by Dan Abnett
‘A squirt from the governor’s office. An expert on his way. I’m thrilled, of course. It’s about time. So, what’s the plan?’
‘Plan?’
‘Your m.o.?’
Drusher shrugged. ‘I suppose I’ll examine habitat, look for spores, collate cases and get a decent pict or two if I can.’ His voice trailed off. In seven years, no official had ever taken such interest in his work.
‘And how do you plan to kill it?’ she asked.
‘Kill it?’ he echoed.
‘Yes,’ she said, chuckling, as if party to some joke. ‘That being the point.’
‘I don’t intend to kill it. I don’t take samples. Just descriptive records, for the taxonomy.’ He patted his sketchbooks.
‘But you have to kill it,’ she said, earnestly. ‘I mean, if you don’t, who the hell will?’
By the firelight of the great hearth, Baron Karne went on expansively for several minutes.
‘The Lord Governor is a personal friend, a childhood friend, and when he makes it known that a scholar such as yourself is coming to my part of the world, I take pains to make that scholar welcome. Ask, and it will be given, magos. Any service, any requirement. I am happy to provide.’
‘Th–thank you, baron,’ Drusher said uneasily. He looked around the room. Trophy heads, crested with vast antlers and grimacing their fangs, haunted the shadowy walls. A winter storm battered at the leaded windows. Outer Udar was colder than he had dared imagine.
‘I wonder if there might have been a mistake,’ Drusher ventured.
‘How is that?’
‘Sir, I am a taxonomist. A scholar. My expertise is in the cataloguing of fauna-forms. The Lord Governor – your childhood friend, as you say – commissioned me to compile a concordance of Gershom’s animal life. I’ve come here because... well, there seems to be a curiosity out here I may have missed. A predator. I’m here to identify it for the taxonomy. Not to kill it. I’m no hunter.’
‘You’re not?’
‘Not at all, sir. I sketch and examine and catalogue.’
The baron bowed his head. ‘Dear me... Really?’
‘I’m truly sorry, sir.’
He looked over at the door into the dining room. It was ajar, and light slanted through the gap.
‘What will I tell them?’ the baron said.
Drusher felt desperately out of his depth. ‘If you have guests – I mean, to save face – I could play along, I suppose.’
Around the long candlelit table were nineteen local lairds and their ladies, the rotund Bishop of Udar and his secretary, and a square-jawed man with sandy-white hair and piercing eyes. His name was Skoh. Drusher wasn’t entirely sure who Skoh was. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure of anything any more. The baron introduced him as ‘that expert from the city I’ve been promising’.
‘You are a famous hunter, then?’ the bishop asked Drusher.
‘Not famous, your holiness. I have some expertise in the line of animals.’
‘Good, good. So claims Skoh here, but in three months, what?’
‘It is a difficult beast, your honour,’ Skoh said softly. ‘I’d welcome some expert advice. What weapon do you favour, magos? Hollowpoint or shot? Do you bait? Do you use blinds?’
‘I… um… favour multiple means, sir. Whatever suits.’
‘Aren’t you terribly afraid?’ asked one of the ladies.
‘One must never underestimate the quarry, lady,’ Drusher said, hoping it conveyed an appropriate sense of duty and caution.
‘They say it has no eyes. How does it find its prey?’ asked the bishop.
‘By scent,’ Drusher replied emphatically.
‘Not so,’ snapped Skoh. ‘My hunters have been using sealed body sleeves. Not one sniff of pheromone escapes those suits. And still it finds them.’
‘It is,’ said Drusher, ‘a difficult beast. When was it last seen?’
‘The thirteenth,’ said the baron, ‘Up in the ridgeway, having taken a parlour maid from the yard at Laird Connok’s manse. My men scoured the woods for it, to no avail. Before that, the swineherd killed at Karla. The waterman at Sont’s Crossroads. The two boys out late by Laer’s Mere.’
‘You forget,’ said one of the lairds, ‘my potman, just before the killings at the Mere.’
The baron nodded. ‘My apologies.’
‘The beast is a blight on our land,’ said the bishop. ‘I say to you all, a speck of Chaos. We must rally round the holy aquila and renounce the darkness. This thing has come to test our faith.’
Assenting murmurs grumbled around the table.
‘Are you a religious man, magos?’ the bishop asked.
‘Most certainly, your holiness.’
‘You must come to worship at my temple tomorrow. I would like to bless you before you begin your bloody work.’
‘Thank you, your holiness,’ Drusher said.
The outer door burst open, scudding all the candle flames, and a servant hurried in to whisper in the baron’s ear. Baron Karne nodded, and the servant hurried out again. A moment later, Arbites Officer Macks was standing in the doorway, dripping wet, a riotgun over one arm. Her badge was now pinned to the lapel of her leather bodysuit.
She looked around the room, pausing as she met Drusher’s eyes.
‘Deputy,’ said the baron, rising from his seat. ‘To what do we owe this interruption?’
‘Another death, lord,’ she said. ‘Out by the coops.’
The acreage to the north of Baron Karne’s draughty keep was a low swathe of marshy ground given over to poultry farming. Through the sleeting rain, thanks to the light of the bobbing lamps, Drusher could make out row upon row of coop-sheds constructed from maritime ply and wire. There was a strong smell of mud and bird lime.
Drusher followed the baron and Officer Macks down boarded paths fringed by gorse hedges. With them came three of the baron’s huscarls, lanterns swinging from the tines of their billhooks. The weather was dreadful. Icy rain stung Drusher’s cheeks numb, and, as he pulled his old weathercoat tighter around him, he longed for a hat and a warm fox-fur jacket like the one Macks wore.
There was an odd wobbling noise just audible over the drumming of the rain. Drusher realised it was the agitated clucking of thousands of poultry birds.
They reached the coops, and trudged up a metal-mesh walkway between the first two shed rows. The bird-dung stink was stronger now, musty and stale despite the rain. Teased clumps of white feathers clogged the cage wire. Macks said something to the baron, and pointed. A flashlight beam moved around up ahead. It was one of Macks’ junior Arbites, a young man by the name of Lussin, according to his quilted jacket’s nametag. He looked agitated, and extremely glad to see company at last.
The frame door to one of the coop sheds was open; Macks shone her light inside. Drusher caught a glimpse of feathers and some kind of metal cylinder lying on the floor.
He followed Macks and the baron into the coop.
Drusher had never seen a dead body before, except for that of his Uncle Rudiger, who had died when Drusher was a boy. The family had visited his body in the chapel of rest to pay their respects, and Uncle Rudiger had looked normal. Asleep. Drusher, with a child’s naiveté, had quite expected his uncle to jump up and laugh in their faces. Uncle Rudiger had been a great one for practical jokes.
The body in the poultry coop wasn’t about to jump up or do anything. It was face down, thankfully, its limbs draped in a contorted, awkward way that wasn’t a practical joke.
This was one of the baron’s farm staff, apparently, a yeoman called Kalken. He’d been doing the night feed, and the metal cylinder Drusher had seen was Kalken’s grain-hopper, lying where he’d dropped it in a pile of spilt maize.
Macks knelt by the body. She looked up at Drusher, and made a little jerk with her head that indicated he might want to go outside again. Drusher stuck his hands in his coat pockets resolutely and stayed put. With a shrug, Macks turned the body over.
‘Are you all right?’
Macks said.
‘What?’
‘Are you all right?’
Drusher opened his eyes. He couldn’t remember leaving the coop, but he was outside in the rain again, leaning against the barn opposite, his hands clenched in the wire mesh so tight he’d drawn blood.
‘Magos?’
‘Y-yes,’ he stammered. ‘I’m fine.’ He thought it likely that he’d never forget what he’d just seen. The awful flop of the rolling body. The way a good deal of it had remained behind on the muddy floor.
‘Take a few deep breaths,’ she said.
‘I really am fine.’
‘You look pale.’
‘I’m always pale.’
She shrugged.
‘You might as well stay here,’ she added, though Drusher felt she’d said it less out of concern for his nerves and more because she knew he wasn’t particularly useful. ‘I’m going to make some notes in situ.’
‘There were bites,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Macks replied. ‘At least, I think so.’
‘Measure them. And examine the bite radius for foreign matter. Tooth fragments that might have lodged in the bone. That sort of thing.’
‘Right,’ she said and turned away.
‘Where did it get in?’ he called after her.
‘What?’
‘Where did it get in? Was the cage door open?’
‘No. He’d fastened it behind him when we found him.’
‘Can I borrow a flashlight?’
Macks got a lamp-pack from Lussin and gave it to Drusher. Then she went back into the coop with the baron to begin her grisly inspection properly.
Drusher began to walk away down the length of the coop run, shining his torch in through the cages on either side.
‘Don’t roam too far, sir!’ one of the huscarls called after him.
Drusher didn’t answer. He wanted to roam as far as he could. The thought of being anywhere near that bloody, dismembered mess made him shiver. He was sweating despite the winter gale.
Ten metres down, near the end of the row, he found the wire cage roof of one of the coops had been torn wide open. Drusher played the torch around. He was near the end fence of the poultry compound, a three-metre timber pale topped with a barbed and electrified string of wires. He could see no hole in the fence or damage to the deterrent wires. Had the beast cleared the wall itself? Quite a leap. There was no sign of spore in the thick mud at his feet. The rain was washing it into soup.
He let himself into the ruptured stoop and examined the torn wire roof. With the rain splashing off his face, he reached up and yanked part of it down, studying the broken ends with his lamp closely.
It wasn’t torn. It was cut, cleanly, the tough wire strands simply severed. What could do that? Certainly not teeth, not even teeth that could take the front off a man’s face and body. A power blade, perhaps, but that would leave signs of oxidation and heat-fatigue.
As far as he knew – and there was no man on Gershom better qualified – there wasn’t an animal on the planet that could leap a three-metre security fence and slice open reinforced agricultural mesh.
Drusher took out the compact digital picter he always carried, and took a few snaps of the wire for reference. It came through this cage roof, he thought. Probably landed on it, in point of fact, coming over the fence, cut its way in... and then what?
He looked around. The covered timber coop-end of the shed was dark and unforthcoming.
It suddenly occurred to him that whatever it was might still be there.
He felt terror and stupidity in roughly equal measures. He’d been so anxious to get away from that terrible corpse and prove he was good for something, the blindingly obvious had passed him by.
It was still here. It was still right here in the shadows of the coop-box. Once the idea had entered his brain it became unshakeable fact. It really was there, just out of sight in the gloom, breathing low, gazing at him without eyes, coiling to pounce.
He backed towards the cage door, fumbling for the latch. He could hear it moving now, the rustle of straw, the crunch of dried lime on the box’s wooden floor.
Dear God-Emperor, he was going to–
‘Drusher? Golden Throne! I nearly blasted you!’ Macks emerged from the coop-box, straw sticking to her wet hair. She lowered her riotgun.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked
‘I was... looking for... traces...’ he said, trying to slow his thrashing pulse. He gestured up at the torn cage roof.
‘You’ll love this then,’ she said, and led him into the stinking darkness of the coop-box. The floor was littered with dead poultry, feathers glued to the wallboards with blood. The smell of offal was overpowering, and made him gag.
Macks shone her flashlight at the end wall, and showed him the splintered hole in the timbers.
‘It came in and went right down through the row of coops, smashing through each dividing wall until it found Kalken,’ she said. She’d come back along that route to find Drusher. The holes were easily big enough for her to get through.
‘Killed everything in its path,’ she said. ‘Hundreds of roosting birds.’
‘But it didn’t eat anything,’ he observed, struggling to overcome his nausea. ‘It slashed or bit its way through, but there’s no sign of feeding.’
‘That’s important why?’ she asked.
He shrugged. He took shots of the splintered holes with his picter, and then got her to hold the light steady while he measured the dimensions of each hole with his las-surveyor.
‘Have you told anyone?’ he asked her.
‘Told anyone what?’
‘The truth about me? About what I am?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t see any point.’
‘The baron knows,’ he told her.
‘Right.’
There was movement outside, and he followed her out of the stoop. Skoh was coming down the walkway through the rain. He’d changed into a foul-weather suit, and was hefting what looked like an autolaser, though Drusher was no expert on weapons. It had a big, chrome drum-barrel, and was so heavy it was supported by a gyro harness strapped around his torso. An auspex target-lens covered his right eye like a patch.
‘You’ve seen the body?’ she asked him.
‘Yes. My men are sweeping the wood behind the fence.’
‘It came right through here,’ she said, indicating the run of coops.
Skoh nodded and looked at Drusher, as if expecting some expert insight from him. When none came, Skoh left them without a word, and continued on down the path.
‘Who is he?’ Drusher asked.
‘Fernal Skoh? He’s a freelance hunter. Game specialist. The community hired him and his men when it became clear I wasn’t up to the job.’ There was rich contempt in her voice.
‘The bishop doesn’t think much of him,’ Drusher said.
Macks grinned. ‘The bishop doesn’t think much of anyone. Skoh hasn’t had much success so far, despite his flashy rep. Besides, the bishop has his own man on the job.’
‘His own man?’
‘Gundax. You’ll meet him before long. He’s the bishop’s bodyguard. Tough piece of work.’
‘Doesn’t the bishop think Skoh can get the job done?’
‘I don’t think anybody does any more. The baron’s threatening to withhold Skoh’s fee. Anyway, Skoh’s not the bishop’s sort.’
‘What?’
‘Skoh’s ungodly, according to his holiness. His background is in bloodsports. The Imperial Pits on Thustathrax.’
Drusher’s repose was fractured by lurid dreams of bodies that left steaming parts behind when they rolled over. In the small hours, he gave up on rest, and got out of bed.
He’d been given a room on an upper floor of the keep. It was terribly cold, and the wind and rain rattled the poorly fitted shutters. Drusher got dressed, activated a glow-globe, and stoked some life into the portable heater. He spread out his equipment and notebooks on the table, by the
light of the globe, and distracted himself with study.
There wasn’t a land predator in Gershom that even approximately fit the evidence. Prairie wolves from the western continent, Lupus cygnadae gershomi, were rapacious enough, but their pack mentality meant they were unlikely to be lone killers. The great mottled felid of the peninsula taiga, sadly almost extinct, had the bulk and power, and could have cleared the fence, but neither it nor a prairie wolf could have cut wire like that. And either would have fed.
Besides, Macks had given him her scribbled findings. There was no foreign matter in the poor yeoman’s wounds, but she’d made an estimation of the bite radius. Fifty-three centimetres. Fifty-three!
No wolf came close. The biggest radius Drusher had measured for a felid was thirty-seven, and that had been from a skull in the Peninsula Museum. All the biggest cats were long dead now.
The only thing that came close was Gnathocorda maximus, the vast, deep ocean fish. But this was Outer Udar. There were no wolves here, no forest cats, and certainly no sharks on the loose.
He looked at the picts he’d made of the holes in the coop walls. It was hard to define from the splinter damage, but it looked like each gap had been ripped open by a double blow, each point descending diagonally from the upper corners. Like a man slicing an X with two swords.
And what was all this talk about it having no eyes?
Lyam Gundax’s eyes were dark and set close together. He was a tall, massively muscled man with a forked beard and braided black hair. Drusher could smell his body-sweat, a scent like that of an animal.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’
It was early in the day. The rains had slowed to a drizzle, and the land was dark under a grey sky. Outer Udar was a wide skirt of rocky uplands and black forests around the dismal horizon.
Drusher had come to the cathedral only to find his way into the nave blocked by the big, fur-clad Gundax. The bishop’s man was decorated with bead necklaces and wriststraps, heavy with polished stones, charms, Imperial symbols and animal teeth.
‘Gundax! Come away!’ the bishop called out, as if calling off a dog. He wobbled into view as Gundax stepped back.
‘Drusher, my dear child,’ the bishop greeted him. ‘Pay no attention to my rogue here. This is the magos biologis I told you about,’ he told Gundax.
