‘No point now,’ it crackled, its vox-unit slurring into static. ‘Quantrain could not halt it. What chance you have?’
From the corridor outside came the echoing clang of metal claws on a metal floor, lots of them. Crowl shot a glance at Revus, who shook his head.
Crowl stood, drew Sanguine and placed it up against the magos’ chrome forehead.
‘You were not really very helpful,’ he said, and blew the skull-unit apart.
Then they were running, both of them, with Gorgias swooping in behind, back along the paths and the chambers. Behind them came the rattle of advancing skitarii, and the mingled lumens of their gunsights flared in the broken dark.
‘What now?’ asked Revus, running swiftly but without panic, changing his pistol charge-pack while he ran.
‘Nothing more to be taken,’ replied Crowl, not moving so fluently, his power armour boosting his pain-spiked limbs. ‘Primary tasking — get out alive.’
Spinoza told her everything. She told her of the Custodian’s testimony, of the discovery on the Rhadamanthys, of Crowl’s mission to Skhallax. Throughout it all, Khazad listened, absorbing the information hungrily, studying it for fallacies or inconsistencies.
The two of them had disentangled and limped along the bridge towards a partially sheltered hollow under the shadow of a halfway brace station. Night had fallen fully by then, and the skies burned a sullen, old red. Rampant fires were burning in the open spaces between the great towers, lattices of rubies spread out across the urban vastness. Down amid the endless roar below, klaxons blared from arbitrator squads and Ministorum fervour-bringers.
‘So that is what I know,’ said Spinoza, sitting in the lee of the brace station. ‘How about you?’
Khazad did not respond immediately. She had taken off her helm to reveal a starkly beautiful face, albeit bruised. The assassin had the deep brown skin common to natives of the death world of Shoba. The cult tattoos on her right cheek were plentiful, a riot of her home world’s iconography mingled with the death’s heads and kill-marks favoured by the ordos. Olive-shaped eyes stared out at her with uncanny directness, and a full-lipped mouth remained sullenly closed.
Shoba’s culture was entirely devoted towards the warlike arts of survival. Its male children were taken as aspirants for the Iron Shades Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, and both male and female adolescents were selected for service in the Imperial armies, usually as agents or shock troops for the specialised divisions. No Gothic was spoken on that world, not even amongst what passed for Imperial authority, and so it was always learned late. The difference in syntax made the transition difficult, something that served as a marker for those who knew what to listen for.
‘It is months now,’ Khazad said. ‘My master works on it for long time. We have agent within office of Deputy Speaker of Chartist Captains, high enough to monitor comms between departmentos. For long time he gets nothing, just rumours within Palace. They know Feast is coming. There are cabals recruiting, slaying, close to walls, hard to pin down. And then whisper begins — a weapon, brought in, ready to carry insurrection. They are going to move on from random kills, stage something bigger. We obtain transcripts of coded vox-calls from adept in deputy speaker’s citadel, but no detail, and then he is removed.’
‘When was this?’
Khazad thought for a moment. ‘Three weeks. A little more. We get nowhere, then my master has to talk to Provost Marshal. He is sure something is coming. They order soak-search. Every ship is tested. You know how hard this is to do? Thousands of troops, hundreds of lifters. It gets them scared. Our agent is shut down. The Palace is into kind of panic. They tell me word gets to Custodians — my masters says he speaks to one of them.’
Khazad’s brown eyes flickered a little as she spoke. Her cheeks were hollow, the rings under her lids dark. Spinoza wondered how long it had been since she’d eaten properly, slept properly, or done anything but run and fight.
‘Then we discover it is failed,’ said Khazad. ‘They find nothing. Lord Phaelias remains sure something has broken cordon, begins to scan orbital records. He has savant, Vaskadre, who is good. They are working fast, burning out. I am sent to underhives, to monitor gangs, in case they make delivery ahead of time. I study them, close, and that keeps me out of way. So I do not see it. They are being killed, and I never know.’
‘Who?’
‘All of us. They move quickly. Whoever does it can mobilise force. I do not know when they catch my master. I do not know where he is. Do you?’
‘No. Crowl — my inquisitor — has been following the same trail. He believes a ship came down in Skhallax.’
Khazad pursed her lips. ‘Maybe. Maybe. Fabricator General — he could be in this. We think there are three. Phaelias always thinks there are three.’
Mention of the High Lords made Spinoza instinctively resistant. They were the ultimate power of the Imperium, inviolate and sacred. Crowl’s casual jibes at their expense had offended her, and this speculation was in the same vein.
‘Who killed your comrades?’ Spinoza asked.
‘I do not know.’ Khazad shook her head, and for a moment the shock of it was visible in those brown eyes. ‘An order goes out. We are all targets, make us excommunicate traitoris. They say we are heretics of the gangs, witches, xenos-friends, you name it. Every arm is turned against us. I try to get back to my master, and they nearly get me. Still fast, though. Too fast for them.’
‘Aido Gloch,’ Spinoza said. ‘He said he’d fought you.’
‘Who?’
‘The one you escaped from, when we last met.’
Khazad smiled bitterly. ‘Do not know all the names. When world is after you, you run.’
‘But you followed us. You followed me.’
‘I had to know. Who gives the orders? Who is working to finish task? I follow you, I follow others. There are agents crawling through whole of underhives, you know this? They are all hunting something.’
‘The Angel’s Tears.’
‘Some of them. Others, something else. I think plan has gone wrong. I think things have unravelled. Weapon is not delivered, not to the right place. But I don’t know.’ She shivered. ‘I never learn much.’
Spinoza weighed up the information. Crowl would need to be told. He would need to judge whether it could be trusted, and whether the assassin could be sheltered. Such claims demanded testing, possibly under the trials.
She tested the comm-link, which still buzzed with static. She switched channels to Courvain, with the same result.
Khazad laughed. ‘Too late for that.’ She gestured with her outstretched hand, sweeping across the firelit vistas. ‘It is begun. Rites. Every vox-relay in five hundred kilometres is overloaded. They move to Gate now.’
As if to confirm the limitations of that, Hegain’s voice crackled over the close-range link, distorted but just audible. ‘Lord! Militarum convoy detected as… so you will it but… coming in now, to… trust you are preserved? Please, acknowledge signal when you.’
‘I came to Boreates on advice,’ said Spinoza, looking up at the hive summits that angled around them like the points of a great iron crown. ‘I was told the Angel’s Tears were concentrated here. That was my mission — you were a hypothesis.’
Khazad laughed. ‘So what now? You regret not killing both of us?’
‘I still have my orders, and you are under interdict. Unless there is something specific you can contribute.’
Khazad gave a weary, sceptical look. ‘Hypothesis?’
‘You have been out here a long time.’
The assassin shifted position, a little painfully. Her body must have taken a beating; Crowl had told her Phaelias had gone missing twenty days ago — a long time to be surviving alone in a world roused against you.