Emmaline clutched my sleeve, but it was as if her touch was a transient sensation to my dulled senses. I was far away, shocked at what I was seeing before my very eyes. It simply did not make sense. I felt it must be some chaos induced dream, or some facsimile fraud having stripped the regalia of an Inquisitor to mock our most sacred traditions. But I knew that was impossible as soon as I thought it. I recognized the armor he wore. It was Malleus Power armor, one of the Ordos' most sacred armaments. Gilded ceramite, inscribed with pentagrammatic wards upon its forging deep within the Tricorn Palace on saturn. Every strike from the armor could banish a daemon, every attack upon its form would licit a conflagration upon an entity of the warp and perhaps expatriate it from this very plane. Only our most trusted Inquisitors could gain access to such a consecrated piece of equipment, much less wield it. It would take me two centuries of peerless effort for me to even be considered to hold such an armor, and only in dire need. No heretic could get its hands on one, and an Inquisitor wielding one would have to be rent asunder to be killed, destroying the armor with it. 

The armor meant trust. I could put my faith in a man who wore it, beyond any shadow of a doubt. And yet here he was, in this obscenity of a courtyard at the crux of an unholy city half buried in the accursed warp. It made no sense to my young mind, and it was only Emmaline's grip tightening on my sleeve that brought me back from a state of numbness.

"That's a Medicae Servitor," Selencia said softly, gesturing with her head at the third one down. She hadn't deigned to look too closely at the man or the tech adept yet. Her eyes had always been sharp, but this place was having its effect on her. She wanted to speak on what she knew, clinging to the familiar. "Remidium Pattern, I think. But it's been tampered with. I saw many in my time at the Officio Medicae."

"Do you recognize him?" Emmaline asked in a hoarse whisper, feeling my distraughtness in her close proximity. 

Had I, I would have likely been far too gone to be duly reasoned with. His features were fine and well formed, with a strong nose and a look of purpose in his striking green eyes. His chocolate hair was combed back to keep out of his hawkish eyes. He looked only a little older than I, but with rejuvenat technology he could be over eighty, perhaps a hundred years old. Even as I studied his features, he unholstered a bolt pistol and began to prowl the basterdized thing one might call a tower, eyeing the servitors as the servo-skulls buzzed around him in their dutiful work. 

"Orders, boss?" Clara asked, nervously fingering her carbine. She seemed ready to spring, but I was hesitant to attack the man. Not out of any sense of camraderie, though the wrongness of firing upon a fellow inquisitor was painfully evident. His armor was the problem, and the distance it would take to close the gap on him. No bullet or lasbolt would be able to penetrate its hull. Only my power sword could, and even then it would be a near thing. Perhaps Emmaline could hold him steady, but that left the handful of guards and the servo-skulls, which might be armed themselves. We could also fire from here and if we were lucky, take the man, the traitor, in the head. But I couldn't. 

I needed to know who he was.