by Dan Abnett
‘Don’t start,’ she said.
He opened his mouth to carry on, but saw the look on her face. It was a self-pitying rant she’d heard from him too many times. He cleared his throat.
‘It also appears from experience,’ he said, less emphatically, ‘that I do not make for sparkling company, and so an isolated existence is better for everyone. Someone once told me I’d be happier alone. Or that I’d make others happier if I was alone. I don’t recall precisely. There was a lot of shouting and door-slamming.’
Macks sighed and looked away.
‘Did you train that eagle?’
Drusher glanced around. The younger, blond man was sitting on a bench in the corner. He was holding a dressing to the gashes on his cheek and neck.
‘It was a sea raptor,’ said Drusher.
‘What?’ asked the blond man.
‘A sea raptor. Not an eagle. Gortus gortus gershomi.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said the man. ‘I asked if you trained it.’
‘No.’
‘Then… a control implant of some kind?’
‘No.’
‘Is he psykana?’ asked the bald man. He was suddenly standing in the doorway behind Drusher.
‘No, he’s not,’ said Macks.
‘Good,’ said the bald man, ‘because, you know–’
‘I let a wild thing out, and you were in the way,’ said Drusher to the younger, blond man.
‘Ah, but you knew Voriet was in the way,’ said the bald man, ‘and you knew what would happen.’
‘Yes,’ said Drusher. He hesitated, then looked over at the blond man.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Voriet shrugged.
‘It’s fine,’ he replied. ‘It was smart thinking, actually.’
‘Yeah,’ growled the bald man. ‘If we’d been a road-mob, you’d have eagled the crap out of us.’
‘What is this about?’ Drusher asked. He was looking directly at Macks, the only person in the room he felt he could consider a friend, and even then, not much of one. ‘Who are these people?’
The blond man got to his feet. With his free hand, he took out a rosette and showed it to Drusher.
‘Interrogator Darra Voriet, Ordo Hereticus,’ he said. ‘These are my associates Medea Betancore and Harlon Nayl.’
Valentin Drusher didn’t hear much beyond the word ‘ordo’. It felt as though a trapdoor had opened under him and plunged him into a world where there would never, ever be enough anxiety meds.
‘We have need of assistance,’ said Nayl, the big bald man. ‘A specific area of technical expertise. You came highly recommended.’
‘By the marshal, I presume?’ asked Drusher, wiping his lips. Macks had produced a hip flask of amasec and let Drusher take a swig to steady his nerves.
‘Yes,’ said Voriet.
‘I don’t do consultations,’ said Drusher.
‘What are you, retired?’ sneered Nayl. ‘Living in your beachfront property, training eagles?’
‘N-no–’
‘I think I just heard you complaining there were piss-all opportunities for employment here on Gershom,’ said Nayl.
‘Does this pay?’ asked Drusher.
‘Yes,’ said Nayl, ‘in the form of deep satisfaction, and pride at having served the Emperor of Mankind and His Inquisition.’
‘I thought so,’ said Drusher.
‘There’s a stipend, and expenses,’ said Voriet.
‘Is there?’
‘Maybe,’ said Nayl. ‘Name a fee. Bear in mind you’re labouring under the false impression that you have any choice in this. The Inquisition needs your help. It’s not a yes/no option.’
Drusher looked across the table at Macks. Panic was beginning to set in.
‘Why did you bring these people here?’ he hissed. ‘What have you got me into? Why are you doing this to me again?’
‘They need a magos biologis, Valentin,’ she said.
‘Well, they can find someone else,’ said Drusher. ‘I’m not going to get dragged into another one of your insane adventures.’
‘Come on, Valentin. Outer Udar was fun. And Tycho City? We went to the zoo.’
‘So you have history?’ asked Medea Betancore.
‘We do,’ said Macks. ‘Which is why I brought you to him.’
‘A history of “insane adventures”?’ said Betancore. ‘In, what was it… Outer Udar and–’
‘It’s possible he was referring to the three years we were married,’ said Macks.
Nayl snorted.
‘It’s not funny,’ said Drusher.
‘I am absolutely certain it wasn’t,’ said Nayl, ‘for her.’
Drusher got up and tried to appear dignified.
‘Look, sir,’ he said. ‘I am a magos biologis. I study flora and fauna. Make taxonomies. I have been here on Gershom for more than thirty years. I wish I hadn’t been, but there you go. It’s not much of a life, however it’s what I do. Twice, in the past, Marshal Macks has co-opted my assistance in certain matters. The last time was twenty years ago. They were dangerous experiences, very much outside my wheelhouse. I do not wish to repeat them. Ever. So I suggest you look for somebody more qualified to help with… whatever it is you’re doing.’
‘Thing is,’ said Nayl, ‘there’s no one more qualified. Not in this system. No one else even qualified, period. You’re the only magos biologis. Marshal Macks didn’t recommend you because she thought you were particularly good. She recommended you because you were the only magos biologis she knew.’
Drusher sat down again.
Macks looked at Nayl sharply.
‘You really didn’t have to tell him that,’ she said.
Nayl shrugged.
‘I know what he’s like,’ Macks went on. ‘He’ll mope now. Sulk. We’ll never get him to cooperate.’
‘Wow,’ murmured Drusher. ‘You’re making it better all the time.’
‘I’ll make him cooperate,’ said Nayl.
Betancore raised a gloved hand.
‘First of all,’ she said, ‘we’re on a clock. He’s waiting for us. I don’t want to keep him waiting much longer, do you? And I’d rather we brought this gentleman along in a cooperative frame of mind than drag him unwillingly. So there must be something he wants, something that will make it worthwhile for him.’
‘He wants to get off this planet,’ said Macks.
Drusher looked at her. She was serious.
‘He’s wanted nothing more since the day I met him. One-way passage.’
‘Where do you want to go?’ asked Voriet.
Drusher swallowed hard.
‘Anywhere,’ he said quietly. ‘Anywhere that isn’t here.’
Voriet looked at Betancore. ‘We can do that. Get him somewhere. Gudrun. Thracian Primaris…’
‘You’d… pay for a travel bond?’ asked Drusher.
‘We’ve got a ship,’ said Betancore.
Drusher began packing some belongings in an old Munitorum kitbag. His house was full of clutter, but when it came down to it, there were very few items he felt he had to take: his journals, the manuscript of his taxonomy, his sketchbooks. He wasn’t sure any of that even mattered, but he felt obliged to take them; something to show he hadn’t entirely wasted the previous thirty-four years.
‘What is the issue?’ he asked Nayl.
‘Wildlife problem. Up north. Unkara Province.’
‘And the work involves?’
‘Insane adventures. You won’t like it.’
‘I will be resolved. I can be resolved, you know.’
‘When the offer is right,’ said Nayl.
Drusher stiffened.
‘I’m not a mercenary,’ he said.
Nayl shrugged.
‘I am,’ he replied.
He looked at Drusher.
‘Just to be fair,’ he said, ‘you say you’ve had insane adventures.’
‘I have.’
‘I’m sure. I’m also sure that whatever escapades you and the ma
rshal have enjoyed in the past… they’re nothing. Nothing compared to what we do.’
‘You underestimate what–’
‘No,’ said Nayl.
‘Then you’re boasting.’
‘Not that either. I’m just trying to tell it to you straight. In all fairness. This isn’t going to be like anything you’ve known before.’
‘It must be like something I’ve known, sir,’ said Drusher, ‘or you wouldn’t need my expertise.’
Nayl thought about that.
‘Well, you know animals,’ he admitted. ‘You know how to let a wild thing out of a cage, and what will happen when you do. This is going to be like that, only in reverse.’
‘Putting something back in a cage?’
‘Mmm-hmm. We’ll do the heavy graft. We just need expertise. Identification. Insight. That sort of thing.’
Drusher fastened the kitbag.
‘Ready?’ Nayl asked.
‘Yes,’ said Drusher. He paused. ‘No, wait. Cages. You reminded me. I’ll be right back. Two minutes.’
He went outside, to the back of the property. It was nearly dawn. The sky had turned mauve over the white dunes. It almost looked beautiful. Typical, Drusher thought. Now that I’m finally leaving…
He went to the pens and opened the cages one by one, shooing out the tarkonils and the seabirds. He couldn’t leave them caged up and not come back. He threw down some feed for them, and they started to peck, strutting around the little yard warily.
They’d have to fend for themselves. It wasn’t kind, but it was kinder than leaving them penned up to starve.
He looked at the property. He wasn’t coming back. He wouldn’t miss it.
He realised he was being watched.
The sea raptor was perched on a fence strut at the top of the dunes. It should have been down the coast by now, or out to sea, but there it was, watching him.
Drusher took off his spectacles, cleaned the lenses on the hem of his shirt so he could see better, and put them back on.
The sea raptor ruffled its wings, then spread them and powered down in one long swoop, landing on the ridge of the pens above him. It clacked its proud beak.
Drusher smiled.
‘So all those months of being a bastard,’ he said to it softly, ‘and you wanted to stay after all? You could have sat on the back of my chair at night, watched me work… Go on, now. You’re free.’
The raptor tilted its head and studied him.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m going. You can go too. But thanks for seeing me off and everything.’
The raptor tilted its head the other way and opened its beak. He could see the sharp spear of its tongue. Such a majestic creature, so–
It stooped from the roof ridge into the yard, killed one of the pecking tarkonils outright, and took off with it in its talons. He watched it fly away into the dawn sky, lugging the limp prey with hefty beats of its wings.
A few tarkonil feathers drifted in the air around Drusher like snowflakes.
‘Typical,’ Drusher said.
‘Who are you talking to?’ asked Macks, stepping through the back door.
‘Myself,’ said Drusher.
‘Ready?’
‘I’m supposed to be a magos biologis, Germaine, but every day I realise I know nothing about anything. You sure you want me for this?’
‘Not really,’ she said, ‘but we’re going anyway.’
THREE
Helter Fortress
Several roads converged in Unkara Town – the highways from the Peninsula to the south and the western routes through to Ottun and the ocean – and the least of them, a track, wound north into the hills for ten kilometres until it found the fortress.
The hills were not hills. They had earned that insufficient title in ages past, because they were a four hundred kilometre spur of the Tartred Range, and all peaks on Gershom were hills compared to those monsters.
They towered in their own right: younger mountains, sharp-edged, clothed in evergreen forests below their shoulders, sweeping up into spires of naked dark granite. They were called the Unkaran Hills, known too as the Karanines, and they formed the northern and eastern limits of the province. Their older, glowering cousins, the Tartreds, could be seen, from high ground on a clear day, as a blue shadow two hundred kilometres away, like the front wave of a great deluge, frozen solid and forever about to roll in and sweep the province away.
The history of the territory had been fraught. It had evaded Gershom’s recent conflicts, including the long and complex civil war that had ravaged the Peninsula, spared by its outlying state and lack of significance. But the fortresses that clung to the long spur of the hills spoke of older disputes. Outer Udar lay to the east of the Tartreds’ flanks, and in the early days of settlement, its territories had bred fierce nomadic peoples with an expansionist mindset. Long, ungainly wars of invasion and repulsion had haunted the Karanine belt.
No one studied them any more. The deeds and efforts of those wars were remembered only by the pages of history texts that slept on the library shelves of Unkara Town, and were never opened. The sites of skirmishes and battles were lost in the woodland slopes and valleys, so overgrown and misplaced that even their particular significances and causes had vanished. Occasionally, a farmer, grazing high pasture, or a woodsman in the deeper forest, would stumble on a rusted buckle or spear tip, or a piece of bone that was not an animal’s, and realise that something had once happened in that empty place.
Only the fortresses remained as any kind of memorial to an age of conflict. Raised in the dark granite of the Karanines, they had taken longer to fade into nature. Most were gone: heaps of stone scattered on lonely hillsides; stumps of wall, furred with moss, lingering in forest twilight.
Some had endured. Talla Keep, far to the west of Unkara Town, was a ruin, but its architecture was so cyclopean and its prospects so magnificent, it had enjoyed a romantic afterlife as a site for visitors, hunters, recreational walkers and a few amateur historians. Korlok Fort, another ruin, was less accessible, but it had survived in a local children’s rhyme, and in the name of two hostelries in the town.
Helter Fortress was the most complete. It was the closest of all the fortresses to the town, and for the two centuries following its duties as a stronghold, it had served as the home of the Karanine Proctors, then as the summer retreat of the provincial governor, and finally as the estate of a local dignitary called Esic Fargul, who had retired there to enjoy the rewards of a successful career in the timber industry.
Fargul’s wealth had run out five years before his health. Helter sank into neglect, and the old man died there, alone, in a draughty bedchamber on the fifth floor of the tower.
Helter Fortress was shut up at his passing. Its windows were boarded over, its gates chained, and weeds took up residence. No one had lived there, or even visited, for thirty years.
FOUR
Heuristic Amplification Disciplines
Garofar found Audla Jaff where he had left her in the old man’s library. She was still reading, but he noticed it was a different book from the one she had been intent on an hour earlier.
An early rain had come up after dawn. Garofar could hear it pattering at the plastek sheeting they’d taped across Helter’s broken windows, and tapping at what glass remained. There were wooden shutters, but Jaff had opened them for light, despite the glow-globes she had set around her perch on the ratty old chaise.
It had been two weeks since he’d met her, and he still didn’t know what to make of her: elfin, with a frame like a boy, and a high forehead that made the curve of her brow seem huge, and very young, younger than him. She was smart, he knew that. Big eyes, like new coins, a tiny pinched mouth. He understood she was some kind of expert retained by the visitor. With the visitor absent, she was in charge.
He stood for a moment, feeling awkward, rain dripping off the leather-jack of his deputy’s uniform.
‘I’ve done a sweep,’ he said.
‘Are yo
ur colleagues on station?’ she asked. She didn’t look up. She turned a page.
‘Yes, mam,’ he said. He thought of Cronyl, sheltering from the rain in the gatehouse, and Edde, walking the west wall with her riotgun under her slicker.
‘Any… any word from him?’ he asked.
She closed the book and picked up another from a pile beside her.
‘No,’ she said.
‘You don’t think… something might have…’
‘No,’ she said. She was intent on the book. ‘It’s possible that something has, of course, but I doubt it. He knows what he’s doing. Is there any sign of the others?’
He shook his head.
‘Did you check the cold store?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
She raised her head and looked at him. The slightest hint of a question.
‘You’re reading, mam,’ he said, changing the subject.
‘I am,’ she said, looking right at him.
‘A book.’
Jaff looked down at the book in her hands and reacted as if surprised to see it there. Garofar had noticed her sense of humour before. It was at odds with her serene, cerebral manner. It seemed older than she was.
‘I am,’ she said.
‘Anything in particular?’ he asked.
‘This?’ she asked, gesturing with the book, a slim volume. ‘Folk Verse of the Karanine Passes by Nettial Farell, second edition, published by the Red Grange Press in Delci seventy-eight years ago, some water-marking, foxing and shelfwear, inscribed on the flyleaf “To my dear nephew Esic, your beloved aunt”.’
She rolled off the details rapidly without even consulting the book.
‘Good, is it?’ he asked.
Jaff rose to her feet, unfolding her legs from under her. She was significantly shorter than him.
‘You have a tell, Deputy Garofar.’
‘A tell?’
‘Several. In this case, a slight twitch of the masseteric ligament on the left side. A micro-expression that indicates annoyance or aggravation. You wonder why I am reading and not working. You ask if the book is good, when what you want to ask is why it’s you who has to do the patrol sweep in the rain. The answer to your un-vocalised question is that I am researching. I am not reading for recreation. I am investigating Esic Fargul’s library, or at least those parts of it that have not been reduced to pulp by damp and insect activity.’
