The Magos

by Dan Abnett

  +There was a psyker here.+ Kara stiffened.

  +Relax. He… no, I believe it was a she. She’s not here anymore. But she was here for a long time and she left only recently.+

  ‘When you say a long time, you mean?’

  +Years.+

  ‘And when you say recently…?’

  +Days, maybe less.+

  We explored the tower. For Kara, this was a curious process. She could not see or feel, taste or smell the traces that were so evident to me. She just followed me around, one empty room after another. I could sense her boredom and her frustration. She wanted to be with the others, active, rounding up the last of the scholam’s inhabitants.

  ‘Sorry. This must be tedious for you,’ I said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she replied. ‘Take your time. I can be patient. Patience is a virtue.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  We entered a large dining hall in the upper reaches of the tower. The traces were strongest and freshest there.

  ‘Telekine,’ I said. ‘I’m in no doubt. A telekine, raw but potentially strong.’

  ‘We have to find her,’ Kara said. ‘If this damn place really was grooming subjects for the Cognitae, she could be a lead. A direct connection to a Cognitae procurer.’

  Kara was right. Among their many crimes, the Cognitae prided themselves on recruiting and retaining unlicensed psykers for their own purposes.

  ‘Go and find Carl for me, Kara,’ I requested. ‘I want to get him working on discovering who this psyker was and where she might have gone.’

  ‘Because of the Cognitae link,’ she nodded.

  ‘Yes, because of that,’ I replied. ‘But even if no link exists, we still have to find her. An unsanctioned psyker, loose on Sameter. That cannot be permitted. We must track her down. And dispose of her.’

  X

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Carl Thonius said. ‘Sir, I’m very sorry.’

  The device was very small, no larger than a hearing aid implant.

  ‘I should have searched him right there, but with all the shooting and screaming.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Carl,’ I said.

  ‘I think I will, sir. Everything’s blanked.’

  The device was a trigger switch, coded to Cyrus’ thumb print. An advanced piece of tech. Down on the floor, helpless from the wound Kara had delivered to his leg, Cyrus had plucked this device from his pocket and activated it. And the scholam’s entire data archive had been erased.

  ‘Can you recover anything?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a fairly comprehensive wipe. I might be able to recode the last few days’ worth of material. The stuff most recently processed might still exist in the codification buffer.’

  ‘Do what you can,’ I advised. Privately, I was annoyed with his lapse. But we had, with the assistance of local law-enforcement, rounded up dozens of tutors and scholam elders, including Cyrus himself. And who could say what the poor pupils themselves might be able to tell us?

  Besides, it was hardly surprising. Carl was so poor in circumstances of violence. I don’t believe he had ever fired a shot in anger, though he performed well enough in weapons drill.

  ‘I’ll get to work, sir,’ Carl said. ‘I’m so very sorry–’

  ‘So you bloody should be,’ Nayl snorted.

  ‘Enough, Harlon!’ I rebuked. ‘Carl is my interrogator and you will address him with respect.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Nayl replied, ‘when he earns it.’

  ‘Do what you can, Carl,’ I said. ‘But remember, your priority is to find out all there is to know about the unsanctioned psyker they had here. Who she was, where she went. She has to be found and dealt with, quickly.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  As Carl moved away, the senior magistratum approached. His enforcement officers, clad in black and silver, were still clearing the scholam, floor by floor. I could sense his unease. He was an experienced criminologist, but he’d never had his entire station house requisitioned to assist the Inquisition before. He was terrified of screwing up. He was terrified of me.

  ‘Problems?’ I asked.

  ‘A few scuffles, sir. You’d rather taken the wind out of their sails.’

  ‘I want all the children to be given medical checks, and then safehoused until statements can be taken from them all. Inform the Administratum that welfare assistance will be required, but not yet. No one is to be rehoused or re-homed unless they’ve been examined. Why do you frown?’

  The Magistratum started a little.

  ‘There are over nine hundred children, sir…’ he began.

  ‘Improvise. Ask the local temples for alms and shelter.’

  ‘Yes, sir. May I ask… is this an abuse case, sir?’

  ‘Indirectly. I can’t say more. The staff I’ll interview here, now. I’ll need some of your men to assist in guarding them while the interrogations are underway. Once I’m done, I will file charges, and you can begin to process them.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’ll start with the Prefect.’

  A Magistratum first-aider had patched Cyrus’ leg wound, and they’d shackled him to a chair in one of the refectories. He was in pain, and very frightened, which would make it easier to extract information.

  Cyrus stared at me as I rolled in to face him. Nayl followed me in, but sat his ominous bulk down at the far end of the long table from Cyrus, a threat waiting to happen.

  ‘I… I have rights,’ Cyrus began. ‘In the eyes of Imperial Law, I have–’

  ‘Nothing. You are a prisoner of the Inquisition. Do not ask for or expect anything.’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you nothing.’

  ‘Again, you are mistaken. You will tell me everything I ask you to tell me. Harlon?’

  From the far end of the table, Nayl began to speak. ‘His name is Ludovic Kyro, Cognitae-trained, wanted on five worlds for counts of heresy and sedition…’

  Cyrus closed his eyes as the words came out. We already knew his true identity. What else did we have?

  ‘Tell me about Victor Zahn.’

  Cyrus frowned. ‘I don’t know a Victor Zahn…’ I was watching his mind. It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t an outright lie either. Cyrus didn’t immediately recognise the name.

  +Tell me about Victor Zahn.+

  Cyrus blinked as the telepathy slapped him. My interrogative was accompanied by an image of Zahn’s corpse in the Hinterlight’s morgue, which I dropped into his mind like a slide into a magic lantern.

  ‘Oh Throne!’ he murmured.

  ‘You know him, then?’

  ‘He was a pupil here, years ago.’

  +And Goodman Frell? And Noble Soto?+

  Two more graphic images.

  ‘Oh, Holy! They were pupils too. This was years ago. Five or more.’

  ‘And you groomed them,’ said Nayl. ‘You and your staff. Groomed them like you groom all the poor strays who wind up here. Sold them on.’

  ‘No, this is a respectable place and–’

  ‘So respectable,’ I said, ‘that you wipe all your records so we can’t see them.’

  Cyrus bit his lip.

  ‘Zahn. Frell. Soto. Who did you sell them to?’

  ‘T-to a merchant, as I remember.’

  Lie. Bald and heavy. And well formed, not just vocally, but mentally too. A layer of mendacity cloaked Cyrus’ thoughts, like a cake of dried mud. A mind-trick, one of the many taught by the Cognitae. I had been expecting as much. For all his fear, Cyrus was still a product of that heretical institution, and therefore had to be unlocked with precision.

  If I’d just burst into his mind telepathically from the outset, I might have damaged or destroyed many of his locked engrams. But now I had a solid lie out of him, and that lie revealed the way his mind-shields worked: their focus, their strengths, their inclination.

  ‘Who did you sell them to?’

  ‘I told you, a merchant. A free trader.’

  +Who?+

  He squealed as the psi-jab rattled his mind. He was
utterly unprepared for the sharpness of it.

  ‘That was a demonstration of how things will be if you resist,’ I said. ‘Now I’m going to ask the question once more…’

  XI

  Patience heard the buzzing, not with her ears but with her mind, and slid into cover behind a crumbling rockcrete wall. Moments later, a varnished human skull hovered past through the gloom. Tech implants decorated the back of its cranium, and lights shone in its hollow orbits. A sensor drone, sweeping for her. She’d heard the bastards talking about them before her release. This was the first physical proof that men were actually after her.

  Men. Hunters. Killers.

  The skull hovered on the spot for a moment, circled once, and then sped away into the shadows. Patience stayed low. After another minute, a second drone – this one built around the skull of a dog or cat – skimmed past and made off in another direction.

  She slowed her breathing, and deliberately encouraged her mind to do the sort of tricks that usually happened unbidden. She reached out. She could feel the area around her in a radius of ten metres, forty, sixty. The shape of the geography: the sloping trench to her left, the broken columns ahead, the line of burned-out habs to her right. Behind her, the sewer outfall pouring sludge into a cracked storm drain. She sensed bright sparks of mental energy, but they were just rats scuttling in the ruins.

  Then she sensed one that wasn’t.

  This spark was bigger, human, very controlled and intense. Right ahead, beyond the columns, moving forward.

  Moving slowly so as not to dislodge any loose stones, she turned and began to creep away around the storm-drain chute towards a jumble of plasteel ruins. Her left toe kicked a rock, and it rolled away off the drain’s edge and started to fall. Patience caught it neatly with her mind and lifted it up into the silence of her hand.

  The brief delay had been to her advantage. Now she sensed three or four human mind-traces in the ruins ahead of her. Not focused like the other one, feral. In the shadows.

  Don’t trust the black, that’s what DaRolle had said to her. Trouble was, could she trust DaRolle’s advice?

  She crouched low, and stayed there until she could see them. Ragged human shapes, barely visible, moving like animals through the ruins. Gangers, members of the notorious Dolor clan. She could see three, but was sure there were more. The hunter was closing from the right, now almost at the rockcrete wall.

  Patience lifted the rock in her hand and threw it, sending it far further than her arm alone could have managed. It landed in the trench with a loud clatter.

  The hunter turned and made for it immediately. She got a glimpse of a man in an armoured jack and high boots scurrying towards the lip of the trench.

  Then the Dolors saw him too.

  A pivot-gun roared, and the hunter was knocked off his feet. The gangers rushed forwards at once, baying and yelling, crude blade weapons flashing in their dirty hands.

  The hunter’s jack had stopped the worst of the ball round. He leapt back up, and shot the closest Dolor through the neck with his handgun. The savage figure spasmed and went down thrashing. Then the others cannoned into the hunter, and they all went over into the trench.

  Patience started to run. She heard another shot behind her. A scream.

  She scrambled over a rusted length of vent-ducting, and dropped into the cavity of a roofless hab…

  …where a man was waiting for her.

  Patience gasped. There had been no spark off him at all. Either he was shielded, or his mind just did not register to her gift like regular human minds.

  He was tall and thin, clothed head to foot in a matt-black, skin-tight bodysuit. Only his eyes were visible through a slit in the tight mask, but she saw the way the fabric beneath them stretched to betray the smile that had just crossed his face. He held a long, slender spike-knife in each hand.

  Patience stretched out with her mind, hoping to push him away, but the tendrils of her gift slipped off his black suit, unable to purchase. He lunged at her, the twin blades extended, and she was forced to dive sideways, grazing her palms and knees on the rough ground. She started to roll, but he was on her at once, the tip of one blade slicing through the flesh of her left shoulder.

  Patience cried out, but the pain gave her strength. She kicked out, and as the man jumped back, she flipped onto her feet. She backed as he circled again. She could hear him chuckle, feel the blood running down her arm.

  He lunged again, leading with his right-hand blade. She ducked it, and came out under his arm, but the other blade raked across the back of her right hand as she tried to fend him off. She punched at him. He struck her in the side of the head with the ball of his right hand, and knocked her onto the ground.

  There was a rushing sound in her head. She thought of her sisters, and the mother she could no longer picture. In desperation, she lashed out with her gift, but the killer’s black skin-suit again rendered him proof against her power. It was too slippery. She couldn’t get hold of anything except–

  The man stumbled backwards in surprise as the knives flew out of his hands. He might have been armoured against a telekine, head to toe, but his blades were good, old-fashioned solid objects.

  Patience pulled them both in until they were slowly orbiting her body as she rose. It would be the matter of a moment to toss them both away out of the hunter’s reach.

  But she had a much better idea.

  With a bark of effort, she drove them point-first towards his eye-slit and nailed his skull against the back wall of the hab.

  XII

  Carl Thonius knocked on the refectory door and waited for a response. From inside, the oddly modulated screams and yelps of Prefect Cyrus shivered the air. As he waited, Carl glanced around at the four Magistratum troopers guarding the hallway. They were clearly unnerved by the strange sounds of human pain echoing from the refectory. Carl smiled breezily, but got no response. He knocked again.

  The screams ebbed for a moment, and the door flew open. Nayl peered out.

  ‘What?’ he spat.

  ‘I need a word, dear fellow. With the boss.’

  ‘Don’t “dear fellow” me, frig-face. Is this important? He’s busy!’

  ‘Well,’ Carl stammered. He was always edgy when he had to deal with the big ex-bounty hunter. ‘It is, sort of.’

  Nayl sneered. ‘Sort of doesn’t cut it.’ He slammed the door in Carl’s face.

  Carl cursed and knocked again. Nayl threw the door back open.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Carl snapped. ‘Don’t treat me like that–’

  ‘Oh, go away you frig-wipe…’

  Carl looked Nayl in the eyes. ‘Know your place, Nayl. You may not like me, but I am his interrogator. I want to see him now.’

  Nayl looked Thonius up and down.

  ‘Balls after all,’ he said, grudgingly. ‘All right.’

  Carl walked into the room. Cyrus was slumped forwards in his chains, wheezing, blood leaking from his tear ducts. Kara sat on a chair just inside the door, her face grim.

  ‘Carl?’ I said softly. ‘This isn’t really the time for an interruption.’

  ‘Sir, I’ve been trying to recover the lost data. The erased data. There’s really not much to get back, I’m afraid. I doubt we’ll ever find out what happened to most of the poor children laundered through this place.’

  ‘Your incompetence could have waited,’ Nayl said.

  ‘Stop ragging on him, Nayl,’ Kara hissed.

  Carl shot Nayl a dark look. I could tell there was something more.

  ‘I told you I might be able to recode the last few days’ worth of material. Uh, recently processed material still existing in the codification buffer.’

  ‘Yes, Carl.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘There was one item there. A record of a transaction made two nights ago. An older female pupil named Patience. Groomed by these bastards partly because of her spirit, and mostly because she was a latent telekine.’

  I swung around to face him. ‘
Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘A telekine?’

  He nodded. ‘The recoding is pretty clear. I think she was the psyker you were looking for.’

  ‘Did you say her name was Patience?’ Kara asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, why?’ Carl replied. She shrugged. She was holding something back.

  ‘Kara?’ I nudged.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just, when you were looking around, for traces of her, you thought I was bored and I said–’

  ‘Patience is a virtue,’ I finished.

  Kara nodded. ‘Yeah, Patience is a virtue. Spooky.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Nayl muttered.

  ‘Believe me, Harlon,’ I said, ‘in the length and breadth of this great Imperium of Man, there is no such thing as coincidence. Not where psyk is involved.’

  ‘Duly noted,’ he replied, not caring or believing.

  ‘Where did this Patience go, Carl?’ I asked.

  ‘She was sold for ten thousand to a narcobaron cartel that purchased her for use in a game they like to play.’

  ‘A game?’ I asked.

  ‘The record implies this is not the first subject the scholam has sold to the cartel for this purpose. I say game, it’s more sport. They release the purchased child into the slum-tracts and then… then they gamble on how long he or she will survive. Once they send their hunters out.’

  ‘So what?’ asked Nayl. ‘They’ll clean up our little psyk-witch loose end without us having to break a sweat.’

  ‘If the records are true,’ I warned. ‘Consider this. There might be a game. There might be a narcobaron with a taste for barbaric gladiatorial sport. On the other hand, all those things might be a substitution code to conceal an act of purchase to a Cognitae procurer.’

  ‘I actually don’t know which would be worse,’ Kara said.

  I turned back to Cyrus. He whined as my mind re-entered his. He was still weak and reeling from our initial session, and by rights I should have left him a while to be sure of getting accurate responses. But there was no time. An unsanctioned menace was loose somewhere, or already leaving the planet under close watch.