Nemesis

The cathedral’s second life as a place of justice served the building well. It was just as impressive a home for the Sentine as it had been for the long-departed priests. Sabrat crossed the long axis of the main hall, past the open waiting quad where citizens queued and argued with the luckless jagers on desk duty, and through the checkpoint where an impassive, watchful gun-servitor licked his face with a fan of green laser light before letting him by. He threw a cursory nod to a group of other reeves from the West Catchment, all of them gathered around a nynemen board with tapers of scrip, waving off an invite to join them in a game; instead he took the spiral stairs up to the second level. The upper floors were almost a building inside a building, a multi-storey blockhouse that had been constructed inside the hangar-like confines of the main hall, and retrofitted into the structure. The room was in the same state of shabby, half-controlled clutter as it ever was, with bales of rough vinepaper and starkly shot picts arranged in loose piles that represented some sort of untidy order, if only one knew how to interpret it. In the centre of the room, a pillar studded with brass communication sockets sprouted thick rubber-sheathed cables that snaked to headsets or to hololiths. One of them ended in a listening rig around the head of Yosef’s cohort, who sat bent over in a chair, listening with his eyes closed, fingers absently toying with a gold aquila on a chain about his wrist.

‘Daig.’ Yosef stopped in front of the man and called his name. When he didn’t respond, the reeve snapped his fingers loudly. ‘Wake up!’

Reeve Daig Segan opened his eyes and let out a sigh. ‘This isn’t sleep, Yosef. This is deep thought. Have you ever had one of those?’ He took off the headset and looked up at him. Yosef heard the tinny twitter of a synthetic voice from the speakers, reading out the text of an incident report in a clicking monotone.

Daig was a study in contrasts to his cohort. Where Sabrat was of slightly above average height, narrow-shouldered, clean-shaven and sandy-haired, Segan was stocky and not without jowls, his hair curly and unkempt around a perpetually dejected expression. He managed another heavy sigh, as if the weight of the world were pressing down upon him. ‘There’s no point in me listening to this a second time,’ he went on, tugging the rig’s jack plug from its socket on the pillar with a snap of his wrist. ‘Skelta’s reports are just as dull with the machine reading them to me as him doing it.’

Yosef frowned. ‘What I saw out there wasn’t any stripe of dull.’ He glanced down and saw a spread of picts from the storage shed crime scene. Even rendered in light-drenched black and white, the horror of it did not lessen. Mirrors of liquid were in every image, and the sight of them brought sense memory abruptly back into the reeve’s forebrain. He blinked the sensation away.

Daig saw him do it. ‘You all right?’ he asked, concern furrowing his brow. ‘Need a moment?’

‘No,’ Yosef said firmly. ‘You said you had something new?’

Daig’s head bobbed. ‘Not so new. More like a confirmation of something we already suspected.’ He searched for a moment through the papers and data-slates before he found a sheaf of inky printout. ‘Analysis of the cutting gave up a pattern that matches a type of industrial blade.’

‘Medical?’ Yosef recalled his impression of the almost clinical lines of the mutilation; but Daig shook his head.

‘Viticultural, actually.’ The other reeve pawed through a box at his feet and produced a plastic case, opening it to reveal a wickedly curved knife with a knurled handle. ‘I brought one up from evidentiary so we’d have an example to look at.’

Yosef recognised it instantly, and his hand twitched as he resisted the urge to reach for it. A harvestman’s blade, one of the most familiar tools on the planet, made by the millions for Iesta Veracrux’s huge army of agricultural workers. Blades exactly like this one were used in every vineyard, and they were as commonplace as the grapes they were used to cut. Being so widespread, of course, they were also the most common tool of murder on Iesta – but Yosef had never seen such a blade used for so ornate a killing as the one at the airdocks. To use the crude tool for so fine a cutting would have required both great skill and no little time to accomplish it. ‘What in Terra’s name are we dealing with?’ he muttered.