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Backcloth for a Crown Additional

Hereticus

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Backcloth for a
Crown Additional

Lord Froigre, much to everyone’s dismay including, I’m sure, his own, was dead.

It was a dry, summer morning in 355.M41 and I was taking breakfast with Alizebeth Bequin on the terrace of Spaeton House when I received the news. The sky was a blurry blue, the colour of Sameterware porcelain, and down in the bay the water was a pale lilac, shot through with glittering frills of silver. Sand doves warbled from the drowsy shade of the estate orchards.

Jubal Kircher, my craggy, dependable chief of household security, came out into the day’s heat from the garden room, apologised courteously for interrupting our private meal, and handed me a folded square of thin transmission paper.

‘Trouble?’ asked Bequin, pushing aside her dish of ploin crepes.

‘Froigre’s dead,’ I replied, studying the missive.

‘Froigre who?’

‘Lord Froigre of House Froigre.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Very well. I would count him as a friend. Well, how very miserable. Dead at eighty-two. That’s no age.’

‘Was he ill?’ Bequin asked.

‘No. Aen Froigre was, if anything, maddeningly robust and healthy. Not a scrap of augmetics about him. You know the sort.’ I made this remark pointedly. My career had not been kind to my body. I had been repaired, rebuilt, augmented and generally sewn back together more times than I cared to remember. I was a walking testimonial to Imperial Medicae reconstruction surgery. Alizebeth, on the other hand, still looked like a woman in her prime, a beautiful woman at that, and only the barest minimum of juvenat work had preserved her so.

‘According to this, he died following a seizure at his home last night. His family are conducting thorough investigations, of course, but...’ I drummed my fingers on the table-top.

‘Foul play?’

‘He was an influential man.’

‘Such men have enemies.’

‘And friends,’ I said. I handed her the communique. ‘That’s why his widow has requested my assistance.’

But for my friendship with Aen, I’d have turned the matter down. Alizebeth had only just arrived on Gudrun after an absence of almost eighteen months, and would be gone again in a week, so I had resolved to spend as much time with her as possible. The operational demands of the Distaff, based on Messina, kept her away from my side far more than I would have liked.

But this was important, and Lady Froigre’s plea too distraught to ignore.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Alizebeth suggested. ‘I feel like a jaunt in the country.’ She called for a staff car to be brought round from the stable block and we were on our way in under an hour.

Felippe Gabon, one of Kircher’s security detail, acted as our driver. He guided the car up from Spaeton on a whisper of thrust and laid in a course for Menizerre. Soon we were cruising south-west over the forest tracts and the verdant cultivated belt outside Dorsay and leaving the Insume headland behind.

In the comfortable, climate-controlled rear cabin of the staff car, I told Alizebeth about Froigre.

‘There have been Froigres on Gudrun since the days of the first colonies. Their house is one of the Twenty-Six Venerables, that is to say one of the twenty-six original noble fiefs, and as such has an hereditary seat in the Upper Legislature of the planetary government. Other, newer houses have considerably more power and land these days, but nothing can quite eclipse the prestige of the Venerables. Houses like Froigre, Sangral, Meissian. And Glaw.’

She smiled impishly at my inclusion of that last name.

‘So... power, land, prestige... a honeytrap for rivals and enemies. Did your friend have any?’

I shrugged. I’d brought with me several data-slates Psullus had looked out for me from the library. They contained heraldic ledgers, family histories, biographies and memoirs. And very little that seemed pertinent.

‘House Froigre vied with House Athensae and House Brudish in the early years of Gudrun, but that’s literally ancient history. Besides, House Brudish became extinct after another feud with House Pariti eight hundred years ago. Aen’s grandfather famously clashed with Lord Sangral and the then Governor Lord Dougray over the introduction of Founding Levy in the one-nineties, but that was just political, though Dougray never forgave him and later snubbed him by making Richtien chancellor. In recent times, House Froigre has been very much a quiet, solid, traditional seat in the Legislature. No feuds, that I know of. In fact, there hasn’t been an inter-house war on Gudrun for seven generations.

‘They all play nicely together, these days, do they?’ she asked.

‘Pretty much. One of the things I like about Gudrun is that it is so damned civilised.’

‘Too damned civilised,’ she admonished. ‘One day, Gregor, one day this place will lull you into such a deep sense of tranquil seclusion that you’ll be caught with your pants down.’

‘I hardly think so. It’s not complacency, before you jump down my throat. Gudrun – Spaeton House itself – is just a safe place. A sanctuary, given my line of work.’

‘Your friend’s still dead,’ she reminded me.

I sat back. ‘He liked to live well. Good food, fine wines. He could drink Nayl under the table.’

‘No!’

‘I’m not joking. Five years ago, at the wedding of Aen’s daughter. I was invited and I took Harlon along as... as I don’t know what, actually. You weren’t around and I didn’t want to go alone. Harlon started bending his lordship’s ear with tales of bounty hunting and the last I saw of them they were sprinting their way down their fourth bottle of anise at five in the morning. Aen was up at nine the next day to see his daughter off. Nayl was still asleep at nine the following day.’

She grinned. ‘So a life of great appetites may have just caught up with him?’

‘Perhaps. Though you’d think that would have shown up on the medicae mortus’s report.’

‘So you do suspect foul play?’

‘I can’t shake that idea.’

I was silent for a few minutes, and Alizebeth scrolled her way through several of the slates.

‘House Froigre’s main income was from mercantile dealings. They hold a twelve point stock in Brade ent Cie and a fifteen per cent share in Helican SubSid Shipping. What about trade rivals?’

‘We’d have to expand our scope off-planet. I suppose assassination is possible, but that’s a strange way to hit back at a trade rival. I’ll have to examine their records. If we can turn up signs of a clandestine trade fight, then maybe assassination is the answer.’

‘Your friend spoke out against the Ophidian Campaign.’

‘So did his father. Neither believed it was appropriate to divert funds and manpower into a war of reconquest in the sub-sector next door when there was so much to put in order on the home front.’

‘I was just wondering...’ she said.

‘Wonder away, but I think that’s a dead end. The Ophidian War’s long since over and done with and I don’t think anyone cares what Aen thought about it.’

‘So have you got a theory?’

‘Only the obvious ones. None of them with any substantiating data. An internecine feud, targeting Aen from inside the family. A murder driven by some secret affair of the heart. A darker conspiracy that remains quite invisible for now. Or...’

‘Or?’

‘Too much good living, in which case we’ll be home before nightfall.’

Froigre Hall, the ancestral pile of the noble House Froigre, was a splendid stack of ivy-swathed ouslite and copper tiles overlooking the Vale of Fiegg, ten kilometres south of Menizerre. Water meadows sloped back from the river, becoming wildflower pastures that climbed through spinneys of larch and fintle to hem the magnificent planned gardens of the house; geometric designs of box-hedge, trim lawn, flowering beds and symmetrical ponds. Beyond the sandy drive, darkened woods came right down to skirt the back of the great hall, except for where a near-perfect sulleq lawn had been laid. Aen and I had spent several diverting afternoons there, playing against each other. A kilometre north of the house, the gnarled stone finger of the Folly rose from the ascending woods.

‘Where to put down, sir?’ Gabon asked over the intercom.

‘On the drive in front of the portico, if you’d be so kind.’

‘What’s been going on here?’ Alizebeth asked as we came in lower. She pointed. The lawn areas nearest to the hall were littered with scraps of rubbish – paper waste and glittery bits of foil. Some sections of grass were flat and yellow as if compressed and starved of light.

Tiny stones, whipped up by our downwash, ticked off the car’s bodywork as we settled in to land.

‘Oh, my dear Gregor!’ Lady Freyl Froigre almost fell into my arms. I held her in a comforting embrace for a few patient moments as she sobbed against my chest.

‘Forgive me!’ she said suddenly, pulling away and dabbing her eyes with a black lace handkerchief. ‘This is all so very terrible. So very, very terrible.’

‘My deepest sympathies for your loss, lady,’ I said, feeling awkward.

A houseman, his arm banded in black, had led us into a stateroom off the main hall where Lady Froigre was waiting. The blinds were drawn, and mourning tapers had been lit, filling the air with a feeble light and a sickly perfume. Freyl Froigre was a stunning woman in her late sixties, her lush red hair, almost flame-pink it was so bright, pulled back and pinned down under a veil coiff of jet scamiscoire. Her grief-gown was slate epinchire, the sleeves ending in delicate interwoven gloves so that not one speck of her flesh was uncovered.

I introduced Alizebeth, who murmured her condolences, and Lady Froigre nodded. Then she suddenly looked flustered.

‘Oh, my. Where are my manners? I should have the staff bring refreshments for you and–’

‘Hush, lady,’ I said, taking her arm and walking her down the long room into the soft shade of the shutters. ‘You have enough on your mind. Grief is enough. Tell me what you know and I will do the rest.’

‘You’re a good man, sir. I knew I could trust you.’ She paused and waited while her current wracks subsided.

‘Aen died just before midnight last night. A seizure. It was quick, the physician said.’

‘What else did he say, lady?’

She drew a data-wand from her sleeve and handed it to me. ‘It’s all here.’ I plucked out my slate and plugged it in. The display lit up with the stored files.

Death by tremorous palpitations of the heart and mind. A dysfunction of the spirit. According the the medicae’s report, Aen Froigre had died because of a spasm in his anima.

‘This means...’ I paused, ‘...nothing. Who is your physician?’

‘Genorus Notil of Menizerre. He has been the family medicae since the time of Aen’s grandfather.’

‘His report is rather... non-specific, lady. Could I present the body for a further examination?’

‘I’ve already done that,’ she said softly. ‘The surgeon at Menizerre General who attended said the same. My husband died of terror.’

‘Terror?’

‘Yes, inquisitor. Now tell me that isn’t the work of the infernal powers?’

There had, she told me, been a celebration. A Grand Fete. Aen’s eldest son, Rinton, had returned home two weeks before, having mustered out of his service in the Imperial Guard. Rinton Froigre had been a captain in the Fiftieth Gudrunite and seen six years’ service in the Ophidean sub-sector. Such was his father’s delight on his return, a fete was called. A carnival feast. Travelling players from all around the canton had attended, along with troupes of musicians, acrobats, armies of stall holders, entertainers, and hundreds of folk from the town. That explained the litter and faded patches on the lawn. Tent pitches. The scars of marques.

‘Had he any enemies?’ I asked, pacing the shuttered room.

‘None that I know of.’

‘I would like to review his correspondence. Diaries too, if he kept them.’

‘I’ll see. I don’t believe he kept a diary, but our rubricator will have a list of correspondence.’

On the top of the harpsichord was a framed portrait, a hololith of Aen Froigre, smiling.

I picked it up and studied it.

‘The last portrait of him,’ she said. ‘Taken at the fete. My last connection with him.’

‘Where did he die?’

‘The Folly,’ said Lady Froigre. ‘He died in the Folly.’

The woods were damp and dark. Boughs creaked in the late afternoon wind and odd birdsong thrilled from the shadows.

The Folly was a stone drum capped by a slate needle. Inside, it was bare and terribly musty. Sand doves fluttered up in the roof spaces. Cobwebs glazed the bare windows.

‘This is where I found him,’ said a voice from behind me.

I turned. Rinton Froigre stooped in under the doorframe. He was a well-made boy of twenty-five, with his mother’s lush red hair. His eyes had a curious, hooded aspect.

‘Rinton.’

‘Sir,’ he bowed slightly.

‘Was he dead when you found him?’

‘No, inquisitor. He was laughing and talking. He liked to come up here. He loved the Folly. I came up to thank him for the fete that he had thrown in my honour. We were talking together when suddenly he went into convulsions. Just minutes later, before I could summon help, he was dead.’

I didn’t know Rinton Froigre well, though his service record was very respectable, and I knew his father had been proud of him. Aen had never mentioned any animosity from his son, but in any noble house there is always the spectre of succession to consider. Rinton had been alone with his father at the time of death. He was a seasoned soldier, undoubtedly no stranger to the act of killing.

I kept an open mind – literally. Even without any invasive mental probing, it is possible for a psionic of my ability to sense surface thoughts. There was no flavour of deceit about Rinton’s person, though I could feel carefully contained loss, and the tingle of trepidation. Small wonder, I considered. Uncommon are the citizens of the Imperium who do not register anxiety at being quizzed by an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos.

There was no point pressing him now. Rinton’s story might easily be put to the test with an auto-seance, during which psychometric techniques would simply reveal the truth of his father’s last moments to me.

Rinton walked me back to the Hall, and left me to my ponderings in Aen’s study. It was as he had left it, I was told.

The room was half–panelled and lined for the most part with glazed shelves of neatly bound books and data-slates. Discreet glow-globes hovered around the edges of the room at head-height, set to a low luminosity, and a selection of scroll-backed couches and over-stuffed chairs were arranged in front of the high-throated ceramic fireplace with its wood-burning fusion stove.

The desk, under the diamond-paned west windows, was a wide crescent of polished duralloy floated a metre off the carpet by passive suspensor pods. The desk was clean and bare.

I sat at it, depressing slightly the hydraulics of the writing chair – I was half a head taller than Aen Froigre. I studied the mirror-smooth, slightly raked surface of the desk. There was no sign of any control panel, but a gentle wave of my hand across it woke up heat-sensitive touch-plates engraved into the duralloy’s finish. I touched a few, but they needed Aen’s touch – probably a combination of palmprint and genekey – to unlock them.

That, or Inquisition-grade software. I unpinned my Inquisitorial rosette, which I had been wearing on the sternum of a my black leather coat, and slid open the signal port. Holding it low over the desk, I force fed the touch-plates with several magenta-level security override programs. It gave up the fight almost at once, opening systems without even the need for passwords.

Built into the stylish desk – an item of furniture that had clearly cost Aen a lot of money – was a fairly powerful cogitator, a vox-pict uplink, a message archive, two filing archives, and a master control for the simple, limited electronic systems built into the Hall. Separate pages of each file and message could be displayed as a facsimile on the blotter plate and a touch of a finger turned them or put them away. Aen had destroyed all paper records.

I played with it for some time, but the most interesting thing I found was a log of invoices for services provided at the fete, and a list of the invitations. I copied both into my own data-slate.

Alizebeth and Gabon arrived while I was busy with that. Alizebeth had been interviewing the household staff, and Gabon had been out, walking the grounds.

‘There were over nine hundred guests here, sir,’ he said, ‘and maybe another five hundred players, musicians, entertainers and carnival folk.’

‘Where from?’

‘Menizerre, mostly,’ he replied. ‘Local entertainers, a few troubadours and some street tumblers from the biweekly textile market. The biggest individual groups were Kalikin’s Company, an acclaimed troupe of travelling actors, and Sunsable’s Touring Fair, who provided the games and rides and diversions.’

I nodded. Gabon was as thorough as usual. A short, spare man in his one fifties with cropped black hair and a bushy moustache, he had been with the Dorsay Arbites for about seventy years before retiring into private service. He wore a simple, refined dark blue suit that had been ingeniously tailored to hide the fact that he was wearing a handgun in a shoulder rig.

‘What about you?’ I asked Alizebeth. She sat down on one of the couches.

‘Nothing scintillating. The staff seem genuinely shocked and upset at the death. They all react with outrage at the idea your friend might have had any enemies.’

‘It seems quite clear to me that he did have some,’ I said.

Alizebeth reached into the folds of her gown and fished out a small, hard object. She tossed it across onto the desk top and it landed with a tap. There it extended four, multi-jointed limbs and scurried across onto my palm.

I turned the wriggling poison-snooper over and pressed the recessed stud on its belly. A little ball of hololithic energy coalesced above its head-mounted projector and I read it as slowly scrolled around on its own axis.

‘Traces of lho, obscura and several other class II and III narcotics in the garden area and the staff quarters. Penshel seed traces found in the stable block. More lho, as well as listeria and e. coli in small amounts in the kitchen section... hmmm...’

Alizebeth shrugged. ‘The usual mix of recreational drugs one might expect, none in large quantities, and the kitchens’s as hygienic as anywhere. You’d probably get the same sort of readings from Spaeton House.’

‘Probably. Penshel seeds, they’re quite unusual.’

‘A very mild stimulant,’ said Gabon. ‘I didn’t know anyone still used that stuff. Time was, it was the drug of choice in the artists’ quarter of Dorsay, back when I was on the force. The seeds are dried, rolled and smoked in pipes. A little bohemian, an old man’s smoke.’

‘Most of the outdoor traces can be put down to the visiting entertainers,’ I mused, ‘plus a little off-duty pleasure from the staff or loose-living guests. What about the stable block? Are any of Froigre’s ostlers penshel smokers?’

Alizebeth shook her head. ‘They’d cleared large parts of the stable area to provide spaces for the fair stall-holders.’

I put the snooper down on the desk and it wriggled back and forth for a few moments until it got enough purchase to right itself. ‘So nothing untoward, in fact. And certainly no significant toxins.’

‘None at all,’ said Alizebeth.

Damn. Given the description of Aen’s death, I had been quite sure poison was the key, perhaps some assassin’s sophisticated toxin that had not shown up on the initial medicae report. But Alizebeth’s snooper was high-grade and thorough.

‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

I passed her my data-slate. ‘Send the contents of this to Aemos by direct vox-link. See what he can come up with.’

Uber Aemos was my ancient and trusted savant. If anyone could see a pattern or make a connection, it was him.

Evening fell. I went outside, alone. I felt annoyed and frustrated. In fact, I felt thwarted. I’d come there as a favour to my old friend’s widow, offering my services, and in most respects I was overqualified. I was an Imperial inquisitor, and this was most likely just a job for the local Arbites. I had expected to have the entire matter sewn up in a few hours, to settle things swiftly in a quick, unofficial investigation, and leave with the thanks of the family for sparing them a long, drawn-out inquest.

But the clues just weren’t there. There was no motive, no obvious antagonist, no aggressor, but still it seemed likely that Aen Froigre had been killed. I looked at the medicae report again, hoping to find something that would establish natural causes.

Nothing. Something, someone, had taken my friend’s life, but I couldn’t tell what or who or why.

The evening skies were dark, stained a deep violet and smeared with chasing milky clouds. An early moon shone, passing behind the running trails of cloud every minute or so. A wind was gathering, and the stands of trees beside the lawn were beginning to sway and swish. The leaves made a cold sound, like rain.

I walked over to my flyer, popped the cargo trunk and took out Barbarisater. I slowly freed it from its silk bindings and drew the long, gleaming blade from its machined scabbard. Barbarisater had been an heirloom sword, a psychically-attuned weapon from the forges of distant Carthae and slaved to the minds of the generations of warrior women who had wielded it. Enhancing its strength with pentagrammic wards, I had used the long sabre in my battle against the heretic Quixos, during which struggle it had been broken below the tip. Master swordsmiths had remade the blade from the broken main portion, creating a shorter, straighter blade by rounding off and edging the break and reducing the hilt. A good deal smaller than its old self, now more a single-handed rapier than a hand-and-a-half sabre, it was still a potent weapon.

Naked, in my hand, it hummed and whined as my mind ran through it and made it resonate. The incised wards glowed and sobbed out faint wisps of smoke. I walked out over the grass under the seething trees, holding the blade out before me like a dowsing rod, sweeping the scene, letting the blade-tip slide along the invisible angles of space. Twice, on my circuit of the lawns, it twitched as if tugged by sprite hands, but I could discern nothing from the locations.

But there was something there. My first hint of a malign focus. My first hint that not only was foul play involved, but that Lady Froigre might be right.

Though they had left only the slightest traces behind them, infernal powers had been at work here.

Alizebeth came into my room at eight the next morning. She woke me by sitting down on the side of my bed and handed me a cup of hot, black caffeine as I roused.

She was already dressed and ready for work. The day was bright. I could hear the household coming to life: pans clattering the kitchen block and the butler calling to his pages in the nearby gallery.

‘Bad storm in the night,’ she said. ‘Brought trees down.’

‘Really?’ I grumbled, sitting up and sipping the sweet, dark caffeine.

I looked at her. It wasn’t like Bequin to be so perky this early.

‘Out with it,’ I said.

She handed me a data-slate. ‘Aemos has been busy. Must’ve worked all night.’

‘Through the storm.’

‘There was no storm up his way. It was local.’ I didn’t really hear that reply. I was caught up in a close reading of the slate.

Failing to cross-match just about every detail I had sent him, Aemos had clearly become bored. The list of guests I had sent him had led to nothing, despite his best efforts to make connections. The caterers and performers had revealed nothing either. No links to the underworld or cult activity, no misdeeds or priors, except for the usual clutch of innocent and minor violations one might expect. One of the travelling actors had been charged with affray twenty years before, and another had done time for grievous wounding, that sort of thing.

The only item that had flagged any sort of connection was the description of Aen Froigre’s death. Aemos had only turned to that rather vague clue once he’d exhausted all others.

In the past twenty months, eleven people in the Drunner Region of Gudrun, which is to say the coastal area encompassing Menizerre, Dorsay and Insume all the way to Madua chapeltown, had died of a similar, mystery ailment. Only a tight, deliberate search like the one Aemos had conducted would have shown up such a connection, given the scale of area involved and the size of population. Listed together, the deaths stood out like a sore thumb.

Here, Aemos had come into his own. Another clerk might have sent those findings to me and waited for direction, but Aemos, hungry to answer the questions himself, had pressed on, trying to make a pattern out of them. No simple task. There was nothing to demo-graphically or geographically link the victims. A housewife here, a millkeeper there, a landowner in one small village, a community doctor in another, seventy kilometres away.

The only thing they had in common was the sudden, violent and inexplicable nature of their demises: seizures, abrupt, fatal.

I set down my cup and scrolled on, aware that Alizebeth was grinning at me.

‘Get to the last bit,’ she advised. ‘Aemos strikes again.’

Right at the last, Aemos revealed another connection.

A day or two before each death, the victim’s locality had been paid a visit by Sunsable’s Touring Fair.

Lady Froigre was most perturbed to see us about to leave.‘There are questions here still...’ she began.

‘And I’m going to seek the answers,’ I said. ‘Trust me. I believe my savant has hit upon something.’

She nodded, unhappy. Rinton stepped forward and put his arm around his mother’s shoulders.

‘Trust me,’ I repeated and walked out across the drive to my waiting flyer.

I could hear the sound of chain blades, and turned from the car to walk around the side of the hall. One of the trees brought down in the night’s freak storm had crushed part of the stable block and the housemen were working to saw up the huge trunk and clear it.

‘Is that where you detected Penshel seed?’ I asked Alizebeth when she came to find out what was keeping me.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Fetch my blade.’

I called the housemen away from their work, and walked into the collapsed ruin of the stable, crunching over heaps of coarse sawdust. The ivy–clad tree still sprawled through the burst roof.

Alizebeth brought me Barbarisater and I drew it quickly. By then Lady Froigre and Rinton Froigre had emerged to see what I was doing.

Barbarisater hummed in my hand, louder and more throatily than it had done the previous night. As soon as I entered that part of the stable block, the particular stall the tree had smashed, it jumped. The taste of Chaos was here.

‘What was this used for?’ I asked. ‘During the fete, what was this area used for?’

‘Storage,’ said Lady Froigre. ‘The people from the fair wanted to keep equipment and belongings out of sight. Food too, I think. One man had trays of fresh figs he wanted to keep out of the light.’

‘And the hololithographer,’ said Rinton. ‘He used one of those stalls as a darkroom.’

So how do you find a travelling fair in an area the size of the Drunner Region? If you have a copy of their most recent invoice, it’s easy. The fair-master, eager to be paid for his services at Froigre Hall, had left as a payment address an inn eighty kilometres away in Seabrud. From the invoice, I saw that Aen had been asked to mail the payment within five days. The fair moved around a great deal, and the travelling folk didn’t believe much in the concept of credit accounts.

From Seabrud, we got a fix on the location of Sunsable’s Fair.

They had pitched on a meadow outside the village of Brudmarten, a little, rustic community of ket-herds and weavers that was flanked by a lush, deciduous woodland hillside to the east and marshy, cattle-trampled fields below at the river spill to the west.

It was late afternoon on a hot, close day, the air edged with the heavy, fulminous threat of storms. The sky was dark overhead, but the corn was bright and golden down in the meadows, and pollen balls blew in the breeze like thistle-fibres. Grain-crakes whooped in the corn stands, and small warblers of the most intense blue darted across the hedges.

Gabon lowered the limo to rest in a lane behind the village kirk, a pale, Low Gothic temple in need of up-keep. A noble statue of the Emperor Immaculate stood in the overgrown graveyard, a roost for wood doves. I buckled on my sword and covered it with a long leather cloak. Gabon locked the car.

‘Stay with me,’ I told Alizebeth, and then turned to Gabon. ‘Shadow us.’

‘Yes, sir.’

We walked down the lane towards the fair.

Even from a distance, we could hear the noise and feel the energy. The arrival of the fair had brought the folk of Brudmarten and the neighbouring hamlets out in force. Pipe organs were trilling and wheezing in the lank air, and there was the pop and whizz of firecrackers. I could hear laughter, the clatter of rides, the ringing of score bells, children screaming, rowdy men carousing, pistons hissing. The smell of warm ale wafted from the tavern tent.

The gate in the meadow’s hedge had been turned into an entranceway, arched with a gaudy, handpainted sign that declared Sunsable’s Miraculous Fair of Fairs open. A white-eyed twist at the gateway took our coins for admission.

Inside, on the meadow, all manner of bright, vulgar sights greeted us. The carousel, lit up with gas-lamps. The ring-toss. The neat, pink box-tent of the clairvoyant. The churning hoop of the whirligig, spilling out the squeals of children. The colourful shouts of the freak show barker. The burnt-sugar smell of floss makers. The clang of test-your-strength machines.

For a penny, you could ride the shoulders of a Battle Titan – actually an agricultural servitor armoured with painted sections of rusty silage hopper. For another penny, you could shoot greenskins in the las-gallery, or touch the Real and Completely Genuine shin bone of Macharius, or dunk for ploins. For tuppence, you could gaze into the Eye of Terror and have your heroism judged by a hooded man with a stutter who claimed to be an ex-Space Marine. The Eye of Terror in this case was a pit dug in the ground and filled with chemical lamps and coloured glass filters.

Nearby, a small donation allowed you to watch an oiled man struggle free from chains, or a burning sack, or a tin bathtub full of broken glass, or a set of stocks.

‘Just a penny, sir, just a penny!’ howled a man on stilts with a harlequined face as he capered past me. ‘For the young lady!’

I decided not to ask what my penny might buy.

‘I want to go look at the freak show,’ Alizebeth told me.

‘Save your money... it’s all around us,’ I growled.

We pushed on. Coloured balloons drifted away over the field into the encroaching darkness of the thunderhead. Corn crickets rasped furiously in the trampled stalks all about us. Drunken, painted faces swam at us, some lacking teeth, some with glittering augmetic eyes.

‘Over there,’ I whispered to Alizebeth.

Past the brazier stand of a woman selling paper cones of sugared nuts, and a large handcart stacked with wire cages full of songbirds, was a small booth tent of heavy red material erected at the side of a brightly painted trailer. A wooden panel raised on bunting–wrapped posts announced ‘Hololiths! Most Lifelike! Most Agreeable!’ below which a smaller notice said ‘A most delightful gift, or a souvenir of the day, captured by the magic art of a master hololithographer.’ A frail old man with tufted white hair and small spectacles was seated outside the booth on a folding canvas chair, eating a meat pie that was so hot he had to keep blowing on it.

‘Why don’t you go and engage his interest?’ I suggested.

Alizebeth left my side, pushed through the noisy crowd and stopped by his booth. A sheet of flakboard had been erected beside the booth’s entrance, and on it were numerous hololithic pictures mounted for display: some miniatures, some landscapes, some family groups. Alizebeth studied them with feigned interest. The old man immediately leapt up off his chair, stowed the half-eaten pie behind the board and brushed the crumbs off his robes. I moved round to the side, staying in the crowd, watching. I paused to examine the caged birds, though in fact I was looking through their cages at the booth tent.

The old man approached Bequin courteously.

‘Madam, good afternoon! I see your attention has been arrested by my display of work. Are they not fairly framed and well-composed?’

‘Indeed,’ she said.

‘You have a good eye, madam,’ he said, ‘for so often in these country fairs the work of the hololithgrapher is substandard. The composition is frequently poor and the plate quality fades with time. Not so with your humble servant. I have plied this trade of portraiture for thirty years and I fancy I have skill for it. You see this print here? The lakeshore at Entreve?’

‘It is a pleasing scene.’

‘You are very kind, madam. It is handcoloured, like many of my frames. But this very print was made in the summer of... 329, if my memory serves. And you’ll appreciate, there is no fading, no loss of clarity, no discolouration.’

‘It has preserved itself well.’

‘It has,’ he agreed, merrily. ‘I have patented my own techniques, and I prepare the chemical compounds for the plates by hand, in my modest studio adjoining.’ He gestured to his trailer. ‘That is how I can maintain the quality and the perfect grade of the hololiths, and reproduce and print them to order with no marked loss of standard from original to duplicate. My reputation rests upon it. Up and down the byeways of the land, the name Bakunin is a watchword for quality portraiture.’

Alizebeth smiled. ‘It’s most impressive, Master Bakunin. And how much...?’

‘Aha!’ he grinned. ‘I thought you might be tempted, madam, and may I say it would be a crime for your beauty to remain unrecorded! My services are most affordable.’

I moved round further, edging my way to the side of his booth until he and Alizebeth were out of sight behind the awning. I could hear him still making his pitch to her.

On the side of the trailer, further bold statements and enticements were painted in a flourishing script. A large sign read ‘Portraits two crowns, group scenes three crowns, gilded miniatures a half-crown only, offering many a striking and famous backcloth for a crown additional.’

I wandered behind the trailer. It was parked at the edge of the fairground, near to a copse of fintle and yew that screened the meadow from pastures beyond the ditch. It was damp and shaded here, small animals rustling in the thickets. I tried to look in at one small window, but it was shuttered. I touched the side of the trailer and felt Barbarisater twitch against my hip. There was a door near the far end of the trailer. I tried it, but it was locked.

‘What’s your business?’ growled a voice.

Three burly fairground wranglers had approached along the copse-side of the booths. They had been smoking lho-sticks behind their trailer on a break.

‘Not yours,’ I assured them.

‘You had best be leaving Master Bakunin’s trailer alone,’ one said. All three were built like wrestlers, their bared arms stained with crude tattoos. I had no time for this.

‘Go away now,’ I said, pitching my will through my voice. They all blinked, not quite sure what had happened to their minds, and then simply walked away as if I wasn’t there.

I returned my attention to the door, and quickly forced the lock with my multi-key. To my surprise, the thin wooden door still refused to open. I wondered if it was bolted from inside, but as I put more weight into it, it did shift a little, enough to prove there there was nothing physical holding it. Then it banged back shut as if drawn by immense suction.

My pulse began to race. I could feel the sour tang of warpcraft in the air and Barbarisater was now vibrating in its scabbard. It was time to dispense with subtleties.

I paced around to the front of the booth, but there was no longer any sign of Bequin or the old man. Stooping, I went in under the entrance flap. An inner drop curtain of black cloth stopped exterior light from entering the tent.

I pushed that aside.

‘I will be with you shortly, sir,’ Bakunin called, ‘if you would give me a moment.’

‘I’m not a customer,’ I said. I looked around. The tent was quite small, and lit by the greenish glow of gas mantles that ran, I supposed, off the trailer supply. Alizebeth was sat at the far side on a ladderback chair with a dropcloth of cream felt behind her. Bakunin was facing her, carefully adjusting his hololithic camera, a brass and teak machine mounted on a wooden tripod. He looked round at me curiously, his hands still polishing a brass-rimmed lens. Alizebeth rose out of her seat.

‘Gregor?’ she asked.

‘The good lady is just sitting for a portrait, sir. It’s all very civilised.’ Bakunin peered at me, unsure what to make of me. He smiled and offered his hand. ‘I am Bakunin, artist and hololithographer.’

‘I am Eisenhorn, Imperial inquisitor.’

‘Oh,’ he said and took a step backwards. ‘I... I...’

‘You’re wondering why a servant of the Ordos has just walked into your booth,’ I finished for him. Bakunin’s mind was like an open book. There was, I saw at once, no guile there, except for the natural money-making trickery of a fairground rogue. Whatever else he was, Bakunin was no heretic.

‘You took a portrait of Lord Froigre at the fete held on his lands just the other day?’ I said, thinking of the picture on the harpsichord back at the hall.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘His lordship was pleased. I made no charge for the work, sir. It was a gift to thank his lordship for his hospitality. I thought perhaps some of his worthy friends might see the work and want the like for themselves, I...’

He doesn’t know, I thought. He has no clue what this is about. He’s trying to work out how he might have drawn this investigation to himself.

‘Lord Froigre is dead,’ I told him.

He went pale. ‘No, that’s… that’s...’

‘Master Bakunin... do you know if any other of your previous subjects have died? Died soon after your work was complete?’

‘I don’t, I’m sure. Sir, what are you implying?’

‘I have a list of names,’ I said, unclipping my data-slate. ‘Do you keep records of your work?’

‘I keep them all, all the exposed plates, in case that copies or replacements are needed. I have full catalogues of all pictures.’

I showed him the slate. ‘Do you recognise any of these names?’

His hands were shaking. He said, ‘I’ll have to check them against my catalogue,’ but I knew for a fact he’d recognised some of them at once.

‘Let’s do that together,’ I said. Alizebeth followed us as we went through the back of the tent into the trailer. It was a dark, confined space, and Bakunin kept apologising. Every scrap of surface, even the untidy flat of his little cot bed, was piled with spares and partly disassembled cameras. There was a musty, chemical stink, mixed with the scent of Penshel seeds. Bakunin’s pipe lay in a small bowl. He reached into a crate under the cot and pulled out several dog-eared record books.

‘Let me see now,’ he began.

There was a door at the end of the little room. ‘What’s through there?’

‘My darkroom, along with the file racks for the exposed plates.’

‘It has a door to the outside?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Locked?’

‘No...’

‘You have an assistant then, someone you ordered to hold the door shut?’

‘I have no assistant...’ he said, puzzled.

‘Open this door,’ I told him. He put down the books and went to the communicating door. Just from his body language, I could tell he had been expecting it to open easily.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It’s never jammed before.’

‘Stand back,’ I said, and drew Barbarisater. The exposed blade filled the little trailer with ozone and Bakunin yelped.

I put the blade through the door with one good swing and ripped it open. There was a loud bang of atmospheric decompression, and fetid air swept over us. A dark, smoky haze drifted out.

‘Emperor of Mankind, what is that?’

‘Warpcraft,’ I said. ‘You say you mix your own oxides and solutions?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where do you get your supplies from?’

‘Everywhere, here and there, sometimes from apothecaries, or market traders or...’

Anywhere. Bakunin had experimented with all manner of compounds over the years to create the best, most effective plates for his camera. He’d never been fussy about where the active ingredients came from. Something in his workshop, something in his rack of flasks and bottles, was tainted.

I took a step towards the darkroom. In the half-light, things were flickering, half-formed and pale. The baleful energies lurking in Bakunin’s workshop could sense I was a threat, and were trying to protect themselves by sealing the doors tight to keep me out.

I crossed the threshold into the darkroom. Alizebeth’s cry of warning was lost in the shrieking of tormented air that suddenly swirled around me. Glass bottles and flasks of mineral tincture vibrated wildly in metal racks above Bakunin’s work bench. Jars of liquid chemicals and unguent oils shattered and sprayed their contents into the air. The little gas-jet burner flared and ignited, its rubber tube thrashing like a snake. Glass plates, each a square the size of a data-slate, and each sleeved in a folder of tan card, were jiggling and working themselves out of the wooden racks on the far side of the blacked out room. There were thousands of them, each one the master exposure of one of Bakunin’s hololiths. The first yanked clear of the shelf as if tugged by a sucking force, and I expected it to shatter on the floor, but it floated in the air. Quickly others followed suit. Light from sources I couldn’t locate played in the air, casting specks and flashes of colour all around. The air itself became dark brown, like tobacco.

I raised my sword. A negative plate came flying at my head and I struck at it. Shards of glass flew in all directions. Another came at me and I smashed that too. More flew from the shelves like a spray of playing cards, whipping through the air towards me. I made a series of quick uwe sar and ulsar parries, bursting the glass squares as they struck in. I missed one, and it sliced my cheek with its edge before hitting the wall behind me like a throwing knife.

‘Get him out of here!’ I yelled to Alizebeth. The trailer was shaking. Outside there was a crash of thunder and rain started to hammer on the low roof. The hurtling plates were driving me back, and Barbarisater had become a blur in my hands as it struck out to intercept them all.

Then the ghosts came. Serious men in formal robes. Gentlewomen in long gowns. Solemn children with pale faces. A laughing innkeeper with blotchy cheeks. Two farmhands, with their arms around each other’s shoulders. More, still more, shimmering in the dirty air, made of smoke, their skins white, their clothes sepia, their expressions frozen at the moment they had been caught by the camera. They clawed and tugged at me with fingers of ice, pummelled me with psychokinetic fists. Some passed through me like wraiths, chilling my marrow. The malevolence hiding in that little trailer was conjuring up all the images Bakunin had immortalised in his career, ripping them off the negative plates and giving them form.

I staggered back, tears appearing in my cloak. Their touch was as sharp as the edge of the glass plates. Their hollow screaming filled my ears. Then, with a sickening lurch, the world itself distorted and changed. The trailer was gone. For a moment I was standing on a sepia shoreline, then I was an uninvited guest at a country wedding. My sword hacking and flashing, I stumbled on into a baptism, then a colourised view of the Atenate Mountains, then a feast in a guild hall. The ghosts surged at me, frozen hands clawing. The innkeeper with the blotchy cheeks got his icy fists around my throat though his face was still open in laughter. I chopped Barbarisater through him and he billowed like smoke. A sad-faced housemaid pulled at my arm and a fisherman struck at me with his boat hook.

I began to recite the Litany of Salvation, yelling it into the leering faces that beset me. A few crumpled and melted like cellulose exposed to flame.

I heard gunshots. Gabon was to my right, firing his weapon. He was standing on the pier at Dorsay at sunset, in the middle of a inter-village game of knockball, and a harvest festival, all at the same time. The conflicting scenes blurred and merged around him. A bride and her groom, along with five mourners from a funeral and a retiring Arbites constable in full medals, were attacking him.

‘Get back!’ I yelled. Barbarisater was glowing white-hot. Thunder crashed again, shaking the earth. Gabon shrieked as the bride’s fingers ripped through his face, and as he stumbled backwards, whizzing glass plates chopped into him like axe heads.

His blood was in the air, like rain. It flooded into the ghosts and stained their sepia tones crimson and their pale flesh pink. I felt fingers like knives draw across the flesh of my arms and back. There were too many of them.

I couldn’t trust my eyes. According to them, I was standing on a riverbank, and also the front steps of an Administratum building. The locations overlaid each other impossibly, and neither was real.

I leapt, and lashed out with my blade. I hit something, tore through and immediately found myself rolling on the rain-sodden turf behind the trailer.

Lightning split the darkness overhead and the rain was torrential. The storm and the bizarre activity around Bakunin’s booth had sent the commonfolk fleeing from the meadow. The trailer was still vibrating and shaking, and oily brown smoke was gushing from the hole in the side wall I’d cut to break my way out. Inside, lights crackled and flashed and the phantom screaming continued. The warptaint was berserk.

Bakunin appeared, looking desperate, with Alizebeth close behind him. He put his hands to his mouth in shock at the sight of me torn and bloodied.

‘Where is it?’ I snarled.

‘Third shelf up, above the workbench,’ he stammered. ‘The green bottle. I needed tincture of mercury, years ago, years ago, and an old woman in one of the villages gave it to me and said it would do as well. I use it all the time now. The emulsions it mixes are perfect. My work has never been better.’

He looked down at the grass, shaking and horrified. ‘I should have realised,’ he muttered. ‘I should have realised. No matter how much I used, the bottle never emptied.’

‘Third shelf up?’ I confirmed.

‘I’ll show you,’ he said, and sprang to the trailer, clambering in through the hole I had smashed.

‘Bakunin! No!’

I followed him inside, tumbling back into the jumble of landscapes and the maelstrom of screaming ghosts. Just for a moment, a brief moment, I saw Aen Froigre amongst them.

Then I was falling through another wedding, a hunting scene, a stockman’s meeting, a farrier’s smithy, the castle of Elempite by moonlight, a cattle market, a–

I heard Bakunin scream.

I deflected three more deadly hololith plates, and slashed through the thicket of howling ghosts. Spectral, as if it wasn’t there, I saw the workbench and the shelves. The green bottle, glowing internally with jade fire.

I raised Barbarisater and smashed the bottle with the edge of the shivering blade.

The explosion shredded the inner partition wall and lurched the trailer onto its side. Dazed, I lay on the splintered wall, sprawled amongst the debris of glass and wood.

The screaming stopped.

Someone had called the local Arbites. They moved in through the crowds of onlookers as the last of the rain fell and the skies began to clear.

I showed them my credentials and told them to keep the crowd back while I finished my work. The trailer was already burning, and Alizebeth and I threw the last few hololith prints into the flames.

The pictures were fading now. Superimposed on each one, every portrait, every landscape, every miniature, was a ghost exposure. An after-image.

Bakunin, screaming his last scream forever.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘Backcloth for a Crown Additional’ first published in Inferno! magazine in 2002.
Hereticus first published in Great Britain in 2002.
This eBook edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK.

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