by Dan Abnett
‘Don’t start, Titus,’ the officer said.
The other man leaned against the wall.
‘Nosey old bitch,’ he remarked.
‘Forty-eight,’ said the old man lurking behind them.
‘Forty-eight what?’ asked the officer, turning.
‘Steps. Two flights of twenty-four. Asquar spruce, not local. Vitrian glass in the lamp housings, though some of them have been replaced by cheaper alternatives.’
‘And this is pertinent how?’ inquired the young man called Titus. The old man shrugged with a bionic hiss. ‘Oh, it’s not.’
Master Imus opened the door. He felt rather ashamed of the musty smell that breathed out of the doorway.
The officer produced a docket.
‘Sign this,’ he told Master Imus.
‘What is it?’
‘A waiver. Interrogator Endor and I are about to search your residence.’ Master Imus initialled the docket.
The two interrogators entered the hab. Master Imus followed them, and the old man shuffled in behind him.
The old man sniffed.
‘Sec vinegar,’ he said.
‘What?’ asked Master Imus.
‘Sec vinegar, and kayleaf.’
‘I use the vinegar to clean my fingers,’ said Master Imus. ‘It’s the only thing that gets the ink out.’
‘The only thing that gets the ink out,’ the old man repeated.
‘And I use kayleaf, in a paste, to regrind my quills.’
‘You don’t smoke it then?’ asked the old man.
‘Smoke it? Why?’
‘As a balm against rheumatic inflammation?’
‘No.’
‘Ah,’ the old man said. He shuffled forwards into the living room, his legs creaking like a servitor’s. He was terribly hunched, and his augmetic eyewear clicked as it hunted. ‘You should. It’s very medicinal. It would help your hip.’
‘My hip?’ asked Master Imus.
‘You walk with a slight counter rotation. Two centimetres short on each right step. You shuffle, sir. I presume it is rheumatism.’
Master Imus felt quite dismayed. These three men had intruded into his home. The officer was in his bedroom, overturning the mattress. The other man, Endor, was in the little side kitchen, sniffing the contents of various jars. No one new had been inside Master Imus’ hab for years. It felt like a violation.
‘Are you the inquisitor?’ Master Imus asked.
‘Me? Bless you, no,’ replied the old man. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘I just assumed...’
The old man shuffled over to the sideboard. ‘Fuse-fit sampwood. No maker’s mark. A vase.’
He picked the vase up.
‘Please be careful,’ Master Imus said.
The old man ignored him. He held the vase in his spindly fingers. ‘Sameterware. Third Dynasty.’ He looked inside it. ‘Oh, paper clips.’
The officer came back from the bedroom holding several books.
‘You have books,’ he said.
‘Is there something wrong with that?’ asked Master Imus.
‘You like poetry?’
‘The Early Imperials. The Tacits. Is that a crime?’
‘This is,’ said Endor. He walked in from the side kitchen with something in his hand. There was an ugly, almost triumphant grin on his face. Master Imus realised that what he first registered as handsome in the features of the officer’s companion was in fact a cruel arrogance. Interrogator Endor was accustomed to winning.
‘What is it?’ asked the officer.
‘Buried at the bottom of a jar of caffeine,’ Endor replied. He held out his hand. Six little pills lay in his palm.
‘Yellodes,’ he said.
‘Most perturbatory,’ said the old man.
‘They’re not mine,’ said Master Imus.
Master Imus sat on the threadbare couch tugging at his robe.
‘They’re not mine. Not mine, not at all. I don’t use that sort of thing. I wouldn’t even know how to get that sort of thing.’
‘Zespair Street, or the dealers that frequent the depot,’ said the old man.
‘Be quiet, Aemos,’ said the officer. He stared down at Master Imus. ‘This is a bad turn of events for you. It compounds things.’
‘They’re not mine. How many times do I have to say it?’
‘They were in your kitchen,’ said Endor, who seemed to be relishing Master Imus’ discomfort.
‘I didn’t put them there.’
‘Oh, so someone just came in and hid them in your caffiene, did they?’
‘That must be it. I can think of no other explanation.’
‘I’ve had enough. Let’s process him.’
‘Slow down, Titus,’ said the officer.
‘He’s up to his ears in it.’
‘Slow down, I said.’
‘I had plans for tonight,’ Titus Endor scowled.
‘Fantastic for you. Give me the tablets.’
Endor tipped the yellodes into the officer’s hand. The officer sat down on the couch next to Master Imus.
‘Get lost,’ he told his companions. Endor went out onto the landing to smoke a lho-stick. The old man shuffled away to examine the books in the bedroom.
‘I’ll be frank. This is going badly for you, sir,’ the officer explained to Master Imus.
‘I realise that.’
‘The matter of the accounts is the main thing. But the yellodes. They complicate the matter.’
‘I understand.’
‘They are a prohibited substance. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, they’re yellodes.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Master Imus.
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve inspected an individual’s hab and found evidence of drug use. Obscura, gladstones, that sort of business. But yellodes... They’re mind expanders. We typically find them in circumstances connected to cult activity.’
‘Cult?’
‘We often find them used in association with prohibited texts and deviant knowledge. A man who has the Number of Ruin might use yellodes to help him fathom it and master its use.’
Master Imus put his head in his hands. ‘They’re not mine.’
‘Is the Ur-Saker yours?’
‘The what?’
‘I found it between the Frobisher and the early Tacits in your bedroom.’
‘I don’t know what an Ur-Saker is. I don’t know its significance.’
‘It’s a proscribed text. It defines the methodological use of psychotropic drugs in gnomic enlightenment. So that was just placed there too, was it? Someone just put it there?’
‘They must have done!’
The officer sighed. ‘Master Imus, you brought a matter to our attention, a serious matter. The numbers you showed me in the ledger are quite pernicious.’
‘And I came of my own volition! Remember that!’
‘I do, and that leaves me with two possibilities. You are a practising heretic with a pathological desire to be caught and condemned.’
‘Or?’
‘Or, Master Imus, you have been set up to take the fall for someone. There’s one last thing I would like to do. It’s necessary, for my work.’
‘What is it, sir?’ asked Master Imus.
The officer turned to look at him. His face was no longer human. It was a snout of rancid, gnashing teeth, spatulate and broad, with sharp edges. The snout opened, drooling spit, and seemed about to bite Master Imus’ face clean off. Master Johan Imus smelled the pit-stink of the warp, and the shadows of dark places where no human ever willingly walked. He saw a monstrous horror lunging at him, pallid tentacles whipping up out of the distended throat. He cried out in fear and wet himself.
‘I’m sorry I had to do that, Master Imus,’ said the officer, wiping his mouth.
Titus Endor came in from the stairhead. ‘Throne, Gregor. I felt that.’
‘Sorry. Would you and Aemos please stay here and tidy the place? And help Master Imus t
o get cleaned up?’
‘I had plans for tonight,’ replied Endor.
‘And now I have plans of my own,’ said the officer.
Titus Endor stayed until midnight, and then made some vague excuse and left. The old man remained with Master Imus until dawn. They played regicide, and talked of antiques.
The officer returned at first light.
‘The matter is settled,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your cooperation.’
When Master Imus went to work the next day, he found that Slocha and Daviov et Cie had been closed down. With immediate effect and until further notice, the seal on the door said.
Most of the staff had gathered in the street, bewildered and despondent. ‘Master Slocha was shot,’ muttered one of the underkeepers.
‘He was shot last night by the Inquisition,’ another confirmed.
‘Oh dear!’ said Master Imus.
Three days later, the officer called on Master Imus at his hab.
‘Won’t you sit down, sir?’ invited Master Imus.
‘I’ve come to tell you that you’ve been formally cleared of all charges,’ the officer said.
‘Even my transgression?’
‘Even that.’
‘I’m very relieved,’ said Master Imus.
‘Your employer was conducting bad business, heretical business, in fact. He was engaged in the importation of illicit texts under the cover of the auction house’s primary dealings. We’d been after him for a year. We had no proof of his activities.’
‘I see.’
‘Your employer knew we were on to him, of course. He set you up to act as a distraction. He wanted us to concentrate on you instead of him. And we would have, if you hadn’t been so honest as to bring the matter to our attention.’
‘Did you kill Master Slocha?’ asked Johan Imus.
‘I’m afraid I did.’ The officer rose. ‘Well, I must be on my way.’
‘What happens now?’ asked Master Imus.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have no job to go to. The auction house is finished. What will become of me?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. That’s not my problem.’
The officer turned to leave.
‘I think I might be allowed to ask one question, in all fairness,’ said Master Imus.
‘Ask it.’
‘Why was it necessary?’
‘Why was what necessary?’ asked the officer.
‘Why was it necessary to scare me?’
‘Fear simplifies the mind, Master Imus. It is so strong and pure, it quite empties the head and removes all barriers and falsehoods. I scared you so I could read the truth inside you, the honest part of you that you could not dissemble. I’m sorry about that.’
‘You’re a psyker, then?’ Master Imus asked.
+Yes.+
‘Ah. I see. If you can read into the future, tell me... I have no job, and no references. I am too old and set in my ways to retrain. I have no means of support. I came forward of my own free volition, helped you hunt out a heretic and proved my innocence, and I am left the poorer for it. What do I do now?’
+I’m a mind-reader, not a clairvoyant.+
‘Right. Thank you for your candour anyway.’
‘Goodbye, Master Imus.’
Interrogator Eisenhorn closed the door behind him.
Master Imus sat on the threadbare couch. From the floor below, he could hear a baby crying. He could hear the knock of the landlord, going from hab to hab for the week’s rent. Master Imus’ rent dues were in the sideboard drawer. This week’s, and the next’s, but nothing more.
Master Imus was glad he had come forward, and glad he had spoken out. Duty was duty, after all. He tried to inflate some sense of civic pride in his heart.
But he wished, more than anything, he had just kept himself to himself.
REGIA OCCULTA
I crossed over into Jared County via the pass at Kulbrech. Air links were down, because of the Cackle, so a reluctant motorised unit of the local militia conveyed me from the capital as far as Kulbrech Town, and then only because the Jared Commissioner had been so insistent. This was – oh – 223.M41, and I was only just out on my own.
Even then, at the very dawn of my career, I was treated with a mixture of fear and suspicion. The rosette, or the title ‘inquisitor’, or a combination of both, fairly focused the minds of those who met me. This attitude bores me these days. Back then, it gave me a sort of vulgar sensation of power.
Inquisitor Flammel had been killed six months before in a miserable warp transit accident, and I had been posted as a locum to cover his circuit, which was the fief worlds of the Grand Banks in the coreward reaches of the Helican sub. Circuit work is a drudge, and one acts, in the main, as an itinerant magistrate, travelling from planetary capital to planetary capital, reviewing flotsam cases gathered by the local authorities. Most are trivial and hardly ordo business, scares conjured up by superstition and petty disputation, though I had spent eight weeks on New Bylar working through a caseload that eventually exposed a traffic in low-grade, unsanctioned psykers.
From New Bylar, I went to Ignix, the smallest and most peripheral of the fief colonies, a place locally regarded as the back end of all creation.
Ignix did not disappoint. Small, wet and whorled with ravines and meandering trenches created by an eternity of rainfall eroding its way down into the frothing seas, the planet is administratively divided into counties, each one millions of square kilometres.
Its capital is called Foothold, for it was there the first settlers made planetfall. They were miners, mineral extraction being the only profitable occupation a man can find on Ignix. Not long into their habitation, the miners of Ignix specialised and became wet miners, panning and sifting the planet’s thousand thousand fast waterways, many of them temporary run-offs that surge one day and are gone the next, for precious ores.
Wet mining fortunes had built Foothold into a decent-sized but drab town. All the worthwhile minerals had been shipped off-world in return for hard cash, and the place had been constructed from the residue. The buildings were stained and grim, many of them fabricated from locally cast rockcrete or a type of melta-formed pumice brick. I was put up in an airless residentiary, and went to the courthouse every day to review the pending cases. None of them deserved my attention, or even the rubber stamp of the ordos.
I had been there four days when the Cackle began. The name is a local one, a more appropriate description would be seasonal electrocorporeal storms. A by-product of Ignix’s orbital variations and the virile behaviour of the star it circles, the storms visit each yearly cycle and blanket the northern hemisphere with a steady, florid electromagnetic display. The sky lights up. Corposant nests on rooftops and masts. Vox-links suffer. There is a continuous sound in the air, like a dry, evil chuckle, hence the name.
Some years it’s mild, others it’s bad. 223 was a bad year.
The Cackle was so fierce, it prevented any and all passage by air, including shuttle links from the lift harbour to starships at high anchor. Transfers on and off Ignix were suspended, and I was stuck for the duration, which turned out to be three weeks.
There was some novelty to be enjoyed at first. The flickering lights in the sky, day and night, were quite sublime, and produced certain hues that I swear I have never encountered since.
But the constant dirty chuckle became onerous and tormenting, as did the rancid, metallic sweat the charged air drew out of me. It was fuggy and close, and I quickly wearied of getting shocks from every damn metallic object I touched or used. I came to realise why the late Flammel had made Ignix a low priority on his circuit.
With the cases done with, there was little to do but wait for the Cackle to subside. I read, and studied, and struck up passing friendships with several similarly stranded travellers living in the residentiary, merchants mostly. Perhaps friendships is too strong a word: I knew them well enough to share a drink or a conversation or a game of regicide with, but nothing more. T
hey understood what I was, and it made them nervous around me. For the first time in my career, that vulgar sensation of power began to feel like a burden.
Towards the end of the first week of enforced occupation, a message arrived from the commissioner of Jared County. Due to the vox-out, it was brought by a biker who had run the flooding levees and wash plains of the county limits overnight. I can only assume the commissioner had paid the man well, for he was in a poor state by the time he arrived. The Foothold administrator, an old fellow called Wagneer, brought the message slip to me and waited while I read it.
‘He seems most insistent, this commissioner,’ I remarked.
‘Mal Zelwyn? He’s a good sort, very dutiful. He knew you were in town on circuit duties, and evidently hopes you might oblige him.’
I held the slip up.
‘Do you think this is genuine, administrator?’ I asked.
Wagneer shrugged his sloping shoulders. ‘Sounds like a hot one to me, but what do I know? I don’t have rosette training.’
Zelwyn, the commissioner of Jared County, had reported a pair of killings in his township, the unimaginatively named Jared County Town. He suspected cult activity, and requested an assessment by the circuit inquisitor. I would have dismissed it except for two facts. One, I had nothing better to do, and two, Zelwyn had written:
The victims suffered deep, random cuts and slashes to the body, having been slain by a crushing head wound. Each victim was missing its left ear.
‘How do I get there? Can you scare up a transport for me?’ I asked.
Wagneer laughed at the idea. ‘In this? All right, I’ll see what I can do.’
The local militia took me overland to the pass in a Centaur, hooded against the rain and bulked out with yellow swim-bladders to allow for the fording of flash floods. The crew was not at all happy about the outing, but bit their tongues because of what and who I was. After twelve hours grinding along mud tracks and waterlogged gulches, they got me through the pass, over the iron bridge, and into Kulbrech Town.
As we crossed the old, rusting bridge, I watched the corposant crackle and dance across the posts and stanchions.
In Kulbrech Town, an odious shanty backwater, transit was arranged to carry me on the next leg of my journey. The Centaur turned back to Foothold. I went on in a cargo-8 that had seen better days.
