by Dan Abnett
I kept an open mind – literally. Even without any invasive mental probing, it is possible for a psionic of my ability to sense surface thoughts. There was no flavour of deceit about Rinton's person, though I could feel carefully contained loss, and the tingle of trepidation. Small wonder, I considered. Uncommon are the citizens of the Imperium who do not register anxiety at being quizzed by an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos.
There was no point pressing him now. Rinton's story might easily be put to the test with an auto-seance, during which psychometric techniques would simply reveal the truth of his father's last moments to me.
Rinton walked me back to the Hall, and left me to my ponderings in Aen's study. It was as he had left it, I was told.
The room was half-panelled and lined for the most part with glazed shelves of neatly bound books and data-slates. Discreet glow-globes hovered around the edges of the room at head-height, set to a low luminosity, and a selection of scroll-backed couches and over-stuffed chairs were arranged in front of the high-throated ceramic fireplace with its wood-burning fusion stove.
The desk, under the diamond-paned west windows, was a wide crescent of polished duralloy floated a metre off the carpet by passive suspensor pods. The desk was clean and bare.
I sat at it, depressing slightly the hydraulics of the writing chair – I was half a head taller than Aen Froigre. I studied the mirror-smooth, slightly raked surface of the desk. There was no sign of any control panel, but a gentle wave of my hand across it woke up heat-sensitive touch-plates engraved into the duralloy's finish. I touched a few, but they needed Aen's touch –probably a combination of palmprint and genekey – to unlock them.
That, or inquisition-grade software. I unpinned my Inquisitorial rosette, which I had been wearing on the sternum of a my black leather coat, and slid open the signal port. Holding it low over the desk, I force fed the touch-plates with several magenta-level security override programs. It gave up the fight almost at once, opening systems without even the need for passwords.
Built into the stylish desk – an item of furniture that had clearly cost Aen a lot of money – was a fairly powerful cogitator, a vox-pict uplink, a message archive, two filing archives, and a master control for the simple, limited electronic systems built into the Hall. Separate pages of each file and message could be displayed as a facsimile on the blotter plate and a touch of a finger turned them or put them away. Aen had destroyed all paper records.
I played with it for some time, but the most interesting thing I found was a log of invoices for services provided at the fete, and a list of the invitations. I copied both into my own data-slate.
Alizebeth and Gabon arrived while I was busy with that. Alizebeth had been interviewing the household staff, and Gabon had been out, walking the grounds.
There were over nine hundred guests here, sir/ he said, 'and maybe another five hundred players, musicians, entertainers and carnival folk.'
'Where from?'
'Menizerre, mostly/ he replied. 'Local entertainers, a few troubadours and some street tumblers from the biweekly textile market. The biggest individual groups were Kalikin's Company, an acclaimed troupe of travelling actors, and Sunsable's Touring Fair, who provided the games and rides and diversions/
I nodded. Gabon was as thorough as usual. A short, spare man in his one fifties with cropped black hair and a bushy moustache, he had been with the Dorsay Arbites for about seventy years before retiring into private service. He wore a simple, refined dark blue suit that had been ingeniously tailored to hide the fact that he was wearing a handgun in a shoulder rig.
'What about you?' I asked Alizebeth. She sat down on one of the couches.
'Nothing scintillating. The staff seem genuinely shocked and upset at the death. They all react with outrage at the idea your friend might have had any enemies/
'It seems quite clear to me that he did have some/1 said.
Alizebeth reached into the folds of her gown and fished out a small, hard object. She tossed it across onto the desk top and it landed with a tap.
There it extended four, multi-jointed limbs and scurried across onto my palm.
I turned the wriggling poison-snooper over and pressed the recessed stud on its belly. A little ball of hololithic energy coalesced above its head-mounted projector and I read it as slowly scrolled around on its own axis.
Traces of Iho, obscura and several other class II and III narcotics in the garden area and the staff quarters. Penshel seed traces found in the stable block. More lho, as well as listeria and e. coli in small amounts in the kitchen section… hmmm../
Alizebeth shrugged. The usual mix of recreational drugs one might expect, none in large quantities, and the kitchens's as hygienic as anywhere. You'd probably get the same sort of readings from Spaeton House/
'Probably. Penshel seeds, they're quite unusual/
A very mild stimulant/ said Gabon. 'I didn't know anyone still used that stuff. Time was, it was the drug of choice in the artists' quarter of Dorsay, back when I was on the force. The seeds are dried, rolled and smoked in pipes. A little bohemian, an old man's smoke/
'Most of the outdoor traces can be put down to the visiting entertainers/ I mused, 'plus a little off-duty pleasure from the staff or loose-living guests. What about the stable block? Are any of Froigre's ostlers penshel smokers?'
Alizebeth shook her head. They'd cleared large parts of the stable area to provide spaces for the fair stall-holders/
I put the snooper down on the desk and it wriggled back and forth for a few moments until it got enough purchase to right itself. 'So nothing untoward, in fact. And certainly no significant toxins/
'None at all/ said Alizebeth.
Damn. Given the description of Aen's death, I had been quite sure poison was the key, perhaps some assassin's sophisticated toxin that had not shown up on the initial medicae report. But Alizebeth's snooper was high-grade and thorough.
'What do we do now?' she asked.
I passed her my data-slate. 'Send the contents of this to Aemos by direct vox-link. See what he can come up with/
Uber Aemos was my ancient and trusted savant. If anyone could see a pattern or make a connection, it was him.
Evening fell. I went outside, alone. I felt annoyed and frustrated. In fact, I felt thwarted. I'd come there as a favour to my old friend's widow, offering my services, and in most respects I was overqualified. I was an Imperial inquisitor, and this was most likely just a job for the local arbites. I had expected to have the entire matter sewn up in a few hours, to settle things swiftly in a quick, unofficial investigation, and leave with the thanks of the family for sparing them a long, drawn-out inquest.
But the clues just weren't there. There was no motive, no obvious antagonist, no aggressor, but still it seemed likely that Aen Froigre had been
killed. I looked at die medicae report again, hoping to find something mat would establish natural causes.
Nothing. Something, someone, had taken my friend's life, but I couldn't tell what or who or why.
The evening skies were dark, stained a deep violet and smeared wim chasing milky clouds. An early moon shone, passing behind the running trails of cloud every minute or so. A wind was gathering, and the stands of trees beside the lawn were beginning to sway and swish. The leaves made a cold sound, like rain.
I walked over to my flyer, popped the cargo trunk and took out Bar-barisater. I slowly freed it from its silk bindings and drew the long, gleaming blade from its machined scabbard. Barbarisater had been an heirloom sword, a psychically-attuned weapon from the forges of distant Carthae and slaved to the minds of the generations of warrior women who had wielded it. Enhancing its strength with pentagrammic wards, I had used the long sabre in my battle against the heretic Quixos, during which struggle it had been broken below the tip. Master swordsmiths had remade the blade from the broken main portion, creating a shorter, straighter blade by rounding off and edging the break and reducing the hilt. A good deal smaller than its old self, now mo
re a single-handed rapier than a hand-and-a-half sabre, it was still a potent weapon.
Naked, in my hand, it hummed and whined as my mind ran mrough it and made it resonate. The incised wards glowed and sobbed out faint wisps of smoke. I walked out over the grass under the seething trees, holding the blade out before me like a dowsing rod, sweeping the scene, letting the blade-tip slide along the invisible angles of space. Twice, on my circuit of the lawns, it twitched as if tugged by sprite hands, but I could discern nothing from the locations.
But mere was something there. My first hint of a malign focus. My first hint that not only was foul play involved, but that Lady Froigre might be right.
Though they had left only the slightest traces behind them, infernal powers had been at work here.
Alizebeth came into my room at eight the next morning. She woke me by sitting down on the side of my bed and handed me a cup of hot, black caffeine as I roused.
She was already dressed and ready for work. The day was bright. I could hear the household coming to life: pans clattering the kitchen block and the butler calling to his pages in the nearby gallery.
'Bad storm in the night,' she said. 'Brought trees down.'
'Really?' I grumbled, sitting up and sipping the sweet, dark caffeine.
I looked at her. It wasn't like Bequin to be so perky this early.
'Out with it,' I said.
She handed me a data-slate. 'Aemos has been busy. Must've worked all night.'
Through the storm.'
There was no storm up his way. It was local.' I didn't really hear that reply. I was caught up in a close reading of the slate.
Failing to cross-match just about every detail I had sent him, Aemos had clearly become bored. The list of guests I had sent him had led to nothing, despite his best efforts to make connections. The caterers and performers had revealed nothing either. No links to the underworld or cult activity, no misdeeds or priors, except for the usual clutch of innocent and minor violations one might expect. One of the travelling actors had been charged with affray twenty years before, and another had done time for grievous wounding, that sort of thing.
The only item that had flagged any sort of connection was the description of Aen Froigre's death. Aemos had only turned to that rather vague clue once he'd exhausted all others.
In the past twenty months, eleven people in the Drunner Region of Gudrun, which is to say the coastal area encompassing Menizerre, Dorsay and Insume all the way to Madua chapeltown, had died of a similar, mystery ailment. Only a tight, deliberate search like the one Aemos had conducted would have shown up such a connection, given the scale of area involved and the size of population. Listed together, the deaths stood out like a sore thumb.
Here, Aemos had come into his own. Another clerk might have sent those findings to me and waited for direction, but Aemos, hungry to answer the questions himself, had pressed on, trying to make a pattern out of them. No simple task. There was nothing to demo-graphically or geographically link the victims. A housewife here, a millkeeper there, a landowner in one small village, a community doctor in another, seventy kilometres away.
The only thing they had in common was the sudden, violent and inexplicable nature of their demises: seizures, abrupt, fatal.
I set down my cup and scrolled on, aware that Alizebeth was grinning at me.
'Get to the last bit/ she advised. Aemos strikes again.'
Right at the last, Aemos revealed another connection.
A day or two before each death, the victim's locality had been paid a visit by Sunsable's Touring Fair.
Lady Froigre was most perturbed to see us about to leave. There are questions here still…' she began.
And I'm going to seek the answers/1 said. Trust me. I believe my savant has hit upon something/
She nodded, unhappy. Rinton stepped forward and put his arm around his mother's shoulders.
'Trust me/ I repeated and walked out across the drive to my waiting flyer.
I could hear the sound of chain blades, and turned from the car to walk around the side of the hall. One of the trees brought down in the night's
freak storm had crashed part of the stable block and the housemen were working to saw up the huge trunk and clear it.
'Is that where you detected Penshel seed?' I asked Alizebeth when she came to find out what was keeping me.
'Yes/ she said.
'Fetch my blade.'
I called the housemen away from their work, and walked into the collapsed ruin of the stable, crunching over heaps of coarse sawdust. The ivy-clad tree still sprawled through the burst roof.
Alizebeth brought me Barbarisater and I drew it quickly. By then Lady Froigre and Rinton Froigre had emerged to see what I was doing.
Barbarisater hummed in my hand, louder and more throatily than it had done the previous night. As soon as I entered that part of the stable block, the particular stall the tree had smashed, it jumped. The taste of Chaos was here.
What was this used for?' I asked. 'During the fete, what was this area used for?'
'Storage/ said Lady Froigre. 'The people from the fair wanted to keep equipment and belongings out of sight. Food too, I think. One man had trays of fresh figs he wanted to keep out of the light.'
'And the hololithographer/ said Rinton. 'He used one of those stalls as a dark room/
So how do you find a travelling fair in an area the size of the Drunner Region? If you have a copy of their most recent invoice, it's easy. The fair-master, eager to be paid for his services at Froigre Hall, had left as a payment address an inn eighty kilometres away in Seabrud. From the invoice, I saw that Aen had been asked to mail the payment within five days. The fair moved around a great deal, and the travelling folk didn't believe much in the concept of credit accounts.
From Seabrud, we got a fix on the location of Sunsable's Fair.
They had pitched on a meadow outside the village of Brudmarten, a little, rustic community of ket-herds and weavers that was flanked by a lush, deciduous woodland hillside to the east and marshy, cattle-trampled fields below at the river spill to the west.
It was late afternoon on a hot, close day, the air edged with the heavy, fulminous threat of storms. The sky was dark overhead, but the corn was bright and golden down in the meadows, and pollen balls blew in the breeze like thistle-fibres. Grain-crakes whooped in the corn stands, and small warblers of the most intense blue darted across the hedges.
Gabon lowered the limo to rest in a lane behind the village kirk, a pale, Low Gothic temple in need of up-keep. A noble statue of the Emperor Immaculate stood in the overgrown graveyard, a roost for wood doves. I buckled on my sword and covered it with a long leather cloak. Gabon locked the car.
'Stay with me/1 told Alizebeth, and then turned to Gabon. 'Shadow us/
'Yes, sir/
We walked down the lane towards the fair.
Even from a distance, we could hear the noise and feel the energy. The arrival of the fair had brought the folk of Brudmarten and the neighbouring hamlets out in force. Pipe organs were trilling and wheezing in the lank air, and there was the pop and whizz of firecrackers. I could hear laughter, the clatter of rides, the ringing of score bells, children screaming, rowdy men carousing, pistons hissing. The smell of warm ale wafted from the tavern tent.
The gate in the meadow's hedge had been turned into an entranceway arched with a gaudy, handpainted sign that declared Sunsable's Miraculous Fair of Fairs open. A white-eyed twist at the gateway took our coins for admission.
Inside, on the meadow, all manner of bright, vulgar sights greeted us. The carousel, lit up with gas-lamps. The ring-toss. The neat, pink box-tent of the clairvoyant. The churning hoop of the whirligig, spilling out the squeals of children. The colourful shouts of the freak show barker. The burnt-sugar smell of floss makers. The clang of test-your– strength machines.
For a penny, you could ride the shoulders of a Battle Titan – actually an agricultural servitor armoured with painted sections of rusty silage
hopper. For another penny, you could shoot greenskins in the las-gallery, or touch the Real and Completely Genuine shin bone of Macharius, or dunk for ploins. For tuppence, you could gaze into the Eye of Terror and have your heroism judged by a hooded man with a stutter who claimed to be an ex-Space Marine. The Eye of Terror in this case was a pit dug in the ground and filled with chemical lamps and coloured glass filters.
Nearby, a small donation allowed you to watch an oiled man struggle free from chains, or a burning sack, or a tin bathtub full of broken glass, or a set of stocks.
'Just a penny, sir, just a penny!' howled a man on stilts with a harle-quined face as he capered past me. 'For the young lady!'
I decided not to ask what my penny might buy.
'I want to go look at the freak show/ Alizebeth told me.
'Save your money… it's all around us/1 growled.
We pushed on. Coloured balloons drifted away over the field into the encroaching darkness of the thunderhead. Corn crickets rasped furiously in the trampled stalks all about us. Drunken, painted faces swam at us, some lacking teeth, some with glittering augmetic eyes.
'Over there/ I whispered to Alizebeth.
Past the brazier stand of a woman selling paper cones of sugared nuts, and a large handcart stacked with wire cages full of songbirds, was a small booth tent of heavy red material erected at the side of a brightly painted trailer. A wooden panel raised on bunting-wrapped posts announced 'Hololiths! Most Lifelike! Most Agreeable!' below which a smaller notice said A most delightful gift, or a souvenir of the day, captured by the magic art of a master hololithographer/ A frail old man with tufted white hair
and small spectacles was seated outside the booth on a folding canvas chair, eating a meat pie that was so hot he had to keep blowing on it.
'Why don't you go and engage his interest?' I suggested.