[Dark Heresy 02] - Innocence Proves Nothing

by Sandy Mitchell - (ebook by Undead)

  “He always does,” Horst said, in the tone of a man who was trying to convince himself as much as his listener.

  The triune towers had drifted closer while they spoke, dominating everything in the northern sprawl now that the central spire was behind them, and Barda was able to make out a little more detail. Unlike the other edifices he’d seen, they were relatively devoid of ornamentation, only the Imperial aquila and the stylised letter “I” giving any clue as to who the grim fortress belonged to. A high curtain wall, in the same black stone, connected the three towers, and a scattering of smaller buildings lay between them.

  Right in the centre of the complex was a landing field, and it was only as he caught sight of the shuttles and drop-ships parked there that Barda finally grasped the cyclopean scale of the Inquisitorial citadel. With the sight of something familiar to cue his sense of proportion, the realisation dawned that the Tricorn was at least three times the size he’d first estimated.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Horst said, with a hint of amusement, as Barda began their final descent.

  “Very,” the pilot agreed, as they passed over the curtain wall. “Which pad should I use?”

  Vehicles of some kind were patrolling it, the smooth upper surface as broad as a highway, and the small red dots crewing them glanced up as they slid smoothly overhead. Turreted lascannons emplaced at regular intervals rotated slowly, bracketing the shuttle, alert for any sign of treachery, their barrels depressing as the small craft continued to descend. This close to the edge of the hive a little of the landscape beyond could be seen, and Barda caught a brief glimpse of a desolate wilderness, choked with the detritus of the manufactoria, through which a river of vivid chemical waste wound its way towards the distant ocean. Then the walls rose around them, cutting off the sight of everything beyond, and the universe outside the Inquisition redoubt effectively ceased to exist.

  “Any of the empty ones,” Horst said. “The cogitators will log us in from the ident beacon.” He pointed. “Somewhere towards that edge of the field would be best.”

  “No problem.” Barda selected an empty berth, between a sleek Aquila in crimson and grey livery, and a battered-looking utility transport no one would normally look at twice, which he suspected was the whole point. Powering down the main thrusters, he vectored the manoeuvring jets just enough to nudge them into position, and settled the shuttle gently into its nest. “Any particular reason?”

  “The west tower’s the one we want,” Horst told him. “No need to walk any further than we need to.”

  “I see,” Barda said, trying not to look too hard at the neighbouring Aquila, the kind of vessel he’d flown until the terrifying night it had been shot down by heretics attempting to kill Inquisitor Finurbi and his team of Angelae. The memories the sight of the elegant vessel brought back weren’t pleasant. To escape them he took refuge in the familiar routine of powering down the ship, listening to the whine of the engines as their note deepened to an idling murmur.

  “There are three different ordos of the Inquisition,” Horst told him. “Inquisitor Finurbi is of the Ordo Hereticus, which works out of the west tower.” He paused, as if waiting for Barda to ask what the other ones were, and when the young pilot didn’t speak, he carried on anyway. “The Ordo Xenos has the east tower, and the Ordo Malleus the south one.”

  “I see,” Barda said, although the names added nothing useful to his knowledge of the organisation he now served. He already knew Horst and the others hunted heretics, which was what he’d always thought the Inquisition was for in any case, so the designation of that particular section hardly came as a surprise. The Ordo Xenos sounded equally self-explanatory — he assumed they must deal with the alien threats which continually beleaguered humanity — but he couldn’t for the life of him imagine what the Ordo Malleus did. He had a vague idea from the fragments of High Gothic his childhood tutors had tried to instil in him that their name referred to a tool of some kind, although he’d long since forgotten everything about the ancient language beyond the few phrases necessary to converse with the techpriests who maintained the guild’s aerospace fleet, and the rote-learned catechisms required to propitiate the machine-spirits of his onboard instrumentation.

  “The Malleus are daemon-hunters,” Keira said, leaning in through the narrow doorway to the passenger compartment, almost as if she could read his thoughts, “and probably best avoided. They’re not exactly safe to be around.”

  Barda tried to imagine the kind of men and women who would seek out the worst horrors of the warp by choice, and decided to follow Keira’s advice. “Do you want me to leave the engines running?” he asked.

  “Not this time,” Horst said, stretching as he stood. “I think it would be better if you came in with us.”

  “It’s not as if anyone’s going to steal it while we’re gone,” Keira added, as Barda began to take the engines off-line.

  Drake hadn’t been sure what he expected the Tricorn to be like, but if he’d thought about it at all, he would probably have pictured something along the lines of the citadel he and Kyrlock had been sent to defend in the wilds of Sepheris Secundus. The reality was overwhelmingly different, though, the isolated outpost he’d seen in the Forest of Sorrows seeming little more than a fortified camp in comparison to the mighty fortress they were walking through now. The Tricorn was the size of a small town; larger, if anything, than some he’d seen on his native world.

  At least he wasn’t gawping at everything like Barda was, he told himself, as the Angelae passed through the cordon of storm troopers who’d surrounded their shuttle as soon as it grounded; the soldiers had kept their weapons trained on the newcomers while they disembarked, standing down only after the sergeant in charge had examined Horst’s rosette minutely, both by eye and with the aid of a small slate-like device which downloaded a stream of genetic and biometric data to confirm the identity of its holder.

  Still possessed of a soldier’s instincts, he found a detached part of his mind assessing everything he passed for a potential weakness in the fortifications surrounding them, and he wasn’t sure whether he felt relieved or not that so far he’d failed to find any. No doubt the garrison at the Citadel of the Forsaken had felt completely secure too, until the night the band of mercenaries had descended from the skies in their blasphemous alien spacecraft and all but levelled it to the ground, freeing hundreds of malignant witches in the process.

  Red and grey uniformed storm troopers were everywhere, mounting guard at strategic locations, or double-timing from place to place with an air of grim purpose, and for a fleeting moment he wondered how the few survivors of his old regiment were faring; they’d all been inducted into the Inquisition’s private army, having seen too much of the unhallowed to be allowed to return to the Imperial Guard, and, had it not been for Inquisitor Finurbi’s snap decision to make use of their local knowledge, both he and Kyrlock would have gone with them.

  Come to that, they still might; the inquisitor had made it very clear that the chance to become permanent members of the Angelae would depend on their performance, and if he wasn’t satisfied with his new recruits’ conduct since being seconded to the team, Drake might find himself returning to the ranks before the day was over.

  “Picturing yourself in uniform?” Keira asked brightly, and he realised he’d been staring at a storm trooper detachment in the distance. Something of his nervousness must have shown on his face, despite his best efforts to hide it, because she smiled encouragingly at him. “I’m sure you’d look very dashing.” Then she shrugged, and added, “I don’t think you’re going to get the chance to find out, though.”

  “Neither do I,” Horst assured him. “In my opinion, you and Vos have proven to be exemplary field agents, and I intend commending you both to Inquisitor Finurbi.”

  Drake felt the smile broaden. He’d be willing to serve in the ranks again, if that was what the Emperor willed, but he’d come to like the other Angelae a great deal, and the prospect of becoming a pe
rmanent member of the team was considerably more appealing.

  “I hope we can justify your confidence,” he said, wondering briefly how his friend was faring. Speculation would be fruitless, however, so he appealed mentally to the Emperor to guard Vos and Elyra, wherever they were, and returned his attention to the matter at hand.

  They were approaching the entrance to the west tower now, a forbidding portal more than three times the height of a man, and wide enough to have driven a couple of Chimeras through in line abreast without slowing down. All the traffic entering or leaving the gateway was on foot, though, and now his attention was no longer on the relatively small proportion of the citadel’s population obviously bearing arms, Drake was surprised to note that most of the people bustling about them wouldn’t have excited much notice in the streets beyond the walls. The vast majority were robed in the day-to-day vestments of the various adepta, only the sigil of the Inquisition displayed discreetly on some item of jewellery distinguishing them from their colleagues engaged in more prosaic lines of endeavour; scribes of the Administratum for the most part, although there were several techpriests among them, and more members of the Ecclesiarchy than he’d expected to see. The rest were dressed in the garb of ordinary citizens, as nondescript as that worn by the Angelae.

  “Who are these people?” Barda asked, to Drake’s unspoken relief, as he was damned if he was going to look impressed by any of this.

  “People like us,” Horst told him. “Acolytes working for one of the inquisitors based here, coming in to report to them.”

  “Actually,” Vex said, “that would be only a small proportion of the total. The Tricorn employs over eight thousand ancillary staff, who work here full-time, in the archives or some other support capacity.” He permitted himself to infuse a trace of eagerness into his tone. “And speaking of the archives, I’m confident that, with enough time, I should find the information we need here.”

  “Good,” Horst said.

  By this time the group had all but reached the huge portal, which seemed to Drake to be rather more impressive than defensible. On closer examination, however, he was able to pick out the narrow firing slits in the thick walls, carefully concealed among the bas-relief carvings of the Inquisitorial seal which formed a sombre decorative frieze above the lintel, and the murder holes over the gateway, through which lethal surprises could be dropped on anyone foolhardy enough to assault the tower itself. Which would, he reminded himself, already have required an attacking force to have carried the formidable walls, in the face of whatever active defences the outer perimeter was able to bring to bear. More guards were visible here too, accompanied by techpriests, who swept the passing crowds with portable auspexes, and a few quiet men and women with haunted eyes; momentarily meeting the gaze of one, Drake shivered, feeling the sanctionite peering deep into his soul for any sign of taint.

  As they stepped inside the structure itself he almost stumbled, and Keira reached out, as quickly and surely as a striking serpent, to take his arm. “Watch your step,” she said, a spark of mischief in her voice. “That gets pretty much everyone on their first visit.”

  A shallow channel, no more than a couple of centimetres deep and just over a metre wide, ran across the floor from one wall to the other. It had no purpose that Drake could determine, but on both sides it terminated in a niche running from floor to ceiling, in which an identical pair of life-sized statues of power-armoured warriors appeared to have been installed.

  Then the coin dropped. The niches were nothing of the kind, they were the recesses into which massive blast doors had been retracted. Which either meant that someone had been unforgivably cavalier about the possibility that the last-ditch defences would ever be needed, or what he’d taken for statues were…

  “Emperor on Earth!” he said, forgetting all about his resolution to appear unimpressed by anything he saw here. “Are those really Astartes?”

  “Adepta Sororitas,” Vex said, apparently taking the startled exclamation as a genuine request for information. “Each of the towers has a permanent honour guard from the chamber militant of the ordo it houses. The Sororitas guards the Ordo Hereticus, the Deathwatch the Ordo Xenos, and the Grey Knights ward the Ordo Malleus. In more ways than one, if the rumours are to be believed.”

  Drake didn’t ask what the rumours were: he was quite sure he didn’t want to know.

  Despite himself he turned his head for a better look at the legendary warriors, taking in every detail of their burnished, midnight-black ceramite, inlaid with gold devotional icons, and the richly worked fabric of their surcoats. The crisp white cloth was embroidered with a black goblet, containing a vivid yellow flame, an image echoed on the shoulder guards of the Battle Sisters’ power armour. Their guns appeared huge, but the Sororitas held them as easily as Drake carried his lasgun; after a moment he identified them as heavy-calibre bolters, like the ones he’d seen mounted on Imperial Guard Chimeras, although none of those had been decorated with images of the Emperor wrought in precious metals.

  A second channel in the floor marked the inner limit of the gatehouse, flanked as before by a second pair of impassive, immobile figures, their blank-visaged helmets decorated with the same fleur de lys as those of their sisters. Beyond the silent warrior women, the fortress opened up into a massive antechamber, through which the bustling crowd of acolytes flowed with ceaseless motion. The floor here was tiled, in an intricate abstract pattern, which both drew and repelled the eye.

  “Best not to look too closely at the mosaics,” Keira advised. “They incorporate wards against warpcraft. You don’t want to meet the inquisitor with a nosebleed, do you?”

  “Don’t the sanctioned psykers find that a bit inconvenient?” Drake asked, and the young assassin shrugged. “Elyra’s never complained.”

  “It’s my understanding,” Vex said, “that the patterns are supposed to dampen the kind of raw warp energy drawn on by wyrds. Sanctionites are blessed by the Emperor, so find the effects a great deal less unpleasant than a witch would.”

  “Where to now?” Barda asked, looking around with manifest amazement at the dozens of doorways through which people were hurrying, with all the random energy of a turbulent pool.

  “Over here,” Horst replied, leading the way to a polished wooden counter at one end of the room, behind which a handful of the Administratum scribes Drake had noticed before were seated on high stools, paging through documents or the displays of data lecterns set into the woodwork. The nearest looked up as the Angelae approached, her expression one of polite uninterest.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, evidently unconcerned as to what the answer might be.

  “We need to see Inquisitor Finurbi, at his earliest convenience,” Horst said, slotting his rosette into a recess in front of the scribe’s lectern. The lectern hummed for a moment, then disgorged a slip of paper, which smudged the tips of the scribe’s purple-stained fingers with an additional layer of ink. Drake tilted his head, reading the elegant, and slightly smeared, cursive script.

  PETITIONER IDENTIFIED: Mordechai Horst.

  PATRON INQUISITOR: Carolus Finurbi.

  HOLD FOR SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS.

  This was evidently an unexpected development, Drake thought; Horst’s momentary frown made that perfectly obvious.

  “Something wrong?” he asked, as Horst retrieved his rosette, and the scribe rolled the slip of paper into a cylinder, which she stuffed into a metal tube, and hung from a cable above her head. She pulled a lever set into the wall, and the metal capsule disappeared into the distance with a faint whirring sound.

  Horst shook his head. “I don’t think so. Usually the inquisitor just clears us for access to his chambers, but I suppose he wants to meet us somewhere else this time.”

  “Maybe he isn’t in the Tricorn at all,” Keira suggested. “You know what he’s like when he’s got a lead he can follow up.”

  “Could he have gone to meet Vos and Elyra?” Drake asked, and Horst frowned.

 
; “It’s possible, I suppose. That ore barge they were on should have got here ahead of us, but you can never really be sure of anything where warp travel’s concerned.”

  “Right.” Barda nodded. “I heard about this voider once, his ship arrived back in-system about thirty years before it left, and what with one thing and another he ended up becoming his own father.” He caught sight of Keira’s expression, which could have frozen helium at thirty paces, and trailed off lamely. “Just stories, of course. I never met anyone who actually… urn…”

  “Isn’t that servitor coming to meet us?” Drake asked, mainly to throw the poor lad a lifeline, but the flesh and metal construct continued to plod towards the little group of Angelae with all the fixity of purpose of its kind, and after a moment he realised that he was right. Its metal components were brightly burnished, its flesh ones ruddy with what, in a living creature, he would have considered good health, and its body was draped in a crimson tabard worked with the sigil of the Inquisition in gold thread.

  “It is,” Horst said, sounding surprised.

  “It’s holding something,” Barda said, seizing on the change of subject with grateful alacrity. A moment later the construct had reached the counter, its head turning slightly as the imagifers set into its skull scanned all their faces in turn.

  “Biometric parameters matched to template,” it announced at last, in the flat tones of a vox-coder unit. “You are Mordechai Horst, please confirm.”

  “I am,” Horst said, as calmly as if he held conversations with constructs like this every day.

  “Voiceprint confirmation accepted,” the servitor droned, and held out a small, polished wooden box. “Designated recipient identified within acceptable margins of error. Please take the specified item.”

  Wordlessly, Horst took the proffered casket, and the construct turned and walked away, its function discharged. The box was small enough for him to hold in one hand, its surface inlaid with the Inquisitorial sigil, the stylised letter “I” comprising it chased in some glowing azure mineral unknown on Sepheris Secundus. Horst and Keira stared at it, and even Vex seemed disconcerted, although Drake was at a loss to understand why.