by Dan Abnett
He rose to his feet, facing her. The body on the floor lay in an undignified heap, one slipper off, one stockinged toe turned at right angles. The clothes had been ruffled and disarrayed by the fury of the attack. The votive statue of Saint Kiodrus had made a pink pulp of the moneylender’s face.
‘And if I don’t want to go back to the exclave?’ he asked.
‘Well, I’m not sure I can force you. I have no doubt of your abilities. At the very least, though, we’ll hurt each other. A lot.’
He nodded, and smiled. The smile was genuine. ‘Yes, I believe we would. I like you because you’re honest about these things. We would hurt each other. Let’s not.’
‘Let’s not. Agreed. Now, are you coming back?’
‘Soon. Let’s talk first, Leyla.’
She raised the gun. ‘No. No negotiation. We’re going back.’
He nodded, half turned, and made some kind of quick, flicking gesture with his right arm. She flinched, felt a slight impact against her wrist, and then the Hostec 5 was in his right hand.
He aimed it at her. He expected anger, dismay, perhaps even a futile attempt to retake possession of the weapon.
Instead she said, ‘Teach me to do that.’
THEY CLEANED THE moneylender’s house of incriminating traces, and left the victim on the floor of his study, beside the open floor safe. He stood patiently while she dabbed the specks of impact-spatter blood from his face and neck with a wet cloth. His clothes were black, and the rest wouldn’t show.
‘A robber would set a fire to cover the body, if a burglary had gone wrong.’ she suggested. ‘Oh…’
He had already overturned a lamp bowl, and small, blue flames were dancing along the edge of the rug.
FIVE STREETS FROM the moneylender’s hab, they entered a small eating house, and took a table at the back. Leyla selected the place because of the low light levels and the fact they could sit away from the street. She ordered a pitcher of petal water, sweetmeats, a cauldro of lemon and tchail rice, and a carafe of the local red wine.
‘This is nice.’ he said.
‘It’s not. You still have my gun.’
He displayed his hands, open. They were very pale, very expressive.
She frowned, reached inside her jacket, and found her Hostec 5 secure in its rig.
‘You can teach me how to do that, too.’
‘If you like. Are you eager to learn?’
‘Some things. I have skills, and they earn me a market price. My skills are good enough to please my master. And he teaches me some of his skills too.’
‘I’m sure he does.’
‘But a girl always wants to learn new things. From a man like you—’
‘Like me? My dear Leyla, not so many minutes past, you characterised me as a deviant killer. A psycho.’
She shrugged. ‘With skills.’ she said.
He laughed. She was a piece of work. When the time came, he might even spare her. Or at least, kill her mercifully.
The food arrived. The waitress gave them no more than a passing look. A couple, taking a late lunch. An off-worlder girl, tall, built like a swimmer, with short fair hair and a hard, unforgiving face and what? Her lover? Her employer? A slender man, dignified, dressed in black, with a hairless face that, though handsome, seemed uncomfortably asymmetrical.
Leyla picked at the rice. ‘You wanted to talk.’
He poured some wine. ‘Six months since we left Eustis Majoris.’ he said. ‘All that while, you’ve sheltered me. Kept me hidden, in your custody.’
‘For safety.’
‘I understand. 1 appreciate that. I also appreciate, if I haven’t told you, the efforts you and the others have made to secure my safety.’
‘It doesn’t look that way. The first opportunity you get, you slip away from us, and go off into a strange city, killing.’
‘There’s that,’ he nodded.
‘So?’ She had no desire to tell him the truth. No need to let him in on the fact that her master had told her to allow his escape, and to monitor it.
‘Our principal is getting stir crazy, Ley,’ Orfeo Culzean had said. ‘He’s kicking his heels, pacing the cage. Let him out for a while. Let him think he’s given us the slip. Give him his head for an hour or two, but tail him and bring him back before he, oh, I don’t know, tries to undermine the planetary government or something.’
Leyla Slade had laughed. ‘I’ll watch him,’ she’d promised. ‘If all he wants is a bit of fresh air…’
Molotch took a finger pinch of rice, added a sweetmeat, and slid the load into his mouth. He munched and then washed it down with a sip of petal water.
‘I needed to get out,’ he said. ‘I have been handled for too long. By you, and, before that, by my Secretists at Petropolis. My life has been lived according to the timetables of others. I needed to walk, free.’
‘If you’d asked, it could have been arranged.’
‘If it had been arranged, then it wouldn’t have been freedom, would it?’
‘Point,’ she conceded.
He sat back. ‘On Eustis Majoris, Leyla, I came so close. I came so close to doing something extraordinary, something that would have changed the Imperium forever. Ended it, probably. But I was thwarted, and I failed, and you and your master were on hand to pull me out of the fire and bundle me away. Now, your master and I work on new schemes.’
‘But?’
‘Do you know who I serve, Leyla?’
‘Yourself? The deep-time plans of the Cognitae?’
‘Yes, and before all of those things?’
She shrugged.
‘I won’t speak their names aloud, or all the food in this emporium will spoil and all the wine turn to vinegar. They are Ruinous Powers.’
‘I understand.’
‘Good. So, you see, I had to give thanks. Though my mission to Eustis Majoris failed, I escaped with my life, to continue my work. I had to give thanks for that.’
‘Orfeo would—’
‘Dear Orfeo doesn’t really understand. I don’t know what he tells you he is, Leyla, but he’s a mercenary. A prostitute. Brilliant, skilled, talented… but he works for money. I don’t do what I do for money, or even power, as power is understood by the grandees of this Imperium of Man. I am, I suppose, a man of quite strong religious beliefs.’
‘You needed to give thanks?’ she asked, drinking a sip of water.
‘To the old gods I serve. I had to make appeasement, benediction. I had to make a sacrifice of thanks for deliverance, even though that meant risking discovery. A sacrifice must honour the eight, for eight is the symbol, eight-pointed. A common follower might have killed eight at the eighth house on the eighth street in the eighth enclave, at eight in the evening, but I eschew such crudity. The agents of the Throne would have recognised the occult significance in a moment. Even they are not that stupid. So I made eight subtle sacrifices that, according to inspection, would seem random and unconnected.’
‘But they still had ritual purpose?’
He nodded. He ate some more, and drank some wine. She refilled his glass. ‘The beggar in the alley I made eight incisions with a knife that weighed eight ounces. I did this at eight minutes to the hour. The housemaid had eight moles on her left thigh, and took eight minutes to suffocate. I was very particular. The gamblers both held double eights in their hands, and eight shots were discharged. And so on. The moneylender, killed at eight minutes past the hour, was slain with eight primary blows, no more, no less, and had been busy accounting the books for the eighth trading month. I anointed all the bodies with certain marks and runes, all made in water now long evaporated. It was ritual, Leyla. It was worship. It was not the act of a psychopath.’
‘I see that now,’ she said.
He felt her remark was perhaps sardonic. He half-smiled anyway and drank some water.
‘Such an extraordinary level of detail.’ she added, scooping up more rice. ‘To plan it like that…’
‘I was taught to improvise. Leyl
a, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t think like you think. My mind doesn’t work like yours does.’
‘Really?’
‘I was trained from birth to utilise the full dynamic of my mind. Trained in noetic techniques that give me an edge. More than an edge. What would take another man a week to plan, 1 can do in a moment.’
‘Really?’ she repeated.
He enjoyed the hauteur in her voice. The scorn. She was tolerating him.
‘Really. Leyla, I’m not boasting or showing off. This is what the Cognitae does to a mind. Acute observation, for a start. The ability to read low-level, passive body language. The ability to notice and compare. To analyse. To predict.’
‘Prove it.’
He lifted his glass and smiled. ‘Where would you like me to start?’ he asked.
‘Oh, you go right ahead.’
‘How many buttons did the waitress have on her bodice?’
Leyla hunched her shoulders. ‘Six.’
‘Six. Correct. Good. How many were undone?’
‘Two.’ she said.
‘Well noticed. The top two?’
‘No, the top one and the bottom one. Her hips were wide.’
‘Again, excellent. Are you sure you haven’t had Cognitae training, Leyla?’
She snorted. ‘All you’ve proved is we both like to look at pretty girls.’
‘Dressed in?’
‘What?’
‘Dressed in?’
‘A bodice?’
‘The silk from?’
‘Hesperus.’
‘Good, but no. Sameter. The weave is tighter, and there is a rumpled quality, a Touching, to Sameter silk. And the buttons were made on Gudrun.’
‘Really?’
‘They were gold, and had a hallmark. As she leaned over…’
Leyla put down her glass. ‘You’re making this up.’
‘Am I? The man at the booth next to us. We passed him on the way in. Rogue trader, armed. Where was his concealed weapon?’
‘Left armpit. I saw the bulge. Got a blade in his right boot too, under the hem of the trouser.’
‘You are sharp.’
‘It’s my business to know.’
‘Was his moustache longer on the left or right?’
‘I… why does that matter?’
‘Shorter on the right, because he smokes an obscura pipe, and the hairs don’t grow so fast on the side he sucks the mouthpiece. You could see it in his mannerisms, with the lho-stick. A habitual rise and draw. Which means?’
‘He’ll be unpredictable. And jumpy. Obscura does that.’
‘Now you’re learning.’
‘It means nothing,’ she laughed.
‘The man by the window. Left- or right-handed?’
‘Right. He’s drumming the fingers of his right hand on the table top beside his cup of caffeine.’
‘Wrong. He’s watching the street crowd, because he’s waiting for a business partner he doesn’t know. His left hand is under the table, on the butt of his weapon. A Hecuter model, badly stowed. The right hand is a distraction.’
Leyla shook her head. ‘Should I go over and ask him to prove it?’
‘If you want to get shot. The barman. 19th Gudrunite Irregulars. A Guard veteran.’
‘Why?’
‘Tattoo on his left wrist. “Company of Angels”. The vets of the 19th took that as a tat after Latislaw Heights.’
‘You can see that?’
‘Not from here. But on the way in. And you—’
‘Me?’
‘You’ve eaten enough, you’re full. But you like the rice, so you keep picking at it, even though you don’t want it.’
‘It’s good rice.’
‘And you haven’t touched your wine in thirteen minutes. You keep playing with the glass, but you don’t drink, because you’re afraid that if you get merry, you’ll lose control of this situation. But you play with the glass all the same, so as not to draw attention to the fact you’re not drinking.’
‘That’s just nonsense.’
‘Is it?’ He looked at her. ‘You sit slightly sidelong to me, favouring your left buttock, because your right hip gives you pain. Old wound? An augmetic?’
She breathed out. ‘An augmetic.’
Molotch clapped his hands. ‘You dearly want to go back now, but you’re afraid of goading me, or having to force me. You want to make it seem like my idea.’
‘Now, look—’
‘You’re quite certain I don’t know that Orfeo instructed you to let me loose for a few hours. Orfeo thinks I’m going stir crazy. The idea was to let me walk around and blow off steam.’
‘Dammit, Molotch—’
‘Don’t damn it at all. Enjoy it. What could I do, do you suppose? What could I do, just sitting here?’
‘I don’t know.’
Molotch removed a tiny phial from his sleeve and put it on the table top beside the cauldro of rice. ‘Osicol Plague, in suspension. I took it from Orfeo’s personal kit. If I release it here, I could decimate the entire city quarter.’
‘For the love of— No!’
‘I won’t. There’d be no sense in that. But consider the options. The banker at the table to our left. He works at the city mint. He has a brooch on his waistcoat, before you ask. The sigil of the banking guild, and the office of coinage circulation. If I dropped the phial into his business case, he would find it and open it when he returned to his office. The mint would be contaminated, and would have to be sealed off for fifteen years. The local currency would crash, and bring the subsector economy down. Decades of damage. Or take that young man over there, the one in the private booth. He’s the second son of a minor baron, slumming it, but I know he’s in with the court crowd.’
Molotch produced a small medical injector from his pocket and put it down on the table beside the phial. It was full of clear fluid. ‘Suspension liquid. Inert and viscous, metabolised in six hours. I could go into the washrooms, load the plague solution into it, and bump into that second son as I came back. In a day or two, the entire royal house of this planet would be dead from contact plague. An ideal moment to stage a coup.’
‘But that’s just… just…’ she whispered.
‘Now you’re getting the idea,’ he said. ‘What about this? That drunk by the bar. I’ve been gently hypnotising him with finger movements since we came in. Allow me to prove it.’
Molotch moved his fingers. The drunken man lurched and tottered over to them.
‘What’s your name?’ Molotch asked.
‘Sire Garnis Govior, sir,’ the man wobbled.
‘And your job?’
‘I am chief under translator to the House of the Governor, sir.’
Leyla stared at Molotch.
‘And you thought I’d let you pick this bar.’ he smiled. ‘It’s a famous haunt of the Administratum classes. I noticed Garnis here because of his signet ring.’
‘This ring?’ the man asked, displaying it so abruptly he swayed.
‘The very same. You have face time with the governor, then?’
‘I do, sir, I surely do.’ the man said, wobbling.
‘So, if I asked you to strangle him the next time you saw him, setting off a local sector war that would bring in Houses Gevaunt, Nightbray and Clovis, you’d have no problem?’
‘None at all,’ the man assured Molotch. ‘Not a problem at all.’
‘You’d strangle the Lord Governor?’ Leyla asked.
‘Like a bloody shot. Like he was a bloody whelp. Yes, mam.’
‘But I won’t,’ said Molotch. ‘You can go now, Garnis.’
‘Thank you kindly,’ the man said, and staggered off.
Molotch looked at the wide-eyed Leyla. ‘Every opening. Every chance. Every chink. That’s what the Cognitae are trained to do. To look, to see, to find, to use. In the course of this delightful lunch, Leyla, I could have brought the subsector down three or four times over. Just like that.’
He flicked something away with his thu
mb. It landed on the floor of the bar and broke, oozing fluid.
‘Oh holy-!’ Leyla began.
‘Relax. It’s just the suspension fluid. The plague’s in my pocket. So, let’s consider the Inquisition.’
‘The Inquisition?’
‘Most particularly, the office of the ordos on this world.’
‘You can’t see that from here.’
‘Oh, I can. In the over-bar mirror. See?’
‘Terra, I hadn’t noticed that.’
He sipped his wine. ‘I can see the fortress of the Inquisition from my seat. Such a big fortress. Towering over the city. It was built by the Black Templars, you know? Long since vacated, but one day they might be back. Until then, the Inquisition uses the keep. It’s going to be a bloody fight the day the Templars return. Anyway, they’re flying flags. Several dark flags. What does that mean?’
‘Does it mean anything? They’re flying flags.’
‘The Inquisition doesn’t suppose anyone understands their protocols and heraldry. Black flags above their fortress. Just for show. Just for threat. But I have made it my business to understand and monitor the way they signal to one another.’
‘So? I can barely see the mirror from where I’m sitting.’
‘I’ll tell you what it means. The flags are the black crests of Siquo, Bilocke and Quist, symbols the Inquisition identify with respect and honour. They are flying ceremonially. There are envoys in residence. Several high-ranking envoys. Actually, you can tell that simply by the number of weapon ports they’ve uncovered. Someone important is here.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, Ravenor’s here, as we feared, and they’ve decided to rein him in. Which is good news for us.’
There was a sudden, brutal crash. Voices around the eating house rose in alarm. Garnis had slipped over in the pool of suspension fluid and brained himself on the edge of the bar rail.
He was dead.
‘Let’s go,’ said Molotch.
They rose and picked their way out of the eating house, moving around the crowd that had gathered around Garnis’s misfortune.
‘That’s nine, ‘ Leyla whispered. ‘I thought you only wanted eight?’
‘I did, but I’m not stupid. This one isn’t ritual. This is a ninth to ruin the pattern. The ordos are sharp and clever. They would have seen a pattern of eight except for this.’
