Lord of the Night

Mita wondered if she should comment. As ever, the inquisitor sent her confidence crashing around her, robbing her of any certainty. A wrong word, a misplaced facial expression: in a man as unreadable as this, such things could be disastrous.

On the other hand, if she was here to die anyway...

'I imagine, my lord,' she said carefully, 'they come in useful.'

He nodded, smiling at her boldness.

'Indeed they do. To the ork, symbols of status are vital. I've seen the vermin retreat rather than face a human with tusks greater than their own. I've seen them turn on their own lords when their enemy's fangs are taller or sharper than his. A simple thing, but so very effective.'

Mita's resignation to her fate lent her a dangerous bravery. Go outfighting, she thought.

'Though I imagine they make eating difficult.'

There was a cold, uncomfortable silence. Kaustus's eyes burnt a hole through her.

And then he began to laugh.

'It depends,' he said, when the chuckles subsided, 'what it is you're trying to eat.'

'Am I to be discharged?' Mita said, tiring of the niceties. If she was here to die she'd rather skip the preamble.

For the first time she felt as though she had Kaustus's full attention, and she met his gaze openly. He steepled his fingers.

'No,' he said, finally, 'though the idea was... considered.'

Something like relief, mixed with a perverse portion of disappointment, filtered through Mita's mind.

'You gave us the name of the vessel, interrogator,' Kaustus said, 'which is in itself a revealing detail. That you were so... affected... speaks volumes.'

'B-but I could not answer your question, my lord. I could not tell if there were survivors...'

He waved a vague hand. 'Oh, the retinue handled that. There were none.' He fiddled with the pendant around his neck. 'Such remains as they found were ancient things, long since passed beyond the Emperor's light.'

'Then... how did the ship come to arrive here?'

Kaustus worked his jaw, tusks circulating below his eyes. 'My logi have hypothesised it was lost in the warp,' he said, dismissively, 'and has only recently exited.' He fixed her with a glare, all traces of congeniality gone. 'In any case, it's beyond our remit. We are here to investigate xenophile cults, if you remember, not to ponder upon the complexities of the warp. The retinue found nothing untoward in the wreck. Let that be an end to it.'

Mita recalled the psychic terror incumbent within every joist of the vessel's structure, stabbing at her mind like fire. There was something dark to it, she knew, some echo of past horrors that clung to its hull like an aura.

Despite the discomfort she said nothing to Kaustus, aware that his newfound tolerance could end at any moment, and suppressed her internal shudder.

'I have informed the Adeptus Mechanicus of its arrival,' Kaustus grunted, returning his attention to the paperwork. 'I dare say they'll send salvage crews. It matters little.'

'Yes, my lord.' Inside, she screamed: No, my lord! Something has arrived!

'Which brings me to my point.' Kaustus lifted a parchment, narrowing his eyes. 'It seems this dreary world is fated to present me with as many distractions as it can.' He shook his head, black hair teetering above his scalp. 'I have decided to give you a commission, interrogator.'

Mita's heart stopped. 'My lord?'

'My investigation is bearing fruit. The governor has opened his records and I suspect the presence of a xenophile enclave in the midhive. I wish to concentrate my resources on locating and purging it.'

'O-of course.'

'Of course. So when I received yet another damnable request for assistance, this time from the vindictors, of all people — and after all the fuss they made when we joined their little crash site excursion — I naturally thought of you.'

Mita wasn't sure whether this was a compliment or an insult, so she nodded discreetly and stayed quiet.

'It seems their commander has a problem in the underhive. Quite what he expects me to do about it I don't know, but I'll be damned if I waste another second on the inconsequential internal affairs of this world.'

Mita had a bad feeling about where this was going. 'You'd like me to assist him in your stead...' she said, filled with gloomy resignation, inwardly appalled at the ignominy of such a mission. The underhive, warp dammit!

Kaustus regarded her with a grin, needle-like tusks bisecting his face.

'Congratulations, interrogator.'

A short while later, when the indignity of the commission was begi

'Yes, interrogator?' Kaustus sighed.

'My lord, you... you said the name of the vessel had been... "revealing"...?'

'And?'

'I... I just wondered... in what way, my lord.'

He narrowed his eyes. 'Curiosity is a dangerous thing, interrogator.'

She nodded, dipping in a supplicatory half-bow, and made to leave.

'Interrogator?' His voice caught her on the threshold of the doorway.

'My lord?'

'The Umbrea Insidior disappeared from Imperial records ten thousand years ago. At the end of the Horus Heresy.'

She almost choked, astonished to even hear the name of that most ruinous of times — when fully half of the Emperor's Space Marine Legions had fallen from his light — let alone to have come so close to one of its relics. Little wonder, she realised, that she had felt such a concentration of despair and violence in its crumpled beams.

'Goodbye, interrogator.'

Cuspseal was as low within the hive as one could travel within the broadly defined ''civilised'' sectors. It dominated six full tiers, extended in five kilometres in each direction and had a population — depending upon where one chose to imagine its borders – of somewhere between six and ten million citizens. As with all such industrial loci it wasn't so much a city as a borough of the hive itself, segueing horizontally and upwards with such other townships, settlements and factories as had germinated nearby.

The one border that Cuspseal could define was its base.

Below its adamantium foundations was the under-hive, and there any such abstraction as ''civilisation'' — in short supply even in these supposedly urbane zones — could effectively be ignored.

If the underhive was a madhouse, Cuspseal was its padded walls.

Little wonder that the vindictor precinct owed more in its architecture to some medieval fortress than to the industrial anarchy surrounding it. A perfect cube, it bristled with obvious and massive ordnance, much of it trained on the largest of the cavernous openings into the underworld that dotted the Cuspseal's boundaries: a portal its builders had shrewdly positioned it beside. Tramlines and suspended walkways ringed it on every side, rising in metallic layers that thronged with heavily-cloaked workers.

It had taken Mita three hours to descend this far from the upper spire, riding a succession of increasingly decrepit elevators reserved for authorised perso

Arriving in the centre of Cuspseal's noxious sprawl hot and irritated by the constant checking of papers, Mita was not in the mood to suffer further indignity.