She often wondered what had become of her former master. She’d last seen him back in ’87, during the mission to 5213X. He’d been a wreck of a man by then, supported only by his burning will and fundamental augmetics. Some had said he’d crossed a line and become a radical. Kara didn’t believe that. Eisenhorn had always been so… hard line. She thought of him fondly, as she did the others from that time. Alizabeth Bequin, God-Emperor rest her, dear Aemos, Medea Betancore and Fischig.

They had known some times together. Great times, bad times. But this was her place now.

‘Face doesn’t ring any bells,’ she said. She reached down and lifted the eye patch, just out of curiosity. A real eye, wide and glazed, lay beneath.

‘What the hell is that about?’ Nayl wondered.

Kara reached up and slicked the short, red strands of her rain-wet hair back across her head. She looked across at Mathuin and Thonius beside the other body. Thonius was, as ever, elegantly dressed, and as he crouched in the mud, he fussed about his shoes.

Thonius was Ravenor’s pupil, which supposed that one day Thonius was to be promoted to full inquisitor. Ravenor had been Eisenhorn’s interrogator. Kara wondered sometimes if Carl had anything like the same stuff.

‘If you’d left him a little more intact, we might have made a decent examination,’ Thonius complained.

‘This is a rotator cannon,’ Mathuin said bluntly. ‘It doesn’t do intact.’

Thonius prodded the grisly remains with a stick. ‘Well, I think we’ve got an augmetic eye here too. And what’s either an eyepatch or a very unsatisfactory posing thong.’

Thonius’ caustic wit usually drew smiles from the band, but not this night. No one was in the mood for laughs. Ravenor, generally so forthcoming with his team, had told them virtually nothing about the reasons for coming to Malinter. As far as anyone knew, he’d simply diverted them to this remote waste-world after receiving some private communiqué.

Most alarmingly of all, he’d chosen to join them on the surface. Ravenor usually ran his team telepathically from a distance via the wraithbone markers they all wore. He only came along in person when the stakes were high.

+Let’s move on,+ Ravenor said.

The grotto in the Eastern Telgs is deep in the smoking darkness of the forests. The glades are silent except for insect chitter, and wreathed with vapour and steam. There are biting centipedes everywhere, some as long as a man’s finger, others as long as a man’s leg. The air stinks of mildew.