From the underground bays it was a long climb through a series of internal stairwells. Staff hurried past him in both directions the whole time – sanctioners in black-and-gold riot-plate, verispex technicians in blood-specked plastek aprons, other probators in a variety of civilian garbs. He didn’t know them all, but a few nodded at him as he climbed.

‘Zido!’ said Vasteva as he turned a corner from the unclassified zones and headed towards the protected chambers. ‘Filthy day. How’s the family?’

Probator Lena Vasteva was dressed in a tailored suit of a dark-grey real-fibre weave. She’d changed her hair, Zidarov noticed – pulling it back from her face – and it suited her. A clutch of dataslates were stacked under one arm, and the skull-and-serpent icon hung on a chain around her neck.

‘Fine. We never hear from Naxi. What can you do?’

She laughed. ‘Unless they want something. She’s a good girl, though. What’s going on for you here, then?’

‘Castellan hates me, that’s what’s going on for me.’

‘No one hates you, Zido.’ She pushed a strand of grey-blonde hair off her cheek, as if still getting used to how it fell. ‘So, are we still on, for–’

‘Sure. Yes, we are.’ He started to get uncomfortable. ‘Look, I’d better–’

‘Understood. Wishes to Milija, then?’

‘Will do.’

Then he was up and through the heavy iron-faced security doors, their lintel crowned with an obsidian skull, the jambs carved with High Gothic purity injunctions. He waited for the iris scan, the blood-cycler finger prick, watched the whole time by a glass-eyed gun-servitor with a wire-impaled finger poised over an immobiliser.

The huge chamber beyond the doors was busy. The walls were painted a dark bile green, and the lumens were weak from dirty housings. The air was musty from parchment, boot-polish and warm bodies. Every square inch was crammed with work­stations, walled like confessional boxes, laced with archaic knots of cabling. A lone servo-skull droned back and forth in the haze. It was hot, and getting hotter as the sun filtered through the high, narrow stained-glass windows.

Zidarov reached his station, which was, as ever, crammed with a bunch of mostly unrelated case files and veriquary evidence boxes. Many of the latter were marked with chevroned Do Not Remove holo-prints from the repositories.

Gyorgu Brecht was at the station next door, looking like he’d been there all night. His shirt still had damp patches under the armpits, and his chin was shadowed with stubble. Like Zidarov, his conditioning had slipped a bit.

‘His Hand,’ he said, looking up briefly from the parchment from the Glav case.

‘His Hand,’ said Zidarov, sitting heavily in a rotary-mounted chair. He activated the metal cogitator-unit on his chipped desktop, and waited for the lens to warm up. ‘How’d it go with the sanctioners?’

Brecht grunted. ‘They were really overjoyed. At least I could show them some bodies. I told them two of them were yours.’