The Inquisitor met him on the same landing pad where the mud of victory was still drying.
Grey carapace, a rosette old enough not to need polish, two lean acolytes with eyes like unblinking knives. The breeze carried the cooked-metal scent of gun emplacements cooling and the copper tang of too-recent blood. Behind Aurelius, vox-masts clicked and the Myrridian flag tugged against a cracked pole.
"Custodian," the Inquisitor said, smiling the way cultured men do when they've practiced at mirrors. "There are… reports. The men call it the Emperor's Gift. A demonstration would clarify our records."
Aurelius let the request hang between them. The golden plates of his armor were newly repaired, but he had left a strip of auramite unpolished along his bracer where the chainblade's teeth had died. He preferred a reminder to a myth.
"My work is not performance," he said.
Before the Inquisitor could answer, a red glyph strobed across Aurelius's helm-display. The encryption was a taste more than a code—old, exacting, undeniably ours.
VALDOR: COOPERATE WITHIN MISSION PARAMETERS. NEW ASSET ATTACHED — SERAPHINE KEST.
The Inquisitor's smile widened as if he had pulled the lever. He had not.
A figure stepped from the gunship's shadow with the light refusal of a falling knife. She wore slate-grey plate without sigil, cloak cut to move and then vanish, scalp shaved to gold stubble, eyes the color of unpolished steel. A thin line of scars feathered her jaw. Around her, the air felt thinner—as if it remembered the weight of sins and had chosen to become less.
The Guard nearest the ramp flinched. One gagged, hand to mouth. Even the Inquisitor's acolytes hid a flit of nausea.
Aurelius felt it differently. Observation—the quiet tide he let slip under words and boards—blurred at the edges where her presence brushed it, as if paint were being drawn across a dry wall too fast. The pressure was not attack; it was absence. The warp went dead around her. His Haki, being neither warp nor psyker's trick, endured—but he would have to time it, sharpen it, place it.
Seraphine Kest came to a halt three paces from him and bowed without lowering her eyes. She said nothing. She would never say anything. The Sisterhood's vow had taken her voice; her nature had taken everything else that spoke without words.
Aurelius returned the bow by a degree only a Custodian or a Sister would notice. "Seraphine."
She raised her left hand, two fingers, palm inward—a sign in the old cant their orders shared. Ready.
The Inquisitor cleared his throat delicately. "Excellent. With an… appropriate counterbalance to your, ah, influence, we can proceed to the real issue."
Aurelius turned his head a fraction. "Issue."
"A Word Bearer choir," the Inquisitor said, like a tutor introducing a topic in which he expected obedience. "A vox-cathedrum buried beneath the eastern hives. Their litanies broadcast on every bandwidth mortal brains will accept. Coordinating cult risings across three systems. A blight that grows while we watch. Cut the tongue, the body dies."
"Coordinates?" Aurelius asked.
"Obscured by warp-bleed and machine-spirit temper," said a voice behind the Inquisitor. Magos-Kohort Vexel rolled forward on spider-legged augmetics, mechadendrites furled like sleeping serpents. His optics clicked, irises narrowing and expanding with faint purrs. "But I can teach the spirits a calmer song. A charge in the right place will make the cathedral swallow itself. An elegance, not merely an explosion."
Aurelius looked at Seraphine. She lifted her hand again, one finger tipped left, a small pivot of wrist. Interference zone. His Observation would not carry in a long, lazy sweep through a place conceived to be loud with the warp and then suddenly quieted by a null aura. He would need pulses—cone-throws of sight down corridors, timed like heartbeats. He would need Conqueror's not as a blanket, but as a scalpel a breath long.
He turned back to the Inquisitor. "We'll need five veterans who understand orders that sound like blasphemy because they save lives. One heavy, one sharpshooter, one comms, one breacher, one who will run where others prefer not to."
Larsa, the acting-commander from the "already lost" theatre, had followed at a distance, a map rolled in his fist. "I can spare them," he said. "Names: Havel, Tamsin, Vale, Khosa, Iarro. They'll bring their feet and their sins. You can have both."
"They will do," Aurelius said.
"Wonderful," the Inquisitor said, hands steepled like weapon tips. "We'll observe from the outer cordon. For… records."
Aurelius did not bother to look at him. "You will not observe from within my operation."
A pause. A smile not moving. "Of course."
Seraphine's fingers flicked once where only Aurelius could see. Liar.
They went in at dusk, following a storm drain that had been a river once, then a sewer, then a place superstition refused to name. The walls sweated a thin film that smelled like old coins. Above, the city's bones groaned. Below, something dripped as if counting.
Havel led, hunched under a shield plate stolen from a dead Chimera, each step placed where stone was honest. Tamsin ghosted at his shoulder, long-las broken down and reassembled in a single breath during the last lull; she seemed permanently halfway to a trigger squeeze. Vale bore a vox-set patched with prayers and curses in equal measure, wire wound around his arm like a pet snake. Khosa carried a charge-case that could be a table for six or a funeral for many; he kissed it once as if to assure it that duty is love. Iarro brought a satchel of grenades and a grin that admitted fear and then offered it a seat.
Vexel came behind, mechadendrites clicking, murmuring binharic seductions to the recalcitrant machine-spirits that inhabited rusted gratings and tired hinges. Seraphine walked like a subtraction. Even the rats forgot to be.
At the first turn, Warning Icons daubed in blood and ash presented themselves like tidy teeth. At the second, a censer-skull drifted—gilded, hollow-eyed, trailing warped incense. It should have smelled like chapel mornings. It smelled like a mouth blown through a skein of flies.
Seraphine stepped forward. The incense smoke came to her and stopped, as if it remembered being smoke and wanted to be well-behaved again. The skull clattered to the floor as a toy denied its only trick.
Aurelius tasted the tunnel with a short pulse of Observation. For a half-second, the world drew itself in sharp charcoal lines—two patrols on shaped paths, a blind corner with a lazy watcher, a circle of kneeling men whispering identical prayers to make their fear hold still. The edges frayed when the pulse ended. He catalogued the afterimage and moved.
At a choke point, a guard in scavenged plate looked up and met Aurelius's eyes. The man's mouth opened to shout. Aurelius gave him a sliver of Conqueror's—nothing like the sheet he had thrown across a trenchline, just a breath that decided now is not your moment. The shout folded into a cough. Havel's blade turned the cough into quiet.
The deeper they went, the more the architecture changed. The city's undergut gave way to something older—arches cut to a theology not friendly to humans, columns carved with sigils that wanted to be looked at and regretted. Vox-emission grew visible in the air—an oily shimmer. Vale's set fritzed and sulked.
"Interference intensity at ninety-seven percent of intolerable," Vexel whispered, delighted. "Perfect."
They reached a grate that opened onto dark. Tamsin slid forward like a thought. A heartbeat. Two. A hand-signal: Gallery. Twenty below. Choir.
Aurelius nodded. He looked to Seraphine. She dipped her chin. Ready to unmake the noise.
They dropped into shadow.
The vox-cathedrum had been a cathedral before someone had asked it forbidden questions and liked the answers. The nave was gone, replaced with banks of amplifiers that drank sound with open throats and spat it up the spine of the city as instructions. At the far end, on a pulpit welded from ship metal and bad taste, a Dark Apostle stood in armor lacquered the color of bruises, crozius a cage of light. Around him, a dozen psykers knelt, mouths sewn, throats rigged with lattice mics feeding into vox-pylons draped in skins that had once been flags.
The sermon hit like pressure sickness. Words tried to make the air a substance men would drown in. Guardsmen—captured, stripped, in chains along the gallery—arched against restraints, not in ecstasy, but as if their muscles were being taught new hierarchies. In the transept shadows, Word Bearer veterans watched with patient malice. A pair of hulking shapes lurked beyond—possessed engines with vestigial wings. Choir-servitors clanged censers on chains until the smoke was a second fog.
Seraphine stepped out onto the gallery rail.
Silence went with her like a cloak.
The nearest psyker convulsed and went slack. The second turned his head toward her and learned that turning one's head could be the last free motion in a life. The Apostle's litany cracked on a syllable that had expected to be believed and now was only a sound.
Aurelius dropped beside her, spear point catching a red lantern and sending it clattering to mark his landing. Observation pulsed—half a breath that drew silhouettes and arcs. He moved on the picture: left-hand champion first—tendon behind the knee—down; right-hand bolter next—barrel struck away—cut through the glove—weapon falls; Apostle elevating crozius—step inside—haft turns—strike the arm, not the weapon. Conqueror's went with each motion in precise, mean slivers—bursts that made a guard blink and a veteran count to one before finding his courage again and dying for the delay.
"Now," he said, and Havel moved with Khosa, Vale dropping to his belly to snake a cable into a sullen port Vexel whispered sweet blasphemy at. Iarro rolled a smoke-pot into the choir and kicked it behind a speaker-cowl so the fog would billow back, obscuring faces instead of positions. Tamsin took her post on a pillar and began the work for which her hands had always been too steady: making men stop.
The Apostle recovered. His crozius brightened. "Blaspheme, then. We will sing louder."
Seraphine stepped down the gallery stairs into the nave, and as she moved the air changed shape. Not quieter; truer. The Warp tricks that draped meaning over noise slid off her aura like wet paint off glass. The lattice mics squealed like guilty instruments. The chained psykers slumped with audible gratitude—their pain was not over; their usefulness was.
The Apostle roared and leapt. Aurelius met him two paces from the pulpit, Armament crawling up the spear haft in a black-gold glaze. Crozius hit spear. Light splashed. The blast rattled the iron of the cathedrum and made Tamsin's sights ring.
"Your god is noise," Aurelius said, voice calm because calm undermines sermons. "Mine is silence that keeps promises."
They fought. The Dark Apostle had centuries of muscle memory and a hate that had been polished. Aurelius had the Emperor's patient work in his bones and a will cut to shape by hard use. Observation became a metronome—pulse, move, pulse, cut—short bursts that bought the next choice. Conqueror's flicked in needle-jabs—stealing half-beats, an eyelid's length, enough.
At the base of the pulpit, Vexel popped a panel with the joy of a lockpicker and slid the first charge inside. "Elegance," he whispered. "Inward collapse. The structure will consume itself with confession."
"Two minutes," Vale hissed. "Signal interference fluctuations spiking. Choir elements attempting reconfiguration."
"Attempt noted," Seraphine's hands said, her fingers drawing quick angles in the air. Then she simply stood among the mics. Their feedback died as if ashamed to have existed at all.
The Apostle, disarmed of air, did what all preachers do when the room stops listening: he lunged for the closest throat. Aurelius turned him with a shoulder and a step, the crozius caging light that now caged nothing. He let Observation and Conqueror's once more bite together, a fusion that simplified the world: there was the hand; there was the gap; there was the floor that wanted a man on it.
The spearhead went under the Apostle's arm and through the weak seam where articulation meets pride. The man made a surprised sound—he had expected, perhaps, apocalypse or vindication, not good craft. He fell. The crozius rolled and clicked like a toy whose owner had left the room.
"Charges planted," Vexel sang, awash in his own liturgy. "Detonation on my mark."
"Mark," Aurelius said. "Now."
The world folded inward.
Not an explosion—an admission. Columns kinked and sat down. Vaulting became a decision reversed. The pulpit groaned and then, relieved, fell through the floor it had been abusing. Sound compressed and then went somewhere else. Dust arrived to blind eyes, faithful to its trade.
They ran through a sacristy that had been a locker-room for sins and out into a service tunnel that remembered being useful. The first possessed engine tried to follow, wings too big for the door like a lie too large for the mouth that attempts it; its shriek was cut short by masonry finding the right place to be.
They moved in a practiced silence punctuated by Vexel's counting and Vale's prayer-breathing and Iarro's grins that were now mostly teeth. Seraphine walked shield to shield with Aurelius, their auras throwing strange interference at each other—his will, her un-will—like two ripples passing and refusing to make ugly patterns.
At the last turn, a knot of cultists stumbled into them—men who had come to be present at their own salvation and had found demolition instead. Aurelius did not spend Haki on them. Havel's shield took one; Khosa's elbow found a larynx; Tamsin's long-las whispered behind them and a man forgot what being upright meant. It was a cruelty to waste power where training sufficed.
They emerged into night that tasted like rain and iron. The city above was still—the way a patient is still after a surgeon says It went well and before anyone verifies what that means.
The Inquisitor was waiting with a recorder-servitor that had once been a drunk poet and now clicked instead of rhymed.
"Unprecedented success," he said brightly. "And exemplifies, I think, the wisdom of pairing the Emperor's blade with… appropriate oversight." His hands stroked the words like pets. "With Sister Kest at your side, Lord Aurelius, your… anomalies… can be calibrated."
Seraphine did not look at him. She looked at Aurelius, and her fingers shaped a single sign low at her hip. Shall I remove this noise?
Aurelius answered with the smallest shake of his head. Not yet. Then, aloud: "Results matter. Papers will be filed after they do."
A chime at his wrist. Valdor's glyph. The message was short enough to cut.
SERAPHINE KEST ATTACHED BY ORDER OF THE CAPTAIN-GENERAL. AUTHORITY REMAINS WITH THE CUSTODES. CONTINUE.
Aurelius showed the sigil to the Inquisitor without letting the man actually see the words. The rosette tilted in a bow that was two-thirds courtesy and one-third accounting of options.
"Then we are aligned," the Inquisitor said. He made alignment sound like harness.
"Within mission parameters," Aurelius said.
Vale jogged over, vox-slate held tight as if it were a baby with opinions. "Lord—astropathic ribbon just cut through the storm. High-clearance seal." He swallowed. "From the Phalanx. By order of Primarch Rogal Dorn's Blade-Command. Invitation to consult on fortress doctrine for Solar bastions."
Larsa let out a breath that had been a rumor an hour ago. "The Fists are listening," he said softly, proud and afraid for what that might mean.
Aurelius accepted the slate. The seal was sun-yellow and black like a warning that had decided to become law. He did not open it here. He already knew what it would say: Come and speak to men who build walls about the shape of walls yet to be.
Seraphine's eyes found his. The line of her mouth did not move. Her hand shaped one last sign, a curve and a point. Watcher.
He inclined his head a fraction. He could feel the name settle on him—not a rank, not a prize. A function. Gold that stood where knives preferred to go first. Quiet that refused to be an absence.
"Tomorrow," he said, and the word felt like an oath and an admission at once. "We debrief. We bury. We leave the line with more teeth than it had when we found it. Then we go."
"To Terra?" Larsa asked, hopeful, wary.
"To the Phalanx," Aurelius said. "Then to wherever the next gate will want to fall."
He turned, and the men made a path without thinking. The Inquisitor's smile remained where all good masks do. Vexel clicked to his machine-spirits and promised them new friends. Tamsin broke her long-las down and rebuilt it a second time because rituals are how steady hands stay steady. Havel leaned his shield against his thigh and let it rediscover gravity. Khosa kissed his charges because love is still love even when it explodes. Vale began writing names in the margin of a map because maps that do not carry names are lies. Iarro finally let his grin turn into sleep where he stood.
Aurelius walked beside the woman who unmade noises and measured the edges of his sight around her with something like respect. He let Observation pulse once, experimentally, a small fan of attention out into the wounded city. It showed him nothing he could not have discovered with boots and questions. It was enough. He timed the next pulse to when it would matter. He let Conqueror's sit like a blade laid flat across his lap instead of a banner.
Quiet knives. Bright gold.
The war would keep its promises. So would he.