by Dan Abnett
‘This… false ceiling you told me about?’
‘Maybe,’ She started buttoning her coat and headed for the door. ‘I’m going home. You pulled me that file on the old city plans. I’ll go and start working through it, see if I can’t find something we’ve missed. You stay here and stay in contact.’
‘Remind me: why are we doing this?’
She grinned. ‘Because we serve at the pleasure of the God-Emperor. And because someone I love very much told me to seize the moment because you never know how dark it’s going to get.’
THE SKY WAS turning to a dull undercast as night closed in. Plyton hurried along the pavement as the burn-alarms started to sing and the first spatters of rain started to fall. Too far to run in this. She ducked into the doorway arch of a town-hab to wait out the downpour, just a hundred metres from her uncle’s house.
The rain began to stream down. From the cover of the sinks, the gamper-boys started to yell their trade. She waited. Her mind was ticking over, like one of her uncle’s horologs.
Just a year before. In Rickens’s office. The blanked case. ‘No good will come if it,’ Rickens had told her.
There was a sudden beating of wings. She looked up. A flock of sheen birds swirled up into the rain, turning like a shoal of fish, twisting east.
Something made her very uneasy suddenly.
A sixth sense. What Rickens liked to call the Magistratum muscle.
Ignoring the rain, Plyton ducked out of the archway and ran along the street to the hatchway of the parking garage. She knew her uncle’s code and punched it in. The hatch opened. The attendant, the old man with the apron, waved at her as she walked inside. He knew her. She was the girl who came in to use the Bergman. The attendant wandered away. He was busy soaping up the bodywork of a crimson transporter owned by some local bigwig.
Plyton slipped through the rockcrete gloom, hugging the shadows. Rainwater was gnawing in between the garage’s joints, pooling on the floor in pungent pools. There was the Bergman. Bay A9.
Plyton didn’t have the keys. She peered in through the driver’s door window. There was the folder Limbwall had given her, still tucked into the door pocket. She’d come back for that, once she’d got the keys from Uncle Vally. She walked round behind the automobile, and felt around the dank back wall of the bay for the loose bricks. She kept an eye on the old attendant. He was still washing the crimson transporter.
Plyton lifted three of the soot-black bricks out.
The Tronsvasse 9 was where she’d hidden it, in the cavity, wrapped in vizzy-cloth. She had no permit for the weapon, but every Magistratum marshal owned a back-up piece. It went with the job. Service weapon and a concealed. You never knew when.
Plyton took it out. Heavy, chromed, rubberized grip. Ten in the clip, one in the spout. She eased the slide half-back, saw the glint of the chambered round, and slipped it back. Beside the weapon, two more fat clips.
Plyton put the clips in her pocket, slid the 9 into the waistband of her trousers and put the bricks back.
She waved at the attendant as she walked out of the garage.
THE FRONT DOOR of Uncle Valeryn’s town-hab was ajar. Plyton pushed it wide. She could see immediately that something had happened here, something ghastly. It was as if an erosive force had spilled through the hallway, shredding the wall panels, abrading the carpet, demolishing all the furniture.
Plyton took the Tronsvasse out.
The door to the front parlour was half open. Plyton saw a scattered mess of red-bare bones loosely gathered in a torn blue dress. The shredded remains of a nurse’s starched white headdress. Plyton swallowed hard. Uncle Vally. Uncle Vally.
Weapon braced, she edged along the hall. The place looked as if it had been sandblasted. The wallpaper was stripped, the floorboards scrubbed to bare, splintered wood. The oil paintings on the walls were just empty frames adorned by rags of canvas.
Plyton paused at the doorway of the drawing room and peered in.
Something bony and raw lay on the worn-down carpet in front of the spinet. The spinet itself looked furry. Its once-polished surface was chewed and splintered, the varnished wood pocked with a maelstrom of tiny chips. The curtains were in tatters. Uncle Valeryn’s notation folios were shredded.
A large, slender man was hunched over Uncle Vally’s reduced corpse. Broad-shouldered, with a mane of wispy grey hair, he wore a suit of leather jack with an armoured sleeve.
Drax turned as he heard a sound behind him. His curiously wide face, with its small piggy eyes and a massive underbiting jaw blinked in surprise.
He rose and started to pull out the psyber-lure.
Plyton fired. Her first shot took off the left side of Drax’s face. The second went through his chest and blew out his back. Drax slammed backwards into the ruined spinet, the half-slung lure wrapping around his body. His weight toppled the keyboard instrument over beneath him onto the floor with a discordant clash of strings and keys.
Her eyes burning, Maud Plyton took one last look at her uncle. She backed out of the room. In the litter of debris in the hall, she found fragments of the jar that had always stood on the shelf above the heater. Nearby, she found the Bergman’s keys.
On the pavement outside, running now, she snatched out her hand-vox. ‘Limbwall? Limbwall! It’s Maud. Get out! Get out now!’
THREE
THE WEAPON-SERVITOR reared automatically as Revoke approached. It cycled up its gun-pods and played its pink recog-beam up and down his face. Its handler yanked at its leash and brought it to heel.
‘Sorry, sir,’ the handler said.
‘Don’t be,’ Revoke replied. ‘I admire vigilance. I was told he was here.’
‘Yes, sir. He’s inside. Please observe the drill.’
‘Of course,’ Revoke stepped past the handler and his chrome-plated cannon-hound and went over to the rack of bare metal drawers screwed to the stone wall. He slid out an empty drawer, and placed inside it his weapon, his hand-vox, his wallet, his chron and every other single item about his person that was either powered or bore writing, numerals or inscriptions of any sort. Then he closed the drawer and took down one of the blunting charms that hung from the row of hooks above the rack. As Revoke put it around his neck, he felt the pendant weight of the heavy lodestone against his chest. More particularly, he felt his precious psy stutter away into temporary exile.
Then he stepped into the airgate. All of the entrances to the Encompass Room were actual starship airgates, imported as brand new units from the yards at Ur-Haven in the Antimar sub. It seemed odd to pace down the cold stone hallways of the lord governor’s palace in Formal A and then step into a vacuum lock of brushed steel and recessed lumin panels.
The outer hatch closed. Revoke felt the prickly gust of the decontamination blowers and heard the vents suck the soot and dust away. Then the inner hatch opened.
To step from ancient fortress into an airgate was one thing. To step from an airgate into this was quite another.
Toros Revoke had been in the Encompass Room more than a dozen times before, but still it impressed him. Circular, over five hundred metres in diameter, it had been constructed from the uppermost four storeys of the palace. Revoke was actually stepping out onto a steel bridge walkway that extended out across the chamber two floors up in the air. The walkway met three others like it that sprouted from hatchways at the other compass points to form a platform above the centre of the room.
Above, the roof space was black, and out of the blackness powerful stab-lamps hung down on chains, like stars in the night sky. Below, the floor of the chamber was a brilliant white expanse like the surface of a sunward moon. This entire floor was patterned with a delicate tracery of black lines and other details, all of them too fine and small to be seen clearly from the bridge. But Revoke knew what the intricate pattern represented. He peered down and saw the small figures of the many geometricians on their knees, adding details to the pattern with their consecrated quills. Only a few small portions of the over
all pattern still lacked any detail.
Revoke could see the chief provost standing up on the viewing platform. He hesitated when he realised that Trice was not alone. The Diadochoi was with him.
Trice saw Revoke and nodded for him to join them. Revoke approached with unease. The Diadochoi was spending an increasing amount of time in the Encompass Room of late, eagerly anticipating the culmination of the work.
The Diadochoi was tall and slender, dressed in simple black clothes. His head was bare and, in the Encompass Room, he chose not to wear his public face.
Revoke tried not to look at the Diadochoi’s true visage. The contorted pink flesh, the features fused and melted down like candlewax after a long night.
‘Revoke,’ the Diadochoi gurgled liplessly. ‘Come to me, my son.’
Revoke obeyed. The Diadochoi embraced him and kissed both his cheeks with the wet wound he called a mouth. Revoke could smell nidos and unguent creams.
‘Jader tells me you saved him the other night,’ the Diadochoi lisped.
‘He did, lord?’ Trice said.
‘Against a beast from hell, I hear,’ the Diadochoi said, the heat-blackened stumps of his teeth showing against the pink as he smiled. ‘Any clue yet as to what it was?’
‘We are following some leads,’ Revoke replied.
‘Leave all that to us, lord,’ Trice cut in. ‘Do not trouble yourself with nothings. You must concentrate your mind on the true work.’
The Diadochoi nodded. He took Revoke by the arm and led him to the platform’s rail. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? Quite, quite beautiful. We have made adjustments just this last morning. Recalibrations, according to the refined axes. You see there, where the geometricians are erasing?’
Revoke looked and raised his hand to point. ‘You mean—’
The Diadochoi’s black-gloved hand caught hold of Revoke’s and squeezed it shut with nearly bone-crushing force.
‘Don’t point, Revoke. Not in here. Any gesture can be a signifier. You should know better.’
‘I’m sorry, lord.’
The Diadochoi let his hand go. ‘Where the geometricians are erasing, that is the angle of adjustment. Fate gives even as it seems to take away, don’t you think?’
‘Yes, lord.’
‘By morning, the new axial points will be inscribed. It’s all very… promising. Now, what did you want?’
‘I need a word with the chief provost,’ Revoke said.
‘A word,’ The Diadochoi made a wet, gurgling sound that approximated to a chuckle. ‘A word. In here. A word. You’re a witty man, Revoke.’
‘Am I, lord?’
The Diadochoi turned to Trice. ‘See to your business, Jader. I’ll be here when you return.’
Trice took Revoke by the arm and walked him away along the bridge to the airgate. Behind them, the Diadochoi was still peering down from the platform at the working scribes below.
The airgate hatch closed and the air-scrubbers whirred.
‘He seems in a good humour,’ Revoke said.
‘He is. We’re very close now, Toros. That chance discovery at the old sacristy the other day it’s the piece we’ve been missing. Now we’ve got it, everything is falling into perfect alignment, all our calculations and projections.’
‘The true centre?’
‘Just that. At last. It was no wonder that we couldn’t make things match up. No wonder, indeed, that everything we’d tried before didn’t work.’
‘So…’ said Revoke. ‘We’re close?’
‘Just a few days,’ Trice looked at him. ‘He scares you, doesn’t he?’
‘A little bit,’ Revoke admitted.
Jader Trice smiled as the other airgate hatch opened before them. ‘Be thankful. He scares me an awful lot more than that. So why have you come looking for me?’
They were retrieving their possessions from the rack of drawers. As soon as he took off his blunting charm, Revoke realised the guard nearby could hear them.
‘Not here. Let’s walk.’
‘RAVENOR. EMPTY GODS, are you sure?’
Revoke nodded. The shipmaster’s evidence is quite compelling.’
Trice sat down on one of the private suite’s sofas and wrung his hands as he thought. ‘Get me a drink. Amasec. Mollamot. Anything.’
Revoke went over to the cabinet and found a glass and a bottle of eighty year-old nepenthe. ‘If Ravenor is here, and active, it could explain the killing of the cartel’s banker.’
‘Tchaikov?’
‘Yes, and it could also explain the attack on you at the palace.’
‘You’ve still turned up nothing on that?’
Revoke handed his master the glass. ‘We know it was some form of incunabula, some slaved proto-daemon. A killing tool, directed by a psyker. I’ve had the psy-adept arm of the Secretists searching covertly since the attack, but in a hive this size, without wanting to show our hand…’
‘Would Ravenor use a daemon? I mean, really?’
Revoke shrugged. ‘We’ve studied his records through the Officio Inquisitorus Planetia. He’s known to be hardline, but his master was Eisenhorn. And you know what’s said about him.’
‘Even so,’ said Trice, sipping his drink. ‘You told me you’d killed the psyker operating that thing.’
‘I did. Most surely. His name was Saul Keener, a local black market psyker with prior form. Ravenor wouldn’t have been so impetuous as to slave the thing himself. He’d employ someone. He relies on his agents. Still, right at the end there, I sensed another mind. Ravenor himself, no doubt, looking in to see if the job had been done.’
‘Damn him!’ Trice spat. ‘The Diadochoi mustn’t be told. He’ll go mad.’
‘Of course.’
Jader Trice put his glass down and rose to his feet. He was agitated. ‘When that daemon-thing attacked us, I suspected this faction, that faction, this cult, that coven. All these years, so many accumulated enemies. The one thing I didn’t even begin to consider was Ravenor. He’s meant to be dead!’
‘Akunin has proof otherwise, sir.’
‘You’ve brought him here?’
Revoke nodded. ‘Under the circumstances, I thought I should.’ He got up and waved a control wand at the end wall of the suite. The entire wall became transparent so they could see out into the adjoining anteroom where Akunin waited nervously with his companions.
‘That’s Akunin there?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The other man?’
‘His name is Siskind. Another shipmaster. An interesting man.’
‘And the big brute with him?’
‘A bounty hunter called Worna. Just paid muscle.’
‘What about that… that runty thing at his feet?’
‘The runty thing goes by the name of Sholto Unwerth, sir. Yet another shipmaster. More particularly, the proof.’
Trice looked at Revoke. ‘What do you make of Akunin?’
‘Scared. Scared of us, and scared that, with Thekla dead, he’s now got seniority in the cartel. I can sense he wants out, but only if he gets a massive pay-off to keep him quiet. He sees this evidence about Ravenor as his get-out clause.’
‘Does he indeed? What about this other one? Siskind. You said he was interesting.’
Revoke smiled. ‘Master Siskind reads as ambitious. He’s an associate of Thekla’s who wanted to become part of the Contract Thirteen cartel… except that he didn’t have the funds to buy in. He’s done all the hard work here, sir. He was the one who realised Thekla was missing. He hired Worna to track Ravenor to Eustis Majoris, and brought that proof to Akunin as collateral to buy into the cartel.’
Trice straightened his gold-hemmed robes and put on his game face. ‘This Siskind sounds like my kind of bastard. What about the bounty-grant?’
‘Does what he does for cash.’
Trice turned to Revoke. ‘Let’s go and talk to them,’ he said.
THE MEN ROSE as Trice and Revoke entered the room, all except Unwerth, who was curled up in a bloodied bal
l in kicking-reach of Lucius Worna.
‘Master Akunin!’ Trice announced, hurrying forward and clasping the man by the hands. ‘A thousand apologies for ignoring your many calls! I have been so busy these last few days!’
‘No apologies necessary, chief provost,’ Akunin nodded.
‘No, I must. Revoke here treated you most shamefully. Apologise, Revoke.’
‘I beg the shipmaster’s forgiveness.’
Akunin nodded. ‘There’s no need, chief provost. I only wish to serve. I have brought this piece of scum to your attention. Proof that Inquisitor Ravenor moves against us both. His name is Unwerth. He brought Ravenor here.’
‘Is this true? Is Ravenor here on this world?’ Trice asked.
Unwerth mumbled something and then yelped as Worna kicked him.
‘So, Ravenor, Ravenor,’ Trice sighed, seating himself. ‘The cartel slipped up there, didn’t it?’
Akunin sat down facing the chief provost. ‘Thekla may have been overconfident, sir—’
‘Overconfident? He promised to trap and kill Ravenor for me, and yet Ravenor is alive and Thekla is dead. Overconfident is hardly the word.’
Akunin cleared his throat. ‘Which is why I have come here with this evidence, sir.’
Trice grinned broadly. ‘And for that, I thank you. How will the cartel pay?’
‘Pay, sir? For what?’
‘For messing up. For failing to complete the task I set them?’
Akunin cleared his throat for a second time and sat forward. ‘I’m not sure what you mean, chief provost. Thekla failed you. Him and the agents you sent to help him. They bungled the mission. I’m just here to—’
Trice put his finger to his lips pensively and looked at the ceiling. ‘A moment. Thekla. Wasn’t he the senior member of the cartel?’
‘Yes, he w—’
‘He represented the cartel?’
‘Yes, sir, b—’
‘And now he’s dead, you fulfil that role?’