He smiled. It was the warmest, most genuine thing I’d seen in years.

I was just trundling the last corpse back into its freezer when a militia officer came into the morgue and whispered something to Zelwyn.

He turned to look at me. I felt his pain. I mean, I actually felt it. The psyker talents that would later serve me and shape my career were still raw and unshaped in those days, but my empathetic function nevertheless resounded at his distress.

‘While we were busy here…’ he began.

‘Talk to me, Zelwyn.’

He took a deep breath. ‘While we were fussing around here, there’s been another death.’

‘Is the body still in situ?’

He nodded.

‘Let’s see it.’

We had to wait for five minutes while the New Bridge lowered its spans to let us cross into the Commercia district. Zelwyn let one of his militiamen drive us. The Jared commissioner’s hands were shaking too much to be trusted.

Corposant lit up the bridge. The sky made strange colours that twisted and turned. Rain fell. The river below us rushed along, rich in sediment, towards the distant sea.

Lana Howey had worked the wharf for twelve years, and was a regular face at the drink-stops and taverns along the hem of the Commercia. She’d once been popular, a fast girl with good looks and impressive legs, but the work had taken its toll. In the months before her death, she had earned her income turning tricks for specialist customers, men who were more interested in what she was prepared to do rather than the way she looked.

Now she was dead.

Her body lay on the ground floor of a warehouse just off Commercia Main. It had been discovered by a night watchman. Slim, too slim, and wearing too much make-up, she lay naked and awkward under the over-bright portable lamps. The blood from the deep, slashing incisions had pooled under her in a slick. Her left ear was missing.

‘Same as the others,’ said Zelwyn, shuddering.

‘No,’ I said, crouching beside the body.

‘No?’

‘No, she’s still–’

I wanted to say alive, but that would have been wrong. She wasn’t alive anymore, but she was fresh, fresh compared to the freezer-burned residue Zelwyn had shown me earlier.

‘The hunter again?’ Zelwyn asked.

‘Looks like it. The ear, you notice?’

‘Why do you think it’s a hunter, Inquisitor Eisenhorn?’ Zelwyn asked.

‘The slash wounds,’ I replied. ‘You see? So deep. These are the kind of deep cuts that a hunter might administer to accelerate decomposition. A kill he doesn’t want, and which he wants to rot away quickly.’

Zelwyn pursed his lips. ‘What are you going to do now, sir?’

‘I’m going to ask you and your people to get out of this place. Withdraw to a sixty-metre perimeter.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t ask me that, commissioner.’

‘I want to stay,’ said Zelwyn.