‘So use that,’ she said. ‘You have never been able to save anyone, not really. Not me, not Gideon, not Midas… not even yourself. You are doomed and always have been, and so are all who know you.’

‘I should have stopped years ago,’ he murmured. ‘The magos was right…’

‘Sark?’ she asked.

‘No, Drusher.’

‘Him, I don’t know,’ she said.

‘He’s no one,’ Eisenhorn said. ‘Just a failed man, clutching at the scraps of life, bemoaning his lot. But he said to me that I had gone on far too long. That I had never worked out when to stop. He was very perceptive. He had given up, you see, far too early and far too easily. But he intuitively saw in me a man who had failed in completely the opposite way. A man who just kept going past any point of reason, his friends begging him to halt, then falling at the wayside as he left them in his wake.’

‘I didn’t think you had any friends?’ she mocked.

‘Not any more,’ said Eisenhorn.

‘So, you see, nothing holds you now,’ she said. ‘You can walk the last few kilometres without any burden. Nothing matters to you any more. Can you use that freedom for me?’

‘To save you?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘Far too late for that,’ she replied. She smiled. ‘But a part of me. I have… I will have… It’s hard to explain. A daughter, that’s the easiest word but it’s not accurate. She is of me, but she is also me. And another pariah. You’ve done enough, Gregor. Forget Chase and the King. If you keep going, determined to stop them, you will fail. You will never have the will, despite the uncommon will I know you have… You’ll never have the will to finish this alone. So do something simpler, for me. Save her. Save her from the King before the King claims her. Let me have some afterlife in her.’

‘Where is she?’ he asked.

‘She’ll be born two years from now,’ said Bequin. ‘Deep in the Maze, in the shadow of the City of Dust. She will walk the streets of Queen Mab.’

‘On Sancour?’

‘Yes, like the Jaff woman said. That’s where you’ll find her.’

‘Your daughter?’

‘She’s me, Gregor,’ said Alizebeth Bequin. ‘Beta to my alpha. Think of her that way, and find her.’

‘If it’s the last thing I do,’ he said.

‘It will be,’ she replied. ‘Stop hunting the Great Foe. You’ve done enough. You’ve changed the fate of the Imperium in significant ways. End your days with something smaller. One life.’

‘Will the torment end then?’ he asked her. ‘Will the fire go out then?’

‘Between you and me, it will never go out,’ she said. ‘But the pain will cease. Do you remember the Sameter Ninth?’

‘The Guard company?’