The Portrait in the Governor's Hall

Planetary Governor Anselm Reyes-Varr took office at forty-one and was, by every account and every pict, still forty-one when the Inquisitor arrived sixty years later. He attributed this to clean living and the best juvenat surgeons in the sub-sector. The surgeons had never met him.

In the Governor’s Hall hung his official portrait, painted in the first year of his rule. Visitors to the Hall remarked, over the decades, that the portrait was a poor likeness. It looked tired. Then it looked old. By the time the Inquisitor saw it, it did not look like a man at all.

Household records showed that one member of the Governor’s staff had gone missing every year for the past eleven years. Each disappearance was put down to desertion. Each happened in the week of the Governor’s birthday.

The Governor received the Inquisitor with perfect courtesy. He showed her the Hall himself. When she drew back the curtain he did not look at the portrait; he looked at her face while she looked at it, and she wrote afterwards that he seemed hungry to know what she saw.

The Ordo’s investigation found that the portrait was painted by a travelling artist named Tobiah Fenn, whose other known works are scattered across four sub-sectors. Every one of them has been located and examined. Every one of them has a figure somewhere in the background who is looking straight out of the canvas.

The Governor was executed in the Hall. The portrait was burned in the same room, on the same day, and the Inquisitor ordered the Hall burned after it, because the ashes of the canvas would not stay in the grate and were seen moving across the floor toward the door.

Tobiah Fenn has not been found. A painter matching his description was reported last year on a pilgrim ship, sketching the passengers.