by Dan Abnett
‘Like where?’
‘The safe house in Shorthalls. And if that proves unsafe, wherever your wits can find. But use the Shorthalls site as a drop. Check it regularly, and I’ll look for you there. Or send Comus to me. Just… Guard that book with your life. Oh, and keep an eye on Crookley and his friend. Don’t let them interfere.’
‘I can handle them,’ he said. ‘I’m plying them with drink. They’ll both be asleep soon, I reckon.’
‘Good,’ I said, but glanced past him into the reading room. ‘Where the hell is Aulay?’
‘Stepped out for a piss,’ said Renner. ‘And to get a spot of fresh air. He’ll be back. He doesn’t go anywhere without Crookley.’
I nodded, then briefly squeezed his arm.
‘Be careful,’ I said.
‘You too,’ he replied.
I left, reluctant, and hurried through the quiet and gloomy Academy. The lamps were on in the porter’s lodge, the porter asleep over his day book. Outside, light rain hissed across the blue darkness of the courtyard. I followed the cloistered walks towards the outer gate, the smell of night air and cold, rain-washed stone in my lungs.
A figure lurked in a cloister arch ahead of me, collar pulled up, smoking a lho-stick. He saw me approaching. It was Aulay.
‘Get back upstairs, please,’ I said.
He shrugged, and gave a nod.
‘I thought you were going to expose everything,’ he said. It was quite the longest thing he had ever said to me.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t play games,’ he said. ‘In front of the others, maybe, but here? I appreciate your circumspection, but we can be honest, can’t we?’
‘Let’s,’ I said.
He reached into his coat pocket, fumbled, and pulled something out.
‘Waltur Aulay,’ he said, holding the rosette so the light could catch it, ‘Ordo Malleus.’
CHAPTER 27
Void-hearted
A night filled with steady rain had overtaken Queen Mab.
The city seemed to jolt and rumble past, moving, half-seen, through the darkness and the rain as if on its way somewhere, anywhere, to some undisclosed destination, to some secret destiny, using the rain and the night as a cloak to disguise its identity. It seemed determined not to be found out.
Raindrops struck the little window of the moving fly and settled briefly, quivering, before sliding away. Each one caught the passing lights of the city, and glittered like a star. Whole constellations, each one unique and never seen before, formed on the glass, then shifted, then re-formed. The fly rattled on at a lick, its springs jarring over invisible cobbles. I had told the cabman to make best haste for Feygate, and I could hear him urging the flyhorse on.
I sat in the darkness of the fly’s cab, watching the brief stars on the window. I suppose I had intended to watch the city as it passed by, but that was impossible, for there was scarcely anything visible, so my vacant focus fixed on the raindrops instead. I merely imagined the route: Hecuba Parade from the Academy Yards, where I had hailed the fly, up Antium Hill, past the war memorial at Iprus Circle, then down Paterpath Row, through Tallyhouses and Stall’s Cross and onto the highroad where it met Acremile Street. The fly shook like a child’s rattle, the wheels clattered and splashed on the road. Stardrops came and went on the glass.
I considered Waltur Aulay’s sorry tale. He had been filled with shame and regret. Fear too, I suppose. I had imagined many endings for Ordo careers – death in service, removal from office, heretical decline – but his had come as a miserable surprise. Just a slow erasure of what he had once been.
He was Ordo Malleus, or had been. A novice inquisitor of some promise. This is what he had told me there, in the shadows of the Academy cloisters. He had come to Sancour forty years earlier, on an assignment to identify a notorious heretic. That’s all he said. A notorious heretic. Aulay – and this part of his reluctant confession had seemed the hardest to admit – could now not even remember the name of the heretic he had come looking for.
I wondered if he could remember his own name either. He had come into the city, clandestine, earnest Inquisitor Aulay, adopting the guise of a talented engraver, so as to mix in the louche artistic circles of Queen Mab that, even forty years ago, had been thriving and growing. He had played his part well, immersing himself in the lifestyle, following this lead and that, and he had chosen his role to make use of certain talents he possessed; Aulay had some interest in the work of engraving, a profession to which he had been apprenticed before recruitment into the Ordos. Some interest, some flair, and over the years that became a trade that he prospered at, winning acclaim and commissions to fortify his cover identity and broker introduction into the highest noble houses. He had fallen in with the rakish Crookley.
He had become himself. He had lived the part so deeply and with such gusto, that each element of his original self had slowly been replaced, as minerals in the earth slowly substitute for buried bones and turn them into fossils. Aulay had been, I suppose, seduced, not by the contamination of the warp, as one might expect, but by the debauched and heady lives he had committed to. Crookley’s wayward behaviour was infamous. Aulay had become dependent on drink, until every day of his life passed by in a fuddled alcoholic haze. He had tagged along with Crookley and Crookley’s associates, and thrown himself into the city’s esoteric underlife, and consorted with hermetics, and secret orders, and private societies, and all those who dwelt in the liminal areas of the city culture. He had long since lost contact with his handlers, and those of his conclave he was supposed to report to.
Aulay told me that Crookley went too far, too often. From his story, I believed Aulay’s delinquency had ceased, at some unfathomable point, to be an act by which he got close to malcontents he hunted, and the reverse had become true. Some vague notion that he was doing ‘important Ordo business’ became the excuse for his depravity.
Aulay, with pain in his eyes, told me that he now barely remembered the man he had been. The sight of my rosette had been a shock, a stirring up of old, thick sediment. Waltur Aulay had not been afraid that some secret heresies had been found out. He had been afraid that the Ordos had finally come to find him, to rebuke him and chastise him for the desecration of his sworn path.
And then punish him for the multitude of venal crimes and miserable transgressions he had committed in that wise.
I had assured Aulay that was not my purpose. I had told him, in strict terms, that I would turn a blind eye to his dismal behaviour, but only if he kept out of the way. He was not to get involved, not to meddle, not to even speak of what had occurred. I felt certain that, between them, Renner and the angel could keep the pair out of mischief, but I made Aulay promise to keep Crookley in check. Or, I said, I would reveal Aulay to the Ordo authorities, without hesitation, as a miserable and weak recidivist who had betrayed the honour and dignity of the service.
Not through gross crimes. Not through wild heresy or diabolis extremis. But through simple, pitiful human weakness. The Ordos would liquidate him.
His story had chastened me. I felt listless and bleak. I knew too well how complete the immersion in a function could be. I had been, in my life, so many other people. I had worn different names, different faces, different histories, sometimes for weeks or months at a time. I had answered, subconsciously, to other names, without thinking. Some of those guises, I think, I could have sunk into and never reappeared.
For there was no ‘me’ to be revealed. I had never known my true self, I was but an accumulation of unanswered questions. I almost despised Aulay for that: he had possessed a true identity, an original self, and he had willingly and carelessly lost it, so that any later glimpse of it was a shameful shock. He had owned a real life and he had thrown it away.
Rocked by the motion of the cab, I reassured myself that truths were finally in my grasp. In the past few hours, the last day o
r two, answers had begun to emerge, some of preposterous magnitude and significance. I felt I was approaching a point of conjunction, as when stars finally align after many years, and patterns emerge.
Most of this truth, of course, concerned the King in Yellow, and the great and secret war we fought. These were answers that would matter to many, to every soul in the God-Emperor’s Imperium, perhaps. They were answers that might change the fate of worlds.
But some were mine. These were small, and only concerned me, and only mattered to me. But those answers, oddly, seemed the keenest. I could barely credit the sudden sense of freedom I had felt at showing my rosette to Unvence and Mam Matichek, and saying my name aloud. I had cast Violetta Flyde aside, Violetta and every other guise I had worn. I had revealed the truth of myself. I was Beta Bequin, a servant of the Ordos. No more masks, no more pretence.
It had been liberating. For the first time in my peculiar life, I had a real identity.
And a real purpose too. Though I worried what had befallen Gideon, and what had caused him to summon me with such urgency, I knew I was coming to him with findings of real value. All that I had learned from Mam Mordaunt and the events at Stanchion House, and everything I was learning from Freddy Dance. I had not prised open the truth fully, not yet, but I had made more progress than either Gideon or Gregor in all the years they had worked at it.
And what a truth it was.
I watched the raindrop stars moving on the fly’s window. Specks of light on the glass. I had seen through the mystery at last, perhaps far enough to see some of those extimate stars, those constellations that blind Freddy had observed through his glass. The other heavens, the other place, the other reality that was, I was now sure, more solid and important than this one, even though it was hidden.
And that, I think, is when the notion hit me. The only subliminal prompt was the impenetrable darkness outside, the false rain-bead stars, the dirty glass. I thought of Freddy Dance, blind yet seeing. I thought of him placing his sightless eyes to the glass of the telescope, and witnessing, against all probability, a truth that no one else had been able to see. I thought of his words to me: ‘The glass never lies.’
I felt a fire in me, a certainty. I could scarcely wait for the fly to reach its destination. By the time it rattled to a halt in the street outside the nameless house in Feygate, the horse snorting and steaming from effort, I already had the fare ready in my hand, eager to spring out, to run inside.
Eager to tell Gideon the secret I had been blind to, but which my mind had finally shown me.
I entered the property through the back gate, into the overgrown gardens. Harlon Nayl was sitting in the darkness on a low wall, as though he had been posted to wait for me. He rose, lowering the lasrifle that had been cradled across his lap.
‘Good to see you intact,’ he said.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘Where have you been?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Go on in,’ he said, ‘but tread carefully.’
I frowned at him.
‘What have you been up to?’ he asked. ‘Any results? What the hell happened at Stanchion House?’
It was my turn not to answer a direct question. I was brimming with the urge to share all the things I had learned, and the notion that had just lately sprung into my head, but I held back. I felt uneasy and unsure. The nameless house was quiet and seemed unlit, and there was a sense of foreboding. I felt almost as though I was walking into a trap.
‘I’ll make my account, Harlon,’ I said. ‘Is he inside?’
‘Yes, but hold back until he’s done–’
I moved past him towards the back door.
‘I mean it,’ he growled after me. ‘Don’t disturb things.’
I moved on without acknowledging, and he caught my arm gently and made me pause.
‘Listen,’ Nayl said, his voice dropping low. ‘Beta, just… just don’t react, all right? When the moment comes, don’t react or do anything rash. Do you understand me?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said.
‘You’ll know,’ he said. ‘Please, Beta. If we have any kind of friendship, I’m asking you not to act out. You’ll want to be angry. Hold it in, for Throne’s sake. There’s too much at stake.’
I looked at him, then disengaged my arm from his grip, and continued on to the door. He followed me.
Inside, the rear hallway was a narrow, wood-panelled space. Two lumen globes had been lit, but turned down very low. Kys stood at the end of the passage, leaning against the wall, her arms folded. She had her back to me, but I could feel she was radiating hostility.
I walked down the hall. Nayl came in behind me, and secured the back door. Kys turned to glare at me as I passed her.
‘Stay here,’ she told me.
‘He summoned me,’ I said.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she said. ‘We’re all here for a reason.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked.
Her eyes were narrowed, belligerent, but I sensed it was not an anger meant for me. She was just in a foul mood.
‘I thought we were in a bad place,’ said Kys. ‘That was yesterday. Now I know we’re in a worse place.’
I stepped past her, and walked into the main hall. She made no effort to follow me.
Lamps had been lit in the main drawing room of the house. I could see their soft amber glow through the door, which had been left half-open. I could hear voices, speaking softly. Kara was standing in the door’s shadow out of the shaft of escaping light. She was listening and watching through the gap. Her body language spoke of concern.
I slowed my bold advance, and crept up beside her. She glanced aside, saw it was me, and gave me a brief, tight hug.
‘Happy to see you,’ she whispered. ‘Where’s Mr Lightburn?’
‘Minding some business on my behalf,’ I whispered back. ‘What’s going on, Kara?’
She nodded towards the half-open door. I could smell something, a spice perhaps, like cloves or salo rind. It was almost medicinal. I stepped in close beside her so I could also peer through the gap.
In the large room, I could see the Chair. Ravenor had positioned himself near the fireplace. There were lamps set on the mantelpiece. He was talking to someone, but that person or persons remained quite out of sight from my angle. I couldn’t hear what was being said.
I moved a little, to get a wider view through the door. Kara gripped my arm to stop me, but I edged over anyway.
Now I could see who Gideon was talking to.
Two figures, both standing, both tall. The moment I saw them, my heart pinched cold with fear. The moment I saw them, they could also see me, and one turned to look directly at me.
Its face was a mask, the ornate visor of a plumed warhelm, gleaming in the lamplight like abalone. The design, the features, and the eyes that gazed straight at me from the deep slit of the visor, were in no way human.
They were warriors of the aeldari.
The moment seemed to draw out. I felt I should move, but I could not. I could smell the curious, astringent spice. I could hear the soft purr of their respirator systems. The wraithbone pendant around my neck vibrated frantically like the heart of a tiny mammal. I thought of Mam Mordaunt beseeching me not, in any circumstances, to have dealings with the ancient xenos, and now, it seemed to me, Harlon’s words of caution made sense. He had been warning me not to react to this.
The warrior gazing upon me then said something, though I did not understand the words. The tone of its voice was like a wire brush against velvet.
‘This is Beta, one of my people,’ Gideon said in response. ‘She means no disrespect, and does not intend to intrude.’
I was about to bow and back away, but the aeldari spoke again.
‘Yes, she is one of the void-hearted,’ said Gideon. ‘We call them nulls. She will
not trouble you–’
The other aeldari spoke.
‘I confess she was manufactured by the King,’ said Gideon calmly, ‘but she holds no allegiance to him, and she stands with us. I vouch for her loyalty.’
The aeldari who had spoken first took a step towards me. Its gaze had not left me.
‘Grael,’ it said.
‘No, sir–’ I replied.
‘Crafted to be a grael vessel,’ it said, and took another step closer. It spoke Low Gothic as though the words did not quite fit its mouth, as if the breath of them made unfamiliar shapes.
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘That was a fate I escaped.’
‘You look so alike,’ it said. I did not understand. The xenos being was not the first to make such a remark, nor, I thought, would it be the last time I would be told such a thing. But the implication was that, somehow, this creature had known Alizebeth Bequin, or was at least familiar with her likeness. How could that be? All along there had been hints that Gideon Ravenor had had some dealings with aeldari kind in the past. This suggested a long and complicated involvement.
The warrior turned away from me, and returned its gaze to Ravenor. As it moved, the cabochon gems set in its pearl armour caught the lamplight and twinkled like stars or, as it occurred to me, raindrops on glass.
It spoke again, slipping back into the impenetrable cant of its kind.
‘I urge that you give me longer than that,’ said Gideon in response. ‘A month–’
The other uttered something, cutting him off.
‘I plead this, in light of our long association and friendship,’ Gideon said. ‘We have accomplished many things together. Your proposed course of action would end that. I could not condone it, or argue its merit to my superiors. Moreover, the consequences would be catastrophic for both our species. Your autarchs have warned, from the earliest ages, against allowing Kaela Mensha Khaine to guide the Ai’elethra, for that way leads only to Ynnaed’s realm.’
The aeldari spoke, both of them, in quick succession.