by Dan Abnett
We made a detour on the descent. I felt it prudent to secure Cherabael somewhere other than my residence, though I had previously stored it in the secret oubliette below the foundations. If there were any official consequences to the incident on Durer, my estate could be subject to all manner of unwelcome scrutiny.
I covertly owned a number of premises on Gudrun. They were not held in my name, so that they could be used as safehouses or private retreats. One was a semi-rained watchtower in the wilds, three hundred kilometres south of my home, a lonely, remote spot that I had found conducive to meditation over the years.
Using the shuttle's servitors, I placed the warded cargo pod containing the daemonhost in the tower's crypt, made the necessary rituals of holding, and activated the simple but efficient alarm perimeter I had installed in the tower when I first purchased it.
It would do for the while. Later, I would be very thankful I had made that decision.
My home was a dignified estate out on the Insume headland, twenty minutes' flight time from the venerable lagoon city of Dorsay. Called Spaeton after the feudal family that had built it, it was an H-plan villa constructed of grey ouslite stone with a green copper-tile roof. There were adjoining garages and stables, an aviary, a drone-hive, a famous landscaped garden and maze laid out mathematically by Utility Krauss, a water dock down on the private inlet and a perfect sulleq lawn. It was surrounded to the north and east by untenanted woods, fruit orchards and ample paddocks, and from the terrace it had clear views over the Bay of Bisheen.
Jarat, my housekeeper, welcomed us back. It was late evening and the residence was warm, clean and ready for occupation. Plump and dressed in her trademark grey gown-robe and white-veiled black cap, Jarat was very old by then. Alongside her were Jubal Kircher, my head of security, and Aldemar Psullus, my rabricator and librarian. Beside them, Eleena Koi of the Distaff and the astropath Jekud Vance. The rest of the house staff, thirty of them, maids, ostlers, gardeners, cooks, sommeliers, eltuaniers and laun-derers, were lined up in fresh-pressed white uniforms behind them, along with the five black-armoured officers of the security detail. I greeted each one personally. Jarat and Kircher had employed several newcomers since I had last been there, and I made a point of talking to them and learning their names: Litu, a perky junior chambermaid; Kronsky, a new member of the security detail; Altwald, a new head groundsman inheriting his job from his father, who had retired.
I wondered when Jarat would retire. Or Kircher, come to that. In the case of Jarat, probably never, I decided.
My first act was to open the stronghold oubliette in the basement. I shut down the shields and deactivated the locks, and then spent a long time obliterating all traces of what the oubliette had been used for. I used a flamer to scour the walls and burn away the runic inscriptions. The grisly remains of Cherubael's previous host form, now an empty husk, lay amid the slack chains, and I cremated that too. The host form had been a vat-grown organic vessel I had privately commissioned for use in the original summoning. At the time, it had been a hard enough decision just to use a synthetic body.
I thought of Verveuk and shivered. I burned everything.
Then I bathed, and stayed a long time in the hot water.
* * *
Two weeks I spent, recuperating at Spaeton. I had tried to rest, or at least recover, during the voyage home, but there is a tension in travel itself and my concerns about the daemonhost's rudimentary confinement had prevented me from relaxing.
Now, I could rest at last.
I took long walks around the headland's paths, or stood on the point watching the waves crash into the rocks at the fringe of the inlet. I sat reading in the gardens during the warm evenings. I helped junior staff members collect early windfalls into wicker drowsies in the orchards.
I went nowhere near the library, the maze or my office. Alizebeth was never far from my thoughts.
Aemos served as secretary during that period, a job that Bequin would previously have undertaken. Around breakfast time every morning, he would inform me of the number of communiques received overnight, and I would tell him to handle them. He responded to general letters, filed private ones for my later attention, and stalled anything official. He knew there were only a few kinds of communique that I would permit myself to be troubled with if they arrived: word of Bequin, a direct communication from the Ordos, or anything from Fis-chig.
On a bright morning early in my third week there, with dawn mist fuming off the lawns where the early sun caught it, I was sparring with Jubal Kircher in the pugnaseum.
It was the third morning we had done so. Realising how out of condition I felt, I had commenced a regime of light combat work to tone myself up. We were dressed in bodygloves with quilted shield-sleeves, and circled each other on the mat with scorae, basket-hiked practice weapons from Carthae.
Jubal was a weapons master but he was getting a little old, and on peak form I had no trouble besting him. Where he truly excelled me was in combat-lore and the techniques of military science, which he had studied all his life. He used those that morning, preying on my softness and slowness, overwhelming my superior strength and speed with patient expertise.
Three quarters of an hour, five rounds, five touches to him. His old lined face was glowing with perspiration, but he was five times the winner I was.
'Enough for today, sir?' he asked.
'You're going easy on me, Jubal.'
'Beating you five love straight is going easy?'
I hung my scorae over my belt and adjusted the straps of my sleeve-shield. 'If I was one of your security detail in training, I'd have five bruises now to go with my five losses.'
Kircher smiled and nodded. 'You would. But an ex-Guard bravo or a slumboy trying to make my grade needs the bruises to remind him that work here isn't some well-paid retirement. I don't believe you need to learn that sort of lesson.'
'None of us are too wise to learn.' We both looked and saw Medea entering the pugnaseum. She wandered around the edge of the mat, one moment in the shadows of the wall panels, the next in the glaring yellow oblongs cast by the skylights. She looked at me.
'Just repeating one of your many aphorisms.'
I could tell something was up with her. Kircher shifted uncomfortably.
'Let me spar with him,' she said. I nodded to Jubal, who saluted, Carthaen style, with his scora and left the circular room.
Medea took off her father's cerise jacket and hung it on a window knob.
'What'll it be?' I asked, taking a sip of water from a beaker on the decanter stand.
She walked over to the armoury terminal and keyed on the screen, jump-cutting rapidly through the graphic templates the monitor displayed. She was dressed in a tight, semi-armoured bodyglove and her feet were clad in training slippers. She had prepared for this, I realised.
'Blades and power-bucklers,' she announced, stopping the menu and keying the authority stud.
There was a distant rattle and whirr as automated systems in the armoury under the floor processed the selected weapons from their racks and elevated them up into the ready rack in the wall next to the terminal. Two buckler modules. Two swords, matching, each the length of an adult human femur, single-edged and slightly curved with a knuckle-bar around the grip. She tossed one to me and I caught it neatly.
I walked over to join her, placing my scorae in the rack that would return it to storage. Then I took my buckler. It strapped around the left forearm, supporting a round, machined emitter the size of a pocket watch. Engaged, it projected a disc of shield energy the size of a banquet plate above the back of my hand and forearm.
'Attention, you have selected weapons of lethal force. Attention, you have selected weapons of lethal force…' The terminal issued the notice in soft but urgent repeats.
I shut it off with a key-press.
'We can use full body shields, if you're worried,' she said.
'Why would I be worried? This is just sparring.'
We engaged our power-buckle
rs and faced each other across the centre of the mat, slightly side on, shield towards shield, our blades held low in our right hands.
'Signal cue/ I said.
'Three/ said the terminal speaker, 'two, one… commence/
Medea had been practising.
She swept round with her blade, and simultaneously parried my first approach with her buckler which squealed and sparked off mine as their fields met and repulsed.
I undercut defensively, gathering her blade in towards our shields so that for a moment all four weapons were locked in a protesting knot of spitting electrical energy.
We broke, and circled.
She came in again, leading with her sword. I fended it away with my buckler, then again, and then for a third time as we continued to go around.
She was canny. Sword and buckler work was as old as all the worlds, and the trick to staying alive was to use the shield more than the sword. The trick to winning, however, was to use the sword more than the shield.
I kept my buckler to the front but, by seeming to be unguarded with her own force shield lagging back as if casually forgotten, she was inviting me to overstep or make a badly judged lunge.
I left my blade well alone, keeping it where she could see it, and using my shield as Harlon Nayl had schooled me. The buckler was a weapon. Not only could it block, it could lock or even break a blade. I had heard of some duels where the small shield's solid-energy edge had actually delivered the killing stroke to an unprotected windpipe.
Medea rotated suddenly, driving my buckler aside with a swipe of her own, and lashed in with her blade, dancing across the mat. I was forced to parry with my sword, and then rally hard as she kept up the pressure.
Her blade sliced to within a handsbreath of my face and I cross-guarded desperately with both blade and buckler.
She drove her own shield in under my guard and her own locked sword and doubled me up with a punished strike to my midriff.
I fell onto the mat.
'Enough?' she asked.
I got up. 'We'll go again/
She came at me again, leading with the blade as I had expected. I ducked, swung round and feinted in time for her buckler to swing in to parry my blade.
The spitting electrical dish tore the sword from my hand, stinging my fingers.
Just as I had intended.
Her eyes were on my sword, distracted as it flew aside. With my now free right hand, I grabbed her buckler arm above the elbow and pulled it down so that her own power shield locked with her sword as she brought it up. She stumbled. I smashed her across the extended shoulder with the flat of my buckler and knocked her down.
I could have used the edge. I could have aimed for her exposed face. But we were sparring.
'Enough?' I asked.
She said nothing.
'Medea?'
She extinguished her buckler and pulled the strapping off.
"What's on your mind?'
Medea looked up at me. 'I never wanted revenge/ she said.
"You told me you did/
'I know. And I suppose I did. Part of me. Revenge… it doesn't feel…'
'Satisfying?'
'Like anything at all. Just empty. Stupid and empty.'
'Well… I could have told you that. In fact, I think I did.'
I helped her up. We didn't speak for a minute or two as we put the weapons back in the rack and returned them to the underfloor store bay.
Then we took beakers of water from the stand, opened the pugnaseum's side doors and went out onto the sunlit terrace.
It was going to be a hot day. The sky was cloudless and the light white. The shade of the woods seemed gloriously dark and inviting. The distant inlet was hazy with glare and the sea glinted like diamonds.
'Ever since I was old enough to understand what Fayde Thuring did,' she said, 'I've wanted something. I've always presumed it was revenge.'
'Revenge is a disguise for other, more valid emotional responses,' I said.
She looked at me sourly. 'Stop trying to be my father, Eisenhorn.'
She might has well have slapped me across the face. I had never thought of it that way.
'I only meant-' I began.
'You're a very wise man/ she said. Very clever. Learned. You give people the most profound advice.'
'I try.'
'But you don't feel.'
'Feel, Medea?'
'You know things but you don't feel them.'
Birds twittered in the edges of the woods and the orchards. Two of the junior groundstaff were pressing the lower lawns with a heavy roller. I wasn't quite sure I knew what she meant.
'I feel-'
'No. You don't feel the content of your advice, most of the time. They're just wisdoms, without heart/
'I'm sorry you think that way/
'It isn't a criticism. Well, not really. You are just so driven to do what is… right, that you forget to wonder why it's right. I mean-'
'What?'
'I don't know/
Try/
She sipped her water. You fight the way Kircher tells you to fight because he says that's the best way to do it/
'It usually is/
'Of course. He's an expert. That's why you defeated me. But why is it the best way to fight? Using those weapons, for example?'
'Because-'
'Because he told you? He's right. But why is he right? You never wonder about that sort of thing. You never wonder what mistakes or decisions were made to arrive at that right way/
'I'm still not sure I follow you…'
She smiled and shook her head. 'Of course you don't. That's my point. You've spent your whole life learning the best way to do everything. Learning the best way to fight. The best way to investigate. The best way to learn, even. Did you ever wonder why those are the best ways?'
I put my glass down on the low wall at the edge of the terrace. 'Life's too short/
'My father's life was too short/
I said nothing.
'My father died and I wanted something, and you told me that it wasn't revenge. And you were right. Revenge is trash. Worthless. But why? What was it I needed instead?'
I shook my head. 'I was only trying to spare you the effort. Revenge is a waste of time and-'
'No/ she said, looking at me directly. 'It's a displacement activity. It's something you can lock on to and do because you can't do the thing you really want to do/
I had grown impatient. 'And what might that be, Medea? Do you know?' I asked.
'I do now/ she said. Thuring killed my father. I needed something, and it wasn't payback. It was what he took from me. I needed to know my father. If I'd ever had that, then I'd never have given Thuring another thought/
She was right. It was so obvious, it chilled me. I wondered how many other, similar, obvious mistakes I had made in my life with my head so full of certain knowledge and my heart so numb.
I looked back at the pugnaseum, and saw Midas's cerise jacket handing where she had left it, draped against the inside of one of the windows like a trapped butterfly.
'I can give you what you want/1 said, 'in part, at least. If you really want it/
I summoned my astropath, Vance, and requested that he made the preparations. He suggested that evening might be a good time, when things were quieter, and so I asked Jarat to serve a light dinner early to leave the evening clear, and to leave out a cold supper in case we were hungry once we were done.
At seven, Medea and I went to the reading room above the house's main library. I gave Kircher specific instructions that we were not to be disturbed. Most of the household had retired early to private study or relaxation in any case.
Psullus, the rabricator, was in the library, repairing some bindings that were fraying at the spines.
'Give us a while/1 said to him.
He looked unnerved. Infirm with a progressive wasting disease, he virtually lived in the library. It was his private world and I felt cruel ousting him from it.
'What shou
ld I do?' he asked cautiously.
'Go sit in the study, watch the stars come out. Take a good book.'
He looked around and sniggered.
My library was at the heart of Spaeton House, and occupied two floors. The lower level was divided by alcoves of shelves and the upper gallery was supported by those alcoves, giving access to further shelving stacks lining the gallery walls. Soft glow-lamps hung from slender ceiling chains and cast a warm, golden light all around, and the panelled reading lecterns along the centre of the ground floor were fitted with individual reading lamps that generated little pockets of brighter blue luminescence.
The place was comfortably warm, its atmosphere carefully controlled to guard against any excess humidity that might damage the stored books. There was a smell of wood polish, chemical preservatives, and the ozone whiff of the stasis fields that protected the oldest and most fragile specimens.
Once Psullus had gone, taking with him a copy of Boydenstyre's Lives, I led Medea up the brass staircase to the upper gallery and along to the heavy door of the private reading room at the far end.
At the door, Medea paused and took a Glavian needle pistol from her pocket.
'I brought this/ she said. 'It was also my father's, one of the pair made for him.'
I knew that well enough. Medea still carried the matched pistols in combat.
'Leave it outside/ I told her. 'It's never a good idea to attempt connection through weapons. Even friendly heirlooms like that. The sting of death attaches itself to them and you'd find that unpleasant. The jacket will be fine.'
She nodded and left the gun on a bookshelf near the reading room door. We went inside and found Vance waiting for us. The small chamber was candle lit, with three chairs arranged around a cloth-covered table. The last rays of sunset were glimmering in through the stained glass skylight.