by Dan Abnett
To begin, Mam Mordaunt or the Secretary would brief us on the role that we were required to play. Our preparatory work often involved remote viewing of the subject via the quizzing glass in the top room, and even, sometimes, shadowing them in the streets. Mentor Murlees would acquaint us with aspects of custom and language that would assist us, and Mam Mordaunt would coach our deportment and help us to assemble our disguises in the robing room. Mentor Saur would finesse any defensive or offensive technique we might require, and then the Secretary himself would review our finished role and refine it before sending us out along the holloways to get on with our business.
We were obliged to pose as people, to play-act, to pretend. We took on roles, immersed ourselves in other personalities, so we could get close to various target citizens in the great city without them realising they were being gulled. Often, a function came with a nominal task: enter the household of merchant T___________ and learn the combination to his strongbox; work in the court of Mamzel R____________ and bring back a single pearl button from her finest astarish gown; penetrate the manufactory of the industrialist F__________ and discover the name of his off-world brokers; serve as a waiter at the Telthea Dining House on the Ludovic Ambular, and listen in when Duke H_________ next came to supper, in order to learn the private pet-name he had for his new mistress.
Sometimes these tasks seemed essentially pointless. A mistress’s pet-name? The secret ingredient of a baker’s famous confectionary? The number of minutes slow a particular old clock ran in a particular private reading room? They were, I knew, just tasks for the sake of tasks. Sometimes functions dispensed with them entirely: then it was simply how long could one pass one’s self off as someone else, and how far could one get, before discovery – and flight – became necessary.
Each function was a contest, a challenge, and the longer one lasted, the better one had performed.
‘If you can, with a little modest preparation, pass anywhere within Queen Mab and learn anything,’ the Secretary told us, ‘then you can pass anywhere outside Queen Mab.’
We were learning to be actors. Liars, in fact, because convincing liars are all that actors are, ultimately. We were learning to become other people to such a degree we could get lost in the part. Before anyone else could believe, we had to believe.
I enjoyed it, for the most part. I enjoyed the challenge. There was rivalry between the candidates, usually friendly. Sometimes, if a candidate had to abort a function early, another would be sent in to do better. We learned from each other which disguises worked, and which did not. We shared experience-derived tips about body language and micro-expression control, minute details that enhanced a performance and helped to convince a subject.
My favourite part of preparation was the robing room. The Maze Undue’s theatrical legacy had left it packed with costumes. When a function was handed to me, and my role was determined, I rushed away to select the disguise that would help me get into the part. The robing room never disappointed me. No matter what outlandish guise I lit upon, I would find the constituent parts of the apparel I had in mind hanging somewhere on the robing room’s rails. It was almost uncanny, though I suspect Mam Mordaunt kept the wardrobe supplemented with clothing and props that might be called for.
I think of the month I spent in the mansion house of the Marquis Saintwyrm in the traverse avenues below Feygate. He supposed me, on first sight, to be the tutor of figurative art, engaged to teach his eldest daughter. Corlam had very much wanted this function, and a very fine figure he would have cut as a young private tutor in a sober black suit and a wide-brimmed hat. I dare say the daughter might even have fallen for her handsome teacher. But I could paint and draw much better than he could, so the function came to me. By the end of the month, I had discovered precisely which congenital allergy affected the Saintwyrm line, an allergy the private kitchens and chefs worked scrupulously to avoid. A fatal weakness, of most exploitable use, I suppose, to assassins or blackmailers, was now the currency of the Maze Undue. The marquis, his family, and his vast industrial empire was now critically vulnerable to a piece of leverage eked out during a lesson in paint washes with a talkative, unguarded girl.
I think, too, of functioning as a junior sartor in the palace of the Silver Countess. You’ll have heard of the Silver Countess, I’m sure. One of the most powerful figures in Queen Mab’s noble class, and rumoured to be one of the few people to have the ear and support of the mysterious Yellow King. She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, and I only ever saw her from a distance. Her gowns – resplendent in every way – were the most ambitious and elaborate in the city, nay the world. So ridiculously luxurious and costly were they, the countess’s chamberlain kept them in a wardrobe annex as secure as a banking house’s vault, under the care of the Keeper of the Wardrobe and his staff of junior sartors. Every dress and garment was catalogued and inspected when it came off her body, every fibre checked, any minute wear repaired. Garments were cleaned, often with abstruse methods, and every single gem or ostrich feather or ivory clasp or jewelled element adorning the gowns was removed, one by one, checked against a ledger, and returned to the wardrobe store. Sometimes it took us a whole day to select, sign out, and attach all the jewels afforded to a particular dress, and then another day to disassemble the outfit and retire it, checking each last gem back in. If a single gem went missing, the name of the last person to handle it was always recorded. Junior sartors had been removed – I think, perhaps, even executed – for such failures of care.
I took a jewel, a green garnet the size of an almond, attached to a gold hoop, and I never gave it back. The Silver Countess and her Master of Wardrobe never noticed its absence, however. Another green garnet hangs in its place on those folds of black crepe silk these days, this one, however, has a vox transmitter device wired into it.
I also think of Corodatus, the Ironmaster, the keeper and teller of his own stories. I served him too, on one function, in his verdigrised ruin of a palace below Coalgate. He was another mystery I learned about thanks to a function.
I realise these are stories I need not tell. They are simply exemplars.
I will tell a story that is pertinent instead. The story of the function of the Blackwards, and of Deathrow, and of Sister Bismillah’s new sister. The story where my stories begin to wind tighter.
CHAPTER 6
On the harrowed paths
It was about a year, a little over perhaps, after the intruder had died in the drill. The incident had not been mentioned again, and neither had the Cognitae. I had been worked hard, though I felt that Mam Mordaunt and the Secretary were both keeping a solicitous eye upon me. I was almost twenty-five.
A function was announced. I was selected, beyond Faria and Corlam, and even Maphrodite, who was excelling by then. The emporium house of the Blackwards had to be penetrated. Information was required.
Once prepared for the function – a process which took some two or three days – I set out, following, as always, the city’s holloways to reach my destination.
Queen Mab, if you do not know it, is criss-crossed with an irregular scheme of holloways or harrowed paths. They are sacred ways, streets of the vast city that are distinguished because they felt the actual step of Saint Orphaeus when he trod upon this world during his pilgrimage of grace many centuries ago. This was when he had returned from the empyrean of heaven, and brought its gift of fire back with him. Those streets wherein he passed were closed off as blessed tracts, harrowed by his passing, and the folk of Queen Mab avoid their sanctity. They have become, simply, the place of the destitute and the warblind.
The holloways bisect the city so they serve to divide it into many compartments. Two such quarters may exhibit very different characters, though they are only separated by a single street (admittedly, a street where no one walks). In places, bridges and tunnels have been established to traverse the holloways where to go around would take too long.
I have always liked the holloways. The streets, and the prope
rties that line them, are as they were left, and as time has worn them. They are silent and dusty, almost all colour gone and flaked, sanded down by centuries of weather. Through fogged glass, one can glimpse rooms that look as though the occupants have just stepped out, in the middle of lunch or a game of cards. Shops still display, through cobwebbed panes, the faded residue of their wares.
Devotion to the Imperial saint caused those streets to be abandoned overnight, deserted like a city abandoned because of a volcano warning, and the holy status of the harrowed streets is supposed to bar entry to all.
But the dregs of society go there. They go for shelter and to avoid the city watch, and they go there, as I understand it, in the hope of being blessed by the Saint’s afterglow: to be blessed or cured or saved.
The warblind are there too, of course. It was said the Saint himself bade the broken veterans of the great war cease their mental anguish and their untameable desire for violence, a desire they had not been able to shed once they had come back from the war, and devote themselves to guarding the holloways. The warblind are the sentinels of the paths. Their gangs and tribes lurk there, and they kill or drive out any intruders. The destitute know to stay out of the way when a warblind gang comes by.
Candidates of the Maze Undue use the holloways to travel around the city unnoticed and unimpeded. It is, of course, utterly forbidden, but our entire education is about getting ourselves safely in and out of forbidden places, so it seems not only acceptable but also supremely appropriate. It is also technically hazardous, but we set our cuffs to dead, so our bluntness keeps everyone at bay. No one even glances at us, not even the most barbaric, augmented warblind killgang.
As a result, I sometimes find myself strolling along the holloways as if taking a sightseeing walk. I am in no hurry to leave, or hide, or flee. I look at the empty places that have not been looked at for aeons. The warblind certainly don’t look at them. They see nothing but a jagged blur of a world with a target pipper painted across it, a red mist of rage and homicidal aggression that has been induced by chemicals and sustained by trauma.
Thus, dressed as the factor of an off-world buyer, I was strolling down a Hearthill holloway, heading south towards the Blackwards emporium, when I saw him.
And realised that he had seen me.
He was a beast of a man, a figure of great size. I had never seen a warrior of the legendary Adeptus Astartes, but his was the sort of stature I imagined they might possess. Tall, broad, with immense power in the frame of his shoulders and the depth of his arms.
He wore armour of plate, chainmail and leatherwork over his augmetic build. He was one of the truly old ones, one of the veteran relics that had been alive since the war. The mail and the plate segments, old and surplus scrap, had been worn down to bare metal and ceramite to remove rust, all paint and polish gone. The metal segments shone dully, like matt grey and green stones. A dust-cloak wrapped his upper body, turned around his shoulders three times, in the manner of those who dwell in the Sunderland. I had seen their likeness in ethno-history books.
From the red chevrons on his shoulder plate, I knew him to be of the Tusk Slope warblind. There was a name writ in paint along the cheek of his fighting visor, just below the glowing, buzzing slot of his optics. It read, in hobbled Enmabic, ‘Deathrow’.
Under the hem of his ragged cloak, his fists were full of in-built blades. I could smell the stink of him, even at a distance, the trash smell, the rotten perfume of the coarse, scavenged diet that sustained him.
He had a dog at his heels, a large, ugly cattle dog whose fight-scarred hide showed where old augmetic aggression stimulators had been excised, or torn out. The dog, eyeing me, kept a growl alive in its throat, fluttering like a panicked bird in a drum.
I stopped. I shouldn’t have, of course. I should have run. I should have run, because he could clearly see me, despite my limiter cuff’s setting. The killgangs never looked at the pariahs as they passed through their territories, never even glanced. I never heard of it happening before.
I should have run, because he could see me, but that very fact arrested me and made me turn to him, fascinated by his interest.
Deathrow. The name was notorious. One of the most brutal warblind, a killgang chief. Was this him, in person?
The cattle dog’s growl rolled like a frag grenade along rockcrete. A stray wind gusted dust and clattering paper scraps across the holloway.
I took another step towards him. His shoulders rose slightly, alert.
Combat-ready, probably.
The optic trench in his visor buzzed with a greater fury, and the amber cursor cycled from one end to the other. I could see that below the lip of his fighting visor, his mouth and chin and throat were a corded mass of scar tissue, like pipes of red liquorice bound and squeezed together.
What was I doing? I had no weapon except a slipknife in my mantle. If I could outrun the warblind, I doubted I could outrun his dog.
‘You can see me,’ I said, in street Mabiçoise.
His visor buzzed. The stink of him was awful.
‘You can see me?’ I repeated.
Buzz.
‘I am Beta,’ I said. I certainly don’t know why I told him Beta, rather than Laurael Raeside, the identity I was wearing.
His cattle dog answered me. For a second, its purring growl seemed to swell to make the sounds ‘death’ and ‘row’. I would swear this to be the fact of it, though I do not believe in talking dogs.
‘Deathrow,’ I echoed. The cattle dog ceased its growling, and sniffed repeatedly at a stain on the ground.
I bowed my heard civilly.
‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance this day,’ I said.
I turned away and started to walk. I heard a buzz.
But death did not come at me from behind and bear me down.
CHAPTER 7
Laurael Raeside attends upon the Blackwards; a watcher at the school
My heart rate still elevated after my encounter with the warblind creature, I left the holloway under Hearthill Rise, and entered the busy streets of Ropeburn. This was an old and orderly quarter of habitation apartments rising like grey cliffs above street-level commercias and vendorsites. In some parts, sections of Queen Mab’s old tram systems still operated: clanging brass cars with iron wheels and brightly painted wooden sidings rattled along the stretches of sunken track that were still viable, bearing shift-workers and market-goers, and the servants of high houses off on retail errands. At night, the cars were lit from within by gas lamps, making them little warm, gilded boxes of sanctuary, gliding and rattling through the darkening streets, but I knew they were a fading sight. Once, the trams had run as far as Feygate, and out beyond Toilgate in the south as far as the sheds, and all the way to Savant Point. The network had worn down, and only small stretches remained in function, operated by the last of the livery companies, little relics of life and motion in the city’s otherwise moribund mass. Whenever I saw worn silver rails, half-buried in the street cobbles, and thus knew myself to be in a quarter where the trams still ran. I involuntarily imagined the rails to be strands of the city’s nervous system, embedded in its cobbled flesh, the last responsive neural filaments in a corpse otherwise slipping away.
As the clattering trams of Ropeburn reminded me of life, so the street blocks and gibbets reminded me of death. In older times, Ropeburn’s fine and broad Avenue Parnassos, lined with pollarded fepen trees and iron benches, was the city’s place of public punishment and execution. The bald stone blocks, black-iron platforms and drop-hatch stages are still there, drab with age, and the tie-beams and spars still extend above the common street like flagpoles.
The emporium of the Blackwards lay on Gelder Street, just off the avenue, the corner marked by an especially brutal-looking execution stage, all pitch-caulked timber and iron bolts. The rabble crowd had roared here once, baying for the act, drowning out the last words of dissidents and traitors alike. Drummer boys had beat a steady rhythm until the sharp, final bang
, the thump of the hatch and the mutual gasp of the crowd.
The emporium had one window, lit day and night like the golden glow of a tram. Every day, the display changed, and it was said that no one ever saw employees of the emporium enter the window space to remake the window setting. It was done late at night when no one saw, some said. It was done by sorcery, claimed others. I was disinclined to heed the former, as even in a quieter street like Gelder, Queen Mab was awake day and night alike.
I imagined that for a brief moment, late each night, a drop curtain would fall across the emporium’s window, and then draw again a few minutes later, to reveal a new scene, manifested by quick and ingenious stagecraft, like the living tableaux presented at the theatrical halls.
I reached the door and rang the brass bell. My cuff was set live. I was Laurael Raeside, a representative for off-world commercial interests.
I waited, and looked at the window display.
It was a simple show that day: a space lined with grey silk, like an undressed stage. The area behind the thick, and slightly uneven, lead glass was lit by recessed gas lamps, and a slender glowbar underlight on the inside of the sill.
The items chosen for display were two dolls. ‘Mannequins’ was, perhaps, a better word. They were scaled to about a quarter of human dimensions, so they might sit in the lap of an adult, like a small child. Their eyes, ingenious glass imitations, were large, and stared fixedly out of the tableau into the street. Their faces were painted white with rosy cheeks. Their mouths were wide, and slots descending from the corners of their lips showed how the wood was jointed so that a mechanism could make the mouths flap open and shut to mimic human movement. They were puppets for a voice-thrower’s theatrical act. Old, I guessed, very old, and startling. They were not pretty, or even life-like, but the stare they gave seized my attention, and the set of their mouths was neither smile nor frown, but rather grimace.
