Though I felt I had taken his advice and started from the beginning, I realised more and more that I had not. 1 kept going back, filling in details. To explain Cherubael, I had to go back to Farness Beta and the struggle against Quixos, and that in turn required mention of the mission to Cin-chare. I told him about the assault on Spaeton House and our desperate flight across Gudrun. I recounted the murders that had taken place across the sub-sector. He'd known Harlon Nayl and Nathun Inshabel, not to
mention several other members of my team. My account of Pontius Claw's revenge was a litany of bad tidings.
Once I had begun, I couldn't stop. I spared nothing. It felt liberating to confess everything at last and unburden myself. I told him about the Malus Codicium, and how I might have compromised myself by keeping it. I told him about my dabbling with daemonhosts. And thralls. And warp vortices. I owned up to the deal I had struck with Glaw on Cinchare and how that had empowered him and turned him into the threat that now pursued me.
'Everyone, Tobias, everyone in my operation – my family, if you will –everyone except you, Fischig and the handful I brought aboard here with me, has died because of what I did on Cinchare. Something in the order of… well, I haven't made an exact count. Two hundred servants of the Imperium. Two hundred people who had devoted themselves to my cause in the firm belief that I was doing good work… are dead. I'm not even counting the likes of Poul Rassi, Dudane Haar and that poor bastard Verveuk who perished in what turns out to be the overture to this bloodbath. Or Magos Bure, who must have been killed by Glaw for him to have escaped/
'Might I correct you, Gregor?' he asked.
'By all means/
'You called it your cause. That they were devoted to your cause. But it isn't, is it?'
'What do you mean?'
You still, passionately, believe that you are doing the Emperor's work?'
'Damn right I do!'
Then they died in the service of the Emperor. They died for His cause. No Imperial citizen can ask for anything more/
'I don't think you were listening, Maxilla-'
He got to his feet. 'No, I don't think you were, inquisitor. Not even to yourself. I'm pressing this point because it's so basic you seem to have overlooked it/
He walked across the stateroom and stood looking up at a hololithic portrait of an Imperial warrior. It was very old. I didn't want to think where he might have got it from.
'Do you know who this is?'
'No/
'Warmaster Terfuek. Commanded the Imperial forces in the Pacificus War, almost fifty centuries ago. Ancient history now. Most of us couldn't say what the damn war was about any more. At the Battle of Corossa, Ter-feuk committed four million Imperial Guardsman to the field. Four million, Gregor. They don't do battles like that any more, thank the Throne. It was of course the age of High Imperialism, the era of the notable warmaster, the cult of personality. Anyway, Terfeuk got his victory. Not even his advisors thought he could win at Corossa, but he did. And of those four million men, only ninety thousand left the field alive/