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Chapter 29: Lord Inquisitor Juno
When the banquet ended, Duvette went directly back to his cabin.
He moved through the upper deck's corridors toward the lift, and several commissarial colleagues made attempts to intercept him on the way. Some wanted details of the underground engagement at Heras. Others wanted to discuss tactics. A few simply wanted to meet the newly appointed commissar who had apparently performed well enough to generate a report worth reading. He declined all of them with the same polite economy — a brief nod, a mention of feeling unwell or needing rest — without slowing his pace at any point.
His attention was entirely on the white-haired Inquisitor.
In the Imperium, having an Inquisitor take notice of you was not something that resolved in comfortable directions. With certain kinds of Inquisitors — the genuinely zealous ones — there was not even the courtesy of explanation before the consequences arrived. He needed to be prepared for whatever form this was going to take.
The lift doors opened and he stepped onto the middle deck. The light in the corridor was notably dimmer than above. The environmental systems made their constant low sound in the metal walls, and he registered without immediately placing it that something else was different.
The armed ship's crew who should have been on patrol were gone.
The full length of the corridor was empty. Both sides: sealed cabin doors, pale fluorescent light from the strips above, nobody. His footsteps on the metal floor were the only sound.
He moved faster.
The cabin door was ahead. He reached it, pressed his hand to the identification panel, and the green light came on and the airtight door slid aside.
What he found inside stopped him in the doorway.
Three people.
Evan was in the far corner, back pressed flat against the cold metal of the bulkhead. The boy's face had lost all color. His hands were held at his sides with the fingers clenched, the knuckles white. The moment the door opened and he saw Duvette, his eyes went wide with something that was half terror and half desperate relief.
At the small desk beside the bunk, someone was sitting with their back to the door.
Long white hair braided neatly over the left shoulder. Black Inquisitor's coat with silver edging.
And on her lap, sitting and looking at the desk with clear blue eyes and an expression of complete unclouded curiosity, was Evan's sister.
Duvette's heart did something irregular.
The cold came in from the top of his head and traveled the full length of his spine before it was finished. He was aware of his hands shaking and his breathing doing things it should not be doing and his throat going dry all at once, simultaneously, as if every fear response he possessed had been waiting for exactly this stimulus.
He forced it back.
He was a commissar. He had stood in a tunnel with eight Chaos Astartes and found a way to deal with them. He had given orders at the moment that mattered and the orders had held. Fear was a thing that could exist in him without controlling him, because he had demonstrated that already and the demonstration was still applicable.
Duvette drew one slow breath. Then another. He let his heart come down to something manageable. He stepped through the doorway and the airtight door slid closed behind him.
"What brings you here, Lord Inquisitor?"
His voice was approximately level. He could hear the tension in it himself and assumed she could too.
The woman at the desk did not turn or answer. She was looking at something on the desk's surface, and her attention seemed complete. Duvette stepped further into the room and looked past her.
Four cards lay on the desk.
Imperial Tarot.
Evan's sister was sitting on the Inquisitor's lap looking at them, her small head tilting slightly to one side, her expression entirely absorbed. The precognitive ability that had sounded warnings before every danger the children had faced since the World Eater ambush was, apparently, entirely quiet. She showed no sign whatsoever of registering that anything in this room was threatening.
"Miss," the girl said, in the curious, open voice of a child asking about something she genuinely wants to understand. Her small finger pointed to the leftmost card. "What is this one?"
Duvette looked at the card she was pointing to. An eye. Or a wound that resembled an eye — the Chaos purple and blood-red of it bleeding across a background of dying stars, the iris of it fixed on the galaxy from an oblique angle, everything around it in the process of ending.
"That one is called The Eye," the Inquisitor said.
Her voice was warm. There was even something that sounded like it might be amusement in it, the tone of someone who finds a child's questions genuinely entertaining. None of the qualities Duvette had been bracing himself for were present. She sounded like someone reading a story aloud.
"It represents Chaos," she continued, "and the abyss. It says: this is the abyss of the Warp's gaze, the vortex of heresy and blood. The opening of a situation from which there is no coming back."
The girl absorbed this with the guileless attention of someone for whom the word "heresy" does not yet carry weight, and moved her finger to the second card.
"That one is The Inquisitor." The warmth did not leave the woman's voice. "It represents truth and reckoning. It says: all secrets will be revealed. All debts will be repaid."
The girl's finger moved again. The third card. A ship, or what had once been one, drifting, dark, a structure that had been sealed for so long it had become something else.
The woman's finger traced the card's edge with a light touch. "This one is The Derelict. It represents stagnation, being trapped, a chamber full of dangers with no visible exit. It says: you believe you escaped from hell. In truth you are only locked inside a room from which escape is still less possible. Fate has come to rest in a dead end."
The last card.
The figure on it wore a grinning mask — a jester's face, hollow-eyed and smiling, the expression frozen into something between comedy and threat.
"And this one is The Fool." Something entered the woman's voice that had not been there for the previous three cards. Not quite readable, not quite absent. "It represents the variable. The unpredictable turn of fate. Hope that has no right to be present. It says: in endless despair and rigid, fixed rules, there appeared an element that was ridiculous and arrogant and entirely impossible to calculate in advance, and it mocked a death that had already been written."
She finished.
The four cards lay still on the desk surface. The woman placed both hands gently under the girl's arms, lifted her from her lap, and set her feet on the floor with careful attention. Then she put one foot against the deck and the wheeled chair rotated slowly until she was facing the door.
Facing Duvette.
Her face in the full light: pale and precise, the features with the particular quality of something that had been made rather than grown, correct in every proportion and without warmth in any of them. The left eye: deep, clear red, the color of a gemstone. The right side: black leather eyepatch.
She was smiling.
Duvette did not feel any warmth from the smile.
"Good day, Commissar Duvette Erdmann."
She spoke in High Gothic, each syllable placed with the accuracy of someone for whom the old formal language was neither effort nor affectation. She reached up and opened her coat at the chest, revealing the black lining and, lying flat against it, the Inquisitorial rosette.
"Allow me to introduce myself properly. I am Juno Karol, Lord Inquisitor, Ordo Hereticus." She let the coat fall closed. "You may use my name."
Duvette did not respond immediately. He looked at Evan across the small room. The boy read the look without needing it explained.
Evan stepped away from the wall, crossed to his sister, and took her hand. "We'll step out for a moment," he said quietly.
The girl looked like she wanted to object. Evan was already moving. The Inquisitor did not look at either of them as they passed and made no move to stop them.
The airtight door opened. Closed.
The room held two people.
Duvette walked to the door panel and pressed the interior lock. The red light confirmed it. The door was sealed from inside. Whatever happened in this room now would happen without interruption.
He turned and put his back against the cold metal of the door. He looked at the Inquisitor sitting across the narrow space from him. The desk, the bunk, the storage unit, the mirror, and two people: this was what the room contained.
The fear from the first moment had changed into something colder and more useful. He understood what he was looking at. He understood what the rosette meant and what the organization behind it was capable of. He understood that if this woman had decided he was going to die, the locked door he had just engaged was not a meaningful obstacle.
Which meant, in a particular way, that he had nothing left to lose by being direct.
"Lord Inquisitor Juno," he said. He spoke in Low Gothic, plain and even. "What exactly do you want from me?"
Juno tilted her head slightly. The smile did not change. She lowered the hand that had been resting against her cheek, leaned forward, and settled her arms crossed over her knees.
"Many things, Commissar," she said. "Let's talk properly."
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