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Penitent – Extract

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CHAPTER 1

Which is of the society one keeps,
and also of societies that keep you

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 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 Lorenzo Mastroianni.

Penitent © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Penitent, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-518-9

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Definitely for Jules Styles with thanks for the brainstorms,
helping me with my maths homework (because maths is hard!),
and introducing me to the original white box edition all those years ago.

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