by Dan Abnett
We checked on him regularly. He never seemed to do anything except sleep, or sit silently on the chair, staring at the wall. It was tempting to think he was broken and harmless. But Skoh was a huntsman, one of the very best, and that meant he excelled at stillness and patience.
I knew he was only waiting for us to make a mistake.
MY LINK BIPPED. It was Carl.
‘Tchaikov,’ he said. ‘Keeps coming up. If not banker to the cartel, then money launderer at the very least.’
‘We thought as much. Can we get anything on her?’
‘No, it’s a dead connect. I can’t hack her systems. We’ll have to face-to-face with her.’
‘Understood.’
‘She fronts a fabric import place in Formal K.’
‘Then that’s where we’ll go. But we have to be careful.’
‘Careful. I couldn’t agree more.’
Carl and I had not been idle during our months spent in transit aboard Unwerth’s vessel. We had been preparing the ground, investigating, searching data, developing evidence. All inquisitors do this. If they tell you they don’t, they’re either lying or incompetent. I know for a fact my old mentor Eisenhorn would spend months, years sometimes, locking together the intricate webs of data that supported his investigations. Any effort of the Inquisition founders immediately if the ground is not well prepared.
I had a back-file of data on Contract Thirteen that filled twenty-six slates. Carl and I charted the threads together on a tri-D strategium that Fyflank rigged up in the belly hold of the Arethusa. Such an obedient, capable creature, that man-hound. I am sure Unwerth underestimates him.
Two light-days out from Eustis Majoris, Carl and I finally settled on our preferred strategy. The names, the places, the links. Where we would look first. As an analogy, imagine a verthin nest. You know the thing – that great hummock of chewed material, populated by a billion billion stinging insects. Stick a probe in, dig it in, and you’ll be stung badly by a swarm of soldier verthin, most of which you have no business with. Petropolis is like that. You need to be delicate, careful, extend your probes without hostility into the bowels to get results.
There has to be a careful process of enquiry and inspection, divulging secrets without the keepers of those secrets knowing you’ve exposed them. Delicacy is the key.
That’s why we had the strategy. None of us wanted to get stung.
We would put it together, carefully, piece by piece.
Now Tchaikov seemed to be the first.
THE HARD-NOSE ROUND struck a steel cabinet, glanced off, and started to tumble. It passed through a stack of files on the nearby desk and hit Harlon Nayl in the upper left arm, deformed and flat-on.
There was a puff of blood and a spatter of meat and Nayl started to fall, growling in pain.
So much for bloody careful.
‘You snotwipe,’ spat Patience Kys and pinned the moody hammer’s neck to the doorpost with two kineblades.
Dying, twitching, he dropped the autopistol, blue smoke still spilling from its muzzle.
Nayl came up behind the desk, his left arm streaming with blood, and fired his Tronsvasse Heavy twice. A second hammer folded and fell hard as he came in through the door.
‘We’ve started something,’ Nayl grimaced.
‘No, d’you think?’ Kys replied.
Las-rounds started to whip down the hallway outside. They broke in blossoms of orange flame as they impacted.
+Where’s Tchaikov?+
‘No, honestly, I’m fine thanks,’ Nayl growled, returning fire on auto. His weapon made a dull, dead sound in the enclosed chamber.
‘I’ve got her,’ Kara reported. She was in the corridor outside, overlooking the vast loading bay of the fabric importer warehouse, high in stack 567 of Formal K. There was the tiny, round-shouldered figure of Tchaikov, scurrying away under escort to a waiting flier. Already, the massive exit hatch of the bay was winching open on thick, caternary chains.
Kara leapt off the balcony into the bay, somersaulting, an Urdeshi machine pistol in each hand.
She was firing before she even landed. Her caseless rounds stripped through the hammers around Tchaikov, bursting blood steam into the cold air of the dock, dropping them like stones.
Tchaikov turned.
She was tall, her black hair pinned in a bun, her face sheathed behind a molidiscu mask of silver velvet. She wore a long gown of embroidered ordskin that swirled around her like gleaming smoke as she faced Kara. Gold and red and pamaganter. Her long legs were bound in white linen, her feet arched high on brass clogs.
‘Face to face,’ Kara said, tossing the empty machine pistols away to either side so they slithered across the deck. ‘And research says…?’
+Carl is sure her favoured weapon is the litoge whip.+
‘Let’s hope Carl’s right,’ Kara replied, drawing the shivered sword sheathed over her back.
The sword had been mine – when I’d been a wielder of such hand weapons – long ago. Forged so hard by the hammers of master smiths, the blade had been knocked slightly sideways in time, so it resonated and shivered against the mundane now.
A beautiful weapon, and Kara Swole was beautiful enough to wield it.
Tchaikov produced her weapon. A litoge whip, just as Carl had predicted. Eight metres of thin, coiling, sentient iron, manufactured by an abominable race who dwelt deep in the outworlds.
The winding length of the whip curled in the air and flew at Kara, hungry.
She swept up with the sword, and took a metre off the whip. The cut length fell to the deck, its fused end fizzling.
Tchaikov cried out and lashed again. Another two metres of living metal flew away, smouldering at the cut.
Tchaikov ripped out yet again with her truncated weapon, and this time the shorn tip glanced away from Kara’s block.
‘Got anything else, bitch?’ Kara said, her hand braced on the raised shivered sword.
Tchaikov dropped the litoge whip. It fell dead on the deck.
She turned and reached a hand out towards the open hatchway of her flier.
A sword flew into her grasp. It was a power-weapon, the blade wide and long, the grip double-handed, keyed to her response. Even from a distance, I could smell and taste its thirst. Blood. It was vampire steel, hungry and insolent.
‘I have this, bitch,’ Tchaikov replied, and executed a flourish with the blade.
Holding her shivered sword up in her right hand, Kara beckoned with the fingers of her left.
‘Then let’s go,’ she said.
‘WELL, THIS IS unexpectedly annoying,’ Carl Thonius said.
‘What is?’ I asked.
‘This,’ he said, indicating the engraved glass cube sitting on the top of an otherwise plain burrwood desk in Tchaikov’s private quarters.
‘Oh, good,’ I replied. ‘For a moment I thought you were still banging on about the slight tear in your furnzi mantle.’
He looked wounded, and glanced sadly at the pulled threads on the hem of his expensive, fur-lined cape. He’d caught it on a doorpost coming in.
‘Well, that is a dreadful crime. I love this mantle so. But I had put it out of my mind and moved on to other doings. How shallow do you think I am?’
‘Want me to answer that?’ I replied. ‘We’re raiding a premises, and you come dressed up for a gaudy night.’
Carl adored fine clothes, and prided himself on his turn-out. For this endeavour, where the rest of the team were wearing bodygloves and wire armour, he’d chosen the mantle, a silk blouse embroidered with silver thread, perskin pantaloons and little slippers of gold crepe.
‘You can talk,’ he said. ‘You got dressed up too.’
It was true. I had. I was waring Zeph Mathuin. My physical form was a considerable distance away, in Miserimus House, watched over by Wystan and Zael. My mind had possessed Mathuin’s body for the duration of the mission.
Waring is a skilful, strange activity. I am able to ware almost anyone, though the level of trau
ma for both me and the subject increases dramatically if they are unwilling. I hardly ever used Nayl, Kys or Carl this way, except in emergencies: it was too much like hard work. Kara was more pliant, though waring left her weary and strung out. For some reason, Zeph was the most usable candidate in my team. I could slip in and out of his mind with a minimum of pain. He never objected. It was one of the reasons he remained in my employ.
Waring gave me a physical presence I otherwise lacked, and the opportunity to employ the skills and talents of the subject directly. Zeph Mathuin was a tall and powerful man, an ex-bounty hunter like Nayl. His skin was dark, and his black hair tightly braided out down his back. His eyes were little unreadable coals of red-hard light. His left hand was a polished chrome augmetic tool. He was a mystery, his past a secret, a blank. Even from inside his mind, I knew little about him expect that which he was prepared to tell me. I never probed. Mathuin worked for me because he liked the work and he was good at it. He could keep his secrets; that was all that mattered.
Clothed in his flesh, I felt strong and vital. I felt the weight of his leather stormcoat hanging from his shoulders, I felt the solidity of the matt-black Bakkhaus laspistol in his right hand, I felt the beat of his heart as if it were my own.
‘What is it?’ I asked, gesturing with Mathuin’s hand at the cube.
‘Unless I’m mistaken – which I’m not – it’s a gullivat riddle box. Rare. Priceless, actually. It explains a lot.’
‘I’m glad. Now you explain a lot.’
Thonius shrugged. ‘It explains why we’re here. We were forced to mount this raid because I couldn’t hook in to Tchaikov’s data systems covertly from outside. Couldn’t get a line, not even the whiff of data heat. This is why. She doesn’t use a data system.’
‘Not at all?’
‘You see any cogitators? Any codifiers? Any data engines at all?’
He was right. The room was devoid of any computation devices. There wasn’t even any electrical wiring, no ports, no vox links, nothing. Tchaikov ran her entire operation on paper, the old-fashioned way. There was nothing that could be hacked or broken into.
‘She’s from Punzel. They pride themselves on mental rigour there, the old ways. Didn’t you see the abacus frames the warehouse stackers were using as we came in?’
I had.
‘Plus, of course, the records suggest Tchaikov was Cognitae-trained. The Cognitae use machines as little as possible, preferring to trust their own minds.’
‘Indeed.’
‘We could take her paper files – if we had a bulk lifter – and check through them, but I can tell you now, they’d only be legit accounts and manifests. Her secrets are in here. Stored in a non-electronic format.’
I raised Zeph’s pistol and head shot a moody hammer who had run into the chamber behind Carl.
Carl flinched. ‘Throne! Some warning, if you don’t mind!’
‘You mean like “Look out Carl, there’s a man behind you with a gun, oops too late, he’s shot you”? That kind of thing?’
‘Smart ass. You know about riddle boxes, don’t you?’
‘Not really.’
He stroked the edges of the glass cube gently. ‘They were made by the gullivat three thousand years ago, before they suffered their cultural backslide. The gullivat are now a proto-primitive race unable to fathom the mechanisms they created. They adored secrets and puzzles. Indeed, to this day, no one knows why their culture collapsed in the first place. The riddle boxes are artefacts. They come up for sale, once in a while. I doubt Tchaikov was rich enough to buy one. The cartel must have given her this to run their dealings.’
‘How does it work?’
‘It’s inert, a crystal cube within a crystal cube within a crystal cube, et cetera. There’s no way of knowing how many layers it has. Usually, they are built with anything from ten to seventeen layers. You see the figures carved into the sides?’
‘Yes?’
The riddle box must be turned, each layer in sequence, carefully rotated, until a final alignment is made. Then it opens. Inside, there will be a codex stone, the size of a small pebble, a perfect glass sphere onto which all Tchaikov’s secrets are etched in microscopic form.’
I glanced around. Outside, in a nearby hall, I could hear Nayl and Kys engaging fiercely with the last of Tchaikov’s household guards.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘It could be just a curio, an ornament.’
Carl shook his head. He pointed to a side table on which sat a complex instrument that looked like a microscope to me. ‘There’s the reader. You place the sphere in here, and study it via the scope. And look, here’s the etching needle mount that swings in when she wants to add new information.’
‘So we just break it open,’ I suggested.
‘It’s constructed to grind the sphere clean if the cubes are tampered with.’
‘I see. So why didn’t Mamzel Tchaikov take this vital piece of data storage with her?’
‘Because they’re not called riddle boxes for no reason,’ Carl said. ‘Unless you know the key, they’re utterly impossible to open.’
I was about to retort, but a las-round ripped across the chamber between us and hit the far wall, bringing down a silk hanging. Two house guards, both hammers of the K Bright clan, had burst in through the west door, weapons up. I started to turn, but Carl had already swung round, bringing up the Hecuter 6 Will Tallowhand had given him years before.
The 6 barked loudly, its fatnose rounds slamming both hammers back off their feet in showers of gore. Empty casings tinkled onto the marble floor. Carl walked over to the twitching bodies, and put a round through each one’s forehead.
Carl Thonius was famously unhappy around guns. In fact, he was all but allergic to combat and physical confrontation. He was a thinker – a near-genius thinker – not a doer, and that was partly what endeared him to me and made me choose him as my interrogator. Let Nayl and the others handle the bloodshed. Carl’s worth was his mind and all the skills that lay within it.
Indeed, he’d never fired his weapon in anger before that awful night on Flint, a year ago, and then only in desperation. Now he used it with the nerve and confidence of a seasoned gunslinger. I was impressed, and not a little unnerved.
‘You’ve been practising,’ I said.
‘Oh, you know…’ he replied, bashfully bolstering the piece. ‘The cosmos moves on and all that. Besides, I was tired of you taking the piss all the time.’
‘Me?’
‘No, Mathuin.’
‘This box, Carl. Who has the key?’
He smiled. ‘My guess… Tchaikov and Tchaikov alone.’
+Kara. Whatever you do, don’t kill Tchaikov.+
‘NOT ACTUALLY A problem,’ Kara Swole replied, diving sideways in order to keep her head attached to her shoulders. Tchaikov’s vampiric blade raked sparks from the metal deck. ‘Any chance you could give this bitch the same advice, vìs-a-vìs me?’
+She’s wearing some sort of damper. I can’t get in. Sorry.+
‘I had to ask.’
Kara leapt up and around, and cycled with the shivered sword, but Tchaikov was there to deflect the strike – a ringing chime – and then plough under with a gut-stab.
The very tip of the power blade managed to slice into Kara’s midriff armour and draw blood before she managed to cartwheel clear.
Tasting blood, the vampire sword began to scream.
‘Soon,’ Tchaikov said, patting the sweating blade.
Kara landed stuck, feet wide, shivered sword horizontal at forehead height, left arm extended. Tchaikov turned her back and then came in again, sweeping up and low as she twisted. The blades met… once, twice, three times, four times, parry and redirect.
‘It’s tasted you now,’ Tchaikov spat. ‘This is over.’
Kara blocked two more strokes, then staggered back, gasping. She clutched her belly and stared in disbelief. Blood was leaving her body. It was leaving her body through the cut, tumbling in droplets through the air,
the slow arc of red drizzle pulled towards Tchaikov’s blade.
Kara fell on her knees. Her blood was flying out of her now, like red streamers, flowing towards the thirsty sword, collecting like dew on the blade.
It was sucking her dry.
‘Throne!’ Kara gasped. ‘Help me…’
Patience Kys landed on the loading deck with a thump. Her kineblades orbited about her body like pilot fish around a shark. She blinked and they flew forward at Tchaikov… and then clattered to the deck, dead, a few metres from her. Tchaikov’s damper had cancelled out Kys’s telekinesis.
‘Oh gods!’ Kara cried, falling onto her side, trying to stop the blood from leaving her body with her hands.
Patience ran forward a few steps, but Tchaikov turned and aimed the point of the blade at her.
‘You’ll be next, witch,’ she warned.
‘No, I’ll be next,’ said Harlon Nayl. He staggered onto the dock through one of the inner gates, his bloody left arm limp at his side. His right hand raised and aimed his Tronsvasse Heavy.
Tchaikov turned to face him, Kara’s lifeblood drooling off her blade.
Nayl fired. Tchaikov swung the sword and deflected the shot so it ricocheted away across the warehouse and buried itself in a bale of fabric.
Nayl fired again, and again Tchaikov knocked the round aside in mid-air with her sword.
Nayl nodded, impressed. ‘A guy like me could grow to love a woman who can do that,’ he said.
Tchaikov bowed slightly in acknowledgement, and then readdressed, her sword upright in both hands, angled over her right shoulder.
Nayl raised his handgun again and slid his thumb across the selector lever.
‘How do you do on full auto?’ he asked.
The gun began to fire, roaring, one squeeze of the trigger unloading the full clip at auto-max. To her credit, Tchaikov parried the first three shots.
The fourth hit her in the left thigh, the fifth took off her right leg at the knee. She fell and the rest went wide.
The sword clattered to the deck, and then began to inch itself towards the pool of hot blood spreading from Tchaikov’s severed leg. It rattled itself into the pool and began to drink.
