by Dan Abnett
Alizebeth shook her head. ‘They’d cleared large parts of the stable area to provide spaces for the fair stall-holders.’
I put the snooper down on the desk, and it wriggled back and forth for a few moments until it got enough purchase to right itself. ‘So nothing untoward, in fact. And certainly no significant toxins.’
‘None at all,’ said Alizebeth.
Damn. Given the description of Aen’s death, I had been quite sure poison was the key, perhaps some assassin’s sophisticated toxin that had not shown up on the initial medicae report. But Alizebeth’s snooper was high-grade and thorough.
‘What do we do now?’ she asked.
I passed her my data-slate. ‘Send the contents of this to Aemos by direct vox-link. See what he can come up with.’
Uber Aemos was my ancient and trusted savant. If anyone could see a pattern or make a connection, it was him.
Evening fell. I went outside, alone. I felt annoyed and frustrated. In fact, I felt thwarted. I’d come there as a favour to my old friend’s widow, offering my services, and in most respects I was overqualified. I was an Imperial inquisitor, and this was most likely just a job for the local Arbites. I had expected to have the entire matter sewn up in a few hours, to settle things swiftly in a quick, unofficial investigation, and leave with the thanks of the family for sparing them a long, drawn-out inquest.
But the clues just weren’t there. There was no motive, no obvious antagonist, no aggressor, but still it seemed likely that Aen Froigre had been killed. I looked at the medicae report again, hoping to find something that would establish natural causes.
Nothing. Something, someone, had taken my friend’s life, but I couldn’t tell what or who or why.
The evening skies were dark, stained a deep violet and smeared with chasing milky clouds. An early moon shone, passing behind the running trails of cloud every minute or so. A wind was gathering, and the stands of trees beside the lawn were beginning to sway and swish. The leaves made a cold sound, like rain.
I walked over to my flyer, popped the cargo trunk and took out Barbarisater. I slowly freed it from its silk bindings, and drew the long, gleaming blade from its machined scabbard. Barbarisater had been an heirloom sword, a psychically attuned weapon from the forges of distant Carthae, and slaved to the minds of the generations of warrior women who had wielded it. Enhancing its strength with pentagrammic wards, I had used the long sabre in my battle against the heretic Quixos, during which struggle it had been broken below the tip. Master swordsmiths had remade the blade from the broken main portion, creating a shorter, straighter blade by rounding off and edging the break and reducing the hilt. A good deal smaller than its old self, now more a single-handed rapier than a hand-and-a-half sabre, it was still a potent weapon.
Naked, in my hand, it hummed and whined as my mind ran through it and made it resonate. The incised wards glowed and sobbed out faint wisps of smoke. I walked across the grass under the seething trees, holding the blade before me like a dowsing rod, sweeping the scene, letting the blade-tip slide along the invisible angles of space. Twice, on my circuit of the lawns, it twitched as if tugged by sprite hands, but I could discern nothing from the locations.
But there was something there. My first hint of a malign focus. My first hint that not only was foul play involved, but that Lady Froigre might be right.
Though they had left only the slightest traces behind them, infernal powers had been at work here.
Alizebeth came into my room at eight the next morning. She woke me by sitting down on the side of my bed, and handed me a cup of hot, black caffeine as I roused.
She was already dressed and ready for work. The day was bright. I could hear the household coming to life: pans clattering in the kitchen block, and the butler calling to his pages in the nearby gallery.
‘Bad storm in the night,’ she said. ‘Brought trees down.’
‘Really?’ I grumbled, sitting up and sipping the sweet, dark caffeine. I looked at her. It wasn’t like Bequin to be so perky this early.
‘Out with it,’ I said.
She handed me a data-slate. ‘Aemos has been busy. Must’ve worked all night.’
‘Through the storm.’
‘There was no storm up his way. It was local.’ I didn’t really hear that reply. I was caught up in a close reading of the slate.
Failing to cross-match just about every detail I had sent him, Aemos had clearly become bored. The list of guests I had sent him had led to nothing, despite his best efforts to make connections. The caterers and performers had revealed nothing either. No links to the underworld or cult activity, no misdeeds or priors, except for the usual clutch of innocent and minor violations one might expect. One of the travelling actors had been charged with affray twenty years before, and another had done time for grievous wounding, that sort of thing.
The only item that had flagged any sort of connection was the description of Aen Froigre’s death. Aemos had only turned to that rather vague clue once he’d exhausted all others.
In the past twenty months, eleven people in the Drunner Region of Gudrun, which is to say the coastal area encompassing Menizerre, Dorsay and Insume all the way to Madua chapeltown, had died of a similar, mystery ailment. Only a tight, deliberate search like the one Aemos had conducted would have shown up such a connection, given the scale of the area involved and the size of population. Listed together, the deaths stood out like a sore thumb.
Here, Aemos had come into his own. Another clerk might have sent those findings to me and waited for direction, but Aemos, hungry to answer the questions himself, had pressed on, trying to make a pattern out of them. No simple task. There was nothing to demographically or geographically link the victims. A housewife here, a millkeeper there, a landowner in one small village, a community doctor in another, seventy kilometres away.
The only thing they had in common was the sudden, violent and inexplicable nature of their demises: seizures, abrupt, fatal.
I set down my cup and scrolled on, aware that Alizebeth was grinning at me.
‘Get to the last bit,’ she advised. ‘Aemos strikes again.’
Right at the last, Aemos revealed another connection.
A day or two before each death, the victim’s locality had been paid a visit by Sunsable’s Touring Fair.
Lady Froigre was most perturbed to see us about to leave.
‘There are questions here still...’ she began.
‘And I’m going to seek the answers,’ I said. ‘Trust me. I believe my savant has hit upon something.’
She nodded, unhappy. Rinton stepped forwards, and put his arm around his mother’s shoulders.
‘Trust me,’ I repeated, and walked out across the drive to my waiting flyer. I could hear the sound of chainblades, and turned from the car to walk around the side of the hall. One of the trees brought down in the night’s freak storm had crushed part of the stable block, and the housemen were working to saw up the huge trunk and clear it.
‘Is that where you detected Penshel seed?’ I asked Alizebeth when she came to find out what was keeping me.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Fetch my blade.’
I called the housemen away from their work, and walked into the collapsed ruin of the stable, crunching over heaps of coarse sawdust. The ivy-clad tree still sprawled through the burst roof.
Alizebeth brought me Barbarisater, and I drew it quickly. By then, Lady Froigre and Rinton Froigre had emerged to see what I was doing.
Barbarisater hummed in my hand, louder and more throatily than it had done the previous night. As soon as I entered that part of the stable block, the particular stall the tree had smashed, it jumped. The taste of Chaos was here.
‘What was this used for?’ I asked. ‘During the fete, what was this area used for?’
‘Storage,’ said Lady Froigre. ‘The people from the fair wanted to keep equipment and belongings out of sight. Food too, I think. One man had trays of fresh figs he wanted to keep out
of the light.’
‘And the hololithographer,’ said Rinton. ‘He used one of those stalls as a dark room.’
So how do you find a travelling fair in an area the size of the Drunner Region? If you have a copy of their most recent invoice, it’s easy. The fair-master, eager to be paid for his services at Froigre Hall, had left as a payment address an inn eighty kilometres away in Seabrud. From the invoice, I saw that Aen had been asked to mail the payment within five days. The fair moved around a great deal, and the travelling folk didn’t believe much in the concept of credit accounts.
From Seabrud, we got a fix on the location of Sunsable’s Fair.
They had pitched on a meadow outside the village of Brudmarten, a little, rustic community of ket-herds and weavers that was flanked by a lush, deciduous woodland hillside to the east and marshy, cattle-trampled fields below at the river spill to the west.
It was late afternoon on a hot, close day, the air edged with the heavy, fulminous threat of storms. The sky was dark overhead, but the corn was bright and golden in the meadows, and pollen balls blew in the breeze like thistle-fibres. Grain-crakes whooped in the corn stands, and small warblers of the most intense blue darted across the hedges.
Gabon lowered the limo to rest in a lane behind the village kirk, a pale, Low Gothic temple in need of upkeep. A noble statue of the Emperor Immaculate stood in the overgrown graveyard, a roost for wood doves. I buckled on my sword and covered it with a long leather cloak. Gabon locked the car.
‘Stay with me,’ I told Alizebeth, and then turned to Gabon. ‘Shadow us.’ ‘Yes, sir.’
We walked down the lane towards the fair.
Even from a distance, we could hear the noise and feel the energy. The arrival of the fair had brought the folk of Brudmarten and the neighbouring hamlets out in force. Pipe organs were trilling and wheezing in the dank air, and there was the pop and whizz of firecrackers. I could hear laughter, the clatter of rides, the ringing of score bells, children screaming, rowdy men carousing, pistons hissing. The smell of warm ale wafted from the tavern tent.
The gate in the meadow’s hedge had been turned into an entranceway, arched with a gaudy, hand-painted sign that declared Sunsable’s Miraculous Fair of Fairs open. A white-eyed twist at the gateway took our coins for admission.
Inside, on the meadow, all manner of bright, vulgar sights greeted us. The carousel, lit up with gas-lamps. The ring-toss. The neat, pink box-tent of the clairvoyant. The churning hoop of the whirligig, spilling out the squeals of children. The colourful shouts of the freak show barker. The burnt-sugar smell of floss makers. The clang of test-your-strength machines.
For a penny, you could ride the shoulders of a Battle Titan – actually an agricultural servitor armoured with painted sections of rusty silage hopper. For another penny, you could shoot greenskins in the las-gallery, or touch the Real and Completely Genuine shin bone of Macharius, or dunk for ploins. For tuppence, you could gaze into the Eye of Terror and have your heroism judged by a hooded man with a stutter who claimed to be an ex-Space Marine. The Eye of Terror in this case was a pit dug in the ground and filled with chemical lamps and coloured glass filters.
Nearby, a small donation allowed you to watch an oiled man struggle free from chains, or a burning sack, or a tin bathtub full of broken glass, or a set of stocks.
‘Just a penny, sir, just a penny!’ howled a man on stilts with a harlequined face as he capered past me. ‘For the young lady!’
I decided not to ask what my penny might buy.
‘I want to go look at the freak show,’ Alizebeth told me.
‘Save your money... it’s all around us,’ I growled.
We pushed on. Coloured balloons drifted away over the field into the encroaching darkness of the thunderhead. Corn crickets rasped furiously in the trampled stalks all around us. Drunken, painted faces swam at us, some lacking teeth, some with glittering augmetic eyes.
‘Over there,’ I whispered to Alizebeth.
Past the brazier stand of a woman selling paper cones of sugared nuts, and a large handcart stacked with wire cages full of songbirds, was a small booth tent of heavy red material erected at the side of a brightly painted trailer. A wooden panel raised on bunting–wrapped posts announced ‘Hololiths! Most Lifelike! Most Agreeable!’ below which a smaller notice said ‘A most delightful gift, or a souvenir of the day, captured by the magic art of a master hololithographer.’ A frail old man with tufted white hair and small spectacles was sitting outside the booth on a folding canvas chair, eating a meat pie that was so hot he had to keep blowing on it.
‘Why don’t you go and engage his interest?’ I suggested.
Alizebeth left my side, pushed through the noisy crowd and stopped by his booth. A sheet of flakboard had been erected beside the booth’s entrance, and on it were numerous hololithic pictures mounted for display: some miniatures, some landscapes, some family groups. Alizebeth studied them with feigned interest. The old man immediately leapt up off his chair, stowed the half-eaten pie behind the board and brushed the crumbs off his robes. I moved to one side, staying in the crowd, watching. I paused to examine the caged birds, though in fact I was looking through their cages at the booth tent.
The old man approached Bequin courteously.
‘Madam, good afternoon! I see your attention has been arrested by my display of work. Are they not fairly framed and well-composed?’
‘Indeed,’ she said.
‘You have a good eye, madam,’ he said, ‘for so often in these country fairs the work of the hololithographer is substandard. The composition is frequently poor and the plate quality fades with time. Not so with your humble servant. I have plied this trade of portraiture for thirty years and I fancy I have the skill for it. You see this print here? The lakeshore at Entreve?’
‘It is a pleasing scene.’
‘You are very kind, madam. It is handcoloured, like many of my frames. But this very print was made in the summer of... 329, if my memory serves. And you’ll appreciate, there is no fading, no loss of clarity, no discolouration.’
‘It has preserved itself well.’
‘It has,’ he agreed, merrily. ‘I have patented my own techniques, and I prepare the chemical compounds for the plates by hand, in my modest studio adjoining.’ He gestured to his trailer. ‘That is how I can maintain the quality and the perfect grade of the hololiths, and reproduce and print them to order with no marked loss of standard from original to duplicate. My reputation rests upon it. Up and down the byways of the land, the name Bakunin is a watchword for quality portraiture.’
Alizebeth smiled. ‘It’s most impressive, Master Bakunin. And how much...?’
‘Aha!’ he grinned. ‘I thought you might be tempted, madam, and may I say it would be a crime for your beauty to remain unrecorded! My services are most affordable.’
I moved around further, edging my way to the side of his booth until he and Alizebeth were out of sight behind the awning. I could hear him still making his pitch to her.
On the side of the trailer, further bold statements and enticements were painted in a flourishing script. A large sign read ‘Portraits two crowns, group scenes three crowns, gilded miniatures a half-crown only, offering many a striking and famous backcloth for a crown additional.’
I wandered behind the trailer. It was parked at the edge of the fairground, near to a copse of fintle and yew that screened the meadow from pastures beyond the ditch. It was damp and shaded here, small animals rustling in the thickets. I tried to look in at one small window, but it was shuttered. I touched the side of the trailer, and felt Barbarisater twitch against my hip. There was a door near the far end of the trailer. I tried it, but it was locked.
‘What’s your business?’ growled a voice.
Three burly fairground wranglers had approached along the copse-side of the booths. They had been smoking lho-sticks behind their trailer on a break.
‘Not yours,’ I assured them.
‘You had best be leaving Mast
er Bakunin’s trailer alone,’ one said. All three were built like wrestlers, their bared arms stained with crude tattoos.
I had no time for this.
‘Go away now,’ I said, pitching my will through my voice. They all blinked, not quite sure what had happened to their minds, and then simply walked away as if I wasn’t there.
I returned my attention to the door, and quickly forced the lock with my multi-key. To my surprise, the thin wooden door still refused to open. I wondered if it was bolted from inside, but as I put more weight into it, it did shift a little, enough to prove there was nothing physical holding it. Then it banged shut as if drawn by immense suction.
My pulse began to race. I could feel the sour tang of warpcraft in the air, and Barbarisater was vibrating in its scabbard. It was time to dispense with subtleties.
I paced around to the front of the booth, but there was no longer any sign of Bequin or the old man. Stooping, I went in under the entrance flap. An inner drop curtain of black cloth stopped exterior light from entering the tent.
I pushed that aside.
‘I will be with you shortly, sir,’ Bakunin called, ‘if you would give me a moment.’
‘I’m not a customer,’ I said. I looked around. The tent was quite small, and lit by the greenish glow of gas mantles that ran, I supposed, off the trailer supply. Alizebeth was sitting at the far side on a ladderback chair with a dropcloth of cream felt behind her. Bakunin was facing her, carefully adjusting his hololithic camera, a brass-and-teak machine mounted on a wooden tripod. He looked around at me curiously, his hands still polishing a brass-rimmed lens. Alizebeth rose from her seat.
‘Gregor?’ she asked.
‘The good lady is just sitting for a portrait, sir. It’s all very civilised.’ Bakunin peered at me, unsure what to make of me. He smiled and offered his hand. ‘I am Bakunin, artist and hololithographer.’
‘I am Eisenhorn, Imperial inquisitor.’
‘Oh,’ he said and took a step backwards. ‘I... I...’