'And?'

'I... I just wondered... in what way, my lord,’

He narrowed his eyes. 'Curiosity is a dangerous thing, interrogator,’

She nodded, dipping in a supplicatory half-bow, and made to leave.

'Interrogator?' His voice caught her on the threshold of the doorway.

'My lord?'

'The Umbrea Insidior disappeared from Imperial records ten thousand years ago. At the end of the Horus Heresy,’

She almost choked, astonished to even hear the name of that most ruinous of times - when fully half of the Emperor's Space Marine Legions had fallen from his light - let alone to have come so close to one of its relics. Little wonder, she realised, that she had felt such a concentration of despair and violence in its crumpled beams.

'Goodbye, interrogator,’

Cuspseal was as low within the hive as one could travel within the broadly defined 'civilised' sectors. It dominated six full tiers, extended in five kilometres in each direction and had a population - depending upon where one chose to imagine its borders - of

somewhere between six and ten million citizens. As with all such industrial loci it wasn't so much a city as a borough of the hive itself, segueing horizontally and upwards with such other townships, settlements and factories as had germinated nearby.

The one border that Cuspseal could define was its base.

Below its adamantium foundations was the under-hive, and there any such abstraction as 'civilisation' -in short supply even in these supposedly urbane zones - could effectively be ignored.

If the underhive was a madhouse, Cuspseal was its padded walls.

Little wonder that the vindictor precinct owed more in its architecture to some medieval fortress than to the industrial anarchy surrounding it. A perfect cube, it bristled with obvious and massive ordnance, much of it trained on the largest of the cavernous openings into the underworld that dotted the Cuspseal's boundaries: a portal its builders had shrewdly positioned it beside. Tramlines and suspended walkways ringed it on every side, rising in metallic layers that thronged with heavily-cloaked workers.

It had taken Mita three hours to descend this far from the upper spire, riding a succession of increasingly decrepit elevators reserved for authorised personnel. Such was the reality of hive life: the sequential tiers represented not only a geographical strata but a division of status - the princely affluence of the upper tiers supported itself on a gallery of decreasing wealth. At its base the hive was a pit of destitution.

Arriving in the centre of Cuspseal's noxious sprawl hot and irritated by the constant checking of papers, Mita was not in the mood to suffer further indignity.

This,’ she snapped, when finally Commander Oro-dai entered the anteroom in which she'd been waiting, shadowed by a pair of vindictor sergeants and an aide, 'is intolerable,’

Orodai had the look of a man who had resigned himself to receiving an earbattering. 'Yes,’ he said wearily. 'I'm sure it is,’