by Ian Watson
When Shuturban and company arrived, the bailiff must have been occupied contacting the courthouse. Those extra unexpected visitors had not been spotted. The Arbites believed there were only four miscreants inside Dukandar’s place; not a dozen.
Nor could the Arbitrators know that three were armed with fully-loaded boltguns.
On the count of zero, deafening explosions blasted the front facade of the cobbler’s. Rubble vomited; clouds of dust billowed. The whole of the wall and its door and shutters disintegrated. Beams and rafters sagged. Plaster from the ceiling cascaded upon tools and benches. Still sustained by side walls, the upper storey did not pancake down upon the ground floor, yet the building groaned almightily.
The Arbitrators had fired a volley of krak grenades to open up Dukandar’s premises. The explosive effect of these were entirely concentrated at the target, without collateral blast. Would the Arbites now be switching to choke grenades to disable those who lurked within? Or tanglefoot grenades?
‘Out, out – or gettin’ caught!’ bellowed Lex at Shuturban’s men, remembering to use scum patois. ‘Out, and killin’!’
With a roar he launched himself into the wall of dust and scrambled over rubble. As did Jaq, hauling Rakel with him. As did Grimm. As, with only the briefest of hesitation, did Mardal and his men.
FIVE MIRROR-VISORED Arbitrators were immediately evident, out in the dusty dark street. Two were indeed porting their weapons, busy attaching different grenade tubes to the long barrels.
RAAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP RAAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP RAAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP
The first RAARK of explosive bolts – like the rowdy growl of some carnivorous terror-lizards or of hell-dogs erupting from the dust – caused the Arbitrators fatal instants of hesitation. Bolts penetrated chest or belly. Bolts exploded, CRUMP. Blood sprayed. Autoguns were racketing too. Ducking, two surviving Arbitrators loosed laser pulses which hit one of Mardal’s men simultaneously. Each had chosen the very same target. And a lesser target, too! Perhaps Lex seemed more like a force of nature than a mortal adversary. The abhuman must not be shot. As for the bearded man, was he using that woman as a shield? The woman might be important to the investigation. Wrong decisions, wrong.
Emperor’s Peace and Emperor’s Mercy roared adieu to those two Arbitrators.
Which one of the five corpses was Arbitrator Steinmuller?
From an alleyway around the side of the cobbler’s three more Arbites were coming to assist. From a passageway on the far side, two more emerged. Crossfire flew. An energy blast caught Grimm on the very edge of his flak-jacket, bowling him over, but the squat was able to scramble to his knees. Another of Mardal’s men screamed and fell.
RAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP
RAARKpopSWOOSHthudCRUMP
The raving of the autoguns! The gaudy flowering of energy shells on impact!
Did the fight last for fifteen strobing seconds? Perhaps not as long. Yet it seemed to last for several minutes in slow motion. The Arbites were all dead, or at least severely injured. Lex roved quickly from one body to another. He checked by starlight for signs of life. Where he found life lingering he ended it, so that the courthouse would be unenlightened.
Where was the cobbler?
‘Mr Dukandar!’ Grimm called into the night. ‘Your shop is damaged!’ How sadly the building sagged. ‘It’s time to salvage your tools, Mr Dukandar!’
Once the victors departed, shadowy beggars might flock to loot the premises of its boots and shoes – and of its pincers and shears and nails and leather. No cobbler showed himself. If Dukandar was wise he was already hastening with his wife and sons to lose himself somewhere in the smoky entrails of Bellagunge.
Did a bailiff still keep watch through a cracked shutter in some neighbouring building? Was he whispering urgently into a vox-caster?
Lex raked the street with his gaze.
‘Us gettin’ outa here!’ he shouted at Shuturban.
‘To the theatre!’ cried Jaq.
Grimm paused briefly to scoop up one of the dropped lasguns to which an Arbitrator had been attaching a new tube of grenades. The little man jammed the barrel diagonally inside his belt.
TO THE THEATRE, indeed: to the Theatrum Miraculorum on Khelma Street in Mahabbat, like some intoxicated nocturnal revellers eager for even more exotic entertainment.
En route, Mardal Shuturban collected five more men armed variously with shotgun or chainsword.
Mardal’s group now totalled nine men, plus himself. Would fourteen persons be sufficient to deal with three warrior-troubadours, sufficient to slaughter two and subdue a third? Mardal’s men believed so – especially those survivors of the encounter at the cobbler’s. They were flushed with having exterminated a whole patrol of Arbites.
ELEGANTLY CLAD IN silks and furs, patrons of this night’s performance were spilling out from the domed foyer of the theatre into Khelma Street to meet bodyguards and chauffeurs. Balloon-wheeled automobiles and gilded carriages pulled by snuffling snake-necked camelopards crowded the thoroughfare. Feet and hooves and wheels stirred dust. Rich perfumes competed with the weed-smoke of cigars and with exhaust fumes and with the odours of camelopard dung and urine.
The irruption of the fourteen through this secure normality seemed almost like a continuation of dramatic spectacle – especially since no armed robbery or abduction or murder seemed intended as regards any theatre-goers. A swift frontal approach through an excited crowd which was venting psychic noise might take the Harlequins unawares. Was this not a time and a place for an inquisitor to act flamboyantly? Let the courthouse suspect the secret presence of an inquisitor – aye, and of an Imperial assassin too! This would perplex and perturb.
Weapons weren’t being brazenly flourished, though eye-witnesses could hardly fail to notice the toothed blade of a chainsword or the long barrels of shotguns or of lasguns filched from the dead. Well and good. Had not Shandabar seen a genestealer uprising and a cleansing by Space Marines, and the pious and bloody riots of pilgrims? At times death was a currency as common as the shekel. Jaq and associates lagged a little, letting Mardal and his men take the lead.
THE DOMED AUDITORIUM was almost deserted. Chandeliers of electrolumens glowed brightly. A spangled curtain hid the stage. As the intruders advanced down aisles, some ushers ducked behind plush seats.
‘Master Jadu!’ cried one of those attendants piercingly.
Glittering, the curtain swept up and sideways, bunching tableau-style – to reveal the impresario peering from the wings. What a peculiar fellow Jadu was. Exaggeratedly high heels and short skinny legs elevated a little barrel of a body clad in purple velvet appliqued with crescent moons and comets. With a red coxcomb hat upon his head he resembled a plump, fussy poultry-bird. One could imagine Master Jadu flapping his arms and clucking and crowing resoundingly.
Behind him – much taller than him – multicoloured spangles shimmered where no part of the curtain should be. A ghost of Jadu’s own moon-face swayed in mid-air. It was a Harlequin in chameleon mode. Its holo-suit was copying the sunoundings. Its psychoactive mask imitating the impresario’s own face! A device seemed to float unsupported: a sleek gadget with a sheen to it. Something wrought of psycho plastic or wraithbone – a shuriken pistol!
A stream of what seemed like tiny spangles sprayed along one aisle. One of Mardal’s men screamed. Blood laced his clothing. His chainsword fell from a crimson hand, from which two fingers also fell. No spangles, those – but tiny spinning razor-discs propelled at high speed by a compact gravitic accelerator. Those tiny discs would scalpel through flesh, severing arteries, piercing internal organs, cutting bone. The man behind spasmed in a delirium of pain and injury, and collapsed.
Autoguns opened up. The impresario-bird seemed to fluff out his feathers as shells tore into him.
RAARKpopSWOOSH, spake Lex’s boltgun, as he fired over seats.
RAARK-RAARK, declared Emperor’s Peace and Emperor’s Mercy in chorus.
Explosive bolts ripped through the
spangled drape as if through tissue, and one surely detonated in alien flesh. Ethereally tall, kaleidoscopically fluxing, a figure seemed to drift forward. Its false face was now a private nightmare to whoever beheld it. Mardal shrieked, ‘Chor, no don’t-!’
Rakel squealed, seeing some nightmare of her own. Was that figure on stage the assassin whom she imitated, coming for her? Shuriken spangles sprayed, scattershot. Blood flew from a nick on Grimm’s rubicund cheek. Blood welled from the upper slope of Lex’s brow as a new companion to old duelling marks appeared. The blood immediately hardened to a knob of cinnabar.
RAARK!
RAARK!
The Harlequin danced his last dance.
The raiders hurried backstage past a lanky alien corpse masked in horror and past the dumpy, slaughtered-turkey corpse of unfortunate impresario Jadu.
THEY FOUND THE Death Jester lurking in a blue room walled with lapis lazuli.
Oh such a lanky mischievous figure of death he was. His costume was decorated with real bones. His skull mask, framed by a great clownish yellow collar like the fully-open petals of some huge jungle flower. A wild spray of inky hair fountained from his crown.
The first man through the doorway was greeted by a Harlequin’s Kiss.
Strapped to the back of the Jester’s forearm was a tube bonded to an egg-shaped reservoir. The Jester clenched his fist and punched the air in front of him. Briefly the interloper wobbled as if he had become a jelly; and collapsed. What had been a man had become a bag of minced organs braced with bones.
Such was the consequence of the monofilament wire which had leapt from that tube to pierce its victim’s body and uncoil within his entrails. Thrashing about like a whip, the wire had reduced guts and liver and lungs and heart to a slurry.
The wire had leapt back into its container, curling tight.
Already it was jumping out again, kissing the next man with the same consequences.
How swiftly a third! The third was Mardal Shuturban himself. The man jerked. He was a bony jelly containing warm soup. He spilled upon the floor.
The Death Jester might kiss everyone who came for him before they had a chance to fire their weapons.
Dropping Emperor’s Peace, Grimm hauled out the lasrifle, cranked the grenade tube, and fired several times into the room of lapis lazuli.
Gas billowed within.
Until that moment Grimm hadn’t known precisely what type of grenades would pop out of the launcher. It was a fair guess that those Arbites had intended to capture rather than kill or maim. Now Grimm caught a whiff, and his eyes watered – and he caught his breath.
Jaq had dragged Rakel backward. Mardal’s other men were beginning to gasp and cough at the seepage from inside the blue room. ‘Ceasing fire!’ bellowed Lex. ‘Killing anyone who is firing again!’
Unlike the helmets worn by eldar aspect warriors, that Death Jester’s mask wasn’t sealed against the atmosphere. Inside the cloudy room the tall figure was staggering, bending over, wracked.
Lex was gathering himself. He would rush into the room with his eyes shut, fight and seize the Jester and haul him out. Just then, the eldar lurched for the doorway, fending wildly at whoever might be in his way. No longer was he able to use his weapon. He himself might blunder into the wire when it retracted.
Lex seized the emerging alien. He snapped the Jester’s wrist. The Harlequin wouldn’t be able to clench his fist and punch again. Lex threw the eldar, skidding, along the passageway, away from the gas. Launching himself upon the choking alien, he dragged the long arms behind the bone-cloaked back. Discarding the lasgun, Grimm was beside Lex a moment later. He pulled from a pouch a plastight manacle-loop to cuff sound wrist to broken wrist. Struggles would only tighten the tether. A second loop fettered the Jester’s ankles. Quickly Grimm retrieved Emperor’s Peace before the precious weapon might be stolen.
‘This one being ours,’ Lex roared at the coughing bystanders. ‘Yourselves finding the third Harlequin and killing him!’ Jaq knelt by the disabled choking Jester, and stated in Eldar: ‘I have your Book of Fate. We will take you to it, Jester.’ This should ensure that the Harlequin of Death wouldn’t try to kill himself by swallowing his tongue or by some other guile.
MARDAL WAS DEAD. Only Mardal had imposed any discipline upon his gunmen. Whatever discipline there had been now quite disintegrated. Orders to search the rest of the theatre for the other Harlequin were heeded only insofar as the gunmen would keep an eye open while they were escaping to safety.
The third Harlequin must also have escaped rather than blending with his surroundings in ambush.
They had left by a door at the rear of the Theatrum Miraculorum. Lex carried the Jester slung over his shoulder at a fast trot by way of inky back alleys. Sirens wailed distantly, and there was an occasional crackle of gunfire.
No Harlequin, dappled in darkness, shadowed their route. Lex would surely have heard whenever he paused alertly. Jaq would have sensed. The third Harlequin must have judged it wiser to flee from Shandabar. To steal a camelopard. To ride it into the Grey Desert until the beast’s heart gave out – on his way to wherever the hidden webway entry was.
Would that Harlequin return a few days later accompanied by aspect warriors riding jetbikes? Or might the spy declare that the mission to Sabulorb had proved lethal yet inconclusive?
THE JESTER WAS chained in the cellar near to the lectern, unable to touch it physically. After removing the Harlequin’s Kiss, which the Jester bore stoically, his wrist had been splinted and bound up.
Less stoical was his reaction to the removal of his skull-mask. He had bucked and writhed – but off had come the skull to reveal a lean, sinisterly handsome alien face with the highest of cheek bones and slanting turquoise eyes.
Next morning Jaq began learning the runes.
At first the Jester was uncooperative – until Jaq ripped out half a page from the Book of Rhana Dandra and lit the vellum with the same igniter as Rakel had used to light the Finger of Glory.
Flame climbed. Runes writhed as if alive. Runes crisped and crumbled to ash. Smoke laced the air as if the consumed words were attempting to maintain a ghostly existence. Jaq swept the smoke aside as brutally as a power gauntlet breaking cobwebs.
This sight wrung such a groan of grief from the Jester, more agonized than any physical torture might have caused. The destiny of his race had been diminished.
‘Page by page,’ vowed Jaq in Eldar, ‘I shall destroy the book before your eyes, Jester. I shall cram the final page into your own throat to choke you!’
‘To destroy what you cannot understand – that is the human way!’
‘Precisely. So therefore I wish to read these runes.’
The Jester laughed wretchedly.
‘Hieratic high eldar runes! Have you a spare month, and the mind of a cogitator?’
‘I have all the time in the cosmos, and a mind honed by my ordo, and I shall conjure concentration.’
Jaq made to wrench out the remaining half of the page. Runes squirmed beneath his fingers.
‘No!’ cried the Jester. ‘Enough. I shall teach!’
THE HARLEQUIN’S NAME was Marb’ailtor, which signified something akin to Corpse-Joker.
Jaq waited until the next day to demand, ‘Marb’ailtor, where exactly is the webway entrance which you used?’
The Jester demurred. Jaq tore out a whole page from the book and set it alight. Might that be the very page upon which his own involvement with eldar affairs was inscribed?
‘Truly you are insane!’ shrieked the Jester.
Jaq smothered the half-consumed page against his robe. He displayed the remains tauntingly. Thus he had been taught how to torment a person.
‘A day’s march east of the city called Bara Bandobast,’ confessed the Harlequin, ‘there is a labyrinth of rock. Humans regard the place as haunted because holes in the rocks give the wind a voice. Near the centre are six giant mushrooms of stone. There is the gateway.’
‘I think you’re lyin
g,’ said Jaq. He relit the page.
The Jester howled impotently. Evidently he had told the truth.
‘How,’ asked Jaq, ‘can there be stone mushrooms?’
‘The wind whirls around stone pillars. Grit in the wind abrades the stone. Big grains of grit cannot rise as high as little grains. The lower part of a pillar wears away faster than the top.’
LATER, JAQ DEMANDED, ‘Where do the Emperor’s Sons have their stronghold?’
‘I do not know, I do not know!’ insisted Marb’ailtor.
IN THE MATTER of the runes the chained Jester was certainly cooperative – scrupulously so, sometimes repetitiously so. Did Marb’ailtor aim to prolong the period of instruction in the hope that he might be rescued before Jaq could read the prophecies fluently enough?
Yet at other times the Jester seemed almost impatient to accelerate the process. It was as if Marb’ailtor were torn between two conflicting outcomes – both of them undesirable.
One outcome must be that Jaq would soon achieve mastery of the Book of Fate – and therefore he would take the stolen book elsewhere with him, to act upon what he had learned. The other outcome was that he and the book would remain on Sabulorb for a while – with what consequences? The worst consequence must be the destruction of the book so that it was lost to the eldar forever. How was the book likely to be destroyed, other than by the sort of vandalism with which Jaq had earlier threatened the Jester?
Even in that cellar beneath the mansion the air was perceptibly less chilly. Upstairs, despite the permanent black drapes which cloaked the windows, rooms were warm. Outside, the temperature was almost sultry. For what must have been the first time in millennia Shandabar sweated. Discernibly the great red sun had shrunk somewhat.
LEX WAS TROUBLED. Rakel was bewildered.
‘How can a sun shrink,’ she asked, ‘and yet be hotter?’
‘Gas shrinks inwards and compresses,’ Lex said. ‘Thus more gas will burn in the interior. Thus more heat radiates.’