I felt his presence before I heard him. Of course, he of all people would know where and when to wait for me.

'Rogue Trader,' he said, stepping out of a side corridor.

'Heinrix. I missed you at dinner yesterday night.'

'I apologise deeply for that; urgent business called me on Footfall.' I held my hand for him to shake and, as he then fell in stride beside me, he must have caught the side eye I gave him. 'Which you already knew, of course.' Shuttles do declare their flightpath to the bridge, and it had taken me less than a minute to know where he had gone.

'Was that business concluded to your satisfaction?' Ever since the chirurgeons had given him leave to go back to his normal activities, Heinrix had buried himself in work — mainly for his Inquisition masters, but the bits he had decided to share with me had been invaluable in rounding up the last of Vistenza's Janus heretics. During the weeks we spent parked in orbit, his time had been mostly dedicated to conducting interrogations dirtside without, as far as I was able to find out, boiling anyone from the inside, and the days since we left I suppose he spent going over the collected material. An open invitation to play regicide he had never answered. Being too old to play mind games for company, I had let the matter go and simply enjoyed our conversations at dinner, which Heinrix had never missed until the previous evening.

'It was,' he replied. 'May I solicit a private audience with you? Some matters I learned bear upon your protectorate.'

I tilted my head in the direction of my study. 'Come. I need to leave in three hours for a meeting with Tocara, but we still have ample time.'

By my desk stood a small table that carried a gift from the Magos Biologis on Janus: one I had taken an immediate liking to, and that I was satisfied to see perplexed Heinrix. I pushed a small icon on a silver cylinder, and the grumbling song of warming water rose.

'Please, make yourself comfortable,' I said, waving him to one of the nearby chairs. I pushed on another icon on another part of the contraption and, for a precise ten point four seconds, a roaring, grinding, gritting sound prevented all attempts at conversation. A tiny drawer opened; it was full of a dark brown powder and a perfume both rich and bitter flooded my office. By then, a ting announced the water had reached the perfect temperature and I hurried to put the recaf powder in a glass beaker engraved with holy symbols of the Mechanicus. The warm water I then poured. A silvery mesh went on top of the beaker; when I fastened it, I murmured a blessing that fell in the artificial ear of a nearby servo-skull and this started a countdown.

'I'm not usually a recaf person,' I explained while I removed two tall cups from a cupboard, 'but those grains come from the Janus plantations and this blessed apparatus turns them in the best drink I've ever had. Honey instead of sugar makes it particularly fine. Will you have some?'

We made small talk while the recaf brewed. After three minutes, there was another ting and a tiny whirring motor pushed the mesh down the beaker. I filled our cups and waited for Heinrix's reaction. His eyes widened with curiosity when he raised his cup to better smell the aroma and, taking a careful sip, he pronounced the recaf excellent indeed. I drank some of mine, too, and invited him to unburden his mind of its secrets. Not that he ever would, but it's the thought that counts.

'There are some worrying reports about Kiava Gamma. An informant from the Lord Inquisitor's network left a message for me, which was delivered as soon as we docked, and yesterday night I met with some travellers with an interesting story.'

'What kind of travellers?'

'Refugees from Kiava Gamma, whose ship erred through Warp storms for weeks before luck — or the Emperor's grace — put them in a place where their Navigator could bring them out and into realspace close enough to Footfall that they could hobble to port.'

Rising, I asked for the name of the ship; it was the Fanal of Faith. I put a request in the cogitator encased between bookshelves and, after a short litany of percussive maintenance, the machine spirit confirmed that ship was a barge registered on Kiava Gamma. My seat, when I went back to it, felt uncomfortable. Kiava Gamma. If Janus was the granary of my dominion, Kiava Gamma was its weapons locker. From that forge world poured all manner of Mechanicus creations — ships and transports of all kinds, yes, and the heavy machinery at the heart of sheltered hives, but also everything needed to repel xenos ambitions against my tiny part of the Expanse. Kiava Gamma wasn't specialised like some worlds I had seen in the Imperium and that would sometimes build a single pattern of boltgun; it produced a bit of everything. And, like all forge worlds, Kiava Gamma housed a significant Adeptus Mechanicus presence. In truth, if I owned the planet, they all but rented it and fulfilled the terms of their lease by giving back a good portion of their production.

One thing I do appreciate about Heinrix's moral build is that he doesn't believe in sugarcoating the truth so, when I asked, he gave it to me in a single word.

'Heresy.'

I cursed. Of the three worlds that remained of the von Valancius realm (it had once been much more extensive and had crumbled, little by little, since Theodora's father's time), another one was threatened by the Archenemy. The more I learned about the woman, and the more I wondered what Theodora had filled her days with — and the memory of the cursed lens I had found and given to Heinrix came back to needle me. One planet can be an accident. Two are a suspicion. I cursed again, because neither Abelard, Argenta, or that poor crazy Idira — or any superior officer who had known Theodora — had given me any inkling that something was off. Idira, of course, would have been shipped off to Terra or burned at the stake without Theodora's protection, so she could have been lying the whole time. But Abelard himself was the picture of honesty, and I didn't pitch Argenta as the kind of Sister of Battle who could be corrupted.

'Homegrown, or another Final Dawn cult?'

'It is too early to say, although the refugees said it came as an outside invasion.'

I hesitated, but it had to be said: 'I will want to interrogate those refugees myself. I do trust your word, but I need to hear them with my own ears. They are my people, after all.' Using the word subjects still felt unnatural to me: the Emperor has subjects, but governors have constituents, or citizens, and regiments have the rank and file. Only on Janus had I fully grasped that my Warrant granted me authority over people akin to that of a High Lord of Terra (not that I had ever seen one of those), and with the same adjunct vocabulary.

'Of course, Rogue Trader.'

More than anything, I needed to know if Abelard and the others were trustworthy. I voxed for them to meet me, fully equipped, in the hangar bay, twenty minutes from now. Another call to ask Vigdis to transmit my utmost regrets to Liege Tocara but that I would be an hour late to our meeting. The recaf I downed tasted more bitter than usual and, smacking down the cup, I told Heinrix he had fifteen minutes to brief me before we left for the station.

Even walking at speed, it took us a while to find the Fanal of Faith people. They had made themselves at home in a far corner of the Atrium — without a view on the Emperor's golden statue, hidden as it was by precarious shacks of corrugated iron and cardboard stacked in defiance to gravity and architectural safety. The situation had terribly degraded on Footfall while we had been gone: more beggars with hollowed eyes, more children with arms like matchsticks — and more weapons, carried openly in defiance of local ordinances. Posters with rebellious slogans were glued haphazardly, often signed by gangs. Tocara was sitting on a tinderbox, and the fire was getting closer. No wonder he had been in a hurry to get the barges to begin unloading, despite the late hour of our arrival the day before.

A group of people a bit less raggedy than the rest sat, or stood, or paced idly, before the shacks. About two hundreds still lived aboard, but a few dozens had elected to disembark for good on Footfall. A voidborn, tall and lanky, hairless face pale as a carp belly, waved to Heinrix and walked to us with a curious stare. The implants that replaced part of his skull twisted their cables like roots.

'Lord-captain,' said Heinrix, 'may I introduce Gabor Helem, boatswain of the Fanal of Faith?'

'Lord-captain, Your Ladyship!' cried out the man as he fell to his knees. 'We did our best, I promise we did. Please show us mercy, we had no choice but to run if we wanted to keep serving you. And don't be too hard on the others, it was me who gave the order to sell all that stuff. Our children needed to eat. The blame lies on me alone!' The man, crumpled on his feet, was terrified while a minute ago he had been at ease, and it took me too long to understand why. They had sold many of their ship's components to get whatever food they could, stripping whole decks of environmental controls: a station in the state of disrepair Footfall was in would be desperate for these. And it was theft, against the von Valancius dynasty.

'I don't blame you, boatswain. You did what you had to do in order to keep serving me. Equipment can be replaced; people, not so much. My riches come from those like you; I would have sold the whole ship myself for the sake of its people.'

It was an exaggeration, perhaps: one born of years of morale boosting, but the parts were already sold, and nothing would get them back. What I could get for their price was the loyalty of those I could have shot without a trial — or a grumble of protest.

Still on his knees, the boatswain made the sign of the Aquila, and he thanked me, his voice muffled by relief. Others, apparently reassured by my lack of violence, flocked to us, little by little. Their faces were gaunt and their clothes shabby, but a fire of interest lit their eyes when they looked at my little group. They whispered between themselves, like wind in a forest canopy, and the boatswain rose under Abelard's urging and began his tale.

'Like I've said to the gentleman there,' he said, pointing to Heinrix (who, I noticed, had for once hidden his rosette away), 'until a few weeks ago there was nothing wrong with Kiava Gamma. My clan has run cargo between the Cranach system and the rest of the Expanse since my great-grand-mother's day. A good planet, Kiava Gamma, full of cogboys to take care of our ship, and with good Warp currents all around. The captain, he had us wait for our next shipment like we often did, and then one day there's this ship in orbit, come out of nowhere. You'd think we'd have seen 'em on their way from the Mandeville point, but no; and it was huge, it was a beast that could've been a battleship, but no Imperial battleship has ever looked like that. The captain and the vox master, and all those who were on the bridge... I dunno, they hailed them and it was as if they had gone mad. They…' His voice failed; he swallowed hard and whispered: 'They said terrible things. Heretic things. 'Bout the Emperor, an'... an' you, Your Ladyship.'

A woman's voice came from the crowd: 'We didn't know about poor Lady Theodora then, may her soul shine ever bright. They said a coward killed her and a coward took her place. They said the protectorate was doomed and our only hope was to join those on the weird ship.'

'And when we tried to get them to see reason,' continued the boatswain, 'that the protectorate was fine, that even if Lady Theodora had died there was no way there was a coward in the von Valancius clan, and that they were spreading lies out of the void, they got angry at us. So we fought, and some got on escape pods down to the planet to join the heretics, and others we sent to face the Emperor's own judgment. Others who weren't fully gone killed themselves rather than sin against what's right. But it was spreading like a blight. There was more and more of them and the Navigator, bless her foresight, she said there was something in the place that was tempting some of us to fall to evil ways. So we hightailed out of it, but without a helmsman and with the Warp currents being all strange in the wake of the weird ship, well, it was hard.'

'The captain had smashed all the sextants too,' said someone else. 'Didn't want us to leave.'

'Yeah, he never left Cranach all right,' spat another voice. 'Got 'is head bashed in and serves 'im well.' A few cheers saluted that — repressed laughs, even.

Coward. I recognised the insult that had already been lobbed at me once. Kunrad, that was Kunrad Voigtvir's move, the Master of Whispers who had already slandered me to the Rykad Minoris governor. So that rat had fallen to the same trick again, and now we were also seeing his friends aboard an unknown ship branded to Chaos. I could see Heinrix had made the connexion, too, and Argenta, who had murder in her eyes.

Now Heinrix prodded Gabor Helem again, getting him to talk about the planet itself.

'Before we left the system, we heard them,' said the boatswain. 'The people of Kiava Gamma, they called us on vox. They called for help. Those from the weird ship, they butchered, tortured, sacrificed entire blocks to the darkness. And then there was silence on all frequencies.'

At my side, Abelard shook his head in disbelief, his face marked with deep thoughts. 'Lord-captain, this cannot be the work of the traitor Kunrad alone. He is scum, but he is no idiot, and wouldn't take on Kiava Gamma without the resources of powerful allies.'

'Later, Abelard,' I asked. This kind of thing was better not discussed in the open — but Idira didn't take the warning for herself. She wondered aloud about the different nuances of heretics and traitors that could be involved until Abelard took her arm and got her to just listen to her voices again instead of chatting away her every thought. Going back to the boatswain, I asked about their journey to Footfall: horrendous weeks where the crew, besieged by horrors and fears seeping from the Immaterium, killed anyone who threatened to turn to heresy. Their number had already fallen by half when the spectre of famine appeared: they had left orbit in a rush, without having replenished the galleys. Helem wasn't the only one speaking now: many had something to say, some hardship to describe or report some heart-wrenching decision that had to be made.

A voidborn woman cried: 'We barely escaped, we barely made it here… Why, why did this happen to us?'

Argenta answered first, her clear voice, devoid of doubt, carrying to the most distant ranks of the small crowd. She spoke of tests of faith, of the fires of challenges which purify the soul — of the Emperor's chosen and of the duty to face one's worst fears, and she left the survivors either trembling with pride or frowning with doubt. When she was done, I took a step forward and said:

'The Emperor's half a galaxy from the Koronus Expanse and He works in mysterious ways. No one can know why you went through that; I certainly don't pretend to, and if faith strengthens you it's all the better. But what I know is that you brought honour to the von Valancius name, to the von Valancius spirit. You, all of you, are to be commended for your resilience and your courage in the face of danger.' And they would all have nightmares for years to come, peopled with the friends and family members they killed or who killed themselves along the way. 'I praise you for having survived, and I thank you for bringing these tidings of Kiava Gamma to me. You will now leave those shacks and report to deck Alpha-Rho. Those who wish can transfer to the Emperor's Mercy, and I will refit the Fanal of Faith for those who want to stay; in the meantime, all will have decent food and shelter. And if none want to set foot again on the ship of your misery, it will be sold and another bought in its stead, and armed for you to travel between the stars. You're back in the von Valancius fold now: your tribulations have come to their end.'

And I believed it. These people had challenged the Ruinous Powers for their lives and won, and they called me their lord-captain while they wouldn't have known me on the street had we met earlier. The human mind is very bad at dealing with large numbers: the millions of Janus, the billions of Dargonus and Kiava Gamma, I barely grasped. But give me the remnant crew of a half-gutted ship, and those I will know how to take care of.

We spoke some more. I voxed for some servitors with anti grav plates to help the Fanal of Faith people move and, while we waited, they told me how the able-bodied stayed on the station to work for a salary paid in scraps, because the others: children, the elderly, or the wounded, were safer on the ship. Argenta promised to visit them in charity; despite her warrior's disposition, sometimes I do feel there's a heart beneath the silver power armour. All in all, none of my retinue behaved suspiciously, and I couldn't have said if I was relieved or even more worried.

Soon, however, I had to leave: being late to the Liege's residence after pushing back our appointment would have bordered on the insult. I dispatched Idira and Abelard to escort the hungry and the tired to our dock, where they could be brought aboard the Emperor's Mercy and, from there, get supplies for the Fanal of Faith. Abelard, because the First Officer's authority would be needed for that, and Idira because she appeared to suffer more than usual from the voices beyond the Veil. Argenta, as for herself, was to go the Fanal of Faith and assess their needs as well as coordinate with Abelard for establishing a direct shuttle link. Before I could send Heinrix to accompany her (and discreetly check for signs of heresy here and there, which was, after all, his bread and butter), he announced his intention to come with me to Tocara's. 'The Rogue Trader cannot present herself without her retinue,' he said, 'and there is no time to send for Lady Orsellio or Mistress Heydari.'

Abelard gave him one of his patented looks, that are in equal parts accusatory and shrewd and probably pushed many a junior officer to confess crimes against regulations not yet committed, but as always Heinrix didn't care. However, Abelard also gruffly agreed that etiquette required I had an escort of proper standing and, thus ganged upon by the two most grox-headed men in my life, I took my leave from the refugees with Heinrix in tow, steel epaulettes, cape, power sword and all.

We had to wind our way through the Atrium. Once a cathedral of spectacular size, it had been altered through the centuries in a maze of platforms, ladders and partitions, of side streets and dead-ends that we had to navigate before reaching the promenade. I was glad to see Heinrix showed no obvious sequela of his wound: his step was brisk as ever — he was unchanged. Suddenly, we were in the open; the cries of peddlers surrounded us (Shoes! Shoes resoled! — Prayer book of saint Drusus! Save your soul with the prayer book of saint Drusus! Holy medals at half price!) and we glimpsed from afar the golden statue of the Emperor. Heinrix offered me his arm to help navigate the crowd. I took it gladly.

'Katov,' he said (and he looked even more emotionally constipated than usual), 'I haven't properly thanked you yet for your thoughtfulness when I was wounded on Janus. Know that I very much appreciated everything you did that day. It has seldom been that I found such selfless support in an hour of need. Most people labour under the assumption that, as a biomancer, I need no help of the kind you provided; yours was therefore doubly esteemed.'

This had all of a rehearsed speech and, for some reason, it made me angry — no, not angry, but annoyed. Annoyed that he chose the Atrium promenade for this, while he had snubbed my last invitation. Annoyed at — once more — the swinging pendulum between Inquisition acolyte and maybe confidante. Annoyed by his ever-present veneer of courtesy that hid everything and that forced me to respond in kind.

'I'm glad that you think so,' I managed. 'Your gratitude, however, would be more valued if you could make up your mind between calling me by my given name or my title. The way things are, I never know whether to think of you as a friend or as Calcazar's pawn.'

He was stung, I could tell, and stiffened before speaking again. 'Excuse me, then, for wanting to spare commoners the need to wonder at some of the more intimate aspects of our relationship.'

'Heinrix,' I retorted. 'I don't call you by your given name because we fucked twice, the last of which was by the way beyond mortifying. It's because, for all your faults and despite my best judgement, sometimes, in between your bouts of dogmatic devotion to duty, you are actually somewhat likeable. I actually enjoy when we play regicide, you know.'

'How was it mortifying?' Oh, the way he latched on off-hand remarks! A proper Interrogator.

Letting his elbow go, I opened wide my arms in disbelief. 'I don't know, because I ended up curled in foetal position instead of enjoying your skills below the belt, because I was overwhelmed by, by other stuff? That doesn't qualify as a success in my book.' Taking a step back, I collided with a passerby and they swore at me with a rude gesture, which I ignored. 'And then the only time you mentioned it again was to make a joke out of it right when I was worried about pacifying a rebellion, and I am about sure you only agreed to that one evening of regicide afterwards because you couldn't worm out of it without being impolite. And impolite is the worst sin in your eyes, even worse that daemonettes and cults and xenos.'

'Katov, I never…' Heinrix stopped and rubbed his hands over his face in an uncommon display of emotion. 'We all have our baggage. I never held it against you. I… by the Throne, whenever I tried to get close later you gave me the cold shoulder! I know when I am unwanted, and if by attending the mess hall these last weeks I have made you uncomfortable I apologise, but I felt it my duty to keep an eye on you, even if your presence can be so… distracting at times. And I did… I do need you to know that the way you went over you obvious distaste for my presence in order to help me hasn't gone unnoticed. You have my deepest gratitude for it,' he finally snapped, 'although if the fact irks you I have no remedy for your damned testiness.'

There were so many things plain wrong with his reasoning that I would have needed a week in order to pinpoint them all. Meanwhile, Tocara was waiting, so I just sighed in dissent and said we needed to go.