The Magos

by Dan Abnett

  The stairwells were unlit, and choked with trash. A domestic quarrel was raging on the fifth floor, and the residents of other habs were yelling out protests at the noise. Just before he located 870, it occurred to him that 870 was twice 435.

  Titus Endor stood in the gloomy hallway, listening to the racket of someone else’s private life disintegrating, and wondered if the numbers were significant. Numbers could be dangerous. A life of study and an eventful career had shown him that. Certain numbers, usually abstract mathematical constructs, possessed power. He’d heard of several cases where cogitators had been corrupted by warped numbers, and he’d been party to another case, years ago, when some old fool had mistakenly believed he’d uncovered the Number of Ruin. He and Gregor had handled it, and it had come to nothing, but they’d taken it seriously. He couldn’t remember the old fool’s name now, some dusty scribe, but he remembered the case. They’d been interrogators then, him and Gregor, just starting out. They’d been friends.

  An age ago, in another life.

  His mind had wandered. He blinked, and wondered how long he’d been standing in the dim passageway outside 870 Arbogan. The domestic had ended, and the night was still. From somewhere, he heard the frail sound of zendov music, playing on an old voxcordian.

  He decided to steady his nerves with a sip of the quart of amasec, and discovered that the bottle was half-empty already.

  He knocked on the door.

  There was no answer. Someone in a neighbouring flat cried out, the half-awake mew of the nightmared.

  He knocked again.

  ‘Mira Zaleed?’ he called.

  The door was baffled shempwood in an iron frame, with double dead-bolts and a triple-tumbler, Blaum et Cie safety lock. The lock had been retrofitted into the door, an expensive piece of kit for such a low-rent hab. He rummaged in his trouser pocket, and found his anykey. The slim blade extended from the grip, slipped into the lock, and muttered as it explored the permutations.

  He waited. One murmur more, and the anykey turned. The lock sprung with a clatter of rotating drums, and the deadbolts unlatched.

  He put the anykey back in his pocket and pushed the door open with his toe.

  ‘Mira?’

  The squalid apartment was cold and dark. The windows of the main room, overlooking the hab’s cinderblock courtyard, had been left open, and snow damp had blown in like wet breath. The drapes were lank and partly stiff with frost. He snapped on a pair of latex gloves, and clicked the light switch. An overhead light bar woke up, lazy and slow. Frizzy purple mould had colonised the cups and plates left on the little dining table. A chair had been overturned on the bare floor. On the wall, faded picts of laughing friends and solemn family gatherings jostled with playbills and programmes from Theatricalas from half a dozen worlds like Gudrun, Eustis Majoris, Brontotaph and Ligeria.

  The bedroom was vacant. A single bed, crumpled with use, had been pushed against the wall, and yellow markings, made in chalk, had been scribed on the exposed floor space. The marks were arrows, circling and crossing, and numbers. 4, 3, 5 and then an 8, a 7, a 0. To the left, 87, the digits stacked as a column. 5, Endor thought, went into 435 87 times.

  He stepped over the marks, and took out his little chrome picter. He took four or five shots of the markings.

  He felt cold on his back, a shiver. In the little closet, packed tight, were dozens of dance costumes, all gauze and lace. They smelled, very faintly, of sweat and lho-smoke. He reached in, and rifled through shoes and hats at the back of the closet space. His hand closed on something: a book.

  He drew it out.

  It was an unauthorised edition of Stratified Eating Customs In The Halo Star Sub-Races, by Soloman Tarsh. Tarsh was a pen name Maliko had used to publish his most scandalous theories. Endor smiled. Like the tumbling mechanism of a Blaum et Cie safety lock, things were falling into place. He bagged the book in a plastek evidence sheath, and put it in his pocket. Then, he rootled some more, and found a string of cultured pearls, a small jewellery box, and a fetish made of bent wire and feathers.

  He bagged them all.

  The kitchen was a dank mess of grime and grease, stacked with culture-bearing crockery. He went to the bathroom.

  Violent death marked the small, tiled room. Blood had extravagantly stippled the walls and dried into black scabs, and it had pooled in the enamel tub, separating into dark sediment and glassy surface plasma. From the spray travel and the splash vectors, Endor approximated a frenzied attack, multiple stabs with a short, double-edged blade. There was no shower curtain, and the rings on the rail were broken and buckled. The perp wrapped the body in the curtain, he deduced.

  ‘Are you dead, Mira?’ he asked out loud. It was unlikely. The kill scene was a week old, and he’d danced with her just the night before.

  ‘Who’s in there?’ a voice called. Endor stiffened. ‘Come on out, unless it’s you, Mira.’

  The voice was sixty years old, and carrying twenty or thirty kilos too much weight. Endor unclipped his shoulder holster so his weapon was in grab range, and came out of the bathroom. A torch beam shone in his face.

  ‘This had better be good,’ said the sixty-year-old, overweight voice.

  ‘Get the light out of my eyes, please,’ said Endor.

  The beam swung away, revealing a fat old man aiming a combat shotgun. The barrels of the weapon were pointing directly at Endor. The old man was wearing pyjama bottoms and unlaced, scuffed army boots. His belly stretched his stained vest. Old Guard insignia, the stitching worn, decorated his fatigue jacket.

  ‘Who are you?’ Endor asked.

  ‘This says I get to ask the questions,’ the old man replied, settling his shotgun. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A friend of Mira’s.’

  The old man snorted. ‘That’s what they all say. They don’t all get in, though.’

  ‘She gave me a key.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’ the old man asked.

  ‘We’re friends,’ said Endor.

  ‘Round and round we go,’ said the old man. ‘Give me a good reason not to blast your lungs out through your spine.’

  Endor nodded. ‘I’m going to reach into my jacket, all right? I’m going to show you my credentials.’

  ‘Slow as you like,’ the old man replied.

  Endor reached into his coat, forced himself to ignore the invitation of his gun, and flipped out his wallet.

  ‘Titus Endor, Ordo Malleus. I’m an inquisitor operating under Special Circumstances.’

  The old man’s eyes widened. He lifted the shotgun away from Endor.

  ‘I beg your forgiveness, sir!’ he stammered.

  Endor flipped the wallet away.

  ‘It’s no trouble. You are?’

  ‘Nute Jerimo, from eight-six-eight, just down the hall. I…’ the old man cleared his throat, ‘… I’m kind of the unofficial super on this floor. The residents like me to keep an eye on things, keep the place safe, you understand?’

  ‘You’re ex-mil?’

  ‘Karoscura Seventh, and proud of it. Mustered out eighteen years ago.’

  ‘You got a licence for that riotgun, Jerimo?’ Endor asked.

  The old man shrugged.

  ‘It kind of followed me home from the wars, sir,’ he replied.

  ‘You keep the peace here, and watch over your neighbours. I’m not going to report you,’ said Endor.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Tell me about Mira.’

  Jerimo shook his head. ‘Lovely girl, she is. A dancer. Moved in nine months back, keeps herself to herself. Always polite. Last spring, on my wife’s birthday, she gave us tickets to a performance at the Theatricala. A present, you see? What a night! I’d never have been able to treat my wife so well, not on my pension.’

  ‘She’s a good girl.’

  ‘She is that. Is she in trouble, sir? Is Mira in some sort of trouble?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Endor replied. ‘When did you last see her?’

/>   The old man thought about that. ‘A week ago, maybe nine days. It was early. She was just coming in when I was going out to tend the boiler. It won’t fire the heating for this block unless someone cranks it, and so me, being me, goes downstairs and–’

  ‘She was just coming in?’

  ‘She always comes in late, sometimes with gentleman callers. Dawn or after.’

  ‘That was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Jerimo replied.

  ‘Go home, go to bed,’ said Endor. ‘I’ll lock up here.’

  The old man shuffled off, taking his shotgun with him.

  Endor took a last look around the apartment, and switched off the light.

  He could smell Maliko.

  Back in his room in the residentiary, in the small hours, Endor poured himself the last of the amasec. Sipping, he took the items he’d retrieved from Mira’s hab, and laid them out on his desk. The book, the fetish, the jewellery box, the pearls.

  He unbagged the jewellery box, and opened it with his anykey. The trays inside were dusty and empty. The only thing in it was a pendant, a gold chain fastened to a small, curved tooth. Titus Endor fingered the jagged tooth that hung around his neck.

  Then he printed out the picts he’d taken of the markings on the floor, and studied them.

  When he woke up, the prints were scattered across his chest.

  He had slept badly. A recurring dream of death had stalked him. A supple ballet dancer with worms coming out of her eyes. A lizard carnivore, snuffling through the dark.

  ‘Wake up,’ he told himself.

  He felt vile. He washed and dressed, and went to a dining house that was fifteen minutes away from the end of breakfast service. He ordered caffeine, poached eggs, black bread and a slice of the local sausage. He took the book out of his pocket, and flipped through it as he waited for his order to arrive.

  Stratified Eating Customs In The Halo Star Sub-Races, by Soloman Tarsh. It had been vanity-printed on low-quality paper. Someone had annotated the well-thumbed pages. Passages were underlined, and notes dotted the margins. Why would a dancer like Mira Zaleed own a copy of a specialist tract like this?

  One section of the book had been especially heavily annotated. It was titled ‘The Eaters and the Eaten’, and it dealt with primitive customs relating to human communities and their local predators. Some hunter clans in the wilderness worlds of the Halo Stars ritually ate the flesh of apex predators in the belief that this would both proof them against predation and invest them with the traits of the killer creatures. On Salique, tribesmen drank the blood of local crocodilians so as to share their cunning. On Gudrun, in ages past, the powdered teeth and genitals of the giant carnodon were believed to imbue the ingester with feral potency. It was a recurring theme. Wherever man inhabited a world where he was in competition with a significant apex predator, rituals of devouring evolved. Eat what would otherwise eat you, and you would be magically protected. Hunt and consume what you fear will hunt and consume you, and you would be proofed against its fanged jaws.

  This was nothing new to Titus Endor. His painful experiences on Brontotaph as an interrogator had taught him much about these curious beliefs. After his clash with the saurapt, an encounter he’d never care to repeat, the local tribes had treated him with the utmost respect. He had been ‘in the jaws’ and he had survived. This made him special in their eyes, as if some curious supernatural relationship had been forged between man and predator. They were bound together, both eaters, both eaten. The tribesmen had urged Endor to hunt down the saurapt, kill it and ingest its flesh, so as to become master of the compact.

  Endor had laughed this off and refused. The old superstitions were ridiculous. ‘But the saurapt will now stalk you forever,’ the tribesmen had warned, ‘to the end of your days, when it will claim you at last and finish its bite.’

  Finish its bite. Quite a phrase. It had made Hapshant laugh. Endor had relished the notion of a predator’s bite that took years, decades perhaps, to close entirely.

  Many notes, most of them hard to decipher, appended the passages dealing with such traditions. Brontotaph was mentioned. Certain charms and prophylactic rituals were described, whereby sacrifices could be made to ward off the stalking killer. Fresh blood and surrogate victims could be offered up to stall the attentions of invisible beasts.

  Endor wondered about the tooth he’d found in Mira Zaleed’s jewellery box.

  ‘Are you Endor?’

  Titus looked up from his eggs. It took him a moment to recognise the barman from the zendov club.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

  ‘May I?’ the barman asked, indicating the other chair.

  ‘Please.’

  The barman sat down. He was in casual clothes, a white shirt under a striped coat. Endor imagined the man’s formal wear was being pressed somewhere in a backstreet laundry.

  ‘Master Endor,’ the barman began, ‘Mira wants you to know that–’

  Endor held up his fork. ‘I don’t talk to men unless I know their names. Especially over breakfast.’

  The barman cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable.

  ‘My name is Jeg Stannis, sir,’ he said.

  ‘And I’m Titus Endor. See, that wasn’t so hard. You were saying?’

  ‘Mira wants you to know that you can’t follow her any more.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘You went to her hab last night.’

  ‘Maybe I did.’

  ‘She knows you were there.’

  ‘And where is she?’

  Stannis shrugged. ‘She wants to stay well away from you. She asked me to come and deliver this message, as a favour to her.’

  ‘I’ll go where I like, Master Stannis.’

  ‘The club has rules, sir,’ Stannis said. ‘The girls have to be protected from–’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘Predators,’ said Stannis.

  Endor bit the corner off a slice of black bread. ‘I’m no predator, I assure you.’

  ‘You went to her home, uninvited, and let yourself in.’

  Endor sighed.

  ‘The club has rules,’ the barman repeated. ‘Fraternisation with guests is strictly–’

  ‘It happens all the time, Master Stannis,’ said Endor. ‘Please, we’re both adults. Most of the dancers at your club are already supplementing their income from day jobs and Theatricala work. Let’s not be naive. They add to their wages in other ways too. Women are a rare commodity on Karoscura.’

  The barman’s face darkened. ‘Leave her alone.’

  ‘Or what?’ Endor smiled.

  ‘Or things will go badly for you.’

  Endor nodded. ‘We’ll see. Tell me this, Master Stannis…’ He pulled a pict from his coat and set it on the white cloth. ‘What does this mean?’

  Stannis looked down at the print. It was a shot of the yellow chalk marks on the floor of Mira Zaleed’s bedroom.

  ‘They’re practice marks,’ he said. ‘Dance steps. The girls often draw out the turns and steps.’

  Endor picked up the print and looked at it. ‘Are they really? I’m not convinced. The numbers–’

  ‘Beat counts.’

  ‘Who did she kill in her bathroom, Master Stannis?’

  The barman got up. ‘Kill? I think there must be something wrong with your head, mister. You leave her alone, you hear me?’

  ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Endor nodded.

  After breakfast, Endor stopped at a street bar on Kalyope and took an amasec against the cold. Sleet was coming down, brittle and wet. He read some more of the book. Maliko, Throne damn him, had a way with words.

  Endor looked up. Across the street, through the veil of sleet, he saw a man watching him, a tall, thin man, dressed in sober black, with a high black hat.

  Endor looked away to pay the bill. When he got up, the thin man in the tall black hat had vanished.

  ‘How much?’ Endor asked.

  ‘Four crowns,’
the adept replied.

  ‘To turn it around by tonight?’

  ‘Twenty crowns,’ the adept replied.

  Endor showed him his rosette, but the adept didn’t seem all that impressed.

  ‘Twenty crowns,’ he repeated.

  Endor paid him the money, and handed him Mira’s tooth. ‘Typed, by tonight, no excuses.’

  The adept nodded.

  Endor left the backstreet alchemist’s, and trudged up into the cold. The sleet had stiffened into snow, and it was belting along the thoroughfare in waves. He pulled up the collar of his coat, and walked into it, head down.

  His route took him back past the Theatricala, unlit and drab in the daylight. He went in. Cleaners were mopping the marble floors, and turning out the waste bins.

  ‘We’re closed,’ a man said, coming forward to meet Endor. ‘The box office opens at six.’

  Endor looked the man up and down.

  ‘My name is Endor, and I’m an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos,’ he said. He didn’t bother with his badge this time. It seemed to have lost its impact.

  ‘My pardon, sir,’ the man said.

  ‘Do I know you?’ asked Endor.

  ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

  The man was tall and skinny.

  ‘Do you own a very tall black hat?’ Endor asked.

  ‘No, I don’t, sir.’

  ‘You have a dancer here, by the name of Mira Zaleed. I would like to inspect her dressing room.’

  ‘We don’t do that, sir,’ said the man.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ smiled Endor. ‘I thought I’d explained that I was an inquisitor.’

  ‘This is where they all change,’ the man said. Endor stepped into the room, and turned on the light. The man waited by the door.

  The room was long and low, flanked with grubby mirrors. Piles of dirty laundry heaped the baskets behind the door. Floaty white dresses hung on a rail. On the work surfaces, pins and reels of thread and thimbles lay beside pots of greasepaint and waxy sticks of rouge and base white. The room stank of greasy makeup, sweat and smoke.

  ‘Her station?’ asked Endor.

  ‘I have no idea, inquisitor,’ the man said.

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘Maybe to the left there, third mirror along. It’s very busy in here at night.’