Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

Amberley led the way through a pair of curtains hanging heavily across one corner of the room. Sidling through behind her – not without some peril to the contents of my impromptu pile of provender – I found myself facing a doorway plastered, moulded and painted to blend in with the rest of the wall, which it did most effectively. Indeed, had it not been for the crack of light showing around the jamb where it had been left wedged open, it would have remained invisible to all but the most diligent of searchers. Shouldering it aside, I found myself in a narrow hallway, off which a number of doors led, each one as plain and unornamented as the whitewashed walls. Turning back to see if the one I’d entered through was the same (it was), I inadvertently nudged the small wooden wedge propping it open with the toe of my boot. With the inevitable result; with my hands full, I was unable to stop it clicking to.

‘Nads,’ I said, with feeling.

Amberley, who had paused a few paces further along, presumably to make sure I set off in the right direction, shrugged, juggling her own provisions as she did so. ‘No problem. It’ll open easily enough from this side.’

‘Which is where?’ I asked, already certain of the answer.

‘Servants’ corridor. Which none of them will be using tonight.’ She started moving again. ‘We want the third room on the left.’

‘Why?’ I asked, and Amberley glanced back at me with a slightly quizzical expression on her face.

‘Because it’s reasonably comfortable, no one uses it much, and I’ve got Flicker guarding the door on the public side.’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘I meant why are the servants staying out of the way?’

‘Flicker had a word with them,’ Amberley said. ‘Money may have changed hands, or threats been made. Possibly both.’

‘I see,’ I said, and followed her into the room.

The room beyond was quiet, tastefully furnished with armchairs and occasional tables loaded with bric-a-brac, both apparently randomly distributed. What looked like wood panelling, but which a surreptitious poke revealed to be casting in some kind of resin,94 covered the walls, which were largely concealed in their turn by tapestries depicting local heroes of whom I’d never heard slaughtering their enemies with unseemly gusto and gouts of crimson-threaded gore.

‘Commissar. All rising in yours?’ Zemelda greeted me in her own idiosyncratic version of Gothic, the street patois of her home world – or at least that small section of one city on it which had looked like being the only part of the galaxy she’d ever see until a pack of gene­stealer cultists, backed up by a handful of purestrains, had tried to kill Amberley and me on her snack-vending pitch. She was dressed as a lady’s maid, in keeping with Amberley’s cover, and almost looked the part if you ignored the bright purple hair and the bulge in the small of her back where she kept a laspistol holstered beneath the tabard covering her bodyglove.

‘Perfectly,’ I said, parsing the phrase as probably being an enquiry about my health, or general disposition at least, and returned the courtesy. ‘I trust you’re well?’

‘The summit,’ she assured me, which I took to be an affirmation, then slipped through the door we’d just entered by, drawing her laspistol as she went. The concealed panel clicked to behind her, leaving no trace of her passing.

‘Commissar.’ The man in the brown robe I’d seen Amberley speaking to before rose from one of the armchairs, with sufficient good manners to wait until I’d put my food and drink down on a nearby table top (displacing some hideous crystal cherubs to make room for them) before proffering a hand to shake. His voice was dry, and about as emotional as a tech-priest’s voxcoder. ‘Inquisitor Vail speaks very highly of you.’

‘You know she’s an inquisitor?’ I asked, assimilating this somewhat startling piece of information. In my experience Amberley only revealed her true vocation to a very select few: those whose aid she needed (who, like Jurgen and myself, generally moved into the second category if they survived the experience), members of her informal network of operatives and allies, and whichever heretics she was currently rounding up – who, by definition, were hardly going to be in a position to reveal her secret to anyone else.

‘As am I.’ He raised his hand, and an Inquisitorial sigil flashed into visibility in the palm of it: an electoo like the one Amberley had, confirming his identity without a doubt. ‘Rasmus Vekkman, of the Ordo Malleus.’

‘I said I was calling one of my colleagues in to deal with the cult we found on Drechia,’ Amberley reminded me. ‘Fortunately Inquisitor Vekkman was already on Ironfound.’

‘On Ironfound,’ I said, seating myself as comfortably as I could in a chair facing the one Vekkman had previously occupied, and to which, as I’d expected, he returned. In all honesty I’d have preferred to face Amberley, who I found far more congenial to the eye, but I trusted her, and the man in the brown robe was an unknown quantity. ‘Not Drechia.’