by Xenos (lit)
He licked his lips with a tiny, pallid tongue and nodded. 'Since coming to Gudrun I have rooted out and burned two heretical cells. I am reasonably sure of the activities of another nine, three here in Dorsay alone. I have allowed them to fester as I observe them. For months, they have seemed bent on preparation for some event. Abruptly, a matter of weeks ago, their behaviour changed. This would have been around the same time as your confrontation on Hubris.'
'Eyclone's undertaking was also great, with extensive preparatory work. Yet, at the eleventh hour, something either went wrong or plans were suddenly changed. Though I defeated and destroyed him, his plans were really thwarted by the fact that the Pontius didn't arrive. What has your work revealed of House Glaw?'
'I have visited them twice in three months. On both occasions, they have made every effort to answer my questions, allowing me to search the estate and their records. I have found nothing.'
'I fear, perhaps, that is because they knew they were dealing with an inquisitor. Tomorrow, Sire Farchaval has a trade meeting with the Glaws at their estate.'
He mused on this. The Inquisition has a duty to stand together, firmly, against the arch-enemies of mankind. In the spirit of co-operation, I will wait and see what your dubious methods reveal. Precious little, I imagine.'
'In the spirit of co-operation, Voke, I will share all I learn with you.'
'You will do better than that. The Glaws know me, but not all of my students. Heldane will go with you.'
'I don't think so.'
1 insist. I will not have years of work ruined by another agency such as yourself running rough-shod through the matter. I require my own observer on the ground, or my co-operation will not be extended.'
He had me in a vice and he knew it. To refuse outright would simply confirm my radical, careless approach in his eyes. And I had no wish to draw battlelines against another of the Inquisition, especially a man as powerful and influential as Commodus Voke.
Then he had better do exactly as I instruct him/ I said.
We left Dorsay for the Glaw estates the next afternoon at four. Dressed once more as wealthy but not ostentatious merchants, Bequin and I were accompanied by Aemos, Betancore and Heldane, Voke's man. Heldane, I was pleased to see, had made a reasonable job of adopting simple civilian
dress. He and Betancore would pose as our bodyguard and escort, and Aemos was to take the part of a gene-biologist.
Macheles, and four other luxuriously robed envoys from the Regal Bonded Merchant Guild of Sinesias, were waiting for us at the guild headquarters. An atmospheric launch had been prepared.
The launch, a burnished dart bearing the guild crest, left the landing platform of the guild building's roof, and rose smoothly into the overcast sky. It was, Macheles informed us, to be a two-hour flight. A guild envoy circulated through the richly furnished cabin with trays of refreshment.
Macheles explained our itinerary: a formal dinner with the representatives of House Glaw that evening, an overnight stay, and then a tour of the estates the following morning. After that, negotiations if both parties were still interested.
We flew west, inland, leaving the inclement coastal weather behind and passing into a sunlit landscape of rolling pasture, low hills, and maintained forests. The snaking silver line of the Dranner winked below us. There were occasional small settlements, farmsteads, a compact market town with a tall Ecclesiarchy spire. Once in a while, we saw another air vehicle in the distance.
A dark range of hills began to fill the western skyline. Evening was beginning to discolour the clouds. The region approaching the hills rose in bluffs and headlands, a more majestic and wild landscape, thickly wooded on escarpments and deep vales.
Already, Macheles boasted, we were flying over Glaw property.
The estate itself loomed out of the dimming hills some minutes later: a three-storey main house built in the neo-gothic style, dominating a bluff and staring down across the deep valley from a hundred window eyes. The limewashed stone glowed lambently in the twilight. Adjoining the main structure were substantial wings built at different times. One led to stables and other considerable stone outbuildings along the edge of the woodland, and I presumed this to be the servants' block. The other wing edged the crown of the bluff, and was dominated by a dome that shone gold in the sinking sun. The place was huge, and no doubt labyrinthine. The population of a modest town could have been accommodated within it.
The launch settled onto a wide stone yard behind the house. At the edge of the yard, in what looked like converted coach houses, three other launches were stationed in hangars with well-equipped maintenance bays.
We disembarked into the yard. The air was cold and a night breeze was bringing spots of rain with it. The wind sighed in the stands of trees beyond the house. Heavy bars of cloud laced the evening sky above the towering hills.
Servants in dark green liveries hurried out to us, taking up our luggage and raising wide, long-handled parasols to shield us from the drizzle. A number of uniformed guards from the Glaws' house retinue flanked the yard. Haughty and confident in their long emerald stormcoats and plumed silver helmets, the guards seemed like experienced veterans to my eyes.
The servants escorted us and the guild envoys into an atrium with a black and white tiled floor and a bright, silvery cast to the light. Dozens of vast crystal chandeliers hung from the high, arched roof. More guards flanked the doorways. The Glaws' militia was clearly sizeable.
"Welcome to the House of Glaw/ a woman's voice said.
She approached us, a well-made woman of good, high stock, her powdered face bearing the proud insouciance of all nobility. She wore a regal black gown, floor length and wide in the skirt and laced with a silver over-stitching, and a great twin-cusped head-dress of black mesh and pearls that tied under her chin with a wide black ribbon.
Macheles and the envoys bowed ceremoniously and the five of us made more conservative nods.
The Lady Fabrina Glaw/ announced Macheles. She approached, green-coated servants forming a human wake behind her.
'Lady' I said.
'Sire Farchaval. I am so pleased to meet you.'
She gave us a brief tour of the main house. I have seldom seen such extravagance and riches outside of an Imperial court - or Tobius Maxilla's staterooms. Lean hunting dogs trotted with us. She pointed out a number of ancient paintings, mostly oil portraits, but some exquisite hololithic works, as well as vivid psyk-pict miniatures. Her illustrious family... uncles, grandfathers, cousins, matriarchs, warlords. Here was Vernal Glaw in the dress uniform of the house militia. Here was Orchese Glaw entertaining the royal house of Sameter. Over there, Lutine and Gyves Glaw, brothers at the hunt. There great Oberon himself, in the robes of an Imperial commander, one hand resting on an antique globe of Gudrun.
The envoys made appropriate noises of admiration. Fabrina herself seemed to just be going through the motions. She was acting the hostess. We were, after all, just grain merchants. This was a duty. An obligation.
I saw Aemos making surreptitious notes. I too made careful observations, especially of the house geography. In one long hallway, the stone floor was dressed by the rather worn pelts of three carnodons, skinned, spread-eagled, their massive tusked mouths and baleful eyes frozen in attitudes of rage. Even in this sad state, the size and power of these creatures spoke for themselves.
"We hunted them, but there are few left now/ Fabrina Glaw remarked, off-hand, seeing my interest. 'Old times, long passed. Life was rather more feudal then. Today, House Glaw looks entirely to the future/
At dinner, in the massive banqueting hall, we were joined by Urisel Glaw, the commander of the house militia, and his eldest brother, Oberon, the current Lord Glaw. But the dinner was not solely in our honour. A cousin of the Glaw family and his entourage were visiting from off-world, as were several other trade delegations and a wealthy ship master called Gorgone Locke.
I was not surprised. Visiting grain traders, even ones accompanied by the prestigious Guil
d Sinesias, hardly merited a formal banquet. It was appropriate we should be honoured by our inclusion at a larger event. No doubt we were meant to be impressed.
I attended with Bequin and Aemos. There was no place for servants and bodyguards here, so Betancore and Heldane had been escorted to our suite and food provided for them there. That suited my approach fine.
There were five long tables in the hall, laden wim roast meat, fruit and countless delicacies. Attentive butlers and serving staff moved everywhere, offering platters and topping up glasses. Stern members of the house militia in green and brocade dress uniforms and polished silver helmets stood at every corner of the chamber.
We were on the third table, with a contingent of livestock merchants from Gallinate, a city on Gudrun's southern continent. Our status afforded us the company of Lady Fabrina, Captain Terronce from the household guard, and a talkative man named Kowitz, a House Glaw official responsible for buying produce.
Lord Oberon and his brother, Urisel, presided over the head table, with their visiting cousin, the ship master Locke and an elderly ecdesiarch called Dazzo. Kowitz was happy to tell me that Ecdesiarch Dazzo represented a missionary order from the sub-sector edgeworld Damask, which House Glaw was sponsoring.
In fact, it was difficult to shut Kowitz up. As the butlers refilled his cup, he rattled on, identifying the other parties of guests. House Glaw had interests on worlds throughout the sub-sector, and regular banquets such as this oiled the wheels and kept mings moving.
Eventually, I managed to hand Kowitz off to Aemos, the only man I knew capable of out-talking him. The two fell to complex discussion of the sub-sector balance of trade.
I kept a close eye on the head table. Urisel Glaw, a bloated, thick-set man in bejewelled ceremonial battledress, was giving Gorgone Locke plenty of attention. I watched Urisel closely. There was something about the man, not the least that his wide, puffy face and slick, lacquered hair made his resemblance to portraits of his infamous ancestor Pontius uncanny. He drank unstintingly, and laughed a wet, loose laugh at the ship master's jokes. His fat, powerful fingers constantly pulled at the braided collar of his uniform jacket to ease his wide neck.
Lord Oberon was a taller, leaner man with generous, cliff-like cheekbones rising above a forked goatee. The familial characteristics of the Glaw line were plain in his physiognomy, but he was more regal and distinguished, and lacked the dissolute languor of his younger sibling. Lord Glaw spent the night chatting happily with his off-world cousin, a bumptious young cretin with a whooping laugh and flamboyant courtly manners. But his real interest seemed to lie with the quiet ecdesiarch, Dazzo.
I took note of the ship master too. Gorgone Locke was a raw-boned giant with hooded, sunken eyes. He had long red hair, tied back and
beaded, and his jutting chin was peppered with silver stubble. I wondered about his ship, and his business. I would contact Maxilla and make enquiries.
The banquet lasted until past midnight. As soon as was polite, we retired to our rooms.
The Glaws had given us a suite of rooms in the west wing. Outside, the wind had got up, and was making plaintive sighs down the old chimney flues and open grates. Rain pattered against windows, and doors and shutters twitched and knocked in the drafts.
Heldane was alone in the suite's sitting room when we came back. He had several data-slates open for study on a table and looked up as we came in.
'Well?' I asked him.
He and Betancore had run sweeps of the immediate wing whilst we had been dining. He showed me the results. Most of the rooms were spy-wired with vox-thieves and a few pict-sensors, and there was a complex infrastructure of alarm systems. Heldane had set up a small jammer to blind the spy-ware in our suite.
'Comparisons/ he said, showing me an overlay of two charts on a data-slate. 'The green areas show the parts of the buildings my master gained access to during his visits.' Voke had been obliging enough to supply me with reports of his inspections.
We can overlay in red the results of the sweeps your man and I have managed to make this evening.'
There were considerable discrepancies. Voke may have opened every door he could find, but this showed me ghost areas that he had not gained access to because he hadn't known they were there.
'These are cellars?' I asked.
'Underground rooms, certainly' said Heldane. He had a soft, sickly voice that seemed to seep from his slit-like mouth. 'Adjoining the wine vaults.'
The drapes billowed in as an exterior window opened. Betancore, his hooded black bodyglove wet with rain, climbed inside. He pulled off his grip-gloves and boots, and unstrapped his equipment harness.
'What did you find?'
Dripping and cold, he took a glass of spirits Bequin brought him and showed me his scanner pad.
'The roof is lousy with alarms. I didn't dare probe too far, even with my jammers and sensors. There are rooms under the east wing that Inquisitor Voke didn't know about. A network of tunnels seems to link them to the west wing under the courtyard.'
I spent a few more minutes running through the details, and then went into my room to change.
I put on a heat-insulated bodyglove of matt-black plastic weave with a tight-fitting hood and supple gloves. Then I strapped a webbing harness around my torso and filled the integral pouches with a compact scope, a set of multi-keys, a folding knife, two spools of monofilament wire, a
tubular torch, two jamming units and a scanner pad. I secured my vox-unit's earpiece under my hood, buckled an autopistol into the rig strapped across my chest, dropped two spare clips into a thigh pouch, and finally placed my inquisitorial rosette in my hip pocket.
This was an endeavour that risked discovery. The rosette would be my joker, to be played if it became necessary.
I went back into the sitting room and laced on the grip-gloves and grip-boots that Betancore had been using.
'If I'm not back in a hour, you can start to worry,' I told them.
Outside, blackness, rain and the assault of the wind.
The outside wall of the great house was soaked and old, the limewash crumbling in places. I had to test every move I made to make sure the overlapping teeth of the grip-pads on my hands and feet were secure.
I moved along the side of the house, feeling my way, until I was able to crouch on an outcrop of guttering. I'd taped Betancore's data-slate to my left forearm for easy reference. The tiny backlit screen showed a three-dimensional model of the building, and an inertial locator built into the slate moved the map and kept my current location centred.
Over the downpour, I heard feet crunching gravel two storeys below. I clung to the bricks and tapped off the slate so that the screen glow wouldn't give me away.
Two men from the house militia huddled in foul-weather capes passed below me, lit by the windows on the ground floor. They took shelter in a doorway porch and shortly after that I saw the flash of an igniter or match. Presently, the cloying odour of obscura drifted up to me.
They were almost directly below my perch and I didn't dare move until they were gone. I waited. My joints were going numb from the cold and from the hunched position I had been forced to adopt simply to stay on the gutter.
The rain grew still heavier and the wind swished the invisible trees of the steep woods behind the house. I could hear the men chatting. An occasional laugh.
This wouldn't do. I was losing time and the feeling in my legs.
I focused, drew in a calming breath and reached out with the will.
I found their minds, two warm traces in the cold below me. They were soft and blurred, their responses undoubtedly slowed by the opiate effects of the obscura. Difficult minds to plant strong suggestions in, but vulnerable to paranoia.
I drove in with the will, toying gently with their anxieties.
Within seconds, they started from the cover of the porch, hissing animatedly at each other, and headed off at a trot across the yard.
Relieved, I moved down the wall, bracing my weight against
a jutting window ledge as I found footholds around a down-pipe bracket.
On the ground, I hugged the shadows of the west wing, and moved down the yard. Betancore's careful reconnaissance had shown up laser
trips around the gatehouse, and others that extended from the edges of the border beds to the basin of a fountain in the yard. Though I could not see them, they were precisely marked on the slate, and I simply stepped over each in turn, all except the last, which ran at waist height and which I ducked under.
My goal was the launch hangars on the far side of the rear yard. The sweeps had shown up an access point to the cellar network there. Betan-core had located others, but they were all in private areas of the house, or in staff sections such as the scullery, the cold store and the meat pantries.
The shutter doors of the launch hangars were closed, and the lights off within. I gripped my way up the outside stone, and up along the shallow tiled roof. At the summit of each hangar roof was a metal box-vent designed to expel exhaust fumes. With my folding knife, I prised a louvred metal panel away and slid into the duct, feet first.
The short metal funnel of the duct was open below me and I looked down at the top of a parked launch. A short drop and I was crouching on the back of the vehicle in the dim garage.
I got off the craft and went around behind it. A small wall-hatch led through into a servicing workshop, which then opened into a parts store. The ferrocrete floor was spotted with oil, and I had to move carefully in the dark to avoid knocking into obstructions such as lathes, tool-trolleys and dangling hoist chains.
I checked the slate. The access-way was at the rear of the parts store.
This door was taking itself much more seriously. A tamper-proof ceramite seal, a tumbler alarm and a keypad for entry-codes.
1 sighed, though I hadn't expected this to be easy. I would need to tape a jammer to the latch to avoid tripping any alarm or access signal. Then it would be a job for the scanner to search and configure a usable code. Ten minutes' work if I was lucky. Hours if not.
I pulled off my grip gloves so I could more easily manipulate the tools, and paused. An idea struck me. My mentor, the mighty Hapshant, had lacked psychic skills of his own. A dyed in the wool monodominant, Emperor love him. But he had been a firm believer in gut-instinct. He told me a servant of the Emperor could do worse than trust a flash of instinct. In his opinion, the Emperor himself placed such feelings there.