claws pushing hard through flesh and cable, pinning him. The diagram fluttered from his hand, the connections of his shoulder severed.

The man did not scream.

'You will tell me what you know of the thief,’ Sahaal growled, voxcaster blending his smooth syntax with dangerous, reptilian tones. The filth with the spiral on his skin. Who is he? Where is he?'

The man smiled. With half-metre claws pinioning him to the ground, with razor edges playing across bone and muscle, with a thick paste of blood and servo-oil soaking into his decorous robes, he smiled.

Sahaal twisted the knives.

'Het-het-het-het...'

Sahaal fought the urge to cut out his tongue.

'My name is Pahvulti,’ the man said uninvited, shivering with amusement, eye lenses revolving. 'I think we shall be friends,’

Sahaal almost killed him then, infuriated by the scum's audacity. He jerked a claw free and lashed at his face, ripping across cables and skin. A rebreather tube snickered apart with a hiss and the lens of his left eye shattered, its sutured edges bleeding from fresh sores. Sahaal stopped short - fractionally - of a killing blow, and it required all his effort to force down the rage in his mind.

The thiefV he bellowed. 'Or you die in pain!'

'I doubt that,’ the man said, calm to the point of insanity, 'on two counts. First... I don't believe you foolish enough to kill the one person who recognises the symbol you've been slicing onto all your victims. And second, het-het-het, I don't feel pain. I regard it as an inconvenience I'm better off without,’

Sahaal all but screamed. Did the fool not know how easily he could be crushed? Did he not know what

manner of man - what manner of warrior - he directed his insolence towards?

As if reading his thoughts, the worm's one remaining eye twitched across Sahaal's armour, taking in every detail of his colossal form. 'I daresay that painlessness is something to which you can relate,’ he grinned. 'Space Marines are notoriously robust.'

Later, in a place so silent that every spoken word was returned to its speaker's ears in a spectrum of glassy echoes, Sahaal folded his arms and fought for calm.

The man-machine Pahvulti had been crucified. With jagged splints of debris forced between the bones of his arms and a tight cord securing his neck to the slumped pillar Sahaal had chosen as his anchor, he should by rights seem a pitiful thing: stripped naked of his robes, bound with chains and barbed cables, slashed and bleeding in a dozen places.

Alas, his situation did not appear to have dented his enthusiasm, nor silenced his laughter.

'.. .and at one time, het-het-het, I might have prayed to the Omnissiah,’ he cackled, 'but no longer, no, no. Not Pahvulti. They tried to turn me, you see? They said the puritens had rejected my flesh. Het-het-het. Rejected! No! It made me strong! It made me wiseY

'Be silent, confound you!' Sahaal's temper was by now comprehensively frayed.