The Encoded Heart

by Peter J Evans

  "There must be a million tonnes of the stuff!" Red leaned over the rail, peering down over the sheer drop to the kicking, hissing pools far beneath. "And the Magister's got his home under that?"

  "Some distance below this stratum, yes." Sorrelier put his back to the rail. He was sweating, his hair plastered to his scalp with a mix of perspiration and spray from the fountains. "Durham Red, listen to me. This is where things start getting difficult."

  "Start?"

  "So far this has just been a long walk. The Magister takes his privacy very seriously, believe me. I've only been below this level once, and then only to the outer reaches of his court. The way will be guarded, heavily."

  "Great. And I don't even have a gun."

  "You don't honestly think I'd be anywhere near you if you did?"

  Red gave him a look, then straightened up. "Come on then. Let's see how many heads we can crack."

  "It's this way."

  She followed him around the walkway to an exit hallway, and in turn to a gleaming, carpeted lobby bigger than Mazatl's entire longhouse. Three sets of sliding double doors occupied one wall. More elevators.

  As he saw them, Sorrelier slowed. "That's odd."

  "What?"

  "No guards."

  "How many would there normally be?"

  He made a face. "I'm not sure. A lot."

  "Wonderful. They must have been called away. Let's get in and go down a few strata before anyone notices they've left the doors open."

  She ran forward, hearing Sorrelier and Lise follow. As she reached the nearest set of doors they slid aside and she stepped in. "Come on."

  "This isn't right."

  "Don't get cold feet on me now, buster!" She reached over the threshold and dragged him in, ducking a blow from Lise as she did so. "Hey!"

  "Lise!" Sorrelier regained his balance, and went to stand warily next to Red. "It's all right, Lise. She meant no harm."

  "Yet," Red grinned, showing him her fangs. Hers were still a lot longer and sharper than his. By the look that crossed his face, he knew it.

  Sorrelier pressed a control, the lowest one on the board. The elevator doors slid closed, and Red felt the floor drop below her. On the control panel was a series of indicators, glossy jewels set into the brass. The top one lit, then went out as the next one down came on. As it did so, there was a faint chime.

  Red smiled wryly to herself. Twelve hundred years from home, and some things stayed exactly the same. "Sorrelier?"

  "What now?"

  "Just so I know what to call His Majesty once we get in there, what's his name?"

  The man shrugged. "I have no idea. We're only told the name of a Magister once he dies. Only the Board of Arch-Domini know the identity of the living Magister."

  "Because they elect him."

  "I'm impressed."

  "Don't be. It's pretty snecking obvious when you think about it."

  The chimes continued, faintly, as the elevator continued to drop. "Almost there," said Sorrelier, after a few seconds. "Be ready."

  "I'm always ready."

  "Are you? I had no idea." He arched an eyebrow. "You must be a very popular girl."

  Red was weighing up whether she should break Sorrelier's spine and spare herself any more of his wit when the lowest indicator lit up, and chimed. "Here we go," she growled, tensing.

  There was another chime, then, seconds later, another. "Sorrelier, we're still going down."

  "That can't be."

  Red watched him turn to the panel and begin pressing randomly at the controls. Despite his denial, the lift was not only still descending, but doing so at an increasing rate. She could feel the floor vibrating under her, hear the faint whine of its systems rising in pitch, in volume.

  Something was definitely, horribly wrong. "Sneck. I knew we should have taken the stairs."

  Without warning, the lift slammed to a halt. The floor bounced hard enough to knock Sorrelier off his feet. Lise caught him, blurringly fast, just as the doors snapped open.

  Red dived out. If the elevator had suffered one of the Keep's mysterious systems failures, she had no intention of setting foot inside the thing again. Next time she'd walk, blisters or no blisters.

  A moment later, Sorrelier followed, with Lise hanging onto his arm. The man looked thoroughly shaken. "Mutant," he muttered.

  "What? Don't blame me for that. You're the one who pressed the damn button."

  He waved her to silence. "Mutant, we are here! The inner court!"

  Red glanced about. The elevator doors had opened onto a space so big that, for an instant, she hadn't even registered that they were indoors.

  It soared away from her in every direction, the floors polished so close to a mirror finish that it was like standing in mid-air. The distant walls reared up in sheets of pastel amber, meeting columns of blinding white at every intersection. Red couldn't even gauge the exact shape of the place, let alone its size. There were chambers leading off chambers, stairways and balconies and halls, linking and interlinking in awesome, airy profusion.

  It was a city made from cathedrals, each one knocked through into the next. "Sneck me," Red whispered.

  Sorrelier seemed just as enrapt by the sight as she was. He stood with his neck craned backward, his eyes wide. "Incredible. I've never imagined anything like this." His voice, hushed as it was, echoed around the pale walls.

  "Never mind that, Sorrelier. How did we end up here?"

  "The elevator?"

  "Yeah, the snecking elevator. Except it wasn't even supposed to come down this far, was it? What do you think that was, one of your crazy systems breakdowns? No chance." She stalked away from him for a few paces, out across that gleaming floor. "No guards upstairs, no one down here, and the elevator just happens to go mad and drop us on the exact floor that we want?"

  "What are you saying?"

  "That the Magister wants us down here. In fact, he's wanted us down here from the start."

  He paced over to join her, Lise just behind him. "For what reason?" he whispered.

  "Search me. But he's the one whose been screwing us both around since Christ-knows-when, so it's no surprise he's still at it now." She began striding off, aiming herself directly away from the elevator door. "Come on. The Magister's made it really easy for us to get down here so far. He's not about to start making it difficult now."

  "As flawed logic goes, that's so skewed as to be practically circular."

  Red nodded ahead at the door she had spotted. "Oh yeah?"

  It wasn't quite that easy. The door lead to an empty hallway, rather than to the Magister himself, which led in turn to a similar chamber. In all, five more chamber awaited them - a full twenty minutes of brisk walking - before they reached what Red decided had to be the last door. It was easily the biggest and most ornate of them all, for one thing. For another, she wasn't sure how much further they would be able to walk in a straight line before hitting the opposite wall of the Keep.

  "This is it."

  "You're sure about that." Sorrelier drew something small and slender from his coat pocket. The needle gun.

  "Sure enough." And she drew her foot back to kick the door aside.

  They opened, silently, before she could connect, and the aborted kick took her a few stumbling paces beyond the doorway. Almost to the feet of the man who sat within.

  He was seated on a vast golden throne, set atop a circular dais of jewelled steps. He wore a suit of black silk, a frilled white shirt, and a collar fixed with an ruby the size of an eyeball. Straight hair, jet black, framed a cold, imperious face, and a heavy moustache drooped over a sensual, slightly smiling mouth. He was looking right at Durham Red.

  "My," said Simon D'Isis, the Gothking. "You really have taken your own sweet time."

  16. RISE AND FALL

  By sunrise the perimeter of the clearing had stopped burning. Judas Harrow was able to venture out past the treeline again, into the wide space between the towers.

  The air in the clearing
was foul, thick with acrid smoke. It was still rising from the ground, trails of it mixing with the morning mist, forming a nauseating miasma that caught Harrow's throat and made his lungs ache. Still, at least the ground had cooled down a little. The last time he had tried to walk here, his boots had caught fire.

  That had been hours ago, not long after the inferno. He had still been groggy from Ketta's blow, not thinking straight, and had wandered out into the flame-shot darkness without even a weapon. After his soles had started to smoulder Ketta had darted out and dragged him back, and moments after that he had collapsed again. When he came round the sun was already casting shafts through the forest, and the pounding in his head had diminished enough for him to speak. He had asked Ketta why she had dragged him back into the relative safety of the trees.

  Her answer was no surprise. "You'd have attracted attention, blundering around out there. I didn't want another encounter with the Omegas so soon."

  And that was that. Ketta had busied herself with preparations: sharpening her knives, testing her poisons, making sure the guns were loaded and oiled. She didn't speak to Harrow, and he didn't speak to her, but he found watching her oddly fascinating. She tended the tools of her bloody craft the way some women might tend children, or their own beauty.

  Perhaps it was better that she lavished her care on bullets and blades. Harrow found the thought of Ketta even being near a baby quite disturbing. She seemed such an unashamedly lethal thing, devoid of any trait or talent not directed towards destruction. It might have just been her demeanour in front of a mutant - her enemy, after all - but Harrow wondered if she had ever felt anything but bloodlust in her life.

  Still, for whatever reason, she kept watch on him while he ventured into the clearing.

  The ground was warm beneath him, but no longer smouldering. He trudged through the ash to where Godolkin and the Omega commander had been when the lightshow began, and crouched there, sifting through the carbonised muck with his fingertips. There was little to find - powdered ash, mainly, wood or soil so blasted with heat it had been reduced to smuts. Scraps of stone, patches of sand turned to brittle glass. Nothing much.

  He was about to give up when he discovered what he was looking for, and pulled it free with a small smile of triumph. He got up, cradling his find in his palm, all the way back to where Ketta crouched.

  "Here," he said, handing it to her. It was a scrap of blackened wood, finger-length and slender.

  She didn't take it. "And what 's that supposed to be?"

  "A twig."

  Ketta blinked at him, her huge eyes dark and impenetrable in the smooth sand-brown of her face. "I'm sure I'll regret even asking this, but-"

  "It's a twig. Just a twig, don't you see?"

  "Yes, mutant, I see what you're getting at. How could you find a burned twig, but no bone?"

  He nodded. "Bones are tough, even normal human ones. If Godolkin and that Omega had been burned-"

  "Harrow," she interrupted. "He's dead. Face it."

  "I think you're wrong."

  She pointed over to their left, deeper into the woods. "The Omega I saw killed by the towers is over there. I buried him myself. If you like, I can dig him up for you."

  "No, thank you."

  "Do you want to know what a human skull looks like turned completely inside-out? Because I can show you."

  "I said no!" He stalked away, back to the treeline, and stood looking across the clearing. "There's no sign of them because they weren't here when the fire came. I'm certain of it."

  "Yes, but you're an idiot."

  Harrow stood quiet for a time, then turned back to her, unclipping the dataslate from his belt. "We'll see."

  Being so close to the towers when they activated had given Harrow all the information he needed. The dataslate had been picking up their power signatures the whole time, and sending it back to Crimson Hunter for processing by the ship's on-board computer. Where before Harrow had been relying on long-range scans, blocked by a hundred kilometres of solid forest, now he had accurate, close-up data direct from the source. And it told him a great deal that he hadn't known before.

  "There," he told Ketta. "That's the point of maximum output. Hunter's sense-engines lost all resolution at this point, on every long-range scan."

  They had retreated back to Ketta's campsite. Harrow was showing her the dataslate output, the modified recordings he had recently downloaded from Hunter.

  The day was already starting to warm up. Ketta had discarded her jacket, and now wore nothing above the waist but a black vest. She seemed quite unaware of any effect her figure might have on Harrow, but he was finding it difficult not to be distracted.

  Instead, he concentrated on the dataslate, and the thought that there were more important things to do than consider the body of a woman who would kill him as soon as her use for him was finished. Whatever that use might be.

  The slate was showing Ketta a field of static. She raised one eyebrow at him, very slightly. In response, he advanced the data a few seconds, until the static was gone. "There."

  "Which tells me what, mutant?"

  "Nothing at all. But if we go back to that point, and factor in the new information we have about the towers..." He advanced the scan again.

  This time there was no obscuring static. Just an explosion of flame, billowing out from the centre of the towers in a cluster of superheated gasses before spurting upwards. In a few fractions of a second, a spine of fire had risen up from the clearing and whipped out of sight.

  "The sense-engines never picked it up before. They were scrambled by the initial spike."

  "A take-off," Ketta muttered. "Mutant, I take it all back. You're not a complete idiot after all."

  The evidence, now they could see it with the raw voltage from the towers filtered away, was clear. Something had appeared in the centre of the clearing at the same time as Godolkin had disappeared and launched itself on a column of fire towards the stars.

  Crimson Hunter had told them it had seen no orbital traffic since they had arrived, and that was true. That wasn't to say there hadn't been any, just that the ship hadn't detected them. Judging by this, at least four starships had left Ashkelon in the past twelve days and no one had been any wiser as to where they were going, of where they had come from.

  "It must be some kind of transportation device," Harrow ventured. Ketta opened her hand for the dataslate, and he passed it to her. "The ships start off somewhere else, maybe on the other side of the planet, or even another world close by, then transport via the towers and lift off."

  "Why? That's an insane waste of power." Ketta was tapping at the dataslate with her forefinger.

  "I don't know. Maybe they come from a world with much higher gravity, and use the towers to accelerate. What are you doing?"

  "Factoring this filtering equation into some scans of my own."

  Harrow leaned close. The renegade was operating the slate quicker than he had ever seen it done, taking his equations and working them through a new series of returns, linking back to another source which could only have been her daggership. Within a few moments the screen changed, flipping over from a 3D representation of the clearing to a flat sheet of interlocking lines and panels. "There," she breathed.

  "What?"

  "The Omega's landing site. I've been looking for it ever since I got here, but their damned shadow web defeated me. Now I have those towers out of the way, I can see where they've hidden themselves."

  Harrow frowned. "And what are you going to do with that knowledge?"

  Her look was open, almost innocent. "What do you think?"

  "Something involving flayer missiles."

  "Oh, at the very least." Ketta got up, rising to her feet with an easy grace. "Mutant, I've had these bastards on my back for months, ever since I delivered their creator to the Ordo Hereticus. They hate me almost as much as they hate your Durham Red. If I've got a chance to bring them down, I'll take it, without hesitation."

  Harrow got up a
s well. He could feel his usefulness to Ketta wearing rapidly thin. "You seem to have done all right so far."

  "Really?" She turned her head slightly, raising her chin to show him the scar. "I heal fast, Harrow. Do you know how much it takes to put a mark on me? Hermas did that, with a vibrablade. He had my jawbone in half."

  "Ouch."

  "I escaped by blind luck, and that's how I've survived this far." She was looking past him, consumed by a private horror. "But luck runs out."

  He had to ask. The question had burned on his lips ever since he had seen her there in the clearing, with guns flaring in her hands. He knew it would invite retribution, but if she had her map and was done with him, he may as well have been damned.

  "Ketta? Why did you turn renegade?"

  She blinked, as if waking from a reverie, then turned her gaze on him. It seemed surprisingly calm. "I'd spent too long with your Saint. The Ordo took me when I went back after Lavannos, but even after they'd declared me purified I knew there was no future for me. And after what they'd done..." Momentarily lost in a reverie, she then stated, very quietly, "Saulus killed himself before the Ordo could take him. If I'd had the sense, or the courage, I would have too."

  Abruptly her mouth curled up at one corner. "Anyway, that's enough. I've got work to do." She reached down for her bolter. "I know you want my ship, Harrow. Yours is a wreck. But I've become rather attached to it, I'm afraid."

  "Which leave me in something of a pickle."

  She smiled. "That's a quaint turn of phrase. Hers?"

  "Yes."

  "Thought so." She paused. "You could come with me, you know."

  Harrow stared. Of all the things he might have expected her to say, it was probably the least likely. For a second he wasn't even certain whether his own panicking mind had decided to betray him, to calm him with hallucinations before the blow fell. "Excuse me?"

  "You seem useful enough in a fight, and you're not half as arrogant as most males I've met. Maybe another pair of eyes would come in handy."

  "Ah, you're not proposing-"

  "Don't get any funny ideas. I'm not into men. But there's profit to be had, if you live long enough."