(The blade had snapped. So had Sahaal's patience.)

And yes, now perhaps he could reflect upon the responses to his work. He could skulk here in the ruins of this derelict factory, on the cusp of a deserted

settlement, its floors long since collapsed into the abyss, and consider his palette of fear like a painter scheming to mix new colours.

But always, always such distractions were tempered by hate, by focused rage, and by the spectral possibility of failure.

What, he asked himself, had he learnt from his murderous forays? What had he discovered from all his many questions, all his many descriptions?

Nothing. Nothing of the Corona Nox, at least.

He'd gone to pains to illustrate the spiral electoo sported by his quarry - carving it lovingly on each victim's skin - but not one had recognised it. He'd described the thieves' shaggy furs, their crude goggles, even the unknown word - TEQO - daubed on their transport; though it was familiar to none. Sahaal did not for a moment consider that his victims might have been withholding: one by one their defences cracked, their sanity shattered, but their ignorance remained intact.

No, he'd learned nothing of the Corona. His revelation had concerned something entirely less pleasing.

Since awaking on this nocturnal world something had eaten at him, gnawing at his psyche. When he took his twelfth victim - a bearded man with copper fletches across his brows and rags draping his wiry form - Sahaal's curiosity had finally overcome him. He'd gritted his teeth, hooked one elegant claw into the wretch's arm, played the bladed edge along the cusp of exposed bone, and asked the question that haunted him.

What year is this?'

Despite the pain, despite even the terror that had gripped him since first he was attacked, the man had paused with a look of almost comical incredulity.

'W-w-what?'

The year!' he roared, rippling the waters of the sludge-lake to which he'd brought his captive. He raised the claws of his gauntlet above the man's groin, poised to clench. It was a crude form of threat, but he had to know. 'What year, worm!'

'Nine-eight-six!' the man wailed, all thoughts of bemusement obliterated. 'Nine-eight-six!'

Sahaal growled, absorbing this unwelcome information. An absence of six centuries was far greater than he'd feared. Adrift upon the trance in the Umbrea Insid-ior, he had been resolutely unable to estimate how long he had spent in silent incarceration. Time moved differently in the warp, and a day's slumber in its coiling belly could easily affect a month's passage in crude reality.

Six hundred years was beyond his most fearful approximation. In a fit of pique he began to bring down his claw, venting his anger on his captive.

And then an ugly afterthought arose, and he paused to form words in the plebeian Low Gothic tongue, so appropriately favoured by the underhive filth. The thirty-second millennium? Yes? Answer me!'

For a fraction of a second, the man's lips curled in a dumbfounded, confused smile.