She finally stopped screaming when the inquisitor slapped her, hard, across the cheek.

ZSO SAHAAL

Zso Sahaal leaned out from his sheltered alcove and drew hungry eyes across the structural anarchy around him.

He'd warmed to his new environment quickly - a predator entering fertile hunting grounds - and couldn't resist a secret smile, relishing the darkness. This chequerboard of shadows, this ferrous jungle, this cavity-filled mountain: here he was indomitable.

Unable to pause, fighting urgency and excitement, he quit his nook and bounded across a plungeshaft, dodging chains and cables: a shadow moving through shadows. Rising across vertical gantries, claw-over-claw, he pushed off with his hooked feet to hop between silent elevators, hanging like gibbeted bodies. Voices filtered from passages to either side and he paused, mimicking the ragged fabric of the wall. In a world of such haphazard architecture one more uneven shape, midnight-coloured and indistinct, was unlikely to

draw attention. He unsheathed a claw, shivering at its silky emergence, and waited, every muscle tensed.

Thus poised, with every sense racing and alert, his mind found itself free to wander. It seeped into his memory like oil into a sponge, musing upon how he had found himself here: stalking this ancient labyrinth like a panther in the night.

The previous day, leaving the Umbrea Insidior countless kilometres behind him, he had watched the city appear by degrees on the horizon. For all its enormity he hadn't paused to admire it, or even to catch his breath - bounding ever onwards, tracing what faint evidence of the thief s passing remained.

At one point a phalanx of vehicles streaked nearby, engines broadcasting their approach long before the snow-haze gave them up. Cautious of confrontation, Sahaal merely pushed himself into the snow and watched them pass, ebony eyes tracking them through scarlet eyeslits. He assumed they must be heading for the crash site, and wondered vaguely what manner of personnel had been dispatched, and by whom. He decided eventually that he didn't care: there were a host of such minor questions to be answered, but nothing must divert him from the Corona.

He'd hastened towards the city, finally losing what vestiges of the thief s tracks remained. Staving off anxiety, he told himself the tracks no longer mattered: the scum's destination could hardly be doubted.

The city was, simply, vast.

At its uncertain base, where scarred ridges of stone and snow segued with serried ranks of ferrocrete and steel, he'd come to a deep fissure in the earth. Into the cavity iron foundations coiled down into the dark like the rusted roots of a titanic tree, colonised on every

expanse by the grinding structures of industry. The rent billowed its fumes like the breath of a devil; a toothless mouth into the scarred ground.

Above it, where the frosted rock sprouted the lowest towers and tiers like mould, a multitude of heavy-doored gates had greeted his eyes: loading bays and vehicle access points, a hundred and one ways to cross from the arctic waste to the cloying darkness within. And every last one was closed, sealed against the cold.