by Dan Abnett
"Fine words, provost," the guild mistress said as she sat down next to Trice. "You know how to stir an assembly."
"If only you knew." Trice murmured.
"I'm sorry?" she said, leaning forward. "The music is rather loud."
"I said I am gratified, mistress."
Halwah turned to speak with a guild senior who had approached. Trice sat for a moment, toying with his goblet, staring at the dancers, the hurrying servants, the clusters of guests in loose conversation. Jader Trice was a slender, ageless man with a distinguished beard on his chin and long, black hair that he had tied back for the evening. He had unmatched eyes, one sea-blue, the other ember-brown. He wore heavy brocade robes of gold and sarry over a long gown of silver willowthread. His amulet of office hung around his neck on weighty gold links. Sharp-minded, silk-tongued, he was one of the most effective and assured political operators in the Angelus sub. Trice recognised no superior except the lord governor subsector himself, and the ministry he controlled had been established by Barazan when he had come to office in 400.
Trice was a little weary. The day had been long and spoiled by an unexpected turn of events. He also had little relish of functions such as the guild banquet, but these were important people and he wanted to keep them on his side.
+My lord.+
Trice looked up. Right across the busy hall, two hundred metres away, a figure had appeared, and was standing in the grand doorway, half hidden by the ormolu frame.
+I need a word.+
Trice nodded slightly, so only the figure would notice. He rose to his feet.
"Not going, surely? You promised me a spin," Halwah said, turning to look at him. Several guildsmen around them also urged him to stay.
Trice smiled his most winning smile. "Of course not, my friends. But you know my job never stops. Word is, the value of the crown... which we all worship as the true master of mankind, do we not?"
The guilders roared at his joke.
"The value of the crown in the rimward market is still declining. I have to put in a call to the chief treasurer on Caxton before the market closes. Once that onerous duty is done... the chief treasurer does so enjoy the sound of his own voice amplified by astropath..."
More laughter.
"...I will return. Between you and me, honoured friends, it's jitters. Our Lord Barazan came to office three years ago, and the honeymoon period is over. Investors and some trade amalgams in the rim are getting edgy that the liberal reforms our lord promised at inauguration are slow to be fulfilled. What is it I always say?"
"These things take time!" a senior guilder nearby called.
"Precisely, Sire Onriss." Trice smiled as the laughter buffeted once again. "So excuse me while I take a moment to dampen their nerves. You'll appreciate it on the morrow when you slate-read your trading portfolios. As for you, dear Mistress Halwah, I swear on my mother's pristine honour that I will return in no more than fifteen minutes. Then you will experience a volta more sublime than your wildest dreams."
Yet more laughter, led by the exaggeratedly demure Halwah. Trice strode from the table.
Immediately, four waiting house guards from the Gubernatorial Service closed around him: bullish men in dark blue leather and ceramite, visors down, hellguns mag-clamped to their chest plates. As a senior official of the subsector Administratum, Trice enjoyed all the protection benefits of the lord governor himself.
Escorted, he walked down the length of the banquet hall and out into the crystal-lit grand processional. The chatter and music of the feast dimmed behind him.
The figure was waiting for him up ahead beside the door of a privacy suite. Servants dashed past.
"Wait here." Trice ordered his house guard squad, and went into the suite with the waiting figure.
The suite was a series of luxurious meeting rooms, designed to be completely surveillance-opaque, so that the senior ambassadors of the diplomatic department could conduct conversations in the strictest secrecy.
As soon as he was inside, the door closed. Trice felt the vibration hum of audio-bouncers, vox-inhibiters and psy-blunt systems activating and overlapping.
Trice walked over to a gilt cabinet and poured himself a large amasec.
"Anything for you, Toros?"
Toros Revoke shook his head politely. Revoke was wearing a subtle, dark suit, and his hands were gloved. He was as much a part of Trice's protection as the armed house guards waiting outside. But nothing like so official. Toros Revoke was a senior lieutenant of an unofficial body known as the Secretists.
"Well, that's another evening of my life I'm never getting back," Trice said, sipping his amasec and sitting down on an upholstered tub chair. He crossed his legs, folding the heavy gown across his knees for comfort. "They're all idiots, you realise? Every last jack one of them. Fools in love with profit. I could have told them I shat stools of solid gold and they'd have asked me to show them how."
"The public face," Revoke said.
Trice nodded. "The public face. So tell me about your day. Tell me something to make me happy."
"Well..."
"You've got bad news, haven't you, Toros?"
"Not at all. Curious news, perhaps. I'll start with the good. Nine more private masses went ahead tonight, all as decreed, all in temples along the defined axes."
"I heard there was trouble the other night. Where was it?"
"The chapel at Rudiment and Pass-on-over. The usual story. A poor nobody who shouldn't have been there wandered in on the service."
"Did he see anything?" Trice asked, swirling the dark liquor in his glass.
"Oh, plenty. Fortunately, I was there to secret the mass. I'd brought along Monicker and Drax too."
"How is Monicker? Still not sure who she is?"
"She's a dissembler. It goes with the territory. We turfed the man out, and saw to him."
"Cleanly?"
"The Unkindness stripped him bare."
Trice smiled. "I do so love it when this city looks after its own secrets."
Revoke crossed the room and sat down in a plush seat opposite Trice. "I understand today has been eventful. I heard about the business at the sacristy. Do you need my people to cover that?"
Trice shook his head. "No, it's in hand. Could be a blessing, actually. It may transpire that we've been mislocating the true centre all this time. There is a secrecy issue. Some strand of the Magistratum has got it already. But I've put wheels in motion. So now, this curious news of yours?"
"Akunin wants an audience with you. Pretty much demands it."
Trice lit a lho-stick from the casket on the table beside his chair. "Shipmaster Akunin knows it doesn't work that way. No direct contact between me and the contractees."
"Even so..."
"Even so, screw him. What does he want to see me about?"
Revoke leaned forward. "Earlier tonight, a premises ran by the cartel's chosen banker was raided. Burned down. A lot of deaths."
"Then the cartel's a fool for using a financier who ran so close to the wind. Tchaikov was black market. She had any number of enemies. It's not our concern where they stash the money we pay them. Die too, did she?"
Revoke nodded. "It appears so. I have my team sifting the wreckage right now. A gang dispute, I think. One of her rivals in the underworld."
"So... why is Akunin asking for me?"
"He thinks it's more than that. He believes it could be the work of someone who is trying to break our programme open."
Trice frowned. He set his glass down and took a long draw from the smouldering lho-stick. "Is that possible?"
"I don't believe so." Revoke replied. "There was one potential troublemaker, but you sent him to his doom yourself."
"I did. Tell Akunin to get over it and use a more reliable money-launderer. But keep an eye on what you turn up. I don't want us to be caught out. Was that all?"
Revoke rose. "Yes, lord. Thank you."
Trice stubbed out his stick. Thank you. "Back to the party, I suppose."
Revoke held the door open for his master, and Trice stepped out of the suite. The waiting Gubernatorial servicemen closed around the first provost to lead him back down the processional to the banquet hall.
An eight-metre square skylight above them exploded in a blizzard of glass debris. Looking up in the storm of falling shards, reaching for their weapons, the servicemen got one brief glimpse of the attacker.
The paired rhyming swords took off two heads and ripped open the torsos of the other two.
Jader Trice turned as the Brass Thief landed behind him. Glass fragments were raining down from the window, and the ripped bodies of the four servicemen were still falling, blood sheeting from their awful wounds.
Crested helm bowed, its arms like gold-sleeved pistons, the Brass Thief struck its rhyming swords at Jader Trice.
Trice gawped in dread as the razor-edged blades swung at him simultaneously. But he was a quick-witted man. He had already activated the displacer field built into his amulet of office.
Jader Trice vanished in an oily smudge of air, and reappeared ten metres away down the processional. The incunabula's blades sliced through empty space.
It paused, lifting its golden, crested helm, reacquired its quarry, and bounded forward.
Alarms were suddenly ringing. Half a dozen armed Magistratum officers spilled out into the long hallway and found themselves between the chief provost and the golden daemon.
The incunabula didn't break stride. It had ploughed through them before they had even realised what was going on. Two more armoured heads were carved in half, then the daemon speared its blades into two chests, somersaulted, and brought the rhyming swords down in scything strokes that cleft the last two from their shoulders to their navels. One of the final pair opened fire, but it was just a nerve spasm. Hellgun shots whickered up the processional wall as the man collapsed.
"Avaunt thee!" Trice yelled at the oncoming monster, his hands forming a hexagrammic sign in its face.
The incunabula recoiled for a moment, then spun its blades and pounced at the chief provost.
Auto-fire of tremendous force blew it out of the air before it could reach him. It crashed sideways into the wall, crazed the stone facing, and hit the ground.
Before it could rise, a second blaze of auto-fire smacked into it, tumbling it away across the marble floor. By now, the music in the hall had broken off and hundreds of voices were rising in loud panic.
Toros Revoke strode towards the crumbled incunabula, keeping the hellgun he had snatched from one of the butchered house guards raised and aimed. It wasn't dead. He could see that. It had soaked up a lot of punishment, but still it wasn't dead. Revoke started firing again, ripping the creature backwards.
Then the powerclip was out, the weapon dead, and the Brass Thief was surging up at him, renewed, blades whirring. The first chop sheared the hellgun in half.
Revoke flicked aside like a dancer, turning a one-handed spring that took him clear. The Thief jerked its golden head round, cocked on one side, as if curious. It swung murderously for Revoke again, and again he evaded, this time with a rapid backwards handspring.
The Brass Thief made an odd, pulsing sound. It was laughing in delight to have found an opponent who could even begin to trouble it.
It engaged Revoke again. This time there was no holding back. The dark-suited man and the golden daemon turned and spun and dodged and struck and ducked and blocked, inhuman blurs, faster than the eye could follow.
Saul Keener shuddered slightly and groaned. The sound was disturbingly loud in the close silence of the lighthouse basement.
"What's the matter with him?" Leyla Slade asked.
Orfeo Culzean didn't reply. The lights of the fraters' intently staring eyes filled the darkness around them.
"Saul?" Culzean said softly. "Let me look." He reached out his own right hand and touched its fingertips to the trigger orb. He pursed his lips as he began to share the psy-cast images.
"I see the Thief," he said. "It's found Trice. I see the chief provost, fleeing down a great hallway. But there's someone in the way. A man. He's preventing the Thief from reaching Trice."
"How?" Leyla Slade asked.
"He..." Culzean began, uncertainly. "He is fighting with it. He seems to be unarmed, but he has closed with it. He... Oh, so fast! He's matching it move for move, reading every cut it tries to make, evading. The speed, the skill is... phenomenal."
"No one can do that," said Leyla Slade. "Not against the incunabula. It's not possible."
"It seems it is. I'm seeing it," said Culzean. "I knew Trice would employ seriously capable protectors, but this a revelation. The movements are so fluid, so fast, I can scarcely track them. But it won't last."
"You're sure?" asked the magus-clancular.
"The Thief never tires. The man will. And he is, as I said, unarmed. All he can do is protect himself."
Instinct told Revoke he was just two, maybe three, strokes from running out of luck. He couldn't sustain this pace of combat much more than a few seconds longer. He sidestepped the Thief and yelled an un-word in desperation.
The force of the un-word smashed the incunabula back fifty metres. It hit the processional's side wall, cratering it, and fell to the floor.
"What... what was that?" Saul Keener gasped.
"I don't know." Culzean snapped. "Hold your concentration, damn it!"
Revoke sprinted down the hall and caught up with Trice. He started to hurry his master towards the nearest exit. "Securitas!" he yelled into his vox. "Securitas to the main processional! Code black!"
"What was it?" Trice asked, his eyes wide with shock.
"Not was, is. Still. Come on!" Almost dragging Trice, Revoke reached the stairwell that led down to the palace's wide courtyard. Behind him, the incunabula stirred and got up. It flew after its prey, down the hall, down the staircase, into the courtyard.
And halted. The raised weapons of sixty palace troopers faced it.
The men opened fire.
The vast barrage blew the stone doorway apart, shattered the lintel and punched deep shot-craters in the stones of the wall. The night lit up with a dazzling storm of energy bolts.
The incunabula came out of that fire, las-rounds bouncing like raindrops off the primaevally-forged metal of its sheathing armour. The rhyming swords glowed red with heat as they swung.
A guard lost his face in a burst of blood. Another went over, headless. A third staggered back, missing his left arm; a fourth was savagely deprived of most of his rifle and both the hands that had been clutching it. Still the shots rained as the Brass Thief hacked into their ranks. Two men toppled slackly, their waists clean-severed. A decapitation. A trooper fell to his knees, trying to hold his stomach in. Another fell on his back, his sternum snapped through. The troopers kept shooting, though they were now backing away, splashing through the pooling blood that was starting to cover the flagstones. An arm was struck off, a leg at the knee. A man flew backwards through the air, cut in two, and crunched down onto the roof of a parked transport, bursting out the windows. A trooper sank onto his side, clutching his visor. Another dragged himself across the slippery paving, trying to find his legs.
There was an especially vivid flash of light. A specialist trooper team hefting a plasma cannon had begun to open fire. The Brass Thief lurched as it was hit, turned, and threw one of its rhyming swords at the weapon-team.
Tip-first, the whistling blade tore through the plasma weapon's breach and impaled the chief operator. Its power-pod ruptured, the plasma cannon exploded, incinerating the entire team in a boiling cloud of violet energy. The Shockwave felled another dozen men nearby. A fragment of razor-sharp debris from the cannon's focus ring zinged out and sliced through the neck of a guard officer.
Culzean smiled. "Oh, tell him to bring that, Saul. For my collection."
The remaining troopers had broken in terror and were running for their lives. The blazing wreck of the exploded cannon formed a white-hot pyre at the heart of the co
urtyard, the leaping flames reflected in the oil-dark lake of blood. Bodies and body parts lay everywhere. Nearly forty men of the palace elite, butchered.
The Brass Thief stepped forward, the firelight glinting off its blood-flecked armour. It bent down and picked up the piece of focus ring and hooked it around its belt. Then it held out its empty hand and the rhyming sword it had thrown flew back into its grasp, plucked from the burning corpse.
On the far side of the courtyard, Revoke pushed Trice behind him, and turned to face the oncoming spectre of destruction.
"Toros, old friend," Trice said. "Please, don't let it get me."
Revoke tried to reply, but his mouth was bleeding from the un-word he had used to knock the daemon down in the processional. That had been the only thing that had worked.
Though it hurt and tore his throat, Revoke howled another un-word. The advancing incunabula rocked back as if it had been hit in the chest by a tank round.
Revoke could smell psychic powers suddenly. The trace had probably been there all along, but he'd been too busy to taste it. He reached out with his telepathy, not at the approaching daemon - that would have been futile - but at the distant mind that guided it.
"Toros!" Jader Trice cried out. The Brass Thief was powering forward. Two more un-words, agonisingly voiced, slapped it back. Revoke's real counterattack was somewhere else. As he shouted the monster down, his mind was soaring elsewhere, into the dark, into the depths of the city.
There. There. There! Some twitching lunk called Keener.
"Saul?" Culzean said.
"Mhhh..." Keener replied.
"Saul, disengage now. Right now."
Orfeo Culzean tore his hand away from the orb to break contact. He had felt what was coming. A vengeful telepathic fury of hideous force struck Saul Keener like a hammer blow. He stroked out at once, his brain pulped. His eyes burst into flames.
With a violent, twitching fit, he toppled over, dead.
Loosed, unguided suddenly, the incunabula staggered, off-balance. It glared around the courtyard for a moment, the firelight dancing off its crested mask.
