Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘Somebody’s lying,’ Zemelda said, sprawling on a couch and stuffing palovine pastries into her mouth with her functioning hand. The other arm, now professionally trussed up by a medicae, was pretty much immobilised by bandages and a sling, but it seemed her mouth was still functioning normally at any rate.

‘Somebody’s always lying,’ Pelton said, which I suppose, given his current and former occupations, was a reasonable assumption to make. ‘The question is, who? Vekkman or Porten?’

‘Maybe neither,’ I said, turning in response to a familiar odour, and gratefully accepting a steaming bowl of tanna from my aide. ‘Whoever sent that assassin after me must have had some access to the governor’s household. Maybe even a position in it where they can pull rank on the Ironfound Defence Force. Perhaps it’s time we checked in with Defroy about how his enquiries are going.’

‘Good point,’ Amberley agreed, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Flicker, go and chase him up. Try not to scare him any more than you need to.’

‘Right.’ Pelton nodded, and adjusted the fall of his jacket to make the bulge of his holstered bolt pistol a little more visible. ‘I’ll have a word with Clarys while I’m at it, too. The local plodders might have dug something up as well, even if they don’t recognise its significance.’

‘Have fun.’ Yanbel looked up as the former arbitrator left the room, then returned his attention to the spirit stone still clasped in his mechadendrite. He’d spent the last half hour or so poking and prodding at it with a variety of things that buzzed, hummed and beeped, with every sign of enjoyment, in so far as a tech-priest would ever admit to experiencing so human a sensation.149 Every now and then he peered at it closely, although what he expected to see eluded me.150 After a while he dropped it among the others Mott had collected from the dead scavvies, with something approaching a shrug. ‘Can’t tell a thing from it, sorry. Or any of the others. But if it’s any help, they all seem to be identical to the one the heretech smugglers had.’

‘Heretech smugglers?’ I asked, intrigued. I’d gathered that Amberley had been led to the webway portal in the underhive in the first place by an investigation of some kind, but she hadn’t mentioned any of the details, and I hadn’t bothered to ask, on the entirely reasonable grounds that if she’d wanted me to know she would have told me. That and the fact that we’d been rather busy at the time, what with all the eldar, daemons and heretics trying to kill us.

Zemelda nodded, spraying a few previously overlooked crumbs as she spoke. ‘Small-time dishrags dealing t’au toys to the chinless,’ she said disparagingly, which I interpreted as a relatively insignificant operation151 supplying a few xenos trinkets to the local aristocracy, a few of whom would always place novelty above common sense and the preservation of their souls.

‘Which we rolled up quite easily,’ Amberley said. ‘The real surprise was finding a spirit stone among the Imperial artefacts going the other way.’

I felt my brows knitting themselves into a puzzled frown. ‘Why would the t’au want an eldar spirit stone?’

Amberley shrugged. ‘Why wouldn’t they? They collect all kinds of stuff from other races. Even the orks, who don’t have anything worth taking in the first place.’

‘They may not have known what it was,’ Yanbel reminded her. ‘The smugglers didn’t.’

‘Fair point,’ Amberley agreed. ‘But that doesn’t mean the buyer was equally ignorant.’

‘And the buyer was?’ I asked, to show I was paying attention. Probably a t’au, or one of their client races, and thus well out of reach of the retribution they deserved,152 but in my experience a polite show of interest always went down well when an attractive woman was showing off her intellectual superiority, and occasionally paid dividends.

‘Somewhere out-system,’ Zemelda said, a trifle indistinctly, clearing the last of her plate. She flinched slightly as Jurgen materialised at her shoulder and took it from her, disappearing in the general direction of the kitchen, and everyone’s breathing became a little deeper.

Yanbel nodded. ‘We never got the chance to follow that up,’ he said. ‘It seemed more important to find out where it came from.’

‘Good call,’ I said feelingly, and Amberley nodded, looking a trifle smug.

‘Which took us through the webway to Drechia,’ she finished. ‘And the rest you know.’ At least as much of the rest as she felt like telling me.

I nodded. ‘Sounds like the trail’s cold anyway,’ I said. ‘Whatever ship the stone should have left on will be long gone by now.’