by Dan Abnett
Too much, too many. The acid rain drenching the upper level streets burns my skin, though I have no skin. The sensation is delicious. I wish I could linger on it.
No time for that. I taste Nayl. Pure muscle and testosterone. Hugging the shadows of a deep, sink-stack slum.
And then...
What's this? Who's this? Beloved Emperor, this one hurts to touch. Hurts so very much... From inside his head, I hear his name. Zael...
PART ONE
Burn City
ONE
He used his first flect the summer he turned eleven, but he'd seen them before. Seen the users too. Scrap-heads, burn outs, wasters. Then he found out just how crap life in the sink-stacks could get.
Four months before his eleventh birthday, the Departmento Munitorum shut down two fabricatories in the district. Nineteen thousand indentured workers were, in the Munitorum's words, "decruited". No reason was ever offered for the closures. But it was common knowledge that there was a trade slump right across the sub. Stories went round that new, automated plants had been opened in the northern-most zone: plants where a single servitor could perform the work of twenty indents without the need for sleep shifts. Other rumours said the fabs had lost a navy contract to manufactories on Caxton. Whatever, the work was gone. The fabs were shuttered up and boarded. Nineteen thousand able indents were hung out to rot.
Zael's parents had both died in a hivepox outbreak years before. He lived in the stacks with his granna and his sister, Nove. She was eighteen, a flat-frame rigger, and the family's only wage earner. Nove was one of those decruited.
It got hard, fast. Welfare and subsist tokens couldn't feed them. Zael was forced to cut scholam sessions to earn money, by doing errands for local traders. Some of them were less than clean. He never asked what was in the brown carriers he delivered to scribbled addresses in the stacks. Meanwhile, granna killed her worries with the fumes from spent glue-wands that she gathered from the trash spills behind the hemming fab. And Nove looked for work.
She found none. But somewhere in the looking, she found flects. Zael didn't know how she paid for them. He got used to her glassy look and the vacant smile.
"Should try one, little," she said once. He'd always been "little brother", but now "brother" seemed too much like an effort.
He'd come home after an errand job with a sweaty fold of notes in his pocket. Nove hadn't been expecting him back so soon. She started up from the little dinette table in the hab's tiny kitchen, and pushed something away under a grubby dish towel. Zael stood in the doorway, fascinated by the glint of whatever it was she was trying to hide.
Nove relaxed once she realised it was him. She'd been afraid it was the marshals, or a surprise knock from the ministorum temperance division. They'd been working the stacks in Formal J that week, going from door to door bearing pamphlets and disapproving expressions.
Zael stepped into the kitchen, forked the bills out of his pocket, and dropped them onto the rusty drainer.
"Good one, little," Nove said. "Good little little, working hard."
Zael ignored her and looked for the last of the citrus-flavoured drink he'd hidden in their larder.
Nove had already found it and drank it. He set a pan on the stove to boil water for a dehyd soup mix instead.
His sister slid the dishtowel back to reveal a small chunk of glass, irregular and no longer than a thumb. It lay in a crumpled sheet of pale red tissue paper.
He tried to look busy so she wouldn't notice him sneaking a glance. The water pinged in the pan as it boiled. The kitchen smelled of soured meat stock and granna's glue.
Nove smoothed out the edges of the tissue wrap and stared down into the sliver of dirty glass. She blinked, then shivered. Her lips were trembling. She rocked back against the chair rest, and put her hands flat on the table-top.
That's when she said it. "Should try one, little."
"Why?" he asked.
"Makes everything seem better."
The soup in the pan boiled over, and drowned the burner's flame. Zael had to twist the tap quickly to prevent the room from filling with escaped gas.
A week later, Nove was dead. The marshals collected up her body, marked the scene, and hosed down the sink-alley. They said she'd fallen from an upper landing while under the influence of a proscribed substance. No one was ever able to explain why she'd landed face up. Backing away from something. People backed away when they were scared.
Eighteen storeys. Only the medicae mortus' report established which way up she'd been at impact.
Years of watching his granna inhale fumes from discarded wands, years of watching her sneeze up blood-stringed snot and piss herself in her armchair had made Zael damn sure he would never try her particular poison.
But there was something different about flects. They were just bits of glass. Little, grubby chunks of glass wrapped in pale red tissue. He saw dealers on dark block corners handing them over in exchange for cash. He'd heard of parties where a dozen eager users had shared the same, large pane.
The summer he turned eleven, he'd done a run for a local type called Riscoe. Nove had been dead three weeks. Riscoe, a bloater with his very own atmosphere of stale sweat stink, raffled Zael's hair with fat salami fingers, and remarked he was clean out of bills. Did Zael want to wait for cash, or would he take a look as payment? Zael took the look. A tiny bundle of pale red tissue was fished out of Riscoe's coat and passed to him underhand, like a card sleight.
"Lose yourself," Riscoe said. He hadn't meant "go away". It was just user advice.
Zael kept the flect in his pocket for eight days. Finally, one night, when his granna was unconscious, he went up to the stack-hab's deserted service level, unfolded the tissue, and looked.
And never looked back.
He was twelve now. Or fourteen. He couldn't be sure, but he was certain it was an even number. He ran full time, and took his wages in flects - or money that he used for flects. Either way, it worked. The only recent memory that stood out was the removal of his granna's body by the Magistratum.
"How long has she been dead?" the Magistratum medicae asked him, pulling a gauze mask down from his grimacing mouth.
"My granna's dead?"
"Choked on her own vomit..." the medicae faltered. "She's decomposing. Must have died weeks ago. Didn't you notice?"
Zael shrugged. He'd just scored a flect and wanted to use it. It itched in his pocket. These men and their questions were keeping him from it.
"Everything will be fine," the man said, standing back as his colleagues wheeled a shapeless bodybag out through the kitchen onto the stack landing. He was trying to sound reassuring.
"I know," Zael said.
Zael was looking for a look when he saw the guy.
The guy was trying to blend, but he wasn't making it. Tough-looking knuck-head: tall, wide in the shoulder and heavy in the arms. He could almost have passed for one of the Stack clan's moody hammers - which he was clearly trying to do - except that he was a little too washed and his matt-black bodyglove was too new. Zael had been intending to score a flect from his usual dealer, a flat-brained tube addict called Isky who worked out of a stack hab on the lower northsink. But when he sussed the guy, he made new plans.
The guy followed him, all the way down through the stacks of Formal J to the river bridge. Zael loitered a while on the bridge's wrought iron walkway, gazing down at the polysty garbage bobbing in the murky water. A steam train rattled over the boxgirder elevation above him, strobing carriage lights down at the unlit river. Coal-tar vapour shrouded the walkway for a few seconds, and Zael took his chance to slip.
Two streets later, heading into the hab-stacks of Formal L, he spotted the guy again. No mistake. The matt black bodyglove, the shaved head, the dark goatee that hadn't been sink fashion for several seasons.
At Crossferry, Zael split west, hoping to shake. The guy was good. Really good. A double-back, a jink, and still he was there, hanging back.
Zael started to ran. He ra
n back along Crossferry, through the stalls of the weekly cheap, and along a gloomy underpass below the triangle stacks. He turned to look back over his shoulder, and ran smack into an open hand.
The guy clamped him around the throat and pushed him back against the wall.
"You're a looker," said the guy, his voice edged with an off-world accent. "I was trying to make this easy on you, but you needled it. Your dealer. I want your dealer."
"Screw you," Zael said, laughing falsely.
The grip tightened, and wasn't even remotely funny anymore.
"Why d'you want my dealer so bad?" Zael asked when the guy let him go.
"Because."
As if that explained everything.
"You a marshal?"
The guy shook his head.
"What then?"
"Worst thing you can imagine."
Zael breathed hard. He was scared now. He got hassled every day in every way, but not like this. This guy wasn't a user looking for a dealer to rip off, and he wasn't a moody hammer out to fix the competition. He was hardcore. Zael wasn't about to lead him to Isky, but he knew he had to give this guy something actual. There were some other dealers he knew of, over in the Formal L stacks. He had no qualms about giving them up. It was his damn neck in the vice.
"You got a name?" Zael asked.
The man paused. "Yours or mine?" he asked, as if speaking to an invisible person beside him. A pause. The guy nodded.
He turned to Zael.
"Call me Ravenor," he said.
It started to rain. A brisk westerly had thickened the cloud cover over the district, and precipitation alarms fixed to the street posts began to bleat.
Carl Thonius didn't seem to hear them, so she pulled him by the elbow and gestured towards the cover of the tintglas walkway.
"I hate this frigging planet," he said.
Two dozen centuries of dirty industry had poisoned the atmosphere of Eustis Majoris. Ninety per cent of the time, the immense city-state of Petropolis stewed under a roof of toxic stain cloud, its streets choked with hydrocarbon smog. Every now and then, the clouds burst and drenched the surface quarters with acid rain. The rain ate into everything: stone, tiles, brick, steel, skin. Epidermal cancer, a by-product of exposure to the rain, was the planet's second biggest killer behind pollutant-related emphysemas.
The moment the rain-burn alarms started to sound, gampers flocked out of alleyways and sink shops and began loudly offering their services to passers-by. Each one flamboyantly unfurled the long stemmed, telescoping umbrella he carried over his shoulder like a spear. Some gamps were treated paper, others steel-silk or plastek or cellulose. Almost all had been hand-painted in eye-catching ways and inscribed with details concerning hourly rates and the gamper's unimpeachable character.
The two off-worlders shooed them away and kept themselves under the walkway. They could hear the corrosive rain pattering on the tintglas, and sizzling on the open flags of the street.
Carl Thonius kept a linen handkerchief clamped coyly over his nose and mouth. He had soaked it in oil of osscil.
There had been a look of fastidious distaste on his face since the moment they had arrived on the surface.
"You look like a complete pussy." Patience Kys told him, not for the first time.
"I don't know how you can begin to suffer this foul air," he replied scornfully. "Every breath brings a lungfull of pestilential filth. It is quite the most loathsome frigging arsehole of a planet I have ever known."
Thonius was a man of unremarkable stature but remarkable poise. He stood or walked or sat just so - always with a perfect mix of elegance and composure. An ankle turned thus, an elbow crooked. He was dressed in a red velvet suit that screamed of good tailoring, with expensive, black buckle-shoes and white lace cuffs, and a mantle-slicker of oxidised grey plastek. He was twenty-nine years old, standard. His heavy blond hair was brushed back off his high forehead and he had dusted his face with white foundation. With the pasty pallor and the kerchief to his nose, he looked like a classical school statue-"Gentleman about to sneeze".
"Pussy," she repeated. "Reminds me of home." Patience Kys had been born on Sameter in the Helican sub: another dirty, smoggy, deluged hab-stacked world. The Imperium was full of them.
They made an odd couple. The dandy and the vixen. Taller than him, athletically slender, she walked with an exaggeratedly casual roll that seemed to slide her along the pavement. Her chocolate-brown bodyglove was detailed with scales of silver and left nothing to the imagination except the risks involved. Her black hair was coiled up in a tight chignon secured by two long silver pins, and her face was pale and angular. Her eyes were green.
"Lost him," she admitted.
Thonius glanced at her and cocked a plucked eyebrow. "The blue one," he said.
"And how can you tell?"
The walkway and street before them was a bobbing sea of gamps in the downpour. In the midst of them, a blue one stood out.
"No markings. No inscriptions or hourly rates. He's rich. He doesn't use a public gamper. He has his own man."
"The stuff you know..." she mocked. "Though you're still a pussy."
Thonius snorted, but he didn't deny it. Anyone shy of an Adeptus Astartes in full Terminator plate was a pussy compared to Patience Kys.
They moved through the midday crowd, following the blue shade. It was morbidly fascinating to see how many pedestrians around them had skin burns. Some old and faded, some raw and new. Some - and Carl Thonius pressed his fragrant kerchief tighter still - no longer burns, but discolouring into lethal melanomas. The received remedy was faith paper. You could buy it from street corner vendors and stalls in the sink-shop arcades. Tissue-thin and gummed, it had been blessed by various ecclesiarchy somebodies and infused with palliative serums like thistle, milkroot and flodroxil. You cut it to shape - usually into little patches - moistened it, and stuck it to your rain-burns. Faith, and the God-Emperor of Mankind, did the rest. The civilians around them were speckled with faith paper patches. One old man had his entire neck and forehead wrapped in it, like papier-mâché.
A whirring sound passed over them through the lethal rainfall. Kys looked up in time to see a flock of birds turn overhead and dart as one up into the high reaches of a city spire, hazed by the drizzle.
"How do they live?" she wondered aloud.
"They don't," said Thonius.
She didn't know what he meant, but she didn't care. It was too miserable for a Carl Thonius lecture.
At the crossroads on Lesper Street, the blue gamp turned left and bobbled away down the wide boulevard of St Germanicus into the ceramicists' quarter. The rain continued to hiss down.
"Where's he going now?" she muttered.
"It's his only vice. He collects klaylware."
"Not his only vice," she ventured.
Thonius nodded. "The only one he admits to."
Under iron awnings and heavy jalousie blinds, the artisans and dealers of the quarter had set out their wares on wooden stalls. Blue gamp lingered around those that displayed bowls and vases of a fat-lipped, heavy style, with rich earthy colours and gleaming glazes.
"They say he has the finest collection of antique klaylware in Formal B." Thonius said.
"You say that like it's something to be proud of. Or even something that makes sense," Kys said. "I'm getting bored, Carl. Let's slam him."
"No. We'll never get his guard down if we push him. He's far too clever for that."
"His orientation is hetero, isn't it?"
Thonius paused and looked at her. "That's what the briefing notes said. Why?"
She pulled him by the arm and fast-walked him until they were well ahead of the blue gamp. It was hesitating around another pot-monger's storefront. "Kys? What are-"
"Shut up. He'll be here in a few minutes." She gestured to the ceramics display of the shop nearby. "This place any good?"
"I... uh... yes, I think so. Some fine quality pieces from the late third era."
"Pick me s
omething."
"What?"
"You know this stuff. Because you're a pussy. Now pick me something. The choicest thing they have."
Umberto Sonsal, second director of the Engine Imperial manufactory in Formal B, was an unpleasantly portly man with soft, full lips and lidless eyes. The rain alarms had stopped - the downpour had abated - and as he approached the ceramics shop he adjusted the dial of his signet ring. The anti-acid scales that had loricated his skin retracted into the slit pockets behind his ears and under his eyebrows. His personal gamper furled the wide blue rain-shield.
Sonsal dabbed his forehead with a lace handkerchief and wandered in between the rows of shelves, occasionally pausing to lift and examine a particular piece. His assistant, his shader and his two bodyguards waited in the doorway of the shop.
The dish on the third shelf was particularly exquisite. No more than late third, perfect in all dimensions, and with a sought-after crackling to the glaze. He was about to reach in and lift it up, when a hand came and scooped it away.
"Oh, so beautiful," murmured the girl as she held the piece up to the light.
"It is," he said, his voice a rich whisper.
"I'm sorry. Were you about to look at it?" she asked.
She was stunning. Her eyes so green, her slender form so striking, her love of klaylware so evident.
"Be my guest," Sonsal said.
She turned the piece expertly in her hands, noting the maker's stamp on the base, and the little disc of paste-paper showing the import serial.
"Late third?" she mused, casting a glance at him.
"Indeed."
"And the stamp. It looks like Nooks Workshop, but I think in fact it might be Solobess, before Nooks bought him out."
She held the piece out to him. He patted his fat lips and blinked. "I would concur. You know your ware."
"Oh no!" she said hastily, smiling an intoxicatingly flecting smile. "Not really. I just... I just like what I like."
