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smiled and again the bones clicked through his fingers.
    ‘I ate the eye,’ he said. ‘Did you know, Horkos, it was once thought that to eat an eye would grant wisdom?’ He shrugged, the tanned skins across his shoulders flapping against the plates of his armour. ‘We will have to see. Perhaps you should try the other, if we take it from him?’
    Ahriman remained silent, his head bowed in respect.
    The eating of an eye does not grant wisdom, you fool, he thought. The sacrificer of an eye is the one who gains the boon, not the taker.
    ‘Of the other two captives… Well, if they do not bow to us then perhaps we can see what more than one eye will do.’
    Once I would have taught you the depths of your ignorance. The thought snarled inside Ahriman’s mind, and he had to struggle to suppress it. He was Horkos, the oathbreaker, the lowest of renegades; he did not have such thoughts.
    ‘Yes, master,’ he said. Maroth chuckled, the sound like the rattle of dry scales.
    ‘Good. Come with me. There is something else I wish you to appreciate.’
    Darkness folded around Ahriman as he followed Maroth. After a few minutes Ahriman could tell they were making for the outer hull, as the passages got narrower and colder, and the blast doors thicker. Eventually the thin air gave way to hard vacuum, and they had to don their helmets. Ships like the Titan Child let parts of their outer hull drain of heat and atmosphere. Like layers of dead skin, these void-cold sections provided a buffer against damage and drew no power.
    It was as they walked down a lightless passage towards a sealed door that he felt his skin prickle and smelt an impossible copper tang in the helmet’s air. He stopped, his eyes fixed on the door ahead. There was something behind that door, something that radiated malevolence and hunger like heat from a forge.
    ‘You feel it?’ said Maroth, turning to look back at Ahriman. The front of Maroth’s helm was shaped into the muzzle of a hound, its eyes glowing in the gloom. Behind the hound’s snarl Ahriman was sure Maroth was smiling.
    ‘What is it?’ asked Ahriman, without moving. He had begun to close off portions of his mind, armouring his spirit with passive layers of protection.
    ‘Come and see,’ said Maroth, and stepped towards a closed door. It was small, and reinforced with thick spars of metal. In the red light of Maroth’s eyes the surface of the door sparkled. Smeared marks covered it: eyes, spirals, toothed letters and hooked lines, all daubed in dark frozen liquid. To Ahriman they were little more than childish scrawl. Maroth raised a hand, activated the lock, and pulled the door open.
    Behind the door there was darkness so complete that it looked like a hole leading to oblivion. Ahriman could smell rotten flesh and dank water, the stench filling his mouth and nose though there was no air to convey it. Maroth looked back at him, raised a beckoning hand and stepped through. Ahriman paused. Every part of his being was screaming to run, to turn away from the waiting door, but he could not, he had to follow. Maroth would not let him escape this revelation. He stepped forwards and through the door.
    Blackness. For a second he could see nothing except the icons pulsing on the edge of his helmet display. Then shapes appeared, outlined in pale light though there was no light. He saw Maroth, the soothsayer’s face turned towards him, eyes dim coals in an iron hound face. The other shape floated in space, its splayed limbs tethered by a web of chains to unseen walls. Rags covered its body, though he could still see the bulk of muscle and definition of a Space Marine’s frame. The skin of its face and hands was death-white and hairless. Crude stitches walked across its chest, closing a ragged fissure in muscle and bone. Strips of tanned skin hung from pins in its flesh, each crawling with burned marks that twisted as the eye caught them. Ahriman tasted bile in his mouth. The suspended figure stared back at