Penitent

by Dan Abnett

  Sometimes, I wondered if the curious text, handwritten in the common­place book, the one mentioned by the late Mam Tontelle, was some glyphic representation of Enuncia, though it did not resemble any other written traces of that language known to us. I wondered if it was an encrypted form of Enuncia, and if it in fact hid, within itself, that singular, authentic name of the Imperial Majesty.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Eisenhorn asked me.

  ‘Idle thoughts,’ I replied.

  ‘No room for those,’ he said. ‘Whoever used Mam Tontelle so cruelly was a psyker, or had a psyker in their employ. We–’

  ‘What about Ravenor?’ I asked. ‘You said he was a psyker of near-unmatched power, and he hunts for you.’

  ‘Not him,’ he said.

  ‘Not to draw you out? He has Chase’s commonplace book now. He knows the details enough to use them. He–’

  ‘You think that was a trick, then?’ he asked. ‘An attempt to lure me out?’

  ‘Could it not have been?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Such scheming is beneath him. I know him well.’

  ‘Do you really, though?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He was my pupil.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, for there was nothing more I could say to that.

  ‘Gideon knows to stay out of my way and leave me alone,’ he said. ‘For if our paths cross, that will be the end. He is sworn to burn me, and I will not submit. If he chose… when he chooses… to move against me, it will be direct and bloody. It will not involve games and tricks.’

  ‘Good to know,’ I said.

  ‘If the graels were sent to stop Mam Tontelle delivering her message,’ I added as an afterthought, ‘it suggests the message was of genuine import. That it was not a trick to beguile us, but a true thing they didn’t want us to hear.’

  ‘Or anyone to hear,’ he replied.

  ‘But the message was for us,’ I said, smiling. ‘You said so.’

  ‘Violetta! Daesum! Hurry along!’ Crookley called to us, laughing the while. ‘We’re there!’

  We had arrived at the Two Gogs.

  CHAPTER 5

  Which is of numbers

  The Two Gogs was a drinking hall two streets from the salon, a shabby corner building at the bend of Feygate Road where it became Little Heckaty Street. Perhaps you have passed it, if you have paid a visit to Queen Mab?

  More properly The Yagoch and Magoch, it is named after the mythic daemon giants who sundered the primordial void and split materium from immaterium, and its doorway is overmounted by two figures of carved fepen wood, portraits of the twin brutes entwined and roaring. These figures, something of a local landmark, are repainted regularly to protect the ageing wood from the elements, though evidently this is done with whatever surplus paint is to hand at the time. That night, they were, for the most part, a lurid green, familiar from infirmary wards, their limbs and beaks the stale blue of barge-hull undercoat, and their talons, teeth and buckled chainmail a caustic yellow. In truth, I cannot think of anything that would ever be painted that colour for there to be any paint left over.

  Perhaps a madman king?

  They had held weapons once, to beat each other with, or at least something raised in their hands, but these objects are long gone to decay and vandalism. Yagoch clutched a wreath of dead flowers stolen from some city cenotaph, and Magoch held up a battered hat that had probably been tossed there for sport. It looked as though he was welcoming us in with a strenuous wave of his cap.

  We entered. The place was not busy, and smelled strongly of spilled ale and unbathed bodies. Oztin Crookley, who clearly loved to be the centre of all things, loudly hailed the staff in overfamiliar terms, and roused them to bring refreshment for all those in his train.

  We took tables, and conversations begun in the street became louder and more animated. As at Lengmur’s salon, I took a moment to mark the room. At a side bar, I saw a large man flirting with two waiting staff. His back was turned, but I knew it was Harlon Nayl. He was in place already, and I knew he knew we had come in.

  My attention turned to the rest of the party, Crookley’s ‘gang’, an ill-assorted bunch of almost twenty, who evidently hung around him like a fan club retinue, delighting in his every word and basking in the tarnished glory of his celebrity. I do not know what he was more famous for, his verse, some of which, I admit, was very fine, or his scandalous reputation for debauchery, bedding anything that moved, consorting with dubious types, and proclaiming himself a master – a magus, no less – of occult practice.

  He was no disciple of Chaos, though he prided himself on his wicked reputation as a charismatic rake. He was nearing his dotage by then, overweight, alcoholic, his mind and health ruined by decades of substance abuse. He seemed to me a man determined to prove he still had potency in all things, when those things in actuality had long since decayed. He clung to the idea of what he used to be, intent on never letting go.

  In this, I am ashamed to say, he reminded me of Eisenhorn.

  As to the others, most were of no consequence: sycophants and hangers-on, or merely dypsomaniac chancers who knew from experience that if Crookley was around, the drink would flow.

  But some were of interest. Aulay, the ink-stained engraver, was a quiet soul, whose work had made him very famous. His attire showed that his career had rendered him prosperous, but his hands shook, and it was clear he was a hopeless lush. His role was as Crookley’s partner in crime, a duty he undertook with reasonable patience. I think Crookley kept him around because he liked to be seen in the company of famous men, but also because Aulay was boundlessly wealthy and could underwrite most evenings out of his own pocket. For Aulay’s part, I think he simply disliked drinking alone.

  Then there was Timurlin, who was – for he told everyone several times – ‘the’ Connort Timurlin, a concert clavierist of great merit. He played the edge of the table like the keys of his instrument. He was a young man, the very same young man, I realised, in pinstriped suit and over-robe I had seen in altercation with the woman in the rust-coloured gown at Lengmur’s.

  Near him sat Mam Matichek, a tutor and linguist from the Academy Hecula. She was a stern, vulpine woman, who had once been a great beauty, and retained a haunted glamour in her declining years. Whether by choice or a lack of income, she had never elected for juvenat work. I took her to be at least sixty years old, and her expressive face wore its lines well, like a diagram of her excessive youthful beauty. Nor did she colour her hair, but left it – in a long bob – the colour of first frost on dead winter grass. She dressed in black crepe and lace gloves, and lacked a smile of any kind. She smoked lho-sticks in a silver pinch-holder, and was prone to correcting, without warning, the grammar of those around her. When Crookley held forth on the initiatic path that had led him to the level of magus – apparently a long and penitential pilgrimage into the Crimson Desert, where the daemon simurghs of the Herrat came to him and bestowed the gifts of nekuomanteia, pharmaka, mageia and goteia – Mam Matichek chided him that the simurghs should use ­Eleniki terms rather than Enmabic words, and wondered too why they mixed this with the Chaldean term makus – for magus – and, further to this, puzzled that the entities of the warp should be so fluent in the dead languages of Terra, languages that were dust before even Old Night.

  ‘Did they not have languages of their own, these daemons?’ she asked.

  ‘They did, mam!’ Crookley laughed. ‘But not any I knew! Nor had they the inclination to teach me, nor I the mouth to speak them!’

  ‘So, Oztin,’ she remarked, ‘you were fluent in Eleniki and Old Chaldean before you went into the desert?’

  ‘Oh, dearest Aelsa,’ Crookley cried out, amused, ‘do you not like a good story?’

  ‘I delight in them, sir,’ she replied. ‘I just wonder why Sancour is such a reef of shipwrecks. It seems to me that more debris, more pieces of old, ol
d Terra, wash up here and mingle all together than in any other corner of the great Imperium. It is as though we are the high water mark, and the Current of Time sweeps all the litter of the past in and heaps it here for us to pick at.’

  And, of course, there was Fredrik Dance, the object of our interest. He spoke very little, no matter the rowdy talk around him, and seemed at ease in his own thoughts, provided there was a drink in his grip. The elderly man with the spider-long limbs sat at his side. This, as we had learned, was Lynel Unvence, a senior clerk with the Helican Shipping Line. I did not know that existed still, or that anything was ever shipped anywhere.

  In the salon, though they had sat side by side at the bar, they had not acknowledged each other, but in the Two Gogs there was some kind of relationship, even if it didn’t match what Crookley had described as ‘friends’. Unvence made sure Dance was supplied with drinks, and even seemed to be listening to him, though I never saw Dance speak at all. Sometimes, Unvence adjusted his silver pince-nez, and scribbled something in his notebook, quite as though Dance had said something worth noting.

  Interesting.+

  Eisenhorn hissed into my mind on the most confidential level of psykana. I raised my eyebrows.

  This Unvence. Now I understand it. He’s a psyker. Low level, and of a very specific type.+

  ‘Really?’ I whispered, raising my chipped glass of joiliq to hide my response.

  Type D-theta-D, as the Ordos notate it on the standard Gaumonic Scale. Passive and singular.+

  ‘Like one of Mam Matichek’s grammatical rules?’ I murmured.

  No. It means he can read, but not send. And specifically from only one mind at a time. It’s rare. Very limited. He can’t hear me now, for example, nor the minds of any others around. His focus is entirely on Dance. He’s listening to his mind. Reading it. The relationship is odd, almost symbiotic. Unvence is Dance’s eyes and mouth. He… writes down what Dance is thinking, like a stenographist. It would not surprise me to learn that Unvence wrote the mad book of stars for Dance, taking dictation.+

  ‘And what is the blind astronomer thinking now?’ I asked very quietly.

  I can’t say. Unvence is so locked to Dance’s mind, it’s closed. A private conversation. That’s strong for a D-theta-D. It suggests a long familiarity, almost a dependence.+

  ‘Well,’ I whispered, ‘let’s find out what they’re saying.’

  Eisenhorn looked at me sharply.

  ‘I hear you work in shipping,’ I said, leaning forward to Unvence. Down the table, most of the party were hanging on the details of Crookley’s latest smutty tale, which he had stood up to deliver.

  ‘I do, mam,’ Unvence replied. ‘It is dull work, I’m sure a fine young lady like you would find it very tedious to relate.’

  ‘I find shiftships most exhilarating,’ I replied. ‘To go beyond this world, to reach other stars…’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘my work is mainly in manifests, for cargo, you see. It is just pen-pushing. I have never left Sancour myself, though I have seen shiftships in the docks and at high anchor.’

  ‘They must be very splendid things,’ I said.

  ‘You are the lady who spoke,’ said Fredrik Dance suddenly. He cocked his head my way, though his eyes remained as unseeing as ever. ‘You spoke to Mam Tontelle during her voicing.’

  ‘I did,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I know your voice. She’s dead, I hear. Just dropped dead.’

  ‘Sadly true, sir,’ I said.

  ‘She hooked you with a number,’ said Dance. ‘One-one-nine. One hundred and nineteen. An interesting number. I thought that at the time. A natural number, of course, semiprime, surprisingly large totient. The sum of five consecutive primes.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Seventeen plus nineteen plus twenty-three plus twenty-nine plus thirty-one. It is the fourth number in the Shepralon Sequence, and the smallest composite number that is one less than a factorial. It–’

  ‘Oh, hush now, Freddy,’ said Unvence, placing a caring hand over Dance’s wrist. But Freddy Dance was in the mood to talk.

  ‘One hundred and nineteen is the order of the largest cyclic subgroup in the Benchian Master Group,’ he went on, ‘and also the midpoint in the Leukamiss Scale. It is the number of stars in the constellation Antiko, and the angle, in degrees, of Sycax at Midwinter sunrise. It is the number of steps in the tower of Saint Zoroast, and the number of rail posts on the western side of the Parnassos Bridge. It was the tail number of the Thunderbolt flown at Iprus Defile by Commander Dorian Cazlo, during the Fifth Orphaeonic. His wingman, Vieve Laratt, made one hundred and nineteen kills during that campaign. It is the number given to Phantasmagor in Clinides’ ­Bestiarie Of All Daemonkind. It is the age your aunt would have reached, had she seen another birthday. Is she dead?’

  ‘My aunt?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Mam Tontelle.’

  ‘She is, I’m afraid.’

  ‘“L” and “C”… those were the letters that followed. I wonder–’

  ‘I wonder too, sir,’ I said. ‘You are a man of numbers. How might you employ one-one-nine as a key in, say, a written cipher?’

  CHAPTER 6

  A private matter

  A great storm rolled down onto Queen Mab during the week that followed, a beast that lumbered in from the mountains, and whipped at the city for days with its gales, rattling the shutters and making the weather­vanes spin. We kept to ourselves at the house called Bifrost, which had become our lair, of sorts. Eisenhorn and I had parted company with Crookley’s coterie that night at the Two Gogs on good terms, with a promise to revisit, and I had established a bond with Freddy Dance. He seemed intrigued by the problem of a cipher key, and promised to think about it if I cared to return and visit him. Unvence seemed wary, but admitted it would do his friend good to have a puzzle to occupy his mind. Despite the gales, Eisenhorn set Nayl and Deathrow the task of surveilling Dance, to learn his habits and frequencies. They were not to let him out of their sight.

  Bifrost stood in the Talltown district, west of Feygate, its fine mansions and hab blocks degraded by the fumes of the Farek Tang manufactories nearby. The house was a fine place of great size with room enough for a roof dock to house Medea’s gun-cutter. I think it had once been a habitation block for many families. Entire floors of it, at one time fine apartments, stood empty. Nayl had made the place secure with extensive autodefences, and Eisenhorn had warded it inside and out with protective hypersigils. I felt safe there, as safe as anywhere.

  But it was not a friendly place. It was spare and serviceable, and lacked personality. It was never a home. It felt like a hotel, which we might vacate at short notice and without regret. Eisenhorn, I guessed, never made a home anywhere for long, and was always ready to cut his losses and run.

  I thought, as I waited out the storm in Bifrost’s cheerless interior, of Mam Matichek and her comment about Sancour being like a junk room of Old Terra, an attic where such a curious melange of oddments had wound up. I had no experience of worlds beyond Sancour, but both Medea and Eisenhorn had separately remarked on this quality. There were remarkable survivals here, all thrown together, both as word memory and physical artefact, so much of Old Earth and mankind’s beginning, as if Sancour was a drain around which human culture’s dirt had circled and lodged. I knew that Bifrost was a name from ancient Terran myth, the Yggscandik legends, and referred to a bridge between realms, a bridge that spanned the void between the material world and a divine kingdom. This struck me as odd, for it described the very thing we were seeking. I wondered if Bifrost might, of all strange coincidences, be a door or a bridge to the City of Dust. I looked to find out, but was quickly disappointed. As with all things in Queen Mab, including me, nothing matched its name. The truth was writ in flaking paint across the loading dock behind the house: ‘Bi[ochemical] Fr[aternity] O[f] S[outh] T[alltown]’. The name was made from
the letters left visible on the wall.

  ‘How will you test Mr Dance’s key, if he makes one for you?’ Medea asked me. She had just brought me caffeine and sweet, baked rodas for breakfast. She was wearing a simple white shift and trousers, but her hands were as ever clad in red gloves. There was a smudge of powdered sugar on the dark skin of her cheek. Rain rippled down the tall windows, making the light shift as though we were behind a waterfall. It was very early, still dark, three days after the night at Lengmur’s and the Two Gogs. I was not sleeping long or well, because of the dark, oozing dreams.

  I showed her, opening a notebook I had purchased the day before.

  ‘You wrote this from memory?’ she asked as she read.

  I had. My memory is good, if not quite the eidetic skill of old Mentor Murlees at the Maze Undue, but he had taught me tricks of recollection and recomposition. I had studied the commonplace book extensively while it had been in my possession, and had managed to reproduce a fair copy of the first few pages, though I did not know any of the characters I was making. I had shown them to Eisenhorn, thinking that perhaps he might recognise them. They seemed, in part, to be numeric, and I fancied they might relate to binaric, the data-cant used by the mysterious Adeptus Mechanicus, but Eisenhorn assured me they ­resembled no binaric script he had ever seen, nor any language he knew of.

  ‘I’ll show these to Mr Dance,’ I said, ‘and see if he can make sense of them.’

  Medea pursed her lips and nodded.

  ‘And if he can?’ she asked. ‘If he devises a key that works? Will you write out the rest from memory?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘That’s beyond my skills. This is all I can manage.’

  ‘So then?’

  ‘So then if he can decrypt them, we’ll need the original.’