‘I yearn only to serve again.’
Rassilo closed the file and laid it on her lap. ‘You’ve been asked for by the Inquisitor Erasmus Crowl — do you know the name?’
Spinoza shook her head.
‘Perhaps not the master I would have chosen for you, but I cannot refuse him. He has been here too long, alone, but no servant of the Throne is more dedicated. He will drive you hard, in his own way, but he is fair, and you will learn much if your ears and eyes stay open.’
Spinoza’s expression never flickered. She remembered the killing fields of Forfoda, the glory of the Space Marines: unstoppable, a living wall of gold set against the parapets of faithlessness.
‘What does he require of me?’ she asked.
‘He has no retinue,’ said Rassilo. ‘For years he never demanded one. Now he wishes for an acolyte. Why? I do not know. It is his right, though, and I suppose he judges your qualities will balance his own.’
‘I will learn what I can.’
Rassilo smiled. ‘You need not hide your feelings, interrogator. This station will not last forever. Acquit yourself well here, and there are those in the ordo who will notice.’
‘My apologies, I did not mean-’
‘You are young, you have ambition.’ Rassilo clicked her fingers again. ‘Your time will come. In the meantime, let me make your path a little easier.’ The dwarf-servitor waddled back into the room, this time towards Spinoza. In its chubby grey hands was another file, bound with snapwire and sealed with a thick dollop of wax. The servitor held it up and gazed at Spinoza with a vacant, dumbly sorrowful expression.
Spinoza took the file. It was marked in the ordo routine cipher: Crowl, E., O.H. 4589-643.
‘Read it,’ said Rassilo. ‘It will assist your introduction.’
Spinoza looked up at her. ‘Is this…’ she started. ‘Does he know?’
‘I doubt it.’ Rassilo leaned forwards in her chair. Her armour-plates were artfully made, and moved like folds of fabric around her. ‘Consider it a gift made in recognition of sacrifice. This is Terra, child — one gift given, another returned.’
Spinoza looked down at the file, and ran her finger down its spine. The servitor stalked off again, its bare grey feet tottering across the wooden floor.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Rassilo waved that away. ‘I appreciate your vision of service. We talk and talk — puritans, radicals, whatever that means — but ignore the real divisions. We need those whose blood is hot.’
Rassilo rose from her seat, and Spinoza followed suit. The interview was at an end. The two of them walked to the door, Rassilo ahead, Spinoza following. Before taking leave, Rassilo embraced her formally, then studied her a final time.
‘There are many battlefields, interrogator,’ she said. ‘This is just another one — just as deadly, just as noble. Remember that.’
Spinoza nodded.
‘I will,’ she said.
CHAPTER TWO
From Rassilo’s tower, within sight of the Palace walls, Spinoza took an air shuttle to travel south. The pilot wore a dark grey uniform bearing the ordo symbol — a bronze skull superimposed on the Inquisitorial ‘I’ device. As she boarded, she glanced at his neck just above the stiff collar and invoked the filter over her left iris. A false-colour security tattoo showed up on his flesh: barcode, the reference number, operational history.
‘Location, interrogator?’ he asked as she took her seat next to him.
‘Down-grid, Salvator sector, 456-42-Delta-Delta,’ she said, securing herself.
The air shuttle powered up from the pad, its landing gear folding inwards as it turned on a wave of superheated downdraught.
Spinoza looked out of the nearside portal. The airspace around them was thick with boiling tox-spirals, twisting up from the cityscape below. The shuttle pushed up into regulated airspace — the preserve of Adeptus Arbites, the Inquisition and other exempted Imperial agents — and the craft’s macroturbines opened up.
Below them, a thousand lesser aircraft plied filth-trailed passages from spire to spire, feeding the gritty haze that shrouded the depths below. Marker-lumens, red and filmy, blinked by the million, faint beacons amid a sea of perpetual murk.
Above them, just visible against the bone-grey of the sky, were the shadows of the sentinel watch-stations, hanging in low orbit, each crammed with listening devices and augur batteries, forever scanning. Above them in turn were the behemoths of the defence grid, some as old as the Imperium itself, and above them, out into the icy vacuum, were the voidships — millions of them, embarking, arriving or engaged in ceaseless patrols.
Spinoza had served with Tur on major hive worlds, but the multitudes here were still numbing. She looked down, watching the airborne fleets mingle and congest, and knowing that below, far below, groundcars and grav-transits were crawling through stacked-deep tunnels and catacombs, ferrying far more souls than could ever hope to afford privileged aboveground passage. She also knew that what she witnessed was the same on every single square kilometre of the world’s surface — there were no forests, no seas, just an unbroken press of spires, hab towers, temples, gaols, crypts and garrisons, grasping and throttling the entire globe in a vice of iron and rockcrete.
As they travelled south, the monumental profile of the Outer Palace finally dipped below the horizon. The tips of the spires below them became less ornate, the film of smog thicker. The background stench of unwashed humanity, always present on Terra, became more pungent. They were heading into less exalted zones.
Eventually the pilot brought the air shuttle down, spinning it on its axis as it descended past the tower-crowns. The light around them faded, and the flanks of the spires rose up on all sides, dark with age and pollution. Directly below, less imposing than the colossal constructions soaring up around it, was another tower — coal-dark, buttressed and crenellated in the classical gothic style. Steep-angled roofs and stacks of age-darkened blast shielding gave the impression of a rambling, tottering mortuary, archaic and lit from within by strange fires. At its summit was a wide landing platform, ringed with las-batteries and marked with an ordo skull sigil.
The shuttle touched down and the doors released, ushering in a waft of hot, astringent air. Spinoza disembarked, to be greeted by a storm trooper captain, clad in battle-armour though helmless. A team of servitors limped across the platform to retrieve her sealed void-crates from the shuttle’s hold.
As standard, as she walked, she scanned the man before her.
Physique human-normal, she noted. Heavily built. Trace stance-type indicates non-progena intake. Hellpistol, combat-knife. Nine visible combat honours, three of them exemplar militaris. Impressive.
‘Welcome to Courvain, interrogator,’ the captain said, making the sign of the aquila. ‘Captain Maldo Revus, personal attachment commander to the Lord Crowl. The inquisitor awaits within.’
As they walked towards the exit ramp, hot wind whipped across the platform, stirring up the films of fine dust that coated every exposed surface. Ordo gun-drones whined overhead, tracking every aircraft within a few hundred metres of the fortress. The sounds of the infinite world-city rose up around them, above and below, a dull roar like the crash of the planet’s long-forgotten waves.
‘You have served here long, captain?’ she asked, wishing to see if his answers matched the information she had already processed.
‘Eight years,’ said Revus.
‘That is good,’ Spinoza said. To stay alive that long in the company of an active inquisitor was rare, and indicated either great luck or capability. ‘That is very good.’
Revus didn’t reply. Perhaps he considered the subject beneath him.