[Ravenor 02] Ravenor Returned - Dan Abnett

by Dan Abnett

  He went under.

  Kys forked her arms and splashed over to him, dragging him up, her flesh tingling from the dilute acid in the water. She towed him over to the nearest mossy brick bulwark and heaved him up onto the platform.

  "Unwerth? Unwerth?" Kys pumped his chest and blew air into his mouth.

  He remained still.

  "Unwerth!" She pounded harder and planted her lips around his, breathing out hard.

  He started, gagging, and she rolled him onto his side. A quantity of river filth drained out of his mouth.

  Coughing, spluttering, he looked up at her.

  "Birds?" he said.

  "Yes, bloody birds!"

  "As I concupise it, most birds can't swim," he said.

  Patience Kys realised what he had done and began to laugh. Her laughter echoed out across the dark caves of the overfloat.

  THREE

  "How's everyone doing?" Belknap asked.

  "Do you have any rubbing alcohol?" Frauka asked him.

  "Why? For the scratch on your head?" Belknap said.

  "No. Just thirsty." Frauka smirked, lighting a lho-stick.

  Belknap had concealed us in a lockup over the street from the den he used as a surgery. It was a poor place, but it was out of the way. Even at this late hour, the noise from the dirty sink-streets outside was loud and raucous. Drunken tavern crowds, what sounded like a gang fight in a nearby alley, a cluster of black market stalls around the oil can fires of the nearest walkthrough.

  Carl limped over to me. He'd bought a hand-vox from one of the black market vendors on the street, and with it he had contacted Kara and Nayl.

  "They're both on their way."

  "What did you tell them?"

  "Only where to come," he said. "Neither have heard from Patience."

  "Get some rest."

  I was waiting near Zael. Belknap had laid the boy down on a ratty cot. Zael's eyes were still open. He had made no sound or motion since I'd found him in Carl's room.

  "Physically he's fine. A few scratches. But he's in a fugue state," the medicae said. "Brought on by severe shock or trauma."

  "Very likely," I said. "Tonight has been... difficult."

  "The best thing is to leave him for a while." Belknap advised.

  I agreed, but in my heart I knew the good doctor was wrong. The best thing, the safest thing, would be to execute Zael Efferneti right now, while he was comatose. There was a high likelihood that Zael had manifested Slyte during the psyker attack, that the warp latency in his mind had been provoked into action by the assault. I'd seen that before: individuals suddenly displaying previously unknown psy powers under extremis. Caught in the teeth of three or four murderous psykers, Zael's fragile sanity had snapped and something else had come out.

  And what a thing. Even newborn, it had destroyed perhaps three of the psykers. It had also, I was quite sure, playfully linked its power to mine and assisted with the destruction of the Brass Thief. That was where my almost mindless rage had come from.

  The Divine Fratery had spent years preparing the way for the daemon Slyte. My master, Eisenhorn, had trekked across the sector to warn me. Slyte was an abominable threat to Imperial security, and I, or one of those about me, would bring it forth.

  I knew I should just kill Zael right then, before he woke.

  But I had good reasons not to. Not just yet. The first, the most human, was that I did not relish murdering a boy in his sleep, especially as I had only circumstantial evidence he was corrupted. There was still a slender chance he was innocent.

  Secondly, I could detect no trace of the warp upon him, except for the foggy latency of his farseeing gift. And that was the third reason. Zael's unformed talent was so rare and so passive. A mirror seer, a reactor. That was precisely why I hadn't executed him or consigned him to the black ships the day I discovered him. His nascent talent was a precious thing, one that could benefit the Imperium of Mankind so very much. And it was not an active talent. It seemed so unlikely that a passive gift could be the womb, the cradle of a manifesting daemon. Such things inevitably came into our world through minds twisted by madness, greed, psychosis, or potent, active psyker power.

  Like mine, for instance.

  With his name, and his odd, disarming manner, and his sometimes doubling gift, Zael Efferneti was so obviously the threat. Too obviously.

  I would stay my hand until I had the opportunity to study him further. If I got that chance. I owed Zael the benefit of the doubt.

  And, of course, there was the fourth reason. If Slyte was lurking beneath the surface of the comatose boy's mind, if Slyte was anything like as powerful as I had been led to believe, putting a weapon to Zael's head would be a very, very bad idea. It might be the hasty action that caused the daemon to manifest permanently.

  For now, Zael slept. And if Slyte was sleeping inside him, then at least Slyte was sleeping.

  "Sir?" It was Carl. "Some good news at last. Nayl just called to say he's been contacted by Patience. She was calling from a public vox in Formal L."

  "Formal L?"

  "There's a story to it, apparently. She's fine, though her powers are temporarily inhibited, which is why you couldn't find her. She's on her way here. Apparently, she's got some important information for us."

  "Enuncia," Patience Kys said.

  There was a moment's pause.

  "Are you sure?" I asked.

  "I followed that bastard Molotch all the way to Zenta Malhyde when he was looking for it. He never told me much or shared any of what he had learned, but I know the taste of it, the smell of it. Trice's Ministry is engaged in the production of a working grammar for Enuncia."

  It was a staggering thought, but it made sense of many things.

  "I believe they're processing, one piece at a time," said Kys, "one morpheme at a time. They're not deciphering it from some archaeological cache or ancient text. They're weaving it from our own, known language bases."

  "You mean randomly?" Thonius asked, doubtful.

  Kys nodded. "Yes. They're taking raw language, raw symbols, alphabet characters, scripts, syllables, numerals, number bases, etymons and word roots, syntax and grammar structures, and they're breaking it right down to the smallest units, to phonemes and morphemes, which they are then systematically recombining at random into every conceivable permutation."

  Nayl sniffed. "Recombining?"

  "In any way they can," Kys said. "Ciphering, deciphering, transliterating, substituting. They're forcing the raw material through patterns of anagram, acrostic, pangram, hell, rhymes for all I know. At the most basic level, they are taking every morpheme and trying it against every other possible combination of morphemes. And every now and then, they get a strike. They get a piece of Enuncia that they can identify and secure into... well, I suppose they are producing some kind of primer program."

  "And like completing a puzzle," I said. "The more pieces they get, the more help it gives them finding the rest."

  "Wait, wait!" said Carl, getting to his feet. "I understand what you're saying, but you're talking about a massive undertaking. Truly massive! Just handling that amount of data and processing it randomly, that would take thousands of years!"

  "But it could be done," I said. "Remember the old joke about giving an infinite number of simians an infinite number of script engines and eventually, probability demands, they would produce the complete works of Vayten?"

  Carl looked at me. "Yeah, and the bit of that to really remember is that it's a joke."

  "Maybe not an infinite number of simians," Kys said. "But how about the entire Administratum of a subsector capital? Millions of scribes using, as far as we know at least five million cogitators brought in from the Mergent Worlds? Sixty main system data looms?"

  "Sixty..." Carl breathed.

  "It suddenly sounds more plausible, doesn't it?" Kys smiled. "And for the most part, those infinite simians have no idea what they're doing. They're just drones, processing what comes in front of them. Oh, every now a
nd then one has a fit because he's accidentally found or created a piece of Enuncia, but the Ministry have supervisors on hand to cover that."

  "Well, I suppose that would explain why the data you fed me made no discernible sense," said Carl, "and then fried my engines. They must be using the imported cogitators because they're polluted. Perhaps more resistant to the material they are handling."

  "Or more sensitive," I said.

  "I have, as it might be, a query."

  We all looked round. Since arriving with Kys, Unwerth had sat in the corner of the chamber, with Belknap cleaning and dressing his miserable injuries. I regretted, yet again, that another individual had suffered because of their association with me.

  "What, beggaring the question," he said, "is this Enuncia? And please, sir, do not obstinate me to be excluding my nasal from your business for the good of my health."

  I winced at that and moved over to face him. "Enuncia is the name ancient scholars gave to a lost, pre-human language, Master Unwerth. Its origins and use may have associations to the warp itself, or to antique super-races that may once have existed in our cosmos. Tiny scraps of it have occasionally been discovered. We don't know how it was created originally, or even used. It's possibly the source of the arts we now understand as 'magic'. Simply put, the language was a tool, an instrument. By the power of words alone, the fabric of reality could be changed, transformed, controlled, manipulated, reshaped. It was a fundamental device of creation."

  "Or destruction." Kys added.

  "That sound you made," Unwerth said to Kys. "In the cell. The one by which manner you discomforted our jailer. That was Enuncia?"

  "A tiny part of it, probably a meaningless unit." Kys replied. "But yes."

  Unwerth thought about that. "I have turned words around in my lifetime, but I have never by wit of them enforced a man to be ill upon the floor."

  "You say that..." Nayl grinned.

  "How did you know it?" Unwerth asked.

  "We've encountered it before," I said. "Some years ago, we were engaged in the pursuit of a heretic called Molotch. His ambition was to recover enough elements of Enuncia from xenoarchaeological sites in the out-worlds to master a rudimentary command of it. Patience actually infiltrated his party for some time, enabling us to track them down and stop them. Molotch was killed."

  "Molotch was Cognitae," said Patience. "Should we be concerned that several figures in this drama have the same connection?"

  "We should bear it in mind," I said. "Either Cognitae agents are making a second attempt to break Enuncia, or this is a direct sequel to Molotch's work."

  "And what will Trice or his occult masters do with Enuncia when they have it?" asked Nayl.

  "I would suppose," I said, "anything they like."

  A buzzer sounded. The outer door. "I'll get it," Frauka said, rising and stubbing out another lho-stick. "Garters and firm, white buttocks."

  Everyone looked at him, even Belknap.

  "Sorry, just reading aloud," said Frauka, putting his data-slate down. "My, the power of words."

  It was Kara, the final member of my team to congregate in the Formal J undersink. She was accompanied by a dark-haired woman with an attractive face that at present looked drawn and tired.

  "This is Maud Plyton," said Kara. "Junior marshal, Magistratum."

  "Department of Special Crime," Plyton said. She was staring at my armoured chair dubiously.

  "Ravenor." I replied. The forward shell of my chair displayed my rosette.

  "Maud may be the only member of her department left alive," Kara said. "Special Crime made a chance discovery a few days ago, a discovery the Ministry has been at such pains to cover up that it has silenced many members of the department. Attempts have been made on Maud's life. Her invalid uncle was murdered in one of them."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "Can you tell me what this discovery was?"

  "Yes." Plyton replied. She had a sheaf of documents under her arm. "It will take a little time to explain. The discovery was made in the old sacristy adjoining the grand templum-"

  "...in Formal A." I finished. "Could it be, by any chance, that's also where the two of you met?"

  Kara shot me a wicked grin. "Zael, huh? How about that?"

  "Kara, Marshal Plyton, I'm keen to hear everything you have to tell me. But first, Kara, I need to talk to you about Zael. And Zeph."

  FOUR

  For Jader Trice, the day of days began early. He had trained his body and mind over the years to require only three or four hours' sleep, but on this auspicious night, he snatched just one frail hour. His hand servants woke him at the third bell, with night still sprawled across the city and dawn another four hours away.

  The servants lit the lamps in his apartments, bathed and dressed him, and brought him his breakfast. As per the instructions he had written himself, the bathing water was without tincture or oils, and the clothes were a simple attire of dark grey. He put on no rings or signets nor marks of wealth or status. The only concession he made was his fine pocket chron. In due course, that would have to be set aside too, but for now he needed to keep a careful record of the passage of time.

  His breakfast eschewed the caffeine, freshly baked sugarbread and conserve he usually favoured. The servants presented him with ripe fruit, ebongrass tea and some wheat biscuits.

  As he ate, half-heartedly, sitting at his bureau and reading the first of the day's despatches brought to him by his seneschal, he realised how utterly despondent he felt. This was a day, a moment, he had been dreaming of for over twenty-five years. He'd been planning for it for the last fifteen, and actively working towards it for the whole of the previous decade.

  Trice prided himself on a precision of labour, on patience, on attention to detail. He hadn't risen to the rank of chief provost without those skills and, fate knew, they were essential for the matter in hand. The first Enunciation. The commencing Rite of Transcendence.

  He had planned every last detail with meticulous care, even down to the weave pattern to be used in the ritual clothing. This wasn't a matter of carefully arranging a private ceremony, like the cabals and séances he and his fellow Cognitae initiates had conducted in their scholam days. This was on a scale unimaginable back then. This was orchestration.

  And now, after all the fastidious preparation, all that planning, all that discipline, he found he was being rushed into it. The Diadochoi's unseemly haste! This was wrong. With the lexicon so close to completion, why were they risking failure by advancing the moment of the first Enunciation so recklessly?

  Trice toyed with the last piece of fruit and considered getting to his feet, climbing up to the Residence, and demanding that the Diadochoi reconsider. Surely he could be made to listen to reason?

  No. Of course not. One did not reason with a man like the Diadochoi. Once the master's mind was decided, nothing would change it. And now, that bastard facilitator, the honey-tongued Culzean, had the Diadochoi's ear, egging him on. Culzean was an expeditor. By the very nature of his profession, he made things happen in the quickest, most direct way. All very clever, Orfeo Culzean, but an Enunciation could not be brought to fruition by following the path of least resistance. It should not be rushed or forced, it should not be expedited. It was far too pure and intricate an event for that.

  Forty-five minutes after Trice had been woken, a colonel of the Eustis Majoris Planetary Defence Force arrived at the governor's palace in a military pinnace, escorted by four lifter gunships. He had come directly from PDF watch command, Station Lupercal, a star fort in geosynchronous orbit above Petropolis. He was attired in full dress uniform and carried a locked despatch box that was chained to his wrist. The secretists accompanied him to the chief provost's chambers.

  Revoke personally led the man in and stood back while the colonel presented himself.

  "At your bidding, my lord," the officer announced, putting the box on the floor, snapping to attention and making the salute of the aquila.

  "The Emperor protects.
" Trice replied, rising to his feet. "Good morning. You have the weather station reports and the global attitude?"

  "Yes, lord. Reports as of midnight, equatorial, with a thirty-six hour plot as commanded. Attitude was calculated by the officers of the watch at Lupercal, Fraylees, Antropy and Kuskin stations, triangulated via astropath through Navy flotillas at Caxton, Lenk, Tancred and Gudrun. The attitude was further confirmed by Adeptus Astrocartographus, at the Deep Relay Discemer at Kobish, the Massive Circular Array at Lockmore Heights and the Kristophe Cartenne Observatory."

  "Margin of error?"

  "Decimal zero zero zero two, sir."

  Trice nodded. The colonel picked up the box, unlocked it with a code and handed the chief provost a small yellow data-tile.

  "Thank you, colonel."

  "Thank you, sir," the colonel saluted, and left the chamber.

  Trice sat back down and slid the tile into the cogitator beside his desk.

  The screen lit and data scrolled down it. It was a projection of Eustis Majoris' precise sidereal alignment: the planet's position in space described as exactly as Imperial science could establish. Trice tracked forward and watched the screen resolve the relative plot developing through the course of thirty-six hours. Then he overlaid the weather mapping and watched it again.

  "Damn," he whispered at last.

  "A problem?" Revoke asked.

  "No," said Trice. "And that's the problem. Positional variance is excellent and the weather suits us too. We've actually chanced upon a tertiary level alignment. A good one, as it happens. Phasic spread is almost secondary in quality. Gods! A week ago, mis data would have suggested an abysmal alignment tonight. But now we factor in the true centre, it's..."

  "Perfect?" Revoke suggested.

  "Perfect happens once every sixteen thousand years, Toros. Extremely fine, once every five hundred. We knew we wouldn't hold out for that degree of alignment. By the old calculations, we estimated we'd get a good around Midwinter. Now, it appears, we have an acceptable tonight. At the eighth hour plus six precisely. What are those odds, do you suppose? It's almost as if he knew."