'Someone had. Someone with the keys to the shutter. The killer.'
The soil stack where Hewall had been found was behind a row of commercial properties built into an ancient skin of scaffolding that cased the outside of a toolfitters' workshop like a cobweb. There was what seemed to be a bar two stages up, where a neon signed flicked between an Imperial aquila and a fleur-de-lys. Fischig and Wrex continued up to the next scaffolding level to peer in through the stained windows of the habs there. Bequin and I went into the bar.
The light was grey inside. At a high bar, four or five drinkers sat on ratchet-stools and ignored us. The scent of obscura smoke was in the air.
There was a woman behind the counter who took exception to us from the moment we came in. She was in her forties, with a powerful, almost masculine build. Her vest was cut off at the armpits and her arms were as muscular as Fischig's. There was the small tattoo of a skull and crossbones on her bicep. The skin of her face was weathered and coarse.
'Help you?' she asked, wiping the counter with a glass-doth. As she did so I saw that her right arm, from the elbow down, was a prosthetic.
'Information,' I said.
She flicked her cloth at the row of bottles on the shelves behind her.
'Not a brand I know.'
"Vou know a man called Hewall?'
'No/
'The guy they found in the waste pipes behind here/
'Oh. Didn't know he had a name/
Now I was closer I could see the tattoo on her arm wasn't a skull and crossbones. It was a wheatear.
'We all have names. What's yours?'
'Omin Lund/
You live around here?'
'Live is too strong a word/ She turned away to serve someone else.
'Scary bitch/ said Bequin as we went outside. 'Everyone acts like they've got something to hide/
'Everyone does, even if it's simply how much they hate this town/
The heart had gone out of Urbitane, out of Sameter itself, about seventy years before. The mill-hives of Thracian Primaris eclipsed Sameter's production, and export profits fell away. In an effort to compete, the authorities freed the refineries to escalate production by stripping away the legal restrictions on atmospheric pollution levels. For hundreds of years, Urbitane had had problems controlling its smog and air-pollutants. For the last few decades, it hadn't bothered any more.
My vox-earplug chimed. It was Aemos.
'What have you found?'
'It's most perturbatory. Sameter has been clear of taint for a goodly while. The last Inquisitorial investigation was thirty-one years ago standard, and that wasn't here in Urbitane but in Aquitane, the capital. A rogue psyker. The planet has its fair share of criminal activity, usually narcotics trafficking and the consequential mob-fighting. But nothing really markedly heretical/
'Nothing with similarities to the ritual methods?'
'No, and I've gone back two centuries/
What about the dates?'
'Sagittar thirteenth is just shy of the solstice, but I can't make any meaning out of that. The Purge of the Sarpetal Hives is usually commemorated by upswings of cult activity in the subsector, but that's six weeks away. The only other thing I can find is that this Sagittar fifth was the twenty-first anniversary of the Battle of Klodeshi Heights/
'I don't know it/
The sixth of seven full-scale engagements during the sixteen month Imperial campaign on Surealis Six/
'Surealis… that's in the next damn subsector! Aemos, every day of the year is the anniversary of an Imperial action somewhere. What connection are you making?'
The Ninth Sameter Infantry saw service in the war on Surealis/
Fischig and Wrex had rejoined us from their prowl around the upper stages of the scaffolding. Wrex was talking on her own vox-set.
She signed off and looked at me, rain drizzling off her visor.
They've found another one, inquisitor/ she said.
It wasn't one. It was three, and their discovery threw the affair wide open. An old warehouse in the mill zone, ten streets away from Fasple's hab, had been damaged by fire two months before, and now the municipal work-crews had moved in to tear it down and reuse the lot as a site for cheap, prefab habitat blocks. They'd found the bodies behind the wall insulation in a mouldering section untouched by the fire. A woman and two men, systematically mutilated in the manner of the other victims.
