by Dan Abnett
‘The question’ was what Rickens always asked his officers. Why us? Why has this been given to Special Crimes?
‘Because we don’t know what sort of crime it is, or even if it is a crime,’ Plyton said. ‘The beat marshals who were first on the scene called it in to us because they didn’t know who else to vox.’
‘I see.’
‘There’s also the sensitivity issue, sir,’ said Plyton. ‘That’s why I sent for you. The suspicious death of a senior cleric in what is, let’s face it, the most revered sacred building in the hive. I thought we should be seen to be dealing with it seriously.’
Smart woman, Rickens thought. They passed through the west entrance, and out along a wide exterior cloister to the door of the old sacristy. Though now regarded as a side chapel and annexe of the grand templum, the sacristy was actually an entirely separate building. It predated the templum itself by nearly three centuries, and had actually been the city’s original high church in the early years. As Petropolis expanded and grew, the sacristy was deemed too slight and small to properly serve a thriving hive-state, and the grand templum had been raised beside it, eclipsing it and turning it into just one of the many buildings – dormitories, almshouses, beneficent chapels and church schools – that clustered around the grand templum’s skirts.
They entered the sacristy. Though far smaller than the grand templum, it was still an impressive vault. The narrow dome was painted with gilt figures against a white field and this, together with the deep, clear-glass windows, made the place seem much lighter and brighter than the great temple.
But it also showed its great age, and the way it had been neglected in favour of its more splendid neighbour. Plaster peeled, and there were patches of damp on the limed walls. The stone flooring was worn, and the slabs cracked and uneven.
Rickens saw the scaffolding at once. It was hard to miss it, especially because of the man hanging by the neck from the upper platform.
‘That the reverend cleric?’ asked Rickens. ‘Or is there something you’re not telling me?’
‘That’s him,’ Plyton said. ‘We left him in situ while we covered the scene. Medicae mortus and forensic fysik are waiting to move in.’
‘He hanged himself,’ Rickens said.
‘He hanged to death, yes,’ replied Plyton. ‘More than that, we don’t know. Suicide, murder, accident…’ She shrugged.
The scaffolding was a huge structure that reached right up into the bowl of the dome. Pews had been cleared aside to accommodate it. Drip sheets had been stretched out, and there were piles of unassembled scaffolding, along with artist’s equipment and pails of paint and lime. Two more of Rickens’s junior marshals were present, Broers and Rodinski. Broers was standing beside a long-haired young man in paint-spattered overalls who was sitting on a pew.
‘What do we know?’ Rickens asked.
‘The sacristy is undergoing cleaning and restoration, sir,’ said Plyton. ‘Archdeacon Aulsman was responsible for supervising and approving the work.’
‘Who’s the young man?’
‘A limner. Name’s Yrnwood. Part of the restoration team working on the dome. He’s eager, very skilled, I think, loves his work. He came in early this morning, to put in a few extra hours. It seems he found something up there, sir. When Aulsman looked in to see how he was getting on, Yrnwood took him up the scaffolding and showed him what he’d found. And then…’
‘Then?’
‘Yrnwood’s not making much sense. Aulsman was troubled, apparently. Upset. Before Yrnwood understood what was happening, the archdeacon had fallen off the scaffolding. Either he got tangled in a trailing rope on the way down, or it was already around his neck. Anyway, here we are.’
‘And you make of it what?’ Rickens asked her.
‘Like I said. A nasty accident. An unconventional suicide. Or someone – and the fingers would point at Yrnwood – killed him.’
Rickens looked around the sacristy again. There was something about the place that had always made him feel uncomfortable. In the days immediately after his wife’s passing, he’d come here first, assuming the sacristy would be more private and soothing than the grand templum. But for all its lime-wash white and glowing gilt, it had seemed oppressive. Enclosing. After a few visits, he’d taken to sitting in the umbran shadows of the grand templum instead.
‘If Aulsman killed himself, we’ll soon know,’ Rickens said.
‘I’ve already got Limbwall running background checks,’ Plyton said. ‘Trying to turn up any private troubles.’
‘Tell him to be thorough. Secret debts. Hidden illness. The usual things, up to and including shameful secrets involving altar boys or dining hall waitresses.’
‘Of course.’
‘Thorough, but circumspect, Plyton. I want to find secrets, not create a juicy scandal.’
‘Sir.’
Rickens tapped his way over to Broers and the young man. The young man was very handsome, in a wild, artistic way. Long, agile fingers, long hair romantically flecked with dots of paint. A long face, narrow and bony, with the sort of stark cheekbones Rickens had last seen on himself in his graduation pict. Magistratum Induction, class of seventy-two. Two hundred and seventy-two.
I’m getting old, Rickens thought.
‘Rickens, Special Crime. What can you tell me, Master Yrnwood?’
The young limner looked up. His eyes were wet with tears, and he was shaking. ‘He just fell off.’
‘Why did he fall?’
‘He was upset. I’d showed him what I’d found. It surprised me too, of course. But when he saw it, he… he just went to pieces. He was shouting these things I didn’t understand and—’
‘What had you found, Master Yrnwood?’
‘The other ceiling, sir.’
Rickens looked up at the dome and then back down at the restorer. ‘Other ceiling?’
Yrnwood swallowed. ‘I’ve been working on the dome for weeks now. Replacing the gilt where the damp had got to it. It’s bad in places. You have to lie on your back on the scaffold and work above you. It’s tiring on the arms.’
‘I bet.’
‘Some parts have just collapsed. I mean, the lime plaster’s like wet paper, and just hanging off. There was a particularly bad bit up there.’
The limner rose and pointed to a shadowy black stain on the roof just above the golden shoulder of Saint Kiodrus.
‘It was really going, with the recent rains, so I came in early to try and seal it before it spread. I got up there, and it just came away.’
Rickens saw a splattered mess of old plaster and shredded mulch on the sacristy floor under the scaffolding.
‘I thought for a second the whole dome was going to fall on me,’ Yrnwood went on. ‘Then I saw the hole. It’s quite big. A hole right through the dome. So I got a lamp and looked up through it.’
‘What did you see, Master Yrnwood.’
‘The other roof, like I said. This dome is a false ceiling. There’s a cavity up there, and beyond it. There’s a whole other dome about two metres above it. It’s painted. I mean, the frescos are beautiful. So very old. There’s no record of it. I mean, it must have been hidden up there for centuries. Centuries! Why would they cover something like that over? Why doesn’t anyone know about it?’
‘This is what you showed the archdeacon?’
Yrnwood nodded glumly. ‘He was intrigued. Excited, when I told him. He climbed up, and borrowed my light. Looked through. Then he simply went… mad.’
‘Describe mad.’
‘He came back out of the hole, and first off he was just murmuring and shaking. Then he started shouting, and threw the lamp at me. I ducked. I didn’t want to fall. Next thing I knew…’
‘He was dead.’
Yrnwood nodded.
Rickens looked around at his juniors. ‘Anyone else taken a look?’
Broers and Rodinski shrugged. ‘Not yet, sir,’ Plyton admitted.
‘Maud,’ Rickens said. ‘There’s no way in the world
I’m going to get up there. With my hip.’
Plyton nodded. Rickens only called her Maud when he really needed her. She stripped off her gloves, unhooked her helmet from her belt, tossed the gloves inside it and handed it to Broers. Then she slid out her power maul and gave that to him too.
‘Be careful,’ Rickens said.
‘I’ve a head for heights,’ she grinned.
‘That’s not actually what I mean,’ Rickens muttered.
Plyton started up the scaffold ladder. The entire structure trembled slightly as she went. The lashed ladders zigzagged up the scaffolding frame.
The air had become very cold by the time she reached the top platform. The last part of the climb had taken her right up past Aulsman’s body, so close she had looked into his bloodshot eyes and seen the swollen, mauve flesh of his throttled face. His body had begun to pendulum slightly from the vibrations of her ascent.
Maud Plyton had no head for heights at all, but she was damned if she’d let her beloved superior down. The floor of the chapel was so far away now, the figures looking up at her were the size of dolls.
‘Crap,’ she whispered, as she finally dared to rise to her feet on the top platform. So high up. The platform boards did not quite meet, and she could see the drop between them. That was so much worse. That, and the vibration.
Look up, she told herself. The dome was just above her face. What had looked splendid and golden from the ground was mouldering and rotten close up. She could smell the decay, see the gilt tissue peeling like scabs from the blind faces of disintegrating worthies. Saint Kiodrus’s face had discoloured so much that it looked as dark and dead as the archdeacon’s.
Left hand out for balance, Plyton walked along the boards, plucking her service stablight from her belt and switching it on. The tight bright lance shone like a las-beam in the cool gloom.
She saw the hole, the mucky, blackened puncture in the ceiling. The smell of rot was more intense here. Old air, stagnant like water that had stood too long. The smell wafted out of the hole.
She looked up through the hole, aiming her light.
‘Oh, Holy Throne…’ she said.
‘Plyton?’ her vox-link buzzed. ‘Plyton, what can you see?’
‘Another ceiling, sir,’ she said. ‘Like the man said. A whole other dome above this one. It extends… Throne, I can’t see how far. So old, so very old…’
Golden images, figures, faces, intagliated beams, lapis lazuli and pure selpic, ornate lettering in traced silver, lines and constellations, a hint of some vast organised chart that covered the ceiling.
‘Plyton? Maud?’
‘Sir, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’
SEVEN
TWO DAYS AFTER Carl’s successful penetration of the Informium Depository, my team took up occupation of a rented townhouse in the ninth ward of Formal E.
The house was called Miserimus, and it was a dank, sulking manse of rain-eaten ouslite and formstone that stood in a quiet up-stack neighbourhood of private gardens and secluded mansions.
The lease was acquired in the name of Morten Narvon. The forename was that of a childhood friend of Nayl’s, the family name that of the first boy Kara had kissed. Carl Thonius’s devious concealed graft program had done the rest, including transferring down-payment from an obscured account to the rental guild. Hidden within the Informium’s data-core, the graft program could now provide anything we needed, not falsified but genuinely created by the unimpeachable archive of all records. It was superb work, but I think none of us showed proper appreciation to Carl. It was the sort of thing we expected from him. He remained sullen and unhappy about the way things had gone.
The empty halls and chambers of the unfurnished townhouse were cold and unfamiliar, but it was a home of sorts, a safe house. We settled in. Carl and Patience went out and purchased some simple items of furniture to make it liveable. They used false names and false accounts provided by the graft. In those first few days, that became the game. My friends would sit around and dream up alter egos, and Carl would tap his codifier, send them through the Informium’s data-wash, and make them real. It cheered him up somewhat to amuse the others with his skill.
There was a tension however. An apprehension about the task ahead. We had names, most of which Skoh had provided: Akunin, Vygold, Marebos, Foucault, Strykson, Braeden. Each one the shipmaster of a rogue trader. Each one a member of the Contract Thirteen cartel.
‘Search them down,’ I told Carl. ‘Find out if any are logged as on planet. Find me backgrounds and trade histories. Find me connections. What links them?’
Carl nodded.
‘You have the Informium at your disposal now, Carl. The central registry of data in this subsector. And you can use it to sift and search it invisibly. Do so.’
Carl had set up in the east bedroom, his equipment resting on packing cases. His cogitators had a vapour link to the local wireless mast (registered, via the graft, to an invented rickshaw firm) and dry/ground splices to the main civic data conduits in the street outside, courtesy of a midnight pavement excavation by Nayl and Zeph. He also had click-links to the municipal vox system and landlines.
‘What else am I looking for?’ he asked.
‘Links to the Ministry of Subsector Trade,’ I replied. ‘Anything fuzzy, anything irregular. Jader Trice especially. We can’t be sure, but there’s a better than good chance he knew he was sending us downriver into a death trap when he teamed us with his agents last year. Who knows? Trice may be clean and the conspiracy might be operating at a level below him. But I met him and I doubt it. By the same token, look upwards.’
‘At the lord governor?’
‘At the lord governor. If Barazan himself is involved, I need to know as soon as possible. It makes our action here so much harder if this rot has spread to the very top.’
‘I’ll get to work,’ Carl said.
‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘See what you can recover concerning the Divine Fratery.’
Carl nodded again. I’d told him everything about the warning my once-mentor Eisenhorn had delivered on Malinter, six months earlier. Thorn had been quite specific. The Divine Fratery, a cult of seers based on Nova Durma, who delighted in farseeing the future and then manipulating it to their own dark ends, had seen something – a prospect – that concerned either me or one of my team. We would awaken something here on Eustis Majoris before the end of the year, which was just a few short months away now, and the Imperium would pay dearly for that mistake. The danger went by the name of Slyte or Sleight or Sleet or something of that form. I hated farseers. I’d done enough farseeing myself in my early days with the eldar to know that way led only to madness.
I was also concerned about the Cognitae connection. The Cognitae was – is – a cult school for genius heretical minds ran nearly a century before by a witch named Lilean Chase. My nemesis, the now-dead Zygmunt Molotch, had been a pupil of that school. Though shut down, its hand was in everything, stirring, tainting, fiddling. So many of its brethren were out there, unrecognised. I had encountered a shipmaster on my way into Lucky Space, a man named Siskind. He had been of the Cognitae bloodline, and his cousin, Kizary Thekla, master of the Oktober Country, had been the primary architect of our fate at Bonner’s Reach.
Although deceased, one member of the Contract Thirteen cartel had enjoyed strong Cognitae associations. It made me worry. Were we entering a war as bloody and deceitful as the campaign we had waged against the bastard Molotch?
I left Carl to his work, and glided along the empty halls of the townhouse. In one room, I saw Kara working out against a makeshift punch bag. Her compact, voluptuous body was clad only in tight shorts and a vest, and it moved wonderfully as she slammed blow after blow at the target. I so resented my enclosed state.
Nearby, Wystan Frauka was asleep on a window seat. I pinched my mind and extinguished his still-burning lho-stick as I slid past. In the next room, Kys and Zeph sat either side of an upturned box and played regicide.
Kys was laughing coyly. I sensed how much she was attracted to Mathuin, and how little of that infatuation he realised.
In the next room down the hall, Harlon Nayl, stripped to the waist, was standing before a trestle table on which the tools of his trade were laid out. Autoguns, laspistols, bolters, sense-rifles, grenades, daggers and estocs, throwing darts, revolvers, pump-guns, sting-blunts, synapse disruptors, ammo drums, mags, individual loads, a matched pair of fighting poniards, a longlas, an Urdeshi-made assault weapon.
I watched him as he selected each weapon in turn, spun it, slammed home a clip, aimed, dry-fired, then unloaded swiftly and cleaned. It was like watching a conjurer at work, a cardsharp. So smooth, so deft. So certain. He reached down and grabbed a twinned set of nine mil Hostec 5 autos, burnished in gold, raised, them, one in each hand, spun them forward, spun them back – Click! Clack! Click! – smacked them into grip, forward spun them again and then set them down.
I wasn’t the only one watching. In the corner of the room, I spied Zael. He was staring in awe at Nayl’s activities.
‘What do they do?’ he asked.
‘The 5’s? They kill folk.’
‘How?’
‘Your basic squeeze and forget. Self-aiming. One touch drains the clip. Here’s the slide, see?’
‘Where?’
Nayl beckoned him over and racked back the top of one of the golden pistols. ‘See, the ejector port here? The safety? Here’s where the mag loads in…’
I left them to their study.
One final room to visit, and I did so only with my mind. The ‘guest bedroom’. Locked, the room was bare except for a wooden chair in the middle of the room. Skoh sat on the chair, his wrists manacled, and the manacles secured by a long chain to an iron peg Mathuin had secured through a floor joist. The chain gave him enough slack to walk around the chair, or lie down beside it on a blanket. The window, the door and the walls were out of reach.
