‘I don’t…’ Abaddon forced the words out through broken teeth and pain. At some point in the fight after the ambush, something had shattered half the bones of his face. ‘I don’t want to be a king.’

Laughter boomed out again.

‘That is something you will never be, Abaddon,’ said the warrior with grey eyes. ‘Either you will die here, or you will become one of us. We are the slayers of kings and the killers of tyrants. We are brothers in war, and blood. We live for each other and die for the future we make, and that is all we will ever be. Can you be that, Abaddon?’

He looked up at them. The pain was trying to pull him down into its grasp. He sucked a breath, heard the chains clink. In his mind he saw the cave of becoming again, his father falling from his bloody hand, him turning fast but too slow as one of the guards yanked back Kars’ head and sawed a knife across his blood-sibling’s throat.

‘Is what you say true?’ Abaddon asked, pulling the words from the pit of his pain. ‘Do you swear that it is true?’

Syrakul glanced at his companion, and then nodded.

‘It is true, boy. By the oath I took on this moment, it is true.’

Abaddon tried to rise but the chains held him.

‘I am…’ he said, hearing his voice rasp. ‘Then I am yours.’

They did not move. He could feel them watching him, weighing him in their eyes.

‘Break the chains,’ said the grey-eyed warrior.

Syrakul stepped forwards and took hold of the links of Abaddon’s bonds and broke them as though they were rotten rope.

Syrakul and the grey-eyed warrior watched him. Abaddon drew a breath and then pushed himself upright, inch by agonised inch until he stood, bloody, his face a broken mass. His left arm hung by his side, broken, the hand hanging by a strand of skin and sinew. Pain shook through him.

The grey-eyed warrior exchanged a look with Syrakul, and then nodded.

‘I am Hastur Sejanus. There is a long road ahead of you, Abaddon, and much of it will be marked with greater pain and loss than you have known. There is no reward at the end except to be one of us, to be a brother of warriors and wolves. If that is not enough, then it is better to never begin.’

Abaddon swayed, refusing to let himself prove weaker than his wounds in front of these warriors.

‘It will not be enough,’ he said. ‘It will be everything.’

Syrakul laughed.

‘I like him. He is going to be trouble.’

Abaddon watched the dark replace the past, then turned and walked away.

Freighter ship Antius, Trans-Saturnian Gulf

Mersadie awoke with a start.

‘No…’ she gasped with a breath that had been drawn in a dream of a wolf turning to smile at her with bloody teeth.