Context

by John Meaney

  ‘Help...’

  Cold water had revived the courier and that helped: he reached out and Tom grabbed then hauled him bodily over the edge before his strength gave out. The man’s legs were still dragging in the water but Tom lay back on broken cargo boxes, too tired to care.

  Something small and black sprang into the air, dropped into the water with a tiny plop.

  ‘Catch it!’

  Black, the size of a child’s fist, they bounded all over the loading dock.

  ‘I’ve got one.’

  Laughter, as it slipped from the stevedore’s grasp and bounced out of reach.

  It was the cargo Tom had disturbed, coming to life now where the warmth was greater: hundreds of frogglies, each one black and round with a single yellow eye, a pair of springy legs—and a dislike of being roughly handled.

  Off to one side, two medics were working on the injured courier. He lay on a blue emergency pallet, eyes closed as they fitted an amber cast to his shattered arm.

  ‘Friggin’ stokhastikos!’

  One of the men tripped, caught off balance by a froggly underfoot. He fell heavily onto the flagstones, and the two frogglies he had been holding bounced free.

  ‘This is your fault,’ the foreman said, trying to hold in his laughter. His big shoulders shook.

  ‘Sorry.’ Tom could not help grinning.

  Two more men entered the dock, and Tom recognized them both.

  What are you doing here?

  It made reasonable sense that Xyenquil should be involved in a medical case, come to see the injured courier. But he was accompanied by a blond man wearing a violet tunic and burgundy cloak, with an amber ovoid inset on his left cheek: Ralkin Velsivith. News travelled fast.

  A froggly bounded across Tom’s path as he made his way towards them.

  ‘My Lord.’ Velsivith gave an abbreviated bow. ‘Exactly what happened to him?’

  ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ said Tom.

  The words roused the courier, who looked up from the pallet. Half a dozen frogglies were sitting on his chest. But he stared at Velsivith, taking in the twin daggers at his hips, the unmistakable security officer demeanour—

  ‘No!’ Xyenquil dropped to the man’s side, fumbling for a medi-strip.

  The courier’s eyes rolled up in their sockets —

  Sweet Fate.

  — and his body gave one great spasmodic twitch, then lay still.

  ‘Destiny!’

  Thanatotrope.

  ‘Another suicide.’

  Velsivith stared at Tom.

  ‘I don’t—’

  But Xyenquil was running a scan over the courier’s corpse, and when he looked up it was almost with relief.

  ‘An ordinary thanatotrope, if that makes sense.’ He shrugged. ‘Just a suicide implant. No additional features, I’d say, unlike Captain Strelsthorm’s ... Well. But whoever he was’—nodding towards Velsivith—‘he chose death rather than your custody, Lieutenant.’

  Velsivith turned away then, but for one extraordinary moment Tom could have sworn that it was tears that caused the lieutenant’s eyes to glisten: a strange liquid regret which was totally incongruous on a hardened intelligence officer.

  Particularly one who worked for an organization which had the safety of the wealthy Aurineate Grand’aume as its prime remit, and the implicit authority, Tom was sure, to carry out its work in any fashion necessary.

  ~ * ~

  14

  NULAPEIRON AD 3418

  Creamy jade, carved opalescent panels which cast their own diffuse light—for an interrogation chamber, it showed a great deal of style.

  ‘If I’d wanted to kill him’—Tom sat down on a low jade bench, facing Velsivith—‘I wouldn’t have carried him to safety. I could’ve drowned.’

  ‘So you were friends.’ With a fingernail Velsivith tapped the ovoid in his cheek. ‘Or merely colleagues?’

  ‘I’d never seen him before.’

  ‘So you said.’

  Tom tried to keep calm. This was standard technique, nothing more. Nothing personal.

  But Velsivith’s attitude had changed, covering any evidence of regret and replacing it with impersonal efficiency, as though he were under scrutiny as much as Tom.

  ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’ Tom shrugged.

  Velsivith reached inside his cloak, pulled out something.

  A bluemetal poignard, sheathed.

  Searched my quarters. Bad sign.

  ‘Somebody gave it to me.’ Tom shook his head, exasperated. ‘A vassal. With no message.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing.’

  Did the Kilware Associates hallmark mean anything to Velsivith? Tom suspected the shadowy weapons suppliers of a great deal, but this was the first sign of them he had come across in years. And there were more pressing concerns, which made Tom question the wisdom of meekly following Velsivith to this place.

  ‘You have to leave this realm,’ the courier had said.

  Perhaps he should have taken more notice, treated it with urgency.

  Sentinel. You tried to warn me.

  Risking a courier. But why commit suicide?

  There’s more going on than I know about. Far more.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Velsivith looked down at the floor. ‘I’d like to believe you, Lord Corcorigan. I really would.’

  ‘So why don’t you—’

  But then a platoon of soldiers burst in.

  Move. Now.

  The most propitious time for escape from capture is the first few seconds. Tom launched himself, leaping from the bench, crescent kick deflecting the first soldier’s graser rifle, straight-arming him into another’s field of fire, a clear path to the doorway but—

  Flash of white.

  A stunburst exploded and he fell.

  Darkness.

  Came to, retching.

  Cold, naked, fastened somehow in a standing position.

  Destiny—

  He coughed, spat. But the phlegm landed on a floor which was liquid red and glistening, like flayed flesh, and his spittle was absorbed quickly, greedily.

  Where am I?

  Pink/red gelatinous tendrils encircled his upper arm, his ankles and his throat. Merging with the floor, the walls. The entire chamber was of warm, wet flesh-like stuff. As he watched, it pulsed once then lay quiescent, gently quivering. It was like the interior of a great stomach, and he the food morsel about to be dissolved in acid and digested: tiny and of no significance beyond his constituent minerals and macro-molecules.

  Tom’s stallion talisman no longer hung round his neck.

  Father. . .

  Carved by his father, enhanced by the Pilot... he never, ever removed it. Anxiety made him suck in a breath: instant cold pain flared in his mouth, rousing him.

  Evaluate.

  They had broken several of his teeth. His right eye was swollen shut, thick with fluid pain, and his left thigh throbbed. When he swallowed, a tight dry band of agony tightened his throat: someone had struck him across the larynx with fatal intent, and he knew that he was lucky to be alive.

  Some luck. Should‘ve known...

  His diaphragm was cramped with tension, and his ribs -broken, for sure—lanced sharply with every breath.

  ‘Well, well.’

  A stocky figure clothed in grey, with hood and heavy gauntlets, came through the red flesh-wall—it slurped, liquid and obscene, as he slipped inside—and he stopped, pulling off the hood. The man was grizzled and scarred, and grinning broadly.

  ‘Neural interrogation,’ he said. ‘Heard of it? Does no real damage, just hurts like heisenberg.’

  Tom stared at him.

  ‘Thing is’—the man spat—‘clever folks know that. Override the pain, like. So we doesn’t waste our precious bleedin’ time with it.’

  ‘What... do you want to know?’

  A shrug of heavy shoulders. ‘Not a soddin’ thing, me darling boy.’

  Then his gauntlet-clad big hand slowly encircled Tom�
�s soft defenceless testicles, rough against flaccid skin, and tightly squeezed. Molten pain exploded, pulsed in sickening waves, even when the iron grip relinquished its agonizing and degrading hold.

  Smiling, the grizzled man swiped his hand, stiff-fingered, across Tom’s stomach. For a moment nothing happened, then Tom’s abdominal skin split apart, red and glistening, revealing greyish balls of fat bathed in warm blood, with layered fibrous muscle.

  ‘Looks like you got guts, boy.’ His face was mere centimetres from Tom’s, and his breath stank of something foul and rotted, even through the waves of agony rolling over Tom. ‘Who’d’a thought?’

  And then, with a grey-toothed smile which knew nothing of decency or compassion, alive with its own twisted fires and desire, he bent down over Tom and got to work.

  ‘... you know about the Grey Shadows?’ Woman’s voice.

  Shadows... Blood-red, and hazy.

  Steel whip, singing.

  ‘No—’

  Cracked against the backs of Tom’s bare thighs.

  Hood pulled halfway up, the grey-clad man grinned, halted, waiting for relief to pulse through Tom, then the realization of false hope ... A feint, to break the rhythm, before it sang its hymn of blood and steel once more.

  Crack.

  ‘The courier?’ Her elegant tones swam in and out of Tom’s awareness. ‘Well?’

  He shook his head, tried to speak through swollen lips.

  Don’t know.

  ‘Did it? Why?’ Insistent now.

  ‘Wha—?’

  ‘Strelsthorm killed herself. What happened?’

  Shook his head.

  Tendril, tightening round his throat.

  ‘Enough.’ And with exquisite insouciance: ‘I’m bored.’

  Squinting, he followed her motion: heading for the fleshy wall... and it opened at her approach. She walked through—glimpse of plain tunnel beyond—and then it sealed shut.

  She wore grey, was hooded like the torturer.

  Toxin.

  This was important and he must remember it. Protective clothing, and wet glistening walls which were surely pregnant with deadly neurotoxic fluids. There was more than heavy raw-flesh membrane holding him trapped and helpless.

  ‘Hey, you know,’ the torturer clapped Tom’s bare shoulder, ‘I’m not bored. Not yet.’

  He pulled open his tunic a little, to show the stallion talisman hanging amid a forest of black wiry curls. Then leaned close as a lover, displaying his twisted grin, his rotten breath.

  ‘Thanks for the pretty present, boy.’

  And began to explore new avenues of inventiveness.

  Plotting escape vectors: squinting, using the part of his mind which, after the Sorites School’s relentless drilling, never stopped its rational analysis. He modelled the wet toxic membrane as overlaid scalars of viscosity and toxicity, as a first draft; then shifted it into a seven-dimensional phase-space of his own imagining, searching for the minimax flaws which would allow him to—

  A crack of pain.

  Tom screamed, high-pitched, a sound that was scarcely human, as a great tsunami wave of black awful suffering crashed through his being, splitting his logosophical constructs apart. Rational thoughts spun away, torn in fragments, twisting in the flood like useless flotsam, never to be recovered or even glimpsed again.

  He tried to hold his bladder, but at some point he had to let go. Sudden urine spattered off the floor, trickled down his bare legs, wet as blood and hot as shame.

  The torturer laughed, knowing a psychological barrier had shattered beneath the stress.

  ‘Now I can use the brass needle,’ he said, ‘up into the urethra. Without getting pissed on, I mean.’

  Throat restraint. Tom could not speak.

  Some of the wet oily exudate, leaking from the walls and dribbling thickly along the restraining tendrils, finally reached Tom’s skin. Torched it, with a deep acidic burn.

  ‘No—’

  It began again.

  They used their whips and needles: for hours, perhaps for days. Thirty-six hours, whispered some fragment of Tom’s disintegrating mind: a rational cog in a shattered machine.

  Dehydrated, weak, but no longer aware of hunger or thirst: he—it—had become an organism overwhelmed by its most basic chemical perception, an immense and pressing tropic need made worse by the impossibility of movement.

  Pain.

  Immense pain. The need to escape; the trapped despair.

  And finally the moment which had to come, when relentless pressure and implacable dissolution became too much to bear.

  ‘Stop…’

  Whip, song, blood.

  ‘I’ll…’

  The soiled and stinking animal which had once been Tom Corcorigan whimpered. It moaned, it mewled, and cried at last:

  ‘I’ll tell...’

  Woman, bending close. Intimate yet impersonal, sure of her control over the cringing mess before her.

  Muldavika. He recognized her now, despite the hood. One of his first questioners, when he had been Tom Corcorigan, and life was wonderful had he but known it.

  Coughing, almost choking, he could not speak.

  Ring.

  ‘Damn it.’ She turned to the torturer: ‘Relax the throat restraint. This thing is going nowhere.’

  Silver ring, glinting, and then he got it: the control locus of the flesh-wall’s unfurling motion. It was big, the control ring, fitting over the gauntlet, round her forefinger. That was what kept her safe, granted her passage through the wet raw-flesh barrier, unharmed by acid exudates or dripping neurotoxins designed to kill.

  It moved towards him, that hand, towards the fleshy restraint which burned his throat, and the ring’s proximity caused the tendril to loosen: just a fraction, but that was all he needed.

  Now.

  She was close and his limbs were enclosed but her face was centimetres from his, hood pushed back a little to hear his words, and he snapped forwards and sank his teeth into her nose.

  Bite.

  It was animal desperation, and it worked.

  ‘Ah! Get him—’

  Bite hard.

  Teeth clenched, he hung on.

  A civilized human might have found humour in the situation, but the half-sentient organism once called Corcorigan was fighting for pure survival. He pinned his victim, sending every last fraction of his strength into his jaws—predator’s jaws—and she yelled for help, arms flailing.

  Bite, and don’t let go.

  Bright hot copper taste.

  Then her flailing ring hand struck the tendril which held Tom’s wrist. A loosening ...

  Yes!

  His hand slipped free.

  Half-fist to the larynx, grab her gauntlet—he twisted, felt the small bones snap, pushed her hand against the remaining tendrils, and gave an incoherent grunt of triumph as they dropped away beneath the control ring’s influence.

  Danger...

  The woman was on the floor, one hand between her thighs and the other clutching her face, crimson blood trickling through her fingers. But the torturer crouched before him, raising his steel whip—then hesitated at the final moment, as though seeing something in the creature which confronted him that gave life and substance to childhood tales of Chaos demons, the eternal burning afterlife: pitiful attempts to instil restraint and sympathy in the uncontrollable boy who became a man of pain and power and degradation.

  The unthinking Corcorigan-thing was on him then, animal-fast and without restraint, raking the face—darkness blossoming in eyes which had seen everything—then collapsing the throat, and the torturer’s twisted life was done.

  It burns.

  Every barefooted step Tom took upon the red flesh-floor coated his feet with hot stinging acid. A thinking being would have howled, but he was something primeval now: crouched prey, fleeing from the hunt, with death so close he could taste it.