Pariah (Bequin #1)

by Dan Abnett

My family’s name was Bequin, and this is the name I have always used when I am being myself. I was given to understand that proof of this heritage could be found in a marshland cemetery, for my family was a marshland family,

My status as an orphan

brought to the Scholam Orbus on Highgate Hill and raised there, and then transferred on my twelfth birthday to the Maze Undue, whose rambling accommodations adjoined the scholam.

My name is Beta Bequin. The forename is an affectionate contraction of my full name, Alizebeth, and not an uncial label. It is said aloud with a long vowel as in Bay-tar, not as Beater or Better.

and upon investigation it was revealed that my mother had passed away of a distemper.

The city is called Queen Mab.

Sancour, which itself is in the subsector of Angelus.

War made it mighty. But the war ended, and Queen Mab was left spent and exhausted.

When I was twelve, and not one day more, I entered the Maze Undue, and began my private instruction by the fourth, unspoken branch of the worshipful Ordos.

quizzing glass

The glass was unsettling. I saw things in it that I did not wish to see.

I saw black hair, shoulder-length, and a good nose.

I was tall,

and I had a slender build because I maintained a trained condition.

I knew I could be attractive to men and women in circumstances when I was not being Beta Bequin, and that was the point.

The Maze Undue was a school. The Ordos established it in Queen Mab a long time ago, as a discreet place in which to conduct the unremarked-upon training of remarkable people.

It was not a school like the Scholam Orbus. That was a home for foundlings, instituted to clothe and feed, at the city’s expense, lost waifs, and teach them their letters, their numbers, and a sufficient measure of the Ecclesiarchy’s texts. To earn a place in the Scholam Orbus, one simply had to lack a family. To earn a place in the Maze Undue, one needed to be selected. We entered, usually singly, never more than two from any batch of foundlings. I never knew there to be more than twenty students.

Some of these works were pre-Imperial, and dated to the time of the Great Crusade, the Unification, even to Old Night and the Age of Technology.

I have an aptitude for languages. I believe it is an eidetic skill.

He was no more than ten years older than me. He had a truly eidetic mind, one that made my talents in that direction pale into insignificance. Anything he saw, he learned. His head was full of data, all instantly absorbed, all instantly recallable.

– the candidates, as we were known

When I turned twenty-four,

Twenty-six or twenty-seven years old seemed to be about the age when one finished one’s training and graduated.

The skirts were our term for the outlying and largely ruined parts of the Maze Undue along the eastern wing,

It was in the drill, during my twenty-third year, that I first saw a man die close up. And, in the main, he died because of me.

I had seen deaths. I had been obliged to draw or improvise weapons to defend myself and others. I had inflicted injury.

Mentor Saur. Thaddeus Saur. Teacher of combat craft and measures of defence.

Until I met Deathrow, he was the most physically intimidating man I had ever known.

but I knew at once that this was a disguise. He was dressed the way someone would dress if he had made a close and considered study of Queen Mab’s merchant classes in order to pass as one.

His disguise was not imperfect, I felt. It was instead too perfect.

He had drawn first, and been disarmed by a sword-thrust. It had only become a blade duel when Saur had been deprived of his pistol.

To focus the attack there forces the opponent to fight not only you, but his own autonomic responses as well. Saur was trying to undermine the stranger’s technical control.

Why are they fighting? Why is this man here? Blood had been drawn. This was no practice session, no combat lesson for a private client. They were fighting in earnest.

He maintained a face-on stance so he could play in both sword and armoured sleeve.

I glimpsed, beneath that, the wire mesh of an armoured bodyglove. The stranger was not as soft as he looked.

I heard the crack of metal on flesh, the sound of an axe smacking a ripe tuber. Saur’s head was snapped aside, his body rotating after it.

Three, four seconds: enough time for them to trade two dozen blows. I had come in with just enough time to grasp the basic situation and see Saur fall.

My cuff was turned to dead, so the force of my bluntness came with me and my shout.

It can be like a slap to have a pariah come at you, aggressive, unlimited.

To even a non-sensitive, a regular human, the psykanic null of a blank mind can be distu...

I think he wanted to say something to me, but he didn’t know what.

I could sense his conflict. Unarmed as I was, I drove at him, using his reluctance against him. Fighting Saur was one thing, but he didn’t want to engage a young woman.

He doubled up as Saur’s cutro tore into him from behind. The short sword went through his coat, through his robes, through his under-jack and mesh, and sliced into his waist.

He fell down on his back. Saur just stood there, watching him bleed out, the bloodied cutro low at his side.

Perhaps he didn’t have to die, I thought. We could hold him, bind his injury, call for the city watch. I tried to apply pressure to his ghastly wound, but it was open, and as big as a dog’s mouth. My hands were no better at stemming the flow of blood than his had been.

He said, ‘Cognitae.’

Interesting

A bark of pressure clouted me along with the noise. I flinched as bloody backspatter hit my face, throat and chest. I had his blood in my eyes. Mentor Saur put another round through the stranger’s face for good measure, and then holstered his snub pistol.

‘Turn your cuff live, for fug’s sake,’ he said. I did so. I clicked the centre band of the metal cuff around to activate my limiter and mask my blankness. The pariah effect makes us hard to like or sympathise with.

Just a touch, for Thaddeus Saur was never soft.

‘The word he spoke,’ said Saur, ‘that’s what he was. Cognitae. Heretic filth. Now leave, Bequin, you’ve done your part.’