by Various
Of course, for reasons I could not have ever imagined, that would not be the case. Hindsight is a worthless toy.
Wystan Frauka emerged from the lander, lighting his latest lho-stick from the stub of the last. He had his limiter turned on, of course, and it would remain on until I told him otherwise. He looked bored, as usual, detached. He wandered over to where a servitor was unloading our luggage from the lander’s aft belly-hatch and looked for his own belongings.
Harlon remained at the edge of the safety cage, deep in thought. A heavyset man, thick with corded muscle, his head shaved, he had a dominating presence. Born on Loki, he’d been a bounty hunter for many years before gaining employment with my mentor Eisenhorn because of his skills. I had inherited him, so to speak. There was no man I would rather have at my side in a fight. But I wondered if Harlon Nayl was at my side any more. Not since… the event. I’d heard him talk about ‘going back to the old game’, his defeated tone the same as Cynia Preest’s. If it came down to it, I would let him go.
But I would miss him.
Kara Swole trundled me over to the gantry edge until we were facing the safety basket too. We stared out across the city.
‘See anything you like?’ she asked. She was trying to be light and funny, but I could taste the pain in her voice.
‘We’ll find something here, I promise,’ I said, my voice synthesised, expressionless, through the mechanical vox-ponder built into my support chair. I hadn’t mind-talked to any of them for a long time now, not since Majeskus, probably. I despised the vox-ponder’s menacing flatness, but telepathy seemed too intimate, too intrusive at a time when thoughts were raw and private.
‘We’ll find something here,’ I repeated. ‘Something worth finding.’
Kara managed a smile. It was the first I had seen her shape for months, and it warmed me briefly. She was trying. Kara Swole was a short, voluptuous redhead whose rounded build quite belied her acrobatic abilities. Like Harlon, I had inherited her from Eisenhorn. She was a true servant of the ordos, as hard as stone when she needed to be, but she possessed a gentleness as appealing and soft as her curves. For all her dexterity, her stealth, her confidence with weapons, I think it was that gentleness that I most valued her for.
Molotch had faded into the void after his crimes above Majeskus, leaving no trace. Sameter, benighted planet, offered us the vestige of a clue. Three of Molotch’s hired guns, three of the men we had slain in the battle on the Hinterlight, had proved, under forensic examination, to have come from Sameter. From this very place, Urbitane, the planet’s second city.
We would find their origins and their connections, and follow them through every tenuous twitch and turn, until we had Molotch’s scent again.
And then…
Carl had finished his transactions with the lander pilot. As I turned, I saw the pilot looking at me, staring at me the same way he and the other crew members had stared since they had first seen me come aboard. I didn’t have to reach out with my mind to understand his curiosity.
The wounds of Chaos had left me a mangled wreck, a disembodied soul locked forever within a grav-suspended, armoured support chair. I had no physical identity anymore. I was just a lump of floating metal, a mechanical container, inside which a fragment of organic material remained, kept vital and pulsing by complex bio-systems. I knew the very sight of me scared people, people like the pilot and the rest of his crew. I had no face to read, and people do so like a face.
I missed my face. I missed my limbs. Destiny had left me one virtue, my mind. Powerfully, alarmingly psychic, my mind was my one saving grace. It allowed me to carry on my work. It allowed me to transcend my pitiful state as a cripple in a metal box.
Molotch had a face. A handsome visor of flesh that was, in its way, as impassive as my sleek, matt-finished metal. The only expression it ever conveyed was a delight in cruelty. I would take great pleasure in burning it off his shattered skull.
‘Do we have the names and physiologues?’ I asked.
‘Nayl’s got them,’ Kara replied.
‘Harlon?’
He turned and walked over to join us, pulling a data-slate from the hip-pocket of his long, mesh-weave coat.
He flipped it on.
‘Victor Zhan. Noble Soto. Goodman Frell. Biogs, traces, taints and histories. All present and correct.’
‘Let’s do what we came here to do,’ I said.
III
Oubliette. A place where things or persons are put so that they may be forgotten about. Or, as Patience preferred to think, a place where one might sit awhile and forget.
The scholam’s oubliette was a cavity under the lower hall, fitted with a bolted hatch. There was no light, and vermin scuttled around in the wet shadows. It was the punishment place, the area where those pupils who had committed the worst infractions were sent by the rigorists. But it was also one of the few places in the Kindred Youth Scholam where a pupil could enjoy some kind of privacy.
According to its register, the scholam was home to nine hundred and seventy-six young people, most of them slum orphans. There were thirty-two tutors, all privately employed, and another forty servants and ancillary staff, including a dozen men, all ex-Guard, known as the rigorists, whose duties were security and discipline.
Life in the scholam was austere. The old tower, built centuries earlier for some purpose no one could now remember, was chilly and damp. The tower itself clung for support to the side of a neighbouring stack, like a climbing plant against a wall. The floors of its many storeys were cold ouslite dressed with rush-fibre, the walls lime-washed and prone to trickles of condensation. A murmur from the lower levels reminded the inhabitants that there was a furnace plant working down there, but it was the only clue, for no heat ever issued from the thumping pipework or the corroded radiators.
The regime was strict. An early rise, prayers, and an hour of ritual examination before breakfast, which was taken at sunrise. The morning was spent performing the many chores of the scholam – scrubbing floors, washing laundry, helping in the kitchen – and the afternoon was filled with academic classes. After supper, more prayers, ablutions in the freezing wash-house, and then two hours of liturgical study by lamplight.
Occasionally, trusted older pupils were allowed to accompany tutors out of the tower on trips into the nearby regions of the hive, to help carry purchased food stocks, fabrics, ink, oil and all the other sundry materials necessary to keep the scholam running. They were a distinctive sight in the busy streets of the western stacks: a grim, robed tutor leading a silent, obedient train of uniformed scholars, each one laden down by bundles, bales, bags and cartons. Every pupil wore a uniform, a unisex design in drab grey with the initials of the scholam stitched onto the back.
Few pupils ever complained about the slender comfort of their lives, because almost all of them had volunteered for it. Strict it might be, but life in the Kindred Youth Scholam was preferable to the alternative outside in the tracts. Existence in the wastelands west of the hive offered a lean choice: scavenge like an animal, or bond into a gang. Either way, life expectancy was miserably low. Municipally-sponsored scholams, offering a bed, food and a basic education that emphasised the values of the Throne, represented an escape route. Reasonably healthy, lice-free, qualified youngsters could leave such institutions with a real prospect of securing an apprenticeship to one of the hive guilds, a journeyship, or at least a decent indenture.
Patience had been at the scholam for twelve years, which meant she was twenty-two or twenty-three years old and by far the oldest pupil registered at that time. Most pupils left the care of the charity around their majority, when their age gave them a legal identity in the eyes of the guilds. But Patience had stayed on because of her sisters. Twins, Providence and Prudence were fifteen, and Patience had promised them she would stay and look after them until they turned eighteen. It was a promise she’d made to her sisters, and
to her dying mother, the day their mother had brought the three of them to the scholam and asked the tutors to take them in.
Patience was not her birth name, no more than Prudence’s was Prudence or Providence’s Providence. They were scholam names, given to each pupil at their induction, symbolic of the fresh start they were making.
Except for Patience, few pupils were made to suffer the oubliette. She had now been in there nineteen times.
On this occasion, she was in for breaking the nose of Tutor Abelard. She’d punched the odious creep for criticising her work in the laundry. The crack of cartilage and the puff of blood had been very satisfying.
Cooling down, in the dark, Patience recognised that it had been foolish to strike the tutor. Just another mark against her record. For this, she was missing the graduation supper taking place in the vaults many floors up. There was an event like it every few months, when distinguished men of consequence – guild masters, merchants, manufactory directors and mill owners – came to the scholam to meet and examine the older pupils, making selections from the best and contracting apprenticeships. By morning, Patience knew, many of her long-term friends would have left the scholam forever to begin new lives in the teeming stacks of Urbitane.
The fact was, she’d been there too long. She was too old to be contained by the scholam, even by the hardline rigorists, and that was why she kept running into trouble. If it hadn’t been for her promise, and her two, beloved sisters, she’d have been apprenticed to a hive mill long since.
Something bristly and locomoting on more than four legs scuttled across her bare hand. With a twitch of her gift, she hurled it away into the dark.
Her gift. Only she had it. Her sisters showed no sign of it. Patience never used her gift in front of the tutors, and she was fairly certain they knew nothing about it.
It was a mind thing. She could move things by thinking about them. She’d discovered she could do it the day her mother left them at the scholam gates. Patience had been practising ever since.
In the dark of the black stone cell, Patience tried to picture her mother’s face, but couldn’t. She could remember a warm smell, slightly unwashed but reassuring, a strong embrace, a hacking cough that presaged mortality.
The face, though, the face…
It had been a long time. Unable to form the image in her head, Patience turned her mind to something else. Her name. Not Patience. Her real name. The tutors had tried to rid her of it, forcing her to change her identity, but she still hung on to it. It was the one private piece of her that nothing and no one could ever steal. Her true name.
It kept her alive. The very thought of it kept her going.
The irony was, she could leave the oubliette whenever she chose. A simple flick of her gift would throw back the bolt and allow her to lift the trapdoor. But that would give her away, convince the tutors she was abnormal.
Patience reined her mind in and sat still in the darkness.
Someone was coming. Coming to let her out.
IV
Harlon Nayl’s eyes didn’t so much as blink as the fist came at him. His left hand went out, tilting inwards, captured the man’s arm neatly around the inside of the wrist, and wrenched it right round through two hundred degrees. A bone may have snapped, but if it did, the sound was masked by the man’s strangled squeal, a noise which ended suddenly as Nayl’s other hand connected with his face.
The man – a thickset lhotas-eater with a mucus problem – shivered the deck as he hit it. Nayl kept hold of his wrist, pulling the man’s arm straight and tight while he stood firmly on his armpit. This position allowed for significant leverage, and Nayl made use of it. Harlon was in a take-no-prisoners mood, I sensed, which was hardly useful given our objective.
A little leverage and rotation. A ghastly scream, vocalised through a face spattered with blood.
‘What do you reckon?’ asked Nayl, twisting a little more and increasing the pitch. ‘Do you think I can get top C out of him?’
‘Should I care?’ replied Morpal Who Moves with mannered disinterest. ‘You can twist Manx’s arm right off and beat him round the head with it, he still won’t tell you what you want. He’s a lho-brow. He knows nothing.’
Nayl smiled, twisted, got another shriek. ‘Of course he is. I worked that much out from his scintillating conversation. But one of you does. One of you knows the answer I want. Sooner or later his screams will aggravate you so much you’ll tell me.’
Morpal Who Moves had a face like a crushed walnut. He sat back in his satin-upholstered buoy-chair and fiddled with a golden rind-shriver, a delicate tool that glittered between his bony fingers. He was weighing up what to say. I could read the alternatives in his forebrain like the label on a jar.
‘This is not good for business–’
‘Sir, this is my place of business, and I don’t take kindly to–’
‘Throne of Earth, who the frig d’you think you are–’
Morpal’s place was a four-hectacre loading dock of iron, stock-brick and timber hinged out over the vast canyon gulf of the West Descent, an aerial thoroughfare formed by the gap between two of the hive’s most colossal stacks. Beneath the reinforced platform and the gothic buttresses that supported it, space dropped away for almost a vertical kilometre to the base of the stacks. Ostensibly, this was a ledge where cargo-flitters and load-transporters – and many thousands of these craft plied the airways of the West Descent – could drop in for repairs, fuel, or whatever else the pilots needed. But Morpal was a fence and racketeer, and the transience of the dock’s traffic gave him ample opportunity to steal, replace, backhand, smuggle and otherwise run his lucrative trade.
More than twenty men stood in a loose group around Harlon. Most were stevedores and dock labourers in Morpal’s employ. The others were flit-pilots, gig-men, hoy-drivers and riggers who’d stopped in for caffeine, fuel and a game of cards, many of them regulars who were into Morpal for more than a year’s salary each.
All this and more was visible from their collective thoughts, which swirled around the loading dock like a fog. I was five kilometres away, in a room in a low-rent hotel. But it was all clear enough. I knew what Mingus Futir had eaten for breakfast, what Fancyman D’cree had stolen the night before, the lie Gert Gerity had told his wife. I knew all about the thing Erik Klass didn’t want to tell Morpal.
Wystan Frauka sat beside me, smoking a lho-stick, his limiter activated. He was reading a tremendously tedious erotic novel on his slate.
Surface was easy. Deep mind was harder. Morpal Who Moves and his cronies were well-used to concealing their secrets.
That was why Harlon had gone in first.
Morpal finally arrived at a decision. He had determined, I sensed, to take the moral high ground. ‘This is not how things are done on my platform,’ he told Harlon. ‘This is a respectable establishment.’
‘Yeah, right,’ snorted Nayl. ‘One last time. What can you tell me about Victor Zhan? He worked here once, before he went off planet. I know he worked here, because I had the records checked out. So tell me about Victor.’
‘Victor Zahn hasn’t been around in five years,’ Morpal said.
‘Tell me about him anyway,’ Nayl snapped.
‘I really don’t see any reason to do that.’
‘I’ll show you one.’ Nayl reached his free hand into his hip pocket, took something out and threw it down onto the cup-ringed, grimy tabletop. His badge of authority. The signet crest of the Inquisition.
Immediately all the men took a step beck, alarmed. I felt Morpal’s mind start in dismay. This was the kind of trouble no one wanted.
Unless…
‘Damn it,’ I said.
Frauka looked up from the midst of his book’s latest loveless tryst. ‘What’s up?’
‘Morpal Who Moves is about to make a miscalculation.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Fra
uka, and turned back to his novel.
Morpal had run the dock for forty-six years. For all his misdeeds and misdemeanours, some of them serious, he’d never run foul of the law, apart from the odd fine or reprimand. He actually thought he could deal with this and get away with it.
Harlon. Morpal’s signal will be a double finger-click. Your immediate threat is the grey-haired gig-man to your left, who has a dart-knife. To his right, in the leather apron, the rigger has a pivot-gun, but he will not be able to draw it as fast. The flit-pilot in green wants to prove himself to Morpal, and he won’t hesitate. His friend, the one with the obscura-tinted eyes, is less confident, but he has a boomgun in his cab.+
‘Well?’ Harlon Nayl asked.
Morpal Who Moves clicked both middle fingers.
I flinched at the sudden flare of adrenaline and aggression. A great part of it came from Nayl.
The rigger in the leather apron had drawn his pivot-gun, but Nayl had already stoved the table in with the face of the grey-haired gig-man and relieved him of his dart-knife. Nayl threw himself around as the pilot in green lunged forward, and slam-kicked him in the throat. The pilot went down, choking, his larynx crushed, as the pivot-gun finally boomed. The home-made round whipped high over Nayl’s head as he rolled and triggered the dart-knife. The spring-propelled blade speared the rigger through the centre of his leather apron, and he fell over on his back, clawing at his belly.
