Those fears lived with him and woke him at night, even though the dangers had long passed. They were hard-edged fears, and they tasted bitter, like dirty iron pressing on his tongue. They made his pulse skip and his skin go clammy. They made him dull and stupid, as if fear were a weight that pressed common sense and logical response out of his head. Both of those truly fearful experiences had happened when he was in the company of Germaine Macks. She was like a damned jinx that made bad things happen to him. Not insane adventures. That was a euphemistic, jolly term that suggested thrills and excitement. Just bad things. Things that had put him in the path of genuine, violent extermination. Things he didn’t wish to repeat or even remember. The closest he’d ever come to death.

But there in the kitchen passageway of Helter Fortress, with Macks’ stablight – yes, Macks there yet again, the common denominator of his misfortune – with her stablight illuminating the ghastly and impossible as it hobbled towards them, he oddly felt no fear at all.

The figure was simply unbelievable. Old human bones, mottled and stained by loam and mildew and decay, roughly assembled in anatomical order, scabbed and crusted with mould and dried-black blood and residual masses of dead sinew and tissue. The empty eye sockets were dark pits of shadow.

For a moment, time seemed to dawdle, as if waiting for Drusher’s mind to catch up. He became aware of how not frightened he was. Perhaps he was simply denying what was in front of him, refusing to accept it. Perhaps it was just so extraordinary it had taken him beyond the limits of any fear he could register.

Perhaps the day had already been too strange. He had been forced to accept things that his scientific background did not allow for. The workings of the psykanic mind, the notion of speaking to the dead, the post-mortal apparition of an old man. He had, for Throne’s sake, shaken hands with a ghost. Perhaps the strange day spent in the company of Eisenhorn and his curious band of assistants had acted as a crash course, a steep learning curve into the truths of the unknown. Perhaps the day had been like a baptism, annealing his soul and his fear so that it was ready for this moment.

Or perhaps… perhaps it was just too fascinating. Drusher’s curiosity, the appetite for wonder and discovery that had steered him into his profession, had eclipsed all fears. Even the xenos thing he had faced in the windmill all those years ago, that had been definable. He’d been able to know it, to describe it in accurate terms. He’d been afraid of it simply because it had been going to kill him.