“And the beneficence of the Emperor,” put in Ksana Phrax, standing behind her husband’s shoulder with her arms folded.
“Alright, and that too.” Domasa conceded. “But still, grabbing up power with your mind on a ship at warp is like firing krak missiles back and forth when you’re sitting in a shuttle. That was why we waited until we broke warp to go after him, except we got to the Psykana dome and found he’d already gone scuttling off.”
“What did he do?”
“We were taking a bit of a chance with the microshock, weren’t we Cherrick? But it was worth it, we needed to make sure that his concentration would be scrambled.” Domasa was almost gabbling—it was the most excited Varro had seen her.
“What did he do?”
“But I don’t think it was really too much of a chance, I mean, if he had been somewhere else, but the winch-wells, that’s pretty heavy machinery and the microshocks would barely scuff the metal, we judged it a worthwhile risk.”
“That was my judgement, yes,” put in Cherrick, with a not particularly subtle emphasis on “my”.
“What did he do?” The snap in Ksana’s voice was finally enough to register with the others. Domasa caught her reflexive sneer and bowed.
“Apologies, my Lady Phrax, events have me a little keyed up. He sent an astropathic transmission just as we passed the cometary zone. Not enough of the signal was caught by anyone actually loyal! her speech turned into a spit for a moment, “for us to know about it word for word. But we know that our friend Symozon here has been harvesting information on our voyage and our ship’s complement, and he was careless enough to leave some ghosting around the telepathica chair he used that one of our loyal astropaths was able to catch before it evaporated, so we know at least some of the names in the transmission.”
“I don’t see why you’re doing this,” said Varro. His hands were clasped in front of him, taut with distress. “What have we to hide? You told me yourself that this counterclaim is just rubbish. If we have the stronger claim, then who cares who knows what about this? About us?”
Domasa’s mouth opened and closed for a moment.
“Prolegis Maghal has shared some of the Administratum’s knowledge of our destination with me,” she said after a moment. “And one of the things he said was that this arbiter who’ll preside over the succession—at which she’ll judge whether you even succeed to the charter, I’ll remind you—is a straight arrow. Not like some of the Arbites my House has encountered, the ones who love their secret informants and midnight raids. This Calpurnia’s apparently a fussy little bitch. If a woman like that wanted to know our complement she’d have an Arbites herald bang on the hull until we handed over a list. She just loves barging in where she’s got no right and throwing her weight around, that’s what I heard.” Domasa turned, and the hem of her russet skirt twitched as she jabbed Symozon with her foot. “No, if our friend here was doing any spying then it wasn’t for the Arbites. It was for whoever is trying to pull your family’s legacy out from under you. Is that honestly the kind of thing you’ll sit back and take?”
“How are you going to confirm all of this?” asked Ksana as Varro stared at Symozon’s slumped form. “What has he told you? Wouldn’t there be some sign we could find that he has ties to… to some possible other interests?”
“Nothing on his person, nothing in his cell,” volunteered Cherrick. “But he came on board as a last-minute transfer by the Telepathica chambers at Gunarvo. it’s not the kind of thing they do too regularly. Strings got pulled, you mark me.” Domasa nodded agreement.
“We have to deduce, because of where we are. If we were out of warp, then this would be a lot easier. We could peel back the little rat’s brain until we found what we wanted. There are certain ways to use a warp-eye that I’ve even been keen to try out myself, although I’m no psyker in any kind of way that would let me do a thorough job. But we’re in warp at the moment, and it’s rough out there too.” Her face grew sober and she took a breath. “Things can ride in storms like this. Pulling a mind, especially a psyk-mind, inside out in conditions like this, when our protection is already strained… no,” she said more loudly, as if convincing herself. “We’re not going to risk that. I don’t even want to take a chance on a mind like his in pain or drug-weakened, not when the warp’s like this.” She flared her narrow nostrils. “And I’m certainly not taking the risk of having him fire off some kind of distress call after we break warp. He’s not going to be communicating then.”
“I think that this ship has psyk-cages.” Varro began, “so if we need to imprison him…”
“Imprison,” snorted Cherrick, cutting him off, “Did you hear what Lady Dorel was saying?”
“We need to be able to confront these counter-claimers with him as evidence for what they’ve tried to do,” said Varro. His mouth was dry. There was something in the eyes of both the Navigator and her trooper that he didn’t like. “I would have thought that the evidence of wrongdoing, espionage, like this, would weaken their case at law. If this Calpurnia is such a stickler for above-board legality.
“It would have about as much effect on them as their producing evidence of a spy of ours would have on us,” said Domasa. “And if the arbitor-woman is surprised that it’s happening then she’s even dumber than Maghal’s reports made her sound. If he just doesn’t transmit again then we’ve got them wondering. Did we catch him? Did he get left behind? Did he turn? Has he just not got much to report?”
“So it’s the psyk-cage, then,” said Varro. “I’ll have one of the stewards paged and they can make the arrangements.”
He stood up from his seat, but no one else moved. Domasa was staring at him. Varro looked to his wife for support, but she had gone pale and was looking away.
“I think, Varro, that I need to provide a demonstration of the way your mind is going to have to start working from now on,” said Domasa, raising her needier. One of her elongated fingers curled around to work a stud on the trigger-grip nestled in her narrow palm.
“Lethal dose,” she said briefly, and lowered her arm. There was a tiny sound, no louder than a sniff, and Symozon slumped forwards. As Varro watched, his gorge rising, he saw the little sliver of crystallised toxin that had embedded itself in the back of the astropath’s high-crowned head melt and soak the rest of the way into his skin. He dropped back into his seat as the strength seemed to go out of him.
“The nature of my mission here has been made very clear to me by my backers.” Domasa said. “I am to help you in whatever way I can to fight the counter-claim and have you succeed to the Phrax Charter and the mastery of the flotilla. You need to travel there, so here is a ship and a Navigator. You need protection for your own good, so here am I and here is Cherrick. You will need aid and support for your future work as a trader, and so worthies of Gunarvo and of the Administratum are with you.” She raised her arm and Varro flinched, but she simply released the grip of the needier and folded it back into her armband. “All you have to do,” she told him sweetly, “is claim your inheritance and remember your friends. That’s all you have to do, Varro. We’ll take care of everything else.”
They left him, then, left the silent tableau: Varro Phrax, pale and clutching the arms of the seat; his wife in her yellow gown, turned away with her face in her hands, and at their feet the sprawled corpse of Astropath Symozon.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Arbites Fortress of
Trylan Tor, Hydraphur
The Adeptus Ministorum arrived at Trylan Tor on the fifth day of Shira Calpurnia’s stay there, on an afternoon when she was distracted and irritable and in absolutely no mood for uninvited visitors at all.
It wasn’t the tor itself that she disliked. Both island and fortress were rugged and powerful: like all Arbites architecture the tor fortress was designed so the mere sight of it intimidated any onlooker. It took up the whole crowning plateau of the tor for which it was named, sitting on an almost sheer-sided pillar of rock that jutted three hundred metres
above the waves. Even from the air it radiated power and immovability; she thought it would be even more impressive from the sea.
Inside, away from the constant wind and the booming of the waves, the warm air and narrow corridors made the place feel almost like some giant burrow. Through most of the building the halls were only just wide enough for two Arbites to pass, and even then it was only Calpurnia’s slender build that meant she could move through them easily. Even Culann, not a heavyset man, was noticing the cramped quarters when he was in armour and Odamo, manoeuvring his broad shoulders around the tor on two canes and his sticklike metal legs, had resigned himself to having to wait while anyone he met coming the other way either backed up to a niche or a cross-corridor, or plastered themselves against a wall.
The tor was not a conventional precinct fortress. The archipelagos were lightly populated, and the sea and all the surrounding island-tors were kept empty for a hundred kilometres around by Arbites interdict. Some long-ago Arbitor General had decided that the Arbites presence on Hydraphur could not be crippled by a decisive strike on the Wall: pockets of strength were carefully cached around the planet and the system so that, should the unthinkable ever happen and the four thousand year-old citadel at Bosporian fall, the surviving precinct houses would not be without their most essential tools: weapons, personnel and the Lex Imperia. The fortress at Trylan was one of those specialised bases, keeping within its thick black walls copies of the most vital core of Arbites scripture and dogma.
It was the custom for Arbites to come there to study or teach, the fortress becoming over the years a kind of miniature university. There were texts there of which copies existed nowhere else in Hydraphur except for the Wall itself, and while the tor had its garrison of arbitrators guarding the walls, crewing the sentry posts on the surrounding tors or patrolling the interdiction zone in armoured flyers or snub-nosed submersibles, most Arbites on Trylan spent their time by lamplight in honeycomb of tiny reading-cells in the lower levels of the central bastion.
Judges were the most common, bent over bound papers or flickering data-arks as they explored ten millennia of ever-expanding, ever-complicating Imperial laws. But there were chasteners there, too, standing out from the rest in their bulky uniforms and brown tunics, usually posted to Trylan to build their knowledge of the rarer and more obscure treatises on the capture, handling and breaking of prisoners. Verispex officers came to wade through the forensic notes of cases a thousand or more years old. Garrison preachers studied the texts of their forebears, sharpening their understanding of their religious duties to their fellow Arbites. And the arbitrators themselves would go down to the reading levels when they were not walking the walls with magnocs in hand, to read about techniques the Arbites of generations past used to break a crowd, or a bunker, or a seditious parade; the weak points of a house, a palace, a tank, a cargo-dray, an unarmoured rioter; how formations of arbitrators could best work to lock down a hab-block or bring it down in rubble, storm a spaceship or commandeer one, defend a power-plant or detonate it from within.
Calpurnia approved of the bookish atmosphere. Two Calpurnii five generations before her had both been Arbites General in border systems on the Ultima Segmentum: she had read their diaries and the remark of one of them that force without understanding was of no more service to the law than understanding without enforcement had stuck with her. Under almost any other circumstances at all she would have found a spell at Trylan tor restful and inspiring. But not when she was being badgered by uninvited visitors on a day when her hands were full dealing with her invited ones.
“Arbitor Senioris Calpurnia, I fully understand, I assure you, that I stand on sovereign ground of the Adeptus Arbites.” Genetor-Magos Sanja spoke carefully and formally. “But arbitor, you must understand that I just do not have licence to throw off the laws and traditions of my own Adeptus, which are not only binding by decree of the Mechanicus but sacred in the sight of the Machine God. This must be how I work here. There can be no other way.”
“But I have to respectfully repeat my question, magos. Can I know, please, the specific requirements on your rituals? If your laws are against anyone outside the Cult of the Machine setting eyes on your—” she had been about to say equipment, but she knew that some Mechanicus considered such a term for their sacred devices derogatory, “—on the homes of your machine-spirits, then we have no conflict. A screen can be erected, or curtains, or a simple veil or blindfold on all the non-Mechanicus present in the room whenever the machines are in the open. I’ll allow one of your own servitors to do the blindfolding. I’ll stand in the room and allow myself to be blindfolded first—”
“The matter is not one of beholding.” Sanja told her. As far as Calpurnia could tell he was accoutred identically to the first time she had met him on the steps of his own shrine in the Augustaeum. He made a vivid splash of colour in the fortress’ dark, austere little courtroom: a crimson Mechanicus kimono, his head hooded and veiled with only his bright blue eyes and hooked nose visible, a skull-cog emblem around his neck in black steel and diamond, the red and white sash decorated with the helical livery of a genetor in tiny gems. Behind him stood one of his junior acolytes, also in scarlet, his head completely hidden by a hood of red chainmail and his hands bulging with shrouded augmetics. Shoulder to shoulder behind him in turn were four dwarfish servitors, resembling obese, blank-eyed children balanced on hoofed, reverse-jointed augmetic legs that gleamed under the lamps. Sanja’s luminants, the gold-plated skulls of Mechanicus dignitaries that accompanied him around his shrine, had not followed him here.
“The ark of the Helispex is one of the most revered engines of the Genetor cult on the whole of Hydraphur.” Sanja said. “To consult with it is to perform an act of religious significance. Even on consecrated ground, the rituals of calibration and initialisation take over an hour to please its anima to the point where it will bring the engine to bear. To remove it from our shrine is something I have done before, and the engine itself is built for travel, but in every case we travel to ground that has been sanctified by a member of our cult before our arrival. That is the issue here, arbiter. I don’t care to think about what might happen to the Helispex engine should we attempt to rouse it on unsanctified ground. The possibility that its spirit might be angered or damaged beyond our ability to repair does not bear contemplating. If this is where you wish me to examine the gene-samples from these two heirs, then some part of this fortress must be handed over to one of my liturgical mechanics for consecration as sovereign Adeptus Mechanicus ground. There is no other course of action. If this is impossible,” he went on as Calpurnia opened her mouth to reply, “then I shall provide every assistance that I am able without the engine. Or, if you prefer, I shall return to the Augustaeum and rouse the Helispex there, so that the work you require can be done and the results communicated to you here. I shall do this with no animosity and with my respect for you undiminished, as it goes without saying.” Sanja finished his words with a bow.
“What we have here, you see, magos, is a clash of sovereign territories. I am just as bound as you are. Every precedent for a contest between heirs has said that the claimants remain in the courtroom while their blood is taken, away, brought before the Helispex and the engine’s verdict brought back before the court by one of your order. Trouble is, all the precedents are for trials conducted in the Wall, where your shrine is not much more than walking distance.” She sighed. “You don’t want to be the man who broke the Helispex engine for all time, and I don’t want to be the woman who created the precedent for an outside organisation to claim sovereignty over an Arbites fortress.” Her fingers had found the scars over her eye and were lightly tracing them. “I can’t lie, even by omission, and leave something like that out of the records. And once it’s recorded into precedent, magos, it’s a devil to get out again. Things don’t just un-happen.”
“I understand. We are at an impasse, one that is the creation of neither of us.” Sanja had nothing against the Arbitor Se
nioris, and his willingness to help was genuine. But for a moment he could not help but be amused. While its control over its own jurisdictions was absolute, the Mechanicus had little ability to simply move in and overrule other arms of the Adeptus as the Arbites did, and he suspected that such impasses happened to him more often that they did to her. He tried again.
“Where are the engineering functions of the fortress carried out, arbitor? Do you have tech-priests ministering to your systems, or laity?”
“Laity. It’s the same here as in our other fortresses, there are lay tech-adepts granted indulgence by your priesthood for the duty. There’s no tech-shrine on the tor that will meet your needs, I thought of that.” She looked around.
The room was probably the biggest one in the whole fortress, and it was barely bigger than some of the meeting chambers back in the Wall. That was unusual for an Imperial building, which tended to have at least one soaring, vaulted space in it, although at first it seemed bigger than it was because the ceiling and far walls got lost in the dimness of the light. The light at Hydraphur’s equator was brighter and less fusty-yellow than further north at Bosporian, but they were far too deep inside the fortress for windows. Although while she thought of it…
“Is outdoors out of the question? The surrounding tors have sentry posts on them, but nothing else. “There should be enough open ground to put up some kind of tabernacle…” But Sanja was already shaking his head.
“The engine’s physical form is as delicate as its temperament,” he said. “I cannot chance exposure to the elements, even under conditions better suited to it spiritually. I suspect, arbitor, that if I am to use the engine to verify this succession as you wish me to, then it will have to be done either back at Bosporian or at one of our shrines on the southern coastline of Nyherac. There are perhaps some there that would be suitable, although I would be obliged if your own arbitrators would assist with fortification and security while the Helispex was housed there.”
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 11