by Dan Abnett
‘More importantly, they’re wasting time,’ I said.
‘I know,’ said Medea.
I turned to her. ‘You will not interrupt them?’ I asked her.
‘Frankly, I dare not,’ she said.
‘Then when they stop – if they stop – tell them Kys and I have gone to run an errand. We won’t be long.’
‘What errand, Beta?’
‘It’s important. Tell them that. Tell them to contact us with all urgency if we have not returned by the time they are done with this… this… pointlessness.’
‘You are leaving the house?’ Medea asked, surprised.
‘Yes.’
Her face hardened.
‘I can’t permit that, Beta,’ she said. ‘I forbid it.’
‘Medea,’ I replied, ‘I say this with the greatest affection, but you are in no way my mother to forbid me anything.’
We left through the back door, through the overgrown tumble of the rear garden. The rain had stopped, and the stars were out.
‘Where to?’ asked Kys.
‘Highgate Hill.’
‘The holloways, then,’ she said. ‘The quickest route.’
We descended into the shadows of the Footstep Lane holloway. Almost at once, we became aware of a figure behind us.
The cattle dog growled. As ever, his master was an unresponsive slice of darkness save for the buzz of his visor and the fidget of the amber cursor in the visor’s optic trench.
‘Deathrow,’ I said. I could feel Kys tense beside me, her telekine power fluttering to life.
The dog growled again. Beta.
‘We know each other’s names,’ I said. ‘I do not think your fine hound needs to speak for you any more.’
The visor buzzed.
‘Are you sent to stop us?’ I asked. ‘To prevent us leaving?’
Deathrow raised a hand, and removed his battered visor and mask. His face, the mere suggestion of a handsome, noble countenance quite at odds with his brutal garb, was still masked by shadows. I fancied it would be so, even in broad daylight.
‘I am charged to watch the rear of the property,’ he said. ‘To watch for intruders. Are you intruders?’
‘How can we be?’ I asked. ‘We are leaving, not coming in.’
‘Then you are not in my purview, Beta,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance again this day.’
He walked away, past us, down the holloway, the old dog trotting at his side.
‘I was sure he’d been sent to stop us,’ said Kys, watching him go. ‘Why didn’t he?’
‘He may have been. Who knows what agenda he truly follows?’
‘Because he is Eisenhorn’s?’ she asked.
I shook my head.
‘Because he is Alpharius,’ I said.
In just a little over an hour, after brisk walking, and with the night still deep upon us, we reached Highgate Hill, and walked up the cobbles of Low Highgate Lane. Above us, looking out across the wastes of the great Sunderland, stood the ruins of the Maze Undue.
The last time Kys and I had been there together, the last time we had been there at all, we had been trying to kill each other.
And I thought I had succeeded.
CHAPTER 29
A-mazed in the House of God
‘Renner? Renner?’
For a moment, he didn’t answer. Then the micro-bead’s vox-link crackled.
‘I’m here,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’
‘Working,’ I replied. ‘I’m just checking in. Are you safe? How is it going?’
‘We’re safe enough,’ Lightburn’s voice came back, tinny and hollow over the link. ‘Still where you left us. The old boy’s working, decoding. I think he’s making progress.’
‘A translation?’
‘Getting there, I think. Dance is tired, but he’s keeping at it.’
‘Stay in touch. Contact me the moment he gets something solid.’
I shut the link down, and walked through the crumbling archway, leaving one ruined, empty room for another. Kys stood waiting for me, a scatter of broken roof tiles under her feet.
‘Where do we look?’ she asked.
‘Further in. These are just the skirts. If there’s anything left, of course. Your raid punished this old place badly.’
‘And weather’s done the rest in the months since,’ she replied.
‘This old place’ was, of course, the building that had been my home for the greater part of my childhood. My life, in fact. The Maze Undue, a scholam said to be a training house for Inquisitional prospects, but in truth a Cognitae facility used to raise the products of their breeding programme.
Products like me. Blacksoul nulls.
If you were not a pupil there, or if you have not visited the Highgate part of the city, then know that the building faces the dusty north-east on the top of Highgate Hill, and that the side of the building is permanently stained by the grey murk of the Sunderland. Even in my time, parts of the site were no longer fit for habitation. Now, more than ever, it was a broken shell, a heap of rubble open to the elements.
It adjoins the orphanage, the Scholam Orbus, a companion faith school. The orphanage faces west and north, confronting – from its position on the edge of the Highgate Hill crag – the black threat of the Mountains. It is now closed too, shut down, I imagined, after the Ordo raid.
The buildings once leant together for support, stone pile against stone pile, their definitions blurred, but the Maze was now virtually collapsed. As Kys and I made our way through the wreck, I glanced up, imagining floors and staircases that were long gone, the vacant air where once had stood the candidates’ rooms. Mine had been there, Judika’s, Faria’s, Corlam’s…
The robing room, the refectory and the washrooms were gone too, but part of the main pile still stood, just about: the remains of the staff room and the library. Above them, I hoped, some vestige of the top room still existed.
We picked our way through the skirts, which had been Mentor Saur’s domain. The skirts had been our term for the outlying and largely ruined parts of the Maze Undue along the eastern wing, where physical training and combat practice took place. Rainwater pattered from the shattered roofs. The night breeze gusted through bare doorways and blind windows, fidgeting the rubbish that had blown in to litter the rubble-strewn floors.
Kys led me into a large chamber that had once been weatherproofed and lit. We had called this the drill. The railed rings for sparring were still there, half-buried in fallen slates. To the left were the practice dummies, sad ghosts in the twilight, and a row of pegs where once had hung pavis shields and ceramite bucklers. To the right was the smashed debris of the two mechanical sparring machines.
‘You trained here?’ Kys asked.
I nodded. ‘Saur trained me here. And this is where he killed Voriet.’
‘He was our way in,’ she said. ‘He found Eisenhorn, led us to him. But for Voriet, we wouldn’t be here.’
‘He didn’t deserve to die for that,’ I said.
‘No one does.’
I believe the Maze Undue had been, for a long time, a playhouse, because there had been the traces of an arched stage in the hall, and other evidence of an unsuccessful theatrical past. But like all of the play-acting trade, it had known many functions. Originally, I think, it had been a place of worship.
As a child and a candidate, I had guessed this from the name. Maze Undue. I had studied texts of Old Terra in works kept in the datastacks of the library, and acquired some grasp of Old Franc. I once mentioned to Mentor Murlees, who was the savant and librarian of the house in my time, that Maze Undue could easily be a corruption of the Old Franc phrase maison dieu, or ‘house of god’.
He had smiled at the thought of it and nodded.
He
had said, ‘Indeed, there is no maze, Beta.’
I knew better now. There was indeed a maze, and for the most part it was the convoluted pathway of my life. At least I still had a life. Murlees, like so many of them, was dead now.
‘We need to find a route to the top room, if it’s there still,’ I told Kys. ‘This way.’
The top room was where the briefings had taken place. There, candidates had been prepared for their functions. Part of that preparation was to observe and read the lives of those we were going to deceive.
For that purpose, the mentors had kept a quizzing glass there.
We found a staircase, every third or fourth step gone, and made our way up. The ruin seemed to shift and creak beneath us, its weight uneasy. Steadying herself against a wall, Kys glanced at me grimly.
‘You think a mirror will have survived this?’ she asked.
Increasingly, I did not.
The floor gave way without warning, in a splintering crash of dust and rubble.
Kys’ mind caught me as I went down, and suspended me above the pitch-black plunge that had opened up. She hauled me onto the relative safety of the remaining stairs.
‘You could fall to your death here,’ she said.
We were near the top when our wraithbone pendants began to tingle.
‘He wants us,’ she said. ‘He’s discovered we’ve gone.’
‘He can wait,’ I said.
We took the pendants off, and left them at the top of the stairs where we could find them again later. Kys seemed amused by this, to be liberated from Gideon’s beck and call.
‘If he knows we’ve gone,’ she said, ‘he’s finished his damn argument.’
‘Which means they’ve reached some kind of agreement,’ I said.
‘Or Eisenhorn’s dead,’ she said.
‘He isn’t,’ I said.
‘How do you know?’
I pointed.
We had entered the upper hallway, at the end of which the top room was located. The roof was gone, blown out, the rafters left like a ribcage. Ahead of us, a figure floated in the night air.
‘He sent him,’ I said.
Cherubael drifted into the hallway like a lost kite.
‘You ran away, little things,’ said the daemon. ‘He’s very cross about it. They both are.’
‘And you’ve been sent to fetch us?’ I asked.
The daemon shrugged, bobbing in the breeze.
‘He insisted,’ he said. ‘I hardly care what you do, but he insisted. I think he wonders about you. Wonders what you’re doing here, wonders if you can be trusted. You’re not up to no good are you?’
‘No, daemon,’ I said.
‘Ah, but you’d say that if you were. I know I would.’
‘I’m doing his work,’ I said.
‘Are you? Or are you doing the work of the Cognitae that made you? Work you may have been doing all along?’
‘We’ll finish what we’ve come here to do,’ said Kys.
‘No, little things, you’ll come along back with me. I’m sent to fetch you. No arguments.’
Kys lowered her head slightly, her feet planting a little wider. The kine blades slipped out of her hair, and flashed up to hover either side of her.
‘We will finish what we’ve come here to do,’ she repeated.
Cherubael snorted with amusement, and then began to laugh so hard, and with such helpless mirth, I thought his tight flesh might burst. The wracking laughter wobbled him from side to side in the air. The sound of daemon hilarity was unpleasant, a maniac peal that I would not choose to hear again.
‘That’s just darling, little thing,’ he giggled, recovering a little composure. ‘So very funny. You? Fight me? You don’t want to do that.’
‘Kys does,’ I said. ‘But she shouldn’t. She’d lose. I don’t want to.’
‘Then don’t,’ the daemon said. His smile faded. ‘I have become quite fond of you, Beta. I’d hate to hurt you.’
‘I think that’s a lie.’
He looked offended.
‘It’s not,’ he said, clutching a clawed hand to his breast as if offended. ‘I am fond of you.’
‘I think you are, in your own strange way,’ I said. ‘No, the other part. That was a lie. I think you’d like to hurt me.’
‘Oh, I’d love to hurt you,’ he said, with worrying relish. ‘Both of you. In a lingering fashion. But I am instructed merely to fetch you, not harm you. Although, if you resist and put up a fight, injuries may unavoidably occur.’
‘Go back,’ I said. ‘Tell him we’ll return before long. We are not finished here.’
‘I’m a daemonhost, little thing,’ he said. ‘I don’t do nuance. I am a chained slave-soul. I am given an instruction, I perform it. He told me to fetch you. I must fetch you. I don’t get to argue with the instructions. So are you coming, or not?’
‘Not,’ said Kys. Her kine blades shivered in the air, ready to fly.
The daemon smiled.
‘All right, then,’ he said, making an attempt at reluctance, but unable to disguise his glee.
‘You don’t want a fight, daemon,’ I said.
‘Why?’ he asked.
I plucked one of Kys’ blades out of the air with my right hand and quickly dug the tip into my left palm. Beads of blood spilled onto the floor, and away into the night wind.
‘Because it won’t be with us,’ I said.
Uttering a wail, the daemon flew at us, arms wide to snatch us up in his embrace. Kys pushed me to the left with her kine-force, throwing me out of the way, as she executed an impossibly high somersault over the onrushing fiend.
I sprawled clear. Cherubael overshot me, and the end of the ruin’s ledge, then turned back in mid-air to swoop again. Kys, still airborne, caught a passing rafter, spun her bodyweight around it like a gymnast on asymmetric bars, and landed on her feet on the hall floorboards. Everything was shaking and creaking.
Kys was facing the charging daemon. I tried to scramble out of the way. Kys dropped into a crouch, extending her arms in front of her, hands cupped one over the other. The kine blades spat past her on either side and met the daemon, burying themselves side by side in his chest.
He writhed in the air, let out a shriek of outrage, and wrenched the blades from his torso. Sticky black gore, the texture of my dreams, oozed off the spikes.
He came at us again.
I conjured the blinksword into my hand. If I could time a strike…
He was so fast.
He was an inch from me when Comus took him in his arms, then through a wall, then through part of the eaves, then out across the broken roofscape of the Scholam Orbus. The angel had arrived like a thunderbolt.
The two of them tumbled away into the night, angel and daemon, light and dark, locked together in a savage tearing, biting, clawing brawl, each quite as terrible as the other. They fell, together, grappling, and smashed through the roof of the scholam below us. We could hear the fight continuing, now out of sight: tiles rippling, walls quivering, sudden sprays of pulverised brick and mortar. We could hear the sounds of inhuman blows, and the daemon screeching in pain and delight.
‘You all right?’ I asked Kys.
She nodded.
‘Quickly then, while we have the chance.’
I picked myself up, and began to hurry to the top room.
‘Will they… destroy each other?’ Kys asked, looking back.
‘They may. I imagine Cherubael may win. But Comus is singularly savage. He has a rage in him. A thirst. I think he was purpose-built to fight daemons.’
‘You signal him… and then send him to what will almost certainly be his death to protect yourself?’ she asked.
‘He fights for the God-Emperor, not me,’ I said. ‘But, yes. I did that.’
She raised her eyebro
ws.
‘I know,’ I said miserably. ‘I already have all the makings of a true inquisitor, haven’t I?’
Somehow, the mirror had survived the doom of the Maze Undue.
It had fallen from its stand, and lay in the dust and dirt with a great crack across it.
‘I’m amazed,’ said Kys.
‘It’s a quizzing glass,’ I said. ‘Perhaps hardier than normal glass. Let’s not question our luck.’
‘How much luck can a broken mirror afford us?’ she asked.
We took it up between us, and dragged it upright to lean it against the rain-eaten bricks of the wall. A few slivers of silvered glass fell out.
I stared into it. The ghost of my face looked back, dirty, wet with rain. I had seen myself in its surface so many times down the years. So many versions of myself, and so many other lives besides.
Daemon screams bubbled up from far below.
‘Will it work?’ Kys asked.
‘I know how to quiz it, at least. Wait.’
‘What if it works?’ she added.
‘Now you ask that?’
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘How will we know if it works?’
‘We’ll know,’ I assured her.
She didn’t reply. Because it had worked, and she was no longer there.
Or, rather, I was no longer here.
CHAPTER 30
Finding myself in the Palace of Thaumeizin
There was no sense of change or transfer, no stammer or edit of reality. Upon a drawn breath, I was in the cold and dark and damp of the ruined Maze Undue; upon the exhalation, I was in a place of warm daylight.
I was still staring at a mirror. It was square and plain, but impossibly pure, manufactured with incredible precision. It was hanging on a wall of polished amber tiles. I could see myself in it: the dirt on my cheeks, the drops of Queen Mab rain in my hair, the surprise in my expression. In the reflection, the room behind me was tiled from floor to ceiling.
I stepped away from the mirror, and turned. The room was square and very plain, tiled entirely in gleaming amber. My boots left muddy smears on their perfection. I didn’t know how they had been set: there seemed to be no mortar or cement, but I could not have slid a leaf of paper between the lustrous tiles. Above me, the ceiling was domed, and the tiles followed the curve of that dome until they met at the apex without blemish or irregularity. There was one door, an archway, facing the wall on which the mirror hung. It seemed that the entire purpose of the room was the mirror.
