To the left lay the brightly-lit aleatorium, to which night crowds were already flocking to gamble away their pay. To the right, Kasr's senaculum with its gleaming, ceramite-plated shatrovy pyramid. Ahead, lay the minster of the Inquisition. The vox-ponder pinged again as the gun-walls along the deep approach followed us.
Fischig settled the speeder down on the spicae testicae paving of the minster's inner yard, where sunken guide-lights stitched out a winking cross. Inquisitorial guards in gold-laced burgundy armour approached us as we swung back the speeder's canopy and climbed out.
I showed the nearest one my rosette.
He clipped his heels together and saluted.
'My lord/
'I wish to see the inquisitor general/
I will inform her staff/ he said obediently, and hurried away across the herringbone paving, holding up his baldric so his power sword wouldn't trip him.
'You won't like her/ Fischig said as he came round the parked speeder to join me. 'Why?' 'Ah, trust me. You just won't/
It's late. I had finished business for the day/ said Inquisitor General Neve, stabbing her holoquill back into the brass power-well on the desk.
'My apologies, madam/
'Don't bother. I'm not about to shut my doors to the famous Inquisitor Eisenhorn. We're a long way from the Helican sub, but your fame precedes you.'
'In a good way, I hope.'
The inquisitor general rose from her writing desk and straightened the front of her green flannel robe. She was a short, sturdy woman in her late one tens, if my eye was any judge, with salt and pepper hair plied back tighdy into a bourse. She had the typical pale, tight flesh and violet eyes of a Cadian.
'Whatever,' she snapped.
We stood in her sanctum, an octastyle chamber with a black and white cosmati floor and aethercite walls inscribed with a waterleaf design. It was lit with rushlights and the flame glow accented the carved lotus motif.
Inquisitor General Neve clumped around her desk to face us, leaning on an ornate silver crutch.
'You'll want to be reviewing the Bael records, I suppose?'
'How did you guess?' I asked.
She favoured her weight on her sound foot and pointed the rubber-capped toe of the crutch at Fischig.
'Him, I know. He's been here before. One of yours, I suppose, inquisitor.'
'One of my best/
She arched her spare, plucked eyebrows. 'Hah. Much that says about you. Come on. The archivum/
A dim screw-stair led down to the basement archivum. The turning steps of the spiral were hard for her to manage, but she shooed me away curtly when I offered to assist her.
'I meant no insult, inquisitor general/ I said.
'Your kind never do/ she snapped. I felt it wasn't the moment to inquire what kind that might be.
The archivum was a long, panelled chamber lit only by the lamps of the double- faced desk-row that ran down its middle.
'Light buoy!' Neve snarled, and a servitor-skull drifted down from the coffered ceiling, hovering at her shoulder and igniting its halogen eye-beams.
'Bael, Sons of. Find/ she told it, and it coursed away, turning and dipping, sweeping the racks of the catalogue with its twin spears of light.
It stopped, eight sections down, and began to buzz around a shelf groaning with data-slates, file tubes and dusty paper books.
Fischig and I followed Neve as she hobbled over to join it.
'Sons of… Sons of… Sons of Teuth, Sons of Macharius, sons of bitches. She glanced round at me. That passes for humour here, Eisenhorn/
'I'm sure it does, madam/
Her fingers went back to the stacks, running along the fraying spines and tagged slate-sleeves, following the skull-buoy's light beams.
'Sons of Barabus… Sons of Balkar… Here! Here it is. Sons of Bael/
She pulled a file case off the shelf, blew the dust off it into my face and handed it to me. 'Put it back where you found it when you've finished/ she said. She turned to go.
Your pardon, wait/ I said.
Two emphatic thumps of her cratch swung her around to face me again.
'What?'
'Your predecessor… um…'
'Gorfal/ whispered Fischig.
'Gorfal. He burned the members of this cult without examination. Have you never reviewed the case?'
She smiled at me. It wasn't encouraging.
'You know, Eisenhorn… I always imagined roving inquisitors like you had adventurous, exciting lives. All so very exhilarating, all that celebrity and heroism and notoriety. To think I used to dream of being like you. You have no idea, do you?'
'With respect, inquisitor general… of what?'
She gestured at the file case I was clutching. 'The crap. The nonsense. The bric-a-brac. The Sons of Bael? Why the hell should I review that case? It's dead, dead and nothing. A bunch of fools who were pulled off the West-moorland pylon in the middle of the night for playing around with geo-locators. Whoooo! I'm so scared! Imagine that, they're measuring us! Do you have any idea what this wardship is like?'
'Inquisitor general, I-'
'Do you? This is Cadia, you silly fool! Cadia! Right on the doorway of Chaos! Right in the heart of everything! The seepage of evil is so great, I have a hundred active cults to subdue every month! A hundred! The place breeds recidivists like a pond breeds scum. I sleep three or four hours a night if I'm lucky. My vox chimes and I'm up, called out to another nest of poison that the arbites have uncovered. Firefights in the street, Eisenhorn! Running battles with the foot soldiers of the archenemy! I can barely keep up with the day-to- day banishments, forget the past cases my crap-witted predecessor filed. This is Cadia! This is the Gate of the Eye! This is where the bloody work of the Inquisition is done! Don't distract me with stories of some engineering club gone bad/
'My apologies/
Taken. See yourselves out/ She limped away.
'Neve?'
She turned. I dropped the file case on to the reading table.
They might have been idiots/ I said, 'but they're the only solid link I have to a daemonhost that could destroy us all/
'A daemonhost?' she said.
That's right. And the beast that controls it. A beast that, if I'm right… is one of ours/
She lurched back down the archivum.
'Convince me/ she said.
THIRTEEN
A reunion.
