‘Slower,’ warned the inquisitor, dragging the muzzle of his revolver down the man’s cheek and placing it closer to his lips. ‘Order your thoughts. I have seen the results of your work. I have seen corpses with terrible things done to them. I have seen blood on the walls, smeared in mockery of holy sigils. These are not the work of cutpurses. They are the work of heresy.’ ‘No!’ The eyes went wide again with terrible fear. ‘You have it wrong!’ ‘Most strange, how many who come here say that.’
‘It is true, lord, true. I know nothing of these… crimes, only that he told us we must arm against the dark, for no one else-’
‘Does anything. But now someone is doing something. I am doing something. I would like to do more. I would like to root this out.’
‘Yes, yes, you must root it out.’
‘Where do you meet?’
‘Malliax.’
‘You have told me this already. You know what I need. The place. The place where you went to hear these things.’
‘I do not.’ The fear returned. ‘I do not know the name. I cannot take you there.’
The inquisitor’s grey eyes narrowed by a fraction. His finger, finely armoured in dark lacquered plate, slipped away from the trigger, but he kept the barrel pressed against the man’s chin. For a long time the two of them looked at one another, one desperate, the other pensive.
‘See, now I believe you,’ the inquisitor said at last, withdrawing the gun and slipping the safety catch on.
The man took a sucked-in breath — until then, he had hardly dared to. He started to sweat again, and his trembling grew worse.
‘It’s true!’ he blurted, his voice cracking from fear. ‘It is true — I can’t take you there.’
The inquisitor sat back. ‘I know it,’ he said, easing the pistol back into its soft real-leather holster. ‘You are not foolish enough to lie to me. I could break you apart, here, now, and you could tell me no more than you have already.’ He flickered a dry smile. ‘Consider yourself fortunate you met me this day, rather than when I was a younger man. Then, I would have rendered you down to your elements to seek what you hide, just to be sure. Not now. I know when there is nothing left to find.’
The man did not relax. A different fear entered his eyes, one of new cruelty — a deception, one of the thousand that the agents of the Holy Inquisition knew and practised. There was no way out for him now — once a mortal man entered the black fortresses, that was the end. All knew that. Everyone.
‘I would tell you,’ he stammered, breaking down into tears, ‘if I could.’
The inquisitor rose from his chair, and his robes whispered around his ornate boots. Fine ceramite armour pieces slid across his body as he moved, each one as black as obsidian, each one edged with a vein of silver. His movements were precise, feline, barely audible despite the power feeds coiled tight inside every segment.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said.
‘Please,’ sobbed the man, slack in his bonds. ‘I would tell you.’
The inquisitor reached for the table on which the testimony parchment had been piled, and pressed a command bead. He looked over the scrolls absently — heaps of yellowed, scaly hides bearing the blood-brown scrawl of scholarly transcription, each one sealed with his own personal sigil of authority.
‘That is all I asked you,’ the inquisitor said, almost to himself. ‘You are free to go. You have done me some service, and you should reflect on that, when you are able, with pride. It is through loyal souls that we are able to do our work.’
The man stared at his interrogator, open-mouthed. Lingering suspicion played across his ravaged features.
The inquisitor glanced over towards him. ‘We’re not monsters. You have nothing more to tell me. If you recall more, you’ll come to me, I’m sure.’
The man began to believe. His eyes started to dart around — at his bonds, at the tools, at the barred door beyond. ‘Do you mean…?’
The inquisitor turned away, moved towards the door. As he approached it, thick iron bars slid from their housings and the armoured portal cracked open. A dull red light bled from the far side, snaking over the dark stone flags of the interrogation room. For a moment, the inquisitor was silhouetted by it, a spectral figure, gaunt and featureless.
‘All we wish for is the truth,’ he said.
Then he moved out into the long corridor beyond. The air was sterile, recycled down through the levels of the Inquisitorial fortress by old, wheezing machines. Black webs of damp caked the flagstones, and the filmy suspensor lumens flickered. An augmetic-encrusted servo-skull hovered down to the inquisitor’s shoulder, bobbing erratically and trailing a thin spinal tail behind it.
‘Hereticus-minoris,’ it clicked. ‘Phylum tertius. Tut, tut.’
At the end of the corridor, a man waited. He wore the thick-slabbed armour of a storm trooper captain, dun-grey, battle-weathered. His face was similarly seasoned, with a shadow of stubble over a blocked chin. His black hair was cropped close to the scalp, exposing tattooed barcodes and ordo battle-honours.
He bowed. ‘Lord Crowl,’ he said.
‘Something keeps him from talking, Revus,’ the inquisitor said. ‘A greater fear? Maybe loyalty. In either case, it is of interest.’
‘Will you break him?’
‘We learn more by letting him go. Assign a watch, mark his movements until you gain the location. I want him alive until then.’
‘It will be done. And afterwards?’
The inquisitor was already moving, his boots clicking softly on the stone as he made his way towards the next cell. ‘Termination,’ he said. ‘I’ll oversee, so keep it contained — I want to see where this leads.’
‘As you will it.’
The inquisitor hesitated before entering the next cell. The sound of panicked weeping could already be made out through the observation grille in the thick door. ‘But I did not ask you, Revus — how is your sergeant, Hegain? Recovered fully?’
‘Almost. Thank you for asking.’
‘Give him my congratulations.’
‘He will be honoured to have them.’
The servo-skull bobbed impatiently. ‘Numeroso. Dally not.’
The inquisitor shot the thing a brief, irritated look, then reached for the armour-lock on the cell door. As he did so, he summoned a ghost-schematic of the next subject’s file, which hovered for a second in an ocular overlay. Reading it, his lips tightened a fraction.
‘I will need my instruments for this one,’ Inquisitor Erasmus Crowl told.
Revus, then went inside.
Terra.
Holy Terra, marvel of the galaxy, heart of wonder. No jewel shone more brightly, no canker was more foul. At its nexus met the fears and glories of a species, rammed tight within the spires and the vaults, the pits and the hab-warrens. Spoil-grey, scored and crusted with the contamination and majesty of ten long millennia, a shrine world that glowed with a billion fires, a tomb that clutched its buried souls close. All the planet’s natural beauty had long since been scrubbed from its face, replaced by the layers upon layers of a single, creeping hyper-city. The sprawl blotted out the once-great oceans and the long-hewn forests under suffocating mountains of rockcrete and plasteel, tangled and decaying and renewed and rebuilt until the accretions stretched unbroken from the deepest chasms to the exalted heights.