by Dan Abnett
‘My call,’ I said. ‘We established this morning that you are torn, and thus cannot be relied on to make good decisions. You admitted it.’
‘You kind o’ did,’ said Lightburn.
‘You can’t be objective, Harlon,’ I said. ‘I can. My judgement is… This is what we’re doing.’
Nayl sat for a moment, exhaled wearily, then got to his feet. He walked over to the vox-caster, set the dials carefully, and picked up the mic, letting the spiral cord dangle.
He threw the ‘send’ switch.
‘Thorn wishes Talon,’ he said.
CHAPTER 14
Upon the slipway
Thus it was that a meeting was arranged. I cannot pretend I was not apprehensive. My dealings with Gideon Ravenor had been brief, but I was in no doubt of his power. In many ways, he was to me a more alarming and dangerous prospect than Eisenhorn. So often, the pupil exceeds the mentor.
In truth, I know, as I had told Nayl, that they were both immeasurably dangerous and ruthless. But with Gregor Eisenhorn, I had always felt I had a small advantage: his uncharacteristic affection for the late Alizebeth Bequin, and my connection to her. It was a rare fingerhold of emotional loyalty, an unspoken bond that he tacitly acknowledged in his dealings with me, and which preserved me somewhat. Eisenhorn had gone through life showing no regard, ultimately, for any human soul, except for my mother, and thus, for me.
With Ravenor, I felt I had no such card to play.
But there were other safeguards and checks that I could employ. I knew I was playing with a weak hand, and from a position of severe disadvantage, but my mentors – no matter if they had been good people or bad – had taught me well. It was almost liberating. I answered to no one now, and used my years of training to prepare as well as I could. At last, I felt as though I was a player in the game, and not a mere pawn on the regicide board.
Nayl had set the meeting up, through vox exchanges coded in Glossia. He accessed private funds laid down in some of the city’s counting houses, emergency deposits left by Eisenhorn over the years in case of extremity, and furnished us with some goods through the black market. I visited the municipality records archive at the City Chambers, and acquired copies of the site plans, which Nayl and I studied. Renner supplied his own, local knowledge. We devised the terms of the meeting, means of securement, and methods of exit should it go bad.
On the night before, I went up to the roof of the buildings beneath which the bunker was hidden, slipping up the dingy common staircase, past the landings of the bookkeepers and the mender-tailor, and the eye-doctor, until I faced the little roof door, painted shut, at the top of an unlit staircase. I forced it open, causing a little flurry of old paint chips, and went out onto the ragged, mossy tiles overlooking the Pauper’s Field Commercia and Shorthalls in the fading light. I had told Nayl and Renner that I was going for a walk, to clear my head, and perhaps raise a prayer to the God-Emperor for His safekeeping.
That was a lie. I took a small blade with me.
The meeting was to take place on a slipway in the old shipyards south of Toilgate’s crumbling mass. The day was not promising. The storm had shambled back into its lair, leaving lank, grey-smudged skies from which light rain fell in a desultory fashion. The sky was so wan and empty, it felt as though it had set itself to default, a vacant space awaiting new weather patterns to be programmed in and activated.
We were on the verge of the great river, on its tidal plain where once great industry had seethed to fill the coffers of Queen Mab. The throngs of shipyard workers no longer poured in and out of Toilgate every day, and the rockcrete roads were cracked and overtaken with weeds, and had not rung with the clump of hobnail boots for centuries. It was a very flat place, and wet. The old river, very wide at this point, lay like a grey strip along the horizon, and had taken back much of the land that industry had stolen from it. Old causeways ran out into watery nothing. Silted marshes had invaded the area for kilometres around, and lay stubbled with wretched trees and the mossy shells of derelict buildings. This was the marshland belt where, in some fabricated history, I had been born, and where my imaginary parents had died. From the slipway, I could see, across the marshes, the small and impoverished communities that still clung to the river’s course: little dwellings, and the spire of a small templum church, all with blotted reflections. I fancied that its tiny, waterlogged yard might be the site of my parents’ gravestone, but I did not pause to visit it, for that, I am sure, is all quite a fiction, and I did not know which would bother me more: to find no gravestone in the cemetery, or to find one after all, placed there to cement the lie.
Besides, I had work to do.
We went on foot, the three of us, via the holloways, and then on beyond the decaying city gate. The huge sheds of the shipyards stood at intervals along the wide marsh plain. They were buildings of ridiculous scale, raised in precast rockcrete, though in the great flatness they looked small. Within their walls, great ships had been wrought by armies of expert craftsmen, ships that would sail to other continents and other worlds. The sheds were ruined now, of course, and empty, though their sheer scale had allowed them to survive the generations of weather and neglect. The service buildings, annexes, store-blocks and canteens that must have once clustered around their flanks like little towns were long since gone, reduced to mudflats, weed-banks, beds of salt-willow or bare rockcrete platforms.
We had chosen Shed One Hundred & Nineteen. They were most all alike, but the number had appealed to me. It towered, a rotting monolith, from the marsh levels, fringed by morning mist. Everything was grey, like ink running in water, and the very air was damp, even in the breaks between showers. From the mouth of the shed, a giant slipway ran down to the river shore and the muddy bounds. Ships had once rolled out, along that great stone avenue, before cheering crowds.
We came two hours early, and reconnoitred. Neither Harlon nor I doubted that Ravenor’s team might have scouted ahead, or even sent an advance into position. But the shed and its environs were vacant. Inside, it was a realm of wet shadow, dripping with rain from the incomplete roof, and piled with items of bulk engineering so black with corrosion it was impossible to determine what they had once been. There were great coils of metal chain, the links of quite fantastic size, too heavy for a man to shift, and lengths of this chain ran out from the shed’s mouth and down the causeway like mighty marine serpents laid out as fishermen’s trophies. Weeds nodded in the breeze. Out on the grey plain of the estuary, I could make out the grim shapes of the distant prison hulks: dead ships neutered, stripped of masts and engines and vanes, and moored in the river as exile gaols.
Satisfied the ground was ours to command, we took up our positions. Nayl secured himself on top of a giant engine block inside the shed doorway, which gave him a commanding view of the slipway. He had purchased a Militarum long-las rifle, along with scope, from some backstreet dealer, a marksman’s weapon that would assure him a clear field of fire across the open rockcrete. Renner, armed with a reconditioned assault autorifle, laid in at the rear of the shed, out in the rain, with keen sight back across the approach roads and the marsh, all the way back to the ghostly mass of distant Toilgate. He would spot anything moving in our direction. We were linked by small vox headsets, again ex-Militarum, that Nayl called micro-beads. We checked in with each other on a timed schedule, for the space, and our placing, was so considerable we were almost out of contact by eyes alone.
I waited on the slipway, out in the open. My bodyglove was reinforced by a waistcoat of flak-mesh that Nayl had provided, and over this I wore a long coat with a hood collar. My quad-snub was in a belt holster, and a pair of stab-dirks – short, sharp knives for hand-combat or throwing called sluca – were strapped flat, one to each forearm. I had a short-pattern lascarbine on a sling over my shoulder. I had my cuff.
The cuff, set to off, was all that mattered. Without it, Ravenor’s mind, and his minions, would ove
rcome us in a trice, no matter what arsenal we fielded. I almost dreaded encountering the lethal telekine Kys again, as much as I did Ravenor.
I waited. I watched the distant flats of the river, the wind bristling the marsh grass. I smelled the cold, the wet. I felt the rain, and notched up the heating elements of my bodyglove. My mind would not be still. It jittered. I looked again, and saw the lonely little spire of the templum church once more, far away. I focused on that. For a moment, it troubled me, for it made me think of the memories I had grown up believing, memories I had been taught to regard as sad. But they were gone, and false, and there was nothing to mourn, at least not in that distant cemetery. Instead, I used the distant spire as a focal point, a drishti, as Mam Mordaunt had called it, citing the ancient teachings of the Indus practices. Using it as a focus, I ran through my old tempering litany to still my mind and my nerves. It seemed quite odd to use what was most certainly a Cognitae mind-tool, but it had always served me well. Each of us at the Maze Undue had selected a calming memory as the basis of our tempering litany. Mine had been a passage from The Heretikhameron, that ancient verse epic that declaims the War of the Primarchs, ‘… the Nine Sons Who Stood, and the Nine Who Turned’.
But my tempering litany had never been just the words, it had also been Sister Bismillah’s voice reciting them. She had often read the poem to me in the dormitory of the Scholam Orbus, so the memory of her gentle voice was an essential part of the meditation.
I stopped, almost at once, feeling a pang of true sadness, not the mendacious sadness of the distant spire. Sister Bismillah had been Medea, and Medea was lost. That was an honest and keen loss, far greater than anything I had grown up believing, and it was still raw.
My micro-bead clicked.
‘Are you all right?’ Nayl’s voice murmured in my ear.
‘Yes, Harlon,’ I answered.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have eyes on you, Beta. You just seemed to falter there, for a moment. Something in your posture–’
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
I paced on the slipway. I thought to quit the litany, for its worth was now tainted with sadness. Then I thought of Eisenhorn, and of Ravenor too. They were men whose lives had been devoid of emotion, who had trained themselves to care not for anything, or allow feelings to weaken them. But it was not weakness. To care for another, that was not weakness. To feel, that was not weakness. Emotional response was what made us human, what gave us character and worth. I resolved I would not become like them, not ever. I would hold on to what I was and what made me – what truly made me, and not some marshland lie – even if it hurt.
I returned to my litany, allowing now for the loss it bore, and embraced it, and let it settle my mind. Even gone forever, Medea would be at my side to steady me.
‘Nine Sons who stood, and Nine who turned, Nine for the Eight, and Nine against the Eight, Eighteen all to make the Great Cosmos or bring it crashing down…’
My ’bead clicked again.
‘Are you talking to me?’
‘No, Harlon. Stay vigilant.’
A moment later, Renner came over the link.
‘Looks like it’s showtime,’ he said.
A cargo-8 came down the circuit road from Toilgate, and then turned onto the feedway that led to Shed One Hundred & Nineteen. Renner, from his vantage, saw it first, long before I did, and kept his weapon trained on it, staying out of sight.
It came down the eastern side of the shed, jolting over the weeds and ruptured rockcrete on its heavy wheels. I heard the rumble of its engine before it came into view. I checked, for the umpteenth time, that my cuff was set correctly and my blankness unmasked, but it would have been too late by then if I had made an error. Ravenor’s mind, or the human puppets he would oftentimes ’ware, would already have taken us down.
‘Check in,’ I said, ‘then settle and follow the plan, and my lead.’
‘Acknowledged,’ crackled Nayl.
‘Understood,’ said Renner’s voice.
I stayed put on the open slipway, a lone figure on acres of rainswept ’crete. I undid the catch on one of the sluca scabbards.
The truck came into view, toiling along slowly. It was, from the look of it, an ex-Arbites vehicle, a cargo-8 with small, reinforced window panes and a closed payload space. Sections of its bodywork were armoured with metal plating, including skirts that covered the tops of the wheel arches, and it had been painted pale blue, the colour of a marshchaff’s eggs. It drove onto the slipway, tyres hissing in the greasy wet, and came to a halt facing me, twenty metres away. I waited.
‘Covering the doors,’ Nayl voxed. From his position, the truck was almost side-on, and easily in range of his hotshot loadouts. I was confident that military-grade kill-shots could defeat even Arbites body-plating.
‘Re-setting,’ Renner reported. I could not see him, but I knew that he, according to our predetermined plan, was moving along the side of the shed from the rear to cover the truck from behind. Between him and Nayl, we had the vehicle in a one-eighty fire-field. Of course, I had no cover at all. I hoped that would not become something I regretted. But I had to present myself in the open.
Nothing stirred for a while, and then the cab door swung open, and a figure jumped down. I knew it at once: the tall, lithe form of Patience Kys in her rich brown bodyglove. Her black hair was pinned up with those deadly silver needles. Her telekine abilities were damped by my raw presence, but she moved with feline grace, and I knew she was entirely formidable, even bereft of the psychokinetic talents of her mind.
She stood and looked at me, then strode across the slipway from the pale blue truck until she was twenty paces from me.
‘I have the shot,’ Nayl voxed.
‘Copy,’ I replied.
Patience looked at me. There was ever a cynical air to her expression.
‘Beta,’ she said.
‘Patience.’
She looked around casually, as if disapproving of the weather.
‘A wide open space,’ she remarked.
‘In which we both stand.’
‘Yes, but you have me at a disadvantage,’ she said, and smiled. ‘You have at least two shooters on me.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘Don’t you know?’ she asked, with a glint of mischief. ‘Mm, perhaps you’re not as prepared for this meeting as you should be. Where’s Harlon? Was it him I glimpsed at the back of the shed as we drove through? No, he’d be closer.’
She looked at the dark, cavernous mouth of the shed. In its dark gulf, Nayl was invisible, but she waved cheerily anyway.
‘Morning, Harlon!’ she called out. ‘Head or heart, please! I don’t want to suffer!’
She looked back at me.
‘You left us so soon, Beta,’ she said.
‘I had little choice, as I’m sure you’re aware.’
‘Cherubael,’ she said, and nodded. ‘He left his stink behind. But you could have returned.’
‘Perhaps I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I was under duress.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Or perhaps I was doing your master’s work all along, as requested, and infiltrated Eisenhorn’s retinue.’
‘That seems unlikely,’ she replied, ‘given how long it’s been, and the nature of this meeting. For whatever reason you went silent, things have clearly changed. Do we have something to discuss?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, but not with you. I’m waiting.’
‘For?’
‘For him,’ I said. ‘And to see what furious surprises you might unleash.’
She raised her gloved hands, open, wide.
‘I’m just here to start the conversation,’ she said, ‘and to estimate your furious surprises too.’
‘You know I have none,’ I said. ‘We do not have the kind of resources that you d
o.’
‘Resources?’
‘The manpower and gunships that took down the Maze Undue. Your master has the full backing of the Imperium at his beck and call.’
Kys gave a little sniff of a laugh.
‘Not so much,’ she said. ‘That raid was undertaken with the cooperation of local Arbites, and the office of the Baron Prefect. They supplied the muscle and vehicles, in the expectation of a significant haul. And that, Beta, we didn’t get. Oh, we closed the place down, but the Prefect was expecting a round-up of arch heretics that could be paraded through the courts to put him in good odour with the Sector Ordos. It was not to be. So he is disgruntled with us, and less inclined to assist our operation these days.’
She looked at the sky, and closed her eyes, letting the raindrops fleck her face.
‘There will be no flights of gunships descending on us today,’ she said. ‘This is a quiet meeting, just as you requested.’
‘Then let us begin it,’ I said.
She nodded again, turned, and walked back to the truck. She seemed in no rush. I waited, listening to her heels click across the rockcrete pan. She went to the back of the cargo-8 and unfastened the rear doors. I heard the whine of a hydraulic cargo lift.
‘Something’s coming out,’ Renner voxed.
‘Stay put,’ I replied.
‘It’s him,’ crackled Nayl.
‘Hold steady on the targets.’
Kys reappeared from behind the vehicle. She was walking beside the heavy, armoured object known as the Chair. It was part box, part throne, entirely enclosed, hovering softly on its gravitic assemblies. It looked like a small glide-tank. I knew that the bulges and pods lacing the sculpted plate of its hull concealed more than just scanners and optic systems. Some were weapon modules that could shutter open at any moment and unleash streams of psycannon fire.
The modules remained shut.
The Chair moved towards me, Kys walking at its side, and came to a halt on the spot where Kys had previously stood.
