I had too, naturally. That was partly why I had come. It was said the notes were revelatory. That they showed, in Keeler’s own, authenticated script, that she considered Horus a man, not a transformed, daemonic being. Further, they related that it had been commonly known at the time that the Emperor denied His divinity. He had formally declared that He was not a god, and sought to suppress the notion that He was. The Lectitio Divinitatus was already growing back then. The notes showed that the Emperor wanted it proscribed and forbidden.

They showed that the Emperor did not believe Himself to be a god. Keeler and her companion saints had created the foundation of Imperial faith against the Emperor’s express wishes.

That was a different kind of heresy, and I wasn’t sure if the heretic was Keeler or, somehow, the Emperor Himself.

‘There’s no way to know the truth,’ I said.

‘The truth is in the writing,’ said Karyl.

‘The danger,’ I corrected him, ‘for truth is arbitrary – it’s what people will do with it. If one, shall we say, stood against the Imperial Truth, one might use a pict and manuscript from such an august and exceptional source as the basis for a new creed.’

‘To undermine the faith and deny the Emperor’s divinity?’

‘It is not reaching to imagine so.’

‘And that, I presume, is why the Inquisition is here… To seize the image and remove that possibility.’

‘I never said why I was here,’ I replied.

‘Not you.’

He nodded gently in the direction of a woman on the far side of the hall. She was talking with other guests.

‘Halanor Kurtecz,’ said Karyl. ‘Ordo Hereticus. So I am told.’

‘If the Ordo Hereticus wanted the Keeler image,’ I replied, ‘they would have stormed the palace, taken it, put all within to the sword, and levelled the site from orbit.’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Unless they wanted to find out who was interested first, to observe the individuals a relic of this kind brings out of the woodwork.’

He was right. I had thought as much. The sale was private, but it was still bait of the first magnitude. From my seat, I could see at least six persons of interest from the ordo watch-lists: renegades, recidivists and heretics, lured into the open by the mouth-watering promise of a truly blasphemous artefact. If I had been in control of Ordo Hereticus operations, I would have stayed my hand, planted agents in the palace, and waited for the sale. Then, in one stroke, I would have taken possession of the heretical image, and also ended a dozen key enemies of the Imperium, possibly obtaining enough information, via torture and interrogation, to bring down most of the cult networks in the subsector.