by Dan Abnett
‘Patience, you were detained in the oubliette, for your own wrong-doings. I decided the matter. Your sisters are already long departed, and I trust you will wish them well in your prayers this night.’
‘No!’ she shouted.
‘Shut your hole!’ warned Knill, stepping forward, his light bobbing after him.
‘No need for that, Knill,’ said Cyrus. The Prefect gazed at Patience. ‘I am rather surprised by your response, Patience. I had thought you would be pleased.’
She glowered at him. ‘You cheated me. You knew I wasn’t around to object. This is wrong! They are too young–’
‘I tire of this, Patience. There is no rule or law that says girls of your sisters’ age may not be contracted. Such an agreement is in my power.’
‘It isn’t! You can only authorise a contract of employ in the case of an orphan lacking the appropriate blood-kin! That’s the law! I’ve only stayed here this long to supervise their well-being! You bastard!’
‘Take her away, Knill,’ said the Prefect.
‘Don’t even think about it, Knill,’ Patience warned. ‘I want his name, Cyrus. The name of this man who has taken my sisters.’
‘Oh, and for what good?’
‘I am of majority. I can leave this stinking tower whenever I choose. Give me the name… now! I will find him and secure the release of my sisters!’
Prefect Cyrus turned to Knill. ‘Another period in the oubliette, I feel.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Patience, backing away. ‘You can’t touch me now. Not now. I’ve stuck by the scholam’s frigging rules this long, one way or another, for the good of my sisters, but you have no hold on me! I am an adult, with the rights of an adult! Go frig yourself, Cyrus, I’m leaving!’
‘Double the period for that vile language!’ Cyrus barked.
‘Double this, stink-breath!’ Patience cried, making a gesture one of the pot-boys had taught her.
Knill lunged at her, arms wide. She ducked sideways, putting a little of her gift into the kick she slammed at the old soldier’s belly. Knill lurched away and crashed into a table, knocking pewterware onto the floor, anxiously steadying himself against the table’s edge in surprise.
Somehow, Ide had got behind her. The blow from his baton, swung two-handed, caught her across the back of the skull and dropped her to her hands and knees. Patience blacked out for a brief moment, and blood streamed out down her nose onto the flagstones. She felt Ide’s big hand crush her left shoulder as it grabbed her.
‘Never did live up to your name,’ she heard Ide murmur.
Her name. Her name. Not Patience. The one little piece of her life she still owned entirely.
Ide was swinging the baton down again to smack her shoulders. She froze his hand. Ide gasped, sweating, terrified, as an invisible force slowly pulled his powerful arm back and drew the baton away from her. She let it smash Ide in the face.
He staggered back with an anguished cry, blood spurting from his mangled nose. Then she was up, on her feet, flicking her head back hard so that the blood from her nose spattered out in a shower. Knill was coming for her. So was the Prefect. Someone was crying an alarm.
Patience looked at Knill and he flew backwards through the air, slamming into the table again so hard it went over with him. She looked at Cyrus, and snarled as she simultaneously burst all the blood-vessels in his face. He fell down on his knees, whimpering.
‘You bastards!’ she was screaming. ‘My sisters, you bastards!’
Ide swung at her again. He was crazy-mad now, trying to kill her. Patience held out a hand and Ide went sprawling over on his back… and continued to slide down the length of the hallway until his skull crashed into the stone doorpost.
Rigorist Souzerin had appeared from somewhere, his flail raised as he ran at her. Knill was clambering to his feet.
Patience ducked Souzerin’s first slash, then hurled him backwards a few steps with a twitch of her mind. She was getting tired now. Knill thundered forward.
‘I’ll take that,’ Patience said, and ripped the medal from Knill’s tunic with a mental flick. She slapped her outspread palms against Knill’s dented skull and blasted him away into the murals. The ancient plasterwork cracked under the heavy impact and Knill fell limp onto the floor.
Souzerin came in again. Knill’s medal was still hanging in the air. Patience whipped it around and buried it in Souzerin’s cheek. He fell down with a wail of pain, blood pouring from the long gouge.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ said the man in the red robe.
The ginger-haired man rose to his feet and turned off his limiter.
Patience shrieked as her gift went away completely. It was as if her strength had been shut off. A hard vacuum formed and popped in her soul. She had never met an untouchable before.
Staggering, she turned. The ginger-haired man came towards her, his hands open and loose.
‘Let’s go, darling,’ he said.
She threw a punch at him. She felt so weak.
He caught it, and hit her in the face.
The blow seemed effortless, but she fell hard, barely conscious. The ginger-haired man leaned over and pinched a nerve point that left her paralysed.
Blind, helpless, she heard Prefect Cyrus being helped back onto his feet.
‘You were right, Cyrus,’ she heard the man in red say. ‘An excellent subject. An unformed telekine. The gamers will pay well for this. I have no objection to meeting your price of ten thousand.’
‘Agreed, Loketter,’ the Prefect sniffed. ‘Just… just get her out of my sight.’
VI
Carl Thonius was patently pleased with himself. ‘Consider the names again. Victor Zhan. Noble Soto. Goodman Frell. The forenames are all names, yes, but they’re also all simple, virtuous. The sort of solid, strong, aspirational names a highborn master, for example, might give to his slaves.’
‘These men were slaves?’ Kara asked.
‘Not exactly,’ said Carl. ‘But I think they’re all given names. Not birth names.’
Carl had a particular talent in the use of cogitators and logic engines. Since our arrival, he had spent many hours in the census archives of Urbitane. ‘I’ve been tracing the file records of all three men. It’s laborious work, and the records are, no tittering at the back, incomplete. The names are officially logged and genuine, but they are not connected to any local bloodlines. Soto, Zhan and Frell are all common names here on Sameter, but there is no link between any of these men and any family or families carrying those names. In other words, I believe they chose the surnames themselves. They chose common local surnames.’
‘Fake identities,’ Nayl shrugged. ‘Not much of a lead then.’
‘Says the man who pushed our last decent lead off a kilometre high ledge,’ Carl mocked. Nayl gave him a threatening look, and the interrogator shrugged. ‘No, not fake identities. The evidence points to the fact that all three men were orphans, probably from the slums. They were raised in a poorhouse or maybe a charitable institution, where they were given their virtuous forenames. On leaving the poorhouse, as young adults, they were obliged to choose and adopt surnames so that they could be registered on the citizenry roll and be legally recognised.’
‘Odd that he employed three men with the same background,’ Kara said. She could not bring herself to utter Molotch’s name.
‘Curious indeed,’ I agreed. ‘Carl, I don’t suppose you managed to identify the institutions that raised them?’
‘Throne, you don’t want much do you?’ Carl laughed. He beamed, like a conjuror showing off a sleight-of-hand marvel. ‘Of course I did. And they all came from the same one. A darling little place called the Kindred Youth Scholam.’
Nayl left the hotel room almost immediately and headed off to scare up some transport for us. For the first time in months, I felt my team moving with a sense of focus, so refreshingly different from the blunt-edged vengeance that had spurred them since Majeskus. Carl deserved praise. He had
diligently uncovered a trail that gave us refined purpose once again.
We had been so squarely and murderously outplayed by the heretic Zygmunt Molotch. I had been pursuing him for a long time, but at Majeskus, he stopped running and turned to face me.
The ensuing clash, most of which took place aboard my chartered starship, The Hinterlight, left over half the crew dead. Amongst them, trapped by Molotch’s malicious evil, were three of my oldest, most trusted retainers: Will Tallowhand, Norah Santjack and Eleena Koi. Badged with their blood, triumphant, the bastard Molotch had escaped.
I had lost friends before. We all had. Serving the ordos of the Holy Inquisition was a dangerous and often violent calling. I myself, more than most, can vouch for the cost to life and limb.
But Majeskus was somehow a particularly searing blow. Molotch’s assault had been ingeniously vicious and astoundingly callous, even by the standards of such vermin. It was as if he had a special genius for spite. I had vowed not to rest until I had found him again and exacted retribution in full.
In truth, when I came to Sameter, I do not think I was an Imperial inquisitor at all. I am not ashamed to admit that for a brief while, my duty to the God-Emperor had retreated somewhat, replaced by a more personal fire. I was Gideon Ravenor, burning to avenge his friends.
The same, I knew, was true of my four companions. Harlon and Kara had known Eleena Koi since their days together in the employ of my former master Eisenhorn. Harlon had also formed a particular bond of friendship with the mercurial Will Tallowhand. In Norah Santjack, Thonius had enjoyed the stimulating company of a mind as quick and clever as his own. There would be no more devilish games of regicide, no more late-night debates on the respective merits of the later Helican poets. And Thonius was yet young. These were the first comrades he had lost in the line of duty.
Even Wystan Frauka was in mourning. Louche and taciturn, Frauka was an unloved, unlovely man who made no friends because of his untouchable curse. But Eleena Koi had been an untouchable too, one of nature’s rare psychic blanks and the last of Eisenhorn’s Distaff. There had been a relationship there, one neither of them ever chose to disclose, presumably a mutual need created by their shared status as outsiders, pariahs. He missed her. In the weeks after Majeskus, he said less than usual, and smoked all the time, gazing into distances and shadows.
Aboard the hired transport – a small, grey cargo-gig with whistling fan-cell engines – we moved west through the hive-city. Carl linked his dataslate to my chair’s input and I reviewed his information concerning the scholam.
It had been running for many years, ostensibly a worthy charity school struggling to provide housing and basic levels of education for the most neglected section of Urbitane’s demographic. There were millions, nay billions, of institutions like it all across the Imperium, wherever hives rose and gross poverty loomed. Many were run by the Ecclesiarchy, or tied to some scheme of work by the Departmento Munitorum or the Imperial Guard itself. Some were missionary endeavours established by zealous social reformers, some political initiatives, some just good, four-square community efforts to assist the downtrodden and underprivileged.
And some were none of those things. Carl and I inspected the records of the Kindred Youth Scholam carefully. On the surface, it was respectable enough. Its register audits were a matter of public record, and it applied for and received the right grants and welfare support annually, which meant that the Administratum subjected it to regular inspection. It was approved by the Munitorum, and held all the appropriate stamps and marques of a legitimate charitable institution. It had an impressive portfolio of recommendations and references from many of Urbitane’s worthies and nobles. It had even won several rosettes of distinction from the Missionaria.
But scratch any surface…
‘You’ll like this,’ said Carl. ‘The Prefect, he’s one Berto Cyrus. His official file is spotless and perfectly in order. But I think it’s a graft.’
A graft. A legitimate dossier that has been expertly designed to overfit previous records and eclipse them. Done well – and this had been done brilliantly – a graft would be more than adequate to bypass the Administratum. But we servants of the holy ordos had greater and more refined tools of scrutiny to bring to bear. Carl showed me the loose ends and rough edges that had been tucked away to conceal the basic deception, the long, tortuous strands of inconsistency that no one but the Inquisition would ever think to check, for the effort would be too labour-intensive. That was ever the failing of the Imperium’s monumental Administratum. Overseeing hives the size of Urbitane, even an efficient and ordered division of the Administratum could only hope to keep up with day to day processing. There was no time for deeper insight. If one wanted to hide something from the Imperial Administratum, one simply had to place it at the end of a long line of diversions and feints, so far removed from basic inspections that no Administry clerk would ever notice it.
‘He’s older than he pretends to be,’ said Carl. ‘Far older. Here’s the give-away. Three digits different in his twelve digit citizenry numeric, but changed here, at birth-registry date, where no one would ever go back to look. Berto Cyrus was actually a stillborn infant. The Prefect took over the identity.’
‘Which makes him?’
‘Which makes him eighty-eight years older than his record states. And therefore makes him, in fact, Ludovic Kyro, a cognitae-schooled heretic wanted on five worlds.’
‘Cognitae? Throne of Earth!’
‘I said you’d like it,’ Carl smiled, ‘and here’s the other thing. Its implications are not very pleasant.’
‘Go on.’
‘Given the scholam’s throughput of pupils over the years, very, very few are still evident in the city records.’
‘They’ve disappeared?’
‘That’s too strong a word. Not accounted for would be a better term. The ex-pupils have dropped off the record after their time at the scholam, so there’s no reason anyone scrutinising the school’s register in an official capacity should question it. Pupils leave, sign up indentures, contracts, hold-employs, but then these documents lead nowhere.’
‘From which you deduce what?’ I asked, though I could see Carl had the answer ready in the front of his mind.
‘The scholam is a front. It’s… laundering children and young adults. Raising them, training them, nurturing them, and then moving them as a commodity into other hands. The fact that the pupils are known only by their scholam names means that they can be slipped away unnoticed. It’s quite brilliant.’
‘Because they take in anonymous children, give them new identities to provide them with legal status, and then sell them on under cover of perfectly correct and perfectly untraceable paperwork?’
‘Just so,’ said Carl.
‘What do they do with them?’ I wondered.
‘Whatever they like, would be my guess,’ said Wystan, glancing up from his tawdry book. I hadn’t even realised he’d been listening. ‘Those three we’re tracking, they ended up as hired guns, probably because they were handy in that regard. Strong guys get muscle work. Pretty girls…’
‘Whatever else we do,’ I said, ‘we’re closing that place down.’
* * *
VII
The cell was a metal box and smelled of piss. The ginger-haired man opened the hatch and dragged Patience out. She tried to resist, but her limbs were weak and her mind muddy. The ginger-haired man still had his limiter off.
His name was DaRolle, that much she had learned, and he worked for a man called Loketter.
‘On your feet, darling,’ DaRolle said. ‘They’re waiting for you.’ He prodded her along the dim hallway. Patience didn’t know where she was, but she knew it was at least a day since she had been taken from the scholam by these men.
‘It’s Patience, right?’ the ginger-haired man said. ‘Your trophy name?’
‘My what?’
‘Trophy name. The scholam gives you all trophy names, ready for the game. And yours is Patience
, isn’t it?’
‘Where are my sisters?’ she asked.
‘Forget you ever had any.’
Loketter, the man in red, was waiting for them in a richly appointed salon at the end of the hallway. There were other men with him, all distinguished older males just like him, sitting around on couches and buoy-chairs, smoking lho and sipping amasec. Patience had seen their type so many times before at graduation suppers. Men of wealth and status – mill owners and merchants, shipmasters and guilders – and Patience had dreamed of the day when one of them would select her for service, employment, a future.
How hollow that seemed now. For all their grooming, for all their fine clothes and fancy manners, these men were predators. The scholam which she had trusted for so long had simply been their feeding ground.
‘Here she is,’ smiled Loketter. The men applauded lazily.
‘Still in her scholam clothes,’ a fat man in green said with relish. ‘A nice touch, Loketter.’
‘I know you like them fresh, Boroth. Her name is Patience, and she is a telekine. I’m not sure if she realises she is a telekine, actually. Do you, my dear? Do you know what you are?’
Loketter addressed the last part of his question at her. Patience flushed.
‘I know what I am,’ she said.
‘And what is that?’
‘Trapped amongst a bunch of perverts,’ she said.
The men laughed.
‘Oh, such spirit!’ said Boroth.
‘And pretty green eyes too!’ said another man, swathed in orange furs.
‘The wager is seven thousand crowns per half hour of survival,’ Loketter announced.
‘Very high,’ said the man in furs. ‘What is the area, and the jeopardy?’
‘Low Tenalt,’ replied Loketter, and several of the men laughed. ‘Low Tenalt,’ Loketter repeated. ‘And the jeopardy is the Dolors. Although, if she’s nimble, she might make it to Pennyraker territory, in which case the wager increases by another hundred and fifty.’
‘How many pawns?’ asked a tall, bearded man in a selpic blue doublet.
