To his credit, the chirurgeon rallied well, taking a deep breath and fetching a tray of surgical instruments that probably harboured more bacteria than a Biologis gene lab from the table opposite. He bent over and began to examine Kai’s bloody eye sockets.

‘Augmetic scarring. Input jacks torn out, and bruising around the ocular cavity,’ said Antioch, dabbing away the sticky blood on Kai’s cheeks with the sleeve of his nightshirt. He removed a sealed package from a bottle filled cupboard and tore the sterile lining to expose its contents. Without looking up from his work, Antioch laid a number of smaller packets on Kai’s chest and with care and precision Atharva hadn’t expected began to apply counterseptic gel to the inside of Kai’s eye sockets before packing them with what smelled like a mix of saline and petroleum gauze.

‘How did this happen?’ asked Antioch. ‘It’s wasn’t surgical, but it’s neat.’

‘I pulled his eyes out,’ said Asubha.

Antioch glanced up, as though trying to work out whether Asubha was joking.

He shook his head and sighed. ‘I won’t ask why. I get the feeling I won’t like the answer.’

‘The people hunting us were using them to spy on us,’ said Subha.

Antioch paused and bit his lip. ‘So who hunts seven warriors of the Legiones Astartes?’ He held his hand up before Subha could answer. ‘That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, I definitelywon’t like that answer. Now be quiet all of you if you want this man to live.’

Opening a suture kit, Antioch began sealing Kai’s sockets with deft strokes of the needle, working swiftly and methodically on each eye. Sweat like bullets popped on his forehead, and Atharva could see the effort it was taking for the chirurgeon to maintain his composure and steady hand. With the sutures complete, Antioch wrapped a bandage around Kai’s head that, miraculously, appeared to be free of stains.

‘How is it a man of your skill comes to live in a place like this?’ asked Atharva as Antioch tied the bandages off and stood upright with a groan of relief.

‘None of your damn business,’ was the curt answer. ‘So, are you going to tell me what else is wrong with him or do I have to guess?’

‘He was drugged and repeatedly psychically interrogated by skilled neurolocutors.’

‘Of course he was,’ sighed Antioch, wiping his hands on his chest. ‘And I suppose that helping you with these men makes me an accomplice in whatever it is you’re mixed up in, yes?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Atharva. ‘That depends. Save their lives and we will be gone. No one will ever know we were here.’

Antioch gave a bitter bark of a laugh. ‘Half the city will already know you are here, and the other half will know by morning. You think seven warriors like you can move through a city like this without attracting notice? However superhuman you are, you’re not thatskilled.’

‘He’s right,’ said Tagore. ‘We should not linger here.’

‘We’re not leaving before he treats Gythua,’ said Kiron.

‘I didn’t say that,’ snapped Tagore angrily. ‘Don’t put words in my mouth.’

Antioch ignored the altercation and rummaged through his cupboards to concoct a hybrid potion of chemicals from a series of unmarked bottles. He filled a cracked hypo with the end result and pressed the needle against the loose flesh of Kai’s arm. Before depressing the injector trigger, the wiry chirurgeon looked up at Atharva.

‘You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?’ said Antioch.

Atharva chuckled. ‘I have fought alongside the Vlka Fenryka,’ he said. ‘You are going to have to do better than that if you are trying to offend me.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ he said, and depressed the trigger.

Kai drew in a sucking lungful of air and his back arched with an audible crack. His muscles spasmed and a geyser of noxious fluids erupted from his mouth. Kai danced the dance of the hanged man on the bench, his heels rattling on the wood as his body evacuated itself from every orifice.

‘I’d turn him on his side if I were you,’ said Antioch, stepping away from the convulsing astropath. ‘There’s some clean-ish clothes in the back he can have once he’s done shitting and puking. He’s going to need them.’

Tagore grabbed Antioch and said, ‘The astropath will live, yes?’

Antioch’s face crumpled in pain at the World Eater’s grip. ‘The chem-purgatives should clean out his system, yes, but he’s so exhausted and worn thin it’s a miracle he’s still alive.’

‘Good enough,’ said Tagore pushing Antioch towards the Death Guard. ‘Now do the same for our brother.’

Gythua was barely breathing, his body having suspended most of its surface functions to divert its energies into restoring itself. Atharva had seen Space Marines survive wounds more hideous than these, but without the facilities of an apothecarion to hand, he suspected Gythua had been broken beyond repair.

Antioch bent over Gythua and, using the same instruments with which he had examined Kai’s wounds, he made a thorough inspection of the bloody craters and valleys torn in the Death Guard’s pallid flesh. From his expression, Atharva’s worst suspicions were confirmed.

‘This man should be dead,’ said Antioch at last. ‘For starters, this wound here looks like its ruptured his heart, and I think both his lungs have collapsed. And I don’t even recognise the organ this wound’s damaged. He’s been shot by energy weapons and there’s enough bullets in him to equip an entire squad of Army grunts.’

‘Are you saying you can’t save him?’ demanded Kiron.

‘I’m saying I can’t even begin to guess at the anatomy beneath what’s left of his skin,’ said Antioch. ‘He’s beyond my help. Beyond anyone’s help would be my guess, but I think you all know that.’

‘Damn you,’ said Kiron, pressing the chirurgeon against the wall of his home. ‘You have to do something. Do you realise who this is? This is Gythua of the XIV Legion. He was the first Lantern Bearer, one of the original Seven! This man saved my life when we drove the Ringers from the equatorial ridges of Iapetus. He carried the Emperor’s banner and planted it in the dark heart of Cassini Regioat the fall of Saturn. Do you understand?’

Atharva and Asubha prised Kiron’s fingers from the chirurgeon’s neck before his anger and grief overcame his intellect.

‘Kiron, let go,’ said Atharva. ‘Killing him won’t help Gythua.’

‘He has to save him!’

‘Nothing can save Gythua now,’ said Asubha. ‘He has walked the Crimson Path.’

Kiron stepped away from Antioch, his fists balled and a perfect rage boiling behind his grey eyes. He stared in hatred at the cowering chirurgeon, but even as the need to break something threatened to turn his anger into murder, Severian called out a warning from his watchful position at the doorway.

‘Save your anger, brothers,’ he said. ‘A better target for it comes this way.’

‘Our hunters?’ demanded Tagore. ‘Who is it, Imperial Fists or Legio Custodes?’

The Luna Wolf shook his head.

‘I don’t know who they are,’ replied Severian, looking back out the door into the square beyond, ‘but they are armed and they are definitely notImperial.’

EIGHTEEN

Dark Imperium

The Battle of Crow’s Court

ALL OF IT was here, all of the echoes of truth retraced, all the wasting light and the garbled words of a million madmen. It seethed in the whisper stones, swirling around the length of the tower like caged electricity that must soon earth or else burn away the fool who has summoned it into being.

Evander Gregoras swayed on the point of exhaustion, his body wasted and his flesh drained of life and vitality. He had not eaten or slept in days, the obsession to unlock the truth of what had come to this tower driving him to that liminal space between devotion and madness. A lifetime’s worth of text in touch-script filled the air, a static explosion in a library held aloft in the aetheric energy that engulfed the chamber.