Reckon you can make it to the door on a seven count? Three'.

Weezel tipped the last of his drink down his throat and rose to his feet. 'Sorry, captain. See you around,' he said as he scuttled for the door.

'Four.' Weezel turned and tried to walk away with some dignity but his strides got longer and longer, and he was almost sprinting by the time he hit the door. Janus had reached nine, on a fairly slow count.

Once he was through it, and Janus had bolstered his gun, everybody started to relax a little. A Hydraxian bosun made some nasty remark about Weezel and everybody at his table laughed. Shaven-headed Maggot, the biggest and meanest of the bouncers, put whatever he was holding back down behind the bar. It was only when Weezel had vanished that the reaction hit Janus and his hands started to shake.

That was madness, he thought. I really might have shot him. I might have killed him just because I did not like the tone of his voice. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Too much booze, too much golconda and too much time spent in dives like this trying to drown out the voices in his head, and blot out the things he saw. He was getting worse. Maybe he really should turn himself in to the Inquisition. If what the preachers said was right, it was only a matter of time before the daemons came and ate his soul. Maybe he should save that little bit of himself, before it was too late.

It came to him that he was finally confronting the thing he had been avoiding for so long: he was going mad, he was losing his soul. His personal daemons were closing in. It seemed that they always did, no matter how hard he tried to escape them.

Once it had all seemed so easy. His life had been good. He had looked forward to the prospect of one day being one of the richest and most powerful men in this part of the Imperium. Now he was reduced to terrorising pathetic rootheads because he couldn't stand seeing himself reflected in the mirror of their contempt. Maybe he should just go back to his chamber and end it all. It did not look as if he had anything left to lose any more.

Why bother, though? He could just sit around here a while longer and let somebody's tame killers show up and do it for him.

After what I just did, I am sure Weezel will run off and bring them right back, and I doubt if anybody around here will mind too much if they take me outside for a short walk to the graveyard.

He smiled sourly and took another sip of the drug-laced wine. He glanced around and saw that no one would meet his gaze, not even the bargirl he wanted to bring him another drink. It seemed that he had suddenly acquired all the social cachet of a skawy with para-leprosy. How could things get any worse, he wondered?

It was at that exact moment that the strangers walked in through the door.

 

TWO

TWO STRANGERS

 

Janus fought down the urge to reach for his gun. These people did not look like the ones Weezel had described. There were two of them alright, but they were garbed in massive black cloaks, trimmed with white fur of some sort. Cowls covered their heads and cast their features into shadow. They were taller by far than most of the men present, and thin. Janus was reminded of the low gravity dwellers on Talus's Wheel - the thin, sickly ones too weak to move in anything like Earth-normal gee without an exo-skeleton - but when the strangers moved he put that thought aside.

Not even the bulky cloaks could hide their grace.