Саймон Спуриэр - Lord of the Night

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 beginning to sink in, when her master had provided her with all the documents of authority that she needed, and when she was dismissed with no more than a ''that will be all'', she paused at the exit to Kaustus's suite and cleared her throat.

' 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 personnel. Such was the reality of hive life: the sequential tiers represented not only a geographical strata but a division of status — the princely affluence of the upper tiers supported itself on a gallery of decreasing wealth. At its base the hive was a pit of destitution.

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.

'This,' she snapped, when finally Commander Orodai entered the anteroom in which she'd been waiting, shadowed by a pair of vindictor sergeants and an aide, 'is intolerable.'

Orodai had the look of a man who had resigned himself to receiving an earbattering. 'Yes,' he said wearily. 'I'm sure it is.'

He was an old man, if indeed his face accurately reflected his age. Where others in his position might have opted for rejuve treatments or augmetic components, his features betrayed the sort of leathered erosion rarely glimpsed in high-ranking personnel. As a member of the Adeptus Arbitus, and therefore operating entirely exclusively of the hive's administration, his command was arguably second only — if not equal — to that of the governor himself. For all that, he was a small man in bland clothing, whose psychic emissions betrayed no sense of self-importance. Mita's overriding impression from his warp-presence was of an impressive dedication to his vocation. Still, decorum must be observed.

'I've been waiting two hours!' she barked, stabbing at the air with a finger. 'The inquisitor will hear of this!'

Orodai arched an eyebrow. 'I dare say he hears of everything else.' He offered her a bundle of parchments, which she snatched with bad grace. 'In any case, it couldn't be helped. Your documents required confirmation and your companion was... unhelpful.'

Ah yes , she thought, my companion...

'Your men called him an ogryn .'

'And?'

'And that wasn't a good idea.'

'No?'

'No. Last time he met an ogryn it kept calling him Tiny.'

Orodai had the look of a man clutching at straws. 'And that was a problem?'

'Not really. It stopped when he pulled off its arms. I demand that you release him.'

Orodai's expression contrived to suggest that she was in no position to be making ''demands'' but he nodded thoughtfully and gestured to the aide. The man scurried away, oozing reluctance. Mita could well imagine why.

'Under normal circumstances we wouldn't allow his... kind in the city,' Orodai said, stroking his grey beard. Though perhaps circumstances are not "normal"'

'You forget,' Mita retorted, 'that it was you who invited the Inquisition's assista—'

'Actually, we invited the inquisitor's assistance, not that of his lackey and her pet, but let's not split hairs.'

Mita's outraged rebuff was spectacularly postponed.

The door parted with its hinges and her companion entered.

Loudly.

His name was Cog, and he was human — broadly speaking. Whatever feral world had sired him had been isolated for millennia, denied the purifying light of the Emperor's influence, and its sparse population had stagnated in a downward spiral of inbreeding and corruption.