The heat-resistant glass of the industrial incinerator had long been cracked, revealing a disquieting orange-red glow inside. The fan blades, probably not oiled for decades, made a dry, rasping sound like an old woman coughing, barely covering the crackling of fat at two thousand degrees.
Cyril pinched the cigarette that was almost burned down to the filter between his fingers, staring at the black mass rapidly carbonizing within the furnace.
The real Inquisitor's eyes, which had once been so piercing, lasted only three seconds in the intense heat before bursting like overripe fruit, leaving behind two charred hollows. Without those eyes, the body was no longer a threat, reduced to mere organic waste soon to be flushed into the recycling system.
"S-sir, the fire... isn't it too strong?"
Valen huddled in the corner, his expensive silk shirt plastered to his corpulent torso like a dead pig pulled from water. He stared fixedly at the glowing red furnace door, his stomach threatening to rebel once more.
Cyril casually grabbed a rag soaked in years-old machine oil from the tool rack and threw it at the fat man's face.
"Wipe your sweat. You're the Acting Governor, not a Grox waiting for the rendering vat."
Valen fumbled for the rag, not minding the filth, and frantically wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. The smell of machine oil, oddly, calmed his churning stomach a bit.
"Listen, Valen." Cyril threw the cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it under his heel. "When you go back, you only need to do three things."
"At your command!" The fat man immediately stood at attention, his flabby flesh wobbling twice.
"First, regarding all witnesses from the Paradise Garden, you will visit each of them personally, using your family's name. Make them understand that loose tongues are more dangerous than death. Fear can be more effective than corpses.
"Second, purge the Inner Guard. Those old dogs who will not heel to their new master? Feed them to the Lower Hive's recycling furnaces or exile them to the radiation mines.
"Third..." Cyril walked up to Valen, reached out and straightened his crooked collar with a touch as gentle as preparing a corpse for viewing. "...prepare to be inaugurated in grand style. I want you to sit in that seat, smiling like a real winner."
Valen swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing.
"Sir, what about you...?"
"Me?" Cyril patted the fat man's cheek, the lingering scent of tobacco on his fingers drifting into Valen's nostrils. "I'm an Inquisitor. An Inquisitor is like a ghost. With me in the shadows, you can live safely in the light. Understand?"
"Understood! Understood!"
"Get out of here. Make sure no one knows you came."
Valen acted as if pardoned from a death sentence, scrambling and crawling toward the exit elevator, his retreating back as wretched as a wild dog caught stealing food.
Only after the heavy airtight door slammed shut, isolating the frantic footsteps, did Cyril turn around.
The sternness on his face instantly crumbled, replaced by extreme exhaustion.
He walked to the incinerator and pulled the discharge lever.
The bottom gate opened, and pale gray dust slid down the pipe, the final trace left in the material world by an Imperial Inquisitor who had once commanded awe.
Cyril skillfully dragged a rusty metal bucket from under the workbench and caught some of the ashes. He put on rubber gloves and sifted through the still-hot embers.
Sure enough, something had not burned.
Several twisted metal fragments, neural interfaces and skeletal reinforcement implants. And half a charred bionic eye lens.
Expressionless, Cyril used tweezers to pick out these metal pieces and threw them into the nearby acid bath.
A hissing sound and a plume of white smoke rose as the last bit of evidence dissolved into pungent bubbles.
After finishing all this, he finally took out the still-warm rosette from his chest pocket.
Using the red light leaking from the incinerator, he flipped the badge. On the back of the grotesque skull relief, there was a line of Gothic script so tiny it was almost invisible to the naked eye.
The light had been too dim at the previous banquet, and the situation had been urgent, so he had not noticed it at all.
Rubbing his thumb over the raised characters, Cyril felt his heart skip a beat.
This was an encryption key.
Without this string of keys, the rosette was just an exquisitely crafted hunk of iron, utterly incapable of invoking the Inquisition's high-level permissions. It might even trigger an alarm directly when inserted into certain terminals.
"Pretending to be an Inquisitor is a tough gig, but it sure has its little surprises," Cyril muttered. He memorized the key, then scratched it off and tucked the badge back into his pocket.
In his previous life as a magician, during his first stage performance of "Bullet Catch," the accomplice had been half a beat too slow, and the audience had immediately jeered for a refund.
The shame of standing under the spotlight, pointed at by thousands, still woke him from nightmares.
But here, in this damned 40K universe, there are no refunds for a bad performance.
A bad performance here is the pile of ashes in that furnace.
Suddenly, a violent metallic crash shattered the mortuary's deathly silence.
BANG!
The already precarious iron door was brutally kicked open from the outside. The lock snapped, and half the door hung crookedly on its hinges, emitting a pitiful creak.
Cyril did not turn around and did not even pause his task of cleaning the ash bucket. He merely slid a scalpel from the workbench into his sleeve.
"I was wondering where this barbecue smell was coming from. So it's you, kid, having a private feast?"
A coarse voice, accompanied by the strong smell of cheap tobacco, flooded the room.
Three figures swaggered in.
The leader was a bald strongman with a scar like a centipede running from his left cheek to his ear, a kiss from a chainsword. He had a half-smoked cigar in his mouth and was casually playing with a serrated dagger.
Behind him were two lackeys holding homemade double-barreled shotguns. The barrels were wrapped in tape, and the dark muzzles swayed aimlessly.
Scarface. A small leader of the Black Hand Gang, and the very man who had sold Cyril like a dog to Butler Moss.
"Well, well, if it isn't our 'Dead Face' Cyril?" Scarface recognized the figure with his back turned and let out a grating, strange laugh. "Heard you were taken to the Upper Nest by that dead-fat butler to enjoy the good life? What, did the noble lords get tired of playing with your ass and throw you back into this pile of rotten meat?"
The two lackeys followed with raucous laughter, their eyes greedily roaming over Cyril's still-decent servant uniform.
Cyril slowly turned around, wearing the humble, ingratiating smile he had grown accustomed to using while scraping by in the Lower Hive.
"Scarface, what are you talking about? There's been some trouble on Butler Moss's end, so I'm just back here to lay low for a bit."
As he spoke, he pulled out the pack of top-tier Amasec cigarettes he had lifted from Valen and quickly stepped forward.
"Perfect timing. I brought some good stuff from above. I was just about to come pay my respects to you."
Scarface's eyes were glued to the cigarette pack stamped with the golden double-headed eagle emblem. Down here, one of these could buy you a woman for a whole week.
"You know what's good for you." Scarface grinned, revealing a mouthful of uneven, rotten teeth, and reached out to take the pack.
Cyril presented it with both hands, his body slightly leaning forward, posture humble to the extreme.
The moment Scarface's fingers touched the cigarette pack.
Cyril's right thumb pressed down with extreme subtlety. The scalpel hidden in the pack's base, propelled by a flick of his wrist, instantly snapped into his palm.
This move, the Phantom Draw, he had practiced for a full decade as a magician.
Scarface only felt a blur before his eyes, followed by a sudden icy sting on his neck.
Before he could react, Cyril had already sidestepped behind him. The sharp scalpel pressed precisely against his carotid artery. Two more millimeters, and that artery would spray like a high-pressure water jet.
"Don't move."
Cyril's voice had changed. It was no longer the subservient tone from before, but cold as frost in a morgue freezer.
"I dare you to move!"
Scarface wanted to struggle but found that this usually meek mortician now had a grip as steady as iron tongs.
The two lackeys froze for a second, then raised their shotguns to aim.
"Put down the guns! Or I'll kill him!"
Cyril ignored the two dark muzzles entirely, taking advantage of their hesitation.
He grabbed a handful of ash from the workbench, ash he had deliberately left uncleaned, and flung it with his left hand.
It was ash mixed with acid residue and metal powder.
"Ah! My eyes!"
The two lackeys screamed, clutching their faces. The acid powder rapidly took effect on their corneas, instantly blinding them.
Cyril hooked his right foot under a rusty iron chain used for binding corpses, flicked it up, and whipped it out. The chain coiled like a venomous snake around one lackey's ankle. He pulled hard.
BANG!
The lackey fell flat on his back. His shotgun discharged from the impact, blowing a hole in a ceiling spotlight.
The entire process took less than three seconds.
The mortuary was now filled only with Scarface's heavy breathing and the agonized wails of the other two rolling on the ground.
Cyril whispered in Scarface's ear, "Seems business hasn't been too good for Morozha lately, huh? Even bringing this kind of trash out to embarrass himself?"
Scarface's whole body stiffened, cold sweat trickling down his scar into his collar.
What the hell? Is this still that spineless wimp who only knew how to put makeup on corpses?
"C-Cyril, brother... a misunderstanding, all a misunderstanding..." Scarface swallowed, his voice trembling. "I just... just came to... check on you."
Cyril smiled, flicked his wrist, and the scalpel instantly retracted back into his sleeve as if it had never appeared.
He released Scarface and even thoughtfully straightened the other's rumpled leather jacket collar, patting off the ash.
"Mm, I've been missing Boss Morozha too."
Cyril picked up the dropped cigarette pack from the floor, took out one, and stuffed it into Scarface's still-trembling mouth. Then he pulled out a lighter, flicked it open with a sharp click, and lit it.
The flame illuminated Cyril's bottomless eyes.
"Take me to see him. I have a big deal, one that'll earn more than him selling corpse starch in the Lower Hive for a lifetime."
Scarface took a deep drag of the cigarette. The harsh smoke made him cough violently, but he no longer dared to look into this young man's eyes.
At this moment, he felt he was not facing a person, but a wolf in human skin that had just eaten its fill.