THE CASE OF UDWIN PRIDDE
SMALL TALK WITH VERVEUK
SOMETHING LIKE VENGEANCE
When the time came, Fayde Thuring was damn near impossible to stop.
I blame myself for that. I had let him run on for too long. For the best part of eight decades he had escaped my attentions, and in that time he had grown immeasurably from the minor warp-dabbler I had once let slip away.
My mistake. But I wasn’t the one to pay.
On the 160th day of 386.M41 a nobleman in his late one sixties appeared at the Examination hearings held in the Imperial Minster of Eriale, the legislative capital of the Uvege in the south-west of Durer’s third largest landmass.
He was a landowner, widowed young, and he had built his fortune in post-liberation Durer society on a successful agri-combine venture and the inherited wealth of his late wife. In 376, as a mature, successful and highly eligible newcomer amongst the gentry of the Uvege, a prosperous region of verdant farmland, he had made a socially-advancing second marriage. His new bride was Betrice, thirty years his junior, the eldest daughter of the venerable House Samargue. The Samargue family’s ancient wealth was at that time seeping away as the efficient land-use policies of Administratum-sponsored combines slowly took control of the Uvege’s pastoral economy.
The nobleman’s name was Udwin Pridde, and he had been summoned by the hierarch of the See of Eriale to answer charges of recidivism, warpcraft and, above all, heresy.
Facing him across the marble floor of the Minster was a dignified Inquisitorial body of the most august quality. Inquisitor Eskane Koth, an Amalathian, born and bred on Thracian Primaris, one day to be known as the Dove of Avignon. Inquisitor Laslo Menderef, a native of lowland Sancour, Menderef the Grievous as he would become, an Istvaanian with a cold appreciation of warp-crime and poor body hygiene. Inquisitor Poul Rassi, son of the Kilwaddi Steppes, a sound, elderly, even-handed servant of order. The novice Inquisitor Bastian Verveuk.
And myself. Gregor Eisenhorn. Inquisitor and presiding examiner.
Pridde was the first of two hundred and sixty individuals identified by Lord Rorken’s work as possible heretics to be weighed by this Formal Court of Examination. He looked nervous but dignified as he faced us, toying with his lace collar. He had hired a pardoner called Fen of Clincy to speak on his behalf.
It was the third day of the hearings. As the pardoner droned on, describing Pridde in terms that would have made a saint blush for want of virtue, I thumbed half-heartedly through the catalogue of pending cases and sighed at the scale of the work to come. The catalogue – we all had a copy – was thicker than my wrist. This was the third day already and still we had not progressed further than the preamble of the first case. The opening rites had taken a full day and the legal recognition of the authority of the Ordos Helican here on Durer, together with other petty matters of law, yet another. I wondered, may the God-Emperor forgive my lack of charity, if Lord Rorken’s illness was genuine or just a handy excuse to avoid this tedium.
Outside, it was a balmy summer day. Wealthy citizens of Eriale were boating on the ornamental lakes, lunching in the hillside trattorias of the Uvege, conducting lucrative business in the caffeine houses of the city’s Commercia.
In the echoing, cool vault of the Minster, there was nothing but the whining voice of Fen of Clincy.
Golden sunlight shafted in through the celestory windows and bathed the stalls of the audience gallery. That area was half empty. A few dignitaries, clerks, local hierarchs and archivists of the Planetary Chronicle. They looked drowsy to me and I knew their account of these proceedings would be at odds with the official log recorded by the pict-servitors. Hierarch Onnopel himself was already dozing. The fat idiot. If his grip on the spiritual fibre of his flock had been tighter, these hearings might not have been necessary.
I saw my ancient savant, Uber Aemos, apparently listening intently, though I knew his mind was far away. I saw Alizebeth Bequin, my dear friend and colleague, reading a copy of the court briefing. She looked stately and prim in her long dark gown and half-veil. As she pretended to turn the pages, I glimpsed the data-slate concealed inside its cover. Another volume of poetry, no doubt. The glimpse made me chuckle, and I hastened to stifle the sound.
‘My lord? Is there a problem?’ the pardoner asked, breaking off in mid-flow.
I waved a hand. ‘None. Please continue, sir. And hasten to your summary, perhaps?’
The Minster at Eriale was only a few decades old, rebuilt from war rubble in a triumphant High Gothic style. As little as half a century before, this entire sub-sector – the Ophidian sub-sector – had been in the embrace of the arch-enemy. In fact, it had been my honour to witness the embarkation of the great Imperial taskforce that had liberated it. That had been on Gudrun, the former capital world of the Helican sub-sector, one hundred and fifty years previously. Sometimes I felt very old.
I had lived, by that time, for one hundred and eighty-eight years, so I was in early middle age by the standards of privileged Imperial society. Careful augmetic work and juvenat conditioning had retarded the natural deteriorations of my body and mind, and more significant artifice had repaired wounds and damage my career had cost me. I was robust, healthy and vigorous, but sometimes the sheer profusion of my memories reminded me how long I had been alive. Of course, I was but a youth compared to Aemos.
Sitting there, in a gilt lifter throne at the centre of the high table, dressed in the robes and regalia of a lord chief examiner, I reflected that I had perhaps been too hard on that duffer Onnopel. Any reconquered territory, taken back from the taint of the warp, would perforce be plagued by heresy for some time as Imperial law reinstated itself. Indeed, Ordos dedicated to the Ophidian sub-sector had yet to be founded, so jurisdiction lay with the neighbouring Officio Helican. An Examination such as this was timely. Fifty years of freedom and it was right for the Inquisition to move in and inspect the fabric of the new society. This was necessary tedium, I tried to remind myself, and Rorken had been correct in calling for it. The Ophidian sub-sector, thriving in its recovery, needed the Inquisition to check on its spiritual health just as this rebuilt Minster needed stonemasons to keep an eye on its integrity as it settled.
‘My lord inquisitor?’ Verveuk whispered to me. I looked up and realised Fen the pardoner had finished at last.
‘Your duty is noted, pardoner. You may retire,’ I said, scribing a mark on my slate. He bowed.
‘I trust the accused has paid you in advance for your time,’ said Inquisitor Koth archly. ‘His assets may be sequestered, ’ere long.’
‘I have been paid for my statement, sir,’ confirmed Fen.
‘Generously, it seems,’ I observed. ‘Was it by the word?’
My fellow inquisitors chuckled. Except Verveuk, who barked out a over-loud whinny as if I had just made the finest jest this side of the Golden Throne. By the Throne, he was a sycophantic weasel! If ever a windpipe cried out for a brisk half-hitch, his was it.
At least his snorting had woken Onnopel up. The hierarch roused with a start and growled ‘hear, hear!’ with a faux-knowing nod of his many chinned head as if he had been listening intently all along. Then he went bright red and pretended to look for something under his pew.
‘If there are no further comments from the Ministorum,’ I said dryly, ‘perhaps we can move on. Inquisitor Menderef?’
‘Thank you, lord chief examiner,’ said Menderef politely, rising to his feet.
The pardoner had scurried away, leaving Pridde alone in the open expanse of the wide floor. Pridde was in chains, but his fine garb with its lace trim seemed to discomfort him more than the shackles. Menderef walked around the high table to face him, turning the pages of a manuscript slowly.
He began his cross-examination.
Laslo Menderef was a slender man a century old. His thin brown hair was laquered up over his skull in a hard widow’s peak and his face was sallow and taut-skinned. He wore a long, plain velvet robe of selpic blue with his rosette of office and the symbol of the Ordo Hereticus pinned at his breast. He had a chilling manner that I admired, though I cared not at all for the man’s radical philosophy. He was also the most articulate interrogator in Sakarof’s officio. His long-fingered, agile hands found a place in the manuscript and stopped there.
‘Udwin Pridde?’ he said.
‘Sir,’ Pridde answered.
‘On the 42nd day of 380.M41, you called upon the house of an unlicensed practitioner of apothecary in Clude and purchased two phials of umbilical blood, a hank of hair from the head of an executed murderer and a fertility doll carved from a human finger bone.’
‘I did not, sir.’
‘Oh,’ said Menderef amiably, ‘then I am mistaken.’ He turned back and nodded to me. ‘It appears we are done here, lord examiner,’ he said. He paused just long enough for Pridde to sag with relief and then wheeled round again. Glory, but his technique was superb.
‘You’re a liar,’ he said. Pridde recoiled, suddenly alert once more.
‘S-sir–’
‘The apothecary was executed for her practices by the Eriale Arbites in the winter of 382. She kept annotated records of her dealings which, I presume, she foolishly thought might serve as some kind of bargaining tool in the event of her apprehension. Your name is there. The matter of your purchases is there. Would you like to see it?’
‘It is a fabrication, sir.’
‘A fabrication… uhm…’ Menderef paced slowly around the defendant. Pridde tried to keep his eyes on him but didn’t dare turn from his spot. Once Menderef was behind him, Pridde started to shake.
‘You’ve never been to Clude?’
‘I go there sometimes, sir.’
‘Sometimes?’
‘Once, maybe twice every year.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘There is a feed merchant in Clude who–’
‘Yes, there is. Aarn Wisse. We have spoken with him. Though he admits to knowing you and doing business with you, he says he never saw you at all in 380 or the year after. He has no receipt of purchase for you in his ledger.’
‘He is mistaken, sir.’
‘Is he? Or are you?’
‘Sir?’
‘Pridde… your pardoner has already taken up too much of the day extolling – and magnifying – your multiple virtues. Do not waste any more of our time. We know you visited the apothecary. We know what you purchased. Make us like you more by collaborating with this line of questioning.’
Pridde shuddered. In a small voice, he said, ‘I did make those purchases, sir. Yes.’
‘Louder, for the court, please. I see amber lights winking on the vox-recorders. They’re not picking up your voice. The lights have to glow green, you see. Like they are now, hearing me. Green means they hear you.’
‘Sir, I did make those purchases!’
Menderef nodded and looked back at his manuscript. ‘Two phials of umbilical blood, a hank of hair from the head of an executed murderer and fertility doll carved from a human finger bone. Are those the purchases you mean?’
‘Yes, sir…’
‘Green lights, Pridde, green lights!’
‘Yes, sir!’
Menderef closed the manuscript and stalked round in front of Pridde again. ‘Would you like to explain why?’
Pridde looked at him and swallowed hard. ‘For the stock.’
‘The stock?’
‘My breeding stock of cattle, sir.’
‘Your cattle asked you to make these purchases?’
Koth and Verveuk laughed.
‘No, no, sir… I had purchased fifty head of breeding stock from a farm in the South Uvege two years before. Cosican Red-flank. Do you know the breed, sir?’
Menderef looked back at us, playing to the gallery with raised eyebrows. Verveuk laughed again. ‘I am not on first name terms with cattle, Pridde.’
‘They’re good stock, the best. Certificated by the Administratum Officio Agricultae. I was hoping to breed from them and establish a commercial herd for my combine.’
‘I see. And?’
‘They sickened, over winter. None would carry to term. The things they whelped were still-born… such things… I had to burn them. I asked the Ministorum for a blessing, but they refused. Said it was a failing in my stockmanship. I was desperate. I had sunk a lot of capital into the herd, sir. Then this apothecary told me…’
‘Told you what?’
‘That it was the warp. Said the warp was in the feed and the land, the very meadows. She said I could cure the trouble if I followed her guidance.’
‘She suggested you used rural warpcraft to mend your ailing cattle?’
‘She did.’
‘And you thought that was a good idea?’
‘As I said, I was desperate, sir.’
‘I know you were. But it wasn’t for the cattle, was it? Your wife had asked you to make the purchases, hadn’t she?’
‘No, sir!’
‘Yes, sir! Your wife, of the Samargue bloodline, desperate to restore power and vigour to its ailing fortunes!’
‘Y-yes…’
‘Green light, Pridde!’
‘Yes!’
From the documentation and my preparation, I already knew that House Samargue was the biggest game we were after on Durer. To his credit, Verveuk had suggested we begin with Pridde, a minor player, no more than an accomplice really, and use him as a lever to open up the noble family. On the basis of his testimony, the corruption of the ancient House would be easy to force out into the open.
Menderef continued his questioning for over an hour and, to tell the truth, it made for captivating theatre. When the Minster bell sounded nones, he cast a subtle glance at me to indicate there was no point pressing Pridde further for the time being. A break, with opportunity for the defendant to pace and worry, would serve us well for the day’s second session.
‘We will suspend the hearing for a brief term,’ I declared. ‘Bailiffs, conduct the accused to the cells. We will resume at the chime, an hour from now.’
I was hungry and stiff. Lunch offered a decent respite, even if I would have to tolerate Verveuk.
Bastian Verveuk was thirty-two standard years old and had been an inquisitor for seven months. He was a fresh-faced boy, he seemed to me, of medium height with a centre-parted bowl of heavy blond hair and slightly hooded, earnest eyes. He looked like he was yearning all the time. Yearning and swept up in some spiritual rapture.
He had a brilliantly ordered mind and had doubtlessly served Osma well as an interrogator. But now his hour had come and he was pushing up the ranks with immodest ambition. His transfer to Rorken’s staff – for ‘supplementary schooling’ – had probably been the result of Osma losing patience with him. Osma was like that. Osma was still the same Osma who had plagued me fifty years before. Except that now he was set to inherit Orsini’s role as Grand Master of the Inquisition, Helican sub-sector. Grand Master Orsini was dying and Osma was his chosen heir. It was just a matter of time.
Rorken was dying too, if the rumours were true. Soon, I would be friendless in the high ranks of the Ordos Helican.
Thanks to Rorken’s infirmity, I had acquired Verveuk. He was simply a burden I had to carry. His manner, his yearning, his bright eagerness; his damned questions.
I stood in the Minster’s warm sacristy, sipping wine and eating thick seed-bread, smoked fish and a strong, waxy cheese locally produced in the Uvege. I was chatting with Rassi, a pale, quiet senior inquisitor from the Ordo Malleus who had become a firm friend in recent years despite his association with the caustic Osma.
‘A month, you think, Gregor?’
‘For this, Poul? Two, maybe three.’
He sighed, toying his fork around his plate, his silver-headed cane tucked under his arm to free his hands. ‘Maybe six if they each bring a bloody pardoner, eh?’
We laughed. Koth slid past us to refill his glass and cast us a nod.
‘Don’t look now,’ Rassi murmured, ‘but your fan club is here.’
‘Oh, crap. Don’t leave me with him!’ I hissed, but Rassi had already moved away. Verveuk slid up beside me. He was balancing a dish of game terrine, pickles and salted spry that he clearly had no intention of eating.
‘It goes well, I think!’ he started.
‘Oh, very well.’
‘Of course, you must have great experience of these sessions, so you know better than I. But a good start, would you not say?’
‘Yes, a good start.’
‘Pridde is the key, he’ll turn the lock of House Samargue.’
‘I’m quite sure of it.’
‘Menderef’s work was something, wasn’t it? The cross-exam? So deft, so well-judged. The way he broke Pridde.’
‘I – uh – expected no less.’
‘Quite something, yes indeed.’
I felt I had to say something. ‘Your choice of Pridde. As the first accused. Well judged, well… well, a good decision, anyway.’
He looked at me as if I was his one true love and I’d just promised to do something significant.
‘Lord, I am truly honoured that you say so. I only did what I thought best. Really lord, to hear that from you, fills my heart with–’
‘Stewed fish?’ I asked, offering him the bowl.
‘No, thank you, lord.’
‘It’s very good,’ I said, slathering my bread with it. ‘Though like so many fine things in life, you can quite quickly have too much of it.’
He didn’t take the hint. The hint would most likely have to be embossed on the tip of a hi-ex bolter round and fired up his nose before he’d notice it.
‘I feel, lord,’ he said, setting his untouched dish aside, ‘that I can learn so much from you. This is an opportunity that few of my status get.’
‘I can’t fathom why,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘I almost feel I should thank the miserable tumors eating at my Lord Rorken for this chance.’
‘I feel I owe some sort of payback to them too,’ I muttered.
‘It’s so rare that a – if I may say – veteran inquisitor such as yourself… a field inquisitor, I mean, not a desk-bound lord… participates in a process like this and mingles with lesser officers such as me. Lord Rorken has always spoken so highly of you. There is much I want to ask you, so many things. I have read up on all your works. The P’Glao Conspiracy, for example. I have reviewed that from end to end, and I have so many queries. And other matters–’
Here it comes, I thought.
And there it came.
‘The daemonhosts. And Quixos. There is, oh, so much in that that demands the attention of a scholar such as myself. Can you give me personal insight? Perhaps not now… later… we could dine together and talk…’
‘Well, perhaps.’
‘The records are so incomplete – or rather, restricted. I yearn to know how you dealt with Prophaniti. And Cherubael.’
I was waiting for the name. Still, hearing it, I winced.
Cherubael. That’s what they all asked. Every last neophyte inquisitor I met. That’s what they all wanted to know. Damn their interest. It was over and done with.
Cherubael.
For one hundred and fifty years, the daemon had plagued my dreams and made each one a nightmare. For a century and a half, it had been in my head, a shadow at the horizon of sanity, a softly breathing shape in the dark recesses of my consciousness.
I had done with Cherubael. I had vanquished it.
But still the neophytes asked, and swirled up the memories again for me.
I would never tell them the truth. How could I?
‘Lord?’
‘I’m sorry, Verveuk, my mind wandered. What did you say?’
‘I said, isn’t that one of your men?’
Godwin Fischig, dressed in a long black coat, still powerful and imposing after all these years, had entered the sacristy by the rear door and was looking around for me.
I handed my plate and glass to the startled Verveuk and went directly across to him.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here,’ I whispered, drawing him aside.
‘Not really my thing, but you’ll thank me for busting in.’
‘What is it?’
‘Paydirt, Gregor. You’ll never guess in a hundred centuries who we’ve turned up.’
‘Presuming we don’t have a million years, Fischig, tell me.’
‘Thuring,’ he said. ‘We’ve found Thuring.’
Vengeance, in my opinion, is never an adequate motive for an inquisitor’s work. I had sworn to make Thuring pay for the death of my old friend Midas Betancore, of course, but the eighty years since Midas’s murder had been filled to distraction with more weighty and more pressing cases. There had not been time or opportunity to spare the months – perhaps years – required to hunt Thuring down. He was… not worth the effort.
At least, that is what Lord Rorken always counselled me when I brought the matter up. Fayde Thuring. An inconsequential player in the shadow-world of heresy that lurks within Imperial society. A nothing who would run foul of justice soon enough all by himself. Undeserving of my attention. Not worth the effort.
Indeed, for a long time, I had believed him dead. My agents and informants had kept me appraised of his activities, and early in 352.M41 I had learned he had fallen in with an out-world fraternity of Chaos called the Hearthood, or sometimes the Chimes of the World Clock. They practised a stylised worship of the Blood God, in the form of a local tribe’s minor swine-deity called Eolkit or Yulquet or Uulcet (the name differed in every source consulted) and for some months had plagued the crop-world Hasarna. Their cult-priest took the ceremonial guise of the swine-butcher or culler who, in older times, had travelled between the communities of Hasarna at the end of each autumn, slaughtering the livestock ready for the cold months. It was an old tradition, one that mixed ritual blood-letting with the dying of the calendar year, and is common throughout the Imperium. Pre-Imperial Terra had just such a myth once, called the Hallows, or the Eve of Hallowing.
The cult leader was Amel Sanx, the Corruptor of Lyx, reappearing for the first time after a century of hiding to spread his poisons. Sanx was so notorious a heretic that once it became known he was involved, the initial Inquisitorial efforts to prosecute the Hearthood multiplied a hundredfold and a kill-team of the Adepta Sororitas led by Inquisitor Aedelorn obliterated them in a raid on Hasarna’s northern capital.
In the aftermath, it was discovered that Sanx had already sacrificed most of his minor followers as part of a ritual that Aedelorn’s raid had interrupted. Thuring was one of his second tier of trusted acolytes in the Hearthood. His body was listed as amongst the ritual victims.
Midas’s killer was dead. Or so I had thought until that moment in the sacristy of Eriale’s Minster.
‘Are you sure of this?’
Fischig looked at me with a shrug as if I should have trouble doubting his words.
‘Where is he?’
‘That’s the part you’ve going to love. He’s here.’
They had taken their places already in the main vault of the Minster by the time I joined them. House Samargue had brought out a militant advocate to answer for them and already he was strenuously trying to establish the fragility of Udwin Pridde’s testimony.
I slammed my fist on the table to shut him up.
‘Enough! This Examination is suspended!’
My fellow inquisitors swung round to look at me.
‘It’s what?’ asked Menderef.
‘Until further notice!’ I added.
‘But–’ Koth began.
‘Gregor–?’ asked Rassi. ‘What are you doing?’
‘This is highly irregular–’ Verveuk said.
‘I know!’ I told him, right into his face. He flinched.
‘My lord chief examiner,’ asked the Samargue’s advocate, stepping towards the bench nervously, ‘may I presume to ask when this hearing might recommence?’
‘When I’m ready,’ I snarled. ‘When I’m good and ready.’