by Dan Abnett
"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 rain-spout. 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, Bazarof 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' 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.
From behind, I heard Nayl hiss. "Get out of him. Boss, get the hell out of him!"
I realised... that I could not. I was sliding forward into the black-light landscape of his blighted, burned-out mind. For a moment, it seemed almost comical to me: as if I was perched, not in my suspensor module, but in an old-style, non-powered wheelchair, which had been set on a slope and I was rolling, rolling down, gaining speed, rushing headlong, without hands or feet or brake to stop me.
+Odysse. Let me go.+
Bergossian was thrashing around, cracking his head, heels and elbows against the floor. There was a screaming, but I could no longer tell if it was his physical vocalisation or some keening threnody surging across the scorched earth of his thoughtscape.
I plunged on, unable to stop. Before me, a vast wasteland of jet cinders and blackened material, twisted, bulbous, shattered, crusted. The sky was domed and full of rushing, splintered cloud. A sun, as red as a blood-shot eye, rose and climbed across the flitting heavens and set again in the space of a single breath.
The howling increased. The black landscape cracked open into a stinking abyss. A pit of skulls. Billions of human skulls, every single one tainted by the echo of its own death-scream. There were buildings before me, towers and spires and cyclopean citadels, all ruined, all made of solidified night. A burned city. A murdered hive. Was this Petropolis? Was this the future?
I fell between the vast towers, and saw their countless windows, row upon row, tier upon tier, deadlights like eye sockets, giving back no reflection, stained by unimaginable ages spent in consuming darkness.
Then I was stationary. The howling had stopped. I was alone in the silence, the ruins rising around me, the air heavy with ash and decay. There was broken glass underfoot and-
Underfoot.
Underfoot.
I started to shake. I was standing. I was whole. Feet, legs, torso, arms, fingers...
I looked down, and saw with eyes instead of photoreceptors. The crazed black soil under my naked feet was covered in a myriad shards of broken glass. Imperfectly, like a deranged mosaic, they reflected back my perfection.
I saw my face. The face I had on
ce had. Gideon Ravenor, young, strong, determined. How I had missed that face...
Something was coming. I could hear it behind me. Something heavy, something fast, skittering and crunching the glass underfoot. Snorting. Growling. Spitting.
I wanted to turn. My remade body refused to move. In the broken reflection at my feet, I saw the hulking, hairy shadow of some great thing loom up behind my shoulder. Teeth flashed.
In the last second, the numberless glass fragments showed my reflection change and become true again. My true self. A knotted, bulging sack of scar-tissue and old burn-smears, the stumps of limbs, the ragged useless lump of a head, healed up and pink-smooth like a badly-sewn bag.
And entirely helpless in the grip of Chaos.
FIVE
You could hear the circus from twenty streets away and see it from ten. The horns, the sirens, the deafening come-ons from tannoys, the dancing light beams and the popping flares. It lit the city night of Formal G like a bowl of fire.
The approach streets and ramps were packed: jostling multitudes, laughing and drinking, and the peddlers, tricksters, hawkers and smile-girls who fed off them. It was a game night.
The circus drome was a colossal domed amphitheatre, its tiered and arcuated outer walls towering ninety metres high. But the great ouslite substance of it was just a shadow in the smoky night, lost behind the flash and dazzle of the raging lightshow. Red stablights on the tops of the walls crisscrossed the exuberant crowd. Screamer rockets banged up from the upper arches and fizzled into showers of green and white sparks. Twenty metres above the street on the main facade hung a massive wiron sign that flashed out the name CARNIVORA in letters three times the height of a man. The orange light tubes blinked out the word whole, then pulsed it in syllables - CAR-NI-VOR-A - before blazing out the whole again. Caged fires and glowglobes lit up the stadium's exterior columns, and blue-white electric discharge danced up and down cathode filaments over the horseshoe arches of the public turnstiles.