by Xenos (lit)
'Upstairs?' Fischig asked me without looking round.
'Clear/1 reported.
I walked round the room, eyeing the dead and examining items left scattered on tabletops and bureaux.
'I know some of these men/ the chastener added, unsolicited. 'Those two by the window. Locals, low-grade labourers. Long list of petty convictions on both/
'Hired muscle/
'Seems to be your man's way. The others are off-worlders/
'You've found papers?'
'No, it's just a hunch. None of them have got any ID or markers, and I haven't found a cache anywhere/
What about this one?' I walked over to join him by the prisoner he had cuffed to the chair. The man coughed and whined, rolling his eyes. Unless he possessed unnaturally boosted strength thanks to drugs or hidden aug-metics, this man wasn't muscle. He was older, spare of frame, with grizzled salt and pepper growth on his chin.
'You didn't kill this one deliberately, did you?' I asked Fischig. He smiled slightly, as if pleased that I had noticed.
'I- I have rights!' The man spat suddenly.
'You are in the custody of the Imperial Inquisition/ I told him frankly. 'You have no rights whatsoever/
He fell silent.
'Off-worlder/ Fischig said. I raised an eyebrow. Accent/ Fischig explained.
I'd never have detected it myself. This was one of the reasons I used local help whenever I got the chance, even a potential troublemaker like the chastener. My work takes me from world to world, culture to culture. Slight differences in dialect or incongruities of slang regularly pass me by. But Fischig had heard it at once. And it made sense. If this was a leader rather than muscle, one of Eyclone's chosen lieutenants, then the odds were he was from off-world.
'Your name?' I asked.
'I will not answer/
'Then I will not have that wound treated for a while/
He shook his head. The wound was bad and he was obviously in considerable pain, but he resisted. I was even more certain he was a ringleader. He was no longer shaking or whining. He had switched in some mental conditioning, no doubt taught by Eyclone.
'Mind tricks won't help you/ I said. 'I'm much better at them than you are.'
'Go screw yourself.'
I glanced at Fischig out of courtesy. 'Brace yourself.' He stepped back.
Tell me your name/1 said, using my will.
The man in the chair spasmed. 'Saemon Crotes!' he gasped.
'Godwyn Fischig/ spat the chastener involuntarily. He blushed and moved away busying himself with a search.
Very well, Saemon Crotes, where are you from?' I didn't employ any will now. In my experience, it took only one blow to loosen mental defences.
'Thracian Primaris/
'What was your job there?'
'I was trade envoy for the Bonded Merchant Guild of Sinesias/
I knew the name. Guild Sinesias was one of the largest mercantile companies in the sector. It had holdings on a hundred-plus planets and links to the Imperial nobility. It also, as Betancore had informed me just that morning, had a trade launch berthed at the Sun-dome landing stage.
'And what work brought you to Hubris?'
'That same work... as a trade-envoy/
'In Dormant?'
'There is always trade to be had. Long-term contracts with the authorities on this world that require the personal touch.'
'And if I contact your guild, will it confirm this?'
'Of course/
I walked around behind him. 'So what brought you here? To these private apartments?'
'I was a guest/
'Of who?'
'Namber Wylk, a local trader. He invited me for a mid-Dormant feast/
'This dwelling is registered to Namber Wylk/ Fischig put in. 'A trader, as he says, no priors. I don't know him/
What about Eyclone?' I asked Crotes, leaning down to stare into his eyes. There was a ripple of fear in them.
mo?'
'Your real employer. Murdin Eyclone. Don't make me ask you again/
'I don't know any Eyclone!' There was a ring of truth to his voice. He may well not have known Eyclone by that name.
I dragged up a chair and sat down facing him. 'There is an awful lot of your, story that doesn't add up. You're found here consorting with recidivists who we can connect to a planetary conspiracy. There are charges of murder to be considered - a lot of them. We can continue this in far more intimate and comprehensive circumstances, or you can make me like you more by filling in some details now/
'I... don't know what to tell you
Whatever you know. About the Pontius, perhaps?'
A dark, stricken look crossed his face. His jaw worked for a moment, trying to form words. He quivered. Then there was a liquid pop and his head fell forward.
Throne of Light!' Fischig cried.
'Damn it/ I growled, and bent down to lift Crotes's limp skull. He was dead. Eyclone had left failsafes in die conditioning that would trigger at certain subjects. The Pontius evidently was one of those.
'A stroke. Artificially induced/
'So we know nothing?'
We know a great deal? Weren't you listening? For a start we know the Pontius is the most precious secret they protect/
'So tell me about it?'
I was about to, at least evasively, when the shutter barring the far wall to the climate extremes of the world outside the dome blew out. Hidden charges fired simultaneously. The metal sheet splayed outwards into the freezing dark. The blast-force threw both Fischig and myself to the ground.
A millisecond later, the shattered crystal in the portal blew back in at us, carried by the hurricane power of the Dormant winds outside - a blizzard of billions of razor-sharp slivers.
FIVE
Covered traces.
The Glaws of Gudrun.
Unwelcome companions.
Deafened by the blast, I had wit enough left to grab Fischig and roll with him out through the terrace doors as the emergency shutter clanked down from its slit in the hardwood ceiling. We lay panting and half-blind on the terrace, the hard light and warmth of the Sun-dome thawing our cold-shocked bodies.
Alarms and warning bells sounded all along the Thaw-view residences. Arbites units were already on their way.
We got up. Our clothes and simple good fortune had protected us from the worst of the glass-storm, though I had a gash straight down my left cheek that would need closing, and Fischig had a long splinter of glass embedded in his thigh between armour joints. Apart from that, we had just superficial scratches.
'Bad timing?' he asked, though he knew it wasn't.
'The charges were set off by the same spasm that killed Crotes.'
He glanced away and rebuckled one of his gauntlets, giving himself time to think. His face was a dingy grey colour, mainly through shock. But I think he was now beginning to understand the resources and capabilities of the people we worked against. Their abominable crime at Processional Two-Twelve had demonstrated the scale of their malice, but he hadn't seen that first hand. Now he was witnessing the fanatical servants of a dark cause, men who would fight without hesitation to the death. And he had
seen how brutally they would cover their traces, using mental-weapons and brain-wired booby traps that spoke of vast resources and frightening sophistication.
Arbites squads moved into the dwelling and secured it while local med-icae servitors patched our wounds. The clearance squads brought out the shivering girl, Bequin. She was wrapped in blankets and her face was pinched blue with cold. Under my seal and instruction, they placed her in custody. She was too cold to voice a complaint.
Fischig and I re-entered wearing heat-gowns. It would be another two or three hours before engineer teams could replace the outer shutter. From the harsh light of the terrace, we passed through three hastily hung insulation curtains into the dim, blue twilight of the apartment. The far wall was gone and we looked directly into the clear, glassy night of Hubris, a glossy grey landscape of stark
shadows and backscattered light stretching away from the edge of the Sun-dome. Once more I was exposed to the piercing cold of Dormant and my blood ached.
The main room where we had questioned Crotes was a gutted cavity, blackened by soot and jewelled with glass. Hard lacquers of frost caked furniture surfaces and twisted the faces of the dead. Blood spilt by the shredding storm of glass was crusted like rubies in the dark.
We played the smoky white beams of our lamps around. I doubted we would find much now. There was a good chance any valuable documents had been set to burn or delete on the same trigger signal that had blown the shutter and killed Crotes. And it also seemed likely these people carried all truly important information internally, as memory engrams, or meme-codes, the sort of techniques usually reserved for the higher echelons of diplomatic corps, the Administratum and elite trade delegations.
That turned my mind back to Crotes's employer, the Guild Sinesias.
'It's a common enough name in this sub-sector/ Aemos told me back in the comfortable half-light of the gun-cutter in its landing platform berth. He had been researching the name 'Pontius'. 'I've turned up over half a million citizens with that forename, another two hundred thousand with it as a middle name, plus another forty or fifty thousand spelling variants.'
He waved a data-slate at me. I brushed it aside, and used a hand mirror to study the line of metal butterfly sutures in the wound in my cheek.
"What about the definite article?'
'I have over nine thousand marks with that connection,' he sighed. He began to read them from his slate list. 'The Pontius Swellwin Youth Academy, The Pontius Praxitelles Translation Bureau, The Pontius Gyvant Ropus Investment Financiary, The Pontius Spiegel Microsurgical Hospi-'
'Enough.' I sat at the codifier, typing in name groups. Flickering runes hunted and darted across the view-plate. Text extracts drifted into focus. I searched through them by eye, my finger resting on the scroll bar.
'Pontius Claw,' I said.
He blinked and looked at me. There was a half-smile of scholarly delight on his narrow face. 'Not on my lists.'
'Because he is dead?'
'Because he's dead.'
Aemos came over and looked across my shoulder at the screen. 'But it makes a sort of sense.'
It did. A kind of illogic that had the flavour of truth. The sort of spore an inquisitor gets a nose for after a few years.
The Glaw family was old blood, a thrusting noble dynasty that had been a main player in this sub-sector for almost a millennium. The primary familial holdings and estates were on Gudrun, a world that had already come to our attention. House Glaw was also a major shareholder and investor in the Regal Bonded Merchant Guild of Sinesias, so the codifier had just revealed to me.
'Pontius Glaw...' 1 murmured.
Pontius Glaw had been dead for more than two hundred years. The seventh son of Oberon Glaw, one of the great patriarchs of that line, he had suffered the fate of most junior siblings in that there had been precious little for him to inherit once his older brothers had taken their turn. His eldest brother, another Oberon, had become lord of the house; the second eldest had been gifted the control of the stock-holdings; the third had taken on the captaincy of the House Militia; the fourth and fifth had married politically and entered the Administratum at high level... and so it went.
From what I remembered of Pontius Glaw's biography, required reading as a trainee, Pontius had become a dilettante, wasting his life, his robust virility, charisma and finely educated intellect in all manner of worthless pursuits. He had gambled away a significant measure of his personal fortune, then rebuilt it on the revenues of slave-trading and pit-fighting. A ruthless sliver of brutality stained his record.
And then, in his forties, with his health ruined by years of abuse, he turned to a much darker path. It has always been suspected that this turn was triggered by some chance event: an artefact or document that fell into his hands, perhaps the strange beliefs of some of the more barbaric pit-fighters he enslaved. Instinct told me the propensity had always been within him, and that he was looking for a chance to let it flourish. It is documented he was a life-long collector of rare and often prohibited books. At what point might his appetite for licentious and esoteric pornography have spilled over into the heretical and blasphemous?
Pontius Glaw became a disciple of Chaos, a devotee of the most abominable and obscene forces that haunt this galaxy. He drew a coven around him, and over a period of fifteen years committed unspeakable and increasingly brazen acts of evil.
He was slain eventually, his coven along with him, on Lamsarrote, by an inquisitorial purge led by the great Absalom Angevin. House Glaw
participated in this overthrow, desperate to be seen to distance themselves from his crimes. It is likely this alone prevented the entire family from being pulled down with him.
A monster, a notorious monster. And dead, as Aemos had been so quick to point out. Dead for more than two centuries.
But the name and the connection of facts seemed too obvious to ignore.
I wandered up to the cockpit and sat with Betancore. 'We'll need passage off-world, to Gudrun.'
'I'll arrange it. It may be a day or two.'
'As fast as you can.'
I sent word to High Custodian Carpel, informing him of some, though not all, of my findings and telling him I would shortly be leaving to continue my investigations on Gudrun. I was reading through the confidential case records of Inquisitor Angevin when two Arbites brought Bequin to my gun-cutter. I had sent orders for her to be delivered into my charge.
She stood in the crew-bay, frowning in the gloom, cuffed. She had dressed in a tawdry gown and a light cloak, but despite the cheapness of her garb and the discomfort she was in, her considerable beauty was plain to see. Good bones, a full mouth, fierce eyes and long dark hair. Yet, again, there was that air about her, that tone I had detected before. Despite her obvious physical attractions, there was something almost repellent about her. It was curious, but I was convinced I knew what it was.
She glanced round as I entered the crew-bay, her expression a mix of fear and indignation.
'I helped you!' she spat.
'You did. Though I neither asked for nor needed your help.'
She pouted. That air was stronger now, an unpleasant feeling that made me want to bundle her out of the cutter and have done with her then and there.
'The Arbites say they will charge me wim murder and conspiracy.'
The Arbites desperately want someone to pin the crimes on. You are unhappily involved in those matters, though I don't believe deliberately'
'Damn right!' she snarled. 'This has ruined me, my life here! Just when I was getting things together.
Your life has been difficult?'
She fixed me with a sneer that questioned my intelligence. I'm a pleasure girl, an object, it seemed to say, lowest of the low... how difficult do you think my life has been?
I stepped forward and removed the Arbites' cuffs. She rubbed her wrists and looked at me in surprise.
'Sit down/ I told her. I was using the will.
She looked at me again, as if wondering what the funny tone was all about, and then calmly took a seat on a padded leather bench along the crew-bay's back wall.
'I can make sure the charges are dropped,' I told her. 'I have that authority. Indeed, my authority is the only reason you haven't been charged or interrogated so far.'
'Why would you do that?'
'I thought you believed I owed you?'
'Doesn't matter what I believe.' There was sullen cast to her face as she looked me up and down. I found myself intrigued. Objectively, 1 was looking at a girl whose looks and vivacious spirit made her undeniably desirable. Yet I... I almost wanted to shout at her, to drive her away, to get her out of my sight. I had an entirely unwarranted and instinctive loathing for her.
'Even if you clear me, I can't carry on here. They'll hound me out. I'll be marked as trouble. That'll be the end of my work.
I'll have to move on again.' She stared down at the floor and muttered a curse. 'Just when I was getting it together!'
'Move on? You're not from Hubris?'
This miserable shit-pit?'
"Where then?'
'I came here from Thracian Primaris four years ago.'
'You were born on Thracian?'
She shook her head. 'Bonaventure.'
That was half a sector away. 'How did you get from Bonaventure to Thracian?'
'By way of this and that. Here and there. I've travelled a lot. Never stayed put very long.'
'Because things get difficult?'
The sneer again. That's right. I'd stuck it out here longer than anywhere. Now that's all screwed up/
'Stand up,' I snapped suddenly, using the will again.
She paused and shrugged at me. 'Make your mind up.' She got to her feet.
'I want to ask you some questions about the men who employed you at Thaw-view 12011.'
'I thought you might.'
If you answer helpfully, I can cut you a deal.'
What sort of deal?'
'I can take you to Gudrun. Give you a chance to make a new start. Or I can offer you employment, if you're interested.'
She smiled quizzically. It was the first positive expression I had seen on her. It made her more beautiful, but I didn't like her any better.
'Employment? You'd employ me? An inquisitor would employ me?'
'That's right. Certain services I think you can provide/
She took two fluid steps over to me and placed her hands flat against my chest. 'I see/ she said. 'Even big bad inquisitors have needs, huh? That's fine/
'You misunderstand/ I replied, pushing her back as politely as I could. Physical contact with her made the unnatural feeling of revulsion even
stronger. 'The services I have in mind will be new to you. Not the sort of work you are accustomed to. Are you still interested?'
She set her head on one side and considered me. You're an odd one, all right. Are all inquisitors like you?'
'No/
I ordered the servitor, Modo, to provide her with refreshment and left her in the crew-bay. Betancore was stood in the shadows outside the door, gazing in at her appreciatively.
