A/N: Chap 16 review responses are in my forums as normal. This is the final chapter of Part 1, and it's a very busy chapter. As a reminder, the sorcerer referenced in the first part is the same that we saw in the first chapters of the story, and whom Caligus is searching for. Terra is caught in the grip of a Warp storm caused, first, by the fall of Cadia and an incursion of the war across the galaxy, and second by the collapse of the Astronomicon which helped create an aegis around Terra against the Warp. Complicating factors is that there has been a slow incursion into the capital world of Chaos cultists for centuries, all waiting for this moment. A lot of this is detailed in the Vaults of Terra series.
I know the the story has gone far afield from past works, and is not an easy read. So for those of you sticking with it, thank you for reading.
Chapter Seventeen: Custodiendam Viam Ligni Vitae
The crush of bodies broke before him as Orobek the Untainted walked through the lower habs of Botan Hive, like the Warp parting before the bow of a Gellar drive. He was a son of Magnus, exiled for his sins. He sought penance in the blood of his enemies.
The hive city was among the first ever built, dating back many thousands of years even before the Unification Wars. Those who knew its history knew it once looked out over a long-lost ocean. It was old when the Emperor began his Great Crusade to unite the disparate human worlds of the galaxy.
He towered over the wretched, starving menials that made their way to and from their service to the false emperor. Clad in loose, gray unitards, they moved almost without volition, like insects. Servitor skulls and picters monitored their every step, and city security stood ready to quell any hint of independence with crushing, immediate violence.
They did not see Orobek. They felt nothing but a surge of cold at his passage; a touch of the Warp their primitive, weak minds could not understand. The menials around him could not see him as he was. They saw another of their own kind. But their instinct forced them to keep their distance-as much as the stinking press of humanity would allow. Even with his illusions, those around knew that a predator walked in their midst.
There was nothing they could have done. Crammed together so tightly that steps were reduced to a slow shuffle, they could not have fled even if they tried. This, though, was not the place for his penance. And so Orobek continued moving through the tide of humanity until he came across a junction leading to the 13th level of the 92nd sector of the manufactorums of the hive city.
He followed the increasingly nervous menials. There were far fewer now, though still enough to ensure the crowd moved slowly. Ahead, city guard in the livery of the local nobility directed workers to a series of paths, each leading to any of a dozen sweatshops. Like all the other means of security, none could pierce the illusion he wore. After all, why would they? This was Holy Terra, why would they fear the Ruinous Powers here?
The smell that filtered through his helm directed Orobek where he wanted to go. It was a sickly-sweet smell, like raw meat mixed with sweat and hopelessness. He turned with a handful of workers, and emerged into a long, high-ceiling chamber filled with hundreds of vats of soylens. Workers moved about the vats like hive insects, making sure the putrid mix of recycled proteins resolved into the green protein paste that many of the menials of Terra subsisted on.
Orobek sneered at the sight of it. Ten thousand years ago, the even the false Emperor would never have permitted such a food to exist. It was, after all, recycled bodies. Nor was the recycling limited to just humans. Discarded food from the upper levels of the Hive City also found its way into the vats, turning the soylens into a grotesque sludge of organic soup.
He moved inside the chamber door and began to observe. The floor supervisors were marked by their slightly better clothing, and one of them actually even had hair on her head. They still bore the pasty, ashen complexions of those who spent the entirety of their lives within the hive. Those five floor supervisors oversaw a staff of at least a hundred menials, and another fifty or so servitors who were likely human once, but were now reduced to the status of lobotomized cybernetic automatons.
In the far back of the chamber, he saw an elevated office with a pair of Ordinates of the Adeptus Administratum overseeing more servants. That meant at least some of the soylens was to be prepared for military use.
He made his way between the boiling vats of protein, watching with thinly veiled amusement as the hopeless, bald, half-starved menials moved out of his way. Though under his illusion they saw another of their kind, in truth he towered over them by half their height or more. In his Astartes armor and the hood that augmented his psyker powers even before he embraced the powers of the Changer of Ways, he moved as a giant among insects.
The stairs groaned under his weight as he walked up toward the office and the four workers within. The door stood closed and locked; a wave of his hand and a pulse of power from his mind rendered the lock inert.
The four within-three female and a male-all turned and stared in surprise. For a brief moment, they saw only the illusion of a menial. "What are you doing here?" one of the Ordinates said, her voice dripping with contempt. "Get back to the floor, or face a reduction of your food quota!"
In answer, Orobek closed the door and let his illusion fall back into the warp. The four dead fools stared dumbfounded, unable to comprehend the terrible glory of a Chaos Sorcerer in their midst, nor able to process their impending deaths.
Orobek did not bother with sorcery, not for such weak, pathetic creatures as this. His gauntlet shattered the Ordinate's skull in a shower of blood and bone. The second one screamed in terror before a swift kick crusted her rib-cage so thoroughly all breath was immediately stopped and her heart crushed. She stared gaping at him as portions of her lung burst from her crimson lips even as she flew back against the wall.
The male in livery jumped to run, but Orobek brought his fist down atop the crown of the man's head, crushing his skull like a ripe melon. Only the female in yellow livery remained, weeping in terror as she sat in her controller chair. Before her, cogitators ran arcane computations on the ratios of proteins and amino acid chains and other such minutia only one of a small mind would bother with.
"Hello, child," Orobek crooned. It was so easy to pierce her mind; weakened already by what she had seen. "You will assist me, will you not?"
Weeping profusely, she nodded.
"Very good. Close the chamber, use any excuse you wish but the truth. Ensure the menials cannot escape. We have work to do, you see. Valuable, important work."
The woman's hands shook. "Are you going to kill me?" she asked in a tremulous voice.
"No, child," Orobek said in as reassuring a voice as he could still muster. "No, I shan't kill you. I shall show you the truth, and set you free."
~~Revelation~~
~~Revelation~~
The Engineers and Techadepts managed to restore power to the Inquisitorial Fortress before Lyta found her way out of the vast maze of holding cells that occupied much of the lower levels. No explanation came for the power loss.
She did not make for the exit immediately, though. Her power armor was too exquisite and expensive to just abandon, so it took another hour wading through the border-line panic of Ordos tech adepts to find where her belongings had been stored.
Artigan found her as she was in the process of trying to manually enter access runes in the vambrace control plate to use the armor, since she no longer had her cerebral jack. He ran into the evidence chamber with his helmet off and a wild look to his eyes, and saw her immediately.
"What in the Golden Throne are you doing?"
"I'm trying to power up my damned armor," she snapped back.
"Why?"
She didn't bother to explain–she finally got the right rune combination for the suit to accept her slightly altered biometric feedback. She grabbed her power sword, her las pistols, and the Sabbat-pattern helm to the armor she didn't want to wear unless necessary. "Where's Maerya?"
"She's at the transport," Artigan said. "Do you know what's happening?"
"Do you?"
He met her gaze squarely. The man wasn't just old enough to be her father–he was old enough to be her grandfather. "The fortress is on lockdown–no incoming transports. They're allowing egress, but things are bad. There's a warp storm out there–like I haven't seen since the Cadian gate. They're saying…" He forced himself to swallow, and in that moment revealed how deeply unsettled he was. "They're saying the Emperor has abandoned us!"
It only took a glance at his Cadian-violet eyes to understand his pain. He might not have been from Cadia proper, but he was very much of the culture of that world and its colony worlds. And if the reports were to be believed, his world had just fallen.
"I lost my vox. Have you spoken to Lord Moro?"
"I can't reach him or the others," he said. "Vox channels are overloaded with chatter, even the priority and Adepta channels."
She found herself reciting prayers in the back of her mind. "Any luck on recruiting?"
"We were due fifty men when I arrived. They're giving us ten."
"Ten is better than none. We need to get back to Botan Hive. Lead the way!"
They wanted to run, but the transit arteries were so full of alarmed, motivated inquisitors, soldiers, throne agents and battle sisters that the best they could manage was a jog. Twice they managed to grab onto a RHINO armored transport that slowly rolled its way through heavy traffic until they had to let go to head a different direction.
It took almost forty long, hectic minutes for them to reach the hangar that held their waiting Thunderhawk transport. The heavily armored vehicle was surrounded by ten stormtroopers in spotless Ordos armor, all of them so newly minted some had barely even passed out of the training. Compared to the young men and women, Lyta felt positively old.
She rushed in with Artigan at her side. "Take the stick," she ordered. She felt the need to concentrate on other things beside flying. Instead, she settled into the co-pilot seat as their new recruits settled into the personnel hold. She saw Maerya already there, bruised but otherwise unharmed.
They received priority clearance runes to lift off, and Artigan did so immediately. When they cleared the outer landing hub and entered the open atmosphere, Lyta sucked into a deep, terrified breath. "Emperor save us," she whispered. "It's just like during the Heresy!"
Artigan glanced at her in alarm, but said nothing.
The sky was red and black. Not the putrid yellow of forty thousand years of war and pollution, but the violent crimson red of death and blood. As the Thunderhawk shot free of the fortress, she saw a long, horrible streak of bright red lightning flash across the sky. It lingered, throbbing, like the arterial blood flow of some ancient, primordial god.
Its effects were worse, though–the result of the terrible flash of lightning was a massive cargo hauler falling out of the pollution clouds fifty kilometers south of the fortress. The kilometer-long craft was a typical food hauler, one of many tens of thousands that kept Terra fed on a daily basis.
The ship fell in slow motion, its primary plasma drives rendered inoperable by the blood-red lightning that seemed almost to target it in particular.
"Pull up," she whispered in hopeless prayer. "Pull up."
"Too late. Adjusting course."
Artigan pulled hard on the ship's controls to bring them far west of the impending disaster. Lyta's power told her with distressing detail what was about to happen, but she couldn't pull her eyes away. A kilometer long, five hundred-thousand-ton vessel laden with barely a day's worth of food for a hive city, crashed into the very hive it was intended to feed. She didn't know the name of the unfortunate hive, if in fact it was a hive at all and not just a part of the never-ending carpet of habs and towers that covered even this cold part of the polar regions.
The plasma drives went seconds after the impact; the explosion forced the Thunderhawk's canopy to activate countermeasures to keep them all from being instantly blinded by the flash. The death toll had to have been catastrophic, but there was nothing she or her small band of Ordos soldiers could do about it.
"This is happening all over Terra," Artigan muttered, shaken as badly as she was. "How can this be happening?"
Artigan was no pysker, but the Astronomicon was such a constant part of Terran life that even he could feel its absence. As much as Lyta hated the sacrifice required for the Emperor's light, for the thousand of her kind whose souls were burned away to fuel it every day, the be without it was tantamount to being without air, or water. It felt as if something essential and necessary was gone, and there was no possibility of replacing it.
"Get us back to Botan Hive at best speed, commander." She looked back into the personnel chamber. "Maerya, are you injured?"
"No more than normal," the other woman replied in a distant tone. "They took my music player."
Lyta answered by tossing her the small hand-held device, with the ear pieces attached. It was stored with her own personal belongings.
It hit the psyker in the chest; she gasped blindly at it before blinking back tears. "Ah. My thanks."
With Maerya sorted away, Lyta turned her attention back to the Thunderhawk vox channels. Runes flitted by the various screens, while actuality orbs hung just over the console in distorted displays of Terra's security status. She monitored not just Ordos channels, but also lines of communication for the Militarum, the Terran Auxilia and Adeptus Arbites. Mostly all she heard were cries for help. Like Artigan claimed, the Warp storm appeared to be planetary in scale.
As they cleared the polar circle, however, something else brought her attention level to their flight path. Green-blue fires were illuminating the clouds. "What is that? Another crashed hauler?"
Artigan clucked his tongue. "Looks like the Lador Hive."
"What?" She brought up the ship's powerful auspex suite and switched the reality sphere from orbital to local Auspex readings. Lador Hive was not the tallest or largest hive, having grown from a remote area of most ancient Albion, but even so it still housed eight hundred million souls at least.
It was the work of only a moment to focus her vox to the local security feeds. The moment she did, she ripped her headset off when she heard the screams. A thin layer of hoarfrost began to form over the headset.
"God Emperor," Artigan whispered. "Hold on!"
He put the Thunderhawk into a dive toward the starboard side, peeling away from the burning, Chaos-infected hive as fast as the massive transport permitted.
Lyta knew what was coming. She would have ordered the same if some other had not already done so. Even knowing it, she still turned and watched in horror as a thick streak of lance fire seared down from the sky and splashed against a shimmering void shield. More fire came, then an entire barrage of fire from the ships of Battlefleet Solar in orbit, that ignited some of the pollution clouds, causing odd bursts of flame in the air, until the void shield finally failed.
She turned the security channels off. The screaming continued through her headset anyway. "Emperor guide their lost souls," she prayed.
Macrocannon shells pierced the sky, streaking down slower than the lances, but with a terrible inevitability. Five of them, each carrying multi-kiloton shells, descended almost like winged saints from the heavens to bring the wrath of the Emperor's fleet onto the corrupted hive city.
Lador Hive and the eight hundred million lost souls within it died in five flashes of fire and mushroom clouds that briefly pushed away the pollution.
Despite Artigan's best efforts to put kilometers between them and the dying city, the shockwave rocked their transport so violently Maerya cried out in the back.
Finally, the commander regained control; Thunderhawks were designed to fly in wartime conditions. The gargantuan cloud of debris and ash from the explosion and death of a hundred million lost souls continued to buffet their transport.
"We're receiving a priority communication," she saw as new sigil runes splayed across her delays. "It's…it's from the Inquisitorial Representative herself."
"Arx?" Artigan glanced at her, wide eyed. "I've…I don't think I've ever seen direct communication from the Representative's office. Play it, lord."
Lyta entered her credentials, hoping that Lord Moro authorized them through the central administratum. He had, and the message played. Her stomach sank hearing the words of a Lord of Terra and the nominal head of the Inquisition speak the impossible.
"...this world is currently subject to a theta-grade anomaly warning, according to the Karcher scale. All operatives and agents, staff and retainers of the Holy Orders present on the Throneworld are advised to travel immediately to locations within or adjacent to the outer Palace precincts…"
"Is she saying what I think she's saying?" Artigan said.
"That we should abandon the rest of Terra and flee to the palace? Yes, Commander, I think that's what she's saying."
"The Enemy is laughing at us," Maerya called aloud from the back. She sounded like she was crying.
Artigan turned and stared at her, glancing briefly at her interrogator's mark. "Your orders, Lord?"
Lyta didn't hesitate. "To Botan Hive, Commander. All haste."
~~Revelation~~
~~Revelation~~
She knew something was seriously wrong before they even came within sight of Lord Moro's hab spire. None of her signals were being returned; none of her security inquiries were being challenged. She looked to Artigan and saw he was thinking the same thing.
"I don't have my vox bead," she said. "Anything?"
"No," he said.
The Dalet Spire of the Hive had several fires burning at some of the lower points. The Aleph and Bet towers were dark along several sectors. Things were obviously not right. But as they cleared the north-eastern corner of the Gimel Tower and came within sight of Lord Moro's hab, Lyta saw that something truly terrible had happened.
The point defense systems were not just down–she saw las cannons burning and ripped from their turrets.
"Take us in," she said. She looked back to their new recruits. "Hostile insertion. Possible friendlies with the hostiles. Prepare for aggressive defense."
She'd drilled for the same as an Ordos recruit. She used the words they would be familiar with, even if she were only slightly more experienced than they. They had the best training the Astra Militarum could provide–so much so, the Tempestus Scions were the preferred shock troopers of the Inquisition. Even as young as they were, the ten new recruits were the best they could hope for.
Artigan brought the thunderhawk around and they got their first glimpse into the hangar. It was mostly empty, but she did see bodies. Lots of bodies. Some of them were wearing gray Ordos armor, but most were not.
"The automated defenses are offline, I'm getting nothing," Artigan reported. His tone went terse–all business. "Heading in. Gorbin, man the side repeaters for a combat drop."
As the trooper did just that, Lyta found herself thankful she had Artigan pilot. He was better than she was, as proven by the casual skill he displayed in bringing the thunderhawk into a parallel entrance of the hangar, presenting not just the side exit ramps, but also the ant-personnel repeater las weapons of the transport as he opened the doors and landed, all at the same time.
Nine newly minted stormtroopers, with their hellgun-pattern repeater las-rifles at the ready, poured out with academy-precision and formed a secure perimeter while their tenth member manned the heavy repeater cannon. Lyta slipped on her helm and followed, with Maerya and Artigan himself following moments later. The commander paused only long enough to secure their only ride.
The attack came just moments after they landed. Figures in menial gray swarmed by the hundreds out of the ripped-open security doors. They came without rhyme or reason, screaming with madness in their eyes and mutation warping their limbs.
The side gunner opened up with the heavy repeater lascannon. The air sizzled with eighteen hundred las bolts per minute directly into the oncoming wave of warp-tainted humanity. The sound of it was like a chainsword in her ears, making the air itself thud staccato rhythm almost as if it were a drum.
She and the others knelt, but held fire to conserve their power packs. The thunderhawk's weapon was enough for this.
The gunner proved thorough and well trained, sweeping the weapon back and forth like one might with a watering hose in an agri-hab. None of the tainted slowed or hesitated at all; many absorbed several shots before they fell. Limbs flew and still they came, screaming their madness, until their legs failed.
The wave was not infinite, thank the Throne! The gunner slowed his rate of fire, and the troopers picked up with more precise shooting of the dwindling numbers, until the last fell. Lyta stood and glanced back where the side door gunner was quickly changing out the flash barrels which had gone red hot with the massive release of energy.
The troopers stayed in defensive formation until the barrels were switched out, and the gunner stood ready again. Only then did Lyta stand and begin scanning the floor. "Count twenty friendlies down," she called out.
"Confirmed," Artigan answered. "Hundreds of enemies. Lord, some of these were our people."
"I know. Can you access the hab security auspex from here?"
"I believe so." He jogged across the floor of the hangar, trying his best to go around the piles of dead menials, until he reached the nearest security interface stations. Lyta drifted towards him, watching as Maerya hugged herself and stood in the middle of the cordon of stormtroopers. All of them were closely watching the pile of bodies for any movement.
"What can you see?" she asked.
Artigan hugged a breath. "Lord Moro wasn't on premises when the attack occurred." He quickly summoned picter footage of their security perimeter.
Lyta sucked in a breath and held it with near primordial horror as she saw the monster that walked casually up to the hab's security line at the front of a small army of twisted monsters. What a pretty face. It shall adorn my armor.
"Chaos sorcerer," Artigan cursed. "God Emperor protect us, that's a chaos sorcerer."
"Thousand Sons," Lyta agreed. "The same as what I fought on Luna. Just one of those bastards wiped out Lord Norquis's entire entourage.'
"You've killed one before, though, right?"
"I'm not so sure it was me, commander. Can you tell if he's still on premises?"
Artigan quickly began switching through various picter and auspex feeds. "Doesn't look like it. Throne, Lyta, that bastard killed almost everyone."
"Lord Moro?"
"He'd be on the twenty-fifth level, if he was still alive or came back."
"Then that's where we go. Come on!"
At Artigan's orders, eight of the troopers joined them, while two remained behind to keep their only means of escape secure. Lyta made sure Maerya kept up as they dove headfirst into Lord Moro's hab.
More bodies littered the hallways. Oddly, the servitors kept working, mopping mindlessly or trying to move the bodies of the fallen menials or Ordos personnel for disposal. Lyta didn't know most of the fallen just because she was new and had no free time to intermingle while she was there. Artigan, though, knew every single victim.
They found Deon Kotran, the next youngest of Moro's interrogators, in the stairs. He was surrounded by so many bodies they couldn't get through without moving some of them. The man's carapace armor was torn apart by brute force, and the tearing and gnawing continued long after he died.
Her power did not spare her anything. "Zhaena was here. He…he sacrificed himself to serve as an obstacle to give her time to concentrate fire."
"What happened?"
They found the answer one flight up. One of the troopers spun away, flipped their visor and was noisily sick despite their indoctrination and mental conditioning. The Battle Sister fought fiercely, but it wasn't the menials that killed her. It couldn't have been, because no mere menial could so perfectly disassemble power armor, and so expertly flense a body of all its flesh, leaving only bones and nerves. The flensed flesh covered the wall in a grotesque splatter of human viscera, but the disassembled armor and the core of Zhaena's body nervous system were hung on it, arms spread out, like an angel.
Like a perversion of Telos herself.
"The sorcerer," Artigan growled. "Emperor damn him."
"He could be hiding himself," Lyta said. "That's what one of them did on Luna."
"He's not here."
She turned and saw Maerya. The pysker was shivering as she hugged herself. "He was so angry. What he wanted wasn't here."
"What was he looking for?'
It was disconcerting when blind eyes stared at her. "You. It makes me wonder if Luna wasn't quite what you and your masters thought."
"Ten more flights. Come on"
Maerya groaned. "Just leave me here to die, please," the psyker said. "My legs hurt."
"No. Come on."
They found the rest of the defenders on the twentieth floor. Gamet and Aberfort had obviously organized the remaining forces of the hab at the fitness facility. Lyta counted over a hundred defenders, and almost six hundred menial and non-combat specialists and family behind them.
Artigan moved with a constant stream of angry curses. The defenders gave a good accounting of themselves, piling up thousands of corrupted dead before the true evil struck.
These were his friends. Colleagues. Most she barely knew. This was as personal to him as if he had gone after…her… Oh Throne, Rina! Cori! "Come on, we can't do anything for them right now," she said. It took effort to keep the trembling from her voice.
Artigan nodded. "Right." They continued up the stairs.
She was grateful for the artificial fiber bundles of her armor that strengthened her steps. They reached Lord Moro's antechamber, and it was there that they saw the enemy's true wrath.
Hot, acrid wind blew in through shattered crystalflex windows. Artigan quickly pulled his helm back on and pressurized it against the thin atmosphere. "Anyone have an extra rebreather for our pysker?"
"I do, Lord," one of the troopers said. Maerya took the rebreather without comment; she was already short of breath just from the stairs.
Lord Moro's chamber was torn apart. Every stasis case was destroyed, the contents within shredded or broken. His desk, cogitators and hololith table were reduced to cinders. The wood paneling was scored to char and ash on the walls. Windows that were designed to stop bolter cannons and artillery had shattered in three places.
And the bodies. Lyta was wrong about where Aberfort made his last stand. He died over his own family, with twenty other of their elite troopers. The bodies were barely recognizable–torn apart with the same angry zeal as the room itself.
"Search the room," Lyta said. "Look for anything of interest."
She did just that, concentrating on Lord Moro's desk.
Maerya ignored them and walked to a thin section of paneling that survived the chaos sorcerer's wrath. She hummed something—a simple song. Perhaps something from her playlist.
Something within the wall clicked.
"Maerya? What did you do?"
"Abrin had me shield his secure chambers," she said.
Abrin? "You were able to fool the senses of a sorcerer?"
Blind eyes turned to her. "I hid them by making them something else. To the sight of an angry sorcerer, it was simply a hidden hygiene station."
"You…hid a secret chamber by making it look like a toilet?"
"It worked. Come."
Lyta followed, curious just what type of relationship the psyker had with Moro. That thought didn't make it past the threshold of the hidden chamber. Within were more cells. These were of a much higher quality than those below, with translucent walls, padded beds and small, private hygiene stations. There were only two of them, and of those two, only the nearest was occupied.
The assassin, Eta Bequin, knelt on the floor with her intact hand clenched into a fist under her chin where she prayed. Her amputated arm still ended in a medicae cuff, but in the days since Lyta's interrogation, the young woman appeared to at least have been given food and medical treatment. The delimiter collar around her neck hid her blank status–that was likely all that saved her from the Chaos Sorcerer.
"He kept her alive?" Lyta asked. She turned back to Artigan as the commander followed. "Did you know about this?"
"Lord Moro only shares what he thinks I need to know."
Which meant Artigan knew. Maerya, for her part, walked to the crystalflex wall and knelt down on the floor. "Hello, Eta."
The assassin opened her eyes. Lyta did not need her power to see the fear in the other woman's eyes. "Has the monster left?"
"We hope so," Maerya said. "I do not think we could stop him."
Terrified. Confused. Lyta's power sometimes provided too much information. She could see the young Eta Bequin, not even eighteen standard years of age, huddled in her cell as she listened to the roars and screams of those just outside.
Artigan recognized her. That little tidbit of information brought Lyta up short. She turned and glared at the commander. "You've seen her before."
"No, Interrogator, I haven't," he said.
"He has, twice before," Maerya said. "There is little point to lying to her, Rael. She may not be able to dominate your mind, but she can see your lies."
"This isn't the time to hide things from me, Commander," Lyta said. "Who is this woman, and how do you recognize her?"
"Not her, particularly," Artigan said. "She's a clone. Lord Moro could tell you all about her progenitor. I've run into clones of her two other times. Killed one. Aberfort killed the other, a few years later. She's Cognitae."
Within the cell, the woman named Eta stopped trying to pray. "You lie!" she screamed, all control lost. "I am no one's clone!"
"And Amelyta Rothid was not corrupted from her original purpose, just distracted. Yet, you tried to kill her." Maerya sounded oddly focused as she spoke to the assassin. "Odd, isn't it, how our masters sometimes twist our perspectives to ensure our compliance?"
"Why am I the only one who doesn't understand what this woman is doing here?" Lyta demanded.
"Lord Moro obtained more information after chemical interrogation before we went to the fortress," Maerya said. "This child thought she was serving the Emperor. She thought you had become corrupted from your original purpose to protect Saint Elosia. She wasn't targeting you because you were an Interrogator, but because you were a Rothid. The cell she operated in seemed to think the Rothid family were supposed to be cultists for Saint Elosia."
"Cell?"
"Lord Moro planned to purge it while we were away," Maerya said.
There was the faintest slip. Just enough for Lyta's power to return something new about the psyker, and why she spoke Moro's name differently than others. She'd called him Abrin.
Lyta looked away; it meant nothing in the here and now. Instead, she stared down intently at her would-be assassin. "Tell me what you know about Taylor Hebert."
Once again, the woman had an almost visceral reaction to the name. "I'll die first."
"But Hebert wouldn't, would she? Or if she did, she'd just return again a century or so later. Century after century, millennia after millennia, for tens of thousands of years. The Saint Everlasting. The mortal aspect of Telos."
Maerya hissed. The hot air swirled with a subvocal snarl of rage and anger at the name.
The effect on Eta, though, was more profound even than that. She stared up at Lyta in horror. "How can you know that?"
"Because she's chosen, you little fool," Maerya said. Her normally distracted air focused with shocking intensity. "Your masters played you, and sent you to kill the very one you were sworn to protect!"
"What does this matter?" Artigan muttered. "It's not going to help us find Lord Moro, or that thrice-damned sorcerer."
Lyta heard his angry question from a distance as her mind rushed through everything she had learned. "Hebert left Terra ten thousand years ago," she said. "She escaped during the Great Heresy with the help of Malcador the Sigillite. Whatever the Inquisition thinks of her now, she had personal ties and received personal protection from Malcador. Eta, for both our souls, do you know where she is? Malcador said if she fell to Chaos, all humanity would fall. Do you know where she is?"
The young woman was weeping freely. "No. No, I never knew. In Scholam I learned she was lost in the trees."
That phrase again. "Two trees were associated with the cult. Trees with golden boughs. They were here, in Gimel Spire. Do you know where?"
The girl bowed her head, and in so doing affirmed that she did. Lyta turned to ask Maerya a question, but stopped whens he saw something in the far wall she hadn't seen before.
"What is that?"
"Something that resonates with your soul, I suspect," Maerya said.
On an ornate wood and gold trim podium within a stasis cube, Lyta saw a large gilt-edged book of actual paper. She stepped past the psyker, recognizing it instantly. "How can Lord Moro have this book? It was in the Sigillite's personal vault!"
"Which Gallent Sidozie had access to, as his Chosen," Maerya said.
"Throne's sake, did he tell you everything, Maerya?" Artigan sounded exasperated.
"She was privy to things you'd never be, Commander," Lyta said. She drifted closer to the ancient holy book. "Tell me what you know, Maerya. Lord Rassilo was right, Moro is a Gallentist. But it doesn't mean what she thought it meant."
"Moro's own master taught him the truth," Maerya said. "Gallent Sidozie was not a heretic like Xanthus became. As the Sigillite slowly perished on the Golden Throne so that the Emperor could confront the Traitor, Malcador sent orders directly to the minds of his Chosen. The Inquisition was subverted by its earliest founders into a weapon against Malcador's true wishes. Whether through jealousy, hatred or corruption, Xanthus and Veritius, another of the first Inquisitors, framed and murdered Sidozie and hunted his acolytes into the shadows. But we never forgot our true purpose."
"Which was?"
"To find you, of course. So that you could guide her back home when the time came."
Lyta drifted closer to it and studied the real leather binding.
"The Saint Everlasting," Lyta whispered aloud. The ancient book before her rested on a red velvet pillow. It was gilded with gold leaf in relief on red-dyed leather. A large, exquisite book.
Sacra Biblia Telosia
Standard Revised Edition
As Trans by Sabbatina XV, Pythia
Vates Publications 418.M23
She opened the stasis chamber. The binding creaked with age as she lifted the cover. There, on the first page, was the very same portrait that hung in Malcador's vaults. The woman from her vision, with dark, curling hair sitting in profile. Two golden-boughed trees on either side of her, with the cruciform Telosia hanging in the sky above her.
"I may fall," she heard herself say.
"We'll catch you," Maerya promised.
"We don't have time for this!" Artigan said.
"We must make time," the pysker told him. "This is necessary. She's Chosen."
Lyta flipped the page to the first line of text. In the far distance, she heard a frightening voice speaking a language she'd never heard, and yet somehow still understood. "It's falling!"
All was lost in a rush of shadows and wind.