‘By the Emperor,’ she breathed. Sef Lentzen was no longer the only dead body in the hold. Anthons and Sica had both died thanks to stab wounds from a powerblade, although not before discharging their hellguns; however, with one broken leg and one head wound between them, it seemed they hadn’t managed a great degree of accuracy. Not enough, at least, to prevent their attacker from killing both of them, along with Kennevario Xudine.

Chetta wasn’t surprised to see that his warp eye had been cut out, but that didn’t help with the sudden wave of nausea that swept over her. Encountering it in the flesh, with a still-bleeding wound in the forehead of someone to whom she’d been speaking only a few minutes beforehand, was a very different proposition to seeing a holo of a mutilated body.

‘Niklau,’ she hissed, gripping the handle of her cane so tightly her fingers began to cramp. ‘He was here.’

‘So perhaps he isn’t far,’ Ngiri said. The inquisitor sounded as icily calm as might be expected of her breed, but Chetta was sure there was a raging fire burning beneath Ngiri’s apparently serene exterior. ‘He may be able to move unnaturally, but he must have limits.’

‘Don’t tell me that you want to go hunting for a witch in this?’ Chetta demanded, waving a hand to encompass the pollution surrounding them. One of the hellgun blasts had punched a hole through the thick armourglass of a porthole – the blast that they’d seen outside – and the Smog Deeps’ choking atmosphere had leaked into the hold.

There was a faint click in the comm-bead in her ear.

‘Want to?’ Ngiri replied, and Chetta realised the inquisitor had switched her comm to Chetta’s personal channel. Sealed inside her power armour’s helmet as she was, none of the others would be able to hear what Ngiri was saying. ‘No. No I do not. I’m Ordo Xenos! I deal with aliens! I can identify twenty xenos species from their architecture. I’ve studied the fighting styles of the Scythian warrior monks. I can converse with the aeldari. I can explain the societal schisms within the T’au Empire and how they can best be manipulated for the Imperium’s advantage, and I can tell you the five fastest ways of killing an ork warrior. This warp-damned groxshit is not my area of expertise! But I cannot turn and walk away from such a threat when I believe it to be so close.’