by Dan Abnett
Kys got up, walked towards the door, and listened.
Nothing.
She breathed in, exhaled, and quickly reached her mind into the lock. Fear and fury in equal measure fuelled her with a clinical precision. She seized the lock, scorching the tips of her mind’s tendrils on the anti-psi wards, and rattled the tumblers into place.
The lock slumped open with a heavy clack and she mind-wrenched the bolt back.
Kys touched the edge of the door with the tip of one shoe and it swung open heavily.
Her thirteen-day stay in the Arethusa’s brig had come to an end.
SHE WALKED ALONG the grim, poorly lit hallway of the brig block. Nothing howled, nothing sobbed, nothing smiled. The air was close and warm, as if the ship’s air pumps had shut down.
She looked for a weapon, but the best she could find was a set of keys hanging on a peg. She took the old, heavy keys off their ring and put them in a pocket. In an emergency, she could kine them.
She stole through the brig’s half open outer hatch onto the grille mesh of the lower third access. There was no sign of anything in either direction. The access was lit by wall globes, one or two of which were flickering on and off like candle flames guttering in a draught.
Her spike heels caught in the deck mesh, so she slipped her shoes off and carried them.
Padding forwards in stocking feet, she reached a junction. Ahead, the short, bulk-headed passage to the aft air gate. Left, a flicker-lit companionway turned back to the enginarium.
To the right, a corridor led forwards.
She turned right. Ten metres along, she found a spilled box of shotgun cartridges, a discarded boot and a damp towel.
The air was still very stale. More of the glow-globes and lumin panels were flickering on and off.
Kys bent down and pressed her hand against the cast iron wall, low down. There was no vibration at all. No throb of power plant, or of idling drive. Although the air was fuggy, it was getting colder.
The Arethusa was like a cooling corpse.
At the next junction, she reached a wall-mounted intercom, a recessed speaker cone with a brass switch. She put her shoes down and reached out for the switch.
It took her a long time to pluck up the courage to push it.
Click. A long, empty sigh of dead leaves and static breathed out of the speaker.
She took her finger off the switch and the sound went dead. She pressed the switch again, and said, into the rustling, ‘Hello?’
The static shushed her.
‘Hello? Anyone?’
Somewhere far away, behind the hiss of dry leaves, a man started sobbing.
Kys took her finger off the switch and killed the sound.
At the next junction, there was a fire control point riveted to the hull. She helped herself to the heavy, saw-toothed fire axe hanging over the sand box. Axe in one hand, shoes in the other, she continued on her way.
THE ARETHUSA’S SMALL excursion bay was empty. The docking clamps were vacant. Neither of the ship’s two battered landers were present. Kys stood on the overlook platform for a while, staring down into the open vault. The heavy duty docking clamps, thick with black grease and lubricant jelly, stared back at her. Some of the fuelling hoses on the right-hand side of the bay had been disconnected in a hurry. Pools of spilled fuel covered the deck plates.
‘Where did everyone go?’ she asked out loud. She didn’t dare ask her real question.
Why did everyone go?
HALFWAY ALONG THE companionway leading to the forward junction, she found a place where the wall plates had been dented and scorched by gunfire. The marks were fresh, carbonised. A metre or two further along, there was a smeared streak of blood on the wall, and a track of drops leading away down the tunnel.
Wall lights blinked on and off, strobing manically
She bent down. The blood was cold.
SHE ENTERED THE infirmary. She put her shoes on before she did, because the floors in the upper decks were solid plate.
She slithered in slowly, her axe raised.
The outer surgery was empty. Water drizzled out of a half open tap into a scrub bowl. She turned the faucet off. The doors to the pharm cupboards were open, and the contents ransacked. Pill boxes littered the floor. She was crunching over scattered capsules, grinding them to powder. She could hear a soft, panting, purring sound.
Kys nudged the adjoining door open with the head of her axe. The panting grew louder. She reached out, but her mind touched nothing at all.
She entered the ward room. The air stank of Frauka’s lho-sticks, a cold, distant, tarnished after-smell.
There was nobody in the ward room. Zael’s cot was empty. The plug feeds and drip tubes that had been keeping him alive were draped over the crumpled bed, leaking fluids. The life support unit he had been attached to was grinding and rattling, its lung bellow rising and falling with a dry pant. Cardiac systems and brainwave monitors purred aimlessly.
Kys walked over to the cot. She scraped the sheets back with the blade of her fire axe, although she knew the cot was empty. She reached over and turned off the relentless life support unit.
The bellows ceased their panting and became still. The monitors buzzed. Viscous fluid squirted out of the lank tubes left on the bed. A flat line alarm began to ping.
She wrenched the unit away from the wall to make it shut up. The bellows flapped and sighed. Silence returned.
She walked around the cot and sat down in Frauka’s chair. His dish of lho-butts sat on the bedside cabinet. The last one had burned itself out in a long, perfect column of white ash. His data-slate was on the floor in front of the chair. It was still switched on, the battery low warning flashing.
She reached down and picked it up.
‘He slowly, hungrily, licked the juice off her ample—’ she read out. She switched the data-slate off and hurled it at the ward room wall. It broke and fell in pieces.
She rose and then sat down again. She’d seen something on the floor beside the bedside cabinet. She reached down with her mind and picked it up. It hovered in front of her face. It was Frauka’s autopistol.
Kys took hold of it with her hand and thumbed out the clip. Full. She looked down at the floor again. It was littered with blood-soaked swabs. ‘Oh, you stupid, stupid bastard,’ she said.
THE ARETHUSA’S BRIDGE was as empty as everything else on the ship. She walked in, Frauka’s pistol in one hand, the fire axe in the other.
The viewers and repeater screens flicked and scrolled mindlessly. Auto-systems chattered on and off like muffled gunfire.
‘Hello?’ she called out, hoping for an answer and no answer at the same time.
Kys sat down in the master’s chair, put down her pistol and her axe, and began tapping the keys of the main station board.
Gudrun, the screen told her. They were at high anchor above Gudrun, in the Helican sub. The ship had been set to dormancy. She punched some keys and corrected that. Cool air began to hiss through the air-scrubbers. She heard the power plant wake up.
She heard distant sobbing too, but she ignored it.
Replay recent log, she typed.
The console blinked and replied Void.
She repeated her command.
Void.
She was about to type again when she heard a tiny sound. It came from behind her, in the companionway leading up into the bridge. Kys picked up the autopistol, and slid down behind the master’s chair, aiming the weapon. She picked the axe up too, with her telekinesis, and lifted it into the ceiling above, just under the roof stanchions. It began to spin, chopping around like a murderous propeller.
She heard another sound, a footstep. Someone stepped onto the bridge.
Her index finger pulled at the trigger.
SHOLTO UNWERTH PEERED at her. ‘Hello?’ he said.
Kys rammed the pistol down, so that it fired into the thick deck.
‘Sorry, sorry!’ she exclaimed.
He blinked at her, baffled, flinching fro
m the retort of the shot. She dropped the gun and ran to him, hugged him tightly, and kissed him.
‘I’m very glad to see you,’ she exclaimed.
He stared back at her, lips slightly parted in surprise as hers pulled away. She let him go. She coughed and brushed the front of his jacket as if to smooth it.
‘Master Unwerth.’
‘Patience.’
‘It’s really good to see you again. I thought I was alone up here.’
‘You kissed me.’ He frowned.
‘Yes, I did. I did kiss you. Sorry.’
‘Do not be apoplectic. It was… it was unexpectorant.’
‘Well, forgive me. I’m just happy to see a friendly face.’
‘Me also,’ he said. He smiled, and then cringed as the fire axe fell out of the roof onto the deck. She’d forgotten it and let it go.
‘What, maychance, was that?’
‘Insurance,’ she smiled. ‘Are you alone?’
‘Indeed, no.’ Unwerth said. He gestured to the men behind him. Fyflank emerged into the light of the bridge, followed by Onofrio, the head cook, and Saintout, the tertiary helmsman.
‘We four are all that’s left,’ said Unwerth. ‘Following the mutiny all such.’
Fyflank grumbled his disgust.
‘Mutiny?’ Kys asked.
‘Mutiny, indeed,’ said Unwerth. ‘My crew was stricken by a mutational urge. Just after we made arrival. Just after Master Thonius took them down.’
‘Who?’
‘Mam Plyton, Masters Ballack and Belknap, and himself.’
‘Down?’
‘In a lander, number one lander, to the surface.’
‘What happened here, Sholto?’ Kys asked.
He shrugged. ‘Screaming and crying,’ he said.
‘And howling,’ added Saintout behind him.
‘Yes, and that. My poor ship went mad. Oh, the screaming and the howling! Oh, the upsetment! Boguin led the mutiny—’
‘I never liked him much,’ put in Onofrio.
‘Me neither,’ said Saintout.
‘It was Boguin’s doing,’ said Unwerth. ‘He was enspooked. When the howling started, he gripped the crew with all forcefulness. They had guns. They debarked on the second lander.’
‘Thonius had already taken the first?’ Kys nodded. ‘Sholto, where did the howling come from?’
Unwerth shrugged.
‘Where is Frauka? Where is Zael?’
‘I have no idea,’ he replied, timid and worried.
‘Sholto, we’re in trouble,’ said Kys.
Fyflank nudged Unwerth. The little shipmaster ran to his command console and adjusted some dials. Several warning lights had started to flash.
‘What?’ asked Kys, coming over.
‘Something is extruding,’ Unwerth said.
‘Extruding?’ Kys replied.
‘A ship,’ said Unwerth. ‘Bearing in towards us.’
Kys looked at the flaring screen. It was a mess of complex graphics, with little clarity. ‘Are you certain?’ Kys asked. ‘It could just be an imaging artefact.’ Unwerth fine-tuned the scanners, and the display cleaned up. The track became very legible. Plotting data overwrote the curving trajectory marker, showing comparative speed, position and size. The approaching ship was decelerating from an immaterium exit point nine astronomical units out. It seemed twice the size of the Arethusa. ‘Pict feed?’ she asked. ‘Can we get a visual with the stern array?’ He stabbed at some of the controls. On a secondary imaging plate, a ghost image appeared, a fog of green and amber pixilation. The screen image jumped and panned as the pict array grabbed focus and range.
They could see it. A long way off, and small but, to Patience Kys, unmistakable.
‘Oh Throne,’ Kys gasped. ‘That’s the Hinterlight.’
The vox bank lit up behind Unwerth. ‘Hailing signal,’ he said, ‘pict and voice in simulation.’
‘Take it,’ said Kys.
Unwerth nodded to Saintout, who hurried to the comm station and woke the vox bank. The main screen blinked twice and then lit up.
The distorted, blinking view of a woman’s face appeared, peering at them.
‘Hello, Arethusa? Hello, Arethusa?’ The words came through a yowl of white noise.
Kys lifted the vox mic on its heavy cable. ‘Hello, Hinterlight, hello. Mistress Cynia, is that you?’
The fuzzy visual frowned at them. ‘Confirmed. Who am I speaking to? Is that you, Kara?’ More white noise squalled.
‘No, it’s me,’ Kys called into the mic. ‘It’s Patience.’
‘It’s Patience,’ the blur on the viewer said to someone off screen. There was yet more crackle and fuzz. ‘Get me a clean link, Halstrom, for Throne’s sake,’ they heard her say.
The viewer image suddenly sharpened. Kys looked up at the unsmiling, troubled features of Cynia Preest, mistress of the Hinterlight.
‘This is an unexpected pleasure,’ said Kys, aware she had tears in her eyes.
‘I imagine you’re surprised to see me,’ said Preest over the speakers. ‘Believe me, you’re not half as surprised as I was a week ago.’
‘What?’ asked Kys.
The image of Preest jumped and fluttered. She glanced sidelong at someone off view and stepped back. A figure moved into her place and looked into the picter with a half-smile.
It was Harlon Nayl.
TWO
THERE WAS A storm coming.
Leyla Slade could hear the brewing grumble of thunder rolling down from the hog’s back of dark mountains above Elmingard. The fulminous sky, and the increase in negative ions, made her scratchy and irritable.
It was late afternoon. She stood on the dry, bare stone of the high terrace, and looked down the crag. Elmingard occupied the crown of a buttress of old, black rock, which dropped away, sheer in places, about a thousand metres to the valley below. Down there, only a few kilometres away, there was sunlight and arable land, low hills skirted by woodland, post-harvest fields full of dry straw, the rural belt of southern Sarre, where the headwaters of the Pellitor sprang, about as comfortable and pastoral a tract of land as you could find on any old Imperial world.
Things turned darker and wilder, however, when you reached the abrupt feet of the Kell Mountains. Smaller, surly, westerly cousins to the mighty Atenates that dominated the continental heartland, they rose like a mistake from the undulating countryside of Sarre. Storms fretted around them all year long, as if their thorny backs snagged the passing weather and detained it until it became annoyed. Mists filled the abyssal gorges and steep ravines like uncombed wool. Often, the cloud and haze descended so deeply that the entire range was lost from sight. One could stand in a cornfield ten kilometres away and not know there were mountains there at all.
It was not Leyla Slade’s favourite place in the galaxy. Elmingard had been built as a monastic retreat seventeen hundred years earlier, during a period of plague and schismatic war that had marred Gudrun’s history. Subsequently, it had been derelict, and then the home of a feral astronomer. For many years after that it had been the impractical country seat of wealthy Sarrean viticulturists who cultivated vast vineyards in the peaceful country below.
They had died out and departed, defeated by the lonely eminence, and Elmingard had fallen back into disuse, scavenged by the weather.
Orfeo Culzean had purchased it through a chain of faceless middlemen twenty years before. He’d had extensive work done to restore and develop the rambling property, but Leyla still had little love for the place. It had been too many things in its bleak lifetime, and the result was a schizophrenic knot of identities. It was too large, too jumbled, too muddled. The long, austere sections of monastic origin were cold and damp, sagging under patches of sloped grey tile roof that looked like snakeskin. The viticulturists’ contributions consisted of dirty, white-stone halls grafted in between the monastic wings, halls that interlocked oddly and had too many storeys. There were stairs and abutting terraces everywhere. The astronomer, in a characteristic
act of whimsy, had raised a crude tower of black stone at the north end of the crag, perhaps as an observatory platform. Its construction was not especially sound, and it had become a leaning ruin, but it had never been demolished. Culzean believed it lent Elmingard an ‘alchemical charm’.
Slade walked back along the high terrace, under the shadow of the astronomer’s tower. Roosting birds clacked and cawed like lost souls. Thick beards of ivy and asterolia covered the face of the grey walls below her.
Culzean and Molotch were arguing in the solar. She could hear their voices. Another storm brewing. They had been arguing for several weeks. Culzean described it to her as ‘debate’, but she’d seen the growing resentment in the eyes of both men. The essential nature of the ‘debate’, as far as she understood it, was to agree upon the scheme they would undertake together.
There was the recurring question of Slyte. Since Culzean had first posited the notion of Molotch’s relationship with Slyte – and Ravenor – Molotch had become increasingly obsessed and distracted. He was starting to exhibit what Slade believed was paranoia, pure and simple. He had been gravely disappointed to learn that Ravenor had bluntly rejected Culzean’s proposal, as if he had actually been expecting a positive response. He stayed up late into the night, in his room in the dormitory wing, filling up notebooks with rapid, almost feverish penmanship, consulting the library of books and manuscripts that Culzean had imported.
A vast number of books, manuscripts and other esoteric objects filled the rooms and corridors of Elmingard, many of them still in shipping cases, waiting to be unpacked. Culzean had sent for them when he had decided on the place as his latest bolthole, and they had arrived by freight shipment from storage deposits, bank vaults and discreet caches all over the sector. Culzean was a collector of many things, and he magpied away his lifetime’s accumulation of arcane ephemera in a thousand separate hiding places for later retrieval.
Only the most valuable items came with him on his travels. Certain potent devices, his ‘shining weapons of destiny’, certain books of special provenance, certain charts and grimoires. He always carried his small but priceless library of anthropodermic bibliopegy – the life stories of significant saints, savants, murderers and heretics bound in the skins of the men themselves, and his collection of deodands. The desperate nature of their flight from Eustis Majoris had forced him to leave his precious deodands in Petropolis, a fact that he still complained about. He had arranged for their private recovery, again through an untraceable chain of anonymous intermediaries, but the caution he had to exercise to procure them meant he probably wouldn’t be reunited with the collection for several years.