Empty Between the Stars (The Songs of Old Sol Book 1)

by Stephen Hunt

  I wanted to suspect their filthy house. How could I not when I had lost my son in the Great Contact War? Surgeon on a neutral hospital ship ambushed in orbit above Upsilon Andromedae. Death by nuclear fire, a hull burster launched without warning by the wurm. Boiled into gases and a mess of slagged metal. No mercy. No merge for my precious Adam. My little boy. I needed the Derechors and their corrupt alien allies to be the guilty party here. I tried to keep anger from choking my words as well as tainting my mind. ‘The Derechors are undoubtedly guilty of courting allies willing to flout Hexator’s arms embargo. But as for involvement with your husband’s death, we shall see.’

  ‘What a savage carnival we must seem to you here,’ said Lady Blez. ‘I will introduce you around the other families. Mark them well. All the dogs would happily slit my throat in front of everyone if they thought they could escape unpunished. Let us start with the Derechors.’

  It took the best part of two hours for introductions to be made. By the end, it wasn’t only Professor Muilen eying me spitefully. Many of my competitors were jealously wondering who this well-favoured newcomer was, that he should be taken in turn to be presented before each of the great ruling houses. Of course, I was introduced as a renowned trader who would play a magnificent part in the forthcoming auctions, not an ex-magistrate for Arius. Although I was certain the other families would soon be familiar with my passport’s history if they weren’t already. They operated the port together. Clinging onto the last vestiges of civilization to permit their planetary narcotics racket to limp along for a few centuries more.

  The Derechors were led by a handsome pair of twins, Zane and Sarlee Derechor. The Trabbs bent their knee before a sixteen-year-old stripling, Lady Martina Trabb, although the real power behind the throne was her fearsome aunt, Nie. The Seltins, however, were led by the most unlikely head of house, Falt Seltin, a quiet man of late middle-age. He put me in mind of an archivist I was fine friends with back home inside the Humanitum. Serene and learned. A librarian sitting aloof among a band of roistering steely cutthroats. I managed to catch a moment alone to talk with the unlikely fellow. His manner had piqued my curiosity. And it was entirely possible that this quiet bishop had arranged for a king to be removed from the chessboard.

  Lord Falt Seltin fixed me with his languid green eyes. ‘I know why you are here, Master Roxley.’

  ‘Of course, Lord Seltin, for auction season.’

  ‘You have been pressed into service for the Blez. Don’t deny it.’

  ‘Is it so obvious?’

  ‘Even to a blade as dull as Commander General Laur. Although I didn’t need the word he sent me to mark your true colours. Don’t worry, Master Roxley. If Lady Blez hadn’t pressed you to help her house, I most certainly would have.’

  ‘You have need of a magistrate’s services?’ I asked.

  ‘The same need as the Lady Blez. The very same task, in fact.’

  ‘You wish me to investigate the murder of Lord Blez?’ I couldn’t keep the shock from my voice.

  ‘Major Rolt and his siege-engine of a ruster managed to beat the warriors I sent to escort you to my palace by a few minutes,’ said the Lord Seltin.

  I rubbed my chin thoughtfully. That put a different complexion on things. ‘You and Uance Blez were friends?’

  ‘Yes, more than allies of convenience among the Four. I’m old enough to remember the last serious outbreak of fighting between the families.’ He pointed towards Lady Blez. ‘Alice was the cause.’

  ‘Lady Blez started a war?’

  ‘Not intentionally. Not in those days. Alice was born to a minor house, the Maglades. A fine bloodline once of the Four, but their house fell far from greatness centuries ago. Before Alice’s first flush of beauty caught Uance Blez’s eye, the girl aspired to little more than helping the orphan mothers of the foundling house near the central market. Blez was promised to marry the Trabbs’ oldest daughter, Gale, but Uance threw that alliance away to take the Maglade girl. The result … years of spilled blood and civil war before a new balance was struck.’

  ‘Lord Blez a romantic fool, who would have thought it?’

  ‘A wilful fool who placed his base desires before his house’s welfare, because he was all too used to getting his own way,’ answered the Lord Seltin. ‘I know you view us as thieves scrabbling in the dirt; but even a criminal must honor the protection and holding of his own. Uance Blez failed that test during his life. His death may well fail Hexator further.’

  ‘And who do you suspect of Lord Blez’s murder?’

  ‘Everyone, naturally. Even Commander General Laur.’

  That thick-necked butcher biting a hand which fed him? A fascinating idea. ‘The Watch? But for what reason … ?’

  ‘The previous Lord Blez blamed the Watch for losing control of the outlying districts. Many of the provinces have stopped paying taxes and acknowledging the council’s laws. At the first meeting of the Four after the auction the Lord Blez was going to propose a vote to dismiss Laur and replace the man with a more effective commander. Use a portion of our auction profits to raise and equip a new militia army to crush the dissenters and drag the peasants back into the fold.’

  Such an idea would explain the commander general’s keenness to be kept informed of my investigation. Halius Laur could certainly lay his hands on a couple of well-trained snipers with access to long guns, and he possessed an insider’s knowledge of the lord’s movements to draw upon. Arranging an ambush to put a fatal volley of lead into the lord? He could have done that. But what about the earlier assassination attempt on Uance Blez? Poison didn’t seem like Laur’s style to me. Not blunt enough for the brute by half.

  ‘Something else to consider,’ I mused. ‘Would you have supported Uance Blez’s proposal?’

  ‘I was wavering. When a council establishes a militia powerful enough to break all its enemies, that council may not merely be forming an army. It might well be creating its new masters.’

  So, the Seltins preferred a pliant thug to an over-ambitious dictator in the making. ‘Should I suspect you, my lord?’

  ‘Probably, although in truth I am tired of all of this. Even if I seize complete control of Frente, what can I achieve now? What would I build to outlast the few years I have left in me? There was never much light on Hexator, but what there was is fading.’

  ‘You worry about the legacy you will leave for your heirs?’

  ‘I have no children, doctor. There was an outbreak of Blue Fever on the moon during my thirtieth year, which I managed to catch. Sterility was the sad result. My second cousins will squabble over what I leave behind.’

  ‘Thing always change,’ I said. ‘For better or worse.’

  Falt Seltin gazed across at the wurm ambassador seated among the humans on the Derechor table. ‘Yes, things can always change. A curious matter, don’t you think? The slowly rising tide of interest in Hexator. So many merchants and offworlders showing up this year. There’s a mystery in that, also.’

  Lord Seltin was drifting a little too close to the truth. How much did he know about why I was really here? How accurate were his suspicions? ‘The auctions …’

  He snorted. ‘The auctions, the auctions. Naturally. The auctions. Well, what we have to sell won’t be sold cheap, that much I can guarantee you. Left to rot here by the gods. Be sure that our price will reflect our people’s bitterness.’

  I believe you. I nodded and left Lord Seltin to his melancholy, an infectious mood – my mind running to shadows also. I stood by the central well for a second. Watched the bull slowly turned on its spit, embers crackling and flames licking up from the charcoal. Falt Seltin was my long-separated twin on Hexator. What was I doing here? What could I achieve in the little time I had left? What would William Roxley build that might outlast his end?

  ‘More wine, sir?’ asked a male server who appeared hovering behind my left shoulder.

  ‘Why not?’ I sighed, having my cup refilled.

  ‘Your left pocket,’ whispered the man
in my ear before turning and vanishing among the bustle of retainers.

  I dug inside my jacket pocket, finding a small fold of paper that hadn’t been present when I left my tavern. Slipping the paper out, I concealed it alongside the cup to scan the message without attracting attention. Opposite the council hall: the glassblower on Cattle Street. Ask for a vase made of slow glass. Come alone for the truth about Lord Blez.

  The truth? I doubted I would ever find such a beautiful object so easily. Yet someone was out angling for William Roxley and they’d dangled his favorite bait. I dropped the message into the fire pit, saw it consumed by flames, then slipped away towards Mozart and Simenon, the pair still seated among the retinue of feasting courtiers and warriors. The staff appeared far more ruckus at feast than the lords and ladies they served. Drinking like fish, strangers to anything approaching table manners, gales of laughter, arm wrestling while competing in contests of bawdy tale-telling. Even the often dour and apprehensive Simenon let his guard down to jest and banter. Mozart was doing a noble job in resisting the warriors’ yells, urging him to wrestle Link for their amusement.

  ‘If anyone notices, I’m off searching for the garderobes and a chance to lighten my weak bladder,’ I quietly told both lad and robot. ‘Remain at the feast and fly the house’s pennant for me.’

  Simenon accepted my instruction without question, but a disapproving flash of crimson light came from within Mozart’s helmet-like head. ‘Last time I checked you didn’t have a flag or a coat of arms bleeding fit to be stitched onto one.’

  ‘Something to be rectified.’ I tapped the robot’s chest plate. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll stay safe. Try not to rip Link’s arms off.’

  I left Moz’s complaints behind me and infiltrated a gaggle of kitchen staff to exit unnoticed. Of course, my robot friend was right to be worried. My promise to Moz was meaningless. This clandestine invitation could result in one of two outcomes. A slightly wiser William Roxley, or the removal of the same from this affair by means most violent. I preferred the first result, but as I walked out into the deep warm darkness outside the old cathedral, either outcome seemed as likely.

  I left the cathedral, walking fast. Beyond the building’s steps I was accosted by a wailing woman led by a tiny rag-clad girl of around six years. I slowed in case the woman carried more whispered instructions for me. As she stumbled closer I noted she was blind, eyes swollen and almost sealed shut. An early genetic hack for night vision now mutated into a flower of uncontrollable cataracts. The little girl clutched a fluttering sparrow to her chest, trying to comfort it. The lizard-bug had been wounded by a predator and now served as a broken toy to ease the child’s broken existence. I pressed a coin into the beggar woman’s thrusting palm and side-stepped both her and her dirt-faced daughter, searching for a stone marker with the name of the road I sought. Not easy, with so many near-starving wretches clustered outside the old cathedral, begging as close as they dared without triggering the sentries’ violence. I trusted the harvest feast’s charity extended to passing leftover slops to the city’s unfortunates.

  The night swallowed me. The night was all Hexator had.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rebel. Rebel.

  In retrospect, it wasn’t the wisest move I could have made. Listening to the whispered voice coming from the alley behind my rendezvous point. No sooner had I entered inside than I was jumped by an unknown number of assailants. Pushing me to the ground, binding my arms and cutting off my sight with a dark leather hood reeking of its previous victim’s vomit. Then I was dragged fast through a maze of back streets and narrow runs between houses. Whispered threats of violence. Angry men. Why was it always men? Well, women are obviously too sensible for this kind of tomfoolery. Finally, I was prodded and goaded inside some kind of structure. More twists and turns. Then I was shoved down hard into a chair, my hood dragged off.

  I sat in a windowless room, possibly underground. Used to store food supplies, normally. A few dried mushroom stalks lying withered across the brick floor. There were perhaps twenty ruffians sharing the room with me. Their faces covered with scarves, eyes hard and cold. Fists clenched where they weren’t clutching a variety of swords, daggers and nailed clubs. Patched clothes and pinched thin faces spoke of poverty. Desperation has a stench to it. This band of nincompoops could have bottled the odour and sold it on the local perfume market. One of the braves swaggered forward. His head was covered with a cheap straw hat. The scarf hiding the lower half of his face had been painted with the jaw of a white skull.

  ‘I’m Daylen Wang. You will have heard of me.’

  I hadn’t. Well, I had. But I doubted this was actually Daylen Wang, the First Citizen. Founder of the colony. Daylen had died two centuries after landing on Hexator, an industrialist at the limit of life extension therapies. Hexator had been his final stab at immortality. But the grandiose manner of “Daylen’s” introduction told me everything I needed to know about the rebel’s ego. Did his parents name him that as a joke? Daylen must have sensed my quizzical thoughts despite not a flicker of emotion crossing my face. Normally, only the worst paranoids possess such hyper-sensitivity.

  ‘The rebel leader! The fighter the people call Jack Skull!’

  ‘Of course,’ I dissembled. I tapped my ears. ‘Hearing’s cursed spotty. I’ve not acclimatized to your moon’s atmospheric pressure yet.’ Jack Skull. A bringer of death. An outlaw legend, an identity assumed by many a dangerous mental case down through the ages.

  Daylen calmed down enough to regain his composure. ‘You were taken in by the Watch today.’

  Time to feed him a happy pill. ‘You know about my interrogation?’

  ‘We have people everywhere.’ He sounded pleased with being fed such easy lines. So, what, he had a mental age of a teenager? I suspected that if I had time to psychoanalyse our Daylen Wang, I would find this fine fool was rebelling against a lot more than the Four Families.

  ‘Commander General Laur won’t be pleased to hear that,’ I said.

  ‘Then don’t tell the old goat, moneyass. What the hell are you doing on Hexator? Being coddled by the Blez and now by Laur. Normally we’d cut your throat as a collaborator for cosying up to just one of the oppressors.’

  ‘Odd’s fish, m’dear, but I’m the poor fellow being oppressed here. An innocent merchant much abused ever since landing. First, Lady Blez grabs me up and threatens to confiscate everything I own before tossing me penniless off her moon. Then that brute Laur does much the same, with the added promise of an introduction to his dungeon and my choice of broken limbs.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. You’re an offworlder. Rich as the gods you worship.’

  ‘I’ve got a free trader’s ferry, a prayer-box, and a robot, that’s it,’ I protested.

  ‘What do the Blez and Laur want from you?’

  ‘The identity of Lord Blez’s murderer in the case of his widow. And as far as Laur’s concerned, the name of a murderer that doesn’t upset his well-provisioned apple cart. I served as a magistrate for the Humanitum. Lady Blez wants a mind free of the taint of local politics examining the evidence.’

  ‘Us,’ said Daylen. ‘Laur wants you to drown us in the soup.’

  Drowning in the soup. A delightedly spicy colloquialism. ‘I’m afraid you’re guilty and hanged as far as the Commander General is concerned.’

  ‘We didn’t shoot Blez,’ growled Daylen. ‘Now, don’t get me wrong, moneyass. We’d gladly have done for his high and mighty lordship. But if we had, we’d be printing shout-sheets and nailing them to every wall in the capital proclaiming the fact. No point killing one snake when there’s three more waiting to slither into our warm beds, is there? The privileged bastards breed faster than single executions at a time. When the revolution arrives, we’ll be hunting every filthy aristocrat and family stooge through these streets. There won’t be a basement deep enough for them to escape the people’s revenge. The streets will run red with blood!’

  Daylen was working himself into quite a
froth. My m-brain, ever alert, fed me the high probability that this psychopath was the product of a courtly liaison between one of the Four and a female retainer. Unrecognized and with a chip on his shoulder larger than the processing core of most gods. As much a Wrongman as my hired laddie. But with the insult of everything he’d been denied constantly rubbed in his face.

  ‘I may be a free agent,’ I explained, ‘but I’m still bound by the magistrate’s oath. Only the truth. Always the truth. If I discover who is behind the murder, I’ll expose them. Not whoever is most convenient for the Watch to blame. If it was one of the Four, they will be named. If it was you, then sink me, you might as well drop my corpse in a canal now.’

  My honesty was enough to trigger Jack Skull. He grabbed me up from the chair and landed a pile-driver in my gut. Damn, but it hurt. ‘We can snatch you up whenever we have a care to. Slit your throat with ease. Never forget that! We used to execute offworld filth like you. But all that did was raise the price the Four received for the harvests they steal from us. We executed dozens of collaborators, only to pile extra coins in the Four’s pockets!’ Daylen shook his head at the outrageous nature of supply and demand. I wasn’t sure what he had in mind for replacing the feudal warlord setup here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it involved common ownership of the means of production. Swapping one tyrant for another, then.

  ‘If you want the truth to come out,’ I coughed, regaining use of my lungs, ‘then let me go.’

  ‘You think they’ll let you tell the truth?’ Daylen roared with excited laughter. ‘When the Blez goes to war with another of the Four Families, we’ll know who you fingered for old man Blez’s execution. If you have any sense, you’ll be long gone from Hexator by then.’

  I raised both hands in surrender, rather than earn another rabbit punch. ‘I’ve arrived at much the same conclusion.’

  ‘We can always use another war between the Four. Maybe they’ll all pick sides and have a real set-to,’ said Daylen, clearly relishing the thought.