‘Who are you?’ I repeated, adding will to the words.

+Who are you? I did not expect you. You were not anticipated. Who are you? Reveal your name.+

The will-force in the send almost made me speak my name aloud, but I bit back. So I wasn’t the intended target after all. I was, in fact, the rogue element. The unexpected player in the game.

+I know you. I can smell your mind. The rogue. The famous pariah. Long years since your rosette carried any authority.+

The mind was strong. I pushed at it, harder, harder still. I knew the psyker was stronger than me, but sometimes strength isn’t everything. I was hoping to outflank it with skill and practiced technique, to wrong-foot it. The mind sounded young, not experienced enough to know every trick an old dog has in his book.

But it was hard to push, because the mind kept moving. There was a flexibility to the psionic pattern that was quite disturbing. It was fluid. It flitted, like a wild bird, from slave to slave, yet it did so with great purpose and accuracy. It was not simply ricocheting from one consciousness to the next.

It was fast. Strong and fast.

I pushed again. It slipped aside, but this time I came away holding some words torn off its elusive subconscious like a handful of grass.

Grael Ochre, the Yellow King.

‘Grael Ochre. Is that your name?’

No answer.

‘Yellow King… of what?’

No answer.

‘Yellow for cowardice? Won’t you reply?’

I pushed again.

‘What is Orpheus, Grael Ochre?’ I asked. ‘Why does that word lurk so brightly in your mind?’

The mind pushed back. Fire cored through the neural links of my augmetics, making me gasp and stagger to the wall for support. All my old wounds – all the artificial neurons spliced in to allow me to control my exo- and endo-augmetics – shrieked with induced pain, the cellular memory of injury and surgical incisions replayed.

Clever, turning old pain against me. Getting me out of his head.

He was gone again. The house was alive with the sounds of shouting, of security teams rushing up and down the tight, wooden staircases. I limped into the retiring room, and pulled the door shut behind me. It was cold in there, unfriendly. No one had bothered heating it for the day. A limpid grey light fell through the tall windows. Drapes and tapestries hung dark like shrouds. There were shelves of books, some ragged furniture.

I needed to sit down. I tried to let go of the pain he’d poured into me. This Grael Ochre, whoever he was – and I was sure a name like that was just another mask, a psydonym – was cruel and exceptionally skilled. I had only stolen the few clues I had by brazen persistence and the fact that he had not expected another psyker to be in play at the symposium.