by Dan Abnett
"It," corrected Leyla Slade.
"You don't know him like I do." Culzean grinned. He turned to the fraters. "We can begin in a day or so. Where are you based, master?"
"The occulting lighthouse at the bay end of Formal Q." Lezzard replied.
"Remote, is it? Discreet?"
"Yes, Orfeo."
"I'll come to you there. We'll wake the incunabula and begin our work."
"What is this thing you speak of?" asked Stefoy.
"Just a tool. A deodand."
"Like a roof tile or a pen?"
Culzean shrugged. "Slightly more proactive than that. There will be a cost involved."
"The Fratery's funds are at your disposal for this, Orfeo." Lezzard replied.
Orfeo Culzean raised a fist and coughed politely into the core of it. Leyla Slade took a step forward. "Magus-clancular, sir, my employer did not mean a monetary cost. You must arrange for there to be persons present whose lives can be used as payment."
"Sacrifices?" asked Lezzard.
"At least a dozen," said Orfeo Culzean. "The Brass Thief gets his name because he steals lives. And when he wakes, he will be so awfully hungry."
FOUR
"Hey, I've an idea. Try opening it." Nayl suggested.
"Try waiting for me to open it." Kara growled back, fumbling with the power driver. It whined pathetically in the gloom, and she coughed as rust flecks billowed down. "Damn thing's corroded shut. Just use your cutter. This is wasting time."
Nayl lit the torch blade of his las-cutter. The fizzling glow lent their surroundings an even greater sense of decay and neglect.
Kara jumped down from the crusted metal rungs. She made an "after you" bow - difficult to do in a bodysuit so laden down with kit.
Nayl clambered up the ladder, and dug the cutter into the rim of the heavy roof hatch. Metal curled away, glowing, melting, dripping onto the floor below in fat, orange droplets.
The vox pipped. "Are you two quite ready yet?" Carl said. "This plan relies on perfect co-ordination. I explained that, didn't I?"
"Yes, Carl. You did." Kara replied. "Little technical difficulty with the roof access."
"I blame the acid rain," Nayl said, still at work.
"So noted." Carl's voice cracked over the line.
"I blame Nayl," said Kara. "It makes me feel better about myself."
"Also noted. I applaud the sentiment."
"We're through." Nayl called, killing the cutter blade and slipping it back into his hip pouch. "Mask up and brace yourself."
Kara checked her hood seals and pulled the breather mask down over her face.
Nayl punched the ancient metal hatch and it flopped over, open onto the exterior roof. Immediately, a pressure wave of wind and rain burst down onto them. It was even worse than she'd expected, howling, murderously violent. The acid-warning lights inside their headsets lit up. A stormy night in downtown Petropolis.
The high, flat roof of the Mansoor Hagen Manufactory was just a jumble of duct heads and old reheater blocks in the darkness. The roaring crosswind drove the acid rain in slantwise sheets across the mouldering roof and threatened to tear them off their footing.
They staggered on, heads low, two strange, bulky shapes in the dark, moving east. Up ahead, through the fuming rain, the lights of the city glowed, one in particular.
The Mansoor Hagen Manufactory in Formal H had once, proudly, been the subsector's chief producer of buttons and other quality clothing fasteners. Twenty years before, it had ceased production and closed down; maybe there had been a new trend in button recycling, maybe the citizens of the Angelus Subsector had begun to care less if they were decently fastened up. Whatever, the place had died, and the site had been sealed by the guild foremen.
The manufactory itself was a massive ouslite blockhouse a kilometre long and half a kilometre wide, rising nearly four hundred metres above the top of the upper stack levels. It lay across eight sink blocks, arranged roughly east-west along its longest sides. The western end looked out to Formal F and the sprawl of factory residuals. The eastern end faced the vast donjon of the Informium Depository on the boundary of Formal D.
Nayl and Kara reached the east-end lip of the massive building. They had to cling on to the old support wires to prevent themselves being torn off the roof by the wind.
"Decent take-up." Nayl noted, his voice tinny over the vox.
"There's a kindness. Check the direction."
Nayl fumbled with the instrument strapped to his left wrist.
"Blowing due east. Eight over seven. It's going to be a quick trip."
Kara did some quick mental math. "Really quick," she replied. "No more than eighteen, nineteen seconds. We'll have to be really sharp not to overshoot. Shave off another two seconds td compensate for the way the wind's going to carry us even when we're uncoupled."
"Two?"
"Yes, two! Trust me! Now, are you set?"
Nayl played out the carry-tube from his belt and the wind immediately tugged at the limp sack like a flag. He kept one hand clenched to the guard wire, and took hold of the inflator pump with the other.
"Set!"
Kara had done the same with her own kit.
"We're set," she voxed to Carl.
"Then I'll start making my way in. Thonius out."
"Ready?" Kara asked Nayl.
"For this? No," he said. "But let's do it anyway."
They both activated the pressurised helium canisters fixed to their belts. In less than a second, the two limp sacks trailing wildly in the wind at the end of their carry-tubes had expanded into taut globes a full metre in diameter. The wind grabbed them at once.
Kara and Nayl let go of the wires and the windshear, wrestling with their globe balloons, yanked them forward with brutal force, off the edge of the manufactory, into the open sky.
Carl Thonius hurried across the rainswept street, past the singing burn alarms, and reached the north portico of the Informium Depository. Under the awning, he paid off his gamper, tipping the boy well. The gamper took the coin with a smile, shook off the huge, acid-resistant folds of his gamp, and went in search of other business.
Thonius brushed down his blue merskin jacket, flushed out his lace cuffs, and straightened his cravat. He took a moment to check his reflection in one of the deep windows of the entranceway.
"Sublime," he murmured.
Tucking his document case under his arm, Thonius clipped up the wide steps and entered the towering north atrium. It was dreadfully warm inside, almost tropical. Well-armed Magistratum guards lingered on the vast marble floorway, and beyond them stood the ornate silver podiums of the public interlocutors. At this late hour, only a few citizens bustled to and fro, most of them lawyers or legal assistants chasing down last minute details before the courts opened the following morning.
"May I be of service, sir?" asked a uniformed docent.
"I don't know." Thonius smiled back. "May you?"
The docent produced a datawand from under his mantle and flipped it on. A hololithic list of headings and sub headings projected up into the air from the wand's tip. "Do you require births? Deaths? Marriages? Lineage? Augment or cloning records? Land rights? Settlements? Copyright manifests? Historical and/or analytical claims? Tithe records? Buskage? Tullage? Vellement? Remallage? Gubernatorial records-"
"Do you have frottage?"
"Uh, I don't believe so, sir."
"Pity. I'll tell you what. What it is, you see, is that I'm actually a student of High Imperial architecture: modern, intuitive, post-modern, quasi-modern, whatever. I'm on sabbatical here on this lovely... and I do mean very, very lovely... world of yours, and I was told to look this place up. Lingstrom, they said, for that is my name, Lingstrom, you really must behold the Informium in Petropolis before you die."
"Are you dying?" the docent mumbled, wide-eyed.
"My dear soul, we're all dying. Each in our own way. I intend my parting to be extravagantly consumptive and melancholic, yet a touch romantic. How ab
out you? By the look of you, I'd say the best you could hope for is a bad step on a wet stairwell. Or maybe a ram shellfish supper. Alone, no doubt."
"S-sir?"
Thonius spread his arms wide and looked up at the vast, frescoed ceiling of the atrium two hundred metres above their heads. "Just look at it. No, look! Really look!"
The docent looked up, and blinked, as if he had never seen the magnificence before.
"Splendid, isn't it?" Thonius said.
"I... I suppose so, sir," the docent replied.
"I'm in the front door." Thonius whispered into his concealed vox-mic. "Get our little friend in position, Patience."
"You know what to do?" Patience Kys asked.
"I think so." Zael replied. She was shooing him along under the walkway canopy towards the Informium's west entrance. Acid rain beat on the tight covers above them. Zael was fidgeting with his right hand.
"Leave it alone."
"It itches really bad," he complained.
"Wait a minute," Kys said, stopping suddenly. "Let me check... No, I don't care. Get on and don't mess this up."
"Stop ragging me. I'll do this."
"You'd better." Kys warned. She fixed the boy with her hard green eyes. "One hair out of place and I'll debone you faster than you can say, Oh, Mr Ravenor, bweh bweh bweh..." Kys mock-sobbed, her knuckles up at her eyes and pulled a stricken face, her lower lip stuck out.
Zael laughed.
She slapped him round the chops.
"What the hell was that for?" Zael asked, his eyes reddening with tears.
"Just getting you into character. Come on."
She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him at a run into the quiet of the west entrance. This was a minor public entrance, just a couple of interlocutor podiums staffed by clerks and a handful of guards.
Kys pulled Zael up to one of the desks and yanked him to attention. From his high silver podium, the clerk peered down. He adjusted his augmetic implants to focus properly.
"What is your business?" he asked.
"I need this one gene-screened," Kys said, indicating Zael.
"And you are?"
"Subsist officer, Formal E department." Kys flashed a leather identity wallet open and shut perfunctorily, just too fast for it actually to be seen. She was wearing a sober, well-tailored grey suit, her hair in a tight coil, and no make-up. Her blunt demeanour and austere look was precisely that of a humourless social welfare agent. "Found this one sleeping rough. Thieving too. We need a screen to establish next of kin and get him assigned."
The clerk looked at Zael. The boy's clothes were worn and frayed, and his face was sullen.
"Very well." The clerk selected some coloured forms from his desk and passed them to her through the grille. "Fill these out. There's a booth over there. Then bring him back for scanning. The fee will be two crowns."
"Thank you." Kys replied. She tucked the forms under her arm and led Zael over to the writing booths.
"We're inside, Carl. Just say the word," she whispered.
Below them, the city whipped by, dark and dotted with lights. The hindwind was fierce. Kara feared for a moment that it would lift their globes right up into the stratosphere.
The vast, illuminated shape of the Informium was coming up. A gigantic rotunda of basalt, its exterior dressed in ashlar and swathed with climbing ivy and tether-weed around its upper levels. It was one of the largest single buildings in the inner Formals, and the depository of all civic documents and records for Eustis Majoris.
"Fourteen seconds!" Kara voxed. "Fifteen. Sixteen. Release!"
Kara hit her harness lock. Let go, her globe shot up at once and was lost in the high altitudes of the storm. She dropped like a rock. There was no time to look around for Nayl. Blackness turned over and under her. The city lights whirled dizzily.
Then the upper parapets of the rotunda were rushing up at her. Kara coiled, and landed with a winding impact on a fringe of stone roofway thick with bushy tetherweed and ivy. The plant growth helped cushion her landing. She rolled hard to rob her body of momentum. Sheen birds, startled by her landing, flocked up into the sky.
Battered by the wind and streaming rain, she got to her feet.
"Kara?" the vox crackled.
"Harlon?"
"Teensy problem."
"Where are you?"
"Somewhere I'd rather not be."
She scrambled to the edge of the stone roof, struggling through the acid-bleached ivy and stiff weed. She peered down. The sheer drop was giddying. The street was a necklace of lights a kilometre below.
Ten metres beneath her, Nayl was hanging over the drop, clinging to the beard of ivy that cascaded down the outer wall.
"You stupid ninker," she said.
"Thanks for that. Uh, help?"
Kara quickly unwound the mono-filament line wrapped around her waist. From below, over the vox, she heard Nayl curse. The bushy vines were weak and sickly from years of acid rain, and they were beginning to tear and snap under his weight.
"Kara?" Carl voxed. "Is everything all right? Are you in position?"
"We're fine. Everything's fine," she heard Nayl vox back. "We'll call you back as soon as we're in place."
"Okay, Thonius out."
"Why did you tell him that?" Kara called down.
"I don't want to mess up his frigging plan, do I? I don't want to let him down. He's trying to prove something to the boss with this operation."
"Harlon, you don't even like Carl. You've never liked him. You-"
"Kara. Baby. Quit it with the mouth and help me, for Throne's sake."
"Okay. Don't move. Don't even breathe."
Standing in the booth, Kys mimed writing with the pen. She'd finished filling out the forms minutes earlier. Now she was just playing for time. She sent a nudge.
+Carl? We're waiting.+
"Keep doing just that. Kara and Nayl are not quite in place."
+Is there a problem, lady?+
Kys stiffened. The telepathic voice wasn't Ravenor, it wasn't any mind-voice she knew. It had come from right beside her.
+Zael? Was that you?+
+Yeah. It was me.+
+I didn't know you could cast. Since when could you cast?+
+I dunno. I just thought out loud and there you were.+
Kys looked at him. After all these months, she still didn't know what to make of the kid. There was something about Zael that worried her, scared her even.
And it took quite a lot to scare Patience Kys.
Wystan Frauka looked up from his data-slate. It was yet another of the tediously bad erotic novels he wiled away his time reading, though he never seemed to derive any titillation from them at all. He took the lho-stick out of his mouth, exhaled, and said, "What's the matter?"
"What do you mean?" I replied, using my chair's voice transponder.
"Something's the matter. I can tell."
"Really? How?" I asked.
"It's the way you always..." his voice trailed off and he shook his head sadly. "You're a floating box. I don't have the first clue. I was trying to be personable. Remember how you said I should improve my people skills?"
"I remember," I said. "Here's a tip. Referring to me as a 'floating box' is not all that personable."
"Right ho," he said.
"However, there is a problem." I admitted. "Carl's in place, so are Kys and Zael. But Kara and Nayl are experiencing difficulties."
"So intervene. Help them," Wystan said.
"Carl's so anxious to run this show and make it work. He wants to prove himself to me. If I intervene, it'll dent his confidence. It'll look like I don't trust his abilities."
"So?"
"So I'm supposed to be training him. Making an inquisitor out of him."
"If he screws up, he screws up this entire operation, right? I thought you told me it was important."
+It is important?+
Wystan stubbed out his lho-stick and immediately lit another. "Hello?"
Som
etimes I forgot that Frauka was deaf to my mind.
"It is important. Very important. I'm impressed, Wystan, I didn't think you were even listening at the briefing."
"You wound me, inquisitor. I listen. Quite often, actually. I just don't care much."
We were holed up together in an empty hab on the sixtieth floor of a stack two kilometres from the Informium. The place was a dank wreck, rain pelting hard against the smeary window. Wystan was sprawled on a sofa that looked as if it had been used as a practice target on an artillery range and then given to hungry rats. He was my untouchable, my psychic blank the real outsider of my team. Most of the time there was very little for him to do, and he sat around with his limiter activated, smoking and speed-reading his dreary pornography.
I cast my psi wide, and summoned a picture of Kara on the roof of the Informium, Nayl hanging from the slowly tearing vines below her.
"You said they were experiencing difficulties," Frauka said.
"Yes."
"What sort of difficulties?" he asked.
"The falling off a tall building to certain death hundreds of metres below kind," I said.
"Bummer," he remarked casually.
"Any time you like." Nayl murmured. The vines were really starting to give way now.
Kara played out the filament line down to Nayl.
"Grab it and hook it up!"
He got hold of the end, swaying out as he did so on the bending boughs. Frantically, he cinched the carabiner to his belt.
She tightened the line and braced her body against the stonework.
"I'm having a sodding ball, you know." Nayl mumbled.
"Try and stay rigid. I'm going to lift you now."
"Rigid. Not a problem."
"Here we go."
It took thirty seconds. Thirty seconds of effort that almost broke Kara's back. Nayl dragged himself up over the lip of the roof.
"Ahem? Are you there yet?" Thonius voxed.
"Two minutes more, Carl. That's a promise." Kara replied.
Kara got Harlon to his feet and together they hurried up the slope of the donjon's domed metal roof towards the branching radiator vanes that rose like a metal forest from the summit of the dome.
