by Stephen Hunt
Yes. When the cats roll about the floor scratching each other, what mayhem might the mice get up to? I saw the appeal for him.
Daylen slapped me, hard. ‘Magistrate’s nose. Hah. You can continue your sniffing around – we’ll be watching you. Just don’t think you’ll change anything here. Only the people’s struggle will achieve that.’
I nodded in agreement. The deluded revolutionary didn’t know how much things were already changing for Hexator. How could he? William Roxley had arrived. Sometimes, I felt like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. A raven on the tombstone. Whatever Daylen’s true name, he wasn’t Jack Skull. Daylen was about to release him back out into the world, though…
CHAPTER NINE
Dangerous waters.
Once again, I found myself in the presence of Lady Alice Blez. Inside an old music room in the heart of her palace. It held enough instruments to outfit a minor orchestra. A piano grand enough to grace a foldship’s musical auditorium, metal stands containing harps, clarinets and even a drum set. This was a private place. Soundproof walls thick enough to protect it from the hot howl of the worst energy storms blowing over the capital. Panelled with oiled ancient wood. Real Terran Oak rather than the local mushroom analogue. A long set of leather sofas where spectators could listen to their loved ones scrape away at a violin. A wooden stand with a music box and speakers. No doubt the ancient ceramic casing plugged into the speakers had a dense memory drive containing as many songs as had carried into this forgotten corner of the universe. You could sit here and forget you were on an alien world completely inimical to human existence.
Alice Blez occupied one of the room’s chaise longues, her ears muffled with headphones so basic they actually had wires dangling towards the music box. She removed the set when she saw me enter; passing letters of introduction into my hand, old school, wax sealed, all the authority I needed to poke around her plantation in search of the attempted poisoning. I told her about my encounter the previous night with the rebels and their protestations that they weren’t involved in the assassination of her dead husband.
‘How does the old adage go,’ said Lady Blez, ‘but they would say that, wouldn’t they?’
‘Their line of reasoning runs to an internal power struggle among the Four Families,’ I explained.
‘You won’t lack for suspects on Hexator,’ sighed Alice. ‘There are paupers on our streets who would slit your throat for a chance to pawn one of these instruments. Sometimes I think I swim through nothing but a swamp of jealousies, rivalries and envies to stay afloat.’
A knock sounded at the door of the music room. Lady Blez called for the visitor to enter. A retainer appeared bowing before her and passing the noblewoman a list, then departed. Alice Blez read what I took to be a report for a few minutes before setting it aside. I noted tears welling up in the corner of her eyes.
‘Bad news arrives?’ I suggested.
‘The same old news arrives, sad to say. These are the accounts kept by a woman I pay to act as our private sentry on the canals to the city’s south. The flow is strongest there around the locks, before the canals are squeezed out of Frente. Dangerous waters. It’s the favoured spot for families to throw in unwanted babies. The unfortunates our families can’t afford to feed.’
‘And the woman warns them off, threatens to call the Watch?’
‘How would arresting refugees feed their bellies? No. My friend buys babies from any poor who arrive to drown their children. It used to be easier to place the rescued with families. The storms’ radiation makes many infertile on Hexator. But high numbers of neighbouring districts continue to fail. Refugees babies are cheaper now than the grain it takes to keep our children alive.’
‘You very much need a successful auction,’ I surmised.
Alice nodded. ‘I don’t know if whoever wants the Blez to fail wishes our house to fall or its works?’
‘There are citizens who object to your charity?’ I asked.
‘People who still try to do help, well, we hold a mirror up to those who step over dead bodies in the street. We are passed the blame for their own ugliness. Even the revolutionaries would have me halt my work, the sooner to stir their slaughter of the monied they curse for their ill state.’
‘It can’t be easy.’
‘You have no idea,’ said Lady Blez. She leant forward, and I thought she was about to tell me a confidence, but instead, she kissed me!
I pulled back, surprised. These are dangerous currents. You might as well drown me in one of their canals. I actually checked my m-brain to make sure I hadn’t accidentally activated a synthetic pheromone response. It had been an age since I had needed to seduce my way into someone’s secrets; I wasn’t planning to do so in this faded palace.
‘Am I so hideous?’ Alice asked.
‘Quite the contrary, my lady. There are goddesses who should be jealous of you. But you are my client and there are proprieties to be observed in such matters.’
A quick flash of anger crossed her face. ‘Proprietaries be damned!’
Was this the real Alice Blez, I wondered, or was it the woman who sooner saved the helpless thrown to drown, rather than throwing society balls? Of course, she could be both, such complicated creatures are we.
‘I had a husband whose interests rarely extended beyond his latest dalliance with his courtesan of the week,’ sighed Alice, ‘and now? If I favour one of my peers, the family will end up enmeshed in dynastic alliances destabilising my house from without. Should I choose from my staff, I will face court intrigues and jealousies weakening my house from within.’
Ah, Sweet William, his disposability so useful to so many. A passing fancy, then, emphasis on the passing. ‘So, this is more in the way of my extending my range of services to you?’
‘I command you,’ she whispered in my ear, dropping her dress to the floor with an alacrity that seemed designed in by its modiste.
Commanded? Well, there are worse ways to take one for the team. Despite Alice’s protestations about the complications of dynastic politics, the worn velvet of her Baroque-inspired chaise longue suggested that I wasn’t the only one commanded to sing for his supper inside her music room. She arched back to switch the music off the earphones and onto the speakers, exposing her noble naked body to me. A sign to her sentries that there were to be no more intrusions apart from those she had already planned.
Whichever of Alice’s ancestors had paid for the germline’s beauty edits had certainly surpassed expectations. Literally, a goddess given flesh. An easy environment to extend my services, matching even this noblewoman’s elevated levels of satisfaction. Her music box bounced out a suitably rousing ballad, one of Jimenna Alarcón’s saucy songs from the late twenty-seventh century. Go fetch your sickle to crop my nettle, that flows so near my brim; you farmer of high degree, your sharp sickle must come a-courting me.
Alice Blez proved as imperious taking her pleasures as she did commanding my investigation. Hardly a by-your-leave as she strode above the chaise longue with her impossibly long legs and pressed my head in firmly to taste the nettles. Given how high she needed to turn the music to hide her own loud song, I thought perhaps that my extra workload might soon come to an end. In fact, if Alice’s moaning grew much louder – camouflaging music or no – I worried the warriors outside might rush in suspecting a second assassination was in progress.
But this farmer had furrows yet to plough, as far as Alice Blez was concerned. When it came to sharpening my sickle, the lady needed no whetstone save her body. Her brim flowed all too well as she pushed me off the chaise longue and stole the furniture for herself, laying her face on its velvet. She moaned at me to finish taking in the harvest from the rear of the field, and poor fool that I am, I had little choice but to comply.
And yes, I was all too aware that I was spoiling Lady Blez’s future enjoyments at the fumbling hands of the locals. A millennium of experience in matters of biting the pillow and an augmented body that hardly ages unt
il the moment a man dies; with a built-in chemical arsenal able to be deployed at whim? How could matters be otherwise? Alice certainly didn’t seem to mind, at least, not presently.
Alice had given me the mission I had originally been sent to Hexator to fulfil – investigating Lord Blez’s murder. She didn’t know why I had been sent to do it. I couldn’t tell Alice that without putting her in even more danger than she already was. Perhaps it was only fair I paid her back in kind? Ah, any excuse.
By the time we’d finished cropping, there was only one of us in the music room who still feared this had been a mistake. That definitely being me. Sweet William? Sweet for her. Stupid Simple William, collecting complications he didn’t need in an already precarious situation. If I had the comely Alice Blez as a wife, I certainly wouldn’t be dallying with a courtesan of the week. My main difficulty would be keeping myself from entering her music room at every damnable opportunity.
CHAPTER TEN
Hot rain.
Simenon took the rain as a bad augury and I felt hard-pressed to disagree with him. The deluge came down in scalding hot sheets, a monsoon sending the capital’s denizens scattering for cover. It was as if the world was hissing an angry rebuke at me for indecently pushing the bounds of client privilege. Ah, Alice Blez. It was hard to keep the woman from my mind. Luckily, I had another female looking out for me. The Expected Ambush spotted geysers erupting out of the moon’s water table from her position in high orbit. My darling ship had forewarned me of the rain-front forming. Storms passing across Hexator’s uninhabitable hemisphere, picking up heat and energy on the moon’s permanent light side before descending on its dark half as a host of unleashed furies. Steaming water rolled off giant fungi and pooled in the streets below, turning dirt to bubbling hot mud. Even the insect-like flying lizards sought shelter under mushroom caps. Where people went out at all, they wobbled under the weight of umbrellas that resembled mobile rain shelters. I received word at the tavern from a Blez runner that the house’s convoy to the spore-spice plantations would be delayed until the rains passed and the roads hardened back from sopping wet mud. It took a day and a half for the monsoon to abate and a second runner summoned me and my companions to one of the city gates. On arrival, I found a line of twenty canvas-covered wagons and a mounted escort of seventy riders, a warrior next to each wagoneer on the cart’s forward seat. The trains of horses pulling our wagons resembled armoured warhorses, leather and metal mail as much to protect the beasts from scalding monsoons as a shield against crossbow bolts. Only the finest warriors to bring home the house’s final harvest of the season. Each fighter carried a rider’s curved saber, a shield, and an ugly-looking short-barrelled carbine. Just the thing to be fired fast on the gallop. No explosive head lances, I noted. The wildlings and reavers obviously lacked shields and the means to recharge them. I wondered if any of these eyes belonged to the rebels. If the “people” were keeping Wang’s promise to surveil my progress.
A small shrine had been built into the city walls, this one still attracting worshipers despite the lack of tangible responses to their left offerings. I looked closer and spotted the brazier shaped as a letter ‘G’ inside; ash-filled, unlit and surrounded by sad gifts of rotting fungi. It was a shrine to Goog, ubiquitous finder of lost things and god of the small journey. Some habits die harder than others. Many venturing beyond the city walls obviously felt the need for divine protection, even if it was of the hollow variety out here in the Empty.
I was told to mount a wagon in the train’s centre, Mozart and the lad with me in the flatbed. Unladen for now. On the way back, I would doubtless be balanced on pitch-sealed spore-spice barrels. Simenon reached out to a glass lantern dangling on the wagon’s side, about to strike its built-in flint, when our driver swivelled around to stop him.
‘We travel without lanterns for now,’ instructed the man. ‘Riding lit is a bad idea. Too many moths waiting in the wilds along the main highway.’
Moths? My m-brain provided me with the local slang’s meaning. Highwaymen.
‘Stand and deliver, or feel an arrow from my quiver,’ I muttered.
‘It’s unlucky to travel without lanterns,’ protested Simenon.
The driver fixed my guide with a weary gaze. ‘Maybe you should ride ahead carrying enough candles for a feast day, then, boy. Give the moths something bright to be drawn towards. You can draw their fire away from us!’
That raised a round of laughter from mounted warriors waiting on our flank.
The driver gazed at Mozart. ‘How well do you see in the dark, big lad?’
‘Well enough, mush,’ said my robot friend.
‘Fine, because I’m counting on your metal fists giving any raiders second thoughts.’ The driver tossed me a leather mask with a brass visor to strap around my head, then lobbed a similar mask at Simenon. I inspected it. The mask contained a battered old crystal matrix designed for low-light amplification. I waited to depart before strapping it on. Frente was encapsulated by battlements in the manner of a medieval city. Its original hexagonal-mesh barrier, formed by construction nano, had long-since lost any self-repair capability. Now it stood patched with quarried stone and compacted mud – a bizarre melding of the old and the new. A keep on the eastern wall acted as our portal to the land beyond, its gates resting open. Manned by bored-looking Watch sentries shaking down new arrivals for customs duties.
We put Frente’s lights behind us and set out along a rutted dirt road little wider than two wagons abreast. Our passage kept clear of forest by weight of traffic – assisted by flamethrowers in the settlement’s early days. It was only beyond the capital’s walls that the alien nature of the locale made itself felt in my soul. A deep unease gripped me. I couldn’t help but shudder. No Tudor-age architecture or ancient colonial buildings to anchor me onto out here. Nothing at all of mankind’s soul. Instead, an entire ecosystem which had spent millions of years developing in the deep darkness without humanity’s involvement. Insects crawled over clumps of mushrooms as tall as cathedral spires. A thick twisting canyon of looming sinuous shapes, unfamiliar chirrups, clicks, screams, cries, bursts of strangely unsettling animal song, lizard-insect analogues curiously buzzing low over our convoy. Without the maze of Frente’s buildings to break the moon’s hot whipping winds, the continuous gusts felt closer to a molten thick treacle we needed to labour through.
Even with the visor amplifying starlight, my sight barely penetrated further than a few feet either side beyond our track. Where the flora glowed with luminescence, the low-light amplifier made vegetation appear wreathed in ghostly white phantoms. I chanted prayers to Modd and a dozen other deities without the comfort of my prayer box on hand to channel the energy. I included Korj, Protector of Alien Voyagings, in my beseechings. That was, I realized, a sign of my nervousness. Worlds like Hexator made me reconsider accepting the merge. Life eternal. Surrender my tired old flesh before it expired for good and embrace a dreaming beyond dreams. Warm. Safe. Folded within Modd’s eternal grace. One day, doubtless, Modd would embrace the singularity and carry all of paradise’s souls to mysteries beyond existence, much as Inuno had herself transcended. My dead wife would make that journey, but would I? I had resolved not to, but my flesh was cut damnably weak. And Hexator’s darkness made me feel the weight of my petty mortality, every pound of flesh so small and insignificant. I thought I might welcome true death. But here was its promise hovering close to me, and this scared superstitious little chimp was sent scuttling to hide begging under his gods’ cloak. How weak was William Roxley.
I stared at Simenon on the opposite side of the wagon. Concerned about the journey’s dangers, yet at ease with his environment. I felt ashamed. Here was the lad with nothing but the clothes on his back, facing the same voyage as me, and his courage put me to shame. You might think the longer you live the better you get to know yourself, but the opposite is often true. Or perhaps old age peeled away bark, revealing the true rings of the tree below. Was I a coward?
One of
the warriors came trotting past, giving me a long hard look. ‘You’re not armed.’
I pointed to Mozart. ‘I’m with big-and-shiny.’
‘He’s not that shiny and nobody travels with the convoy who isn’t packing.’ The grim-faced brute rode off and returned with two pistol holsters, one for myself and a second for Simenon. Mozart, he wisely left alone, despite the lack of buff on my friend’s steel hull.
I reluctantly belted the weapon on, feeling like a gunslinger in a cheap entertainment sim. Simenon looked no more at ease with the weight of his new addition. I imagined the fact that brandishing a pistol inside the city limits could land him a near-fatal beating from Laur’s Watch thugs proved a weight on his mind. Out here, he was free. But not in a comfortable way.
‘You know,’ I told Moz,’ if only you’d polished up nicely, that wouldn’t have happened.’
‘Just try not to shoot me, doc.’
I eased the pistol out of its holster and examined it. An old metal revolver, snub-nosed with six chemical-propellant rounds squatting in the cylinder. Locally manufactured to low standards, if the worn mushroom-wood of its grip was anything to go by. ‘Don’t worry, even if I hit you, I think the ricochet from this marginally upgraded flintlock is likelier to kill me.’
‘Small mercies, eh.’
‘I don’t suppose it’s traditional to have a sing-song along the way?’ I asked Simenon, looking to cheer the lad up.
‘Kill me now,’ muttered Mozart.
‘Best we don’t, sir. Many creatures beyond the walls hunt by sound.’ The boy indicated a pair of muffled cloth-wrapped bells mounted on poles at the back of our wagon. ‘If we’re set upon by a pack too large for our escort to scare away, that’s what those bells are for. Ring them as loudly as possible … echoes around the forest will confuse and blind the attacking beasts.’
A trip through Hexator’s wilds with only my limited skills at campanology to keep us safe? This journey wasn’t working out quite the way I hoped.