boss back safe/
I smiled and fixed myself a small amasec from the bureau. Bequin hated to be called 'Lizzie'. Only Nayl had the balls to do it.
Aemos was hovering by the window. Somehow, the rags of his twist disguise suited him.
'Most perturbatory… the arbites are coming this way/
'What?'
Nayl moved to the window.
'Aemos is right. Three land cruisers pulled up outside. Officers coming in/
'Hide yourselves, now!' I ordered.
Aemos hurried through the communicating door into the other bedchamber and threw himself down on the cot. Nayl blundered into the adjoining bathroom and used a tooth mug and loud groans to suggest he was busy throwing up.
Alizebeth looked at me frantically.
'Into bed! Hurry!' I ordered.
The arbites kicked open the door and played their flashlights over the bed. 'Hive arbites! Who's in here?'
What is this?' I asked, dragging the sheets back.
'Streetfight killers… witnesses said they came in here/ said the arbites sergeant, advancing towards the bed.
'Me, I been here all night. Me and my friends/
They gonna vouch for you, twist?' asked the sergeant, raising his weapon.
Wass goin' on? Too much light!' said Bequin, emerging from the dirty linen on the bed. Somehow she had removed her dress beneath the sheets. Clad in brief underwear, she slithered on top of me.
'Wass you doin'? Stoppin' a girl makin' her way? Shame on you!'
The sergeant ran his flashlight beam up and down the length of her body as it clung to me. I smiled the inane smile of the lucky or well-oiled.
He snapped the light off. 'Sorry to interrupt you, miss/ The door closed and the arbites thumped away.
I looked down at Bequin with a wink. 'Good improvisation/1 said.
She leapt off me and grabbed her clothes. 'Don't get any funny ideas, Gregor!'
I'd had funny ideas about her for years, truth be told. She was beautiful and sublimely sexy. But she was also an untouchable. It hurt me to be close to her, physically hurt.
I hate that fact. I feel a lot for Bequin and I long to be with her, but it was never going to happen. Never, ever.
That's one of the truly great sadnesses of my life.
And hers too, I hope, in my more self-aggrandising moments.
I lay in bed and watched her drag on her dress again, and I felt the pang of desire.
But there was no way. No way in the galaxy.
She was untouchable. I was a psyker.
That way pain and madness lay.
TEN
Ruminations on Lyko.
The Chew-after.
The highest bidder.
Tumultuous sap-storms hammered the twist-town in the pre-dawn, blanketing the sky with swirling vapours and shaking the tiles and shutters with the gross weight of their heavy pelting goop. Thunder rolled. In the aftermath, veils of mist swathed the countryside, and the stillness was alive with gurgling and dripping and the swarming scurry of sap-lice and storm-bugs.
Nayl went out early with Aemos and bought paper pails of warm food from the twist-town commissary just down the street, which was already serving the work lines forming for the shift change in the mills. By the time they returned, we had been joined by Inshabel and Husmaan, who had slept through the night's altercation with the arbites in a shared room down the hall.
I'd yet to formally notify the ordo that Inshabel had joined my band, but he was now very much part of it. I felt he had the right to be here on this mission, for Roban's sake, and for his own. He had brought the news of Esarhaddon to me, directly and selflessly. Few of my team yet referred to him by his rank – it would be a long while until anyone eclipsed the memory of Interrogator Ravenor – but he had meshed well, with his bright mind and healthy, caustic wit. He was already providing me with more solid service than Alain von Baigg had ever managed.
Duj Husmaan had been a skin-hunter on his homeworld of Windhover when Harlon Nayl had first met him. That was back in Nayl's
bounty-chasing days, before he'd joined my cause. I'd recruited Husmaan eight years before on Nayl's recommendation, and he'd proved to be a resourceful, if superstitious, warrior with a great sense for pathfinding. Nayl had personally selected him from the individuals in my retinue as muscle for this venture, and I had no quibble with the choice.
Husmaan was a slender man of medium height with coppery skin and white, sun-scorched hair and goatee. Here on Eechan, like all of us, he'd drabbed down his clothing to ragged black twist robes. He ignored the bundle of disposable wooden forks that Aemos had brought back from the commissary and started to eat the hot food from his paper pail with his fingers.
I picked at my own food idly, wondering how close we were to Lyko.
Lyko had been a fool and had damned himself. The damaging revelation that it hadn't been Esarhaddon who had been torched on the lawns of the Lange palace could have been circumvented if Lyko had kept his head. He could have claimed it a mistake, another example of the heretic psyker's treachery.
But Lyko had run. Out of fear, or chasing some timetable, I didn't know. But he'd run and, in so doing, incriminated himself.
I'd gone to his residence, a rented hab high in the spires of Hive Ten, the moment Inshabel had alerted me to the deceit. But Lyko had cleared out, taking his people with him. His hab was empty and abandoned, with just afew scatterings of trash left behind in the stripped rooms.
I had set my staff to work tracing him, a tall order given the planet-wide data- access problems in the wake of the rioting. I had decided almost at once to pursue him alone, without informing the Inquisition. You may see this as odd, almost reckless. In a way, it was. But Lyko was an inquisitor of good repute, held in high regard, and with many friends. There was scant chance I could tell the ordos I was undertaking a hunt for him on the basis he was harbouring a notorious rogue psyker without the fact reaching him, or without his friends making trouble for me.
Those friends of his, of course, included Heldane and Commodus Voke: the stalwart trio that had captured the thirty-three rogues on Dolsene in the first place. How empty that 'heroic' action now seemed to me. I had been so impressed when Lord Rorken had shown me the report. Perhaps the 'capture' had been easy, or even staged, if Lyko was secretly in league with Esarhaddon. Perhaps it had all been part of an elaborate conspiracy to perpetrate the atrocity of Hive Primaris.
I was dogged by grim, unanswerable speculations. I had no way to prove Lyko was corrupt, not even now, though I certainly suspected it. He might have been an unwitting pawn on Dolsene, or at the Lange palace, or he might have been in it all along. It was possible too that his departure from Thracian was a coincidence that I had misinterpreted. It wouldn't have been the first time an inquisitor had moved undercover without announcement.
