by Dan Abnett
Kara drew her compact and checked the load. Mathuin put down his kitbag and unfastened it. He pulled the rotator cannon out and settled its bulk over his left shoulder, buckling the support frame around his torso. The weapon was about as long as a man's arm, a counter-weighted cluster of ammunition hoppers from which a swathe of six aluminium barrels projected. The cannon actually depended from a gyro-balanced armature that extended from the harness frame under his left armpit. Mathuin took off his left glove and revealed the polished chrome augmetic connector that replaced his left hand. He clunked the connector into the receiving socket on the back of the cannon so that it became an extension of his arm, and brought it to life. The autoloading mechanism clacked and shifted the first of the ammo hoppers into place. The swathe of barrels test-rotated as one with a metallic whir.
"I'd like to be able to talk to him before you paint the walls with his body," Nayl said.
"Just a precaution," Mathuin said.
"In that case, you get to be backstop." Nayl made to walk on, then turned back. "You kill me or Kara with that bullet hose, Zeph, and we'll come back to haunt you to the end of your frigging days."
"I know what I'm doing, Nayl," Mathuin said. He did. Kara knew that. He really did. In this trio, despite her years of experience, she was the amateur. She'd learned her trade since recruitment as an ordo auxiliary. These two had both been doing it since they could walk. Bounty men, hunter-killers, so hard-bitten teeth broke on them.
But when Nayl offered her point, she felt flattered, even now. Stealth was her thing. She moved like silk, and had a nose for surveillance. Those skills had been why Eisenhorn had chosen her for his retinue in the first place.
She led the way, Nayl a dozen metres behind her, Mathuin out of sight down the hall. Sunlight blazed down through the skylights, mobile and distorted by the fast motion of passing clouds. She could smell acid.
The music was louder now. Thumping, tinny. It sounded like bootleg pound, the music of the twists. Mutant club sounds were all the rage with younger types.
At the end of the hallway, a door was shrouded with opaque plastek sheeting stapled to the jamb. Hard daylight shone out around it. That was where the music was coming from. She thumbed off the safety and edged forward. Handwritten in paint by the doorway were the words "GET OUT".
Ordinarily, she'd have had Ravenor tell her what was behind the sheeting. Now she had to sidle close and peer through a slit. A large penthouse chamber, part of a suite. Bare floorboards, bare flakboard walls, huge tintglas windows through which the sunlight blazed.
Kara waved Nayl flat against the wall, and took a breath. Then she pushed through a gap in the plastek sheeting, her weapon raised, and panned it left and right.
There was no one there. A stained mattress roll, some empty wine bottles, drifts of discarded, soiled clothing, a battered old four-speaker tile player covered in club stickers from which the music was raging. There were open doorways to the right and the left.
Beside the mattress roll was a polysty tray full of glad-stones. The Bazarof woman had said Bergossian had a habit. The smooth stones, mined on a distant outworld and strictly prohibited, were slightly psyk-reactive. Held in the hand or put under the tongue, they produced a warm, blissful sensation. The sense of euphoria and well-being could last days apparently. They were popular in the twist clubs down in the undersink.
These, strangely, were dusty, as if unused and untouched for weeks.
The floor around the bedroll was covered in screwed up hanks of red tissue paper.
Nayl came in after her, his heavy pistol up and ready. She pointed to the player to suggest she might turn it off, and he shook his head. He kept watch on the right hand doorway as she checked the left. A galley kitchen, unlit. It stank. With the power and water cut, it had no function anymore except as a dump for trash. Heaps of discard rubbish and crap rotted in there. Craproaches scurried in the gloom.
She re-emerged and moved towards the window to be out of line-of-sight from the other door. With Nayl covering her, she went through.
Another large room, also well lit thanks to the vast expanse of tintglas. This one was also empty. There was a broken toilet stall to the left, and another doorway in the right-hand wall. Originally, this had been where the apartment finished. The doorway had been opened through the flakboard partition with a sledgehammer, allowing access to the neighbouring apartment. More plastek sheeting covered it.
Kara waved Nayl in. Immediately, he saw what she'd seen. Someone had used a charcoal or graphite stick to write on the bare walls, the ceiling and the floor. The markings seemed insane. Some were patterns and geometric designs, dividing up the sections of the room. These were annotated by odd, scrawling texts, some of which were written directly onto the walls, others on sheets of paper taped to them. There were drawings too: men, cherubs, monsters, all primitive but carefully rendered.
"Ninth heaven of truth..." Nayl whispered, tracing a finger along one annotated space.
"The place of atonement. The zone of understanding. The fifteenth heaven, where men rest from their travails..."
Kara looked at him. "What the frig is this?"
He shook his head, and pushed his way - gun raised - through the plastek-covered doorway.
Odysse Bergossian had taken over nineteen apartments in the top of the deadlofts. All of them were stripped and almost scrubbed clean and all linked by holes he'd smashed in the dividing walls. Each one was an annotated diagram of insanity. The markings and writings became more and more complex as they edged their way on. Increasingly, the creator of the markings had used colour - wax crayons - to decorate the walls and ceilings and floors. They found discarded lump ends of crayons underfoot, and more scraps of red tissue.
By the tenth apartment, the designs had become manic, and extraordinary. Fully rendered views of the city in full colour, as good as any limner could have managed. Lifelike faces. Unearthly beings that made Kara's skin goose to look at. Intricate captions rendered in gold leaf and paint, naming such things as the "Hall of Sublime Healing", the "Domain of the Sane", the "Fifty-First Heaven of Lesser Gods" and "Somewhere New". Some of the murals had blood and body fluids caked into them. Kara and Nayl were both on their nerve ends. The music, far behind them, was a distant pulse. They could hear the creaking of the high-alt wind.
In the nineteenth apartment, they found Odysse Bergossian.
He was naked and hunched up, drawing on a wall. A basket full of broken crayons, paint pots and mucky brushes lay beside him. He had half-covered the room with designs. The contrast between the decorated half and the bare walls was oddly distressing.
He didn't look up as they came in. They only knew it was Bergossian because he jumped when Nayl said his name.
He looked at them. He was young, no more than twenty-five, and his face and neck had nasty burns on them. He covered his face with paint-smudged hands and rolled over in a heap.
"Where's Drase Bazarof?" Nayl said.
Bergossian moaned and shook his head.
"Harlon!" Kara called. Nayl went over to her, keeping his eye on the trembling man.
She pointed at the wall, and Nayl looked. This was the drawing Bergossian had been halfway through when they interrupted him. In full colour, beautifully captured, was the likeness of Bergossian. Standing over him, half-finished but unmistakable, were the figures of Kara Swole and Harlon Nayl.
"Emperor preserve me!" Nayl whispered.
Zeph Mathuin decided he had waited long enough. He was about to move when he heard footsteps coming up the hall behind him. Silent, he backed into the shadow of a doorway.
A thickset young man in labourer's clothes walked past him, carrying a pail of hot riceballs and meat sticks, and three polysty caffeines on a preformed tray. He disappeared in through the plastek drapes.
Mathuin keyed his voxer.
"Nayl. I think Bazarof is coming your way. Want me to intercept?"
"Follow but hold back. We'll get him."
"Odysse
? Odysse? I've got lunch," the young man called as he walked through the connected, decorated chambers. "Odysse? Where are you?"
"Busy," said Nayl, stepping out of a doorway and aiming his weapon.
The young man gasped and yelped, and dropped the foodpail and the drinks.
Kara appeared behind Nayl, dragging the whimpering Bergossian by the wrist.
"Drase Bazarof?" Nayl asked, lowering his gun. The young man clearly saw this as a chance to flee, and turned. Mathuin stood behind him, rotator cannon aimed at his chest.
"Uh uh uh..." Mathuin hissed.
"I'm not Bazarof!" the young man implored, looking back at Nayl. "I'm not! My name is Gerg Lunt."
"And that makes you what?" Nayl asked.
"A friend! Odysse's friend! Shit, I knew Bazarof would get us into trouble..."
"He's here?" Nayl asked.
"Three cups of caffeine." Mathuin noted.
Lunt looked twitchy.
"Up," said Kara suddenly. She'd heard the creaking of the roof before any of them.
Mathuin swept his weapon up to aim at the ceiling.
"No!" Nayl cried. "I want him alive." He looked at the skylight. "Boost me, Kara," he said.
"You're kidding, right?" she answered. "You boost me."
Nayl was about to argue.
"Wasting time!" Mathuin growled and placed himself under the skylight with his free hand cupped. "Move it and do what you do," he said to Kara.
She used Mathuin's cupped hand as a stirrup for one foot, and his shoulder as a shelf for the other. He was rock steady. Nayl glared at him.
There was no clasp or catch - the light had not been designed to open - but the seals were rotten and Kara pushed it out of the frame with the heel of her hand. Then she hoisted herself up and through from Mathuin's shoulder.
Nayl looked at Mathuin a moment longer. "Guard them," he said, pointing at the two men, then hurried from the room.
Outside, it was bitingly cold and painfully bright. The air was min. Kara edged her way along the roof, testing every step. Years of acid rain had turned the fabric of the roof into a damp, flaking landscape.
She put on her glare-shades and pulled up her hood. The gables and wings of the roof section projected before her. Behind her was a tower of old comm-masts and cable-stays, a vertical nest of rusting metal and faded plastics. She looked around. There was no sign of anyone. Maybe it had just been the wind.
The world was huge. She could see for many kilometres in every direction: an immense raft of curdled black cloud cover out of which the massive towerheads of Stairtown poked like islands. The sky above the cloud layer was a bright, watery smear. She didn't want to be out here for long, especially if the rain or wind picked up. She could already feel the skin of her face tingling. She fastened the neck of her hood up to her nose.
She walked along further, getting nearer to the edge. It was treacherous underfoot. Kara held onto a stay-cable for support and saw smoke waft out where her glove clasped the dripping steel. Fumes from acid reaction was also puffing out from under her feet.
Over the steady buffeting of the wind, she heard a noise, turned, and almost slipped. Then she realised it was her vox-link. "What?"
Nayl's voice sounded like it was coming up from a deep drain, "-are you?"
"On the frigging roof!" she answered.
"No... where on roof?"
She looked around, trying to translate the stark roofs-cape into something he would understand from beneath. It wasn't easy.
"Just turn on your locator!" he snapped.
Stupid. Obvious. The precariousness of her state had made her forget basics. She was light-headed. The thin air was making her pant. Kara pulled back the cuff of her jacket and activated the little tracer sewn into the lining.
"Got me?"
In the deadlofts below, Nayl came out of Bergossian's rooms into the hall. There was a rune flashing on the fold-out screen of his compact auspex. "Yes," he called back. "I'm almost under you."
She moved on. The wind was gusting stronger and it smelled wet and corrosive. There was a flapping, rattling sound, but it turned out to be a series of tatty old mills along the edge of the roof, their vanes spinning as the air moved.
Thirty metres away to the west, a gaggle of sheen birds burst up into the air, wings beating, and curled away over the lip of the eaves. They'd been disturbed. Kara saw a figure scrambling along the lower slope of the next roof section, clinging on to a tension cable.
Arms out for balance, she paced down the pitch of the roof like it was a high wire, and then leapt down onto the flat top of a ducting box. The bare metal of the box's top dented like a tin dram under her weight and splashed up moisture from the pool gathered there. She saw a smatter of burn-holes appear in the strengthened cloth of her leggings.
He'd heard her land. She saw him look her way, and then continue on with more animation.
Ninker was going to slip, if he wasn't careful...
"Bazarof!" she yelled. It was hard to project her voice over the thump of the wind.
He vanished out of sight behind a flue stack. She dropped down off the ducting box and scurried over the coping of the lower wing. Almost at once, she slipped over and began to slither down the hip of the roof. She caught a projecting truss-cable and arrested her slide.
"Kara?"
"West of me! About forty metres!"
In the corridor below, Nayl broke into a run, calculating her guess on the auspex screen. He had to kick open a door that had been locked for decades and pick his way through a dark, stinking apartment withered by the encroachment of the rain. Through another door, ajar and decayed to the consistency of wet paper, and he was out into a service corridor. It was littered with rusting junk and as dark as the room before it. A derelict servitor, decomposed down to bone and bare metal, decorated the next junction. It was lying on the bonded floor as if prostrate in prayer. Nayl turned left, groping now: it was so dark. Slimy tendrils of filth dangled from the ceiling and got in his face. He spat and wiped them away. There was another door. It gave beneath his shoulder.
Sunlight, bright and dangerous, streamed down through broken skylights into another corridor. The floor had almost rotted and burned away. He had to step his way on the exposed cross members. Below his feet, gnawed holes showed the drop into the darkness of the floors below.
Nayl paused, legs braced wide between two mouldering joists, and raised his pistol to cover the skylights. The wind was creaking the superstructure, but it sounded like someone was up there.
Kara followed her quarry's path along the lower roof, using the tension cable as he had done. By the time she reached the flue stack, her gloves were rained. She could feel spot-burns on her legs from the splashed rainwater. She was out of breath and dizzy.
The metal flues, like the pipes of an organ, had been burned almost blue by the climate. She swung around them. The end gable of the roof wing was immediately beneath her, then the gulf itself: the flank of the tower dropped away into the cloud cover below. It looked a long way, even to the clouds. Much less to the ground itself.
There was no sign of Bazarof. Had he slipped and fallen? If he'd managed to scramble around the gable-end - using only the rotting fascia as a foothold - he might have made it onto the adjoining roofwing - a wide mansard that abutted the central rise of the tower. Beyond that was a flat roof section fitted with broken skylights.
Kara chose her grip and spidered her way around the gable. Mushy pieces of verge boarding came off in her fingers. She leapt the last of the distance onto the edge of the mansard, trying to ignore the prospect of the drop behind her, and ran up it on all fours to the crest. There, she slithered down onto the flat section. Her heart was pounding, and her breaths came in rasps.
Gun drawn, she reached the skylights and peered down. Nayl and the barrel of his gun were looking up at her.
"Damn!" she panted. "Didn't he come that way?"
"No sign here."
She looked round. "I'd have seen
him if he'd doubled back. Maybe he did fall off..."
"What?"
"Just stay there," she said, and circled back away from the skylights. Debris and junk fallen from the inner tower littered the inward part of the flat roof. She picked through it. The pieces of flaking metal siding, that were bent and collapsed like fallen window blinds, were large enough to conceal a man. In fact, they concealed nothing except pools of slime water and rot.
The rising elevation of the inner tower was smooth travertine, streaked with orange stains of corrosion. As she got closer, she realised the stains marked out where iron rungs had been set into the wall. They were loose and unsteady, but they supported her weight. She went up with her gun tucked in her belt.
The end of one of the rungs popped out in a puff of floury mortar. She skipped it, stretched, and pulled herself up onto the next few. The extra exertion made her head swim.
"Kara?"
Nayl ached to know what was going on. With his feet braced wide between the joists, there was no way he could launch himself up far enough to get out of the roof lights.
"Kara!"
There was a ledge, ten metres up, underbraced by eroded arcature. She got up onto it. It was only a metre wide and ran along the face of the tower to the corner. At the head of the rungs, lichen had been scratched and torn away recently: she wasn't the first to make this climb.
She went along the ledge to the corner. The turn of the central tower looked out over another jumble of roofs. Bazarof was scrambling over them, into the face of the gale.
"Got him! South-west! The next wing!" she voxed and jumped off the ledge. It was a five-metre drop, down onto a flat section of coping that ran along between the beehives of six air-exchangers. Bazarof was still going. He hadn't heard her.
She ran down the coping, stepping wide over iron roof ribs, and jumped down again. She was coming up the slope of roof behind him. Stay-cables swung loose from stanchion brackets and the wind moaned through the few strands that remained under tension. He looked back and saw her, then darted left sharply along the line of the roof, his feet slipping on the loose tiles.
