The verdikine meat in the pot flared and the cooks laughed and clapped at the bursts of yellow flame. Petronas started shuffling between the two slop-chutes, but his knees folded and the dagger point squealed against the chutes as he toppled over. He lay slumped in the cramped space, feeling his stomach roil—the last of the food had come up two hours ago, but he had still been bringing up bile every few minutes. His eyes felt like coals, and no matter how many times he squeezed them shut or worked the eyelids with his fingers he could not get them to water and give him some relief.
Waking up like this, he had known straight away Gensh was responsible. When he had lurched out of his bed, throat bubbly with vomit, he had realised even through the cramps in his gut and the spike that twisted behind his eyes that it had been deliberate. Rengill, Rengill his dear friend since the days they had played along the ornamented garden-decks of the Callyac’s Promise, who had sat beside him at Gensh’s dinner, was sprawled in the doorway of her own stateroom, convulsing. Her own mouth and chin were smeared with bile, but it was mixed with blood and mucus, and as Petronas had staggered toward her blood began to drip from her nostrils and ears as well.
Beyond her, Lead Ensign Omya sagged against a wall and wept from the pain that was doubling him over as pretty, dark-haired Atith tried to help him move. Omya had sat opposite Petronas and argued with him about the merits of the wines, and had helped hold the unlucky deckhand’s friend back while Petronas had worked off his anger afterwards. And behind Atith, a sprawled shape that Petronas barely recognised as Nimmond, against whom he had boxed until they both collapsed from exhaustion and with whom he had learned the strange lilting Low Gothic dialect they spoke on Spaeter Relixas so they could read the stirring warrior-poems of its militant priests. They had even given a recitation at the dinner, clanging their pewter wine-cups together as they roared out the verses. He recognised Nimmond by the swept-back way he wore his long hair and the broad gold belt he had won for his gunnery—he would not have recognised the young man’s distorted face, bloody where muscle had torn the skin apart and twisted itself free of the bone.
His surroundings now matched those grim memories, as bloodied scraps and bone were dumped into the chutes with clamour and echoes from the metal walls. The racket shook Petronas back out of semi-consciousness and gave him enough energy to drag himself to his feet. His balance was still bad, though, and he could not stop his forward lurch. But the interruption had been timely, because ahead of him, walking around the seasoning tubs, was the moustachioed senior steward who had served them their dinner. Their poisoned dinner.
Petronas erupted from his niche in a wild-eyed run, the kitchen crew yelping and scattering out of his way. In the hot fog of his vision the steward turned, his eyes widened and he scrambled backward. The point of the punch-dagger caught in his tunic but only made a shallow gash from hip to shoulder. He howled and grappled at Petronas’ arm as the ensign made graceless stabs at his face and eyes.
Petronas heard a voice, cracked and crazed, screaming over and over again and when he saw the man’s mouth move in reply he realised it was his own. When he stopped to suck in a tortured breath he had a chance to realise that he had been shouting, “Your life for Gensh! Your life for Gensh!” over and over.
The steward, groaning, hit the side of a tall carving-block and slid down it as a sudden burst of hot, liquid pain in his abdomen made Petronas double over with a cry and go down on one knee. When it slackened again he spiked the point of the dagger into the floor to steady himself and looked the steward in the eye.
“Gensh… Officer Gensh… I can take you to him! We didn’t know! We didn’t know! Please! I bear you no ill-will, sir, you know that! I was pleased for you, I was happy that such a fine young man…” the steward gulped and clutched at the wound across his torso, “such a fine officer had been invited…”
“You poisoned me.” Petronas knew his words were coming out slurred, but there was no time to slow down to try and talk properly. So many of them must have been involved, there were so many of them to track and find. “You all did. Rengill and poor Nimmond. Why Nimmond? Who poisoned…”
“No, no, not we! Food and celebration are our, our, calling!” The steward was gabbling, his hands held out. Dimly, Petronas realised why no one was coming near them: to the ones who knew no better he was carrying the marks of disease. Better to let him stab a colleague than get close and risk the flotilla’s ruthless internal quarantines. He drew his arm back and the steward screamed.
“No! We were driven out of the kitchen, the red-robed man, that was him! He never eats! The red-robed man and the trader’s doctor! They came in with staff and—”
Petronas let his weight drop forward and aimed the dagger carefully at the steward’s eye. It went in true; the man shivered and died. After a moment slumped against the corpse Petronas pushed himself back and staggered upright to look at a grey-uniformed blur in the centre of his melting, throbbing vision.
“Gensh.” For a moment Petronas was thankful almost to the point of prayer that his nemesis had been miraculously placed here for him. But he was confused. There were more? The trader’s doctor, D’Leste, an ugly man Petronas had only seen once or twice, and the red-robed man who never ate, that, that had to be… Suddenly Petronas saw everything clearly.
“Here’s the last one. Light of Terra save us all, but look at what he’s done! It’s a good thing we got to you, Petronas. When we heard you’d gone over the edge we feared the worst.” The blur that was Gensh turned to the indistinct masses behind it. “Get him down and restrained, and get that grox-sticker off his hand. We’re lucky we were vigilant, it looks like he only got one.”
The thing about the punch-dagger was this: Petronas already knew that he could kill with a simple forward fall to put his weight behind it. He tottered a step, then another, then as someone started to say, “It’s alright, sir,” he let his final collapse pull his arm forward and heard the shocked whoosh of air out of Gensh as his weight bore them both over in a cascade of cries and shouts from around them.
“Two,” Petronas gurgled contentedly into Gensh’s face. And although he felt strong hands gripping his arms and hair, he was deep in unconsciousness and never felt them dragging him clear of the dying officer’s body.
Private Offices of Shira Calpurnia,
The Wall, Hydraphur
“So what the hell is this about a counter-claim?”
Normally the briefing conferences of the senior Adeptus Arbites followed a detailed and traditional protocol, which was why when Shira Calpurnia needed to get quickly to the pith of an issue she held a less formal and more forthright meeting somewhere away from the meeting-vaults around the Arbitor Majore’s tower. The Arbites who made good use of the freer, blunter-spoken environment tended to be the ones who found their way onto her growing personal staff; the ones who were scandalised by it or allowed it to make them sloppy were quickly and firmly rotated out. Now in her little set of chambers were three of the staff she liked and trusted the most: Culann, her personal aide, the grizzled Arbitrator Odamo and Umry, the quick-witted praetor-cognatis who’d distinguished herself in the Anstoch trials the previous year.
“Received by communiqué sent by flotilla astropaths from Shexia system, repeated again at Antozir Proxima. Authentication reads ‘Zand’, that’s one of the flotilla masters. Shexia and Antozir-Prox are successive steps on the route to Hydraphur from the border sectors where the old man died. Time-stamps on each of them show the flotilla making good time.” Leaning against the table by Calpurnia’s door, Praetor-Cognatis Umry was twirling the data-slate in her fingers but rattled off the report without referring to it.
“Good time? Hurrying, are they?” Kyle Odamo was a heavy-jawed aedile senioris with thirty-two years on arbitrator strike teams, including eight on an Arbites intercept cruiser until a shipboard accident had cost him both his legs. The augmetics hadn’t taken well enough to return him to full combat assignments, but on his planetside posting he still
took an interest in spacefaring. “Don’t know much about that direction firsthand but I’ve heard it’s not hard to hurry through. They’ll have an easier time of it than that other poor fellow. Fearful rough it gets coming up the well past Knape and straight out from galactic centre.”
“We can’t know.” Umry replied, tossing the slate and catching it. “That message is pretty much all we’ve had out of them. We’ve got no informants on the flotilla. The really old traders have had these whole sealed communities grow up around them, just try getting one of your own people in or turning one of theirs. Next to impossible, I’d think. Unless the Emperor willed it,” she added piously.
“But someone’s got an insider,” said Calpurnia. She was out of armour and in simple duty fatigues, sitting cross-legged on a soft mat in front of her bookshelf. “We know that because we’re monitoring the Varro end, or so Culann tells me. Culann?”
“Yes, ma’am. Things are as rough between here and Gunarvo as Arbitor Odamo said, and our communiqué from the commander of court there took a few attempts. But, well, the flotilla may not be hurrying but the heir, this Varro Phrax, is moving like a scorch-arsed blasphemer. A representative of Navigator House Dorel visited him and he was making tracks out of the system within twelve hours. Rather a lot got spent to make sure he had a ship in a hurry. More than we think Varro can afford, although he’s not badly off.”
“Is this House Dorel behind any of it?” Calpurnia asked. In her experience, very little that the Navis Nobilite did was as it appeared on the surface.
“I don’t know about that, ma’am.” Culann was the only one to still call her ma’am in the private meetings—he seemed to find the habit hard to get out of. “But we do know that the rush-requests on some of the exit permissions for the ship that they’re taking out of Gunarvo weren’t paid for by Phrax himself. One of the astropaths travelling with them is part of the precinct commander’s collaborator networks, so we have a couple of insights from what he was able to send. The money came from an exchequer to a shipping syndicate with ties to the House Yimora, not Dorel. There’s been more money moved around in the financial houses at the Gunarvo docks that the Courthouse there is starting to pull out into the open, but it looks like bribes may have been paid to get the right traffic patterns for the Gann-Luctis, that’s their ship, to get out of the system and break warp as soon as it possibly could. No formal communiqué is recorded in Gunarvo’s astropathic logs about any counter-claim.”
“And I assume we didn’t tell him ourselves?” Calpurnia asked. “Of course we didn’t.”
“We didn’t,” said Odamo. “I used your delegation to demand confirmation of that. Our own Astropathicae chambers certainly didn’t pass anything on, and the Chancellor of the Witchroost confirms likewise. Oops,” he added.
“Oops is right.” Calpurnia told him. “I’ve made my feelings on that clear. Use one of its more respectful names, please.” She looked over at Umry. “So… This counterclaim…?”
“I’m sorry to say it, but I think at this moment we know exactly as much about it as has just been aired in this meeting and we’re going to have to wait to find out any more. The older a charter, the eager its holders tend to be about letting any Adeptus hooks into them.”
“That notwithstanding.” Calpurnia put in, “I wanted us to sweep for information. How far along is that?” Umry glanced at the slate and tapped a key.
“Transmissions have gone out to every Arbites leader on the list I gave you and the secondary list is with the Arbitor Majore’s cryptomechanics prior to transmission.” She turned to the others. “To keep you up to speed, the prime list is every taskforce and precinct head on every world and patrol route that we know the flotilla has had dealings with in the last thirty years. The secondary list is a range of possible but unconfirmed stops. We’re asking all of them for any records or observations that may give us an idea of who this new mystery counter-heir is and how strong his claim on the charter might be.”
“What we need,” said Odamo, half to himself, “is some way of forcing these people to share their records with us.
“Now, if they had to supply us with information on every change in events that might impact the charter…”
“I believe there are some like that,” said Calpurnia. “There were several major rogue traders in the Ultima Segmentum whose charters required them to co-operate with inspectors and archivists. Unfortunately, that provision tends to have to be built into the charter from its creation.”
“If we have the authority to oversee the charter, ma’am…” Culann began, but Calpurnia was already shaking her head.
“Oversee is exactly what it is. We can enforce the possession of the Phrax Charter by the rightful successor, and where the succession is unclear we can judge and rule and enforce our ruling. That’s it.”
“It’s kind of the point,” said Umry. “It’s the exact things about the old charters that make them so sought after—antiquity, tradition, exalted legal status—that make them so hard to interfere with. And they’re next to impossible to amend. I don’t think alterations to any of the really old charters have ever even been considered.”
“Whose mark do the oldest charters bear?” asked Calpurnia, and the question hung in the air for a while. For a citizen of the Imperium, a subject of the Emperor, a worshipper at the altars of the Adeptus Ministorum, how could the idea even be countenanced? How did you set yourself up to rewrite and tinker with words penned and sealed by a walking god? Calpurnia watched the same thought go through the minds of the others: Odamo’s eyes had gone hooded, Umry was staring at the floor and Culann was actually shivering. She knew exactly how they felt. She had only been able to concentrate on the details of the succession ceremonies because she had kept the nature of the charter out of her mind. When she allowed herself to think about it the weight of it was almost physical. It made her feel too small, too young.
But duty was duty, and only in death did duty end. She picked up the jug and refilled her water glass, poured more for the others and picked up her data-slate.
“Well,” she said, “whatever the details of the claimants and their cases, the fact of it is we’re going to be conducting a hearing, not a ceremonial handover. So let’s start getting ready for one.”
The Flotilla of Hoyyon Phrax,
in transit
“—USELESS IF HE—”
Blackness.
“—ink he’s going to be able t—”
Blackness.
“—atch what you’re doing, I don’t kn—” Blackness. A moment of pain.
Blackness.
“—e thought it best, magos. But Doctor D’Leste, sir, I should tell you that the codes—”
Fading away more slowly this time, but still…
…blackness.
Slow fade up, blurry light. Something wedged in his mouth. Needs to get it free, needs to—
“Gods, but he’s thrashing! Get over here! I don’t care, just get over here and hold the little bastard down, get him, get his arm!”
Blurred movements in the blurred light. Pressure bearing down on tender muscle and skin. Pain. Have to get the pressure off.
“How can he be so bloody strong, look at him! Damn it, get D’Leste! No, get the magos. Yes, bloody well disturb him! Do it! Give me that slapneedle—”
A startling cold sting through the fog of raw pain.
Blackness.
Dreams, for the first time in a while. Not good dreams. Wandering through the decks and halls as a child again, dead bodies bleeding through their skins littering the floors and piling up in the arches and hatchways. Mother’s voice echoing through the ship. She’s singing a lullaby, except that she’s trying not to cry at the same time. Hearing her aches.
Blackness.
Light. Not blurred this time. A white, concave ceiling and figures, way up in the distance, looking down on him. Faces he knows from shipboard musters and officers’ gatherings. He knows there was something about them that was so clear
, so clear, back before all the light and the blackness and the dreams and the pain.
There is still pain, though. His brain seems to float in a strange, unearthly cup of it.
Rich red at the foot of the bed. Hard to see. He knows he stabbed someone. Did they live? Couldn’t have. Did they die and come to tell him they’re dead? They must have. In the tilted fever-logic that is all he can think in now, he decides this must be the only explanation.
“Can you hear me? Can you understand me?” The voice is odd in cadence, beautifully warm and soft, but soulless with it, like the voice of an actor who can reproduce all the appearances of a human voice but believes none of them.
“Ensign Petronas, can you understand me?”
A rich red robe with odd, geometrical gold trim, characters that he doesn’t recognise. A steel chain at the neck. And above the neck, the face, the face of pale flesh and glittering metal and a single red-rimmed eye…
“His cognition seems to be returning,” says the voice from that face as he thrashes and the hands grasp his arms again. “Sedate him. Another day of rest and we’ll see if he’s ready to meet with us.”
Blackness.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 8