by Dan Abnett
'I thought I should be ready for anything.'
The dining salon was on the upper deck of the sixth car. Crystal chandeliers hung from the arched roof, and the roof itself was made of armourglas. It doubled as an observation lounge, though just then it simply provided a ceiling of starry blackness.
A string quartet was playing unobtrusively at one end, and the place was filling up. The air was filled with gentle music, clinking silverware and low voices. Discrete poison snoopers hovered like fireflies over each place setting. A uniformed steward showed us to a table by the portside windows.
We studied the menus. I realised how hungry I was.
'How many times, do you suppose?' she asked.
'How many times what?'
'Years ago, when we were together. You would come to visit me in Ravello, secretive as is your manner. How many times did I suggest we took the express through the mountains?'
You mentioned it, yes.'
We never did, though.'
'No, we didn't. I regret that.'
'So do I. It seems so sad we're doing it now out of necessity. Although I might have guessed I'd only get you on a romantic trip like this if you had to do it.'
'Whatever the reason, we're here now.'
'I should have put a gun to your head years ago/
We ordered potage velours, followed by sirloin of lowland runka, roulade with a macedoine of herbs and forest mushrooms affriole, and a Chateau Xandier from Sameter that I remembered was a favourite of hers.
The soup, served with mouthwatering chapon and a swirl of smitane in wide-lipped white dishes delicately embossed with the crest of the Trans-Continental company livery, was velvety and damn near perfect. The runka, simply pan-seared in amasec, was saignant and irreproachable. The Xandier, astringent and then musty in its finish, made her smile with fond memories.
We talked. We had decades to fill in. She told me about her work and her life, the interest in xeno-anatomy she had developed, the monographs she had composed, a new procedure for muscle grafting she had pioneered. She had taken up the spinet, as a means of relaxation, and had now mastered all
but two of Guzella's Studies. She had written a book, a treatise on the comparative analysis of skeletal dimorphism in early human biotypes.
'I almost sent you a copy, but I was afraid how that might be misconstrued.'
'I own a first edition/1 confessed.
'How loyal! But have you read it?'
Twice. Your deconstruction of Terksson's work on the Dimmamar-A sites is convincing and quite damning. I might take issue with your chapters on Tallarnopithicene, but then you and I always did argue over the "Out of Terra" hypothesis/
'Ah yes. You always were a heretic in that regard/
I felt I had so much less to give back. There was so much about my life in the last few years I couldn't or shouldn't tell her. So I told her about Nayl instead.
This man is trustworthy?'
'Completely/
And you're sure it's him?'
Yes. He's using Glossia. The beauty of that code is that it's individually idiomatic. It can't be broken, used or understood by outsiders. You'd have to be in my employ for a long time to grasp the fundamentals of its mechanism/
That bodyguard. The one who betrayed your household/
'Kronsky?'
Yes. He was in your employ/
'Not for long. Even with the basics he'd grasped, he couldn't dupe me for long using Glossia/
'So we're going to be rescued?'
'I'm confident we'll be able to get off-planet/
Well, Gregor, I think that good news calls for an indulgent dessert/
The steward brought us ribaude nappe, sticky and sweet, followed by rich black Hesperine caffeine and digestifs, an oaky amasec for me and a thimble of pasha for her.
We were laughing together by then.
It was a fine dinner and a good night spent in delightful company. I have not known its like to this day.
I was woken by the jar and a thump of a halt just after dawn. Outside, a whistle blew, muffled by the car's hull, and there came the distant mutter of men's voices.
Slowly, I slid out of bed, doing my best not to disturb Crezia. She was still deeply asleep, though she rolled over and reached, murmuring, into the cooling space I had just vacated.
I tried to find some clothes. They were strewn on the floor, and with the blind down, it was a matter of touch.
I prised back the edge of the blind with one finger and peeked out. It was already light, frosty and colourless. There was a station outside, and people milling on the snowy platform.
We had reached Fonette.
I got dressed, shivering. Now the train was halted and idling, the wall vents issued a cooler wash of air.
I opened the door and slipped out, casting one last look behind me. In her sleep, Crezia had curled up into a ball, cocooning herself in the bed-sheets, shutting out the cold and the world.
Outside, it was near-freezing and very bright. The wide platform was busy with passengers leaving or joining the express, and servitor units conveying pyramids of baggage.
Snow was lightly falling. I hugged myself and stamped my feet. Several other travellers had got down from the train to stretch their legs.
Fonette station occupied an elevated area above the town, shadowed to the north by Mons Fulco and to the south by the Uttes, Minor and Major, and then the weather-veiled bulk of the Central Atens.
'How long do we stop?' I asked a passing porter.
Twenty minutes, sir/ he replied. 'Just long enough for change over and for the tender to take on water.'
Not long enough to ran down into the town, I figured. I stayed on die platform until the boarding whistle sounded and then stood in the carriage hallway leaning out of the doorway window as we slowly pulled out of town.
The station building slid by, revealing a view of the town below that had not been visible from the platform. Steep roofs iced with snow, a Minis-torum chapel, a sturdy arbites blockhouse. A landing field, just below the station causeway, filled with berthed and refuelling fliers.
One of them was small and yellow.
I went back to Crezia's cabin, took off my coat and boots and lay beside her until she woke. She rolled over and kissed my mouth.
'What are you doing?' she asked, sleepily.
'Checking the timetable/
'I don't think there are any changes on this line/
'No/ I agreed. 'We'll be at Locastre in about four hours. There's a longer halt there. Forty-five minutes. Then the long run to New Gevae/
She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Drowsy, unguarded, she was more beautiful than ever.
'So what?' she asked.
'I'll check the astropathic account there. There'll be time/
There was a knock at the door. It was the cabin-service steward with a laden trolley. The last thing we had done the night before was to order a full, cooked breakfast.
Well, not quite the last thing.
Eleena and Aemos were up, taking breakfast together. Crezia pulled on her robe and checked on Medea, who was still stable and sleeping deeply.
The signs are good/ she told me on her return. 'Tomorrow, perhaps the day after, she should be back with us/
We ate together in her cabin, picking up our conversations from the night before. It was all familiar and relaxed, as if we had adjusted our clocks by twenty-five years. I realised how much I had missed her company and vitality.
'What's the matter?' she asked. 'You seem preoccupied/
I thought about the yellow speeder.
'Nothing/ I said.
During the long, slow climb up through the Uttes to Locastre, I went through the data-slates of material Aemos had compiled since the attack on Spaeton House. I paid particular attention the name Khanjar the Sharp. Aemos had compiled a list of planet cultures where the word 'khanjar' was still in parlance. Ninety-five hundred worlds, and I went down the list systematically, even though I knew Aemos, with his greate
r knowledge of trivia, had already done so. Any one of them might hold the key. A khanjar was a ceremonial oathing dagger on Benefax, Luwes and Craiton. It was the slang term for a gang-lord on distant Mekanique. It was the common word for a pruning knife on five worlds in the Scarus sector alone. It was a hive-argot adjective for sharp practice on Morimunda. On three thousand worlds, it was simply the word for knife.
A knife cutting me to the quick. Who was Khanjar the Sharp? Why was he diligently seeking my destruction and the destruction of my entire operation?
I turned to consider the slate listing the injuries he had dealt against me, the deaths he had, I'm sure, ordered. They were all still shocking to me. The sheer scope of his murderous efforts astounded me. So many targets, so many worlds… and all struck at the same sidereal moment.
I found that I kept coming back to the notice of Inshabel's death. It was, simply, the odd one out. Every other victim or location target had been a specific part of my personal organisation. But Nathun Inshabel was not. He was – had been – an inquisitor in his own right. During my campaign against the heretic Quixos, almost fifty years earlier, Inshabel, then holding the rank of interrogator, had been part of my team. He had joined my fold after the death of his master, Inquisitor Roban, during the atrocity on Thracian Primaris, and had continued to aid me devotedly until after the purge of Quixos's stronghold on Farness Beta. After that, with my sponsorship, he became an inquisitor and began his own work.
Since then, we had been in contact only a few times and, apart from our old friendship, there was no connection between us. Why had he been marked out for destruction too? Coincidence was not a good enough answer.
What connected us? Who connected us? The obvious name was Quixos, but that led nowhere. I had eliminated Quixos myself.
I ran through the list of worlds again, trying to discern a link.
One of the planets named on the list was Quenthus Eight.
That name snagged me like a protruding claw. Quenthus Eight. A margin world. I had never been there. But I'd once been told about it.
Running on instinct, I cross-checked Quenthus Eight with the vast list of worlds on which Tarray or Tari was a registered surname. Aemos had already cross-referenced the lists of worlds using 'khanjar' with worlds owning the surname 'Tarray', and had come up with seven hundred possibles. Now I was able to add sense to one of them.
There it was. 'Khanjar' was the word for a war knife on Quenthus Eight, and Tarray was a clan name from that world. Nearly three hundred and fifty years before, one of the most vile sociopaths in the Imperium had started his career on Quenthus Eight. Maria Tarray's reported claims to have been born on Gudran had been discounted by Aemos, who had checked the census and found no sign of the name.
He hadn't gone back far enough. He hadn't gone back three and a half hundred years. I did, and found that Tarry had been a peasant name on Gudran until that time. The family tree ended right there.
I knew who it was. I knew who my enemy was.
THIRTEEN
Locastre.
Full stop.
End of the line.
We arrived at Locastre over an hour behind schedule. Unseasonal blizzards had swept up from the east into the Uttes, and the express had been forced to reduce speed to a crawl. On steep gradients through the passes, there was a danger of back-slip, and we could feel the frequent jerks as the car bogies hunted over the ice-caked rails. There was a ten minute stop on a straight section on the west of Utte Major as the train's engineer gangs got out and winched the locomotive's nose plough into place. The blizzard was around us then and everything outside the windows was a colourless swirl.
I went down to the end of the car and peered out through the van windows. Black blobs were moving in the white haze, some lit by fizzling flares of green and red. I felt several jolts and metallic clunks shiver through the deck beneath me.
The intercar tannoy softly informed us that we would be on our way soon, reassured us that the weather was no hazard, and soothed us with the news that complimentary hot punch was now being served in the dining salon. Unnecessarily muffled in furs or expensive mountainwear, other passengers came to peer out of the mush-flecked ports, grumbling and what if-ing.
I returned to the cabin I shared with Aemos, locked the doors and sat down with him. 1 ran through my theory.
'Pontius Glaw…' his old lips spat the name. 'Pontius Glaw…'
'It fits, doesn't it?'
'From what you tell me, Gregor. Though of course, I know little of what passed between you and that monster on Cinchare.'
We had first tackled the villainy of Pontius Glaw and his poisonous brood right there on Gudrun back in 240, an age ago as it seemed. At the time, Glaw himself, a notorious heretic, had been dead for two centuries, his obscene activities curtailed by Inquisitor Angevin.
But Glaw's intellect and engrammed personality had been preserved in a psi-pathetic crystal by his noble family. We thwarted the attempts of House Glaw to restore him to corporeal life, and afterwards I had the crystal placed for safekeeping with my old ally, Magos Geard Bure of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
A century later, in 340,1 had revisited Bure's remote fastness on the mining world Cinchare during the Quixos affair, in order to obtain arcane information concerning daemonhosts from his prisoner. Without Pontius Glaw's dark advice, I would never have been able to vanquish Quixos or his slaved daemons Prophaniti and Cherubael.
But I had been forced to deal with Glaw. Make it worth his while. The lure I dangled was that in return for his help, I would commission Bure to manufacture a body for him to inhabit.
And, because I was an honourable man, I kept my word, believing that even if Glaw was given mobility, he would never escape Geard Bure's clutches.
It seemed I had been wrong about that.
During those private interviews on Cinchare, Glaw had confessed to me die event that had driven him, the accomplished scion of one of Gudrun's most respected noble houses, into the worship of the warp.
It had happened on Quenthus Eight in 019. Glaw had been visiting the Quenthi amphitheatres, purchasing gladiators for his pit-fighting hobby. Even before his fall, he was a cruel man. He bought one brute, a warrior from a remote feral world… Borea, I seem to recall. Anxious to please his new master, the warrior had given Glaw his tore. It was an ancestral relic from the feral world, and neither the warrior nor Glaw realised it was tainted with the foulest Chaos. Glaw had put it on and immediately had fallen into its clutches. That one simple act had sealed his fate and transformed him into the idolatrous fiend who had plagued the Helican sub-sector for nearly two decades.
I gave Aemos the gist of this.
The matter seems to fit together. You believe, I take it, that Pontius Glaw has escaped from his prison on Cinchare, built up his forces, and is now targetting you for revenge?'
'Revenge? No… well, indirectly, perhaps. He certainly would want to have his revenge on me, but the scale of his attack, the effort, the comprehensive scope… every element of my operation, and Inshabel too.'
Aemos shrugged. 'Inshabel was with us at Cinchare.'
That's my point. Pontius is trying to destroy everyone who might know he exists. Most of the Imperium believes he is long dead. We pose a threat to him just by knowing about him.'
I could tell Aemos had something on his mind that he didn't want to say.
Aemos?'
'Nothing, Gregor.'
'Old friend?'
He shook his head.
'Say it. Pontius Glaw's existence is only a secret because I never informed the ordos that he was still sentient. Because I never delivered his engram sphere into the custody of the Ordo Hereticus as I should have. And he's only free now because I had a body built for him/
'No.' He got to his feet and squinted out of the car window, trying to see something, anything, in the blizzard. 'We've had this conversation before, or at least one like it. About Cherubael'
He turned to look at me. He was so very old. 'Y
ou are an inquisitor of the Glorious Imperium of Mankind. You are dedicated to the destruction of evil in any facet of its three classic forms: Xenos, Malleus, Hereticus. You face unimaginable hazards. Yours is the most arduous task undertaken by any Imperial servant. You must use every weapon at your disposal to protect our culture. Even the arsenal of the enemy. And you know full well that sometimes such uses have consequences. We may now regret your actions with Pontius Glaw, but without those, Quixos would not have been brought down. We can play the "if only" game all day. The simple truth is that victory comes at a price, and we are paying that price now. The true measure of your character is what you do about it/
'I correct my mistakes. I bring down Pontius Glaw/
'I have no doubt of that/
Thank you, Aemos/
He sat down again. This Tarray woman. How does she fit in?'
I showed him the census record. The Tarrays were a low caste family on Gudrun during Glaw's organic lifetime. Then the line stops abruptly, but reappears on Quenthus. I think the Tarrays, or at least a Tarray, was amongst Glaw's retinue, and he took them to Quenthus. I need you to look into mat at Locastre/
'Locastre? But we're only going to be stopping there for forty-five minutes/
I gestured to the window. 'It'll probably be longer given the weather, but you'll have to move fast. I'm going to use the time to access the Aegis account/
The handle of the locked connecting door ratcheted back and forth.
'Gregor?' It was Crezia.
'What are you doing locked in there?' she called through the door.
'Just discussing things with Aemos/
They're serving hot punch in the salon. I thought we might mingle/
'In a minute/1 called out in reply. There was a lurch and the train started to move again.
I looked at Aemos. 'The things we've spoken about… they don't go any further. Not yet. Crezia doesn't need to know, neither does Eleena, come to that.'
'My lips are sealed/ he said.
We came out of the blizzard and down a comfortable gradient into Locas-tre. It was nearly midday. The bad weather lurked like a grey wall behind us, veiling the Uttes, but reports suggested it was moving into the valley.