Varitens regarded her for a moment, face concealed within the featureless orb of his visor.

'Murder,’

She blinked. 'We're investigating a murder?'

'More than one. Five confirmed, probably more. We're taking you to the most recent discovery,’

She shook her head. This assignment was growing more and more ridiculous by the instant.

'Sergeant, it's my understanding that there are several hundred unexplained deaths every day. I imagine the figure is far higher in the underhive,’

'You imagine right, lady,’

Then I'm afraid I don't understand. Why pay such close attention to this one?'

The Salamander turned a corner and began to throttle down, and Mita became aware that her companions were preparing themselves to disembark, hefting mauls and autoguns professionally.

Varitens pointed to a side tunnel, bored from a drift of mangled steel, and cocked his head.

Through there. You'll understand,’

She had been a missionary, judging by what little of her clothing remained: a white robe with a hemp cord and a reliquary cache slung across her shoulder, embroidered with golden scriptures.

She had come to this deep, dark place to spread the Emperor's light: as brave and selfless a being as one could ever hope to find. Her reward hardly seemed fair.

The robe was shredded.

The hemp cord creaked around her neck as she twisted above the ground.

The reliquary lay shattered at her feet and the fragments of bone from within - the knuckles of some long-dead saint, perhaps - were ground to dust.

'Emperor preserve us...' Mita hissed, stepping into the tunnel.

The woman had not died here - that much was clear. Whatever violence had ended her life would

certainly have spilled out across the murder scene: splattering walls and ceilings, pooling in thick puddles underfoot. This was less a scene of frenzy than an exhibit, a calling-card: neat, tidy, arranged.

Her hands were gone. Her eyes had been put out. One foot hung by a single scrap of gristle; the blow that had parted it with such razor ease stopping short -deliberately - of amputation. Her viscera had been evacuated, hanging in translucent loops from the incision across her belly.

And all across her, along every part of her worm-white body, lazy lines had been drawn: fluid ripples and scarlet whorls like the eddies of some mantra-wheel, spinning through holy water. At first Mita had mistaken the lines for red ink, scrawled across the body's skin. She was wrong. Each line was a cut, administered so delicately, so perfectly, that not a drop of blood had oozed clear to spoil the effect.

This was not psychosis. This was art.

And the artist had not shied from signing his work.

Above the body, carved on the rocky surfaces of the borehole in a dipped, tidy hand, an engraved legend picked at the light of Mita's illuminator and drew her eye.

Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus Ave Dominus Nox