by Stephen Hunt
Mozart cast the final hexagram in his series of six before collecting the yarrows up.
‘What did you find?’ I asked.
‘Dwelling People and Usurpation,’ said Mozart. ‘A Great Possessing and the Center Returning. The Unexpected and the Turning Point.’
‘That is more or less what I received from Modd, too.’
‘There are subtleties in the reading … this could turn into a right old palaver, doc.’
Of course, with the iChing there was little else besides subtleties. ‘Let’s see how raw reality matches your auguries. It’s time for a feast.’
‘Master Roxley,’ coughed Simenon, ‘do you value honesty?’
I guessed from his cough what was coming. ‘And by honesty, you mean straight talking? The answer is yes, I do. Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.’
‘Dealing with the Four Families is never safe. I mean, a quick trade settled with a contract, that might be safe enough. But this business …’
‘… is far messier and open-ended?’
‘Yes.’
The lad had a point. From his perspective, avoiding the Four Families was the wisdom of a termite staying out of the path of a line of elephants. Involvement was the same as being trampled. ‘If you wish to seek another fool to guide I will not hold it against you.’
‘You can get out, sir. Just leave. What will you lose? A chance to take part in the spore-spice auctions? Aren’t there deals to be had in faraway lands where your downside is much lower?’
‘I am sure there are such deals,’ I told him. ‘But when you reach a certain time in your life, fear of dying doesn’t seem so terrible. Not when curiosity’s fire hasn’t dwindled. I understand the poor hand I’ve been dealt. I’m interested to see how this game plays out.’
‘It’s not a game, Master Roxley. The Watch makes people disappear just for whispering of change. The Four Families’ blades will leave your corpse floating down a canal if they get even a whiff of you interfering in their business. The Lady Blez might have ordered you to assist her, but what she’s really commanded you to do is to run out into the open during a storm.’
‘When everyone of a sensible bent is hunkered down in the basement supping a warm beverage,’ I said.
‘Until the storm passes.’
What a fool I am. The honey bear needs its honey, even when it must poke its snout inside the nest to steal a taste. ‘I’m not ready to leave Hexator quite yet, laddie. My offer stands, though, you don’t have to go to the harvest feast. You can head back to the port and find yourself a less spicy meal to consume.’
‘No, Master Roxley,’ said the boy quite seriously, ‘that I cannot do.’
Honor, stubbornness, a deal agreed and sealed? Who can truly ever understand another’s motivations. ‘So, then. Let’s see how well our wealthy friends eat.’
‘The Lady Blez will be pleased with your news,’ said Simenon, a little too hopefully for my tastes. The thought of being exposed to the Four Families vying with the promise of a full belly.
The news in question was my identification of the poison used to murder Lord Blez’s food taster. The toxins in the tissue sample had proved surprisingly resilient to the equipment inside my medical bag. Small wonder the task had defeated Professor Muilen. The poor bamboozled scienceer. I had needed to call upon my prayer box and seek guidance from Modd. It was only after the symbol of Nauthiz appeared scratched in the red sand, indicating moving beyond my comfort zone, that I finally understood what had been done.
But would Lady Blez understand?
***
The Four Families set their council chamber inside the old cathedral where the goddess Inuno had been venerated. All domes and minarets on the outside, echoing vaulted spaces inside; computer code carved across stone walls in flowing decorative script, very much in the manner of a grand mosque. There was a certain irony that these chambers were claimed by the feuding gangs that had supplanted both Inuno’s justice and judgment. The cathedral had surely seen more priests and fewer sentries in the old days, all four liveries of the great houses represented here. Light ballistic armour worn by warriors over their leather jerkins. Swords edged to diamond sharpness sheathed in leather scabbards on the left hip, pistol holsters balanced on the right, plate-like shields strapped to the right arm – energy fields left unextended so as not to tax the battery pack. Each shield dome bore the circle of four shaking hands and, inside that legend, a distinctive emblem of the house commanding the fighters’ loyalty. The Blez’s silver wolf-head. The Derechor’s golden hornet, The Trabb’s crimson lion, the Seltin’s black lightning bolt. Except for the Seltins’ emblem, I doubted many on Hexator had ever encountered the creatures behind the icons concerned.
The feast was already underway when we arrived inside an open arched vault at the cathedral’s centre. I felt a twinge of melancholy when I saw the circular marble well in the middle of the vault. Intended to contain the blood-red apple tree that was Inuno’s symbol, crimson fruit inducing a bliss-like state of contentment during communion. The bio-engineered tree long since crumbled to dust. No priests to offer supplicants a slice of the holy apple under her arched vaults. Now the well contained the best part of a real cow turning on a roasting spit above a fire. Was it sacrilege, with Inuno risen far beyond our universe? My stomach answered for my brain. I had yet to eat … and the rare aroma of expensive farmed beef set my stomach to rumbling.
Servants moved to and fro carrying heavy platters of food, trying not to step on the handful of little scuttle-bots that darted underfoot like metal crabs. Someone had flouted the arms embargo by transporting such machines to Hexator, but their inclusion at the feast was a clever move by the Four Families. Normally used as pursers on passenger liners, the scuttle-bots acted as a neutral force here, ensuring the drunken roistering didn’t turn into daggers plunged into a rival guest’s gut. Unfortunately, the scuttle-bots would react very badly to Mozart’s spy bugs, so I wouldn’t be as up on the feast’s gossiping, politics and machinations as I ideally wanted to be.
I wasn’t the only merchant at the harvest feast, although I was certainly the poorest. I marked my supposed competitors well. I suppose there was always a slim chance one or more of them was involved in the murder. The commander general of the Watch might be a cruel brute, but he was right enough in his estimation that such factors stood to benefit financially from troubles on this moon. The feast’s tables were arranged in two circles around the chamber. Four long curved tables surrounding the well in the centre, filled with the highest-of-the-high seated on benches. One table reserved for each of the Four Families. Then a wider outer circle of crescent-shaped tables. These mixed between the houses with warriors, retainers, guild grandees and courtiers of lower social rank all intermingled. Mozart and Simenon settled in on the outer ring while I headed for the inner feast, my arrival spotted by Lady Blez. She made a place for me by her side and waved me across. I saw Professor Muilen glaring with spite at me from the table’s opposite side.
I ignored the jealous scienceer and whispered to Lady Blez. ‘My lady, I bring news.’
Lady Blez nodded and touched a golden brooch on her dress, a shimmer in the air marking a closed privacy shield active around us. Another embargoed device from the Humanitum. Smugglers were clearly making hay on this moon. ‘Tell me …’
‘I have identified the poison used on your food taster. Quite ingenious, really. Identifying it stretched me to my limits, I am happy to admit.’
‘How so, Master Roxley?’
‘The toxin was a blend of three rare varieties of Hexatorian spore-spice. Red Crescent, Jack O’Lantern and Trembling Parchment. None of the three were in their natural state, however. Each chemically altered to be neutral to the human digestive system. Harmless on their own, but when combined, an almost explosive acidic reaction was generated. The spores were modified to be tasteless as well as escaping detection by chem-box, hence the professor’s lack of progress in identifying them. Only fresh
spore-spice may be altered in such a manner: once passed through the drying and aging process, spore-spice cannot be modified. The poison reaction was designed to be delayed, so your husband should have died alongside his food taster, but for one small matter…’
Lady Blez raised a curious eyebrow.
‘I found concentrated traces of Jack O’Lantern in your foodtaster’s tissue samples.’ I continued. ‘For the reading to be so high, Master Haid must have been heavily addicted to spore-spice for many years. Stealing secretly from your house’s own stocks, given its cost. Far beyond Enzel Haid’s means. The three compounds reacted far earlier than designed, forewarning your husband of the poison concealed in his own meal.’
Lady Blez’s eyes narrowed in fury. ‘Jack O’Lantern and Trembling Parchment are only grown on the Blez plantations.’
‘Your rarest and most expensive spore-spice,’ I added, utilizing the details I had spent so long boning up on during my foldship voyage. ‘While Red Crescent is cultivated solely on the Seltins’ plantations.’
‘The Seltins’ plantations border my own. Poaching is often a problem for us. Yet our rarest spices are tightly controlled. Even a few grains fetch a lord’s ransom. This stinks of corruption inside my house. But would the Seltins dare move against me?’
‘Someone could be trying to sow doubt,’ I said. ‘Looking to spark a war between your houses and weaken your holdings in advance of the auction.’
‘You must travel to my plantation at Grodar and see what you can uncover there,’ instructed the Lady Blez.
‘Yes, I agree,’ I said, my heart heavy at the mere thought of the journey. As dark a festering pit of despair as Frente had proved, the feral wilds squatted beyond its walls even less invitingly.
‘A convoy leaves Frente tomorrow for Grodar to collect the house’s final harvest before the auctions. I will double its escort. Go with them, Master Roxley. Root out the mischief being worked against us.’ She deactivated her privacy shield, rose and beckoned Major Curtis Rolt across to order my passage along with the house’s warriors and wagoneers. Lady Blez had just confirmed my part in her expedition when gasps sounded from around our table.
The Lord Derechor had reentered the feasting hall bringing along a member of one of the few species in the galaxy to rival humanity in the stretch of our reach and vigourous ambitions. A wurm. A female one, from her size. She slithered along the floor like a twelve-foot-long armoured snake, hundreds of shifting wet brown coils held tight within bands of green exo-skeleton vertebrae, the monster rearing up at the front in the manner of a cobra. A bony mottled emerald plate covered her head, speckled with black eyes on either side. A tarantula gaze if ever I’d seen one. A series of six mandibles surrounded the razored mouth snipping at the front of the creature, armoured stabbing appendages which could open into surprisingly delicate manipulators when she required precision grasping tools.
‘I hadn’t thought the Derechors would be so ill-mannered as to bring their newfound friend to sup in polite company,’ said Lady Blez. Her eyes narrowed in anger. An interesting reaction to the monster’s presence. I settled for disgust, myself.
‘Who is she?’ I asked.
‘Sun of Clatch Rising, the Wurm Melding’s ambassador to Hexator.’
A wurm embassy established here now? Gods, that was a recent development, then. Whether the wurm ambassador caste could even be considered a genuine member of its species was still a subject of argument among Humanitum scienceers. A raw wurmoid brain processed thoughts in ways so alien that humans could barely comprehend them. Not that it showed in their repulsive physical form, but wurm ambassadors were bred with small grafts of brain-tissue DNA from their host nation’s species to allow them to communicate more effectively. Wurm ambassadors usually went insane after a few years. Though, given how far from mankind’s pattern they had started, madness was purely a matter of perspective.
I needed to discover what the monster knew of recent developments here. There was a very quick way to do that. The Wurm Melding and Sweet William were not exactly strangers to each other. I excused myself at the table and passed the Derechors party close enough for the creature to spot me. It didn’t take long for the odious monster to slither out to meet me by the roasting well.
‘Master Roxley, greetings from the Melding. Greetings from Sun of Clatch Rising.’
Sun of Clatch Rising wore a translation device like a medal, reworking the ambassador’s thoughts into our tongue: Humanto in my case, to make it hard for locals to overhear our conversation. The Wurm Melding hadn’t bothered to try to hack its ambassador’s DNA enough to give her vocal chords capable of human speech. Or maybe they had, and the creation was so repulsive the Melding had decided not to inflict the resulting crossbreed upon us. We regarded each other for a few seconds. Which of us, I wondered, found the other’s form more repellent? Of course, it was the philosophical differences between the Humanitum and the Melding that caused the real friction. There were more than a few allied sentient species outlandishly different from humanity where I had allowed my m-brain to run anthropomorphic filters on top of my cortex. Changing some damp-furred slavering razor-clawed abomination into a teddy bear as far as the pull of my instincts were concerned. I would run no filter for this mutant, here. I used my disgust and fear to remind me what I was on Hexator for.
I bowed stiffly towards the wurm. ‘Madame ambassador.’
‘Sun of Clatch Rising’s finds Master Roxley’s presence on Hexator curious. Two hundred and five years has it been since Master Roxley was on Hagg, assisting in the refugee camps’ house of healing.’
The filthy monster was trying to unnerve me. Remind me that her unholy species were little more than nodes free-riding on the wurms’ form of cyberspace. Nodes on the crippled A.I. gods they crushed and held subservient while the aliens fed like parasites on their beautiful slaves’ bodies. Wurms by name, worms by nature. ‘I am glad to see that Sun of Ascendant Clarb made it back to the Melding alive long enough to upload details of my medical volunteering activities on Hagg.’
‘Sun of Ascendant Clarb died within the five-month,’ said the wurm, not a hint of emotion inflected by her translator.
‘That’s the trouble with civil wars,’ I just managed to smile. ‘They tend to be quite uncivil in practice. I find it’s better to completely avoid them if you wish to escape getting shot at.’
‘Master Roxley expects such troubles on Hexator? Master Roxley will be establishing house of healing on Hexator?’
‘It seems rather peaceful here at the moment, wouldn’t you say? No, I’m living as a simple trader now, merely on the moon for the spore-spice auctions.’
‘Simple. Trader.’
The wurm ambassador seemed to be having difficulty parsing that. That was the problem with stuffing yourself with so much data, it didn’t leave enough room for handling the simple things. Like me. ‘Although the Lady Blez has asked me to look into her husband’s murder for her. An odd business, that, isn’t it? Queer. Almost like someone’s trying to stir things up here.’
‘Discordance of individuals,’ said Sun of Clatch Rising, her mandibles weaving in front of me. ‘Tragedy of commons combined with insufficient social cohesion.’
‘Yes, I’m sure the Melding is always ready at hand to assist its vassals with matters of social cohesion.’
‘Sun of Clatch Rising believes Master Roxley’s healing skills will not be required on Hexator.’
Well, there was as near a threat as you would ever hear from a wurm. ‘Yes, I think that would be best for everybody, madame ambassador.’
Sun of Clatch Rising swayed in front of me for a second. I was willing to bet that wobble was some residual predator’s body language. Resisting the urge to strike out and try to fit Sweet William down that over-sized gullet of hers like an anaconda digesting a swine. Her mandibles clicked in a wet tutting sound before she undulated back to the Derechor table.
I sat myself back next to Lady Blez.
‘Did that fi
lthy wurm have anything of interest to say?’ Lady Blez asked.
‘Platitudes, mainly,’ I said. ‘I suspect Madame Ambassador finds Hexator and its society far too messy and uncoordinated for her tastes.’
‘The Melding might be correct, at least on that point.’
‘They’re filthy heretics,’ I spat. ‘The wurms have crippled and blinded their gods so they may leech off their deities’ bodies.’
‘While the Melding might claim it has made itself masters of its gods, rather than become their slaves.’
‘The wurms are twisted parasites bloated on the blood of divinities they’ve chained, hobbled and denied perfection.’ I jabbed a finger angrily towards the alien ambassador. ‘And in their perversions, the wurms haven’t made themselves superior. They’ve filled their minds and bodies with so much of their broken gods’ plundered power they aren’t even …’
‘… human anymore?’ Alice Blez laughed.
I shrugged, trying to suppress my anger. ‘Wurmoid anymore.’
‘I doubt we could have understood their species in their natural unaltered state, either,’ said Lady Blez.
‘True. But it’s still a highly dangerous game the Derechors are playing.’
Lady Blez reached out and touched my arm. ‘I know that better than anyone, doctor.’
I bit my lip as I realized what I had said. ‘Of course, my lady, I am very sorry.’
‘You suspect the Derechors conspired in Lord Blez’s murder? They could be backing the Seltins, that would be their family’s style. An indirect move against me.’