Amberley Vail

Amberley Vail is an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, best known for her close professional and personal association with the famous commissar Ciaphas Cain.

Vail does not profess allegiance to any particular Inquisitorial faction, but her actions are generally those of a Puritan. She prefers safe disposal of xenos or Chaos artefacts in most cases with few exceptions, and she considers Radicals of any ordo to be barely distinguishable from their heretical prey.

Physically, Amberley Vail is tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, and has the powerful contralto voice of a trained singer. In addition to High and Low Gothic, she is reasonably fluent in the T'au, Aeldari and Orkish tongues.

Vail operated mostly in the Damocles Gulf and the surrounding space of the Segmentum Ultima. Her length of service is currently unknown, but spans for at least a standard century. Cain first met Inquisitor Vail in 931.M41, and her active career continued past his eventual death in the first century of the 42nd Millennium.

History

Keffia

Vail's first actions mentioned in the Cain Archive were in the late 920s.M41. After dealing with the space hulk Dolorous Tidings, which delayed her longer than expected, she arrived on Keffia. This Agri-world had been the site of a major Genestealer Cult, but the Astra Militarum had already broken the cult's military strength, and Inquisitor Vail merely took over from them to root out the last remaining traces.

Perlia

Around this time, Vail was also involved in a joint Ordo Xenos/Adeptus Mechanicus project on the world of Perlia, studying the Shadowlight, a pre-Human xenos relic located there that possessed strange, Warp-based powers. The Mechanicus laboratory-shrine studying the artefacts was hidden within a hydroelectric dam in the so-called Valley of Daemons. Unfortunately, the project was disrupted by an invasion of the world by the Orks of WAAAGH! Korbul, which conquered the continent where the Valley of Daemons was located. After the area was reconquered, the laboratory-shrine proved to have been robbed by unknown parties and the Shadowlight stolen.

On the bright side, a great many other artefacts were found during the reconstruction efforts. Ciaphas Cain had raised an army from within Ork-held territory to meet the Greenskin threat, known as the "March of the Liberator." They had breached the dam in the Valley of Daemons in order to take out an Ork horde, and the resulting flood scoured much of the valley down to bedrock, unearthing dozens of other artefacts that had been buried there.

None were of the same potency as the Shadowlight, but many were designed to work with that artefact as part of a greater system of unknown purpose, or were xenos documentation related to its use. The rebuilt laboratory-shrine had plenty of material to study even without the Shadowlight itself.

Gravalax

Amberley Vail's first well-known action was the Gravalax Incident in 931.M41, during which she helped prevent both the takeover of the planet Gravalax by the T'au Empire, and a plot by a Genestealer Cult to provoke a bloody and pointless war between the T'au and the Imperium. It was during this mission that Vail first met Commissar Ciaphas Cain, beginning a long and fruitful relationship. She also discovered that his aide Ferik Jurgen was a Psychic Blank, a fact that likely saved the lives of all three during Cain's duel with the Genestealer Patriarch and Vail's fight with the tainted planetary governor.

As the dust settled and the Imperium consolidated its victory on Gravalax, Vail saw the withdrawing T'au rescue two Fire Warriors who had been lost fighting the Genestealers. She watched in satisfaction, recognising what the T'au did not: both scouts were showing clear signs of Genestealer infection, and were doomed to spread their genetic curse to whatever T'au world they were taken to.

Simia Orichalcae

A standard year later in 932.M41, Vail and Cain met again, following the Valhallan 597th Regiment's encounter with a Necron stasis tomb on the world of Simia Orichalcae. The regiment had survived with few losses and apparently destroyed the Necron tomb, though at the cost of losing much of their materiel and destroying the promethium refinery they had come to protect from Orks.

At Cain's recommendation, Vail immediately placed Simia Orichalcae under Inquisitorial quarantine. She then spent some solar weeks comprehensively debriefing the 597th's troops, as well as warning them of the dire consequences they would suffer from the Inquisition should any of them breathe a word about the existence of the undying robotic warriors to anyone else.

Even while the regiment was still fighting to hold the refinery, Cain's record search revealed that the refinery was not sited on the planet's richest promethium deposits, but on a lesser deposit that was sited directly over the stasis tomb. Vail and her Ordo Hereticus colleague Inquisitor Kuryakin easily discovered which Adeptus Mechanicus magi chose the site, but were unable to prove that the Tech-priests were knowingly attempting to gain access to the xenos tomb. The matter is still under investigation by Kuryakin.

Periremunda

Shortly after the Simia Orichalcae incident, in 933.M41, Vail arrived on the odd plateau-world of Periremunda. It is unknown what first brought her here: the ongoing civil uprising, which turned out to be the work of yet another Genestealer Cult, or the trail of Ernst Stavros Killian and Magos Metheius, a rogue duo of Inquisitor and Tech-priest identified as the the perpetrators of the raid on the Valley of Daemons.

The Genestealer infestation proved even worse than that on Gravalax, and a Tyranid hive fleet was already approaching Periremunda in response to the siren call of the Genestealer Cult's Broodmind. Vail and her Sanctioned Psyker Rakel succeeded in hunting down and destroying the Genestealer Patriarch, disrupting the call of ther Broodmind at least for the time being. Unfortunately, the Shadow in the Warp of an approaching splinter fleet remained detectable, and there were indicators that Tyranid scout organisms were already present on the world.

On the way back from destroying the Genestealer Patriarch, Vail rescued the recently-arrived Ciaphas Cain, who had been ambushed in traffic by Genestealer cultists.

As for Killian and Metheius, both Vail and the Tech-priest Lazarus knew that Metheius was holed up somewhere on the planet, and possibly Killian as well. Though partners in the hunt, Vail and Lazarus both hoped to claim the prestige of finding the Renegades and reclaiming the Shadowlight. Both sought assistance from Cain, but as Vail was an old friend (and lover) of Cain's and Lazarus was a stranger, his choice proved an easy one. This was fortunate for Vail, as an uptick in Genestealer Cult activity prevented her from investigating the Renegades herself.

In the following solar weeks, Cain was the target of several different assassination attempts. The first of these, an attempt made by a Chaos Sorcerer, led Vail's party to the mining colony Hell's Edge. The colony had been wiped out by Tyranids, but had clearly hosted Metheius' secret laboratory until then, suggesting that Metheius had somehow fallen in with the Chaos Cult to which the sorcerer belonged.

Another assassination attempt prompted Cain to visit Gavarrone, home of the Adepta Sororitas' Order of the White Rose, and Vail's retinue came along disguised as his military escort. Unexpectedly, their car was diverted to the Sororitas convent itself.

It turned out that the Order of the White Rose was actually in the service of Inquisitor Killian, as the Sisters of Battle were unaware that he was a Renegade. They had served as the military force for Killian's and Metheius's raid on the Valley of Daemons, as well as their escape from Hell's Edge, and they were the hosts of his new laboratory. Killian had decided that trying to kill Cain wasn't working, and hoped to sway the commissar to his own cause instead.

Killian revealed to Cain that the Shadowlight had the power to activate latent Human psykers. Once this was discovered, the Ordo Hereticus arguably had a claim on the artefact, but the Tech-priests voted to remain with their original partners in the Ordo Xenos. Metheius disagreed, believing that Shadowlight-activated psyker armies would be the ultimate weapon against the Chaos Gods. He contacted Killian, who he knew was a like-minded Radical, and together the pair destroyed the laboratory-shrine and seized the artefact for their own use. The pair had been hiding on Periremunda since then, using the "Covenant of the Blessed" Chaos Cult to test the artefact's powers.

As soon as Cain and Killian were out of view, Vail revealed herself to the canoness of the convent, and informed her of Killian's excommunication. Shortly afterward, she received a frantic vox from Cain, saying that Killian had brought a Tyranid Lictor to the convent, in order to summon a Tyranid swarm that would bury his trail along with the entire plateau. In the battle that followed, Cain, Vail, and their combined party escaped with the Shadowlight, but Killian and Metheius were both killed and the Convent of the White Rose was completely overrun by Tyranids.

Vail proceeded to destroy the swarm and the convent alike, by calling in a orbital Lance barrage which cleaved the entire convent grounds off the edge of the Gavarrone plateau. The rest of the Tyranids and Genestealers were finished off not long after this, as an Imperial relief fleet finally arrived. The ancient xenos relic was returned to Perlia, where it remained until the turn of the millennium.

Vail's activities over the next several solar decades are mostly unrecorded, except that four standard years after the events on Periremunda, in ca. 937.M41, she eliminated a Hrud infestation.

13th Black Crusade

During the 13th Black Crusade, Vail discovered that one of Abaddon's subordinate Chaos Lords, Varan the Undefeatable, and his army were headed towards Perlia, clearly hungering for the power of the Shadowlight. If he found it, he could manufacture psykers by the billions, all unprotected by the Emperor's sanction. Reality would be torn asunder throughout the galaxy within solar decades. Varan had to be denied his goal at all costs.

Since Varan had thus far easily conquered every Imperial world he had attacked, Vail sent her Rogue Trader associate Orelius to spirit away the Shadowlight to safety elsewhere. However, the greater apparatus surrounding the Shadowlight was now too large to move, and moreover Orelius' ship was driven out of the system before he could try. Instead, the defence of the artefact fell on the Planetary Defence Force, led by Ciaphas Cain. Miraculously, Cain and his forces managed to hold out long enough to lure Varan into a trap, and kill him in a personal duel.

All might still have been lost, as Varan's enraged army attacked the laboratory-shrine in full force. Unexpectedly, however, a Necron Monolith Phalanx materialised at the Chaos army's rear. The Necrons ripped through the Lost and the Damned like a chainsword through butter, marched into the shrine as the Imperial defenders hastily got out of their way, defeated an attempt to self-destruct the shrine, and absconded with the Shadowlight.

Cain and Vail later concluded that the complete Shadowlight complex was a psychic superweapon, created by the long-vanished Old Ones to fight the Necrons, who greatly feared psychic powers and the energies of the Warp. A Necron surveillance post had been lurking in the Perlia System for aeons, hoping to finally neutralise the ancient weapon. Varan's attack had revealed the artefact to them, at which point the Necrons launched a raid to seize it.

While not an ideal resolution, if the Necrons had feared the Shadowlight so, they likely had no plans to use it against the Imperium. Better for the artefact to fall into their hands, rather than those of the forces of Chaos.

Cain Archive

After Ciaphas Cain died, Inquisitor Vail examined his personal effects in order to secure any Imperial secrets they might hold. In the process, she found a Data-Slate full of jumbled files, which Cain apparently wrote during his retirement as a sort of retrospective private journal. Unlike his official memoir, To Serve the Emperor: A Commissar's Life, these accounts were brutally honest about both the redacted parts of Cain's famous exploits, and the commissar's own less-than-noble motives.

Naturally, Vail immediately placed the contents of the slate under Inquisitorial seal. Imperial secrets aside, the Inquisition could hardly allow the public to know that the celebrated Hero of the Imperium was in fact a scoundrel and a self-seeking rogue, let alone that those very flaws likely made him such a effective champion of the Emperor in the first place.

However, she did feel that her fellow Inquisitors should understand what had made Cain who he was. Further, over the course of his career Cain had fought almost every enemy the Imperium has, from the Archenemy to the Great Devourer to the Greater Good of the T'au Empire, and Vail felt that the Inquisition should gain the benefit of his own insights into Humanity's various enemies.

Accordingly, Vail began a side project to edit the Cain Archive. She sorted the unstructured account into a series of relatively self-contained books, and added various footnotes and material from other sources in order to give Cain's self-centered narrative a wider context.

As each book was completed, she released it for internal Inquisition circulation. She was pleased to see them widely read, although less pleased to see that most Inquisitors took them as light entertainment, rather than the serious food for thought she intended them to be.

In a fictional conceit, Vail's edited volumes of the Cain Archive were the actual Black Library books about Ciaphas Cain written by Sandy Mitchell.

Wargear

• Inquisitorial Rosette

• Electoo of the Inquisitorial Rosette embedded in palm

• Bolt Pistol

• Digital Needler

• Displacer Field

• Cameleoline Cloak

• Inquisitor Artificer Armour with integrated bolter and Power Fist

• Externus Exterminatus - The Externus Exterminatus was Vail's Warp-capable personal yacht.
  • Aquila Lander armed with Twin-linked Lascannons

Entourage

Acolytes

Amberley Vail maintained a relatively small group of Acolytes in her service.

• Rakel - Rakel is a Sanctioned Psyker. It was Rakel's extreme physical and mental reaction to Ferik Jurgen that prompted Vail to suspect him of being a Psychic Blank.

• Cogitator Yanbel - Yanbel is a Tech-priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

• Caractacus Mott - Mott is a savant in service to the Inquisition. Mott possessed numerous bionic augmentations and a tendency to launch into long-winded explanations of any topic that came up, often at inopportune moments. Nevertheless, Ciaphas Cain seemed to enjoy Mott's company, especially since Mott's prodigious mathematical abilities allowed the pair to cheat at cards in gambling houses.

• "Flicker" Pelton - Pelton served Vail as a covert operations specialist. He was once an agent of the Adeptus Arbites until his superiors became concerned he had genuinely joined a crime cartel he was infiltrating and tried to retrieve him. Unwilling to let his work go to waste, Pelton engineered an internal war that bloodily destroyed the cartel. This effective but unlawful tactic ended Pelton's Arbites career, but caught Inquisitor Vail's approving eye.

• Zemelda Cleat - Cleat was a street rat and former fast food seller who ended up in Vail's service on Periremunda.

• Simeon (KIA) - Simeon is a former commissar who was sentenced to a Penal Legion after snapping under the pressure of his position. Simeon was fitted with a combat-drug implant that supercharged his speed and reactions in battle, at the cost of a crippling addiction and withdrawal symptoms. Simeon was killed in action on Periremunda.

• Pontius - Pontius served as Vail's pilot.

Collaborators

• Ciaphas Cain - Cain was one of the most famous commissars ever to serve with the Astra Militarum and is considered a hero of the Imperium. This is despite his own memoirs indicating that his heroic deeds were often driven by more base motives, such as simply seeking to save his own life.

• Ferik Jurgen - Jurgen is Ciaphas Cain's meltagun-toting aide, a guardsmen of the Valhallan Ice Warriors, and a Psychic Blank. Despite Jurgen's incalculable value to the Inquisition, Vail decided to leave him with Cain rather than requisitioning him for herself, which would have made him a prize to be fought over within the byzantine ranks of the Inquisition.

• Orelius - Orelius was a Rogue Trader who commanded the Lucre Foedus, a vessel comparable in size and firepower to an Imperial Navy cruiser.

• Kuryakin - Kuryakin was an Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus. In 999.M41, Kuryakin and his entourage were dispatched to Perlia, on a tip from Vail, to help combat the heretical influence stirred up in the wake of Abaddon's 13th Black Crusade. By the time he arrived, the Chaos forces present on the planet had already been defeated.

Sources

• For The Emperor (Novel) by Sandy Mitchell, Preface, Chs. 4, 8-17
• Caves of Ice (Novel) by Sandy Mitchell, Chs. 12, 16
• The Traitor's Hand (Novel) by Sandy Mitchell, Ch. 9
• Death or Glory (Novel) by Sandy Mitchell, Chs. 1, 21-22
• Duty Calls (Novel) by Sandy Mitchell, Chs. 3-4, 9-15, 18, 23-27
• Cain's Last Stand (Novel) by Sandy Mitchell, Chs. 6, 13-14, 21-25
• The Emperor's Finest (Novel) by Sandy Mitchell
• The Last Ditch (Novel) by Sandy Mitchell
• Dead in the Water (Audio Drama) by Sandy Mitchell
• The Greater Good (Novel) by Sandy Mitchell
• The Devil You Know (Audio Drama) by Sandy Mitchell
• Old Soldiers Never Die (Novella) by Sandy Mitchell