‘Monstrous,’ she mutters. ‘It is monstrous.’

I know it is the water she means, because I feel the same. I have seen great acts of cruelty and more deaths than I would care to count, but nothing else turns my stomach in the way that wasted water does. It is an unmatched act of ugly privilege.

If Viskia hears Yumia’s words, she ignores them, leading us in silence up a flight of thickly carpeted stairs to a waiting set of heavy doors. They are painted with an ornate frieze of sleeping figures, their dreams painted ten feet high. A pair of serfs stand in waiting, their faces hidden behind silk veils set with stones.

‘Your weapons,’ Viskia says. ‘They must be peace-bonded before you may enter.’

I allow the serfs to bind my sabre hilts, and Yumia does the same with the short swords at her hips. Zoric won’t let them touch his rifle or his pistol, but he makes a show of removing the powercell from the former, and every one of the custom hard rounds from the latter.

‘The Master awaits you,’ Viskia says again when it is done, and she gestures to the gene-bulked bodyguards, who take hold of the doors and open them for us in perfect synchronicity.

Beyond the heavy doors lies the heart of the Reverie. The chamber is circular and vast, the ceiling so high that it is lost to shadow. It is gilded, too, decorated with sculptures of dreamers contorted in agony, cast in gold and set with glittering stones. Thickly scented smoke coils and drifts around the statues from incense burners all around the edge of the room.

‘By His watchful eyes,’ Yumia says, as the heavy doors grind closed again behind us.

She is not looking at the gilding, or the sculptures. She is looking at the floor. It is made of armaglass, through which Thul’s choir of dreamers can be seen. Dozens of psykers, pale and wasted, their eyes bound with silk blindfolds. They lie in cushioned cradles with injector lines pushed under their skin, murmuring and stirring in their sleep.

‘A sight to behold, isn’t it?’

The voice comes from the centre of the room, from the lean, lightly muscled man sitting amongst a heap of furs and silken cushions and patterned bolsters, his hands laced in his lap. He is being watched over by four silent guardians. They stand either side of him in pairs, lightly armoured in gold and steel, their faces hidden behind silk veils just like those the serfs were wearing. Each of them holds a finely made curved sword, the point facing down to the glass. As we cross the chamber, Dagra Thul gets to his feet and smiles.

‘Madame Ravara,’ he says. ‘It has been quite some time.’

‘Long enough for your choir to grow, it seems,’ I reply, with deliberate delicacy. It is another facet of the illusion I present to Thul, along with the Crypsis. As far as the Master of Dreams knows, I am just another benumbed highblood with too much wealth and a dwindling number of vices.