“Thank you.” Calpurnia answered. “And the fact that this current attempt seems to have been made with no knowledge of the previous one is heartening. It strikes me that Simova, and the Eparch too, are blinded by ambition for a unique relic and haven’t done their research.” She looked out over the courtroom again, with its high-sided boxes and dock, the aisles cut into the floor, the stacked galleries around the walls. As an arbiter senioris she was at the lowest rung of the arbites general, where the Judge and arbitrator hierarchies recombined. Just as arbites generals promoted from the Judges had to get used to donning armour and commanding actions in the field, she was having to get used to presiding over trials and ceremonies. She, she thought, had the better deal.
The doors to either side of the pulpit swung wide and bailiffs from the courtroom garrison saluted up to her and began setting up the dais on which the charter would sit. She was prepared and confident of herself against the Ecclesiarchal claim now. She had the counter-arguments and the precedent, whatever Simova might think. And once his interference was cancelled out, the heirs could put their cases. And when she had heard those, she was confident that the right judgement would be obvious. Whatever had happened with the flotilla tech-priest might have traumatised or scandalised Sanja into seclusion, but that was a loss she was sure she could handle. It was nothing she couldn’t handle. She was starting to feel eager for the courtroom to fill up, eager for the hearing to start. Patience, she told herself. It wouldn’t be long now.
Main landing hangar,
Selena Secundus, Calata
Her uniform was grey silk that whispered when she moved; her hood-cap was of the same grey as her eyes and the veil that fell across her face made her look at the world as though through a fog. The other nine were dressed alike, in paler, simpler versions of the ceremonial uniforms the flotilla masters were wearing. Through the veil, when Atith had looked around, her companions looked like ghosts.
The ten of them stood in the cold air of the hangar bay, breathing the acrid smell of propellant smoke from the tubes of the ship’s boat that stood on six landing-legs behind them. They stood with antique long-barrelled autoguns, held outward to show where the ammo clips had been removed, and slender formal daggers thrust through their grey silk cummerbunds at precise angles. They stood in a ring, all facing outwards, and in the centre of the ring: a simple dome of dark metal, perhaps a little over a metre across, catching the light dully.
None of the ten wavered or looked around as the circular platform on which they stood began to move. On growling treads it carried them to the broad hangar doors, to the broad passage leading deeper into the fortress. It was lined with black-armoured Arbites, all with shotguns held at arms, their faces as invisible behind helmet visors as Atith’s own was behind her veil. For the first time, she wondered if she would come out of this alive. Ten of them, only ten. The seven who had come out of the soul-branding meeting with Nils in the medicae, three more they were sure they could trust. Ten of them, ten whom Nils (Petronas Phrax, she corrected herself, he was Petronas Phrax now) had insisted on for the charter’s ceremonial guard. Ten to help him get his revenge.
She breathed out and snapped through the motions of the drill, dropping her empty gun into the ceremonial position in the crook of her arm and falling into step as four heavy servitors, their thick augmetic limbs shining with filigree and fluttering with ornamental grey silk, lifted the dome and began carrying it toward the courtroom.
Not long now, she told herself. Whatever happened, she would help Nils. They all would. That was all she had to remember. Not long now.
The dromon Omicron’s Dart,
Low orbit over Galata, Hydraphur
They were being flown straight to Selena Secundus, and Simova was delighted. Arbitor Calpurnia didn’t seem to want to stand on formality, and the charter was being conveyed to the courtroom as they were flying in. It meant that they would be able to walk almost straight into the hearing in the company of the heir, and although Simova had spared some time for a moment of dutiful indignation at such an offhand treatment of such a precious relic, the whole affair couldn’t suit his purpose better. Or the Emperor’s, he assured himself, or the Emperor’s.
Sister Krovedd had seemed confident, too, when he had instructed her in the basics of the case as his second, and he more than trusted the Sisters Militant to emphasise the Ecclesiarchy’s determination. He was even willing to let the heir make a statement or formally hand the thing over or whatever he felt like doing, if propriety allowed. He wasn’t sure why the horribly deformed Navigator woman was tagging along, but that was probably why there were guards with them, so that Varro could order her contained if she tried anything. Not that she would; he was sure the abhuman knew her place.
He gripped the landing harness in sweaty hands as they coasted in under the giant shape of the Baron Mykal and towards a docking bay in the side of the fortress. He was looking forward to this. Not long now.
Not long at all.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Adeptus Arbites courtroom,
Fortress of Selena Secundus, Galata
The honour guard from the flotilla, ten young officers in pale uniforms and veils, stepped aside with empty weapons pointed down, and the servitors removed the metal cover and carried it away. Shira Calpurnia leaned over as far as dignity and the high-collared formal uniform would allow, but there seemed little to see: a small square of cloth, a closed book. It was only knowing what was in those pages that made her breath catch.
“Bring in the heirs and claimants,” she said. She had been mildly surprised that the terms of the charter laid down no formal legal liturgy for the hearing itself, but she was taking advantage of it. No ornate ceremony. Respectful, plain, functional as an arbitrator’s kit. It was her way of paying the charter her respects.
Simova was first to bustle in, of course, at a pace that had Calpurnia expecting him to trip over his robe at any moment. His arbitrator escorts halted him well back from the two raised boxes and he stood there, scowling, stymied.
Varro Phrax came in next, a tanned, nuggety man with cropped black hair, wearing a suit of deep green that Calpurnia considered a little too dishevelled for an occasion like this. He had a broad, likeable face full of deep laughter lines, but his expression was tired and haunted. He was followed by two retainers in heavy armoured shipsuits and a slender shape in a deep-cowled rust-brown gown that Calpurnia took to be one of his Navigator backers. A third retainer, with odd silver ridges inlaid into his head, had turned away at the door and walked back out into the atrium as Varro and the cowled shape stepped up into the box.
The third party, the second heir…
…the second heir was nothing like she had expected. Three junior flotilla ratings, in simple bodygloves with blinker-harnesses and mouth-stitches to show their indentured status, pushed in a medicae carriage on silent suspensor cushions. There was something behind its curtains, something that twitched and wheezed. The man hurrying beside the carriage, with the face of a slum-thug and the elegant uniform of a flotilla master, had his eyes riveted to the flickering life-sign runes on the diagnostors floating by the curtains. Others in the same uniforms filed in behind the carriage: two women, one tall and gangling, one hunched and sour-faced, an elderly man with a lugubrious hound-face and a slender metal staff, the next bald, with a blade of a nose and darting, suspicious blue eyes, the last a bull of a man with a plaited red beard.
They were grim, tense, and when the curtains retracted Calpurnia understood why.
“That… that’s my half-brother…” Varro’s words were disbelieving, and not quiet enough. Domasa heard him and snorted. But most of the court’s attention was on the wasted travesty nestled amongst the soft white cushions.
The thing was dressed in Phrax livery, more ornate than the flotilla masters’. But surely no uniform had ever been tailored for a body like that.
Its lower limbs were fluid-swollen and elephantine. On its torso weeping tumours strain
ed against the cloth, ribbed or folded like brain coral. The arms were sticks, the hands gripped into fists that the thing began to flail in the air: the skin and flesh on one seemed to have melted the hand into a single uneven lump. The other opened into a hand, but the flesh between the fingers had split so deeply there was barely even a palm now, just cracks where the hand was splitting right up to the wrist, lined with a red-black crust. The head above the ruffed collar looked like a skull covered in runneled and melted white wax, clouded eyes glaring blindly. The final touch, which nauseated Varro all the more for its banality: such a head should have been hairless, not bearing such a mane of tawny hair.
A shudder seemed to pass through the flotilla guards. Varro heard someone cry out. The female arbitor with the green eyes was leaning forward again, staring down.
What was left of Ensign Nils Petronas beneath the hate and the tumours and the agony-induced psychosis could dimly make out the woman leaning over to watch him, high, high above. He idly wondered if it might be his mother looking down, or one of the women he had killed in that alley. He was trying to focus on her when he heard D’Leste’s voice buzzing in the aural feed they had fastened to his head to make sure he could hear them.
“They’re looking at you, Petronas. Be careful. Can you understand me?”
Somewhere in his mind, down past the dreams and hallucinations, a switch was tripped. This was it. The moment. Mad, scrambled thoughts spun and tumbled.
Then, rising up through his fevered mind like an iceberg surging to the surface of a stormy sea came lucidity, clear thoughts forced together by a monstrous effort of will.
D’Leste moved a vox-pickup in front of his face.
“I… am…” His voice was a death-whisper, barely his own. For a long moment his thoughts wandered and he tried to remember whether his mother’s eyes had been as green as this woman’s. Then he shuddered and coughed and squeezed his eyes shut.
“I am Petronas Phrax, the son… the son of Hoyyon Phrax, Phrax the… the elder.” It was broken up by wheezes, but he recognised it. It was his own voice. His own body and mind had been taken away from him, but he still owned his voice. That pleased him and he grinned, and above him Calpurnia flinched: his teeth were a gapped and snaggled ruin, but white new teeth were trying to push themselves out of the fronts of his gums. “I am here… here. For the inheritance. Father’s charter, mother’s… mother’s, mother’s satisfaction. My doctor knows about that, although he doesn’t know really. That’s what my friends are here for.” Petronas giggled and his split hand rapped and drummed on the coverlet. D’Leste, face white with nerves, bent over his equipment and muttered orders to the diagnostors. “It all makes sense if you know what… what…” something seemed to puzzle him and the blind head began questing to and fro.
“My… my lord-in-waiting Petronas Phrax has become unwell, arbitor, as you see,” said Zanti, thinking fast and stepping forward. “And we made all haste to Hydraphur so that the legacy of the great Hoyyon could be placed in his hands. Once we are able to return my lord to his ship we shall be able to help him rest and regain his strength.”
“This is a travesty!” boomed Simova, striding forward under Zanti’s furious gaze. “That a holy relic of the Emperor should be turned over to such as that? The harbouring of the mutant is an abomination unto the Emperor and this shall not stand!”
“Back in your place, Simova.” Calpurnia warned him. “You are here on sufferance, not in charge. You.” She pointed at the man with the ruffian’s face, and he looked fearfully up at her.
“I am D’Leste, madam arbiter, physician to the Lord Phrax.”
“Does the ford Phrax have the ability to understand what is going on, for a start? And will the Lord Phrax submit to a genome trial before an Arbites medicae, as we shall demand of his rival?”
“Lord Phrax!” cried the wriggling thing on the bed. “Yes, Lord Phrax will undergo your genome trial, for the trials that have already been visited on him through his genome have given him no reason to fear one more!” The thing grinned again. One of its lips split open and pinkish fluid began to drizzle out. Behind the carriage the flotilla masters were leaning into an urgent, whispered conversation; by the carriage the veiled heads of the charter’s honour guard were turning too.
“A trial by genome is farcical,” declared Simova. “By the authority vested in me by the priesthood of sacred Terra and the Eparch of Hydraphur I—”
“Back in your place, Simova. Now.” Four armoured arbitrators stepped away from the wall. Simova glared at them and started to back away.
“The Mechanicus will not conduct a gene-trial for us on the occasion of this succession,” Calpurnia told the courtroom, “but a trial there will be. Trial by genome and trial by testimony. Let the two heirs and claimants come forward. The two heirs and claimants, Simova, and you disgrace these proceedings and shame yourself that I have to say it to you. Restrain him if you need to.” Her voice was ice-cold. Simova of all of them she had expected to know how to behave in a court, but the man was arguing with the arbitrators and shooting glances back over his shoulder at the Sisters Militant, who were looking to Sister Krovedd for direction. D’Leste was guiding the carriage forward to just below the pulpit, beside the charter; the honour guards were following. And with the noise from one and the grotesquerie of the other, it took Calpurnia a moment to notice that Varro Phrax had not moved.
“Move it, Varro, that’s your call. This is as good as over. Look at that joke. The charter’s ours, go fetch it.” Domasa’s voice was low and pleasant, not carrying even to her guards. She looked at Varro for a moment as he stared at the floor between his feet. He had laced his hands together to stop them shaking.
“I said move. Are you going to make me kick you?” He could feel the Calpurnia woman’s eyes on him as well, as cold as Domasa’s. And then for a moment it wasn’t Domasa he thought of or the little blonde woman in the pulpit, but Ksana, Ksana’s beautiful dark eyes looking into his. He looked at the chronometer at his cuff. It was nearly the time they had agreed. Rikah would have things moving by now.
“Varro Phrax,” said Calpurnia, “as an heir and claimant—”
And Varro stood, and opened his mouth. What came out first was dry and rusty, but then he managed it.
“I am the eldest son of Hoyyon Phrax. I was told his charter was mine. But I have had enough of blood and murder and greed and scheming. If that is the Phrax legacy then I am well rid of it. So, if it please the most learned and respected court: I will not claim the charter.”
Atith and the honour guards didn’t really register the words. They were focused on the wreck of Petronas, ready for the signal, ready to keep their promises.
D’Leste barely heard it either. He was almost weeping with fear. Petronas dead in the courtroom would mean his own life within the hour, he knew it, and as rune after rune on the diagnostors went into the red he scrabbled through his memory for something, anything that Dyobann had said that might help.
The other flotilla masters heard the words but were too stunned to react to them. The look they exchanged was simple. It said: what does this mean for us now?
Kyorg felt a burst of fear, the sudden certainty that he had taken the wrong bet.
Domasa Dorel felt like a trapdoor had dropped open under her: the lurch in her gut was like falling. She felt her muscles tighten and her third eye start to throb.
“I hope you know you’ve done it now, you little bastard,” she told Varro aloud. Now that everything had gone in a heap it seemed stupid to care about disrespecting the courtroom. “You knew what we arranged, and if you think you’ve seen—” That was when she realised that it might indeed matter what she said there, and without a word she turned and strode out of the courtroom, her two guards falling in behind her. One of them paused by Varro and gave a leer from under his visor and an obscene little fist-in-crotch gesture that Varro did not acknowledge. Then the tall doors swung shut again and they were gone.
“Someone’s go
t to keep an eye on her,” muttered Kyorg to Halpander and hurried out after them. He didn’t care if his exit had sounded convincing. By the look of things, points like that were going to be distinctly moot soon.
“On behalf of the departed—” Simova began. He had belatedly remembered that he was here because he had supposedly joined the Phrax entourage as they flew in. He was wondering when Arbiter Calpurnia was going to get things back onto an even keel so that he could begin his arguments. Then Krovedd pushed past him and walked forward level with the carriage.
“Let’s neither of us fool ourselves, Arbitor Calpurnia. One heir refuses to claim, the other won’t last another day barring the hand of the Emperor Himself touching him. If the charter passes to this Petronas there’ll be another hearing soon and, if there’s no line, then I think—” but she was interrupted by a scream from the carriage.
“Rogue Trader Petronas!” the thrashing thing howled. The violence of its movements tore its skin in half a dozen places and fluid stained the grey of the coverlet and the white of the cushions. “Even better! What a time! What timing! Mother, are you listening? Pay close attention, be proud! Rogue Trader Phrax knows no laws, we all learned that, didn’t we! Goes where he wants, does the rogue trader! No more sneaking, then!” It snapped upright and suddenly its mummified face was staring point-blank into D’Leste’s. His scream cut off as Petronas’ split and bleeding hand gripped his neck with terrible, feverish strength.
“Rogue Trader Petronas’ first order!” the thing screamed into his face, and D’Leste felt something warm splash out of its throat onto his skin. Something bounced off his lip and onto the bed: a tooth. “First order is avenging! First order is justice for mother-killers! First order is…”
Petronas stopped. For a moment he had felt wonderful. There had been terrible pain in his hand, but he had felt his fingers sinking into something and his blurred, doubling, tripling vision had shown him the doctor who had done all this, the doctor who had stood over the bed, the doctor, the doctor was dead.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 21