"Very good, my lord." A man's voice had sounded from beyond the panel, and it was followed swiftly by the heavy sounds of bolts being drawn across. A moment later the door swung inwards.
Makeblise motioned Harrow through with the derringer.
Beyond the doorway, the passageway widened. The lanterns were bright, casting a flickering yellow light across smooth plaster walls and a marble floor. There were doors on either side, and a larger door straight ahead, at the very end of the passageway.
Guards stood along the walls, white-clad and holding long, double-handed swords. From what Harrow could see, they wore less armour than the halberdiers, but their faces remained covered by near-featureless helms.
Another guard was holding the door open. "My lord," he said curtly, as Makeblise followed Harrow inside.
"Fonteyn, has there been any progress?"
"None, my lord."
Makeblise must have pocketed the derringer. He held his hands before him, as if in prayer. "I see. Well, that may change, Fonteyn. If so, be ready." He turned to Harrow, and then nodded towards the door at the far end. "Shall we?"
The last door was larger than the others, and of plain wood. Makeblise moved past Harrow and took a small ring of keys from beneath his robe, separating one from its neighbours.
As he unlocked the door, Harrow carefully noted which key he used. There was no telling when that kind of information might be useful.
Without a word, Makeblise pushed the door open, and motioned Harrow through.
Harrow stepped forwards, into an environment he had certainly not been expecting.
He was surrounded by machines.
The chamber he found himself in was shaped like half a circle, and was only slightly larger than the dungeon. Its walls were faced with white plaster and lit by lanterns, but there were no implements of pain here. Instead, arranged on rough wooden benches around the walls, lay a humming, stuttering array of electronics.
There were data-engines, of a primitive type Harrow couldn't immediately identify; flat information screens, cracked and stained, supported by wooden boards; electro-abaci; datapads; a rack of leaking batteries that for a moment baffled Harrow completely, until he saw the iron crank-handle lying nearby.
That was when he noticed that he and Makeblise weren't alone in the chamber. There was a figure in the far corner, hunched behind a screen. The figure seemed to be mainly rags, but Harrow caught a white flash of face before it ducked away.
"You'll have to excuse Verney," Makeblise sighed. "There are no visitors here."
"I don't doubt it," replied Harrow.
It was hard not to either roar with laughter or shake his head in despair. Never in all his life had he seen such a ragged, crumbling and ill-treated collection of technology.
Most of the equipment was dark and silent, and those few sections that were operating flickered and buzzed alarmingly. There were crude patches and repairs on everything, and the air reeked of burnt insulation and ozone. Fat cables, insulated with waxed linen, snaked up and out of the mess to disappear through holes in the walls, or dangled from the ceiling. More cables lay tangled on the flagstone floor like jungle creepers.
Makeblise made a dismissive gesture. "This is what we are reduced to, stranger. This place is our city's last line of defence."
Harrow swallowed, and found himself trying to edge further away from the batteries. The voltages they were providing must have been vanishingly small, but he couldn't help but wonder what kind of chemical fumes they were giving out. "I see," he said flatly. "Very impressive."
"Almost as impressive as your lies, stranger. These devices are ancient, and they are close to utter dissolution. I would happily see them returned to hell, but without them our enemies would have free reign. They would return the city to the old ways, and bring down God's tears all over again."
"Yes," murmured Harrow. "I suppose they could..."
He was thinking furiously. The machines arranged in front of him were almost beyond hope, a collection of pitiful wrecks but the fact was that they had survived Brite's attack. By the sound of Makeblise's words other things might have too, enough to bring about a return to the technological age he feared so much. If that was the case, there might be something useable to repair Omega Fury.
And if there was any way of finding it on the whole planet, it was right here in this room.
"What do you want from me, Makeblise?" he asked quietly.
"I think you know."
"And the alternative?"
The man spread his hands, very slightly. "You will be publicly tortured and then burned alive, as a warning to all those who would defy the will of God."
"Verily. However, my lord, your vision has inspired me. Where do I start?"
8. THE LOWER CITY
By the time Red and Godolkin reached Pike Cross it had started snowing. Dusty white flakes whirled and spun along the narrow street, settling over the cobbles.
Red shivered inside her robes, pulling them tighter around herself. "Sneck me, it's cold. It's like Crucifer. How do they survive this?"
Godolkin seemed unconcerned by the weather. "One can become used to almost anything," he replied darkly, "over time."
"Yeah, all right." She knew exactly what he was getting at, and it wasn't the cold.
There were four taverns on Pike Cross. Two of them looked like reasonably professional establishments, with knobbly glass in the windows and lanterns glowing alongside the doors. The third was closed, and in the process of being converted into a church. The fourth was almost entirely lightless, barring the glow that emerged from gaps in the closed shutters. As Red and Godolkin drew close, shouts erupted from behind the door and then faded again.
"It's got to be this one," Red told him.
"I bow to your superior knowledge." Godolkin scowled at the door, and adjusted the eyepatch he now wore over his right eye. He'd poked a tiny hole in it to avoid impairing his vision, but it still seemed to make him uncomfortable. "What do you intend?"
Red was tying a scarf over her head, under the hood of her robe. It made her look rather like a gypsy, but her hair had been a feature on the wanted poster. "Okay, here's the plan: I'll go to the bar and find somebody drunk. You wait a couple of minutes and then come in, but keep to the back. Find a table or something. We don't know each other."
"Would that were true. One further question, just how long do you expect to remain in this establishment without currency?"
She grinned. "I won't need any, trust me. As for you, do you really think you'll be the only guy in here who hasn't got any money?"
Finding answers in a city where there were no questions wasn't an easy thing to do.
Igantia was, Red had been able to confirm, Gerizim's only centre of population. It didn't follow an established colony-world pattern of having one major city and several small satellite towns. There weren't even rural communities outside the city wall. Ever since the Manticore's attack the entire population had huddled within the city and only ever ventured out to farm.
This, for Durham Red, brought back unpleasant memories of Magadan. On both worlds, vastly different though they were, people were crowded together by the fear of what lay beyond their boundaries. That, however, was where the comparison ended - on Magadan, her status as an off-worlder had made her exotic, important, the centre of things; in Igantia it would get her killed.
That meant that there was no way she could ask questions about the place without instantly giving herself away. Not only that, but the citizens of the city had evolved their own unique accent and cadence of speech, which Red found difficult to mimic. Getting it wrong would have the marshals on her as quickly as asking too many questions.
It was hard, the people of Igantia didn't even call their world Gerizim any more. It had been Purity ever since the Manticore.
The only way Red had been able to learn about the city was by doing something that didn't come naturally to her: keeping her mouth closed and listening. This had pro
ved easier to do than she had feared as Igantia was a populous city and its people far from silent. By the time she and Godolkin had formulated their plan of action, the cobbles were nearly jammed with citizens, and everyone had something to say to someone else. All Red had to do was walk slowly, usually with Godolkin following a few metres behind, and allow what was being said all around her to filter in.
She heard a labourer telling his co-workers, while digging frozen slurry out of a drain-gutter, that to see marshals being commanded by Endura was a sure sign of another purge. Daedalus had better watch out, or they would all find themselves swinging from gibbets on the Tabernacle wall...
She heard a mother reassuring her children that there was no dragon. While the Eye of God looked down on them all, such horrors could not exist...
She heard two washer-women discussing, while collecting icicles for their tubs, how an entire family was to be taken down the Street of Sorrows later that diurn. The father, having no money, had burned furniture to warm his children. When that ran out, he started on the roof timbers, and the structure had given way...
She heard an old man tell his priest that, may the Eye not judge him harshly, the ale in the Rat and Wagon on the Northway was foul, daysummer or nightwinter, and the innkeeper should be hung up by his heels and left to freeze...
Once Durham Red had heard these things, and a great many more, she felt able to choose a place that would really give her some answers.
Pike Cross had seemed as good a place as any. The experience Red had gathered during her former life, from Search and Destroy missions on a hundred frontier worlds, still held true. She needed to find a location where people had the least to lose: where the opportunities were few, the pay low, and where everybody knew it.
Once her eavesdropping in the centre of town had given her a feel for the place, she headed for the lower city, that south-eastern corner of Igantia where white-plastered walls and smoothed timbers gave way to rough stone and frost-eaten thatch. The lower city was built largely around a road called the Street of Sorrows, which led from the market sections south to the Corpse Gate. This, she had since learned, was the place where the dead were taken. There were burial grounds outside the city, and places to keep the corpses until the ground thawed enough for digging.
Few homes stood in that part of the city. It wasn't hard to see why: most of the industries that congregated towards the south-east were the kinds that no one wanted to live close to. The bleachers of cloth and the tanners of hide plied their trades there, along with the fish-gutters, slaughterers, salters and bookbinders. Glovemakers and saddlers had their premises up in the northern sections of Igantia, but the raw materials they used were made in the lower city.
The place stank, even in the freezing cold of Purity's long night. In daylight hours it must have been intolerable.
Pike Cross was in the heart of the lower city, cutting through the Street of Sorrows partway along, and it had taverns on it. That made it Red's first choice. Nowhere, in a city like Igantia, would tongues be looser than in a tavern. A woman on her own would get more answers than one accompanied by a hulking, scowling companion like Matteus Godolkin, and so Red left him to stand out in the cold while she pushed her way through the door and into the warmth and light beyond.
The air inside the tavern, after so long in the nightwinter chill, felt like walking into a furnace. For a moment it threatened to stop Red in her tracks, to leave her swaying in the doorway with all eyes on her, but she managed to force herself forwards. After the first couple of steps it became easier, and she made it past the benches and up to the bar without collapsing in a heap.
The bar was a long L-shape, taking up one corner of the tavern, and was tended by a solid-looking fellow with odd, woolly hair. Tall wooden stools were arranged around the bar, with the room's solitary drinkers firmly in residence there. As Red had expected, the long benches around the fireplace were packed with those who drank in company, and as such were of no interest to her. Those at the bar, sipping at their flagons and wooden cups, would be far more amenable to the attentions of a curious stranger.
There were a dozen, maybe more. A couple gave Red appraising stares as she approached, but most didn't even glance her way. Some, their heads already dropping forwards towards puddles of spilled ale, were probably incapable of sight.
Of those that remained, one in particular drew Red's eye. She sidled up to him and hopped onto the closest stool. "Hot in here," she purred, loosening her robes and throwing her hood back.
The man glanced around at her, and frowned. "'Scuse me, my lady?"
"I said it's hot." She moved towards him on the stool, just a fraction. "In here."
He nodded, slowly, so as not to break eye contact. "That'll be the fire."
Red grinned at him, not bothering to hide her fangs. "Lucky I like it warm, then. What's your name?"
"Raulin," said the man, blinking at her. "Your teeth are a bit sharp, my lady."
"Then I'd better not bite you, had I?"
He smiled at that. Perhaps if he'd been sober he would have reacted less favourably to her mutation. If he had been more drunk he wouldn't have noticed but this man Raulin was hovering at the point between sobriety and inebriation, where the ale had taken a hold of his wits but hadn't quite gotten control of them yet. Red knew that point well - Raulin still knew what he was saying and doing, but he just didn't much care.
He was a smallish man, wide across the shoulders, with a dark growth of stubble on his face and a pudding-bowl cut of dark hair. Red judged his clothes to be simple, but well-made, and she saw that his hands were calloused when he picked up his mug of ale. A labourer, then, but possibly a skilled one.
She found herself wondering, uncontrollably, what his neck tasted like. It took some effort to shake the thought away, and some of it must have shown on her face. Raulin's forehead creased in consternation. "You all right?"
"Aye. Just a little, ah, thirsty."
"Thirsty, eh? I think I can do something about that..." He reached out with his mug and tapped the inside edge of the bar with it, hard. Ale jumped out in foamy spots to spatter the wood. "Taverner! Two ales!"
"Two?" The taverner leaned over from a conversation he'd been having with one of the other drinkers. He shot a look at Red. "You sure?"
"Aye," said Raulin emphatically. "One's for me."
Red was about to answer when the door banged open behind her. She looked back despite herself, but the man who came in was slender, stooped, his hair a shock of wiry ginger. Not Godolkin.
Red turned to Raulin again. "Thank you. That's kind, buying me ale."
He smiled. "Well, if a fellow can't spend his coin on ale for a high-born, then what does he work for?"
"High-born?" Red raised her eyebrows.
"With a voice like that, my lady, no way you're from this end of the city."
Her accent obviously hadn't been flawless, but good enough. She shrugged. "Does it matter?"
"No." The innkeeper had finished pouring two more mugs of ale, and Raulin passed one to Red. "I'd just not heard the like in this place before."
"Well," she said, lifting the mug. "The Northway gets so boring, you know? Sometimes a girl needs to go where the action is..."
"Right..." Raulin tipped his mug back and swigged from it, and as he did so Red saw him wink at the innkeeper.
Wool-head turned away in disgust, but Red couldn't have been more pleased with the reaction. She'd managed, to Raulin at least, to establish herself as a rich girl out looking for a piece of rough. She could get away with a lot of sins if people thought that of her. "Anyway, it's getting bad up there. Marshals everywhere, Endura... It's scary." She leaned closer to him, and lowered her voice. "Don't think they'll be planning another purge, do you?"
The tavern door thumped open again. Red saw Raulin's eyes flick away from hers, and cursed silently. Perfect bloody timing, Godolkin!
She heard the Iconoclast's heavy tread as he walked in and headed for the fire. Th
ere was the scraping of chair-legs against the wooden floor, and the sound of someone scurrying to another spot - Godolkin had obviously found a place he'd liked the look of, and the previous tenant hadn't seen fit to argue.
"God's blood," whispered Raulin, staring over her shoulder. "He's a big fellow."
Red followed his gaze, and saw Godolkin settling by the hearth with his hood drawn up. "Mm, too big for me." She giggled. "I mean, could you just imagine?"
"I can, aye." He shook himself, suddenly flustered, the colour rising to his stubbly cheeks. "I mean, no, my lady. God. What was I saying?"
"You were telling me about how there was going to be purges again."
"Oh, yes." Raulin looked relieved, obviously he found that a safer subject. "Well, it's none of my business but those Daedalus buggers, scraping around in the wilds for their devilries... Serve 'em good if Makeblise strings a few more of them up."
That was a name she'd not heard before, and it was frustrating not being able to ask about it. But if, as she had heard earlier, the sure sign of a purge was the Endura giving orders to the marshals, that gave her a reasonable picture of who was in charge of what.
She made a face. "I don't like all that. Seeing the bodies, up there on the wall..."
"Well, they've got to be shown, haven't they? People, I mean." Raulin's face was quite ruddy now, ale and enthusiasm forming a potent mix. "If it wasn't for the Endura, those bastards would have the Eye down on us all over again-"
"Raulin!" That was the taverner, moving quickly back along the bar. "Drink your ale, and watch your mouth."
The man's voice was low, but the vehemence behind it was obvious. Raulin recoiled slightly. "Sorry, Gerard."
"You should be. We might have wood in the windows, but this is still a respectable place, hear me?" The taverner turned to Red, putting his hand on her arm. "And you, lady..."
"Me?" said Red sweetly, reaching out and taking his hand away. She squeezed it, gently, just enough to make the bones squeak together. "What about me?"
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