ahead.
I think she was feeling excited. Like me, she'd been taking a back seat for too long.
Kircher came up the terrace, entering the filmy green light.
'Sir, you have a visitor.'
'At this hour, who?'
'He says his name is Inshabel, sir. Interrogator Nathun Inshabel.'
Inshabel was waiting for me in the library.
'Interrogator. Has my staff offered you refreshment?'
'None needed, sir.'
Very well… so to what do I owe this visit?'
Inshabel, no more than twenty-five, pushed his thick blond hair out of his eyes and looked at me fiercely. 'I… I am masterless. Roban is dead…'
'God-Emperor rest him. He will be missed.'
'Sir, do you ever think what it would be like if you died?'
The notion stopped me in my tracks. I had, in all honesty, never considered it.
'No, Inshabel. I haven't.'
'It's a terrible thing, sir. As Roban's senior acolyte it falls to me to disburse his staff, his fortune, his knowledge. I'm left to tidy up, as it were. I have to make sense of Roban's estate.'
You will not fail in that duty, interrogator, of that I'm sure/
He smiled weakly. Thank you, sir. I had… I had thought to come to you, and beg you to take me on. I so very much want to be an inquisitor. My master is dead, and I know that your own… your own interrogator is…'
'Indeed. I choose my own staff, of course. I-'
'Inquisitor Eisenhorn. Begging you to take me on as a driftwood student was not why I came here. As I said, I had to close up Roban's estate. That meant filing and authorising the pathologica statement of his death. Inquisitor Roban was killed by a cargo servitor manipulated by a rogue psyker.'
'Yes?'
'So to complete the papers, I had to review the death notice of Esarhad-don so as to establish causal motive/
That is the procedure/1 admitted.
The statement was very brief. Esarhadon's corpse was burnt from the calves upwards and utterly immolated. As in the incidents of spontaneous human combustion, the relics left by the plasma weapon were little more than the flesh and bones of the feet and ankles. Just bare vestiges/
'And?'
There was no Malleus brand on the ankle flesh/
'It– What..?'
'I don't know who Inquisitor Lyko burned on the lawns of the Lange house… but it wasn't the heretic Esarhaddon/
NINE
Eechan, six weeks later.
A word with the Phant.
Knives in the night.
The bicephalic minder in the squalid doorway of the twist bar regarded us with one of his lice-ridden heads, while the other glazed out, smoking an obscura pipe.
'Not your place, not your kind. Get on/
The sap rain was falling heavily on our heads through the rotten awning, and I had little wish to stand in it any longer. I nodded a sidelong glance to my companion, who tugged back his hood and showed the minder the cluster of malformed, winking eyes that mottled his cheek and ran down his pallid throat. I raised my own damp cloak and revealed the knot of stunted tentacles that sprouted from an extra sleeve slit under my right armpit.
The minder got off his stool, one head nodding dozily. He was big, broad and tall as an ogryn, and his greasy skin was busy with tattoos.
'Hnh…' he muttered, limping around us as he sized us up. 'Maybe then. You didn't smell like twists. Okay…'
We went inside, down a few dark steps into a nocturnal club room that was fogged with obscura smoke and pulsing with a brand of harsh, discordant music called 'pound'. Panes of red glass had been put over the lights of the lanterns and the place was a hellish swamp, like the damnation paintings of that insane genius Omarmettia.
Mal-forms, deforms, halfbreeds and underscum huddled or gambled or drank or danced. On a raised stage, a naked, heavy-breasted, eyeless girl
with a grinning mouth where her navel should have been gyrated to the pound beat.
We reached the bar, a soiled curve of hardwood under a series of hard white lights. The barkeep was a bloated thing with bloodshot eyes and a black snake tongue that flickered between his wet, slit mouth and rotting teeth.
'Hey, twist. What will it be?'
'Two of those/ I said, pointing to clear grain-alcohol shots that a waitress was carrying past on a tray. She would have been beautiful except for the yellow quills stippling her skin.
Twists. We were all twists here. 'Mutant' is a dirty word if you're a mutant. They delight in referring to themselves by the Imperium's glibbest and most detrimental slang, as a badge of honour. It's a pride thing, a common habit with any underclass. Non-telepaths do it when they call themselves 'blunts'. The tall, slender people of low-grav Sylvan do it when they call themselves 'sticks'. A slur's not a slur if you use it on yourself.
Labour laws on Eechan permit twists to work as indentured labourers in the industrial mill-farms and the sap distilleries, provided they abide by the local regime and keep themselves to the licensed shanty towns huddled in the skirts of the bad end of Eechan mainhive.
The barkeep slapped two heavy shotglasses down on the counter and filled them to the brim with grain liquor from a spouted flask.
I tossed a couple of coins down and reached for my drink.
The bloodshot eyes leered at me.
'What's this? 'Perial coins? Come now, twist, you know we ain't allowed to trade in those.'
I paused. A glance down the counter showed me that the rest of the clientele were paying in mill-authorised coupons or nuggets of base metal. And that they were all staring and scowling at us. A basic mistake, right off the bat.
My companion leaned forward and sipped his drink. 'Don't get fret with two thirsty twists who's happened to have lucked into a good black score, eh?'
The barkeep smiled and his black tongue flickered. He scooped up the coins. Ain't no fret, twist. You earn 'em, I'll take 'em. Just sayin' you might not want to go flashing 'em, s'all/
We took our drinks away from the bar, looking for a table. It had taken six weeks to reach Eechan, and I was impatient for a lead.
The beat changed. Another pound number began pumping through the underfloor speakers, which to my untutored ears was simply a variation in auditory assault. But the crowd clapped and roared approval. The naked girl with the grinning stomach began rotating her hips the other way.
'I have a feeling I should be leaving this to you,' I whispered to my companion.
'You're doing fine.'
