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  ‘You killed him,’ breathed the metalworker.

  ‘No,’ said Severian, drawing the serrated knife belted at his hip. ‘Though he deserves death for disrespecting the Warmaster.’

  ‘You’re him, ain’t ya?’ said the addict, wringing his hands and worrying at the nailbeds of his fingers. ‘You’re the one they’re all looking for.’

  Severian ignored him.

  ‘You’re like ignorant children,’ snapped Severian. ‘You know nothing of Lord Horus, the battles he won and the blood he spilled for his father. My Legion waged war across the heavens for two hundred years, conquering the galaxy in the name of humanity. And this is the thanks we get? I should kill you all. You ought to be building statues of the Warmaster and shrines to his deeds. Horus has won the galaxy for you, not the Emperor.’

  The addict crumpled to his knees, weeping and pawing at Severian’s boots. The Luna Wolf kicked him away in disgust, drawing a cry of pain from the man’s lips. The metalworker swallowed hard and looked up at Severian.

  ‘Horus is a traitor,’ said the man. ‘The Emperor said so…’

  Severian’s fist drew back, his arm quivering with tension. One tap and the man’s skull would be in a hundred fragments.

  ‘The Warmaster is the Emperor’s beloved son,’ said Severian through gritted teeth. ‘These things you say… They cannot be true. I would know of it.’

  The metalworker fell to his knees with his hands laced before him as though in prayer. His terror sickened Severian. The emotion was too unknown to him and made Severian want to kill him even more.

  ‘You are what we fought for?’ laughed Severian, the sound as anguished as it was derisive.

  He leaned down and placed the tip of the knife against the man’s chest.

  ‘Your kind doesn’t deserve to inherit the galaxy,’ he said. ‘Your life isn’t worth one drop of Legion blood.’

  ‘Please… don’t… kill me,’ sobbed the man.

  Severian sheathed his knife and looked at the man with the eyes of a god who stared upon his failed creation.

  He turned away in disgust, robbed of certainty and adrift on unknown tides.

  The light was falling away to evening as Severian left the hab-tenement. He moved through narrow streets taken by decay, avoiding the thoroughfares and arteries of the Petitioners’ City. Every junction would have a complement of soldiers stationed at its corners and rooftops.

  His steps were sure and swift. A lone wolf, he owned the silence and made the shadows his own. There were few people abroad in these narrow alleyways, only the occasional footpad or lost soul, and they wisely kept out of his way.

  He did not kill as he went. A body was a trail, but a frightened man kept his own counsel.

  The heavy-handed approach of the soldiers sweeping the streets was working in Severian’s favour. Word of the Black Sentinels’ brutal search tactics had spread quickly, and now no one was admitting to anything.

  They had no clue where he was heading.

  The villa of the Emperor’s Warmason was a shining bauble atop the granite scarp above the Temple of Woe. Severian’s route had taken him in a looping course away from his pursuers and back around to where he had begun, ready to climb that cliff to where the Warmason kept his orbit-capable flyer.

  Vadok Singh, like many of his gene-bred bloodline, favoured elevated positions from which to observe his works and it was from here that Severian would begin his journey back to his Legion.

  To prove the falsehood of the accusations levelled against his primarch or to call him to account for his crimes.

  Severian paused at an irregular confluence of narrow streets of corrugated steel and looted cinderblocks. He pressed himself to the wall as he heard the tramp of booted feet from his left. Muffled voices echoed with a curious metallic quality from the walls, and Severian picked out five speakers. A combat squad, which meant there was likely another one nearby. Severian crouched like a runner awaiting the starting pistol and closed his eyes, letting his hearing take up the sensory slack.

  There, behind him, moving through the building to his rear.

  They moved carefully, which meant they knew he was nearby.

  A crackle of vox, a hushed voice calling for backup.

  Moisture dripped from above, and Severian looked up to see a young girl leaning from a scaffolded trellis. Dressed in a simple green shift with a red flower pinned to her breast, she saw him and waved. Severian watched the play of muscles around her mouth and knew she was about to call out to him.

  His hand closed on a sharp-edged rock. He could put it through her skull before she spoke, angling his throw so she would fall back into her dwelling. Instead he lifted a finger to his lips and shook his head.

  He saw panic in her eyes as she retreated into the building, and shook his head in disbelief.

  Legion warriors were avatars of battle, but when had they become figures of fear to human beings? He remembered the cheering multitudes at the expeditionary fields as the marching hosts of Space Marines had left for a life of war. The crowds had laughed and cheered them, but those days were gone.

  Now they were murderous killers, savage weapons that could turn and blood their creators as easily as their foes.

  The spaces between the buildings were hung with wet sheets like the battle flags won by the Legion in its earliest days; the reclamation of the asteroid belt, the taking of the outer planets and the first push out into the wilderness of space beyond the solar system.

  How many more victory banners were now hung in the Museum of Conquest aboard the Vengeful Spirit? What glories had passed Severian by as he rotted on Terra as little more than a ceremonial figurehead of wars he would never fight?

  Severian let out a soft sigh, forcing down the random jumping of his thoughts when there was killing in the offing. He calculated the distance between him and the first man in the approaching squad. Severian counted down until a booted foot and the wavering barrel of a carbine appeared around the corner.

  He swung out, keeping the Black Sentinel’s body between him and the rest of the squad. A pistoning jab crushed the man’s skull. He spun around the falling body, going low and swinging his leg out in a scything sweep that felled the two soldiers behind him. They dropped and Severian slammed his fists against their chests, smashing their ribs down through their lungs and stealing the air from their screams.

  He sprang forwards and chopped his hands out: hard left, hard right. The two soldiers bringing up the rear of the squad toppled, their necks broken cleanly before they had even realised they were under attack.

  Severian heard the bark of urgent voices in the vox-beads clipped to their helmets.

  He lifted one of the tiny voice units to his mouth. ‘Five dead and counting. Who wants to be number six?’

  When Nagasena reaches the bodies, ragged scavengers have already begun to gather. They look at him with hostile eyes, debating whether or not to fight him for possession of the dead.

  He already knows they will make the wrong decision.

  After all, desperation makes fools of men.

  There are five of them, more than enough – they think – to take down one man. Two are armed with factory-stamped stubbers, the third with a custom rig that looks more dangerous to its owner than him. Two men rush him, armed only with lengths of rusted pipe and fear-born courage.

  Shoujiki whispers from its sheath and the first dies with his belly sliced open. Nagasena spins on his heel and brings the lethal edge down on the neck of the second. The head flies clear and crashes through a nearby window.

  Nagasena is moving before the first body hits the ground. Stubber fire blasts from perforated barrels. The low-grade ammo makes the guns’ recoil too powerful to keep the weapons on target. Two quick cuts open the first gunner from groin to sternum.

  Nagasena leaps up and his sword stabs down into the holl
ow behind the second gunner’s collarbone. It slices effortlessly through the man’s heart and lungs. Nagasena twists the blade free and a crimson geyser arcs over the wall as the man falls to his knees.

  The last scavenger backs away, his converted pistol held out in a shaking grip. It is a primitive thing – loud, dangerous and intimidatingly large. Nagasena’s pistol matches it in lethality, but his does not waver.

  ‘You will miss,’ he says, ‘and then I will kill you.’

  He sees the man’s decision in his eyes a fraction of a second before he knows it himself.

  Nagasena presses the firing stud on his volkite pistol and a searing beam flashes into existence, linking the tapered barrel and the scavenger’s head.

  The man’s skull detonates as his brain cavity is superheated and the blood, oxygen and brain matter expand explosively. His headless corpse drops straight down and his finger tightens on the trigger. The report echoes through the streets of the Petitioners’ City and Nagasena feels the distortion of the air as the shell tears past him to blow a shield-sized crater in the wall behind him.

  He holsters his pistol and bends to wipe the blood from Shoujiki on a dead man’s clothes. With the worst of it removed, Nagasena unfolds an oiled cloth and polishes the blade to a mirror finish once again.

  He brings the blade up and touches the tip to the end of the scabbard. He pauses for a heartbeat to honour the weapon, before sliding it home in one smooth motion. He hears angry voices behind him. Men who wear the same uniform as the dead Black Sentinels killed by Severian.

  A five-man combat squad, the brothers of these dead Sentinels.

  A lieutenant reaches down to a fallen warrior and Nagasena opens his mouth to shout a warning, but it is too late. The dead man’s body shifts and the fragmentation grenades wedged between his breastplate and the ground roll clear. Nagasena hurls himself behind a stack of crumbling bricks as they detonate with a hard, echoing bang. Fire rolls out, and in its wake comes a storm of red-hot shrapnel.

  It engulfs the street, ricocheting back and forth in a flesh-shredding hurricane. The blast wave lifts the other dead bodies into the air, and grenades hidden beneath them go off in a deafening succession of secondary explosions. Nagasena puts his hands to his ears, pressing himself into a tight ball as the concussive force of the blasts punches the air from his lungs.

  Tumbling fragments of hot steel slice his cheek, his arm and his neck. One embeds in Shoujiki’s scabbard, and he plucks the smoking metal from the lacquered wood. At last the ringing echoes of the blast diminish as it travels outwards through the streets.

  He sucks in a breath of fyceline-hot air. Blood runs down his face and from his ears. His body feels like it has been worked over by an Arbiter’s shock maul. Nagasena rises unsteadily to his feet, but he can see nothing of the Sentinels. He weaves a path back down the street, seeing dark, wet lumps that were once human beings scattered like butcher’s offal. The smoke obscures the worst of the carnage, but not enough to keep the horror from his face.

  One man is still alive.

  Incredibly, it is the lieutenant who turned over the first grenade-rigged body.

  Nothing is left of him below the waist, and he stares at Nagasena with pleading, disbelieving eyes. His mouth flaps like a landed fish, trying to form words, but failing in the face of such unendurable agony. Nagasena kneels beside the lieutenant and takes his hand.

  The lieutenant’s eyes ease shut, as though he is falling asleep and might soon wake.

  The man’s hand slips from Nagasena’s, who gives voice to the jisei composed by Master Nagamitsu on the eve of his assassination:

  ‘Should this body die and die a thousand times over,

  White bones turning to dust, with or without trace of a soul,

  My steadfast heart is Truth, can it ever fade away?’

  Nagasena looks up, feeling someone’s gaze upon him.

  Leaning from the high window of an adjacent building is a young girl, strikingly pretty, with skin so dark it puts him in mind of the Salamanders legionary he saw at the Preceptory. Her eyes are wide orbs of pale white, and she wears a crimson flower pinned to her green dress. She sees him looking at her and darts her head back inside.

  The instant their eyes meet, Nagasena sees a sure and certain truth.

  She has seen the Luna Wolf.

  Severian moved at speed through the streets, following the mental map he had compiled in the hours after his escape from the Temple of Woe. The street plan followed no logic and changed with each passing day, but he navigated the spaces between its scrapyard palaces and junk-habs with aplomb.

  Like his ability to blend, his innate sense for direction had never yet let him down. He had guided the Outcast Dead through the labyrinthine complexity of the mountain gaol with ease, and they had travelled the Petitioners’ City like natives. Cities opened up to Severian, their roads rising to greet him, their highways and byways like old friends.

  Frightened faces poked from openings in scavenged structures above him, some seeing him, most not. Even those who looked right at him did so with perplexed expressions, as though unsure of what exactly they were seeing.

  Severian did not question this.

  The shadows were lengthening and Severian kept to the walls, moving low and keeping his eyes constantly in motion. The noise of the city was familiar to him, a rustle of bodies, the clatter of pots and the sharpening of knives. Then came the dull echoes of distant grenade blasts, and he shook his head at the foolishness of his pursuers.

  Cookfires and smoke scents joined those of sweat and desperation and fear.

  And beneath it all, the low-level buzz of the broken earpiece in his helmet.

  He’d listened to the skirl and sway of the static during the quieter moments of his solitude, picking out the odd word here and there, like impossibly distant echoes from a bygone age seeking a connection to the present. Nothing of any use, but the interleaving ghost voices made him feel marginally less isolated. He wondered if he would eventually join them, a lone voice lost among the millions of dead in the wars fought to bring unity to a world on the verge of extinction.

  A static warble, like a soft wave breaking on a golden beach, washed through the helm and Severian let the vox-fragments surf the edges of his consciousness as he slipped through the evening.

  He crested a rocky defile towards the scarp upon which rested Vadok Singh’s walled enclosure. He skirted the edges of what looked like a small cemetery, the three graves hacked from the rock of the mountain and marked with carved cherubs. Severian saw no names, but from the size of the holes cut into the rock, two of the dead were children.

  He looked back through the jumbled silhouettes of the buildings behind him, seeing the arched roof of the Temple of Woe. Despite the wild stories of what had taken place within its walls, the people of the Petitioners’ City still brought their dead to its doors.

  No one would dig a grave for Severian, and the thought hardened his heart.

  He began to climb.

  Nagasena looks for a way into the building, eventually finding a rope-hinged doorway of nailed timbers and sheet metal. He pauses as he enters, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light. Stairs lead to a broken landing, upon which sits an ill-fashioned ladder of metal struts and baling twine. Swiftly he ascends, knowing he does not have much time until mistrust seals the girl’s lips.

  The floor above is a crumbling permacrete slab, divided into myriad living spaces by struts of trench shuttering. Huddled bodies crouch in their allocated spaces, gathered around stuttering thermal generators, sleeping or kneeling before opened boxes with carved fronts. Children look at him with open mouths before parents pull them away. They do not know him, but they know he is dangerous.

  These people are pinched and wary, curious at the bloodshed beyond their home, but hoping he will pass swiftly. He is an unwelcome visitor in a place he does
not belong. The sensation of being a trespasser on Terra saddens him, and he wonders if these people even think of themselves as citizens of the Imperium any more.

  He sees the girl in the green dress sitting with her back to the wall, her knees drawn up before her, and he makes his way towards her slowly. She looks twenty, but is probably younger. Poverty and desperation age people.

  He keeps his hands in plain sight, palms up. She watches him with eyes that tell him she saw him kill the scavengers.

  ‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ he says.

  ‘You promise?’ she asks, and her desire to believe him almost breaks his heart.

  Nagasena twists the sash at his waist, holding the lacquered scabbard as though offering it to her. Her eyes widen at the workmanship, and he knows she will never see anything this beautiful again.

  ‘This sword is Shoujiki,’ says Nagasena. ‘In one of the dead languages, it means honesty. The man who gave it that name bound it to me with a promise to live by that principle. I am not a good man, and I have done many terrible things in my life, but I have never broken that promise.’

  She searches his face for deceit, but finds none and the tension in her taut body visibly relaxes.

  ‘You saw him,’ he says. ‘The Legion warrior.’

  Her face crumples at the memory, and Nagasena waits, knowing it would be a mistake to force the words from her. To see a Space Marine is no small thing, and to see one make war is to witness killing fury at its most violent.

  ‘He is not coming back,’ Nagasena promises her. ‘If that is what you’re afraid of.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ she says. ‘I saw him look at me, and he had death in his eyes.’

  A single tear runs down her cheek, and Nagasena hates that the treachery of Horus has made this girl afraid of the very warriors wrought to win the galaxy in her name.

  ‘He will never hurt you,’ he says.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I am going to kill him.’

  She looks up, and she gives him a crooked grin at the certainty in his voice.