Ignored in the doorway, Mita found herself reflecting upon how differently he wore his armour to the fiend that stalked her nightmares, that blue'black monstrosity from the underhive. As an alumnus of the Inquisitorial scholastia she knew more than most about the elaborate biological changes that the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes — the Emperor's Space Marines — underwent. Such things were shrouded in mysticism, and the mere knowledge that each Marine started life as a lowly human marked her as the recipient of privileged secrets. Nonetheless, the specifics of such alterations were beyond her, and she had imagined that, like Kaustus, such warriors wore their armour as she wore a cloak: the fastenings more complex, perhaps, the fabric more arcane, but ''clothing'' nonetheless.
And yet the Night Lord had moved like his armour was his skin, unencumbered, his movement recalling liquid in its smooth, roiling reactions.
Compared to that shadowed figure Kaustus's motions abruptly seemed cumbersome, and Mita marvelled to find herself so unimpressed by him where previously she had thought him awesome.
'My lord,' she said, announcing herself. The flock of servitors dispersed quietly, their task complete, and Mita noticed with chagrin that her master too had chosen a scarlet and white ensemble, albeit far grander than her own.
'Interrogator. Good.'
'You sent for me, my lord?'
'I did. I've decided it's safer to keep you where I can see you. I think we shall spend the day together.'
He sounded almost cheery. Mita feigned a smile.
Governor Zagrif surprised Mita by being neither old, corpulent, sinister or pompous. She'd met a small but illustrative number of Imperial commanders on other worlds, and in her experience the post bred one of either melancholia or megalomania. To a psyker, such things were as palpable as girth, height or clothing, and she failed to detect either in Imperial Commander Cinnavar Zagrif.
He was skinny and short, dressed entirely in white. As she and Kaustus approached his straight-backed throne, flanked by bronze combat servitors like toy soldiers, he regarded her with a watery-eyed expression of pleasure. Dwarfed beneath the vast heraldry of a familial tapestry — crossed sword and sceptre upon a dappled ice-field, crested by a crescent moon and a ring of stars — he seemed the very opposite of authoritative. Mita's expectations were utterly confounded: amongst them all the one thing she had failed to anticipate was a softly spoken man of her own age, with an astral presence that was profoundly dull. When his subconscious flickered a brief tendril of lechery towards her it came almost as a relief.
Almost.
'Kaustus!' he exclaimed, rising with an outstretched hand. 'What news from the deepest darkest depths?' He giggled at his own alliteration, like a child reciting a nursery rhyme.
To Mita's astonishment Kaustus returned the handshake.
'Nothing troublesome, Cinnavar.'
Mita almost choked. The governor didn't notice.
'Good, good.' He glanced towards her. 'And who is this? A consort, perhaps?' He nudged Kaustus mischievously. 'I thought better of you!'
Mita held her breath, waiting for the inquisitor to chop the man in two for his insolence. When he merely chuckled and waved the insinuation aside, she was left wondering if it was she, or he, who had gone insane.
'I'm afraid not, Cinnavar. This is my interrogator.'
Mita bowed formally, doing her best to ignore the smog of promiscuity ebbing from the governor's mind. It was one thing to suspect someone of undressing you with their eyes but quite another to share the experience.
'And to what do we owe this pleasure?' The governor rubbed his hands, eyes flitting to meet the inquisitor's. 'Is she here to help us with the lock?'
For an instant — a single horrific moment — Mita felt Kaustus's emotion. Where before he had presented a solid ball of impenetrable thought, impossible for her to examine or invade, abruptly his defences fell, and what boiled beneath was rage.
But it was only an instant, as sudden as it was intense, and his mind — whatever had caused it to flex so venomously — was once more locked away beneath layers of self control.
'No,' he said.
And was that a blush of guilt swelling on the governor's psyche? Had he said something he shouldn't have? Mita grit her teeth at the uncertainties, the secrets. Something was going on here, something she knew nothing about. What was ''the lock''?
'Fine,' the governor said, struggling to seem dismissive. 'Good, good.'
'I thought the interrogator might appreciate a view of your collection,' Kaustus said, voice tight. 'That is all.'
The governor nodded with the look of a man who has narrowly escaped an unpleasant fate, and gestured towards a set of painted doors to one side. 'B-by all means. Please. By all means.'
Mita found herself regarded by governor and inquisitor alike.
'My lord?' she said.
'Through there,' Kaustus grunted, nodding at the doors.
She pushed them open with a strange sense of foreboding, feeling like some performing animal, and found herself on a narrow bridge, enclosed on all sides by thick plasplex. Even through the ice and settled snow that patterned the tunnel's outer surfaces she could see that the causeway stretched between the hive's central peak — in which the throne room skulked — and a lesser tower, rising parallel from the shadowed depths. She crossed the abyss with a lurch of nausea, horrified at the vertiginous chasm below her feet, and it was only Kaustus's quiet footsteps at her heel that kept her from crying out, or clinging to the handrail for her life.
The tunnel ended in a second set of doors and, with an impatient nod from her master, she pushed her way through.
And stopped.
In all of the palace — a maze of jewelled stairways and iMricately frescoed chapels, cloistered archways hung with tapestries of spun gold and elaborate congresia sporting sculptures of alabaster and onyx — it was difficult to imagine encountering anything that might shatter the atmosphere of perpetual, unyielding opulence. Nonetheless, Mita stepped through the painted doorway and felt her knees weaken.
'The governor has a fondness for curios,' Kaustus muttered, in explanation.
It was like a gallery. A bazaar. A treasure trove. And it was vast.
There were windows marking the entire periphery. Tiny reinforced portals, perhaps, but windows nonetheless: a subtle symbol of wealth which implied this one chamber, this circular cavern with its sky-blue dome and pearlescent columns, stretched the entire diameter of its tower.
And within it?
She'd never seen such measures. At close intervals, raised on silver plinths and bordered by bright illuminators, the governor's collection of antiquities and valuables could have easily held her spellbound for weeks. Books, archeotech, pictslates, sculptures, pickled beasts, jewels, antiques... At every angle there stood some priceless rarity, some article of unthinkable value, and Mita's blood raced to see them all. She tottered forwards as if drunk, and extended a hand towards a nearby exhibit — a great emerald containing at its heart the shadowy form of a tiny lizard.
'No touching.' Kaustus chided behind her, like a parent slapping his child's wrists. A gloved finger gestured vaguely upwards, drawing her eye towards the ceiling. Set in a wide ring around the plinth, like spotlights with narrow apertures, a bevy of lasguns glared down upon her, crude servos tracking every movement. At their centre, like some grotesque trophy displayed at the heart of a spider's web, a disembodied human head fixed its baleful eyes — long since replaced by compound optics — upon the tip of her outstretched hand.