Dan Abnett - Eisenhorn Omnibus

'Such a looker too/ Betancore sighed, gazing back in at her.

'Useful to us. If she passes certain requirements, I'm going to employ her/

He nodded. Untouchables were rare, and almost impossible to create artificially. They have a negative presence in the warp that renders them virtually immune to psychic powers, which in turn makes them potent anti-psyker weapons. The side-effect of their psychic blankness is the unpleasant disturbance that accompanies them, the waves of fear and revulsion they trigger in those they meet.

No wonder her life had been difficult and friendless.

'News?' I asked Betancore.

'Made contact with a sprint trader called the Essene. Master's one Tobius Maxilla. Deals in small units of luxury goods. Coming here in two days to deliver a consignment of vintage wines from Hesperus, then on to Gudrun. For a fee, he'll make room for the cutter in his hold/

'Good work. So we'll be on Gudrun when?'

Two weeks/

I spent the next hour or so interviewing Bequin, but as I suspected she knew precious little about any of the men. We gave her accommodation in a small bunk-cell next to Betancore's quarters. It was scarcely more than a box, and Nilquit had to remove piles of stowed equipment to clear it, but she seemed pleased enough. When I asked her if she had any possessions she wished to collect from the Sun-dome, she simply shook her head.

I was reviewing yet more piles of data with Aemos when Fischig arrived. He was dressed in his brown serge uniform suit and carried two bulky holdalls over his shoulder, which he dropped to the deck with a declamatory thump as he stepped aboard.

'To what do I owe this visit, chastener?' I asked.

He showed me a slate bearing Carpel's official seal. 'The high custodian grants you permission to leave to pursue your inquiry. Dependent on this…'

I reviewed the slate and sighed.

'I'm coming with you/ he said.

SIX

Divination by auto-seance.

A dream.

Joining the Essene.

I lodged A formal complaint with the high custodian's office, but it was simply for show. Carpel could manufacture serious problems for me if I tried to leave without his agent. I could do that, of course. I could do as I liked. But Carpel could delay me, and I didn't know how much co-operation from the elders and administrations of Hubris I'd need later if any part of this investigation led to trial.

Besides, Carpel knew I was going on to Gudrun, and he would plainly send Fischig there under an Arbites warrant to investigate anyway. On the whole, I decided I'd rather have Chastener Fischig where I could see him.

On the afternoon before our intended departure, I had Lowink prepare for an auto-seance. I doubted whether anything further could be learned now, but I wanted to cover every avenue.

As usual, we used my quarters, with the cabin-door locked, and Betan-core strictly instructed to prevent interruptions. I sat in a high-back armchair, and spent some quarter of an hour lowering my mind to a semi-trance state. This was an old technique, one of the first I had been taught when my abilities had originally been detected by the tutors of the Inquisition. On a cloth-covered table between us, Lowink laid out key evidence items: some of Eyclone's effects, some other pieces taken from Thaw-view

12011, and some from the processional. We also had the mysterious casket from the cryogenerator chamber.

Once he was satisfied I was ready, Lowink opened his mind to the warp, and filtered its raging influence through his highly trained mental architecture. This transitional moment was always a shock, and I shuddered. The temperature in the room dropped palpably, and a glass bowl on a side counter cracked spontaneously. Lowink was murmuring, his eyes rolled back, twitching and jerking slightly.

I closed my eyes, though I could still see my room. What I was seeing was a visualisation of our surroundings constructed by Lowink astropath-ically in the Empyrean itself. Everything shone with a pale blue light from within, and solids became translucent. The dimensions of the room shifted slightly, stretching and buckling as if they had difficulty retaining their coherence.

I took up the items on the table in turn, Lowink's projection enhancing their psychometric qualities, opening my mind's abilities to the signatures and resonances they carried in the warp.

Most were dull and blunt, with no trace of resonance. Some had wispy tendrils of auras around them, relics of passing contact with human hands and human minds. Eyclone's vox– device buzzed with the distant, unintelligible whinings of ghosts but gave up nothing.

Eyclone's pistol stung my hand like a scorpion when I touched it – and both I and Lowink gasped. I had a brief aftertaste of death. I decided not to touch it again.

His data-slate, which Aemos had yet been unable to open, was dripping with a sticky, almost gelatinous aura. The thickness of the psychic residue betokened the complex thought processes and data that had adhered to it. It gave up nothing, and I became frustrated. Lowink amplified my scrutiny and at last, as a whisper, I landed the word, or name, 'daesumnor'.

The final item for inspection was the casket. It resonated brightly with flickering bands of warp-traces. Our contact with it was necessarily brief because of the exhausting strength of its halo.

We probed, opening what seemed to be three levels of psychometric activity. One was sharp and hard, and tasted of metal. Lowink averred that this was a relic of the intellect or intellects that had crafted the casket. An undeniably brilliant but malevolent presence.

Beneath that, colder, smaller, denser, like a lightless collapsed star, lay a heavy, throbbing trace that seemed to be locked in the heart of the casket's machine core.

Around both, fluttering and swooping like birds, were the vestigial psychic agonies of the dead from Processional Two-Twelve. Their plaintive psychic noise rippled through our thoughts and sapped the emotional strength from us both. The dead souls of the processional had left their psychic fingerprints on this device that had been instrumental in their murder.

We were about to step back and end the seance when the second trace, the cold, distant, dense one, began to well up to the surface. I was

intrigued at first, then stunned by its gathering force and speed. It filled my head with a nauseating, intolerable sense of hunger.

Hunger, thirst, appetite, craving…

It rose from the depths of the casket, wailing and yearning, a dark thing tearing up through the other trace energies. I glimpsed its malice and felt its consuming need.

Lowink broke the link. He slumped back in his seat, panting, his skin dotted with the stigmatic blood-spots of an astropathic augury taken far too far.

I felt it too. My mind seemed cold, colder even than the ministrations of Dormant. It seemed to take a very long time before my thoughts began to flow freely again, like water slowly thawing in an iced pipe.

I rose and poured myself a glass of amasec. I poured one for Lowink too as an afterthought. Neither of us ever came away from an auto-seance feeling good, but this was signally worse than usual.

There was danger,' Lowink husked at last. Vile danger. From the casket.'

'I felt it.'

'But the whole seance was unseemly, master. As if distracted and spoiled by some… some factor.

I sighed. I knew what he had felt. 'I can explain. The girl we have aboard is an untouchable.'

Lowink shuddered. 'Keep her away from me.'

I passed the word 'daesumnor' to Aemos in case it assisted his work on the data-slate and rested in my cabin to recover. Lowink had gone back to his tiny residence under the cockpit deck. I doubted he would be useful for much for a goodly while.

I gathered up the evidence items, re-bagged them and locked them in the cutter's strongbox, all except the casket, which was too big to fit. We kept it bagged and chained in a tarpaulin locker aft. As I hefted it up to return it to the locker, I felt the aftershock of its aura, as if we had woken something, some instinct. I considered this to be the imagination of my stung mind working overtime, but I completed the task only when I had buckled on a pair of work gloves.