by Dan Abnett
"I want to retain your services," Siskind said.
Worna straightened up and looked at the ship captain directly. "You sure? Some people don't like what they get. If this is a midnight wish, then forget it. You're drunk. Go to your bed."
"A midnight wish?" Siskind echoed.
"Look at your chron, master." Worna rumbled, returning to his labours. "The Imperial calendar is about to flick over one more meaningless digit. A new year. If you're partied up, and fancy to settle some old score, sleep on it. I'll still be here in the morning."
"No," said Siskind. "I know what I'm doing. I want the services of a bounty tracker. I'm prepared to pay."
"How much?" asked Worna.
Siskind glanced at Ornales. "Twenty thou. Plus a ten per cent stake of whatever cut we make."
Lucius Worna dropped a still-twitching hand into one of the icy caskets and closed the lid. He looked at Siskind. "You've got my attention," he growled. "What sort of cut are we looking at?"
"You know, you're still kind of bleeding there..." Ornales said timidly, indicating his cheek.
"Yeah." Worna replied. "You gonna sew me back up, pussy-boy?"
"N-no, I just-"
"Then I'll get to it when I get to it," Worna said. "What sort of cut?"
"Six, maybe seven million in the first year."
"At ten per cent? That's a real lot. What's the job?"
"I need you to hunt for me."
"That's what I do."
"I was meant to meet a body here, here at Bonner's Reach. A good friend. Name of Thekla."
"So go look around."
"I have." Siskind replied. "He's not here. He told me he would be, at Firetide, but he's not. If he'd gone out on some trade run, he would've left a message here for me on the personal spindles. But he hasn't."
"Why's it so important?"
"I know he has enemies."
"Yeah?"
Siskind shrugged. "I want to employ you, Worna. To find my friend, or find the bastard who killed him before he got here. There's a lot riding on it."
"And who might this bastard be?" Worna asked.
"Gideon Ravenor. An Imperial inquisitor. Is that a problem?"
"Not even slightly," said Lucius Worna.
NOW
Local winter time, Eustis Majoris, 403.M41
I have to admit, after ten months aboard the Arethusa, I am filled with an almost unquenchable desire to throttle shipmaster Sholto Unwerth. And I don't have any hands.
I employed Unwerth through my team principals. It was, in fact, Harlon Nayl who arranged the contract and negotiated the terms of Unwerth's service. The price had seemed agreeable at the time, but as it turns out, there were hidden costs, infuriation being chief amongst them. Unwerth is diligent enough, and ineffably eager to please me. It is clear he takes his secret compact to serve the ordos of the Imperial Inquisition very seriously. But he is everywhere, everywhere I turn, underfoot, tormenting me with questions, and butchering the language with such a disregard for-
Well, enough.
It has been a trying time. The trap at Bonner's Reach tested us all, and cost us. I doubt Cynia Preest will ever forgive me for the damage done to her beloved ship and the losses suffered by her crew.
I glide along the third deck companionway of the Arethusa towards the small stateroom Unwerth obliged me with. Zael is there, playing some game of his own devising with the pieces of my regicide set. He's just a boy: sallow, shaggy-haired, no more than fourteen. He often tells me he's eighteen, and I know he's lying. I also know he doesn't know what the truth is.
Zael looks up as I whisper in. After all this time, he's still not used to my presence and appearance. I sense his fear. I am... no longer made as other men are. Grievous injuries, received over sixty years ago on Thracian Primaris, have left me confined to an armoured, enclosing support chair. The chair is dark-matt, sleek, suspended and propelled by a humming field projected by the ever-turning anti-grav hoop. I am just a mind, wrapped in a shred of ruined flesh, locked in a mobile life-support unit. I have no face anymore.
"Ravenor." Zael says. For all his wariness, he has never been afraid to call me by my name. No rank, no deference. Behind my back, I know he calls me The Chair.
"Want to play?" he asks.
I've been attempting to teach him the rudiments of regicide. So has Nayl. It is diverting to sit with Zael and push the playing pieces around the board with my mind. But for a bright lad, he's slow to pick up the knack.
I switch to "speech" via my chair's mechanical vox-ponder. My words issue flat and monotonous, a quality I despise, but Zael is unsettled by my psi-voice. "I have work to do, Zael. Can you find somewhere else to be?"
Zael nods. He gets up. From the flash of his surface thoughts, I understand he's deciding whether to seek out Nayl and ask him impertinent questions about women, or go and torment Unwerth's manhound, Fyflank.
Zael's excited. I pick that up too. We're going home. To what he thinks of as home, anyway. It's just a few days away now. We're going back to the place where all this started, before I went off chasing wild geese. To finish it.
Zael leaves. I shut the hatch with a flick of telekinesis, and slide the bolt. Alone, I turn the chair to face the transcriber unit. Another flick, and it turns on, ready. I start to write, moving the stylus armature with my mind.
To my Lord, Rorken, Grand Master of the Ordos Helicon, salutations. Sir, this missive is a testament-
Too slow and fussy. Too painstaking. I am seized by an urgency to get it all down at last, almost as if time is running out. I extend a mechadendrite cable from the base of my chair and link it to the transcriber's terminal. Now all I have to do is think the words.
Sir, this missive is a testament, and I am recording it in the event that I will not survive to communicate it to you in person. I have sent this statement in encrypted form via astropath to the ordo office on Gudrun, with explicit instructions that it be delivered to you by a senior ranking interrogator. It has opened and decrypted only because it has registered your bio-template. You are the only one I can trust anymore. The heresy I am endeavouring to expose may reach into the upper society of the Angelus subsector itself. To the very top, I fear.
My lord, here are the facts. Corroborating evidence may be found in the encrypted data-curls attached to this report.
In the early part of 401, I took my team to Eustis Majoris, capital world of the Angelus subsector, to investigate the illicit trade in so-called "flects". These corrosively addictive objects are flooding the black market throughout the subsector group, smuggled in from the Mergent Worlds rimwards of Angelus. Flects are dangerous things, abominably dangerous. They are splinters of glass from the billion broken windows of the decaying hive ruins out in the Mergent Worlds, swollen with abhuman energies due to their long exposure to the warp. They have soaked up the light of Chaos, marinading for centuries in its glare.
In these little splinters of corrupted glass, a user might glimpse a reflection of something wondrous and be uplifted for a brief time to some transcendant high. When they come down, they immediately crave another glimpse of the wonder, another "look", as the slang goes. But a great number of flects contain nothing except a flecting vision of ultimate cosmic horror, a true vision of the warp. Such a sight destroys minds. And, of course, no user ever knows what he or she is about to see until they look into their next flect.
Flects are a curse. A disease. A plague. They are more addictive and destructive than any of the prohibited chemical drugs that blight Imperial culture. Not only do they kill, they corrupt. Every single flect that passes into the community carries with it the potential to open a gateway to the Ruinous Powers and destroy the Imperium, piecemeal, from within.
Reading this, it may surprise you, my lord, to hear that flects are no longer my primary target. The trade must be stamped out, and the distribution of flects stopped as soon as possible, and if I and my band can assist in that great work, so much the better. But because of the flect tr
ade, I have uncovered something far more insidious.
The flect trade is just the by-product of a greater heresy.
A cartel of rogue traders, operating under the terms of an off-book, black-budget arrangement known as Contract Thirteen, is providing the senior ministries of Eustis Majoris with tech salvage procured in secret from the polluted Mergent Worlds. This trade is in the form of codifiers, cogitators and other calculating engines recovered from the warp-drowned Imperial hives in that doomed territory. Someone, someone very high up in the hierarchy of Eustis Majoris, is paying well for such tainted artefacts. At the time of writing, their motive is not clear to me.
The cartel, risking everything to slip past the battlefleet blockade sanctioning the Mergent Worlds and anxious to maximise their profits, has been smuggling in flects as a supplement to their lucrative trade in logic engines.
Ironic, then. I come to Eustis Majoris to choke the flect trade and the traces of it bring me to greater threat. In their greed, the rogue traders have betrayed their true agenda. Contract Thirteen.
I pursued the matter of the flects to the hilt, until it brought me face to face with agents of the Administratum itself, in the form of one Jader Trice, First Provost of the Ministry of Subsector Trade. He seemed to share my concern about flects, and arranged for several of his agents to accompany my team on a trip to the black market source, up the line into what is known as Lucky Space.
But this was a trap, a trap sprung by Trice's agents and by the rogue traders I was chasing. I commend them for their ingenuity. At Bonner's Reach, they took control of my ship, the Hinterlight, murdered several members of the crew, and sought to dispose of us into the local star. Taking me down on Eustis would have caused a fuss. If I and my team failed to return from Lucky Space, it might have been years before anyone thought to examine why.
My team and I prevailed. Against the odds. We overcame Trice's agents, and also the rogue trader, the Oktober Country, which was their instrument for our deaths. I will convey a more complete report concerning these actions later, if I have the chance.
In short, my lord, this is the situation. For want of any definite communiqué, our enemies on Eustis Majoris now assume that we are dead. My chartered ship, the Hinterlight, seriously damaged in the battle, is moving at low speed to the Navy yards on Lenk, where I have made arrangements for it to be repaired. Along with my warband, I have procured transit aboard a freelance merchant ship called the Arethusa, which is giving us passage back to Eustis Majoris, via Encage, Fedra, Malinter and Bostol, in other words, by an indirect route away from the Lenk/Flint trade lane.
We intend to re-enter Eustis Majoris clandestinely. Our enemies believe us dead, and I do not intend to disabuse them of that idea. Undercover, anonymous, we will infiltrate the upper levels of the Administry on the capital world and attempt to reveal the corruption there.
Or die trying.
That is why I am writing to you in this way. What we seek to uncover may run high. Jader Trice is second only to the Lord Governor Subsector, Oska Ludolf Barazan, himself. My lord, I may be about to topple the highest from power. The Angelus sub might be plunged into confusion. I beg of you, stand ready. I don't know how far up this goes. For this reason, I am now operating under the terms of Special Condition status.
As far as the galaxy is concerned, I am dead. My warriors are dead. We will play that deceit as far as it goes until it becomes the truth. At that time, may it be far off, the Emperor protects, I trust you will action this missive and mobilise the ordos to finish what I have started.
In the name of Terra!
Your friend and servant,
Gideon Ravenor.
The scratching stylus creeps to a halt. I instruct the transcriber to encode the document, keying it to a pheromonal sample of Rorken kept in my chair's databanks. Then I retract the mechadendrite and turn away.
There is one thing I have not covered in my report to the grand master. One detail. On our way back down through the edgeworlds of the Angelus sub, we diverted to the waste-world Malinter because of a summons from an old friend. Call him Thorn. He warned me of a danger, a danger that had been predicted and foreseen. It might be me, it might be one of my team. But something was going to happen on Eustis that would make the Imperium shake.
I wanted to believe it, but I couldn't see it. Thorn, God-Emperor watch him, was not as reliable as he used to be. I feared his judgement was off. I am sound. So are my people. I trust them all with my life.
Maybe he had meant Unwerth.
There is a knocking at my cabin hatch.
"Yes?"
"Master Ravenor, I would be obligated if you might spare a moment or two to circumcise this star chart I am grandiose to be embrouchuring for your diverse perspicacity."
Unwerth. Throne, let it be Unwerth that Thorn warned me about.
Throttling him would be a pleasure.
PART ONE
Smoke and Mirrors
ONE
Jairus hammered as moody as any, when the whet was on him, and the whet was on him now. Blurry souled, knuck-brained, his left hand twitching like a beater-box, he woke from a dream where he had been awake all the time, dreaming of sleep.
Jairus was gut-hollow hungry, and thirsty after the last flect. His eyes were filmy, because they had been open and unblinking all the while he'd been asleep, staring at the pimple-board tiles of his hab's ceiling.
Outside the broken window, the city boomed, boomed as loud as the burning city that had backdropped his waking dream. Snatches of looped triumphal marches from the public tannoys, street-vendor cries, pound music from the sink-level clubs, the drum of rain, bells, the whit-whup whit-whup of a Magistratum cruiser going past at full pursuit.
The sounds of down-stack Petropolis.
Craproaches ran up and down inside the panes of his eyes, and Jairus moaned aloud, until he realised the roaches were real and the surface they were running up and down on was the cracked plastek of his hab's casement.
Jairus found his gun under a sweat-wet pillow. A knockoff Hostec 13 long-jaw, twenty in the clip, two in the spout. Reassuring as a mother's love. He aimed it at one of the roaches.
Then he lowered his hand. Waste of a load. Man could get more for the price of a bullet than one bug. Specially when the whet was on him.
Saint, but it was.
He staggered to the wash sink and stared at himself in the mirror over the bowl. The mirror was dent-smashed. He'd done that with his forehead the night before last, starving for a look to flect him happy, angry with the mirror for being so...
...so nothing. So empty.
Jairus felt like butting it again, but his reflection showed a forehead still crusted with blood from the last time.
He saw himself. A mound of vat-grafted muscle, a face peppered with clan-piercings. A tongue - and he unrolled it now - fitted with its own snapping teeth at the tip.
Beauty boy. Slab-clanner. Moody hammer.
In the cracked room behind his face, Nesha was still unconscious on the mattress. She lay twisted on top of the cover, her naked body dancing with snake tattoos. Two cobryds were twisted over her belly and up around her bosom, the gaping mouths framing her dark nipples. She would be out for hours. But when she woke, she'd want a look too.
More than want.
Need.
Need, screw you very much sir, need!
Going out time. Hunting time. Scoring time. Jairus flexed his arms and saw the gun still in his right paw. Just so.
He grabbed his coat and his big black gamp.
Street level, the city booming still. Burn alarms singing from the street posts as the rain pelted out of the west, showing up like a laser blitz in the sodium glow of the sidewalk lanterns. Vehicles splashing by The bell, the bell again.
The bell. Jairus followed the sound.
At the junction of Rudiment and Pass-on-over, there was a chapel. A select place, reserved for highborn worship. The bell was ringing from the acid-gnawed tower. Grand men in lon
g-tail coats were hurrying along the pavement to attend the service.
Jairus joined them, gamping for one of the fine fellows.
"My thanks," the man said, as they reached the chapel door, and palmed Jairus a coin. Jairus folded his gamp and let the rain trickle off it. Always a useful tool, the gamp. Everyone needs a gamper in Petropolis. Jairus had got his from a ten year-old boy he'd knifed to death in the underpass below Golgotten Walk.
They were closing the chapel doors. Jairus slipped inside, into the dry gloom, and made a hasty observance at the sacristy so he wouldn't look out of place. Down the aisle, the gentlemen were settling in the front few pews as the cleric took the silk cloth off the triptych of Saint Ferreolus, a patron of automation.
Light sang down in colours through the apse windows. Unnoticed, Jairus shuddered as an aftershock of his last look fluttered through him. He took a seat at the back. He smelled the acid in the rain dripping off his furled gamp as it bit into the marble floor. The gun felt deliriously heavy in the hip pocket of his coat.
The service was beginning. The same old junk. The cleric intoning, and the unison answers echoing back from the congregation. Jairus was back in the embracing shadows. Down the front, the gilded triptych was caught in a jetting beam of white light from the overheads, haloed, almost glorious. The cleric's hands moved in front of it, making symbols, like pale puppets.
Head down, Jairus looked left. He saw the temple boys waiting behind the dossal, straightening their cassocks and mantles, whispering to each other as they prepared the censer, the magnetum and the plate.
The plate. The offering plate. That was what Jairus was interested in. A congregation like this, rich men from the inner formals... that plate could be a major score. Forget flects for tonight. This would be a week of looks, plus enough lho and yellodes to cushion the come down afterwards.
