Desolane turned and barked orders to the footmen at the door of the hall. They vanished in a hurry.
“I take it the Plenipotentiary has been informed,” Sturm asked, idly inspecting some of the bladed chrome tools laid out on a nearby trolley.
“He has. He is making arrangements to come here as soon as possible. Command echelon leaders, strategists and other key ordinals have also been summoned. After the transcoding, you will need to rest well. The next few days will be demanding.”
Sturm nodded. “I want a better room. With a proper bed in it. And no more shackles.”
“Sir, I—” Desolane began.
“I want a better room, a proper bed and no more shackles. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” said Desolane.
The footmen returned with a uniform. It was the dress garb of a sirdar of the Occupation force, though all rank pins and badges had been removed. Black boots and shirt, green breeches and a long green jacket. Sturm dressed quietly and then admired his reflection in a looking glass hanging on the wall of the fysik hall.
He stared at his image for some time. He’d seen his own face in mirrors several times since entering custody, indeed the transcoders had often shown him his reflection in the hope that it might aid the loosening of his memory. That had been frightening. The face he’d seen had been unknown to him, an alien thing.
Now it was like an old friend. Every line and fold and crease had a comfortable familiarity. He scratched at his stubbled chin.
“I want to shave,” he told the life-ward. This is unacceptable.”
“Yes, sir,” said Desolane. “But first, the psykers.”
They walked together along the echoing halls and galleries of the bastion, passing hurrying servants, patient soldiers, lean excubitors and chattering gangs of ordinals. Desolane noticed that the pheguth no longer shuffled. He marched, back straight.
An impish little creature was waiting for them at the door of the loathsome transcoding chamber. He was little more than a metre tall, his bent, simian frame shrouded in a red velvet robe with gold-thread decoration. The hem of the robe spread out over the flagstones. He wore a mechanical harness around his torso, the front of which formed a lectern that was braced against his chest. Fastened to this was a black metal printing machine, with rows of wiry letter levers and a thick roll of parchment wound into the spindle-lock. The little man had the lever section hinged up as they approached, and was carefully applying ink to the back of the letter press using a suede paddle. He looked up. His eyes were beady and he had nothing in the way of a nose, but his mouth was a lipless grimace of exposed gums and discoloured, spade-like teeth. In place of ears, he had augmetic microphones sutured into his flesh, and a wire armature from each secured flared brass ear trumpets to either side of his head.
His name was Humiliti, and Desolane had summoned him.
“What for?” Sturm asked.
“He is a lexigrapher. He will accompany you at all times, and record your comments so that nothing can be lost.”
Humiliti closed his machine’s lever section with a sharp metallic clatter, put the suede paddle back in a pouch at his side, and flexed his long bony fingers for a moment. Then he began to type on the keys, a jangling sound, and the parchment roll began to turn.
Desolane opened the door, and Sturm entered. The little lexigrapher waddled after him. Sturm sat down on the seat and the electric cuffs immediately closed over his wrists and ankles.
“They will not be necessary,” he said, and heard the lexigrapher record the words. After a moment’s pause, the cuffs disengaged. The chair tilted back until he was looking at the arched roof.
“Pheguth,” a voice whispered.
“Not this time,” he replied.
“Again, we begin.”
Sturm heard the shuffling, and felt the chamber go chill. Foetid fingers picked the rubber plugs from the holes in his skull. Then, making their distinctive high pitched squeal, the psi-probe needles swung in and slipped into the holes.
Sturm grunted slightly in discomfort.
“Let us start again at the beginning,” the psi-voice commanded.” Your rank?”
“Lord militant general.”
“Your name?”
“Noches Sturm.”
“How do you come to be here?”
Sturm cleared his throat. Over the murmuring acoustics of the warp filling his head, he could hear the damned lexigrapher jabbing away at his machine. “As I understand it,” he replied, “I was a prisoner aboard a military transport ship that was caught in an ambush near Tarnagua. When the attackers realised they had captured a senior branch officer of the Imperial Guard, I was taken directly to a safe world for interrogation. That was where the mindlock was discovered. I was then sent here to Gereon, away from the front line, so that the mindlock could be undone.”
“What do you understand of the mindlock, Noches?” another psi-voice asked. This one sounded distressingly like a small child.
“It is a standard provision. In cases where a subject knows sensitive information. The guild can blank a man’s mind entirely, but that does not allow for any future recovery of his memory.”
“Your mind is full of secrets, Noches,” the male voice said. “Intelligence of the highest level of confidentiality. Why would they not have just blanked you?”
“I’ve no idea,” Sturm said. Chatter chatter went the lexi-graph machine.
“That is not true,” an old, female voice asked. “Is it? Think about it. This is a memory you can reach.”
Sturm closed his eyes. He realised he could remember now. It felt amazing. “I was being prepared for trial. Court martial. The Commissariate did not want my mind wiped, because I would not be able to face their cross-examination. But until the trial date, it was considered too risky to leave me… accessible. The Guild Astropathicus placed the mindlock on me, securing my secrets. They intended to remove it at the time of the trial.”
“You didn’t like that much, did you, Noches?” the child-voice asked.
“I hated it. I implored them not to do it. But they did it anyway. It was monstrous. Numbing. Afterwards, I had no idea what they’d done. Just the nagging memory that something barbaric had been accomplished in my mind. It took everything away. I’m only now just understanding quite how much was stolen.”
“Your memories are returning rapidly.”
“Yes, but I’m not just talking about facts and figures, names and dates. I’m not talking about the empirical data they shut away. I had forgotten myself. My character. My nature. My soul. They had taken my personality. The man you have been transcoding these last few months was just a shell. He was not Noches Sturm. I’d forgotten even how to be myself.”
There was a pause. The acoustic murmur circled around him.
“Hello?” Sturm called.
“Why were you in custody, Noches?” asked the male voice. Why were you facing trial?”
“It was a mistake. I was betrayed.”
“Explain.”
“I was serving in the defence of Vervunhive, on the planet Verghast. It was a bitter fight, and for a while it seemed we would be overrun. But my worst enemy was a commissar in the Guard. Our paths had crossed before, and there was some animosity between us. I was prepared to let it go—we had a war to win, no time for petty squabbles. But he manipulated the situation and accused me of forsaking my post. Trumped up charges. But he was a commissar, and enjoyed some popularity in that dark time. He made the charges stick, and, with the backing of his superiors in the Commissariate, kept me incarcerated and forced me to trial.”
“Doesn’t the Commissariate ordinarily perform summary executions?” the child-voice asked.
“On low-lifes and dog-troops. Not on lord militant generals. My family has powerful connections to the High Lords. There would have been uproar if he’d taken my life.”
“What was his name?”
Sturm smiled. The one thing that the mindlock had never closed off was that name. “Ibram G
aunt. May he burn in hell.”
The voices swooped and whispered around him.
“Are we done?” Sturm asked.
“We are pleased with the state of your mind, Noches. Your memory has almost entirely returned. The last tatters of the mindlock are falling away from your psyche. Our work is all but finished.”
“And I thank you for it,” said Sturm. “Even on the days you made me scream. I’m glad to have myself back.”
“There is one last question,” the female voice asked.
“Ask it.”
They asked it together, all three voices as one chorus. “When you first came to us, you swore allegiance to the Anarch. You promised that once we had unlocked your mind, you would renounce the cause of the False Emperor and fight with us against his forces.”
“I did.”
“But today you have admitted that you are a different person now. You have told us that the pitiful wretch who swore that oath was not Noches Sturm. So, we ask you… have you changed your mind?”
“You have changed my mind,” Sturm said. “If I’m lying, you’ll read this in my head. So listen well. I served the Imperium loyally, and devoted my life to the Throne. But the Imperium turned on me, and kicked me down like a dog. There is no going back. The Imperium has made me its enemy, and it will live to wish it hadn’t.”
Behind the chair, Humiliti’s type-levers were clattering almost frantically.
“I swear allegiance to the Anarch, whose word drowns out all others,” said Sturm. “Does that answer your question?”
The Sleepwalker led them up through the great basin of the Untill, through the steaming glades of the Niht. They skirted vast thickets of crimson thorn, so dense that there was no way through. They waded through green water, through stinking amber bogs. When the water level finally began to drop, where the land shelved up and away, the world became a mire of thick, grey mud. White globe fungus clustered on the black bark of the gnawed trees. Some of it was photoluminous, and created clearings of frosty blue-white radiance that the moths flocked to in their millions. Blizzards of them swirled through the air. There was still no sunlight. The canopy above was an impenetrable black roof.
The team pushed on. It had taken them two full days’ march from the partisan camp to reach these upland marshes. The temperature had dropped by several degrees, and the humidity was less. Consequently,