Nemesis

She absently touched the collar around her neck as she did this. It was just metal, just a thing, secured only with a bolt that she herself could undo with a single twist. It had meaning, though, for those who looked upon it, for those who might read the words from the Nikaea Diktat acid-etched into the black iron. It was a slave’s mark, after a fashion, but one she wore only for the benefit of the comfort of others. It was not a nullifier, it could not hold her back; it was there so those who feared her ability could have her at their side and still sleep soundly, convinced by the lie that it would protect them from her unearthliness. The texture of the cool metal gave her focus, and she let herself draw inward.

The last thing she looked at before she closed her eyes was the chronometer on a nearby desk; Hyssos and the local lawmen had returned from the Iubar several hours ago, but she hadn’t seen any of them since the audience with the Void Baron. She wondered what Hyssos would be doing, but she resisted the urge to extend a tendril of thought out to search for him. Her telepathic abilities were poor and it was only her familiarity with his mind that allowed her to sense him with any degree of certainty. In truth, Perrig’s desire to be close to Hyssos only ever brought her melancholy. She had once looked into his thoughts as he slept, once when he had let down his guard, and there she saw that he had no inkling of the strange devotion the psyker had for her guardian; no understanding of this peculiar attachment that could not be thought of as love, but neither as anything else. It was better that way, she decided. Perrig did not wish to think of what might happen if he knew. She would be taken away from him, most likely. Perhaps even returned to the Black Ships from where Baron Eurotas had first claimed her.

Perrig suffocated the thoughts and returned to her business at hand, eyes tightly shut, her calm forced back into place like a key jammed into a lock.

The psyker knelt on the hard wooden floor of the room. Arranged in a semi-circle around her were a careful line of objects she had picked from the debris of the old wine lodge. Some stones, a brass button from a greatcoat, sticky grease-paper wrapping from a meat-stick vendor and a red leaflet dense with script in the local dialect of Imperial Gothic. Perrig touched them all in order, moving back and forth, lingering on some, returning to others. She used the items to build a jigsaw puzzle image of the suspect, but there were gaping holes in the simulacra. Places where she could not sense the full dimension of who Erno Sigg was.

The button had fear on it. It had been lost as he fled the fire and the howl of the coleopters.

The stones. These he had picked up and turned in his hands, used them in an idle game of throws, tossing them across the shack and back again, boredom and nervous energy marbling their otherwise inert auras.

The grease-paper was laden with hunger, panic. The image here was quite distinct; he had stolen the food from the vendor while the man’s back was turned. He had been convinced he would be caught and arrested.

The leaflet was love. Love or something like it, at least in the manner that Perrig could understand. Dedication, then, if one were to be more correct, with almost a texture of righteousness about it.

She dithered over the piece of paper, looking through her closed lids at the emotional spectra it generated. Sigg was complex and the psyker had trouble holding the pieces she had of him in her mind. He was conflicted; buried somewhere deep there was the distant echo of great violence in him, but it was overshadowed by two towering opposite forces. On one hand, a grand sense of hope, even redemption, as if he believed he would be saved; and on the other, an equally powerful dread of something hunting him, of his own victimhood.

Perrig’s psychometry was not an exact science, but in her time as an investigator she had developed a keen sense of her own instincts; it was this sense that told her Erno Sigg did not kill for his pleasures. As that thought crystallised inside her mind, Perrig felt the first fuzzy inklings of a direction coming to her. She allowed her hand to pick up the stylus at her side and moved it to the waiting data-slate on the floor. It twitched as the auto-writing began in spidery, uneven text.

Her other hand, though, had not left the leaflet. Her fingers toyed with the edges of it, playing with the careworn paper, seeking out the places where it had been delicately folded and unfolded, time and time again. She wondered what it meant to Sigg that he cared so much for it, and sensed the ghost of the anguish he would feel at its loss.

That would be how she would find him. The sorrow, fluttering from him like a pennant in the wind. The scribbling stylus moved of its own accord, back and forth across the slate.

Confidence rose in her. She would find Erno Sigg. She would. And Hyssos would be pleased with her–