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Lepidopterophobia - Dan Abnett

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Lepidopterophobia

(Medea Unbound)

Dan Abnett

Where is delight? and what are pleasures now?-

Moths that a garment fret.

The world is turned memorial, crying, 'Thou

Shalt not forget!'

- Anodos (Mary Elizabeth Coleridge)

Just south of Toilgate, in the shadow of that great monument, lay a warren of courtyards and alleys known variously as the booksellers' market or the Remainders.

It was a little maze of street stalls and tiny shops that threaded the worn brick and stone buildings of that quarter, and its little nooks and passageways occasionally opened into the pale sunlight of small yards or courts where dealers set out their wares. It was a quiet place, and but for these small oases of sunlight, a place almost permanently shadowed. The winding alleys were narrow, so that two pedestrians encountering one another might have to turn sidelong in order to pass, and the walls were high, blocking the daylight with their mouldering brickwork and rheumy, blinded windows. The market had been there for a long time, perhaps for as long as Queen Mab had been a city, and was the haunt of the solitary, the scholarly, the bibliophilic and, from time to time, the lost, who had become turned about on Saint Zoroast Circle, or had stepped the wrong way off the Toilgate Road.

It was here that Medea stumbled upon the book that would later unlock many secrets, but this happenstance did not occur without uncanny hazard.

It was just after noon on a middleday, and she came to the market as herself, which is to say as Medea Betancourt, a Glavian shipmistress. She wore a tailored suit of soft black, black boots of patent leather, and the scarlet gloves associated with the pilot-caste of Glavia. She carried a small groxskin satchel over her shoulder. Her hair was bound back from her face, her eyes bright and inquisitive, and her skin a lustrous dark, quite at odds with the drab shadows of the market quarter.

She came as herself, for it was her day off, and though her garb was formal, it was a liberating relief from the coarse red vestments and starched gull-wing headdress that she was obliged to wear the rest of the time. For the other six days of every week, and for almost two decades, she lived in the disguise of Sister Bismillah, a nun administering to the needs of orphans at the Scholam Orbus on Highgate Hill. This was her role, her duty, as directed by her master, an agent of the Holy Ordos. As Sister Bismillah, her assignment was to watch over a certain child, now a young woman, who was a pupil at the Maze Undue that adjoined the orphanage.

No task had ever lasted as long, and Medea had never sustained a cover identity for quite so many years. The guise of Bismillah, the simple, ascetic life of work and contemplation, had become such second nature that she had almost forgotten how to be her original self. Such were the sacrifices made by servants of the Throne. The motley, secret team to which she belonged had come to Queen Mab nearly twenty years before to begin its slow and forensic investigation of a hidden evil, and there was every chance it would be another twenty before a conclusion was reached and the evil rooted out.

But Medea persevered. This was the life she had chosen, or perhaps which had chosen her, and she was unfailingly loyal to the Throne, and to the service of her master.

So it was that for six days every week, she existed as Sister Bismillah, and performed the task her master had set her to watch over the singular girl in the Maze Undue. For the other day each week, the day she was given leave to be absent from the foundling school, she became her old self and, rather than resting, she set about her duty in a different manner.

She trawled the great city's markets, bazaars, libraries and museums looking for clues. They all did this, the whole team, though the others – her master, Harlon, Deathrow, and even the thing named Cherubael – were at liberty to do it seven days a week. They combed the ancient city for secrets and signs, for their task was to somehow find the so-called King in Yellow, and to devise some means to enter his occulted lair, known in legend as the City of Dust.

In truth after near twenty years of scrutiny, they knew very little, not even the identity of the King. All they knew for certain was that he represented an ancient and lingering threat to the security of the Imperium, and that his veiled lair - by some metaphysical means - occupied and overlapped the very same space as the city of Queen Mab on Sancour.

On her precious free days, Medea favoured the city's many markets, for she had found that all manner of curiosity and oddness could be turned up on their stalls. She would visit the art dealers on Olitonhall, the print-mongers at the Tailtown Commercia, or the scrap-tech brokers who laid out their rusting, salvaged wares upon oilskin sheets on the waste ground behind Coalgate. She would go by the curio shops and antique emporia on Ropeburn and Tie's Hill and Cloaken Place, and peer at the treasures displayed in their windows. She would tarry in the cloth market on Fayside Wharf and, under the wide leaden roof of the old warehalls, sometimes spy strange glyphs and symbols woven into the patterns of rugs and carpets shipped in from the Herrat.

The city was full of secrets, or at least partial secrets and fragments of truth, and all of them were old. It had been remarked upon that Queen Mab was an unsettlingly strange place. Its ancient streets and meandering thoroughfares seemed to act as lodestone, drawing to it every last, lost thing that had ever been discarded or mislaid by the human race. It was like the high water line on some forlorn beach, where the tides of space had washed up flotsam and jetsam of civilization. Medea and her collegues had, over the years, found all kinds of trinkets, their purposes now indecipherable, which evidently pre-dated man's expansion to the stars from Terra. They had found nameless things, and the components of nameless things, that had been made long before even the Dark Age of Technology. No one could say, not even her master, why such objects had found their way to Sancour, except that the currents of the void or the eddies of the immaterium had carried them there, and deposited them, like sun-bleached bones or rusted shipwrecks on the shingle of a dead, stilled, saline sea.

Sancour - and Queen Mab - was like a scrapbook of obscured culture, a memorial to the forgotten. None of the objects had ever given up its answers, despite careful analysis. Medea had come to believe that, if it was a truly comprehensible answer they were seeking, it would most likely be found in words, in texts, and thus the book markets were her most common destination. There were several such, dotted around the city, but the Remainders beneath Toilgate was the largest.

That afternoon, she made her way into the shadowed warren. The dealers, silently pensive men and women who seldom made eye contact, had set up their stalls throughout the alleys and little courts, further diminishing the pavements and passing spaces. Some books were spread out on rugs, or in wire baskets or old fruit cartons. Some were arranged in little window displays, crammed tight, or rested upon wooden lecterns and reading stands liberated from long-closed libraries or deconsecrated temples. Such books were splayed open, like pinned birds or butterfly specimens, with little lead bars or cushions of sand to weight their pages, so that their fine illuminations were visible to passing trade. Many stalls were shaded by canvas awnings, which stirred softly in a breeze that could otherwise not be felt. Pages stirred too, twitched by the same breeze, whispering like fallen leaves in autumn.

If she was being honest with herself, Medea found the book market disquieting.

She was a capable and confident woman, and in her long life she had faced down many dangers without demur: sometimes dangers that would have robbed another soul of its sanity. She presented as a woman in her late thirties: uncommonly beautiful, lithe and distinguished by a keen intelligence. Discreet juvenat work down the years had maintained this illusion of youth, for in fact she had seen nigh on two centuries of life and, in those centuries, some of the greatest horrors the benighted universe could unleash. She had endured. She wore the attire of the Glavian pilot-caste, though it was hardly a disguise, for two reasons: for one, a respectable shipmistress would curry greater favour and service from vendors and dealers anxious to make a sale; for the other, it was the one day each week she could remind herself who she truly was. Her true self was an escape from the shackles of Sister Bismillah... and a disguise for Bismillah too, in case she was seen.

For though she was looking for secrets, others were looking for her.

Medea Betancourt, Glavian pilot, servant of the Ordos, was a very able operator. But, and she had never admitted this to anyone, not even her beloved master, she had a secret fear, a phobia that had stalked her since childhood. The endless, shuffling whisper of the twitching pages in the market made her skin crawl.

She followed Danzik's Passage, behind the old chapel-house, stopping twice to browse the stands of lurking dealers. Her red-gloved hands turned pages, and examined spines, and sorted through crates of almanacs and poetry chapbooks. The fear lurked at the back of her skull, like an itch.

The Remainders was a relatively safe quarter of the city. It was far away from the wretched holloways and the vicious warblind gangs, and there were few cutpurses or pickpockets to watch for. The worst one might encounter were the Curst beggars, the pitiful burdeners, who hustled for alms on some street corners and byways.

But the fear remained, an uneasy itch. It was the rustle of the pages, the stir of leaves. It reminded her, for all she tried to ignore the thought, of dry, dusty wings.

The name of her anguish was lepidopterophobia. This was, according to medicae learning, a fear of moths and butterflies. Such harmless, fragile things, often miraculously patterned and beautiful, yet Medea found them quite distressing.

She could make no account of it. Irrational fears are, after all, irrational. There was, as far as she could recall, no causal moment from her childhood, no triggering incident when she, as a young girl, had been alarmed or surprised by a sudden flurrying moth or fluttering butterfly. Her late mother, and other members of her clan, had often teased and chided her when she recoiled from the sudden whirr of wings. 'My dear girl,' her uncle had said, 'I do not understand your repulsion. The lepidoptera are courageous things. They are very like us. They are frail creatures that nevertheless brave the perils of flight, despite their fragility. They are like Glavians in their determination to command the sky.' She had never been able to supply him with a satisfactory reply, and now it was too late, for he, like the father she had never met, had fallen from the sky a long time since.

It was not flying things per se that made her phobic. Flies and stinging insects didn't bother her in the slightest, not even the drone buzz of them. It was the dry flutter that made her shudder: the dusty, powdered shiver of their wings, the soft, furred nature of their bodies, the feathered twitch of their antennae, the way they beat and pattered against window panes, or burred around a lamp at dusk. It was the sound of them, and the silence of them.

Medea knew the Remainders well, for she had been there many times down the years. She knew the layout of the open courts and crepuscular passageways, and the locations of various notable dealers. Most dealers had a speciality: vendors of alchemical and anatomical works clustered in Stern's Court; purveyors of history lined Molkine Way; dealers in literature and classics set out their stalls in Governor's Walk and Balference Court; vendors of engineering and mechanical tracts congregated in Tylass Row, Naeme's Court and Chylight Underwalk. For maps and charts, and pictographic engravings, one had to visit Hinter's Passage, for biography Sylasic Court, and for miscellanea the low yards of Dank's Alley.

For works of a more curious or esoteric nature, the best place was a small court accessible via a flight of steps descending from Tylass Row, which led to a place called Grammaticus Yard.

Here, the sunlight seldom reached, even at midday, and a dozen booksellers vied for yardage on the shadow-pooled cobbles to display their wares. Because of the perpetual gloom in the little yard, most dealers suspended brass lamps or old glow-globes from their awnings, so that customers could see to peruse the stock. Moths inevitably batted around these lamps.

The yard was almost empty when she reached it. The acid yellow glow of the lamps filled the twilight under the canvas. High above, a little oblong of blue, noonday sky was visible, boxed by the ancient darkness of the buildings on every side.

She could hear the flutter of book leaves in the breeze.

There were but a few customers present, browsing the stalls like somnambulists. Most looked to her like scholars or academics, most likely from the Academy Hecula, researching their dissertations. One, a younger man, reminded her for a moment of Belovoir, but it was not him.

There was a drowsy air to the yard. Only a handful of vendors were visible. One old woman was re-sorting books in the boxes on her stand, as if annoyed that they had been disturbed by customers. An elderly man in a frock coat sat in a worn armchair at the back of his stand, almost half-asleep, smoking 'roma from a bubble pipe. The others, she presumed, were in the darknesses of their tiny shops, cataloguing stock or taking noontide naps, or perhaps had stolen off to the caff-houses on Molkine for a bite of lunch. On vacant stands were little handwritten signs saying 'will return presently, please browse', and little ceramic bowls or brass dishes in the shape of cupped hands had been set out to accept payment according to an honesty system.

The leaves whispered.

Cats prowled the sleepy quiet of the court - strays, she guessed. They sat on stacks of books and washed their faces, or gazed from shadows with unblinking eyes. Some slept in baskets on top of manuscripts, or basked in the small patches of sunlight where it penetrated the little court. One, she saw, chased a moth around a lamp. The silent and languorous mood of the cats entirely suite the yard. It was a place of soft, feline lassitude.

Medea surveyed the stalls. She knew them well, but the stock changed regularly, and all manner of new oddities might turn up. She had to disturb a fat yellow tomcat in order to examine atlas of Sancour. The animal regarded her indignantly as it repositioned itself. The atlas, too old and faded to be legible, was worthless.

There was no perceptible breeze, yet pages stirred with a moth-wing fidget. Her skin crawled again, but there was work to do. She thought of Belovoir, and wondered what had become of him. A few years earlier, to assist with the legwork, she had employed two or three bookfinders, all students of the Academy eager to earn a little extra income. Praed Belovoir, an anxious young man with thyroid eyes, had been the most competent. He was reading Neoclassical Philosophies at the Academy, and had a good nose for books. In exchange for a few coins each week, he dredged the markets on her behalf, returning with likely volumes or information on more expensive items. Nothing of what he found was of any real use, but he was keen, and through him she had been able to map the city book markets. He was able to list dealers for her, and their locations, and their specialities. With his help, she had gained a greater understanding of the city's second-hand book trade than she would have obtained by herself during her one free day a week.

He had been glad of the work, and had never asked any questions as to her purpose or motives. Then, one day about six months before, he had stopped coming to her, without a word. She presumed he had found better and more gainful employment elsewhere, but she had never seen him again.

She came to Mam Tarding's stall. The old woman was still fussing with her crates, and paid Medea no mind. Across the way, a customer was haggling with an elderly dealer over the price of a first edition Savignor's A Historie of the Greate Unification. A cat slunk by in the shadows of the tables.

The baskets at the front of Mam Tarding's stall were filled with unbound manuscripts, great concertina folds of raw pages that were reproductions of old and frail works. For a small price, a customer could purchase the uncut bundles; for a higher fee, Mam Tarding could arrange to have them trimmed and bound by a local bookbinder.

This was how Medea found the book. She was searching the manuscripts in the baskets, trying to stifle her distaste, for the unbound paper fluttered and rustled in the breeze with more agitation than the bound books, and made her flesh creep. She had just turned up a potentially interesting reprint of Constanza's Rubric when a large moth rebounded from the lamp over her head, and landed with a percussive tap on the pages in her hand. She recoiled, despite herself, dropped the manuscript and backed away sharply bumping into the table of an adjacent stall. Mam Tarding looked up from her re-sorting, shot Medea a dirty look, and went back to her work.

Medea recovered herself, and felt foolish. The moth was a small thing, so much smaller than her, but its whiskered grey form filled her with revulsion, and she gritted her teeth as she heard it thrum into the air and circle aimlessly away.

She turned to look at the table she had backed into, anxious to make sure she had caused no disarray, for the booksellers could be an irritable lot. But there was no sign of a dealer present, just four small trestle tables, choked with books, under a canvas awning outside the doorway of a tiny shop. The door was closed, and there was no sign propped in it promising an imminent return. Beside the door was a small display window, the glass dusty and begrimed, the window space piled with ageing volumes. The interior of the tiny shop was dark.

No apology was necessary. Nothing had been disturbed. Medea was about to move away when she realised there was something odd about the shop. She had not seen it before, or noticed it at least, not on any of her previous visits. Above the door was written 'M. Borgez, prop'. The name was not familiar. Belovoir had never spoken of a proprietor by that name.

She started to look at the wares more closely. The books were very old and worn, and many she did not recognise. A Treatise of Lunar Rocketry, a History of the Low Country Waterways, something called a Baedeker's Guide, a folded map of coloured lines that appeared to correspond to some lost city's subterranean railway system. There was a volume entitled The Shorter Fiction of Cervantes, and a copy of verses by someone named Keats or Yeats, though the cover was so decrepit it was hard to make it out for certain.

The books were of immense age, and some, even to her inexpert eyes, were clearly written in the languages of Old Terra, the multiple forms that predated Low Gothic. Here, of all heresies, was a hymnal. Here, a grimoire of mystically erotic sketches by a man named Spare. Here was a small volume named Petit Albert, filled with hermetic symbols.

And here was a gazetteer of the stars.

She picked it up. There was no sleeping cat to coax aside; indeed, of all the stalls in the little yard, M. Borgez's premises had no cats lurking around it at all.

Medea opened the book. It was comparatively new, unstained and un-foxed. It was titled Of the Stars in the Heaven (with ephemeris), and it had been written by one Fredrik Dance, who had, it appeared, once served as the Astronomer Elect at the court of the Baron Prefect of Queen Mab. It was written in Low Gothic, with a comparative text presented in Enmabic, and boasted that it presented an inventory of all constellations visible from Sancour. As a Glavian shipmistress, such works interested her, and as a Glavian shipmistress, accustomed to the arrangements of the outer heavens, she knew at once that it was filled with errors. The star charts presented inside did not in any fashion match the star systems of Angelus.

Medea turned the pages, frowning. It was a curious find, a deranged work. Perhaps this Dance fellow had been quite mad, though the technical detail and composition was very precise and thorough. A thought struck her, and made her as uneasy as the constant rustle of paper leaves around her. Though it was a very long shot, and her master would no doubt dismiss it, perhaps this odd book offered a glimpse, a rare insight into the other, sideways place, the lair of the King that they had been seeking for so long.

It was certainly worth investigation. She decided she might purchase it, and examine it at her leisure. But there was no price marked in graphite on the flyleaf, nor any bowl in which to leave a payment. She tucked the book under her arm and decided to examine the stall further until the mysterious M. Borgez returned from his luncheon.

Time passed. The dealer did not reappear. While she waited, Medea found other oddities on the tables. They were all fragments of Old Terran literature, washed up here, no doubt, by the unruly gusts of time and space that carried all strange things to the shore of Queen Mab. But if that was so, then this little shop in this obscure yard represented a particularly fierce tidal bore, an eddying undertow of unusual strength. Such a peculiar concentration of things had ended up here, as if borne by a singular rip tide of chance.

She grew impatient. Time was getting on. She went across to the murky window and tried to peer inside. Perhaps the proprietor was in there. It was hard to see, for the panes were too smoked with dust and age. To her disgust, she saw that the inside sill was thick with the desiccated husks of moths that had flown into the shop and perished trying to beat their way out through the glass.

She could see no one within, but she could see the jumbled books crammed on display. One, most dilapidated, had half its spine missing, but on what was left she could see the incomplete title '…in Yellow', and the name Chambers. She stared at it through the thick, dirty glass. That, she was certain, was a volume she needed to examine.

Medea went to the door of the shop. She knocked and listened, but heard no reply. The door handle was an ornate brass security lock, quite modern, with a digital mechanism. M. Borgez favoured greater security than most dealers in the Remainders. She tried the door anyway.

It was unlocked.

With the astronomical gazetteer under her arm and the satchel across her body, she went inside. The shop interior was a miniature realm of shadows, where hardly any light came through the door panes or the little window. Books were piled on every side, well over head height, or arranged on teetering shelves, and formed a narrow canyon into the bowels of the place. There was barely room to move, and the air was thick with dust and the smell of paper rot.

She called out a hello, but there was no answer. She called out again, this time the name.

'Master Borgez?'

She edged inside, groping her way in the gloom, making a strenuous effort not to knock or disturb any of the perilous book stacks either side of her. It was warm, almost airless, and she could hear the soft rustle of papery leaves.

Medea thought to reach the window display from behind, but the way was blocked by a daunting cliff-face of books. Instead, she went further inside, hoping that the narrow defile between shelving might open out deeper in the shop, and that she might be able to turn around the stacks and make her way back to the window. The dark canyon of books merely led deeper. Her eyes struggled to adjust to the half-light. Loose pages had fallen on the floor and been trodden underfoot. She called the proprietor's name again.

Leaves rustled.

The slender ravine of books led back a long way, so deep in fact she lost sight of the shop door, and began to wonder how deceptively large the tiny shop must be. The premises had to run back under the shops of Tylass Row, perhaps even under the raised walkway adjacent to St Coglass Halcyon. It was a burrow, like the dwelling of some scurrying animal, lined in books, or like the narrow tunnel of some mine's workface where men might labour with pickaxes to work free seams of printed lore.

The ravine ended in a T-junction, where another thin avenue crossed it. This too was lined with shelves. To the right, stacked books vanished into the darkness. To the left, there seemed to be a glimmer of light. She went that way, stumbling over boxes of stock left on the walkway, her gloved hand feeling its way against rows of embossed leather spines. There was a light ahead.

'Master Borgez?' she called out.

There was still no answer, but the book tunnel gave out into what seemed to be a small reading room. This too was entirely lined with books, but in the centre was a small table and a chair, and over the table a glow-globe was suspended on a chain. The globe shone weakly, making shadows in every corner. Sluggish moths orbited the globe, wearily knocking against its dusty shade.

She held her breath in distaste, and edged around the room. A small alcove, no wider than her shoulders, led into the darkness of another corridor. Medea put the gazetteer into her satchel so both her hands were free, and found a light switch on a patch of bare wall. She pressed the switch, and a series of glow-globes slowly welled up with light along the corridor ahead.

She could see, to her amazement, that there was a whole library down there, row upon row of overstuffed shelves filling what was clearly a large, low-ceilinged space. It was labyrinthine. The passing ways between the shelves were so narrow they could only be slid along side-on, and the air was fearfully musty. Antique glow-globes lit up each section with pale light, a tobacco haze, and the lights of adjoining walkways forced their glow between the books on the shelves. Moths, drawn by the new lights, whirred past her, circling between the stacks.

She had begun to lose her sense of direction, but she felt if she went left again, she might be able to turn back and make her way to the window at the front of the shop. Her heart was beginning to beat rather too fast, and she couldn't catch her breath. She decided she would retrace her steps, exit the shop, and leave an appropriate payment for the gazetteer on the tables outside. More fool M. Borgez for failing to attend a customer.

But then the lights went out.

The darkness was solid and sudden. She started. Perhaps the globes had been on a timer switch that had popped back out. The enfolding darkness was even more stifling. The place was so fusty, her throat was dry with book mould. She tried to feel around and find the way out, but touched only books on every side of her, pressing in. She felt, or thought she felt, the brush of dusty wings against her cheeks: other lost souls searching for the light.

She tried to stay calm. She groped her way again. She could hear a tapping sound, the persistent, irregular patter of something knocking against a window. It sounded like a moth. A large moth, beating itself mindlessly to death against a panel of glass.

Medea swallowed her fear. She felt her way along the books in the pitch-black. She sensed, just ahead, an open space.

A light came on, as suddenly as the others had shut off.

She winced at the abrupt glare of it. Another antique glow-globe, hanging from a chain, illuminated another small reading space. It was not the same one as before. There were two chairs here, and a reading stand on the little desk. Perhaps, she thought, the lights in the shop were motion sensitive, switching on only when someone was nearby in order to conserve power. That was perhaps why the others had gone off and this one had come on.

There was a book propped open on the reading stand. She almost didn't regard it, but something about it drew her eye.

It was a copy of The Spheres of Longing by Gideon Ravenor.

Fear chilled her, even more than the distant tapping of the monstrous unseen moth. How could that be? How could that book, of all books, be here, and left open for her to see?

She sat down and stared at it, and then laughed. Of course. Of course. This was it. Finally. This was how the cat-and-mouse game ended. He had finally tracked them down. This was all his trickery.

'Gideon?' she called out.

Nothing answered, except the distant tapping of friable wings against unyielding glass.

'Gideon, I know it's you. One of your mind-tricks, is it? Very well done. You have quite bewitched me and lured me here.'

Still no answer, and no familiar tremble of psykanic power at the edges of her thoughts.

'I expect you have brought me here to answer questions,' she said to the darkness. 'To interrogate me. Who will do that, Gideon? You? Or will it be Kys or dear Kara? You must know, Gideon, that I will not give him up. Not Gregor, not any of them. You have caught me at long last, and you may treat me cruelly to get at his secrets, but I will not betray him, not now or ever.'

More oppressive quiet answered her, almost silence, save for the tapping of wings and flutter of leaves. The sounds made her shudder. Was that his approach? Psychological torment designed to exploit her deepest and most private phobia?

'You have caught me, Gideon, you have bound me. But I will not betray him. Show yourself, and be done with these theatrics.'

Still no answer. She got up. She looked at the books lining the shelves around her. Here were more sadistic games. A copy of The Lies of Slyte. A slender, miserably rotting volume called The Strange Demise of Titus Endor. A Life of Pontius Glaw. A treatise called On The Malus Codicium. A trim chapbook called Nathun Inshabel On Elvira Cardinal. Another, The Lives and Deaths of the Alizebeth Bequins.

And here, a book bound in black leather and embossed in gold.

An Account of the Doom of the Heretic Gregor Eisenhorn, and Also of the Rogue Gideon Ravenor.

This... this was not his doing. It couldn't be. It was too spiteful, too unkind, even for Gideon at his most determined. Medea knew him of old. She knew that he would not sink to such base intimidation, not if he expected her to deal with him. He had to know such mind games would only harden her resolve, not soften it.

The tapping grew louder. She turned, and flinched. The globe over the table had drawn more moths, dozens of them, grey as fruit-mould, fat and fur-bodied, and they circled the lamp frenetically strumming their floury wings against its shade, fluttering wretchedly. They were large, larger than any she had ever seen, and that made her catch her breath. Fear, her old phobia, closed its hand around her heart.

There was a click, and the light went out. Darkness plunged in again. She could see nothing, but she could hear the moths milling furiously, blindly, lost now that their light source was gone. She felt things brush her cheek, felt wing-powder on her tongue, felt soft pinions feather and vibrate against her lips. She tried to cover her face and not scream at the same time. The tickle of wings was at her nostrils, and the flutter of leaves was in her ears, as if the things in the dark were trying to flutter and crawl into her skull. She stumbled back against the shelves, and heard dislodged books tumble and spill like a little landslide.

Then another click. Another light had come on, but this one was to her right, three rows away. She could see the globe shining between the bookshelves. The moths were suddenly gone, perhaps drawn by the glow.

She was breathing hard. Half-blind, she edged in the direction of the new light. More moths came with her, large and small, what seemed like scores of them tumbling and flickering towards the beams of light.

Medea reached the light, swiping moths away from her face in disgust. The lamp hung in another cleared reading area. There was a book propped on the table stand, but it had begun to rot with mildew and gluey slime, its pages crumpled limp and wet like the wings of a moth crushed underfoot. The text was unreadable. Moths, in alarming profusion, beat against the globe and crawled on its surface, twitching, rustling and shivering.

Medea backed away, her phobia almost choking her. In a moment the light failed, darkness returned, and the air was full of wretched throbbing wings. A click, and another light came on, behind her four rows away.

She blundered towards it headlong, barging books from the shelves on either side of her. Volumes, pamphlets and unbound manuscripts cascaded in her wake. The light hung in another little alcove, where two small tables had been pushed together to form a partners' desk arrangement. The glow-globe was very dim, and cast only a dull, ruddy light in the space because of the sheer number of moths crawling and seething across its surface like a hideous, embroidered cover.

The light clicked off. Medea stood her ground, panting, brushing unseen whiskery forms off her face. She almost gagged. Another lamp came on. This was even further away, six rows deeper, a beacon beyond the silhouettes of book-laden shelves.

She paused. She tried to settle her wits.

The lights were leading her on. She was sure of it. They were not switching on and off at random. Each one shone, then shut off, and then another lit, in a zigzag pattern that was drawing her ever deeper into the maze of shelves, a constant promise of escape that led simply to more dismay.

She stared at the light, waiting for it to shut off, willing it to end its timed duration. It continued to glow. Moths spiralled past her in the twilight, purring madly and wildly towards the radiance.

She waited. The light did not turn off. It was going to keep shining, she realised, until she moved towards it. It was beckoning her. It was summoning her.

She stayed in place. The light continued to shine, daring her, taunting her.

She breathed hard in the close air, desperate to rid her lungs of the stale atmosphere, and fill them with the clear breeze of the yard that was still, she hoped, somewhere outside. This was not how she was going to end.

She straightened up. The light continued to burn.

She turned her back on it. With grim resolve, she walked away from the single light, and into the darkness of the stacks, feeling her way. The blackness consumed her. There was grit in her mouth. She could hear the threnody of frantic wings. The single light continued to shine behind her until, it seemed, it realised she was no going to come to it. It shut off, and another light snapped on some where to her left. She ignored it, and continued to blunder into the darkness. Books spilled from shelves as her fingers clawed into them.

The light lingered, then shut off. Another came on, to her right. She ignored that, too. She kept going, away from all light, and towards the blackness. The lamp shut off, as if annoyed and frustrated with her, then another came on, behind her, then it shut off and another took its place to her left again. When that failed to draw her, it switched off, and yet another lit up, deep in the maze of stacks to her right.

Medea ignored them all. She stumbled towards the place where there was no light, following the path of darkness. She could hear the tapping again, the feathery tapping, the bump-bump-bump of something knocking against a window pane. She followed the sound instead, trying to locate the source of the tapping, which sounded like an irregular, terrified heartbeat.

Then, she saw light ahead. It wasn't a lamp or a glow-globe. It was a pale, cold smudge, scarcely visible. It was daylight, not the artificial radiance of a bulb.

She bumped into a stack, and heard it crash over against another, spilling an avalanche of books. She picked her way on, tripping on heaps of folios and octavos. The light was so faint she could barely see it. If she stared directly at it, it vanished. Only the sensitivity of her peripheral vision could detect its vague, ghost shimmer.

The tapping grew louder still. Her way was blocked, so she deliberately shoved a shelf unit aside, causing a huge collapse of tomes and splintered wood. Dust billowed up like woodsmoke. As it cleared, she could see the light properly at last. It was the shop's grubby little window, looking out into the yard. She had found her way to the back of the window display, with only book-piles and trolleys between her and the glass. Something with ragged wings was fluttering and beating repeatedly against the inside of the glass. Like her, it was trying to find a way out of the shop, and into the light.

It was not a moth. It was far too large. It was fluttering up and down the window, knocking and knocking and knocking, beating its papery wings.

Medea dragged laden carts and trolleys out of her path, and dug her way through the piles of books that blocked her passage like a rockslip. She reached the window, sweeping the displayed books aside, wholesale. Through the thick, sooty glass, she could see out into Grammaticus Yard. She could see the stalls, the browsing customers. She could see the cats reclining in spots of sunlight. She could see Mam Tarding sorting her book crates. She could see the old dealer asleep beside his bubble pipe.

She tapped on the window. No one outside heard her, or looked her way. She began to beat against the glass with her fists, and yell for help. No one looked around. She was banging frantically against the old window, as mindlessly and pointlessly as a moth trying to chase the light. The glass did not break, or even shiver. She couldn't crack it or smash through it. It was as hard and resilient as rock, or as hard as glass to a delicate insect. She hammered and shouted to no avail. The world outside continued in its own slow, quiet pace, unheeding.

The thing fluttering up and down the window dropped suddenly in front of her face. Medea yelped and jerked away from it, involuntarily swatting it aside with her hand. It tumbled, as though dead, onto the sill.

She stared at it. It lay amid the rind of dry, dead lepidoptera, its cover slightly parted like broken wings. It was a book, a small chapbook. It had somehow been alive and fluttering.

She picked it up. There was no title on the cover, and no words inside on the powdery leaves. Instead, there was a patterned print that ran across every page like marbling, a distorted, smudged pattern of ink that showed, simply, a face, like a blurred pict-capture taken in low light. A human face, screaming in dismay, repeated in slight variations on every page. If she had flicked the pages and rippled through them, it would have animated the image into one fluid, mechanical sequence of a face twisting to shriek in terror.

It was the likeness of Praed Belovoir.

Not her.

She took off her right glove, peeling away the red leather to expose the intricate, gleaming Glavian circuitry that inlaid her hand. She clasped the handle, made interlink contact with the security mechanism, and forced an override.

The mechanism disengaged with a loud click. The door unlocked.

Outside, the yard was quiet. The cats had all fled, for the sun had begun to set and the rare patches of sunlight had vanished. Some dealers had already shut up for the day, their stalls cleared and folded up, their awnings cranked back into the over-window recesses.

The door to M. Borgez's premises had shut behind her, all on its own. It was pitch-dark inside the shop. She still had the strange gazetteer in her satchel, but she felt she had made payment enough. She hoped the book would prove of some use, though she thought it doubtful.

Medea walked away, across the yard, towards the steps to Tylass Row. She breathed deeply, drinking in the outdoor air. It was polluted, and soiled with the exhaust fumes and stove smoke of the old city, but it tasted fresh and clean to her. The undertows of time that lapped Queen Mab flowed especially deeply in the dark yards of the Remainders, and in the little labyrinth shop on Grammaticus Yard, they were the most treacherous of all.

All around, the leaves of books left out on the stalls rustled in the breeze like moth-wings, but her fear was behind her.

She did not look back. She never went back.

And even if she had, the shop was never there again.

INTRODUCTION

Penitent Limited Edition

Well, I expect you have questions. And that's the point.

What we now refer as The Inquisitor Cycle began in 2001 with the novel Xenos, which became the first part of the Eisenhorn Trilogy, and was then followed by the Ravenor Trilogy, the stand-alone novel The Magos, numerous short stories, and then the Bequin Trilogy, of which Penitent is the second volume. This cycle of books contains a lot of different storylines and plots, but is essentially linked by various enduring characters: Eisenhorn, Ravenor, and the likes of Medea, Nayl, Kys, Kara and so on. It is - and I mention this merely in passing - regarded as something of a 'gateway drug' to the universe of Warhammer 40,000, especially as it deals with the non-military, 'domestic' life of the Imperium, the complex life away from Warhammer 40K's infamous battlefields.

Inquisitor novels are, essentially, detective stories. They are mysteries, involving investigations that slowly uncover dangerous and, more often than not, forbidden truths. Xenos set the template for this by being, unashamedly, a hard-bitten detective noir set in the 40K universe. That format was successful, and so over the course of the cycle, I've attempted to continue it, while introducing some variation so that the sequence remains fresh.

Those variations include point of view. Leaving aside the short stories, and the novel The Magos, which is essentially a bridging piece to link the first two trilogies to the third, the point of view has changed three times. In the Eisenhorn Trilogy, I adopted (on a whim, to be honest) a first person narrative, because it mimicked the hard-boiled style, so we got the first three books from Eisenhorn's perspective. This turned out to be an unexpectedly demanding exercise: I had quite underestimated how hard it would be to maintain his POV for three novels. I promised myself I wouldn't do it again.

With the Ravenor Trilogy, I switched to third person. Though some sections of the story are carried by Ravenor's 'voice' and perspective, they are merely there as connective tissue: the Ravenor books are far more about a team of agents working together, so the third person framework, and the ability to switch between characters, was both a relief from the rigours of first person narrative, and entirely appropriate to the scope of the novels.

When I came to the Bequin Trilogy, I decided to avoid the 'easy' route and return to the first person again. For all its difficulties, it seemed appropriate. The Eisenhorn books had made first person an almost trademark part of the Inquisitor series. Besides, I really wanted to focus on Beta as a character. She is a bit player, a mere pawn in a larger storyline, so I wanted her to be central to our view, and for the readers to see things through her eyes.

For me, as a writer, this led to some great opportunities. Beta's voice is significantly more 'characterful' than Gregor's. Where he is matter-of-fact, she is constantly curious and questioning. Her narrative has a quality of its own, a somewhat antique style, which lends the books a very different feel to what has come before, and allows me to depict Queen Mab in almost 'old-fashioned' prose that I hope helps build atmosphere and increases our immersion in the otherness of a 40K society.

More importantly, she knows very little. She is nothing like as knowledgeable or well informed as Eisenhorn or Ravenor, and what little she does know about the world and universe is usually wrong, or filtered through myth. She's not exactly an unreliable narrator, for at no point is she deliberately misleading us, and we're aware from the outset that she is striving to learn. But, very often, the 40K-literate reader is several steps ahead of her, because they know the universe lore, or they are familiar with the previous books. I was rather inspired by the concept of a book where the reader knew more than the protagonist, where they might be willing her not to do a particular thing, or felt they wanted to warn her about a character she was meeting for the first time.

With Penitent, Beta's pursuit of knowledge is in full swing. She is hungry to learn. I wanted the story to travel to a point where she, at very least, had caught up with the reader. But having your main character learn what the readers already know is ultimately unsatisfying so it had to go further than that: it had to reveal universally shocking new things, things that the readers would start to question, allowing them to share her wonder and confusion.

So, you have questions, and not all of them have been answered here. As I said, that's the point. You're supposed to be left wanting. You're supposed to be demanding explanations. You are, in fact, Beta now... right there with her.

The Eisenhorn Trilogy follows the path of a man plunging - by necessity - from the light to the dark, a conscious price paid in order to do his duty to the Emperor. It is a story of descent. The Ravenor Trilogy follows a man fighting to keep himself, and his cohort, on the right side of the line, to keep them in the light no matter what. He is not always successful, but it is a story of equilibrium, of balance.

The Bequin Trilogy is a story of ascent. A determined climb from ignorance and darkness towards light and truth. It is, deliberately, the mirror (see what I did there?) of Eisenhorn's story. And like Gregor and Gideon before her, Beta may not be entirely successful in her efforts. And where she ends up may not put her on the same path as Gregor and Gideon at all.

It's a murky universe, and everything is pretending to be some thing it is not.

By pure chance, the bulk of Penitent was written during the pandemic lockdown. Writing a novel is, for me, always a bit of an escape, but this was more of an escape than usual. During the lockdown a poll in The Times showed that the British public had deemed 'artist' as the least useful profession in the crisis; this, while people everywhere were seeking relief from stress in books, films, music, comics...

I make no claims to be an 'artist', but through the period of lockdown I have had far more than the usual number of messages and emails from readers saying how much they enjoyed particular books or comics, and how these had been such a valuable release from everyday concerns. A tiny but appreciated vindication for the function of fantasy.

So if you have questions - and I know you do - then reflect that you are right there with Beta, and fiction has performed its little sleight-of-hand trick, and you must have passed through the mirror, at least for a little while.

And while you're there, you may care to go back in time to a moment that took place before this novel, and join Medea as she visits the street markets of Queen Mab. The short story Lepidopteraphobia, which follows here, answers a few questions and asks some more, and was written especially for this edition.

Dan Abnett

Maidstone, July 2020

About the Author

Dan Abnett has written over fifty novels, including Anarch, the latest instalment in the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series. He has also written the Ravenor, Eisenhorn and Bequin books, the most recent of which is Penitent. For the Horus Heresy, he is the author of the Siege of Terra novel Saturnine, as well as Horus Rising, Legion, The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers. He also scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous Black Library audio dramas. Many of his short stories have been collected into the volume Lord of the Dark Millennium. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

An extract from Penitent.

My dreams had become sticky and black since I met the daemon.

It had been two months since he first visited me, and his immaterial presence had seeped into my dreams like tar, gumming all of my thoughts together so that nothing was clear or separate any more. Just one fused lump of black confusion, wherein ideas writhed, enfeebled, unable to pull themselves free or define themselves.

I had hoped for clarity. I believe, in fact, that clarity was the thing I had been seeking my whole life. I wished I had met, instead, an angel, whose essence would have flooded my mind like amber. This was, I confess, utter fancy. I had never met an angel, and I did not know if they existed, but that is what I imagined. Where a daemon’s touch might drown my dreams like dark ooze, an angel’s would fill them with golden resin, so that each thought and idea might be preserved, alone and intact, quite clearly presented, and I could make sense of them. Of everything.

I had seen amber on the market stalls below Toilgate. That was how I knew of the stuff: polished pebbles in hues of ochre, gamboge and orpiment, resembling glass, and within each one a lace fly or burnished beetle, set fast for eternity.

That is how I wished my mind was: each thought presented thus, available to the light from all sides, so clear that one might examine every smallest detail through an enlarging glass.

But the daemon had welled in, and all was black.

I say daemon, but I was told the correct term is daemonhost. His name was Cherubael. This sounded to me like the name of an angel, but as with all things in the city of Queen Mab, things and their names do not agree. They are, ineluctably, ciphers for each other. Through my sticky, black dreams, I had come at least to understand that Queen Mab was a city of profound contradiction. It was a place half-dead, or at least half-other, where one thing was in fact some opposite thing, and truth and lies interleaved, and people were not who they appeared to be, and even doors could not be trusted for, altogether quite too often, they opened between places that should not intersect.

The city was a dead thing inside a live thing, or the other way around. It was a place haunted by the ghost of itself, and few had the mediumship to negotiate between the two. The dead and the living questioned each other, but did not, or could not, listen to the answers. And those few who walked, aware, in the dark places between the two, the margin that divided the physical from the shadow it cast, seemed more concerned with consigning souls from one side to the other, sending the screaming living to their deaths, or plucking the purblind dead back to life.

Great Queen Mab and I had that in common. There was a dead-half part of me too, a silence within that made me pariah. I was a true citizen of Queen Mab, for I was a contradiction. I was shunned by all, an outcast orphan not fit for society, yet sought by all as a prize of some sort.

My name is Beta Bequin. Alizebeth was my given name, but no one called me that. Beta is a diminutive. It is said Bay-tar, with a long vowel, not Better or Beater, and I had always thought this was to distinguish it from the Eleniki letter that is commonly used in scientific ordinal notation. But now I began to think that was exactly what it was. I was Beta, the second on the list, the second version, the second-ranked, the lesser of two, the copy.

Or maybe not. Perhaps I was merely the next. Perhaps I was the alpha (though not, of course, the Alpha who stood with me in those days).

Perhaps, perhaps… many things. My name did not define me. That, at least, I learned from Cherubael, despite the gluey darkness of the dreams he spread. My name did not match me, just as his did not match him. We were both, like Queen Mab, contradictions from the outset. Names, as we will see, are infinitely untrustworthy, yet infinitely important.

I had become very sensitive to the distinction between what something is called and what it actually is. It had become my way, and I had learned it from the man Eisenhorn, who was by then, I suppose, my mentor. This practice of not trusting something by its surface was his very mode of being. He trusted nothing, but there was some value in this habit, for it had patently kept him alive for a very long time. A peculiarly long time.

It defined him too, for I did not know what he was any more than I knew what I was. He told me he was an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos, but another man, who claimed to hold that title with equal insistence, told me that Eisenhorn was, in fact, a renegade. Worse, a heretic. Worse, Extremis Diabolus. But perhaps that man – Ravenor, his name – perhaps he was the liar.

I knew so very little, I did not even know if Eisenhorn knew what he was. I wondered if he was like me, bewildered by the way the truth of the world could shift so suddenly. I thought I was an orphan, raised in the scholam of the Maze Undue to serve as an agent of the Ordos. But now it seemed I was a… a genetic copy and not an orphan at all. I have – had – no parents. There was no dead mother and father for me to mourn, though I had mourned and missed them my whole life, for they were a fabrication, just like the story of their tombstone in the marshland cemetery.

And I had been told the Maze Undue was not an Ordo scholam, but in fact an academy, run by a hermetic society called the Cognitae, which was of ancient standing, and served as a shadow-twin of the Inquisition.

I was expected now to decide my loyalty. Should I serve the Cognitae that bred me, or the Holy Ordos that I always believed I was a part of? Did I throw my lot in with Eisenhorn, who might be a servant of the Hallowed Throne, or a thrice-damned heretic? Did I turn to Ravenor, who claimed Imperial authority, yet may be the biggest liar of all?

And what of the other parties in this game? Not the least of them, the King in Yellow? Should I stand at his side?

I was resolved, for now, to walk with Gregor Eisenhorn. This, despite the fact he consorted with daemonhosts and a warrior of the Traitor Legions, and had been denounced to me for a heretic.

Why? Because of all the things I have just said. I trusted nothing. Not even Gregor Eisenhorn. But I was in his company and he had, I felt, been the most open with me.

I had my own principles, of course. Though it was done underhand by the Cognitae, I was raised to believe my destiny was to serve the Throne. That, at least, felt right. I knew I would rather pledge to the God-Emperor of us all than to any other power or faction. Where I would ultimately stand, I could not say, for, as I have stated, I could not identify any truth that could be relied on. At least in Eisenhorn’s company I might learn some truths upon which I could base a decision, even if it was, in the end, to quit his side and join another.

I wished to learn, to make true learning, not the dissembling education of the Maze Undue. I wished to learn the truth about myself, and what part I played in the greater scheme of mystery. More than that, I wished to unravel the secrets of Queen Mab, and lay them bare to light, for plainly an existential menace lurked in the shadows of the world, and exposing it would be the greatest duty I could perform in the name of the God-Emperor.

These things I wished, though, as I came to reflect later, one must be careful what one wishes for. Nevertheless, revelation of the entire truth, in all clarity, was the purpose I had privately vowed to accomplish. Which is why, that cold night, I was Violetta Flyde, and I walked through the streets of Feygate Quarter at Eisenhorn’s side to attend a meeting at the Lengmur Salon.

Yes, I know. Violetta Flyde was yet another veil, an untrue name, a false me, a role to play, something that the tutors of the Maze Undue used to call a function. But illumination might be earned from the play-acting, so I walked then, and for the time being, at Eisenhorn’s side.

Also, I was fond of his daemon.

Cherubael was cordial. He called me ‘little thing’, and though he polluted my dreams, I fancied he was the most honest of my companions. It was as though he had nothing left to lose, and thus honesty would cost him nothing. There was no side to him.

Not all found him so bearable. Lucrea, a girl who I had brought with me into Eisenhorn’s care, left after a short time. She slipped away into the streets one night, without a goodbye, and I am sure it was the daemonhost’s company that had finally driven her away, despite all she had seen till then. But Lucrea had never been part of the intrigue, just a bystander. I could not blame her for wanting to be out of it.

Cherubael was a daemon, a thing of the immaterium, shackled inside a human body. I think the body had been dead for a long time. His true self, inside, stretched at his outer casing as if trying to get out. The shape of horns pushed at the skin of his brow, as though some forest stag or scree-slope ram was striving to butt its way out of him. This pulled taut the bloodless flesh of his face, giving him an unintentional sneer, an upturned nose, and eyes that blinked oddly and too seldom. I wondered sometimes if he would burst one day, and there would be nothing left but sprouting antlers and a grinning skull.

He was quite terrifying, but I found the fact of him reassuring. If he was a daemon, then such things existed. And Queen Mab constantly demonstrated that there was symmetry in all things: dead and alive, materia and immateria, truth and lies, name and false name, faithful and faithless, light and dark, inner and outer. So if he was a daemon, then surely there had to be angels too? Cherubael, cursed and wretched, was my proof that angels existed.

And perhaps, in time, one would come to me and fill my dreams with amber sap, and let me see things, golden and clear, for what they actually were.

‘One may measure a city,’ Eisenhorn remarked as we walked, ‘by the number of metaphysical societies it harbours.’

‘One may measure a circle,’ I replied, ‘starting anywhere.’

He looked at me, puzzled.

‘Your point?’

‘It’s still a circle,’ I said. ‘No start, no finish. Infinite.’

‘Yes. And this is still a city.’

‘Is it, though?’ I asked.

I was in a playful mood, and he didn’t care for it. He meant, of course, the temperament and health of a city. A city in decline, one leaning towards corruption and malady of spirit, becomes home to curious beliefs. An interest in the other grows. This is basic Ordo teaching. A fashion for the occult and esoteric, a preponderance of fringe interests, these are the symptoms of a culture in dangerous deterioration.

If you do not know the city, the Lengmur Salon lies in a hollow of old streets beneath the flaking spire of Saint Celestine Feygate, whose bells chime at odd hours. On this night, upon the broad steps before the templum, many of the poor wretches known as the Curst loitered, begging for alms. I could not help but look to see if Renner Lightburn was among them. In the months since we had been separated, I had thought of him often, and wondered what fate had befallen him, for no trace of him could be found anywhere.

Nor was there trace here. Eisenhorn noticed my look, but made no comment. Though Lightburn had been brave and selfless during his time with me, his mind had been wiped by Ravenor’s agents and he had been returned, mystified, to the streets. Eisenhorn believed I was better off without him and, most certainly, that Lightburn was better off without me.

Still, I had never had the chance to thank him.

All around that small, muddled quarter of Feygate there were salons, dining halls and meeting houses that were popular haunts for those of a metaphysical bent. I saw placards on the walls and notices in windows advertising spiritual lectures, quizzing glasses and table-turning evenings, or opportunities to hear noted speakers orate on many matters esoteric, such as ‘Man’s place in the Cosmos,’ or ‘The Secret Architecture of the Queen Mab Templums,’ or ‘The Hidden Potency of Numbers and Letters’. Several establishments advertised the reading of taroche, by appointment, and others promised spiritual healing and past-life revelation that would be delivered by expert practitioners.

The Lengmur Salon, its old windows glowing gold in the deepening evening, stood foremost among these. It was the meeting place of souls artistically and mystically inclined. It was said the celebrated poet Crookley dined here regularly, and that often he might be found drinking with the engraver Aulay or the beautiful opera singer Comena Den Sale. The place was famous for its lectures, both formal and informal, and its readings and performative events, as well as the provocative dialogues that flowed between the eclectic clientele.

‘On another world,’ Eisenhorn muttered as he held the door open for me, ‘this place would have been closed by the Magistratum. By the Ordos. This whole district.’

There is a fine line, I believe, between what is permissible and what is not. The Imperium loves its lore and its mysteries, and there is always active interest in what might be considered fringe ideas. However, it is but a short step from those harmless and jolly diversions to outright heresy. Queen Mab, and establishments like this, teetered on that edge. There was an air of the occult to it, by which I mean the old definition of the word, the hidden and the unseen. It felt as though real secrets lay here, and true mysteries were discussed, mysteries beyond the innocuous fripperies and trifles tolerated on more upstanding worlds.

Queen Mab, indeed the whole world of Sancour, had slid into unwise, bohemian decay, falling from the strict and stern grasp of Imperial control into a state of end-times dissolution, which would only end in its decadent demise, or in a hasty and overdue purge by off-world authorities.

But the salon, ah such a place! Facing the street was its famous dining hall, a large, bright room that rang with the clatter of flatware and chatter of the customers. The place was packed, and people queued outside to get a supper-table.

Behind the hall and the kitchens lay the salon itself, a back-bar accessible by doors in the side lanes and through a curtained archway at the rear of the dining hall. This was the heart of the establishment. It was fusty, I would say, if you have never visited it, lit by old lumen globes in tinted glass hoods, the walls papered with an opulent pattern of black fern-leaves on a purple field. There was a long bar to the back, the heavy wood of it painted a dark green and ribbed with brass bands. The main space was filled with tables, and there were side booths around which black drapes could be drawn for private assignations.

The place was busy, thronging with patrons, many of whom had come through from the dining room to take a digestif after their supper. The air was full of voices and the waft of obscura smoke, but it was not lively, like a city tavern, or the busy dining hall without. There was a reserve here, a languor, as though these conversations were slow and involved matters of philosophy rather than the empty blather of drinkers finding evening recreation. Servitors, worked in brass and robed in green, weaved through the throng, serving trays of drinks and platters of food.

We took a booth to the side from where we could observe a decent part of the lounge. A servitor brought us joiliq in small, patterned glasses, and small plates of griddled gannek smeared with mustard, and kethfruit flesh dipped in salt.

We watched.

I was intrigued by the clientele and their heady conversations.

‘Is that Crookley?’ I asked, eyeing a heavyset man who was sitting beneath a painting of the Tetrachtys, locked in conversation with a small woman in grey.

‘No,’ Eisenhorn replied. ‘Crookley is taller, less meat on him.’

I am skilled at observation. It was part of my training. While caring to maintain the role of the prim young lady Violetta Flyde, I scanned the crowd, noting this visage and that, seeing whom I might recognise, and who it might be useful to recognise on another day. I saw a bearded caravan master from the Herrat, holding forth with three men – one who seemed to be a meek scholam master, another who was clearly a humble rubricator from his ink-stained hands, and a third who would not have seemed out of place at the head of a Heckaty Parish killgang.

At another table, three nurse-sisters from the Feygate Lazarhouse sat in silence, sharing a bottle of mint wine, identical in their tight-belted grey serge habits and white coifs. They did not speak or look at each other, and their tired faces read blank. I wondered if they were here by mistake, or if this was simply their nearest hostelry, and they tolerated the decadent society each evening for the sake of a restorative drink.

Beside the bar stood an elderly man with quite the longest arms and legs I have seen. He gangled awkwardly, as if he had never quite mastered the lengths to which his skinny frame had grown. He was dressed in a dark tailcoat and trousers, and peered through a silver pince-nez as he scribbled in a notebook. Alongside him at the bar, but apparently not of the elderly man’s company, for they exchanged no words, sat a small, sad old man who was evidently blind. He sipped at drinks that the bartender slid into his grasp so he might find them.

I noted many others. I noted, too, any indication of weapons on their persons: a bulging pocket here, an underbelt there, a stiffness of posture that hinted at a concealed knife-girdle or disguised holster. I had no expectation that the evening would turn untoward, but if it did, I had already mapped the dangers, and knew from which directions threats would come.

Just before the lights started to flash, I saw two people at the side door, talking urgently. One was a young gentleman of means in a pinstriped suit and over-robe. The other was a woman in a rust-coloured gown. I was drawn by the quiet animation of their conversation. Though I could not hear the words, their manner was somewhat agitated, as if some serious personal matter was being discussed that was quite different in tone from the meandering debate in the rest of the salon.

The woman made a gesture of refusal, then turned to leave by the side door. The man took her arm – gently – to dissuade her, but she shook him off and stepped out. As she passed beneath the low lamp of the side door, I saw her profile, and felt at once that I knew her from somewhere.

But then she was out, and gone into the street, and the salon lights were flashing on and off.

Gurlan Lengmur, the patron of the establishment, stepped up onto the small stage and nodded to the barman, who ceased flicking the light switches now that attention and quiet had been achieved.

‘My friends,’ said Lengmur, ‘welcome to this evening’s diversion.’

His voice was soft and buttery. He was a small man, refined and well dressed, but otherwise quite bland in appearance, a fact that seemed to bother him, for his dark hair was shaved on the right side and then turned over long on the crown in a huge, oil-dressed lick as the latest society fashion prescribed. I felt he had embraced this modern style less because it was modish and more because it afforded his person some specific feature of interest.

‘There will be taroche later, in the back room,’ he said, ‘and then a talk by Master Edvark Nadrich on the significance of the Uraeon and the Labyrine in Early Angelican tomb sites. Those of you who have heard Master Nadrich’s talks before will know to expect a riveting and educational treat. Afterwards, then, an open discussion. First, though, on this small stage, Mamzel Gleena Tontelle, the feted voicer, will share her mediumship with us.’

There was a warm round of applause, and some clinking of butter knives against the rims of glassware. Lengmur stepped back, extending a gesture of welcome as he bowed his head, and handed up onto the foot-stage a dowdy woman in a pearl-grey silk dress of a style that had been out of fashion for some decades.

Her plump face was pinched. I guessed her age to be about fifty years. She accepted the amiable applause with a nod and a gentle sweep of her hand.

‘Her dress,’ Eisenhorn whispered. ‘Styled old to remind us of generations past. A common trick.’

I nodded. Mamzel Tontelle indeed looked like a society lady from the glittering ballrooms of the previous century, a time when Queen Mab had been a grander place. I had seen such things in pict-books. Even her mannerisms had something of the old-fashioned about them. This was an act, a role, and I had a great interest in those who performed roles well. She had, I think, applied some costuming powder to her skin and dress.

‘Powdered like a ghost,’ Eisenhorn grumbled. ‘Voicers call it “phantomiming”, and it’s yet another stale conceit.’

Mam Tontelle had done herself up like some mournful shade, the light powder making it seem as though she had stood, unmoving, through the passage of decades as dust settled upon her. It was understated and, for my part, I thought it most amusing.

She clasped one hand to the shelf of her bosom and spread the fingers of the other across her brow, furrowing in concentration.

‘There is a boy here,’ she said. ‘A small boy. I see the letter “H”.’

In the crowd, some shaking of heads.

‘Definitely a boy,’ Mamzel Tontelle continued. Her voice was thin and colourless. ‘And the letter “H”. Or perhaps a “T”.’

‘Cold reading,’ muttered Eisenhorn. ‘The oldest trick of all. Fishing for reception.’

And of course it was. I saw it for what it was, and shared Eisenhorn’s scepticism, but not his disdain. I had always been charmed by such distractions, and was entertained to watch an actor at work. More so, a trickster who was, through performance, fabricating something out of nothing.

Mam Tontelle tried another letter, a ‘G’, as I remember, and a man at the back took her up on it, and presently had become convinced that he was receiving a message from his godson, long dead. The man was quite astounded by this, though he had provided all the facts that had made it convincing, offering them innocently in response to Mam Tontelle’s deft suggestion.

‘He was young when he died. But ten years old.’

‘Eight,’ the man replied, eyes bright.

‘Yes, I see it. Eight years. And drowned, poor soul.’

‘He fell under a cart,’ the man sighed.

‘Oh, the cart! I hear the rattle of it. It was not water upon the poor child’s lips, but blood. He loved so a pet, a hound or–’

‘A bird,’ murmured the man, ‘a little tricefinch in a silver cage. It could sing the song of the bells at Saint Martyr’s.’

‘I see the silver bars, and bright feathers too,’ said Mam Tontelle, hand to head as if in exquisite pain from a migraine, ‘and so it sings…’

And so it continued. The man was beside himself, and the crowd much impressed. I could tell Eisenhorn was quickly losing patience. But we had not come to watch the voicer ply her tricks, nor had we come to hear a lecture or have our taroche read.

We were here to find an astronomer who had either gone mad, or had seen a great secret that many in the city would kill to learn.

Or possibly both.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Penitent in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Tazio Bettin

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