This one was circular, thirty metres in diameter, crowned with another dome of sodden brick and stone, a patchwork of old repairs that leaked in dirty cascades. Stalactites, black with age, hung from the roof. The floor was lost under a morass of the same foul water, rimed with chem-yellow foam and studded with more floating bodies.
Revus had already secured the space. Every enemy still drawing breath — three souls only by then — was now isolated against the far wall. Two were abhumans: bloated, over-muscled, their pulpy necks bulging against work-shift collars. They both carried cable-wrapped iron wrenches two-handed, looted from some manufactorum assembly line and converted into primitive shock mauls. The third was human-normal, wearing dirty robes, his head bare and shaved. The same look of almost fanatical loathing lit his scrawny features, but he was weaponless and his hatred was impotent.
They had backed away, those three, until the wall rose up at their backs. Revus’ squad had them pinned, and faint red points of sighting-beams rippled across their blotchy faces.
One of the abhumans was already twitching, its pudgy eyes flashing with panic. As Crowl and Spinoza approached, it broke out, splashing towards the inquisitor. The storm troopers opened up, punching a flurry of las-spears into the oncoming mutant, and it stumbled, crashing into the mire. The foam boiled red around it.
That left two. Only then did Crowl take out his pistol.
‘To cleanse the soul,’ he murmured, aimed, and fired a single bullet.
The robed man was caught in the chest, flung back against the wall and splayed like a spider. The body slipped down into the mire, leaving a long black stain on the crumbling bricks, eyes wide the whole time.
Spinoza looked at Crowl. ‘I thought you wanted him alive, lord?’
None of the storm troopers moved.
‘This is Terra,’ Crowl said, strolling up to the trembling abhuman. ‘I have the one I wanted.’
Only then, walking with Crowl, did Spinoza get close enough to see the surviving mutant’s eyes. They were not as twitchy as the other one’s, not as febrile, although they gave away fear. A lot of fear.
Crowl came up close, heedless of the danger from the looming shock maul. Gorgias hummed overhead them both, chuntering to itself semi-audibly.
‘You’d rather have died without agony,’ Crowl said, addressing the mutant. ‘You’d rather have given up that slave to my knives, and he would have let you do it, too.’
The abhuman looked down at the inquisitor, defiantly, but his jowls quivered. ‘He was a faithful son.’
‘There’s no faith in this place.’
‘You won’t get what you want from me.’
‘No,’ said Crowl, turning to look at Spinoza. ‘But she will.’
Then the abhuman lunged, hammering the shock maul down at Crowl’s exposed head.
Spinoza leapt between them, skidding through the slime to bring her own maul to bear. The two weapons screamed against one another, shrieking with unleashed electric power, before the abhuman’s weapon cracked apart. Spinoza lashed out, left, right, smacking the shards away before pressing her crackling crozius up against the mutant’s chins and driving him back against the wall.
‘Enough, Spinoza,’ said Crowl, coming alongside her and placing a restraining hand on her arm. The stench of burning flesh rose pungently from the abhuman’s charred jowls. ‘But very good. Really, very good. I can see why the Space Marines liked you.’
Spinoza relaxed the pressure, slowly. The abhuman had been surgically altered. Up close, she could see the suture lines. Underneath all that blubber and vat-grown muscle fibre was a human-normal, mutilated and stretched, but with standard mental capacity.
‘How did you know?’ she asked.
‘You get a sense.’ Crowl studied the pseudo-mutant up-close, reaching out to feel the fat-rolls between his fingers. ‘He’s yours now, anyway. Find out what they’re doing here.’
Then he turned, splashing his way towards Revus, who was waiting in silence at the chamber’s edge, his hellpistol trained unerringly on the cult’s sole survivor.
‘All corpses to be preserved,’ Crowl said. ‘Get them sent to Gulagh for processing. I’ll handle the scholarship myself this time.’
Revus saluted. ‘Then cauterise?’
Crowl kept on walking. ‘Yes, captain. Burn it all.’
Gorgias, floating ahead with its eye glowing bloodily, clicked agreement.
‘Affirmativo,’ it chattered, mindlessly. ‘Yes-yes. Combustum. Yes.’
CHAPTER THREE
On Terra, dawn was a meagre thing, a faint lifting of the dark, half-accomplished, leaving semi-night shrouding all but the highest spire peaks.
Spinoza had woken long before the grey creeping daylight, conditioned by her schola training. She had pushed herself from her bunk, shivering as her naked feet touched Courvain’s cold steel floor, then knelt before the altar in the wall.
Then she had prayed, mouthing the Ministorum rites, sticking to the old Pradjia doctrine, the one she had loved as a child, with its old rhythms and replies.
I am weak. He is strength. In Him, I am strong.
I am imperfect. He is perfect. In Him, I am perfected.
She had knelt until her knees had numbed and her wrists ached. Then she had risen, performed the physical exercises, donned her clothing, her armour, and then finally her interrogator’s rosette — a clenched steel fist, crushing a snake with ruby eyes. It was not a full Inquisitorial sigil, and lacked the holographic tell-mark of the ordo, but those who knew what to look for would know what it meant.
Her small chamber had no mirror, but she knew what she would see if she had one brought: a stocky woman, thirty Terran-standard years old, short peroxide-blonde hair, broad features, pale freckled skin, brown eyes. She would see the tight features, the erect stance, the belligerence bubbling under the surface, only tempered by decades of conditioning.
I am unfinished. He is finality. In Him, I am completed.
She looked down at her rosette. It was flecked with blood, and she reached for a rag to clean it. The pseudo-abhuman had died badly, thrashing and screaming at the end. They all died badly under the trials. It didn’t matter how they entered them — confident, terrified, numb — they all ended weeping.
Still, there was knowledge now. She had gained what Crowl had sent her to gain. She had a name — the Angel’s Tears — and the location for two other cells, and half-snippets of data on movements and plans. It was a cabal of sorts, a gathering of malcontents, just as existed on every world in the glorious Imperium, gnawing like rats at the base of civilisation. But they were getting ready for something — an event that the subject knew almost nothing about in detail, only that it was coming, and soon, and required heavy armament if all was to be accomplished. In the end, his bloodied face had almost been ecstatic.
A soft chime sounded at her door.
‘Come,’ she said, reaching for her cloak and pinning it to her shoulder.
A thin girl entered, grey-skinned, clad in a black shift. Her hair was sparse, already beginning to shed. Spinoza guessed she was no more than eighteen standard. She carried a tray laden with food — meatslabs, vitgruel, real fruit.
Real fruit! There were eight grapes, dried almost to raisins, clinging to a black stalk. The girl’s hands shook as she carried the tray, and her sunken eyes never left it.
Spinoza took the tray from her, placed it on the chamber’s only table, then sat. The girl turned to leave.
‘Wait,’ said Spinoza, tearing a strip of meatslab and chewing. ‘How long have you served here?’