Crowl looked at the riches, the abundance of natural growth, and a part of him recoiled. ‘Strange,’ he remarked, ‘how judges always seem to have access to coin.’
Navradaran walked over to the pyramid’s eastern face, pushing past the overhanging foliage, his heavy boots clinking on the metal floor.
‘I ask you again, inquisitor,’ he said, halting as he reached the great sloping armourglass panels, facing the eternal city in all its murky grandeur. ‘Why did you come?’
‘I gave you my answer,’ said Crowl, drawing alongside him and looking out at the same view. They were a long, long way up. Jagged pinnacles rose above a seething mat of grey. A cargo-hauler was burning its way slowly north, underslung with cargo modules, trailing lines of inky residue behind it. Over to the north, the clouds were building into turbulent snags of
darkness, as if they might break into rain.
But it never rained.
‘They would not have harmed him,’ said Navradaran. ‘Not once they realised whom he worked for. You would have got him back, sooner or later.’
Crowl smiled dryly. ‘Your faith in them exceeds mine. What did you want him for?’
‘He had entered the Triad spire.’
‘Triad is a long way from the Palace. I thought you never left it.’
‘Where then does His Palace end?’ asked Navradaran.
‘The Imperium Entire is His Palace,’ said Crowl, remembering the line from the catechisms. ‘I always supposed that was figurative.’
‘Know this — if there were a threat capable of harming His realm, I would travel to the edge of time and space to run it down.’
‘What threat?’
Navradaran turned to face Crowl, his wing-marked helm glinting dully from the weak sunlight. ‘A thousand ships enter orbit every hour. A million eyes watch them, and yet even the most vigilant may be blinded. Twenty-one days ago a formal request was made to the Provost Marshal to halt all Terra-inbound vessels and subject them to Tier Four scrutiny.’
Crowl raised an eyebrow. ‘Now? Before the Feast?’
‘The request was granted.’
‘Who made it?’
‘Inquisitor-Lord Hovash Phaelias, the Ordo Xenos.’
‘So that’s who that is.’
‘You had not heard the name?’
‘I don’t mingle much. What was he after?’
‘I wish to learn this. The inquisitor and members of his retinue last made traceable contact with authorities eighteen days ago. Since then, silence. But then, after the silence, something else. There have been bodies left, close to the inner walls of the Palace where none but the sanctified may tread. Mutilated bodies, marked with excruciation. This is a great blasphemy. I sent servants to scour the approaches. They found nothing, but heard tales of flesh-gangs working in the underhives. The False Angel — you know this name?’
‘I’ve heard it.’
‘Now we reach the limits of what is known. An inquisitor orders orbital quarantine, for reasons unknown, then disappears. Organised killing begins, with signs of ritual debasement, and stories of heretical movements grow in number. I place these events together.’
‘Correlation does not imply causation.’
‘Your pardon?’
‘An old superstition. Go on.’
‘I took it upon myself to study the eyes that watch the voidcraft. Phaelias believed that something of importance had been due to arrive from orbital transfer, and if he was correct in this then the Chartist guilds were capable of corroborating it. We listened, we waited. I commandeered the services of this precinct-fortress, and that brought us to Triad. When my agents reported the intervention of an outside force in Holbech’s jurisdiction, I believed it might be him. When I encountered your captain, I remained of that conviction.’
‘So you forcibly took him in.’
‘He disabled six of those under my command, crippling two.’
‘That’s what we trained him for. You’ve spoken to him?’
‘We had barely begun. He was… defiant.’
Crowl smiled and pressed his fingers of his right hand up against the armourglass, watching the condensation bobble over the ceramite plates of his armour. The hauler had almost disappeared by then, sliding into the smog-sea that its own burners fed. More atmospheric bulkers appeared on the eastern horizon to replace it, members of an endless procession, eternally moving from maw-depot to maw-depot.
He couldn’t see the street levels below — too far down, occluded by the urban fug. For a moment, locked away in such rarefied air, he might forget who existed in those lightless metal valleys, jostling, sweating, scrabbling for air.
‘But that’s not enough,’ he said, softly.
‘What do you mean?’
Crowl turned back to him. ‘You tell me of bodies and of heretics. My interrogator chides me for chasing scraps like these, and I have the commission to do it. But you. You.’ He let his gauntlet fall from the streaked glass. ‘You are as close as I will ever come to the gods of old. What have you seen? What did your augurs tell you, to bring you out from
the Palace?’
Navradaran did not answer immediately. When he did reply, the voice was just the same as it had been before — deep, rolling, muffled behind that great golden mask.
‘I wish to know what became of Phaelias,’ he said. ‘I wish to know why there is a mockery of the Angel breaking flesh as the Feast approaches. If you discover these things, you will tell me.’
Crowl smiled to himself. ‘How will I find you?’
‘The Feast concludes in four days,’ said Navradaran. ‘On the final day, the elect will march upon the Eternity Gate itself for the final rite of remembrance, and then all my vigilance must be there. So you have that long, no more.’
‘A simple task, then.’ He turned away from the cityscape and ran his eyes across the sweltering plant-life. ‘I will take my troops back with me. I trust the judges here will wish to let any outstanding grievances drop.’
‘There are no grievances.’
‘Then our business here is concluded.’ Crowl extended a hand. ‘Whatever else transpires in this, it was the highest honour to meet you.’
Navradaran looked down at the proffered gauntlet, bewildered. He made no move to follow suit.
‘Four days,’ he said, turning away.
CHAPTER TEN
Spinoza did summon a flyer, and it came for her within ten minutes, weaving through the swarming skies. The pilot did not ask what she was doing so far from the last drop-point, nor why she had neglected to report in immediately after the failed action. Spinoza considered asking for news of Crowl and Hegain’s kill-team, but decided against it. Either the pilot did not know, which made the enquiry pointless, or he did, in which case it was shameful to ask.
They took off, turning east, and powered up into the labyrinth once more. The day was waning, though there was no lessening of activity in the multilayered web of accessways and transit corridors. As the mottled grey sky fell away to a dull gloaming, a massive land-train trundled out of a tunnel below and across a many-tiered viaduct, spewing soot from banked smokestacks as its armoured tracks churned. Bulky cargo-cars clattered past, one after the other, following the heavy locomotive-unit as it powered along the long bend, across more soaring arches and into another tunnel mouth several kilometres back into the urban sprawl. Spinoza watched the land-train travel as the flyer climbed higher. By the time they had passed out of range, angling past the shoulder of a twisted comms-node the height of an upended starship, its progress had shown no sign of ending. They might have hovered over that thing for an hour or more and the massive payloads would still be trundling past, just one of thousands of scheduled supply drops for the insatiable appetites of a famished planet.