‘We’ll doubtless all have many opportunities to employ our skills before Horus shows his face,’ said Soalm. She hadn’t left the room, but stood off to one side as the sniper and the infocyte talked.
‘We will do what we have to,’ Kell replied, without looking at her.
‘Even if we destroy ourselves doing it,’ his sister replied.
The marksman’s jaw hardened and his eyes fell to a line of words that had been etched into the slender barrel of the rifle. Written in a careful scrolling hand was the Dictatus Vindicare, the maxim of his clade; Exitus Acta Probat.
‘The outcome justifies the deed,’ said Kell.
What he saw in the room was like no manner of death Yosef Sabrat had ever conceived of. The killings of Latigue in the aeronef and Norte at the docks, while they were horrors that sickened him to his core, had not pressed at his reason. But not this, not this… deed.
Black ashes were scattered in a long pool across the middle of Perrig’s room, cast out of a set of clothes that lay splayed out where they had fallen. At the top of the cascade of cinders, a small hill of the dark powder covered an iron collar, the bolt holding it shut still secure, and in among the pile there were the silver needles of neural implants glittering in the lamplight.
‘I… don’t understand.’ The Gorospe woman was standing a few steps behind the investigators, outside in the corridor with Yosef where the jagers milled around, uncertain how to proceed. ‘I don’t understand,’ she repeated. ‘Where did the… the woman go to?’
She had almost said the witch. Yosef sensed the half-formed word on her lips, and he shot her a look filled with sudden fury. Gorospe looked up at him with wide, limpid eyes, and he felt his hands contract into fists. She was so callous and dismissive of the dead psyker; he fought back a brief urge to grab her and slam her up against the wall, shout at her for her stupidity. Then he took a breath and said ‘She didn’t go anywhere. That’s all that is left of her.’
Yosef walked away, pushing past Skelta. The jager gave him a wary nod. ‘Heard from Reeve Segan, sir. They called him in from his off-shift. He’s on his way.’
He returned Skelta’s nod and took a wary step through the field barrier and into the room, careful not to disturb the cluster of small mapping automata that scanned the crime scene with picters and ranging lasers. Hyssos was crouching, looking back and forth around the walls, staring towards the windows, then back to the ashen remains. He had his back to the doorway and Yosef heard him take a shuddering breath. It was almost a sob.
‘Do you… need a moment?’ As soon as he said the words, he felt like an utter fool. Of course he did; his colleague had just been brutally murdered, and in an abhorrent, baffling manner.
‘No,’ said Hyssos. ‘Yes,’ he said, an instant later. ‘No. No. There will be time for that. After.’ The operative looked up at him and his eyes were shining. ‘Do you know, I think, at the end… I think I actually heard her.’ He fingered one of the braids among his hair.
Yosef saw the semi-circle of objects on the floor, the stones and the paper. ‘What are these?’
‘Foci,’ Hyssos told him. ‘Objects imbued with some emotional resonance from the suspect. Perrig reads them. She read them.’ He corrected himself absently.
‘I am sorry.’
Hyssos nodded. ‘You will let me kill this man when we find him,’ he told Yosef, in a steady, measured voice. ‘We will make certain, of course, of his guilt,’ he added, nodding. ‘But the death. You will let me have that.’
Yosef felt warm and uncomfortable. ‘We’ll burn that bridge after we cross it.’ He looked away and found the places on the far wall behind him where the markings had been made. On his entry into the room, he hadn’t seen them. Like the paintings in blood inside the aeronef or the shape that Jaared Norte’s body had been cut into, there were eight-point stars all over the light-coloured walls. It seemed that the killer had used the residue of Perrig as his ink, repeating the same pattern over and over again.
‘What does it mean?’ Hyssos mumbled.
The reeve licked his lips; they were suddenly dry. He had a strange sensation, a tingling in the base of his skull like the dull headache brought on by too much recaf and not enough fresh air. The shapes were all he could see, and he felt like there was an answer there, if only he could find the right way to look at them. They were no different from the mathematical problems in Ivak’s schola texts, they just needed to be solved to be understood.
‘Sabrat, what does it mean?’ said Hyssos again. ‘This word?’
Yosef blinked and the moment vanished. He looked back at the investigator. Hyssos had removed something from among the ashen remains; a data-slate, the screen spiderwebbed and fractured. Incredibly, the display underneath was still operating, flickering sporadically.
Gingerly, Yosef took it from him, taking care to avoid touching the powder-slicked surfaces of the device. The touch-sensitive screen still remembered the words that had been etched upon it, and flashed them at him, almost too quickly to register.
‘One of the words is “Sigg”,’ Hyssos told him. ‘Do you see it?’
He did; and beneath that, there was a scribble that appeared to be the attempt to form another string of letters, the shape of them lost now. But above the name, there was another clearly-lettered word.
‘Whyteleaf. Is that a person’s name?’
Yosef shook his head, instantly knowing the meaning. ‘Not a person. A place. I know it well.’
Hyssos was abruptly on his feet. ‘Close?’
‘In the low crags, a quick trip by coleopter.’
The investigator’s brief flash of grief and sorrow was gone. ‘We need to go there, right now. Perrig’s readings decay over time.’ He tapped the broken slate. ‘If she sensed Sigg was in this place, every moment we waste here, we run the risk he will flee again.’
Skelta had caught the edge of their conversation. ‘Sir, we don’t have any other units in the area. Backup is dealing with a railganger fight that went bad out at the airdocks and security prep for the trade carnival.’
Yosef made the choice then and there. ‘When Daig gets here, tell him to take over the scene and keep Laimner occupied.’ He moved towards the door, not looking back to see if Hyssos was following. ‘We’re taking the flyer.’
The operative had lost colleagues before, and it had been difficult then as it was now; but Perrig’s death was something more than that. It came in like a bullet, cutting right into the core of Hyssos’s soul. Losing himself in the rush of the dark, low clouds outside the windows of the coleopter, he tried to parse his own emotional reactions to the moment without success. Perrig had always been a good, trusted colleague, and he liked her company. She had never pressured him to talk about his past or tried to worm more information out of him than he wanted to give. Hyssos had always felt respected in her presence, and rewarded by her competence, her cool, calm intelligence.
Now she was dead; worse than dead, not a corpse even, just dark cinders, just a slurry of matter that did not bear any resemblance to the human being he had known. He felt a hard stab of guilt. Perrig had always given him her complete and total trust, and he had not been there to protect her when she needed it. Now this investigation had crossed from the professional to the personal, and Hyssos was uncertain of himself.