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The name is given as Voriet, and the rank is interrogator.’
Could be him, then she is being trained by Cognitae and doesn't know it
If your function is to infiltrate an Ordo training facility, what else do you pretend to be?’
‘I can show you a real one, if you want to compare.’
‘This is what the… the Cognitae do, is it? They infiltrate–’
Her name was Eusebe dea Mordaunt, but we all called her Mam, a respectful contraction of the formal mamzel
Mam Mordaunt was tall and quite beautiful, though it was impossible to gauge her true age.
‘You did well, Beta,’ she said afterwards. ‘He was a cruel assassin, and might have killed us all.’
I never saw what they did with the body and, to my knowledge, the city watch was never called. I did, shortly thereafter, overhear Mam Mordaunt say to Saur that they must be on their guard for ‘others’,
There was no tenderness in it. To me, it did little more than remind me that her hand was always on us.
At least, I think that’s what the look was supposed to evoke in me.
I suppose that is why Queen Mab was chosen as the location of the Maze Undue. It was, eternally, a perplexing and gaudy metropolis, quite intoxicating in its variety and business.
That nature was deceit.
Our preparatory work often involved remote viewing of the subject via the quizzing glass in the top room, and even, sometimes, shadowing them in the streets.
We were obliged to pose as people, to play-act, to pretend.
Sometimes these tasks seemed essentially pointless. A mistress’s pet-name? The secret ingredient of a baker’s famous confectionary? The number of minutes slow a particular old clock ran in a particular private reading room? They were, I knew, just tasks for the sake of tasks.
Each function was a contest, a challenge, and the longer one lasted, the better one had performed.
We were learning to be actors. Liars, in fact, because convincing liars are all that actors are, ultimately. We were learning to become other people to such a degree we could get lost in the part. Before anyone else could believe, we had to believe.
experience-derived tips about body language and micro-expression
Being conditioned by Cognitae, told they are being trained for Inquisition
The robing room never disappointed me.
He supposed me, on first sight, to be the tutor of figurative art, engaged to teach his eldest daughter.
By the end of the month, I had discovered precisely which congenital allergy affected the Saintwyrm line, an allergy the private kitchens and chefs worked scrupulously to avoid. A fatal weakness, of most exploitable use, I suppose, to assassins or blackmailers, was now the currency of the Maze Undue.
one of the few people to have the ear and support of the mysterious Yellow King. She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, and I only ever saw her from a distance.
Junior sartors had been removed – I think, perhaps, even executed – for such failures of care.
Another green garnet hangs in its place on those folds of black crepe silk these days, this one, however, has a vox transmitter device wired into it.
Corodatus, the Ironmaster, the keeper and teller of his own stories. I served him too, on one function, in his verdigrised ruin of a palace below Coalgate.
Blackwards, and of Deathrow, and of Sister Bismillah’s new sister.
It was about a year, a little over perhaps, after the intruder had died in the drill.
I was almost twenty-five.
The emporium house of the Blackwards had to be penetrated. Information was required.
Saint Orphaeus when he trod upon this world during his pilgrimage of grace many centuries ago.
Yellow King? Corrupted Saint?
empyrean of heaven, and brought its gift of fire back with him.
The warblind are there too, of course. It was said the Saint himself bade the broken veterans of the great war cease their mental anguish and their untameable desire for violence, a desire they had not been able to shed once they had come back from the war, and devote themselves to guarding the holloways.
when I saw him. And realised that he had seen me.
He was a beast of a man, a figure of great size. I had never seen a warrior of the legendary Adeptus Astartes, but his was the sort of stature I imagined they might possess. Tall, broad, with immense power in the frame of his shoulders and the depth of his arms.
He was one of the truly old ones, one of the veteran relics that had been alive since the war.
Tusk Slope warblind.
‘Deathrow’.
I stopped. I shouldn’t have, of course. I should have run. I should have run, because he could clearly see me, despite my limiter cuff’s setting.
Deathrow. The name was notorious. One of the most brutal warblind, a killgang chief. Was this him, in person?
I certainly don’t know why I told him Beta, rather than Laurael Raeside, the identity I was wearing.
I heard a buzz.
