Ravenor

by Dan Abnett

  Sunlight, bright and dangerous, streamed down through broken skylights into another corridor. The floor had almost rotted and burned away. He had to step his way on the exposed cross members. Below his feet, gnawed holes showed the drop into the darkness of the floors below.

  Nayl paused, legs braced wide between two mouldering joists, and raised his pistol to cover the skylights. The wind was creaking the superstructure, but it sounded like someone was up there.

  Kara followed her quarry’s path along the lower roof, using the tension cable as he had done. By the time she reached the flue stack, her gloves were ruined. She could feel spot-burns on her legs from the splashed rainwater. She was out of breath and dizzy.

  The metal flues, like the pipes of an organ, had been burned almost blue by the climate. She swung around them. The end gable of the roof wing was immediately beneath her, then the gulf itself: the flank of the tower dropped away into the cloud cover below. It looked a long way, even to the clouds. Much less to the ground itself.

  There was no sign of Bazarof. Had he slipped and fallen? If he’d managed to scramble around the gable-end – using only the rotting fascia as a foothold – he might have made it onto the adjoining roofwing – a wide mansard that abutted the central rise of the tower. Beyond that was a flat roof section fitted with broken skylights.

  Kara chose her grip and spidered her way around the gable. Mushy pieces of verge boarding came off in her fingers. She leapt the last of the distance onto the edge of the mansard, trying to ignore the prospect of the drop behind her, and ran up it on all fours to the crest. There, she slithered down onto the flat section. Her heart was pounding, and her breaths came in rasps.

  Gun drawn, she reached the skylights and peered down. Nayl and the barrel of his gun were looking up at her.

  ‘Damn!’ she panted. ‘Didn’t he come that way?’

  ‘No sign here.’

  She looked round. ‘I’d have seen him if he’d doubled back. Maybe he did fall off…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just stay there,’ she said, and circled back away from the skylights. Debris and junk fallen from the inner tower littered the inward part of the flat roof. She picked through it. The pieces of flaking metal siding, that were bent and collapsed like fallen window blinds, were large enough to conceal a man. In fact, they concealed nothing except pools of slime water and rot.

  The rising elevation of the inner tower was smooth travertine, streaked with orange stains of corrosion. As she got closer, she realised the stains marked out where iron rungs had been set into the wall. They were loose and unsteady, but they supported her weight. She went up with her gun tucked in her belt.

  The end of one of the rungs popped out in a puff of floury mortar. She skipped it, stretched, and pulled herself up onto the next few. The extra exertion made her head swim.

  ‘Kara?’

  Nayl ached to know what was going on. With his feet braced wide between the joists, there was no way he could launch himself up far enough to get out of the roof lights.

  ‘Kara!’

  There was a ledge, ten metres up, underbraced by eroded arcature. She got up onto it. It was only a metre wide and ran along the face of the tower to the corner. At the head of the rungs, lichen had been scratched and torn away recently: she wasn’t the first to make this climb.

  She went along the ledge to the corner. The turn of the central tower looked out over another jumble of roofs. Bazarof was scrambling over them, into the face of the gale.

  ‘Got him! South-west! The next wing!’ she voxed and jumped off the ledge. It was a five-metre drop, down onto a flat section of coping that ran along between the beehives of six air-exchangers. Bazarof was still going. He hadn’t heard her.

  She ran down the coping, stepping wide over iron roof ribs, and jumped down again. She was coming up the slope of roof behind him. Stay-cables swung loose from stanchion brackets and the wind moaned through the few strands that remained under tension. He looked back and saw her, then darted left sharply along the line of the roof, his feet slipping on the loose tiles.

  ‘Stay put!’ she yelled. He reached another cluster of air-exchanger domes and disappeared from view.

  She drew her weapon again, and edged between the first of the metal beehive casings. She winced as a squall of rain spattered down out of the pale sky, then she advanced a few metres more, around the next two domes. Another flurry of rain. This time she turned her head aside and raised an arm to shield her face.

  He hit her from behind, slamming into her hard and banging her sideways into the nearest dome. She dropped her shoulders and flinched in time to evade his follow-up punch. His fist cracked hard against the dome’s metal.

  Bazarof squealed with pain. She brought her gun up, but he lashed out blindly and chopped her across the inside of her elbow. At the same moment her right foot came out from under her on the wet leading. She fell back against the dome again, and he kicked her hard in the belly. She was coughing, spitting, cursing, so winded she couldn’t move. Bazarof – bigger and tougher than he’d seemed from a distance across the roofscape – reached down and tore the compact from her hand. He moved to aim it at her head, but had to fiddle with the unfamiliar design. She rolled hard, sweeping his legs away with a desperate scissor kick.

  He crashed over heavily, the gun skidding away down the guttering. They rose together, Kara extending an open palm in time to stop his first punch dead and a forearm in time to block his second. Bazarof had physical strength, but no combat training, except maybe a diploma in basic brawling. His third strike was a hooking punch that she stepped back out of, turning her back step into a full rotate that delivered a backward spin-kick to his chest. He was thrown back against another of the domes, but came back for more, his eyes bright with fear. She pivoted back on her right foot and, straight-legged, brought her left heel down into his shoulder. The blow broke something and folded him into a heap.

  She reached over to grab him, but wobbled badly. The effort of subduing him had really made her head spin, and she had idiot stars of nausea dancing across her vision.

  He put an elbow into the side of her left knee and Kara folded, hitting her head a glancing blow against the side of the air-exchanger as he went down.

  A blur. Colour. Shapes. The smell of blood in her sinuses and the taste of it in her throat. She shook herself. Bazarof was gone.

  As she was getting to her feet, she heard a sharp cry above the wind.

  ‘Bazarof? Bazarof?’

  He had tried to flee, but the thin air and effort had made him dizzy too. He’d slipped on the edge of the coping and gone over the side, sliding down the hip of a steep catslide roof almost to the edge.

  Kara peered over and saw him. A terrified white face looked up at her. His hands were wrapped around a rainspout. His feet were milling in empty air, the sheer drop of Stairtown below him.

  She couldn’t reach him. She leaned out and tried, but knew at once that she was likely to slide right down after him. She looked around and found a broken length of pipe, but it was too short. He squealed again, his hands slipping, acid fumes rising from between his fingers.

  Kara ran back along the coping and grabbed one of the slack stay cables. It was heavy and awkward, and coiled against her grip like it was alive. Grunting with effort, she dragged it back to the edge and spilled it out down the catslide. It writhed open and down, flopping over the gutter near to him with a weighty metal snap. Then she worked it along so it was right beside him. The cable squeaked along the guttering.

  ‘Grab it! Come on!’

  He moaned that he couldn’t.

  ‘Come on!’ Kara was damned if they were going to lose another source before he could be questioned. Their record during the Petropolis op so far was dismal.

  ‘Grab it!’

  With a frantic lunge, Bazarof grabbed the cable. He started to slide again almost at once. Kara cried out with the effort of bracing against the cable.

  With a shriek, Bazar
of went over the edge.

  Kara cursed aloud, but the cable was still dragging heavy. He hadn’t fallen. He was still holding onto the steel line, dangling out of sight. She heaved once, twice, her teeth gritted, her straining hands slipping on the wet cable. He was too heavy. She couldn’t – Patience Kys appeared beside her.

  ‘Where did you come from?’ Kara gasped.

  ‘We thought you might need a hand.’

  ‘Help me, for frig’s sake, before he falls!’

  Kys didn’t move to take hold of the cable. She just looked down the catslide towards the gutter, her brows furrowing.

  Kara felt a sudden slack on the line, as if Bazarof’s weight had gone. Ninker had fallen after all…

  But no. He slid into view, hands first, then his face, then his body. He was still gripping the cable, but it was Kys’s telekinesis that was dragging him up. Face down, the whimpering man slithered up the tiled slope like a snail, until he was close enough for them both to grab and pull onto the coping. Kys stood back, exhaling softly from the effort. Bazarof writhed and moaned at their feet.

  ‘Enough!’ Kara told him, dragging him to his feet. He was shamming. He clawed at her, so she rammed his head against the side of an air dome with enough force to dent the dome’s casing.

  ‘Enough!’

  And at last it was.

  Suspensors gently humming, the inquisitor moved through the chambers of Bergossian’s deadloft at a slow, frictionless glide, scrutinising the intricately marked walls one centimetre at a time.

  Frauka walked beside him, smoking another lho-stick. They looked like sedate visitors at a public gallery.

  ‘Important?’ Frauka asked.

  Ravenor’s chair-speakers responded with a soft, non-vocal click, the equivalent of a pensive human ‘hmm’. The chair swivelled round and the sensors regarded the opposite wall. From deep inside the chair-body came the faint whirr of recording pict-ware.

  ‘Acts of insanity,’ Ravenor said at last. ‘Random scrawls, showing signs of tertiary stage derangement, yet sub-ordered with specific or quasi-specific symbolism. The product of a trance-state, I think. An altered state, certainly. No way to tell if there’s any consistency to the inscriptions. The maker could be mad, or illuminated beyond the remit of sanity.’

  ‘Surely not,’ Frauka said. The voxponder’s cadences were created only by the generative combinations of artificial speech. There was no inflection to the rise and fall tones, so it was impossible to tell when the inquisitor was joking.

  ‘I’m joking,’ Ravenor said. ‘Probably.’

  Nayl walked into the room behind them. ‘They’ve got him,’ he reported. ‘Just dragged him back.’

  ‘Then let’s talk to them. Wystan, if you please?’

  Frauka stubbed out his smoke and activated his limiter.

  They would not need much breaking. I could tell that as I rolled into the room where Mathuin had them under guard. Their surface thoughts were all but shouting out. Bazarof was dazed and terrified, and Lunt was scared and at a loss to know what was going on. Odysse Bergossian was a mess of tics and withdrawal spasms.

  They were frightened enough by the armed members of my team, but the sight of me chilled them into silence. My chair has that effect, I know. Faceless, armoured, cold, as unforthcoming as a polished stone block.

  At first, I didn’t even have to ask questions. Lunt’s mind was the most open. He was a friend of Bergossian’s, and sometimes – like now – stayed with him in the deadlofts when work was thin and he didn’t have the cash for flop-house rates. He was a labourer, poorly schooled, but intelligent enough. Bazarof, known to Lunt but not considered a friend, had shown up that morning desperate for a hiding place. He had refused to elaborate, but Lunt thought it likely the authorities were after him.

  Lunt had advised Bergossian not to take him in. Bazarof was not good news. The pair had found trouble together before. More importantly, Bergossian was in no fit state. For years now, he’d slithered from one addiction to the next, spending great swathes of time out of his head. It had been obscura for a long while, then pills, then gladstones.

  In the last few months, Bergossian had been using flects too. A few at first, relying on gladstones for his base fix, but then more and more. Bergossian had really lost it. He’d forgotten about gladstones, and used flects every day. That’s when the drawing had started.

  Lunt was worried about his friend. Lunt was no user – a little lho, sure, sometimes a puff of obscura, but nothing hardcore. He wanted his friend clean. Bergossian wasn’t taking care of himself. He wasn’t eating properly and he certainly wasn’t working enough. Strange thing was that he seemed happy. Blissful, most of the time, muttering with delighted but barely comprehensible enthusiasm about the designs he was making.

  He’d become so obsessed with them; he’d knocked through room after room with a sledgehammer to open up more space to work in.

  I drifted out of Lunt’s mind. Bazarof was tougher-edged, even though his head was still throbbing from the crack Kara had given it. He’d heard about Sonsal, and was running witless.

  +You’re right to be scared.+

  Bazarof’s head snapped up and he stared at me, blinking.

  +Everything you tell me now will encourage me to press for leniency in your case. Where do the flects come from?+

  I knew he wasn’t going to tell me, not just like that. Under verbal interrogation, he’d spin lies for hours until there was nowhere left to go. But the moment I asked him, the answer he didn’t want to give came right to the forefront of his mind as he concentrated on not letting it slip.

  Bazarof was no user either. A line chief at Engine Imperial, he pulled a decent enough wage, but supplemented it with black market dealings, usually narcotics. He couldn’t afford to use. The guild mechanicus kept a tight watch on their franchised workforce, with random urine sampling and blood tests. If he used, he’d lose his job. Likewise, if he dealt at work. But he did a nice little off-book business in his home stack.

  As a line chief, he knew people, and had plenty of contacts in supplier manufactories and haulage consortiums throughout the city. He had good travel papers too, which gave him the luxury of free movement. Most of all, he had a lot of old friends like Odysse Bergossian who lived and earned in the shadows of the hive’s economy.

  Bergossian had been Bazarof’s line of supply for three years, on and off. He could get most things, mainly because he craved them himself. What he got depended on where he was working. Yellodes and gladstones when he packed meat in K, grinweed when he gamped the sink markets, though he hadn’t done that for a while.

  The good stuff, like the flects, came from his links at the circus.

  I switched my attention away from Bazarof, and directed my thoughts towards Odysse Bergossian. His mind was like rubber.

  +Odysse. Tell me about the circus.+

  Bergossian blinked and laughed out loud, looking around like a child for the source of the voice. Lunt and Bazarof both looked at him in alarm.

  There was no tricking Bergossian’s mind into the truth the way I had done with Bazarof. There was no guilt or secrecy to trigger, no hidden truths to tease out. His thoughts were a miasma of unfocused light and colour.

  I probed a little deeper. I felt Kys start as she sensed the tingle of increasing psyk in the room. A little pattern of frost flowers bloomed along the window.

  I went deeper still. Uncomfortable, Kys walked out into the hall. Blunt as they were, Kara, Mathuin and Nayl could feel it too now, their wraithbone markers glowing slightly. They stood back warily. Bazarof and Lunt trembled and tried to distance themselves from Bergossian. He was sitting in the middle of the floor, chuckling to himself. They pulled away towards the kitchen doorway. Behind me, feeling none of it, Frauka lit another lho-stick and started to hum a tune.

  +Odysse.+

  Another laugh, but it was followed by a slight wobble of the lower lip. I extended into his surface consciousness, surprised by the manifold waves of bliss
and contentment I found there. His mind was a warm soup, a thick, reassuring, fluid space.

  +The circus, Odysse. Tell me about that.+

  ‘The circus, the circus, the circus!’ he giggled. This made everyone jump. It was the first thing anyone had said since I had entered the room.

  +Yes, Odysse. The circus. That’s where you get the flects, isn’t it?+

  ‘Yes, yes. On reflection, yes!’ he gurgled and started to laugh hard at his own awful joke. He rolled over on the floor and pawed at the air.

  +Who sells them to you, Odysse?+

  Bergossian snorted. ‘Duboe!’ he cackled. ‘On reflection, Duboe at the cavea!’

  ‘For frig’s sake, Odysse!’ Bazarof shouted. ‘They’ll frigging kill you if you sell them out!’

  +Shut up, Bazarof.+

  ‘Duboe! Duboe and the game agents!’

  ‘Don’t, Odysse!’ Bazarof yelled again, moving forward. I had no time for that. I kicked out a little psi-slap that slammed Bazarof off his feet and back into the kitchen wall.

  Then I rolled forward until the giggling Bergossian was right in front of me.

  +That’s very helpful, Odysse. What else can you tell me?+

  He started to shake his head, as if he was tiring, like a man who has been on a wild circus ride which had been fun at the time but had left him feeling sick. Like a drunk who has drunk too much. I could feel the bitter tang of his nausea rising, the wild disorientation of a mind and body spinning out of control.

  May the Emperor forgive me, it was delicious. Any extremes of physical experience, even the most unpleasant, are so alien to me that I cherish them.

  But this was getting worse. It was as if the blissful, warm fluid of his thoughts was draining away. Shapes rose out of the liquid like submerged rocks exposed by the tide. The warm light in his head dimmed and a black dawn rose up around the rim of his mind.

  +Odysse.+

  The shapes were around me now, twisted, calcified, bone-brown, slick with the last of the warm fluid as it spattered and gurgled away. On the floor in front of me, Bergossian was starting to have some sort of seizure.