“In the course of your duties, you will have frequent occasion to examine the bodies of both the living and the dead for signs of the Enemy. And there is no shortage of treatises from the pens of our peers as to the appearances and nature of such marks. But we should be rightly cautious of leaping to conclusions, for the lives of our fellow humans are not without incident. Injury, disease and even natural deformity can be mistaken for the touch of Chaos by the unwary. And whilst the more assiduous of our brothers and sisters might say that it were wiser to err on the side of caution, it is one thing to exercise due caution and another to allow oneself to surrender to sheer paranoia.

“Nevertheless, there is one mark which always draws my eye and which I will always treat with not mere suspicion but outright contempt and that is the mark of perfection.

“Be wary of the unmarked as you would of a sleeping devilworm. Man, woman or child - even helpless, gurgling babes - that present as flawless, uncontaminated or perfect can be only one of two things: daemons in human form, or holy saints.

“And, of the two, I think the saint is the more dangerous.”

- Extracted from the collected rumination of Silas Cleopas, Inquisitor-at-Large

----------------------------------------

‘The Inquisition, boy? What is this nonsense?’

Drill Abbot Loric Malpas fixed his fiercest glare upon the diminutive and sickly progenius standing at limp attention before his desk. Malpas had fifty years in the habit of a Drill Abbot and forty more as a man-at-arms before that, in which he had risen to the lofty rank of Master Sergeant of the Temple. It had been said more than once that his stare alone could set heretics on fire, and hundreds of progenii had passed under his supervision, each one terrified of the prospect of being on its receiving end. So it was disconcerting to find his stare met by the eyes of a child.

Progenius Dire had a lank head of black hair that always conveyed the impression of being slightly greasy. His eyes were blood-shot and deep-set within dark rings and his skin was so white it was almost translucent, except where a livid bruise around his left cheekbone and eye socket turned it shades of bilious yellow and purple.

Dire held Malpas’s gaze for, perhaps, two seconds before lowering his eyes. There was no fear in the movement - just a calculated appraisal.

‘There is no such thing!’ Malpas snarled. ‘Would you go to join the fairies? Or seek work in the land of cuckoos?’

The boy made some whispered remark and Malpas barked, ‘Speak up boy! What is the meaning of this!’

‘They do exist,’ said Dire more clearly, lifting his face again to stare back at Malpas. His words came out in odd bursts, like the brief chatter of an autogun. ‘I have studied the h-histories. I can s-see the gaps. They have been removed, yes. B-but the gaps have been left. They didn’t have to be. They could have closed them, too. But they left the gaps for people to find. P-people like me.’

Dire was fourteen standard years old, more or less. His age when he had been first brought to the Schola’s nursery had been hard to determine and it had been a close-run thing to keep him at all according to the notes. Only a natural gift for numbers and mathematics had saved his life from the same fate that had befallen his parents and siblings - a gift close enough to uncanny that it had been argued he should simply be exterminated immediately. But the Schola had ultimately decided against it and taken him into their untender care, to be raised in service to the God Emperor, tested, tempered and honed into a form fit to do such duty.

As most such duty involved the force of arms, it was an unkind life to a child ill suited to such adventures, such as young Goge Dire. Not that the boy hadn’t tried. But, in Malpas’s experience, there were two kinds of human: predators and prey. The Emperor needed predators. But Goge Dire, by his considered assessment, was a prey animal: constantly the victim of institutionalised bullying, the boy had most likely not had a single hot shower in six years. Malpas had never seen him without a black eye at the very least.

Not that the Schola Progenium had no room for the intellectually gifted, of course. The cunning, the insightful, the manipulative… These children soon took the measure of their bullies and turned them into allies. These children were destined to the masters of mankind, after all - to take up the robes of the Temple of the Saviour Emperor and join the ranks of the Ecclesiarchy. These children weren’t the victims of bullies. No. They were their masters.

Dire was, by most assessments, easily smart enough to join their ranks, but of all his academic lessons, the only one in which he failed to excel was catechism. Without meeting the minimum grade requirements, he wasn’t eligible for a place amongst those blessed to speak directly with the God-Emperor through prayer and intercession and so he was pushed down and down the pecking order until even the progenii of the lower orders could spit on him with impunity.

And now he asked to join the Inquisition. And that placed Malpas in a very delicate situation.

The Inquisition didn’t exist. They were the bogeymen of the Imperium. Rumour, hearsay and malicious gossip said that they were beholden neither to the Ecclesiarchy nor to the Administratum; that they were empowered directly by the Golden Throne to act in the Emperor’s name in whatever way they saw fit. Life and death lay within the palms of their hands. Or so it was said, in whispers. But they didn’t exist.

That, however, didn’t mean they weren’t real.

Most progenii chose a path in their fourth year. Most chose a martial path, in the Commissariat or the Frateris Templars, and there was a friendly and violent rivalry between those two groups for the best and most brutal of the students. Most of the rest chose to join the Adeptus Ministorum, joining either the Missionaria Galaxia, if they wanted to travel, or the Ecclesiarchy, if they preferred a more sedentary existence.

And, in most cases, it was a choice the progenii made without interference from the Drill Abbots. Of course, the older progenii who had already made their choices and aligned themselves with a faction were free to interfere to their heart’s content and campaigns of recruitment, inducement, intimidation and extortion were perpetual in the halls of the Schola. Malpas and those like him took pride in the fact that their little Schola and its measly five thousand or so progenii could be such a perfect microcosm of the realities of life in the Imperium beyond its dark and towering walls.

The exception to this was the Administratum.

The Adeptus Administratum was the left hand to the Ministorum’s right. The tension between the two was the fire that burned in the heart of the Imperium’s mighty engine of progress! At every step the Administratum sought to snatch from the Ministorum that which was its right! And at every step, the Ministorum sought to foil the grey-faced bean-counters in their tedious obsession with order that would see the God Emperor’s glorious work turned to stagnation and dust!

Which was why only the most dolefully incompetent and physically unadept of their progenii were ever sent to the Administratum. But some children just seem to be born to be an impediment to the Emperor’s work and Goge Dire managed to be one of them.

He had asked - asked! - to join the Administratum. It was as if he had walked up to a Drill Abbott and begged to be punched in the face. He might be a scrawny runt, with the combat utility of wet cardboard, but he was too much of an asset to be wasted on an Administratum tithe, so he had been assigned extra catechisms and the punishments for failure had been raised until he had scraped enough of a performance to be worth a Ministorum posting, and then…

‘The Inquisition doesn’t exist, boy,’ said Malpas again, darkly. ‘You will remove your application and choose something else.’

‘I-if it doesn’t exist, Father,’ replied Dire, defiantly, ‘r-remove it yourself. St-strike a l-line through the word. Make y-your initial.’

Fatidicus’ bones, thought Malpas, we underestimated this boy.

The Inquisition didn’t exist and neither did its agents, hidden among their ranks, watching them. And Dire’s application had already passed through too many pairs of hands on its way to him for him to be sure that they couldn’t have already seen it. And if he were thought to be interfering with the will of the Inquisition, well… Malpas had seen and done many things in his life to haunt and sicken him. But he was utterly certain that whatever fate would await a man in defiance of the Inquisition would defy even his depths of cynicism.

He locked eyes once more with young Dire.

‘Fine,’ he said at last. ‘It shall remain. But you will speak of it with no one. You will be placed amidst the Administratum cadre. You will, I promise you, Progenius Dire, be watched most closely.

‘And if you draw their attention… Well, you might well yet live to wish you had not.’

*

Dire closed the Drill Abbot’s door behind him and, as he marched as smartly as he could back towards his cadre’s common room, he couldn’t suppress at least the ghost of a smile.

He had won. He had taken a leap of faith and he had won.

No, not a leap of faith. A leap of intellect. He had studied. He had questioned. He had pressed up against the very short limits of his teachers’ patience to glean what he needed and he had put the clues together to see the gaps in the narratives. There had been more than one possible explanation, of course. But the account of humanity’s survival in the face of the vast and endless threats of the galaxy had just not seemed probable to him.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Take the greenskins, for example. In his first two years, he had been taught that they were savage imbeciles, easily out-thought and out-manoeuvred, with crude and inefficient weaponry who could only barely cling to interstellar travel. And yet there were thousands of tales of humanity’s conflict with them in the histories. They had stood even upon the very threshold of Terra itself, requiring the intervention of one of the legendary primarchs to stop their advance! Dire had long ago accustomed himself to the idea that the histories were lies, but they couldn’t be complete lies. There had to be germs of truth to them. And if humanity was fighting the greenskin monsters so frequently, then they had to be a more serious threat. And, sure enough, in the next two years he had learned that, whilst they were savage and brutal, they could also be devious and tactical - that the older they grew, the bigger and more intelligent they became, making it vital to leave no survivors. From that, Dire had concluded that the orks - as they called themselves - must have at least as many victories to their name against humans as the humans had recorded against the orks. Probably more, because some of the victories had to have been, at best, pyrrhic, if not reframed as victories post hoc.

Then there were the tithing records of the fringe, which they had to study. They made no sense. Tithing values would be consistent for centuries only to suddenly plummet to nothing or almost nothing for decades before gradually rising back up. No sort of global catastrophe - no climate collapse or civil war - should result in this kind of pattern. And it looked even more damning when looked at as a whole. Clearly, there were places in the galaxy where humanity was clinging to existence by, at best, a finger. Century after century, the patterns were clear to him.

And yet, despite the obvious evidence that there were enormous, extinction-level threats out there, constantly taking enormous bites from the body of humanity, they endured.

He had pointed this out to one or two of the classmates less likely to simply punch him for daring to address them and they had shrugged and pointed to the size of the Imperial Guard and the might of the Frateris Templars. Others had pointed out the incomparable power of the Adeptus Astartes and their angels of death. One of the more tiresome - Glorifex - had simply given prayerful thanks to the benevolence of the omnipotent God Emperor.

But it was all rubbish.

The Frateris Templars had their own records of valour and victory and they were concentrated at the heart of the Imperium, rarely straying even as far as Ultramar, let alone to the Segmentum Obscurus, where Imperial rule grew more tenuous. Meanwhile, the Imperial Guard was little more than an insanely disordered drain upon the power and attention of the Administratum.

He had thought long and hard about the Astartes. They were said to be superhuman, transfigured into new men by the grace of the Emperor in a gauntlet of pain and blood. The images showed them taking to the field in brightly-coloured suits of powered plate armour, similar to that of the Frateris Templars. But whilst the accounts of their tactics and performance varied wildly, one factor never did: accounts of their numbers. In fact, having reviewed one hundred and three records of engagements involving the Astartes angels of death - sometimes called “space marines” - Dire could see only one point of commonality: in not a single record were the angels not outnumbered at least five to one. It simply wasn’t feasible that they could be holding back the tide of extermination on their own.

And so he had realised that there had to be someone else out there conducting a lightning war of timely intelligence, surgical precision and devastating violence. And it was that realisation that had led him to stories so old that they were barely more than legends.

The Inquisition.

Amongst the younger progenii, they were a joke.

‘Polish your shoes or the Inquisition will come for you!’

‘If you don’t give me that back, I’ll call the Inquisition!’

‘I heard that an Inquisitor pulled his eyes out and replaced them with guns!’

But you never said those things where the Drill Abbots could hear you and, as you grew older, you stopped talking about them, much as you might stop looking forward to presents from Old Father Ascension… or much as you might stop imagining that some forgotten relative might show up at the doors of the Schola demanding that you be returned to the bosom of the family you had lost on the day you arrived.

The Inquisition didn’t exist.

And yet the only other possible explanation for what Dire saw in the accounts was Glorifex’s: a benevolent, omnipotent God Emperor watching over his beloved people. How strange, Dire thought, that his peers could grow out of believing every other myth except that one.

That was the first myth that Dire had surrendered. The day he had watched his family murdered in their beds by the Templars was the day he knew there was no God Emperor - that if there was a Golden Throne on distant Terra, and if there was something on it, it was nothing more than a rotten corpse that gave no more of a care about him than it did about the maggots feasting upon the oozing remains of its own festering eyeballs.

So he had called their bluff and he had won.

To see Malpas squirm at the idea of crossing out the word “Inquisition” in his own hand had been glorious! To watch that sadistic evil bastard all but admit that he believed in the bogeyman hiding under his bed…

His footsteps slowed, though, as he approached the towering rood screen and single, low door that separated Chimaera College from the rest of the Schola. Chimaera was where he had lived for six years, starting in the cellar where the first-year progenii lived in a single, dank, lightless dormitory. Now he was on the fourth floor, sharing a room and a single oil-lamp with the only two people in the entire galaxy that he trusted. But for all that he knew every inch, every nook and corner, every secret of Chimaera, it was still a place of danger.

Progenii in their final, ninth year at the Schola were moved to a new college - the Terminus, better known to the progenii themselves as “The Finishing School”. But there were still students up to two years older than Dire in Chimaera who were more than happy to use him as their favoured punching bag, given the slightest provocation. And the larger boys of the lower years knew that they could use him as proof of their authority, beating an older progenius without consequences to assert dominance. Dire’s peers, though, were oddly the least threat to him. They had had more opportunities than most to learn an important lesson about their classmate: that Goge Dire took a grudge very, very seriously.

All the same, he began to move more slowly, following a strange path that avoided squeaking floorboards and hugged the deepest shadows. The whole Schola was made up of twenty collegia, each named for some piece of Imperial military hardware - Chimaera, Hydra, Medusa, Warhound etc. Its full history was obscure, but it was hundreds of years old and sprawled across a mountainous site, its black towers and walls rising like teeth from the jaws of some monstrous, twisted beast. The Schola had grown and shrunk over time, in response to the fortunes of the Ecclesiarchy that ruled it and, as such, it was an irrational maze of corridors, classrooms, refectories, chapels and a thousand other species of room and space. From the foetid bowels, where bonded serfs and mindless servitors toiled over laundry, maintenance and other menial tasks, to the lofty spires of the Great Chapel, the whole Schola raised a hymn to the tenets of the Temple of the Saviour Emperor. As a result, even the least important of its outlying wings was a feast of vaulted ceilings, minutely carved pillars and one example after another of the craft of human hands in service to the God Emperor - or, at least, in service to the Ministorum which was, in the mind of the Ministorum at least - the same thing.

Consequently, there was no shortage of hiding places, and Dire had learned all of them.

He was good at avoiding notice. He was good at looking unobtrusive and at blending into the background. His black uniform was faded to a just dark enough grey to be almost indistinguishable from the Schola’s black stone, and with his head bowed at just the right angle, he had mastered camouflage to a level that ought to have delighted his tactical instructors… if they had noticed. And usually, it was enough for Dire to move from classes to college without interruption.

‘Dire,’ said a voice as he tried to skirt the stairwell to the fifth floor. ‘What’s wrong with your face?’

He stopped, sighed and turned.

‘I don’t know, Senior Poldue,’ he replied to the lanky boy, lounging in the stairwell. Poldue was from the sixth floor, nearly ready to go to the Finishing School and bound for the Commissariat. He was a tireless runner and, apparently, a fine shot. He would do well as a political officer for the feckless wasters that most planets sent to the Imperial Guard as their tithed obligation. ‘What’s wrong with your face?’

Usually a well-placed and juvenile insult would be enough to elicit an instant response that would burn off his tormentor’s adolescent rage and let Dire escape without much more consequence, but Poldue was made of more disciplined stuff.

‘Now, now,’ chided Poldue, approaching him with a mirthless smile. He had a good eight inches on Dire, being at least six feet tall already, whilst Dire was yet to see anything approaching a “growth spurt”. ‘I’m worried about you, Junior Dire. Your face looks miscoloured. What happened?’

‘I must've walked into a door, Senior,’ replied Dire. Long ago, he might have been fooled by the show of concern. But this was a well-trodden path by now.

‘Walked into a - oh! I see!’ laughed Poldue, grasping him by the chin and twisting his head painfully back and forth. ‘So you mean this awful pasty white is how you normally look, while the nice warm colours over here have been imposed upon you by some beneficent friend trying to do something about it and make you look almost human instead of like some mutant gave birth to an amphibian hybrid!’

‘Could you just punch me and get it over with?’

Poldue’s grip slipped to Dire’s throat, spun him around and slammed him up against the wall behind him, lifting him up so that he rested on tip-toes. The senior’s face was an inch from Dire’s.

‘No, Dire,’ hissed Poldue, deliberately enunciating his letters so that he spat into Dire’s face as he spoke. ‘I will not punch you, because I do not do requests and, in any case, it is far less amusing when there is no audience to admire my technique. So this is what you will do, Dire. You will report to my room at Last Chime. You will be in uniform and you will bring with you one medium-sized pot of sugar. Then, once I have availed myself of the sugar and summoned an audience who might benefit from the value of my demonstration, I will punch both sides of your face until they are an even, unblemished shade of black! And at the end, you will say “thank you, Senior Poldue” and walk yourself to the sanatorium, where you will gracefully pass out and not offend my vision for a minimum of two days!

‘Are my instructions clear to you, Junior Dire?’

‘Y-yes, Senior,’ Dire concurred, all the pleasure of his victory over Malpas draining as Poldue spoke. Getting the sugar meant stealing it from the kitchens, which would be punished with a flogging if he were caught. Not attending Poldue’s rooms on time was disobeying a direct order, which would be punished with flogging, as would doing so without the sugar. He could probably get away with falling unconscious during the beating, but then there was no telling where he would find himself waking up.

With some of his seniors, Dire might risk the flogging. Boys had died from a vigorous flogging before now, although not often, and the less restrained seniors were probably more likely to kill him by accident than a Drill Abbot expertly wielding a punishment stick. But Poldue was himself an expert with his fists and he had honed his skills on Dire among others. Given his options, turning up with the sugar and taking a beating was probably the safest choice. And it would mean at least a day in the sanatorium which, whilst cold and lonely, was at least a break from further assaults.

Poldue released him, smoothed the lines of Dire’s uniform with his hands, patted the junior on his head and said with a smile, ‘Well, off you go, then. I’ll see you at Last Chime.’