The summons arrived on a ribbon of black vellum that smelled faintly of incense and hot iron.
Aurelius turned it over in his gauntlet once, reading the seal without breaking it. The rosette was not the simple sigil most citizens feared; this was thorned, old, pressed so deep into the wax that it had left stress fractures at the edge. Conclave-mandated. Ordo Mixed. Serious enough to come to Cadia rather than demand that Cadia come to it.
Seraphine Kest watched from the window slit of the kasr's briefing room, eyes on the storm-slashed horizon. Her presence kept the Eye's background itch from settling in the skull. She signed without looking at him: Knives in robes.
"Many," Aurelius said.
He broke the seal.
To Custodian Aurelius, called the Emperor's Gift; to Silent Sister Seraphine Kest, lawful null of the Sisterhood; to Lord Castellan Draeven, commander of Cadian ground authority.
By mandate of the Senatorum Imperialis and the Ordos of the Inquisition, an Audit of Faith and Function will be conducted at Kasr Kraf, Chamber Seven, in two days. The scope includes: battlefield anomalies attributed to 'the Gift,' command influence over Imperial assets, and doctrinal deviations in fortress procedure.
Presence is compulsory.
— Inquisitor-Lord Halix Vorn, Conclave Solis
Draeven arrived an hour later, jaw set to survive a century. He read the parchment, said nothing for a full breath, then: "They would audit the wall while it's being built."
"They always do," Aurelius said, without heat.
"We will seat this on our ground," Draeven decided. "My kasrs are not theatre. They can hold knives and law both. And if someone tries to put a bullet through this audit, the bullet will be ours first."
Seraphine's fingers: Bullet will come.
Aurelius did not argue. He called the day's drills, revised the watch-rosters around Chamber Seven, and wrote the Inquisition's seating plan himself—an architecture of angles and lines of fire that pretended to be courtesy.
The chamber filled the way a wound fills: from the edges first, then the middle. Priests in black with gold thread, scribes with ink-stained fingers bright as wounds, a short, dense Commissar who looked like a drawer packed with pistols, Magi with cog-toothed halos, Naval officers crisp as folded razors. Three Inquisitors took the front bench.
Halix Vorn sat at the center. He wore plain grey, immaculate. The only ornament was the small, old rosette at his throat. His eyes were careful and unblinking, the way surgeons' eyes are when they want their tool to forget it's a knife. On his left: Inquisitor Marr, Ordo Hereticus, rings of polished bone around her wrists. On his right: Inquisitor Kellen, Ordo Xenos, skin as pale as the paper his acolytes clutched.
Aurelius stood without helmet, spear grounded. Seraphine took a position to his left, two paces back, exactly where a shield should be.
"Proceedings begin," Vorn said. The chamber's vox caught the words and made them law.
"We convene," Marr intoned, "to hear testimony regarding anomalous battlefield phenomena attributed to this Custodian, and to ensure that such phenomena are neither witchcraft nor disobedience wearing gold."
Kellen's voice was a whisper that preferred to be a draft. "We also take interest in the blackstone structures beneath Cadian pylons. Reports of pre-human geometry. Uncatalogued."
Draeven spoke from the witness rail as if it were a parapet. "You will have what you came for, and not a grain more."
Vorn inclined his head by half. "Custodian Aurelius."
Aurelius stepped forward. The room smelled of parchment, oil, and nerves. He tasted intent the way a smith tastes steel. Observation went out in a shallow pulse—no more than two heartbeats—and returned with quiet truths. Vorn's attention held like wire: tensile. Marr's simmered: hot and looking for an excuse to boil. Kellen's moved sideways, cataloguing the margins while he pretended to read the center. Among the benches, a note of too-still—a bodyguard with a pulse half a beat off the room's music. Another by the rear door with a sleeve too loose where a holdout pistol wanted to be.
He filed it all where it would be useful.
"Custodian," Vorn began, "we have statements from Caltrius, Myrridian, Dagon Reach, and Cadia. Men claim you steadied their breath with a word. They claim enemy champions faltered when you looked at them. They claim your presence bent the moment. We ask: by what authority do you accomplish these effects?"
Aurelius met his gaze. "By will honed to war. By training that refuses panic. By the Emperor's intention that men be more than the sum of their fear."
Marr's mouth thinned. "Answer the question asked. Are you a psyker?"
"No," Aurelius said, and the word did not rise, it settled. "This is not the warp's trick. It neither feeds on it nor bends to it."
"Demonstrate," Marr said.
Draeven stiffened. "This is a kasr, not a circus."
Vorn lifted two fingers. "Demonstration will be confined to heart-rate mapping and stress-response in volunteers." He looked to Seraphine. "The Sister remains in proximity."
Seraphine lifted a hand: I am.
The medicae brought a rig, auspex leads like silver veins. A Guardsman volunteered—young, exhausted, unafraid of needles because he had learned better fears. Aurelius stood three paces before him. He let Conqueror's lift a fraction—not a hammer, a hand on a shoulder saying you know how to stand; do it now. The man's pulse steadied; his eyes ceased to skitter after peripheral ghosts; his hands remembered to be hands, not birds.
"Again," Marr demanded. Seraphine stepped between them. Aurelius did it again. The graphs changed less. The warp's noise had nowhere to breed in Seraphine's silence; Haki still reached the man, but it reached him like a voice across a winter field rather than a palm to the back.
Kellen watched, lips moving in internal arithmetic. "Not psykana," he murmured. "Not null. A third thing."
"Will," Vorn said softly. "An old word for an ancient function."
The back doors eased open.
Two latecomers entered—robes wrong by half a stitch, the wrong kind of dust on their boots, smiles the shade of knives held behind backs. Aurelius let Observation flick—enough to taste metal under sleeve, a breathing cadence that belonged to assault work, not scholarship.
Seraphine's fingers: Two. Rear. Left.
Aurelius did not turn his head. "Lord Castellan," he said, so casually a clerk might have thought him bored, "your right flank is thin."
Draeven did not ask. His fist closed. Two kasr-kin stepped from angles they had been born to stand in. The first "scribe" reached for his sleeve and found a hand closing on his wrist like a vice invented to make wrists regret being wrists. The second tried to duck; Seraphine turned without haste, and his motion slowed as if the air had decided it no longer respected enthusiasm.
The room moved in the complicated way rooms do when two different kinds of authority realize they share a ceiling. The Commissar's hand hovered over his sidearm and then, wisely, did not draw. The Magi clicked. Marr hissed. Vorn did not move at all.
"Disguised," Draeven said, disgust clean in the word. The kasr-kin tore the sleeves. Stub pistols winked in the light like embarrassments. "You try to shoot my audit in my kasr."
The captured men remained too calm for men who had failed this badly. Aurelius saw why a second later: the camera skull in the cornice, one of the Conclave's, rotated a hair too smooth. Its optic dilated wider than it had before, and a thumb-sized bore irised open at its base.
"Down," Aurelius said.
He didn't shout. He decided. Conqueror's cut across the room like a slab dropping. Men who would have looked up did not. Marr's head snapped toward him in outrage, then toward the skull, then back—caught between pride and survival. Vorn's eyes were already sliding to where the shot would go if a shot came. Seraphine flicked a coin from her belt—plain, stamped metal—so fast it cracked the skull's lens before the bore finished irising. The coin pinged the wall and dropped, the skull sagged like a guilty thought denied its performance.
The two "scribes" lunged in the confusion. Aurelius stepped into their lunge. Observation pulsed once: one feint, one real cut. He let the feint pass through borrowed space; he caught the real cut and ended it with economy that would have pleased a Mechanicus budgeteer.
Silence filled the room with the decency of a blanket.
Marr rounded on Vorn. "Your audit is compromised."
"Someone wished it to be," Vorn said, voice level. He looked at Aurelius as if they had been sharing a private conversation since the ribbon arrived. "We proceed. More carefully."
He turned to the benches. "Remove the infiltrators. Verify every machine-spirit in this chamber to my seal."
Draeven's men obeyed with the grateful malice of soldiers allowed to tidy a mess with permission.
Vorn faced Aurelius again. "Let us return to the matter. You are not a psyker. You are not a null. And yet men under your command show unusual cohesion, reduced rout incidence, improved fire discipline. Explain how this avoids the sin of undue influence."
Aurelius took the weight of the room and set it down where it would be useful. "I impose nothing that makes men other than what they are. I give them a single second in which the right choice is simpler than the wrong one. They still choose."
"Is that not what a sermon claims?" Marr asked, bitter.
"Seraphine stands," Aurelius said, "and no sermon functions at all."
Seraphine's empty voice was a mercy in the chamber.
Kellen tapped a stylus against his teeth, thinking with precision. "Show us the limit."
Seraphine signed before Aurelius could respond: No sheet. Only scalpel. He nodded.
He let Observation run in timed cones across the room—mapping heart-beats, not to control them, but to avoid breaking them. He sent Conqueror's in a single thin line—toward the Guardsman who had volunteered earlier. The man's shoulders dropped a fraction; the tremor in his fingers stopped. Everyone else felt nothing but a draft. The graphs showed a pulse steadying in exactly one chest.
"This is not mass coercion," Vorn said, half to Marr, half to himself. "This is command distilled."
"And if he someday chooses coercion?" Marr pressed.
Aurelius did not look away. "Then you will kill me."
It was not bravado. It was the answer that closes a circuit.
Vorn's mouth moved at last into something not quite a smile. "Noted."
A scribe shuffled forward with a slate. Vorn glanced at it, then passed it to Aurelius. The glyphs were Mechanicus, sealed in cog-tooth red.
BLACKSTONE MATRIX: further correlation with pylon harmonics. Patterns suggest intentional interference not aligned with Ruinous Powers. Source vector: deep sub-crustal nodes. Design: unknown.
Addendum: localized null-field amplification in Sister Kest's presence yields repeatable 'quiet zones' free of warpsong. Strategic application recommended.
— Magos-Lex Ulym, Kasr Kraf Forge Annex
Kellen leaned in like a pale moth to light. "Older than Chaos."
"Or different," Vorn said. His eyes, at last, showed interest not entirely pinned to law. "Custodian, Sister—this goes beyond your… anomalies."
Draeven folded his arms, satisfied to be vindicated by work. "We still have pylons to raise. We still have trenches to dig. Audit or no."
Vorn stood. The chamber rose, relieved to have instructions to obey.
"The Audit of Faith finds," he said, voice carrying to beams, "that Custodian Aurelius's influence is neither warp-borne nor heretical. It is a matter of command applied at scale. It is to be monitored, recorded, and deployed at the Captain-General's discretion." He inclined his head a whisper toward Seraphine. "With appropriate counterbalance."
Marr did not look pleased; Kellen looked intrigued, which for his kind was a kind of victory. Vorn fixed Aurelius with a last, square look. "You have enemies. Some wear your colors. Fewer than yesterday, more than tomorrow if you are careful."
"Understood," Aurelius said.
"Good," Vorn replied. He nodded to Draeven. "Lord Castellan, your world belongs to its work. We will not delay it further."
The benches emptied the way a storm drains: leaving behind heavier things. The broken skull glared blind at the floor. The captured men were led away to learn how long a kasr's corridors can be when they disapprove. The Magi whispered to their slates, words that tried to be prayers and became math.
Seraphine and Aurelius stood alone by the window slit where the Eye glowered like a bruise that had learned teeth. Her fingers moved: We survived the knives.
"For now," Aurelius said. He touched the sill. It was cold, honest stone. "We build. We watch. We teach the wall to learn."
She nodded once. From the corridor outside came the living noise of Cadia—boots, rivets, orders, breath. In the weave of it all, a new thread: the quiet certainty that the Gift was not a witch's trick, but a craft; that a null stood ready to trim it; that the wall had teachers, not just martyrs.
The kasr lights flickered as the generators took a deeper load for the night drill. Far below, in the sub-strata, blackstone waited like a thought an empire had not yet learned to think. The Mechanicus would bring him more numbers. The Inquisition would bring more questions. Both were knives in the same kit. He would choose which to use, and when.
"Next," Seraphine signed.
"Silent Oath," Aurelius said. "We visit a Black Ship before its noise becomes a fire."
They left the chamber together—the quiet and the gold—moving toward the next gate that wanted to fall.