His body rejected the implants. He awoke shriven of his pain and his dreams, but excised utterly from the obsessive faith he'd held before. He awoke a greedy, flawed bastard with the mind of a computer, and when his priest-masters ordered that he report for dismantlement, he laughed down his thrice-blessed comm-line and fled.
And now?
Now he was the self styled ''cognis mercator'' of the Equixus hive: an information broker whose lattice of influence and spymongering extended to all points. He served the gangmasters with mercenary neutrality, sold his rumours to upcity analysts, hired himself to navy officials to direct pressganging and grew fat and rich in the certain knowledge that he was too valuable, too vital, for any fool to kill.
He alone had collated information on all twelve of Sahaal's slayings. He alone noted the spiral scars cut into each corpse. He alone recognised the power, the lethality, of the killer on the loose. He alone had compiled maps and behavioural patterns, identifying the point central to each murder. He alone had found Sahaal's lair.
And he alone was bold enough to come looking for him, seeking influence and opportunity over whatever force of destruction had entered his territory.
And he alone was fortunate enough to be in a position to achieve both.
Sahaal cursed his name again, flexed his claws impotently, and prepared to cut him free.
Mita Ashyn
The knocking at her cell door, which she had been expecting, came in the evening of the third day. The cowled acolyte responsible sniggered as she read the summons he delivered.
Her master demanded an audience.
Having failed utterly to distinguish herself at the crash site of the Umbrea Insidior — its name being the only detail she remembered from her trance and subsequent blackout — she expected the summons to herald a formal discharge. The Inquisition was ruthless in defending its obscurity, and if that required ineffectual personnel to be cerebrally cleansed or, worse, culled, then so be it.
She had spent the intervening days meditating — neither scrying nor dreaming, but basking in the Emperor's light — and when the summons arrived she had prepared herself for death, or at least lobotomisation, as best she could.
Kaustus received her alone — that was the first of her surprises, she'd assumed the retinue would turn out in force to witness the spectacle of its newest member being cast aside.
'Interrogator,' Kaustus greeted her, not looking up. He sat at a simple desk in the centre of his suite, engrossed in a bundle of parchments and auspex pads, and delicately laid down his writing stylus as she dipped her head in return.
'My lord.'
The second shock, and one for which she was utterly unprepared, was that he had removed his mask. His face was unremarkable — somewhat gaunt, perhaps, bordering on the aquiline — and his hair, tied in a tall black tower that crested his head like a topknot, could hardly be described as outlandish amongst the clashing fashions of the upper hive. But it was his teeth that stood out. Two of them, at any rate.
Inquisitor Kaustus had tusks.
'Orkish,' he said, without prompt.
Mita realised she'd been staring and lowered her eyes, brows furrowing in uncertainty. He hadn't even looked up.
'For three days I stalked the bastard through the tar pits on Phyrra. We'd freed his slaves, wiped out his war-band, crippled his fleet and filled his green flesh with more lead than a target range, but the brute wouldn't give in. Warlords are like that. Proud. Stubborn.'
Mita fidgeted, wondering if this was some perverse treat the inquisitor reserved for the condemned: a story from his own lips, a glimpse of his secret features, then a bullet between the eyes. If Kaustus noted her tension, he gave little sign.
'We caught up with him on the edge of a volcano,' he continued, turning a page of parchment before him, 'and after he'd hacked his way through my men I fought that piece of xeno filth for two hours. The way I saw it, if he'd killed me he would have taken my head as a trophy.' He twanged a tusk with a gloved finger, finally looking up with a smirk. 'This seemed an appropriate measure.'
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 q
uiet.
'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.
Still human, if only just.
Cog and his kin had grown massive. Shunning the need for higher thought, rapid evolution had seen their skins grow thick, their brows brachiate, their chests barrel. Over long centuries of clambering through forests their arms had elongated and formed secondary elbows, their legs had shortened and their hands had grown massive.
Kaustus had found Cog in the slaughterpits of Tourelli Planis, where he was goaded by his captives with energised spears and electroflails, forced to grapple a succession of beasts and automata for the crowd's amusement. His hands had been taken from him, replaced with crude bionics. Watching the giant enter the ring with a tribal prayersong to the Emperor, Kaustus had been impressed with his piety as well as his physique, and had purchased him from the slavers for a princely sum.
Given her own barely-tolerated mutation, since joining Kaustus, Mita had found in Cog an unlikely ally. She knew he regarded her with a simple devotion based on lust, and tolerated his clumsy advances with good grace despite never acceding to them. If stringing-along a gentle giant was all it took to secure his personal loyalty, she judged it a fair price to pay Cog had been her natural choice of companion for this degrading foray into the plebeian morass of the hive's lower tiers, and his puppy-like pleasure at her invitation had been touching. He'd remained at her side ever since, as silent as a statue, until the vindictors of Cuspseal had decided his obvious corruption was a step too far and had him tranquilised. Cog was dragged away in chains, Mita's protests were ignored, and her sympathy for whichever poor devil was eventually chosen to release him had been growing ever since.
Cog d
idn't lose his temper often. But when he did...
The door, set firmly in a ferrocrete bracket, crumpled like a dead leaf. Cog followed it through with his head dipped and his shoulders hunched, roaring like a hive-tram. The vindictor sergeants reacted as if electrified, staggering away, fumbling for power mauls. A third voice added to their panicky exclamations, and it took Mita a moment to spot Orodai's unlucky aide, clutched in the giant's mechanical hand like a fleshy club.
Cog's beetle-black eyes squinted, seeking the best target, brows collecting in moronic indecision. One of the sergeants settled the matter by thumbing the activator of his maul and shouting: ''Stand down, brute!'' — an attempt at machismo derailed when Cog contemptuously swatted him with the aide's body. Both men tumbled in a confusion of limbs and squeals towards the wall, which vented a layer of mortar dust at their impact. The second sergeant whimpered.
Commander Orodai, by contrast, had reacted with admirable composure, directing his impatient eye at Mita. To her psychic senses he exuded little fear, only an air of irritation at what he clearly considered to be a waste of his time.
Across the room, Cog picked up the second vindictor, plucked off his helmet like the lid from a tube of paint, and crumpled it into a ball between thumb and forefinger. The man — stupidly, in Mita's view — took a ridiculous attempt at a punch to Cog's face, an attack which earned him a rib-splintering bearhug and a casual toss over the giant's shoulder.
Cog turned his attention to Orodai and advanced, metal fingers twitching. A long cord of spittle dangled from his lower lip.
'I think that will do, interrogator,' the commander said, regarding Mita calmly. 'You've made your point.'
She smiled, nodded with faux graciousness, and turned to the advancing monster.
'Cog,' she said. 'I'm fine.' She eked out a small portion of her consciousness and coiled herself around Cog's simple mind, soothing its jagged edges.
'H-hurt you?' Cog said, blinking rapidly. 'Hurted Mita?'
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