Lord of the Night

Never before had Mita encountered such an indistinct anima. In a typical personality the fronds and tentacles of outward thought clustered at their roots around a solid core of ego, that diamond-hard seed of identity that informed all else, as a bitter stone informs the growth of a peach. Not so here. In the tormented mindscape of this plain man no such centre existed, no nucleus of 'this-is-me' presented itself, and the one uniformity she could identify was a lust, a desire, a craving: though for what she could not say.

She withdrew with less information than she'd held before, and regarded the uninteresting figure with a new sense of caution. What manner of human was unaware even of its own personality, its own gender, its own name?

'Approach, child...' Kaustus said, and the man stepped forwards until he all but touched his master. Kaustus leaned down towards him, and for one surreal instant Mita wondered if the inquisitor planned to kiss him, irrespective of his mask. At the last instant he diverted his face towards the figure's ear and there, looming over like some ancient ogre, he whispered his secret plans.

If the rest of his acolytes felt any jealousy at this preferential treatment, or frustration at being so excluded, even their thoughts failed to betray them. Mita alone struggled with her annoyance, consumed by something that bore all the ugly hallmarks of envy.

She was the interrogator. She was the inquisitor's second. She had found the enemy, and this was her reward — to be ridiculed and excluded? This was the glory she'd pursued?

And then the nameless man broke away from Kaustus's clinch and was gone, walking from Orodai's office without a backward glance. The inquisitor glanced at his remaining disciples and barked a surly ''dismissed'', and Mita imagined that he paused as his eyes passed hers and something dark, some shadow of malice, shifted minutely in the lagoons of his irises.

She left Cuspseal alongside the rest of the retinue, returning to Steepletown with resentment clouding her mind, and with every breath she cursed her master's name for not believing her, for not taking her seriously, for not seeming troubled. There was a Chaos Marine loose in the hive, by the Emperor's tears, and he seemed no more bothered than had he found a fly in his drinking grail.

Mita watched him, and brooded and seethed, and did nothing.

The next morning, installed once more in the drab envelope of her meditation cell, she awoke to the knocking of a servitor-herald, pompously dressed in ermine and satin. She received its monotone message half awake, unashamed of her nakedness before a creature so devoid of emotion, and slammed the door just a little too loudly as it left.

Kaustus had once more requested her presence.

She prepared to join him with all the usual surges of apprehension and frustration that his beckons always entailed, and spent several flustered minutes considering what to wear. It was as if the turmoil of the previous days had never occurred and she was reduced once more to panicking over how best to secure his respect. She hated herself for such meaningless exactitude as fussily choosing her costume, but was enslaved to it nonetheless.

Cog slept on the floor beside her simple palette, and she stepped over him to rummage in her luggage without even attempting stealth. Having noted her dismal mood, he'd come to her cell the night before with child-like words of comfort, and she'd allowed him to sleep on the floor beside her palette with guilty gratitude — there was someone in the galaxy, at least, who liked her. She knew from past experience that nothing short of a blow to the head would wake him from his contented slumber, so she left him to it and got on with the business of dressing. She began by shrugging on a scarlet robe with white and gold filigree at its seams: nothing too ostentatious, but fittingly colourful for the hive's upper tiers. In these decorous corridors and it was the gaudiest and most patterned who went unnoticed, and the drab who attracted the most attention.

Today, attention was something she could do without.

To her great relief the retinue was absent when she reached Kaustus's chambers. He stood amongst a gaggle of macabre servitor-attendants and skull-drones, meticulously fastening his power armour and layering his magnificent robes. Up until the moment that a hovering arcocherub — a baby's corpse riddled with preservative machinery and cogitation engines — settled his mask over his tusked features, he appeared utterly bored by the whole procedure.