‘If they want to get ahead of us, they won’t go around,’ Va’lin told the other. ‘They’ll come through us with tooth and claw. Try running with a maimed leg or your guts hanging from your stomach.’

That silenced the noble. He carried a knife, Va’lin had nothing else to spare. His bolter was the last of his weapons that had survived the fall and he wasn’t about to part with it. He doubted the boy could fire it and not cave in most of his ribcage with the recoil anyway.

Again, Va’lin was reminded of his enhanced physiology. Soon it would be strengthened further, by the black carapace and the fusion of flesh to power armour. That was if they could escape the storm.

Darkness was gathering thickly, the smoke almost impenetrable. Breathing was difficult, even for Va’lin. The aspirants suffered badly. In a few short minutes, they had lost sight of the serrwyrms. Dead or fled elsewhere, it didn’t matter. The mouth of the canyon could be mere metres away, but they would never know. From his eidetic memory of its original geography, modified by what little information he had gleaned whilst crouching on the pillar of rock, Va’lin knew there were several routes out of the fire canyon. Even if, by some freak of fortune, Ba’ken found the right one there was no guarantee they would see his signal.

Kilometres across, swathed in ever expanding black, they might as well have been in an ocean.

Slowing down, beckoning the others to do the same, Va’lin pulled three phosphor-flares from his webbing. When broken off at the tip, they burned magnesium-white and were the best chance they had of someone seeing them from beyond the storm.

‘Can you throw?’ he asked the Hesiod noble.

‘With a javelin, at gnaw-squid in the Acerbian Sea. But yes, I can throw.’

Snapping off the end where it blazed in a riot of pellucid white, Va’lin handed him one of the flares and pointed to the east. ‘As far and deep as you can.’

The noble was true to his word, the flare cutting through the smoke in a dazzling parabola, landing somewhere just beyond the sixty-metre mark where it continued to burn and became a beacon in the smog.

The other two flew farther, cast by Va’lin. One disappeared, swallowed by lava or simply plunged into a gaping crevice. The other flickered briefly and died.

‘We follow yours, aspirant.’ Va’lin nodded, indicating the wan magnesium glow in the distance. ‘And hope for solid ground between us and it.’

‘I am Za’tenga,’ said the noble, holding out his hand.

Briefly they had stopped running. Not to catch a breath, for there was precious little of that remaining, but to try and get some kind of bearing. It was like running in the void with only the illusion of solidity beneath them to tell up from down.