On this, the planet's unlit face - tumbling in perfect synchronicity with the orbital year - it was always dark, and always cold. Against the gloom, factories belched fiery waste and loading bays vented nebulae of ionic pollution. From the upper tiers, above the drudgery of plebeian life, windows bled galaxies of spilled light. In Mita's eyes, with her binox devouring every luminous pinprick, the hive stood against the darkness like a monolith-god, an effigy thick with fire.

More pronounced still was the brightness in the chambers of her mind: in those unseen tendrils of psychic thought that swarmed about her like the arms of an anemone, she could taste the life of the city. Two hundred million souls, each one a guttering candle of psychic light. Each one as fragile as it was bright.

She turned away, briefly dazzled, and focused instead upon the small convoy. There were four transports -converted Salamanders with widened tracks and pintle flashlights - racing across the ice at an alarming speed. Three contained the Inquisitorial retinue - assorted cloaks fluttering as their mass allowed - whilst in the lead vehicle a squad of the local lawmen, the Preafec-tus Vindictaire, set their helmeted heads against the wind and glared back towards the others, no doubt deriding the interference of outsiders. Officially the Preafectus was an independent body, administrated by the galaxy-spanning Adeptus Arbites, but a certain amount of diplomatic compromise to Imperial officials was customary. Mita suspected that the inquisitor's involvement had been far from sanctioned by the lawmen, though it would be a brave man indeed who denied an offer of assistance from Kaustus.

The man himself shared her portion of the rear vehicle, gazing out from a raised gantry with face and mind equally as shrouded. The Inquisition trained its

operatives to shield their minds from psykers with enviable aplomb, and where the other members of the retinue blazed in her sixth sense like lanterns, his radiance was shuttered and barred. He stood with arms crossed, as unperturbed by the cold as if still within his suite, and only his fingers - kneading together -belied the impression that he was a statue: some decorous idol draped in fine cloth. She realised without surprise that she still knew all but nothing about him. In the short time she'd spent in his service the one obvious conclusion she'd drawn was this: The legends were wrong.

Inquisitor Kaustus came complete with a reputation as glowing as the nocturnal hive at his back, and exploited it shrewdly. That he had undertaken great deeds, that he had crushed alien heresies throughout the Ultima Segmentum, she did not doubt. But that he had done so with nobility and honour - with heroism, no less, as the myths claimed - was harder to digest. Ruthlessness and heroism did not, in her experience, sit well together.