‘I’m sorry, Spinoza,’ Crowl said, stooping to enter. ‘Truly sorry.’
That wrong-footed her. ‘Ah, for-?’
‘You never received your promised support.’ Crowl stalked over to her cot — the blankets pulled tight, the devotion-books placed neatly on the thin pillow — and sat on the edge. His long hands flexed as he gestured for her to sit, then placed them on his knees. ‘You probably heard — Revus ran into trouble, and it took me away.’
‘I do not expect you to chaperone me, lord.’
‘It’s a twisted thicket out there, Spinoza. One path leads into another, and then to nowhere, perhaps, and then back out again.’ He looked at the stacks of parchment. ‘Extra study?’
‘I encountered one of Inquisitor Quantrain’s agents.’
‘The giant?’
‘Aido Gloch.’
‘They must have fed that one grox-flesh as a child. Wholly unnatural. What did he want?’
‘The woman — the target of the pursuit — they call her Falx, and they are hunting her too. She is one of the cabal, connected to its masters, so he said.’
‘I don’t suppose he offered to join forces?’
‘I did not raise it.’
‘Good. This will not be a priority for them. Quantrain has fingers in all sorts of places, but I doubt he’d ever show his face down here. Although, you can never be sure who’ll suddenly come out of the tunnels.’ Crowl smiled ruefully. ‘See, I met a Custodian today. The first of my life, and in all probability the last.’
‘I thought they never-’
‘Yes, it’s been a day of surprises. And that’s why I needed to speak to you.’ Crowl leant forwards, and appeared to wince as his shoulders moved. ‘These gangs, they’re killers and I wish to run them down just as much as you, but something else is happening. Revus has been doing some work for me after an unusual object turned up in a processing morgue, and it’s begun to worry me. There was a body, a scribe charged with recording landing records, and something he noticed seems to have got him quite badly killed. We have the name of a ship, one he thought was important, and I need to look into it. One of my colleagues from the Ordo Xenos had the same thought and has now disappeared too — hence the appearance of this Custodian, who would not tell me precisely why he was taking an interest
in all of this, which is to be expected, but makes me worry even more.’ Spinoza took it all in. ‘Do you have a location on the ship?’
‘It’s called the Rhadamanthys, and it’s still at low anchor. It achieved orbit nineteen standard days ago and is due for departure in three weeks. I’ve been doing my own studying. From what we can tell, it’s totally unremarkable — a deep-void bulk carrier owned by a major import cooperative and chartered to the Guilles Frethe corporation. I’m aware of no great corruption in this organisation, beyond the usual necessary to turn a living. Their proctoress-ordinary has been conducting an affair with a canon of a Ministorum compliance chapter for two years, and there are staff members with close links to cartels controlled by the Chartist Speaker, which all seems prudent enough if you want to negotiate landing permits. But that’s the name we have. It’s all we have. I want to take a closer look.’ Spinoza looked down at the floor. ‘And you wish for me to join you?’
‘Yes, that would be good.’
Despite herself, that was welcome. ‘And the Angel’s Tears?’
‘They’re important, like I say, but what leads do you have, right now?’ ‘There is work to be done.’
‘Exactly. And I could use you, Spinoza. I could use that damned maul, which I suspect you wield quicker than anything I could.’
‘I do not wish this Falx to evade me,’ said Spinoza.
‘Understood, but do not let it become personal. They win a small victory every time they insert a splinter under our nail. You understand?’
‘She is dangerous.’
‘So are you.’
Spinoza looked up again, and met Crowl’s steady grey eyes. ‘What do you hope to achieve?’ she asked.
‘I have no idea. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. That’s the chance of it.’
It was impossible, just then, not to contrast that with how Erastus had been. A Space Marine was a soldier, and everything he did was as a soldier did — objective defined, target isolated, result understood. This was speculation, hunches, based on little more than a feeling. Perhaps that was how it had to be, though she doubted Tur would have agreed. Different wars, different tactics.
‘But you must have some idea,’ she said.
Crowl hesitated before replying, as if weighing up how much to take her into confidence. ‘The Custodian didn’t say much,’ he said eventually. ‘Only that the elect of the Ministorum will reach the Eternity Gate in four days. Why did he say that? I don’t know. Everyone on Terra is aware. There will be millions there to see it, and hundreds of thousands of guards watching them, and guards watching the guards. The Companions will be there, Titans and enforcers and assassins. It will be the most absurdly militarised point in the galaxy for that one day, and you would have to be quite insane to contemplate taking advantage of it.’ He met her gaze, and his own was as hard as ouslite. ‘But then, there’s a lot of that about.’
‘They are getting weapons,’ Spinoza said.
‘From somewhere, yes. But would it not be the greatest of chances, if our friends in the Angel’s Tears were connected to this new thing? That would be neat and helpful, and I don’t think life is neat and helpful. It’s never been that way for me, anyway.’ Crowl exhaled, and his tight cheeks flexed, betraying the fine-lined limits of rejuve therapy. He got up, pulling his cloak around his armour. ‘I have a transport being primed. Will two hours rest suffice?’
It wouldn’t. She was still suffering the effects of the long warp passage, exacerbated by the exertions of the past few days, compounded by the enervating effects of Terra’s destructive environment. Ten hours would not have been enough.
‘I will be ready, lord.’
‘Cro-’ he began, then smiled in defeat. ‘Very well. It’ll be good to have you with me.’
Then he was gone, limping through the doorway with a brush of cloak-hem and a thrum of power armour.
Once the door was closed, Spinoza looked over at the cot. The pristine blanket had an indentation on it now, a faint rumple in the coarse wool. That might have been an irritant, had she planned on making use of it. But that had never been her intention.
She pushed the parchment stacks aside, the ones from the archives that she had been willing to show her master. Underneath were the folios given to her by Rassilo.
‘Enhance,’ she commanded, and the overhead suspensor lumen swelled into brightness, illuminating the script of a tattered leaf entitled ‘Crowl, E.,
O.H. - What We Know, and What We Do Not.’
Spinoza leaned forwards, resting her elbows on the metal slab, and resumed her study.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Making the leap from solid earth and into the void beyond had once been beyond the dreams of the insane. Generations of soil-dwellers, scratching about amid the dirt of aeons, prisoners of gravity, had looked up at the stars and called them gods, knowing that they would forever be far out of reach.
No longer. Though so much else had been forgotten, the means to break the bonds of the planetary was still commonplace within the Imperium, so much so that even a modestly endowed mercantile combine would have a dozen system-runners in its orbital sheds, plying the short hop between terrestrial landing stages and local orbit, ready to rendezvous with the true giants of the deep. The atmosphere of the Throneworld was nigh as congested as its urban surfaces, scored and re-scored by the crossover trails of a million near-space vessels. There had ceased to be much significant difference between the atmospheric and the true-vacuum zones — they were just steadily rarefied sections of the same world-city, extending up from the darkest chasms, out beyond the turrets and into the high-air stations, and then further out, back into darkness, up to where the mighty orbital plates slowly gyrated in the harsh light of an unfiltered sun.