Nemesis

Yosef hesitated, his eyes adjusted to the dimness now, and his sight picking out what did not fit. Here and there he saw signs of recent motion, places where dirt had been disturbed by human movement. Looking up from the gates, an observer would have seen nothing, but here, close up, there was evidence. Yosef thought about the Norte and Latigue murders, and he reached into the pocket of his coat for the butt of his gun, comforting himself with the steady presence of the firearm.

‘We take him alive,’ he hissed back.

Daig shot him a look as he drew a thermal register unit from inside his jacket, panning it around to scan for a heat return. ‘Of course.’

They found their suspect asleep inside the cooper’s shack, lying in the curve of a half-built barrel. He heard their approach and bolted to his feet in a panic. Yosef put the brilliant white glare of his hand lantern on him and took careful aim with the pistol.

‘Erno Sigg!’ he snapped, ‘We are reeves of the Sentine, and you are bound by law. Stand where you are and do not move.’

The man almost collapsed, so great was his terror. Sigg flailed and stumbled, falling against the side of his makeshift shelter, before catching himself with an obvious physical effort. He held up his shaking hands, in the right gripping the handle of an elderly fuel-lamp. ‘H-have you come to kill me?’ he asked.

It wasn’t the question Yosef had expected. He had faced killers of men before, more often than he might have liked, but Sigg’s manner was unlike any of them. Dread came off him in waves, like heat from a naked flame. Yosef had once rescued a young boy held prisoner for weeks in a wine cellar; the look on the boy’s face as he saw light for the first time was mirrored now in Erno Sigg’s expression. The man looked like a victim.

‘You are suspected of a high crime,’ Daig told him. ‘You’re to come with us.’

‘I paid for what I did!’ he retorted. ‘I’ve done nothing else since!’ Sigg looked in Daig’s direction. ‘How did you find me? I hid well enough so even he couldn’t know where I was!’

Yosef wondered who he might be as Daig answered. ‘Don’t be afraid. If you are innocent, we will prove it.’

‘Will you?’ The question was weak and fearful, like the words of a child.

Then Daig said something that seemed out of place in the moment, and yet the words were like a calmative, immediately easing the tension in Sigg’s taut frame. Daig said ‘The Emperor protects.’

When Yosef looked back to Sigg, the man was staring directly at him. ‘I’ve done many things I’m not proud of,’ he told him. ‘But no longer. And not those things the wire accuses me of. I’ve never taken a man’s life.’

‘I believe you, Erno,’ said Yosef, the words leaving his mouth before he was even aware of them forming in his thoughts; and the strangeness of it was, he did believe him, with a totality that surprised the reeve with its strength. On some instinctual level, he knew that Erno Sigg was telling the truth. The fact that Yosef could not fathom where this abrupt conviction had come from troubled him deeply; but he did not have time to dwell upon it.

The roof of the cooper’s shack was a shell of corrugated metal and glass, some of it warped or shattered by the passage of the old inferno. From nowhere, as the dawn wind changed direction, the musty air was suddenly full of noise. Yosef recognised the rattling hum of coleopter rotors a split-second before harsh sodium light drenched the floor with white, the glare from spotlamps blazing down through the smoke-dirty glass and the holes in the roof. An amplified voice echoed Yosef’s original challenge to Sigg, and then there was movement.

The reeve looked up, shielding his eyes, and made out the blurs of jagers dropping from the hovering flyers, heavy guns in their grips at they fell on descender lines.

He looked back and saw pure fury on Sigg’s face. ‘Bastards!’ he spat venomously, ‘I would have come! But you lied! You lied!’

Daig was reaching out to him. ‘No, wait!’ he cried out. ‘I didn’t bring them! We came alone–’

Sigg cursed them once again and threw the fuel-lamp in his hand with a savage jerk. The lantern hit the ground and split in a crash of glass and fire, even as overhead the intact portions of the roof were breached by the jagers. As pieces of the roof rained down from above, the lamp’s burning oils kissed the soiled matter and old spills on the floor and a pulse of smoky flame erupted. Yosef pushed Daig aside as the new blaze rolled out, chewing on the piles of rotting wood and discarded sacks all around them.

Daig tried to go after Sigg, but the fire had already built a wall between them, and the droning throb of the coleopter blades fed it, raising it high. Sigg vanished into the heat and the smoke.

The jagers were disentangling themselves from their ropes as Yosef stormed over to them; one was already on the wireless for a firefighter unit. The reeve saw Skelta’s face among the men and grabbed him by his collar.