Even helmed and armoured, the shock was terrible. Spinoza felt herself spinning wildly, lost in a whirl of limbs and stars. For all that her armour attempted to compensate, the sudden plunge into frigidity took her breath away, and she felt her heart racing. For a moment, as the debris wheeled past her and her sound-world disappeared into a claustrophobic drumbeat of snatched breaths, she could latch on to nothing at all — just circling stars and a sensation of horrific dislocation.
Then the snow-grey arc of Terra’s horizon swam up across her visual field, followed by the immense shadow of the burning Rhadamanthys. She saw Crowl, barely visible in his black armour, sail past her, arms outstretched as if to catch something.
The Spiderwidow loomed up out of the void below them right on schedule, its crew-bay doors open and its thrusters jetting expertly to gather them up. Crowl went in first, before Aneela brought the gunship around to capture Spinoza.
The interrogator hit the far side of the crew-bay at speed, bouncing from the impact and nearly cartwheeling back out into the void. Crowl, already shackled in place, grabbed her as she sailed past, pulled her upright and shoved her unceremoniously into a restraint harness. Gorgias, propelled by its own thrusters, shot into the narrow compartment just as Aneela closed the outer doors and swung the gunship around. Pumped air began to siphon in, restoring the growl of engine noise and the crash of impacting debris.
‘That was too close, lord,’ she chided, strapping herself down, furious at the needless delay.
‘I had full trust in you,’ replied Crowl, perfectly relaxed.
The Spiderwidow was now travelling at full speed, boosting clear of the void-hauler, its cockpit lowering and its plasma drives burning hard. A second later, and a huge blast wave caught them, hurling the gunship into a swirling dive. Heavy clangs made the hull shiver and buckle — big objects were hitting them, careening into them before spinning away planetwards. Their enclosed world tilted on its axis as the grav-compensators lost traction and the Spiderwidow corkscrewed. That lasted for what seemed like many minutes — a wave of impacts that would surely smash the gunship apart and send them all burning up into the toxic airspace below.
Eventually, though, the onslaught abated. Aneela righted the gunship and set them on a stable course. The comm-link crackled open, and her matter-of-fact voice broke out from the cockpit above.
‘That’s created a stir,’ she reported. ‘We have incoming patrol vessels, and a battleship’s turning to gunward.’
‘Evade them, Aneela,’ ordered Crowl, reaching up for the seal on his helm. ‘Get us down before anyone gains a lock. They’ll put this down to an accident.’
Spinoza twisted her own helm free and glared at her master. Adrenaline pumped hard around her system.
‘So was it worth it?’ she demanded, trying hard not to shout the words out loud, half wishing she could reach out and throttle him.
Crowl looked back at her, and smiled.
‘Very much so, Spinoza,’ he said. ‘At last, I think we’re getting somewhere.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Despite her growing exhaustion, sleep did not come easily. Even insulated within Courvain’s thick walls, the clamour from the world outside remained audible. After an hour of attempted mind-calming meditation, Spinoza donned her robes again, left her chamber and went to one of the tower’s many viewing balconies.
It was close to dawn, though the skies were still dark, underlit only by the thousands of fires. The drumbeats had become incessant — a rolling, beating clamour that echoed and re-echoed down the twisting emptiness between the spires.
Spinoza leant against the balcony’s railings. Even in the hour before sunrise, it was still humid. Her throat was dry, and swallowing only brought more filth into her system. Overhead, the permanent cloud cover was angry with reflected flame, a shifting mass of bloody turmoil broken only by the ink-black profile of the world-city’s extremities.
Far below her, the causeways were now entirely occupied with teeming crowds of pilgrims, roaring out their devotion in increasingly frenzied tones. They knew that time was running out — if they were still languishing in Salvator by now then they had little chance of fighting their way anywhere close to the Palace approaches in time. Most of them did not know the way, in any case. If given no guidance, they would soon wander into oblivion, dropping off the face of the world and into one of its many pits of forgetfulness.
The airspace above them was filling up steadily, too. Gaseous blimps plied smoky paths between landing stages, trailing pennant banners with injunctions against vice and exhortations towards piety. Ministorum flyers hovered low on straining grav-plates, their vox-augmitters now tuned exclusively to Sanguinala-specific screeds. More effigies of the fallen primarch, some many metres high, tottered through the sweaty bedlam, given crude masks of gold paint and sporting crooked wings.
Spinoza flexed her muscles, one by one, going through the rituals she had been taught on entry to the Inquisition. It was hard now to conjure up the raw excitement she had felt in those early days, having been plucked from obscurity and taken up into a world of terror and wonder, shown the things that had caused her to experience unmatchable ecstasy, as well as the horrors that had made her retch quietly in private.
She had never considered herself a candidate. There had been others in the schola more obviously suited to the rigours of the Holy Orders, or so she had always supposed. The ones who had highborn family to sponsor them, pulling strings within the cat’s cradle of Imperial diplomacy. For her, the wild orphan without connections, brought into the precincts on a military transport with only the recommendation of an Astra Militarum colonel to her name, the choices had seemed more limited. As her devotion to the rituals had grown, her first ambition had been for the Missionarus Galaxia — inspired by the tales of adventurous piety, she had dreamed of travelling out into the furthest reaches of the galaxy, fuelled by faith, bringing the Emperor’s Light to those wretched scraps of humanity temporarily lost from its embrace. That would have been a worthy life, one that rather than merely guarding the realms of humanity actually expanded it.
It had been rain-soaked night on Astranta when the alternative summons had come. The agent had been burly, armour-clad and taciturn, as if words were not his preferred tools of trade. The schola’s masters had woken her and taken her to the Chambers of Discipline in the north keep, the ones that overlooked the tide-crashed rocks of the Ironfell coastline.
‘Do you love the Emperor?’ the man had asked her, and she, shivering in her nightshift, her fists balled against the cold, had said, ‘With all my mind, with all my heart, with all my soul.’
That, at least, had not changed. Throughout the following years, after leaving the storm-wracked world of her instruction and enduring the tests and the trials, that devotion had not wavered. When she had killed her first human — the two of them alone in that cold cell, his face hooded, her only weapon a blunt knife — she had repeated the mantra to give herself the strength to do it. When she came into contact with her first xenos, a coiled horror of purple segments and curved talons chained up in the cages under Regita’s dungeons, she mouthed the words to herself to keep from vomiting. As she became hardened, tempered, turned from an earnest scholar of the Imperial Cult and into one of its most potent weapons, the words never changed.