him in a far more economical course between the sweeper and his team. Any moment, and its dragging weight might intersect with an unseen energy cone.
‘Domor! Freeze!’ Gaunt snarled into the intercom. On the far side of the vault, Domor stopped dead. ‘Untie your safety line and let it drop,’ the commissar instructed him. Wordless, Domor complied, fumbling blindly to undo the slip-knot Caffran had tied. It would not come free. Domor tried to gather some slack from the line to ease the knot, and in jiggling it, shook the strap of the sweeper set off his shoulder. The rope came free and dropped, but the heavy sweeper slipped down his arm and his arm spasmed to hook it on his elbow. Domor caught the set, but the motion had pulled on the cord of his headset and plucked it off. The headset clattered onto the dusty floor about a metre from his feet.
Everyone on Gaunt’s side of the chamber flinched but nothing happened. Domor struggled with the set for a moment and returned it to his shoulder. ‘The headset? Where did it go?’ he asked over the microbead.
‘Don’t move. Stay still.’ Gaunt threw his lasgun to Rawne and as quickly as he dared followed Domor’s route in the dust across the chamber. He came up behind the frozen blind man, spoke low and reassuringly so as not to make Domor turn suddenly, then reached past him, crouching low, to scoop up the headset. He plugged the jack back into its socket and placed the ear-pieces back around Domor’s head.
‘Let’s finish this,’ Gaunt said.
They moved on, close together, Gaunt letting Domor set the pace and direction. It took another four minutes to reach the doorway.
Gaunt signalled back at his team and instructed them to follow the pair of them over on the path Domor had made. He noticed that Fereyd was first in line, his face set with an urgent, impatient scowl.
As they came, Gaunt turned his attention back to the door. It was visible only by its seams in the rock, a marvellously smooth piece of precision engineering. Gaunt did what the data crystal had told him he should: he placed an open palm against the right hand edge of the door and exerted gentle pressure.
Silently, the twin, fifteen metre tall blocks of stone rolled back and opened. Beyond lay a huge chamber so brightly lit and gleaming it made Gaunt close his eyes and wince.
‘What? What do you see?’ Domor asked by his side.
‘I don’t know,’ Gaunt said, blinking, ‘but it’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.’
The others closed in behind them, looking up in astonishment, crossing the threshold of the Edicule behind Gaunt and the eager Fereyd. Rawne was the last inside.
Twenty-Three
INQUISITOR HELDANE allowed himself a gentle shudder of relief. His pawn was now inside the sacred Edicule of the Menazoid necropolis, and with him went Heldane’s senses and intellect. After all this time, all this effort, he was right there, channelled through blunt mortal instruments until his mind was engaging first hand with the most precious artefact in space.
The most precious, the most dangerous, the most limitless of possibilities. A means at last, with all confidence, to overthrow Macaroth and the stagnating Imperial rule he espoused. It would make Dravere warmaster, and Dravere would in turn be his instrument. All the while mankind fought the dark with light, he was doomed to eventual defeat. The grey, thought Heldane, the secret weapons of the grey, those things that the hard-liners of the Imperium were too afraid to use, the devices and possibilities that lay in the blurred moral fogs beyond the simple and the just. That is how he would lead mankind out of the dark and into true ascendancy, crushing the perverse alien menaces of the galaxy and all those loyal to the old ways alike.
Of course, if Dravere used this weapon and seized control of the Crusade, used it to push the campaign on to undreamed-of victory, then the High Lords of Terra would be bound to castigate him and declare him treasonous. But they wouldn’t know until it was done. And then, in the light of those victories, how could they gainsay his decision?
Some of the orderlies in the isolation bay began to notice the irregularities registering in the inquisitor’s bio-monitors and started forward to investigate. He sent them scurrying out of sight with a lash of his psyche.
Heldane took up the hand mirror again and gazed into it until his mind loosed