Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘This’ll do,’ Jurgen said, as the major-domo ushered us into the guest suite he’d conducted us to, through the same kind of lavishly decorated corridors I’d walked along in Fulcher’s spire-top residence. Though almost as garish and with a similar overabundance of family crests and Imperial iconography, the overall effect here was less cluttered, and a little more homely; I strongly suspected that this was indeed where the governor felt most comfortable.

‘I’m gratified to hear so,’ Evander said, in studiedly neutral tones, and withdrew with a perfunctory bow, the door clicking closed behind him.

Jurgen was, as usual when stating the obvious (or, in this case, understating it), perfectly correct. As well as a bedroom large enough to have parked a Baneblade in, the suite of rooms assigned to me contained a second one almost as lavish, a balnearia I could have swum laps around, a drawing room furnished in so sumptuous a fashion that anyone daring to sit on the sofa would probably have been completely engulfed in its upholstery, and a smaller sub suite apparently intended for a servant, which would have fitted in its entirety into any of the primary rooms. In all honesty it looked a lot more comfortable than the quarters I’d been given, and I felt a faint stirring of envy as Jurgen took possession of a mattress hard enough to sleep on and a washroom unlikely to be much troubled by his presence.

‘Nice view, anyway,’ I said, gazing out through the large picture windows, across the lawns, and up (or down) at the vast curved face of Ironfound hanging across half the sky.

‘I can get you some refreshment, if you’d like, sir,’ Jurgen offered, his mind as ever on the more practical side of things.

‘Just a snack, perhaps,’ I said, realising that, now he came to mention it, I was beginning to feel a little hungry. ‘And get something for yourself while you’re at it.’

‘Right you are, sir,’ my aide agreed, and disappeared with remarkable alacrity.

Left alone, I took a few minutes to explore my surroundings in a little more detail, and confirm to myself that I really wasn’t comfortable just sitting around waiting for the eldar to attack the orbital or a bunch of slavering cultists to jump out of the wardrobe and attempt to assassinate me. Neither of these things happened, though, and carried on not happening, so I tapped the comm-bead in my ear and reported in to Amberley.

‘We’re at the mansion,’ I told her, ‘and the governor seems safe for now. He even seems to be planning some kind of party.’

‘That would be in accordance with protocol,’ Mott chimed in, confirming my suspicion that, once again, her entire team was listening to our conversation. ‘The governor traditionally marks the transition between residences with a formal gathering.’

‘I’ll keep an eye on things anyway,’ I said. ‘If there are guests arriving, an assassin or a heretic might be able to sneak in among them.’

‘Has Defroy said or done anything suspicious yet?’ Amberley asked.

I thought about that. ‘No,’ I said, uneasy at having him out of my sight for so long. But I could hardly have refused to go with Evander without raising suspicion about my real reasons for being here. ‘I’ll catch up with him again as soon as I can. Has Rakel come up with anything yet?’

‘The singing’s back,’ the psyker told me, and some half-formed thought stuck its head up, before skittering away through my synapses before I could get a proper look at it. ‘Louder than before.’ She hesitated. ‘It sounds frightened.’

‘But can you track it?’ I asked. There was a short pause.

‘We’re trying a new approach,’ Amberley said, when it became obvious that Rakel had become lost in her own private world again. ‘Psychometry. Trying to narrow down our search area by getting her to pinpoint the location on the structural plans Caractacus got for us.’ She sighed. ‘But it’s not going well. The impressions she’s getting are strong, but diffuse.’

‘Then perhaps I can offer a fresh line of enquiry,’ a new voice broke in, Vekkman’s acidic tones eliciting a barely audible groan from Amberley in response to the intrusion. ‘The lead you gave me turned out to be a solid one.’

‘Delighted to hear it,’ Amberley said, sounding faintly confused.