‘Why should I blame her for an accident?’ Sudjic said.
‘Precisely. And there’s an end to the matter.’
‘Not quite,’ Volyova said. ‘Now may not be the best time to raise the matter, but . . .’ She trailed off. ‘I was going to say that I wanted to extract the implants from his head. But even if I was allowed to do so, they’d probably be damaged.’
‘Can you make new ones?’ Sajaki said.
‘Given time, yes.’ She said it with a sigh of resignation. ‘I’ll need a new candidate, too.’
‘When we lay over around Yellowstone,’ Hegazi said, ‘you can search for someone there, can’t you?’
The knights were still clashing across the glade, but no one was paying them very much attention now, even though one of them seemed to be having difficulties with an arrow inserted through his faceplate.
‘I’m sure someone suitable will turn up,’ Volyova said.
The cold air in the Mademoiselle’s house was the cleanest Khouri had tasted since arriving on Yellowstone. Which was really saying very little. Clean, but not fragrant. More like the smells she remembered from the hospital tent on Sky’s Edge, redolent of iodine and cabbage and chlorine, the last time she had seen Fazil.
Manoukhian’s cable-car had carried them across the city, through a partially flooded subsurface aqueduct. They had arrived in an underground cavern. From there, Manoukhian had ushered Khouri into a lift which ascended with ear-popping speed. The lift had brought them to this dark, echoey hallway. More than likely it was just a trick of acoustics, but Khouri felt as if she had just stepped into a huge unlit mausoleum. Filigreed windows floated overhead, but the light which leaked through them was midnight pale. Given that it was still day outside, the effect was subtly disturbing.
‘The Mademoiselle has no passion for daylight,’ Manoukhian said, leading her on.
‘You don’t say.’ Khouri’s eyes were starting to adjust to the gloom. She began to pick out big hulking things standing in the hall. ‘You’re not from around here, are you, Manoukhian?’
‘I guess that makes two of us.’
‘Was it a clerical error that brought you to Yellowstone as well?’
‘Not quite.’ She could tell that Manoukhian was deciding how much he could get away with telling. That was his one weakness, Khouri thought. For a hit-man, or whatever he was, the man liked to talk too much. The trip over had been one long series of brags and boasts about his exploits in Chasm City - stuff, which, if it had been coming from anyone other than this cool customer with the foreign accent and trick gun, she would have dismissed out of hand. But with Manoukhian, the worrying thing was that a lot of it might have been true. ‘No,’ he said, his urge to spin a story obviously triumphing over his professional instincts towards surliness. ‘No; it wasn’t a clerical error. But it was a kind of mistake - or an accident, at any rate.’
There were lots of the hulking things. It was difficult to make out their overall shapes, but they all rested on slim poles jutting from black plinths. Some were like sections of smashed eggshell, while others more resembled delicate husks of brain coral. Everything had a metallic sheen, rendered colourless in the sallow light of the hallway.
‘You had an accident?’
‘No . . . not me. She did. The Mademoiselle. That’s how we met each other. She was . . . I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, Khouri. She finds out, I’m dead meat. Pretty easy to dispose of bodies in the Mulch. Hey, you know what I found there the other day? You’re not going to believe any of this, but I found a whole fucking . . .’
Manoukhian went off on a boast. Khouri brushed her fingers against one of the sculptures, feeling its cool metal texture. The edges were very sharp. It was as if she and Manoukhian were two furtive art lovers who had broken into a museum in the middle of the night. The sculptures seemed to be biding their time. They were waiting for something - but not with infinite reserves of patience.
She was perplexingly glad of the gunman’s company.
‘Did she make these?’ Khouri asked, interrupting Manoukhian’s flow.
‘Perhaps,’ Manoukhian said. ‘In which case you could say she suffered for her art.’ He stopped, touching her on the shoulder. ‘All right. You see those stairs?’
‘I guess you want me to use them.’
‘You’re learning.’
Gently, he stuck the gun in her back - just to remind her it was still there.
Through a porthole in the wall next to the dead man’s quarters Volyova could see a tangerine-coloured gas giant planet, its shadowed southern pole flickering with auroral storms. They were deep inside the Epsilon Eridani system now; coming in at a shallow angle to the ecliptic. Yellowstone was only a few days away; already they were within light-minutes of local traffic, threading through the web of line-of-sight communications which linked every significant habitat or spacecraft in the system. Their own ship had changed, too. Through the same window Volyova could just see the front of one of the Conjoiner engines. The engines had automatically hauled in their scoop fields as the ship dropped below ramming speed, subtly altering their shapes to in-system mode, the intake maw closing like a flower at dusk. Somehow the engines were still producing thrust, but the source of the reaction mass or the energy to accelerate it was just another mystery of Conjoiner technology. Presumably there was a limit on how long the drives could function like this, or else they would never have needed to trawl space for fuel during interstellar cruise mode . . .
Her mind was wandering, trying to focus on anything but the issue at hand.
‘I think she’s going to be trouble,’ Volyova said. ‘Serious trouble.’
‘Not if I read her correctly.’ Triumvir Sajaki dispensed a smile.
‘Sudjic knows me too well. She knows I wouldn’t take the trouble of actually reprimanding her if she made a move against a member of the Triumvirate. I wouldn’t even give her the luxury of leaving the ship when we get to Yellowstone. I’d simply kill her.’
‘That might be a little harsh.’
She sounded weak and despised herself for it, but it was how she felt. ‘It’s not as if I don’t sympathise with her. After all Sudjic had nothing personal against me until I . . . until Nagorny died. If she does anything, couldn’t you just discipline her?’
‘It’s not worth it,’ Sajaki said. ‘If she has the mind to do something to you, she won’t stop at petty aggravation. If I just discipline her she’ll find a way to hurt you permanently. Killing her would be the only reasonable option. Anyway - I’m surprised that you see her side of things. Hasn’t it occurred to you that some of Nagorny’s problems might have rubbed off on her?’
‘You’re asking me whether I think she’s completely sane?’
‘It doesn’t matter. She won’t move against you - you have my word on that.’ Sajaki paused. ‘Now, can we get this over with? I’ve had enough of Nagorny for one life.’
‘I know exactly how you feel.’
It was several days after her first meeting with the crew. They were standing outside the dead man’s quarters, on level 821, preparing to enter his rooms. They had remained sealed since his death - longer, as far as the others were concerned. Even Volyova had not entered them, wary of disturbing something which might place her there.
She spoke into her bracelet. ‘Disable security interdict, personal quarters Gunnery Officer Boris Nagorny, authorisation Volyova.’
The door opened before them, emitting a palpable draught of highly chilled air.
‘Send them in,’ Sajaki said.
The armed servitors took only a few minutes to sweep the interior, certifying that there were no obvious hazards. It would have been unlikely, of course, since Nagorny had probably not planned to die quite when Volyova had arranged it. But with characters like him, one could never be sure.
They stepped in, the servitors having already activated the room lights.
Like most of the psychopaths she had encountered, Nagorny had always seemed perfectly h
appy with the smallest of personal spaces. His quarters were even more determinedly cramped than her own. A fastidious neatness had been at work there, like a poltergeist in reverse. Most of his belongings - there were not many - had been securely racked down, and so had not been disturbed by the ship’s manoeuvres when she killed him.
Sajaki grimaced and held a sleeve up to his nose. ‘That smell.’
‘It’s borscht. Beetroot. I think Nagorny was partial to it.’
‘Remind me not to try it.’
Sajaki closed the door behind them.
There was a residual frigidity to the air. The thermometers said that it was now room temperature, but it seemed as if the molecules in the air carried an imprint of the months of cold. The room’s overpowering spartanness did not offset this chill. Volyova’s quarters seemed opulent and luxurious by comparison. It was not simply a case of Nagorny neglecting to personalise his space. It was just that in so doing he had so miserably failed by normal standards that his efforts actually contradicted themselves and made the room seem even bleaker than had it been empty.
What failed to help matters was the coffin.
The elongated object had been the only thing in the room not lashed down when she killed Nagorny. It was still intact, but Volyova sensed that the thing had once stood upright, dominating the room with a fearful premonitory grandeur. It was huge and probably made of iron. The metal was as ebon and light-sucking as the surface of a Shrouder emboîtement. All its surfaces had been carved in bas-relief, too intricately rendered to give up all their secrets in one glance. Volyova stared in silence. Are you trying to say, she thought, that Boris Nagorny was capable of this?
‘Yuuji,’ she said. ‘I don’t like this at all.’
‘I don’t very much blame you.’
‘What kind of madman makes his own coffin?’
‘A very dedicated one, I’d say. But it’s here, and it’s probably the only glimpse into his mind we have. What do you make of the embellishments?’
‘Undoubtedly a projection of his psychosis, a concretisation.’ Now that Sajaki was forcing calm she was slipping into subservience. ‘I should study the imagery. It might give me insight.’ She paused, added: ‘So that we don’t make the same mistake twice, I mean.’
‘Prudent,’ Sajaki said, kneeling down. He stroked his gloved forefinger over the intagliated rococo surface. ‘We were very lucky you were not forced to kill him, in the end.’
‘Yes,’ she said, giving him an odd look. ‘But what are your thoughts on the embellishments, Yuuji-san?’
‘I’d like to know who or what Sun Stealer was,’ he said, drawing her attention to those words, etched in Cyrillic on the coffin. ‘Does that mean anything to you? Within the terms of his psychosis, I mean. What did it mean to Nagorny?’
‘I haven’t the faintest.’
‘Let me hazard a guess, anyway. I’d say that in Nagorny’s imagination Sun Stealer represented somebody in his day-to-day experience, and I see two obvious possibilities.’
‘Himself or me,’ Volyova said, knowing that Sajaki was not to be easily distracted. ‘Yes, yes, that much is obvious . . . but this doesn’t in any way help us.’
‘You’re quite sure he never mentioned this Sun Stealer?’
‘I would remember a thing like that.’
Which was quite true. And of course she did remember: he had written those words on the wall in her quarters, in his own blood. The expression meant nothing to her, but that did not mean she was in any sense unfamiliar with it. Towards the unpleasant termination of their professional relationship, Nagorny had spoken of little else. His dreams were thick with Sun Stealer, and - like all paranoiacs - he saw evidence of Sun Stealer’s malignant work in the most humdrum of daily annoyances. When one of the ship’s lights failed unaccountably or a lift directed him to the wrong level, this was Sun Stealer’s doing. It was never a simple malfunction, but always evidence of the deliberate machinations of a behind-the-scenes entity only Nagorny could detect. Volyova had stupidly ignored the signs. She had hoped - in fact come as close to praying as was possible for her - that his phantom would return to the netherworld of his unconscious. But Sun Stealer had stayed with Nagorny; witness the coffin on the floor.
Yes . . . she would remember a thing like that.
‘I’m sure you would,’ Sajaki said, knowingly. Then he returned his attention to the engravings. ‘I think first we should make a copy of these marks,’ he said. ‘They may help us, but this damned Braille effect isn’t easy to make out with the eye. What do you think these are?’ He moved his palm across a kind of radial pattern. ‘Birds’ wings? Or rays of sunlight shining from above? They look more like birds’ wings to me. Now why would he have bird wings on his mind? And what kind of language is this meant to be?’
Volyova looked, but the crawling complexity of the coffin was too much to take in. It was not that she was uninterested - not at all. But what she wanted was the thing to herself, and Sajaki as far away from it as possible. There was too much evidence here of the canyon depths to which Nagorny’s mind had plummeted.
‘I think it merits more study,’ she said carefully. ‘You said “first”. What do you intend to do after we make a copy of it?’
‘I would have thought that was obvious.’
‘Destroy the damned thing,’ she surmised.
Sajaki smiled. ‘Either that or give it to Sudjic. But personally I’d settle for destroying it. Coffins aren’t good things to have on a ship, you know. Especially home-made ones.’
The stairs went up for ever. After a while - already in the two hundreds - Khouri lost count. But just when her knees felt as if they were going to buckle, the staircase came to an abrupt end, presenting her with a long, long white corridor whose sides were a series of recessed arches. The effect was like standing in a portico under moonlight. She walked along the corridor’s echoey length until she arrived at the double doors which ended it. They were festooned with organic black scrollwork, inset with faintly tinted glass. A lavender light poured through them from the room beyond.
Evidently she had arrived.
It was entirely possible that this was a trap of some kind, and that to enter the room beyond would be a form of suicide. But turning back was not an option either - Manoukhian, for all his charm, had made that abundantly clear. So Khouri grasped the handle and let herself in. Something in the air made her nose tickle pleasantly, a blossomy perfume negating the sterility of the rest of the house. The smell made Khouri feel unwashed, although it was only a few hours since Ng had woken her and told her to go and kill Taraschi. In the meantime she had accumulated a month’s worth of dirt from the Chasm City rain, suffused with her own sweat and fear.
‘I see Manoukhian managed to get you here in one piece,’ said a woman’s voice.
‘Me or him?’
‘Both, dear girl,’ the invisible speaker said. ‘Your reputations are equally formidable.’
Behind her the double doors clicked shut. Khouri began to take in her surroundings; difficult in the strange pink light of the room. The enclosure was kettle-shaped, with two eyelike shuttered windows set into one concave wall.
‘Welcome to my place of residence,’ the voice said. ‘Make yourself at home, won’t you.’
Khouri walked to the shuttered windows. To one side of the windows sat a pair of reefersleep caskets, gleaming like chromed silverfish. One of the units was sealed and running, while the other was open; a chrysalis ready to enfold the butterfly.
‘Where am I?’
The shutters whisked open.
‘Where you always were,’ the Mademoiselle said.
She was looking out across Chasm City. But it was from a higher vantage point than she had ever known. She was actually above the Mosquito Net, perhaps fifty metres from its stained surface. The city lay below the Net like a fantastically spiny sea-creature preserved in formaldehyde. She had no idea where she was; except that this had to be one of the tallest buildings; one that she had probab
ly assumed was uninhabited.
The Mademoiselle said: ‘I call this place the Château des Corbeaux; the House of Ravens; by virtue of its blackness. You’ve undoubtedly seen it.’
‘What do you want?’ Khouri said, finally.
‘I want you to do a job for me.’
‘All this for that? I mean, you had to kidnap me at gunpoint just to ask me to do a job? Couldn’t you go through the usual channels?’
‘It isn’t the usual sort of job.’
Khouri nodded towards the open reefersleep unit. ‘Where does that come into it?’
‘Don’t tell me it alarms you. You came to our world in one, after all.’
‘I just asked what it meant.’
‘All in good time. Turn around, will you?’
Khouri heard a slight bustle of machinery behind her, like the sound of a filing cabinet opening.
A hermetic’s palanquin had entered the room. Or had it been here all along, concealed by some artifice? It was as dark and angular as a metronome, lacking ornamentation, and with a roughly welded black exterior. It had no appendages or obvious sensors, and the tiny viewing monocle set into its front was as dark as a shark’s eye.
‘You are doubtless already familiar with my kind,’ said the voice emanating from the palanquin. ‘Do not be disturbed.’
‘I’m not,’ Khouri said.
But she was lying. There was something disturbing about this box; a quality she had never experienced in the presence of Ng or the other hermetics she had known. Perhaps it was the austerity of the palanquin, or the sense - entirely subliminal - that the box was seldom unoccupied. None of this was helped by the smallness of the viewing window, or the feeling that there was something monstrous behind that dark opacity.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 10