A Warhammer 40,000 story
I. The View
The dead man had been dressed for dinner.
Someone had shaved him, closed his mouth and put a fresh gardenia in his buttonhole. He lay on a couch upholstered in pale green silk. Beyond the open windows, water fell from the terraces of Bellacourt in long white curtains, and the first of the evening pleasure barges was crossing the lake.
Investigator Oswin Pahl lifted the dead man’s right hand. The nails were clean. The skin beneath the wedding ring was grey and soft.
“You washed him.”
“Naturally,” said the physician.
“Before the examination.”
“There had been an accident.”
Pahl looked up.
The physician swallowed. “Of the bowels.”
“They do that.”
Behind him, Sister Meret shifted her weight. Her armour made a small mechanical correction at the knee. She had been standing since their lander touched down, refusing three chairs, a footstool and an attendant whose only apparent duty was to hold her helmet.
The red of Our Martyred Lady showed at her cuffs. Pahl had requested her by name when Ghedde authorised the inquiry. Seven months of working together had taught him that she would question his decisions to his face and defend him until the shooting stopped. He needed both qualities more often than he admitted.
Pahl set the hand down. “How old?”
“One hundred and seventeen, subject to rejuvenation.”
“I meant the corpse.”
“Nine hours.”
Examiner Stenn had been dead for nine hours, then, and had requested assistance eleven days before. His message had travelled off-world by astropath. Pahl had received it aboard an Inquisitorial courier, three systems away.
*Discrepancies in household expenditure. Require independent spiritual assessment. Bring someone who will not enjoy herself.*
The last sentence had persuaded him. Stenn had disliked jokes in official communications.
“Was he alone?” Meret asked.
“At the end.”
“Who was with him before?”
The physician glanced towards the door.
“You can tell us here,” Pahl said, “or you can tell me somewhere without windows.”
“Mistress Ramm. The comptroller of the palace households. She visits all distinguished guests in distress.”
Meret went to the couch. Stenn’s left hand lay flat against the silk, fingers spread. There were shallow crescent marks in the upholstery.
“He gripped this.”
“A cardiac episode can be painful.”
She bent closer. White hair fell against the gorget of her black armour.
“Then why are his fingertips burnt?”
The physician had no answer for that.
Outside, a choir began singing from one of the barges. The sound carried beautifully over the water. Pahl waited until the physician had gone before he drew back the dead man’s collar.
Under the left ear was a pinprick, sealed with transparent surgical wax.
Meret touched the scar above her own ear, where an armour jack had once become infected. “A neural contact?”
“Possibly.”
“You knew him.”
“He lent me money.”
“Did you repay it?”
“Now you sound like him.”
She waited.
“Yes,” he said.
Only then did she help him turn the body.
Their hosts received them on a balcony wide enough for a military parade. Roses climbed pillars banded in gold. Imperial eagles hung above the balustrade; below it, orchards and pleasure gardens descended through the foothills to the lake. Snow remained on the mountains because, Pahl was informed, visitors preferred it.
He had seen worlds whose entire annual water allowance would not have supplied this balcony’s fountains for a week.
Mistress Ramm wore unadorned grey among the silks. She was a broad woman with close-cut hair and a slight tremor in one hand. Her face had the patient, practical expression of someone who knew how long everything took to clean.
“Examiner Stenn was a valued guest,” she said.
“He was an auditor.”
“The distinction needn’t make his stay unpleasant.”
Ramm offered the household records, the physician’s notes and unrestricted access to the deceased’s rooms. All had been prepared before Pahl arrived. He disliked competent hospitality. It removed useful reasons to be rude.
He presented his warrant. The seal belonged to Inquisitor Ghedde of the Ordo Hereticus; the signature beneath it was Pahl’s own. Delegated authority, considerable but not unlimited. Ramm studied it with appropriate gravity.
“You will have every assistance.”
“People sometimes say that.”
“I expect they do.”
She turned to Meret. “And accommodation for your needs, Sister. A private chapel has been consecrated. We have no wish to interfere with your observances.”
“My needs are ammunition, maintenance access and an unbarred exit.”
“All three have been arranged.”
Ramm’s eyes dropped, briefly, to the Sister’s right knee.
That evening Pahl stood alone on the balcony, stretching his fingers. His joints ached after warp travel. He had begun to suspect that they also ached before it, during it and whenever there was no travel to blame.
His reflection in the window looked more distinguished than he felt: long grey hair, a carefully trimmed beard, an investigator’s black coat under ceremonial red. Bellacourt had good glass. Even exhaustion looked expensive in it.
Meret appeared behind him carrying two cups.
“Recaf,” she said. “I watched it made.”
“What happened to the man who made it?”
“He survived.”
He accepted his cup.
Below them, attendants were lighting the garden paths one lamp at a time. A distant woman laughed, and another voice answered her. Somewhere near the lake, an animal gave a deep, contented cough.
“Have you been here before?” Meret asked.
“Worlds like it.”
“I haven’t.”
“Does it offend you?”
She considered the question instead of giving him the answer expected of her.
“The water does.”
He liked her a little more for that.
“Stenn sent three requisitions for neural analgesics,” he said. “Enough for a siege hospital. None reached the palace pharmacy.”
“Where did they go?”
“Household expenditure.”
Meret watched a barge turn beneath them. Its canopy shone with tiny devotional lights.
“Then we should see the household.”
II. At Table
At supper, a woman with pearls sewn into her hair asked Pahl whether he had ever condemned an innocent man.
“Certainly.”
She laughed, assuming wit.
“How terrible you are.”
“Not nearly enough to discourage the questions.”
She moved away after that. The young man reclining at her feet followed, carrying her wine.
The feast occupied a hall whose outer wall was almost entirely open to the lake. Musicians played behind a lattice of beaten silver. Marble saints stood between the pillars, their familiar instruments of martyrdom rendered with such delicate craftsmanship that the wounds seemed decorative. A white tiger lay under a table of sugared fruit. Its handler was feeding it morsels from a fork.
Meret remained in armour. An attendant had been trying for several minutes to arrange cushions behind her without touching her boltgun.
“Stop,” she told him.
He froze.
“The cushions. I can’t feel them through ceramite.”
“My apologies, Sister.”
“You haven’t injured me.”
He had a crooked little finger, improperly set. Pahl noticed Meret noticing it.
The attendant introduced himself as Bero. He was perhaps thirty, with a gold leaf caught in his dark hair and an old burn showing above the drape of his white tunic. His smile arrived promptly whenever anyone looked at him. It disappeared the instant they looked elsewhere.
“May I bring you something less cumbersome to wear?” he asked.
“No.”
“Something to eat?”
Meret looked towards Pahl.
“Unless the enemy has infiltrated the apricots,” he said.
She took one.
Later he would remember that quite clearly: her expression when she bit into it, the surprised stillness. A woman who had eaten field rations through eighteen campaigns discovering what fruit tasted like when no one had dried it, processed it or grown it beneath a manufactorum.
“Good?” he asked.
“Yes.”
She finished it with great care.
The evening’s entertainment began with a recital by a fleet captain. He read a list of engagements in which he had participated, pausing after each name for applause. A woman beside him kissed the decorations on his chest. He was very drunk and, Pahl thought, very close to crying.
Across the hall, another guest was being held while she wept openly into an attendant’s shoulder. Nobody found this remarkable. She was a provisioning prefect from a war zone. Her bracelets were worth the collective wages of a regiment.
“We are accustomed to difficult arrivals,” Ramm said, taking the chair beside Pahl. “People bring their duties with them.”
“I hope they take them away again.”
“More effectively, in most cases.”
She watched the prefect. There was no mockery in her face.
“The armies need supplies. Supplies need signatures. After a certain number of casualties, some people find they can no longer lift the pen.”
“That sounds like a selection problem.”
“You would prefer less sensitive administrators?”
Pahl took a drink.
The wine was excellent. He disliked being offered a proposition he could not dismiss without lying.
On the far side of Meret, Bero dropped a spoon.
He apologised. As he stooped to retrieve it, his hand touched the Sister’s gauntlet. She looked down. He was holding something against her palm.
She closed her fingers.
Ramm was asking Pahl about the voyage.
The object was a laundry tally, thin bone marked with a room number. Someone had scratched a second set of figures into its reverse.
“A date?” Pahl asked.
“A lift designation.”
He looked at her.
“There are maintenance markings on the service doors. I read them.”
They were in his suite. Meret had checked the vents while he dismantled a devotional cherub which had shown an excessive interest in his correspondence. Its recording spool lay on the table beside its artificial eyelids.
“Bero may be bait,” he said.
“Then we find out what for.”
She unclasped her right greave. Beneath the armour, her knee was wrapped in old scar tissue. The joint had healed at a slight angle. He had known her for seven months and had never seen it before.
“You could have that replaced.”
“It’s been replaced twice.”
“Ah.”
She adjusted a worn actuator. He offered her a tool without being asked. For a while they worked in comfortable silence.
“Where?” he said eventually.
“The evacuation at Drail.”
He knew the campaign. A breach in the perimeter. Hospital trains trapped at the terminus. A Sororitas rearguard under orders to hold until the last civilian transport cleared the line.
“I read the citation.”
“Then you read the train left.”
“It did.”
“One did.”
She took the tool back.
He said nothing. He knew when a silence was being entrusted to him.
Meret tightened a screw, tested the joint and began again. “There was a porter under a carriage. His name was Tull. We couldn’t move the carriage without bringing down the roof. He asked me not to leave him.”
“You stayed.”
“Until the charge was set.”
She watched her own hands for a moment.
“I could still hear him when we fired it.”
Pahl had an answer ready, one of the serviceable things people said about duty and necessity. He was glad he did not use it.
“How old were you?” she asked him.
“When?”
“When you condemned the innocent man.”
He smiled without humour. “Which one?”
She did not smile back.
After she left, he opened Stenn’s effects. There was no diary. There were seventeen receipts, a change of clothes, two letters from an estranged daughter and a small pharmacological handbook.
The handbook had been opened so often at the section on pain that its binding had split.
III. Below the Falls
The service lift descended behind a waterfall.
For three floors, the glass shaft gave them a view through moving water. The palace became a blurred arrangement of gold and sunlight. Then the glass ended, the lights changed, and the smell of hot linen replaced the roses.
Bero was waiting beside a trolley of towels.
“You came together.”
“Would you prefer we took turns?” Pahl asked.
Bero ignored him and looked at Meret. “I thought you would understand the number.”
“Where does it lead?”
“My mother.”
They followed him through a laundry where workers moved in the steady mechanical rhythm of people who could not afford errors. Numbered brass bands clicked against the sorting tables. A woman with reddened forearms held a sheet to the light, found a stain and quietly began to cry.
No one stopped working.
“Why not approach Stenn?” Pahl asked.
“I did.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted proof.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“He’s dead.”
Bero led them past the kitchens, past a chapel where the congregation prayed without sitting down, and into a corridor marked with the crossed instruments of a medical ward.
His mother lay in the fourth room.
She was awake. Someone had brushed her hair and put a clean pillow beneath her head. Fine gold wires ran from contacts behind her ears into a socket in the wall. Her hands were strapped beneath the blanket.
“Idda,” Bero said, too brightly. “I’ve brought someone.”
She turned towards the Sister.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she whispered.
Meret looked at the monitor. “What have they given her?”
“They stopped telling me.”
Pahl read the case sheet. Occupational injury. Compensatory placement. Voluntary assumption of transferred burden.
He read the last line again.
On the bedside cabinet lay a little painted eagle. Its wings had been handled until the gilding wore away.
“What’s the burden?” Meret asked.
Idda shut her eyes.
From somewhere inside the wall came the opening bars of the music they had heard at supper.
The woman’s back lifted clear of the bed.
Bero caught her shoulders. Meret reached for the leads, but Pahl stopped her. A warning rune on the monitor had changed from amber to red. Beneath it, in precise surgical script: *Abrupt interruption risks cortical failure.*
“Find the regulator.”
“She is in pain.”
“I can see that.”
For six minutes, while Meret worked the controls and Pahl read the machine’s instructions aloud, Bero held his mother and told her lies about how quickly it would end.
When the monitor returned to amber, Idda was crying silently.
Meret stood with her hand on the regulator. There were dents in its metal casing where she had gripped it.
“Who is on the other end?”
Pahl checked the destination code.
The provisioning prefect. The woman who had wept at supper.
There were forty beds on that floor and five more floors beneath it.
The hospital’s overseer received them with professional irritation. He wore Mechanicus red beneath a sterilised apron; the organic portion of his face consisted of one eye and a patch of cheek. His name, according to his brass credential, was Adept Uhl.
“These procedures have local medical authorisation.”
Pahl set his warrant on the desk.
Uhl’s remaining eyelid retracted.
“Local,” Pahl repeated.
He ordered the machinery held at its current setting, no patients moved, no records destroyed. Meret took the ward keys. Bero stayed beside his mother.
The records occupied six cabinets. Physical records: vellum, paper, copper strips for the expensive guests. Names above, numbers below. A continuous exchange of distress, from people wealthy enough to reject it to people whose contracts allowed very little rejection at all.
The analgesics had been used here. Not on the guests.
Pahl photographed every page. The apparatus was neither standard medicae technology nor any sanctioned treatment he had encountered. Uhl insisted it used a devotional relic to focus a sympathetic neural circuit. He repeated the phrase three times, each repetition quieter.
“Which relic?” Meret asked.
“I maintain the contacts.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“The central reliquary is under the comptroller’s authority.”
At the back of the final cabinet, Pahl found the transport manifests.
Penal labour. Debtors. People reassigned after emergency censuses. Each lot had been purchased through intermediaries and processed as voluntary household service.
He stopped at a familiar seal.
Nine years earlier, on Vey’s Landing, he had investigated stolen grain. There had been a riot, a breached ration depot, an appeal for exemplary punishment. Pahl had secured commutation for four thousand people scheduled for execution.
He had written *reassignment without right of return* because that was the concession available to him. He had been proud of obtaining it.
The receiving stations had never sent confirmation. His office had requested it twice, then closed the matter. In his annual account of the operation, Pahl had included all four thousand among the lives preserved through his intervention.
Here were eighty-three of their names.
He remembered the office in which he had signed. The clerk had sneezed on the blotter. He remembered asking for another.
“Investigator?” Meret said.
He turned the page before she could see the signature.
“We need the central reliquary.”
Someone began running in the corridor.
The first shot struck Uhl in the chest. He fell against the cabinet, trailing cables. Meret shoved Pahl behind the desk and fired twice through the doorway. The sound in the confined office was appalling.
Pahl drew his pistol. A man in a laundry uniform crawled past the opening, pulling one leg. Meret caught him by the collar and dragged him inside. His weapon was a palace-issue stub carbine, its serial plate filed smooth.
“How many?” she asked.
He tried to raise the carbine.
She broke his wrist against the floor.
“How many?”
He bit down. Blood ran between his teeth, blackened almost immediately. By the time Pahl reached him, his pulse was gone.
At the far end of the corridor, an alarm sounded. Doors began closing on the wards.
Meret was already moving.
Pahl gathered the manifests, including his own. He had time to do it. Afterwards he would measure that time against everything else.
By the time he reached the fourth room, Meret had forced the door back into its runners. Bero was alive. Idda was still connected.
The Sister had caught a bullet in the side of her neck, where the seal joined the gorget. Blood ran beneath her armour. She pressed a dressing to it with one hand while keeping the door open with the other.
“Get the wounded,” she said.
From the floor below came a long, rising scream, followed by others.
Someone had increased the load.
IV. A Useful Man
They saved nineteen people before Meret reached the distribution room.
She put a burst through the lock, kicked the door open and found a woman at the controls. The woman was wearing a surgeon’s gown over evening dress. She held a little silver rod between thumb and forefinger, turning it with the absorbed pleasure of a musician tuning an instrument.
Meret shot her before she could turn it again.
Pahl arrived in time to see the gauges fall. He picked up the rod with a fold of the dead woman’s gown. Its tip was the shape of a hooked crescent. Although the room was cold, the metal scorched the cloth.
The same shape was repeated inside the opened console, worked into a ring surrounding a cloudy crystal. He knew it from a book he had once been permitted to read under armed supervision.
“Don’t touch that,” he said.
Meret had seen it too. She backed away, taking him with her.
They severed the cables at the wall with the surgeon’s own tools. Only when the surviving patients had been disconnected did Meret burn the console.
For an instant, the crystal showed a room much larger than the one around them. Someone in it lifted a hand.
Then the promethium caught, and there was only fire.
Ramm was waiting upstairs with armed household guards and three frightened physicians.
She surrendered her keys without protest.
“Dr Hest was appointed before I assumed office,” she said.
“You knew her name quickly,” Pahl replied.
“I know all my senior staff.”
He detained the physicians, took the guards’ weapons and placed Ramm under confinement in her own office. The household soldiers obeyed the warrant. One thanked Meret, very quietly, as he handed over his carbine. After questioning them separately, Pahl rearmed six and set them to guard the prisoners and the wards. He disliked depending on men whose names he had learned that morning. There was nobody else.
For a few hours the palace behaved like an ordinary criminal enterprise after a competent raid. People hid papers. Minor officials denounced their superiors. Locked rooms were discovered to have extra keys.
It reassured Pahl more than it should have.
They established a ward in a dining room overlooking the lake. Meret requisitioned beds, dressings and the palace’s entire stock of uncontaminated analgesics. Servants appeared with them, then stayed to help. A man who had spent the previous night arranging fruit held a basin while a former laundress vomited into it.
Idda survived. She could sit up, though she no longer recognised her son’s face reliably. Bero introduced himself each time she woke.
Pahl dictated a warning for the palace astropath to send to Ghedde: evidence of a proscribed cult, medical atrocities, compromised household authorities. Through the orbital vox relay he ordered a local halt to passenger departures and requested armed assistance from the courier.
The courier that had brought them was already carrying Ghedde’s other agents towards the system’s outer settlements. Its armed tender could return in eight days. The station commander acknowledged the quarantine and began holding outbound vessels.
Pahl had done the essential thing. He told himself this while preparing the annexes.
His clerk aboard the tender had requested scans ahead of collecting the originals. The transport manifests were relevant. They established how long the practice had continued, which departments had enabled it, and who had supplied the victims.
He put his own commutation order beside the transmitter.
The open channel waited.
It was possible to explain. It would cost him his position, probably his life, but it was possible. Ghedde was a severe woman; she was not stupid. She knew what a signature could and could not prove.
Pahl imagined giving evidence before her. He imagined the moment she would turn a page and cease to regard him as useful.
He sent the medical records instead.
When Meret came in, he was sealing the manifests in a document case.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Eight days.”
“Then we have eight days.”
Her neck dressing was already wet. He made her sit while he replaced it.
“You should let a physician do this.”
“You arrested them.”
“There are others.”
“You have clean hands.”
He nearly laughed.
Ramm’s office contained no secret altar. There were duty rosters, repair schedules and a collection of cheap ceramic dogs. Pahl examined each dog. Ramm watched without comment.
“Hest worshipped Slaanesh,” he said.
“So you believe.”
“That is not a useful answer.”
“You seem to have a particular definition of useful.”
He put the hot silver rod on her desk, inside a leaded specimen box. Her trembling hand stopped moving.
“Where is the central reliquary?”
“Beneath the reception hall.”
“You will open it.”
“Of course.”
“And Stenn?”
She looked at the box.
“He found the distribution rooms. Before you did.”
“He was murdered.”
“He wanted to know whether the treatment could be made safe. I arranged a demonstration. He tried to pull the conductors from the panel. Hest increased the current.”
“On your instructions?”
Ramm was silent.
Pahl pressed the box shut.
“He sent for me eleven days ago. You had time to dispose of the evidence.”
“I kept him alive because I needed to know who else he’d told. He gave us names. We had to check them. By the time he died, you were already in the system.”
For the first time, she sounded angry.
“There are two hundred and forty people attached to that system. Thirty-one distinguished guests were undergoing treatment when you entered the wards. Hest panicked. If she’d followed my instructions—”
“Fewer witnesses would be alive?”
Ramm’s mouth closed.
He had his first unqualified pleasure since arriving on Bellacourt.
Then she said, “How many people did you save on Vey’s Landing?”
He left his hand on the lid of the box.
Ramm did not smile. “Your name is in the manifests, Investigator. I know whose papers arrive in my office.”
“You bought them.”
“Yes.”
“You knew what would happen.”
“Yes.”
Her willingness to say it deprived him of the next thing he had meant to say.
“And now,” she continued, “you have to decide how much of that your Sister ought to hear.”
Pahl called the guards and ordered Ramm taken below.
He could have told Meret that evening. There was time, and she would have listened.
Instead he asked her about the patients.
V. The Quiet Room
The reliquary was behind a chapel altar.
They opened it under floodlamps, with Ramm kneeling in restraints and Meret covering her. Pahl had brought tools, recording equipment, sanctified oil and as much of his limited understanding as he could assemble.
Inside stood a chair.
It was upholstered in red velvet, worn dark at the arms. Gold cables ran from its back into the walls. Above the headrest hung a disc of polished metal, pierced by six narrow slits. The space behind the disc appeared deeper than the chapel itself.
Meret began the Litany of Detestation.
On the third line, something behind the disc said the fourth.
Her bolt struck the metal squarely. The impact threw fragments across the chamber and knocked Pahl from his feet. The disc remained intact. Meret brushed a fleck of hot gilding from her neck dressing without lowering the weapon.
“Don’t fire again,” he said, tasting blood.
She held her aim.
“I said don’t.”
The chapel was silent.
Pahl took a slow breath and examined the feeds. The crystal in the distribution room had been one of several intermediary devices. This was the heart of it. Cutting power extinguished the lamps but left a weak light in the slits. He sealed the chamber behind a portable warding screen from his field kit and sent a second warning to the tender. It would bring demolition charges and the courier’s sanctioned psyker, who knew rather more about containment than he did. The reply forbade further contact. Pahl copied the prohibition onto the chapel door and posted guards.
He entered *probable daemonic artefact* in the report. No euphemism this time.
“Who made it?” he asked Ramm.
“I don’t know.”
“What is behind the disc?”
“It calls itself the Guest.”
“And you believe that?”
“I don’t believe anything it says.”
Meret lowered her boltgun by a fraction. “You served it.”
Ramm looked up at her. “I found it easier to serve things when I was younger.”
They took her away.
Four days passed.
The patients grew worse.
Some had ordinary wounds which could be treated. Others had spent years receiving sensations their bodies had not produced. Cut free of the apparatus, they suffered attacks no sedative could reliably suppress. The physician Pahl finally cleared for duty explained it twice before admitting she did not understand it.
The former guests suffered too. A general began screaming during breakfast and had to be restrained with curtain ties. The provisioning prefect clawed her face when the memory of a starving garrison returned with every detail intact.
There were people who demanded the treatment be restarted. Meret sent them away. When one threatened a servant, she put him through a door.
She slept in the ward for ninety minutes at a time.
On the fifth night of quarantine, Pahl found her with Idda’s hand between both of hers. The older woman had mistaken Meret for a daughter who had died long before Bero was born.
“Stay,” Idda said.
“I’m here.”
“You keep saying that, and then you go.”
Meret watched the sweat gather at Idda’s hairline.
“Not yet.”
Meret flinched as if something sharp had entered her damaged knee. Her fingers tightened around Idda’s hand.
Idda stopped trembling.
The bedside monitor settled.
“What did you do?” Pahl asked.
Meret did not answer. Her jaw was clenched. He could hear her breathing through her teeth.
Idda fell asleep.
They tested it in the morning with the physician present and Bero watching every movement.
Meret held a sick man’s hand. His spasms eased; her pulse rose. When she withdrew, his symptoms returned gradually over several minutes. The physician found no new neural contacts on the Sister, no device under her skin.
There was a small burn at the base of her throat, beneath the dressing. It resembled the marks on Stenn’s fingers.
Pahl made her remove the dressing completely.
“Since the chapel?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should have reported it.”
“I thought it was from the wound.”
He examined the burn through a lens. It was neither a recognised holy sign nor a symbol he could identify.
“Stop doing it,” he said.
She looked past him towards the beds.
“You don’t know what it is.”
“Exactly.”
“You don’t know what it isn’t, either.”
“Meret.”
She pulled her collar closed. “I know.”
For the rest of the morning she obeyed him.
At noon, a kitchen worker began convulsing so violently that his recently mended arm broke against the bedrail. Meret caught him. She could have held him through the fit, as the physician instructed. Instead she took his hand.
By evening there were people asking for her by name.
Later that sixth day, as she walked between the beds, a woman kissed the hem of her tabard.
Meret told her not to do it.
When Pahl checked on her after midnight, she was still awake. She had smoothed that patch of cloth flat across her lap.
Pahl found Bero on the balcony, repairing a tear in one of the Sister’s spare surplices. He had a needle tucked behind his ear and a bowl of apricots beside him.
“Those hers?”
“She forgets to eat.”
“You could remind her.”
“She says there isn’t time.”
Pahl sat down. Below them, the pleasure barges were tied up along the quays. For once, nobody was singing.
“Was Stenn kind to you?”
Bero continued sewing. “He wasn’t cruel.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“No.”
The needle went in and out.
“Did you know he’d been in the chair?”
Bero nodded. “He said he was testing it. He slept afterwards. It was the first time I’d seen him sleep.”
“And then?”
“He tried to shut it down.”
“Ramm told me that.”
“Did she tell you he’d gone back three times first?”
Pahl looked at the lake.
“My mother wants to leave,” Bero said. “There’s a workers’ shuttle held at the lower port. She has a sister on the station.”
“Nothing leaves until the tender arrives.”
“I know. I wanted to ask whether we could go with it.”
“If she’s fit to travel.”
“She isn’t fit to stay.”
He examined Bero’s neat stitching. “You could find work on the station.”
“Her sister repairs pressure suits. She said she could teach me.”
“Better than this?”
Bero drew the thread through and held it against the seam. “When someone tears a suit, they know who did it.”
Pahl promised to arrange their passage.
Later, when he went to find Meret, she was sitting upright in the ward, white-faced, while a man rubbed warmth into her fingers. She had taken pain from eleven patients. It had not left her; he could see what carrying it was costing.
He knelt beside her.
“This ends now.”
“Help me up.”
“You need rest.”
“There are two more.”
“You can’t save everybody.”
She looked at him with sudden, unguarded hatred.
It lasted only a moment.
He helped her stand.
VI. What She Could Bear
On the seventh day of quarantine, the chapel guards called Pahl to deal with Meret.
She had come without her armour. She could no longer bear its weight over the accumulated pain. A white robe hung from her shoulders; her feet were bare on the cold stone. In one hand she carried her bolt pistol.
“Move,” she said.
He stood in front of the warding screen. Behind her, two guards waited with their weapons lowered, visibly relieved to have someone else decide what to do.
“It gave you this.”
“Then it can take it back.”
“That is what it wants you to think.”
“Have you ever been burned, Oswin?”
He had. She knew it.
“Try remembering all of them at once.”
She was shaking hard enough that the pistol tapped against her leg. He wanted to take it from her. He was afraid she would let him.
“The tender arrives tomorrow.”
“There are people who won’t reach tomorrow.”
“And there will be more if you open that door.”
She closed her eyes. He could see her counting breaths, a technique he had watched her teach a frightened witness months earlier.
“You’re right,” she said at last.
Her knees gave way.
He caught her, awkwardly, and almost fell. For a few seconds she leaned her full weight against him. He had never realised how small she was without the armour.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He held her until she could walk.
That was the moment he would later return to most often. She had turned away. There had been a door, and she had left it closed.
Ramm asked to see him that afternoon.
In confinement she had begun to age. Her cheeks sagged. The tremor had spread into both hands. Pahl wondered how long the palace physicians had been maintaining her, and by what methods.
“You’ve been busy,” she said.
“Tell me how to free her.”
“You can’t.”
He put his pistol on the desk.
Ramm looked at it. “You could certainly free me.”
“The Sister.”
“I understood.”
He drew the chair close.
“I know you aren’t resigned to dying. People who are don’t keep asking the guards what time it is.”
Ramm’s mouth worked.
“There are surviving branches of the circuit,” she said. “Old guest suites. Private treatment rooms. Your people haven’t found them all.”
“Where?”
She gave him six locations. He wrote them down.
“The burden can be spread among willing participants. Small shares. No one needs to bear what she has taken.”
“And what does the Guest receive?”
“Attention.”
“Try again.”
Ramm rubbed her hands together.
“People come here wanting something to stop. They discover how good it feels when it does. After a while they don’t want to return to ordinary life. Ordinary life begins to hurt. The device helps that process along.”
Pahl thought of Stenn returning to the chair.
“You made addicts.”
“Yes.”
“And Meret?”
Ramm watched him carefully. “Ask her how she feels when they thank her.”
He struck the desk hard enough to jar the pistol.
“Don’t.”
She drew back. He was pleased to see the fear, and knew that she saw his pleasure.
“I can’t tell you what it will do,” she said. “I used machinery. It has found something it likes better.”
“You chose her.”
“I chose to offer you a pleasant room and her a chapel. You found my wards. She burned my surgeon. Don’t make me cleverer than I was.”
He took the locations to Meret. The instruction against contact remained pinned to the chapel door. He passed it on the way.
The first volunteer was a former artillery officer named Hauk, a guest who had never used the treatment. He had helped carry patients upstairs. When Meret explained that he would experience a small portion of their distress, he agreed without asking what he would receive in return.
Pahl watched the connection made through a small subsidiary panel. The physician monitored all three of them: Hauk, Meret and the patient.
For twelve minutes it worked.
Hauk sat sweating, but smiling. Meret’s hands steadied. The patient’s breathing became regular.
When the session ended, Hauk said he would do it again.
Pahl documented everything. He called it an emergency measure. Meret called it sharing.
They dismantled the panel afterwards, bagged its components and placed them under seal. They had used a thing they knew was corrupt, and neither pretended otherwise. Tomorrow there would be specialists. Tonight, for twelve minutes, three people had survived something they might not have survived alone.
At the next bed, another patient asked when his turn would come.
Meret looked at the sealed bag.
By midnight there were twenty volunteers.
They sat in a circle in a treatment room beneath the reception hall, each with a thin gold lead clipped behind one ear. Meret moved among them, checking faces, asking permission, stopping when someone said they could not continue.
The second time Hauk volunteered, he wanted to bear more.
“You don’t need to prove anything,” she told him.
“I know.”
But he watched her until she agreed.
Pahl stood at the door with the list of names. His handwriting became cramped near the bottom. He had stopped entering the word *temporary*.
Bero brought water. He looked at the gold leads, then at the discarded seals on the floor.
“When does this finish?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” Pahl said.
Across the room, Meret was laughing softly at something Hauk had said. It was the first time Pahl had heard her laugh since they landed.
Bero put down the water and went to his mother.
Afterwards they ate upstairs, in the part of the reception hall that had escaped conversion into a ward. The volunteers were hungry. Meret insisted they be fed from the guests’ kitchens, and soon there were silver dishes passing between people who had never been allowed to touch them.
A woman brought the Sister a robe of soft white silk. Her own was stained through at the collar. Meret accepted it, then accepted help changing behind a screen. When she returned, an attendant settled her among the cushions and loosened the fastening at her throat.
She started to object to the attendant’s touch, then settled back. The dressings had pulled at her skin for days. He worked them free, bathed the wound and laid a warm cloth along the muscles of her neck. She closed her eyes.
Someone began playing the small stringed instrument left behind by the musicians. A few of the patients knew the tune. They sang badly and with pleasure.
“They needed this,” Meret said.
Pahl nodded. A woman on the opposite couch was smiling without pain. It was difficult to resent the means while looking directly at her.
He reached for his cup. A hand supplied it before his fingers touched the table.
The attendant behind Meret asked whether he should stop.
“A little longer,” she said, without opening her eyes.
VII. The People Who Came to Help
The tender landed at dawn.
Lieutenant Sabet came down the ramp with twelve armsmen, a demolition case and a sanctioned psyker whose weatherproof coat had been darned at both elbows. The psyker’s name was Noll. He was old enough that the sanctioning brand on his temple had stretched into the folds of his skin.
Meret watched him from the edge of the landing ground.
“Put her behind a screen,” he told Pahl quietly.
“You haven’t examined her.”
“I’m examining her now.”
She heard him. Her expression did not change.
They held the examination in Pahl’s suite. Meret surrendered her pistol, then sat between two warding standards while Noll worked. He asked her questions about her childhood, the taste of salt, the prayers she said before sleeping. Twice he made her repeat an answer. Once he apologised.
Pahl stood at the window, hating the sound of the old man’s breathing.
Finally Noll touched the edge of Meret’s throat wound with a silver probe.
Every glass in the room cracked.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, and drew the probe away.
Meret’s face was wet. She had not made a sound.
“Can you remove it?” Pahl asked.
“I can attempt to separate her from the focus. Whether she survives is another matter.”
“Is she possessed?”
Noll hesitated. “There is still a boundary. She’s maintaining it. I’ve never examined a Sister in this condition, Investigator. Don’t ask me to promise what her faith will withstand.”
“And the patients?” she asked.
“They will need ordinary care.”
“Ordinary care isn’t working.”
Noll sat opposite her. He made no effort to look imposing.
“I know.”
“How many will die?”
“I don’t know.”
“Twenty? Forty?”
“Possibly.”
She looked towards the window. Outside, the transport crew were unloading blankets and field cots. Genuine help, arriving with all the ugly limitations of genuine help.
“You can still refuse it,” Noll said.
Meret turned back.
“Whatever it has promised. Whatever it has already done. You can refuse the next thing.”
Pahl thought she would strike him. Instead she asked, very carefully, “Will you help them first?”
“We will move everyone we safely can. Then we destroy the focus. You will be under guard until I can treat you.”
She nodded.
They took her to the chapel and replaced Pahl’s portable screen with Noll’s heavier apparatus. Within the field, Meret’s pain diminished enough for her to stand unaided. The old psyker seated himself outside the chamber while Sabet’s men carried in the charges. At her request, he permitted her to return to the ward under escort and identify the patients who could be moved. She was not to touch any of them.
For most of the morning, the evacuation proceeded.
Bero had packed his mother’s things in a laundry bag. There were very few of them: a comb, a spare shift, the little painted eagle from her bedside.
“I found something for you,” he told Pahl.
It was Stenn’s missing notebook.
“Where?”
“He gave it to me before they moved him upstairs. I didn’t trust you.”
Pahl opened it. Medical observations, account numbers, the dates of Stenn’s treatments. On the final page, a statement in a hand made almost illegible by pain.
*It does not take anything away. I can still remember every question I asked and what they did when I asked it. I only want to forgive myself more than I want to stop.*
Below that were the beginnings of a message to his daughter.
Pahl closed the book.
“Why now?”
“Because you’re getting us out.”
Across the ward, Meret stood between two armsmen, watching a patient being lifted onto a stretcher. A young woman thanked her. Meret opened her mouth, but the woman was already thanking the physician who had secured her splint.
Pahl saw her expression change. Only a flicker. She was tired; she was in pain; there were many innocent explanations.
Bero saw it too.
The first death occurred on the stairs.
The patient was Hauk, the artillery officer. He had insisted he was strong enough to walk. Halfway to the landing, he stopped, tried to speak and fell against the rail.
Meret reached him before the physician.
“Don’t,” one of the armsmen said.
She ignored him and put her hands against Hauk’s face.
Nothing happened.
His eyes moved towards her. He tried to smile.
Noll’s voice came over the vox. “Keep her clear. We’ve broken the first feed. This may be a withdrawal response.”
“Reconnect it,” she said.
“We can’t leave—”
“Reconnect it.”
The physician began compressions. Meret held Hauk’s hand, saying his name. Around them, the evacuation stopped.
Pahl watched the exact moment she understood that she could do nothing.
He had seen her under fire, wounded, exhausted, trapped. He had never seen that expression before.
The physician stopped working.
“Again,” Meret said.
“Sister.”
“Again.”
The physician looked at Pahl.
He shook his head.
Meret let go of the dead man’s hand. She rose slowly.
“Take me back,” she said. “I can’t bear it.”
The armsmen glanced at one another. Their orders were to return her to the warding field if her condition deteriorated. One called Sabet for confirmation.
“Now,” Meret said.
VIII. The Last Prayer
Noll had drawn a circle on the chapel floor with a stick of pale chalk. Inside it, the gilt chair looked shabby. Velvet had peeled from one arm. The disc above it hung at a slight angle.
Without the gold lamps and the music, the object seemed almost contemptible.
Meret stopped at the edge of the circle.
“Can it restore him?”
Noll did not ask whom she meant.
“No.”
Behind the pierced disc, something breathed.
“It will claim otherwise,” he added.
Pahl and Sabet arrived together. Ramm was already in the chapel, held by an armsman. The lieutenant had brought her to identify the remaining feeds. She looked at Meret, then at the open reliquary, and began pulling against the grip on her arm.
“Get her out,” she said.
“Be quiet.”
“You don’t know what she’s connected to.”
“Neither did you,” Pahl said.
“No.” Ramm’s voice broke. “I didn’t.”
Meret stepped closer to the chalk.
Noll lifted his hand. “Please stay where you are.”
She halted. For a little while, there was nothing but the steady clicking of the demolition timer being set.
“There were two trains,” she said.
Pahl knew at once where she had gone.
“Meret.”
“One left. We had enough charges to clear the track for the second. The commander said the line beyond the terminus wouldn’t hold its weight. She was right. I knew she was right.”
Her hands opened and closed.
“I still dream about moving the carriage.”
The thing behind the disc made a sound like someone settling comfortably into a chair.
Noll spoke over it. “It knows what you remember. That doesn’t make it the people you’ve lost.”
“I know.”
“It knows how to make this feel necessary.”
“I know.”
That was worse.
The Sister knelt.
Pahl heard the beginning of a prayer he knew well. She had said it before entering burning buildings and before shooting a prisoner whose mutation had finally become visible. It asked for strength, clarity and an end worthy of the Emperor’s service.
Her voice was steady until the last line.
“Help me leave them,” she whispered.
Noll did not interrupt. Sabet lowered her weapon a little.
Meret remained kneeling. Beyond the chapel walls, someone in the ward was calling for her. It might have been an ordinary cry. Pahl would never know whether the thing had made it louder.
The Sister stood.
“Disconnect the charges.”
Sabet raised her weapon again. “I can’t do that.”
“Oswin.”
He looked from her to the lieutenant.
He could order a pause. He still held the senior warrant. They would listen for a few minutes while he searched for another arrangement, another exception, something that preserved what remained of the woman who had brought him recaf and trusted his hands.
Stenn’s notebook was in his pocket.
“No,” he said.
Meret looked at him for a long moment.
Then she stepped across the chalk.
Noll cried out. The sound had an ugly physical effort in it, as if he were holding something enormously heavy. Blood appeared beneath his nostrils. The chapel lamps dimmed.
For two steps, Meret struggled. Every movement cost her. Pahl saw the old injury in her knee give way and caught himself reaching to help.
She fell against the chair.
“You can still come back,” Noll said.
The thing behind the disc spoke in Meret’s own voice.
“And leave them here?”
She put her hand on the velvet.
Pahl never forgot what happened to her face. The pain went out of it. So did the exhaustion. She drew a breath that seemed to fill her for the first time in years.
Noll’s chair scraped across the floor.
Sabet fired.
The first las-bolt struck Meret’s shoulder. The second caught the gilt frame. Meret flinched, and in the ward above them, a patient screamed.
“Stop!” Pahl shouted.
Sabet did not stop. She had understood the same thing he had and reached a different conclusion.
Meret raised her injured hand.
Noll went rigid. The chalk circle blackened around him. He held for three breaths, four, while the armsmen tried to reach their lieutenant and Ramm crawled towards the doorway.
The psyker looked directly at Meret.
“You’re doing it,” he said.
For an instant she seemed to wake.
She could have lowered her hand.
Instead she closed it.
The old man fell sideways. The room filled with the smell of scorched cloth.
Something struck the armsmen from behind. Pahl saw gold cables tearing free of the walls, moving with a strength and purpose no machine should have possessed. One wrapped around Sabet’s rifle. Another caught the demolition case and dragged it into the dark beneath the chair.
Sabet drew a knife and cut herself loose. She reached the doorway, pushed Pahl through it, and shouted into her vox for a full withdrawal.
Then the door closed between them.
Pahl hit it with his shoulder. It did not move.
On the other side, Sabet kept firing for a surprisingly long time.
When the chapel opened again, Meret was sitting in the red chair.
She wore no armour. The wound in her shoulder had closed. Her damaged knee rested straight beneath the hem of her robe. Fine gold threads lay across her hands, following the paths of the veins.
Ramm knelt at her feet.
“I can run the households,” the comptroller was saying. “You will need someone who understands them.”
Meret looked past her at Pahl.
“What did she do to Stenn?”
He found he could still answer questions. “She arranged it.”
Ramm shook her head. “I told you—”
“And the wards?”
“She ran them.”
“I can be useful.” Ramm had turned towards him now. “Tell her.”
Meret touched the side of the comptroller’s face.
For a moment Ramm appeared to receive the comfort she expected. Her breathing steadied. Then her eyes widened. She tried to pull away, but Meret held her gently in place.
“You should know them,” the Sister said.
Pahl thought she meant the patients.
He understood when Ramm began to scream.
It lasted until Meret could no longer keep her alive.
When it was over, the woman in the chair looked sickened. Pahl took one step towards her.
“Meret.”
She touched her throat. The gold beneath the skin brightened.
Her expression eased.
Outside, the bells began ringing for the evening meal.
IX. The Witness
Pahl found Bero at the service lift.
He had Idda in a wheeled laundry chair. Her feet were wrapped in towels. Beside them stood two surviving armsmen, one supporting the other. The unwounded man turned his rifle towards Pahl, then lowered it when he recognised the seal.
“The landing ground’s blocked,” he said. “The lieutenant ordered us to withdraw.”
“I heard.”
“The household guard are shooting at the ramp.”
They had obeyed Pahl when he showed his warrant. Now someone else was issuing orders.
Bero held out a small data wafer.
“The records,” he said. “Your clerk opened the case. I helped him feed the pages into the reader. He went to the landing ground when they called the retreat.”
“Which records?”
“All of them.”
Pahl looked at the wafer.
Bero noticed.
“Your name’s there,” he said.
The wounded armsman made a low sound. His companion tightened the bandage around his ribs.
“Yes,” Pahl said.
“Did you know?”
“When I signed? No.”
“When you found the papers?”
The lift arrived with a chime. Behind its glass, water moved downwards in bright, unbroken sheets.
“I was trying to get you out.”
Bero’s face changed. There was no shock in it, only an exhaustion so complete that Pahl briefly mistook it for forgiveness.
“Then come.”
He moved his mother’s chair into the lift. The armsmen followed.
Pahl stayed in the corridor.
“Come,” Bero said again. “Tell them yourself.”
The offer was real. There were armed men, a service route to the lower port and, if they could reach it, the workers’ shuttle. Bero had every reason to leave him behind and had still made room.
Pahl could picture the hearing. He could picture what would be said about Meret: contamination, apostasy, exceptional but decisive failure. They would want every detail. He would have to give them the apricot, the hands, the way she had asked for help leaving the people she could not save.
He would have to admit that he had brought her the locations of the surviving circuits.
“Give me the wafer,” he said.
Bero stepped back.
The unwounded armsman lifted his rifle.
Pahl’s pistol was already in his hand. He shot the man through the throat, then fired at the second before he could free his weapon from its sling. In the confined lift, the reports were deafening.
Idda began calling for her son.
Bero stood between her chair and Pahl.
“You could still let us go,” he said.
Pahl shot him.
He had expected him to fall at once. Bero remained standing for a moment, one hand on the back of the chair, as if trying to remember what he had been doing.
Then he sat down hard on the lift floor.
The wafer fell beside him.
Pahl picked it up.
Idda reached towards the sound of his movements. “Bero?”
He could not make himself answer.
He used his warrant to recall the tender.
The pilot demanded Sabet. Pahl reported her dead and gave the correct emergency cipher. He reported Noll dead as well. He ordered the vessel to hold above the palace, beyond range of the household guns, until he brought out the surviving patients.
The pilot complied. He had been ordered to rescue an Inquisitorial investigator and the evidence of a cult. Pahl gave him exact numbers, landing instructions and the voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed.
He omitted the service lift.
Then he opened the palace command channel and told the household guards which colonnades the pilot would be unable to see.
By the time the tender returned to the landing ground, Meret’s people had moved concealed weapons into the colonnades.
Pahl watched from an upper window. He did not look away when they opened fire.
The pilot tried to lift. One engine failed, the vessel yawed across the gardens, and its stern struck a fountain. The ramp was still down.
For several minutes, people in white carried the injured into the palace. Meret went to meet them.
The courtyard grew quiet.
Pahl sat at his desk. His hands were shaking so badly that he could not insert the data wafer into the reader.
He finally managed it on the fourth attempt.
Meret found him after midnight.
There was blood on the cuff of her robe. She had brought a basin and a cloth.
“The old woman is alive,” she said.
“Idda.”
“Yes.”
He watched her set the basin on the table.
“She keeps asking for Bero.”
“I know.”
Meret knelt beside his chair. He flinched when she took his hand.
“I saw the manifests,” she said.
“Ramm?”
“The copies in your case.”
He stared at the opposite wall.
“They were going to be shot. I got them reprieved.”
“I believe you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
She turned his hand over and began cleaning blood from the lines of his palm. He could not remember whose it was.
“I can help with this,” she said.
He almost let her.
He had never wanted anything with such immediate, humiliating force. Stenn had been right. Nothing would need to be forgotten. He could remember Bero exactly, and be able to bear remembering him.
“No,” he said.
Her hand stopped.
“I need it.”
“The pain?”
He nodded.
She studied him, and for a moment he saw the Sister who had waited patiently for an honest answer beside a damaged suit of armour.
“Keep it, then.”
She resumed washing his hand.
Pahl understood, with a coldness that reached his teeth, that she had found something else to give him.
He could go on suffering. He could count that as payment. She would allow it for as long as it kept him at the desk.
He pulled his hand free.
The clean cloth lay between them.
After a while he asked, “What do you need?”
“You know how to make them listen.”
Outside, the lake reflected the windows of the palace. There was light in every one.
X. Household Expenditure
Forty-three days after the deaths of Lieutenant Sabet and her party, Pahl completed his report.
He attributed the massacre to the terminal manifestation of the entity contained in the reliquary. He listed the artefact as destroyed, its human custodians executed, its surviving victims under medical supervision. Mistress Ramm’s body and the surgeon’s records supplied useful corroboration.
Noll was recorded as having died in the successful containment of the outbreak. Pahl gave him a generous account of his courage. Every word of that part was true until the last sentence.
The loss of the tender was blamed on cultists in the household guard. Six guards were selected, shot and entered into the report. Four had taken part. Two had been guarding the wrong door when names were required.
Meret was listed as unfit for transport following grievous injury sustained in the Emperor’s service. Pahl attached old medical scans to new dates. Her Order would ask questions. Ghedde would ask more. He had not devised a permanent answer to either.
For now, astropathic disruption following the manifestation explained the delays. Destroyed records explained the gaps. The palace’s surviving dignitaries supplied statements praising the investigator who had saved them.
Most believed what they signed.
Pahl did not need to persuade the entire Imperium. He needed a port official to honour a medical requisition, a transport clerk to accept a seal, and the next inquiry to arrive later than the next departing ship.
He had spent his working life learning how to obtain those small accommodations.
The station commander had refused to lift the general quarantine. Pahl had therefore requested a single humanitarian exemption, attaching the endorsements of three senior officers recuperating in the palace. The approval allowed one transport to carry convalescents and medical equipment to the next system. Everything else would wait for Ghedde’s investigators.
The great reception hall had been restored.
The bullet marks were gone. New carpets covered the damage to the floor. The marble saints had been altered so subtly that an arriving guest might first have noticed only the workmanship: a hand held at an unfamiliar angle, a smile that had not belonged on that face, a thin curve of polished stone emerging from beneath a robe.
In private gatherings, the Imperial banners were rolled up. Purple hangings took their place. The gold symbols on them hurt Pahl’s eyes if he looked too long.
He looked away often.
Meret reclined where the provisioning prefect had once sat. Her white hair had grown past her shoulders. The gold threads beneath her skin had become a fine network visible at the throat and wrists, gathering into a darker mark on her upper arm. A circlet framed her head, its narrow spokes recalling the disc behind the old chair.
The chair itself had been broken up. Pahl had watched the pieces burn. Nothing in the palace had changed when they did.
The people around her wore white, gold and the washed red of her old Order’s colours. Some were former patients. Some were guests. Several had been household guards. They knelt beside the couch, laid their heads against the cushions and waited for her attention.
The tiger slept at her feet. Its handler had vanished. Nobody remembered having dismissed him.
She still spoke gently.
She still remembered names.
Pahl had once thought those things meant something definite about a person. Now he watched her call a woman forward, touch her cheek and relieve a pain she had endured for twenty years. The woman’s gratitude was real. So was the look on Meret’s face as she received it.
It faded too quickly.
“Stay,” she said when the woman began to rise.
The woman knelt again.
There were rules now.
Nobody was to be connected unwillingly. Nobody was to receive a burden without having agreed to bear it. Nobody was to be punished for declining.
Meret insisted on the wording. Pahl had written it down.
The guests learned that declining meant waiting longer to see her. The attendants learned that leaving her service meant losing access to treatment. Those who volunteered eagerly were given lighter duties, better rooms, more time in her presence.
After a fortnight, people began competing for the heavier burdens.
After a month, there were private contests to determine who could bear the most without crying out.
Meret disapproved of the contests. She summoned their organisers, heard their apologies and allowed them to remain. That night she asked why nobody had told her what they were willing to endure.
Pahl was there when she began asking them to show her.
He continued entering the figures in the household accounts.
Idda asked to leave on the morning the first medical transport was cleared for departure.
She had been given a room with a view of the mountains. She could walk a little now. Her hands no longer shook. Every morning someone brought her clean linen, fresh fruit and flowers she did not know the names of.
She asked for her son less often. Pahl did not know whether Meret had done something to achieve that or whether the woman had simply learned that nobody answered.
He found her standing in the doorway with her laundry bag.
“My sister lives on the station,” she said.
“I remember.”
“Can I go?”
He looked at the bag. The painted eagle protruded from its neck.
“You would need to speak to her.”
Idda’s grip tightened.
“I thought you could ask.”
Pahl could. She had chosen the right person. That made it worse.
He took her to the reception hall.
Meret listened without interrupting.
Around her, the court waited. The fountains sounded loud in the silence. An attendant held a goblet near her hand, making no attempt to draw attention to the effort of holding it there.
“Are you unhappy?” Meret asked.
“I want to see my sister.”
“We can bring her here.”
Idda looked at Pahl. He said nothing.
“I want to go to her.”
Meret sat forward.
For a moment the fabric at her knee pulled tight, and Pahl remembered the scar beneath it, the little mechanical correction of her armour. There was no scar now.
“The treatments aren’t finished.”
“You said I was better.”
“You are.”
“Then I should be able to go.”
Someone near the couch drew a sharp breath. Meret glanced at them, and they lowered their eyes.
“You don’t understand what it costs,” she said.
Idda held the bag against her chest.
“I think I do.”
Pahl wanted to stop her. He wanted to tell her that this was courage wasted, that there were gentler ways to ask, that she should wait until Meret was rested, satisfied, less closely watched.
He recognised every excuse before he made it.
Meret extended her hand.
“Come here.”
Idda did not move.
The Sister’s expression tightened, hardly at all.
“I won’t hurt you.”
The old woman walked to the couch. It took her some time. Nobody offered an arm.
Meret laid her palm against Idda’s forehead.
Idda sighed.
Her shoulders loosened. The bag slipped from her hands. She sank to her knees beside the couch, looking up with an expression Pahl had seen on the faces of people given water after days without it.
“There,” Meret said.
Idda tried to speak.
“You were frightened. That’s all.”
The old woman’s lips moved again. Pahl could not hear the words.
Meret withdrew her hand.
At once Idda caught it and pressed it back against her forehead.
The Sister smiled.
Pahl bent to retrieve the bag. Inside were the comb, the spare shift and the little painted eagle. There was also a single gold leaf, bent almost in half. He recognised it from Bero’s hair at supper.
He closed the bag.
From the terrace came the sound of engines. The medical transport was lifting through the afternoon light, carrying six treatment cabinets, twelve attendants and an authenticated recommendation to a military convalescent station. He had signed the recommendation an hour earlier.
Meret watched it rise.
“They’ll send more people,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She settled back among the cushions. An attendant offered the goblet again, and this time she accepted it. At her feet, Idda held on to her hand.
The bag was still in Pahl’s arms when a servant approached him.
“Shall I return the patient’s belongings to her room, sir?”
He looked down at the worn cloth. A brown stitch marked the place where Bero had repaired the handle.
“She won’t need them,” he said.
He handed it over and went back to his desk.
