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Pentimento – Extract

A Black Library Imprint

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Pentimento

Nick Kyme

The body stood erect and cruciform, naked and without modesty. Male, though the anatomical excisions made this difficult to define for certain, as did the general disfigurements to the victim overall. It appeared almost ritualistic. A statement of some kind.

Observation was Mabeth’s art. She had an eye for it, or so Hakasto had joked. Gifted, some said. To her, the old artisan had been like a father. He taught her everything he knew, until eventually she surpassed him. Oka Hakasto’s craft became Mabeth’s craft, she his only student. Then, their work had been venerated around the world, as nobles and oligarchs clamoured for a sitting with the great Hakasto and his protégé. Coin, renown, they had been short of neither.

And now…

They say scent is the most powerful sense memory. Sitting in that empty church, the air thick with the reek of copper, Mabeth remembered her master. His legacy had ended with a knife in his neck and his arterial blood making a terrible mess of his otherwise fine robes.

Coin, renown… but also jealously and greed. She had wept and not changed her mourning robes for six days, her eyes thick with kohl, her lips inked black.

His death, for all its callous senselessness, was mundane. Not like this. This was art. Grotesque, unconscionable, but art nonetheless. And she knew art. Hakasto had not taught her that. That was innate. She bled art.

And there was much blood, lustrous and red.

Now, only the dead would sit for her, and they had little choice or awareness of the matter. As Mabeth sketched, she took in the arms that had been strung by the victim’s own sinews. Hanging limply, as if some godlike and invisible puppeteer held onto them from above. No, not a puppet, she realised. She had misread the artist’s intentions. She sketched splayed feet, their broken toes and bones distended, and the clawed fingers reaching like strange branches. And finally, the position of the body, utterly straight, rigid as any trunk.

‘A tree…’ she murmured aloud, pausing to regard it.

‘What?’ asked Levio. The proctor sounded gruff, his unshaven face further testimony of either a lack of self-respect or the lateness of the hour. Or both. He was badly dressed in a long coat and peacekeeper fatigues, one of several weary lawmen at large in the church. He worried at the aquila rosary wrapped around his wrist, half eyeing the shadows of the dingy church with only stab-lights to lift the darkness. He hid his irritation poorly.

‘A tree,’ Mabeth repeated, her charcoal stylus poised. ‘He has been arranged in the manner and aspect of a tree.’

‘There aren’t any trees in the city.’

‘I didn’t say it was based on anything in Durgov.’

Levio took another look. ‘I only see some poor bastard, tortured to death.’ He turned, frowned. ‘You said arranged?’

Mabeth nodded.

‘What do you think it means?’

‘Growth, rebirth… knowledge, maybe,’ she said. ‘A tree has broad symbolic meaning.’

‘I don’t see meaning. I see madness. City’s infected with it.’

It had got worse. Ever since the sky had changed and the astropaths had died. No word out, no word in. Entire world had been affected. Something had happened, but no one knew what it was, only that it had. Powerlessness bred fear. Fear bred violence. And so it went.

‘Why I am here, Proctor Levio?’

‘Arbitrator wants a record.’ He stalled to pick at something in his teeth. ‘Doesn’t want to come down here to see for herself.’

Mabeth gestured to the perturbed looking hunchback busying around a picter unit.

‘Then what’s he here for? Would a pictograph not capture a more accurate impression of the scene? Not to mention be much faster? I’m not complaining,’ she hastened to add, ‘I need the coin. Not much work for an artist when every patron has decided to start hoarding their wealth for the end of days.’

‘I honestly do not know,’ admitted Levio. ‘So far, he’s done precisely fuck all.’

The hunchback’s dark robes hid several disfigurements, most of them cybernetic in nature. He was a sacristan, conversant in the utilisation and repair of machines. Right now, as he switched out parts from the picter or replaced powercells, he appeared only to be conversant in a varied lexicon of expletives.

‘Here…’ Levio pulled a folder from his long coat and handed it to Mabeth.

She opened it and leafed through several flimsies.

‘They’re all useless,’ she said, frowning. ‘Just blurred images.’

‘Yep. Doesn’t matter what that hunchbacked arsehole does, the picts won’t come out. That’s the sixth picter we’ve tried.’

‘How long have you been in here?’

Levio rubbed his unshaven face and she had her answer.

Mabeth looked back through the images. They were obfuscated as if overexposed or smeared by a sudden jerk of the lens. But the subject was static, the picter secure and the light steady.

‘This is very strange,’ she conceded.

‘I’ve gone from strange to irritating, and I’m circling livid. Or suicidal,’ said Levio, ‘it changes by the minute…’

Mabeth glanced down at her sketch. The rendering was good. The curve of the thigh, the overall musculature, the texture of the lank hair and scarred flesh… As vivid as she had ever been on parchment and almost more real than any pictograph…

‘I see,’ she said, handing back the useless flimsies.

‘So, if you don’t mind,’ said Levio, ‘hurry it the hell up. I can’t get out of here until you’re finished.’

He walked away to berate the sacristan, leaving Mabeth to it.

‘Charming…’ she whispered, but her work was almost done. Just a little detailing remained. She had a leather field case for carrying all her equipment and pulled from it a magnifying lens she attached over her left eye via a skull frame. Up close, even via the lens, the scene felt… intimate. Every knife stroke revealed. Every abuse. And it was neat murder, almost surgical. It spoke to obsession. Through her enhancing lens, she looked through a window into something dark. She lingered on the face, partly hidden by the hair. Something looked back at her from those cold, dead eyes. Recognition? Mabeth found herself drawn, though she wanted to recoil. The lips were barely parted, but she caught the suggestion of white teeth and then… they moved.

Paradise…

Like a lover’s breath against her ear, warm and susurrant. The scent of cloying lavender filled her nose.

Mabeth tore away the lens, letting out a stifled cry.

Levio whirled around, reaching for his sidearm, until he realised the girl had shrieked at shadows.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said, a little breathless, and out of instinct touched her neck. But there was nothing there. It just felt cold, like a strange absence.

Levio scowled, standing down as he went to light up a smoke and muttering some about the bad decisions that had led up to this moment.

Tentatively, Mabeth put the lens back on. Nothing happened. The body remained as it was, horrific but lifeless. There was no voice, no scent of lavender. Just old blood and musty prayer scrolls. She got what she needed and finished up, handing the parchment to the proctor on her way out.

‘I expect prompt payment,’ she said by way of a parting shot.

Levio’s coarse laughter followed Mabeth until she had left the church.

Gethik was waiting for her outside, the servitor’s dull eyes barely comprehending his surroundings and not so different from the corpse Mabeth had just sketched.

‘Follow,’ she uttered as she passed the brutish creature, hearing him fall into clomping lockstep behind her. The city had lost its mind since the killings, so it paid to have protection, even if Gethik was a piece of cyborganic shit better suited to the scrapheap than bodyguard detail. Intimidation went a long way though, and Gethik was big. He smelled of machine oil and rust, but at least it helped to banish the memory of sickly lavender.

‘Must be tired…’ she said and through the gaps in the overarching buildings caught glimpses of the sky. A blood-red blush coloured it, like paint clouding in water. Shouts echoed on the warm night air, a sign of the madness to come. She’d be gone before any of that. Mabeth turned away and headed for the mag-rail.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-503-5

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