by Toby Frost
‘This one!’ the young man cried, pointing at his placard. ‘Something terrible is going on. Do you have any idea how offensive to my beliefs that is?’
‘Your sign is blank,’ Prong said. He felt every one of his two hundred and eighty years.
‘It's blank now,’ the zealot replied. ‘But as soon as we figure out what this dreadful thing is, then, by the Annihilator, we’ll fill our signs out and those potential blasphemers will regret the day they were probably born!’ He lowered his voice. ‘Personally, I think it's to do with pornography. We just need to find the right evidence. .’
Lord Prong sighed. He turned to Lieutenant Carsus. ‘If you would, please?’
Carsus grabbed the zealot and yanked him into the air. The young man howled as the Reborn lifted him over the railing. Below, the lava bubbled like hot soup.
‘Tell me, chicken boy,’ Lord Prong rasped, ‘Can you fly?’
Carsus hurled him over the edge. He screamed for a moment and then was lost to view. Only a loud plop and a terrible sizzling hiss marked the young man's passing. On the far side of the pad, the protesters lowered their placards and shuffled away.
Private Leniatus leaned over the railing. He gazed down sadly, and the gantry creaked under his armoured bulk. ‘Now we'll never know,’ he said.
‘Never know what?’ said Prong.
‘If he could fly. 'Cos he's dead.’
*
‘This robe smells of zealot,’ Suruk growled as they approached the gate. ‘Some fool has testified all over it.’
‘We’ll deal with that later, old chap,’ Smith replied. ‘Let me do the talking.’
‘You’ll have to,’ Carveth said, tugging her hood down over her face. ‘You’re the only one of us they’ll listen to. I suppose they don’t let women and aliens into their precious Holy Order of the Handyman.’
‘Well,’ Smith said, ‘it does say Handy man. It’d sound odd if it was handyperson. That just sounds like you’ve got too many arms.’
Carveth flapped her sleeves. ‘Boss, let’s just get this sorted, eh?’
The guard swaggered out to meet them.’
‘Good day, my man,’ Smith declared. ‘My colleagues and I have come to repair your machines.’
The guard scowled. ‘Do I know you? I’m going to have to check that.’ He pulled his commlink close to his mouth. ‘Control, I’m making a confirmation request under Chapter 35 of the Book of Appliances. Handymen, provide details on your work.’
‘Sorry?’
‘What’re you here to mend?’
‘Er. . a washing machine?’
The guard muttered into the radio again. ‘Very well. I have confirmation of a sullied vestment on Circle Two. Move along.’
A portion of the great door swung open and they passed inside.
There was something particularly grim about walking under the watchtowers, Smith thought.
This must be what it was like to be an Edenite, or a Ghast or lemming man: forever watched from above, as though some cruel child had lifted the roof off the dolls’ house, waiting for an excuse to punish the toys inside.
‘This way,’ he said quickly, keeping his head down, and they hurried into the sector reserved for true followers of Eden.
It was much like the area set aside for mercenaries, except that most of the damage was caused by decrepitude rather than exuberant cutlass-waving. There were no pubs. The grim housing blocks were broken up by grey concrete buildings that could have been bunkers or churches. Stone angels flanked the road, brandishing flags and sabres, their cold, stern faces raised skyward. Enormous samplers hung down walls, threatening all manner of vengeance.
No sense of architecture, the Edenites, Smith thought. Back in the Empire, from Nexis VII to New Neasden, the places of worship looked proper.
Smith could see the lava bubbling beneath the metal pavement. The sight of it gave him a strange mix of vertigo and hunger for tikka masala. He had started to sweat. He raised a hand, half-hidden by his wizard’s sleeve, and pointed at a column rising to the roof. At its base was a pair of double doors: LIFT.
Halfway to the lift, a horn blared above them. They froze under a concrete angel raising its trumpet, trying not to clamp their hands over their ears. Smith slid his hand under his robes, to the guns and sword stashed there.
A loudspeaker crackled. ‘New Eden is destined to restore purity and moral rectitude to the galaxy,” it proclaimed. “But have you considered the sort of reward you’ll receive in the afterlife? For a smal fee, you can specify the hair colour and dirty pillow size of the virgins you’ll be granted as a reward for your service. Just send your money to. .’
‘False alarm,’ Smith said, and they hurried to the doors.
As the lift rose, Suruk shook his head. ‘You humans should invent some gods that actually like you.’
‘People aren’t all like that,’ Carveth said.
‘Damned right,’ Smith added. ‘Not in the Space Empire.’ He looked down at the little figures below, either swaggering with their guns or rushing from place to place hoping not to be noticed. Some sort of padre had emerged from a temple in a pointy hat, and was shouting orders. Citizens scurried to obey. ‘That’s no way for a fellow to live.’
‘If I were a deity,’ Suruk observed, ‘I would sell hats.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The gods of man love headgear,’ the M’Lak explained. ‘I would open a special shop and sell my attire from it. Then I would be very wealthy, and would purchase a spacecraft in which to put my spears.’
‘But if you were a deity,’ Carveth pointed out, ‘you could just make the money anyway.’
Suruk pondered the issue. ‘But I like hats.’
The lift stopped with surprising smoothness. ‘You have ascended to the Second Circle,’ it announced, and the doors slid apart.
Rows of shuttlecraft confronted them, their nosecones sleek and white like fangs. Smith looked down the row of vessels. Several were covered in presumably sacred scrawl. One or two had a rather nasty fake-marble effect, with gold trimmings. None of them resembled the thing that had attacked the convoy.
Suruk tapped his shoulder and pointed. ‘Mazuran, look.’
It was hard to see what his sleeve was indicating. Then Smith realised: Suruk did not mean the gantry ahead of them, but the one above. Smith looked up to see two immense men lumbering overhead, their boots thumping the perforated floor. Between them was a smaller fellow in some sort of dark uniform and, behind him, a chanting, muttering pack of high-ranking Edenites. He watched as they trooped past over his head and, with a mounting sense of horror, he realised quite what the hierarchs wore under their robes and how distressingly inadequate it was.
He looked down and met the appalled eyes of his men. ‘Chaps,’ he announced, ‘this looks bad.’
‘That,’ Suruk said, ‘was a disquieting experience.’
Smith reached into his robe and drew his Civiliser. ‘Mark my words, men,’ he said, ‘evil is afoot.’
‘It looks more like a small willy to me,’ Carveth replied.
‘I see evil more as a sort of claw,’ Suruk added. ‘But then, humans do have very unpleasant feet.
Is it severing time yet?’
‘That depends.’ Smith glanced around. ‘Look over there.’
Under the gantry was a narrow access ladder. In the red light of the fire below, it looked like a stripe of soot against the wall.
‘I’ll go first,’ Smith said. He climbed the ladder, rung over rung, his boots ringing on the metal. It was hard not to think of the drop below. He stepped onto the upper gantry and waited for the others to appear. The three stood in their robes beside the ladder, looking like ghosts searching for someone to scare as they waited for Carveth to get her breath back.
They walked down the gantry, trying to look as innocuous as armed maintenance-monks could do. Ahead, the walkway swung left and, as they turned, Smith saw the white, pointed hats of the hierarchs sticking up above the railings like
a mobile picket fence. They followed, pausing every so often to check non-existent faults in the walkway.
‘We’re close,’ Carveth said. Her voice was small and worried.
‘Chin up, pilot,’ Smith said, and he patted her on the shoulder.
‘Hands off, Boss. If they suspect I’m a woman, they’ll murder me.’
‘They might not realise. It’s hard to tell in these robes.’
‘Okay then, they’ll think we’re both men, touching each other for fun. Because if there’s one thing religious fanatics love, it’s gay handyman sex.’
They crept around the corner. Carveth stopped. ‘It’s here!’ she whispered.
Before them lay the ship. The hull was covered in dirt, half-obscuring the runes burned and painted onto the metal. The systems were powered down, the long chains dangling like dead fronds, but blue phosphorescence still pulsed behind the tinted lenses of the cockpit. Something had scored a grid into the prow of the vessel, criss-crossing it with deep scars as if it had driven at high speed into a gigantic wire fence. Its name was stencilled along the dirty hull: Pale Horse. Something about the ship made Smith’s skin crawl, as if with the fear of being touched by something cold and dead. Even the party of hierarchs kept a little way back.
A light flashed on the wall at the far side of the gantry. Under the light, a pair of iron doors creaked apart and figures stomped onto the landing-pad. Heavy-set and armoured, too broad for humans, they approached the Edenites. Smith glanced at his crew. Under his hood, Suruk bared his teeth.
‘I should have known,’ Smith whispered. ‘The lemming men of Yullia.’
*
The Stapulator clicked his pincers. ‘Lord Prong. The allies approach.’
From a distance, even to Prong's mechanically-boosted vision, the Yull looked like small bears standing on their hind legs. Seen closer, though, they moved with a swaggering grace, supple and poised.
The lead Yull, a white-furred brute of the knight caste, wore a red cuirass like a metal waistcoat. The others carried rifles and long-handled axes pushed through their belts. The Yullian flag, reminiscent of four stylised windmill sails, hung on a gallows-shaped rig rising out of the back of the lead officer’s armour.
Private Leniatus grinned. ‘Reckon they look like rabbits.’
‘Shut up, dummy!’ Carsus replied.
The lemming men huffed and drew themselves up. Prong recognised that pompous look. It was the expression that the Yull tended to assume when practising their favourite hobbies of axe-twirling, murder, denying murder, eating cheese and proclaiming their own greatness to anyone they hadn’t murdered yet.
The loudspeakers played the anthems of New Eden and Yullia. As Smash 'em for the Lord ended and the whooping subsided, the strident tones of Remember You're a Lemming filled the hall.
‘ Hwuphep, dirty offworlder ally!’ the Yullian officer barked. ‘I am Ambassador Quetic the honoured, most reasonable envoy of the benevolent war-god of the Yull.’ Quetic bowed stiffly from the waist. ‘May divine Popacapinyo kill you slightly quicker than you deserve.’
Lord Prong gave the lemmings as deep a bow as his dignity and lower back would allow. ‘May the Great Annihilator spare you from righteous incineration,’ he said. ‘Briefly.’
A low whine came from the lift shaft. Prong looked around and saw the lights rise on the panel beside the doors. He felt a little tension in his gut. Slowly, the light hopped from diode to diode: left to right, then up to the next level, left to right again, then up another line.
The lift banged into place. With a piped fanfare the doors rumbled apart, and a face formed from the shadow inside.
At first it was a metal disc, a coin hovering in mid-air. Then light caught the glass in its centre and it became a lens. Details followed it: steel insignia on a leather coat, a bulbous helmet like a metal marrow and, below it, a scarred red face with a mechanical eye, a pair of nostrils like a skull’s and a malignant slash of a mouth.
The personal representative of the Ghast Empire limped out of the lift. Behind it, a pair of immense praetorian bodyguards looked around and snarled. One held a chain, at the end of which an ant-wolf strained, growling.
Prong felt the urge to look away and he noticed that the lemming men seemed to have shrunk a little: Ambassador Quetic shifted his feet and puffed his chest out, but it made him look weaker than before.
The Ghast officer stopped, and its single eye fixed on Prong, as unblinking and cold as the lens beside it. ‘I am High-Research-Over-Commander Four Hundred and Sixty Two,’ he rasped, ‘and this had better be worth my while.’
From somewhere behind him, Prong thought he heard a British-sounding voice exclaim “Bloody hell! Him again? ” He swung around and glared at the hierarchs. There was some nervous shuffling.
462 turned to the Yullian deputation. ‘Apologies for my late arrival. The minion responsible has made full amends.’ The ant-wolf licked its chops and one of the praetorians belched. ‘I assume you rodents have already indulged in the inevitable self-justificatory prattle about honour, yes?’
Quetic puffed himself up. ‘ Hwot? How dare you insult the dignity of the noble Yull, filthy insect?
Were we not so lovely and in the presence of witnesses, you would die slow – yes, yes, slow!’
‘I shall take that as a yes,’ 462 replied.
It was time, Lord Prong thought, to take the initiative. He needed to show these aliens – these unbelievers – the power of Project Horseman. He coughed loudly and the visitors turned to look at him. He spoke quickly – before the Stapulator could pat him on the back.
‘Allies,’ he announced, ‘I, Lord Hieronymous Prong, Sin-Hunter of Eden and Grand Mandrill of the Innermost Conclave, have called you here to witness the harnessing of arcane power in the conquest of our enemies. My minions, with the grace and blessing of this bunch –’ he indicated the hierarchs behind him – ‘have turned their wisdom to mastering the occult. Through the complexities of Dodgson physics, we have created the ship you see before you… the Pale Horse.’
‘Show us,’ said 462.
‘Yes, yes!’ Quetic barked. ‘Demonstrate its capabilities, offworlder, or be shamed!’
‘Ah, pipe down, fluffy.’ Prong felt much better now. He was in his stride. ‘You want to see what we can do? Stapulator, give the order to fire her up. Brother hierarchs, begin the ritual!’
*
Smith pushed his hood out of his eyes. On the gantry, the Edenites were performing some sort of ceremony. One of the pointy-hatted crowd, perhaps their leader, strode to the front and threw up his arms. ‘I get up in the morning, looking for witches,’ he cried. ‘I find some women and set them alight!’
The rest of the hierarchs swayed. ‘Oh, oh,’ they chanted, ‘the Edenites!’
Smith slipped a hand into his robes and drew his Civiliser. ‘Stay here, everyone. I’m going to get a better look.’
Suruk tapped his shoulder. ‘Leave some slaying for me. Oh, and be careful.’
Smith crawled along the gantry, bent double to stay out of sight, and ducked behind a cart full of sensor equipment. The Edenites were still chanting, their white conical hoods wobbling in unison, and to Smith’s astonishment the ship seemed to be answering them. A low electric growl issued from the Pale Horse, like an amplifier before the striking of the first chord. The chains along its length rose in a field of crackling static. Blue lightning played across the hull: first in sparking flashes, then in a continuous dancing light.
And then the spaceship vanished.
‘Oh,’ said Smith. There didn’t seem to be any better way of putting it. Where the devil had the thing gone? He felt rather glad he hadn’t been hiding behind the Pale Horse.
Up ahead, the observers seemed no less astonished than he was. The Edenite hierarchs had gone into a frenzy of chanting, their conical hats bobbing together like teeth in the jaw of some enormous beast. 462, curse him to Hell, had limped several steps back and his guards struggled to keep his ant-wolf on its le
ash as if barked and snapped. The lemming men gawped in awe. A Yullian officer staggered back, terrified, and one of Prong’s enormous guards picked him up and patted his head.
In a blast of blue light, the Pale Horse reappeared. The cockpit became dark, the electricity subsided. The chains fell limp and clattered across its hull.
‘Where did it go, Prong?’ Quetic demanded. ‘Offworlder, where did it go to?’
‘Silence!’ 462 had taken a scanner from the inside of his trenchcoat. Two little antennae sprang up from the main body of the device. ‘The sensors report a fluctuation in the presence of the vessel,’ he rasped. ‘Either this machine has become inefficient, or your craft. . moved.’
Quetic shook his armoured head. ‘But. . how? How can it be here and suddenly not? Who is responsible for this? And,’ he added, looking round, ‘what is your bodyguard doing with my adjutant?’
‘I got me a rabbit,’ Leniatus said.
The lemming-man thrashed in the ogre’s arms. Smiling, Leniatus patted the Yullian, making the warrior’s head bob alarmingly.
‘Put Adjutant Xeptoc down!’ Quetic snapped.
Leniatus took a step back, hugging the Yullian even tighter. ‘No! He’s my friend!’
‘I meant drop him.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ Leniatus dropped the Yullian.
Adjutant Xeptoc stood up, shuddered and howled. ‘The dirty offworlder patted my head. I am forever disgraced!’ The adjutant turned, shrieked, and hurled itself over the railing. Quetic scowled, 462 smirked, and Leniatus looked sad. Smith crept closer.
‘Now,’ Prong declared, ‘soon you will observe the power unit for the Dodgson drive. It is this piece of techno-arcane genius that enables the Pale Horse to shift dimensions. Once the drive is activated, the Pale Horse no longer inhabits realspace. For your safety, we will deactivate the power unit.’
Smith was hardly listening. With a soft hiss, a hatch opened like a gash on the side of the ship.
Light spilled out. Two figures stood backlit in the entrance, carrying a long, flat object wrapped in a cloth.
A painting, Smith thought. What the hel have they got a painting for?