The sanctioners’ patrols were more frequent along stretches like this, as the communal areas got neater and the levels of violence and thievery slowly sank. The people here had things to protect, and so the armed response teams prowled more often, taking fewer bribes, stowing the extortion attempts, actually looking out for disturbances.

That process ended entirely once the levels of wealth shifted from merely substantial to the wholly obscene. Once you got to Revenna, sanctioners were no longer required at all, for these urban palaces had their own armies, their own weapons, their own laws. The border between the realms was unmarked, but you always knew where it was. The transitways became less clogged. The hab-towers disappeared entirely, replaced by sprawling mansions of ashlar, marble and ivorystone. Living greenery popped up – pleasure gardens fed by underground filtration systems and tended nightly by gangs of indentured menials. You could just about see the crowns of the spiatrees over the tops of the electro-field-guarded walls.

Zidarov watched it all slide by. The people here were less likely to slit your throat directly, but that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. In terms of raw power, the conjunction of money and influence, these were more or less the most dangerous people in Varangantua.

He didn’t normally feel too self-conscious about his appearance. Now, though, he glanced down at his coat sleeve, and saw the spot-marks on the cuff, the less-than-perfect stitching on the seams. He should have shaved more carefully, probably. He really needed to watch his diet, just like Milija had been telling him.

Too late now. He pulled from the main arterial and headed down an egress ramp. His groundcar soon growled along a long, straight boulevard lined with some kind of off-world fir tree that he didn’t recognise – tall, wiry black trunks crested with glossy bursts of blue-green foliage. Every building around him was gigantic, their grounds hidden from view by long, blank walls twenty feet high, all crested with flaywire and patrolled by whining remote gun-skulls, the monotony only broken here and there by heavily defended gatehouses, each one stuffed with more weapons than a Militarum bunker.

By then, Zidarov’s Luxer was the only vehicle on the road. It was a strange sensation, not to be surrounded by the snarl and clatter of other traffic. Everything here was strange – too still, too clean, too open.

Stay away, everything screamed, silently.

He prowled around for a while, searching for the location he’d been given on the iris from Vongella. His loc-transponder didn’t seem to pick up a tether this far out, so he watched the gates pass one by one, hoping to catch a plot number or a helpful sign to guide him.