"Surely Lord Deckard, more comfortable accommodations can be found for your wife while you undertake this scared duty?" Salavere objected. Hadrian made a brushing gesture with his hand, body language current on Gudrun but not widely spread beyond.

"You will forgive me Cleric Salavere, if given what I have seen of your security, I prefer to undertake my wife's protection myself," he spoke coldly. Salavere flushed and Osten grimaced at the rebuke implicit in the words but neither contradicted them.

"If your Excellencies will excuse us we will see about rounding up your stray Primates."

_____

"I don't like this," I told Hadrian as we headed out into the street once more. Urien's troops were deployed in rough columns to either side of us with Clara and Lazarus forming the advance party. Between weapon's master and the skitarii there seemed little chance of us blundering into anything unprotected. 

"Which aspect?" Hadrian asked, "the politics, the fraternus militia, the bombing?" I shrugged my shoulders and pulled the grey cloak Clara had given me to conceal myself around me.

"All of it, none of it, I don't know," I temporized, trying to find the words to describe what I was feeling.

"Who cares who wears which pretty hat, we came here to find heretics and now we are collecting votes?" I asked. Hadrian's lips pursed slightly at my words, he knew that the time I had spent with Lucius Raj had eroded my faith in the Emperor to a degree that was best not openly voiced but for him the God Emperor and His Church remained as fixed and immovable as the stars.

"We know that the heretics had something to do with the assassination, so we pull at this thread until we learn more," Hadrian replied. He hesitated as though considering what to say next, and then went on.

"My old Master taught me that Inquisitors act like the anti-bodies of the Imperium, seeking out wrongs and corruptions of all kinds, and that in that pursuit we will inevitably find the enemies of Man at work. We will find something, trust me."