Once inside, thick blast shutters closed over them both, sealing them within an environment-type she was familiar with. The walls were black, glossy, embossed with litanies from major Ministorum devotion screeds. The sealed atmosphere was filtered, pulling out the worst of the filth but exposing the other aromas of an ordo fortress — warding incense, surgical chemicals, the lingering human excretions of fear.
They descended steep flights of stairs. They passed robed scribes, their faces hidden under heavy synthwool cowls, shuffling between scriptoria with dusty bundles of parchment clasped under their arms. Servo-skulls blundered through the shadows, chittering mindlessly. Echoing clanks, origin indeterminate, rose up from the depths below.
Spinoza took in the detail. Tur’s demesne had been different. He had been a crusading inquisitor, as most were, forever tracking the void in search of deviation, and so his travelling entourage had been extensive — assassins, gun-servitors, priests, together with standing response arrangements with three separate chambers of the Adepta Sororitas. As a result, Tur’s permanent base of operations, on the death world of Regita V, had been an echoing, half-empty place, visited only to consult the archives or interrogate the most challenging of subjects.
But this fortress was very much occupied, very much in use. Spinoza could hear the overlapping whisper of leather-soled sandals, hundreds of them, moving from one candlelit chamber to the next. She could sense the press of warm bodies above and below her, teeming like flies on rotting sugar, stuffed tight, running down level after level, until the holding chambers were reached, and despair was the only emotion left.
Revus showed her to a pair of closed wooden doors, finely made but sparsely adorned. Over the doorway was a brass death’s head, spotted with patina, under which was inscribed the High Gothic Servitio Aeternam Ad Mortem.
‘I will leave you here, interrogator,’ he said, bowing.
‘You do not smile much, captain,’ Spinoza said.
‘This is Terra, interrogator,’ he said, shrugging, and withdrew.
Rassilo had said the same thing. It seemed to be something of a mantra, This is Terra, used when no further explanation could be given.
Before she could reflect on that further, the doors before her opened, swinging silently on hidden hinges.
The chamber beyond was lit poorly by a few suspensor lumens. Just as elsewhere, there were no external windows. The entire place felt as if it might have been buried underground.
Her new master sat beneath two great iron candelabras, robed in silver-lined black, his face illuminated from below by the flickering green of a data-slate. Above his shoulder hovered a servo-skull, its single red eye glowing in the gloom.
‘Closer,’ he said.
She took in more details as she approached, automatically appraising, judging, filing. The inquisitor was tall, gaunt, clad in extremely fine armour. His skin was pale and ridged with a faint crust of old scar tissue.
‘Thank you for your summons, lord,’ Spinoza said, coming to stand before him.
‘Nothing to thank me for. And call me Crowl.’ The man’s voice was dry as a gnawed bone, unfiltered by vox enhancement. He pressed an armoured finger to the data-slate, and the green light flickered out. ‘You spoke to Rassilo?’
‘I did.’
‘She’ll have given you a file on me.’ Crowl smiled, and it made his pale face flex strangely. ‘Read it yet?’
‘I have seen no file.’
‘Good answer. Sit down.’
There was a heavy seat, carved like a throne, opposite Crowl’s. Everything in the chamber had the weight of age on it. Spinoza did as she was bid, trying to work out how much of the inquisitor’s display was genuine and how much feigned.
‘I’ve been following your career,’ Crowl said. ‘I suppose it’s now that I tell you what a good man Tur was, and how sorry we are that he died like that. But he wasn’t, was he?’
‘He was an excellent inquisitor.’
‘That’s possible too. Did you conduct many actions?’
‘I think I earned my position.’
‘I agree.’ Crowl’s forehead was lit by the soft blush of red from the servo-skull’s hovering presence. ‘You were tutored on Astranta. You must like rain.’
‘Then you know it?’
‘A long time ago. What did they teach you there?’
‘Everything that I needed to know.’
‘To love the Imperium, I suppose, which endures forever.’
‘Of course.’
‘What would you say if I told you that it was a lie, and that nothing lasts forever?’
Crowl’s speech was rapid, his mouth moving economically. Spinoza could see how that might unsettle an interrogation suspect, and resolved to study the auditory patterns later.
‘Then I would call you heretic,’ she replied, ‘and have you terminated.’ ‘Good again,’ Crowl said. ‘But down here, every spire has a million tongues, and every tongue is forked against its neighbours. We tell them to inform on their own kind, and they do. All the time. If I wanted, I need never leave this tower, and still they’d find their way down here, all ripe for destruction. You’d be busy, if you terminated them all.’
‘Better to die, than to-’
‘-infect an innocent. You’d be burning the bodies of liars. They come to us because they’re jealous, lustful, or their minds have gone. I had a man tell my processors his own mother had fallen to the dark. He wanted to take her hab-unit. Three metres square, stinking like a grox-pen, underground, unheated. But it would have been his.’
‘I hope he was punished,’ said Spinoza.
‘Nothing I could devise would have been worse than the life he’d made for himself.’ Crowl leaned forwards. ‘Here’s the point, interrogator. There are witches on Terra, but to see them, you have to filter out the noise. Pay no attention to the voices you can hear. Pay attention to the ones you can’t.’
‘I shall heed the warning.’
Crowl laughed, a dry chuckle. ‘Maybe you even will, in time.’
‘Ignoro, child,’ rasped the servo-skull suddenly, whining as it gained loft. ‘Filth toto mundo. Burn-burn.’
Spinoza raised an eyebrow.
‘This is Gorgias,’ said Crowl.
‘The skull has a different philosophy to yours, then,’ said Spinoza.
‘It’s good to be faced with contrary views. Some of the time. Now, are you ready?’
‘Give the order.’
Crowl got to his feet. ‘I conducted an action yesterday,’ he said, gesturing for Spinoza to join him, and they walked back towards the doors. ‘A man. He had the mark. You know it? When you sense it, like a smell. I almost put him to the trials, but he was resisting me. Most of the time my presence alone is enough to induce terror, but he was ready to face more of it before he broke. So that made me curious, and I let him go.’
The doors opened. Revus was waiting on the other side, his armour now fully sealed and his black-visored helm in place. Behind him were six others of the unit. The storm troopers offered salute, and stood aside to let them pass.
‘Captain Revus tracked him,’ Crowl went on, moving into the corridor. ‘The subject resisted temptation for a while, but they always give in, sooner or later, and so he led us to his minders. Someone has power over him, and I wish to know why.’
‘What do you intend?’ Spinoza asked.
‘Cut out the den, find someone who knows something, bring them back here for a quiet conversation.’ Crowl sniffed. ‘There’s something stirring out there, I think.’
‘And Sanguinala is coming.’
‘You noticed that? Keep up, Spinoza — I want you close on this. It’ll be a good introduction to the glory of our infinite city.’