Amberley Vail

Amberley Vail is an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, and something of a rarity among her kind: a servant of the Holy Ordos who retains her wit, her sense of proportion, and a clear-eyed awareness of just how close her profession sits to outright madness. She swears allegiance to no formal faction, though in practice her methods fall upon the puritan side of the divide, tempered always by a pragmatism that keeps her from the excesses of grimmer colleagues.

Tall, fair, and blue-eyed, with the rich contralto voice of a trained singer, Vail moves through the Imperium's high and low places with equal ease. Beyond the High and Low Gothic of Imperial society she has command enough of the T'au, Aeldari, and Orkish tongues to treat and to eavesdrop where other agents would be deaf, an accomplishment well suited to the xenos-hunting remit of her Ordo.

The Companion of Cain

Vail is remembered above all for her long entanglement with Commissar Ciaphas Cain, the celebrated hero of the Imperial Guard whom she first encountered in 931.M41 upon the contested world of Gravalax, where a Valhallan regiment had been sent to quell unrest and forestall the planet's defection to the T'au Empire. What began as a professional association deepened over the years into something unmistakably personal, and it is to Vail that posterity owes its knowledge of Cain at all.

For it was she who gathered his private papers and edited them into the sprawling Cain Archive, publishing his candid, self-serving memoirs for the private amusement of her fellow Inquisitors. Throughout them she scatters her own dry footnotes, forever reminding the reader that Cain was a gifted liar whose unverified boasts should be taken with a considerable measure of salt. In those wry annotations the measure of Amberley Vail is plain: shrewd, capable, and quietly amused, an Inquisitor who does her lethal duty with a style all her own.