Lord of the Night

Bitter comfort.

She acknowledge with a start that she despised them all, every last one.

'So you don't believe me,' she said, doing her best to ignore the laughter.

Kaustus seated himself again and waved an untroubled hand.

'Spare me your damaged pride,' he said. 'I've already told you I believe you. Something is loose in the underhive and it must be brought to heel. There's no question of that.' He fixed her with a pointed look. 'Whatever that "something" might be.'

'My lord! I recognised the traitor's heraldry!' Her voice came almost as a whimper. 'A fanged skull, leather-winged and homed, rampant against a field of lightning.'

Kaustus's casual posture did not change.

'The mark of the Night Lords!' she shouted, furious at his tranquillity. 'I would not mistake it! I've studied the Insignium Tratoris! I was zealous in memorising such th—'

'Your schooling is of no consequence, interrogator. If reading ancient texts is the full measure of your wisdom then I suspect your tenure with my retinue shall be very short.'

Another guffaw from the mob, another burning moment of shame and hatred.

'My lord...' her voice was quiet, almost plaintive. 'You must believe me.'

'Child.' Kaustus preened at the sleeves of his robe, voice sceptical, 'if a heretic Marine is indeed at large, perhaps you could account for how it is that you — a mere interrogator — were able to escape him?'

Mita opened her mouth.

And closed it again.

In truth, she had barely been able to believe it herself. She had lashed out at the monster with an impetuous psychic strike, a panicky assault without measure or hope of success. It was as if the Night Lord had been utterly unprepared, not just lacking in psychic defence but unaware that such a thing even existed. His mind had been like that of a child, as if the very last thing he had expected to face was a psyker.

Not the type of vulnerability one identified with the Traitor Legions.

'I... I don't know my lord,' she muttered, beaten, 'but I'm certain of the identifica—'

Kaustus silenced her with a sigh.

'That is beyond the point, interrogator,' he growled, looking away with a dismissive wave. 'We thank you for your report nonetheless. It shall be dealt with.'

She opened her mouth to remonstrate, to make him see sense, to scream and shout and vent her frustration until her throat bled, but Kaustus cut her short with a raised palm and a glare.

'It shall be dealt with,' he repeated. 'But not by you.' He turned to face the retinue, crooking a finger to beckon forth a solitary member. 'Dissimulus!'

A man, whose name Mita did not know, stepped from the throng and turned to face him, dipping his head. Mita instinctively dipped inside his mind, tasting the surface of his thoughts. Visually he seemed unremarkable, what few features his robe betrayed were average — his age was indeterminate, his hair cut to a medium length, physically neither tall nor short. Little wonder, Mita reflected, that she'd paid so little attention to him: amongst the menagerie of personalities comprising the retinue he was positively mundane.

In the boiling ocean of his mind, however, he was unique.

Never before had Mita encountered such an indistinct anima. In a typical personality the fronds and tentacles of outward thought clustered at their roots around a solid core of ego, that diamond-hard seed of identity that informed all else, as a bitter stone informs the growth of a peach. Not so here. In the tormented mindscape of this plain man no such centre existed, no nucleus of 'this-is-me' presented itself, and the one uniformity she could identify was a lust, a desire, a craving: though for what she could not say.

She withdrew with less information than she'd held before, and regarded the uninteresting figure with a new sense of caution. What ma

'Approach, child...' Kaustus said, and the man stepped forwards until he all but touched his master. Kaustus leaned down towards him, and for one surreal instant Mita wondered if the inquisitor pla

If the rest of his acolytes felt any jealousy at this preferential treatment, or frustration at being so excluded, even their thoughts failed to betray them. Mita alone struggled with her a

She was the interrogator. She was the inquisitor's second. She had found the enemy, and this was her reward — to be ridiculed and excluded? This was the glory she'd pursued?

And then the nameless man broke away from Kaustus's clinch and was gone, walking from Orodai's office without a backward glance. The inquisitor glanced at his remaining disciples and barked a surly ''dismissed'', and Mita imagined that he paused as his eyes passed hers and something dark, some shadow of malice, shifted minutely in the lagoons of his irises.

She left Cuspseal alongside the rest of the retinue, returning to Steepletown with resentment clouding her mind, and with every breath she cursed her master's name for not believing her, for not taking her seriously, for not seeming troubled. There was a Chaos Marine loose in the hive, by the Emperor's tears, and he seemed no more bothered than had he found a fly in his drinking grail.

Mita watched him, and brooded and seethed, and did nothing.

The next morning, installed once more in the drab envelope of her meditation cell, she awoke to the knocking of a servitor-herald, pompously dressed in ermine and satin. She received its monotone message half awake, unashamed of her nakedness before a creature so devoid of emotion, and slammed the door just a little too loudly as it left.

Kaustus had once more requested her presence.

She prepared to join him with all the usual surges of apprehension and frustration that his beckons always entailed, and spent several flustered minutes considering what to wear. It was as if the turmoil of the previous days had never occurred and she was reduced once more to panicking over how best to secure his respect. She hated herself for such meaningless exactitude as fussily choosing her costume, but was enslaved to it nonetheless.

Cog slept on the floor beside her simple palette, and she stepped over him to rummage in her luggage without even attempting stealth. Having noted her dismal mood, he'd come to her cell the night before with child-like words of comfort, and she'd allowed him to sleep on the floor beside her palette with guilty gratitude — there was someone in the galaxy, at least, who liked her. She knew from past experience that nothing short of a blow to the head would wake him from his contented slumber, so she left him to it and got on with the business of dressing. She began by shrugging on a scarlet robe with white and gold filigree at its seams: nothing too ostentatious, but fittingly colourful for the hive's upper tiers. In these decorous corridors and it was the gaudiest and most patterned who went u

Today, attention was something she could do without.

To her great relief the retinue was absent when she reached Kaustus's chambers. He stood amongst a gaggle of macabre servitor-attendants and skull-drones, meticulously fastening his power armour and layering his magnificent robes. Up until the moment that a hovering arcocherub — a baby's corpse riddled with preservative machinery and cogitation engines — settled his mask over his tusked features, he appeared utterly bored by the whole procedure.