'Decoys/ said Betancore.
The Glavian is right, for my money/ he said. Then he shrugged. 'But good armour can rob away signals. We may never know/
'We'll know, Madorthene/ I promised him.
He took another tug on the decanter, handed it back to me and rose, brushing down his seamless armour.
'I'm glad naval security could serve you here, Inquisitor Eisenhorn. I hope it's restored your faith in the battlefleet/
I looked up at him with a weak nod. 'I'm impressed you came to oversee yourself, procurator/
'Are you kidding? After what happened on the Essene, the admiral would have had my head!'
He walked away. I liked him. An honest man doing his best amid the conflicting political interests of battlefleet command and the Inquisition. In later years, I would come to value Olm Madorthene's honesty and discretion immeasurably.
A fragile hunched figure clomped across the yard and stood over me. 'Now whose methods seem wise?' Commodus Voke asked, with a sneer. 'You tell me,' I replied, getting up.
Voke had brought a staff of nearly fifty with him, all clad in black robes, many with augmetic implants. They stripped the noble house of every shred of evidence they could find. Crates of papers, books, slates, artefacts and pict-tiles were carried out to waiting transports.
I was in no mood to argue. Pain and fatigue made my senses swim. Let Voke use his vast retinue and resources to do the painstaking work of recovery.
'Much has been deleted, dumped or burned,' a dour-faced savant called Klysis reported to Voke, as I walked with my fellow inquisitor into the shattered house. 'Much else is encrypted.'
We progressed into the basement system, and I led Voke to the force-shielded chamber where Glaw had trapped me. Kowitz's blood still marked the floor. The artefact from the altar plinth was gone.
'He referred to it as the Pontius/1 told Voke. The room no longer showed signs of being psychically shielded, so logic said the psyker-effects had been generated by the Pontius itself. As had the mental attack that had felled me, I was sure.
I leaned against the chamber wall and patiently told Voke the key points I had learned. 'Eyclone's mission to Hubris, involving the Pontius, was clearly important to them, but Oberon Glaw told me explicitly that said endeavour had been aborted… cancelled because something more vital had come into play. They referred to it as the true matter.'
'It would explain why your foe Eydone was abandoned,' he mused. 'After all his preparations, the Glaws failed to deliver the Pontius as they had promised.'
That fits. Dazzo and the shipmaster Locke were clearly deeply involved in this true matter. We need to establish more facts about them. I'm certain the work that concerned them touched on some archeoxenon material. They mentioned the "saruthi".'
A xenos breed, outlying the sub-sector/ said Voke's savant. 'Little is known of them and contact is forbidden. The Inquisition holds several investigations pending, but their space is uncharted, and while they keep themselves to themselves, more urgent matters have caused investigations to be postponed.'
'But a rogue like Locke may well have established lines of contact with them.'
Klysis and Voke both nodded. 'It will bear further research,' Voke said. 'Ordo Xenos must begin a survey of the saruthi. But for now, the matter is closed.'
'How do you reason that?' I asked with a contemptuous laugh.
Voke fixed me with his beady eyes. 'House Glaw is destroyed, its principal members and co-conspirators are slain. With them are lost the items precious to their cause. Whatever they were planning is finished.'
I didn't even begin to argue with the old man. Voke was sure of his facts. His main failing, in my opinion.
He was wrong, of course. The first hint came ten days later. I had returned to Dorsay with my colleagues, and had spent some time in the care of the Imperial Hospice on the Grand Canal where my many wounds and injuries were treated. Most of the cuts and gashes were superficial, and would heal in time. Locke's work on me had left deeper scars. Multiple neural injuries afflicted my system, many of which would never repair. Augmeticists from the battlefleet's Officio Medicalis conducted microsurgery on shredded nerve transmitters in my spine, thorax, brainstem and throat. They implanted more than sixty sections of artificial nerve fibre and ganglions. I had lost a good deal of sensitivity in my palette and oesophagus, and the reflexes on the left side of my body were dulled. My face they could do nothing with. Neural systems there had been utterly scourged. Locke's promise had been lasting. I would never smile again, nor make much of any expression. My face, impassive, was now just a mask of flesh.
