Intian syrup. The gilded sommelier served petillant Samatan rose, heavy-bodied Cadian claret, a sweet and sticky Tokay from a lowland dos on Hydraphur, and stinging shots of Mordian schnapps.
Our humours were good, and the impromptu supper gave us time to step back from the work at hand and relax. None of us spoke of the case, or the demands that it was likely to make of us. To rest the mind often clears it.
I was going to need clarity now.
We returned to Kasr Derth the next morning in the gun-cutter. The steel dawn over the wide island group of the Caducades was cut by the rising edge of a burning, red sun. As we swept in over the craggy mainland, the peaks and edges of the moors were caught with a pink alpenglow.
Despite the fact that we were broadcasting the correct clearances, we were challenged six times in the half-hour descent. At one point, a pair of Cadian Marauders rolled in and flanked us as they checked us over.
Military security dominated the Cadian way of life. Every non-military transport, shuttle and starship was placed under acute observation, especially those that behaved suspiciously or wandered from the authorised flight routes. Aemos told me that a pinnace carrying the Deacon of Arnush, visiting Cadia for a promulgation seminar, had been shot down over the Sea of Kansk six months earlier, simply because it failed to give the correct codes. It made me wonder how our unknown foe had got his minions on and off Cadia.
Unless, like us, he had an identity and a rank that easily turned aside routine security checks.
We were diverted sixty kilometres west of Kasr Derth because a war was going on. The dawn light was filled with the flashes and light streaks of a mass rocket attack.
Eight regiments of Cadian Shock, just a few days away from shipping out to a tour of duty on one of the inner fortress worlds of the Cadian Gate, were staging a live firing exercise.
We finally set down on the minster's launch pad over an hour late. The war-bells in every tower and shatrovy in the Kasr were ringing to signal that the roar of battle from the nearby plains and moors was just a practice.
We divided our efforts. Fischig took Aemos to the Minster's archivum to study the records we had ordered copied the night before and do further research. Bequin, escorted by Husmaan, went to search the stacks of the Ecclesiarchy's records in the apostolaeum. Inshabel and Nayl visited the Administratum's catalogue of records.
I went with Medea to the Ministry of Interior Defence.
There are no arbites on Cadia. A permanent state of martial law governs the world, and as a result, all civil policing duties are overseen by the Interior Guard, a sub-office of the Cadian Imperial Guard itself. In Kasr Derth, the region's administrative capital, their headquarters is the Ministry of Interior Defence, a grey-stone donjon adjoining the fortress of the martial governor, right at the heart of Kasr Derth.
Members of the Interior Guard are chosen at random. Worldwide, one in every ten soldiers recruited into the Cadian forces is transferred into the Interior force at the end of basic and preparatory, whatever their achievements and promise. As a result, some of the most able troopers ever raised on this planet of warriors serve out their time on the home world itself, and Cadia boasts one of the most effective and skilled planetary defence forces of any Imperial world.
We were seen by a Colonel Ibbet, a powerful, lean man in his forties who looked like he should have been leading the charge into the Eye of Terror: He was courteous, but mistrustful.
'We have no files on illegal or suspect immigration.'
'Why is that, colonel?'
'Because it doesn't happen. The system does not permit it.'
'Surely there are unfortunate exceptions?'
Ibbet, his grey and white camoed uniformed starched and pressed so sharply you could have cut yourself on the creases, steepled his fingers.
'All right, then/ I said, changing tack. 'What if someone wanted to get onto the planet anonymously? How could that be managed?'
'It couldn't/ he said. He wasn't giving at all. 'Every identity and visit-purpose is logged and filed and any infractions quickly dealt with.'
'Then I'll start with the files annotating those infractions/
Resignedly, Ibbet showed us into a codifier room and assigned us a military clerk to take us through the records. We sorted and checked for about three hours, slowly becoming bored with the interminable lists of orbital boardings, air-space interceptions and ground-based raids. I could tell that a thorough review of these records alone was going to take weeks.
So that's what we did. We spent ten and a half weeks scouring the archives and catalogues of Kasr Derth, working in shifts and living out of the quarters on the gun-cutter. Every few days, we returned to the
FOURTEEN
Winter brings a chance. The damned has a name. The pylon at Kasr Gesh.
Wintertide on Cadia.
There had been glinting ice-floes in the gun-metal waters of the Cadu-cades that morning, and light snow had fallen on the moors. At that time of year, the foul corona of the Eye of Terror was visible even during the fleeting hours of daylight. The unholy mauve radiance of the nights became a violet fuzz in the cold daylight, like a badly-blotted ink stain on white paper.
It made us feel like we were under surveillance all the time. The Eye, bloodshot, angry, peering down at us.
Worst of all were the moor winds, cold and sharp as a Cadian's bayonet, blowing down from arctic latitudes. The high lakes were all frozen now, and lethal pogonip fogs haunted the bitter heaths and uplands. In the Kasr itself, it seemed like the locals had a morbid fear of heaters or window insulation.
Chilly gales breathed down the hallways of the minster and the Admin-istratum building. Water froze in the pipes.
Despite it all, the war-bells sounded every few days, and the moors rolled with the sounds of winter manoeuvres. I began to imagine that the Cadians were simply shooting at each other to keep warm.
Ten and a half long, increasingly cold weeks after we had begun our systematic search of the Kasr's records, I was making my now habitual morning walk from the minster of the Inquisition to the headquarters of
the Interior Guard. I wore a thick fur coat against the cold, and spike-soled boots to combat the sheet ice on the roads. I was miserable. The search had left us all pale and edgy, too many fruitless hours spent in dark rooms.
There had been so many promising leads. Links and traces of the Sons of Bael, unauthorised starship traffic, suspicious excise logs.
They had all dwindled away into nothing. As far as we could make out, no living member of the Sons of Bael, or any living associate or family member, remained. There had been no pylon-related cult activity, not even registered xeno-archaeological work. I had interviewed specialist professors at the universitary, and certain tech-priests from the Mechani-cus who were shown in the records as having expert knowledge of the pylons.
Nothing.
With Inshabel, Nayl or Fischig, I had travelled the region, as far afield as Kasr Tyrok and Kasr Bellan. A worker in the gunshops of Kasr Bellan, who had been identified as a Bael cult member, turned out to simply have the same name, misfiled. A wasted ten hour round trip by speeder.
Aemos had constructed a codifier model by which we checked record anomalies against the timetable of past cult activity.
There seemed to be no correlation at all.
I walked up the steps of the Ministry of Interior Defence, and submitted myself to
