Nemesis

are Imperial Fists and we observe the letter of Imperial law. There must be proof

positive.”

“Your orders, then, sir?”

“Have the serfs maintain their observations,” Dorn looked up into the darkening

sky. “For the moment, we watch and we wait.”

103

EIGHT

Cinder and Ash

Toys

Unmasked

The room in the compound they had given over for Perrig’s use was of a reasonable

size and dimension, and the last of four that had been offered. The other three she had

immediately rejected because of their inherent luminal negativity or proximal

locations to undisciplined thought-groupings. The second had been a place where a

woman had died, some one hundred and seven years earlier, having taken her own

life as the result of an unplanned pregnancy. The adjutant, Gorospe, had looked at

Perrig with shock and no little amount of dismay at that revelation; it seemed that no

one among the staff of the Eurotas Consortium had had any idea the building on Iesta

had such a sordid history.

But this room was quiet, the buzzing in her senses was abating and Perrig was as

close to her equilibrium as she could be in a place so filled with droning, selfabsorbed

minds. Running through her alignment exercises, Perrig gently edited them

out of her thoughtscape, eliminating the disruption through the application of a gentle

psionic null-song, like a counter-wave masking an atonal sound.

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

104

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