Pascal felt his heart race at the thought of striking back at the Screaming Eagles. He fought to control his excitement, knowing that a cool head was needed here. Emotional men made mistakes and he was not a man given to displays of emotion, considering them a waste of energy.

He paced the room, thinking through the situation, unlocking talents for analysis that had once served him well in the ranks of the Imperial Administratum, a duty that seemed a lifetime ago.

Pascal Blaise had been a scribe overseer in the office of Governor Shaara, a cog in the ever-turning machine that was the Imperial bureaucracy of Salinas in the days before the Achaman Falcatas had come. Though other planets in the system had seethed with turmoil and unrest, Governor Shaara had kept Salinas free of malcontents and rabble-rousers in the belief that they could ride out this time of troubles.

How wrong he had turned out to be.

Tarred with the same brush as the system's other worlds, the hammer of the Imperial Guard had fallen, on Salinas with no less ferocity and force as it had on the others. Governor Shaara had been executed the day the Falcatas had landed and his officers rounded up in detention camps while the Departmento Munitorum officials decided what was to be done with them.

Pascal Blaise had been part of the delegation chosen from among the surviving administrative personnel to approach Colonel Leto Barbaden, the commander of the Imperial forces moving across the surface of Salinas, to protest at the unnecessary nature of these measures.

The memories of that day were burned forever on Pascal Blaise's mind. No sooner had they spoken against the harshness of the Falcatas and the loyalty of their former governor than a detachment of soldiers, men and women that Pascal later learned were Barbaden's 8th Company known as the Screaming Eagles, had surrounded them.

Colonel Barbaden had spoken of the treachery that infected the system and of how he had heard the same protests of innocence from the lips of every leader on the rebellious worlds.

Then the shooting had begun.

Pascal reached towards the puckered scar tissue at his chest where the first las-bolt had struck him. A second had grazed the side of his head and he had fallen into a black pit of pain and unconsciousness. When he had awoken, he was in a long trench, freshly dug outside the palace walls, which was filled with corpses. He had recognised the faces of his fellow delegates and the horror and injustice of their murder allowed him to plumb reserves of strength and endurance that he had not known he possessed.

Bleeding and on the verge of collapse, he had climbed from the mass grave and lurched through the shot-and-scream-filled darkness until he found his way to the nearest house of healing, where his strength had finally given out.

He remembered nothing of the next few days except pain and the sedative highs of medication. A week after his shooting, he had risen from his bed to hear the sounds of Imperial Guard tanks rumbling through the streets of his city and the tramp of marching feet as red-clad soldiers of the Achaman Falcatas rounded up suspected traitors.

Hatred filled him and, in that moment, the administrative overseer he had once been died and the warrior he became was born. Within a month of the Falcatas arrival, the newly formed Sons of Salinas made its first gesture of defiance, planting a bomb that had killed several senior officers of the Falcatas.

Under the charismatic and fiery Sylvanus Thayer, the Sons of Salinas had enjoyed initial successes and had seriously hampered the work of the Falcatas in securing Salinas.

It couldn't last.

Against the relentless force of the Imperial Guard and the ruthlessness of Leto Barbaden, the Sons of Salinas could not hope to prevail. After the horror of the Killing Ground, Sylvanus Thayer had led the vengeful Sons of Salinas into a pitched battle, a battle they could not hope to win, and the flower of their world's manhood had been wiped out.

Pascal had pleaded with Sylvanus not to meet the Falcatas in open battle, telling him over and over that the destruction of Khaturian had been designed to draw him into such a reckless act, but his leader's fury at the massacre could not be restrained.

And, they had died, pounded by artillery, ground over by tanks and finished off by infantry.

Men called Sylvanus Thayer a hero, but Pascal knew the man was a fool. Blinded by rage and the need for vengeance, he had not seen the trap that Barbaden had laid for him. Or if he had seen it, he had not cared.

Pascal Blaise had rallied the survivors and taught them the value of caution and secrecy. He had taught them that they were not the almighty avenging force that Thayer had told them they were, but the trickle of water that, over time, would split the rock.

Thus the war of the Sons of Salinas had continued.

There were no grand gestures of defiance, but small attacks that gradually wore down the soldiers who occupied their cities and whose former colonel sat in the Governor's palace.

A knock at the door drew Pascal from his bitter reveries and he looked up to see Cawlen Hurq standing at the door once again.

'You coming?' he asked.

'Yes,' said Pascal, lifting his ash-grey storm cloak.

He smiled and dropped the cloak, opening the gun-metal footlocker beside his bed and reaching for the cunningly disguised switch that opened the secret compartment at its base. Pascal lifted the false bottom and drew out a carefully folded bundle of green and gold cloth.

He swept up the double wrapped cloak of the Sons of Salinas and fastened it to the buckles at his shoulder and chest.

Cawlen nodded appreciatively.

Pascal bolstered his pistol and grinned to his bodyguard. 'If we're going to kill Verena Kain, it's only fitting she should know who her executioners are.'

High in the mountains above the dead city, the Lord of the Unfleshed sat with the rest of his brethren in the midst of a forest of tall trees. Mist clung to the ground and the wet sensation of it around the exposed musculature was strange and unusual. The softness of the ground beneath him was a joy and the cold air in his lungs the sweetest elixir.

He had never known such things, his every breath before now coated with toxic filth from the belching refineries that covered the desolate plains of the Iron Men's world.

They had brought down another two of the beasts that lived in the pastures below a towering escarpment of rock and dragged them into the concealment of the forest. The carcasses lay torn apart and bleeding in a ring of the Unfleshed. The Lord of the Unfleshed tore meat from the bone with his teeth, the hind leg of one of the animals clutched in one meaty fist.

The meat was like nothing he had tasted before, fresh, bloody and full of goodness. All he could remember eating was the spoiled meat of the dead or the chemically disfigured, the fatty bodies of the ones they had found in the flesh camps of the Iron Men.

The thought that there could be another way to live had never entered the Lord of the Unfleshed's mind, for what other life was there? Fragmentary visions of his life before, like images on the shards of a broken mirror pricked his mind from time to time, but he had always turned from them.

Sometimes, when the pain and exhaustion of his existence grew too great to bear, he would travel deep into the ashen mountains and bask in the smoggy peaks wreathed in caustic pollutants that would send him into the deepest slumbers, where he could cling to the last of his remembrances.

There his body would rest, and he could reach the dreams of another life, another way of living.

Were they memories? He didn't know, but he liked to think so.

He would see a woman's face, kind and full of unconditional love. He hoped she was his mother, but had no memory of her beyond this sight. She would speak to him, but he never heard the words. All he saw was how beautiful she was and how much she cared for him.