I was honoured. Whatever I thought of his modus operandi, I knew our purposes pointed in the same direction.
With a weak gesture he beckoned Heldane forward. The man's raw, damaged head was no prettier than when I had last seen it.
'I want you to trust Heldane. Of all my students, he is the best. I intend to recommend his elevation to the level of high interrogator, and from there, inquisitional rank beckons. If I die, look to him for my sake. I have no doubt the Inquisition will benefit from his presence.'
I promised Voke I would do so, and this seemed to please Heldane. I didn't like the man much, but he had been resilient and unfaltering in the face of savage death, and there was no doubting his ability or dedication.
Voke took my hand in his sweaty claw and rasped 'Thank you, brother.'
As rr turned out, Commodus Voke lived on for another one hundred and three years. He proved nigh on impossible to kill. When Golesh Constan-tine Pheppos Heldane was finally elected to the rank of inquisitor, it was all Voke's doing. The sins of the father, as they say.
Invasion training began three weeks off 56-Izar. Initially, Admiral Spat-ian's plan was for a fleet action, a simple annihilation of any targets from orbit. But Lord Rorken and the Deathwatch insisted that a physical invasion was required. The recovery and destruction of the xenos Necroteuch
had to be authenticated, or we would never know for sure that it was truly gone. Only after that objective was achieved could extreme destructive sanction be unleashed on 56-Izar.
All that could be learned from my associates and the surviving Gudrunites concerning the saruthi tetrascapes – ironically, we were using Malahite's term by then – was collated during a scrupulously searching series of interviews conducted by naval tacticians and Brytnoth, the Death-watch's revered librarian and strategist.
The collected information was profiled by the fleet's cogitators, and simulations created to acclimatise the ground forces. To my eyes, the simulations conveyed nothing of the wrongness we had experienced on the world of the plateau.
Brytnoth himself conducted my interviews, accompanied by Olm Madorthene. Shaven-headed, a giant of a man even without his armour, Brytnoth was nevertheless cordial and attentive, addressing me with respect and listening with genuine interest to my replies. I tried to do verbal justice to my memories of the experience, and additionally related the theories that Malahite had expounded during that fateful seance.
Eschewing the luxury of a servitor scribe or clerk, Brytnoth made his own notes as he listened. I found myself engrossed watching the warrior's paw working the dwarfed stylus almost delicately across the note-slate.
We sat in my apartments for the sessions, which often lasted hours. Bequin brought in regular trays of hot mead or leaf infusions, and Brytnoth actually extended his little finger as he lifted the porcelain cups by the handle. He was to me the embodiment of war in peacetime, a vast power bound into genteel behaviour, striving to prevent his awesome strength from breaking loose. He would lift the cup, small finger extended, consult his notes and ask another question before sipping.
The fact that small finger was the size and shape of an Arbites' truncheon was beside the point.
4Vhat I'm trying to establish, brother inquisitor, is whether the environments of the saruthi xenos will hinder our forces or deprive them of optimum combat efficiency/
'You can be sure of that, brother librarian.' I poured some more Olicet tea from the silver pot. 'My comrades were disoriented for the entire duration of the mission, and the Gudranite riflemen had broken because of the place more than anything else. There is a wrongness that quite disarms the senses. It had been conjectured by some that this is a deliberate effect used by the saruthi to undermine sentients used to three physical dimensions, but the traitor Malahite made more sense in my opinion. The wrongness is a by-product of the saruthi's preferred environments. We can expect the effect to be the norm on any homeworld of theirs.'
