Have no doubts on this score. You will take me there or the thing in your head will consume you and you will become a terror unto your fellow man.'

So compelling was the stranger's tone that Janus almost believed him; it was impossible not to. He sounded as certain as a man saying the sun was red, or that gravity pulled things down. Janus sat startled for a moment and then slowly a terrible truth rushed into his booze and drug addled mind. This stranger was privy to a secret he was prepared to kill to keep. He knew about the things in Janus's head.

'What did you just say?'

'I know what you are, Janus Darke, and I know how you came to be that way. There is nothing about you I do not know. Already we have had this conversation a thousand times. I have followed all the probability lines leading from it. I know that if you do not do what I wish then death, aye and worse than death, will come for you. The voices in your head will drown out your thoughts. The thing that waits behind the locked door in your mind will consume your soul. A hundred exits lead from this room into the future, Janus Darke. Ninety-nine of them lead to a place where your body is a shrivelled husk consumed by the daemons of Chaos. One of them charts a course to safety, and, believe me, I know which one.'

Janus felt himself teeter on the edge of sanity. This stranger in some strange way knew the truth about him. It was not possible. He had taken every precaution, had shielded himself from any who might detect him, or ran from those he could not. There was only one way that was possible.

'You're a psyker.' Janus spat. 'I could have the Inquisition on you in a moment.'

'I have heard you say this a hundred hundred times, and I have always given this same response: but you will not, will you, Janus Darke? For to do so would bring their attention to yourself, and like a cockroach scuttling from the light, that is something you wish to avoid.'

'I could do with less of the cockroach analogies,' muttered Janus. The stranger gestured towards the doorway.

'Go,' he said. 'Pass through that doorway, and you will meet the Inquisition sooner than you would wish. One future that lies down that road ends in a dungeon where men's bodies and spirits are broken on engines of agony. And compared to your other futures the Inquisition's cells would be a mercy.'

This is not happening Janus told himself. This is a trick, a trap. There has to be some way out. What does this strange creature want, what does he have to gain by doing this? He shook his head and grinned mirthlessly. When he had woken up this morning, he had had an ominous feeling that this was going to be a bad day, but he had had no idea exactly how bad it would turn out to be.

Kill him, kill him now, whispered the voices in his head. Kill them both! They are a danger to us. Janus slugged back all of the remaining powdered golconda in one long draft.