Nemesis

execution of his son… Perhaps it may be beyond the pale. And that is why some

things cannot be spoken of outside this chamber.”

26

Valdor folded his muscular arms over his chest and stared down at Malcador.

“That statement has all the colour of an order,” he said. “But who gives it, I wonder?

The Master of Assassins, or the Regent of Terra?”

The Sigillite’s eyes glittered in the gloom. “Decide for yourself,” he said.

Before the Emperor’s enlightenment, the Sentine’s precinct house had been a place

of idolatry and ancestor worship. Once, the bodies of the rich and those judged

worthy had been buried in crypts beneath the main hall, and great garish statuary and

other extravagant gewgaws had filled every corner of the building, with cloisters and

naves leading here and there to chapels for every deity the First Establishment had

brought with them from Old Earth. Now the crypts were cells and memory stacks,

armouries and storage lockers. The chapels had different tenants now, icons called

security and vigilance, and all the artworks and idols were crushed and gone, a few

saved in museums as indicators of a less sophisticated past. All this had taken place a

long time before Yosef Sabrat had been born, however. There were barely a handful

of living citizens on Iesta Veracrux who could recall any vestiges of a past with

religion in it.

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

27

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