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'But you just said as much.' She crossed her arms. 'If I were less charitable, I might consider that assertion to border on the heretical...'
She left the veiled threat dangling, watching him carefully.
He knew he was beaten. And in his thoughts — which of course he believed to be entirely private — he cursed her venomously. Inwardly, Mita joined him, briefly hating herself for steamrollering the objections of such a fundamentally honest man. She assuaged her guilt by reminding herself of the mission's importance. She could brook no concessions, no compromises.
'Fine,' Orodai snapped, hunching forward in his seat. 'Have the damned men. But how you plan to find a single killer amongst a multitude is a trick I'd love to know.'
She half smiled, dipping in a bow of genuine gratitude. 'I have my ways.'
'You'll need them,' he said, unimpressed. 'That quake started below. It's going to be messy down there, girl. Messy and mad.'
Orodai's predictions were unerringly accurate.
It was as if the subterranean blast had expelled not only fire and ash, but some indiscernible smog of insanity. In every settlement around the ruined husk of Hemiatown, across every sumpflow and debris-dune, madness had spilled out from the shadows to reclaim its domain.
Most visible amongst the agents of lunacy were the Purgatists — sinister preachers enmeshed in suits of barbs and bones, lashing at the groaning crowds with hook-tipped whipcords. They prophesied the Emperor's return in a hail of blood and smoke, and attested in crazed tones to his wrath. In the city above Mita had noticed advocates of the movement on street corners and mezzanine junctions: moderates with earnest voices and scarred faces, the marks of quiet zeal and self-flagellation.
Not so in the undercity, where eccentricity bred delusion and piety begot fanaticism.
The Purgatists here yelped and howled, struck at the willing crowd, set alight pyres containing ''mutants'' and ''witches'', and cast quivering fingers towards where Herniatown had once stood, citing the Emperor's splendid venom as the force that had purged so utterly the Glacier Rat filth.
Passing by the lunatic zealots, Mita couldn't prevent a guilty thought from seeping through her defences: Is insanity the price of faith?
The deranged-but-pious were not alone in seizing the prospects presented by the explosion. To the gangs the explosion marked not only a territorial opportunity in the Glacier Rats' wake, but a power vacuum. Total war had come to the underhive.
The crackle of distant gunfire struggled to be heard above the shouts of combatants and the thunder of collapsing buildings, gutted by fire or otherwise undermined. On several occasions gangers themselves, flamboyantly dressed in the colours of their pack, appeared beside the debrisflows to snap off a few optimistic rounds at the vindictors in their trio of Salamanders, before vanishing into their warrens like ghosts. Mita thought it somehow exotic: like jewelled wildlife glimpsed at a forest's edge.
The vindictors, of course, endured these sightings with less sentimentality, taking turns to rise into the Salamanders' open-topped diases, vying to pick off those unfortunates unable to seek cover. Mita endured the noisy distractions poorly, struggling to remain focused.
In less enlightened times a hunter might follow a trail of prints, or spend days pursuing rumours and sightings. To Mita such crudities were unthinkable: the maelstrom of emotion that comprised the psychic environment was as perceptible to her as the scorched earth of its roads or the buckled struts of its walls. The shadow she sought — an oilslick of malign influence and, yes... yes, she was certain, the taint — wound its way throughout like a spectral cord. Whether it represented the killer's exact trail or not was irrelevant, its loci were places he had been, its tentacles were the paths of people he had stalked. Without a clue as to who or what the killer was, she nonetheless tracked his flavour, she followed the strings of his emotion, blossoming and nebulising in his wake. He was angry.
Angry, and cold and bitter.
'Right at the junction,' she instructed the Salamander's pilot, eyelids closed, and watched the manoeuvre through a spectrum that employed neither light nor colour.
The trail had led them on a merry dance already, and she dimly suspected the Preafects thought she was inventing as she went. She couldn't care less.
Their first destination, against Sergeant Varitens's noisy protests, had been the perimeter of the contested zone itself, where Herniatown had once stood. That pulverised area of metallic slag and scorched earth — its walls and ceilings presenting not a single straight line or right angle in their fractured surfaces — had clamoured in her mind with the darkness she'd been seeking, and briefly she'd thought the killer must have died in the inferno. He'd been present, she had no doubt of that. When Herniatown belched itself out of existence he'd been there, at the thick of whatever action had transpired, and she considered the possibility of his death with an uncomfortable thrill of disappointment.
But, no... The trail had reappeared, coal-black, leading away from the ruined zone into the darkness of the western caverns. She led the convoy away from the petty gang squabbles, away from the central settlements with their vestiges of civilisation and their ranting Purgatists, and she resumed the hunt with guilty pleasure.
It had not taken the Preafects long to grasp the reality of their leader's psychic gifts. Mita guessed that had it not been for Cog's silent presence, great machine-hands clenching and unclenching around the autoca
She huffed at the off-putting mussitation — a prayer, she guessed — and refocused, fighting the exhaustion that such intense meditation inevitably caused.
The killer's influence wended its way through a knot of twisting alleys — a filigree of black and blue on the very cusp of her psychic sight — and she guided the pilot through with a calm voice, ignoring the hammering of opportunistic bullets on the tank's sides. As the vehicle clambered from the labyrinth onto a rising steppe of detritus, tracks struggling for purchase, an uncomfortable silence settled, leaving her alone with only the sound of the Salamanders' engines.
Strange shapes loomed in the dark, and at first she mistook them for mighty oaks, grown beyond normal scale, their branches rising above, ghostly lights adorning their tips. Only when perspective adjusted itself in her mind that her eyes decoded what they were seeing.
Vast ducts, each a hundred metres across, littered with scaffold and piping, branching in myriad patterns between floor and cavernous ceiling. At odd points on their colossal trunks hellish lights blazed angry red, steam geysering from every rent, and Mita realised with a stab of amazement that she was seeing thermal ducts, siphoning heat from the planet's crust where even the frozen fluctuations of its weather could not hope to diminish it. From below the entire hive drank the warmth of Equixus, and as the vehicles passed by she found herself humbled, forgetting for an instant the trail she followed.
Varitens's mutterings finally snapped both introspection and temper.