by Dan Abnett
‘He slowly, hungrily, licked the juice off her ample–’ she read out. She switched the data-slate off and hurled it at the ward room wall. It broke and fell in pieces.
She rose and then sat down again. She’d seen something on the floor beside the bedside cabinet. She reached down with her mind and picked it up. It hovered in front of her face.
It was Frauka’s autopistol.
Kys took hold of it with her hand and thumbed out the clip. Full.
She looked down at the floor again. It was littered with blood-soaked swabs.
‘Oh, you stupid, stupid bastard,’ she said.
The Arethusa’s bridge was as empty as everything else on the ship. She walked in, Frauka’s pistol in one hand, the fire axe in the other.
The viewers and repeater screens flicked and scrolled mindlessly. Auto-systems chattered on and off like muffled gunfire.
‘Hello?’ she called out, hoping for an answer and no answer at the same time.
Kys sat down in the master’s chair, put down her pistol and her axe, and began tapping the keys of the main station board.
Gudrun, the screen told her. They were at high anchor above Gudrun, in the Helican sub. The ship had been set to dormancy. She punched some keys and corrected that. Cool air began to hiss through the air-scrubbers. She heard the power plant wake up.
She heard distant sobbing too, but she ignored it.
Replay recent log, she typed.
The console blinked and replied Void.
She repeated her command.
Void.
She was about to type again when she heard a tiny sound. It came from behind her, in the companionway leading up into the bridge. Kys picked up the autopistol, and slid down behind the master’s chair, aiming the weapon. She picked the axe up too, with her telekinesis, and lifted it into the ceiling above, just under the roof stanchions. It began to spin, chopping around like a murderous propeller.
She heard another sound, a footstep. Someone stepped onto the bridge.
Her index finger pulled at the trigger.
Sholto Unwerth peered at her. ‘Hello?’ he said.
Kys rammed the pistol down, so that it fired into the thick deck.
‘Sorry, sorry!’ she exclaimed.
He blinked at her, baffled, flinching from the retort of the shot. She dropped the gun and ran to him, hugged him tightly, and kissed him.
‘I’m very glad to see you,’ she exclaimed.
He stared back at her, lips slightly parted in surprise as hers pulled away. She let him go. She coughed and brushed the front of his jacket as if to smooth it.
‘Master Unwerth.’
‘Patience.’
‘It’s really good to see you again. I thought I was alone up here.’
‘You kissed me.’ He frowned.
‘Yes, I did. I did kiss you. Sorry.’
‘Do not be apoplectic. It was... it was unexpectorant.’
‘Well, forgive me. I’m just happy to see a friendly face.’
‘Me also,’ he said. He smiled, and then cringed as the fire axe fell out of the roof onto the deck. She’d forgotten it and let it go.
‘What, maychance, was that?’
‘Insurance,’ she smiled. ‘Are you alone?’
‘Indeed, no,’ Unwerth said. He gestured to the men behind him. Fyflank emerged into the light of the bridge, followed by Onofrio, the head cook, and Saintout, the tertiary helmsman.
‘We four are all that’s left,’ said Unwerth. ‘Following the mutiny all such.’
Fyflank grumbled his disgust.
‘Mutiny?’ Kys asked.
‘Mutiny, indeed,’ said Unwerth. ‘My crew was stricken by a mutational urge. Just after we made arrival. Just after Master Thonius took them down.’
‘Who?’
‘Mam Plyton, Masters Ballack and Belknap, and himself.’
‘Down?’
‘In a lander, number one lander, to the surface.’
‘What happened here, Sholto?’ Kys asked.
He shrugged. ‘Screaming and crying,’ he said.
‘And howling,’ added Saintout behind him.
‘Yes, and that. My poor ship went mad. Oh, the screaming and the howling! Oh, the upsetment! Boguin led the mutiny–’
‘I never liked him much,’ put in Onofrio.
‘Me neither,’ said Saintout.
‘It was Boguin’s doing,’ said Unwerth. ‘He was enspooked. When the howling started, he gripped the crew with all forcefulness. They had guns. They debarked on the second lander.’
‘Thonius had already taken the first?’ Kys nodded. ‘Sholto, where did the howling come from?’
Unwerth shrugged.
‘Where is Frauka? Where is Zael?’
‘I have no idea,’ he replied, timid and worried.
‘Sholto, we’re in trouble,’ said Kys.
Fyflank nudged Unwerth. The little shipmaster ran to his command console and adjusted some dials. Several warning lights had started to flash.
‘What?’ asked Kys, coming over.
‘Something is extruding,’ Unwerth said.
‘Extruding?’ Kys replied.
‘A ship,’ said Unwerth. ‘Bearing in towards us.’
Kys looked at the flaring screen. It was a mess of complex graphics, with little clarity.
‘Are you certain?’ Kys asked. ‘It could just be an imaging artefact.’
Unwerth fine-tuned the scanners, and the display cleaned up. The track became very legible. Plotting data overwrote the curving trajectory marker, showing comparative speed, position and size. The approaching ship was decelerating from an immaterium exit point nine astronomical units out. It seemed twice the size of the Arethusa.
‘Pict feed?’ she asked. ‘Can we get a visual with the stern array?’
He stabbed at some of the controls. On a secondary imaging plate, a ghost image appeared, a fog of green and amber pixilation. The screen image jumped and panned as the pict array grabbed focus and range.
They could see it. A long way off, and small but, to Patience Kys, unmistakable.
‘Oh Throne,’ Kys gasped. ‘That’s the Hinterlight.’
The vox bank lit up behind Unwerth. ‘Hailing signal,’ he said, ‘pict and voice in simulation.’
‘Take it,’ said Kys.
Unwerth nodded to Saintout, who hurried to the comm station and woke the vox bank. The main screen blinked twice and then lit up.
The distorted, blinking view of a woman’s face appeared, peering at them.
‘Hello, Arethusa? Hello, Arethusa?’ The words came through a yowl of white noise.
Kys lifted the vox mic on its heavy cable. ‘Hello, Hinterlight, hello. Mistress Cynia, is that you?’
The fuzzy visual frowned at them. ‘Confirmed. Who am I speaking to? Is that you, Kara?’ More white noise squalled.
‘No, it’s me,’ Kys called into the mic. ‘It’s Patience.’
‘It’s Patience,’ the blur on the viewer said to someone off screen. There was yet more crackle and fuzz. ‘Get me a clean link, Halstrom, for Throne’s sake,’ they heard her say.
The viewer image suddenly sharpened. Kys looked up at the unsmiling, troubled features of Cynia Preest, mistress of the Hinterlight.
‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ said Kys, aware she had tears in her eyes.
‘I imagine you’re surprised to see me,’ said Preest over the speakers. ‘Believe me, you’re not half as surprised as I was a week ago.’
‘What?’ asked Kys.
The image of Preest jumped and fluttered. She glanced sidelong at someone off view and stepped back. A figure moved into her place and looked into the picter with a half-smile.
It was Harlon Nayl.
Two
There was a storm coming.
Leyla Slade could hear the brewing grumble of thunder rolling down from the hog’s back of dark mountains above Elmingard. The fulminous sky, and the increase in negative ions, made her scratchy and irritable.
It was late afternoon. She stood on the dry, bare stone of the high terrace, and looked down the crag. Elmingard occupied the crown of a buttress of old, black rock, which dropped away, sheer in places, about a thousand metres to the valley below. Down there, only a few kilometres away, there was sunlight and arable land, low hills skirted by woodland, post-harvest fields full of dry straw, the rural belt of southern Sarre, where the headwaters of the Pellitor sprang, about as comfortable and pastoral a tract of land as you could find on any old Imperial world.
Things turned darker and wilder, however, when you reached the abrupt feet of the Kell Mountains. Smaller, surly, westerly cousins to the mighty Atenates that dominated the continental heartland, they rose like a mistake from the undulating countryside of Sarre. Storms fretted around them all year long, as if their thorny backs snagged the passing weather and detained it until it became annoyed. Mists filled the abyssal gorges and steep ravines like uncombed wool. Often, the cloud and haze descended so deeply that the entire range was lost from sight. One could stand in a cornfield ten kilometres away and not know there were mountains there at all.
It was not Leyla Slade’s favourite place in the galaxy. Elmingard had been built as a monastic retreat seventeen hundred years earlier, during a period of plague and schismatic war that had marred Gudrun’s history. Subsequently, it had been derelict, and then the home of a feral astronomer. For many years after that it had been the impractical country seat of wealthy Sarrean viticulturists who cultivated vast vineyards in the peaceful country below.
They had died out and departed, defeated by the lonely eminence, and Elmingard had fallen back into disuse, scavenged by the weather.
Orfeo Culzean had purchased it through a chain of faceless middlemen twenty years before. He’d had extensive work done to restore and develop the rambling property, but Leyla still had little love for the place. It had been too many things in its bleak lifetime, and the result was a schizophrenic knot of identities. It was too large, too jumbled, too muddled. The long, austere sections of monastic origin were cold and damp, sagging under patches of sloped grey tile roof that looked like snakeskin. The viticulturists’ contributions consisted of dirty, white-stone halls grafted in between the monastic wings, halls that interlocked oddly and had too many storeys. There were stairs and abutting terraces everywhere. The astronomer, in a characteristic act of whimsy, had raised a crude tower of black stone at the north end of the crag, perhaps as an observatory platform. Its construction was not especially sound, and it had become a leaning ruin, but it had never been demolished. Culzean believed it lent Elmingard an ‘alchemical charm’.
Slade walked back along the high terrace, under the shadow of the astronomer’s tower. Roosting birds clacked and cawed like lost souls. Thick beards of ivy and asterolia covered the face of the grey walls below her.
Culzean and Molotch were arguing in the solar. She could hear their voices. Another storm brewing. They had been arguing for several weeks. Culzean described it to her as ‘debate’, but she’d seen the growing resentment in the eyes of both men. The essential nature of the ‘debate’, as far as she understood it, was to agree upon the scheme they would undertake together.
There was the recurring question of Slyte. Since Culzean had first posited the notion of Molotch’s relationship with Slyte – and Ravenor – Molotch had become increasingly obsessed and distracted. He was starting to exhibit what Slade believed was paranoia, pure and simple. He had been gravely disappointed to learn that Ravenor had bluntly rejected Culzean’s proposal, as if he had actually been expecting a positive response. He stayed up late into the night, in his room in the dormitory wing, filling up notebooks with rapid, almost feverish penmanship, consulting the library of books and manuscripts that Culzean had imported.
A vast number of books, manuscripts and other esoteric objects filled the rooms and corridors of Elmingard, many of them still in shipping cases, waiting to be unpacked. Culzean had sent for them when he had decided on the place as his latest bolthole, and they had arrived by freight shipment from storage deposits, bank vaults and discreet caches all over the sector. Culzean was a collector of many things, and he magpied away his lifetime’s accumulation of arcane ephemera in a thousand separate hiding places for later retrieval.
Only the most valuable items came with him on his travels. Certain potent devices, his ‘shining weapons of destiny’, certain books of special provenance, certain charts and grimoires. He always carried his small but priceless library of anthropodermic bibliopegy – the life stories of significant saints, savants, murderers and heretics bound in the skins of the men themselves, and his collection of deodands. The desperate nature of their flight from Eustis Majoris had forced him to leave his precious deodands in Petropolis, a fact that he still complained about. He had arranged for their private recovery, again through an untraceable chain of anonymous intermediaries, but the caution he had to exercise to procure them meant he probably wouldn’t be reunited with the collection for several years.
Slade walked to the solar and peered in through the half-open door. Molotch and Culzean were conversing with some vehemence. For the third day running, the talk had turned to the feasibility of constructing new gnosis engines for a return to Sleef. When Slade had first heard them mentioned, she had questioned Culzean about them privately.
‘Sleef Outworld, Ley,’ he had said. ‘Dirty little mudball, far away from all things good, out in the skirts of Callixes sector.’
‘Have you been there?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘but I’ve studied various reports. Molotch has been there. It was where Ravenor killed him the first time.’
Leyla Slade had looked at Culzean, puzzled. Culzean had snorted, as if he’d made a fabulous joke. ‘I don’t understand. What’s so wonderful about this place?’
‘There are vents there, Leyla, volcanic vents. They have a special quality. The skin of reality is thin there, Leyla. One can hear the vibration of the Immaterium, just out of reach. The vents speak.’
‘They speak, do they?’
‘They do. Voices from the warp, mumbling fragments from the daemonverse. With the correct equipment – in this case a very curious and expensive device called a gnosis engine – the voices can be collected and stored.’
‘For analysis?’
‘Yes, and as a source of infernal power.’
Culzean had then rambled on at length, his terminology becoming more and more technical and arcane, until Leyla was lost. She knew he knew she hadn’t the slightest hope of understanding the workings of the gnosis engine, but he insisted on explaining it. He had even drawn a little sketch for her.
Then he had told her about Ravenor. Molotch had been on Sleef Outworld with several gnosis engines built by the Cognitae, and the Inquisition had arrived to destroy the project. Molotch and Ravenor had battled – they hadn’t even known who each other was – and Molotch had escaped with his life, just.
He had jumped, or fallen, into a vent. A teleport had saved him, but not before he had been caught in an upblast of venting fire. He had been scorched by daemonic energy, injuries that took him a long time to recover from.
Culzean told her he believed that was the moment when Ravenor and Molotch had their destinies linked and placed in the hands of the Ruinous Powers. Through the vents, the warp had scented them, tasted them, acquired them. The Ruinous Powers had enigmatic plans, plans too long, too involved, and too abstruse for any mortal mind to comprehend. But the powers could see that, before their brief lives ended, Ravenor and Molotch would perform a great service for them.
‘And this service is Slyte?’ she had asked.
‘This service is Slyte, yes,’ he had replied.
Leyla stepped back from the solar door. From what she could hear, Molotch and her master had managed to disagree on the precise configuration of a gnosis engine, and what alloy best served as an inner lining. There was talk of engaging private fabricators, possibly from Caxton or Sarum, at great expense,
and a discussion of how the engine would be shipped.
The only thing they seemed to agree on was that the vents of Sleef Outworld might be a conduit through which they could learn pertinent and valuable information about the mysterious Slyte.
Her ear tag pinged, and she left the solar, coming out of the building across a small, walled courtyard, before running up the steps into the central block of the house sprawl.
Thunder grumbled in the sky behind her, and a breeze had picked up, nodding the tight buds of the arid roses that grew in the courtyard. The sky itself, bright yellow in the east, had bruised black with a thunderhead in the west, as if night and day were co-existing in the same sky.
She reached the security control centre. Like many rooms in Elmingard, its crumbling exterior of flaked plaster and patchy stone belied an extensive modern interior. The walls had been panelled with brushed steel plates, and a grilled deck allowed an under floor gap for power cables and data trunking. There were six cogitator desks arranged in a star pattern, all facing into the centre. The machines clacked and hummed, their valve tubes glowing, and their imaging plates rippling with green sine waves. In the centre of the circle, in the heart of the star, was a large, three-sixty degree hololithic display. Each cogitator desk had a vox assembly bolted on to it, linked under the floor to a bulky, high gain voxcaster in the corner of the room. Extractor fans in the ceiling kept the accumulation of machine heat in the room to a minimum.
Drouet and Tzabo, two members of Culzean’s hired, immaculately vetted staff were on duty. They wore plain suits of navy blue wool with neat silver buttons.
‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘Incoming transport, mam,’ said Drouet.
‘Origin?’
‘The landing fields at Dorsay. It’s broadcasting the correct code fields.’
‘How far out is it?’ Slade asked.
‘Six minutes, mam,’ said Tzabo.
‘Ask for the final handshake code, and direct it to the landing. I’ll be there to meet it.’
The two men nodded, and turned back to their cogitators.
Leyla Slade hurried out of the security room, back out across the courtyard, and began to descend through the rambling labyrinth of Elmingard via terraces, stone staircases, and twisting steps. As she strode along, she opened her link.
