by Ian Watson
He heard the city’s limbs, sucking and gliding hydraulically. And the mid-distant signature of boltgun fire. First came the popping ejaculation of the bolt. Then a flaring swish as its propellant ignited, accelerating it helter-skelter accumulating redoubtable kinetic energy. As double finale, the thud of piercing impact followed a fraction of a second later by the blast of detonation…
A hissing swish was also evident, and intensifying, a sly hissing scherzando.
Ssssag-ram-ossso! Ssssag-ram-ossso! the sound seemed to say.
Up a nearby spiralling ramp, up from that funereal glassy whirlpool, skaters were speeding, sable silks fluttering like sails, shuriken catapults outstretched bowsprit-fashion.
“Shurikens,” warned Akbar.
“So I can see.” Yeremi had already recognised those still-distant weapons because of the magnetic vortex fins sweeping back from the muzzles, like twin wings tipped with engine pods, and the flat round top-mounted magazines.
At sight of those silken black figures rushing their way, d’Arquebus jerked forward as though mesmerised.
“Lordly Phantasms!” he cried out. “Raphaelo Florienborque!”
Kik! Kik! Kik! said the tower beside them as a spray of accelerated star discs impacted overhead. Most stars ricocheted wildly. Others actually sliced into the vitrodur with their monomolecular edges and lodged there like so many tiny pitons hammered into a precipice – an irregular, minimal ladder of discs, a coinage with the face-value of death, leading back skyward.
Were their assailants aiming to kill? Or were they a security squad determined to drive some supposed gawping cluster of citizenry below, unsure as yet in the darkness of their rank or affiliation?
Or were they more intent on capture and rapid interrogation? Those shuriken stars could slice through armour and carapace and bone and might cripple Scouts yet would not inevitably kill a superhuman body.
More skaters were emerging, with graceful pumping scything thrusts of their legs. Were their boots equipped with tiny wheels, ball bearings, blades?
“Lordly Phantasms!” cried d’Arquebus into the night, as though in torment, vexed by spooks. He started forward.
As Akbar and Tundrish opened fire with bolts, Yeremi lunged to drag the impetuous, or hallucinating, fool back.
D’Arquebus evaded Yeremi’s grasp and raced aslant of the line of fire, right out in the open, seemingly intent on matching the speed of the skaters. Now that they had emerged, they did not continue headlong towards the Scouts. Swiftly the skaters circled and arced and sashayed, firing their sprays of lethal stars.
D’Arquebus mimicked their motion mockingly. He too arced and raced in ellipses. Perhaps thus to confuse the skaters – was this sprinter really one of them, even in his silkless, padded garb?
Or magically to copy the essence of their being and so to own them within himself? To own, and consume, digest and destroy.
Or was he inviting injury, to prove that he could fight, even filleted by shurikens?
Crouching, Yeremi contented himself with firing his bolt pistol at the athletically shifting targets. The pistol hardly jerked at all as each bolt ejaculated before incandescing and zipping away. Yet only by luck did he hit one of the skaters – who was blasted apart. His silk ballooned, ripping into shreds. His flesh and bone opened up like a bud deploying a blood-red, white-stamened flower from which the petals almost instantly fell. Other bolts raced away into the night or else caromed off vitrodur surfaces.
D’Arquebus ice-danced on the roadway, spiralling, looping, serpentining. Somehow he had captured that foreign poise, for when he did fire his weapon…
Sergeant Juron had entrusted d’Arquebus with a heavy bolter that could loose a single hellfire shell as well as ordinary explosive bolts.
D’Arquebus did just that – exactly prior to the moment when, quite unexpectedly to Yeremi, perhaps even to those parabolically criss-crossing skaters themselves, they configured close to one another like planets swooping into conjunction.
Had d’Arquebus’ dance in some fashion drawn them together unwittingly as they concentrated on him, on his bizarre behaviour?
The shell only needed to hit one of the skaters – though it did indeed need to strike a target and not be wasted, as might easily be the case when fired seemingly without aiming. That weapon could certainly continue to fire ordinary bolts yet not a second hellfire shell without a perilous pause for reloading…
Time seemed to halt for Yeremi as he saw d’Arquebus squeeze the trigger, and was sure that d’Arquebus was squandering that single shell, shooting his hellfire bolt off prematurely.
It was an ancient, historic weapon that d’Arquebus had been privileged to handle. Generations of artificers had lovingly serviced and adorned the gun; and Yeremi had felt bitten by envy. Gilded panels of religious inscriptions enchased the foregrip. Strips of engraved antler from some rare combative rutting beast inlaid the casing, and mother-of-pearl the trigger guard.
Surely an ex-tech should tote such a fine tool! A tech possessing almost genetic rapport with antique devices which might jam or fracture. A tech knew the appropriate litanies to mutter.
However, it had been d’Arquebus who returned along that terrifying, tormenting tunnel… had it not?
The crystal missile impacted in a skater’s chest, and erupted. Needles of razor-shrapnel sped outward. Fierce acids and neurotoxins engulfed almost all of the skaters in a caustic, nerve-convulsing fog.
Their silks and skin dissolved as if gobbled by a cloud of ravenous moths. The skaters skidded outward, their muscles convulsing. They were crashing, tumbling, writhing every which way.
Yeremi, Tundrish, and Akbar shot down others who had survived the crystal slivers and the death cloud but who had slowed in apparent shock.
D’Arquebus simply stood motionless, his zany rush abruptly halted. How nonchalantly he posed, letting his menials deal with the remaining, no longer so elegant riff-raff.
“You were rash!” Yeremi called out to him. “You were lucky.”
“I was blessed,” replied d’Arquebus airily; and he laughed.
Yeremi glanced at the Sergeant in case he might chastise d’Arquebus. However, Zed Juron simply nodded approvingly.
The route down that petrified whirlpool into the entrails of Sagramoso City invited them.
“It’s skraggin’ time,” whooped Tundrish.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BIFF REJOICED. THE spider on his face smiled. Grinning, he showed the mandibles of his filed teeth, and sucked saliva to and fro through his pointed ivories.
The skraggin’ o’ the city was goin’ good, from his point-a-view.
In swank-zones, you wouldn’t exakly a thunk there was a war goin’ on – not till the Scouts arrived…
I mustn’t slump into scum lingua just ’cos I’m excited, Biff told himself. Because I’m excited, he corrected mentally. For one thing, that was unworthy of Rogal Dorn, warrior and courtier. For another, it was unworthy of the transformed person Biff had become. For a third, d’Arquebus would look down that slim, ruby-ringed nose of his.
Valence might enjoy a squirm of… masochism, on account of d’Arquebus. The ex-tech might relish enduring the pain of minor humiliations, as though the flaw in his gene-seed had found a convenient outlet in that regard. But not Biff Tundrish, Biff was rather a basic name, wasn’t it? Biff himself wasn’t basic; never had been, not even down in the depth of ignorance that had been the undercity of Trazior. Tundrish sounded like a heap of turds. Biff Tundrish was someone who bashes piles of turds. Which suited okay for scavvies who grazed on a hive’s garbage, who supped on its polluted excretions – and skragged each other for the chance to do so.
There was magic in a name. Prayer-words made machines work, that was a fact. So was he a captive of his name – as d’Arquebus might well be of his?
No. Never.
You gave me your sludge, Universe, he told the cosmos, and I’m turning it into gold.
And other bits of you into deb
ris, he added with a feral grin.
Those skragged bits were the sacrifices to his personal god of Transformation. Nothing high-falutin’ about this, nothing d’Arquebus-like. Still, Biff sensed the imminence of a pattern, which one day he would fully perceive. He would discover a web, a network of creation and destruction, which the spider on his face would recognise, and know how to navigate – to arrive at what? At personal gold, at himself thoroughly transmuted – by way of the furnaces of pious warfare.
Then the name Biff would mean something really special. Someone would carve it on an adamantium monument.
SEVERAL CITY LEVELS above, it would be mid-afternoon now, though the inhabitants of Sagramoso City plainly spurned the radiance of daylight, sheltering as they did under their immense, interlocking umbrellas of black glass. Whenever the volcanoes held their fusty ashen breath, the white sun cruelly baked the lava plains, from which polishing thermal winds whipped dust away towards the east, always eastward, to the Death Drifts, a shallow sea without liquid.
Sated by skragging, Wolverine Squad were preparing to cloze on guard in a vast dim dusty vitrodur cellar crowded with a petrified army of lava sculptures. None of these sculptures was less than three metres in height. Some were slender, others bloated. All bore a distinct snub-nosed family resemblance to one another. Many, indeed, were duplicates. Their carved costumes varied: uniforms, togas, robes. Some were nude. A few were merely giant heads; for fashions changed. Here was a storeroom of statuary of deceased Sagramosos, exiled at the accession of a new lord, though not condemned to be crushed to dust – their sheer enduring weight might act as anchor to the multi-thousand-year dynasty.
A few electrolumens flickered, ensconced in nooks, though others were defunct. Scores of chained skeletons lay in the aisles – rivals, no doubt, of the regime, potential competitors for power who had been left here naked over the centuries, stripped of everything, to contemplate its monumental history while they starved.
The night before, and through the morning into the afternoon, the Wolverines had rampaged from level to level, always moving as quickly and confusingly as they could. Sometimes the Scouts took the initiative, and in extremis Sergeant Juron herded his squad hastily. The shuriken skaters of Sagramoso City were swift – if inclined to capricious flourishes and virtuoso displays, as though recognising that the Scouts were providing some destructive harassment, but ultimately posed no major danger.
“I think they don’t mind if we trash some areas,” Biff had said. “Then people’ll feel more loyal to their lord… ’Course, they don’t mind killing us neither.” All four Scouts sported minor shuriken wounds, swiftly healed, their cinnabar blood closing up gashes like sealing wax. Only Zed Juron was wholly uninjured – that slab of a man was so nimble at dodging, as if he had second sight – though a ricocheting shuriken had smashed his communicator. Juron almost seemed to be enjoying a second adolescence in company with his Scouts, while yet remaining devoutly responsible.
The Scouts had skragged many gaiety pods. Those black ovoid lustres linked by slideways dangled beneath over-arching vitrodur umbrellas as though these were weeping solid sooty rain. The Scouts had rushed skiddingly from one pod to the next, annihilating languid swanky drugsters, warbling liquorites, squirming orgiasts who were responding to the war in their own indulgent style, if they even heeded it at all.
Parts of the city which were more heedful had recessed into themselves, clearing great arena-spaces – although contracted routes through the internal organs of those zones were still negotiable.
The Wolverines had burst into a chapel to Fulgor Sagramoso Deified where a floodlit lava statue stood in place of the Emperor’s altar. Aged heretics were hymning wailingly to their god-dictator, supervised by armed deacons. Perhaps the worshippers had no other choice but to sing Sagramoso’s praises and sniff the victory-incense already so impertinently burning. The Wolverines threw offerings of frag grenades into the elderly congregation.
The Scouts had hellfired crowded transport sledges that slid at speed down glossy oiled vitrodur channels, diving from transit stations, canting along branch-lines, corkscrewing, swooping up to come to rest at other destinations…
Once, they came across a dead fellow Scout of the Wild Boar Squad, lying in a glassy cul-de-sac. He had been so butchered by shuriken stars that his corpse was a mere long mound of rashers glued by cinnabar. Later, from a nearby height Wolverine Squad spied many other corpses of Karkason natives laid out in sinister rune patterns along one dismal lacquered boulevard – spoor of the Boars, now being exorcised with burning incense and sprinkled acid by some raving Sagramoso cultist guarded by skaters.
So the Boars had been busy… while the real battle raged closer to the black chandelier of the Imperium, to set those parts which had not contracted a-tinkling and a-rattling.
And the Wolverines had likewise been busy – though they had not thought of that rune trick…
Sergeant Juron seemed dubious of its merits. Swapping speed for apery may well have resulted in the conversion of that fallen Boar into bacon.
AND NOW THEY should rest a while.
Where better than this great vault of abandoned statuary and skeletons, to avail themselves of their Catalepsean Nodes for a couple of hours?
So the Scouts sat deep in that cellar amidst the jumbled dusty lava-carved genealogy of the Sagramosos.
So they switched off one side of their brains in order to purge fatigue poisons from their systems while the other cerebral hemisphere remained alert for intruders…
Logic and speech slumbered in Biff, and dreamed; for the left half of his brain was asleep now.
In that half-dream, of which he was less than half-aware, regiments of rubbery words marched to war with one another. Nouns and verbs armed with chainswords and power axes paraded on elasticated feet. As each side manoeuvred, they sought to spell out some seemingly important message – conflicting messages over which they were about to fight.
The Emperors Will is Supreme, Blessed, and Eternal.
The Emperor’s Name is Death; his Throne is the Grave.
These sentences, and others, clashed. They hacked and sliced at one another till there was no meaning left, only a confusion of bloodthirsty syllables spelling out absurdity.
The alert, conscious right side of Biff’s brain registered the faint odour of ancient dust. It noted the faded fustiness of death from the many skeletons, and the drying sweat of his comrades spiced with hints of their precious superhuman hormonal secretions. It savoured the tang of Biff’s own saliva, similarly flavoured, like a waxing and ebbing tide inside his mouth. It detected the twin heartbeats around him and the mingled sigh of breath. It scanned the gloomy pattern of piers and arches which sustained the fan-vaulting above. Configured like the reticulated rib-cage of some enormous alien creature, long dead and looming over them, the vault appeared not to have been carved but rather rubbed into shape painstakingly, no doubt by the labour of slaves over many decades, millennia earlier.
The right hemisphere of his brain could not articulate what it registered. Words and logic had deserted. They had fled away to war, to that dream of a ghostly battle elsewhere. Raw sensory impact was what that hemisphere knew of – moods and intuitions, the imminence of patterns and rhythms founded upon survival. It was as though Biff had devolved into an animal, even a reptile, temporarily torpid since there was no spur to action, yet spring loaded to respond…
Something itched…
Some oddity.
Some anomaly in the echo of breath and heartbeat within that vault of monumental Ozymandian arrogance and slow chained doom.
The right brain noted something amiss…
Meanwhile, Yeremi’s logical tech-side dreamed.
It dreamed a ghostly dance of rune-scribed tools. With their assistance, gears and warped carburettor components and portions of armour major and minor were assembling themselves into an enormous baroque weapon.
Elephantine wheels supported a caged chassis of wr
ought adamantium. Hydraulic recoil buffers were worthy of a sewage pumping station. Presently a hugely long brass-hooped barrel jutted up towards the heart of the galaxy.
That gun would fire an armoured human missile, namely Yeremi himself, brandishing in his outstretched hands a huge volume bound in luminescent human skin inscribed with the spidery title Codex Lex, the Book of Law…
Unless the barrel exploded.
Meantime, Yeremi’s wakeful passion-mind was heedful of his environs and his comrades, in particular Lexandro d’Arquebus…
Yeremi did not think logically. He could not. His rationality was exiled to that other phantom domain where the Weapon of Law was being constructed according to dream-logic.
He experienced hormonal surges – an equation of wordless emotions. Jealousy. Hatred. Piety. Fraternity.
Each value circled around the d’Arquebus enigma like a shark seeking its supper.
Until he knew deep in his belly that he would only ever excel and humble that damnable “brother” of his by making himself into a devotee of Lexandro’s existence, akin to a cultist, a protector and preserver of d’Arquebus in his ostentatious recklessness.
Yes, Yeremi would hone his senses to detect danger to d’Arquebus, to avert the threat of death from him. Yeremi must become Lexandro’s beneficial leech or remora, his benevolent vampire, sucking away the poison of peril into himself, and thus leeching away also – parasitically – at Lexandro’s spirit. Aye, until d’Arquebus knew bitterly and until others recognised scornfully – the sham of his valour, which came not from Dorn at all, but was really no more than the flipside of his former high-hab extravagance…
Thus vowed Yeremi’s passion-hemisphere – not in so many words, but rather in the form of emotive emblems that lodged within his heart and guts, to flourish there like tumours.
Lexandro’s own schismed mind dreamed of himself ennobled. Blazons of heraldry tattooed the whole surface of his skin – he seemed to be a living shield armoured in righteousness. He was wearing a translucent gossamer pain-glove that hardly anyone else could see. High up on a wrought-plasteel balcony he posed implacably, beholding the execution by Fists of an unending stream of aliens and heretics. And enjoying his own agonising never-ending penance, of which his Marines could only whisper with awe.
