Penitent

by Dan Abnett

  For my part, I knew of only three: myself, Lightburn and the angel. I had no idea how the battle had been resolved, or who had prevailed. We had kept ourselves out of sight, not even risking a return to the nameless house in Feygate. There had been no contact from Gideon or the rest of his team. The district around Stanchion House had been evacuated and cordoned. There was a heavy presence of arbitrators and city watch in the streets, and talk of another war looming.

  The cobbles of the wide courtyard gleamed wet in the trailing light. A handful of students hurried down the lamp-lit portico to find shelter from the rain. The clock above the yard sounded the quarter.

  We entered via the lodge, and were directed to an upper reading room by a sleepy porter. We aroused no suspicion in him. We had cleaned up, and dressed decently. I wore a bodyglove and a long coat, Renner a set of pressed tan fatigues and a greatcoat, as one might expect of an ex-military lifeward escorting a young, female academic. Renner wore his right arm in a sling under his coat, the coat sleeve empty. I had done my best to clean, set and splint his broken hand. I am no medicae, but the essentials of battlefield aid had been part of my Cognitae schooling.

  Our retreat from Stanchion House had been to the cargo-8 parked in a side street some way from the old port, the vehicle we had used to embark upon the mission. We stripped it of everything we could – medi-pack, clean clothes, a few small-arms, and then dumped it in a vacant lot behind Storax Place. We tried to break the thread of our progress as much as possible, in case anyone was following us.

  Comus assured us no one was. He had stayed with us for a while, trudging the streets in our wake with, at my insistence, a dirty tarpaulin we had found in the cargo dock draped around him. He left us once we had reached the vehicle. I asked him to stay close, and he gave me a nod. The streets of Queen Mab were no place for a creature like him, but from the secret landscape of the rooftops, he could watch over us without being seen.

  I had decided to press on with the leads I had left.

  ‘Violetta, my dear,’ said Mam Matichek, rising from her seat as we entered the reading room. She was, as ever, disposed in a black crepe dress and lace gloves, but over this she wore the purple gown and untied white cravat of a tutor-fellow.

  It was a pleasant enough room, comfortable and inviting, lined floor to ceiling with shelves of books and manuscripts. There were several old, leather club chairs, with side tables, and the room was warmed by a fire burning in the grate. She had lit the table lamps and closed the shutters against the approaching night. The smell of her lho-sticks hung in the air. The chamber shared the same musty, scholarly feel that pervaded the entire Academy. It was the city’s oldest and most respected seat of learning.

  ‘I apologise, mam,’ I said, squeezing her proffered hand, ‘that I was unable to make our appointment yesterday.’

  ‘And no wonder,’ she replied sardonically. ‘Whatever was that business at the old port? The whole city is a-chatter. The King stirs.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘My dear, the old battle hymn? “When plight upon Angelus falls, King Orphaeus stirs from sanctum deep…” la dum dee da dee dum.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Patriotic legends offer us reassurance,’ she said. ‘Well, not me. But the common folk lap it up. I’ve heard it sung three times today. Orphaeus will rise from his eternal rest and come to save us from the approaching war, whoever we’re fighting this time. I honestly don’t think anyone remembers who the enemy was last time. Anyway, a derelict building burns down, and there are mysterious explosions, and everyone decides a war’s under way and Orphaeus will come to save us, as he always does. Stops them rioting in the streets, I suppose. You look different today.’

  She had placed her hands on my shoulders to look me up and down. She didn’t seem to disapprove so much as be surprised. I certainly looked nothing like the Violetta Flyde she had met twice before.

  ‘I like your hair short,’ she remarked. ‘The coat and bodyglove are quite masculine, though you pull it off. I have no idea of fashions these days. I have worn the same cut of gown for the last thirty years. And my hair, though it was once auburn. Too wet for a dress, is it?’

  ‘I decided–’

  ‘What have you done to your hand, young man?’ she said, cutting me off, and crossing to Renner, who was waiting by the door.

  ‘Oh, a little… altercation, mam,’ Renner mumbled.

  Mam Matichek looked sharply at me.

  ‘Do you come in disguise, Violetta?’ she asked. ‘Are you in some sort of trouble?’

  ‘I could not make our appointment yesterday,’ I replied gently. ‘But you were kind enough to give me your card, and courteous enough to respond to my message that we reschedule.’

  ‘I’m simply worried about Freddy,’ she said. ‘These are strange days. Yesterday’s goings-on troubled him.’

  ‘Do you know what happened in The Shoulder that night?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, some brawl in the public bar, I hear,’ she replied, lighting a lho-stick in her silver pinch-holder. ‘I stay out of it. Though I hear it was Timurlin. Drunk again, no doubt. He is such a troublemaker. No wonder we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of him since. I didn’t see you again, though. Did you witness it?’

  ‘My bodyguards escorted me away,’ I replied. ‘Public brawls are no place for a respectable married lady. So, Freddy? Is he here?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I persuaded him to come. Well, Unvence and I did. Come through.’

  She drew aside a panelled partition door and led us into an adjoining room. This too was lit by hearth and lamps, though the lamps were shrouded with felt cloths and provided only under-light. There was a long, polished table, set with several chairs and stacked with several piles of books. At the end of the room was a large bay window, with a beautiful antique astronomy scope set up on the bay-step. The shutters were open, and twilight hung outside.

  Unvence got up from his seat at the table as I entered, and bowed his ungainly form at me with unnecessary formality. Freddy Dance, rather dishevelled, was sitting at the table too, but he did not rise. He was turning the pages of an astral gazetteer that he couldn’t possibly read, a glass of amasec close by him.

  ‘How is he?’ I asked.

  ‘Agitated, mam,’ said Unvence solemnly.

  ‘As ever,’ said Mam Matichek. ‘We’re quite concerned for his mental wellbeing.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said. I crossed to the table and sat down beside Freddy Dance. He seemed oblivious to me. Mam Matichek and Unvence looked on, with Renner, from the doorway.

  ‘Sir?’ I said, quietly, leaning close to him. ‘It’s Violetta. Do you remember me?’

  Dance cocked his head, turning to me with his ears and not his eyes.

  ‘Mamzel Flyde,’ he said, in a tiny voice. ‘Quite a puzzle, quite a puzzle.’

  ‘I am sorry that my casual enquiry has thrown you into such confusion, sir.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. No, mamzel. A puzzle is welcome. A distraction. I have not been distracted by anything for a long time. Not by anything good. Your aunt died. At one hundred and eighteen.’

  ‘She did, sir.’

  ‘One hundred and eighteen,’ he said, tilting his head again and turning the pages of the book. ‘Not the number in question. Fascinating in its own right, of course. One hundred and eighteen was the precise number of treatises written, in his lifetime, by Saint Corustine, upon all matters of philosophy, natural and miraculous–’

  ‘I hear my question has confounded you and become an obsession, sir,’ I said. ‘Your friends worry for you. You take no food–’

  He raised a hand.

  ‘Knowledge is nourishment,’ he said. ‘It feeds us. A fine feast of facts and figures. I am sustained, Mamzel Flyde. And I am glad you have come. I am not confounded. No, not at all. I have written it all down.’


  He laid his hands on the open pages of the star atlas, and stroked them with his fingertips.

  ‘In my notebook here, you see?’ he said. I bit my lip.

  ‘Did you build me a cipher, sir? A key?’

  ‘You are the key, mamzel.’

  ‘I am?’

  He sat back, staring upwards with his blind eyes, smiling, his head switching to and fro.

  ‘I have made a start, as you may see from my notebook,’ he said. ‘But I cannot build a complete key without further information, without context, you see? Which only you can provide.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘And I think I may be able to do that. But before I do, tell me what you have fathomed so far. I fear I will need to concentrate to keep up with your reasoning. I am no scholar of maths.’

  I was cautious still. Freddy Dance might be a mad genius, or simply mad, and I was reluctant to share the book with him until I had decided which. Further, I had no wish to break the clearly secret confidence between him and Unvence in front of witnesses.

  Dance put his gnarled hand on mine gently, as if he sensed my unease and wished to reassure me.

  ‘Not just mathematics, dear child,’ he murmured. ‘Symbolism, secrets, many things.’

  ‘Many things?’

  ‘Yes. I have considered it carefully, and I believe 119 does not mean anything. It means many things. All at once. It is a mystic symbol, in numeric form. It is a hypersigil. Do you know that term?’

  ‘I do, sir,’ I replied warily.

  ‘Then you know more than you appear to know, Mamzel Flyde,’ he said. The old fellow seemed impressed with me. ‘A hypersigil, or hyperglyph, compresses many significances into one concentrated form,’ he said. ‘It binds multiple meanings into one.’

  ‘I would be happy, sir,’ I said, ‘with just one meaning.’

  ‘Well,’ he laughed, ‘that is hard to provide, for they are inextricably bonded to each other. You desire a key for your cipher, but to have a functioning key, the right key, one must, so to speak, know every cut and notch on it. We must untie the sigil, you see? Let me do that for you, little by little. First, let us consider prime numbers. A prime number is simply a number, greater than one, that is divisible only by itself and one. Prime numbers hold an exquisite fascination for scholars like me. They obsess us and, yes, I know I am more prone to obsession than many.

  ‘Why do they do so? Well, the definition of a prime number is deceptively simple. As you count up from one, it’s impossible to predict when the next prime number is going to occur, and as the numbers grow very big, it actually becomes more and more difficult even to determine if a given number is actually prime. Prime numbers underpin the Imperium in some quite significant ways. Since before the Dark Age of Technology, the encryption used to protect communication, financial transactions and data transfer has made use of prime numbers, although in very different ways over the millennia. Prime numbers allow you, in theory, to encode all the knowledge in the universe in a single very large number… Though I haven’t done it myself, I understand the means.’

  ‘You… do?’

  A smile crossed his face. Though he could not see me, no flicker of a smile crossed mine. He had just described a process of encoding that was strikingly similar to the way Enuncia had been explained to me.

  ‘The thing is, mamzel,’ he said, ‘most mathematically inclined people have an instinct for whether a number is a prime or not. And, instinctively, 119 looks very much like a prime number. An unusual number of totatives. But here’s the rub. Every other combination of those three digits is prime. 911 is prime. 191 is prime. 119611 – combining 119 with itself, turned upside down, you see? – is prime. But 119, that tricky deceiver, is not. 119 equals 17 times 7. Are you following?’

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  ‘So… 119 looks like a number of great power, part of the mysterious brotherhood of primes. But it’s an imposter. It’s a semiprime number posing as a prime number. It’s a mathematical oddity.’

  ‘And that’s important?’

  ‘Any oddity in the field of mathematics is important. Now, come, come.’ He rose to his feet, unsteady, and I rose too, taking him by the arm to support and guide him, though he was most certainly leading the way. He walked me over to the fine astronomical telescope in the window bay, reaching out his hands blindly to locate it, then grasp it, then caress it as a reassuring object.

  ‘This is my scope,’ he said. ‘I did almost all of my significant work with this. Even the observations that led to my disgrace.’

  ‘You mean Of the Stars in the Heaven, with ephemeris?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he chuckled. ‘That.’

  ‘Pardon me, sir, but you cannot see. How did you make observations?’

  ‘The glass never lies,’ he said, and stooped to peer through the eyepiece. ‘I do not see conventionally, not any more. The observations for that book, my masterwork, eroded my sight. They were other stars, you see? Stars of elsewhere, yet here.’

  ‘And where might that elsewhere be, sir?’ I asked, with a great effort to sound innocent.

  ‘The King’s realm,’ replied Freddy Dance.

  I have, in telling you this story, mentioned the King many times, so many, I am sure, that you are overfamiliar with the name. However, I feel I need to stress the importance of his remark. For many months, I had been in the company of people who spoke of the King, or referred to him, as a fact. But they had all been agents of the Inquisition, or the Cognitae, or otherwise privy to the dark secrets of Sancour. We accepted it, just as the course of this narrative has persuaded you to accept it. Yet to the common folk of Sancour, even educated persons like Freddy Dance, or Mamzel Matichek, the King in Yellow was no more than a fairy tale, if they had heard of him at all.

  Here now was a man, mad though he might be, firmly speaking of the King as matter-of-fact, and connecting the name to a wealth of clues that had not yet been unscrambled.

  It was his tone, I think, the surety in his voice. Freddy Dance was not a madman who had accidentally glimpsed the truth. He was a man who had discovered a truth that had driven him mad. I understood his madness, and feared that it might be my fate too one day, and the fate of all of us pursuing that truth. The answers, when they came, might be more than our minds could bear.

  So Violetta Flyde faltered at that moment, hearing those words from him. Penitent, the novice inquisitor, yearned to step forward and ­formally take control of the moment. Yet Mam Matichek was there, and Unvence, and I was keenly aware of the bafflement and ­disapproval with which they were watching me. I wanted to protect myself, and Freddy too, but the truth, which had remained so elusive to me, and to Gregor and to Gideon, seemed at last to be in grasping distance. I made my choice.

  Softly, I said, ‘The King?’

  Dance continued to stare through the eyepiece. ‘Yes, mamzel. The King in Yellow. I find, as the years pass, that everything leads back to him, sooner or later.’

  ‘So the stars you saw, and wrote of in your book,’ I said carefully, ‘these stars of elsewhere… Might they be the stars of an extimate space?’

  He straightened up again, with a quizzical expression.

  ‘Quite so. Quite so. Extimate space. My dear, you are a puzzle to be unlocked too, if you know of such things.’

  ‘I believe I am,’ I said. ‘Your observations, sir? They ended your sight… And your career?’

  ‘They didn’t like it,’ he replied, neglecting to specify who ‘they’ were. ‘None of them. Told me I was mad, seeing firmaments that were not present, but I knew the real reason. They didn’t like that I’d seen them. They didn’t like that I’d spied into the King’s private heavens.’

  ‘Mamzel Flyde,’ Mam Matichek hissed from across the room. ‘I wonder at you! You indulge him with such nonsense! I fear you are overexciting–’

  I held up an i
ndex finger in her direction, instructing silence.

  ‘Continue please, sir,’ I said to Dance.

  ‘Happily. You see the scope here?’ Dance asked me. He reached for my hands, and I allowed him to place them on the apparatus. Below the main scope was an ancient mechanical keyboard by which coordinates and angles might be pre-set.

  ‘The keyboard?’ he asked me. ‘You feel it there?’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  ‘So then,’ he said, ‘I mentioned archaic technologies just now. I am fascinated by the way aspects of old technology survive, and sometimes get carried forward even after the technology itself is obsolete or forgotten. Especially here on Sancour. Tell me, what are the values on the keys there, from the top left?’

  I began to read them, ‘Q, W, E, R… as it is on all keyboards.’

  Dance nodded. ‘That arrangement of keys was devised so long ago, it would shock you. Long before the Dark Age of Technology. It was designed for mechanical writing machines, and we still use it because of familiarity and convenience. The symbol on our vox-devices that means “end link” is based on an old, wired communication system. And distress signals, such as 999 and 911, and 119, to this day, are based on the old mechanisms in telephonic exchanges. To this very day! A trio combination of three 1s or 9s still means “distress” or “emergency” in so very many aspects of our culture.’

  ‘So…’ I began, ‘119 could be an ancient warning symbol, a coded distress call, a reference to an all-but-forgotten expression for “emergency”?’

  ‘Yes, my dear.’

  ‘That’s what it is? That’s what 119 is?’

  ‘Yes. In part,’ he assured me. ‘As I told you, it is but one aspect of the sigil. A significant one, I believe. But let us now consider the number in binary form.’

  ‘Binary?’ I felt a certain unease. Did this touch on the Mechanicus suspicion of mine?

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ he said. ‘In binary, 119 is 1110111. The moment I visualised the binary, I regarded the central “0” and exclaimed “the eye”! It is a very compelling visual pattern. And of course, you can have longer and shorter versions – 5 equals 101, 27 equals 11011, 119 equals 1110111, 495 equals 111101111, 2,015 equals 11111011111–’