V2 Chapter 47: The Thorian Lord Inquisitor
Expedition fleet flagship. Senior officer quarters.
Duvette Erdmann had been in the cabin for more standard Terran hours than he had bothered to count.
Marshal Blackwood had not restricted his physical movement in any strict sense. The cabin, rated for naval officers of commander grade, was fully equipped. Two Storm Troopers stood outside the door, but their weapons were pointed at the floor. It was less a detention than a form of protection wearing detention's clothes.
Supreme command had even permitted Duvette to keep an encrypted short-range communications array.
Through it, he could continue issuing tactical directives to the Ash Watchers-Eisenmark 112th Regiment at the main anchorage below, operating remotely by coded command.
The summary reports Evan had transmitted confirmed that the 112th's situation was entirely stable.
The regiment's record on Ashek II had opened every door in the logistics department. Supplies, ammunition, and fresh armour vehicles were being inventoried in a continuous stream. Veterans were resting at the billet. Newly assigned replacements were being put through high-intensity conditioning drills under the supervision of those veterans.
Duvette's own state of mind was considerably less settled.
Inquisitor Maysondaire, who had levelled a bolt pistol at Duvette's chest in the conference room, had vanished completely, as though the man had never been present in the expedition at all.
Belisarius Cawl, the cause of everything that had followed, had returned to his Ark of Omen after leaving his promise to come again, and was now conducting whatever technical work occupied him, waiting for the Inquisition's senior hierarchy to arrive.
What had actually put tension back into nerves that had grown accustomed to proximity with death was the classified intelligence Blackwood had transmitted personally to him several hours ago on an encrypted channel.
The Lord-grade Inquisitor coming to take personal charge of his case was not Juno Karol.
It was a Lord Inquisitor of the Thorians.
When he heard that, Duvette went quiet for a long time.
Part of the reason he had dared to use the System's capabilities in certain desperate situations, beyond his absolute read of the tactical situation, was that he had known his file and anomaly records were sealed inside the archives of Juno Karol, a relatively rational Inquisitor with whom he had an existing arrangement built on shared Imperial interest.
That arrangement had just lost its protection.
Juno Karol was currently occupied by something considerably more lethal. Slaydo's intelligence indicated that Juno was running down an extremely sensitive and dangerous lead in another sector, one that connected directly to a certain Inquisitor Heldane.
Juno had clearly picked up information relating to the Men of Iron STC site.
With her attention fully committed to Heldane, a temporary gap had opened in the security around her sealed archives. The Inquisition's higher levels had exploited that gap, working through the base-level logic of those records and pulling out the name Duvette Erdmann, along with the pattern of anomalous tactical instincts and inexplicable survival rates that appeared across every campaign file attached to it.
The Inquisition had made its decision. A different Lord Inquisitor would be sent to take the case personally.
"Wonderful." Duvette leaned against the bulkhead with a sharp exhale, his brow tight.
Of all the possible moments for Juno to be dragged away, it had to be now, with Heldane's thread pulling her off in another direction entirely.
He stood and began moving through the narrow cabin, working through the problem.
A Thorian Lord Inquisitor.
After Slaydo's warning, Duvette had made sure he understood this particular faction thoroughly. The Thorians were a distinct case from the blunt instrument approach of hardline Puritan factions like the one Maysondaire had represented. A Puritan simply decided you were Warp-tainted and had you burned. The Thorians were different.
These were people who had built a theology around the belief that the Emperor's soul could achieve permanent physical incarnation in a mortal vessel. For an Astra Militarum officer whose file contained multiple events that could not be explained by any conventional standard, what a Thorian Lord Inquisitor was most likely to do was not a polite interview.
They would take him somewhere. A subterranean interrogation chamber, old instruments covering the walls alongside Warp-detection equipment. Then they would apply every extreme method available to them.
They would cut his skin. They would stimulate his nervous system. They might place him in an enclosed arena with things that wanted to kill him.
None of this would be to extract a confession. The purpose would be to push him into absolute life-or-death extremity in order to test whether the Emperor's light genuinely resided within him, and confirm whether he was a suitable permanent vessel.
If he died under the treatment, that would prove he was only mortal. If he survived and produced something inexplicable, they would pursue him with greater fervour than before.
Duvette stopped pacing.
He had brought the 112th through enough close-contact killing to harden his mind into something that did not rattle easily anymore. A bolter round to the skull at close range during an engagement was something he had made his peace with in principle.
But that was entirely different from meaningless, methodical religious torment with no tactical purpose.
He had no capacity for performing sincere devotional fervour under high-voltage electrical stimulation. He was not a true believer. He had no "holy light" to manifest on demand. If the Thorians strapped him to their instruments expecting a saint and received a man who found the entire exercise both painful and conceptually absurd, the outcome would not be favourable for anyone in the room.
Setting aside the final option of simply killing every Thorian present and putting the 112th in open conflict with the Inquisition, the only viable exit he could identify was Belisarius Cawl.
In this fleet, Cawl was the only entity whose political standing and raw capability could hold a Lord-grade Inquisitor at arm's length by force if necessary and keep Duvette alive while doing it.
He was still working through worst-case scenarios in his mind when the communications panel beside the cabin door lit with the gold indicator that represented the highest command authority.
Blackwood's message came through, brief and carrying weight.
"Duvette. Come out. The Thorian Lord Inquisitor has arrived."
Duvette drew a slow breath. He straightened his black commissar's greatcoat, pinned the Star of Terra back to its visible position on his chest, checked that the items in his inner pockets were properly secured, and pressed the door release.
He followed the guards through the flagship's steel corridors back to the large strategic conference chamber where the confrontation had played out.
When Duvette stepped through the doors and got a clear look at the Inquisition Lord standing at the far end of the long table, his stride paused for one brief, involuntary beat.
For a moment he genuinely could not reconcile what he was seeing with the concept of a Lord Inquisitor, a figure with authority to order the destruction of entire star systems.
There was no black hood obscuring the face. No cold servo-skulls. No heretic-hunting instruments radiating discomfort from their surfaces.
Standing there was a somewhat overweight middle-aged man.
He wore a coat of quality material that was deliberately unremarkable. His thinning hair had been combed with considerable care.
In a flagship conference room full of muscle, steel, and the physical marks of war, this man looked considerably more like a heavyset bureaucrat responsible for ledgers in some hive city's lower administrative district than a cold hunter of heresy.
The instant this man saw Duvette enter, his round face assembled a broad and entirely amiable expression. He moved toward Duvette at a pace that had something almost light-footed about it.
Behind him, Marshal Blackwood followed like a tensed statue, his expression completely serious, watching Duvette with eyes that communicated one message with considerable clarity: do not do anything unexpected.
"Ah, you must be Colonel-Commissar Duvette Erdmann. I have heard a great deal about you." The heavyset man came forward without the condescension of seniority, and introduced himself with the warmth of someone meeting a colleague they had been looking forward to. "I am Heinz Werner. As you can see, I am a Lord Inquisitor."
Heinz's expression held no aggression whatsoever. He continued in the same mild tone. "I have come to replace Maysondaire and conduct some routine review of your file. Relax, Commissar. There is no need for tension. I have reviewed your record thoroughly. I give you my word that I will not stand by and allow anyone to use fabricated charges to wrong one of the Imperium's heroes."
He let that settle for a moment, and then his smile moderated slightly. His voice dropped a register without losing any of its warmth.
"And naturally, I would equally not allow any genuine miracle to be clumsily mistaken for heresy by less perceptive colleagues."
Duvette looked at the pleasant expression on the heavyset man's face and believed none of it.
Maysondaire had been a straightforward threat. His logic was simple: find Duvette guilty, remove him from the board. That was a physical problem; sufficient force or political cover could deflect it.
This Thorian was a different kind of problem entirely. Heinz did not want to kill him. Heinz wanted to prove him useful.
Useful meant something specific here: an object, a vessel, a container for something divine. To establish that usefulness, Heinz would work methodically, one layer at a time, pushing Duvette toward every available limit until every secret had been extracted. That kind of deep examination of a person's foundations was not something conventional political countermeasures could stop.
Duvette did not follow Heinz's lead. He kept the neutral gravity that a commissar's bearing required and spoke without inflection.
"I appreciate your objectivity, Lord Werner. However, regarding this review, I believe we need to wait for one additional party before proceeding. I will not be answering any questions before Archmagos Belisarius Cawl is present."
At the name of Cawl, Heinz showed no displeasure. He gave a short nod and allowed the pleasant expression to recede.
He turned and walked a short distance along the conference table with his hands behind his back, and began murmuring to himself in a very low voice, apparently without intending to be heard.
"Yes, yes... and the Mechanicus as well, and an Archmagos... this is genuinely complicated..."
Duvette stood where he was and watched this Lord Inquisitor murmuring to himself in what appeared to be a state of genuine neurotic preoccupation, and said nothing further.
Every additional word was a potential opening. Until Cawl arrived, silence was his only reliable defence.
The conference room went quiet in a way that sat heavily on everyone in it.