The Magos

by Dan Abnett

  Behind me, the sporadic sounds of gunfire continued to disturb the mountain air, and I could still feel a dangerous mind at large.

  I hate running from a fight.

  As it turns out, I wasn’t.

  THE MAGOS

  I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

  What hours, O what black hours we have spent

  This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

  And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

  With witness I speak this. But where I say

  Hours I mean years, mean life.

  Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

  – Religious verse, Terran, M2

  ONE

  The Bone Coast

  Sometimes, at night, the lights would wake him.

  It didn’t happen often. These days, there wasn’t much traffic on the Bone Coast Highway. Cargo convoys, now and then; the occasional freight tanker, once in a while; perhaps a fast transit, purring up the coast road to Delci, or down to Tycho. By day, he’d glimpse the dirty sunlight winking off their hulls as they rattled past. He’d hear their engines and the thok-thok! of their heavy wheels on the highway’s broken rockcrete. The sounds of other lives with places to go, rushing past him, Doppler-distorted.

  At night, sometimes, passing lights backlit his window blinds and drifted across the ceiling of his little bedroom.

  Very rarely, the passing lights slowed down, perhaps hoping his little roadside property was a tavern or machine shop. They’d speed up again as soon as they saw their mistake.

  Rarest of all, they’d stop. If they knocked at his door to ask directions, Drusher would answer them as politely and helpfully as he could. He didn’t know much. He hadn’t had much direction of his own for a very long time.

  Some didn’t knock. He’d hear them outside, prowling around, trying doors and windows, boots crunching on the chalky gravel. Reavers, that was his guess, road-mobs. There were more of those these days, chancers and migrants from the lawless zones of the north. He’d hide in the back room, one hand on his gun, until they went away. He’d heard stories. He knew that, one day, they’d do more than just try the door.

  They’d kick it down. They’d come in.

  That night, he woke to lights on the tatty blinds. They drifted above him, right to left, across the water-stained ceiling. Something southbound.

  It slowed, then was gone.

  Drusher lay back on his lumpy pillow and sighed. He stared up at the blank darkness and found it no less fathomable than his life. He’d been dreaming of something, something better than this. He wondered whether, if he closed his eyes and willed it, he could find his place in the dream again and pick up where he left off.

  The lights came back, left to right this time. They stopped. The same vehicle, reversing. He recognised the throbbing engine tone.

  He got out of bed. He put on his old spectacles with shaking hands. He didn’t know what to reach for first, his jacket or his anxiety meds. Then he remembered he’d been out of anxiety meds for three months. He pulled his jacket on over his nightshirt and pushed his feet into unlaced boots.

  The lights went out. The engine died. That decided it for him. Anyone who pulled over to ask directions out here left their engine running.

  There were no lights on inside his property. He fumbled in the blue gloom and found his way to the hall. He heard boots on the gravel outside: someone moving around, to the left of the front door, then the right, casing the place.

  This was not how he wanted to die. In all honesty, he would have been pushed to make a list of ways he did want to die, but being beaten to a pulp in his own property by a foraging road-mob certainly wouldn’t have been on it.

  Drusher crept into the back room. He tried to remember where he’d left his gun. He didn’t like guns, never had. It had sat on the dresser for a while, a paperweight for some ageing migration reports. But it had kept looking at him, so he’d put it in a drawer.

  That was it, a drawer. Which drawer?

  As quietly as he could, he looked in one, then another. He was on the third drawer when someone came to the door. He could see the front door from the back room. The shadow against the window lights was distressingly big.

  The owner of the shadow knocked. Hard. The sound made Drusher jump. It took a big hard fist to make a big hard noise like that. He couldn’t help but fancy he was hearing, for the first time, the very fist that would eventually beat the life out of him.

  Idiot, he told himself. That’s it. Paralyse yourself with fear. With fancy. Valentin Drusher’s imagination was his worst enemy. He tried to remind himself of that. He could imagine far worse and more horrible things than his imagination, but that kind of proved the point.

  He found the gun. It was under a bundle of expired ration stamps, a broken clock and a coil of fishing wire. Of course it was. The ideal place. It was a small, chunky automatic, a Regit Arms .40 that Macks had given to him years ago. He had never, ever fired it.

  Was it even loaded? She’d given him ammunition. Had he loaded it? If he hadn’t, where was the box of ammunition? If he had, were the bullets still good? Did they… go off? Was that a thing?

  He probably should have cleaned the weapon too, the way she’d taught him. It was probably so corroded it had seized solid.

  Much like his life.

  The shadow knocked a second time. Drusher started again. He steeled himself and decided to do the bravest thing he could think of.

  He put the gun in his pocket and ran out of the back door.

  The property was a pre-fab shack set back, a hundred metres or so, from the ragged coast highway. Drusher had lived in it for seven years. It was weather-worn and set on waste gravel, shrouded by bleached undergrowth and gnarled saltwood trees. From the front porch, by day, he could see the ocean, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. To the rear, where the property backed into the dust dunes and the ridges of silt, were the coops and pens and outhouses. Everything got covered in a fine white dust blown in by the sea wind.

  At night, it seemed a ghostly place, the white dunes silver against the low black sky. The air was still. It was a warm night, breathlessly warm. Even in winter, the Bone Coast was a thirsty place.

  Drusher scuttled towards the outbuildings. Sweat was already dripping off him. He considered making a run for it, but there was nothing around for kilometres. The war, twenty or so years earlier, had scoured the Peninsula. The area around his home was a Throne-forsaken waste of bone-dry dunes, dotted ruins, inshore refineries, long since closed down, and the rusted carcasses of ATV carriers. The remoteness, and lack of amenities, were key reasons why the place had appealed to Drusher, and also key reasons why he’d been able to rent it for a manageable sum. He remembered the landlord, a property dealer in Tycho City, actually smiling with relief when Drusher had signed the lease and forked over the first quarter rent.

  He decided to hide in the outbuildings, among the clutter. Most of the stuff had been there when he arrived. He’d added to it over time. Scavenging on the shore and inland had provided him with materials to use in various projects, the coops and pens for instance. Steel poles and wooden posts for frames, chain-link and mesh fencing to make the cages. Fuel cans hacksawed in half to make water troughs. There was some old sacking he used for windbreaks and lagging. He imagined himself under it, being very still.

  He froze when he saw movement. A man appeared, walking around from the front of the property. He had a stablight in his hand and was playing it around. Drusher’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He made the man to be young, slight of frame, fair-haired. Then the stab-beam pointed his way, and the glare ruined his night vision.

  He ducked down, wincing, and crawled behind a pile of rotting cargo pallets. They had been going to be a lookout tower, a blind from which he could observe the winter migrations. But he’d never worked out how to engineer the old pallets into a platform that wouldn’t collapse under him.

  H
e heard the man call out. He heard footsteps on the chalky gravel. He dashed towards the pens and let himself in.

  It was musty and dry inside. The air stank of birdlime, and there were feathers matted into the cage wire. His menagerie fluttered and warbled at his arrival. There were two Tarkoni tarkonil in the cage nearest the door, ailing creatures that he had found on his walks, one with a broken wing, the other matted with promethium. He was nursing them back to health, though he doubted either would ever be fit for release. Beside them, in the row of smaller cages, were various seabirds that had been grounded by a storm the previous winter, and seemed to have lost their migratory instincts. He’d fed them, and they’d stayed, pecking around the property, showing no signs of resuming their endogenous journeys. In his journal, he had written up each case, theorising that the electromagnetic fury of the storm had screwed up the magnetoceptive faculties that regulated their migratory behaviour. Either that, or it had caused some malfunction of the trigeminal system. They had lost the motivation to go on, and had forgotten why they were supposed to.

  Sympathising acutely, he had taken them in.

  In the end cage, beside the feed store, was the foul-tempered sea raptor, Gortus gortus gershomi. It hadn’t been foul tempered when he found it. It had been dead, hanging like a broken umbrella from a stretch of chain on the beach. It had tangled a foot in the wire, exhausted itself trying to flap free and died upside down, of thirst and starvation.

  He’d taken it as a specimen, intending to mount the long wing feathers on an armature for study and reduce the carcass to bones for anatomical comparisons. Only when he had brought it back to his shack, and laid it on his work table, had he realised that a flicker of life remained. He had cleaned it and fed it by hand, using a pipette that, now he came to think of it, was definitely part of the cleaning kit Macks had given him for the gun.

  As it regained strength, it did not express gratitude of any sort. Drusher had been disappointed, but not surprised. He was a magos biologis and knew from long experience that wild things remained wild, and would peck if he got too close. Setting aside his brief, foolish dream of a wise and saturnine companion who would perch around his home and watch him with cold eyes as he shuffled into old age, he had confined it to the cage, intending to release it when it was strong enough.

  It was still there after six months. He had yet to work out a way of opening the cage to let it out without losing several fingers and his eyes.

  Drusher stood in the pens, breathing hard. He heard the tarkonils chatter and flap, the seabirds yik with agitation, and the damn raptor clack its scissor beak with undisguised contempt.

  He was as trapped as they were.

  The man approached the pens. Drusher edged towards the feed store. The raptor bashed at the wire, snapping at him.

  ‘Please be quiet,’ he whispered to it, putting a shushing finger against his lips.

  It glared at him with fathomless, jet-dot eyes and resumed its assault on the wire.

  A light shone in. The door opened. Drusher saw the man silhouetted against the night.

  ‘Show yourself!’ the man called out. The stab-beam swung. ‘Throne’s sake! Are you in there? Are you hiding?’

  The man took a step forwards. Drusher shrank back, his shoulders against the door of the feed store.

  ‘Take w-what you want!’ he cried. ‘I don’t have much, but just take it!’

  He’d heard that if you allowed the road-mobs to pick you clean without arguing, sometimes they let you live.

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ the man replied. He sounded surprised. The stab-beam found Drusher’s cowering, flinching face. ‘I’ve come for you.’

  Well, that was it, then. He was done for. Might as well just string him up from a fence by one foot like a broken umbrella.

  At least he knew, now. At least he knew all hope was gone. It gave him an odd sort of strength, a resolve that he’d only managed to summon a couple of times before in his entire life. There was nowhere left to go. His back was against the wall. Well, literally, the door of the feed store, but metaphorically a wall, unyielding. He was cornered, trapped.

  As on those previous occasions, the sudden resolve unlocked something in him. A will to live, an anger towards the world that thwarted and frustrated him at every last damn turn.

  He wrenched open the clasp of the end cage. The sea raptor came out like a summoned fury in a blizzard of feathers. Keening, it went for the light and the open door.

  The man in the doorway yelled out in alarm. The raptor hit him, pecking and raking. He yelped, covered his face and tried to fight it off. Its wings slammed at him. He lost his footing and fell sideways, the back of his head bouncing off the doorframe.

  The raptor burst past, up into the night air, wings wide.

  A second later, Valentin Drusher followed it out of the pens with equal determination, leaping over the body of the man sprawled in the doorway. He saw the raptor high above, its powerful white-fletched wings beating as it banked towards the sea. He felt as if he were flying too, flying free, leaving the horror of the world behind and soaring high into–

  Something hit him across the mouth and clothes-lined him onto his back. The impact knocked his spectacles off. He was stunned for a moment, his head spinning, his mouth full of blood.

  Another man was standing over him. He was very big, the owner of the shadow at the door. Drusher groped around, found his spectacles and jammed them back on. They were bent, but he could see the man. He was wearing a jack-armoured coat. His head was shaved, rounded and solid like the tip of a large-calibre bullet. He had a goatee.

  He looked down at Drusher, baffled.

  ‘The hell you playing at?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t kill me!’ Drusher gurgled.

  ‘I’m not going to,’ the man replied.

  Drusher wrenched out the pistol and aimed it at the man’s face.

  ‘Do not kill me!’ he cried.

  The man looked at the gun in annoyance.

  ‘Well, now I want to,’ he said.

  Stab-beams bobbed behind him. More people, running over.

  ‘Have you found him?’ a voice asked.

  ‘I found someone,’ said the bald man, frowning at Drusher. ‘He’s got a gun.’

  ‘And I’ll use it!’ Drusher yelled, lying on his back and brandishing the weapon wildly.

  The bald man sighed and, in some manner that Drusher couldn’t quite understand but which clearly involved terrifying reflexes, took the gun out of Drusher’s hand.

  ‘Now he hasn’t,’ the bald man called out.

  The other figures arrived. They shone their stablights at him.

  ‘Is that him?’ the bald man asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said one of the figures. A woman. ‘Valentin Drusher. Magos biologis.’

  ‘He doesn’t look like a magos biologis,’ said the bald man. ‘Just some old loon. Why isn’t he wearing any trousers?’

  ‘I was in bed!’ Drusher wailed.

  ‘With your boots on?’ the bald man asked.

  ‘That was after!’ cried Drusher.

  The woman bent down beside Drusher.

  ‘Get up and stop making a fuss, Valentin,’ she said. ‘These nice people have come a long way to find you.’

  Drusher knew her voice. After fifteen years, he still knew the smell of her too. Body heat, leather, a faint fragrance called True Heart that had cost him too much money in a Tycho city perfumery twenty years before.

  ‘Macks?’

  ‘Hello, Drusher,’ said Germaine Macks. ‘It’s been a while.’

  TWO

  A Specific Area of Technical Expertise

  There were four of them. Macks and three others, two men and a woman.

  ‘I made you this,’ the other woman said. She put a tin mug down on the table beside Drusher.

  She was a finely made woman with very dark skin, her hair tight-pinned around her head. Drusher could not guess her age. Thirty, perhaps? She wore gloves and an embroidered ceris
e jacket.

  ‘What is it?’ Drusher asked, dabbing at his split lip.

  ‘Caffeine,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have any caffeine,’ he replied.

  The woman frowned and gestured towards the kitchen. ‘Brown powder. Silver tin. Second shelf. Marked “Caffeine”.’

  ‘A sample of desiccated treefox droppings, for analysis,’ said Drusher.

  She nodded thoughtfully, then shrugged.

  ‘Probably better not drink it, then,’ she advised.

  They had brought him inside and allowed him to get dressed. The bald man had not given him back his gun. Drusher’s mouth, jaw and neck hurt from the blow that had knocked him down. He was fiddling with his spectacles, but the frames were still bent. No one had even said sorry.

  Macks came in, pulled out the other chair and sat facing Drusher. He hadn’t seen her in fifteen years. Her short hair was just beginning to lose its depth of colour, but she still looked good. He could see the tiny zigzag scar above the left-hand side of her mouth, and the trace of the other scar on her forehead. Both were old now, faded, like memories. She wore the uniform of a Magistratum marshal. Beside her, he felt ancient.

  ‘I heard you retired,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t suit me,’ she said. ‘The division was understaffed so I took reassignment.’

  ‘Tycho City?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Unkara Province. Up north.’

  He nodded, as if that meant something.

  ‘Still a silly bastard, I see,’ she said. ‘When someone knocks on your door, you don’t run away and attack them with eagles.’

  ‘You do out here,’ said Drusher.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Why are you living like this, Valentin? In this dump. Alone.’

  ‘Well, odd as it may sound, there is very little in the way of paid work available for a highly qualified magos biologis on Gershom,’ he said. ‘A fact that I have wrestled with for, let me see now, thirty-four years, and a detail I wish I had been aware of when, as a young man with splendid prospects, I took the commission to do a survey of the planet’s indigenous fauna, and ended up stuck here for the rest of my–’