He got up, left the bed as it was and returned the way he had come like a golem on its master’s path, letting no thought rise and grow. He was a sterile desert as he crossed back harder ways, took a route through dusty rooms and along service corridors until he reached the Legal Promenades. At the entrance to the Halls of Records he used his infomancer’s badge to get access to the census from nineteen years ago. The keepers didn’t mind his silence and they knew him and had no reason to deny him. He sat down at a magetable and flicked through the pages, letting his eyes see but refusing to let his mind read. He remembered but he didn’t register what it meant. Over the vellum he saw once again the Empress’ face as she was leaving.
She had seen that he could smell Tzaban in her but she must have seen something else because she allowed him to live and still know it.
His eyes passed over her name. Another, another, another. A signal sprang across a vast distance with an electrical shock that ran down his arms and made him shudder. In a long forgotten, dusty room in his mind something made a tinkling crash as it fell over, an urn full of fortune runes landing on the floor, spelling out a fate that was written entirely in the blood. He could see only two names, written endlessly over and over. Night. Torada. First one. Then the other. Blood.
A thought is a spell. Without words, without images, it is almost uncatchable, so he kept this understanding in that protoform, before thought.
He closed the records and left them as he found them, took the hidden, winding path back to the Engine House and the anteroom where Isabeau was still sleeping as he had left her.
He bent and gently shook her shoulder. ‘Isabeau. It is forty minutes.’
He waited until she had got herself up, then escorted her back to her work. As the engineers spun their arrays he stood among them silently, and alone. A feathery trace sent to feel for Shrazade and Night confirmed their attention was distant from him, far enough that he could consider matters so long as they brought up no significant emotions to attract their attention. He cautiously allowed one mote of what he had found after another to fall into his conscious thoughts.
Tzaban might not know why he had come to Glimshard, but Zharazin did. Night had called him. For her daughter.
No doubt that was why he too was here. No accident he had become her student at all. He had missed far too much about Night, right under his nose which he had never thought to investigate purely because she had once told him that the blankness he found in his knowledge of her was due to the Karoo inheritance and he had believed her because his trust in her was absolute, because his love for her and desire for her had occupied all the space he would have needed to see anything else. He had been her bloodhound, looking out not just for her, but on Torada’s behalf, in case anyone threatening came sniffing around.
He knew Torada had no idea that Night was her mother. Why should she? How would he have known it except for his faultless memory? Torada’s official mother, Siagnine, was a lesser noble who had never had more children and who had found religion when her daughter Ascended following the death of the old Empress. He had met Siagnine as a matter of course during his studentship, and found her barren. It had never occurred to him that she had been so all her life. Such things happened regularly to women after a certain age. In every other way she did match Torada, she was, plausibly, her mother. They even looked alike.
All he knew now was that Siagnine might have given birth to Torada, but Night was the mother. Leave out any suspect for fatherhood and it was a perfect combination. How she had done it he didn’t know but that is how it was. To prevent him finding out Night had blocked him and to maintain that block through the years and ensure he didn’t discover it she had kept him close. All his liaisons around the city simply gathered information for her to pick over. He was aghast at the scale of the deception now that he realised how he had been played. And then he was amazed at his own foolishness. It was simply Karoo. What had Tzaban told him? Queens built their empires, guarded their territories, groomed their offsprings. Males collected, provided base material, and then were disposed of.
He wondered what Tzaban had carried south with him to the Karoo at the pit. Torada must have given him something. Whatever Karoo wanted, Zharazin could not begin to know, but whatever it was lay in that muddy hole. He wondered if Night were an emissary too, and what then was he? No wonder Night had tried to keep it from him. If the Infomancy came to the same conclusions they would do everything they could to stop Torada and the city. He knew them well enough to understand that, whatever Empire meant to them, first and foremost it meant human. The Empress reigned, but what she knew was their business. She was at the mercy of their revelations.
He had no way to know how unified higher nodes were in their goals but he would have bet preserving their own power and interests was right at the top of the list.
Just then he felt the Infomancy seethe. Every node shivered as energy surged through it. He sensed Shrazade rebelling against Torada’s will, summoning the power to resist an Imperial decree. Without hesitation he concealed all he had been thinking of – hid it quickly, buried it, locked it and hid key after key under layers of irrelevant things.
Mazhd, Shrazade’s command was in the centre of his skull. You should have warned me.
I couldn’t, he replied. She ordered me not to.
Then it seems you forget where your loyalties lie. I smell secrets about you. They are like ghosts.
Everyone has them.
Not from me. One day soon your secondment will expire. Think on that.
If you survive what’s coming, he thought, feeling his concentration slide away as she used part of his capacity to sustain herself. I’ll think of it then. He fancied she paused but it could have been for reasons other than him. He wondered at himself, threatening her. It must be the Karoo in him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
TZABAN
Tzaban sat in the dark at the top of a shaft through which air moved in occasional shifts so slight only the tips of his finest fur could detect it. He was perched on a narrow pipe of some tough, slippery material that crossed the shaft from one dark hole twice its diameter to another. It was extremely strong and stiff enough that it had not bowed in the slightest with his weight. His hands gripped it between the points where his feet balanced on their ball, toes curled lightly about the same. He was able to breathe so slowly that he could be relatively sure the air motion did not come from him. Five metres down was a metal gantry of a kind he found everywhere inside the cask, running like insect paths between various kinds of holes and storage areas. It was near the central, empty core of the thing – a place he loathed and had witnessed only once on coming to the sudden open edge of a slipway.
The core was a massive black hole that angled down and down. He had dropped a small chunk of metal down it and heard it hit the side, skid, bounce, slide and stop after a while, though he was sure that was not the bottom. It could be for ever. The air there was stagnant: breathable but as dead as could be. The vastness of the space had upset him and he knew it would be something the other Karoo would want to avoid. The point he had chosen to hide in was near the beckoning depths of it, but close enough inside the walls that its siren lure could comfortably be ignored. He had been up and down the more common parts of the trail he was covering a few times that day, to be sure the other Karoo knew he’d been about and might still be. But this was on the way out of the area, a little-used trip between two stashes, one of water, and the other of plundered kitchen items from the expedition above. The smell of an opened pack of spice was strong enough to blot most of the rotting odours from whatever had been rejected from this.
The outer hairs on his ruff feathered a little and he heard the ping and shiver of a metal cable set to vibrating a way off. He had to work to keep his lips shut against the sudden flow of salty saliva in his mouth. If he had been about to pounce he would have increased the tension, cranked it up now, but instead he relaxed until only pure balance kept him in plac
e. He folded his ears flat and his shoulderblades into his back, unblinking, unbreathing, watching the small area below him until the faint, angular light bleeding across it from a much higher emergency rig was cut off.
He dropped, energy contained so deep the other felt nothing but a breeze and then a hundred kilogrammes of dead weight.
Then tooth and claw, blade and bite. Strike of metal, skin to metal, claw to bone. Bite harder and feel bone break – the sudden give and snap made his eyeballs judder and a fierce joy inside come rising like a tide of hot sugar. This was all there was and all there was to want in the universe.
He rose out of that state a time later, saw his dead opponent under him, felt the warmth of the body against the chill of the cask’s natural constant background, dying out. He fed off the energy of it and drained the blood out of it, then dragged the pieces out to the edge of the horrible darkness and tossed them as far out into the emptiness as he could. He watched them turn and turn as they slowly shrank and passed beyond the reach of the lights. He listened and fancied he heard soft thumps, as gentle as the blow of a cat’s paw on the side of a vast iron bell. Then he had to go lay up for a while and digest what he had done. He passed the food cache with its stench and wound through rooms of odd devices and some with many things that he almost recognised as chairs or perhaps couches bolted to the floors. The lair itself was in a small dead-end room filled with stolen clothes and some personal items of the expedition team, plus things looted from further afield – symbols and panes, things of interesting shapes or surfaces that looked attractive. He loaded as many of these as he could carry back with him into his pack and then slunk up the long winding ways to the zone where the science team were still working, past their busy rooms where they were too occupied to notice him, to the bunk area and then to the curtained corner where Tralane’s bed was.
He emptied the pack and slid the objects under the low army cot and then lay down on top of it and went to sleep. He was hurt and aware of pain that would be worse later, but victory made him content and happy, the taste of the blood in his belly an intensity of joy that warmed every part of his being. He had never felt more powerful.
Sharp voices and screams woke him up. He was alert instantly, then a second later had his ears flattened with exasperation. It was her friend, the curly haired woman she called Carlyn, standing with her hands clutching the curtains behind her for some reason, shrieking at him as if he were a monster.
‘Be quiet,’ he said. His voice was a growl that was barely intelligible. It surprised him. His mouth felt that same difficulty it had had with words since the queen had changed him, as if he was going to drown on them. Anyway, it had the desired effect. She shut her mouth and stared at him in a way that made him want to reach out and swipe her face off. She must have read the notion in his gaze. She glanced down quickly and he felt the hair on his spine sink down again. He expected to feel the lash of it in his tail, but then felt only the ghost of a tail and a grim disappointment that verged on anger; the queen had pushed him towards them, away from Karoo, and they were weak.
At that moment others came, Tralane among them. He looked at her and was reassured by her. She might be irritated, alarmed and tired but she looked at him with concern and not fear. The others with her grouped behind her, asking questions which didn’t interest him. He waited as she got over her grimacing and then sat up, putting his feet on the floor. Only then did he notice how filthy he was, covered in blood; his trousers were stiff with it. He rested, arms on his knees, head hanging, and waited until the initial fuss was over before straightening up to find her sending them away. He didn’t know the actual things they said but he felt their fear and hatred of him, their mistrust and loathing, their envy of her. He growled a little, wishing he could kill them too, then she was standing in front of him, holding out two towels and a cake of soap.
‘You should clean up before you eat.’
‘I don’t need to eat,’ he said, taking them, finding them suddenly half the size in his hands until he realised that consuming his enemy had made him grow. The towels caught on his claws.
‘You need to rest.’
‘The men who were taken,’ he said, carefully. ‘Professor Asynax and Engineer Orblane.’
‘You found them?’ She sounded so hopeful he hated to reply.
‘Get your recorder,’ he said, finding the engineer’s words flowing quickly into his mouth. ‘I will be able to tell you everything they knew, for the next couple of hours, before it’s gone.’
‘What?’
He looked at her directly. ‘I found the one that ate them. I ate him. I know what he knew but after a few hours I will lose the ability to tell it. It will become me, not something I know, something I am. In the flesh but not in my mind. Only a queen would be able to read it.’
She tried to hide her disgust. ‘You are – you have the consciousness of the one you killed?’
‘And those he consumed. For a little while.’ He couldn’t help himself smiling. The death was there, the rage, the defeat, the spite of the last moment in which it had hated him so very, very much; an unrelenting ever-hate that he loved to remember again and again. ‘But it does not last. The form lasts. My ability to speak knowledge does not last. Hurry if you have questions.’
‘Yes. Right.’ She started to look for the device under the cot, then stopped. ‘What’s all this stuff?’
‘I found it. It is yours now.’
She pulled things out into the light. They meant nothing to him. Her hands were shaking as she examined them, some of them Orblane’s and Asynax’s things, others whatever the trove of the dead Karoo had held. He could see by her expression that they meant something to her and that was satisfactory, but when she looked up her face was full of amazement and gratitude and that filled him with a hot fever so he had to look away. In his hand one of the towels tore.
‘These things are… They’re… I have to… Just wait here! Wait!’ She picked them up and ran out with them, calling.
As he heard the commotion and excitement, the horror and the recriminations, all pouring out of them in a mass babble he sat and carved a groove into the soap bar with the claw on his index finger. It was only with the greatest difficulty that he could get it to retract. He had not wanted to eat that Karoo for himself. He had done it for Tralane. Its form was degrading his, pushing him away from human and so away from her. There were others too he would have to consume, though from what he had been able to tell so far he might be better off that way in the end. There were three others left and one of them he didn’t like the smell of at all. If he had come across it in ordinary times he would have left it well alone.
Beyond the curtain excitement over his finds overrode revulsion at his deeds. There was almost a heroic moment of support for him. He registered it without interest except to note that humans were like queens in this regard: give them what they valued and they would not care how you got it or what you were.
He gathered up the soap shavings in his hand and went out to the room of water where they had set up places for washing and doing something with their waste that smelled of powerful alchemical stinks. The blood rinsed away in dark rusty runnels but it stained him in places, where his fur was whitest. Afterwards he looked good in human terms. In his terms it made little difference. He could tell his own scent was altering to reflect the changed circumstances – advertising his status so that now the hunt would change for the others – and the true smell of the blood was only dimmed rather than removed by the herbal soap. But humans had no nose for anything.
When he returned they were still arguing about if he could be trusted, though they shut up when they saw him and gave him grudging respect for his title: wasted effort. He could feel how much they hated and feared him. He longed to be away from them but instead he must sit in this tiny place pressed against their every fragile second of terror.
Only Tralane was not afraid. She was sitting on the cot, adjusting something on the square plate he rec
ognised as a device she could record his voice with. He sat patiently on the bed’s other end and closed his eyes. After concentrating on her presence and listening to her voice for a while he felt calmer. He let his mouth do the talking necessary – none of what he said meant anything to him other than the facts that the two men had met their ends in the same manner – by being snatched from doorways that opened on to halls near strategic turns (for the Karoo killer, that was) and had put up no significant resistance. They had not known the first thing about how to defend themselves.
They talked for almost an hour and then his recall grew hazy and muddled and they were forced to stop.
‘I had no idea you could do that,’ she said, packing the device away in some carrying case. ‘It was as if you saved them. Well, you saved something about them. Does any of it stick?’
‘If it didn’t, I would not be able to speak.’
She went quiet after that and spent a while very busy with the things he had brought her. Finally she held up one of them. ‘You won’t know what this is.’
‘No.’
‘It’s a…’ She paused, drawing out the last sound as she thought about how she could explain it to him. ‘It’s for calculating the positions of the stars and everything in the sky. You can use it to tell where you are. And you can use it to tell where everything else is. The really interesting thing about it however, is that you could use this anywhere. I mean, it has these old records in it from the person who used it last.’ She got up from the floor where she had been sitting and sat beside him, holding it so that he could see a circular pane and inside the pane a lot of bright lights and coloured lines. He recognised the lights as looking like the night sky, except that part of it was blotted out by a large blue and white curve. He watched her finger trace out constellations and name them in the Imperial way though he knew them differently, as points in his body that seemed to ring with faint bells telling him which way he should go when he was abroad in the dark.
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