The Magos

by Dan Abnett

  I left the next day by launch with Kalibane. No one from the hospice saw me off or even spoke to me. From Math Island, I transmitted my report to Symbalopolis, and from there, astropathically, it lanced through the warp to Lorches.

  Was Uhlren’s Pox expunged? Yes, eventually. My work assisted in that. The blood-froth was like the Torment, engineered by the Archenemy, just as sentient. Fifty-two medical officers, sources just like Valis, were executed and incinerated.

  I forget how many we lost altogether in the Genovingia group. I forget a lot, these days. My memory is not what it was, and I am thankful for that, at times.

  I never forget Ebhoe. I never forget his corpse, wheeled out by the sisters. He had been caught in the infirmium flames on Pirody Polar. Limbless, wizened like a seed-case, he hung in a suspensor chair, kept alive by intravenous drains and sterile sprays. A ragged, revolting remnant of a man.

  He had no eyes. I remember that most clearly of all. The flames had scorched them out.

  He had no eyes, and yet he was terrified of the light.

  I still believe that memory is the finest faculty we as a species own. But by the Golden Throne, there are things I wish I could never remember again.

  MASTER IMUS’ TRANSGRESSION

  ‘I suppose,’ he sniffed, ‘you get a lot of cases like mine.’

  The officer did not reply. In the ten minutes since Master Imus had been received, the officer had made very few remarks, except to announce his credentials and ask a few general questions.

  Master Imus had presented himself, of his own volition, at the portico of the dark, unfriendly building late that afternoon. He had been invited to wait in an anteroom off the inner yard.

  The anteroom was cold and forlorn. The fretful fingers of individuals previously invited to wait there had marked the white plaster with a greasy patina, and pacing feet had worn the wooden floor. There were no windows, but light poked in through a trio of dingy filters. From outside, faraway, Master Imus could hear the street noises of workers flooding home to their habs and their evening meals.

  Master Imus sat in one of the old wooden chairs provided.

  A clerk attended him first. The clerk led Master Imus through to a side office panelled in dark wood, and sat him at a small desk. The clerk was hunched over with the weight of the stenogram built into his chest. He sat on a stool, handed Master Imus a form, and told him to read out the questions printed on it and answer them in his own words. As Master Imus spoke, haltingly at first, the clerk’s bird-foot hands pecked the keys of the stenogram and recorded his comments. The stenogram clattered like an adding machine, a sound that made Master Imus feel exceptionally sad.

  When the form was completed, the clerk left the office, and was replaced, after a few minutes, by a second clerk. The second clerk led Master Imus into a chamber that smelled of machine heat, and was cluttered with banks of whirring cogitators.

  The second clerk examined Master Imus’ papers, and copied them on one of the cogitators. Several versions of Master Imus’ biographical particulars flashed up on the multiple screens for a moment and then faded into a dull, green glow. This slow, silent dissolution of all he was seemed unpleasantly symbolic to Master Imus.

  He was taken back to the anteroom, and left alone again. The daylight was ebbing. A small lamp had been lit in his absence. Master Imus waited for twenty minutes, and then the officer arrived.

  ‘Johan Imus?’ the officer asked as he entered the room, reading from a data-slate.

  Master Imus stood up.

  ‘That’s me, sir,’ he said.

  The officer was a tall, well-made man with dark hair. He was dressed, and this came as no surprise to Johan Imus, in black clothes and a black leather coat. The officer looked Master Imus up and down with unforthcoming eyes, and announced his credentials with a cursory wave of his rosette.

  ‘You have been received for inspection. Follow me, please,’ he said.

  Master Imus followed him obediently. He followed him across the twilit yard, in through an archway, and up an endless flight of varnished stairs. The officer opened a door, and ushered Master Imus into a small room. The room had a large, ornamental fireplace that looked as if it had not seen a fire in centuries. A gilt clock ticked on the mantle. There was a rug on the wooden floor, and two plain chairs on either side of a desk. An armchair stood in one corner, a comfortable and friendly item of furniture that Master Imus never got to sit in.

  They took their seats on either side of the desk.

  ‘What is the nature of the crime you are confessing?’ the officer asked, after studying the data-slate for a few minutes.

  ‘Not a crime, as such,’ Master Imus replied hastily.

  ‘No?’

  ‘A transgression. Yes, transgression, that is a better word altogether.’

  ‘The nature of the transgression, then?’

  ‘I have already explained this,’ Master Imus offered, ‘to the clerk.’

  The officer scrolled back through the slate’s files. ‘Have you born false witness to this statement as I read it?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Were you coerced, invited or urged to make this report?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Master Imus said. ‘I have come here of my own volition. I... I said as much.’

  ‘That is noted here, strenuously. You made that point several times during the preliminary examinations.’

  ‘I simply wanted it to be clear,’ said Master Imus. ‘I was persuaded to come here by my own conscience, nothing else.’

  The officer was silent for a moment. ‘You say you have been suborned by the Ruinous Powers, drawn into their evil, and set upon an unholy task?’

  Master Imus nodded.

  ‘I suppose,’ he sniffed, ‘you get a lot of cases like mine.’

  ‘Everything must be held carefully to account,’ stated Johan Imus. ‘I am an indentured book-keeper and a citizen of Imperial Hesperus, the latter an honour I hold even more dear than my work at Slocha and Daviov et Cie. My father was keeper of books for Slocha and Daviov, and his before him. My work, like theirs, involves the enumeration of company accounts, the allocation of funds, the scrutiny of audits, and the day-to-day upkeep of financial income and outgoings. I have held my post for sixty-two years, and run a department of eighteen under-keepers. No, I have no wife. No kin to speak of. My work is my life.

  ‘Slocha and Daviov? An illustrious auction house, surely you’ve heard of it? Well, it maintains offices in the Garcel Commercia, just off the Place Fourteenth Jaumier. In the main, we deal with antique furnishing, silks, Sameterware, Brashin mannequins, and fine arts. The sale rooms are on Varsensson’s Street, beside the lifter depot. There are open fare sales every Mainsday, and specialist auctions every other Solday. Occasionally, we hold irregular fetes for particular customers or particular treasures. Last Gorgonsday, we offered a list that included eight small ouslite busts by Sambriano Kelchi and a series of humaniques from the jokaero ruins on Tornish.

  ‘No, sir, I am no connoisseur. My salary does not provide me with the funds to collect or speculate. But funds are my business. I am painstaking and exact in my work. I would never wish to cause Master Slocha or Master Daviov professional embarrassment by misplacing a decimal point or wrongly adding a column of figures.

  ‘This is why I have come. I do not make mistakes.

  ‘Ah, well, now you ask, we come to the meat of it, I suppose. Last Solday I set out to review the quarterly accounts. The year end looms, and the Imperial tithe statements must be returned correctly. I found an error. Well, not an error so much as an aberration. Something that could not be accounted for. It was an idle annoyance at first, but the more I studied the pages of the ledger, the more peculiar it became.

  ‘There was a void, you see. A void – a gap or empty place in the flow of the accounts that defied explanation. It was as if a page or two were missing from my ledger.

  ‘No, not at all. This was the master ledger. Only I had access to it.

  �
��Sir, you belittle my craft with such a question. I keep books, and I have kept books my whole life. I am a creature of accuracy. It was not simply a matter of a creeping error, a stray sub-total. There were figures missing. Simply missing. And yet, a page or two on, the books balanced, seamlessly, as if there had been no hole.

  ‘This is what I mean by the word ‘void’. Numbers are my language, my life. I know when they are lying. There was a void in the accounts, and the more I struggled to identify it, the more the figures hid it from me. It was as if they were closing ranks to conceal the truth.

  ‘Why have I come to you with a book-keeping error? Sir, again you mock me. It was no error. I reviewed and recalculated. I redid the accounts eight times. As I added to this column and subtracted from that, the numbers began to betray me. They became numbers that I did not understand.

  ‘Sir, I believe I have calculated something that should not be. I believe I have found the Number of Ruin.’

  He regarded Master Johan Imus for a moment. Such a small man, shrivelled by age, his sparrow bones lost in heavy robes that had evidently been cut to fit his father or his grandfather. The gilt clock ticked on the mantle. Its face had no hands, a simple ordo trick. The constant, measured ticking was all that mattered. Tock, tock, tock, flicking time away without a trace of its passage on the enamelled face. Guilt got them all in the end.

  Imus possessed a small, neat face with a wide, slit mouth that might have revealed a toothy grin had the circumstances been different. His hair was straggly and white, and he wore half-moon eyeglasses. His knuckles bulged with arthritis.

  ‘The Number of Ruin?’ asked the officer.

  Imus nodded. ‘That is my transgression. Will it be painless?’

  ‘Will what be painless?’

  Imus strugged. ‘My punishment. I presume... Well, censure is inadequate. Will it be burning? Poison?’

  The officer had been making notes in a small copy book. He dipped his pen into the desk’s power well.

  ‘Do you believe you have committed a crime, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no not at all. But I believe I have become a crime. I am a criminal thing.’

  ‘I see.’

  Master Imus sat forwards and adjusted his eyeglasses. ‘I see you are quite a young man, sir. Will this have to go to a superior?’

  ‘My superior?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I imagine something this grave-’

  ‘My master’s name is Hapshant. He is indisposed, an old ailment. I hold the rank of interrogator, as I told you. I can deal with this matter.’

  ‘Oh, good. That’s good. Very good. So, how will you proceed?’

  The officer stared at Master Imus. ‘Forgive me, Imus, you don’t seem alarmed at all by this process.’

  ‘Alarmed?’ Imus echoed. ‘Of course I’m alarmed. I’m terrified. I’ve been terrified of this day all my life.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it happens to us all, sooner or later, doesn’t it? Every day of my working life, I have walked to work up Sarum Street, and come by this place, so dark and unfriendly. I never pass it without a shudder. It is mortality. It is the fate that awaits us all should we cross the line. Do you think it was easy coming here today? No, sir. It has taken me a week to find the confidence. This afternoon, as I raised my hand to rap at the door, my courage almost fled. But I am a true citizen of Imperial Hesperus. I am a true son of the Emperor. It was my duty to report this, no matter what fate awaits me.’

  The officer nodded. The clock ticked.

  ‘Tell me what you understand by “the Number of Ruin”,’ said the officer.

  Master Imus sat back and shrugged. ‘It is an impossible number, an abomination. It is a notation of filthy power. Numbers own power, you see. My father raised me to respect three and seven, thirteen and the triple sixes, the primes, the constants. But the Number of Ruin, that is the number of–’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Of the warp,’ Imus whispered, looking to one side and then the other as if in fear of being overheard.

  The officer nodded his head. ‘So Hapshant has taught me. Can you show me the number? Can you write it down?’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘This room is warded and I am armed. Can you show me the number?’ Master Imus took a data-slate from his robe pocket. It was battered and worn from use. He activated it and entered a series of digits into the display.

  ‘There are the accounts,’ he said, pausing before handing the slate over. ‘I have selected the key section. Please be careful.’

  The officer held out his hand. ‘Show it to me, please, sir.’

  Master Imus hesitated. ‘What did you say your name was, young man?’ ‘Eisenhorn,’ the officer replied. ‘Interrogator Eisenhorn of the Emperor’s Holy Ordos. Why?’

  ‘Please, please be careful with this, Interrogator Eisenhorn.’

  Master Imus handed the old data-slate to the officer. The officer looked at the screen with a slight frown.

  The gilt clock stopped ticking. A strange silence filled the room.

  ‘I–’ the officer began to say, and caught fire. Blue flames, as hot as a burner torch, consumed his skin and roasted the flesh off his bones until nothing remained except dripping, blackened meat and a charred skull wrenched into a rictus by heat-tightened sinews. The data-slate dropped onto the desk from a smoking, skeletal hand with a thump. The officer’s clothing was untouched.

  The flames guttered out and the scorched corpse slumped forwards with a crack of dry ligaments. Imus got up and backed away. His eyes were wide. He fought back a terrible desire to urinate.

  ‘Someone,’ he murmured, ‘someone, anyone... help me!’ He reached the door and tried to open it, but it was locked. He knocked on it, gingerly, as if hoping someone on the other side might open it without being put to too much trouble.

  A hand took his arm.

  ‘Please sit down, Master Imus,’ the officer said.

  Master Imus started rather badly and recoiled with such surprise he banged his elbows and the back of his head against the door. The officer, who was not burned in any way, was standing in front of him.

  ‘Master Imus?’

  Master Imus began to shake. Then he started to hiccup. He continued to stare at the officer.

  ‘What did you see?’ the officer asked.

  ‘You were on fire,’ replied Master Imus. ‘You caught fire. The fire burned you until you were dead!’

  ‘Master Imus?’

  Johan Imus repeated his previous commentary, this time forcing his voice to actually make some sounds.

  ‘Ah,’ said the officer, ‘an illusion, that’s all, necessary to the work.’

  ‘Necessary?’ asked Master Imus. ‘Necessary how? To what work?’

  ‘To my work.’ The officer gestured towards the chair Imus had vacated. He paused. His tone became more sympathetic. ‘I apologise. I have shaken you, haven’t I?’

  Master Imus shrugged and managed a small, dry laugh. ‘Indeed. I have never seen a man combust before. I have never even seen a man die. How was the illusion done? What was the point of frightening me?’

  The officer’s sympathetic air melted. ‘I’m not about to answer any questions, sir. All the questions will be mine.’

  There were a great many of them. They came at Master Imus so rapidly, he became rather flustered. The officer asked him the names of his parents, and his votation numeral, and inquired of his political leanings. He asked Master Imus to account for his whereabouts on certain dates stretching back two years. He asked if Master Imus could operate a cogitator, if he held keys to the auction house premises, if he had ever been off-world, and where his family originated from. Master Imus attempted to answer as best he could. Sometimes a new question came at him before the last answer had been completely recited. Is there a record of public misdemeanours in your family? How long have you resided at your current address? Can you detail your diet in general terms? Are you receiving medicae treatment for any ailment? Have you ever been t
o Ausolberg? How many languages do you speak? How many languages do you read? Do you dream? What do you dream about? How often do you attend templum services? Have you ever taken the Standard Psykana Test? Have you ever been in trouble before?

  ‘Am I in trouble now?’ asked Master Imus.

  He was made to wait in the anteroom again. Night had fallen. The lamp, almost out of promethium, fluttered valiantly.

  The officer came to get him, and led him out into the street. The evening was warm and humid. Master Imus could smell the roasting and poaching and frying underway in the kitchens of the local eating houses. A few pedestrians passed by along the pavement under the street lamps.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Master Imus asked.

  ‘What did I tell you about questions?’ the officer asked. Master Imus pursed his lips and shrugged.

  Two men joined them from the dark building. One was an old, shuffling being in long, dark robes. The other was a young man, of an age and mode of dress that matched the officer’s. This man was more handsome, however, more genial in his countenance.

  ‘Is this the fellow?’ he asked.

  The officer nodded.

  ‘Let’s process this, Gregor,’ the man requested. ‘I had plans for tonight.’ They walked down the street. The officer and the other young man walked on either side of Master Imus, like an escort of gaolers walking a convict to the scaffold. The old, hunched man followed them.

  ‘We will inspect your hab,’ the officer said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Master Imus. ‘It’s not far.’

  Master Imus took out his keys and opened the deadbolts of his door one by one. A baby was crying loudly on the floor below, and the stairwell was pungent with the odour of steamed cabbage. Mistress Elver, from down the landing, came out and made a point of sweeping her front step so she could get a good look at the dark men Master Imus had brought home with him.

  As Master Imus finished the business of unlocking, the officer’s companion turned to look at Mistress Elver.

  ‘Are these your eyes, goodwife?’ he called. ‘I found them in the back of my head.’

  Mistress Elver bridled and went inside. The young man laughed.