Atop the eight-story building that housed the Harkon Trading Guild, a black-clad figure clambered out of a small manhole built into the roof. He looked out over the edge of the rooftop, taking in the streets of the city below, before collecting a ladder and raising it upright. Above his head, stretched the seemingly endless expanse of metal that separated the tiers of Iram, interspersed in the distance by the great pillars that gave the city its namesake. Great lights hung from this metal disk, illuminating the streets below in a facsimile of daylight. Maintenance of these lights, so vital to the survival of the city, was achieved by the means of a great network of catwalks, that hung from the ceiling and covered the city from end to end.

The ladder was rested against one of these gantries, and the figure clambered up in total silence, before it was collected and set down by a second figure, who quickly withdrew back inside. The assassin ran along the gangways, passing over streets of commuters illuminated by the lights that hung below his position. His footfalls reverberated with a metal ringing as the gantries swayed and creaked but he did not mind. These gantries only saw the occasional maintenance worker, and the Inquisition had lifted their schedules. The only people up here at this hour would be those with ill-intent.

Beneath his feet, life went on entirely unaware of his presence. The great and good of the trading guilds were making their way back from innumerable engagements, having negotiated, or failed to negotiate, deals that would advance their standing. The best of them were delivered in vehicles driven by couriers, escorted by files of uniformed guards who advertised their employer’s professionalism, and the security of their assets. Further afield, the city as winding down for the evening as the hawkers collapsed their stalls and the industries that kept the city running shuttered up for the night. The bars began to ply their trade, and great crowds of workers gathered outside these establishments, spending what little time they had in relaxed company.

The assassin followed the gantries along the diameter of the city, making for the great spiralling ramps that ringed the Doctrinopolis and allowed road and rail traffic to pass between the tiers. The size of Iram, and its geography, rendered most wheeled traffic unsuitable and expensive, but there would always be a steady stream of larger vehicles carting produce from the shipyard to the city, or moving supplies between the tiers. Most of the citizens, when they had cause to travel greater distances, relied upon the public railways that ringed the city. On the Second Tier, these trains were elevated high above the streets, so as to reduce noise pollution, and served both the Second and First Tier.

Stations were built atop rooftops, or suspended on gantries of intricate iron workmanship. The latter platforms lead into small gaps in the solid mass of the First Tier, and provided the fastest means of illicit transport between the two levels. The assassin made for the nearest stretch of railway, following the clattering of the electric engines as their wheels crossed the tracks. His gantry brought him to the very side of one of these structures, while the eyrie’s natural darkness, and his own jet black synthskin, rendered him utterly unseen. He lay beneath the tracks on a maintenance crawlspace suspended dangerously above the eight-story drop. As he crawled, he could see the lights of the city dim and fade as the night cycle began, and a thin band of orange appeared over the distant rooftops as the setting sun poked its head into the narrow gap between Tiers.

He crawled past three stations, at times swinging out and under the walkway so as not to be seen by passengers at the stations. The assassin had trained for most of his life, and he suffered no physical or psychological difficulty as he hung above an eight story drop by the tips of his fingers. When he had passed beneath three stations, he swung himself back onto the gantry and, pausing while a train passed overhead, he clambered up onto the track itself. He stood close to a platform, a few metres from the patch of light that divided the railway’s workings from its public face, and leapt up again until he had gripped the entrance to a maintenance passage. Through this covert entrance, he found himself in an alleyway on the First Tier, beneath the wonderous night sky.

It was a moonless night, and the stars seemed endless and infinite. The major thoroughfares were lit, but much of the First Tier had been left in darkness so as not to disturb the growth of the sacred foliage in the oasis. The end result was a series of shadowy passageways that twisted and turned through the labyrinthine college buildings, interspersed by well-lit roads populated only by late night deliveries or the occasional drunk student staggering back to his halls. The assassin was simply one shadow amongst many, a darker patch of space that moved quickly and cautiously, going utterly unseen.

His journey along the gantries had brought him close to his target, and he only had to move a few hundred metres before the baroque edifice of the College of the Penitent Priest emerged from the urban jungle. The assassin creeped his way to a side entrance of the building, where great trucks would be loaded and unloaded. The gate was guarded by an Enforcer of the Faith, with a blunted mace and a laspistol belted to his armoured robes, but the assassin simply snuck by as the guard was blinded by the headlights of a passing truck. As he approached the entrance, an invisible force opened the magnetic lock with a slight click and he edged his way into the building itself.

As the assassin snuck through the passages in the lowest level of the college, he found himself in a long row of cells. Rather than succumbing to curiosity, he simply lowered his body below the small grills and kept out of sight. No-one was to know of his presence here. This effort at discretion was aided by the utter lack of any security cameras, as the college’s own guilt was turned against them. The assassin paused for a moment at the sound of a wailing woman, interspersed by heavy cracks, but he moved on once he had assessed the possible threat they posed. He was not blind to the suffering that went on in this place, indeed his heart was filled with righteous anger at the desecration, but his own interpretation of the faith called for subtlety, and an utmost dedication to duty.

The unseen man made his way up the tower, until he was roughly a third of the way up. His route was sure, for he had memorised the layout of the tower beforehand, and he moved with the quiet confidence that came from years of practical experience. The corridors were sparsely populated, the majority of the college having left the site at the day’s end, but there was the occasional group of priests engaged in late night study. No guards, though, for the College of the Penitent Priest valued its privacy and limited its main building to inducted members, students, or the poor unfortunates who found themselves in the cells.

The assassin paused before a door, indistinct from the dozen others in this corridor, and withdrew a small device from his belt. The Inquisition had access to any number of ways of opening a door, from mechanical skeleton-keys to discrete devices that contain override codes for all Imperial-standard electronic locks. The two thin pieces of metal used by the assassin were neither of these but, unlike the more advanced options available, they left absolutely no trace of their use. It was a risk, unlocking the door, but the man who held the key had accidentally left the door unlocked on two occasions over the last month, and one more would hardly be out of the ordinary.

The door swung open, and the assassin beheld an enormous monitor, hooked up to a nest of wires and spools that compiled the monitor’s image onto tape. There were banks and banks of tape along the walls, each doubtless depicting some horrifying act that had occurred in the next room. The assassin turned his attention away from the tapes, labelled with the name of the student participating in them, and grabbed a small leather-bound leger. Inside its neatly-kept pages were the names, dates of birth and ages of hundreds of young women who had ‘participated’ in the films, each sacrificed in this profane ritual. The assassin set the ledger back in place, and moved off to his next task.

Two floors up from the observation room, behind yet another unmarked door, huddled the form of Khadem Mason, a native of Sumer and novice student of the College of the Penitent Priest. He had been locked in this room to reflect on his sins, on the poor girl he had killed. The Confessor had instructed him to remain here in isolated meditation until he came to a revelation about the girl’s death. No revelation had been forthcoming, and he had been reliving the sensation of her death for every waking hour. Days into his torment, he had been visited by a saint; an angelic voice had come to him as he slept and spoken to him of the terrible sin he had committed, and the need for him to write the wrongs he had caused.

It was as if a blindfold had been lifted from his eyes. He had been stuck in a fugue state, reliving the sensations of driving the barbed whip over and over into her weeping flesh until the memories had become almost pleasurable. Now he could only recall horror as he looked back on his actions, and he had spent the past two days screaming and raving as the gilt of his actions had begun to sink in. In all that time, no member of the priesthood had come to console him, and no other human contact had been present apart from the occasional bowl of watery gruel pushed into his cell.

But the saint had come to him again in his sleep, had comforted him and soothed his seething spirit. She had told him that today was the day he would right the wrong he had done, that today he would make amends for his crime in the eyes of the Emperor. In doing so, he would sooth his wounded spirit and become whole once again. He no longer ranted and raved, but simply waited. He knelt in the centre of his cell, facing the door, for innumerable hours in the sure knowledge that he would be called upon to act. It was blind faith, pure and unsullied.

When the saint spoke to him again, in a voice so near as to be almost inside him, he did not leap to his feet in shock, but waited in mute acceptance as she told him what he must do. He stood to his feet, unsteady after so long in captivity, and squared his shoulders to the cell door. He slammed into it with all the force he could muster, and the lock sprang from the door frame in a crack of metal and wood. Khadem swung with the momentum of the door until he stood in the corridor, ignoring entirely the masked figure who stood beside him.

The student set off down the halls, guided by the saint and his memories, until he found himself standing before the room where it had all happened, where he had fallen onto this dark path. He didn’t want to go in and, to his immense relief, the saint instead directed him to the next door, a small office filled with tapes. He collected a leather-bound file that had been set on the desk, concealing it and three random tapes within the fold of his robes, before heading back out into the corridors, closing the door behind him. Khadem made his way down through the college until the crowds grew thicker, and he was able to wander unseen amongst the small groups of students and lecturers.

He left the college through the front entrance, descending the ornate staircase that lead to the road below, and moved through the streets of Iram with newfound purpose. In spite of his confidence, the doubtful, sinful, part of him was wracked with agonising fear. Fear of discovery, fear of pounding feet and weapons drawn in anger. But nothing came, there were no shouts or shocked cries, and he descended the steps to the railway without any issue. The wayward student waited on the platform, one student in an entire city of students, and boarded the first train that arrived. Even at this late hour, there were still a few passengers on the train. Workers on night shifts or revellers returning from nights out occupied many of the seats, but Khadem was able to isolate himself from them at the very front of the train. His journey brought him past fourteen stations, and to the other side of the ringed city, and when the conductor called out the station name it was all he could do to stand.

A great elevator brough passengers down to the second tier of Iram, before spilling them out into the streets of the Adeptus district. This region of the city was defied by great fortified compounds, remote and imposing. These buildings were the Imperium in Iram, and in their halls worked civil servants from unnumbered planets engaged in the maintenance of a city that wasn’t their own. The streets here were almost entirely empty, for the servants of the Imperium had no time for worldly distractions. He moved through this district, passing the enclosed enclaves of the Administratum and the Mechanicus, before entering a patch of empty space before an enormous structure.

The Arbites compound was a fortress among fortresses, perched at the very edge of the city with its own landing jetties and consecutive arcs of fire. It was an immense grey monolith that reached from the floor to the very ceiling of the Tier, eight stories high. It was as if an immense wall had been built in his path, but the wayward student moved towards it without any sigh of fear or regret. Unlike most of the city, which was shrouded in darkness at this late hour, the Precinct was lit from top to bottom by immense searchlights, while yet more lights played across the streets. On of these lights found Khadem, following him as he walked towards the bare walls of the fortress.

There was only a single entrance to the precinct, a small steel door built into the perimeter wall, and Khadem moved right up to this edifice, before dropping to his knees and raising his arms to the unseen sky.

“I wish to confess!” he roared and begged, “I have sinned, and my college has sinned! I have killed, and been parley to killings, and I throw myself before you a broken man seeking penance.”

For a moment, a horrible, awful, moment, there was silence until the great steel doors began to slide apart, and orange emergency lights began to flash. The tremendous sound of a klaxon was joined by boots on concrete as a file of four arbitrators surrounded the student, shotguns drawn and aimed at his head. Their leader put the boot to the boy’s back, driving him into the ground, before binding his arms behind his back. He was hauled to his feet, and a second officer patted him down, retrieving the folder and three tapes. They dragged him into the precinct, sealing the doors behind them until the street was empty once again, the face of Imperial justice entirely unchanged.