Sibellus oir

The Tower of Saint Orithiel

Being an outline of events taken place upon Scintilla of the Calixis Sector in the 9th century M41, involving
agents beholden to the dread Inquisition. This is a tale of men and women fallen from grace, enmeshed in
conspiracies, and compelled to serve.
o-one but the Emperor knows the steps of your path, for mere words cannot carry the essence of the
souls action from one heart to anotherwe are all of us alone beneath His gaze. You will be judged upon
your innermost truths when you come before Him, though, mark me well.

- Pius Mefonte

Creative Commons licensed by Reason of Principia Infecta in 2010 under the

Attribution 3.0 License. You are free to do as you will with the words found
herein, provided fair attribution is given to the author.
Art provided for non-commercial use by the Educational Technology Clearing
House, DragonArtz Designs, and psdGraphics.
Principia Infecta can be found online at www.principiainfecta.com.

Contents
4. Imprimis
6. Beholden to the Man
7. The Processional's Commencement
10. A Descent into the Pit
13. The Court of Hollowed Fanes
17. Handout: Catechism of Pius Mefonte
18. Within the Pit of Lies and Conspiracies
26. Handout: Assignation T.IV.3478.816.M41
27. Conversations Amongst the Damned
32. Whispers from Afar
37. Watchers at the Door
42. Raques in the Librarium
51. Handout: VESSUS C A INDEXUS-T10 // XIV
52. An Ascent Upon Black Wings
61. Interlude: Communications in the City
69. Handout: A Missive Placed by an Unknown Hand
70. Interlude: By These Lines is the City Divided
74. Interlude: Mortuarium, Within Tolus District
89. A Tattered Man Awaits

Imprimis
The backdrop to this tale is the populous hive world of
Scintilla, administrative center of the Calixis Sector in late
M41. Narrowing the view, we might look to the vast and
sprawling Hive Sibellus, which spans two thousand leagues
and a continent from Lucid Palace to Voltis Spires. Its crushed
depths are a half-league below the citytop, its spire peaks a
league above. To the uncounted billions who live and die
within its walls, Sibellus is the City, a crowded world unto
itself, its piled structures and layered institutions built across a
span of more than 8,000 years. For priest, manufactory worker,
and renegade, there is nothing worth thinking of beyond the
City.

The Least and the Ignorant

This is a record of damaged men and fallen women who live at
the dark, conspiratorial outskirts of the Inquisition, bound to
the hive-city of their birth, and compelled to serve as mere cogs
in machinations that tower beyond their vision. These lesser
servants are known as agents. The demands of the Inquisitorial
machine grind upon them as they struggle to find their way
through darkness and ignorance.

icknames are Shields

To bury a true name is to shield yourself from its meaning and
power. Everyone with something to hide reveals their greatest
fear by cloaking its source in a nickname. Agents compelled to
serve the fearsome Inquisition have better reasons than most to
try and obscure their fears. Thus they speak in euphemisms:
they serve "the Man," rather than an Inquisitor, and attend "the
Pit," rather than the Invisible Bureau. Hive Sibellus becomes
"the City"for every agent has a dark and squalid history
hidden somewhere in the hive.

oir as an Imperial Genre

Noir is a natural genre for tales that take place within Imperial
hive-cities. The central triad of Noir is formed of death,
treachery, and eroticismand Hive Sibellus upon Scintilla, the
City, is a teeming madhouse built atop this foundation. Murder,
conspiracy, and sex are everywhere entwined, from the lowest
sumptowns to the highest noble spire. Agents blackmailed into
serving at the tattered edge of the Inquisition are consummate
products of this environment: scar-faced men with dark pasts,

deadly femme fatales, and would-be betrayers left twisting on

the hook of a greater master of that art. Some of the common
tropes of this genre follow.

The tension of sex, death, and betrayal:

One or more of this triad are never far away, providing a

tension of anticipation for the next terrible act they inspire.
Jealousy, joygirls, women scorned. Revenge, brutal thugs, men
wronged. The hammer will fall upon someone, somewhere.
This is the nature of the asylum that is a hive-city.

Amidst low-life:

The thronging masses are colorful, black hearted scum. Those

who stand above them as nobility, appointed leaders, or
political adepts are clawing, would-be traitors. Everyone is out
for advantage, and true nobility of the heart is so rare as to be
unheard of.

The City as a character:

She is a treacherous woman, or a one-time friend that stabbed

an agent in the back. An agent cannot bring himself to leave
the City behind, but hates it for all the memories it holds. In
brooding recollections, the hurtful actions of the past become
the actions of the City herselfan old lover who strikes out at
those she once embraced.

Darkness, haze, and rain:

Dark nights, dark places, and the chemical haze that hides the
distance. The chill, acrid rain that falls on the wicked and the
virtuous alike.

Corrupt officialdom:

Power corrupts, and corrupt petty bureaucrats and militant

leaders are the norm. They use their positions to feather their
nests and further their own agendas, inflicting misery and
trouble upon those who try to stand up to them.

Cancerous, dysfunctional organizations:

Where men at every level of power have their own agendas,

organizations grow cancerous. No-one is sure of their
allegiance, sub-groups act against one another's interests, and
the original goals are lost in secrecy and infighting.

Beaten down by the asylum:

The City will take everything you have, and then break you.
4

Agents are betrayed and bitter women, hard men past their
prime, regretful betrayers of trust, and the once-incorruptible
now slowly rotting inside.

Still got the job done. Still coming back to the City. I don't
punch the mirror like I want to, like some kid would. Instead I
splash the water on my face, turn on the heat unit. Make an
effort. Damned ifI know who for.

The distant God-Emperor:

Faith is fragile and provides little real hope to anyone capable

enough to be an agent. It is a facade, the Saints and the
Emperor too distant to hear prayers. Agents are agnostics,
laymen without any real faith, or apostates: pitied or cursed by
both the masses who cling to belief and the zealots who rule
over them.

A ProcessionalAnd Dreams of Freedom

The events described herein form a processional, a clearly
defined path with a beginning and an end for those agents who
traverse it: what matters is not the destination, for that is
predetermined by fate, but rather what is done upon the way.
What is freedom, really, and what value does it have in
this dark age of mankind? Each agent is compelled to follow
the orders of his distant master, a victim of some dark secret or
unbreakable hold over the heart. Yet these agents will be
distant from temporal and spiritual authorities during much of
the processional, and thereby comparatively unchained whilst
upon their journey. So long as the agents remain upon the
allotted path, they may do as they will. Yet a dreadful lesson
lurks in this: in the City, freedom can be the greatest curse, for
the enemy is withincorruption and darkness stems not from
what is done to you, but rather from what you yourself choose
to do.

Lho-sticks, tranq, and amasec:

The drugs of the masses are prominent in the lives of agents; a

little false comfort to ward against cruel reality. The rituals of
smoking, the act of drinking to forget, and the ever present
addicts who remind agents of the eventual cost of selfdestructive habits.

Hidden hooks and dark secrets:

Every agent serves the Man because they are compelled; the
hooks dig in deep, and the personal secrets must never be
revealed. If there is any possibility of redemption, it is remote
indeed.

The City is all there is:

Nothing beyond Sibellus is well defined, much spoken of, or at

all important to agents. The City is all there is, for all practical
intents and purposes.

Brooding internal monologues:

Self-reflection and self-awareness is one amongst many curses

bestowed upon an agent beholden to the Man.

Fresh From the Landing Fields

The battered mirror above the cleanser is laughing at me, the
scars upon its metal face a mocking reflection of the ridges
upon my own. Been a long time since I looked myself in the
eyes, a long time away from mirrors. ot sure I like what I see
now. Can't blame the Man for that, though Throne knows I
want to. Emperor damn him.
So here I am, my reflection and I. Beaten down again by
years and what the Man demanded from me. Still standing.

Agents

Beholden to the Man

Agents are the lowest of the Inquisition's servants; often

unwilling, often unaware of the full sweep of whatever
conspiracy they are involved in. Agents live enmeshed in the
treacheries of both the hive masses that spawned them and the
Pit that controls their lives.

The Man

Lady Ve

A poised murderess, a dancer with blades, and a human mirror

of Imperial society. Cool and collected, she plays the high
noble lady just as adroitly as the joygirl from the depths, hiding
her true origins behind a dazzling array of masks and accents.
Ve was once a Sister Hospitaller, committed to life within a
conventand that itself is secret enough to bring damnation.
But dark and treacherous deeds brought an end to that past, and
give the Man the power of life and death over this agent.

An agent might have seen the Man, or seen his trusted

servantsonce upon a time, memories that he would rather
forget. But never again. The Man pulls upon an agent's hooks
from a far distance now, through many layers of adepts and
coordinators, and neither knows nor cares of an agent's fate.

The Pit
The Invisible Bureau, known to agents as the Pit or the
Hellmouth, is a nest of suspicion and secrets. It is a complex,
shifting hierarchy of adepts who direct agents beholden to
many different Inquisitors in their dutiesand their
conspiracies. Funded by hidden coffers, its inhabitants engaged
in hidden activities, the Dicasterium Invisiblis of Hive Sibellus
occupies lesser, outer reaches of the dread Tricorn Palace, a
sprawling Inquisitorial fortress. Agents sent to serve the Pit
soon find good reasons to fear it and its occupants: death and
treachery are commonplace, and the masters of the Pit care not
for their servants.

The Few Beneath the Lumen

Many and varied are the agents who live and die at the edge of
the Inquisition. May these few illustrate the multitudes.

ethin Callehan

A scar-faced, intimidating, taciturn bruiser possessed of an

augmetic arm and a cynic's dark thoughts. An enforcer by
training, he is equally skilled with his fists or a large-cal
pistolbut parting sinners from their secrets whilst seated
across a table is his true calling. Nethin's past is in some way
entwined with the City Magistratum, a history that would seem
him dead or worse should its specifics ever come to light. This
blade over the agent's neck is now held by the Man.
6

The Processional's Commencement

memories trapped down there in the asylum. Sibellus. I work at
killing the lho-stick.

The Abyss, Viewed From the Spire Flank

The Moll

Sibellus. City without end, layered hive ofmankind, asylum for

billions struck ignorant and mad by its walls. I've been gone a
long time, to far, sickened places. Long enough for me to
forgetif I had wanted to. Long enough for a generation of
newborns to be crippled, struck dumb, made sinners. But the
City has its hooks into me, just as it does them. So I remember
everything.
It's been five years by my ticking clock, and twenty by the
booming beat ofthe City. The Man sent me away, and now the
Man brought me back. He thinks he is the one whose devices
and secrets have the hold over mebut the City is a cruel moll,
and she wields the sharpest implements ofall. o man can ever
forget Sibellus, not in his heart, no matter how much he wants
to.
I look out upon the City from this dizzying mid-Spire
vantage, lit lho-stick dangling half-dead and dying, swapped
between lips and my clicking, metal off-hand. Those invisible
hooks set firm in my flesh, unseen puppeteers tugging like the
demented. My feet are upon the edge of the precipice, hardshod in the Magistratum gray I have no right to wear, up
against the buzz of the imagefield that cloaks this jutting
landing platform. Beneath and beyond spreads the crying
citytop, as far as can be seen, its artificial hills and valleys
draped in chemical foga hopeful shroud for the massed mad
wished dead, pierced only by towers and gigantic statues of
forgotten paragons. From this height they look like beatendown men, small and insignificant in a misted landscape. The
sun struggles with the haze, a dull yellow glow somewhere
near the horizon. Left and right, above and below, run the
walls of the Spire, baroque with saints and gargoyles, their
scowling faces and the Spire wall-plates that support them
gilded in this half-light.
The imagefield denies the winds that would drag me to the
same fate as awaits the lho-stick; I chew it over, look down.
Long fall. Very long. Plenty of time on the way down to think
about how it will end. I flick the lho-stick, the ash drifts slowly
beyond the field - and is torn from sight in a heartbeat by the
spire-gale beyond. A sudden end, unexpected, without warning.
o chem-shroud for the spire. It isn't cold within the field, but I
pull my plated shot-coat closed and hold it that way. Too many

The spire-moll is beside me, sudden, soundless. I lose the lhostick, flip it outwards as a benediction to the city below. The
moll is out of her high-caste gown and trail assemblage now,
dressed instead like a joygirl murderess: sleek, gaudy, knifeedged, dangerous. Blades upon thighs and across her back. It
fits her better. She walks away along the landing platform edge
now that she has my attention, fingernails ofone hand out over
the abyss to brush ripples in the imagefield. Each careful step
sliding her supple form in ways that cry out. I try not to notice,
and fail. Think instead about the hooks the Man has in her, and
what rots inside her heart in mirror to my own.
In a heartbeat, the moll turns, flickers. My metal hand in
front of my face to catch what she threw before I'm past my
own thoughts. Getting old, too easily distracted. It's a lho-stick,
Moross Below sigil upon the yellowed paper. The bitter scent
of it stops me, trigger to an ambush of memories; I realise my
flesh hand is under my shot-coat, on the grip ofmy 17-Cal. I let
it go. The moll half-smiles, a brief twist to the face of a fallen
angel ofthe Emperor, perfectly poised upon the edge. I passed.
I fumble for my flamebox, light the Moross Below. Take
three steps back from the abyss, turn my back on it. Ask the
moll her name.

Backdrop
The Endless City of Stone and Crystal
The City is vast in its extent: near two thousand leagues of
continent-spanning cityscape separate the coastal Lucid Palace
from Voltis Spire Secondus. Entire mountain ranges were
leveled across millennia in the construction of the City, their
stone employed in the construction of imposing hab-vaults,
noble manses, temples, towers, and vast statues. While forgemetal, pressed plasteen, and ceracrete structures are found
everywhere in the City, they merely fill the gaps between
towering stone edifices and paved avenues lined by gargantuan
statues. It is age-worn stone that dominates: structure piled
7

upon structure, century after century, level upon level, until the
depths were little more than crushed ruins.
If stone is the City's flesh, it must be supported by bone.
Long ago, lost secrets of the Machine Cult were used to
compress earth and soil into tecryilite crystal, a dull, matt
material of immeasurable strength. Behind the City's stone
facades, and beneath paved streets enclosed by vaulted
ceilings, lie massive, branching support struts made of
tecryilite. Pillars of crystal support the City's spires, the
massive prime spirebase, and looming hills: cathedrals, vaults,
and dwellings built far too high.
Countless billions live within the City, from noble houses
of the towering spires, to merchant guilds of rich manses upon
the citytop, to the masses who toil and teem within labyrinths
crushed and buried by later structures. So it has been for time
immemorial, for the City is ancient beyond measure; some say
that fragmentary, dead scripts eight thousand years old are
inscribed upon temple stones in the deepest ruin-crushes. No
one person could ever see more than a tiny fragment of the
City's ways with his own eyes. Many never see the sky, living
enclosed by stone labyrinths from birth to death.

Spirebase and Spires

The stepped Spirebase is a the greatest of city-hills, a plateau
built by men that rises high over the surrounding cityscape,
fifty leagues in breadth. Buried within are vast Administratum
palaces, league after league of scribe-runs and libraria, grand
Machine Temples, and the gargantuan bureaucratic engines of
the oldest City institutions.
From the center of the Spirebase rise Spire Primus and the
five Spires Secondus: this is the dominion of noble houses,
servant clades who number in their millions, and the refined
industries that accompany staggering wealth. The flanks of
these vast edifices are richly set with buttresses, chem-pitted
gargoyles, armored statues of Imperial saints, and ornate voxarrays. The Spires tower high above clouds and chem-smoke,
high above the haze. The upper reaches of Spire Primus are
leagues removed from the Spirebase below.

The Citytop Landscape

Away from the Spirebase, seen from the high vantage of a spire
edgewall, the city-top is a seemingly endless landscape of
ridges and rolling hills cast in worn, chem-darkened stonework.
These are hills built by men, not nature; temple piled upon
shrine piled upon tower piled upon mansea half-league from

crushed undercity to crenellated citytop. Where the City's

materia has succumbed to the passing of millennia, or where
strong tecryilite support is lacking, the crush of time and
reluctance to build has formed vales. Above larger support
struts or vital, deep emplacements such as City Legion
fortresses, the City has grown upward into ranges of man-made
hills and stepped ridges.
Upon the highest points of the citytop stand vast towers,
vox-array masts, and looming macrostatues of saints and
forgotten heroes. Surrounding them are the peaks of cathedrals,
leaning manufactory flues, and corroding guildhall spire-vanes.
Between these largest citytop structures wind broad avenues,
jagged streets like deep knife-cuts, and stepped avenues of agecracked stone. Upon these ways the City masses move and
crowd, wearing masks and cloth against the chem-haze. From a
high spire vantage, these masses appear no more than
swarming insects or fluid tides, rivers of humanitywhere
they can be seen at all through the haze of distance and
manufactory chem-reactants.
By night the citytop glows with a billion points of light:
lumens and floods upon the avenues and cathedrals; plasma
torches billowing atop the greatest of Imperial constructions;
blue gas-fumes of alchemical plants; stab-lights sweeping from
Magistratum barracks.

The Skies Above

The skies of the City are fogged by a haze of alchemical
compounds and manufactory byproducts. On some days, thick
chem-clouds fog the citytop, running like white rivers through
the slump-vales. On others, the tainted skies are comparatively
clear: crowds atop hill-structures can see for leagues, distant
towers and close-packed stonework fading into a yellow haze.
When darkness falls, the sky glows a dull yellow and orange,
the ever-present chemical haze reflecting the lights of the City.
Large drogue-craft lumber across the chem-yellow skies.
The Spirebase is orbited by a fleet of Magistratum vox-relay
drogues, each bristling with comm-arrays. Away from the
Spire Primus, most drogues are Moving Guild bulk lifters,
sedately carrying materials across hundreds of leagues.
Powered airframes of many different tech-patterns cut through
the haze above the City, sweeping stab-lights and flashing navbeacons. Amongst their number are roaring thrust-engine
Vastigans of the City Legion, noble house lift-wings, darting
rotory-aerovessels of the missive guilds, heavy Adeptus
Arbites troop transports, and others besides. Flying craft are the
tools of great wealth and mighty organizations; the crowds of
8

the citytop do not look up, for the passage of fliers is a matter
far above their station.

foot of a long, long ledger of blackmail and unwilling servants.

They would not be the first to overestimate the Man's interest
in their actions and punishments. Middling factotums of the
Man's conspiratorial organization recently decided to balance
one small account of favor and influence by pledging a token
resourcethe agentsto the Invisible Bureau. Scrolls were
amended and data-vaults etched with new sigils. The matter
was then set in motion, dismissed, and forgotten.

Overview
The agents were called by representatives of the Man to meet
in an empty, gilded spire manse. The summons carried them
unmolested through spire regions far above their station, a
shield against guardians set to keep the lowly from the vaults
and plazas of power. The path ended high above the City
masses in opulent but deserted roomstheir disuse a greater
statement of wealth and power than any gilded decor.

Dark and Errant Paths

If corpses remain behind in the manse, no-one will ever hear of
it or care. What is one more murder in the City? Other faceless
servants of the Man or fearful spire factotums will discover the
bodies and dispose of them, hiding away all evidence for their
own fearful reasons.

Setting the Scene

It is evening, the sunlight yellow. The quarter-height marker of
Spire Secondus Merrow is a half-league above the stepped
spirebase mass that rises from the endless City, well above the
shrouding chem-cloud layer. This is the dominion of nobility
and wealth, the privileged few who stand far above the massed
billions.
The manse is set against the gleaming outer spirewall, one
structure amidst a maze of noble holdings, the ways and stairs
within patrolled by the elite of the Spire Magistratum. The
manse halls stand empty, but walled and vaulted in blue veinstone, imported at ruinous expense from far worlds, and the
floors a polished gemstone mosaic. Crystal windows look out
upon a private landing promontory that juts from the spirewall,
discretely shielded from nearby structures by holo-projectors.
The view is staggering: a rugged landscape of citytop hills and
valleys, structure piled upon structure, built up across
millennia. Their details are all but invisible beneath yellowed
haze. A Magistratum vox-relay drogue drifts a kilometer away,
lift-wings flit above the chem-clouds, and the trails of orbital
lifters cross the high skies.

A Course of Events
The agents eye one another, exchange terse words: efforts to
seek common ground, test allegiances, or establish whether any
one of them knows more than the others. They share poor
quality lho-sticks on the landing platform, and hide their
suspicions.

Behind the Curtain

The agents are less than nothing to the Man, entries near the
9

A Descent Into the Pit

An Unwelcome Arrival
The lift-wing breaks from the sun-glow chem haze, floats into
the landing. oise of burning engines and hot wind breaking
through the imagefield like a roaring wave. Wings shifting like
it wants to clutch at empty air, red eyes of the machine-man
pilot glowing bright behind the front glass. Another place,
another landing wells up unbiddena betrayal, the chug-crack
of wing-cannon, a man burst in tumbling pieces. Memories. I
tell myself they're just memories. Force my face to relax, my
flesh hand to unclench.
Ve, a moll dressed for murder, stands on one leg and a
light touch of the other foot, perfect hips tilted, balanced like
the lift-wing downdraft is nothing. Doesn't move back. Makes
red-eye dance the wings and set down where he didn't want to,
closer to the edge. I decide to like that. The last wind-rush of
landing kills my second Moross Below. I drop the smoking
remnant, grind it under a heavy boot. A distraction to kill a few
heartbeats, doubting I'll much like what comes next. The seal
on the lift-wing cracks, the hatch and stepway peel out like an
insect's opening shell. The fatman, Falis, emerges, damp and
dead-faced in his creased, spire-wrought finery. I'm right. This
I don't like.
"Callehan! How perfectly repulsive to see you again!" The
fatman doesn't false smile to match the false cheer. His pallid,
fleshy lips work the words like he's rehearsed them, and the
skull-drone floating behind him clacks its pict-device as
through possessed.
I feel the fatman's diseased presence, even twenty paces
away in the engine backwash. Like a scar in the heart that
itches to beat him bloody and dead. Maybe I'd give in and do it
this timeifI didn't know he'd enjoy it. Would mean he'd won,
he'd got to me. Instead I grunt, scowl, cover up what the
fatman's presence does to everyone. Wrap the shot-coat tight
against the hot wind, and head for the lift-wing. Might as well
get this over with.
Five paces. The fatman works for the Man, sees things I
can't imagine. His dead eyes watch me. Ten paces. I eye the
moll sideways, once. She's hiding the urge well. But I can tell.
She wants to gut the fatman, throw him into the abyssand
that idea's like hard drenn buzzing in my veins. I keep it
circling another ten steps, grab the airframe at the hatch, haul

myselfinto the velvet luxury inside. Smile at the fatman like I'm
going to tear him limb from limb. Then there's nothing to do
but sit back on cushions that are too soft and yielding for my
taste, pour a double of amasec uninvited, and wait for the
punchline.

A Long, Silent Flight

The moll and I had time to talk on the landing platform, before
the lift-wing. Said her name was Ve, chose her words the way
she chose her steps, each a right choice perfectly placed. She
asked me my story. The Man, the City, I said. Shrugged. Tough
guy act. She arched an eyebrow, not buying it. Didn't give me
anything in return. So we sparred a while, word by word,
telling each nothing. Classy dame.
But no-one's talking in the lift-wing. Only the crackle-hum
from red-eye up front to compete with the muffled engine-noise.
The City whips by, a million stacked lives come and gone in a
heartbeat. To the left, corroding structures built into an
impossible hill, to the right a vast statue of a forgotten saint.
The flyer cants, banks about a lesser spire where machine-men
crawl and build. That's outside. Pretty and ugly by turns.
Inside, now, it's a tomb waiting to happen, a plush wake
with overstuffed finerytwo real people and one sweating
animal pretending to the role. The fatman's eyes are all over
Ve, close as her joygirl bodysuit, never missing a movement.
The skull-drone clicks off another pict any time we breathe
deep. Easy wager that the moll's dreamed up ten ways of
cutting up the fatman before he knows it, laying it out in her
head, move by move. Maybe the fatman thinks she's crazy
enough to do it, and that's why the silent treatment. ever turn
your back on a dame with a blade.
I think about all of that while the amasec warmth spreads
out a way from my gut, liking the vision. Putting off thinking
about where we're going. The Pit.

Backdrop
Crucis Pattern Lift-wing
An ancient tech-pattern brought to the City in the Angevinian
era, a lift-wing is a small passenger atmospheric craft with
10

Overview

variable wing topology, propelled by powerful, adjustable

thrusters. The wings flex, hinge, and extend when needed, like
an avian when coming in to land in a tightly enclosed space. A
lift-wing is not fast in comparison to Imperial warplanes, but
can hover and land in small, enclosed spaces.
The lift-wings plying the chem-clouded skies above the
City are owned by noble houses and other enormously wealthy
concerns. Each is large enough for a handful of travelers and
the sound-shielded interior is luxuriously outfitted to suit the
taste of its owner. These craft are piloted by a servitor
emplaced within the forward cockpit machinery, made able to
fly routes between a few select destinations by Machine Cult
tech-adepts. Noble passengers have no more control over a liftwing than the ability to specify the destination, usually via a
simple tech-device, such as an gilded dial or lever.

Adept Falis, an unpleasant individual in service to the Man,

arrives at the spire manse by flyer. He informs the agents of
their fate, which is to be bartered so as to in some way meet the
Man's obligation to the Invisible Bureauthe Pit of
conspiracies that occupies an outer reach of the Tricorn
fortress. The agents are provided with a Pledge Key and
conveyed to the Tricorn entrance known as the Court of
Hollowed Fanes, enduring a most unpleasant flight.

Setting the Scene

A Crucis-pattern lift-wing emerges from the haze below and
ascends to arc onto the landing promontory, reconfiguring its
wings, and flaring engine thrust to cushion the landing. The
passenger within doesn't stand on ceremony; the hatches open
while the thrusters still roar, hot air and backwash buffeting the
waiting agents.

Pledge Key
A small cipher device often used by representatives and
servants of the Man to identify themselves to one another. A
common form is a icon of Saint Castor the Obviate whose
wounds must be touched in a certain order to express a cipher:
bearer and then reader must enter the correct cipher and
response to cause the pledge-key to show true. Such devices
are used within the Pitwhen confirming that a newly pledged
agent is who he claims to be, for example.

A Course of Events
The lift-wing arrives, and the agents board, wrestling with their
reactions to Adept Falis. The flyer carries the group across the
City skies, above the rolling City landscape of artificial hills
and vales, lesser spires and crush-slumps, wealthy enclaves and
manufactory barrens hidden under chem-haze. While the liftwing powers through the skies above the cityscape, Falis stares
at the agents, or makes disconnected statements that might be
related to questions answered or matters he has been instructed
to disclose.
At some point during the flight, Falis provides the agents
with the Pledge Key they need to enter the Pit: it takes the form
of an embossed pict-slate bearing an image of wounded Saint
Castor. Attached to the Key by wax are a scint-parchment and
pennon scroll bearing well-known words from the Catechism
of Pius Mefonte, starting with what then is the form of life?
It takes a few hours of flight for darkness to fall, and for
the citytop below to become a patchwork of flares and lights,
the hazed sky a dull glow in reflection. The lift-wing descends
to the Court of Hollowed Fanes upon the citytop, an entryway
to the Pit.

Scint-Parchment Charm
A faith charm of the Qualmiarch districts of the City, where
subtle, remnant signs of ancient and pre-Imperial heathen faiths
remain. The poor of deeper City layers use heated hammers to
flatten scint coins into small, irregular metal sheets. Apprentice
scribes painstakingly engrave miniscule scripture upon the
scint-parchment so produced, and the resulting charms are sold
to pilgrims and penitents. Extracts from the works of Pius
Mefonte are a popular, common choice.

The Catechism of Pius Mefonte

Even an apostate of the City knows a few lines of the
Catechismit is one of the Superlative Screeds preached in
every Calixian shrine and cathedral of the Imperial faith. That
part of the Catechism most often quoted follows the question
"What then is the form of life?"

Behind the Curtain

Adept Falis is enmeshed in the Man's service at a level of trust
and responsibility far greater than the agentsbut still merely
11

a cog in the greater machine of conspiracies. He knows less

than the agents might assume. The adept has been tasked by
shadowy coordinators to convey the agents to the Pit and
provide the Pledge Key for entry to that reach of the Tricorn.
Falis neither knows nor cares of the agent's arranged fate, and
is displeased by having to undertake this duty.
The scint-parchment charm accompanying the Pledge Key
is of a particular design that can be recognized by someone
who knows what to look for. Gaps in the lettering form an
identifying cipher. This is one way in which those sent to the
Pit by the Man can identify one anotherprovided they are
careful about it.

Hollowed Fanes, a corpse within, the Black Troops would

make a report and dispose of craft and remains. Another mark
buried in the depths of a great library of accounts, and a long
time, if ever, before anyone gave it the slightest attention.

Adept Falis

A bloated, fleshy man dressed in unkempt and dirt-strewn

fineries. Falis is a victim of his own dark gift, a psychic
untouchable whose very presence is an irritant to ordinary
humans and brings pain to psykers. His nature as a psychic
dead zone would make him an outcastif it did not also make
him valuable to the Man. Falis is dead-faced, dead-eyed, a
blank slate who exhibits none of the little quirks and tells that
make even the worst of men in some way comprehensible. For
all his capabilities as an adept, there is little sign of a sane mind
behind his flabby, expressionless face, nor of any real emotion
behind his ill-timed but carefully practiced statements.
Falis lives by routine, and despises interruptions or events
that require him to change his plans. In conversation he tends
to speak over others, answer questions late or not at all, use a
tone of voice completely inappropriate to the present remark,
break off into silence, and stare into empty space or at someone
other than whom he is actually addressing. He otherwise
ignoresor is oblivious tonormal conversational cues.
Disturbing in both appearance and disregard for social
graces, Falis earns the loathing that would otherwise come
naturally as a result of his dead psychic aura.

Dark and Errant Paths

Were Adept Falis to be murdered and left on blood-soaked
finery in the lift-wing, and the pilot-servitor instructed to
journey to one of its distant set locations, it would be a long
time indeed before the lowest reaches of the Man's
organization turned to think of the agents. No-one cares for the
outermost and least servants. Their deaths become small marks
in a large datavault, a matter of little concern.
Similarly, were the lift-wing to remain at the Court of
12

The Court of Hollowed Fanes

above, armored. Every weapon pointing at Ve. I hazard a
guess that she has been here before, that it wasn't pretty. Might
as well be a walk on the avenue, a common crowd, for all she
shows. I hold up the key for the head faceless, but it's not for
him. He just needs to see it - the machines in his head need to
see it. He makes a sign and they frisk us: a bad joke, a
rebellion.
They don't care about us, they're not even men. To be a
man needs choices, thoughts the machines can't hear. They're
cogs in the Black Legion, each looking for a way to be
something that isn't a cog for a few heartbeats. So they frisk us,
and take their time with the moll, hoping that makes them men.
So one tries to keep my flamebox: iridium, sigils, and a gift
from someone worth a hundred cogs, far away and gone now. I
close my metal hand over his glove and flesh. Squeeze, just
enough to get two hellgun snouts pressed right up close against
my chest, and a kick-rush in the blood like bad drenn. I look at
the head faceless, ask him ifhe knows what happens to guardraques that bite the wrong gangers in the low City. Thin
lectoknife, behind the left ear, stir things up, makes the raque
settle right down. That needles him. Faceplate up, a scarred
snarl and white surgery lines. I get punched in the gut, go
down hard. The cogs get to feel like men, I get the flamebox
back. Everyone wins. I get up, pained. o big deal. I've had
worse.
The machines in their heads tell them to let us go, to feed
us to the gate into the Pit. The marker-lights glow on the path,
and Ve is already walking, lithe and ready like it was nothing. I
follow, and enjoy the view while I can, while the blood's still
buzzing.

The Gauntlet
I took the key to the Pit from the lift-wing just like I took the
fatman's amasec; it was there, and I could. The difference: the
pledge key was intended for the moll and I. But the fatman
wasn't going to offer it. Drop us in the Court without a key,
then a dead-face pretence of amusement amidst plush finery,
watching in ascent while the gauntlet shredded us to blood and
tatters. The end, curtain closes, fade to black. A way out, a way
to damn the Man. But I took the key, a device-box and saint's
pict, prayers on parchment ribbons. The fatman said nothing,
stroked his damp, fleshy fingers, kept his empty eyes on Ve.
Landed and hatch open, roar ofthrusters deafening again,
and out into the chem-laden night air. Like a bad lho-stick,
alchemical, harsh on the back of the throat. I put some space
between my hands and the fatman's murder-itch, the moll doing
likewise beside me, blade-laden and beautiful. The lift-wing
roars as it ascends, thruster heat whipping my shot-coat, the
moll's jet hair, making the prayer-pennons of the key dance.
Scribed by a dead man, telling me how to live a good life,
lashing at my arms and chest. There was a kid a long time ago,
a cold stone bench in a City shrine. He listened to the
catechisms, but didn't hear them. Throne knows it's too late for
that good life now.
Instead this: the Court, the landing zone, the gauntlet.
Myself, the moll, and a hundred weapons pointed at us, enough
to shred the landing deck and every last living thing on it. Stablights, bunkers, glowing markers, the waiting squad backlit at
the yellow paintline, the machine-men turned into weapons,
crawling and clinging on tall stone cathedral ruins. The saints
in ancient lumen-alcoves, chem-worn faceless, accusing stares
without eyes.
"Been here before?" I ask the moll. A prelude to a
warning. She gives me the look, the one that says I'm just a
dumb enforcer, a walking muscle, I know nothing about how it
really is. An array ofsmall, dark Magistratum rooms, a parade
of joygirls across the table from me. The look from each of
them. Memories. I shrug it off, tell myselfit doesn't matter. Let
the moll keep her secrets, and I keep to myself whatever I was
going to say. We go to meet the real walking muscles, squinting
against the roving stab-lights.
The squad is black on black, masked faceless as the saints

The Smoker
Under the citytop now, and into the stone vaults of the upper
City, inside the canker of the Man that spreads from the
Tricorn spires. I light up, lho-smoke to take off the edge I'm
running from the cogs, the edge from the chem-haze. The hard
echo of my boots rings from time-blackened, dead pictwalls,
drowning the click-click of Ve's joygirl steps. The hanging
lumens are dim and old, failing for centuries, trailing insectthreads. An old place, a dead place between guardians. Left
unkempt, unwatched.
"Kaja, " says the moll, low-strata Voltis slang, and a
poverty accent that wasn't there on the spirewall. "Was here
before. " Shoots me a glance, eyes lingering on mine a

13

heartbeat. I watch her walk, remind myself about dames and

blades, for all the good it does. ot the place for small talk.
Ahead looms the gateway to the Pit, imposing and arched
in the darkness, owned by men ridden by machines. Machinecant noise bursts in staccato, and the first machine-man
emerges from the gloom, a hunched form swathed in red and a
halo of twining metal vines. A sick-sweet mix of obscura and
oil from metals beneath his stained, heavy robe. Familiar
scents. I recall a man, laced lho-stick dangling from the corner
of his mouth, younger then, a giggling addict. I recall the
machines that consumed him, made him what he is now. A
tendril ofiron flexes forward to take the lit Moross Below from
my metal hand, conveys it to the shadows beneath the manmachine's hood. The ember-end glows. A vox-static blurt that
might be a laugh. More twisting dendrites claim the key,
writhing over it like rusted serpents. Another arches and
points, its unblinking eye watching Ve.
Other machine-men move in the shadows, twist-shaped
slaves to forge-metal mysteries. The entryway glimmers in
purple, hums like a choir of generators, and my metal fingers
bend unbidden, as though wanting to pull me into that dark
servitude. My skin crawls. Hidden machines and invisible
touches, nerve-twinges as they probe for secrets. But this is the
door to the Pit: the machine-men let the damned in, secrets or
not. I grimace, watch the smoker work upon my Moross Below.
Make like this is nothing, keep the tough guy face as the lie, a
racing heart and punch-bruised ribs as the secret.
The moll whisper-exclaims a bad word from Voltis Low I
haven't heard in a decade. ot cut from whitestone after all.
Looming from the upper gate, a witch-monitor emerges from
shadow; a withered machine-man lost amidst blades and
humming engines, forge-metal and paltry flesh circled round
the urge to kill. Like a master come unexpected amongst errant
servants, it surveys us with reddened eyes, finds us unworthy,
and retreats into the gloom. Machine-cant noise, and machinemen move to tend to their charge. I let out my breath, unclench
my hands. The gate passes us.
More machine-speak, like voices rusted away to mere
static. A sliding rust-tendril returns the dying stub of my
Moross Below. It stinks, an extra layer ofstained, rune-marked
paper wrapped around it. I put it to my lips anyway, suck it up.
The smoker and the secret passed. Just like old times.
The Pit beckons.

Backdrop
The Tricorn Palace
The Tricorn Palace is a mighty fortress of the Inquisition. It has
taken root across millennia like a cancer, spreading though the
City layers beneath its three black-armored spires. The masses
that throng upon nearby citytop avenues see the Tricorn spires
through the chem-haze and shudder in fear at what they
represent, but the fortress expanse beneath the citytop is far
greater and more complex than the visible signs of its presence.
Much of that hidden structure lies empty and forgotten. No
maps exist of the Tricorn's sprawling vaults, and no-one can
claim knowledge of every last sealed vault, hidden librarium,
or dust-covered warren.

Court of Hollowed Fanes

This is a tertiary entry to the outermost labyrinths of the
Tricorn Palace, most often used by those pledged to the
Invisible Bureau, or by other lesser conspirators compelled to
serve the Inquisition. The Court is a walled depression set into
the citytop a league from the Tricorn spires. Tall stone arches,
pillars, and forlorn buttresses thrust upwards from within the
hollow, remnants of some great Imperial cathedral of centuries
past. These relics rise through gaps left in a raised forge-metal
deck of a design rarely seen in this City of paving and stone.
Statues of saints and Imperial heroes, chem-corroded from an
age of exposure, stand in alcoves set into the looming
stonework.
Bulky weapon servitors cling and crawl high upon the
stone ruins like insects or feral primitives, their heavy cannon
mounts and glowing eyes pivoting to track any new arrival. A
squad of black-clad, face-shielded Black Troops stand ready to
escort new arrivals to auspex-bearing tech-adepts for
verification and purity assays. More of the impassive
Inquisition soldiers keep watch from gun-nests, ceracrete
bunkers, and heavy weapon platforms set throughout the Court.
The only entry to the Court is from the sky: by lift-wing,
Vastigan-pattern craft, or similar flyer capable of a controlled
landing in an enclosed space. The landing zone is marked by
red lumens and fading lines painted upon the scorched forgemetal. A clear pathway runs through the cathedral ruins and
into a vaulted stonework tunnelthe way down to the understructures of the Tricorn.

14

Black Troops of the Tricorn

watch impassively from their emplacements.

The Tricorn is defended and secured by an oversized regiment

of Inquisitorial stormtroopers: the Black Troops. They are
drawn from the best of the Legio Hereticus and militant
survivors of Ordo actions. Black Troops are all mindconditioned to some degree, many implanted with volitor
neuroaugmetics or repeatedly mind-wiped. The regiment's
militant resources include weapon servitors, heavy weapon
teams, and flights of Vastigan-pattern combat lifters. Common
troopers wear unmarked black uniforms and are equipped with
full-face helmets, carapace shot-armor, and hellguns. Larger
Ordos actions undertaken in the City usually draw upon the
Black Troops for combat support.

A Course of Events
The agents are pressed by the first of the Black Troops as the
lift-wing ascends, buffeting all with heated, chem-burned air.
The soldiers step too close, and are rough in searching the
agents. They make a show of claiming a small personal item,
and resistance is met with the butt of a hellgun. The CaptainAssignate stands back from his men to watch.
One way or another, the agents work their way through the
gauntlet of dangerous and errant Black Troops. The weapons of
the servitors above track the agents until they exit the Court
and descend into the citytop. Their way is dimly lit by biolumesconces, the passage through vaults of stone and grimy metals
ending at a vast gatethe entry to the Pit, guarded by techdevices and their Mechanicus attendants.
The agents are enveloped by device-fields and threatened
by witch-monitors. The tech-adepts of the gateway pay no heed
to the agents, save for one, who examines their Pledge Key.
This tech-adept, Sa Orven, uses the formal interaction of the
Key as cover to slip a small rune-parchment to the agents: it
contains a subtle hint that the agents and the tech-adept share
the same Lord, and a straightforward request to meet at a given
location within the cell warrens of the Pit.
The gate yawns wide and the agents pass within the Pit.

Witch-Monitor Servitor
These monotask servitors are employed by the Inquisition to
watch allied psykers in places where heavy psychic dampers
cannot be used. A witch-monitor is assigned to follow a psyker,
whom it will immediately execute should its psy-devices detect
the use of warpcraft. Many different patterns of Witch-Monitor
exist, such as retooled combat servitors, floating blade-lined
coffers within which the psyker must lie, and skull-drones
equipped with poison-dendrites.

Overview

Behind the Curtain

The agents exit the lift-wing and pass through a gauntlet of

troops to gain entry to the Pit that lies at the outskirts of the
Tricorn fortress. At the gate to the Pit, the agents meet with a
tech-adept who was also once an agent of the Mana potential
tutor to the ways and conspiracies of the Pit.

There are no hiding conspiracies here, for all that the

suspicious will see plots in every face, act, and shadow. The
Captain-Assignate and his Black Troops are simply following
their nature, trapped in their fate and raging against it. Sa
Orven has placed himself at the gate to the Pit watch for those
who serve the Man, to better his position through connections,
but he has no foreknowledge of the agents' arrival.

Setting the Scene

The lift-wing slows and swoops to a hollow in the citytop,
wings flaring. A painted metal landing deck is outlined by
glow-markers, lit by the sweep of stab-lights from the flyer and
the Court. The stone cathedral ruins loom tall as the lift-wing
sinks below the Court walls, balanced on its thrusters.
Weapons track the descent: from bunkers, gun-nests, and bulky
servitors clinging like gargoyles to the ruins. The servitor pilot
sets the lift-wing to rest, keeping the thrusters live and ready
for takeoff. The hatch opens to let in the acrid citytop air and
buffeting engine-roar. A squad of black-clad, face-shielded
Black Troops jog forward to meet the agents, whilst others

Captain-Assignate Morcelis

Like most Black Troops assigned to the Tricorn, the CaptainAssignate is conditioned and implanted with volitor-augmetics
that control his thought processes. He is efficient, nearmonomaniacal, and has no opinion on anything outside his
focusesone of which is finding ways to subvert his
conditioning, just to feel whole for a few moments. The
authorities of the Pit care little about what happens in the
Court, and so corrupt acts of rebellion are commonplace there,
usually directed at agents and other arrivals who have little
15

influence. Lesser violence, theft, solicitation of bribes:

conditioned soldiers should not be able to accomplish any of
these transgressions. But they possess a great deal of time and
human frustration, and where there is a will, ways will be
found.

Tech-Adept Sa Orven

An obscura user whose addiction and human cravings survived

his initiation into the Machine Cult, Sa Orven is caught in the
Man's lines and hooks, just like the agents. He quickly outlived
his immediately usefulness and was sent to the Pit many years
ago. Since then he has eked out a thankless existence, an
outcast trapped amongst outcasts. He is a mind-rusted, poor
tool to the Mechanicus pledged to the Inquisition, and an
untouchable to the adepts of the Pit, a part of these
organizations in name only. What little common ground and
human contact he can ever hope to forge is with lesser agents
snared in the Man's schemesand even that goal must be
accomplished with caution, for conspiracies and lies are
everywhere.

Dark and Errant Paths

There is danger in the Court of Hollowed Fanes for agents who
do not accept that they are weak in the face of overwhelming
power. No-one will avenge them or even care should they
resist or provoke the Black Troops greatly enough to be left
charred, steaming, and dead from hellgun fire upon the Court
deck. The Court is a test, and those who do not recognize what
sort of test it is will struggle.
Whether or not the agents accept Sa Orven as an ally at the
gate is irrelevant to the course of the processional. His aid will
ease the difficulty of later events within the Pit, and place
another face within the gallery of suspicion that all agents carry
in their hearts, but that is all.

16

Catechism of Pius Mefonte, XIV.33-38 c. 340.M40

XIV. 33 What then is the form oflife?

Life is a holy processional of great ceremony and antiquity, started from the marshalling ground of the cradle,
and proceeding towards the Cathedra of Death and the God-Emperors arms thereafter. In this way beginning
and end are known, and all men are pilgrims.
XIV. 34 Who leads this processional?

The Lords of the Imperium are grand marshals of the life-processional, and Ecclesiarches of the Imperial Cult
stand at each waypoint to guide the faithful. In such a way is the path shown true for all. Bow to the Lords and
guides, and offer them fealty.
XIV. 35 Where is challenge and adversity ifthe way is known?

The Holy God-Emperor of Mankind judges our mortal souls upon acts within the life-processional. Consider
two men: the first stumbles through the processional borne by intoxicant fumes and blasphemy, toiling not,
and reliant on his betters to keep him to his feet. The second prays at each tenth step and robes himself cleanly
in the pilgrims garb. He pays humble respect to marshals and guide-men, thanking them for their great
efforts. He looks ahead to see stones upon the way, and moves them diligently that those of lesser strength
might not falter. Both men are judged in the Cathedra of Lifes End: one found wanting and one lauded.
XIV. 36 Speak further upon challenge.

Consider that men are imperfect and frail, tempted by the Archenemy and Unbelief at every step. Challenge
lies in rightful action upon the processional and refutation of temptationsbut further, it lies in standing forth
as the pilgrims exemplar. It is clearly true that there are greater men and lesser men: the God-Emperors
blessings fall upon those whose will to holy toil raises them above their fellows.
XIV. 37 And what more ofadversity?

Adversity arises from men given in to temptation, who curse guides and marshals, and who raise their hands
against true pilgrims. Adversity rises from the road betwixt cradle and Cathedra, upon which stones fall and
mires form. It is adversity that gives the need for greater men, the God-Emperors blessed, that the
processional way is made clear, and the tempted sent ahead to their judgment.
XIV. 38 The labors offaith lie in how we go, not whence we go?

In certain truth! The God-Emperor crafts the way between cradle and Cathedra to best cast His light upon our
souls. We are blessed of all beings in knowing our processional, laid out before us in pennons and prayer.
Whether a man is ascendant or damned within the Cathedra of Lifes End is upon his faith, his acts, the heed
he paid to scripture and his fellows. Did he rise to be a great man in traversing the way clearly marked, or did
he fall?
17

Within the Pit of Lies and Conspiracies

face hidden.
So here and now, the stepped circle-chamber where
hunched scribes sometimes scurry, like raques scared by Citynoise they cannot understand. The six clustered around the
bloody seventh on the tiled floor, blades drawn and black-wet,
looking up at the two of us on the balcony. Another intrigue
come to its inevitable end. They think their stare tells us that
this is none of our business, but that's not what it is. The Pit
looks at us through their dead eyes. Welcome. Stay a while.
Time slows, each breath an age of detail. We circle the
balcony, eyes on dead eyes, Ve stepping like a hungry felid.
One hand on the holstered large-cal. My shot-coat creaks,
boots crunch on something old. There are mud-streaks on the
balcony pillars. Mix ofstone dust and trickling condensate, the
centuries-sweat of the city. I picture the ways this will fall to
shreds and chaos, how a clip of 17-cal slugs will break the
bodies packed below. Which way the moll will leap. Whether
they hide their own pistols. Whether there are others I cannot
see, where the shadows are too deep. Where I'd cover to
reload. A dozen cold preludes to gunfire crashing from memory
into the here and now, a locker stuffed too full oflessons, burst
open to spill its distractions. Do this, no, do that. Remember
your training, no, remember what happened with Alde in Ward
12. This is how it burns you in the end, why you get slow, why
you get dead. Just listen to what your muscles tell you. Be like
the moll.
And, that urgent voice in the back ofmy mind, I know that
watchers will be coming soon, drawn by murder, jealous that it
was not their doing. I want to be gone, gone from here through
the far arch on the balcony. Emperor make it that the way is
clear, and watchers far!
But the Pit lets us go. one of the six draw, or move. We
fade into the shadowed hall; no-one dies, no company for the
lonely murder. My heart thinks about slowing its sudden
pounding. Another unwanted memory, sealed by the rush of
buzzing blood. The Pit's gift.

Sanctum
The narrow halls are ancient stone, mismatched and eroded
blocks once crushed amidst pagan ruins in the City depths.
Vaulting ribs the walls and ceilings like the throat of a beast,
and the lumens are too far apart. Pooled shadows for
dangerous watchers, but I know there are no eyes and waiting
hands here. Too close to the gate and the machine-men. Suits
me. Ve is impatient, but I need to think, need to nurse my ribs a
little while. There's the thing about a hit to the gut: you can
hold it in a good long time, but sooner or later you have sit
down, let it go.
"Tsa!" the moll says to herself again, but really to me.
Flick ofthe hand. More low-Voltis manners, ganger twitches. I
know, lady, I know. Give me a count. Only the arm is metal,
and the rest hurts. But I don't say anything, just lean back.
Been here before, this little alcove and bench. Perhaps it was a
shrine, but there's no statue or Aquila now. Still, a sanctum. An
unnoticed place to let the minutes drag between one gauntlet
and the next; a man learns to value the quiet momentslearns
to push down that nagging urge to light up another lho-stick
and start walking again. I think about explaining that to the
carefully pacing moll, decide against it. She twitches a glance
in my direction.
She knows as well as I what's next: the long walk from the
gate, the watchers and the masters. Then the life-warrant
marking you as the Pit's ownbut better that than the chase of
grinning, lusting watchers, freed to murder any left untainted.
We have no warrant, only the key to the Pit, and there are
watchers who lurk between the gate and the pledge masters.
My bruised gut says Ve has the blade-itch, the taste of what
she'd do to them. I think that over; it wouldn't bother me if I
heard about it secondhand and far away, but we're going to
take the long path to the pledge vaults. Ways where the
watchers don't expect new faces.

The Watcher

Upon the Circle Balcony

Vaults, passages, and stairways pass in watchful, wary silence.

From deserted halls where fungus hangs from City stone in
place of carved angels, we come to the populated back ways.
The hurrying ofa scribe avoiding something better left unsaid.
Chains hang against the walls, guides for blinded serfs, the
least of the Pit's own. Rejected even by the Man, their eyes

Yet the will Pit have its welcomeit won't be denied. It has its
own voice and needs, a presence that is more than the sum of
the lost and the damned within. othing so simple as choosing
the empty ways from gate to masters could keep the Pit's true

18

taken by the machine-men, they serve. Then a crossway, a

spiral stair, and a huddled knot of hard men in meshwork
Legion armor, jarred by our intrusion into their whispered
conference. One holds up a life-warrant as a ward, thinking us
watchers. Who else walks between the lumens?
We follow a line of serfs bowed beneath parchment
bundles, upon their way to a master's scribe pen, hand over
hand upon their wall-chain. Our boots on stone and duct-plate
bother them not as though they simply hear by our footfall
what the Legion-men could not see. The rusting plates where
their eyes used to be drip runnels of sweat, glistening under
each dim lumen. A whitestone statue of the Man watches our
quiet procession from its alcove. Armored, judgmental.
Staring.
I should say something to the moll. Ve. The Magistratum
itch, it sees a new face from another ward, won't lie still. Wants
to be talking, find out who it is you're going to be back to back
with one day soon, taking on a room ofknives while the vox is
dead static. But the moment doesn't come, and something won't
let me chase it. So silence, and now ten steps behind serfs who
can do nothing but listen. A reminder of what awaits when the
Man has wrung the last from his tools.
The back ways open onto an avenue, pillared and tall,
lumen-sconces hung from every baroque carving. We are
suddenly amidst hurried messengers and slow-stepping
machine-men, each bearing secrets and avoiding every gaze.
And there, archways and the first ofthe scribe pens. A master's
domainthe least of them, one who deigns to look upon the
damned and send them to their fates.
But the Pit laughs at me yet, because there at the very
archway I seek stands a watcher, a killer. The Pit's own blade.
The symbol ofthe Man set upon his carapace, upon the cannon
of a bolter he cradles like a child, and burned upon the flesh
side of his face. He turnsand I know him. I know him, and I
know his weaknesses. A hot relief after silent, darkened halls
and the specter of watchers far more terrifying. Enough to
burn away the last of what the black-clad cogs did to me. Ten
paces and I am at the archway, privy to the clatter of
cogitators, scribes, and keyslates beyond. The sounds of slow
death by hunched wasting and decree ofthe Manbut my eyes
are on the death in armor, close enough to touch.
"I know you, " the watcher rumbles. Clavus Ommic. He
should know me. A flash of memory, my hand on his throat,
large-cal pressed right up against his jaw. The last I was in the
Pit. The switch pins on the metal side ofhis face click. On, off,
on. Levers pulling at the meat of his brain, ridden by the
machine. I watch them, not his glowing eye. That's where I'll

jam the barrel, pull the trigger, ifit comes to that.

"We can go again, you and me. " Tough guy face, slips on
easy as the Magistratum boots used to. Easy when you know
you can win, when you're sure you've already won. Metal
fingers twitch, wanting in on what is next.
"I know you. " But slow, and slurred. Slow and damned,
like me, and I see it now. The machines have eaten what he
was, left a shadow behind, a puppet. Just another cog in the
Man's machinery. He steps back, a door-weight in human form,
and the switch pins all click at once. I curse, bitter. There was
a man, a long time back; jumpy, drew on a scutter-raque. We
didn't let him live it down. What was he going to do, drag it
back to the barracks in little raque-cuffs? Throw it into the
cells, beat it into following City law? I push it away, shrug it
off. Pretend I don't know the moll is watching, judging. Pretend
to myselfthat I don't care.
The scribes look away, suddenly busy with their
parchments, pretend to hear nothing. So we're all pretending
now. The master's office is beyond the serried cogitators and
autoquills, marked by pennons and symbols of the Man. It
beckons. Come on in. Stay a while.

The Master of Pledges

It's not an office, it's a place where scribe-tools come to die. Or
to be consumed by the many-limbed devices surrounding the
master, the creature in the heart of its lair. The walls are lost
behind racks and shelving, their contents half-spilled. Green
cogitator display-light wars with a too-small lumen in the high
corner. The master, ensconced within his scribe machinery,
dangerous eyes in the sunken face ofa man too old to be alive.
Arms wrapped in engine-rods, so they can move at all. Two
savants are making their case, for what I don't know. We didn't
announce ourselves.
The moll slinks past meall the grace I never had. The
entry is narrowed by clutter piled high. Doesn't bother her; she
doesn't touch me or the racked scrolls and rotting vox devices
on the other side. A heartbeat and she's on the master's deskenclosure; two and the savants are leapt up and gabbling like
sqarals in the nest. I'm three steps in when the blade comes out.
She stabs it sparking into the metal of the desk, and the
autoquill dies with a sharp crack. Like lightning. Emperor!
Magistratum habit rolls back in like a friend from years
pastthe one who stabbed you in the back, and here he is
again with the same old expectations. Back it up to the hilt,
whatever it is, and recriminations later.
So I watch the portal and the savants. One is crying. I'm

19

are usually efficiently poisoned if discovered in the upper and

mid-levels of the City. More primitive methods are employed
deeper within the City: an Administratum-sanctioned
hereditary class of vermin hunters exists in those lower,
crushed reaches where City law is still respected. Charters and
skills pass down through families in the poverty caverns, and
raque bodies are exchanged for scint coins at reprocessor
facilities watched over by the Machine Cult. Elsewhere,
gangers of the lawless wards grow raques to the size of a canid
through the use of medical chem-distillates, employing these
aberrant creatures as guard-beasts.

trying not to think about what will be coming nextboltrounds from what used to be Clavus Ommic. Damned, all
damned. Open up the shelves, the dead machines, everyone in
here into wet splinters. The savants are watching my flesh hand
like it's a pointer. I look down, see I'm holding the 17-cal. I
don't remember drawing it. I catch flashes of the moll and the
master, hissing at each other.
"Svalt! This time, not with the gothre-filth. . . "
". . . listen well Veneth. . . assure you. . . unnecessary. "
An agonizing number of heartbeats, and they come to
some accommodation. Death does not burst in through the
portal. The moll retrieves her glow-wreathed blade, uncoils
from the desk-enclosure. Motions me over.
"And you?" the master asks, cold as chem-snow on the
citytop. Eyes that would put a hole in armor plate, like every
tutor who ever beat the low-scholam kid I was came back from
the dead to stare.
Back it up to the hilt. "Whatever she said. " I toss the
pledge key onto his desk, amidst the parchments and clicking
devices. Holster my large-cal, and watch as machine-arms pick
at the key, turning it this way and that.
A pause, too many breaths. Listening to the quiet sobbing
of the savant to the left, trying not to show it gnawing at me.
The master's mind turns behind that cold stare; I see him
weighing what he'd like versus what he can achieve. Weighing
blades and a large-cal against words and consequences.
Weighing the needs ofthe Pit.
"As you will, then. Welcome to the Dicasterium. " There is
no welcome in his voice, but a bitterness, a concealed hunger.
All I hear is the Pit of Lies and Conspiracies, speaking to me
through yet another mouth.

The Institution of the Dicasterium Invisiblis

Any Calixian world populous enough to merit an Inquisition
fortress has some form of Dicasterium Invisiblis, an Invisible
Bureau. These are cancerous, barely-controlled organizations
of the least of the Ordos, wherein no-one is certain who is truly
in charge, or whose directives are being fulfilled. A Bureau is a
dysfunctional machine, rife with petty corruption and
competing agendas; a tool controlled by no one Inquisitor and
set to watch for lesser heresies or the signs of greater evils.
The Bureaus' name stems from the hidden nature of their
workDicasterium actions rarely invoke the authority of the
Inquisition, and are little acknowledged beyond its walls. Men
and women assigned to a Bureau are a mix of permanently or
temporarily pledged specialists, lesser adepts from Inquisitors'
personal organizations, and the unwanted or the tainted, swept
up in Inquisitorial actions yet somehow survived. Resources
and materials are pledged from many different Ordos coffers,
or are obtained from less savory sources. The Invisible Bureau
of any particular world grows and diminishes according to the
whims of Inquisitors and the factotums who oversee their
personal organizations.
Within the Calixian Inquisition it has long been the case
that lesser Ordos actions, maintenance of minor librari,
correlation of unremarkable but potentially heretical data, and
local surveillance are undertaken by agents of the Invisible
Bureau. These are matters beneath the notice of Inquisitors and
those who serve them directly. It is a dark joke amongst those
pledged to a Bureau that the organization's name is an
indication of how little their toil is regardedat least until
something goes wrong or a moral threat is uncovered, at which
point agents of the Dicasterium might wish they were
invisiblis. Inquisitors and their privileged adepts are
unforgiving: the hand that touches upon corruption is often cut
from the body.

Backdrop
Raques
Raques are resilient, bald vermin that live upon detritus,
fungus, oils, and other marginal sources of food, their breeding
lines mutated by the slow seepage of alchemical reactants in
the low-City. Their bones and claws are soft, and they can
survive crushing or even the amputation of much of their
bodythough it will not grow back. Horribly disfigured raques
are commonplace in the vaults and crush-zones where they run
wild. Their skittering is a sign of decay and disuse, as raques
20

Agents pledged to a hiveworld Bureau may become may

become involved in wide range of labors, which might include
research to validate a suspected lesser heresy, suppression of
widespread least-heresies such as Denialism, investigation into
the nature of local religious unorthodoxy, delving into the
underworld of smugglers in search of proscribed xenos
artifacts, imprisoning or assassinating suspect members of the
planetary Administratum or Ministorum offices, seeking
information to answer astropathic requests from Inquisitorial
servants of far worlds, conducting interrogations of minor
heretics, or searching for remnant heretic cells left in the wake
of larger Ordos actions. A Dicasterium can also serve as a
ready source of trained agents or expendable lives when an
Inquisitors has need of such at short notice.
The mix of agents from many Inquisitors personal
organizations, coupled with the corrupt, cancerous nature of
most Bureaus, ensures that these are poisonous nests of
politics, intrigue, murder, and mistrust. The Dicasterium
Invisiblis of Malfi is the epitome of this type, but the Scintillan
Conclave bears rifts just as deep. The Invisible Bureau of the
City upon Scintilla is known to its denizens as the Pit of Lies
and Conspiracies, and with good reason. Some Inquisitors
pledge agents to an Invisible Bureau not because it is
traditional and expected, but because it pays to have eyes, ears,
and hands everywhere. Thus the consequences of distant
Inquisitorial disputes seep down even into these lower reaches
of the Ordos, and lives are lost for it.

The Pit of Lies and Conspiracies

The Dicasterium Invisiblis of Scintilla is much larger than most
such organizations, and occupies outflung reaches of the
Tricorn Palacea league from the spires, but close to the
citytop. It spreads tenuously through mazes of stone vaults,
narrow avenue-corridors, and piled structures long ago
repurposed or abandoned. The paved ways, labyrinths, and
pillared halls of the Bureau are rife with furtive, whispered
activity: darkened back ways where conspirators gather to plot;
messengers hurrying alone, watched by predatory Custodians;
agents taking carefully obscured routes between hideaway and
destination. Various sanctums and areas of activity stand like
small fortresses in the citytop, linked to one another by poorly
lit vaultways that cross neglected reaches of the outer Tricorn
structure. The innermost portions of the Bureau, closest to the
spires, reach downward into the City layers to touch upon the
grand Librarium Mundi, barracks of the Black Troops, and
sealed correlation vaults. These are all resources that can be

accessed, albeit cautiously, by agents and other functionaries

of the Bureau.

The Pit's Denizens

Atop the visible hierarchy of the Pit stand the Masters and their
attendant coordinators, long-serving adepts placed in their
positions by hidden and often disinterested powers in the
Tricorn spires. As a matter of tradition, the Masters are tasked
with presenting findings of note to those higher powers, and
suppressing nascent disturbances in the City that might grow to
the point of requiring an Inquisitor's attention. Years or even
decades might pass without any strong interest shown in the Pit
by the powerful of the Ordos, however. Thus the Masters turn
to the growth of their own organizations and agendas: they
accept pledges from newly arriving agents, wrest control over
some fraction of the Pit's resources, and establish a flow of
duties and obligations. Their stables of coordinators distribute
labors, assess progress, and record the results. Most agents
pledged to the Pit will rarely interact with any Master,
becoming instead tools used by a coordinator to achieve his
ends.
The dominions of influence and control ruled by Masters
and their coordinators are ill-defined, overlapping, and the
cause of many a slow-burning conspiracy or open feud.
Coffers, titles, and subordinate organizations are fought over,
secretively and viciously. Woe betide the agent who becomes a
pawn trapped between Masters or coordinators warring over
resources.
Beneath the Masters and their coordinators stand the
Custodians, heavily armed militants who watch the Pit's lesser
denizens and enforce the Masters' will. A Custodian might be
appointed by a Master, or simply appoint himself if accepted
by his new peers, but motives and loyalties are always murky.
In theory every Custodian answers to the Masters, but in
practice the most dangerous Custodians are a law unto
themselves, as much a threat to the Masters of the Pit and each
other as to any other pledged servants. For so long as an errant
Custodian slays no-one of importance, however, he is free to
indulge any murderous desire without consequenceand the
least of the Pit live in constant terror of those who watch from
the darkness between the lumens.
The remaining inhabitants of the Pit, many of whom were
once beholden to an Inquisitor's personal organization, include
agents coming and going from their assigned tasks, a small
army of scribes, savants of City lore, interrogators, medicae,
quartermasters, tech-adepts, and a population of serf laborers.
21

All have pledged to the Pit, marked as the Pit's own by lifewarrant, secret knowledge, andfor mostfear of the Masters
and those who speak for them. Suspicion, factionalism,
betrayal, and secret murder are rife within the Invisible Bureau:
many agents and other servants of the Pit are pawns in
conspiracies and conflicts that reach upward to the Masters and
beyond. Few trust anyone beyond a close circle of allies, but
are nonetheless compelled by coordinators and Custodians to
provide their services as directed.
Tech-adepts of the Tricorn, however, and even within the
Pit, serve the Inquisition under the weighty terms of compacts
forged millennia past, in the era of Saint Drusus. The Masters
may hold the power of life and death within the Bureau, but
they are lowly in the grand hierarchy of the Ordos. Thus a
Master has but limited influence over tech-priests within his
domain, even though these Mechanicus leaders are just as
much servants to the Pit as every agent to pass through its
gates.
The serf laborer clade is formed of resources pledged to
the Bureau but later judged useless by a coordinator or
designated for punishment by a Custodian. They are blinded,
their eyes surgically removed, and set to the thousand menial
tasks required to sustain any Imperial organization. The serfs'
presence is a constant reminder of the cost of displeasing those
who hold power within the Bureaubut they hear everything,
and no-one can be sure whose tool they are. The blinded serfs
use back ways to carry out their duties: thin, darkened corridors
that run close to the lit vaults of the Pit, set with guide chains
and marker-sigils.
Beyond that which is seen beneath the lumens, the Pit
possesses a great many secrets and its own ragged class of
outcasts. There is room enough to hide away in its darker
reaches, where raques and other vermin feed upon fungus and
the detritus of centuries. Decaying, darkened places lie beneath
and between the vaults where agents gather and scribes toil
upon parchment: forgotten halls, empty shrines, and corridormazes where Custodians hunt runaway serfs or favored agents
fallen from grace. Survivors of bloody conspiracies and
servants fled from the Pit's terrors eke out a meager, fearful
existence in these crumbling, disused reaches of the Tricorn
Palace citytop.

by new constructions. Across centuries, the lines between what

was once shrine, hab-unit, scribe pen, and storage vault were
blurred with new stonework. Uses changed and changed
againaltars deconsecrated or moved, cogitation arrays
shifted, power and fluid conduits reworked. The walls of
scholars' cells knocked down to form a storage cistern; a grand
guildhall divided into office vaults; a manse bisected by sealed
corridors; new stairs passing through a cathedral window. Few
paths through the Bureau citytop are level and straight. Hidden,
forgotten spaces lie behind apparently solid stonework, and old
divisions between buildings are marked now by oddly placed
stairways or a sudden twist and slope in a vaulted passage. City
fundament channels and pump-devices for air, water, or waste
are revealed where gaps between structures were never fully
closed.
Corridors within the Bureau are typically broad enough for
a few to walk abreast, vaulted, paved, and set with ornate
archways. But any journey through the Pit also requires
passage through a menagerie of City architecture: stacked and
debris-strewn hab-cells; vaulted transepts where the walls are
carved with High Gothic paens; high balconies that look out
upon dust-strewn halls; promenades cluttered by pillars and
statues; strangely-shaped rooms within once-baroque manses;
noisy vaults used by scribes and serfs. It is a layered maze of
stonework, and few of the Pit's denizens know more than a
fraction of it well.
Most of the Bureau citytop is built of a mix of the finished
whitestone used for shrines or noble dwellings and the
greystone of common habs. Stone slabs are prominently
engraved with manufactory seals, some recent, some ancient.
Carved scenes and frescos of Imperial saints or renowned City
structures are not uncommon, the details of many near-ruined
by the passage of years. Some of the stonework is older yet,
clearly dredged from the crush zones of the City depths. These
are ancient, worn fragments of pagan temples, pillars of preImperial design, and fractured blocks reassembled by unknown
hands. Many a wall within the Pit is a mismatched mosaic of
strange symbols and broken carvings, their meaning lost long
ago.
Lumen-alcoves throughout the Bureau are set with the
Aquila and time-eroded statues of an unknown Inquisitora
personification of "the Man" for many agents. In the darkened
ways, and by long tradition, these statues serve to mark
meeting places, the surrounding stonework defaced with
centuries of cryptic graffiti and sigils whose significance was
only ever known to a select few.
Beyond the trafficked corridors, the empty spaces of the

Stonework of the Invisible Bureau

As is true of much of the City, the citytop of the Invisible
Bureau lacks well defined levels; structure was once piled upon
structure, and then the avenues and rail-tunnels between filled
22

Invisible Bureau are unkempt to a degree unusual elsewhere in

the higher City strata. Fungus grows, and raques skitter in the
darker places. Lumens have failed, and whitestone is streaked
with clinging mud where dust has mixed with condensate
across the years. Rusted remnants are all that remains of
stabilizing scaffolds, and some stonework leans precariously,
or long ago collapsed to reveal the fundament conduits behind
the walls. The fundament pumps themselves function poorly in
some deserted sections of the Pit, creating shifting zones of
dead, poisoned air.

void-plaza before the towers. Military vox-caster installations

attend the barracks and landing decks of the Tricorn. Further, it
is supposed that those archivists sealed within the correlation
vaults of the Tricorn employ vox-tech to eavesdrop upon the
endless etheric chatter of the City, although this may in fact not
be the case. Vox-stealer emplacements and great silver-iron
vox-auspex grids exist in the heights of the Tricorn spires, but
they stand unused and out of favor. Consistency, as said the
great Inquisitor Vara Te, is the daemon that feeds upon the
souls of the petty.

Vox-Tech and Missives Within the Tricorn

Palace

Life-Warrants and Gene-Rolls

The hidden Lords-Inquisitor of the Tricorn have historically

been wary of vox-tech. The ardent listener does not like to
imagine his lack of control over who might be listening to his
words, and the Adeptus Mechanicus, for all their effectiveness
once compacted, are far from trustworthy. Considered further,
the babble of bodiless voices has little to offer those who can
simply abduct, torment, and question the suspicious as needs
must. Degrees of concern over vox-tech come and go, waxing
and waning like fashions with the influence of the servants of
one Inquisitor or another over the myriad organizations within
the Tricorn's sprawling vaults. These tides are felt within the
Invisible Bureau, and agents sent forth upon assigned duties
typically make their own arrangements for vox use in the City,
and have little contact with Masters or coordinators whilst
beyond the Tricorn's walls.
At the present time, neither voxlines nor vox-casters are
much used by functionaries within the Tricorn, though the
devices and cables do in fact exist. Some remain in good
condition, maintained even in disuse by diligent tech-adepts,
but most are decayed to uselessness. The halls of the Pit are no
exception in this respect. Rotting conduits run along grooves
carved in ancient stonework, and abandoned rooms hold
forgotten vox-emplacements or age-tarnished cipher arrays.
Thus even the most trivial missives between coordinators and
agents travel by scroll, ciphered dataslate, and whisper, borne
by servitors or scribe apprentices sent hurrying through the
vaultways. Intricate traditions attend the form and timing of
such missive exchanges, especially amongst savants, archivists,
and correlators.
The Black Companies of Ordos-pledged armor and
footsoldiers are equipped with vox-casters, however, as are the
transports and attack craft of the Black Flights based in the
Tricorns launch vaults, and the orbital lifters that char the

In the waning years of the age of Saint Drusus, the

Administratum began to take census of the City, in the process
issuing its citizens with inscribed metal life-warrants. The lifewarrants were required for Administratum approval of
compacts, ownership of City structures, and the recording of
tithes. They were also intended as part of a process to identify
and segregate the impure of gene in the City populace. But the
City crowds have always been vast beyond imagining; the midlevel wards of even the more influential districts were never
fully catalogued, and the deepest, poorest reaches were left
uncounted. After centuries of this mass issuance of lifewarrants, the scheme faded. The use of life-warrants as a mark
of station, privilege, or servitude persisted within Imperial
institutions of the City, however. In the lower reaches of the
Tricorn Palace, for example, agents and other lesser servants of
the Inquisition are authorized and restricted to their roles by
life-warrants inscribed with gene-data and other arcane
information.
In the broader City populace only the wealthy and the
well-connectedguilders and spire-dwellersnow bear
recently created life-warrants. They are a sign of status for
these worthies, their issuance assured by vast sums paid to lawwrights who navigate the crumbling warrens of Administratum
bureaucracy. But the life-warrants issued centuries past still
exist, and in countless numbers. These worn relics of the
distant past are prized as evidence of lineage and importance
by the teeming mid-City masses. Life-warrants pass down
through families, or are enshrined in manses and habresidences. Some have become communal possessions, revered
tokens that exist in place of formal property-compacts, etched
with thousands of names. Each new generation to inherit the
right to dwell within a particular hab-block make compact with
a tech-adept to microscribe their claim upon millennia-old lifewarrant metal.
23

Magistratum enforcers and Administratum clerks in the

better City wards treat those who bear life-warrants with
greater respect, and especially so if the original family or clan
name is the same as that of the present holder. A worker whose
name is scribed upon the life-warrant enshrined in a good habtemple is set above any traveler or other gutter-vermin. Only
scum from the low reaches, troublemakers, recidivists, or
despised Malviatoris lack even the record of their familial
name upon a communal life-warrant.
The oldest life-warrants are crowded with the inscribed
seals of Administratum adepts: approval granted upon
compacts made. Wealthy guilders proudly display the lifewarrants of their ancestors as evidence of the long-standing
worth of their guilds. But that age is gone to dust: mercantile
and property compacts are now gene-sealed by tech-adepts
pledged to Administratum district offices. The tithes for this
service can be ruinous, but far less ruinous than being
discovered to operate an unapproved manufactory. The largest
guilds are quick to crush those who seek to evade tithes or
otherwise act without Administratum approval. Around these
giants, however, black markets and lesser traders flow freely.
Small manufactories, unregistered and untithed, are rife in
the mid-City, and dangerous work in their halls is often the
only respectable toil that the poor from deep crush-wards can
aspire to. In some districts these lower wards are wellregimented, with their own hab-temples far from the worst
crush zones, where life-warrants are shared between thousands.
But throughout much of the deep City, and in poverty caverns
carved from crushed stonework, few of the inhabitants are
permitted to formally pledge to manufactory service.
Administratum grants of approved toil place strict limits upon
the workforce in any industry.
In particular, the impure of gene are kept from the best
manufactory labor. Large tech-devices of gene-assessment
move about the greater guilds, brotherhoods, and
manufactories at the behest of Administratum adepts. In theory,
the gene-patterns of toiling brotherhoods are recorded every
few years to ensure that the bounds of compacts are strictly
adhered to, that tithes are well-applied, and that impurity has
not seeped into the respectable levels of the City. Workers
gather for days of waiting in endless lines, progressing slowly
towards the needles of an assessor-device. Their names and
gene-patterns will be carried away to obscure vaults of the
Machine Cult and Administratum, and there put to unknown
uses. Their print-marks are applied to official manufactory
gene-rolls, placed in dusty storage coffers and never again
used. In practice, decades might pass between assessments, and

many manufactory owners and guilders find ways to avoid

even that lesser inconvenience.
Inevitably there exist great discrepancies between what is
tithed and assessed and what actually exists in a given City
district. Mutants are hidden away, rolls manipulated, bribes
made, and tithes evaded. Respectable guilders and renowned
noble houses accomplish this through law-wrights and
influence, while lesser merchant guilds simply disperse their
unsavory operations to lawless wards deeper within the City
structure, or otherwise arrange a picture of conformance for the
next Administratum assessment.

Overview
Now beyond the gate and its Mechanicus guardians, the agents
seek out a Master of the Dicasterium Invisiblis to accept their
pledges. Upon the winding way to scribe pens and a Master's
offices, they are threatened by the very nature of the Pit and its
predatory Custodians. Once pledged to the Invisible Bureau,
and in service to a coordinator, the agents are tasked with a
seemly minor duty.

Setting the Scene

The hostility of the Pit presses upon the agents as they navigate
its vaulted passageways and echoing halls. The close, strange
stonework from the City depths; the knots of savants and
militants who fall silent when the agents near; the furtive
whispers and accusing glances. The staring statues of the
unknown Inquisitor. The blinded, bowed serfs. Places where
the lumens have failed, old bloodstains make trails across
flagstones, and stone walls are shot-pitted or blade-scored. But
there is no way backthe only path leads onwards and deeper.

A Course of Events
The agents make their way through the enclosing citytop
toward the offices of a Master of Pledges, passing varied
denizens of the Pit going about their duties. Within a quieter
section, the agents interrupt a scene of murder: seven armed
scribes within an empty hall, one of who bleeds out upon the
floor from fatal wounds. Little short of an extended firefight
would quickly attract the attention of dangerous Custodians,
and other inhabitants of the Pit are wise enough not to become
involved. The agents deal with the situation as they see fit and
move onany consequences that result from their bold actions
will occur much later.
24

Closer to the Master's offices, the agents are stopped by a

slow-thinking, machine-enhanced Custodian: Clavus Ommic.
The actions of nearby serfs and scurrying scribes show clearly
how greatly the Custodians are feared; they flee at the first hint
of a confrontation. Ommic presents a terrifying obstacle until
the agents realize that he is little more mindful than a servitor,
and so can be circumvented with ease. But the Custodian is a
sign of greater threats that lurk in the darkness of the Pit, and
that lesson is taken to heart.
Soon thereafter, the agents come before the impassive
Master of Pledges, and looming over their heads is the implicit
threat of being transformed into servitors or serfs should they
fail to measure up. The Master silently weighs their fateand
then dismisses the agents from his presence. They are assigned
to Coordinator Harwine, their blood tasted by life-warrant
machinery, and their pledge to the Pit accepted. The agents
give up the pledge key that allowed them to pass the gates, and
receive in its place life-warrants, requisition allotments, and a
duty from the coordinator's list of lesser matters: find out what
the archivists of the Librarium Mundi know of the Tower of
Saint Orithiel, and deliver that information to the correlation
vault that requested it.

and limited of thought now, as much a servitor as a

manwhich benefits the conspirators and higher powers who
on occasion use the Custodian as their tool. But Clavus Ommic
remains unpredictable and a danger, like all Custodians. He is
vaguely aware of what he has lost, and it eats at what is left of
him.

Behind the Curtain

A thin, tight-lipped adept of indeterminate old age, Harwine

maintains his position in Master Mard's stable through drennfueled diligence, paranoia, and ruthlessness. The chemaddiction burns bright in his eyes and mannerisms, but the
Master tolerates Harwine's scheming and hidden assaults upon
other coordinators for so long as he terrifies the scribes, lesser
agents, and other Bureau servants into ever greater efficiency.
Harwine favors bronzed ocular lenses and long-sleeved pale
robes cut in the fashion of high functionaries of the spirebase
Administratum wards a century past, an affectation that hides
the most obvious signs of his drenn-use and enhances his
fearsome reputation within the scribe pens of Master Mard.

Of small accidents and coincidences are great consequences

born. The agents have been given a task that will soon cause
ripples and then waves to spiral outwards from their course.
No-one, not Master, coordinator, or the correlator to originate
the task is yet the slightest bit aware of the significance of what
they have donefor all that they will be the first to fall under
later suspicion and suffer acts of retribution. To their eyes, this
is nothing more than another petty duty of evaluation assigned
to newly pledged resources.
The requisition allotment provided to the agents is
sufficient for quartermasters of the Issuance Vaults to grant
them food rations vat-grown in deep City processories and the
simple equipment required for duties. Nothing more than the
most basic necessities are authorized, for the Pit is only
generous to those who have climbed upward in its twisting
hierarchy.

Clavus Ommic

Clavus Ommic is a mountainous hulk of a Custodian, clad in

thick carapace armor and armed with a boltgun. Half of his
face and skull are replaced by metal augmentations, the result
of an injury that left him more dead than alive. He is slow

Thomus Mard, Master of Pledges

Ancient, cold, and calculating, the adept Thomas Mard has

lived for more than lifetime enmeshed in the conspiracies of
the Pitlong enough that no-one now knows from whence he
came, or what his hidden allegiances might be. Mard habitually
thinks through future choices and consequences before
speaking; each word is carefully considered in advance, whilst
his clear eyes stare from a shrunken, lined face. He is sustained
in his frail third century of life by exoskeletal machinery, rare
juvenat chem-compounds, and a thick web of blackmail,
favors, and conspiracies that spreads throughout the Invisible
Bureau. But he is still only one of many Masters, and his
position is ever only as strong as his hand in each new shift of
the Pit's machinations.

Coordinator Harwine

Dark and Errant Paths

Agents might seek out other destinations within the Pit before a
Master's offices, but the Bureau's corridors are threatening to
those without the life-warrants that prove their allegiance. They
are prey for murderous Custodians, or fall victim to calculating
lesser figures who seek to curry favor with the powerful. Once
pledged, however, the agents' path through the Pit of
Conspiracies is up to themfor so long as they give no reason
for the serried and corrupt masters of the Invisible Bureau to
sanction their conduct.
25

Assignation T.IV.3478.816.M41
+++++++++++

Declaration
By the High Authority vested in Master Mard, I, Coordinator Harwine, place upon the bearer the duty
described herein, to be solemnly enacted in the name of the Bureau, and in the ways and means of the
Bureau, the wrath of the Master to fall upon failure. In the matter of issuance, so pledge to the bearer
such resources as meet an allotment quota of the sixteenth degree, and no more.

+++++++++++

Duty
Correlation vault 16 makes request of definitions and associations for the phrase "Tower of Saint
Orithiel." Attend to the correlation vault and verify its wishes. Proceed to the Librarium Mundi,
obtain a true transcription of the requested lore, and deliver it to correlation vault 16. Thence report
upon your actions and the demeanor of both vault and Librarium.

+++++++++++

Authority
By my word and mark,

Harwine, Coordinator to Master Mard

So codified, date-sealed 213.816.M41, and transcribed to autoquill by Scribe Third Devain.

+++++++++++

26

Conversations Amongst the Damned

Arrayed, the Essentials
The firing hall is empty, the flagstones littered with uncleared
casings, exactly as I remember it. A blinded serf curled on a
pad in the corner the only human presence. Bolters would blow
through the flakboard targets and the shot-traps behind, and
the lumens burn bright over each fire-lane; no watchers here.
Reminds me of a dozen barrack basements, a way to bleed
away the taint ofthe Pit I'm carrying. But it's watching me. It's
always watching.
I throw down the carry-case. Clothes, other loot from the
issuance vault. Bodyjacket and leggings with shot-plate
pockets. Cleanser packets. Legion-standard ration packs. Bad
lho-sticks. A stack ofplasteen-sealed scint coins. I pick a firing
enclosure, empty out the metals from my shot coat. 17-cal in
the middle. Solid shot clips on the left. Auger rounds with the
white paint cross on the right. Won't be using those here; put a
hole right through the back stonework and into whatever space
lies behind it. Message coffers, old and marked with symbols of
the Pit. Flamebox and the last Moross Below. The life-warrant.
I turn it over in my hands. The microrunes on warrant metal
coil and overlap, giving it the texture of raque skin. The
puncture on my wrist where the warrant machine took measure
of my blood throbs with the beating of my heart. Bound to the
Pit.
I place the warrant face-down. Flick open the flamebox,
light up the last decent lho-stick I'll see for a while. Breath it
in, blow it out. Lho-smoke curls around the ammunition.
"Sir? Mistress?" The serf is up, making his way to his
assigned post. He knows it's 'sir, ' and he knows exactly where
I'm standingand knows enough not to show it. I let him have
that; Throne knows he has little else. The scars radiate from
his eye-plate like shatter-lines across an age-worn face and
shaved pate. But that's the only touch ofthe machine upon him.
I flex my metal hand, remembering things I'd rather leave dead
and buried.
"Over here. Two clips, large-cal, second fire-lane from the
left. "
I unload the 17-cal, break it open, work through the gunrites. Work through the Moross Below as well. I don't have to
think about the rites; all muscle memory now. Get interrupted
though, it works a number on you. You lose your place, can't

figure out where you were. Have to start over. You learn that
one early, the hard waydon't interrupt the old man.
I think about Ve while my hands do Magistratum work. I
don't know where she is, but I know where she'll be. Like blood
from City stone, getting three words in a row from the moll
after the coordinator's office. But she, I, and the smoker, in the
cell warrens, that much she swore to. "Tsa! Yes. You and your
machine-speaker. Later. " she said. My eyes lingered on the
sway of her body as she walked away into the shadows. We'll
see.
The serf knows well enough to stay quiet, listening to the
clack and rattle ofgun-rites. I appreciate that. Have nothing to
give him that isn't marked with the Pit's poisonsor words that
aren't useless to a man bereft ofeyes and all he once was. I set
it aside, my bleeding heart. Ram a clip home, chamber the
topmost, look downlane and think about the shot-pattern I'll
put into the flakboard.

Walking the Cell Warrens

I pull out the same issuance lho-stick for the third time, put it
away again. It has the stink of preservatives, like a fundament
spill. Like the bad times in the low Sepat wards, the crumpled
bodies left by gangers in waste-strewn shaft alleys. The same
stench. More memories that I try to leave with the dead.
But I'm thinking about the moll as the cell warrens wrap
their damp walls around me. She's easy on the eyes, too easy,
and Emperor-damned hard on everything else. The sort of
dame who pulls blades on a master of the Pit is the sort of
dame will get a man dead. But done is done, and now there's
the questions waiting. Questions and a meeting with the
smoker.
The corridor narrows. Plasteen ration bottles lie crumpled
beneath a pillar etched with manufactory devotionalswhere
the passage ofblind hands hasn't worn it smooth. It smells like
neglect, like bad air, like burned out fans in the fundament
vents. I know where I'm going. I don't know where I am. The
cell warrens are that way, a knot ofmaze-levels and stairs, and
an armor for the lost. A way to hide from the watchers and the
damned. Find a cell where the locks still work, push out the
serfs who use itanother indignity to place atop all they've
lostand sleep like the dead. So I keep at it, wait for the
memories to tell me where the ways cross. Chains for the
blinded on the walls, and a symbol carved on each stair and
junction; I'll find the ones I knew sooner or later.

27

I flick the flamebox lid in my shot-coat pocket, try to

squash the lho-itch while thinking through the number Ve
worked on the coordinator. He knew what happened in the
master's vaults. Don't know how, but he knew. The drenn-tic in
his eye like the moll was pulling on his puppet-threads, all the
way from on high. Me, I ranked nothing, just another mark in
the Man's ledger, but the coordinator would've clawed down
the walls to get away from Ve. He kept it in and stone-straight,
the twitch and the jerk, long enough to set an assignation, I'll
give him that much.
Spend the years drenned to the hilt and it never leaves,
always that last dreg feeding the fires. The chem-burn makes
them jump and turn to its heartbeat, makes them crazy in the
end, biting blood from their own arms to stop the screaming.
The coordinator wore long sleeves, eye-covers to hide the
hollows. Made it part ofa look. He wasn't fooling anyone who
mattersbut he's still the one who'll tell the machine-men to
take your eyes or send the watchers to break you. I
remembered that while the drenn-sweat formed on his face,
and the moll watched him like he was half a squashed raque,
squirming.
We left with parchment and seals, issuance rights, told to
step and fetch at the Pit's demand. An evaluation duty, thrown
to the fresh meat to see how rotted it is under the skin. A dark
joke, and no-one was laughing.

I can watch the door and the machine-man I once knew. Drop
the carry case, take a seat, a little too heavy.
"Long time. " the slumped machine-man grates, slowly. A
flat machine-voice where there should be feeling, emphasis,
anything. "What did you bring for me?"
"Go to hell, Orven. " Too tired for the old back and forth.
His poisons should have rotted him out from the inside long
ago. The same each time, making like I'm fresh from an
obscura den, weighed down and generous. The little mockery
that's like a hopeful needle, jabbing at me. The Man sends you
away, takes years from you, cuts out a part of you that you
didn't know you had left. You fight your way back, only to find
the rot, the things that wormed their way under your skin. All
just waiting for you.
But I'm tired. So I cut to the chase. Ask him what the story
is with the Pit. Meaning what's new, what's going to get a man
killed. Whether working the coordinators for time on the
outside is still good. Who's in, who's out. I want to build a
foundation. Work up to understanding when I can expect the
master and the coordinator to cut me short at the neck for
standing too close to the moll.
The smoker coils his dendrites, gives me the glassy, silent
treatment. That's fine. I'm not going anywhere. I get up, start
knocking around the stow-shelves. Figure there's going to be
something to drink in here somewhere. That'll make it easier
all round.
"The tranq is under the cleanser. " The smoker's words,
like rust in dead lungs.
I look. A cerajar, dirty, and the contents smell bad. Acrid,
but not as bad as the issuance lho-sticks. Suits my mood. Back
to the stool, and I take a swig. Tastes like cleaning fluid, and
burns going down before the numbness starts to kick in.
Tranq's an old friend, smears out the pains and the need to
sleep, makes them hard to see, like plasteen sheets wrapping
through the body. I'll cut out a few scints from the stack later,
leave it for the blind. For what it's worth. The eyes ofthe GodEmperor stare accusingly from the prayer-mirror.
So we catch up, the smoker and I, in our own way. Like
digging at an old wound. Can't chase what's goneEmperor
knows a man has to live with what is.

The Machine-Speaker
What do you say to a man you haven't seen in five years, twenty
by his clock? But who you haven't really seen since the low
City days, the schola, the bad times. ot his face, not the one
you knew. First the obscura, then the machines. Then the Man.
"Long time, Orven, " I say. Feels like I said nothing at all.
The smoker laughs through the grill that took his mouth.
Machine noise, like nails on the nerves. "Long time, Callehan. "
The small room is heady with obscura-scent, littered with
the meager possessions of its displaced occupants. A single
lumen, a prayer-mirror, a rusted cleanser. The smoker halfway
reclined on the single stained sleep-pad, red cloak falling open
to show me things I don't want to see. The raw junction ofoiled
machine and chem-treated skin. The roots of metal tendrils.
They explore the room like blind worms, like they have minds
of their own, turning over each new discovery. Makes me too
aware ofmy metal hand. The nerve-tugs I try not to notice, the
times I wonder who just moved my fingers. Different. ot my
own.
There are stools, plasteen and flimsy. I kick one to where

The Sharp Edge

The moll makes her entrance like she owns the room, all two
scints of it and its waste. The smoker's rust-serpents rise up
sharply, rearing from their drugged coils. The only part ofhim
that moves like it's alive. Interested or threatened? The tranq is

28

bad, fluid dregs from a power cell, but numbs me enough not to
care one way or another. Halfleft now, was making it last.
"Clean was too much, no?" Ve surveys the walls and
cluttered floor, flares her nostrils at the scent of itat the oilobscura odor of the smoker. Lips thin, tone clipped. A tutored
spirebase accent, like she shrugged off every last trace of the
joygirl in the cleanser. She's a guilder's escort-guard now,
sheen-slick armorgown heavy with plates and a ceremony
blade across her back. High priced, beautiful. The gown slits at
the thigh, and the tranq isn't enough to keep my eyes away.
"o ears, no watchers. That's clean enough. " I proffer the
cerajar, indicate a stool. "Have a seat. . . Veneth. Join the party.
Tell me why we're not both dead. " The tranq drags me straight
to the point, paints on an edge offrustration, just like always.
"Vecca. Mistress Vecca. But Ve keeps it simple. " Her clear
eyes locked on mine. "So people don't slip up. " Each word
slotted precisely in its place, the emphasis on "people. " Real
subtle. ot scoring any points.
The moll eyes the plasteen stool like it's dirt, chooses the
cleanser edge for a throne instead. Where she can see the door,
and where she's a half-step from standing. One heel against the
cleanser's rust-streaked side, long leg bent at the knee and
naked outside the armorgown. She ignores the offered tranq.
Her loss. So I take a swig and watch her. Like a hundred bare
rooms, a hundred faces across the table, a hundred questions,
a hundred murders. Put on the Magistratum mask and don't
speak a word. The City hates silence; they always talked.
But the moll says nothing. Makes it a contest.
The smoker's voxgrill grinds out a broken non-word, an
attention-getter. "A thought. The master has an uncertainty.
Whether watchers can kill you before you find out. " Ve glares
down at him, and his dendrites recoil as though burned,
curling back onto the stained mattress. One metal leg twitches
beneath the disheveled robe.
A pause. "He fears you kill him first, regardless of after. "
The same obscura-slow pacing offlat, machine-made words.
I shake my head. He lets me think he's rusted to nothing,
then shows there's a little of the old left in there somewhere.
Buried under the rust and the mind-poisons. God-Emperor
damn him for it.
Back to word-sparring, then. "Let's say that's right. A
dangerous game you're playingwinning by not caring about
winning. "
"It is my game to play, " counters the moll, sharp and
certain.
"o. It's our game now, two names on the same pledge.
You dragged me into your wager, and I backed you up

anyway. " The tranq makes me sound angrier than I want.

Throne knows this isn't the first time I've said this. It's just been
a while.
The new face in the barracks, then right beside you out in
the City, both of you looking at the same sins and knowing
nothing about the other. You feel out the edges of the bargain,
find out how to get along, how get the job done. That's the way
it was, and that's the way it is, nothing to get heated over. But
she loathes being challenged, I see that lumen-bright in her
perfect face and the tension of her stance. Is that her, or is it
like the joygirl sway, painted on thin? Damned ifI can tell. The
door's right there and she isn't walking yetthat has to count
for something.
"You made the choice, " she tells me, biting down hard on
that last word. "What is it that you want?" The perfect line of
her from ankle to neck under the armorgown. The blade-hilt
past her shoulder.
What do I want. That's a start; I can work with that.

Backdrop
Rights of Issuance
The Pit provides for its own, but upon a sliding scale that
measures worth and need. Coordinators grant rights of issuance
to agents and servants in connection with their duties, each
grant being a claim upon supplies stored in the Bureau's
issuance vaults. Issuance rights are limited in time and degree,
with the least good for cleanser and ration packs and little
more, and the greatest reserved for equipping large-scale
militant actions in the City.
Without any right of issuance, an agent effectively
becomes an outcast reduced to scavenging and the charity of
former allies. Denial of issuance is a threat and a weapon used
by coordinators. The result is a slow sentence of death, as the
victim's weakness and lack of patronage is revealed to his
enemiesand ultimately to the Custodians.
As for any system of patronage and rationing, a black
market thrives amongst the Pit's denizens. Many long-standing
servants of the Bureau stockpile and barter issued materials,
and forged or misused rights of issuance are not uncommon
despite the dire consequences should these activities be
discovered by Custodians. Hidden caches litter the darker
reaches of the Pit citytop, and favors are traded by the
29

desperate for goods worth a mere few scints.

The Bureau's issuance vaults are armored storage halls and

converted cisterns, stocked with tools, arms, and provisions,
and each watched over by a small force of scribes and
Custodians loyal to a single Master and his coordinators. Longestablished compacts of supply that feed the vaults from deep
within the Tricorn Palace are one of the prizes fought over by
the powers of the Dicasterium Invisiblis. Issuance vaults are
not armored and guarded to ward against corruption and theft,
but rather as a way to sabotage the power-plays of other
Masters.
The face of an issuance vault is a massive sealed portal, a
looming, stern-faced statue of the Man, and barred clerk's
windows arrayed beneath the symbols of the Bureau. Worn
metal plates set upon the stonework carry instructions long ago
rendered irrelevant but never removed. Agents and other
denizens of the Pit assemble at allotted times to present their
rights of issuance and lay claim to required supplies. Armored
Custodians watch, murder in their eyes, waiting for mistakes to
be made.

intersections. Each sigil is different: icons of the Imperial

Creed, abstract shapes, and High Gothic symbols are amongst
their number. All are worn by generations of touching hands,
as like the chains they are used by serfs to find their way
through the maze. Rooms in the warrens are small, furnished
after the fashion of the mid-City poor: plasteen furniture, basic
cleansers, Imperial iconography, and rusting metal fixtures.
What few personal possessions a serf can claim as his own are
packed away into unlocked stow-shelves. The fundament
piping of the warrens is decrepit, the air-pumps noisy, but they
are at least functional. Cleanser water is warm at best, and the
fundament groans and clicks from behind the stonework with
the temperature shift from night to day.
The lowest and most damned of the Pit are not the only
occupants of the warrens, however. Agents and paranoid
scribes make temporary hideaways and meeting places of the
rooms, casting out the blinded serfs for a short time. No-one
but those few serfs will know where an agent might be resting,
vulnerable, or where conspirators choose to meet. The warrens
are large enough a maze that searching them would be futile
for any small group, and so no-one tries. When agents meet,
accidentally, in the complex knot of corridors, they look away
and take another path.

Firing Halls and Sparring Rooms

Overview

Buried within the layered Bureau citytop are spaces set aside
for militant practice: sparring rooms with blade-scarred
whitestone walls, or pillared firing ranges set with thick
backstops and age-faded flakboard partitions. Few of these are
well maintained or often used, however, and those that are
belong wholly to the Custodiansother denizens of the Pit
trespass at their own risk.

Now pledged to the Invisible Bureau, the agents have a chance

to take stock of one another and work out any remaining
differences. They draw supplies from an issuance vault and
then enter the cell warrens to meet with Sa Orven, there
learning enough about the Pit to avoid the worst of its traps.
There is a chance to rest before proceeding with their assigned
duty.

Cell Warrens

Setting the Scene

The cell warrens are a many-leveled, sprawling greystone

labyrinth of narrow corridors, spiral stairs, and small rooms.
They were once a monastery, or perhaps arrayed serf-habs
adjoining a crafthall; an unplanned maze, its ways disjointed or
come to unexpected dead ends where old property lines once
stood. Every corridor is lined by hab-rooms, their stone slabs
and carved pillars damp with condensate where the ventilation
is poor.
The warrens long ago became a barracks of sorts for the
blinded serfs of the Bureau. Rusting guide-chains hang upon
the walls and large sigils are carved into the stonework at

Life warrants and an assignation from a coordinator are ward

against the brute force of Custodians, but little more.
Nonetheless, once pledged to Master Mard, the manifold
threats of the Pit become more subtle and less immediate. The
clock ticks against Coordinator Harwine's patience, but there is
time to wash the chem-grime from skin and armorand for the
agents to assess just what it is they have been thrust into.

Issuance Vaults

A Course of Events
The agents obtain supplies from a forbidding issuance vault
30

frontage under the limited authority granted by Coordinator

Harwine. They then seek out the cell warrens and the techadept Sa Orven. The cryptic parchment given to the agents at
the gate to the Bureau references the sigils set at crossways and
stairs within the warrens: it is a system of coordinates that
leads to a hab-room that Orven has chosen for this meeting.
The tech-adept is waiting for them, patient as only the obscuradazed can bebut cautious, and wary of possible agendas. The
agents converse with Orven, who is willing to teach them about
the Pit and its inhabitants in exchange for news and rumor,
once he has satisfied himself that the agents mean him no
harm.

hidden enemies. Murders and treachery committed away from

prying eyes will likely go undiscovered for a long time. On the
other hand, agents who offend or harmand then let liveone
the Pit's denizens, even a lesser, seemingly powerless
individual, may find that the consequences of their actions later
fester into a conspiratorial and murderous revenge.

Behind the Curtain

Sa Orven has no hostile intent, and no agenda beyond his
immediate human needs, the yearnings of an outcast caught in
the gulf between groups. His initial caution may give rise to
suspicion in the agents, but this is the way of the Pitwho, if
anyone, is what they appear, or can be fully trusted?
In fact no group immediately threatens the agents at this
time. They have become a part of the Pit, entries in its ledgers
and pledged to serve Master Mard, but are not yet enmeshed
enough to be the target of ongoing machinations and feuds.
The Pit's denizens remain dangerous, but only to those who fail
to learn their ways or break the traditions. This state of affairs
will change soon enough, and the agents likely already feel
threatened or suspicious given what they have learned and
experienced so far. For now, however, the only real concern is
that Coordinator Harwine expects the completion of his
assigned duty within a day or two, or consequences will result.

Dark and Errant Paths

The agents cannot delay for too long before undertaking the
assignment provided by Coordinator Harwine, or they will find
themselves called to account, rights of issuance revoked, and
Custodians set upon their trail. The fate of those who quickly
displease a coordinator is unpleasant. Most become outcasts
within the Dicasterium, hunted down by Custodians or forced
into near-starvation amidst the ragged bands who haunt
darkened vaults beneath the Masters' domains.
Many of the factions and denizens of the Pit are
dangerous, but all are suspicious, secretive, and uncaring of
lesser servants. The Masters give little thought to individual
cogs in their machinations, and indeed expect a fraction of their
charges to succumb to the Pit's predators or the actions of
31

Whispers from Afar

though. Like an aspidvenomous and angry, waiting for the
boot to tread too close. o less a beauty for it, sleek and
curved to catch the eye while she's two stairs ahead.
She looks, so I call her on it. "You got something to say,
say it. "
A pause. "You owe me a lho-stick. "
The spire platform, a catch. Maybe I do. Good cover.
"That it?"
"For now. "
The Pit seeps into every soul, and no-one speaks straight.
Maybe that's her, maybe that's this place and the Man. I pull
out an issuance pack, a quarter gone already. Low-City taintsticks, chem-soaked and vile. I proffer them.
"Take what you want. They're as bad as they look. " That
wins a twist ofa half-smile on the lips, nothing in the eyes. I try
not to care.
She pulls out three lho-sticks one-handed, flicks them up
into her armorgown sleeve-cuff. All one move ofthe hand, just
as quick as I'm slow to put the pack away. Pretty trick.
"You practice that?"
The moll snorts. Derision.

The Downward Spiral

Broad greystone stairs slope down into thrumming blackness
past the last functioning lumen. Rounded and pitted, the steps
are slabs laid an age ago in some deep ward, dragged from
their resting places to bring slow stone-rot to the Citytop.
Condensate drips from fundament ducts overhead, set too low
for comfort. The fan-pumps within rattle and wheeze, left to die
in their own time by the machine-mentoo small, too
insignificant. Or too near to our destination: a prison for the
madmen that the Pit calls correlators.
Madness and an asylum. . . needles digging too close to the
bone. And the damp here brings out the old ache, where the
metal of my arm meets flesh. Another thing to pretend I don't
feel.
The moll, two steps down and half the City away for all I
can read of her. She flicks her head to look me in the eye
again; I guess the pace is too slow for her liking. The hollowed
stone eyes ofthe Man stare at me from a shallow alcove above
her shoulder. Heavy thoughts and fresh-issued boots drag a
man down, rack up the count between each step.
We came to an understanding while the smoker watched,
the moll and I, bitter and sharp by turns. A snapping lho-itch
and acrid tranq fumes made into a negotiation. Then an
uneasy, dulled sleep in the cell warrens while the Pit breathed,
waiting. Waking up to stare into the rust-streaked mirror of a
stolen cleanser, a tranq-bitten head and the past day's bruises
stiff. Cover it all in an issuance bodyjacket, throw on the shotcoat, rig the holster and 17-cal. Make as though you're still as
fit as ten years past.
But right about now I'd say the past night's exchange has
settled to a bad taste in the moll's mouth. She wants this all
done one way or another; spit it out or wash it down. She's still
thinking that choice over, turning it round, looking at the
angles. But what needles her isn't the taste of my Magistratum
habitsno, it's that the Pit has her between two walls, the
hooks in her flesh tugged by worthless hands. Taken by the
Man and then thrown amidst waste. Damned, just like me.
I tell myselfthat when she gives me the look. Eyes narrow,
face set. o joygirl parted-lip ambiguity now. This one I can
sometimes read, sometimes not, and Throne damn me ifI know
whether I'm right for any of it. She bleeds the danger-signs,

The Correlator
The gate room to the correlation vault stands empty, its rusted
metal floor a stepped funnel leading down to a heavy gratesealed portal. The layered stink of promethium and rotting
wastes hangs heavy in the slow-moving airfew working
pumps here. The sole dim lumen flickers on, then off, then on
again in a slow pattern. Perhaps deliberate, perhaps not. More
likely the machine-men never come to this metal oubliette. A
place for the secret, the damaged, and the mad.
Thick, age-crusted data conduits are restrained against
the walls by chains, clamps, and seals set as though wards
against what flows within. Secrets only the Man knows. Secrets
I wish I'd never learned. Above the conduits, shadowed vents
from which burning promethium will spillwhen the Man
decides that the mad within the vault have suffered enough, or
that some dark knowledge must be extinguished even from the
Pit. I try not to think about that; push it down. Push it away.
Too many sepulchers left open, too much best forgotten.
either Ve nor I have spoken since the stairs. Darkened
greystone corridors, close walls, decay. There was sobbing,
somewhere in the dark beyond the grate-door, ceased with my
first loud footfall on the metal flooring. A bad place, this. A

32

sump for the Pit's damnation. I don't need the sick feel in my
gut to tell me that.
The control levers for the portal are weld-sealed, buried
under metal runnels. What might have been a vox-speaker is
torn away, gone. I rap the back of my machine hand against
the grating; metal on metal, three times. Step back, taste ofbile
in my mouth from the stench.
I've done this once before, years past. A different
vault. . . but the same open promethium vents overhead, and skin
crawling with echoes of the screaming in the collapse-edge of
the Sarvass stonefire. Memories. What the flames left,
afterwards. But this is worse, the reek rising from the dark like
a sickness, like something from the deepest wards. Poverty
alleys without medicae, corpses lying where they were
murdered. Rot and raque-meat.
The lumen flickers out. Sudden hiss, a body spread against
the grate. Throne! I'm two steps back without thinking. Sudden
thump of the heart, loud in my ears. Hand on the 17-cal. A
crackle and white glow, left. I glance. Ve hasn't moved, but her
blade is out. Long, field-wreathed.
"Out, " the body groans. More than one now, sliding
against the portal grating. The stink of festering sores and
unwashed flesh adds to the rank air. Crawling, some, fingers
poking through the lowest gaps to scratch at the metal flooring.
Moaning "let us go. "
Shouting starts somewhere far beyond the pleading, mindburned bodies fumbling at the portal. Indistinct barked
phrases. I don't want to hear it well enough to understand, but
the flat promethium taste hangs in the air like a shroud over
this madness, wrapping me away from drawing the 17-cal,
from taking the only sane action.
The moll breaks the moment, steps forward. Touches her
blade tip to a finger, to the metal bars. A screech, burned hair,
ozone. A rush away from the grate.
"The tower of Saint Orithiel, " she commands. A sudden
bronze medallion voice, something to kick new faces into
barracks-shape. And just how many faces hide behind her
perfect features?
But silence. The lumen flickers once, remains dead, the
only light the white blade coruscations.
A scuffle from the darkness, then a croaking incoherence,
a voice unused. A glow-lit, pallid hand behind the grating, a
single eye peering from a gap between crossed bars. A
whisper, suddenly hopeful: "The tower. . . my request. You have
the datum?"
"o, " the moll replies.
The lumen flickers on abruptly. A moan arises from the

black shadows behind the grill bars, the eye and hand gone.
"Why? Why?" the hidden voice croaks, broken.
Ve quiets her powerblade, one fluid motion to arc it over
her shoulder and sheath it. Without thought to it, a practiced
act ofmurderous hands.
"Enough to satisfy the coordinator, " she says, a scornful
emphasis upon "satisfy. " Words for me, or for the savant
broken by what he was forced to learn?
I don't ask, say nothing as we leave the gate room.
Footsteps on metal, then flagstones. Faint, disturbing sounds
from the vault behind us, and I look backbut nothing, all just
as it was. The moll keeps walking.

Backdrop
Madness in the City
To the City masses, madness is a fearsome sicknessand like
all sicknesses it might be both a contagion and a punishment
sent by Saints or God-Emperor. Sophisticates are merely
nervous in the presence of insanity, but the lower-City crowds
truly fear the mad. To the eyes of the uneducated and the
faithful, every madman spills heresies from his lips and is
cursed for it.
But the mad are everywhere. In the spire heights can be
found weak noble blood and the hereditary, gnawing insanity
of the powerfulhidden away, or ignored in plain sight for so
long as consequences are only visited upon servants and the
lowly. In the worst of the low-City wards there is slow
alchemical poisoning, gene-damage, and the numbing horrors
that attend lawless poverty, filth, and unending violence. In the
crushed depths the fragile of mind and the damaged are at best
herded into makeshift asylum-camps and abandoned, but are
more often victimized by the fearful and the superstitiouscast
out, beaten, dragged upon chains and forced to perform, or
burned for mumbling blasphemy.
In more civilized manufactory wards and the Citytop
layers, guild brotherhoods make at least a token effort to care
for their own. Age-demented laborers and the mind-poisoned
from alchemical plant shifts are segregated within madhouses
adjunct to the great district hospices, the costs of their
confinement paid from guild compacts. Religious orders of the
cathedrals and priories of the Imperial Cult, such as the Sisters
Hospitaller, operate more modest asylums. There they tend to
33

unfortunate souls born insanecursed by the God-Emperor to

bear the cost of another's sins. Many such asylums are funded
from the estates of the wealthy, perpetual trusts established in
the last days of life to atone for past misdeeds.
Yet still the insane are rife amidst beggar crowds, ragpilgrims, malviatoris, and other human detritus gathered upon
mid-City vault-avenues and in the alley warrens that lead into
the depths. The charity of guilds and cathedrals extends only so
far, and many are those who fall far past any helpor who flee
from such confinement. The mad and the broken-souled fear
the asylum no less than the sane, and there are those who
would call them right-minded for it. Even in the hospice
madhouses, little or no effort is made to treat the mad. They are
merely imprisoned, forgotten by those who once knew them,
and given only a minimum of care by their medicae jailors. The
mid-City mad languish amidst screams and filth, locked within
small wards or chained to their bed-frames, wasting away for
what remains of their lives.
Disordered minds amongst the influential of the spires and
the wealthy of the Citytop are tended by doctors of physik, and
are consequently far better off than their counterparts of the
lower City. Nobles, guilders, and their trusted servants might
even recover from insanity, or be maintained in the eccentric
region that lies between normalcy and incurable madness by
rare tech-devices and costly serums brought from across the
voids. Some are even operated upon by Magi Biologis,
provided with neuroaugmetics and the sickened portions of
their brains excised at ruinous cost. But such surgeries are
rarely as successful as the participants desire them to be.
Even amidst the grand and widespread Machine Cult of
the City there is insanity: tech-adepts consumed by damaged
augmetics, mind-rusted by improper data-psalms, or become
strange and broken after years or decades confined to the same
room and trivial duty. When discovered, these errant Cult
members are usually transformed into servitors, their madness
destroyed along with their will, and their tormented souls
released to the Omnissiah.

applying data-psalms of correlation to all that the Inquisition

knew, the savants sought out patterns, priorities, and hidden
events of significance. These results were in turn evaluated by
adepts in the service of Inquisitor Santhus: an adept-evaluator
and those who acted upon his recommendations were never
exposed to the underlying, corrupting knowledge of the
correlation vaults, and thereby protected from the risk of taint.
The few early vault structures built by direct command of
Inquisitor Santhus still cling to the Tricorn spires like plasteel
tumors, each set beneath promethium pump-lines used to
purify in flame those correlators who became too tainted to
serve. Runnels of once-molten material and deep char-burns
upon the spire flanks attest to many such past purges. In stark
contrast, the Schola Compositus was buried somewhere deep in
the mid-City layers below the Palace, and lasted little past the
lifetime of Inquisitor Santhus. Its only remaining legacy is the
Principia Compositus, a disjointed and at times ranting folio
that teaches the fundaments of correlation logic, assembled by
long-dead savants of damaged souls and fragile sanity.
Despite the passing of the Schola many more vaults were
built across the centuriesbut filled by tainted servants,
outcast tech-adepts, and lesser agents driven mad by the touch
of the profane. Far from the ordered centers of correlation
envisaged by Inquisitor Santhus, these correlation vaults
became little more than asylums, convenient prisons within
which the last fragments of worth could be wrung from mad,
damaged, or unwanted resources. Service within a vault is a
permanent assignment: a new correlator is provided with a
copy of the Principia Compositus, thrust beyond the seal-gates,
and never seen again.

A Correlator's Toil
Some fraction of the records of the City and the Tricorn Palace
lie at a correlator's fingertips, flowing into vault cogitators
through armored conduits and from unknown sources. The
wretched and the mad imprisoned within a correlation vault
must use these reams of data and the principles of correlation
logic to provide answers, suggestions, or at least the
appearance of activity if they wish to eat. Each vault only
survives insofar as it is of value to a higher power of the
Palace, and that power will in turn ensure that the vault is
supplied with provisionswhile also dooming a steady supply
of unwilling new correlators to a horrid fate.
Enclosed within a correlation vault, without hope of
escape, even the strong-willed eventually succumb to the touch
of madness: they are continually beneath the ax-blade, half-

Correlation Vaults of the Tricorn Palace

In the 9th century M40, at the behest of Inquisitor Santhus of
Prol, a Schola Compositus was founded within the Tricorn
Palace to train savants in the principles of orthodox correlation
logic. Sealed correlation vaults were built to house these
servants of the Ordos, wherein they sifted through data of the
City, histories of the Calixis Sector, the vast Librarium Mundi
of the Palace, and missives from Inquisitors upon far worlds. In
34

starved in some vaults, and exposed to both tainted knowledge

and the contagious insanity of fellow prisoners. A vault that
finally falls to collective, useless corruption is purged by a
flood of burning promethiumor simply sealed completely
and left forgotten, a tomb for the lost and the damned.

Correlation Vaults Within the Invisible Bureau

The greater correlation vaults in the higher Tricorn are ancient
and well known within the Ordos, some even carefully tended
by trusted savants, their pronouncements used to guide the
actions of potent Inquisitors. No single record lists all of the
lesser vaults within the cancerous spread of the Tricorn beneath
the Citytop, however, and it is rarely clear just who controls or
benefits from these half-forgotten prisons and knowledgesumps.
A number of active correlation vaults lie within or close to
the Citytop layers of the Invisible Bureau. A few are
completely sealed, all communication with the trapped
correlators conducted by means of cipher and electro-signal
panels. These are well-guarded fiefdoms of the Masters of
Correlation, powerful figures in the Bureau who are thought to
have the support of greater coffers and higher functionaries of
the Tricorn.
Other correlation vaults of the Pit are poorly tended and
only crudely protected, however, their gates closed by welded
bars and missives passed by hand or speech to the correlators
trapped within. These metal-shelled oubliettes are hidden away
in decayed reaches of the Citytop layers, their maddened
occupants forced to serve unknown masters. The existence of
such lesser vaults is as much a threat of punishment as the
blinded serfs who toil within the confines of the Bureau. There
are many ugly ends that might befall a wayward agent, and to
be thrown screaming into the tainted asylum of a correlation
vault is one such.

Overview
The agents make their way to Correlation Vault 16, where they
are confronted by mad, knowledge-burned savants. They
obtain at least the appearance of the verification required in
their remit and leave before they themselves suffer the
contagion of insanity.

Setting the Scene

Judging eyes watch the agents as they leave the major avenues

of the Pit, taking stairways that spiral downward past thin

corridors where chains hang and machine-blinded serfs feel
their way. In the layers below, lumens are farther apart and
failing, the fundament air pumps labored, and stone slabs
dirtied by mud runnels, the result of centuries of mixed dust
and condensate. The agents enter a region of abandoned vaults
and untended passageways, a penumbra for the asylum in all
but name that is their destination.

A Course of Events
Amidst the darkness and slow-rotted stonework, the agents find
the Correlation Vault 16. The most deranged of the correlators
within drag themselves to the seal-gate to beg, plead, or shout
in strange tongues. Only after these poor wretches are beaten
back or sent fleeing in terror do the agents meet with Correlator
Xethis, he who sent the request that found its way to the offices
of Coordinator Harwine. After obtaining the required
verification from this strung and fragile-minded correlator, the
agents depart the vault in hastefor madness is feared in the
City.

Behind the Curtain

Some time ago, somewhere far across the Calixian voids, a
servant of the Inquisition heard the words "the Tower of Saint
Orithiel," and thought the circumstances important enough to
send a ciphered astropathic query as to the meaning of this
phrase.
No-one in the lower Tricorn Palace understands the paths
taken by missives come from far beyond the City: how it is that
calls for knowledge or aid are severed from their context,
replicated through hidden data-vaults, and presented to
imprisoned correlators. Within Correlation Vault 16, all that
Correlator Xethis knows is that display screens task him to find
significance in the Tower of Saint Orithiel, and that grasping at
such instructions is the thin cord that yet saves him from
madness. The Tower of Saint Orithiel stands alone, its meaning
unknown to Xethis, and further mention nowhere to be found
within the disordered logic-psalms and corroded data-vaults he
can access.
How much time has passed since the original missive was
sent, and for how many months did the requests of Correlator
Xethis languish unanswered within the scribe pen of
Coordinator Harwine? These facts may never be known. The
hidden bureaucracies of the Tricorn Palace move slowly
indeed, and no one servant can glimpse any more than a
35

fragment of these wheels within wheels.

Correlator Xethis

Once a scribe, the gaunt, ill-nourished correlator now teeters

upon the brink of the abyss, the effects of his confinement and
abuse within Correlation Vault 16 on the verge of blossoming
into insanity. Perhaps this will be a welcome ruin if it carries
him far from what he suffers, even if it makes him no better
than the other broken-minded, feral correlators of the vault. But
as yet Xethis clings to his sanity in the same way he clings
obsessively to the few tasks displayed upon filth-specked pictscreens; he treasures the sparse missives that yet arrive at the
vault. He memorizes each and every one, repeating them over
and over while hidden away from the other correlators in his
own secret niches.

Dark and Errant Paths

If the agents have already made enemies of one or more of the
Pit's lesser denizens, the descent to Correlation Vault 16 is an
opening for vengeance: a murderous ambush conducted out of
sight of the Custodians. Leaving the lumen-lit ways for a
decayed, deserted section of the Bureau is an invitation to
unseen watchers. Careful brokers of rumors and secrets may
know enough to be able to sell the agent's enemies an
opportunity to quickly settle a fresh grudge.
The agents may tamper with Correlation Vault 16, but
little good will come of it. Breaking the seals of the correlation
vault, either to let its prisoners escape or to scourge what lies
within, will bring no immediate consequencesave for the
threat of corruption and the contagion of madness should the
agents set foot inside. Letting the mad run free might seem like
a mercy, but the Pit will consume them one way or another.
They will starve, lost and fearful in the darkness, or be hunted
down by Custodians and outcast scavengers in ruined sublevels.
Destruction of the vault will be noted eventually,
conclusions drawn, and steps taken. Master Mard will not look
kindly upon the loss of a valuable resource within his domain.
But given what will come in later days, this may not even
matter, a little ruin lost amidst greater havoc.

36

Watchers at the Door

The Way It Is
The eyes of the Pit gather in their furtive clusters beneath
cross-passage lumens. Whispering, watching. Pretending to
know my black thoughts, and making a poor job ofhiding their
own. The lowest scribes in stained robes, plotting archive
treachery. The machine-man standing like a statue, counting.
Missive-bearers passing secrets to one another, and no-one to
say which master they're betraying.
I think about talking to Ve, two steps to the left. Tell her
how it all fits together in my head, what comes after this ugly
here and now of doing the coordinator's waste-work. This
acting like a cog, a puppet dragged through the Pit's leavings.
Maybe cut short the way she looks at me.
It's like this: you walk the low alleys in Magistratum blue
and silver, listen to the curses and the screams, step over the
drugged and the deadbut not because it has any worth. It
makes no difference to the misery and the filth whether the
barracks makes itself known, whether you knock heads
together, whether you send the thieves and the killers before a
magister. The City will be the City. She was cruel when you
were a kid, she'll be hard-lipped and sneering when you're
gone.
o. You do what doesn't matter because it's a path to the
few moments that do. That the three of you took shock mauls
and hammered a scar-ganger to a bloody, burned smear on
stone before he could kill another decent priest. That you found
the woman who stole children for meat, put a round through
her gut and dragged her back to the barracks. Threw her into
an empty cell to bleed out, took your Emperor-damned time to
let the commander know.
You walk amongst the lost and the vile, pretend you're one
of them if you have to, and wait for the few times that will let
you live with yourself later. Throne knows if there's any other
way for the likes of me. It's been a long time now since I lost
the chance at a better life, and maybe it was never there to
begin with.
But the moll isn't a confessor. Break the fundament pipe
open, watch the words fall like waste-waterthat makes a man
look weak. Enough chances at that in this place without
making more of my own. Either she gets it already, or there's
nothing I can say that'll make a difference. I tell myself that,

and maybe it's true. I shrug, but inside, where none of these
prying eyes can see. Emperor damn them.
One way or another, it's precious little small-talk on the
back-ways and close, pillared avenues leading to the librarium.
Ve has her thoughts, and I have mine. I turn the angles over in
my head, still looking for the key to work the coordinator given
all the moll's said and done. Figure a way out. Even marked as
the Pit's own and under the Man's eyes, a way out is a way
outto some far district where the stain isn't painted so black.
Where I can pretend for a little while that the hooks and lines
don't exist, that the past years never happened.

The Door to Knowledge

There are two watchers by the bronzed doors, set on the sideway that splits from this demi-paved avenue. Shaved heads and
carapace plate, hanging back at the edge of the lumen-light.
Big, ugly bolters, slung Legion-fashion. That's what catches my
eyehard cases in armor, not the High Gothic scripting on the
vaults or the scrollwork engravings, marks of the librarium
exterior. Old habits from walking the poverty wards, attention
paid to what will keep a man breathing that much longer. But
Throne! The tightness in my gut says there are damned few
reasons watchers would be here. one ofthem good.
"Keep walking straight, " I tell Ve.
She's seen the muscle, cuts to the chase. "You think it'll be
different"hard on that word"ifwe talk about it first?"
Meaning she figures oil and water, then straight to the bad
place whatever's done. There's the itch that says to take that
personally, but what's on my mind is that talking it out now
means I won't be cut short between two bolters and a
powerblade when the moll loses patience.
I don't say that. Wouldn't help. Instead: "Talking can't
hurt. We've got time. "
She goes along with it. For now.

The Hard Case

They're flanking the librarium portal as Ve and I approach,
footsteps suddenly loud in the vaulted side-way. Scarface on
the close side, redbeard on the far. Heavy-shelled in polished
armor, and eyeing us, somewhere between confident, bored,
and predatory.
"Coming through, " I call. Get the ball rolling. Be the
tough guy, disinterested.

37

Backdrop

They consider this for a few heartbeats. Scarface steps

forward, hand resting on the slung bolter. "o. ot through
here, you're not. " Voice like a box full of broken stonework,
half his mouth twisted into the scar-mass that runs from the
armor-collar to where his ear used to be.
Redbeard casually unslings the weight ofhis weapon. I act
like that doesn't make my metal hand twitch, doesn't send red
burning lines through the nerves. Muzzle wide as my wrist, still
pointing at the floor. Like that much matters.
"The master says otherwise. "
Say it like you mean it, and it might as well be true. That's
what you learn in the barracks. How to give orders to a
madman, lies to a preacher, and leave them both pleased with
it.
Up close now, close enough to the watchers to talk like
we're civilized. Civilized. The thought makes me twitch half a
cynic's smile.
But scarface doesn't give, stands in place like a wall of
muscle and armor. "This, " he says, rapping the Pit's sigil on
his chestplate. "This says you're nothing, and I don't hear you. "
Real friendly. The moll gives him the look, like he's fungus
crawled down from the filth collected in the vault corners.
Every tight nerve feels what my gut knows is coming, poised to
fall in and bury me. Bolters in a narrow vaulted way. Knowing
just what that looks like afterwards.
"You're hearing me now. " Lean on the Magistratum
bronze voice, eye to eye with scarface. "You're looking at new
issuance and thinking we're dirt. You're wrong. I was here
before you were tall enough to hold up that cannon. I was here
when Clavus Ommic could string more than two words
together. "
It's the eyes and tone that matter, just him, me, and the
dropped name. Redbeard will fold ifscarface backs down. The
moll will get us all dead if words aren't enough, damning me
for thinking they were.
"We're coming through, like I said, and because I liked
Ommic"flash of memory, hand clenched on a windpipe,
snarling"I'm playing nice with you. Do the right thing, and
we're all friends here. "
Scarface twitches, blinks. Didn't expect the dirt to stand up
and bite.

The Librarium Mundi

The Librarium Mundi lies beneath the Citytop layers of the
Tricorn Palace, within a strata old enough to retain original
pre-Imperial stonework. It is home to a clade of clerks,
lexmechanics, record-keepers, and their archivesand hidden
Machine Cult guardians, defenders of the intricate cogitation
machinery at the Librarium's heart. This is one of many distinct
and independent organizations within the Tricorn, nurtured by
stipends too traditional or obscure to be changed, and protected
by patrons within the shadowy upper reaches of the Scintillan
Conclave of the Ordos Calixis.
The Librarium occupies what was once a fortress, or
perhaps a temple-militant, before it was overtaken and buried
by the growth of the City. All that remains of the original
structure are its adamant-reinforced outer walls: they are thick
and hollowed by passages, but only a few bore-tunnel
entrances and once-mighty gateways now connect the
restructured interior to the surrounding maze of the Tricorn
Palace. Behind these fortress walls, the Librarium Mundi is
divided into a series of vast archive halls, each host to a grand
and slowly expanding collection of rune-print folios, scribed
papers, and datavaults, the lined stacks alternately tended and
fought over by rival factions of clerks and tech-adepts.
The Librarium is sustained by a long-standing tradition of
the Ordos Calixis: that Inquisitors provide a modest tithe of
records, letters, and reports over the long years of their service,
and that the personal libraries and collected works of
Inquisitorial retinues find their way to the Librarium Mundi in
the fullness of time. The origins of the Librarium as a
destination for Inquisitorial records are vanished into the haze
of the last millennium, but this tradition is far from universally
observedfor every Inquisitor who freely provides action
reports to the Librarium, there are two who would fight tooth
and nail before allowing a single shred of parchment to leave
their sealed and secretive estates.
An Inquisitor's lesser retinue sheds parchment and
dataslates like scales from a serpent, however, and scribed
records have a way of outlasting their owners no matter what
steps are taken to assure otherwise. When an Inquisitor is
declared dead and the known extent of his estate assessed,
private collections and record-vaults are transported to the
Librarium Mundior at least those not cautiously destroyed,
too well hidden, or seized and secreted. Once within the
Librarium, these posthumous remains are scattered to
38

competing catalogs, soon lost amongst myriad folios gifted by

living Inquisitors, dust-coated records amassed by extinct
factions of the Tricorn Palace, and countless dataslates and
transcripts once thought important enoughor unimportant
enoughto be preserved.
Thus much of significance lies buried within the Librarium
Mundi, intentionally or otherwise, but obscured beneath a
mountain of dross: rumors from past centuries, interrogation
transcripts and execution records of lesser heretics, ciphered
parchments lacking cipher-keys, scrawled suspicions and
lettered feuds now crumbed to irrelevance, tithe-legers for
manses long vanished, and a thousand other concerns. This
camouflage has served well over the centuries, and few
amongst the Librarium's present array of clerks and
lexmechanics know enough to uncover the most hidden and
dangerous secrets. Still, this is a library of the Ordos, a vault
for materials once composed by Inquisitors and their trusted
servants: even the dross must be kept from the eyes of the
Imperial masses. Servants of the Inquisition directed to serve
within the Librarium live the remainder of their lives bounded
by the walls of the Tricorn Palace, for even the least of them
know too much.

The Passage to the Librarium

The Librarium Mundi touches upon the innermost and deepest
extent of the Invisible Bureau at a single point: a greystone
passage built within a borehole that passes the width of the
Librarium walls. Fundament vents, tubing, and thrumming
pump-machinery surround the passage on all sides, glimpsed
through gaps left between the wall-slabs. It is sealed at either
end by tarnished bronze-alloy doors, each bearing a long list of
engraved names and flanked by chem-pitted statues of
saintsthat must have once stood a lifetime in the haze that
settles upon the Citytop.
The nearby layered structures of the Pit are built around
jutting buttresses of the Librarium's massive exterior wall and
vertical fundament wells where vents and piping route around
the ancient fortress. Where the Librarium's uneven shell
projects into scribe runs, storage halls, and high-ceilinged
avenues, every portion of the exposed stonework is engraved:
worn High Gothic scripts within traditional Imperial
scrollwork.

The Pit and the Librarium

The relationship between the Pit and the Librarium is far from

simple. Both are long-established fiefdoms within the Tricorn

Palace, each with its own prideful leaders, factions, long-held
grudges, and patrons amongst higher powers. Within the
hierarchy of the Invisible Bureau, the task of managing
relations with the Librarium Mundi traditionally falls to the
Master who holds sway over the scribe pens, avenues, and
issuance vaults closest to the Librarium entrance. It is an
uneasy peace at the best of times, marked by the disappearance
of clerks and agents who made enemies, witnessed secrets, or
asked the wrong questions.
Dictates issued from on high during various eras of the
Scintillan Conclave variously declare that the Librarium Mundi
must provide access to all servants of the Ordos, and that the
Librarium is subordinate to other factions of the Palace. Yet
more dictates state the opposite: that the Librarium is sovereign
within its domain, with the right to refuse any and all
petitioners, and that servants of the Invisible Bureau are
forbidden from its halls. Which of these declarations stands
dominant varies with the broader balance of power within the
Tricorn Palace: whether the Librarium Mundi is arrogantly
unassailable or ruefully subservient depends upon ongoing
machinations that are largely invisible to mere agents.
Regardless of the current situation, the Pit's servants can
and do gain access to the Librarium and its resources, usually
by convincing a Coordinator to either authorize or overlook
their activities. This is not without risk: feuds and enmities
complicate relations at every level. The wise agent treads
cautiously, as he cannot possibly know where all the pitfalls
liewhether an unwitting action or events beyond his sight
will permit the Librarium's predators to act upon the dictates of
forbiddance. The threats lurking within the Librarium Mundi
are hidden and unpredictable, but just as lethal as those of the
Pit.

Overview
Escaping the disturbing madness of Correlation Vault 16, the
agents return to the well-lit and oft-travelled passages of the Pit
to make their way to the Librarium Mundi. At the entrance to
the Librarium, the agents are confronted by Custodians, and
must forge a way past these dangerous men.

Setting the Scene

The broader corridors of the Invisible Bureau are safe enough
for agents set upon a coordinator's biddingonly the most
dangerous and mad of foes will strike in the open, where the
39

lumens are close together and the shadows short. But the Pit's
lesser servants hurry with eyes downcast or faces hooded when
they see armed agents, or worse, watching Custodians. The
large corridors are comparatively safe, yes, but they do not
have the feel of safetyrather of a nervous ward awaiting the
ax blade.

Prospere, subtly cultivated and protected in her actions by

Quellen. Mullen isn't sharp enough to understand that she will
be the sacrificial victim when the inevitable incident arises.
All in all, Coordinator Quellen has cause to be satisfied
with his work: for the cost of nurturing a foolish and greedy
scribe, he can make Master Tiellus appear weak to the rest of
the Pit, and Coordinator Prospere appear weak to the Master.
All he must personally ensure is that Tiellus and Prospere are
sufficiently distracted to overlook Mullen's forgery of the
Master's seal and the related Custodial activities.
Ostian and Ress know their orders to be a flimsy cover for
opportunism, and so exercise their own discretion in whom
they lean on. The Custodians will make trouble for an agent
because it will be something to talk about afterwards: standing
watch at the Librarium entry is as much a chance to be a
sanctioned predator as it is to build up a personal stash. These
are dangerous men, arrogant and easily provoked, but they are
nonetheless motivated to avoid any larger confrontation that
might get back to the ears of Master Tiellus.

A Course of Events
Spend too much time within the Pit's embrace and every figure
on the lit avenues comes to look like an enemy. The agents
pass conspirators and huddled meetings in the shadows as they
descend the sloping ways that lead toward the Librarium
entrance. Missive-bearers avoid their eyes, and they are
watched, warily, by agents no longer capable of trustevery
face seems suspicious in one way or another.
The Pit is what it is, but the real threat lurks at the very
entrance to the Librarium. Two armored Custodians, Ostian
and Emmust Ress, are watching and waiting. Their intent is
extortion, lightly masked in the formalisms of the Invisible
Bureau, but the Custodians' strong-arm tactics are quickly
turned around and used against them. For their own reasons,
they fold rather than escalate the confrontation, and allow the
agents to pass and enter the Librarium Mundi.

Ostian

A hard-faced man with a chem-regimen bulk to his muscles,

imposing in carapace armor marked with the Pit's symbols. His
scalp is shaved, showing off the burn-scars that twist the flesh
of one side of his neck and skull, that ear just a ragged hole.
Ostian comes from a hard and murderous background in the
low City, caught up in a purge of lesser heresy and somehow
sent to the Pit instead of the reclamation vats. But years as a
Custodian have worn off the sharp edge of practice, left him
overconfident and soft beneath the armor: too much
intimidation, too many scared scribes, and too few dangerous
confrontations. His growling confidence will turn to
momentary hesitation if faced with a real threator an agent
who can push back and mean it.

Behind the Curtain

Ostian and Ress believe that their orders originate with Laitha
Mullen, a self-interested scribe in the lesser pens. Whilst
marked with the seal of Master of Issuance Tiellus, that figure
has no knowledge of this matter: it is nothing more than a way
to extort lesser servants of the Pit. The Custodians halt
potential entrants to the Librarium, refuse passage, and
confiscate choice items of issuance. Those foolish enough to
protest will suffer for it, beaten or worse, and a cut of the
action will later make its way back to Mullen.
It is common enough in the Bureau for Custodians to
conspire with lesser officials to create a thin cover for their
murders and other corruptions. But here, the Custodians stand
at the Librarium entrance due to the machinations of
Coordinator Quellen, an ambitious functionary in the offices of
Master Tiellus. Quellen maintains his own network of servants
and agents within the scribe runs, and is steadily corroding the
positions of both his Master and his fellow coordinatorssuch
as by causing Ostian and Ress to be placed where they can
make trouble for the pledged servants of other Masters. The
scribe Mullen is an unwitting tool in the service of Coordinator

Emmust Ress

Ress boasts a stain-dyed red beard and serpent skin-brands on

his ungloved hands, his torso bulked by thick armor plates.
Before being claimed by the Inquisition, he was an enforcer
and guard for years enough that wary readiness is second
nature. The Pit hasn't taken that from him yet, but he is no
leader. He prefers others to accept the attention and adulation
of leadershipas well as the attendant dangers. After all, there
are ways and means of ensuring that your cut is just as good as
that of the man giving the orders. The deal on the side, a little
one-on-one pressure: whatever it takes. Ress is not a man to
idly cross, and nurtures his grudges for as long as it takes to
40

quietly even the score.

Dark and Errant Paths

Murdering Ostian and Emmust Ress within sight of the lit ways
of the Pit will be loud and noticeablethough even a short
firefight will clear the area. No sane servant of the Pit wishes
any connection with an assault upon Custodians, and news and
rumor of the event will be quickly spread by scribes and blind
serfs who fled the sounds of bolter fire. Should the agents
manage to evade the immediate taint of responsibility, and
Custodians come in search of murderers, Coordinator Harwine
will soon enough put two and two together. He will reach out
to ensure that the agentsand what might be seen as his error
of judgmentare eliminated by vengeful Custodians loyal to
the Masters Mard and Tiellus.
Agents fresh from the slaughter of armed Custodians may
well be able to strong-arm Harwine in person and make him do
their bidding, especially if they can show sheaf-print orders
apparently sealed by the authority Master Tiellus. This strategy
can work in the short term, but in the long term the agents are
dead: coordinators are powerful, Custodians brutal, and the Pit
will win one way or another. In these circumstances, the
agents' survival is only assured by the coming storm that will
remove Harwine and destroy all record of their pledge to the
Bureauthough such an assurance will likely be cold comfort
at the time.

41

Raques in the Librarium

So I take the first hit of hot chem-tainted lho-smoke, blow
it out. . . and see the moll has an issuance stick balanced between
two long fingers. Perfect nails, painted to match the
armorgown.
"Light me, " she says.
I touch the end of my smoke to hers, look her in the eye.
Watch her set the tip glowing bright. Acrid grey curls lazily
falling from her lips when she breathes out slow.
"You're right. These are bad. "
I look away, shrug. "Better than nothing. " I was
rightabout the lho-sticks, and about the hard cases at the
door. But she won't say that.
Machine-ridden clerks stare at us like we're ferals.
Gangers from the worst City depths. Savages. To hell with
them, a little lho-smoke won't hurt their sanctum.
"You can't. . . do that here, says one. Her folded tines click
against one another like anxious metal fingers.
"Beg to differ, " I tell her.

The Librarium Outskirts

Shelves surround us, dividers for a maze built within vast,
joined halls, each split a hundred ways into avenues and
hidden spaces by lined stacks. Secrets, polemics, and lies set
side by sidethe currencies of the Man, spilled across
parchment and ciphered into datavaults. Whitestone saints
dressed as scribes lean outward from high alcoves, others peer
from faded murals upon the vault above. Looking down at us.
Watching.
The blood's still running hot in my veins, a drenn-buzz
from pushing past the watchers. It'll fade, but I'll ride it while
it's there; one more time I've walked through a crush-fall
waiting to happen. The moll may as well be stone, not a word
from her. Alabaster legs beneath the armorgown, long strides
to keep pace with mine, perfect face composed. Emperor knows
she'd be the same if she'd cut the watchers at the gate dead in
steaming pieces.
The librarium is beyond the easy reach ofthe masters, for
all two scints ofwhat that's worth. But it still has its slaves, just
as damned as those of the Pit. They dress like records clerks,
fresh from hidden rooms where machines pick over their
minds. Arrayed eyeglasses screwed to devices that protrude
from surgery-scars on shaven pates, heads weighed beneath
the machines that ride them. Hands replaced by spreading
tines and hooks. Focused, unblinking stares, fixated on what
awaits when red-cloaked machine-men decide a living brain is
too febrile for its assigned task.
Their remains stand at intersections, dead flesh contorted
within metal frames to become bowed catalogues and guidepointers. What's left when the machines are done with men and
women. The clerks who can still walk and speak whisper to one
another when we passunwelcome intruders into their world
of tomes and dataslates, the moll and I. For my part, I try not
to see what the machine-men have wrought here. The end of a
path I don't want to stand on.
This place kicks my lho-itch, fingers turning over a
crumpling issuance pack in the body-jacket pocket. Flicking
open the flamebox and lighting up feels like giving in, but it
smoothes out the jagged slide back down from being face to
face with bolters and muscle. Damned ifI want the moll to see
my flesh hand shaking.

The Harridan
We walk and smoke, the moll and I, passing between stacked
folios and carefully disordered shelving. Looking like hard
cases next to the scurrying clerks, like hired murder drifted out
ofplace. That's the game, let you think you're the biggest raque
in sightbut the machine-men in hidden rooms behind these
walls never sleep. Push a clerk once, no-one cares. Do worse,
and ten kinds of death await, silent and patient. I've heard the
stories. Throne, I've told a few. Corpses wrapped in rust and
weapons, like the glowing killer at the gate to the Pit.
"We're not trouble. ot in here, " I tell Ve.
She says nothing. Gives me the silent look, flicks the ash
from her smoke.
We reach the center of it all. A circle-hall: shelves and
flooring high above in ones and twos, hung from wires winding
up into a darkness. Stairs like floating slab-paths, and lumens
atop curved poles. The floor-maze of stacked and overflowing
storage racks is rife with wary clerks, machine hands picking
at disarrayand worried stares when we pass.
A thousand secrets in the last ten paces. Buried deep, set
in one rack ofmany in one hall ofmany. The best place to hide
what should never be known.
The stacks part to show the clacking, glittering
centerpiece: the Index. Set in its stepped arena basin, large as
a ground-transport. Gleaming, shifting rods at the core and a

42

hedge of machine-arms moving in quick arcs, the whole in

motion like a sectid nest, about its business at the command of
machine-men and wordsmiths. They and their apprentices
cluster, or are joined to their charge so profoundly as to be a
part of it. Cabling trails the floors, dragged and layered like
serpents.
Amidst it, but apart from it, a bright red dress. Her, I've
heard of; the harridan at the heart ofit, old as sin and twice as
deadly. She doesn't need the drifting edge oftainted lho-smoke
or the whispers ofindex clerks to know that outsiders are here.
She turns like a statue, and is smilingbut that means nothing.
Metal teeth to push the lips back, machines corded through her
wizened neck, machines inside her frail arms. Always the fixed
surgery smile and the thin, hooded eyes. Calculating.
She sweeps up the steps towards us, hunched with age and
trailing red like something from a spire gathering. Maybe there
are still legs under there, maybe not.
"Mistress Indexus, " I say. Guarded, neutral.
She points one long metal fingernail at the smoldering tail
ofthe lho-stick, balanced between two fingers. I drop it, stub it
out. Eyes on hers, on the metal threading her withered face.
Ve cuts right to it. "The Tower ofSaint Orithiel, " she says.
The harridan pivots, as though on a dais. Stares at the
moll unblinking.
"This tower. . . where then stands it?" Her voice is cracked,
age-worn. But each word laid in line like stonework in a City
wall.
"Ifwe knew that, we wouldn't be here, " I tell her.
The harridan turns her head only, still facing the moll. I
pull out the crushed lho-pack, extract another smoke. Slow and
deliberate. The cabling in her neck pulses, her eyes narrow.
It's a pretty tableaux. The Pit and the Librarium cast in
miniature, and the God-Emperor damn Harwine for making me
play that role.
"Orders from the master, " I say.
"Who?" hisses the harridan. Eyes like augers now.
"Mard. Harwine. That a problem?"
See a hammer, lay out an anvil. One far away and that you
care little for. The Magistratum itch is needling me, wanting
attention. Something doesn't add upit isn't the lho-stick
catching at the harridan's mood.
She leans in, poison anger and a rictus smile. "Light
that. . . and die. " Then sweeps away without a backward glance.
A pause, the eyes ofclerks and machine-men half-looking,
pretending not to.
"o trouble at all, " the moll says. Dry, like she wasn't still
measuring the draw, the angles, and the cut.

The harridan meant it, but that isn't what's gnawing at me.
The itch won't let up, wants me to think things through. I shrug
for Ve's benefit. The steps still have to be taken, the Pit's task
completed. . . and the Index beckons.

The Thin Clerk

An alcove of layered shelves and freshly scattered papers,
hidden awaysave for the glowing eyes of machine-men high
above in the darkened vaults. A pict-reader for data capsules,
fragile upon a thin podium. Dust, scuffed by the three ofus. Ve
is making the clerk nervous: getting too close, a hard face.
Deliberate, because she doesn't like what he's saying. That's
clear enough in her stance, even to a sheltered librarium serf.
The clerk is thin everywhere, barely past being a kid,
never filled out. Dead or a ganger's toy in the low wards, fed to
the machines here. Maybe that's better, but he wouldn't know
one way or the other. His forearms are long gone, replaced by
dataslate manipulators, tines, and flanges, trailing from his
sleeves down to his knees like a frayed rope of clicking,
stretched fingers.
I'd picked him from the edge of the Index gathering. He
saw us with the harridan, thought we had all the permissions. I
didn't disillusion him. So he put the question to the Index,
playing what should have been hands across exposed
machinery held rigid by a machine-manlike a wound of
component parts and switches, and that machine-man in turn
joined to the Index by a nest ofcabling in place ofa skull. His
face twitched with the move of the clerk's tines, followed by a
ripple in the arms of the Index. Like a great insect, and it the
master over all it touched.
I turned away then: to hide the chill that starts where my
flesh ends and the metal of my arm begins. But the moll's eyes
were on me, watching. I met her stare, held it. Then shrugged,
made some tough guy comment, covered up by reflexcomes
easy with the years ofit, came easy then.
But here and now I'm the watcher, my eyes on Ve's
sculpted back. The cant ofher hips, the line ofher armorgown
when she leans in to glare at the clerk. The way her hair slips
and folds across the nape of her neck. The blade hilt beside.
Underneath the beauty, the same blank wall as the hard case
joygirls of past years: sit across a table in a dark barracks
room, hear their stories, and never know what they're really
thinking.
So keep it leashed, tell yourself it doesn't matter. Just
another dancer, with dancer's moves and a blade to cut
yourselfon. Wish I was convincing myself.

43

That's the one thing. But there are others, and the itch I'm
nursing is turning to a bad gut feel. Something doesn't fit here,
and the pieces chase around my thoughts. The harridan, quick
with the first reply; like she was waiting for more, a practiced
line. Then cold when she didn't get what she expected. Angry
maybe, but something else under there too. Enough to walk
away, with her the master and us nothing.
So Harwine, nothing but drenn-sweat and fear, passed a
poisoned task? I don't think so, not the way he acted when he
saw the moll. ot ifhe wanted to live.
And Ve, what's her story under all those faces? Sent here
marked as waste for the Pit to use up, or instead carefully
placed on the Man's ordersand this some part of it? I
grimace. Asking the Pit's questions, pouring acid to eat away
at what's made of the dregs of trust. But what else to do?
Damned ifI'll be left to play dumb, surprised when the hammer
falls.
The Tower ofSaint Orithiel. o saint I've heard of, but it's
been half a lifetime since a priest smiled and taught me
something true. There are more ofthe God-Emperor's saints on
the Citytop than any man knows, statues like towers above the
chem-clouds, every face weathered to the same smooth mask.
But the Index had no answer either. That made the
machine-men tense, hunched shoulders as they ignored us. Set
the serfs whispering, like they knew something we didn't. Our
thin-boned clerk, still eager to please, led us away then, to this
maze of stacked shelving. He knew more, or perhaps not
enough to leave well alone. The Index is a beacon, he told us,
and like calls to like. The Librarium holds indexes from
countless archives, called from far and wide in the Cityand
beyond.
The moll cut short the clerk's explanation. o patience.
Brought him back from a fantasy of doing the harridan's
bidding to the ugly reality of standing alone in the stacks with
the Pit's ownand the two of us damned for playing that role.
The kid swallowed, in a hole of his own making, and the only
way out to continue. Whilst he searched, Ve loomed, an
unvoiced threat with a beautiful face.
I waited, thinking. Watching.
And now Ve is pressing the kid again.
"o, that's itall there is!" the clerk protests, shrinking
backward against the pict-reader stand.
"othing?" The word sharp, a blade held raised.
The clerk's tines embrace a silversheaf print-scroll,
crumpling it in his anxiety.
I intervene. "What does he have?"
"You heard. "

"o, no, " the clerk half-babbles. "Looka reference, I

don't know why the Index. . . " He holds the silversheafas though
it were a ward, a shield.
"Show me, " I tell him. Firm, reassuring.
He unrolls the print-scroll, an impossible jagged act of a
dozen clumsy tines, clattering. Another dozen scrape over the
runes, meaningless to me. Machine speech, numbers,
fragments ofGothic.
The moll angles herselfback, gives me the look. She and I,
playing good and bad to the clerk, I suddenly realize. Enough
to quirk halfa smile, and the kid thinks it's for him.
"See? Here, " he emphasizes, a tentative smile returned.
Hoping I'll keep Ve at arm's length.
We go back and forth, and I learn that the Tower of Saint
Orithiel is mentioned in an index made of a certain Vessus
Chantry Archive, lifetimes past. Perhaps the index is here,
somewhere in this vast mausoleum of references, perhaps not.
Even then, it wouldn't give us the answer.
Ve clicks her tongue, severe. "othing. A waste. "
The loose pieces and warning signs may not hang
together, but the next steps are suddenly clear to me. This may
be nothing to the moll, but it can be made to look like
something to the Pitand reason to leave its bounds, covered
by a coordinator's writ and issuance rights sufficient to
prepare well.
My gut is telling me that I want to be far from this place.
"We're done here, " I tell Ve.
She graces me with a considered, thoughtful look.

Backdrop
The Halls of Knowledge
The halls of the Librarium Mundi are towering and vaulted,
most taller than they are broad, lit by lumen-globes placed
upon tall poles or hung from on high. The upper vaulting in
some is shaped to form looming saints, arms reaching to the
apex of the ceiling and faces sternly viewing the floor far
below. In broader halls, the watching saints are instead huge
whitestone statues that lean outward from high alcoves. The
vaults and upper walls bear fading murals of Imperial heroes
and City historyfew of the scenes are identifiable to any but
the most practiced scholar of antiquity.
The halls are formed into a grand series of interconnected
44

mazes by innumerable tall, parchment-laden stacks of metal

and plasteen. The few remaining open areas are themselves
piled high with Aquila-stamped crates of uncategorized new
additions. In some halls, additional levels of walkways and
shelving line the lower walls, reached by ladders and thin
switchback ramps. In others, open platforms and stair-treads
hang upon wires at many levels, providing additional space for
more recently constructed stacks. A few main avenues,
cluttered with piled dataslates and material in transit, link the
archway passages between halls. All else is a warren of
shelving, the domain of clerks and savants.
Tucked away into dead ends within the maze of stacked
folios and hidden secrets are thin desks, portable lumens, pews,
reading stands, and wirework wheeled shelves containing
scribe tools. Each such work area is claimed by one small
group of the Librarium's lesser denizens: a lesser savant, or
team of toiling clerks. Some more rarely accessed rows of
shelving are blocked away by lines of stacked cribs, used in
rotation by clerks who work to a schedule that bears no relation
to day and night in the City beyond the Tricorn Palace.
The Librarium is floored in ancient veinstone slabs of
varying shapes and sizes that fit together as though a vast
puzzle. Long-established paths through the arrayed stacks are
worn to shallow channels in the stonework by centuries of
shuffling feet. Enigmatic codes and High Gothic phrases are
carved into smaller floor-slabs, and inlaid Aquila symbols
mark stonework that covers the remains of a particularly
devout or prized savant. All are constrained within the
Librarium whilst alive, but few indeed are permitted to remain
after death claims them.

Behind the Librarium Walls

The inner walls of the Librarium Mundi are thick and hollowed
by passages, stairs, and tall rooms. Within are machine shrines,
prayer-spaces, dormitories where tech-adepts socket
themselves into slumber-machines and waste units, tool-stores,
cogitation arrays, and passages choked by conduits for power
and data. These hidden spaces are the domain of the
lexmechanics who tend the Indexus and other sacred
machineryand who watch all that takes place in the halls of
knowledge. Spy-holes allow unblinking pict-capture devices a
viewpoint from on high in every vault, and the eyes of the
Librarium's vast saintly statues may not be as blind as they
appear.

Archivites and Masters

The inhabitants of the Librarium Mundi are an even mix of
clerks, lesser savants, menial serfs, and lexmechanics. The
Librarium is not controlled by tech-priests of the Adeptus
Mechanicus, though like many Imperial data-repositories it
might at first appear to be. Even the least of clerks are heavily
augmented, their lower arms replaced by tine-bundles and
faces obscured by ocular devices. Many are machineconditioned, their thoughts narrowed to the task at hand by
volitor implants set into their skulls. Servitors stalk the stackmazes, and humming info-devices are everywhere, tended by
red-robed lexmechanic tech-adepts. The lexmechanics are
simply one of a number of factions vying for influence,
however, and their machine shrines are small and hidden away
within the walls.
In the hierarchy of the Librarium, clerks and the menials
who cleanse and carry stand at the very bottom. They are
essentially enslaved to the needs of their organization, just as
are the blind serfs of the Invisible Bureau. Menials are unseen,
allowed from their cramped dormitories and work spaces
beneath the halls only rarelythen they scurry to carry out
their tasks, avoiding the gaze of savants and lexmechanics.
Clerks have no more real freedom than the menials they look
down upon: they know little beyond the data-lore required to
carry out their immediate assignments, herded each day to
numbing tasks of rote memorization and moving parchments to
and fro. Those who show talent or a greater understanding of
the materials they handle may be raised to apprentice
savantsbut are more likely to be implanted with mindlimiters, their memories erased.
Above the clerks are savants responsible for the arcane
operations of the Librarium, indexing and ordering its contents,
and providing assistance when answers are sought by
authorized outsiders. The least savant is a specialist in one
small catalogued area; he might not leave his small alcove of
shelving and carefully ordered data for years on end. The
oldest develop manias of suspicion and frustration as their
bodies grow frail, becoming jealous and unstable guardians of
their tiny domains. Master savants, by comparison, have a
much broader view and greater control; in directing their lesser
brethren they gain a much more expansive understanding of the
Librarium's contents. For all that, they are still prisoners of
their knowledgeforbidden to leave, trapped alongside buried
secrets that, if assembled and fully comprehended, might break
a weaker mind.
Lexmechanic tech-adepts and tech-priests are pledged to
45

the halls of knowledge under the meandering terms of an

ancient bond-compact struck long centuries past by Inquisitors
of the Scintillan Conclave and Archmagi of the Lathes. In
theory, the lexmechanics and savants are peers, the two sides
working together to assure continuance of the Librarium. In
practice, such cooperation is fractious at best: tech-priests
might not control the Librarium Mundi, but many amongst
their number believe that they should. For others, data-lore and
sacred technology are the primary focus, not the desires of
outsiders who wish to use that technology. Thus lexmechanics
are frequently secretive or high-handed, while savants resort to
laborious toil and ink on parchment in order to retain greater
control over their own dominions.
The powers that be within the Librarium include the
various Masters Indexus, the Lexmechanic Primus, the Master
Divisor who directs the assessment and assignment of new
materials, and a council of Archivites Senior who speak for the
savants. There are sometimes one or more specialists from an
Inquisitor's extended retinue temporarily in residence,
searching for information. These visiting savants are an
unstable influence, magnets for intrigue and suspicionbut the
balance of power within the Librarium Mundi is fragile in any
case, swayed by shifting allegiances amongst the shadowy
higher powers of the Tricorn Palace. The masters of the
Librarium are only sustained in their positions through the
patronage of those who find unfettered access to the
Librarium's secrets useful, or who wish to quietly destroy
inconvenient and potentially threatening records. The masters
are allied in their desire to retain both the power and the
comparative independence of the Librarium within the Tricorn
Palace, but at one and the same time they are locked into
suspicious opposition by the hidden agendas of their patrons. It
is a poisonous environment of spies and whispered rumor in
which the weak are soon deposed.

condition.
Other forms of menial servitor wander the stack-mazes on
spindly legs, or float upon suspensor plaforms, constantly
checking tomes and dataslates with clicking, many-tined hands.
Most are hung with binary-speech prayers inscribed upon metal
plates and trail data-conduit cables that lead to the hidden
spaces behind the walls. Clerks are wary of these
servitorseven while manipulating parchments, their red
machine eyes turn to watch everyone who passes by.
The true guardians of the Librarium are also servitors, but
of a far more lethal tech-pattern. Stored in sealed passages,
drenched in machine oils and set with purity seals, they are
worn and ancient, weapon-bearing, and yearn to be awoken.
Suspensor-supported, these war-servitors can float over the
maze of stacks and tomes when unleashed, and their weapons
have cut down many an unwanted presence within the
Librarium halls across the centuries.

The Data-Lore of Indexes and Catalogues

The foundational art of the savant is not in fact encompassment
of knowledge. Mere recollection is a task best given to lesser
archivites, such as scribes, clerks, and the lexservitors assigned
to rarely accessed repositories. A savants true worth instead
rests upon the ability to reliably locate needed information, and
the data-lore that makes this possiblea hidden world of
jealously guarded techniques, corroding indexes, and halfcompleted catalogues. It is a realm rife with its own rivalries
and lost histories, dependent upon mysterious cogitation
devices and data-psalms grudgingly provided by lexmechanic
tech-priests.
Any long-standing librarium has passed through many
schemes of cataloguing and indexing, few if any of which
came to completion. The partial results linger for generation
after generation, their use taught to new clerks for so long as
they remain useful. Patchwork, incomplete indexes are the
norm in an Imperial data-repository, as few scholarly
organizations have the lasting will needed to create and
maintain a large index, or even simply a comprehensive
catalogue. Thus the Indexus Primus of a major librarium may
well consist of scores of layered sub-indexes, all of which are
wildly different in form, ciphering, accuracy, and
completeness, created over the course of centuries or millennia.
Such a master index may span a dozen different patterns of
ancient and barely functional datavault device, stacks of
crumbling parchment, ciphered microrune plates, and
lexservitors sealed away in preservation vats. A savant may be

Servitors and Guardians

To be formed into a servitor is the final level of punishment
within the Librarium, the fate of a clerk fallen far out of
favorperhaps thought to be a servant of the Invisible Bureau
or in thrall to another faction of the Tricorn Palace. Stationary
and voiceless, built into podiums or set upon bronze stands,
these lesser servitors are guideposts to the Librarium's division
of contents. They point the way with truncated arms, or display
blurred High Gothic instructions and outdated floor plans upon
an inbuilt pict-display, and each bears a small plaque to note
the offenses against the Librarium that led to their present
46

required to laboriously follow a single line of inquiry back and

forth between these tech-systems, and maintaining the oldest
sub-indexes so as to encompass new additions to the librarium
becomes a near-impossibility.
Efforts to construct catalogues and indexes thus begin out
of simple necessity. Seeking specific information in an
unordered librarium of any meaningful size is a task to occupy
clerks for weeks, months, or even years. Seeking correlation
and insight in a librarium that lacks even partial indexes is a far
worse prospect, a futile endeavor doomed to failure from the
very outset. So savants and scribes of each new generation are
set by their patrons to the task of replicating the work of their
long-dead predecessors: they recreate indexes and catalogues
in a new form, and incorporate more recently archived
materials. Unfortunately, few such efforts have the support
needed to grow into a functioning, maintained sub-index that
will last for lifetimesbut they are not useless. The Indexus
Primus of a large librarium is often supplemented for practical
use by hundreds of so-called Indexii Asperius, the unrefined
catalogues assembled at the behest of individual savants for
their own use. Experienced archivites look for an Indexus
Asperius covering the topic of interest first of all, and hope that
is not ciphered or otherwise incomprehensible in the absence of
its creator.
A catalogue or indexeven an Indexus Primuscan be
held by a single lesser data-device, transcribed many times
over, and transported far and wide. Well-traveled savants, such
as those pledged to Inquisitorial retinues or noble households,
collect index datavaults to better steer their future inquiries,
and the price of access to a newly visited librarium is often the
transcription of an index brought from afar. Thus the contents
of a large librarium typically include many indexes and
catalogues from other repositories of data. They are invariably
decades out of date at the very least, and more likely centuries
old, but still potentially very valuable.

Deletion Orders and Their Echoes

Inquisitors and their directly appointed representatives are
known to issue deletion orders, a tradition-bound and highly
formal Inquisitorial dictate commanding the destruction of all
information on a particular subject. Grand deletion orders of
the past have stretched across centuries and the breadth of the
Imperium, setting in motion countless initiatives to wipe all
mention of an event, person, or group from Imperial datarepositoriesand often as not murder the savants who tended
that knowledge. But such sweeping deletion orders are rare.

More common are those issued within a Sector, spurring lesser

actions on a few score worlds over the course of a few years or
decades.
Master archivites of sophisticated Imperial worlds are
aware of the existence of deletion orders and the threat they
pose. That knowledge is part of the secret lore of the savant's
trade: terrified clerks warn one another as a deletion order
unfolds, and some few inevitably manage to escape the
sentence of death for what they know. Further, data-assassins
are rarely subtle, leaving scars in info-repositories and physical
collections that speak volumes to a well-trained savant or techadept. Indirect references and index entries often survive the
destruction, especially given the way in which index datavaults
pass from librarium to librarium.
Still, the wise savant quietly moves on when the evidence
of a past deletion order is apparent, and avoids any
entanglement with outsiders who search for data that cannot be
found. Perhaps the information was never thereor perhaps it
was destroyed by order of the Inquisition, and the searchers are
either fools risking the lives of all who associate with them or
heretics already hunted by indiscriminate killers. The fear
inspired by past deletion orders, real or imagined, is contagious
amongst archivites. Even though there is little immediate risk if
the deletion order took place in the remote past and all who
might know of it are long dead and gone, there are few reliable
ways to determine whether this is the case without becoming
too involved.

The Indexus Laephal

The Indexus Primus of the Librarium Mundi is a masterful
example of data-lore, supported by a school of knowledge that
has endured for thirteen centuries since its founding by SavantErrant Uth Laephal. The arch-archivite Laephal was a larger
than life figure in the Scintillan Conclave of that era, shielded
from the consequences of a soul and speech far greater than his
standing by the patronage of Lord-Inquisitor Yantalus. Despite
zealous participation in Ordos Hereticus actions, Laephals real
passion was data-lorethe quiet and methodical taming of
disordered collections. Across a century of life, punctuated by
his persecution of the heretic and the witch, Uth Laephal
directed archivites of the Tricorn Palace to toil upon his grand
vision: a true and complete index for the Librarium Mundi.
While the full scope of Laephal's designs were never fully
realized, the resulting Indexus is nonetheless a triumph of the
savant's art and lexmechanic's tech-knowledge. The principle
Indexus machinery resides atop a stepped dais at the center of
47

Laephal's Tomb

the Librarium: an open arrangement of thousands of thin,

shifting adamantine ingots, held within suspensor fields and
surrounded by a hedge of gilded rune-imprintors, erasuretorches, microlenses, and other stranger devices. Upon the
concentric steps below stand serried lexservitors and cogitators
linked by conduit-bundles thickly crusted with purity seals, and
these are in turn enclosed by machine prayer lecterns, hanging
pict-slates, and the info-thrones used by archivites and
lexmechanics. This imposing array of sacred machinery was
created by the much-storied Magos Talth of the Lathes: the
Magos marshaled the silver-handed of the City to this task and
personally embossed a blessed Aquila upon the completed
Indexus, or so the histories state. The truth of that may never be
known, but Talth's ornate lexmark is upon the dataslate of
enumerated guide-rules hanging within a stasis field in the
Librarium's central hall.
It is said that Uth Laephal challenged Magos Talth to show
that an index, that most hidden of things, would be a creation
of beauty were it set forth for the eyes of men. Watching the
flowing movement of a hundred golden rune-arms, like fronds
before the shining dance of data-ingots, it is hard to disagree.
Yet the true legacy of the arch-archivite was less the techdevices of the Indexus and more the creation of a lasting school
of index-lore within the Librarium, for it is the latter that has
long ensured the Indexus Primus remains used and valuable.
Enthusiasm for Laephal's creations amongst the Librarium
masters has waxed and waned across the centuries, and as a
consequence the present Indexus stands far short of the
perfection that the Savant-Errant desired, but the continued
maintenance and use of a single index for a large datarepository across more than a millennium is a marked
achievement.
The Indexus Laephal permits the toil of forsaken,
maddened savants trapped within the correlation vaults of
Tricorn Palace, and makes the Librarium Mundi a tool of great
value to the powers of the Scintillan Conclave. The Inquisition
has an extremely long and baroque history: revelations that
might have taken years to surface, if they ever did at all, can be
uncovered in a matter of days via the Indexus and the
archivites who understand its intricacies. Datavault
transcriptions of the Indexus are made every few generations,
with or without the approval of the Librarium masters, and
either carried to Ordos fortresses of the Calixian worlds or
secreted within the personal collections of noted Inquisitors.
Most such extant datavaults are now centuries out of date, but
they are nonetheless a great treasure for highly placed savants
of the Ordos Calixis.

A veinstone statue of Savant-Errant Laephal stands upon an

upper level of the darkened central vault of the Librarium
Mundi, high above the Indexus dais. The arch-archivite's
graven image is modest in size next to the vast whitestone
saints to either side, and appears to be contemplating his
creation from aboveor perhaps it stares at the savant's final
resting place, an Aquila-embossed stone slab upon the hall
floor. A plaque upon the statue's base declares it commissioned
by the Lord-Inquisitor Yantalus in poor recognition of an
exceptional life lived beneath the all-seeing gaze of the GodEmperor.
It was at one time traditional for savants who earned the
right of access to the Indexus to hang a small Aquila about
Laephal's stone neck or arm, risking a thin ledge and few
handholds high above the stone floor below. While the
tradition is centuries vanished, the statue remains festooned
with corroded chains and symbols of the Imperial Creed,
obscuring the fine details of the stonework beneath.

Overview
The agents enter the Librarium Mundi in search of meaning
behind the phrase "the Tower of Saint Orithiel." Engaging the
clerks and lexmechanics of the Indexus Laephal at the
Librarium's center, the agents uncover nothing more than a
reference pointing to a data-repository in a far district of the
City. But in doing so, they set in motion a series of events that
will later overtake them.

Setting the Scene

The clerks within the Librarium's great halls are wary, and the
robed tech-adepts just short of hostile. Few have any liking for
emissaries of the Invisible Bureau, and many eyes are on the
agents as they make their way between stacks of silversheaf
print-tomes and piled dataslates. Whitestone statues of the
saints watch as well, looming in the vaults above, a reminder of
the insignificance of mere agents and archivites in the grand
scheme of Imperial society.

A Course of Events
The agents make their way through shelving-lined avenues of
the Librarium, following reluctantly given directions to the
central hall where inquiries can be answered by the Indexus
48

Primuseven those originating from the loathed Pit of Lies

and Conspiracies. Within the darkened Indexus hall they are
intercepted by the formidable Mistress Indexus: she is no more
than brusque at the outset, but then suddenly and inexplicably
angered by the details of the agents' request for information.
The Mistress departs immediately without further comment,
leaving the agents to find a cooperative clerk from amongst the
gathering at the Indexus dais.
One clerk steps forward: Solomon Menasta, a talented
archivite, but young and inexperienced. To his eyes, the agents
spoke with the Mistress Indexus and are thereby worthy of care
and attentiona dire misreading of what has just transpired.
An exchange of glances between the other clerks ensures that
Menasta is set forth as the target for whatever wrath will later
fall from the skies.
Guided by the young archivite, the agents at first find no
reference at all to Saint Orithiel within the Indexus, a discovery
that makes the nearby lexmechanics very uneasy. Menasta then
suggests a survey of the index collectiona faint hope, but
perhaps the topic is so obscure that it only exists in a
specialized archive of the City. The indexes of many such datarepositories are stored in the Librarium Mundi, but few are
completely processed by the Master Divisor and his archivites.
The young clerk does not know enough to see the signs of a
past deletion order in this, more is the pity, but his fate is by
now sealed regardless.
In due course, Menasta and the agents uncover an index
reference that points to a storage vault of the Vessus Chantry
Archive, a librarium located somewhere within a far district of
the City. The agents leave the Librarium Mundi behind, their
minds set upon departing the Tricorn Palace in search of the
Archive.

supposed destruction of the conspiracyand all record of the

Saint's existence was erased from Calixian data-repositories.
Only the conspiracy's shards and other scattered signs remain,
one of which lies within the index collection of the Librarium
Mundi. It is a century-old reference on heat-printed silversheaf
that links the Tower of Saint Orithiel to record vault 66-F in the
Vessus Chantry Archive, a modest librarium in the mid-wards
of Mortuarium, a City sub-district far from the Tricorn Palace.
Unfortunately for all concerned, the Mistress Indexus
Ealtae is an initiate of the much reduced Claustrae Ruinae of
the present era, her position in the Librarium assured by more
powerful conspirators within the Tricorn Palace. The Mistress
is a Low Recongregator of cold, considered, and allencompassing hatreds. She would gladly see every edifice and
institution of the Palace, the City, and the Imperium itself
ground to dust, and gives little thought to what might come
after. Meeting agents of the Pit who know of the Saint, give a
sign of the conspiracy by asking of the Tower, but then cannot
complete the countersign because they know no more, spurs
Ealtae to a slow, controlled rage. These unknowing trespassers
are a threat, but the Mistress cannot strike them down
immediately because she does not yet know who or what is
behind their appearance. Her first action is instead to leave, so
as to task her retinue and send slow-moving, ciphered missives
to her co-conspirators.
Events are thus set in motion: the wrath of the Mistress
Indexus will soon enough fall upon those in the Pit responsible
for the agents' presence in the Librarium Mundi. By that time,
however, the agents will be gone from the Tricorn Palace,
searching the stone-walled depths of Mortuarium.

Behind the Curtain

The Mistress Indexus is a terrifying, ancient harridan, an angry

presence now more machine than flesh. Even her lined face
does little more than frame a rictus smile of metal teeth, twisted
by the tubing that runs through her neck and cheeks. Despite
her age and appearance, she wears flowing, bright dresses more
suited to the high noble spires than a savant's calling. Her long
trains trail behind her as the hidden augmentics beneath sweep
her frail body smoothly through her domain. Ealtae has been
the Mistress Indexus for so long that few recall her as anything
else, or even remember her name: she is cutting, disdainful,
ruthless in her dominance of potential successors, and has
powerful patrons in the higher Tricorn Palace. Her reputation
has spread beyond the Librarium walls, and few figures in the
lower Tricorn would dare challenge hera dangerous beast in

A conspiracy of poisonous Recongregationist teachings has

waxed and waned within the Scintillan Conclave for many
centuries. The name most often recorded is the Claustrae
Ruinaemeaning the keys to ruin, or the beginning of the
wastelands yet to come. Thought destroyed long ago by all
who still know of it, the conspiracy's remnants in fact survive:
weakened and cut off from their roots, but nonetheless alive.
The hidden signs and symbolism of the Claustrae Ruinae
derive from the life and works of a holy man of Scintilla: Saint
Orithiel of the Wastes, beatified in the centuries following the
Angevin Crusade. For reasons that have vanished to history, a
deletion order was issued either during or following the

Ealtae, Mistress Indexus

49

the form of a woman so old as to be almost beyond death.

Invisible Bureau, and the extended organization of Master of

Pledges Thomas Mard will be dismembered and destroyed.

Sermon Menasta, Fourth Clerk Indexus

An orphan babe dragged from the debris of an Inquisitorial
action in a spirebase merchant ward, Sermon was brought into
the Tricorn Palace along with other souls best removed from
the City. In time he was apprenticed as a clerk within the
Librarium, where his talent for memorization saw him assigned
to the index collections whilst still young and naive. He is an
outsider amongst the older index clerks, expected to earn his
place and be a good many years yet in the doing of it. Sermon's
augmetics are still incomplete, raw at the junction of the flesh,
and he has yet to have the verve of City youth beaten from him.
Thus, he will help and perhaps say things that should remain
unsaid when agents from the Pit come in search of deleted
knowledgeand will no doubt pay for those careless actions
when the agents are long gone.

Dark and Errant Paths

Evading a meeting with the Mistress Indexus in the Indexus
hall will only slightly delay the inevitable. Clerks and
lexmechanics are disconcerted by agents of the Invisible
Bureau who touch upon the remnants of a deletion order, and
sufficiently detailed suspicions will make their way back to the
Mistress. Solomon Menasta will tell her all he knows, and then
briefly and bitterly regret his part in it all.
Violence within the Librarium is far more disruptive to the
course of events, however. It also offers little hope for survival;
this, at least, is well known within the Pit. But perhaps agents
insane enough to attempt it are also capable of barely escaping
the war-servitorswhich in turn will cause the Librarium to
seal its doors to the Invisible Bureau. A slow-moving dance of
accusation and retribution between masters of the Pit and
masters of the Librarium will result, with the agents a single
step ahead of each realization that they are the ones
responsible. Vengeance and murder will come in due course,
but before they materialize the agents are removed from the
Bureau: sent in search of the Vessus Chantry Archive by
Coordinator Harwine on the basis of data recovered from the
tormented minds and cogitators of Correlation Vault 16.
The treachery and unrest within the lower Tricorn that
follow the agents' departure will come to much the same
conclusion regardless of what took place within the Librarium
Mundi. The Claustrae Ruinae will know of the agents, the
Mistress Indexus will arrange for the hammer to fall upon the
50

+++ VESSUS C A INDEXUS-T10 // XIV +++

Tower, SAB
Tower, Sabette Quintus

Vault 332-X
Vault 190-D

Tower,
Tower,
Tower,
Tower,

Vault 13-AF
Outward 8
Vault 28-S
Outward 10

Sacred Templum
Sacristry Pattern 3
Saddmuth Lower
Sae-25 Oynx Pattern

Tower, Saint Orithiel

Tower, Sanitance II-IV
Tower, Saviallen Regular

Vault 66-F
Vault 15-M
Vault 217-D

Tower,
Tower,
Tower,
Tower,
Tower,
Tower,

Inner A-12
Inner A-11
Vault 332-X
Outward 73
Vault 131-R
Vault 255-K

Sediasis Administratium Block 10

Sediasis Wall Face
SEG
Sephicrystal Spire
Sepulchur Pattern
Seventh Brotherhood Registrar

Tower, Sibellus Archaic

Tower, Sibellus-Drom Pattern

Inner B-11
Vault 21-C

Tower, Slate Orthodox

Tower, Sook Antiquity
Tower, Spine-Upper

Vault 271-T
Vault 92-AA
Vault 80-F

Tower,
Tower,
Tower,
Tower,
Tower,

Outward 10
Vault 71-B
Vault 241-H
Vault 241-H
Vault 241-I

Subvox Plate
Sublat 15af
Superstructure Pattern A
Superstructure Pattern B
Superstructure Pattern C

+++ COMMITTED THIS DAY 4. 118. 691. M41 +++

+++ VERIFIED UPON THE MARK OF SAVANT JONTALLUS +++
51

An Ascent Upon Black Wings

The lho-stick drops, my hand on the large-cal, half-drawing it.
Then the sick scent of an obscura den, and something rotten
beneath. Rust, oil, and the dying join between flesh and
machine.
"Orven. " I say. oncommittal, like I wasn't ready to draw,
aim, and squeeze the triggerall in a heartbeat, without
thought. The old, bad instinct, a gift from gangers and the
poverty wards. But it suits the Pit. Suits what the Pit would
make ofme ifI stayed.
A grating noise of vox-laughter, and metal tendrils slide
over the folds of the statue. A red cloak, sunken eyes in a face
claimed by the machines. He'll listen to what I want him to do
for me. I'll owe him, make it worth his whileand damn myself
for feeding his need.

A Last Meeting
The flank of what must be a statue halfway blocks the dark
corridor. A saint's hip, or the sleeve of an Imperial hero, once
thirty spans tall and proud upon the old Citytopthen
swallowed by structures raised by machine-men. Drowned in
greystone, given to the Pit. I lean back against it, shoulder and
one hard boot heel. The lumen beyond long ago faded to a dull
glow, a companion to the red pinprick ofanother bad lho-stick.
I blow out the tainted smoke, watch it spiral and fold on itself
in the half-lit passage.
The life-warrant is a weight in my shot-coat, and on my
mind. A poison charm to keep the watchers at bayand a thin
hope out here, away from the Pit's whispered, suspicious
bustle. I pull it out again, turn it over in my machine hand,
fingers clicking on warrant metal. ot much to show for a
pledged life, thrown to the wastes by the Man.
I wait, half a meeting yet to happen. Back on the lit ways,
I'd crumpled a blank missive parchment into the hands of a
machine, the ruins of a blind serf now forever unable to rest.
Orven will know what it means, where to find me. GodEmperor, but I want to be beyond these walls! Something that I
don't yet understand looms largethe grinding ofwheels in the
Pit, feuds and secrets waiting to crush the careless who wander
too close. But the old habits die hard; there are matters to
arrange, angles to cover before the moll and I can make our
exit.
Ve is wherever she wishes to besomewhere else in these
stained halls, upon her own business. Armorgown curling
about her long legs as she strode away. I told her to leave well
alone with Harwine and Mard; maybe she'll listen. I try not to
think ofall the ways she could bring the hammer down on both
ofus. Blood and blade-murderand then a watcher's boltgun.
I turn the life-warrant over, feel the patterned microrunes
under a nail that isn't mine. I remember doing just the same,
but with my own fingers and a Magistratum assignment tag.
Before the Man, a life away from here and now. I take a
another drag of bad lho-smoke and work at thinking about
nothing for a while.
Time passes, quiet in the half-light.
ow footsteps and a grind of metal scaped on stone. A
sudden shadow cast from beyond the saint's worn stone flank.

The Launch Transept

Vox-feedback and rumbling engine noise is the welcome as I
step from the entry stonework to a raised, rust-streaked
walkway. Black Company cogs to left and right, faceless
behind their helmet visors. A promethium tang to the air, and
the acrid chem-scent of Citytop haze. A gust catches my shotcoat, tugs at Harwine's seal and the rights of issuance in my
hand.
The transept is as I remember it, a veinstone cathedral
hall, towering open space, fluted columns and distant vaults
above. What were once icon-glass windows are now gaping
portals looking out onto the Citytop, large enough to pass an
orbital lifter between flanking statues, open to the wind and a
hazy vista ofdistant spires. It is the house ofthe God-Emperor
made stained and filthy in storing the works of the machinemen. My arm clicks in time with the vox-feedback throb as flyer
engines turn over. Touched by the machinebut not claimed,
never claimed.
The cogs step forward, hellguns slung, one reaching for
the issuance print-screed. So I do the dance with them, thinking
about being on my knees, gut-punched and surrounded by
black armor. ot letting it show on my face. The machines that
tell them what to feel don't care about the Pit, Harwine, or the
issuance right that passes me to the transept. Just about
crushing the last of what makes a man. I watch a black
gauntlet twitch twice, flatten one corner of Harwine's seal. A
tic, an urge, a stray thought caught and destroyed.
Then it's the way down to the transept command pulpit,
shod boots on gridwork metal stairs that run past dormant

52

stab-light arrays and dangling vox-lines. Metal-plate landing

zones below, each edged in faded yellow and white. Thick,
oiled fuel feeds and bundled power conduits wind and cross
one another like a carpet of serpents on the veinstone slabs,
coiling about the base of marker lights and railing supports.
Paths laid by machines, not men, and followed by visored black
flight suits and red robes. They walk and gather about arrayed
Vastigan flyers, watched from on high by nameless whitestone
saints, those statues the only ones in this great vault left
unmarked by the machine.
Women turned into nothing more than fuel-bearers clank
slowly past the stair base-plate, dead faces lost amidst ruststreaked machine bulk. More of the sameno different from
the clicking metal set into the flight controller's skull, linked to
his pulpit by pennon-flagged conduits. Methodically polished,
like the matt black rank symbol and holstered handgun, but all
just the same.
I put it away, the crawling nerves, and work on turning
issuance into a Vastigan flight. It takes longer than it should,
gathers more ofa crowd than I like.

Violet Eyes in a Pale Face

The moll strides between the cable-runs, ignoring the blackclad cogs that flank her. She's a demi-ganger in traveler
clothes now. Wraps and ties, bare shoulders. Young and faking
what she's too high in the City to bea pale malvi, stolen
powerknife worn as a challenge, take it ifyou can. I can't help
the grimace when I catch her eyes: Rund Breed violet. Fake
now, or fake before? Is that just another face to her? Makes my
chest tight.
"Problem?" she asks, blunt. Licks her lips. Looks at me
with those damned Rund eyes.
"Only ifyou make it one. " Suck it up. Call it fake now, and
don't ask later.
She giggles. Takes a decade off her, makes her what she's
making out to be, and beautiful for it. Kicks me in the gut, and
my heart thumps. So I look away, hard-faced, think about the
violet-eyed exiles in the low wards, scrabbling and killing. The
travelers in their rusting six-spans, always moving, grinding
metal and stone away where the filth-choked alley vaults
narrow. Rotting malvi camps in the mid-hive sumps, waste
floated above their level, staring at the Magistratum outsiders
come to round them up.
Tainted, violet-eyed scum. My metal hand twitches, and it
doesn't matter that I don't want that. Echoes I don't want to
hear; old, bad times buried a life away.

A Vastigan powers up for lift, the roar and scream of it

drowning out whatever Ve says next. She kicks my boot, points.
Machine-men stalk from the armored flyer and its launch zone,
heat-haze whipping at their red robes. The flight rises, slides,
and then angles to slip sideways through the near portal. Like
a drugged man falling from sight at first, but it arcs upward
and roars from sight in the haze-yellow sky beyond, thrusters
burning hot. Secrets and lies sent to some far ward ofthe City,
the only things that escape the Pit in any way that lasts.
Fuel-bearers retreat clumsily from the next flyer in line,
slow piston steps that drag leaking conduits in their wake. The
black-clad pilot is walking the rampway, and the flight
controller barks short, clipped sentences into his vox-pickup.
We're up next.

Black Flight 17
The thruster noise builds to a grinding pressure behind my eyes
again, a queasy twisting in my gut as the Vastigan banks.
Restraint webbing is suddenly tight against my chest, the metal
seat edge cutting into my legs. Been this way on and offfor too
long: the troop compartment is closed up like a low-ward
ration pack, holes punched in a metal box. A view of nothing
through plex-covered firing slits: by turns brief glimpses of a
yellowed sky, clouds, the tallest Citytop towers, statues, and
piled hill-structures. Half a heartbeat and gone, nothing to fix
the eye on. The slide-doors and gun mounts are latch-sealed,
but that doesn't stop the cold chem-taint wind whipping
through the flyer.
Throne! Too loud to talk, too loud to think about what
mattersthink about what we're flying away from. o view but
of what's within reach: bare metal, empty mounts for battle
gear, open stowage lockers, embossed symbols ofservice to the
Man. A dedicational plaque, far older than the flyer, cracked
across the middle: His Will Be Done. Red cron-digits on the
wall mount by the cockpit entry, crawling ever slower each
time my eye returns to them. I can see the pilot's black-clad
shoulder and a thin line ofsky past it from this angle, no better
than the firing slits.
So I watch Velle again. The hundredth time, the thrusterache in my head pushing me well past pretending not to eye
her. A moll, a blade, a face I can't see past. The curves, the wry
quirk in the face, the sudden clutch at the heartand you think
I'd have learned by now. It's never ended well.
Dames and blades.
She brought a slim arms-case with her, slung, and pulled
an over-wrap from it early. There'll be a long blade in there;

53

God-Emperor alone knows what else. She's playing with her

trophy powerknife now, intently melting lace-ties on the edge of
its field, following a pattern only she knows. othing to hear
over the thrusters, but acrid plasteen smoke mixes with
alchemical City air, one breath there, one breath gone as gusts
sweep the compartment.
I watch her long fingers handling the knife and the
bundled ties: precise, quick, countering every sway and buffet.
Head bent down, hair braided to hold it out of the way. Biting
her lip as she considers each careful, burning touch to the
latest victim.
And the violet eyes. Rund Breed eyes. I tell myselfto put it
away, let it go, God-Emperor damn it.
Ve glances up, sees me staring. Flicks her fingers wide
without putting down either tie or powerknife, mouths "What?"
silently. Annoyance. I shake my head, and she purses her lips.
Then back to the plasteen torture, like she never even looked
up.
The Vastigan kicks, drops briefly. Turning again, and the
ceiling vox crackles and growls behind the thruster noise. The
pilot's voice, or what passes for it. Can't make out the words,
so I punch the webbing release and grab at a grip-point with
my metal hand. Work up to the cockpit that way, hold by hold,
legs protesting; too long wrapped up and still on a hard bucket
seat. Good to be moving again.
Braced in the cockpit entry, a hand against each wall, a
Citytop slope sprawls beyond the plex canopy. The Vastigan
turns towards the higher structures, rolling away from the
white chem-cloud river that runs the slump vale at the slope
base, pierced by smoking manufactory vents. A cathedral
looms atop the ridge, plasma-torches burning at its spires,
hedged by towers, piled manse roofs, and age-worn, vast
statues atop their storage-hall plinths. The flyer is skipping
over avenues now, thronged trenches in the Citytop hillside,
low enough to glimpse a blur of faces, rebreathers, guild
masks.
The pilot is talking, clipped and short, as the Vastigan
slows, but I'm not listening. I'm watching Sibellus. The asylum.
Taking in the view, taking a measure before what comes next.
Feeling the old memories crowding, the old habits itching. . . and
cold worms in the gut, like I was raw in blue and silver,
waiting with the patrol for the barracks doors to open, the
muffled roar of a City crowd beyond. It never goes away; you
just learn to pretend that it did.
So I put a hand on the pilot's shoulder, point to the skeletal
clattertower upslope, landing platform jutting from the boxy
tower control rooms above the semaphore machines. Put on

the tough guy mask, act like I'm sure, like I'm not second
guessing myself. Like my head isn't pounding from the thruster
noise. Like the lho-itch isn't biting at my mood.
Black on black in the pilot seat arcs the Vastigan toward
the clattertower struts. He can't see through the act, treats me
like what I'm making out to be: a hard case with the Man's
orders and a hand on his shoulder. I look back, and Ve is
already up and hanging from a grip, arms-case slung and my
carry-bag in the other hand.
I nod. She grins.

Backdrop
The Launch Transept
The Launch Transept is a echoing, massive installation, styled
after standard template Imperial cathedrals raised in the early
Calixian centuries. Its baroque upper reaches resemble a cliff
face of deep caves and shadows rising from a low structure-hill
of the Tricorn Palace Citytop, but the foundations and lower
buttresses were long ago buried by the layered, haphazard
construction of new buildings. The Transept is built upon a
grand scale: cathedral vaults a hundred spans above worn
floors, looming macrostatues, flying buttresses that arch over
lesser Citytop structures, and tall portal-windows large enough
to pass orbital shuttles. Were it not for the towering Palace
spires, the Transept would dominate the surrounding
Citytopbut near them it is merely a foothill.
The Launch Transept is of an uncertain age and history.
Whatever its original purpose, it has been a barracks for Black
Troops and launch platform for Black Flights for
centuriesfor as long as mention of its existence can be found
within Inquisitorial datavaults, in fact. The void of records
from earlier ages hints at deliberate deletion, and the topic is
thus avoided by wise savants, but both the Transept and the
Inquisitorial troops within are thought to be the wards of an
unseen power of the Scintillan Conclave, watched over and
guarded to some mysterious end. This is an open secret, scribed
nowhere but whispered widely in the Tricorn Palace: that those
who involve the Transept in the ongoing, murderous power
struggles between factions simply vanish, and are never heard
from again.
The Transept is a particular danger for the Mechanicus
pledged to the service of the Inquisition, given their desire to
54

hold dominion over all places where sacred tech-patterns are

maintained. The lessons taught by experience must be
relearned every few decades, and at a steep pricepresently
wise tech-priests send only lowly adepts and bulky, barely
conscious monotask servitors to perform the duties required by
compact and Inquisitorial decree. They themselves never enter
the Launch Transept or its supporting structures.
The lower, buried reaches of the Transept house
companies of mind-conditioned troops: levels of unadorned
barrack cell rows, vaulted training halls, and well guarded
armory oubliettes reached only by cage-elevator. The upper
halls, their vast windows open to the wind and drifting,
yellowed, alchemical clouds, are launch decks and hangers for
squadrons of armored Vastigan flyers. The Black Flights roost
in clusters upon raised grillwork platforms set at intervals upon
the stonework floors of these massive vaulted chambers.
Between the flyers are grouped flow valves, stab-light mounts,
warning klaxons, vox-pillars, and other, less familiar techdevices. Power cables, data-conduits and oozing promethium
lines cover the pitted, discolored veinstone floor slabs, in some
places layered and tangled like a carpet of nesting serpents.
The hanger halls are never quiet: a background of voxcalls, shouted commands, machine noise from tech-adept toil,
and clanking fuel-servitors only fades when drowned out by
the roar of launch and landing. Looming whitestone saints
watch from on high, serene and stern by turn, as pilots bring
their charges in to nestle up against the landing grid locks and
mounts. The statues that flank the Transept portals are the
height of the halls themselves, their outstretched hands almost
seeming to brush against the Vastigans as they arc in through
the archways, flaring their thruster vents for landing.
Actions undertaken by the Invisible Bureau and other
militant factions of the Palace are often initiated from the
Transept, flights of Vastigans delivering agents, interrogators,
and Black Troops to fall upon heresy. On occasion even
Inquisitors and their immediate retinues have cause to set foot
within the Launch Transeptwhen their remit leads their
baleful attention to fall upon the City.

Black Flights
Day after day, flights of matt black and unmarked Vastigans
sweep out across the City from the Launch Transept. The
armored flyers pass unremarked by the teeming masses who
throng the avenues and upper structures of the Citytop, but are
watched with fear by the few who believe that they know
better. There are always quiet tales: that the Black Flights carry

those marked for death to their fate; that they bear barely
mortal assassins in the pay of the Spire Houses; that they are
the Ministorum's watching eyes who capture even the faded
memory of blasphemy; that they carry away children to the
Machine Temples in order to forge them into half-men. Deep
beneath layered stonework, in mid-City manufactory zones and
poverty wards where the masses have never seen the sky, these
tales only grow in strangeness.
In reality the Black Flights are tasked to bear agents,
assassins, and emissaries of the Invisible Bureau and other
factions of the Tricorn Palace upon their missionsprovided
that they and their masters have sufficient leverage to negotiate
passage. Military assaults upon heresy in the City, when the
flight decks are crowded by Black Troops and militants from
the Pit, are rare in comparison to transport assignments: lesser
servants of the Inquisition carried to undisclosed destinations at
the behest of hidden patrons and secret orders.
As a matter of record, and by decree of the Scintillan
Conclave, the Black Flights and all of the troops barracked
beneath the Launch Transept are at the disposal of any of the
powers of the lower Tricorn Palace. They are a resource to be
used when the need arises, the stormtroopers, pilots, and
commanders mind-conditioned to obey any order. In practice,
however, the looming presence of the Transept's hidden
guardian ensures that the flight commanders are treated as
though leaders of an independent faction of the Palace. They
are strained and strange, these leaders, some driven into mania
by volitor devices too crude for this present situationbut to
take advantage of their weaknesses is to court the death that
awaits all who interfere with the Transept.
A working relationship of sorts has formed over the
generations between flight commanders and agents of the Pit,
as there are ways for the Transept's leaders to make use of
Invisible Bureau issuance documents. These are winding and
largely unofficial paths through scribe pens and the offices of
coffer-masters in the depths of the Palace, but the
arrangements, even shifting and uncertain as they are, permit
agents and their masters to bargain for passage or favor on the
basis of issuance rights.

Black Troops of the Launch Transept

Within the heart of the Transept foundations are mind-brand
machines, halls filled by hissing, clicking walls of antiquated
technology, and lined by surgical alcoves surrounded by
machine probes. Some areas are corroded to uselessness, while
others stand strangely pristine after the passage of centuries.
55

These devices were never understood by the lesser techadepts who enter the Transept depths, but they are nonetheless
used to maintain the neuroaugmetic devices and conditioning
of Black Troops.
The volitor mind-devices implanted into the brains of
stormtroopers bluntly impose loyalty and constrain
independent thought. Very sophisticated forms of control are
possible when volitors are combined with conditioning under
the oversight of tech-priests initiated into the appropriate
mysteries, but that is far from the case for the Black Troops.
Their effective life spans are short as a consequence: the mind
gives way to irreparable madness, violent rampage, or death
within a few short decades of induction into the Black
Companies. The cracks begin to show after only a handful of
years: compulsions, tics, intoxicant use, self-mutilation, and a
growing ability to subvert the basic layers of conditioning built
up during years of Legio Hereticus service.
Black Troops who are more advanced upon this path of
decay engage in the smugglers' black paths and whisper
markets of the Tricornin fits and starts, seemingly
irrationally, driven by dark inner needs. These are disturbing
encounters for scribes and clerks, in which armed, scarred
Black Troops twitch in face and muscle as they fight the
machines in their skulls. More signs of neuroaugmetic rot lie
hidden behind the facade of unmarked walls and mindconditioned order in the lower Transept, such as sealed cells in
which Black Troops lie drugged, or in which the walls are
etched with nonsense phrases. Hidden stashes of contraband
are obsessively organized and reorganized, and stormtroopers
gather in darkened storage halls to scar patterns into their own
fleshfor no reason other than to prove their ability to do so.
At the lowest foundational levels the broken-minded are
euthanized in red-lit medicae wards, their remains consigned to
a Machine Cult processory shrine in the Palace depths.
In sharp contrast, pilots of the Black Flights are far less
constrained by volitors than their fellows in the barracks
below: the neuroaugmetics are more sophisticated or absent
entirely. Rather than being drawn from the Legio Hereticus,
pilots are culled from the best of the City Legion and then
conditioned to a somber state of focused professionalism
within the Doctrinary Crypts of the higher Tricorn Palace. As
is the case for all servants of the Inquisition who pass through
the strange and secretive doctrinary processes, their ultimate
loyalties are unknownbut this origin is not common
knowledge beyond the Transept, and few within are concerned
by such matters.
From these mixed roots arise the Transept's leaders: the

Black Company commanders who rule below and a triumvate

of flight commanders who rule above. They are older and
grizzled, veterans who have survived Inquisition actions, harsh
conditioning, and volitor implants far past the point at which
others have been driven to insanity or death. The commanders
are not all stable, however, nor are they all safe for outsiders to
negotiate with. Their every waking moment is a war between
the needs of independent leadership and broken mindconstraints that demand obedience, conformance, and loyalty
to strictures that cannot possibly apply to them. Every decision
is a battle, and there can be no rest, for the conditioning
demands they lead as instructed even as it digs needles into
their minds when they try to obey.

Vastigan Pattern Assault Transport

Vastigan atmospheric transports are constructed in Fabrication
Compact manufactories throughout the Calixis Sector, built
under the watchful eyes of Mechanicus emissaries and destined
for use by planetary defense legions or Imperial Guard. The
tech-pattern relies entirely on vectored thrust for lift, and its
stubby wings are little more than stabilizersa Vastigan
crashes uncontrollably on losing all three thruster vents on the
same side, and only a skilled pilot can survive the loss of two.
Vastigans are heavily armored and ugly in comparison to many
other Imperial aircraft. Their primary role is that of assault
transport: landings conducted under heavy fire.
Fully loaded, a Vastigan bears thirty Guard line troops and
their equipment, four heavy side-door autoguns, and a slung
Chimera-pattern vehicle or artillery piece. Transport is
punishing for the passengers: the troop compartment isn't fully
sealed, thruster-driven flight is far from smooth, and the noise
is deafening. Any view of the outside world is limited to
weapon-slits, and soldiers are usually buckled into flight
restraints right up until the doors open into the face of enemy
fire.
The Imperial Guard assault on Tranch in 807.M41 made
heavy use of the pattern. The massive orbital drop-vessels of
the opening wave disgorged a cloud of Vastigans on attaining
the lower atmosphere. Thousands of flyers were launched from
open bays, whipped by slipstream, their thrust-vents burning
hot as they carried the elite of ten regiments to begin the
bloody Alpha Zone Pacification.

The Rund Breed

A small fraction of the City masses are born to the Rund Breed,
56

a sanctioned gene-variant of pale skin and violet eyes. The

Rund have been upon Scintilla for so long that even they have
only myth and legend to tell of when they first arrived, but
their origins almost certainly predate the Angevinian Crusade
and foundation of the Calixis Sector more than two thousand
years past, a time of great upheaval in which much of the old
was lost or torn down.
The recorded history of the Rund Breed in Hive Sibellus is
one of long discrimination and persecution. Rund culture is
insular, their partnership rituals strange, and to the common
people of the City, the violet-eyed are one step away from
unclean mutants. This is not an especially rational belief: any
number of similarly sanctioned minor human variants exist in
the broader Golgenna Reach, few of which attract the same
level of hostility. As the tales are told amongst the ill-educated
of the mid-City and the low poverty wards, however, the Rund
have savage mutant ancestry, or arise from sub-human pairings
and degeneracy. They plot to steal children or commit
blasphemies with icons of the Imperial Creed, horde scints and
precious gem-crystals, and engage in any number of other
imagined calumnies. These are all lies and fantasies, but are
widespread enough to be preached from the pulpit in some
districts, and to give rise to riot and rampage in low wards
where the Red Redemption is influential.
A few amongst the Rund have risen high enough to dwell
upon the Citytop in poorer districts, or establish merchant
dynasties in the mid-City. It is even the case that one House
Minor of the Spire Primus has Rund Breed ancestry within its
official gene-rolls. The majority of the Rund dwell within to
the lowest City strata, however, in enclave-wards and poverty
caverns in the crush zones. They toil amidst filth and pollution
for a bare few scints, and many are reliant upon the dubious
protection of ganger lords, or the infrequent charitable missions
undertaken by chantry orders of the Ministorum.
The reputation of the Rund is not helped by the roving
travelers known as malvisa derogatory term derived from the
Mal Viatoris section of City Law that determines how the
Magistratum deals with traveling companies of all varieties.
These wandering bands are a single step removed from outcast
status, each an impromptu family with no guild, magister, or
brotherhood to speak for the rights of its members. It is far
from the case that all malvis have the characteristic violet eyes
and Rund Breed pallor, but the commoners in many City
districts assume it. Some Rund Breed malvi groups are indeed
little more than bands of hardened scum, lurk-thieves, and
least-hereteksgangers in all but namebut others are made
up of honest manufactory laborers, Waiting Guild members,

and families escaping persecution or the collapse of an enclave

ward. These demi-outlaws travel the winding, narrow mid- and
low-City ways in convoys of failing vehicles, forming camps in
abandoned structures and ruin-vaults for as long as they can
before being moved on by the Magistratumor a roused mob.

Overview
The agents make their arrangements for an escape from the Pit
of Lies and Conspiracies: meeting with allies and quickly
obtaining such Issuance supplies as are needed. They embark
upon Black Flight 17 from the Launch Transept, bound for
Mortuarium, just as their wake begins to collapse behind them.

Setting the Scene

Any path from the Pit to the City that passes through the
Launch Transept is a literal ascent, climbing to the Citytop
structures and yellowed skies in order to leave behind the
dimly lit avenues lined by statues of the Man, the whispering
conspirators, the hard stares of Custodians. Ways through the
Citytop between the Bureau and Transept are empty and
echoing. Like so many of the boundary zones dividing the
outer regions of the Tricorn Palace, this reach is abandoned by
all except the lost and the outcast, and regularly scoured by the
watching militants of bordering factions. Flight after flight of
stone steps pass through merged, crumpled, and rebuilt
structuresa tower stair opens to a foundation storage vault,
which in turn gives onto a City fundament access chamber,
whose gates provide a view of a deserted market hall, from
which a balconied stairway leads further upwards. So it
continues, until the air is chem-tainted rather than fundamentcycled, and gusts clear stone-dust from the corridors.

A Course of Events
The agents organize claims upon issuance rights and arrange
meetings with the allies they feel can be useful. They search for
what is known of Mortuarium, but it is one amongst tens of
thousands of sub-districts in the City; scribes of the Pit
maintain little in the way of local knowledge for any of the
City's countless wards, especially those far removed from both
the Tricorn Palace and Spire Primus.
As a part of these efforts, the agents meet with Sa Orven in
a safe location away from the well-used avenues. He is a
comparative font of knowledge, and the agents learn enough of
their options to choose the Launch Transept as their point of
57

departure from the Pit. It is faster to negotiate passage on a

Black Flight than to navigate any of the other available exits
from the Bureauand considerably faster than finding passage
through the City by rail guild.
Orven also advises the agents on ways to return to the Pit
that might evade unwanted attention: not all of the gateways
into the outer reaches of the Tricorn Palace are well used, or
even well known. In some deserted and darkened vaults
beneath the Bureau proper, layers of stonework and fundament
structures have collapsed to create passage into the City
beyond. In others, ancient gates predate the Tricorn's slow and
cancerous spread across the Citytopsome have never been
fully barred. There will be machine guards, but they can be
circumvented by prepared agents with an ally upon the inside.
Orven and the agents agree to communicate in the only
limited fashion possible under the circumstances: through the
ill-used and ancient Vocae, whereby either side can leave voxand script-missives for the other under suitable circumstances.
Orven has an undisclosed way to access the Vocae, one of
many buried secrets held by tech-adepts of the Pit.
Their equipment gathered, the agents leave the Invisible
Bureau by its innermost reach. They travel long, half-lit, and
dust-strewn corridors towards the central Tricorn Citytop, and
then climb upward through the piled hill of structure built atop
structure that surrounds the Launch Transept. It is a menagerie
of architectures and styles, enough space for tens of thousands
of Imperial citizensbut left empty, a buffer between
independent powers of the Palace.
The gateways to the Launch Transept are massive
structures, thick adamant seal-gates set into the Transept walls,
guarded by emplaced weapon-nests and impassive black-clad
troops. Surrounding walls and structures are partially removed
to form fire-hall approaches to the Transept entries. At the
guard stations, the agents' intentions are questioned and their
life-warrants examined before they are passed. The muzzles of
heavy mounted stubbers follow them as they approach, but
they are not assaulted or threatened as they were at the Court of
Hollowed Fanes; the most threatening aspect of the Black
Troops' instability is their unpredictability.
Escorted by a demi-squad of stormtroopers, the agents
climb to the hanger levels and are brought to the pulpit of
Flight Commander Sabelarde. He is as the center of a bustle of
command staff, bowing tech-adepts, and the oppressive noise
of the landing hall. The agents carefully negotiate their passage
under the watching eyes of armed Black Troops, and are
assigned to Black Flight 17with departure waiting only on
the fueling servitors to complete their mindless toil.

Vastigans are not built for comfort, and the flight to

Mortuarium is a long, testing experience. The agents are
trapped in a roaring, juddering box, too loud for conversation,
whipped by chill wind, and with only firing slits to provide
glimpses of fleeting structure-mounds, macrostatues, and lesser
spires as the flyer powers across the Cityscape. The assigned
pilot, Attal Dhomadias, has little to say to his passengers.
On arrival at Mortuarium, Dhomadias offloads the agents
at the high cathedral ridge of the sub-district, hovering on
screaming thrusters beside a clattertower's gridwork landing
platform. The structure is designed for light missive guild
flyers rather than the bulk of an assault transport: it flexes and
grinds under the Vastigan's side-wash, a hundred spans above
the vaulted roofs of the Citytop below. The agents jump from
the open side-doors to the platform below, battered by a
whirlwind of thruster-blown fragments, and the Black Flight
tilts to slide up and away.

Behind the Curtain

The Black Flights and commanders of the Launch Transept
have no part in the conspiracies and unfolding events that will
soon flare up to engulf the Invisible Bureau. Where the agents
meet with obstruction or opposition, this is nothing more than
the inherent nature of the Black Troopsjust as demonstrated
in the Court of Hollowed Fanes when the agents first arrived at
the outskirts of the Tricorn Palace.
The conspirators of the Claustrae Ruinae have not been
idle, however: as the agents arrive in Mortuarium, the Mistress
Indexus and her allies act. Master Thomas Mard and his
coordinators vanish, and a wave of assassinations spirals out
through Mard's allies and resources. The Pit is disturbed as
whispers spread, the first signs of what is to comeand the
wise heed the warning. Others are caught as the scribe pens of
Master Mard are destroyed in a series of fiery explosions. Even
the stonework ignites in some areas and sub-levels become
choked by fumes and smoke. Tech-adepts assemble to seal the
surrounding vaults in order to allow the potential stone-fire to
burn itself out.
Custodians roam the halls in search of the offenders who
usurp their sole right of murder. Some turn upon one another,
while others find more than they bargained forgroups of
Custodians are soon engaged in brutal, heavy firefights with
intruding squads of well-armed militants. The death toll is high
on all sides, leaving intersections and narrow corridors
cratered, scarred, and blood-splattered.
Shortly thereafter, the sacrificial trigger for Correlation
58

Vault 16 is activated by unknown hands. Every last one of its

tormented souls burns to death in a flood of ignited
promethium. Cogitation arrays and data-looms within the Vault
detonate, or melt into charred and twisted ruins.
As firefights, assassinations, and other actions unfold, the
lit avenues and darkened back ways of the Pit are deserted and
chaotic by turns. Those who hide or fortify are pitted against
those who seize the moment to settle scores and advance their
position. Rumor and falsehood runs rife as lesser scribes and
blind serfs flee in panicked groups to crumbling, abandoned
places in the lower Pit. Tech-adepts shelter in fundament
passages and hidden, sealed machine shrines. Stealthy murders
are committed against a backdrop of distant bolter-fire and
smoke seeping from the fundament ventilation grills. Lone,
crumpled corpses lie unattended in the corridors and officevaults.
As the intruding militants retreat from the Invisible
Bureau, their missions apparently complete, surviving
Custodians regroup to defend coordinators and Masters whose
favor they believe will be useful in the future. The wisest of the
Bureau's leaders know that worse has happened in the past, and
their institution nonetheless survived. As they send missives to
their patrons, and time passes without further attacks, the
unrest and internal conflict within the Bureau begins to
subside.
Across the course of a day thereafter, companies of Black
Troops enter the Pit to scour its labyrinth of passages and
avenues, dragging away scribes, agents, and serfs seemingly at
random, and to unknown fatesthe result of a poor bargain
struck by one of the Masters. The Invisible Bureau has as many
enemies as it does allies in the higher Tricorn Palace, but the
balance of power between Masters soon shifts. The unwise are
deposed or murdered and the Black Troops are banished once
more. Custodians reclaim their role, their allegiances shifting to
newly empowered Masters.
The few remnants of Thomas Mard's organization are
swept up or destroyed by one of the more thoughtful and
cautious Masters: within days it is as though Mard's bastion
and influence in the Pit never existed. A slow process of
discovery begins thereafter, as the Bureau's Masters and other
interested parties seek answers as to the cause of this
upheavalanswers that will be slow in arriving, fragmentary
at best, and never widely known. For most of the Pit's
denizens, it is a salutary reminder that their existence is
precarious, and all survive at the whims of their patrons.
Thomas Mard angered one of the secretive powers of the
Tricorn and paid the price.

Flight Commander Enthis Sabelarde

Flight Commander Sabelarde is a grey-haired, sunken-eyed
veteran who lost his left leg and arm in a Vastigan crash
decades past. His ruined limbs were replaced by augmetics, but
he was removed from the flight line. While retirement from the
stresses of flying under volitor constraint may explain the
Flight Commander's survival long past his contemporaries, he
has become locked into the paths and habits of an obsessive
ritualist. He is irrationally enraged by every action that does
not conform to the patterns forged in his mind across decades
of battle with his volitor implantseven in the ways in which
outsiders approach him to negotiate passage on the Black
Flights. He cannot always act upon his anger due to his
conditioning, but it is very visible in the color of his face and
the clenching of his hands. He otherwise appears cold, clipped,
and inhumanly professional: answers to questions come slowly,
interspersed by the commands he issues in the course of his
duty, either at the command pulpit or walking the hangers
during briefings and inspections.

Attal Dhomadias
What must have been a long and unpleasant road led
Dhomadias from his guilder upbringing upon the high overlook
of the Vathe Tumble to City Legion service as a pilotand
then an institutional abduction to serve the Inquisition. He can
recall little of his past prior to the last decade spent within the
Launch Transept, however; fuzzy, patchwork glimpses are all
that the Doctrinary Crypts left for him, and he only knows in
certainty that there was much to hate. The God-Emperor
judged him, found him wanting, but offered a second
chanceand in the allotted times for prayer within the
Transept chapel he still offers heartfelt thanks. This may go
some way towards explaining why Dhomadias is judgmental
and cutting when his conditioning permits it of him. He is wary
of those he carries upon transport missions, however, even if he
decides they are worthy of nothing but contempthis
continued ability to serve the God-Emperor might depend upon
their beneficence, but he will never know whether or not this is
the case until it is far too late.

Dark and Errant Paths

If the agents do not listen to their allies, it may be that
Coordinator Harwine forces their hand by ordering them to
Mortuarium and ensuring that they negotiate with the Launch
59

Transept for passage upon a Black Flight. Perhaps this is an

oblique way to ensure that issuance rights find their way to a
place that will ensure a continuing supply of drenn to feed his
addiction; whatever the reason, it will soon enough be moot.
The agents may still choose to depart the Pit and the Tricorn by
other roads, a perhaps sensible wariness under the
circumstances. Yet their fate will follow just implacably if they
travel to Mortuarium over the course of a number of days spent
within Rail Guild carriages and crowded six-spans of the
Unified Guild of Moving.
If the agents may force Attal Dhomadias to land anywhere
upon the Mortuarium Citytop, not just the upper cathedral ridge
where the clattertower standsit matters little where they
begin, for they must still find their way to the same
destinations.

60

Communications in the City

The vox-device, like the serf, has only the value imparted by the
brotherhoods to which it is pledged. Alone it is an outcast,
shunned and ofvalue to no-one.

- Vessifus, from the Considerations

The City is vast in extent and populous beyond measure,

thousands of districts and countless wards. Yet only the elite of
Imperial institutions, noble houses, and powerful guilds have
easy access to the great engines of communication that bind the
City together. These leaders possess a true vision of far events,
whilst the masses beneath must live upon rumor, the
embellished tales of sanctioned criers, and age-worn Imperial
propaganda.

Voxcasting Beneath the Citytop

The stratified stone and hidden structural crystal of the City is
not as thickly layered and reinforced as the discolored
adamantine vaults of some Imperial hives, but it nonetheless
hazes vox-devices into static or silence. The populous mid-City
and deeper, more dangerous reaches of Sibellus are cut off
from the crackling vox-engines of the Citytop, locked away by
a weight of stonework. A few institutions of these buried wards
do still make use of long-distance voxcaster devices, however,
as their leaders have inherited or wrested control over vox-mast
emplacements and data-vents to the Citytopbut they are few
and far between.
Construction of new vox-engines and data-vents is near
unheard of, even at the behest of the powerful. Any such
ambitious undertaking would require an army of law-wrights to
forge passage over the grasping objections of the guilders and
brotherhood elders who lay claim over the piled structures of
each City stratum. Claim-right battles are baroque, slow affairs
that can last for decades and ruin all involvedsome conflicts
have taken on lives of their own to drain coffers long past the
deaths of the first plaintiffs, lingering to employ generations of
clerks.
Only the greatest and most established of Imperial
institutions maintain widespread vox networks in Hive
Sibellus: the representative factions of the Adeptus Terra, the
Ministorum, the Legio Scintilla planetary defense force, and
the web of powerful interests that surround the Spire Primus
noble houses. Each of these networks of vox-engines is entirely

independent of the others, tailored to specific tasks and closed

to outsiders. Even then, outposts buried in the lower City levels
are usually vox-silent, where they exist at all. Their custodians
must rely on slower methodologiessuch as missive-bearers
or infrequent excursions to the Citytop in order to use portable
vox-casters.
Nonetheless, in buried strata beyond the reach of greater
vox-engines, small voxcasters and strung vox-conduit lines are
used within large structures to transmit messages that would
otherwise be transcribed by clerks and carried by lesser
apprentices. Dusty cables hang from the vaults of
Administratum tithe-holds and guild manufactories, while voxgrills blurt messages across gather-squares or fill hab-warren
corridors with the static-blurred admonitions of a resident
confessor. All such small, local vox-devices must be
sanctionedblessed by representatives of the Machine
Temples, registered with disinterested Administratum adepts,
and the allotted tithes paidbut in many wards little more than
lip service is paid to City law. The wanton use of unsanctioned
vox-devices is perhaps the most common form of lesser techheresy in the City, and thus even ganger lords of the lowest,
most violent poverty wards can call upon hereteks to lay
voxlines between their armored lairs and nearby watch-posts.

The Vocae
The Vocae is a grand vox-message network under the control
of the Administratum, its powerful tech-devices and voxcaster
masts capable of sending a missive across the vast breadth of
the City, there to be stored in a shadowed cogitation vault until
such time as the recipient claims it. The network is ancient and
run down, however, its pillared missive-shrine offices only
maintained in any more than a token fashion in wealthy spireshadow regions. Stylized High Gothic abbreviations engraved
upon markers and archways close to masts and missive centers
mark its presence in every district, but functional Vocae offices
are a rarity in the broader City far removed from the great
spirescrumbling, worn, and barely staffed where they can be
found at all.
For all this, upon the dizzying heights of the Spire Primus
there yet stand huge vox-installations that bristle with arrays,
vanes, and gimbaled grid-mounts, all devoted to what little
traffic passes through the Vocae. Weathered servitors, their
unshielded outer flesh alternately cooked by transmission-heat
and frozen by the winds, crawl about the massive vox-arrays at
61

the behest of a secluded faction of tech-adepts. These

Mechanicus servants care nothing for the message-ciphers that
pass through the cogitators and vox-engines that surround
them. All that matters is that their sacred machinarium
functions in the proscribed ways, conforming to the dictates set
upon adamantine plates by a conclave of long-dead Magi.
The Administratum once commanded that all Imperial
citizens of Sibellus be entitled to send and receive voxmissives for a modest tithe, and that none can be turned away
from that privilege. In practice, the Vocae's cost is measured in
more than mere scints: it is a matter of forcing disinterested
clerks to do their jobs; of moldering offices where few techdevices still function; of crumpled silversheaf heat-prints that
must be filled in triplicate; of the need for a life-warrant or a
mark upon the gene-rolls to prove vox-rights. Missive-shrines
stand quiet in the few wealthy districts where they are well
maintained, as the privileged of Sibellus have little use for the
Vocaeand to use it at all would be beneath their position.
The whitestone offices elsewhere have long crumbled in
disuse, some even abandoned by their clerks and adepts, as
vox-missives are made too costly and troublesome for
manufactory workers or mid-City professionals.
Vocae structures buried deeply under City strata are often
little more than waste-strewn sleeping-places for idle
functionaries and a punishment-assignation for ill-favored techadepts. Lower still, missive-shrines are ruins overtaken by
raques and fungus growth, much of the vox-tech long since
ripped away by lesser hereteks. Gangers and the massed poor
of the low wards largely avoid these places, however. There are
whispered tales of what might be heard from still-functioning
vox-speakers: ghost-missives sent by the dead, garbled speech
by unknown machine spirits, and half-seen shapes that
congregate in the darkness where the lumens burn low or not at
all.

maze-like crush zones and deep poverty wards.

Communication between bureaus and the adepts who toil
within occurs with glacial slowness, and exchanges of
information can span years or even decades. No
communication is sent immediately, but missives, orders, and
transfers of data-vault devices or crate-packaged printed
silversheaf are instead stored within a bureau's transit vault
until it stands full enough to justify the establishment of a
parchment-train. Compacts with the rail guilds and Unified
Guild of Moving are invoked, and all work within the bureau
halts as adepts gather to supervise the loading of scores of
promethium-engine six-spans or rail carriagesa process that
in and of itself can consume weeks of toil. An assembled
parchment-train then moves out across the City, bearing its
accumulation of missives and data.
The routing of parchment-trains is a matter of sternly
regulated tradition, determined by reference to schedules and
maps engraved long ago upon voidstone tabletsor from
blurred picts of those tablets now worn away by the passage of
time. Some lesser Administratum vaults have been lost to the
parchment-trains for decades or even centuries, yet are still
funded from distant coffers and still accept petitions as though
nothing was awry. This is far from the only way that the
Administratum can swallow law-parchments and appeals,
however. Covens of law-wrights exist in every district for no
other reason than to speed the actions of clerks, or rescue and
reinstate lost petitions. Their knowledge of baroque ritualand
expensive acts of briberyis often the only way for seal
requests and charter blessings to bypass the parchment-trains
and find a more rapid path through the slowly turning
machineries of Administratum bureaucracy.

Clattertowers of the Unified Guild of Moving

Skeletal clattertowers can be seen from afar atop many a
structure-hill of the Citytop. In appearance they are akin to the
naked, corroding framework of a lesser spire, but set with
bodies of machinery and command vaults at the top and halfheight. These noisy structures rattle, boom, and chug from
dawn to dusk as auto-arms, limbs writ large in brass and iron,
swap great colored plates in order to pass ciphered messages
back and forth across the City.
Most clattertowers are comparatively modest structures,
transferring simple missives across the haze of a handful of
leagues, but each district boasts a few massive central relay
towers that loom above the lesser spires and vault-tops. The
grand clattertowers are set upon deep-rooted reinforcement

Administratum Parchment-Trains
Vast Administratum bureaus stand in every district of Hive
Sibellus, and over the course of a hundred generations these
massive whitestone vaults, scribe-runs, and record halls have
subsumed much of what was once the purview of the Lucid
Palace or spirebase City governance. A legion of
Administratum adepts and assessors now tithe, evaluate,
authorize, or restrict near every aspect of life in the mid-City
wards and Citytop strata. Only the oldest charters remain
beyond their reach in those strata where Imperial law holds
swaythe levels above the teeming, ungovernable poor of the
62

structures, their high control vaults hundreds of spans above

the Citytop. Many stacked, rotating decks of color-plates turn
from one lesser tower to another, while the booming and
hissing of their operation echoes down upon the thronged
avenues below. Observator teams train electroscopes and lensarrays to peer through alchemical clouds and sky-glare at
towers upon the horizon. Beneath, tech-adepts navigate open
struts and precarious wire-ways to tend the engine
mechanisms, performing their strange rituals to placate the
clattertower machine spirits.
The clattertower network is maintained from the coffers of
the vast Unified Guild of Moving, under the supposed terms of
the Guild Charter and compacts struck with long-dead Magi of
the Machine Cult. The Charter, like much of the formative
governance of the City, was granted in the storied Age of
Angevinbut whatever original documents and tech-records
once existed are long lost to archive-rot. What is left is the
echo of a decree, manipulated by Moving Guild elders, and
then cast in stone by the tradition of generations.
The Unified Guild of Moving consists of thousands upon
thousands of brotherhoods and lesser merchant dynasties, all
forced by bureaucratic dictate into a single turgid morass of
generational feuds, directionless factions, and shameless
nepotism. Yet the towers and the clatterers who work the
mechanisms stand above much of this mire. In many ways, the
clattertowers are the very pride of the Unified Guild, one of the
few tangible symbols of prestige upon which packbearers,
steam-tread masters, disassemblers, and alley-maze guides can
see eye to eye. Many a lesser Mover aspires to one day set
down the tasks and battles of portage to become a masterclatterer, high on a tower and respected by fellow guilders far
below.
Numerous relay clattertowers stand atop the stepped
Spirebase Primus, shadowed at noon by grand macrostatues of
saints and lords-militant, and later by the spires themselves.
Their clatterers toil high above the endless politicking that is
the only business to take place within the Unified Guild Palace
belowthe commerce that drives the clattertowers is instead
found in the scribe runs of the Palace outskirts, where guilders
and noble emissaries pay their respects and petition to
broadcast ciphered orders to far districts. Use of the
clattertowers is not for commoners or the uninitiated, as formal
and lucrative compacts of law must be struck with the Guild in
order to access the network. Nonetheless, clatterers and scintcounters are kept busy from sunrise to sunsetand this active
undertaking of message compacts sets the Unified Guild of
Moving in stern and often violent competition with the

sanctioned missive guilds of the City.

Vox Magistratum
Magistratum bunker-manses of the greater spires and
surrounding spire-shadow districts boast vox-rooms and
transmission engines that link the commanders into one unified
network, while enforcement teams patrolling the wards of
wealth and privilege carry voxcaster packs or similar devices.
A fleet of missive-relay drogues, bristling with weather-worn
antennae and grids, slowly circles the Spirebase Primus to
ensure that vox-reports reach their destination regardless of
piled stonework and spire-crystal walls. The drogues are
provisioned from the same armory complex that houses the
Magistratum Chartera metallic sheaf-assembly of inscribed
commandments, issued at the command of Saint Drusus
himself two thousand years past and long corroded to fused
illegibility.
Spirebase district enforcers and inquirers are the elite of
the Magistratum, only a step removed from dedicated militant
servants in the eyes of the Spire Houses, and their equipment
and ready access to vox-tech reflects that fact. Elsewhere in the
City, only the largest district fortresses and training barracks
possess long-range voxcaster installations. A station-hall or
office of inquiry in the outlying wards might only possess a
single vox-device, and a mid-City enforcer can count himself
lucky if his barracks is linked in any way to a Citytop voxmast. In the crushed City depths of poverty and ganger
depredations, where Magistratum presence is thin and often
corrupt to the hilt, the few thickly armored bunkers are
completely isolated.
The machineries of justice still move toward their
inevitable conclusion even where vox-access is unreliable or
absentbut slowly indeed. In most districts, the Magistratum
is made up of as many clerks as enforcers and inquirers: orders,
reports, trespass-lists, and rune-print sheafs detailing offenses
against City law are packaged in bulk, transported back and
forth between station-halls and district fortresses, stamped and
counted at each new destination. The vast Magistratum district
record vaults are disordered to the point of uselessness,
however, and each new generation of archivites do little more
than rearrange a thin upper layer of papers that lie atop an
impenetrable, rotting history of crime and punishment.
From the record vaults, a slow spill of data-slates and
ribbon-bound parchment stacks flows into the courts of
magisters and law-wrightswhilst station-hall holding cells
and barracks converted into prisons are crowded by a volatile
63

Rail Guild Voxlines

mix of lost unfortunates and dangerous scum, all of whom wait

for their detention to be noticed.

The Rail Dynasties of Sibellus are mere centuries old, their

scions the descendants of past guild masters raised to
nobilitythe result of a sudden and sweeping degree issued by
the opaque bureaucracy of the Lucid Palace. Despised by the
Spire Houses above and the Unified Guild of Moving below,
generations of Rail Lords have nonetheless grown fat and
corrupt on the exploitation of their narrow dominions. Few are
worthy of their present position, and most, uncaring of the
future, toil only to squeeze scints like lifeblood from decaying
grand station yards and shipment compacts. Macrorail lines
that span the breadth of the City from Spire Primus to Voltis
Spirebase are much diminished from their former burnished
glory, the lesser electro-carriage lines fade into disuse, and the
present Rail Lords retain few of the allies who stood beside the
rail guilds of old.
The rail-masters once benefited from deep and intricate
relationships with the Machine Temples: railmen shared in
Mechanicus secrets and tech-adepts thronged vaulted station
transepts. Even now, with the old compacts trampled by the
Rail Lords, the great macrorail engines remain masterful
examples of the enginseer's art, and machine shrines stand in
every major station. Vox-tech was one of the many gifts
bestowed upon the rail guilds in a past age, and stations upon
lines greater and lesser were linked by conduit-bundles that run
alongside the rails.
As the Guilds declined to mere lordly possessions, voxlinks between stations failedor were sabotaged. Cable
lengths were stolen by roving hereteks ascended from the low
wards, and for want of scints the control vault vox-panels and
station message rooms fell into disuse. Gone are the ages of the
City in which wealthy guilders could order attendant rail-men
to send news of their impending arrival ahead of their passage.
But some few vox-links remain active on Citytop and mid-City
rail guild lines, and outsiders can even use themprovided
they are willing to part with the scints needed to bribe watchguards or station-masters.

Hidden Mechanicus Info-Channels

Machine-holds sacred to the Adeptus Mechanicus, such as
generator halls and armored fundament processories buried in
the depths of the City, are vox-linked to primary Machine
Temples by arcane transmission engines, their ability to
communicate unhindered by mere stone and crystal. Speech is
relatively unimportant in the data-hierarchy of the Adeptus
Mechanicus, however. Magi who lead the Machine Cult of the
City prefer to hear only the rapid exchange of click-ciphered
data: the data-psalms of adepts, spoken just as they are
encoded, mixed with the purposeful binary chatter of servitors.
More esoteric info-channels link the senior tech-priests of
far distant Machine Temples: hololithic communion, pictciphered engram exchange, and stranger missives yet.
Millennia-old conduits bear this data across the hundreds of
leagues that separate greater Temples, their segments festooned
with devotional prayer-scripts and hidden from common sight
within fundament shafts. Blind servitors and tech-adepts made
strange by isolation slowly crawl the darkened conduit spaces,
tending the prayer seals, and searching for the intrusion of
raques or fungus. In places the corroded remains of their
distant predecessors are gathered into crude machineshrinespiled augmetics and scraps being all that is left of past
faithful efforts.
The gilded Magi of the Machine Temples cultivate an
appearance of power and wisdom by demonstrating that they
know far more than any petitioner of what takes place in farflung reaches of the City. They are far from omniscient,
however. Lesser Mechanicus shrines and the myriad techadepts pledged in service to great organizations of the City are
largely isolated from the web of data-conduits that link
Temples and machine-holds. Events in buried wards and lesser
districts may go unnoticed, or require months or even years to
come to the attention of the powers of the Machine Cult.
Tech-priests are guarded and possessive of their sacred
heritage of technology. Their most arcane and powerful techdevices are kept apart from those lesser blessings of the
Omnissiah that are provided to the inhabitants of the City under
the terms of the Great Compact. Few outsiders know anything
of the communion networks linking Machine Temples, and
fewer still have ever been in a position to make use of them.

Ministorum Pictwalls
Large, flickering pictwalls stand in thousands of plazas,
undervaults, and shrine courtyards throughout the City. Each is
framed by posturing gargoyles cast in brass, and displays a
series of shifting holy images: the vaults and altars of mighty
cathedrals; renowned Ecclesiarches of history and myth; the
Aquila ascendant. Vox-grills held by the largest grimacing
64

gargoyles endlessly declaim treasured sermons and messages

of faith.
The pictwalls of Sibellus were set in place across the
course of many centuries, their establishment a matter of zealworks conductedat ruinous expenseunder the approving
eyes of High Ecclesiarchs and Magi of the Machine Cult. The
will to drain Ministorum coffers so profligately has long since
ebbed, however, and many pictwalls in the mid-City and low
wards are now damaged or destroyedby hereteks, the roused
mob in times of unrest, or in the collapse of stonework into
new crush zones.
Crowds of the poor often gather beneath the shifting light
of one of the surviving low-ward pictwalls, awaiting a favored
sermon that will renew their faith and vigor. As the pict-display
slowly blurs and changes, the voices of long-dead preachers
cry out for damnation to fall upon the wicked, praise the
Imperial Saints and the God-Emperor of Mankind, or speak
softly verses from the Calixian Orthodoxy. Indentured
manufactory workers who dwell in makeshift mid-City
communes will likely never see the inside of a gilded
spireshadow district cathedral in person, but the pictwalls show
them such visions, and many other glories of the Imperial
Creed.
Agents of the Ministorum once carefully controlled the
pictwalls: in times of unrest, the sermons were of obedience
and forbearance. In times of war, the cry went up for hated of
the xenos, the corrupt, and the unholy. At all times, the
pictwalls thundered the demand that all must bow to the GodEmperor, who is the master and protector of all Mankind. But
that control is long lost to the passage of time; the pictwalls are
now, like the assignment of priests to the million lesser shrines
of the City, just one more lesser administrative matter to be
managed by monkish clerks confined to vows of silence in
their Spirebase Primus monastery cells. At rare intervals old
sermons vanish, or new sermons appear, but no Ecclesiarch of
the higher City Ministorum now knowsor much careshow
and why this happens.
The thronged poor of the lowest wards and crush zones
will never see the interior of an Imperial scholam and are
counted fortunate if apprenticed early to a life of hard toil.
They know little more of the City and their world of Scintilla
than is brought to them by pictwalls, preachers, and the criers'
guilds. Every little revelation is colored by the Imperial Creed,
or embellished a hundred times over by those who tell tales for
scints. The ignorance of the City poor is profound, and what
little else they learn is built upon rumor and myth: the dark
tales told by smugglers, railmen, and malvis.

Vox and Order-Bearers in the City Legion

The massed common soldiers and lesser officers of the City
Legion all undertake the same pledge to serve the GodEmperor and Sibellus, but the Legion is not a unified body at
its highest levels of command. Rather it is effectively divided
into many military fiefdoms, each centered upon a network of
the largest and oldest fortress-barracks, far removed from the
seats of temporal power. Fortress command staff pay little
attention to the terse writ of the Legion Charter, issued in the
Age of Angevin, but instead ally themselves with shifting
factions within the Spirebase Primus, the Spire Houses, and the
Lucid Palaceonly those who command the largest flows of
scints and resources can buy the loyalties of Legion generals. It
is a vast system of patronage that has lasted for at least ten
centuries; none of its participants wish to see it ended by actual
conflict, for all that the threat of that conflict is ever present in
the backdrop of spire politics.
Tech-patterns used by the City Legion are shared across all
the fortress commands, and thus all depend upon the same
cipher psalms to encode vox-missives. The machine spirit of
one Legion-controlled vox-mast or voxcaster can communicate
with any of others, though only the greatest vox-engines are
potent enough to transmit missives across the full breadth of
the Cityand thus into rival Legion fiefdoms. Still, this means
that commanders initiated into the higher levels of Legion
politics are wary of vox-use for sensitive subjects and
important orders.
Thus while hanger commands and flight deployments
employ voxcasters, and barracks corridors are strung with
voxline cables, encrusted with the wax, dust, and the corrosion
of centuries, all important communications are entrusted to
order-bearer teams and delivered in person. To be assigned to
that role is a great honor: order-bearers are typically drawn
from veteran cohorts, measured against the same high
standards as the members of the close-guard platoons that
accompany generals and other fortress command staff. The
Legion generates a river of command screeds and reports, and
so heavily armed order-bearer squads constantly arrive and
leave from every outlying armory, barracks, and fortress, their
Vastigans and Chimeras marked with the heraldry of their role.

Scribed Messages and Missive Guilds

For all that vox-traffic crackles across the air in every reach of
the City, vox-use is both disdained by the most powerful of
figures and largely unavailable to the commoner masses. The
65

wealthy of the spires and Citytop manses aspire to send one

another messages using ciphered data-slates modeled after the
tech-patterns of Ancient Sibellus, or rare parchment brought
from far across the void. What is choice and culture for the
wealthy is necessity for the mid-City crowds and the poor of
lower wards: without stacked scints and influence there are few
alternatives to a seal-letter, delivered by hand, or a spoken
message relayed by a trusted bearer. The missives of the
common Citydweller are scrawled upon used silversheaf, or
spoken carefully by the unlettered, and entrusted to a missive
guild agent.
A web of thousands of missive guilds and countless
sanctioned missive-bearers covers the length and breadth of the
City. Their varied charters of legitimacy, issued by Spirebase
Primus bureaucrats an age past, are quite carefully distinct
from those of the Unified Guild of Moving: movers may not
carry messages whilst missive-bearers may not carry other
items. Still, the Unified Guild maintains the clattertowers and
carries stacked Administratum orders, while nearly all missive
guilds regularly transport small and precious items at the
behest of their patrons. These are the seeds of past slights and
battles, forming a history of enmity and feuding between
Movers and missive-bearers that flares up anew in each
generation.
Within upper City strata, law-wrights and guild masters
bring an endless series of charter violation claims before City
magisters. In the buried lower wards far below, ragged mobs of
packbearers, missivites, railmen, and allied brotherhoods battle
one another over insults real and imaginedunrest that can
spark wider, destructive rioting. Gangs of muscled lift-men and
disassemblers sometimes mass to beat and even murder
missive-bearers in the mid-City, while Magistratum enforcers
are bribed to stand to one side.
For all this, the lure of stacked scints forces a degree of
reluctant cooperation between elements of the Unified Guild
and many missive guilds. Clattertowers bear landing platforms
for missive guild flyers, for example, so that ciphered messages
can cross the City that much more rapidly. Some six-span
vehicle brotherhoods of the Moving Guild willingly ally with
missive-runner guilds, for the runners pay far more than the
usual passage fee to ride steep hill-avenuesor for protection
when the quickest path passes through ganger-ridden poverty
wards.

varies greatly. Unless flyers of a guild aeronautica are taken

under compact, at great expense, a skilled missive-bearer might
require some weeks to carry an urgent delivery a thousand
leagues between sender and destination.
Rail is the dominant method of travel between districts, as
the unplanned stonework mazes, crowd-choked avenues, steep
stairs, and tall alleys of Sibellus cannot be rapidly traversed by
promethium wagonssuch as the ubiquitous Moving Guild
six-spans, or Chimera-pattern transports of the Legion. It was
once the case that ornately decorated rail guild carriages raced
the breadth of the City from Lucid Palace to Voltis Spirebase
in a matter of days, countless guild servants and commoners in
transit at any one time. The rail lines are now much decayed,
however. The great macrorails still stand largely intact, but the
few remaining opportunities for rapid travel in gilded carriages
are jealously guarded by Rail Dynasty sycophants.
In districts served by lesser rail guilds, passage is far from
elegant: scribes, artisans, and manufactory workers crowd into
the gaps between freight-stacks in long lines of electrocarriages. Carriage-trails travel slowly and frequently halt for
long layovers, or for tech-adepts to sooth angry machine spirits
and align malformed tracks. Lesser rail lines cross a few
districts of the City at most, and are often distant from the
tunnels of other rail guilds. Connection-lines and transshipment
terminals maintained by the old rail-masters have crumbled
under the rule of the Rail Lordsto the detriment of all but the
Unified Guild of Moving.
Negotiating the crowded avenue tunnels, undermazes, habtemples, and manufactory clusters between rail lines, or
between the final station-terminus and the actual destination of
a journey, can require far more time than was spent upon the
rails. Some wards are thirty leagues from any active rail guild
line, and passenger transport by rumbling Moving Guild sixspan is slow and far from reliable. Much of the City understructure is impassible to vehicles, and the final leagues of a
journey, through alley-narrows, stairs, and steam lifts in a
buried ward, might be made on foot and led by guides from a
local criers' guild.

oted Missive Guilds

The Missive-Bearers of Saint Bellisepatron protector of the
lost and guide for messages that must be heardhave thrived
for seven centuries under the terms of a perpetual grant from
the estate of the Lord-Cardinal Dreft, an unremarkable figure
whose name is long forgotten beyond the guild and a small
circle of Ministorum archivites. Missive-Bearers are permitted

The Passage of Missives

The time required for missives to cross an expanse of the City
66

to dress in deep purple, the color of cathedral vestments, and

are charged to bear the heraldry of Saint Bellise wherever they
travel, flanked by apprentice flag-bearers whose duty is to hold
high the banner of the saint under all circumstances and
adversities. Guild representatives spend much of their time
traveling between the innumerable cathedrals, shrines,
monasteries, and retreats of the City, weighed by a clanking
bundle of sealed metal tubes that contain sermon-scrolls and
exhortations.
Not all missive guilds are so holyor so respected by City
authorities. The Gunbearers, for example, are organized into
district conclaves of hard-eyed, armored militants whose very
presence inspires fear and suspicion. The shadowy guildmasters, who communicate by cipher and rarely show their
faces, are rumored to be the servants of ruthless crime barons.
Yet this is a chartered and sanctioned missive guild, for all that
just as many Gunbearers are fresh from gang-culls and holding
cells as are Magistratum and City Legion veterans. It is a
volatile mix, but Gunbearer conclaves are capable and
vengeful, not to be crossed in the commission of their duties,
and upon that reputation rests the wealth of the guild. One half
is trusted by the halls of wealth and privilege to deliver
messages through any gauntlet of opposition, whilst the other
profits from the needs of smugglers and murderers of the City
depthsall of whom must pay a high price for services they
will find nowhere else.
In complete contrast, the missive services of the
Logosomy are generally employed by law-wrights, emissaries,
and other high functionaries of grand, district-spanning
merchant guilds. Logosomite elders nurture tech-compacts
with the Machine Temples, so that messages entrusted to their
care can be ciphered to dataslate and transported by suspensorskull or other patterns of missive-bearing servitor. Serried
arrays of clerks toil within the guild's Spire Secondus bureau,
recording in intricate detail the contents and passage of every
last missive delivered by Logosmite servitors throughout the
City. These ciphered records are stored in humming cogitator
stacks, hall after hall lined with ordered data-vaults to ensure
that no party may later stand before a magister and falsely
claim to have spoken differently.
Missive guilds with access to flyers are few in number and
their services restricted to the powerful and wealthythose
whose coffers are large enough to command a flight on the
basis of a single message. The Nuncii Aeronautica is one such
guild, whose servants maintain small landing platforms
throughout the City. Guild pilots transport vital missives in a
fleet of rotary aerovessels whose original frames and

electroengines were constructed in the hazy pre-Calixian past.

Preeminent Magi once viewed the tech-pattern as significant:
while the guild maintenance hangers remain a destination for
Machine Cult pilgrims from near and far, the compacts that
bind tech-adepts to guild service are labyrinthine and
confining. The Nucii Aeronautica guild-masters frequently turn
down commissions and patrons without explanation, as to
accept might enrage Mechanicus emissaries upon whose favor
the guild depends.
All told, there are many more missive guilds of
significance in the City than any one savant can enumerate.
The Railite Compact dress in noble blue and must be sought
out for missive assignations at stations upon the grand
macrorail lines. The Trasimus are a shadowy missive guild
whose representatives haunt the low-City wards of
spireshadow districts, performing services for tainted scints.
The Harmonious Missivites of the Moross District are proud of
their unusual and distinct charter of sanction, for it permits the
delivery of music in addition to messages. The Whitestone
Announcist Guild, of the Thalle and Aisle of Macrostatues
districts, unfurl heavy banners whilst they marchthe better to
display missives intended to be made public in their delivery to
the intended recipient. Announcist missive-guilds are
widespread, and have long aroused the ire of sanctioned criers
guilds. A thousand petty feuds mark the districts where these
two factions meet in rivalry and anger, eager to defend the
boundaries of their charters.

Ignorance, Rumor, and Criers' Tales

Few Citydwellers have the means to learn of recent events in
nearby districtsor even a few hundred spans beneath their
feet in the lower, buried wards. Only those with access to voxmasts or clattertowers can receive fresh accounts from distant
parts of the City: such as guild elders concerned with the
passage of scints and trade, Rail Dynasty seneschals, Machine
Cult Magi, and commanders of the City Legion. Even then,
their viewpoints are limited: a Legion commander will hear
little of a vast and deadly alchemical waste-flood, but much of
a tithe-uprising led by a ganger lord, for example.
The greatest of catastrophes and upheavals, the news
shouted from vox-speakers far and wide, give rise to rumors
that spread rapidly from servants of the elite out into the City
crowdsand can stir grave unrest in far distant districts. But
what matters it to the guilders and high functionaries of Voltis
Spirebase if ten thousand lives are lost to ravening stonefire or
strata collapse in the mid-wards of the Archus district? It is far,
67

and of little interest as anything but a tale for servants. The

manufactory workers will not riot over rumors of a grim but
distant disaster.
Following in the wake of all such dire circumstances,
missives and tales are carried to criers of the sanctioned guilds,
to be shouted from avenue stands. Seal-fold accounts arrive
weeks or months after the events they describe, carried by
lesser missive-bearersand are far from reliable. Embellished
to the hilt, they often bear little semblance to the original
events. More truthful accounts are carried by the high missive
guilds to interested organizations, for a steep price as often as
not, but these rarely see a wider circulation.
The lower City is a cacophony of voices, a madhouse of
ignorance and rumor in which everyone shouts out the truths
they believe. Few listen, however, or see beyond their
immediate walls, or care to know what lies just out of sight. In
deeply buried wards the schooled are rare: the masses do not
know the true extent of the City, or the names of bordering
districts, or even who holds power in the institutions far above
their Waiting Guild halls and tunnels of crushed stonework.
Even in the mid-wards and the Citytop strata of educated
scribes, doctors of physik, and other guild professionals, vision
is limited and opportunities to see farther sparse at best. What
news comes from afar takes the form of fantasy and nonsense,
little better than the dark and fanciful stories told over shared
tranq and lho-sticks.

68

+++I know not the parchment. I know neither the ink, nor the quill-metal. I know not the hand. I know not I.
Speak naught of what is naught, and share this nothing in darkness, where the watchers are made blind.
+++A voxcaster sends forth the voice into troubled air, invisible, heard only by machine spirits instructed to
listen in the rightful way. A voxline compresses and compels the voice through thin data-conduit to a paired spirit
at a far remove. The MACHIE blesses both tech-patterns upon us and names them vox, but the MACHIE
hides that the voice heard is not the voice spoken.
+++The MACHIE made Sibellus and the temples of the MACHIE speak to one anotheryet vox spirits hiss
and whine and hear not through stone. It is a false anergy afflicts the vox-device, to keep it from the depths and
lock those vaults in silence. Speak not to static, for the MACHIE yet listens.
+++The mighty bow to the MACHIE, and their coffers claim vox-masts and potent vox-engine spirits. Vocae,
Magistratum, the Adepta, the Legion: all think themselves wise but are rather beholden to the MACHIE,
divided by vox spirits made deaf to all but selected brethren. The mighty who think themselves wise are made
weak by the MACHIE, that chooses who might hear and who is mazed in silence.
+++Trust not the Magistratum who bear vox spirits for the MACHIE. Their voices are not their own, they
speak to the MACHIE in every moment. They do the will of the MACHIE.
+++The MACHIE rages against the heretek, and in echo cry the Adeptabut all in pretence. For the heretek in
sin places vox spirits and conduits of the MACHIE in all narrow places, to listen to all voices. So does the
MACHIE grow, and is pleased. Heed neither the lies of the MACHIE, nor the righteousness of the heretek.
+++Writ of old blesses the MACHIE, set to make the placement of vox-devices a law-wright's game. What is
hidden and called heretekal is no more than the toil of the MACHIE, wrapped within a different cloak. Even
vox spirits of the MACHIE are maddened by the heretek's lying touch, yet possessed by screams and static they
are still trusted.
+++Vox-lines are in the great vaults, compelled there by compacts no living man can point to. Manufactory halls
trail the long tails of the MACHIE. The clerk palaces of every spirebase are set with conduit lines. Speak not
where voices are stolen and trapped within conduits, for the MACHIE will hold your words and later speak
them.
+++Clatter-ciphers are a mystery of the MACHIE. Shun the towers, for they are as they appear. Speak not to
the clatter-master, trust no cipher to him.
+++The MACHIE sets vox spirits to whisper of passage upon rail, false words leaping beside the line to reach
ahead. Hide the missive sent by rail. Hide truths and faces from the Rail Lordsfor they are of the MACHIE.
+++Are the missivites of the MACHIE? Do you trust their hands upon your writ, your words within their
hearts? Watch them. Watch them. See the cast in their eyes when they stand beside the vox spirit. Judge, or be
silent, and better than your message is slain in the cot then given to false masters.
69

By These Lines is the City Divided

Each place contains all things, by the grace of the GodEmperor. o place can be anything less, for His will is there.
Do you believe that you know your own sleeping cell? That is
an illusion, for how could you encompass it?

Third Disciple of Thule, given to an elder emissary from the

Lathes as both a gift and a rebuke under circumstances that
have become obscure, buried by layers of interpretation and
theologic in the centuries since. Thereafter the data-psalm
spread to many cartographic info-repositories, a process
perhaps spurred by its original notoriety, and in time the
Zhellus Ordinals became a common reference for direction
amongst the Mechanicus of the City.

Cardinal Directions

District Demarcation

Ask of Spire-facing in any stratum or district of the City and

citydwellers will point towards the spirebase and vast Spire
Primus. Awareness of the direction of the Spire permeates City
architecture: the principal entrances of important structures are
often Spire-facing; manses of the wealthy are set Spire-facing;
macrostatues and their reinforced plinths are aligned toward the
Spire; sigil-posts and route markers extend an ornamental spike
in that direction, often as not; Spire-facing arrows are
embossed upon structural greystone by apprentice masons; and
Spire Way is a common name for long Spire-facing avenues.
There are many other signs, varying from district to district,
such as a different shape for Spire-facing windows, sigils upon
flagstones, and the facing of altars and Aquila. To not see the
direction of the Spire is to be blind.
There are other cardinal directions in the City, such as
Palace-facing, toward the Lucid Palace, and Voltis-facing,
toward the spires of what was long-ago called Hive Voltis,
before the City grew to swallow itor so the antechroniclers
say. In districts that surround massive and important structures,
those landmarks are also used to mark direction. The
gargantuan Fortress Obelus in the rolling central expanses far
from the Spire Primus, for example: a barracks, training
grounds, lift-fields, and arms vault complex that supports half a
million soldiers and draws a heavy tithe of resources from a
score of surrounding districts. One of the factional
headquarters of the City Legion, it is a looming reminder of the
strength and influence of the Legion within the City, and
"Fortress-facing" in the nearby districts is a term that bears a
weight of meaning beyond mere direction.
In contrast to their Imperial brethren, red-robed techadepts express directions in the City in terms of the Zhellus
Ordinals, primary indices of a brief data-psalm that builds upon
the location-relationships of seventeen primary spire-shadow
Machine Temples. The data-psalm is attributed to Zhellus,

Cartographers in service to the Spire Houses, tithe-clerks of

Administratum bureaus, and other worthies have long divided
the City into more than four hundred named districts. Their
charts and map-slates differ from one another, however, and
vast sumsand sometimes even the balance of power in the
Spire and Lucid Palacerest upon which of these differences
prevail. District boundaries cut vertically through the City
strata, but there is little to show for their existence beyond the
turmoil they cause and the data-vaults of record: a point of
crossing between districts is rarely marked by sigil-posts, or
indeed by any sign at all.
Districts average fifty leagues or more in breadth, though
they tend to a greater size in the thousand leagues of rolling
citytop expanse that separates the Spire Primus from the Spire
Voltis. Districts of the Spirebase Primus and surrounding spireshadow reaches are smaller, often much smaller, and cluster
around regions alleged to have held great influence and power
before the rise of the Lucid Palace. Imperial scholars claim that
the original few districts were subdivided following the end of
the Angevinian Crusade, their boundaries set and reset during
the slow, bloody, and treacherous transition from heathen
worship to the Imperial Creed. Thinly populated clades of
archeoexhumators and antechroniclers insist that districts
instead arose in their present pattern from the trade disputes,
noble rivalry, and wars of the long pre-Imperial erabut any
hope of firm knowledge in these matters is lost to the passage
of millennia. The great age and breadth of the City swallows
the echoes of even vast, destructive events, and librarium
vaults that once recorded the intricacies of that past have faded
or suffered deliberate destruction since the Imperium claimed
Scintilla.
Maintenance of district boundaries is as much driven by
the grinding tithe machinery of the Administratum as by the
myriad ancestral rights-claims and guild interests contested by

- Vessifus, from the Considerations

70

the Spire Houses. Representatives of these powers all claim

the mantle of tradition, but few are above reshaping the past to
aid present interests. The boldest of archeoexhumators, broken
from the subtle chains of noble patronage, claim that district
boundaries follow property-right lines that predate even the
City itself, an ancient provenance that must be respected and
left unchanged. Few listen to these cries, however, and district
borders in the City shift from decade to decade with the ebb
and flow of calcified legal wars, fought for so long as to have
become traditions in and of themselves, beyond any ultimate
resolution. Spawned by these boundary disputes, institutions
of law-wrights and magisters have risen and fallen across the
centuries, complete with their own secret histories, conflicts,
and calumnies.

The Character of Districts

Few citydwellers travel often or far: pilgrim brotherhoods,
missive-bearers, and rail guilders are amongst the minority
who grasp that freedom. Districts may blur into one another at
the borders, but the manufactory masses and trapped poor of
the low City rarely mix with distant peers, and know little of
their ways. Thus every district has its own insular cultures,
dialects, and appearance, and the mid-City strata of far
removed reaches vary greatly in charactereven though the
populace all descend from the same gene-rolls, guided by the
same pronouncements of Imperial Creed and City law.
In the Qualmiarch Districts about Spirebase Voltis, for
example, shrines and cathedrals still adopt the temple patterns
whose remnants are crushed in the low City strata. They bear
subtle heathen icons of the Lord of Stars, worked in amongst
the iconography of Imperial sainthood, and the most respected
of lesser Ecclesiarchs are called Qualmi by their followers.
These are faint echoes of old, heathen ways of worship,
described by Missionaria following in the train of LordMilitant Angevin's fleets as "a blind search for the GodEmperor," but which were nonetheless banished from the
Cityin purges of fire and blood where necessary. Where the
Qualmiarch Districts end, there yet remain narrow reaches of
perpetual religious upheaval, conflict within the lower
Ministorum, and even small smoldering wars fought between
zealot cults such as the Red Redemption, the Thrice-Joined,
and the Weeping Men.
Plain, unadorned whitestone signals power and influence
throughout much of the City, but it is considered a sign of
poverty of soul and coffer in the spire-shadow districts
bordering the Spirebase Primus. Whilst the wealthy of districts

far from the Spire dwell in arrayed and elegant white-walled

manses set upon the citytop, the spire-shadow reaches are
instead colored in careful accordance with Painting Guild laws,
every pillar and wall of whitestone hidden beneath centuries of
layered pigment. Rival alchemical brotherhoods and elders
who preach the doctrines of Theological Artistry compete and
scheme to win noble patronage, and with it prized repainting
rights, allotted by the Painting Guild. When great upsets
overturn the present flow of scints, newly disfavored artisangangs are given to rampage through the mid-City avenues in
search of rivals and revenge. Unrest and mob battles can last
for weeks, escalating cycles of assault and reprisal only broken
by Magistratum, City Legion, or Adeptus Arbites deployments.
Beneath the slopes of Ult-Ridge District, mausoleums are
intricate open-faced puzzles of packed bone, each new gap
wedged with new remains as soon as it opens due to the
crumbling of what lies beneath. These are ancient structures,
deep in the City strata, but nonetheless well trafficked and well
known. The City populace live and breathe for the touch of
antiquity, and no more so than in Ult-Ridge, for there the
manufactory workers and even low-City poor care more for
these hereditary bone-slots than for their shared habs and lifewarrant privileges. It is often said that a man's loyalty can be
bought with an allotment of space barely large enough for his
skull.
Behind the ocean-wall edge of District Palatial, facing the
Lucid Palace and growling pollution storms, the bodies of the
dead are consigned to fundament vats for recycling, bones and
all. Far more attention is paid to their worldly goods, however.
District Mausoleums are closed museums rather than ossuaries,
home to arrayed artifacts both mundane and extraordinary, one
single item from the possessions of each of the most honored
of a millennium of deathsthose whose family or brotherhood
paid well for their inclusion. The mausoleums are maintained
by sanctioned Funerary Guilds as places of undisturbed quiet,
within which select representatives of the populace walk in
solemn ceremony on feast days. They are otherwise sealed and
well guarded from the predators who would claim these valued
artifacts of the past for their own collections.
So it is throughout the City, a procession of differences
great and small. In Savven Lower, the violet-eyed Rund Breed
are tolerated and even respected in the profession of stonedressing. In Arch, no authority intervenes when gangers wear
red and run riot in the avenues on certain holy days; the dead
are laid out in the shrines and spoken of well in ceremonies
where gang-elders stand to one side. In Aisle of Macrostatues,
the sigil of House Tarius, long extinct, is set upon the keystone
71

of every archway. Few now recognize the sigil for what it is,
however, and scholars argue over how the tradition came
about and why it persists. In Mathebias, the mid-City is ten
leagues of half-deserted ruin, partial crushfalls, and blackened
stonefire chasms, patrolled by City Legion and Adeptus
Arbites to separate textile mill laborers from alchemical
workers whose deep grudges have lasted five hundred years.
In the lower Spire Secondus, priests plot and scheme over the
ten who will wear the purple by Ministorum decree in the
yearly Sermon of the Ascensionand even murder for that
honor, or so it is whispered. In Embol District, the portage
brotherhoods of the Unified Guild wear hoods and long robes
to obscure their identity; each man further takes a guild-name
and renounces his own. In the Fale mid-City, warm lumens
hang above plant-beds set in the middle of greater avenues,
but not even condensation molds grow in that cracked and
lifeless soil. Instead preachers and stall-sellers use the beds as
a platform for their chants and cries, and slowly spread the dry
dirt out onto the surrounding paving slabs, one footstep at a
time.
The City is a world in and of itself, rich with countless
regional differences and patchwork, half-forgotten histories.
The uniformity of Imperial Creed and scripture, emanating as
much from the Lucid Palace as from Spire Primus cathedrals,
settles but lightly upon the City's myriad variations. Every
district has its peculiarities of speech and culture, its unique
landmarks, its organizations, traditions, and secrets that exist
nowhere else.

relation to the present wards, and which go unremarked by

passing crowds. Archeoexhumators who tunnel the crush zones
in search of artifacts for their patrons care little for the details
of past wards, but antiquities guilders have some interest, as
ancient sigil-posts raised from the deep strata are ever in
fashion in the relic-markets. Equally, while every wizened
elder is his own antechronicler, eager to tell of past years and
old wards, such inconsequential matters are beneath the interest
of true antechroniclers, the professional historiographs who
serve the halls of learning and noble patrons.
Thus the lower wards change and are forgotten, leaving
only their sigils to wear away and be corroded. Administratum
maps and tithe litanies tend to reflect that past rather than the
present wards: data-vaults may be centuries out of date for the
mid-City and contain only sparse entries for the wards of
deeper strata. While it is true that a more diligent record is
made of low-City reprocessing vats, Machine Temples, and
hab-complexes of workers indentured to the worst of
manufactory lords, this accounts for only a small fraction of the
depths. These are mere enclaves in the low strata, clustered
around structural support bases where City law holds at least
some influence.
Yet even beyond the few bastions of comparative order,
the denizens of half-collapsed depths and low-City poverty
mazes mark and name their own wards. Like the citydwellers
above them, the poor know their own ward and those nearby,
by reputation at least, and tell tales of notorious wards that
came before. In the worst of the deep City, wards are
synonymous with ganger territories, the borders sometimes
marked by rotting, piled raque corpses, and sometimes not, but
no less dangerous for it. Ganger wards are as short-lived as the
gangs themselves, but other, lasting wards are sustained
through ill-repute, ruthlessness, or the outright strength of local
powers: a Waiting Guild supply warren shielded by the
visitations of a charitable sisterhood; a shrinehold claimed by
the Red Redemption's fiery zealots; a crime baron's fortress,
surrounded by blockades and hunters; a virulent alchemical
seep that vents toxins and choke-gases; a City fundament
servitor barracks, guarded by decaying auto-weaponry.

Wards
Districts are divided into wards, small reaches each a league or
half a league broad. Wards are formal within the citytop,
named for long-dead guilders and important structures, their
locations and boundaries recorded in numerous data-vaults. A
citytop ward is often as not marked by sigil-posts upon its
principal avenues, or at the very least a grand statue that
stands at an appropriate central location. Descending into the
mid-City, wards become less concrete, however. They center
around hab-blocks, storage vaults, and manufactory clusters,
but tend to shift over the generations, their edges tenuous and
overlapping.
Workers of the mid-City strata know the name of their
own ward, other nearby wards, and perhaps a few hints of the
old demarcations of generations pastand it is their allotted
task to recall that history, for few others will. The mid-City is
littered with old ward-sigils and corroded markers that bear no

Destinations and Addresses

For an outsider, finding any specific location within a ward can
be challenging. The City is a place of brotherhoods and guilds,
pledges and invitations, and so travelers bound for an
unfamiliar destination are either provided with directions or
accompanied by fellows who know the way. Go to this ward,
72

find that avenue, look for this and that landmark, or simply
meet with a representative at the rail head, at the flyer
platform, and be guided the remainder of the way. Even
missives are packaged with careful instructions on how to
locate the ultimate destination or the final recipient. An
address in the City is thus more often a set of advice and
directives than a shorthand cipher or anything so simple as a
way-marker upon a named avenue.
Most major avenues and large structures in the upper
strata are in fact formally named, even if the majority of
connecting alleys, warren-passages, and arrayed hab-temples
are not. In some districts, stonework buildings are haphazardly
numbered or coded to show that they open onto specific
avenues ("Aleph-17 Habs of Descendant 20 Low"), but such
coding schemes are invariably partial, ancient, and nearuseless where they are present at all. Furthermore, few
districts of the City are comprehensively mapped to the level
of individual habs and slope-alleysand those maps are in
any case inaccessible, held by the Machine Cult,
Administratum, City Legion, or Magistratum, none of which
are given to sharing lore.
Simple maps that show only the major avenues, stairs,
and steam-platforms, the boundaries of important wards, and
the largest structures are widely available, however: sold by
criers and at shifting stall-markets, and engraved upon the
greystone walls of rail guild terminals. These serve well
enough to direct pilgrims to the cathedral or law-wrights to
Administratum vaults, but are of little use to someone seeking
a specific hab-temple or vaulted tunnel.
Navigating an unfamiliar ward is best accomplished by
searching for guides who can direct a traveler ever closer to
the final destination. There is the haphazardand potentially
dangerousmethod of accosting likely faces in the avenue
crowds or at the ration-stalls, but every ward is a raque-nest of
ways and levels, and few of those who dwell there know more
than a few score passages, avenue names, or address-codings.
Not all will have a traveler's best interests at heart, either: even
citytop wards have their dangers, and busy crowds can hide
much from the Magistratum and other order-makers.
Potential guides in the citytop and mid-City wards include
the criers, who take scints to advise travelers just as they take
scints to cry rumors and tales that masquerade as news from
far districts. Also the child-gangers and apprentices who run
the back-alleys to find broken walls that give onto fundament
vents. Lastly, perhaps clerks of the nearest Administratum
tithe office, hunched and testy figures who can list hundreds of
avenues and steam-platforms by name and intersection, but

have never seen those places with their own eyes.

In deeper strata, guides are harder to find and the wards
themselves are more maze-like and dangerous to traverse.
There are few welcoming faces within the crushed low-City
reaches far from support pillars and Machine Temples: these
are ruin-tunnels, and warrens where Magistratum enforcers are
a rare sight and the massed poor pay tithes to ganger-lords. All
too many in the poverty caverns would, given the opportunity,
guide outsiders to robbery, ambush, or worse for a bare few
scints or the promise of more.

73

Mortuarium, Within Tolus District

conjectured, depending upon which scholarly faction is
believedas a result of archeoexhumations carried out deep
beneath the City's central spirebase.
Greater vox masts cluster in a few places upon the
ridgeline, taller than even the Great Guilder and set with
platforms and red stab-lights. The latter are lit at night, but
often enough blurred to a mere sky-glow by thick, chemtainted clouds. The Mortuarium ridge also boasts a skeletal,
many-leveled clattertower of the Unified Guild of Moving. It
appears to be a larger, fattened cousin of the masts, bulging at
the top into decks of machinery and square-cornered control
vaults. The clattertower overlooks manse domes and towertops, but is far less solid than their sealed stonework: like the
vox-masts, its sparse structure of reinforced girders and heavy
cable is entirely open to the winds and alchemical rain.

I need not meet a man to know his measure. I need not stand
upon a tower to know its height. I need not journey to a far
place to know its people. Do not look lightly upon these gifts.

- Vessifus, from the Considerations

Mortuarium is a noted Tolus subdistruct, an expanse of gentle

Spire-facing slopes leading down and away from a piled
structure-ridge. The ridgetop is dominated by vast edifices with
foundations that reach down into the mid-City strata: a
cathedral of the Imperial Creed; palatial whitestone manses;
arrayed vox-masts; half-buried macrostatues. The Mortuarium
citytop slopes down from these looming masses, past varied
architectures and further grand structures, descending into an
alchemical slump-vale where tower vents, deserted upperworks, and a railhead are cloaked by flowing rivers of
corrosive fume-mist.
The subdistrict is named for its great circular trade-house,
set into the citytop halfway between cathedral heights and
slump-vale mists, where the agents of corpse-starch barons and
reclamation guilds throughout the City gather to bid upon
death-notes, mortuary predictions, and promissories. An
extensive industry of record-keeping and law-speaking attends
the trade floor, but beneath the Mortuarium citytop there are as
many fabric mills and alchemical processories as scrivening
brotherhoods and law-wright covens. The manufactory masses
of the mid-City and low strata far outnumber the privileged of
the upper scribe wards.

Scions of Wealth and Privilege

The proud ridgetop manses stand apart from the broadest
avenues, carved like channels into the citytop. They are absent
from the shadow of the cathedral, and suitably distant from
both vox-mast clusters and yawning fundament exhausts that
vent shimmering heat and manufactory fumes from the midCity. Manse entrances in the citytop strata are well shielded
from the masses by gates, private avenue-tunnels, and militant
servants. Similarly, the exotic gardens and broad plazas
enjoyed by the nobility and their privileged retainers are
protected against chem-haze and tainted rain by faceted domes
of whitestone and crystal. These small enclaves of wealth are
jeweled in comparison to the strata beneath Mortuarium, yet
are one step removed from poverty in comparison to the true
wealth of the distant Spire Primus.
Guilders and demi-nobles of the Mortuarium ridge include
House Onculus, that holds much of the alchemical industry of
the sump-vale in its withered hands; the Five Mediators, lawwright families who manage the greater balance of corpsestarch bond disputes; two feuding Offspring Houses of the
long-fractured Tolus Promethium Brotherhood; the fallen
House of Miravus, forced from the Voltis Spires ten
generations past; and a dozen others of lesser repute, including
the usual scattering of houses risen to temporary positions of
local wealth within the Unified Guild of Moving. Moving
Guild houses rarely last more than a few generations, and are
often shunned for their comparative lack of tradition. As is the
case throughout the City, more doors are opened by a genuine

The Citytop Strata

The Mortuarium upper ridgeline is crowned for leagues by
immense manses, the residences of noble households and
influential guild elders. Looming over the grand whitestone
towers and domes are far larger and more time-worn structures,
such as the Cathedral of Saint Salesse and the Great Guilder,
the latter a towering macrostatue buried to the waist by the
slow growth of the City. Other macrostatues, younger and less
overtaken by the citytop, gaze out over leagues of deep-cut
avenues leading downslope towards the hazed manufactory
slump-vale below. The shielded balconies and observatories of
the ridgetop manses share that vista; these are pillared and
lavish edifices, built centuries past in imitation of the Maquali
Pattern, a standard template architecture recoveredor falsely
74

connection to antiquity than by piled scints.

Scions of the influential houses of Mortuarium move
within a society of privilege and wealth, but few bear anything
but mistrust and contempt for their peers. Their gatherings and
partnership-compacts are joyless affairs, carried out beneath a
weight of obligation, and even their rivalries lack the bite of
earnest hatred. This poisoned atmosphere is perhaps a
consequence of the continual presence of far greater powers:
noted trade-barons, representatives of City-spanning guilds,
and Spire House seneschals, brought to the Mortuarium trade
floor for matters that are trivial in their eyesyet which
involve sums that could buy and sell even House Onculus
many times over. The resident nobility of Mortuarium are
eternally reminded of their true place in the City: that they are
small cogs in a great machine, far removed from any true
circle of importance.

Cathedral of Saint Salesse

The faux-Maquali manses are imposing structures, wreathed
by statues and intricate facades, but the buttressed walls of the
Orthodoxic Cathedral of Saint Salesse are far greater by any
measure. They rise high above the ridge citytop, rugged cliffs
of shaped greystone that host a populace of gargoyles,
grotesques, and armored saints. At the cathedral's upper
works, where buttresses join the wall-top, open plasma torches
burn a piercing blue both day and night, illuminating the
cathedral architecture in sharp lines and shadows. When
chem-laden clouds roll in to shroud the tallest structures, the
plasma light spreads to a diffuse white glow that is visible for
leagues.
Beneath the cathedral's Spire-facing flying buttresses,
almost filling that vast space, stands the Convent of the Sisters
Verdigris. The outer walls of the convent's training halls and
hab-wings are set with hundreds of crenellated false-bunkers
in the Ministorum Militant pattern, and the convent as a whole
would dominate the Mortuarium ridge if not for the greater
bulk of the cathedral. Both structures extend deep into buried
levels, and their foundations and solitude cells lie well within
the mid-City strata. These enormous masses of reinforced
stone stand upon tecryilite fundament supports, branched from
a massive trunk of crystal that leads down into the depths,
entirely hidden beneath millennia of piled stonework. Such
grand structures could never be established atop a sump-vale,
even if the will to build there existed: they are simply too
heavy for any partially supported upper strata.

The Great Guilder

The chem-scoured torso of a gargantuan statue rises from
amidst palatial domes a little more than a league along the
ridgeline from the cathedral, the splendor of the surrounding
noble residences entirely overshadowed by its size. The reason
for the macrostatue's construction is long forgotten and the
masses know it only as "the Great Guilder," supposing it built
by the ancestors of whichever merchant house presently stands
in greatest repute. Other statues upon the ridge are massive in
and of themselves, but by no means comparable to the Guilder.
They line the Cathedral Ways, assembled from blocks of white,
grey, and veinstone, or rise beside manse upper works to mark
the wealth of the original builders. Like the Great Guilder,
many are partially buried by later construction, and the
alchemical rains long ago ate away both pigments and finely
engraved details.

Cathedral Ways
Three Cathedral Ways cut deep into the ridgetop, crowded
avenues that converge at the plaza gates of the Cathedral of
Saint Salesse. Each is a wide trench floored with worn
flagstones, open to the sky and overlooked by the mismatched
structures that form its walls: exclusive compact-habs, faithworks, the plinths of vast statues. Closer to the cathedral the
thronged avenues are half-blocked by relic markets and every
wall-structure is a shrinean altar and Aquila for every
Imperial saint whose name is engraved within the cathedral, or
so it is said. Hanging vox-grills boom forth prayers and
sermons, competing with the cries of relic-guilders, zealous
lay-preachers, and the countless voices of massed pilgrims and
worshippers.
Burly acolytes of the dominant Orthodoxic faction patrol
the Cathedral Ways armed with shock-stavesor more
commonly lounge upon its side-stairs and raised pillars,
watching lazily for blasphemy or an opportunity to beat down
the makings of unrest. The Magistratum long ago relinquished
the Cathedral Ways, and enforcers from the central barracks
only make an appearance under the worst of circumstances.
Such peace and punishment as exists is imposed by the
Orthodoxic acolytes, many of whom are little better than the
gangers endemic to the low-City, being a mix of petty thugs
and brutal, unimaginative zealots. They are all too ready with
their fists and staves, but the threat of such crude ministrations
nonetheless keeps the crowds to a semblance of order. Each
new day sees a mix of intoxicant-drunk pilgrims and mill
75

workers, guild retinues and noble servants, gangers and ragged

Waiting Guild assemblies from the low wards, youths and
tutors from the scholams, and fervent acolytes of many rival
sects, all pushing, shouting, and even coming to blows upon
the avenues. All Mortuarium from low to high at some point
walks the Cathedral Ways, yet rarely is there any earnest riot.
In addition to the usual alley slopes, stairs, and tunnelavenues that lead down from the Cathedral Ways into the
citytop, there are great steam-pneumatic lift-platforms set at
intervals. Broad grillwork cages slowly rise and fall in their
shafts at regular intervals, wreathed in steam from the
surrounding machinery. The lift-platforms disgorge mill
workers and servants from mid-City avenues a hundred spans
below, and at times even carry throngs of the hungry poor
from deep poverty warrens, Waiting Guild unfortunates who
must petition for permission to ascend to the citytop in any
great numbers. When shifts change and the mill gates open in
the deeper City, soon enough the faithful stream from liftplatform cages to swell the pilgrim multitudes. Crowds gather
outside the shrines, or beneath crackling vox-grills in the
cathedral plaza, watched from on high by the blank eyes of
chem-weathered statues.

overhead. The Associative is one of the more influential groups

within the subdistrict's Moving Guild, for its ancestral brethren
long ago captured a hereditary compact to transport certain
materials through the scribe wards. The steam-cars are ever
laden with scrivening tools, silversheaf stacks, ink vats, and
shred-waste from the scribe pens, bearing these and other
compact-sanctioned cargo to and from slipways that circle
down to mid-City storage vaults.
The scribe-slope's greystone walls hide long, cubicle-lined
corridors and halls transformed into plasteen fence-board
warrens, the spaces filled with cogitation plinths, parchment
stacks, autoquill lecterns, lexographic thrones, and the many
other duty stations of the scribe's trade. The parchment halls
hum with the background noise of scrivening: insular
hierarchies of numericists and clerks toil day and night, bent
over their labors as task-counters patrol in search of idlers and
the distracted. They work on an endless flow of ledgers, bondpledges, transaction seals, and a thousand other forms of record
generated by the Mortuarium trade floor and its attendant
industries. Menial workers pledged to life-long service in any
one of a score of Moving Guild brotherhoods walk the
hallways in short processions, led to their destinations by
apprentice scribes and bowed beneath heavy loads: parchment
folios, ink-canisters, and racked dataslates.
Small shrines, narrow scholams, and tunnel-like tutorial
residences are crammed between the greystone work-mazes or
cling to their walls. They appear as almost architectural
afterthoughts, filling gaps once planned to hold little more than
fundament piping or back-alleys, or barely planned at all.
Despite their appearance, the scholams are more wealthy than
their larger cousins of the mid-City, and their tutors bask in the
patronage of eminent brotherhoods. A skilled apprentice might
strive for years within these small scholams to gain a
certification of fitness and entry to a select association of
scribes. The tutors award their scrollwork blessings grudgingly
indeedunless the apprentice happens to be drawn from a
patron's circle, of course, in which case award is all but a
formality. Yet there are ever ten young apprentices waiting for
each possible vacancy, hopefuls drawn from amongst the
children and grandchildren of those who already toil within the
scribe wards.
The uppermost scribe-pens and towers, their squared
rooftops etched by alchemical taints in the air and rain, are
occupied by wealthy brotherhoods and populated by an elect
hierarchy of clerks. The ruinous cost required to hold these
parchment halls is only undertaken by those with a longstanding position in the vast torrent of scints that passes

Upper Scribe-Slopes
Citytop avenues branch and cross downslope from the vast
structures of the ridgeline, deepening to become chasms
between many-floored numericist towers, parchment halls,
and scribe-pens. These squared greystone structures have
narrow slit-windows and little ostentation in their exterior
stonework: a subtle relief here; an embossed scrollwork there.
The scribe-pens pile atop one another, pauses between
centuries of steady construction marked by layered alignments
of fundament channels, bridges crossing the avenue-chasms,
and networks of narrow squeeze-tunnels. The tunnels are often
the shortest path between adjoining structures, crowded by
apprentices as they hurry about the tasks set by their elders
and betters.
The citytop chasm-avenues and tunnels below are ever
busy, populated by serried clerks, proud law-wrights, portage
gangs of the Moving Guild, and cleansers laden with
equipment. Magistratum enforcers occupy side-wall alcoves of
the larger way-junctions; assigned from mid-City
stationhouses, they stand apart from the masses, watching.
Ugly, broad-bodied steam-cars of the Greater Tolus
Scrollbearers' Associative part the crowds as they chug slowly
along the upper avenues, following guide-chains suspended
76

through the Mortuarium trade floor. That massive, buttressed

structure dominates the downslope view, and a true hierarch of
scribes can stand at the slit-windows of his hall to gaze upon
the trade floor at the commencement of each new day. These
privileged individuals include feuding assessors pledged to the
greater reclamation guilds; wizened elder law-wrights
compacted to the Five Mediators; Spire House scint-wardens;
and other similar figures. The scribes who labor for these
senior guilders and other worthies are much envied by their
peers in lower, buried, and less eminent vaults, but these are
treacherous circles for the ambitious. Competition in the
hierarchies of favor is ruthless, corruption is widespread, and
the false-reckoners and record-forgers need their sacrificial
victimsyounger scriveners set in place to be thrown to the
magisters or the rough justice of the crime barons when a
scheme begins to fray at the edges.

Mortuarium Wards
In the midst of the lower scribe-slope stands the massively
buttressed drum and dome that gives the district its name: the
Mortuarium. The interior is completely open, an echoing
space above a circular trade floor of polished veinstone, where
reclamation guilders and the representatives of noble houses
barter mortuary predictions, waste-tokens, and promissories
written on future corpse-starch production. Huge pict-screens
mounted upon suspensors and machine arms display changing
trade counts, moving in response to the tenor of the floor or
demands made by guilders and tithe-assessors. The
Mortuarium's thick outer walls are hollowed by lift-platform
shafts and passages leading to galleries that circle the trade
floor space at many levels. Robed figures gather there each
day to engage in the machinations of their trade, enter into
whispered intrigues, and watch the business of others with
sharp eyes.
A vast tide of commerce washes through the trade floor,
staggering sums when measured in scints, and all parties seek
to gain every possible advantage in their dealings. Trade
representatives and their retinues frequently engage in threats,
data-theft, coercion, and the corruption of tithe-assessors, as
their patrons in the Spire Houses and greater guilds largely
stand above mundane City law. There is no balance of power
within the Mortuarium: every public statement uttered by a
trade representative is likely a lie, the friend of today is the
enemy of tomorrow, and alliances can shift in an instant. All
agreements are entered into warily, regardless of the
counterparty, and proven scint-flows are guarded in the

expectation of future treachery. Disputes between trade

principals are mediated by select law-wrights, or by assassin
guilds and crime barons when necessaryand every action
undertaken in a commerce feud is weighed against its cost;
even long-standing foes continue to forge trades with bared
teeth while there is profit in it. This is an environment in which
the suspicious and the strong prosper: the Mortuarium is
dominated by the greater guilds and Spire Houses, those with
the resources to manipulate prices and trade countsand force
others to comply with their schemes, one way or another.
Lesser participants are eyed with a certain hunger by these
privileged insiders.
Missives stream to and from the Mortuarium wards. The
great ridgetop clattertower is kept busy with the orders of
portage brotherhoods and data-quill factors who supply the
mundane needs of the scribe-slope halls. Trade representatives
and their cloaked missive-bearers travel downslope, to send
ciphered messages through the Tolus-Gainst-Spire railhead
vox-line, or load silversheaf folios and dataslate racks for
transport to distant taskmasters. A few, however, venture to use
the decaying central Vocae office buried in the mid-Cityits
disrepair and disuse is thought by some to be better suited to
missives whose very existence should remain secret.
The Mortuarium's crushing weight rests atop the upper
supports of a circus-carnival known as the Magister. Like the
trade floor, it is also thick drum-wall structure surrounding a
great central void, braced by massive buttressesbut long ago
buried by layered stonework. The trade floor and scribe-pens
dominate the citytop, but the character of these wards changes
quickly in the lower levels: a few stairs and slope-alleys or a
short lift-platform descent leads to painted walls, carniefolk
habs, roving barter-courts, and the ebb and flow of circus
crowds, timed to the cycle of entry gates in the mid-City
below. The mix of scribes, trade guilders, carniefolk, and
pleasure-seekers is strange indeed, as are the services and
criminals that prosper at this boundary between cultures. The
joygirl trade and narco-houses are the least measure of what
takes place in shadowed corners: crime barons and their
followers are drawn upwards by the lure of scints beyond
measure, while trade representatives are drawn downward by
the need for services best provided by outlaws. The two sides
meet, strike compacts, and betray one another at the boundary
between their domains, where the Magister blends into the
Mortuarium.
More than a millennium has passed since the circus upperworks last saw the sky, and much was rebuilt to form the
necessary foundation for the Mortuarium. Half-collapsed view
77

galleries and long corridor sections lined by lookout niches yet

remain, however, hidden or walled away in the uppermost
reaches of the circus-carnival and the lowest trade floor
foundations. Portals and balconies that once looked out over
an older, lower citytop are blocked by stone slabs and
fundament ducts. These dust-choked spaces are seemingly
deserted, below the forgotten record halls of the trade floor,
and above the sparsely populated lumen levels of the circus,
where corroding metal grid-walks hang suspended over the
central circus vault and ragged tech-adepts tend to stab-light
arrays. But the old view galleries are not empty: they are used
by the worst amongst guilders and carnival brotherhoods
aliketo hide narco-caches, to conduct secretive liaisons, and
to conceal the measured threats and violence that lie behind
both carnival glamour and trade floor dealings.

tainted rain. Plazas set every quarter-league on the citytop

boast further works: weathered reliefs of saints and forgotten
heroes, and so very many statues that some are crowded plinth
to plinth in ragged rows, as though awaiting purchase or
transport.
Barter-courts, shrines, thin habs, and ration houses crowd
into the space left free by the artisan brotherhoods, and are
generally safe enough, most well-watched by Magistratum
enforcers or hired thief-takers. The relic-markets, however, are
the worst of their kind. Artifact traders of the upper strata are a
volatile mix of carniefolk, acolytes, outright criminals, and
industrious peddlers, who stage and sell false antiquities,
charms, and crudely fashioned icons of the Imperial Creed. The
markets are busy and loud, their popularity driven by the
common desire to own a piece of the City's deep past. Those in
earnest search of true relics would have to descend to more
dangerous markets in the depths, however, as few true
antiquities rise to the citytop without being claimed by agents
of noble museums, archeoexhumators, or other serious
collectors.

Stone Artisans and Portage Ways

Winding, shallow avenues lead downward from the
Mortuarium and scribe-slope wards, crowded with portage
brethren of the Unified Guide of Moving. Their ragged mobs
and processions follow sigil-posts set at each turn, bowed
beneath their packs as they pass covered barter-courts, ration
houses, relic-markets, and the expansive work-halls of
successful artisan brotherhoods. From there the portage-routes
descend into the slump-vale, its structures hidden by pooled
chem-haze.
The artisan citytop is sustained by a complex web of
relationships and lazy feuds. Its ever-changing brotherhoods
center upon a small number of artisan houses and their
hereditary compacts, written long ago by great stone magnates
and still honored by upslope guilds and nobility. The most
talented artisans produce engraved stonework for the
Cathedral of Saint Salesse and Convent of the Sisters
Verdigris, but other equally lucrative arrangements exist. Still,
of the former Stone Guilds of Tolus, little is left but the
hereditary compacts and a few prized life-warrants that are the
key to their continuation.
Inheritors and claimants have carved out citytop wards for
themselves, but the old influence of the stone magnates is
lostno elder artisan, no matter how respected, is presently
the equal of his patrons. Nonetheless, the stoneworkers thrive
and their craft spills from the work-halls, much of it
commissioned to meet the original compact terms and then
forgotten. Avenues and structures are set with countless
statues, ornate pillars, and engraved false-walls, these works
pitted and discolored by their long exposure to the chem-

Alchemical Slump-Vale
The slump-vale citytop is an uneven pattern of manufactory
vault-roofs, cooling towers, vents steaming mists and vapor,
and a web of narrow avenues lined by haulage entrances. The
air is hazed with alchemical wastes at the clearest of times, and
on some days thick yellow and white reactant-mists flow
across the vale like low, dense rivers, obscuring all vision.
Signs and sigils abound, marked on every surface, but corroded
and largely incomprehensible to anyone outside the alchemical
brotherhoods. Deep pits yawn between the upper-works of
some larger structures, gaps left for fundament construction
that never occurred, some surrounded by fields of broken and
canted statues, their features eaten away by centuries of fumes.
The deserted upper reaches of hab-blocks loom between
peaked manufactory vaults, and abandoned works stand
surrounded by rows of stacked greystone slabs, left that way
for generations.
Few other than the masked Moving Guild crews of
antiquated promethium haulers can be found on the slump
citytop avenues, their transports seeping fumes as they carry
stacked chem-casks to and from the railhead. Bands of outcast
travelers and Waiting Guild runaways sometimes risk lung-rot
to camp in the dubious shelter of abandoned habs and works,
however. The more cunning of these malviatoris strike
secretive compacts with vat-worker gangswho have their
78

own reasons for haunting the deserted hab-levelswhilst

others venture upslope each morning to escape the worst of
the alchemical mists and beg for alms.

Tolus-Gainst-Spire Railhead
The sprawling railhead and loading concourse of the TolusGainst-Spire Rail Guild stand on raised struts and stonework
platforms directly above the steaming vents of House Onculus
Alchemical #12. Roofed by translucent crystal arches, the
concourse was once a place of gleaming metals and veinstone,
but its surfaces are now chem-eaten and blackened. Broad
stairs and transport ramps sweep up to the railhead frontage
from three converging avenues. They are perpetually crowded,
the ramps usually half-blocked by loaded six-spans and
haulers. Raised rail lines leave the concourse loading docks to
run above the citytop for a league, then enter the Mortuariumfacing ridge-slope beyond the slump. There the line descends
to merge into deeper rail guild tunnels, ultimately leading to
the City's primary spirebase.
Despite a bulky, thrumming system of air-blessing
stations set about the exterior of the railhead, the air within is
thick with slump-vale fumes and the sharp taste of unshielded
lightning junctions. Numerous power-conduits and thick
shunts run from a central plasma generator housing to charge
rail-tug capacitance stacks. One concourse sidewall is taken up
by clattering brass and stonework vox-stations, where
missives are fed into a vox-line connected to distant stations.
The railhead technology stands in the open, unshielded by
stonework, power-machinery and loading cranes attended by
covens of chanting tech-adepts and their hulking servitors. The
rail-tugs themselves are an imposing tech-pattern, engineered
to pull far greater loads than they are given by the rail guild.
Their every line and curve speaks to the power beneath their
armored shells, butlike the railhead and the Rail Lords
themselvesthese engines are much decayed from their
former greatness.
Mechanicus adepts pledged to the rail guild keep their
own council: they ignore the masses crowded about the voxstations and railcars, where shouting portage guilders and serfs
wrestle plasteen boxes along loading ramps. Rail-schedule
announcements boom from hanging vox-grills to periodically
drown out all other noise. Barter-court representatives and
recently arrived railcar guardians exchange seal-marks and
inspect manifests as compacts are countersigned and goods
exchanged. Surly rail guild workers gather in clots, halfwearing faded Tolus-Gainst-Spire colors and awaiting

assignment to a ready railcar or other task. A range of dubious

services are proffered by mid-City peddlers, slump-vale
cripples, and manufactory outcastswatched by a patrol of
armored Magistratum enforcers assigned to the railhead, but
rarely stopped. Missive guilders wearing ornate breather masks
purchase their journey passes, and then compete for space
within the few enclosed railcars with carniefolk beast traders,
commissioned artisans, pilgrim brethren, servitor-handlers, and
other varied travelers.
Watching this all from a control vault raised above the
loading docks, the rail master and his ranked aides and
apprentices strive to order the commerce of the railhead. They
place schedules, grant vox-line access, and on occasion rally
the workers to take up spars and clubs to defend the concourse
from a roused mob of portage brethren. There is no love lost
between the Rail Lords and the Unified Guild of Moving, but
this feud of centuries rarely leads to earnest violence in
Mortuariumthere are riots at the railhead only when the
portage brotherhoods are greatly disadvantaged and their
leaders unusually weak or desperate.

The Mid-City Strata

Textile mills and plasteen shaperies cluster about the branched
tecryilite supports of the central Mortuarium strata-ridge.
Broad air vents and fundament passages containing thick water
pipes feed these huge structures: their machineries run
constantly, shift after shift. Storage vaults and guildhalls
surround the mills, pressing up against the foundation levels of
citytop structures, and reaching down to lower strata. These
industries sustain the manufactory masses, who ascend day and
night from mid- and low-City habs to toil for a few meager
scints and the protections of a work brotherhood. It is a hard
life of monotonous, often crushing labor, one that begins with
an early apprenticeship and ends with a failing, work-worn
bodybut there are few alternatives, and the vast majority of
these half-educated workers learn to accept the obligations
placed upon them by mill brethren, preachers, and shift-bosses.
The vaulted ways and pillared concourses that cross the
center of the Mortuarium ridge bustle at all times, but flood to
capacity when manufactory shifts change. Redoubled crowdnoise echoes through the surrounding network of tunnel-alleys,
plazas, and steep, narrow stairs wedged between layered
structures. Ecclesiarchs from the cathedral wards chant
devotions to the God-Emperor, exhorting all who pass to kneel
beneath the Aquila. Ragged supplicants, one cheek scarred by
the Pilgrim's Brand, beg for the scints that will allow them to
79

make pilgrimage to the spirebase. Factors shout the prices of

their wares, and sanctioned criers call out rumors from far
reaches of the City. Rumbling six-spans of the Moving Guild
force a slow passage through the crowds on broader avenues,
so loaded down with mill products and plasteen bales that
their wheels scrape the bodywork. Where few good routes for
promethium transports exist, packaged goods are instead
rolled through alleys and stair-slopes by sweating mover
brethren, in lines of portage that can span entire wards.
Massed manufactory workers mob the ration-houses, halfintoxicated, hungry, and belligerent. Gangers and ragged
Waiting Guild brethren from deeper strata keep to darkened
corners and side-alleys, waiting for an opportunity, or simply
for a Magistratum patrol to pass from sight.
Lift-platforms of various sizes provide the shortest path
between different layers of the mid-City, a gift for those
unwilling or unable to navigate a maze of stairs and slopealleys. The lift plazas are wreathed in machine-steam, their
vaults drip with condensate, and they crowd to capacity during
shift changesa volatile mix of citydwellers packed shoulder
to shoulder, jostling the resident barter-court traders from their
allotted positions.

between rival zealots are commonplace in lower strata. There

are broken heads, cries of outrage, and regrettable deaths, but
the most persistent troublemakers cannot rise far in the
cathedral hierarchy, and the influence of any particular
demagogue is usually limited by the presence of his rivals.
When a lesser sect has raised mobs, rioted in the mid-City, or
otherwise threatened Orthodoxic dominance, the cathedral
hierarchs have declared blasphemy and send ringleaders to the
Magistratum, or imposed a collective penance of pilgrimage to
far distant shrines. Either strategy has usually been enough to
diminish the influence of a troublesome sect within
Mortuarium.
Wards adjoining the cathedral foundations contain a mix
of established hab-communes, impromptu pilgrim camps, gated
hermitages, priories, theosophic scholams, plazas given over to
faith-markets, and shrines of many different stylesbut in
every shrine, the Aquila. Statues of saints, both celebrated and
forgotten, line the avenues and stair-alleys. Sanctioned
preachers mount the plinths and faith-maddened zealots climb
up upon ledges where they stand to shout and gesticulate at the
passing crowds. Tunnel-ways that run alongside the ancient
cathedral walls provide fragmentary glimpses of macrostatues
and vast bas-relief figures long buried by the City. Some of the
great statues have been hollowed to expand existing habs or
form contemplation cells for monkish orders. Numerous
tunnel-gates pierce the thick cathedral walls, some following
the path of fundament ducts and flanked by vast pipes, others a
part of the original stonework. The lower cathedral levels are
entirely open, and a constant flow of the faithful passes through
these gateways.
Some open spaces are lit by Ministorum pictwalls rather
than lumens, larger and more imposing than those present
elsewhere in the subdistrict. The age-worn pictwall of the Lift
Plaza of Saint Tesemial stands a full ten spans high and thirty
broad. Barely half of its pict-segments remain lit, yet it still
recognizably displays the Abbot-Elect of the famed Cathedral
Trancius, high in the distant Spire Primus. Flanked by worn
stone columns and false-brass cherubim, the pictwall casts
shifting purple light and booming blessings upon the pilgrim
crowds, drowning out the plaza faith-market and echoing
through surrounding tunnels. The traders, long since deafened,
sell their scint-parchment charms and rune-print prayer scrolls
with hand-signals and nods.

Ministorum Wards
The sprawling lower reaches of the Cathedral of Saint Salesse
enclose all of the varied structures of a religious community:
shrines, entombment-halls, monuments, sealed hermit cells,
prayer chambers, dormitories, cisterns of blessed water,
storage vaults, and countless altars, to name but a few. It is
populated by unruly acolytes and priests of numerous lesser
sects, each occupying their own section of the low cathedral:
Drusians, Agonists, Qualmiarchi, and many others. These
massed zealots are in theory constrained and instructed by the
dominant Othodoxic hierarchs of the Tolus Ministorum, but in
practice have long overflowed the cathedral's capacity. The
varied priests, theosophists, faith-tutors, and their followers
occupy the surrounding wards as much as their own reaches
within the cathedral itself, and carry the Imperial Creed
throughout the subdistrict as they see fit. Pilgrim brethren and
the faithful poor swell their ranks, swept up by whichever
faction best harnesses their fervor.
For so long as these lesser sects cause little meaningful
unrest, the Orthodoxists tolerate their unrulinesswhich is not
to say that there is peace within the cathedral or the
surrounding mid-City wards. Orthodoxic acolytes are
numerous and heavy-handed upon the citytop, but clashes

Hidden Fundament
Much of the mid-City fundament is hidden away within
80

concealed shafts and behind thick, unbroken stonework.

Machine Cult servitor transports crawl through these spaces
on hooked legs, carrying the lesser tech-adepts who tend to
churning pumps, fans, power conduits, purity-filters, and
countless other installations. Fundament-clade Mechanicus
rarely interact with other citydwellers, and most are as distant
from common mankind as the fundament machinery itself.
The minds of these tech-adepts settle into well-worn tracks
following their initiation into the Machine Cult, steered by
ritual and neuroaugmetic implants, and they react poorly to the
confusions and upheavals of human interaction.
That the fundament works to the favor of the City is a
blessing, and that it fails is a curse, but there is little that either
the masses or their leaders can do to influence either situation.
The Adeptus Mechanicus act as they see fit in maintaining the
thrumming tech-devices and machine stations that provide
cleansed air, blessed water, and capacious powerand their
decisions are inscrutable at the best of times. The Magi who
orchestrate the Mortuarium fundament dwell in the depths of
the structure-ridge, within armored Machine Temples of
reclamation and power generation. They have lived for long
centuries within the bounds of their limited purview, rarely
leaving their control thrones, and their minds have become
different and distant. These Magi are if anything even less
accessible than the fundament-clade tech-adepts who do their
bidding.

Servant Habs
Nobles and guild elders of the Mortuarium ridgetop maintain
large households. Each palatial manse is a small town in its
own right, possessed of its own long-standing traditions and
rigid hierarchy of servitude. A household's mix of specialists,
militants, hereditary serfs, and compact-servants must be
housed, however, and thus beneath the whitestone palaces lie
mid-City wards of well-kept servant habs, crossed by broad
and quiet avenues. These habs were once the splendid manses
and drum-towers of an older citytop, styled in the manner of
ancient temples. Their outer walls remain intact, the worn,
heavy stonework carved to form reliefs and scriptural verse,
but the interior reaches were long ago rebuilt and subdivided
into storage vaults, residences, ration halls, and dormitories.
This upper section of the mid-City is separated from the
surrounding mills and shaperies by guarded vault-passages,
grill-gates, and reinforced supporting walls ten spans thick.
Lesser servants of the wealthy and the powerful regularly
leave their wards to trade in the barter-courts and conduct

other errands, but their regimented lives of comparative

privilege are nonetheless largely hidden from the manufactory
masses.

Magistratum Barracks
The primary subdistrict Magistratum barracks and prison stand
two hundred spans below a ridgetop vox mast, linked to it by
thickly armored data-conduits. They are imposing, windowless
structures, former plasteen mills with thick walls of reinforced
greystone. The surrounding stonework was cleared away at
some point in the past to form tall avenues, and the entrance
vaults are studded with weapon ports.
Enforcer patrols are normally widely dispersed from the
main barracks, assigned to walk long-unchanged routes, watch
avenue junctions at allotted times, or occupy one of the many
stationhouse bunkers scattered throughout the Mortuarium
strata. Squads are also detached to guard Administratum adepts
in the course of their duties, or compacted to protect noble and
guild interests. There is a hierarchy of favor and corruption
within the barracks, however, distinct from that of mere rank
and seniority, which determines whether an enforcer is
regularly directed to dangerous low-City routes or given an
easier path. Regardless, the Magistratum only masses, heavily
armed and armored, for riots or other great disturbances. It is
rare to see more than a single squad of enforcers gathered
beyond a stationhouse, even in the more dangerous reaches of
the low-City.
The Magistratum prison is crowded, filthy, and inhumane:
the unfortunates taken by patrols are thrown into holding cells
regardless of capacity and crimemurderers, gangers,
blasphemers, petty thieves, and the innocent are all locked up
together with barely room to lie down. The air-blessing units
work poorly and it can take half a year for the record of any
new prisoner to reach magisterial review. The pace at which
records of imprisonment, identification, and confession
progress through the Magistratum is painfully slow throughout
the City, but particularly so in Mortuarium. Sarnus Envold, a
gaunt figure entrusted with command of the Mortuarium
stationhouses, believes in the necessity of penanceand that
all captives brought in by his enforcers are guilty of some
crime against God-Emperor and City. In his eyes a holding cell
must harrow its occupants, such that some measure of justice
will be done regardless of later machinations by magisters and
law-wrights.

81

The Scribe Maze

and distraction. The carnival mid-City is a mote in the eyes of

the Magistratum, and enforcers claim a toll of prisoners from
each new night of intoxicated revelrywhilst the carniefolk,
and the criminals who cloak themselves in patchwork carnival
garb, extract a tithe of their own. The intoxicant-felled, stripped
of all valuables, the beaten, and the dead are found in low
slope-alleys after the circus gates close.
The circus crowds see little of this when they are granted
leave from toil, the manufactory brotherhoods, the artisans, the
apprentices, and the clerks gathered to fritter away their few
scints upon spectacle and pleasure. They stream into the
Magister, intoxicated brethren supporting one another, through
gates flanked by ancient bluestone statues: law-makers and
law-speakers clad in a formal garb of the pre-Imperial age. The
masses come and go as beast-slaughters, gladiatorial
acrobatics, promethium explosions, and other exhibitions take
placefor much of the attraction of the Magister lies outside
its walls, the circus itself and its varied sports merely a beacon
to draw crowds into the nearby wards.
The circus-carnival is surrounded by countless shrines to
the base desires: companion associations, narco-houses, lustmiddens, risk halls, and a range of other establishments lie
hidden within a maze of avenues and stairs. They span the
gamut from faux-manse frontages that sell exorbitant beautycompanion compacts to run-down pits where tired-eyed Rund
Breed joygirls offer diluted intoxicants or run risk-games with
rigged odds. Some of these establishments are outright
extensions of the Magister, just another of the many ways in
which carniefolk capture scints from the masses or cloak
dubious acts from prying eyes. There are independent
companion houses and risk halls, however, many of which
claim to be Sanctioned Providersbut the Administratum
faction that governs such matters in Tolus is at the very least
distant and quite possibly extinct. Those who claim to fall
under its purview, and thereby act within City law, are
scrutinized by venal tithe-assessors and Magistratum enforcers.
An accommodation of some sort is usually reachedand if
not, names and places soon enough shift to fill the void.
The circus-carnival wards are raucous and unruly on any
given night, but are brought to a state of near riot on
Orthodoxic feast days, when the Magister turns inside-out, its
armed acrobats and beast-handlers overtaking the nearby strata.
Chem-madded beasts from the breeding pens are set loose on
deeper tunnel vaults, bounties placed on their heads and
hooves, whilst promethium torches are lit in every plaza and
the Aquila daubed upon greystone walls in gold and silver
pigments. Crowds stream from the shrines and down from the

Beneath the scrivener wards lies a reach of the mid-City

known as the Maze, where vaulted avenues split into a web of
slanted passages and thin stairs. Much of the Maze is too
cramped for promethium vehicles, its narrow ways squeezed
between piled and close-packed habs, home to a horde of
clerks, carniefolk, mill shift-bosses, and barter-court
merchants. Greystone hab exteriors are sculpted to resemble
shrines of the distant past, and worn paving stones are swept
clean by crippled workers for a pittance in charity. Beneath
their feet, the lower reaches of the Maze are far less
welcoming, however: a sump of discarded waste and defaced
walls, a refuge for the unwanted and the criminal, and the
Magistratum's first recourse when hunting fugitive
blasphemers and lesser hereteks.
Small plazas stand where slant-alleys cross one another,
set with statues of Imperial heroes and ornate
fountainswhich are mostly dry, as the fundament channels
corroded or collapsed long ago. In higher levels, some spaces
are clumsily painted with scenes from Orthodoxic scripture,
others with peeling feast-day motifs from recent years. Every
such alley-junction in the upper Maze has its barter-court,
ration-house, and passing crowds. In the lower Maze, they
stand empty of all but the gangers who sometimes gather
there.
Long stair spirals and hissing steam-pneumatic liftplatforms link the Maze to citytop scribe wards. Each morning
and evening countless scriveners make the long climb, as only
the most privileged brethren are allotted one of the prized liftplatform tokens. The rest must make an aching spiral
pilgrimageor fall from the mid-City into the poverty caverns
and Waiting Guilds when they are no longer able. Scribe
brotherhoods assist the unfortunate and the elderly, but are
limited in their charity by compacts inked long ago with
uncaring powers of the upper strata. Bitter, age-crippled
scribes are commonplace in the low Maze, clinging to the last
handholds that save them from the squalid embrace of the
low-City.

Circus-Carnival Wards
The hollow drum of the Magister spans many levels of the
mid-City, and each level has its entry gates, set at regular
intervals in the outer wall. The circus-carnival stands at the
center of numerous narrow, radiating wards whose converted
habs and ration-houses offer a hundred varieties of dissolution
82

Cathedral of Saint Salesse, enough to fill every last alley and

stairway surrounding the circus. Intoxicants flow, decorated
steam-transports and painted pilgrim brethren attempt
impossible processions through the narrow avenues, and
impromptu gladiatorial exhibitions rouse the masses, spilling a
crush of color-splashed, shouting carniefolk and intoxicated
revelers into the surrounding wards.

The Scint-Hump
The Tolus-Mortuarium Tithe Vault sprawls within the midCity a league from the Magister. By far the largest buried
structure in the subdistrict, this stronghold of the
Administratum is a fortress in all but name, its thick armorshell enclosing level after level of cell-barracks, work halls,
and record vaultsand the dreary, mechanical lives of
countless clerks. Scriveners pledged to service arrive as pallid
apprentices and spend the rest of their lives hidden behind
these walls, rarely venturing far from their assigned stations.
Few classes of functionary are permitted to leave the Tithe
Vault, most notable of which are the tithe-assessors: cloaked
in Administratum grey, they bear staves topped by the Aquila,
carry brass-framed dataslates as a mark of rank, and are
attended in their duties by well-armed Magistratum squads.
A sealed and gleaming avenue connects the upper reaches
of the Tithe Vault to a citytop plaza and the Spire-facing gates
of the Mortuarium trade floor. Bronze pillars and statues of the
saints line the avenue, each draped in metallic cloth. The roofvaulting is a masterwork: a league of images from the
Processional of Wonders, a suppressed record of the years in
which the Imperium claimed the City for the God-Emperor of
Mankind. Only tithe-assessors and their retinues are permitted
upon the avenue, a constant procession of grey-robed figures
sent to ensure that all upon the trade floor happens in
accordance with Administratum dictates. From there they
journey outward to assay the rest of the subdistrict.
Regardless of the intent of superior adepts and writ of
City law, Tithe Vault emissaries inevitably become corrupt to
the core, quick to wield power or avenge petty slights, but
readily made the useful tools of nobles and trade barons. This
is well known throughout Mortuariumtithe-assessors are
only welcomed by the patrons who own their loyalty, and even
in the mid-City these adepts must be well guarded against
violence.
Tunnel-avenues near the Tithe Vault give way to broad
stairways or veer steeply upward in switchbacks to clear the
great mass of the Administratum fortress and its attendant

structures. The mid-City crowds know this as the "scint-hump,"

the worn slabs of slope-tunnels and stairways imagined to rest
atop a buried hill of treasure, a vast repository of coin-vaults
and stacked promissories. In reality the tithes collected by
roving assessors are sent on to the spirebase at irregular
intervals, following schedules and slow routes through the City
set a thousand years past. Only moldered, rusted records
remain stored behind the vast portals of the Tithe Vault, but
they are nonetheless warded by emplaced weapon servitors,
electrocution plating, and a dozen other forms of lethal techdevice.
The deepest record halls were once each the equal of an
Imperial librarium: replete with lexographic devices; watched
over by the Machine Cult; the arrangement of their shelving
blocks and data racks manipulated by vast machineries. Now
they corrode, however, the records of past centuries wasted
away into data-rust and the rot of fungus on silversheaf, the
defense mechanisms erratic and dangerous. Too few techadepts tend to these vaults, whilst senior Administratum adepts
care nothing for the oldest records, or indeed for any of what
lies in the lower levels. To their eyes the deep halls are a
suitable place to exile the unwanted and little more. Even the
very structure of the Tithe Vault breaks down within its depths:
its foundations press upon the uppermost poverty warrens of
the low-City, and there are places where the armor-walls are
buckled and broken open by the settling of vast
massesforming an often fatal invitation to the Waiting Guild
poor and ambitious gangers.

Underways of the Moving Guild

Downslope of the scint-hump and the Magister, every mid-City
way that leads into the slump-vale is filled with brethren of the
Unified Guild of Moving. These vaulted avenues, many lined
with carved pillars bearing the motifs of extinct barter-trade
associations, effectively belong to the Guild, and other
travelers quickly find that there is little space for them. Even
trudging packbearer processions are sometimes forced into
side-alleys to clear a slow passage for the promethium engine
six-spans and laden steam-cars of wealthier brotherhoods.
Many of these bearer-serfs are laden with rations allotted by
the reclamation guilds, as fundament industries are sparse in
the Mortuarium slump. Great pipes that might have carried a
slurry of protein-reconstitute and tech-blessed water from the
waste-processories lie crushed in the depths, or were long ago
converted into habs and manufactory machine spaces.
83

Slump Alchemical Wards

of the thronged vat-workers are untouched by chem-burns or

toxin sickness.
The slump mid-City avenues are crowded to overflowing
at shift changes and deserted of all but chem-haze and the
Moving Guild at other times. Their walls are set with bluestone
slabs, once engraved with inspirational prayers and scenes
from the lives of the saints. Few are more than a century old
but the vapors have eaten them to illegibility. Corroded bronze
sigil-posts mark important waypoints for packbearers and
flatbed steam-cars, but they too have lost all of their
distinguishing marks.
The fumes and reactant-mists are not left completely
unaddressed: fundament tech-adepts constantly herd slow,
clanking fan-servitors about the slump mid-City, moving as
directed by their arcane data-psalms. A shift spent at the gates
of Alchemical #7, causing the fume-carpet there to fly up into
the vaults; a shift amidst transient barter-stalls of the Brethren's
Way, kicking up waste-squalls and setting plasteen stall-covers
flapping. Back and forth the Mechanicus trudge from one
obscure waypoint to another, tasked with keeping fume-laden
air in circulation and the worst reactants apart, lest they further
damage hidden fundament machinery.

The slump-vale strata contain the economic heart of House

Onculus of Tolus: alchemical manufactories that produce the
varied and poisonous compounds used in the creation of
plasteen, ceracrete, false-brass, and other materials. The
present aged Baron Onculus occupies a sprawling manse high
upon the Mortuarium ridgetop. Its towers survey the industry
of the fume-shrouded slump, but the Baron and his scions
rarely descend from on high. Instead a coven of trusted,
tyrannical retainers oversee House Onculus interests directly
and in person: watching the vat-worker brethren for signs of
disloyalty; evaluating the pace of production; enforcing
compacts; training the militants that accompany them
wherever they go.
The alchemical processories, with their long halls of
twisted piping, mix-vats, and looming synthesis machineries,
are in fact only a fraction of the slump industry. They vie for
space with gargantuan condenser units, set to extract the
Seven Axiomatic Compounds from chem-tainted air,
enormous transport pipes and storage vats, metal shaperies
that produce tools and plating, and other more esoteric
machine-houses. Much of this manufactory mid-City consists
of uneven rows and stacked layers of converted halls,
originally a cerecrete standard template pattern but extended
in greystone to house alchemical tech-devices and work-areas.
All are fume-laden, the stonework deeply pitted by centuries
of reactants. Between the alchemical halls are narrow paved
avenues and many-floored worker habs that reach unbroken
from the deep mid-City all the way to the crumbling, chemfogged citytop.
A fume-haze is everywhere within the slump, as the
processories long ago overwhelmed fundament air-blessing
devices. It is thickest within synthesis halls and around leaking
storage vats, where mists frequently spill forth into the midCity tunnels, reacting with one another wherever they meet.
On some days a fuming white carpet flows along slope-alleys
and down into the lowest hab-levels. On others, plazas and
steam-lift platforms are hazed yellow, masked faces in the vatworker crowds fading into the miasma after just a few paces.
An abandoned hab halfway between Alchemical #2 and Vat
Hall #10 perpetually seethes with thick reaction-mist where
airflows meet, and the vaulting drips acid onto deeply etched
stone floors. Breather masks and water-soaked cloth are used
by alchemical brethren, but the blood-cough is nonetheless
endemic. If there is any mercy in the manufactory sump, it is
that lung-rot usually brings death before the mind decays. Few

The Vat-Workers
Two classes of vat-worker toil in the slump manufactories: the
first consists of hereditary serfs indentured to House Onculus,
housed in stonework habs pressed between the alchemical
processories, while the second is drawn from toil associations
of the low-City closer to the Mortuarium ridge. The latter
group travel through the low-strata each day, following
promethium wagon lines and winding stair-tunnels to labor
amidst choking alchemical fumes. In the rough hierarchy of
vat-worker brethren, the indentured stand well above the
compact-bearers. It requires little for a compact-bearer to be
dismissed to the Waiting Guilds, and the indentured take full
and cruel advantage of the power they wield as a result.
House Onculus maintains rudimentary convalescence halls
for serfs stricken by burns or reactant fumes, though the halls
themselves lie within the upper slump and are no less fumeridden than the avenues. Vat-worker brotherhoods tithe to
support at least some of the many brethren so crippled by toxin
sickness they can no longer work, but the compacted are left to
fend for themselvesthe injured and the lung-rotted simply
vanish into the poverty warrens like so many others before
them. Toil associations establish tontines and death-payments,
but all too often even these meager funds are siphoned away by
84

the corrupt or stolen by gangers.

The indentured vat-workers are a font of intoxicants and
narco-stimulants. A hidden hierarchy of alchemists exists
within their brotherhoods, the source of much of what passes
through the smugglers' black paths of the surrounding lowCity. The citytop reach of any vat-worker hab is a maze of
collapsed stonework, but some of these abandoned levels hide
small distillation vats, sealed mix-rooms, and stacks of stolen
chem-casksall carefully tended between shifts. Drenn-laced
tranc, redrage, false-obscura, and many other dangerous
compounds are distilled by the alchemists, much of which is
claimed for the narcobarons by Blackwreck gangers at the
upper edge of the slump crush zones. The remainder is used
by addicts and hopeless cases amongst the vat-workers, slaves
in all but name to their alchemist brethren, or bartered with
upslope carniefolk and rail guild laborers. Some is even made
a part of compacts struck with outcast malviatoris encamped
upon the chem-hazed citytop.

Corroded Shrines
Numerous shrines stand within the slump strata, ancient
structures built by some long-forgotten sect of the Imperial
Cult, with strangely twisted pillars and walls carved with
leering reliefs that depict the fate of the heathen and the
damned. They are blackened by alchemical reactants, and
even interior stonework is eaten by centuries of seeping
fumes. Masked ecclesiarches set forth from the shrines each
day to roam the alchemical vaults and paved ways, chanting
muffled prayers to encourage those who toil in the GodEmperor's name. They are trailed by antiquated servitors that
bear chem-eaten poles of false-brass topped by the Aquila and
strike bells to mark the passage of time. As manufactory shifts
change, the avenues fill and the shrines flood with vatworkers. Those who cannot force their way inside gather at the
open doorways whilst reactant-mists from the avenues drift
within. Wardens and acolytes activate vox-speaker grills so
that all of the assembled, jostling workers can hear the
sermon, and then carry heavy stone collection boxes through
the crowd, accepting scints and pledge-marks for the shrine.

Forlorn Assessors
The Mortuarium Office of Manufactory Assessment is a
crumbled and half-abandoned edifice, buried in the lower midCity close to the once-glorious wagon line terminus and
directly beneath Vat Storage #5. This branch of the

Administratum has languished in disfavor for centuries, and the

assessment office is staffed by no more than a handful of aging,
outcast scribes and disgraced administrators, originally
appointed decades past in a senior adept's purge of her
followers. The furnishings are falling apart, the cogitators
failing, and the walls run with chem-seepage from the slump
industry. The elder functionaries, worn and disinterested, don
breather masks and set forth each day to ask pointless questions
of the shift-bosses above, and the information that they gather
is interred within corroding cogitation registers. It has been
years since any instruction or newly exiled clerk arrived from
higher offices of the Administratum, and longer still since any
gathered assessment was sent onward to the district archives.

Enforcers, of House Onculus and Otherwise

There are no permanent Magistratum stationhouses in the
slump, and it is rare for patrols to walk the chem-hazed
avenues between habs and alchemical processories. In their
place, packs of trustee vat-workers keep the peace, watched
and sometimes led by armed and armored House Onculus
militants. What passes for law in the slump is brutal and
corrupt: workers who cause trouble or fail to give up a share of
any subversive enterprise are beaten, sometimes to death, as an
example for the others. The House militants step forward to
quell riots amongst serfs and compacted vat-workers or to
prevent damage to valued machinery, but otherwise stand
aside. The House Onculus overseers answer only to their upslope masters, and then only in the matter of production quotas
and costs: there are always more workers from the Waiting
Guilds to take the place of the dead and the crippled.

Sanctioned Barter-Court
House Onculus representatives prefer guilders and merchants
from the Mortuarium slopes to trade with indentured serfs and
compact-workers in the sole sanctioned barter-court, a tall and
vaulted plaza converted into a sprawling market of divided
levels. Its stone walls are deeply engraved with admonitions
and verses of the Imperial Creed, and metal-grid floors are
suspended between stone support pillars, linked by winding
scaffold-stairs. The levels are crowded by small stalls and
barter-spaces separated by plasteen dividers, where merchants
cry their wares and negotiate loudly with gathered vat-workers
and their families. Well-armed thief-takers patrol in search of
troublemakers and censured traders, while masked scribes
seated at the entranceways assess a tithe upon merchants as
85

they arrive and leave. Shifting barter-courts constantly spring

up elsewhere in the slump, but the traders risk confiscation
and worse at the hands of House Onculus enforcers: the
overseers insist upon a rightful share of every activity that
takes place within their domain.

overcrowded. Tunnels wind and slope to pass around crushed

masses or churning machine enclosures. Some alleys are grillfloored and rise high above into darkness, little more than large
and unstable cracks formed in the City structure, while others
are crawlways between bulkheads and crushed stone, too small
for travelers to stand up straight or easily pass one another.

The Low-City Strata

Habs and Workers

The enormous bulk of a tecryilite support base stands deep

beneath the Cathedral of Saint Salesse and the center of the
Mortuarium ridge, pressed down upon the crushed remains of
an ancient, forgotten history. Machine Temples Ma/Qaul/13
and Ma/Orgu/13 are set between crystal buttresses that spread
out into the crush floor, surrounded by the great machineries
of waste processing and reclamation. These Mechanicus
enclaves are themselves a part of the fundament support
structure, and their adamantine walls bear the weight of
countless stonework layers. Huge primary plasma generators
are sealed behind twenty spans of greystone immediately
above the Machine Temples, the center of a web of powerconduits that extends upward and outward to span the
subdistrict.
Fundament transport shafts originate in these depths and
follow branching crystal supports up through the strata,
traveled by servitor-crawlers and tech-adepts whose entire
lives are spent in hiding, overseeing machine installations
entrusted to the Mechanicus. Some of these shafts run
vertically for almost the entire height of the City without
obstruction, but most serve as a part of the venting and
purification systems, passing through huge fan-stations and
alchemical air-blessing units.
Reclamation is the primary industry of Mortuarium's
central low-City wards: sludge processories, corpse starch
mills, and breakage halls. Every space within half a league of
the greater waste-works vibrates with the operation of
gargantuan pumps as they return tech-blessed water to the
upper strata. Yet the low-City workers must make do with
what filters back down through ancient and corroded pipe
networks, or is carried from cistern-lakes by portage
brotherhoods of the Moving Guild.
The ways and spaces of the reclamation wards are not
planned or built for people, but are rather a compromise with
the unyielding architecture of the deep strata. There are few
vaulted avenues and tall, pillared plazas in the style of the
mid-City. Instead, ragged and irregular spaces gape open
about lesser support struts, bridged by girders and cerecrete
slabs. Elsewhere passages are narrow or canted, and always

The manufactory poor dwell in cube-habs and plasteen board

warrens squeezed into abandoned reclamation structures,
crushed temples, or between secondary support struts of the
low-City stratawherever space can be found. They live
between great machines, spill into unused Mechanicus tunnels,
and cling to fundament infrastructure with little regard for
comfort. Generations of toil associations, unorthodox sects, and
outcasts have carved out their own enclaves and mazes
between stonework and machinery: plasteen shaper brethren;
reclamation workers; zealots of the Red Redemption and the
Weeping Men; ganger alliances; smuggler communes. The
stone ruins of the pre-Imperial past have been displaced over
millennia to make room for the industries of reclamation and
the low-strata masses. In these wards little remains whole of
the City that once was: a few temple pillars, worn sigil-walls,
and heathen statues thousands of years old.
Lawlessness is rife and commonplace: theft, violence
between gangers and worker brotherhoods, the narco-trade, and
lesser tech-heresy. Yet it is not overt in the hab wards and
reclamation vaults, where lumens remain functional and there
is a semblance of order at most times. Even heretek voxartisans and autolimb crafters hide their work-rooms, whilst
gangers prefer to drag their victims to darker tunnels.
Brotherhoods watch out for their own, and the Magistratum
patrols these central depths, though far less effectively than in
higher strata. The best enforcers are rarely assigned to low-City
stationhouses, and the worst become little better than the
gangers and narco-smugglers they hunt.
With each change of manufactory shifts in the mid-City,
the few greater lift-platforms that reach down to the low strata
become crowded with indentured serfs and compact-workers,
shrouded in steam from huge pneumatic pistons. Shift-bosses
count heads at the lift-platform gates and guild militants watch
closely to ensure that workers from the low-City are sanctioned
by the brotherhoods. After ascending from the depths, mill
workers and plasteen shapers gather in their allotted workgroups to make the short journey from lift plaza to looming
manufactory entrance. As these massed workers pass the open
86

archways of mid-City shrines, wardens and priests emerge to

shout cautionary verses of Orthodoxic scripture, or strike at
tired, work-worn laggards with shock-staves. Few of these
laborers see the chem-clouded sky more than once each year,
on feast days when certain toil associations are permitted
pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Saint Salesse far above,
escorted by the very same ecclesiarchs who bellow at their
passage each day.

Raques and Other Vermin

In deeper strata, vermin clades such as raques, motile fungi,
and sectids become more than the mere nuisance they present
in the mid-City. They are far more numerous, grow to a
greater size amidst wastes and seepage, and infest rationhouses, storage vaults, and poverty warrens. There are dark
tales of what low-City raques will do to the intoxicant-felled
and the sick, and rumors of doomed poverty caverns where the
Waiting Guilds are gene-twisted, forced to eat weeping raqueflesh and twitch-fungus.
Administratum vermin offices stand within the low-City
strata, standard template bluestone structures where illeducated clerks sanction rare life-warrant holders as verminhunters and menial assessors count dead raques for
dispensation. Three sanctioned Hunter Brotherhoods and
many more outcast vermin hunters haunt the very lowest
reaches of Mortuarium, spearing diseased raques and torching
the fungus breeds that creep towards the brighter lumens.
Some of the catch makes its way to mid-City carniefolk to be
used as fodder for strange circus beasts, while the rest is left to
rot in middens or incinerated in promethium pyres. Sanctioned
vermin hunters of the reclamation wards are little different
from the manufactory workers who dwell there, but the
poverty warren hunter covens are little more than gangers,
ready and willing to murder in order to have their wayand
fierce, bloody feuds over hunting rights play out in the lowCity tunnels where the two sides meet.

Promethium Wagon Lines

Pallid workers pledged to the poorest toil associations journey
to the slump alchemical manufactories each day, as that
poisonous, dangerous vat-work is all that prevents them from
slipping into the poverty caverns. Rail tunnels run from the
low ridge to the slump, curving around larger structures at the
boundary strata where low-City meets mid-City. The rail guild
that once maintained these tracks is long gone, but a

promethium wagon brotherhood uses the tunnels to transport

workers at the behest of House Onculus. The wagons
themselves are shuddering, noisy engines that drag open cargohaulers in procession; the poorly ventilated wagon-line and its
surrounding tunnels are thick with promethium fumes, the
stonework thickly blackened with residue. Vat-workers cough
and choke as they are transported, but these pollutants are
better by far than the reactant haze that hangs within the slumpvale. Many who slave for House Onculus become crippled by
lung-rot and the blood-cough.
The primary wagon-line terminus of the deep mid-City
slump is a faded glory of a past age, built for some unknown
purpose centuries before being claimed and then relinquished
by a rail guild. Its vast vaults are long untended and so
blackened by corrosion that their intricate mosaics are all but
vanished from sight. Huge statues of forgotten lords still line
the loading concourses, while the graven veinstone sigil-posts
that once stood beside them now lie broken, their remnants
pushed into unused alcoves. The terminus is a dangerous place
in the comparative quiet between shift changes, as it is close to
the true undercitythe lawless, poisoned crush zones beneath
the slump. Careless travelers vanish, taken by gangers or
worse. The retainers of House Onculus care for quotas,
however, and not what happens to a few errant vat-workers;
vengeance and protection are left to the toil associations.

Poverty Caverns of the Waiting Guilds

Away from the great crystal fundament supports and closer to
the slump, the low-City increasingly gives way to crush zones:
lawless mazes where even the air can be hard to breathe.
Poverty warrens are carved from the boundary rubble and
caverns established where some ancient structure still partially
supports the weight above. These are hab-camps for the fallen,
where Waiting Guilds of the crippled and the hopeless survive
as best they can. The outcast Rund Breed and lesser mutants
are more numerous here than in the City above, but just as
persecuted for their differences. There are few direct paths to
the mid-City from these deep places, and the masses who
occupy them own little more than rags and stones. A few
craftworks and a makeshift industry exist in better defended
caverns, those less plagued by gangers, but most of the
wretched must steal and beg for alms in order to eator starve
if they have pride, ragged and forlorn.
Sanctioned Waiting Guilds have many rights under City
law, which declares that a fraction of the brethren may rise to
work alongside the toil associations, claiming the same scints
87

and benefits. In practice, all such rights are meaningless unless

persistently demanded: the ragged poor must elude gangers
and other dangers, climb to the mid-City, and present the
records of their Guild to a magister. Yet even when successful
in such a pilgrimage they are frequently refused. Toil
associations and manufactory brethren see the Waiting Guilds
as a threat to their own sometimes tenuous positions, and often
deal harshly with those who attempt to ascend to the mid-City.
With nearly all hands turned against them, is hard for those
who fall into the poverty warrens to ever escape.
The Order of Sisters Verdigris maintains a few small
shrines and false-bunker altars close to the poverty caverns,
tended by novices and usually guarded by militants assigned
the duty as a penance. They are sometimes destroyed, their
defenders murdered, but are always rebuilt. The Orthodoxic
cathedral hierarchy, by way of a perpetual chantry willed
under the strict terms of a House Miravus matriarch two
centuries past, sends a regular pittance of rations, water, and
waste-rags into the low-City, to be disbursed amongst the
most needy. Alms intended for the Waiting Guilds are just as
likely to fall into the hands of predatory gangers, however, and
lesser ecclesiarchs sent to preach to the desperate poor often
fail to return.

and bones, who prey upon the poverty caverns even as the
Poisonfall slowly kills them. They steal children to maintain
their numbers and commit hideous atrocities upon their rivals.
The Blackwreck are more numerous, more rational, and more
frequently encountered beyond the Poisonfallbut no less
murderous for it. Led by a coven of ruthless narco-trader
outcasts, they are one link amongst many in the black path of
smugglers that passes through low-City Mortuarium.

The Undercity and the Poisonfall

Deep beneath House Oculus alchemical processories, the
stonework of millennia past was long ago flattened by the
weight of the mid-City rested upon its inadequate fundament
supports. Ancient stone manses, macrostatues, pillared
temples, and later Imperial standard template buildings were
all slowly compacted into the low strata. This large crush zone
is the undercity proper, extending the length and breadth of the
slump-vale above, and named the Poisonfall by those who
brave its unstable tunnels and dig-ways. It is an deadly maze
of flattened ruins and worming crawlways, haunted by feral
gangers and dying heretics shunned by even the low-City. Old
ways crush shut and new ways open with each shift of the vast
mass above, and in many areas waste pours down from the
habs and manufactories abovethe Poisonfall is named for its
toxic slurry, bad air, and mutated vermin. No-one enters
without good cause, and few who do live long as a result.
The Kretch and the Blackwreck are two of the more
notorious gangs whose members rely upon the Poisonfall as a
refuge from Magistratum enforcers and vengeful mobs. The
Kretch have inspired rumors that the dead and the damned
stalk the undercity: they are near-feral cannibals, clad in rags
88

A Tattered Man Awaits

The Clattermaster
Down below, through the open gridwork at my feet, massive
machinery shifts weather-worn color plates. Like gargantuan,
rusted hands and arms, hooked to a skeleton's sparse frame,
fumbling at their task. The landing platform shudders with
each boom and squeal of tormented metal. It's a dizzying
tower's height to fall to the baroque citytop stonework.
The wind is eager, tugging and pushing. Ve might be
walking the avenues below for all the notice she gives. The
seal-door to the windowless control vaults, vid-lenses grinding
slowly around to watch usthat's where her attention is.
Where mine should be, God-Emperor damn it, not looking
below or at the shape ofher as she walks ahead.
The seal-gate doesn't open. The corroded exterior of the
tower's upper block is flaking, bubbled in the slow boil of an
age under City rain and chem-clouds. Ve makes an obscene
ganger-sign at the nearest scratched-blind lens. I hammer the
plating, Magistratum loud, metal on metal with my machine
hand. Chips fall away, scatter across my shot-coat, caught and
carried by the wind.
I give it a few breaths, then touch Ve's arm, catch her
attention from the vid-lens. Make the blade sign, two fingers
straight, rather than shout over the wind and the tower
machines; she gets it. Pulls out her powerknife, lights it
upmakes a show ofit for the watchers.
The seal-gate and gridwork walkway quiver as internal
bolts withdraw, hard thunks. Ve makes a half-smile, wry beauty
and wind-whipped hair, flicks the powerknife off and away in
one smooth move. I'm still thinking about the touch to her arm,
with the fingers that are yet mine.
The metal walls ofthe interior entryway are streaked with
old condensate and corrosion. The trails overrun and peel a
pict-board, leave crusts upon a log-stamp machine intended for
missivite pilots. The seal-gate grinds closed behind us, locking
out the wind. It muffles the clattertower's noise, but not the
vibration and shudder of large movements below. Ahead are
dim lumens and half-open slide doors marked with faded paint
stamps. The sounds of lesser machinery, a start-stop clatter
like knives in a broken cleanser.
The main vault is a maze of wires, levers, and pneumatic
rods, all fashioned into a web of extended, tangled

manipulators. Every space is filled by skeletal, makeshift

arrays ofopen metalwork: hanging from chains, propped upon
frames formed from their predecessors, socketed into wall
panels. They jerk and rattle at the behest of their invisible
controllerand then fall silent.
"Who are you?" The sudden voice wavers between
querulous and unaccustomed bravery. "We've done nothing!
The God-Emperor loves us!"
Ve shrugs, ducks through a gap in the crowded wireframes and connecting struts, arms-case slung across her back,
looking for an exit.
I take the other path, making my own gaps in a hedge of
connected manipulator-extensions. They catch at my shot-coat,
hook at the carry-bag. And there he is, the clattermaster,
sunken and reclined into a plasteen-padded throne, halfdressed in stained bodygarb. Obese, jowled face and small
eyes, but spindly, wasted limbs left naked, surrounded by pictscreens and box after box of control levers. Parchment spills
from a scroll dispenser, and autoquills hang from thin chains.
A sectid in the nest he's spun, a stale scent of unwashed flesh
and medical dispensers.
"Who are you?" he whines, loudly.
"You know who we are. " I say. He watched us jump from
the black flight, thinks he knows what that means. "Where is
the way down?"
Seeing me drives the next thought from his lips. He
scrabbles at the parchments folded in his ample lap, thin
fingers twisting one another. The old reaction. Didn't make me
feel good half a life ago, wearing barracks bronze on buried
stone hab-ways, doesn't make me feel good now.
"The way down, clattermaster. " More harsh than I meant
it to be.
"I pray, go down to the shrines . . . each third-year. Thirdyear! I have the dispensations. . . " the sectid gabbles.
He isn't listening to me. He isn't even looking at me now,
his sunken, dark eyes drifting down and around. The control
boxes; the web of reaching mechanical levers; electro-plates
halftucked away into the padding by his skeletally thin feet.
The plates. The old habits, the ones you never really lose,
say step up and kick the electro-plates out from hiding, see
what cuts at the clattermaster's nerves. There's always
something, some darkness to gnaw at the heart. I push it away.
There's no duty here, no call to turn over yet another
stonefallin search ofnothing but waste and raques.
Ve shakes the edges of the web of machinery. Rapping on

89

thin metal to catch my attention; I see her pale skin through the
gloom and gaps in the patchwork rod-mechanisms, pointing to
a rail, a gantry stair.
"I'll find my own way. " I tell the clattermaster.
I turn away, but I know the look. Relief. Lingering fear.
Hope. Outside the Pit they wear their hearts upon their faces,
and it's a form ofdamnation to have been taught enough to see
thatwhether by the years or by the Man. God-Emperor knows
there are times I wish for the blind eyes I once had.
So I follow Ve, looking to put another darkened vault and
the lingering poisons of the Pit behind me. The brand may be
burned deep enough for a clattermaster to see, but the City
below will neither know nor care.

Mouthing a low-City cant, leering at Ve. I knock them away,

nearly a scuffle. One sees the large-cal under the shot-coat,
wide eyes and warning noises. Then they're backing off, the
three, not risking the look in my eyes. Gang-initiates above
their level, a pretence at sanctioned pleading to steal a few
scintsor the chance at more.
early a scuffle. Getting old, letting the City get to me. She
is what she is, raques and stone, always will be. But the burn
from it runs my nerves, hot and cold, and carries past the next
buttress base, scraping stone against one shoulder, plasteenclad mill serfs jostling the other.
Ve is already there, pushes off the glyph-scarred
stonework with a flourish and narrowed eyes, like she was
waiting half a day. To the side, a down-sloping alley-tunnel,
strewn with package-waste. A few disheveled joygirls, wary
like scrabbling vermin caught out in the open, circled by
stained workers from the deep manufactory levels.
Further, the crowd carries a murmur-roar and a miasma
of sweat. Incense hangs over the chem-stench of the citytop;
this way is grown to a cathedral avenue, hung with smoking
censers and pennants, flanked by barred shrine entrances.
Burly acolytes loll upon watch-stands and statue pedestals
above the masses, electrostaves and shock-clubs meant to keep
the peacebut they care little. Shoulders bump mine, chanting
pilgrims too wrapped in the moment to care. My head throbs.
I look for Ve, catch her bending back prying fingers,
slipping to the next fleeting space in a moving press of clothmasked portage guilders. Angry glances, turned lips at her
violet eyes, but not much more. ot yet.
Lho-smoke nearby, and it sharpens my itch. But not here,
not yet: I'm too busy watching the moll . . . or no, telling myself
that's what I'm doing while I watch myself fall into Sibellus.
The knives of the City, angry that I left, angry that I'm back,
carried unknowing by the ten thousand faces of this shouting,
hot crush. Each cut a memory, a discomfort, a regret. And
above them all, the cathedral loomsa shadow in the chemhaze, its towering statues blind to the procession ofsins below.

The Asylum
The lho-itch gnaws in earnest now, from the flight, from what's
ahead. My metal fingers twitch and fidget, unbidden, chased by
the urgeor by the ghost of a lost hand and memories that
won't let me alone. Screaming crowds pressed against
Magistratum ward-shields, shouting, the rack of slide-loaders.
But what's done is done, and now is now. The clattertower
noise still echoes above, but here at the base gate, between
promethium tanks caked in corrosion, it gives way to the
growing rumble ofcitytop throngs.
So we wade into the madhouse, the moll and I, into the
sweating, crying crush of a high-walled avenue, open to the
sky. Chem-clouds wisp and drift at the rooftops, buoyed by the
heated breath of packed madmen and lost women. Ten paces
from the arched tower-base gate, a lay-preacher and his
followers, screaming the God-Emperor's blessings as they
shove and push for space. Thirty paces and chained penitents
mob a sobbing man beneath a buttress whose flanking statues
are worn featureless, forcing him to the filth-strewn flagstones.
The crowds don't care, breather-masks and faces don't turn to
look. Servants, workers, the faithful, beggars, even machinemen, packed and pressed into slow currents and tides.
Two servants fight as the stream carries them with their
fellows, the woman tearing at her foe's guild livery. Others,
carrying banners, laugh. A drenn addict totters behind, bent
and buffeted, giggling and choking by turns as she vomits grey
bile. Bodyguards watch with murder in their eyes, shielding
their fat charge as he threatens a ragged man.
There's a sickness in my gut, a pressure in my temple. It'll
pass. Gone too many years, slipped from the City's embrace,
that's all. I tell myselfthat.
A beggar trio grasp at my sleeve, grab at my carry-all.

The Chained Witch

Ve holds a spice-ration, taken from where I don't know. She
picks pieces from it with sharp nails, eating them precisely and
carefully. Gives me sidelong glances. Concern? Impatience?
She's a closed book.
Me, I'm hunched against the wall, breathing in lho-smoke,
holding it for too long. Letting it rasp at my lungs. Staring at
the etched serf-marks and painted glyphs on every surface of

90

this corner ofthe avenue wall, the lowest buried by mud crusts;
stone dust and waste mixed by the last fall of chem-rain.
Century upon century, scored over one another until few are
recognizable. Each serf-mark a cry for the City to notice, and
each worth what now? A moment's glance, and then gone.
A stream of figures push and jostle one another as they
pass our alcove. My eyes slide off the serf-marks and across
the shifting crowd. Tattered renouncist pilgrims in one
direction, a raucous manufactory mob in the other. Loud and
ragged psalms somewhere beyond, perhaps vox-mouths hung
at the shrine gates. Pleaders in skinbrands and rags, threading
the masses with hands cupped, shying from raised fists and
anger. A few intoxicant-dazed workers from the last shift,
abandoned by their brethren, staggering aimlessly or halfcarried by the crowds.
The pressure, the noise, the stench. The feel ofdrowning in
the City, in the mass of it and the old web of scars for
memories. She'll swallow me ifI let her, like I never even left.
I look down again, carefully watch the ember-end of the
issuance lho-stick as it burns down. Another lungful, and the
taste of it is the Pit; I should throw the pack to the scavenger
poor in the alley-tunnels, but even chem-smothered lho soothes
away the knives. Lets me get a grip, put a lid on it.
I catch Ve's eye. Velle, waiting on me. "I. . . , " I begin, and
stumble under her gaze, realize I don't have the words. So I
suck it up, change the topic, the one that never started. "We
find a crier. "
She flicks her fingers, maybe agreement. "You good?" she
asks, loud, over the shouting, the babble, the avenue chant.
Disinterested tone. She eyes me as she puts another carefully
severed piece ofspice-ration to her lips.
"Good enough. "
I meet her stare, her damned Rund eyes. Act like they
aren't part ofwhat's eating at me. I drop the last ofthe smoke,
flex my metal fingers like they're flesh.
Good enough.
We abandon the alcove, walk the crowd again at the
avenue sidewall, keep out of the worst of it. But the press
becomes heavier, the noise more chanting than talkand
something is coming, forcing a path. Its lumbering shape
appears above the masses and amidst hanging pennons; a
grand palanquin walker, chugging promethium exhaust from
tall vent-tubes as its metal limbs move. Its deck sways like the
back ofa stiffened animal.
Acolytes jump down from watch-placements and plinth
ledges, making to look busy. Swaying stave-tops wade through
heads, clearing the avenue center for the procession.

A machine-man in red robes sits like a beast-rider at the

palanquin's painted prow, metal tendrils coiled like worms
around a dozen control rods. Behind him, a lectern and priest
in cathedral regaliapretending to the same command.
Masked attendants flank the marching platform, tall wardstaves and Aquila sashes. Tethered false-brass cherubs crush
and tear white anaquine blooms, each worth more than a
pleader can wring from the avenue in a day.
Atop the hump of the machine's back, a raggedly draped
cage of devices, purity seals, and silver barsand within, a
seeress. A Ministorum witch. The cursed turned to the service
of the God-Emperor. Damned for what she might say and see,
damned for the way she is used. Her robes are white, her face
a blank and enclosing mask. She trails conduits and fluid-tubes
like the sweep ofhair.
Witch-monitors float beyond the walker, their withered,
chem-grey flesh encased in rusted frames and weapon-mounts,
draped by data conduits and chains. They drift like the dead,
hungry things they are, empty eyes sweeping the masses.
Hands in the crowd are upheld, the sign ofthe Aquila, eyes
averted. There is a sudden acrid taste to the air.
The seeress looks about her. The mask that serves her for
a face turns to us, and there is a blur. Like a deep tranc-haze,
sudden gaps in the moment. Ve is pallid, biting her knuckles.
Then she is behind me and facing away, as though I am a wall,
her back against mine. Three men were standing in front ofme,
now on their knees, one is weeping. Velle's grip is iron, her
nails like claws. My heart thumps, turns over. It runs fast and
slow at once; my nerves burn drenn-red, are cool. A woman
shouts for the God-Emperor, and for a moment I think I know
her.
The gaze passes. The tranc-haze slides. Velle is against my
back. Pilgrims are crying out, holding up relics and woven
icons. Webs of cloth to catch the glance of a chained witch.
Masked guardians atop the walker point their batons and
acolytes wade into the throng with shock-staves. Crackling,
shouts and screams.
Then they are past. The avenue is muted, the crowds
dazed. There is a wailing somewhere, murmurs left and right.
Moans, and a distant vox-chant, muffled. Ve shudders, mutters
something low-City vile, pulls herself away. She's wiping her
eyes with fisted hands, glaring at meand from anyone else
that would be an invitation to make something ofit.
But here and now? o. I flex my wrist, rub at the burn of
nail-scores with machine fingers that won't move as they are
told, twitching in time to some hidden heartbeat. The City,
laughing, welcoming me back.

91

"You good?" I ask.

The answer is a while coming. I don't push it.

I stare down the relic-seller as we pass. He sees muscle

looking out for violet-eyed scum, and thinks worse. But he lets
it go. Wish I could say as much.
Twenty steps to ponder that. Then for a heartbeat we're
pressed side by side, between stalls and a coven of cleanserfamily matriarchs. We both glance, just a moment, catch each
other's eyes. The sweep ofher dark hair, the perfect face . . . and
the God-Emperor damned eyes, and the nothing that is all I
can see of her beneath the beauty. Just a lingering single
heartbeatand then she's moved on, a ripple of her bare
shoulders and wrap-skirt, the arms-case swinging against her
back.
Breath in, breath out. Keep walking, Callehan. Keep
walking.
Just like you can't still feel the nail-scores on your wrist,
just like you're not still thinking about it.
The flash of a few scints is all it takes to draw the crier
down from his auto-pulpit, its frame corroded, gaping where a
promethium engine and servitor were once mounted. His
tatters are a fur of torn parchment, maybe inked with the sum
of his lore, maybe nonsense to impress the credulous. Scroll
cases and an Announcist banner of sanction complete the
uniformand I've seen similar, fingers in too many rationpacks.
Tatters eyes Ve, grimaces, decides to deal with me. Fine.
So I ask: the Vessus Chantry Archive. Where is it? Placing my
foot on another of the steps laid out by the Pit and a drenntwitch coordinator. Hard to play at being any better than
whatever it is the crier makes ofhimself.
Tatters gives me the same old Announcist padding, half
working for the scints, half working his jaw to hear his own
guild cant. The moll drifts back to the nearest relic-stalls,
maybe disinterested. But I'm only half-listening. My gut has me
following the way tatters glances, the move of his off-hand.
Sectid fingers, and easy to draw a line from the crier to some
watcher, off to the shrine walls past the stalls. Perhaps the
bored muscle in stained Ministorum bodywraps, supposedly
watching the relic-gather. Shock-staves will want their cut.
It's an old game for low-ward criers, feeding outsiders to
those who'll shake out more scints than chants and rumors.
So I cut him off, mid-flow, hard-voiced: "I don't like being
played. " Easy to be the hard case here.
That catches the moll's attention, even over the market
noise. She looks up from the nearest spread of false relics and
a scowling guilder who sees the violet of her eyes. Tatters is
derailed. Stares off to the side, at whomever his friends are.
Maybe they'll be getting up, coming over.

The Tattered Man

The relic-market spills from downslope tunnel mouths, out to
claim grimed paving slabs. A gabble of sellers preaching to
pilgrims, a few guilder emblems slumming. The goods are
false, broken gargolyes, sigils, and shards. Crudely forged
authenticity seals invoke the normal panoply: circles of grand
archeoexhumation, seats ofantehistorical learning.
I know this without having to look; I've walked too many
similar gathers. Only deeper in the City are there real relicmarkets, fragments of the past worth somethingworth
murder, worth hiding the bodies to claim a few shattered datacrystals or crushed inscriptions. Leave the broken flesh for
raques and Magistratum, while scints fall into some unseen
pocket.
A thief-cage stands on a plinth, more a hint than any
serious declaration of intent. But that's an easy guess as
wellno need for a longer taste of this Ministorum ward. A
heavy in acolyte's robes is still a heavy; where priests claim the
Magistratum's law there'll be blood on the flagstones and
empty holding cells. Was a time I thought that better, a time
worse. All just more futile, circled memories now. Arguments
with people long gone.
The false relics have no such cares, sitting in their boxes,
set upon folding plasteen stands, arrayed in tall racks. Seated
relic-sellers see the moll at my side, catch her Rund looks.
They'd have her in the thief-cage already. That line ofthinking
ticks over like oiled librarium machinery, each step a page
turning on their faces.
I urge Ve onward, past crowd-lines entering the market's
informal aisles. She gives a petulant look, knocks my hand
awayseemingly oblivious to guilder stares.
Seeing the crier interrupts whatever I might have said,
thoughts half-formed. A man in tatters, parchment strips
layered to hide the bodysuit beneath. He tops a battered autopulpit at the far edge of the relic-market, arms open to chant
the first of his pitch. He favors the gather with sidelong,
frowning glances. The cant will be Announcist ritual; he barely
has to think about what he proclaims. Plenty of room up there
to dwell on present dissatisfactions.
Ve baits a guilder by running her fingers along the clothdraped edge of his display case. But she notes the crier. "That
one?" she says, not looking around.
"He'll do. "

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"Don't look at them. They aren't going to help. We'll be

done by the time they get here. "
I step between the man and his auto-pulpit, back tatters up
against a rack of stone-shard antiquities. He's smiling that
nervous smile now, the one they can't help, the one that says
"please don't" and sits in your head for days, damning you for
making it happen. A guilder jumps up from his rolling-seat,
mouth open to shout something . . . but decides better ofit.
I make my pitch. "I see it this way: so we take your advice,
get down into the alleys, maybe meet some friends of yours.
Maybe we all just talk, maybe not. But it won't go well for
them, and it won't go well for you when we're back. "
Tatters shakes his head, vehement, out of sorts. "o! o,
you have it wrong. I stand upright! Upright!"
One metal finger lightly on his chest, no pressure at all. I
lean in, point the exit while he's still off-center. "So we're all on
the narrow here. But maybe you made a mistake, thought you
knew the way and didn't, told us wrong. "
"Just. . . " And then he's back already. Trying to grab for
control, thinking fast. "Scribe wards. Yes! Scribes. Go
downslope, ask there, find a ration-house. The ink brethren will
know. "
"See? ot so hard. Everyone gets to walk away, no harm
done. "
I give some attention to left and right, something other
than reading tatters' face. Two angry shock-staves shoving
through the relic-stalls. Shouting from the crowd the other
wayprobably more ofthe same.
"Trust a crier and weep, " says the moll, appearing at my
side. Been a while since I heard that. She indicates tatters, but
watches the heavies in their acolyte garb. The tip ofher tongue
touches her lip.
With an outstretched arm I point two fingers at the muscle.
Get their attention, flip back the shot-coat. They see the 17Cal, holstered, reevaluate the situation. Tatters slides away to
the side ofthe relic-stall. I let him go.
"Like I said, we're all walking away, " I tell Ve.
She wrinkles her lip, shrugs and turns. Still letting me run
the game here.
I watch her slink more than I watch faces in the crowd.
Wondering when she'll change her mind, lose patience and cut
someone short at the neck.
My heart hardly paces; leaning on the crier was falling
back into the old training scripts, some other mouth speaking
your lines while you watch. The City makes you claim her
ways, makes the hard case mask easy to put onand the Man
does worse. Maybe tatters was upright. I'd like that to matter,

one way or another. But everyone walks away here. More than
sometimes happens.

Backdrop
Weapons in the Broader City
City law is vast in its scope and petty in its minutiae. Its
Dictates of Least-Expenditure are an ever-changing list of what
can and cannot be bought, sold, worn, or owned, by whom and
at what price. It is a mass of law beyond easy measure,
accreted over millennia, containing innumerable dispensations
for specific items, guilds, districts, and noble houses. No one
law-wright coven or court of magisters knows its full
extentor even whether that full extent still exists.
Little regard is given to most least-expenditure law, and
near everyone beneath the nobility is guilty of some
offensemost often through mimicry of the fashions and
graces of their betters. These laws were once a way to bolster
the dominance of City nobility, but have run wild and grown
cancerously since their origination. The Dictates are now most
often used as a weapon in the course of commerce feuds
between guilders and lesser nobles, or other forms of conflict
between the powers that be and pretenders who become too
influential.
For all this, a few least-expenditure forbiddances are
widely know and enforced throughout the City. Of these, the
Weapon Dictates are perhaps the best example: lesser
citydwellers have long been barred from the weaponry
commonly employed by Magistratum enforcers, City Legion
soldiers, and militants pledged to noble households. Even small
stub guns and las-weapons are rare in the upper strata, and
heavy weapons are almost never seen upon the avenues unless
the City Legion or Adeptus Arbites are deployed. Any
appearance of guns is usually taken as a mark of status or duty,
and thus a sign of influential backing.
Contact weapons such as shock-staves and batons are
more common, however, sanctioned for use by many classes of
guard and enforcer. In either case, Magistratum patrols are
unlikely to challenge the armed agents of greater powers upon
the avenues, even when the identity of the organization they
serve is not in evidenceprovided that they act with
discretion.
The City masses are near-disarmed in comparison to their
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guardians, and are more closely watched by enforcers. Few in

the upper strata openly carry a weapon; manufactory workers
and pilgrims who bear even mere clubs or blades on the
citytop will likely receive unwelcome attention. In mid-City
ration-house brawls, the worst to be feared is usually a
concealed knife. Weapons quickly appear in any more earnest
riot, however. A mob of manufactory workers or Moving
Guild brethren may bear a mix of heavy tools, broken
masonry, sharpened machine-spars, as well as other, more
inventive improvisations, such as the flame-flasks favored by
rebellious alchemical serfs.
Only in the low-City are forbidden weapons more openly
displayed amongst the populace and in the barter-courts:
smuggled caches of City Legion lasguns and autoguns, horded
by gangers and ambitious sects; pistols and explosives used by
agents of the crime barons; the strange weapon-patterns
fashioned in heretek workshops. In the poverty warrens,
slings, vermin-spears, and the occasional crudely fashioned
single-shot stub gun are the order of the day, howeverbetter
means of protection are beyond the reach of the deep-strata
poor, though they are scarcely constrained by the Weapon
Dictates.

allow a conflict to tail off to completion as they are to intervene

immediately. Enforcers readily drag away victims as well as
criminals after any confrontation in public spaces, but are more
often called to hunt and clear the aftermath of violence at their
own pace. The Magistratum is methodical, persistent, but often
indiscriminate in its slow search for those responsible for
criminal acts.
In the citytop and mid-City strata there are few further
threats beyond these, but in the depths of the low-City it can
seem as though every crowd has its roving murderers and
strong-arm thieves. Hard-eyed men and women openly carry
forbidden weapons and boast the willingness to use them:
tranq-numbed vermin hunters, crazed gangers, starving exiles
from the poverty warrens, smuggler covens on the move, coldblooded agents of the crime-barons, and worse. Pride, paranoia,
fear, and the desperations of poverty spawn sudden clashes in
darkened side-alleys, bloody ambushes amidst the flow of
manufactory workers, and theft by force wherever the strong
can take from the weak without fear of retribution.

Tattered Men
Criers of the Tolus Announcist Brotherhood employ their own
cipher-script to record guild lore upon parchment shreds, which
are passed between brethren and handed down from master to
apprentice. A crier usually inherits his position by lineage,
conditional on the approval of elder brethren, and is expected
to learn by rote all that his predecessor knew of the
surrounding wards. Announcists wear this knowledge, torn and
pinned to clothing, as a sign of seniority and worth.
Brotherhood elders stand bowed by age but proudly cloaked in
a thick fur of tatters, each parchment strip carefully placed in a
personal scheme of organizationa walking librarium of
ciphered tales and local lore.
Announcists quickly gather a crowd wherever they speak,
but "trust a crier and weep" is heard throughout the City. The
brethren trade first in rumors, tall tales, and lies, and only
secondly in true knowledge. In any case, much of what they
learn as apprentices was first scribed centuries past, distorted
and made false by the passage of time.
There is a deeper truth to the folk wisdom, however:
carniefolk, gangers, and other criminal types pay well for fresh
markspilgrims who are easily shaken down, or travelers
from distant wards who won't be missed. Criers can be a
profitable source of such traffic, directing the unwary to
crooked risk-houses or darkened ambush-alleys in exchange
for a modest cut.

Predators Amidst Crowds

Any of the City's crowded ways and plazas can be dangerous
to outsiders or the unwary, but there is a marked difference
between a mob of intoxicated, belligerent shift-workers,
euphoric zealot pilgrims, or arrogant household militants, all
of whom can be evaded or placated, and the more directed
predators who set out with theft and violence in mind.
Gangers are among the least of such threats in higher
strata, as they are outnumbered and distant from their
alliesthose who venture upward are often little more than
would-be initiates, lacking the nerve to compete with or prove
themselves to truly violent low-City outcasts. They are
opportunistic least-thieves who prey upon the weak and thugs
who victimize drenn-burned addicts or the intoxicant-felled.
The enforcers placed upon the avenues and toughs paid
off by local factions are a more dangerous prospect. They are
frequently armed with shock-weapons, and show little of the
restraint displayed by the Magistratum. Outsiders of any sort
are fair game, and the authorities put in place in some wards
are far worse than the criminals they supposedly keep in
check.
The Magistratum themselves are a threat to all who attract
their attention, though they are as likely to stand aside and
94

Procession of the Houses

A host of electro-palanquins and false-beast machines gather
upon Imperial feast days to form the Procession of the Houses,
when they carry Mortuarium's citytop nobility to worship at
the Cathedral of Saint Salesse. The baroquely decorated
machine transports assemble upon the Cathedral Ways, either
suspensor-borne or walking upon frame-and-gear legs, led by
red-robed tech-adepts and surrounded by household servants.
As the Procession commences, militant retainers forge ahead
into the crowds, clearing a path for their masters and the grand
palanquins.
The Procession of the Houses parallels similar traditions
in many other districts, and has existed for so long that it is
depicted in chem-eaten tableaus and wall-slab reliefs
throughout the upper strata of Mortuarium. The oldest of these
are so worn by the passing generations as to be almost
unrecognizable.
Lesser machine processions are held upon the arrival of
illustrious worthies arrived from distant districts: emissaries of
the great reclamation guilds, Spire ecclesiarchs, and others. If
in good standing with the Orthodoxic heirarchy, they and their
attendants traverse one of the Cathedral Ways by palanquin, in
order to be seen by the masses as they go to receive the
blessings of the hierarchs. Machine transports and guardian
retinues are placed at the disposal of such powerful guests by
allied noble houses of the Mortuariam ridgetop, thus ensuring
that these relationships of status and patronage are properly
recognized, called by criers to the masses and spoken of in
whitestone manses.

Ministorum Seers
Many Ministorum factions cultivate psykers with the rare seer
giftor those only believed to possess it. Psykers can be
fragile of mind and there is often little difference to be
discerned between warp-touched babble and the mumblings of
true prophecy. Properly controlled, however, watched over by
guardians and machine wards, these visions of the future are
said to be a true and rightful gift of divine revelation,
bestowed by the God-Emperor and the Saints.
Control of a seer-psyker can bring prestige and political
advantage in the struggle for preeminence within the City
Ministorum, and the seers themselves are granted positions of
worth and status in the hierarchy of the Imperial Cult. These
are gilded cages, however, and their occupants are just as
constrained as any other psyker pledged to the Adepta.

Further, the gift of foresight exacts its own heavy toll, and
seers often become withered or mad long before they are
finally discarded, consumed by the psykana implants and
wards forced upon them.

Relic-markets
The City hungers for the past: all are judged by their peers on
the length of claimed lineage and traditioneven the Spire
Houses, whose vaunted scions maintain sprawling museums
and compete in the patronage of antehistorical study and
archaeoexhumation. Far below these lofty heights of wealth,
mere servants show off shelves of encased shards in their small
hab-rooms, supposed temple fragments from the depths that are
passed down across generations. Priests kneel before chemeaten altars said to have been brought up from the earliest
Imperial shrines, now buried in the mid-City. Manufactory
brethren decorate their guildhalls with faded, preserved banners
and script-plaques of past ages, worn near-smooth. Families
cling to and squabble over life-warrants issued centuries past,
religiously inscribing new names until no space remains. Even
in the deepest poverty warrens, the few crushed caverns where
millennia-old inscriptions remain almost legible are prized and
fought over.
Where there is desire, there will be trade. Relic-markets
and roving antiquity-gathers exist throughout the City, places
where icons of the Imperial Creed, faith-charms, and shards of
the ancient City are bartered side by side. Most peddlers and
relic-guilders sell only the illusion of antiquity, however,
dressing up common ruins and broken plaques with ornately
false certifications of authenticity. Upon the citytop there is
little of true value in any relic-market, but the manufactory
masses care not: they flock these gathers.
Nonetheless, a diffuse society of earnest collectors does
exist: nobles, crime barons, high functionaries, guild elders,
and others possessed of discerning tastes. Its members collude
and compete in the search for authentically rare and ancient
materials from the low-City. Treachery and violence are never
far from the surface in their dealings. Wealthier collectors
finance a range of archaeodigs, shaft exhumations, and
dangerous barter-courts in the depths, ever seeking after that
one unique relic that will place them at the head of their peers
for a generation.

Spice-rations
The ubiquitous ration packs produced within low-City
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Setting the Scene

low-City reclamation plants and protein shaperies vary little in

their contents. Most consist of bland gruels, barely different
from the raw nutrient slurry that is pumped upward through
fundament channels to processories serving the mid-City and
upper strata. In these higher layers of the City more is made of
the reclaimed slush, and that includes a variety of what are
known as spice-rations.
Spice-rations are made of nutrient slurry, corpse-starch,
cultured fungus breeds, and alchemical flavor-compounds, the
resulting mixes then heat-treated and shaped. Some are
produced by hand in ration-houses using ad-hoc and
sometimes dangerous ingredients, and are sold immediately or
passed on to nearby institutions. Most are fashioned in bulk
within provisory guild mills, packed into preservative fluid
vats for later storage and transport.
Within Mortuarium, spice-rations are usually hard starch
shell-tubes with a crumbling protein interior, but many of the
other traditional forms can also be found: chill-tasting white
sliced squares in a dark liquid; sour green ovals; a mush of
grey run through with crisped strands.

This is the asylum, the City proper: the ebb and flow of unruly
crowds upon the tunnel-avenues, the harsh noise of countless,
thronging lives and thumping fundament machinery. The great
public spaces and major ways are turbulent processions of the
intoxicated, the rowdy, the hopeless, the work-worn, the needy,
the crazed, the poor, the wealthy, and the zealous, all pressed
shoulder to shoulder. In every close-packed avenue the
predators and the corrupt move watchful amidst the masses,
and often enough they are one and the same with the
authorities ostensibly tasked to keep order. Every quieter slopepassage and alley stair has its history of ill deeds; most of those
who pass by know enough to keep to the well-travelled ways,
even in the citytop strata.

A Course of Events
Deposited at the clattertower landing platform, the agents
quickly force an entry to the tower superstructure. In place of a
crew of clatterers and apprentices they find instead the isolate
Quintus Threft and his strange, encompassing controlmachinery. Threft is terrified of the agents, as he has heard
enough of the truth behind the Black Flights to envision the
God-Emperor's servants come to claim him for his sins. He and
his enclosed little world are no more than a minor distraction,
however, and the agents soon find the way down to the citytop
far below: a network of stairs and ladders clinging to the
exposed tower structure.
The clattertower base plinth and exit tunnel open onto one
of the ridgetop Cathedral Ways. The agents push their way
through the crowds and the noise in search of a crier, beset by
pleaders, lay-preachers, intoxicated addicts, and others too
ignorant or too desperate to leave well alone. They are soon
witness to the disturbing passage of a Ministorum seeress and
her procession of machines, traveling to the Cathedral of Saint
Salessea rare event, and one that might be taken as an omen
by more fervent servants of the Pit.
In a large plaza, and beside a relic-market, the agents find
Gasten Gasten, one of the Tolus district's tattered men. To the
crier's eyes, the agents are comparatively wealthy outsiders and
few in numbersomething to send on to the thugs who have
been complaining about thin pickings of late. This is a poor
choice, and one that might have been avoided with more
thought and a closer inspection of the agents, but Gasten
nonetheless offers directions to an ugly mid-City cathedral
ward and an ambush of sorts. Perhaps fortunately for the crier,

Serf-marks
Communal stonework throughout the City bears glyphs and
serf-marks left by generations of idle hands, more so in some
places than others. The cornerstones of busy avenues, statue
plinths, colonnades fronting shrines, and the like are often
heavily scored by icons, names, and crude runesleft to show
that a pilgrim once knelt there, or a man waited for his
brethren. In lower strata there are gang-sigils also, and other
signs left by varied factions: ciphered warnings or
communications, the meaning long lost to the passage of time.
As the generations pass the oldest serf-marks are overtaken
and buried by the new, or stonework smoothed and refinished
to remove the inscriptions. Most remain for centuries or
longer, however, each a plaintive cry to show that the longforgotten engraver once existed.

Overview
Newly arrived in the Mortuarium subdistrict, the agents begin
their search for the Vessus Chantry Archive. They find a
knowledgeable figure who can point to the scribe wards that
most likely contain the Archivebut who attempts instead to
provide false guidance that leads only to dangerous back-stairs
and waiting violence.
96

the agents see through this deception: pressing Gasten for true
guidance, they narrow down the likely location of the Vessus
Chantry Archive. It perhaps lies within mid-City wards
beneath the scribe slopes, closer to the Mortuarium trade floor.

Behind the Curtain

No malign forces yet stalk the agents through the avenues and
alley-stairs of Mortuarium, although this will change soon
enough. For now the threats they face are minor, of the sort
inherent to any district of the City: gangers risen from the lowCity, corrupt enforcers, angry or intoxicated manufactory
mobs, least-thieves, and roving thugs.

Quintus Threft, Clattermaster

Quintus Threft believes in sin, for he knows himself to be a
weak and degenerate sinnerthough in truth his loathsome
urges and his small collection of pict-plates are petty things in
comparison to the true and terrible corruptions that lie far
beyond his blinkered vision. Threft's rise through the Moving
Guild to become a solitary Clattermaster, ensconced amidst
machinery and tech-adepts rather than clatterer subordinates,
was a lengthy triumph of conscience and fear of discovery
over base needs. It removed him from the temptations of
former associates and habits, but unfortunately left him both
his urges and his self-disgust. So Threft has moldered these
past years: become fat and self-pitying, he dwells upon
punishment and the God-Emperor's will.

Gasten Gasten, Announcist

In some districts, the adoption of a doubled household name is
commonplace when laying claim to a disputed life-warrant. A
worn, micro-scribed life-warrant is passed down across
generations, but only one of an original warrant-holder's
descendants can actually possess it and thus bolster claims
upon hab-space, barter-court allotments, or other hereditary
privileges. Many life-warrants have been lost to the years,
later claimed by pretenders to the gene lineageand Gasten
Gasten is exactly this, a schemer of few morals and parochial
ambitions, a habitual liar quick to deceive for any momentary
advantage or simply because he can. Years past, Gasten parted
a life-warrant from its tranq-numbed inheritor in order to
smooth his ascent from unruly mid-City poverty. He took the
life-warrant name and later bartered its lineage-rights to
became a tattered man of the Tolus Announcists. Elder

brethren of the citytop wards were persuaded to accept both

rapid advancement and the later convenient disappearance of
his mentor in the Brotherhood. Thus Gasten now tends his
chosen ward alone, able to lie freely, laze when he wants to,
discard the traditions of his brethren as it suits him to do so,
and trade favors with thugs and least-thievesall the while
hiding behind a crier's smiles and ritual patter.

Dark and Errant Paths

The agents can push the Vastigan pilot to land in any cleared
space of the Mortuarium citytop: a statue-strewn plaza on the
low slope; a noble manse landing platform; amidst chem-fumes
at the railhead; upon the enormous flagstones fronting the
Cathedral of Saint Salesse. The heat and noise of flared thrustvents will clear crowds, and enforcers who might otherwise
investigate will think twice about interfering with the
passengers of a Black Flight. The agents can slip away into
citytop alley-tunnels, even as rumors spread rapidly.
It matters little where the agents begin their search for the
Vessus Chantry Archive, though some landing zones may
present more of a challenge than others: exiting a noble manse
after arriving unannounced at its upper levels may prove
difficult, for example. The militants and seneschal in residence
might be cowed or hostile, but it would be hard to present the
intrusion as anything other than an assault of some sort upon
the household.
From any starting point upon the citytop the path ahead is
similar, however: find an announcist or other source of local
knowledge, narrow down the likely location of the Vessus
Chantry Archive to mid-City scribe wards, and seek it out
amidst scrivener brotherhoods and their ink-stained industries.
Beyond the criers, other possible informants include adepts of
Administratum satellite offices or functionaries of the scribeslope portage guildsorganizations that keep painstaking
records of what is carried and for whom. Any of these guides
could be as corrupt as Gasten Gasten, of course, with their own
ways of profiting from the appearance of outsiders.
If the agents do not see though the deception put forward
by Gasten Gasten, and follow his initial directions, they will
find themselves delving into the mid-City cathedral wards, led
towards a reach of waste-strewn alley-tunnels and ill-kept
commune habs. There a rough mix of acolytes and outright
thugs await, like sectids in the darker corners. Escaping that
crude trap should be easy enough for armed agents, but they
must then still find a reliable guideand will perhaps be more
suspicious and cautious the second time around.
97