You had passed through the habitation ring, and the storage ring. You were in the engineering and environmental ring now, with the power systems, and the life-support, and the exhausts and waste. The lights were dim here. There were fewer portholes, and the effect was immediately more claustrophobic, more tubular. Even here, no space was wasted: ten thousand years of memorial meant that even in the sharp yellow shadows of the filtration panels, and past the enormous gurgling vat of the water tank, the inlaid bones of the Nine Houses sat forever watching switchboard lights marked things like END EFFECTOR SUCK—END EFFECTOR WINNOW—END EFFECTOR SIFT. Better to decay to powder in the Drearburh oss than keep watch above END EFFECTOR SUCK until the end of time.

The blood was still wet beneath your toes, although thinning out somewhat; it trailed in a nearly black ribbon down past the filtration rooms, and you followed it out to the exhausts. It dripped down a short flight of metal stairs into a wide, deep room within the station, not so thickly built up with the accretion of computers and mechanisms from upstairs. You could understand the great scope of the Mithraeum in here. Tall oblong plex windows were set high in the walls, and wads of thermal foam nuzzled up against a little bunker, windowless and solid, with huge valves set in it travelling up through the walls and into chambers unknown. You did not yet know why the station had an incinerator: as far as you knew, it recycled rather than destroyed its waste. Mechanical arms dangled overhead, waiting to place things into the incinerator via a roof-hatch. Partway up the main wall, above the bunker, was a tiny plex-fronted control booth, which you could see no way of accessing; the door must have been somewhere back up the stairs.

The blood ended abruptly at the door of the incinerator. As though in a dream, you followed it to its terminus. Set in the door was an immensely thick plex panel, yellowed from old fire, and you peered through it.

Ortus the First lay propped against the wall at the back of the incineration chamber. His chest was a neat, bloody void where the spearhead had gone precisely through his heart. It would have meant instant death for a normal human being, even a skilled adept. He lay with his chin lolled down on his chest. There was nobody else in the incinerator with him.

The showdown between you and the Saint of Duty was already over. Your enemy had been killed without you laying a finger upon him. You felt, dimly, cheated.