The processions were getting more numerous. Over the next few days, they would coalesce, boiling out of the cavernous shells of the cathedral precincts, swelling like a living river and rising towards the hundred-kilometre-long Avenue of Eternal Remembrance — the vast causeway built from the annihilated remnants of enemy Titans that led down, eventually, to the fabled Eternity Gate itself.
The groundcar sped north, weaving between the colossal spire flanks, ducking under layers of overhanging transit-tubes. Vox-augmitters blared out ritual scripts, fifty-metre-high pict screens displayed glowing icons of the Angel Sacrificed, while every scrap of exposed space seemed to be occupied by Ministorum adepts, whipping up the crowds of workers into ever higher degrees of devotional frenzy. Amid the drifting clots of air traffic, augmetic cherubs in chipped gold-and-red armour floated listlessly, weeping continually from gilded tear ducts.
‘Madness,’ breathed Crowl, absently.
‘Lord?’ asked Aneela.
‘Nothing. Keep driving.’
They passed around the bole of a tattered, rockcrete-grey hab tower and up higher, threading into ganglia of converging transit lanes. Soon another edifice loomed before them, dark as pitch and illuminated from within by pale blue lumen-points. A tarnished iron skull hung over the fortified gate, its eyes empty and gaping.
The guards waved them through, and Aneela drew up to a pair of polished obsidian doors. Crowl got out, to be greeted by two guards wearing dark chainmail armour and bone-white helms. They bowed low, sweeping the tips of electro-halberds across the stone floor, and behind them the doors swung soundlessly open.
Crowl marched in, passing under a lintel marked with the sigils of the Adeptus Terra, the serpent banners of the medicae guilds and obscure icons of lesser ordos, all crowned with an Imperial twin-headed eagle set in bas-relief.
He was greeted by an obese man draped in robes of pale blue, blotched with grease and clinging to the folds of flesh beneath. His hairless head was pale, his lips red, his eyes piggish. The man folded thick fingers before him, each one clustered with iron rings. An augmetic earpiece glinted from behind rejuve-smoothed lobes, a wire thread with pearl-like cogitator nodes. He wore the amulet of an medicae-general on his sloping chest, marking him as psycho-screened and cleared to oversee ordo clean-up work.
The bulbous man bowed.
‘Inquisitor,’ he said, turning to usher Crowl in.
Crowl nodded, walking on. ‘How goes it, Gulagh?’
‘The air is hot. The pilgrims disgust me. I have more labour than I care for.’
‘Did I hear that right?’
‘The air is pleasant. The pilgrims are an inspiration. My labours are a blessing.’
‘All we wish for is the truth.’
The two of them passed within the complex, entering snaking tunnels of slag-grey rockcrete. Just as in Courvain the atmospherics were recycled, sealed off from Terra’s smog outside. They passed surgical chambers, each one antiseptic, lit brightly with lurid sodium lumens, most with their medicae slabs occupied. Menials shuffled past in the tight-twisted corridors, bowing and pulling plasticky green cowls over hidden faces. They carried the panoply of their trade with them: steel trays piled with instruments sticky with blood, swilling vials, skin-bleachers, eviscerators, bone saws, deep-vein needles.
‘They tell me you have a new acolyte,’ said Gulagh, leading Crowl deeper down.
‘Cracking ordo ciphers again, Gulagh?’
‘Oh, I hear things.’
‘She won’t be mine for long. Too good. Too keen.’
‘Ah.’
They entered a long hall, its floor tiled, windowless and lit by hovering suspensors that whirred from their archaic power feeds. Lines of medicae slabs ran down either wall, each one occupied by a cloth-draped body.
Crowl paused at the first one and lifted the fabric. The corpse underneath was female, young, tattooed at the neck, greasy hair pulled back from a thin face.
‘These are the ones from Malliax?’ Crowl asked, studying her carefully. ‘The very same.’
‘Find anything?’
‘Nothing.’
Crowl turned to Gulagh sceptically. ‘Nothing at all?’
Gulagh chuckled, and his many chins wobbled. ‘I never know why you come down here, inquisitor. None of the other lords do.’
He pulled a magnomonocle from his robes and wedged it over his left eye, making the lens-motors whisper. Then he bent over the corpse, pulling its eyelids down, opening its jaw, yanking at the empty gums. As he worked, he wheezed, and gobbets of perspiration twinkled on his folds of fat.
‘All of them the same,’ he said, pulling the sheet aside and working down to her ribs. ‘Hellgun rounds, single punctures. We’ve got one with a broken spine — who did that? Your troops are good shots, I’ve said it before. Otherwise, these are underhive scum. Rotten teeth, rotten bones, cancers, cataracts and rickets, but nothing much else.’
Crowl looked down the rows of corpses. ‘They don’t run away, not at first,’ he said. ‘They’re organised. Something’s driving them.’
‘What was their crime?’
‘Unsanctioned association.’
‘You don’t know, then.’
Crowl smiled. ‘My interrogator, the one you know all about, she spoke to one of the cell leaders. He told her they were getting ready for something, but he hadn’t been told what. They’re hoarding information from their own kind. Remind you of anyone? And they’ve got weapons.’
‘Who hasn’t? There’s a lasgun for every newborn down here.’
‘What an inspiring thought.’ Crowl turned back to the corpse. ‘How many of them are here?’
‘All you sent us. We’ve taken the teeth, we’ll take the hair. Any organs good enough to freeze I’ll send to the splicers.’
‘I count twenty-five.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I sent you twenty-four.’
Gulagh chuckled, wiping his podgy hand on the corpse’s shroud. ‘You counted them yourself, inquisitor? I think you do need more staff.’
Crowl didn’t smile. He paced down the lines of slabs, pulling the linen from the face of each corpse. The one at the very end was a mountain of slumped muscle — the first of the two abhumans — while the rest were just skin and bones.
Gulagh waddled after him. ‘They were brought in on standard transports. If there’s been a mistake…’
‘Detail,’ Crowl muttered, ignoring the apothecary-general. ‘That is the problem.’
He reached a body near the end of the line, and exposed its face. This one was a man, perhaps thirty standard, a little fuller of face than the first woman, hair cropped tight to his scalp, eyes ringed red. The corpse stared up sightlessly into the sodium globes above.
Crowl hesitated. ‘I don’t remember this one.’
Gulagh hovered at his side. He looked a little paler. ‘It was a firefight, they told me. With guns. You really noticed every…’
‘Everything,’ said Crowl, reaching out to turn the head to one side. ‘He’s not from the chamber we cleared. Where’s he from?’
Gulagh reached to the foot of the slab and pulled a cracked roll of parchment from an iron clasp. As it unravelled, the dry brown scratchings of scribe auto-quills became visible. ‘Dispatch 56-76a-ed3/G, Malliax, your reference, your seal,’ read Gulagh. ‘Like I said, they came in with this batch, all together, piled on a grav-slab with their chests still hot. I don’t know how you…’
Crowl turned to face the apothecary. His gaunt face had darkened, and Gulagh stopped talking. The fat man put the parchment down quietly.