Even if he could not work out exactly what. The beatings had been for his own good, to drive out sin. His father had been a good man, doing the work of the righteous. That was why he smiled as he punished him. He didn’t enjoy it. He told him that over and over. It was for his own good. In a way it had been a great lesson. He had learned that it was often necessary to do painful, bad things for the greater good.

It had made him hard. It enabled him to do what he had to today, free from the weakness of lesser men. It enabled him to stand up for right. It had made him into a man his father could be proud of and he should be grateful. He was strong without being malicious. He was like his father.

He had taken no pleasure in the torture of young Slazinger. He had taken no pleasure in the skaven report that the nobleman was a Slaaneshi cultist. Although he had to admit that it was a fortunate coincidence, given the rumours concerning Slazinger and Emmanuelle. More malicious lies: someone as pure as the countess would not, could not, have anything to do with the likes of Slazinger. The worm was a notorious rake, the sort of handsome young dandy who thought it witty to speak out against the lawful servants of the state, to criticise the harsh measures needed to maintain law and order in this festering sink of iniquity and sin.

He pushed Slazinger from his mind and gave his thoughts over to other matters. His agent in the watch house had brought him the report on the Gant incident. No action was being taken. It would cost too much to make a full sweep through the sewers beneath the Old Quarter and that would cut into the take the watch captain got from his station’s financial allocation. Well, even corruption sometimes has its uses, thought von Halstadt.

His spy had brought him word that Gant’s patrol had been nosing around in the area of his death, though, which was more worrying. They might accidentally come across some more skaven going about their business. They might even discover the skiffs that ran from the docks to van Niek’s Emporium. He doubted, though, that they could ever discover that the shop was simply a government front which channelled warpstone from outside the city to the skaven in payment for their services. He smiled.

It was an arrangement with a certain pleasing symmetry. He paid the skaven in the currency they wanted. They did not seem to realise it was both useless and dangerous. Warpstone actually caused mutation. The skaven claimed to use it as food.