Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ I said, ‘what exactly are you doing here?’ Amberley had made no secret of her desire to keep him at arm’s length, so finding him waiting in her car had come as a real surprise.

‘I wanted a word with you about the attempt on your life,’ Vekkman said. ‘Could the heretics be responsible?’

‘The head of the household troops thinks they were,’ I said. ‘Though I’m not sure why they’d bother, to be honest.’

‘Neither am I,’ Vekkman agreed. ‘They seem to have gone to a great deal of trouble and expense, infiltrating the governor’s household, and fitting out a couple of air cars with heavy weaponry. That implies access to a lot of resources, which would be more purposefully employed advancing their agenda, rather than frittered away seeking revenge.’

The outer door began to grind open, revealing the purple sky behind it, clotted with aerial traffic. There seemed to be a little more of it than I remembered, including an increase in the number of shuttles and other spaceworthy craft, and after a moment I realised that they’d probably come from the orbital void stations, seeking refuge in the illusory safety of the hive. I doubted that the eldar would resort to a sustained bombardment from space, as destroying the hive utterly would bury the webway portal under trillions of tonnes of rubble,121 which would pretty much put an end to any hope they might have of swarming through it to retake the planet they’d abandoned millennia before.

‘Quite.’ Amberley nodded, in reluctant agreement. ‘If they could sneak an assassin into the mansion, why not just take out Fulcher while they had the chance, and have done with it? Quick coup d’état, job’s over, heretics in charge. Probably through some well-meaning idiot distantly related to him.’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘They’re all barmy anyway.’

‘No,’ Vekkman said emphatically. ‘They are not. Irrational, deluded, and extremely dangerous, yes, but there’s always some purpose behind their actions which makes perfect sense to them.’

‘Tangling with the eldar doesn’t seem to make much sense to me,’ I said, and Amberley nodded, glancing down at the seething cloud of filth below us. Pelton was descending slowly, sticking to the traffic lanes, and I found myself looking around at the swarm of other flyers surrounding us, searching for more like the ones which had attacked me during my ascent. I knew how unlikely that was, of course, but I simply couldn’t help it; my innate paranoia had kept me alive often enough for me to indulge it now and again.

‘Which is what puzzles me,’ she said. ‘They were there, in just the right place and at just the right time to save your life. Then, instead of taking a pot-shot at you themselves, they broke off and fled.’

‘Which is not, I take it, typical behaviour for the eldar?’ Vekkman asked.

Amberley shook her head. ‘In so far as that phrase has any meaning at all, no, not really.’

‘You said the farseer you spoke to seemed to think I was going to do something significant,’ I said. ‘Maybe I just haven’t done it yet.’

‘That’s possible,’ Amberley replied, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Though I can’t imagine what it could be for them to go to all that trouble to save you from a couple of heretics.’

‘All that trouble?’ I echoed, a very uncomfortable suspicion beginning to coalesce. But we hadn’t been able to find any other plausible targets for the Vypers, and of all the fast-moving aerial unpleasantness in the eldar arsenal there was nothing better suited to shooting down the heretic air cars. ‘You think the only reason they risked running our blockade in the first place was to save my neck?’

‘I said it was possible,’ Amberley said, ‘not likely. For one thing, I can’t think of anything you might do that would make them take a chance like that.’

‘Me neither,’ I lied. I could think of an excellent one, but it wasn’t an idea I wanted to share. What if I was going to make some catastrophic strategic or tactical blunder which would ensure the success of their invasion? That would surely be worth the eldar taking a few risks to bring about. ‘Just how reliable is this Sambhatain’s prediction likely to be, anyway?’

Amberley shrugged, with the usual aesthetically pleasing results. ‘I couldn’t say,’ she replied, which was hardly the most reassuring thing I could have heard. ‘Farseers’ abilities aren’t quite the same as a human psyker with precognitive abilities. Rakel, for instance, seems to pick up sense impressions, which are generally hard to convey verbally.’ Which, as understatements go, ranked somewhere around asserting that orks have a tendency to testiness. ‘Farseers, on the other hand, seem to perceive potential timelines directly, like the threads of a tapestry, and nudge events towards following the one they see as having the most beneficial outcome.’