Crowl took it, rolled it in his palm. ‘Vox-capsule,’ he said.
Gorgias hovered lower, fascinated. ‘Ordo Xenos,’ it voxed.
But then Revus was backing up further, his weapon trained on the closed portal. ‘Incoming signa-’ he started.
The doors slammed open, squealing on corroded runners. Something serpentine writhed on the far side before bursting towards the gap, a hydra of metal links, thrashing in a frenzy. The tech-priest magos swelled into focus, multi-limbed, clad in thick bronze-plate armour over a hollowed-out skeleton of iron, and swathed in robe-strips of Martian-red. Multiple eyes, green as burning emeralds, glowed in the dark from under a tattered cowl — and then the creature was inside the chamber, unravelling, uncoiling and extending until it towered over them. Mechadendrites unfurled, revealing circular saws, rotating claws and needle-hammers.
‘Remain static!’ it bellowed, the sound coming from grilles implanted across the creature’s chest. ‘Weapons down! Surrender selves!’
On return to Courvain, Spinoza did as she was bid and took the esoteric readings from her auspex and handed them to the chirurgeon Erunion, who seemed, in addition to his role as flesh-flenser, to be the one to whom anomalous tech was submitted.
‘I am a lover of systems,’ he told Spinoza, taking up the auspex data and feeding it with some care into his own diagnostic apparatus. ‘Human bodies, cogitator innards, binaric sequences. They’re all the same to me.’
Spinoza had smiled, or attempted to. There was something wholly unsavoury about the old man, with his pink eyes, his wattle-neck, his unwavering stare. ‘If you unearth anything,’ she said, ‘you have my vox-access.’
Then she left him to his slabs and his machines, happy to be away from the smell of antiseptic and ritual oils. She went next to her own chambers, where more files awaited her attention. Some were the ones from Huk, some she had brought from Rassilo detailing actions in the Boreates sector. After ingesting a regulation nutrient-boost to maintain alertness, followed by a caffeine slug, she started to work through them, reading official report after official report. All were in the format she was used to — headed with devotional mottos, followed by cross-references to other investigations in other archives, most untraceable, then transcripts of interrogations punctuated with redacted sections and unintelligible responses. The latter became more frequent as the transcripts went on, until, with grim inevitability, they ended with the formal expression qui exspiravit and the monologues terminated.
There was little to learn. Rassilo’s agents had uncovered much the same information as they had — the False Angel’s exact location was unknown, but he was operating in the underhives. He would lead them out of darkness, they said, against the forces that oppressed them, for the authorities cared nothing for the travails of the weak and the sick. They always denied responsibility for the flesh-breaking, claiming other hands had been at fault — at least until the tools were applied and the truth began to flow. Some repented fully under scrutiny; others remained defiant, repudiating the worship of the Emperor and all His works. Those were the ones whose torment was prolonged. As she read the accounts, Spinoza found herself nodding in approval at the expert work of the truth-finders.
By the time she turned to the papers forwarded to her by Crowl, the chronos showed that the day was waning. With every passing hour her impatience to be doing grew, and she almost pushed them aside in favour of assembling her kill-team right away and leaving the citadel. With some reluctance, she reached for the topmost sheaf, and started to read. Huk had been diligent, and the material was artfully arranged. Halfway down the second folio, she suddenly halted. She read it again. Then, only then, she reached for her comm-bead.
‘Sergeant, ensure your squad is assembled for immediate dispatch,’ she commanded. ‘I will be with you shortly.’
She placed the vellum sheaves back in their leather pouches, all except the last one, which she rolled tight and took with her. Then she reached for her combat-helm and mag-locked it to her armour. Last of all was Argent, suspended over the altar in the corner of her chambers. She took the crozius up reverently, mouthing the words Erastus had taught her — to the glory of Him on Earth — and stowed it carefully at her belt. The weight of it was an instant reassurance, a testament to the power and resilience of humanity’s finest.
She should have felt a greater drag of fatigue, but somehow her muscles felt tauter, her tread lighter. The prospect of action again, on her own initiative and in search of a target she understood, was a powerful motivation.
Hegain was waiting for her in the main hangars. Clad in combat armour, his wounds were invisible, but a livid scar was visible under the flipped visor of his helm.
‘You are recovered sufficiently?’ she asked.
‘Absolutely, yes I am.’
‘You seem to make a habit of picking up damage.’
‘Indeed so it is, lord! Twice in short time. But that is the business, is it not, and I do not mind it. And others had it worse. It’ll do us good to spill some blood for it, and return the pain they gave us.’ Then he grinned. ‘But I saw it, lord. I saw the Custodian. Just for an instant, before he laid me low, but it would have been worth the dying, had he meant to end me, just to witness it. Nothing so fast, nothing so strong. I wish you could have been… Forgive me. Time is pressing.’
‘Just so, sergeant,’ said Spinoza, striding towards the prepped Nighthawk. The rest of Hegain’s ten-strong squad clipped to attention and fell in behind her. ‘We fly for Boreates. You will pilot.’
The squad buckled up, the doors slammed closed, and the turbines powered. Soon they were back into the air, boosting above the clogged streets and into the clogged airways. Hegain pushed the craft hard, sweeping and tilting between the heavy traffic flows.
‘More than ever of them,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘As it should be. They are preparing for the Rites.’
Hegain nodded. ‘I know it. There’ll be blood on the streets before sundown.’
Spinoza opened up a comm-link to Crowl. Just as she anticipated, the far end buzzed with static — he had warned her that Skhallax would be impenetrable.
‘Lord Crowl,’ she voxed, using it anyway. ‘I approach Boreates castrum sextus, following intelligence from the archives. Insertion point designated, pontius novus, overwatching main entrance maws. Will report in two hours when subjects sighted.’
Hegain shot a brief, questioning look at her, then returned to his flying.
Already the skies were darkening to their night-red. The spire trunks were deepening to black, strung across with their glittering necklaces of internal lumens. The western sky was aflame, a tortured wash of glowing cloudbanks, streaked with the dark trails of arbitrator crowd-control lifters.
‘So you have the coordinates,’ said Spinoza.
‘Yes I do have them. But, and I only ask this for enlightenment, I have seen no intelligence on this place. What can we expect by way of tactical deployment? Is this one of their centres?’
Spinoza looked straight ahead, watching as the towers swept past, their darkening faces rolling by in a shadowy blur of speed.
‘Fly steady, sergeant,’ she said.
Soon Boreates loomed ahead of them. It was a spire complex — a cluster of nine great towers linked by ridged transit bridges impaled high up their sides. There had once been a vogue for such monstrous conurbations in the distant past, spearheaded by the mega-urbanite Corbus and his visions of walkways in the sky, but the clusters of linked spires proved an even greater magnet for violence and squalor than the usual lone-spire pattern, and it was said their advocate had been executed during the bloody reign of the Administratum Master Tjemen, reputedly buried alive within the foundations of one of his colossal follies.