They flew back to Courvain, taking the route she was now getting used to — tight through the hive-spires, skimming across the lightless chasms between those mountains of rockcrete. Spinoza pressed her face close to the viewportal, watching specks of humanity marching below. Shift-bells were toiling now, summoning workers from their stations. The communal refectories were opening, and the duty-watches in the cathedrals were changing over. Just as always, the vox-augmitters were hammering out the same messages, and she saw a mechanised throne-walker staggering along at the head of one of the many processions, bearing a cardinal in purple robes. His choristers were heavily altered, with grille-speakers for faces and spiked banner-racks for arms, and they all limped and swayed along, accompanied by pilgrims scourging themselves with barbed neural-whips. Gun-servitors prowled at the procession’s edges, their body-cannons tracking anything that got close.
Crowl’s fortress appeared again in the forward scopes. The flyer slowed, then entered the hangars. Once they were down, the pilot hurried to open the doors, saluting as Spinoza disembarked.
‘I require the keeper of records,’ she said. The pilot bowed, and said he’d show her the way.
They went up from the hangar level, climbing narrow spiral staircases cut deep into the black matter of the fortress, lit only by the bumping pale suspensors that glided over their heads. Once at the destination, the pilot bowed and left her at the doors. She pressed her palm against the authorisation seal, felt the pinprick of a blood-taker, and waited a moment for the analysis to complete.
The doors clunked, clicked, then slid open, revealing a tall lamplit chamber, circular like a well shaft, more than thirty metres across and rising up in a series of terraced levels. Every wall, every surface, was covered with bundles of dry parchment tied with ribbons and sealed with brown wax. Archive servitors, little more than torsos, sinewy arms and fibre-bundles, whirred up and down the rack-faces on long chain-pulls, their spindly claws reaching for records, replacing them, spinning around, plunging through the chamber’s central void.
As Spinoza entered, she saw a withered woman clad in faded, patched robes. Half her face was augmetic, and the rest was aged by service under artificial light and deprived of what passed on Terra for fresh air. Her shrunken face was dominated by a circular oculus that cycled and focused continually. Ironwork fingers the length of a child’s arm protruded from the frayed hems of her sleeves, and her stooped stance was dragged even lower by a heavy linked chain of office hung across bony shoulders. Thick cables ran from plugs in her back and into the jaws of a ring of cogitator columns, keeping her shackled to her station on the floor of the chamber. Whenever she moved, the cables shook and pulsed with strobing slivers of darting electro-pulses.
‘Then you’re his new one,’ the old woman said, smiling to reveal two lines of grey teeth.
‘You are the keeper of records?’ Spinoza asked.
‘I am.’
‘You carry records of serving Ordo Hereticus personnel?’
‘Of course. Whether they’re correct, whether they’re out of date, whether they’re forged — could you tell?’
‘You will show them to me.’
The woman chuckled, and the sagging flesh under her robes wobbled. ‘He told me you’d be stiff. Schola-trained? So was I. A long time ago.’ She shot Spinoza a shrewd look from her one filmy real eye. ‘But the manner won’t get you far here, girl. This is Terr-’
‘Show me the records.’
The woman chuckled again, shaking her head, and shuffled over to the first of the cogitator columns, her cables dragging. ‘I was Yulia Huk, once as young and stiff as you. I like it better here now. It’s best, when you find your place. Come, take a look.’
She had moved in close to one of the cogitators and extended her spike-fingers into its activation nodes. The column shuddered, gouted a wisp of steam, and began to valve-up.
‘Speak the name to me, girl,’ said Huk, licking her dry lips and concentrating on the pict-screen stuck out from the cogitator’s central hub like an insectoid compound eye.
‘Two names: Aido Gloch, interrogator. Quantrain, inquisitor.’
Huk chuckled, and punched at a heavy runewriter keyboard with her unplugged hand. Every input caused the unit to chunter to itself, and green-tinged arcs of electricity spiralled between copper spheres hung high above the stations.
‘So this is a waste, is it not?’ Huk chided, completing the enquiry then turning back to face Spinoza. Once it was done, neural pulses flickered out across the dome, and the archive-servitors started to work, boosting up their chain-pulls to seek parchment bundles. ‘Everyone knows those names. Inquisitor-Lord Flavius Quantrain — I could fill your prayer-chamber with screeds on him, and you’d never squeeze inside to read them.’
‘Then he operates on Terra?’
‘Of course he does. And I know the name of his interrogator too. I know a lot of names. And he has a retinue the size of a small army, and he is in the favour of the High Lords, so if you have a problem with him then best you tell Crowl quickly, and then keep your head down and your armour on.’ Spinoza looked up at the servitors. They were little better than meat-lumps with needle-limbs, diligently probing and siphoning through the rustling leaves before pulling the required documents out and throwing them into their back-mounted storage hoppers.
‘No problem,’ she said. ‘I merely wished to confirm his identity.’
‘Throne, child, he is known everywhere.’ Huk unplugged herself from the cogitator and licked the end of her oil-greased node-fingers. ‘What do you want this for? Just ask Crowl. He can tell you it all. Sometimes he pretends he doesn’t know names. I don’t know why. But he remembers them all — the ones who crossed him, the ones who were honest and the ones who told lies. He is fair, is Crowl.’
Rassilo had said that too.
‘The inquisitor has not made contact with me since this morning,’ said Spinoza. ‘I will no doubt speak to him when he returns.’
Huk laughed then, a vaguely horrifying sound like felines being skinned. ‘Ha! You’ll keep it up. I like that. But don’t let that neck get too stiff, or it’ll crack.’ She limped back across from the cogitator column, just as the first of the servitors began to drop down bearing heavy piles of parchment, filling up a shaky-looking gurney. ‘He’ll test you, because he wants to see if you can weather it, and I don’t doubt he sees something interesting there under that stiffness. Right now, all you see is this place and its shadows, and he does not talk like the ones you’re used to, and you think this is some kind of purgatory, but you and I were made to serve in purgatory so the others don’t have to. They will all die for Crowl, in here. I would, if he asked me. But he hasn’t yet. And he wasn’t always alone like he is now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come now, you think things have always been this way?’
The last of the bundles slapped down onto the gurney, and Spinoza saw how many of them there were. The dust hung in clouds above them, fine and settling, kicked up as the chained servitors sped back up into the heights of the archive to their endless task-rotas.
‘You will send them to my quarters,’ Spinoza said. ‘There are other names I need reports on, and I will send you requests.’
‘Do that!’ said Huk, sounding delighted. ‘The more obscure the better.’ Then she came closer, and Spinoza smelt her odour — a mix of congealed machine unguents and halitosis. Huk extended a metal hand towards her, though fell short of actually touching. ‘I hardly remember the schola now,’ she murmured. ‘Perhaps, when your time allows, if you come again, you can remind me how it was. I was there, just like you. I was Yulia Huk, before… all this.’