The girl looked confused, and it was then that Spinoza realised her error. The girl had always served here. Her parents had always served here. If in the future she obtained a sanctioned mate, then he, and her, and any children would always serve here. Courvain was her world, within the world of the city, within the world that was Terra.
‘What is your name?’
‘Yessika.’
‘You serve the Lord Crowl?’
The girl nodded, warily.
‘In his private chambers?’
A shake of the head.
‘You deliver from the refectories, to the higher levels?’
A nod.
‘You will serve me, while I dwell here?’
Another nod.
‘Good. I am glad to know you, Yessika.’ Spinoza took one of the grapes, and the leathery skin yielded just a little in her grasp. ‘You looked at these, as you carried them to me, did you not?’
Yessika shook her head vehemently then, a mix of outrage and fear. ‘No, lord, I did-’
‘You would not be human had you not. Looking is no crime. Come here.’
Yessika shuffled closer, twisting her hands on her shift, looking nervous.
‘I wish to serve the Lord Crowl well, while I am here,’ said Spinoza, popping the grape into her mouth and chewing. By the Throne, it was good — real juice, acrid, bitter from whatever transport it had endured, but real. ‘I can only perform my duty with knowledge. If you hear things, you will tell me, yes?’
Yessika looked uncertain. She halted, coming no closer.
Spinoza took a second grape and rolled it between her fingers. ‘Come here.’
The girl sidled closer. Spinoza reached out, pressing the grape against her thin lips. ‘Open.’
It took a second for Yessika to comply. When she did, taking the fruit, she was too afraid to chew.
Spinoza laughed. ‘Go ahead.’
Yessika’s jaw began to move. As she did, a look of awe spread slowly over her emaciated features. She smiled, the juice dribbling down her chin, which she greedily caught with a fingertip and licked clean.
Then the fear returned, and she started to twist the fabric of her shift again.
Spinoza placed an armoured hand on her shoulder, feeling the bird-thin bones shift under the skin. ‘One gift given,’ she said softly.
The girl looked back at her warily, then nodded.
‘You may go.’
Yessika hurried out, closing the door as she went. Spinoza sat back, and finished her meal. As soon as she had done so, a red light blinked on top of the console next to her bunk. A brass receptacle, slung with black cabling, hung like a crushed spider on the wall, crowned with an iron vox-emitter. It looked like it had been there for a thousand years.
Spinoza activated the link. ‘Your command?’
‘I read your report,’ Crowl’s voice crackled. ‘Very thorough. You’ll go to the coordinates you extracted and bring us another subject.’
‘As you will it.’
‘The Angel’s Tears. That’s what they call themselves?’
‘So it would appear.’
‘What do they want, Spinoza?’
There was no answer to that, not with precision, and yet precision was hardly required. They were mobilising, storing looted weapons, spreading like a contagion throughout the lower reaches of Salvator’s spires. Like so many, they had listened to foul whispers in the night — of another order, of a better life, of another way — and that was enough to drag their actions into the sordid swamp of perversion.
‘I will endeavour to discover more detail,’ she said.
‘Keep one of them alive a bit longer next time, maybe?’
‘If there is something to be gained by it.’
There was a pause at the other end of the vox-link. ‘Very well,’ said Crowl. ‘Use your judgement. And be wary — the location you identified is further into Malliax. I recommend taking an escort.’
‘I will.’
The link cut out. Spinoza studied her reactions. Was she being too curt? It was hard to maintain the proper sense of respect, something that had always come naturally with Tur. Crowl was testing her, that was evident, looking for a reaction. She understood that, and ought to have been able to adjust.
But there was no reverence in his speech. If he had been a man of the Imperium, rather than an agent of the Holy Ordo, she might have…
I am impatient. He is eternal. Through Him, I endure all things.
She got up, and pressed the comm-bead to summon an armed escort. Before leaving the chamber, she reached for the crozius and mag-locked it to her belt. She had little doubt it would be needed.
Crowl sat back in his throne, pressing his hands together, his brow furrowing.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
Gorgias’ sensor-eye dimmed momentarily, then strobed back to life. ‘Like-like. Spiritus bonum. Chose well.’
‘Thought you’d approve. She’ll have to learn fast.’
‘Spiritus bonum.’
‘Yes, you said that. I suppose that counts for something.’
Crowl reached for a crystal vial, perched on a leather-topped table by his side. He took a distasteful look at the blood-red liquid within, then removed the stopper and drained the contents. It took a few seconds for it to work, and the restorative effects were less than they had once been.
Gorgias chuntered disapprovingly, and levitated into the shadows. ‘Nequissimus. No good.’
‘I know it,’ Crowl replied.
Then he rose from the throne and walked from the chamber. Once in the hallway, he descended four levels, took a turbo-lift to nominal thoroughfare-level IX, and summoned a groundcar from the waiting pool. The driver pulled up, opened the side doors and made the sign of the aquila. She was middle-aged, in her twenties, wearing a stiff-collared uniform. The groundcar was heavy-tracked with armour-grade plates and slit windows. As it came to a halt, its trembling smokestacks leaked sooty palls up the walls.
Crowl got in. ‘My thanks, Aneela.’ He settled into the padded seat. ‘How is your daughter?’
‘She is well, I thank you, lord.’
‘Learning her rotes?’
‘She strives to.’
‘If she wants to join the Adeptus Terra, she will need to.’
‘We tell her this.’
Crowl smiled. ‘The young.’
‘Your command?’
‘Take me to Gulagh.’
The driver saluted again, raised the groundcar’s flak shields, and powered the machine smoothly towards one of Courvain’s many exit ramps.
Crowl sat back, watching idly through the long horizontal real-viewer. The tarquezine began to have an effect, and he felt the first twinge of stimulus bleed through his muscles.
They trundled out into the open, leaving the arched gates to the fortress and powering out across a single-span bridge towards the forest of rockcrete ahead and above. Soon they were surrounded by phalanxes of traffic — ore-haulers, tracked personnel crawlers, Astra Militarum supply trucks, all shoving and belching into the transit lanes that webbed the chasms between towers.
Aneela skilfully guided the groundcar out onto the priority conduits used by privileged Imperial agencies, and soon they were rumbling across a series of vaned bridges that vaulted the gridlock below. Statues of saints flanked the thoroughfare, all of them caked in soot and with their faces cracked and obscured.
Above, the skies were thick with boiling dust, punctured only by sulphurous lumen beams. The arbitrators were out in force, their black-flanked hunter-killers hovering on gritty downdraughts like metal vultures. Below them, below it all, churned the eternal throngs, milling in amorphous gradations of mania. Crowl spied cowled processions wending their way across the ambulatory plazas, headed by priests carrying gauzy red lanterns. Dimly, just audible over the endless thunder of ranged promethium engines, he could hear the massed chanting, the rolling boom of drums, the heavy clang of servitor-dragged gong-gurneys.