by Dan Abnett
I wandered the room, looking at his pictures and sketches, and leafing through some of his notebooks. I was quite torn. My primary concern had to be protecting myself, and repairing the interests of the Maze Undue, so that the Ordos might be fortified and warned of their secret aggressor. But if this was the warp at work, if the Primordial Annihilator was functioning through the medium of Constant Shadrake, I felt a great compunction to take some action. A servant of the Inquisition cannot stand by when something like this is brought to their attention. It would be derelict to do so.
‘Where is my sighting glass?’ he cried, momentarily annoyed. ‘Where is the damn thing?’
His lackeys rushed around to search for it. Shadrake had a small plate of glass, very old glass that he claimed had come from the leaded, stained-glass window of an Ecclesiarchy oratory. He had framed the thing in wood, for holding, and had it inked up with a simple grid so that he could, by eye, section and compose a subject.
Someone found it, and brought it to him, along with a glass of wine to soothe his cares. He took it, and then looked at me through it, holding it up as though it was a magnifying glass.
‘Take a seat!’ he cried. ‘Take a seat against the backdrop there and let me look at you! So beautiful! So lovely!’
He lit another lho-stick and studied me some more.
Uncomfortable under such scrutiny, I glanced up and saw Lightburn enter the studio and look on, frowning. From the look of him, I fancied some outburst was imminent. I hoped he would have the sense not to make things more difficult.
‘Who is this?’ asked one of the girls, noticing Lightburn.
‘Yes, who is this?’ asked Shadrake, turning. He viewed Lightburn speculatively through his sighting glass, and was evidently unimpressed by the composition it presented. I saw that a clash was almost inevitable. The Curst was the only other mature male in the room, the only one who was a physical match for Shadrake. Lightburn was not as tall, but he was better made. Shadrake, the king of his little commune realm, would instantly see another male as a rival, as a competitor for the attention and charms of his addled entourage.
‘Who is he?’ asked Shadrake again, with an ugly sneer, lowering his sighting glass. He stressed every word. He stood with his legs apart, in a very masculine pose that suggested he was master of all, and that his testicles were too large to permit his legs to get any closer together. It was such pantomime, I might have laughed.
Instead, I said, ‘This is Renner.’
I saw Lightburn, his face already set like an overcast sky, flinch slightly at the public use of a name he’d been reluctant to tell me.
‘And who is Renner?’ asked Shadrake. ‘He looks a proper sort.’
‘Renner is with me,’ I said.
‘How is he with you, dearest Pad?’ asked Shadrake suspiciously.
I got up and walked towards Lightburn. The actual psychology required to coax Shadrake out of his confrontational stance was very simple, for the nature of the upset was ludicrously basic. I just hoped that Shadrake’s mind was not already too befuddled for it to work.
‘Renner sat with me for Sym,’ I said. ‘He did not like Sym much either, so I told him I’d put a word in here.’
‘He is not very… aesthetically pleasing,’ said Shadrake.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘but he is Curst.’
Shadrake frowned.
‘What difference does that make?’ he asked.
I turned to him and smiled, as if it was obvious.
‘I thought I explained that,’ I said. ‘Sym is quite beside himself over your rivalry.’
‘He is?’ asked Shadrake, trying not to sound surprised.
‘Your reputation begins to surpass his in the city,’ I explained. ‘His work is very accomplished, but it is considered far too safe. He does not get to grips with reality the way you do.’
‘Is that… what they say?’ asked Shadrake.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘They say Shadrake has an eye for the street, sir. The underbelly of the city. They talk of the raw honesty of your work, that you will paint less becoming images and thus achieve a greater artistic truth. Only you would think to use beggars and harlots and street runners.’
‘This is true,’ he said. ‘There is much more honesty in my work. I bare my soul.’ He was flattered, as I knew he would be. In truth, he used harlots and beggars as models because they would work for a glass of amasec and a crust of bread.
‘Sym has heard it all,’ I went on. ‘He is quite threatened by it. He decided he would paint such subjects as lepers and penitents… the pariahs of the street, and thus revive his reputation. He intends to paint the low residents of the gutter, sir, those who usually are invisible. So he chose a Curst man. This burdener here.’
Shadrake regarded the Curst afresh.
‘That man Sym mocks me,’ he said. ‘He would steal my truth.’
The half-drunken entourage around us, who had been listening to the exchange, hissed and booed.
Shadrake fished the lho-stick out of his mouth and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
‘Will you do me the honour, Curst one?’ he asked Lightburn. ‘Will you sit for me? I’ll show that Sym how it’s done.’
Lightburn looked at me. He was mystified.
‘Show him your ink,’ I said.
‘What?’ Lightburn asked.
‘Show him your ink. Master Shadrake will like the marks of it.’ With my eyes, I tried to implore the Curst to play along.
I expected him to roll up a sleeve or turn back a cuff. Apparently understanding the play we were acting, Lightburn set down the bag he had been carrying on the floor, then unceremoniously took off his coat and his shirt.
His arms and upper body were lean and heavily muscled. His skin was a sun-less white. The tattoos covered him from the waist to the throat, front and back, and down each arm to the wrist. There were thousands of close-writ lines, each one a burden or a penance, a task or a duty. They were the things he would do or perform to alleviate others and to purge himself. They seemed to go on below the line of his waistband.
A Curst usually has three or four inks upon his skin, sometimes a dozen, depending on the weight of his burden. I had never seen a man with so many.
It made me wonder what he had done to need so very much atonement.
Shadrake was impressed.
‘Will you take a glass of wine, sir, or a smoke?’ he asked Lightburn.
‘I do not partake of neither,’ said Lightburn.
‘Will you sit here then?’ Shadrake asked, ushering Lightburn towards the chair I had occupied in front of the dropcloth.
Lightburn wandered to the chair and sat down. Shadrake snapped orders to his hangers-on, sending them off for charcoal, paper, a clean board, a particular easel and more amasec. All the while, he considered Lightburn through his sighting glass.
I wandered up to the Curst.
‘Just sit here quietly for a while,’ I whispered. ‘Keep him occupied. In half an hour, he’ll be too drunk to draw. He’s already smoked too much tonight.’
‘This is a pretence?’ he asked.
‘Just play along. I appreciate your effort.’
I stepped back, and then looked down at him. The ink on his skin was so packed in, the letters so small, they were hard to read. One would have to be intimately close to him to comprehend them.
‘What did you do, Renner?’ I asked.
He did not reply.
I stayed on-hand, watching, but gradually moved back so I was no longer the centre of attention. Some music started up again. Shadrake actually began to draw.
I could still feel the eyes on me. The sense of a psyker’s regard had not left me, throughout the encounter. I wondered who or what was in the commune with us, or who might be gazing down upon it from some otherness with his mind’s eye. The God-Emperor is said to watch us all from His high vantage of the Golden Throne of Terra, but I did not think this was Him.
This was a closer scrutiny.
After a
n hour, a cry went up for more wine, and I volunteered to help fetch some, thinking it would give me the opportunity to leave the room and see if there had been any sign of Judika. Lightburn glared at the painter, trapped in his chair. I nodded to him, a signal to be still and bear it. Then I went out and ascended the stairs to the residence level.
There was no one around. Everyone was up for the night, and downstairs getting drunk or altered.
On my second circuit of the curtain-screened encampment under the roof, I heard a child laugh.
I followed the sound, pushing through curtains, drawing them aside, stepping over and through the mattress plots and possessions of the commune dwellers instead of going around. I glimpsed a tiny figure scurrying down the stairs, just a silhouette backlit by the chandelier below. It looked like an imp or one of the other little people, or like one of the squat-kind in the old legends.
I ran. I heard laughter again.
Hitching up my skirt with one hand, cursing Laurael Raeside for her manner of dress, I ran down the stairs. The curtain in the doorway of the pigment shop was swaying as if someone had drawn it aside and let it drop.
I flipped out the silver pin.
‘Who is there?’ I called out. ‘Show yourself. If you are just a child, then I will not harm you.’
From below came the sound of laughter and crude music, the sound of clapping.
I pulled back the curtain and went into the pigment shop. It was just as I had seen it earlier.
‘Hello?’ I called.
On one of the tables, the glass bottles and flasks were trembling slightly, as if someone had just walked past and rocked an old floorboard under them.
‘Show yourself!’ I called. My fingers curled around the bent pin.
No one answered. More laughter and music floated up through the floor. I heard a drum.
I bent down, and looked under the tables, but the spaces below them were filled with drums and crates, and it was impossible to see through.
I heard laughter again. A child’s stifled glee.
I stood up smartly.
‘Where are you?’ I asked. I edged around the end of one bench until I could see clear down to the door into the second mixing room.
‘Where are you?’ I repeated.
Another laugh.
I took a step. I heard a wooden clack and turned.
A tiny figure appeared, stepping out from behind a bench to face me. Its eyes were very wide and very bright, innocent and amazed, unblinking. It smiled. It was only a little taller than my knee.
But it was not a child.
And it was not alone. A second figure, almost identical, appeared at the other end of the bench. They moved towards me from opposite directions, smiling.
They were the voice-thrower’s puppets from the window of Blackwards emporium: the boy and the girl. Their eyes fixed me with blank, glassy intent. Their cheeks were rosy. Their mouths clacked open and shut as though they were trying to speak.
They both had tiny toy knives in their hands.
They were just objects. I knew this full well: they were wooden things, literally puppets for a telekine mind. I twisted my cuff to dead so that I would cut their strings and break the control.
They did not drop to the floor. They rushed me.
CHAPTER 20
A consideration of playthings
The boy doll reached me first. With the tottering steps of a toddler, he dashed across the floor and attacked my legs, slashing his toy knife to and fro. His mouth clacked. Its mouth, I should say, for it was just a toy. But despite the obvious artifice of its over-sized head, the wooden construction, the white paint, the rosy cheeks, the black lacquer hair and the slots beside the mouth, I could not help feeling it was a he.
There was even a little wooden tongue, painted red, that jiggled on a hinge when his mouth clacked open. The glass eyes swivelled in their sockets to look up at me.
I believe I exclaimed in disgust as it attacked. It was a vile and unnatural thing, the product of a child’s fever-dream. I simply kicked out, and the toe of my shoe caught the doll in the chest and sent him flying back across the pigment shop. He tumbled as he landed, clattering head over heels, and ended up lying on his shoulders, with his body and small legs draped back over his face. I saw the little gentleman’s shoes on his feet, perfect little leather shoes with tiny laces.
He jerked, rolled over awkwardly, and then stood up. He had to use his hands to raise himself onto his feet. It was like a child learning to stand.
I didn’t have time to observe the full, uncanny horror of the performance. The girl doll was at me too. It had moved more slowly than the boy, because it had been obliged to lift up the train of its court gown with one hand to free its legs. I could sympathise with that. I dodged back as the tiny lady’s knife stabbed at me. Again, I believe, I made an involuntary cry of disgust. They were so small, it was like fighting against animals. And the details were so alarming: the unblinking eyes, the carved grin. On the lady, it was the bun of real hair on top of her painted head. She had tiny earrings.
I backed away, moving around the corner of the bench. The combat, such as it was, was shaking the floorboards, and all the jars and pits and glasses on the mixing benches were rattling and clinking together.
Striking with my hands was impractical. The girl doll was too low a target for my silver pin. Apart from anything else, what could a silver pin do against a wooden breast?
I knew I would extend too far and probably over-balance if I tried to stab at her. The focus of her attack was my shins and knees. I kept skipping and dodging back. She landed one stab, but it was brushed aside by the folds of my skirt.
I needed a better weapon. I stumbled backwards, and banged into the nearest bench. The impact knocked a couple of bottles over, and one rolled off the side and smashed on the floor, filling the air with a cloud of blue dust. Not daring to look away from the jabbing, striking girl doll at my feet, I groped around frantically for something on the bench beside me. My hand turned over bottles, smashed jars, and sent cups of brushes and mixing sticks spilling over. I finally seized upon a small glass flask, and threw it at the girl doll.
The flask glanced off her head with a wooden crack and made her totter back a few steps. The impact rotated her head slightly, and she had to straighten it again to look at me. The glass eyes swivelled sideways in their sockets, first, coming around to look at me. Then they remained fixed on me as the head rotated back to face me.
I grabbed another pot and threw it. The doll ducked, and it went over its head. The first flask had not broken. It had simply landed and rolled across the floor. The second, flung with more force, smashed against the legs of the bench opposite and released a floury cloud of yellow pigment.
I grabbed a third bottle, and threw it, and then a fourth, then a fifth, snatching them up and slinging them at the girl doll to keep it at bay. The pots and flasks sailed past her, to one side, or the other. She tilted her body to avoid them. Each one exploded as it landed, a little grenade of dried colour that stained the floor and filled the air with a vivid smoke. The third bottle clipped her shoulder. The fourth struck her full in the chest, and knocked her down into a sitting position. This gave me a chance for another kick, and I took it, propelling the doll clear across the room with considerable force. She bounced off a bench further away, smashing bottles and breaking ceramic pots, and cartwheeled off the side out of sight.
The boy was already back, toddling towards me. I threw a tincture pot at him too. The glass vial, full of bright red pigment, hit him in the face and smashed, covering his head and shoulders with red mineral dust. He shook his head – a horribly human mannerism – to rid himself of the dust, but it had fully stained his face and ruined the collar and shoulders of his velvet suit. Wooden eyelids clicked, blinking dust away. The glass eyes looked at me as manically as before, staring out of a crimson face.
I backed up, and saw a mahl stick lying on the bench between the mixing trays. It was nearly
a metre long, and the cushioned pad at one end allowed an artist to lean it against a painting, to use as a steadying rest, without harming the canvas.
The boy doll rushed at me again, brandishing his toy knife. I jabbed at him with the stick, shoving him back with pokes of the cushioned end. Each time, he stumbled back at me, hacking at the stick with his knife, so the third time I rammed him hard and knocked him on his back.
I felt a sharp pain in my left tricep, and turned to find the lady doll standing on the workbench beside me. She had stabbed me with her toy knife. I cried out and jerked away from her, and she followed me along the bench, toddling rapidly from step to step, kicking bottles and pots out of her path. The damage I had done to her by kicking her across the room was mainly scuffs and scrapes, but it had also knocked off her bun of human hair, leaving nothing but a brass fixing in the back of her painted head.
She seemed angry.
She had made a mistake attacking me at a higher level. I slammed down the silver pin and staked the trailing train of her gown to the bench as firmly as though I’d nailed it there. Arrested, she strained at her dress, then turned to try to yank the pin out.
The red-faced boy doll grabbed at my legs, and became tangled in my skirts. I knocked at him, but felt another sharp puncture in the meat of my left calf. With both hands, driven by rage, I swung the mahl stick like a bat and sent him flying the length of the room.
The girl doll tore off the last few centimetres of her train, which she left nailed to the bench by the silver pin, and launched herself at me. She leapt clean off the bench, arms raised high.
I met her with a round-house punch that connected in mid-air and smashed her off to my left. She landed on another bench, shattering a number of bottles.
With them both driven off, I had an opportunity to flee. Some odd sentiment made me pause long enough to recover the silver pin, but as I reached for it, I realised that my left arm was numb.
A moment later, my left leg went cold, and stopped supporting me. I fell badly, unable to move my left arm to break my collapse, and cracked my shoulder and jaw against the edge of the bench.
