The guardian spear swung out, but Asubha dived beneath its killing arc and swept up Subha’s fallen blade. He slashed twice in quick succession as he rolled upright in one smooth motion. Blood sprayed from the twin cuts through the flexible mail weave at the back of Saturnalia’s knees, and the Custodian fell into a pool of blood, unable to stand, but still able to fight.

Asubha circled around to face him, his anger filling him with its purity of purpose.

‘You will die here today,’ hissed Saturnalia through his agony. He held his guardian spear before him, and Asubha took a step forward until the tip was resting on his chest.

‘I know that,’ agreed Asubha. ‘But so will you.’

Asubha drove his bloodied blade down through Saturnalia’s skull as the Custodian thrust his spear with the last of his strength. The guardian spear clove Asubha’s heart and tore through his lungs, wreaking irreparable damage to his body. Both warriors slumped against one another as though embracing in honour of their fight to the death.

Asubha slid to the side and fell beside the body of his twin.

As he bled out onto the temple floor, he pressed the broken blade that had ended Saturnalia’s life into his brother’s dead hand.

‘We walk the Crimson Path together, brother,’ said Asubha.

ATHARVA SAW A lithe man in a loose bodyglove lift Kai from the ground, and thrust his hand towards him, uttering the fireborn cant of the Pyrae. A horizontal pillar of fire burned its way across the temple, setting alight every single piece of smashed timber and every body in its path. Flames leapt to life, greedily devouring this feast of combustible material, but they guttered and died before they reached the man holding Kai in his grip.

The man turned as Atharva ran towards him with heavy thudding footsteps, and the building of a Pavoni flesh manipulation faded in his mind as he recognised Yasu Nagasena’s clade pet. He reached for the blade at his belt, stifling a twist of nausea in his gut at the thought of being so close to such anathema to his powers.

Waving streams of gunfire zig-zagged through the temple, but Atharva pushed them aside with short-lived kine shields as he ran through the flames of his own making. He had seen Tagore fall to Yasu Nagasena, but had no clue as to the fates of Subha and Asubha. With Severian in hiding or fled, he could expect no aid in the fight against this clade warrior.

‘Oni-ni-kanabo,’ said the man with a wretched grin that made Atharva sick to his stomach. ‘Come one step closer and Kai Zulane dies.’

Atharva’s lip curled in grimace of distaste. ‘You are going to kill him anyway, pariah.’

‘How does it feel, warlock?’ asked the clade warrior. ‘How does it feel to be blind?’

‘Liberating,’ lied Atharva, taking another step forwards. ‘But I can kill you without recourse to my powers.’

‘Perhaps,’ conceded the pariah, tightening his grip on Kai’s neck. ‘Though I doubt you can kill me before he dies.’

Though he could see the man clearly with his genhanced eyes, Atharva found it difficult to keep his image from blurring. His vision was far superior to that of mortals, but the pariah’s umbra made it almost impossible to fix him in his mind’s eye. He forced himself into the lower Enumerations, honing his concentration and sharpening his focus. The pariah’s blurred form swam into clarity, a black outline against a haze of yellow smoke and orange flames.

Atharva tried to summon even the tiniest morsel of the Great Ocean into his flesh, but the proximity of such an unnatural creature made even that simple task impossible. The pariah was a hole in the world that drained every scrap of energy.

Kai squirmed in the warrior’s grasp, his face twisted in pain at the pariah’s touch. He let out a cry of such desperation that even Atharva was moved to pity. As vile as it was to be near this man, Atharva could not bear the thought of being touched by him. The clade killer withdrew a long knife with a serrated edge and a blade that ended in two distinct points.

‘Whatever you wanted from him is gone,’ said the pariah.

Before the pariah could stab Kai, a shape rose up behind him and swung a long spar of jagged timber at his head. The clade warrior sensed the incoming attack at the last moment and twisted out of the path of the blow. He could not avoid it completely, and instead of hammering the side of his skull, it slammed into his shoulder.

Atharva saw the Navigator woman raise the piece of wood to strike again, but the clade warrior was not about to give her a second chance. He ducked under her clumsy swing and slammed an open palm against her chest. The woman flew back, slamming into the faceless statue with a sickening thud of flesh on stone.

Atharva seized the opportunity and lunged forward with his own blade extended. The clade warrior dropped Kai and bent his entire body back, swaying aside from Atharva’s thrust. His hand chopped down, but Atharva’s flesh and bone were genetically toughened to withstand pressures greater than any mortal, even a clade-trained one, could bring to bear.

Atharva backhanded the pariah in the chest, and the warrior turned the impact into a springing vault. He landed lightly amid the flames, one leg extended to the side, the other curled up beneath him.

‘So many psykers,’ he giggled. ‘It’s almost too easy.’

Before Atharva could wonder what that meant, a rippling series of metallic plates rose up from the warrior’s neck. As though growing organically at high speed, curved sections of chromed metal unfolded to encase the pariah’s head in a bulbous helm of gold and silver. A tubular device extruded the side of the pariah’s newly-formed headgear, and lenses tinted with unfathomable colours slotted into place over one eye.

Atharva sensed a terrible threat in this strange device, and put himself between the clade warrior and Kai. He passed his blade from hand to hand, readying himself to fight in close combat. Behind him, Kai groaned as the nausea of the pariah’s touch eased.

‘I should thank you,’ said Atharva. ‘It has been too long since I fought blade to blade. It will make a refreshing change to kill without my powers.’

The pariah leapt into the air and the strange device attached to his helmet spat a stream of black light from the unnatural lenses. Instinctively, Atharva threw up a kine shield, but the power of the Great Ocean was dead in him. The bolts struck him in the chest, the plates of sheet steel strapped to his body offering him no protection against so abominable a weapon.

An inferno of cold fire filled Atharva, a numbing pain that felt like liquid nitrogen flowing through his veins. Pulsing waves of dark energy exploded within him, like the supernova of a dead star. And just as an exploding sun must collapse into the gravitational hell of a black hole, so too did Atharva feel his life contracting into a deathly singularity from which there could be no escape.

This was not just death, this was an ending that would deny his life force its release into the Great Ocean where it would exist forever as raw potential. The horror of so bleak a fate gave Atharva the strength to resist it, and he roared as he surged to his feet. The pariah landed next to him, its blade stabbing again and again. Blood oozed from the cuts, and Atharva felt a soul-deep horror at each blow.

His every instinct was to escape this nightmarish being, this abomination that had no right to exist in a world where living things claimed dominion. Unreasoning terror made Atharva want to run and hide, anything to get away from this terrible, abhorrent creature. He fought against the insidious effects of the pariah as another knife thrust opened the meat of his body and a scorching blast of black fire from the clade warrior’s helmet enveloped him.

Through the shocking pain, Atharva saw the unfolding battle as though viewed through a slowly shattering window. Black-clad soldiers moved like glacial automatons through the burning temple, the bullets of their weapons stuttering in slow motion as they slaughtered the huddled people taking shelter from the carnage. He saw Tagore lying where he had fallen, his stomach a smoking ruin and a gaping hole cut in his chest.