The Magos

by Dan Abnett

  ‘There’s been killing, you know?’ the driver mentioned, conversationally.

  ‘I had heard something to that effect.’

  The driver nodded. Tiny threads of static were playing across his knuckles as he nudged the wheel.

  ‘Four dead,’ he said.

  I can honestly say that I quite admired Jared Commissioner Maldar Zelwyn. What he lacked in almost everything he made up for in sheer optimism. He showed me around Jared County Town personally, and made it clear he was tremendously proud of it.

  The town straddled twelve river threads, and it seemed to be all bridges and decking and cantilevered platforms. Habs stacked up high above the steep, rain-river chutes. Water throbbed and rattled and chugged down the channels through the town on its journey from the hills to the sea. As he drove me across the New Bridge, Zelwyn proudly explained how he had seen to its construction five years earlier, for the benefit of the community. It was a large metal structure connecting the Commercia quarter to the merchantman residences, and was evidently a boon to working practices. Before the bridge, the merchants had been obliged to take taxi boats from their homes to the Commercia every day. The river it crossed was one of the largest and most powerful bisecting Jared County Town, and the New Bridge was equipped with elevating sections so it could lift to admit the passage of trade ships and other water traffic coming inshore from the coast to the warehouse docks. It was an impressive piece of engineering, lit up, as we rode across it, by the unending light-show of the Cackle. Zelwyn clearly worked hard to support and improve his community, at the back end of all creation though it was.

  We drew up on the glistening wharfs of the Commercia, and got out of the bulky land car. Zelwyn was a stocky man in his late forties with thinning hair and a heavy, bushy moustache. He took a data-slate out of his overcoat pocket.

  ‘All the victims were discovered in the Commercia district,’ he told me. ‘Here’s a plan of the locations. It seems arbitrary to me.’

  I agreed, but I didn’t say so. ‘Is there crime scene data? Forensic material?’

  ‘I’m having it processed for you,’ he replied.

  ‘And you’ve got four now?’

  ‘Two more since I sent my message,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Is there a pattern?’

  ‘Apart from the way they were killed?’ he asked, and shook his head. ‘There’s no connection between the victims, except for the area they worked in – a trolley pusher, a warehouseman, a junior mercantile clerk, and a whore. We haven’t been able to connect any variables. As far as we know, they didn’t know each other.’

  ‘But you have a theory?’ I asked him.

  He nodded. ‘The killer lives somewhere in the Commercia.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Each killing took place at a time when the New Bridge was raised. There was no crossing to the merchant district. To me, that says it must be local.’

  I nodded. ‘But just a regular killer, surely? Not an ordo matter?’

  ‘We’ve had our share of murders over the years, inquisitor,’ Zelwyn replied. ‘My office handles the cases. But this… the random mutilation, the missing ears–’

  ‘What do you think that signifies?’ I asked.

  ‘Trophy taking?’ he suggested. ‘Cults do like to take trophies, I understand. Ritual, I suppose. It smacks of ritual.’

  ‘I reckon it might.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought so,’ said Zelwyn.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be here otherwise.’

  The Cackle grew more fierce as night pushed in. When we left the Commercia, rain was beginning to fall, and sirens hooted, warning that the New Bridge was about to raise its hydraulic spans. The river was at flood tide.

  I reviewed the victims in the frosty twinkle of the town morgue. Preservation methods in Jared County were not ordo standard. The cadavers had been dumped in bulk freezer units, and came out on their gurneys caked in frost, their vulnerable tissues blackened and cold-burned.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Zelwyn, watching me work. ‘I wish… our facilities could be better.’

  ‘Forget about it,’ I replied.

  I used probes and skewers on the frigid bodies, sampling and measuring. The hacking wounds, some so deep they looked like claw marks, were especially ugly. They smiled like happily parted lips, their mouths full to the brim with frozen black ice.

  ‘Cult work, then?’ he asked, after a few minutes. ‘Have I got a cult here I need to deal with?’

  ‘No, a hunter,’ I replied.

  ‘A hunter?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Trophy taking is a hunter’s quirk – an ear, a finger, a lock of hair.’

  ‘But that’s ritual, isn’t it?’ Zelwyn asked.

  ‘Hunters have rituals too,’ I said. He looked downcast.

  ‘Not a cult thing, then?’

  ‘You sound disappointed.’

  The Jared commissioner managed a weak smile. ‘Of course not. It’s just that I’d hoped I was on the money. I wanted to impress you. If this is simply some nut-job serial, I’ve wasted your time, and I should have known better.’

  ‘Not to mention,’ I added, wickedly, ‘that if this had been cult work, I’d have dealt with it for you?’

  Zelwyn shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry to have cost you a journey, sir,’ he said.

  I felt rather ashamed of my attitude. I put down the probe, wiped frosted blood off my gloved hand, and turned to face him. ‘Look, I’ve nothing better to do. Let me help you anyway.’

  ‘You’d do that?’ he asked, rather taken aback.

  ‘Of course. Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re… you know…’

  ‘An inquisitor? Inquisitors don’t like serial killings any more than commissioners do,’ I said. ‘I have certain skills, Commissioner Zelwyn. I think I can bring this animal down.’

  He smiled. It was the warmest, most genuine thing I’d seen in years.

  I was just trundling the last corpse back into its freezer when a militia officer came into the morgue and whispered something to Zelwyn.

  He turned to look at me. I felt his pain. I mean, I actually felt it. The psyker talents that would later serve me and shape my career were still raw and unshaped in those days, but my empathetic function nevertheless resounded at his distress.

  ‘While we were busy here…’ he began.

  ‘Talk to me, Zelwyn.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘While we were fussing around here, there’s been another death.’

  ‘Is the body still in situ?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Let’s see it.’

  We had to wait for five minutes while the New Bridge lowered its spans to let us cross into the Commercia district. Zelwyn let one of his militiamen drive us. The Jared commissioner’s hands were shaking too much to be trusted.

  Corposant lit up the bridge. The sky made strange colours that twisted and turned. Rain fell. The river below us rushed along, rich in sediment, towards the distant sea.

  Lana Howey had worked the wharf for twelve years, and was a regular face at the drink-stops and taverns along the hem of the Commercia. She’d once been popular, a fast girl with good looks and impressive legs, but the work had taken its toll. In the months before her death, she had earned her income turning tricks for specialist customers, men who were more interested in what she was prepared to do rather than the way she looked.

  Now she was dead.

  Her body lay on the ground floor of a warehouse just off Commercia Main. It had been discovered by a night watchman. Slim, too slim, and wearing too much make-up, she lay naked and awkward under the over-bright portable lamps. The blood from the deep, slashing incisions had pooled under her in a slick. Her left ear was missing.

  ‘Same as the others,’ said Zelwyn, shuddering.

  ‘No,’ I said, crouching beside the body.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, she’s still–’


  I wanted to say alive, but that would have been wrong. She wasn’t alive anymore, but she was fresh, fresh compared to the freezer-burned residue Zelwyn had shown me earlier.

  ‘The hunter again?’ Zelwyn asked.

  ‘Looks like it. The ear, you notice?’

  ‘Why do you think it’s a hunter, Inquisitor Eisenhorn?’ Zelwyn asked.

  ‘The slash wounds,’ I replied. ‘You see? So deep. These are the kind of deep cuts that a hunter might administer to accelerate decomposition. A kill he doesn’t want, and which he wants to rot away quickly.’

  Zelwyn pursed his lips. ‘What are you going to do now, sir?’

  ‘I’m going to ask you and your people to get out of this place. Withdraw to a sixty-metre perimeter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t ask me that, commissioner.’

  ‘I want to stay,’ said Zelwyn.

  ‘On your own head, then. Get your people out.’

  Later on in my career, I only ever undertook auto-seances when I had a properly qualified astrotelepath to assist me. Such acts can take a toll. Back then, I was young and headstrong, and full of my own energy and will. It’s a wonder I ever survived.

  ‘Bolt the door,’ I said to Zelwyn. He obliged. His men had gone. ‘Do what I say and don’t interrupt me,’ I added.

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  He stood back, near the heavy warehouse door, watching. I knelt beside the hacked corpse and sighed.

  Outside, the Cackle sputtered and pulsed.

  ‘Lana Howey?’ I called softly.

  I felt Zelwyn open his mouth, to ask why in the name of the Throne I was talking to a dead body. I think it was about then that he finally woke up to what was going on. I sensed fear bubbling up inside him, along with a strong desire to be outside with his men after all. He’d never seen anything like this done before.

  ‘Lana Howey?’

  The warehouse air took on the glossy, cold feel of hyper-reality. The light refined in clarity, and small details became impossibly sharp. The various odours of the place: soot, rockcrete, oil, sacking, thinners and the body itself, were suddenly more concentrated, more pronounced.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ asked the late Lana Howey.

  I heard Commissioner Zelwyn groan. I felt his gnawing fear.

  ‘Lana Howey?’ I called.

  ‘Hello, mister. What’s your pleasure, then, sir?’

  ‘Lana, my name is Gregor.’

  ‘That’s a lovely name. Gregor. You’re a handsome one for sure, Gregor. What can I do for you tonight?’

  ‘Where are you, Lana Howey?’

  ‘I’m in the warehouse, with you, silly man. This is my place. Don’t you fret. It’s quiet here, discreet. You’re a regular, aren’t you? I know your face.’

  ‘You’ve never seen me before, Lana Howey. You’ll never see me again.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ she sniggered. Her chuckle was the scratchy glee of the Cackle. ‘I bet you’ll be back again for more, soon enough.’

  ‘I need you to focus, Lana Howey,’ I said.

  ‘Focus? What? Why do you keep using my name, my whole name, like that? Is that your thing, mister?’

  +Lana?+

  I felt Zelwyn fighting back an urge to throw open the door bolts and run. I really hadn’t wanted him to be here in the first place. All he could see was me kneeling beside the body. He could not see what I could see.

  An after-image of the victim had appeared to me. She was wearing a cheap, revealing dress and had taken a seat on a nearby freight trunk, one leg crossed over the other. The raised foot was swinging impatiently.

  +Lana? Can you hear me?+

  ‘How do you know my name, mister?’ the image asked, watching me.

  +Administratum files. Lana, who was it?+

  ‘Who was it that what? Come on, I’ve got punters waiting. What are you on about?’

  +Lana. Please let me see. Who did this to you?+

  ‘Who did what to me? Look, I haven’t got all night,’ she breathed. ‘Show me some money, mister.’

  I reached into my pocket and produced three crowns. The air was very cold. My breath was steaming, and so were the open wounds on the corpse in front of me. On the trunk, image Lana swung her leg.

  ‘That’ll do it,’ she said. ‘What do you want? Full service, all the stuff?’ She stood up abruptly and reached down to pull her dress off over her head. It was only then that she seemed to notice the body on the floor.

  The image stared down at it for a long time, her hands frozen in the act of bunching up her dress to drag it over and off. When she looked at me again, her eye make-up was blotted and running.

  ‘When?’ she asked.

  +Not long ago.+

  ‘Oh, Throne. What did I ever do to deserve that?’

  +Nothing. Lana, I want to know who it was. Will you show me?+

  She showed me.

  She showed me, her voice growing steadily quieter and quieter, and when she was done, she faded altogether without any protest, casting me one last, hurt look with her make-up-stained eyes.

  I took off my storm coat and laid it over the corpse.

  Outside, dawn was no more than an hour away. The rain had eased off and the Cackle had dropped in intensity. Zelwyn stood by the waiting militia transports, taking repeated draws from an old hip flask. When I walked up, he offered it to me. I took a big swallow.

  ‘Are you–?’ he began

  ‘I need a moment.’ The work had drained me, not so much sapping my will as abrading my emotions.

  ‘Can the details move in, at least?’ he asked.

  I nodded. Several militia officers and two coroners with a stretcher went into the warehouse at Zelwyn’s nod. After a few minutes, someone brought me my coat.

  I gestured to Zelwyn and walked away in the direction of the New Bridge.

  ‘It’s a good thing I stayed,’ I told him. ‘This turns out to be an ordo matter after all.’

  ‘A cult?’

  ‘No, and not a hunter either… At least it could be either of those things, but that’s not what makes it an ordo matter. We’re dealing with a regia occulta.’

  ‘Hidden way,’ he translated. Zelwyn was no fool, he had High Gothic.

  ‘That’s the literal translation. In the Ordo Malleus, it has a more specific meaning.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘A regia occulta is a pathway… A tunnel or portal, if you like, that links our reality with that of the warp.’

  ‘Is it a deliberate thing?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps. Cults and heretics do sometimes open them deliberately. But it could be a natural occurrence. Most are. The fabric of space is thin in places, you see, and sometimes there are leaks.’

  He shook his head and a sad smile appeared under his heavy moustache. ‘I don’t actually know much about the warp, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Nor should you, commissioner. It’s forbidden lore. I’m just telling you what you need to know. There is a regia occulta in Jared County Town, and it’s right here.’

  We were standing at the Commercia end of the New Bridge.

  It took Zelwyn just a few minutes to have the bridge and its feeder roads closed off and barricaded by the militia. Another hour, and it would have been teeming with traffic heading in for work.

  ‘Can you tell me why this only happens when the bridge is up?’ Zelwyn asked. ‘I mean, surely that would block a crossing?’

  ‘I’ll do better than tell you,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you.’

  We took up a position at the Commercia end; me, Zelwyn and four men from the militia armed with powerful autorifles. At my nod, the commissioner signalled to the bridge machine room on the far bank, and the operators engaged the hydraulics. Ponderously, with a dull squeal like gates opening, the massive spans began to lift.

  The Cackle fluoresced in the dawn sky over our heads. Blue ropes of fizzling corposant writhed and trickled like snakes around the iron finials of the bridge towers, and traced their way along th
e rising edges of the gigantic metal spans.

  The hydraulics cut out when the spans were at a standard lifted position, at about forty degrees from the horizontal. We waited, looking up the steep metal slope of the span facing us. Below us, out of sight, the fast-running river gurgled and hissed.

  We waited for ten minutes. Corposant gathered in increasingly heavy ribbons around the raised tips of the bridge span, as if attracted there in concentration, like lightning drawn to a conductor.

  There was a dry electric crack, and we smelled ozone. One of the militiamen pointed. A whip of corposant had flicked out from the tip of one span and connected with the tip of the other, like a squiggle of electrostatic voltage crackling between two insulated orbs. It remained there, jerking and sizzling, like a bright, twisting rope tying the two halves of the raised bridge together. This feature had not been evident in the patchy disposition Lana Howey had shown me, but I suddenly felt I had discerned the key mechanism of the infernal regia occulta.

  One of the militiamen started to say something, but I already knew ‘it’ was happening. The hairs on my neck were raised. I felt something akin to a ball of ice in my stomach, and a searing pain behind my eyes.

  The killer came into view. He simply manifested out of nowhere, as if the air had parted like a curtain and let him through. He appeared high up on the span ahead of us, and began to plod down the steep slope. He did not see us at first. We heard his feet slapping heavily on the metal roadway.

  Though humanoid, he wasn’t human. I was the largest man in our party, and he was twice my mass and half my height again. He came wrapped in a heavy, ragged cloak of animal skins with a hood drawn up. His shoulders were very broad.

  The pain behind my eyes was getting worse by the second. I could barely focus.

  ‘Kill it,’ I said.

  We opened fire: four military-grade autorifles, firing reinforced rounds with fifty per cent more grain in them than standard, Zelwyn’s lasgun, and my Tronsvasse assault pistol. The noise was stunning, and the muzzle flash a strobing flutter. The killer was dead in just a few seconds. Our firepower tore him apart and shredded his foul cloak, though he possessed such astonishing strength that he actually managed to walk into our fusilade a step or two, trying to shrug it off, before it overcame him.