For now, he needed information.

He let his instincts take him past the teeming marketplaces; down the great thoroughfares where the faceless, grey-souled masses of the Imperium’s chattel dragged themselves to or from their place of employ at the sound of the shift-change klaxon; over a spindly looking crossway that swayed in the wind between blocks, and was clustered with lights in an effort to prevent flyers from colliding with it; around the gently humming sealed chambers where the power generators throbbed. After a while, he became consciously aware of what was guiding his steps.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ Radimir murmured, eyeing a sigil in the smear of graffiti and gang signs that crawled down one wall of a throughway. It was a crude depiction of a crowned serpent – not particularly large or ostentatious, and not created with any remarkable degree of artistic skill, but it had caught his eye. There had been another, one block back, in the same style and with its head pointing towards this one.

A trail, perhaps. But leading where?

This serpent had a kink in its neck, suggesting that he should turn right at the next junction. He did so, and found his next guide some way down the passage, nestling beside a flickering strip lumen in the ceiling. That one sent him on to its fellow, scratched into the wall above a garbage compactor. He nearly missed the next, half-concealed as it was by a wanted poster for an outlaw going by the name of Emerson Tobias, who from the look of the bad pict seemed to be some sort of foppish dandy with an over-fondness for knives. However, a quick easing aside of the text describing Tobias’ misdeeds gave Radimir the direction he needed to take at his next turning, up a long flight of stairs into a wide public atrium.

Here he slowed, feeling uncertainty gnawing at him for the first time. There looked to be only one way in or out of this hall, so presumably here was where he would find what he sought. But there was always the possibility that the sigils were old or, worse, had already been deciphered by one of the Imperium’s watchdogs, yet been left as bait. The luminators on the walls and ceiling here were close-spaced and in good condition, and there were few places to hide. A very bad place for a fight, should it come to one.

Radimir calmed his breathing, and ran through a quick mental focusing exercise. Discovery was always possible, but it was highly unlikely that a constant watch was being kept, even if someone had realised what the sigils meant. Besides, entrapment of that sort was incredibly unlikely: the Imperium would almost always destroy such things, if they realised their true nature. Destruction was one of the few things the Imperium excelled at, and the only thing about it that he admired.