The Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th touched down at their destination after a transit that had not been without turbulence.
Pyrite, hub world of the storied Sabbat Worlds sector, occupied a position of considerable importance in the orbital traffic picture. The station above it held layer upon layer of troopships, supply transports, and escort warships at anchor, each one carrying a regint or a stockpile or a void crew that would, in all likelihood, eventually be committed to the long campaign the sector had already begun preparing for.
Duvette stood at the observation port and looked at them. He understood what they represented.
Their own transport was a smaller vessel than the Siren's Fury, narrower and less accommodating, but compared to the grinding hell of what the 112th had co out of, the accommodation was entirely adequate.
The transit had taken close to a month, and Duvette had not had a restful mont of it.
As the commissar who had killed a Hive Tyrant in close combat and received personal recognition from the Chapter Master of the Ultramarines, his na had circulated through the transport's command levels before they had cleared Macragge's orbital zone. The result was a steady stream of colleagues, fellow colonels from other regints and senior officers from the escort vessels, who found reasons to be in whatever compartnt he was occupying and wanted to exchange a few words with the man the account described.
Duvette was aware that he had never been naturally suited to this kind of social navigation, in either of his lives. The conversations required a mode of operation he did not possess at the instinctive level. He could not do warmth on demand. What he managed, most of the ti, was a smile that was polite and communicating nothing, followed by a graceful extraction using the pretext of needing to supervise the 112th's training rotation.
This pattern had an unintended consequence.
"Have you seen the legendary commissar?" one officer had said to another, unaware that the subject was within earshot. "Even during the rest period he runs his soldiers for eighteen hours a day. Eighteen hours. The Macragge miracle wasn't chance. Our n are getting soft. Starting tomorrow, add training."
When Duvette overheard this, his internal response was a brief apology directed at whichever regint's soldiers were about to have their rest period restructured on his account.
The 112th trained because Veteran's Fra was not a courtesy. Soldiers operating at that level of physical conditioning needed to put the excess sowhere productive, or what accumulated on the lower decks stopped being high spirits and beca sothing that required a commissar's intervention to address. The training was entirely real. Its cause was not what the observers assud.
As for the other regints' soldiers, he quietly wished them luck.
The lander's engines had wound down to a low rumble by the ti the ramp descended. Duvette led the 112th out onto the surface of Pyrite's largest and oldest city.
Klassya.
The mont he stepped clear of the ramp, his attention was pulled to the distance.
A tower. Not a large building, not a prominent structure: a tower that had broken through the cloudline and continued well above it, its upper reaches lost in grey. The estimation that ca to him was sothing above three thousand tres, and the structure's profile communicated clearly that its builders had not been interested in practical height. They had been interested in a statent.
"That tower is over three thousand tres tall," Elias Hawthorne said, appearing at Duvette's shoulder as if he had been there for so ti. He pointed toward it, his voice carrying a note of genuine appreciation. "The Ministorum twin spires are not far from it, and the Administratum tower beside them. That one dwarfs both. The tallurgical workers of Pyrite built it over several centuries. A declaration of faith and of craft simultaneously. In Klassya, it is the coordinates of belief."
"You know this city?" Duvette turned to look at him.
"Ha. Lucky enough to have been here twice." Elias showed a self-satisfied expression that ca with a flash of sothing nostalgic underneath it.
Duvette let one eyebrow move slightly. With the Astra Militarum's attrition rates at the level they were, surviving long enough to visit a rear hub world twice was a noteworthy fact about a soldier's luck and capability. It said sothing specific about Elias Hawthorne's record.
The Cadian seed entirely relaxed. Relaxed enough, in fact, to reach out and put an arm around Duvette's shoulders with the easy confidence of a man who has assessed the situation and concluded there will be no consequences.
He was not wrong in that assessnt. After the underground passages beneath Macragge City, Elias had a reasonable read on where the lines were. Duvette's exterior ran cold, but the field of tolerance he extended to the people he had fought beside was considerably wider than the surface suggested.
"I know a good place," Elias said, lowering his voice and producing the particular look that communicated his aning without needing to make it explicit. "The Cold Quarter. We should go later."
"Count in." This ca from Stroud, who had materialized at Elias's other side with an expression that required no interpretation. His eyes had the look of a man who has identified an opportunity for entertainnt and intends to pursue it.
"Wait." Duvette pushed Elias's arm aside. "The Munitorum's authorization is clear. Our permitted area is the Warm District. The Cold Quarter is outside the boundary and outside the regulations."
"My dear Commissar." Elias waved this off with the serenity of a man who has never found regulations particularly binding. "Wear plain clothes and no one recognizes you. Rules exist for context, not as permanent constraints. We are not going to cause trouble. We are going to experience the local culture. We have a week here." He was already moving, Stroud falling in beside him with enthusiasm. "Get settled at the Polar Imperial and I'll co find you."
Duvette watched them walk away together with the comfortable alignnt of two n who had just agreed on sothing that was going to be explained away later, and directed a private thought at the reputation of Cadia's legendary military discipline.
He gave his non-commissioned officers their instructions: no incidents, rest properly, stay in the Warm District, and dispersed the regint to their assigned billets. Then, rather than returning to the hotel imdiately, he turned into the upper city streets on his own. The unfamiliar environnt warranted a personal look at the ground before he settled in for the week.
Walking the streets of Klassya, the Gothic architecture pressed in from every direction: heavy dressed stone, soaring arches, black iron statuary at the corners of buildings, gargoyles occupying every overhang with the patient civic permanence of things that had been carved to last. But there was a quality to the place that distinguished it from every world Duvette had passed through in his ti on this side of the divide, a quality that brought sothing from far back in his mory.
It resembled a city. A real one. Not a military installation, not a fortress city braced against imminent assault, not a devastated ruin in the process of being cleared.
Shops with display windows. Cafes producing light and the sll of hot food. A street-level heating system in the cobbles underfoot, and at approximately the height of a building's first storey, a low-power void shield running continuously across the street, deflecting the precipitation entirely. Rain and snow broke against the invisible barrier and fell away from it, leaving the pedestrians below in dry air. The residents on the street were well-dressed and moving with the particular ease of people who have not had to think about whether they will eat today.
By front-line standards, this was a different species of world entirely.
He had been walking for so ti when sothing caught the edge of his attention.
A bird. A dark one, roughly corvid in form and size, perched on the stone trim of a building a short distance behind him. It was maintaining a gap that was neither the distance of natural wariness nor the distance of an animal that had lost interest. The gap was deliberate.
Duvette stopped and turned his head enough to look at it directly.
As if it had been waiting for the acknowledgnt, the bird stopped pretending to be indifferent. It dropped from the stone trim to a lamp post perhaps two tres ahead of him, and looked back. Two sounds, clear and direct. Then it hopped forward along the post, opened its wings, relocated to the next lamp post, and looked back again.
The eyes were red.
The familiarity that hit him was not imdiate. It arrived in stages, like sothing working its way to the surface from depth.
Red eyes.
He stood for a mont, his hand moving without conscious thought to the plasma pistol at his hip. The power sword was with Evan, too conspicuous for a supposedly informal shore leave. The pistol would handle whatever the situation ahead of it called for.
He followed the bird.
It took him through the ordered streets of the Warm District and then, gradually, out of them. The buildings around him changed register as he walked. The dressed stone gave way to older, dirtier construction. The heating in the ground underfoot stopped. The void shield was no longer running at street level, and the cold asserted itself through the fabric of his greatcoat with a thoroughness that the Warm District had prevented. Where there had been black ice on the street, it was old and deep and had not been cleared, ground into grey-black compression by the traffic of people who had no expectation of its removal.
The Cold Quarter.
The shift in population was imdiate and total. The well-dressed pedestrians were gone. What occupied these streets were people with the particular quality of individuals who have learned to exist in the margins of a city's economy and have adjusted their faces accordingly. Eyes that assessed quickly and without warmth. Figures that moved with the particular awareness of the permanently exposed. And among them, the harder variants: the n in groups at alley corners with the body language of people who have concluded that other people's property is a reasonable supplent to their own.
One such group registered Duvette's greatcoat and drew the obvious conclusion from the quality of the fabric and the silver of the rank insignia. Several hands moved toward concealed edges.
Duvette turned his head and looked at them.
That was all he did.
The eyes that had looked up at a Hive Tyrant without flinching, in a tunnel beneath a world that had been nearly consud, were not complicated things to read at close range. The n at the alley corner had spent their careers evaluating threats to their continued existence, and what they read in the mont his gaze found them had nothing in it that resembled the easy mark they had been preparing for. The assessnt took less than a second.
They retreated. Then they scattered, in the way of small animals who have just understood what kind of attention they have drawn.
Duvette returned his attention to the bird and kept walking.
The red-eyed crow led him through alley after alley until the streets had narrowed to the width of two people passing abreast, and then stopped at a door. A low door, half-sunk below street level, set into the base of a building that communicated nothing about its interior from the outside. The bird dropped from the door fra to the step, produced its two-note call once more, and hopped aside.
Duvette looked at it for a mont.
He drew one breath, settled his grip on the plasma pistol at his hip without drawing it, and pushed the door open.
The noise inside was total. Alcohol and close-packed bodies and the underside of a city's social order, all of it concentrated in a low-ceilinged space filled with the kind of people who could not conduct their business in the Warm District. Cards on tables. Deals in corners. The particular quality of conversation that stops being conversation and becos the sound of things being arranged.
Every bit of it stopped the mont Duvette ca through the door.
The black commissar's greatcoat, the rank insignia, the face above the collar: everything about what stood in the doorway told the room that the law had arrived, and the law had been forged in sothing beyond their experience. The assessnt took less ti in here than it had in the alley. Every head went down. Not a single eye held contact.
Duvette was scanning the room for whoever had sent the bird when a voice ca from the darkest corner.
Clear. Level. Cold in the way of soone who has not needed warmth in a very long ti.
"He is a friend of mine."
His breathing stopped for a mont.
He turned toward the corner.
At a table that had seen better decades, in the part of the room where the lamp light had given up reaching, sat a figure he recognized with absolute certainty. White hair, long. A single eye the colour of fresh blood, regarding him across the distance with an expression that communicated an entire private conversation in a single look. Black robes bearing the gold insignia of the Inquisition at collar and cuff.
Duvette stared at her. The na ca out through his teeth.
"Juno. Karol."
"A long ti, Commissar Duvette." Lord Inquisitor Juno Karol set down her glass. Her red lips parted into a smile that did not simplify anything.
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