by Dan Abnett
I ran back into the Maze Undue, away from the street. The man sprinted after me. The woman got up and came after him.
My headlong flight was not so counter-intuitive. They hadn’t cornered me, or driven me back towards others of their kind. My choice of direction had been deliberate. Ten yards down the stable hallway, I passed through a stone archway. My pursuers, close behind me, reached the archway, then both flew off their feet as though they had run into a wire. They slammed onto their backs, twitching and gurgling.
My cuff had cancelled the effects of the pain door built into the archway. They had run directly into its field.
I did not wait. I turned back, picked my way quickly between their spasming bodies, and ran down to the open street door and the grey light beyond.
The rain was still falling, very hard. I stepped into Low Highgate Lane, and smelled the cold damp air, the wet stone, and the trash and soot of the city.
The whole city had been my classroom.
Now Queen Mab would become my hiding place.
CHAPTER 14
Which concerns a plan
I ran through the rain. I urged the night to be my ally.
I followed Low Highgate Lane down to the junction with Tiebone Street, skipped over the vast and muddy ruts that grox carts had worn in the hollow over centuries with their wheels, and continued along Snakepie Lane until I came to the public pump.
Rain had kept most folk indoors, though the commotion from the Maze Undue on the hill above had brought tavern customers out under the awnings to peer up at the aircraft and the searchlights. The huddles muttered, smoked lho and cascade weed, supped, and discussed the moralities of intervention against private citizens. Most of the conversations I overheard supposed that the commotion was a raid by the city watch upon a bordello or narcobaron.
I wondered how private mercenaries could be mistaken for the city watch, but barely had the thought occurred when a troop of watchmen entered the pump yard and began to question the drinkers.
The men of the watch were all big bruisers. They wore black leather doublets and puffed sleeves embroidered with gold and scarlet thread, starched white collars and black felt skull caps. Their ceramite helms were slung from their belts at their hips. Each one carried a pain staff. These were metal devices, which telescoped out to length. All of the staves were extended, ready for use.
I lingered on the far side of the pump, pretending to quench my thirst, using one of the brass cups hanging by a chain from the stone flank of the pump’s plinth. I reasoned it out. The forces bedevilling us had shown no qualms about impersonating the authorities, including the Inquisition. Judika and the Secretary had been very plain about this. Their false credentials and, I’m sure, a simple and understandable fear of the Holy Ordos, had persuaded even the stoic and unimaginative city watch to assist them.
I quit the pump yard, and followed the alleys behind Selvedge Street, crossing the rain-drenched yards of a tannery, a silversmith’s shop, and two mechanical repair businesses. I felt sick, quickly crashing after the adrenaline high of my exit from the Maze Undue. My bumps and scrapes, especially my arm and the cut on my head, were beginning to hurt in a way I could not ignore.
‘Beta!’
I stopped in my tracks. The voice hissed again. I saw Judika in a doorway, wet and dishevelled. There was bruising on his face and his clothes were torn.
‘For Throne’s sake!’ I exclaimed, coming up to him. He smiled thinly. We faced each other for a moment, and then gave each other a tight hug.
‘You got clear,’ he said, as the embrace broke.
‘Evidently,’ I said.
‘A terrible night,’ he said. ‘Terrible, terrible.’
‘Do you know who else got out?’ I asked.
He shook his head.
‘There was so much confusion. It was mayhem.’
‘What do you know about it?’ I asked.
‘Very little,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Really?’ I replied. ‘You were sent back to us to review this situation. The Ordos sent you home because of the Cognitae.’
‘Don’t use that word,’ he said.
‘What word should I use then?’ I asked. ‘A heretic society operates in Queen Mab. It threatens the safety of the Maze Undue so significantly, the Ordos sends an interrogator to watch over us. Then this, whatever this is…’
‘The society has moved against the Inquisition,’ said Judika. ‘Our presence in the city has always been discreet. There is not a permanent office or department. The society evidently believes that by eliminating the training school, it can extinguish all Ordo influence in the city.’
‘Is that true?’ I asked.
He shrugged.
‘At the worst,’ he said. ‘Only temporarily. If any of the mentors got clear, and I expect they would have done, then they will transmit a report back to headquarters. Assistance will be sent. With some impunity, I would expect. The society has harmed itself by making such a bold and aggressive step against the Ordos.’
‘They can’t be that stupid,’ I said. ‘They must know they have stirred things up. They must be after something else.’
‘Like what?’ he asked. There was slight scorn in the question, as if he sincerely doubted an undergraduate like me could have reasoned something an interrogator such as he could not.
‘Where is the nearest Ordo headquarters?’ I asked. ‘The nearest permanent office?’
‘Not on this world,’ he said.
‘Then,’ I replied simply, ‘it is a matter of weeks or even months before any response will be made. Perhaps that’s what the Cognitae wanted – two or three months without Ordo interruption.’
‘Don’t use that word,’ he said again, with less conviction.
I sighed.
‘We must lie low until help arrives,’ I said.
‘I am rather deprived of options,’ he replied.
The command of Hajara was simple. Pupils were to flee the school and become, full-time, whatever role or identity they had been playing in the current function. If necessary, they were to move back through previous identities and function-roles until they found one in which they could live, secure, until help came. I was to become Laurael Raeside, and live as Laurael Raeside until the affair was over.
Judika, unassigned to any function and newly arrived on the planet, had no identity to fall to.
‘You’ll have to come with me, for now,’ I said.
‘I could act as your role’s lifeward,’ he suggested.
‘My main client knows I don’t have one,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to be my manservant. Or my clerk.’
‘Oh, will I?’ he retorted.
‘This isn’t a joke, Jude,’ I said. ‘Enemies are chasing us and trying to kill us.’
He nodded. He knew full well that whatever he became had to fit perfectly with the function-role I had already established.
‘Raeside is a factor,’ I said. ‘You could be a valuer… an assayer…’
He shook his head.
‘I haven’t the time, or the resources, to brief and prepare well enough. I’d make a mistake and be found out. It’ll have to be a footman after all.’
If the Blackwards, or any agency in Queen Mab, or any other person on the world of Sancour, had done any checking on the off-world factor Laurael Raeside, they would have found that she had arrived by interorbital earlier that week, and taken rooms in the Cronhour Helican, a very respectable establishment on Delgado Square, in the embassy district. Preparations of each function were scrupulous, so the reservation existed, even though I had not actually used the rooms. The Cronhour would be our first port of call.
It did not take us long to discover that passage across the city was not going to be easy. The weather had brought Queen Mab to a crawl, but worse still, the city watch was abroad in force. The heretic society’s influence was considerable and rather frightening, or rather the reputation of the Holy Inquisition was. Just the threat of the Inquisition, enforc
ed with fake warrants and rosettes, had been enough to galvanise the watch forces and send them into the streets checking papers and permits. I thought, though I did not tell Judika, for fear of another scornful reaction, that the heretic society might well have members who held prominent offices in the city’s society.
‘We cannot stay on these streets,’ Judika advised as we came up on another checkpoint where watchmen were stopping foot and vehicle traffic to examine permits.
‘We cannot,’ I agreed. We were both dirty, carried minor injuries, and would find it hard to account for the blood on our clothes. Furthermore, we were coming down from the Highgate Hill region.
‘We will take to the holloways,’ I said.
He looked uncomfortable.
‘It is the only way,’ I insisted.
We went back up Palister Walk, across a little park of dead trees and memorial plaques, and clambered over a wall into the holloway that ran down through the Padlock Hill district towards Delgado Square.
It was especially grim and quiet in the empty street of the harrowed path. Rain fell dismally, like a curtain, and the dead buildings all around stared down at us through blind windows. They felt like skulls. It felt like walking through an ossuary or a bone house, with the blank sockets gazing out from catacombs. I had previously liked the holloways, but now I felt oppressed by them. I suddenly felt how wrong it was to shut up a street of the city and let it atrophy, and how macabre and unnatural an urban thoroughfare becomes when all bustle and life is erased from it.
The sacred paths were a strange and rather twisted expression of piety.
More than that, I felt, with a sudden and great certainty, that once the sacred paths had been established, once they had grown silent and neglected, and had begun to decay into an emptiness of weeds, no one had any business being there.
Especially not us.
Judika became convinced that we were being watched, or even followed. After the night’s traumatic happenings, we were both rather deflated by shock, and thus were prey to paranoia.
However, though I dismissed his worry, I felt it too. Eyes were upon us.
‘We should get out of here,’ Judika said. ‘This is not safe.’
‘Your mind is playing tricks,’ I said, though I did not feel that confident. ‘Only the poor warblind wander these streets, and they will not bother us with our cuffs set to dead.’
He nodded. He checked his cuff.
‘Beta,’ he said quietly.
‘What?’
He showed me his wrist. At some point during the attic fight, no doubt when the telekine had hurled him around, his cuff had struck something which had buckled its mechanism. It was stuck live, and there was nothing either of us could do to move the setting ring.
Judika was limited. He had no blank-ness with which to render himself invisible to the warblind killgangs.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have noticed. I’ve put us in danger.’
I wanted to tell him he hadn’t, but I could not. From the shadows all around, from out of the heavy rain, the warblind were closing in.
CHAPTER 15
Which concerns the warblind
They came out into the open. They were of forms I had seen so many times before, but always from a distance. Some of them were just feral men, filthy vagrants clad in the ragged remains of Guard uniforms. Others were more obviously enhanced with hardshell plating, augmetic limbs and weapon implants. These were the old ones, the relics of the Orphaeonic War, the true warblind. They stank. Apart from filth, rank chemical odours wafted from them, the toxic secretions and hormones of bodies irrevocably hardwired for aggression. Bio-engineering, implants and combat trauma had deranged these creatures. They were blinded by war, and knew nothing except a raging appetite for violence. In wartime, they had been useful berserker weapons. In peacetime, they were bloody, atavistic reminders of a more miserable era.
Worse still, they would not die. The bioengineering that had prepared them for war had included crude juvenat work to improve their durability and healing factors. It had given them unnatural longevity. Consigned to the ghettos and the holloways, the warblind had developed a gang culture, taking in cut-throats and outlaws as retainers, breeding new generations of chemically mutated offspring from lowlife females in the sumps of the city, and leading extended lives punctuated by death that was only ever visited through violence. The war was centuries past. The warblind had outlived everything except the stones of the city. They had outlived even their own purpose.
Two of the big augmetic monsters led the way. They were of the old kind, the veteran kind, and had served in the war at the Saint’s side, before returning to Queen Mab broken with pain. Their gang marks were of the Leach Lane clan. One had a fist made of knives. The other hefted a double-ended battle-axe. Rain dripped off their mail and their tusks.
‘There is no need for this,’ I said in Enmabic. ‘Let us pass.’
I could see they would not. They resolutely would not. Their brains were not wired to allow for such things as mercy or negotiation. They were already goaded, by neural aggression stimulators or chemicals, to a kill-haze. Their human followers, sensitive to the chemical scents, began to tremble and whimper with sympathetic aggression.
We turned and ran, splashing across the flagstones. We got as far as the point where the street widened to accommodate a statue on a plinth (only the plinth and the hooves of the horse that stood on it now remained), and found our way plainly blocked by another wing of the killgang.
As I relate this, matter-of-fact, it may sound as if I was not in terror for my life. I was indeed, and Judika Sowl was too. Going about one’s business in Queen Mab, one never met a person who had tangled with the warblind and lived to tell of it, and there was a reason for that. The killgangs were intractable, they were brutal, and they were said to be anthropophagi. Some said their consumption of human flesh was often cited as one of the reasons they lived such unnaturally long spans, even the ones who were not bioengineered veteran relics of Saint Orphaeus’s War.
We were terrified. We were, I think, beyond terror. Though both of us had experienced dangers and threats in our lives (I cannot fairly account for all that Judika may have known), the night thus far had been the most traumatic either of us had ever lived through. The loss of the Maze Undue, the fate of our fellow candidates, the threat of capture or death… These things had left us numb with shock. Even given the fine training afforded us by the mentors of the Maze Undue, we needed time to rest, to recuperate, to reset our minds.
To be cornered by warblind reavers was almost beyond our capacity for sensation.
Nevertheless, we were trained. We were students of the Maze Undue, practiced and rehearsed in methods of combat, infiltration, disguise and all other agency, to make us the most excellent special operatives of the Holy Inquisition, and thus the most excellent and loyal servants of the God-Emperor of Mankind, whose Golden Throne blesses us all.
I was not about to give up. Poor Roud had died, or been mortally hurt, in order that I might escape. I had caused an enemy to suffer a fatal fall, and had injured others, and I had put supreme effort into evading capture. That effort, and the moral step I had taken, and Roud’s sacrifice… I would allow none of those things to be wasted.
I would fight, with a twisted silver pin, if I had to. I simply dismissed the notion that it was a fight I could not win. I knew that, but I ignored it. I needed confidence and clarity, not rational pessimism. I would take down as many of them as I could.
With Judika at my side, I stepped forwards as they rushed us. I selected my first target, a dirt-caked man with a billhook. He was not augmeticised, and therefore not one of the old kind. He was nothing like as much of a threat as the big, plated beast on his right, a howling monster with luminous target-pipper eyes whose voice came from a vox-speaker built into the centre of his chrome breastplate. But I could fell the dirt-caked ganger quickly, with my bare hands, and his billhook would then allow me to strike at a
rm’s length at the greater horrors.
A dirty yellow shape drove into my vision from the right, and knocked down the man with the billhook. The man screamed. A massive cattle dog stood on his torso, jaws clamped around his head. It shook its muzzle, stretching and snapping its victim’s spine. Then it leapt at the next warblind attacker, lips peeled back, black gums flecked with spittle.
Its master was close behind it. Deathrow rushed the pack from the side. He was swinging a broadsword, a massive cross-hilted weapon with a dark, oiled blade. He knocked one man down with the sheer mass of his person, and then struck another through the shoulder with his whirring blade. Despite the jack armour he was wearing, the warblind retainer split like a hung carcass in a butcher’s shop. There was an alarming release of blood, as though a pail of it had been overturned. The man showed bright white bone and red meat in cross section as he fell in two directions at once.
The broadsword blade did not stick or wedge in a thick bone like the pelvis as I would have imagined. Deathrow took it with him, without effort, circled around over his head in a scything cut, and dismantled another of the retainers. The blow, crosswise, split the man into four parts in the most gruesome fashion, striking as it did the upper part of his arm below the shoulder. The blade simply did not stop, not for armour, quilting, flesh, muscle mass, arm bones, breastplate, ribcage, heart sac…
It cut him right across. The arterial jets reminded me of the Tyvoke Fountains in Highgate Park when they are first turned on in the morning. The sword cut his head and shoulders, like a marble bust, from his trunk and legs, and severed both his arms at the middle point of the bicep into the bargain.
The dog, by now, was upon another target, one of the old ones, who was forced back by the animal’s feral bulk and ferocious muscle power. The cattle dog turned its gnashing head to the side, so as to bring its large carnassial teeth in like scissors, snipping and shearing at the warblind’s front armour.