Wyntor imagined that such thoughts had never even occurred to the Praetorian, before he began demolishing the path. Dorn, in one of the endless diktats of defensive measure he had issued since returning to Terra, labelled the Eagle’s Highway as both a military weakness and a waste of resources. Large sections of it had been deconstructed and the marble repurposed for ugly, battlefield uses. Talking to a wine-seller of his acquaintance on the Avenue of Sacrifice, Wyntor learned that the stone was now a series of gargantuan tank traps out on the Katabatic Slopes, and at the time the news had been enough to make him weep.

That seemed like such a terrible thing. An act of martial, uncultured barbarity in the name of a war yet to arrive, a hard-souled soldier taking a chisel to a thing of transcendent splendour in order to carve himself another graceless redoubt. But now that ignominy seemed utterly trivial.

Pretty marble meant nothing. Beauty meant nothing. Not when ranged against the horrors of what Wyntor knew now. The secrets he had been told had unseated his reason. A lesser man might have gone mad to know them. Perhaps, in some subtle way, he had.

Wyntor’s thoughts inexorably slipped back towards the revelations and the dark realities lurking in the back of his mind, and the giddy, terrifying rush they brought up threatened to overwhelm him. It was as if he were being stalked by the medusae out of ancient Hellenik myth. To look directly into the eyes of this truth would petrify his flesh and bone.

His flimsy leather shoes, over-elaborate and made for soft, carpeted domiciles, slapped on the frosty stone. Wyntor skidded to a halt to catch his breath, hiding in the lee of a carved griffon. The cold marble burned at the soles of his feet, and the icy air at this great altitude was hard and heavy in his lungs.

Rake-thin and taller than most men, on other days he would have been more graceful than his gangly form suggested. Beneath the hooded robes he wore, his colouring was that of deep sand, and above an elegant chin and a regal face, his violet-hued eyes flitted back and forth on the verge of panic. A learned observer who knew human cultures might have guessed he was of Yndonesic extraction, and they would have been gravely mistaken.