On the way back to the Bastion, he felt like kicking himself. He’d never questioned it. He’d never thought to query why a woman like Udmil Terashova would have taken Mordach’s family name so quickly.

By convention, a legal marriage in Urgeyena carried no obligation on either party to adopt the bloodline name of the other. It was common for the most influential or wealthy family signifier to end up being preserved – such things were often cause for haggling and slate transactions when there was anything serious at stake. Everyone he knew had stories of furious multi­generational rows, with entire habclaves changing hands and shots being fired just to keep a particular name in circulation. On some occasions, no accommodation was reached, and so an entirely new name might be dreamed up, or something hyphenated and elaborate concocted to satisfy every bruised ego.

He’d known from the start that Udmil had once been a member of the Ramenev family, a bloodline with just as much prestige as the Terashovas. Even if she had been down on her luck at the time of matrimony, it felt strange, now that Mordach had mentioned it in passing, that she’d not put up a fight to keep the old name. She fought to keep everything owed her, that woman.

He reached the Bastion again, and headed swiftly up the winding stairs towards the archives level. His private terminal was capable of accessing most of what the databanks held, but not all, and not as efficiently as the dedicated analysers’ machines.

So he made his way down a long corridor, darkening as the day faded, until he reached a pair of locked iron doors. They were guarded by two gun-servitors, one of whom looked up blankly at him as he approached. He gave the servitor the hardform of his holo-seal, and it inserted the wafer into a slot carved into its chest. A few seconds later, the lock on the door clicked open, and the wafer slid out again. Zidarov took it, ignoring, as ever, the servitor’s milky eyes and waxy skin.

Inside, it was like entering a cathedral nave. The ceiling was high and arched. Ranks of parchment bundles ran off into the dark, barely lit by the spore-like suspensor lumens. The walls were as thick as any in the Bastion, and had no windows. They said that a block-leveller bomb could go off inside the Bastion compound, and everything would still be intact in here. The entire fortress could be turned to rubble, and still the records would be safe, mouldering away slowly in the dark.