‘Perhaps you’d best take a look yourself, Mister N.’
It wasn’t a hard scenario to picture, I thought, as I pulled myself up to the edge of the hatch with two of Skosse’s crew boosting my feet. A work detail had some little task or other to do, splitting up, falling behind schedule, getting careless about checking everyone back in before they sealed the conduit behind them. And someone was still stuck on the wrong side of that hatch when the pulse came roaring down it.
The rest I knew from the little report docket Mowle had been waving at me. The final moments of whoever had died in there had been noticed, or rather, the infinitesimal buzz of interference in the plasma containment field had. Just a microsecond-long itch in the conduit’s magnetised gullet but it had been enough for the pulse to cut out before something could go really wrong. The ship had routed around it, and the helm officer had sent an angry message to the enginarium wanting to know why one of their attitude ports was dead. The enginseers had sent a retort that it wasn’t any of their doing. A service crew had been dispatched as soon as one could be formed. And they had found…
‘Ooough.’
Like I said, not my first encounter with a dead crewmate, but definitely the closest. My head popped up through the hatch and my nose was bare centimetres from, well, where the other nose would once have been. Almost kissing distance, if the heat hadn’t peeled the lips back from the mouth and then scorched them away. The eye sockets were empty, the jawbone hanging crooked. A sneer? A scream? Both thoughts were ridiculous, but there would be sleepless nights to come when I found myself staring into that heat-blasted wreck of a face after I closed my eyes.
‘Not the prettiest he’s ever looked, hey?’ Skosse observed as I lowered myself out of my chin-up and his crew crouched again to set me on the floor. I shook my head. ‘There’ll be a bit of work here. He’s right down in the cables and vanework. There’ll be fragments, that powdery ash is going to be a bastard to clean out. You’ll be wanting to pass that on to them yourself, I’m thinking?’ A little tilt of his head acknowledged the Adeptus Mechanicus delegation who’d been silently watching us from a dozen metres down the accessway. I sighed.
‘Alright, Skosse. You get the poor soul down, and I’ll go and speak with our learned colleague.’ I stepped away and then stopped as something that had been nagging at me came into focus.
‘Why “he”, Skosse? How do you know it was a he?’
He looked back at me. The brass visor grafted to his face took away a lot of his expressions but I got the impression of mild surprise.
‘Big head, Mister N.’ He spread a hand so the finger and thumb spanned his forehead from temple to temple, then tapped the visor. The three green eyelights inside it didn’t blink. ‘If I concentrate on something for a few seconds it brings up an overlay and shows me all the measurements. Fifty-eight centimetres. Seemed too big to be a lady’s head.’
‘It does that? I never knew it did that. Live and learn.’
‘Or not, I suppose, sir, for one of us present.’
‘I suppose not. Alright, Skosse, fetch him down while I go and speak to the enginseer.’
‘Non-optimal and disrespectful.’
The deckhands had managed to drag out most of the, well, the lumps, and rake a little drift of ash down through the hatch. Nothing was connected to anything else. The skull lay on its side, staring past my ankles; a scatter of leg bones lay in among the dirty grey powder. A couple of cinders near Skosse’s foot might have been fingers? Maybe? I was hoping not to have to find out.
‘I infer that the conduit remains contaminated,’ the voice went on. ‘There is no possibility that it can be otherwise given the elapsed time and the nature of the workers.’
Here was something creepy: I knew for a fact that there were six enginseers in the Barrekat’s enginarium coven. None of them looked remotely like one another, but every one of them used the same synthesised voice, sing-song but totally affectless. A few of us had wondered about that over our cups in the refectory after a late shift. Was it some form of Machine Cult devotion whose meaning we didn’t grasp? Was it their idea of playfulness? Were the six ’seers we were used to seeing even real, or were they just puppets for one of the reclusive inner coven of magi whom only the captain ever spoke directly with? Or was that their idea of playfulness, to trick us into thinking that?
Still, really, there was only one thing someone like me needed to know: how to be polite to them.
‘I submit that my crew have performed commendably, Enginseer Tzucha.’ I glanced over to Skosse, who caught it, nodded and made a quiet little brushing gesture with one hand. ‘They have removed the better part of the remains with admirable haste. But to restore the conduit to pristine condition is beyond our humble capacities. Your priesthood made it, and by the nature of the thing it will take your priesthood to restore it.’ Too late, it occurred to me that ‘disrespectful’ might have been referring to regular crew being in the conduit at all, rather than just not cleaning it out well enough.
‘There’s ashes still in there right down in the cables and vanework,’ I said, pushing on, stealing Skosse’s phrase. ‘The corpse was pushed down into them after it was dragged up there. The fine cleaning of the machinery and the remediation of any disturbance is the proper domain of your priesthood, not my crew.’
‘I question your analysis,’ Tzucha said, moving towards the burned remains. I did a hurried shuffle to stay level with him before the trio of servitors following behind him could tread on my heels with their brushed-steel boots. ‘We posit that the damage was caused by the now-deceased attempting to push down to the conduit wall in the hope that being outside the repulsant radius would allow the possibility of survival.’ A jointed metal rod slowly extended from under Tzucha’s hood and swivelled about until it was regarding me with a bright blue eyelight mounted on the tip. ‘You will have observed that this was not a valid expectation. Even from a position outside the magnetic corridor, the radiant heat would have been instantly fatal upon the pulse’s approach.’
‘I understand and welcome your correction, enginseer,’ I said, reaching for the cloyingly polite tones I used for my annual audience with the ship’s comptroller. ‘But without wishing to overstep my place, I respectfully suggest that your dataset may not be complete, and seek leave to add some relevant facts to it.’
A second metal finger peeked out from under the hood. The eye on this one was purple.
‘The victim could not have been trying to climb down to the conduit wall,’ I went on, ‘because the conduits were all flushed an hour before we broke warp, as per regulation. The interior was hard vacuum, and the deceased had no breather or vac-hood. If he had, they would have melted onto him, or left some other trace. And even discounting that…’
I walked past Tzucha and stood over the skull, pointing at the centre of its forehead.
‘…this man was shot in the head before his corpse was pushed up through that hatch and down into your conduit. Whatever he spent his last moments doing, it did not include a futile scrabble for shelter among your fragile repulsion machines. The disturbance of your sacred artifices is a shame, enginseer, but if you want an apology you’ll have to ask whoever it was who shot him.’
Skosse went into a coughing fit that I was absolutely sure was cover for a chuckle, and Tzucha’s two finger-eyes moved apart, then together again, then apart, then retracted under the hood and disappeared.
‘And who did shoot him?’ the enginseer finally asked.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Well. As to that…’
‘Nobody cares who shot him.’
Deputy Assistant Senior Steward Yebrett was the highest authority on the ship that someone like me would ever get to speak to face to face. If by ‘face to face’ you meant me talking to the side of his head while he scooped starch dumplings and gravy into his mouth, and by ‘speak’ you meant him cutting me off halfway through every sentence I tried to utter.
‘Sir, if you’ll allow me–’
‘I want to make sure you know–’
‘And now you’re wasting my time.’ He managed to spare a quick glance more or less in my direction before another ladleful of steaming dumplings arrived at his lips. ‘I’m a busy man, Noverin. We all knew that this ship would slam into its highest gear once we were before the Visage, and here we are, and here you are with your head full of trivia.’ He gulped, licked his lips and pressed a napkin over his mouth and chin. I waited.
‘You’re still here,’ he said eventually, his words a little muffled by the soft folds of linen. I bobbed my head a little so he wouldn’t hear me sigh.
The here was the ready room above the Long Lounge, deep in the Barrekat’s belly. The lounge was the admin and logistical hub for all the lower foredecks, and had got its name the same way ogryns get nicknames like ‘Tiny’ – not a lot of lounging got done there. Even with the door closed behind me I could still hear the bedlam of the ship’s clerks and ordinates shouting over one another to get orders processed and messages out. I didn’t think I’d ever heard it as crazy as that.
‘This is the first food to pass my lips in nine hours, Noverin,’ he went on. ‘The first time I’ve taken my weight off my feet in, oh, call it at least seven.’
‘At least seven it is, deputy assistant senior steward,’ I said. Yebrett narrowed his eyes and dropped the ladle into the bowl.
‘Notice anything on your way in here?’ he asked me. ‘Did the Long Lounge seem a little busier than usual to you?’
‘Since you ask, Mister Ye–’
‘How long until the shutters go up, Mister Noverin?’ Yebrett finally deigned to swivel his deep-set little brown eyes and his long disapproving nose around in my direction.
‘Six hours? And a half?’ I squinted at the shift clock on the far wall. The centre of the dial was an embossed image of the Golden Throne, the hour marker a little model of the Barrekat that orbited it once per shipboard day. Oh. ‘Four hours.’
‘Four hours, sir. And in that four hours our shift has to iron out the hauler snarl-up that has over fifty crates backed up at the freight shafts. Which we have not yet managed to do.’
‘Yes, Mister–’
‘And make sure both the refectory kitchens have the crew service out of the way and are ready to feed thousands of pilgrims churning through the port galleries, which I do not believe they are.’
‘I understand, sir–’
‘And make sure the shipwardens and ratings are all formed up for crowd control the way we drilled them. Which I am not convinced that they are.’
‘Well…’
‘Which I had you listed as helping to organise, Mister Noverin. Which you are not doing, because you are still here. Still bothering me with a matter beneath both of our notices.’ He looked longingly at his dish again. There was still some savoury steam rising from it. I didn’t get to see food that fancy on my own plate except at Candlemas and the captain’s birthday. Certainly not brought to me at my own table. ‘Am I really going to have you ruining both my schedule and my dinner every time some nameless indentured deck-grub pops a cobbled-together laslock into someone’s face over a jug of rotgut or a dice game?’
I held my tongue and stared at the dish along with him. Finally, Yebrett sighed, loaded up an extra-large ladleful of dumplings and bent down to slurp them up. I spoke as quick and clear as I could while he was bulge-cheeked and chewing and couldn’t interrupt me.
‘The weapon wasn’t some gimcrack job from the swelter-decks. The traces Tzucha found in the skull were from a frangible ceramic round that only the shipwardens’ guns can fire. But the killer wasn’t a shipwarden, because all the wardens are accounted for, because of the crowd control deployment you were just accusing me of not paying any attention to. And the victim’s not a menial because all the rating decks were locked down under the warp-transition census and none of the work crews are missing anyone.’
Yebrett was glaring at me as his mouth worked and starting to make mnff mnfff noises through his food – I was running out of time. I produced the yellow message flimsy from my sleeve and held it up so he could see what it was, although not so close he could read it for himself.
‘We do, however, have one reported disappearance whose timing is tenably linked to the corpse in the conduit. As such I seek permission to enter the forward premier decks to make enquiries…’
‘Mnff!’ Yebrett was shaking his ladle at me. I took a step back to avoid any flying droplets of gravy.
‘…about the missing esholi.’
‘What…’ Yebrett coughed, gulped, and glared at me. ‘What the blazes is an esholi?’
‘Well, I am one, for a start.’ It sounded like the sort of answer that should have been accompanied by a smile, but the girl’s expression didn’t change from the look of melancholy concentration she had been wearing since she had shown me into the library.
I hadn’t known the Barrekat Faltornae even had a library, but by this point I was honestly a little numb to new wonders. I lived in the mid-decks and spent a lot of my working time down in the menial sections and the swelters. Living on a deck where you had to stretch your hand right up to touch the deckhead could lead you to think you were pretty fancy, until you pinned a pass to your collar and came up here.
There were gardens up here: actual gardens under rotunda domes decorated with frescoes of the saints and primarchs, with galleries – sometimes two or three of them! – swooping around overhead. The staterooms opened into companionways broad enough for a dozen people to walk abreast, some of them two levels high with balconies so that the nobles and dignitaries in their suites, their whole apartments, could step out and watch me walking underneath them. The central spine of the primary deck was a soaring colonnade that ran the Barrekat’s entire length, whose arched exterior windows reached up a dozen metres over my head. They were still filled with the featureless grey-brown of the shutters, but the crowds were already jostling in front of them, haggling over their assigned spots, fidgeting as they watched the time tick down. Three hours to go, now, until they opened the windows and let us look at the Visage.
Three hours. I was supposed to be back down in my own decks by then, back at work and then straight to sleep shift. I had found myself wondering if there was going to be any way I could linger up here long enough to see her for myself.
I suddenly remembered I was in a conversation.
‘I do apologise, mamzel. The occasion is overwhelming my manners. May I ask you to repeat yourself?’
‘Or I was,’ she said, ‘until just before this voyage.’
She had a quiet voice and lovely, strong-boned features. The artisans who maintained the devotional murals in the crew chapels would be able to capture her in half a dozen smooth, confident brushstrokes. Her accent was one I had heard before, one I associated with bright silk robes of blue and green…
‘You’re from Hagia?’ She nodded and her expression grew slightly less haunted, although she didn’t meet my eyes. ‘Some bad fighting there, I heard. Saint bless you for escaping it.’
‘She did.’ And that was that, going by her tone, so I squared my shoulders and got back to the point.
‘Did you know an Esholi Brillin? Was he posted with you here?’
‘The name isn’t familiar, I’m sorry.’
‘But an esholi is a librarian? A scribe?’
‘A scholar. We spend…’ She blinked hard and shook her head. ‘The esholi spend their lives immersed in study. In every field of knowledge in the Emperor’s light. We learn so that we can teach and guide, until something in our learning calls us to… to a different way.’
Whatever event had ended this girl’s days as an esholi, it was clearly not that long ago, and it had not been kind. I decided I didn’t want to press for details.
‘Esholi Brill
in.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t know him. I know there are a number of Hagians aboard, but we don’t all know one another. When the chance to travel out to the Visage came around, a lot of us took it. Our world has been scarred by the Archenemy. When we heard this ship was taking the faithful to see the Visage it seemed like a grace offered from the Throne itself.’
I remembered some of the petty officers gloating about the Ecclesiarchal charter in terms rather less pious and more financial, but it didn’t seem tactful to mention that.
‘If the esholi are scholars,’ I asked instead, ‘then where do you think Brillin might have been if not here in the library? As an– as a former esholi yourself, can you tell me where on the ship he might gravitate to?’
‘Something’s happened.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘If he’d just wandered off and found himself in the wrong compartment then why not just wait until he turned up again? It’s not as if there’s anywhere he could go. If you were truly concerned you could ask for him over the casters and wait for him to present himself. Not come around asking questions about where an esholi might go.’
‘Very good, Mamzel…’ I glanced at my slate. ‘…Sanian. So. Where might an esholi go?’
‘No esholi came through here. MOVE THAT NOW.’
Overseer Quan had quite the pair of lungs on her. It wasn’t just me who flinched when she boomed out that order: the nearest deckhands did too, and they worked for her all the time.
‘You’re sure?’ I asked. I was trying to be as tactful as I could in case she turned that sledgehammer of a voice on me next.
‘Yes. There are a few sorts of devotees who dress pretty similarly. He would have been wearing these off-white sort of robes and a mantle, cut out to about here, maybe with a grey or black clasp along here. Head would have been shaved except for a– WHY is it taking three of you to lift that by HAND?’
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