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Last Night at the Resplendent – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Ciaphas Cain:
Last Night at the Resplendent

By Sandy Mitchell

As I’ve spent most of my life rattling around the galaxy, and more of it than I’m comfortable with in a state of mortal danger, hysterical panic or both, the rare quiet interludes tend to stand out more clearly in my memory as I’ve got older. Of these, one of the longest was the couple of years or so I spent on Keffia in the early days of my career. Not that it was entirely without incident. Like the time I found myself facing a genestealer horde with only my aide Jurgen, a couple of local constables and a handful of hungover Guardsmen to hide behind. But all in all it was a relatively uneventful period which I still look back on with a faint air of nostalgia.

If you’ve read any of my previous reminiscences of the time I spent with the 12th Field Artillery, my first assignment after being kicked out of the schola progenium with a new scarlet sash and the heartfelt sighs of relief of most of my instructors, you won’t be surprised to know that when one of the more memorable bits of unwanted excitement occurred it was all Divas’ fault. Toren Divas was a junior lieutenant in the battery, and as our duties (which in his case included any administrative trivia Colonel Mostrue couldn’t be bothered with, especially if it involved interacting with me) brought us together on a more or less daily basis, he was about the closest thing I had to a friend among the Guardsmen whose morale and discipline I was supposed to be taking an interest in. Since he had an exaggerated opinion of his abilities as a tarot player, which pretty much amounted to a gift from the Emperor whenever I found myself a little short of currency, I generally found his company congenial enough – apart from his habit of using the familiar form of my given name, which I found irritating in the extreme. A fact that he failed to pick up on so comprehensively that I eventually gave up even attempting to draw the matter to his attention.

‘Cai! The very man.’ He strolled into my office, breezing past Jurgen with every sign of completely failing to notice my aide’s attempt to impede his progress. Not wanting to have to smooth things over after he left, Jurgen having a tendency to regard any breach of protocol as not far short of spitting on the aquila, I caught my aide’s eye and nodded, at which point he retreated behind his desk and resumed his perusal of erotic material on a data slate, glancing up now and again to glower at my visitor’s oblivious back. ‘Doing anything this evening?’

‘Depends on what the gunners get up to,’ I replied, with a quick glance at the leave roster. None of the most reliable troublemakers had a pass that night, so I was unlikely to be called to the scene of a major incident; probably all I’d have to do was make the by now familiar trip down to the local law enforcement office to collect the night’s gutter-sweepings in the morning. A by no means unpleasant chore when Wynetha Phu, their senior sergeant, was on duty, but she was in the planetary capital, briefing the Keffian Arbites office on the hunt for the still-missing patriarch of the genestealer brood we’d stumbled across together, which meant my preferred choice of companion would be unavailable for another week at least.

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘Tickets to the music hall,’ Divas said, producing them from a pocket of his fatigues with the air of having successfully performed a conjuring trick. ‘I’ve got two, wondered if you’d like to join me.’

‘Might as well,’ I agreed. ‘But what about that girl you’re so keen on?’

He’d been mooning over some local civilian in the tithing office for weeks, trying to pluck up the courage to talk to her about something more interesting than provender supplies to the battery, and this would have been the perfect opportunity to get to know her better. Then my brain caught up with my mouth, and I adopted an appropriately sympathetic expression.

‘Oh. Turned you down, did she?’

Divas coloured a little. ‘Not as such,’ he said. ‘She got caught up in the purge. Turned out to be one of the hybrids from that brood you uncovered.’

‘Oh,’ I said again, uncharacteristically at a loss. ‘I’m sorry.’ Then a rather more alarming possibility presented itself. ‘You didn’t... you know, kiss her, or anything, did you?’ The worst thing about the whole episode had been the way the brood had been spreading its taint to unwary Guardsmen, its collective mind absorbing theirs as their genes mingled, their altered allegiance only becoming clear when they turned on their comrades without warning.

Divas flushed. ‘Never got the chance,’ he said, to my intense relief. ‘I was hoping if I asked her out...’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I already had the tickets, and it seems a shame to waste them, so...’

‘Indeed it does,’ I said, with all the enthusiasm I could feign. Singers and acrobats weren’t really my cup of tanna, but in the absence of Wynetha, and with the bars and gambling dens I normally frequented either closed down or being periodically visited by jumpy Guardsmen with lasguns on the lookout for undetected hybrids, my recreational options seemed somewhat limited at the moment. Besides, Divas was looking as though someone had just kicked his puppy. And I felt vaguely responsible for that. I hadn’t actually set out to kill his putative girlfriend, just save my own neck when the brood turned on me, but the least I could do was ensure he had a memorable night out.

Which we did, though hardly in the manner either of us would have wished.

Click here to buy Ciaphas Cain: Last Night at the Resplendent.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Vladimir Krisetskiy.

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