>>96543106
>Things continued in this manner until, seemingly overnight, the name of Salafié went from a fearful whisper at fringes of Imperial space to being sung in heroic cheers on every street corner of the Segmentum. But how could it be?! Though he knew it not at the time, Inquisitor Corsini had at last encountered the vast propaganda apparatus of the Von Nassau-Mendoza dynasty.

>Scarcely had the Inquisitor begun to investigate these rumors when word came that this Rogue Trader had petitioned the High Lords of Terra to pardon the Techpriestess. Shocked and horrified, Inquisitor Corsini summoned a council of his fellow Inquisitors to warn them of what could only be a vast and terrible conspiracy. He told them of worlds laid waste by this mad heretek, and begged them not to heed the tales of her triumph against the forces of Chaos, for what was one good deed weighed against generations of wickedness?

>Yet, when they asked him for proof of his accusations, there was none to be found. At archive after archive, Corsini discovered that reports documenting a lifetime of investigation had vanished or were edited into unrecognizable nonsense, while Administratum clerks assured him he must merely be misremembering. Once more, the Inquisitor had been one step behind his foe, his visits preceded by the Rouge Trader's agents, whose bribes had more than sufficed to persuade the clerks to betray their oaths.

>In that moment, watching those vile scribes lie to him from behind cynical smiles, draped in finery their wages could never have paid for, the Inquisitor finally understood the truth: He was opposed not by a lone heretic, but by the all-encompassing power of a trading dynasty whose machinations had frustrated his every effort for seven long decades. But more than that, he saw arrayed against him the very rot at the heart of the Imperium. Here were men both great and small for whom lust for money and power stood above faith in the God-Emperor and love of humanity...