Текст книги "The Outcast Dead"

Автор книги: Грэм Макнилл

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

He tried to struggle, but the restraints and drugs held him utterly immobile.

Hiriko sat beside him on a wheeled stool, and consulted a data slate hanging from the side of the gurney.

‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘You’re making wonderful progress, Kai. We should be ready in just a moment.’

Adept Scharff sat opposite Hiriko and Kai saw him insert a screw-plug into the back of his neck, where he could just see the gleam of implanted cognitive agumetics. He took the other end of the cable and plugged it into a featureless black box fitted to the side of the gurney. He smiled at Kai, unspooling a thin cable from the box and snap fastening it to a connective port on Kai’s leather headpiece. His eyes lost their focus for a second, and Kai felt a stab of pressure in the frontal lobes of his brain.

‘Are you in the umbra?’ asked Hiriko.

‘Yes,’ answered Scharff, his voice distant. ‘Ready for your insertion.’

‘Good,’ said Hiriko, and likewise wired herself up to the featureless black box. She too fastened the end of a cable to the apparatus covering Kai’s skull and, once again, he felt the pressure of an invasive presence within his mind.

‘Now,’ said Hiriko. ‘Let us begin.’

She depressed an orange stud on the side of the box, and Kai’s mind filled with light.

THE LIGHT GREW to unbearable brightness, like the surface of a star viewed so close that it would burn his eyes away. Kai screamed, and the light faded until it became tolerable. He found himself standing in the middle of the desert, nothing around him for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. A hot wind feathered the lips of dunes around him, and the hammerblows of the searing sun were a welcome relief after the sterile environment beneath the mountain.

This was his place of safety, this was the Empty Quarter.

Whatever they had done to him hadn’t worked.

Kai knew this wasn’t real, knew it was an artificially conjured dreamscape, and in that realisation, he knew he should not have come here. This was what they wanted. They wanted him here, where his innermost thoughts were laid bare, and his deepest secrets might be revealed.

Though he had professed a desire to tell Hiriko and Scharff what they wanted to know, an unbidden imperative arose in his mind that warned him against that path of least resistance. His life depended on keeping what he had been given secret. Only the man with the golden eyes could be told what he knew, and only by keeping it safe from Hiriko and Scharff would that be possible.

No sooner had he given them names, than he felt their presence in his mind. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there. Lurking, waiting for him to lead them to what they wanted to know.

A figure appeared on the sand beside him, a robed woman with long silver-grey hair with eyes that were kind and warm. He knew her, but not like this, not with eyes of flesh and blood. They were emerald green, sparkling and full of life. It seemed perverse to have willingly exchanged such beautiful eyes just to have gained protection from the creatures of the warp.

‘Aniq,’ he said. ‘You’re dead.’

‘You should know better than that, Kai,’ said Sarashina. ‘No one is every really dead so long as someone remembers them. As the great poet said, “that which is imagined, need never be lost.”’

‘Sarashina told me that, but you are not Sarashina.’

‘No, then who would you have me be?’ said the woman, her features transforming in a heartbeat to those of his mother. Her eyes remained emerald green, but where before there was warmth, now there was only aching sadness.

Kai turned away from those eyes, remembering the looks of sorrow every time he and his father had left on another adventure across the globe. He fought to remain dispassionate, but it was difficult in the face of the woman who had raised him and helped shape him into the man he had become.

Except this wasn’t her.

His mother was dead, just as Sarashina was dead.

‘You are Adept Hiriko, aren’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said his mother.

‘Then look like you’re supposed to,’ snapped Kai. ‘Don’t hide behind disguises.’

‘I wasn’t hiding,’ said Hiriko, assuming the form with which Kai was more familiar. ‘I am simply trying to put you at your ease. This process will go much smoother if you don’t fight us. I know you don’t know what Sarashina told you, but I need to find it.’

‘I don’t know where it is.’

‘I think you do.’

‘I don’t.’

Hiriko sighed and linked her arm with his, guiding him towards the gentle slope of a sand dune. ‘Do you know how many psychic interrogations I’ve done? No, of course you don’t, but it’s a lot, and the subjects who fight us are always the ones who end up brain dead. Do you want that?’

‘What kind of stupid question is that?’

She shrugged and continued as though he hadn’t spoken. ‘The human mind is a dizzyingly complex machine, a repository of billions of memories, inputs, outputs and autonomic functions. It’s hard to break into it without causing irreparable damage.’

‘So don’t break in,’ said Kai.

‘I wish that were possible, I truly do,’ said Hiriko with a smile. ‘I like you, but I will tear the meat of your mind apart with my bare hands if I have to. Everyone yields their secrets in the end. Always. It’s just a matter of how much damage they’re prepared to live with at the end of it.’

They reached the top of the sand dune, and Kai found himself looking down at the shimmering fortress of Arzashkun. Its tallest towers wavered in the heat, and Kai shielded his eyes against the reflected glare of sunlight from its golden minarets.

‘Impressive,’ said Hiriko. ‘But it won’t keep me out. Don’t think for a minute it will.’

Kai stopped and turned about, scanning the sands for some sign that they weren’t alone. A suggestion of shadow moving under the sand on a far distant dune flickered at the corner of his vision.

‘Where is Scharff?’ he asked. ‘Doesn’t he join you?’

‘He’s here, but I’m leading this auger.’

Intuition surfaced in Kai’s mind like a sunrise, and a slow smile creased his features.

‘He’s here to pull you out if this gets too dangerous, isn’t he?’

A flash of irritation in her emerald eyes confirmed his insight.

‘You don’t know if you can do this, do you?’ he said.

Hiriko’s grip on his arm tightened. ‘Trust me, I can do this. The only question is how hard you want it to go. I’ll demolish that fortress in a heartbeat, tear down every fictive stone and brick. I’ll break it down to dust and powder until you won’t be able to tell its remains from the sand of the desert.’

She stretched out her hand, and the tallest tower of the fortress began unravelling. What had seemed solid only moments before was now dissolving into smoke and vapour. She clicked her fingers and another tower fell apart. Hiriko met his gaze as she undid in a heartbeat what had taken him years to perfect, but his eyes were on something far distant, something fashioned from dark memory and horror. It pushed through the sands towards them, the predator with the scent of blood in its nostrils.

Kai felt a spike of pressure behind his eyes and Hiriko turned in time to see the dark shape power to the surface of the sand. It came on a tide of blood, a subterranean river violently thrust to the surface of the desert. It roared, this river. It roared and screamed and filled the world with thousands of death cries and agonising last moments. Like a deluge of crimson oil it spilled over the desert, filling the depressions between the dunes with pools of stinking death fluids, washing up their slopes like an angry tide.

‘Is this your doing?’ demanded Hiriko.

‘No,’ said Kai.

‘Stop it,’ ordered Hiriko. ‘Now.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Of course you can, this is yourmind. It bends to your will.’

Kai shrugged as the swelling lake of oily blood rose higher, its surface rippling with the motion of thousands of hands and faces pushing up from below. Until now, Kai had always feared this buried monster, its rages and its guilt, but now the sight of it was a blessed relief. The oozing tide rolled uphill in defiance of hydrodynamics, and gelatinous shapes at last broke the surface of its stinking substance. Tall and thin, with spindly limbs of red scale and volcanic breath, they folded themselves into existence with thin, screeching wails. Their distended skulls formed glossy and horned, their mouths ripped open with jagged fangs.

Creatures of memory to be sure, but no less dangerous for that in a place of dreams.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Hiriko.

‘I told you, it’s not me,’ said Kai. ‘It’s the Argo.’

The tide of night-skinned monsters roiled towards them, and Hiriko looked up to the sky.

‘Get me out of here,’ she said. ‘Now.’

The adept vanished, and the tide of darkness that billowed and seethed like a living curtain of endless darkness spilled over the top of the dune, swallowing Kai and plunging him into an abyss from which there could be no escape.

‘WHAT JUST HAPPENED?’ demanded Saturnalia.

Hiriko lay on the floor of the interrogation room, her eyes rolling back in their sockets, and blood running from her nose like a tap. Scharff propped up her head and administered a hypo of clear fluid via a canula on her forearm.

‘I asked you a question,’ said Saturnalia.

‘Be silent!’ said Scharff. ‘I just extracted her from a hostile dreamspace without any of the proscribed decompressions. Her mind has gone into shock, and if I don’t bring her back we might lose her completely.’

Saturnalia bristled with anger at being spoken to like a subordinate, but bit back his anger. Consequences for speaking out of turn to a warrior of the Legio Custodes could wait.

‘What can I do?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ said Scharff. ‘It’s up to her now.’

Scharff continued to speak to Hiriko in low, soothing tones, stroking her cheek and holding her hand. Eventually, her eyes fluttered open and gained a clarity Saturnalia hadn’t been sure she would ever know again.

‘This is going to be harder than I thought,’ said Hiriko.

ELEVEN

Erosion of the Self

An Open Door

Aeliana

TIME BECAME MEANINGLESS to Kai. Days, weeks and months passed in his dreamscapes, passages of time that bore no relation to the waking world. He recalled ceramic tiled rooms, rocky passageways and the glacier blue walls of his cell, but which of these experiences were real was beyond his ability to guess. The psi-sickness had gone from him, washed away in the daily exercises of his ability to enter a nuncio-receptive state.

He was fed and bathed, for he lost control of his bodily functions when severed from the routine cycles of existence. So much time was spent in realms of the senses beyond those endured by mortals blessed without psychic powers that Kai grew ever more disconnected from what was real and what was imagined.

He thought he saw his mother, standing at his cell door with a wistful expression. Her green eyes drew him in, but no sooner had he opened his mouth to speak to her than a black figure loomed behind her and drew a blade across her throat. An ocean of blood spilled from her ruined neck, a thousand voices screaming in the darkness.

Once, as he wandered a desolate plain of ashen grey, Kai thought he saw a shining figure armoured in red and ivory. The figure was calling to him in a language Kai did not know, but which faded in and out of clarity as a ghostly wind rose and fell. Kai wanted to run to the warrior, feeling that he represented some kind of salvation, but each time he turned towards him, the warrior retreated as though not yet ready to face him.

Time and time again, the neurolocutors went into Kai’s mind. Sometimes Scharff, sometimes Hiriko, but each time they were cast out by the oily black thing and the howling revenants of the Argo. In the few moments of lucidity Kai grasped onto, he spat hatred and admiration at the late Aniq Sarashina. Hiding her message in his memories of that doomed vessel had been a masterstroke. As much progress as Kai had made, she knew he was not yet ready to face the horrors unleashed upon that ghost ship.

He could sense the growing frustration of his captors, and revelled in it.

They quickly abandoned such direct attacks on his psyche and changed tack to more subtle, less invasive approaches. While Scharff attempted to reason with him, Hiriko attempted seduction. Pleasure dreams, power dreams and a thousand gratified desires were paraded before Kai in myriad guises. Some masqueraded as reality, some as fantasy, but none could reach the buried secrets contained in the black horror of the Argo.

‘We cannot remove it,’ said Hiriko after a particularly gruelling session. Kai’s face glistened with sweat, his body a husk of papery skin draped over a thin collection of bones, wasted muscle and sunken meat.

A giant loomed over Kai, and his augmetic eyes whirred as they shifted focus. Saturnalia’s broad cheekbones and tapered jaw stared at him with contempt written all over his features.

‘Why not?’

‘It is buried deep inside a memory he will not face,’ said Scharff.

‘The Argo?’

‘Indeed,’ said Hiriko. ‘Sarashina, or whatever was acting through her, knew what she was doing. It is most aggrieving.’

‘So if you can’t get it out, who can?’ demanded Saturnalia, and Kai could feel the man’s urge just to kill him and be done with the matter.

‘Only one person has the key to unlocking the information you require,’ said Hiriko.

‘Who?’

Hiriko placed a hand on Kai’s shoulder. ‘Kai himself.’

Kai laughed, but the gum shield in his mouth turned it into a gurgling sob.

THE CRUDITY OF their methods was what angered him the most. Like chirurgeons attempting brain surgery with a logger’s saw and stonemason’s chisel, they hacked into delicate aetheric structures of mental architecture without thought or hope of success. Atharva felt every brutal thrust of the psi-augers, their clumsy attempts to hack out the information they sought, and the childishly simple blandishments they hoped would seduce it to the surface of their captive’s mind. Like a clawed gauntlet down a blackboard, the shrieking squalls of their brutish methods pained him on every level.

Like any true craftsman, amateurish work offended him, and though he was by no means certain that he could lift something evidently buried deep in the captive’s mind, he would have a better chance than the two butchers they had working here.

He sat cross-legged in the centre of his cell, letting his mind wander the labyrinthine passages of Khangba Marwu, testing the boundaries of his confinement with casual ease. It amused him to let his gaolers think him confined to his cell, going slowly mad with the isolation like his brothers. It had been months since Yasu Nagasena had come for them, and in that time the captive warriors of the Crusader Host had seen no one but the two Custodians and their woefully inadequate company of mortal soldiers.

Atharva had touched each and every mind within this subterranean prison, some lightly, others less gently. A mind was like a delicate lock, the tumblers of each psyche requiring the precise amount of pressure before it yielded all its secrets. The trick was in recognising the correct points to apply that pressure, the exact memories, desires or promises that would open a mind like a new blooming flower.

To an adept of the Athanaean cult, it was skill of no great consequence to lift thoughts from the surface of a mind. Far greater challenge was to be had in going down through the layers of a mortal consciousness, to plunge beyond the random surface clutter, past the basic desires and drives, beyond the secret vices and petty depravities lurking in the sewers of every individual to the heart of a person. This was where the truth could be found, the lightless place where the naked beast of existence lurked and every thought was exposed.

Reaching this place without detection was a talent few possessed, but one which Atharva had honed in his many years as a truth-seeker. Ever since the Crimson King had rescued the Legion from destruction, the truth-seekers had been the first to serve in the ranks, scouring the dormant minds of those who had been saved from the horror of the Flesh-Change for any latent signs of weakness.

Atharva knew his mortal gaolers better than they knew themselves. He knew their fears, their desires, their guilty secrets and their ambitions. He knew everything about them, and it amused him to know how simply their minds were assembled. How could any living thing that professed self-awareness function with such basic cognitive faculties?

Ah, but the Custodians…

Their minds were things of beauty, artfully-wrought arrangements of psychic engineering and genetic perfection. Like the most complex machines imaginable, they were like steel traps ready to snap shut on an unwary intruder. Like a cogitator protected from infiltration by a skilled infocyte, their minds were fully able to defend themselves from attack, and Atharva had not even attempted to do more than drift the outer edges of their brilliant consciousnesses.

Yet even though the Custodes were fascinating beyond measure, Atharva’s thoughts were forever drawn to the mind the psi-augers were attacking. At first glance, there was little to distinguish this person from the hundreds of others incarcerated here, save the modicum of psychic ability and the glassy scarring left by the Soul Binding.

He understood the man’s selfishness, the entitled conceit bred by years spent with Guilliman’s Legion. Understandable, but not the man’s true self. He was better than he knew, but it was going to take great hardship to strip that away, a process that had already begun, but would likely be left undone before his death.

Kai Zulane was the man’s name, the man the Eye had spoken of, but it was a name unknown to Atharva. Even with all the man’s memories laid bare, there was little to indicate what interest anyone could have in him. Yet there was something buried within him that not even Atharva could see, something wrapped in a black horror of raw aetheric rage and guilt that would be impossible to remove without the right tools.

Force was useless, this horror was stronger than any threat of violence. Likewise, it could not be appealed to by external reason or promises of gratification. This was an ordeal that could only be ended from the inside, yet what treasures might lurk within so heavily guarded a prison?

Atharva loathed mysteries, and this was one that demanded to be revealed. His scholar’s brain had to unravel this secret. The Crimson King had taken an ill-advised step in coming to Terra, but his arrival had shown Atharva what needed to be done. Kai Zulane was vital to the future in ways no one could understand, but if there was anyone who would relish the chance to prise open his mind, it was a mystic of the Thousand Sons.

Atharva opened his eyes as a pack of guards moved past the glass door of his cell. All but one managed to avoid looking in his direction, and Atharva flicked a barb of his consciousness into the man’s mind.

He was called Natraj, and Atharva smiled at the appropriateness of the name. Natraj was a soldier in the Uralian Stormlords, an elite drop-troop regiment that had served the Imperium since the early years of the wars of Unity alongside the gene-septs of the southern musters. His wife was raising their five sons in a hydro-farm collective on the slopes of Mount Arkad, and his brothers were all dead. Natraj was an honest man, a good man, but a man who no longer wished to serve in the Imperium’s armies.

His devotion to his fellow soldiers and the oaths he had sworn before the regimental Ark of Wings bound him to his role as soldier and gaoler, but Natraj was nearing his fortieth year, and desired only to return home to his family and see his boys grow to men.

A simple desire. An understandable one.

An open door to an Athanaean.

KAI LAY ON the floor of his cell, sweat layering his skin and his heart racing as though he had sprinted the entire height of the Whispering Tower. His body ached and his eyes felt as though the sutures binding them to his skin were tearing loose. The bilious taste of vomit caked the inside of his mouth and his robes stank of urine and uncontrolled bowel movements.

Every portion of his anatomy ached, and micro-tremors in his muscles kept him from any form of rest. Bright light filled his cell and harsh static blared from an unseen vox grille. Kai wanted to pick himself up, to face his interrogators with dignity and courage, but he had nothing left in him for defiance.

His clawed hand scratched at the floor, and the ghost of a smile creased Kai’s face as he finally made a mark of his own in the fabric of the cell. His parched tongue rasped over his cracked lips and he blinked away the raw, infected tissue gathering at the corner of his eyes.

Kai had no idea how long he had been lying here in pools of his own ejected matter, and, in truth, had stopped caring. He watched the patterns his breath made in the vomit, like ripples on the surface of a vast lake that sweltered beneath a glaring red sun.

Then, a change. A shiver of air movement. A door opening.

Kai tried to move, but he could no longer move his limbs. He saw a pair of boots, heeled and fashioned from expensive materials available only to the moneyed and influential of Terra. He heard a woman’s voice, dull and indistinct, then hands were under him, grabbing him and hauling him upright. Kai flinched at their touch, his body a morass of pain that shied away from human contact. Dragged across the floor of the cell, he was deposited on the edge of the bunk. Two figures in bulky black armour, layered bands of what looked like leather and bonded ceramite plate, took a step back from him as the most exquisite woman Kai had ever seen appeared between them.

Kai squinted through the glare of his cell’s lights. His visitor was unknown to him, a woman of undoubted noble breeding and subtly judged cosmetic surgery. Her eyes were vivid green, the surgically enhanced structure of her features framing them perfectly with high cheekbones. She wore her blonde hair in an elfin bob, asymmetrically cut and laced with amethyst beads.

A black bodyglove enclosed her lithe form, and a purple weave of shimmering fabric spiralled around her body like a frozen whirlwind. She was dressed for one of the grand Merican ballrooms, not a gaol beneath a forgotten mountain, and Kai wondered what she could possibly want from him.

‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked.

Kai licked his lips with the little moisture left in his mouth.

‘No,’ he said, his voice a barely audible whisper. The dusty rattle of a desert corpse.

‘And why should you? I move in circles far beyond your limited understanding,’ said the woman, picking her way carefully through the matter on the cell floor and kneeling beside him. Her dress moved with her, slithering around her form like a snake and ensuring it never touched the ground.

She saw him notice and smiled. ‘Nanofabric programmed to remain a fixed position and distance from my body at all times.’

‘Expensive.’

‘Monstrously,’ she agreed.

‘What do you want?’

The woman snapped a finger.

‘Give the man a drink. I can barely hear him.’

One of the woman’s protectors knelt beside Kai and offered him a plastic tube he detached from the shoulder of his armour. A droplet of moisture beaded the end of the tube, and Kai gratefully sucked cool liquid from the trooper’s recyc-pack. That the water was reconstituted from the man’s sweat and bodily waste did not bother Kai one iota. He felt it flowing through his body, along his limbs and revitalising him like a stimm shot.

Instantly, his thoughts sharpened and the sickness that plagued him abated.

‘That’s more like it,’ said the woman. ‘Now I don’t have to get so close to you to hear what you’re saying.’

‘That wasn’t water,’ said Kai, indicating the trooper as he snapped the clear plastic pipe back to his shoulder plate.

‘No, it wasn’t, but you feel better, don’t you?’

‘Much better,’ agreed Kai.

The woman cocked her head to one side and let her eyes roam his face. They were quite magnificent eyes, genuine and likely gene-tailored in utero. Kai’s augmetic eyes saw the faint outline of an electoo just beneath the third dermal layer, and unconsciously brought it into clarity. Rendered in a familiar cursive, it was an italicised capital C, and Kai groaned as he touched the underside of his wrist, were an identical electoo had been applied.

‘You are from House Castana,’ he said.

‘I amHouse Castana,’ said the woman. ‘I am Aeliana Septmia Verduchina Castana.’

‘The Patriarch’s daughter,’ said Kai.

‘Just so,’ said Aeliana, lifting her fringe to reveal a bejewelled patch in the centre of her forehead concealing her third eye. ‘And you are an embarrassment to my house, Kai Zulane.’

‘I never meant to be, Domina,’ said Kai, quickly averting his gaze and employing the formal means of address. To look into the eye of a navigator was death, and he had more than earned such a fate in the eyes of the Castana family of the Navis Nobilite.

‘I am not here to kill you,’ said Aeliana. ‘Though Throne knows, that would solve a world of problems. I am here to give you a second chance. I am here to give you a chance to make amends for the loss of the Argoand the near-crippling loss of face my father has endured among the Conclave of Navigators.’

‘Why would you do such a thing?’

‘Because I dislike waste,’ said Aeliana. ‘For all the trouble you have caused, you are a skilled astropath and I would recoup the significant outlay my father incurred in securing your secondment to our House.’

‘You can secure my release from this place?’ asked Kai.

Aeliana smiled and shook her head as though amused at the naïve questioning of an infant.

‘I am Navis Nobilite,’ she said. ‘I speak and the world listens.’

‘Even the Legio Custodes?’

‘Even the praetorians,’ said Aeliana. ‘On assurance that I never allow you to return to Terra. A small price to see an end to this… unpleasantness, I think you’ll agree?’

Kai nodded. To never see the planet of his birth again would be no price at all.

‘And you can take me out of here?’ he said.

‘I can, but first you have to do something for me.’

‘What? Anything, Domina,’ said Kai, reaching out to take Aeliana’s hands.

Her skin was smooth, yet there was a hardness to it that spoke of subdermal haptic implants. Aeliana’s eyes bored into his, and once again he was struck by the lambent green of her perfectly circular irises.

‘I need you to look at me and understand that House Castana does not hold you responsible for what happened aboard the Argo. It was an old ship and well beyond its scheduled maintenance refit date. The vanes of its Geller field generators had been damaged in transit through the asteroid belt around Konor, and it was only a matter of time until they failed. It had nothing to do with you.’

‘I was transmitting just before they failed,’ said Kai, so softly he wasn’t even sure he’d spoken aloud.

‘What?’

‘I was in a nunciotrance,’ said Kai. ‘I was sending a message to Terra when the shields failed. I was the way in for those… monsters… those thingsthat live in the warp. The shields might have been cracked and ready to fail, but I was the hammer that finally broke them. The whole crew slaughtered and it’s my fault!’

Aeliana gripped his hands tightly and looked him straight in the eye.

‘It was notyour fault,’ she said. ‘The creatures of the warp are dangerous, yes, but you are not to blame for what happened. I have seen the shipwright’s report on the wreck that emerged from the warp, and it is a miracle the Argomade it back to realspace at all. You and Roxanne were all that brought it home at all.’

‘Roxanne…’ said Kai. ‘Yes, that was her name… I remember. We knew each other. What became of her?’

‘She is well,’ said Aeliana, but Kai caught the hesitation before her answer. ‘After a brief convalescence, she returned to her duties. As you must, but you need to tell the Custodians what Sarashina told you. There is no reason not to; you have my word as Mistress of House Castana that no harm will befall you, whatever words you speak to me.’

Kai tilted his head back and stared into the bright light filling his cell. He could see no source of illumination, yet the walls shone with reflected light. The grainy static noise swelled, and now he recognised it for what it was: a desert wind blowing through the valleys and troughs of a dune sea, reshaping the landscape with every gust.

‘Very good,’ he said. ‘You almost had me.’

Aeliana’s grip tightened, and the perfect cast of her bone structure wavered for the tiniest fraction of a second. But with awareness of its falsehood, the rest of the fiction fell away with increasing rapidity, and the walls of the cell fell away like the threadbare backcloth of a cheap playhouse.

In their place, the achingly empty expanse of the Rub’ al Khali stretched out to the edge of the world. The armed troopers melted away like wind-blown sand sculptures and Kai found himself seated upon a shelf of rock overlooking the fortress of Arzashkun.

‘What was my mistake?’ said Adept Hiriko, the guise of Aeliana falling away from her.

‘The eyes for starters,’ said Kai. ‘You can never change your eyes, and though I forget each time, you can never hide them.’

‘That is all?’

‘Well, no,’ said Kai. ‘You made one other mistake.’

‘Oh, what was that?’

‘Aeliana Castana is a complete bitch,’ said Kai. ‘She would never be so understanding to someone who had cost her house so dearly.’

Hiriko shrugged. ‘I have heard that, but gambled on you never having met her.’

‘I haven’t, but word travels.’

Hiriko still held his hands and she leaned in to him. Her skin smelled of cheap herbal soap, and the sheer ordinariness of it made Kai want to weep. If only he could.

‘Whether or not you believed the dreamscape is immaterial,’ said Hiriko. ‘The words I spoke with her lips are no less true. You were not to blame for what happened to the Argo. Only by accepting that will you be able to let go of what holds you here.’

‘Maybe I don’t want to let go of it. Maybe I feel I deserve to be punished just for surviving. Had you thought of that?’