When she was finished with the cognis mercator — the information broker she'd risked so much to find — Mita returned to Cuspseal feeling uncomfortably pleased with herself. She hadn't broken the rules her master had imposed, hadn't prosecuted her own attack against the nightmare lurking in the underhive, hadn't sanctioned such an attack from any other source, and certainly hadn't interfered with the inquisitor's own plans. Whatever they were.

All she had secured was an element of... insurance. Kaustus need never know.

At the secondary tiercluster, alongside the Arbites precinct, she paused to lead Cog into a hospice of the Order Panacear. The giant had fared well despite his wounds, stalwart physiology seemingly impervious to the pain his injuries looked likely to cause.

Or perhaps, Mita reflected cruelly, he was simply too stupid to know when he should have been dead.

Either way, she found herself quietly affected by his plight. His defence of her safety had been selfless, his loyalty utterly beyond reproach, and in some emotive corner of her mind she found herself sharing his pain, empathic senses indulging her shame with masochistic relish.

It could not be ignored, of course, that Cog's loyalty to her was a far purer, more successful thing than her loyalty to her master. Had Cog ever questioned her orders? Had he ever doubted her, or mistrusted her, or sought to disobey? Of course not.

And look where it got him...

He was a mess. Great ragged holes bled freely all across him, the vast musculature beneath revealed in all its grisly glory. One of his cheeks was ripped — a vacant chasm that exposed gums and molars to the very back of his mouth, leaving a tortured flap of flesh trailing from his jawline. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen, his knuckles grazed of almost all their skin, and his long arms punctured with more holes than a cratered asteroid. Even the sisters of the Order, fluttering from bed to bed in cassocks and starched wimples, with a quiet prayer and a dispensoria of arcane drugs for every occasion, did not seem overly optimistic at his chances of recovery.

After, that is, Mita had bullied them into accepting ''the abomination'' as a patient. The authority of the Inquisition remained unsullied in some quarters at least.

She left her loyal giant in their care for a scant hour, returning to the precinct to change her clothes and steal a short moment's soothing meditation, before returning to oversee his care. She walked between the Preafect fortress and the hospice with an irrepressible spring in her stride, satisfied that whatever the movements of the thing prowling the shadows below her feet, whatever clandestine actions it undertook, she would be fully aware of it.

And then she stepped into Cog's cramped healing cell and recalled, with a jolt, Kaustus's words.

'I am sending a mutual friend to collect you'.

There was someone waiting for her.

He was the sort of man, Mita had decided during the tedious minutes that followed, whose petty affection for authority had come to dominate every part of his persona, to the extent that any story, any piece of unshared information, was delivered with trembling relish. I know something you don't, his gimlet eyes said, and I'll take my damned time in telling you.

'It was on the seventh tier that we found them,' he expounded, waving an arm for emphasis. A small fleck of froth had gathered in the corner of his mouth as he talked — an unpleasant detail that Mita found herself unable to ignore. 'Wretched creatures. Totally disorganised, of course — their kind always are. So pitifully earnest.'

He locked his lips around the tip of the hookah he wore in a strap against his chest, dislodging the bead of spittle, and drew bubbles through the bulb at its base.

...buglbuglbuglbugl...

'Mmm.'

He breathed out cherry-scented smoke, lips curled in a feline smile, a set of onyx-black false teeth twinkling like a starry void within. Mita repressed the temptation to apply a fist to their gloomy surface.

'We killed them all, of course,' he droned, 'bar the leader. We thought you might appreciate an interrogation. Heh. When you're ready.'

He was a priest — or at least that's what he called himself. His obvious self-adoration was hardly in keeping with the selflessness that came with devotion, and were it not for the winged aquila burned above his right eye he would look no different to any other member of Kaustus's retinue. She wondered why the inquisitor had chosen him as his errand boy.

'Tauists,' he blurted, red smog spilling from his nostrils like some ghastly dragon. 'Got hold of a tau propaganda vidslug — we're looking into how. Heretical hogwash. "Greater good" this, "mutual benefit", that. And the idiots believe it — can you image? No place in the Emperor's light for fools like that.'

Mita kneaded her temples, exhausted and headachey. That Kaustus had dispatched this man to fetch her — to rein her in — was obvious, and that he had thus far occupied his time with meandering anecdotes and tales of inconsequence was not helping her mood. She might as well have been talking to the inquisitor himself.

Her patience for her master's obliqueness was rapidly reaching its end.

...buglbuglbuglbugl...

And to make matters worse, it was becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a more irritating sound than the hookah's incessant watery mussitation.

'Why,' she asked, diplomatic to the end, 'are you telling me all this?'

He scowled at her over the ridge of Cog's chest — rising and falling with the shallow sleep into which he had slipped — as if affronted by her ignorance. His mind told a different story, an unsubtle blend of smug superiority and false piety. He was enjoying himself, talking down to his supposed superior like a parent patronises a child.

'Because,' he sniffed, 'last time I checked you were an interrogator of the Ordo Xenos, and — hah — an affiliate of the team that conducted the raid. I thought you'd appreciate the successes of your comrades.'

'Oh, spare me,' she snapped, patience expiring. 'We're on the Eastern Fringes, you fool. The chances are there are Tauist cells on every warpdamned tier. You didn't come all the way from Steepletown to boast about shooting up a bunch of bored idealists.' She crossed her arms and slumped, inwardly annoyed at the ease with which her temper had broken.

The priest's thought patterns changed with frightening speed. Cold, boundless distaste flooded her senses. Briefly, she wished Cog was still awake.

'That sounds an awful lot like rebel sympathy,' he hissed, every word a barb. 'You should have a care, interrogator...'

'I seem to be managing fine so far'

'That is a matter of some... debate, amongst our lord's disciples.'

'I'll bet it is, she snarled internally. Last time I saw the obtuse bastards I killed one of them. She kept the sentiment to herself, this time. An uncomfortable silence settled, broken only by the incessant thought-destroying buglbuglbugl, and as she drummed her fingers against the edge of Cog's sleeping pallet a sliver of enquiry arose in her mind. She knew she should repress it, should control her insolence in the presence of this ghastly little man — who would, of course, relay this encounter word-for-word to the inquisitor — but her curiosity was engorged and, as ever in its implacable face, her objections were bulldozed as if insubstantial.

'Tell me, father,' she said, raising an ironic eyebrow. 'During this... heroic... attack...'

He met her gaze undaunted, her sarcasm wasted. 'What of it?'