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 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 produced a plastic case, opening it to reveal a wickedly curved knife with a knurled handle. ‘I brought one up from evidentiary so we’d have an example to look at.’
Yosef recognised it instantly, and his hand twitched as he resisted the urge to reach for it. A harvestman’s blade, one of the most familiar tools on the planet, made by the millions for Iesta Veracrux’s huge army of agricultural workers. Blades exactly like this one were used in every vineyard, and they were as commonplace as the grapes they were used to cut. Being so widespread, of course, they were also the most common tool of murder on Iesta – but Yosef had never seen such a blade used for so ornate a killing as the one at the airdocks. To use the crude tool for so fine a cutting would have required both great skill and no little time to accomplish it. ‘What in Terra’s name are we dealing with?’ he muttered.
‘It’s a ritual,’ said Daig, with a certainty that seemed to come from nowhere. ‘It can’t be anything else.’ He put the blade aside and gestured at the scattered files. As well as the tide of paperwork from the airdock murder, packets of fiche and other picts had arrived from a couple of the sub-precincts in the nearby arroyo territories, automatically flagged by the reports of the incident sent out on the planetwide watch-wire. There had been other deaths, and while the nature of them had not been exactly the same as Jaared Norte’s, elements of similar methodology were expressed in each. Daig had suggested that their killer was ‘maturing’ with each assault, growing more confident in what they wished to convey with their deeds.
This was not Iesta Veracrux’s first serial murder spree. But it seemed different from all the others that had gone before it, in a manner that Yosef could not yet fully articulate.
‘What I don’t fathom,’ began a voice from behind them, ‘is how in Stars the bugger got the poor fool up on the ceiling.’ Yosef and Daig turned to where Reeve Warden Berts Laimner stood, a fan of picts in his meaty paw. Laimner was a big man, dark-skinned and always smiling, even now in a small way at the sight of Norte’s grotesque death; but the warm expression was always a falsehood, masking a character that was self-serving and oily. ‘What do you think, Sabrat?’
Yosef framed a noncommittal answer. ‘We’re looking into that, Warden.’
Laimner gave a chuckle that set Yosef’s teeth on edge and discarded the images. ‘Well, I hope you’ve got a better reply than that up your sleeve.’ He pointed across the room to an entranceway. ‘The High-Reeve is just outside that door. She wants to weigh in on this.’
Daig actually let out a little groan, and Yosef felt himself sag inside. If the precinct commander was putting her hand on this case, then the investigators could be certain that their job was about to become twice as hard.
As if Laimner’s words had been a magical summons, the door opened and High-Reeve Kata Telemach entered the office with an assistant trailing her. Telemach’s appearance was like a shock going through the room, and every reeve and jager scrambled to look as if they were working hard and being diligent. She didn’t appear to notice, instead making a direct line for Yosef and Daig. The woman was wearing a well-pressed dress uniform, and around her neck was a gold rod with one single silver band around it.
‘I was just telling Reeves Sabrat and Segan of your interest, ma’am,’ said Laimner.
The commander seemed distracted. ‘Progress?’ she asked. The woman had a sharp face and hard eyes.
‘We’re building a solid foundation,’ offered Daig, equally as good at giving non-answers as his cohort was. He swallowed. ‘There are some matters of cross-jurisdictional circumstance that might become an issue later, however.’ He was about to say more, but Telemach shot Laimner a look as if to say Haven’t you dealt with this already?
‘That will not be a concern, Reeve. I have just returned from an audience with the Lord Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites.’
‘Oh?’ Yosef tried to keep any sarcasm out of his voice.
Telemach went on. ‘The Arbites have a lot of wine in their glass at the moment. They’re engaged in a few operations across the planet. This… case doesn’t need to be added to that workload.’
Operations. That seemed to be the current word of choice to describe the actions of the Arbites on Iesta Veracrux. A colourless, open term that belied the reality of what they were actually doing – which was quietly dredging the lower cities and the upper echelons alike for the slightest evidence of any anti-Imperial sedition and pro-Horus thinking, ruthlessly stamping out anything that might blossom into actual treason.