by Darius Hinks
Grekh shook his head. ‘The pilot is a deserter. Audus. She’s not here. Your Navy has a price on her head. Her crime was serious. The Skeins aren’t safe for her now. But I can find her. We must to go to the Helmsman.’
‘A deserter?’ Draik frowned. ‘We were headed to the Helmsman anyway, I suppose. A short interview can’t do much harm. You may accompany us as far as the Helmsman, Grekh. And if you can back up your claims with an actual pilot, I’ll pay you a reward.’
Grekh shook his head. ‘My reward is to come with you.’
‘Where?’
‘Through the Teeth. Into the Unfathomable. To the Ascuris Vault.’
Draik laughed, shocked by the creature’s presumption.
Grekh retained the same earnest, confident tone. ‘There is a debt. Swear to take me. I will lead you to the pilot and I will save your life.’
Isola could not hide her outrage. ‘Are you trying to give Captain Draik an order?’
Draik dismissed her concerns with a wave. ‘If he fails to give us anything of value in the Helmsman, we can part company then.’
‘Swear the oath,’ said Grekh in the same flat, abrupt tone.
Draik ignored the creature’s crude manners and considered the offer. It was extremely unlikely that the alien would get him to the Ascuris Vault. And if Grekh really could achieve such a feat, enduring the alien’s company would be a small price to pay. He nodded.
‘Very well. If you find us passage to the Ascuris Vault, I swear, as a scion of the most venerable House Draik, that you will accompany me as my personal retainer.’
Grekh grunted and led the way back down the transitway, walking in a strange, swaying gait.
As they followed, Isola saw a gleam in Draik’s eye and shook her head. ‘Voracious indeed,’ she muttered.
2
Gatto was the first to see the truth. The Blackstone Fortress was not a prize to fight over; it was not a treasure to be ransacked. It was an open grave – a snare designed to catch only the bravest and the most idiotic. Precipice had yet to be built when Gatto arrived. There was no place to dock in those days. No place to pray. Only a headlong plunge into the unknown. He made dozens of attempts to breach the fortress, as desperate as all those who followed, losing a little more of his body with every attempt until he finally accepted defeat. Few since had shown such wisdom, but Gatto had realised that there are more ways than one to find a fortune. As a rapacious horde followed in his wake, crowding the fast-growing port with their ships and dreams, Gatto saw how to feed on the hunger that devoured him – how to save his sanity, even when it was too late to save his flesh.
The Emporium of Fools, as Gatto preferred to call the Helmsman, was a circular hall built around a single, stolen shard of the fortress – an ominous hexagonal slab of pitch, bolted to the heart of the Helmsman’s lounges and staterooms. It was the cruellest taunt Gatto could think of, made all the crueller with every sip of his absurdly expensive liquor. It sat there, tantalising, untouched by the bustle and din. Silent and alien. Half of Gatto’s patrons would never fly again, trapped in the limbo of Precipice – their ships lost, their crews dead and only enough money left to pickle themselves before the uncaring shard. No one had ever been able to mark it or even discern its nature, but humanity always finds a way to leave its dirty fingerprint. Gatto had covered the shard’s lower half with pict captures. Hundreds of them. Strange, haunting portraits of the dead. Whenever one of his patrons failed to return from the fortress, he pinned their portrait to the black monolith, taking perverse glee in the fact that another fool had met the fate he dodged.
Gatto’s bar was built around the shard and Gatto was built into the bar. His iron lung was as big as a coffin and roughly the same shape, mangled together from the same rusty salvage as the walls. His robotic arms were in constant motion – dozens of them, whirling back and forth, anticipating the needs of every drinker who slumped towards him, sloshing cups and hurling food in a fluid ballet of lunges and flips. There was a circular, glass-fronted hatch in the centre of his iron lung, displaying his withered organs. They were suspended in grey milk, dark and ugly like a cluster of charred fruit. Gatto’s head was the only part of his body still fully intact, but it more than made up for the lack of anything else. As Grekh led Draik through the crowd, Gatto was in full flow, screaming at the room – a casket of vented hate, spitting red-cheeked vitriol at everyone and no one.
Draik grimaced as the Helmsman attacked his senses. It was deafening. An unsavoury, scandalous explosion of life. The circular room was a warren of alcoves and booths and the air was thronged with Gatto’s pets – skinless void-creatures he called bloodbirds. They were not true birds, but huge, leathery moths, fluttering around the room in their hundreds, larger than a man’s hand and slick with crimson tar. They had thick, grimy lenses sewn into their heads that rattled and whirred as they flew, focusing on the lurid scenes below. As Draik tried to follow Grekh through the crush of yelling bodies, he had to swat them away. The bloodbirds screeched indignantly at him, but even that could not compete with the sounds of squalid revelry. The pictures on the shard were a constant reminder of what lay in store for most of Gatto’s patrons, so no one was drinking to relax. They had come to crush their fear. To fuel their hunger.
The room was sparsely lit, the humid darkness bisected by thin columns of light that shone harshly on a few faces but left everything else hidden in murk. As he followed Grekh, Draik caught snapshots of crazed, adrenaline-fuelled drunks, bellowing at each other, leering and gemmed with sweat. Some human, some not, but all radiating the same thought: I will be the one. I will scale this peak. I will conquer the dark.
‘Gatto!’ cried Grekh as they forced their way to the bar.
Gatto’s iron lung was mounted on runners and he was currently rattling towards the far end of the bar, screaming as he threw trays of food at a group of hulking, glowering abhumans.
‘Gatto will be no help,’ shouted Isola. She was standing beside Draik, but the Helmsman was so loud that she struggled to make herself heard. ‘He never stops yelling long enough to hear anything.’
‘He knows everything,’ said Grekh. He waved at the bloodbirds. ‘They record things. They see everyone who comes in here. And everyone comes in here.’
Draik studied the shadows flitting overhead, wondering if Grekh could be right. The kroot seemed peculiar, even by the standards of an alien. He reminded Draik of similar characters he had encountered on Precipice – fervid, humourless types who spoke like everything was a prayer. A particular kind of mysticism preyed on those who survived several trips into the fortress. A solemn, quiet religiosity. It was as though the strangeness of the fortress attached itself to them, adding its shadow to theirs, muddying their thoughts with its riddles. The locals called them devotees, using the word with a mixture of derision and fear.
A noise came from a few feet down the bar – a tidal roar of oaths and howls, accompanied by the sound of shattering cups.
The crowd pressed against Draik, causing him to stagger as a large shape loomed through the shadows. His instinct was to draw his pistol, but he gripped the bar instead. Precipice’s laws forbade the use of firearms in any of its drinking halls or markets. Gunfights broke out, of course, but it could be an expensive business if the proctors got involved. Draik understood the logic. Precipice was more than a simple way station; it was a fragile alliance – a tense truce between smugglers, traders and privateers from every race and creed in the galaxy. These were dangerous souls. In any other situation, they would have gunned each other down without hesitation. On Precipice they forged allegiances and struck deals, united by their eagerness to profit from the Blackstone, but violence was never far away. The first captains to lash their ships together over the Blackstone Fortress saw how quickly such a lawless state would collapse, so they called themselves the proctors and enforced brutal, simple governance. The rules were easy to understand: ste
p out of line and the proctors would execute you, seize whatever you had taken from the Blackstone and then deny ever hearing your name. The law was so simple it worked – most of the time, at least. As the commotion next to the bar grew more violent, Draik steadied himself, straining to see the cause.
A bear waded into the throng, standing on its hind legs and roaring, spraying saliva over the drinkers who were howling and reeling away from it, trying to claw their way back from the bar.
It was more machine than animal, implanted with a junkyard of pumps and flywheels and shackled to the end of the bar. A dozen feet from where Draik was standing, the chains snapped it to a halt. Its rusting lower jaw was stained crimson and there was a man at its feet, screaming and laughing as he slipped in his own blood trying to escape. Hands grabbed the man and hauled him to safety as the bear lurched from side to side, lashing at anyone nearby, bellowing and straining against its chains.
‘Bosa!’ howled Gatto, his head spinning on top of his iron lung to glare back down the bar.
The bear dropped onto all fours and lowered its head but kept pulling at the chains, straining its massive shoulders and causing the hydraulics in its legs to hiss and pop. Gatto rattled down the length of the bar, apoplectic. As he rushed along his track, he hurled cups and plates and lashed the bar with his metal arms, filling the air with spilled drinks and shattered crockery.
‘Rug!’ he screamed, reminding the bear of his ultimate sanction.
Bosa held its nerve until Gatto had almost reached the end of the bar, then lurched sullenly back into the shadows, rattling its chains one last time as it padded back into the one corner of the Helmsman that always remained empty. A wave of drunken laughter washed through the room along with cries of ‘Rug!’
‘Gatto!’ cried Grekh as the iron lung rattled back the way it had come, passing right in front of them.
Gatto caught sight of the kroot and halted. Behind him his multitudinous limbs snaked across rows of bottles, filled a cup and banged it down, then he bellowed a stream of obscenities into Grekh’s face. Gatto’s features were gaunt, swarthy and fixed in a constant snarl. He glared at Grekh, his mouth hung open, spittle hanging from his chin.
‘Information,’ said Grekh.
The noise around the bar continued unabated, but Gatto fell quiet for a moment, a mischievous look in his eyes. He rolled his casket closer to Grekh and tilted it until their faces were almost touching. Even then, he chose to yell.
‘You’re going back in?’
Grekh nodded.
Gatto laughed. It was a mean, filthy sound. He nodded to the base of the shard behind him, and the portraits taped across it. ‘I thought you might escape me, Grekh. I thought you had more brains than the others.’ He noticed Draik and Isola. ‘These two as well?’
‘If we can find Audus.’
‘Audus?’ Gatto looked disappointed. ‘Too late. She has a hefty price on her head. And there are too many bounty hunters here for a prize like that to go unnoticed.’ He poured drinks for Isola and Draik. ‘Keep trying, though.’ He nodded at the portraits stuck to the shard. ‘Make yourself famous.’
‘Who took her?’ asked Grekh.
Gatto’s face turned purple. ‘Am I your stinking mother? Do I look like a friend, you feathered sack of excrement?’
Draik calmly sipped his drink, eyeing Gatto’s rage-knotted face over the rim of the cup. He grimaced at the taste and put the cup down, leaning over the bar until he was in range of Gatto’s spittle. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever been introduced. Captain Janus Draik of House Draik.’
Gatto sneered at his delicately embroidered dress coat and the intricate workmanship of his weapons.
‘I bet a princess like you has some money.’
Draik nodded, revealing an impressive collection of proctor tokens.
They had barely emerged from his coat before one of Gatto’s rubber limbs snaked through the pools of beer and whipped them out of sight. Gatto leant closer to Draik, his bloodshot eyes focusing for a moment.
‘Grusel Bullosus took her. She didn’t go happily though. She’s a maniac. Things got messy.’ He grinned. ‘She’ll be dead by now.’ He paused to howl another string of obscenities at Grekh, then rattled off back down the bar.
Grekh clicked his beak again, as though trying to swallow something. Then he rummaged through the caskets hung around his chest, peering into each one and whispering to it, conversing with the tormented insects. He singled one out and tapped its cage with his long, bony talons.
‘She’s still alive,’ he said, raising his voice over the din. ‘Bullosus would not kill her. And I know where Bullosus’ ship is.’ He finished his drink, slapped down some proctor tokens and pushed away from the bar. ‘We can get her back. Bullosus is greedy and you have money.’
‘Wait,’ demanded Draik, grabbing hold of Grekh’s arm, then immediately regretting it as dozens of tiny cages shattered beneath his fingers. They were flimsy things, made of wooden splinters and locks of hair, and as they broke they stained his gloves with crushed insects.
Grekh scraped up the remnants of the insects and ate them. He seemed to forget where he was, closing his eyes as he chewed, savouring every morsel.
‘I have my own pilot,’ said Draik, struggling to hold his place as raucous laughter broke out behind him, causing the crowd to stagger and press against him. He was starting to remember why he avoided the Helmsman. ‘This Audus just needs to supply me with directions. In fact, if you were part of the original mission, why can’t you just tell me the way yourself?’
Grekh continued eating for a moment longer, then shook his head, rattling his mane of quills. ‘You need Audus.’ He looked again at the pulped insects on his arm.
Isola shook her head. ‘Captain. Why listen to this ridiculous creature? And would you really let some renegade fly the Vanguard?’
Draik took out a handkerchief and wiped the dead insects from his glove. ‘I’ll judge Audus’ character when I meet her.’ He nodded at Grekh, who was already barging through the crowds to the exit. ‘And he may be perfectly sound according to the mores of his own race.’
At the back of the room, someone started playing a fiddle, adding a grating, discordant screech to the general cacophony of laughter, fighting and whirring moths.
Isola tried to answer Draik, but the racket drowned her out and all she could do was follow as Draik made his way back through the crowds of reeling drinkers. Terrible as the music was, people were trying to dance it, so the way back out was even more of a battle than the way in had been.
They had almost reached the door when another group arrived at the Helmsman and swooped into the tightly packed main bar. They were humans but they looked as out of place as Draik, trailing a storm of voluminous robes. They were as tall and slender as Grekh, but where he lurched and hopped, they sliced proudly through the throng with their chins raised, gliding into the Helmsman like an elegant yacht cutting effortlessly through the tide. They all wore masks, and the leader sported an impressive helmet that contained his whole head and was crested with six blade-like antennae, making it look like a stylised star. He was clearly a nobleman, swinging a gilded cane topped by a gem the size of a fist. The filigree on his chest armour displayed an ancient Terran family crest.
Draik stumbled to a halt, shocked to see someone from his own strata of society. The leader of the group was striding at such a pace that, when Draik paused, the two men collided and the noble’s cane clattered across the floor.
The rest of the group surrounded him and drew pistols, training them on Draik.
The music faltered.
Grekh waded back through the crowd and interposed himself between Draik and the noble with a threatening snarl.
The Helmsman fell quiet. Even Gatto ceased his ranting to watch the exchange, waiting to decide who was most deserving of his bile.
‘Stand down!’ sai
d Draik to Grekh, irritated that he had to reveal his connection to such a beast in front of a Terran noble.
Grekh hesitated, then stepped back to Draik’s side. A small circle had opened around them and Draik had enough room to bow.
‘Captain Draik of House Draik, at your service,’ he said, waving Isola to the noble’s cane.
She snatched it from the floor and handed it back.
For a few awkward moments, the noble did not move or reply; he just stood there, staring at Draik.
‘Helmont Corval,’ he said finally, his voice reverberating through the mouth grille of his helmet. ‘Emissary of House Corval.’
‘I did not anticipate meeting a gentleman in such surroundings,’ said Draik.
‘Nor I,’ replied Corval. ‘An unexpected pleasure. Please, you must call on me when you have a chance.’ He handed Draik a beautifully embossed calling card displaying his name and coat of arms. ‘My ship is the Omnipotence. We are moored to the spar called the Celsumgate. I am newly arrived from the Cainus Subsector. I have heard fascinating rumours about this anomaly but I have yet to discuss it with–’
‘We must go,’ snapped Grekh, stooping so that his stubby beak was directly in front of Draik’s face.
Corval stepped back, clearly repulsed by the alien.
Draik glared at Grekh and then gave Corval another bow. ‘I have urgent business to attend to but I would be delighted to talk more when I have time.’
Corval seemed at a loss for words again, but he returned Draik’s bow.
Draik waved Grekh on and they made for the door, escaping the crush of bodies and stepping out into the blood-red fog.
‘Where is this pilot?’ said Draik, quickly losing his patience with Grekh.
Grekh headed down the walkway, passing beneath a vast archway. The structure was hundreds of feet tall and oddly beautiful, like the buttress of a grand cathedral, but it was actually the casing of a turbine, torn from the engine of a long-forgotten ship. Grekh weaved through the arch and hopped onto a girder, before loping off in another direction.