wreck's remaining generarium, glowing with a pestilent green tinge. This he loaded carefully between layers of foam, acknowledging that sometimes the precision of a blade would never be enough.

The crate hissed as he depressed its sealing rune, and as he gripped its iron handle he reflected that in another time such an ignoble thing as carrying luggage would have been unthinkable; the remit of the numberless slaves that tended to his every desire.

How the mighty are fallen... A simple phrase, whispering through his mind for a second time, like the ghost of an echo. He realised with a start that it was his master's voice he'd remembered, and with crystal clarity recalled the time, the circumstance, the sentiment.

It had been on Tsagualsa. On Tsagualsa, before the killer came. Gazing into the night, brows beetling together, ancient eyes clouded, Sahaal's lord had turned to him and smiled, and said those words, and in his voice Sahaal could taste his disposition.

Troubled. Bitter. Betrayed. Haunted.

'We shall be mighty yet,’ Sahaal promised, words lost to the driving snow, fist clenched against his heart.

Lifting the crate to his side, he set his sights upon the faint shadows of the transporter's tracks, took one last glance at the Umbrea Insidior, and leapt into the night.

MITA ASHYN

It was less an awakening than a rebirth.

Always it was like this, after the trance. Always she allowed the subtle skeins of perception and concept to break free from her focus, shifting her mind state from some inner vantage to the mundane outer realities, the province of conventional sense and thought.

She returned to her corporeal self like an eagle resuming its eyrie, breathing honeyed incense and enjoying the slow trickle of physical sensation. It felt like blood flowing through starved arteries.

In the Scholastia Psykana she'd learnt to call this the pater donum: the brief flush of warmth and contentment that followed a scrying trance, like a reward from the Emperor's own hand. She allowed it to work its way along each limb, curling her toes and arching her back.

Relish it, the adept-tutors had taught. Enjoy it whilst it lasts. It was, after all, the single facet of telepathy that

justified the term 'gift' where all others equated more accurately to the symptoms of a curse.

The pater donum would not last. It would be gone in an instant, and at that unhappy moment all the fierce memories of the trance would crash inwards to drown her.

She opened her eyes, focused on the single guttering candle at the centre of the scrying-ring, and allowed the sludge of recollection to break through.

Her first thought was this:

Something has fallen from heaven.

The meditation cell was a simple affair.