he asked.

Subha shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Asubha’s the clever one, not me. He was going to be sent to Mars to train as a Techmarine before we got posted to Terra.’

‘Your augmetics were provided by the Telepathica?’ asked Atharva, taking hold of his head and peering into the caverns of his eye sockets. Kai wanted to close his eyes, but he had no lids to close, and he could not turn away from the golden brightness of Atharva’s outline. Where the rest of the world was subtly out of focus, the warrior of the Thousand Sons was a crystal clear silhouette of shimmering light and wonder. So realwas Atharva that it set off a roiling nausea in Kai’s belly.

‘No,’ said Kai. ‘House Castana arranged the implants.’

‘The Navigator House?’

‘Yes,’ nodded Kai, and instantly regretted it as the motion made him sick to his stomach. He grabbed onto Subha’s arm, feeling the colours and light of the world swirl around him like a shimmering rainbow whirlpool. His legs gave out and he retched glistening wads of bile.

Subha lowered him to the ground and let him heave until there was nothing left to come up. Kai felt as weak as a newborn, the strength that had sustained him until now pouring from him in each expulsion. Atharva knelt beside him.

‘Our hunters are cunning,’ he said. ‘They must have been given the specifications for your augmetics from House Castana and acquired the feed from your optic conduits. The Eye alone knows how much they heard and saw, but we must assume they are close.’

Kai felt himself lowered to the ground and propped up against a rough wall of poorly-formed adobe bricks. The texture was rough, but simply to pause for a moment was the most sublime sensation. He rested his head on the bricks, feeling the pulse of life behind it. This was a dwelling place, a home where people lived, loved and dreamed. Kai missed his clifftop home, perched on the smooth rock of what had once been an ancient king’s brow. He missed the sad smile of his mother and the warm embrace of the very notion of home.

‘I want to go home,’ he said, as a welcome peace settled upon him. ‘I miss my home… it was a nice home. You would have liked it, Athena. It had floors of pearl-smoked marble and domed ceilings painted with replicas of Isandula Verona’s work.’

‘What’s he talking about?’ asked a gruff voice he felt sure he should know. ‘Who is this Athena he’s talking to?’

A hand touched his brow, rough and callused from a life of hard work. It was a large hand, too large for any normal man’s hand.

‘His body is giving out,’ said another voice. ‘He was virtually dead by the time we got to him, and the crash and Asubha’s surgeryhas almost finished the job. He needs medical attention.’

‘What do any of us know about mortal bodies?’ asked a silver voice with a petulant edge to its vowels. ‘None of us are apothecaries.’

‘There will be one in this city, several probably.’

‘And you know where to find one?’

‘No, but someone here will.’

‘Someone who can heal Gythua too?’

‘Don’t be foolish,’ rasped the blunt edged voice of a chained angel in red. ‘Gythua is on the Crimson Path, and no one in this city can turn him from its end.’

Kai heard the voices, but it seemed they belonged to shimmering ghosts that gathered around him like angels of legend. He remembered tales carved into the pillars of a sunken hall discovered by agents of the Conservatory in the fjord-beds of Scandia that spoke of warrior maidens who carried the souls of the dead to a heroic afterlife of battle and feasting.

He laughed at the idea of warrior maidens coming for him. What had he done to deserve such a gathering? Warm wetness gathered on his cheeks and he reached up to one of the figures, a golden giant limned in a halo of shimmering light.

‘I saw you…’ he said. ‘In Arzashkun. You were in my dreamscape…’

‘I was?’

‘Yes, I mean, I think it was you,’ said Kai, his voice trailing into a whisper as the abuses heaped upon his already weakened body took their toll. ‘I remember thinking you must have a thousand more important things to do than talk to me.’

‘You spoke to me?’ asked the golden figure, his form leaning close.

Kai nodded. ‘You said you wanted to know your future, and that I was the key to understanding it…’

‘You are,’ said the voice, with undisguised interest. ‘And you can tell me of it whenever you are ready.’

‘I will,’ promised Kai, feeling as though his body was becoming lighter by second. He wondered if that was what these beings were waiting for. Perhaps it was easier to carry him away if he shed his mortal flesh. But there was one thing he wanted to know before they took him up.

‘Why the Outcast Dead?’ he asked. ‘Why did he say it was an appropriate name…?’

Kai felt the golden giant’s amusement and was content to know he had managed to please him.

‘When this was a world of gods, men believed that if they prayed hard enough and lived their lives according to laws handed down by mad prophets they would go to a wonderful afterlife upon their death. They would be buried in ground deemed sacred, and at the appointed hour they would rise up to take their place in this miraculous dimension. But those who these prophets deemed outcast were not afforded such bounty, and the bodies of the unwanted, the forgotten and the invisible were sunk in the liminal spaces of the world. No markers. No headstones. Quicklime and a shallow pit. Forgotten and discarded. They were the Outcast Dead, and so are we.’

‘I see…’ said Kai, happy to have learned this last fact.

Another shape appeared beside the golden angel, and his aura was like a shadow, half-glimpsed and elusive. To Kai’s fading senses it was beautiful, more akin to something animal instead of a man.

‘Can he continue?’ asked this lupine shape.

‘No,’ answered Kai. ‘I think I’m done.’

Fresh wetness rolled down his cheeks, and a finger gently pressed it away.

‘Am I crying?’ asked Kai.

‘No,’ said the lonely warrior. ‘You are dying.’

THE HUNTERS FAN out through the ruined tenement block, searching for any sign of where the escapees might have gone. Golovko paces like an angry bear, cursing the World Eater for realising they were observing them, while his Black Sentinels overturn broken pieces of furniture and ragged bundles of sodden cloth.

Saturnalia kneels beside a wet patch of cracked permacrete and dabs his fingers in it, his golden armour glistening with moisture and the red horsehair plume of his helm hanging limply at his shoulder.

‘They were here, damn it,’ snarls Golovko. ‘We just missed them. Someone must have seen them, so we need to get out there and break some heads until someone starts talking.’

Saturnalia and Nagasena share a wordless glance that says all that needs to be said of Golovko’s outburst. Water cascades through the cracked slabs, and the sound is soothing as Nagasena moves through the space as though stalking a prey creature. His legs are slightly bent, his head cocked to one side as if listening for a telltale crackle of a breaking twig or the rustle of leaves.