Penitent

by Dan Abnett

  He was committed to it indeed, despite the roaring disapproval of the tavern crowd, who were aghast that he should attack a young lady of fine bearing so savagely, and yet too afeared of their own wounding to intervene.

  He was committed because he was Cognitae. His sword, which had come from nowhere as if by magic, was a blinkblade. I had never seen one, but I had read of them. At the Maze Undue, Mentor Saur had warned us that such rare dangers existed. They were blades held in scabbards of what I now know is called extimate space. Bidden by their masters, they appear in corporeal reality, conjured from pocket-space. Saur, of course, had said that these were weapons wielded by what was called the perfecti, the ‘high guard’ of the Ordos, specialist lifeward killers who guarded the most senior Inquisitorial worthies.

  But Saur’s tale, as I now knew, was upside down. The perfecti, whatever that meant, were not Ordo, they were the Cognitae elite.

  So I was certain, in that frantic moment, that Connort Timurlin was Cognitae, and that he was of the Cognitae’s very best lifetakers.

  I gave a good account, for had I not been trained by the same organisation? My knives whipped and clashed, blocking and repelling his every stroke, or wrapping them aside. I kept line, claimed space, and used both hands and both blades to control his sword and find a movement of conclusion. For a moment, I was almost thankful to odious Thaddeus Saur for training me so well. My staunch defence clearly bothered Timurlin. It was much more than he had anticipated. He had been expecting to make a quick kill, and then to bolt out of the tavern, and be gone into the night. Now he was hemmed in, and caught in a bitter fight he regretted starting.

  I heard Renner yelling. He had lunged forward the moment Timurlin went for me, and was forcing his way through the stunned crowd to reach me.

  Timurlin heard him too. Distracted, his eyes switched aside to gauge the approach of a second assailant. I plunged at him, knocked his guard up with my right sluca, and caught him across the flank with my left.

  Timurlin yelped. He suddenly, impossibly, had his sword in a reverse grip, stabbing with it like a dagger’s downstroke, and it caught the corner of my right shoulder. I felt no pain, but my right arm was suddenly running hot and wet.

  By then, Renner had tired of the crowd’s reluctance to part for him. He drew his handgun and fired into the ceiling. The shot, loud as a cannon salute as it seemed, brought down a cascade of plaster and one of the hanging lamps. The patrons scattered in terror, heads down, screaming. Two men vaulted the bar to find cover.

  ‘Don’t you bloody move!’ Renner yelled, aiming the gun at Timurlin across the suddenly emptied saloon.

  ‘Screw you, Curst!’ Timurlin roared, swinging to attack.

  ‘You first,’ Lightburn replied, and shot him.

  Renner’s aim was good. The bullet would have struck Timurlin in the breastbone, and blown out his spine. But Timurlin – I can see it now in my mind’s eye, for it was so memorable and so improbable – Timurlin flipped his sword around and dashed the bullet out of the air before it could impact. The bullet flicked sideways, tumbling, and destroyed a shelf of bottles behind the bar.

  Then, then Timurlin was out the door. He took off like a startled stag, kicking the street doors out of his path. I gathered my skirts and gave chase. Renner ran after me.

  ‘You’re cut!’ he cried.

  ‘Shut up! Where did he go?’

  The night was cold, the street dark and empty, despite the pools of lamplight. How could he have vanished, as magically as his blinkblade had materialised?

  ‘There!’ I yelled.

  There were spots of blood on the cobbles. I had stabbed his flank, and he was leaving a trail. I began to run again, then stopped, and used my slucas to slice Violetta’s torn gown off me. I cast it aside. In the bodyglove beneath, untrammelled by the weight and volume of silk and lace, I could run much faster.

  We reached the street corner, where Mereside Row turned down into Cavalry Parade. Renner and I ran down either side of the empty street, hunting for more telltale splashes of blood. I was leaving a trail of my own. The sword had cut through my gown and my bodyglove, and into the meat of my right shoulder. My right arm was sore, and growing numb, and blood was dribbling from my right hand.

  At the public pump at Cavalry Cross, we stopped again, and looked left and right.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Renner said to me.

  Kys appeared between us, cat-silent.

  ‘What?’ she demanded. Her silver kine blades were floating either side of her like nectar-birds.

  ‘Timurlin,’ I said.

  ‘Did that to you?’ Kys asked.

  ‘Yes. He’s Cognitae.’

  ‘Gideon!’ Kys snapped.

  Ravenor’s voice was in our heads.

  Turn left. He flees towards Saint Kallean’s.+

  We started to run. I realised Kys was barely touching the ground and quickly outpacing us. Buoyed by her telekine force, she ran as though she were bounding across some weightless world.

  ‘Can’t you drop him?’ she yelled.

  He’s shielded. Perhaps a cuff of some sort. But I can read the heat of him. He’s gone left again, onto Little Orphic Street. We’re close. We’ll shut off his routes.+

  We ran past the steps of Saint Kallean’s Vow-house, and down the ­cobbled slope of Little Orphic. Late carousers at the street taverns watched in bafflement as we sped past.

  He’s turned back.+

  Timurlin came out of the dark, thrusting his blade at Kys. She cleared him, and his sword, and two and a half metres of air besides, cartwheeling with almost lingering slowness in mid-air. Kine-force brought her down on her feet behind him.

  Panting, Renner put his fist into Timurlin’s face. Timurlin staggered backwards, and fell sideways against a stone drinking trough.

  ‘You needn’t have bothered,’ Kys said to Lightburn. She looked at Timurlin, and picked him up with her mind. She slammed him into the wall of a grain merchants, and smashed the wind out of him. As he started to slide, the twin kine blades whistled out of the night air, and pinned him to the wall, one through each sleeve.

  ‘We have him,’ she said.

  But we did not. Like an escapologist, he twisted out of his coat, cape and shirt and broke free, leaving his garments pinned to the wall. In a second, he was gone down the mouth of a side-alley.

  ‘Should have put them through his arms, not his clothes,’ Renner said to Kys, though there was a slight wobble in his voice that betrayed his disquiet at her frightening gifts.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ she replied, and took off again, following Timurlin into the unlit passage. Her kine blades followed her like chase-hounds, chinking out of the bricks and letting Timurlin’s shirt and jacket drop.

  Ahead of us, we saw Timurlin’s silhouette as he scrambled over a high wooden fence. Kys cleared the fence with ease, and landed on its top like a rope-walker, gazing down the far side.

  ‘Oh, you stupid fool,’ I heard her say.

  We got over the fence. On the far side, in the muck and refuse of another backlane, Timurlin lay on his back. There was a sword wound through his heart. His eyes were open.

  Saur stood over him, a salinter in his hand.

  ‘What?’ he said to us. ‘You saw him. He had a sword.’

  Ravenor arrived, flanked by Nayl and Kara. They looked grim. Saur was protesting that he’d had no choice. Kys told him to shut up.

  ‘That was a mistake, Saur,’ said Ravenor through his transponders. ‘We wanted him alive. He will not answer questions now.’

  ‘My apologies, sir,’ Saur replied, sullen. ‘He had a cutro out, and–’

  ‘Convenient,’ I said, ‘that you should silence him and allow him to keep Cognitae secrets.’

  ‘Now look here, you little wretch,’ Saur snapped, turning on me. ‘I just did what I could. Don’t start accusing me of any�
�’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘I am not a part of it!’ Saur protested. ‘I didn’t even know him! Not even his face! I was just trying to help–’

  ‘We will consider your actions later,’ said Ravenor.

  ‘And take that sword from you now,’ said Nayl.

  Kara came forward to examine my wound, and was about to tear strips from her bodyglove to bind it.

  ‘No need,’ said Kys. She twitched her lip, and I felt the wound pinch shut, clamped by telekine force. ‘I’ll stop her bleeding. You can dress it when we get back.’

  I looked down at Timurlin’s body.

  ‘We may yet get his secrets,’ I said.

  ‘How so?’ asked Kara.

  ‘The same way Gregor got secrets from Mam Tontelle,’ I said.

  They looked at me.

  ‘No,’ said Nayl.

  ‘You told me yourself that it could be done, Harlon,’ I said. ‘You’ve seen it done, and it’s been done many times. Gregor had the knack of it. I’m sure Gideon does too.’

  ‘It’s not a technique I care to practise,’ said Ravenor.

  ‘You’ve done it before, I’ll bet,’ I said. ‘Needs must. Nothing we do here on Sancour is orthodox, or risk-free.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Nayl, ‘the last time… I mean, when Gregor did it, there was hell to pay. I would advise against such a show. We have no idea what danger it could bring down.’

  ‘Gregor did it,’ I repeated. ‘And as I am often reminded, Gideon is a far superior practitioner of psykana. One of the most powerful in the ranks of the Ordo.’

  I looked at the Chair.

  ‘Yet you seem to withhold,’ I said, ‘and seldom use your gifts to anything like their potential. Why is that, Gideon? Are you afraid of yourself?’

  ‘Hey!’ exclaimed Kara, horrified.

  ‘Beta is simply trying to goad me into a course of action,’ said Ravenor flatly. ‘Crude psychological persuasion. I am both offended and amused. Insulting my pride and daring me to show off will not work, Beta. I have weathered worse.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘But give me one good reason why you won’t do it anyway.’

  CHAPTER 17

  The revelation of dead whispers

  The nameless house was silent.

  When that which had been Connort Timurlin spoke, it came as a reluctant gust of breath, like a fretful draught blowing beneath an ill-fitted door, or a dry wheeze of air forced from old, leather bellows.

  Gideon asked him his name.

  ‘Connort Timurlin,’ the sigh said. ‘The Connort Timurlin.’

  That identity was a function. I mean your real name.+

  The flames of the candles arranged in a precise pattern around the corpse fluttered outwards, as though a breeze was stirring within the cold body.

  ‘Do not make me tell you, please,’ the dead voice whispered.

  I am afraid you must.+

  ‘And I am afraid too. It is dark here, and I don’t know where I am, and I cannot find my way out.’

  To hear something of death’s sombre realm, from one who is witnessing it, bothered me greatly. The voice sounded so desperately lost and disappointed. The description, though slight, also reminded me too much of how I had felt in the Below while searching for Lightburn, the incarcerating darkness and lack of dimension. I had lost all sense of myself, and all ability to see, and had felt that my connection to the world had gone forever. All hope and sight and meaning had been taken from me. The memory of that fear struck me, and I hoped that death was not like that.

  I knew, like all of us, I would find out one day.

  It was late, which is also to say, brutally early: the deepest part of the night, two hours before the first hint of dawn. Nayl had urged that we wait until the following evening to perform the auto-séance, so that we might have time to rest and prepare, but Gideon had gainsaid him, arguing that the longer we waited, the further Timurlin’s essence would have drained from his cooling body. To have hope of any coherent answers, we had to act at once.

  We conveyed the body back to Ravenor’s nameless house in Feygate, and laid it out on the flagstones of the old muniment room, the largest chamber in the half-timbered Pre-Orphaeonic section at the western end, and a chamber we barely used. Nayl and Renner swept the room clean of dust and cobwebs. Under Gideon’s direction, Kara and Kys marked out certain symbols on the floor around it in chalk and trickled sand, and arranged fresh candles at measured intervals. The drapes had been closed, and the frames of the windows, doors, and even the grate itself, had been warded with herbs such as fellwort, bindsap, asafoetida and rosemary, along with sigils in chalk, and brass cups of shaellic gum incense. I was charged to tie sprigs of lammasberry and gorax to the door handles and window latches with bows of black ribbon.

  Once the preparations were complete, Gideon ordered everyone except Kara and me to repair to the Antebellum eastern end of the house, furthest away, and to bolt the doors. They were not to emerge, but at his direct command. They were to ignore any noises or odd phenomena, and not answer any knocks at the door until after sunrise.

  He instructed Kara and me to bathe scrupulously and dress ourselves in clean clothes, all white or undyed, no colour. We were to assist him. He chose Kara because she had no psykana gift that could be annexed, and also because he found her the easiest to ware in an emergency. And, of course, I think he trusted her the most, and thought of her as the most stable and reliable.

  Me, he chose primarily because I had insisted on the matter being done, and wished to witness it and participate in it. But I was also the safeguard. My cuff was set to limit me, but could be adjusted in an instant if the dampening force of an untouchable was required to shut the practice down.

  Before I went down to join him, I opened the little window of my bedroom. The blood I had spilled earlier in the night, thanks to Timurlin’s blinksword, had drawn Comus to me in the aftermath, much to the concern of the group. I had assured him all was well, and instructed him to wait.

  As I opened the little window-light, I found the angel perched on the tiled eaves outside, hidden from the street in the shadow of the ridge tiles.

  ‘You were hurt,’ he said. ‘I smelled it.’

  ‘I was cut in a fight,’ I told him. ‘The wound is cleaned and bound now.’

  ‘Should I find and kill the soul responsible?’

  His voice was soft. He was a snowy shape in the darkness, like a looming chunk of sea-ice spied from the porthole of a ship at midnight.

  ‘The culprit is dead already,’ I said. ‘We are about to perform a psykanic interrogation. You may want to depart from here. I fear the conditions might alarm you.’

  I had no real way to judge the robustness of the angel’s mind, but I was concerned that the outwash of a psyker’s power might agitate him untowardly.

  ‘I will stay,’ he said.

  ‘Then stay outside, Comus Nocturnus, and stay hidden. Keep watch on the house, but do not come in. If things become difficult, I ask you to withdraw until I call you again.’

  The vague, pale shape in the darkness nodded.

  ‘But if things become difficult…’ he said.

  ‘Then I will make sure to call you,’ I said. ‘Then you may enter. But it will not be necessary.’

  ‘So be it,’ he replied.

  I was about to close the window when a question occurred to me. It was the first opportunity I’d had to ask it. I stepped back into the room, and fetched the commonplace book.

  ‘Do you know this number?’ I asked, leaning out of the window to show him the inside cover. ‘The number, here, or the name writ beneath it?’

  His large hands took the book from me and made it look like a miniature hymnal or chapbook. I could barely see much besides his spectral shape in the night’s darkness, but his eyes were evidently better
than mine.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I know neither name nor number.’

  ‘But you can read them?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and glanced at me. ‘I did not know I could read.’

  ‘Can you read the text?’ I asked. ‘The main body of the book?’

  He turned some of the leaves slowly.

  ‘No,’ he said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘But I know the script,’ he added. ‘Not to read, or comprehend, but I recognise the marks. When I was chained, in the dark place under the world, this was the script used there.’

  ‘Used? Used how?’

  ‘I remember little,’ said the angel, ‘but I know these marks. They were used to make the hexes which bound us and made us serve. A language of command. I’m sorry, I know no more than that, and I cannot tell you what the words say.’

  He passed the book back to me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Now, remember… If things become unruly, do not enter. And if you become troubled, withdraw from here until I call you again. Gideon knows what he is doing.’

  ‘If that is your command, null,’ he replied.

  I closed the window. The angel, a faint ghost, was still there when I went downstairs.

  I was certain Gideon Ravenor did know what he was doing. His psychic abilities were monumental. Even Gregor had spoken of them in awe. I found myself wondering, yet again, why Ravenor used them so sparingly, mostly on what seemed like modest or routine purposes. With such keen gifts bestowed, by the God-Emperor Himself no doubt, he could surely smite down every foe and heretic and enemy of the Imperium. Had I been right to think he was afraid of his own power?

  My needling of him had worked, at least, because he had agreed to the séance, though I sensed it was something he had considered himself. As Kara and I joined him in the muniment room, I began to understand some of his reservations.

  His chair sat facing the feet of the prepared body. He was deep in contemplation, perhaps performing tempering litanies of his own to prepare his mind. There was an odd silence in the room that seemed to muffle even the ambient sounds of our breathing and our footsteps. That too reminded me of the ossuary’s underworld. We closed the doors, and checked that the wards and totems were all still in place. Then Kara lit the candles, one by one, with a white taper, and I lit the cups of incense with a red one.