There, a girl and a boy make love for the first time. There, an ageing thief wakes up and takes a drink to steady his nerves. There, an ecclesiarch’s servant scrapes wax from the temple candlesticks. There, a visiting businessman, late for his appointment, realises he has taken a wrong turn, and hurries back down the street the way he came. There, a woman sews. There, a man wonders how he’s going to explain it to his wife.
There, a man worries how the meeting to renew his employment contract will go at five, not realising that he won’t make the meeting because a heart attack is going to kill him, quite suddenly, in twenty-six minutes.
And somewhere out there…
I cast my mind wider. Forty streets, fifty, a radius of two kilometres… five. Thousands of minds, thousands of lives, twittering on, en masse but individual, lit up to me like the stars in the heavens: some hot, some cool, some clever, some stupid, some promising, some doomed, all contained within the warren of red stone, red brick and red tiles, soaking in the heat.
And not one of them Zygmunt Molotch.
I know he’s here. I can’t taste him, or breathe him, or sense even an afterthought of him, but I know. I can’t say why. I won’t be able to tell the envoys why either, when I finally decide to stop ignoring them. But this is where he’s hiding. Six months, faint leads, false trails, and here is where I’m drawn to. I have been a servant of the Inquisition since 332, and an autonomous inquisitor since 346. A long time. Long enough to be confident that I am good at what I do. I have faith. Or am I just obsessing?
The nagging idea that I have been fooling myself has come and gone with increasing regularity these last few weeks. The others feel it, I know. I see it in their faces. They’re tired and frustrated with my quest.
I rein back my mind, and pull it in like a trawler’s nets until it covers only the house around me. A leased residence, red brick built, well made. Three floors, a grand walled courtyard, a well. There’s Patience Kys, my telekine, reclining on a stone bench in the covered walk. She has the plays of Clokus open on her lap, a first folio, but inside it is a copy of my early work, The Mirror of Smoke. She doesn’t want me to know that she’s been reading it. She is too embarrassed to admit she likes what I composed. I am too embarrassed to admit I know, and that I am flattered.
In the yard, there’s Sholto Unwerth, my erstwhile shipmaster, and his elquon manhound, Fyflank. Fyflank is throwing a ball for the little man to chase. Shouldn’t that be the other way around?
Overlooking the yard, Harlon Nayl thinks the same thing. He’s laughing at the antics as he cleans the mechanism of an autopistol on a small desk. I hear him call out ‘Look at this, now!’ to Maud Plyton, and she gets up from the bowl of salad she was eating and comes to join him, munching, wiping her mouth. She laughs too. It’s a deep, dirty snort. I like Maud. I’m glad she left the Magistratum of Eustis Majoris to come with me in the service of the ordos. I have hopes for her. She’s as canny as Kara and, I suspect, every bit as tough as Nayl.
Where’s Kara? Not in the library. That’s Carl Thonius’s domain. He’s working at his cogitator, winnowing down the latest crop of leads I fed him. He’s changed a lot, these last few years. Since Flint, I suppose. The prissiness has gone. He’s hard now, like glass, almost unreadable in his determination and reserve. He’s dressing differently, behaving differently. He looks Kys and Nayl in the eye these days, and gives as good as he gets. I doubt it will be long before Interrogator Thonius is ready for his next career step. I’ll sponsor him, without question. Inquisitor Thonius. It will suit him. I will miss him.
I find Kara Swole, in the rear bedroom. I look away again instantly. Belknap is with her. The moment they are sharing is… intimate. I have no wish or right to intrude.
Belknap, the medicae, is a useful addition to my party, though his manner of joining was improvised. He’s a good man, fiercely religious, wonderfully skilled. He came to us when we needed a doctor to tend Kara, and stayed, I think, through love for her. They make a pretty pair. He makes her happy. I question his resolve: such a devout, centred man might not condone some of the things that an inquisitor and his party are forced to do.
I worry about Kara. There is a guarded quality to her, a guarded quality and an unspoken need, and it’s been there since we were billeted in the house called Miserimus, in the ninth ward of Formal E, Petropolis. She was hurt and we needed a doctor to save her. I don’t like to pry, and I don’t like to rifle through the minds of my friends without their consent, but she’s hiding something from me. A heavy secret.
I can guess what it is. She wants to leave. An inquisitor can only hold on to his followers for so long. Death is the most usual end to service, I’m sorry to say, but there are other circumstances: disenchantment, incompatibility, fatigue. With Kara, it’s fatigue. Kara Swole has served me loyally for a long time and, before that, served my master, Gregor. She has been nothing but a credit, and has nothing left to prove. Tchaikov’s vampiric blade almost killed her, and that gave her pause. Then Patrik Belknap came along, her literal saviour, and brought the prospect of a viably different lifetime commitment with him. She wants to live. She wants to live a life where hazard is not a daily expectation. She wants to step back from the duty, her duty done, and embrace the ordinary, miraculous world of love and parenting and, I wager, grand-parenting.
I don’t resent that. In moments of private despair, I yearn hopelessly for the same thing myself, truth be told. She’s done her part, done more than the Emperor himself could have expected of a no-prospects dancer-acrobat from Bonaventure. I wish her that happiness, and delight in the fact that now, for a brief moment, she has the opportunity to seize it. That opportunity won’t last, once we get going again. It’s now, or, I fear, never. I just wish she’d decide. I wish she’d pluck up the courage and tell me. I won’t rant or sulk or try to change her mind. She knows me better. I will give her my blessing, heartfelt. An inquisitor seldom gets that privilege.
That said, I won’t suggest it to her either. She’s too good to lose. She has to tell me herself, in her own time. This is, I suppose, petulant and controlling of me. I make no apologies. I am an Imperial inquisitor. Gregor Eisenhorn taught me this control, and I can’t change the way I am.
Emperor knows, I’d love to.
There are two other people in the house with us.
I roll my support chair away from the window and coast across the floor of the room. The armoured chair is dark-matt, ominous, sleek, suspended and propelled by the ever-turning grav hoop’s whispering hum. I have lived inside it, essentially bodiless, for almost seventy years, since that day at the Spatian Gate, that day of hideous alchemy when triumph changed to atrocity, and I changed from an able, upright young man to a fused mass of burned flesh that required an armoured support chair to allow me to function. It’s not much, but I call it home.
I slide, frictionless, down the hallway to the room where Zael sleeps. Zael is one of the other two people in the house. Wystan Frauka is the other. Wystan is sitting at Zael’s bedside, his customary place. Wystan is my blunter, my untouchable, leadenly impervious to any and all psychic operation. He smokes lho-sticks incessantly, affects a disdainful manner, and amuses himself by reading lurid erotica.
He’s quite wonderful. The disdain is an act. I can read that despite Wystan’s unreadability. He has looked after Zael since the boy fell into his fugue state, his coma, his trance… whatever it is. He has carried him, washed him, read to him, watched him.
And he has promised me that he will kill Zael the moment he wakes up. If Zael is what we fear he is.
Zael Efferneti. Zael Sleet. A low-hab stack-runt from Petropolis, a vagabond kid, and also a nascent psyker, undetected by the periodic sweeps and examinations. Not just a psyker, a mirror psyker, that rarest of rare beasts.
And – and this is the big ‘and’ – potentially the most dangerous being in the sector. There exists a complex and involved series of predictions that concern the manifestation of a daemon in our reality, a d
aemon called Sleet or Slyte or some such variation. It was reckoned that Slyte would incarnate because of me, or because of one of the people close to me, on Eustis Majoris, between the years 400 and 403.M41. Hundreds, perhaps millions, were predicted to perish if Slyte got loose. So I was warned. I took precautions. Fate can be changed, predictions denied.
At Miserimus, during the attack that took Zeph Mathuin from us, Zael collapsed under psychic assault. At the time, the psykers bombarding him shrieked the name Slyte. Zael has been catatonic ever since. Perhaps his mind couldn’t take it. Perhaps his fugue state is a result of him being too weak a vessel to host a daemon.
When he wakes, we will know. He will wake as Zael, or he will wake as a daemon clothed in flesh. If the latter is the case, then my untouchable is standing by to blunt the power of the waking daemon. There is also an autopistol in Wystan’s coat pocket, so he can kill the host before it’s too late.
Many of my fellow inquisitors, including my beloved ex-master, would chastise me for this. They would say I am being too lenient. They would say I am a fool, and I should take no chances whatsoever. I should extinguish Zael’s life, right now, while he is helpless.
I choose not to. For one thing I cannot predict how such a course of action might provoke a sleeping daemon.
For the other, I cannot, in all conscience, murder a teenage boy in his sleep. Zael may not be possessed. Zael may not be Slyte. While there is still a chance, I will not be party to his execution.
Does that make me weak? Charitable? Foolish? Sentimental? Perhaps. Does it make me a radical? Yes, I think it does, though not in the way the term is usually used. I cannot, will not, sanction Zael’s death on the basis of ‘what if?’; I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Throne help me.
If I’m wrong, pray Terra I can contain the damage. If I’m right… it begs the question ‘Where is the real Slyte?’ Have we aborted his birth? Is his threat passed? It’s 404, and that puts us outside the time span of the prophecy. Far enough outside? I don’t know. Does Slyte lurk somewhere else, beyond my knowing? Like Molotch? I don’t know that either.
I just have to go with what I have.
Wystan looks up as I enter the room. We do this every day. I give him a break from his steadfast vigil.
‘All right?’ he asks, nodding to my sleek metal chair.
‘I’m all right. Were you reading to him?’
‘A bedtime story.’
‘About people at bedtime?’
He sniggers, and switches off his data-slate. ‘The boy doesn’t care what I read.’
‘And if he does?’
‘It’s educational.’
‘Go for a walk,’ I tell him. ‘Take a nap.’
Wystan nods and leaves the room. The scent of his last lho-stick lingers after him.
I bring my chair to a halt at the side of Zael’s cot. His flesh is pale, his eyelids dark and sunken. He has been away a long time.
Zael, I begin. Zael, it’s me, Ravenor. Just checking in. Are you well?
No response. Not even a flutter of muffled sentience. We’ve done this every day, so many times now.
If you can hear me, here’s how things are. We won. On Eustis Majoris, we won. It was a hard fight, and the battle was costly, but we won. It was my old, old nemesis, Zygmunt Molotch, Zael. Dead twice at my hands, so I believed. He has a habit of coming back. He had taken the identity of the Lord Subsector, and was intent on using the arcane geography of Petropolis to reawaken an ancient language.
I imagine Zael chuckling, and looking confused. Even as I explain it, I realise it’s such an odd story.
Enuncia, Zael. A primaeval language that grants the speaker the power of creation, the power to speak a word, and have that word make or destroy. He’d been years planning it. The city was the mechanism to bring it to life. And we stopped him. That’s good. Thousands of people died, but that’s preferable to billions. We couldn’t have allowed him to walk free, empowered like a god.
I turn my chair slightly, kill the field, and drop onto the struts. The hooves of the struts sink into the carpet.
The bad part is, Molotch escaped. Hurt but alive, and in company with several dangerous individuals. Chief amongst them is a cult facilitator named Orfeo Culzean. Culzean is enormously pernicious. So is Molotch. Together…
Zael does not move. He does not react in any way. He sleeps like death is his sleep.
It’s my duty to find them, to hunt down Molotch before he can regroup and try another scheme. That’s the way he works, you see. Long term plans. He doesn’t think twice about embarking on a scheme that might take years, decades, to reach fruition. This I know about him. I’ve been sparring with him for more than seventy years. I dearly wish he’d stay dead.
There was a school, Zael, an academy: private, esoteric, long since closed down. It existed about a century ago. It was run by a renegade called Lilean Chase, now long dead. Its aim was to develop, by means psychic, eugenic and noetic, a generation of people who would work to further the cause of Chaos in this sector. Every one of them was a genius, a devil, a monster. They, and their handiwork, have plagued the Inquisition for decades. A secret society. A weapons-grade secret society. Molotch was one of the academy’s graduates, one of Chase’s star pupils. His intellect was astonishing, and it was tempered with extraordinary noetic training. Zygmunt Molotch, you see, is one of the Inquisition’s most wanted. He is abominably malicious. He is Cognitae.
So, that’s why I’m chasing him. It’s not enough we thwarted him on Eustis Majoris. He’s still alive, and we have to track him down and finish him before he can rise again. Nothing in my career is more important or vital than this. Not the Gomek Violation, or even the Cervan-Holman Affair on Sarum which, incidentally, I’m sure Molotch had a hand in. Tracking and executing Zygmunt Molotch is the single most important thing I can ever do with my curious life.
I regarded his so-innocently sleeping form.
Zael Sleet. Or is that Slyte?
The single most important thing, I hope. Anyway, we’re close. I think we have him. He’s here. By which I mean he’s where we are. Tancred. One jump stop down from your homeworld, Eustis Majoris. The trouble is, the ordos want to reel me back in. I left Eustis Majoris in a mess. They want a report, and my explanation. They won’t wait any longer. I risk losing my warrant and being denounced as a rogue element.
I don’t like it, Zael, but I have to stop and answer to my masters. I just hope I can find and finish Molotch before they take away my rosette.
I pause.
Well, that’s me. How are you? Zael?
He doesn’t respond. I don’t expect him to. I hear the door open behind me and presume it’s Wystan.
It’s not. It’s Carl.
‘The envoys have arrived,’ he says.
+Have they? Very well. I’ll be down directly.+
Zael sleeps on, unperturbed.
I engage my chair’s lift field, turn, and follow Carl out of the room.
To face, as they say, the music.
PART ONE
A MATTER OF THE MOST PLEASANT FRATERNAL CONFIDENCE
ONE
IT TOOK A certain sort of man to perform eight ritual killings in three hours, and he was, without doubt, that sort of man.
Each killing was random, opportunistic, each one carried out with wildly different methods and weapons. The first, with a purloined knife, looked like a back street mugging. The second, a strangulation, was made to seem like a sex crime. The third and fourth, together, would later appear to be a drunken argument over cards that ended with both parties shooting one another simultaneously. The fifth, a poisoning, would have any medicae examiner blaming poorly preserved shellfish. The sixth and seventh, also simultaneous, were electrocutions, and made faulty hab wiring seem responsible. The eighth, the most grisly, was staged to resemble a robbery gone wrong.
She finally caught up with him during the eighth murder. A local moneylender, and part-time fence, owned a house on the lower pavements beh
ind the Basilica Mechanicus. He had slipped in through the back kitchen, found the moneylender alone in a shuttered study, and bludgeoned him to death with a votive statue of Saint Kiodrus.
Then he’d removed some paper money orders and gold bars from the moneylender’s floor safe to cement the notion of a robbery.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked, cautiously entering the gloomy room behind him. The rank, metallic stink of blood choked the close air.
Bent over the body, he glanced at her. ‘What needs to be done.’
He reached down and did something to the bloodstained corpse.
‘You don’t need that,’ he added.
She kept the snub-nosed Hostec 5 aimed at the back of his head. ‘I’ll be the judge of what I need,’ she replied.
‘Really, you don’t need that,’ he repeated, using the tone of command this time.
She lowered her aim, but she was strong and well trained. She didn’t put the gun away.
‘This is madness.’ she said. ‘You were told to stay in the exclave. Secrecy is paramount. To walk abroad invites discovery. And this… this killing…’
Her voice caught on the word. Leyla Slade was not a squeamish woman. She’d done her fair share of killing, but it had always been professional work. She’d never killed for pleasure, or to appease some mental deviation.
She was disappointed with him, he could tell. He didn’t really care, because Leyla Slade wasn’t very important in the grand sweep of things. But, for the moment, there were good reasons for keeping her on his side. She was one of his few friends in the cosmos. He could see the disgust on her face, as if she was being asked to babysit some sociopath. She didn’t understand. He decided it was time she did.
If nothing else, he didn’t like the idea that she considered him to be a homicidal pervert.
‘You think I’m killing for kicks?’ he asked.
Leyla shrugged. ‘It looks like what it looks like. I don’t care what kind of animal you are. I just get paid to mind you. In this case, that means dragging your psycho arse back to the exclave.’