Penitent

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Lilean Chase. Lilean Chase,’ said Dance, almost immediately, staring off into nothing. ‘There is the “L” and the “C” at once, you see? The “L” and the “C” and the “1” and the “1” and the “9”, just as poor Mam Tontelle said. And it is blue. She said that too.’

  Unvence gazed at the first intricate page of text. It, like all the other pages, was just a dense block of handwritten and impenetrable glyphs. This I knew from my fruitless study of it.

  ‘What is happening?’ Mam Matichek whispered to me.

  ‘Lynel is reading it for him,’ I replied.

  ‘I declare everyone has gone mad,’ she said.

  ‘Is it written in binaric?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Dance. ‘But that’s a good guess, mam.’

  ‘I’m glad you can see why I asked,’ I replied, ‘and why I was startled by your talk of binary interpretations. I feared it was a connection to the Adeptus Mechanicus.’

  ‘Oh, it is,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me how, please? And how you know that?’

  ‘I knew a man,’ he said. ‘A friend of sorts. He was once a visiting scholar at the Universitariate of Petropolis, on Eustis Majoris, when I was the Reader in Astromathematicae there. This was many, many years ago. We bonded over our mutual love of numbers. I think he quite admired my facility with them, which was flattering. He never said, but I believe he had some past association with the Priesthood of Mars. Perhaps a renegade, an apostate run from their flock. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in six decades. At the time we became friends, he quizzed me much about binary notation, and other codes used by machine systems. His name was Godman Stylas.’

  ‘You have never spoken of him, Freddy,’ said Mam Matichek.

  ‘I have little cause to bring his memory to mind, Aelsa,’ said Dance. ‘This was years ago, and he was only around for a matter of months. Very private, very quiet. Very inquisitive, so to speak. But he told me something of the Mechanicus. Taught me things. He claimed the Adeptus used binaric for primary communication, but that they had another language. A secret one, a sacred one, I suppose. He called it Hexad. Binary, you see, is a little cumbersome. And our conventional “hundreds-tens-units” notation for numbers is also cumbersome, because it doesn’t easily convert into binary, and it doesn’t conveniently fit into bits and bytes. For fluency, in terms of cogitation machines, it is better to use hexadecimal, or base-sixteen, notation. Hex is trivially easy to convert to binary and vice versa. It’s a convenient compromise, easy for both people and machines to read. Hexad is a hexadecimally based language the Adeptus Mechanicus uses for its more intimate and secret scriptures. For its spiritual lore, and its holiest texts, those of an Omnissianic nature, if you follow? Godman showed me how it was notated in written form.’

  He pointed to the book in Unvence’s hands.

  ‘This, Mamzel Bequin, is Hexad. Your cipher is written in the most sacred and consecrated machine-code of the Adeptus Mechanicus.’

  ‘Are you sure, Mr Dance?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I know these glyphs. Few outside the Martian Priesthood do. Besides, there is a symmetry. Suppose 119 is not a decimal number, but a hex number. Well, 119 in hex is 281 decimal. And 281 is deliciously interesting, because to a mathematician like me, it looks obvious that it’s not a prime number. But, aha, it is! Another imposter. And another part of your hypersigil. The sum of the digits of 119 is 11. The sum of the digits of 281 is also 11.’

  ‘Can you translate the text?’ I asked. ‘Can you make the key fit?’

  ‘It will take me some time,’ said Dance, ‘but I believe I can. Hexad is composed in a number of divine configurations. This is how the Mechanicus encrypts its deepest gospels. One has to know which configuration the Hexad is written in, and I think the key tells us. The 1 and the 1, irrefutable, give us the value for 9, and the value for 9 is 6,337,338. This is Hexad Configuration six-three-three-seven-three-three-eight. I can unravel it from that.’

  He turned his head in our direction.

  ‘A copy of Trefwell’s Tables of Hexadecimal Concordance would make things a little easier,’ he said.

  ‘There are copies of that in the library,’ said Mam Matichek. ‘I’ll fetch one at once.’ She hurried to the door that led back to the reading room, pulling from her robes a set of keys for the Academy’s main library.

  ‘That would certainly speed up my work, Aelsa,’ said Dance.

  ‘And what work might that be?’ asked a sneering voice.

  ‘Oh shit!’ Renner exclaimed. Mam Matichek had slid open the door into the reading room. Oztin Crookley, flushed and clearly foul-tempered, stood behind it, staring in at us. Mam Matichek made to close the door and keep him out, but Crookley pushed past her. I could see Aulay hovering outside in the reading room, peering in.

  ‘Well, this is a fine little assembly,’ said Crookley, looking at us all. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his embroidered, high-throated waistcoat, and puffed out his chest like a disapproving scholam-master surprising miscreants after lights-out. But I could see the slight sway in him, and smell the alcohol sweating from his pores.

  ‘Very nice, very cosy,’ he remarked unpleasantly.

  ‘This conversation is private,’ said Renner.

  ‘Screw your private,’ Crookley retorted, glancing at Renner with disdain. ‘The Two Gogs has reopened. We were all to meet. Aulay and I have been there two hours, and not a sign of you. Not a sign of you! My own friends.’

  I had heard stories of Crookley’s foul moods, especially when in his cups. His charming charisma could turn on a knife-edge and become boorish and petulant, especially when he felt he was not the centre of attention he believed he should be.

  ‘A little private meeting of friends, is it?’ he asked. ‘A little rendezvous of pals, all together, prattling secrets to each other behind my back? Why wasn’t I invited? Why d’you leave me and Aulay sitting in the Gogs like a pair of spare eunuchs at an orgy?’

  He looked at me.

  ‘You’d steal my friends from me, would you, Mamzel Flyde?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s not her name, Oztin,’ Mam Matichek cut in.

  ‘I don’t shitting care what her name is,’ he replied. He stared at me, making an effort to focus. ‘I invite you into my circle, you little tart, you and that strange husband of yours, I offer you the hand of bloody friendship, and this is what you do? Steal my friends away as your own little retinue?’

  ‘Stop it, Oztin,’ said Mam Matichek.

  ‘I bloody won’t,’ said Crookley, and advanced towards me.

  ‘I suggest, Mr Crookley, you calm down,’ I said.

  ‘I suggest you–’ He paused, then waved his hand, unable to form a suitably biting retort. Instead, he pushed past me, took up Freddy’s drink, and knocked it back in one. ‘What’s your game then, “Violetta”? Eh? Eh? What have you been saying about me behind my back?’

  ‘Step out, sir,’ I said. ‘Step out, or shut up.’

  ‘Wooooo!’ he said, play-acting scared. ‘Or what? Or what, eh? You going to hurt me, are you? You or that one-armed ninker you call a lifeward? I’ve broken young fillies bigger than you, my girl. I’ve spanked them for disobedience, and they’ve thanked me for it.’

  ‘Oztin!’ Mam Matichek almost shrieked. He looked at her, and she glared meaningfully at the rosette still open on the table. ‘Don’t be such a Throne-damned idiot,’ she whispered, ‘or you’ll wind up in more trouble than you could know.’

  Crookley swayed for a moment. He cleared his throat. Then he walked to the table, stared at the rosette, and slowly picked it up.

  ‘Is this a joke?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘These… these can be faked,’ he said, with contempt.

  ‘They can,’ I said. ‘But that’s real.’

  He stared at the rosette for a moment longer. I could al
most see his mind working. Then he put it down very suddenly, as though it had become too heavy, or too hot, to hold.

  ‘Chair,’ I said.

  Renner dragged a chair into place just in time to support Crookley’s sudden and unsteady descent. It creaked under his weight. He gazed at the fire in the grate and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. In the doorway, Aulay looked on, his face as pale as paper.

  ‘Shit,’ murmured Crookley. ‘I… That is to say… Shit. Am I… Am I condemned? Have you come for me at last?’

  ‘What?’ asked Renner.

  ‘Is this why you… You take my friends to one side, for private interview?’ asked Crookley. ‘To gather evidence? Incriminating accounts? I… I’ve always walked a line, I know. I am a magus, I make no secret of it. I knew, one day, the bloody Ordos would come a-knocking, jealous of my liberated power, my force of will, my deep initiatic knowledge. I thought I had a few more years. Ah, there’s so much I would have done…’

  ‘They’re not here for you, you silly old goat,’ said Mam Matichek.

  ‘We could be,’ said Renner.

  ‘Yes, we could,’ I said. ‘But we’re not. Unless there’s something you’d like to confess?’

  Crookley turned pasty.

  ‘I’ve done many things,’ he murmured. ‘Heinous things. In… in the Herrat, when the daemon-simurghs came for me, I gave myself to them, body and soul. I was their plaything, surrendering my flesh in return for their secrets. The humiliation, the obscene depravity…’

  ‘How drunk were you at the time?’ I asked mildly.

  He paused, and glanced at me.

  ‘Quite a little bit,’ he admitted. Mam Matichek snorted, and tried to cover her laughter with a cough.

  Crookley flushed blotchy red.

  ‘You all mock me?’ he asked. He got up. ‘Is this about your number, mamzel?’ he asked me. ‘The number puzzle you set old Freddy? I heard all about that. Is that why you inveigled your way into my set of friends?’

  ‘I came because of the book Freddy wrote,’ I said. ‘The one that made him blind and drove him to disgrace, the one that made everyone believe he was mad. But that led to the number. I apologise for abusing your hospitality–’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Renner.

  I frowned at him.

  ‘She’s a bloody inquisitor,’ Renner told Crookley. ‘She doesn’t have to apologise for anything. She does the Emperor’s work. So you just please-and-thank-you her for sparing your life, all right? And know that Mr Dance, and Mam Matichek, and Mr Unvence are all here sworn to the discretion of the Ordos, on pain of death. They are deputised to service, to render their skills as savants and linguists and what-not to the Holy Inquisition. So you, sir, and your friend in the doorway there, you will not betray them or that confidence.’

  I was touched by Renner’s fierce defence of me, and by the zeal with which he had played the part in character.

  ‘My colleague is correct, Oztin Crookley,’ I said. ‘You and Aulay may consider yourselves bound by that order too. One word, one solitary word to anyone, and you’ll burn for it. Am I clear? Your mouth is always too loose, Crookley. At least Aulay says little. From this moment, you must learn to be as quiet as him. This is not a story you can tell your friends, or blurt out over a shared bottle to impress some poor girl and get in her drawers. Do we have a plain understanding?’

  Crookley nodded frantically.

  I had Renner take Crookley and Aulay back into the reading room, and settle them quietly, out of earshot, dispensing to them glasses of joiliq and the sort of look of fatigued disparagement that Lightburn seemed to have perfected. I would have preferred them further away, or sober, or both, but it made sense to keep watch on them and mollify them with alcohol. I was becoming aware that the work of the Ordos was not black and white, not merely Throne versus Chaos. There was a problematic grey area in the middle where the eternal struggle crossed paths with civilians, even aggravating ones like Crookley. I am sure that seasoned inquisitors – Gregor, I imagine – would pile onwards, heedless of public safety and public lives, in the name of the greater good. If he had been here, would he have simply executed the miscreants, or chided me for not doing so? I hardly cared. Protecting the Throne was protecting the Imperium, and the Imperium was its citizens. What was our purpose, when all was said and done, if not to safeguard them?

  Yet as I stood in the doorway, watching Freddy and Unvence work, as I awaited Mam Matichek’s return from the Academy’s library, I wondered if anyone was truly innocent. Freddy Dance and I had agreed that everything, and everyone, in Queen Mab and Sancour, and perhaps beyond and outward across the Angelus Subsector, was woven into the immense schemes of the King in Yellow. He is in everything that we are here, Freddy had said.

  I feared that now more than ever. I wondered if we were all minuscule component parts of the King’s plan, and if we had always been so. What Freddy had told me, what he had revealed by dismantling that simple three-digit number, was a staggering consequence. As I have oftentimes remarked, I had spent what felt like my entire life grubbing for the truth, trying to make sense of myself and the world around me, and here was such profound sense that I felt as though I had plunged into a pool of truth so deep and cold that it might shock me and drown me. I could see so much, so suddenly, as though I had abruptly gained a clear and uninterrupted view out across the city, where every detail of the streets and rooftops was magnificently revealed… But only because I was diving from the parapet of a high place and observing it all as I hurtled to the ground.

  The number encoded the secret name of the King in Yellow. The text of the book, I was sure, would reveal his identity in greater and more specific detail. He would be known to me, perhaps with such intimate precision I could have power over him. He was some great being, who in all other regard, reduced me to microscopic insignificance. But his secret might be in my grasp.

  And that secret, unspeakable and heretical though it seemed, might be that he was one of the founding figures of the Imperium, a living myth, a demigod who had once helped oversee the creation of human civilisation.

  A lost primarch.

  There was, I believed, promising sense in this. The King in Yellow both consorted with, and utilised, the power of the warp, to such a level of mastery he was feared and hunted by loyalist and traitor factions alike. The Traitor primarchs, those that had fallen so long ago, were also adepts of the warp. Their heresy and fall to Chaos had caused them to be shunned and outlawed for millennia, their names damned as obscenities.

  Of the two missing primarchs of legend, nothing at all was known, not even their names, to be spat on and damned. What monstrous level of crime must they have committed to be redacted so? Something greater even than the genocidal sins of Horus himself, for though Horus Lupercal was considered the greatest of all evils, his name was yet remembered.

  Theirs were not. What breach had they made that was so terrible they could not, like Horus the damned, even be named?

  The warp. It could only be the warp. They had transgressed even further than Horus, if that could be imagined, past redemption, past infamy, past death and eternal condemnation, past even identity itself, erased forever for being more unspeakable than the greatest heretic.

  No wonder the unspoken name was coded.

  And they were not dead. Not gone. One of them still existed, in a City of Dust just behind reality. One of them was here.

  The notion was terrifying. I am sure the notion even alarms you, reading this account after the fact. As I watched Freddy work, I felt the tremble in my limbs, the ringing in my nerves, as my entire being tried to rationalise the significance of what we were learning. I felt my heart flutter in the cage of my ribs as if it wished to burst free, and escape and flee this place.

  Then I realised that the flutter upon my breastbone was not merely my racing heart. The wraithbone pendant was twitching
fitfully, like a moth weary from beating against an unyielding pane.

  I excused myself quickly, and went through the reading room into the corridor beyond. The hall was dark, quiet and cold. The Academy had been shut down for the evening. I hurried through the shadows to the seclusion of a small alcove facing the lamp-lit stone steps down to the main library chambers.

  ‘Gideon?’

  Talon wishes Penitent.+

  ‘Penitent acquires Talon. Where have you been?’

  Talon wishes Penitent, in nameless walls, required.+

  ‘Cease with the Glossia,’ I whispered. ‘Where have you been?’

  Get here. You know where.+

  ‘I am occupied,’ I said. ‘I have in hand matters of profound importance. I can’t just leave–’

  You must. Matters arise that cannot be postponed. I need you, and your expertise.+

  ‘Gideon, I assure you. I would not hesitate but for the most vital reasons–’

  I’m sorry. I need you here.+

  I took a breath.

  ‘Half an hour,’ I said.

  I walked back to the reading room, and called Renner to the door.

  ‘I have to go.’

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I have no choice,’ I said. ‘Ravenor’s returned, and I am summoned. Stay here, Renner. Watch over Freddy. Comus is watching you, so call him if you need help. Contact me on the link if Freddy makes any headway, or reveals anything about that text.’

  Lightburn nodded. He checked the function of his micro-bead link.

  ‘How long will you be?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied frankly. ‘I think as soon as I tell Gideon what we’re on to here, he’ll want to come himself. Just keep watch. And if anything happens, get Freddy, Unvence and Mam Matichek somewhere secure and lay low.’